Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has asked his Democratic colleagues to draft a legislative package to "outcompete" China, create new American jobs and invest in strategic partners and alliances like NATO and India. On a caucus call on Tuesday, Schumer discussed his push to direct Senate committees to draft a legislation to protect American jobs and outcompete China. He said his intention is to put the legislation on the Senate floor for a vote this spring. Today I directed the chairs and members of our relevant committees to start drafting a legislative package to outcompete China and create new American jobs, Schumer said. The new legislation, he said, must achieve three goals. They should enhance American competitiveness with China by investing in US innovation, American workers and American manufacturing; invest in strategic partners and alliances: NATO, Southeast Asia and India; and expose, curb, and end once and for all China's predatory practices which have hurt so many American jobs, Schumer said. The legislation will have as its centrepiece a bicameral, bipartisan bill, the Endless Frontiers Act, which Schumer introduced last year with Senator Todd Young, Indian-American Congressman Ro Khanna and Senator Mike Gallagher in the House. It will take the key cutting industries and make American investments so we will outcompete China in all of them. In addition, we will make serious investments in strengthening the US semiconductor industry to outcompete China and stop depending on foreign sources, Schumer said. He said at present semiconductor manufacturing is a dangerous weak spot in US economy and national security and that has to change. You've all seen that auto plants throughout America are closed because they can't get the chips. We cannot rely on foreign processors for the chips. We cannot let China get ahead of us in chip production. This will be part of the proposal that we will introduce, Schumer said. We will also talk about the build out of 5G and how America can remain number one there. And all of these have bipartisan support. The bill we will intend to introduce...will be bipartisan. Our intention is to put this legislation on the Senate floor for a vote this spring, he said. This month alone, nearly 20 anti-China legislations have been tabled or reintroduced in either chambers of the US Congress. During a US Senate Finance Committee hearing, Senator Todd Young pushed the Department of the Treasury to assure Americans that they are not unknowingly investing in US-sanctioned and other questionable Chinese corporations that are linked to human rights abuses. Also in a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Young wrote that if the Biden administration were to undo policies of the last four years, Americans could be unwittingly supporting Chinese companies affiliated with the Chinese military and others who are committing genocide against the Uyghur population in China, manufacturing advanced weapons systems, and constructing an oppressive surveillance state. "One of China's most glaring weaknesses is access to the kind of large-scale financing that only US capital markets can adequately provide, Young wrote. As this is one of our country's greatest strengths, we must take every measure necessary to protect it. We must place American investor protection and our national security interests ahead of any fleeting investment gains when it comes to the financing of the Chinese Communist Party and its affiliated enterprises and activities, he said. Four Republican senators Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley and Rob Portman in a letter to President Joe Biden have urged him to implement the proposed rule requiring US academic institutions disclose their relationships with Confucius Institutes, which are funded by the Chinese Communist Party. We have significant concerns regarding the CCP's nefarious actions and urge you to follow through on your commitments to advancing the interests of the American people as we collectively respond to the challenge that the CCP poses, they wrote. We believe it is critically important to better understand and reduce the CCP's influence on the American people, including through the Hanban, its propaganda arm that runs Confucius Institutes through the PRC Ministry of Education. The proposed rule is a necessary step in that effort and would bring needed transparency to Confucius Institutes, the senators said. They alleged that Confucius Institute funding comes with strings that can compromise academic freedom. The Chinese teachers sign contracts with the Chinese government pledging they will not damage the national interests of China. Such limitations attempt to export China's censorship of political debate and prevent discussion of potentially politically sensitive topics, the senators said. Confucius Institutes exist as one part of China's broader, long-term strategy. Through Confucius Institutes, the Chinese government is attempting to change the impression in the US and around the world that China is an economic and security threat. "Confucius Institutes' soft power encourages complacency towards China's pervasive, long-term initiatives against both government critics at home and businesses and academic institutions abroad," they said. Also read: Galwan Valley clash: Chinese express anger, pay tributes to dead soldiers on Weibo Also read: 500,000 COVID-19 death toll in US 'grim, heartbreaking milestone': Joe Biden KARACHI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 24th Feb, 2021 ) :Chief of the Naval Staff Admiral Muhammad Amjad Khan Niazi Tuesday explained to constantly align employment and development strategies with evolving threats to deliver a resolute and strong response to any misadventure by the adversary. He was addressing Pakistan Navy Operational Commands Seminar held at Bahria Auditorium Karachi as Chief Guest, said a Pakistan Navy press release. Speaking on the seminar, Naval Chief emphasized on maintaining highest level of combat readiness. The Admiral reiterated PN resolve to ensure seaward defence and to safeguard national maritime interests of the motherland at all costs. He highlighted various development initiatives being undertaken by Pakistan Navy to maintain a balanced and potent force capable to defend Pakistan against maritime threats and challenges. The Chief Guest while appreciating quality of the papers commended panel members for presenting well researched papers and organizers for conducting the seminar in a professional manner. Pakistan Navy Operational Command Seminar is a prominent event held annually under the auspices of Operational Commands i.e. Fleet and Coastal Command during which selected panels of officers from relevant Commands present papers on contemporary naval professional issues. Amid substantial pushback, the head of the San Francisco Board of Education said this week that the board was pausing plans to purge the district of school names that it said were linked to racism, sexism or slavery until after it reopened schools for in-person learning. Gabriela Lopez, president for the board, said in a statement on Twitter on Sunday that reopening will be our only focus until our children and young people are back in schools. Board meetings about renaming schools are canceled for the time being and we will not be taking valuable time from our board agenda to further discuss this, as we need to prioritize reopening, she said. I want us to focus our time and actions where they matter most, Ms. Lopez added. On the safety of our children, and on safely getting them back into schools. The boards renaming effort had been criticized by some parents, students and elected officials for its targets as well as its timing. The board began this work in 2018 and had planned to rename schools by April. San Francisco public schools have been focused on distance learning for nearly a year amid the coronavirus pandemic. Local private schools and public schools in other cities have already started offering some in-person options. Public health officials are concerned over new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants emerging in various parts of the world. The B.1.1.7 variant was first found in the United Kingdom and found to have the N501Y mutation that allows it to have a faster transmission rate than previous strains. The B.1.351 variant was detected in South Africa and also has the N501Y genetic mutation observed in B.1.1.7. However, scientists are also concerned over two other genetic mutations K417N and E484K that have shown an ability to evade the immune system. Prior evidence has found the B.1.351 variant resistant to neutralizing antibodies produced from either prior infection or vaccination. Ongoing research is looking at how to slow the spread of these variants. Currently, the total number of global COVID-19 cases has reached over 112 million. There are also more than 2.4 million global deaths. Understanding how these variants become more deadly is necessary for finding the appropriate target to neutralize them. New research by a team of scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine in the U.S. found that both variants display tighter binding to the human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor. This receptor allows SARS-CoV-2 to enter and infect host cells. The study results SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 Spike variants bind human ACE2 with increased affinity are available as a preprint on the bioRxiv* server, while the article undergoes peer review. How they did it The team used an experimental tool called Microscale Thermophoresis to investigate how the B.1.1.7 and B.1351 variants become more infectious and how their spike proteins receptor binding domain interacts with the human ACE2 protein. Specifically, the receptor-binding domain of B.1.1.7 and B.1351 was compared with the receptor-binding domain of Hu-1 the SARS-CoV-2 strain that was initially detected in Wuhan, China. Spike proteins of both variants bound tighter to ACE2 Results showed a greater binding affinity between B.1.1.7s receptor-binding domain and ACE2 compared to Hu-1s binding affinity. B.1.1.7 showed a 1.98-fold higher affinity. Binding affinity with ACE2 was highest with the B.1.351 variant. There was a 4.62-fold greater affinity compared to Hu-1. These findings suggest that acquisition of enhanced affinity of Spike proteins for the human ACE2 receptor may be a convergent feature of more transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variants arising in multiple geographic regions and indicate that MST provides a rapid way to biochemically assess such changes. Based on the findings, the researchers suggest the results are consistent with previous models that also attributed both variants increased transmissibility with greater binding affinity with human ACE2. *Important Notice bioRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information. New Delhi, Feb 24 : The Central Drug Standard Control Organisation's (CDSCO)Subject Expert Committee has asked Dr Reddy's Laboratories to present additional data of immunogenicity while reviewing its application for Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) of Russian Covid vaccine Sputnik V in India, sources said. Dr Reddy's had applied for EUA before the CDSCO, and its application was reviewed by the SEC on Wednesday, a source told IANS. Meanwhile, the committee has also asked Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech to submit efficacy data of Covaxin before seeking its trial on children. The firm had sought permission from the Drug Controller General of India to conduct vaccine's trial on the children. In September 2020, Dr Reddy's partnered with the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) to conduct the clinical trials of the Sputnik V and for its distribution rights in India. The vaccine is currently undergoing the Phase 3 clinical trial in India. The Berkshire Eagle's Larry Parnass and Francesca Paris will discuss the latest news and updates concerning COVID-19 and the vaccination program in Berkshire County during a livestream broadcast at noon on Thursday. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Results from the latest round of the real-time assessment of community transmission study (REACT-1) study in England indicate that although coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases have decreased, the number of hospitalizations remains high. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic early in 2020, there have been several waves of infection. In England, the second wave of infections began in September 2020. With strict social distancing, the number of cases declined, and as the social distancing norms were relaxed, the cases increased. Beginning December 2020, the number of infections increased significantly, with regions in the South being affected more than those in the North. The increase in cases was attributed to the new variant of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent of COVID-19, that emerged around September 2020. A third lockdown was imposed beginning January 2021 to break the transmission chain. To determine patterns of prevalence of COVID-19, throat and nose swabs are obtained randomly in the England population as part of the REACT-1 study program. Round 8 of the study collected samples between 6 and 22 January 2021. The results showed an increase in the number of cases for the first ten days and then a decrease over the next seven days. Decline in cases during third lockdown In a paper published in the medRxiv* preprint server, researchers report the results of round 9a of REACT-1 for self-administered swabs that were collected between 4 and 13 February 2021. The first round of REACT-1 began in May 2020, and since then, around 150,000 to 175,000 people above the age of five provided throat and nose swabs for real-time polymerase chain reaction reverse transcription (RT-PCR) testing. Data is usually collected every 2-3 weeks at monthly intervals. An online or telephone survey is used to collect demographics, symptoms, and lifestyle. The results are analyzed to provide unweighted and weighted SARS-CoV-2 infection estimates, to account for sampling method and differential response. In round 9a, there were 378 positive samples out of 85,473 swabs, giving a weighted prevalence of 0.51%. This is a more than a two-thirds decrease in the positive cases from 1.57% in the previous round. Upon further analysis, the researchers found a halving time of 14.6 days in the latter half of round 8 and in round 9a. When analyzed for the entire round 8 and round 9a, the halving time was 20.4 days. From round 8 to round 9a, there was a decline in weighted regional prevalence. The greatest declines were in London, West and East Midlands, and East and Southeast England. The highest cases were now in the North. The reproduction number was less than one everywhere except for North East, North West, Yorkshire and The Humber. Neighborhood prevalence of swab-positivity for rounds 8 and 9a. Neighborhood prevalence calculated from nearest neighbors (the median number of neighbors within 30km in the study). Average neighborhood prevalence displayed for individual lower-tier local authorities. Regions: NE = North East, NW = North West, YH = Yorkshire and The Humber, EM = East Midlands, WM = West Midlands, EE = East of England, L = London, SE = South East, SW = South West. Cases also declined among all age groups. The highest prevalence was in the 18 to 24 years olds and 5 to 12-year-olds. The lowest prevalence was in people older than 65 years. Continued monitoring still needed The results of REACT 9a, which started about a month after the third lockdown, indicate a sharp decline in SARS-CoV-2 prevalence. This decline follows a plateau in the prevalence at the beginning of the lockdown and going down thereafter. The trend is similar to the trend from testing symptomatic patients. The prevalence in London was about 3%, and about 4% for young people and the prevalence dropped by 80% in London, South East, and West Midlands. The United Kingdom started vaccination for COVID-19 in December 2020, with the vaccine being offered to almost everyone older than 70 years. However, the prevalence of COVID-19 for those above 65 years is similar to that in other age groups. This suggests the decrease is mainly due to reduced social interactions rather than the effect of vaccination. The prevalence was higher in people of Asian origin compared to white and more cases were seen in people living in the most deprived areas. Hospital and home care workers had higher prevalence suggesting this group has ongoing infection risk. The authors note several limitations of the study. Despite correcting for sampling, the sampled population may not be truly representative of the true population. But, the study does not have self-reporting bias, arising from only testing symptomatic patients. The self-administered swabs may be less reliable than those taken by health care professionals, although detailed video instructions are provided. Thus, although there is a significant decrease in COVID-19 prevalence in England during January and February 2021, the prevalence is still high. The number of hospitalizations is higher than that in the first wave of the pandemic. The effects of easing of social distancing when we transition out of lockdown need to be closely monitored to avoid a resurgence in infections and renewed pressure on health services, the authors write. *Important Notice medRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information. When we start the deployment of this vaccine, we will not have sufficient concrete data to prove that this vaccine reduces transmission. The New York Post - November 24, 2020 https://nypost.com/2020/11/24/moderna-boss-says-covid-shot-not-proven-to-stop-virus-spread/ 3. Will Covid-19 Vaccines Save Lives? Current Trials Arent Designed To Tell Us. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said, Ideally, you want an antiviral vaccine to do two things . . . first, reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill and go to the hospital, and two, prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission.7 Yet the current phase III trials are not actually set up to prove either (table 1). None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus. The British Medical Journal - (Published 21 October 2020) https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037 4. Frequently Asked Questions about COVID-19 Vaccination Do I need to wear a mask and avoid close contact with others if I have gotten 2 doses of the vaccine? Yes. To protect yourself and others, follow these recommendations: Wear a mask over your nose and mouth Stay at least 6 feet away from others Avoid crowds Avoid poorly ventilated spaces Wash your hands often Its important for everyone to continue using all the tools available to help stop this pandemic as we learn more about how COVID-19 vaccines work in real-world conditions. Experts are also looking at how many people get vaccinated and how the virus is spreading in communities. We also dont yet know whether getting a COVID-19 vaccine will prevent you from spreading the virus that causes COVID-19 to other people, even if you dont get sick yourself. CDC will continue to update this page as we learn more. Centers For Disease Control and Prevention Updated Feb. 17, 2021 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/faq.html#:~:text=Do%20I%20need%20to%20wear,virus%20that%20causes%20COVID%2D19. 5. Key Things to Know About COVID-19 Vaccines If you are vaccinated against COVID-19, you may still be exposed to the virus that causes COVID-19. After exposure, people can be infected with or carry the virus that causes COVID-19 but not feel sick or have any symptoms. Experts call this asymptomatic infection. For this reason, even after vaccination, we need to continue using all the tools available to help stop this pandemic as we learn more about how COVID-19 vaccines work in real-world conditions. Centers For Disease Control and Prevention Updated Feb. 9, 2021 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/keythingstoknow.html A newborn baby has gone through a successful surgery in Ho Chi Minh City to remove a parasitic twin from her abdomen. The one-day-old baby suffered from a condition called fetus in fetu -- a rare congenital anomaly with an incidence of 1:500,000 births that is characterized by the incorporation of one or more partially-developed fetuses into the body of an otherwise normally developed fetus. Doctors at Tu Du Maternity Hospital discovered a tumor with unknown characteristics that had grown quickly in size inside the fetus abdomen when she was in her mothers womb. The baby was born prematurely at Tu Du at 36 weeks, weighing 3.4 kilograms, a representative of the Children's Hospital 2 in District 1 said on Tuesday. Following her birth, the newborn got her abdomen distended and suffered respiratory failure, so she had to be intubated. She was then transferred to the Childrens Hospital 2 for further treatment. Medical examination results showed that the tumor inside the babys abdomen had grown large, containing a fetus-shaped mass with the bony outline of shoulder blades, a spine, limbs, and a working blood supply from the host. The tumor is indistinguishable from the fetus in fetu condition, doctors affirmed. Surgeons thus decided to remove the malformed fetus from the baby girl. The surgery was successfully completed after an hour and a half, with the child patients respiratory condition improving remarkably. The baby girl was then transferred to the neonatal resuscitation department. Currently, she is in good health and has been discharged from the hospital. According to medical experts, a child patient with fetus in fetu conditions has to be medically monitored for at least three years after surgery. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! KEY TAKEAWAYS Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday declared that the process of granting Indian citizenship to Hindu refugees in Bengal under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) will resume once the process of COVID-19 vaccination has ended. As soon as the COVID vaccination process ends the process of granting citizenship under CAA will begin. All of you [Matua community] will be respected citizens of this country, said the minister, stating that the implementation of law was pause in view of the pandemic. Amit Shah was attending a rally in Thakurnagar, West Bengal, the base of the Mathua community. WHO ARE THE MATHUAS? Mathuas are Hindus, originally from East Pakistan, who migrated to India during the Partition and after the creation of Bangladesh. They are estimated to have a population of three million in West Bengal, enough to tilt the scales in favour of a political party in minimum four Lok Sabha seats and over 30 assembly seats in Nadia, and North and South 24 Parganas districts. The community is generally considered to vote in favour of the TMC, but stood with BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. CAA BACKGROUND Several protests were broken out across India in 2019 against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019. This act seeks to alter the definition of illegal immigrant for Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Buddhists, and Christian immigrants from our neighbours Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, who have been settled in India without legal documentation. These minority immigrants from other countries will be granted fast track Indian citizenship within 6 years. Till now, the standard eligibility requirement for citizenship by naturalisation has been 12 years of residence. The Supreme Court, on hearing the initial petitions challenging CAA, declined to sustain the contentious law, but insisted that the Centre file its reply against the petitions stating its unconstitutional, explaining the functioning of the act. The legislation will apply to those who were forced or compelled to seek shelter in India due to persecution on the grounds of religion. Its main objective is to protect such people from the processes of illegal migration. The cut-off date for eligibility of citizenship is December 31, 2014, i.e. the applicant should have entered the country on or prior to the given date. Indian citizenship, under the present law, is given either to the people born in India or have resided in India for at least 11 years. The bill also proposed to incorporate a sec. 7 (d), providing for the cancellation of Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) registration, where the OCI card-holder has violated any provision of the Citizenship Act or any other law in force. The Centre claims that these minority groups have come escaping the persecution in Muslim-majority countries. This logic, however, is inconsistent. The bill does not include protection of all religious minorities, and does not apply to all neighbouring nations either, like Ahmedia Muslims and Shias in Pakistan, Rohingya Muslims and Hindus in Myanmar, Hindu and Christian Tamils in Sri Lanka. To this contention, the government had responded that Muslims are open to seek refuge in Islamic countries. HOME MINISTER AT THE RALLY The nation-wide protests against CAA that followed after it was passed by the Parliament in December 2019 created a lot of fear among people that if seen in consonance with the proposed National Register of Citizens, the CAA could be used to disenfranchise Indian Muslims. However, Shah in his rally said that the implementation of the act would not have any effect on the citizenship status of Indian minorities and accused opposition parties of misleading and misinforming the minorities about the law, widely criticised as discriminatory as it has a criterion for religion for eligibility of Indian citizenship for the first time. Shah also promised Rs. 18,000 in each farmers bank account if BJP take over from TMC in the upcoming polls. He also announced Centres decision to raise a paramilitary Narayani Battalion on the demand of Koch-Rajbanshi community of the state. Appeasing the Matua community, Shah said if voted to power, the BJP government would propose renaming the Thakurnagar railway station to Shri Dham Thakurnagar, dedicated to Sri Harichand Thakur, their socio-religious guru. Reacting to Shahs proposal, the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee stated that he should mind his language and announced that she would never allow CAA, NRC, or NPR to be enforced. CONCLUSION As of December 2020, the rules governing the Act were still under preparation according to the home ministry, a year after it was passed by the Parliament and received the Presidents assent. In response to an RTI query from The Hindu, B.C. Joshi, Director (citizenship), Foreigners Division also said that the rules under Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 are under preparation. WHAT ARE YOUR VIEWS WITH REGARD TO THE CAA IMPLEMENTION IN BENGAL? LET US KNOW IN THE COMMENTS BELOW! Reliance Retail intends to collaborate with large numbers of smaller retailers as it scales its online JioMart platform across categories such as grocery, electronics and fashion, said Damodar Mall, chief executive officer, grocery retail, Reliance Retail Ltd. The entire new-commerce initiative, across all categories in retail, is actually founded on the point of view that collaboration with a large number of micro retailers is probably the best shot at modernizing the entire consumption system in India," Mall said at a virtual Retail Leadership Summit (RLS) on Wednesday. JioMart, Reliance Retails new commerce platform that plans to connect small stores to shoppers, was rolled out last year starting with groceries. However, for now, most orders are serviced from the vast network of Reliance Retail-owned stores. For groceries, it is currently onboarding kiranas, or neighbourhood stores, onto the JioMart platform. Several kiranas have already been onboarded. These are now placing business-to-business orders with the retailer and also using the JioMart PoS device for billing. The platform has also expanded its offerings to sell apparel and electronics in some parts of the country. Orders for electronics are currently fulfilled through Reliance Digital. In the grocery business obviously we do it with kiranas. In the value fashion business and in the digital goods, as well as the pharmacy business its the same approach that the largest share and the largest customer centricity and entrepreneurship pool of retail energy in India lies with the micro entrepreneurs, said Mall. If players like us can be those agents of just little modernity and support at scale that is needed, then, overall, the end consumers will benefit, he noted. At the same time the micro entrepreneurs will see that support, which makes sure that their businesses and their incomes grow... Its very core to what were driving today in terms of strategy across all pillars of retail in the Reliance Retail system," added Mall. Estimates by Goldman Sachs suggest Reliance Industries Ltds online gross merchandise value will reach $35 billion in FY25 with a 31% share of the e-commerce market from around 1% now. There are high expectations from the platforms work with large, packaged consumer goods companies and local entrepreneurs. Reliance Retail operates multiple formats, including neighbourhood stores, supermarkets, fashion, jewellery and electronics among other categories, both online and offline. It operates around 12,200 stores. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 23:05:39|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close Wang Yang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), presides over a Chairperson's Council meeting of the 13th CPPCC National Committee and addresses the meeting in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 24, 2021. (Xinhua/Liu Weibing) BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China's top political advisory body, held a Chairperson's Council meeting Wednesday. A work plan for the CPPCC National Committee to carry out democratic oversight was reviewed at the meeting presided over by Wang Yang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the CPPCC National Committee. While addressing the meeting, Wang said the CPPCC National Committee will continue to carry out consultative supervision following the implementation of the 14th Five-Year Plan, which is of great significance for the CPPCC to play its role in the national governance system. Wang called on the special committees of the CPPCC National Committee to conduct in-depth investigations and studies, strengthen coordination and cooperation with other forms of supervision and offer relevant suggestions, thus contributing to fully building a modern socialist China. The meeting heard a report on the preparations for the fourth session of the 13th CPPCC National Committee. Wang stressed the implementation of the decisions and plans made by the CPC Central Committee on successfully holding the annual "two sessions" and the requirements of regular epidemic prevention measures. The meeting also heard a report on the exploitation, utilization and protection of data resources. Enditem Nava Bharat Ventures soared 11.75% to Rs 65.6 after the company said its board will consider a share buyback on 26 February 2021. In a BSE filing made on Tuesday (23 February), the company said that its board will meet on Friday, 26 February 2021, to consider the proposal for buyback of equity shares. Nava Bharat Ventures has presence in ferro alloys, power, mining, agribusiness and healthcare services. On a consolidated basis, the company posted a 168% jump in net profit to Rs 161.79 crore on a 29.5% rise in net sales to Rs 660.13 crore in Q3 FY21 over Q3 FY20. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Disney's Raya and the Last Dragon will be released in China on March 5, the same day as on Disney Plus and cinemas in other territories. Chinese actress Zhao Liying will be dubbing the main character, Raya, into Chinese. The film tells the story of a lone warrior, Raya, who must track down the legendary last dragon to stop an evil force that has returned after 500 years to threaten her home world, Kumandra, a fantasy world where humans and dragons once lived together long ago in harmony. Raya and the Last Dragon is helmed by Don Hall, director of Disney's Academy Award-winning Big Hero 6, and Carlos Lopez Estrada, whose feature film directorial debut was the critically acclaimed Blindspotting. Veteran artist Paul Briggs, known for his work on Frozen and Big Hero 6, and fellow longtime animator/story artist John Ripa, Moana and Zootopia, are co-directors. Award-winning playwright and writer Qui Nguyen and Adele Lim, who penned Crazy Rich Asians, wrote the screenplay. The film is the first Disney film to have a Southeast Asia-inspired setting. It is inspired by the cultures and people of Southeast Asia, and throughout the making of the movie, filmmakers worked closely with the Raya Southeast Asia Story Trust, which consists of expert consultants from the region. The animated movie features the voices of many actors and actresses of Asian descent, including Kelly Marie Tran as Raya, Awkwafina as the magical dragon named Sisu, as well as Sandra Oh, Daniel Dae Kim, Benedict Wong, Ross Butler and Gemma Chan. The Chinese version cast famous actress Zhao Liying to dub Raya. This is the first time I have voiced an animation, it's very challenging for me, and I need to understand more about my character, Zhao said. I felt my voice was hyperbole, but it's also very fresh for me. We will see adventure, friendship and courage in the film and I hope every audience can find something to resonate with. Raya joins Disney's collection of culturally iconic female characters it has created this century, including Anna and Elsa (Frozen), Judy Hopps (Zootopia) and Moana (Moana). It is worth noting that this is the first Disney Animation movie to be created by a team working remotely, due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Nearly all production for Raya and the Last Dragon took place in the homes of more than 450 artists and crew members. In total, more than 900 employees of Walt Disney Animation Studios worked remotely contributing to this film and other upcoming projects. (CGTN) Partners at McKinsey & Company voted out the consulting firms top executive, Kevin Sneader, this week as it continues to face blowback over its role in fueling the opioid crisis. The decision to deny Mr. Sneader a second three-year term as global managing partner came in a vote by more than 600 senior partners, according to a company executive. Earlier this month, McKinsey had agreed to pay 49 states a historic settlement of almost $600 million because of sales advice the company had given to drugmakers. It is highly unusual for a sitting managing partner at McKinsey to be refused a follow-on term. The last time a firm leader was denied a second term was in 1976, according to the companys internal history book. Mr. Sneader, 54, did not even make it to the final round of balloting, according to the company executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The final candidates for Mr. Sneaders replacement are Bob Sternfels, based in San Francisco, and Sven Smit, based in Amsterdam. The shake-up at the prestigious consulting firm was first reported by The Financial Times. Denton, TX (76205) Today Scattered thunderstorms. High near 75F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Locally heavier rainfall possible.. Tonight Showers and thundershowers this evening will give way to steady rain overnight. Low 64F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected. Locally heavier rainfall possible. LAKE OF THE WOODS, Ore. A Chiloquin woman was killed and multiple people injured in a two-vehicle crash on Highway 140 near Lake of the Woods on Tuesday, according to Oregon State Police. State troopers and emergency crews responded to reports of the crash around 2:45 p.m. on Tuesday. A preliminary investigation found that 64-year-old Paula West of Klamath Falls was headed eastbound in a Toyota SR5 pickup when she lost control of the vehicle, colliding with an eastbound Dodge Grand Caravan driven by 63-year-old Mary Wolf of Chiloquin. West was transported to the hopsital with unknown injuries. Wolf sustained fatal injuries and was pronounced dead at the scene. Wolf had two passengers in the vehicle with her, OSP said. 37-year-old David Burton of Chiloquin was taken to the hospital via ambulance, and a juvenile female was airlifted for treatment. Girl Power! More than 80% of the girls who participated in the 2019 Girl Day event with Collins reported that they are now more likely to consider a career in engineering. A campaign begins Enter DiscoverE. Twenty years ago, DiscoverE, along with other prominent engineering organizations, created Introduce A Girl to Engineering (IAGTE) Day to show middle-school girls everywhere what it's like to work as an engineer. Why middle-schoolers? Research shows girls begin to question their interest in STEM right around the age of 10, or fourth grade. Why the focus on girls? Less than 10 percent of female freshmen say they'll pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers, compared to nearly 30 percent of their male counterparts. Collins Aerospace, a business of Raytheon Technologies, has supported the event from the start. Volunteers at the former Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, opened their doors to a small group of girls on that first, cold IAGTE Day in 2001. The program has grown: Last year, more than 2,300 girls and 1,000 volunteers participated at 55 Collins sites across eight countries. Over the years, in-person activities have ranged from donning all kinds of goggles (safety, night vision, virtual reality) to see problems in new ways, conducting lab experiments, testing algorithms, designing robotics, and even sitting at the controls of a (parked) aircraft so girls could experience a day in the life of an aerospace engineer. An unexpected curveball When COVID-19 hit, Collins event organizers had to rethink curriculum and logistics so they could keep the 20-year tradition going. "We made it work this year by doing what engineers always do," said Katie Cody, who leads the Corporate Social Responsibility team at Collins. "We found new and creative ways to solve problems." This year's IAGTE event will take place Thursday, February 25, and yes the organizers have taken it online. The team designed a toolkit with local and corporate-provided resources that could work for most any participant, anywhere. "This is the first year we've planned the event as part of Raytheon Technologies," said Adriana Johnson, Collins corporate social responsibility program manager, who has coordinated the global event for eight years. "This has given us a greater opportunity to spotlight our people and our products across the business. The virtual platform has allowed several sites to team up to form one large event throughout several communities." The perks of going virtual Virtual sessions mean more participants in more places can connect to livestreamed and pre-recorded modules. Technology and products that are unique to a particular site, such as our ACES 5 ejection seats or our world-famous spacesuits, can now be explored by everyone. Sites now have the same access to Q&As planned with engineers, subject matter experts and because it's Collins our favorite astronauts. As a bonus this year, Time magazine's first-ever Kid of the Year, Gitanjali Rao, will join us on a number of fronts, including a Zoom chat with Collins President Steve Timm. But the best part of IAGTE Day, both this year and in years past, is the stories that come from it. "I love to hear about employees who are paying it forward because someone else encouraged them," added Adriana. "And I love hearing from the girls who come away with a whole new level of confidence." Lorrin Johnson, an engineer who now works in marketing at our Avionics business in Wilsonville, Oregon, agrees: "A lack of female representation in a male-dominated field [like ours] can make it hard for girls to envision a STEM path. Hearing women share about their love of aerospace engineering and their successful STEM careers gives the girls this vital representation a way to picture themselves as future engineers." Girls who take part in this year's event led by the Wilsonville team will engage with activities via the Collins virtual tradeshow booth. An interactive URL will invite girls to view videos, learn about the site's products and engineers, and engage in competitions at their own pace. With all the virtual activities at participants' fingertips, and with 56 Collins sites across 13 countries expected to participate this year, our business is ready to help tomorrow's STEM leaders imagine their own futures. Additional Resources: Follow us on Twitter: @CollinsAero SOURCE Collins Aerospace Related Links https://www.discovere.org/our-programs/girl-day A woman who struck a close relationship with Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman's wife after glamming her up is hoping the 31-year-old former beauty queen will avoid prison time after the was arrested at Dulles International Airport in Virginia on Monday. The makeup artist, who goes by the name Maralu, shared a photo of Emma Coronel on her Instagram Story feed on Tuesday with a Spanish caption that reads, 'see you soon.' The makeup expert's Instagram account, maralumakeup._, also contains several modeling photos of Coronel, including one posted Monday, which apparently was part of a Valentine's Day photo shoot. Maralu, who also bills herself as a hairdresser, also shared two photos of Coronel in a wedding dress that are part of a December 2020 Instagram ad campaign for a Sinaloa, Mexico, hair salon, and at least two other closeup shots of her friend displaying her makeup strokes. While her professional work received hundreds of likes, Maralu was blasted by a Mexican follower who accused of her of being a 'narco makeup artist.' 'Anyone who agrees to work with drug traffickers and murderers, who have their hands stained with blood from thousands of innocent Mexicans, is also morally responsible for it,' @saidcst wrote. However, plenty of the 554,000 Instagram followers of the verified @therealemmacoronel account are wishing U.S. federal prosecutors and investigators will show leniency toward Coronel, who is the mother to the couple's twin daughters who were born in California in 2011. 'I hope you are allowed to leave soon because of your babies,' @86salazarmayo wrote. A makeup artist knows as @marulamakeup._ on Instagram shared a photo of Emma Coronel, the 31-year-old former beauty queen wife of Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman, via her Instagram Story feed with a Spanish caption that read 'see you soon' Instagram followers of Emma Coronel are hoping that El Chapo's wife will be cleared of drug trafficking charges and be allowed to leave jail and rejoin the couple's twin daughters Emma Coronel, who married El Chapo at the age of 18, is accused by the Justice Department of helping him escape from El Altiplano, a maximum-security prison near the city of Toluca in 2015. U.S. federal authorities also accused her of plotting a second prison break before he was extradited to the U.S. Emma Coronel appears before U.S. Magistrate Judge Robin Meriweather with her lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman in a virtual hearing Tuesday in federal court in Washington, DC Coronel's Instagram follower @ruthortiz shared the same sentiment: 'May God bless you and protect you, come out soon for your beautiful girls.' Another Instagram follower was sympathetic toward El Chapo's wife, arguing that he would have never allowed her to participate in the cartel's illicit, yet lucrative business. 'She is not a drug trafficker. They blame her only [due to] the fact of being the wife of [El] Chapo Guzman,' @adelove17 wrote. 'The husband was never going to allow to mix her in his business. She has always been dedicated to her twins. She never got close to cocaine. They only judge her for being [El] Chapo's wife.' Instagrammer @lupitaescobar chimed in by saying Coronel's apprehension and charges were unjust. 'I hope everything works out well for you and that you are freed,' she wrote. 'It's not fair. God bless you.' Coronel made her first court appearance in Washington before a U.S. judge Tuesday and was ordered to be detained on charges she conspired with her husband to run a multibillion-dollar drug enterprise while he was behind bars. She is being held at a jail in Alexandria, Virginia, and her lawyers are expected to apply for bail. She has not yet entered a plea. Authorities said Coronel relayed messages to help Guzman conduct drug trafficking from 2012 to early 2014, and continued delivering messages while visiting him in a Mexican prison following his February 2014 arrest. Emma Coronel is facing up to life in prison and a potential $10 million fine for helping operate El Chapo's Sinaloa Cartel while he was in prison, plotting his jail escape in 2015 and trafficking drugs to the United States A makeup artist known as @maralumakeup._ struck a friendship with Emma Coronel (pictured) after glamming her up for events and photo shoots They also said Coronel conspired in Guzman's famous July 2015 escape from the Altiplano prison in Mexico through a mile-long tunnel dug from his cell, and began plotting another escape following his January 2016 capture by Mexican authorities. Coronel is being charged with conspiring with El Chapo, who she married at the age of 18, to distribute heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine for unlawful importation into the United States. If convicted on all charges, Coronel faces up to life in prison and a potential $10 million fine. So if you were a dog, would you rather belong to Ted Cruz or Mitt Romney? Yes, you have to choose. Perhaps you remember that many, many years ago, Romney drove to Canada for a family vacation with his Irish setter Seamus on the roof of his car. I mentioned this fact about 2 million times when Romney ran for president, mainly to break up the tedium of a very boring campaign. Cruz recently made headlines when he got caught taking a plane for a family escape to Mexico while Texas was suffering through its stupendous weather crisis. Michael Hardy, a Texas journalist, went to check on the empty Cruz house in Houston and discovered the neighborhood had indeed had a power outage. He also saw a small, white dog looking out the bottom right pane of glass in the senators front door. Ted had abandoned Snowflake the poodle! OK, thats a little tough. A security guard parked outside the senators house volunteered that hed been doing some caretaking. We will not stop to investigate whether Snowflake is a boy or a girl, or even if weve got the breed exactly right. Suffice it to say that he/she was among the millions of weather-bound Texans Cruz had left behind when he went on, um, a planned vacation. Cruzs story keeps evolving, naturally. His original claim that he was just dropping his girls off for a visit with friends faded when many Americans noted the guy was dragging a really big suitcase for a dad who wasnt planning to hang around. The crucial question is whether Snowflake got a worse deal than Seamus. Any doubts out there, people? One dog is being taken on a family vacation and the other is being left behind in a weather crisis/power outage. In a house Cruzs wife described to friends by text as FREEZING. Serious citizens also might want to note that Romney lately has been reborn as the champion of independent thinking. Taking the lead in standing up to Donald Trump during the impeachment crises does tend to overshadow driving with a dog on the roof in 1983. Cruz, however, stuck with the crazed conspiracy theorists after the election and voted against certifying Joe Biden as president. Romney said Cruz and his fellow Biden denialists would forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy. And then he went off to Cancun, Mexico, after Texas was battered by snow, ice and rain, cut off from lights and deprived of reliable clean water. While he scurried back after getting caught in the act, its not likely a whole lot of his fellow Texans appreciated his explanation that he was just trying to be a good dad. Yeah, tell it to Snowflake. GAIL COLLINS writes for The New York Times. For Subscribers Why South Dakota county officials are shirking state-given water rights Grant County could be the thirteenth county to repeal their drainage ordinance in the past decade. COLUMBIA Former SCANA Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kevin Marsh will spend at least two years in prison and pay back at least $5 million for defrauding electric ratepayers in South Carolinas $9 billion nuclear power fiasco, according to a plea deal that was presented to a federal judge Feb. 24. The 65-year-old Marsh appeared in court for the first time to plead guilty to fraud charges and formally accept responsibility for his role in the failed, decade-long expansion of SCANAs V.C. Summer nuclear power plant in Fairfield County. Marsh had to surrender his passport at the courthouse but was released without having to post money for bond. Once one of South Carolinas top businessmen, Marsh has spent the past six months as a criminal informant and will continue to be a key witness for state and federal prosecutors who continue to probe the V.C. Summer projects failure. He faces up to 10 years in prison if he does not fully cooperate with that investigation, according to the new terms of his plea deal. "Justice has been served," U.S. Attorney for South Carolina Peter McCoy said after the hearing. "For years, institutions and individuals have abused the public trust with little to no accountability. This includes corporations that have increased profits at the expense of their customers. Oftentimes, it's assumed that these executives will avoid any oversight because of who they are and where they've worked." Marsh's first day in court was a long one, a product of a three-year investigation by the FBI, U.S. Attorney's Office for South Carolina, State Law Enforcement Division and S.C. Attorney General's Office that brought both state and federal fraud charges against him. He spent Wednesday morning atoning for his crimes in a federal courthouse in Columbia and the afternoon apologizing before a state judge in Spartanburg. "I'm sorry it's come to this," Marsh told state judge Mark Hayes. "I stand responsible for my actions. I will fulfill my obligations under the agreement with the state to cooperate whenever and however I can and don't expect to create any problems for you or the court." In both hearings, Marsh clad in a gray suit and black face mask listened quietly as prosecutors lay out the case against him. They recounted how the sudden collapse of the project in July 2017, now considered the greatest business failure in state history, sent shockwaves through South Carolinas legal, regulatory, political and business communities. All told, SCANA and its minority partner on the ambitious venture, state-owned Santee Cooper, spent $9 billion before pulling the plug on the construction effort, which was supposed to usher in a new era of clean nuclear power in South Carolina. The V.C. Summer expansion would have been the United States first successful nuclear construction project since the 1970s. SCANA hiked its rates nine times on its 753,000 electric customers to finance the project. Now, ratepayers for both SCANA and Santee Cooper will spend decades paying off that debt on their power bills. Marshs main crime while managing the project, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim May told federal Judge Mary Geiger Lewis, was failing to tell regulators and the public about the ongoing supply chain, design and construction problems that were dooming the expansion effort. Instead, prosecutors asserted, Marsh and his colleagues at SCANA presented only rosy projections and assessments of the progress at the V.C. Summer construction site, even as lead contractor Westinghouse struggled to assemble the two new nuclear reactors. Marsh and SCANAs top executives knew by late 2016 that their project was doomed, destined to miss critical deadlines to have the reactors online, prosecutors asserted Wednesday. At that point, SCANA executives needed only to raise their concerns to the state Public Service Commission, which sets utility rates in South Carolina, and begin an honest conversation about whether the project should continue. In fact, a similar debate took place about the ongoing expansion of the Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia after the V.C. Summer project collapsed. There, regulators decided to continue the construction effort rather than cancel it. But Marsh never brought those concerns to regulators, Instead, May asserted, Marsh and his SCANA colleagues knowingly repeated Westinghouse's false reports of positive progress at the site. "This isn't a typical fraud scheme," May said. "This isn't Bernie Madoff. This isn't a Ponzi scheme. This is more a crime related to violation of public trust." Marsh pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud and wire fraud and admitted, clearly and repeatedly, in response to questions from Judge Lewis, that he committed those crimes. May said investigators determined Marsh should pay back $5 million to S.C. ratepayers after an "exhaustive process" that included studying Marsh's compensation from the company and determining how much of it, including performance-related bonuses, was directly tied to the nuclear project. Prosecutors said Marsh has been cooperating with the investigation since fall 2020. The probe is "looking at additional actors" who may have committed crimes during the project's construction, May told Lewis. "We are going to need his help," May said of Marsh. Marsh, who now lives in Flat Rock, N.C., is the second SCANA executive to plead guilty to defrauding ratepayers. The company's former chief operating officer, Steve Byrne, pleaded guilty in a similar arrangement in July. Now, prosecutors have both Marsh and Byrne at their disposal as witnesses as they continue their investigation. If Marsh fails to cooperate or "misbehaves while he's out, then all bets are off in terms of this plea agreement," said Creighton Waters, an attorney at the Attorney General's Office. Marshs guilty plea comes at the close of Peter McCoys run as U.S. Attorney for South Carolina. The James Island Republican is resigning Feb. 28 after President Joe Bidens administration asked almost all Donald Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys to step down by the end of the month. As a state lawmaker in 2017, McCoy led the S.C. Houses investigation into the V.C. Summer projects failure and questioned Marsh and other SCANA officials about their role. "I am honored to have been U.S. attorney throughout this prosecution," McCoy said. The V.C. Summer fiasco proved an existential threat for both SCANA and Santee Cooper. Once a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Cayce, SCANA was ultimately sold to Virginia-based Dominion Energy. The company was later rebranded as Dominion Energy South Carolina. The General Assembly is currently debating whether to sell Santee Cooper to Florida-based NextEra Energy as a means of offloading the power-and-water utility's V.C. Summer debt. After the morning hearing, as McCoy and S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson held a press conference to discuss the guilty plea, Marsh and his attorneys exited the federal courthouse and attempted to walk past the gaggle of reporters and prosecutors near the front gate. Tom Clements, an environmental activist who criticized the nuclear project even before its abandonment, noticed and shouted a question as the former SCANA executive walked past: "Mr. Marsh, are you going to apologize to the people of South Carolina for this nuclear nightmare?" Marsh did not respond. He climbed into the passenger seat of a black truck that revved its engine and drove away. Avery G. Wilks reported from Columbia and Conor Hughes from Spartanburg. Jamie Lovegrove contributed from Columbia. Celebrate Recovery founder John Baker dies: 'The world lost a giant of a man' Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Pastor John Baker, founder of Celebrate Recovery a global ministry born out of the heart of Rick Warrens Saddleback Church aimed at helping people recover from addiction and other hurts, habits, and hang-ups has died. The Celebrate Recovery National team shared the news of Bakers death in a social media statement Tuesday. The cause of death has not yet been announced. There are times in life when words are totally inadequate in sharing how you feel, this morning is one of those days, the statement attributed to Celebrate Recovery National Director Mac Owen and his wife, Mary, states. My dearest friend and brother has gone Home. John Baker co-founder of Celebrate Recovery made his way Home early this morning. To say this took us by surprise would be an understatement. John touched more people with the healing power and grace of Jesus Christ than anyone else that I have ever known personally and one of those lives was mine. The team plans to share more details in the days to come, but asked supporters to keep Bakers wife and Celebrate Recovery co-founder, Cheryl Baker, in their prayers. We will miss John more than words can express but it will only be for a short while and then we will see him again. See you soon my brother," the statement added. Celebrate Recovery is a Christ-centered, 12-step recovery ministry started in 1991 at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. The ministry was founded after Baker wrote Warren the now-famous, concise, 13-page, single-spaced letter outlining the vision God had given him for the program. Today, 35,000 Celebrate Recovery groups meet around the world. The program has been implemented in churches, recovery houses, rescue missions, universities and prisons. Baker, who authored several books on addiction and recovery, previously shared how his heart for others was birthed out of his own recovery story. A functioning alcoholic with a failing marriage, he found freedom and recovery through Christ and Warrens ministry. Although Baker initially found help with his addiction through Alcoholics Anonymous, he desired a Christian-based healing program. He presented a plan to Warren about starting a Christ-centered 12-step program through Saddleback Church, according to a frequently-asked-questions page. All of us have several things in common. We love Christ, were willing to turn our lives over to Him, and were praying that we can begin to break the cycle of dysfunction for our families, Baker shared in an online testimony. On Facebook, Saddleback Church leader Kay Warren said that the world lost a giant of a man today" and that her family lost a dear friend and brother in the Lord. Thirty years ago John Baker turned the ruins of his life over to Jesus Christ and God transformed him from a driven businessman with an addiction to alcohol, a failing marriage and alienated children to a Christ-follower with a passion to help others with their hurts, habits and hang ups through the principles of recovery, she wrote. More than 7 million men and women around the world have found hope, a new start, and the God who made them [through] the program he co-founded with his precious wife Cheryl and Rick - Celebrate Recovery. There is simply no way to put into words how I love John and will miss this kind, creative, brilliant and faithful man. Our world lost a giant of a man today, and our family lost a dear friend and brother in the Lord. Thirty years ago John... Posted by Kay Warren on Tuesday, February 23, 2021 Celebrate Recovery International Director Richard Cobb said that Baker is a hero of the faith who gave many of us a fresh picture of how God can help with our brokenness. He will continue to be an example to this forever family in so many ways, Cobb tweeted. James Ackerman, president of the national evangelical prison ministry organization Prison Fellowship, said in a statement that the impact of Baker's "faithful obedience will go on for generations." "Several years ago, I met John in his office in California. We had a great discussion and began a fruitful collaboration that continues to this day," Ackerman explained. "God simply put us together at the right time. Celebrate Recovery Inside is now a key component of the Prison Fellowship Academy, and Celebrate Recovery chapters in the community are key partners in the ministry of Angel Tree Christmas." On social media, hundreds shared how Bakers program changed their lives. Thank you, John Baker, for the difference you made in my life. You made a remarkable difference in countless lives across the face of the globe, for the glory of HIS kingdom. Prayers for your family, friends, and a great multitude of forever family, commented one supporter. Wrote another: This man has done so much for the hurting people in this world, including me. I have to say I am in shock, but I know he is receiving his reward today in the presence of his King. I appreciate his heart and his obedience to Christ in founding Celebrate Recovery. WASHINGTON - The spirit of cross-border co-operation is lingering as Canada's environment minister talks climate change priorities with presidential envoy John Kerry. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry speaks during a press briefing at the White House, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021, in Washington. The spirit of cross-border co-operation is lingering as Canada's environment minister talks climate change priorities with presidential envoy Kerry. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP/Evan Vucci WASHINGTON - The spirit of cross-border co-operation is lingering as Canada's environment minister talks climate change priorities with presidential envoy John Kerry. Jonathan Wilkinson says he expects Canada and the United States to push each other to reach more ambitious climate targets as they work together over the next few months. Today's conversation follows a virtual meeting Tuesday between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden. The two leaders vowed to move "in lockstep" in a shared North American effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Biden says their overall shared goal is to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Wilkinson says Canada hopes to set a new target for emissions cuts by 2030 somewhere between 31 and 40 per cent of 2005 levels before Biden's April 22 climate summit. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 24, 2021. Srinagar, Feb 24 : An encounter broke out between the terrorists and security forces in the Shalgul forest area in South Kashmir's Anantnag district on Wednesday, officials said. The gunfight took place after security forces cordoned off the area and launched a search operation on the basis of a specific information about the presence of terrorists. As the security forces zeroed in on the spot where the terrorists were hiding they came under a heavy volume of fire that triggered the encounter. "Encounter has started at Shalgul forest area of Srigufwara, Anantnag. Police and Army are on the job," police said. By Mussab Ali Gov. Murphy, I am a big fan of your work. As a fellow progressive, I have celebrated as we passed the path to $15 minimum hourly wage and expanded paid sick leave. I also appreciate your strong stance during the pandemic with mask mandates alongside restaurant and retail shutdowns. These laws resulted in New Jersey being one of the safest states in the country over the summer. However, New Jersey has become a hotspot for cases again. As of Friday, Feb. 19, New Jersey and New York are adding cases at rates higher than every other state except South Carolina. We are well aware that students, educators, parents, along with school board members like ourselves want schools to reopen. We are asking that you take the bold step of immediately prioritizing educators to receive the COVID-19 vaccine to assist with safely reopening schools. Ensuring educational staff have prompt access to vaccines aligns with federal priorities. Both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have said that we must prioritize teachers getting the vaccine. As of Feb. 11, 28 states have made educators eligible for the vaccine. Some urban health departments estimate that nearly 40% of the population within their jurisdictions are eligible to receive the vaccine as part of category 1B, which includes smokers. Waiting until this phase ends could be too late for school employees who need protection before returning to in-person learning. The extent to which schools pose a risk for community spread depends heavily on the extent to which widespread testing measures, sanitation and ventilation efforts, and proper social distancing and quarantining can exist in schools. However, in schools that are already overcrowded and underfunded, enabling our highly exposed staff to get the vaccine is a more realistic plan than executing all of the above measures perfectly. In the Jersey City school district, we have already lost three dedicated staff members to COVID-19 and we dont want to lose anymore. In order to properly run a school district of this size, we need to ensure that our staff are protected to keep schools open. Currently, all staff must quarantine when there is a COVID-19 case in their building. If our staff were vaccinated, this would minimize the need to shut down a building due to a COVID concern. It is not too late to adjust your plan to include making school employees eligible to receive the vaccine. California Gov. Newsom just announced he would reserve 10% of the states first doses for teachers and school employees. We should follow his lead. Despite the CDCs recent comments that vaccinating teachers is not a mandatory prerequisite to schools reopening, it is still a highly recommended course of action. In New Jersey, you have often gone above and beyond federal guidelines, such as when you mandated masks outdoors over the summer before it was a recommendation from the CDC. Governor, the schools are the backbone of our economy. During your campaign in 2017, I was often reminded that you would have our back. Will you protect the backbone of our economy by prioritizing teachers to get vaccinated? Or will you continue to force schools, particularly urban school districts into impossible dilemmas? It is no coincidence that our states three largest school districts Newark Public Schools, Jersey City Public Schools, and Paterson Public Schools have all been remote since the start of this year. Please help us put our students and our communities first and prioritize New Jersey school employees to receive COVID-19 vaccine immediately. Mussab Ali of Jersey City is president of the Jersey City Board of Education and a member of the Harvard Law Class of 2023. Send letters to the editor and guest columns for The Jersey Journal to jjletters@jjournal.com. WASHTENAW COUNTY, MI A disproportionately small number of Black and Hispanic people have been vaccinated against COVID-19 in Washtenaw County, according to data from the Washtenaw County Health Department. The data, shared by the health department on Tuesday, Feb. 23, is broken down by age, race/ethnicity and ZIP code. As of Feb. 17, 16.7% of Washtenaw County residents have been vaccinated against COVID-19, state data shows. In Washtenaw County, 8% of vaccinations have been received by Black people, who account for 12.3% of county residents, 13% of coronavirus cases and 22% of deaths. White people make up 74.1% of the countys population and have received 77% of first doses of the vaccine, according to the data. Hispanic or Latino residents, who make up 4.8% of Washtenaw Countys population, account for 2.5% of those who have received at least one dose of vaccine. Those of Asian decent make up 6% of those getting at least one shot. Eight percent of those who have received at least one dose of the vaccine did not report their race. Because many of the first people vaccinated were health care workers -- that could be part of the problem. But obviously we have a lot to correct and improve moving forward, Washtenaw County Health Department spokeswoman Susan Ringler-Cerniglia said. As health systems move beyond the initial groups eligible to receive the vaccine, keeping track of which groups are being vaccinated helps ensure equity and increase the proportion of people of color vaccinated locally, health officials said. Of those vaccinated by health systems serving Washtenaw County, 17.5% of county residents age 16 and older have received at least one vaccine dose, while 37.6% of residents age 65 and older have received at least one dose. The health departments vaccine data includes the ongoing vaccination clinic at the Eastern Michigan University Convocation Center, now operating with additional staffing support from St. Joseph Mercy Ann Arbor. Broader vaccination information for Washtenaw County residents who have been vaccinated through local health systems, pharmacies or in other jurisdictions also is included in the data, health officials said. The data also includes the percentage of the county population vaccinated to date from the Michigan Care Improvement Registry, which does not include doses provided through the Ann Arbor VA health system, officials said. The vaccine data page is being updated weekly to include information about first doses given through Health Department clinics and outreach, as well as more limited information on countywide vaccination efforts. Reliable data are critical for understanding and improving health equity, said Jimena Loveluck, Washtenaw County health officer. This information helps us identify existing disparities in our local vaccination rates and inform ongoing efforts to vaccinate those most vulnerable to COVID-19 or less likely to seek vaccination. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services posted statewide race data for the first time on its COVID-19 Vaccine Dashboard on Tuesday, Feb. 23. It shows nearly 42% of recipients to be white, 3.7% Black and 43% of recipients who did not report their race. Read more: New Michigan vaccine data shows disparities along racial lines MORE FROM THE ANN ARBOR NEWS: AAPS, Michigan Medicine vaccine partnership a game-changer in students return to classroom, officials say 10,000 gallons of sewage spill on Ann Arbors Main Street Two men charged for threatening Michigan Democrats over presidential election results Lung transplant recipient at University of Michigan gets COVID-19 from donor, dies two months later The views expressed by public comments are not those of this company or its affiliated companies. Please note by clicking on "Post" you acknowledge that you have read the TERMS OF USE and the comment you are posting is in compliance with such terms. Your comments may be used on air. Be polite. Inappropriate posts or posts containing offsite links, images, GIFs, inappropriate language, or memes may be removed by the moderator. Job listings and similar posts are likely automated SPAM messages from Facebook and are not placed by WFMZ-TV. Miami University officials dedicated the former Campus Avenue Building as Nellie Craig Walker Hall after the university's first Black graduate. She earned a two-year teaching certificate in 1905. By Margo Kissell, university news and communications Nellie Craig Walker is the first woman of color to have a building named in her honor at Miami University. Miami University officials on Wednesday dedicated the former Campus Avenue Building as Nellie Craig Walker Hall after the universitys first Black graduate. The Oxford native graduated from Miami in 1905, having earned a two-year teaching certificate. She became the first Black educator to student-teach in the communitys public schools to a mixed-race class. Now, she is the first woman of color to have a building named in her honor at Miami. Nellie Craig Walker had a tremendous impact, not only at Miami, but in the larger Oxford community, Miami President Gregory Crawford said in the virtual dedication ceremony. In the face of racial barriers, she stood strong and accomplished so much. We hope that by dedicating this building, we will honor her legacy and inspire future generations of Miamians. The trailblazer Great-granddaughter Melanie Walker said Nellies father was a private who fought in the Civil War and her mother was a freed slave from Kentucky. Nellie Craig Walker overcame racial barriers to achieve her dream of becoming an educator. Though neither of her parents could read or write, Nellie excelled in what little education was available to African American children, great-great-grandson Jordan Walker said in a video the family created to honor their trailblazing ancestor. Great-grandson Damion Walker noted that Ohio didnt accept blacks in the teaching field at that time, so Nellie taught at an Indiana elementary school after graduating from Miami. She moved to Cleveland after marrying James Walker in 1911. Following his death 16 years later, she took over her husbands tire company to support their four children. That was pretty remarkable, especially for the time, noted Laura Walker, her great-granddaughter-in-law. By 1927, a Black-owned business was a rarity in any circumstance, but a company a successful company at that, run by a Black woman that was practically unheard of, Walker said. Nellie Craig embodied the true spirit of America with her hard work and determination. Its that spirit that lives on through Nellies descendants. New generations of college graduates Every generation of our family has gone on to become college graduates, after she obtained this ground-breaking achievement, said Melanie Walker, who graduated from Howard University with a degree in accounting and then earned her MBA. She is now assistant dean of finance and administration at Case Western Reserve Universitys School of Law. Nellie Craig Walker enrolled in Miami's Ohio State Normal School, known today as the College of Education, Health and Society. Students and visitors to the building can learn more about her. Nellie Craig Walkers story is so inspiring because of what she overcame, said Denise Taliaferro Baszile, interim dean of Miamis College of Education, Health and Society. She hopes every student at Miami will come to know that story and be inspired by it, especially those who confront their own set of challenges. More than 115 years ago, I imagine that one fine morning Nellie Craig woke up with great pride and some anxiety and put on her best dress, laced up her boots, pinned up her hair and walked resolutely onto campus and eventually across the stage and into history , Taliaferro Baszile said in the pre-recorded video dedication. What we most want you to know is that when you think you wont make it or you cant do it or someone else doubts your ability, skills and fortitude, remember Nellie Craig Walker, Taliaferro Baszile said. Hold your head up high, walk undeterred against those stubborn winds and into history in your own right, she said. This is the promise of Nellie Craig Walkers legacy for all students coming along the trail she blazed so long ago. Also Wednesday, Miami honored the lives of three slain Freedom Summer activists by dedicating residence hall lobbies after them near the grounds where they trained during Freedom Summer of 1964. Watch the video of the Nellie Craig Walker Hall Dedication: [February 24, 2021] BBTV Appoints Blake Corbet as VP Corporate Development VANCOUVER, BC, Feb. 24, 2021 /CNW/ - BBTV Holdings Inc. (TSX: BBTV) (OTCQX: BBTVF) ("BBTV" or the "Company"), a media tech company that uses technology enabled solutions to help content creators and influencers become more successful, announces the appointment of seasoned financial executive Blake Corbet as VP, Corporate Development of the Company's wholly-owned operating subsidiary, BroadbandTV Corp. ("BBTV Corp"). An accomplished business leader, Blake will report to BBTV Corp's Chairperson & CEO, Shahrzad Rafati. "BBTV has developed a deep pipeline of potential accretive acquisitions that could strategically support organic business growth, especially across the company's higher margin Plus Solutions," comments Shahrzad Rafati, Chairperson & CEO, BBTV. "As a public company, we remain focused on allocating capital strategically and leveraging our data and relationships to further enhance revenue and margins. We're excited to add Blake's deep financial expertise as we further expand the business." Blake is an accomplished investment banker with over 25 years experience in London, New York, Toronto and Vancouver. He started his banking career at Haywood Securities in 1990 as an investment banking analyst. This was followed by Salomon Brothers in London and New York, before returning to Canada in 1996 as an Executive Director, Investment Banking where he spent eight years with CIBC World Markets in Toronto. Most recently, Blake was Managing Director and Co-Head of Investment Banking at PI Financial where he completed a variety of financing and advisory transactions across the Technology, Telecom and Healthcare sectors. "BBTV has a fundamental impact on the success of some of the world's most prominent influencers and content creators across multiple platforms, countries and verticals. The opportunity to further scale and monetize this content and reach is significant," comments Blake Corbet, VP, Corporate Development, BBTV. "Shahrzad has built a phenomenal business and team, and I'm excited to help take the company to the next levl." For more information visit www.bbtv.com . About BBTV BBTV is a media and technology company headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. The company's mission is to democratize content by leveraging its proprietary technologies to drive viewership and monetization for content creators of all sizes. From individual content creators to global media companies, BBTV monetizes the media of content creators through end-to-end management, distribution and monetization solutions, powered by its innovative VISO Platform, including related proprietary technology, while allowing content creators to focus on their core competency content creation. In August 2020, BBTV had the second most unique monthly viewers among digital platforms with more than 600 million globally, who consumed more than 50 billion minutes of video content, the most among media companies*. www.bbtv.com *Calculations and classifications made by BBTV based on August 2020 data from Comscore's reports from its top 12 countries. Each report is titled, "Comscore Video Metrix Media Trend Multi-Platform Top 100 Video Properties Report." This press release contains "forwardlooking information" and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities laws (collectively, "forward-looking information") which reflects the Company's current expectations regarding future events, including that the Company's pipeline of potential acquisitions could be accretive and support organic business growth, especially across the Company's higher margin Plus Solutions; that the Company will further expand its business; that there is a significant opportunity to further scale and monetize the Company's content and reach; and that the Company's mission is to democratize content by leveraging its proprietary technologies to drive viewership and monetization for content creators of all sizes. Forward-looking information is necessarily based on a number of estimates and assumptions that we considered appropriate and reasonable as of the date such information is given, including but not limited to our assumption that any acquisitions we may close will be successful and our assumptions regarding continued changes and trends in our industry or the global economy, and the performance of our services and technology. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control, that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including but not limited to the risk that our assumptions on which our forward-looking information is based may not be accurate, we may fail to close any substantial acquisitions or fail to grow in any meaningful way, we may not further enhance revenue and margins to any significant extent or at all, and we may not reach the next level, as well as the factors discussed under "Risk Factors" in the final prospectus of the Company dated October 22, 2020 filed on sedar at www.sedar.com and in our other filings with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities at www.sedar.com . The Company does not undertake any obligation to update such forwardlooking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable law. Media Contacts Dan Gamble Head of PR & Corporate Communications dgamble@bbtv.com +1778 873 0422 Ashley Buck PR & Corporate Communications Specialist abuck@bbtv.com +1778 875 1346 BBTV-C View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bbtv-appoints-blake-corbet-as-vp-corporate-development-301234153.html SOURCE BBTV Holdings Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Financial Supervisory Service Governor Yoon Suk-heun speaks during a plenary session of the National Assembly in Seoul, Feb. 17. Yonhap By Lee Min-hyung Calls are growing for Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) Governor Yoon Suk-heun to step down and not seek another three-year term. Yoon took office in May 2018, and the union at the FSS which opposed him then union is expressing strong opposition to any extension of his term, urging him to take responsibility for the regulator's involvement in several recent controversies. Last year, the FSS came under fire for poor supervision of a nationwide fund mis-selling fiasco. The union has also been stepping up criticism of Yoon for what it calls "immoral personnel management" after the regulator promoted certain officials who had been punished for unfair hiring practices. It promoted two officials this year who were punished for giving preferential treatment to family members of ranking political and financial figures. The officials were promoted to a deputy director and a team leader, respectively, even after receiving punishment for corrupt behavior. The deputy director was given a reprimand for offering preferential treatment in the hiring of the son of a lawmaker in 2014. The team leader also helped the son of a former vice president of the Export-Import Bank of Korea unfairly join the FSS in 2016. Yoon pledged to take harsh measures against those who caused such social controversy, but this was far from the truth, the union said. "Yoon has exhausted the lives of employees for the past three years since taking office, and did not show any sense of responsibility during the recent personnel appointments," the union said in a statement. "We want the government to choose a bureaucrat as the new leader of the FSS." "If the leader has sole discretion for personnel appointments then Yoon will end up taking responsibility for recent decisions," the union said. Yoon is a former economist with expertise in finance. He had been a professor at Soongsil University and Seoul National University before being appointed to lead the FSS. The union also took issue with Yoon's conflict with the Financial Services Commission (FSC), calling the power struggle the root cause of the FSS' annual budget decline. "Yoon has taught us that a professor cannot be an alternative to a bureaucrat for the leadership of the organization," it argued. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Former Chinese journalist Qiu Ziming has been detained by authorities for his social media comments in relation to the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers involved in the border clashes with the India troops in June 2020. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) condemn the arrest and call on the authorities to release Qiu immediately. Police in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing confirmed the arrest of Qiu for picking quarrels and provoking trouble on February 20. The 38-year-old, known as Labixiaoqiu on the Twitter-like Chinese platform Weibo, had made illegal remarks on the internet that distorted the truth and demeaned the five heroes that had defended their country and guarded the borders, according to the police statement. Qiu reportedly questioned the authenticity of the death toll revealed by the military, suggesting the number of casualties was likely higher. Quis comments were published following the Chinese military newspaper ending its eight-months-long silence on February 19 over the number of casualties, announcing honours for five Chinese soldiers, four of whom had died during a border skirmish with Indian troops in the Galwan Valley in June. Indian media reported that at least 20 Indian soldiers were killed in the conflict. Qiu worked with the weekly newspaper, Economic Observer until 2015, and had 2.5 million followers on his Weibo account, which has subsequently been suspended by the platform. At least three people have been arrested for allegedly publishing insulting comments on social media against the Chinese soldiers who were killed in the border conflict. In addition to Qiu, Chinese state-run media outlet, Global Times, said a blogger surnamed Yang and a 28-year-old surnamed Chen have also been detained by the authorities. The IFJ said: Freedom of expression is a universal right that every Chinese citizen is entitled to. The IFJ condemn the arrest based on unfounded charges and call on the Chinese authorities to release Qiu immediately. Burma Myanmar Protesters Call ASEAN Not to Endorse Military Regime Protesters at the Thai Embassy calling for discussions with the Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw. / The Irrawaddy Myanmars anti-regime protesters gathered outside Asean member embassies, including Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, on Wednesday, calling them to reject any cooperation with the illegitimate military government. A larger crowd gathered at the Indonesian embassy in Yangon than on Tuesday, holding placards saying: Dictator never keeps promise. Stop negotiating with them and Meet our elected government. Among the crowd were womens rights defenders. They gave the embassy officials an open letter on behalf of Myanmars women asking Jakarta to refuse to recognize the junta as a legitimate government. Indonesia is consulting with other Asean members to reach a consensus before a special meeting on Myanmars coup. Myanmars military-appointed foreign minister, U Wunna Maung Lwin, flew to Bangkok to meet Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi on Wednesday after the latter abruptly canceled her planned trip to Myanmar following protests in Myanmar against a purported plan to support the juntas new election proposal. Thai prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha received U Wunna Maung Lwin in Bangkok and held talks which were also attended by Marsudi. We will do our utmost to condemn any country that supports the military dictatorship, said Daw May Sabe Phyu, a prominent womens rights defender, who marched to the Indonesian Embassy on Wednesday. She added that secret talks would be seen as illegitimate, while stressing that Asean should respect the will of the people as it pledged, instead of supporting dictators. Daw May Sabe Phyu said the protests at the embassies were fighting for human rights and democracy at home and across Asean to be respected. Thailand and other Asean members were condemned on social media for meeting members of the military regime. Protests were held at the Malaysian and Thai embassies, calling for discussions with the Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, a committee representing elected members of the Union Parliament from the National League for Democracy (NLD) and ethnic parties, instead of offering to mediate between the military regime and protesters. Access to the Singaporean Embassy in Yangon was denied so protesters staged a nearby sit-in, holding placards saying: Singapore: please stand with us and Freeze Myanmar juntas bank accounts. Singapore, however, said its banks do not hold significant funds from Myanmar. U Aung Myo Min of Equality Myanmar said: If Asean does not respect the will of the people, the international pressure on it will increase. At the same time, it will conflict with the basic principles of strengthening a member states path to democracy, as outlined in the Asean Charter. You may also like these stories: Myanmar Police Fails to Probe Headquarters Raid: NLD Myanmar Foreign Minister in Bangkok to Meet Indonesian Counterpart China Says It Will Work With ASEAN to De-Escalate Situation in Myanmar Banking stocks zoomed during the extended trading hours today after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that the government has lifted the embargo on grant of government businesses to private banks. Bank Nifty rose 1,451 points to 36,567 against previous close of 35,116 in afternoon trade. Similarly, BSE bankex climbed 1,601 points to 41,097 against previous close of 39,496. Buoyed by the gains in banks, Sensex and Nifty rallied over 1,000 points and 250 points, respectively. Top Sensex gainers were Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, HDFC, Bajaj Finance and SBI shares which rose up to 5%. Govt lifts embargo on grant of govt businesses to private banks Taking to Twitter, FM Sitharaman further stated that all banks can now be equal partners in development of the Indian economy. "Embargo lifted on grant of Govt business to private banks. All banks can now participate. Private banks can now be equal partners in development of the Indian economy, furthering Govt's social sector initiatives, and enhancing customer convenience," the finance minister tweeted. Trading hours on NSE, BSE extended till 5 pm today Updated, March 2 Edward Jones Jones is a retired judge of the Multnomah County Circuit Court. He lives in Portland. In a recent op-ed, Washington County District Attorney Kevin Barton and Clackamas County District Attorney John Wentworth explained their opposition to various bills before the Legislature that would amend Ballot Measure 11 (Legislators should respect voters will and keep Measure 11 intact, Feb. 10). They argue the bills, which would reduce many of Measure 11s mandatory prison sentences, violate the will of the voters, as expressed some 20 years ago, and will unleash a crime wave. In reality, these bills, SB 191, SB 401, HB 2002, and HB 2172, merely propose a long overdue adjustment to the unnecessary harshness of Measure 11. They are opposed by these prosecutors because the bills impinge on their negotiating power, which has long given them unfettered discretion to determine how much time each defendant must spend in prison. I spent two decades as a trial judge, sentenced many Measure 11 defendants and spoke to many victims. I often had victims thank me after a sentencing, but I never had a victim say to me, Those extra months you imposed meant the world to me. Victims know justice is not measured in months. It is not that these prosecutors are opposed to short sentences. Their offices routinely offer defendants a chance to avoid a Measure 11 sentence by pleading guilty to less-serious charges that dont carry a mandatory sentence. They are merely opposed to letting someone other than them decide who deserves that shorter sentence. The so-called mandatory minimums of Ballot Measure 11 are mandatory only for the court and the defendant except in rare occasions that the crime in question meets a detailed set of criteria. The prosecutions authority to reduce or change pending charges allows it to determine whether Measure 11 applies a huge stick for prosecutors, considering the vast majority of cases are resolved through plea-bargain agreements. That means the prosecution decides the sentence and there is no check on the prosecutions ability to reward or punish defendants by granting or denying relief from the mandatory sentences; the court has no such discretion when it comes to sentencing a defendant for a Measure 11 crime. Over the years, I explained to many defendants that I had no power over their sentence, that the number was entirely up to the prosecution. These prosecutors want you to believe the credit for Oregons current low level of violent crime should go to the long sentences imposed under Measure 11. Yet violent crime has decreased dramatically across the country, regardless of whether states adopted Measure 11 type sentencing or not. Furthermore, no evidence supports the notion that allow prosecutors, rather than judges, to determine sentences reduces crime. Putting the judge back into sentencing is not a radical idea, but it will reduce the power of the prosecution to determine sentences, so its not surprising that Mr. Barton and Mr. Wentworth resist it. They call for improvements, guided by experience and data, but have no improvements to offer. They claim it to be imperative to address racial disparities but fail to specify any policies or practices intended to reduce them, and even deny racial bias in the operation of Measure 11. If these men were committed to reform it would have been obvious long before now. Their opposition to these bills is just business as usual. Ballot Measure 11 is far from perfect. Improvement is possible. These bills provide exactly the reasonable reforms that are needed. They deserve our support. This op-ed was updated on March 2 to clarify that there are rare circumstances in which a defendant may receive less than the minimum sentence established by Measure 11. Sign up for our free weekly Oregon Opinion newsletter. Email: New Delhi, Feb 24 : The Indian government has produced a report detailing conservation initiatives for many species listed on the CMS Appendices, including those added during COP13 in Gandhinagar, the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) secretariat said on Wednesday. Marine species are among those that benefit from new conservation measures. Being a signatory of the IOSEA Marine Turtles MOU, the government has launched a National Marine Turtle Action Plan (2021-2026) to take effective measures for the conservation of marine turtles, it said. Stranding of whales and dolphins is a widespread phenomenon that requires urgent attention. New Marine Megafauna Stranding Guidelines provide guidance to handle stranding situations and eventually reduce mortality of these species. The endangered Ganges river dolphin or Platanista gangetica is benefitting from a concerted action adopted at the 13th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Migratory Species (COP13) held in Gandhinagar in February last year. The recently launched Project Dolphin aims to strengthen the conservation of both riverine and marine dolphins. According to the report, government bodies and fishermen will be involved in the project and local communities will also participate. A flagship species, the critically endangered great Indian bustard has disappeared from 90 per cent of its historic range. Over the last year, the Indian government has taken steps to reduce the number of birds injured and killed in collisions with power lines. Captive breeding to increase the bird's numbers has produced first results, said the Bonn-headquartered CMS secretariat. India is also taking concrete steps to conserve other migratory bird species, including vultures, and Amur and Saker falcons. Ecological connectivity is essential for the functioning of animal migrations. Eco-friendly measures for linear infrastructure projects will facilitate movements of migratory wildlife and enhance their resilience and genetic diversity. The Asian elephant, which has been accorded the National Heritage Animal status in India, is the focus of transboundary conservation efforts. This Appendix I-listed species faces threats resulting from human-animal conflict. India and Bangladesh have agreed to ensure safety for both animals and humans through early warning systems. Also, India has made progress in conserving the snow leopard through the Global Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Protection Program. A community volunteer programme aims to involve young people and women in wildlife conservation and in the sustainable use of biological resources of high-altitude ecosystems. The CMS is the only United Nations treaty that addresses migratory species and their habitats. Russia ruffled feathers in Afghanistan last week when its envoy to the country suggested forming an inclusive and transitional coalition government in Kabul to hasten the peace process and accused the United States of reneging on its agreement with the hard-line Taliban Islamist movement. Kabul swiftly rejected the proposal by declaring envoy Zamir Kabulov's pronouncements as inconsistent with the current realities of Afghanistan and contradicting past official statements of the friendly country of Russia. Analysts say the latest controversy is part of the Kremlins efforts to compete with the United States for influence in Afghanistan. At the least, they maintain, it poses a hindrance as Washington reviews a critical peace agreement with the Taliban, signed in February 2020, that stipulates a complete U.S. withdrawal by May in return for Taliban counterterrorism guarantees and peace talks with the Afghan government. The Taliban purportedly supports a transitional government as a step toward building a new political system in Afghanistan, but Kabul says the idea undermines Afghan sovereignty and endangers the survival of the Afghan state. Moscows main motive [in signaling to the Taliban] appears to be to make life difficult for Washington, especially in the current movement when the new administration is trying to balance itself at a difficult time in U.S. domestic politics, Asfandyar Mir, a South Asia specialist at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, told Gandhara. The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden is currently focused on reining in the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 500,000 Americans. Hameed Hakimi, a research associate with the Chatham House think tank in London, agrees. He told Gandhara that Kabulovs statements are aimed at courting the Taliban at a low cost. Moscows warmth toward the Taliban is a pragmatic step to [remind] the Western governments that Russia will remain keenly involved in its backyard in Afghanistan, he said. Kabulov made the remarks as he began a regional tour to prepare the groundwork for a high-level diplomatic meeting of the countries with influence over the Afghan peace process including Russia, the United States, China, Pakistan and Iran. Moscow prefers that all parties to the conflict in Afghanistan agree on the establishment of an inclusive and transitional coalition government, Kabulov told the state-owned Sputnik news agency on February 16. A seasoned Russian diplomat who has overseen or played a major role in the Kremlins diplomacy toward Afghanistan for over two decades, Kabulov accused Washington of breaking its agreement with the Taliban. The Taliban adhere to the agreement almost flawlessly, he said. Not a single American soldier has died since the agreement was signed -- which cannot be said about the Americans. Russian Bounties The controversy follows the storm over the news of alleged Russian bounties to the Taliban for targeting U.S. troops in Afghanistan, which came to light last summer. Many questioned the Kremlins real motives in Afghanistan after media reports suggested officers of the GRU -- Russias foreign military intelligence service -- paid or offered bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers. The Kremlin, the Taliban, and then U.S. President Donald Trump rejected the reports. The Afghan government quickly responded to Kabulovs statement. Be assured that as long as I am alive, they will not see the formation of an interim government, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani told families of fallen Afghan soldiers on February 20. I am not like those willows that bend with the wind. A day earlier on February 19, the Afghan Foreign Ministry issued a lengthy rebuttal of Kabulovs pronouncements. Mr. Kabulov also said the Taliban were almost flawless in fulfilling their agreement with the United States while the entire world knows that the Taliban have violated their four major commitments to (1) sever ties with terrorists, (2) reduce violence, (3) continue meaningful negotiations, and (4) not allow the released fighters to return to the battlefield, the statement said. Russias relations with Afghanistan have long been a rollercoaster. A disastrous defeat at the end of a decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s led to its disintegration in December 1991, and yet Kabul remained significant for the Kremlin as a regional neighbor. With the rise of Islamist militants and drug cultivation in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s, the Kremlin welcomed the hard-line regimes demise in 2001. The presence of Islamic State (IS) militants in Afghanistan after the drawdown of NATO troops in Afghanistan in 2014 prompted Russia to extend an olive branch to the Taliban. Its fascinating that a group formerly viewed as an enemy, i.e., the Taliban, are now warmly welcomed into Moscow, Hakimi said, adding that the Kremlin is unlikely to replace Tehran or Islamabad in terms of influence over Afghan political and militant actors. Moscow will find it incredibly difficult to arm the Taliban because it will have broader consequences for the Taliban with their other significant backers and will also impact [the] Talibans narrative of jihad on the ground. In addition, the emotional trauma of Soviet defeat in Afghanistan is still lingering in Moscow, with hesitation to be dragged into the Afghan conflict directly, he said. Mir says theres also little Russian interest in repeating its role in Syria, where its military intervention prevented the collapse of President Bashar al-Assads regime after a mass revolt in 2011 evolved into a multipronged civil war. Afghanistan is far more difficult to enter and stabilize, he noted. Russia is recognizing that, having suffered their own failure in the country in the 1980s. Russian goals are far more modest; they are limited to keeping the U.S. off balance instead of attempting another Syriaization policy of Afghanistan. Hakimi says Russias support for the Taliban is a double-edged sword. While it could help the once pariah movement still under heavy international sanctions gain some international legitimacy, it also might jeopardize the Talibans delicate relations with Washington. Any overreach in relations with Moscow can hurt the Talibans position with the United States; the last thing Washington wants to see is a Taliban attempt to pressure them via Moscow, he concluded. Charity to Provide Free Combat Rosaries to Military, Law Enforcement and First Responders NEWS PROVIDED BY Combat Rosaries for Heroes Inc. Feb. 24, 2021 MADISON, Wisc., Feb. 24, 2021 /Standard Newswire/ -- A new nonprofit charity founded by a Catholic priest will provide free military-grade steel rosaries to U.S. military personnel, law enforcement officers and first responders. Combat Rosaries for Heroes is being launched on February 23, 2021, which is the 76th anniversary of the iconic photo showing the flag being raised by the U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima during the latter part of World War II. "We chose the Iwo Jima photo to represent this "Combat Rosaries for Heroes" initiative because it shows the perilous conditions our heroes have faced in the battle against evil, and the surrendered ground they have heroically reclaimed," said Rev. Richard Heilman, a priest of the Diocese of Madison who founded the charity and serves as its president. "Placing themselves in harm's way, these heroes have done everything asked of them in their mission to serve and protect our country," said Fr. Heilman, "We want to honor these heroes by gifting them with this powerful spiritual weapon - The Combat Rosary - which will be touched to a Relic of the True Cross of Christ. This particular relic was rescued from a bombed out church during the D-Day invasion in WWII. The Catholic Church teaches that religious articles touched to this relic makes their religious articles a third-class relic of the True Cross of Jesus Christ! That makes these "Combat Rosaries for Heroes" very powerful spiritual weapons." Combat Rosaries for Heroes Inc. will raise funds to provide a free Combat Rosary to as many of these heroes as possible. Father Heilman designed the Combat Rosary based on the 1916 pull-chain Rosary issued by the U.S. government during World War I. The Rosary is made of steel and features a gunmetal finish. The Combat Rosary is carried by the Pontifical Swiss Guard at the Vatican. Each donated Rosary will come with a protective leather zippered case so the sacramental can be easily tucked in a pocket. "St. Padre Pio once said, 'Love the Madonna and pray the Rosary, for her Rosary is the weapon against the evils of the world today. All graces given by God pass through the Blessed Mother,'" Fr. Heilman said. "With all of our world's troubles and challenges, it's more important than ever to arm our nation's heroes with this very powerful spiritual weapon. This project has long been a dream of mine. As Pope Pius XI once said, 'The Rosary is a powerful weapon to put the demons to flight and to keep oneself from sin.'" Every effort is being made to put all donations toward only the raw cost of materials and assembly in order to get the most Combat Rosaries to the most heroes. Fundraising for the project will be done online. Donate at CombatRosariesForHeroes.com. Checks can be sent to P.O. Box 44036, Madison, WI 53744. Combat Rosaries for Heroes Inc. is a Wisconsin-based nonprofit corporation. SOURCE Combat Rosaries for Heroes Inc. CONTACT: Pat Moertl, 608-369-0936 Related Links www.combatrosariesforheroes.com Despite facing furious opposition from local residents, a big barge equipped with dredgers is publicly extracting sand off the Tra On River in Vinh Long Province, located in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. The barge has mined sand on the river for a few days, residents of My An Village in the province's Binh Minh Town, said in a report to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Tuesday. As witnessed by Tuoi Tre, a massive boat numbered LA-07135 appeared at the junction of the Hau River and the Tra On River. It was accompanied by another boat with registration number BTr-7402, with a perceived load capacity of hundreds of cubic meters of sand. A sand-mining boat with registration number LA-07135 uses suction hoses to extract sand from the Tra On River in Vinh Long Province, Vietnam, February 23, 2021. Photo: Chi Hanh / Tuoi Tre During the daytime, these vehicles publicly anchor their dredging hoses down the bed of the river and run their clamorous engines, which upsets residents living just 100 meters away. After spotting the reporters, the boat crew quickly retracted the suction hoses and drove the vehicles off the scene. I was informed that the boats started mining sand near my house yesterday," said Huynh Thi Tay, 46, from My An Village. "I shouted but they did not seem to bother." Tay quickly reached out to the commune authorities and the local bureau of natural resources and environment. Two officers arrived, only to inform Tay that the boats had just got their sand mining permit issued. A few more sand-mining boats have pulled up near mangrove apple trees that Tay planted, which caused them to collapse. As far as I know, authorities only issue sand-mining permits to excavator boats, not dredgers extracting sand near the shore like this," Tay said. "It will cause erosion and harm the residential areas." Pump engines on a sand-mining boat on the Tra On River in Vinh Long Province, Vietnam, February 23, 2021. Photo: Chi Hanh / Tuoi Tre The authorities will check the circumstances, Nguyen Van Hieu, director of the Vinh Long Department of Natural Resources and Environment, said on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Bui Minh Chanh, director of the bureau of natural resources and environment of Binh Minh Town, said officials and specialists will be sent to the scene for investigation. The use of suction hoses for dredging sand near the shore is prohibited, Chanh declared. A sand-mining boat with registration number LA-07135 is seen on the Tra On River in Vinh Long Province, Vietnam, February 23, 2021. Photo: Chi Hanh / Tuoi Tre Suction hoses on a sand-mining boat on the Tra On River in Vinh Long Province, Vietnam, February 23, 2021. Photo: Chi Hanh / Tuoi Tre Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Two Senate committees abruptly postponed votes they had planned on Wednesday to advance the nomination of Neera Tanden, President Bidens pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, signaling pessimism that she could secure enough support to be confirmed by an evenly divided Senate. The Budget Committee and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee both postponed the planned votes, according to three people familiar with the situation who insisted on anonymity to discuss the decisions. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the chairman of the homeland security committee, told reporters on Wednesday that people needed a little bit more time to assess it. He declined to give specifics, adding, Were still having discussions with folks. Ms. Tandens nomination has been in jeopardy since Friday, when Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, announced he would not support her, citing concerns about public criticisms she made of lawmakers in both parties in Twitter posts before her selection. The social media was contesting a proposal to make tech giants pay for the content reposted from news organisations ( ) has signed a partnership with Australias largest media company hours after reversing the ban on news implemented last Thursday. The social media giant will host news provided by Seven West Media, which owns the prominent Seven Network, The West Australian, The Sunday Times and Seven Studios among others. Earlier on Tuesday, Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told reporters Facebook had re-friended Australia. Australian news will be restored to Facebook in the coming days. Facebook has committed to entering into good faith negotiations with Australian news media businesses to reach agreements to pay for content. @PaulFletcherMP More https://t.co/OXTZ2mtyBY pic.twitter.com/ffFJ17JHb0 Josh Frydenberg (@JoshFrydenberg) February 23, 2021 Mark Zuckerbergs empire was contesting a proposal to make tech giants pay for the content reposted from news organisations. MPs are now debating the law in the Senate after it was approved in the lower house last week. Also a week ago, Seven West Media clinched a deal with s ( ) Google to provide content for the News Showcase platform, becoming the first Australian media outlet to secure such a partnership. Shares in Facebook were flat at US$260.33 in after hours trading. On Monday, March 1, the Peace Corps commemorates 60 years since President John F. Kennedy established the agency. Over the last six decades, Peace Corps volunteers have worked in 60 countries promoting peace and friendship through volunteerism and public service. In honor of the milestone, the Master of Arts in International Administration (MAIA) and Master of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Community and Social Change programs will host two virtual panel discussions. With introductory remarks from President Julio Frenk, the first forum will be moderated by Bradford McGuinn, director of the MAIA program in the College of Arts and Sciences. The discussion will take place at 4:30 p.m. on Monday, March 1, and feature Douglas Neese, assistant director of the Toppel Career Center; Mariah Schuemann, a lecturer in the Intensive English Program; and Felicia Casanova, a Ph.D. student studying sociologyall members of the University community who have volunteered with the Peace Corps. The panelists will discuss the University's continued involvement with the agency and share their view about service. Maryann Tobin, assistant dean for professional education in the College of Arts and Sciences, helped coordinate the event. The University has a long, rich history with the Peace Corps. Several alumni have gone on to serve and work with them. Im looking forward to hearing what the panelists have to share about their experiences, Tobin said. Our MAIA program and the School of Education and Human Developments M.S.Ed. program are focused on developing public servants who can work on both local and global scales, and quite a few graduates have gone on to volunteer and work in remote parts of the world as part of the Peace Corps. Tobin said she hopes the panels will raise awareness of Peace Corps programs and encourage students and members of the University community to volunteer in the future, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic. On Wednesday, April 21, in a follow-up event, the MAIA program will host another virtual forum highlighting the Peace Corps mass repatriation of volunteers during the pandemic. Donna Shalala, a former congresswoman and former University of Miami president who was among the first volunteers in the Peace Corps, and Carol Bellamy, former director of the Peace Corps, will be guest speakers. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, the Peace Corps brought more than 6,000 volunteers home to the United States within seven days. Everyone who was serving had to pack up and go home. All our volunteers ended their service in March 2020, said Taylor Majher, the regional recruiter for the Peace Corps, who was serving in Guatemala. The Peace Corps, as an agency, has still been working. As recruiters, we are still talking with people who are interested in applying and sharing our experiences. We're still spreading our mission of world peace and friendship, even while back home, she added. Majher will deliver an overview and brief history of the Peace Corps during the discussion on March 1. As a recruiter in South Florida, she works closely with University students and recent graduates interested in volunteering for the agency. We are proud to say that from our last available report, the University of Miami is ranked number 16 among medium size universities, with alumni who served in the Peace Corps, Majher said. Since the Peace Corps founding, 462 University students or alumni have volunteered with the agency, serving within a wide variety of specialties. Ragan Sawyer, a M.S.Ed. student, returned from Peace Corps service in 2019. After spending years in the Philippines as a six-grade-elementary-education volunteer, Sawyer said her Peace Corps network enriched her career path and set her up for success academically. In my time in the Peace Corps, I developed an understanding of participatory action. Listening to the community I was serving and evaluating what their needs were has been extremely relevant to my studies and my career, she pointed out. Just the community of other Peace Corps volunteers at every level has been a massive support to my future. As the Peace Corps celebrates our 60th anniversary, I am reminded of how far we have come and what an unprecedented time we are in now, Carol Spahn, acting director of the Peace Corps, shared in a statement ahead of the occasion. The past 60 years have truly prepared us for this historic moment. During a pandemic that has touched every corner of the globe, its clear that we are all in this together, she wrote. As we look to the next 60 years, I know the Peace Corps will continue to be a community of peopleall over the worldwilling to do the hard work of promoting peace and friendship. Anyone interested in attending the virtual panel at 4:30 p.m. on Monday, March 1, can register here. Visit maia.miami.edu for additional information on the April 21 event. India on Wednesday dispatched the first batch of six lakh COVID-19 vaccine doses to the African country of Ghana under the COVAX facility in collaboration with the UNICEF, which aims to cover 92 countries under the initiative. The doses are a part of the first batch of COVID-19 vaccine the country is acquiring through the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility (COVAX), which Ghana among nearly 92 countries have signed into. Speaking to PTI, Yasmine Ali Haque, Representative, UNICEF India, said that six lakh doses of Astra Zeneca vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII) were sent to Ghana from Pune, via Mumbai and Dubai. "The doses arrived in Ghana at noon, Indian time. In the coming week, Cote d'Ivoire, a country in western Africa, will also get it in the coming days. Out of the 92 countries, which are the beneficiaries of the COVAX facility, 85 are low-income and middle-income countries. "It is the beginning of our aim to deliver two billion doses to around 100 countries around the world. By March, we aim to deliver 80 million doses and by December, two billion should be delivered across the world. Our target is especially the low-income and middle-income countries and to protect frontline and healthcare workers as well as high risk and vulnerable people," Haque told PTI. She said that UNICEF also aims to deliver up to one billion syringes by year-end across the world and 520 million syringes will come from the stockpile UNICEF created in 2020, while the rest will be delivered direct from the manufacturer to the countries. Haque, however, could not name which country will receive the next consignment of the vaccine due to non-availability of the list with her. As part of the COVAX facility, United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) is leading efforts, in collaboration with Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) Revolving Fund, to procure and supply COVID-19 vaccine doses for these countries on behalf of the COVAX facility. Of these, PAHO will be procuring and supplying doses to 10 nations in Latin America, which are Bolivia, Dominica, El Salvador, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, an official source said. "UNICEF is closely working with vaccine manufacturers since November 2020 to ensure the vaccines are delivered in a safe manner and we also ensure communication with communities and work on ground to support national governments," Haque said, adding that India is also one of the beneficiaries under the COVAX facility. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) Alexei Navalny returned to Russia, knowing what he would face when he arrived, and yet, none of the Syrian opposition leaders have dared to return to Damascus writes Al-Araby Al-Jadeed. Alexei Navalny decided to return to Russia despite President Vladimir Putins threats to have him arrested. Navalny had left Russia months ago, after Putin tried to poison him, but luckily, his life was saved when German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, sent a private jet to fly him to Germany to receive treatment. But his condition was critical. As soon as Navalnys health improved, he made the decision to return to Russia. He was well aware that Putin would arrest him, try to neutralize him, and tarnish his reputation, if not try to assassinate him once again. Navalny could have sought asylum in Germany or any other Western country and become the leader of the Russian opposition abroad. Western governments would have welcomed him and offered him a comfortable life and a wide array of outlets for political action. He, however, refused. Navalny knew that Moscow would follow through on their promise. The Putin government had routinely made threats against the governments enemies and had usually succeeded in preventing people from returning home. In 2003, oil tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, decided to defy his governments threats. As soon as he set foot on Russian soil, he was arrested, stripped of his wealth, and imprisoned for 10 years. In 2014, politician Boris Nemtsov, defied a similar warning and was killed. That did not weaken Navalnys resolve, though. Navalny engineered his comeback with meticulous precision and a distinctive sense of humor. On Sunday morning, Alexei and Yulia, Navalnys wife, boarded a Berlin-Moscow plane, accompanied by his lawyer and spokesperson Kira Yarmish, and several journalists. On board, Navalny took a selfie with the flight attendants, who apparently had requested to take a photo with him, and he and Yulia recorded a five-second video in which Navalny said, Garcon, bring us some vodka. We are going home! Navalny was arrested as soon as he arrived at the airport and was taken to prison. I cannot but compare Navalnys courage and his insistence on returning home because it is at home where the real battle must take place with the decision that many leaders of the Syrian opposition took to continue to reside in Istanbul, Riyadh or Paris, where they lead, all the way from their home-away-from-home, worthless and useless Don Quixote-ian battles against the regime. What if the head of the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition forces, Naser al-Hariri, or the head of the High Negotiations Committee, Anas al-Abdah, or both, decided to return to Damascus? I am not, in any way, referring to the shameful return of some opposition figures who came back to the heart of the homeland and threw themselves into the arms of the security services. Rather, I am talking about another kind of return; one imbued with defiance and determination to oppose and overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, from within. A return that is characterized by a desire to work adamantly in order to form a strong and united opposition front in the face of the criminal Assad regime. Assads brutal history of murder, torture, rape, and immoral trials would make anyone think twice before returning. Before Navalny, the Russian opposition was not of great significance. However, Navalnys courage, defiance, and determination to confront the oppression of Putin and his government made him a symbol around whom most of the figures across the opposition spectrum rallied. I think a similar situation would come to life should the Syrian opposition leaders decide to return to Damascus and challenge Assad in their homeland. Will they be arrested? Perhaps, but it is likely that they will not be subjected to the same kind of torture to which the peaceful activists were subjected to, the same activists who decided to keep on fighting despite their imminent fate, which they were well aware of. Assad and the Russians know that they can arrest figures as prominent as Hadi al-Bahra, Burhan Ghalioun, or Naser al-Hariri, but they are also aware that they will not be able to liquidate them, torture them, or make them disappear as they did with the leader Abdul-Aziz al-Khair. A return to the homeland would constitute an effective framework for convincing Syrians at home and abroad that the leadership of the opposition is serious in its political pursuit and that it is putting the interests of the Syrians first and not partisan or individual interests. Most importantly, it would put the interests of the Syrians before the interests of the regional powers which the opposition is allied with. I am not optimistic, nor do I think that this will happen soon, for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that the brutal history of Assad when it comes to killing, torture, rape, and shameless, unfair trials makes anyone question their decision to return. However, there is an even more important factor, which is that the leaders of the Syrian opposition differ from Alexei Navalny at the level of honesty, integrity, and independence. At the end of the day, Navalnys decision was his own, not anyone elses. 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. How the pandemic accelerated change in government The cloud is the new data center Software-as-a-service is the new application The internet is the new network that gives us connectivity The edge is where the person or device is Are you ready for your next generation of employees? Implement solutions that help avoid burnout syndrome Find ways to keep employees connected Develop processes and programs to help assure each employees mental health Work proactively to attract the right new talent and adopt methods to retain them by helping them develop their leadership skills. How citizen services are changing How you can prepare For those who said governments could not move fast, recent events revealed otherwise. But its more than working from home the public sector must be able to legislate, educate, and deliver all sorts of citizen services virtually. When you see what the workforce has done with collaboration tools like Webex, connectivity capabilities like software defined wide area networks, and applications that live where they need to for accessibility and security, we are in a pretty good spot.Post-pandemic, some 86 percent of government leaders agree these changes are permanent in some form. This effort to digitize has rapidly accelerated. The context thats starting to emerge is:For the next generation of government employees, the need for flexibility is the new norm (see the findings from a recent CDG survey of more than 2,000 early-career working Americans). As a result, governments will have to reimagine their approach to work by expanding the view of how and where work gets done.The new generation is driven by a desire for a better work-life balance. Engaging employees and ensuring their well-being must be a top priority for government leaders. So post-pandemic, the public sector must:Going forward, governments will start focusing on services that rival private industry so citizens can have that equal-to experience. So it is key that the public and private sector work together as partners, sharing ideas and technologies that can break down the silos that exist across government agencies, increasing efficiencies for everyone. For example, when a citizen is accessing one state portal (lets say to pay taxes), they might receive a pop up message reminding them that their drivers license has expired. This would immediately link them to the states DMV site, providing the citizen a hassle free renewal experience.When we bring all these things together, we enable the concept of a digital citizen. At Cisco, were already partnering with state and local governments to drive interagency collaboration that can power applications centered on what citizens want versus how government traditionally operates. During the pandemic, we have seen bureaucracy take a back seat, creating opportunities to implement some of these approaches.As state and local governments transition to a new operating model that is more resilient and responsive, a high level of leadership is going to be paramount (learn more from a recent CDG survey of government IT leaders). Leaders in government IT must stay close to their people, remain connected, and lead with empathy and compassion.To successfully serve the next generation workforce, we must also remember that technology is just the enabler. It is people and processes that are and will be the secret sauce to leverage this full stack to deliver quality citizen and workforce experiences.When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, governments quickly discovered how to cut through red tape to get things done. The pandemic has proven that government can move fast, especially when supported by a reliable and experienced private sector partner in IT like Cisco.At Cisco, were partnering with the public sector to actively develop and implement innovative and secure solutions that can scale with the needs of government and enhance resiliency in times of stress. And together with our partner Government Technology , were exploring strategies for building the next generation of government ( learn more here ). We invite you to join us.Dive deeper on Building the New Operating Model for Government Nigeria Bloczynski, Vice President and Chief Risk Officer Bloczynski has been named Vice President and Chief Risk Officer. Her responsibilities include corporate insurance programs, credit risk, enterprise risk management, trade risk and analytics, and trade surveillance. Bloczynski joined PJM in 2019 and has more than 20 years of experience in commodity and credit risk management in both financial and energy markets. She holds a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Morgan State University and an MBA from Johns Hopkins University. Asim Z. Haque, Vice President State and Member Services Haque continues in his role as Vice President State and Member Services, but will now also be a designated officer in the organization. He oversees State Government Policy, which includes both the State Relations and State Policy Solutions functions, as well as Member Services, which includes the Stakeholder Affairs, Client Management, Knowledge Management Center, and State & Member Training Departments. Haque, an attorney, joined PJM in 2019 and has previously served as chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. Haque has a bachelor's degree in chemistry and political science from Case Western Reserve University and his Juris Doctor from The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Christopher O'Hara, Senior Vice President, General Counsel, Secretary and Chief Compliance Officer O'Hara has been named Senior Vice President, General Counsel, Secretary and Chief Compliance Officer. He oversees PJM's Compliance & Reliability Standards and Law Departments and is responsible for PJM's legal operations, including all of the company's regulatory, litigation and commercial needs. Before joining PJM in 2017, O'Hara had extensive in-house and private law firm experience in the energy field. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and his Juris Doctor from the University of Maryland. Ricardo Rodriguez, Senior Director Internal Audit Rodriguez has been named Senior Director Internal Audit. He oversees PJM's Internal Audit Department, in which he is a member of the Executive Team and reports to the CEO and to the Risk and Audit Committee of the PJM Board of Managers. He is responsible for conducting company-wide business risk analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of business processes and operating controls at PJM. Rodriguez is an experienced audit professional with over 20 years of experience in the energy, pharmaceutical and financial industries in the areas of finance, regulatory compliance, information security, operations and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Puerto Rico and a Master of Science in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business. The executive promotions are effective March 10, 2021. PJM Interconnection, founded in 1927, ensures the reliability of the high-voltage electric power system serving 65 million people in all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. PJM coordinates and directs the operation of the region's transmission grid, which includes over 84,236 miles of transmission lines; administers a competitive wholesale electricity market; and plans regional transmission expansion improvements to maintain grid reliability and relieve congestion. PJM's regional grid and market operations produce annual savings of $3.2 billion to $4 billion. For the latest news about PJM, visit PJM Inside Lines at insidelines.pjm.com. SOURCE PJM Interconnection Related Links http://www.pjm.com A parish council that went viral after a Zoom meeting descended into chaos could soon be abolished, it emerged today. A clip of a Handforth Parish Council meeting in which numerous insults were thrown around and members were kicked out went viral earlier this month. Jackie Weaver, the acting clerk, shot to fame after chairman Brian Tolver said she had 'no authority at all' and ordered her to 'stop talking'. But Handforth Parish Council could soon disappear if an ongoing boundary review sees Handforth merge with nearby Wilmslow council. A source close to the council told MailOnline they 'fully supported' the merge because the authority was 'unworkable in its current form'. Jackie Weaver (pictured), Handforth Parish Council's acting clerk, shot to fame after chairman Brian Tolver said she had 'no authority at all' and ordered her to 'stop talking' But Handforth Parish Council could soon disappear if an ongoing boundary review sees Handforth merge with nearby Wilmslow council (file image) 'Weve got too many people who are interested in power rather than whats good for the community,' they said. The review began before the meeting went viral, according to the BBC's political reporter for Cheshire, Phil McCann. Handforth Parish Council's clerk Ashley Comiskey Dawson told MailOnline he doubted residents would be in favour of a merger. Handforth Parish Council's clerk Ashley Comiskey Dawson told MailOnline he doubted residents would be impressed with a merge (file image) He added: 'Firstly I doubt that the residents in Handforth would be very impressed about surrendering their unique identity to fall under the bracket of Wilmslow Town Council. 'The housing developments occurring in Handforth will take its population to potentially above 10,000 and would therefore qualify to have a town council in its own right. 'It would appear from first sight that Cheshire East Council want to strip Handforth of its individuality as well as take away any community infrastructure levy monies already hard fought for by Handforth Parish Council.' It's not yet known when the final decision will be made but any changes will be in place by the next election in 2023, Cheshire East Council has revealed. A source told MailOnline Wilmslow are 'up in arms' with one member allegedly saying 'we won't have Handforth'. The source close to Handforth Parish Council said: 'I got wind of it a while ago. Its not officially been put forward by the borough council but I fully support it. 'Handforth Parish Council is unworkable in its current state. Weve got too many people who are interested in power rather than whats good for the community.' They said the merge would see the number of members rise from 15 to 20 and will go ahead if Cheshire East Council decides regardless of Wilmslow's opposition. 'Wilmslow say they dont want anything to do with Handsforth. Wilmslow wont have it. They do not understand how this works. The council is responsible for making sure the governments are in order for all the councils under their jurisdiction. 'They decide how the councils are going to work. The individual councils cant decide. They dont have the power to say no.' Viral council meeting star Jackie Weaver (pictured with her husband Stuart) has insisted she did have the power to boot out a 'disruptive' council chairman who ordered her to 'stop talking' in a now-viral Zoom hearing A Cheshire East Council spokesperson said: 'The council can confirm that it has just published the draft report into its community governance review, which includes a number of proposed changes to parish boundaries, including a proposal that Handforth Parish Council should become a ward of the existing Wilmslow Parish Council. 'All these proposed changes will be subject to further consideration by the authoritys constitution committee. Work on this draft report began two years ago and predates recent events, which attracted widespread media attention. 'The review of town and parish council governance follows government guidance and is intended to take account of a range of issues, including major changes to the housing, electorates and infrastructure within the borough. 'The final recommendations will be drawn up following a 12-week consultation and it is expected that the changes will be in place in time for the next round of parish and town council elections in 2023.' MailOnline has contacted Wilmslow Parish Council for comment. It comes just weeks after a video of a Handforth Parish Council meeting went viral online. Mrs Weaver, Cheshire Association of Local Councils, clashes with chairman Brian Tolver who claims he was chucked out of an earlier meeting by her A seven-minute edited highlights package of its planning committee's December meeting captured a multitude of chaos - including one person shouting 'f*** off', someone flushing a toilet and another answering the front door. But the real show-stealer was acting-clerk Mrs Weaver who kicked out council chairman Brian Tolver after he told her she has 'no authority at all' and ordered her to to 'stop talking'. Factions of the council backing Mr Tolver claim she had no right to kick the chairman out. But Jackie - who chairs the Cheshire Association of Local Councillors - has insisted she did because the meeting was not called by the chairman nor the council's official clerk. Her action has gained her wide-spread support, with Jackie's husband Stuart Weaver, 69 - a retired design engineer - telling MailOnline that he's 'proud' of his wife for standing up to them. Jackie - who has worked with Handforth Parish Council on and off for nine years - says the hostility from Mr Tolver's faction of councillors was hardly a surprise. Councillors Cynthia Samson, John Smith and Susan Moore - who can all be seen in the zoom - asked Jackie to act as clerk in the meeting because the council's formal clerk had been suspended by Mr Tolver. Another extraordinary moment came after Jackie Weaver ejects Mr Tolver and asks to appoint a new chairman, when his ally Councillor Aled Brewerton (left) 'No they can't because the vice chair is here! I take charge! Read the standing orders. Read them and understand them!'. Jackie said she 'thought something might kick off' so took on the role herself - rather than pass it onto someone more junior. In a normal parish council meeting, Jackie wouldn't have the authority to remove someone, but because it was called by two councillors - who risked having the hearing 'hijacked' - she says she did. Jackie earlier admitted that 'there is an element of bullying and bad behaviour around in local councils' - with councillor Peter Moore, 70, one of those on the Zoom call, describing Handforth Parish Council as a 'den of bullying'. Jackie told MailOnline: 'I had the authority to kick them of the call. They shout all the statements about it being illegal but I've been doing this for 25 years. 'If it had been a normal parish meeting I wouldn't have had the authority to do that.' The row started several months ago between two warring camps within the parish council with four on one side and three on the other. One councillor, Jean Thompson, was dismissed as she did not attend meetings for six months. It left the council split, with three councillors on each side: chairman Mr Tolver, Aled Brewerton and Barry Burkhill versus Mr Smith, Ms Samson and Ms Moore. Mr Tolver was thrown out of the pre-Christmas hearing - the second meeting in a row - after he accused rival councillors of calling it illegally and yelling: 'You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver! NO AUTHORITY AT ALL!' and repeatedly telling her to 'stop talking'. Jackie, acting as the clerk, then kicked him off Zoom for being 'disruptive'. She was not in charge of the previous meeting when Mr Tolver was kicked out. Mr Tolver's ally Councillor Mr Brewerton is shown angrily shouting at Ms Weaver when she tries to elect a new chairman: 'No they can't because the vice chair is here! I take charge! Read the standing orders. Read them and understand them!'. Mrs Weaver told MailOnline: 'They were annoyed because I wouldn't tolerate their behaviour. My life is usually very dull and this doesn't normally happen. 'I would normally ask someone else to go to the meeting but I thought something might kick off, so I thought I go and do it myself.' 'I couldn't believe the reaction of Brewerton. He was very angry.' In her role as Chief Officer of Cheshire Association of Local Councils, Jackie helped set up Handforth Parish Council nine years ago. She said she's 'surprised by all the coverage' as the council meeting - shared to YouTube as a record in December - garnered no interest in the time. (TNS) A local utility company announced last week that it will be making another expansion to its rural broadband Internet services, thanks to a $7.4 million federal grant.Otsego Electric Cooperative announced Friday, Feb. 19, that its OEConnect service had gotten a funding commitment from the Federal Communications Commission's Rural Development Opportunity Fund. The grant will provide $7.4 million to expand existing infrastructure farther into unserved and underserved locations in Otsego, Herkimer and Madison counties."We are very excited to be able to bring this level of service to more of our neighbors," OEC CEO Tim Johnson said in a media release. "Fast and reliable Internet is just as important to rural residents as electricity was when Otsego Electric Cooperative and the other rural electric cooperatives in the nation brought service to these same hard-to-reach areas over 75 years ago."In a follow-up interview withon Monday, Feb. 22, Johnson said the money would allow the company to extend its network of broadband fiber-optic lines about 100 more miles, leading to 500 or 600 new households with service."This is very good news," Johnson said. "It does help. Every little bit helps."Johnson said the service is earmarked for certain households and OEC must follow federal guidelines about where to run its lines and offer its services."Unfortunately, we don't have a lot leeway," he said. "The condition of getting this federal funding is that we stick to the census blocks. We have funding to build in 23 census blocks locally. There are a lot of areas where we will be doing this work."OEC has about 4,000 members for its electric services, Johnson said, providing energy through about 4,900 meters. More than half of those homes also get their Internet services from OEConnect, he said.The company had offered satellite Internet services in the past, but it wasn't as reliable as the fiber-optic based Internet, which OEConnect began connecting to its customer's homes in 2018, Johnson said.Last month, OEConnect announced it had connected its 2,500th household to the broadband service."Now, we're at abut 2,700," Johnson said Monday.Johnson said he expects more funding for the project over the next year, from the FCC and perhaps from a federal conronavirus pandemic stimulus."We'll continue to look for better sources of funding to help people where we can," he said. "We already have the backbone in place. We'll continue to build on this." Women now hold more than a third of board positions in the UK's 350 largest companies after a 50% surge in five years, a new report has revealed. . The final report from the Hampton-Alexander Review revealed that the number of women on FTSE boards has jumped to 1,026 up from 682 in 2015. It means that 34.3% of FTSE 350 board roles are now held by women, up from 21.9% in October 2015 hitting the review's target for at least a third. There are also no all-male boards, against 15 in 2015, in another milestone for the review, which was launched in 2016 with the aim of increasing female representation at the top of business. But the review's chair Sir Philip Hampton called for further progress on increasing the number of women in top executive roles, with men still firmly dominating the ranks. Review found that 34.3% of FTSE 350 board roles are now held by women, up from 21.9% in October 2015 Fiona Cannon (far left at Bucking Palace reception with four other female Lloyds TSB executives), Group Sustainable Business Director, Lloyds Banking Group, hailed the results of the review Sir Philip said: 'There's been excellent progress for women leaders in business over the last 10 years or more, with boards and shareholders determined to see change. 'The progress has been strongest with non-executive positions on boards, but the coming years should see many more women taking top executive roles. 'That's what is needed to sustain the changes made.' The report showed that only 29.4% of leadership roles are held by women in the FTSE 350 up from 28.2% in 2019 while there are still 28 all-male executive committees. The report said that 'significant progress remains to be made on the highest executive roles, such as CEO, and the review will reflect on these findings in order to chart a way forward'. It also revealed a sharp drop in the number of so-called 'One & Done' boards those with only one woman down from 116 in 2015 to just 16. 'All businesses should be pushing themselves to move beyond tokenism, and ensure even more women are getting into the highest ranks,' according to the review. Of those with a solid representation of women leaders, it found high street chain Next was the best performer with 53.8%, followed by luxury fashion house Burberry with 50.4% and drug giant AstraZeneca in third place with 42.9%. The report also said that for the first time, two FTSE 100 Index firms now have more women represented on their board than men Guinness drinks group Diageo with 60% and Severn Trent Plc with 55.6%. Four firms in the FTSE 350 have women in the post of chief executive and chair insurers Admiral Group and Direct Line Insurance Group, as well as water firms Pennon Group and Severn Trent. Mary O'Connor, Acting Senior Partner at KPMG UK, said: 'It's hard to believe that as recently as 2011, 43% of the FTSE 350 still had all-male boards. Mary O'Connor, Acting Senior Partner at KPMG UK, praised the outcome of the report Liv Garfield, chief executive officer of Severn Trent Plc, speaks at the Confederation of British Industry in 2018. She is one of 1,026 women in senior board roles 'Thankfully the representation of women on boards and in leadership positions has significantly improved in recent years, with this review having played a critical role in realising that. 'Achieving the review's 33% target at boardroom level marks great progress, but it's vital we have a strong pipeline of female talent rising the ranks. 'While women now make up nearly a third of wider senior leadership roles, structural and cultural barriers still exist for women, as well as other underrepresented groups. 'Our collective efforts to truly eradicate those barriers and create an inclusive leadership culture doesn't stop here, this is where it intensifies.' Fiona Cannon, Group Sustainable Business Director, Lloyds Banking Group & Hampton-Alexander Review Steering Group, said: 'Lloyds Banking Group has been pleased to support the Hampton-Alexander Review over the past 5 years. Susan Davy, CEO of Pennon, one of four FTSE companies to have a female chair and CEO Milena Mondini is the CEO of Admiral, another firm that has both a female CEO and Chair 'The framework of voluntary targets, annual reporting and availability of data has been a real strength of the Review as evidenced by the significant progress across UK business. 'This is hugely encouraging and I hope that the momentum created will continue at what is a crucial inflexion point for gender equality.' The Minister for Women, Baroness Berridge, said: 'I want to thank all those companies that have shared their best methods of retaining and promoting talented women in their workforce. 'Getting women into senior positions can be vital for a company's success, and we want to see more of it as part of the UK's COVID-19 recovery. 'It also makes good business sense, with companies in the top 25% for gender diversity on their executive teams also 25% more likely to have above-average profitability.' Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said: 'FTSE companies have made incredible progress in recent years, but we cannot become complacent in building a society where everyone has an opportunity to get on and succeed. 'As we look to build back better from the pandemic, it's important businesses keep challenging themselves to use all the talents of our workforce and open up the top ranks for more, highly-accomplished women.' As of Feb. 5, Canada had administered 2.7 COVID-19 vaccination doses per 100 people compared to 61.7 for Israel and 16.2 for the United Kingdom. By contrast, Canada has signed contracts with seven different companies for a total of 234 million doses with options for tens of millions more. Opinion As of Feb. 5, Canada had administered 2.7 COVID-19 vaccination doses per 100 people compared to 61.7 for Israel and 16.2 for the United Kingdom. By contrast, Canada has signed contracts with seven different companies for a total of 234 million doses with options for tens of millions more. Whats going on? To understand the problem, we need to go back to the 1980s. At that time, the government-owned Connaught Labs was producing vaccines here in Canada and decision-making was in the public realm. But Connaught was partially privatized and then finally allowed to be sold to the French company Merieux (now part of Sanofi) by the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney. Fast forward to the 2000s, when Quebec-based vaccine manufacturer IAF BioChem went through a couple of sales and ended up being owned by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Sanofi and GSK still make vaccines in Toronto and Ste-Foy, but decisions about what vaccines to produce are not in Canadian hands. Unheeded warnings It didnt have to be that way. After the SARS outbreak in 2003, the report Learning from SARS, led by Dr. David Naylor, recommended that Canada develop a "national vaccine strategy" and prioritize the security of our vaccine supply. We got another warning about the need for a secure and steady supply of vaccines with the H1N1 pandemic of 2009 when there were production delays at the GSK plant in Ste-Foy. Nobody seems to have been paying attention. As a result, when the COVID-19 pandemic started, Canada was left with few options. COVID-19 response Canadas first attempt to ensure domestic production was a deal with the Chinese manufacturer CanSino Biologics in May 2020. Had that deal gone ahead, it would have involved trials at the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology at Dalhousie University and, if successful, subsequent domestic manufacturing. But within days of the agreement being announced, there were already troubles as the Chinese delayed sending the seed material for the vaccine and, ultimately, it never arrived. Efforts to secure a domestically made supply then turned to upgrading the National Research Council (NRC) facility in Montreal and subsequently building an entirely new plant at a total cost of $170 million. In doing so, the government bypassed providing PnuVax, a biopharmaceutical company also located in Montreal, with any of the $600 million from Industry Canadas Strategic Innovation Fund earmarked for the research or development of COVID-19 vaccines and therapies. PnuVax had been renovated in 2012 to meet Health Canada standards and, according to sources cited by the Globe and Mail, the company could have been ready to produce millions of doses of a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2020. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau initially said the NRC facility would be up and running by November 2020 and producing 250,000 doses a month. However, in early February, Trudeau admitted that the NRC plant wouldnt be ready until the summer of 2021, and with the need to outfit the facility for the Novavax vaccine and subsequent Health Canada inspections, there wont be any vaccine coming from there until the end of 2021. The failure of the CanSino deal and the delay in building the new NRC facility left Canada reliant on foreign sources of vaccine. The contracts for the vaccine were negotiated based on advice provided by the 18-member COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force set up by the NRC in June 2020. Both the co-chairs of the task force have conflicts of interest with companies producing the vaccines and the terms of the contracts are being kept secret. Among other things, we dont know what price Canada is paying for each vaccine, what the timeline for delivery is, whether there are penalties for delays and how the contracts are being enforced, if at all. Complicating things even further, the contracts focused on large-scale delivery starting in April 2021 because of uncertainty back in the summer about when vaccines would be available. Delayed deliveries Now Canada is facing delays in vaccine delivery from both Pfizer and Moderna, the companies making the only two vaccines approved in Canada so far. The Pfizer plant in Belgium, where our vaccine comes from, is being retooled to increase production while the exact reasons for the Moderna delay are unclear. Moderna is shipping its vaccine to Canada through Belgium. (Both companies and the federal government have promised that the amounts scheduled for delivery by the end of March will be honoured.) On top of having no domestic production and the delays, Canada is facing vaccine nationalism from other countries. U.S. President Joe Biden is sticking to an America-first position and not allowing the Pfizer plant in Michigan or the Moderna plant in New Hampshire to export any of their vaccines to Canada until all Americans have been vaccinated. The European Union is also threatening to block the export of vaccines possibly affecting exports from Belgium, as it too is confronting delays in being able to vaccinate its citizens. One response from Canada to all of this is to claim 1.9 million doses of the yet-to-be-approved AstraZeneca vaccine from COVAX, a facility primarily set up to ensure that low- and middle-income countries will have access to vaccines. Canada is the second-largest country donor to COVAX and is entitled to claim vaccines from COVAX, but is doing so when, as of Feb. 3, only four African countries have started vaccinating their citizens. In an interview on CBCs As It Happens, Karina Gould, Canadas minister of international development, defended Canadas move, a made-in-Canada form of vaccine nationalism. Ensuring that Canadians would receive an effective vaccine quickly was never going to be a sure thing; there was always plenty of opportunity for something to go wrong. But the uncertainty involved has been compounded by a lack of government planning in the past, secrecy, a lack of international co-operation and poor government decision-making. Lets hope we do better when the next pandemic comes around. Joel Lexchin is professor emeritus of health policy and management at York University, an emergency physician at University Health Network and associate professor of family and community medicine at the University of Toronto. This article was first published at The Conversation Canada: theconversation.com/ca. (Newser) An "unimaginable catastrophe" has befallen a town near Genoa, Italy, where hundreds of coffins that long rested in a seaside cemetery fell some 160 feet toward the Mediterranean Sea on Monday. CNN reports that as many as 200 coffins were swept up in a landslide in Camogli, and only a handful have been recovered, with some in the sea and others buried under rocks and debris. A regional official says reclaiming the rest "will depend on the sea in the coming days." The Independent has a quote from a woman who spoke to local media and fears her father's ashes are forever lost: "My legs are shaking, it's like he's dead again." The Local has video taken by cemetery workerswho on Saturday spotted signs of fissures in the rocks along the coastlinethat captures the moment of the collapse. Coastal erosion was likely the cause. (Read more cemetery stories.) The VietBank appointment is effective since yesterday. Photo: Vietbank The new chairman of the Board of Directors of VietBank was previously the Standing Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade. He was also in charge of operating a number of large-scale corporations. The newly-appointed chairman is rich in experience in managerial positions and held senior management positions such as general director of Viet Tien Garment Corporation, general director of Vietnam Textile and Garment Corporation. Currently, Khu is also the vice-chairman of Global Petroleum Investment JSC. In 2020, VietBank's consolidated pre-tax profit reached VND403 billion ($17.5 million), down 34.3 per cent compared to 2019. After-tax profit was VND319 billion ($13.87 million), down 32.3 per cent. As of December 31, 2020, VietBank's total assets increased by 33 per cent at the end of 2019 to VND91.66 trillion ($4 billion). The non-performing loans ratio to total outstanding loans was 1.75 per cent. A motion calling on the government to legislate on the difficult issue of parental alienation was withdrawn at Offaly County Councils recent meeting following a contribution by Offalys only female councillor, Clare Claffey. Parental alienation is when one parent causes a child to be alienated from their other parent, either by their words, attitudes or behaviour. Speaking at last weeks meeting, the Social Democrats Councillor said: At face value, this motion looks credible and our first reaction would be to agree with it but we have to look at the hidden impact this will have for victims of domestic abuse. "After months of research myself and communicating with people who understand all sides of the issue, I can tell you that while there of course are some genuine and difficult cases of parental alienation, the potential impact of this proposal on victims of domestic abuse - especially where coercive control is prominent in the abusive relationship - would be horrific. She continued: I have concerns at how this law would be used as a tool and a tactic to silence the victim - meaning further abuse, further control and Im concerned this will prevent victims coming forward. In cases of domestic violence, where one parent is accused of parental alienation, the focus is now on that issue and not on the violence. The abuse is pushed aside and now the victim is forced to defend themselves. Speaking at the Council meeting, Cllr Claffey said that many people dont realise the hidden impact of the motion proposed, but that several local services including Offaly Domestic Violence Support Service, Barnardos, Arden Community and Family Resource Centre and Mens Aid had submitted their concerns through a joint submission to council members. She said We have been made aware of the possible negative impacts of supporting this motion, by groups who are dealing with family issues on a daily basis, so I believe it would be negligent on our behalf to pass this motion without consideration of the concerns of these agencies. They are the ones dealing with it on a daily basis. We cant ignore their concerns. Cllr Claffey was supported in the Chamber by Cllr Mark Hackett and Cllr Sean OBrien. Other Councillors also recommended caution and the motion was eventually withdrawn by its proposer Cllr Peter Ormond pending an independent review by Minister for Justice Helen McEntee. Speaking after the meeting, Anne Clarke Manager of Offaly Domestic Violence Support Service expressed relief that the motion had been withdrawn, pending review by the Department of Justice. We must be mindful that perpetrators of violence will use whatever tactics they can to dominate and control the protective parent - Parental Alienation could be a tactic weaponised by the perpetrator," she said. A high number of other Irish councils have passed motions seeking action on parental alienation legislation while Minister for Social Protection, Heather Humphreys TD, recently announced the launch of the Consultation Process under the review of Child Maintenance Arrangements. As part of the six-week consultation, stakeholders and members of the public are invited to submit their views on the current treatment of child maintenance payments and the obligations of liable relatives within the social protection system. An electrical substation is seen after winter weather caused electricity blackouts in Houston, Texas, on Feb. 20, 2021. (Go Nakamura/Reuters) Top Executives of Texas Electric Grid Operator Resign After Widespread Power Outages Five board members of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), Texass power grid operator, resigned Tuesday after the state power system failed during a deadly winter storm, leaving more than 4 million customers losing electricity amid subfreezing temperatures. All of the five board directors live outside Texas. Their resignations are effective Wednesday, just a day before Texas lawmakers are expected to question grid managers and energy officials about the failures during hearings at the state Capitol. ERCOT Chair Sally Talberg, Vice Chair Peter Cramton, and board members Terry Bulger and Raymond Hepper, wrote in a joint letter addressed to other ERCOT board members: We want to acknowledge the pain and suffering of Texans during this past week. Our hearts go out to all Texans who have had to go without electricity, heat, and water during frigid temperatures and continue to face the tragic consequences of this emergency. The letter was attached to a notice (pdf) to the states Public Utility Commission, which appoints the 15-member board. We have noted recent concerns about out-of-state board leadership at ERCOT. To allow state leaders a free hand with future direction and to eliminate distractions, we are resigning from the board, the resigning directors added. Vanessa Anesetti-Parra, a fifth director, separately resigned. Anesetti-Parra is an executive with Just Energy of Canada. In addition, Craig Ivey, who was nominated to the board, withdrew his nomination. Ivey, a former president of Consolidated Edison of New York, in his letter cited stakeholders concerns over the propriety of out-of-state ERCOT directors, and said he wanted to withdraw his petition to be approved to the board to avoid becoming a distraction. The resignations were disclosed the same day ERCOT was hit with a proposed class action lawsuit in a Texas court by customers who claim they lost power and drinkable water because of its failure to ensure the grid could function properly despite the bad weather. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded to the resignations in a statement, saying he welcomes the move. When Texans were in desperate need of electricity, ERCOT failed to do its job and Texans were left shivering in their homes without power, he said. ERCOT leadership made assurances that Texass power infrastructure was prepared for the winter storm, but those assurances proved to be devastatingly false. He added, The lack of preparedness and transparency at ERCOT is unacceptable, and I welcome these resignations. The State of Texas will continue to investigate ERCOT and uncover the full picture of what went wrong, and we will ensure that the disastrous events of last week are never repeated. Reuters contributed to this report. It was pretty quick. The Fire Department worked with the Police Department and with the extra hands, the police officers started clearing that ice and that snow right away so the firefighter-paramedics could go through the house and out the back door to actually get to the patient, to her upper body, and were able to speak with her and start stabilizing her, Cesaretti said Wednesday morning. The whole thing took about 10 minutes. She was injured and obviously very cold. Following last weeks winter storms, people took to social media with worries about expecting high energy bills. An Xcel Energy representative said the companys customers should not be concerned. Frozen wellheads in the Permian Basin and other gas-producing areas to the southern part of the state prompted energy consumers across both the Southwest Power Pool and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to experience controlled power outages throughout the week in an effort to balance the power grids. Xcel Energy draws from the SPP power grid. The following Texas cooperatives draw energy through Xcel: Bailey County Electric Cooperative Association Big Country Electric Cooperative, Inc. Deaf Smith Electric Cooperative, Inc. Greenbelt Electric Cooperative, Inc. Lamb County Electric Cooperative, Inc. Lyntegar Electric Cooperative, Inc. North Plains Electric Cooperative, Inc. Rita Blanca Electric Cooperative, inc. South Plains Electric Cooperative, Inc. Swisher Electric Cooperative, Inc. All of Hale County is in the SPP as well, said Wes Reeves, spokesperson for Xcel Energy. The reports of higher-than-anticipated bills have not come out Xcel Energy regions, he said. He noted that natural gas prices rose last week when supply crashed. We paid very high prices for natural gas but we have the ability to surcharge customer bills over long periods of time to recover those costs, Reeves said. In other words, there wont be an immediate rise in electric bills because of this. When costs are determined, the company will file a proposal with the Public Utility Commission to surcharge bills for two years if need be, he added. We will communicate any intentions to do so well in advance, Reeves said. CHICO, Calif. - Former San Diego Mayor visited Chico on Tuesday to show his support for the recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom and campaign for governor. Kevin Faulconer, republican, served two terms as Mayor of San Diego and he hopes to become a candidate this year if the recall effort gets enough signatures. This recall is going to happen, there's no doubt in my mind, Faulconer said. The recall effort needs nearly 400,000 more signatures to be certified before March 17. The former mayor said he would make changes this year if he becomes governor. I have an opportunity to get in immediately this year and make the change, not just on our economy, COVID, our schools, all the things that people are clamoring for action and not just rhetoric. I'm gonna bring in a whole new team, Faulconer said. Faulconer also said he supports opening public schools full-time. RESEARCHERS MAY HAVE UNCLOUDED THE MYSTERY OF COVID-19 'BRAIN FOG' Media Contact: Michael E. Newman, mnewma25@jhmi.edu People who survive a severe case of COVID-19 have reported a variety of lingering aftereffects, but perhaps none as unusual as what has been popularly called "brain fog." Clinically known as dysexecutive syndrome, the condition is a COVID-19-kindled delirium, initially experienced by patients -- mostly older -- while sick as a state of confusion and impaired awareness. It then often stays on after recovery to torment as persistent cognitive sluggishness. Unfortunately, the origin of brain fog has remained unclear. Now, pathologists at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston have found evidence that large bone marrow cells known as megakaryocytes may be responsible for the brain fog. They suggest that megakaryocytes migrate to the brain in a journey precipitated by the destructive activity of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. There, the researchers believe, the out-of-place cells may reduce or completely block the flow of nourishing blood through individual capillaries in the cerebral cortex -- the area of the brain where most information processing occurs. Such capillary occlusions, they say, could lead to neurological impairment. The team's findings are reported in a research letter published Feb. 12 in JAMA Neurology. Megakaryocytes are the cells responsible for production of platelets --blood components that are necessary for clotting and wound repair. Interestingly, the researchers say, a scientific literature search they conducted indicates this may be the first time that megakaryocytes have been found in blood vessels in the human brain. The researchers evaluated brain tissue from autopsies of 15 patients who died of COVID-19. In five of the samples, they discovered large cell nuclei resembling those of megakaryocytes in the cortical capillaries. Immunohistochemical testing confirmed that the nuclei were those of megakaryocyte immigrants from bone marrow. No megakaryocyte nuclei were found in post-mortem brain tissues from decedents who were negative for the COVID-19 coronavirus and served as the study's control group. What isn't clear is how the COVID-19-associated megakaryocytes are signaled to leave the bone marrow or how they can navigate the fine network of lung blood vessels on their way to the brain, says David Nauen, M.D., Ph.D., study lead author and assistant professor of pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "We suspect that SARS-CoV-2 damages lung tissue, leading to the release of chemical signals that induce the megakaryocytes to travel there from the bone marrow," says Nauen. "When that happens, these large cells somehow find a way to pass through the lung capillaries and get to the brain." "We don't yet know if the megakaryocytes we found in the brain are just the result of blood flow carrying them there or if a specific change occurs in the brain vessels that trap them," he adds. Nauen says the researchers plan next to characterize what happens in the brain tissue and cortical capillaries during severe cases of COVID-19 to better understand how megakaryocytes are signaled and recruited. "Because standard brain autopsy sections represent only a minute portion of the cerebral cortex, the actual numbers of these cells in the brain as a result of COVID-19 could be considerable -- as could their potentially negative neurological impacts on those who survive," says Nauen. Nauen is available for comment about these research findings. SCIENTISTS ARE BUILDING MORE COMPREHENSIVE TESTS FOR COVID-19 Media Contact: Vanessa Wasta, wasta@jhmi.edu New strains of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, may have greater transmissibility or altered virulence, or may exhibit resistance to the current vaccines. Now, scientists are racing to develop better ways to detect emerging SARS-CoV-2 strains among the high number of diagnosed infections. Johns Hopkins assistant professor of pathology Ben Larman, Ph.D., and his team have been working to improve the analysis of genetic material called RNA that forms the genome of many viruses. Specifically, the Johns Hopkins team is developing a technique to scan biological specimens, including saliva or specimens obtained with nasal swabs, using specialized DNA probes that sift through a complex "forest" of RNA sequences. The probes can detect specific RNA sequences of viruses and other disease-causing pathogens. A report describing the development and application of the test (cRASL-seq), led by Larman and postdoctoral fellow Joel Credle, Ph.D., appeared online Feb. 3 in the journal Modern Pathology. A key feature of the newly developed test, says Larman, is its ability to analyze and detect the many subtle changes that can occur in the SARS-CoV-2 viral genome -- so-called variants, such as those first identified in the United Kingdom and South Africa. Read more about development of the test. Larman is available for interviews. ### (Alliance News) - A possible extension of stamp duty in the UK until the end of June could risk simply creating another cliff edge for the housing market, experts have warned. Some said a three-month extension may simply shift problems with the housing market a and a potential house price dip a "a few miles down the road". The Times newspaper said it has been told that Chancellor Rishi Sunak will use his Budget on March 3 to move the deadline from March 31 to the end of June. Rightmove estimates that 100,000 buyers who agreed a purchase last year are set to lose out, if the deadline remains at March 31. Tim Bannister, a property expert at Rightmove, said: "We estimate that around 100,000 sales will miss the current March deadline, and so, if the holiday is extended to the end of June, it would give these the chance to complete in time, plus a number of other sales could now make it through that were only agreed at the start of this year. "If it is announced next week, we're likely to see a rush of new buyers also trying to make use of the savings. "But it's worth remembering that the huge logjam will mean a new sale being agreed is still likely to take over four months on average to complete, so really an extension for a few months would be an indication that it's to help those already trying to get their purchases through." Richard Donnell, research and insight director at Zoopla, said a potential extension would support sales agreed in January "that had little more than a 50% chance of benefiting from the relief, and will bring a further tranche of buyers into the market in the immediate term". He added: "While this will inject a new wave of impetus into the market, drawing in new buyers until Easter, the Chancellor hasn't resolved the cliff edge that the market will face at the end of June, when the new deadline comes into play." The "nil rate" stamp duty threshold was temporarily raised from GBP125,000 to GBP500,000 last July. Stamp duty applies in England and Northern Ireland, with similar holidays also taking place in Scotland and Wales. There have been some calls to extend the holiday, while others have urged a more gradual phasing out, or tapering of the holiday, to prevent buyers from suddenly pulling out of deals. Mark Hayward, chief policy adviser, Propertymark, which represents estate agents and other property professionals, said speculation that the holiday will be extended "is good news for the property sector". "However, extending the holiday until June will create another cliff edge," he warned. "We know from our own research that the majority of estate agents expect to see an increase in the number of failed sales if the stamp duty holiday ends at a cliff edge, so we need Government to consider a tapered end to the holiday so that buyers aren't forced to pull out at the last minute and the property market can continue to thrive." The coronavirus pandemic has added to pressure on the system as buyers rush to beat the stamp duty deadline. Rightmove estimates around 628,000 sales are currently in the legal process across Britain. House prices have hit record highs in recent months, with increases potentially outweighing the stamp duty savings that some buyers are making. According to Halifax, house prices jumped by GBP57,000 across England and Wales in the second half of last year. Karen Noye, a mortgage expert at Quilter, said: "If (the report) proves to be the case, it will no doubt be good news for many; however, it does simply kick the can down the road in terms of some of the structural problems in the housing marketa "It is likely that, come June, we will see more pressure to keep the stamp duty holiday in play to stop the inevitable house price correction that will come in the future as the economic realities of the pandemic bite. "While this news helps to avoid the looming cliff edge for lots of buyers, it does just move it a few miles down the road and many will be in a similar position come June." Nitesh Patel, strategic economist at Yorkshire Building Society, said: "Bringing the policy to a dead halt on March 31 is likely to cause issues for potential buyers, who have agreed a sale and have a mortgage in place, but won't have time to complete before the deadline. These buyers could potentially be facing an unexpected tax bill of up to GBP15,000." He urged the government to consider a tapering of the tax relief. Patel said this would give "a period of grace which would allow any property sales which have been agreed and have secured a mortgage approval given a set period of time to complete their transaction with stamp duty reduction benefit. "If the policy is merely extended, we may well face the same situation of home-buyers who are caught out when the extension comes to an end." Adrian Jaggard, chief executive of conveyancers Taylor Rose MW, said: "Pressure could be reduced at a controlled rate by a tapered end to an extended stamp duty land tax holiday period, or ideally a wholesale review of the stamp duty land tax." A Treasury spokesman said the department could not speculate on tax ahead of fiscal events. By Vicky Shaw source: PA Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved. It's an honor to be named on Wing VC's Enterprise 30 list for a third year as we continue to scale our Feature Management platform. Now serving peaks of 20 trillion features a day, LaunchDarkly is used by enterprise organizations... to reduce risk and innovate. LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management solution that software teams use to build better software faster, is witnessing record use of its platform as organizations strive for better control over the digital experiences and services they deliver to their users. Recently serving peaks of 20 trillion feature flags in a single day, LaunchDarkly is seeing a significant increase in usage over the past year. This high volume reflects a growing focus on feature management as companies like IBM, Sling TV, and Advance Auto Parts prioritize continuously delivering value to customers without additional risk. COVID-19 has dramatically increased the urgency to digitally transform, but change introduces risk and uncertainty that can be challenging to manage. LaunchDarkly has seen that when development teams and business stakeholders have more control over what they put into the world, they are empowered to make better software, faster. LaunchDarklys feature management platform is used by more than 1,500 customers globally, including over 20% of the Fortune 100 list. The company is seeing government agencies use feature flags to validate releases in production before sharing with the public, while also rapidly configuring features in real time. EdTech companies are using the feature management platform to put new code into production weekly, and then turn features on for students and teachers when they're confident they are ready. LaunchDarkly is also seeing large software companies that serve 50+ million consumers worldwide find immense value in being able to quickly make new features available within complex platforms that include multiple code bases that have varying release schedules. In January, LaunchDarkly was named to InfoWorlds 2021 Technology of the Year list. This week, the company has been named to the Enterprise Tech 30 list, an exclusive list of the most promising private companies in enterprise tech, as determined by the prominent venture capitalists in the sector. It's an honor to be named on Wing VC's Enterprise 30 list for a third year as we continue to scale our Feature Management platform, said Edith Harbaugh, CEO and Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly. Now serving peaks of 20 trillion features a day, LaunchDarkly is used by enterprise organizations including IBM, Northern Trust, and Atlassian to reduce risk and innovate. LaunchDarkly will host its first user conference, Galaxy, on April 6-7th. The live streaming event will feature learnings, best practices, and interactive opportunities for LaunchDarkly users to up-level their understanding and use of the Feature Management platform. Topics will include testing in production, Progressive Delivery, dynamic configuration, managing code debt, and safe infrastructure migrations and cloud transformations, among others. Galaxy conference is free for all to join. About LaunchDarkly Founded in 2014 by Edith Harbaugh and John Kodumal, LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that software teams use to build better software, faster with less risk. Development teams use feature management as a best practice to separate code deployments from feature releases. With LaunchDarkly, teams control their entire feature lifecycles from concept to launch to value. Serving over 1600 customers, LaunchDarkly is used by teams at Atlassian, HashiCorp, and Intuit. LaunchDarkly is named on the Forbes Cloud 100 list and on the Bay Area Best Places to Work list. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com Video of a jet engine in flames shot by terrified passengers 30,000 foot aloft, or images of aircraft debris being scattered far and wide on the ground are a public relations nightmare for any aerospace company. For Boeing, which is still battling the fallout from the 737 Max crisis after two of the jets crashed killing 346 people, the threat weighs even more heavily. However, the US aviation giants reaction after a United Airlines Boeing 777 suffered an engine failure on a flight from Denver to Hawaii was a decisive change of course after its response to the first 737 Max crash in October 2018. The latest incident involving a Boeing plane puts fresh pressure on the beleaguered company. Credit:AP This time, Boeing was quick to announce it recommended grounding all 128 of the 777s with the type of engine that failed. It said it supported the decisions made by the Japanese and US air safety bodies to suspend operations of 777 aircraft powered by Pratt & Whitney 4000-112 engine, while Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, has said he is banning 777s with the affected engine from British skies. Boeings response is in marked contrast to efforts after the Lion Air crash in Indonesia to keep the bestselling 737 Max in the air. Court documents unearthed last month from a lawsuit filed by Boeing investors allege that executives ordered a public relations, investor relations and lobbying campaign to counter bad publicity about the Max. Boeing also highlighted what it claimed were pilot and maintenance errors as factors. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. "Businesses are more committed than ever to making their public and shared spaces safer, and this heightened awareness of health and safety should be a continued focus, even after the pandemic ends," said Chris Tucker, Vice President and General Manager of CloroxPro. "Cleaning and disinfecting are a key part of a holistic strategy to help reduce the spread of illness-causing germs, and CloroxPro is proud that through this program, we can help support businesses with tools and education to help maintain a healthier and safer environment." CloroxPro will donate up to 1,000 Clorox Total 360 Systems to businesses fitting the application criteria. Priority will be given to small businesses that have been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Clorox Total 360 System leverages innovative technology to help keep facilities healthier while saving time, money, and labor. The electrostatic sprayer works by charging and atomizing trusted Clorox solutions, delivering a powerful flow of charged droplets that are attracted to surfaces with a force stronger than gravity. This allows the product to quickly and uniformly coat hard, non-porous surfaces including hard-to-reach areas that manual cleaning can often miss. In addition to the device donations, CloroxPro will donate $100,000 in GBAC Scholarships enabling recipients to further their cleaning, disinfection and infection prevention education. The GBAC Fundamentals Online Course teaches fundamentals of cleaning and disinfecting for health as well as prevention, response and control measures for outbreak situations such as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. "We are proud to partner with CloroxPro to continue to support the professional cleaning industry and our members in a time of need," said John Barrett, Executive Director, ISSA. "We are thankful for CloroxPro's continued support and dedication to further education and offering the tools to enhance our members' operations amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond." Applications for the program open today, February 24, 2021 and will close on March 31, 2021 at 11:59 PM PST. To apply for the program or get more information, visit www.issa.com/clorox-gbac. About CloroxPro Building on a century-long legacy in cleaning and disinfecting, CloroxPro offers some of the industry's most recognized and trusted brand names for commercial cleaning, including its Clorox Healthcare products and technologies for healthcare facilities. Whether it is schools, offices, restaurants, hotels, hospitals or other commercial facilities, CloroxPro is committed to meeting the demands of industry professionals. For more information, visit www.CloroxPro.com or follow @CloroxPro on Twitter. CLX-B About ISSA With more than 9,300 membersincluding distributors, manufacturers, manufacturer representatives, wholesalers, building service contractors, in-house service providers, residential cleaners and associated service membersISSA is the world's leading trade association for the cleaning industry. The association is committed to changing the way the world views cleaning by providing its members with the business tools they need to promote cleaning as an investment in human health, the environment and an improved bottom line. Headquartered in Northbrook, Ill., USA, the association has regional offices in Mainz, Germany; Whitby, Canada; Parramatta, Australia; Seoul, South Korea; and Shanghai, China. For more information about ISSA, visit www.issa.com or call 800-225-4772 (North America) or 847-982-0800. About GBAC, a Division of ISSA Composed of international leaders in the field of microbial-pathogenic threat analysis, mitigation, response and recovery, the Global Biorisk Advisory Council (GBAC), a Division of ISSA, provides training, guidance, accreditation, certification, crisis management assistance and leadership to government, commercial and private entities looking to mitigate, quickly address and/or recover from biological threats and real-time crises. The organization's services include biorisk management program assessment and training, Forensic Restoration response and remediation, the GBAC STAR facility accreditation program, training and certification of individuals and consulting for building owners and facility managers. For more information, visit www.gbac.org. ### SOURCE CloroxPro Related Links http://www.cloroxpro.com/ Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. If you want to understand how the snowstorm truly was a disaster, you must read this heartbreaking testimony from Selena Xie, medic and president of the Austin EMS Association. On Tuesday, Xie shared her letter that left many on social media shocked and devastated. The medic wrote on Austin EMS Association's Facebook page that the testimony is only the tip of the iceberg, and should prove those naysayers who say the storm was just a "minor inconvenience" wrong. In fact, she said it was possibly the worst shifts some medics ever experienced. READ ALSO: Here's how to apply to replace SNAP benefits damaged during winter storm Xie begins the letter with what it was like trying to respond to emergency calls early Monday, a day where many Texans didn't have power due to the rare Valentine's Day snowfall. "While our shift started at 10 am, the ambulance had been t-boned by a vehicle that lost control," she stated. "We had heard of crews holding over for over 4 hours working over 28 hours straight, with no rest." The medic said their first call was to help someone who was reliant on his oxygen concentrator to live. He had no power and his levels were dropping without it, Xie noted. The medics reached him hours later after getting stuck in the snow. The patient's levels were half of what is normal, Xie said. READ ALSO: Use vacation time or go without pay? Some Texans forced to choose after winter storm On her second call, Xie recalls a bone cancer patient in agonizing pain because he couldn't get his pain medication refilled due to icy road conditions. Xie's third was possibly the most heartbreaking, as she told a story of a man who was expected to die at home comfortably surrounded by his loved ones. The power going out didn't allow that. "When his oxygen, that was making him comfortable, went out, he started making awful grunting sounds. It is not acceptable to die like that, in agony," Xie said. "We had no other options at the time than to take the person to the hospital to keep him comfortable, but not before we let his wife cry against his chest for 5 minutes, which was all we felt comfortable sparing at the time." Throughout the letter, Xie told more horrifying details of an overdose and carbon monoxide calls. She explained how the power outage affected Austin's methadone and dialysis clinics. Many people couldn't receive dialysis, and only could if they were "close to dying." The medic described how many EMS crews were stranded at work or asked to work back-to-back 24/7 shifts. READ ALSO: Next cold front moves into San Antonio late Wednesday night If that doesn't open your eyes to the horrific scenes from the snowstorm, Xie shared how she told someone to drive their relative's body to a funeral home because there were no resources to take the body away at that time. She said she cried for an hour after that phone call, writing that it wasn't the best advice to give but the best she could do considering the circumstances. "It was only Wednesday, and we would continue to see people resort to illicit drugs to stave off withdrawals from methadone clinics closing, people dying from electrolyte imbalances from lack of dialysis, our only Level 2 trauma hospital evacuating patients and closing the doors to EMS, our only Level 1 hospital almost on the same verge," she concluded. "It was and continues to be a humanitarian crisis and it is horrifying that there exists so much privilege that people can be blind to it." You can read the full letter below: Priscilla Aguirre is a general assignment reporter for MySA.com | priscilla.aguirre@express-news.net | @CillaAguirre Egypt insists that any accord over the disputed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) must preserve its water rights as well as serve the interest of all parties, Irrigation and Water Resources Minister Mohamed Abdel-Aty told Congolese official Alphonse Ntumba, according to an official statement. In a meeting in Cairo with Ntumba, the coordinator of the panel concerned with the DRC's presidency of the AU, Abdel-Aty stressed Egypts keenness on reaching a fair and binding legal agreement that takes into account the interests of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. The two officials discussed Sudans proposal, which Cairo backs, to form an international quartet committee to mediate the stalled negotiations on the dam. Abdel-Aty stressed that Egypt supports its African counterparts in Nile Basin countries in providing drinking water for its citizens and implementing rainwater harvesting and other projects. Their meeting comes hours after Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told the Congolese official that Cairo backs Khartoums proposal on forming the quartet committee comprising of the US, the EU, the UN and the AU to mediate the GERD negotiations. The mediation talks will be sponsored by Felix Tshisekedi, the president of the DRC, the current head of the AU. Shoukry expressed hope that the proposed methodology would push the negotiations forward and assist the three countries in reaching the desired agreement as soon as possible. Since last year, the AU has been mediating the talks between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia over the decade-long dispute caused by the GERD. The last round of AU negotiations, mediated by South Africa, the former president of the AU, stalled in January due to Khartoum's withdrawal from the latest meetings in objection to the methodology upon which the talks had been held. Sudan called for granting a bigger role to the experts involved in the talks instead of holding direct discussions between the three nations. Ethiopia, as well as Egypt, rejected Sudan's demand. The efforts to resolve the crisis come amid worries over controversial plans by Addis Ababa to complete the second filling in July without an accord with Cairo and Khartoum. Egypt fears the project will significantly cut its crucial water supplies from the River Nile, while Sudan has concerns over how the reservoir will be managed. Ethiopia says the massive project, which it hopes will make it Africas largest power exporter, is key to its development efforts. Short link: Guangzhou further expanded its nucleic acid testing as the city battles the spread of Covid-19, with Haizhu and Yuexiu districts starting mass testing on Sunday. In Haizhu district, residents queued for hours in the rain to get tested on Sunday. The city reported four new local and three new imported cases, and confirmed 14 cases originally reported as asymptomatic on Sunday May 31, 2021 05:47 PM WASHINGTON and SCHAUMBURG, Ill., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Emergency Nurses Association (ENA) and American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) praise the introduction of Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act of 2021 which aims to better protect health care workers from the ongoing threat of workplace violence. "Emergency nurses and physicians go to work every day driven by their commitment to caring for patients they shouldn't have to do so with fear of being violently attacked," said ENA President Ron Kraus, MSN, RN, EMT, CEN, ACNS-BC, TCRN. "This legislation takes a positive step toward protecting the safety of all emergency health care providers." The problem has not subsided amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The No Silence on ED Violence campaign, organized by ENA and ACEP, continues to share stories of front-line health care workers who suffer physical and emotional injuries after workplace assaults. "Violent incidents that put health workers at risk are on the rise," said Mark Rosenberg, DO, MBA, FACEP, president of ACEP. "This bipartisan bill is a strong demonstration of congressional commitment to the safety of emergency physicians and others risking their lives on the frontlines. This bill is going to help strengthen workplace safety standards, enhance incident prevention, and allows our health care heroes to focus more on their mission to care for patients during the pandemic and beyond." ACEP and ENA thank Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT) and the bipartisan coalition of original bill sponsors, including Rep. Robert C. "Bobby" Scott (D-VA), Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), Rep. Alma Adams (D-NC), Chairwoman of the House Education and Labor Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, Rep. Don Young (R-AK), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), and Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) for continuing to make workplace violence against health care workers a legislative priority. ENA and ACEP have supported workplace violence-related bills introduced in previous sessions of Congress. Members from each association traveled to Capitol Hill in recent years to directly tell legislators their stories of attacks, injuries, and the aftermath caused by violence in the emergency department. The associations launched No Silence on ED Violence in 2019 to build awareness around the issue of workplace violence, while also providing resources and a peer network to support emergency nurses and physicians. About the Emergency Nurses Association The Emergency Nurses Association is the premier professional nursing association dedicated to defining the future of emergency nursing through advocacy, education, research, innovation, and leadership. Founded in 1970, ENA has proven to be an indispensable resource to the global emergency nursing community. With more than 50,000 members worldwide, ENA advocates for patient safety, develops industry-leading practice standards and guidelines, and guides emergency healthcare public policy. ENA members have expertise in triage, patient care, disaster preparedness, and all aspects of emergency care. Additional information is available at www.ena.org. The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) is the national medical society representing emergency medicine. Through continuing education, research, public education and advocacy, ACEP advances emergency care on behalf of its 40,000 emergency physician members, and the more than 150 million Americans they treat on an annual basis. For more information, visit www.acep.org and www.emergencyphysicians.org. SOURCE American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) Related Links http://www.acep.org A Chinese divorce court has ordered a husband to pay his wife more than $7,700 in compensation for the housework she performed during five years of marriage, in a landmark decision that activists hope will lead to greater protections for women in China. The court in Beijing said this week that the husband was obligated to compensate his wife because housework carries intangible property value and should be considered an asset, according to Chinese news reports. The decision comes amid global debate about whether societies should do more to recognize and compensate women for work they perform at home. Studies show that in many countries, women shoulder a disproportionate burden of household labor, hindering their ambitions and career opportunities. While some commentators in China hailed the case as a breakthrough, many people said the compensation was inadequate, noting that full-time nannies in China earn far more. Cyber Biden pledges international cooperation on cyber in speech President Joe Biden on Friday called for the United States to work with European allies to advance international norms in cyberspace. "We must shape the rules that will govern the advance of technology and the norms of behavior in cyberspace, artificial intelligence, biotechnology so that they are used to lift people, not used to pin them down," Biden said in a Feb. 19 speech to the 2021 Munich Security Conference, which was held virtually. Biden also pledged multilateral commitment on several other issues such confronting Russia's attempts to subvert democracy, addressing the coronavirus and climate change. In addition to prioritizing cybersecurity, Biden has also made central to his administration the desire to renew alliances among European nations who feel scorned after four years of the Trump administration's "America First" policies. Biden's comments come as his administration continues to deal with the fallout from a wide-ranging hack involving the SolarWinds Orion IT management software. The president has said in speeches he will prioritize cybersecurity but has not yet detailed actions he might take in response to suspected Russian intelligence agents launching a years-long operation to enter and remain undetected on the federal government's networks. Anne Neuberger, deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, has said the White House is planning executive actions in the near future in response to the hack. Moreover, the government is currently focused on expelling hackers from federal networks, modernizing federal IT to better protect it against this kind of attack and considering "potential response options to the perpetrators." This article first appeared on FCW, a Defense Systems partner site. LONDON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Delta Air Lines has been named the second best airline in the world according to eDreams - one of Europe's largest online travel agency brands - in its most recent 'Best Airlines in the World' Report. The survey has been updated this year to reflect the unique and complicated year faced by travellers and airlines alike, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Top 3 airlines Qatar Airways took top spot in the world rankings, proving to be consistently excellent across the board, scoring top marks for airline refunds and ticket flexibility in particular. Delta Air Lines came in second with unwavering commitment to passenger safety and customer refunds. In third place was Japan's largest airline, All Nippon Airways, ranking highly for customer satisfaction, refunds and the implementation of new safety measures. A second US airline, United, just made it into the top ten, in 10th place. Best for refunds In the top 10 rankings, British Airways, Qatar Airways and Delta Air Lines scored highest as best airlines for refunds. Best for Reliability: Ticket flexibility and flight cancellations Airline cancellations during the first COVID-19 lockdown were inevitable - a crucial step in reducing the spread of the virus. Qatar Airways cancelled the fewest scheduled flights and offered excellent ticket flexibility. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and Turkish Airlines came in joint second place. Best for Customer-Experience Data collected from a survey of over 61,000 reviews sent to eDreams customers, showed that All Nippon Airways was voted the highest customer-rated airline based on the overall passenger experience and perceived value for money, followed closely by Qatar Airways. Safety Due to the spread of COVID-19, airlines have all increased and improved their health and safety protocols and implemented new measures to keep passengers safe. The airline with the most measures was Delta Air Lines, setting itself apart from the rest with its commitment to reducing capacity on board by blocking its middle seats. Pablo Caspers, Chief Air Supply and Advertising Officer at eDreams ODIGEO, comments: "As the largest online travel agency in Europe, our priority during these uncertain months has been to remain loyal to our 17 million clients. This 'Best Airlines in the World' study offers consumers a clear understanding of the current travel market, particularly addressing consumers' main concerns during the pandemic and allowing travellers to make more informed decisions when booking trips abroad. This study is another example of the added value that eDreams brings to travellers as a leading online travel agency." For further information, please visit: https://www.edreams.com/best-airlines/. Top 10 airlines in the world: 1 Qatar Airways 2 Delta Air Lines 3 ANA (All Nippon Airways) 4 KLM Royal Dutch Airlines 5 British Airways 6 Turkish Airlines 7 Etihad Airways 8 Singapore Airlines 9 Lufthansa 10 United Airlines Methodology: The top 10 ranking is based on a unique 360 analysis of information from over 61,000 customer reviews, and data from over 667 airlines. Refunds: Data taken from entire year 2020 Reliability: Cancellation rates data taken from period July - December 2020 ; ticket flexibility information taken from airline websites in January 2021 Airline experience: Data taken from period October 2019 - March 2020 Safety: Data taken from airline websites in January 2021 *The refund approval rate refers to the average time the airline took to review each refund application. About eDreams eDreams is one of the world's leading online travel brands. A true disruptor in the online travel booking sector since its foundation in 1999, putting cutting-edge technology solutions to work on behalf of travellers across 40 countries worldwide. It offers the widest choice of flights from 667 airlines, hotels, flight + dynamic hotel packages, car rentals, travel insurance as well as innovative services such as eDreams Prime, the very first subscription programme ever created in travel. eDreams is part of the eDreams ODIGEO Group, one of the world's largest online travel companies serving 17 million customers in 45 countries globally. SOURCE eDreams Related Links https://www.edreams.com Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Cat owners may find some bare shelves in the pet food aisles at local grocery stores. At Boyers on 15th Street in Hazleton, incoming orders are very sporadic, said store manager Bill Nice. He said disruption in the flow of the product began two to three weeks ago. Ashley Flower, public relations manager at Giant, said pet food suppliers have informed the company of challenges over the past month that have impacted supply. We continue to remain in close contact with our suppliers and are working to bring in alternate products, but its possible customers may find a particular brand or variety is unavailable due to these challenges, she wrote in an email. BCI at 485 Susquehanna Boulevard, Hazle Twp., hasnt experienced a shortage in cat food or any products for large and small animals, said store manager Charlene Kennedy. She was told certain brands of cat food are scarce due to a shortage in the cans themselves. Christine Caparro at the Hazleton Animal Shelter didnt hear anything about a cat food shortage when contacted Tuesday, though they were relieved and grateful for recent food and financial donations, she said. Johnsons Pharmacy on 15th Street in Hazleton just donated $550 worth of gift certificates from chewy.com so the shelter could buy what it needed and a Wapwallopen girl just dropped off pet food and supplies on Saturday after a two-week donation drive. However, other shelters are feeling the effects of the shortage. Operators at the Schuylkill Countys two animal shelters say they are low on donations of canned pet food, while officials at county grocery stores say their pet food aisles have been low. Both Hillside SPCA outside Pottsville and Ruth Steinert Memorial SPCA in Pine Grove Twp. have had a decline in pet food donations beginning at the start of the month. Tricia Moyer-Mentzer, Hillsides executive director, said she has noticed a lot less of canned cat food donations, so much so that she put out a call on Facebook for donations. While the public responded, she said they had to order the donated food online as grocery stores were low on it. Its a problem for a shelter like us that has a lot of animals, particularly cats, she said, adding there are nearly 200 cats at Hillside. While there is canned cat food at the shelter, Moyer-Mentzer said it is the same brand, Nine Lives, which not all cats like. As a result, she said some employees have used their own money to purchase food the cats like, including tuna, baby food and lunch meats. They are also ordering food online themselves. Its nice to have a variety of food to offer them, Moyer-Mentzer said. At Redners, whose locations include Shenandoah, the shortage of pet food hasnt been any different than other products that have faced distribution and manufacturing challenges during the pandemic, spokesman Eric White said. Weve had some challenges, but there hasnt been a shortage, he said. White said the low supply of pet food at the store depends on the manufacturer, the supply and buying patterns of consumers. A Wegmans spokeswoman said stores are experiencing a cat food shortage as a result of weather challenges over the last few weeks, especially in Pennsylvania. Manufacturers arent able to produce and distribute as many cases, creating shortages across the industry, Wegmans spokeswoman Laura Camera said. We are working with our suppliers to secure as much product as possible and hope to get more product back on the shelves soon, Camera said. A cat food shortage also can be seen at Weis Markets, mainly in the wet and canned food categories. Weis spokesman Dennis Curtin said the shortage isnt as bad as the shortage of paper goods and surface cleaners last spring, however. For the moment, retailers across the country are receiving less pet food shipments due to production issues related to the pandemic, he said. Curtin said the shortage of wet and canned cat food products bottomed out in January and Weis started catching up this month but the recent winter storm impacted suppliers who missed a couple days of production. Our suppliers expect it to improve significantly in March and April, he said. We are still getting a significant amount of wet and canned products, just not enough in some cases. This is an industry-wide problem for the moment. Blue Chip Farm Animal Refuge in Franklin Twp. has about 100 cats ready to be adopted and founder Marge Bart said they havent experienced any problems getting wet and dry cat food which is delivered from Chewy and donated. If people cannot find the cat food they typically buy, they should not feed their cats dog food, said Brenda Bartlett, owner of Village Pet Supplies and Gifts. You cant give a cat dog food because it causes heart problems, Bartlett said. While grocery stores have experienced shortages of certain brands of canned cat food, Bartlett said Village Pet Supplies and Gifts stores in Hanover Twp. and Luzerne are stocked with natural cat food with human-grade ingredients. This pet food is not made at the same facilities as the canned cat food experiencing shortages, she said. We are actually seeing everything bounce back to normal at this point in terms of the manufacturing rate of the human grade foods, she said. The problems are in the grocery brands and that doesnt affect anything at our stores and we are having no problem with product arriving. Acting on Cambodian farmers complaints who are unable to harvest rice due to extremely low water levels downstream, the United States on Tuesday called out at China to share timely and essential water data of the Mekong River basin, including all of its upstream dam operations. According to reports by the Mekong River Commission (MRC), the water outflow from the Jinghong hydropower station in Chinas Yunnan province has been dropping to worrying levels due to PRCs power grid maintenance. This has widely impacted countries downstream like Thailand, Lao PDR, and Cambodia. Questioning Chinas management of transboundary resources in the region, the US state department spokesperson Ned Price, Tuesday, resonated Mekong region governments concerns, asking PRC to live up to its commitments to water data transparency. The US also asked China to shun pursuing its national interest in the governance of the Lancang- Mekong River and opt for a trans-governmental approach around the basin. The U.S. supports a healthy, sustainable Mekong River. We share regional calls for the People's Republic of China to live up to its commitments to water data transparency. Visit @MekongMonitor for updated information on water levels. #MekongUSPartnership https://t.co/wAJmYIMqQu Ned Price (@StateDeptSpox) February 24, 2021 United States supports transparency and accountability in managing transboundary resources. For decades, these values have guided our work to promote the health and sustainability of the Mekong River and the nearly 70 million people whose livelihoods depend on it, the US department of state said in a statement. Citing the recent rapid fluctuations in the Mekong River water levels, the United States advised China, that it was essential to live up to commitments and consult with downstream countries. Under the Mekong-US Partnership, the Biden administration has been supportive of the local communities with its Mekong region Mekong Water Data Initiative, the Mekong Dam Monitor, and other tools that the US launched to enable transparency among the partner countries. [Credit: MRC] [Credit: MRC] Last month, Chinas Ministry of Water Resources issued a statement to Mekong River Commission Secretariat (MRCS), saying that the maintenance of transmission lines of the power grid on Mekong dam will result in outflow reduction at 1,000 cubic meters per second effective January 5 until 24. However, China had alleged that the water flow will be gradually restored. Although, in its recent analysis, the MRCs observation and forecasting team found that there had been an almost 50 percent drop in the water volume in the Mekong rivers level, which stretches from Vientiane to Paksane of Lao PDR, including Nongkhai of Thailand. Read: 'ITBP To Strengthen Short & Long-range Patrolling, BOPs On Full Deployment': DG Deswal Read: Filipino Fishermen Protest Against China Coast Guard Law [Mekong River covers a distance of nearly 5,000 km from its source on the Tibetan Plateau in China to the Mekong Delta and flows through six countries: China, Myanmar, Thailand, Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Viet Nam. Credit: MRC] Local livelihood impacted In a warning issued last month, the MRC said: Navigation activities on the Mekong River, especially around the areas close to Jinghong, may be affected more than the other places. This included Cambodia. Head of the MRC Regional Flood and Drought Management Centre, Dr. Lam Hung Son, said that the local livelihood activities downstream, such as river weed harvesting and fishing, were hampered. Under an agreement between China and the MRC, China pledged to notify the member countries of any abnormal rise or fall in water level or discharge, and other information on factors that might lead to a sudden flood. Over the course of last month, water levels downstream that flow through Cambodia, along the Mekong in Stung Treng and Kratie had been declining steadily, although, the levels, according to MRC remained higher than the long-term average. Read: European Commission Chief Warns Against Over-reliance On China For Rare Earth Elements Read: China Condemns Canada's Motion Calling Uighurs Treatment As 'genocide' ROCHESTER, Minn. - The Biden Administration is expanding the Paycheck Protection Program designed to help minority-owned and very small businesses. Businesses with fewer than 20 employees will have an exclusive two-week period to apply for funding. Those include self-employed people, sole proprietorships and independent contractors. The president of the Rochester Area Chamber of Commerce, Ryan Parsons, explained 1 in every 3 individuals is employed by a small business in Rochester. He said the goal with this expansion is to give them a fair chance of receiving financial help just like the bigger businesses and chain companies. "You know, a lot of these people are friends, family, people you know in the community and I think as many of us know with small business, you wear multiple hats," he explained. "There's not usually roles or departments or anything like that. You're likely the accountant, the manager, you could even be the customer service staff." Out of all the businesses that are members of the Rochester Area Chamber of Commerce, Parsons said 80% have one to 20 employees. He explained that contributes to how diverse of a business environment the Med City has. "Having that small business presence is huge because they're bringing something from their own walks of life or their own interest and that can just create one more level of attraction for somebody looking at moving to our area where we have plenty of great job opportunities," said Parsons. Small businesses with fewer than 20 employees can apply for aid until March 9th. After that, new rules will enable some businesses previously excluded from the program to take part. Vaccination in Ukraine will begin as soon as regions receive the first batches of coronavirus vaccine, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has said. "Vaccination should begin as soon as possible, as soon as the regions receive the first batches. But it must be voluntary - no one needs to be forced, it is better to inform people in detail about the proper quality of the drug," Zelensky said at a meeting with Deputy Health Minister - Chief State Sanitary Doctor Viktor Liashko, the presidents press service reports. Zelensky stressed that the logistics of vaccine supply to all regions of Ukraine has already been worked out, and there should be no delays. The drug will be delivered to the hospitals by mobile teams. First of all, doctors of medical institutions that provide care for COVID-19 patients will be vaccinated, then - employees of somatic hospitals, emergency medical care, family doctors, etc. Liashko noted that the second stage provides for the vaccination of the military. In turn, Zelensky confirmed his readiness to be vaccinated together with the servicemen as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. As reported by Ukrinform, the first batch of 500,000 doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca (Covishield) coronavirus vaccine were delivered to Ukraine on February 23. The purchase was carried out through the British agency Crown Agents. In total, Ukraine is planning to purchase 12 million doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca and NovaVax using budget funds. Health Minister Maksym Stepanov said that an agreement had been reached with the Serum Institute on the supply of additional 5 million doses of the NovaVax vaccine to Ukraine. iy The FDA issued new guidance on how to fight coronavirus variants. It includes potential changes to the current coronavirus vaccines. These changes have not been asked for yet, but if there was a modification, Dr. Neil Lamb with HudsonAlpha says it would be a slight change. Kind of like how the flu varies from year to year. However, companies would still have to go through a process to make sure the vaccine is not only effective against the coronavirus variants, but safe to administer. "I want to live to see those great-grands and have fun," Ella Scruggs said. She is a three-time cancer survivor, and got her first dose of the vaccine on Tuesday. "I've been up on tougher things than this, so I was looking forward to having my shot," Scruggs said. She along with others who got vaccinated said they weren't too concerned about the variants going around. "You don't want to get it anyway, so I can't be any more concerned than I was before really," Charles Prochaska, who got his second vaccine Tuesday, said. Health experts say the current vaccines are less effective against the coronavirus variants, but still produce an immune response. "I think we hear less effective and we immediately think not effective, and that's not the case at all. The vaccines are still effective," Dr. Neil Lamb with HudsonAlpha says. However, he warns there may come a point where the virus mutates into a variant that can withstand the vaccine. "That's when you start thinking about how to modify the vaccine to respond to this additional set of variants," Dr. Lamb says. Modifications to vaccines are rather common especially when a virus mutates a lot like the flu. Dr. Lamb says companies would still need to have safety trials. They just wouldn't be as big or take as much time. "There's this continual adjustment where the virus has a change that gives it an advantage, and we have to respond. Then, the virus has a change and we have to respond," Dr. Lamb explained. Dr. Lamb says these continuous changes only mean we have to remain alert and keep taking precautions. That's something people who are already vaccinated say is already on their minds. "The last thing I need is to get sick. I got too many things I want to do," Prochaska said. Both Pfizer and Moderna say they're looking at ways to boost immunity against the current variants. The FDA does say further discussion will be necessary to decide whether modified vaccines may be authorized without the need for clinical studies. President Muhamadu Buhari has received a list 25 top corruption cases linked with stolen or mismanaged funds worth N900 billion. In a letter delivered to Mr Buhari this week, the Human and Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA) warned that the country was sliding into the red light district of corruption and vice. The group also alerted that corrupt people were taking over critical institutions undermining the countrys anti-corruption profile. In the letter titled Re Awakening the Anti Corruption Drive and signed by HEDA Chairman, Suraju Olanrewaju, the group said the volume of money linked to ignored corruption cases since 2015 when President Buhari assumed office was not less than N900 billion. The anti-corruption group regrets that many cases of corruption involving prominent people have been scuttled by government-appointed gatekeepers. HEDA said the top corruption cases that appeared to have been swept under the carpet suggest that some N900 billion may have gone into the covers of corrupt officials. This only affects top corruption cases, yet we have many other smaller cases that have met institutional road blocks, HEDA said in the letter addressed to the president. The cases include but not limited to the Managing Director of Fidelity Bank, Nnamdi Okonkwo, who was arrested during the 2015 General Elections by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for allegedly receiving $115 million in cash from a former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke; the Executive Director of First Bank Plc, Dauda Lawal, tried by the EFCC for allegedly handling the sum of $25 million of $153m rolled out by Mrs Alison-Madueke; former Comptroller General of Customs, Abdullahi Dikko, who was alleged to have stolen over N40 billion, but was asked to return N1.5 billion to the Federal Government, and former Accountant-General of the Federation, Jonah Otunla, linked to a N2 billion graft. Others were the dubious payment of $16.9 million fees to two friends as new lawyers for the recovery of the loot traced to a former Nigerian Head of State, Sanni Abacha, after a Swiss lawyer hired and fully paid by the previous government, Enrico Monfrini. Apart from cases involving cash, HEDA documented cases of influence peddling involving top government officials that used their seats to upturn justice in favour of politically exposed individuals. HEDA listed official interference in the investigation of a multi-billion Naira fraud in Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NISRAL) through a letter ordering the EFCC and the ICPC, the DSS and the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) to halt investigating the financial misappropriation in NIRSAL. There was also the attempt to reinstate Abdulrasheed Maina, former chairman of the Pension Reform Task Team (PRTT) while the Attorney General, Abubakar Malami, discontinued N25 billion criminal charge against Danjuma Goje without any justification. HEDA also mentioned the allegation that the former Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai, bought properties in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, using allegedly corrupt means as the Procurement Officer of the Nigerian Army. The group said the cases are well known and recorded by Nigerians and foreigners against the Buhari government adding that they are considered as failure to match the presidents words and professed commitment against corruption with the actions by his government. We believe that the manner in which the above cases were handled, indirectly or directly, portray the Nigerian government and her mandate to eradicate corruption in bad light in the global space, HEDA wrote in the letter. Mr Suraju said beyond the return of the culture of impunity into governance and management of public resources, the few corrupt and compromised elements have allegedly taken over the reign of power in government and supplanted leadership of both institutions and reversing the anti-corruption gains. He said Nigeria is facing fast declining reputation, as evidenced in the negative Transparency International perception reports in recent years. The group said the self-professed cardinal agenda of the Buhari government and popular mandate of Nigerian citizens to fight corruption and restore the integrity of Nigeria amongst the comity of Nations face a huge threat. HEDA said, Your Excellency, whereas this agenda of fighting corruption was vigorously pursued, albeit with some negligible shortcomings and international sabotage by some of your appointed officials and aides, significant results were recorded by the government and overwhelming supports received from local partners and international stakeholders, resulting in return of recovered stolen assets and aggressive investigation of several cases of past corruption cases by anti-corruption agencies, particularly the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Presidential Panel on Recovery of Public Property. HEDA is a leading global partner in the fight against corruption at the local and international levels. The group provided agencies of government with human resources and technical support in their accountability, good governance and anti-corruption mandates. Many of the groups efforts led to the recovery of illicit funds from local and international crooks. ADVERTISEMENT Mr Suraju said the latest letter was informed by his groups position to assist Mr Buharis government if it still retains genuine interest to fight corruption as a guiding principle. The New Hermes Men's Fragrance H24 - Discover the Hot Iron Notes Fragrance Reviews A major new fragrance from a famous house like Hermes is always a big deal in our microcosm. H24, which is released today (February 24, 2021) at all of the brand's outlets, keeps its promises in that it breaks with the current codes of the genre. Indeed, with its herbaceous, floral and metallic signature, both full and dazzling, it is immediately recognizable among the many masculine scents on the market. For this new fragrance, "I had to open other, less predictable paths, to move away from a conventional woody scent," explains in-house perfumer Christine Nagel. A successful bet, because, whether you like this novelty or not, the fact is that it breaks free from the male trends that prevail on the market. It is in the spirit of a game of textures and volumes that Christine Nagel sketched H24. The composition was inspired in particular by the work of Veronique Nichanian, director of the male fashion universe of Hermes. "When I attend a Veronique show, I am always impressed with how I can see texture and even the weft of the fabric with my own eyes." She therefore wanted to transcribe through this new fragrance sensations of fluidity, proportions, and materials. With the idea of 'urban nature' in mind, she played with vegetal, floral, but also metallic notes, as well as a touch of the sea, to conjure up the image "of a small fragile shoot which splits the concrete to take its place." The result is a peppy fragrance, with full, airy volume, oscillating between strength and freshness, whose "hot iron" accents may perhaps surprise, but whose originality cannot be denied. It is first an entry into plant matter that grabs you, with nuances of hay and cut grass, subtle amber, and clary sage (essential oil and absolute), undoubtedly pushed by a few green notes to accentuate the effect. After the herbaceous top, the perfume is gradually filled with a floral dimension (jasmine hedione-type notes, I suppose, but also a watery rose), from which emanates, among others, the narcissus, which extends the hay-like frame of the top, while adding volume to the whole. Rosewood from Peru underlines the herbaceous nuances for 24 hours with its dense and aromatic notes. At this stage, under the green and flowery contours of the perfume, I also perceive the aldehydes, which propel the whole in a sensation of strength and freshness, of fullness in volume, with that metallic side that we know of these compounds. These nuances become more and more "hot-iron like," reminding me of the blood aspect of Secretions Magnifiques by Etat Libre d'Orange, or certain facets of Mugler's Cologne. This metallic impression is due to the use of sclarene, according to the press kit, a modern molecule with green shades, but above all metallic in character and very "hot iron"-like indeed. I get the feeling this feature is accentuated by the use of rose oxide, but also by the presence of marine notes such as calone, and it will largely dominate the rest of the evolution of the perfume, while a few touches of amber wood provide hold and persistence to the creation. If the "hot iron" accord can be disconcerting (it is not, personally, my cup of tea), H24 also offers a feeling of clarity, brightness, texture and volume that is quite impressive. All dressed in a beautiful green and floral light. A novelty that boldly renews the masculine gender, offering another vision of freshness and strength, always with the recognizable Hermes elegance. Give it a try! And yet it is far from clear that a demagogic militarist in the White House caused more harm through warmaking than his two bipartisan predecessors. Mr. Trump found it easy to deliver on his promise that our military dominance must be unquestioned. He needed only to inherit the armed forces globally deployed for decades. In the end, he escalated many existing conflicts but managed to avoid launching new ones (though he came close with Iran) and put the Afghanistan war on a path to termination. That is why Mr. Trumps tenure makes it more important, not less, to be critical of what came before him. Americas version of liberal internationalism code for global military dominance exercised on behalf of liberal values remains the primary source of decades of foreign policy disaster. Unless Mr. Biden challenges the very premise, he will repeat the same mistakes, now in a more competitive world. We will meet the responsibility of defending human liberty against violence and aggression, George W. Bush declared in gearing up to commit a supreme act of violent aggression, the invasion of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis paid with their lives. Mr. Bush, re-elected, waxed lyrical about ending tyranny in our world. Like the current president, Barack Obama entered office collecting plaudits for not being his predecessor. America is back, he even proclaimed in 2012. But Mr. Obama, despite frequently resisting calls for intervention, failed to get through his first term without launching a disastrous military escapade. This one, undertaken on humanitarian grounds and with multilateral backing, aimed to prevent a massacre in Libya. To stand idly by, Mr. Obama explained, would have stained the conscience of the world. The intervention ultimately lengthened Libyas civil war and led to the destruction of the regime, unleashing chaos, terrorism and slavery. More broadly, Mr. Obama expanded and streamlined perpetual warmaking via drones and special forces across the greater Middle East. In Washington, few consciences, or careers, have been stained by Americas sins of commission. Foreign policy elites have displayed more ingenuity in developing justifications for armed dominance, toggling through such rationales as stopping genocides in the 1990s, spreading democracy in the 2000s and containing Chinas and Russias authoritarian influence most recently. The record of Mr. Trump, broadly similar in military terms to his politesse predecessors, lays bare the limits of deploying the coercive power of the United States on behalf of humankind. Johnson & Johnsons one-dose COVID-19 vaccine appeared safe and effective in trials, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday, paving the way for its approval for emergency use as soon as this week. The vaccine was 66% effective at preventing moderate to severe COVID-19 in a 44,000 person global trial, the FDA said in documents ahead of a Friday meeting of independent experts who will advise the agency on emergency authorization. New data provided by J&J to the FDA showed the vaccine was 64% effective at stopping moderate to severe cases of COVID-19 after 28 days in thousands of trial participants in South Africa where a worrying new variant has swept across the country. Overall, the vaccine was 100% effective at stopping hospitalization 28 days after vaccination, compared with 85% at 14 days, and there were no COVID-19 deaths among those who received the shot rather than a placebo. J&J also said the data suggested its vaccine cut down on asymptomatic infections, which experts said was another sign COVID-19 vaccines may indeed stop transmission of the disease. Most encouraging to me were the data in South Africa, said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the FDA advisory committee that will make its recommendation on Friday. That you could still get protection against medically attended illnesses meaning hospitalization, ICU admission and deaths from that vaccine against the South African strain, I thought that was really encouraging. While the FDA is not bound to follow the advice of its experts, it approved both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines the day after the advisory committee met. The United States, where COVID-19 has killed more than half a million people, has been struggling to speed up its vaccination program because of the limited supply of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines so far. Worldwide, COVID-19 has infected 112 million people and killed more than 2.5 million and governments are racing to get their hands on any effective vaccines. ASYMPTOMATIC TRANSMISSION CUT J&J said this week that it expected to have 4 million shots ready to go following an FDA green light and would ship 20 million doses by the end of March. It has promised the United States 100 million doses by the end of June. The vaccine is administered in a single dose and can be stored in normal fridges, in contrast to the Pfizer and Moderna shots which need two doses and must be kept in freezers. The J&J vaccine is also considered essential in the global vaccination effort due to its routine storage requirements and is already being rolled out to 500,000 healthcare workers in South Africa. J&J said in documents submitted to the FDA that in a preliminary analysis of its trial, it found 16 cases of asymptomatic cases in the placebo group versus two in the vaccine group, or an 88% efficacy rate. While fighting asymptomatic infection was not the primary goal of the trial, which studied the vaccines ability to stop moderate to severe COVID-19, the reduction of asymptomatic cases implies the shot can also cut transmission of the disease. The data is consistent with the fact that these coronavirus vaccines, including the J&J vaccine, do have an impact which is significant on asymptomatic spread, said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. However, he said some public health authorities may ask to see more robust data before being persuaded. The effectiveness of the one-dose vaccine varied over time. In Brazil, where a similar variant to the one in South Africa is circulating, the vaccine was 66% after 14 days, rising to 68% at 28 days. In the United States, the effectiveness fell from 74% at 14 days to 72% two weeks later. Overall, only two vaccine recipients developed COVID-19 severe enough to need medical intervention after 14 days and that dropped to zero after 28 days. J&J has said it sees rising immunity from its vaccine until at least 28 days after injection. The drugmaker has said it expects sustained or even improved protection over time. SIDE EFFECTS Three vaccine recipients had severe side effects in the trial that were likely related to the vaccine, but the FDA said its analysis did not raise any specific safety concerns that would preclude issuance of an emergency use authorization. The FDA said the most common reactions were injection site pain at 48.6%, headache at 39%, fatigue at 38.2% and myalgia at 33.2%. Other side effects included a fever in 9% of participants and a high fever in 0.2% of those who received the vaccine. The regulator said one case of pericarditis, a heart disease, may have been caused by the vaccine. It said cases of a rare disorder, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, were unlikely to be related to the shot though data was insufficient to determine whether the vaccine had caused these side effects. SOURCE: REUTERS The report, covering 41 countries, said the UKs e-commerce market is currently the third largest (Tim Goode/PA) Buy now, pay later (BNPL) schemes were the fastest-growing online payment method in the UK last year, according to a report. Such schemes are predicted to account for 10% of UK e-commerce spending by 2024. Overall, BNPL spending in the UK will balloon from 9.6 billion in 2020 to 26.4 billion in 2024, the research predicts. The global report was compiled by payment processing technology provider Worldpay, a brand of FIS (Fidelity Information Services). It said 2020 catapulted payments years ahead of where they were projected to be, with rapid digital changes taking place against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic. We predict that the BNPL sector will not slow down Pete Wickes, Worldpay Pete Wickes, general manager, Europe, Middle East and Africa at Worldpay from FIS, said: Buy now, pay later services continue to appeal to consumers thirst for seamless user experiences. The payments landscape is evolving at pace to respond to consumers drive for convenience and the ability to have more flexibility in their purchasing decisions. We predict that the BNPL sector will not slow down, with the UK market seeing double-digit expansion over the next few years. As this happens, its important that the frameworks that govern and protect consumers and merchants also adapt to ensure that there continues to be trust and reliability in payments technology. The report, covering 41 countries, said the UKs e-commerce market is currently the third largest, behind China and the United States. By 2024, it predicts that more than 20% of all purchases in the UK will be made online. The UK e-commerce market reached 192 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow to 264 billion by 2024, the report found. This follows 13% growth from 2019 to 2020. Online sales growth continues to be driven by mobile shopping, and in three years time the report predicts that 40% of of all online shopping in the UK will be done via mobile. In early February 2021, it was announced that BNPL credit agreements will be regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) following a surge in shoppers turning to such products during the coronavirus pandemic. Weave announced plans to regulate interest-free buy-now-pay-later credit agreements, giving consumers greater protection: a affordability checks a fair treatment for customers facing difficulties a access to the Financial Ombudsman Read more: https://t.co/0qEeu7jwuV pic.twitter.com/jmfk9WbHe4 HM Treasury (@hmtreasury) February 2, 2021 The agreements, provided by firms such as Klarna and Clearpay, allow shoppers to spread purchase costs interest-free when online shoppers go to the checkout. Evidence suggests schemes are particularly popular with women and younger adults. But they have been criticised for potentially encouraging people to spend more than they had planned and getting into debt that they cannot comfortably pay back. Under the plans, providers will need to undertake affordability checks before lending and ensure customers are treated fairly, particularly those who are vulnerable or struggling with repayments. The Worldpay report said BNPL services were the fastest-growing online payment method in the UK for the second year in a row, and this trend is expected to continue over the next four years. E-commerce is booming and now, more than ever, retailers need a strong online presence to capture consumer spend Pete Wickes, Worldpay It also said that, within Europe, cash use declined particularly sharply in the UK and France last year, with less drastic declines recorded in Germany. The report said: Denmark, Sweden and Norway are expected to be nearly cashless within five years, while above-average cash use will persist in Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland. The Worldpay 2021 Global Payments Report was compiled using a survey of 46,000 consumers globally. Mr Wickes continued: This research shows the speed and scale of the transformation in consumer attitudes we have seen over the last 12 months. E-commerce is booming and now, more than ever, retailers need a strong online presence to capture consumer spend. The shop floor is now in the palm of our hands and consumers expect the same hassle-free and convenient retail experience whether its on the go, in store or from the comfort of their living room. In the months since the first person was vaccinated against the coronavirus, 602,697 people in Connecticut have received at least one dose. In a single day, on March 1, about 610,000 people will become eligible. How the state will handle the increased number of patients is largely a numbers game, with a complex, growing network designed to inject tens of thousands of arms every day. Its success depends on an ever-increasing supply of dozes and a demand that falls short of what public health officials suggest. When Gov. Ned Lamont announced Monday that the vaccine would be rolled out by age group, he and other state officials described three-week intervals, an approximate time frame for each group. March 1 would launch vaccinations for people age 55 to 64, which is about 515,000 Connecticut residents, or 14.6 percent of the states total population. Lamont also said teachers, other in-school workers and child care professionals would be eligible on March 1, a group that comprises 160,000 people. Subtract the 63,000 or so people who already received the vaccine in the 55-64 age group and you have more people eligible on that one day than have already received the vaccine since Dec. 14. But no one expects 100 percent of that group to seek a shot in the arm immediately, and some never will. We know not everyones going to take the vaccine when its offered the first time around, said Josh Geballe, the states chief operating officer. We assume a 60 percent uptake. That means Connecticut expects about 360,000 people to get the vaccine in the first weeks of March. Supply should not be a problem, Geballe said. Connecticut expects to average at least 105,000 to 110,000 doses delivered every week, meaning the state can work our way through that group in three to four weeks. The next group, people age 45 to 54, become eligible on March 22. Thats about 480,000 people, and Geballe said he expects 400,000 people or fewer to take advantage. Up after that are people between the ages of 35 and 44, another 427,000 on April 12 minus teachers and health care professionals already vaccinated. Then the largest group becomes eligible on May 3. There are about 875,000 people in Connecticut between the ages of 16 and 34. To put the picture in broad perspective: Connecticut has about 2.9 million people 16 and older. A goal of vaccinating 70 percent, or just over 2 million, means about 1.45 million more need to be inoculated. First vaccinations can be done in three months or less if the supply expands from the current level of about 90,000 doses a week. Geballe said he expects vaccine supply, provided by the federal government, to meet that level of demand. All throughout this, the allocations are continuing to increase, he said. Things will continue to accelerate as we go forward. Of course, its not so cut-and-dried. Not everyone will get vaccinated on May 3, Geballe said, or any one date, and there will be overlap. Some people who were eligible earlier in the year but chose to wait will sign up. Some states have had issues with the sign-up process. Massachusetts statewide vaccination signup website crashed earlier this month. Unfortunately, the system did not scale fast enough to accommodate the increased volume," said PrepMod, the company that developed the site, in a statement to WBUR. The Los Angeles Times reported that Californias signup site was plagued with software hiccups, and software issues were blamed for similar problems in Philadelphia. Those problems have encouraged some states to move to pre-registration, allowing everyone to input their information in advance so that they can be alerted when a slot becomes available. We need to make it as easy as possible for every Minnesotan to get the vaccine when its their turn, said Minnesota Gov. Tim Waltz when his state announced a statewide pre-registration system. But Geballe said he did not foresee similar issues in Connecticut and, as such, residents cannot register until their eligibility date comes around. I don't think our challenge is that people aren't able to pre-register right now, he said. Instead, the goal is to make it as easy as possible for people, once they become eligible, to get an appointment. At least 7,000 people who fled escalating ethnic violence in western Ethiopia have sought asylum in neighboring Sudan, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday, amid heightened tensions between the two Eastern African nations. Violence in the Metekel Zone of the Benishangul-Gumuz region is separate from the deadly conflict in Ethiopias northern Tigray region. Thats where Ethiopian and allied regional forces began fighting Tigray regional forces in early November. The Tigray war sent more than 61,000 Ethiopians into Sudans provinces of al-Qadarif and Kassala. The UNHCR said most of the 7,000 asylum seekers who fled Metekel have been living among Sudanese host communities. It said it was working with local authorities in the Blue Nile province to respond to the humanitarian needs of the newly arrived, many of whom have arrived in hard-to-reach places along the border. Tensions escalated in the past three months in Metekel Zone, prompting Ethiopias government to declare a state of emergency in the area on Jan. 21, the U.N. agency said. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission said more than 180 people were killed in separate massacres in Metekel in December and January. Amnesty International reported in December that members of the ethnic Gumuz community the ethnic majority in the region attacked the homes of ethnic Amhara, Oromo and Shinasha. The rights group said the Gumuz set the homes on fire and stabbed and shot residents. The Gumuz see minorities as settlers, the rights group said. Ethnic violence poses a major challenge to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed as he tries to promote national unity in a country with more than 80 ethnic groups. Amharas are the second most populous ethnic group in Ethiopia and they have been targeted repeatedly over the last year. Fighters from Amhara, however, have been accused by witnesses of carrying out atrocities along with Ethiopian and Eritrean forces in the Tigray conflict The new influx of refugees into Sudan comes amid tensions between Addis Ababa and Khartoum over a border dispute and the deadlocked talks over a massive dam Ethiopia is building on the Blue Nile, the main tributary of the Nile River. SOURCE: AP Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. While supermarkets are legally allowed to operate between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. on the public holidays, Supermarket Association of Trinidad and Tobago President Rajiv Diptee says, for obvious reasons, groceries will not be opening. The makers of Spider-Man 3 unveiled three fake titles of the upcoming film while releasing the first stills from the film. On Tuesday (February 23) Tom Holland, Jacob Batalon and Zendaya posted three different titles of the film along with a still from the sets. The three new posters were released with reading, Spider-Man: Phone Home, Spider-Man: Home-Wrecker and Spider-Man: Home Slice. However, the cast announced the titles with all seriousness. "So excited to announce the new Spider-Man title. Can't wait for you lot to see what we have been up to," posted Holland aka Peter Parker. "We're so excited to share the title of our new movie!" wrote Jacob Batalon, who plays Parker's best friend, Ned Leeds. Meanwhile, Zendaya, Peter's love interest MJ, wrote, "So excited to announce the new Spider-Man title. So proud of this one...FOS is back!" All stills featuring Tom Holland, Jacob Batalon and Zendaya, show them in an unknown dark location, searching for something. Fans have also been trying to find easter eggs in the stills. One fan theory suggests the trio met Doctor Strange. Kevin Feige reportedly had confirmed that Spider-Man 3 (releasing December 2021) will be connected to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (releasing in March 2022). While others couldn't help but notice that MJ is wearing the broken Black Dahlia necklace, Tom had gifted her in Spider-Man 2. Notably, Jamie Foxx and Alfred Molina will be reprising their roles as Electro and Doctor Octopus from previous Sony Spider-Man movies, leading to a new fan theory that the three titles are connected to the multiverse storyline with three different Spider-Man. Questioning the colours of the three titles, another fan wrote, "Maybe each fake title with different Spider-Man fonts represents the villains showing up in the movie?" Take a look at more theories and Twitter reactions, Zendaya, Tom and Jacob really woke up and chose violence #SpiderMan3 pic.twitter.com/Jtkn1NDBGv giuls (@Giuls2828) February 24, 2021 Sonys Marketing Team after pulling that stunt: #SpiderMan3 pic.twitter.com/IYg14VT4xG aaron vision scrapbook era (@vandawision) February 23, 2021 Tom Holland addresses some of the rumors surrounding #SpiderMan3 once again on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show. pic.twitter.com/d1keL4WT80 Spider-Man News (@spideysnews) February 24, 2021 Tom Holland has been shooting for the upcoming release for the past several months. He has also shared pictures while on set and revealed that he has been having the best time shooting for Spider-Man 3. The Marvel film has been a much-awaited release from the MCU franchise. ALSO READ: Tom Holland Calls Himself 'Lucky Little S***', Says Spider-Man 3 Is Most Ambitious Standalone Superhero Movie ALSO READ: Jamie Foxx's Electro Set To Return As Villain For Tom Holland's Spider-Man 3 Yes, no matter what Yes, but it depends on variety No, for medical reasons, uncertainty No, principle Vote View Results In 2018 when Trump was not on the ballot, 538 calculated that 15 out of a total of 17 candidates he endorsed won open-seat primary contests that often pit two conservatives against each other. Trumps win-loss ratio was better than 11 conservative and business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Club for Growth and the Koch network. There is a recent precedent for the current Trump-McConnell conflict that I just mentioned, the Tea Party versus the Republican establishment in the elections of 2010 and 2012. The results were a mixed bag. One group of Tea Party candidates won primaries but lost the general election in states as diverse as Delaware, Colorado, Nevada, Alaska and Indiana. Another group, including Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Tim Scott and Mike Lee, defeated establishment candidates in the primaries and went on to win Senate seats in the general election. The movement also produced some of the more outspoken conservatives in the House, some of whom have since proven to be Trumps most devoted allies, including Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio. The Trump wing of the Republican Party is not only dominant, it is angrier and more determined to disrupt the normal course of events than the Tea Party movement was 10 years ago. And Trump commands a level of loyalty the envy of authoritarians around the world. What remains unknown is the strength of Trumps determination and his ability to consistently stay at the helm of an internal partisan power struggle at a time when he will not only face opposition from the party establishment, but an onslaught of debilitating civil and criminal charges. On Monday, the Supreme Court denied Trumps final bid to block the release of his tax returns and financial records to Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney. The material is key to at least two lines of inquiry Vance is pursuing: whether the former president and his company manipulated property values to get favorable bank loans and tax benefits, and whether Trump was involved in payments to two women, as A.P. put it, to keep them quiet during the 2016 presidential campaign about alleged extramarital affairs with Trump. Lord Kilclooney is photographed in the Houses of Parliament in London. A former deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist Party has called on the Northern Ireland Executive to help the Republic ramp up its Covid vaccination programme. In a tweet Lord Kilclooney said the Executive should ask the Irish Government how it could help increase its vaccination levels. Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph, he said: "Some 96pc of the population in the Republic have not been vaccinated and we have freedom of movement on this island. So, it is important for the health of people in Northern Ireland also to help as many people get vaccinated as we can. "It hasn't dawned on anyone that I live near the border, so I am very conscious of this issue. I just hope [the Executive] investigates the possibility of assisting the Republic's vaccination programme... but of course the decision at Stormont depends on the availability of extra vaccine doses, and I do not know whether we have that or not." Read More SDLP's health spokeswoman Cara Hunter said it had always advocated a whole-island approach to tackling the pandemic. "There is no screen at the border that prevents transmission of the virus so it's important that we work steadily to vaccinate everyone in Ireland," she said. "Closer coordination is clearly needed to eradicate the threat we're facing. That should involve vaccination cooperation and a mass testing and tracing initiative to prevent recurrence." Alliance's health spokeswoman Paula Bradshaw said: "Alliance is already on record as being supportive in principle of the UK and Ireland working together to deliver completion of the vaccination programme as quickly as possible across the entire Common Travel Area." The vaccine rate in Britain is 25.4pc for England, 25.7pc for Scotland and 26.8pc for Wales. International community concerned over the arrest of opposition leader Melia, protests break out By Veronika Malinboym On February 23, at 8.50 the chairman of the opposition United National Movement party Nika Melia was arrested during the special ops storming of the partys headquarters. Melias supporters resisted the SWATs entering the building, who then broke in through windows. During the operation, which lasted for about half an hour, tear gas was released in the building, and the partys property was severely damaged.Newly appointed PM Irakli Gharibashvili responded to Melias arrest by saying that the government and law enforcements actions were completely in line with the democratic standards and applauded the police efforts, adding that he is proud of them. He noted that Melia has been found guilty in the Cartu case and in the case of inciting violence during the 2019 protests as he was encouraging people to break into the parliament building, which is why he was arrested earlier today.Speaker of the Parliament and member of the ruling Georgian Dream party Archil Talakvadze stated that Melia purposely acted provocatively in order to further escalate the situation in the country. Similarly, Tbilisi Mazor Kakha Kaladze praised the police, adding unfortunately, people in Georgia still disregard the Law.Transparency International as well as the Ombudswoman of Georgia Nino Lomjaria, condemned Melias arrest. Lomjaria stated that todays shameful arrest would lead to Georgias alienation from the West.Various members of the international community voiced similar concerns over the ongoing crisis. The US Embassy to Georgia released a statement in which it described todays events as Georgia moving backward on its path to democracy.The United States Embassy is deeply concerned by the governments decision to detain the head of a major opposition political party at the partys headquarters this morning. We regret that the call of the United States and other international partners for restraint and dialogue was ignored. We are dismayed by the polarizing rhetoric from Georgias leadership at a time of crisis. Force and aggression are not the solutions to resolving Georgias political differences. Today, Georgia has moved backward on its path toward becoming a stronger democracy in the Euro-Atlantic family of nations, the Embassy stated.US President Joe Bidens foreign policy adviser Michael Carpenter said that very sad events are unfolding in Georgia and expressed his hope for more level-headed leaders to win and ensure the consequent de-escalation.US Congressman Adam Kinzinger called for the government to refrain from dramatic actions. Zigimantas Pavilionis, Lithuanian MP who has recently visited Georgia in order to express his support for the countrys opposition bloc tweeted:Wake up. Ring the bells and take action. Democracy is in danger! (The Georgian authorities) use gas and violence, just like Putin does. Ivanishvilis regime has to pay for what it has done!Carl Hartzel, EU Ambassador to Georgia, called for all sides to demonstrate responsibility and have the best interest of the country and the Georgian people at heart, and continue the efforts to find a common ground.Nika Melia was charged with incitement of violence during June 2019 protests and was released on bail in June 2020. Melia violated the conditions of the bail by publically removing the surveillance bracelet and later refusing to pay the GEL40,000 bail. He was consequently stripped of his MP immunity by the Georgian Parliament and, on February 17, Tbilisi City Court ruled in favor of his arrests. The day after the court sentencing was announced, former PM Gakharia resigned amidst the inability to come to an agreement regarding Melias arrest with the other members of the ruling Georgian Dream Party. We all feel like taking a day off from our jobs from time to time, but one Arizona youth landed in hot water after faking his own kidnapping to avoid going to work. On the afternoon of February 10, police in Coolidge, Arizona, received an emergency call about a man lying on the side of the road with his hands tied behind his back. A police car was dispatched and soon reported in that they had indeed found a young man who appeared to have been bound and abandoned on the side of the road. The victim, identified as Brandon Soules, 19, told police that he had been kidnapped by two masked men who first hit him on the head, knocking him unconscious, and then drove him around and dumped him where police found him. That wasnt entirely true, though First, the subject informed the police that two masked men kidnapped him, struck him in the head and took him to a vehicle before leaving him in the area where it was found, police said in a statement. Coolidge investigators conducted a thorough investigation and evidence was found that his story was made up and that there was no kidnapping or assault. Soules claimed that his kidnappers were after some money that his father had hidden around town, but police found no evidence of that. The surveillance footage they checked also contradicted most of his statements, and after confronting him about it, the 19-year-old admitted that he had made the whole thing up. Brandon Soules confessed that he had been desperate to get out of going to work that day, and decided to fake his own kidnapping. He shoved a crumpled bandana into his mouth, then used his leather belt to tie his hands behind his back. Finally, he dropped down on the ground on side of the road where someone could see him, and waited for the police to rescue him. On February 17, Soules was arrested for filing false reports with the police. He has since been fired from the tire company he worked at. With the first developer preview of the planned Android 12 platform, the developers of Googles mobile OS are emphasizing privacy, user experience, and app compatibility. The Android 12 developer preview, which is not intended for consumer use, was introduced on February 18. Instructions on accessing the preview can be found at developer.android.com. To bolster user privacy, Android 12 adds controls over identifiers that can be used for tracking as well as safer defaults for app components. The builders of Android recommend testing to gauge the effects of these changes, adding that more security and privacy capabilities are coming in later preview releases. Platform stability is expected in August, with the final release to follow. Android 12s WebView class for displaying webpages includes SameSite cookie behaviors to offer additional security and privacy and give users more control over cookies. This feature is in line with changes to the Chrome browser. Android 12 also is set to continue improvements pertaining to privacy-protecting resettable identifiers. Further restrictions will be imposed regarding access to a devices NetLink MAC address. Also, to prevent apps from inadvertently exporting activities, services, and receivers, the default setting of the android:exported attribute will be made more explicit. To improve user experience, Android 12 is set to include compatible media transcoding to support HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding), which is becoming increasingly popular in camera apps. Googles Dave Burke, vice president of engineering, said Google recommends that developers support HEVC in their apps. If they cannot, then compatible media transcoding should be enabled. Android 12 also debuts platform support for AV1 Image File Format, a container format for images and sequences of images encoded using the AV1 video coding format. Other additions and improvements in Android 12: Moscow: The Kremlin on Friday said it agreed with President Donald Trump that US-Russian ties were at an all-time and very dangerous low. We fully share this opinion, President Vladimir Putins spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists over Trumps view, expressed on Twitter on Thursday. The danger may lie in a lack of mutual collaboration and cooperation over the topics that are vitally important for both our countries and their people, Peskov added. Suggested read | Donald Trump slams Congress for US-Russia ties hitting all-time and very dangerous low For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes SAN FRANCISCO and UTRECHT, Netherlands, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Narvar , the original customer engagement post-purchase platform, and Cycleon , the industry-leading returns management provider, today announced their strategic partnership to create a full-service global returns solution for retailers. This partnership makes it easy for brands to seamlessly centralize their entire reverse logistics engine from elegant customer experience, to reduced shipping rates and item consolidation, to value recovery all powered by data & intelligence. Consumers expect a convenient returns process and speedy refunds from retailers, which can turn a first-time customer into a loyal one. In fact, 76% of new customers say that a great returns experience is a critical factor in deciding whether they will shop with a retailer again, making it imperative that retailers focus on the post-purchase journey to drive retention and yield higher-value customers. However, meeting these expectations can be costly, especially as the shift towards ecommerce accelerates. While the average return rate for in-store purchases is about 8%, for online purchases it's 20-30% depending on product category, equating to $428B last year . For brands trading globally, whether big or small, international returns add another complication. Retailers must find as much operational and cost efficiency as possible in returns to mitigate some of these costs and maintain the value of the returns experience to drive loyalty. Consumers are also increasingly focused on sustainability, choosing to do business with companies that share those values. The combination of Narvar's intelligent rules engine plus Cycleon's network of 30 distribution centers placed strategically around the globe creates a sophisticated routing automation capability, saving carbon footprint and reducing time to process returns and refunds. "Narvar and Cycleon are a great match, with complementary capabilities, many mutual customers, and a shared vision to help retailers solve reverse logistics," said, Jelle Schoenmaker, EVP After Market Services & General Manager at Cycleon. "We're excited to integrate Narvar's market-leading front-end experience and data & intelligence with our operational expertise to deliver a comprehensive service." "Returns are an integral part of the retail journey, and will only increase as ecommerce accelerates. Retailers have been valiantly grappling with the challenges of balancing consumer expectations with operational efficiency," said Amit Sharma, founder & CEO of Narvar. "We're thrilled to partner with Cycleon to support those efforts with a flexible and sustainable one-stop returns solution." This integrated returns solution is available immediately. For more information, contact either Narvar or Cycleon . About Narvar Narvar is an intelligent customer experience platform that helps commerce companies simplify the everyday lives of consumers. Serving over 800+retailers globally including Sephora, Patagonia, Levi's, Bose, Warby Parker, Home Depot, LVMH, and L'Oreal, Narvar ensures every touchpoint along the consumer purchase journey engages consumers and enables emotional connectionsfrom pre-purchase to in-store experiences and beyond. With customizable customer messaging and tailored interfaces driven by unparalleled data intelligence, Narvar empowers commerce brands to turn every touchpoint into an opportunity. For more information, visit narvar.com . About Cycleon Cycleon (part of the Reverse Logistics Group) are experts in product returns management. Their global platform and logistics network optimizes returns each step of the way. Cycleon provides seamless return experiences for both retailers and consumers, and strives to reduce the environmental impact and cost of reverse logistics. Active in 80+ countries, and with 200+ partners, Cycleon provides returns solutions for leading brands in ecommerce, both fashion & apparel and electronics. For more information visit cycleon.com . SOURCE Cycleon New Delhi: Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) completed two years on Wednesday (24 February). The Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) Scheme, was launched by PM Narendra Modi in 2019, aims to provide income support to all landholder farmer families across the country with cultivable land, subject to certain exclusions. Under the Scheme, an amount of Rs 6000 per year is released in three 4-monthly instalments of Rs 2000 each directly into the bank accounts of the beneficiaries. Who are eligible to get benefits under the PM-KISAN Scheme? All landholding farmers' families, which have cultivable landholding in their names are eligible to get benefit under the scheme. Who are excluded from the PM-KISAN Scheme? Live TV #mute Those excluded from the PM-KISAN include institutional land holders, farmer families holding constitutional posts, serving or retired officers and employees of State or Central government as well as Public Sector Undetakings and Government Autonomous bodies. Professionals like doctors, engineers and lawyers as well as retired pensioners with a monthly pension of over Rs 10,000 and those who paid income tax in the last assessment year are also not eligible for the benefits. How many times the PM-KISAN Scheme benefit will be given in a year? Under the PM-KISAN scheme, all landholding farmers' families shall be provided the financial benefit of Rs 6000 per annum per family payable in three equal installments of Rs 200O each, every four months. The period of 1st installment under the scheme was from 01 .12 2O18 to 31 03 2019, that of 2nd installment from 01 04.2019 to 31 07 .2019,3'd installment from 01 08.2019 to 30 11 2019, and so on. PM-KISAN Scheme for only Small and Marginal Farmers' families? ln the beginning when the PM- PM-KISAN Scheme was launched (February, 2019), its benefits were admissible only to Small & marginal Farmers' families, with combined landholding upto 2 hectare. The Scheme was later on revised in June 2019 and extended to all farmer families irrespective of the size of their landholdings The Central Government had notified a decision to extend the benefit of Rs 6,000 per year under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme to all 14.5 crore farmers in the country, irrespective of the size of their landholding. The U.S. Capitol is seen in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 6, 2020. (Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images) Critics Say $1.9 Trillion COVID Bill Larded With Special-Interest Spending Buried on page 305 of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 is a provision that awards federal employees with kids as much as $21,000 for each household to stay home. The Emergency Federal Employee Leave Fund provision includes $570 million for government workers who remain home to care for children because their schools havent resumed in-class instruction. No similar specific provision is included in the bill for the millions of private-sector workers whose children are unable to return to their public schools. The additional funding for paid leave is available to federal workers if the school or place of care of the son or daughter has been closed, if the school of such son or daughter requires or makes optional a virtual learning instruction model or requires or makes optional a hybrid of in-person and virtual learning instruction models, or the child-care provider of such son or daughter is unavailable, due to Covid-19 precautions, according to the bills text. The special paid leave for federal workers is available through Sept. 30 and is capped at $21,000 per household. It was first reported by Adam Andrzejewski, president of Open The Books, a nonprofit foundation that tracks federal spending. Its a personal bailout for federal employees and helps to take the pressure off teachers unions who have resisted reopening the schools to full-time education, Andrzejewski told The Epoch Times on Feb. 24. If federal employees in the D.C. area are being compensated with lucrative paid time off when the schools are remote or even hybrid, theres a lot less parent pressure for full-time, classroom education. Our kids are the biggest losers here, he said. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said on Feb. 23 that the House of Representatives will vote on the bill on Feb. 26. Democrats have a slim 221211 vote majority in the House after losing 13 seats in the November 2020 congressional elections. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has promised to move the bill through the Senate as quickly as possible, once its approved by the House. His majority depends upon Vice President Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) being present to break ties in the Senate, which is split 50-50 between the two parties. If the proposal makes it to President Joe Bidens desk, he will sign it, bringing the total spending by the federal government since March 2020 in response to the CCP virusalso known as the novel coronavirusto more than $5.7 trillion. According to an analysis by Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), only about 5 percent, or less than $100 billion, of the $1.9 trillion will be spent in 2021. The vast majority of the spending will be done between 2022 and 2028, long after the disease will have been controlled. An analysis by Andrzejewskis group stated that targeted Covid-19 relief in the bill can generously encompass the $473 billion in payments to individuals, $75 billion in cash for vaccines, $26 billion to restaurants, $15 billion to help fund airline payrolls, and another $7.2 billion in Paycheck Protection Program funding for small businesses. But much of the balance of funds covered by the proposal is slated for non-CCP-virus purposes, according to Andrzejewski, who pointed to the following examples: $350 billion allocated to bail out the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The allocation, which is based on unemployment rates, effectively subsidizes the programs of Democratic blue-state governors such as Californias Gavin Newsom and New Yorks Andrew Cuomo, who had the strictest lockdown policies. States such as Florida are penalized because they remained open for business and continued to flourish with minimal economic withdrawal. $270 million for the National Endowment of the Arts and the Humanities, which had a $253 million budget last year. A 2017 Open The Books analysis found that 80 percent of the agencys nonprofit grant-making flowed to well-heeled organizations with more than $1 million in assets. $200 million for The Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is so comparatively small that it doesnt even employ an inspector general. $128.5 billion to fund K-12 public education. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) determined that most of this money will be distributed to schools in 2022 through 2028. $39.5 billion to aid higher education. Previous CCP virus relief and recovery laws provided more than $35 billion to colleges and universities. $86 billion to save nearly 200 pension plans insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), many of which are co-managed by labor unions that contributed heavily to Bidens 2020 presidential campaign and to Democratic incumbents in Congress. No reforms in how the funds must be managed are included in the bill. Andrzejewski added that other provisions of the bill provide $1.5 million earmarked for the Seaway International Bridge connecting New York state with Ontario, Canada, as well as $50 million in family planning services with no exemption for abortions; $110 million for the second phase of the Silicon Valley subway connecting San Francisco and San Jose, California, and $852 million to support civic volunteering through AmeriCorps. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Deborah Barrera was still in shock Tuesday hours after her grandson Jayden Rico, 10, was shot Monday night at her West Side apartment. You never thought it would happen to you or your family, Barrera said. At 9:49 p.m. Monday, San Antonio police received a call for a shooting in progress at an apartment in the 1700 block of South Hamilton Avenue. According to a police report, a juvenile was playing with a gun when it went off and struck Jayden. After the shooting, the juvenile ran away from the scene, investigators said. Jayden was taken to University Hospital in critical condition, police said. Police are investigating the incident as an accidental shooting. On Tuesday, family members said Jayden is expected to be in the hospital for the next two to three weeks. Hes in a lot of pain, Barrera said. Jaydens grandmother said a relative had come to the apartment with a backpack to spend the night. On ExpressNews.com: 'I have this fear that if I get COVID, I'm going to die' - San Antonio health care workers plead for vaccine According to family members, Jayden was walking into a room when the relative was taking the gun out of the backpack. The gun went off and a bullet hit Jayden, piercing his intestine. It continued through him and went into a wall, Barrera said. Nobody knew that he had a gun, she said. Several other children, including Jaydens siblings, witnessed the shooting, she added. Family members said the relative panicked and left. As of Tuesday, Jayden has been in and out of consciousness because of the anesthesia, his grandmother said. Family members said his mother asked him if he knew what occurred. They said he told her he remembers everything. He said he just wished it wasnt him, his grandmother said. Family members describe Jayden, a student at Las Palmas Elementary School, as quiet, shy and a good kid. He enjoys staying indoors and watching television, even when all the other children are playing outside, his grandmother said. Because of COVID-19 restrictions, only one family member can visit Jayden. His mother has been by his side all day, his grandmother said. Shes been in and out of it, hysterically crying, Barrera said. On ExpressNews.com: Couple accused of starving and abusing 9-year-old girl who weighed only 35 pounds Barrera said she hopes to visit her grandson when he is more alert. Jaydens aunt Linda Barrera, 38, said its a lesson learned. Parents need to be more concerned about what their children do, she said. They get a hold of a gun, she added, this is what happens. Another innocent child is going to get hurt. The police department has not said whether the juvenile who fired the shot had been taken into custody or if charges will be filed. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Chicago, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Prevent Child Abuse America (PCA America) announced today two new $25,000 innovation grants, one to focus on preventing human trafficking in New Jersey and another to promote positive parenting through a groundbreaking fatherhood initiative in Ohio. The grants are an integral part of the organizations ongoing efforts to provide the safe, stable, and nurturing relationships and environments that enable children, families, and entire communities to thrive. Prevention happens in partnership, and our robust nationwide state chapter network resides at the heart of our work to ensure that all children and families get what they need to succeed, explained PCA America President & CEO Dr. Melissa Merrick. Dedicated state-level leadership and staff, as well as the numerous local partners they collaborate with, allow us to both extend our primary prevention efforts broadly and tailor them to meet the specific needs of diverse communities across the country. For instance, the project spearheaded by our New Jersey chapter addresses the very serious problem of human trafficking in the state. Given its proximity to many large cities, New Jersey is a prime target for human traffickers to recruit adolescents. Young girls and boys, targeted under the pretenses of love or a job opportunity, are forced and coerced into a dangerous, exploitative and traumatic life. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the problem: experts project an increase in human trafficking due to the loss of jobs, increase in poverty and uptick in childrens activity online, where predators are continually trying to recruit adolescents through social media platforms. In recent years, the focus in our state has been on programs that identify victims and provide services after they are rescued, according to Rush Russell, executive director of Prevent Child Abuse New Jersey (PCA New Jersey). Unfortunately, there remains little support for research-based strategies to prevent trafficking among our most vulnerable youth before it happens. This grant provides an opportunity to increase our prevention efforts, proactively protecting youth before they experience the trauma of sex trafficking and suffer its lifelong repercussions. Specifically, the PCA America innovation grant will allow PCA New Jersey to create a comprehensive web-based training series on minor sex trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation of children and adolescents. This high-quality trauma-informed tool will be customizable to the needs of schools and other youth-serving organizations, addressing human trafficking prevention through interactive, engaging trainings that provide professionals, community members and youth concrete strategies to interrupt the recruitment of youth into trafficking. Additionally, PCA New Jersey will offer a comprehensive Preventing the Trauma of Trafficking toolkit for professionals, parents and youth to help them put those prevention strategies into action. This is a great example of our commitment to reshaping how child abuse and neglect prevention is addressed in the United States, added Merrick. We want to continue to shift from reactive, after-the-fact programs and processes to deliberate, forward-thinking approaches that support child and family well-being holistically. Ohios Fathers Feelings project also illustrates this. The Ohio Childrens Trust Fund (OCTF), the Ohio chapter of Prevent Child Abuse America, will utilize its grant to expand the Fathers Feelings study into Southeast Ohio, which combines short questionnaires into casual conversations about new dads experiences and in-person visits designed to improve caretaking strengths and parent-child relationships. Undertaken in partnership with OhioGuidestone and its center of excellence for clinical research and quality performance, the Institute of Family & Community Impact, the study also includes using a proprietary play-based research model that helps lower parental stress and increases childhood resiliency through playing games. Becoming a new dad can be both exciting and overwhelming at the same time. However, most people dont think about providing postpartum support for fathers, said OCTF Executive Director Lindsay Williams. Because fathers are instrumental in child rearing, we want to make sure they have the resources they require to be successful caregivers, too. The Fathers Feelings project is helping us to understand and address their specific needs in a meaningful way. To learn more about the Fathers Feelings study, please visit: https://familyandcommunityimpact.org/fathers-feelings-study/ About Prevent Child Abuse America Prevent Child Abuse America is a leading champion for all children in the United States. Founded in 1972 and headquartered in Chicago, we are the nations oldest and largest organization dedicated to the primary prevention of child abuse and neglect, working to actively prevent all forms of child abuse and neglect before they occur. Our success is founded on a nationwide network of state chapters and nearly 600 Healthy Families America home visiting sites, which directly provide parents and caregivers a wide variety of services and resources that help children grow up to be productive, contributing members of their communities and society. Our comprehensive approach is informed by sciencewe translate and disseminate innovative research to promote proven solutions that our vast network then puts into action. And we raise public awareness and advocate for family friendly policies at the national, state and local levels to support transformative programs and promote the conditions and contexts that help children, families and communities across the country thrive. Visit preventchildabuse.org to learn more. # # # 18:09 | Chimbote (Ancash region), Feb. 23. "We have noticed that medical consultations for respiratory symptoms have dropped considerably," he said. De La Cruz explained that up to 180 patients with COVID-19 symptoms were treated daily in the Basic Primary Care Unit (UBAP) during the darkest days of the second wave. Today, the number has reached up to 90 people per day. "The long lines of people seeking care at Hospital No. I in the Southern Cone (Nuevo Chimbote), which stretched around the corner, have disappeared. The influx of patients has decreased, too," he commented. Regarding hospitalizations at Hospital No. III of Laderas del Norte urbanization in the city of Chimbote, the physician reported that beds are 60% full now, considering they had been fully occupied. "ICU beds are at 100% capacity, but there is a downward trend in general," he added. According to the doctor, the factors determining the pandemic's behavior along the Ancash coast can be the targeted lockdown, the improvement in health care habits of the population, or the behavior of the virus itself. "The second wave was expected to reach a very high peak and to descend vertically. Maybe, the lockdown had the expected effect or people are taking better care of themselves. This analysis will be carried out by epidemiologists," he pointed. (END) GHD/MAO/RMB/MVB Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain No one went to Oktoberfest in 2020, but chances are those who attended in the past are still thinking about it. In a case study of the famous German beer festival, researchers tested the theory that events which create memorable experiences can increase life-satisfaction. This deep connection with customers has big benefits for associated businesses, according to Robert Harrington, lead author of the study recently published online in the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management. "If you can do something that transforms people even a little bit, it can have a huge impact on the success of your company and your brand," said Harrington, professor and director of the School of Hospitality Management at Washington State University Carson College of Business. "The more customers are delighted, the more likely they are to be return customers. They are also more likely to give positive recommendations to friends and relatives, and particularly on social media. In today's environment, people trust those reviews more than paid advertising." For the study, the researchers surveyed more than 820 people attending a festival beer tent over several days of the 2018 Oktoberfest. The majority of the respondents were male (56.8%) and largely German, though roughly 12% were from outside the country, including from Italy and the United States. The respondents answered questions related to food and beverage quality, connectedness, experience uniqueness, memorability and life satisfaction. When the researchers analyzed the relationship among those answers, they found that connectedness to Oktoberfest, such as feeling a close association with a particular beer tent or to Oktoberfest traditions, influenced impressions of food and beverage quality and the uniqueness of the experience. These in turn influenced how highly the participants felt that attending the event increased their overall satisfaction with life. The researchers purposely chose to study the annual beer festival in Munich because it is so well-known and brings together a mix of tourism and hospitality services. "Oktoberfest has a very strong brand. It's almost like a bucket-list event," said Harrington. "As a significant event in visitors' lives, there's a greater likelihood that there's a quantifiable measure of life satisfaction or sense of well-being from those experiences, as opposed to people going out to a neighborhood bar or restaurant." Emulating Oktoberfest, which attracts more than 7 million visitors a year, may be a tall order, but the researchers suggest that other businesses can learn from its success. Breweries or wineries can create regional or local events on a smaller scale. Like Oktoberfest, these events could bundle goods and services, such as a tasting that pairs beer or wine with food or adding an experience like a music performance or art show. The idea is to invite customers to participate in creating a memorable experience that lasts, Harrington said. "Once people go back home, they will want to bring up that memory again," said Harrington. "They will go buy that beer because they went to a festival where they had a great time." Explore further German court rules hangovers are 'illness' More information: Robert J. Harrington et al, Experience perceptions, memorability and life satisfaction: a test and theory extension in the context of Oktoberfest, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management (2021). Robert J. Harrington et al, Experience perceptions, memorability and life satisfaction: a test and theory extension in the context of Oktoberfest,(2021). DOI: 10.1108/IJCHM-07-2020-0723 MBABANE A security guard stationed at the Mbabane District Commissioners (DC) Office was allegedly assaulted by members of the security forces for allowing campers inside the premises at night. Campers are the members of the public who, at times, spend the night at the DC offices, hoping to be the first in the queue in the morning for various services which include getting a national identity document. According to Musa Sibandze, he was at his workplace with those who usually spend the night at the DC offices to access services in the morning. Sibandze claimed that after being questioned why he had allowed the campers inside the premises, he was made to do push-ups, pinched, punched and attacked with the back of a rifle by members of the Umbutfo Eswatini Defence Force (UEDF) and His Majestys Correctional Services. This incident happened at the DC offices at around 8pm on Monday. Giving a full narration of what happened, the security guard stated that he was seated when he saw the campers running, as if escaping from something or someone. He alleged that the members of the security forces came in and asked him why he allowed the campers inside the premises. They also questioned me why one of the offices was not locked yet it was after working hours. They demanded the keys to the office, to which I said I did not have them as I had no clue where the keys were, Sibandze alleged. Thereafter, he claimed that the members of the security forces made him do push-ups on the concrete floor, while one officer pinched him at the back of his thighs. He claimed he was also punched on one of his ears. As a result, my hands are painful and there is an echoing sound in my ear from the punch, said the security guard. He narrated that after the alleged assault, he went to the Mbabane Police Station to report the matter. Sibandze alleged that an officer recorded his statement and wrote a letter addressed to a healthcare worker to assist him as he had been assaulted. He told this reporter that he had also reported the incident to his employers at work. Deputy Police Information and Communications Officer Inspector Nosipho Mnguni said the police were trying to communicate with him, after they had been informed that the security guard was allowing people inside the offices. We are dealing with the issue of COVID-19 and this is against the regulations, said Mnguni when referring to the security guards alleged practice of allowing people to sleep at the offices. She further alleged that there were reports to the effect that Sibandze charged people money for standing in queues on their behalf. Mnguni said this was also illegal, though she did not cite any relevant law. She said in any case, if the security guard claimed he was assaulted, he should formally report the matter to the Operations Department within the police service, where the matter could be ironed out. Meanwhile, UEDF Public Relations Officer Tengetile Khumalo said her office was not aware of such a report. I can only respond and comment once such has been conveyed to the Public Relations Office, she said. Health authorities in Hanoi have proposed the purchase of 15 million COVID-19 vaccine doses for a double inoculation plan, according to Hoang Duc Hanh, deputy director of the municipal Department of Health. The proposition was announced during a teleconference on COVID-19 prevention chaired by Chu Xuan Dung, deputy chairman of Hanoi, and joined by ward-, commune- and district-level officials in the city on Monday. The capital citys Department of Health has consulted the municipal Peoples Committee before sending the procurement proposal on COVID-19 jabs to the Ministry of Health, Hanh said. As suggested by the proposal, double inoculation will benefit city residents that are over 18 years old, he added. Hanh reported that the infection risk remains high even though Hanoi has not reported any new case for almost a week, and transmission is generally kept under control. He pointed to the host of returnees to Hanoi from other provinces after the Lunar New Year holiday, which ended last week, who have yet to be thoroughly monitored via medical declarations, as a potential source of transmission. Officials will continue monitoring the COVID-19 situation until the end of the week before deciding on the potential resumption of schools, as well as changes to social distancing rules and festival activities. Hanoi has so far screened 51,595 returnees from the COVID-19 epicenter of Hai Duong Province, with 49,637 sampled for testing and 40,672 receiving negative results, Nguyen Khac Hien, director of the Department of Health, said in a meeting chaired on Monday by Vuong Dinh Hue, secretary of the Hanoi Party Committee. The number of returnees from outbreak sites to submit health declaration forms as required will continue to rise in the next few days, Hien said. According to Hien, lockdowns were already lifted from 14 out of 18 areas considered at high risk of COVID-19 transmission in Hanoi, while the four remaining locations are on track to get the medical blockage cleared by March 1. Meanwhile, Hue recognized the positive results in epidemic prevention that are helping local businesses and local residents return to normal. Keeping a vision of long-term co-existence with the virus in mind, the municipal Party Committee required lower-level officials to abide by COVID-19 prevention guidelines, as well as reviewing the drawbacks in implementation to keep up with the circumstances. The Party Committee also endorsed loosening restrictions on business operations and reopening schools. Vietnam has recorded 2,403 COVID-19 cases as of Wednesday morning, with 1,760 recoveries and 35 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health. A total of 811 local infections have been detected in 13 provinces and cities since January 27. Among them, 627 cases have been documented in Hai Duong Province, while 35 cases have been recorded in Hanoi. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Texas A&M University researchers have designed a reinforcement-based algorithm that automates the process of predicting the properties of the underground environment, facilitating the accurate forecasting of oil and gas reserves. Within the Earth's crust, layers of rock hold bountiful reservoirs of groundwater, oil and natural gas. Now, using machine learning, researchers at Texas A&M University have developed an algorithm that automates the process of determining key features of the Earth's subterranean environment. They said this research might help with accurate forecasting of our natural reserves. Specifically, the researchers' algorithm is designed on the principle of reinforcement or reward learning. Here, the computer algorithm converges on the correct description of the underground environment based on rewards it accrues for making correct predictions of the pressure and flow expected from boreholes. "Subsurface systems that are typically a mile below our feet are completely opaque. At that depth we cannot see anything and have to use instruments to measure quantities, like pressure and rates of flow," said Siddharth Misra, associate professor in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering and the Department of Geology and Geophysics. "Although my current study is a first step, my goal is to have a completely automated way of using that information to accurately characterize the properties of the subsurface." The algorithm is described in the December issue of the journal Applied Energy. Simulating the geology of the underground environment can greatly facilitate forecasting of oil and gas reserves, predicting groundwater systems and anticipating seismic hazards. Depending on the intended application, boreholes serve as exit sites for oil, gas and water or entry sites for excess atmospheric carbon dioxide that need to be trapped underground. Along the length of the boreholes, drilling operators can ascertain the pressures and flow rates of liquids or gas by placing sensors. Conventionally, these sensor measurements are plugged into elaborate mathematical formulations, or reservoir models, that predict the properties of the subsurface such as the porosity and permeability of rocks. But reservoir models are mathematically cumbersome, require extensive human intervention, and at times, even give a flawed picture of the underground geology. Misra said there has been an ongoing effort to construct algorithms that are free from human involvement yet accurate. For their study, Misra and his team chose a type of machine-learning algorithm based on the concept of reinforcement learning. Simply put, the software learns to make a series of decisions based on feedback from its computational environment. "Imagine a bird in a cage. The bird will interact with the boundaries of the cage where it can sit or swing or where there is food and water. It keeps getting feedback from its environment, which helps it decide which places in the cage it would rather be at a given time," Misra said. "Algorithms based on reinforcement learning are based on a similar idea. They too interact with an environment, but it's a computational environment, to reach a decision or a solution to a given problem." So, these algorithms are rewarded for favorable predictions and are penalized for unfavorable ones. Over time, reinforcement-based algorithms arrive at the correct solution by maximizing their accrued reward. Another technical advantage of reinforcement-based algorithms is that they do not make any presuppositions about the pattern of data. For example, Misra's algorithm does not assume that the pressure measured at a certain time and depth is related to what the pressure was at the same depth in the past. This property makes his algorithm less biased, thereby reducing the chances of error at predicting the subterranean environment. When initiated, Misra's algorithm begins by randomly guessing a value for porosity and permeability of the rocks constituting the subsurface. Based on these values, the algorithm calculates a flow rate and pressure that it expects from a borehole. If these values do not match the actual values obtained from field measurements, also known as historical data, the algorithm is penalized. Consequently, it is forced to correct its next guess for the porosity and permeability. However, if its guesses were somewhat correct, the algorithm is rewarded and makes further guesses along that direction. The researchers found that within 10 iterations of reinforcement learning the algorithm was able to correctly and very quickly predict the properties of simple subsurface scenarios. Misra noted that although the subsurface simulated in their study was simplistic, their work is still a proof of concept that reinforcement algorithms can be used successfully in automated reservoir-property predictions, also referred as automated history matching. "A subsurface system can have 10 or 20 boreholes spread over a two- to five-mile radius. If we understand the subsurface clearly, we can plan and predict a lot of things in advance, for example, we would be able to anticipate subsurface environments if we go a bit deeper or the flow rate of gas at that depth," Misra said. "In this study, we have turned history matching into a sequential decision-making problem, which has the potential to reduce engineers' efforts, mitigate human bias and remove the need of large sets of labeled training data." He said future work will focus on simulating more complex reservoirs and improving the computational efficiency of the algorithm. Explore further Artificial pancreas system upgraded with AI algorithm More information: Hao Li et al, Reinforcement learning based automated history matching for improved hydrocarbon production forecast, Applied Energy (2020). Hao Li et al, Reinforcement learning based automated history matching for improved hydrocarbon production forecast,(2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2020.116311 HOLBROOK, NY (OnSachem.com / OnTownMedia.com) The 7-day positivity rate for new COVID-19 infections remains around 4% in Suffolk County. Meanwhile, Long Island's infection rate is still the second-highest in New York state, behind New York City. COVID-19 in Suffolk County LATEST STATS: In Suffolk County on Monday, 10,476 people took a COVID-19 test, down from 10,767 on Sunday; 554 people tested positive (5.3%), down from 563 (5.2%) on Sunday; 39 were hospitalized (total 484); 8 people died; and 19 were discharged. Among 3,199 hospital beds, 960 (30%) are available. Since March 22, 159,146 have tested positive (5.6%); 3,043 died, and 11,541 were discharged. POSITIVITY RATE: The 7-day average across Long Island (Nassau and Suffolk counties combined) was 4.30% on Monday, down from 4.35% the day prior. Among the 10 regions in New York state, Long Island continued to have the second-highest 7-day average behind New York City's 4.49%. VACCINE SUPPLY AND DISTRIBUTION: As of 11 a.m. Tuesday, Long Island received 485,990 first and second doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, up from 468,995 the day prior. 428,672 (88%) were administered, up from 422,457 (90%) a day earlier. Suffolk County reported the following positives during the past week: 554 on Monday, Feb. 22 562 on Sunday, Feb. 21 513 on Saturday, Feb. 20 602 on Friday, Feb. 19 714 on Thursday, Feb. 18 461 on Wednesday, Feb. 17 590 on Tuesday, Feb. 16 Note: 2,181 on Thursday, Jan. 14 - Second-most on a single day since March 18, 2020 Note: 2,194 on Wednesday, Jan. 6 - Most on a single day since March 18, 2020 Support Local Journalism Now, more than ever, the world needs trustworthy reportingbut good journalism isnt free. Please support us by making a contribution. Contribute HOW TO GET THE VACCINE New Yorkers can use the Am I Eligible? website to determine when they are can receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Once eligible, residents can use the tool to locate a provider and schedule an appointment. Residents can also call the New York State Vaccination Hotline at 1-833-NYS-4VAX (1-833-697-4829). COVID-19 in New York State Throughout New York state, Governor Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday said there were 6,654 (4.23%) daily positives, up from 6,146 (4.33%) a day earlier, and 86 people died. The state's 7-day average positivity rate was 3.46%, down from 3.52% a day earlier. COVID-19 hospitalizations in the state dropped to 5,977, down from 5,804 the day prior. "The decline in our hospitalization and infection rates is all thanks to the dedication New Yorkers have time and again shown to defeating this invisible enemy," Cuomo said. "As our rates continue to decline, we are opening back up our economy and proving that vaccine distribution can be fair and equitable." Cuomo added, "The light at the end of the tunnel is brighter and brighter each day, but we're not there yet. I encourage New Yorkers to remain vigilant until the war is won: Wear a mask, socially distance and wash your hands." The following is New York state's full status report for Tuesday: MASON CITY, Iowa - The damage left in the wake of last August's derecho left a devastating scar. Winds reached a peak of 126 mph, and roughly 43% of the state's crops last year were affected. In addition, farmers were already grappling with market disruptions caused by COVID-19 when they were hit by the powerful windstorm. But there may be relief in sight for those affected included in the new $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package that Democrats are set to pass. U.S. Representative Randy Feenstra (R - Hull), who represents Iowa's 4th district that covers much of North Iowa, has spearheaded an amendment to that package that would allocate about $4 billion to be distributed by the USDA's Wildfire and Hurricane Indemnity Program. The money would be distributed to farmers, producers, elevators and other agriculture related businesses that were hit hard by the distaster. Feenstra has seen up close just how the bad damage was, and the long term repercussions of it. "Being a rural Iowa kid, I've seen tornadoes, but I've neer seen the devastation...just acre after acre seeing the corn and soybeans down. It's devastating. And come to know that 43% of the crop in Iowa was destroyed. That's very significant for our state." With the next planting season set to start soon, Feenstra feels that the funding can take some off the weight off of farmers' shoulders. "There's a lot of cost when you start putting crops down, so this will help that. Hopefully farmers will be continue to plant this year without having so much debt or not understanding where the money will come from." The amendment passed the U.S. House Agriculture Committee, of which Feenstra is a member, with a 24-23 vote. In addition, the amendment has bi-partisan support; Iowa Congresswoman Cindy Axne (D - West Des Moines) was the deciding vote in favor of the proposal. Out of the roughly 200 amendments that were proposed for the relief package, Feenstra's amendment was the only one adopted as part of the Democrats' plan. "I applaud all sides that are understanding how devastating the derecho was, and how we can help our producers and our agricultural community in this way." International travelers are particularly vulnerable to virulent strains of drug-resistant bacteria - often picking up several different types during a trip through spending time in the company of other tourists, a new study reveals. The global spread of intestinal multidrug resistant gram-negative (MDR-GN) bacteria poses a serious threat to human health worldwide, with MDR clones of E.coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae threatening more antibiotic resistant infections around the world. Researchers monitored a group of European travelers visiting Lao People's Democratic Republic for three weeks - analyzing daily returns of information and stool samples to build a comprehensive picture of the tourists' gut health. Bacterial strains colonized multiple travelers staying at the same hotels and spending time in each other's company. In one exceptional instance, two participants staying in separate accommodation shared an identical strain after one took a shower in the other's bathroom. The international group of researchers, led by scientists at the Universities of Basel, Birmingham, Helsinki and Oslo, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute have published their findings in The Lancet Microbe. International travel is strongly linked to the spread of MDR-GN bacteria, with transmission highest in India and Southeast Asia, Africa and South America. Travelers visiting these high-risk regions are at substantial risk of acquiring the bacteria. Colonization by MDR-GN bacteria is a highly dynamic process. We found constant 'competition' between circulating strains acquired by individual hosts and the travelers 'native' bacteria. Travelers can pick up the bacteria even during short visits and further spread the strains after returning home." Alan McNally, Professor and Study Senior Author, Microbial Evolutionary Genomics, University of Birmingham The impact of travel on the global spread of multidrug-resistant E. coli is well documented - up to 80% of travelers returning from high-risk regions are colonized by MDR-GN bacteria, with colonization lasting up to a year. Previous traveler studies only analyzed pre- and post-travel samples, rather than the actual travel period. Researchers found that, of the group of 20 European volunteers visiting Laos, 70% had been colonized at the end of the study. Daily sampling revealed that all participants had acquired extended-spectrum beta-lactamases(ESBL) at some time point during their overseas stay. ESBL enzymes create resistance within the body to mostbeta-lactamantibiotics, including penicillins, cephalosporins, and aztreonam. Infections with ESBL-producing organisms have proved difficult to treat. All but one participant acquired multiple strains of bacteria with 83 unique strains identified (53 E. coli, 10 Klebsiella, 20 other ESBL-GN species) and some of these strains being shared by as many as four subjects. Study co-senior author Jukka Corander, Associate Faculty at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK, and professor at Faculty of Medicine at the University of Oslo commented: "Our study reveals the true scale and complexity at which drug-resistant bacteria colonize the intestinal tract during travel, demonstrating that it has been seriously underestimated previously. "In addition, several of our participants lost some of their travel-acquired ESBL-GN strains while still abroad - indicating that previous studies solely employing pre- and post-travel sampling have under-reported the extent to which travelers are colonized by ESBL-GN." Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 23:38:56|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close NAIROBI, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations on Wednesday said that the Horn of Africa has recorded low desert locust infestation in the past month. FAO attributed the reduced spread of voracious pests to the ongoing aerial control of immature swarms across the region. Significant progress is being made in the aerial control of immature swarms in Kenya and Ethiopia. "The scale of spring breeding is expected to be limited because of ongoing control operations that continue to reduce the number of swarms and the likelihood of poor spring rains starting next month," FAO said in a statement issued in Nairobi. In Ethiopia, immature swarms persist, including southern areas of the Rift Valley where more swarms were reported. In Kenya, small immature swarms are declining in the northern and central parts of the country. It said there were no new reports of swarms arriving from Somalia into Kenya as was the case in the recent past. According to FAO, one aircraft was deployed from Kenya to assist in managing the situation in north-eastern Tanzania where control operations are underway. In Somalia, hopper bands and new immature swarms continue to form in northeastern Puntland. They are likely to disperse along the northern plateau, drifting west towards Aysha district in Somali region in eastern Ethiopia. A few swarms may move south towards Kenya. The UN agency said the present situation in the Horn of Africa differs significantly from one year ago. Intensive aerial control operations, supported by ground teams, are well-established and make good progress in reducing locust infestation. Current swarms are smaller and less numerous since very little rain has fallen since the end of the short rains last year. Enditem Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes John Kinnear photo One of 3 new pillows at Hillcrest with Cumberland disasters on it At the 2004 unveiling of the statistical pillows at the Hillcrest Monument an invited guest by the name of Bill (Bronco) Moncrief, the Mayor of Cumberland on Vancouver Island, pointed out a missing statistic to me at the ceremony. It was my worst fear come true; that an important tragic event would get by me somehow and not get onto the master list for the pillows. The master list was a compilation of every coal mine disaster in Canada of three men or more. I eventually went on to revisit those statistics and a total of 19 items were added to three new pillows that were installed in 2014 at the hundredth anniversary commemoration. There are a total of 6 Cumberland/Comox mine disasters that total 77 men on the pillows and I had in fact missed three of them. The missed disaster Montcrief spotted occurred on August 30th, 1922 at the Comox #4 Colliery in Cumberland when a broken electric power cable ignited methane gas. It took the lives of eighteen men. Nine were Chinese, 6 were Japanese and 3 were (as the mine's report terms them) white. While doing the monument research I noticed that the BC Annual Mines Reports showed no Chinese were ever reported as working in the mines in BCs central and southeastern coal mining districts. No doubt this had a lot to do with a deliberate screening process fueled by unsubstantiated stories of them being the cause of some of the awful mine disasters that befell Vancouver Island mines. In all 295 men died in the Cumberland Mines. continued below ... I wondered then, where and when did all these Chinese men come from that worked at the coastal collieries from 1887 on. At the time of the 1922 accident at Comox #4 there were 369 Chinese and 121 Japanese out of a total force of 836 underground workers at that mine. A little research revealed that the gold rush on the Fraser River in 1858 had a lot to do with their eventual presence there. As soon as word hit San Francisco that year about the Fraser gold strike men like Chang Tsoo and Ah Hong made a beeline for Victoria, the jumping off point for the rush. They were the very first Chinese immigrants to Canada and the first Chinese gold prospectors on the Fraser. By January 1860 some 1,195 Chinese fortune hunters had passed through Victoria on their way to the mainland gold fields. Up to 7,000 Chinese, mainly single men coming via the United States landed in British Columbia in the early 1860's. An interesting side note to the Chang Tsoo and Ah Hong story is that 70 years earlier 50 Chinese artisans and carpenters accompanied British sea captain John Meares to Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island to help build a non-indigenous settlement to develop a year-round fur trade in sea otter pelts between Natives there and Canton, China. Unfortunately the Spanish still ruled the roost in the area at the time and drove the English off. Many of the Chinese decided to settle on the island and sought shelter with the locals. Reports years later by American sailors and Hudson Bay Company traders told that these Chinese had blended into Native society quite well. There were Chinese-Native unions and children but apparently through the years indigenous culture and language prevailed and all trace of these original Chinese gradually disappeared. continued below ... There is another interesting story from Nootka Sound that I will share soon about a Nootka (Mowachaht) Chief named Maquinna and an 1802 massacre known as the John Hewitt Story. The Mowachaht are Nuu-chah-nulth and are part of 15 related tribes of the Nootka Sound/Pacific Northwest Coast area. The gold rushes were not the only reason though that Chinese immigrated to Canada. Events in China prior to the rushes also drew them here. They were firstly the Opium War which began in 1839 and led to the ruin of Cantonese textile firms and tea trade and the Taiping Rebellion of 1851 which resulted in a civil war in which 20 million people died and many were left homeless, jobless and poor. For some of them emigration was the only way out of poverty. If you really want to understand where China is today and what the British did to that country study the opium war history at length. They learned of the gold strikes and of work opportunities in North America. The Canadian and American railways, as we know, used cheap Chinese labour to open up the Western frontiers. They were denied full citizenship rights in B.C. and in the words of the 1884 Canadian Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration they were:"living machines worked for the benefit of progress and free enterprise." The 15,000 Chinese who toiled for Andrew Onderdonk to complete the CPR between 1880 and 1885 saved his company an estimated $3 million to $5 million. They were in his words "industrious and steady" and he said that the "development of the country would be retarded and many industries abandoned" without them. continued below ... Racial "accidents" gave rise to that terrible saying that "for every foot of railway through the Fraser Canyon, a Chinese worker died." It was not quite that bad but at least 600 Chinese workers perished in helping Sir John A. MacDonald fulfill his dream of uniting Canada coast to coast. At the time the western link of the CPR was completed most of the 2,900 Chinese rail workers had drifted back to the coast mostly to Victoria where an established Chinese community already existed. Not all went west though; many headed east following the railway. By 1911 Calgary's Chinatown was home to 1,700. In all, that year, there were 28,000 Chinese spread across Canada, most of them working as cooks, laundry workers, domestic servants and any other job that didn't pose a threat to white male workers. They may have appeared to be mostly bachelors but most had wives and families back in China. Our bigoted government saw to it that it stayed that way with the introduction of the Dominion Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 which imposed a $50 head tax on immigrants and severely limited their number. Not being needed anymore for the hard labor jobs the feds found it easy to continually raise this head tax till it reached $500 in 1903. No other immigrant group ever had to pay such a patently racist tax to enter Canada. continued below ... The movement to full rights for the Chinese in Canada was a long time in coming. Saskatchewan gave full voting rights to its Chinese population in 1944 and B.C. opted to only give voting rights to those Chinese who had fought in the two World Wars. My aren't they a benevolent bunch. Thankfully civil libertarians, veterans and church, labour and business groups joined to demand an end to all legal discrimination. The Canadian Citizenship Act of 1947 finally restored their voting rights federally and B.C. followed suit provincially soon after. The story of the Chinese coal miners on Vancouver Island and how Robert Dunsmuir exploited them has been thoroughly documented by Lynn Bowen in her book "Boss Whistle". It is a piece of B.C.'s not so romantic history everyone should know about. Here is a small excerpt from Lynne Bowens book Boss Whistle, The boss whistle was silent when the Big Strike closed the mines, it bided its time and then sounded again defiantly as it called scabs to work in the place of union men. When the coal markets began to die, the boss whistle assumed even greater powers. Families listened each day for its voice, their livelihood depending on its message. One whistle- work tomorrow. Two whistles- another day without work. And when a retired miner stopped on the street to check his watch with the twelve noon whistle from the mine he was acknowledging the lifelong influence of the Boss Whistle. Authors Note: The 3 men-or-more acknowledgement of coal miners lost in the Crowsnest Pass falls terribly short of the mark of proper recognition of every single miner lost here. With that in mind I have started the research to create databases of those lost at every mine within the Pass. Ultimately I hope to be able to bring them forward to where, like the Bellevue Mine, a commemorative plaque can be placed at an appropriate spot at each former mine site. I have begun my research with McGillivray Mine where 58 men were lost during its operational years. It is the right thing to do. HOME PAGE We are excited and honored to be able to work with this experienced and diverse group of professionals who believe in Ericoms Zero Trust security mission. The groups mandate will be to support Ericoms solution development and global go-to-market efforts as the company continues to quickly scale. Ericom Software, a leader in cloud cybersecurity solutions for secure web and application access, today announced the formation of its Industry Advisory Board (IAB) and welcomed a group of leading business executives to advise and collaborate with Ericoms management team on various growth initiatives, business development activities, and corporate strategy. Zero Trust security has become the strategic cybersecurity approach CISOs and CIOs are adopting to protect the digital transformation projects underpinning the growth of their organizations, making the timing right to bring together a talented group of leaders with start-up, industry, and security practitioner experience to support Ericoms continued market momentum. Demand for Ericoms security solutions, like Remote Browser Isolation (RBI), has accelerated as cybersecurity investments shift toward innovative, cloud-delivered Zero Trust security controls designed to protect the distributed work environments that have become the norm as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Chase Cunningham, Ericoms Chief Strategy Officer and former Forrester Analyst focused on Zero Trust security, will chair Ericoms Industry Advisory Board. Regarding the formation of the Ericom IAB, Chase commented "We are excited and honored to be able to work with this experienced and diverse group of professionals who believe in Ericoms Zero Trust security mission. The groups mandate will be to support Ericoms solution development and global go-to-market efforts as the company continues to quickly scale." The Ericom Industry Advisory Committee members include: Ramy Houssaini, Chief Cyber & Technology Risk Officer & Group Privacy Officer, BNP Paribas - Ramy has two decades of global experience helping highly regulated organizations optimize their security engineering operations and transform their overall approaches to Cybersecurity & Technology Risk Management to adjust to a borderless (cloud and data driven) operating model in a collaborative and sustainable way. His technical and leadership expertise in the development and management of teams has driven the execution of numerous transformation cybersecurity programs. In 2017, Ramy joined BNP Paribas as its Chief Cyber & Technology Risk Officer with responsibility for all aspects of cyber, technology and operational resilience risks. In 2018, he was also appointed to the Group's Global Data Protection Officer. Becca Chambers, Vice President of Global Corporate Communications, Ivanti Becca is an award-winning corporate communications and brand strategist with more than a decade focused on the cybersecurity space, most recently transforming four brands in the Zero Trust security space. Known for creating strategic and innovative programs that build brand clout, Becca has been tapped by both large and small security companies over the past decade for her expertise. She currently advises multiple security startups, is a contributor to Forbes, and together with Steven Hua (see below) has won 7 MUSE brand awards for their work on zero trust security brands Idaptive (acquired by CyberArk) and MobileIron (acquired by Ivanti). Steven Hua, Vice President of Global Digital Demand Generation, Medallia Steven is an accomplished marketing executive with deep cybersecurity experience and a proven track record of building high-performing GTM teams and driving successful M&A outcomes. Steven excels at digital demand generation and account-based marketing strategies, with a focus on sales and marketing funnel alignment. He is experienced in building modern marketing infrastructure to track and measure marketing effectiveness and is an accomplished brand-builder and storyteller working alongside industry veteran Becca Chambers bringing brands to life. Steven advises a number of growth-stage startups in the B2B SaaS industry and is a contributor to Forbes.com. Dr. Chase Cunningham, Chief Strategy Officer, Ericom Software As the creator of the Zero Trust eXtended framework and a cybersecurity expert with decades of operational experience in NSA, US Navy, FBI Cyber, and other government mission groups, Chase is responsible for Ericoms overall strategy and technology direction. Chase was previously VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research; Director of Threat Intelligence for Armor; Director of Cyber Analytics for Decisive Analytics; and Chief Cryptologic Technician, US Navy. Hes author of the Cynja series and Cyber Warfare: Truth, Tactics, and Strategies. Chase has assembled an impressive team for our Industry Advisory Board and Im looking forward to having the opportunity to engage and collaborate with this talented group of industry leaders, said David Canellos, CEO Ericom Software. Their guidance and input on the direction of our strategic initiatives and technology innovation will help us as we continue our rapid growth. Ericom Software provides Zero Trust cloud security solutions that keep organizations connected and productive, while protecting them from advanced cybersecurity threats. Leveraging a strategic combination of remote browser and application isolation technologies, as well as cloud-focused security solutions that are all delivered via the Ericom Global Cloud, a high availability multi-tenant cloud platform that makes adoption of Ericom's solutions simple and cost-effective. Ericoms security and connectivity solutions are used by thousands of businesses and millions of end users. About Ericom Software Ericom Software is a leading provider of Zero Trust cybersecurity solutions that protect organizations from advanced security threats. Leveraging innovative browser and application isolation technologies, Ericom's cloud-delivered security solutions enable simple, secure policy-driven access to mission-critical applications and resources, including the web, without impacting end-user productivity. Ericom's platform of browser isolation, remote access, secure connectivity, mobility, and virtualization technologies enhance 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. A digital twin of the Earth is to simulate the Earth system comprehensively and at high resolution and serve, for example, as a basis for guiding adaptation measures to climate change. Credit: ESA A digital twin of our planet is to simulate the Earth system in future. It is intended to support policy-makers in taking appropriate measures to better prepare for extreme events. A new strategy paper by European scientists and ETH Zurich computer scientists shows how this can be achieved. To become climate neutral by 2050, the European Union launched two ambitious programs: Green Deal and DigitalStrategy. As a key component of their successful implementation, climate scientists and computer scientists launched the Destination Earth initiative, which will start in mid-2021 and is expected to run for up to ten years. During this period, a highly accurate digital model of the Earth is to be created, a digital twin of the Earth, to map climate development and extreme events as accurately as possible in space and time. Observational data will be continuously incorporated into the digital twin in order to make the digital Earth model more accurate for monitoring the evolution and predict possible future trajectories. But in addition to the observation data conventionally used for weather and climate simulations, the researchers also want to integrate new data on relevant human activities into the model. The new Earth system model will represent virtually all processes on the Earth's surface as realistically as possible, including the influence of humans on water, food and energy management, and the processes in the physical Earth system. Information system for decision-making The digital twin of the Earth is intended to be an information system that develops and tests scenarios that show more sustainable development and thus better inform policies. "If you are planning a two-meter high dike in The Netherlands, for example, I can run through the data in my digital twin and check whether the dike will in all likelihood still protect against expected extreme events in 2050," says Peter Bauer, deputy director for Research at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and co-initiator of Destination Earth. The digital twin will also be used for strategic planning of fresh water and food supplies or wind farms and solar plants. The driving forces behind Destination Earth are the ECMWF, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). Together with other scientists, Bauer is driving the climate science and meteorological aspects of the Earth's digital twin, but they also rely on the know-how of computer scientists from ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), namely ETH professors Torsten Hoefler, from the Institute for High Performance Computing Systems, and Thomas Schulthess, Director of CSCS. In order to take this big step in the digital revolution, Bauer emphasizes the need for earth sciences to be married to the computer sciences. In a recent publication in Nature Computational Science, the team of researchers from the earth and computer sciences discusses which concrete measures they would like to use to advance this "digital revolution of earth-system sciences," where they see the challenges and what possible solutions can be found. Weather and climate models as a basis In their paper, the researchers look back on the steady development of weather models since the 1940s, a success story that took place quietly. Meteorologists pioneered, so to speak, simulations of physical processes on the world's largest computers. As a physicist and computer scientist, CSCS's Schulthess is therefore convinced that today's weather and climate models are ideally suited to identify completely new ways for many more scientific disciplines how to use supercomputers efficiently. In the past, weather and climate modeling used different approaches to simulate the Earth system. Whereas climate models represent a very broad set of physical processes, they typically neglect small-scale processes, which, however, are essential for the more precise weather forecasts that in turn, focus on a smaller number of processes. The digital twin will bring both areas together and enable high-resolution simulations that depict the complex processes of the entire Earth system. But in order to achieve this, the codes of the simulation programs must be adapted to new technologies promising much enhanced computing power. With the computers and algorithms available today, the highly complex simulations can hardly be carried out at the planned extremely high resolution of one kilometer because for decades, code development stagnated from a computer science perspective. Climate research benefited from being able to gain higher performance by ways of new generations of processors without having to fundamentally change their program. This free performance gain with each new processor generation stopped about 10 years ago. As a result, today's programs can often only utilize 5 percent of the peak performance of conventional processors (CPU). For achieving the necessary improvements, the authors emphasize the need of co-design, i.e. developing hardware and algorithms together and simultaneously, as CSCS successfully demonstrated during the last ten years. They suggest to pay particular attention to generic data structures, optimized spatial discretisation of the grid to be calculated and optimisation of the time step lengths. The scientists further propose to separate the codes for solving the scientific problem from the codes that optimally perform the computation on the respective system architecture. This more flexible program structure would allow a faster and more efficient switch to future architectures. Profiting from artificial intelligence The authors also see great potential in artificial intelligence (AI). It can be used, for example, for data assimilation or the processing of observation data, the representation of uncertain physical processes in the models and data compression. AI thus makes it possible to speed up the simulations and filter out the most important information from large amounts of data. Additionally, the researchers assume that the use of machine learning not only makes the calculations more efficient, but also can help describing the physical processes more accurately. The scientists see their strategy paper as a starting point on the path to a digital twin of the Earth. Among the computer architectures available today and those expected in the near future, supercomputers based on graphics processing units (GPU) appear to be the most promising option. The researchers estimate that operating a digital twin at full scale would require a system with about 20,000 GPUs, consuming an estimated 20MW of power. For both economic and ecological reasons, such a computer should be operated at a location where CO 2 -neutral generated electricity is available in sufficient quantities. Explore further Scientists develop new land surface model including multiple processes and human activities More information: Peter Bauer et al. The digital revolution of Earth-system science, Nature Computational Science (2021). Peter Bauer et al. The digital revolution of Earth-system science,(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s43588-021-00023-0 A digital twin of Earth for the green transition. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 8083 (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-021-00986-y Journal information: Nature Computational Science This is a moment in time when we can do more, he said. He also asked if lowering the minimum $7.5 million asking price might make it more financially feasible for the winning bidder to offer additional affordable housing. Thats a trade-off that makes sense to me, looking at this property, Pedroza said. County officials said the $7.5 million minimum asking price is for the property with its present public use zoning. They expect the value will rise once the city rezones the land for housing. We dont feel we were overly aggressive with the appraisals, Supervisor Brad Wagenknecht said. The $7.5 million was on the light side, because it truly was looking at the property as it is zoned now. Several supervisors noted that the city of Napa will zone the land and approve whatever housing is built there. I dont know if we have any real control over this, Gregory said. Once we sell it, its between them and the city. It's perhaps the most unlikely intervention Stormont has ever witnessed. American media pesonality and socialite Paris Hilton has made an appeal for the Assembly to introduce tougher laws on when youngsters can be physically restrained at school. She spoke out in support of Harry's Law, a campaign led by Co Tyrone mother Deirdre Shakespeare after she realised how much her son was being restrained at his special school upon seeing a photo diary of his first year. While permission was granted by Harry's parents to be put in a chair at mealtimes, the extent of the use of restraints is now the subject of a legal dispute. The campaign for Harry's Law would make it compulsory for schools to report to parents and the Education Authority when they had restrained or isolated a pupil. It would also mean that more school staff were trained in other, positive ways to address a child's behaviour. The issue was discussed at a meeting of Stormont's education committee yesterday, which heard about restrictive practice, seclusion and restraint in schools. Afterwards the well-known celebrity issued a message to her 17 million Twitter followers appealing to the committee and its chairman, Alliance MLA Chris Lyttle, to provide "meaningful protections" for children. Earlier this month Ms Hilton testified to the Utah state senate about abuse she said she suffered as a teenager at a boarding school, including being forced into solitary confinement naked and being beaten. Mrs Shakespeare is pleased the issue is receiving so much attention. She said the chance to address MLAs yesterday had been "very powerful", but said so many more children will have suffered harm as so much time had been wasted in updating laws. "What this showed me was that the department has failed children for far too long," she said. "Many parents have felt unable to speak out. "It has been very difficult at times for me, but if I stay silent nothing will ever change. That's why I've kept going. "The education committee now sees the urgent need for a change in legislation. But what's more important now is that the department acts on the urgency being shown. "There is, at least, a recognition now that this is actually happening in schools." The Department of Education's guidance on the issue, which hasn't been updated since 1999, states all incidents involving the use of reasonable force should be "rare" and recorded by schools, but the recording of such incidents is not a legal obligation. The British Association of Social Workers Northern Ireland has also said the practices could have damaging effects. MLAs heard from representatives of the International Coalition against Restraint and Seclusio (ICARS), which was named in Ms Hilton's tweet, and Parent Action NI. Orla Watt from Parent Action NI said children with special educational needs had "suffered" restraint and seclusion in special and mainstream schools in recent years and said there was a need for more training. "We'd also like to request the appointment of a parent-carer champion similar to a mental health champion," she added. The suggestion was supported by the UUP's Robbie Butler and the SDLP's Daniel McCrossan, who said there was a "desperate need for a voice, someone central" to advocate for families. ICARS said that stricter protocols on restraint and seclusion were needed so that the Assembly could fulfil obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Mrs Shakespeare and Beth Morrsion, who founded ICARS with Zoe Read, also gave evidence to the committee. "The first step is ensuring mandatory recording and documenting of any incidents of physical or mechanical restraint or the use of seclusion on a child," Mrs Shakespeare said. Campaigners hope the high-profile Ms Hilton's intervention will draw attention to the issue. It is not the first time a famous face has intervened in local affairs. Actor Liam Neeson has previously called for the Executive to provide a "lifeline" to the arts sector here, and has been a passionate supporter of integrated education. And in 2015 Queen guitarist Brian May, an activist against animal cruelty, criticised proposals for a pig farm in Co Antrim. Founding members Troy Walton and Steve Telken, along with firm attorney Micah Summers of Walton Telken, LLC were selected as Illinois Super Lawyers for 2021. Firm attorney, Adam Bragee, was also recognized as a Rising Star for the third year in a row. Super Lawyers selects attorneys using a patented multiphase selection process. Each candidate is evaluated on 12 indicators of peer recognition and professional achievement. No more than five percent of attorneys in the state are given the honor of being named a Super Lawyer. Walton was also honored as a distinguished member of the Top 100: 2021 Illinois Super Lawyers List. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The historical imagery found in the archives at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago was troubling, McDonald said. A number of McDonalds pieces juxtapose covers of sheet music produced by the Gotham-Attucks Music Publishing Company, a Black-owned firm which entertainers Bert Williams and George Walker were associated with. According to McDonald, artists in like Williams and Walker were prolific in their time, but still but they still had no control over the imagery that would be used on the sheet music, including their own image. Combining historic images of Black artists whose careers had to be built in controlled conditions, with contemporary photos of contemporary dance parties subverts the racist representations of Black musicians popularized in the late 1800s, according to the shows literature. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company You are the owner of this article. Public Safety Minister Bill Blair responds to a question during a news conference in Ottawa on May 1, 2020, when the government announced a ban on over 1,500 models and variants of assault-style firearms. (The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld) Federal Gun Bill Raises Constitutional Questions on Jurisdiction New federal legislation to further restrict long guns would allow municipalities to have their own gun bylaws, while legislative attempts in Alberta and Saskatchewan to keep municipalities from enacting such laws have raised constitutional questions. Bill C-21, tabled on Feb. 16, amends federal firearms laws. Although the sweeping legislation doesnt cover handguns, it empowers municipalities to pass bylaws on handguns, such as prohibiting storage at home or anywhere within their municipal boundaries and limiting their transport to or from the municipality. Dwight Newman, a law professor and Canada research chair at the University of Saskatchewan, told The Epoch Times that this is an unusual aspect of the bill. Theres something very strange about the federal government engaging directly with municipalities on this kind of issue when municipalities are themselves constitutionally creatures of the provincial governments, he said. Saskatchewan passed legislation last June to prevent municipalities from making their own gun laws. A private members bill introduced in Alberta on Dec. 8, 2020, seeks to do the same. Alberta intends to follow Saskatchewans lead by appointing its own chief firearms officer to interpret and enforce federal gun laws. The government of Alberta is committed to protecting public safety and ensuring law-abiding firearms owners are respected, Justice Minister Kaycee Madu said in a Nov. 9 press release. Recent legislation announced by the federal government would punish hard-working farmers, hunters, and other lawful gun owners, while failing to address the true problem: the flow of illegal firearms throughout Canada from south of the border. Newman believes provincial jurisdiction will prevail. I would tend to the view that the provincial legislation that governs municipalities would win out, but theres going to be an argument about it, he said. Newman said he has already seen conflicting legal opinions on whether such federal laws could override the provinces. If the law passes, he expects that question will wind up in the Supreme Court of Canada. Part of why theres so much difference of viewpoint is people are struggling to find any case just like this, he said. The Canada Temperance Act allowed for municipalities to choose prohibition policies by local decision, and it did get upheld as valid federal legislation in 1896 and 1946. So that will be a precedent the federal government will try to invoke that might support its policy having priority over the provincial. The government says that the legislation, which includes a buyback program, aims to combat intimate partner and gender-based violence and self-harm involving firearms, fight gun smuggling and trafficking, help municipalities create safer communities, give young people the opportunities and resources they need to resist resist lives of crime, [and] protect Canadians from gun violence. Melanee Thomas, a political science professor at the University of Calgary, believes Bill C-21 is not a regional issue but an extension of the past 30 years of gun laws. A lot of people forget that policy history for the long gun registry coming out of the Montreal massacre, where women were killed because they were women. Rural women know that when they face gun violence, its at the end of a long gun, Thomas said. The Liberals put in the long gun registry after the long gun massacre and the Conservatives thought this was a bad idea. And so this is very much that particular partisan policy debate playing out through federalism. Thomas said its possible the Trudeau government could last long enough to pass the bill, and if not, it could campaign on it. That issue looks it would be more of an election winner for the Liberals in places like Toronto, where the city has actually said that they want to be able to ban handguns inside the city. Rod Giltaca, CEO and executive director of the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights, says the bill wont help public safety. If they were to crack down on the border and crack down on the illegal proliferation of firearms, then theyre going to reduce those numbers far farther and more quickly than by constantly attacking licensed gun owners, Giltaca said. A main issue is who is going to enforce these municipal bylaws while they are a federal criminal offence. Is it going to be bylaw officers or is it going to be the RCMP? Under current laws, anyone concerned about violence from a gun owner can ask police to seek orders from a judge to have that individuals firearms removed. Bill C-21 would allow anyone to seek such orders. Were not sure what effect this law would have, but it could be susceptible to abuse by the public or it could also have an undue burden on the courts, Giltaca said. The Liberals implemented a ban on assault rifles on May 1 following the Nova Scotia massacre. C-21 allows gun owners to keep such guns but bans any use or transfer of the weapon. However, the bill authorizes firearm use by security personnel at the Bank of Canada and the Royal Canadian Mint, as well as by any other Crown employee designated by the Governor-in-Council. Pennsylvania movie theaters ditch mask mandate Three chain movie theaters have announced that masks are no longer mandatory for moviegoers who have been vaccinated against coronavirus. Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., listens during the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hearing on her nomination to be Interior Secretary, Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Amaravati, Feb 24 : Authorities in Andhra Pradesh are probing the alleged consumption of donkey meat by some people, believing in myths that it will heal back pain and asthma as well as work as an aphrodisiac. "Donkey meat is mostly being consumed in the districts of Prakasam, Krishna, West Godavari and Guntur," animal welfare activist Gopal R. Surabathula told IANS. He said the meat is on sale every Thursday and Sunday, where even some well-educated folks could be found buying it. At least 100 donkeys are believed to be slaughtered on these occasions. Saying that the stocks of donkeys have depleted in AP, he said that the people engaging in this trade are sourcing the animals from Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. However, Surabathula said that many animal lovers have lodged cases on this illegal trade, leading to vigil on donkey transportation from other states intensifying. "I have disguised myself and am in touch with the traders," said Surabathula as he highlighted that a kilogram of donkey meat is being sold at around Rs 600 and being relished by interested people from all communities. According to the animal rights activist, the habit of eating donkey meat was believed to have originated from Stuartpuram in Prakasam district, which was notorious a hub of thieves at one time. There was a myth that drinking donkey blood and running for a longtime would enhance the sprinting potential of an individual and that thieves from this place used to indulge in this practice. In fact, a few negative characters in the recently released Tollywood hit movie, Krack, starring actor Ravi Teja and Shruti Hasan, were also depicted drinking donkey blood and sprinting. According to Surabathula, some fishermen are also believed to drink donkey blood before going to fish in the Bay of Bengal sea off Vetapalem village coast in Prakasam district. Surbathula said that a donkey costs between Rs 15,000 to Rs 17,000 and reportedly its hide commands a good price in China. He shared photographic evidence of open slaughter and sale of donkeys. Meanwhile, AP Animal Husbandry department assistant director Dhanalakshmi said that the slaughter of donkeys is illegal and confirmed that they received complaints about this trade. She shared a recent letter from the Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) about the alleged slaughter and trade of donkey meat at Chirala in Prakasam district. "In 2001 and 2011, the state government ordered that donkeys should not be slaughtered," she said, observing that the department received similar complaints a couple of years ago as well about Guntur which did not see a positive end. However, she noted that this subject falls under the purview of the local bodies. Dhanalakshmi said the Animal Husbandry department will only give technical guidance to the local bodies when needed. The AWBI wrote to the Animal Husbandry department in January to look into the complaint it received about donkey slaughter in Chirala. "The board received an email dated January 18 from Animal Rescue about illegal slaughtering of donkeys and sale of donkey meat and blood at an open place in Chirala," said the board's secretary S. K. Dutta. He highlighted that donkey slaughter is a violation of Sections 3 and 11 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960 and Sections 428 and 429 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), 1860. "It is requested to investigate the above complaint and take appropriate action as per law against the offenders and forward your action taken report to the board immediately to take further necessary action," wrote the board's secretary S. K. Dutta. Meanwhile, calls and text messages to M. Mallikarjuna Nayak, commissioner and director municipal administration to check what action was being taken on this matter, did not elicit a response till the time of publishing. Have You Seen This? Baby calmed by Imperial March Nextech AR Virtual Event Platform (VXP) Selected to Host the Student Veterans of America's 2021 National Conference; Keynote Delivered by First Lady Dr. Jill Biden; Speakers Included Gary Vaynerchuk Nextech AR Solutions Corp. ("Nextech'' or the "Company") (OTCQB: NEXCF) (NEO: NTAR.NE) (CSE: NTAR) (FSE:N29), a leading provider of virtual and augmented reality (AR) experience technologies and services for advertising, eCommerce, education, conferences and events, today announced that its Virtual Experience Platform (VXP) was selected to host the Student Veterans of America's (SVA) 2021 National Conference. The conference took place February 19-20, 2021 and is the largest annual gathering of post-9/11 veterans in the world. Elevating the academic, professional, and personal lives of American veterans, the Student Veterans of America has more than 1,500 on-campus chapters in all 50 states and three countries overseas. They represent over 750,000 student veterans and military affiliate students. Using Nextech's VXP platform, attendees had a super-secure, best in class mainstage presentation with over 40 breakout sessions as well as live Q&A's and one-on-one networking opportunities. SVA NatCon's 2021 keynote address was delivered by First Lady Dr. Jill Biden who is the daughter of a Veteran herself. Other notable speakers include entrepreneur and author Gary Vaynerchuk, actress, neuroscientist, and author Mayim Bialik and Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough. Event sponsors and exhibitors include well-known companies such as Google (News - Alert) , Prudential, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, L'OREAL and more. CEO of Nextech AR, Evan Gappelberg comments, "I'm very proud of our Nextech delivery team who flawlessly pulled off this high-profile event. It is a great honor for our young company to be selected to work with SVA to build an engaging and secure venue for veterans and high-profile thought-leaders. Seeing everyone coming together on one platform and using our technology at the highest level of business and government in the USA is an amazing accomplishment." He continues, "Our platforms continue to be in high demand, and we look forward to continuing to innovate with new AR technologies pushing the boundaries of what's possible in order to continue to serve up creative, immersive and dynamic events throughout various industries." Nextech's platforms have serviced dozens of Fortune 500 businesses such as Amazon, Viacom (News - Alert) , Johnson and Johnson, Bell Canada, UNESCO, Dell Technologies, Luxottica, Vulcan Inc , Boehringer Ingelheim, TEDx, Grundfos, and Arch Insurance. Security is a core feature of the company which reported a breakthrough in security with the help of Fastly, an edge computing company. Bringing token authentication to the edge greatly enhances security and performance, which is essential for Nextech to collaborate with additional Fortune 500 companies in the near future. To learn more about Nextech AR, please visit www.Nextechar.com About the Student Veterans of America The Student Veterans of America is the top organization leading in service, research, programs, and advocacy for veterans in higher education. Our goal is to empower students to lead their best lives through resources, networking support and higher education. Recent Company Highlights: February 17, 2021: The Company announced that its Virtual Experience Platform (VXP) will host this year's virtual Ontario Dental Association's Annual Spring Meeting taking place May 6-8, 2021. The Company announced that its Virtual Experience Platform (VXP) will host this year's virtual Ontario Dental Association's Annual Spring Meeting taking place May 6-8, 2021. February 16, 2021: The Company announced it has hired Zak Mcleod formerly of Fastly: FSLY as Senior Director of Sales - EMEA. The company is also pleased to announce that Rory Ganness formerly of Salesforce.com : CRM has joined the Nextech team as Director of Enterprise Sales-North America . The Company announced it has hired Zak Mcleod formerly of Fastly: FSLY as Senior Director of Sales - EMEA. The company is also pleased to announce that Rory Ganness formerly of Salesforce.com : CRM has joined the Nextech team as Director of Enterprise Sales-North America February 10, 2021: The Company announced the launch of version 2.0 of its AiR Show app, an application that turns your favorite music artist into a 'live' hologram that you can interact with in your living room, providing an immersive and engaging AR experience. The Company announced the launch of version 2.0 of its AiR Show app, an application that turns your favorite music artist into a 'live' hologram that you can interact with in your living room, providing an immersive and engaging AR experience. February 9, 2021: The Company announced that its Virtual Experience Platform (VXP) will host this year's virtual Canadian Surgery Forum (CSF) taking place September 21-24, 2021. The Company announced that its Virtual Experience Platform (VXP) will host this year's virtual Canadian Surgery Forum (CSF) taking place September 21-24, 2021. February 8, 2021: The Company announced the launch of new standardized chat features within its Virtual Experience Platform /VXP) and recently-launched ARoom collaborative streaming solution. Nextech will also offer the chat platform, as a stand-alone SaaS service externally, increasing the company's revenue potential for 2021. The Company announced the launch of new standardized chat features within its Virtual Experience Platform /VXP) and recently-launched ARoom collaborative streaming solution. Nextech will also offer the chat platform, as a stand-alone SaaS service externally, increasing the company's revenue potential for 2021. February 3, 2021: The Company announced that the Canadian Dairy XPO (CDX) has selected Nextech AR's Virtual Experience Platform (VXP) to host its 2021 trade show, taking place virtually on April 7-8, 2021. The Company announced that the Canadian Dairy XPO (CDX) has selected Nextech AR's Virtual Experience Platform (VXP) to host its 2021 trade show, taking place virtually on April 7-8, 2021. February 1, 2021: The Company announced that it has been invited to Microsoft's (News - Alert) Global Education Partner Summit (GEPS), taking place virtually on February 8-10, 2021. The Company announced that it has been invited to Microsoft's (News - Alert) Global Education Partner Summit (GEPS), taking place virtually on February 8-10, 2021. January 29, 2021: The Company announced Society of Physician Leaders (CSPL) has selected Nextech AR's Platform to host this year's Canadian Conference on Physician Leadership (CCPL) taking place April 26-29, 2021. The Company announced Society of Physician Leaders (CSPL) has selected Nextech AR's Platform to host this year's Canadian Conference on Physician Leadership (CCPL) taking place April 26-29, 2021. January 26, 2021: The Company announced in partnership with ARB Meetings and Events it has signed a six-figure annual contract to supply its InfernoAR video conferencing and virtual events platform to NAMD. The Company announced in partnership with ARB Meetings and Events it has signed a six-figure annual contract to supply its InfernoAR video conferencing and virtual events platform to NAMD. January 25, 2021: The Company announced that Strategic Site Selection (SSS), a 15 year old site selection leader in the meeting and events industry, has selected Nextech AR as a preferred channel partner, making Nextech's industry leading virtual experience platform and services available to SSS clients. The Company announced that Strategic Site Selection (SSS), a 15 year old site selection leader in the meeting and events industry, has selected Nextech AR as a preferred channel partner, making Nextech's industry leading virtual experience platform and services available to SSS clients. January 20, 2021 : The Company announced that Microsoft's Azure Cloud Services platform will be a standard offering across its virtual experience platforms and consumer apps enabling hyper-scalable, secure, and immersive events and applications for users. : The Company announced that platform will be a standard offering across its virtual experience platforms and consumer apps enabling hyper-scalable, secure, and immersive events and applications for users. January 15, 2021: Company has signed a renewal agreement with Poly with an initial value of $470,000 for a six-month term and the potential for additional revenue after the six months. Company has signed a renewal agreement with Poly with an initial value of and the potential for additional revenue after the six months. Record Q4 2020 Total Bookings of $7.3 million +275% growth over the same period last year CEO Evan Gappelberg purchased 250,000 shares. This purchase brings his 2020 purchased shares to 1,279,885 common shares of Nextech. Announced the launch of its ground-breaking "Genie in a Bottle" human hologram AR marketing platform and new eCommerce store for its TruLyfe brand of human supplements. and new eCommerce store for its TruLyfe brand of human supplements. Announced that it is expanding its services into the Asia-Pacific market after establishing a presence in Singapore . To support this expansion, Nextech has hired Yau Boon Lim, a technology industry veteran with over 25 years' experience in strategy, planning, marketing, operations, and business management for various industries in the Asia Pacific market. Lim has held leadership positions within global enterprise technology companies, driving marketing and strategies for blue chip global tech companies, including IBM (News - Alert) where he led marketing management, Motorola where he was Head of Strategy and Planning, and SAP where he was Vice President of Marketing for the Asia Pacific market. Lim is based out of Singapore. . To support this expansion, Nextech has hired Yau Boon Lim, a technology industry veteran with over 25 years' experience in strategy, planning, marketing, operations, and business management for various industries in the Asia Pacific market. Lim has held leadership positions within global enterprise technology companies, driving marketing and strategies for blue chip global tech companies, including IBM (News - Alert) where he led marketing management, Motorola where he was Head of Strategy and Planning, and SAP where he was Vice President of Marketing for the Asia Pacific market. Lim is based out of Singapore. Coex chooses Nextech as its hybrid virtual event platform partner. Coex is a global leader in Meetings, Incentives, Conferences & Events (MICE); it hosts over 200 exhibitions and 3,000 meetings & events in-house each year in Korea at the Coex convention and exhibition center. Coex also organizes numerous exhibitions throughout Korea and abroad, with international reach in Vietnam, Indonesia, and China. as its hybrid virtual event platform partner. Coex is a global leader in Meetings, Incentives, Conferences & Events (MICE); it hosts over 200 exhibitions and 3,000 meetings & events in-house each year in Korea at the Coex convention and exhibition center. Coex also organizes numerous exhibitions throughout Korea and abroad, with international reach in Vietnam, Indonesia, and China. The Canadian Society of Nephrology (CSN) has chosen Nextech AR's Virtual Experience Platform (VXP) to host its 2021 Annual General Meeting, taking place May 10-13. AR's Virtual Experience Platform (VXP) to host its 2021 Annual General Meeting, taking place May 10-13. Launched a new collaborative streaming solution with AI and AR enhancements, that integrates with its existing Virtual Experience Platform (VXP) and its ARitize SaaS offerings. Nextech is one of the leaders in the rapidly growing Augmented Reality market estimated to grow from USD $10.7B in 2019 and projected to reach USD $72.7B by 2024 according to Markets & Markets Research; it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 46.6% from 2019 to 2024. The company is pursuing four verticals: Virtual Experience Platform (VXP): An advanced Augmented Reality and Video Learning Experience Platform for Events, is a SaaS video platform that integrates Interactive Video, Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality in one secure platform to allow enterprises the ability to create the world's most engaging virtual event management and learning experiences. Automated closed captions and translations to over 64 languages. According to Grandview Research the global virtual events market in 2020 is $90B and expected to reach more than $400B by 2027, growing at a 23% CAGR. With Nextech's VXP platform having augmented reality, AI, end-to-end encryption, and built-in language translation for 64 languages, the company is well positioned to rapidly take market share as the growth accelerates globally. ARitize For eCommerce: The company launched its SaaS platform for webAR in eCommerce early in 2019. Nextech has a ?'full funnel' end-to-end eCommerce solution for the AR industry including its ARitize360 app for 3D product capture, 3D/AR ads, its Aritize white label app, its 'Try it On' technology for online apparel, 3D and 360-degree product views, and 'one click buy'. ARitize 3D/AR Advertising Platform: Launched in Q1 2020 the ad platform will be the industry's first end-to-end solution whereby the company will leverage its 3D asset creation into 3D/AR ads. In 2019, according to IDC (News - Alert) , global advertising spend will be about $725 billion. ARitize Hollywood Studios: The studio is in development producing immersive content using 360 video, and augmented reality as the primary display platform. To learn more, please follow us on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook, or visit our website: https://www.Nextechar.com. On behalf of the Board of Nextech AR Solutions Corp. "Evan Gappelberg" CEO and Director The NEO has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Certain information contained herein may constitute "forward-looking information" under Canadian securities legislation. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as, "will be", "looking forward" or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events, or results "will" occur. Forward-looking statements regarding the Company increasing investors awareness are based on the Company's estimates and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements of Nextech to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, including capital expenditures and other costs. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. Nextech will not update any forward-looking statements or forward-looking information that are incorporated by reference herein, except as required by applicable securities laws. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005347/en/ A new Syracuse-based production company is seeking proposals for a pilot episode for a new show filming later this year. According to Visit Syracuses film office, Hey Alec Productions is looking to shoot a project under the working title Off the Wall & Up Close in 2021. The series will focus on how a vibrant arts scene contributes to the local economy and help offer exposure to Central New York artists in an approachable and entertaining way. Each episode, including the pilot, will focus on a local featured artist; what kind of art they create and why; and a conversation about their passions over a meal or cup of coffee. Filming locations will include local restaurants, galleries or exhibits where the art is displayed, and artists work spaces. The inspiration for the series comes from other similar shows, like Jerry Seinfelds Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and knockoffs like Funny Uber Rides and Clergy in Cars Getting Coffee. According to a press release, proposals should describe how to tackle the filming of the show concept and include an estimated budget. Basic requirements for the scope of work include 4K, shooting B-roll and post-production editing, all of which captures the intent of the show. All professional sound and video equipment will need to be provided by the submitting entity. Submitted proposals must also include a portfolio of work. Proposals are currently only for the pilot episode. The pilot will then be used to generate interest and raise funding for producing the first season of eight episodes. Proposals will be accepted through Friday, March 5. Submissions and questions may be sent to info@heyalecproductions.com. The project comes from Hey Alec Productions creators Aldea Gerard and Laura Thorne, who also created the group Syracuse Artists Raising the Bar! in 2017 to help artists with support and networking in CNY. Gerard, a local artist, art curator and podcast host has focused her efforts on bolstering the arts in Syracuse through collaborative works and an appreciation of the local art community. Thorne, a social entrepreneur, was nominated for a 2020 Economic Champions award for her efforts to promote small business and opportunities for artists in Syracuse. RELATED: Falun mine, which closed in 1992, has had 28 million tonnes mined at 4% copper, 4 g/t gold, 35 g/t silver, 5% zinc and 2% lead. Ltd ( ) managing director Peter George presented on the companys Greater Falun Copper-Gold Project in Sweden, which includes a past-producing mine, during Proactives Copper Webinar this week. Falun mine, which closed in 1992, had 28 million tonnes mined at 4% copper, 4 g/t gold, 35 g/t silver, 5% zinc and 2% lead. George: We are talking about very, very big ore bodies. You dont get better than what we have where we are in a production sense, everything is already set up and ready to go. NORWICH A former Norwich man was extradited from North Carolina this week and charged with murder in connection with the July 2020 homicide of Anthony Williams, according to police. The fatal shooting that killed the 39-year-old Williams was described by police as a targeted attack, which occurred on Lake Street around 4:30 p.m. July 21, 2020, police said. Investigators identified Phillip C. Wise, 40, as a suspect in the case and obtained a warrant to charge him with murder on July 24, 2020. Wise, a former Lake Street resident, fled the area after the fatal shooting, police said. Police said he was known to have connections in surrounding states, but was eventually apprehended last month in North Carolina. Police said the Detective Division worked with U.S. Marshals over the past several months to apprehend Wise. He was held in New Hanover County Sheriffs Office Detention Facility in North Carolina on a fugitive from justice charge until he waived extradition on Feb. 15. On Tuesday, Wise was transported to Norwich police headquarters and charged with murder. He was held on a $1.5 million bond. Police said the warrant is sealed and no further information was immediately available. Anyone with information about the case can contact Detective Dennis Bialowas at 860-886-5561, ext. 3157 or diablowas@cityofnorwich.org. Anonymous tips can be called in to the tip line at 860-886-5561, ext. 4. GAZA CITY A Hamas-backed court in Gaza has backtracked on its decision requiring women to get permission from a male guardian to travel abroad after widespread criticism, yet rights advocates say the changes do not go far enough. On Feb. 10, the head of the Sharia Supreme Judicial Council in the Gaza Strip, Hassan al-Jojo, issued a ruling banning women from traveling outside of Gaza without the consent of a male guardian. Yet after pressure from international institutions and human rights groups, alongside protests held in front of Jojos office in the Gaza Strip, Jojo issued an amended ruling Feb. 21. According to the amended decision, a male guardian may submit a claim to the judicial authorities if he feels grave harm will be done should the woman under his tutelage travel outside the country. The decision to allow the woman to travel or not will be determined by the competent judge, according to the amendments. The Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights on Feb. 15 had called for Jojo to urgently rescind the ruling that he issued. The initial ruling, which came into effect on Feb. 14, prohibited unmarried virgins, previously married women and divorced women who are not a virgin from traveling abroad without the permission of a male guardian. In addition, fathers and parental grandfathers were allowed to file legal proceedings to prevent unmarried men aged 18 or over from traveling in case this would cause grave harm. The ruling had sparked public outrage and angry reactions from political, human rights and legal parties, denouncing its content and deeming it as a direct contradiction to the Palestinian Constitution and a violation of Palestinian womens rights. The Supreme Judge Department in Ramallah issued Feb. 15 a statement stressing that the travel ban decision in Gaza violates the teachings of Islam, adding that Palestinian citizens are not bound to abide by it and that the judges of Sharia courts ought not to consider it in their judgments and rulings. The department continued that the circular was issued by a party with no legal capacity. Yusef Salem, the coordinator of the legal department at the Palestinian Bar Association in the Gaza Strip, told Al-Monitor, The amendment to the [Feb. 10] circular is not satisfactory, as it gives the authority to the Sharia court to issue a final decision on allowing a woman to travel if the guardian files a case stating that there is grave harm in traveling. He added, The circular takes us back dozens of years, and it clearly violates the Palestinian Basic Law. "Why should the Sharia court have the final say in allowing or preventing the travel of a woman? Salem asked. He stressed that the definition of grave harm in the amendment is unclear, which leaves it open to interpretation by the judge. He explained that a judge may be open-minded and allow women to travel, yet others may be stricter and believe that women traveling without the consent of a male guardian is forbidden. Salem continued, The criteria that the judge relies upon to determine the grave harm must be known to everyone. He explained that the amendment was only done to absorb the anger of human rights institutions and the Palestinian people. The circular must be canceled immediately and completely, without negotiation, as implementing it is a grave legal violation since any circular must be based on legal justifications that have an origin in the Palestinian Basic Law," he added, stressing the need to launch protests to pressure the judge to cancel the decision. Regarding the grounds of the ruling, Jojo said during a meeting organized Feb. 16 by the Gaza-based Maryam Center for Culture, The circular that was published is not in violation of the Palestinian Basic Law nor does it undermine the freedoms affirmed by the law. It is based on the powers of the Sharia judiciary. The circular was issued because there are pertinent lawsuits and cases in the courts that necessitate organizing the community relations within the framework of jurisprudence in the law, Jojo noted. He explained that the controversial provisions were issued according to the legal texts used in the Ottoman Personal Status Law and the Egyptian Family Law of 1954. Mustafa Ibrahim, an advocacy coordinator at the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights in the Gaza Strip, told Al-Monitor that redrafting the circular is not enough, as he has to rescind the ruling altogether, because if the circular remains, the restrictions will remain too. The circular violates the personal freedom of a person guaranteed by Article 11 of the Palestinian Basic Law, whereby the arrest, search, imprisonment or restriction of anyones freedom in any way or restricting their movement is not prohibited unless by a judicial order issued by a competent, independent and impartial court in which defendants retain their rights to defend themselves something that is disregarded in the circular, as well as in the redrafting of the circular, Ibrahim said. He added, By reaching the legal age of 18, children have full legal capacity and their parents cannot prevent them from traveling except in accordance with legal procedures. The freedom of residence and movement is guaranteed by the law in accordance with Article 20 of the Basic Law. He added that issuing such a circular is not within the powers of the Sharia Supreme Judicial Council, which does not have any remit of jurisprudence. It appears that the circular was issued to respond to one particular case, which should have been dealt with separately without the need to issue a ruling, Ibrahim said. Yet it seems there have been unannounced restrictions on women traveling without the consent of a male guardian in the enclave, even before the controversial ruling. Reem, a pseudonym for a 27-year-old lawyer in Gaza, told Al-Monitor, I went for training in Egypt last year, and I was surprised that the female police officer at the border asked women to wait in a designated place, and required them to give the phone numbers of their parents to make sure they were traveling with their consent. I could not object to this because otherwise they would not have let me travel, she said. Reem recounted that the policewoman who called her mother was provoked when she learned that the latter had given her consent to her daughter to travel. She asked my mother how she could allow me to leave Gaza by myself and bombarded her with questions, prompting my mother to tell her lies and assure her that we had relatives in Egypt that would receive me, she said. I almost missed the bus transporting women at the crossing because of this interrogation. Luckily my colleagues stopped the bus from leaving the Egyptian terminal, she added. Suheir al-Baba, a lawyer for the legal department at the Womens Affairs Center in Gaza, told Al-Monitor, It would have been more appropriate for the Sharia Judicial Council to issue circulars on the problems and suffering of Palestinian women such as custody of children after divorce instead of issuing edicts violating their dignity and aggravating their suffering. This circular will create several social problems. She said, This ruling comes at a time when Saudi Arabia a strict Islamic state has recently abolished the guardianship system, which has been around since the kingdoms inception, requiring women to obtain permission from a male guardian to travel. And now Gaza is imposing this rule. This should be stopped and rescinded immediately. Ezzat Qassem, a feminist activist, told Al-Monitor, It appears that the circular was issued for specific considerations, and at a time when Palestine is getting ready for elections. She said that issuing the ruling without the approval of the authorities in the West Bank reinforces the Palestinian division. It seems that the decision contradicts the statements of the two sides [Hamas and Fatah] that the division is coming to an end," she said. "The circular reinforces patriarchy in Gaza." Qassem stressed that violations of the law are common in Gaza in light of inaction by the Hamas government and that whoever issued this circular was well aware that it violates the Palestinian Basic Law and human rights in the Gaza Strip. Laws should be designed to regulate rights, not to violate them, she said. Sikar: Renewing threat to the Central Government, Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader, Rakesh Tikait has said that if the three farm laws are not repealed, the farmers will hold a march to the Parliament on 40 lakh tractors. Speaking at a farmers rally in Sikar in Rajasthan on Tuesday, Tikait said, "Our next call will be for a march to Parliament. We will tell them before marching. This time it wont be just 4 lakh tractors but 40 lakh tractors will go there if farm laws are not taken back." The BKU leader also demanded that a new law should be enacted ensuring minimum support price for farmers. On February 18 at a kisan mahapanchayat at Kharak Punia in Haryana, Tikait said the protesting farmers will take the agitation to the poll-bound West Bengal if the Centre does not concur with their demands against the new farm laws. He again reiterated the claim the next day and said, "Talks are going on about taking out a tractor rally to West Bengal. Farmers broke barricades to enter Delhi and indulged in vandalism across several parts of the national capital during their Kisan tractor rally organised to protest against the Centre`s three new farm laws on January 26. Several public and private properties were damaged in acts of vandalism by the protestors. A total of 22 FIRs have been filed by the Delhi Police with one of them mentioning the incident at ITO where a farmer died after his tractor overturned. Farmers have been protesting on the different borders of the national capital since November 26 against the three newly enacted farm laws - Farmers` Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; the Farmers Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and farm Services Act 2020 and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020. Live TV ADVERTISEMENT A 27-year-old auto mechanic, Michael Adeniyi, on Wednesday appeared before an Ikeja Magistrates Court for allegedly beating up his customer and knocking out his tooth. The police charged Mr Adeniyi, who resides in Agege, Lagos, with obtaining money under false pretences and causing grievous harm. The prosecution counsel, Raji Akeem, told the court that the defendant committed the offence on January 4 on Oyemekun St., Pen Cinema, Agege. Mr Akeem alleged that the complainant, Salau Adebayo, gave his tricycle to the defendant to repair and he charged N7,000 for workmanship. He said the complainant gave the defendant the money and he asked Mr Adebayo to return in two days for his tricycle. After two days, the prosecution said the complainant returned to the defendants shop and discovered that the defendant did not do anything on the tricycle. He said that an argument broke out between Messrs Adeniyi and Adebayo and the defendant beat him up, removing a tooth in the process. The defendant, however, pleaded not guilty to the charge. The magistrate, O.I. Adelaja, admitted the defendant to bail in the sum of N50,000 with two sureties in like sum. The magistrate adjourned the case until March 31 for mention. (NAN) All 77 BJP MLAs in Bengal to have central security cover Bengal elections 2021: Bihar model of polling to be followed India oi-Vicky Nanjappa Kolkata, Feb 24: The Election Commission of India (ECI) will follow the Bihar model, taken up last year for conducting the assembly polls amid the coronavirus pandemic, during the upcoming election in West Bengal, a senior official at the CEO office said on Tuesday. The ECI has already started inoculation of the officials involved with the polling and the entire process would get over before the election starts, he said. "Covid protocol is still applicable in West Bengal. We will stick to the protocol followed during the assembly election in Bihar," the official said. West Bengal not singled out, central force deployment routine in poll bound states Candidates for the election would also have to follow the protocols, he said. Officials inside polling booths will wear masks, face shields and gloves and use sanitiser on the premises. Once inside polling stations, voters will have their body temperatures checked, the official said. He said that the body temperature of a voter would be checked for a second time if the person is found having a temperature beyond the permissible limit of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. "If the person''s body temperature is found high for the second time too, the voter will be asked to come back to cast vote in the final hour of the day (5 pm-6 pm)," he added. Suspected Covid-19 patients will be allowed to cast their votes only after others finish exercising their franchise. Electors would be provided with disposable gloves for one hand, which they will use for signing and to press the button of an EVM, the official said. "The gloves must be thrown to dustbins kept outside the polling stations. The bins fitted with GPS tracking devices will be taken to nearest hospitals where the gloves will be destroyed," he said. Election to the 294-member West Bengal assembly is due in April-May. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 9:44 [IST] Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Paulo Guedes joined the administration of Brazils Jair Bolsonaro in 2019 as a super minister charged with steering Latin Americas largest economy through an ambitious program of privatizations, deregulation and tax and spending cuts. Two years later, its the president whos increasingly calling the shots and moving away from his star ministers market-friendly agenda, despite acknowledging openly that he knows little about the economy. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers Bolsonaros decision to replace the head of state-controlled oil company Petrobras after a feud over fuel prices sent Brazilian markets into a tailspin on Monday, with investors viewing the move as a sign that the Guedes era is drawing to a close. Guedess political future is a matter of concern for many investors who see him as the last line of defense against Bolsonaros natural inclination toward interventionist policies. The stakes are rising as Brazils economic recovery sputters and Bolsonaro increasingly dwells on the 2022 presidential campaign, a race that is beginning to look like an uphill struggle as his popularity drops following the expiry of a program of pandemic aid to the poor. Guedes is now in a complicated spot," said Sergio Vale, chief economist with MB Associados. The impression is that he no longer has the strength he had in 2019," said Vale. With the president looking at re-election, prices climbing as they are and his popularity this low, the economy minister ends up being steam rolled -- like he was now." The Petrobras CEOs ouster underscores Guedess waning standing in the cabinet since it mirrors a similar confrontation in 2019, when the president suspended a planned fuel-price hike by the oil company. Guedes responded then that he would fix" the situation. This time, hes remained silent as he watched the treatment of Roberto Castello Branco, the outgoing Petrobras chief executive officer who was a colleague from the University of Chicago. Guedes personally invited Castello Branco to join the government and help him implement the pro-market economic policies for which the school is famous. On Tuesday, Guedes canceled his participation at an online event discussing Brazils bid to join the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. His office said he was busy negotiating his reform agenda with the lower house speaker, but declined to comment for the story. Obstinate, Defeated The fact that Bolsonaro no longer shows any scruples about undermining Guedess agenda, as one person familiar with the presidents thinking described it, leaves investors and former members of the economic team wondering what is keeping him in office. Guedes is resilient, obstinate and determined, but he did not realize that he was defeated," Salim Mattar, former privatizations secretary and a close friend of the minister, said in an interview to newspaper O Estado de S.Paulo over the weekend. Mattar stepped down in 2020 saying he was frustrated with lack of progress in the privatization program. Later on Tuesday, Bolsonaro praised his economy minister, saying he plays a key role in the fight against Covid-19 as he holds the key to government finances. Guedes doesnt want to step down before building an economic legacy he can be proud of, according to three government officials close to him. Yet he has started to signal that his future in government hinges on the fate of an emergency bill that lawmakers are set to start voting on Thursday. The constitutional amendment would allow the government to bypass fiscal rules for a second consecutive year to provide another round of cash handouts to poor Brazilians. In exchange, it establishes a new crisis protocol for future emergency spending. Even if approved as suggested by Guedes, the proposal pales in comparison to his initial plans to reinstate fiscal austerity in Brazil this year. The Economy Ministry declined to comment for this story. The outlook for additional austerity reforms in congress also looks uncertain under the leadership of Lower House Speaker Arthur Lira, elected this year to replace Rodrigo Maia. While more politically aligned with Bolsonaro and willing to deliver on some reforms, the new speaker has no commitment to Guedess agenda, according to a top lawmaker close to him. Instead, the legislator said, Guedes will have to navigate even more troubled waters from now on since Bolsonaro is making it increasingly clear that hes not willing to follow the recommendations of his economic advisers. Of course the new house leadership is more tolerant of interventionism," said Kim Kataguiri, a lawmaker critical of Bolsonaro who is deputy leader of the center-right Democrats party. Lira has been elected on a public spending platform and, behind the scenes, he is a fierce critic of economic liberalism." This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. New Delhi, Feb 24 : Facebook India Vice President and MD Ajit Mohan on Wednesday told the Supreme Court that the Delhi Assembly has no legislative power to set up a panel to examine the issue of peace and harmony. Senior advocate Harish Salve, representing Mohan, submitted that his client has right to silence, that law and order in Delhi falls under the domain of the Centre, and setting up panel on peace and harmony was not the core function of the Delhi Assembly. A bench comprising Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Dinesh Maheshwari and Hrishikesh Roy reserved the judgment in the matter after counsel representing the Centre, the Facebook official and the Assembly panel completed their arguments. Mohan had moved the top court challenging the summonses issued by Assembly's Peace and Harmony Committee in connection with Delhi riots last year. Salve argued that there are two broad silos, one is existence of powers in compulsion of appearance and second is competence, and that the Delhi Assembly is wrong on both. He insisted that his client has the right to make a decision whether he intends to go or not. "In the noisy times of the present, right to silence is a virtue," he submitted. Senior advocate A.M. Singhvi, appearing for the Assembly panel, had submitted before the court that the Assembly has the power to summon. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing the Centre, contested this argument and stated law and order in in Centre's domain. The Delhi Assembly had also informed the Supreme Court that any senior and responsible officer from Facebook can appear before it, instead of Mohan. The Delhi government's Peace and Harmony Committee had summoned Mohan as an expert witness on the misuse of Facebook for disseminating hateful content during the February 2020 riots. The committee had issued summonses to Mohan on two occasions allegedly stating that his non-appearance would be treated as breach of privilege. Mohan's plea said that on September 2, 2020, at the request of the Parliamentary Committee, he appeared before it. "Specifically, the Committee is seeking to make a 'determination of the veracity of allegations levelled against Facebook' in the Delhi riots, which intrudes into subjects exclusively allocated to the Union of India", he said in his plea. BRECKSVILLE, Ohio -- The Brecksville-based Cuyahoga Valley Republicans club has acknowledged that it plugged a Jan. 6 bus trip to Washington D.C. on its website, although it noted that it didnt sponsor or organize the trip. The admission appeared Jan. 28 on the Cuyahoga Valley Republicans website, two days after a Jan. 26 cleveland.com article showed that the club had promoted a DC Protest Bus Trip. The article questioned whether the club itself had planned the Jan. 6 trip to Washington, where some Donald Trump supporters became violent and broke into the Capitol building. The acknowledgement also came nine days after a Jan. 19 City Council meeting during which Mayor Jerry Hruby, a Cuyahoga Valley Republicans founding member; council members, some of whom are members of the club; and Republican club President Dominic Sciria excoriated residents who had inquired about the clubs involvement in the bus trip to Washington. The residents were members of A Better Brecksville, a political group with a strong Facebook presence. The group claimed that Cuyahoga Valley Republicans had indeed sent a bus to the Capitol Jan. 6 and asked whether the club and its members -- including Sciria and Councilwoman Kim Veras, who is the Republican clubs recording secretary -- supported violent action against the U.S. government. Hruby, Sciria, Veras and all council members have condemned the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Hruby has stated that anyone who commits violence or destroys property should be prosecuted. During the Jan. 19 meeting, city officials -- including Sciria, who is a member of the Brecksville Planning Commission -- accused A Better Brecksville of spreading false information. Hruby said he knew of no busload of people that headed to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Veras said A Better Brecksville was factually incorrect in suggesting that Cuyahoga Valley Republicans had sent a bus to Washington. Sciria, in a letter read to council Jan. 19, said the claims that his club organized a bus trip to Washington were blatantly false. However, no one at the Jan. 19 council meeting clarified that Cuyahoga Valley Republicans had promoted a Jan. 6 Washington bus trip organized by Ohio Patriots, a separate group, or that by Jan. 19, the Republican club had removed that posting from its website. When asked whether the public was misled by those omissions, Hruby and council members Lou Carouse Jr. and Laura Redinger, who are also both members of the Republican club, said they didnt know Cuyahoga Valley Republicans had promoted the Jan. 6 Ohio Patriots bus trip when they spoke at the Jan. 19 council meeting. It has been a long time, probably years, since I have looked at the (Cuyahoga Valley Republicans) website, Carouse -- who, like Hruby, is a charter member of the group -- told cleveland.com in an email. Hruby told cleveland.com, I did not know of a bus trip notice by (Cuyahoga Valley Republicans) or anyone else. Yet Sciria told cleveland.com that by the Jan. 19 council meeting, it was public knowledge that Cuyahoga Valley Republicans had posted a link to information regarding the Ohio Patriots Jan. 6 bus trip. Anyone following the Cuyahoga Valley Republicans knew that, Sciria said in an email to cleveland.com. However, Sciria didnt respond in time for this story when asked when or why Cuyahoga Valley Republicans removed the Ohio Patriots bus trip posting from its website after Jan. 6. Sciria said it was A Better Brecksville that misled the public. He called on the group to retract its claim that Cuyahoga Valley Republicans sponsored a bus trip to Washington Jan. 6 and to apologize, adding that the group had jumped to wrong conclusions. They didnt bother to make any inquiries, Sciria said. They just made inaccurate claims. Clearly, they were eager to try to paint a picture that suited their purposes. Rebecca Kapur, cofounder of A Better Brecksville, said Cuyahoga Valley Republicans -- not her group -- was spreading false and misleading information. She said the Republican club clearly played a role in buses going to D.C. on Jan. 6, and that the club was splitting hairs by saying it didnt sponsor the trip. Kapur said that when Cuyahoga Valley Republicans promoted the Jan. 6 bus trip on its website, the club didnt clarify that another group was involved. (Cuyahoga Valley Republicans) seemed very excited to promote this bus trip, Kapur told cleveland.com in an email. Its not really relevant whether they directly arranged and paid for a bus. Veras, the recording secretary of the Republican club and a council member, didnt return emails. The L word In its Jan. 28 website posting, Cuyahoga Valley Republicans said it wasnt aware that any of its members had participated in the Jan. 6 bus trip that was organized by Ohio Patriots. Brad Lynnet, who said he founded Ohio Patriots for the specific purpose of organizing a bus trip to Washington D.C. on Jan. 6, told cleveland.com that no other group helped him do so. Lynnet said his plan started with one bus, but ended up with seven buses and 372 people. The original departure point was in Valley View, but due to a mix-up, the buses left for Washington from the parking lot of a former Kmart about a mile away. We wanted to make noise (in Washington), but not violence, Lynnet said. In a recent BuzzFeed article, Lynnet said he didnt enter the Capitol building Jan. 6 and wasnt aware of anyone who did. He did witness the break-in, however. Cuyahoga Valley Republicans said A Better Brecksville was libelous in saying that the Republican group had sponsored a Washington bus trip. Its not the first time the club and/or Sciria has used the word libel when referring to A Better Brecksville. This is harassment, driven by misinformation and ignorance, and is endemic of the poison of national politics seeping into our local communities, the Cuyahoga Valley Republicans Jan. 28 posting said. Sciria, in his email to cleveland.com, said Cuyahoga Valley Republicans has publicized events for every Republican president for 20 years, so it should have come as no surprise that it did the same for Trumps Jan. 6 rally in Washington. Political firestorm Kapur said she first noticed Jan. 9, three days after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol building, that Cuyahoga Valley Republicans had removed the posting about the Washington D.C. bus trip from its website. Kapur then learned through internet research that Ohio Patriots had organized a bus trip and wondered if it was the same trip Cuyahoga Valley Republicans had promoted. Her concern grew when she noticed that Ohio Patriots, on its website, had provided a link to a website for the Proud Boys, members of which have been charged with criminal conspiracy in the Jan. 6 violence at the Capitol. In fact, Ohio Patriots on Monday (Feb. 22) had a page on its website dedicated to the Proud Boys, with the purpose of educating those who have been misled by (mainstream media) disinformation campaigns. Proud Boys should not be feared unless you are among those trying to destroy this great nation, the Ohio Patriots website said. Kapur dismissed Cuyahoga Valley Republicans demand for an apology. She said its that group that should apologize to the people of Brecksville for trying to distract attention away from its own distribution of false and misleading information. Regarding the accusation of libelous statements, my understanding is that libel requires the aggrieved party to suffer damages, not just have their feelings hurt, Kapur said. Kapur said that in addition to the bus trip, Sciria and Veras, as Cuyahoga Valley Republicans officers, signed a letter asking three congressmen to object to Electoral College votes cast for Joe Biden from six states. The letter and the bus trip together prompted reasonable questions from A Better Brecksville, she said. Asking questions of elected officials should not elicit a firestorm of upset officials, but should result in calm explanations, Kapur said. Instead of a council meeting with accusations by the mayor that we were trying to suppress First Amendment rights ... perhaps Ms. Veras could have simply made a statement, clarified her beliefs and intent, and we all could have moved on with that knowledge, Kapur said. At the Jan. 19 council meeting, Law Director David Matty said Veras was within her First Amendment rights to express her political opinions to the three congressmen. Read more from the Sun Star Courier. Portugal is aiming to have 70 percent of its population vaccinated by some point over summer, Health Minister Marta Temido said Monday. Temido's comments at a news conference came with the number of new cases in the country markedly declining after having suffered the world's worst rate of infection in January. So far, some 294,000 people have received a first vaccine dose and 106,000 have been administered two doses. National vaccine programme coordinator Henrique Gouveia e Melo said herd immunity "should be achieved in August or early September" if "the forecasts on the availability of vaccines are confirmed." The vaccination programme should accelerate "from the second quarter to reach the rate of 100,000 vaccines per day" compared to the current average of 22,000, he said. After weeks as the country with the greatest number of infections in relation to its population, Portugal recorded the strongest decline last week with a 51-percent drop in new cases to 2,100 per day. Health authorities said Monday that the country, in lockdown since mid-January, had over 24 hours recorded 61 deaths from Covid-19 and 549 new cases, the lowest number of new infections since the beginning of October. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. New York: The Committee to Protect Journalists, New York-based non-profit, non-governmental organization that promotes press freedom and defends the rights of journalists, has called upon the Indian government to drop investigations into the work of journalists Mir Junaid, Sajad Gul and Yashraj Sharma and allow them to report without interference. On January 30, Indian police in occupied Jammu and Kashmir opened criminal investigations into Sharma, a reporter at The Kashmirwalla news website, and Junaid, a reporter at The Kashmiriyat news website, on the fake charge of incitement. Fahad Shah, editor-in-chief of The Kashmirwalla, and Qazi Shibli, news editor of The Kashmiriyat, both spoke to CPJ over phone and informed the global journalist protection body about the concocted charges leveled against Kashmiri journalists by Indian police in the territory. On February 12, police opened an investigation into Gul, a freelance journalist who contributes to The Kashmirwalla, for allegedly taking part in a demonstration against home demolitions in Hajin, according to Gul, who spoke to CPJ via phone. Journalists Yashraj Sharma, Mir Junaid, and Sajad Gul should be allowed to do their jobs without harassment, intimidation, and criminal investigations from Kashmiri authorities, said Aliya Iftikhar, CPJs senior Asia researcher. Jammu and Kashmir Police must drop their investigations into all three journalists and stop targeting journalists because of their reporting. The investigation into Sharma and Junaid concerns reports they published on January 27 in The Kashmirwalla and The Kashmiriyat, which each quoted the chairperson of a school in the southern Kashmiri city of Shopian, who said Indian Army authorities had pressured the school to celebrate Republic Day, according to Shah and Shibli. Shah told CPJ that The Kashmirwalla outlet stands by its story. The investigation is based on a complaint filed to police by an unnamed Indian army official, who accused Sharma and Junaid of spreading fake news. Both Shah and Shibli told CPJ that their reporters were not given copies of the complaint, and they found out about the police investigation through social media. On February 2, a court rejected Shah and Sharmas petition for pre-emptive bail, which would exempt the journalists from detention during the investigation, and both are now petitioning IIOJK High Court, Shah told CPJ. The investigation into Gul stems from an article he published on February 9, in which residents of Hajin, a town in Bandipora district, in north Kashmir, said that local government official Ghulam Mohammad Butt had threatened them and forcefully demolished their homes, Gul told CPJ. Gul denied partaking in such a demonstration, and told CPJ that he was in Srinagar, about 40 miles from Bandipora, on February 10. Gul also told CPJ that the police had not given him a copy of the complaint, and have merely mentioned the counts on which he is being investigated. CPJ contacted Amritpal Singh, senior superintendent of police for Shopian, Colonel K. Arun of the armys Additional Directorate General of Public Information, and Sajad Malik, police deputy superintendent of Hajin, for comment via messaging app, but did not receive any responses. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Grandpa was not a man of very many words. His vocabulary was not strong as he never went to school. He could not read or write, but one day, I noticed a sign over the side of the barn where Grandma kept her laying hens. The sign said Nidification. The sign was tattered and worn. You could tell it was older than the barn. He said, Years ago I was a deck hand in the Merchant Marines. We went to Italy to unload some cargo. While at the dock, I found an old man making bird houses. I asked him how much for one. He looked puzzled at me as he could speak no English. Worse, I could not speak Latin or any other foreign language. I only spoke good old southern country redneck slang. I pointed at the bird house and he pointed at a sign that said Nidification. Soon, together we understood that I wanted to buy a bird house. So, with a big smile he said, Nidification. I nodded yes. He was a kind man. After I paid him for the bird house, he gave me his bird house selling sign, too. A ship mate told me later that this was Latin in origin and means "to build a nest." He said now Nidicolous is used to mean "living in a nest." Being at a lost as to the meaning of the word and wondering why Grandpa would put up a sign like this was puzzling, so I asked him.He said, Years ago I was a deck hand in the Merchant Marines. We went to Italy to unload some cargo. While at the dock, I found an old man making bird houses. I asked him how much for one. He looked puzzled at me as he could speak no English. Worse, I could not speak Latin or any other foreign language. I only spoke good old southern country redneck slang. I pointed at the bird house and he pointed at a sign that said Nidification. Soon, together we understood that I wanted to buy a bird house. So, with a big smile he said, Nidification. I nodded yes. He was a kind man. After I paid him for the bird house, he gave me his bird house selling sign, too. A ship mate told me later that this was Latin in origin and means "to build a nest." He said now Nidicolous is used to mean "living in a nest." Grandpa told me, "You know a nest is a place of rest, retreat, or lodging. In other words a home, a place of refuge.Nests are built using several different types of materials. They are placed in various places to provide shelter, safety, warmth and protection. Many animals seek natural cavities in the ground or in trees to build their nests. Each nest is a labor of love and commitment. So are the nests your Grandma laying hens are in. She took real care in making them just right for her chickens. So I hung my bird building sign so the chickens would know where their nests were. I figured it was the right thing to do as most of those chickens were not local hens, but so foreign that came from nearly twenty miles away. You could tell, they cackled differently." Grandpa said, "You know one day after sitting under my favorite shade tree, I thought we humans also build a nest, but we call it a house. Like all animals that build a nest, we gather our favorite things around us to create a safe dwelling place providing us warmth, comfort, security, beauty, and peace. Each of our homes is unique to us. They reflect our personality, our passions, interests, and family life. We build our nest to make it our home. While your Grandma and my house was not filled with lots of material things, it was filled with love and laughter with all seven kids. Grandpa said after a while while looking at the new church in his old cornfield, "I realized that it too was a sort of a nest. Today's church house is like a nest. A place of rest, retreat and refuge from the World. They are built by different denominations united in the adherence of their beliefs and practices. They offer a place for believers to praise, give thanks, worship, sing, reflect and rest with the Creator. Although they may differ in doctrine, all churches are held together not by brick and mortar but by a body of writings considered sacred. The Scriptures." 2 Timothy 3:16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. Grandpa said there is the mystery of the church as a nest. It is not a building. Its a people, with or without a building. A nest united with a labor of brotherly love and commitment. It has a builder, and the builder is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus builds the church. The place where love, grace and mercy dwells. When we belong to Christ, we nest and dwell." Psalm 18:4 One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple. The nest or church is a place of peace and brotherly love. It is built upon the confession of Jesus as Gods Son and Christ. The church is engaged in persuading unbelievers to become disciples of Jesus which the Great Commission defines as baptizing them and teaching them to obey Christ. John 13:34 A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. 35 By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. Psalm 91:2 I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust We all are welcomed to enter the refuge, a sinner. With the stirring of our hearts and upon our confession and belief of Jesus as God's son and Christ, we are filled and saved with peace, joy, love and forgiveness. The church is successful in Nidification. Its nest grows when people show love one to another. Its members like my chickens have a safe place to roost. Psalm 84-3 Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O LORD of hosts, my King, and my God. 4 Blessed are they that dwell in thy house: they will be still praising thee. Find a church, nest and build on its foundation. Share love to cushion the hardships of others. Be blessed and praise the Lord. --- Charles Finney ccfinney@yahoo.com Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ATLANTA With her children struggling in many classes last spring, Kelli Rivera became so frustrated with how her suburban Atlanta district was handling the coronavirus pandemic that she withdrew them to home-school them. Theyre back in public school and mostly attending class in person. For now. Rivera is thinking of enrolling her younger son in private school next year, and she hopes the state of Georgia might help her pay for it with an expansion of school choice programs. Weve been just a public school family forever, without any intention or desire to leave, Rivera said. But when the pandemic hit and we moved into virtual schooling, it really wasnt working for us. School choice advocates and lawmakers in many states are counting on the frustrations of parents like Rivera to bolster efforts to pass or expand laws allowing families to use public money to pay for private school or to help teach their own children at home. ADVERTISEMENTSkip ................................................................ Some sort of school choice program already gets public money in 29 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, according to EdChoice, a group that supports the concept. Backers say they are optimistic about making new gains this year as surveys nationwide have indicated private schools have been more likely to offer in-person instruction. If you talk to any parent of a school-aged child, what youll find, literally across the board, is theyre just mad, frustrated, that traditional public school districts failed to deliver education to their children, said American Federation for Children President John Schilling, who lobbies for school choice programs. What the pandemic has laid bare is just how inflexible the K-12 system is. Opponents argue vouchers, publicly funded educational savings accounts and tax credits for private school scholarships will sap funding for the traditional public schools, which could be particularly damaging for districts that serve low-income families and face overwhelming challenges. Voucher programs generally target students in less affluent districts where schools are struggling, but opponents argue in some cases they amount to unnecessary subsidies for families who could pay their own way for private school. Any loss in funding also could further hobble public schools ability to help children who have lost ground as districts struggle to reopen or soldier on in hybrid or distance-learning scenarios. They drain money from public schools and they allow private schools to discriminate in all kinds of ways, said Jessica Levin of the Education Law Center, which is part of the anti-voucher group Public Funds for Public Schools. She said private schools arent required to admit students, often dont have their academic outcomes publicly tracked, and may not be equipped to offer special education services. While it remains early in many states legislative sessions, there are fresh proposals in states that already offer abundant subsidies for private and homeschooling, such as Indiana, Arizona and Florida, and in states where there are none, such as Missouri. The proposals appear more likely to pass in Republican-controlled states, where schools have been more likely to open for in-person instruction. In Georgia, Republican state Rep. Wes Cantrell has introduced a bill that would create educational savings accounts, which would let parents direct money to private school tuition or home-schooling costs. The proposal would give the money to various groups including students in districts not offering full in-person instruction. The major concern Ive had over the last year has been from parents who dont have a public school offering in-person classes, Cantrell said. If the public schools are not meeting their needs, they should have another choice. Rivera said grades for both her sons, a sixth grader and sophomore, have been terrible during periods of virtual learning. Last spring, she home-schooled them, spending money on computers and curriculum. She said this year has been bumpy as well, even though the 107,000-student Cobb County district has been offering in-person classes four days a week. She said her sophomore is intent on sticking with his public high school, but shes considering enrolling her younger son next fall in a private school that provides two days a week of in-person instruction, with parents home-schooling the other days. Tuition is a concern. As it stands, Im not sure we could swing it, Rivera said. In Missouri, where school choice measures have repeatedly failed, Republican Senate Majority Leader Caleb Rowden said his top priority is a bill giving tax breaks for donations to organizations providing scholarships to private schools or other public schools outside a students home district. Ive got a lot of left and center-left friends who are more frustrated with the public school system than they ever have been in their lives, said Rowden, who sends his child to a private Christian school. They have now recognized they have so little control over the say of their kids education that something needs to be done about it. In Indiana, which already has one of the nations largest voucher programs, Republicans are trying to increase the number of students getting assistance by up to 40% next year by opening eligibility to wealthier families. Iowas Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds has proposed a bill that would make open enrollment available in all school districts, expand charter school options and create an education savings account allowing parents to move a child to another public or private school, taking the taxpayer money allocated for that student with them. Rivera herself wonders about the tension between her desires to support her kids and support public schools. I would love to put my kids where I can offer certainty, she said, but I dont know what that does to our schools, I dont know the stresses it puts on our teachers. ___ Associated Press writers David Pitt in Des Moines, Iowa; David A. Lieb in Jefferson City, Missouri; Lindsay Whitehurst in Salt Lake City and Casey Smith in Indianapolis contributed to this report. Assam: The steady decrease in extremism continues India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Feb 24: Over 1,000 extremists laid down their arms before Assam Chief Minister, Sarbananda Sonowal. The extremists belonged to five organisations- People Democratic Council of Karbi Longri (PDCK), Karbi Longri North Cachar Hills Liberation Front, Karbi People's Liberation Tigers, Kuki Liberation Front and United People's Liberation Army. These organisations were active in Assam's Karbi Anglong. Police officials said that 1,040 members of these groups deposited 338 firearms. The move came after Ingti Kathar Songbijit, the chief of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland joining the mainstream. He left the group to form the PDCK. BSF reviews left wing extremism situation in Odisha Sonowal said that peace is central to development and together we shall build a stronger Assam. Prior to this 1,515 cadres of different extremist groups received a one time grant of RS 4 lakh. On the other hand 3,702 have been receiving a stipend of Rs 6,000 per month. Hiren Nath, IGP of Assam said that under the state government's Swabalambam scheme, 1,800 cadre were provided training in various skills and 1,192 of them received Rs 1 lakh each for entrepreneurship in the farm sector. There has been a steady decrease in extremism in Assam since 2016. 1,914 extremists have been arrested and 70 were killed since 2016. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 8:16 [IST] (CNN) The US Justice Department is facing a tougher climb as it argues Capitol riot defendants should stay in jail with federal judges pressing prosecutors to explain possible inconsistencies in their arguments in some of the most high-profile cases related to the insurrection this week. The apparent calculus prosecutors are using to determine whether they ask for jail time came to a head twice in court Tuesday, as they argued for the detention of a member of the pro-Trump extremist group the Proud Boys who carried an axe handle wrapped in a flag, and for an alleged conspirator among the paramilitary group the Oath Keepers who was suited up in armor at the riot and had said she was leading a group in response to the President's and others' signals. Federal judges have landed all over the map in their decisions to keep alleged Capitol rioters detained, with many judges rejecting the Justice Department's initial requests to keep defendants in jail pending trial, and several appeals ongoing. As the cases unfurl and count into the hundreds, the Justice Department is developing some patterns outside the obvious arguments for keeping a defendant in jail before trial. For defendants that could go either way based on their charges and criminal history alone, prosecutors have tried to push threats related to weapons they may have carried and actions they took after January 6 in making the cases for detention. In the Proud Boy case on Tuesday, Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, DC, pressed prosecutors to explain why one of more than a dozen Capitol riot defendants affiliated with the group should stay in jail, when the Justice Department previously took no issue with the release of other Proud Boys leaders who were arrested. Howell, considering whether to keep Kansas City-area Proud Boy William Chrestman detained, asked about the release of Proud Boys Hawaii leader Nicholas Ochs, who allegedly organized support before January 6 then etched the words "murder the media" on a door in the Capitol alongside his co-defendant Nicholas DeCarlo, who was also released after his arrest. Howell also asked about comparing Chrestman to Proud Boys leader, Enrique Tarrio, who was charged in local court before January 6 for destroying a Black Lives Matter flag in Washington, DC, and illegal ammunition position. Ochs, DeCarlo and Tarrio have pleaded not guilty, and Chrestman's case a conspiracy case linked to several other associates of the Proud Boys is still in an early stage. "Is it all because of the axe handle the defendant (Chrestman) was carrying into the Capitol?" the judge asked about Chrestman on Tuesday. Prosecutors explained Chrestman was more of a danger than the other Proud Boy rioters because they say he had carried the weapon into the Capitol. Howell would agree. "He wasn't coming to stroll around the reflecting pool, looking at the monuments. He was coming with a gas mask ... an axe handle. There was some preplanning there," Howell said, ordering Chrestman to stay in jail pending trial. She also noted Chrestman hadn't expressed any remorse, hadn't disavowed the Proud Boys and hadn't conceded the legitimacy of President Joe Biden's election. His attorneys had argued he wasn't dangerous after January 6. Howell has reacted strongly in recent weeks to the actions of the rioters in several cases where the Justice Department has argued to keep them in jail, often siding with prosecutors. But that's not how all judges have handled the arguments and legal questions over which defendants should stayed detained. In a separate hearing on Tuesday afternoon in the same Washington courthouse, the Justice Department faced a tougher reception as it tried to keep alleged Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins in jail. "These are issues that are going to affect not only Ms. Watkins but dozens and dozens of people who are coming through the pipeline," Judge Amit Mehta said. Watkins has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy and other charges related to January 6, and her attorney has said she was not violent that day. But the Department of Justice has shared her text messages and statements she made to argue she relished the insurrection and remained indignant afterward. They say she discussed wanting to go "underground" if Biden were elected, and texted that a news reporter's coverage of the Oath Keepers should prompt the group to "sue harder. Class action style." "It's not clear to me ... what the government is relying on" to make the case for detention, Mehta said at Watkins' hearing on Tuesday. He did not make a decision on whether she must stay in jail, pushing additional arguments to Friday. Watkins remains detained until at least then. The prosecutors had tried in Watkins' case unlike almost any other Capitol riot case to claim her charges related to pre-planning and intimidating the Congress amounted to a crime of terrorism that merits her staying in jail. They also argued she could abscond. "She turned herself in. I just have a hard time finding that it rises to a level of a serious risk of flight," Mehta responded. Judges are overturning rulings as well In two other cases this week, the Justice Department lost one argument and won another on whether to keep Capitol rioters detained both of which involved overturning rulings from previous judges, again showing how much the Capitol prosecutions have varied. Doug Jensen of Iowa, who was caught on video chasing a Capitol Police officer near the entry to the Senate, will stay in jail, Judge Timothy Kelly decided at a hearing on Tuesday. Kelly said there was no indication Jenson's "interest in revolution" had gone away following the insurrection. Kelly also pointed to Jensen's previous criminal convictions, including a domestic assault charge. Kelly's decision overturned a ruling by a lower court judge in Iowa to release him. Jensen's attorneys hadn't fought for his release once his case moved to DC and he was indicted. He has pleaded not guilty. In the other case of Texas winery owner Christopher Grider, who allegedly told his wife to "get rid of his Trump things" after the riot Judge Kentaji Brown Jackson decided he should be released. Grider's defense attorneys had argued he had been a "passive bystander" in the insurrection. He has pleaded not guilty. Still, Jackson condemned his actions. "If there is a more serious offense against who we are as a society and the rules that are at the core of our democratic process, then I don't know what it is," Jackson said at a hearing Monday. Jackson noted it was the "closest call" on detention she'd had among the cases, after the Justice Department did not offer any new argument and failed to meet the legal threshold to keep Grider in jail that other DC federal judges were requiring. Her decision overturned a ruling by a lower court judge in Texas to keep him detained. This story was first published on CNN.com "The Justice Department is facing a tougher climb trying to keep Capitol rioters locked up" Malaysia's Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin receives the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at a clinic in Putrajaya, Malaysia, Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021. (Malaysia Health Ministry via AP) Many nations in the Asia-Pacific region are rolling out the first shots for COVID-19 this week. Here's a look at major developments: SOUTH KOREA South Korea's top infectious disease experts warned that vaccines will not bring the disease to a quick end and called for continued vigilance in social distancing and mask wearing as the country prepares to give its first shots on Friday. Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, said Wednesday it would take a "considerably long time" before the mass vaccination campaign brings the virus under control. The country aims to vaccinate more than 70% of the population by November. But a safe return to a life without masks is highly unlikely this year, considering various factors including the growing spread of virus variants, said Choi Won Suk, an infectious disease professor at the Korea University Ansan Hospital. "We are concerned that people might drop their guard as vaccination begins, triggering another massive wave of the virus," Jeong said. Jeong spoke as South Korea began transporting the first vaccines rolled off a production line in the southern city of Andong, where local pharmaceutical company SK Bioscience is manufacturing the shots developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha holds samples of Sinovac vaccine during a ceremony to mark the arrival of 200,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccine shipment at Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok, Thailand, Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021. Thailand is schedule to receive first shipments of 200,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccine and 117,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine on Feb. 24. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit) The country will kick off the vaccination on Friday starting with residents and employees at long-term care facilities. Separately, some 55,000 doctors, nurses and other health professionals treating COVID-19 patients will begin receiving the shots developed by Pfizer and BioNTech on Saturday. AUSTRALIA Two elderly people have been administered with higher-than-prescribed doses of the Pfizer vaccine, Australia's health minister said Wednesday. The 88-year-old man and 94-year-old woman were being monitored and the doctor who administered the shots had been stood down from the vaccination program, Health Minister Greg Hunt said. The error occurred at the Holy Spirit aged care home in the Brisbane suburb of Carseldine on Tuesday, the day after the vaccine rollout in Australia began, Hunt said. "Both patients are being been monitored and both patients are showing no signs at all of an adverse reaction," Hunt said. He did not say how much more than the prescribed dose was injected. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, left, and Yang Xin, right, Charge d'Affaires of China embassy of Thailand clap during a ceremony to mark the arrival of 200,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccine shipment at Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok, Thailand, Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021. Thailand is scheduled to receive first shipments of 200,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccine and 117,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine on Feb. 24. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit) Lincoln Hopper, chief executive of St. Vincent's Care Services that owns the home, said he was "very concerned" for the residents' welfare. The woman remained at the home while the man had been admitted to a hospital, Hopper said. "This incident has been very distressing to us, to our residents and to their families and it's also very concerning," Hopper said. "It's caused us to question whether some of the clinicians given the job of administering the vaccine have received the appropriate training." Hunt later revealed that the doctor who administered the overdoses had not completed the online training that all health professionals involved in the program must undertake. Hunt apologized for earlier telling Parliament that the doctor had been trained. He said he had asked the Health Department to take action against the doctor and the company the doctor works for. THAILAND Samples of Sinovac vaccine are displayed at Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok, Thailand, Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021, aheads of the arrival of first shipments of 200,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccine and 117,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine on Feb. 24. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit) Thailand on Wednesday received the first 200,000 doses of China's Sinovac vaccine. Another 117,000 doses of AstraZeneca are expected later Wednesday. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha attended a ceremony with the Chinese Embassy deputy mission chief to receive the vaccines at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport. Thailand has ordered a total of 2 million doses from China. Later this year, local manufacturer Siam Bioscience will supply 200 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine for the region, of which 26 million are allocated for Thailand. Thai officials have said they had secured an additional deal with AstraZeneca for a total of 61 million doses. Many critics and opposition parties have criticized the government's procurement plans as too slow and inadequate. Thailand, whose economy relies on income from tourism, is aiming to inject 10 million doses a month from June, and plans to inoculate at least half the population by the end of the year. The first shipments of the Sinovac vaccine are unloaded from a Thai airways flight at Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok, Thailand, Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021. Thailand is scheduled to receive first shipments of 200,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccine and 117,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine on Feb. 24. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit) A container containing AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccines is unloaded from a truck at a distribution center in Icheon, South Korea, Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021. South Korea's top infectious disease expert has warned that vaccines will not end the coronavirus pandemic quickly as the country prepared to give its first vaccinations this week. (Yonhap via AP) MALAYSIA Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin received Malaysia's first COVID-19 vaccine shot on Wednesday at the start of the inoculation campaign. "I did not feel anything at all. It was all over before I realize, just like a normal injection. Don't worry, come forward anytime," he said at a ceremony broadcast live. Health Director-General Noor Hisham Abdullah was also among the first to be vaccinated. Malaysia, which has signed deals with several vaccine suppliers including Pfizer and AstroZeneca, aims to vaccinate up to 80% percent of its 32 million people by next year. A container containing AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccines is transported at a distribution center in Icheon, South Korea, Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021. South Korea's top infectious disease expert has warned that vaccines will not end the coronavirus pandemic quickly as the country prepared to give its first vaccinations this week. (Yonhap via AP) More than half a million health care and front-line workers will be given priority in the first phase. Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. LUCKNOW : The police in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh questioned a top Amazon executive for nearly four hours on Tuesday over allegations that one of its political dramas on Prime Video hurt religious sentiments and caused public anger. Shows on streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have often faced complaints in India, a key growth market, for obscenity or hurting sentiment, but the latest controversy involving the Amazon show "Tandav" is among the highest-profile cases. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers "Tandav", a political drama starring top Bollywood actors, has in several states faced police complaints and court cases. In Uttar Pradesh, police questioned Amazon India's head of original content for its Prime streaming service Aparna Purohit over similar allegations at a police station on Tuesday. Amazon declined to comment, and Purohit did not take questions from reporters outside the police station. A state police officer told Reuters that Purohit had told police an apology had been issued and scenes that concerned the public had been edited out after its release in January. While the show has angered some, the complaints against the drama and Purohit's questioning by police have also caused grave concerns among India's vibrant film industry, where many see this as an attack on free speech. One Bollywood producer criticized police action on Tuesday, saying such incidents were unnerving. "You never know when you will be next in line for a scene that you never thought would be offensive," said the producer, who declined to be named. Amazon is separately facing the ire of small retailers in India, who have called for a ban on its operations. Reuters last week reported that the U.S. firm had for years given preferential treatment to a small group of sellers on its India platform and used them to circumvent the country's strict foreign investment regulations. Amazon has denied any wrongdoing and said it complies with Indian law. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. A medical staff holds tubes for collecting samples of Noi Bai Airport employees for Covid-19 testing, Hanoi, February 10, 2021. Photo by VnExpress/Giang Huy. A Japanese man found dead in Hanoi before being confirmed a Covid-19 patient was infected with a coronavirus strain that has never been reported in Vietnam. Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long revealed the information at a meeting Wednesday, 10 days after he died. The strain, known as CAL.20C, originated from a group of viruses tracked from Europe to New York early in the pandemic and was first detected in California in July. The virus strain has been spreading fast in many U.S. states and has mainly surfaced in South Korea, Taiwan and India. The 54-year-old Japanese man who entered Vietnam on Jan. 17 was quarantined at a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City and showed two negative test results. He later took a flight to Hanoi and underwent self-quarantine at Somerset West Point on Feb. 1. On Feb. 13, he was found dead inside his hotel room, with his sample tests returning positive for the novel coronavirus. Two other people in close contact with him were confirmed positive as well. Vietnam has earlier reported U.K. coronavirus variant in the outbreak in Hai Duong and neighboring Quang Ninh, and the South African variant on an imported case. Recently a patient in Hai Duong was also found to be infected with the highly contagious coronavirus variant from South Africa. Long said: "Pathogens could exist in the community, and especially spread by foreign experts and migrants." In light of new variants, the government has limited inbound flights. Only special cases approved by authorities can enter the country. Vietnam has closed its borders but allows a limited number of flights to return citizens from overseas or carry foreign experts, with all arrivals required to enter 14-day quarantine. Advertisement Simon Bowes-Lyon, the Earl of Strathmore, arrives at Dundee Sheriff Court yesterday where he was jailed for ten months for a sex attack carried out hours after he joked being his private castle's monster The Queen's playboy cousin joked about being the 'Monster of the Glamis' - one of many ghosts reputed to haunt his ancestral home - hours before carrying out a violent sex attack that has left him languishing in prison today. Simon Bowes-Lyon, 34, has started a ten-month jail term after swapping his private castle where the Queen Mother grew up for a 55sqft cell in Scotland's oldest prison, HMP Perth. At his Glamis Castle home there are reputed to be at least nine ghosts with the most terrifying said to be 'Monster of Glamis' - a 19th century heir to the Earl of Strathmore title kept in a secret room all his life because he was so deformed. On the night before he attacked his 26-year-old victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, Bowes-Lyon, 34, entertained her and other guests with tales of the castle's haunted rooms and estate. Guests have reported seeing ghostly faces at windows, a woman carrying a bundle of clothes across a courtyard, a tongueless maid, a hanged butler and hammering noises piercing the night that spooked guest Sir Walter Scott so much in 1790 he didn't sleep because he felt 'too far from the living and too near to the dead'. When asked about the 'Monster of Glamis' in February last year, Bowes-Lyon said straight-faced to guests: 'Look no further. Here I am', according to the Daily Telegraph. The following evening, after a night of heavy drinking, he carried out a terrifying and despicable sex attack on a female guest that means he will spend up to ten months at Her Majesty's pleasure inside HMP Perth. The Queen Mother's great-great nephew was handcuffed and swept from Dundee Sheriff Court in a prison van after being sentenced for a violent sex attack in one of the grand bedrooms of his ancestral home Glamis Castle, which has been a royal residence since 1372. Bowes-Lyon, whose friends call him Sam instead of The 19th and 6th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, is unlikely to be released from HMP Perth before July and will be on the sex offenders' register for a decade. The multi-millionaire laird will spend up to 23 hours a day in his cell because of Covid-19 regulations in the jail, which houses approaching 700 male prisoners including sex offenders and murderers. Built on the banks of the River Tay between 1810 and 1812 for 7,000 French Napoleonic prisoners of war, the jail had Scotland's only purpose built execution shed before the death penalty was abolished in 1965 and was named Scotland's most violent prison in 2016 due to the number of serious assaults and brawls. In 2018 the size of cramped cells in two blocks were criticised by inspectors. It has been recently renovated and hit the headlines last year inmates were given the go-ahead to open Scotland's first fine-dining vegan restaurant for the public in the grounds. But there have also been complaints about the quality and quantity of food for prisoners, whose typical menu is porridge or a fry-up for breakfast, a Scotch Pie and beans for lunch and a pastie and chips for dinner. The small cells and the carb-heavy meals are a world away from Bowes-Lyon's life at Glamis, where he lives in one of the UK's most beautiful castles and can roam its 14,000 acre estate freely. Parts of the castle are open to the public for private tours and it is well known for its local produce, and famed for delicacies such as the Glamis pheasant and duck burger as well as world-class venison and game. Pronounced 'Glams', the castle was the beloved childhood home of Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who died aged 101 in 2002, and the Queen's sister Princess Margaret was born at the castle in 1930 - the first royal baby born in Scotland for more than 300 years. Bowes-Lyon was led away to prison in handcuffs yesterday after being jailed for ten months for a violent sexual assault at his ancestral home in the Highlands where the Queen Mother enjoyed an idyllic childhood and Shakespeare was inspired to write Macbeth. Simon Bowes-Lyon (right), the Earl of Strathmore, is escorted in handcuffs from Dundee Sheriff Court, after being jailed for ten months yesterday The cells at Scotland's oldest prison HMP Perth, where the laird is starting prison life, were criticised in 2018 for being so cramped The violent incident, to which the 34-year-old aristocrat has admitted, took place at Glamis Castle the childhood home of the Queen Mother. The castle, found near the village of Glamis in Angus, Scotland is the seat of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne Bowes-Lyon, whose friends call him Sam instead of The 19th and 6th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, is unlikely to be released before July from HMP Perth (pictured left and right) The dining all at Glamis, which dates back to the 12th century, where the chefs are famed for serving venison, duck, partridge and pheasant The Queen Mother's chamber, Glamis Castle, where she was born and gave birth to Princess Margaret Glamis' grand living room in the castle, which has been a royal residence since 1372 Timeline: How the great-great-nephew of the Queen Mother ended up in the dock February 13, 2020: Simon Bowes-Lyon forced his way into a sleeping woman's room and assaulted her during a travel PR weekend he was hosting at the 16,500-acre estate, Glamis Castle. He sexually assaulted a 26-year-old woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons. Bowes-Lyon admitted repeatedly pushing her onto a bed, forcibly grabbing her breasts, repeatedly trying to pull her nightdress, pushing her against a wall, touching her bottom and genilalia and trying to kiss her. February 14, 2020: The woman fled the castle in the morning and flew home to immediately report the matter to police. Both Police Scotland and the Metropolitan Police were involved in the investigation. Bowes-Lyon emailed an apology to the woman - but gave police a 'no comment' interview at Dundee HQ. January 12, 2020: At Dundee Sheriff Court he admitted he sexually assaulted a 26-year-old woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons. The wealthy aristocrat was granted bail and placed on the Sex Offenders Register as sentence was deferred for reports. February 23, 2020 Bowes-Lyon is jailed for 10 months. Advertisement Sitting at Dundee Sheriff Court this morning, Sheriff Alistair Carmichael, told Bowes-Lyon that the offence was so serious that he had to go to prison because it would send the wrong message to others, ignoring the laird's plea for a suspended sentence. Bowes-Lyon forced his way into the woman's room, grabbed her breasts, put his hand up her nightie and forced her on to the bed telling her he was 'going to f**k her'. His victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had undergone 'cognitive behaviour therapy' in the wake of the attack and still has nightmares more than a year after the incident, the court heard. Sheriff Carmichael told him as he stood in the dock: 'She had no sexual interest in you and had done nothing that could be interpreted by you to the contrary. 'You went to her bedroom and persuaded her to open the door, pushed your way into the room, pushed her onto the bed and grabbed her hard on the nipple and tried to push her nightdress up. 'You told her that you were going to f**k her and that she needed a shafting. You continued to pull at her and tried to kiss her. Throughout all this she made it clear she wanted you to stop.'. The 19th and 6th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne was styled Lord Glamis until his father's death in 2016. He is a first cousin twice removed of Queen Elizabeth II. His family owns Glamis Castle - the childhood home of the Queen Mother and the home of Macbeth in William Shakespeare's play - and inherited a share of his father's 40million estate. The current Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne found himself in the dock after he barged his way into the woman's bedroom while she was sleeping during an event he was hosting at Glamis Castle. Bowes-Lyon who as a 15-year-old walked behind Prince William in the Queen Mother's funeral cortege issued an apology to his victim as he left court after pleading guilty last month, adding that he is 'greatly ashamed' of his conduct and that 'alcohol is no excuse'. He repeatedly grabbed his victim and told her he wanted to have an affair with her - although he is unmarried - during the drink-fuelled assault, which lasted more than 20 minutes. He is said to have tried to pull up her nightdress, and pushed her up against a wall and groped her bottom and genitals. Even after she managed to get him out of the room, the terrified woman heard Bowes-Lyon coming back and trying to get back in a second time. The Earl of Strathmore, who was swept from court in a prison van this afternoon, had pleaded for a suspended sentence but the judge refused and said he must be jailed Bowes-Lyon, a distant cousin of the Queen, pleaded guilty to forcing his way into the room of a guest at Glamis Castle and groping her viciously, injuring her breasts Bowes-Lyon (circled) who as a 15-year-old walked behind Prince William in the Queen Mother's funeral cortege issued an apology to his victim as he left court, adding that he is 'greatly ashamed' of his conduct and that 'alcohol is no excuse' The Earl poses with his brothers John and George, who have homes in London, County Durham and also lived together at the family castle in Scotland Sheriff Alistair Carmichael said: 'She was afraid to the extent that she locked the door and wedged a chair under the handle. She was left shaking. 'Even now, one year on, she still has nightmares and feels panic because of being sexually assaulted by you. It was made worse that you were her host. 'You assaulted her in the face of repeated protestations to stop and you repeatedly prevented the complainer from getting away. The force, aggression and persistence you used are concerning. 'The sentence must reflect the gravity of this crime and the need for punishment to adequately express society's disapproval.' He imposed an initial sentence of 15 months and reduced it to ten months to recognise the plea of guilty at the first opportunity by Bowes-Lyon. Troubled Laird's brushes with police and how his sex assault conviction is another cursed day for the Bowes-Lyon family The fourth season of The Crown tells the tragic story of the Queen's 'hidden' cousins Katherine (left) and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon (right), who were locked up in an asylum and neglected Simon Bowes-Lyon is facing jail for a violent sex assault - but it is not the first time he's been in trouble with the law - and yet another stain on the Queen Mother's family. The troubled Earl is a first cousin twice removed of Queen Elizabeth II, and a great-great-nephew of the late Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. His family owns Glamis Castle and inherited a share of his father's 40 million estate. His father was known for his chequered relationships and struggles with alcohol. In June 2020, Durham Police contacted the Earl for violating the COVID-19 related travel restrictions then in place. A report said he travelled 200 miles to Holwick Lodge, Middleton-in-Teesdale, and was outed when his butler went to the shops. In 2010 he was banned from the road for nine months after he was clocked riding his motorbike at 100 mph on a 60 mph stretch of road. The latest episode is yet another stain on the Bowes-Lyon family. The latest series of The Crown told the tragic story of the Queen's 'hidden' cousins who were locked up in an asylum and registered as dead after being born with severe learning difficulties. The Netflix drama offers its take on the shameful scandal that saw sisters Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon - the Queen Mother's nieces - neglected and forgotten about for decades. At the ages of 15 and 22 respectively, the pair, who were unable to speak due to their condition, were secretly placed in the Royal Earlswood Institution for Mental Defectives in Redhill, Surrey by their parents in 1941. They remained at the institution, cruelly dubbed The National Asylum for Idiots, for the majority of their lives and, according to reports, were barely ever visited and registered as dead. Advertisement Counsel for the accused, John Scott QC, asked the court to impose a non-custodial sentence and said his client had expressed genuine remorse for his behaviour. He said: 'His sense of deep regret and deep shame comes through. It is entirely out of character for the accused. 'He does not wish to be treated better than anyone else and nor should he be. Nor should he be treated any worse. 'Character references speak to his otherwise exemplary behaviour and a picture of some of the challenges he has had in life that might not necessarily be widely understood or known, and rather assumptions are made about his privilege. 'He has recognised he did something very bad and he is sorry for it. He is only at medium risk of reconviction.' Mr Scott told the court that Bowes-Lyon had childhood issues but had not fully expressed them to social workers as he preferred to focus on the happy parts of his upbringing. The aristocrat was hosting a party for a luxury lifestyle magazine, where guests enjoyed gin tasting, helicopter rides, shooting and a tour of the castle. His victim took pity on her attacker when she noticed no-one was talking to Bowes-Lyon during dinner and she engaged him in conversation, he then took her outside to show her one of his many classic cars. The following evening there was a black tie dinner and, after the victim went to bed, Bowes-Lyon carried on drinking before arriving uninvited at her room at 1.20 am and carried out the attack on the woman, who cannot be named. In a statement outside court after pleading guilty last month, Bowes-Lyon apologised and said he is 'greatly ashamed of my actions which have caused such distress to a guest in my home'. He said he had 'drunk to excess' on the night of the attack, which he said was 'no excuse' for his actions. He added: 'I did not think I was capable of behaving the way I did but have had to face up to it and take responsibility. 'Over the last year this has involved seeking and receiving professional help as well as agreeing to plead guilty as quickly as possible. 'My apologies go, above all, to the woman concerned but I would also like to apologise to family, friends and colleagues for the distress I have caused them.' Bowes-Lyon, known for his love of fast cars and holidays with reality TV stars, was named one of the UK's most eligible bachelors by Tatler in 2019. Last month MailOnline revealed that just weeks after the sex attack, in June 2020, Durham Police contacted the Earl, whose friends call him Sam, for violating the COVID-19 related travel restrictions banning from people leaving home. He had travelled 200 miles to England to stay at one of his second properties, a lodge on the family's 20million Holwick estate in Middleton-in-Teesdale, just outside Barnard Castle, where Dominic Cummings went on his notorious lockdown drive to test his eyesight a month earlier. Bowes-Lyon was outed to local detectives when one of his servants was seen as he went to the shops. 'It's the talk of the village,' a local source said at the time. 'His butler was spotted buying newspapers.' The Earl then agreed to return to Glamis Castle in Scotland the childhood home of the Queen Mother, north of Dundee. And in 2010 he was banned from the road for nine months after he was clocked riding his motorbike at 100 mph on a 60 mph stretch of road. It was noted in court, as the then 24-year-old was fined 500, that his licence had already accumulated 23 penalty points due to various speeding convictions. His father, the rambunctious Mikey, was a larger-than-life character who battled alcohol problems, married three times, romped with escorts and was known as the 'head of the Queen's Scottish family'. Bowes-Lyon, known for his love of fast cars and holidays with reality TV stars, was named one of the UK's most eligible bachelors by Tatler in 2019. Pictured: Simon Bowes-Lyon with his father the Earl of Strathmore in 2000 Bowes-Lyon, 34, who is the Queen's cousin twice removed, admitted a charge of sexually assaulting the woman Police: Conviction of Queen's cousin shows that 'status' doesn't protect you from prosecution Police have welcomed the conviction of a relative of the Queen who admitted sexually assaulting a woman at his ancestral home. Simon Bowes-Lyon, 34, the Earl of Strathmore, attacked the woman at Glamis Castle, Angus, in February last year. Detective Inspector Marc Lorente, from Police Scotland's Tayside Division Criminal Investigation Department, said: 'We welcome the conviction of Simon Bowes-Lyon who has admitted to his actions. 'Working with the Metropolitan Police, we carried out a thorough investigation into this sexual assault and I would like to thank the victim for her bravery, courage and support throughout our inquiries. 'This case shows that no matter the status of an individual involved, we will listen to victims and investigate thoroughly to ensure offenders are held accountable for their actions.' Buckingham Palace declined to comment. Advertisement This highly-colourful lifestyle - and a series of scandals - meant the young Lord Glamis, along with his two brothers John 'Jock' Bowes-Lyon, 31, and George 'Geordie' Bowes-Lyon, did not have the most conventional start in life. Glamis Castle is the seat of the earls of Strathmore and Kinghorne, part of the late Queen Mother's family. The nobleman and peer was styled Lord Glamis from 1987 until his father's death in 2016. He is the eldest son of Michael 'Mikey' Bowes-Lyon, 18th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorn, and Isobel Weatherall. His parents divorced in 2004, and he succeeded his father in 2016. His father was known for his chequered relationships and struggles with alcohol. The former Scots Guards captain was considered to be 'head of the Queen's Scottish family' and walked behind Prince Charles and Prince William at the Queen Mother's funeral. The Bowes-Lyon brothers certainly seem at home at Glamis. In one Instagram video posted by Geordie, a scene that wouldn't be out of place in Brideshead Revisited unfolds as what appears to be Sam and a friend whiz up the main drive in a motorbike and sidecar. Driving at some speed, they narrowly avoid clipping the verge while bemused tourists look on. Indeed life for the trio seems to be something of a whirlwind of walked up grouse shoots, society parties and girls in pretty dresses - another of their father's weaknesses. The demise of Mikey's first marriage to the boys' mother was turbulent. Isobel - known to friends as Iso - demanded the right to live at Glamis until 2016, the year Geordie would reach the age of 25. In the end, she accepted a 5million settlement which, at her insistence, included paintings and the couple's matrimonial four poster bed. She later sold the bed at auction in London, where she raised eyebrows by scribbling out the 'Countess of Strathmore' title from her name badge and writing in 'Iso' instead. Two states, New Jersey and Virginia, regularly elect governors in the year after each presidential election. Timing aside, it's rare that the race for Chris Christie's old job looks anything like the race for Thomas Jefferson's. That changed this week, when both states moved toward legalizing marijuana for recreational use. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, signed three bills to start legal sales before the November election; in Virginia, Democrats began merging House and Senate bills that would legalize weed by 2024. "The public doesn't see marijuana use as being the scourge that it used to be," said Virginia Sen. Scott Surovell, one of the Democrats promoting the bill. "If we don't take action this session, the next cycle will be about marijuana legalization." The more popular legal marijuana gets, the more elections are held on it - something that's increasingly encouraging for Democrats. Last year, every state that held a referendum on legal weed approved it. Democratic governors in several states where the drug is prohibited have used their budget addresses to endorse legalization, citing the fiscal crunches caused by the coronavirus, successful legalization drives in nearby states and the lack of an organized opposition. "Sports betting, Internet gaming and legalized marijuana are happening all around us," Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, said last week in his annual State of the State speech. "Let's not surrender these opportunities to out-of-state markets or, even worse, underground markets." Legalization, which Democrats and Republicans treated carefully just a few years ago, has quickly become more popular than either party. But its political support is mostly concentrated among Democrats, and the party increasingly sees it as an issue that can bring in voters. Late last year, when the House passed a federal legalization measure for the first time, six Democratic members opposed it, two of whom were lame ducks headed into retirement. Five Republicans supported it, and their leadership accused Democrats of focusing on "drugs" instead of jobs. In the states, as in Congress, opposition to legalization has become a Republican issue. In Idaho, where Democrats have gone winless statewide for years, Republican legislatures have advanced a constitutional ban on any drug legalization, putting it on the state's next ballot. "I beg you, we have to keep this state clean," Sen. Van Burtenshaw said during the debate on the measure. In South Dakota, where 62% of voters supported President Donald Trump's reelection and 54% voted for legal marijuana, Republican Gov. Kristi Noem has taken the lead in preventing legalization. This month, a judge struck down the ballot measure passed in November, and Noem has threatened to veto any legalization efforts passed by the GOP majority. For that reason and a few others, Democratic opposition to legalization largely has disappeared. The Virginia and New Jersey measures are both part of the party's 2021 agenda, with their gubernatorial hopefuls in favor and Republican candidates opposed. In New Jersey, the legalization drive has squeezed Jack Ciattarelli, who has supported decriminalization in the past but came out against the package of Democratic changes alongside the state's Policemen's Benevolent Association. "Today's decision by Trenton Democrats to prohibit police officers from even asking questions to a car full of underage kids who appear to be smoking weed is outrageous," Ciattarelli said in a statement, which his campaign referred to when asked about his position. But legalization advocates said that opposition, the kind that had previously come from police and prosecutors' associations, was harder to hear now. "Every once in a while you have some pediatrician who's worried about the long-term effects, or someone worried about family use," said Emily Kaltenbach, a director at the Drug Policy Alliance who is working to pass legalization through New Mexico's Democratic legislature. "But there's no organized opposition." New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, endorsed legalization in her State of the State address; in Wisconsin, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers included it in his budget proposal, drawing opposition from the Republican-led legislature and teeing up an issue for his 2022 reelection campaign. In Minnesota, where Democrats blame the Legal Marijuana Now Party for siphoning some liberal votes in tight races, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz backed legalization before the election and has gotten behind it in budget negotiations. Republicans, who have not won a statewide race in Minnesota since 2006, have blocked legalization while cracking open a window for a debate on medical marijuana. All of this has happened without any direction from the Biden administration. The only top-tier candidate for the party's nomination who did not back outright legalization, Biden has suggested that he may de-schedule the drug, removing it from a list of illegal substances and allowing states more flexibility to sell it. In his first day of hearings, attorney general nominee Merrick Garland, who as a District of Columbia Circuit judge in 2012 sided with the DEA against drug decriminalization campaigners, told Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., that his Justice Department would continue to let legalization proceed in states. "It does not seem to me useful the use of limited resources that we have to be pursuing prosecutions in states that have legalized and are regulating the use of marijuana, either medically or otherwise," Garland told Booker, a legalization advocate and now chair of the criminal justice and counterterrorism subcommittee. State legislators and state parties were expecting that. So are investors, who have been pushing for congressional passage of the SAFE Banking Act, which would remove restrictions on dispensaries and was backed by two dozen Republican House members in the last Congress. Matt Hawkins, the Dallas-based managing partner of Entourage Effect Capital, said that full-scale national legalization was years away, but that political opposition was getting weaker. "There's plenty of bipartisan momentum behind this," Hawkins aid. "It's the only thing I can think of that's bipartisan these days." New Delhi, Feb 24 : Fresh Covid-19 cases are showing an upward trend over the past one week, with the country reporting 13,742 cases in the last 24 hours taking the overall tally to 1,10,30,176 on Wednesday, Union Health Ministry said. The rise in new cases is almost 3,158 more than Tuesdays. India has been recording less than 15,000 new infections daily with the toll not crossing the 200-mark over the last one month. However, the number spiked possibly owing to "mutations and new strains" as has been studied by the laboratories involved in Covid detection across the country. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said that there were 104 more deaths taking the overall toll to 1,56,567. Last week, officials said that the average daily new infections for the last 15 days were oscillating between 9,000 to 12,000 while the deaths were between 78 to 120. On February 9, India had reported 9,110 new cases, the lowest this year so far. Last year, the lowest 9,633 cases were recorded on June 3. As per the Ministry's data, there are 1,46,907 active cases at present after 14,037 patients were discharged in a day. Till now, 1,07,26,702 persons have been discharged so far. The recovery rate has remained to 97.24 per cent, while the fatality rate is 1.42 per cent. At least 84 per cent of the new cases are from six states -- Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Karnataka and Gujarat. Six states account for 84.62 per cent of the new deaths including Maharashtra, Kerala, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh and Karnataka. The Ministry also informed that 8,05,844 samples were tested on Tuesday. The cumulative tests done by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) so far stands at 21,30,36,275. More than 1,21,65,598 doses of corona vaccine have been administered in the country since the drive began on January 16 after approval for 'Covishield' and 'Covaxin'. As per the Union Health Ministry, India has become the fastest nation in terms of the vaccine doses administered, even though many countries had launched their vaccination campaigns much earlier. Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19) -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text Kanye West was spotted emerging from lockdown this Monday in his first public sighting since his wife Kim Kardashian filed for divorce. The 43-year-old was paying a visit to his Yeezy Christian Academy for children and brought his and Kim's son Psalm, one, along for the outing. While stepping out this Monday the rap icon went without his wedding ring - which he had been seen wearing only last Wednesday. There he is: Kanye West was spotted emerging from lockdown this Monday in his first public sighting since his wife Kim Kardashian filed for divorce Moving on?: While stepping out this Monday the rap icon went without his wedding ring - which he had been seen wearing only last Wednesday Meanwhile Kim has been seen out without her own wedding ring on multiple occasions since January when conjecture began to circulate about the split. Kim finally filed for divorce this past Friday after more than a month of rumors that shew as on the verge of ending the marriage. A source told The Sun this week: 'In the last two weeks, Kanye was attempting to sell jewelry he had purchased for Kim to at least two top jewelers.' The insider clarified: 'Although he never ended up selling the jewelry he was talking about how he didn't want to reminded of the past.' Family time: The 43-year-old was paying a visit to his Yeezy Christian Academy for children and brought his and Kim's son Psalm, one, along for the outing Kim has enlisted the services of top showbiz divorce lawyer Laura Wasser who also represented her when she left her second husband Kris Humphries after 72 days. The reality TV superstar is requesting joint custody of her and Kanye's children North, seven, Saint, five, Chicago, three, and Psalm, one. Both parents are amenable to the idea of split custody, they are both willing to let their prenuptial agreement stand and the property settlement is well on its way to being sorted out, TMZ reports. Kim is allegedly worth about $780 million according to a Forbes estimate last October, and the same magazine reported last week that Kanye is worth $1.3 billion. New phase: Kim finally filed for divorce this past Friday after more than a month of rumors that shew as on the verge of ending the marriage A source told DailyMail.com: 'The split is amicable and there is no drama,' and a Deadline insider predicted 'a fairly straightforward and hopefully quick process.' 'He thinks that the Presidential run was the straw that broke the camel's back. Before that, there was hope. After that, none. It cost him his marriage,' a source told People. Kim married Kanye in Florence, Italy in 2014 in a bridal gown designed by his friend Riccardo Tisci, but last year the problems in the marriage became a spectacle. 'The sweetest boy!': Kim posted a picture of Psalm to her Instagram this Wednesday and gushed: 'You cant tell here but he has the most infectious smile! I love you baby Psalm' After his presidential campaign rally on July 19 in which he tearfully revealed he and Kim considered aborting their daughter North, he launched into a days-long string of Twitter rants denouncing his wife and his mother-in-law Kris Jenner. He claimed Kim and Kris tried to have him committed and accused his wife of having an inappropriate relationship with the rapper Meek Mill. Kanye, who referred to his mother-in-law as 'Kris Jong Un' in one of his outbursts, also posted and deleted a tweet claiming he was 'trying to divorce' his wife. Seen in happier times: Kim married Kanye in Florence, Italy in 2014 in a bridal gown designed by his friend Riccardo Tisci, but last year the problems in the marriage became a spectacle Amid her husband's Twitter rants Kim, who was reportedly livid that he shared the abortion story publicly, made a statement saying the family was 'powerless' to intervene in Kanye's bipolar disorder issues since he is an adult. The couple then traveled to the Caribbean with the pastor who married them for what was widely reported as a make-or-break trip to save their relationship. Kanye and Kim's already strained relationship reportedly was dealt its final blow after the couple had 'a big fight in early December,' an insider told Us Weekly. .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... Copyright 2021 Albuquerque Journal Asked why she wanted to become the next secretary of the Department of the Interior, Rep. Deb Haaland referenced the Navajo Code Talkers, saying the group used the Navajo word for Our Mother as code for United States. I feel very strongly that sums up what were dealing with, she told senators on the committee considering her nomination. ADVERTISEMENTSkip ................................................................ This is all of our country. This is our mother. Youve heard the Earth referred to as Mother Earth. Its difficult to not feel obligated to protect this land, Haaland said. And I feel every Indigenous person in the country understands that. For a second day in a row, Haaland fielded questions from members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that is considering her nomination to be interior secretary. Republican senators threatened to filibuster, repeated their questions and raised their voices when questioning Haaland. They objected to the New Mexico Democrats previous statements about the fossil fuel industry and fracking on public lands. The hearing came to a close without members taking a vote on Haalands nomination. The Associated Press reported later Wednesday that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, the committee chair, said he will vote to confirm Haaland. Thats a key vote for Haaland on her way to becoming the first Native American to head a Cabinet agency. Through two days of hearings, Haaland made the case that the fossil fuel energy will be used for years to come. She said she has a record of successful bipartisan work, citing her sponsorship of a bill that aims to address violence against Native American women. And she repeatedly said she would work to carry out President Joe Bidens agenda, not her own. When she was challenged about previous statements shes made about environmental issues such as saying she supports bans on fracking and animal trapping she said her role as a congresswoman is different from the one she is poised to take. She said shell gather data and be guided by science when issues come across her desk. At one point, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, raised his voice after Haaland deflected a question about the Endangered Species Act. Being a secretary is far different from being a member of Congress, she said. Last month, President Biden issued an executive order to indefinitely pause all new leasing activity on public lands so the U.S. Department of the Interior could review leasing and permitting processes. Asked about that pause Wednesday, Haaland said it wont be permanent. The pause that President Biden has put on the new permits pending review; the review is not going to last forever, Haaland said. This pause is just that, a pause. Its not going to be a permanent thing where were restricting all these lands. New Mexico Democratic Party Chair Marg Elliston said after Wednesdays hearing concluded that Haaland demonstrated over two days that shes the right person for the position. Its clear that she will continue to make New Mexicans proud as a voice for all those who cherish and value our nations natural resources, she said. Larry Behrens, Western states director of Power the Future, a group that has opposed renewable energy mandates, said in a statement after the hearing that Haaland appeared to be dodging questions. Deb Haaland has a long record of radical statements and actions, but for the last two days she would have us believe she doesnt have a position on critical issues facing New Mexico and the rest of the nation, he said. Deb Haaland is pretending to be someone else during these hearings, and its clear some of the senators arent convinced. Lockdown is getting to us in different ways, but all are depressingly familiar. Many parents are juggling home schooling, work, house and family. Theyre teacher, psychologist, PE instructor, nurse, playmate, cleaner and cook. Some are realising that the people they love the most arent actually the people they like the most. When restrictions lift, rather than heading to the airport, many couples will be heading to divorce courts. An on-the-run West Sussex criminal went one step further. According to police, the man handed himself into custody because he could no longer stand living with his family in lockdown. Presenting himself to Burgess Hill station, he said he craved the peace and quiet a jail cell would offer. He informed us he would rather go back to prison than have to spend more time with the people he was living with, said the police following the easy collar. It got me thinking. Perhaps the Governments mandatory quarantine project isnt a bad idea. For stressed-out mothers, that is, not just tourists arriving from red-zone countries. If the average day under the current prevailing circumstances sees you fielding kids, shopping, cooking, home schooling, toddler tantrums and unsympathetic partners, you might find the idea of an enforced stay in an airport hotel something of a relief. Not because you want to breach regulations and fly to the sun, but because it keeps your family away from you. OK, so its a warm bath instead of a spa, three regulation meals a day (left outside the door on a tray, but what the hell, you didnt have to cook them), a view of Terminal 2 instead of Tuscany and your walks within 5 metres rather than 5km but, honestly, when things get too much, which of us wouldnt take a Holiday Inn if we cant have a holiday? Leaving Cert lobby New legislation is set to be passed making it illegal to lobby a teacher to get better calculated grades in the Leaving Cert. The Government has signed off on the exam roll-out following hefty negotiations with teacher unions so that 50,000 or so Leaving Cert students can sit their exams. The Lobbying Register was set up in 2015 as an anti-corruption measure, but Im not sure legislators envisaged having to put sixth-years on it. Will the new bill make it illegal to give the traditional bath salts or bottle of wine at end of term? Will a handmade thank-you card be subject to a fingerprint check? Will the guards knock on your door if you send a teacher a Dunnes Stores voucher? We should be told. Royal TV ratings rumble Buckingham Palace stole a march on the wayward branch of the royal family by scheduling the queens address to the Commonwealth on the same day as Harry and Meghans address to Oprah. Itll be a ratings winner in this particular long-running soap opera; a coup by the shows writers. Advertising slots are already selling out, we hear. (Natural News) When the experimental covid vaccine was first rolled out at the University Hospital of Brest in Brittany, a staggering 25 percent of the vaccinated healthcare workers fell ill. Many suffered from severe headaches, high fever, chills, sore muscles and consequentially, could not go to work. The rate of vaccine injury was so high, the hospital had to stop vaccinating the healthcare workers altogether. The VACCINE, not the virus, is leading to intermittent staff shortages in hospitals throughout France. This appalling rate of vaccine injury was first observed in clinical trials, but the issues were never investigated or resolved. Now vaccine injury is being extrapolated across entire population groups, as coercion is used to get as many people as possible vaccinated at once. In the rush to vaccinate people in a collectivist fashion, informed consent and medical ethics are being abandoned as vaccine injury becomes a normal way of life. France orders hospitals to slow down vaccine rollout because of widespread injury The real-life effects of this mass medical experiment has caused the French vaccination task force to SLOW DOWN the covid vaccine rollout for healthcare workers. Hospitals in France are now being advised to stagger the vaccination schedule for healthcare workers who are in the same care unit. French authorities also recommend that healthcare workers take acetaminophen before the injection and for two days after the shot. How many drugs must people take to tolerate or counter the negative effects of the vaccine? Isnt the whole objective of vaccination to prevent illness, health complications and hospital visits? Instead, submission of the mind and the body to vaccination is creating the very problems vaccination promises to prevent. The mass inoculation of healthcare workers using the Oxford-AstraZeneca has had tragic results. Personnel shortages are now being observed in the intensive care units throughout Europe. Approximately one in five young people are negatively affected by the vaccine, whereas the vaccine deliberately causes real symptoms of illness that disrupt the daily work activities of young adults. Vaccine injury is now accepted as normal sacrifice for the greater good The town of Brittany is not the only place to suffer from a high rate of vaccine injury. The towns of Quimper, Morlaix, Normandy, Dordogne, and Vannes have reported similar issues across their healthcare staff. One of the hospitals lost half of their physiotherapists after the vaccine forced the staff to take sick leave simultaneously. The vaccine injured 18 percent of the healthcare workers in Vannes, forcing them to take sick leave. The damage is so immense, the hospital of Saint-Lo in Normandy had to suspend the vaccine drive on February 11. The day prior, approximately ten out of fifty vaccinated workers fell ill with high fever and nausea. At the hospital of Perigueux in Dordogne, hospital staff are boycotting the AstraZeneca jab after seeing a considerable number of their colleagues suffer from severe adverse events after vaccination. The hospital initially agreed to tolerate a vaccine injury rate as high as ten percent, but saw between 50 and 70 percent of the vaccinated workers fall ill! How long will populations permit this dangerous experiment? As vaccine injury becomes accepted as a normal sacrifice for the greater good, many people are refusing the vaccine for conscientious reasons. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was developed by culturing the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a cell line derived from the kidney of an aborted baby. Because there is no guarantee that the purification process removes all the cell culture material from the vaccine, vaccine companies cannot promise that fetal DNA is absent in the final formulation. It doesnt matter if the babys DNA does/does not persist in the vaccine; most people find this process of using aborted fetal cells morally repulsive. Even more repulsive yet is that human lives men, women, and now children are being treated as experimental dumping grounds, coerced to submit to a savior science that sacrifices more human life, health, liberty and dignity along the way. Sources include: LifeSiteNews.com NaturalNews.com FranceTVInfo.fr Ms. Oz, in interviews with the Hebrew media around her books publication, has also described her childhood as dark. Speaking to Kann, Israels public radio, on Tuesday, she said, I was born into a world in which the standards and culture were very violent and oppressive. We got used to erasing immediately any expression of violence, scare tactics, or terror directed toward us, almost in real time. If there were black-and-blue marks, I would hide them with a longer shirt. In a promotional clip of a television interview to be aired on Israels Channel 12 over the weekend, she said, There are no two sides here, adding of the exposure, It was harder to be silent. In her book, Ms. Oz writes that the abuse began when the family lived in Kibbutz Hulda, a communal farm in central Israel where Mr. Oz had moved as a teenager, and where he met his wife and first raised their children. Under the kibbutz rules at the time, offspring slept away from their parents, in the communal childrens houses and visited their parents for a few hours a day. But even that was too much, Ms. Oz wrote. This is not your home, they told me. Go back to the childrens house. I was neglected in a way that surpassed the already problematic norm that was customary then under the auspices of the communal sleeping arrangements. A representative for Kinneret, Zmora, Dvir said the decision to publish the book now was Ms. Ozs, since she had come to them with the manuscript. There are no current plans to translate it to English or other languages. In a Facebook post, her brother Daniel Oz called for both Galia Ozs and his familys voices to be heard. My father was not an angel, just a human being. But he was the best person I had the privilege to have known, he wrote. Investigation: Police at the scene of the gun attack in Mosside on Monday night where a man aged 53 was wounded The PSNI needs to "get a grip" on the number of shootings taking place in the Causeway Coast and Glens district following the latest gun attack in Ballymoney, a former Justice Minister has said. Independent MLA Claire Sudgen spoke out after a 53-year-old man was injured in the shooting in Mosside on Monday night. The victim was taken to hospital but no details in relation to his condition had been released at the time of going to press. The PSNI appealed for anyone with information to come forward. The Ballymoney gun attack comes just days after concern was raised over the number of shootings in the area. Last year a total of 14 shootings were logged by the PSNI. None were recorded in the area in 2019. There have been three shootings in the area since the start of the year. Last week police district commander Ian Magee revealed he had called in the Paramilitary Crime Task Force in a bid to tackle the issue. Yesterday he reiterated his appeal for people to come forward with information. Ms Sudgen said the authorities need to do more. "This number is not insignificant and needs focus," she said. "The police are concerned by it and can only do what they can with the resources they have. "The Executive also needs to give this focus and address the issue... the Executive and the PSNI need to get a grip on this. "I believe we're 17 shootings now in that area [from last year] and it's second, I believe, only to Belfast for the number of incidents, and you could argue that it's higher proportionally to the population. "And I think that's giving cause for concern. It does indicate there is a bubbling undercurrent going on." Superintendent Magee said the gangs responsible for recent criminality "represent no one but their own self-interests", regardless of what they call themselves. "They have shown themselves capable of brutal attacks, many amounting to attempted murder, as well as intimidation activity and being deeply involved in the sale and supply of illegal drugs," he added. "They offer nothing to the communities in our district but fear and misery. We are working closely with colleagues from the Paramilitary Crime Task Force to disrupt their illegal actions. "We are in no doubt that focused, proactive action has prevented further crimes. "However, we are not complacent. It can be difficult to speak up when the people who are holding your community back live on your street or their children attend the same school as yours. But nothing will change until we start working together. "Your local policing teams, neighbourhood officers, district support team and others will redouble their efforts to provide this community with the confidence and reassurance they need to come forward." Anyone with information should contact detectives via the non emergency number 101 quoting reference number 1841 of 22/02/21. Liberty Bank CEO Alden McDonald said an investment from JPMorgan Chase that was announced Tuesday will mean his 49-year-old community bank will be able to make at least $150 million more in loans to the traditionally underserved customers his bank caters to. The $16 million investment by JPMorgan Chase, the largest banking group in the country, is large for a bank of New Orleans-based Liberty's size, with current assets totaling about $700 million. "The significance of the investment is that it will allow us to grow our lending capability and expand and reach $1 billion in assets sooner than we would otherwise be able to," McDonald said. "It will help us move the economic needle for homeowners and small businesses in the communities we serve." In addition to New Orleans, Liberty operates branches in Baton Rouge; Detroit; Forest Park, Illinois; Jackson, Mississippi; Kansas City, Kansas; Kansas City, Missouri; Louisville, Kentucky; and Montgomery and Tuskegee, Alabama, according to its website. The investment is in the form of "equity-like" instruments, including perpetual preferred stock a kind of indefinite loan. It comes as part of a $30 billion initiative started last October by JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon aimed at "advancing racial equity." Liberty Bank is among the first four "minority depository institutions and diverse-led community development financial institutions" chosen by JP Morgan for an equity investment. The others are North Carolina-based M&F Bank, New York-based Carver Federal Savings Bank and Los Angeles-based Broadway Federal Bank. The equity-type investment counts as so-called Tier 1 capital, which allows the banks to leverage that to borrow cheaply and lend much more to their customers. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up JP Morgan's initiative last October came after a summer of protest over the deaths of George Floyd and other unarmed Black men and women by police. The protests brought to the fore long-simmering questions of racial inequality across the board, including in financial services where studies have supported the fact that traditional banks have systemically discriminated against Black and other minority customers. Launching the program, Dimon said that systemic racism is a tragic part of Americas history, adding that "its long past time that society addresses racial inequities in a more tangible, meaningful way. As well as the direct investment in Liberty Bank, the JP Morgan program also channels funds to banks through New Markets Tax Credits, as well as an investment-share program that gives companies like Google a chance to contribute. McDonald said that he has been doing business with JP Morgan well before last year's resurgence of the Black Lives Matter protests and sees the latest investment as simply good business. "Weve done partnerships with JP Morgan before the Black Lives Matter sensitivities came about and they've been doing initiatives in the community long before it became popular," McDonald said. "We've been a profitable institution for a very long period of time, so (the investment) makes all the economic sense in the world," McDonald said. In New Orleans, the city's economic development agency, the New Orleans Business Alliance has pointed out that 40% of small businesses in the city are Black-owned but only account for 2% of total sales receipts. They have identified lack of access to capital as one of the principal reasons holding Black-owned businesses back. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Two Andean condors were released into the wild in Paca municipality, southeast of the Bolivian capital, on Tuesday. They had been rescued by the Bolivian Ministry of Environment and the municipality of Palca, after being reported injured. The two female condors, aged 5 and 8, were released after two weeks' rehabilitation. The rescue comes after 34 condors had died in February. Authorities are investigating the deaths. The condor is not only part of Bolivia's emblem; it is considered the king of the Andes for being one of the world's largest birds capable of flight. It is also listed as a "vulnerable species in extinction" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) Gugu Mbatha-Raw at the Women's Centre in Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda, May 2019, with Sifa Semeki, a refugee. UNHCR/Caroline Irby UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, today announced the appointment of British actor Gugu Mbatha-Raw as its newest global Goodwill Ambassador. Gugu has been working as a High-Profile Supporter for UNHCR since 2018 and is a powerful advocate for the rights of refugees. Im so thankful to have the opportunity to work in support of refugees and help amplify their voices. I am always amazed by their courage and strength in the face of such seemingly insurmountable odds and its a real honour to play a part in sharing their stories. The Covid crisis has made us all aware of the fragility of the lives we build and the importance of doing all we can to support those who have had to leave the place they call home, said Gugu. The crisis has also taught us that, in this interconnected world, we are only as strong as the most vulnerable in society. Inclusion of refugees is vital in ensuring the wellbeing of whole communities. Gugus robust engagement with UNHCR and advocacy for people forced to flee has seen her take part in UNHCRs EveryOneCounts campaign, challenging xenophobia and advocating for stronger partnerships to find solutions to global displacement. She also contributed to UNHCRs COVID-19 awareness appeal and to an IMDb and UNHCR partnership, Films of Hope, to raise funds for the Covid Solidarity Appeal. She has spent time in the field, hearing directly from refugees about their experiences of conflict, displacement and exile. This included visits to Burundian and Congolese refugees in Rwanda as well as in Uganda, learning from refugee women who survived conflict-related sexual violence and also refugee youths living with albinism. In her public advocacy for refugees, Gugu has spoken at UNHCR events in Venice , Los Angeles and London and has written about the refugee cause in outlets such as Refinery29 and Vogue. She has also used her own artwork to raise awareness for refugees on social media and is a keen supporter of MADE51 , a programme that empowers refugee artisans by helping them sell products globally. We appreciate Gugu Mbatha-Raws heartfelt advocacy and support for refugees and welcome her to the UNHCR family. We look forward to continuing our work together to help raise attention on the issues and needs facing refugees, said UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi. Now more than ever, in the context of the unprecedented impact of the Covid pandemic, the voices of refugees some of the most marginalized and forgotten people on earth need to be heard and amplified. Gugu is known for her award-winning role in Belle, Beyond the Lights and Black Mirror San Junipero and most recently starred in The Morning Show, Misbehaviour and Summerland. She will next been seen in Loki, the Marvel limited series coming to Disney + this Spring. Gugu was awarded an MBE in 2018 for services to Drama. To find out more about Gugu Mbatha-Raws work with UNHCR, visit: https://www.unhcr.org/gugu-mbatha-raw For media enquiries, please contact: Claire Lewis [email protected] +44(0)7880230934 Fivetran Doubles Revenue and Customers in 2020 Fivetran, the leading automated data integration provider, today announced another year of explosive growth - doubling its revenue and customer base and growing its global team to nearly 500. The Fivetran customer roster includes global companies such as ASICS, Autodesk (News - Alert) , BJ's Restaurants, Conagra Brands, DocuSign, Forever 21, Lionsgate, Square, Strava, Urban Outfitters and Ziff Davis. The company achieved a $1.2 billion valuation following its $100 million Series C funding in June. To stay competitive in today's digital economy, organizations must be able to quickly and reliably access all their data to make decisions. As a cloud data integration service, Fivetran manages its customers' data pipelines, providing instant access to more than 1.5 trillion rows of data every month. Fivetran automates delivery of data to leading cloud data stores the same way a utility company delivers electricity, by centralizing all of an organization's data even when source systems change, including schema and API changes. As a result, companies can focus on putting their data to work instead of figuring out how to find, collect, manage and centralize the data. "Our strong business momentum is the result of two simple facts: we provide always-available data pipelines that just work, and we stand by our word to make access to data as simple and reliable as electricity," said George Fraser, CEO of Fivetran. "To put that in perspective, Fivetran manages more than 700,000 schema changes every month - events that commonly break legacy ETL pipelines and need to be fixed by a data engineer. This is the value of Fivetran - delivering accurate, timely data even when source systems change, which ultimately powers analytics teams to make better decisions." To better service its customers, Fivetran grew its presence across the globe in 2020, opening new offices in Germany, France, India and Australia. Fivetran also added new data centers in these regions and Canada, ensuring locally delivered pipelines in accordance with its customers' best practice data governance principles. Over the last 12 months, Fivetran customers have doubled the number of connectors they use to sync data, bringing the total number of monthly connectors managed by Fivetran to more than 30,000. Given their positive experience, customers continue to expand their use of Fivetran across their respective organizations, fueling global user adoption to a record number. 2020 also marked a year of enterprise-class infrastructure and reliability upgrades of all Fivetran service offerings. Managing more than one million syncs daily, Fivetran guarantees 99.9 percent data pipeline uptime. Its ever-expanding portfolio of connectors are maintained by a globally distributed team of more than 200 software and customer success engineers available 24/7/365. As a result of these product and service upgrades in 2020, Fivetran customers experienced world-class support, as evidenced by the company's industry-leading 93 percent customer satisfaction rating. In addition, 94 percent of Fivetran customers cited positive or very positive experiences with its support team. "Fivetran is the pipeline of the modern data stack that moves data quickly, accurately and cost-effectively to data warehouses and lakes, where it powers analytics across organizations," said Bob Muglia, entrepreneur, former Snowflake CEO and Microsoft (News - Alert) president. "Fivetran dramatically simplifies the process of collecting and preparing data for analytics and data science. It makes it easy for organizations of any size to quickly derive value from data, and that's why Fivetran is the ELT leader in the modern data stack." Fivetran delivered several new product enhancements and features over the past year, including new enterprise database connectors for IBM (News - Alert) , SAP and Oracle. The company also added integration for dbt, the popular open-source analytics engineering tool maintained by Fishtown Analytics. The dbt integration allows data analysts and engineers to transform data for immediate use. Additionally, Fivetran advanced its integration with Databricks, which accelerates time to value for customers by enabling BI on its Delta Lake and Lakehouse architectures. "At Innive, we provide our customers with a scalable framework for ingesting data from multiple sources, creating a single source of truth that enables better business decision-making. In order to keep up with not only the growth in our customer data volumes but also required new data sources, we needed a more modern and scalable data integration solution," said Vivek Chakravarti, senior data architect for Innive. "By using Fivetran, we have been able to quickly and easily migrate billions of rows of data from a variety of data sources, including on-premise databases, into a customer's cloud data warehouse. Fivetran's automated data pipelines and large library of connectors have saved us tremendous time and eliminated significant cost." Over the past year, Fivetran has been recognized by the leading cloud data warehouse vendors as the top "EL" provider in the ELT architecture of the modern data stack. In 2020, the company received accolades from various partners, including the Snowflake Technology Partner of the Year (Top Performer) award and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Data and Analytics Competency designation. Fivetran was also named a Google (News - Alert) Cloud Premier Partner, the highest achievable status reserved for Google Cloud partners, for its continued collaboration with BigQuery. In November, Databricks saluted Fivetran with the ISV Partners Innovation Award. The company was also recognized by top industry analyst firms, including Gartner (News - Alert) , and made its debut in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools. Fivetran has also been the recipient of numerous awards recognizing its strong business growth and company culture. Accolades include the 2020 "Best Small & Medium Workplaces" and 2021 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area by Great Place to Work and Fortune; Built In 2021 100 Best Places to Work (#1 in Colorado, #11 in the Bay Area); Business Insider Top 100 Startups; 2020 Deloitte Fast 500; 2020 San Francisco Business Times Fastest Growing Companies; and Enterprise Tech 30 for 2020. Fivetran was also named to the Forbes Cloud 100 and Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list in 2020. For a deeper dive into 2020 product enhancements and company milestones, please visit the Fivetran blog. For images and additional assets, please visit the Fivetran newsroom. About Fivetran Fivetran, the leader in automated data integration, delivers ready-to-use connectors that automatically adapt as schemas and APIs change, ensuring consistent, reliable access to data. Fivetran improves the accuracy of data-driven decisions by continuously synchronizing data from source applications to any destination, allowing analysts to work with the freshest possible data. To accelerate analytics, Fivetran automates in-warehouse transformations and programmatically manages ready-to-query schemas. Fivetran is headquartered in Oakland, California, with offices around the globe. For more information, visit fivetran.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005379/en/ VANCOUVER, BC, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - NEXE Innovations Inc. ("NEXE" or the "Company"), a leader in plant-based materials manufacturing, is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the Province of British Columbia (BC), Canada under the BC Ignite Program. This funding will support the Company's research and development into new plant-based compostable materials in collaboration with The University of British Columbia ("UBC"), and the commercialization of its single-serve beverage pod products. "We are appreciative of this support from the Government of BC, which reflects its commitment to supporting disruptive companies in the cleantech space," said Ash Guglani, President of NEXE. "This grant, combined with the recent Innovative Solutions Canada $1 million award from the Government of Canada further validates NEXE's global expertise in biopolymer technology and supports our vision of eliminating single use plastic across the globe." The BC Ignite program is part of the Government of British Columbia's strategy to help companies to grow, create jobs, and commercialize new technologies in BC. In addition to providing funding, Innovate BC's mandate is to build the capacity of BC companies to access global markets and attract new investment. NEXE was one of three winners of Round 9 of the BC Ignite Program. "We're excited to help supercharge game-changing innovation. Past winners have solved billion-dollar market problems that companies like Goodyear have tried to solve for 50 years." said Raghwa Gopal, President + CEO, Innovate BC "Innovation is one of the pillars of economic growth and will become increasingly important as we rebuild from the impacts of COVID. These companies are producing breakthrough technologies that will help protect the environment, stimulate the economy, and benefit people's lives." said Ravi Kahlon, Minister of Jobs, Economic Recovery and Innovation NEXE is also pleased to announce that it has now received approximately $8.5M from warrant exercises to date in addition to the $14.2M that the Company raised in its December 2020 financing. The company is fully funded to fulfill its projected capital requirements for the next 12 months as it scales up manufacturing of its compostable single-serve beverage pods. About NEXE Innovations Inc. NEXE Innovations Inc. is a leader in plant-based compostable technology and advanced materials manufacturing based in British Columbia, Canada. The company has developed one of the only patented, fully compostable, plant-based, single-serve coffee pods for use in leading single-serve coffee machines. The proprietary NEXE pod is designed to reduce the significant environmental impact caused by single-serve pods, >40 billion of which are discarded every year. With over $35M raised to date from equity and government funding and over five years of R&D, NEXE is well-positioned to meet the growing demand for environmentally friendly and sustainable products in the single-serve coffee sector and beyond. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Social Media https://twitter.com/nexeinnovations https://www.facebook.com/nexeinnovations https://www.linkedin.com/company/nexeinnovations https://www.instagram.com/nexeinnovations Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements in this release are forward-looking statements or information, which include the proposed use of proceeds, commercialization of the NEXE PODs, including the NEXE Nespresso Compatible Pod, development of the NEXE Mask, and increase production capacity, create other environmentally friendly compostable packaging opportunities, development of technologies, the potential of the Company's technology, future plans, regulatory approvals and other matters. Forward-looking statements consist of statements that are not purely historical, including any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Such information can generally be identified by the use of forwarding-looking wording such as "may", "expect", "estimate", "anticipate", "intend", "believe" and "continue" or the negative thereof or similar variations. The reader is cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of any forward-looking information may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, as a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company, including but not limited to, business, economic and capital market conditions, the ability to manage operating expenses, consumer demand for and sentiment towards the Company's products, security threats, and dependence on key personnel. Such statements and information are based on numerous assumptions regarding present and future business strategies and the environment in which the Company will operate in the future, including the demand for its products, anticipated costs, and the ability to achieve goals. Factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include, failure to obtain regulatory approval, the continued availability of capital and financing, equipment failures, litigation, increase in operating costs, the impact of Covid-19 or other viruses and diseases on the Company's ability to operate, competition, failure of counterparties to perform their contractual obligations, government regulations, loss of key employees and consultants, and general economic, market or business conditions. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking information. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release. Except as required by law, the Company disclaims any intention and assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. SOURCE Nexe Innovations Inc. Related Links https://nexeinnovations.com/ IRELANDS Catholic bishops have called for vaccines to be made available to priests who are chaplains to nursing care facilities and who preside at funerals as a matter of priority. The call was made in a statement on Wednesday by Bishop Michael Router on behalf of the Irish Catholic Bishops Conferences Council for Healthcare. Dr Router, Auxiliary Bishop of Armagh, also appealed to everyone to support the vaccination programmes currently in place both in the Republic and in Northern Ireland. We encourage all parishes and Church personnel to promote this programme and to encourage elderly parishioners, relatives and neighbours to avail of the opportunity to protect their health and the health of the whole community. He said the development and provision of the vaccines is already providing reassurance for those who are most vulnerable to the virus and added that the vaccine roll-out would help us to return to normality in terms of work, education, religious practice, and sporting and leisure activities as soon as possible. The bishops welcomed the fact that all residents and staff of nursing care facilities have been vaccinated and that the next group prioritised in the Republic to receive the vaccine in the coming weeks are those over 70 years of age, while in the North it is those over 65 years of age along with others who are clinically vulnerable. Read More Last December the bishops encouraged Catholics to support the programme of vaccination not only for their own good, but for the protection of life and the health of those who are vulnerable and for the common good of humanity. They said, safe and effective vaccination is an essential aspect of the prevention of disease. The Vaticans Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made a similar call to all Catholics in December. The Irish bishops statement follows concerns raised by the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) on Monday over the proposed reopening of churches for public worship for Easter. In a statement, the group, which represents 1,000 priests, said its members have significant misgivings about reopening churches for Easter ceremonies, believing it to be a premature and potentially detrimental move. Although they commended the four Catholic archbishops for their engagement with Taoiseach Micheal Martin about public worship last weekend, the ACP said: Numerous priests, many elderly and not yet vaccinated, are Covid-19 frontline workers as they journey with families during sadness and bereavement. The group also noted that the post-Christmas surge in new Covid-19 cases and the threat from Covid-19 variants represented a persuasive evidence-based platform to strongly argue against an early return to congregational worship. WATERLOO TWP., MI A suspect in a Tuesday evening shooting in Jackson County is considered armed and dangerous. Darvin Cole, 38, of Henrietta Township, is accused of shooting a man in the leg and fleeing the area of the 10000 block of Waterloo-Munith Road on Feb. 23, the Jackson County Sheriffs Office said. Police were sent to St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor at 5:10 p.m. to talk to the victim. Cole is 5 feet, 6 inches tall, 140 pounds with brown hair and blue eyes, police said. He was out of jail on bond for stealing snowmobiles and he has a felony warrant for larceny of a firearm and a misdemeanor warrant for failing to appear in court, police said. An investigation revealed the shooting started after a verbal argument between Cole and the victim, a 33-year-old man from Waterloo Township, police said. Police say Cole shot the victim in the leg with a shotgun before fleeing. A woman drove the victim to Chelsea Hospital, where he was then taken to St. Joseph Mercy Hospital by ambulance. The man is in serious but stable condition, police said. Detectives are trying to find Cole as they investigate the shooting. Police are asking the any members of the public with information about Coles whereabouts to call Detective Kelley Ebersole at 517-768-7932 or the Jackson County Sheriffs Office at 517-768-7901. Those who want to be anonymous should call Crime Stoppers at 1-517-483-7867. Additional charges for attempted murder are being requested from the Jackson County Prosecutors Office. Read more from MLive: Police thwart meth smuggling attempt at Jackson County Jail I lost all my babies. Woman devastated after fire destroys barn, kills animals Its role in the Underground Railroad could earn Jackson train station national historic recognition Stolen snowmobile found frozen in Jackson County lake March 6 marks World Lymphedema Day an opportunity to educate ourselves about a condition that affects about 1 in every 1,000 Americans. Lymphedema is an abnormal swelling of the arm, leg or other body part due to an excessive buildup of fluid called lymph. While lymphedema is a common complication of cancer treatments, the causes of the condition are varied. It can be hereditary (primary lymphedema) or it can occur after a surgical procedure, infection, radiation or other physical trauma (secondary lymphedema). Lymphedema is a progressive and chronic condition in which protein-rich fluid builds up in the interstitial tissue spaces. This can lead to tissue damage and adversely affect the immune system. With the onset of lymphedema, the lymphatic system cannot successfully pick up and convey fluid back into cardiovascular circulation. Lower-extremity lymphedema is often underrecognized and, as a result, underserved as a patient group. While many individuals cite cancer as the top cause of lower-extremity lymphedema, chronic venous insufficiency is actually to blame. Some secondary causes of CVI are obesity, trauma, pregnancy, surgery, extended periods of standing or sitting, and muscle weakness. Studies have shown that CVI is a top reason for patients to end up transitioning to lymphedema-phlebolymphedema a condition that affects about 5% of the population, or about 16 million patients in the United States. In a 2010 article in The Journal of the American College of Certified Wound Specialists, Dr. Wade Farrow describes phlebolymphedema as a two-system failure that can result in a downward spiral of worsening symptoms. Clinicians need to address the veins and lymphatics, or this issue will continue to worsen. Put simply, venous insufficiency is a failure of the veins to circulate the blood satisfactorily. Phlebolymphedema patients face major issues with their condition, such as cellulitis, venous leg ulcers, pain, and functional performance deficits with functional mobility and completion of activities of daily living. Those diagnosed with lymphedema and phlebolymphedema can find relief and manage symptoms with completed decongestive therapy. This is a comprehensive therapy approach that includes manual lymph drainage, compression bandaging and, later, compression garments, skin and nail care precautions, patient education in self-care, and training in a home program to promote lymphatic circulation. French Actor Gerard Depardieu Charged With Rape in Revived Case PARISThe Paris prosecutors office said on Tuesday that French actor Gerard Depardieu was charged in December with rape and sexual assault after authorities revived a 2018 investigation that was initially dropped. The office told The Associated Press that Depardieu was not detained when he was handed the preliminary charges on Dec. 16, 2020. The prosecutors office addressed the charges after the case was leaked to French media. Depardieus lawyer Herve Temime was not immediately available for comment, but he has previously said that the actor absolutely denies any rape, any sexual assault, any crime. French media reports said the charges relate to allegations made by an actress in her 20s that date back to 2018. An initial inquiry against the star was dropped in 2019 because of lack of evidence, but was later revived. French newspaper Le Parisien and broadcaster BFM TV said the woman alleged that Depardieu assaulted her on Aug. 7 and Aug. 13, 2018 at his home in Paris. The two met when Depardieu led a master class at her school, BFM TV reported. The actress, who has not been named, first filed a complaint with details of alleged rape and assault in August 2018 in the southern French city of Aix-en-Provence. The probe was take over by Paris investigators, but was soon dropped. Depardieu, 72, is among Frances most well-known stars. He has appeared in 200 films over six decades and is among a few French actors who have made a name for themselves in Hollywood. He won a Golden Globe best actor award for his performance in Green Card, a 1990 English-language romantic comedy co-starring Andie MacDowell. His performance in the French-language Cyrano de Bergerac the same year won him the award for best male performance at the Cannes film festival, and a nomination in the best leading actor category at the 1990 Academy Awards. His first big hit in France was Les Valseuses, (Going Places), Bertrand Bliers classic farce about two wandering thugs. Before crossing the Atlantic to star in Green Card, Depardieu played an array of roles, ranging from Jean Valjean, the thief-turned-saint in Les Miserables, to Christopher Columbus. In 2012, Depardieu had a public falling out with the Socialist presidential administration in office in France at the time, accusing it of suppressing talent with the taxes it was levying on high earners. He said he was handing in his French passport and moving to a home he had bought in Belgium. In 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin granted Depardieu Russian citizenship. The actor received his new passport in person from Putin at the Russian leaders residence on the Black Sea coast. In 2014, he played the leading role in Welcome to New York, the film inspired by the life of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former director of the International Monetary Fund who was accused in 2011 of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. Reuters contributed to this report. The delegation to the UN has also voiced support for Crimean Tatars. The Permanent Mission of the Republic of Turkey to the United Nations has declared non-recognition of the annexation of Crimea and support of the Crimean Tatars. "Non-recognition of the illegal annexation of Crimea is a matter of principle for us. We will continue to support Crimean Tatars, in their just desire to live freely and safely in their ancestral homeland," the diplomats wrote on Twitter on February 24, 2021. "We fully support Ukraine's sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, which is essential for peace, security and stability in the wider region," reads the tweet. Read alsoUkraine's envoy to UN Kyslytsya: "Russia should not be allowed to use veto power"Background On February 23, 2021, the UN General Assembly held a debate "Situation in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine." Ukraine's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Serhiy Kyslytsya called on the UN to deprive Russia of its veto right at UN Security Council meetings, as it is an aggressor country that continues waging a war against Ukraine. "As a party to the conflict, non-elected member of the UN Security Council that is not even mentioned in Article 23 of the UN Charter on the composition of the Council, Russia should not be allowed to use veto power," he said. According to Kyslytsya, repetitive statements by Russian officials about Russia's alleged "mediation" role in the Donbas peace process are outrageous. "Russia has not been and cannot, in principle, be a mediator in the conflict it has started and continues to take part in since the first day of aggression," he said. Reporting by UNIAN The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company A billboard with the inscription "Crimea is Ukraine!" has been put up outside the building of the Russian Embassy in Kyiv, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has reported on Facebook. "Just a photo, just the Russian embassy in Kyiv, just stating a fact: Crimea is Ukraine!" reads the post, accompanied with a respective photo. The poster depicts the symbols of the SBU's counterintelligence department. Similar billboards have appeared in other cities of Ukraine, where Russian consulates are located: in Kharkiv, Lviv, and Odesa. On February 20, 2014, Russia launched its armed aggression against Ukraine, capturing part of its territory - Crimea. On March 16, 2014, Russia held a so-called referendum on the status of Crimea on the occupied peninsula. Two days later, on March 18, 2014, the Kremlin signed the so-called Treaty on the Admission of the Republic of Crimea to the Russian Federation. Most UN member states and other international organizations declared illegitimate the rigged Crimean referendum held by the invaders. On February 26, 2020, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree establishing in Ukraine the Day of Resistance to the Occupation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the City of Sevastopol. Photo credit: SBU Banjul, Gambia (PANA) - President Adama Barrow og Gambia has called for stronger cooperation in the manufacturing and tourism industries, saying that such investments will create job opportunities for the youth, as well as curb illegal migration Two workers were found dead Wednesday morning at a construction site in Bostons Financial District, authorities said. Boston police and firefighters, among them technical rescue personnel, were sent to the area of 190 High St. around 8 a.m. after receiving a report of two pedestrians hit by a truck, public safety officials in the city said at a press conference Wednesday morning. Officers, firefighters and EMS personnel soon located the workers in a hole at the construction site. The two individuals were pronounced dead at the scene after a firefighter and a EMS paramedic were lowered into the hole to assess the situation. Authorities then started to work to recover their bodies, according to officials. NBC Boston reported the two men were struck by a dump truck and fell into a trench. The circumstances surrounding the incident, including how the truck was involved, remain under investigation, though, authorities noted. As the mayor said, this is a tragic incident for the victims, their families and their coworkers, Boston Police Superintendent-in-Chief Greg Long said at the press conference. Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins office will be directing the investigation into the incident, working with the Boston Police Department and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to do so. Rollins, along with Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and representatives from OSHA, were at the scene of the incident Wednesday morning. We have done this before unfortunately, Rollins said at the press conference, noting the 2016 case of two Atlantic Drain employees killed on the job in Boston. Authorities dont yet know if what occurred Wednesday morning was a crime, but they know its a tragedy, Rollins noted. My office is here making sure these families know that we take this very seriously, the prosecutor said. We are going to be in constant contact with our federal and local and state partners to get to the bottom of this for our families. Walsh later wrote in a Twitter thread that authorities immediately suspended Atlantic Coast Utilities only other permitted worksite in Boston. Until a thorough investigation is complete, the company, which was operating at the construction site on High Street, will not be allowed to perform work in the city, according to the mayor. As a former laborer, the safety of our workers is of paramount importance to me, Walsh tweeted. Im heartbroken that two hardworking people lost their lives so suddenly and tragically this morning, and we will work tirelessly to understand how this happened in order to create safer conditions in the future. Im heartbroken that two hardworking people lost their lives so suddenly and tragically this morning, and we will work tirelessly to understand how this happened in order to create safer conditions in the future. Mayor Marty Walsh (@marty_walsh) February 24, 2021 While authorities were responding to the incident Wednesday morning, several blocks around High Street were closed off from Oliver Street to John F. Fitzgerald Surface Road due to police activity, the Boston Police Department wrote in a tweet around 9:45 a.m. BPD Traffic Advisory: High Street (between Oliver Street and John F Fitzgerald Surface Road) will be closed for police activity Boston Police Dept. (@bostonpolice) February 24, 2021 Got a news tip or want to contact MassLive about this story? Email newstips@masslive.com or message us on Facebook or Twitter. You can also call our news tips line at 413-776-1364. Dauphin County officials said Wednesday theyve signed an agreement to distribute COVID-19 vaccines from a large parking lot at Harrisburg Area Community College. However, they said no dates can be announced until after a significant increase in available doses. Currently, there is not enough vaccine to administer doses on a large scale as would be supported by a mass vaccination site, according to a news release from the county. County Commissioner Mike Pries said in the news release, Getting vaccinated is a concern to many of our residents and is a top priority of ours. We have been planning in the event doses become available to supply such an operation. This agreement ensures we will have a central location able to support mass vaccination, should dosages increase. Dauphin County officials also said they are working with health care professionals and others needed to run the vaccination site. The further said the location, on the northern edge of Harrisburg and near Interstate 81, is accessible for minority communities and as well as residents of rural areas in northern Dauphin County. Still, all of Pennsylvania, and the rest of the country, faces a shortage of doses, with the weekly supply growing but still far short of demand. Barry Ciccocioppo, a spokesman for the health department, said Wednesday the state lacks ability to immediately increase the supply of vaccine to accommodate the planned site at HACC. People need to have patience. We have said from the beginning that its going to take months to get enough supply to meet the demand for the vaccine and that is still the case. We are getting as much vaccine to Pennsylvania as is allowable from the federal government, he said. Pennsylvania expects to receive 225,890 first doses and 180,610 second does this week, not including those sent to Philadelphia, which receives its own supply. Thats about 80,000 more doses than last week. Pennsylvania, with 12.8 million residents, has about 4.5 million people who have top priority for receiving vaccine because they work in health care, live in long-term care, are 65 or older or are between 16 and 64 with a chronic illness. The state had given nearly 2.1 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine through Tuesday. That includes about 1.5 million people who have received one dose and are awaiting a second, and about 585,000 who have received two doses. More from PennLive Health network allowed employees kin to skip COVID-19 vaccine line SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Colin Crawford, dean of the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville, is joining Golden Gate University School of Law as its 16th dean. GGU President David Fike announced the hire to the university on February 18, and Dean Crawford will join the San Francisco school this summer. "Dean Crawford is a very experienced and accomplished dean and legal scholar,'' Fike said. "I'm delighted to be able to work with him to help GGU Law deepen our strong commitment to student learning, maintain the high quality and rich diversity of the school's student body, and support the professional success of our graduates." Serving as dean at Louisville since 2018, Crawford improved the school's academic profile each year, substantially increased philanthropic giving, and revamped admissions and student services to increase enrollment and support for racially diverse students. Before that, Crawford was the Robert C. Cudd Professor of Environmental Law at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans. He also directed the university's multidisciplinary graduate and undergraduate Development Studies programs and taught undergraduate courses in the School of Liberal Arts. Crawford said he was drawn to GGU after visiting the school last year while serving as a member of an American Bar Association accreditation team. "I was positively impressed by and drawn to the mission of the school and the longstanding commitment of faculty, staff, and students to diversity, equity, and inclusion, including those for whom a law profession might otherwise be out of reach," Crawford said. "I am convinced that Dean Crawford is ideally suited to nurture our values and advance our goals in this vitally important area," Fike said. Crawford was selected "from among a pool of very talented, diverse, and qualified candidates," said Professor Samuel Ernst, chair of the dean search committee, during a months-long process that engaged law school faculty, staff, and students. "He assumes the leadership of GGU Law at an exciting time,'' said Interim Dean Eric Christiansen. "Recent investments in the entering classes and pedagogical reform of the last few years are bearing exciting fruit in the launch of our JD Flex program and graduation of some of the most highly skilled classes in decades." Crawford is a prolific scholar in environmental, urban development, and land-use law. He also has experience with international programs, having developed and taught courses throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, served as the Project Director for the Environmental Law Capacity-Building Initiative in Central America funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, and published books and articles in English, Spanish and Portuguese, languages in which he is fluent. He has also lectured and taught in China, Cuba, France, Japan, Panama, and South Korea, and was a Fulbright scholar in the Dominican Republic. He has a law degree from Harvard Law School and degrees in modern history from Cambridge and Columbia universities. He was admitted to practice law in the State of New York. Located in San Francisco, Golden Gate University School of Law provides students with a solid foundation in legal theory and the skills necessary to be a successful practitioner. GGU Law has a special commitment to public interest law. In addition to a strong public interest law curriculum, the school offers financial assistance to students who pursue careers in public interest law, and our in-house clinics provide legal assistance to underrepresented populations. GGU students reflect a wide variety of ages, work experience, and cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. GGU's 700 law students include working professionals and recent college graduates from more than 100 undergraduate and graduate institutions. Contact: Michael Bazeley Director of Communications, GGU at [email protected] 415-442-7853 SOURCE Golden Gate University Related Links http://www.ggu.edu Charity to Provide Free Combat Rosaries to Military, Law Enforcement and First Responders NEWS PROVIDED BY Combat Rosaries for Heroes Inc. Feb. 24, 2021 MADISON, Wisc., Feb. 24, 2021 /Christian Newswire/ -- A new nonprofit charity founded by a Catholic priest will provide free military-grade steel rosaries to U.S. military personnel, law enforcement officers and first responders. Combat Rosaries for Heroes is being launched on February 23, 2021, which is the 76th anniversary of the iconic photo showing the flag being raised by the U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima during the latter part of World War II. "We chose the Iwo Jima photo to represent this "Combat Rosaries for Heroes" initiative because it shows the perilous conditions our heroes have faced in the battle against evil, and the surrendered ground they have heroically reclaimed," said Rev. Richard Heilman, a priest of the Diocese of Madison who founded the charity and serves as its president. "Placing themselves in harm's way, these heroes have done everything asked of them in their mission to serve and protect our country," said Fr. Heilman, "We want to honor these heroes by gifting them with this powerful spiritual weapon - The Combat Rosary - which will be touched to a Relic of the True Cross of Christ. This particular relic was rescued from a bombed out church during the D-Day invasion in WWII. The Catholic Church teaches that religious articles touched to this relic makes their religious articles a third-class relic of the True Cross of Jesus Christ! That makes these "Combat Rosaries for Heroes" very powerful spiritual weapons." Combat Rosaries for Heroes Inc. will raise funds to provide a free Combat Rosary to as many of these heroes as possible. Father Heilman designed the Combat Rosary based on the 1916 pull-chain Rosary issued by the U.S. government during World War I. The Rosary is made of steel and features a gunmetal finish. The Combat Rosary is carried by the Pontifical Swiss Guard at the Vatican. Each donated Rosary will come with a protective leather zippered case so the sacramental can be easily tucked in a pocket. "St. Padre Pio once said, 'Love the Madonna and pray the Rosary, for her Rosary is the weapon against the evils of the world today. All graces given by God pass through the Blessed Mother,'" Fr. Heilman said. "With all of our world's troubles and challenges, it's more important than ever to arm our nation's heroes with this very powerful spiritual weapon. This project has long been a dream of mine. As Pope Pius XI once said, 'The Rosary is a powerful weapon to put the demons to flight and to keep oneself from sin.'" Every effort is being made to put all donations toward only the raw cost of materials and assembly in order to get the most Combat Rosaries to the most heroes. Fundraising for the project will be done online. Donate at CombatRosariesForHeroes.com. Checks can be sent to P.O. Box 44036, Madison, WI 53744. Combat Rosaries for Heroes Inc. is a Wisconsin-based nonprofit corporation. SOURCE Combat Rosaries for Heroes Inc. CONTACT: Pat Moertl, 608-369-0936 Related Links www.combatrosariesforheroes.com A 19-year-old with cerebral palsy who authorities say was killed by her younger sister died of multiple stab wounds, the Lancaster County coroner said following a Wednesday morning autopsy. Manheim Township police discovered Helen Miller, 19, in bed with a pillow over her face and a knife sticking out of her neck early Monday, after her 14-year-old sister Claire Miller hysterically called police to tell them, I killed my sister, according to court documents. Helen Miller was pronounced dead shortly after 4 a.m. Monday at her Clayton Road home in Manheim Township. Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni confirmed to PennLive that Helen Millers death was ruled a homicide as a result of multiple stab wounds. He did not say the number or location of the wounds because of the ongoing investigation. Claire Miller is charged with homicide for her sisters death. She was denied bail and is being held in a private cell at Lancaster County Prison. Claire Miller, 14, is charged with stabbing to death her sister Helen Miller, 19, early Mon., Feb. 22, 2021, in Manheim Township. Authorities said Helen Miller had cerebral palsy. (Photo courtesy of the Lancaster County District Attorney's Office) Authorities confirmed Helen Miller had cerebral palsy and used a wheelchair. They have refused to offer a motive as to why Claire Miller killed her sister. Among other symptoms, cerebral palsy can cause stiff or floppy muscles, lack or balance or coordination and slow movements, according to the Mayo Clinic. Pennsylvania is among about a dozen other states where the burden of proof is automatically placed on a juvenile who has been charged with murder. This means her name and mugshot can be released to the public, and she can be held in an adult correctional facility. Miller is among the youngest defendants charged with criminal homicide in central Pennsylvania in recent memory. She has a preliminary hearing scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Friday. READ MORE: What we know about the 14-year-old accused of killing her disabled sister and why shes in an adult prison Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 22:35:44|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close Boxes of the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine are distributed to family doctors for vaccination in Kecskemet, Hungary on Feb. 24, 2021. Hungary has started to administer China's Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine, as a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic looms, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Wednesday. (Sandor Ujvari/MTI via Xinhua) BUDAPEST, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Hungary has started to administer China's Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine, as a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic looms, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Wednesday. "Today is an important day because (on) this day we are starting to vaccinate with Chinese vaccines," Orban said in a video message on his Facebook page, after a meeting with healthcare experts. "Officials in charge of the defense against the pandemic will probably also be inoculated" next week, he added. "The situation is not easy, because on one hand we have more and more vaccines, and therefore the number of vaccinated people will increase, but at the same time, a third wave is threatening Hungary," Orban said. Therefore, epidemiologists have asked to have as many citizens vaccinated as possible, Orban said. "It is not possible to talk about easing measures yet, but there is one issue that we will consider: residents of nursing homes -- where more than 80 percent of people are already vaccinated -- suffer a lot from not being able to receive visits and are prohibited from leaving the institutions," he said. "We want to find some humanly acceptable solution here," he added. Hungary currently has five vaccines at hand to fend off the virus, including the Sinopharm vaccine. The first shipment of Sinopharm vaccines purchased by Hungary arrived in Budapest on Feb. 16. The Central European country on Wednesday registered 2,855 new COVID-19 cases in a 24-hour span, raising the national total to 410,129, according to official data. In the past 24 hours, 102 people have died from the disease, taking the toll to 14,552 in the country, while 313,450 have recovered. Currently, 4,353 patients are being treated in hospitals, including 407 on ventilators, figures from the government's coronavirus information website showed. As of Wednesday, 471,004 people have received at least the first vaccine jab, while 208,846 have received two jabs, according to the website. Enditem The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Qatar Airways has suspended flights from Doha to both Skopje and Sarajevo until further notice with services unlikely to resume before 2022. The carrier has been delaying the resumption of its operations to the two cities for some time now. It initially planned to restart flights at the start of the 2021/2022 winter season in late October but has now discontinued ticket sales. The decision comes as a result of weak demand caused by the coronavirus pandemic, with both routes being heavily reliant on transfer passengers coming from markets which are currently completely closed for both outbound and inbound travel. Qatar Airways has suspended flights from Doha to both Skopje and Sarajevo until further notice with services unlikely to resume before 2022. The carrier has been delaying the resumption of its operations to the two cities for some time now. It initially planned to restart flights at the start of the 2021/2022 winter season in late October but has now discontinued ticket sales. The decision comes as a result of weak demand caused by the coronavirus pandemic, with both routes being heavily reliant on transfer passengers coming from markets which are currently completely closed for both outbound and inbound travel. In a statement to EX-YU Aviation News, Qatar Airways said, Similar to other airlines around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic has created significant operational challenges for Qatar Airways. While we continue to operate as many flights as possible, many routes remain commercially unviable due to the significant drop in global demand for air travel. After careful consideration, we have taken the decision to temporarily suspend the Sarajevo and Skopje routes. We have advised all stakeholders and impacted passengers and are working closely with them to offer alternative travel options to other points in our network or full refunds in line with our Travel With Confidence flexible travel policy. It added, We understand how important it is for many of our passengers to have access to flights and we want to reassure them we remain committed to operating as many flights as possible. An ongoing review is being conducted and the intention is to reinstate flights in line with a return to regular conditions and market demand. Qatar Airways inaugurated flights to both Skopje and Sarajevo in 2017. It was the only Oneworld alliance member to maintain services to the two cities. Elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, Qatar Airways continues to maintain flights to Belgrade and Zagreb. It currently operates three weekly services to Belgrade with its Airbus A320 jet and one weekly to the Croatian capital with the same aircraft type. Due to increased demand for holiday destinations in the Indian Ocean, the airline will be increasing capacity to Belgrade on select dates in March to the Airbus A321 and has also pushed back its departure time from the Serbian capital in order to cut down on transfer time in Doha. It plans to increase services to four weekly from March 28. On the other hand, services to Zagreb will increase to two weekly at the start of the summer season. Sorry! This content is not available in your region Eighteen companies have terminated their participation or are in the process of withdrawing, following U.S. sanctions threats. The U.S. has only imposed sanctions on one company, but has threatened to "take further action." So far, only the company operating this pipe-laying ship has faced U.S. sanctions At least 18 European companies have either terminated their participation in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline or have pledged to withdraw from the project over threats of U.S. sanctions, according to a U.S. State Department report for Congress. The State Department submitted a report on the pipeline to Congress on Friday, in a document which has not yet been publicly released. The U.S. has threatened sanctions against several other companies involved in the construction and certification of the roughly 1,200-km gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea. So far, however, the U.S. has only imposed sanctions on the Russian company KVT-RUS, which owns the Russian pipe-laying vessel Fortuna. Most of the companies terminating their participation are insurance companies, the majority of which are based in the United Kingdom. Among them are Munich-based insurer Munich Re Syndicate Limited and Switzerland-based Zurich Insurance Group. Axa Group, based in Paris, and civil engineering group Bilfinger of Mannheim have also terminated their involvement, according to the U.S. State Department. Kalyani : , Feb 24 (IANS) Suraj Rawat scored a stoppage time winner as Mohammedan Sporting recorded a 2-1 win over Chennai City FC on Wednesday in the I-League. Ranjeet Pandre gave Chennai the lead in the first half but Mohammedans scored twice in the second half to wipe out Chennai's advantage. Chennai suffered a set back early in the second half with defender Tarif Akhand getting a red card and Mohammedans used the advantage to the full. Mohammedans, despite dominating possession, failed to make the most of their chances and were pinned by a defensive error that resulted in a goal in the 19th minute. Defender Kingsley Eze failed to make a routine clearance after a whipped-in cross from Jishnu Balakrishnan awkwardly bounced for the defender. The cross fell for Pandre, who slotted home from close range to give Chennai the lead. Conceding much against the run of play looked to take the wind out of Mohammedans' sails. However, they recuperated and in the 28th minute, new signing Pedro Manzi set up Faisal Ali inside the box. An onrushing Ali, however, could only shoot wide of the goal. But perhaps the best chance of the half for Mohammedans came in the 40th minute when John Chidi combined with Pedro Manzi inside the box. Chidi set himself up with a fake shot, but his final effort lacked precision as it rattled the post and went out. The half-time scoreline read 1-0 in Chennai's favour. Chennai City FC were dealt a heavy blow in the early minutes of the second half when defender Akhand was shown a second yellow card after handling the ball. Reduced to ten men, Chennai City FC committed bodies in defence to safeguard their lead. Mohammedans capitalised by scoring the equaliser in the 55th minute with Sadhu heading in the ball from a corner kick. It could have been two goals in two successive minutes had Pedro Manzi not skewed his chance wide of goal. A combination of good Chennai defending and sloppiness up front from Mohammedans led to the latter being unable to find the winner despite having an extra man on the field. Chennai even earned a glorious chance to snatch a goal in the 84th minute after a low cross from the left found Vineeth Kumar inside the box and after setting himself up with a good touch, Vineeth shot over the bar from handshaking distance. But, there was another twist left in the tale. In stoppage time of the second half, Rawat was set up by Tirthankar Sarkar outside of the box. He took the shot and it found the back of the net to hand the Mohammedans the lead. "I HATE the term Rip-off Ireland, says Trea Heapes of Pure Camping, a family-run campsite and yoga retreat on Co Clare's Loop Head peninsula. "No-one benefits from that impression on either side I hope everyone is fair this summer. We all need a break. She may be disappointed. As soon as summer holiday searches started this January, with little to no chance of overseas alternatives, cries of rip-off' followed. Screengrabs of extreme peak season prices were shared on social media. Radio debates sparked up. Id get a week in Spain for that! is by now a familiar cry. But this year, many like Heapes believe the quick-trigger outrage could do deeper damage. With no overseas visitors, festivals or big wedding business, Irish tourism and hospitality desperately needs the jump cables of a strong staycation summer. A chorus of negativity that focuses on price over value, and doesn't always compare like-for-like, is a growing concern. "I think Rip-off Ireland has become a bit of a soundbite, adds Julie OBrien of Runda, a company offering sales, marketing and revenue management solutions to the industry. I think in Ireland we need to take a breath and think about the people we are talking about when we say this stuff... a huge number of the people I work with are in tourism because they have a passion and they are literally looking to keep the wolf from the door and create a livelihood." Of course there are gougers in Ireland, just as there are in any country and its not unpatriotic to question pricing. Instead of rehashing the annual rip-off reflex, however, why not move the conversation on with a deeper look at what were paying for, using like-for-like comparisons? 2021 offers a chance for Irish punters to fall back in love with this country, and businesses to win over a whole new generation of home holidaymakers. Whichever side youre on, here are 10 points to bear in mind before we put the price on our summer staycations. 1. What exactly is the rip-off? This morning, I searched a well-known global booking site for a three-night break in a Killarney hotel. One price quoted for a family of four was over 1,600. I couldnt afford it. Few could. But what does the price actually include? The hotel is a five-star offering two rooms including full breakfast for a family over the August Bank Holiday weekend. It includes all the facilities and service of a luxury hotel, free cancellation with no pre-payment, Covid compliance measures and equates to 133 per person a night in peak season. There was a more expensive option in Killarney that weekend, and there were many cheaper ones, starting from 327 for a family of four in basic accommodation for three nights. Simply highlighting the price means nothing. It's like saying a 50,000 car is expensive, without describing the car. 2. Ireland is an expensive place to run a business No holidaymaker wants to hear a hotel whinge about rents, fixed costs or VAT bills. But we should be aware of what it costs to provide a holiday here. Irelands insurance, rents, rates, energy and labour costs are higher than many of the sun hotspots and cheap city breaks we often compare them to. Kilkenny is a very different place in which to pour a beer than Krakow. The cost of business in Kerry is higher than the Canaries. Irish tourism and hospitality businesses, when you hear staycation prices described as "a rip-off", what is your constructive response? How do you counter this, or explain otherwise? I'd love your thoughts for a piece.#JournoRequest pic.twitter.com/Hv87UTPeHN @poloconghaile (@poloconghaile) February 12, 2021 Its not just holidays. We see that cost of living in our weekly shops, rent and takeaway coffees. This years hotel or restaurant bills also have to cover Covid-19 health and safety measures, from perspex screens to hand sanitiser and reduced capacities. 3. None of this lets hospitality businesses off the hook The home holiday industry also has some thinking and explaining to do. Irish people are acutely sensitive to being over-charged, the memory of Celtic Tiger excesses remains raw, and though many households have saved money in the pandemic, many have lost jobs and income too. "There's a danger we'll self-destruct if we start abusing the situation, as one hotelier told me. Punters understand that prices rise in peak season. We're not stupid. But worst-case scenarios in the past, when rates skyrocketed to coincide with big concerts, rugby weekends or events like the Galway Races (problems we may only wish we had right now), have left a bad taste too. "If we truly want to look after customers then these fluctuations should be kept reasonable, says Seamus Leahy of hospitality consultants, Invite Resorts. The balancing act is key between short-term opportunism and long-term sustainability. For me, the first step is honesty for hoteliers. 4. Value does not mean 'cheap Ive eaten terrible sandwiches that cost a few euro. Ive also paid hundreds for special-occasion meals out. The sambos were a waste of money, but some of those meals were the best Ive ever had, combining mouthwatering food, cutting-edge Irish cooking and super service. Bad value stings; good value gives us a glow. The price tag often has little to do with it. Is that apartment in a great location, by the coast or in the city centre? How many bedrooms? Is it luxury or basic? Does the hotel have a pool, or kids clubs? Ireland can offer amazing service, great culture, and generations of family-run properties at the top of their game. That's all included in the price. 5. Staycation businesses need to think value, too We dont need a long list of essentials like Wi-Fi, water or towels. But creative explanations of what packages and price tags entail can bring a lot more value to light. "I think the Irish breakfast is a very good example, says Julie OBrien of Runda. While French or Italian markets may hear breakfast and think of coffee and a croissant, she says the Irish experience can offer huge value but is often taken for granted. You can say 'breakfast anywhere in the world, but when you say it in an Irish B&B or hotel, you get a tonne of stuff for that. Cooked, continental, pastries, juices, yoghurts, tea, coffee. Outside of the service, a lot of that is cooked to order comparing like with like is very important. "Many B&Bs offer added value often not taken in to account, as Ardmore Country House in Kinnitty, Co Offaly tweeted me recently. We offer complimentary tea/coffee and home baking on arrival, a wide choice of breakfast only cooked when you sit down, including home-baked bread and preserves all for just 45pps. 6. There are people behind the prices One of the most heartening things about this pandemic is the way in which communities have rallied around to support each other. We have shopped local. Many hotels and restaurants provided meals to isolated or vulnerable people. We want to pull on the green jersey, but of course we dont want to feel like we are being fleeced simply because we can't travel overseas. "We need to visualise the faces of the people we are talking about, says OBrien, whose clients range from hoteliers to beekeepers, kayakers and chefs. And be aware that using the rip-off message as a soundbite is doing a huge disservice to those people. Trea Heapes of Pure Camping adds: "When we are setting the pricing for our place, we always have in mind, What would I be happy to pay? and, Is this a viable business to keep a family going?" It is a fine line. Every couple of years we have a look at our competitors pricing and offerings and try to gauge where we fit in. We have increased our prices this year, but it's not Covid-related; it's to deal with increased costs. We focus on making things more comfortable, adding more value and offering a more personal experience while keeping it affordable and ensuring we can be viable. "We don't want to be millionaires, we just need to make a living." 7. Shop around. Book direct. And use the phone No matter how fair prices are, they can still be expensive. But consumers can shop around. Instead of a week away this summer, what about booking a couple of short breaks midweek? What about a night in Dublin, where only one in ten hotel rooms are currently booked in peak months, according to the Irish Hotels Federation? We can look beyond July and August (September is shaping up as a particular sweet spot this year), search for self-catering inland, or look for packages that add value through inclusive meals or discounts for longer stays (eg, three-nights-for-two offers). While big websites are handy for holiday searches, they hit accommodation providers with booking fees of 15pc or more. By booking direct, you can often get a lower rate. Better still, pick up the phone. If youre staying a few nights, ask for packages including dinner or activities, a room upgrade, or resort credit-style offers like 10pc off spa treatments. Hotels know that the longer you stay, the more you are likely to spend in bars and restaurants. Its in everybodys interests to have a happy customer walk through the door. 8. We may be ripping off Ireland's reputation Bad value and gougers should be called out. By continually stoking Rip-off Ireland fire-storms without any meaningful discussion, however, we risk doing reputational damage to an industry that desperately needs future overseas visitors to recoup 160,000 job losses. Intelligent debate and meaningful global comparisons? Bring em on! Expand Close Pure Camping, Loop Head, Co. Clare / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Pure Camping, Loop Head, Co. Clare But remember, we are talking about one of the worlds most beautiful places, with landscape (91pc) and people (83pc) among the considerations overseas visitors rate highest when considering Ireland for a holiday, according to Failte Ireland surveys. Ireland is not cheap to visit, and never will be. But time after time, research shows it as a quality holiday experience and a destination with world-class customer service. 9. Stop luxury shaming Luxury and high-priced holidays are not intrinsically bad things. Of course, few can afford to spend 625 a night on Ashford Castle, no more than we might drive a Mercedes or buy an 65" OLED TV or Fendi handbag. But luxury has a market, just like budget or mid-range travel. High-end experiences attract high-spending visitors who can in turn help sustain local jobs, suppliers, drivers, tour guides and attractions. Tourism doesn't always trickle down fairly or sustainably, but when it does, it can bring huge benefits to local communities. Tourism Ireland has also identified the luxury market as one that may return to travel sooner, representing an early opportunity for tourism post-Covid. 10. Start turning guests into ambassadors After being closed for so long, revenue is obviously critical to Irish tourism and hospitality businesses this year. But a great customer experience could be even more so. I firmly believe that we need to demonstrate a unique product, excellent service and a value proposition to our domestic market," says Nuala Mulqueeney of the family-run Aillwee Caves and Birds of Prey Centre in Co Clare. We, hopefully, will have an opportunity to serve, educate and entertain our home visitors which will in turn create a large cohort of knowledgeable ambassadors, ready to recommend and refer the Irish tourism product to others both here in Ireland and further afield, in time. "The cost of doing business is high, yes, but a long-term, sustainable, regenerative approach needs to be applied. Make our own proud to have visited thereby choosing to return and recommend, even all year round! Generations of people and families influence each other greatly. We all want the same thing this summer. We want to come home from a well-earned break, thinking, I want to holiday in Ireland again. We dont want to think: Never again." Let's start by rethinking the 'rip-off' debate. Story Highlights Estimate has risen more than one percentage point from 2017 update Majority of LGBT Americans say they are bisexual One in six adults in Generation Z consider themselves LGBT WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Gallup's latest update on lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender identification finds 5.6% of U.S. adults identifying as LGBT. The current estimate is up from 4.5% in Gallup's previous update based on 2017 data. Line graph. Gallup trend in self-identification as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. In 2020, 5.6% of U.S. adults identified as LGBT. That is up from 4.5% in 2017, the last year it was asked, and 4.1% in 2016. Between 2012 and 2015, 3.5% to 3.9% of U.S. adults identified as LGBT. Currently, 86.7% of Americans say they are heterosexual or straight, and 7.6% do not answer the question about their sexual orientation. Gallup's 2012-2017 data had roughly 5% "no opinion" responses. The latest results are based on more than 15,000 interviews conducted throughout 2020 with Americans aged 18 and older. Gallup had previously reported annual updates from its 2012-2017 daily tracking survey data, but did not routinely measure LGBT identification in 2018 or 2019. The identity question asked in 2020 offers a greater level of detail than the question asked in previous years. Now, respondents have the ability to more precisely indicate aspects of their sexual orientation or gender identity. In addition to being able to identify whether they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or straight, respondents may also specifically identify whether they are transgender. Different approaches to measuring LGBT status can produce varying estimates of its incidence in the U.S. population. Results from Gallup's new question do appear comparable to those from its prior question. The 1.1-percentage-point increase in the 2020 estimate (using the new question) compared with the 2017 estimate (using the old question) is about what would have been predicted from the recent trends. The LGBT percentage rose an average of 0.3 points per year in 2016 and 2017. Assuming that trend continued the past three years, the total increase would have been about one percentage point. Majority of LGBT Americans Identify as Bisexual More than half of LGBT adults (54.6%) identify as bisexual. About a quarter (24.5%) say they are gay, with 11.7% identifying as lesbian and 11.3% as transgender. An additional 3.3% volunteer another non-heterosexual preference or term to describe their sexual orientation, such as queer or same-gender-loving. Respondents can give multiple responses when describing their sexual identification; thus, the totals exceed 100%. Rebasing these percentages to represent their share of the U.S. adult population finds 3.1% of Americans identifying as bisexual, 1.4% as gay, 0.7% as lesbian and 0.6% as transgender. Americans' Self-Identified Sexual Orientation Which of the following do you consider yourself to be? You can select as many as apply: Straight or heterosexual; Lesbian; Gay; Bisexual; Transgender. Among LGBT U.S. adults Among all U.S. adults % % Lesbian 11.7 0.7 Gay 24.5 1.4 Bisexual 54.6 3.1 Transgender 11.3 0.6 Other (e.g., queer, same-gender-loving) 3.3 0.2 Percentages total more than 100% because respondents may choose more than one category. Gallup, 2020 LGBT Identification Not Uncommon Among Younger Generations One of the main reasons LGBT identification has been increasing over time is that younger generations are far more likely to consider themselves to be something other than heterosexual. This includes about one in six adult members of Generation Z (those aged 18 to 23 in 2020). LGBT identification is lower in each older generation, including 2% or less of Americans born before 1965 (aged 56 and older in 2020). Americans' Self-Identification as LGBT, by Generation LGBT Straight/Heterosexual No opinion % % % Generation Z (born 1997-2002) 15.9 78.9 5.2 Millennials (born 1981-1996) 9.1 82.7 8.1 Generation X (born 1965-1980) 3.8 88.6 7.6 Baby boomers (born 1946-1964) 2.0 91.1 6.9 Traditionalists (born before 1946) 1.3 89.9 8.9 Gallup, 2020 The vast majority of Generation Z adults who identify as LGBT -- 72% -- say they are bisexual. Thus, 11.5% of all Gen Z adults in the U.S. say they are bisexual, with about 2% each identifying as gay, lesbian or transgender. About half of millennials (those aged 24 to 39 in 2020) who identify as LGBT say they are bisexual. In older age groups, expressed bisexual preference is not significantly more common than expressed gay or lesbian preference. Americans' Self-Identified Sexual Orientation, by Generation Bisexual Gay Lesbian Transgender Other % % % % % Generation Z (born 1997-2002) 11.5 2.1 1.4 1.8 0.4 Millennials (born 1981-1996) 5.1 2.0 0.8 1.2 0.4 Generation X (born 1965-1980) 1.8 1.2 0.7 0.2 0.1 Baby boomers (born 1946-1964) 0.3 1.2 0.4 0.2 0.0 Traditionalists (born before 1946) 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.3 0.1 Figures represent the percentage of all adult members of each generation who have that sexual orientation Gallup, 2020 In addition to the pronounced generational differences, significant gender differences are seen in sexual identity, as well as differences by people's political ideology: Women are more likely than men to identify as LGBT (6.4% vs. 4.9%, respectively). Women are more likely to identify as bisexual -- 4.3% do, with 1.3% identifying as lesbian and 1.3% as something else. Among men, 2.5% identify as gay, 1.8% as bisexual and 0.6% as something else. 13.0% of political liberals, 4.4% of moderates and 2.3% of conservatives say they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Differences are somewhat less pronounced by party identification than by ideology, with 8.8% of Democrats, 6.5% of independents and 1.7% of Republicans identifying as LGBT. There are no meaningful educational differences -- 5.6% of college graduates and 5.7% of college nongraduates are LGBT. Bottom Line At a time when Americans are increasingly supportive of equal rights for gay, lesbian and transgender people, a growing percentage of Americans identify themselves as LGBT. With younger generations far more likely than older generations to consider themselves LGBT, that growth should continue. The pronounced generational differences raise questions about whether higher LGBT identification in younger than older Americans reflects a true shift in sexual orientation, or if it merely reflects a greater willingness of younger people to identify as LGBT. To the extent it reflects older Americans not wanting to acknowledge an LGBT orientation, the Gallup estimates may underestimate the actual population prevalence of it. One of the biggest recent advances in LGBT rights was the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide. Gallup's new estimates on same-sex marriages and domestic partnerships in the U.S. can be found here. Editor's note: On Feb. 26, 2021, some article text was revised to clarify aspects of sexual orientation versus gender identity. Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Spanish demand down 19% in January ICR Newsroom By 24 February 2021 Cement consumption in Spain decreased by 19.2 per cent YoY to 842,861t in January 2021, according to the countrys cement association, Oficemen. Demand was impacted by the stoppage of works due to snowstorm Filomena as well as subsequent clearing operations that lasted for a fortnight. In addition, January had two fewer working days than last year. The storm, although temporary, has been the last straw to a situation that, as we have been saying, is already critical for a sector, that of construction, which has been greatly affected by the economic crisis derived from the health pandemic that we have been experiencing for almost a year, and to which it arrived when it was still in the process of recovering from the previous crisis , explains the president of Oficemen, Victor Garcia Brosa. The Public Administrations must now prioritise, in the context of European funds, the implementation of mechanisms that allow a real structural transformation of our economic and industrial fabric in the long term. In this sense, and within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, at the sectoral level, the cement industry has presented, both alone and in collaboration with other industrial sectors, several innovative projects associated with the circular economy, sustainability in construction, use of hydrogen, digital transformation and decarbonization, designed to improve our competitiveness, as an industry and as a country, both inside and outside our borders, Mr Garcia Brosa added. However, exports advanced 11.2 per cent YoY to 492,395t in January 2021 when compared with the export volumes of January 2020. Published under Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 17:37:28|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close WINDHOEK, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Namibia has recorded an outbreak of the Lumpy Skin Disease in Eiseb in the Omaheke region in the eastern border of the country, an official said Tuesday. The disease was first detected at Otjiuapehuri village on Feb. 12, Chief Veterinarian Officer from the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Land reform, Albertina Musilika Shilongo said, adding that a total of 31 cattle from 10 different homesteads have been affected. In a move to further curb the spread of the disease, Shilongo announced the suspension of cattle movement and cattle gatherings in Eiseb till further notice. "Farmers in Eiseb are urged to vaccinate all cattle above six months of age against lumpy skin disease and to control biting insects, such as mosquitoes, and farmers should report all suspected cases to the local veterinary office," she added. These disease control measures will be reviewed once the extent of the outbreak is determined, she said. Lumpy Skin Disease is a viral disease of cattle that is spread by biting insects, characterized by nodules on the skin and other parts of the body. Enditem Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador gives his daily, morning press conference at the National Palace in Mexico City on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021. (Marco Ugarte/AP Photo) Mexican President Says Mexico Doing Better Than US on Virus MEXICO CITYMexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Tuesday that his country is doing better than the United States in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, even though Mexicos per capita death rate is probably higher and the country has vaccinated less than one percent of its population. Lopez Obrador said Tuesday that comparing countries is in bad taste, but went on to say the most powerful nation on earth, our neighbor, did worse than us. The Mexican governments estimated death toll from COVID-19 is now about 201,000. The United States death toll is around 500,000, but its population is 2.6 times larger. Moreover, estimates of excess deaths in Mexico since the start of the pandemic suggest the COVID-19 toll is now well above 220,000. Mexico has administered about 1.7 million vaccine doses, while the United States has given 64 million shots. Lopez Obrador blamed rich countries for hoarding vaccines, calling that totally unfair, and said, the UN has to intervene. The Mexican leader invited Argentine President Alberto Fernandez onstage at his daily morning press conference Tuesday, where the Argentine leader proposed that vaccine companies be forced to cede intellectual property rights and allow anyone to manufacture their shots. The idea is to propose at the G20 the need to declare COVID-19 vaccines as global goods, so that they cede their intellectual property rights and all countries can freely produce them, Fernandez said. Mexico is trying to beef up its supply of Pfizer vaccines with Russian and Chinese shots, and late Monday the country received its first shipment of 200,000 doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccines. Mexico has had over 2 million test-confirmed coronavirus cases, but the low level of testing means the real number is probably several times that amount. The principal of a primary school in Dublin has said that her school will consider mask wearing for pupils if it would help allay their fears. Tonya Hanly, of Lourdes NS, Inchicore, told RTE radios Morning Ireland that some children had already opted to wear their masks in school as it made them feel more confident and safe. She was excited about the return to school but said that the new variants and continued high numbers would be challenging. Ms Hanly said she had missed the children and was confident that the return to school would go well once the practical guidelines were adhered to, such as ventilation. "One of the greatest challenges will be with regard to communication," she added, "to ensure that concerns were heard and that the school community continued to support each other." Ms Hanlys experience with public health measures to date had been positive and reassuring, she said. However, Sean Twomey, principal of St Aloysius College, secondary school in Carrigtwohill, Cork told Morning Ireland that he did not have the same level of confidence in public health as his experience with contact tracing following an outbreak in his school before Christmas was not good. "Getting contact tracing improved would be the most important thing about the return to school," he said. Mr Twomey said he was looking forward to the return of students, but he said there would have to be a little bit of caution. On the issue of ventilation, he pointed out that the provision of a ventilation unit for every classroom in the country would be very expensive and a big ask. In his school, they would keep doors and windows open. Everyone would have to be sensible staff, parents and students and some would be nervous. The priority would be preparing Leaving Cert students for this years exams or predicted grades. They will use the Oxford/AstraZeneca (Covishield) vaccine provided by the Health Ministry. Kyiv Town Hall has announced the launch of a local COVID-19 vaccination campaign on Thursday, February 25. This was reported on Kyiv City State Administration's website on February 24. Read alsoFirst AstraZeneca jab administered in Ukraine (Photo) "On February 25, the capital city will start the process of vaccination against COVID-19 with the Oxford/AstraZeneca (Covishield) vaccine provided by the Health Ministry," the report said. The local authorities said that one of the first vaccination shots will be given to the head of a department at Kyiv's Oleksandrivska Clinical Hospital. It became known earlier that Kyiv would receive 42,000 doses of the Covishield vaccine from a wholesale batch that has just arrived in Ukraine. COVID-19 vaccine in Ukraine On February 22, the Ukrainian Health Ministry registered the Oxford / AstraZeneca (Covishield) COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use. The vaccine was developed by the University of Oxford in partnership with the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca. The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine for emergency use has been approved by the World Health Organization (WHO) and authorized by the UK, the European Union, and India. On February 23, the first batch of the Covishield vaccine arrived in Ukraine. The vaccination campaign in Ukraine was originally expected to start with the use of a vaccine produced by Pfizer/ BioNTech, which Ukraine was supposed to receive during the first wave of distribution under the global COVAX Facility. The supply of 117,000 doses of that vaccine to Ukraine has been booked. During the first half of the year, Ukraine could receive from 2.2 million to 3.7 million doses of the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine as part of COVAX. In addition, the vaccine will be purchased with public funds directly from producers. It is expected that at least 500,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine will arrive in Ukraine in February. On February 24, Ukraine launched a nationwide COVID-19 vaccination campaign. The first who got vaccinated was an intensive care physician in the city of Cherkasy. Reporting by UNIAN Catholic leaders in Malaysia recall that refugees, migrants and asylum seekers are vulnerable people, and that they should be treated with humanity, based on mercy, compassion and love. By Robin Gomes At a time of grave political uncertainty in Myanmar, our faith tells us that we cannot remain silent and be complicit to this action towards those who have fled due to a grave humanitarian crisis, the Bishops of Malaysia said in a statement on Tuesday. The statement, signed by the Bishops of the countrys 9 dioceses, expressed their deep concern, after learning from media reports about Malaysias plan to repatriate 1,200 Myanmar nationals, among them also refugees and asylum seekers. Laws of humanity The Malaysian bishops pointed out that guaranteeing personal security to the most vulnerable refugees, migrants and asylum seekers, must not only be governed by international laws but also by the 'laws of humanity, which are grounded on mercy, compassion and love. Not long after the Bishops raised their voice and Kuala Lumpurs High Court ordered a temporary halt to the deportation, Malaysia's immigration department repatriated 1,086 Myanmar nationals. They were deported in 3 Myanmar navy ships, the department said, insisting there were no refugees or asylum seekers among them. In their lawsuit that made the High Court issue the stay order, rights groups Amnesty International Malaysia and Asylum Access Malaysia said there were refugees, asylum-seekers and minors among the deported. According to the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, at least six people among the deported were registered with it. The two rights groups named at least three UNHCR cardholders and 17 minors with one parent still in Malaysia. Myanmars uncertain times The Bishops urged the government not to subject the lives of these Myanmar nationals into an uncertain and unknown fate by simply repatriating them in these uncertain times. They called for international organizations, such as the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, to verify these individuals so that their personal security can be guaranteed. As caring Malaysians, they said, we should not subject anyone to situations that are marked by fear, uncertainty and unease. Malaysian lawmakers and rights groups on Wednesday demanded that the government explain why it violated the court stay order and deported the migrants, saying it put their lives in danger following Myanmar's military coup. Malaysian Church close to Myanmar The Malaysian Bishops called on the faithful to offer their fast during the current season of Lent for the people of Myanmar, so that there be a genuine dialogue among all sides and that there be lasting peace and freedom in the troubled land. While expressing their prayerful solidarity with the people of Myanmar, they invoked God for peace, reconciliation and harmony in these uncertain times. Malaysian Christian Churches The Council of Churches of Malaysia (CCM) has also raised its voice against the deportation, saying it was an act contrary to international law and norms. In a press release, CCM general-secretary Hermen Shastri said, The prime minister should grant UNHCR full access to detention centres to identify refugees and asylum seekers, and ensure their protection and safety. He added that those whose lives were being threatened should not be forced to return to any country where they may face persecution or even death. Earlier, the United States called on Iran to immediately cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding its alleged undeclared material. The foreign ministers of France, Germany and the UK urged Iran in a joint statement to stop and reverse all measures that reduce transparency and to ensure full and timely cooperation with the IAEA. According to the statement, Irans actions constitute a further violation of its commitments under the JCPOA and significantly reduce the safeguards ensured by IAEA oversight. On Monday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry reaffirmed Tehran's intentions to limit the implementation of the Additional Protocol on inspections of its nuclear sites starting 21 February. In December, Iran passed a law to increase its uranium enrichment and stop UN inspections of its nuclear sites in response to the killing of nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. At the start of January, Irans atomic energy organization announced that the country had succeeded in enriching uranium at 20 percent at the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant. In 2015, Iran signed the JCPOA with the P5+1 group of countries (the United States, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom - plus Germany) and the European Union. The agreement required Iran to scale back its nuclear program and downgrade its uranium reserves in exchange for sanctions relief, including lifting the arms embargo five years after the agreement's adoption. In 2018, the United States withdrew from the JCPOA and re-imposed sanctions against Iran, prompting Tehran to largely abandon its obligations under the accord. (SPUTNIK) Guest Column Re-imagining Myanmar - The Mother of All Critical Junctures An anti-military regime protest column made up of people from Myanmars different ethnicities marched through downtown Yangon on Feb.18, calling for the release of anyone detained by the regime and the end of the military dictatorship. / The Irrawaddy These are extraordinary times in Myanmar, which will shape the country for many years to come. Although the militarys intervention has been a disaster, it could lead to a re-imagining of relations between the Bamar majority and ethnic nationality communities. Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) will have key roles to play. This is already the most significant political upheaval in Myanmar (then Burma) since the 1988 democracy uprising. The Tatmadaws pretext for the Feb. 1 military coup was a narrative of irregularities in the November 2020 elections. However, the main problem with last years election was that millions of ethnic nationality citizens especially those working overseas or living in conflict-affected areas were denied the right to vote. Meanwhile the National League for Democracy government enjoyed incumbent advantage, especially with COVID-related restrictions on smaller parties ability to campaign. Not surprisingly, the Myanmar Armys pretext for seizing power did not mention the rights of ethnic nationality citizens. In the first week after the coup, several friends questioned whether it would make much difference to ethnic communities. As one person said, Changing a parliamentary dictatorship for a military dictatorship wont mean much for ethnic nationality people. The NLD-led government did little to help ethnic nationality communities or achieve progress to peace process. Why should we campaign for them now? However, the massive protests since Feb. 6 and the new regimes increasingly violent repression mean the country has entered new territory, involving all citizens in these momentous events. The State Administrative Council (SAC) seems likely to attempt dividing the opposition. The regimes strategy is reportedly to divide the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) between supporters of the previous NLD government and Generation-Z youth, many of whom were not previously interested in politics. Having co-opted a number of ethnic nationality leaders (and a couple of ethnic political parties) into joining the SAC, the junta also seeks to separate ethnic nationality activists from the broader CDM. Given these dynamics, some have criticized EAOs for a perceived lack of support for the counter-coup protests. In reality, EAOs have adopted varying positions. EAO positions Ethnic Armed Organizations in the north and west of Myanmar have arguably had little room to maneuver, given reported pressure from China not to intervene. However, after a slightly slow start, EAOs in the southeast have been much more proactive. On Feb. 13, the New Mon State Party (NMSP) became the first EAO to explicitly stand with the people, issuing a statement unequivocally denouncing the coup and supporting the CDM. The next day the Karen National Union (KNU) issued a similarly strong statement. On Feb. 2, the day after the military coup, the Peace Process Steering Team (PPST, coordinating group of 10 Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement signatory EAOs) had issued a statement expressing grave concerns. This was followed on Feb. 20 by another PPST statement, confirming Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) signatory groups did not recognize and could not engage with the SAC. Although not explicitly cancelling the NCA, this statement effectively suspended the agreement during the period of illegal military government rule. Other EAOs have adopted varying positions. On Feb. 11, the Kayan New Land Party negotiated with security authorities to secure the release of seven activists in Kayah State. The Karenni National Progressive Party has been supportive of CDM behind-the-scenes. The Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS) has issued several statements, including protesting against Myanmar Army attacks on RCSS positions, stating that these violate the NCA. The Kachin Independence Organization also issued a statement on Feb. 17 supporting the peoples efforts and calling for protection of protesters, without outright denouncing the coup or the SAC. On the ground, the KNUs Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) has intervened to protect and allow free passage of protesters, for example in Taungoo (Feb. 11); in Kawkareik (Feb. 19); and in Myawaddy (Feb. 21). Thus far, EAOs have not intervened directly, but have presented themselves on the edges of protests. On one occasion, on the weekend after the coup (Feb. 7), Democratic Karen Benevolent Army personnel were credited with protecting protesters from armed police in Myawaddy. All of this has happened against the background of increased Myanmar Army aggression in some ethnic areas. Since mid-December, the Tatmadaw has launched a series of violent assaults on civilian communities in northern Karen State and eastern Bago Region, in the context of increasing militarization building new roads and resupplying army bases which are perceived locally as occupying forces. Myanmar Army shelling and other attacks on civilians has driven more than 6,000 Karen Internally Displaced People to flee since mid-December. According to the Free Burma Rangers, more than 700 Karen civilians were forcibly displaced in the KNUs 5 Brigade area between Feb. 20-21 alone. Ongoing Myanmar Army attacks have created significant needs for protection and assistance. With the increasing suppression of protests, and attacks on civilian communities in urban areas, Myanmar Army aggression may force more people to flee. The KNU has established a committee to receive any refugees (technically, Internally Displaced People) from the protests, should violent crackdowns lead to a repeat of Burmas 1988-1990 experience, when protesters fleeing violent oppression in the cities fled to EAO-controlled border areas. The KNU is developing contingency plans for creating a degree of quarantine in reception centers, in case recent events drive a new outbreak of COVID-19. The NMSP has established a similar committee. The mother of all critical junctures The past three weeks have been a time of anger and sadness. This period of rapid change and political realignment (or critical juncture) has the potential to inspire a deep transformation of peace-building in Myanmar. Before the coup, things were not going well for ethnic nationality communities, especially in conflict-affected areas. The ceasefire was stalling, with new Myanmar Army attacks on civilians. The present crisis could be an opportunity to change the narrative, and re-imagine Myanmar, transforming relationships between different communities in their struggle against the new junta. The protests have seen an important emerging alliance or coalition between NLD members and activists, ethnic nationality individuals and groups, and the Gen-Z youth. There are echoes here of 1988, when violent military suppression of the democratic uprising drove a generation of students to the border areas to seek common cause with ethnic nationality groups who had long been struggling against the military regime. One result of the SAC juntas oppression of the people is to provide a common experience, bonding different elements of Myanmar society together in new and creative ways. The realignment of politics and society currently underway in Myanmar comes only once in a generation (thankfully). Based on bonds of solidarity, a deep re-orientation and re-imagination of identities and interests could be an opportunity to begin re-making the country in a more equitable and inclusive way. Taking just one example, in its statement of Feb. 8 the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hlutaw (the committee formed by legally-elected members of Union Parliament) recognized the importance of a broad-based anti-coup coalition, including the roles of EAOs. New alliances in the struggle against the illegal military coup could prefigure transformed relationships between different stakeholders, including members of the Bamar majority community and ethnic nationality or minority peoples. Under decades of military rule, few members of the Bamar majority community had the opportunity to understand the realities, concerns and hopes of ethnic nationality people in conflict-affected areas. New bonds are now being forged, which can have major implications for the future of Burma. (Dr Ashley South is an independent analyst, and a Research Fellow at Chiang Mai University, specializing in politics and humanitarian issues in Burma and South-East Asia. His views are his own.) You may also like these stories: Doctors in Civil Disobedience Movement Put Pressure on Myanmar Military Regime Myanmar Student Unions Call on China Not to Recognize Military Regime Myanmars Military Arrests Doctors for Joining and Supporting Civil Disobedience Movement Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 14:09:36|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close ADDIS ABABA, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Ethiopian Ministry of Health on Tuesday evening reported 716 new COVID-19 cases over the last 24 hours, taking the national count to 154,257. Meanwhile, 12 new fatalities and 1,338 more recoveries were recorded over the same period, raising the COVID-19 death toll to 2,305 and the total recoveries to 133,051. Ethiopia, Africa's second most populous nation, is one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic in Africa, after South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. The country has so far reported the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the east African region. The Ethiopian government recently started a campaign to encourage face mask wearing in public places as part of the COVID-19 precautionary measures. The east African nation has so far conducted 2,102,317 COVID-19 tests, including 5,507 during the last 24 hours, said the ministry. COVID-19 tests conducted in Ethiopia are among the highest in Africa according to recent figures from the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Enditem Castillo Copper, Alicanto Minerals and Havilah Resources are among the ASX-listed explorers with exposure to a strong copper market with positive future fundamentals. Australian copper hopefuls are rubbing their hands together with glee, with exploration programs peaking just at the right time as a range of factors send the copper price to decade-long highs. One of the ASX's most promising copper up-and-comers is ( ) ( ) ( ), which is making strong progress with its strategy to become a mid-tier copper producer. Two other copper juniors with strong projects presented to investors at a Proactive copper-focused online conference on Tuesday - Ltd ( ) and ( ) (FRA:FWL). Castillo will present at a future Proactive webinar. This all comes as copper prices jumped past US$9,000 a tonne on Monday for the first time since September 2011, driven by a supply crunch and an expectation of increased demand from China. Thats just shy of its all-time high of US$10,190 a tonne back in February 2011 when the European debt crisis was at its peak - and given has said the market is on the cusp of the tightest phase in what we expect to be the largest deficit in a decade, the price could yet go higher. Castillos Big One As reported by Proactive in mid-February, Castillo has further extended its Big One Deposit in northwest Queensland following the final results from its 2020 drilling program and historical assays. Factoring in the extensive data points from the three drilling campaigns, which highlighted mineralisation is open in all directions, Castillo is now preparing a geophysics campaign, ahead of modelling a resource update before finally applying for a mining licence. Castillo Copper managing director Simon Paull said the company was excited by the highly promising Big One Deposit, located within the Mt Oxide Project in the rich Mt Isa copper-belt. All systems are go as we accelerate developing Big One Deposit, especially aiming to extend known mineralisation further and identify new test-drill targets, he said. Our two new initiatives are now taking shape, with an upcoming IP survey being planned and JORC modelling now underway. Discovering FMEs assays was a windfall, as we can now optimistically assert that Big One Deposit is a high-grade copper system. But thats not all - Castillo believes Mt Oxide delivers further exploration upside with the Arya Prospect (with an inferred 130-metre thick massive sulphide conductor) set for drilling, plus a further eight targets in its sights. And thats just Mt Oxide, one part of the companys aim to be a mid-tier copper producer. It also owns four highly prospective copper projects in Zambia, near large, established operating mines with major exploration upside, and the high-grade historic Cangai Copper Mine in NSW, which has a JORC-compliant resource of 3.2 million tonnes at 3.3% and up to 14.45% copper in assayed diamond core intersections. Castillo is considering divesting its BHA Project, close to the world-class Broken Hill silver-zinc-lead deposit. Alicanto presents massive opportunity Alicanto Minerals is focused on its portfolio of historic, high-grade copper-gold and polymetallic skarn (copper-gold-zinc-lead-silver) projects in the well-known Bergslagen mining district of Sweden. Its managing director, Peter George, told investors this week the projects were once described as the treasury of Sweden. Two projects of such high grade and value that they were coveted by multiple Swedish kings, and were instrumental in laying the foundations of a very wealthy country, he said. George said Alicanto had undertaken a body of work over the past year that had revitalised the projects, culminating in a $6 million capital raise last year to fund an extensive 20,000-metre follow-up drilling program at the Greater Falun Copper-Gold Project. If we find what were looking for - and theres a lot of smoke about to suggest that we will - our current market cap of only roughly $40 million is going to stick in your mind as a missed opportunity, he said. We are aiming for a $100 million market cap by the end of the year. The presentation can be viewed by clicking here. Havilah confident in South Australia Havilah Resources portfolio of projects in northeast South Australia hosts copper, gold, cobalt and iron ore resources, and its current focus is on its flagship Kalkaroo copper-gold deposit, near Broken Hill, which also has rare earth potential. Recent drilling at the deposit confirmed further economic copper and gold results with key intercepts returned from the fault intersection zone, in part lying outside of the current Kalkaroo JORC mineral resource envelope, including: 16 metres of 1.31 g/t gold from 69-85 metres; 10 metres of 1.51 g/t gold from 102-112 metres; and 13 metres of 1.37% copper and 0.55 g/t gold from 133-146 metres Its technical director Dr Chris Giles told investors the company hoped to start site works before the end of the year, on a gigantic ore reserve of 100 million tonnes of copper. Dr Giles also heavily emphasised Havilahs attractiveness to investors looking to gain exposure to copper. Havilah has by far the highest leverage to copper of our peers, he said. $1 invested in Havilah buys you more copper in ore reserves than any of our ASX-listed peers, and its the same story with copper-equivalent resources. The presentation can be viewed by clicking here. - Daniel Paproth In a unanimous opinion released Tuesday, the Tennessee Supreme Court held the inevitable discovery rule, an exception to the exclusionary rule that applies when tainted evidence would have been inevitably discovered regardless of police misconduct, does not apply to a case when law enforcement merely could have obtained evidence through a search warrant or other lawful means. The Court further concluded the search of the Defendants home was illegal because her consent was not freely and voluntarily given. The Court ruled that evidence obtained during the illegal search was not admissible, and the defendants convictions must be dismissed. In this case, the White County Sheriffs office asked its counterpart in Warren County for assistance in looking for Mr. Ronald Dishman, who had several outstanding warrants. Warren County deputies were told that Mr. Dishman may be armed and was located at a house owned by defendant Samantha Grissom Scott. Shortly thereafter, nine deputies approached Ms. Scotts home and reported seeing a male on the porch. He entered the house after seeing the deputies. Law enforcement then surrounded the house with weapons drawn. For about one-half hour, during which Ms. Scott testified that she was having a panic attack, police yelled through loudspeakers for occupants to come out of the house. Ms. Scott finally appeared. She further testified that she was put on her knees with guns pointed at her, and officers requested permission to search her house, which she denied. She told them Mr. Dishman was not in the house. Later, a man identified as Mr. Scott Bell came out of the house. Deputies repeatedly requested permission from Ms. Scott to search the house and she continued to say no. Nearly an hour after the incident began, Ms. Scott gave permission to search the house for Mr. Dishman. He was not found, but drugs were seen and a search warrant was then obtained. After she was charged, Ms. Scott filed a motion to suppress the evidence found during the search, asserting her consent resulted from coercion and was not freely and voluntarily given. After the trial court denied the motion, she pleaded guilty to possession with the intent to deliver methamphetamine and possession of drug paraphernalia but specifically reserved a certified question of law contesting the legality of the search. During the appeal, the state raised the inevitable discovery doctrine, arguing the drugs could have been discovered without Ms. Scotts consent to search. In a split opinion, the Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed the appeal after concluding that the certified question of law is not dispositive of the case because the evidence would have been admissible under the inevitable discovery doctrine. Ms. Scott appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court first addressed the inevitable discovery rule and whether the certified question is dispositive. The Court found the inevitable discovery rule is not merely that law enforcement could have found the evidence by other lawful means, but instead requires a higher standard that the evidence would have been discovered by proper legal means regardless of the illegal search. The Court concluded there was no evidence presented that law enforcement would have discovered the drugs without the search in question or that they would have obtained a search warrant if requested prior to entering the home. The Court then reviewed the legality of the search itself. It determined exigent circumstances did not exist to justify the constructive seizure of the Defendants home. The Court reviewed the factors required for valid consent and, when considering the circumstances as a whole, determined Ms. Scotts consent to search her home was not freely and voluntarily given. As a result, the Court determined the evidence obtained during the unlawful search was tainted and inadmissible. Therefore, the Supreme Court reversed the holding of the Court of Criminal Appeals and dismissed Ms. Scotts convictions. To read the opinion in State v. Scott, authored by Justice Roger Page, visit the opinions section of TNCourts.gov. Less than a week after accepting boyfriend Carter Reum's proposal, Paris Hilton and her fiance stepped out in public for the first time as an engaged couple. The 40-year-old Hilton was spotted in an all-black ensemble as she grabbed a late dinner in Malibu with her 39-year-old fiance. The couple has yet to announce a wedding date at this time, but the engagement (Hilton's fourth) comes after a year of dating Reum. Stepping out: Less than a week after accepting boyfriend Carter Reum's proposal, Paris Hilton and her fiance stepped out in public for the first time as an engaged couple Hilton stepped out of her black SUV with an all-black outfit, including a black long-sleeved top. The top was tucked into a short black leather skirt with black leggings and black suede heels. She was carrying a black Chanel purse and her phone as she walked into the restaurant, with a grey face mask covering her mouth and nose. Paris' look: Hilton stepped out of her black SUV with an all-black outfit, including a black long-sleeved top While Paris has never been married, she was previously engaged to model Jason Shaw, Greek socialite Paris Latsis, and actor Chris Zylka. Reum popped the question on February 13, just before Valentine's Day, with the couple announcing the news on February 17. Both Hilton and Reum opened up about the engagement over the weekend with their first joint interview with People. Fourth engagement: While Paris has never been married, she was previously engaged to model Jason Shaw, Greek socialite Paris Latsis, and actor Chris Zylka Hilton and Reum celebrated their one-year anniversary in December, with Hilton admitted she was 'a little bummed' when he didn't propose then. Reum hinted that when he did propose, 'it's going to be something even more amazing than this,' telling her she'll 'see soon.' The couple were on a private island, and when they got to the beach to take photos, Reum got down on one knee. Celebrated: Hilton and Reum celebrated their one-year anniversary in December, with Hilton admitted she was 'a little bummed' when he didn't propose then 'I just started shaking and crying because I was so excited, so happy. It was so nice that he thought to have our families there to celebrate the moment,' she said. She added that she also plans on taking his name, though it will likely be hyphenated like Hilton-Reum, adding she, 'can't wait to start a family together.' Reum added, 'It's something we've talked about a lot ever since we've been together, First the wedding, then the babies.' Crying: 'I just started shaking and crying because I was so excited, so happy. It was so nice that he thought to have our families there to celebrate the moment,' she said .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... LAS CRUCES County officials in southern New Mexico have said most of the first responders in Dona Ana County, which includes Las Cruces, have received at least one of the two doses of coronavirus vaccine under a county mandate, despite questions about requiring the vaccination. County employees were told last month they were required to receive COVID-19 vaccines to continue working for the county, despite legal questions about requiring a vaccine only approved for emergency use. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in August that vaccines are not allowed to be mandatory while they only have emergency use authorization. County Manager Fernando Macias told the Las Cruces Sun-News that 195 county employees out of 203 at the county detention who are subject to the directive were at least partially vaccinated, while the remaining eight had registered or had an approved waiver. ADVERTISEMENTSkip ................................................................ Officials said 140 employees at the Dona Ana Sheriffs Office had been vaccinated out of 156, and 26 out of the 31 county fire personnel. Macias confirmed that employees were scheduled to receive COVID-19 vaccinations Friday, and employees who were ordered to appear on their day off would be compensated, he said. Volunteer firefighters were strongly encouraged but not required to receive vaccination under the same directive. Macias said 29 out of 132 active volunteers were at least partly vaccinated as of Friday. Macias said volunteer firefighters were not included because of limited vaccine supply. Two labor unions representing first responders questioned the directive and asked the county to come to the bargaining table. The Communication Workers of America, representing county deputies, filed a formal demand earlier this month with the county Attorneys Office, officials said. However, Macias told the Sun-News that no such demand was pending. We have been made aware that employees have been informed that if they refuse to be vaccinated for COVID 19, they will be terminated, staff representative Robin Gould said in the demand, arguing that the directive would be subject to grievances or prohibited. Santa Fe attorney Nancy Ana Garner said she has also notified the county of an impending lawsuit seeking an injunction against the directive. Macias said he would not comment on pending or threatened litigation. In view of the rising cases of coronavirus, Janata curfew will be observed in Maharashtra's Latur district on February 27 and 28, a district administration official announced on Wednesday. "Only essential services will remain functional during the Janata curfew," Latur collector Prithviraj B P said during his video address on a social media platform in the evening. He also urged people not to leave their homes during the weekend, except in case of emergency. The number of coronavirus patients is increasing across the state, but Latur district is comparatively in a better position, he said. The situation in the district is under control and there is nothing to panic about. The administration is ready to handle the situation, the collector said. "But to prevent the spread of the virus, the citizens are requested to avoid stepping out, except for essential services, on Saturday and Sunday. We can break the virus chain through it," he added. With 98 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, the infection tally in the district has reached 25,045, while 703 people have died so far, the officials said. Superintendent of Police Nikhil Pingale, who was also present with the collector, urged the citizens to keep wearing masks while stepping out. "Those who are spotted not wearing masks in public places are being fined. Citizens should cooperate with the police," he said. In a separate address on social media, Latur Mayor Vikrant Gojamgunde said that the two-day 'Janata curfew' announced by the district administration is meant to bring self-discipline among people. "Although no strict action will be taken during it, people should observe it seriously. It is the responsibility of all to cooperate with the administration to curb the virus spread," he said. (With inputs from agencies) Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. New Delhi, Feb 24 : Retired Army personnel came out in full support of the protesting farmers at Ghazipur on the Delhi-UP border on Wednesday. IANS spoke to Anurag Lathwal, National Secretary, Veterans Association of India, and he said, "All demands of the farmers are genuine. The central government intends to push the agriculture sector into the hands of industrialists in the same manner as it has handed petrol, diesel and airports in the hand of industrialists." Jai Prakash Mishra, National President of the Veterans' Association, said "we had been supporting the farmers from the start and would continue to do so." Gurcharan Singh, the District President of Lakhimpur Kheri branch of the Veterans Association, said, "There is a huge difference between what the Modi government says and what it does. Therefore, the Modi government cannot be trusted." He said the three "black farm laws" were like a death warrant for the farmers and also said the government should not be allowed to do whatever it wants. Mani Dev Chaturvedi, National Joint Secretary, Veterans Association of India, said that whichever government went against the wishes of people was always defeated. He said "history is witness to the fact that evil was always defeated as were Ravana, Kansa and Duryodhana." The governor of Plateau State, Simon Lalong, has explained why he rejected the Rural Grazing Area Programme, popularly referred to as RUGA, for Plateau State. Mr Lalong gave the explanation on Tuesday when he appeared on a Channels TV programme, Sunrise Daily. He said the RUGA initiative was a strange concept that came after the National Economic Council had adopted the National Livestock Transformation Programme (NLTP). The governor said the council, headed by the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, and which members include state governors, saw NLTP as a comprehensive approach to tackling the cattle herder-farmers conflict and associated challenges in Nigeria. Mr Lalong said on the other hand, RUGA, which was also proposed to address the same problems, did not have the buy-in of concerned parties and fell short of addressing the concerns of most state governors. I was one of the first governors to kick against the RUGA programme when it was introduced, Mr Lalong said. To start with, the concept was literally sneaked in for reasons we did not understand. For me as Governor of Plateau State, I just heard that they had erected signposts in some sites within some local governments. How can you embark on such a project without my knowledge and the buy-in of the people of my state? I had no interest in it because it was far below the NLTP, which was more robust and passed through a series of engagements with critical stakeholders. Mr Lalong said Plateau subscribed to the NLTP because it will carry along many groups and individuals involved in livestock business and the value chain. These include farmers, herders and other people involved in processing and packaging of meat. There is also provision for other animals such as sheep, goats, pigs and others. Mr Lalong said Plateau State was chosen as one of the pilot states for the NLTP, having earmarked the Wase and Kanam grazing reserves for it. He said the implementation of the NLTP will go a long way in addressing many of the issues associated with the activities of herders, which have led to clashes with farmers and other crimes. READ ALSO: Plateau governor speaks on Ruga controversy after meeting with Buhari On herders bearing arms, the governor condemned the practice and called for strong measures to check it. He lamented that many non-state actors are in possession of arms in the country, saying the situation must be addressed. Today, we are now seeing the hazard of allowing people do open grazing here and there. But they (herders) also want solution. By the time you explain to them, they also want to stay in one place, they would also want to keep away from carrying AK-47. I am not justifying anybody carrying AK-47 but dont forget that in the course of our deliberations and investigations, it was not only Fulani herdsmen that were carrying AK-47, even farmers were carrying AK-47. The governor said in order to address the situation, deliberate efforts must be put in place to curtail the influx of light arms while other ways, such as the NLTP, must be embraced to take people away from the old type of farming and introduce them to the modern system. ADVERTISEMENT New Delhi: A class III student and an NRI living in Kuwait, Riddhiraj Kumar, presented a cheque of Rs 18,000 to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi as donation for the Army Welfare Fund on Thursday evening. PMO India tweeted about the donation made by Kumar to the Prime Minister. He was accompanied by his mother. PMO India tweet read, Riddhiraj Kumar, a youngster from Kuwait met PM and presented a cheque of Rs 18,000 for the Indian Army Welfare Fund. Second tweet from the PMO India said, The amount Riddhiraj donated was the amount he won in the international Bench Mark Test for Improving Learning Award for Excellence. Riddhiraj Kumar, a youngster from Kuwait met PM & presented a cheque of Rs.18,000 for the Indian Army Welfare Fund. https://t.co/hmC6Uqm0lW pic.twitter.com/zIojzIJyVS PMO India (@PMOIndia) August 3, 2017 Kumar had won total of 80 Kuwait Dinars (Rs18,000) as prize money from ACER. He won the International Bench Mark Test for Improving Learning Award for Excellence conducted by the Australian Council for Education Research. He excelled both in Mathematics and Science. The NRI donater is a student of Indian Educational School, Kuwait. The amount Riddhiraj donated was the amount he won in the International Bench Mark Test for Improving Learning Award for Excellence. PMO India (@PMOIndia) August 3, 2017 Indian prime minister congratulated Riddhiraj for his generosity and his excellence performance in academics. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. 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Order Follows Recent SmartGATE Insights Engagements VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / Legend Power Systems (TSXV:LPS), a global leader in commercial electrical system solutions, today announced 5 new SmartGATE Platform orders through channel sales partner, Haven Consultants International ("Haven"). The order comes shortly after Haven ordered 29 SmartGATE Insights study services in late 2020. With over 20 Insights engagements still in progress, the early conversion to full platform sale results is very promising. This recent order is a testament to the SmartGATE Insights service accelerating SmartGATE Platform sales. "Legend's SmartGATE Platform is a revolutionary way to enhance a building's resiliency that pays for itself through energy savings," said Michael Parry, President of Haven. "The Power Impact Report, provided as part of an Insights engagement, is critical as it delivers non-technical explanations of the negative financial effects being suffered in single buildings and entire portfolios and how they are solved by the SmartGATE Platform. Having the SmartGATE Platform then mitigate the risks and costs discovered during the Insights engagement while saving energy is game changing. We are still collecting data and presenting the findings for many more buildings in our recent order for 29 Insights engagements we are confident that Haven can solve these previously invisible challenges for our customers leveraging SmartGATE." "These sales continue to validate our strategy of empowering partners with the ability to generate Power Impact Reports," said Legend Power Systems CEO Randy Buchamer. "For the first time, our partners can quantify energy impact and risk for their customers and make fact-based business cases on how Legend's SmartGATE Platform can mitigate excessive costs, operational risks, and improve tenant satisfaction. We are encouraged by the traction Power Impact Reports have gained across all of our verticals and are optimistic about the growth in our sales pipeline prospects." To learn more about Legend's SmartGATE Platform, SmartGATE Insights, Power Impact Assessment, reducing operating costs, improving ESG scores and tenant experience, please contact us at: https://legendpower.com. About SmartGATE SmartGATE is an industry-leading, turnkey solution which identifies and fixes underperformance and waste in the electrical system of a commercial building. These performance issues often impact key areas of commercial real estate metrics including occupant safety and satisfaction as well as financial performance. This waste can also lead to higher operating costs, lower net operating income and other potential financial risks to the building owner, including adverse tenant experiences. About Legend Power Systems Inc. Legend Power Systems Inc. (www.legendpower.com) provides an intelligent energy management platform that analyzes and improves building energy challenges, significantly impacting asset management and corporate performance. Legend's proven solutions support proactive executive decision-making in a complex and volatile business and energy environment. For further information, please contact: Steve Vanry, CFO + 1 604 671 9522 svanry@legendpower.com Sean Peasgood, Investor Relations + 1 647 503 1054 sean@sophiccapital.com Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Statements This Press Release may contain statements which constitute "forward-looking information", including statements regarding the plans, intentions, beliefs and current expectations of the Company, its directors, or its officers with respect to the future business activities and operating performance of the Company. The words "may", "would", "could", "will", "intend", "plan", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect" and similar expressions, as they relate to the Company, or its management, are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future business activities or performance and involve risks and uncertainties, and that the Company's future business activities may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. Such risks, uncertainties and factors are described in the periodic filings with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities, including the Company's quarterly and annual Management's Discussion & Analysis, which may be viewed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking statements prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described herein as intended, planned, anticipated, believed, estimated or expected. Although the Company has attempted to identify important risks, uncertainties and factors which could cause actual results to differ materially, there may be others that cause results to not be as anticipated, estimated or intended. The Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements other than as may be required by applicable law. SOURCE: Legend Power Systems Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631576/Legend-Power-Systems-Channel-Partner-Orders-5-SmartGATE-Systems Tokyo: Japan has appointed its first Minister for Loneliness this month after the country`s suicide rate increased for the first time in 11 years during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to The Japan Times, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga added a minister of loneliness to his Cabinet earlier this month, following the example of the UK, which in 2018 became the first country to create a similar role. Suga tapped minister Tetsushi Sakamoto, who is simultaneously in charge of combating the nation`s falling birth rate and revitalizing regional economies, for the new portfolio. In his inaugural press conference, Sakamoto said Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga appointed him to address national matters "including the issue of the increasing women`s suicide rate under the pandemic," according to CNN. "Suga instructed me to examine the issue and put forward a comprehensive strategy, by coordinating with the related ministry... I hope to carry out activities to prevent social loneliness and isolation and to protect ties between people," Sakamoto added. CNN reported that the Japanese government also created an "isolation/loneliness countermeasures office" within the cabinet on February 19 for issues such as suicide and child poverty -- which have risen during the pandemic. The country has recorded more than 426,000 coronavirus confirmed cases and 7,577 deaths, according to data from John Hopkins University. BOZEMAN, Mont., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CrossTx, a leading cloud-based health and human services network technology platform supporting patient discharge planning and referral management, care coordination and care management for Medicare value-based programs reports a number of successful Critical Access Hospital client implementations across multiple states. With an emphasis on empowering rural health care organizations and networks, CrossTx's Client Success team recently ensured valued partners are achieving an ongoing, robust return on investment (ROI). CrossTx Powers Compelling Medicare-based Chronic Care Management Solutions in Rural Critical Access Hospitals & Regional Health Centers CrossTx's Chronic Care Management (CCM) solution helps hospitals and health centers around the nation secure reimbursement for a range of Medicare-based services. The company and its strategic partner, HealthTechS3, jointly configure and deliver a turnkey, cost-effective, and robust CCM compliant solution that supports superior patient care while generating greater revenues for rural hospitals. Chad Nybo, CrossTx's Founder and Chief Executive Officer recently shared, "We are proud of our compelling track record of Medicare, value-based CCM solutions deployed in over seventy (70) Critical Access Hospitals and regional health centers across the United States." The company's founder emphasized that "the evidence as to the value of the CrossTx CCM cloud-based offering is explicitly apparent by so many great partners that benefit daily, with patient care improving." What follows are some compelling success stories evidencing the substantial value of the CrossTx CCM program for rural-based hospitals and health centers. Based in New Mexico, Gila Regional Medical Center (GRMC) has been caring for patients in this rural part of New Mexico for over 100 years. With a powerful regional connection to the community, GRMC began its chronic care and principal care journey in the late fall of 2020. Registered nurses Jesse Doubrava and Angie Cox stepped into the roles of care coordinator for the family medicine clinic and their cardiology specialty clinic, following an intensive CrossTx CCM onboarding session with Faith Jonesa trusted CCM subject matter expert with HealthTechS3, as well as Brad Putnam, Client Success lead for the Bozeman, Montana-based CrossTx. Establishing a series of goals for patient benefit, as well as community and GRMC reimbursement, the turnkey, compelling CrossTx implementation led the GRMC team to immediately surpass CCM expectations. Now with the CrossTx CCM suite in place, GRMC providers know exactly which of their patients would benefit from care coordination and eagerly refer them. In a very short period of time, GRMC runs a state-of-the-art, Medicare reimbursable CCM program thanks to the CrossTx platform, as well as the dedicated team at GRMC. A thriving CCM program, as well as Principal Care Management (PCM) program ensued. Meanwhile in GRMC's Cardiology group, patients were already remotely monitored using Kardia devices. As they signed consent forms, they were moving forward and managed with a comprehensive care plan in place as part of a remote patient monitoring program. Enter CrossTx implementation and the GRMC team has enabled an end-to-end Chronic Care Remote Physiological Monitoring (CCRPM), now with not only state-of-the-art care coordination and management but also turnkey billing for Medicare reimbursement. Based in the Columbia Basin in Washington State, Samaritan Healthcare is a multifaceted healthcare organization located in Moses Lakeorganized as Grant County Public Hospital No. 1. Founded back in 1947, this rural critical access hospital is committed to improving the health and well-being of the people in this region. Nicole Talbert, RN, a Clinical Care Coordinator, reports on the benefits of CrossTx: "We began our care coordination program with a small grant. The CrossTx platform helped us track and report auditable and accurate numbers for the grant, as well as receive significant reimbursements for Medicare Chronic Condition Management, leading to sustainability for our care coordination program." Ms. Talbert continued, "With CrossTx, we are able to accurately report on results to a grantee and generate significant reimbursement for Chronic Care Management with the same platform." Cobre Valley Regional Medical Center (CVRMC), a rural critical access hospital in Arizona, has roots going back to this region for a century. Providing healthcare for about 30,000 residents in the Copper Corridor area, the advanced rural-based health center offers innovative medical services for a range of major conditions. Margo Flores, Patient Care Coordinator, helps lead care coordination there for CVRMC and recently shared the benefits of working with CrossTx: "Working with the CrossTx platform gives us a compelling platform to communicate across various groups and teams resulting in a seamless, coordinated and holistic patient care." Ms. Flores continued, "The CrossTx platform tracks all of our patient encounters and the associated time spent with each patient so billing at the end of the month is a breeze." Ms. Flores finished, "The CrossTx platform helps us provide extraordinary care for our Medicare patients while maximizing our reimbursement from our care coordination program." Considerably to the east in the state of Illinois, Carlinville Area Hospital committed to the development of a state-of-the-art rural hospital with superior local healthcare services; this 25-bed acute bed hospital has used CrossTx for several years now. An easy-to-use, compelling system, Case Manager/Care Coordinator Kathy McQuade, RN, MSN reports, "We have been using the CrossTx program for seven years now, and it is so easy to use. This program has really helped us maximize our Medicare Chronic Condition Management program. CrossTx allows us to track and care for far more patients than we could without it. The support system is always available to problem solve or answer any questions as soon as they come up." Back in the Intermountain West in Thermopolis Wyoming Hot Springs County Memorial Hospital has operated a committed healthcare institution, dedicated to quality health delivery since its founding in 1958. With state-of-the-art technology and dedicated healthcare professionals, Jeri Slover, RN recently shared her recent experience with the CrossTx platform: "I recently took over a Medicare chronic condition management program for this hospital involving five clinics. I have found the CrossTx platform to be very intuitive and easy to use. The software product has directly supported my jumping right into caring for our patients rather than spending time trying to learn a difficult to use piece of software." Summing up the CrossTx platform CCM experience, accessible cloud-based, easy to use yet secure supporting HIPAA compliance combined with a high return on investment ensures a successful partnership between the rural healthcare hospital and health center and CrossTx. Daniel O'Connor Chief Business Officer, CrossTx M: 925-570-7486 [email protected] Related Images medicare-based-chronic-care.jpg Medicare-based Chronic Care Management Solutions CrossTx Powers Compelling Medicare-based Chronic Care Management Solutions in Rural Critical Access Hospitals & Regional Health Centers SOURCE CrossTx, Inc. Minister of State for European Affairs, Thomas Byrne makes virtual visit to Great Britain Press release Minister for European Affairs, Thomas Byrne, is undertaking a virtual visit to Great Britain today to engage with UK interlocutors, including Ministers, MPs and think tanks. The programme is an opportunity to discuss British-Irish ties, the future of the EU-UK relationship and realising the potential of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Speaking about the visit the Minister said: I welcome todays opportunity to undertake a virtual visit to London one of the many new ways of working that have arisen since the pandemic and an opportunity to further strengthen bilateral links between our two countries. Irelands relationship with our nearest neighbour is a vital one and I was pleased to meet a range of British interlocutors, including British Ministers, for discussions on a wide range of issues including post-Brexit relationships with Ireland and with the EU. I look forward to continuing these positive discussions in person as soon as it is safe to do so. Todays virtual visit includes meetings with Wendy Morton MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for European Neighbourhood and the Americas, and Robin Walker MP, Minister of State for Northern Ireland. These meetings were complemented by engagements with Members of Parliament and the Institute for Government and Centre for European Reform think tank. ENDS Press Office 24 February 2021 Previous Item | Vientiane, Feb 24 : The authorities across Laos continue to implement preventive measures and closely monitor the people entering the country to prevent the second wave of Covid outbreak. People entering Laos especially returning workers will be sent to quarantine centers for 14 days, and the temperature of each person entering the country must be checked, Deputy Director General of the Department of Communicable Disease Control under the Lao Ministry of Health Latsamy Vongkhamsao told media here on Wednesday. A total of 2,335 people has been quarantined at 27 accommodation centres across the country, Xinhua reported. The National Taskforce Committee for Covid-19 Prevention and Control asked everyone to continue to follow the Covid safety norms. As on Wednesday, Laos reported 45 fresh Covid cases, even as 42 people have recovered. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) -Prospero Silver Corp. (TSXV: PSL.H) (the "Company") provides the following summary update to shareholders. This press release includes a correction of a typographical error in the commentary below under the heading Current Financial Position regarding the amount of the Company's current working capital deficit. Capital Reorganization Efforts As previously reported in December 2019, a Special Committee of the Company's Board of Directors reviewed and recommended, among other things, the Company cease mining exploration activities in Mexico. The Company accepted the committee's recommendations, ceased all such activities, disposed of its exploration assets to avoid ongoing obligations and commenced a reorganization of its capital so that it may consider new business opportunities in due course. Towards that end, and as previously reported, the Company completed a 1 for 10 share consolidation in July, 2020 and then a further 1 for 3 share consolidation in February, 2021. The combined result was to reduce the number of issued and outstanding shares from 57,471,879 to 1,915,728. As of this date there are: no outstanding share purchase warrants; and outstanding stock options as follows: Exercise Price Number Expiry Date $1.50 5,500 March 4, 2021 $9.00 13,333 September 19, 2021 $7.80 59,000 May 24, 2022 $2.25 30,833 September 6, 2023 Current Financial Position The Company has no active business or assets and, at present, has negative working capital of approximately $295,000, as of this date, and not "$20,700", as initially reported in error. In order to settle its current liabilities, pay ongoing expenses to maintain its share listing and, in due course, acquire and finance a new business opportunity, the Company will have to issue additional securities, which will result in further, and likely significant, dilution to investors. Recent Share Trading As a result of the cessation of its previous business operations, the Company's shares ceased to trade on the TSX Venture Exchange effective January 26, 2021, and its listing was transferred to the NEX Board, where it is expected to remain until such time the Company successfully completes a reactivation plan that includes the acquisition of a qualified asset or new business. The NEX Board provides a trading forum for listed companies that have fallen below TSX Venture's minimum listing standards. At the close of business yesterday the Company had a market capitalization of $1,149,436. The Company does not presently have any agreement to acquire assets or a business and is not aware of any reason why the Company's shares are trading at its current share price. Outlook The Company's Board of Directors will be seeking to settle existing debts and secure financing to stabilize the Company's financial position. If successful, the Company will then seek to acquire qualified assets or a business, which may result in a change in control of the Company. There are no assurances the Company will be able to settle debts, secure necessary financing or acquire assets or a business on terms acceptable to the Company or on any terms. The Company may, from time to time, provide updates regarding its progress. However, except to the extent required by applicable securities laws and the policies of the NEX board of the TSX Venture Exchange, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. For additional information readers are referred to the Company's disclosure documents, including, but not limited to, the Company's audited and quarterly unaudited financial statements, which can be accessed at www.sedar.com. On behalf of the Board of Directors William Murray President, CEO and Director Tel: (604) 551-7505 Email: wmurray@prosperosilver.com Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75373 The regions largest COVID vaccine site created to cater to vulnerable communities is drive-thru-only, a process that frustrated some observers as health officials work to balance better access to shots, huge demand and the need to inoculate as many people as fast as possible. Opened Wednesday, the vaccination site at NRG Park is accessible only by automobile, Harris County officials said. We want to operate at full speed 6,000 vaccines a day and the only way to reach that number safely in the very limited amount of time weve had to set up the site is via drive-thru, said Rafael Lemaitre, spokesman for Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo. Unfortunately, a walk-up option at that particular site would significantly cut into the number of people were able to provide vaccines for overall. Critics, however, said requiring an automobile is counterproductive to correcting existing disparities in how vaccines are distributed. It makes no sense to focus on those ZIP codes and not have an option for people who dont have a car, Houston At-Large Councilmember Leticia Plummer said. To deny them access, simply because they do not have an automobile, is against the idea of equitable access. Federal officials are paying for and helping operate the mass vaccination site at NRG Park for at least eight weeks. Houston Health Department and Harris County Public Health are working with FEMA, in the hopes of vaccinating 126,000 people over the next eight weeks. The decision to focus solely on drive-thru shots leaves folks such as Sam Stamport out of the mix. Stamport, 65, lives in southwest Houston but does not own a car to easily arrive at his Saturday appointment. I thought NRG was chosen because several Metro routes are nearby, Stamport wrote in a social media post. The Red Line light rail route runs along the east side of NRG Park, with a centralized stop. The stop is one station down from where the Red Line connects to some of the regions larger bus routes including the Alameda, Lyons and Bellfort routes. The Route 84 Buffalo Speedway bus runs along the western side of NRG Park. Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Lemaitre said while the county does realize people are going to need options, officials are keeping NRG as a drive-thru. The solution for those without automobile transportation, he said, is to move the appointment. They can call us and be offered their appointment at another location that is closer to them, including perhaps one of our four other large sites or two mobile sites or federally qualified health center where we are delivering vaccines, Lemaitre said. Wait in line To make arrangements to secure a vaccine appointment in Houston or Harris County, call: Houston Health Department 832-927-8787 Area Agency on Aging 832-393-4301 Harris County 832-927-8787 Source: City of Houston, Harris County See More Collapse Critics countered that seemed inconsistent with all of the claims of NRG Park being a major resource for low-income residents. You set up a site for people who are struggling and then make it so you have to own a car to use it; it makes no sense, said Curtis Jansen, 56, a frequent transit rider. If I had a car, I could drive out to Pearland or wherever and get the vaccine. LINK Houston, which advocates for better mobility options for vulnerable communities, urged county and FEMA officials to redesign the NRG Park process. Specifically, Executive Director Oni Blair, said the group wants NRG and all sites for vaccination to offer walk-up options that are closely located to the transit stops, with bicycle parking. The challenge of balancing best ways to distribute the vaccine with widespread demand is an ongoing discussion within the medical and policy realms, said Claire Horner, a clinical ethicist and professor at Baylor College of Medicine. The aim of any policy is to make sure everyone has equal access to the vaccine, but certain considerations might make some sites targeted to specific recipients. You cannot accommodate everyone every time, Horner said. You cant make it perfect at every site. The measure is whether everyone across the community has an equal chance at the vaccine, she said. That likely requires communities to develop systems that rely on multiple options, both mass vaccination sites such as NRG and smaller neighborhood-based locations. You need to be in the communities, working with the communities, Horner said. You need to be where the people are. POTENTIAL FOR POTHOLES: Freezes likely to worsen some streets Officials also must connect with people when and how they are most effectively reached, not how it is easiest for the officials, Horner said. Smartphone applications and web forms, for example, can be effective for certain segments of the population but may have a tougher time reaching poor seniors. Horner noted one of the stumbles of early vaccine access in the Houston area was that waiting list information was quickly finding its way to Twitter, allowing the tech-savvy a leg up. Something as simple as that can really affect who gets it and who does not, Horner said. A solution at NRG for transit riders remains elusive but also under consideration. Plummer said officials still are working through the details of possibly relying on Metropolitan Transit Authority or another provider to offer a van that could take people who arrive by transit, bicycle or on foot through the line. Metropolitan Transit Authority officials said they are prepared to assist Houston and Harris County with transportation needs, similar to efforts in San Antonio, where VIA Metropolitan Transit is driving vaccine recipients to the mass distribution site at the Alamodome. Rides are free the day of a valid COVID vaccine appointment in San Antonio. Similar programs were established for other sites in the Houston area, but not NRG. Mark Mulligan, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Our access and equity vaccine strategy includes making vaccine available at the community level by partnering with clinics and pharmacies in directly vulnerable communities, Houston Health Department officials said in a statement. As supply increases, we will also offer vaccine directly in vulnerable communities via mobile units. Plummer said such considerations need to be made long before vaccination sites open. This should be a part of the discussion, absolutely, Plummer said. It is something we should be able to figure out and apply everywhere. dug.begley@chron.com Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. Progressives have geared up for a funding battle to gut the Defense Department, but the Senate Armed Services Committee's new chairman doesn't expect any big moves in the next budget. Sen. Jack Reed, the Rhode Island Democrat who leads the panel, said he expects "tighter budgets going forward, more flat than rising." The government must juggle a DoD modernization effort to compete with near-peer threats by boosting cyber warfare and space capabilities after unprecedented spending for economic recovery efforts amid the pandemic. Read Next: Major Changes Coming to the Marine Corps Annual Rifle Qualification Course "I think there's going to be budget pressure on all budgets," Reed said in a call with reporters Wednesday. "We're gonna deal with a tighter budget; we need to make judicious calls on what's worthwhile." A lack of big surprises in the next budget potentially sets up a fight between Democrats on Capitol Hill. Progressives have pounced on the opportunity to scale back military spending in favor of investing in other parts of the government and curtailing the economic devastation caused by the pandemic. "After the past year spending $740 billion a year on this one piece of the federal budget is unconscionable," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who serves on the Armed Services Committee, said at a hearing earlier this month. "We continue to overinvest in defense while underinvesting in public health and so much more that would keep us safe and save lives." Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, vowed to combat fraud and waste in the DoD and has long sought to cut its budget by 10 percent. "Military spending, now higher than the next 11 nations combined, represents more than half of all federal discretionary spending," Sanders said in a statement last year. "If the horrific pandemic we are now experiencing has taught us anything, it is that national security means a lot more than building bombs, missiles, jet fighters, tanks, submarines, nuclear warheads and other weapons of mass destruction." President Joe Biden said he doesn't foresee any major cuts to the Pentagon, telling Stars and Stripes in September that, if anything, there could be a slight increase in funding for emerging warfighting domains such as cyber. -- Steve Beynon can be reached at Steve.Beynon@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevenBeynon. Related: Air Force Wants to Harden the B-2 Bomber to Withstand an EMP Attack WINCHESTER Although some west-central Illinois communities were able to lower natural gas use by urging residents to conserve during this months cold snap, they are worried about what will happen when bills come due. Places like Winchester can see higher prices because of variable rates in their contracts with municipal and cooperative systems. Companies regulated by the Illinois Commerce Commission, such as Ameren Illinois and Illinois Peoples Gas, buy natural gas in advance of winter to ensure they are less prone to sudden increases in wholesale rates. City Council members met Monday in special session to discuss options in the wake of a jump in natural gas prices that has affected some rural communities. Winchester is required to buy enough gas to cover residents daily needs or face a penalty. From Feb. 1 to Feb. 5, the citys cost for natural gas was $6,900. The following week, the cost rose to $28,000. But the week of Feb. 13-21, when record low temperatures reached into the region, the citys cost for natural gas was $320,000, according to the city. The cost of natural gas for Winchester this month is expected to be in the range of $450,000 to $475,000, according to the city. Several other cities including Franklin, Pittsfield, Waverly, White Hall, Winchester and Roodhouse could be in a similar situation. Some closed schools for the week to help keep gas use lower. State Sen. Steve McClure, a Springfield Republican, said Gov. J.B Pritzker wants to give people relief from high utility bills. Pritzker on Tuesday announced low-interest loans were being made available to impacted communities to support a manageable payment program for the spike in costs. We all understand the position that youre in and now its up to us to try and advocate to get you guys as much relief as we can, said McClure, who attended the council meeting along with state Rep. C.D. Davidsmeyer, a Jacksonville Republican. Pritzker said the Illinois Finance Authority will develop a low-interest $15 million loan program for impacted communities to support a manageable payment program for the record-high utility costs. The catastrophic pricing surges have rained down on downstate communities in Illinois, demanding an unbearable financial sacrifice from small municipalities and their residents, Pritzker said. The state of Illinois will not leave our people out in the cold. Winchester gets its natural gas from Panhandle Eastern Pipe Line and normally pays about $3 a dekatherm, according to Mayor Rex McIntire. During the next 10 days, the city estimates it will pay $6 a dekatherm for natural gas. A dekatherm is a measure of the approximate energy content of 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas. Panhandle Pipeline implemented restrictions on gas use because of an increase in demand stemming from extreme temperatures across the country, as well as a choking of the supply in Texas and Oklahoma because of wellhead freeze-offs at production sites. Panhandle Pipeline implemented restrictions to maintain operational capacity. This is an unprecedented event, its never happened like this before, McIntire said. Davidsmeyer said state lawmakers are working with their federal counterparts to address the matter. There are times when we all can come together and do the right thing, and I think we have to do everything possible to protect our citizens, Davidsmeyer said. Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith has called for a federal investigation into the spike in natural gas prices. My hope is we see deductions from the bills very soon because they realize supply was never lost, Davidsmeyer said. They will recover, they will come back. McIntire said residents turned down their thermostats when asked to do so, which greatly reduced the amount of gas that had to be bought and saved several thousand dollars. Still, there is absolutely no justification for a cost increase of this magnitude, he said. Access Garage Doors, an industry leader with more than 15 years of experience in residential and commercial garage door repair and installation, is growing its presence in the Northeast. The company is proud to announce the addition of its newest franchise, Access Garage Doors of Morristown, New Jersey. Brothers and businessmen Mohamed and Suliman Masoud are bringing Access Garage Doors to the Morristown area. The pair has extensive experience in sales and customer service and are excited to introduce the Access brand to their community. Mohamed says the brands attention to customers needs and the pledge to provide high-quality service will be welcomed with open arms. The companys dedication to customer service really appealed to us, said Mohamed. This is a business where having the training and tools to do an excellent job for a customer means theyll recommend you to their neighbors and friends. Were excited to build those relationships in our community. The pair was looking for entrepreneurial opportunities when they discovered Access Garage Doors. Suliman says they were sold on the brand after speaking to other franchisees. We werent sure about starting a business during the pandemic, said Suliman. But we saw that other owners were busy and doing well, so we knew this would be a good opportunity for us. Investing in a business thats recession-proof makes us feel more confident in our future success. Were looking forward to growing with Access. Access Garage Doors President and CEO, Jesse Cox, says Mohamed and Suliman understand the value of creating a trusted working relationship with clients and will make successful Access franchise owners. We are excited to have Mohamed and Suliman join the Access team, said Cox. We know they have what it takes to manage Access Garage Doors expansion in Morristown and look forward to helping them achieve their goals. Access Garage Doors offers homeowners a comprehensive selection of services on garage door opener systems and garage doors, as well as a wide selection of high-quality new garage doors and openers. Access Garage Doors is a Master Authorized Clopay dealer and an Authorized Service Provider for LiftMaster, Home Depot, Genie, Clopay, and Amarr. To learn more about Access Garage Doors, please visit: https://accessdoorcompany.com/. For more information about Access Garage Doors franchise opportunities, please visit: https://accessdoorcompany.com/franchise/. ### ABOUT ACCESS GARAGE DOORS Founded in 2005, Access Garage Doors provides service, installation and sales of state-of-the-art residential and electric openers. Based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Access is a top-tier Master Authorized Dealer for one of the largest garage door manufacturers, Clopay, and is a top-tier LiftMaster ProVantage Dealer. Access also carries brands such as Amarr Doors, Genie, Craftsman, Chamberlain, Marantec, and Sommer; and services Hormann, Wayne Dalton, CHI, Raynor, Sears, Linear, Lynx, Overhead Door, Ideal Door, Windsor Door, Stanley, Door Link, and Ryobi brands. Access is a long-term member of the International Door Association, as well as the Home Builders Association of Greater Chattanooga. A 54-year-old Massachusetts man accused of trying to pay an undercover FBI agent posing as a hitman to kill his wife last month was indicted Tuesday on a murder-for-hire charge. Massimo Marenghi was indicted by a federal grand jury on one count of use of interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire over claims he tried to get someone who he believed was a contract killer but was actually an undercover federal agent to kill his wife, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office. The Malden man was arrested and charged in January, and after a hearing Feb. 10, he was ordered to remain detained before his trial, the prosecutors office noted. The investigation into Marenghi started Jan. 1 when a confidential source contacted the Northwood Police Department in New Hampshire about a conversation he had with the Malden man earlier that day, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court. During the conversation, the confidential source claimed, Marenghi described having issues with his wife and how she caused a restraining order to be issued against him. He is accused of asking the source if he would be willing to help kill his wife on his behalf, the complaint reads. That same day, Northwood police referred the report to the Malden Police Department, which then contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation for help with the investigation, according to the complaint. A day later, the FBI contacted and interviewed the confidential source, who reported that as early as several months prior, Marenghi had raised the topic of killing his wife with him. The source said he had been able to dissuade the Malden man from pursuing any further steps. However, authorities said, in text messages between Marenghi and the confidential source on Jan. 1, he again broached the subject of killing his wife. The source responded by saying that if the Malden man was serious about ordering a hit on his wife, then the price tag would be $10,000 cash. According to court documents, Marenghi agreed and provided the confidential source with photographs of his wife, information regarding the location and hours of her employment, her home address in Malden, a description of her vehicle and her telephone number. The source then contacted law enforcement. At the end of his interview with the FBI, the confidential source agreed to help the investigation by providing Marenghi with the name and contact information for someone who he would be told could be hired to kill his wife but who, in reality, would be an undercover federal agent, court records say. At the instruction of the FBI, prosecutors said, the confidential source sent a text message to Marenghi that included the phone number for the person he claimed could help the man with his plan to kill his wife. The confidential source sent Marenghi certain words to use when contacting the purported hitman, the U.S. Attorneys Office said. He was told to refer to the fabricated contract killer as Mrs. Smith and himself as Boston. The Malden man was also instructed to inquire about the construction job. Marenghi is accused of calling the phone number Jan. 13 and using the code words. The undercover agent in turn told the Malden man the job would require blueprints, pictures of the site, what time work could start and a preliminary invoice. The two individuals scheduled an in-person meeting for a week later, according to the criminal complaint. On Jan. 20, they met at a pre-determined location in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. During the meeting, the complaint alleges, Marenghi described a situation he needed taken care of. The situation he was referring to was his soon-to-be ex-wife, authorities noted. The undercover agent asked, You want to get rid of her? Marenghi is accused of responding, Yeah, I need to ... eliminate that problem. According to court records, the agent then said, I mean, we can make it look like an accident. ... It is your call. The Malden man allegedly replied, Yeah, well, I mean obviously thats the best way. At one point, Marenghi is accused of saying, I just need her out of the way for now. The undercover agent responded, Thats totally different. You either want her killed or you dont, to which the Malden man allegedly responded, Um, I need- I need the problem eliminated, court documents detail. The pair discussed a price for the alleged murder-for-hire and settled on $10,000, though Marenghi is accused of saying he may need some time to free up some assets because everything is tied up right now, according to the criminal complaint. Authorities said the Malden man provided the undercover agent with a photograph of his wifes home, explained in detail the location of the camera outside her house and described how someone could stand behind the barrels at the end of the driveway so they remain hidden from any cameras and out of sight from his wife. Marenghi further provided a possible exit route, likely to evade detection, the criminal complaint says. During their next meeting Jan. 29, the U.S. Attorneys Office said, Marenghi and the undercover agent discussed details related to the alleged murder-for-hire. The Malden man is accused of giving the agent $1,500 cash as a deposit for the killing. He explained that the sooner the demolition job takes place, the sooner he will be able to pay the balance, court records read. He also provided the [agent] with a photograph of his wife, the hours of operation of her place of business and a schedule indicating the best time for the construction work to start. " Marenghis arraignment is set for March 4, according to authorities. Related Content: Massimo Marenghi took out hit on woman who sought restraining order, federal agents say President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has met with Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania Gabrielius Landsbergis in Kyiv, according to the press service of the head of state. The president thanked Lithuania for its continued support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, European and Euro-Atlantic integration, and its sanctions policy against Russia. "Ukraine must be a member state of the European Union. Thank you also for supporting Ukraine's accession to NATO. We expect that after receiving an Enhanced Opportunities Partner status, Ukraine should obtain a MAP. And in the future we see ourselves as a NATO member," Zelensky said. The president also considers it important to support the position of the Ukrainian state in order to oppose the Nord Stream 2 project and preserve energy security in Europe. "I want to thank you for the sanctions policy in connection with the temporary occupation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, and for the sake of Europe's energy security," he noted. Zelensky stressed that he expects the personal participation of the president of Lithuania in the ceremonial events on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Ukraine's independence and in the Crimean Platform summit to be held in Kyiv in August 2021. The interlocutors discussed the situation in Ukraine and Lithuania in connection with the coronavirus pandemic and the measures taken by the leaders of both countries to overcome the pandemic and ensure the protection of citizens. As Ukrinform reported, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania Gabrielius Landsbergis is on a working visit to Ukraine on February 23-24. ish Todays news from HMD arrives for Android Enterprise users. The company is announcing two Nokia phones certifications as officially recommended Android Enterprise compatible smartphones. The Nokia 5.4 receives the AER (Android Enterprise Recommended) stamp of approval running Android 10. Meanwhile, the Nokia 8.3 5G receives the same recognition with its most recent Android 11 update. Nokia 8.3 5G The Nokia 8.3 5G finally received Android 11 earlier this month and the company says that its rollout was completed on February 7. The Nokia 8.3 5G currently retails in the US for $599 and is powered by the Snapdragon 765G chipset. The phone has a large 6.81 FHD+ LCD screen with a hole-punched selfie camera. It comes with 8GB+128GB expandable storage. The quad-camera array consists of a main 64MP camera, a 12MP ultrawide, and two 2MP cameras, each for depth sensing and shooting macro photos. Nokia 5.4 The Nokia 5.4 runs Android 10 and is powered by the Snapdragon 662 paired with either 4GB of RAM. Theres a 6.39 HD+ screen and 4,000 mAh battery. This phones quad-camera system is made up of a 48MP main camera, a 5MP ultrawide shooter, and dual 2MP sensors for macro photos and depth sensing. The Nokia 5.4 starts at $249. Android Enterprise Perths rainfall has fallen dramatically for decades and the city now relies very heavily on desalination for its water supply. Credit: Callistemon/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA As we were still recovering from last summer's fires in southeast Australia, the southwest fires brought in 2021. Both were far more intense fires than seen before, driven by deep drying, extreme heat and powerful winds. It's a harsh reminder that climate change is going to bounce us up and down with increased frequency. We have published a new research paper in the journal Nature, titled "Apocalypse Now: Australian Bushfires and the Future of Urban Settlements." It was put together as the fires were raging in the east, and comes out as Perth residents are still reeling from the devastating fires in the west this month. Both sides of Australia have now learnt hard lessons. What have we learned? 1. Bushfires have become more frequent and more intense The 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires were unprecedented in their scale and were fuelled by unprecedented climatic conditions. The fires burned about 21% of eastern Australia's temperate broad-leafed (mainly eucalypt) forests. That's more than ten times the annual average of about 2%, even in extreme fire seasons. Individual fires were also massive in size. For example, the Gospers Mountain fire near Sydney burned more than 500,000 hectares. This made it the largest individual fire ever recorded in Australia. 2. Climate change is creating unprecedented conditions The preceding climatic conditions were also unprecedented. 2019 was Australia's hottest year on record. The average maximum temperature was 2.09C above the baseline and 0.5C higher than the previous record. Australia also experienced its driest year on record in 2019. Rainfall was about 40% below average across the continent. Climate change played a strong role in driving these weather records. 3. It's a global problem Modeling by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows if the world goes past the 2C rise on average and moves towards 3C, the world is likely to lose most of the forests in dry climate areas like ours. The southwestern region of Australia has been drying for 40 years, linked to climate change. In recent years, the Perth region has depended on desalinating seawater for about half of the water supply to more than 2 million residents. The bushfires have become more intense over the past decade. Similar patterns are found in California and other areas with a Mediterranean climate. 4. The global community is watching State and federal governments must commit to net-zero emissions targets. These would signal to industry and communities that there is a diminishing future for fossil fuels and encourage investment in a renewable future. The fires strikingly remind people that we remain a global climate laggard. This will soon spread to our trade discussions and ability to raise finance for nation-building infrastructure and major projects. 5. Our settlements will need to change The most vulnerable parts of our cities are in the urban fringes where there is substantial scattered development set in bush. Such homes are going to be increasingly vulnerable. As a result, owners will find insurance harder to secure. Consolidating the city will need to start by reviewing such lifestyle zonings to reduce risk to communities. Rural areas and coastal settlements also will need a new model based on new green technology infrastructure, new building materials and new ways of living together rather than living in forest hideaways. 6. Indigenous fire management needs to be applied to all bush Indigenous fire techniques are beginning to be developed and adapted with local communities after the fires last summer. These are needed around our cities and in urban bushland, as well as in forests and rangelands across our country. If we don't begin to adopt such "cool burn" approaches, then we face the prospect of losing our forests, even those in and around our cities. What must we do to make this happen? Key elements include: regional urban centers make the transition to renewable energy urban design becomes responsive to climate through retrofitting programs and consolidating settlements settlements retreat from areas of high climate risk, working with affected communities to identify options community climate action plans get funded, including climate change adaption, climate-sensitive urban design and heat reduction though urban green spaces embed action on climate change (mitigation and adaptation) through a national investment program, in partnership with the states, to review urban planning processes. This is a crisis that needs strong leadership of the type shown in the COVID response. That means working together, fostering innovation and investing in creating and building more climate-adapted communities. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The boss of Melrose faced a backlash after claiming that the closure of GKN's last British automotive plant was 'difficult' but unavoidable. Simon Peckham said the Birmingham factory had lost more than 100million in a decade and was shedding more business because of the switch towards electric vehicles. He told Parliament's business committee that he blamed previous managers for a decision to make GKN's electric car parts in Europe. Undertaking: Melrose boss Simon Peckham said GKN's Birmingham factory had lost more than 100m in a decade Hours later, trade unionists accused him of making 'misleading' claims and demanded he correct the record. The row follows an outcry over GKN's plan to shut its car components plant in Erdington, with the loss of 519 jobs. Critics say the move flies in the face of Melrose's stated aim to make GKN a 'UK manufacturing powerhouse'. Peckham insisted Melrose had kept all its promises after buying GKN for 8billion three years ago. He told MPs: 'We have complied with the spirit and the wording of every undertaking we gave, but we also said we would make difficult decisions. Unfortunately, Erdington is one of those. 'I'd like to say we are sorry. We do understand this is difficult for the employees at Erdington. 'But we have done everything that we said we would and unfortunately this is one of the difficult things we have to do to make GKN a better business.' Peckham said 25 per cent of the plant's UK market had 'disappeared' from 2016 to 2019 and that 40 per cent of remaining sales came from parts not needed in electric vehicles. He said GKN had already set up electric vehicle manufacturing operations in Italy under previous management. 'We did not make that choice, they did,' he said. 'Unfortunately there's nothing we can do about it, it is a legacy we inherited.' Trade union Unite spokesman Des Quinn said: 'Erdington has a world-class manufacturing capability. Either MPs have been misinformed or the workforce has been misled.' He claimed that losses at the plant reflected internal accounting methods and not its true business contribution. Melrose denied that last night, saying: 'Erdington is an assembly operation and any attempt to characterise it any other way is misleading.' Jack Dromey, the Labour MP for Erdington, accused Melrose of 'exporting production and British jobs to continental Europe'. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close London, UK: Nothing , a new London-based consumer technology company co-founded by former co-founder of OnePlus, announced Teenage Engineering as a founding partner of the company. Teenage Engineering is a Stockholm-based company known for its craftsmanship and specialisation in industrial design. The companys first product, the portable wonder synthesizer OP-1, was launched in 2010 and is still used by world-famous musicians today. This also gives us a strong hint that Nothing might introduce audio products in future. Im really excited to welcome teenage engineering to the growing Nothing family. They consist of some of the best designers and creatives that Ive had the pleasure of working with. Together, weve created a product roadmap thats unique and true to Nothings vision," said Carl Pei, CEO & co-founder of Nothing. Jesper Kouthoofd, co-founder & CEO of teenage engineering, is the Creative Lead and the visionary behind Nothings design world, while Tom Howard has been appointed as Head of Design of Nothing. When Carl first told me about Nothings vision I remember being super excited thinking about how this would be translated into the design identity of the products. After months of research and development, we are now in a place where I believe we will have something exciting to show to the world," said Jesper Kouthoofd, Founding Partner & Creative Lead of Nothing. Nothing will be releasing its first products in the coming months. The company recently announced that it is opening up for its community to invest as part of its Series A. So far, over 20,000 people have signed up for early access with a registered interest close to $30 million in total. This community funding round will be carried out through a crowdfund campaign starting on 2 March. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Result of hard work that BJP is main opposition in Bengal: Nadda Nadda vows to 'save' people of Bengal from chain of political violence BJP chief JP Nadda to launch poll manifesto crowdsourcing campaign in West Bengal today India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Feb 25: BJP president J P Nadda will launch an election manifesto crowdsourcing campaign in West Bengal on Thursday and address a public rally, the party said in a statement. He will also address a conference of the intelligentsia, among his other engagements during a daylong stay in the poll-bound state, BJP''s national media in-charge Anil Baluni said. Nadda will reach West Bengal on Wednesday night and launch the "Lokkho Sonar Bangla Manifesto Crowdsourcing" programme on Thursday morning, Baluni said, referring to the party''s poll promise of rebuilding the state as "Sonar Bangla". Ahead of West Bengal elections 2021, TMC worker killed, 2 injured in bomb attack The BJP chief will also pay tributes to Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, the composer of Vande Mataram, at his residence and museum. Nadda''s programme schedule includes lunch at the house of a jute mill labourer and prayers at the Anandpuri Kalibari temple, followed by a "Parivartan Yatra" rally. In the evening, he will visit the ancestral home of renowned Bengali writer Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay to pay his tributes, followed by a visit to the West Bengal State Armed Police headquarters to pay homage to the martyr Mangal Pandey pillar, the statement said. While theres no substitute for the in-person Symposiums, being able to see and experience every session, Core Courses and the interactive Exhibit Hall is a special and worthwhile opportunity for all particpants, says Bonnie Harken, Managing Director at iaedp Foundation. The International Association of Eating Disorders Professionals (iaedp), recognized for its high-level education and training standards for eating disorders healthcare professionals, is host to the annual education and training conference, the iaedp Symposium. Unlike past iaedp Symposiums, where the in-person event enables participants to see select sessions over the four-day conference, the 2021 Symposium premieres virtually on March 18 and runs to September 1, allowing registered participants to virtually experience all 87 sessions and workshops and the interactive Exhibit Hall over six months. From diverse presentations that include managing strategies for children and adolescents with eating disorders, treating avoidant food intake disorder, exploring issues of race and culture in eating disorders treatment, as well as operating a full track of Spanish presentations, the 2021 iaedp Symposium offers significant value for participants who have the opportunity to earn 40 Continuing Educations Units (CEUs) at this years conference. Also included in the 2021 Symposium registration are the Core Courses, which fulfill the prerequisites for Certification or the Educational Designation. While theres no substitute for the in-person Symposiums, which we are hoping will return in 2022, being able to see and experience every session, Core Courses and the interactive Exhibit Hall is a special and worthwhile opportunity for all participants, says Bonnie Harken, Managing Director at iaedp Foundation. For more information about 2021 Symposium registration and Sponsorship, go to iaedp.com. About the iaedp Foundation: Since 1985, the International Association of Eating Disorders Professionals has provided education and training standards to an international and multidisciplinary group of various healthcare treatment providers and helping professions. For more information on the 2020 iaedp Symposium, visit iaedp.com. The Presidents Council provides iaedp support and includes: Alsana; Center for Change; Center for Discovery; Eating Recovery Center; Laureate; The Meadows Ranch; The Renfrew Centers; Rogers Behavioral Health; Rosewood Center for Eating Disorders; Selah House; SunCloud Health; Timberline Knolls; Veritas Collaborative; and Walden Behavioral Care. * Username This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. Choose wisely! Advanced labour code dismaying foreign employers, illustration photo As soon as the new law came into force in early January, a great number of employers, especially foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs), displayed their dissatisfaction with Article 32.3 which stipulated that part-time employees shall be entitled to receive rights and obligations equal to those of full-time employees, including in equal opportunities, safety, and hygienic working environments. In other words, employers have to fulfil insurance fees for part-time employees, said Mai Duc Thien, deputy director-general of the Department of Legal Affairs at the Ministry of Labour, Invalids, and Social Affairs (MoLISA). Speaking at a workshop about the Labour Code last month, hundreds of FIEs voiced that the total cost they pay for labourers has now increased greatly as a result of the changes. Those include the on-year growing minimum wage, subsidies, and health and social insurance, among others. Thus, paying insurance for part-time labourers will increase the cost burden for FIEs in Vietnam, said Tran Nguyen Trung, director at Japanese-backed recruitment consultants I-GLOCAI. Early this month, Hoang Xuan Hiep, a member of the Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association and owner of a garment facility employing dozens of part-time workers, said that the cost for businesses will be higher if paying insurance for labourers who work fewer hours than full-time labourers. Increasing costs are seen as inappropriate at this time as many businesses like us are struggling to cope with COVID-19, said Hiep. Vietnamese labour costs have been a concern for many businesses, especially FIEs, despite the nations perceived advantage of low-cost labour. Speaking at a webinar about the law last month, Thiet Nguyen, director of Management Consulting at PwC, said that the minimum wage in Vietnam has constantly increased over the years. In the 2006-2015 period, the sum grew as much as four times. Annually, the wage on average increases by 6-10 per cent. Nguyen added that one of the things businesses need to be aware of is the high insurance contribution. Employers currently pay 21.5 per cent of labourers social insurance, much higher than other regional countries such as Malaysias 13 per cent, the Philippines 10 per cent, Indonesia at 8 per cent, and Thailand at 5 per cent, he said. Working part-time roles is very popular in Vietnam. Over the years, a large number of FIEs such as Lotte, McDonalds, KFC, and Shopee have constantly recruited part-time employees, reflecting the high demand for such positions. Data published by job listing site vn.indeed.com showed that the monthly number of available part-time positions on their site was at around 30,000. According to the MoLISA, as of mid-2020, part-time workers occupy 8.5 per cent of the total labour force in Vietnam. The main beneficiaries of such part-time jobs are students and those who have yet to find full-time roles. Most of them may also be unfamiliar with their rights in regards to insurance or labour contracts. They hire me for serving drinks for about four hours per day with the wage of VND30,000 ($1.30) per hour, said Nguyen Thi My, a 21-year-old student at Hanoi University who is working at a cafe. That is basically all the information I have about my current job. Sam Luong, a former student at the Foreign Trade University, also shared, I worked as a teacher at an English language centre for nearly two years. During that time, I never signed any labour contract or received any rights similar to full-time jobs. Luong said that most people she knows who are working part-time assume that the jobs are temporary, so they do not care too much about rights or benefits. And most employers, of course, always do their best to cut costs. If part-time workers like us were entitled to more insurance benefits, our job-related risks would be reduced significantly, she added. Commenting on the change in the new law, Colin Blackwell, chairman of the HR Committee at the Vietnam Business Forum, said that improving local labourers rights and benefits on par with international standards is necessary. However, in some cases, those might lower the ability of employers because the businesses are already struggling to ensure appropriate human resources in Vietnam. The biggest problem with finding quality staff in Vietnam are educational certificates. Companies currently have to spend too much time trying to retrain people, Blackwell said. FLORENCE, Ore. Oregon OSHA has fined the Little Brown Hen Cafe in Florence $17,800 for potentially exposing workers to COVID-19 by allowing indoor dining. The business remained open knowing it was violating a public health order limiting the capacity for indoor dining to zero in an extreme risk county, Oregon OSHA said in a statement. The fine is twice the minimum penalty for a willful violation. OSHA Administrator Michael Wood used his discretionary authority under state law to impose the $17,800 penalty. The decision reflects the need to ensure a more appropriate deterrent effect where employers insist on disregarding public health measures, OSHA said. Most employers are choosing to do the right thing, even as they face very real economic hardships, Wood said. "As for those relatively few employers who are working against our shared project to defeat this disease, we will continue our enforcement work in the interest of accountability. The fine was the result of an inspection opened in response to multiple complaints about the Little Brown Hen Cafe. The inspection was carried out despite several people including one carrying a firearm who blocked the business entrance and threatened compliance officers. Because of safety concerns, two compliance officers were assigned to open the inspection of this business. When they arrived at the restaurant Jan. 4, they were met by several people standing outside the entrance of the business, one of whom carried a firearm. The compliance officers identified themselves and asked to speak with the business owner. They were threatened and told to leave. The officers politely left, OSHA said, and as the officers walked to their cars the people outside the entrance followed them. The people shouted at the officers as the officers left the parking lot. The inspection of the Little Brown Hen Cafe found the employer committing the violation beginning on or about Dec. 26, 2020, and continuing to do so afterward. The inspection included visual confirmation of indoor dining and a Jan. 5 phone interview with owner Stacey Brown, who said she understood the public health rules regarding the spread of the disease in Lane County. Employers have 30 days to appeal citations. DURHAM, N.C., Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CoImmune, Inc., a clinical stage immuno-oncology company developing cell-based therapeutics to treat unmet medical needs in blood-borne and solid tumor indications, today announced the appointment of Dr. Edgardo Baracchini, to the Company's board of directors. Dr. Baracchini brings a wealth of biotechnology industry and financial expertise, as well as significant prior board level experience, to the CoImmune board of directors. Dr. Baracchini has over 25 years of experience in structuring and negotiating research and development partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, and licensing agreements as a biotech industry executive. He has personally negotiated more than 80 business transactions with multinational pharmaceutical firms, biotechnology companies, and prominent universities. He has significant experience in alliance management, strategic planning, and IR/PR. Additionally, Dr. Baracchini has been a key member of executive teams that have successfully completed two IPOs and has previously worked in biotech companies such as Imago Biosciences, Xencor, Inc., Metabasis Therapeutics, Elitra Pharmaceuticals, Warner Lambert, Agouron Pharmaceuticals, and Ionis Pharmaceuticals. "We are excited to welcome Dr. Baracchini to the CoImmune board," stated Dr. Charles Nicolette, chief executive officer and member of the board of directors. "Ed has considerable biotechnology industry and financial expertise that will benefit CoImmune as we seek to advance our novel pipeline of cell-based immunotherapies directed at important diseases, including advanced renal cell carcinoma and acute lymphoblastic leukemia. In particular, Ed's financial and strategic expertise will complement the expertise of the current board members as well as add a valuable new perspective." Dr. Baracchini has served on a number of boards of directors of companies in the biotechnology industry and is currently serving on the board of directors at INmune Bio, Inc., La Jolla, California, and 4D Pharma, plc., United Kingdom. Dr. Baracchini obtained his B.S. in Microbiology at the University of Notre Dame, a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology at University of Texas at Dallas, and an MBA at University of California, Irvine. About CoImmune, Inc. CoImmune is a privately held clinical stage biotechnology company specializing in the development of immuno-oncology therapies based on its two proprietary platform technologies. The first platform is an autologous RNA-loaded dendritic cell technology for solid tumors that specifically targets each patient's unique tumor antigens. The second platform is an allogeneic CAR-CIK technology that is a variation on CAR-T therapy with greatly reduced toxicity while retaining strong efficacy. For more information, visit www.coimmune.com. Media Contact: Lori Harrelson CoImmune, Inc. 919-287-6349 lharrelson@coimmune.com MASON CITY, Iowa - A mobile home fire at Gracious Estates in Mason City ends with one person dead. The call came into the fire department just before 9 p.m. Firefighters worked at the scene until about 1:45 in the morning, putting out the fire and investigating the cause. The Mason City Police Department has not released the name of the victim, pending notification of the family. KIMT News 3 spoke with a neighbor who says the couple who lived in the mobile home involved in Monday night's fire were always very friendly. "She would always come out and sing, with her guitar and everything and we'd sit and listen and I'd bring the dogs out and we'd always talk. They were really nice people," said Jeronical Watson. The fire department says smoking materials caused the blaze. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. TOKYO, Feb. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Terumo Corporation (TSE: 4543), a global leader in medical technology, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire all assets of Health Outcomes Sciences, Inc. (HOS). HOS specializes in predictive analytics and clinical decision support that enable healthcare organizations to deliver personalized, predictive insights at the point of care, resulting in significant and measurable improvements in clinical, patient and financial outcomes. "The acquisition of Health Outcomes Sciences and the ePRISM platform expands Terumo's presence in the digital healthcare arena and represents a compelling growth opportunity for our company. It further allows Terumo to deliver innovative digital solutions, providing healthcare systems with critical data needed to lower the cost of healthcare delivery while substantially improving patient outcomes," said Toshi Osada, President of Terumo Corporation's Cardiac and Vascular Company. Rather than relying on broader, generalized population data, ePRISM delivers each patient's unique risks to physicians prior to treatment. By calculating and assembling a patient's actual procedural risk, that includes their unique disease severity, co-morbidities and demographics, ePRISM provides valuable data to enable providers to tailor the intensity of treatment to patients' unique risks. The use of validated predictive models in routine care has the capacity to improve the consistency, outcomes and cost-effectiveness of care across various cardiac procedures and care pathways. "When combined with Terumo's 100-year history and commitment to transforming global healthcare, our ePRISM technology will enable healthcare providers to deliver uniquely focused patient care; improving patient satisfaction, decreasing variability, optimizing outcomes and minimizing costs. This acquisition provides Terumo with a digital solutions platform that can be scaled globally across multiple healthcare segments," said John Spertus, MD, MPH, FACC, FAHA and Founder of Health Outcomes Sciences. The acquisition is expected to close in February 2021. Following the close, the ePRISM platform will be integrated into Terumo Business Edge, a business unit of Terumo Medical Corporation that provides healthcare systems with solutions designed to reduce care variation, improve quality metrics, minimize cost and maximize revenue. About Terumo Terumo (TSE:4543) is a global leader in medical technology and has been committed to "Contributing to Society through Healthcare" for 100 years. Based in Tokyo and operating globally, Terumo employs more than 25,000 associates worldwide to provide innovative medical solutions in more than 160 countries and regions. The company started as a Japanese thermometer manufacturer and has been supporting healthcare ever since. Now, its extensive business portfolio ranges from vascular intervention and cardio-surgical solutions, blood transfusion and cell therapy technology, to medical products essential for daily clinical practice such as transfusion systems, diabetes care, and peritoneal dialysis treatments. Terumo will further strive to be of value to patients, medical professionals, and society at large. More information can be found at www.terumo.com. About Terumo Medical Corporation Terumo Medical Corporation (TMC) is a subsidiary of Terumo Corporation, founded in 1972 as the United States expansion of our larger Tokyo-based parent. For nearly 50 years, TMC has continued the Terumo mission of offering the best possible solutions to healthcare providers and the people they serve. TMC provides products and services across four divisions: Terumo Business Edge, which provides healthcare systems with solutions designed to reduce care variation, improve quality metrics, minimize cost and maximize revenue; Terumo Interventional Systems (TIS), which offers solutions for entry site management and lesion access; Terumo Medical Products (TMP), which provides devices for injection and infusion therapy; and Terumo Pharmaceutical Solutions (TPS), which develops drug delivery devices. About Health Outcomes Sciences, Inc. Health Outcomes Sciences is driving the practice of precision medicine through its patented content enablement platform, ePRISM, which translates scientific models into automated evidence-based decision support solutions. By helping health and life science organizations -- as well as allied technology partners -- deliver the power of personalized predictive science at the point of care, the company facilitates significant and measurable improvements in clinical and financial outcomes, variations in care, appropriate use and rational consumption of resources. The company's solutions are specialty agnostic, scalable at the enterprise level and employ a cloud-hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model. More information can be found at www.h-outcomes.com. SOURCE Terumo In a major setback to KP Sharma Oli, Nepal's Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned the (now) caretaker Prime Minister's December 20 decision to dissolve the country's House of Representatives and asked authorities to summon a meeting of the Parliament within 13 days. In a landmark ruling, a five-member constitutional bench led by Chief Justice Cholendra Shumsher annulled the Oli government's "unconstitutional" decision to dissolve the 275-member lower house of Parliament. Nepal's House of Representatives reinstated The country's top court has also decided to cancel all decisions that the incumbent K P Oli government took after December 20, the day when the House of Representatives was dissolved. As many as 13 writ petitions including the one by the ruling party's Chief Whip Dev Prasad Gurung were filed in the apex court seeking the restoration of the lower house of Parliament. According to The Himalayan Times, the court had summoned all the writ petitioners for the final verdict. The Constitutional bench comprising Bishwombhar Prasad Shrestha, Anil Kumar Sinha, Sapana Malla and Tej Bahadur KC conducted a hearing on the case from January 17 to February 19. Nepal plunged into a political crisis on December 20 after President Bidya Dev Bhandari dissolved the House and announced fresh elections on April 30 and May 10 at the recommendation of Prime Minister Oli, amidst a tussle for power within the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP). In his letter recommending President Bhandari that the House be dissolved, Oli had argued that he controlled 64% of the majority in the House, that there was no possibility of forming a new government and that the country needed a fresh mandate of the people to ensure stability. Oli's move to dissolve the House sparked protests from a large section of the NCP led by his rival Pushpa Kamal Dahal 'Prachanda', also a co-chair of the ruling party. Oli repeatedly defended his move to dissolve the House, saying some leaders of his party were attempting to form a "parallel government". He said that he took the decision as he enjoyed the inherent power as the leader of a majoritarian government. READ | Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee reaches nephew Abhishek's home before CBI lands to probe Rujira Last month, the Prachanda-led faction of the NCP expelled Prime Minister Oli from the general membership of the Nepal Communist Party for alleged anti-party activities. Earlier in December, the splinter group Oli, one of the two chairmen of the ruling party, as the co-chair. Former Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal was named as the party's second chairman. Prachanda is the first chairman of the party. READ | Gujarat civic polls: BJP retains power with bigger win, Congress routed; AAP on the rise The Prachanda-led faction of the NCP and main opposition Nepali Congress had been opposing the dissolution of the House, saying it was unconstitutional and anti-democratic. The Prachanda-led faction had been holding protest rallies and public gatherings in various parts of the country. READ | Rahul Gandhi indulges in 'North vs South India' politics, faces backlash from BJP leaders Oli-led CPN-UML and Prachanda-led NCP (Maoist Centre) merged in May 2018 to form a unified Nepal Communist Party following the victory of their alliance in the 2017 general elections. After a vertical split in the ruling party following the dissolution of the House, both the factions, one led by Oli and another led by Prachanda, submitted separate applications at the Election Commission claiming that their faction is the genuine party and asked to provide them with the election symbol of the party. READ | Gujarat civic polls: Amit Shah thanks people for BJP's landslide win, slams Congress (With agency inputs) Amazon removes scholar's trans-critical book as Equality Act to be voted on in US House Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Online retailer Amazon has removed scholar Ryan Anderson's book critiquing the transgender movement in its latest move suppressing conservative thought on LGBT issues. Anderson, formerly a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, is the new president of the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. His 2018 book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, explores the meaning of human embodiment and public policy considerations related to transgender issues. He only found out about the removal of his book from the worlds largest retailer after he was told that people were trying to purchase it and that it disappeared. It is not out of stock. Even the pages to purchase used copies have been taken down. It is also not possible to purchase the Kindle or Audible versions of the book on the website. The Christian Post confirmed that the pages are gone. In an email to CP Monday, Anderson said that when his book was released three years ago, it was criticized twice on the New York Times editorial page. He said The Washington Post also ran a hit piece on the book and subsequently rewrote the article to fix all the errors. "It's obvious the critics hadnt read the book," Anderson said. "People who have actually read my book discovered that it was a thoughtful and accessible presentation of the state of the scientific, medical, philosophical and legal debates, Anderson argues. Yes, it advances an argument from a certain viewpoint. No, it didnt get any facts wrong, and it didnt engage in any name-calling. He noted that the book earned praise from prominent medical experts and legal scholars. Yet none of that matters anymore, he continued, nor does it matter how arguments are framed and presented. All that seems to matter, Anderson suggests, is whether one dissents from the new sexual orthodoxy. "Three years after publication, in the very same week that the House of Representatives is going to ram through a radical transgender bill amending the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Amazon erases my book opposing gender ideology from their cyber shelves, he explained. Make no mistake, both Big Government and Big Tech can undermine human dignity and liberty, human flourishing and the common good." The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote this week on the Equality Act, legislation backed by President Joe Biden that would codify sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under civil rights law. Anderson told CP that his publisher reached out for an explanation and has not received a response. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment when asked by CP about Anderson's book but pointed in the direction of Amazon's content guidelines that govern the books the company sells on its website. "We carefully consider the types of content we make available in our stores and review our approach regularly, listening to feedback and investigating concerns from our customers. We reserve the right to remove content from sale if we determine it creates a poor customer experience," the Amazon guidelines state. "Well remove content that does not adhere to these guidelines and promptly investigate any book when notified of potential noncompliance. If we remove a title, we let the author, publisher, or selling partner know and they can appeal our decision." Part of the Amazon.com guidelines includes a section on "offensive content." "We dont sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech, promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, advocates terrorism, or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive," the section reads. A 2018 book written in response to Anderson's book is titled Let Harry Become Sally: Responding to the Anti-Transgender Moment is still available for purchase on the site. On Twitter, Anderson stated that the attention that Amazons removal of his book created led to the book selling out at book retailer Barnes & Noble. Anderson also questioned the timing of the removal as he had an op-ed published in The New York Post Monday in which he called the Equality Act "a sword" that will be used "to persecute those who dont embrace newfangled gender ideologies." The book removal is the latest move the retail giant has made regarding LBGT issues, specifically content that scrutinizes transgender ideology. Last summer, Amazon disallowed Regnery Publishing from purchasing ads to promote journalist Abigail Shrier's book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Shrier's investigative work examines why, for the first time in approximately 100 years of diagnostic history, teen girls have become the predominant demographic of gender dysphoria diagnoses. Until recently, gender dysphoria was an infrequent condition seen mostly in young boys. The book criticizes the lack of medical oversight and documents the myriad medical risks inherent in medicalized gender-transitioning that have yielded irreparable harm to girls as well as young women's bodies and psyches. The retail giant has also removed books where men and women who once lived and identified among the LGBT recounted their stories of transformation in Jesus Christ at the apparent behest of activists. According to Amazon, the books constituted a "violation of our content guidelines." In August of 2019, Anne Paulk, author of Restoring Sexual Identity: Hope for Women Who Struggle with Same-Sex Attraction, told CP she was not surprised that Amazon had banned books like hers. "But it is literally criminal what the site still offers for sale, she said at the time, noting that books are still available for purchase that normalize adult-child sex. Among the books that remain available on the platform is an academic work titled Pedophilia and Adult-Child Sex: A Philosophical Analysis by Stephen Kershnar, which amounts to a defense of the sexual exploitation of children and calls into question its moral status. Reports of smelly tap water have been trickling in around the Houston area, even after the lifting of boil notices. From Presidents Day, when the winter storm rolled in, through Feb. 23 the city received 127 calls about water quality, more than double the 60 calls received over the same period before the storm. Some who turned to social media described the water smelling like chlorine, while others described it on Twitter as tasting FUNKY. Like dirt or the bayou. Alanna Reed, a spokesperson for Houston Public Works, acknowledged the smell had noticeably changed but said its safety had not. Houston Water has conducted more than 100 tests on drinking water samples since the boil notice was lifted Sunday, she said, and Houston drinking water still meets or exceeds all of the federal and state standards. At first unsure of the source of the smell, the city called on the community to report water concerns to 311 and engineers mapped the influx of calls to look for patterns. Most complaints came from west of Interstate 45, and the resulting picture led the city to believe it had found the likely cause of the odors. The city takes water from multiple sources, and in the area west of downtown, groundwater from the west and surface water from the east each treated using different chemicals blend in the system. When combined, those chemicals chloramine in the surface water and chlorine in the groundwater can create a taste, odor and even slight discoloration, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. After the lowered water pressure led to a boil notice, the city increased the disinfectants used to treat the water within regulatory parameters. The increased presence of those chemicals led to the smell many had noticed. The combination of these disinfectants leads to the odors that people experience the stink, the city said in a statement released late Wednesday afternoon. This will not compromise the safety of the water, the TCEQ said in its rules and regulations for public water systems. Houston Public Works will continue to monitor the water and plans to adjust disinfectant concentrations to pre-storm levels over the next two to three days, which should eliminate the smell. Houston Waters experience was not unique. Other utilities experienced the stink after upping the amount of groundwater in their system. Clear Lake City Water Authority, which oversees water in Clear Lake City and parts of southeast Houston, said it believed the smell in its water is coming from well water. Jennifer Morrow, its general manager, explained well water is safe to drink it gets treated before it entered the system but tends to have a smell and a taste. Its perfectly safe to drink, she said. Its just not as appealing. On HoustonChronicle.com: Boil water notice is lifted in Houston. The water is safe, again. When water pressure fell, Morrow said, the system, which normally relies on surface water from lakes, supplemented its supply with well water. (The Houston area once used water pumped from the Chicot, Evangeline and Jasper underground aquifers as its primary source of water but shifted away after so much water was withdrawn by 1979 that land in the Houston-Galveston region sank by as much as 10 feet, according to the United States Geological Survey.) We turned on some of the wells to get water back in the system for fire suppression purposes, she said. The freeze not only burst pipes, which lowered water pressure, but also led to a number of fires as residents looked for ways to stay warm. Clear Lake City Water Authority stopped using well water when water pressure resumed over the weekend. However, much of the well water is still in the pipes, leading to the continued odor and taste experienced by some in the area. Mike Morris contributed to this report rebecca.schuetz@chron.com Ukraine is launching its COVID-19 vaccination campaign on Wednesday, Ukrainian Health Minister Maksym Stepanov said. "The COVID-19 vaccination campaign is starting today [on February 24]. The first vaccine [shipments] were sent to the regions at 7:00 a.m. I have set an objective to carry out the first stage of vaccination within a short period of time," Stepanov said at a press briefing in Kyiv on Wednesday. Ukraine has enough vaccine doses for the first and second stages of the campaign, the minister said. "We are expecting supplies through the COVAX initiative of more than 100,000 doses from the Pfizer company, around two million doses from Sinovac, 1.5 million doses from AstraZeneca, another four million doses or so from Serum Institute under COVAX, a contract for ten million doses from Novavax has already been signed, and we plan to sign a contract for another five million doses in the near future," Stepanov said. This amount of vaccine doses is more than enough for a full-fledged vaccination drive this year, he said. "Apart from that, we are going to sign more contracts and already have relevant agreements," Stepanov said. Stepanov also said that he had visited the Bharat Biotech enterprise, which has developed a COVID-19 vaccine, during his visit to India. "The vaccine has undergone the three phases of clinical trials, with the final stage involving more than 25,000 volunteers. The final results of the phase 3 trials are expected to become available within the next ten days. Scientists' tentative conclusions are optimistic - the vaccine is effective and safe," the minister said. "During the negotiations with the company, we reached an agreement confirming the mutual readiness of the producer and Ukraine to take part in clinical trials of a new development, which is a vaccine in the form of nasal spray or drops. They are starting the phase 1 trials, while the phase 2 and phase 3 trials may be conducted partly in Ukraine. The clinical trials should be completed before September-October. Conducting such trials in Ukraine will give us priority access to the vaccine if its efficacy is proven," Stepanov said. The State Expert Center of the Ukrainian Health Ministry, in turn, has announced that it finished reviewing the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines for the novel coronavirus on February 22. In brief: Roblox is one of the most popular online gaming platforms out there. It lets users create and play their own custom minigames using Roblox's intuitive, Lego-like building mechanics, simple Lua scripting language, and a plethora of user-made content. Now, after over 15 years of operation and two delays, the platform is finally ready to take itself public via a direct listing. Roblox was valued at about $29.5 billion in a January funding round, though its true public value was up to the market to decide. On its first day of trading, Roblox got a big 40% bump giving the company a market cap of just over $38 billion. This is big news for Roblox, as well as its more avid fans. Interested parties can check out the company's full SEC filing here. The prospectus lays out the details of Roblox's business model and financials -- it earned $924 million in revenue throughout 2020 -- as well as some of the risks and challenges it will face as a public company. For example, since Roblox has a history of net losses, the company acknowledges that it may struggle to "achieve or maintain" profitability in the future. Roblox, like most other software companies, was adversely affected by the pandemic on the development side, and those disruptions likely won't abate soon. However, the pandemic had the opposite effect in terms of user growth. A year ago, Roblox was celebrating that it had reached 115 million monthly active users (MAU), but then it added some 80 million users in 2020 alone, so the official count is close to 200 million MAU as of writing. If you truly believe in Roblox as a platform or as a company, you can now get your piece of the pie. Roblox is trading on the NYSE under the RBLX symbol. Click here for updates on this story OCEAN COUNTY, New Jersey (KYW) -- Its a story of inspiration! A South Jersey woman has survived three husbands, two cardiologists and now two pandemics. Ms. Lucia DeClerck wears her faith in her heart and its also physically displayed all day. The 105-year-old devout Catholic just celebrated her birthday on Jan. 25 at Mystic Meadows in Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey. Its the same day she was diagnosed with COVID-19. Im feeling wonderful, she said. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy surprised the centenarian with a personal phone call Monday morning. Ms. DeClerck has not only survived COVID, she was 2 years old when she lived through the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Shes just been open with everything in life and I think that has really helped her because she hasnt hesitated to do whatever shes wanted to do, her son, Henty Laws III, said. Her son and daughter-in-law tout her unwavering compassion and her years of traveling the country, dedicated to community service. Shes a real compassionate person, shes a very gentle person, Lillie Jean Laws said. We asked about her secret to longevity. Pray, pray, pray and dont eat junk food, she said. Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform. Toxic lead shot can still be found in more than 99 per cent of pheasants shot for food, despite a commitment last year for hunters to begin using safer alternatives. Experts from England and Scotland dissected wild common pheasants bagged during the recent October to February shooting season, finding shot in 180 of the 276 studied. Of these, lead-based shot was extracted from 179 birds, all of which were destined for the table and were obtained either from retailers or directly from shoots. A five-year voluntary transition from the use of toxic lead to other, safer metals in shot was agreed by nine different shooting organisations in February last year. The findings, however, suggest that the agreement has, at least so far, had very little real-world impact. Toxic lead shot was found in more than 99 per cent of pheasants shot for food despite a commitment last year for hunters to begin a switch to safer alternatives. Pictured, a hunter Experts from England and Scotland dissected wild common pheasants bagged during the recent October to February shooting season, finding shot in 180 of the 276 studied. Of these, lead-based shot (pictured) was extracted from 179 birds, all of which were destined for the table and were obtained either from retailers or directly from shoots THE DANGER OF LEAD POISONING Lead poisoning occurs when the metal builds up in the body. Children younger than six years old are particularly vulnerable as such poisoning can damage their mental and physical development. In severe cases, lead poisoning can be fatal. Lead poisoning is often caused by exposure to contaminated paint and dust in water, air and soil. Symptoms include learning difficulties, irritability, loss of appetite, weight loss, vomiting, constipation, seizures and hearing loss. Aside from removing the source of contamination, treatment includes medication that encourages lead removal via urine. Blood lead levels higher than five micrograms is considered abnormal in children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Some 535,000 children in the US are thought to have at least levels this high, the CDC adds. Source: Mayo Clinic Advertisement In their study, conservation biologist and ecotoxicologist Debbie Pain of the University of Cambridge and colleagues were forced by the coronavirus pandemic to dissect the birds they obtained in their own kitchens, rather than in the laboratory. 'We took out the shot and sent it off for analysis and 99% of the ammunition we extracted was lead,' Professor Pain told BBC News. 'So really that hasn't declined at all since the shooting organisations signed up to the voluntary ban.' Even at very low concentrations, lead is toxic. 'It has been banned from a progressively lengthening list of products, including plumbing, paints on things like children's toys and as an additive to petrol,' Rhys Green, a bird conservation expert from the University of Cambridge, told BBC News. 'The maximum allowable concentration of lead in many foods has also been limited by an EU directive, which still applies in the UK.' 'But game meat products are not included on that list of foods, for reasons that are unclear. Currently, the amount of lead in game meat sold for human consumption is not regulated by law.' The problem is also not limited to the lead that ends up inside game birds shot and retrieved for sale and consumption. 'A lot of lead gunshot falls into the environment and it can then be eaten by wildfowl and terrestrial birds and cause poisoning,' Professor Pain told the BBC. These concerns prompted the European Union to recently introduce a ban on the use of lead-based shot over wetlands. However, the timing of the legislation, which came into effect after the end of the Brexit transition period, means that it does not apply in the UK. A five-year voluntary transition from the use of toxic lead to other, safer metals in shot was agreed by nine different shooting organisations in February last year. The findings, however, suggest that the agreement has, at least so far, had very little real-world impact 'Lead shot is the traditional ammunition for live quarry shooting it has been for generations,' British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) director Steve Bloomfield told the BBC. The organisation previously opposed changes to rules surrounding the use of lead-based ammunition, but more recently has said it supports the voluntary transition away from the toxic metal. However, 'change is difficult', Mr Bloomfield added, suggesting that BASC members need 'to take time to try the alternatives and those alternatives have to be effective and humane.' In Denmark, the use of lead shot for all hunting was prohibited in 1996 meaning that there are tried and tested alternatives already in use on the continent. These include shot made from bismuth, steel and tungsten. Pictured: a pheasant In Denmark, the use of lead shot for all hunting was prohibited in 1996 meaning that there are tried and tested alternatives already in use on the continent. These include shot made from bismuth, steel and tungsten. The researchers hope that their findings will encourage game hunters to move away from lead-based shot. Even at very low concentrations, lead is toxic. 'The maximum allowable concentration of lead in many foods [has been] limited by an EU directive, which still applies in the UK,' Rhys Green, a bird conservation expert from the University of Cambridge, told BBC News. 'But game meat products are not included on that list of foods, for reasons that are unclear. Currently, the amount of lead in game meat sold for human consumption is not regulated by law' 'I hope, within a few years, lead shotgun ammunition is not being used at all for game shooting in the UK,' Professor Green told BBC News. 'I have an open mind on whether this can be achieved through voluntary change or requires a government ban, but the evidence so far indicates that the voluntary approach needs to step up its effectiveness dramatically if it is to remain credible.' The full findings of the study were published in the journal Conservation Evidence. Bharti Airtel Ltd on Wednesday launched an advertising platform that will connect any brand to its customers, the Sunil Mittal-led telecom operator said. The Airtel Ads platform will enable brands to curate consent-based and safe campaigns for subscribers of the telco, it said. Airtel has more than 320 million customers across businessesmobile, direct-to-home (DTH) and homes. Airtel Ads has so far enabled campaigns for more than 100 brands across categories, including fast moving consumer goods, banking, financial services and insurance, digital startups, among others. It has partnered companies such as PepsiCo, Zomato, Cred and Tata AIG. Airtels data research and analytics will help identify and connect target customers to brands selling products or making offers on the platform, the telcos chief product officer Adarsh Nair said in an interview. Customers expressing interest in certain products or offers will enable Airtel to understand their preference, Nair added. For instance, lets say, you come on Airtel Thanks app for a recharge, and you see Zomatos offer of a 40% discount. We take that Zomato offer and present it to you while you are doing the transaction. Airtels research is dependent on what you do next," Nair said. Based on such interests, Airtel Ads will be able to make relevant future offers and avoid unwanted campaigns that could spam a users apps, he said. These ads will feature only on various Airtel platforms. Given the size of Airtels customer base of 320 million, with 190 million using the companys music streaming app Wynk, over-the-top (OTT) video content Xtream and Thanks, while about 17 million avail the DTH service, the telco does not plan to cater to customers from outside. We will also be able to tap customers via our 1 million mass retail stores and we have many super premium stores. Besides, we can connect with users using voice as well," he said. The reach is so big that we dont envision to go outside Airtel." Nair said the investment to build this adtech platform was minuscule as Airtel has been developing its core businesses, and such digital assets are being mounted on them. He did not share the investment amount. Through Airtel ads, we ran a focus digital campaign on the Wynk music app for the launch of new packs of 7UP and Mirinda. The outcomes of the campaign were really impressive given the customisable ad formats and quality audience base," said Om Jha, associate director of media, PepsiCo India. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Maharashtra State Commission has summoned State DGP over allegations made by Bhopal BJP MP Pragya Singh Thakur about custodial torture against her. He has been asked to appear before April 6, as per the lawyer Aditya Mishra who filed a complaint at NHRC regarding it in 2018. Lawyer Aditya Mishra had lodged the complaint at NHRC immediately after Pragya Singh Thakur appeared in a news television show in October 2018 mentioning her ordeal. The NHRC transferred the petition to MHRC for further proceedings. Now MHRC has summoned the DGP of Maharashtra Thakur, an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, had earlier sought an exemption from daily appearance in court on the grounds of health and security. Six people were killed and over 100 injured when an explosive device strapped to a motorcycle went off near a mosque in Malegaon, a town in north Maharashtra, on September 29, 2008. (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 further 56 Covid-related deaths have been reported this evening as the country faces into six more weeks of lockdown. Of the 56 deaths confirmed today, 31 occurred in February, 13 in January and three were in December or earlier. A further nine are currently under investigation. The youngest person to lose their life to the virus was 16 years old. The oldest person was 97. The Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) has also reported an additional 574 confirmed cases of the virus. Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr Ronan Glynn, said that there has been good progress but this needs to be sustained. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins "It is vital that we get our children back to school over the coming weeks. "A key part of making this a success will be our continued collective buy-in to the public health measures that are tried and tested. Stay at home, work from home where possible. "Given the increased transmissibility of the virus now, we must continue to limit our social contacts and do all we can to starve this disease of opportunities to spread." Of the cases reported today, almost 70% are under the age of 45, the average age is 34 years old. The largest number of cases are found in Dublin where there are 175 while there are 57 in Limerick, 43 in Kildare, 37 in Galway and 35 in Meath. The remaining 227 cases are spread across 18 other counties. As of 8am this morning, there are 652 Covid-19 patients in hospitals around the country. Of these, 137 are in ICU. There have been 35 additional hospitalisations in the past 24 hours. According to the latest vaccine data, there have been 353,971 doses of the vaccine given - 222,073 people have received their first dose, 131,898 have received their second. 80% of adults expected to receive at least one vaccine dose by June The Government expects to have the capacity to deliver half a million vaccinations a week later this year. They remain confident over 80% of the adult population will have received at least one covid vaccine by June. Health Minister Stephen Donnelly says most adults will have received at least one dose by the end of June. "If those advanced purchases come through then the figures that have been given out by me previously, by the Taoiseach yesterday, they are accurate." People with certain illnesses have been moved up the list after the prioritisation was changed. However, family carers still dont have a defined place on the list. "There is good news for them in that those they are caring for have been prioritised for vaccination so that has to be our first target," said Professor Karina Butler, Chair of the National Immunisation Advisory Committee (NIAC). NIAC is still examining the issue, but given there is around 500,000 family carers, there is reluctance to revise the list on that sort of scale again. There is positive news today on the vaccine front as Johnson and Johnson's Covid vaccine has moved a step closer to approval in the US. The Food and Drug Administration in America released data that supports its authorisation for emergency use. A further meeting will be held on Friday to evaluate the one-shot jab. The European Medicines Agency is due to give its decision on the vaccine by mid-March. Dail debate hotel quarantining The Dail is debating new laws introducing mandatory hotel quarantine for people coming from high-risk countries. It is in a bid to reduce the possibility of new variants of Covid-19 coming into Ireland. A number of opposition parties have submitted amendments to expand the laws to all people arriving into Ireland with limited exceptions. Health Minister Stephen Donnelly says the laws are a significant step to take. "The proposals in the bill may be regarded by some as harsh and may be regarded by others as insufficient. "while the UK has introduced mandatory hotel quarantining, very few countries in Europe have introduced such a regime." Meanwhile, the Taoiseach clashed with the Labour leader in the Dail over the amount of Brazilian people arriving into the country. Alan Kelly said it was laughable to ask people to stay within their five kilometres while 2,000 Brazilians have come into the country over a number of weeks this year. Micheal Martin rejected the criticism of his government's approach to mandatory quarantine for people. "I think it is a bit populist and wrong the way you spoke about 2,000 Brazilians coming into the country," said Mr Martin. "Many of those are could be Irish residents. I don't know the exact 2,000 but there is a Brazilian community in Ireland." Two further deaths and 260 new Covid cases in NI Two additional Covid-19 related deaths have been reported in the North. A further 260 people have tested positive for the virus in the last 24 hours. There are currently 356 patients being treated for the disease in hospitals, with 44 in ICU. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. The final tally for a New Dorp Beach man in whose home authorities allegedly found a stash of guns and ammunition 16 months ago is a felony conviction but no time behind bars. Adam Rosa was sentenced on Tuesday to five years probation under a plea agreement. Rosa was busted on Oct. 17, 2019. A criminal complaint said investigators from the NYPD and federal Drug Enforcement Administration discovered multiple guns and numerous rounds of ammunition stored in the basement, attic and bedroom of the residence. Rosa told authorities he had lived there since November 2018, said the complaint. The defendant did not have a permit or license to possess any of the guns or ammunition, the complaint said. Defense lawyer Patrick V. Parrotta has said there were two main weapons in the home an assault rifle and a semiautomatic rifle. Both were the property of Rosas grandfather, who was placed in a nursing home about two years ago, said Parrotta. The grandfather had stored the assault weapon in a locked box in the attic prior to entering the nursing home, the lawyer said. The older man had lawfully purchased the semiautomatic rifle about 20 years ago upstate, said Parrotta. Last month, Rosa, then 35, pleaded guilty in state Supreme Court, St. George, to third-degree criminal weapon possession to satisfy charges against him. Afterward, Parrotta said the resolution was reached after a thorough investigation and conference with prosecutors. We presented factual issues, and those factors were taken into consideration, the Advance/SILive.com quoted the lawyer as saying. It was agreed by all parties that a non-jail probation sentence was appropriate. In any case, 2067 is a time-travelling eco-disaster thriller in which Kodi Smit-McPhee plays the ordinary Joe or the ordinary Ethan, to be precise who has to try to save humankind from an impending extinction of our own making. Why are we going extinct? Because we killed off every last plant on the planet, so were running out of oxygen to breathe. This intense Australian sci-fi movie endured some blistering reviews when it hit film-festival screens last year. New to Netflix, it will be hoping to meet a gentler reception from viewers comfortably ensconced on their own couches with expectations lowered. Now all drama requires some suspension of disbelief, so its only natural that some movies will require a block and tackle to get that disbelief up off the carpet. Theres no point dwelling on the fact that we couldnt kill every plant on Earth, even if we tried, and it doesnt help to ponder what everyone is supposed to be eating in the year 2067, given that you cant feed livestock with sand. Just go with it and follow young Ethan Whyte down into the grimy tunnels beneath the city, where he works on the power supply alongside his best mate, Jude (Ryan Kwanten). Things are certainly no worse down there than they are up on the city streets, which are a bit like Blade Runner but with vending machines selling synthetic oxygen made by a sinister company named Chronicorp. Deborah Mailman in 2067. Credit:Netflix As it happens, Ethan is about to be summoned to Chronicorp HQ. Chronicorp research boss Regina (Deborah Mailman) has been overseeing the building of a time machine and theyve just received a message from 400 years in the future a message that reads: Send Ethan Whyte. Obviously, Ethans going to have to go and find out how it is that someone is still alive and sending messages about him 400 years in the future. For added motivation, it might be Ethans only hope of saving his sick wife (Sanaa Shaik). Writer-director Seth Larney has a background in visual effects, and he certainly achieves some spectacular images. But the story, clever as it might be, feels too familiar to be really compelling and some of the key performances arent what they could be. Thankfully, Smit-McPhee (The Road, X-Men: Apocalypse) is mostly in great form, and his intense, haunted performance is enough to carry things over the line. Prithviraj Sukumaran, the actor-filmmaker is all set to play a police officer once again in the upcoming cop thriller Cold Case. The highly anticipated project, which was initially planned as a direct-to-OTT film, is now all set to get a theatrical release. Reportedly, Cold Case has now got a release date. If the reports are to be true, the Prithviraj Sukumaran starrer has been slated to hit the theatres on April 9, 2021, Friday. As per the latest updates, the makers of Cold Case are planning to officially announce the release date along with the first look poster of the movie, very soon. Cold Case, which is said to be an out-and-out crime thriller, features Prithviraj Sukumaran in the role of Sathyajith IPS, the Assistant Commissioner of Police. According to the reports, the actor is playing a unique cop character, which is entirely different from the police roles he has played on the silver screen, so far. Cold Case will mark the directorial debut Tanu Balak, the senior cinematographer. According to the filmmaker, the Prithviraj Sukumaran starrer is completely set in the Capital city of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram. Despite being a police story, the movie will not have any action sequences. Cold Case was mostly shot indoors and has very few crowd scenes, which made it easy to shoot amidst the novel coronavirus pandemic. The project stars Aditi Balan as the female lead. The actress is said to be playing the role of a journalist in the Tanu Balak directorial. The project is jointly produced by cinematographer Jomon T John, editor Shameer Mohammed, and Anto Joseph. Jomon himself handles the cinematography, along with Girish Gangadharan. Shameer himself handles the editing. Also Read: Prithviraj Sukumaran's Kuruthi: The Pre-Release Business Report Is Out! Prithviraj Sukumaran To Play A Key Role In Mohanlal's Barroz? China is caught up in a very delicate balance. Beijing is being forced to walk a very fine line to keep up with growing energy demand while also shoring up the countrys energy security, and all without compromising the entire worlds ability to decarbonize quickly enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. So far, it looks like Beijing is struggling--if not outright failing--to pull it off. Despite the blow that China received as the first country to struggle with the novel coronavirus pandemic, the country achieved the amazing superlative of being the one and only major economy to achieve even a modicum of growth in 2020. As the countrys already massive industrial sector continues to grow and the middle class rapidly expands, Chinas appetite for energy is voracious. While Beijing has made energy security a primary objective, China simply cant create enough energy to keep up with demand and Beijing remains more dependent on energy imports than ever, a reality that was starkly underlined earlier this year when an unofficial embargo on Australian coal imports caused entire Chinese cities to go dark. Further complicating the issue, while Beijing has managed to keep their economy going strong, the speedy comeback also complicates a parallel push by Beijing to reach peak fossil energy consumption in this decade and turn the country into a nation of net-zero emissions less than 40 years later, Bloomberg reported earlier this month. Although President Xi Jinping has made very ambitious and very public promises to lead his country to carbon neutrality by 2060 and to reach peak CO2 emissions by just 2030, these goals are starkly opposed to the countrys equally ambitious economic targets and energy security goals. At the very same time that Beijing has been busily repeating Paris climate accord talking points out of one side of its mouth, other Chinese provinces have been steadily returning to coal, both domestically and abroad, putting global climate goals further and further out of reach. China also has a dangerous addiction to oil. Although coal emissions are a legitimate problem, China's coal consumption has already peaked--the same cannot be said for oil or natural gas, which China continues to consume at an ever-increasing rate. Over the last three decades, China has been the dominant driver of the global oil market: demand has risen almost seven-fold to more than 14 million barrels a day, according to BP Plc data, turning from an exporter into the world's largest importer, writes Bloomberg. Related: U.S. Shales Struggles Will Be Help OPEC Stabilize Oil Prices Chinese natural gas demand, too, is surging, and China has tried to ramp up its domestic production accordingly in order to secure ample supply without compromising its energy security targets. In fact, China is home to massive shale gas resources which may even outnumber the United States massive shale play. Despite Chinas natural resources and best efforts, however, the country has not been able to get its own shale boom off the ground, and a recent analysis by Reuters shows that what progress Beijing has made toward its own shale revolution could already be obsolete by the middle of this decade. Complex geology and failure to draw in more investors are projected to make the industrys expansion economically untenable. If that is the case, it would be a devastating setback to Chinas efforts to further cut its reliance on gas imports, which currently make up 42 percent of the nations overall consumption, the National Interest reported on Chinese shales curtailed life expectancy this week. It would also likely mean that Beijing will have to ramp up development of other more costly gas resources, such as those located in the remote northwest portion of the country. What China chooses to do in response to this disappointing outcome is of utmost importance for all of us. Whether President Xis administration chooses to fill those gaps with coal or with green energy will make a huge and lasting difference for the Earth as a whole. We have just one decade to get on track to avoid the worst effects of climate change, and the clock is already ticking. By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: This article is sponsored by Byte. Everything to Know About Byte Invisible Braces Ready to Impress Yourself With a Brand New Smile? 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. Don't lie you've gotten pretty used to doing just about everything from home these days, haven't you? You can shop for everything you need online, you've finally learned how to cook for yourself, and you may even be working remotely. So why should straightening your smile be any different? With byte, it doesn't have to. Their invisible braces are backed by orthodontist-directed treatment and FDA-cleared technology, and their remote monitoring means that you can achieve your best smile without ever having to leave your house. They just send you a kit so you can take an impression of your teeth for yourself, and then you ship it back with prepaid postage so byte can take the rest from there. RELATED: Upgrade Your Oral Hygiene Game With These Top Electrical Toothbrushes Best of all, it's totally risk-free to try it out. If it turns out that you're not a good candidate for byte, you'll get a refund for your impression kit. Simple as that. And there's no obligation to move forward if you're not ready to commit even if you do qualify. But, once you check out what byte can do, we have a feeling you just might impress yourself. (Get it? Because you take the impression of your teeth yourself... Okay, we're done with the jokes, promise.) So How Does byte Work? The first thing you'll need to do to get started with byte is request an impression kit to be shipped right to your door in two days time. It'll have everything you need to take an impression of your teeth in the comfort and convenience of your own home absolutely no office visits necessary. However, if you do need a little guidance, byte's got your back. You can easily get in touch for an Impression Session where you can speak or FaceTime with the byte team to make sure you got it all right. Once you return your impressions to byte, they take a lot of Smile Science into consideration to provide the best invisible braces for you. After all, your smile is made up of more than just teeth, right? Created by Dr. Marashi, one of bytes founders, Smile Science considers your unique facial proportions, features, lips, and symmetry to make sure they design the perfect smile for your face not a carbon copy of what would be perfect for someone else. Even better, it's all completely supervised by board-certified, licensed orthodontists and dentists, so you can trust it's the real deal. Once you've got your invisible braces in hand (or, technically, in mouth), you'll switch them out weekly to keep your progress moving forward. Youll also check in monthly with uploads to your byte account so a doctor can ensure your treatment is going smoothly. Oh, and you'll also get your first container of BrightByte for free to clean your aligner, freshen your breath, and whiten your teeth all with one pump of foam at a time. What Option Does byte Provide for Invisible Braces? Youll have two choices when deciding the right invisible braces also known as aligners for you. All-Day aligners from byte can get your smile straightened up in an average of three to four months because you'll be wearing them 22 hours per day. This makes it one of the fastest treatments out there, and it's possible for a couple of key reasons. You'll only take your aligner out to eat, drink, and brush your teeth, and you'll use your HyperByte for five minutes each day. This proven and safe byte-exclusive technology utilizes high-frequency vibration therapy to transmit gentle micropulses through the roots of your teeth and into your jawbone. This encourages better aligner traction and more accurate teeth movement thatll cut your straightening time in half. Even better, it should also reduce the discomfort you could feel from your teeth shifting into their proper place. If you're feeling a little commitment-phobic thinking about 22 hours of aligners on your teeth, you can go for the ultra-convenient option of At-Night aligners instead. A little thicker than their All-Day counterparts, you'll wear these grind-resistant polymer aligners for just 10 continuous hours each night to achieve the same awesome results. And don't worry, a HyperByte device is included for free regardless of whether you choose the All-Day or At-Night option, so you can still tap into the benefit of reduced discomfort and accelerated treatment time. With byte At-Night, you can expect to wrap up your treatment in an average of five or six months. It'll take longer than the All-Day option, but it's still super fast for a nighttime-only aligner. How Much Does byte Cost? When it comes to payment plans, byte offers flexible options that vary in price depending on the aligner route you choose to go. If you opt for All-Day aligners, you can make a one-time payment of $1,895 for the full aligner treatment system. Or, you can make monthly payments of just $83 and you'll also benefit from the Byte Protection Plan (BPP) which provides five years of retainers and coverage in case you lose any to maintain your new smile. If you opt for the At-Night aligners, on the other hand, you can make a one-time payment of $2,295 for the full system. Or, you can pay $99 per month for the aligner system plus BPP. Whichever route you choose, it's still bound to be thousands of dollars less than traditional braces. In fact, byte is estimated to be a whopping 65-percent cheaper! (Not to mention much quicker and far more comfortable, too.) Even better, if you have dental insurance, they may be able to reimburse you for your invisible braces so you could wind up saving even more. If you're not sure though, no worries; byte can do the digging and find out for you. Best of all, they slap a lifetime guarantee on your smile. If your teeth ever turn, shift, rotate, or otherwise move out-of-line, byte will get you all fixed up for no cost, for life. Okay, But What Do the People Say? Customers rave about byte's ease of use and are amazed by the invisible braces' super-fast results. They're also consistently impressed by byte's awesome customer service team who's always there to answer an important question or lend a helping hand (virtually, of course). Here's what just a few of their satisfied customers have had to say. "Byte has been absolutely amazing. The product itself is incredible: it's comfortable, easy, and completely clear. I can't even tell when they are in because they are so clear! Byte's customer care has also amazed me, [as] they are with you through the entire journey." Ovidia A. "I absolutely fell in love with this product! I was very impressed with how fast my treatment went by. It didnt take long to achieve my perfect smile." Sydney M. "I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to avoid trips to the dentist and braces. Easy to use, easy to order, everything shipped straight to your door. Great prices and excellent customer service. Always available when I have a question." Pamela E. You dont have to take their word for it, though. If youre ready to enjoy a straighter, brighter, more confident smile in the span of just a few short months, go ahead and get started with your byte impression kit today. You Might Also Dig: AskMen may get paid if you click a link in this article and buy a product or service. To find out more, please read our complete terms of use. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. US President Joe Biden's administration is preparing to impose sanctions on in the coming weeks over the poisoning and jailing of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny and the SolarWinds hack, CNN reported citing officials. Discussions about the response to the devastating security breach of at least nine federal agencies and dozens of private businesses are still ongoing but could come within a matter of weeks, the US official said, noting that the package will likely include sanctions and a cyber component, as well as other options that make clear just how serious the Biden administration views Russia's actions more broadly, CNN reported. The form the Navalny sanctions will take is being firmed up and they will likely be rolled out in coordination with the European Union, the two administration officials said. The moves would be the first costs imposed on by the Biden administration and would mark a clear departure from the strategy of the Trump administration, which failed to impose penalties over the poisoning and shied away from directly confronting over its misdeeds. EU High Representative Josep Borrell said Tuesday (local time) that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked to coordinate actions against Russia over the Navalny case. However, Blinken addressed the EU Foreign Affairs Council on Monday (local time). Last week, National security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN that the Biden administration's response to the hack will come soon. "We're not talking about months from now, but weeks from now, that the United States will be prepared to take the first steps in response to solar winds," Sullivan said. Sullivan also said that "what the previous administration said was, quote, 'that it was likely of Russian origin.' We believe we can go further than that." The Biden administration is not starting from scratch as they draft the options for Navalny sanctions. The State Department drew up options last year under the Trump administration but they were never imposed, a decision which mystified working level officials who developed them, one of the officials said. On Monday (local time) Blinken participated virtually in EU Foreign Affairs Council (FAC) and said he "welcomed the EU's decision to impose sanctions against Russia under the human rights sanctions regime in response to actions taken against [Navalny] and his supporters." Biden administration officials point to ongoing intelligence reviews and their necessity of fully understanding the state of play before rolling out their entire Russia policy. The intelligence review includes the SolarWinds breach, Russian interference in the 2020 election, Russia's use of chemical weapons against Navalny, and the alleged bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan, CNN reported. Earlier this month, US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said, "The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on this review very expeditiously," adding "I wouldn't expect this review to take any longer than necessary. (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.) Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba believes that the European Union should apply the same human rights sanctions regime to Russia for human rights violations in the occupied Crimea as it was applied for the arrest of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Kuleba made a corresponding statement at a joint press conference with Minister for Foreign Affairs of Lithuania Gabrielius Landsbergis in Kyiv on February 23, an Ukrinform correspondent reported. Kuleba said that Landsbergis arrived in Kyiv after a meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council, so much attention was paid to the EU-Ukraine cooperation during their conversation. "We welcome the decision of the European Union to impose sanctions against the Russian Federation in response to the arrest of Alexei Navalny. But I took the opportunity to express my deep conviction that the EU's human rights sanctions regime should be applied to those who violate human rights in the occupied Crimea," Kuleba said. He also noted that he had discussed with the Lithuanian minister the situation in Belarus and the last meeting between President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin and President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko. Kuleba added that he and his Lithuanian colleague were concerned about the situation in Belarus as it is "our neighbor." The foreign ministers of the EU Member States made a political decision on February 22 to impose restrictive measures against four Russian officials involved in illegal actions against Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny and his arrest, as well as in crackdown on peaceful demonstrations in his support. New sanctions against Russia are due to be approved by EU member states within a week. ol U.S. Border Patrol agents seized more than 900 pounds of marijuana in west Laredo in two separate enforcement actions, authorities said. The first case happened Monday afternoon, when agents responded to a report of a suspicious vehicle near the Rio Grande in west Laredo. A group of people were seen swimming across the river when agents arrived on the scene. LONDON Like many across England, Sarah Rennie has lost sleep worrying about her building catching fire, especially since inspectors discovered that the high-rise is wrapped in a flammable material similar to the one that fueled the deadly blaze at Londons Grenfell Tower in 2017. But the fear is compounded for Ms. Rennie. She uses a wheelchair. The Grenfell disaster, which killed 72 people, forced a national reckoning over unsafe building practices. In its aftermath, people with disabilities are especially troubled about the dangers lurking in their buildings and the lack of plans for their safe exit should the worst happen. The more you unravel, the deeper and darker it gets, Ms. Rennie, 35, said of the dangerous building flaws that Grenfell has exposed. An investigation into the fire at the public housing block, which was home to many lower-income residents, found that the flames spread unabated because of the towers cladding, a combustible aluminum composite material covering the exterior. The same material had been banned in the United States and much of Europe because it is a fire hazard. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) Lawmakers are seeking a House investigation on the death of another infant who was separated from her activist mother in detention. The Makabayan bloc filed Tuesday House Resolution 1600 calling on the Committee on Human Rights to conduct a probe in aid of legislation into the death of one-month-old Baby Carlen last Feb. 14 due to alleged infection of the lungs and blood, while she was separated from her mother, political prisoner Nona Espinosa. The resolution was shown to the media on Wednesday. Citing Kapatid, a support network for political prisoners, the resolution noted that Baby Carlen was born with a cleft palate and had breathing problems. She was separated from Espinosa just three days after birth, when the latter was taken back to jail in Guihulngan City in Negros Oriental. Espinosa was arrested in September 2019 over allegations that she was a high-ranking official of the New People's Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Kapatid previously asked the Commission on Human Rights to conduct a separate probe and look into whether the government is complying with the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-Custodial Measures for Women Offenders. READ: Group asks CHR to probe death of detainee's newborn child in Negros Oriental The death of Baby Carlen comes just four months after the controversial death of three-month-old Baby River Nasino, the daughter of jailed activist Reina Mae Nasino. Baby River was also separated from her mother and died on Oct. 9 due to pneumonia, following a two-week confinement in the hospital. Nasino, who was arrested in November 2019 due to alleged possession of guns and explosives, was also separated from her daughter after giving birth in August 2020 following a local court order stating that infants are not fit to be in a detention facility amid the pandemic. Nasino was denied visits to Baby River in the hospital despite multiple appeals. She was only granted a three-day furlough to see Baby River for her burial last October. Critics earlier slammed the "cruel, inhumane, and degrading" treatment of Nasino by policemen and jail personnel during Baby River's funeral and interment. RELATED: Jailed activist seeks dismissal of judge who separated her from her baby "The death of infant Carlen just months after the controversial death of Baby River highlights the need to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation on the incident to bring justice to the victims of these tragic incidents and avoid further casualties and damages especially against the innocent," the resolution read. You know you have a presence in the art world when celebrities like Pharrell Williams collect your work. From his early beginnings as a graffiti artist, Jersey City native and Brooklyn-based artist KAWS has made a name for himself with his paintings and sculptures of pop cultureinspired characters. An extensive survey of his work has now been catalogued at the Brooklyn Museum with KAWS: WHAT PARTY, highlighting his drawings, paintings, bronze sculptures, smaller objects, furniture, wooden sculptures of his beloved COMPANION character, and a selection of new and existing works that have never been publicly displayed. Visitors can directly engage with KAWS work through Acute Art, an augmented reality app the artist has partnered with. In conjunction with this exhibit, a towering new sculpture by the artist will also be installed at Rockefeller Centers historic plaza this summer.. Born and raised in Jersey City where he attended St. Anthony High School, KAWS (real name Brian Donnelly) moved to New York City in the 1990s where he began doing graffiti art and billboards, bus shelters, and phone booths. He would go on to receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan in 1996, followed by a brief stint doing animation for Jumbo Pictures. The exhibit focuses on five overarching tenets of the artists practice, the first being examples of KAWSs earliest work including graffiti drawings and notebooks from the early 1990s, on view for the first time in the United States. The second focuses on the artists appropriation, alteration, and abstraction of characters from popular American cartoons. The third section consists of all new work addressing the current social climate. In the fourth section, visitors enter a corridor highlighting KAWSs collaborations with other designers and brands in fashion and industrial design. The concluding section of the exhibition centers on KAWS acclaimed COMPANION figure, in a number of forms. The COMPANION figure, a grayscale clown-like figure based on a familiar cartoon mouse covering his face with his hands and two bones sticking out of his head, is KAWS best known work and a continues to be a recurring element. The figure first appeared in his early ad interventions. A number of newly fabricated COMPANION sculptures from the artists holiday project can be seen at What Party. The show also includes an integrated shop featuring the artists products. KAWS: WHAT PARTY opens on Friday, Feb. 26. The Brooklyn Museum is located at 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY. General admission is $16. Gallery hours are Wednesdays and Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Health and safety guidelines should be followed and can be found at brooklynmuseum.org/visit/health. Daniel J. Myers, professor and acting chairperson of sociology at American University, will take over as the next president of Misericordia University on July 1. The university announced Tuesday its board of trustees has appointed Myers. Myers earned a bachelors degree in political science and a masters degree in higher education and student affairs from Ohio State University before completing a masters and doctorate in sociology at the University of WisconsinMadison. Myers will succeed Kathleen Owens, who will continue to serve as president of Misericordia through June 30. Owens was appointed to serve as president for the 2020-21 academic year, succeeding Thomas J. Botzman, who left Misericordia for the presidency of the University of Mount Union in Ohio last June. The Post and Courier provides a forum for our readers to share their opinions, and to hold up a mirror to our community. Publication does not imply endorsement by the newspaper; the editorial staff attempts to select a representative sample of letters because we believe its important to let our readers see the range of opinions their neighbors submit for publication. As many people in the southern U.S. hosted neighbors who had no heat or water during the vicious February storm and deep freeze, Kate Rugroden provided a refuge for shell-shocked bats. Starving and disoriented, the winged mammals tumbled to the snow-coated ground as temperatures plunged to levels rarely seen in the region. "They burned through their energy reserves as they tried to wake up and get away from the cold and ice," said Rugroden, of Arlington, Texas, one of numerous rehabilitation specialists nursing stranded bats plucked up by sympathetic people. "And there aren't any insects out there for them to eat yet." Bats are among numerous wildlife believed to have taken a beating in the South, a region unaccustomed to such a severe and prolonged cold snap. Many species migrate there for winter precisely because of its normally mild weather. It might take weeks or months to determine the extent of the harm, but anecdotal evidence is already turning upincluding dead robins on yards and sidewalks. Alligators in Oklahoma's Red Slough Wildlife Management Area were photographed with snouts protruding from frozen waterwaysa survival maneuver enabling them to breathe while their bodies go dormant to conserve energy. Fish kills were feared in Arkansas and Louisiana. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department said it expected casualties among exotic deer and antelope. Across the Gulf of Mexico coast as far east as Florida, naturalists worried about monarch butterflies and the milkweed plants essential to their survival as they prepare to migrate northward. "Animals can respond to events like this by moving elsewhere, but if it's beyond your flight range or your walking range you have to hunker down," said Perry Barboza, a wildlife biologist at Texas A&M University. "Some animals like small birds can do it just a night or two. The duration becomes the killer." Sea turtles stunned by frigid Gulf coastal waters were still being cared for at facilities this week. More than 10,600 had been found and officials were tabulating how many died, said Donna Shaver, Texas coordinator for the Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Network. Sea Turtle Inc. took in so many that it used the South Padre Island Convention Center to accommodate the overflow, executive director Wendy Knight said. "Our hospital is now completely filled to the gills," Knight said. Fish kills along the Texas coast were expected for recreational favorites such as spotted sea trout and red drum. In Louisiana, officials said it could take a week for dead fish to wash ashore. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission warned anglers to expect die-offs of threadfin shad, a primary food source for lake species such as bass, walleye and crappie. While extreme weather is particularly dangerous for imperiled species, the whooping cranelisted by the federal government as endangeredappears to have weathered the storm, said Joe Saenz, manager of the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas. About 500 of the majestic birds spend winters at the refuge before returning to Canadian nesting grounds. During the cold spell, some were spotted feasting on dead fish floating on the Gulf waters. Biologists are concerned about monarch butterflies, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in December designated as a candidate for endangered or threatened status because of a sharp decline in recent decades. The biggest monarch population winters in Mexican mountains and begins its northward trek in March. Had the cold spell happened a few weeks later, the orange-and-black butterflies could have been devastated, said Ray Moranz, an Oklahoma-based scientist. They still might not escape unscathed. Some typically spend winters along the Gulf coast, where their odds during the deep freeze were poor, said Moranz, of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Another potential danger is to milkweed, which provides spots for female monarchs to lay eggs and food for their larvae. If the plants' growth across the South is stunted, more young would not survive. That situation underscores a hazard for wildlife across the region: Even those that made it through the freeze might see damaged habitat and less food. In South Texas, bur clover, a winter weed crucial for deer in spring, was showing freeze burn. Long-term, the biggest concerns are for birds and bats, both of which had absorbed heavy blows even before the storm. Breeding bird populations in the U.S. and Canada have plummeted nearly 30 percent in the past 50 yearsprimarily because of habitat loss. Spring population counts will offer the first indication of how many succumbed to the cold, said Barboza of Texas A&M. Migratory birds don't bother fattening up for winter because food in the South is plentiful, he said. During the storm, many probably burned through their meager energy reserves and died of exhaustion. About 20 dead brown pelicans were found on Texas' Chester Island. "You worry about food sources covered in snowseeds and berriesand a decrease in insect life," said Ben Jones, executive director of the Texas Conservation Alliance, who found five dead birds in his yard last weekend. Robins, bluebirds, hermit thrushes and gray catbirds were among hard-hit types, he said. Frozen songbirds also were spotted on streets in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where temperatures plunged to minus-13 degrees last week. Bats have their own challenges, including a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome that has killed millions. To those struggling to save them, every bat is precious. They eat huge numbers of insects that consume farm crops and carry diseases. "We're seeing a large population hit," including migratory bats just arriving from Mexico, said Rugroden, the rehabilitation specialist. A well-known colony living in a Houston bridge appears to have taken big losses. 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. BLAKELY A few young students clung to their parents on the first day of full-time, in-person learning at Valley View Elementary School. Others needed directions to their classrooms, since it was their first time back in the building in almost a year. Valley View elementary, middle and intermediate school students in kindergarten through sixth grade returned to their classrooms Tuesday for the first time since March 16, when the state closed schools to stop the spread of COVID-19. The district began the school year fully remote. On Jan. 28 the school board voted to bring the younger students back to the classroom full time while still offering a full virtual option. Sixth graders began a hybrid program Tuesday and students in grades seven through 12 will follow with a hybrid program March 8. I dont think I ever expected a first day of school with snowflakes, said Superintendent Michael Boccella, Ed.D. Valley View is the first to return students to classrooms out of the three Lackawanna County School Districts that began 2021 fully virtual. Carbondale Area School District students in prekindergarten to second grade, higher-need special education students in kindergarten to 12th grade and Carbondale Area Achievement Program students are returning to classrooms part-time March 8; Scranton School District students in pre-K to second grade may follow March 15. Marisa Barilka, director of STEM for Valley View School District, said about 72% of Valley View elementary, intermediate and sixth grade students returned to in-person learning Tuesday. The districts first day was originally set for Monday but Boccella canceled in-person classes because of winter weather, another unique issue the district faced for the first day of school. In place of typical first-day decorations, teachers prepared the school to celebrate St. Patricks Day. Green shamrocks and pots of gold hung in the schools hallways and in classrooms. Welcome Back Students was scribbled across many classroom chalk boards. After temperature checks, students filed into their socially distanced classrooms wearing masks. Some desks had plastic barriers while others were pushed to the far corners of the classrooms. The district relaxed the dress code for both students and teachers, who enthusiastically greeted their students for the first time in person in months. During the first week, students will become acclimated to the school while learning new rules, Barilka said. Their movement will be limited around the building and lunches will be eaten in classrooms. Boccella said student safety is always a major concern of educators, pandemic or not. The district can pivot back to virtual learning in the event of an outbreak. But having the students back in the classrooms Tuesday was reinvigorating for educators, he said. It reminds us why we do what we do, he said. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Forum Energy Metals Corp. (TSXV: FMC) ("Forum" or "Company") announces that it intends to raise $500,000 by way of a flow through private placement (the "Offering") of 1,351,351 flow through units (a "Unit") at $0.37 per Unit, each Unit comprised of one flow through common share of the Company (a "Share") and one non-flow through warrant (a "Warrant"). Each Warrant entitles the holder to acquire one common share of the Company at a price of $0.42 per share for a term of 3 years. Proceeds of the Offering will be used to incur qualifying expenses under the Income Tax Act on the Company's mineral exploration projects in Saskatchewan. Forum has increased its budget for drilling at its 100% owned Love Lake Nickel/Copper/Platinum/Palladium project and will conduct exploration on its Wollaston and Northwest Athabasca Joint Venture uranium projects. The Offering remains subject to receipt of all regulatory approvals including acceptance of the TSXV. The Shares and the Warrants will be subject to a hold period of 4 months in accordance with Canadian securities laws. The Company also announces that, in accordance with the Company's Stock Option Plan, it has granted 100,000 options to Golden Oak Corporate Services Ltd., the company that provides the services of Dan O'Brien as its Chief Financial Officer. The options have an exercise price of $0.36 per share and expire February 23, 2026. About Forum Energy Metals Forum Energy Metals Corp. (TSXV: FMC) has three 100% owned energy metal projects to be drilled in 2021 by the Company and its major mining company partners Rio Tinto Exploration Canada and Orano Canada Inc. for copper/silver, uranium and nickel/platinum/palladium in Saskatchewan, Canada's number one rated mining province for exploration and development. In addition, Forum has a portfolio of seven drill ready uranium projects in the Athabasca Basin and a strategic land position in the Idaho Cobalt Belt. For further information: www.forumenergymetals.com. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS Richard J. Mazur, P.Geo. President & CEO Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. For further information contact: NORTH AMERICA Rick Mazur, P.Geo., President & CEO mazur@forumenergymetals.com Tel: 778-772-3100 UNITED KINGDOM Burns Singh Tennent-Bhohi, Director burnsstb@forumenergymetals.com Tel: 074-0316-3185 To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75291 Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and United States President Joe Biden smile as they say farewell following a virtual joint statement in Ottawa on Feb. 23, 2021. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press) Biden Pledges to Help Secure Release of Canadians Detained in China U.S. President Joe Biden said the United States will work with Canada to help secure the release of Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, who are currently detained in China. Biden made the remarks during a virtual bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Feb. 23the U.S. presidents first foreign meeting since his inauguration last month. Human beings are not bartering chips, Biden said of the Beijing regimes detainment of the Canadians. You know, were going to work together until we get their safe return. Canada and the United States will stand together against the abuse of universal rights and democratic freedoms. Were going to strengthen our shared commitment to providing safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers, and so much more, Biden added. The so-called two Michaels were arbitrarily detained and charged with spying by the Chinese regime in an apparent act of retaliation after Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, on a U.S. extradition warrant in December 2018. They have remained in custody, held on what the federal government and international observers alike have described as bogus charges aimed at putting relentless pressure on Canada. Biden offered no hints about how the White House might help secure their release. Nevertheless, Trudeau thanked Biden for supporting Canada by calling for the release of the two Michaels. Were facing tough times, theres no doubt, Trudeau said. But were not facing them alone. Canada and the United States are each others closest allies, most important trading partners, and oldest friends. The two leaders also discussed getting the COVID-19 pandemic under control, climate change, expanding cooperation on continental defense, and restoring a collective commitment to global institutions such as NATO and the World Trade Organization. Mimi Nguyen Ly and The Canadian Press contributed to this article. Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it. Maya Angelou AppleTree Institute For Education Innovation and AppleTree Schools honor 37 people for their contributions to communities, families, and children. AppleTree Audience is a newsletter that started in 2019 and recognized the contributions and impact of stakeholders who increase diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in education. This year, the newsletter highlighted individuals who wrote poems about their ancestry and family, including Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer, PNC Bank, Richard K. Bynum; Vice President Nickelodeon Digital Consumer Insights Nickelodeon, Makeda Mays-Green, and many more. The publication can be viewed at this link: https://bit.ly/3py5QZh. The interview and poem collection is a seamless tapestry of the beauty of Black people and their contributions to the world, said Natasha Parrilla, director of communications and early learning initiatives, AppleTree. We are all Black History as we contribute our lives in the service of others. The 2019-2021 newsletters are interviews of diverse people who share their career accomplishments and advise others to help them through their leadership path. AppleTree Audience features this years interview with Deputy Director of Early Learning, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Marquita Davis. Past participants have been CEO of New Teacher Center, Desmond K. Blackburn; Former District of Columbia State Superintendent of Education, Hanseul Kang; Chair of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, Rick Cruz; Executive Director, The Equity Lab, Michelle Molitor; and CEO of Education Post, Chris Stewart. You can view these interviews at the following link: http://bit.ly/3pHU4f4 and subscribe to the publication at this link: http://bit.ly/2Mf0CnJ AppleTree was founded in 1996 to increase the supply of effective schools through innovation. AppleTree furthered its quest for innovation by winning a prestigious Investing in Innovation grant in 2010 to research, develop, pilot, roll out and evaluate Every Child Ready (ECR), a comprehensive preschool instructional model for three and four-year-olds. Currently, AppleTree schools serve 1,300 three- and four-year-old children and their families throughout Washington, DC. Learn more at https://www.appletreeinstitute.org/ and https://www.everychildready.org/ Contact: Natasha Parrilla, Director of Communications & Early Learning Initiatives 202-488-3990 (office) natasha.parrilla@appletreeinstitute.org Celebrity businesswoman Paris Hilton has made an open appeal to the NI Assembly to introduce tougher laws on when a child can be physically restrained at school, saying there needed to be "meaningful protections for children". Ms Hilton spoke out in support of Harrys Law, a campaign led by Tyrone mother Deirdre Shakespeare after she realised how much her son Harry was being restrained at his special school after seeing a photo diary of his first year. While permission was granted by Harry's parents for him to be put in a chair at mealtimes, the extent of the use of restraints is now the subject of a legal dispute. The campaign for Harrys Law would make it compulsory for schools to report when they had restrained or isolated a child to parents and the Education Authority. It would also mean that more school staff were trained in more positive ways to address a childs behaviour. Read More The Department of Educations guidance on the issue - which hasnt been updated since 1999 - states all incidents involving the use of reasonable force should be rare and recorded by schools, but the recording of such incidents is not a legal obligation. The British Association of Social Workers Northern Ireland (BASWNI) has also said the practices could have damaging effects. Tweeting to almost 17million followers on Wednesday, Ms Hilton appealed to Stormonts Education Committee and its chairperson chairperson, Alliance MLA Chris Lyttle to provide meaningful protections to children. It came after the committee held a hearing on restrictive practice, seclusion and restraint in schools. In February, Ms Hilton testified to the Utah state senate about abuse she said she suffered as a teenager at a boarding school, including being forced into solitary confinement naked and being beaten. MLAs heard from representatives from the International Coalition against Restraint and Seclusion (ICARS), who were named in Ms Hiltons tweet, and Parent Action NI. Orla Watt from Parent Action NI said children with special educational needs had suffered restraint and seclusion in special and mainstream schools in recent years and said there was a need for more training in the school community. Wed also like to request the appointment of a parent-carer champion similar to a mental health champion, she said. The suggestion was supported by MLAs Robbie Butler of the UUP and SDLP MLA Daniel McCrossan, who said there was a desperate need for a voice, someone central to advocate for families. ICARS said that stricter protocols on restraint and seclusion were needed so that the Assembly could fulfil obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Mrs Shakespeare and Beth Morrsion - who founded ICARS with Zoe Read - also gave evidence to the committee. Read More The first step is ensuring mandatory recording and documenting of any incidents of physical or mechanical restraint or the use of seclusion on a child, Mrs Shakespeare said. Mr Lyttle said MLAs would do everything that we can to support tougher protocols. Sinn Fein education spokesperson Pat Sheehan said there was an urgent need for an overhaul in the Department of Educations approach and added it was disturbing there is still no legal obligation on schools to report incidents where children have been physically restrained or placed in seclusion. Current guidance in relation to restraint and seclusion only deals with the issue in terms of maintaining good order and discipline in the school setting and is completely unreflective of the reality of the additional needs of some children, he said. There is a need for new and robust guidance to be urgently developed and for it to be underpinned by legislation. We need to see the Education Minister bring forward a framework to ensure effective oversight and accountability when it comes to dealing with these incidents. Its also important that our school staff are supported with effective training so that they are equipped with the necessary skills to respond to challenging situations with more therapeutic responses. The Department of Educations Ricky Irwin acknowledged further clarity was needed on when restraint and seclusion could be used in schools and that existing guidance was out of date. Now more than ever we need to provide clarity on physical intervention, especially when supporting pupils with very complex needs who require this intervention as part of their support plan, he said. There is no legal requirement at present for schools to inform the department of incidents and any follow-up. The department is carrying out a review on the use of restraint and seclusion in school settings. There is currently no timeline on when the review will be completed and any recommendations will have to be reviewed by Education Minister Peter Weir. Theoretical physicists from Italy, Spain and Argentina propose a new mechanism for the creation of supermassive black holes from dark matter. Standard formation models involve normal baryonic matter collapsing under gravity to form black holes, which then grow over time. A research team led by Dr. Carlos Arguelles of the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and ICRANet investigated the potential existence of stable galactic cores made of dark matter, and surrounded by a diluted dark matter halo. They found that the centers of these structures could become so concentrated that they could also collapse into supermassive black holes. This could have happened much more quickly than other proposed formation mechanisms, and would have allowed supermassive black holes in the early Universe to form before the galaxies they inhabit, contrary to current understanding. This new formation scenario may offer a natural explanation for how supermassive black holes formed in the early Universe, without requiring prior star formation or needing to invoke seed black holes with unrealistic accretion rates, Dr. Arguelles said. Another intriguing consequence of the new model is that the critical mass for collapse into a black hole might not be reached for smaller dark matter halos, for example those surrounding some dwarf galaxies. The researchers suggest that this then might leave smaller dwarf galaxies with a central dark matter nucleus rather than the expected black hole. Such a dark matter core could still mimic the gravitational signatures of a conventional central black hole, whilst the dark matter outer halo could also explain the observed galaxy rotation curves. This model shows how dark matter haloes could harbour dense concentrations at their centers, which may play a crucial role in helping to understand the formation of supermassive black holes, Dr. Arguelles said. Here weve proven for the first time that such core-halo dark matter distributions can indeed form in a cosmological framework, and remain stable for the lifetime of the Universe. We hope that further studies will shed more light on supermassive black hole formation in the very earliest days of our Universe, as well as investigating whether the centers of non-active galaxies, including our own Milky Way, may play host to these dense dark matter cores. The teams paper was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. _____ Carlos R. Arguelles et al. 2021. On the formation and stability of fermionic dark matter haloes in a cosmological framework. MNRAS 502 (3): 4227-4246; doi: 10.1093/mnras/staa3986 This article is based on text provided by the Royal Astronomical Society. Charter school leaders can sustain momentum and impact by leveraging adaptive strategies and providing extra support to their teams, said Carter Clawson, Project Director of the National Charter School Resource Center at Manhattan Strategy Group. Leading in the Unknown provides a blueprint. Strong leadership skills are essential for charter sector leaders to navigate the challenging times during a public health crisis and unprecedented academic year, and beyond. A new master class from the National Charter School Resource Center (NCSRC) focuses on elements of effective leadership to help charter school leaders support others and maintain focus on their vision in an ever-changing landscape. Charter school leaders can sustain momentum and impact by leveraging adaptive strategies and providing extra support to their teams, said Carter Clawson, Project Director of the National Charter School Resource Center at Manhattan Strategy Group. Leading in the Unknown provides a blueprint. Leading in the Unknown is a three-part series of modules featuring experts in the charter sector who provide real world applications on leading teams through change. Moderated by Lisa Diaz, founder of Lumen Impact Group, the series provides three ways to lead in uncertain times: Create a culture of care The first module, Creating a Culture of Care: Building a Life RAFT for Your Team, explores how developing and maintaining a culture of care is critical to organizational impact. Leaders can develop and foster a culture of care in an uncertain, complex, and highly emotional time by focusing on relationships, acknowledgment, flexibility, and transparency. Dr. Kelli Peterson, assistant superintendent at the Louisiana Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, shares insights about how she is caring for her team during the pandemic. Be strategic Strategic Leadership: Where are We Going?, the second module, helps leaders explore how to move their teams and stakeholders from crisis response to a shared long-term strategic vision of success. Bevon Thompson, Principal and CEO at Imagine Me Leadership Charter School, discusses how he is strategically leading his team to stay focused on its mission and vision during the pandemic. Track strategy to sustain impact The third learning module, Sustaining Impact: How are We Doing?, focuses on how charter school leaders can narrow their focus and sustain the impact of their strategic plans using short-term targets, expectation setting, powerful reflection and refinement practices, and supportive feedback cycles. Dr. Paula Bevan, an author and expert on educator and leader effectiveness, teacher professional development, and educational leadership development, provides practical insights on the strategic planning process. Each module includes three components a webinar with implementation strategies and a guided self-reflection workbook, an interview with a charter school leader on putting the content into practice, and key takeaways. The full series is available at https://charterschoolcenter.ed.gov/learning-modules/leading-unknown-self-guided-learning-experience-focused-leadership. NCSRC is an initiative of the Charter School Programs (CSP) within the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education. NCSRC supports a variety of focus areas within the charter school sector, including facilities, authorizing, accountability, new school development, Native American charter schools, and others. The master class content does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the U.S. Department of Education, nor does mention of organizations imply endorsement by the federal government. Manhattan Strategy Group is a leading government contractor in the provision of technical assistance (TA) to Federal grantees and partners. Under MSGs leadership, NCSRC serves as the central TA center for CSP grantees and other charter school stakeholders through the dynamic and managed interaction of data collection, learning, and responsive TA delivery. About Manhattan Strategy Group (MSG) Manhattan Strategy Group (MSG) is a social sciences and management consulting firm that brings professional services, approaches, and innovative solutions to the areas of education, workforce development, and human services. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, MSG specializes in research and evaluation, technical assistance, and communication and information services. If you would like more information about the National Charter School Resource Center, please visit https://charterschoolcenter.ed.gov/. Out of every economic downturn or crisis comes some amazing new entrepreneurial endeavors, and we are excited to open our arms to those entrepreneurs located in Inland Empire who are looking for a catalyst for growth and a strong support network. Entrepreneurs Organization (EO), the worlds leading peer-to-peer network of successful business owners, continues to strive for diversity within its expansion in 2021, seeking out qualified entrepreneurs with million-dollar businesses from all economic backgrounds, races, religions and beliefs to join the micro-community. Local entrepreneurs are invited to attend the chapters free virtual test drive event on Wednesday, March 10 at 11 a.m. PST. The EO Inland Empire chapter was founded in 2018 and since then, has built a roster of 23 members, 57 percent being BIPOC. The chapter hopes to double its size in 2021. Many members of the Inland Empire chapter were previously members of other nearby EO chapters in Orange County and Los Angeles but jumped at the opportunity to form a new hyper-local chapter given how massive Southern California is. Globally, EO is made up of more than 14,000 entrepreneurs in 61 countries who are founders/co-founders or majority shareholders of a business that exceeds $1 million in annual revenue. In total, the Inland Empire businesses employ over 3,000 people and are responsible for annual sales in excess of $100 million. Companies such as Rastaclat, Protech Staffing, Trend Spot, and ABC Pharmacy, to name a few, make up the EO network in the Inland Empire chapter. According to the Wall Street Journal, the number of applications for new businesses in the U.S. is rising at the fastest rate since 2007, when the nation was in the middle of The Great Recession. While hundreds of thousands of businesses are closing doors due to the pandemic, new entrepreneurs are emerging out of the pandemic at the same rate. We have cultivated an amazing, strong, and diverse group of like-minded individuals in the EO Inland Empire chapter, and having that network has been invaluable to many of us through the chaos of 2020, said Anthony Gatto, President of the Inland Empire EO chapter. Out of every economic downturn or crisis comes some amazing new entrepreneurial endeavors, and we are excited to open our arms to those entrepreneurs located in Inland Empire who are looking for a catalyst for growth and a strong support network. Unlike its competitor organizations like Vistage which is led by a paid facilitator, EO is member-led and focuses on building a global network to serve the unique needs of the complete entrepreneur. Members have the opportunity to take part in a forum, which fosters peer-to-peer sharing between a small group of 7-12 members in a trusted and confidential environment. Forum offers a format where the complex intersections between an entrepreneurs business, personal life, and community engagement can all be addressed head-on so that members can achieve fulfillment in all of their endeavors. Members also enjoy learning events featuring global business leaders, access to prestigious training and tools, global leadership conferences and more. Originally founded in 1987, EO is the catalyst that enables leading entrepreneurs to learn and grow, leading to greater success in business and beyond. This innovative process that EO offers has sustained a growing organization that has withstoodeven flourishedduring times of economic uncertainty. In addition to its flagship program, EO also offers a program called EO Accelerator, where entrepreneurs who have anywhere from $250,000 to under $1 million in annual revenue can join and attend quarterly learning events as well as a monthly forum meeting with a goal to grow their business to over $1 million in revenue and join EO. Interested area entrepreneurs are invited to attend an upcoming Test Drive event on Wednesday, March 10 from 11 a.m. PST to experience a light version of what EO offers. More information can be found here. For more information, please fill out the interest form at https://www.eoinlandempire.com/ About the Entrepreneurs Organization Entrepreneurs Organization is a high-quality support network of 14,000+ like-minded leaders across 61 countries. We help entrepreneurs achieve their full potential through the power of life-enhancing connections, shared experiences and collaborative learning. Welcome Guest! You Are Here: YEREVAN -- A court in Armenia has issued verdicts against members of an armed group, known as Sasna Tsrer, who seized a police base in the capital in 2016 and took hostages. The court on February 24 sentenced seven members of the group to prison terms between six and eight years. One member, Smbat Barseghian, was found guilty of killing two police officers and sentenced to 25 years. Charges against Araik Khandoyan were dropped due to his death. Another defendant, Armen Bilian, who was charged with killing a police officer, was acquitted. Most of the more than two dozen members of Sasna Tsrer, a fringe opposition group composed of a number of prominent Nagorno-Karabakh war veterans, were set free pending the outcome of their ongoing trial after the change of government in Armenia in 2018. Many of them were released under the personal guarantees of parliament members. In July 2016, the armed group led by retired army Colonel Varuzhan Avetisian seized a police compound in Yerevan's Erebuni district and demanded that then-President Serzh Sarkisian free jailed nationalist politician Zhirayr Sefilian and step down. A two-week standoff with security forces left three police officers dead. A political party formed around the Sasna Tsrer movement took part in parliamentary elections in December 2018. The party failed to clear the 5 percent threshold to enter the legislature by securing less than 2 percent of the vote. In the health-care industry, the pandemic led to big fortunes, fast. Now some of them are evaporating just as quickly. Take Seegene Inc., a maker of Covid-19 test kits, and Alteogen Inc., a biotech with subcutaneous-injection technology. Their founders became billionaires as the shares surged last year. Fast forward a few months to the vaccine rollout, and theyve lost their title after both stocks sank more than 41 per cent, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Its a similar story for glovemakers in Malaysia, which counted at least five industry billionaires by August as the worsening health crisis increased demand for the protective gear. Despite a brief rebound amid last months frenzy in retail trading, their shares are down at least 40 per cent since hitting highs, wiping more than $9 billion from their founders net worths. Latex gloves on hand-shaped molds move along an automated production line at a Top Glove Corp. factory in Malaysia in 2020 While the billionaires created by the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc. vaccines have maintained much of their wealth, many others have seen a falling off. The moves show how fleeting fortunes can be with a market so wild that some stocks have had days with fluctuations of more than 20 per cent. Some of the founders took advantage of the volatility to book profits, just as others increased their control by buying more shares as prices fell. It doesnt look like fortunes made from a sudden boom in demand -- such as for test kits or biotech -- would continue to grow once things get more stable, said Park Ju-gun, president of Seoul-based corporate watchdog CEOScore. He expects platform-based services that thrived with the pandemic will lead to further wealth creation. The emergence of Covid-19 and its rapid spread across the globe led to an immediate need for test kits, protective gear and treatments for the disease. such as Seegene, Alteogen and Top Glove Corp. stepped up. Seegene developed a test kit in late January of last year. Alteogen licensed its injection technology that enabled patients to self-administer medications. The worlds biggest maker of rubber gloves beefed up production and continues to do so -- its aiming to produce 110 billion pieces of the protective gear annually by December, up from 91 billion now. Each of the stocks climbed at least 500 per cent last year at their peak, with Seegene up as much as 919 per cent by August as demand for test kits rose. South Korean President Moon Jae-in even visited the companys headquarters in Seoul after then-U.S. President Donald Trump asked for medical equipment to help fight the virus. Ive never felt more pressure in my life, Seegene founder Chun Jong-yoon said in an interview with a local newspaper last June. But the vaccine rollout has put a brake on the ascent. While Seegenes revenue for 2020 jumped almost 10-fold and Alteogens more than doubled in the third quarter, the shares have slumped on skepticism over their ability to maintain such growth. Chun and his family, who together own 31 per cent of Seegene, are now worth about $840 million, down from $1.6 billion last year. Alteogens Park Soon-jae, who controls 25 per cent of the company with his family, is valued at $830 million compared with $1.4 billion at the peak. Glovemakers, which are mostly in Malaysia, became the focus of short sellers soon after the nation lifted a ban to bet against equities at the start of the year. The Reddit-inspired retail trading craze that lifted them in January proved short-lived. Almost $2.2 billion has evaporated from the net worth of Top Glove founder Lim Wee Chai and his family since October. The fortunes of Supermax Corp.s Thai Kim Sim, Hartalega Holdings Bhd.s Kuan Kam Hon and Kossan Rubber Industries Bhd.s Lim Kuang Sia are each down more than $1.2 billion, while Riverstone Holdings Ltd.s Wong Teek Son is no longer part of the 10-figure club. Some of the Chinese health-care and biotech that produced a slew of new billionaires after the pandemics outbreak have also tumbled, including Allmed Medical Products Co., a maker of gauze products and surgical masks, and Guangzhou Wondfo Biotech Co. Boosting Control Some of the newly ultra-rich have taken advantage of the market volatility. The Lims of Top Glove bought almost $23 million of shares since early December as the stock fell, strengthening their control over the company, while Kossan Rubbers founder purchased about $4.9 million of equity after he and his family made more than $128 million selling some of their holdings through August. Alteogens Park family gained about $12 million from offloading shares through September, while the Chuns also sold some of Seegene stock. Others are holding on to their gains. Li Xiting, chairman of Chinese medical-equipment maker Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics Co., became Singapores richest person with a fortune of $23.8 billion as the companys shares hit a record high earlier this month. Moderna and BioNTech, whose Covid-19 vaccines are being administered around the globe, have more than tripled in the past year, boosting the fortunes of at least six billionaires. And of course tech entrepreneurs that benefited from lockdowns and work-from-home arrangements -- such as Amazon.com Inc.s Jeff Bezos, Zoom Video Communications Inc.s Eric Yuan and Forrest Li of gaming firm Sea Ltd. -- remain big winners despite recent stock drops. But for many companies, the tide has already started to turn. The extravagant rise in stock prices is going to be far-fetched, and its unlikely theyll grow at the same rate, said Nirgunan Tiruchelvam, head of consumer sector equity research at Tellimer. Were going to see a rotation from virus stocks to vaccine stocks. My, my, my. When will COVID move on? Jet Airways: NCLT rejects employees' plea for copy of Jalan & Kalrock's resolution plan To bookmark you need to sign in A top corporate tribunal has rejected the plea of Jet Airways employees seeking a copy of the resolution plan of the successful consortium of Murari Lal Jalan and Kalrock Capital. The consortium's resolution plan has been accepted to restart the now defunct airline. According to the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), it noted that the statutory mandate requires that the resolution plan can only be presented to the committee of creditors (CoC) before its approval and presented before the adjudication authority for its satisfaction in approving the same. "The code or the regulation there under do not contemplate presentation or supply of the resolution or a copy thereof to any other body or entity," said the order by a two-bench judge of the Mumbai bench of NCLT. It further said that the respondent, the resolution professional managing Jet Airways is duty-bound to maintain and ensure confidentiality of the resolution plan as provided under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India. "Taking the facts of the case at hand and the law as it stands today into consideration we are of the humble view that the applicants cannot be found entitled to a copy of the resolution plan or any portion thereof." The National Aviators' Guild, representing the pilots of the airline, Jet Aircraft Maintenance Engineers Welfare Association and the Jet Airways Cabin Crew Association, had moved the tribunal seeking a stay on any final order until their plea was decided by the tribunal. In October last year, Jet's CoC had approved the Rs 1,000 crore bid by Jalan and Fritsch. The admitted debt of Jet Airways was Rs 8,000 crore. In a statement in December, the consortium led by Murari Lal Jalan and Kalrock Capital said that it plans to operationalise Jet Airways by the summer of 2021, subject to certain conditions. Accordingly, the consortium announced the revival of Jet Airways as a full-service carrier. "The Jet 2.0 programme is aimed at reviving the past glory of Jet Airways, with a fresh set of processes and systems to ensure greater efficiency and productivity across all routes," it had said. Disclaimer: Information, facts or opinions expressed in this news article are presented as sourced from IANS and do not reflect views of Moneylife and hence Moneylife is not responsible or liable for the same. As a source and news provider, IANS is responsible for accuracy, completeness, suitability and validity of any information in this article. New Delhi: People may have to shell out more for availing of some of the healthcare services such as dialysis, pacemaker implantation, support devices in orthopaedics and cancer treatment due to levying of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), the Union Health Ministry has said. The GST cell of the Ministry has said this on its website in answer to one of the frequently asked questions on the Goods and Services Tax and its impact on the health sector. However, in reply to another question, the ministry has said that life-saving drugs, healthcare services, and medical devices would continue to be tax-free under the GST. "Dialysis (5 to 12 per cent), pacemaker (5.5 to 12-18 per cent), support devices in orthopaedics (5 to 12 per cent), and all support devices for cancers except blood cancer (5 to 7-12 per cent) are the services that will face increased taxation due to GST," the ministry said in reply to the question as to what are the services likely to cost more due to the GST. According to a government official, diagnostic kits, except for those used in the detection of Hepatitis and radiology machines, will come under the high-end ambit of 28 per cent tax and thus diagnosis will get costlier. As far as medical tourism is concerned, with the rollout of the GST, the cost of insurance, pharmaceuticals and international travel is expected to come down which would result in better prospects for medical tourism in the country. The Ministry of Health has also appointed a nodal officer for the GST and is working to disseminate information to all stakeholders and address their concern. Also read: GST: Telangana govt to pursue legal fight against Centre for taking unilateral decisions GST Council meet on Saturday: Textile industry may get tax benefit; Jaitley to review implementation of new regime For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. (Newser) Home Improvement star Zachery Ty Bryan pleaded guilty Tuesday to attacking his girlfriend. Bryan was accused of choking her at their Oregon apartment in October, but the 39-year-old's plea deal saw the felony strangulation charge and others, including coercion, dropped, TMZ reports. Bryan will avoid jail after pleading guilty to two misdemeanor counts, menacing and fourth-degree assault, but will be on probation for three years, KEZI reports. Bryan, who played eldest son Brad Taylor in the 1990s sitcom, has also been barred from contacting the victim, the New York Post reports. (Read more assault stories.) The Russian Finance Ministry said it had reduced the shares of the US dollar and the euro in the normative currency structure of the National Wealth Fund (NWF) from to 35 percent from 45 percent each, including the Japanese yen with a 5 percent share and the Chinese yuan with a 15 percent share MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 24th February, 2021) The Russian Finance Ministry said it had reduced the shares of the US Dollar and the euro in the normative Currency structure of the National Wealth Fund (NWF) from to 35 percent from 45 percent each, including the Japanese Yen with a 5 percent share and the Chinese Yuan with a 15 percent share. "The Russian Finance Ministry informs that in accordance with the government decree ... the Japanese yen with a share of 5 percent and the Chinese yuan with a share of 15 percent are included in the regulatory currency structure of the NWF funds. The shares of the US dollar and the euro have been reduced to 35 percent from 45 percent, and the share of British pound remained unchanged at 10 percent," the statement says. These changes are aimed at increasing profitability and diversifying investment risks of placing NWF funds, the ministry said. "In February 2021, the Russian Finance Ministry completed necessary conversion operations in order to actualize currency structure of NWF fund," it added. Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Denton, TX (76205) Today Scattered thunderstorms. High near 75F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Locally heavier rainfall possible.. Tonight Showers and thundershowers this evening will give way to steady rain overnight. Low 64F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected. Locally heavier rainfall possible. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 A new report from The Elec reiterates a previous report from December that noted vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi, and Google would all be releasing a foldable device. Todays report doesnt mention vivo, but it does mention that Samsung is developing folding displays for Oppo, Xiaomi, and Google. The new report details some of the specifics about each OEMs folding display and its supposed sizes. Starting with Oppo, the display in question is said to open from top to bottom, which means the device will have a clamshell form factor. The external screen will be between 1.5 to 2-inches, so we imagine the display will be long and tall when unfolded. While Oppo has worked with Samsung, BOE and Visionox for an outward folding 7.7-inch prototype, the Chinese OEM will work solely with Samsung for this device. 3D renders based on an Oppo patent for a foldable phone Next up, Xiaomi is switching from an outward folding display to an in-ward folding one. The 7.92-inch screen on its prototype was developed by Visionox, but for this display which may be 8.02-inches Xiaomi will partner with Samsung and CSOT. For reference, CSOT and BOE developed the 2019 Motorola Razrs folding display. Xiaomis folding device will apparently have a 6.38-inch external display. Leaked images of Xiaomi's device from last month might show this very device. Xiaomi foldable phone (reported in January 2021) Finally, although theres not as much information given about Googles device, the report did mention that Samsung was developing an OLED screen for Google. Such a display would measure around 7.6-inch in size. Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2 5G Even if it is only from rumors and reports, its interesting to see so much interest in folding devices from OEMs. Samsung currently holds the crown when it comes to folding phones. The company is expected to unveil three new foldables this year, including a lower-cost Z Flip model. Source "Today's FFA members are tomorrow's ag leaders," says Alison Wedig, Culver's marketing specialist and former Wisconsin FFA president. "Many of these students will go on to dedicate their careers to ensuring a sustainable future food supply, so we want to support them and give them a forum to share their voices and passions." One of the many ways that Culver's supports FFA is through the annual FFA Essay Contest which just launched on Feb. 22, 2021, for its seventh year. Like past years, three winners will be chosen to receive funds for their FFA chapters in the totals of $7,500, $5,000, and $2,500. Because the pandemic has made it very difficult for FFA chapters to host their own fundraisers, the prize money will help the winning chapters pursue educational projects and initiatives that otherwise may have gone unfunded. As always, the contest is a chance for students to demonstrate their passion for agricultural education. New this year, students will also be able to submit videos for the contest. This entry method was introduced to recognize the public speaking and presentation skills students develop in FFA and allow them to showcase those abilities. This year's prompt is: What lessons has the agriculture industry learned from the COVID-19 pandemic? How can we use these learnings to improve the industry to ensure a sustainable future? Both written essays (1,000 words or less) and videos (5 minutes or less) will be accepted at culvers.com/essaycontest until the deadline of April 19, 2021, at 5 p.m. CT. Learn more about how Culver's supports FFA chapters through Thank You Farmers Project fundraising. About Culver's: For over 35 years, Culver's guests have been treated to cooked-to-order food made with farm-fresh ingredients and served with a smile. The ever-expanding franchise system now numbers over 785 family-owned and operated restaurants in 25 states. The restaurants' nationally recognized customer service is based on small-town, Midwestern values, genuine friendliness and an unwavering commitment to quality. Signature items include the award-winning ButterBurger, made from fresh, never frozen beef, and Fresh Frozen Custard, including the famous Flavor of the Day program. For more information, visit www.culvers.com, www.culvers.com/facebook, www.twitter.com/culvers or www.instagram.com/culvers. About National FFA Organization: The National FFA Organization is a school-based national youth leadership development organization of more than 760,000 student members as part of 8,700 local FFA chapters in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. The FFA mission is to make a positive difference in the lives of students by developing their potential for premier leadership, personal growth and career success through agricultural education. For more, visit the National FFA Organization online at FFA.org and on Facebook and Twitter. CONTACT Marcie Waters 608.256.6357 [email protected] SOURCE Culver's Related Links www.culvers.com STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. RZA, founding member of the legendary hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan and co-creator of Hulus Wu-Tang: An American Saga, is giving fans a tease of whats to come in Season 2. In an interview with Rolling Stone, the rapper and producer spoke about the unpredictable elements Wu-Tang has used to tell its story through An American Saga and the Showtime docuseries Of Mics and Men. But there is still more to uncover, according to RZA. In season one, we rarely touched into the actual recording of 36 Chambers ... there are certain things that happened in that studio that are hilarious, thats the caption of our youth, and also thats iconic, RZA said. This season is gonna be even more unpredictable but layered into the fun of what 36 Chambers mean to so many people around the world. RZA added that certain topics, like how Method Man got his name, will be addressed in the second season as well. A premiere date has yet to be announced, but RZA hinted that other Wu-Tang members -- most notably U-God -- will join the creative effort to tell the groups story. My writers room is being ran with Zoom. We have to make three rooms, RZA told Rolling Stone. But we have a great team, and a good thing is that usually when youre doing a TV series, you kindve gotta play catch-up because your scripts are behind. We will be ahead. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Watch the Wu-Tang Clan on Hulu ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A HISTORY LESSON The second season for Wu-Tang: An American Saga was announced in January 2020, following the series debut in September 2019. The first season of Wu-Tang: An American Saga, which was shot and set on Staten Island, was written by RZA and Alex Tse, and executive produced by RZA, Method Man, Tse, Brian Grazer and Francie Calfo. Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa, GZA and the estate of ODB were consultants. Set in 1990s New York at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, Wu-Tang: An American Saga tracks the clans formation -- a vision of Bobby Diggs, aka RZA, who strives to unite a dozen young black men who are torn between music and crime, but eventually rise to become the unlikeliest of American success stories. Ahead of the first seasons premiere, a Wu-Tang Clan branded ice cream truck handed out merchandise and frozen treats to people in Clifton. It also inspired a New York City MetroCard. Cast and crew affiliated with the forthcoming Hulu series "Wu-Tang: An American Saga" filmed in Dongan Hills on July 12, 2019. Filming for the Wu-Tang Clan project took place in the center of the Berry Homes. (Staten Island Advance/ Victoria Priola) Cast and crew of Wu-Tang: An American Saga," a forthcoming Hulu series based on the upbringing of Wu-Tang Clan, films inside an apartment complex on Osgood Avenue and Fairway Ave February 27, 2019. (Staten Island Advance/ Victoria Priola) Naturally, the production filmed in the Park Hill section of Clifton, where Wu-Tang Clan originated. Production trucks and crew members associated with the project began filming in the borough in February 2019 and continued throughout the summer. The project filmed around Clifton, Port Richmond, Fort Wadsworth and inside local businesses like Major Records. The series stars Ashton Sanders as Bobby Diggs; Shameik Moore as Sha; Siddiq Saunderson as Dennis D-Love Coles; Julian Elijah Martinez as Divine Diggs; Marcus Callender as Power Grant; Erika Alexander as Linda Diggs; Zolee Griggs as Shurrie Diggs; David Dave East Brewster as Shotgun; TJ Atoms as Ason Unique and Johnell Xavier Young as Gary/Allah Justice. People in Bengaluru might face another lockdown if they don't abide by coronavirus safety protocol, the city's municipal chief Manjunath Prasad said. Prasad has made it clear that if he found people not following social distancing norms or not wearing masks then imposing a lockdown will be the only option left. The municipal chief made this statement at a meeting attended by officials, civic body doctors, and joint and special commissioners. Prasad said, "We could be in trouble if COVID-19 safety rules are not followed," according to a report in NDTV. He added, "With a population of 13 million in the city, we are seeing a daily rise in cases by 200 to 300. In Kerala and Maharashtra, there is a spike in cases and the concern is we share borders with these two states". This week ten people were found positive for the coronavirus at the SJR Watermark Apartments in Bengaluru. Besides, the civic agency Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has identified two more clusters in the city in recent times - one at a nursing college and another at a residential complex. However, Karanataka's Health Minister K Sudhakar has ruled out the possibility of another lockdown in the state. Sudhakar has urged people to take necessary precautions while cautioning about the possible second wave of COVID-19. Karnataka recorded 383 new cases of COVID-19 out of which 240 cases were reported from Bengaluru Urban area. Also, the city reported four deaths due to COVId-19 in the past 24 hours. Also read: Cabinet to approve PLI scheme for electronics, medical devices Also read: RailTel share allotment today: Here's how to check status Dieppe, New Brunswick--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Colibri Resource Corporation (TSXV: CBI) ("Colibri" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has signed an agreement with Bimsa Minera SA de CV, a private Mexico-based mineral exploration company to acquire up to 100% of the Diamante Gold Project located in the prolific Sierra Madre Occidental of Sonora, Mexico. The highly prospective gold and silver project consists of a cumulative 1,057 hectare (ha) land package in two properties named Diamante 1 and Diamante 2. Diamante 1 borders Colibri's 180-ha El Mezquite Gold Project immediately to the west and Diamante 2, located 700 metres directly south of Diamante 1, and 1.6 kilometres northwest of Colibri's 1,130-ha Jackie project (Illustration 1). Illustration 1: Diamante 1 and 2 Concession Location Map showing distribution of gold values reported in rock chip and channel samples from historical exploration programs To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4269/75330_d745e5a9b4324ace_001full.jpg This property acquisition nearly doubles Colibri's land holdings in this prospective area to 2,367 hectares. "We are extremely happy to negotiate this favourable and timely deal with Bimsa Minera. The Diamante project sits directly beside our highly prospective El Mezquite project currently being mapped and sampled in preparation for a near-term maiden drilling program. The historical sampling and conceptual geological model for the Diamante property also indicate a favorable environment for finding potential deposits," said Colibri President & CEO Ron Goguen. The Diamante Gold project has been explored to a modest degree by modern exploration methods and there is evidence of historical hand surface and underground mining, and placer activities in stream channels and terraces on the project though no records of historical production are known. Geology, Exploration and Mining History The region is located along a northwesterly trend of epithermal Au-Ag deposits in the Sierra Madre Occidental such as La India, Mulatos, Dolores, Pinos Altos, Ocampo, Palmarejo and El Sauzal which host more than 20 million ounces of gold-equivalent. Parallel to this trend, there are Cu-Mo-Au porphyry deposits such as Porphyry 4 Hermanos and Cerro Verde. The Diamante Project exhibits geological characteristics of epithermal low to intermediate sulfidation Ag-Au (Pb-Zn), high sulfidation Au-Cu, and potential transition zones within and peripheral to porphyry style Au-Cu at depth within the system of Sillitoe (2010). The known sulphide mineralization includes galena, sphalerite, pyrite and chalcopyrite with secondary oxidation minerals such as copper carbonate (malachite) and copper sulphates with jarosite, hematite, goethite and limonite. The Property hosts a variety of styles of precious and base metal polymetallic mineralization including disseminated, stockwork and vein hosted accompanied by alteration including silicification (with quartz veining), and phyllic, argillic, advanced argillic (quartz-alunite-pyrite) and propylitic (chlorite) zones, with near-surface overprinting by oxidation (goethite-hematite), jarosite and vuggy silica. Sampling highlights from the ten known areas of interest, five from each of the two concessions, some with artisanal mining, has reported values of precious and base metals in individual samples as follows (Table 1) and as shown within the enclosed maps (Illustrations 2 and 3). Diamante 1 includes known occurrences at La Prieta-El Aguaje, El Chon-El Pillado, La Olla, La Cruz and El Caso. Diamante 2 has targets reported at Mezquite Raizudo, El Puerto, El Cumbro, Calton and the Southern Anomaly. Four areas under the Company's initial exploration focus will be described below in more detail. Table 1: Selected rock chip and channel samples with precious and base metal values Mineralization commonly is coincident with alteration, veining and structural lineaments identified in the historical exploration. Six known vein systems correspond to ENE, NE and NW orientations. To date, exploration by project vendors and others has assembled a database of two hundred and sixty-seven (267) rock chip, surface channel and stream sediment samples, geological and structural mapping in areas of interest, and an ASTER and LANDSAT alteration & regional structure survey. In addition, preliminary metallurgical flotation testing of unoxidized samples from the La Prieta and Olla artisanal workings, both located near Highway 16 in Diamante 1, reported very good recoveries of Au, Ag and base metals. All of the metal values disclosed herein were reported by past operators in the Diamante area, from grab, channel and dump samples which may not be representative of the metal grades, or metallurgical recoveries, and are considered as historical in nature. Phase 1 Exploration Targets Diamante 1 Illustration 2: Diamante 1 concession with exploration targets and significant gold and silver values noted To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4269/75330_d745e5a9b4324ace_002full.jpg La Prieta/El Aguaje The vein system consists of a shear and fissure-filling zone exposed in short intervals (< 20 metres) over a strike length estimated at 2,000 metres. The veins have an ENE orientation and dip from 50 to 60 degrees to the north and northwest, and display widths of 0.40 metres to 1.20 metres with an average estimated at 1 metre. Samples report grades up to 6.76 g/t Au, 351 g/t Ag, and 0.8% Pb over 1.1 metres. Diamante 2 Calton Area The "Calton 1" vein is interpreted to occur intermittently over a strike length of 1,100 metres with thicknesses or widths ranging from 0.30 metres to 1.5 metres. Mineralization consists galena, sphalerite and abundant coarse pyrite hosted with quartz and extensive iron oxides. Sample assays from the Calton 1 vein have returned values up to 18.65 g/t Au and 62 g/t Ag over 1 metre. The Calton 2 vein is exposed in several discontinuous outcrops over a strike length of 900 metres with widths ranging from 0.30 metres to 1.70 metres. Samples report up to 39.8 g/t Au with 109.5 g/t Ag and 1.91% Pb over 0.42 metres. Illustration 3: Diamante 2 concession with exploration targets and significant gold and silver values noted To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4269/75330_d745e5a9b4324ace_003full.jpg El Cumbro/Mezquite Raizudo The El Cumbro-Mezquite Raizudo veins located in the northern part of Diamante 2 consists of fissure-filling quartz with sulphide mineralization of galena and sphalerite. The veins follow a northwesterly structural trend observed over an inferred strike length of 900 metres with widths reported from several centimetres to 1.5 meters with an average estimated width of approximately 1 metre. Samples report up to 5.68 g/t Au and 298 g/t Ag over 1.0 metre. Southern Anomaly The five (5) hectare area of visible mixed hydrothermal alteration covers a porphyritic granodiorite intrusion with zones of quartz-tourmaline in vein stockworks and disseminated mineralization which may represent the apex of a high sulphidation or porphyry Au-Cu occurrence. The target was focused on an ASTER anomaly and rock sampled with a 50 metre grid with assays ranging up to 0.80 g/t Au. Exploration Plans Colibri will deploy a team to initiate exploration beginning in March 2021. The work program will start with verification of historical sampling, geological mapping, and additional sampling to confirm and discover values in and peripheral to the areas of known mineralization. The focus of the program is to identify Phase 1 drilling targets with potential to host sizeable near-surface deposits. Terms of Agreement To earn its initial 50% of the Diamante project, Colibri will pay $100,000 USD and incur the expense of completing 2,000 metres of drilling on the project over the course of up to two years and also will be responsible for all exploration costs while preparing for said drilling program. In addition, the Company will pay of the property tax and security costs during this period. Colibri will operate the project during this "Earn-In" period. Upon completion of its 50% earn-in, Colibri will become equal joint venture partners with Bimsa Minera and then Colibri will have an exclusive period of six months to purchase the remaining 50% of the joint venture by paying Bimsa Minera either of: i) US$2.1 million or ii) US$1.4 million and the grant of a 2% net smelter royalty (NSR) on the project. Qualified Person Greg Davison, MSc, PGeo, is the Qualified Person responsible for approval of the technical content of this press release within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"), under TSX guidelines. About Colibri Resource Corporation Colibri is a Canadian-based mineral exploration company listed on the TSX-V (CBI) and is focused on acquiring and exploring prospective gold & silver properties in Mexico. The Company has six exploration projects of which five currently have exploration programs being executed or planned. The flagship Evelyn Gold Project is 100% owned and explored by Colibri. Colibri is acquiring up to a 100% ownership interest in the Diamante Gold & Silver Project and will soon begin exploration work in preparation for a Phase 1 drilling program. Three additional projects, Pilar Gold & Silver Project (optioned to Tocvan Ventures), El Mezquite Gold & Silver Project and the Jackie Gold & Silver Project (both earn-in agreements with Silver Spruce Resources) are also currently being actively advanced. For more information about all Company projects please visit: www.colibriresource.com. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: This news release contains "forward-looking statements". Statements in this press release which are not purely historical are forward-looking statements and include any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Actual results could differ from those projected in any forward-looking statements due to numerous factors. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release, and the Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the plans, expectations and intentions contained in this press release are reasonable, there can be no assurance that they will prove to be accurate. For further information: Ronald J. Goguen, President, Chairperson and Director, Tel: (506) 383-4274, rongoguen@colibriresource.com For more information about all Company projects please visit: www.colibriresource.com. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: This news release contains "forward-looking statements". Statements in this press release which are not purely historical are forward-looking statements and include any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Actual results could differ from those projected in any forward-looking statements due to numerous factors. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release, and the Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the plans, expectations and intentions contained in this press release are reasonable, there can be no assurance that they will prove to be accurate. For further information: Ronald J. Goguen, President, Chairperson and Director, Tel: (506) 383-4274, rongoguen@colibriresource.com To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75330 Australias international visa program is using a Chinese government-linked company to process visa applications in Beijing, sparking an internal review into the security of sensitive information. The business at the centre of the network, VFS Global, provides visa services for Australia in 43 countries and has facilitated 226 million visas worldwide. It uses Beijing Dongfang Tianxiao Entry-Exit Service Co Ltd to process applications for Australian visas in Beijing. VFS Global uses local subcontractors to process Australian visas in China. Credit:AP The Department of Home Affairs launched a due diligence process in recent weeks into its visa services in China after concerns were raised about VFSs global arrangements to process Canadas visa applications in China. VFS is expected to appear before a Parliamentary inquiry in Canada this week after the Globe and Mail reported that the company had subcontracted its Canadian operations in China to Beijing Shuangxiong, which is owned by the Beijing Public Security Bureau the local police department. New Zealand also uses the same subcontractor. Credit: CC0 Public Domain Climate change represents perhaps the biggest challenge facing humanity, therefore education has an important role to play in teaching students about how we might mitigate the problems but also how to cope with what might be termed eco-anxiety. A team from Canada writing in the International Journal of Higher Education and Sustainability, suggests that part of a well-rounded university education must provide students with the tools with which to address the challenges presented by the environmental crisis we all face. Part of this education should show them how to be responsible eco-citizens but also give them the skills to become creative, solution-oriented thinkers. With such people entering adulthood and becoming the innovators and leaders of the future humanity might be able to cope with the acute problems and address the chronic problems facing climate and the environment. Laura Sims and Marie-Elaine Desmarais of the Universite de St. Boniface and Rhea Rocque of the University of Winnipeg, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, suggest that educators "have a responsibility to create inclusive environmental and sustainability educational approaches that are enabling, emotionally supportive, engaging, and praxis-oriented." Their work focuses on the concept of eco-anxiety and how students might be taught to cope with such a problem in a positive and pragmatic way. At the time of writing their paper, humanity was facing another major challengethe COVID pandemic caused by a lethal coronavirus that emerged towards the end of 2019. The pandemic is still with us more than a year later. The team adds that the pandemic has taught us many lessons that can equally be applied to education for sustainability, inclusion, and eco-anxiety. "In living this experience, we have seen people come together, changing their lifestyles, and acting individually for collective benefit," they write. They add that the pandemic has shown us that "we can stop our destructive, consumptive path, if need be, at very short notice, and re-imagine other possibilitieswe are strong enough, together, to face existential challenges." Explore further Sustainability in a pandemic More information: Laura Sims et al. Enabling students to face the environmental crisis and climate change with resilience: inclusive environmental and sustainability education approaches and strategies for coping with eco-anxiety, International Journal of Higher Education and Sustainability (2021). Laura Sims et al. Enabling students to face the environmental crisis and climate change with resilience: inclusive environmental and sustainability education approaches and strategies for coping with eco-anxiety,(2021). DOI: 10.1504/IJHES.2020.113059 The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Tuesday it was ordering immediate inspections of Boeing 777 planes with Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engines before further flights after an engine failed on a United flight on Saturday. The engines are used on 128 older versions of the plane accounting for less than 10% of the more than 1,600 777s delivered and only a handful of airlines in the United States, South Korea and Japan were operating them recently. Operators must conduct a thermal acoustic image inspection of the large titanium fan blades on each engine, the FAA said. The ... WASHINGTON - A third coronavirus vaccine could soon be available in the United States, a one-shot regimen made by pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson that proved safe and effective in a clinical trial and completely protective against hospitalizations and deaths, according to a Food and Drug Administration review released Wednesday. The document, posted in advance of an all-day meeting of FDA advisers Friday, sets the stage for a vaccine to be authorized as soon as this weekend. As the threat of virus variants continues to swirl, the prospect of another vaccine that could accelerate immunization efforts and prevent more variants from emerging offers hope in the middle of a pandemic that has killed more than a half-million people in the United States. Public health officials have eagerly awaited the arrival of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because it is easier to store and administer and could streamline the logistics of a complicated mass vaccination campaign. But supply will continue to limit the nation's vaccination efforts in the near term, with the full impact of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine not expected until April as manufacturing scales up. If the vaccine is authorized this weekend, federal officials predicted that 3 million to 4 million doses could be allocated next week, with an additional 20 million expected in March. But the FDA review also hinted that a formidable messaging challenge may lie ahead. After the spectacular and relatively straightforward 90-plus percent effectiveness of the first two coronavirus vaccines that were authorized, the Johnson & Johnson results are more nuanced. Johnson & Johnson's one-shot vaccine was tested during a more complicated phase of the pandemic, when a variant capable of slipping by some immunity had emerged. It was more than 80% effective at preventing severe illness, including in areas of the world where concerning variants are circulating, but only 66% protective overall when moderate cases were included. Experts say people should not insist on getting vaccines with higher efficacy rates, considering that a joint vaccine from pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech, and one from biotech company Moderna went through clinical trials earlier, before certain variants emerged. They fear the logistical advantages of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine could be lost if people decide to defer vaccination until they can access a particular shot. Vaccines that transform the virus from a potentially fatal disease into a nuisance illness could end the pandemic, unless they aren't widely adopted. "We know this vaccine prevents 85 percent of the severe disease. . . . It was 100 percent effective in preventing hospitalization and deaths, and that's really what's important," said Nancy Bennett, a professor of medicine and public health sciences at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. "Those facts are the most important thing to recognize." Washington Post photo by Michael Robinson Chavez The FDA scientists found that the "known benefits" of the vaccine included reducing the risk of symptomatic and severe cases of the disease caused by the virus, covid-19, at least two weeks after vaccination. The review found vaccine efficacy against severe covid-19 "was similarly high across the United States, South Africa, and Brazil." People working on the logistics of vaccination see clear benefits from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because it can be stored in a refrigerator for at least three months, making it simpler to use than other vaccines that must be kept frozen. And because it is a single shot, it does not require a follow-up visit for a booster shot. The vaccine's efficacy rate was lower - 42% - in preventing moderate to severe illness in a subgroup of adults older than 60 who had medical risk factors. But regulators noted that the statistical significance of that finding was uncertain, and no deaths or cases requiring medical intervention were reported a month after those older adults received vaccines. Overall, there were seven deaths in the trial, all in the group that received a placebo. David Benkeser, a biostatistician at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health, said that the lower efficacy in some older study participants warranted additional study but wasn't yet a huge concern. He noted that the lower efficacy seemed to be driven by older adults with diabetes, and it would be important to check whether their immune responses to the vaccine were lower. "There's a chance that this is a bit of bad luck - if you cut the data up many ways, you are bound to find some puzzling results," Benkeser said in an email. "For now, the news is overall very positive." Still, the lower efficacy among higher-risk older adults could be a topic of discussion when outside experts meet Friday to recommend whether the FDA should authorize the shot. If the regulatory deliberations follow the path of the previous two authorized coronavirus vaccines a decision could come this weekend. The FDA advisory committee will consider the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at a "very tenuous time," said Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious-disease doctor at Boston Medical Center. "Nobody knows how to feel." While hospitalizations and deaths related to covid-19 are declining, there are concerns that variants could spoil the improving picture. The Johnson & Johnson results highlight the challenge variants pose to all of the vaccines: The large, international trial found the vaccine was 72% effective at preventing cases of moderate to severe covid-19 in the United States, where variants of concern have only recently begun to be detected. In South Africa, where a variant capable of evading some parts of immunity became dominant late last year, it was 64% effective against moderate to severe illness. That drop-off is smaller than has been seen for some other vaccines. The vaccine developed by Novavax was nearly 90% effective in a British trial, but that protection fell to about 50% in South Africa. The vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, which was estimated to be 76% effective in preventing symptomatic infections in trials before variants emerged, was suspended in South Africa after a small study suggested it did not appear to protect against the variant there. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, whose laboratory helped design the vaccine, said protection against the variant was "quite good," although he said that all vaccine developers are preparing for the possibility they will need to redesign vaccines for the variants. Barouch's work in monkeys provides a clue as to why the vaccine's protection may have remained robust against the variant. Studies have shown that antibodies triggered by various vaccines are less effective against the variant first detected in South Africa, leading to fear that vaccines would no longer be protective. But those antibody tests don't capture the full immune response, and his work showed that the response from another prong of the immune system, T cells, is triggered strongly by the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in animals. "The J & J vaccine, if it is approved by the FDA, is going to increase vaccine supply for the country and the world," Barouch said. "That's incredibly important, because we need to immunize our country and our world as quickly as possible to end this pandemic and to prevent the emergence of new variants in the future that might be even more concerning than the current ones." The results suggest that the protection generated by the vaccine will prevent people from the worst outcomes, even if it allows some cases of coughs and fevers to slip by. The vaccine was more than 80% effective at preventing severe illness in South Africa. There was also preliminary evidence that the vaccine may protect against asymptomatic infections, a key question about vaccines throughout the pandemic. Blood tests from 2,650 study participants showed that two months after being vaccinated, 37 trial participants who received the placebo had evidence of asymptomatic infection. But only 10 of the participants who received the vaccine had similar markers in their blood. That suggested the vaccine reduced by 74% the threat of asymptomatic infection. The FDA, which on Monday issued new guidance to manufacturers on how to deal with variants, has emphasized being ready to possibly update vaccines. To streamline the process for getting clearance for modified vaccines, the FDA said, companies will be able to submit smaller studies testing immune responses in people's bodies rather than lengthy, large trials in which researchers give half the participants a placebo and wait to see if people get sick or not. Several manufacturers, including Johnson & Johnson, are studying potential modifications to their vaccines to counter variants such as those first detected in the United Kingdom and South Africa. The FDA described the vaccine as having a "favorable safety profile," with the most common side effects including pain at the injection site, headache and fatigue. It said one patient had a "serious event of a hypersensitivity reaction" - an allergic reaction that was not classified as anaphylaxis - two days following vaccination. If an emergency use authorization is granted, about 2 million doses are expected to be shipped to states next week, while another 1 million to 2 million doses could be sent directly to pharmacies and other sites, federal officials said. That will make only a slight dent in the vaccine shortage affecting the nation. But supply will ramp up quickly in April. In Europe, where the vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford is available in addition to Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, societal debate has flared over whether people should be able to choose which vaccine they get. "We have a really important job to do on how we message this," said E. John Wherry, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "The day that an individual has a choice on which vaccine to get - that's a great day, but probably won't be until summer." Until then, he said, people should take the vaccine they can get, because all are robustly effective. - - - The Washington Post's Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed to this report. Dublin, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "North American Mobile Situational Awareness Market is Accelerating Out of Early Adopter Stage" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. This study examines the North American mobile situational awareness market. For the purposes of this study, mobile situational awareness offerings are defined as software solutions that put near real-time information about critical field situations at the disposal of emergency first responder teams via their mobile devices. This information usually includes mapping of the area and its surroundings, location and status of personnel and other markers, alerts, relevant photos and videos, and up-to-the-minute guidance from central command. While the typical form factor is the smartphone (regular or ruggedized), smart watch capabilities can also be provided, depending upon the vendor. Key market trends, adoption dynamics, and potential growth opportunities are examined. Revenue forecasts are provided for two product categories: 1) Public Safety - firefighters, police, EMTs, etc. 2) Private Security - security guards in the enterprise sector, such as manufacturing, utilities, and health facilities. The total market is projected to exhibit a CAGR of 37.8% over the study's 2019-2025 forecast period. The mobile situational awareness market is in an early stage, with a number of both small and large vendors competing for attention and share. MSA product awareness and interest is accelerating in each of the two major target segments. Current and prospective users of mobile situational awareness offerings will want to remain current on product enhancements and the growing array of industry participants. High-potential new customers should understand the affordability and benefits of this solution category, especially when compared to current Land Mobile Radio (LMR) technology. All stakeholders will want to track trends, partnership opportunities, and evolving customer needs. Challenges to growth in today's mobile situational awareness market include: 1) Solutions remain a work in progress, prompting certain prospective customers to delay purchase and deployment, 2) Finding funding in government departments and overall cost sensitivity in private security settings, 3) A fragmented public safety sector that extends the approval process and complicates the sales cycle, 4) Customer concerns regarding privacy, security and reliability, and 5) The preponderance of technology laggards in the public sector. Companies interviewed for this study include AT&T and Intrepid Networks. Key Issues Addressed Who are the current key participants (vendors and channels) in this industry? What is the current distribution mix? What is the revenue forecast for the mobile situational awareness market as a whole and for each of the two product segments investigated? What are three top strategic imperatives impacting today's mobile situational awareness industry? Who are key competitors in each of the two major product segments? What are three major growth opportunities in this industry? What are the major growth drivers and growth restraints in today's mobile situational awareness industry? Key Topics Covered: Strategic Imperatives Why Is It Increasingly Difficult to Grow? The Strategic Imperative The Impact of the Top Three Strategic Imperatives on the Mobile Situational Awareness Industry Growth Opportunities Fuel the Growth Pipeline Engine Growth Opportunity Analysis, Mobile Situational Awareness Market Mobile Situational Awareness Market Scope of Analysis Market Segmentation Key Competitors for Mobile Situational Awareness Market Key Growth Metrics for Mobile Situational Awareness Market Distribution Channels for Mobile Situational Awareness Market Growth Drivers for Mobile Situational Awareness Market Growth Restraints for Mobile Situational Awareness Forecast Assumptions, Mobile Situational Awareness Market Revenue Forecast, Mobile Situational Awareness Market Revenue Forecast by Product, Mobile Situational Awareness Market Revenue Forecast Analysis, Mobile Situational Awareness Market Pricing Trends and Forecast Analysis, Mobile Situational Awareness Market Competitive Environment, Mobile Situational Awareness Market Growth Opportunity Analysis, Public Safety Key Growth Metrics for Public Safety Revenue Forecast, Public Safety Revenue Forecast Analysis, Public Safety Growth Opportunity Analysis, Private Security Key Growth Metrics for Private Security Revenue Forecast, Private Security Revenue Forecast Analysis, Private Security Growth Opportunity Universe, Mobile Situational Awareness Market Growth Opportunity 1 - Targeting the Private Sector to Expand Reach, Minimize Purchase Barriers, and Increase Revenues, 2020 Growth Opportunity 2 - Enabling Smart City Integrations to Improve Information Quality and Increase Revenues, 2020 Growth Opportunity 3 - Forging White Label Relationships to Expand Into New Markets and Lower Customer's Perceived Risk, 2020 Next Steps Your Next Steps Legal Disclaimer List of Exhibits Companies Mentioned AT&T CommandWear Intrpid-Networks Incident Response Technologies Motorola Verizon For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/q33d3q An Bord Pleanala has refused and overturned the granting of permission for the development of 82 residential units and a creche at Drinan, Ballymahon. Also read: Gardai in Granard arrest three males in relation to violent disorder and criminal damage incidents Longford County Council had initially granted conditional planning permission to Brian Rogers, 28 The Sapphire, The Grange, Brewery Road, Blackrock, Dublin for the proposed development on September 23 of last year, however, following an appeal by Ballymahon Residents care of Enda Connaughton care of David Mooney, Town Planning Consultant of 14 Old Farm Road, Cloughjordan, County Tipperary, An Bord Pleanala refused planning permission. Also read: Author John Connell becomes Longford Reads Ambassador An Bord Pleanala deemed that the proposed development would provide for a poor living environment for future residents and would be premature pending the upgrade of the Ballymahon Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant to serve the proposed development and to facilitate the orderly expansion of the town. Reasons and Considerations for refusal by An Bord Pleanala 1. Having regard to the overall design, scale, layout and low density of the proposed development, the disposition of the buildings on the site and the poor distribution of public open space particularly in the eastern/south eastern part of the site, it is considered, that the proposed development would provide for a poor living environment for future residents and would not comply with the criteria in the Urban Design Manual A best practice guide 2009 or Section 6.11(b) of the Guidelines for Planning Authorities on Sustainable Residential Development in Urban Areas 2009, relative to density for edge of centre sites. The proposed development would, therefore, be contrary to the proper planning and sustainable development of the area. 2. It is considered that the proposed development would be premature pending the upgrade of the Ballymahon Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant to serve the proposed development and to facilitate the orderly expansion of the town. It would therefore be contrary to the proper planning and sustainable development of the area. Proposed Development The construction of 82 no. residential units & creche to be completed in two phases and all associated ancillary site development works. Works will include 2 new vehicular entrances, associated internal access roads & junctions; carparking; footpaths; all boundary treatments and associated landscaping and open spaces; street lighting; associated bin & bicycle stores, a pumping station and temporary sewage treatment system within the site which will be removed on the upgrading of the public foul system; connection to the existing public services; and all associated ancillary site development works, at Drinan, Ballymahon, Co. Longford Time lapse of the Super Soaker launch. Three rockets launched with the mission, two using vapor tracers to track wind movement and one releasing a water canister to seed a polar mesospheric cloud. The green laser beam visible at the top left is the LIDAR beam used to measure the artificial cloud. Credit: NASAs Wallops Flight Facility/Poker Flat Research Range/Zayn Roohi Since the late 1800s, observers have searched the polar skies for elusive, high-flying clouds that shine in the darkness. These polar mesospheric clouds, or PMCs, are wispy swarms of ice crystals that form in the late spring and summer over the North and South Poles. Observers spot them best in the twilight hours, when the Sun illuminates them from beyond the horizon against a dark sky. More than just a pretty sight, they also hold clues to what's going on in Earth's atmosphere. "What has attracted a lot of interest in these clouds is their sensitivitythey're occurring just on the edge of viability in the upper atmosphere, where it's incredibly dry and incredibly cold," said Richard Collins, space physicist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and lead author of the paper. "They're a very sensitive indicator of changes in the upper atmospherechanges in temperature and/or changes in water vapor." Collins and his collaborators suspected that PMCs could be associated with cooling in the upper atmosphereand he set out to try to understand the microphysics of the process. In a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, they shared results from NASA's Super Soaker mission, a small suborbital rocket launched in Alaska, showing that water vapor in our upper atmosphere can precipitously lower the surrounding temperature and initiate one of these bright shining clouds. To test this out, they decided to release a small amount of water and create their very own PMC. They specifically launched at a timeJanuary in the Arcticwhich is typically inhospitable to the formation of PMCs, hoping they could nevertheless catalyze one. "We wanted to make sure to avoid mixing artificially created and naturally occurring PMCs," said Irfan Azeem, space physicist at Astra, LLC in Louisville, Colorado and principal investigator of the Super Soaker mission. "That way we could be confident that any PMC we observed was attributable to the Super Soaker experiment." Polar mesospheric clouds captured by Expedition 31 crew from the International Space Station on June 13, 2012. Credit: NASAs Johnson Space Center/International Space Station The Super Soaker rocket launched in the early morning hours of January 26, 2018, from Poker Flat research range in Fairbanks, Alaska. It reached an altitude of about 53 miles when the team triggered the explosion of their cannister of about 485 pounds of water. Eighteen seconds later, the beam from a ground-based laser radar detected the faint echo of a PMC. The researchers plugged those measurements into a model that simulated PMC production. They wanted to know how the air where the water was released would have had to change in order to create a PMC like the one they observed. "We don't have direct temperature measurements of the cloud, but we can infer that temperature change based on what we think is required for the cloud to form," Collins said. The model showed that significant cooling must have happened. "The only way with the amount of water present that we could get a cloud form was to say that in the body of the cloud, there was a temperature dropabout 45 degrees Fahrenheit ( 25 degrees Celsius) in temperature." Simply introducing water to the region, the results suggested, led to a significant local temperature drop. "This is the first time anyone has experimentally demonstrated that PMC formation in the mesosphere is directly linked to cooling by water vapor itself," Azeem said. A ground test of the water canister release. Credit: NASAs Wallops Flight Facility The paper goes on to connect the results to the reality of space traffic, as water vapor is a common byproduct of satellites and rocket launches. In the days of the space shuttle, for instance, a single launch was responsible for about 20% of the PMC ice mass observed in a season. But more water vapor won't mean temperature dropping without bounds, Collins explains. PMCs act like a thermostat. As the water vapor freezes, it turns into ice crystals. But those ice crystals absorb heat even better than water in vapor form. As the ice crystals heat up, they eventually sublimate back into vapor, and the cycle repeats. "And so there's a yo-yo back and forth, regulating the temperature of the change produced by the injected water vapor," Collins said. Still, increased water vapor will affect how and when PMCs form. For those looking to predict PMC formation, keeping track of both natural and human-injected water vapor will be key to success. "It depends on the amount of space traffic, on what happens if the water vapor budget up there increases," Collins said. "If we had a major amount of new traffic then we're no longer in an ambient natural environment and we would have to start modeling this." More information: Richard L. Collins et al. Cloud Formation From a Localized Water Release in the Upper Mesosphere: Indication of Rapid Cooling, Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics (2021). Journal information: Journal of Geophysical Research Richard L. Collins et al. Cloud Formation From a Localized Water Release in the Upper Mesosphere: Indication of Rapid Cooling,(2021). DOI: 10.1029/2019JA027285 House leaders have put together a package of rules to govern how joint committees and the two legislative branches will work together over the next two years, recommending a different approach from the Senate to how committees should share written testimony, publish votes online and advise the public of upcoming hearings. The proposal drafted by House leaders shortens the required window for advance notice of a committee hearing from one week in the Senate proposal to 72 hours, and it does not require that public testimony submitted electronically to a committee be made available to the public if requested. The joint rules being proposed by Speaker Ron Mariano would also only make the names of committee members voting against recommending a piece of legislation public, while the full vote would be published online in aggregate. Mariano plans to bring the joint rules up for a vote before the full House on Wednesday. As of the 5 p.m. deadline on Tuesday, members -- both Democrats and Republicans -- had filed 15 amendments that had been posted online, many seeking to align the House draft with the Senates. This week the House will take up Joint Rules so that we can have a structure in place with the Senate as we undertake the critical business of the Commonwealth: mitigating climate change, supporting hardworking residents and small businesses, and helping to foster a more equitable education system, among other priorities, Mariano said in a statement. Since taking over as speaker, Mariano has been under pressure from some progressive organizations and lawmakers to improve transparency in the Legislature and use its website to make committee votes, testimony and other documents more accessible to the public. One of the main groups pushing for rules reform, Act on Mass, said Tuesday that the House package (H 68) was much weaker than the version (S 14) that passed the Senate earlier this month. What we want is simple, said Erin Leahy, campaign manager at Act on Mass. We want an easy to read table that shows how our representatives vote on the page of every bill after its voted on in committee. This is not asking a lot. It is bizarre for the House to offer up convoluted solutions like aggregate vote totals. What are you hiding? Just show us the votes. Leahy said she was a Somerville resident and constituent of newly elected Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven, who offered an amendment to align the Houses proposal to the Senate language regarding testimony and public committee votes. The speaker said the House proposal will seek to make the aggregate tally of committee votes more readily available on the Legislatures website, and will adjust the rules to prevent multiple pieces of similar legislation from being reported out of committee to separate branches. He described the changes from the Senate version being proposed as minor but substantive. The Senate voted to require committees to post the time, location and agenda of a hearing a least one week prior, but the House is recommending shortening that to 72 hours. The Senate also voted to require any votes taken in committee by roll call or by electronic poll over email to recommend a bill be posted on the Legislatures website. The Senate rules do not explicitly say whether the names of the members and how they voted should be published. The Houses version of the rules calls for the aggregate count of members voting in the affirmative, not voting, or reserving their rights to be published online, as well as the names of the members of the committee voting against a bill. The House looks forward to continuing its work to make government more accessible as we deliver efficiently on legislation for our constituents, Mariano said in a statement. One change the House and Senate appear to be in agreement over is that committees should make reasonable efforts to ensure diversity of those from whom testimony on legislation is solicited. The House and Senate, which are still operating under emergency rules in response to the pandemic, are about to embark on an unprecedented hearing season that will not feature crowds packing hearing rooms to testify and listen to others testify. Instead, lawmakers will attempt to inform themselves and the public by using technology and other virtual means. The speakers office said Rep. Sarah Peake and Rules Committee Chairman William Galvin are also still working to develop best practices for working with unregistered lobbyists who advocate for public policy. The two Democrats have reached out to Secretary of State William Galvin for input, the speakers office said. Uyterhoeven and several Republicans filed amendments to ensure that all committee votes are posted online, even votes to refer bills for further study, and that submitted testimony be made publicly available, if requested. Minority Leader Brad Jones also filed proposals to give legislators more time to review conference committee reports before they are asked to take a vote and to require the Legislature to pass a local aid resolution committing to a certain level of aid for cities and towns in the annual state budget by March 31 each year. Freshman Democrat Rep. Edward Philips, of Sharon, also filed an amendment that would preclude a joint committee from sending any bill to study that has a majority of both the House and Senate as cosponsors. The House plans to debate its version of the joint rules Wednesday beginning at 1 p.m. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Prominent Greek miniature artist Andreas Rousounelis started his handmade artwork as a hobby seven years ago, before he became a professional miniature artist. Although Rousounelis studied graphic design, he fell in love with handmade miniatures. Rousounelis wants to deliver a message through his artwork by highlighting the importance of art in our world and its positive effect on our lives. I make different miniatures every season. I prefer Greek themes for the summer and abandoned scenes for the other seasons, Rousounelis told Ahram Online, adding that he uses light colours for Greek dioramas and dark colours for abandoned scenes. As for materials, Rousounelis uses paper, plastic and wood. Abandoned doors and sceneries are Rousouneliss favourite artwork, and he takes his ideas from photos and makes scale models of buildings, streets, cars and trucks. Rousounelis describes his art style as hyperrealism, and his inspiration comes from Greek architecture, mostly the Cyclades architecture. Rousounelis emphasised that most of the costumers who are interested in miniatures, are art collectors. He also agrees that the future is for online shopping especially in the era of the pandemic, which he prefers as he can show and display his work to everyone around the world. A piece of artwork can positively change the atmosphere and add good energy, if it fits and matches the style of the place and surroundings, whether in the house or in the office, he says. Rousouneliss favourite artists are French miniature artist Ronan Jim Sevellec and the French photographer and miniature artist Charles Matton. My favourite pieces of my artwork are the abandoned kitchen and the abandoned stone house, said Rousounelis, adding that his dream is that someday one of his handmade artwork will be displayed in an art museum. He advises all new artists to love the art and choose their own style. According to Rousounelis, people like to see their houses made in miniature or scale models, including some tourists who visit Greek islands and collect souvenirs. The artist has many clients from all over the world, including from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Currently, he is working on a new miniature project which is an old house on Naxos Island in Greece. It takes him one week to two months to finish a piece, depending on the projects details. This kind of art is very interesting because we can have our world in miniature form, said Rousounelis emphasising that he prefers classical and traditional architecture, and wishes to make a scale model of the Grand Britain hotel in Syntygma Square, Athens, which is built in the Victorian style. For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture Short link: Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. 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Digital Editor A dog struck by a light rail vehicle in Newark last week survived its injuries thanks to the New Jersey Transit police officers and emergency workers. The Husky got away from its owner shortly before 9 a.m. Friday and wandered onto the tracks near Park Avenue before being hit and pinned beneath the car, a New Jersey Transit spokesman said. New Jersey Transit police and other emergency workers raced to help the dog, carefully removing the cold and frightened pooch and carried it to a vehicle suited for canine transport and driven to a veterinarian for additional treatment, NJ Transit said. Now this pup has promising potential for a full recovery and a good reminder to keep off the tracks, NJ Transit said in a statement. NJ Transit police carry a dog to safety on Friday, Feb. 19, 2021 after it was pinned under a light rail train in Newark.NJ Transit Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JGoldmanNJ. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Minister Counsellor Nguyen Phuong Tra, Deputy Permanent Representative of Vietnam to the UN, has called on the international community to continue to support the political process in Haiti and to assist Haitian people in overcoming difficulties facing them at present. Participants joining the meeting Addressing an online meeting of the UN Security Council (UNSC) on February 22 on the situation in Haiti and activities of the UN Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) in the country, the Vietnamese diplomat expressed her concern over difficulties and instability in Haiti and condemned acts of violence, kidnapping and extortion by criminal groups causing political and social instability there. She urged all stakeholders to strengthen dialogue, determine time and prepare well for elections in the country to ensure they will take place in a fair and transparent manner. The Vietnamese diplomat hailed the BINUH for its recent support for Haiti, and suggested the office and UN working groups identify specific measures to assist Haiti in solving urgent issues, especially the preparation of election, and others related to ensuring security for the people. Reports delivered at the meeting showed that Haiti continues to face many difficulties, especially those relating to election and constitutional amendment. Accordingly, the government of Haiti is expected to conduct a referendum on amending the constitution in April, and hold elections in September. Speakers stressed that the African country is witnessing the increasing number of violence, kidnapping and extortion cases caused by crime gangs and groups, causing insecurity and social instability. Representatives from UNSC member countries condemned acts of violence, attacks, and kidnappings aimed at civilians, especially women and children, and asked the government of Haiti and opposition political parties in the country to enhance dialogues towards political consensus for the upcoming elections. They highly valued the role played by the BINUH in assisting the Haitian government in political dialogue and constitutional reform, and asked the international community and countries to continue support for the country in addressing current challenges. Established in 2019, the BINUH is responsible for advising the Government of Haiti in promoting and enhancing political stability as well as many other areas. The UNSC holds regular meetings every 4 months to hear reports on the offices operation./.VNA Queenslands borders will close to New Zealand travellers on Wednesday night as escalating COVID-19 cases in New Zealand meant it lost its status as a safe travel country. State Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young said all travellers from New Zealand arriving at Queensland airports from 6pm would need to complete quarantine. All travellers from New Zealand arriving in Queensland from 6pm on Wednesday must complete quarantine. Credit:Tertius Pickard Two new COVID-19 cases in New Zealand were confirmed on Wednesday morning, while five cases were reported on Tuesday. New Zealand Health has reported more than 50 cases at its border and 11 in the community. Kollam : Feb 24 (IANS) Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala on Wednesday demanded the resignation of Kerala Fisheries Minister J. Mercykutty over the now cancelled deep sea fishing project. Speaking to the media here, Chennithala said the conspiracy to sell the Kerala seas was a decision taken by Mercykutty, State Industries Minister E.P.Jayarajan with the blessings of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. "The key conspirator in this flawed deal was led by Mercykutty and, hence she has to resign as she was the one who first started talks with the US company way back in 2018 during her US visit. Later, she took the top officials of this US firm to meet with Vijayan and that was how this entire deal, which if had materialised would have finished off the livelihood of our fisher folks," said Chennithala. The US headquartered EMCC, which has an Indian partner, was the company which had entered into an MoU with Kerala Shipping and Inland Navigation Corporation for making 400 trawlers and five big ships. This company also was given a four acre plot of land by Jayarajan's industries department. "We are told that the MoU has been cancelled but there is no word about cancelling the land that has been given to this company. We demand every deal be cancelled and a judicial probe be ordered as we have no faith in the probe by senior bureaucrat --T.K.Jose. His report will not be credible as the key villains include two State Ministers and Vijayan," said Chennithala. Chennithala also pointed out that they are launching a series of protests to press their demands which includes a day-long protest on Thursday at Poonthura -- a coastal hamlet in the capital district which would be led by him. "Two coastal rallies, one led by former Minister Shibhu Baby John will pass through all the coastal constituencies from Thiruvananthapuram to Ernakulam, while another one led by Congress MP, T.N. Prathapan will start from Kasargode and both these rallies will reach Ernakulam on March 7," added Chennithala. Chennithala said had he not voiced his concerns over this flawed project, the Vijayan government would have gone forward and would have finished off the fisheries sector as this is nothing but big cheating of the hapless fisher folk. "We will provide our full support to the coastal 'hartal' called by the fisher folk and boat owners on Saturday against this project," added Chennithala. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. There must be something in the Coalitions DNA which impels it to make life more difficult for the poor and vulnerable. John Truman, St Leonards MPs revolt is just the beginning for PM It seems more than convenient that Craig Kelly can now be free from the constraints of Liberal restriction of comment on COVID issues, and the Liberals can take assurance that they wont be able to pass carbon legislation during his remaining tenure without his vote (Kelly: Ill stymie emissions target, February 24). How good is that? A new opportunity to do nothing and wring their hands in faux horror. No wonder the PM is in no hurry to call an election. Ashley Collard, Fairlight Kelly has vowed to block any policy the government did not take to the last election. It seems to me that he will have free reign because as hard as I try, I cannot recall any policy announced by the Coalition at the last election. It was merely an election to remove Bill Shorten and his franking credits policy. Sue Wilson, Mosman There should be a law passed to stop MPs like Kelly, who change their allegiance during a government term, from having any further influence until they have been properly and fairly re-elected. Elizabeth Kroon, Randwick Although Kelly is the black sheep of the family, others are likely to follow (Exit opens up room for PMs other headaches, February 24). Riding on the back of the success of the vaccine rollout may not be enough to get the Morrison government over the line. The sheep are restless and getting ready to jump the fence. Beware of over-confidence, PM. Chris Moe, Bensville Illustration: Matt Golding Credit: I congratulate Kelly for his conviction and principle and the step he has taken. Democracy allows for group-think, faux outrage, opportune lip-service, sameness, uncritical and lazy thinking . Lets entertain all views, not stultifying censorship from people who never had to fight for, or are indeed fighting against, ideas, alternatives, generosity of thought and expression. Garrett Naumann, Cammeray Congratulations to Kelly for having the guts to leave the Liberal Party because of his ideals. Others should also leave the Liberal Party because of their continuing hurtful responses to the unemployed, women, asylum seekers, refugees, climate change, energy and environment, and poor support of the ABC. Howard Clark, Ryde I propose that we now refer to Craig Kelly MP as the Independent from Reality. Neil Ormerod, Kingsgrove With role models like Sir Winston Churchill and Sir Robert Menzies, what could possibly go wrong for Craig Kelly? Vicky Marquis, Glebe Thanks, Tim Overland (Letters, February 24). I wonder how many other readers looked up their dictionaries to see why Kelly was an ultracrepidarian. Victor Marshall, Meander (TAS) Joy in lessons of lifelong learning What a joy. Not one, but two stories of remarkable women in their late 80s in the Herald. Ruth Wilson and Pat McDonald not only embody of benefits of lifelong learning in their very diverse fields but also passionately promote the virtues of education for others. They are wonderful role models for us all (A Ruth universally acknowledged and Teacher loved her work so much she left it $7 million, February 24). Anne Ring, Coogee I remember Patricia McDonald clearly from our monthly excursions to the Australian Museum from Woollahra Public School in 1954. She was a warm, inspiring, encouraging (and always meticulously prepared) guide not just to the Museum and its collections but to the entire fields of knowledge that found a place there. I have lived an entire lifetime on the educational and intellectual capital that was formed on those visits. I have often thought of her and her influence on me over the years, and am heartened to know that she has made an enduring mark there at College Street. Not uncharacteristially, she had to make it herself, by her own generosity and thoughtfulness. Clive Kessler, Randwick Female principals Dr Briony Scott writes passionately about sexual assault and how young people learn by watching (Our passive attitude must change, February 24). At the root of the scourge of sexual assault lies power; the wanting of power and the wielding of power. Scott cites Trump. His words were when you are a star ... you can do anything. A scan of a dozen boys school websites revealed not one woman as principal, surely the role providing the key early example of power to our children. Until no one blinks at the prospect of a woman leading an elite boys school, I suspect those schools will continue to turn out young men who will strut the streets, and the corridors of power, with an ingrained view of who is running the show. Time to move schools, Dr Scott? Elyse Sainty, North Sydney Unhealthy delegation The federal minister for health should enlighten all Australians about how the vaccine rollout in the aged care sector is being funded and monitored across the country by the Coalition government (Doctor stood down after administering incorrect dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to aged care residents, smh.com.au, February 24 ). The website for the company involved in the adverse administration of the vaccine to aged care residents in Queensland is a workforce recruitment and training agency whose website claims it has been appointed to support the vaccination rollout across the nation . Its advertising makes much of its refresher and upskilling courses for healthcare personnel and its surge staffing capacity for the aged care sector. Hopefully the almost invisible minister for aged care is busy behind the scenes asking some hard questions of all those contracted to deliver this national vaccination program to aged care recipients. Sue Dyer, Downer (ACT) Our meek ambition Ross Garnauts ambition and optimism is a wake-up call in a political landscape dominated by fear and quiet Australians (A vision to lift the nation, February 24). We used to be a country that celebrated youth and bright futures and punching above our weight. Now we look nervously around to see which country we should meekly follow next. Nowhere is this more evident than in our climate policy. We have some of the best wind and solar resources of any country on the planet, yet we nervously prolong our coal heavy grid and our emissions intensive vehicles. We could be the leaders of the clean technology transition if we had the ambition and forward thinking to take the initiative. Emma Storey, Campsie Ross Gittins and Garnaut are correct. However, in order for our nation to have a sustainable economic growth and a fair distribution of wealth we must ensure our politicians act for the people and not just for themselves. We need a PM who can lead us out of the rampant pork barrelling, nepotism, corruption and remove the so-called political donation. We may then have a chance. Paul Lau, Dolls Point Train of thought Investment in more frequent passenger trains in the busiest parts of greater Sydney is most welcome and will bring multiple benefits, not just for those who use the services (Many peak-hour train services get 80 per cent boost under $1b revamp, February 24). Looking beyond the metropolitan area to regional NSW where new passenger trains are also planned, wouldnt it be the right time to consider providing Moree, Tamworth, Armidale, Orange, Dubbo, Parkes, Condobolin, Broken Hill and Griffith with more than one train per day? Then there are significant regional centres to be considered such as Lismore and Mudgee which have lost their passenger train services completely. Perhaps its time for regional rail growth to suit the age of lockdown-inspired migration out of the big cities and to attract workers to bring in the crops. Matthew Tierney, Armidale Cognitive dissonance The Government insists teachers use evidence-based practice in classrooms but it wants to move away from evidence-based practice with the proposed introduction of the new NDIS assessment system (Plans to change NDIS may leave many without care, February 23). It suggests a complete lack of understanding of disability, especially that of cognitive disabilities. The hypocrisy and lack of accountability is astounding. I wonder if it is a ploy to reduce the number of people getting NDIS support? Laura Beaupeurt, Callala Bay Tin ear for Zappa Of all the words one could use to describe Frank Zappas music, I doubt whether anyone familiar with it would choose jangly (Joke or genius? Zappa doco doesnt quite pierce the veil , February 24). In the pop music lexicon that word is usually reserved for the guitar sound made famous by The Byrds. And fussy? Can music itself be fussy? Certainly it can be unashamedly complex, and Zappa was famously and justifiably fussy about how it should be performed. As for tuneless, a word commonly employed to disparage otherwise interesting and challenging music that doesnt necessarily have a jolly sing-along chorus, I would suggest that some of Zappas tuneless music was deliberately so, in the spirit of the sixties exploration of atonality. Peter Dasent, Bondi Using your loaf The bread we had delivered had a seam down the middle that could be pulled apart easily, resulting in a silky soft surface on each half loaf that we called the kissing crust (Letters, February 24). Elizabeth Maher, Bangor Ive never heard of the bakers kiss. In our family it was called the dopey. Anyone else heard of it or were we the only dopey family? Clive Williams, Lavender Bay In the late 50s I assisted our bread delivery man, who drove a van. Before I started work, he would break a loaf of warm bread in half and we both then ate a handful of fresh bread from the loaf. During deliveries more handfuls were consumed. It was not unusual to deliver a half loaf with an order or as a single purchase. Ian Torrance, Dunlop ACT Half a loaf was sufficient for our family, broken before our eyes. On a good day we would get the soft, convex end which for some reason we called the trouser piece. David Booth, Stuarts Point My mother asked me to hold the half loaf of warm bread while she chatted to the baker behind his cart. She was furious finding I had eaten all of the inside of the warm soft bread. Richard Stewart, Pearl Beach Boorowa buff Results of the capital increase with shareholders' preferential subscription right of approximately EUR 50 million in accordance with Europcar Mobility Group's accelerated financial safeguard plan and as part of Europcar Mobility Group's financial restructuring transactions Not to be published, distributed or circulated directly or indirectly in the United States, Australia or Japan. This press release is an advertisement and not a prospectus within the meaning of Regulation (EU) 2017/1129 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 June 2017. Regulatory News: Europcar Mobility Group (Paris:EUCAR) (the "Company") announces today the results of its capital increase with preferential subscription rights ("Preferential Subscription Right") of the shareholders for a gross amount, including issue premium, of EUR 50,104,964.79 through the issuance of 263,710,341 new shares (the "New Shares") at a unit price of EUR 0,19 per new share (i.e. EUR 0.01 nominal value and EUR 0.18 issue premium per new share) (the "Capital Increase with Preferential Subscription Right This transaction was launched on February 4, 2021 and is part of the Company's accelerated financial safeguard plan approved on January 7, 2021 by the Company's committee of banks and financial institutions and the general meeting of bondholders, reviewed by the Paris Commercial Court on January 25, 2021 and approved by the Paris Commercial Court on February 3, 2021 (the "Safeguard Plan Following the subscription period which ended on February 19, 2021, the total demand amounted to 529,416,994 shares, i.e. a subscription rate of 200.76%. The number of New Shares subscribed on an irreducible basis (a titre irreductible) concerned 244,076,242 New Shares. The demand on a reducible basis (a titre reductible) concerned 285,340,752 New Shares and will be consequently partially satisfied up to 19,634,099 New Shares. The allocation scale of the subscriptions on a reducible basis (a titre reductible) is joint as an Appendix to this press release. It is furthermore reminded that the Safeguard Plan also provides for the issuance of new shares: (A) in the context of (i) the capital increase with waiver of the shareholders' preferential subscription rights in favor the noteholders that have committed to subscribe during the open period in accordance with the Lock-Up Agreement (or any assignee of such subscription rights) and the Backstopping Noteholders, to an amount of EUR 199,999,997.921, at the unit price of EUR 0.19 per share, to be subscribed for in cash through a cash payment through the issuance of 1,052,631,5681 new shares (the "Reserved Capital Increase #1"), (ii) the capital increase with waiver of the shareholders' preferential subscription right in favor of the Noteholders (as this term is defined in the Prospectus), in proportion to their Note Claims (as this term is defined in the Prospectus), on the reference date, to an amount of EUR 1,083,406,220.382, at a unit price of EUR 0.38, to be subscribed by way of set-off against the amount of liquid and payable debts held by the Noteholders, on the reference date through the issuance of 2,851,069,0012 new shares (the "Reserved Capital Increase #2") and (iii) the capital increase with waiver of the shareholders' preferential subscription right in favor of the CS Lenders (as this term is defined in the Prospectus), in proportion to their CS Debts (as this term is defined in the Prospectus), at the reference date, to an amount of EUR 50,397,304.683, at a unit price of EUR 0.38, to be subscribed by way of sett-off against the total amount of the liquid and payable CS Debts held by the CS Lenders on the reference date through the issuance of 132,624,4863 new shares (the "Reserved Capital Increase #3", together with the Reserved Capital Increase #1 and the Reserved Capital Increase #2, the "Reserved Capital Increases and (B) upon exercise of (i) 401,251,2144 warrants granted for free to the Backstopping Noteholders (in counterparty for their Backstop Commitments (as this term is defined in the Prospectus)) giving the right to subscribe to a maximum number of 401,251,2144 new shares at a price of EUR 0.01 per new share (without issue premium) (the "Backstop Warrants"), (ii) 75,234,6024 warrants granted for free to the RCF Lenders (as this term is defined in the Prospectus), the Noteholders and the Backstopping Noteholders who have effectively participated in the Refinancing of the RCF (as this term is defined in the Prospectus) in counterparty for their effective participation in the New Senior Credit Facilities (as this term is defined in the Prospectus) giving the right to subscribe to a maximum number of 75,234,6024 new shares at a price of EUR 0.01 per new share (without issue premium) (the "Participation Warrants"), and (iii) 75,234,6024 warrants granted for free to the Members of the Coordination Committee (in counterparty for their time and efforts in the negotiation and structuring of the Financial Restructuring (as this term is defined in the Prospectus) as well as for their overall coordination role in the context of the Financial Restructuring) giving the right to subscribe to a maximum number of 75,234,6024 new shares at a price of EUR 0.01 per new share (without issue premium) (the "Coordination Warrants", together with the Backstop Warrants and the Participation Warrants, the "Warrants Settlement-delivery The settlement-delivery and admission to trading of the New Shares on the regulated market of Euronext Paris ("Euronext Paris") is scheduled for February 26, 2021. The New Shares will be immediately assimilated to the existing shares of the Company and will be traded on the same quotation line under the same ISIN code FR0012789949. Concurrently with the settlement and delivery of the New Shares, the Company will also proceed with: the settlement and delivery of 4,036,325,055 shares to be issued as part of the Reserved Capital Increases. These shares will be immediately assimilated to the existing shares of the Company and will be traded on the same quotation line under the same ISIN code FR0012789949; the delivery to the Backstopping Noteholders of 401,251,214 Backstop Warrants. The Backstop Warrants will be admitted to trading on Euronext Paris as from February 26, 2021 under the ISIN code FR0014001HB5; the delivery to the Noteholders and the Backstopping Noteholders who have effectively participated in the Refinancing of the RCF of 75,234,602 Participation Warrants. The Participation Warrants will be admitted to trading on Euronext Paris as from February 26, 2021 under the ISIN code FR0014001HC3; the delivery to the Members of the Coordination Committee of 75,234,602 Coordination Warrants. The Coordination Warrants will be admitted to trading on Euronext Paris as from February 26, 2021 under the ISIN code FR0014001HD1. The Company appointed today the company Massquote, Societe par Actions Simplifiee Unipersonnelle having its registered office at 7 bis rue de Neuilly, F-92110 Clichy, registered with the Registre du Commerce et des Societes de Nanterre under number 529 065 880, represented by its Chairman, as a representative of (i) the Backstop Warrants mass, (ii) the Participation Warrants mass and (iii) the Coordination Warrants mass. A further press release from the Company will be published following the completion of the above settlement and delivery operations. Credit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank and Societe Generale acted as Global Coordinators and Joint Bookrunners in respect with the Capital Increase with Preferential Subscription Right. Impact of issues on the situation of a shareholder Share of capital (in %) Before issuance of the new shares relating to the Reserved Capital Increases, allocation of the Warrants and issuance of the New Shares as part of the Capital Increase with Preferential Subscription Right 1.00 After issuance of 4,588,045,473 new shares relating to the Reserved Capital Increases and the exercise of all the Warrants 0.03 After issuance of 4,851,755,814 new shares relating to the Reserved Capital Increase, the exercise of all Warrants and the Capital Increase with Preferential Subscription Right (considering the absence of subscription to the Capital Increase with Preferential Subscription Right by the existing shareholders) 0.03 After issuance of 4,851,755,814 new shares relating to the Reserved Capital Increases, the exercise of all Warrants and the Capital Increase with Preferential Subscription Right (considering a 100 subscription to the Capital Increase with Preferential Subscription Right by the existing shareholders) 0.09 Calculations based on the number of shares comprising the Company's share capital on December 31, 2020 (163,884,278) Public Information The issuance of the New Shares as well as their admission to trading on Euronext Paris was the subject of a prospectus (the "Prospectus") composed of (i) the Company's Universal Registration Document filed with the AMF on May 6, 2020 under number D.20-0448 (the "2019 URD"), (ii) the amendment to the 2019 URD filed with the AMF on January 12, 2021 under number D.20-0448-A01 (the "Amendment") and (iii) an offering circular (including the summary of the prospectus) having received approval number 21-027 from the AMF on February 4, 2021 (the "Offering Circular"). The Prospectus is available on the AMF website (www.amf-france.org) and on the company's website (https://investors.europcar-group.com/fr). The Company is drawing the public's attention on the risk factors described in the Chapter 2 of the Amendment and Section 2 of the Offering Circular. Approval of the Prospectus by the AMF should not be considered as a favorable opinion on the securities offered or admitted to trading on a regulated market. Disclaimer This press release and the information it contains do not constitute an offer to sell or subscribe, or a solicitation of an order to buy or subscribe, Europcar Mobility Group securities. The dissemination, publication or distribution of this press release in certain countries may constitute a violation of applicable laws and regulations. Accordingly, persons who are physically present in such countries and in which this press release is disseminated, distributed or published should inform themselves of and comply with any such local restrictions. This press release is not an advertisement and does not constitute a prospectus within the meaning of Regulation 2017/1129 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 June 2017 on the prospectus to be published when securities are offered to the public or admitted to trading on a regulated market and repealing the Prospectus Directive 2003/71/EC (as amended the "Prospectus Regulation"). The information in this press release is provided for informational purposes only and does not purport to be comprehensive and no person shall rely in any manner whatsoever on the information contained herein or its accuracy, precision or completeness. Any purchase of securities must be made solely based on the information contained in the Prospectus approved by the AMF and published on the Company's and the AMF's respective websites. Potential investors are invited to read the prospectus before making an investment decision in order to fully understand the potential risks and benefits associated with the decision to invest in the securities. The approval of the prospectus by the AMF should not be understood as an endorsement of the securities offered or admitted to trading on a regulated market. European Economic Area and United Kingdom With respect to the planned admission to the regulated market of Euronext in Paris and with respect to the member States of the European Economic Area other than France and the United Kingdom (each, a "Relevant State"), no action has been or will be taken to allow a public offering of securities requiring the publication of a prospectus in any of the Relevant States. Consequently, any offer of Europcar Mobility Group's securities may only be made in any of the Relevant States (i) to qualified investors within the meaning of the Prospectus Regulation, for any investor in a Member State of the European Economic Area, or Regulation (EU) 2017/1129 as part of national law under the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (the "UK Prospectus Regulation"), for any investor in the United Kingdom, (ii) to fewer than 150 individuals or legal entities (other than qualified investors as defined in the Prospectus Regulation or the UK Prospectus Regulation, as the case may be), or (iii) in any other case exempting Europcar Mobility Group from publishing a prospectus in accordance with Article 1(4) of the Prospectus Regulation or the UK Prospectus Regulation, as the case may be. United Kingdom This press release does not constitute a public offering of securities in the United Kingdom. Consequently, this press release is only being distributed to, and is only directed at, persons in the United Kingdom that (i) are "investment professionals" falling within Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (as amended, the "Order"), (ii) are persons falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) ("high net worth companies, unincorporated associations, etc.") of the Order, or (iii) are persons to whom this press release could legally be addressed (the persons mentioned under (i), (ii) and (iii) together the "Relevant Persons"). Any investment or investment activity to which this document relates is available only to Relevant Persons and will be engaged in only with Relevant Persons. Any person who is not a Relevant Person should not act or rely on this document or any of its contents. United States This press release does not constitute sale offer for Europcar Mobility Group shares in the United States or in any other jurisdiction, Europcar Mobility Group shares may not be offered, sold, exercised or delivered in the United States absent registration or an exemption from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"). Europcar Mobility Group does not intend to register any portion of the offering in the United States or to conduct a public offering of any securities in the United States; and Europcar Mobility Group's securities have not been, and will not be, registered under the Securities Act. This press release does not contain or constitute an offer or invitation to purchase any securities in France, the United States or any other jurisdiction. Forward-looking statements This press release includes forward-looking statements based on current beliefs and expectations about future events. Such forward-looking statements may include projections and estimates and their underlying assumptions, statements regarding plans, objectives, intentions and/or expectations with respect to future financial results, events, operations and services and product development, as well as statements, regarding performance or events. Forward-looking statements are generally identified by the words "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "plans", "projects", "may", "would", "should" or the negative of these terms and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to inherent risks, uncertainties and assumptions about Europcar Mobility Group and its subsidiaries and investments, trends in their business, future capital expenditures and acquisitions, developments in respect of contingent liabilities, changes in economic conditions globally or in Europcar Mobility Group's principal markets, competitive conditions in the market and regulatory factors. Those events are uncertain; their outcome may differ from current expectations which may in turn materially affect expected results. Actual results may differ materially from those projected or implied in these forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statement contained in this press release is made as of the date of this press release. Other than as required by applicable law, Europcar Mobility Group does not undertake to revise or update any forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. The results and the Group's performance may also be affected by various risks and uncertainties, including without limitation, risks identified in the "Risk factors" of the Universal Registration Document registered by the Autorite des marches financiers on May 6, 2020 and also available on the Group's website: www.europcar-mobility-group.com. About Europcar Mobility Group Europcar Mobility Group is a major player in mobility markets and listed on Euronext Paris. The mission of Europcar Mobility Group is to be the preferred "Mobility Service Company" by offering attractive alternatives to vehicle ownership, with a wide range of mobility-related services and solutions: car rental and light commercial vehicle rental, chauffeur services, car-sharing and private hire vehicle (PHV rental to "Uber like" chauffeurs). Customers' satisfaction is at the heart of the Group's mission and all of its employees and this commitment fuels the continuous development of new services. Europcar Mobility Group operates through a diversified portfolio of brands meeting every customer specific needs and use cases, be it for 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week or longer; its 4 major brands being: Europcar the European leader of car rental and light commercial vehicle rental, Goldcar the low-cost car-rental Leader in Europe, InterRent 'mid-tier' car rental and Ubeeqo one of the European leaders of round-trip car-sharing (BtoB, BtoC). Europcar Mobility Group delivers its mobility solutions worldwide solutions through an extensive network in over 140 countries (including wholly owned subsidiaries 18 in Europe, 1 in the USA, 2 in Australia and New Zealand completed by franchises and partners). Further details on our website: www.europcar-mobility-group.com ____________________________ 1 The definitive amount of the Reserved Capital Increase #1, as well as the definitive number of new shares to be issued, have been amended in comparison with the press release published by the Company on February 4, 2021 in order to take into account the existence of fractional shares (rompus 2 The definitive amount of the Reserved Capital Increase #2, as well as the definitive number of new shares to be issued, have been amended in comparison with the press release published by the Company on February 4, 2021 in order to take into account the existence of fractional shares (rompus 3 The definitive amount of the Reserved Capital Increase #3, as well as the definitive number of new shares to be issued, have been amended in comparison with the press release published by the Company on February 4, 2021 in order to take into account the definitive amount of the interests owed by the Company with respect to the CS Loan (as this term is defined in the Prospectus) to take into account in the amount of the CS Debts, and the existence of fractional shares (rompus 4 The definitive number of the Backstop Warrants, Participation Warrants and Coordination Warrants, as well as the definitive number of new shares to which the Backstop Warrants, Participation Warrants and Coordination Warrants give right to subscribe, have been amended in comparison with the press release published by the Company on February 4, 2021 in order to take into account the definitive number of new ordinary shares to be issued in the Reserved Capital Increases. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005841/en/ Contacts: Europcar Mobility Group Investor Relations Caroline Cohen caroline.cohen@europcar.com Press relations Valerie Sauteret valerie.sauteret@europcar.com Vincent Vevaud vincent.vevaud@europcar.com Publicis Consultants Judith Grancoing judith.grancoing@publicisconsultants.com Mumbai, Feb 24 : Actress Urvashi Rautela on Wednesday posted a thank-you note for UFC fighter Khabib Nurmagomedov, for taking out time to attend her pre-birthday bash. Urvashi celebrates her birthday on February 25. "Thanks a billion for this epic birthday surprise to my dear friend Khabib Nurmagomedov and my brother Yashraj Rautela. I just wanna say to Khabib that you are the epitome of dominance and you are the Dagestani mauler. I'd like to thank your father Mr. Abdulmanap, for raising a person like you. Everyone knows that you are the first Muslim to win a UFC title and the biggest Russian athlete worldwide. All I wanna say is that you are the biggest fighter in the history of UFC, so thank you so much for making my day super special and this is the best birthday present. Thank you," Urvashi wrote. The actress is currently shooting for the upcoming web series Inspector Avinash, starring Randeep Hooda. She also has an international project with Egyptian actor Mohamad Ramadan besides the bilingual thriller Black Rose and a Hindi remake of the Tamil hit, Thirutu Payale 2. Melinda Messenger has revealed she's considering to pay thousands in a bid to find a partner. In a new interview, the former glamour model, who turned 50 on Tuesday, declared she'd 'love to meet somebody', nearly two years after splitting from her First Dates boyfriend Chris Harding following an eight-month relationship. The Page Three icon explained she's open to embarking on her quest for love with exclusive dating agency Sara Eden Introductions, which is said to charge up to 25,000 for memberships. 'I'm just starting to think it would be quite nice to date': Melinda Messenger has revealed she's considering to pay thousands in a bid to find a partner On being open to romance, the former Cowboy Builders star told OK! magazine: 'I'm just starting to think it would be quite nice to date. 'I would love to meet somebody but I'm quite shy so I would never make the first move.' Sara Eden embraced the mother-of-three's plans as they tweeted: 'Thanks to the lovely @melindamessnger for the shout out in @OK_Magazine what a lovely new @SEIntro member she would be! #celebrity #dating #love.' (sic) Melinda shares Morgan, 20, Flynn, 19, and Evie, 17, with Welshman Wayne Roberts, whom she was married to from 1998 until 2012. Ready for something new: The model, who turned 50 on Tuesday, declared she'd 'love to meet somebody', two years after splitting from her First Dates boyfriend Chris Harding (pictured) Pricey! The Page Three icon explained she's open to embarking on her quest for love with dating agency Sara Eden Introductions, said to charge up to 25,000 for memberships 'What a lovely new member she would be!' Sara Eden embraced the mother-of-three's plans in a recent tweet The media personality went on to date coffee shop owner Chris in 2018, but called it quits following a 'row'. A source told The Sun at the time: 'Melinda was talking marriage, then they had one row and split. 'She apparently behaved appallingly and considering shes training as therapist and setting herself up as a dating expert its all a bit strange.' The blonde previously told how her children encouraged her to try out dating apps, but she hasn't taken the plunge yet as she needs to get over her fear of dating. The presenter insisted she and her ex-husband Wayne have a good relationship, with the kids visiting him regularly at his home in Devon before the coronavirus lockdown. The host previously detailed her struggle with other people's perception of her before retraining as a psychotherapist 10 years ago. Although Melinda's TV career was still thriving at the time, the broadcaster admitted she would have regretted it if she hadn't pursued her dream. Speaking on Loose Women, she shared at the time: 'In 2010, I started retraining. I thought, I have children, I have bills to pay. I was working in television and there was no sign of that letting up. Former lover: The blonde parted ways from ex-husband Wayne Roberts in 2012 following a 14-year on-off marriage (pictured in 2009) 'I thought, I can carry on doing what I'm doing but how painful would that regret be? I made the decision to go for it and I've been practising for the last five years and I can tell you, it's the best thing I've ever done. 'It's a big leap. Psychologically, you have all these dependencies and that fear of change is huge. 'I hadn't started my own therapy before the training. As far back as I can remember, I remember being around seven and thinking I wanted to be a psychiatrist. 'My mum said oh no you'd have to go to university, you can't do that. We take in these ideas of what we can and can't do. 'When you start challenging those things, you notice that your life around you changes and those ideas you took as truths are actually not. A lot of it is an internal struggle. You can feel trapped by other people's ideas of you. 'That can be an internal struggle. But if you know that's just a perception and not the truth, it's still a challenge not to be held back by that but you can still keep going forward. People will have ideas. The challenge is not to let that stop you.' The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company White House press secretary Jen Psaki speaks during a news briefing at the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington on Feb. 23, 2021. (Alex Wong/Getty Images) US to Take Action on Russias Alleged Hacking, Poisoning in Weeks Not Months, White House Says The Biden administration will take executive action to respond to Russias alleged involvement in the Solar Winds hack and the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny within weeks, according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki. We have asked the intelligence community to do further work to sharpen the attribution that the previous administration made about precisely how the hack occurred, what the extent of the damage is, and what the scope and scale of the intrusion is. And were still in the process of working that through now, Psaki said. But it will be weeks, not months, before we respond. Psaki did not definitively confirm the executive action, telling reporters at the White House that she is not going to get ahead of the conclusion of that process. Of course, we want to focus on giving our team the time they need to take additional steps to fine-tune the attribution. And we reserve the right to respond at a time and a manner of our choosing, she added. U.S. authorities assessed in January that Moscow is likely behind the Solar Winds hack. Russia denies all involvement. Anne Neuberger, the White House official leading the intelligence communitys review of the Solar Winds hack, told reporters on Feb. 17 that the Biden administration is preparing an executive action to address the gaps identified in the review. Neuberger said talks are underway on how to respond to Russia. I know some of you will want to know what kind of options are being contemplated. What I will share with you is how I frame this in my own mind. This isnt the only case of malicious cyber activity of likely Russian origin, either for us or for our allies and partners. So as we contemplate future response options, were considering holistically what those activities were, Neuberger said. The hack compromised nine federal agencies and 100 private sector companies, Neuberger said. The revelation of the timeline of the potential executive action comes as the Biden administration is facing criticism over the lack of new sanctions against Russia over its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. Lawmakers argue the project is a gift to the Kremlin with devastating implications for U.S. national security and for the energy security of its European allies. Psaki has said that President Joe Biden believes that the pipeline is a bad deal for Europe. The benchmark indices rallied on Wednesday after a technical glitch halted trading for several hours on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) and forced the exchanges to extend trading hours. The Sensex ended 1,030 points, or 2.07 per cent, higher at 50,781, while the Nifty50 index gained 274 points, or 1.86 per cent, to end the session at 14,982. This is the Sensexs largest gain since February 2. The 30-share index had dropped to an intra-day low of 49,649 due to a sharp decline in blue-chip stocks such as TCS and ITC. Market players attributed the surge in the market to short-covering and squaring off of open trades. Several orders created on NSE had to be squared off on the BSE as the former had not provided any clarity on when trading would resume. Market players said this triggered hurried squaring off, resulting in potential losses for several investors. ALSO READ: Natural gas under GST regime likely to benefit tile manufacturers For instance, shares of TCS plunged as much as 9.4 per cent ahead of the close of normal trading hours. Both NSE and BSE extended the trading hours till 5 pm to help investors with open positions. However, the announcement on extension of trade came only at 3.20 pm, and by then many had already squared off their cash market intra-day positions. Due to the weakness in the previous few sessions, several traders had built up short positions anticipating declines. However, as trading resumed, investors had only a few hours to cover their shorts. With Thursday being the derivative expiry day, we saw a lot of short covering, which pushed higher, said Chandan Taparia, derivatives and technical analyst, Motilal Oswal Financial Services. Navneet Dagga, lead derivatives analyst institutional equities, YES Securities, said, Due to the weakness in the market, there was an excessive amount of call writing. Many algorithms got triggered as there was a significant amount of open interest both from Bank Nifty and Nifty on the upper strike call options. The open interest halved in the last hour. Basically, a lot of call writers got trapped, as they had to cover the position on the upside. Market players said stock prices were also boosted by positive global cues. European traded about a per cent higher on the back of encouraging outlook from the US Federal Reserve and promising economic data. More than two-thirds of Sensex components ended the session with gains. HDFC Bank was the best-performing stock and rose 5.04 per cent, Axis Bank and ICICI Bank rose 4.6 per cent and 4.1 per cent, respectively. All the BSE sectoral indices, barring two, ended the session with gains. Banking and finance stocks gained the most, and their gauges rose 3.7 and 3.3 per cent, respectively. Hyderabad, Feb 24 : An interesting battle is on cards in the next month's elections to two seats of the Telangana Legislative Council from graduates' constituencies as the ruling TRS faces an acid test. The resurgence of the BJP following its recent victories and entry of two prominent academics in the fray has made the MLC polls an uphill task for the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS). Though the number of graduates eligible to vote in Hyderabad-Rangareddy-Mahabubnagar and Warangal-Khammam-Nalgonda constituencies are around 10 lakh, the fact that they cover 75 out of 119 Assembly constituencies make the poll battle significant. While the result will have no bearing on the numbers in upper house of the state legislature, where the TRS continues to enjoy overwhelming majority, political observers say the outcome will indicate the mood of voters ahead of 2023 Assembly elections. The outcome may also an impact on ensuing elections to Warangal and Khammam Municipal Corporations and bypolls to Nagarjuna Sagar Assembly constituency. The TRS, which has never won Hyderabad-Rangareddy-Mahabubnagar seat, tried to upset the calculations of the opposition by fielding former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao's daughter S. Vani Devi. This is seen as another attempt by Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao to appropriate the legacy of Narasimha Rao, the only Telugu to occupy the country's top post. The BJP, which is aiming to retain the seat, has once again fielded N. Ramchander Rao, a senior party leader and an advocate. The Congress too has fielded a formidable candidate in former minister and senior leader Chinna Reddy. In a surprise move Telugu Desam Party (TDP) state President L. Ramana has also entered the fray, apparently eyeing large chunk of graduates hailing from neighbouring Andhra Pradesh. However, the TRS and the BJP will be facing the toughest challenge from Professor N. Nageshwar Rao, who represented the seat twice in the past. He is once again contesting as an independent and is considered popular among voters, whose numbers have doubled to 5.17 lakh since the previous election. As many as 179 candidates have filed nominations for Hyderabad-Rangareddy-Mahabubnagar seat, which will be going to polls along with the other seat on March 14. Considering the significance of election, TRS working President K.T. Rama Rao is himself working on the party strategy. He has roped in ministers, MPs, MLAs, MLCs and other leaders to ensure the party's victory. As many as 41 Assembly constituencies come under Hyderabad-Rangareddy-Mahbubnagar seat. The TRS also faces a tough battle in retaining Warangal-Khammam-Nalgonda seat. It is once again fielding P. Rajeshwar Reddy. Upbeat over its victory in Dubbak Assembly by-election in November last year and impressive performance in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections a month later, the BJP is going all out to wrest the seat from the ruling party to once again demonstrate that it is the only viable alternative to the TRS. The BJP has already launched an aggressive campaign. Party's Telangana incharge Tarun Chugh also hit the campaign trail. On his maiden visit to the state, he told a public meeting that he would urge the Union Home Minister to order a probe into corruption charges against the TRS government. The BJP has fielded G. Premender Reddy from this seat while Ramulu Naik of Congress is trying his luck. The entry of Professor M. Kodandaram has made the poll battle interesting. Kodandaram had played an active role in Telangana statehood movement with Chandrasekhar Rao but parted ways after he was sidelined by the TRS following formation of Telangana as a separate state in 2014. A bitter critic of KCR's policies, he floated the Telangana Jana Samithi (TJS). Television show presenter C. Naveen Kumar, popularly known as Teenmaar Mallanna, has also entered as an independent. A record number of 78 candidates, many of them independents, are in the fray for Warangal-Khammam-Nalgonda Graduates' constituency. The CPI, the TDP, the AAP and several smaller parties have also fielded their candidates. The multi-cornered contest will make it difficult to predict the winner. A team of graduate students, representing the Faculty of Economic Sciences and Business Management (FSEGA) from the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca (UBB) has gone up the highest step during the global study contest hosted by the University of Calgary, Canada, thus obtaining the first place in the history of the faculty at an international contest of this type, in the field of economic science. According to a press release sent by UBB to AGERPRES on Wednesday, the team from Cluj-Napoca, formed of Borsos Andras (Corporate Financial Management, MBA, first year), Deak Peter (Business management, MBA, second year), Kelemen Kincso (Business Management, MBA, second year) and Sata Balint (Corporate Financial Management, MBA, first year) had an excellent performance during the global preliminary round, thus qualifying in the top 10 of the competition, thus winning the right of resolving a new case study in 24 hours for the Canada final competition. The competition's finale, dubbed EnergyBowl Case Competition 2021, took place on the 17th and 18th of February, within the 10th Annual Alberta Student Energy Conference event, held by the University of Calgary in Canada. During the final round, the team from Cluj-Napoca competed with college student teams, representing prestigious economic universities from Canada, China, India, Italy, Lebanon, the United Kingdom, Mexico, the Netherlands and Peru. The finalist teams had the topic of elaborating a strategy for cutting pollutants for the Canadian Cenovus oil company, proving the economic and ecological sustainability of the proposed solutions, the quoted source specifies. The solutions were presented in an online format to a jury composed of representatives of the company and specialists of the most important international business consultant companies. "Based on the jury's decision, the contest's global victory of 2021, was awarded by the Synergy Consulting team, representing UBB, who thus won the prize worth 2,000 dollars, as well as the right to present the solutions before the top management of the Cenovus company," the UBB representatives mention. The team from Cluj-Napoca was prepared by Professor Dr. Szasz Levente, Associate professor Dr. Gyorfy Lehel-Zoltan and Dr. Lector Racz Bela-Gergely. City police are seeking two male suspects for a violent attack in a downtown Portage Avenue bus shelter. A 19-year-old man and a 50-year-old woman remained in hospital in stable condition following a "serious assault with a weapon" Monday night inside a bus shelter outside Portage Place mall, Winnipeg Police Service spokeswoman Const. Dani McKinnon said Tuesday. Investigators with the major crimes unit are interviewing witnesses and will be reviewing security video in the area, McKinnon said. "At this stage, we dont know what precipitated the attack." Police said it was likely the assault victims were using the structure as a temporary shelter, and were not waiting for a bus. "In our experience, it has been one of the prime locations in the city where homeless people are using it as a temporary shelter," said WPS spokesman Const. Rob Carver. On Sunday, a woman died in hospital after emergency responders found her in medical distress at the same bus shelter. Police said the womans death was not considered suspicious. The freestanding, heated shelter replaced a larger structure attached to the mall that was demolished in July 2019, following years of complaints it was a hotbed for violence and drug dealing. The demolition came just days before an Alberta man was sentenced to 91/2 years in prison for an unprovoked, meth-fuelled attack in the bus shelter on a 17-year-old international student. Joshua Zachary Snakeskin had been released from Stony Mountain Institution just four days before the Jan. 23, 2018 attack. The victim had been in Canada less than a month. Police would not confirm whether the new structure has been the source of more or less service calls, compared to other bus shelters in the city. "Overall, there has been a lot of stories on the bus shelters and different opinions as to what has caused an increased amount of people in the shelters," McKinnon said. "We arent going to comment that this particular bus shelter is a hot spot. "Its in the middle of downtown... It attracts a lot of attention, a lot of passing public, both using the bus and seemingly not using the bus." McKinnon said demolition of the old attached bus shelter appears to have redistributed the number of people who used to gather there. "I think there has been changes both for the positive and the negative," she said. "Overall, that was a larger area of congregation... and now perhaps people have resorted to dotting themselves in individual shelters along the way." Standing outside the shopping centre Tuesday afternoon, Emily Pilon said she tries to avoid downtown as much as possible. "All the violence that goes down here, especially at night even a lot during the day, too I just try to keep my distance," Pilon, 22, said as city workers cleaned up blood and debris from inside the bus shelter. Pilon said since the arrival of the pandemic, she has avoided using the Transit stop structures. "With everything going on with COVID, especially in the cold, when no one has anywhere to go, the last resort is the bus shelters," she said. Lilian Groom said she sometimes ends up sleeping in bus shelters, and was not concerned about reports of violence. "When I go to sleep and wake up the same way, Im happy," she said. Groom said she uses the shelters to "relax in and get out of the cold," and sees more people doing the same. "You gotta do what you gotta do everybodys gotta stay secure, happy," she said. "To tell you the truth, Id invest in more homeless shelters to make sure they have more places (to go)." A Winnipeg Transit spokeswoman would not comment if the bus shelter was a trouble spot, and referred a Free Press reporter to city police. "With regard to people who are not using the bus congregating in shelters, Transit inspectors who come across such people assess the situation, provide information about emergency shelters that are open, and engage emergency responders if necessary to ensure safety," Megan Benedictson said in an email. dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca Irish renewable energy company NTR has purchased a 54-megawatt (MW) portfolio of solar and battery storage projects in county Wexford from renewable energy developer RES. The total costs for the projects amounts to around 29m. The portfolio is made up of two battery storage projects adding 25MW of storage capacity to the Irish grid network, along with 29MW of solar Photovoltaic (PV). Two of the solar projects were awarded 16-year CFD tariffs in the inaugural Irish renewable energy support scheme (RESS) auction and the battery storage projects will apply to provide grid services through the Irish DS3 grid services scheme. The portfolio of projects will enter operations next year. The mix of solar and battery storage brings much-needed diversity of renewables technology onto the Irish grid, particularly for lower wind days, according to Manus ODonnell, chief investment officer at NTR. Co-location of solar and battery projects can be particularly effective, as they can share grid connections and obtain economies of scale. In the future, they should be able to take further advantage of storing excess power produced on site and we expect to see more co-location of solar and battery storage throughout Europe, he said. The projects were acquired by the NTR Renewable Energy Income Fund II, a wind, solar and energy storage fund that operates across a number of European markets. RES, which has already built over 20 battery storage projects across Ireland, UK and the US, will build the battery projects for NTR. Once operational, RES will provide asset management and operation and maintenance services. This latest acquisition brings the renewable energy assets under management by NTR on behalf of its current two funds to over 600MW of generation and battery storage projects located throughout Ireland, France, Sweden, Finland and the UK. The company, which has almost 40 years of experience in investing in and managing infrastructure assets, said it is investing hundreds of millions into the European energy transition market across Ireland, France, UK and the Nordics. 's Brian Larkin ( ) talks through the latest results from the preliminary test results from the ASH-3 development well, at the Abu Sennan project, which beat expectations. Larkin explains what the numbers mean after the ASH-3 well showed a maximum rate of 7,720 barrels oil equivalent per day, comprising 6,379 barrels of oil per day and 6.7mln cubic feet per day, from the Alam El Bueib ("AEB") reservoir during well-testing. Currently 'on a choke', to maintain the project 'properly and sensibly', Larkin says Egypt is the 'the gift that keeps on giving' after what he describes as an 'incredible result'. Fred Bost, a longtime community organizer and local politician died Sunday, at 82, family told NJ Advance Media. He was the first Black councilman in Irvington, according to the township, where his two terms came twenty years apart one beginning in 1980, the other in 2000. Wednesday, Irvington mayor Tony Vauss called Bost a local pioneer. He was sort of the trailblazer of Black elected officials here in this community, Vauss said. From his youth, Bost was involved in social activism, attending the 1963 March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous I Have A Dream speech, according to family. Bost was born on March 12, 1938 in Monroe, North Carolina. He was the youngest of 11 siblings. After graduating from high school in Washington D.C., he moved to Detroit with his siblings for work and eventually enlisted in the U.S. Army, from which he received an honorable discharge in 1958, his family said. Following his enlistment, he moved to Elizabeth, where he met his wife, former Irvington mayor Sara Bost, in 1973. She said her late husband inspired her to get into local politics. He had become interested in community organizing in the mid-1970s, growing discontent with conditions in Irvingtons East Ward, she said. It had seemed as if the East Ward wasnt getting the same services as the more prestigious South and North wards, said Sara Bost, about her husbands concerns when he first became involved in Irvingtons community affairs. The couple served a tandem role as Irvingtons East Ward District Leaders from 1979 until 2002, Sara Bost said. He also unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 1982, according to Star-Ledger newspaper articles from the 1980s. We both enjoyed it. He was more outgoing than I am. In addition to serving as a councilman, Fred Bost formed a community civic association in his neighborhood, where the couple ran a tailor shop. In 1983, while in office, Bost was convicted of driving on a revoked license and for misstating information on an application for a drivers license, the result of an investigation that followed a fatal accident he was involved in, according to Star-Ledger reports from the time. He was not charged in relation to the death, but was sentenced to a short jail term, the reports said. He spent his final years in Barnegat, where he was elected as District Leader and served on the townships planning board, according to his obituary. A public funeral service is scheduled for 11 a.m. Friday at Bayside Chapel in Barnegat. The internment will be private. Bost leaves to his memory his wife Sara, two sons Olatungi (Cheryl) and Kenneth (Sherry); four daughters Nina, Kimberly (Lenard), Latasha and Sybil; ten grandchildren and two great grandchildren and a host of other extended relatives and friends. Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription. Tennyson Donyea may be reached at tcoleman@njadvancemedia.com. Over this last year over the last two or three years, really the countrys been in a lot of turmoil and were seeing that manifest itself in Congress, Lauf said in a phone interview, pointing to what she calls the heavily politicized COVID-19 response among other issues. And now you have a representative like Adam who would rather spend his time and platform talking about impeachment and censoring Marjorie Taylor-Greene another member of Congress. Thats not representing the values of our district, and its not servant leadership. Premier Gladys Berejiklian says Queenslands stoush with the federal government over a proposed quarantine hub is no excuse for it refusing to pay the $30 million it owes for NSW hotel quarantine. Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles on Wednesday said his state would not pay the money it owed NSW until Prime Minister Scott Morrison approved its proposed pop-up quarantine hub near Toowoomba. Gladys Berejiklian said it was a lame excuse to refuse to pay the hotel quarantine bill. Credit:Kate Geraghty Ms Berejiklian said this was a lame excuse by Queensland after the states had agreed last year to cover the cost of their citizens quarantined in other states. Queenslands quarantine hub issue is with the federal government, while this is a direct debt they owe to the people of NSW and they need to do the decent thing and pay up, Ms Berejiklian said. BOSTON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Yellow Wood Partners LLC ("Yellow Wood"), a Boston-based private equity firm focused on investing in consumer brands and companies, today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire the Scholl footcare brand, which operates globally outside of the Americas, from U.K.-based consumer-goods company Reckitt Benckiser Group plc ("RB"). The acquisition will reunite Scholl with the Dr. Scholl's brand as one entity after 30+ years of separate ownership. The combined business generates annual retail sales exceeding $700 million with leading market shares in the footcare category globally. The Dr. Scholl's brand is a category leader at major bricks and mortar and ecommerce retailers in the U.S. Similarly, the Scholl brand is a category leader in various regions such as France, Italy, Germany, the U.K., Australia and many other markets outside of North America with deep penetration at both major retailers and independent pharmacies across Europe. In addition to its footcare products, the Scholl brand provides a diversified portfolio of skin care products, insoles, and treatment solutions for targeted foot conditions. The combination of Scholl and Dr. Scholl's will create a global footcare brand operating in 50+ countries as an integrated business. Dana Schmaltz, Partner of Yellow Wood, said, "This transaction provides us with a unique opportunity to create a global brand as an undisputed leader in the footcare category. We are excited to reunite these two companies to continue the legacy and heritage of the century old Dr. Scholl's brand. The combined company will have the global resources to continue to develop innovative wellness products with a single vision focused on providing the best footcare products for consumers around the world. We are very proud of the work our management team and we have done thus far to build the Scholl's Wellness Company as a standalone, highly-focused entity in the Americas, and, we look forward to the potential of capitalizing on the company's strong momentum with this highly complementary acquisition." Yellow Wood acquired the Dr. Scholl's brand in the Americas from Bayer AG in 2019 and has since successfully built out a full standalone Dr. Scholl's organization. Successful business enhancement initiatives since acquiring the business include building its e-commerce capabilities, accelerating new product development, strengthening the senior management team, and optimizing the consumer marketing mix. Tad Yanagi, Partner at Yellow Wood, said, "Our experience of successfully executing corporate carve outs has helped us gain a deep understanding of the many complexities that accompany the separation of an operating subsidiary from a large global parent company. Our previous experience with other global multinational CPG companies enabled us to work directly with Reckitt Benckiser to create this opportunity. We look forward to using the full Yellow Wood operating capabilities to complete the Scholl transaction in a smooth manner. We are excited to bring the operating focus required to achieve what we believe is a strong future growth plan for the business that will benefit customers and employees around the world." The transaction is expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2021 and is subject to normal and customary closing conditions. Dr. William Matthias Scholl started the much-loved, iconic brand in 1906 and over the next several decades developed many innovative products and grew the company in the U.S. and internationally. The brand has been owned by a number of multi-national corporations over the last 50 years, and rights to the brand were divided amongst the Americas and the rest of the world over 30 years ago. Bayer bought the Dr. Scholl's Americas business in 2014 as part of its acquisition of Merck & Co.'s consumer health unit. Yellow Wood acquired rights to the Dr. Scholl's brand in the Americas in 2019 from Bayer and established the Scholl's Wellness Company. RB has owned the rights to the Scholl brand outside the Americas since its 2010 acquisition of SSL International, plc. Guy Phillips from Spayne Lindsay & Co. LLP, and Sawaya Partners, LLC acted as financial advisers for the transaction. Fried Frank provided legal counsel to Yellow Wood on the transaction. About Scholl Scholl is a leading global footcare brand that produces a wide range of skin care products, insoles and treatment solutions for targeted foot conditions. The brand was founded in 1906 by William Scholl in Chicago, USA and has a long history of innovation and category leadership. RB acquired the brand as part of its acquisition of SSL International in 2010. The proposed sale also includes RB's Amope, Krack and Eulactol footcare brands. About Scholl's Wellness Company The Dr. Scholl's brand has been synonymous with foot care for more than a century. Founded by William Mathias Scholl, M.D. with a drive to scientifically support the feet to improve mobility, Dr. Scholl's products are clinically engineered and proven to provide comfort, reduce fatigue, relieve and prevent lower body pain. Today, the Scholl's Wellness Company continues to advance the science of movement and foot care with a mission to help people be more active and move comfortably every day of their lives. Visit www.drscholls.com for more details. Facebook: @DrScholls Instagram: @drscholls_usa YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/DrScholls About Yellow Wood Partners Yellow Wood Partners is a Boston-based private investment firm that invests exclusively in the consumer industry in the middle market. The firm seeks to acquire branded consumer products that sell into a variety of consumer channels, including mass, drug, food, specialty, value, club and e-commerce. Yellow Wood's investment and operating strategy is based on utilizing the firm's functional operating resources to help maximize brand performance by driving organic growth and increasing operating efficiencies while acquiring additional brands into a limited number of platform companies in its concentrated investment portfolio. For more information, please visit www.yellowwoodpartners.com. Contact : Chris Tofalli Chris Tofalli Public Relations, LLC 914-834-4334 [email protected] SOURCE Yellow Wood Partners Governor Hope Uzodinma of Imo State has explained why his administration is seizing a property belonging to his predecessor, Rochas Okorocha. He said the state governments action was in accordance with a report of a judicial panel set up by former Governor Emeka Ihedioha before he left office. Mr Okorocha, a serving senator, was involved in a fracas on Sunday with the governors aide and some youth over the government sealing of a hotel belonging to the senators wife. The senator was arrested and briefly detained at the police headquarters, Owerri. You will recall that before I became the governor, the Ihedioha administration set up a judicial panel of inquiry to look into acquisitions of lands and conversion of government lands to personal property. The judicial panel of inquiry chaired by a judge met and they concluded their job. And a white paper has since been raised, Governor Uzodinma told reporters on Tuesday in Abuja after meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari. The governor said the senator went with thugs to unseal the wifes hotel. He went there with thugs himself physically, wounded the policemen there, and wounded the civil defense people, the civil defense officer is currently in the hospital. He then broke in and entered. Of course, you must have heard him say he is richer than the government and that he is above the law. I am not directly involved. It is a position taken by the government. There is a difference between governor and government, Mr Uzodinma said. The governor continued, The government of Imo State sealed a property. And I think that if there is anything anybody considers that is not right, the person should go to court to address the issue. Not to take laws (into his hand). I remember that under Ihedioha, there was a recovery committee, chaired by one Jasper Ndubaku, when they tried to visit Okorochas house, they were beaten to a stupor. And the same man who did that is now also doing the same thing. The governor said he has no personality issues with Mr Okorocha. Mr Okorochas personal aide, Ebere Nzewuji, denied that the senator tried to unseal the property. When he arrived at the premises, they were confronted with thugs who had guns and machetes, and they were attacking him and his entourage. He (Okorocha) cant go there to make trouble, he went to ask questions. A staff member was beaten up, even the hotels guests still had their property inside the hotel. He wasnt going to unseal the property, Mr Nzewuji told PREMIUM TIMES, Sunday. The origin of the feud between the two leaders could be traced to the 2019 governorship election in Imo where Mr Okorocha, then as governor, supported his son-in-law in another party, instead of Mr Uzodinma, who was the candidate of APC Mr Okorochas party. Mr Okorocha said Governor Uzodinma wants to intimidate him and his supporters. ADVERTISEMENT I do not know what the governor wants to achieve, but I think he wants to make everyone fear him, Mr Okorocha told a crowd of supporters, which paid a solidarity visit to him in his residence in Owerri on Monday. A governor who came through court should know how to respect the rule of the law. We shall resist them. Let me remind him, he cannot be judged by the number of people he has locked up, but by the performance he has done for the people. Let him build one hospital and we can clap for him, let him build one school and we can clap for him, let him build one road and then we can clap for him, the senator said. The NHS is facing a 'cronyism' legal challenge over its decision to hand a data contract to a Silicon Valley tech firm. Activist group Foxglove said it was taking action over the health service's link-up with Palantir. It wants a review of a 23.5million contract between NHS England and the Denver-based firm firm to handle sensitive information first agreed in March and extended in December. Palantir has attracted criticism from civil liberties groups who say its software used by government surveillance agencies around the world helped US officials track down illegal immigrants. It is the latest claim that cronyism played a role in the handing out of contracts worth millions at the height of the pandemic to people with links to the Conservative Party. The legal case includes the claim that the NHS failed to do a 'Data Protection Impact Assessment' when it extended the contract in December. Foxglove's founder Cori Crider told the Open Democracy website Palantir had spend a year 'lobbying top UK and NHS officials, courting them in London, San Francisco and Davos over dinner and watermelon cocktails'. Activist group Foxglove said it was taking action over the health service's link-up with Palantir. Foxglove's founder Cori Crider (left, in 2018) told the Open Democracy website Palantir had spend a year 'lobbying top UK and NHS officials, courting them in London, San Francisco and Davos over dinner and watermelon cocktails'. 'We're taking the government to court because, right before Christmas, they quietly gave this CIA-backed firm a major, long-term role in handling our personal health information, and in England's cherished National Health Service,' she said. 'The government claimed the initial Palantir 'datastore' deal, signed last March, was a short-term, emergency response to the pandemic. 'But December's new, two-year contract reaches far beyond COVID: to Brexit, general business planning and much more.' Palantir is controversial because it made surveillance software that the US Government used to track down illegal immigrants so it could deport them. Its technology can harvest personal information about people and has been harshly criticised by civil liberty campaigners for breaching the public's right to privacy. The company has been described as one that 'knows everything about you' by Bloomberg, and its software is used by government surveillance agencies around the world for spying purposes. It is able to link official information such as medical records or driving licences to social media profiles and to track people's activity. The US Department of Health and Human Services uses Palantir to detect Medicare fraud, the FBI uses it in criminal probes, and the Department of Homeland Security deploys it to screen air travelers and keep tabs on immigrants. The company is already in the crosshairs of activists and could attract additional scrutiny for its potential use in the UK's Test and Trace system. The company was contracted by the NHS to work on a Covid 'data store'. The computer dashboard manages the distribution of PPE and other medical equipment between UK hospitals to make sure they have what they need to deal with the coronavirus crisis. But privacy campaigners have criticised the lack of transparency around the contracting process. Privacy International, Big Brother Watch, medConfidential, Foxglove and Open Rights Group sent Palantir 10 questions about their work with the NHS during the public health crisis, and published them on the Privacy InternationaI website in April. Ms Crider added: 'The government has a legal duty to consult us, citizens and NHS users, before they strike massive deals which affect that future. In doing so, they need to take important steps (like conducting 'data protection impact assessments') to ensure our health information and our rights are protected. 'They haven't done this for the Palantir datastore: that's why we're bringing this case.' An NHS spokesman said: 'The company is an accredited supplier to the UK public sector, the NHS completed a Data Protection Impact Assessment in April 2020, and an update will be published in due course.' Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 14:52:39|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BANGKOK, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Thailand on Wednesday confirmed 93 cases of coronavirus infection, mostly domestic, according to the Center for the COVID-19 Situation Administration (CCSA). Of the new cases, 71 were local infections and 22 others were imported cases, the CCSA report said. The domestic cases included 56 in Samut Sakhon, seven in Pathum Thani, five in Ayutthaya, two in Bangkok and one in Nonthaburi, the report said. Thailand has so far confirmed 25,692 cases of infection, 22,956 of which were reported as domestic while 2,736 others referred to those who had returned from abroad. So far, 24,542 patients have fully recovered and been released from hospitals while 1,067 others are currently hospitalized and 83 fatalities have been reported. Enditem Virginia to become first Southern state to abolish the death penalty: 'ineffective and inhumane' Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Virginia lawmakers on Monday voted to abolish the death penalty, making it the first Southern state to end capital punishment. When Gov. Ralph Northam, a supporter of the legislation, signs the legislation to repeal capital punishment legislation, Virginia will be the 23rd state to make this move. The bill narrowly passed the Senate with a vote of 21-17 on Feb. 3, with one Republican crossing party lines. The bill passed the House by a 57-to-43 vote in which two Republicans voted with the Democrats. Virginias House, Senate and executive branches of government are all led by Democrats. Northam, House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn and Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw issued a joint statement Monday after both houses of the General Assembly voted to end the death penalty in the commonwealth. It is vital that our criminal justice system operates fairly and punishes people equitably. We all know the death penalty doesnt do that. It is inequitable, ineffective, and inhumane, the statement reads. Over Virginias long history, this Commonwealth has executed more people than any other state. And, like many other states, Virginia has come too close to executing an innocent person. Its time we stop this machinery of death. The leaders called the legislations passage an important step forward in ensuring that our criminal justice system is fair and equitable to all. Northam also praised the bills passage in a tweet. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Virginia has executed more people since its founding than in any other state. Two Virginia men remain on death row for murder, and the legislation will change their sentences to life in prison without parole,according to The Associated Press. Republicans largely voted in opposition to the identical bills in the Senate and House, raising concerns about justice for the victims of murder and their family members. Republicans argued that some crimes are so heinous that the guilty deserve execution. Republican Del. Rob Bell described the killings the two men on death row were sentenced for, which involved the murder of five individuals, including two children. We have five dead Virginias that this bill will make sure that their killers will not receive justice, Bell was quoted as saying during a virtual House debate. Views regarding the death penalty vary widely among Christians. In 2018, 61% of mainline Protestants supported the death penalty, compared to 53% of Catholics,according to Pew Research. The survey found that 73% of white evangelical Protestants expressed support for the death penalty, while 19% oppose it. Prison Fellowship, an evangelical prison ministry that also works to restore Americas criminal justice system, published an article on its website called A Call to Dialogue on Capital Punishment. The aim of the article is to show the points of division in Christian arguments for and against the death penalty. The article, written by former Justice Fellowhsip Director Dan Van Ness, discusses the range of views from the Scripture mandates capital punishment, and the Scripture prohibits capital punishment, to the Scripture permits capital punishment. The article includes Bible verses to bolster the evidence for each perspective. Though Catholic support for the death penalty is divided, Catholic leadership supports abolishing the death penalty. When Pope Francis revised the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church in 2018, he called the death penalty inadmissible and an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person. Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good, a Vatican statement at the time explained. Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption. In 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention released a resolution on capital punishment. The document traced the origins of the death penalty back to Genesis. A portion of the resolution reads: the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, support the fair and equitable use of capital punishment by civil magistrates as a legitimate form of punishment for those guilty of murder or treasonous acts that result in death. Be it further RESOLVED, That we urge that capital punishment be administered only when the pursuit of truth and justice result in clear and overwhelming evidence of guilt, the resolution added. New technology from Purdue University and Indiana University School of Medicine innovators may one day help patients who suffer devastating vocal injuries from surgery on the larynx. A collaborative team consisting of Purdue biomedical engineers and clinicians from IU has tissue-engineered component tissue replacements that support reconstruction of the larynx. The team's work is published in The Laryngoscope. The larynx is a very complex human organ consisting of outer cartilage for structural support, inner muscle that contracts to permit voicing, swallowing, and breathing, and inner vibratory lining. Currently, thousands of patients each year with laryngeal cancer or trauma require a procedure called total laryngectomy in which the entire larynx is removed, and patients are left without a human voice and breathing through a hole in their neck called a stoma. "There are very few options for laryngeal reconstruction and no options for restoration of laryngeal appearance, structure and function," said Stacey Halum, a fellowship-trained laryngologist specializing in head and neck surgery. "While surgeons occasionally use local or free tissue transfers to repair laryngeal defects, these local or regional tissues just 'plug holes' or close the defects without really restoring function because the transferred tissues are not dynamicthey do not move or contract. They also tend to lose bulk and scar over time." Halum, along with Sherry Harbin, a professor in Purdue's Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, led the innovation team. The innovators used a patented collagen polymer developed by Harbin's lab to fabricate the three regenerative replacement tissues for the laryngeal reconstruction procedure. "Our approach is unique in that we are using customized engineered tissue replacements, with the muscle component fabricated using the patient's own muscle progenitor cells," Harbin said. "We believe these engineering approaches will provide patients with better options for reconstruction so that total laryngectomies become something of the past." Harbin and Halum believe the technology has widespread applications for custom fabrication of engineered tissue replacements for tissue restoration in other parts of the body. Harbin founded GeniPhys, a Purdue startup focused on the commercialization of the collagen polymer technology. More information: Sarah Brookes et al, Laryngeal Reconstruction Using TissueEngineered Implants in Pigs: A Pilot Study, The Laryngoscope (2020). Journal information: Laryngoscope Sarah Brookes et al, Laryngeal Reconstruction Using TissueEngineered Implants in Pigs: A Pilot Study,(2020). DOI: 10.1002/lary.29282 The first batch of 117,600 doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine arrived in HCMC's Tan Son Nhat Airport on Wednesday morning. Vietnam Vaccine JSC (VNVC) said it had signed the deal for importing the batch with AstraZeneca last November, without revealing further details pleading security conditions the British-Swedish firm has imposed. The import of the first batch was advanced following a new outbreak in late January that has spread to 13 cities and provinces. Last week the Health Ministry approved the import of 204,000 doses within this month. Vietnam has ordered 30 million doses from AstraZeneca. It is not yet clear who will get the doses that have arrived, but the ministry had said earlier that frontline Covid-19 workers, teachers and people working in aviation and tourism will be among the first to get vaccinated. The government has waived duties and the vaccines will get priority clearance to make sure they reach VNVC as fast as possible. The company has set up cold storage units in HCMC, Da Nang and Hanoi to store three million doses at a time. Covax, a global mechanism for developing, manufacturing and procuring Covid-19 vaccine candidates that help member countries access vaccines as they become available, has pledged to provide Vietnam with 4.9 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the first half. Around 33 million doses will arrive in the second half of this year. It is stepping up negotiations with the U.S.s Pfizer and Moderna, along with other vaccine manufacturers in Russia and some other countries to ensure it can get a total of 150 million doses in 2021, to cover 70 percent of its 98-million population. Four indigenous vaccines are under development by Nanogen Pharmaceutical Biotechnology JSC, the Institute of Vaccines and Medical Biologicals, Vaccine and Biological Production Company No. 1, and the Center for Research and Production of Vaccines and Biologicals. SOCIAL media users are under criminal investigation for identifying a 15-year-old boy charged over a knife attack on a mother-of-two who died after a stabbing in Dublins IFSC. A judge has warned that they can face prosecution for breaking reporting restrictions. Urantsetseg Tserendorj (48), originally from Mongolia but living in Dublin with her family for a number of years, was rushed to the Mater Hospital following an attack on January 20 last. The incident happened at 9.30pm near the CHQ building at Custom House Quay, as the office cleaner was making her way home from work. She remained in a critical condition for two weeks before she died on February 3. Her husband Ulambayar stayed by her bedside and close family members flew from Mongolia to be with her. The boy, who cannot be named because he is a minor, was arrested and remanded in custody after a brief court appearance on January 23. He made no reply when charged with assault causing harm, attempted robbery and unlawful possession of a knife as a weapon at the CHQ Building, in the IFSC in Dublin 1. He was aged 14 at the time of the incident and could face possible further charges. The teen appeared before Judge Bernadette Owens at the Dublin Childrens Court today. It was his first court appearance since Ms Tserendorj died. Detective Garda Mark Barry asked to address the court in relation to people breaking the anonymity rule in cases involving juveniles. He told Judge Owens there has been alleged breaches of Section 93 of the Children Act, in relation to WhatsApp and Facebook messages in relation to the case. An investigation has started at Store Street garda station, he added. He confirmed that messages could have identified the boy who told the court that he was not aware this had happened. The teens solicitor had reported it to gardai, Judge Owens was told. She thanked the garda for bringing this to the courts attention. Citing Section 93 of the Children Act, she repeated that nothing should be reported that would lead to the boy being identified. People will be aware that in other cases, there have been prosecutions taken when there have been breaches of Section 93, she warned. Directions from the Director of Public Prosecutions are awaited and the garda file has not been received yet, said State solicitor Mairead White. She asked for a four-week adjournment. Defence counsel Alison Fynes said the boy, whose mother was present for the hearing, was anxious to progress matters and every effort should be made for the case to be expedited. The State solicitor pointed out that the alleged offence happened just over a month ago. There was no application for bail and the boy was remanded in continuing custody to appear again in March. About three dozen members of Mongolian community gathered in the square across from the courthouse holding placards on the morning of the teens latest hearing. He has not yet indicated how he will plead. Section 93 of the Children Act states that no report shall be published or included in a broadcast which reveals the name, address or school of any child concerned in the proceedings or includes any particulars likely to lead to the identification of any child concerned in the proceedings. Pennsylvania movie theaters ditch mask mandate Three chain movie theaters have announced that masks are no longer mandatory for moviegoers who have been vaccinated against coronavirus. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-23 21:15:25|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close LISBON, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa announced on Tuesday that the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) will allocate 4.6 billion euros (5.59 billion U.S. dollars) to companies in the country over the next 5 years, according to a video published on the government's website. As stated by Costa, there will be around 1.2 billion euros (around 1.47 billion dollars) for the reindustrialization agendas, 1.25 billion euros (nearly 1.52 billion dollars) for the capitalization of companies and 370 million euros (449.7 million dollars) to support job creation. He pointed out that the PRR includes "a very strong investment of 715 million euros (869 million dollars) in the decarbonisation of the industry, in addition to support for renewable energies and for the energy efficiency of companies." "Another 650 million euros (790 million dollars) will be directed directly so that companies can take advantage of the full potential of digitalization," he said. In addition to the money granted directly to companies, the prime minister stressed that there is also a set of investments that companies are indirect beneficiaries of such as "professional training and qualification of young people." The government also plans to invest in business location areas in the country and establish new connections with Spain, so as to create better conditions to attract companies, Costa said. The head of the government also promised to build housing for 26,000 families and extend the metro networks in Lisbon and Porto. The post-pandemic recovery plan was open for public consultation last week and includes 36 reform projects and 77 investment projects in social, climate and digital areas, totaling 13.9 billion euros (16.9 billion dollars) in grants. Enditem The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Employees work inside a Foxconn factory in the township of Longhua in the southern Guangdong province, China. Photo by Reuters/Bobby Yip. Taiwanese electronics contract manufacturer Foxconn is hiring 1,000 workers in the northern provinces of Bac Giang and Bac Ninh. Its job announcement said they are required to assemble electronic components in Bac Ninhs Que Vo District and Vietnam Singapore Industrial Park and Bac Giangs Quang Chau Industrial Zone, and would be paid a salary of VND8-10 million ($350-440) a month. Vietnam is this Apple manufacturing partners largest production base in Southeast Asia, and it employs more than 50,000 workers in the country. In January, it received a license to build a $270-million plant to produce laptops and tablets in Bac Giang. It also met with authorities in the northern province of Thanh Hoa in January to explore investment opportunities. It is looking for 100-150 hectares of land to build a plant producing electronic components at a cost of $1.3 billion. Foxconn, a major assembler of Apple products, including the iPhone, and the world's largest contract manufacturer, came to Vietnam in 2007, and has been operating mainly in the northern provinces of Bac Ninh, Bac Giang and Vinh Phuc, making computers and other electronic products and car parts. Have You Seen This? Baby calmed by Imperial March TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - The Indiana House has passed a bill that would expand the school voucher program. This essentially gives money to parents to send their kids to private schools in some cases. However, its drawing controversy. Theres been contentious debate surrounding the School Choice expansion bill (House Bill 1005). News 10 spoke with both the Indiana Non Public Education Association (INPEA) and the Vigo County School Corporations Teachers Association to look at both sides of the debate. First, the bill includes several parts that deal with school vouchers, but the most controversial appears to involve funding and exactly where it goes. Basically, it would establish Indianas first educational savings account program. This focuses on students with special needs, foster children, and students from military families. Rather than converting the funding directly to a voucher, it goes into a savings account where a parent has more control over how funds are spent. It could be for private school tuition or educational services such as tutors. John Elcesser is the Executive Director for the INPEA. He says this program provides more opportunities for students and families. Meanwhile, Jodie Buckallew is a teacher and a member of the Vigo County Teachers Union. She contends that 93% of all K-12 students in Indiana attend public schools. She says this is taking away much needed funding for public schools which is determined by enrollment. This program has changed lives, Elcesser said, Its provided opportunities for families who never thought they would have a choice in terms of where they can educate their children. If we look at vouchers and more students leaving our corporation, that reduces the funding that it takes to fully fund our public schools and to really look out for the future learning conditions of our students, Buckallew contended, Ultimately, when we defund public education, we are defunding 93% of students across the State of Indiana. No matter whom the child is or what their educational interests or needs are, they can find the school thats the right fit for them, Elcesser continued, Personally, we dont care if thats in public, private, or charteras long as its a place where a student can be successful. Thats why we support choice because it provides options for families who typically would not be able to afford them. Elcesser says he respects those who oppose this proposed legislation, but he believes rather than this be a funding issue; it should be about the students. Too often, I believe, the education debate comes down to dollars and cents, Elcesser concluded, But, to me whats most important in education is, are kids getting a quality education and an opportunity to be successful? The bill is on its way to the State Senate. News 10 will keep you updated on its progress moving forward. A 46-year-old woman and 20-year-old man, both from Chicago, were driving on I-55 when their vehicle was struck by gunfire, said state police. Both were taken to a hospital with injuries ... from gunfire, according to state police. Their conditions were not given. See Full Image Gallery >> The 2021 Buick Envision inaugurates the second generation of what GM's premium division hopes will become the staple of its all-crossover lineup. The original Envision, while reasonably competent, suffered from ungainly styling and struggled to separate itself from its reputation as the built-in-China Buick. Bundle that with a brand that has (at best) an on-again, off-again relationship with being interesting and you have a recipe for Who cares? No longer, says Buick. While its still assembled in China, the 2021 Envision gets a new platform, a new powertrain, and a complete styling overhaul. Feeling a little deja vu? Thats reasonable. Buick gave us a promising first look at the new Envision last summer, but thanks to, well, you know, 2020, were only now getting our hands on the final product, and if we were intrigued in June, were impressed in February. Buicks first attempt at a compact CUV was not particularly impressive, especially when it came to design. The Equinox-in-a-dinner-jacket thing never really worked and were happy to say that the second effort is a huge improvement. The new look is genuinely attractive. Like the Enclave, the Envision borrows cues from the Avenir concept whose name Buicks product planners appropriated to denote the brands top-trim variants. It works. Power comes from a 2.0-liter, turbocharged inline-four producing 228 horsepower and 258 pound-feet of torque as its only available engine. Front-wheel drive is standard; a twin-clutch all-wheel-drive system is optional. Both setups utilize a nine-speed automatic transmission. Your author managed an average of 23 mpg over the course of a 60-mile test loop against EPA estimates of 22 mpg city, 29 mpg highway and 25 mpg combined. FWD models are rated at 24/31/26, respectively. Size-wise, the Envision is a bit of an odd duck. One could teach an undergrad course on GMs two-row crossover ecosystem, but suffice it to say that its a bit more closely related to the Chevrolet Blazer than it is to the Equinox this time around, despite being closer in size to the latter. Within the luxury realm, its length and wheelbase are a few inches shorter than those of larger compact models like the Volvo XC60, Acura RDX and BMW X3, but its rear legroom is greater than them all. It's actually closer in that measurement to the midsize Lincoln Nautilus. The fact that the Envision's 25.2 cubic-feet of cargo space is less than them all could indicate where Buick found all that extra sprawl-out space in the back seat. Story continues So, the Envision's size is a bit unusual and its engine is, well, not. Fortunately, that conservative powertrain choice and tweener footprint help keep its curb weight under control. A base model weighs just 3,692 pounds. Even with all the goodies and all-wheel drive thrown in, it stays below 4,000. We applaud the restraint. Buick says this choice of platform also means the 21 Envision is lower and wider than the car it replaced. Were not sure whether thats a good thing, strictly speaking, but it is true. The updated interior feels like a scaled-down take on the Enclaves, and thats no bad thing. The 8-inch infotainment system comes with standard Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, with wireless versions (and wireless device charging) available on higher trims, which also feature a 10.2-inch screen to accommodate the extra goodies (and look better doing it). Standard safety tech includes lane-keeping assist, forward collision warning with automatic emergency braking and pedestrian detection, rear parking sensors and GMs Safety Alert seat that vibrates your butt to attract your attention to all those safety systems. You can also add a 360-degree camera, front parking sensors, rear cross-traffic alert, blind-spot warning, a head-up display and GMs rearview camera mirror. With a few exceptions, GMs recent interiors have been functional and feature-rich, if a bit bland. That pattern continues here, where the materials appear to be reasonably high-quality and the design itself pleasant, but not exactly titillating. The push-/pull-button transmission controls seem awkward and cluttered, but they work. Our Essence test vehicle represents the Envisions middle grade, incorporating a heated steering wheel and heated front seats, a power liftgate and a cabin air ionizer. The Envisions driving experience is a mix of old and new. The turbocharged 2.0 provides enough power for confident merging and around-town acceleration. Our Essence lacked the Avenirs fancy adaptive dampers, and we consequently found the ride a bit too plush for our tastes, but not sloppy. Itll hold its own on a curvy back road and pulls straight and true on the highway without constant corrections, which alone is a win. The Envision isnt meant to carve corners; this is a Buick, after all, not a BMW. One of our biggest gripes here is common to all of GM's AWD crossovers. Rather than the all-wheel-drive system constantly being at the ready to send power rearward as conditions demand (as almost every other AWD crossover does), the GM system requires the driver to turn on this capability every time they get in the car. This is done via the drive mode selector. Unfortunately, the Envision won't remember that you previously engaged one of its all-wheel-drive modes and will default back to "Tour" (and therefore front-wheel-drive-only) the next time you get behind the wheel. We have to wonder how many owners of Envisions (and other GM crossovers) are driving around thinking their AWD crossover is powering all four wheels when it's in fact not or, how many know but will forget to engage the system? Since we got to sample the Envision in late February, it was in our care for some of the worst weather Michigan has seen so far this winter. The traction and stability control systems are quick to intervene when the surface gets sloppy and they can be somewhat heavy-handed about it. We tried powering through a couple of snowy corners, only to find our precious throttle control taken from us. With the nannies dialed back, we had much finer control in the slop, but that wasnt really the Envisions happy place. That would be on the highway, at a steady cruise, with the radio going at a reasonable volume, but even there, our experience wasnt flawless. Buick makes a big deal about its QuietTuning approach to interior noise control, but either because it can only do so much (or maybe because the cabin is just that quiet), we noted a surprising amount of wind noise intrusion from the drivers side A-pillar. We couldnt pinpoint the source or identify any complicating factors (ice build-up, etc.) that might explain it. Its just there. That exhausts our list of quibbles, and its brevity is refreshing. The last-generation Envision was a bit of a mess, made only slightly better by a hasty refresh that solved most of its drivability problems but did nothing to improve its frumpy exterior. The 2021 model is the real deal, earning its place alongside the Enclave, which your author would name as GMs most appealing three-row crossover. Appeal comes at a cost, of course. An AWD Essence model like this one checks in at $38,795 (including $1,195 for destination) before you add any options. Throw in the Technology package to get the upgraded infotainment and whatnot and youve crossed the $40,000 barrier. The Avenir, even with just two driven wheels, starts at $41,395. Both are significantly more expensive than the equivalent (a very generous use of the term) Chevy Equinox and a couple thousand cheaper than a similarly equipped Cadillac XT4 (the Envisions platform-mate). In the latter context, the Buick is a solid value. If nothing else, the 2021 Envision elevates the nameplate from being an also-ran to, at minimum, the second-best car Buick has to offer. Playing second fiddle to the Enclave is nothing to be ashamed of, and were taking this as a sign that GM remains committed to putting Buick back atop is previous pedestal. Considering it was little more than punchline a mere decade ago, were encouraged. When Naresh Tikait, the president of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, reached the Ghazipur border to meet farmers agitating against the three farm laws on Tuesday, he was given a traditional welcome with drum beats. While talking to IANS, Tikait said, "If this is government remains, our land will not remain with us. The Prime Minister and the Home Minister should change their advisors and seek their opinion." Over the last three months, the dialogue between the government and the farmers has stopped, but the agitation refuses to die down. "It is our compulsion to sit in protest. More than 200 people have sacrificed their lives. Our elderly have been sitting here in harsh winter. We will not allow all this to go waste." Why is there no dialogue between the government and the people any longer? In response to this question, Tikait said, "This is the responsibility of the government, it is in their hands. If they have made such a bill, why didn't they do it after consulting farmers? What will happen if the farmer is on the verge of ruination?" Tikait expressed concern over farmers losing their land, "We are trying to save our land. If this is the government, we will not have our land. What will we do then? The issue of contract farming is very dirty. Everything is in writing. The farmer will be ruined and become a pauper." What is the problem with amendments and the proposal of a 18-month moratorium? In response to this question, Tikait said, "We are saying that instead of 18 months they should repeal the law completely. If the guarantee on MSP becomes a law, everything will be resolved." Will the farmers' anger spill over in the elections to be held this year? "Absolutely. The government will have to do a lot to persuade those angry with it. " Tikait sees this as a battle of self-esteem. Recently, farmers had to destroy their own crop. "This kind of a step is taken in a very difficult situation. It is a suicide-like step for a farmer to destroy something he has nurtured like a child," says Tikait. Tikait described Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah as important and responsible people. "Both of them are running the government. We would say that a good advisor should advise them on agricultural law. However, if the defence minister has talks with farmers on behalf of the government, the issue can be resolved. He is a good person and will find a way out of the stalemate." 11 rounds of talks held between the government and farmers ' organisations have not made any headway so far. Farmers have been protesting on the borders of the capital since November 26 last year against three newly enacted farm laws. --IANS msk/ash (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.) Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. Good morning, ? Please find below the press release issued today. Best regards, Florence Lievre Global PR Manager | Group Marketing & Communications Capgemini Group | Paris Tel.: +33 1 47 54 50 71 Email : florence.lievre@capgemini.com _____________________ Capgemini Press Contact Florence Lievre Tel.: + +33 1 47 54 50 71 E-mail: florence.lievre@capgemini.com (mailto:florence.lievre@capgemini.com) GEFCO Press Contact Pablo Leguay Tel.: +33 1 49 05 28 12 E-mail: pablo.leguay@gefco.net (mailto:pablo.leguay@gefco.net) Capgemini supports GEFCO in its public cloud migration strategy and infrastructure modernization Paris, February 24 2021 - GEFCO , a global expert in supply chain solutions and leading provider of automotive logistics in Europe, has renewed its contract with Capgemini incorporating a new project dedicated to its infrastructure modernization. The multi-cloud approach will increase operational efficiency and agility, reduce technical obsolescence and optimize the cost of recurring services. Thanks to its deep expertise and GEFCO's long term trust in its infrastructure management, since 2013, Capgemini has been able to modernize GEFCO's Information Systems across the globe. Looking ahead, in addition to the integration of new services, the infrastructure's transformation into a public multi-cloud approach will provide GEFCO with greater flexibility and the ability to optimize its resource consumption. In these turbulent times with strong variations in business activity, the possibility to adjust the resources allocated in the cloud is crucial. Capgemini will also help to transform the GEFCO IT department's operating model, with a digital workstation management service for 8,500 users, including a new "service desk" featuring a chat bot and automated AI features. "GEFCO is taking an important step in its transformation process; the modernization of our information system is key for our employees and our customers. We are delighted to strengthen our partnership with the Capgemini teams who are working alongside us to make our IT systems more robust," said Sophie Baudoux, Information Systems Executive Vice President at GEFCO. "Capgemini has been supporting GEFCO in its digital projects since 2013. We are very pleased that GEFCO is confirming its confidence in the team with this new contract. Our expertise and know-how, reinforced by the contribution of our Cloud Center of Excellence and the support of our key partners in the public cloud, have enabled us to stand out from the crowd and provide GEFCO with the trusted digital services to continue its transformation journey," said Olivier Tarrit, Executive Director of Cloud Infrastructure Services at Capgemini in France. About GEFCO Group GEFCO is a global multimodal supply chain expert and a leading provider of automotive logistics in Europe. With more than 70 years of expertise in managing complex supply chains, GEFCO invents smart, agile and lasting solutions to meet its partners' needs in a broad range of industries. GEFCO's worldwide network spans five continents, with 15,000 employees in 47 countries. In 2019, the Group generated revenues of 4.7 billion. www.gefco.net About Capgemini Capgemini is a global leader in partnering with companies to transform and manage their business by harnessing the power of technology. The Group is guided everyday by its purpose of unleashing human energy through technology for an inclusive and sustainable future. It is a responsible and diverse organization of 270,000 team members in nearly 50 countries. With its strong 50 year heritage and deep industry expertise, Capgemini is trusted by its clients to address the entire breadth of their business needs, from strategy and design to operations, fueled by the fast evolving and innovative world of cloud, data, AI, connectivity, software, digital engineering and platforms. The Group reported in 2020 global revenues of 16 billion. Get the Future You Want | www.capgemini.com Attachment ADVERTISEMENT The COVID-19 pandemic, with all its socio-economic disruptions, has shown us how much despair the poor and vulnerable go through on a daily basis. This Social Protection Policy is indicative of the unwavering resolve of the Kaduna State government to ensure a life of dignity for all its residents on the basis of right, and not charity. With solemn appreciation of the challenges of poverty and social exclusion, the Kaduna State Social Protection Policy is a demonstration of our belief that a sub-national government should have a coherent statement of the values and principles governing its efforts to protect the poor and vulnerable. In the absence of a well-established and properly coordinated social protection system, the poor and vulnerable are left to bear the harsh realities and conditions of life unassisted. The COVID-19 pandemic, with all its socio-economic disruptions, has shown us how much despair the poor and vulnerable go through on a daily basis. This Social Protection Policy is indicative of the unwavering resolve of the Kaduna State government to ensure a life of dignity for all its residents on the basis of right, and not charity. To ensure that social protection is pursued in an inclusive and sustainable manner, this Social Protection Policy will be supported by a Social Protection Law. To ensure that government delivers on its promise, a well-articulated implementation plan and results framework have also been developed. As a party, one of our core objectives in the All Progressives Congress (APC) is to protect the interest of farmers, workers, women, youths and persons with disability, while leaving no one behind. In Kaduna State, our governance agenda since 2015 has been anchored on promoting the equality of opportunity. We have focused on expanding access to education and healthcare as the fulcrum of human capital development. This government has made education in the state free and compulsory for the first 12 years. We have also enacted the Child Welfare and Protection Law. Our public healthcare system offers free services for pregnant women and children younger than five years. To cater to the health needs of the populace, the Kaduna Contributory Health Insurance Scheme Law was enacted, and the Kaduna Contributory Health Management Agency (KADCHMA) was established to manage it. This Scheme was designed to widen the net of coverage and to ensure that all residents of the State, including the poor and vulnerable have access to quality healthcare. In 2018, we launched the Kaduna State Women Empowerment Fund (KADSWEF). The fund began by disbursing N200 million to women across the State as MSME loans. Over 7,000 women benefited from the scheme and have since begun repaying their loans. Our officials have visited over 3,000 of these beneficiaries to assess their trades and we are happy with the results. Just yesterday, the Kaduna State Executive Council approved measures to widen the digital payment infrastructure in order to help improve financial inclusion, especially for rural dwellers. Financial exclusion is a reflection of poverty and it complicates the access of poor people to financial services. A feasibility study we commissioned in 2020 revealed that 64 per cent of Kaduna State residents do not have bank accounts. An overwhelming majority (89 per cent) of persons without bank accounts are female. To cater to the health needs of the populace, the Kaduna Contributory Health Insurance Scheme Law was enacted, and the Kaduna Contributory Health Management Agency (KADCHMA) was established to manage it. This Scheme was designed to widen the net of coverage and to ensure that all residents of the State, including the poor and vulnerable have access to quality healthcare. Beyond that, Kaduna State provides free medical treatment of children under the age of five and elderly citizens over the age of 65 across the State. In September 2019, Kaduna State became the first government to pay the new national minimum wage on N30,000 monthly. As part of our commitment to ensuring that no one is left behind, we also raised the minimum monthly pension to N30,000 for workers who retired on the old defined benefit scheme. The State began implementing the new contributory pension scheme on January 1, 2017. Nigeria is going through trying times. We have the largest number of poor people anywhere in the world. Five per cent of the poor people probably live in Kaduna State. Yet, whenever a programmme is designed to help the poor and vulnerable, we resort to a slot mentality in which important people are allocated slots, instead of targeting those poor and vulnerable people who deserve it. In the coming weeks, a Social Protection Agency will be established by government to ensure that all social protection programmes in the State are delivered in an integrated, inclusive and sustainable manner that optimises resource utilisation and achieves high impact. The Agency will utilise an Integrated Social Protection Management Information System, which will serve as a repository of data to ensure that the poorest of the poor are prioritised in programme planning and benefits. This will also ensure the effective monitoring and evaluation of programme impacts on targeted poor and vulnerable residents of the State. The government is aware of the enormous cost of providing social protection coverage for the poor and vulnerable. Yet, through this policy, we seek to guarantee minimum social protection floors for every poor and vulnerable person. For this purpose, the Kaduna State government welcomes partnership with all key stakeholders (donor agencies, private individuals, NGOs, and CSOs) in the social protection space. Only in this sense will it be possible to achieve the laudable goal of this policy, which is to achieve a Kaduna State where poor and vulnerable persons live productive and dignifying lives. The task ahead is great, yet looking back at what we have achieved, we have reasons to believe in the possibility of actualising the objectives of the policy. For this purpose, I will like to recognise and particularly appreciate the active support of Save the Children International through the Child Grant Development Programme (CDGP) in strengthening social protection in the State. Special thanks goes to members of the State Steering Committee on Social Investment for this major milestone, and all donor partners, NGOs, and civil society organisations who have assisted the State in one way or the other, especially in the area of social protection. Nigeria is going through trying times. We have the largest number of poor people anywhere in the world. Five per cent of the poor people probably live in Kaduna State. Yet, whenever a programmme is designed to help the poor and vulnerable, we resort to a slot mentality in which important people are allocated slots, instead of targeting those poor and vulnerable people who deserve it. This is unfortunate. We must move away from slot mentality and use our social register to offer targeted support to those who truly need assistance. I appeal to all my colleagues, the political elites, to please drop this slot mentality and use the social register so that programmes targeting the poor and vulnerable actually go to the poor and vulnerable. When we think of the poor and vulnerable, we must all remember that the welfare of each is bound up in the welfare of all. Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai is governor of Kaduna State. This is excerpted from the text of remarks made at the launch of the Kaduna State Social Protection Policy, held at the Council Chambers, Sir Kashim Ibrahim House, Kaduna, on Tuesday, February 23. Essar Power to set up 90 MW PV Solar plant in MP for Rs 300 cr Mumbai, Feb 24 (UNI) The board of Essar Power Ltd, an investee company of Essar Global Fund (EGFL) has approved an investment of Rs 300 Crore in a 90 megawatt (MW) PV Solar power plant in Madhya Pradesh, marking the fund's foray into renewable energy. The entry into renewable energy is part of EGFL's strategic decision to rebalance its power portfolio from coal-fired to green energy after investing in hydrogen power in UK and coal gas in India. The fund has overseen the completion of the deleveraging program of investee companies in next two quarters. It intends to repay balance debt Rs 10,000 crore which is largely in power portfolio. ''The strategic plan to rebalance our energy portfolio is in line with our move to an asset light structure. In a series of calibrated steps, this shift will allow the company to bring down its debt from the current level of Rs 10,000 crore to Rs 3,000 crore through restructuring and monetization of existing assets and further investments in this green portfolio,'' said Mr Kush Singh, CEO, Essar Power Ltd. In light of the stupendous success achieved in unconventional energy generation such as CBM and the ongoing initiative Hydrogen generation programme in our Stanlow refinery, UK, Essar's foray into renewable energy will also be a precursor to an exit from coal thereby reaffirming EGFL's commitment to be ESG compliant and mark all its investments a gold standard in sustainability compliance. ''Along with the ongoing hydrogen generation programme in our Stanlow refinery, UK, we have kicked off our transition to a new phase of investment led growth, with the energy portfolio taking the lead said Mr. Singh said adding, We have taken this step in line with the major thrust given by the government of India in promoting and achieving the ambitious target of an installed capacity of 450 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030.'' The proposed power plant is a solar photovoltaic project to be set up in Bhander, in Datia district of central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh across 105 hectares of land and will be executed in two parts: 33.7 MW and 56.17 MW. Electricity generated from this plant will be evacuated at 132 kV level and is proposed to be connected to Bhander 132/33 kV MPPTCL substation, which is located at approximately 5 km and will be supplied to Industrial consumers within Madhya Pradesh. The project is expected to be completed by June 2022. Essar Power has a current operating capacity is around 3185 MW. EGFL has invested about Rs 32,000 crore in the power portfolio including 12000 cr of equity. EGFL has also invested in the transmission business by constructing a 465 km interstate transmission system, which spans across three Indian states. The company has completed its capex programme and is focused on increasing the profitability of the operating assets. The other two businesses of the fund's energy portfolio are also making impressive progress both in India and the UK. Essar Oil Exploration and Production Ltd (EOGEPL) is the country's largest unconventional energy player and has emerged as a pillar of coal bed methane (CBM) gas in the mineral rich eastern region. UNI JS SV 1439 Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 He's pulling double duty as host and performer on this weekend's Saturday Night Live. And on Tuesday, Nick Jonas was seen leaving after a long day of rehearsals for the NBC skit show in New York. The musician, 28, was dressed all in black and carried a zipper briefcase. New gig: He's pulling double duty as host and performer on this weekend's Saturday Night Live. And on Tuesday, Nick Jonas was seen leaving after a day of rehearsals in New York City After news broke of his hosting gig, Nick announced via social media that his new solo single will drop Thursday, right before his SNL appearance. He will perform the song titled Spaceman on the show. Meanwhile, his wife, Indian actress Priyanka Chopra is in London from where she sent him a huge balloon display and a bouquet congratulating him on getting to be on Saturday Night Live. Monochrome: The musician, 28, was dressed all in black and carried a zipper briefcase Casually stylish: Jonas paired a short coat with skinny jeans and boots and donned a face mask New music: After news broke of his hosting gig, Nick announced his new solo single Spaceman will drop Thursday, right before his SNL appearance. He will perform the song on the show Chopra, 38, customized the arrangement, sending balloons that read 'Congrats Nick' and 'Saturday Night Live.' Jonas showed them off on his Instagram and Twitter and wrote: 'That's pretty cool, thank you, babe.' Former Quantico star Chopra is in the British capital with her mother. She's getting ready to film the TV mini series Citadel with Scottish star Richard Madden. Congrats: His wife Priyanka Chopra is in London from where she sent him a huge balloon display and a bouquet congratulating him on getting to be on Saturday Night Live GlobeNewswire AS Pro Kapital Grupp has not yet published audited annual report for 2020 (related notice: https://view.news.eu.nasdaq.com/view?id=b9a14c4af26fbcf29852a28f2d4144b75&lang=en). However, the Company is using unaudited financial statements as basis of preparation in this report. All details related to this issue can be find in Note 2 of the report. MANAGEMENT REPORT Chairmans summary Start of 2021 has been a dynamic working period. We have continued working on our developments, where we see remarkable results, but also had to face a setback as after reporting date the decision of the Supreme Court terminated reorganisation proceedings of our subsidiary AS Tallinna Moekombinaat which led to the permanent insolvency of the subsidiary. Real estate development We have continued construction of Ratsuri Houses and Kalaranna projects and preparing project documentation for the following development phases in Tallinn. In March we completed Ratsuri Houses in Kristiine City where we had booked or presold all 39 apartments already prior to the completion. All apartments were sold and handed over within March and April. Soon we start handing over apartments in two first buildings of Kalaranna project, where completion of eight buildings with the total of 240 apartments will be achieved step by step in four phases. Today we have reservations or presales concluded for 85% of premises. After reporting date, we concluded an agreement for sales of all business premises of Kalaranna project for 16.16 million euros (with VAT) including the option to sell also premises of the last phase, which we are preparing to launch in the near future. This year we have started with construction of the new project Kindrali Houses in Kristiine City, where two building complexes with 129 apartments will be raised by next summer. In this project we had booked or presold more than half of the apartments before signing the construction agreement. Today over 90% of the apartments have been booked or presold. In Riga we are selling our luxury product River Breeze Residence and prepare for the further development of Kliversala Residential Quarter. We have received a building permit for City Oasis residential quarter with 326 apartments a tranquil and green living environment in the city centre. We will be ready to proceed with construction activities as soon as the market situation becomes more favourable. Unfortunately, the Latvian real-estate market has not been as active as its neighbouring countries Estonia and Lithuania. However, we have observed some changes in the recent months and recovery of the market. In 2019 we completed five buildings in Saltiniu Namai Attico project in Vilnius with 115 apartments. Today we have only 5 apartments unsold. We are preparing for the following phase with city villas and commercial building and plan to start the construction this year. Our revenues from the sales of the real estate depend on the completion of the residential developments as the revenues are recorded at the moment notary deeds of sale are concluded. In 2021 we have already completed Ratsuri Houses project with 39 apartments and soon we start handing over exclusive homes in prime location of Kalaranna project. T1 Mall of Tallinn On 3 April 2020 Harju County Court initiated reorganization proceedings of the operator of T1 Mall of Tallinn - AS Tallinna Moekombinaat (TMK). Reorganization proceedings were terminated a year later by the decision of 26 April 2021 of the Supreme Court not to take TMKs appeal into proceedings. Without the reorganisation proceedings AS Tallinna Moekombinaat is not capable to fulfil its obligations and has become permanently insolvent. On 7 May 2021 Harju County Court appointed Kristo Teder as an interim bankruptcy trustee of TMK. Interim bankruptcy trustee presented to the court a written report and opinion on 27 May 2021. Based on the report the court will take a decision about the following proceedings. The management of TMK continues to operate T1 Mall of Tallinn in cooperation with the interim trustee in bankruptcy until appointment of bankruptcy trustee and declaration of insolvency. Supreme Courts decision as an adjusting event after balance sheet date requires writing-off investment into subsidiary. AS Pro Kapital Eesti has written off an investment into subsidiary in amount of 13.4 million euros due to negative equity of TMK and as a result of adjusting event also receivables in the total amount of 26 million euros as at 31 December 2020. When bankruptcy is declared and the Company loses control over subsidiary, TMK will not be consolidated into the group any more. Although discontinuing consolidation will influence consolidated results by 26 million negatively, it will have a positive effect to the Group financial results due to derecognition of negative equity of the subsidiary. Bankruptcy of TMK will not affect liquidity of the Group nor short-term cash flows. Long-term cash flows are influenced by uncollectable receivables to the Group. Adjusting event described above and writing off the debts of subsidiary on parent company level has triggered a non-compliance with financial covenants of secured bonds (Notes 9 and 19). Hotel operations Last year had a significant impact on PK Parkhotel Kurhaus in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, the hotel was closed from March until the end of June and due to new restrictions hotel is not operating since November 2020. The impact of COVID-19 has been 0.7 million euros in less hotel revenues in the first quarter of 2021 comparing to last year. However, due to governmental support, the net result was better by 30 thousand euros. We expect to reopen the hotel in the middle of June. In the following months we continue construction works of ongoing development projects and plan to start with the following phases. In spite of losing T1 Mall of Tallinn, our real estate development is doing well, the Company is a going concern and we have an optimistic view for the future. Paolo Michelozzi CEO Key financials The total revenue of the Company in the first quarter of 2021 was 6.6 million euros, which is an increase of 12% compared to the reference period (2020 3M: 5.9 million euros). The real estate sales revenues are recorded at the moment of handing over the premises to the buyer. Therefore, the revenues from sales of real estate depend on the completion of the residential developments. The real estate sales revenue was higher in 2021 due to completion of Ratsuri Houses project, where apartments were handed over to new owners during March-April. In 2021, the Company has continued with presales of current development projects: first phases of Kalaranna District and Kindrali Houses in Tallinn. The gross profit in the first quarter of 2021 decreased by 8% amounting to 2.0 million euros compared to 2.1 million euros during the same period in 2020. The operating profit in the first quarter of 2021 was 1.9 million euros compared to 0.3 million euros during the same period in 2020. The increase in operating result is mainly influenced by the sale of investment property. The net result in the first quarter of 2021 was -2.1 million euros compared to -4.0 million euros during the same period in 2020. The net result of the reporting period was influenced by the sale of the investment property, but as well in fewer administrative (decreased 27% compared to 2020 3M) and financial costs (decreased 6% compared to 2020 3M). Cash generated from operating activities in the first quarter of 2021 was -2.1 million euros compared to -4.0 million euros during the same period in 2020. The net result of the reporting period was influenced by the sale of the investment property, but as well in fewer administrative (decreased 27% compared to 2020 3M) and financial costs (decreased 6% compared to 2020 3M). Net assets per share on 31 March 2021 totalled to 0.20 euros compared to 1.19 euros on 31 March 2020. Key performance indicators 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited*) Revenue, th EUR 6 563 5 873 19 234 Gross profit, th EUR 1 974 2 137 6 775 Gross profit, % 30% 36% 35% Operating result, th EUR 1 897 346 -43 108 Operating result, % 29% 6% -224% Net result, th EUR -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Net result, % -32% -68% -309% Earnings per share, EUR -0.03 -0.07 -0.98 31.03.2021 31.03.2020 (Restated*) 31.12.2020 (Unaudited*) Total Assets, th EUR 185 287 207 361 179 048 Total Liabilities, th EUR 177 829 142 022 169 477 Total Equity, th EUR 7 458 65 339 9 571 Debt / Equity ** 18.44 2.10 14.15 Return on Assets, % *** Return on Equity, % **** -1.2% -1.9% -30.7% Net asset value per share, EUR ***** -24.8% -5.9% -141.2% * See Note 2 in the Consolidated Interim Report for I Quarter and 3 Months Of 2021 for details regarding the unaudited status of the report and restatement as a result of an error 2019 year end results **debt / equity = total debt / total equity***return on assets = net profit/loss / total average assets****return on equity = net profit/loss / total average equity*****net asset value per share = net equity / number of shares CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS Consolidated interim statement of financial position in thousands of euros 31.03.2021 31.03.2020 (Restated) 31.12.2020 (Unaudited) ASSETS Current assets Cash and cash equivalents 13 331 9 459 9 393 Current receivables 1 542 1 281 1 797 Inventories 61 481 40 329 58 352 Total current assets 76 354 51 069 69 542 Non-current assets Non-current receivables 3 715 2 942 3 517 Property, plant and equipment 6 717 7 100 6 745 Right-of-use assets 318 480 357 Investment property 97 814 145 406 98 512 Intangible assets 369 364 375 Total non-current assets 108 933 156 292 109 506 TOTAL ASSETS 185 287 207 361 179 048 LIABILITIES AND EQUITY Current liabilities Current debt 104 373 83 153 107 581 Customer advances 10 284 5 935 7 866 Current payables 24 011 10 837 22 211 Tax liabilities 1 280 849 458 Short-term provisions 471 329 459 Total current liabilities 140 419 101 103 138 575 Non-current liabilities Long-term debt 33 425 38 398 27 255 Other non-current payables 2 638 1 064 2 295 Deferred income tax liabilities 1 151 1 320 1 170 Long-term provisions 196 137 182 Total non-current liabilities 37 410 40 919 30 902 TOTAL LIABILITIES 177 829 142 022 169 477 Equity attributable to owners of the Company Share capital in nominal value 11 338 11 338 11 338 Share premium 5 661 5 661 5 661 Statutory reserve 1 134 1 134 1 134 Revaluation reserve 2 984 3 262 2 984 Retained earnings -8 031 47 647 47 647 Profit/ Loss for the period -1 951 -3 788 -55 678 Total equity attributable to owners of the Company 11 135 65 254 13 086 Non-controlling interest -3 677 85 -3 515 TOTAL EQUITY 7 458 65 339 9 571 TOTAL LIABILITIES AND EQUITY 185 287 207 361 179 048 Consolidated interim statements of profit and loss and other comprehensive income in thousands of euros 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited) CONTINUING OPERATIONS Operating income Revenue 6 563 5 873 19 234 Cost of goods sold -4 589 -3 736 -12 459 Gross profit 1 974 2 137 6 775 Marketing expenses -126 -161 -621 Administrative expenses -1 143 -1 562 -6 154 Other income 1 351 3 478 Other expenses -159 -71 -43 586 Operating profit 1 897 346 -43 108 Financial income 1 1 4 Financial expense -3 994 -4 244 -15 998 Profit / loss before income tax -2 096 -3 897 -59 102 Income tax -17 -69 -354 Profit / loss for the period -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Attributable to: Equity holders of the parent -1 951 -3 788 -55 678 Non-controlling interest -162 -178 -3 778 Items that will not be reclassified subsequently to profit or loss Net change in properties revaluation reserve 0 0 -278 Total comprehensive income / loss for the year -2 113 -3 966 -59 734 Attributable to: Equity holders of the parent -1 951 -3 788 -55 956 Non-controlling interest -162 -178 -3 778 Earnings per share for the period (EUR) -0.03 -0.07 -0.98 Consolidated interim statements of cash flows in thousands of euros 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited) Cash flows from operating activities Profit/loss for the period -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Adjustments for: Depreciation, amortisation of non-current assets 100 105 416 Gain from disposal of investment property -1 092 0 0 Loss from write-off PPE and intangible assets 0 0 8 Change in fair value of property, plant, equipment 0 0 -16 Change in fair value of investment property 0 0 43 128 Finance income and costs 3 993 4 243 15 994 Changes in deferred tax assets and liabilities -19 -27 -178 Other non-monetary changes (net amounts) 2 -1 -3 111 Changes in working capital: Trade receivables and prepayments 53 -409 -1 514 Inventories -3 129 703 -13 011 Liabilities and prepayments 3 506 1 336 10 025 Provisions 13 10 59 Net cash generated in operating activities 1 314 1 994 -7 656 Cash flows from investing activities Payments for property, plant and equipment -28 -10 -94 Payments for intangible assets -2 -2 -43 Payments for investment property -210 -302 -844 Proceeds from disposal of investment property 2 000 0 0 Interests received 0 1 1 Net cash generated in investing activities 1 760 -313 -980 Cash flows from financing activities Net proceeds from secured bonds 0 28 500 28 500 Redemption of convertible bonds -69 0 -33 Redemption of non-convertible bonds 0 -28 000 -28 000 Proceeds from borrowings 5 838 100 14 410 Repayment of borrowings -2 857 -648 -1 376 Repayment of lease liabilities -46 -48 -135 Interests paid -2 002 -2 742 -5 953 Net cash generated by financing activities 864 -2 838 7 413 Net change in cash and cash equivalents 3 938 -1 157 -1 223 Cash and cash equivalents at the beginning 9 393 10 616 10 616 Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the period 13 331 9 459 9 393 The full report can be found in the file attached. Allan RemmelkoorMember of the Board+372 614 4920prokapital@prokapital.ee Attachment PKG Q1 2021 ENG A court in Germany has convicted a former member of Syrias security services of crimes against humanity in a landmark trial seen as the first step in holding the regime of President Bashar al-Assad accountable for state-sponsored torture. Eyad al-Gharib, 44, was sentenced on Tuesday to four and a half years in prison. Prosecutors at the Koblenz Higher Regional Court accused the former colonel of helping arrest and transport at least 30 pro-democracy protesters to a notorious military intelligence prison in Damascus, known as Branch 251, in 2011. Gharibs state-appointed lawyers said their client, who was a low-ranking officer in Syrias powerful General Intelligence Directorate, was acting under duress and feared punishment from his superiors for failing to carry out their orders. His defense team pointed out that Gharib defected from the regime before fleeing to Germany in 2018 and has apologized for his actions. Anwar al-Bunni, a former Syrian detainee and human rights lawyer living in Germany, called the conviction a message to all criminals who still commit the most horrific crimes in Syria that the time of impunity is over. You will not find a safe place to go to, al-Bunni said in a statement. The verdict came nearly 10 years after Syrias uprising, which started as peaceful protests against the decades-long Assad family rule and grew into a civil war thats since killed 400,000 people and driven more than 11 million people from their homes. Gharib and many other former regime officials fled to Europe, where they have been living as refugees. In recent years, domestic courts in Germany, France and other European countries have taken on Syrian war crimes cases, relying on the concept of universal jurisdiction, which allows for the prosecution of grave crimes committed in another country. Wolfgang Kaleck, general secretary of the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, hopes the verdict will motivate prosecutors elsewhere in Europe to pursue similar cases. The goal must continue to be to bring high-ranking officials of Assads security apparatus to justice. They are responsible for abusing, torturing and executing tens of thousands of people in Syria not just over the past several years; even today, Kaleck said in a statement. The main defendant in the case, Anwar Raslan, is still on trial. Raslan is accused of overseeing the torture of opposition activists between 2011 and 2012. Prosecutors say that Raslan, a former colonel in the Syrian army who ultimately defected, was aware of the massive violence that occurred under his watch. The Syrian government continues to use its vast network of prisons to torture and execute the opposition. The Syrian Network for Human Rights, a local monitoring group, estimates 99,000 people are missing in Syria, a majority of whom are detained by the regime. In June, Germany arrested a doctor accused of torture in one of the Syrian regimes notorious detention centers. Both France and Germany have also issued arrest warrants for Jamil Hassan, the former head of Syrias air force intelligence services. The Australian Federal Police has told politicians they must report allegations of sexual assault and other criminal matters without delay or risk prejudicing any investigations. The advice from AFP commissioner Reece Kershaw to Prime Minister Scott Morrison was circulated to members of parliament on Thursday after debate over the handling of allegations from former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins that she was raped in a ministerial office in March 2019 by a colleague. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has given his full support to Defence Minister Linda Reynolds. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen At the time, Ms Higgins boss Defence Minister Linda Reynolds encouraged her to go to police but the adviser ultimately decided not to pursue a formal complaint. Ms Higgins asked police on Wednesday to reopen the investigation. I cannot state strongly enough the importance of timely referrals of allegations of criminal conduct, Mr Kershaw wrote in the letter to Mr Morrison. Failure to report alleged criminal behaviour in this manner, or choosing to communicate or disseminate allegations via other means, such as through the media or third parties, risks prejudicing any subsequent police allegations. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company McCracken Drug Investigation Nets Two Arrests By West Kentucky Star Staff PADUCAH - Two Paducah residents are facing drug charges after an investigation led to the search of a Paducah home.The McCracken County Sheriff's Office says deputies and detectives learned 54-year-old Marvell Lowe was selling Methamphetamine from his apartment on Marquess Drive. They executed a search warrant at Lowe's apartment Tuesday evening.Detectives located Lowe and 26-year-old Ashley Barbarotto inside the apartment. They also found methamphetamine, synthetic marijuana, and drug paraphernalia.Lowe and Barbarotto were arrested and booked into the McCracken County Regional Jail.Lowe is charged with tampering with physical evidence, trafficking in methamphetamine 2nd or subsequent offense, and trafficking in a synthetic drug.Barbarotto faces charges of possession of methamphetamine, possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Dr Olajide Ogunjimi was cleared of misconduct by a disciplinary panel after it agreed that the two police officers who handcuffed and tear gassed him during an arrest acted 'unreasonably and disproportionately' against the father-of-three (pictured) A hospital doctor who was handcuffed and tear gassed by 'heavy handed' police officers while being arrested has been allowed to return to work by a tribunal. Dr Olajide Ogunjimi was cleared of misconduct by a disciplinary panel after it agreed that the two officers acted 'unreasonably and disproportionately' against him when they arrested him on suspicion of wasting police time. The 47-year-old doctor was arrested after he called police to report an unknown concern then refused to end a phone conversation he was having as they questioned him. Ogunjimi, a former trainee specialist registrar at Bolton Hospital in Greater Manchester, struggled with the two officers in his bedroom before he was subdued with CS spray, also known as tear gas. Senior officers later concluded no action would be taken against the father-of-three on the charge of wasting police time, but he was reported to the General Medical Council. At the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service in Manchester Dr Ogunjimi, who also works as a lecturer at University of Central Lancashire, faced misconduct charges. But he was cleared after agreeing the officers acted 'unreasonably and disproportionately'. The 47-year-old doctor was arrested after he called police to report an unknown concern then refused to end a phone conversation he was having as they questioned him A disciplinary panel concluded the arrest was lawful but said it considered the officers were 'heavy handed' and ruled the doctor was in a 'unique situation which was unlikely to be repeated'. It is not known why Dr Ogunjimi had called police to his house, but the tribunal heard it came following phone conversations he had with his uncle and an unnamed woman. The incident occurred on June 8 2018 after the two officers, a junior policewoman known as PC A and PC B, an experienced Neighbourhood Response constable, were dispatched to Ogunjimi home. Initially he conversed with the two officers amicably for up to 30 minutes in his lounge but trouble began when he fielded another phone call from an unknown caller. PC B himself ended the call but the doctor became 'agitated' and 'frustrated' and went upstairs to make another call. The doctor, a former trainee specialist registrar at Bolton Hospital, Greater Manchester, was arrested on June 8 2018 One of the officers urged Ogunjimi to remain in the living room and accused of him being rude but he went upstairs anyway, and the pair rushed after him. PC B followed him into the bedroom, cautioned him and asked the doctor to end his telephone call, but a struggle was sparked when Ogunjimi ignored him. As he became more agitated, PC B instructed PC A to deploy the CS spray. Dr Ogunjimi's lawyer Mr Phillip Bown told the tribunal: 'The police officers used unreasonable, unnecessary and a disproportionate amount of force when arresting Dr Ogunjimi. 'Following his arrest, Dr Ogunjimi was not charged with the offence for which he was arrested nor any other offence arising from his arrest. 'His behaviour, in the heat of the moment, while in a state of shock and suffering pain to his wrist, was both lawful and excusable. 'This was a once in a lifetime situation that Dr Ogunjimi found himself in. 'The incident was a single error of judgement committed in a very short space of time and in highly charged emotional circumstances.' In clearing Ogunjimi, MPTS chairman David McLean said: 'PC B's genuine belief was that Dr Ogunjimi was being untruthful, his story was fabricated and that he was wasting police time. Dr Ogunjimi worked at the Royal Bolton Hospital (pictured, stock image) and also as a lecturer at University of Central Lancashire 'The officers' actions were certainly reasonable until the point when they reach Dr Ogunjimi's bedroom door but the Tribunal considered that the use of force after this point was heavy handed. 'With the benefit of hindsight, the officers could have dealt with the situation more appropriately. Had the officers not used force, the incident might have resolved without violence.' Tthe Tribunal concluded that the use of force was 'understandable' and not 'gratuitous', but added: 'The situation would have been a very frightening experience for Dr Ogunjimi, who was certainly shocked and distressed. 'On a true view of the facts as they now appear in the cold light of day after having heard extensive evidence, the use of force used by the police officers in arresting Dr Ogunjimi can be seen to have been unreasonable. 'In reality, he was shocked and distressed by the events unfolding, and he reacted while he was in that state of shock. He was in a unique situation, which he had not been in before and is unlikely to be in again, and reacted in a way which, with the benefit of hindsight, he wishes he had not.' 'This was an isolated incident about which Dr Ogunjimi had expressed genuine regret and indicated that he would act differently in the future.' President Biden set out to declare a triumphant US return to the trans-Atlantic alliance. America is back," the president said in his speech this week to the Munich Security Conference. The leaders of France and Germany promptly made it clear that the four years of the Trump presidency had changed the relationship. Frances President Emmanuel Macron renewed his call for Europes strategic autonomy," which would require the Continent to be prepared to defend itself. Germanys Chancellor Angela Merkel bluntly stated that the interests of the US and Europe wouldnt always converge, which most listeners took as a reference to the European Unions recent trade pact with China, along with Germanys determination to complete the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline from Russia. The US may be back, but it cant expect to reclaim its old seat at the head of the table. Underlying the muted response to Mr. Bidens speech is what the European Council on Foreign Relations calls a massive change" in European public opinion toward the US The groups recent poll finds: Majorities in key member states now think the US political system is broken, that China will be more powerful than the US within a decade, and that Europeans cannot rely on the US to defend them." These beliefs are driving fundamental changes in European policy preferences. Large numbers think Europeans should invest in their own defense," the poll found, and look to Berlin rather than Washington as their most important partner. They want to be tougher with the US on economic issues. And, rather than aligning with Washington, they want their countries to stay neutral in a conflict between the US and Russia or China"a stance endorsed by at least half the electorate in each of the 11 countries surveyed. In every country except Poland and Hungary, pluralities agreed with the statement that after voting for Donald Trump in 2016, the American people can no longer be trusted. In Germany, a majority endorsed this sentiment. For decades, Europeans believed that American politics would oscillate within defined boundaries that assured our reliability. Mr. Trumps election undermined this belief, and Mr. Bidens victory didnt restore it. The revolt against elites in both major US political parties isnt going away, and populists may someday be back in power. The problem goes deeper than the destruction of political guardrails. Sixty-one percent of Europeans believe that the US political system is broken." This figure includes 66% of the French, 71% of Germans and, remarkably, 81% of British respondents. In a such a system, gridlock and drift are the most likely outcomes. In Europes eyes, Americas decline coincides with Chinas rise. Fifty-nine percent of Europeansincluding 56% of Germans, 58% of the British, and 62% of the Frenchbelieve that within 10 years, China will displace the US as the worlds leading power. This helps explain why in case of disagreement between the US and China, 60% of Europeans believe that their country should remain neutral, compared with 22% who say that they should take Americas side. This stance extends to the threat from Russia. Amid tension between the US and Russiawhich seized the Crimea and threatens Ukraines territorial integrity59% prefer neutrality, while 23% want to cast their lot with America. Astonishingly, the Polesthe most anti-Russian people in Europeopt for neutrality over taking the US side, 45% to 36%. As perceptions of Americas weakness mount, more Europeans are starting to favor being tougher on the US on economic issues. These Europeans resist American pressure to distance themselves from China, which they regard as an important trading partner, and they will be in no rush to renegotiate their trade relationships with the US America First" has triggered a reactionEurope First. The weakening of America has also heightened European perceptions of Germanys significance. A majority of countries surveyed regarded Germany as the most important power. Germanylong the staunchest defender of Americas role in Europenow regards France as its most important ally. No one can predict how these attitudes might change in the face of a military threat from the east. And if the Biden administration masters the pandemic, unlocks economic growth and stabilizes American political institutions, Europeans may reconsider their views about the trans-Atlantic alliance. Still, the Biden administration is learning the truth of Heraclitus ancient maxim: You cannot step into the same river twice. This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. The Russian side again refused to open the entry-exit checkpoints on the disengagement line in Luhansk region after the Ukrainian side provided shuttle buses to transport citizens through Zolote and Schastia checkpoints. "We have been waiting for a response from the Russian side for a week. Today, from 7:40, a white bus is waiting at Schastia. The yellow bus is at Zolote. The Russian side again refused to open the checkpoint on its part," the Ukrainian delegation to participate in the Trilateral Contact group (TCG) said on Facebook on Wednesday. In this regard, the Ukrainian side is waiting for an appropriate assessment of such decisions from the partner states and international humanitarian organizations. The Ukrainian delegation regards the current situation as the inability of the Russian delegation "to distinguish between deeds and words." "In words, they constantly complain about the plight of Ukrainian citizens (held hostage in the occupied territories). When it comes down to it, the opportunity for our citizens to leave the temporarily occupied territories and receive administrative services, pensions and social benefits is blocked from November 10," the message says. Africas Power & Energy Exhibition is announced as market continues to attract investment Africa has experienced massive internal growth in major areas within the last 22 years which have contributed greatly to investors assets. One area which is particularly high in demand and continuously predicting huge returns is the energy market. It has already made an impact by creating greater well-being to the people of Africa whilst boosting profits for shareholders involved. Due to this massive interest in the regions power sector which includes the UNs 2014 Sustainable Energy for All programme, making Africa as one of the main areas of focus, EXPOGROUP is organizing 6th Power & Energy 2021 Exhibition, from the 24th - 26th of March 2021 in Tanzania at the Diamond Jubilee Expo Center (DJEC) in Dar-es-Salaam and Kenyas 9th edition from the 01st - 03rd July 2021 Sarit Expo Centre, Nairobis famous international venue and and 4th Power & Energy 2021 Exhibition, from the 23rd - 25th of September 2021 in Ethiopia at the Millennium Hall in Addis Ababa and the 3rd Power & Energy 2022 Exhibition, from the 04th - 06th of May 2022 in Rwanda at the Millennium Hall in Kigali Convention Centre. POWER & ENERGY AFRICA is the leading exhibition and meeting place to discuss and discover the latest issues, solutions and technologies to meet the future energy challenges in East Africa. The premier exhibition dedicated to the power generation, renewable and alternative energy & distribution industries attracts delegates from over 22 countries across Africa and around the world. Exhibiting at the largest power event in the industry will allow you to showcase your products and services to the industry's largest gathering of qualified decision-makers Government officials, senior executives and industry players. Trade visitors from all over East & Central African countries are being invited directly and in collaboration with several regional trade bodies in Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda, Somalia, Mozambique & Congo. Though Kenya by itself is one of the biggest markets in Africa & Tanzania steadily progressing towards the investment & trade market, major emphasis is being laid upon attracting traders and importers from neighboring countries. Subscribe to the Expogroup E-newsletters to stay up-to-date on the latest event news For more details visit: http:/powerenergy.expogr.com/ End In this Jan. 22, 2021, file photo, certified medical assistants Martha Sida, from left, Tina Killebrew and Cynthia Bernal prepare doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in Las Vegas. COVID-19 vaccine makers tell Congress to expect a big jump in the delivery of doses over the coming month. The companies insisted Tuesday, Feb. 23, at a hearing that they will be able to provide enough vaccine for most Americans by summer. (AP Photo/John Locher) COVID-19 vaccine makers told Congress on Tuesday to expect a big jump in the delivery of doses over the coming month, and the companies insist they will be able to provide enough for most Americans to get inoculated by summer. By the end of March, Pfizer and Moderna expect to have provided the U.S. government with a total of 220 million vaccine doses, up sharply from the roughly 75 million shipped so far. "We do believe we're on track," Moderna President Stephen Hoge said, outlining ways the company has ramped up production. "We think we're at a very good spot." That's not counting a third vaccine, from Johnson & Johnson, that's expected to get a green light from regulators soon. The Biden administration said Tuesday that it expects about 2 million doses of that vaccine to be shipped in the first week, but the company told lawmakers it should provide enough of the single-dose option for 20 million people by the end of March. Looking ahead to summer, Pfizer and Moderna expect to complete delivery of 300 million doses each, and J&J aims to provide an additional 100 million doses. That would be more than enough to vaccinate every American adult, the goal set by the Biden administration. Two other manufacturers, Novavax and AstraZeneca, have vaccines in the pipeline and anticipate eventually adding to those totals. In this Friday, Jan. 22, 2021, file photo, empty vials of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine are seen at a vaccination center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. COVID-19 vaccine makers tell Congress to expect a big jump in the delivery of doses over the coming month. The companies insisted Tuesday, Feb. 23, at a hearing that they will be able to provide enough vaccine for most Americans by summer. (AP Photo/John Locher, File) Asked pointedly if they face shortages of raw materials, equipment or funding that would throw off those schedules, all of the manufacturers expressed confidence that they had enough supplies and had already addressed some of the early bottlenecks in production. "At this point I can confirm we are not seeing any shortages of raw materials," said Pfizer's John Young. The hearing by a House subcommittee came as U.S. vaccinations continue to accelerate after a sluggish start and recent disruptions caused by winter weather. More than 44 million Americans have received at least one dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, and about 1.4 million per day got a first or second dose over the past seven days, according to the CDC. But state health officials say demand for inoculations still vastly outstrips the limited weekly shipments provided by the federal government. In this Feb. 19, 2021, file photo, people wait in line at a 24-hour, walk-up COVID-19 vaccination clinic hosted by the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium at Temple University's Liacouras Center in Philadelphia. States are scrambling to catch up on coronavirus vaccinations after bad weather last week led to clinic closures and shipment backlogs. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) "The most pressing challenge now is the lack of supply of vaccine doses," Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, said as she opened the hearing. "Some of the companies here today are still short of the number of doses they promised to initially deliver when they last testified before this subcommittee in July." Both Pfizer and Moderna failed to meet delivery quotas for the initial doses of their vaccines late last year. That's prompted Congress to scrutinize the companies' plans for vaccine development and delivery, which they noted benefited from $16 billion in federal funding. "A significant amount of American tax dollars were invested to be able to produce the vaccine immediately upon approval," said Rep. David McKinley, a West Virginia Republican, who questioned executives on why they were still unable to meet demand for the vaccines. In this Feb. 7, 2021, file photo, two people enter a New York City vaccine hub during a snowstorm in New York. Executives from the major COVID-19 vaccine producers are set Tuesday, Feb. 23, to answer questions from Congress about expanding the supply of shots needed to curb the pandemic that has killed more than 500,000 Americans. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, File) Nearly 14% of Americans have received at least an initial dose of the two-shot-regimen vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. The Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed focused most of its efforts on racing vaccines through research, development and manufacturing. But little planning or funding went to coordinating vaccination campaigns at the state and local levels. That effort is now picking up speed with plans for mass vaccination sites and an increasing supply distributed to chain pharmacies. Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat, questioned J&J Vice President Richard Nettles on why the company has fallen behind on the schedule outlined in its federal contract, which included delivering 12 million doses by late February. Nettles said only that the company has faced "significant challenges" due to its "highly complex" manufacturing process. But he noted the company is partnering with drugmaker Sanofi to further expand production. In this Feb. 12, 2021, file photo, scripps health official draws from a vile of the COVID-19 vaccine prior to administering it at their new drive-thru vaccination site at the Del Mar Fairgrounds in Del Mar, Calif. Executives from the major COVID-19 vaccine producers are set Tuesday, Feb. 23, to answer questions from Congress about expanding the supply of shots needed to curb the pandemic that has killed more than 500,000 Americans. (Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune via AP, Pool, File) In this Feb. 11, 2021, file photo, a worker arranges cones at a mostly-empty vaccination site at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Executives from the major COVID-19 vaccine producers are set Tuesday, Feb. 23, to answer questions from Congress about expanding the supply of shots needed to curb the pandemic that has killed more than 500,000 Americans. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) In this Dec. 15, 2020, file photo, Staff Sgt. Noel Bueno, left, Pfc. Saurav Shrestha, center, and Mark Robinson, right, take delivery of a box of the first shipment of the Pfizer vaccine for COVID-19 before putting it in a freezer shortly after it arrived at Madigan Army Medical Center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, south of Seattle. COVID-19 vaccine makers tell Congress to expect a big jump in the delivery of doses over the coming month. The companies insisted Tuesday, Feb. 23, at a hearing that they will be able to provide enough vaccine for most Americans by summer. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File) "This has been an unprecedented effort to scale up manufacturing for a vaccine against a disease that didn't even exist more than a year ago," Nettles told lawmakers. Even with no manufacturing or supply interruptions, other issues could delay or block the U.S. from vaccinating 70% to 80% of its populationthe critical threshold needed to neutralize COVID-19 spread. About 1 in 3 Americans say they definitely or probably will not get the vaccine, according to a recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Concerns about safety were the reason most frequently cited for vaccine hesitancy, despite few serious side effects reported with the currently available vaccines. Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. [February 24, 2021] Axele Creates Preferred Partner Program Integration and Strategic Partnerships Drive Smarter Insights for Truckload Carriers and Increase Market Reach DALLAS, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Axele, LLC, a Transportation Management System (TMS) company, is looking for collaborative partners to join its superior ecosystem of integration, technology, and strategic providers. Axeles Preferred Partner Program consists of partners who play different but interconnected roles to help truckload carriers optimize, automate, and increase profits. Axeles preferred partners take the concept of strategic alliance to the next level, says Ryan Camacho, Director of Strategy & Business Development at Axele. These pioneers collaborate closely with Axele to bring breakthrough technologies to market, specifically for truckload carriers. Most recently, Axele announced a strategic partnership with DAT Freight & Analytics to provide deeper integration between the solutions and collaborate to bring new technologies to market. Axele is now the preferred TMS for DAT, while DAT is the Preferred Load Board for Axele TMS. Axele is looking for both integration and strategic partnerships with companies that provide must-have technology and services to truckload carriers, such as feight marketplaces, ELDs, telematics, maps, accounting systems, factoring companies, and market-rate providers: Integration partnerships allow Axele TMS to create a one-stop-shop that helps carriers manage their business without bouncing among multiple systems. Integration partners benefit by increasing market reach and enhancing the stickiness of their solutions via API. allow Axele TMS to create a one-stop-shop that helps carriers manage their business without bouncing among multiple systems. Integration partners benefit by increasing market reach and enhancing the stickiness of their solutions via API. Strategic partnerships create deeper connectivity between partner and Axele solutions to give carriers even more, such as smarter insights and streamlined processes, plus access to free trials and discounts. Strategic partners qualify for customer referrals, co-promotion campaigns, and commissions/spiffs. Axeles partner program currently features strategic partner DAT Freight & Analytics and a host of integration partners, such as QuickBooks, Omnitracs, Verizon Connect, IBT Technology, Samsara, KeepTruckin, Omnitracs, Eroad, 3MD, TFM ELD, JJ Keller & Associates, and more. About Axele Axele offers transportation management system (TMS) cloud software for truckload carriers leveraging decades of experience and insights into optimization and automation technology. Launched by Optym in 2020, Axele is the industry's first intelligent, connected solution, built specifically for small to mid-sized truckload carriers. Axele serves for-hire truckload operators and private fleets who haul general freight, dry van, flatbed, and refrigerated loads. The Axele TMS integrates with load boards, ELDs, market rates, maps, and accounting systems, to enable an owner-operator or carrier to find better loads, increase profits, and grow their business. For more information about Axele, go to www.axele.com. Media Contact for Axele: Becky Boyd MediaFirst PR (770) 642-2080 x 214 Cell (404) 421-8497 Becky@MediaFirst.Net [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Hyundai Motor India Ltd (HMIL) is ready to launch a new 7-seater SUV in India. The new segment of 7-seater SUVs is gaining traction with the launch of similar offerings from MG Motor, Mahindra and lately Tata Motors. The new SUV Alcazar will be competing with MG Hector Plus, Mahindra XUV 500 and the recently launched Tata Safari. In a statement, the company said, the new SUV will make a global debut in India. The company claims that the Hyundai Alcazar will redefine driving experiences with a combination of versatility and futuristic characteristics. Commenting on the announcement, Mr S S Kim, MD & CEO, Hyundai Motor India Ltd., said, The year 2021 will add a new chapter in HMIL history, as we gear-up to enter and redefine a new segment. Hyundai ALCAZAR will supersede the aspirations of new age buyers and redefine existing benchmarks to ensure customer delight. As Hyundai completes 25 years in the country, we will re-emphasize our commitment to Indian customers with the Global Debut of Hyundai ALCAZAR that is Made in India and Made First for India." The SUV is expected to be based on the new Creta. However, in order to accommodate the third row of seats, the SUV is expected to feature an extended tailgate. The company will also have to re-design the tail-light cluster. The newly introduced Tata Safari has also been based on the 5-seater Tata Harrier which also comes with longer dimensions and re-designed rear-end to feature the third row of seats. The SUV starts at a price of 14.69 lakh. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Porsche's new E-Fuel project could lead to new vehicles that can cut carbon emissions by up to 85%, as claimed by one of the company's top executives. Porsche is just one of the leading car manufacturers that are currently joining Tesla's technology. Other companies include Ford, General Motors, and more. International Busines Times reported that Dr. Frank Walliser, the vice president of Porsche's Motorsport and GT Cars, said that synthetic fuel could be the solution to rising carbon emissions across the globe. He gave his statement during the 911 GT3 launch. On the other hand, Porsche's current development of its synthetic fuel is expected to be tested on the German luxury marque's internal combustion engines this year. "Synthetic fuels are very important to allow us to reduce our CO2 output. Emissions are way better than current pump fuel, with fewer particulates and less NOx produced; synthetic fuels have between eight to ten components whereas petrol today has 30-40 and not all of them are welcome," he said via IB Times. Porsche synthetic fuel's efficiency While EVs are claimed to run clean energy, experts claimed that the factories that manufacture these vehicles still generate carbon emissions. Walliser is also the one that explained this belief when he previously talked about the "wheel-to-well" concept. Also Read: Hyundai Beats Tesla? Ioniq 5 Features Solar Panel Roof Capable of Charging Even Other EVs He said that synthetic fuel is cleaner than electric power since it has no bi-product, which is produced by the car in plants in different parts of the world. Porsche's executive added that they are expecting that the carbon emissions will be reduced by 85% once the production of synthetic-fuelled cars begins. Porsche is expected to use Exxon Mobil-licensed proprietary technology. On the other hand, a facility is already designated in southern Chile to produce Porsche's new synthetic fuel. Is Porsche's innovation better than Tesla's? Although Porsche's new technology is promising, it still falls behind Tesla's EV innovation. Why? Because unlike other EV manufacturers, Tesla's products as the most efficient electric cars across the globe. Tesla's official website stated that its technology reduces city pollution. Aside from this, its factories across the world also reduce the total carbon footprint. "EVs not only reduce the total carbon footprint but also help to reduce city pollution," said Tesla. If you want to know more details about Tesla's technology's efficiency, just click here. For more news updates about Porsche's E-Fuel project and other world-friendly car innovations, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes. Related Article: USPS Electric Mail Truck is Coming in Two Years and Oshkosh Defense Would be the Exclusive Manufacturer! This article is owned by TechTimes. Written by: Giuliano de Leon 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Mumbai, Feb 24 : Actor Ashish Sharma became a familiar face on TV with his roles in shows such as Rangrasiya and Siya Ke Ram. He will soon be seen in writer-filmmaker Karan Razdan's upcoming venture, Hindutva. The film's story revolves around religion and politics, and is being shot in Uttarakhand till March 20. "Ashish has a tremendous screen presence and he appeals to the masses. He has a great physique and is talented too. On television, he already proved that he was a great dancer, did good action scenes and was an overall great package. I am happy that I chose Ashish for the lead role because he will suit the part," says director Razdan.. On his part, Ashish feels "Karan is a great filmmaker" and adds that "it is my pleasure to be directed by him". The film also features Sonarika Bhadoria, Ankit Raaj, Dipika Chikhlia Topiwala and Anup Jalota. OTTAWA - A new report says too many federal inmates in isolation aren't getting a few hours a day out of their cells, pushing them into territory that could be described as inhuman treatment or even torture. Public Safety Minister Bill Blair, who is responsible for Canada's prison system, responds to a question during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Friday, Dec. 11, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Patrick Doyle OTTAWA - A new report says too many federal inmates in isolation aren't getting a few hours a day out of their cells, pushing them into territory that could be described as inhuman treatment or even torture. The report is by Ryerson University's Jane Sprott and Anthony Doob from the University of Toronto, two criminologists. In 2019, the government named Doob to an advisory panel on "structured intervention units," which it said would replace solitary confinement in its prisons. Citing federal data, they say nearly three in 10 prisoners in isolation units didn't have all or sometimes any of the four hours out of their cells they are supposed to get, for two weeks at a time. A further one in 10 were kept in excessive isolation for 16 days or longer, which by international laws and Canadian rulings constitutes cruel treatment. The findings suggest the federal prison system is falling well short of the guidelines the Liberals ushered in for units that were meant to allow better access to programming and mental-health care for inmates who need to be kept apart from other prisoners. Prisoners transferred to the units are supposed to be allowed out of their cells for at least four hours each day, with two of those hours engaged in "meaningful human contact." Some inmates refuse the opportunity. Sprott and Doob say the management of the units demands better oversight, adding the results show Canada commits "torture by another name." The duo call in their report for a permanent body to provide systematic oversight of the units. They also note ideas such as enforceable procedures to remove prisoners from conditions considered cruel or inhuman, or strict time limits, could be considered. "Theres a tendency not just in Canadian society, but in general in many countries, that says what happens to prisoners isnt a high priority," Doob said in an interview. "We have a very expensive federal prison system in Canada and Im not suggesting that we should be cutting corners financially, but rather ... you cant argue we dont have the resources to run it well." The report is based on data Correctional Service Canada provided to Sprott and Doob as part of their ongoing look into practices in the isolation units. Of the inmates whose treatment fell into the "torture" category, as defined internationally, about 45 per cent were in isolation for up to one month, the report said. A further 30 per cent had stays that extended to almost two months, and the remaining quarter were in the units for up to 380 days. There were also wide variations across regions, with Quebec having the highest proportion of stays considered "solitary confinement" under international rules, and prisons in the Pacific region the highest proportion of stays considered torture. Doob said the regional variations suggest what's possible and that better techniques used in one institution can be extended to others. The correctional service said in a statement it is sharing best practices to smooth out differences between regions. It also said independent external monitors keep an eye on cases where inmates are in the isolation units and don't receive the minimum hours for five days in a row, or for 15 days out of 30. About four-fifths of cases reviewed concluded correctional staff took all reasonable steps to encourage an inmate to leave isolation, the service said. The service's statement went on to say that the findings from Doob and Sprott will be used to decide what changes may be necessary in the isolation units. "As we continue to learn and make adjustments, we remain steadfast in our commitment to ensure the success of this new correctional model while we fulfil our mandate of ensuring the safe rehabilitation of federal inmates," the department said. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 24, 2021. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Russias COVID-19 case tally rose by 11,749 in the past day reaching 4,200,902, the anti-coronavirus crisis center told reporters on Wednesday. For a second day in the row fewer than 12,000 daily coronavirus cases were recorded. In relative terms, the growth rate stood at 0.3%. The lowest growth rates in the past day were registered in the Tuva Republic (0.05%), the Magadan Region (0.06%), the Altai Republic (0.07%), the Khakassia Republic (0.07%) and the Jewish Autonomous Region (0.07%). Moscow confirmed 1,417 new COVID-19 cases in the past day. Some 909 daily COVID-19 cases were registered in St. Petersburg, 695 in the Moscow Region, 397 in the Nizhny Novgorod Region, 304 in the Rostov Region and 303 in the Voronezh Region. Currently, 364,910 people are ill in Russia, TASS reported. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 09:23:24|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close ACCRA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Ghanaian President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo Tuesday urged collective efforts to win the battle against COVID-19. Speaking here at the inauguration of the country's Council of State, Akufo-Addo said the economic gains attained by the country were being eroded by the ravages of the novel coronavirus. "We are confronted with the ravages of COVID-19, which have affected the lives and livelihoods of all Ghanaians. Through proactive measures put in place by the government, we have seen a rebound in economic activities," he said. "However, these gains are now being threatened by the rising number of active cases in the so-called second wave that is sweeping the world. Winning the fight against the pandemic remains a collective duty and responsibility, so I appeal to you to help in this endeavor," he added. The Ghanaian president further urged the Council of State to offer honest advice based on unvarnished truth to enable him to discharge his duties effectively. Enditem On February 4, the BMJ (formerly, British Medical Journal) published an editorial accusing the worlds governments of social murder in their collective response to the pandemic. The response to this devastating statement by the media and politicians of all stripes in Britain was to ignore and conceal it. The editorial, Covid-19: Social murder, they wroteelected, unaccountable, and unrepentant, was written by Kamran Abbasi, the executive editor of the journal. The BMJ editorial: "Covid-19: Social murder, they wroteelected, unaccountable, and unrepentant" Murder, the editorial begins, is an emotive word. In law, it requires premeditation. Death must be deemed to be unlawful. How could murder apply to failures of a pandemic response? But, it argued, After two million deaths, we must have redress for mishandling the pandemic Abbasi continued, At the very least, covid-19 might be classified as social murder, as recently explained by two professors of criminology. The philosopher Friedrich Engels coined the phrase when describing the political and social power held by the ruling elite over the working classes in 19th century England. His argument was that the conditions created by privileged classes inevitably led to premature and unnatural death among the poorest classes. The editorial concluded, The social murder of populations is more than a relic of a bygone age. It is very real today, exposed and magnified by covid-19. It cannot be ignored or spun away. Politicians must be held to account by legal and electoral means, indeed by any national and international constitutional means necessary. An article on the significance of the BMJ editorial published on the WSWS has been read tens of thousands of times. The BMJ is the worlds oldest and one of the most prestigious medical periodicals, with a publication history going back to 1840. Abbasi, a doctor, is a major figure in the medical world. His BMJ biography notes, In his career as a medical editor, Kamran is a former acting editor and deputy editor of The BMJ, editor of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, and a consultant editor for PLOS Medicine. He is editor of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and JRSM Open. He created three major e-learning resources for professional development of doctors, including BMJ Learning and the Royal Society of Medicine's video lecture service. Kamran has held board level positions and been chief executive of an online learning company. He has consulted for several major organisations including Harvard University, the UK's NHS, the World Health Organization, and McKinsey & Co. In addition, Kamran is an honorary visiting professor in the department of primary care and public health at Imperial College, London. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and the Royal College of Physicians of London, patron of the South Asian Health Foundation, and a member of the General Advisory Council of the King's Fund. The Guardian, despite its claim to publish the independent journalism the world needs, gave the editorial just five paragraphs in its daily Coronavirus live roundup during the afternoon of February 4 and no independent article. There was no reference to the BMJs editorial in the Times, Daily Telegraph, Independent, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail or Financial Times. The BBC state broadcaster said nothing on the BMJ's piece. The message from the ruling class and its media echo chamber was clear. There must be no public discussion allowed on a statement pointing out that the conditions created by privileged classes inevitably led to premature and unnatural death among the poorest classes. Finely attuned to the threat from below, Britains ruling elite wants no public discussion of the issue of social murder as it prepares to end the last lockdown, with the virus and its dangerous mutations allowed to rip through the population once again to deadly effect. Among those giving the BMJ article a wide berth was John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor of the Labour Party under its then nominally left leader Jeremy Corbyn. John McDonnell [Credit: Wikipedia Commons] In July, 2017, McDonnell told the BBC regarding the June 14 Grenfell Tower fire, which claimed 72 lives, Theres a long history in this country of the concept of social murder where decisions are made with no regard to consequences of that, and as a result of that people have suffered. Thats whats happened here, and Im angry... I believe social murder has occurred in this instance and I believe people should be accountable. The WSWS noted in an article on McDonnells statement, McDonnell did not say so, but he was citing Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Engels, the co-founder with Karl Marx of scientific socialism, wrote condemning the British ruling class for the impact of fetid water supplies, cramped housing and disease on the working class: 'When society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot liveforces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequenceknows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.' Engels as a young man McDonnell was denounced by the ruling Conservatives for his description of Grenfell and by MPs from his own party, including Emma Dent Coad, the newly elected Labour MP for the constituency in which Grenfell is located. Four years on, amid a pandemic that has taken at least 126,000 lives in the UK, McDonnell has dropped all talk of social murder. In a November 21, 2020 interview, prominent Guardian journalist Owen Jones asked McDonnell, Given weve got the worst death toll and You said Grenfell was social murder, how he categorised the pandemic. McDonnell replied, On Grenfell when I said social murder, social murder was developed as a concept from Engels onwards. Then you realise that you are using language that people dont fully appreciate. He described the shock horror condemnation I was getting from a whole range of media outlets as well as individuals who should have known better, in contrast to when I met a lot of the Grenfell residents, they were all completely supportive. He then made clear that he had learned his lesson regarding what can be said. The pandemic could not be described as social murder he insisted: I think that what we are seeing now is criminal negligence where advice is being given from experts to government ministers and the government ministers have overridden that advice and as a result of that people have died and others have suffered badly. And its affected whole families and communities. So, I think it is criminal negligence. The WSWS article cited above noted that McDonnell was correct to describe Grenfell as social murder but that he should be judged by his actions, not just his words. Having said that the guilty should be punished, workers should demand to know what he is doing about it? McDonnell, Corbyn and any politician who presumes to speak on behalf of the working class has the responsibility to name the guilty and fight nationally and within parliament for them to be brought to justice. McDonnell would never do this as, Among those whose political decisions led to the Grenfell inferno are the leadership of the Conservative Party, past and present, and of the Labour Party tooall those who have jointly presided over endless privatisations and savage social cuts that have continued unabated since 1979. The culpable include Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May and her likely successors, such as former Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who laid waste to Londons fire service. McDonnell is not just shielding Johnson with his silence on social murder but the Labour Party, which, initially under Corbyn and then his replacement as leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has allied with Johnson in a de facto government of national unity since the start of the pandemic. Last August, when over 40,000 lives had already been lost, McDonnell came forward to endorse Starmers constructive opposition to Johnson. He said, I think Keirs got this exactly right. Hes approached the government in a constructive wayand weve got to get through this crisis together Johnson and Starmer have relied on the trade union bureaucracy who have dedicated their entire energy and huge apparatus to suppressing every struggle of the working class and policing the herding of workers back into unsafe workplaces and schools. It is this murderous agenda that accounts for why the BMJs editorial is treated like radioactive material, not just by the Tory party and corporate media but by the entire political spectrum, including Labours nominal left-wing and its trade union backers. The critical initiative of the Trump Administration was lauded by Dr. Francis Collins for Operation Warp Speed. If it wasn't for the drive by the past administration, the vaccines now in hand would have come later. One of the past administration triumphs is how fast vaccines were developed a such a hurried pace. Vaccine development should have been slower, but Warp Speed set records. There were risks, but the COVID-19 needed vaccines or else. Trump got vaccines in record time In an Axios interview, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, lauded the Trump Administration to develop COVID-19 vaccines. He noted that the effort put in Warp Speed was crucial in starting vaccine jabs for many sooner. Record development time and scientific research made the 'warp speed' a success, reported The Blaze. He was in the special "Axios on HBO," stressing that the Trump White House is the one who deserves the credit. Adding the shots developed and given is Trump's effort to protect Americans from COVID-19. Details of the Interview According to the Axios editor-in-chief, Nicholas Johnston asked what the previous administration do right. Other than mask-wearing, what else was done right. Collins followed by answering that Warp Speed was a big and very ambitious as well. Warp Speed got everything right off the bat and one big winner. Dr. Francis Collins for Operation Warp Speed said that the former HHS Secretary Alex Azar was the pivot to the entire operation. He said that Azar convinced everyone that it could be done, many were skeptical but got convinced. Also read: Coronavirus Facts Not Acceptable If It Fails to Match Anyone's Worldview, Dr. Fauci Says He expressed that when they were tasked in HHS to get the vaccine rolling out in record time, they were dumbfounded, even saying that it was like the 'Manhattan Project' with all the logistics they had to navigate. It was a first in many aspects that it had a deadline. Sources say aside from Dr. Collins, some argue about Warp Speed if the Trump administration did it right. One of the bigger factors is that the former administration motivated many actions and coordinated very well. He said that two vaccines were ready for rollout by December. The NIH director mentioned that it took 11 months to get the vaccines ready from research to an actual cure. Normally it would take five years to get even one ready. No one like the past administration has achieved the feat, although the new administration can do better. One of the recent claims by the Biden administration is opposite of the NIH Director's praise. The people in the White House are saying that there were no vaccines when they started. Even Dr.Fauci debunked the lie of VP Kamala Harris last week that no plan existed for vaccine distribution. Their claims that no vaccines were ready were false; according to reports and biased media, it reinforces Biden's administration claims. Today, I received the COVID-19 vaccine. To the scientists and researchers who worked tirelessly to make this possible thank you. We owe you an awful lot. And to the American people know there is nothing to worry about. When the vaccine is available, I urge you to take it. pic.twitter.com/QBtB620i2V Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) December 22, 2020 Dr. Francis Collins for Operation Warp Speed said that everything, even the distribution, and logistics, and making the vaccines were factored in. This is all due to the efforts of the Trump administration. Related article: Meghan McCain Suggests Dr. Fauci Be Replaced by Another Virus Expert @ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Hundreds of emergency shelter beds for people experiencing homelessness could pop up across Oregon in the next year if the State Legislature approves a bill to remove cumbersome zoning rules and demand that cities approve new facility proposals. House Bill 2006 would remove a tangle of land-use approvals and paperwork typically needed to open a shelter, which advocates say currently slow the process or prevent it altogether. The bill would demand cities allow shelters to open as long as they meet minimum, basic requirements. There just is not enough shelter space to serve all of those in need, said House Speaker Tina Kotek, a Portland Democrat who sponsored the bill. Communities need this tool Local government has been at the table to help put this bill together and we need to get it to them as quickly as possible. The House Committee on Housing held the first public hearing on the bill, and all who testified spoke in support of it. In Portland, home to the states largest number of unhoused individuals, homelessness prevention leaders have said that the high cost of operating shelters and other alternatives like tiny house pods, not roadblocks to siting them, is the primary reason the city has too few indoor sleeping spaces. Supporters of the bill hope it gains rapid approval in the House and Senate. Thats because Kotek and other leaders plan to pair it with $45 million in funding to be distributed across the state to help create more low-barrier shelter beds and navigation centers to complement them. The centers would provide services to help people transition into long-term housing and other supports like access to mental health services. Of that funding, $26.5 million would support the creation of shelters, $16.5 million would be for navigation centers in Bend, Eugene, McMinnville, Medford and Salem, and $2 million would provide technical assistance to the creation of the new facilities, according to the bill language. The funding that Kotek is asking for would need to be approved in a separate bill, House Bill 2004, which also would have to go through the Joint Committee on Ways & Means, a step that normally doesnt occur until late in a legislative session. The companion bills would require that the shelters and navigation centers be operating by July 1, 2022, when the provisions lifting normal land use and zoning rules would sunset. With so much support for the bill, some jurisdictions are already making plans to hit the ground running if the measure is enacted. A DIRE NEED FOR MORE SHELTER BEDS To ensure that no Oregonian sleeps outside without a roof over their head at night, 5,800 additional shelter beds would need to be created across the state, said Andrea Bell, Oregon Housing and Community Services housing stabilization director. Currently, there are roughly 6,800 such beds in Oregon, including some that pop up only during the winter months, according to a statewide shelter study conducted two years ago. Bell said since the pandemic began, that number has shrunk due to social distancing guidelines requiring more space between beds. Between 2015 and 2019, the number of unsheltered people increased 37%, according to the shelter study. Officials who spoke during the hearing said that the number has likely increased since then and will continue to increase in coming years as a result of the pandemics economic impact. We have to continue to keep investments and urgency and pressure on the need for infrastructure, Bell said. The recent severe winter storms across the state highlighted the need. Rep. Jason Kropf, D-Bend, said one individual in his district died from cold weather-related impacts while on a waitlist to get into a shelter. It takes time to site homeless shelters and that is causing issues in our areas of the state where we experience cold weather worse than other areas, said Rep. Jack Zika, R-Redmond. We tragically have death every year because of the cold. Many city officials and representatives spoke of the challenge of finding land or a building where shelter could be created, often times causing temporary shelters to shuffle from one location to the next year to year. The shelter coalition in Bend spends an entire year locating and getting approvals for a shelter just for winter use, said Gwenn Wysling, who runs a shelter in the area. In Redmond, an outdoor tent shelter was planned to be set up on private property recently but was ultimately denied due to land use rules, Zika said a frustration that he hopes this bill addresses. The funding slated to be attached to the measure is paramount to the success of its implementation, officials said. In Salem, where the city has committed to providing a plethora of homelessness resources, there still has been a struggle to create a shelter and navigation center due to lack of infrastructure funds. A 24/7 program with services is key to saving lives, said Chris Hoy, Salem City Council president. It will be a vehicle to help people get into a rental assistance program or a permanent supportive housing program. While the League of Oregon Cities supports the bill, its lobbyist reminded the committee that it is not the end-all answer. While shelter is not a permanent solution, we need more shelters to provide a safe place to sleep while we continue to do the work to provide more affordable homes, said lobbyist Ariel Nelson. HOW THE MEASURE WOULD WORK Under the measure, emergency shelter could be a building or a cluster of smaller structures, such as a tiny home village, that provides shelter on a temporary basis. While the measure would require the lifting of some rules such as design, planning and zoning regulations, the shelters would still have to meet certain guidelines. The shelters must have sleeping and restroom facilities, comply with building codes, and if they are in a natural disaster zone, comply with regulations that keep people safe if a disaster were to occur. Additionally, the shelter must have adequate transportation for people to reach it and services they will need, such as being located near transit or offering transportation services. An approved shelter must either be operated by a local government or by an organization that has at least two years experience operating an emergency shelter already. If a shelter opts to provide showering, storage, laundry, food or case management services, it must do so at no cost to clients. While the rules for approving shelters would apply statewide, not every jurisdiction or organization would receive funds. The grants are slated to be distributed via a competitive process that prioritizes funding based on need throughout the state. The measure would complement work that the city of Portland is already doing, said Eric Engstrom, principal planner for Oregons largest city. While the bill would remove barriers temporarily, the city is working to create similar solutions to address long-term needs. Portlands proposed shelter-to-housing continuum would similarly address zoning barriers that make it challenging to erect various types of shelters in the city. The City Council is expected to hold a public hearing in mid- or late March regarding the permanent rule changes, which are essentially an extension of a temporary provision it enacted temporarily during the pandemic. Nicole Hayden reports on homelessness for The Oregonian|OregonLive. She can be reached at nhayden@oregonian.com or (810) 210-1561. Follow her on Twitter @Nicole_A_Hayden. When the University of Miami launched the Center for Computational Science in 2007, hoping it would become the central hub for the high-performance computing and software engineering needed to elevate the Universitys problem-solving research, the endeavor was considered an experiment. It was the only enterprise that spanned multiple campuses, and we didnt know if it was going to work, said Nick Tsinoremas, the founding director of the center, which last year evolved into the Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC) with an important mission: to transform the University into a global epicenter of data science through research, education, ethics, and workforce training. Now, IDSC has attracted a combined $12 million endowment from two philanthropic titansthe John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Phillip and Patricia Frostto recruit the innovators and thought leaders who, enticed by a research computing infrastructure unlike that at any other academic institution, will help put the University at the center of the data revolution and propel Miamis emergence as an international tech hub. Think of this as high-test fuel. The Knight Foundations gift supporting IDSCs growth will top off our tank and allow us to go further and go faster, said Jeffrey L. Duerk, the Universitys executive vice president for academic affairs and provost. One of the most important opportunities for the world right now is to harness the power of data science to understand complicated problems and find great solutions. This accelerates our ability to do that. While the internet powered the last tech revolution, data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence will drive the next one. Our partnerships with the Frosts and the Knight Foundation provide us new opportunities to lead this new revolution. Recognizing that nurturing, retaining, and attracting talent is key to advancing Miamis burgeoning technology sector, the Knight Foundation announced Wednesday that it is committing $4.3 million toward the creation of six endowed faculty Knight chairs at IDSC, the second of a planned group of affiliated research enterprises that will fall under the umbrella of the Frost Institutes for Science and Engineering. This investment in IDSC demonstrates the Knight Foundations commitment to transformative philanthropy, noted University of Miami President Julio Frenk. As the University of Miami embraces this turning point in the evolution of technologycatalyzing data-intensive research to solve pressing societal problemswe are grateful for the support of partners like the Knight Foundation and the Frosts. In combination with Knight-endowed funds already held by the University, the gift unlocks an additional $6 million in matching funds from the Frosts, who launched the Frost Institutes in 2017 with a $100 million gift. The match from the Universitys longtime benefactors brings the total endowment for the six Knight chairs at IDSC to more than $12 million. Demand for technical talent is rising, and were just at the beginning of the trajectory, said Alberto Ibarguen, Knight Foundation president and CEO. These investments will assure that there will be a deep pool of talent for Miamis growing tech sector while creating opportunities for Miamians of all backgrounds. Knights newest investments, which also include gifts to Florida International University to expand its School of Computing and Information Sciences and to Baptist Health South Florida to create a fellowship in health care technology, bring the amount to more than $55 million that the foundation has committed to Miamis emerging tech entrepreneurship ecosystem since 2012. The latest commitments also mark the foundations evolution to supporting institutional partners that can develop technical talent at scale and meet the demands of local industrya primary goal of government leaders. Miami is emerging as the next great global tech hub. Miamis people are its greatest asset, and great tech hubs can only be built with great university partners, said Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. The University of Miami will be a key part in creating the next generation of innovators and a workforce that will secure Miamis place at the forefront of technology and innovation. This $12 million dollar endowment is not just a remarkable act of philanthropy, its an investment in the future of our economy and of our workforce, propelling forward our communitys growth as a global tech and innovation hub, noted Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. Tsinoremas The initial endowed chairs, said Tsinoremas, who serves as IDSC director and vice provost for research computing and data, are likely to include leading scholars and innovators in artificial intelligence and machine learning with applications centered on smart homes, smart cities, and digital health. Their presence, he added, will not only draw more renowned technological expertise to the University but help the institution infuse data science into every instructional program. This will ensure that every student, from music to math majors, graduates with a degree of data-savvinessif not a new masters in data science. Launched last fall with 15 students, the new degree program, which has tracks in technical data science, data visualization, smart cities, and marine and atmospheric science, has more than 40 applicants for this fall. But the most vital role of the IDSC chairs will be to bring new ideas and insights to the highly skilled and collaborative data scientists already at the heart of the institute and catalyze research that will generate a new wave of data-informed practices and solutions to real-world problems in nearly every realmfrom medicine to earth sciences, urban planning to digital humanities, and business to communication. Data is everywhere. Everybody is creating and using it. The question is how can we use it as an asset? Tsinoremas asked. How can we use it better? How can we develop new capabilities to address issues we are facing? And what are our responsibilities? How can we ensure the data is secure? That we are using it ethically? An international leader in computational genomics and bioinformatics, Tsinoremas is confident that the Universitys investments will attract the new talent cluster that will help answer those questions and drive data science research, applications, and training to new heights. Just over the past few years, the University installed Triton, one of the fastest supercomputers in the nation, customized for the University by IBM, that can process artificial intelligence and machine-learning workloads in real time. It also became the first university to begin deploying AT&Ts 5G+ and Multi-access Edge Computing technology, which will deliver more data, from the internet to wireless devices at a faster pace. And, it has invested nearly $5 million in the University of Miami Laboratory for Integrative Knowledge, a key element of the Universitys Roadmap to Our Next Century aimed at nurturing the cross-campus collaborations the University envisioned when it recruited Tsinoremas to launch its fledgling experiment just 13 years ago. Everybody talks about San Francisco and Boston, but Miami will soon be mentioned in the same context because these gifts will allow us to reach our potential faster, he said. And speed is important, because the speed of the computer doubles every year. Weve already brought together the infrastructure and the latest in technology, and now were bringing in more intellectual capital to create the superstructure that will catalyze the transformation of our region. A Navy lieutenant commander who was convicted in connection with a Bahrain-based sex-trafficking ring in 2019 was given an unduly heavy sentence, a military appeals court decided this month. Lt. Cmdr. Joseph Nelson, formerly a Reserve officer at Naval Operational Support Center in New York, had been found guilty of unauthorized absence terminated by apprehension; conduct unbecoming an officer; and patronizing prostitutes. The only officer to be charged among at least nine sailors accused of sex crimes and human trafficking during a 2017-2018 deployment to Bahrain, Nelson was sentenced to forfeiture of $7,596 pay per month for four months and dismissal from the Navy. But an opinion from the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals, or NMCCA, published Feb. 8, found that Nelson was wrongly convicted and sentenced on one charge: conduct unbecoming. The document also provides new details in the bizarre and dramatic case. Read Next: Marine Corps Rifle Qualification Is Getting Its First Major Overhaul in More Than 100 Years A Naval Criminal Investigative Service bust in 2018 publicized the shocking news that sailors deployed to Manama, Bahrain -- headquarters of the Navy's 5th Fleet -- were accused of participating in a scheme to patronize and traffic Thai prostitutes. According to an in-depth series on the topic published by Navy Times in June 2020, some sailors alleged that they became involved with women in Bahrain in order to help them find a way out of bad conditions. The court decision shows this was also Nelson's claim. "During his time [in Bahrain on the staff of commander, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command], he patronized and eventually befriended several Thai prostitutes," the document states. "When these women sought to escape their negative living situations, they moved in with [Nelson] and lived in his government-funded housing at various times over the course of several months. In exchange for not paying rent, the women cooked and cleaned for [Nelson.]" As part of the NCIS investigation and crackdown, agents interviewed Nelson, then 33, in January 2018 for roughly two hours, cautioning him about his right to remain silent regarding patronizing prostitutes, but not warning him that "he was also suspected of failing to report the prostitution and sex trafficking-related misconduct of other Service Members," the court said. "Throughout the interview, the agents downplayed the gravity of Appellant's personal misconduct and indicated they were more interested in using his information against other Service Members involved in sex trafficking," according to a summary in the CAAF opinion. But immediately after the interview, NCIS searched Nelson's house and turned up evidence that Thai prostitutes were living with him. A few months later, in May, NCIS returned for another search and discovered a Thai woman hiding behind a bedroom door -- conclusive evidence that Nelson's living arrangement had not changed. After that surprise search, Nelson was sent home to the States early, returning to Navy Operational Support Center New York City. He reported to the command periodically and did regular phone check-ins. According to the court, Nelson was called in to meet with his commanding officer at the support center in June 2018 and told that he was going to start a regular in-person work schedule the following day. But Nelson failed to show up, the court said, and ignored phone calls and emails from his commanding officer and executive officer. On June 21, two days after he was to start in-person work, he was declared a deserter. On July 9, officers with the U.S. Marshals Service arrested Nelson at his New York City apartment, taking him to U.S. Army Garrison Fort Hamilton, New York, for holding. According to the CAAF summary, Nelson told officers he didn't understand why he was being charged as a deserter as he had already fulfilled his service obligation and was no longer on active duty. The lead investigator told Nelson he'd need to take that up with his unit. Nelson pleaded not guilty to all charges, but was ultimately convicted and sentenced May 10, 2019, at a general court-martial convened at Naval Support Activity Naples, Italy, and Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia. The contention of the appeals court is that the prosecution did not independently prove the tenets of the conduct unbecoming an officer charge, which included accusations that Nelson knowingly made a false official statement about his duty status and cohabited with known prostitutes. The court pointed out that Nelson was actually acquitted of a false official statement charge, and the prosecution did not establish how he should be convicted on conduct unbecoming charges related to that offense. "Even viewed in the light most favorable to the Prosecution, we conclude that the evidence fails to establish that Appellant's conduct was unbecoming independent of whether it amounted to false official statement," CAAF concluded. "It would not be hard to imagine how his conduct would have been unbecoming if Appellant's statement to [the lead investigator] was both official and made with the intent to deceive. But if we remove consideration of whether Appellant's conduct amounted to the offense of false official statement, in our view, no readily identifiable service custom or standard of conduct remains to sustain his conviction." The worst parts of Nelson's conviction, including his dismissal from the Navy -- tantamount to a dishonorable discharge -- will stand, however. The court found that he was owed some money back, and his corrected sentence included forfeiture of just $6,596 in pay per month for four months. Other sailors convicted in the Bahrain prostitution scandal included a chief petty officer who received 30 months in the brig for charges related to patronizing prostitutes; in 2020, he was charged with raping a woman in Virginia Beach in 2019. Navy Times reported that the Navy has worked to implement new training regarding human trafficking in the wake of the criminal investigation. The outlet reported that then-5th Fleet Commander Vice Adm. John Aquilino held an all-hands call in 2018 as the investigation was underway. "These things are wrong," he reportedly said. "They are wrong. I don't care if you're in Bahrain, the United States, Singapore, Japan. It's wrong no matter where you are." Editor's Note: This story has been updated to correct the description of Nelson's discharge and the appellate court that rendered the decision. -- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck. 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An overview of the session (Photo: Vietnam Environment Administration) The overall theme of UNEA-5 is Strengthening Actions for Nature to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. The theme calls for strengthened action to protect and restore nature and nature-based solutions to achieve the SDGs in its three complementary dimensions (social, economic and environmental). The delegates discussed the implementation of the UN General Assemblys Resolution 73/333 on strengthening global environmental law and governance, and considered the organisation of a special session celebrating the 50th anniversary of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in March. The remaining agenda items of the UNEA-5 are expected to be discussed in-person from February 28 to March 2. UNEA-5 provides member states and stakeholders with a platform for sharing and implementing successful approaches that contribute to the achievement of the environmental dimension of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs, including the goals related to the eradication of poverty and sustainable patterns of consumption and production. Vietnam also attended the fifth meeting of the Open-ended Committee of Permanent Representatives (OECPR-5) held online from February 15-17, in preparation for UNEA-5. The UNEA is the worlds highest-level decision-making body on the environment, with a universal membership of all 193 member states. Through its ministerial declaration and resolutions, the Assembly provides leadership, catalyzes intergovernmental action on the environment, and contributes to the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The UNEA is also the governing body of the UNEP. It has had four sessions starting in 2014, and was preceded by the Governing Council of the UN Environment Programme, which was composed of 58 member states./.VNA Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. (Newser) "His face was in your windshield, Jason." That was among the commentary that South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg had to contend with during two interviews with law enforcement days after the Sept. 12 crash in which he struck and killed a pedestrian. Gov. Kristi Noem released videos of the Sept. 14 and Sept. 30 interviews on Tuesday as state lawmakers began impeachment proceedings against Ravnsborg, who's refusing to resign even as he faces misdemeanor charges of operating a motor vehicle while using a mobile device, driving outside a lane, and careless driving, per CBS News. Noem has been among those to call for the 44-year-old to step down. He claims he had no idea he'd struck a person on a dark rural road until finding the body of 55-year-old Joseph Boever at the crash site the following day. But investigators found issue with that. story continues below They told Ravnsborg that a flashlight was found next to Boever's body, which was inches from the road, and was still on, meaning it would have been shining in the dark after the impact. Ravnsborg claimed to have searched the scene with a cellphone flashlight. Investigators also said Boever's broken glasses were found inside Ravnsborg's vehicle. "So that means his face came through your windshield," an investigator said, per the Washington Post. Ravnsborg said he didn't see the glasses or anything else. But Boever's cousin, Nick Nemec, argues the videos show Ravnsborg "knew what he hit and he lied." The bipartisan impeachment resolution faults Ravnsborg for "his crimes or misdemeanors in office causing the death" of Boever and for "unbecoming conduct following the crash. A rep for the attorney general tells the Argus Leader the case hasn't affected Ravnsborg's ability to do his job. (Read more Jason Ravnsborg stories.) A doctor checks on a Covid-19 patient in Hai Duong Province, February 2021. Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Health. Two more Covid-19 patients were reported in Hai Duong Wednesday morning, raising the northern province's infection tally to 627 in less than a month. Both cases are linked to previously confirmed infections and have already been isolated. Hai Duong reported one of the first cases of the ongoing outbreak in Vietnam on January 28, when community transmissions reemerged in the country after nearly two months. Since then, infections have escalated. Nationwide, 811 cases have been detected in 13 cities and provinces. Hai Duong still has one week of social distancing left after a 15-day policy was applied last Tuesday. Several parts of it are still under lockdown. Luong Van Cau, the province's deputy chairman, told a meeting on Tuesday that the number of new infections has reduced and the province is now capable of testing as many as 80,000 samples per day separately. If applying the pool testing method, the province could can 120,000 tests per day. Under this method, five different samples are pooled into one for testing and in case the pool tests positive, the samples are tested separately later. Vietnam has registered 2,403 infections so far and 605 are active. HARRISBURG Pennsylvania state lawmakers unhappy Gov. Tom Wolfs administration is considering tolling nine major bridges were warned about that prospect when they passed legislation in 2012 delegating approval to appointees of the governor and top lawmakers, they were told Tuesday. Rep. Mike Carroll, D-Luzerne, reminded colleagues of that vote at the end of an Appropriations Committee hearing during which more than a half dozen committee members questioned Transportation Secretary Yassmin Gramian about potential bridge tolls. It turns out its difficult to fund transportation, Carroll told colleagues during the hearing. But, Carroll said, those were decisions that we made, that this General Assembly made in an effort to find an easy path forward for an admittedly very complicated problem. Carroll, himself, voted against the 2012 bill, but other lawmakers now criticizing potential tolls backed the bill. The Public-Private Transportation Partnership Board, created by a 2012 law, in November voted for the very first time to approve toll projects. The major bridge program allows the Department of Transportation to toll bridges to fund improvements. PennDOT last week named nine bridges that it said it is considering tolling to pay for the reconstruction. Tolls would be between $1 and $2, probably both ways, raise about $2.2 billion and last from the start of construction in 2023 for three or four years until construction is finished, Gramian told the Appropriations Committee. Tolling would be electronic and collected through E-ZPass or license-plate billing, PennDOT has said. The money collected on a bridge is supposed to go to its construction, maintenance and operation. Along with the I-83 bridge across the Susquehanna River, the list also includes: PennDOT has said it selected major bridges badly in need of repair and balanced its selections by geography to limit the impact on any one area. A number of lawmakers on Tuesday warned that the impact of the tolls cost will hurt commuters and commercial haulers. Transportation Committee Chairman Tim Hennessey, R-Chester, suggested borrowing the money. But Gramian responded that payments on a bond would have to come from existing highway construction funds and take money from other, future construction projects. States are seeing stagnant revenue from gasoline taxes, the major source of cash for highway construction, as vehicles are becoming more fuel-efficient and more people buy electric cars. As an alternative, states are exploring user fees as a long-term replacement for declining gas tax revenue. The federal government has not increased the gas tax since 1993 and is encouraging states to explore user fees. PennDOT has said its current highway and bridge budget for construction and maintenance is about $6.9 billion per year, less than half of the $15 billion that is needed to keep Pennsylvanias highways and bridges in good condition and ease major traffic bottlenecks. ___ Follow Marc Levy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/timelywriter. The expert panel advising the Indian drug regulator has asked Dr Reddy's Laboratories (DRL) to come back with more data on safety and immunogenicity from their phase-2 and 3 studies on the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. The expert panel deliberated on the application made by DRL on Wednesday and felt that more data is required before a recommendation for approval can be granted, informed sources. "We have asked the firm to present more data on safety and immunogenicity from their phase 2 and 3 studies here," said one source in the know. The phase-3 studies ended here on February 21. The firm presented safety profile from phase-2 clinical study and interim data from the phase 3 study. DRL applied for a restricted emergency use authorisation of the Sputnik V last week. It has lined up 250 million doses of the vaccine for Indian citizens (from manufacturing partners) over the next 12 months. DRL partnered with the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) to conduct the clinical trials of the Sputnik V and for its distribution rights in India. The vaccine underwent a bridge trial in Indian on 1600 people. Sputnik V has demonstrated an efficacy rate of 91.6 per cent in the interim analysis of the phase-3 trial, which included data on 19,866 volunteers in Russia, who received both the first and second doses of the vaccine. Sputnik V maintained an efficacy at 91.8 per cent even among the group of 2,144 volunteers over 60 years old, DRL claimed. The human adenoviral vector (flu virus) based vaccine candidate is developed by the Gamaleya National Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Russia and was registered in that country in August last year. DRL would market the vaccine in India. It said it hopes to supply both to the government and also to the private market.On the pricing front, DRL has said it was discussing the Indian situation with RDIF. In India, vaccine makers like have announced two separate pricings one for the government and the other for the private market. RDIF has announced a global price of $10 per dose for the Sputnik V earlier. AS the country faces into a further five weeks of Level 5 restrictions, a leading consultant has appealed to people to stick with their efforts to reduce the spread of Covid-19. Dr Catherine Motherway, an intensive care consultant at UHL, was speaking ahead of the formal publication of the Governments revised Living with Covid framework. Speaking on RTE Radio, Dr Motherway said she supports a cautious lifting of restrictions. I think what we need is a degree of patience. There is light now this time last year we didnt know what was coming. This time last year, we were witnessing scenes in Italy which were horrendous and we now know that we have the vaccine, she told Today with Claire Byrne. We still have a lot of work to do with the patients we have in hospital and we need to continue to drive down the figures so we dont see people get this disease while there is in fact a cure and a prevention available to us. So while we are waiting for the vaccine I think being careful is very appropriate, she added. As was widely expected, Taoiseach Micheal Martin confirmed, last night, that the current Level 5 restrictions will remain in place until at least April 5. Ahead of the phased re-opening of schools under the revised plan, Michael Cregan, principal of Laurel Hill Secondary School, said he is cautiously optimistic. We welcome schools opening at any level. I think teachers and students want to be in school. It has been prioritised, and that we welcome. But we are cautiously optimistic around it. There is a worry the numbers are still quite high with Covid, and certainly in ICU, and that is a concern to us. Safety for students and staff has to be the most important factor in schools returning, he said. We are disappointed detail has not come out on how the oral and practical exams will be conducted over Easter. We have no information from the Department of Education or the State Examinations Commission. We'd like clarification on that as soon as possible, he added. One sector which will not be re-opening any time soon is the hospitality sector. However, Paul Flannery, the recently-elected chairman of the Limerick City Vintners Association, says clarity needs to be given as soon as possible. If we knew a framework in terms of what the thinking is in terms of re-opening the economy, that would be great. Then we can plan and set the wheels in motion to get staff trained back up, and re-engaged with the businesses. A lot of them will have to rehire as many of their old staff would have gone as we've been closed for so long, and others just need to re-engage with their regular staff. So we need a lead-in time, he told the Limerick Leader. Last night, 27 new cases of Covid-19 were reported in Limerick. ADVERTISEMENT The Governor of Jigawa State, Muhammad Badaru, has assented to a bill stipulating stiffer punishment for rapists. The new Violence Against Persons Prohibition Law stipulates the death penalty for rape convicts who infect their victims with HIV/AIDS. PREMIUM TIMES had reported how the state House of Assembly passed the bill last Wednesday and transmitted it to the governor for assent. While assenting to the bill, Wednesday, Mr Badaru commended the states Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Musa Aliyu, and the states Council of Ulamas for their collaboration leading to the passage of the bill. The governor said he assented to the bill after consultation with the Council of Ulamas who assured him that no section of the law is in conflict with Islam and the culture of the people of Jigawa State. The law, expected to be gazetted soon, also stipulates that the Sharia law will take precedence if any matter in the new law contradicts Islamic teachings. The chairman, Jigawa council of Ulamas, Bashir-Ahmad, said the new law was scrutinised and vetted by the religious body to ensure its conformity with Islam. The official commended the governor for his trust in the council that made him to task the members to work on the new law before his final assent. The new law The new law also stipulates that rape victim(s) would be compensated with not less than N500,000, while the court would order rape offenders to be subjected to public shame through radio announcements. Also the law says the use of chemical, biological or any harmful substance that causes lifetime deformity to a rape victim will attract life imprisonment without an option of fine. The bill is an adaptation of a similar bill passed by the National Assembly and adopted by some state Houses of Assembly. The bill also proscribes certain conducts that are injurious to the society. It also seeks to offer higher protection to the vulnerable in the society. The bill was unanimously passed by the 30 members of the legislative house representing the 27 council areas of the state. Nigerians recently called for stiffer punishment for convicted rapists as sexual assault cases rose steadily across the nation. As of midnight, Tuesday February 23, the HPSC has been notified of 574 confirmed cases of COVID-19. There is now a total of 216,870* confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ireland, 57 of those in Limerick. Once again, Limerick second only to Dublin in terms of new cases. Dr Ronan Glynn, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Department of Health said: We continue to see good progress, but this needs to be sustained. It is vital that we get our children back to school over the coming weeks. A key part of making this a success will be our continued collective buy-in to the public health measures that are tried and tested. Stay at home, work from home where possible. Given the increased transmissibility of the virus now, we must continue to limit our social contacts and do all we can to starve this disease of opportunities to spread. Limerick's 5 day moving average (to midnight 23Feb2021)** is now at 43. Limerick's 14-day incidence rate per 100,000 population (10Feb2021 to 23Feb2021)** 272.4 while the new Cases during last 14 days (10Feb2021 to 23Feb2021)** now total 531. Of the cases notified today: 285 are men / 287 are women 67% are under 45 years of age The median age is 34 years old 175 in Dublin, 57 in Limerick, 43 in Kildare, 37 in Galway, 35 in Meath and the remaining 227 cases are spread across 18 other counties. ** As of 8am today, 652 COVID-19 patients are hospitalised, of which 137 are in ICU. 35 additional hospitalisations in the past 24 hours. The Health Protection Surveillance Centre has today been notified of 56 additional deaths related to COVID-19. 31 of these deaths occurred in February, 13 occurred in January, 3 in December or earlier, while a further 9 are under investigation. The median age of those who died was 82 years and the age range was 16 - 97 years. There has been a total of 4,237 COVID-19 related deaths in Ireland. As of February 21, 353,971 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in Ireland: 222,073 people have received their first dose 131,898 people have received their second dose (The government, at this time, does not provide a county by county breakdown of vaccinations) The COVID-19 Dashboard provides up-to-date information on the key indicators of COVID-19 in the community including daily data on Irelands COVID-19 Vaccination Programme. Amid a spike in infections in some states, the Delhi government is likely to ask travellers from five states, including Maharashtra, Kerala and Punjab, to show negative COVID-19 test report before entering the national capital, officials said on Wednesday. They said an official order will be issued later in the day and it will be effective till March 15. People travelling in flights, trains and buses from these states will have to produce negative test report before entering Delhi, they said. The requirement of the negative COVID-19 test report is likely to be implemented from Friday night, officials said. The issue had also been discussed in a meeting of the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) on Monday. Maharashtra is showing a daily surge in COVID-19 cases, according to an official of the Union Health Ministry. Kerala is showing an incremental decline, but the daily cases in absolute numbers is still high over there. Punjab, with its daily increase in cases, is also a cause of worry. Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh are also showing an increase in daily cases, the central official had said on Tuesday. Delhi recorded 145 fresh COVID-19 cases and two new fatalities on Tuesday, while the positivity rate stood at 0.25 per cent, authorities said. With this, the toll from the infection has gone up to 10,903 and the case tally rose to 6,38,173. (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.) Authorities in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong have hauled in a rights activist for questioning after he started a signature campaign in support of mass popular protests against the military coup in Myanmar. State security police in Guangdong's Huizhou city summoned activist Xiao Yuhui for repeated interrogations starting Feb. 18 and continuing into this week, RFA has learned. The summons came after Xiao posted to a number of groups on the social media app WeChat condemning the Myanmar military coup. "Xiao Yuhui was summoned to the police station ... he was there about half an hour [that time]," a person familiar with the matter who declined to be named told RFA. "He's back home now, but the state security police have him in their sights, and they call him in at random," the person said. Xiao, who was interrogated by police from the Luoxi district police station in Guangzhou, Hengli district police station in Dongguan, and Huizhou municipal police department, is now being pressured to remain in or near his home. While in Huizhou city, some 30 kilometers away from his home in Hengli district, on Monday night, Xiao received repeated phone calls from officers at his local Yuantongqiao police station asking him to report to them. Xiao made the trip home, eventually arriving in the early hours of Tuesday, where he was forced to write the guarantee before being released. Dissident Wang Aizhong, who is based in Guangdong's provincial capital, Guangzhou, said she had heard similar news of Xiao. "It was about supporting the people of Myanmar [against the coup]," Wang said. "I didn't see it personally." Targeted before She said Xiao has been targeted by state security police before. "He was detained and held under criminal detention for several months at one point, so he's no stranger to being asked to 'drink tea'," she said, in a slang reference to being summoned by state security police. Xiao, who was called back in by police on Tuesday morning, declined to comment when contacted by RFA following his release. "Sorry, it's not convenient right now," he said, using a phrase often used by activists to indicate pressure from the authorities. Rights activists said a number of WeChat users across China, including Qingyuan, Shenzhen, Jieyang, and other Guangdong cities, have been treated similarly since Feb. 18, for adding their names to Xiao's signature campaign. A friend of Xiao's who asked to remain anonymous said the authorities had responded very quickly to Xiao's posts. "He posted to the group calling for solidarity with Myanmar and the protests against the military coup," the friend said. "He got the call [from police] ... within hours [of posting]." Xiao's earlier detention was linked to his online support for the Hong Kong protest movement. He was detained by Guangdong police alongside an unnamed woman after he retweeted a WeChat on May 27, 2020 referring to an online letter-writing campaign by Hong Kong's pro-democracy newspaper the Apple Daily, in opposition to the national security law. The draconian law was imposed on the city on July 1, 2020, and outlaws sedition, subversion, foreign interference, and activities supporting independence for Hong Kong. It is currently being enforced by a newly established state security branch of the Hong Kong police, alongside a branch of China's feared state security police. The woman was subsequently released on bail pending trial, but Xiao was held under criminal detention at the Huicheng district police station in Huizhou. A veteran activist, Xiao has also previously helped vulnerable groups to defend their rights, as well as families targeted by family planning officials under the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s "one-child" policy. Reported by Qiao Long and Chan Chun-ho for RFA's Mandarin and Cantonese Services. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. India today hosted the first meeting of BRICS Finance and the central bank deputies under its chairship. The meeting, which was held virtually, was co-chaired by Tarun Bajaj, secretary, department of economic affairs, ministry of finance and Dr. Michael Patra, deputy governor, Reserve Bank of India (RBI). At the meeting, India shared the priorities of the financial cooperation agenda and also the issues to be discussed in the year 2021. The issues include global economic outlook and response to Covid-19, social infrastructure financing and use of digital technologies, New Development Bank (NDB) activities, Fintech for SME and financial inclusion, BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), among others, ministry of finance said in a statement. India assumed its chairship for BRICS in 2021, the year in which BRICS is celebrating its 15th anniversary. "Under the theme BRICS@15: Intra-BRICS Cooperation, Indias approach is focused on strengthening collaboration through Continuity, Consolidation and Consensus," the statement read. Other participants of the meeting included BRICS Finance and central bank deputies of Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Erdogan (again) accuses US of acting with terrorists in Syria What kind of alliance is this? Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has, for the second time this month, accused the United States of siding with terrorists in Syria. Reacting to a tweet by Col. Wayne Marotto, spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, the US-led mission against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Erdogan said on Feb. 22, What kind of a NATO alliance is this? They (the US) still act with terrorists. Marotto had simply tweeted that the US-led mission hasnt changed and that the coalition works, by, with & thru our partner force SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) to defeat Daesh (Islamic State) in Syria. Marottos tweet hardly seemed like news. But it was a trigger for Erdogan. Background. Erdogan has vowed to expand military operations against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants in Iraq and Syria after the group reportedly ordered the execution of 13 Turkish hostages on Feb. 13; the PKK claims the hostages were killed in airstrikes by the Turkish military on its base in the mountains of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, on the Turkish border. The PKK, founded in 1984, is considered a terrorist organization by the United States, Turkey and the European Union. While the allies agree on that, they differ on exactly who the PKK are. Turkey considers the Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing, the Peoples Protection Units (YPG), extensions of the PKK. But the YPG makes up the core of the US-aligned SDF and thus is the source of the increasingly sharp differences between Washington and Ankara. Last week, on Feb. 15, Erdogan warned the United States that if you want to continue our alliance globally and within NATO, then you must stop siding with terrorists, as Amberin Zaman reports. Does Erdogan have another side to choose, though? One can no longer speak of a Turkish foreign policy as we knew it, writes Metin Gurcan. Erdogans strategy of playing the United States and Russia off one another in crisis regions, especially in Syria, has come to an end as a result of more assertive moves by the United States, Russia and Europe and, most critically, the change of guard in Washington. The Joe Biden administration and the Kremlin are both signaling that time has come for Erdogan to choose his side, suggests Gurcan. Our take. Last week Erdogan said, We believe that our common interests with America outweigh our disagreements by far. No doubt he wants better ties with the United States. There is some signaling on a workaround on Turkeys purchase of the S-400 Russian missile defense system, opposed by the United States, but no signs yet of a breakthrough, as Diego Cupola reports. An understanding on Syria is even harder to fathom, given the deep split on the Kurds. Semih Idiz calls it a dialogue of the deaf. Indeed, the leverage the United States has in Syria, besides sanctions, is its relationship with the very Kurdish groups Erdogan sees as terrorists and equal to Islamic State. Gone is the easy connection Erdogan had with former US President Donald Trump, who was willing to shelve human rights and the fate of the Kurds in the interests of a deal with Turkey. The United States can continue to try to reconcile the PYD/YPG with those Kurdish groups backed by the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iraq (KDP), with whom Erdogan has good relations. But dont expect miracles on this front, as Amberin Zaman reports here. The endgame will require more assertive US diplomacy, starting at the UN Security Council, with some tough talk and trade-offs, with Russia, Turkey and Iran in Syria, as we wrote here last week. Syria: Iran digs in in eastern Deir ez-Zor Entrenched? Iranian forces and affiliated militias in Deir ez-Zor province in eastern Syria are trying to boost their influence after Israeli airstrikes on Jan. 13 hit dozens of their sites in the province near the Syrian border with Iraq, reports Khaled al-Khateb from Syria. Iranian forces are working to recruit Syrians from Deir ez-Zor and other provinces to join their ranks and form new militias, as part of their plan to cling to their influence and strategic interests in the region. It also conveys a message of confrontation to both Israel and the United States, adds Khateb. Read Khatebs report from Syria here. Gulf: Is China rapidly gaining ground on US in the Gulf? Hearts and Minds. Sam Blatteis, former head of Gulf Government Relations for Google and CEO of The MENA Catalysts, says US companies are still the partners of choice for Gulf governments for big strategic projects, with the possible exception of Huawei. When it comes to the hearts and minds and market share among consumers and the public and the vast majority of people in the Gulf, however, its definitely the Chinese companies that are light years ahead certainly of the Russian counterparts and rapidly gaining ground on their American counterparts. COVID as catapult. The painful human and economic cost of the COVID-19 pandemic may have an upside for the digital economy, says Blatteis, which should catapult forward, several years into the future, in a very short time span. The virus created this captive audience in certain ways to compel both companies and governments, as well as the wider public, to rapidly scale up their tech options. Hidden Gems. The Gulf is like a hidden gem for high-tech companies, adds Blatteis. Its hard to see the region for what it is from Silicon Valley, he says, speaking to a lack of knowledge and relationships, and perceptions of risks. But thats changing, he says, as tech companies realize that politics and relationships are the coin of the realm in the region. Check out my podcast with Sam Blatteis here. Gulf: Is the race for private investment undercutting GCC unity? Despite the reconciliation process set in motion last month at the GCC summit in Riyadh, there are signs that economic competition between the six GCC member states is heating up as the double shock of the COVID-19 crisis and the volatility of oil prices weigh on Gulf economies, causing high sovereign debt levels, writes Sebastian Castelier. Being there. Saudi Arabia, which brokered last months reconciliation with Qatar, also is taking care of its own interests. Riyadh announced that companies doing business in Saudi Arabia have two years to set up offices in the kingdom, as a condition of doing business, promising benefits such as zero corporate taxes for 50 years, and a seeming challenge to the UAE, where many of these companies keep their regional offices. Check out Sebastians report here. Public Opinion: Arab Barometer reflects impact of COVID-19, rise of China The latest Arab Barometer survey of public opinion in Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia reflects on how Arab citizens are judging and holding their governments to account for how they addressed COVID-19, as well as freedom of expression. One key finding: Respondents in all six countries preferred engagement with China rather than the United States. Check out Joe Snells video report here. Cool thing: Pharaohs may have used beer in sacrificial rituals Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered what may be the oldest brewery in the world, in Abydos, which most likely dates back to the days of King Narmer, 5,000 years ago. The brewery could have produced 22,400 liters of beer at a time, and its location suggests that the facility supplied funerary rituals for the first kings of Egypt, according to the archaeological team, and evidence was found for the use of beer in sacrificial rituals in engravings found at the site. Check out the report by Muhammed Magdy. In case you missed it: Amberin Zamans podcast with author of Daughters of Kobane Bestselling author and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations Gayle Tzemach Lemmon speaks to Al-Monitor about her new book, The Daughters of Kobani, which tells the story of the women who fought on the front lines of the war against the Islamic State in Syria. Listen to the podcast here. What were reading: RAND calls for re-balance in US Middle East policy A new RAND Corporation report says the United States needs to rebalance its assistance to the conflict-ridden region, pointing out that Israel, Egypt and Jordan received 81% of foreign military assistance in 2019. US policy toward the Middle East, the report says, is outdated, with too much focus on arms sales and Iran. Instead, RAND suggests prioritizing "economic investments, governance, diplomacy and programs focused on people. You can read our article on the report here and the RAND report here. (TNS) Californians who qualify for a $600 state stimulus payment could see the money arrive as soon as a month after filing their tax returns under a $7.6-billion COVID-19 economic relief package approved Monday by the state Legislature.Crafted by Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders last week, the pandemic assistance plan also includes more than $2.1 billion in grants and fee waivers for small businesses. Those companies can soon apply for the grants, followed by an approval process that state officials estimate would take 45 days.Another $2 billion in tax breaks for businesses is expected to be acted on by the Legislature later this week, which would bring the total package to $9.6 billion.The stimulus assistance for residents earning $30,000 a year or less will come much quicker four to five weeks on average after they file 2020 tax returns with the state Franchise Tax Board if they also sign up for direct deposit, said H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the California Department of Finance. The wait could last as long as seven weeks for those receiving the $600 in a check from the state.This is such an important bill because it gives millions of hardworking Californians instant money that they so desperately need during this tough time, during this pandemic, Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) said on Monday during the floor debate before the Legislature passed a half-dozen bills that make up the economic relief package. Newsom said he hoped to sign the measures on Tuesday.Some 5.7 million payments totaling $2.3 billion will go to low-income Californians under the Golden State Stimulus program, which is aimed at helping those in the most dire financial straits, according to state Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley).Our lower-wage workers have been disproportionately impacted, said Skinner, chairwoman of the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee.The COVID-19 relief package was made possible by higher-than-expected tax revenues in California despite the economic hardships brought on by the pandemic.Some 3.8 million of the payments will go to households that qualified for the state earned income tax credit for 2020, which is available to residents earning less than $30,000 annually.About 565,000 stimulus payments will go to those with individual tax identification numbers who did not receive federal stimulus payments and whose income is below $75,000, many of whom are immigrants in the country illegally. Taxpayers with individual identification numbers who also qualify for Californias state earned income tax credit would receive a total of $1,200 in state stimulus.The $600 stimulus payments will also go to 1.2 million people who receive money from the federal supplemental security income or state supplementary payment programs, and 405,000 payments will be provided to participants in CalWORKS, the states welfare-to-work program. Another 15,000 payments are planned for participants in the Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants.The CalWorks payments will be placed on EBT cards and issued to participants by mid-April, although the timing could change based on the ability to automate the process, Palmer said. The timing and method of grant payments for those on SSI and SSP is still being worked out and is dependent on conversations with the federal Social Security Administration, he added.The $600 stimulus checks for low-income residents could be enough to put food on the table for the month for a household and pay for utilities, according to Maeve Elise Brown, executive director of the advocacy group Housing and Economic Rights Advocates.It buys people time for us to begin to emerge from the pandemic shutdown, Brown said. This is $600 that could be the difference for some people between surviving or not surviving.The provision of the relief package that generated the most debate in legislative hearings was the proposal to provide stimulus checks for immigrants who are in the country illegally.State Sen. Jim Nielsen (R-Gerber) questioned providing the money when the state budget, while flush now, could suffer problems in the future if the COVID-19-related recession continues.This budget is going to be creating long-term obligations to the undocumented, Nielsen said during a legislative debate.Skinner noted that the stimulus check to immigrants is a one-time payment, not a continuing budget obligation, while state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles) said the proposal for immigrants and other low-income residents is important but does not go far enough.I think its a great step forward. Its an acknowledgment of all these low-wage workers that they are working hard and they have been disproportionately impacted through unemployment, Durazo said. I think there is room to include more who are still not covered either by our state or by the federal [programs].Advocates for immigrants said many would not get a stimulus check because they do not have individual taxpayer identification numbers, and noted that immigrants also cannot get unemployment benefits or federal stimulus.This doesnt cover all of the relief they have been excluded from and we are creating inequality as a result, California Immigrant Policy Center manager Sasha Feldstein told lawmakers during a budget hearing.She noted that an immigrant household with two ITIN-filer parents and two children would be eligible for a maximum of $1,200 in state stimulus, which is about 21 percent of the federal relief theyve been excluded from.More is needed to protect thousands of undocumented workers left out, added Fanelly Millan, an organizer for the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center.The relief package approved by the governor and Legislature also provides $2.1 billion in grants from $5,000 to $25,000, a program administered by Californias Office of the Small Business Advocate.This will assist qualified small businesses who have been devastated economically by the COVID pandemic, said state Sen. Anna Caballero (D-Salinas), who authored the grant bill. As we know, small businesses throughout the state have continued to struggle to survive during the stay-at-home orders.She cited a recent survey by the advocacy group Small Business Majority that found 35 percent of small businesses were three months from closing if they do not get additional financial help.Assemblyman James Gallagher (R-Yuba City) said during Mondays floor debate that the relief bill would not have needed to be as large as it was if the state had not forced businesses to close for so long.This governor arbitrarily and unilaterally decided to shut down mostly small business in this state and as a result many small businesses have already gone out of business, Gallagher told his colleagues before he joined the bipartisan vote to support the business grants bill.The Legislatures approval of the grant money comes a few months after Newsom launched the program with an executive order that provided $500 million in grant money for 21,000 small businesses.But the demand for the grants is greater than the money available. In the first round of grant awards, 350,000 small businesses filed applications, seeking more than $4.5 billion, officials said.Businesses with an annual gross revenue of up to $2.5 million are eligible. Because not every applicant will be awarded a grant, requests are ranked and judged on criteria including whether the business is in an industry sector most affected by the pandemic.The applications will also be scored to make sure there is wide geographic distribution and that businesses owned by people of color are fairly represented.Our commitment in that effort is to underserved communities and underrepresented communities, which means we are going to be very mindful of where those dollars go, Newsom said Monday during a news conference in Arvin.Once a business is notified that it has been selected for a grant, it will face additional verification requirements before the money is disbursed, according to Kaitlin Lewis, a state spokeswoman.All final awards will be completed within 45 business days of the close of a round and businesses are verified and paid on a rolling basis, Lewis said.A portion of the relief package for which a vote is scheduled later this week would allow companies to deduct up to $150,000 in expenses covered by loans from the federal Paycheck Protection Plan. More than 750,000 PPP loans were taken out by California small businesses, officials said.Two years of fee relief will also be provided for roughly 59,000 restaurants and bars licensed through the states Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, under the bills approved Monday. They normally pay annual fees ranging from $455 to $1,235. More than 550,000 barbering and cosmetology licenses will also have fees waived.In addition, $50 million will go toward grants for cultural institutions that have suffered financially because of the pandemic. The package also includes grants to community college students, and additional money for childcare, food banks, diapers and housing for quarantined agricultural workers. On February 23, 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged microcap issuer Medifirst Solutions, Inc., its president, Bruce Schoengood, and a stock promoter, Joshua Tyrell, with fraud in connection with their roles in unregistered offerings of Medifirst's stock to the public. The SEC also charged Schoengood with manipulating the price of Medifirst's stock. According to the SEC's complaint, beginning in December 2016, Schoengood caused Medifirst to make an unregistered issuance of 20 million shares of its stock to Tyrell pursuant to a sham consulting agreement. As alleged, Schoengood and Tyrell were aware that the shares were actually intended to compensate Tyrell for promoting Medifirst's stock. Schoengood and Tyrell allegedly further misled Tyrell's brokerage firm by representing that the shares were being issued to Tyrell for legitimate consulting services and that Tyrell was not involved in promoting Medifirst's stock. Tyrell then allegedly sold over 19 million shares of Medifirst stock in the public market without registration for proceeds of approximately $125,000. The SEC's action also charged Schoengood with arranging manipulative purchases designed to keep Medifirst's stock price from falling over several months in 2017. The SEC's complaint, filed in federal district court in Long Island, charges Schoengood, Medifirst, and Tyrell with violating the antifraud provisions of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder and the registration provisions of Section 5 of the Securities Act. The complaint also charges Schoengood with violating the manipulative trading provisions of Section 9(a)(2) of the Exchange Act. The complaint seeks injunctive relief against Schoengood, Medifirst, and Tyrell. The complaint also seeks civil penalties, an officer and director bar, and a penny stock bar against Schoengood and disgorgement of ill-gotten gains plus prejudgment interest, civil penalties, and a penny stock bar against Tyrell. On February 23, 2021, the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York announced criminal charges against Schoengood based on the same conduct. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York and the FBI. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Visibility for availability of vaccines for entire month of June provided in advance to States/UTs: Centre Adar Poonawalla hails first supply of COVID-19 vaccine under COVAX initiative India pti-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Feb 24: Serum Institute of India (SII) on Wednesday said it has initiated supplies of COVID-19 vaccine Covishield to COVAX, the global initiative to ensure rapid and equitable access to the vaccine for all countries. "It is a historic moment for all of us as COVAX receives its first doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured by SII, COVISHIELD. We are delighted to see the combined efforts of everyone result in saving the lives of millions," SII CEO Adar Poonawalla said in a tweet. Over 1.14 crore COVID-19 vaccine doses administered so far in India: Health ministry SII will continue to be at the forefront of fighting the pandemic with affordable and immunogenic vaccines, he added. India on Wednesday dispatched the first batch of six lakh coronavirus vaccine doses to the African country of Ghana under the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) in collaboration with the UNICEF, which aims to cover 92 countries under the initiative. The potential owners of the soon-to-be privatized government-controlled banks must be financially strong to ensure that the lenders have robust risk buffers, the Reserve Bank of India Governor said. While the government has the final say in deciding the buyers, from the regulators perspective, the bidders should meet RBIs fit and proper criteria and have enough financial strength to capitalize the banks significantly, Governor Shaktikanta Das said in an interview to CNBC-TV 18 on Wednesday. Indias finance minister had announced earlier this month that the government would privatize two of the 12 state banks in the country without naming the lenders. Indian financial system is stronger after the pandemic than in the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2008, Das said. Here are more comments from Dass interview: There is no need for another one-time asset quality review as the RBI has significantly stepped up its supervision of banks and the top 100 shadow lenders. Uncertainty remains on the extent of new bad loans in the financial system given the ongoing regulatory dispensations. Have taken steps to tighten leveraging rules in core investment companies that fall under the shadow lenders category. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. ADVERTISEMENT At least 50 prisoners have died in three Ecuadorian prisons as a result of riots, local police said Tuesday. The melees erupted in the cities of Guayaquil, Cuenca and Latacunga. It is unknown whether police have reestablished control of the facilities. Among Ecuadors roughly 38,000 inmates, confrontations among criminal groups often result in riots. In December, riots spanning several facilities caused 11 deaths. President Lenin Moreno declared the national prison system in a state of emergency and ordered stepped-up security measures. As a result of the violent riots carried out today among gangs in three of the countrys prisons, I have ordered (the Ministry of Defense) to exercise strict gun, ammunition and explosives control in the surrounding areas of correctional facilities, Moreno said on Twitter. Earlier in the day, the president said he had authorizsed the use of force in a progressive way to guarantee the safety of citizens in confinement. Concerned family members of inmates have reportedly gathered outside prisons seeking information. VOA is Premium Times syndication partner. We have permission to republish Palomar Insurance has added Reese Smith, III to its expanding sales team as an acount executive specializing in the transportation industry. Smith has experience with trucking insurance and personalized service and will work to assist clients in understanding their companys risks and acquiring the right coverage. Smith will join the team in its Kennesaw, Ga., office working in the transportation insurance group. Palomar Insurance delivers insurance programs to U.S. and international companies. It is headquartered in Montgomery, Ala., with offices in Georgia and Tennessee. Topics Georgia ANN ARBOR, MI The University of Michigan will receive $476,490 in National Science Foundation grant funding for autonomous vehicle research, U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell announced Tuesday. The money will help develop cybersecurity defense technology to protect connected autonomous vehicles, as well as to prototype the proposed solutions and evaluate them on the UM-Dearborn shuttle, UM MCity Test Facility and commercial tools, according to Feb. 23 news release. Building a new era of mobility with autonomous vehicles requires a deep understanding of the potential threats and vulnerabilities that exist in the industry, Dingell, D-Dearborn, said. By investing in this critical research at (UM), we can prepare for the future and protect the consumers who will ride in the AVs being developed today. We will keep Michigan, our workers, and our researchers at the forefront of auto and mobility innovation with these proactive strategies. The goal of the project is to safeguard autonomous vehicles against cybersecurity attacks by developing a solution called the Linking2Source framework, according to NSF. The first layer of the Linking2Source framework aims to protect in-vehicle networks. The second layer aims to protect vehicles against firmware/software-level attacks, and the third level aims to protect autonomous vehicles at the sensing and operating level, NSF said. UMs MCity Test Facility is the worlds first purpose-built proving ground for testing the performance and safety of connected and autonomous vehicles under controlled and realistic conditions, according to its website. Ann Arbor City Council recently approved a $52,952 increase in funding for the MCity project. More information on the NSF grant can be found here. READ MORE: Lung transplant recipient at University of Michigan gets COVID-19 from donor, dies two months later 3 venomous spiders cause closure of University of Michigan library When a senior citizens wife died of COVID, University of Michigan students helped him grieve A German court has convicted an imam for sending young people to join the Islamic State (IS). Abu Walaa was found guilty of supporting and being a member of a terrorist organization. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, Germanys public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported on Wednesday. Walla was born in Iraq and came to Germany seeking asylum. He and his associates radicalized young people in northern and western Germany and sent them to places where IS was fighting, according to prosecutors. Walaas defense demanded an acquittal. Three co-defendants were also sentenced to prison terms between four and eight years, according to Deutsche Welle. More than 1,000 Germans joined IS in Iraq in Syria and a portion have since returned. In December, Germany also repatriated women and children of IS fighters from the al-Hol camp in Syria. The US government has also taken legal action against foreigners who allegedly helped IS in Iraq and Syria. In October, British citizens El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, nicknamed the Beatles, were charged with murdering American hostages, including journalist James Foley. They were flown to the United States from US custody in Iraq to stand trial and pled not guilty. Also in October, the United States charged Americans Emraan and Jihad Ali with supporting a terrorist organization. Emraan and his then 14-year-old son Jihad allegedly moved to Syria to join IS in 2015. IS remains active in Iraq and Syria, despite no longer having any territory. IS still conducts bombings and assassinations in its former Syrian capital, Raqqa. The group has also recently increased attacks in Sunni-majority areas of Iraq. Paducah Fire Department Seeks Funding for Staffing By West Kentucky Star Staff PADUCAH - On Tuesday, the Paducah Board of Commissioners approved a grant application to FEMA for fire department funding.The Board unanimously approved a municipal order to allow the Paducah Fire Department to apply for a Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) grant for $835,754.13. The funding would allow the fire department to hire three additional firefighters for three years.During the meeting, Fire Chief Steve Kyle spoke about the grant."This increases our ability to put fully trained staff on to meet industry standards. It also reduces the probability of injuries on the fire ground from personnel trying to do too many tasks while they're operating on the fire ground," Kyle said.Mayor George Bray said if the application were approved, it would give the city time to evaluate the other problem areas at the Fire Department.He said, "We've got facilities that need upgrading that we need to address. That buys us time to take a really close look at what we're doing with everything there, I think."The National Fire Protection Association recommends that the Paducah Fire Department have at least 69 firefighters. They currently have 58.You can see the full meeting below. Sadiq Khan's review of London's statues and street names linked to Britain's colonial past received a major blow today after a hard-left crusader he appointed to his 'diversity' taskforce quit following allegations of racism and anti-Semitism. Toyin Agbetu has admitted he jumped before being pushed, accusing critics of 'Afriphobia' and conspiring with Priti Patel's Home Office to discredit him and damage the BLM movement because they want dozens of monuments across Britain toppled. The slew of incendiary public comments made by Mr Agbetu raises serious questions about Mr Khan's vetting process for members of his 15-member 'Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm'. Agbetu was appointed by the capital's Labour mayor despite him once confronting the Queen at Westminster Abbey where he was dragged away after yelling: 'You should be ashamed' at the monarch. More recently he was publicly disparaging about the Pfizer Covid-19 jab when health chiefs were trying to boost the uptake among ethnic minorities, sarcastically calling it a 'magical vaccine from Viagra specialists'. He also accused Diane Abbott of being 'disloyal to her own community' and called Mr Lammy a 'poor example of Africans' while a Jewish News investigation found he claimed victims of the Holocaust were 'served well by Nazi hunters' compared to African victims of the slave trade. And today the activist from Hackney was forced to step down after a series of damaging stories and pressure from Shaun Bailey, the Conservative Mayor of London candidate, who urged Mr Khan to remove him immediately for his 'racist past'. Mr Bailey said today: 'Sadiq Khans decision to give Toyin Agbetu a public post on his statue commission was concerning as much as it was dangerous. His racist past, record of anti-Semitic comments and anti-vaccine lies were a risk to the safety of all Londoners. So I welcome the news of his resignation'. He added: 'It begs the question - if City Hall carried out an open and transparent recruitment process and if all panel members were assessed for the role by a review panel, then why did Toyin Agbetu get the job in the first place? Either Sadiq Khan is completely unaware of whats happening around him, or hes consciously hiring people with anti-Semitic and racist views. So which one is it?' Toyin Agbetu who was appointed by Sadiq Khan to review London's statues has been accused of racism and has now been forced to step down The activist's comments led Shaun Bailey, the Conservative Mayor of London candidate, to urge Mr Khan to remove him for his 'racist past' A spokesman for the Mayor of London said this afternoon: 'The Mayor has a zero-tolerance policy towards racism and prejudice in any form, and all allegations of this nature are taken extremely seriously. Toyin Agbetu has today resigned from the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm and the Mayor believes this is the right course of action.' Mr Agbetu has refused to apologise for his comments - claiming he is a victim of a Tory conspiracy. he wrote on Facebook: 'This year the mayoral candidate Shaun Baily is now attempting a similar Afriphobic campaign. I can't take the risk that all the gains we have made re BLM unravel so I have had to make a frustrating but strategic move. I voluntarily decided to step back from the post before being asked, to help reduce the attacks on the important work of the commission'. He added: 'They are looking for any means to destroy my reputation'. Mr Khan had hired Mr Agbetu, 53, in the wake of last year's Black Lives Matter movement which led to criticism over the capital's statues which celebrate figures with colonial links. The Mayor faced criticism of his commission which he set up to review the statues after historians claimed it excluded conservative viewpoints. Mr Agbetu wrote in a blog post about Abbott's decision to run for Labour leadership in 2010 that she had been 'disloyal to her own community and, worst yet, with minimal coercion, willingly betrayed herself' by getting involved in frontline politics. He added Labour should not be 'elevating a woman who - to be frank - the African community is embarrassed about'. In a post alongside the video he labelled the Pfizer coronavirus jab a 'magical vaccine from the Viagra specialists' Toyin Agbetu (pictured when he stormed to the front of Westminster Abbey during a service attended by the Queen in 2007), 53, were he yelled at the monarch The activist also published harsh criticism of Mr Lammy, Baroness Scotland and Baroness Amos. Baroness Scotland is the Secretary General of the Commonwealth and former attorney general under Gordon Brown, while Baroness Amos served as British High Commissioner to Australia. Shaun Bailey published an open letter in which he accused Mr Agbetu of spreading 'deeply dangerous information' Mr Agbetu wrote: 'Lammy, Amos and Scotland are all poor examples of Africans whose quest for influence and status has dwarfed their duty to human rights, social justice for African people and opposition to imperialism.' The activist was previously known for his 2007 outburst in front of the Queen in 2007, when he shouted 'you should be ashamed' during a service at Westminster Abbey. He also attracted criticism for expressing scepticism about the Pfizer vaccine, saying: 'We are being encouraged to relax our compliance with these relaxed restrictions because apparently a magical vaccine is around the corner from the Viagra specialists.' In a video recorded in November, he claimed the Pfizer jab was 'ethically unsound' because of a 'profit over people Government'. He does not suggest the vaccine is ineffective, but claimed too little was known about it for such an optimistic roll out. Shaun Bailey penned a letter to Mr Khan asking for Mr Agbetu to be removed from his commission. He said: 'When he's not comparing British people to Nazis, Agbetu is casting doubt on the safety of Pfizer's vaccine. 'For the safety of Londoners and the communities that you and I come from, you must remove Agbetu from his post and publicly denounce his lies.' Mr Agbetu accused Diane Abbott of being 'disloyal to her own community' in an online blog post Mr Bailey said this week he vows to scrap Mr Khan's diversity commission if he is elected. He also highlighted how Agbetu once called the Metropolitan Police 'institutionally racist' and branded the army a 'paid militancy' in an article written for his human rights agency Ligali. A spokesperson for the Mayor of London said: 'Sadiq makes absolutely no apologies for acting to ensure our public realm reflects the amazing wealth of diversity of our city and our history. 'We have a basic moral duty to ask questions about whether it's right for people like slave owners to be disproportionately represented in the public realm. 'City Hall carried out an open and transparent recruitment process in order to form an inclusive and representative board of the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm. 'All panel members were assessed for the role by a review panel and a decision made based on what they could bring to the role. 'Toyin Agbetu was appointed for his significant expertise, knowledge and experience as a social rights activist and in setting up Ligali, which challenges the misrepresentation of African people and culture in the media. His vast experience will provide a valuable contribution to the Commission.' Mr Agbetu, Ms Abbott and Mr Lammy have been contacted for comment. The response raised more questions about when the government knew of the case, given statements that Mr Morrisons office took media queries about it on February 12. In a television interview on Thursday morning, the Home Affairs Minister said he decided not to tell Mr Morrison about the case on the day he found out about it, even though he passed on information as a courtesy the next day. I deemed it not to be appropriate to provide information to the Prime Minister on the 11th, Mr Dutton told the Nine Network. There were media inquiries that came in to the government on the 12th of February, the following day, and as a courtesy we provided information to the Prime Ministesrs office at that point. I dont disclose the information provided to me by the Australian Federal Police, particularly where there are operational matters, and that was a decision, I think quite appropriately, that I took on the 11th of February. Mr Dutton said he asked his chief of staff to pass the information to the Prime Ministers office on February 12 but this was at a high level rather than about the details of the allegation. Mr Morrison has told Parliament several times that he found out about the alleged rape when it was reported in the media on Monday, February 15. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Labor leader Anthony Albanese has expressed disbelief in some of the government claims amid speculation about how Mr Dutton came to be told before the Prime Minister. A source aware of the steps taken by police, but who was not authorised to speak publicly about the matter, said Mr Dutton was told of the case by AFP commissioner Reece Kershaw on February 11 under guidelines that require the minister to be told of sensitive cases. The commissioner contacted the minister after a meeting of the Sensitive Investigations Oversight Board, a group within the AFP that meets to decide whether cases require an alert to senior authorities such as the minister. Loading The AFP guidelines for ministerial briefings on investigations state that ministers must be told of any matters when media attention is reasonably likely. Mr McCartney, the deputy commissioner in charge of investigations, chaired the SIOB meeting with other senior AFP officers and the group decided the minister needed to be told. The AFP commissioner, who is not on the board, acted on the decision the same day. The SIOB meeting came after Ms Higgins contacted ACT Policing, a part of the AFP, on February 6 to say she wanted to re-engage on a complaint she had made soon after the alleged rape. The alleged rape took place on Saturday, March 23, 2019 in the office of Senator Reynolds, where Ms Higgins and the alleged perpetrator both worked. The man was fired on the subsequent Tuesday. Ms Higgins has said she told others in Parliament House of her rape within days, including in a meeting with a police unit in the building on the Wednesday. But there is uncertainty over the timing of some of these steps, with the initial complaint to ACT Policing made on April 1. On that day Ms Higgins also had a meeting with Senator Reynolds and the ministers chief of staff to tell of the alleged rape. ACT Policing confirmed the initial complaint was made on April 1, 2019. It said on Wednesday night it was now investigating the alleged assault after a report was made. Loading The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age asked Mr Duttons three press secretaries why he did not tell Mr Morrison of the case on February 11, but they did not respond before the deadline for this report. Labor sought to link the questions over what the Prime Ministers office knew about Ms Higgins allegations with other reports of inappropriate behaviour by a staff member of newly-independent MP Craig Kelly, who quit the Liberal Party on Tuesday. This Prime Minister is running a dont ask, dont tell government of cover-ups, shadow minister for women Tanya Plibersek said after Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese moved a motion to condemn Mr Morrison. The vote was also intended as a test of the new finely balanced parliamentary numbers after Mr Kellys defection. However, the government won the vote 65-56. Mr Kelly and independent Bob Katter backed the government and Labor was down a vote after backbencher Josh Burns was ejected for interjecting. Crossbench MPs Andrew Wilkie, Zali Steggall, Rebekha Sharkie and Helen Haines opposed the government gagging debate on the matter but abstained from the final vote, walking out of the chamber as a group. The quartet has a general rule of not playing political games or supporting motions that use the word condemn. Ms Steggall saw merit behind the issues Labor was raising and said the governments response had been insufficient. FOSHAN, China, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Bright Scholar Education Holdings Limited ("Bright Scholar," the "Company," "we" or "our") (NYSE: BEDU), a global premier education service company, today announced that it entered into an agreement to acquire 18% equity interests in Golden Ballet Dance ("Golden Ballet"). The Company targets to close the transaction in April 2021, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions and the completion of relevant corporate and regulatory procedures. Established in 2009, Golden Ballet has been teaching classical ballet to over 60,000 children across its 33 training centers in China for the past ten plus years. "Ballet is widely considered the most beneficial dance form for body's structural and muscular placement. Golden Ballet provides high caliber of ballet training and both companies share the same value and take children's development and well-being as our top priority," said Zi Chen, Chief Executive Officer of Complementary Education Services. "The investment in Golden Ballet offers tremendous market opportunities as well as synergies that will further expedite the expansion of our complementary education business." About Bright Scholar Education Holdings Limited Bright Scholar is a global premier education service company, dedicated to providing quality international education to global students and equipping them with the critical academic foundation and skillsets necessary to succeed in the pursuit of higher education. Bright Scholar also complements its international offerings with Chinese government-mandated curriculum for students who wish to maintain the option of pursuing higher education in China. As of November 30, 2020, Bright Scholar operated 94 schools across twelve provinces in China and eight schools overseas, covering the breadth of K-12 academic needs of its students. Safe Harbor Statement This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, the Company's business plans and development, which can be identified by terminology such as "may," "will," "expect," "anticipate," "aim," "estimate," "intend," "plan," "believe," "potential," "continue," "is/are likely to" or other similar expressions. 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 the Company's control, which may cause the Company's actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Further information regarding these and other risks, uncertainties or factors is included in the Company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company 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. IR Contact: GCM Strategic Communications Email: [email protected] Media Contact: Email: [email protected] Phone: +86-757-6683-2507 SOURCE Bright Scholar Education Holdings Ltd. The United States should take the first step toward saving the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers, Iran's ambassador in Geneva told the UN-sponsored Conference on Disarmament in Geneva on February 24. Esmaeil Baghaei Hamaneh spoke a day after Iran officially began restricting international inspections of its nuclear facilities in a bid to pressure European countries and Washington into lifting economic sanctions and restoring the landmark nuclear deal. "The onus is on the offending party to return, restart, and compensate for the damages as well as to reassure that they would not renege again," Ambassador Esmaeil Baghaei Hamaneh said, reiterating Tehran's long-held position. "There is a path forward with a logical sequence as (Iranian Foreign) Minister (Mohammad Javad) Zarif recently outlined." Iran confirmed on February 22 that it had ended its implementation of an Additional Protocol to the 2015 accord allowing for surprise inspections of nuclear-related sites. The administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2018 withdrew from the agreement that lifted most international sanctions in exchange for Iran's curbing its nuclear ambitions. Trump gradually reimposed crippling sanctions that have impacted heavily on Iran's tattered economy. The new administration of President Joe Biden has sought to reverse that decision, although Irans violations of the accord known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA) and the move to limit international inspections underscore the difficulty of the task. Iran is demanding that Washington first remove punishing sanctions. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas urged Iran on February 24 to accept diplomatic overtures to preserve the nuclear accord and avoid further violations of its commitments. "In the end, Iran needs to understand that what's important is to de-escalate and accept the offer of diplomacy that's on the table, including from the United States," Maas said. China, which is one of the signatories of the JCPOA and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, said on February 24 that lifting U.S. sanctions on the country is key to breaking the deadlock. We have always believed that the return of the U.S. to the comprehensive agreement and the lifting of sanctions against Iran are the keys to breaking the deadlock in the Iranian nuclear issue," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a daily news briefing in Beijing. The current situation on the Iranian nuclear issue is at a critical point, with both opportunities and challenges," Wang told reporters. China, which has maintained friendly relations and close economic ties with Tehran, has long been against sanctions. Beijing has been working with the other parties in the agreement -- Germany, France, Britain, and Russia -- to maintain the deal after Trumps decision to pull the U.S. unilaterally out. With reporting by Reuters, AP, AFP, and dpa Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE San Francisco residents who travel outside the Bay Area are no longer required to quarantine for 10 days when they arrive home, but the city is still encouraging its residents to follow the state's travel advisory that advises against nonessential travel far from one's home, city officials said in a statement released Tuesday. The city introduced the mandatory quarantine in mid-December in response to a surge in cases triggered by Thanksgiving travel. While the quarantine was mandatory, a system wasn't in place to ensure people followed it. C.P. Group's businesses have prioritized the implementation of the Group's Corporate Governance Principles, in an effort to ensure that the Group's operations in every jurisdiction meet the highest levels of integrity and uphold the highest degree of accountability and transparency. These principles aim to empower the Group and its employees to deliver long-term value for all stakeholders for sustainable business growth and to be a responsible corporate citizen in every country the Group operates in. "Integrity has been embedded into our DNA and is the foundation for our ethics since we were founded 100 years ago," said Suphachai Chearavanont, CEO of Charoen Pokphand Group. "Being recognized as one of the World's Most Ethical Companies is a true honour, we're still on a journey and I am greatly appreciative of the collective efforts of all our employees." "While addressing the tough challenges of 2020, we saw companies lead above all other institutions on earning the trust of stakeholders through resilience and a commitment to ethics and integrity," said Ethisphere CEO, Timothy Erblich. "The World's Most Ethical Companies honorees continue to demonstrate an unwavering commitment to the highest values and positively impacting the communities they serve. Congratulations to everyone at Charoen Pokphand Group Company Limited for earning the World's Most Ethical Companies designation." Methodology & Scoring Grounded in Ethisphere's proprietary Ethics Quotient, the World's Most Ethical Companies assessment process includes more than 200 questions on culture, environmental and social practices, ethics and compliance activities, governance, diversity and initiatives to support a strong value chain. The process serves as an operating framework to capture and codify the leading practices of organizations across industries and around the globe. This year, the process was streamlined and question set expanded to gauge how applicants are adapting and responding to the global health pandemic, environmental, social, and governance factors, safety, equity, and inclusion and social justice. Honorees The full list of the 2021 World's Most Ethical Companies can be found at https://worldsmostethicalcompanies.com/honorees. About Company Charoen Pokphand Group Co., Ltd. serves as a parent company of C.P. Group. As a holding company, Charoen Pokphand Group Co., Ltd. holds shares of subsidiaries in Thailand and overseas. The Group operates across many industries ranging from industrial to service sectors, which are categorized into 8 Business Lines covering 14 Business Groups. Currently, the Group has investments in 21 countries and economies. About the Ethisphere Institute The Ethisphere Institute is the global leader in defining and advancing the standards of ethical business practices that fuel corporate character, marketplace trust and business success. Ethisphere has deep expertise in measuring and defining core ethics standards using data-driven insights that help companies enhance corporate character and measure and improve culture. Ethisphere honors superior achievement through its World's Most Ethical Companies recognition program and provides a community of industry experts with the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (BELA). More information about Ethisphere can be found at: https://ethisphere.com. Media Contacts Charoen Pokphand Group Media Contact Mr. Viranon Futrakul +662-858-6286 [email protected] Ethisphere Media Contact Clea Nabozny [email protected] SOURCE Charoen Pokphand Group New Zealand and Vietnam boost agricultural cooperation New Zealand and Vietnam today signed an Agriculture Cooperation Arrangement at an dialogue held virtually by New Zealand Chief Executive of the New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries, Ray Smith, and Vice Minister of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), Le Quoc Doanh. At the dialogue. At the dialogue, the two sides voiced their commitment to the two countries deepening agriculture and trade relationship. Smith and Doanh affirmed that the Strategic Partnership, which was jointly announced by Prime Ministers in July last year, has created a solid foundation for increasing bilateral agricultural cooperation and connections between the two countries. Speaking at the dialogue, Chief Executive of the New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries, Mr Ray Smith, emphasized that this is a valuable opportunity to consider what both sides can do together as they build resilience and vitality back into their agriculture economies following COVID-19. The Agriculture Cooperation Arrangement will enable both sides to advance their key agricultural interests in enhancing bilateral trade, reducing agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, promoting food safety, utilising agriculture research and technology, and in rural development. Speaking at the ceremony, Vice Minister Le Quoc Doanh of MARD said: Agriculture is critical to the economic wellbeing of our countries. Both nations are strong agriculture producers and exporters, with complementary products. The establishment of the New Zealand Viet Nam Agricultural Dialogue and the signing of the Agriculture Cooperation Arrangement today will boost our connections, cooperation and two-way trade, in line with what our two Prime Ministers highlighted during last years Strategic Partnership dialogue. The New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries is already supporting agriculture cooperation with MARD with activities in plant health, veterinary epidemiology and electronic certification. These activities complement New Zealands ongoing development programme, which has a number of agriculture projects including the premium fruit development project in Tien Giang, the rural dam safety project in Central Viet Nam, and the safe vegetables project in Binh Dinh. Ray Smith, Chief Executive of the New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries said that New Zealand has developed one of the most efficient agriculture sectors in the world, with a reputation for cutting edge research and technology, robust and safe agricultural practices, and delicious and high-quality products. He expressed his hope that the newly signed cooperation arrangement will help build value and expand investment opportunities between the two countries: We recognise that increased trade is not just about exporting more products, it's about an exchange of knowledge, expertise, technology, services, and investment. This two-way exchange benefits both of us. He added, We also look forward to doing more to assist MARDs greenhouse gas inventory capability through the Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases. The two leaders confirmed their shared commitment to finalising new fruit access for each other this year so consumers can enjoy New Zealand strawberries and squash in Viet Nam and Viet Nams limes and pomelos in New Zealand. Viet Nam is New Zealandss 14th largest trading partner, with two-way trade valued at NZD$ 2 billion, at year end September 2020. While COVID-19 has posed some challenges, Viet Nam remains a promising market for New Zealand and vice versa due to robust demand for key agricultural products. Ashley Cain was left in tears on Tuesday as he marked the moment his daughter Azaylia left hospital to go home for the first time in five months. The Ex On The Beach star, 30, described it as a 'miracle blindsided by heartbreak' after doctors delivered the news her leukaemia had returned- just 10 minutes before the family were due to leave the children's ward. Six-month-old Azaylia is battling a rare and aggressive form of leukaemia and had recently undergone a stem cell transplant. Ashley Cain was left in tears on Tuesday as he marked the moment his daughter Azaylia left hospital to go home for the first time in five months Taking to Instagram, Ashley shared the moment of Azaylia 'ringing the bell' so he and his partner Safiyya Vorajee could finally take her home, with Azaylia continuing her treatment as an outpatient. He penned: 'Today was supposed to be a day of unquestionable happiness. However, it turned out like most days on this journey; A miracle blindsided by heartbreak! 'We got told a few days ago thats Azaylia would be ringing the bell today and coming home with us, as a family to resume treatment 2 days per week as an outpatient. Sad: The star, 30, said it was a 'miracle blindsided by heartbreak' after doctors delivered the news her leukaemia had returned- just before the family were due to leave the children's ward Devastating: 'We got urgently informed that Azaylia's leukaemia had returned. We crumbled and cancelled the celebration as we felt broken and numb to the core', Ashley wrote Keeping positive: Safiyya also commented on Ashley's post saying that their 'special little girl' will 'beat this' Poignant: Taking to Instagram, Ashley shared the moment of Azaylia 'ringing the bell' so he and his partner Safiyya Vorajee could finally take her home Milestone: Azaylia will continue her treatment as an outpatient Proud dad: Ashley continued: 'Seeing her beautiful face telling us, the show must go on and us then realising how far our little girl has come and how much she deserves this moment' 'However, 10 minutes before the moment we have been praying for over the last 5 months... 'We got urgently informed that Azaylia's leukaemia had returned. We crumbled and cancelled the celebration as we felt broken and numb to the core before seeing her beautiful face telling us, the show must go on and us then realising how far our little girl has come and how much she deserves this moment. 'She has battled against the odds, she has overcome every obstacle in her path and she has done it all with remarkable spirit and the biggest smile on her face! Touching: The moving video showed the corridor lined with nurses and doctors applauding the family as they prepared to go home What are the symptoms of leukaemia in children? Fatigue and pale skin - this is because leukaemia can cause anaemia which makes a child feel weak, tired and light-headed. Infections and fever - children with leukaemia lack normal white blood cells which would normally help fight infection. Rash - children may have small, dark spots that look like common rashes if the leukemia cells spread to the skin Easy bruising or bleeding - this includes frequent nosebleeds, bleeding gums and bleeding a lot from small cuts. Bone or joint pain - this is caused by a build up of leukaemia cells near the surface of the bone or inside the joint. Swelling of the abdomen - leukaemia cells may collect in the liver and spleen causing them to enlarge. Loss of appetite and weight loss - if the spleen and liver swell, they can press against the stomach causing loss of appetite. Swollen lymph nodes - some leukaemias spread to the lymph nodes causing them to swell. Source: American Cancer Society Advertisement 'For now we are enjoying precious moments at home until we return to hospital on Friday! Thank you for your support and please keep our beautiful daughter in your prayers!' The moving video showed the corridor lined with nurses and doctors applauding the family as they prepared to go home. Through tears Ashley said: 'I want to say thank you for all the care you've given us. For looking after her but also just the care for us has been amazing. 'We got some news today that Azaylia's leukaemia has come back but that just means that we stay positive and we get back to ring that second bell and get out of here.' Fighter: 'She has battled against the odds, she has overcome every obstacle in her path and she has done it all with remarkable spirit and the biggest smile on her face!', Ashley wrote Tough: The couple had faced an agonising two week wait to find out whether the stem cell transplant managed to clear out the leukaemia from her bone marrow The couple had faced an agonising two week wait to find out whether the stem cell transplant managed to clear out the leukaemia from her bone marrow. Ashley said he was devastated to learn Azaylia was at a higher risk of complications going into the transplant after her cancer returned, following two rounds of chemotherapy. When Azaylia was diagnosed with leukaemia she had a soaring white cell count of 200, and also had tumours on her lungs, kidneys, and stomach. Ashley revealed that a normal person's white cell count is five, while adults who are suffering from the blood cancer tend to have a white cell count of 40, so it was alarming that Azalyia's was so high. The television personality explained that being told the news left him a 'broken man', and he claimed it was an 'absolute miracle' that she has been able to fight the cancer. Through publicising Azaylia's battle, Ashley has helped the NHS get 80,000 people to sign up to become stem cell donors in just 48 hours after he appealed for help. Ashley revealed 80,000 people became stem cell donors 48 hours after he appealed for the public's help amid his daughter's health battle. Saying that he was 'forever grateful' to the members of the public who had ordered test kits to be added to the stem cell register, Ashley claimed the charities usually get 30-40,000 people registering in a single year. Ashley, who made his appeal to find a donor on social media, said he thought it was 'beautiful' how people could come together for a good cause in spite of negativity that is often prevalent online. ClimaCell, a growing private weather company based in Boston whose customers include airlines, maritime shipping firms and everyday consumers, plans to spend $150 million during the next few years to launch its own satellite radar constellation. The goal, company leaders said in an interview, is to make its own forecasts more reliable, thereby benefiting its clients, the public through its weather app, and policymakers. This aim contrasts with the business of most, if not all, space companies today that are pursuing weather applications. These firms, such as GeoOptics and Spire, have business models based on selling the data for others to use in forecasting the weather, with customers that include federal agencies. However, ClimaCell would use its own technology, which already includes proprietary weather modeling, to take advantage of the data it gathers from space. The end result, if all goes well, would be a vertically integrated weather company whose operations range from generating its own data to sifting through that information using computer models and turning that into products aimed at improving how businesses operate. According to ClimaCell co-founder and chief executive Shimon Elkabetz, ClimaCell has several dozen scientists and engineers now dedicated to developing and eventually deploying a fleet of small space-based weather radars that could gather real-time data of every location on the globe at any time. This would be a major leap forward for radar coverage over data-sparse regions, he said, such as Africa, South America and the oceans. The satellites would carry a Ka-band radar instrument, Elkabetz said, which he compared to a research mission that NASA has carried out known as the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite. GPM consists of a dual-frequency radar that allows it to get a three-dimensional view of precipitation falling within a storm, including by seeing the distribution of different droplet sizes within the clouds, according to Dalia Kirschbaum, who heads NASA's hydrological sciences lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The downside to GPM is that it's just one satellite. "When you have a single orbiting spacecraft, if you don't get a good [pass over] a storm, then you just miss it," she said. The space agency has also launched small satellites, such as rainCube, which was mounted on the International Space Station, to help solve the challenge of building powerful radars in small boxes, Kirschbaum said. "The instrument will offer similar capabilities" to the radar aboard GPM, Elkabetz said, "in terms of both resolution and sensitivity, but exceed the swath," or scan footprint, by a factor of more than two. To accomplish this, the company is planning to use its own technologies to develop a new radar and antenna. ClimaCell is seeking to lower the costs per satellite by at least half compared to the NASA satellite, which scans a location on Earth only every three days. The cost savings, Elkabetz said, "will allow us to scale this from a single-satellite mission to a constellation of dozens of satellites that enables global coverage with high revisit rates." Rei Goffer, co-founder and chief strategy officer at ClimaCell, said revisit times, the interval between instances when the satellite passes over the same location on Earth, would be one hour in the company's planned satellite constellation. "We are not going to space just because it's cool," Goffer said in an interview, but instead are trying to solve a data gap that could allow the company to make far more accurate forecasts. Outside experts, such as Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation, questioned whether the new satellites would interfere with other spacecraft also operating within the Ka band of spectrum, including planned 5G satellites and other weather satellites already in low Earth orbit. Elkabetz said he expects to encounter skepticism from those who may not believe that ClimaCell has solved some of the technical challenges in developing and deploying these satellites. If he were not involved in the project already, he wouldn't believe it, either, he said. "I respect anyone who thinks it's difficult, and as we are able to reveal in the future how it works, hopefully people will be able to witness it themselves," he said in an interview. Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia's atmospheric sciences program, said he sees this project as a way to better predict weather extremes. "Precipitation is at the heart of many weather-related extremes ranging from flooding to hurricanes, yet is very difficult to measure on global scales," Shepherd said in an email. "I am not surprised that scholars are exploring new ways to provide measurements with the accuracy and resolution useful for applications." ClimaCell has raised a substantial amount of money for a recent entrant into the weather forecasting business: about $112 million in venture capital funding, with the most recent round closing in July 2020. Elkabetz noted that most of the world still does not have radar coverage, including in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. "The system's capabilities will enable new modeling and analytics with precision never before available in the developing world," he said. "The data will power applications such as monitoring the conditions favorable for locust reproduction and migrations, as well as conditions that lead to devastating infectious diseases such as malaria, which put millions of lives and livelihoods at risk," Elkabetz said in a statement. The satellites could significantly help hurricane forecasts, he said, since they would provide details about the structure and evolution of such storms. The National Hurricane Center has utilized data from the GPM mission and previous weather satellites for forecasting purposes. The chief engineer for the program is John Springmann, who has worked with private sector space firms including SpaceFlight industries, which launched the BlackSky constellation. The team has also been working with Kerri Cahoy, co-director of the small-satellite center at MIT. ClimaCell is aiming to launch its first radar satellite in the third quarter of 2022. Through the company's nonprofit arm known as ClimaCell.org, the satellite data could flow to areas where improved forecasts are desperately needed, mainly in the developing world, Goffer and Elkabetz said. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. By Wanda J. Blanchett Its a no-brainer that we should teach Black history in schools, especially in these troubling times, but its equally important for us to teach it accurately and in its proper context. Historically, when we have taught Black history, we have adopted the contribution approach, meaning we have highlighted the accomplishments of only a few well-known Black civil rights leaders whom most people are fully aware of, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks. Also, we often fail to teach Black history (and even U.S. history) accurately and in its proper context. For example, Dr. King didnt just have a dream and Ms. Parks didnt refuse to give up her seat because she was just tired. Dr. Kings speeches and letters, Ms. Parks resistance and Fannie Lou Hamers advocacy and leadership, among countless others, were significant components of a carefully conceptualized and executed civil rights movement. Including the Black story in its complete context and in vivid and honest terms as a critically important aspect of the American story is essential to ensuring that everybody is brought along. While schools and educators play a major role in teaching Black history, parents are always their childrens first teachers. As such, all parents regardless of their race, and especially parents of Black children, must make sure that even if schools are not presenting this information accurately or consistently, they do. We have all witnessed the damage done by denying, omitting and distorting the truth historically and even recently. We ought to just tell the truth about where we are today, where we were previously and the fact that a lot of the problems we have today are systemic, and accordingly, many hundreds of years old. All of the strides we have made toward becoming a more equitable and just society have been achieved in spite of ongoing significant resistance and there is still much work that needs to be done to achieve a truly just and equitable society. If one reviews, for example, some of the most historic landmark education litigation, we witness just how strategic litigation has moved us toward greater levels of educational access and equity. Keep in mind that in our country, when it comes to the rights of Black and brown people, nothing has been achieved without litigation. Much of that litigation has ultimately led to legislation, which should have led to rights. But decades later, we continue to fight for the same rights and equal protection under the law. If we want to heal as a nation, then part of that racial healing has to be an acknowledgment that systemic and structural racism has been institutionalized not only through societal practices but also through the laws that govern our nation. Racial healing also requires us to engage in truth-telling about the history we have been taught that leaves out centuries of systematic violence and brutality against Black people. The distorted narrative that omits this history has dominated our textbooks, media outlets and now is also prevalent on social media. In this digital age, it has become impossible for a significant number of people in our country to distinguish between fact and fiction, and as a result, many dont believe that police brutality against Black people is real. Many are also led to believe that Black and brown children have an educational achievement gap, when in fact, it is an educational access gap and white privilege that is systemically baked into our educational system that is the real problem. Education can only be effective if we have educators who are well prepared to teach this critical information accurately and in ways that dismantle racism and white privilege and do not reinforce some of these untruths, misconceptions, biases and harmful beliefs. To do this, we must all first begin with ourselves and examine, confront and challenge our own biases there is an abundance of research that indicates that due to the messages that society bombards us with, we are all afflicted with bias against Black people. This year, for Black History month, I ask you to consider going beyond just teaching about Dr. King or Ms. Parks. Challenge yourself to confront institutionalized racism and white privilege and to address your own biases, so that as educators, parents and community members we can engage in racial healing by first engaging in truth-telling about not just the true history of Black people in the United States but also about the systemic and structural racism that we continue to face today. Wanda J. Blanchett is the dean and a distinguished professor at Rutgers University-New Brunswicks Graduate School of Education. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Heres how to submit an op-ed or Letter to the Editor. Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow us on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and on Facebook at NJ.com Opinion. Get the latest news updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. LAND O' LAKES, Fla., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Pasco Middle School welcomed more than 50 school and district leaders from across the United States in January, 2021 as part of a virtual showcase of the Cambridge International program, which Pasco Middle has offered since 2014. Superintendent Kurt Browning opened the showcase and welcomed the attendees to learn about Cambridge implementation at his district. Pasco Middle was selected as one of the first Cambridge International School Demonstration Centers in the United States in February 2020. As a School Demonstration Center, Pasco Middle hosts two showcase events annually, at which administrators, teachers, and students will promote and explain to newly authorized Cambridge schools and districts how they implemented the Cambridge program. The Cambridge program is an international curriculum and examination system that emphasizes the value of broad and balanced study and provides high-quality education accessible to all students. Alongside in-depth understanding of a variety of subjects, students master a broader range of critical skills that will equip them for a world that is changing, both technologically and economically, at an unprecedented pace. The curriculum is designed to develop learners who are confident in working with information and ideas, equipped for new and future challenges, and engaged intellectually and socially. Cambridge Assessment International Education, a part of the University of Cambridge, has schools in over 35 states and the District of Columbia. Over the past decade, the number of U.S. students participating in the Cambridge program has increased by a compound annual rate of 45%; the largest growth has occurred at the high school level where the number of schools offering Cambridge AS- and A-level exams has grown by 220%. "Our investment in Cambridge has strengthened our efforts to create a culture of high expectations at Pasco Middle School through the delivery of a relevant curriculum full of meaningful experiences and inspiring opportunities for our students. This partnership serves as a lever to open doors as well as provide a life changing experience," stated Vanessa Hilton, Chief Academic Officer, Pasco County Schools. "We love having the Cambridge program at Pasco Middle School, because it aligns with our belief in having high expectations for all students. We believe in providing every opportunity for our students as we play a role in preparing them to be college, career, and life ready. Through the Cambridge program, our students are immersed in taking ownership of their learning and reflecting on what they learn," says Danielle Johnson, Principal of Pasco Middle School. Each year, Cambridge International authorizes a very small number of Demonstration Centers following a rigorous application process. Schools must describe how they meet the criteria in five key areas, such as educational values, inclusive teaching and learning, and exemplary leadership and management. Pasco County currently has two elementary, three middle, and fourteen high schools offering Cambridge programs. In 2018, Cambridge International named Pasco County Schools a District of the Year award recipient, which recognizes districts that have consistently strong Cambridge student performance in their schools. Each year, nearly 1 million students participate in Cambridge International programs worldwide, making more than 1.75 million exam entries. Colleges and universities all over the U.S. and the world, including all members of the Ivy League, all Florida public higher education institutions, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Duke University, New York University, and University of Washington recognize Cambridge coursework and assessments, and provide credit and placement opportunities for students. Outside the U.S., Cambridge programs are offered at more than 10,000 schools in over 160 countries. About Pasco County Schools Pasco County Schools is the largest employer in Pasco County, Florida, with approximately 10,000 employees who serve more than 77,000 students. The district is the 10th largest in Florida and 49th largest in the United States. The operating budget is approximately $664.5 million, and the overall budget is $1.39 billion, which funds the operation and maintenance of 96 schools and construction of new schools and additions. Programs include traditional pre-k through 12th grade standards instruction, virtual instruction, career academies, adult education, magnet themes, and charter schools. The district is the largest in the United States with an elected superintendent who governs the district along with five elected school board members. About Cambridge Assessment International Education Cambridge Assessment International Education prepares school students for life, helping them develop an informed curiosity and a lasting passion for learning. We are part of the University of Cambridge. Our Cambridge Pathway gives students a clear path for educational success from age 5 to 19. Schools can shape the curriculum around how they want students to learn with a wide range of subjects and flexible ways to offer them. It helps students discover new abilities and a wider world, and gives them the skills they need for life, so they can achieve at school, university and work. Cambridge International is the short name of Cambridge Assessment International Education. Learn more! Visit www.cambridgeinternational.org SOURCE Cambridge International Related Links https://www.cambridgeinternational.org Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Moogsoft to Host 'Coffee Break with Helen Beal' Webinar Series Moogsoft, the AI-driven observability leader, will host Coffee Break with Helen Beal, a new webinar series dedicated to illustrating the ways that teams can achieve more meaningful work, productivity and best practices using intelligent observability. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005004/en/ Coffee Break with Helen Beal welcomes friends to focus on intelligent observability in action. (Graphic: Moogsoft) Intelligent observability uses AI to automate interrogation of a digital service and identify the underlying cause of incidents at machine speed. It drastically reduces the engineering toil of manually investigating potential explanations for alerts. It also enables DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE) and IT teams with actionable intelligence to quickly resolve issues at all stages of the CI/CD pipeline, then focus on more rewarding work. What: Hosted by DevOps Institute Chief Ambassador Helen Beal, with friends, Coffee Break takes time out to examine the practical implications of intelligent observability upon the day-to-day principles, workflows and tasks of individual team members. Each episode introduces a character on their own journey to find better ways of work in either ITOps, DevOps or SRE, and also features insights from a Moogsoft AI + observability expert. When: Feb. 25 | 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 5 pm GMT - Intelligent Observability for DevOps, featuring Moogsoft Chief Evangelist Richard Whitehead (News - Alert) March 9 | 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 5 pm GMT - Intelligent Observability for ITOps, featuring Moogsoft CTO Dave Casper March 25 | 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 5 pm GMT - Intelligent Observability for SREs, featuring Moogsoft Director of SRE Thom Duran Where: "Adopting DevOps and SRE practices is a tough journey for most organizations and what they really need is practical, action-oriented advice with relatable real-world examples for specific target outcomes," said Beal. "Participants of these webinars will benefit from my and my friends' extensive expertise in the field and help teams transition from where they are to where they want to be." "For teams who directly own the consequences of their software, it is on them as a developer to deliver the best quality service, and be able to quickly diagnose and address incidents across modular and ephemeral systems," said Moogsoft Founder and CEO Phil Tee. "Intelligent observability marries expertise in both service assurance and data science to present users actionable insights from very granular data. Best of all, it's available for use by a DevOps, ITOps or SRE team in the time it takes to make a cappuccino." Ensuring Continuous Availability in Just a Few Clicks The Moogsoft Observability Cloud delivers noise reduction, correlation, anomaly detection and more in just a few quick steps. Users simply ingest their observability and monitoring data and start optimizing their digital experience based on the insights surfaced. Organizations can leverage the Moogsoft Observability Cloud for IT Ops, DevOps, SRE as well as specialized uses such as hybrid cloud monitoring and cloud migrations. Additional Resources About Moogsoft Moogsoft is the AI-driven observability leader that provides intelligent monitoring solutions for smart DevOps. Moogsoft delivers the most advanced cloud-native, self-service platform for software engineers, developers and operators to instantly see everything, know what's wrong and fix things faster. Founded in 2012, Moogsoft has more than 140 customers worldwide including American Airlines, Fannie Mae, Fiserv, HCL Technologies, SAP (News - Alert) SuccessFactors, and Verizon Media. It has established strategic partnerships with leading managed service providers and outsourcing organizations including AWS, Cisco, HCL Technologies, TCS and Wipro (News - Alert) . Moogsoft and the Moogsoft logo are proprietary trademarks of Moogsoft Inc. All other products or names may be trademarks of their respective companies. For more information about the Moogsoft Observability Cloud and its customers' success, visit www.moogsoft.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005004/en/ He transformed his political persona into tough guy and protector-in-chief, stoking latent Sandgroper exceptionalism and repelling dark threats from The East. The Premier could declare secession tomorrow and it would get up in a canter, was the assessment of one veteran political observer yesterday. The weekend Newspoll that shows the Liberals could be reduced to two seats surely couldnt happen, could it? And yet In election campaigns it has long been my practice to watch what parties do rather than what they say in order to try and figure out how they really see the race. Thus it is noteworthy both Mr McGowan and Opposition Leader Zak Kirkup were on the ground campaigning in the once-safest-of-safe Liberal seat of Bateman, which is to be vacated by the departing Dean Nalder. Loading The Liberal posture is of desperate sandbagging defence and retiring members in Bateman, Riverton and South Perth are causing particular concern for party strategists. Over the final three weeks of the campaign youll be able to see where Labor thinks it can make inroads by plotting the location of the Premiers daily media appearances. The true state of the race is best encapsulated by the Liberals revised campaign messaging effectively a white flag which emphasises the risk of handing Labor total control of the levers of government. And the overwhelmingly dominant issue remains COVID, where even whisper the thought so you dont get your head shot off a possibly over-the-top five day lockdown strengthened the Premiers position. Its not yet on the radar of most voters, but WA Labors closeness to a certain circle in the business community is an increasingly hot topic among the political junkie class. The words WA Inc are murmured, and not just by conservatives, though the comparison is not at all proportionate with the excessive and appalling realities of the Burke-Dowding era with its envelopes of cash donated to the premier and lavish taxpayer bailouts of Connell and the mates crooked and failing enterprises. But the McGowan government is racking up a tally of deals that favour businesspeople who have donated, provided vocal support, or both, and it is beginning to create the impression there is good fishing to be done if you know where theyre biting. Property developer donations are banned in NSW and in Queensland but in WA, Nigel Satterley is the archetype, campaigning for the sacking of Liberal powerbrokers while lavishing praise on the Premier and his team and talking up his own fundraising efforts on Labors behalf. Mr Satterley, who has wined and dined politicians of all stripes in his primo corporate box at the footy for decades, has been a determined tin-rattler for Mr McGowan and one of the biggest beneficiaries of COVID-related stimulus measures that have turbocharged the first homebuyer market. Loading Chamber of Minerals and Energy boss Paul Everingham, an experienced and prudent operator, called Mr Satterley out in the pages of The Australian last week, saying his commentary would cast a cloud over the way the public believed the business sector interacted with government in WA. Its certainly not how I would behave, and it doesnt represent the wider West Australian business community, Mr Everingham said. Last weekend there was the $100 million commitment to a film studio backed by another donor, Adrian Fini and Ben Lisles Hesperia, in an election campaign commitment to a project that comes out of the relatively untried market-led proposal mechanism, whereby the private sector brings projects to the government, and not the other way around. As WAtoday reported on Monday, the project is officially in the middle of final negotiations to submit a binding offer so it is more than passing strange the government would advertise a $100 million commitment to it in the middle of those negotiations. And there was decision made by Mr McGowan as State Development Minister in August to ban the export of onshore gas from WA, with one notable exception: the Waitsia project in the Mid West that Seven West Media chairman Kerry Stokes has a nine-figure interest in. Loading That decision allowed Stokes-backed Beach energy and its joint venture partner Mitsui alone to send 1.5 million tonnes of LNG to the Karratha gas plant and on to lucrative export markets, adding tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to the value of the project, according to analysts, with the stroke of a pen. Mr Stokes newspaper The West Australian has given Mr McGowan strong editorial backing during the pandemic and the campaigns only debate will be screened on Seven without the participation of journalists from non-SWM outlets, a departure from election debate tradition. (Disclosure: I wrote columns for SWMs The Sunday Times until December last year). All of this is mostly under-the-radar stuff though, disconnected from the experience of voters who have finally seen a reversal in their economic circumstances after years of tough domestic contraction. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the last great poet of the Beat Generation who helped to establish the counter-culture movement of 1950s America through his City Lights bookshop and publishers, has died. He was 101. Ferlinghetti, a San Francisco institution, died Monday at his home, his son Lorenzo Ferlinghetti said. A month shy of his 102nd birthday, Ferlinghetti died 'in his own room,' holding the hands of his son and his son's girlfriend, 'as he took his last breath.' The cause of death was lung disease. Ferlinghetti had received the first dose of the COVID vaccine last week, his son said Tuesday. 'We love you, Lawrence,' City Lights said on Twitter, adding that Ferlinghetti died on Monday. Born on March 24, 1919, the New York native took part in the D-Day landings of World War II and saw the horror of atomic-bombed Nagasaki before ending up in San Francisco in 1953 and co-founding City Lights. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a San Francisco institution, died Monday at his home, his son Lorenzo Ferlinghetti said. A month shy of his 102nd birthday, Ferlinghetti died 'in his own room' (pictured in 2018) The cause of death was lung disease. Ferlinghetti had received the first dose of the COVID vaccine last week, his son said Tuesday (pictured in 1988) The bookstore became the outlet of Beat expression, a meeting point for its free-wheeling poets and, two years later, the first publisher of its leading authors including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. His 1958 compilation, 'A Coney Island of the Mind,' sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the U.S. alone. Long an outsider from the poetry community, Ferlinghetti once joked that he had 'committed the sin of too much clarity.' He called his style 'wide open' and his work, influenced in part by e.e. cummings, was often lyrical and childlike: 'Peacocks walked/under the night trees/in the lost moon/light/when I went out/looking for love,' he wrote in 'Coney Island.' He was arrested on obscenity charges in 1957 for publishing Ginsberg's 'Howl,' considered an anthem of the disaffected Beat generation with its opening line, 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. He was arrested on obscenity charges in 1957 for publishing Ginsberg's 'Howl,' considered an anthem of the disaffected Beat generation with its opening line, 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked City Lights said Ferlinghetti (pictured outside the store in 1998) 'continued to write and publish new work up until he was 100 years old, and his work has earned him a place in the American canon' The poem, which refers to homosexuality and drugs, was criticized as explicit, but Ferlinghetti was acquitted in a highly publicized trial at which the judge ruled it was 'not ... without redeeming social importance.' Ferlinghetti also was a playwright, novelist, translator and painter and had many admirers among musicians. In 1976, he recited 'The Lords Prayer' at the Bands farewell concert, immortalized in Martin Scorseses 'The Last Waltz.' The folk-rock band Aztec Two-Step lifted its name from a line in the title poem of Ferlinghettis 'Coney Island' book: 'A couple of Papish cats/is doing an Aztec two-step.' Ferlinghetti also published some of the earliest film reviews by Pauline Kael, who with The New Yorker became one of the countrys most influential critics. City Lights said Ferlinghetti 'continued to write and publish new work up until he was 100 years old, and his work has earned him a place in the American canon.' He received an honorary prize from the National Book Critics Circle in 2000 and five years later was given a National Book Award medal for 'his tireless work on behalf of poets and the entire literary community' Ferlinghetti (left) and Allen Ginsberg at the Albert Memorial in South Kensington, London, 11th June 1965 'His curiosity was unbounded and his enthusiasm was infectious, and we will miss him greatly,' the shop said in a statement on its website. He received an honorary prize from the National Book Critics Circle in 2000 and five years later was given a National Book Award medal for 'his tireless work on behalf of poets and the entire literary community.' 'The dominant American mercantile culture may globalize the world, but it is not the mainstream culture of our civilization,' Ferlinghetti said upon receiving the award. 'The true mainstream is made, not of oil, but of literarians, publishers, bookstores, editors, libraries, writers and readers, universities and all the institutions that support them.' In 2012, Ferlinghetti won the Janus Pannonius International Poetry Prize from the Hungarian PEN Club. When he learned the countrys right-wing government was a sponsor, he turned the award down. Pennsylvania movie theaters ditch mask mandate Three chain movie theaters have announced that masks are no longer mandatory for moviegoers who have been vaccinated against coronavirus. A team of researchers concludes that a game-theory approach may offer new insights into both the spread and disruption of viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2. Its work, described in the journal Royal Society Interface, applies a "signaling game" to an analysis of cellular processes in illuminating molecular behavior. "We need new models and technologies at many levels in order to understand how to tame viral pandemics," explains Bud Mishra, a professor at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and one of the paper's authors. "At the biomolecular level, we explain how cellularization may be understood in ways that stymie disease and encourage healthy functioning." The analysis, which also included William Casey, an assistant professor in the U.S. Naval Academy's Cyber Science Department, and Steven Massey, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Puerto Rico, centered on the biological and evolutionary phenomenon "mimicry"--organisms changing form to represent another. The researchers, in particular, focused on two types of mimicry: "Batesian" and "Muellerian". Batesian mimicry, named after the naturalist Henry Walter Bates, involves conflict or deception between the sender and receiver--for example, a harmless hoverfly mimics a more dangerous wasp in order to deter predators. By contrast, Muellerian mimicry, named after the zoologist and naturalist Johann Friedrich Theodor Mueller, occurs when there is a common interest between the sender and receiver--for instance, two species that adopt each other's warning signals as a means to offer protection for both. These types of mimicry also occur at the molecular level. "The gene for an RNA or a protein macro-molecule can be considered as the sender, while the signal consists of the three-dimensional conformation of the expressed gene product," write the authors. "The receiver is the macro-molecule, which specifically interacts with the signal macro-molecule, typically a protein, but could also be an RNA or DNA molecule." The SARS-CoV-2 virus, they add, makes multiple uses of molecular mimicry in its efforts to exploit its human host by mimicking, in Batesian fashion, healthy cells in order to infect the host organism. By contrast, vaccines deceive the human immune system into sensing that it is being attacked by a virus. While this deception is costly to the vaccinated subject in the short term--in the form of reactions to the injection--the immune system retains a memory and so is pre-prepared for a future encounter with the real virus. This dynamic plays out annually in the creation of flu shots--vaccines are altered each year in order to accurately mimic a newly evolved flu virus. With this in mind, the researchers sought to determine if a signaling game could provide a framework for analyzing the different types of mimicry. Under a signaling game, a sender aims to persuade the receiver that it carries a message that benefits both--independent of the veracity of the claim. In their analysis, the paper's authors constructed a mathematical model that mapped out a series of signaling strategies that, theoretically, could be adopted by both a virus (Batesian mimicry) and a vaccine (Mullerian mimicry). Their results offered a range of blueprints of how mimicry is formed, maintained, and destroyed in cellular populations. "Better knowledge of the deceptive strategies of SARS-CoV-2 will help to inform vaccine design," the researchers conclude. ### The research was supported by the Office of Naval Research (N0001420WX01716), a National Cancer Institute Physical Sciences-Oncology Center grant (U54 CA193313-01), and a U.S. Army grant (W911NF1810427). A mother who uses OnlyFans has spoken out after her three sons were reportedly expelled from their Catholic school over her presence on the adult platform. According to Crystal Jackson, from California, she created an OnlyFans account in 2019 as a way to spice up her relationship with her husband Chris Jackson. However, according to the mother-of-three, who goes by Tiffany Poindexter, or Mrs Poindexter, on the app, where she told People she makes more than $150,000 a month, her pictures were eventually leaked to Sacred Heart Parish School in Sacramento, where her children went to school. After her photos were sent to the schools principal, Theresa Sparks, Jackson told KCRA that she received an email informing her that her children were no longer allowed at the Catholic school. Your apparent quest for high-profile controversy in support of your adult website is in direct conflict with what we hope to impart to our students and is directly opposed to the policies laid out in our Parent/Student Handbook. We therefore require that you find another school for your children and have no further association with ours, the email reads in part, according to the outlet. According to Jackson, the expulsion came after an issue with her OnlyFans first arose in July, when a fellow parent from the school found her account and shared it with his wife. From there, the mother-of-three claimed that a group of parents from the community took it upon themselves to advocate for her children to be expelled from the school, with the fellow parents reportedly sending photos from Jacksons OnlyFans to the principal, bishop and church. Their whole strategy from day one was: Im gonna take you down, she recalled to People. It was gut-wrenching, having them send my photos to school saying: This is disgusting and this is gross. However, according to Jackson, the schools decision to expel her children only hurts the couples three boys, aged eight, 10 and 12. My kids are really good and all this is doing is hurting them, the 44-year-old told People. Take me down, thats fine, but leave my kids out of this. Jackson also defended her presence on the site, explaining to the outlet that the photos she and her husband post have ultimately strengthened their bond. It has made our relationship so much more better in the intimacy part and the bond of our marriage has gotten stronger, she said. As for where the couples children will attend school now, Jackson said that she had hoped they could continue going to Catholic school, although she doesnt see that happening. Our goal is to put them back in Catholic school but I dont see that happening. They wont allow them in this diocese, and is this really the place for them to be? she said. Its clear that they said we dont want you. In a statement to KCRA, Sparks declined to discuss the situation, telling the outlet: We cannot discuss the status or circumstances of any member of our school or parish community. The Independent has contacted Sacred Heart Parish School and Jackson for comment. He's currently based in Italy, as he shots his upcoming World War II film, Across The River And Into The Trees, in and around picturesque Venice. And Liev Schreiber was seen preparing to film action-packed scenes for the historic drama while in the Italian city on Wednesday. The actor, 53, looked dapper as he donned an olive-green military uniform as he brandished a gun as he ran through scenes before cameras began to roll. Exciting: Liev Schreiber donned a military uniform and brandished a gun as he prepared to film action-packed scenes for Across The River And Into The Trees in Venice on Wednesday Getting into character as Colonel Richard Cantwell, he wore a longline jacket over a matching blazer, shirt and trousers. He completed his look by wearing black gloves, which he kept on while he looked through the scope of his vintage weapon. Sat on a bench as the crew worked around him, Liev practised his aim with and without the gun to make sure he got his hand positions just right. Wardrobe: Getting into character as Colonel Richard Cantwell, he wore a longline jacket over a matching blazer, shirt and trousers Preparations: Sat on a bench as the crew worked around him, Liev practised his aim with and without the gun to make sure he got his hand positions just right Attention to detail: Liev completed his look by wearing black gloves, which he kept on while he looked through the scope of his vintage weapon Heading out: Liev was seen strolling onto set followed by members of the film's crew It comes after Liev reportedly had to undergo further surgery on his leg after injuring himself in a fight scene during filming. The actor was pictured hobbling on crutches earlier this month as he headed to the doctors in Veneto, where he is said to have undergone keyhole surgery before returning to Venice in the evening. Back in January, the actor told a fan on Twitter he had just had knee surgery and he is said to have aggravated the injury further after filming a fight scene. Wounded? Liev sported make-up to make his character appear battered and bruised Easy does it: Liev was given a helping hand out of a boat from a member of the crew Pals: Liev was seen giving a hug to a brunette woman after he filmed the scene, presumably his co-star Matilda De Angelis Embrace: Liev and the woman hugged briefly after he finished filming his scenes The actor plays US Army Col. Cantwell in the film set in post WW2 Venice, Across The River And Into The Trees, which is based on the last full-length novel by Ernest Hemingway. Liev has been shooting scenes with his onscreen love interest Maltida De Angelis, who plays an 18-year-old Italian contessa called Renata, over the past few weeks Four years ago The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Pierce Brosnan would play the lead role with his GoldenEye director Martin Campbell at the helm. However the current director is Spanish filmmaker Paula Ortiz and this September it emerged in Deadline that Liev was playing the colonel. Safety first: Liev was seen applying a spray on his face before filming scenes while looking at a pocket mirror Period drama: The actor plays US Army Col. Cantwell in the film set in post WW2 Venice, which is based on the last full-length novel by Ernest Hemingway Ouch: It comes after Liev reportedly had to undergo further surgery on his leg after injuring himself in a fight scene during filming Candid: Back in January, the actor told a fan on Twitter he had just had knee surgery and he is said to have aggravated the injury further after filming a fight scene The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company The Hamriyah Free Zone Authority (HFZA) is currently participating in the 26th edition of the Gulfood 2021 Exhibition which kicked off at the Dubai World Trade Centre and lasts until the February 25 amid the participation of 2,500 companies from 85 countries. HFZAs participation in Gulfood, which is the worlds largest annual food and beverage trade exhibition, comes as part of its commitment to fulfilling the current and evolving needs of the local, regional, and global food sector. We are delighted to take part in this great event, which brings together the most renowned international food brands, and we look forward to welcoming visitors at our stand to learn more about Hamriyah Free Zone and Sharjah Food Park which is the first and largest integrated facility dedicated to the food industry, HFZA said in a tweet. Extending over an area of 11 million square feet, Sharjah Food Park is home to 1,700 companies operating in food manufacturing, preservation, packaging, re-packaging, import, and export to markets around the globe. Starting from 2,500 sq m, Sharjah Food Park offers investors and companies various plots of land to operate their businesses, as well as all food licences, with state-of-the-art logistics, sophisticated warehouses, and modern office spaces. Saud Salim Al Mazrouei, Director of Hamriyah Free Zone Authority, said: Participating in Gulfood is part of our annual agenda at HFZA, owing to its importance as a global platform for food and beverage trade, through which we promote our local products and help them penetrate new markets, as well as highlight HFZAs investment privileges provided to companies and investors. When it comes to Sharjah Food Park, it is considered an integrated business environment for the international food companies willing to establish a firm foothold in the global food sector and to have a better reach for local and regional markets, thanks to our sophisticated infrastructure and the numerous benefits we provide to meet the aspirations and needs of our investors, he added. Al Mazrouei further said: Its not surprising that HFZA in general and Sharjah Food Park, in particular, are home to the worlds top food and beverage companies, thanks to our outstanding facilities, on-site customs services, and state-of-the-art logistics, including modern warehouses that are equipped with advance cooling systems for ideal food preservation. IMPORTANCE OF FOOD SECURITY Al Mazrouei made it clear the Covid-19 pandemic has proven the importance of food security, where logistics and an integrated supply chain are two major components of maintaining the supply chain. From this perspective, we, at HFZA, have been keen to establish a world-class transport network along with storage facilities proximate to airports and ports. This stems from the fact that the food sector is one of the key economic sectors that Sharjah is keen to upgrade, as part of the objectives of the UAE National Food Security Strategy and in line with the directives and visions of HH Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, Member of the UAE Supreme Council and Ruler of Sharjah, who always calls for economic diversification and attraction of investments that add a value to the emirates economy and enhance the sustainability of growth, he concluded. Sharjah Food Park, the regions first and largest integrated city for the food industry, provides various lands, stores, offices, services, facilities, and over 136 warehouses of different sizes starting from 200 600 square feet that are equipped with advanced cooling systems, in addition to the warehouses dedicated to perishable goods. In addition to the services provided by the Zones Food Department, Sharjah Food Park also provides accommodations with a capacity of more than 26,000 workers. When visiting HFZAs stand, a team of experts will be ready to provide you detailed information about the benefits of investing in HFZA and the facilities provided to the existing companies and those who are willing to kick off their investments over there. This includes issuing licences, health certificates for food export, no-objection certificates, and official approvals. Additionally, HFZA offers its investors the necessary training and support and food inspection services, besides its role in facilitating the communication between investors and the local authorities concerned. -- Tradearabia News Service New Delhi, Feb 24 : China has a habit of creeping forward, making very small incremental moves, to achieve its objectives, said Indian Army Chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane, adding that this strategy will not work with India. Addressing a webinar organised by the Vivekananda International Foundation, a public policy think-tank, Naravane said, "China is in the habit of creeping forward making very small incremental changes wherein each change by itself is not very big or worthy of a very strong reaction." "Because of the very small incremental moves which were never contested, it has been able to achieve its aims without firing a shot or any loss of life," he said. Naravane citied China's expansionist strategy in the South China Sea and asserted that India will not allow this to happen. Referring to India's resolve in Ladakh, he said, "I think more than anything else, what we have achieved is to show that this strategy will not work with us and their every move will be met resolutely." Terming the recent disengagement in Pangong lake as a win-win situation, the Army chief cautioned about other areas in Eastern Ladakh. "Going forward, there are some issues which remain in the areas of Depsang. The Defence Minister himself mentioned this in his update to the Parliament. There are pending issues in the areas of Eastern Ladakh and in other areas along the Line of Actual Control. But we have our strategies in place for that," Naravane said. Praising the Indian troops for showing their grit in Ladakh during tussle, he said, "We owe it to the great determination of the men on the ground and the junior leadership which struck out through very adverse winter conditions and were willing to that extra mile in carrying out their duties. We actually owe it to all to them." Despite the initial disengagement, the Army chief sounded a warning while dealing with China citing trust deficit. "In whatever we are doing, we should keep in mind that we have to be wary. We have to be very cautious as there is a trust deficit. Unless that trust deficit is removed, we will continue to be very wary and watch whatever movements happen on either side of the LAC. But I think at the end of day, we have achieved a lot," Naravane said. Adding that there is still a long way to go, the Army chief said, "We now have to go the stage of descalation, followed by moving back the troops and the deinduction of troops which went to the higher reaches. We were all in this together. We had a plan chalked out, and had discussed as to what should be the way forward. Whatever has panned out happened as a result of that." STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. An ex-aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo published an essay Wednesday detailing sexual harassment allegations against her former boss. In the piece published on Medium, Lindsey Boylan, a current candidate for Manhattan Borough President who left state government in 2018, alleges that the governor repeatedly harassed her, going as far as an uninvited kiss on the lips, while on the job. I tried to excuse his behavior. I told myself its only words. But that changed after a one-on-one briefing with the Governor to update him on economic and infrastructure projects, she wrote. We were in his New York City office on Third Avenue. As I got up to leave and walk toward an open door, he stepped in front of me and kissed me on the lips. I was in shock, but I kept walking. Today I am telling my story. I never planned to share the details of my experience working in the Cuomo administration, but I am doing so now in hopes that it may make it easier for others to speak their own truth. https://t.co/n1Lcc6Ac66 Lindsey Boylan (@LindseyBoylan) February 24, 2021 The essay details other instances of alleged harassment, including an October 2017 flight in which Boylan claimed the governor invited her to play strip poker. He was seated facing me, so close our knees almost touched. His press aide was to my right and a state trooper behind us, she wrote describing the invitation. Thats exactly what I was thinking, I responded sarcastically and awkwardly. I tried to play it cool. But in that moment, I realized just how acquiescent I had become. Another time when the two were alone she said he showed off a cigar box telling her it had been a gift from former President Bill Clinton. Boylan said she perceived that as a reference to Clintons affair with Monica Lewinsky. Other parts of Boylans piece feature screenshots of messages she received from other members of Cuomos staff, including some of his inner-circle. A message allegedly from a top Cuomo aide in 2016 told Boylan she should look up Lisa Shields, suggesting she could be her better looking sister. In total, the alleged harassment amounted to what Boylan said her former boss at Empire State Development, a state agency, told her was the governors crush. Cuomos office issued a statement Wednesday addressing only Boylans claim that the governor invited her to play strip poker while on a plane. The office shared in a press release that they claim are all flight manifests from October 2017, none of which show Boylan alone with the Governor, a single press aide, and a NYS Trooper. Nothing in Boylans essay suggests she was alone on the flight, just who was sitting near her. Multiple flights listed on the manifest feature at least one press aide and a member of the New York State Police Protective Services Unit. John Maggiore, Howard Zemsky, Dani Lever and Abbey Fashouer Collins four Cuomo aides, who are listed on the flight manifests issued a statement saying the conversation about strip poker didnt happen. When Boylan first went public with her allegations of harassment on Twitter in December, the governor denied her claims during a press briefing. On the tweets, I totally respect a womans right, fought for a womans right to express any concern, any issue that she has in the workplace. I support that, he said at the time. But the tweets were simply not true. India s agreement with China on disengaging troops in a key friction area in eastern Ladakh is a win-win" for both sides, Indian Army chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane said on Wednesday. Indian negotiators have a strategy to ensure that they could reach a favourable" outcome with China in disputes in other border areas as well, Naravane said at an event organized by the New Delhi-based Vivekananda International Foundation think tank. China was used to making incremental moves that were so small that they were not considered worthy of a reaction, the army chief said. This was Beijings strategy to deal with its neighbours in the contested South China Sea as well, he said. More than anything else, what we have shown is that this strategy will not work with us and every move will be met resolutely," Naravane said of Indias quick and matching response to Beijings attempts to change the status quo along the undemarcated 3,488-kilometre-long India-China border in May last year. In an unexpected move, China last year mobilized tens of thousands of troops to the India-China Line of Actual Control (LAC) prompting New Delhi to react. After nine rounds of talks since May last year, the two sides agreed to pull back troops from the northern and southern banks of the Pangong Tso lake, considered the most contentious of friction areas. The disengagement began on 11 February and was completed by 18 February with senior military commanders of the two countries meeting on Saturday to discuss disengagement from other friction points like the Depsang plains, Gogra post and Hot Springs area. Indias strategy of using military, diplomatic, and economic measures paid dividends, Naravane said. I think what we have achieved so far is very good.... As a result of this approach the disengagement has taken place. I think it is a very good end result. It is a win-win situation and I think for any agreement to last, both sides should feel that they have achieved something. To that end, I think this is a very good outcome," he said. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Top-level business leaders and major food and beverages (F&B) producers have praised Gulfood 2021, the worlds first in-person F&B event for 12 months, for facilitating an important and timely return to face-to-face interaction. The worlds most competitive sourcing hub, which runs at Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) until February 25 under strict and proven health and safety protocols, has inspired tremendous global industry confidence, with 2,500 companies from 85 countries recognising the shows capability to kickstart F&B trade. Colombias Ambassador to the UAE, Jaime Amin, said: This is an extraordinary opportunity for Colombia. We are here to show the very best of Colombia and we very much hope it will help increase our trade in the coming years as there is no better opportunity. Our relationships with the UAE are at their highest now. The steps that the UAE have taken to protect everyone are right and we are very happy to be here. This sentiment was echoed by Vladimir Ulakhovich, Chairman of the Belarus Chamber of Commerce and Industry, who said; This exhibition is very important for F&B businesses, it is a signal that we are ready to return to normal to business life despite all the obstacles. I would like to express my gratitude to the organisers for this event, it is a unique event, that demonstrates with respect to all the safety protocols, we are ready to host a normal business event, Belarus is a big exporter of elementary and agri-food products, we export to 114 countries, especially milk and meat products. It is very important for Belarus and Belarussian companies to take this unique opportunity to reach new countries through Gulfood. We have 27 companies at Gulfood, despite the pandemic, displaying our high standards. We are here to develop our relationships. We had a productive meeting with Dubai Exports; we are ready to sign an MoU between Belarus Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Dubai Exports with common intentions to develop relations to support our companies in this sector. Dubai is a hub and a really important market to reach other countries. Meanwhile, the Southern US Trade Association cited a shift towards quality of visitors at this years show. The association said it was witnessing more in-depth conversations with potential partners, pointing to a host of promising meetings. This is one of the best platforms to do this and a truly wonderful opportunity for us. From a representatives point of view you have all the major countries and companies, giving smaller businesses the opportunity to showcase their products to the wider industry, said Paata Kalandadze, Georgias Ambassador to the UAE. - TradeArabia News Service How much money might you expect to earn over the course of five years? Would 5,460 be enough? In a landmark move this week, a divorce court in Beijing ordered a husband to pay his wife compensation for the housework and childcare she undertook during their five-year marriage. The ruling was made according to a new civil code in China, which came into effect this year. It states that compensation may now be sought by a spouse if they bear the greater responsibility for caring duties or household work. The woman, known only as Wang, told the court that her husband didnt care about or participate in any kind of chores, and left childcare to her, while he went off to work. The judge accepted Wangs plea, saying that housework can improve the ability of the other spouse to achieve personal, individual academic growth. About time, too. But heres the rub. The total amount the judge has ordered the man to hand over is just 50,000 yuan. Or 5,460. A thousand pounds a year for full-time childcare and a live-in maid? What a bargain. I cant wait to have kids one day and offload them to someone so cheap. Perhaps I, too, can then achieve personal, individual academic growth. Turns out Im late to the party, though: men all over the world are in on this secret and have been for decades. We know from countless studies that women habitually take on the lions share of housework and childcare, either as their full-time roles or alongside their attempts to build careers. Analysis conducted by University College London in 2019 found that women clock up approximately 16 hours of household chores every week; men, closer to six. Women perform, on average, around four hours a day of this unpaid labour in the UK, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development almost double that of men in the UK and more than double that of men in China. For the same work in the UK, a cleaner or a babysitter would likely be paid somewhere in the region of 12-20 per hour. Thats at least 17,520 a year of unpaid work if your wife does it instead. At that price, til death do us part suddenly seems a whole lot more appealing. An Oxfam report from 2020 calculated that the monetary value of unpaid care work globally for women aged 15 and over is at least $10.8tn (8.3tn) annually. The organisation described the divide as being based on a flawed and sexist economic system and as a broken economic model that has seen wealth funnelled towards men, while women are exploited. They say the systems broken, but actually it was designed that way, and its working perfectly well for those who benefit from it. During the pandemic, womens unpaid labour has only increased, with many taking on most of the childcare, despite both partners working from home. The Office for National Statistics reported that women carried out an average of more than three hours a day of childcare compared to just two hours for men during lockdown in 2020. The consequence? Far more women than men losing or leaving their jobs while the schools are closed. In 2020, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that the average mother was doing just 35 per cent of the number of uninterrupted working hours that the average father did (down from 60 per cent in 2014/15). Meanwhile, gender pay gap reporting in the UK is about to be parked for the second year in a row, so we cant tell exactly by how much this has impacted things on the office floor. Canny. We only need to look to real life examples to see the impact of someone taking a step back in their own career to support their spouse. The 20th-century American realist painter Edward Hopper, whose powerful depictions of the isolation at the heart of American life found new appreciation during the pandemic, wasnt the only painter in his family. Hoppers wife, Jo, was also a painter before becoming his muse, model and glorified personal assistant. When women are given the same opportunities, their achievements have also made history go figure. George Eliots husband also a writer encouraged her to pursue her dreams and supported her work through managing the admin, allowing her to continue writing. And who could say where cancer treatment would be today without Marie Curie, whose husband Pierre gave up his own scientific research to focus on his wifes investigations into radioactivity? Imagine the personal projects or career successes Wang could have achieved during those five years while bringing up her children, if only her husband had been willing to do his equal share. We saw a similar perception of womens roles in the now-axed Conservative campaign that portrayed women as caregivers and cleaners, and when Rishi Sunak said, we owe mums everywhere an enormous debt of thanks for their support during the pandemic. Im sure all those mums appreciated the shout-out. But you know what theyd appreciate more? Fair payment for the labour they contribute to society and their husbands pulling their weight. If we have to start fighting for it through the courts, Wang-style, then so be it. A leading American think tank has released a report urging the US government to prioritize development and good governance in the Middle East over security. The RAND Corporation report says the United States needs to rebalance its assistance to the conflict-ridden region, pointing out that Israel, Egypt and Jordan received 81% of foreign military assistance in 2019. US policy toward the Middle East is outdated, with too much focus on arms sales and Iran. Instead, RAND suggests prioritizing "economic investments, governance, diplomacy and programs focused on people, it said in a Tuesday press release. The report argues that US military assistance, which far outweighs economic aid, has not led to a peaceful Middle East. It cites the looming threat of a nuclear Iran despite harsh sanctions. It also says the continued existence of the Islamic State is due to economic and societal grievances that provide a ready pool of recruits. RAND suggests reducing the assistance gap between the Big 3 of Israel, Egypt and Jordan and other states, and instead increasing investment in health, youth unemployment and climate change, among other things. Overall, the report supports a focus on economic development, human rights and nonviolent methods of fighting extremism. Co-author Dalia Dassa Kaye, a senior political scientist at RAND, said, We need to start thinking about what we are for in this region, not just what we're against. By Deisy Buitrago and Marianna Parraga CARACAS/MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Venezuela is shipping jet fuel to Iran in return for vital gasoline imports for the South American nation as part of a swap deal agreed by the two state-run oil firms, three people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Iran has ramped up assistance to Venezuela since last year as the United States tightened sanctions on both countries, hitting oil exports by state-run firms Petroleos de Venezuela and National Iranian oil Company (NIOC). Iran has sent flotillas of state-operated tankers carrying gasoline ... Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 11:36:07|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close WELLINGTON, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- A second batch of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines have arrived at the Auckland International Airport, New Zealand's COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said on Wednesday. "This shipment contained about 76,000 doses, and follows our first shipment of 60,000 doses that arrived last week. We expect further shipments of vaccine over the coming weeks," Hipkins told a press conference. "As with the first shipment, quality assurance and checks by Medsafe are underway," he said, adding by the end of March, New Zealand is due to receive a total of about 450,000 doses, enough to vaccinate 225,000 people with a two-dose course. The government started the national immunization program for around 12,000 border and managed isolation and quarantine workers last Saturday, and once completed, the government will begin vaccinating their household contacts, Hipkins said. Meanwhile, around 40 border workers from the Christchurch Airport were vaccinated Wednesday morning, the first to do so in the South Island, the minister said, adding this passes a milestone of the first 1,000 border workers and vaccinators in New Zealand to receive their first dose. They included aviation security workers, cleaners, police, customs workers and health protection officers who screen passengers arriving on international flights, he said. Currently the total number of active COVID-19 cases in New Zealand is 62, and the total number of confirmed cases is 2,009, the health ministry said. Enditem Credit: www.shutterstock.com It emerged today that two aged-care residents in Brisbane were given an incorrect dose of the Pfizer vaccinemore than the amount recommended. The 88-year-old man and 94-year-old woman were receiving their vaccinations yesterday as part of the first phase of Australia's vaccine rollout, which began this week. Both residents are being monitored, but haven't shown any signs of adverse reactions so far. Two residents in Brisbane aged care facility given overdose of COVID-19 vaccine https://t.co/syOVFouJrD ABC Adelaide (@abcadelaide) February 23, 2021 Health Minister Greg Hunt has revealed the doctor who administered the vaccines had not completed the proper training. The doctor has been stood down from his position while the error is investigated. But how did this mistake happen, and how can we aim to minimize the risk of it happening again? The challenge of a multi-dose vial We don't yet know exactly what happened, as the incident is still under investigation. But it's likely the doctor gave the patients either the whole or a larger part of the multi-dose vial than indicated. COVID vaccines come in vials containing several doses. A vial of the Pfizer vaccine contains five or potentially six doses, and health-care staff need to extract individual doses from the vial. This is different to most other vaccines, which come in single-dose vials. Multi-dose vials are useful in a pandemic situation. They allow manufacturers to distribute more vaccine, more easily and rapidly around the world. We've actually seen this kind of mistake beforewe call it a multi-dose vial error. It can happen if clinicians are not careful with the extraction, or haven't fully understood the education and training with regards to multi-dose vials. Other countries, such as Israel and Germany, have reported these kinds of incidents during their COVID vaccine rollouts. But similarly, there haven't been serious adverse effects reported to date for the patients involved. We (SAEFVICthe Victorian vaccine safety service) reported on a similar case in Melbourne with the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine in 2010, which came in a vial containing ten doses of vaccine. A person was accidentally given the whole vial (5 milliliters, ten times the recommended 0.5ml). They were monitored and experienced a small local reaction, but no other side-effects. Aged-care residents are among the first groups to be vaccinated in Australia. Credit: Shutterstock Safety isn't a significant concern here In the early phase 1 and 2 vaccine clinical trials, scientists test a variety of dose sizes to determine what dose delivers the best immune response, while also not using more vaccine than necessary. This helps determine what dose is then used in the phase 3 efficacy trials. In clinical trials for BNT162b2 (Pfizer's COVID vaccine), some participants received more than three times the dose the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has provisionally approved (30 micrograms). These participants didn't experience adverse reactions much more so than those who received the smaller doses, apart from one participant who had local pain at the injection site. Although you can overdose on medications, vaccines are a bit different. I often say "you can't have too much of a good thing" when it comes to vaccines. Really large amounts might produce challenges, but we are reassured by the phase 1 and 2 clinical trial data. Even if these aged-care residents received up to five or six times the recommended dose (if they did in fact receive a whole 1.8ml vial), this is still a relatively small amount and not likely to be harmful. Of course, it's still important to monitor them closely. It's possible any local side-effects, such as pain at the injection site or fever, may be slightly heightened with a larger dose. But the information we have from clinical trials, and the reports from other countries, tells us we have no reason to be concerned about anything more serious in the short or long term. What happens now? Even if these "overdoses" are not likely to be harmful, it's always safest to stick to the recommended dose. We don't want to see an incident like this repeated. It may also undermine confidence in the vaccine rollout, and where COVID vaccines are a precious resource, it's important we try not to waste a single dose. In such a large-scale vaccine program, human errors are bound to happen occasionally. It's very positive that a nurse reportedly stepped in on noticing this mistake, and that we've seen open disclosure around the incident. The key now is what action we're going to take to minimize the risk of this happening again. Clinicians in Australia are not accustomed in their usual practice to delivering vaccines from multi-dose vials, meaning there's a greater risk of error. This incident should be the impetus to make sure everyone administering vaccines has completed the required training, including the multi-dose vial component. This should be documented via their Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) registration number (where applicable). This event should also prompt us to look at how we capture and report these sorts of errors in Australia. The focus on vaccine safety surveillance is, for the most part, on patients who have had an adverse event following immunizationthese are summarized nationally by the TGA. Not all vaccine errors will lead to an adverse reaction, but we need to ensure we also have a systematic way to capture any errors in administering the vaccines. The newly established Vaccine Operation Centre, a federal government initiative, is in a good place to capture and collate this information. In the context of global vaccinations against COVID-19, multi-dose vials are the only way forward. The AstraZeneca vaccine will also come in multi-dose vials. So this is something we must do the best we can to get right. Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Abdulrasheed Bawa, the chairman-designate of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), said he has never sold a single asset recovered by the commission. He said this during his screening exercise which was underway at the Senate at the time of this report. The nominee was responding to questions from lawmakers when he made the comment. This comes on the heels of allegations that Mr Bawa was arrested and detained by the agency under former chairman Ibrahim Magu over illegal sale of 244 forfeited trucks to proxies in Port Harcourt. Although the EFCC had refuted the claim in a statement, Mr Bawa had to answer questions about it on Wednesday. He said as head of the Port Harcourt zonal office, he did not have the power to sell any asset recovered under his watch. Such power, he said, was bestowed on the office of the secretary to the commission which was handled by the head office at the time. I never sold a single truck at the Port Harcourt office, the head office handled that at the time. When I took over Port Harcourt, they had 34 convictions but when I got there we recorded 216 convictions. Anybody that is familiar with the processes of the EFCC knows that the chairman doesnt have the power to sell an asset but the secretary of the agency. If I had a skeleton, he would not have nominated me for this position, the nominee told the senators. Relationship with Magu Mr Bawa also said he has a very good relationship with his predecessors. Even the embattled ex-chairman, Ibrahim Magu, he said, congratulated him when he was nominated. Mr Magu, as EFCC chairman, had appointed Mr Bawa to head the commissions zonal offices in Ibadan and Port Harcourt. Both men are believed to have fallen out after the Port Harcourt posting leading to Mr Bawas redeployment to the EFCC Academy in Abuja. That was the position Mr Bawa held until Mr Magu was controversially removed as EFCC chairman. After Mr Magus suspension from office, Mr Bawa was transferred to head the Lagos zonal office of the commission from where he was appointed the chairman-designate. Tasks If Confirmed Mr Bawa said if confirmed, he would work towards strengthening the anti-graft agency and establishing a synergy between the EFCC and other sister security and anti-graft agencies. When asked how he will respond to pressure from influential individuals on any particular case, the nominee said he will discharge his duties without fear or favour. He also said the anti-graft agency does not engage in media trials but has a responsibility to educate citizens on its activities. We have a responsibility to enlighten the public on our activities, he said. Matters that are in court are already in the public domain. It is not in our control to determine which matter could be published or not. Before we reposition, we need to know what the institution stands for. We would work on our standard operational procedure to improve on those procedures. We are looking forward to an EFCC that when I give an instruction to a junior officer he will refuse it because it contravenes the law. ADVERTISEMENT The screening was underway at the time of this report and was being done in plenary with the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, presiding over the screening. The screening comes one week after President Muhammadu Buhari conveyed a letter to the Senate seeking Mr Bawas confirmation as the EFCC boss. The president, in the letter, communicated his decision to appoint the 40-year-old. The appointment, he said, is in accordance with Paragraph 2(3) of Part 1, CAP E1 of EFCC Act 2004. Allegations behind a cut, please! Reply Thread Link done, apologies! Edited at 2021-02-24 11:48 am (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link Disgusting, I don't even like looking at his face also didnt he give up his French passport for a Russian one or something? Reply Thread Link Yeah he didnt want to pay French taxes so he renounced his citizenship. Hes such a fucking toad, I hope he gets jail time. Reply Parent Thread Link hes so repulsive i hate him. you were never obelix for me. Reply Thread Link Throw him UNDER the jail Reply Thread Link I hope he can get jail time. He can pee freely in a cell. Trash Reply Thread Link And no one is surprised Honestly it was at the point were people were waiting for this to come out Reply Thread Link Unfortunately I think this is just the tip of a very large iceberg. Reply Parent Thread Link Honestly, the only surprising thing about this is that hes actually been charged Reply Parent Thread Link I'm pretty sure he's only being charged cause he went to russia had he been paying his taxes in France he would be just fine Reply Parent Thread Link Scary to think of the women who haven't come forward. Reply Thread Link In an interview back in the day, he talked about being part of the gang rape of a woman in his youth. I don't have a link but I swear he said this many years ago and I bet it's searchable. I wrote on another post about Woody Allen how there was an attitude in artistic elites back in the day that you could do anything, nothing was off limits. So when he said this back then, publicly, to a journalist, it wasn't considered horrifying but part of his transgressive appeal as a "real" actor who had come up from a hard background and thus was not just a wild man type but the real thing. TL;DR: There are DEFINITELY other women. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link that is fucking horrifying omfg Reply Parent Thread Link asdkljfasdklfjasfd jfc. that's straight up evil Reply Parent Thread Link The first sentence alone is horrifying. I hope his ass is slammed all the way down with trials and lawsuits from now until the day he croaks, the disgusting fucker. Reply Parent Thread Link Yeah, I found this on reddit... Reply Parent Thread Expand Link [ Forcibly urn this man. ] "What of his story that at 9 he participated in his first rape?" Corliss asked. " 'Yes,' he {Depardieu} admits. And after that, there were many rapes? 'Yes,' he admits, 'but it was absolutely normal in those circumstances. That was part of my childhood.' After the Time magazine story broke, there were the initial denials and then finally last week Depardieu's publicist acknowledged that "he's sorry, but it happened." Perhaps the most damning part of Depardieu's public pronouncements on his life as a rapist were in the 1978 interview. He said there were "too many {rapes} too count . . . . There was nothing wrong with it. The girls wanted to be raped. I mean, there's no such thing as rape. It's only a matter of a girl putting herself in a situation where she wants to be." " From what I can tell both the initial interview (1978) and the resurgence of it (1991) happened pre-internet so I can't find any clips or the original article, but WP has some incredibly chilling quotes on an archived article Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Depardieu, 42, was asked about remarks he had made in an interview published in 1978 in the magazine Film Comment in which he described his rough childhood and said, "I had plenty of rapes, too... http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,156769,00.html Found it! Reply Parent Thread Expand Link That photo alone is triggering not even to mention the allegations Reply Thread Link Ugly, inside and out. Reply Thread Link He's disgusting. The allegations don't surprise me Reply Thread Link is anyone surprised, he's been trash forever Reply Thread Link Lock him up and throw away the key Reply Thread Link He's despicable. Hope he faces some real consequences. Reply Thread Link ugh are there any unproblematic french celebs Reply Thread Link Adele Haenel Reply Parent Thread Link Omar is pretty safe Reply Parent Thread Link Omar Sy, Adele Haenel, Juliette Binoche ...I hope Reply Parent Thread Link [ spoiler ] It feels like we chop heads [off] and I hate that feeling. I think he regrets deeply what happened. Hes been judged. The girl whos been through that rape has wanted also to move on. Binoche said some questionable stuff about Polanski to Vanity Fair last year. TW Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I know, I'm like, Omar! Don't fuck this up for me, I love Lupin too much! Reply Parent Thread Link Tahar Rahim (I hope) Reply Parent Thread Link Alizee Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Babar Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. At MWC Shanghai, ZTE revealed an under-display 3D structured light system that will support Face ID-style facial recognition. The company, which was the first manufacturer to include an under-display selfie camera in a mass-produced smartphone, may have found a balance between allowing enough data to pass through the display to make the system work and ensuring the screen still looks good when the camera isn't being used. ZTE is compensating for for light transmission loss through the screen by cranking up the pixel density of the projector (which creates a 3D map of your face) by over ten times. To help make that region of the screen look more consistent with the rest of the display, it improved the pixel density of the area above the camera from 200ppi to 400ppi. It also boosted the panel refresh rate to 120Hz. ZTE worked with Shenzhen-based Guangjian Technology on the tech, as Engadget Chinese reports. The company claims that the system is secure enough for mobile payment authentication. It will also support 3D modeling, augmented reality selfies and other features. The company didn't say when it will start using the tech or in which devices, but rumors suggest it will plug the system into the upcoming Axon 30 Pro. Hopefully, if the tech works as promised and it becomes widely adopted, it will spell the end of the dreaded, ugly notch. Meeting: First Minister Arlene Foster and Deputy First Minister Michelle ONeill, who met with Secretary of State Brandon Lewis yesterday Troubles victims have welcomed Arlene Foster's pledge that they will receive a pension despite a meeting between Stormont ministers and the Secretary of State failing to resolve a funding row. Ministers held discussions with Brandon Lewis yesterday to end the stalemate over who foots a potential 1.2bn bill for the scheme. Sources said the meeting ended without agreement being reached. A fortnight ago, the Court of Appeal gave Stormont a four-week deadline to make progress with the scheme which is due to open next month. Mrs Foster said. "Many of those eligible to receive this pension could be living outside of Northern Ireland and therefore there remains a very strong argument that the Government should step up in terms of financing this scheme. "There are also significant upfront costs which would place a huge burden on local budgets. "It is important to say clearly to victims however that the uncertainty for them is over. We will ensure that they receive the payment which they are rightly entitled to." The DUP leader added: "Victims have been left on the sidelines for far too long. "The blockage and delay by Sinn Fein in establishing the pension caused unacceptable hurt and anguish for victims. The courts however forced movement and further clarity was then provided by the Court of Appeal." Alan McBride, whose wife Sharon and father-in-law Desmond Frizzell were killed in the Shankill bomb, welcomed Mrs Foster's statement. "I am disappointed that the funding dispute between the Executive and the Treasury hasn't been resolved, but it's good to hear Arlene Foster commit to ensuring victims receive their pension. "I am sympathetic to the argument that the British Government should be contributing to the pension. "However, if London doesn't step forward with money, then it's Stormont's responsibility to pay for it - that's the law. "Ultimately, victims don't care where the payment comes from. They just want certainty, and particularly now when people are struggling with Covid and life." Mrs Foster, Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill, Finance Minister Conor Murphy, and Justice Minster Naomi Long took part in the meeting with the Secretary of State. Mr Murphy is understood to have outlined the significant impact on Stormont if it had to solely shoulder the cost of the scheme for those who suffered physical or psychological injury during the Troubles. It is understood that further talks between ministers and Mr Lewis will take place over the next fortnight. The Court of Appeal in Belfast two weeks ago ruled that Stormont was under a legal duty to fund the payment scheme for injured victims of the conflict. It made no finding on the source of that funding, and gave the Executive and the Northern Ireland Office four weeks to find an agreed solution. The Executive has recently received costing predictions from the Government's Actuary Department based on numbers provided by The Executive Office. Those range from 600m to 1.2bn, with a central estimate of 848m. Stormont ministers have highlighted that London's own policy was to fund initiatives it legislated for. They argue that the scheme legislated for by the Government is significantly wider in scope than that envisaged in an agreement by Stormont parties in 2014. But the Government has insisted that the Executive needs to pay for the scheme, arguing that it was only legislated for at Westminster because the power-sharing institutions in Belfast were collapsed at the time. The scheme should have been open for applications at the end of May last year. It was first delayed when Sinn Fein refused to designate a Stormont department to administer it, after objecting to Government eligibility criteria that excluded former paramilitaries convicted of causing serious harm. Ms O'Neill eventually agreed to nominate a department last August following a highly critical court judgment that found she had been acting unlawfully. However, the separate stand-off involving the Government and the wider Stormont Executive over funding remains unresolved. On Monday, Ms O'Neill said it remained her "firm view" that the UK Government should pay for the pension. "It's really important to have a real conversation about the funding - it was designed in Westminster and has significantly increased the costs," she said. She stressed that the Executive was wholly committed to finding the scheme, and reassured victims that efforts were being made to resolve the dispute. The scheme covers violence related to the Northern Ireland conflict from 1966 until 2010, including incidents in Britain and in Europe. Victims will receive between 2,000 and 10,000 a year for the rest of their lives. After their death, the payments will be made to a spouse or carer for a further 10 years. A federal judge indefinitely banned President Joe Biden's administration from enforcing a 100-day moratorium on most deportations. U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton issued a preliminary injunction sought by Texas late Tuesday, which argued the moratorium violated federal law and risked imposing additional costs on the state. Biden proposed the 100-day pause on deportations during his campaign as part of a larger review of immigration enforcement and an attempt to reverse the priorities of former President Donald Trump. Biden has proposed a sweeping immigration bill that would allow the legalization of an estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally. He has also instituted other guidelines on whom immigration and border agents should target for enforcement. Deportation pause lifted: Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had been told to pause all removals for 100 days under regular laws, although other removals had continued to go ahead. But a judge ruled Biden had not justified the deportation freeze and ended it Legal fight: Federal judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee, ruled against Joe Biden in the first major legal case of his presidency. It is not yet know if his administration will appeal Tipton, a Trump appointee, initially ruled on Jan. 26 that the moratorium violated federal law on administrative procedure and that the U.S. failed to show why a deportation pause was justified. A temporary restraining order the judge issued was set to expire Tuesday. Tipton's ruling did not require deportations to resume at their previous pace. Even without a moratorium, immigration agencies have wide latitude in enforcing removals and processing cases. But in the days that followed his ruling, authorities deported 15 people to Jamaica and hundreds of others to Central America. The Biden administration has also continued expelling immigrants under a separate process begun by Trump officials, who invoked public-health law due to the coronavirus pandemic. The legal fight over the deportation ban is an early sign of Republican opposition to Biden's immigration priorities, just as Democrats and pro-immigrant legal groups fought Trump's proposals. Almost four years before Tipton's order, Trump signed a ban on travel from seven countries with predominantly Muslim populations that caused chaos at airports. Legal groups successfully sued to stop implementation of the ban. It was not immediately clear if the Biden administration will appeal Tipton's latest ruling. The Justice Department did not seek a stay of Tipton's earlier temporary restraining order. The federal civil rights investigation into Derek Chauvin (pictured) has convened a new grand jury, according to new reports The Department of Justice has convened a new grand jury and called on witnesses to testify in its civil rights investigation of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, according to new reports. The federal case received a new push since the start of the year, ahead of Chauvin's March 8 trial on a state murder charge in the death of George Floyd, the Minnesota Star Tribune reports. The DoJ investigation into Chauvin involves a 2017 incident that has been deemed inadmissible by the judge in his upcoming state trial. The incident involves the arrest of a 14-year-old boy, where video also showed Chauvin jamming his knee into his back, while ignoring the teen's pleas that he could not breathe. Chauvin, 44, and another officer had been responding to a call from a woman who said her son and daughter assaulted her. Officers found her son lying on the ground and when he refused to comply with an order to get up, Chauvin struck him with a flashlight and grabbed him by the throat. The boy lost consciousness as Chauvin had him in a neck restraint. State prosecutors believed the episode was strikingly similar to Floyd's death. They argued that it showed 'when faced with a suspect who does not immediately comply with his demands, Chauvin intentionally uses a level of unreasonable force to accomplish subdual and restraint'. Yet Chauvin's legal team argued that it was in keeping with the department's then-policy on dealing with uncooperative suspects and it was ruled inadmissible as evidence. The federal investigation has resumed just ahead of Chauvin's state trial on March 8. The former Minneapolis cop faces murder charges over the death of George Floyd, pictured Chauvin and four other officers will stand trial over the death of George Floyd, pictured Chauvin, who is white, was seen on widely viewed videos kneeling for nearly nine minutes on the neck of Floyd, 46, who was black and could be heard begging for his life last Memorial Day. The investigation announced last May by the Justice Department into whether Chauvin violated Floyd's civil rights had languished, the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing two unnamed people with knowledge of the investigation. It has been revived since the inauguration of President Joe Biden in January, with a new grand jury empaneled in Minnestota and new witnesses subpoenaed to give testimony, the newspaper reported. Grand jury proceedings are secret, and the Justice Department and Benjamin Crump, a lawyer for Floyd's family, have not commented on the new reports. Biden is not personally involved in the federal investigation in keeping with his pledge to let the Justice Department operate independently, a White House official said. The Justice Department had promised a robust investigation when it was first announced last May. Minnesota U.S. Attorney Erica MacDonald had said that it would investigate whether Chauvin and the three other police officers implicated in Floyd's death deprived the black man of his constitutional rights by using their authority as law enforcement officers. According to the Star Tribune, in order for it to meet a federal civil rights violation, it must be proven that the officers acted or failed to act with knowledge of wrongdoing. Ex-officers Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Kiernan Lane are also awaiting trial for the murder of George Floyd. Their trial will not take place until late August Cell phone video footage shows George Floyd on the ground shows him on the floor as Derek Chauvin kneels on his neck. Lane allegedly held Floyd's legs while Kueng was positioned on his back and Thao held off angry bystanders who witnessed Floyd's death, prosecutors said The federal investigation is running parallel to the state case meaning that it can continue regardless of any verdicts in the criminal trials. It is unlikely it is hoping for a quick indictment ahead of the state trial, the Times reports, but in the case of an acquittal or a mistrial, attention would shift to the federal investigation. Chauvin's state trial is scheduled to begin in Minneapolis next month, and the city is bracing for a return of street protests as a verdict, expected in April, draws near. The 44-year-old former cop, who is out on bail, has pleaded not guilty to murder in the second degree and second-degree manslaughter brought by state prosecutors. The federal civil rights investigation into Chauvin (pictured last year) is running parallel to the state criminal case On Tuesday, the Minnesota Court of Appeals agreed to consider a request from prosecutors to reinstate a third-degree murder charge against the former police officer. Jury selection begins March 8 for Chauvin. The appeals court set oral arguments for March 1 on adding the charge. Three other officers - Thomas Lane, J. Kueng and Tou Thao - are charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter and are scheduled to face trial in August. During the encounter with Floyd, Lane allegedly held Floyd's legs while Kueng was positioned on his back and Thao held off angry bystanders who witnessed Floyd's death, prosecutors said. They were also fired from the police department. Last week, lawyers for Lane, Kueng and Thao filed motions to dismiss their cases, claiming that leaked plea-deal negotiations with Derek Chauvin will 'taint' the jury pool. It came after The New York Times revealed earlier this month that Chauvin had agreed to plead guilty to third-degree murder just days after Floyd's death. Under the terms of the deal, Chauvin would have faced more than 10 years in prison to avoid conviction on federal civil rights charges, the Times reported. But the deal fell apart when former U.S. Attorney General William Barr rejected it, saying it deal was too lenient, three anonymous law enforcement sources told the Times. Now, the three former cops' lawyers argue that Minnesota's attorney general either 'directly or indirectly' leaked the details of the plea agreement to the outlet - thereby making a fair trial for their clients impossible when it comes to picking a jury for the August 23 trial. Floyd's death helped spark the biggest protest movement in decades in the United States as people took to the streets across the country and around the world to decry police brutality and racism. Minneapolis leaders announced last week they are bolstering security measures in the city, including bringing thousands of National Guardsmen and additional police officers for Chauvin's trial next month. Barricades are seen around City Hall in preparation for Chauvin's March 8 trial In anticipation of the trial, the city has already started installing a security perimeter around the Hennepin County Government Center and City Hall (pictured last week) The city has already started installing a security perimeter around the Hennepin County Government Center, City Hall, and nearby buildings. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said law enforcement presence in the city will increase in coming weeks and will peak during the trial, with the help of up to 2,000 National Guard members and 1,100 law enforcement officers from 12 agencies. 'No one is going to give away the ghost on exactly how many, and who is going to be where and when, because that's just not good strategic planning,' National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Scott Hawks said of the preparations. 'But what I can say is that it will flex, and those numbers are certainly a number that has been discussed,' Attempts were made to create a $35million fund to bolster security during Chauvin's trial and that of the other three officers but it was rejected by the Democratic-controlled Minnesota House this month. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Beyond barbecues and ceremonies: Recognizing Memorial Day For many, Memorial Day weekend is about gathering with family and grilling or attending a parade. Some find a more personal way to honor the holiday. SELBYVILLE, Del., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Global Market Insights, Inc. has recently added a new report on the fire protection systems market, which estimates the market valuation for fire protection systems will cross US $70 billion by 2027. The growing demand for wireless fire protection systems, owing to connected fire alarm systems that send alerts in real-time to smartphones and smartwatches, thereby reducing the damage to property, is driving the market growth. The rise in the development of smart buildings and homes is also propelling market growth as governments are implementing guidelines and regulations for installing fire protection systems. Fire Protection Systems Market size is set to be over USD 70 billion by 2027, according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. The fast spread of the coronavirus across the globe has affected the market negatively with a reduction in sales. Governments across the globe have restricted trade and implemented lockdowns to reduce the effect of the virus, resulting in the gradual decline in market revenues. Several market players had to briefly suspend the production of fire protection systems and components during the initial quarters of 2020. Request for a sample of this research report at https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/4951 The rise in population, increasing demand for home & building, and rising government support to enhance awareness by implementing regulations and guidelines are expected to boost the fire protection systems market. The residential segment is expected to witness growth over the forecast timeline. The rise in residential fire accidents, property damage, and loss of life is increasing the demand for fire protection systems. The fire protection systems in the Asia Pacific are expected to grow with a high CAGR during 2021 to 2027, owing to growing industrialization and urbanization in the region. Countries, such as Japan, China, and India, are implementing several building codes and guidelines for the fire safety of the structures, which is positively impacting the market. The fire protection systems market players are emphasizing on strategic acquisitions, product launches, and partnerships to fortify their position. For instance, in June 2018, Johnson Controls launched a fire protection system in the Middle East, Autocall. This system was introduced for its application in small as well as large projects in industries including chemical and oil & gas. Some major findings in the fire protection systems market report include: Growing government regulations and standards to improve the safety of individuals and industrial, residential and commercial property during fire outbreak are increasing the installation of the fire protection systems across the sectors. Integration of AI and IoT into wireless fire detection systems to enhance the overall capability of the systems remotely is driving the market. IoT allows the connected fire alarm systems to send signals and alerts in real-time to smart devices, such as mobile phones and smartwatches, preventing fire injury and accidents, thereby increasing market growth. Increasing number of fire accidents due to lack of fire protection systems at heritage sites is propelling the demand for these fire protection systems. For instance, in 2019, National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA) reported around six fire accidents at heritage buildings and sites. To overcome similar issues, the Chinese government has started deploying fire protection systems as prevention measures which is positively impacting the industry growth. Some of the major players operating in the fire protection systems industry are Johnson Controls International PLC, Fire Suppression Limited, Napco Security Technologies, Schrack Seconet AG, Honeywell International Inc., Siemens AG, Robert Bosch GmbH, Halma PLC, Hochiki Corporation, Schneider Electric, and Viking Group Inc. Request for customization of this research report at https://www.gminsights.com/roc/4951 Partial chapters of report table of contents (TOC): Chapter 2. Executive Summary 2.1. Fire protection systems industry 360 synopsis, 2016 - 2027 2.2. Business trends 2.3. Regional trends 2.4. Component trends 2.5. Type trends 2.6. End use trends Chapter 3. Industry Insights 3.1. Industry segmentation 3.2. Impact of COVID-19 on fire protection systems industry landscape 3.2.1. Global outlook 3.2.2. Regional impact 3.2.2.1. North America 3.2.2.2. Europe 3.2.2.3. Asia Pacific 3.2.2.4. Latin America 3.2.2.5. MEA 3.2.3. Industry value chain 3.2.3.1. Research & development 3.2.3.2. Manufacturing 3.2.3.3. Marketing 3.2.3.4. Supply 3.2.4. Competitive landscape 3.2.4.1. Strategy 3.2.4.2. Distribution network 3.2.4.3. Business growth 3.3. Industry ecosystem analysis 3.3.1. Component suppliers 3.3.2. Technology providers 3.3.3. Manufacturers 3.3.4. End use landscape 3.3.5. Distribution channel analysis 3.3.6. Vendor matrix 3.4. Technology & innovation landscape 3.5. Regulatory landscape 3.5.1. North America 3.5.2. Europe 3.5.3. Asia Pacific 3.5.4. Latin America 3.5.5. MEA 3.6. Industry impact forces 3.6.1. Growth drivers 3.6.1.1. Increasing adoption of wireless technology in fire detection across the globe 3.6.1.2. Growing awareness pertaining to fire safety in North America 3.6.1.3. Development of new infrastructure in Asia Pacific and MEA region 3.6.1.4. Introduction of advance fire protection systems across Europe 3.6.1.5. Rising commercial and industrial activities in the Latin America 3.6.2. Industry pitfalls & challenges 3.6.2.1. High cost of the fire protection system 3.6.2.2. Lack of awareness 3.7. Growth potential analysis 3.8. Porter's analysis 3.8.1. Supplier power 3.8.2. Buyer power 3.8.3. Threat of new entrants 3.8.4. Threat of substitutes 3.8.5. Internal rivalry 3.9. PESTEL analysis About Global Market Insights Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology. Contact Us: Arun Hegde Corporate Sales, USA Global Market Insights, Inc. Phone: 1-302-846-7766 Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688 Email: [email protected] Related Images fire-protection-systems-market.jpg Fire Protection Systems Market worth $70 Bn by 2027 Fire Protection Systems Market size is set to be over USD 70 billion by 2027, according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. Related Links Fire Suppression Market Trends Passive Fire Protection Materials Market SOURCE Global Market Insights, Inc. Gardai in Granard have arrested three males in Edgeworthstown and Granard this morning in connection with an ongoing feud. Two of the males were arrested in connection with a violent disorder incident, which took place on Barrack Street, Granard, on November 15, 2020. Videos of the violent incident were circulated widely online. Also read: Gardai seize large quantity of cash and jewellery during Longford search Four females are already before the courts, charged in connection to the same incident. One of the males is currently being detained at Granard Garda Station. The second male is being held at Cavan Garda Station. A third male - a juvenile - has also been arrested in relation to a feud-related criminal damage incident, which occurred on January 1, 2021. He is being detained at Granard Garda Station. All three men are being detained under section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act 1984. Govt - Persons Should Regularise Tax Residence to Prevent Impounding of Vehicles The Government has received representations from several owners of Gibraltar cars and motorcycles who had these vehicles impounded in Spain. Government have said a number of cases have been examined very carefully and brought to the attention of the Spanish authorities. The outcome of that process, which has now concluded, is that the Government is in a position to offer advice set out below. 'The situation that has developed is not related to Gibraltars departure from the European Union. It is a customs procedure under European Union rules regarding the importation of the vehicle and the residency status of the owner. In short, anyone who is officially resident in Spain cannot own a Gibraltar-registered vehicle, and anyone who is resident in Gibraltar cannot own a Spanish registered vehicle. There is a short period of transition after the purchase where the registration of the vehicle or the residency status of the owner needs to be regularised. Needless to say, it is not possible to be officially resident in Spain AND in Gibraltar at the same time. This has never been the case. The objective is a fiscal one in relation to the payment of import duty and VAT on the vehicle by a person who is believed to be mainly resident in Spain. It is important to bear in mind that Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras (ANPR) are installed on both the Gibraltar and Spanish side of the border and that this provides data as to how often a vehicle may cross from one side to the other. Therefore the current issue stems from the residence status in Spain of the affected parties and not from their residence status in Gibraltar. This is why those affected are persons with homes both in Gibraltar and in Spain. This means that it is not deemed to be relevant if the affected person can produce a Gibraltar ID card, utility bills or other proof of residence in Gibraltar if at the same time they are deemed to be Spanish residents by the Spanish system. In any case the Gibraltar identity card is not regarded as definitive proof or conclusive evidence for tax purposes and this is a tax issue. Those affected need to ensure that they have BOTH proper documented residence in Gibraltar and the proper abandonment of residence in the relevant EU Member State, in this case Spain, and for such residence to be established in Gibraltar ONLY. Indeed, these are the rules in all situations and not only as between Gibraltar and Spain. This means that anyone who has not legally moved their residence, will continue to be shown as a Spanish resident even if they no longer live there. Residence in one country does not automatically disprove residence in another. For example, in most cases tax residence is established after residing there for 180 days when there are 365 days in a normal year. It is clear that in such circumstances, affected parties need to familiarise themselves with the legal requirements in Spain. The best way in which this can be done is to engage the services of a lawyer or a tax adviser who will be able to ensure that they comply with all the Spanish rules as well as the Gibraltar rules on residence. It is not enough to comply with the rules of one but not with the rules of the other. This is the same between all countries and not only between Gibraltar and Spain. The new Tax Treaty, which has not yet come into force, will assist with these situations by setting a defined, agreed criteria for the settlement of such tax residency disputes. It is important to recall, in this context, that the Gibraltar ID card is at this time no longer recognised by the European Union as a valid travel document. This is one of the issues we are seeking to restore in the ongoing negotiations with the EU.' SHENZHEN, China, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, today announced at MWC Shanghai, the release of i5GC (industry 5GC) network solution oriented to private 5G networks for industry. The solution introduces 5G capabilities such as large bandwidth, low latency, high reliability and multiple connections into various industries, and integrates technologies such as AI, IoT, cloud computing, big data and MEC to enable the digitalisation of whole industries and build fully-connected intelligent private 5G networks for vertical industries. At present, public 5GC is oriented to consumer applications, so it cannot meet industry users' ultra-high requirements for security, latency, reliability, network control rights, energy consumption and usage environment. ZTE i5GC addresses this by deeply integrating and optimising 5GC functions. It uses 2U general servers to achieve the integration of multiple network functions (NF) and a plug-and-play one-stop deployment mode to achieve minimal space, minimal energy consumption and minimal operation and maintenance (O&M). This solution provides non-professional industry users with rapid and accurate 5G network access deployment and excellent service experience. In addition, ZTE i5GC can be flexibly customised according to a user's diversified requirements for security, traffic processing and autonomy, and provide different function combinations and deployment forms for different scenarios. For instance, the user plane function (UPF) is deployed to the edge, traffic is forwarded nearby, and user data is locally managed. In addition, ZTE i5GC employs a 3GPP service-based architecture (SBA) to seamlessly interconnect with a 5G public network. It can integrate third-party multi-access edge-computing (MEC) applications through open interfaces to achieve flexible expansion and rapid iteration of edge applications, so as to explore and breed 5G killer applications in the vertical field. Towards the construction of business-grade 5G networks, ZTE has implemented in-depth 5G applications for use in vertical fields such as mines, medical treatments and ports. For example, for a 5G smart mine project, ZTE uses i5GC to deploy a complete set of 5G networks underground, meeting the mine's compact space and explosion-proofing requirements, and achieving full coverage from key 5G networks. ZTE i5GC will continue to focus on industry projects, promote the understanding of industry requirements, work with enterprises and operators to build a 5G application ecosystem, help expand the 'blue ocean market' opportunity for 5G for business, and drive 5G large-scale commercial use and value monetisation. Media Contacts: Margaret Ma ZTE Corporation Tel: +86 755 26775189 Email: ma.gaili@zte.com.cn Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Education Minister Norma Foley said advice on whether the rapid Covid-19 tests should be used in schools was expected in mid-March. The HSE has not recommended them for schools although unions have been seeking a speedier ways to identify cases of infection. Known as antigen tests, they are less accurate than the PCR test but have the benefit of not having to go to the lab. Senior medics, including Prof Jack Lambert of the Mater Hospital, have also called for the use of rapid testing in settings where large numbers of people congregate. Read More They have criticised a lack of urgency by the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) towards its deployment. As schools prepare for wider re-opening Department of Education said that the HSE will continue to use PCR tests for testing all index cases and close contacts within the school community The wider use of antigen test in schools and other community settings is being explored by a group headed by Dr Mark Ferguson, Director General of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) who is now also a member of Nphet. Ms Foley told RTEs News at One today that Professor Fergusons determination was expected in mid-March and if antigen tests were recommended for school communities, that would be the case. As schools re-open Ms Foley said public health experts would continue to treat any incidence of Covid in those settings on a case by case basis. The adjudication will happen on the ground, no two schools will be the same, she said, The return of pupils to school is happening on a phased basis and each stage, after next Monday, March 1, will depend on the public health landscape. If the initial stage of the return triggers a significant increase in Covid infection, the plan may stall. Ms Foley said there was a burden on all of society to do what needs to be done to ensure we will be in position to have a full re-opening of schools. The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency on Tuesday issued guidelines for coronavirus vaccinations that bar anyone with a temperature of over 37.5 degrees Celsius or other symptoms from getting the jab. The aim is to prevent people transmitting the virus while being inoculated or mistaking coronavirus symptoms for a side effect of the vaccine. Vaccinations of at-risk patients and frontline health workers start this Friday. Patients with the common cold or other mild symptom can still get a jab. Those who refuse to get the vaccine and fail to book an appointment during their designated period will have to wait for a second chance until after November. Those who have recovered from the virus already must also get the vaccine unless they suffer long-term after-effects. Photo (left to right): Vickie Glinton, Anthony Porter, David Rosen, Alex Frizzelle, Mark Adler, Pedro Jimenez Kira Labs Inc, manufacturer of beauty innovations with a global reach selling in over 100 countries, donated to local non-profit, Meals on Wheels. We were thrilled when KiraLabs reached out to Meals on Wheels South Florida offering hand sanitizer for our 500 volunteers and our more than 10,000 homebound clients. This hand sanitizer is the best I have seen over the past year, and I have seen a LOT of hand sanitizer. Our clients and volunteers will be so happy knowing we and Kira Labs are thinking about keeping them safe and healthy, said Mark Adler, Executive Director https://www.mowsoflo.org/donate The company wants to continue giving back by donating locally and nationally to organizations in need. The giveaway of 10,000 units of Medyskin hand sanitizers is part of Kira Labs generous donation of 1 million tubes. All Medyskin hand sanitizers were produced at the Kira Labs FDA registered manufacturing facility in Pompano Beach and made with high-grade purified alcohol. The sanitizers use at least 70% alcohol which exceeds the 60 percent minimum recommended amount per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. Interested organizations may fill out a donation form at http://www.kiralabs.com/donations to request a minimum of 2,500 and up to a maximum of 20,000 sanitizer tubes. About Kira Labs Inc Kira Labs was founded in 2003 and has grown into a leading marketer and manufacturer of beauty innovations featured in 10,000+ stores. Appealing design, value and high quality, functional formulas characterize all of the Kira Labs brands, which feature products in multiple categories including Face, Hair, Body, Men's, Natural, Home and Pet. For more information, please visit http://www.kiralabs.com. About Meals on Wheels South Florida Meals on Wheels South Florida is a private nonprofit organization providing hunger-relief services since 1984. With the dedication of nearly 500 volunteers, Meals on Wheels South Florida delivers nutritious meals, friendly visits and safety checks that enable South Florida seniors to live nourished lives with independence and dignity. Meals on Wheels South Florida serves more than 10,000 seniors and 5,000 children an estimated 1.5 million meals each year. Included in their comprehensive list of programs and services are home meal delivery, community-based dining, meals for companion pets, grocery shopping assistance, nutrition education and emergency meals. For more information, please call 954.731.8770 or visit mowsoflo.org VIGO COUNTY, Ind. (WTHI) --The paycheck protection program first started for small businesses back in March, when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit. The goal was to give loans to small businesses to help pay employees and, overall, to help them stay afloat during the pandemic. Courtney Chipol is the Regional Director for the West Central Indiana small business devolpment center. She said after 2 rounds of PPP it wasn't what they expected. "There has been feedback from a lot of our small business owners that it's been really hard for them to access this funding, "she said. Chipol said the problem is when PPP loan applications open up banks get overwhelmed. "The bigger businesses, so those that do have quite a bit employees, they probably have accountants. They probably have their books ready to go. So, they get their stuff in quicker and some of our smaller businesses, it takes a little bit longer for them to access all that information," she said. That's why the Biden administration made some changes to the next round of PPP. Businesses with fewer than 20 employees will get an exclusive 2 week window to apply for funding. In march, new rules enable some businesses, previously excluded from the program, to take part. That includes the self-employed, sole proprietorships, and independent contractors. Chipol said if you have questions about the program the Indiana small business development center can help. Applications for the next round of PPP open Wednesday morning. You can find more information on the PPP application, resources or who can qualify, here. You can find more infromation on the Indiana small business development center, here. The UAE Cabinet, on Tuesday, established an Executive Office of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) to strengthen the kingdoms anti-financial crime system, Director of Strategic Communications, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Abu Dhabi, Hend Al-Otaiba informed in an online post. The office, headed by Ambassador H.E. Hamad Obaid Al Zaabi, was approved by Prime Minister of UAE, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al. The AML/CFT was formulated under the UAEs National Action Plan (NAP), a programme that oversees reforms against money laundering. In order to mitigate the impact on the efficient financial flow due to the criminal economic activities, and promote stability in the market, the UAE government drafted the office which will be chaired by the Kingdoms Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, whom the director-general of the executive office of the UAE will directly report. UAE establishes Executive Office to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. The new entity will be headed by HE Hamid Al Zaabi and will work to achieve the UAEs vision in combating money laundering through collaboration between local and international organizations. pic.twitter.com/WWqgTjGyDi Hend Al Otaiba (@hend_mana) February 24, 2021 In a statement to Emirates News Agency, cited by ANI, Al-Zaabi said: "The executive office is a reflection of the high-level political commitment to establishing and operating a sophisticated financial crime compliance system across all UAE entities. Further, he stated, In light of the vision of the UAEs leadership, and the guidance of the chair of the higher committee overseeing the UAEs National AML/CFT Strategy, the UAE takes its role in protecting the integrity of the global financial system extremely seriously. Read: Joe Biden To 'recalibrate' Relations With Saudi Arabia Downgrading Crown Prince Read: Saudi Arabia, OPEC Offer Energy Help To US Battling Against Blackouts Amid Freezing Winter To 'strengthen defences' against financial liabilities According to Al-Zaabi, the scale and complexity of financial crime have increased in recent times across the UAE, and therefore, the Kingdom was committed to taking action. The role of the executive office would be to strengthen defences against financial liabilities such as money laundering and terrorist funding. The AML/CFT, which will operate as the primary national coordinating body, will also focus on effective enforcement of UAEs anti-money laundering laws. UAEs Anti-money laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism office will work in coordination with the National Committee for Combating Money Laundering and the Financing of Terrorism and Illegal Organisations and the foreign ministry, the ambassador further stated. The executive offices responsibilities include: improving national and international coordination and cooperation on AML/CFT issues at the policy and operational levels; tackling money laundering and terrorist financing threats by working with regional and international groups, such as the Gulf Cooperation Council Working Group on AMLCFT, G20, and the Financial Action Task Force. The office will also enhance cooperation and information exchange between the different private sectors, law enforcement, in accordance to the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. Read: Suit Blames Saudi Arabia For Attack At Florida Military Base Read: Long-serving Saudi Oil Minister Yamani Dies At 90 Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 3 mesi fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. The report EV Charging Cables Market Share, Size, Trends, Industry Analysis Report, By Charging Level (Level 1, Level 2, Level 3); By Cable Length (Up to 5 Meters, 6 Meters to 10 Meters, Above 10 Meters); By Application (Public, Private); By Power Supply (Alternate, Direct); By Shape (Coiled, Straight) By Regions; Segment Forecast, 2020 2026 gives a detailed insight into current market dynamics and provides analysis on future market growth. The global EV Charging Cables market size is expected to reach USD 1,992.5 million by 2026 according to a new study by Polaris Market Research. Governments all across the world are taking initiatives to promote the adoption of electric vehicles. Countries such as China, India, France, and the U.S. have invested significantly in the development of charging infrastructure to support market growth. Governments have also introduced stringent regulations regarding vehicular emissions to encourage the use of electric vehicles, which further drives the growth of the market. Market players are introducing technologically advanced EV charging cables in the market to appeal to a range of consumers. Innovations in the market have resulted in the launch of charging cables with reduced charge time and low overall costs. Technological advancement in terms of miniaturization and improvement of components has encouraged established organizations, and small and medium enterprises to invest in EV charging cables. Vendors in the global market are expanding their geographical presence and product portfolios to strengthen their presence. The developing nations of Asia-Pacific would provide significant growth opportunities in the market. Some of the major market participants include Phoenix Contact, Dyden Corporation, TE Connectivity, Coroplast, Leoni AG, BESEN International Group, Sinbon Electronics, Systems Wire and Cable, General Cable Technologies Corporation, Chengdu Khons Technology Co., Ltd., Manlon Polymers, Eland Cables, EV Teison, Aptiv Plc., and Brugg Group. Download Sample Copy : https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/ev-charging-cables/request-for-sample The different charging levels used in the global market include level 1, level 2, and level 3. Level 1 is a single-phase cable that provides battery recharge through an alternating-current plug and a dedicated circuit. It does not require the installation of charging equipment. It usually requires 8 to 12 hours to completely charge a battery, and is usually used for home purposes. On the basis of application, the market is segmented into public and private. The governments across the world are investing significantly in deployment of public charging infrastructure by subsidizing the construction of charging stations. France has declared its goal to deploy 7 million outlets by 2030 for the cars to recharge. In 2016, Korea upgraded its former target of deploying publicly accessible fast chargers from 1,400 to 3,000 by 2020 to increase the adoption of electric vehicles. Norway provides public funding for construction of fast-charging stations every 50 km on main roads. In the United Kingdom, $650 is offered for the installation of a dedicated home charger for an electric car. The market is segmented into Alternate, and Direct Charging based on power supply. AC transforms the incoming AC and into DC, and then forwarded to the battery pack. AC stations are widespread and offer vehicle recharge at affordable rates. However, the demand for DC is increasing owing to faster charging duration. BMW has launched its BMW Digital Charging Service (DCS), which is an intelligent cost-effective service optimizing charging technology for BMW i and BMW iPerformance vehicles. After activation of DCS, the recharge process is carried out independently and autonomously. DCS is based on principles on Tariff and solar optimised vehicle recharge. On the basis of shape, the market is segmented into straight and coiled. In 2019, the straight EV charging cables dominated the global market. Get Exclusive Discount on This Report : https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/ev-charging-cables/request-for-discount-pricing Asia Pacific emerged as the largest market in 2019 and is expected to maintain its dominance over the forecast period. Growing concerns regarding air pollution and increasing need of fuel efficient vehicles have increased the number of electric cars in countries, such as China, U.S., India, and Japan, driving the growth of market. The National Electric Mobility Mission Plan (NEMMP) 2020 in India projects sales of 67 million units of electric vehicles, and a subsequent fossil fuel saving of 2.2 2.5 million tons. This would result in considerable reduction in vehicular emissions, and decrease in carbon dioxide emissions by up to 1.5% by 2020. The increasing penetration of electric vehicles is expected to fuel development of enhanced charging infrastructure, further increasing the demand for EV charging cables. Man Allegedly Threatens to Kill Lyon Deputies By West Kentucky Star Staff EDDYVILLE - An Indiana man was arrested over the weekend after he allegedly threatened to kill Lyon County sheriff's deputies.Deputies were called to an Eddyville motel early Sunday morning and met with a woman who appeared to have been assaulted.They said 48-year-old Raphael Hastie of Evansville was intoxicated when he physically assaulted the woman at the motel. Deputies said while the victim was attempting to call 911 for help, Hastie allegedly broke her cell phone.During the investigation, Hastie reportedly threatened deputies multiple times. Hastie allegedly told deputies that he had a history of killing, and desired to kill them also.Hastie was arrested and charged with 4th degree assault, terroristic threatening, interfering with communications and menacing.According to deputies, this is the second time this year that Hastie has been arrested for the same offense at an area motel. Hastie entered a guilty plea to 4th degree assault on Jan. 20, following an incident in Kuttawa. (Newser) On her 13th birthday, Mara Wilson "made one of the biggest mistakes of my life." She opened up to a reporter, who would go on to describe a "complaining" child star who sounded "like a spoiled brat," Wilson writes in an op-ed at the New York Times. That 2000 article showcased what Wilson calls "The Narrative""the idea that anyone who grew up in the public eye will meet some tragic end." Even at 13, Wilsonthe star of Matilda, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Miracle on 34th Streetwas well aware of the need to avoid this type of narrative for herself, which is probably why, when the reporter also asked her opinion of Britney Spears, she said she hated her. "I think mostly, I had already absorbed the version of The Narrative surrounding her," writes Wilson, 33. "Her story is a striking example of a phenomenon I've witnessed for years: Our culture builds these girls up just to destroy them." Spears had been deemed a "Bad Girl," and Wilson wanted no part of that. story continues below She now sees similarities in her life and that of Spears, both of whom were sexualized by others. Wilson notes reporters were asking if she had a boyfriend when she was 6 and 50-year-old men were sending her love letters. "But my life was easier not only because I was never tabloid-level famous, but because unlike Ms. Spears, I always had my family's support." She notes "The Narrative often has far less to do with the child than with the people around them" and "my sexual harassment always came at the hands of the media and the public," neither of which respected Spears' need for space during her infamous breakdown. "The Narrative was forced upon her, but the reality was she was a new mother dealing with major life changes," Wilson writes. "Fortunately people are becoming aware of what we did to Ms. Spears and starting to apologize to her," she adds. "But we're still living with the scars." The full piece is here. (Wilson also wrote about this topic in 2013.) Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes New Delhi, Feb 24 : As we resume normalcy with caution, it is also the right time to rediscover fashion trends and add a touch of spring-summer to our wardrobes. The New Season Store on Amazon Fashion brings to you 8.5K+ styles across 70+ fashion brands at attractive prices beginning from Rs 249 from leading brands such as Adidas, Biba, Marks & Spencer, ONLY, Puma, UCB and Vero Moda, among others. The Spring Summer '21 collection on Amazon Fashion is all about the best of elevated casual wear, glammed-up athleisure, statement loungewear, contemporary ethnic wear and stand-out styles in accessories. The colour of Spring-Summer '21 is ultimate grey and illuminating yellow as these capture the spirit of the times, looking ahead with fortitude and joy. Athleisure and relaxed casualwear form a very important part of the Covid recovery trends, and this is captured in our new season selection of bold joggers, leggings, sweats, hoodies, sneakers, and in relaxed silhouettes for women like flowy dresses. Eye-catching OTT prints and summer stripes also make a comeback (gone are the muted winter tones), with many of our top brand partners calling out floral and tropical prints, light denim, bold logos, colour-blocks & tailored loungewear. The faded denim, white oversized tee, colourful nautical prints, military-inspired apparel, a mix of pastels and bold colour palettes are all going to show up in a big way this season. One of the biggest layers this season is the light bomber jacket, and as we head deeper into summer, we will move away from layers. Image Source: IANS News For women specially, some of the trends we are seeing are florals -- both dainty and bold, wide denims, oversized puffed sleeves, sheer maxis, and back-to-work power trousers. Ethnic wear for women, takes a more modern route this season with contemporary elements like colour-blocking, patchwork prints and romantic 'Bollywood-esque' pastel sarees. For menswear, grid checks in summery hues, bold Bermudas, boxy tees and tapered cargos are some of the key pieces that spell of 'summer in the city' vibes. Accessories will also play a big part this season to elevate casual and comfort wear. Bags, jewellery, sunglasses, watches and footwear will be also having elements of colour play, prints and summer patterns. (IANSlife Features can be contacted at ianslife@ians.in) -- Syndicated from IANS Mawson Commences EIA and Land Use Planning for the Rajapalot Gold-Cobalt Project in Finland Posted by Publisher Internet Mawson Gold Limited (?Mawson? or the ?Company?) (TSX:MAW) (Frankfurt:MXR) (PINKSHEETS: MWSNF https://www.commodity-tv.com/ondemand/companies/profil/mawson-gold-ltd/ ) is pleased to announce commencement of ?two key planning processes for the 100% owned Rajapalot Project in Finland. Highlights:? Two key planning processes, the Environmental Impact Assessment (?EIA?) and land use planning have been initiated for the Rajapalot gold-cobalt project in Finland; The purpose of the EIA procedure is to generate information on the environmental impacts of a project, facilitate the consideration of environmental issues in planning and decision-making processes, and give the public and other stakeholders opportunities to participate in and affect these processes. The initiation of EIA and land use planning: Is demonstrative of the long term, strong local stakeholder support for one of Finland?s strategic gold-cobalt projects; and Further de-risks the project, as resource-expansion drilling is ongoing with 4 rigs actively drilling 24/7 through the Finnish winter. Mr. Hudson, CEO, states: ?The commencement of the EIA and land use planning mechanisms is reflective of the local and regional support that the project receives, for which Mawson is very thankful. The decisions made by the local authorities are a clear indication that we have succeeded in crucial stakeholder engagement and that the project is welcomed in the area.? As the project transitions from exploration to advanced studies, Mawson will continue to work in the same transparent and open way to retain the social acceptance of the local people in order to de-risk this strategic gold-cobalt project for the future benefit of all stakeholders.? As previously reported on 21 December 2020, Mawson requested the Lapland Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment (?ELY?) to arrange a preliminary consultation in accordance with the EIA Procedures Act, which defines projects whose environmental impact must always be assessed. This triggered the commencement of the preparation stage of the EIA for the Rajapalot gold-cobalt project. In Finland, the potential impacts of a project are assessed at the report stage of the EIA process which follows the EIA preparation stage. Mawson considers stakeholder engagement and collaboration to be a critical part of the potential development of the Rajapalot project, and social aspects will be a key part of the EIA preparation process. The EIA is a project planning tool, and its results must be taken into account when granting permits for projects. In combination with the EIA, the two municipal areas where the Rajapalot gold-cobalt project is located, the City of Rovaniemi and Municipality of Ylitornio, at the request of Mawson, have formally decided to start the sub-area Local Master land use planning processes. Both municipalities have made decisions to propose to the Regional Council of Lapland (?Lapin Liitto?) to start the phased provincial land use plan for the Rajapalot gold-cobalt project (Figure 1). A similar process in Finland has been undertaken for other pre-development stage mining projects including the Suhanko (?Arctic Platinum?) project of CD Capital Natural Resources Fund III L.P., the Sokli project of The Finnish Minerals Group, and the Sakatti project of Anglo American. Land use planning in Finland is defined by the Land Use and Building Act. The regional land use plans?set out the principles of land use and the community structure. The phased provincial land use plan is a long-term plan and a guideline for the municipalities when drawing up and amending?local master plans?and?local detailed plans. Mawson will be responsible for the costs of the EIA and land use planning, as well as the studies to be prepared for them and any measures that require compensation. Qualified Person Mr. Michael Hudson (FAusMM), Chairman and CEO for the Company, is a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 ? Standards of Disclosure or Mineral Projects and has prepared or reviewed the preparation of the scientific and technical information in this press release. About Mawson Gold Limited (TSX:MAW, FRANKFURT:MXR, OTCPINK:MWSNF) Mawson Gold Limited?is an exploration and development company. Mawson has distinguished itself as a leading Nordic Arctic exploration company with a focus on the flagship Rajapalot gold project in Finland. Mawson also owns or is joint venturing into three high-grade, historic epizonal goldfields covering 470 square kilometres in Victoria, Australia and is well placed to add to its already significant gold-cobalt resource in Finland. Forward-Looking Statement This news release contains forward-looking statements or forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws (collectively, \forward-looking statements\). All statements herein, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements. Although Mawson believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements are typically identified by words such as: believe, expect, anticipate, intend, estimate, postulate, and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. Mawson cautions investors that any forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results or performance, and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including, but not limited to, timing, completion and ?receipt of the Company?s EIA and the Local Master land use plan, capital and other costs varying significantly from estimates, changes in world metal markets, changes in equity markets, the potential impact of epidemics, pandemics or other public health crises, including the current coronavirus pandemic known as COVID-19 on the Company?s business, planned drill programs and results varying from expectations, delays in obtaining results, equipment failure, unexpected geological conditions, local community relations, dealings with non-governmental organizations, delays in operations due to permit grants, environmental and safety risks, and other risks and uncertainties disclosed under the heading \Risk Factors\ in Mawson\-\-s most recent Annual Information Form filed on www.sedar.com. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, Mawson disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Patna, Feb 24 : Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar hinted that Hyderabad Member of Parliament (MP) Asaduddin Owaisi's All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) is on the verge of breaking up while speaking in the Bihar Assembly. Nitish launched a sharp attack on Akhtarul Iman, AIMIM Bihar state President and MLA, and said Owaisi would now be left all alone. At present, the AIMIM has five MLAs in the Bihar Assembly. The Bihar Chief Minister was replying to the Governor's address in the Assembly on Tuesday and said that Akhtarul Iman demanded that Purnia be the state's capital, which Nitish rejected outright. Nitish said that people could reach Patna from anywhere in the state in just five to six hours, adding that when Bihar and Jharkhand were part of a single state, then Ranchi was the state capital. The Chief Minister said, "I cannot build any other capital. If anyone else becomes the Chief Minister after me, they can do whatever they wish. I cannot do such a thing." After this statement by the Chief Minister, Akhtarul Iman started walking out of the House along with his party MLAs. Nitish Kumar said if the AIMIM leaders sit and listen in the House it will be beneficial for them in the future. Pointing towards Iman Nitish said, "You have now switched sides to a third party after being with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Janata Dal United (JDU). If you are staging a walkout, you are welcome to go, but in the process you are left alone." With Nitish's statement, it is being speculated that he is sending a message to the AIMIM state President that he would be left alone along with his party Chief Asaduddin Owaisi. All five elected MLAs of AIMIM had met Nitish at his residence in January this year. Since this meeting, there was speculation that all AIMIM MLAs may soon join the JD(U). However, Iman made it clear that the AIMIM MLAs had met the Chief Minister to discuss the problems of their regions. Nitish also said that as the Chief Minister of the state, MLAs and MPs from other parties continue to meet him, but this should not be given any political motive. After the 2020 Assembly elections in Bihar, the JDU is trying to increase its political outreach to various other parties. Earlier, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLA Mohammad Zama Khan had joined the JD(U) and became a minister. Asaduddin Owaisi's party AIMIM is also working on a strategy to contest elections in poll-bound West Bengal. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text When Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed a decree Feb. 21 setting aside a minimum of seven legislative seats for Christians in the upcoming elections for the 132-member Palestinian Legislative Council, he was following a tradition set by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. He was also reflecting on the wide contribution of Palestinian Christians in the last century. Issa el Issa, a Palestinian Christian poet and journalist, founded with his cousin Yousef El-Issa the biweekly newspaper Filastin in 1911 in his hometown of Jaffa. Jerusalemite George Antonius wrote the Arab Awakening in 1938 and Khalil Sakhnini (1878-1953) was the preeminent Palestinian educator of his day, producing a curriculum that continues to be used. In the 1960s, Amin Majaj's research in the basement of the Augusta Victoria hospital involving malnourished Palestinian refugees helped show some of the benefits that Vitamin E can bring. The leadership of the PLO founded in the late 1960s included George Habash of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Nayef Hawatmeh of the left-wing Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. PLO diplomats have included Naim Tarazi, Afif Safieh and Manuel Hassasian. Christian leaders were targets of assassination, including Kamel Naser, killed by Israeli forces in 1973 in Lebanon, and Naim Khader, killed in Brussels in 1981, apparently on order of Abu Nidal. Christian Palestinians such as academic Hanan Ashrawi and nonviolence advocate Mubarak Awad left their marks during the first intifada. Artists such as Suleiman Mansour and Vera Tamari and filmmakers such as Elia Suleiman, AnnMarie Jacier, Michele Khleifi and Najwa Najjar made it to the biggest festivals and reaped international awards. Businessmen such as Zahi Khoury, philanthropists such as Said and Suheil Khoury and others have left their mark in Palestine. The Palestinian government has seen ministers such as Bassem Khoury and Shukri Bishara. Palestinian citizens of Israel have also seen Christian leaders such as Emile Habibi, Tawfiq Toubi, Azmi Bishara and Aida Suleiman. Palestinian theologians and Christian leaders include Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Michel Sabah, Lutheran Bishop Munib Yonan, Anglican Palestinian liberation theologist Naim Ateek and former pastor of the East Jerusalem Baptist Church Alex Awad. Internationally, Palestinian thinkers, creative persons and politicians such as Edward Said, Raymonda Tawil, Kamal Saliba, Kamal Boulatta and John Sununu are all Palestinian Christians who left their mark. Despite all these accomplished Palestinian Christians, the number of Christians still living in the occupied territories have gradually dwindled to around 1% of the population of the occupied territories and 2% among Palestinian citizens of Israel. In 1996, when Palestinians held their first legislative elections, Christians were guaranteed six seats out of the 88-member council, nearly 7%. In 2006, when the council size was increased to 132, the quota for Christians didnt change, bringing the percentage down to 4.5%. Abbas decision to raise the quota to seven means that Palestinian Christians will make up 5% of the council. To his credit, Abbas made the seven seats a minimum allowing lists to include more Christians in safe spots if they so choose. Considering that Palestinian Christians once made up 20% to 35% of the population, some, such as Allam Al Ahmad, a lawyer representing the PLO in Jordan, say 5% is not enough. It is a shame that the percentage allotted to Palestinian Christians is only 5% when they were 31% in 1947, he told Al-Monitor. Ashrawi, on the other hand, said she thinks there should not be a quota for Christians. We need a system that protects people and provides for their rights. If we dont want our churches to become museums, our country should ensure that it allows for a vibrantly rich and inclusive pluralistic society, she told Religious News Network. But former Economy Minister Bassem Khoury said that without the quota, Palestinian Christians would face the danger of being underrepresented, such as is the case of the 10 million Christian Copts in Egypt. It is hard to win unless there is a serious effort by the factions to put a Christian Palestinian in a safe spot, and therefore the quota is important and necessary, Khoury told the news service. For secular Palestinians and those supporting the PLO, the religious connotation is not important. The growth of political Islam and especially the effects of the rise of Hamas as a competing ideology to the secular PLO has resulted in a new way of thinking about religion in terms of ensuring that Palestinian Christians are well represented in any and all political bodies. A former mayor of Bethlehem, Vera Baboun, told Arab News that diversity is very important in Palestine and must be reflected in leading organizations such as the Palestinian Legislative Council. The upcoming elected council needs to reflect the widest national experience and representation of all of our society, including women and Palestinian Christians. Palestinian Christians have also played an important role as a bridge between east and west. The growth of Christian Zionism as a political force, especially in American politics, has also brought a major response from Palestinian Christians, who have the religious knowledge necessary to react and debunk the false biblical claims that attempt to justify Israeli occupation and the subjugation of Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians. The upcoming May 22 elections that will bring about a new legislative council will surely insert new blood in Palestinian politics. Older Palestinian Christians such as Ashrawi have said they will not run, providing an opportunity for younger and energetic Palestinian Christians to carry on the mantle that has been kept alive for over a century. In the immediate wake of George Floyd's killing by police in late May and the epic, enduring protests that horror stirred nationwide, lists went viral flagging Black-owned businesses. But there was something Green Book-y about the lists. Something ghettoized, even performative or flat-out insincere. Before the implosion of its systemic racism in June, one of Bon Appetit's last acts was to publish a meta-list of Black-owned restaurants. Google data from 2020 showed searches for "Black-owned businesses" were far from a nationwide phenomenon, largely limited to the country's liberal enclaves: the District, Maryland, the Northeast, greater Chicagoland, the Left Coast and Georgia. And whatever help they gave came too late; 41% of Black-owned businesses (roughly 450,000 businesses nationwide) had shuttered already between February and April - almost double the overall decline of 22%, according to granular data from the federal government's employment surveys. Tonya Council, a Chapel Hill, N.C., baker who happens to be a granddaughter of the late culinary legend Mama Dip, was struck by the contrast between all the public statements and list-making versus North Carolina's state motto: "Esse quam videri," Latin for "to be rather than to seem." "To me, it's about being supportive, not just seeming supportive," she said. "I'm all for Black Lives Matter and all that good stuff, but I try to look out for the small people - with me being small as well - so that everybody has a voice. That can be Black people. That can be women. That can be immigrants. It can be anyone who doesn't have support." Council sees a need to move beyond the idea of Black-owned businesses - and toward Black-led alliances. To that end, inspired by a long line of game-changing Black female chefs in the South - Mashama Bailey, Leah Chase, Georgia Gilmore, Carla Hall, Edna Lewis and Lena Richard among them - Council in August bought NC Made, a compendium of gourmet foods and homemade goods across North Carolina, from two White women and integrated it into her own Sweet Tea & Cornbread shop, which had run a similar business since 2017. (She also runs the Sweet Tea & Cornbread Cafe in the North Carolina Museum of History.) NC Made offers gift boxes including hyperlocal options for the state's three major cities: Charlotte, Durham and Raleigh. Now Council has pooled hundreds of small businesses statewide, mostly family-run - among them a 106-year-old peanut farm, a line of small-batch jams and dry rubs, a 91-year-old cookie company, terroir tea from the Blue Ridge Mountains, a more-than-100-year-old cheese straw company, a 240-year-old pottery shop, vegan granola and trail mix from Asheville, and salted peanuts that have been cooked in the basement of a Methodist church since 1965. Council herself is known for her gluten-free pecan crisp cookies that have just four ingredients - eggs, molasses, pecans and sugar - that combine in a nutty caramelized meringue, airy and aromatic with a satisfying crunch. During a recent interview, she considered 15 potential new products on her desk - candles, hot chocolate bombs, and tea towels among them - and sighed. "I try not to say no," she said, "but more about what you need to do to be a better fit. I've had someone bring in items in paper bags. That doesn't work. You need the ingredients listed. You need the right packaging that makes it legal to sell. But if it's right and we like it, we bring it in." Some of the business owners she supports through NC Made are Black, but not all. (Of North Carolina's 10.5 million residents, 22% are Black.) One of Council's vendors, Stephannie Renee Cooper Senegal, who is Black and owns a fourth-generation-recipe praline candy company, cited Ecclesiastes 4:12, the Biblical verse that lauds three strands strengthened by braiding together. "As Black women, we always knew we had the sauce," she said. "The work was in getting others to believe it, too. We are finally starting to feel like the voices that have been crying out in the wilderness are being heard." She regards Council as a mentor, not just a partner. Another of Council's vendors, Mark Graves, who is White and runs third-generation-recipe Chapel Hill Toffee, a top seller in Council's shop, was more plain-spoken: "Tonya's always been very open and honest about what she needs, what we can do, and that's helpful. Stores try to be open and honest, but they aren't always as much as you'd like." Council's work is how Black lives mattering manifests - by stepping past Black ownership and into Black leadership as a kind of culinary Stacey Abrams (who is two years older than Council's 45 years). Council has plans to expand under the banner of "Shop South" to Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee - for starters. "I've been in the same shoes they have. I know the struggle," Council said of her vendors. "With supporting local in the pandemic and Black Lives Matter, it's not something you can do for one season and it's over. It's going to have to be ongoing work." Pierce Freelon, a musician and city council member in Durham who is also son to Phil and Nnenna Freelon, agreed. He cited "ujamaa," a central Kwanzaa principle of cooperative economics. "Kwanzaa emerged out of Black power because folks post-civil rights were like, 'All right, we got integration, but why haven't our situations improved?'" he said. "So organizing to build structure and culture around Black economic empowerment is paramount." He added: "That's what Tonya represents: taking the helm, grabbing the reins, stepping into power as a Black woman." North Carolina is ripe territory for Council's mission. On top of its rich culinary history - including barbecue, Bojangles', Cheerwine, Hardee's, Krispy Kreme, Pepsi and Texas Pete hot sauce - it boasts more undergraduates at historically Black colleges and universities than any other state; the innovative Research Triangle Park, a financial sector in Charlotte second only to New York City; the largest Native American population east of the Mississippi River; the fabled "Furniture Capital of the World" in High Point; and an ecosystem that ranges from bucolic Appalachia, through the wooded Piedmont, to the sandy Outer Banks. Freelon also ran through the state's progressive history as "a nursery for radical Black thought," including an integrated government in Wilmington in 1898, Durham's historic Black Wall Street and the Greensboro sit-ins that kicked off the civil rights era. The state, for decades the playpen for the infamous U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, is now the springboard for the renowned Rev. William Barber. But solidarity is not just a conversation among Black and White North Carolinians. Visual artist Gabe Eng-Goetz, a Chinese American native of Durham who has owned Runaway Clothes since 2011 - collaborating with local artists, breweries, coffee shops and restaurants - described North Carolina as "an awesome, diverse place that helps people have a living with their craft." He added: "Chris Rock came in to our store one day and asked 'What the hell is this?' I explained and he said, 'No, no, no, this doesn't belong here,' that it should be in New York. That was super rewarding to hear. Me and Tonya, we're showcasing our culture in a more modernized, community-focused way." And so, every Saturday and Sunday, Council is at local farmers markets, tugging Old Lucy (her blue-but-not-Carolina-blue wagon) as she stocks it with finds. Recently, she picked up jars of small-batch muscadine jelly, a rarity her grandmother had made for home use. It's been flying off the shelves. "You don't have to go around the world to try something new," she said. "Sometimes you just need to go around the corner." Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 3 mesi fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. Market Reports on India Provides the Trending Market Research Report India Acrylate Esters Market: Plant Capacity, Production, Operating Efficiency, Process, Demand & Supply, Type, Application, End Use, Distribution Channel, Region, Competition, Trade, Customer & Price Intelligence Market Analysis, 2015 2030 under Chemical & Materials Category. The report offers a collection of superior market research, market analysis, competitive intelligence and Market reports. Acrylate Esters demand in India grew at a CAGR of around 6.92% during 2016-2019 and is expected to achieve a healthy growth rate during the forecast period. Acrylate Esters has properties like heat and ageing resistance, less toxicity, color stability and low-temperature flexibility. These properties drive its adoption in the end user industries like Paints and Coatings, Textile, Plastic and Adhesive Industry. With the booming population, the infrastructure and construction industry are expected to grow that will drive the demand of Acrylate Esters in India. Acrylate Esters are used in the production of Acrylic Acid that has huge demand in India in the coming years. Request a free sample copy of India Acrylate Esters Market Report http://www.marketreportsonindia.com/marketreports/sample/reports/2337484 The major consumption of acrylate esters is of Butyl Acrylate in Paints and Coatings and Adhesives and Sealants Industry. The water proofing ability of Butyl Acrylate is the property that is used in the end-user industries. In the forecast years, the demand of Butyl Acrylate in Paints and Coating Industry is expected to grow. West India is the major consuming region in India. Methyl acrylate owing to high water and sunlight resistant properties has applications in latex paints production. Ethyl acrylate is widely used in the application in wastewater treatment chemicals. Due to stringent government regulations, the demand of ethyl acrylate is expected to increase in the forecast years. The demand of butyl acrylate in polymerization is also increasing. Fluctuating crude oil prices impact the acrylate esters prices. However, sudden outbreak of novel coronavirus hard hit the countrys Acrylate Esters sector as several Indian ports had to declare force majeure in compliance with the governments lockdown measure in countrys battle against COVID-19. Acrylate Esters supplies remained tight throughout the final quarter of 2020 as the Indian market is dependent on exports from other countries. Years Considered for this Report: Historical Years: 2015 2019 Base Year: 2020 Estimated Year: 2021 Forecast Period: 2022 2030 Objective of the Study: The primary objective of the study was to evaluate and forecast Acrylate Esters production, demand, inventory, and demand supply gap in India. To categorize demand for Acrylate Esters based on end use, sales channel and region. To study trade dynamics and company share in India Acrylate Esters market. To identify major customers of Acrylate Esters in India. To evaluate and forecast Acrylate Esters pricing in India. To identify and profile major companies operating in India Acrylate Esters market. To identify major developments, deals and expansion plans in India Acrylate Esters market. Currently there are no manufacturers of acrylate esters in India but Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited is expected to introduce a manufacturing plant of butyl acrylate and 2 Ethyl Hexyl Acrylate by 2023. India is dependent on imports from international companies for Acrylate Esters. Import of Acrylate Esters declined by almost 20 per cent in FY 2020 and Acrylate Esters prices were assessed at USD XXX per MT on bulk contract basis. To extract data for India Acrylate Esters market, primary research surveys were conducted with manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, wholesalers and end users of Acrylate Esters. While interviewing, the respondents were also inquired about their competitors. Through this technique, Our Analyst was able to include manufacturers that could not be identified due to the limitations of secondary research. Moreover, Our Analyst analyzed various end user segments and projected a positive outlook for India Acrylate Esters market over the coming years. To extract data for India Acrylate Esters market, primary research surveys were conducted with Acrylate Esters manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, wholesalers and end users. While interviewing, the respondents were also inquired about their competitors. Through this technique, Our Analyst was able to include manufacturers that could not be identified due to the limitations of secondary research. Moreover, Our Analyst analyzed various end user segments and projected a positive outlook for India Acrylate Esters market over the coming years. Our Analyst calculated Acrylate Esters demand in India by analyzing the historical data and demand forecast was carried out considering the end use industries growth. Our Analyst sourced these values from industry experts and company representatives and externally validated through analyzing historical sales data of respective manufacturers to arrive at the overall market size. Various secondary sources such as company websites, association reports, annual reports, etc., were also studied by Our Analyst. Key Target Audience: Acrylate Esters manufacturers and other stakeholders Organizations, forums and alliances related to Acrylate Esters distribution Government bodies such as regulating authorities and policy makers Market research organizations and consulting companies The study is useful in providing answers to several critical questions that are important for industry stakeholders such as Acrylate Esters manufacturers, distributors and policy makers. The report also provides useful insights about which market segments should be targeted over the coming years to strategize investments and capitalize on growth opportunities. Report Scope: In this report, the India Acrylate Esters market has been segmented into following categories, in addition to the industry trends which have also been detailed below: -Market, by Type Methyl Acrylate, Butyl Acrylate, Ethyl Acrylate and Others -Market, by End Use Paints & Coatings, Adhesives and Sealants, Textiles and Others -Market, by Application Additives, Binders, Surfactants etc -Market, by Sales Channel Direct/Institutional Sales, Retail Sales, Other Channel Sales -Market, by Region North, South, East, West Competitive Landscape Our Analyst offers detailed analysis of major players including basic company details, Segmental/product information, financial matrices, growth strategies, expansion plans, collaborations, SWOT analysis etc.to give a comprehensive and meaningful insights on the respective product market. Available Customizations: With the given market data, Our Analyst offers customizations according to a companys specific needs. Browse our full report with Table of Content : http://www.marketreportsonindia.com/marketreports/india-acrylate-esters-market-plant-capacity-production-operating-efficiency-process-demand-supply-type-applicat/2337484 About Market Reports on India: Market Reports on India is an excellent source to obtain top quality market research reports that helps you to understand the business in the Indian market. We cover various industries, identifying and understanding key macro and micro-economic trends, insights and futuristic growth opportunities. To help achieve all this and more, Market Reports on India is the answer to all your business needs. Contact us at: Market Reports on India Tel: +91 22 27810772 / 27810773 Email: info@marketreportsonindia.com Website: www.marketreportsonindia.com Follow us on: Twitter,Facebook, LinkedIn Market reform key to 5-year plan From:ChinaDaily | 2021-02-24 09:21 Like many startup founders in China, Shen Cong, the CEO of an internet-based education business, gained his knowledge about the capital market through years of meeting investors. Now he is aiming at an initial public offering for his company GEC Academy. The 32-year-old Columbia University graduate, who was selected on Forbes China's 30 under 30 list in 2018, said his goal is to launch his company on the stock market within the next five years as he foresees "robust growth" in the country's capital market. On Jan 31, the General Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council announced an action plan with 51 measures to develop a high-quality market to correspond with the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25). The measures include improving market institutions, the efficient allocation of production factors, boosting the market environment and quality, high-level opening-up and the establishment of an oversight mechanism. Promoting a healthy capital market is an important aspect of the five-year blueprint, with additional financial opening-up steps in the pipeline. Robin Xing, chief China economist at Morgan Stanley, told China Daily: "The new action plan has pinpointed pressing areas needing further reforms, particularly regarding the underperformance of the onshore equity market and its over-speculative nature." He added that most of the proposals in the plan had been widely anticipated by the market. Registration-based reform The plan underlines the need to promote reform of the registration-based IPO system with information disclosure at its core. Since founding GEC Academy in 2016, Shen has kept a close eye on the progress of this system. His online tutoring platform grew greatly last year as the COVID-19 outbreak pushed students to take online courses. A registration-based IPO mechanism, once expanded, will greatly facilitate the financing needs for many startups, Shen said. Xing said: "Under the registration-based IPO system, it's likely to be easier for tech and new economy firms to tap capital markets, while alignment with global practices also renders the A-share market more attractive to foreign investors." "At the heart of the registration-based IPO mechanism is the principle of information disclosure; essentially passing the baton of valuation and judgment to market entities including investors and financial intermediaries," he added. The registration-based IPO system was first introduced to the technology-focused STAR Market at the Shanghai Stock Exchange on July 22, 2019. The mechanism was also applied to the ChiNext board at the Shenzhen bourse on August 24 last year. China's Securities Law, which took effect in March last year, stresses the overall implementation of a registration-based IPO mechanism. Xing said the shift toward a disclosure framework does not mean looser listing standards. The reform should be viewed alongside market disciplines such as implementation of delisting mechanisms and the nurturing of domestic institutional investors. Delisting mechanism Zhu Ning, deputy dean and professor at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, said the implementation of improved delisting mechanisms and nurturing domestic institutional investors are highlights of the action plan. He believes a mature delisting mechanism would mark a milestone in the development of a high-standard market. In his book, China's Guaranteed Bubble, Zhu wrote extensively about how implicit government guarantees to protect unqualified players hindered China's path to a quality market. Zhu said in recent years, the criterion for delisting had been lowered, putting more firms under pressure. The two measures in the guideline will provide tremendous protection for investors and remove the implicit state guarantee of protection for listed firms, he added. Financial opening-up The action plan also calls for measures to expand the opening up of the financial services market. The moves include allowing the establishment of foreign-controlled joint venture banks and securities firms, as well as wholly foreign-owned or joint venture asset management firms. Daisy Ho, president of China operations at Fidelity International, a global asset manager, hailed the opening up of the financial sector as "timely and robust." Xing said the move will help improve the overall quality of the financial market in China. "Opening up the financial sector will help bring more foreign and private sector expertise and product diversity to the domestic market, particularly in growing areas such as brokerage, investment banking and asset management," he said. "This could help facilitate domestic development and competitiveness, which is a key enabler toward financing China's high-quality growth." Opening up would allow China to leverage years of foreign experience and develop domestic infrastructure, such as environmental, social and governance investments. "While we expect more involvement from private and foreign capital in broader aspects of the market, the pace would likely be gradual, and remains under the overarching principle of growth and financial stability," Xing said. Zhou Lanxu contributed to this story. Accra, Ghana: Ghana has received the worlds first delivery of coronavirus vaccines from the United Nations-backed COVAX initiative the long-awaited start for a program that has thus far fallen short of hopes that it would ensure shots were given quickly to the worlds most vulnerable people. The arrival of 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the West African country on Wednesday (Accra time) marks the beginning of the largest vaccine procurement and supply operation in history, according to the World Health Organisation and UNICEF. It is a linchpin of efforts to bring the pandemic to an end and has been hailed as the first time the world has delivered a highly sought-after vaccine to poor countries during an ongoing outbreak. The first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines distributed by the COVAX Facility arriving at the Kotoka International Airport in Accra, Ghana. Credit:AP Today marks the historic moment for which we have been planning and working so hard. With the first shipment of doses, we can make good on the promise of the COVAX facility to ensure people from less wealthy countries are not left behind in the race for life-saving vaccines, said Henrietta Fore, executive director of UNICEF, which delivered the vaccines. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes General Assignment Reporter Chris Mays is a general assignment reporter for the Brattleboro Reformer. He has been with New England Newspapers Inc. since 2012. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 08:55:19|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa (R) talks with visiting Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan during a meeting at Temple Trees or the Sri Lankan Prime Minister's official residence in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Feb. 23, 2021. Sri Lanka and Pakistan have agreed to expand their bilateral relationship and trade ties during Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan's official visit to the island country. (Office of Sri Lankan Prime Minister/Handout via Xinhua) COLOMBO, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka and Pakistan have agreed to expand their bilateral relationship and trade ties during Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan's official visit to the island country. Following discussions held with his Sri Lankan counterpart Mahinda Rajapaksa on Tuesday, Khan said Pakistan is part of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, under which the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) was a flagship project. The Pakistani prime minister said he aimed to enhance trade and connectivity with Sri Lanka through CPEC, which Sri Lanka could also establish its connectivity right up to Central Asia. He said Sri Lanka and Pakistan also share a common problem of terrorism as Pakistan had suffered 10 years of terror while Sri Lanka had suffered 30 years of terror which it had combated. "I am pleased to say that Pakistan played its part to help Sri Lanka resolve its problem which was impeding their development and growth, and a country which relies on tourism can never progress if there is terrorism. It cannot even have investments," Khan said. He said as the COVID-19 pandemic is a new issue faced by the world, both Rajapaksa and he discussed how the developed countries could help the developing world presently. Rajapaksa, when addressing the media, said Pakistan continued to be a valuable bilateral partner, and a close and genuine friend. He said both Khan and he agreed to enhance bilateral cooperation between the two countries in the economic sector and a number of other areas including trade, investment, science, technology, defense and education. Both countries also agreed to pursue the opportunities presented within the framework of the Pakistan-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement and their talks also focused on important regional and international issues as well as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Khan arrived in Sri Lanka on Tuesday for his first visit to the island nation. The two countries signed several MoUs following the discussions between the two prime ministers, a statement from the Prime Minister's office said. Khan is expected to hold discussions with Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Wednesday and take part in a business and investment forum. Enditem Pretoria (South Africa) 24 February 2021 (SPS)- African movements of solidarity with the Saharawi people organised an African Virtual Conference to Commemorate the 45th Anniversary of the Saharawi Republic on Wednesday, calling on the UN, AU, EU and ICRC to quickly intervene to protect Saharawi civilians from Moroccan violations and put an end to the Moroccan illegal occupation of Western Sahara. Composed of African dignitaries and representatives of political parties, trade unions, civil society and academics from 45 countries, the participants to the conference expressed their steadfast and unwavering support to the legitimate struggle of the people of the Saharawi Republic for freedom and independence. They call on all Pan-Africanists, who love freedom and peace, to stand by the people of this last colony; for Africa will never be free as long as one of our nations is occupied and brutalised. IN this same vain, they urge all African countries, political parties, trade unions, civil society, NGOs, Academia, youth and women organisations and the Media to give more visibility and shed light on the heroic resistance of the African people of the Saharawi people. They considered that they cannot, as the current generation of Africans, allow that our brothers and sisters in Western Sahara are left behind or abandoned in this struggle for freedom, calling on the African Union to assume its responsibility in imposing the respect for its Constitutive Act and compel Morocco to end its illegal occupation of parts of the territory of the Saharawi Republic. Moroccos continued violation of the principles of the AU Constitutive Act should not be tolerated. The Virtual Conference supports the decision of the 34th AU Summit of Heads of States and Government held on 6 February 2021 to have the issue of Western Sahara as a standing item on its agenda. Speaking to the United Nations, the participants call on its relevant decision-making bodies to honour its promise to the people of Western Sahara 60 years ago, and organise the long-awaited referendum on self-determination so that the Saharawi people can decide their future. With regards to the natural resources, the participanting Pan- Africanists called on the European Union to put an end to the violation of the European Court of Justices ruling on its illegal exploitation of the natural resources in Western Sahara, considering that the EU exploitation of Saharawi resources is a direct contribution to the illegal occupation and human rights violations in the territory. The EU should be part of the solution to the conflict and not part of the problem. On the current developments, the participating activists recalled that Western Sahara is now a war zone since the 13th November 2020, because of the Moroccan violation of the ceasefire and the attack against Saharawi civilians in Guerguarat region. Therefore, they urged the Red Cross International Commission and the AU Commission on Human and Peoples Rights to immediately intervene in order to protect the Saharawi civilians from Moroccan systematic and increasing human rights violations in the occupied territories of the Saharawi Republic. Adressing the dire situation of Saharawi political prisoners in Moroccan prisons, the conference called for the unconditional release of all political prisoners and freedom fighters, and for an immediate end to the violence against children and women. They Finally commit to continue to support the Saharawi people in their legitimate struggle for freedom and independence, and encourage all African initiatives and actions in that sense. (SPS) 090/500/60 (SPS) This Jan. 2020 file photo shows a Chinese language school in Houeyxay, Bokeo Province, Laos that is supported by the Construction Department of China's Guangdong province. A Chinese language education boom is underway in Laos as Beijings increasing investments in the Southeast Asian country point to a future where Chinese companies dominate local commerce, sources in Laos told RFA. Chinese investment in Laos was a mere 1.5 percent of its total foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2003, but Beijing accounted for 79 percent of FDI in Laos in 2018. The sharp rise in investment has prompted job hunters in Laos to view proficiency in the language as an essential skill. I am learning Chinese because there are many Chinese investments in Laos, and Chinese fluency will help me to get a job with Chinese companies more easily, a student attending a Chinese private school in the capital Vientiane told RFAs Lao Service Feb. 18. It will also help me continue on to higher education in China, said the student, who requested anonymity for security reasons. A student at the National University of Laos, the countrys top-ranked educational institution, told RFA that the countrys future lies with Beijing. China and Laos are fraternal one-party communist states that share a land border. Laos and China are close friends and partners now. Most companies and investors doing business in Laos are Chinese, said the university student, who requested anonymity to speak freely. To get a job you have to speak Chinese. Thats just the way things are. If you speak only English, where and with whom are you going to get a job? the university student said. A government employee in Vientiane told RFA that even public education should include Chinese. Chinese investment is rising. Most large investors are Chinese. Our youth should learn Chinese in order to have a better future, said the government employee, who declined to be named. Here in Vientiane, there are so many schools teaching English, French and Japanese, but Chinese is becoming more popular and there are more and more Chinese schools opening up, and there are more students, including adults who work for Chinese companies, the government employee said. Over the last several years, several Chinese language schools have opened to meet increasing demand in the capital. Far from low-key study centers opening in available office space, the new schools open to greater and greater fanfare. Mulan Education Center, one of the citys more prestigious Chinese language schools, opened for the new semester Feb. 6 with a crowded open house attended by many high-ranking officials including the vice ministers of finance and foreign affairs. Mulan, which teaches kindergarten through high school and offers continuing education for adults, first opened in 2019 with 306 students, but in 2020 enrollment more than doubled to 705, Pavina Insixiengmai, a representative of the school, told RFA. She said attendance could double to more than 1400 this year. We are accepting children, high school and university students and government workers. On the day of the grand opening, we enrolled several hundred students because so many more people are interested in learning Chinese, a member of the schools faculty told RFA. An adult student of Mulan told RFA that the school would help in finding employment with a Chinese firm. I write and read Chinese, but my speaking is not so great. I am attending Mulan to improve my spoken Chinese. Chinese are the top investors in Laos right now, so speaking Chinese will help me to get a job faster, the student said. While most of the Chinese language schools are concentrated in the capital, schools have sprung up in Laos northernmost provinces, especially those that share a border with China. Luang Namtha province is home to the Sino-Lao High School, which has a student body of about 200. In addition to that, there are many small Chinese schools like two-classroom schools run by Laotians who graduated from China, an education official of Luang Namtha province told RFA. An Oudomxay province official told RFA that two schools, the Laos-China Friendship High School and the Xiew Pei School are the most popular there. These schools attract many students because they teach both Chinese and English. In Oudomxay there are about 10 English schools but now many more students are going to Chinese schools, the Oudomxay official said. Meanwhile Bokeo province, a popular destination for Chinese tourists and gamblers, will welcome a new Chinese language learning center in the town of Hoeyxay. The school will teach Chinese to high school students who want to continue their education in China, a Bokeo education official told RFA. The province already has several private Chinese schools Public high schools also teach Chinese and English according to the education ministrys curriculum, the Bokeo official said. In an effort to promote studies of Chinese language and culture worldwide, Beijing has established partnerships with foreign universities to set up language schools, called Confucius Institutes. The Confucius Institute at the National University of Laos is by far the largest and most popular Chinese language school in the country, an employee of the institute told RFA. This year, more than 1,000 students attend the institute. We expanded the facility in 2019 and it will be able to accommodate 5,000 students in the near future, the institute employee said. Universities in China are now setting up campuses in Laos. Soochow University in Laos is also expanding by building a new campus in the Vientiane suburbs. Several hundred students who attend the university want to continue their studies at Soochow University in China, the institute employee said. Though the World Bank in October 2020 acknowledged that Laos made many developmental gains over the past two decades by halving poverty, decreasing malnutrition and improving education and health, it also said Vientiane could do better at schooling children. A child born in Laos today will only be half as productive as she could be if she enjoyed full health and education While a Lao child goes to school for 10.8 years on average, she only receives the equivalent of 6.4 years of learning, the World Bank said. According to UNESCO, in 2019 91.6 percent of Lao children of primary school age were enrolled in schools, but for secondary school-aged students the enrollment figure was 58.8 percent. UNICEF in 2017 reported that only a third of Lao students in grade 3 met literacy standards, and only a fifth passed math standards for promotion to grade 4. For each additional year of education among young adults, poverty rates were 9 percent lower, the report said. Reported by RFAs Lao Service. Translated by Max Avary. Written in English by Eugene Whong. Israel's parliament today passed a law allowing the government to share the identities of people not vaccinated against the coronavirus with other authorities. The move on Wednesday has raising privacy concerns for those opting out of inoculation. The measure, which passed with 30 votes for and 13 against, gives local governments, the director general of the education ministry and some in the welfare ministry the right to receive the names, addresses and phone numbers of unvaccinated citizens. The objective of the measure -- valid for three months or until the Covid-19 pandemic is declared over -- is 'to enable these bodies to encourage people to vaccinate by personally addressing them', a parliament statement said. Israel, a country of nine million people, has administered the two recommended jabs of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against the coronavirus to roughly a third of its population. Israel's parliament today passed a law allowing the government to share the identities of people not vaccinated against the coronavirus with other authorities (File image) As it emerges from lockdown, the country is restricting certain services, including access to gyms and indoor dining, to the vaccinated only, giving a so-called green pass to the fully inoculated. That too has raised concerns about unequal access for those exercising their right to not be vaccinated. During debate on the measure, Labor party leader Merav Michaeli accused right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of 'denying citizens their right to the privacy of their medical information'. The statement from the parliament, or Knesset, said the personal information cannot be used for any purpose other than encouraging people to be vaccinated. 'The information will be deleted after its use within 60 days,' according to the law, and 'a person who was contacted can demand that his details be deleted and that they not be contacted again.' Haim Katz of Netanyahu's Likud party defended the law as a means to promote vaccination. 'I've been asked what about people's privacy: Is privacy more important than life itself?' Katz said in parliament, stressing the information would include nothing beyond the question of whether or not the person was vaccinated. At a news conference, Netanyahu later called on Israeli citizens to be vaccinated in order to 'return to normal life'. The prime minister deplored misleading news about the vaccine, and said Israel aimed to fully inoculate 6.2 million people before the beginning of April. 'More than a million adults are not yet vaccinated,' he said, adding that 'in the world, people are waiting for vaccines, (but) here vaccines are waiting for people'. Israel is banking on vaccine passports to re-open its economy with gyms, hotels, restaurants and swimming pools , bars and restaurants open to those with a 'green pass' who have had two doses of a jab. More than a third of Israel's 8.6 million population has been fully vaccinated in the world's quickest immunisation programme against Covid-19, and over three million people are eligible for the pass on account of some having already had the virus. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is hoping that the vaccine success and the end of Israel's third lockdown will propel him to victory in March 23 elections. Israel is banking on vaccine passports to re-open its economy with gyms, hotels, restaurants and swimming pools and restaurants open to those with a 'green pass', that indicates who has had two doses of a jab. Pictured: A health worker administers the COVID-19 vaccine to an Israeli at a bar in the coastal city of Tel Aviv The scheme is being closely watched abroad, with Boris Johnson saying on Monday that the UK was looking at the idea of 'Covid-status certification' while adding that there were 'many concerns surrounding exclusion, discrimination and privacy'. Israel, which has one of the world's most sophisticated medical data systems, secured a substantial stock of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine by paying above market price and by striking a data-sharing deal with the drug giant. As of Sunday, nearly 3.2million Israelis were eligible for the green pass, according to the health ministry. That includes 2.5million people who had their second shot more than a week ago, as well as nearly 700,000 people who have recovered from Covid-19. Shopping malls and stores with street access re-opened to the general public on Sunday, with certain limitations on crowd size. But gyms, swimming pools, hotels and some cultural facilities are re-opening only to those who have been fully vaccinated and obtained the so-called green pass. Lifting weights at a gym in Petah Tikva near Tel Aviv late Saturday, Netanyahu insisted Israel was moving ahead 'with caution', while imploring 'everyone to get vaccinated'. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu (pictured on Tuesday) is hoping that the vaccine success and the end of Israel's third lockdown will propel him to victory in March 23 elections Standing at the entrance of a posh Tel Aviv gym, 90-year-old Ora Davidovicz said she 'couldn't wait' to go swimming. 'It's been almost a year since I went to the pool,' she said. 'I've been counting the days. All I have to do is put on my swim suit,' she said, before heading in. Tom John, a muscular 33-year-old, told AFP he'd been training at home for months but felt safe being back at the gym with the protection systems in place. 'Everyone here has a green badge,' he said, surveying the gym. At the family owned Katalina shoe store in central Tel Aviv, Mordechai Nazarian said his business had been closed for eight of the last 12 months, with 'little openings here and there' as Israel lifted restrictions between lockdowns. 'We hope this one is the right one,' he told AFP. Israel has given more does people per-100 people than any other country in the world. As of February 23, 88.77 people out of 100 have had at least one dose. By comparison, 27.34 people per 100 have been given at least one dose in the UK, which is still the third highest rate in the world. Pictured: A visitor presents a coronavirus vaccination certificate at the entrance to the Khan Theatre in Jerusalem, Israel, 23 February 2021 More than a third of Israel's population has been fully vaccinated in the world's quickest immunisation programme against Covid-19, meaning nearly three million people are eligible for the pass. Pictured: A graph showing Covid vaccine doses per 100 people in various countries, with Israel vaccinating well over over 80 people per 100 At the Third Ear record store in Tel Aviv, 32-year-old Itay Shimon said he hadn't been in a record store in many months, but was enjoying just browsing the aisles. Describing himself as a vaccine supporter, he also voiced caution about compelling people to get the jab. 'We cannot force those who don't want it to do it,' he said. Despite the successful vaccination Israel's government has approved a night-time curfew from Thursday until Sunday to prevent the spread of the coronavirus over the Purim holiday. The Prime Minister's Office and Health Ministry said a curfew from 8:30 p.m. until 5 a.m. would be in force starting Purim eve. The Health Ministry has reported over 759,000 cases and at least 5,634 deaths from COVID-19. Pictured: Graphs showing seven-day rolling average of daily new coronavirus infections in Israel (top) and daily new coronavirus-related deaths (bottom) Purim, a Jewish holiday traditionally marked with public festivities and gatherings, begins Thursday at sundown. The holiday lockdown prohibits any large gatherings of more than 10 people indoors at concerts, parades or parties typical of the holiday's observances. Israel reopened its economy last week after a nearly two-month lockdown, the country's third since the start of the pandemic. But recent days have seen a slight uptick in new infections. It has one of the highest immunisation rates per capita, with over 4.5 million of its citizens having received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. The Health Ministry has reported over 759,000 cases and at least 5,634 deaths from COVID-19. (This story corrects paragraph 10 to drop reference to 5G) By Josh Horwitz SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Huawei Technologies saw slight revenue and profit growth in 2020, in line with its expectations, its rotating chairman said on Tuesday, even as Washington toughened sanctions against the Chinese telecom equipment maker. The company was put on an export blacklist by former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2019 and barred from accessing critical technology of U.S. origin, affecting its ability to design its own chips and source components from outside vendors. Huawei has repeatedly ... Genome variation data on more than 7,000 malaria parasites from 28 endemic countries is released today (24 February) in Wellcome Open Research. It has been produced by MalariaGEN, a data-sharing network of groups around the world who are working together to build high-quality data resources for malaria research and disease control. This open data release represents the world's largest resource of genomic data on malaria parasite evolution and drug resistance. It provides benchmark data on parasite genome variation that is needed in the search for new drugs and vaccines, and in the development of surveillance tools for malaria control and elimination. Malaria is a major global health problem causing an estimated 409,000 deaths in 2019, with 67 per cent of deaths occurring in children under five years of age*. This data resource focuses on Plasmodium falciparum, the species of malaria parasite that is responsible for the most common and deadliest form of the disease. The Malaria Genomic Epidemiology Network (MalariaGEN) provides researchers and control programmes in malaria-endemic countries with access to DNA sequencing technologies and tools for genomic analysis. Founded in 2005, MalariaGEN now has partners in 39 countries, each leading their own studies into different aspects of malaria biology and epidemiology, with the common goal of finding ways to improve malaria control. This latest publication represents the work of 49 partner studies at 73 locations in Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania, who together contributed 7,113 samples of P. falciparum for genome sequencing. At the Wellcome Sanger Institute, each sample was analysed for over 3 million genetic variants and the data were carefully curated before returning to partners for use in their own research. This paper brings together the data from all the partner studies to provide an open data resource for the wider scientific community. Dr Richard Pearson, co-author from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: "We have created a data resource that is 'analysis ready' for anyone to use, including those without specialist genetics training. Each annotated dataset sample includes key features that are relevant to malaria control, such as resistance to six major antimalarial drugs, and whether it carries particular structural changes that cause diagnostic malaria tests to fail. Like the Human Genome Project was a resource for the analyses of human genome sequence data, we hope this will be one of the main resources for malaria research." One of MalariaGEN's core principles is to provide clear attribution and recognition of all the groups that have contributed to a data resource. In this dataset, each sample is listed against the partner study that it belongs to, with a description of the scientific aims of the study and the local investigators that led the work. Professor Dominic Kwiatkowski, co-author from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford, said: "It has been a huge privilege to collaborate with our MalariaGEN partners around the world to build this data resource. We are proud to see these genomic data being used in publications by our colleagues in malaria-endemic studies and others in the malaria research community. We hope that the new features in this data release will make it accessible to an even wider audience, and our team is now hard at work to produce the next version." Professor Abdoulaye Djimde, co-author from the University of Science, Techniques and Technologies of Bamako, Mali, said: "A quantitative assessment of how malaria parasites respond to public health interventions is key for a successful and sustainable elimination campaign. Over time, this openly available resource will facilitate research into the malaria parasite's evolutionary processes, which will ultimately inform effective and sustainable malaria control and elimination strategies that will be key in ending this devastating disease." ### Notes to Editors: *For more information on these figures and the state of malaria in general, see the World Health Organisation website: https:/ / www. who. int/ news-room/ fact-sheets/ detail/ malaria For more information on MalariaGEN, visit: https:/ / www. malariagen. net/ Publication: MalariaGEN and multiple co-authors. (2021) An open dataset of Plasmodium falciparum genome variation in 7,000 worldwide samples. Wellcome Open Research. DOI: https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 12688/ wellcomeopenres. 16168. 1 [doi.org] Funding: This work was supported by Wellcome and the MRC Centre for Genomics and Global Health which is jointly funded by the Medical Research Council and the Department for International Development. For full funding information, please see the publication. Selected websites: The Big Data Institute, University of Oxford The Big Data Institute is located in the Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Informatics and Discovery at the University of Oxford. It is an interdisciplinary research centre that focuses on the analysis of large, complex data sets for research into the causes, consequences, prevention and treatment of disease. Research is conducted in areas such as genomics, population health, infectious disease surveillance and the development of new analytic methods. The Big Data Institute is supported by funding from the Medical Research Council, the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund, the National Institute for Health Research Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, and philanthropic donations from the Li Ka Shing and Robertson Foundations. Further details are available at http://www. bdi. ox. ac. uk University of Science, Techniques and Technologies of Bamako, Mali The Malaria Research and Training Center (MRTC) within the University of Science, Techniques and Technologies of Bamako, is a renowned African-led research institution which is divided into six research units, including the Genomics and Molecular Epidemiology Unit, B-cell Laboratory within Immunology Group, Cellular immunology laboratory within Immunology Group, Molecular Epidemiology and Drug Resistance Unit, Clinical Laboratory, Data Management and Analysis Group, and Diagnostic Laboratory. During the past 20 years, MRTC in collaboration with NIH, University of Maryland, EDCTP, Wellcome, African Academy of Sciences, WHO and others has built a state-of-the-art facility including parasite culture facilities, Insectaries, genomic data storage and Bioinformatics facilities. There are five established clinical trial sites for vaccine and seven for drug trials and epidemiological studies and numerous satellite field research sites. The Wellcome Sanger Institute The Wellcome Sanger Institute is a world leading genomics research centre. We undertake large-scale research that forms the foundations of knowledge in biology and medicine. We are open and collaborative; our data, results, tools and technologies are shared across the globe to advance science. Our ambition is vast - we take on projects that are not possible anywhere else. We use the power of genome sequencing to understand and harness the information in DNA. Funded by Wellcome, we have the freedom and support to push the boundaries of genomics. Our findings are used to improve health and to understand life on Earth. Find out more at http://www. sanger. ac. uk or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and on our Blog. About Wellcome Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 10:35:22|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close LONDON, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese embassy in Britain on Tuesday expressed grave concern over The Guardian's misuse of an Air China picture in one of its reports about a plane incident. The British newspaper on Monday carried a report about engine parts dropping from a Longtail Aviation's Boeing 747 cargo plane in the Netherlands causing injury. In the report, the paper used a picture of a cargo plane of Air China. "This misuse of the picture was false reporting and misinformation, which affected the image of a Chinese enterprise," a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy said in a statement. "The Chinese Embassy in the UK expresses grave concern over such misinformation, and requests immediate correction and apology to the Chinese company affected by the misconduct," said the statement. News media should uphold the professional ethics of journalism and conduct reporting in an objective, fair, balanced and accurate manner, said the statement. Misinformation like this has not been rare in some Western media's reports, revealing their disregard for the ethics of journalism and their deep-rooted prejudice against China, it said. "We urge the relevant media to stop seeing China through 'tinted glasses' and view China and its development in an objective and fair manner," said the statement. The Guardian changed the picture on its website on Tuesday. Enditem Some hospitals have begun providing on-demand Covid-19 test services in response to high demand. Nguyen Thu Ha in Bac Tu Liem district in Hanoi said she has returned home from Quang Ninh province where she spent the Tet holiday. She and other family members made health declarations after the return. They were asked to stay in quarantine at home and report to the local medical center if they have a high temperature or cough. If so, they will get tested. However, as Ha is worried about the infection probability, she has decided to use on-demand testing service and pay for the service. Many other people also want to have on-demand tests as the pandemic is still in a complicated situation. The fee for tests is between VND1 million and VND2 million. There are many hospitals in Hanoi recognized by the Ministry of Health as meeting the requirements to test for SARS-CoV-2. The testing center of the University of Public Health has confirmed that the center is providing Covid-19 testing service at a fee of VND1 million to subjects without epidemiological factors. Samples are taken at 9-11 am every day. At Hong Ngoc Hospital, service users have to pay VND1.6 million. At Medlatec, the fee is VND1.199 million. Licensed medical centers have the right to provide on-demand tests. However, hospitals only reserve testing kits to carry out compulsory tests for patients going to the hospitals. Meanwhile, the tests are free if they are conducted for epidemic prevention purposes. At 108 Hospital, people who want to get tested before traveling abroad have to pay VND2,350,000. The E Hanoi Hospital is also one of the medical centers allowed by the Ministry of Health to conduct Covid-19 tests in Hanoi. However, Le Ngoc Thanh, director of the hospital, said the service is only provided to those who have suspected factors or want to go abroad. He went on to say that it would be a wasteful expenditure if tested spontaneously. The test result is valid only at that moment. More importantly, one needs to comply with epidemic prevention principles, he said. Associate Prof Dr Tran Dac Phu, senior advisor to the Center for Public Medical Event Response, said the on-demand testing service has been approved by the Prime Minister, but the service still is not available in some provinces. Many people refuse to get tested despite symptoms of cough and high temperature, while other people just want to get tested, and others dont observe epidemic prevention measures. He said provincial CDCs have been instructed to carry out tests for people in areas with high risks. In Hanoi, for example, all the people returning from Hai Duong have to be tested. N. Huyen Vietnam ranked second for successfully handling coronavirus pandemic Vietnam has done a good job in their fight against the coronavirus pandemic, according to US magazine Business Insider citing Australian think-tank The Lowy Institutes recently-published Index. Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Its nuts! Oregons Department of Education has developed a teaching resource entitled, A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, aimed at removing racism from 6th-8th-grade math. Seems that math + traditional teaching methods = white supremacy! Not to mention promoting capitalism and imperialism. Then this: Expose students to mathematicians of color, particularly women of color and queer mathematicians of color. And this: Too often students are tracked based on the notion that adults know what the right thing is for them, which does not allow room for student agency, reinforcing paternalism and powerhoarding. Parents, now powerhoarders? Whats behind this appalling poppycock? Its not simply a long-standing legitimate concern that minority students might not relate as easily as middle-class white students to certain word problems. Its perverse ideology. The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, says the guide. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates objectivity as well as fear of open conflict. Dare one ask how anything can be unequivocally false when the idea that something is either right or wrong is itself wrong? Or, just exactly when 2+2 isnt objectively 4? Or, if this means that racism isnt always wrong? Never better illustrated than in this bizarre math-e-madness, the fundamental cause of Americas deep division is a battle between subjective and objective thinking. Not that the two cant co-exist, but, while the conservative Right leans heavily on objective, transcendent, universal truth, the liberal Left favors subjective, individualistic, personal truth (unless you disagree, of course, whereupon you are instantly met with objective moral outrage!) But, then, Im speaking to the choir. I can hear it now, Amen! Preach, brother, preach! So, let me do some hard preaching, if I may. Make no mistake, there may still be pockets of resistance, but the culture war is irretrievably lost. Apart from Gods own intervention, no political effort, court decisions, or conservative outcry can reverse the outcome. Despite church buildings still open, In God We Trust on our currency, and under God in our Pledge, we are a post-faith, secular nation, and theres no going back. How can one possibly appeal to objective truth to win over a subjectively-thinking generation for whom there is now no ultimate truth? Its bad enough that weve lost the away game, but far worse that weve lost on home court. Admittedly painting with a very broad brush, the church (choose your definition) has become captive to the spirit of the age. On matters of doctrine, millions of those claiming to be Christ followers have taken an Oregon Department of Education approach to Scripture, subjectively reading into it whatever meaning they jolly well wish, ignoring strictures as plain as 2+2=4. Even those who still honor the objective truth of Scripture have tired of any worship that doesnt subjectively leave one warmly affirmed. Traditional worship (often so dry and perfunctory that the soul is left void) has given way to slickly-orchestrated, leader-focused, celebrations of Self. Is it Pollyannaish to long for objectively-grounded, inspiring worship in both spirit and truth? Subjective faith, like subjective math, simply doesnt add up. It subtracts from obedience, multiplies sin, and divides our allegiance between Self and God. So, where are we in our faith life? Or, are we so caught up in cultures subjective thinking that we cant answer objectively? The winners of the 2021 UGA Campus Sustainability Grant were announced Dec. 18, 2020 and many of the projects are now being implemented, including the Residential Community Garden Pilot Program. Sorry! This content is not available in your region KYODO NEWS - Feb 24, 2021 - 18:41 | All, World The U.S. Defense Department on Tuesday criticized Beijing's assertive activities in waters near the Japanese-controlled, Chinese-claimed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, while expressing "support" for Japan on the issue. "We would urge the Chinese to avoid actions, using their coast guard vessels, that could lead to miscalculation and potential physical...harm," the department's Press Secretary John Kirby said during a press briefing. "We hold with the international community about the Senkakus and the sovereignty of the Senkakus, and we support Japan obviously in that sovereignty," he added. The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, like past administrations, has offered reassurances to Japan that Article 5 of the bilateral security treaty covers the Senkakus, meaning the United States would defend Japan in the event of a conflict there. China immediately reacted to Kirby's comments on Wednesday, arguing that the islands in the East China Sea are part of the nation's "inherent territory." "The U.S.-Japan security treaty is a product of the Cold War and it should not harm the interests of third parties and endanger regional peace and stability," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters in Beijing, referring to the islets as Diaoyu. The United States, meanwhile, has taken a neutral position regarding the sovereignty claims. While Kirby's remarks appeared to back Japan's sovereignty over the islands, another Defense Department spokesperson later clarified that "there is no change to U.S. policy." In Tokyo, Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi welcomed the press secretary's comments, saying they were in line with the two countries' shared concerns over Beijing's unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the East China Sea. "It is extremely deplorable and totally unacceptable that Chinese coast guard ships are entering Japan's territorial waters around the Senkaku Islands repeatedly and making moves to approach Japanese fishing vessels," he said. The U.S. State Department said last week that the United States joins Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and other countries in expressing "concern" over a new Chinese coast guard law, saying it may "escalate ongoing territorial and maritime disputes" in the East and South China seas. Implemented on Feb. 1, the law explicitly allows the Chinese coast guard to use weapons against foreign ships it sees as illegally entering China's waters. Chinese coast guard vessels have been spotted near the uninhabited islets since the law took effect. Related coverage: China coast guard vessels repeatedly enter Japan waters near Senkakus FOCUS: Biden's 1st month shows toughness on China as policy review continues 2 more Chinese coast guard vessels enter Japan's waters near Senkakus Fossils dug up in Uzbekistan reveal a previously-unidentified species of dinosaur that was twice the size of a double decker bus, a new study reveals. Called Dzharatitanis kingi, the gentle giant measured about 65.6 feet (20 metres) in length and was a cousin of Diplodocus the largest creature to ever walk the planet. D. kingi inhabited a coastal plain at the westernmost point of the Asian landmass 100 million years ago when Earth's continents were still bunched together. The creature had a whip like tail and a long neck, enabling it to reach high into the trees to satisfy its enormous herbaceous appetite. A tail bone belonging to the dino was dug up by an international team at the Bissekty Formation in the Kyzyl Kum Desert known as Uzbekistan's 'dinosaur graveyard'. Dzharatitanis kingi had a whip like tail and a long neck, letting it reach high into the trees to satisfy its enormous appetite The Bissekty Formation has 'yielded a vast number of mostly dissociated but often exquisitely preserved skeletal remains' of vertebrates, researchers say. D. kingi had a small head and razor sharp pencil-like teeth and would have ripped whole branches off trees. Its massive frame was supported on four pillar-like legs. D. kingi existed during the Cretaceous period, which lasted from 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago. It represents both a new species and a new genus in the already-existing rebbachisaurid family. Rebbachisaurids were sauropods among the bulkiest creatures to have ever walked the Earth, some weighing the equivalent of 14 African elephants. Rebbachisaurid remains have been dug up in South America, Africa, North America and Europe but never before in Asia. The tail bone was dug up by an international team at the Bissekty Formation in the Kyzyl Kum Desert (pictured) - known as Uzbekistan's dinosaur graveyard The Bissekty Formation in Uzbekistan has 'yielded a vast number of mostly dissociated but often exquisitely preserved skeletal remains' of vertebrates 'This is the first rebbachisaurid reported from Asia and one of the youngest in the known fossil record,' said study lead author Dr Alexander Averianov at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg. 'It was plant eater as all other sauropods and lived in a complex environment with many other dinosaurs.' All previous records of rebbachisaurids come from a narrow band extending from southernmost South America through the northeastern South America and northwestern Africa to Europe. 'Rebbachisaurids are interesting because they were mainly present in Africa and South America,' said Dr Averianov. Researchers have analysed fossilised caudal vertebrae (pictured) taken from the deserts of Uzbekistan that once formed part of the creature's tail 'The discovery of the first Asiatic rebbachisaurid, Dzharatitanis kingi, now considerably extends the known distribution of the group to the east. 'It supports the idea these continents were still connected during the Early Cretaceous.' D. kingi inhabited a coastal plain near the Tethys Ocean on the westernmost point of the Asian landmass during the Late Cretaceous period. The Tethys Ocean was an enormous and shallow body of water that stood between what would become Europe, North Africa, and southeast Asia. The rebbachisaurids probably dispersed to Central Asia from Europe but it is not clear when this could have occurred. For most of the Cretaceous period, Asia was separated from Europe by a stretch of water called the Turgai Strait, but a land connection between the two landmasses existed. Rebbachisaurids including D. kingi may have crossed from Europe to Asia using a bridge of land across the Turgai Strait 'The rebbachisaurids possibly dispersed from Europe to Asia via a land bridge across the Turgai Strait,' said Dr Averianov. Some of the other dinosaurs around at the time of D. kingi would have included the much smaller timurlengia, a type of therapod. Timurlengia a cousin of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex was unearthed at the same location and detailed in a research paper five years ago. The plucky predator would have had a mixture of skin and feathers and chased down its prey in central Asia. 'Timurlengia was a nimble pursuit hunter with slender, blade-like teeth suitable for slicing through meat,' said study author Professor Hans Sues of the National Museum of Natural History at Smithsonian Institution. 'It probably preyed on the various large plant-eaters, especially early duck-billed dinosaurs, which shared its world.' Professor Sues is also a co-author on this new study of D. kingi, which has been published today in PLOS One. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Five Indonesian crew members aboard a Singaporean ship that is anchored off Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province have tested positive for the novel coronavirus. The Ocean Amazing was scheduled to arrive at a port in the southern province to deliver cargo, but on Feb. 20, after it entered Vietnamese waters, a sailor died on the ship due to an unidentified non-health-related issue. Vung Tau authorities then tested the remaining 20 sailors on board for the novel coronavirus. At least five of them have tested positive, the Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province Center for Disease Control said. "All the sailors are Indonesian, and most do not have symptoms of Covid-19," a source said. Gene sequencing is being performed on their samples and a second test is underway. If it too returns positive, the ship will be sent back to Indonesia for replacing the crew and disinfection before it can return to Vietnam with the cargo. As of Wednesday morning the sailors were still on the ship anchored at sea, and have not carried out procedures to enter Vietnam. Vietnam has had 2,403 Covid-19 cases so far, 604 still active. SHELTON Joanna Carloni was appointed Tuesday to fill the Second Ward alderman seat held by Stanley Kudej, who died on Feb. 8. The aldermen, during its meeting at City Hall and live streamed on the citys website, unanimously voted to appoint the 39-year-old Carloni, an attorney who has worked the past eight years in the public defenders office at the Bridgeport courthouse. I am honored to be chosen, Carloni said after being sworn in by city corporation counsel Fran Teodosio. I hope to fill Stans shows. I look forward to serving my community. Carloni and her husband, Jeano, have lived in Shelton since 2012. I love where I live the downtown is great, Joanna Carloni told Heart Connecticut Media. I am excited to represent the people of the Second Ward. Carloni said she tossed her hat into the political ring because she felt it was time to give back to the community she loves. Board of Aldermen President John Anglace Jr., said, according to the city charter, this appointment was to be filled by the remaining Republican aldermen members. Anglace said several Republicans indicated an interest and were considered, but Joanna has exceptional qualifications and a long history of hard work to get where she is today. Her youth brings another dimension to the board, and we look forward to her many expected opinions and contributions, Anglace added. Mayor Mark Lauretti said Carlonis legal background is impressive, and she will also bring a younger perspective to the boards decision-making process. We need to start rebuilding the ranks with the younger generation, Lauretti said. If you look at the age of a lot, not all, of the people that serve, not just in Shelton but all over, it is an older, more seasoned person. I feel it helps to have a different generations perspective in there, too. Lauretti said Carlonis appointment comes as he continues to focus on identifying individuals in their 20s and 30s as potential candidates on boards and commissions in the city. Were looking for a good mix of representation in the city, Lauretti added. brian.gioiele@hearstmediact.com Matthew 'Matty J' Johnson is starring on the next season of Dancing With The Stars. And it appears the 33-year-old will be paired with a brunette for the show's 18th season, after being spotted walking alongside a petite woman on Wednesday. The former The Bachelor star was seen chatting to the woman outside MOVE by Aric & Masha in Sydney's Randwick as she fumbled through her purse. Seen! Former The Bachelor star Matthew 'Matty J' Johnson (left), 33, appears to have been paired with a petite brunette (right) for the 18th season of Dancing With The Stars, after being spotted with a woman on Wednesday They then proceeded to walk away from the studio together, before stopping at the lights and waiting to cross the road. They mimicked each other's stance while chatting to one another, before Matty leaned on a steel pole. He had his legs crossed and appeared to be attentively listening to what the woman was saying at the time. What was he doing: Matty J was seen chatting to the woman outside MOVE by Aric & Masha in Sydney's Randwick (pictured) as she fumbled through her purse Where to next: The duo then proceeded to walk away from the studio together, before stopping at the lights and waiting to cross the road Friendship sign: They mimicked each other's stance while chatting to one another, before Matty J leaned on a steel pole Smiles all round: The pair appeared to be in very good spirits while waiting for the light to change so they could cross the road The reality star cut a cool casual in a black shirt and shorts, and matching joggers. He paired the outfit with brown sunglasses and an Apple watch, and his various tattoos were on display. Meanwhile, the woman he was with donned a black long-sleeved cropped shirt and matching tights. Her abs were on show as she paired the outfit with a sleeveless vest, black sunglasses and light joggers. Comfort is key! Matty J had his legs crossed and appeared to be attentively listening to what the woman was saying at the time What he was wearing: Matty J cut a cool casual in a black shirt and shorts, and matching joggers Finer details: He paired the outfit with brown sunglasses and an Apple watch, and his various tattoos were on display Her long hair was out loose for the occasion, which she appeared to have taken down with a hair tie around her wrist. Matty J will star on the upcoming dance competition - to air on Channel 10 later this year - after he and fiance Laura Byrne welcomed their second child, Lola Ellis, earlier this month. The couple, who met on The Bachelor Australia in 2017, announced Lola's arrival on February 4. They are also parents to one-year-old daughter Marlie Mae. What she was wearing: Meanwhile, the woman he was with donned a black long-sleeved cropped shirt and matching tights Looking fit! Her abs were on show as she paired the outfit with a sleeveless vest, black sunglasses and light joggers A Larne man who bludgeoned a young dog to death just because it was barking has been jailed for three months. Jailing Michael McAllister at Ballymena Magistrates Court, District Judge Nigel Broderick told the 51-year-old that to have caused the death of Marley the Chihuahua was a terribly cruel thing to do. He told McAllister that to have battered the young dog to death out of some sense of frustration with it because it was barking is wholly unacceptable. On the day his contest was due to start McAllister, from Glynnview Avenue, Larne, Co Antrim, entered guilty pleas to theft of a dog and causing unnecessary suffering to the dog on 4 August last year. A prosecuting lawyer told the court how police were called to an address in the town over a report of a dog being killed and when they spoke to Marleys owner, she told them how McAllister had been in her flat in an angry state. Read More The dog was barking and he lifted the dog and left the flat, said the lawyer adding that two witnesses contacted police to report they saw the defendant with the body of a limp, dead dog. They took Marley off him and gave him back to his distraught owner and the court heard that a post mortem examination determined the cause of death was due to a subdural haematoma which was caused by blunt force trauma. According to Marleys owner, McAllister had declared on numerous occasions....that he would choke the dog if it didnt stop barking. Arrested and interviewed McAllister refused to answer police questions and claimed to a probation officer that he had no recollection of what had happened. Defence counsel Michael Smyth submitted that McAllisters late plea was because he didnt want to admit that he had it in him to kill a defenceless animal. He is remorseful in that he is ashamed of what he has done birth to the dog and to his friendship, said the lawyer. Read More Jailing McAllister, DJ Broderick told him it was clear from the victim impact reports that Marley had given his owner a great deal of comfort and friendship and that he had no doubt she has been emotionally traumatised at the death of her much loved pet. "You had no justification whatsoever for taking this dog away and killing it, said the judge who told McAllister that despite his protestations of amnesia, I have no doubt that you knew exactly what you were doing. Although initially taken to the cells, following a defence application, McAllister was freed on 500 bail pending an appeal of the sentence. A trio of New Jersey State Police troopers rescued a 14-year-old boy who was trapped in waist-deep water at a Salem County marsh and showing symptoms of hypothermia, the agency said Tuesday. The rescue unfolded Sunday around 11:30 p.m. when State Police Sgt. Carl Scowcroft, Trooper Matthew Hess and Trooper Thomas Rheault found the boy stuck in the frigid water near Sawmill Road in Alloway Township after the teen ran away from home, according to police. When troopers arrived to the area, they entered the water and discovered the trapped boy, who was breathing slowly and was unresponsive, State Police said in a statement. Faced with the bitter cold, Scowcroft decided he needed to act fast to save the boy and headed through the mud to reach the child, authorities said. Hess and Rheault kept their flashlights on the boy as the sergeant carried him toward the shoreline. At the time of the rescue, the victim exhibited signs of hypothermia, according to the statement. Alloway Township Fire Rescue crews soon went into the water to join in the rescue while Hess and Rheault secured the teen to a backboard and carried him up an embankment. State Police released body camera footage showing the rescue operation. Authorities said the boy was taken to an area hospital and expected to recover. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Guangzhou further expanded its nucleic acid testing as the city battles the spread of Covid-19, with Haizhu and Yuexiu districts starting mass testing on Sunday. In Haizhu district, residents queued for hours in the rain to get tested on Sunday. The city reported four new local and three new imported cases, and confirmed 14 cases originally reported as asymptomatic on Sunday May 31, 2021 05:47 PM Montgomery County Judge Mark Keough has pleaded guilty in a misdemeanor driving while intoxicated charge that resulted in his license being suspended for 90 days and his paying $2,000 in fines relating to a crash he had in The Woodlands in September. Judge Keough has the highest respect for the judicial process and law enforcement to investigate allegations, Keough attorney Doug Atkinson stated in a release Wednesday. Throughout the investigation of this case Judge Keough cooperated fully with law enforcement. The findings of the investigation showed that there was no alcohol, narcotic, or illegal drugs present in the blood test results. The results include only two prescribed medications, taken as prescribed, that were within the therapeutic range. Atkinson said the first medication included zolpidem, a substance found in a sleep aid that can have residual intoxicating effects in the morning. The other medication did not cause or contribute to any intoxication. After a thorough review of the evidence and consultation with his attorney, Judge Keough has decided to enter into an agreement to resolve his case, Atkinson stated. This will result in Judge Keough accepting responsibility for a first offense misdemeanor DWI and paying a fine, a mandatory driver license suspension, and a state traffic fine. Keough turned himself into law enforcement authorities in December following an investigation of the crash where Keough suffered several injuries including a broken hip. According to the affidavit, Keough was driving on Grogans Mill when he allegedly hit a Mazda while traveling about 52 mph before hitting a law enforcement Tahoe driven by a Precinct 5 Constable deputy at about 39 mph. The posted speed limit along that stretch of roadway is 30 mph. Keough was not wearing a seatbelt and the airbag in his SUV did not deploy until he hit the Tahoe. Keough consented to have his blood drawn once he was hospitalized following the crash. Keoughs blood sample contained 155.5 nanograms per milliliter of zolpidem which is sold as Ambien 1.5 ng/mL of fentanyl and 65 ng/mL of amphetamine, the affidavit states. It also noted the fentanyl was given to Keough on scene by paramedics. In the affidavit, Department of Public Safety Sgt. Joshua Pullen provided medical data from the New England Journal of Medicine that noted zolpidem in amounts above 50 ng/mL revealed significant impairment in driving abilities and such impairment is thought to increase the risk of motor vehicle accident. Pullen also noted the article stated people affected by impairment after takin zolpidem frequently do not recognize their impaired state and that patient self-perception is not an adequate gauge for impairment. Pullen reported when he arrived on scene he found Keough in his Lexus SUV with his eyes closed and a small amount of blood on his face and appeared to be in pain. The documents noted Keough was not responsive at the time. Keough was ultimately hospitalized for several days undergoing surgery to repair his pelvis. Judge Keough does not want this case to be distraction in his fight to keep Montgomery County open so that the citizens of Montgomery County can go to work, school, church and gather with friends and family, Atkinson stated. He will continue to work every day to ensure that Montgomery Countys vaccine program provides as many vaccinations as possible to its citizens. Judge Keough took office to fight for the citizens of this county and he will continue to fight to keep Montgomery County strong as he leads the county through its recovery in the aftermath of the winter storm and through the pandemic towards an even stronger future. Jason Millsaps, who serves as Keoughs chief of staff, said the county judge will continue to lead the county because the misdemeanor plea does not rise to the level to be removed from office according to state law. This was Keoughs second major traffic collision in the past three years. On March 28, 2017, Keough swerved into oncoming traffic several times in Austin before hitting a flatbed truck, according to a crash report filed by the Austin Police Department. The report states that Keough was seen slumped against the side window of his car before the collision. The doctors who later treated Keough suspected he might have suffered a stroke. Keough later said he had been sleep deprived and that his license was temporarily suspended while the Texas Medical Advisory Board reviewed his condition. He denied suffering a stroke. cdominguez@hcnonline.com New Orleans and Jefferson Parish transit riders would see faster commutes under plans vetted Tuesday by the Regional Transit Authority. The agency's board did not approve specific changes, citing economic conditions. Instead, some or all of the plans, which are aimed at easing connections between Jefferson and Orleans parishes, could be realized later this year as coronavirus vaccinations increase and the economic hardships of the pandemic lessen, officials said. +5 How could public transit change in New Orleans? RTA set to consider new plan Public transit officials will consider on Tuesday a significant revamp to the region's public transportation network aimed at shortening travel times for riders in New Orleans and Jefferson Parish. More than 40 bus and streetcar routes in the region will change if the board adopts the entire proposal from the New Orleans Regional Planning Commission. The changes are designed to get more riders to work and school within 20 minutes. "I remain optimistic that we will continue to see declining numbers of COVID-19 cases, and that we are going to continue to see an increase in the number of citizens that have been vaccinated across the country," RTA chief executive officer Alex Wiggins said. "If those continue, in the second quarter of this year we would like to present options to the board for your consideration." The proposal aims to remedy two major flaws of New Orleans' public transportation system: its subpar connections to adjacent Jefferson Parish and sluggish bus arrival times that have repeatedly made riders late for work and school. +4 New regional transit plan aims to increase service, shorten commutes A new plan that aims to increase bus and streetcar service and shorten commute times for riders was vetted this week by the New Orleans Region Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up The plan advises cuts to underused routes, and more frequent service on others. That fix would let about 65% of the region's households without cars catch a bus every 20 minutes, provided they live within a half mile of a bus route, Regional Planning Commission representatives said. Right now, only 35% of residents who don't own cars can get somewhere that quickly. When residents with cars are included, about 38% of households would have access to a speedy public transit line under the plan, compared to the 19% that do now. The proposal suggests big investments in neighborhoods far from the city center, such as New Orleans East and Algiers. Algiers would be better linked to nearby Gretna, while New Orleans East riders would have a more direct line to the Central Business District, where jobs are plentiful. St. Charles streetcar on Canal Street in New Orleans Canal Street is visible from inside a St. Charles line streetcar traveling on the Canal line in New Orleans on Thursday, Aug. 27, 2020. (Photo The West Bank would have more frequent access to New Orleans' city center. So would a Jefferson bus that delivers riders from the Louis Armstrong International Airport. The RTA board will decide on those and other changes in the coming months. Whatever is approved would be implemented in the fall, when the city's tourism-based economy is expected to have recovered somewhat, Wiggins said. Now in its 21st year, the Time 100, is Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. While that may be a small swath of the cosmos, it's formidable among spaces with living organisms. Time decided its list might benefit from expansion, so the Time 100 Next list was hatched to honor "100 emerging leaders who are shaping the future." And among Time's 100 Next most influential people of 2021, Harris County Judge Linda Hidalgo makes the cut. Which is a pretty great distinction for a local elected official. You can read the by-the-book account of Hidalgo's work here. She's the county judge for the third largest county in the United States, which is pretty impressive. She was elected in 2018 and has spent a fair portion of her term overseeing the city's doings during a crisis with the pandemic. Her leadership over the past year is part of why Time honored her, looping in Beto O'Rourke to write an essay about Hidalgo. She's part of an interesting list that includes people under the categories of "artists," "leaders," "phenoms," "innovators" and "advocates." Hidalgo is among 22 leaders including Senators Ben Sasse (essay by Mitt Romney), Raphael Warnock (essay by Bernice A. King) and Jon Ossoff (also Bernice A. King). O'Rourke wrote: "Lina Hidalgos persistence, tenacity and intelligence were clear from the moment I met her on the campaign trail in Texas in 2017. At the time, she was running for Harris County judge, and I was running for the U.S. Senate. I soon realized that she also had an extraordinary level of humility that is rare to find in somebody pursuing public office. "At 27, Hidalgo was elected to be the chief executive of a county that has more people in it than in the state of Nevada. Now 29, she is doing an incredible job as judge, as evidenced by her efforts to quickly respond to COVID-19Harris County announced a mask mandate in April 2020, but a statewide policy didnt follow until Julyas well as to expand her constituents access to the ballot box. Early-voting sites offered by the county nearly tripled last year. "Its hard to imagine a tougher set of circumstances to confront in your first term in office, but she has really distinguished herself and makes us proudnot just as Democrats but as Texans. Thats what leadership looks like." Among the artists: actor John David Washington (written about by Spike Lee), musician Luke Combs (written about by Garth Brooks), actor Florence Pugh (written about by Lena Heady), musician Phoebe Bridgers (written about by Carmen Maria Machado), actor Lakeith Stanfield (written about by Boots Riley), filmmaker John Wilson (written about by Jud Apatow) Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Nexen Tire's Zatec plant in the Czech Republic has started to supply OE tires for the first time N'FERA Primus OE supply to Hyundai Tucson Marks milestone for Nexen Tire's European production since plant opened in 2019 SEOUL, South Korea, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Nexen Tire, a leading global tire manufacturer, today announced that it has started supplying Original Equipment (OE) tires since January for the first time from its European manufacturing plant in the Czech Republic, the first recipient being the fourth-generation Hyundai Tucson. Nexen Tire's Czech manufacturing plant located in Zatec has seen operations stabilize despite the current COVID-19 pandemic, and the supply of N'FERA Primus as OE tires marks a historic milestone since the plant's opening in 2019. N'FERA Primus is a premium ultra-high-performance tire that boasts outstanding braking performance, excellent drainage, and advanced handling to present a stable driving experience. Nexen Tire has been supplying OE tires to global automakers since 2012, including Volkswagen last year and Audi and other top-tier carmakers this year. The company's plant in Zatec is strategically located in the heart of Europe, allowing it to meet rising demands in the region. It also gives the company access to around 30 carmakers located within a 400 km radius. With the stabilization of its European production, Nexen Tire will continue to increase its presence in the market by expanding the supply of OE tires for new cars. The N'FERA Primus will be fitted in sizes 215/65R17, 235/55R18, and 235/50R19 to the fourth-generation Hyundai Tucson sold in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. About Nexen Tire Nexen Tire, established in 1942, is a global tire manufacturer headquartered in South Korea. Nexen Tire, one of the world's fastest growing tire manufacturers, currently interacts with approximately 150 countries around the world and owns four manufacturing plants - two in Korea (Yangsan and Changnyeong) and one in Qingdao, China. Another plant in Zatec, the Czech Republic has also begun operation in 2019. Nexen Tire produces tires for passenger cars, SUVs, and light trucks with advanced technology and excellence in design. Nexen Tire supplies OE tires to global car makers in various countries around the world. In 2014, the company achieved a grand slam of the world's top 4 design awards for the first time amongst the various tire makers in the world. For more information, please visit https://www.nexentire.com/international/ A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/a2d301bf-69ae-443c-a2b3-34cddbd068e4 Executives of U.S. technology companies told lawmakers on February 23 that a recent breach of corporate and government networks was so sophisticated that a nation had to be behind it and said all the evidence points to Russia. The hearing was the first to examine the hack, which was discovered by private security company FireEye in December. It was later revealed that hackers slipped malicious code into updates of network-management software made by the U.S. company SolarWinds, which was then downloaded by several branches of the U.S. government and several U.S. and European corporations. U.S. intelligence officials and industry sources had previously blamed the intrusion on Russian hackers. Moscow has denied any involvement. But the technology executives said that the evidence points to Russia as they described the precision, ambition, and scope of the attack. "We asked ourselves how many engineers do we believe had worked on this collective effort. And the answer we came to was...at least 1,000, very skilled, capable engineers, Microsoft President Brad Smith told the Senate Intelligence Committee. Weve seen substantial evidence that points to the Russian foreign intelligence agency and we have found no evidence that leads us anywhere else," Smith said. Smith told the committee that the true scope of the intrusions is still unknown because most victims are not legally required to disclose attacks unless they involve sensitive information about individuals. President Joe Biden's administration is weighing punitive measures against Russia, and White House press secretary Jen Psaki said it would be weeks not months before the U.S. responds. We have asked the intelligence community to do further work to sharpen the attribution that the previous administration made about precisely how the hack occurred, what the extent of the damage is, and what the scope and scale of the intrusion is, Psaki said. And were still in the process of working that through now. At least nine government agencies and 100 private companies were breached, but what was taken has not been revealed. U.S. government agencies affected include the Treasury, Justice, and Commerce departments, but the full list has not been publicly released. Smith said there are victims around the world, including in Canada, Mexico, Spain, and the United Arab Emirates. Microsoft revealed in December that the hackers were able to gain access into its closely guarded source code but said they did not have permission to modify any code or engineering systems. FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia told the Senate committee that his company has nearly 100 people working to study and contain the breach. He said the hackers first installed malicious code in October 2019 but didn't activate it immediately in order to see if they could remain undetected. They then returned in March and began to steal the log-in credentials of people who were authorized to be on the networks so they could have a secret key to move around at will, Mandia said. The Senate committee also heard from Sudhakar Ramakrishna, the CEO of SolarWinds, who took over the company after the hack occurred, and George Kurtz, the president and CEO of CrowdStrike, another leading security company. Ramakrishna said his company still has not found how the hackers managed to slip malware in the middle of the software supply chain at the point where completed code is tailored to users' configurations. With reporting by AP, Reuters, and AFP Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. CHARLOTTE, N.C., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Independence Fund celebrates the introduction of legislation to Adopt Wounded Heroes Day in North Carolina, recognized annually on April 24th. State Representative David Willis and State Senator Todd Johnson led the charge to introduce the bill in honor of wounded Heroes in North Carolina, notably Union County's SGT Michael Verardo who endured life changing injuries in Afghanistan on April 24, 2010. An Alive Day recognizes the day a Service Member was severely injured in combat but because of the advancements of modern medicine survives the catastrophic combat injuries. Since April 24, 2010 SGT Verardo has endured 120 surgeries along with years of speech, visual, physical, and occupational therapies. Verardo, like so many other catastrophically wounded, injured, and ill Veterans, brings the scars of war back home where the bravery and sacrifice from serving our country is reflected every day through courage and resilience to overcome new challenges and obstacles. On this upcoming eleventh Alive Day for Verardo, The Independence Fund salutes not only his heroism, but "all other wounded heroes who have bravely made great sacrifices in service to our nation," according to the General Assembly of North Carolina House of Representatives. "As the wife and caregiver of one of our nation's most catastrophically wounded heroes, I am thrilled to see recognition for those who have paid a high price to keep us the land of the free. Wearing our nation's uniform was the greatest honor of Michael's lifetime - and celebrating that sacrifice is something we can all unite behind," said Sarah Verardo, The Independence Fund Chief Executive Officer. SGT Verardo is an all-terrain track chair recipient and the chief ambassador for The Independence Fund, one of nearly 2,500 Veterans injured in the line of military service who have been awarded all-terrain track wheelchairs from The Independence Fund. Going forward, April 24th will be recognized in the state of North Carolina in celebration of all of our wounded heroes and the battles that they endure long after leaving the battlefield. The Independence Fund and NC General Assembly Members, led by Representative David Willis acknowledge that when a Service Member comes home with life changing injuries, the entire family absorbs the sacrifice and adjusts life to care for the wounded Veteran. "I strongly believe that we have a responsibility to recognize the heroes who serve our country. An Alive Day is the perfect milestone to acknowledge the wounded heroes in North Carolina who have sacrificed for our freedoms and to ensure that their sacrifices are remembered long after they leave the battlefield. As a member of the North Carolina General Assembly I have a duty to support all in our community, and I can think of no finer way to honor our wounded heroes than dedicating this day," said North Carolina House Representative David Willis. About The Independence Fund Established in 2007, The Independence Fund is a national Veterans Service Organization dedicated to meeting the unmet needs of catastrophically wounded Veterans, Caregivers, and their families through a variety of programs. To learn more, visit www.independencefund.org About North Carolina House Representative David Willis David Willis is a member of the North Carolina House of Representatives, representing District 68. He assumed office on January 1, 2021. Willis represents District 68 and has been a resident of Western Union County, NC for nearly 20. A business owner, and businessman of over 25 years, Representative Willis's goal is to help Union County continue to thrive and be the best place in North Carolina to live and raise a family. SOURCE The Independence Fund Also debuting this month is The Afro Sheen X Black Girl Ventures Pitch Competition. A groundbreaking virtual event designed to uplift women of color in their entrepreneurial endeavors. Black Girl Ventures creates access to capital, capacity, and community for Black/Brown women-identifying founders. A trailblazer within the Black hair care space, Afro Sheen enters this partnership in the hopes of opening the doors for new hair care innovators to bring their own businesses to market. Participants will deliver their pitches to a panel of high-profile judges as well as supporters across the United States who will be able to tune in, submit votes, and make donations for their favorite contestants. Afro Sheen executive leadership will serve in a hands-on advisory capacity, providing invaluable business guidance including advice on marketing and preparing to enter the retail space. The application deadline is February 26th at 11:59pm EST, and the competition will air live on April 22, 2021. Afro Sheen products are available in Walmart, Sally Beauty, CVS, and Amazon.com. For more information, please visit Afro Sheen online at afrosheen.com or on Instagram @afrosheen. For all media inquiries, please contact: First and Last PR Stephanie Scott-Bradshaw Harmonee Dunbar [email protected] SOURCE Afro Sheen Related Links http://afrosheen.com Ambassador Korniychuk presented his credentials to the President of Israel Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Yevhen Korniychuk presented his credentials to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and thanked for his assistance in Ukraine's negotiations on obtaining a COVID-19 vaccine. The ceremony took place on Wednesday in Jerusalem. The parties also discussed the current Ukrainian-Israeli relations and stressed the need to combat manifestations of anti-Semitism, racism and other forms of intolerance. Ambassador Korniychuk raised the issue of developing military-technical cooperation, strengthening trade ties and work on the FTA Agreement. The head of the Ukrainian diplomatic mission confirmed the invitation to Reuven Rivlin to visit Ukraine to participate in 30th anniversary of Independence events We live in troubled times, ones which dwarf the effects of the pandemic. It is the nations increasing erosion in the trust of our institutions, our laws, even our history. Half the nation believes the 2016 election was illegitimate, the other half that the 2020 election was stolen, that laws are enforced selectively to reflect the agendas of those in power, even that the Supreme Court lacks legitimacy. The struggle between globalists and nationalists is reflected in border policy, judicial activism, policing and public funding, racial rage, the toppling of statues. Amazingly, the public longs for unity and consensus and politicians running for office deceptively vow to build it where it is no longer possible. We used to believe that the Napa Valley was immune to such a divide, that our politicians would follow up on their promises to safeguard our environment, safeguard our history, safeguard our quality of life. This is what they all say. But at the county supervisors level, their own use permit laws have become irrelevant. Violating them, instead of sanctions result in rewarding them. The weekly onslaught of approved violations has become nothing short of scandalous. Whether the Talibans recapture of Kabul comes to pass or not, staying engaged with Afghanistan is Indias foremost challenge in the region In the Afghanistan context, the present juncture can be characterised as the twilight hour embedding the deepest uncertainty. India cannot but be greatly concerned as it has indicated interest in being invested over the long term. It has unmistakable strategic interests in a geopolitical (and geo-economic) area that marks the junction of South Asia, West Asia and Central Asia. Indias interest has lately been underlined in spite of the unsettling political and military situation in Afghanistan, which may well permit the return of the Taliban to the seat of power in Kabul. Indeed, Indias commitment to the people of Afghanistan was restated when earlier this month it signed the $300 million Shahtoot dam project that will provide clean drinking water to the once great city of Kabul, which has fallen on hard times in recent decades. The Taliban, a strong politico-military outfit specialising in the terrorist method, are a special product of Pakistan, manufactured to permit Islamabad to have a long-term hold over Kabul. This is widely recognised. The Taliban leadership lives in Pakistan. Whether the Taliban will continue to be under Pakistans thumb over the long haul is a matter for the future. Pakistan influences Afghanistan in deep, malignant ways as it has a long border with that country. Pakistans best friend China, now militarily and economically very powerful, also has a border with Afghanistan. India, on the other hand, does not, and is thus disadvantaged by geography. And yet, it must remain engaged with Afghanistan. Whether the Talibans recapture of Kabul comes to pass or not, staying engaged with Afghanistan is Indias foremost challenge in the region. New tools need to be devised. A new diplomacy with the friendly countries of the region, in particular Iran and Russia, which enjoy contiguity with Afghanistan (Russia via Tajikistan, where Moscows influence is paramount), must be envisioned. Indeed, the process of better gauging the Taliban, and forging the terms on which a relationship with this group can be reached, is also a part of the challenge for India. The uncertainty in the Afghan theatre has been precipitated on account of the agreement reached by Americas erstwhile Trump administration with the Taliban one year ago this month. Under the Doha accord, all US troops must leave Afghanistan by May 1 this year in return for the Taliban cutting links with Al Qaeda. Alongside, the Taliban are enjoined to engage in an intra-Afghan dialogue in which the Afghan government is included. This is with a view to the formation of a government that will enjoy wide acceptability in the country. The Taliban have, however, scuttled meaningful negotiations. They have instead unleashed violence on an unheard-of scale, killing around 50 people daily over the past year, and engaging in targeted assassinations. The prognosis is dire. If the American forces pull out wholesale as planned, it is widely thought that civil war will break out. Armed factions are likely to emerge to resist the Taliban as the latter attempt to take control in Kabul with the help of Pakistan (and possibly China), while some groups may strike deals with the Taliban. All eyes are on the new US administration of President Joe Biden. Will he stick to the timetable of withdrawal of American forces envisaged by his predecessor? Or will he, as many have urged, adopt a conditions-based approach whereby the US forces will persevere with a withdrawal scheme that will be guided by conditions on the ground and not by an artificial timetable. The Afghans, and the regional powers, are naturally watching the situation closely. Iran and Russia, which carry considerable weight in Afghanistan, would want the Americans to withdraw soonest, but not in a rush. They fear that a hasty US pullout will inexorably pave the path for a quick Taliban or Pakistan takeover as other leading political and armed factions (over which Iran and Russia have natural leverage) will be disadvantaged if the Taliban cut through militarily, pre-empting a political process. India -- while it has commonalities with Tehran and Moscow on the Afghan issue -- desires that the US ensure a smooth political process for the future governance of Afghanistan in which all participants, including the Taliban if they are interested, engage in political competition on the basis of an agreed Constitution, without resort to arms, in a sovereign, democratic, Afghanistan. New Delhi has nursed such a goal for long but has done all too little to work in that direction. It practically found itself rooted to the ground for more than six months after the US and Taliban signed the Doha agreement in February 2020, uttering diplomatic pieties and doing little else. India showed yet again that while it has influence in Afghanistan, especially with the people, it possesses little leverage. Lately, however, attempts are being made to change this state of affairs. To the satisfaction of the Ashraf Ghani government in Kabul, New Delhi actively engaged the United States and Nato to resist a precipitate military withdrawal and has shown other signs of engaging more deeply. It may be appropriate to make mention in this context of the Afghan charge daffaires in New Delhi, Tahir Qadiry, who worked with energy, and some foresight, in a most difficult moment to impress upon India to step up its act and be proactive to mobilise Afghan factions in the democratic direction even as the US-sanctioned Doha process (which may conceivably unravel) plays its music in a different register. Kabul has not had an ambassador in New Delhi for more than two years and it fell to this young diplomat to fill a big gap. It is this spirit that saw in the recent period the arrival in New Delhi of senior Afghan personalities such as Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ata Mohammad Noor and others although the Covid-19 pandemic inhibited travel. The building of a viable consensus among the top political figures of Afghanistan is crucial in the context of a post-US Afghanistan. India enjoys the goodwill to be a catalyst. But will it play that part? Zamir Kabulov, the Russian Presidents special envoy for Afghanistan and a respected Kabul hand, is said to have noted wryly: If India wants to come to the party, it must dance! Perhaps preliminary steps have been taken in that direction. But it is still early days. What New Delhi must really prepare for is to remain on terra firma in the Afghan theatre even if the US troops pull out completely in the next two months. People in rural parts of the UK who are testing SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband network have responded positively, with one user calling the service 'amazing'. UK users have reported huge jumps in speed after switching to Starlink, which is operated by SpaceX the firm owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and powered by a constellation of more than 1,000 satellites over Earth. Testing of Starlink was recently opened up to UK residents desperate for a better connection in certain parts of the country, while other areas have been told to expect coverage arriving sometime in mid to late 2021. A Starlink kit consisting of a Starlink dish Wi-Fi router, power supply, cables and mounting tripod comes through the post, but it's 'available to a limited number of users per coverage area'. Early testers claim to have achieved download speeds of up to 215 megabits per second (Mbps), making common activities like streaming possible from multiple devices at the same time. In contrast, some users say their traditional broadband would often lag between 0.5 and 1Mbps, only capable of basic tasks such as email. Starlink doesn't come cheap however a Starlink user has to pay 439 for the hardware kit and an extra monthly cost of 89. This compares with an average monthly UK broadband price of 27.39 from cable-based providers, according to comparison website Cable. Pictured, a Starlink dish, which is part of the kit for users of the service. SpaceX aims to beam high-speed internet to those left behind by traditional cable-based providers. A Starlink user has to pay 439 for the hardware kit and an extra monthly cost of 89 Starlink came to the UK after regulator Ofcom issued it a satellite network licence on November 16 last year. MailOnline has contacted Ofcom regarding exactly which areas the service is currently being offered in. Currently anyone can go to the Starlink website, enter their address and place an order for a Starlink kit. However, users in urban areas are likely to get the message 'Starlink is targeting coverage in your area in mid to late 2021' as the initial beta service seems to be prioritising rural areas. Aaron Wilkes, who lives in Bredgar, Kent, is one of the early beneficiaries of Starlink in the UK. He said his household's fixed line should achieve about 20Mbps significantly less than the 71.8Mbps national average reported by Ofcom for May 2020. 'We moved up to this small village and it was an absolute ball ache when we got our slow connection here,' Wilkes said. HOW FAST ARE DIFFERENT FIBRE BROADBAND CONNECTIONS? Full fibre: 1 Gbps. HD video conference or hour-long webinar takes mere seconds to download. Ultrafast: 300 Mbps. Can handle multiple online activities for multiple users at once without major interruptions in service. Superfast: 30 Mbps. Under ideal conditions this will be sufficient for your average internet user. The UK government recommends a minimum of 10 Mbps per household or business, as per its Universal Service Obligation (USO) for broadband. Advertisement Using Starlink, he receives an average of 175Mbps, and up to 215Mbps, meaning games can be downloaded in little over an hour. On a previous occasion, a game started downloading at the snail's pace of 0.5Mbps, so he 'gave up because there was no point'. 'The ability to be able to download content so quickly compared to our standard BT line is amazing,' said Wilkes. Another UK user, Martin Langmaid, set up his mother's home near the Devon village of Dunsford with Starlink because she needed it to run her businesses. 'She moved into the countryside to be nearer to my brother, who is a farmer,' Langmaid said. 'Modern-day business requires internet, you can't get away from it, so that's what she needed. 'If you need connectivity to run a business and if you need connectivity for communication, particularly in Covid times, 90 a month is quite justifiable.' However, he said they are using a mix of Starlink and 4G, as the satellite outages have an impact on real-time tasks like video conferencing. 'I think a lot of people will do something similar, where they will leave their DSL [digital subscriber line] in place at the moment or have 4G, combine it with Starlink,' Langmaid added. Starlink says: 'During beta, users can expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s and latency from 20ms to 40ms in most locations over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system' 'Once Starlink has the capacity there, the outages should ultimately disappear once the coverage is in place, then that's when I think people start cancelling things like DSL and 4G dongles.' Wilkes, on the other hand, is waiting for his landline contract to end so he can cancel it completely. 'I've not touched it [the fixed line]. Everything has been switched over Sky TV, all the Alexas, phones, tablets, are all now over on Starlink,' he said. 'The interesting thing is, over the months I've had it I've gone from having 127 minutes of downtime, probably down to about four to five minutes a day now. 'And that's usually overnight when they're doing updates so you don't even see it.' Musk (pictured) reportedly wants to have tens of thousands of his satellites in space eventually, enabling a seamless connection for all users Starlink is now delivering its initial beta service internationally, and will continue expansion to 'near global coverage of the populated world' in 2021. Musk said on Tuesday that he expects Starlink's speed to double to around 300Mbps and coverage for 'most of Earth' by the end of the year, followed by 'all' in 2022. The firm aims to have deployed 1,440 of the 260 kg (570 pound) spacecraft to provide near-global service by late 2021 or 2022. The last load of 60 satellites to be sent into space were launched only last week. SpaceX has now launched 1,145 Starlink satellites in total, although about 60 have been decommissioned and deorbited. During the current beta test, users can expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s and latency from 20ms to 40ms in most locations over the coming months. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the 19th batch of approximately 60 Starlink satellites launches from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on February 16 Starlink already has 'over 10,000 users' worldwide for its beta service, according to Musk, who wants to have tens of thousands of his satellites in space eventually, enabling a seamless connection for all users. SpaceX has also been approved by the US's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch more than 12,000 Starlink satellites in total. There are some drawbacks for users, however as well as the hefty cost, there are planned outages due to the limited number of satellites and the fact that Starlink is still in early testing. The Starlink website reads: 'There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all. 'As we launch more satellites, install more ground stations and improve our networking software, data speed, latency and uptime will improve dramatically.' However, those who have suffered with sluggish internet say it is a price worth paying. Existing providers seem to be considering satellite as a possible answer for rural areas too, with BT in early talks with government-backed satellite firm OneWeb. Ofcom believes that around 190,000 premises are unable to receive a decent broadband service, which it defines as offering download speeds of 10 Mbps and upload speeds of one Mbps. Judith Monachina is director of Housatonic Heritage Oral History Center at Berkshire Community College. This interview was conducted as a part of the NAACP Oral History Project in collaboration with the Oral History Center. A podcast of this interview will be posted on the Eagle and OHC sites, and the entire interview is online with the University of Massachusetts Libraries Special Collections. This article is part of a series about people and their work. There has been nothing slapdash about the Governments presentation this week of the case for keeping us all locked down in an ever-more depressing loop of lockdown extensions. The Prime Ministers announcement cancelling Christmas last year seemed hasty and ill-prepared. By contrast, the move this week to cancel Easter and keep the economy shut down was better planned, with dossiers and scary graphs based on dubious modelling. To justify keeping us in cold storage for another four months, the PM leaned on his reliable allies in Sage. The more Sage gets wrong, the more Mr Johnson clings to its view of the pandemic. Few politicians have any understanding of science, so they become captives of their most cautious adviser, and fail to question the validity of their data and advice. The Prime Ministers announcement (pictured) cancelling Christmas last year seemed hasty and ill-prepared Ignorance Take the PMs confident assertion on Monday: As the modelling released by Sage today shows, we cannot escape the fact that lifting lockdown will result in more cases, more hospitalisations and, sadly, more deaths. Mr Johnsons use of the word fact is revealing in that context, as it suggests a fundamental ignorance of the uses and limitations of modelling. You do not deduce facts from modelling, but ranges of possibilities, which by their very nature fluctuate wildly according to the assumptions used and the data submitted. Hence the highly contentious figure of 500,000 deaths that was posited by an Imperial College scientist at the beginning of the epidemic, which to be fair was not a prediction, but an extrapolation of a worst-case scenario. That, of course, did not stop the figure being seized upon by the media and used by the Government to justify the first lockdown. Now, based on similarly faulty methodology, we are asked to believe Sage and its modellers claim that 91,000 more people will die if lockdown is lifted too early. In a worst-case scenario, the additional death toll could reach almost 150,000. These figures are not facts. They are hypothetical and based on models which have, in the past, repeatedly been found wanting. Besides, this is not how modelling is supposed to be applied to political decision-making that affects the economic future of this country. Now, based on similarly faulty methodology, we are asked to believe Sage and its modellers claim that 91,000 more people will die if lockdown is lifted too early. Pictured: Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance during Monday's media briefing If you allowed your life to be governed by worst-case scenarios, you would never drive a car or get on an aeroplane. Risk is there to be mitigated, not eliminated. Moreover, this approach ignores the key fact that evidence from around the world, reported in the journal the Lancet at the end of last year, shows there is very little correlation between legal restrictions and the rate of infection. There are numerous ways in which the modelling can be faulty. For a start, it assumes that in lockdown, everyone is obeying the rules, when in fact common sense, and your own eyes, tell you that many are discreetly ignoring them. This is particularly so in rules or laws! banning family contact, which many people regard as disproportionate and cruel. The initial justification for lockdown, you may remember, was to protect the NHS. Well, the NHS did not fall over, though it was mightily tested and subject to its annual seasonal overload. Now, despite the superb progress being made with vaccination, Mr Johnson and Sage have alighted on a new justification to keep the country locked down vaccine refuseniks. Sir Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Adviser, suggests the Government is working on the assumption that 20 per cent of the population will decline the offer of a vaccine. Indeed, although uptake is currently running at over 90 per cent, as the vaccine is rolled out to younger groups this figure will likely decrease. If you add into the mix the children who will not be vaccinated, Vallance suggests, and an 80 per cent vaccine efficacy, then youve got roughly 50 per cent [protected] across the whole population. Sir Patrick adds: So it tells you that even at quite high levels of coverage and protection, youve still got a large number of people unprotected. Sir Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Adviser, suggests the Government is working on the assumption that 20 per cent of the population will decline the offer of a vaccine But this logic is faulty. For a start, children are almost entirely unaffected by the virus. And anyway, why should the country be held hostage because one-fifth of the population decline to protect themselves? It could turn out to be a hugely inflammatory approach those who have had the vaccine may feel resentment towards refuseniks blamed for perpetuating the lockdown. In any event, there is good reason to believe that the R rate will stay low because we are moving towards summer, when seasonal viruses fade away of their own accord. Exposure The flu-like symptoms experienced by many people who have had the Oxford jab may actually suggest that many have a pre-existing degree of immunity, either from a mild case of Covid, or from exposure to a previous coronavirus. But, ultimately, having the vaccine must be a matter of personal choice. If people will not be jabbed, that is their right, and the Governments job should be to explain to them the consequences. As for children, when they return to school next month, it will be reported that cases are soaring again. But that will be because there is to be a vast expansion of testing in the classroom as well as at home by their parents. It is infuriating to see case numbers being reported as rising when the key determinant, the number of tests, is never given. And many of these test results will be false positives. Even assuming a very low level of 1 per cent false-positive results, a million tests per day would mean 10,000 apparent cases per day (roughly the current rate), even if the virus had completely disappeared! To justify keeping us in cold storage for another four months, the PM leaned on his reliable allies in Sage. The more Sage gets wrong, the more Mr Johnson (pictured at a London school yesterday) clings to its view of the pandemic Additional testing will inevitably suggest a surging infection rate, but the numbers are meaningless unless taken with the essential details about the accuracy of the tests details which are never referred to. I sense that Mr Johnson now recognises the troubling truth that Covid has become endemic in our population, and that it will continue to evolve new variants. Damage Regrettably, we may unintentionally have encouraged more serious variants with lockdowns instead of allowing milder variants to circulate and ultimately prevail. The science behind fighting Covid is difficult, and politicians need all the help they can get to interpret it correctly. Sadly, Mr Johnson has repeatedly retreated to his comfort redoubt of a handful of key advisers who seem wilfully blind to the fact that their recommendations are tearing apart the fabric of our society. He needs to draw upon a wider circle of medical and scientific advisers, particularly those who can speak to the long-term consequences of lockdown. Instead, we seem to have reached a peak of risk aversion in a country which once prided itself on its sense of proportion. Worst of all, the continuing actions are hugely counterproductive. If you damage the economy, you damage the healthcare system, as you impoverish the population by destroying jobs and businesses. The economy is vital to healthcare. Countries that grow poorer develop worse health outcomes, and you dont need a computer model to work that out. Potter Park Zoo Nkeke must be a fan of numbers because for her third litter of pups she gave birth to triplets. According to the Potter Park Zoo, the experienced North American river otter mom gave birth to her third litter at the Lansing, Michigan facility on Feb. 3. "This is Miles and Nkeke's third litter of pups, and while each litter has been exciting, this one is especially so since it is their first set of triplets," Carolyn Schulte, a Potter Park Zoo otter keeper, shared on the zoo's blog. "Nkeke is an experienced mom and thanks to her excellent relationship with the keepers we have been able to monitor the pup's growth closely to ensure they each grow at a healthy rate." Nkeke has been doing a great job caring for their babies so far, keeping all of her pups at a healthy weight. RELATED: The National Zoo Panda Cub Is 6 Months Old and He's Ready to Enjoy the Outdoors Snow Included "With triplets there are more demands on the mother and we're cautiously hopeful that she will be able to raise all three without veterinary intervention," Potter Park Zoo Director of Animal Health Dr. Ronan Eustace said. Since the pups are continuing to nurse without issue, the zoo's keepers are giving Nkeke and her babies space to bond. Because of this, the zoo has not yet determined the sex of each otter baby. RELATED VIDEO: Lincoln, a Sea Otter at the Oregon Zoo, Knows How to Work His Angles Lincoln, A Sea Otter at the Oregon Zoo, Knows How to Work His Angles Smile for the camera, Lincoln! Nkeke arrived at the Potter Park Zoo in 2016 from the Roger Williams Zoo in Rhode Island, and her mate Miles was born at the Michigan zoo in 2013, marking Potter Park Zoo's first otter birth. The pair's first litter of two males was born in Feb. 2018, and their second litter also two males was born in Feb. 2020. Otter lovers can keep updated on the progress of Nkeke's three new pups by following the Potter Park Zoo on Facebook. More than 200 childcare centres have fallen foul of a new Victorian government rating system that promotes the best kindergartens in the state. The rating system, launched on Thursday, publicly endorses childcare centres that are government funded, offer kindergarten programs that include play-based learning and are led by a tertiary-qualified teacher. Children at Merri Community Child Care Centre, which has received the state governments tick of approval. Credit:Jason South Centres that satisfy those three conditions will be able to display a kinder tick. Victorian Minister for Early Childhood Ingrid Stitt said the initiative would make it easier for parents to find a good quality kindergarten program. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) whispers to Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) during a House Republican Leadership news conference in the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Feb. 24, 2021. (Al Drago/Getty Images) McCarthy, Cheney Clash Over Whether Trump Should Speak at CPAC Two of the top Republicans in the House of Representatives disagree about whether President Donald Trump should speak at the largest annual conservative conference this weekend. In a tense moment at the end of a press conference, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) gave opposite answers when prompted by a reporter about whether Trump should speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The former president is expected to deliver remarks at the conference on Feb. 28, his first public speech since leaving the White House. Yes, he should, McCarthy said. Thats up to CPAC, said Cheney, who was one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. I dont believe that he should be playing a role in the future of the party or the country. McCarthy, after a pause, said, On that high note, thank you very much. Cheneys public defiance of McCarthy is notable because he rallied House Republicans against voting to remove her from the role of conference chair, the third-highest Republican post in the House. McCarthy and Trump spokesman Jason Miller didnt respond to requests for comment by press time. The small minority of Republicans who broke with Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach are facing political backlash in their home states. The Wyoming GOP censured Cheney for her vote. Republican firebrand Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) traveled to Wyoming to rally against Cheney, and Donald Trump Jr., the presidents son, called the rally to add his support. Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski singled Cheney out as the first target for his political action committee. Shes going to make a great contributor for MSNBC, Taylor Budowich, a conservative strategist and former adviser to Trumps 2020 campaign, told The Epoch Times. In announcing her intention to vote to impeach Trump, Cheney released a statement blaming the president for the breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6. The Senate ultimately voted to acquit Trump of the accusation that he incited an insurrection. But the acquittal didnt close the rift among Republicans about Trump. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), despite voting to acquit the president, laid some of the blame for the Capitol breach on Trump, and doubled down with an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, arguing that Trump bears moral responsibility for the attack. Trump responded days later with a statement denouncing McConnell and suggesting that he will only back candidates who are fully behind the Make America Great Again agenda. National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) released a memo on Feb. 23 urging Republicans to promptly drop the internal squabbling and focus on defeating the Democrats in future elections. But now is not the time for division and heres why: For the first time in any of our lives, socialism has become the unabashed, governing policy of the Democrat Party, Scott wrote. The Democrats are fast abandoning any pretense of allegiance to the first and second amendments to our Constitution, theyll give up on the rest of it in due time. Nearly seven million Texans are struggling with hunger right now, a crisis that hasn't abated despite $3 trillion of federal assistance administered throughout the pandemic. With the state facing another food emergency after last weeks brutal storms and with unemployment rates still high, experts on food insecurity and advocates for low-income people say the next round of aid cant come soon enough. Yet the $1,400 stimulus checks Democrats are pushing through Congress are a stopgap at best, they say. Celia Cole, the chief executive officer of Feeding Texas, the states largest hunger relief organization, said around 1 in 4 households are struggling to afford food. On average, food banks across the state are serving hundreds of thousands of people every month, though some urban areas - like Houston and San Antonio - see much higher volume. Its been described as the perfect storm so many times, we said wed never use that phrase again, Cole said of the spike in food insecurity since the pandemic hit last spring. But it really was. Overnight, the demand doubled. Now Playing: Video: Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle That demand is still evident daily in San Antonio, where Eric Cooper, the CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank, has seen more than 625,000 individuals pass through the organizations food distribution locations. Many are first-time food bank visitors, spurred by job loss and whittled-down savings. Lines of 2,000 cars snake through distribution sites most days, requiring logistical planning on par with that of concerts or sporting events. The scene is sometimes so staggering, Cooper said he asks himself if they will have enough food to meet the need. I have not become accustomed or immune to the line, Cooper said. It haunts me every day when I see it. Stimulus a short-term fix Boosting nutritional assistance, along with direct aid to families in the form of stimulus checks, are key provisions of President Joe Bidens $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, which the House is expected to vote on later this week. But the measure that could most directly address the Texas hunger problem, advocates say, is the controversial proposal to push the minimum wage up to $15 by 2025. Republicans and even some moderate Democrats have rejected it as too devastating to the economy, especially businesses already threatened by the slowdown caused by COVID-19. IN-DEPTH: A $15 minimum wage would mean raises for 3.5 million Texans, but at what cost? Texas would be among the states most affected by hiking the minimum wage, with an estimated 3.5 million workers getting a raise, according to estimates from the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute. Jeremy Everett, the director of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty, said stimulus checks act as Band-Aids that keep families fed and bills at bay for a month or so. Citing data from the Urban Institute, Everett said food insecurity rates in Texas jumped from 11.1 percent before the pandemic to a whopping 23.5 percent by April. Once stimulus payments went out, that rate dropped to 18.5 percent until July. TEXAS TAKE: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox Around 80 percent of respondents among households in the U.S. that spent their spring stimulus checks reported using it on food, according to Household Pulse Surveys from June. All of this is evidence that the spring stimulus checks did have a huge impact, in the short term, for families dealing with a crunch for necessary groceries, Everett said. But he said enduring change will only come from sustained, systemic intervention, like increasing benefits for food stamp programs and boosting employment opportunities. We need policies, systems and environments to support people, said Cassandra Johnson, a professor at Texas State University in San Marcos who studies food insecurity and food policy. What we really need is a dramatic reset to the system. Preparing for a food cliff Last weeks polar plunge has again spiked demand at food banks. The storm may have caused many residents to skip a much-needed paycheck or incur unexpected emergency housing costs, said Brian Greene, president and CEO of the Houston Food Bank. Houston Food Banks massive distribution sites fed around 140,000 people a week during the pandemics peak, Greene said, a number that slowly dropped until the widespread power and water outages last week. Now the crowds are back. Meanwhile, food banks are preparing for an imminent food cliff with federal supplies running dry and need showing no sign of abating, said Cole, CEO at Feeding Texas. Theres also the worry of burnout among food bank volunteers and support staff, who have faced unceasing demands on their time for nearly a full year now. Said Cole: How much longer, from an energy and morale perspective, can we keep this up? raga.justin@chron.com Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct an overestimation of the number of Texans struggling with hunger. One of Queenslands top cops will spearhead an investigation into police conduct hours before the death of a woman at a burned Logan townhouse where two bodies were found. Two bodies, believed to be Doreen Langham and her former partner Gary Hely, were found in the remains of Ms Langhams home in Browns Plains on Monday, as police investigate domestic violence links. A coronial investigation, which will consider the police response to the incident, will also be done. Deputy Commissioner Steve Gollschewski, who became one of the Queensland Police Services most prominent public faces during the COVID-19 pandemic, has been tapped to lead the police investigation. Hundreds of supporters of Georgia's jailed opposition leader rallied Wednesday outside his jail as a political crisis in the Western-backed country showed few signs of abating Rustavi, Georgia, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 24th Feb, 2021 ) :Hundreds of supporters of Georgia's jailed opposition leader rallied Wednesday outside his jail as a political crisis in the Western-backed country showed few signs of abating. Georgia has been in the grip of a crisis since parliamentary elections in October, which opposition parties slammed as rigged after the ruling party, Georgian Dream, claimed a narrow victory. This week's arrest of Nika Melia -- the leader of Georgia's main opposition party, the United National Movement (UNM) -- further exacerbated the political crisis. A motorcade with hundreds of Melia's supporters arrived in the southeastern town of Rustavi where they staged a rally outside his jail to express solidarity with the imprisoned politician. "We are here to express solidarity with Nika," Zaal Udumashvili, a UNM leader, told journalists. Gigi Ugulava of the European Georgia opposition party called Melia a "political prisoner." "Protests will continue until all political prisoners are liberated and snap polls are called," he added. Opposition parties have said the parliamentary elections in October were fraudulent and have refused to enter new parliament and demanded fresh polls. The standoff took on dangerous new dimension on Tuesday when police used tear gas in a raid on the UNM headquarters to arrest Melia. Melia, a charismatic 41-year-old politician who has united Georgia's traditionally divided opposition forces against the ruling party, has denounced as politically motivated his prosecution on charges of "organising mass violence" during anti-government protests in 2019. On Tuesday, thousands took to the streets and opposition parties announced more mass protests to demand Melia's liberation and new polls. Georgian Dream leaders insist his arrest was lawful. Melia's lawyer Giorgi Kondakhishvili said he was awaiting a court decision on the possibility of appealing against his client's detention. The United States has led a chorus of international condemnation of Melia's arrest and called on Georgian leaders to de-escalate the crisis. Cameron Robbie will soon make his debut appearance on Neighbours, following in his sister, Margot's footsteps. And the 25-year-old certainly had his Instagram followers in stitches when he discovered a mouse hiding in the corner of his bedroom. The aspiring actor attempted to capture the rodent late in the evening after returning home from a Disney+ event. Get it out of here! Margot Robbie's brother Cameron struggled to get sleep after finding a tiny mouse hiding in his bedroom on Tuesday After hearing something move in his chest of drawers, the actor pulled out the last shelf and found the critter that was annoying him. He said in one video: 'Okay, f***ing Ratatouille. I don't get enough sleep as it is, so now I'm p***ed off.' In the next clip, he whispered under his breath: 'Why did I even move from the beach. I had a beautiful apartment, by the water.' He then joked: 'I know I went to a Disney+ event, but this activation is too much.' There it is: The actor pulled out the last shelf from his chest of drawers and found the critter backed up into the corner. He said a clip: 'Okay, f***ing Ratatouille. I don't get enough sleep as it is, so now I'm pissed off' Over it! Unfortunately, it appeared the mouse managed to escape from the paper bag he set up. It seemed to have hid under his bed, and the actor joked that he was giving his two weeks notice for the apartment Cameron finally got the final drawer out and discovered the little mouse backed up into the corner and tried to coax it out. He placed a paper bag in front of in and said: 'it's alright, you just get into the bag,' just before the mouse scurried in. Unfortunately, it seemed the mouse managed to escape and hide under his bed, before the actor joked that he was giving his two weeks notice for the apartment. Just like sis! Cameron's shocking discovery at home comes after he revealed he would be following in his sister, Margot's footsteps after being cast on Neighbours Cameron recently revealed that he is set to follow in his sister Margot's footsteps on Neighbours. He has been cast as wealthy lifeguard Jesse Porter, who takes a summer job at Lassiters bar. Cameron told the Herald Sun earlier this year he was grateful to have a role in the long-running soap a decade after his Oscar-nominated sister Margot, who played Donna Freedman, left the Neighbours set to pursue her Hollywood dream. Ramsey St... here he comes!Cameron revealed he will star in Neighbours as wealthy lifeguard Jesse Porter, who takes a summer job at Lassiters bar A legacy to follow: Cameron told the Herald Sun earlier this year he was grateful to have a role in the long-running soap a decade after his Oscar-nominated sister Margot, who played Donna Freedman, left to pursue her Hollywood dream. Pictured in the centre is Margot He told the publication he hopes to achieve his own success. 'I don't place pressure on myself regarding her [Margot's] success, only my own expectation that I work hard, pursue what I love and make it meaningful,' he said. 'Acting has always been my priority, so it's great to be focusing on Jesse Porter at the moment and diving into this role on Neighbours.' The Melbourne-based actor began filming his role on Neighbours in late 2020 and will be seen in his debut episodes in March. Boston, Feb. 24, 2021, the provider's SaaS platform for the P&C insurance industry. With its sights set on becoming the leading specialty insurer, Core Specialty is moving swiftly toward its goal with a unified set of powerful SaaS solutions while intensifying its focus on product innovation and distribution via the nation's largest specialty line brokerages. Core Specialty sought a next-generation technology platform capable of delivering unmatched operational efficiency, harnessing data from myriad sources, and empowering distribution partners with best-in-class ease of doing business. Duck Creek's Professional Servicesarm is handling the implementation of all solutions, as well as developing a proprietary API-based connectionto the broker ecosystem Core Specialty is cultivating. "Core Specialty is truly 'ready to go,' a theme we are emphasizing as part of our Company rebranding," said Jeff Consolino, President & CEO of Core Specialty. "Collectively and in each of our specialist niche business units, we intend to operate with strong entrepreneurial spirit, drive, speed, agility, and empowered decision-making. Duck Creek OnDemand will give us the important tools we need from a technical perspective to continue pursuing our goals. This is a decision we know will serve us well into the future as we grow our business with greater speed to market and critical business intelligence." Duck Creek's OnDemand end-to-end SaaS solution provides all of the services, support, and computing resources needed to help carriers move faster and more efficiently than ever before. By leveraging the best available technology and continuously delivering new functionality to solve ever-changing P&C insurance business challenges, OnDemand enables a fundamentally new approach to competing in today's industry-one where technology supports strategy rather than dictating it, and where carriers are empowered to focus on innovation in entirely new ways. "Core Specialty's digital strategy is quickly building impressive momentum and scale," said Marc Stad, Founder and Managing Partner of Dragoneer Investment Group, a key investor in Core Specialty. "By selecting Duck Creek OnDemand to power their business, Core Specialty is strengthening their leadership position in the rapidly-modernizing P&C insurance sector- and we are excited to see what they can accomplish with the support of OnDemand's highly innovative solutions." "Core Specialty's scale and geographic reach require SaaS solutions that can support all of its operations now, as well as scale and speed to meet its goal of tripling in size over the next three years," said Michael Jackowski, CEO of Duck Creek. "Our team is proud to support our longtime customer as they take this important step forward in their journey, and to provide the solutions and expertise they need to achieve operational excellence and provide their customers and distribution partners with service excellence. We're excited to expand our relationship and look forward to working together to help Core Specialty accelerate their success." About Core Specialty: Core Specialty offers a diversified range of property and casualty insurance products for small to mid-sized businesses. From its underwriting offices spanning the U.S., the Company focuses on niche markets, local distribution, and superior underwriting knowledge; offering traditional as well as innovative insurance solutions to meet the needs of its customers and brokers. Core Specialty is an insurance holding company operating through StarStone Specialty Insurance Company, a U.S. excess and surplus lines insurer, and StarStone National Insurance Company, a U.S. admitted markets insurer. The Company is rated A-. About Duck Creek Technologies: Duck Creek Technologies, the company's enterprise Software-as-a-Service solution, insurance carriers are able to navigate uncertainty and capture market opportunities faster than their competitors. Duck Creek's functionally rich solutions are available on a stand-alone basis or as a full suite, and all are available via Duck Creek OnDemand. For more information, visit www.duckcreek.com. Core Specialty Media Contact: Sam Reinhardt Prosek Partners for Core Specialty Pro-corespecialty@prosek.com 646.818.9035 Duck Creek Media Contact: Paul Rechichi Racepoint Global 617-624-3295 prechichi@racepointglobal.com Attachment BRIDGEPORT The citys Police Department unveiled its newest weapon on Wednesday in its battle against violent crime. In 2020, the ShotSpotter detection system recorded 51,000 shots fired in 1,100 shooting incidents in the city. The city also recorded 24 homicides 21 were by gun, two by knife and one by strangulation. On Wednesday, the U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agency came to the city and parked a blue van and trailer in front of the Police Department which they touted as the latest technology to help trace all these fired bullets. The van and trailer house the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, a technology that can help local police trace guns used in crime scenes, according to Assistant Special Agent James Ferguson, of the ATF. And, he pointed out, its mobile so it can travel not only to crime scenes around the city but to other towns as well. The downside is the city only has it for a month, or 20 working days. The press conference announcing the technology came on the same day a suspect shot up an East Side street then led police on a chase that ended with the suspect crashing into another vehicle in Fairfield. The Police Department has its own ballistics expert, Marshall Robinson, who has matched fired bullets to guns in hundreds of cases. But Ferguson said the network can trace guns recovered in crimes as well as the casings from fired bullets. In a demonstration, another ATF agent fired a gun into a device housed in the trailer. Ferguson then showed how the gun and shell casings information would be entered into a computer in the van. At the press conference, across from the Police Department, Acting Police Chief Rebeca Garcia said the technology will be a tool to help make the community safer. Garcia declined to answer any questions on the specifics of its use by the department. She termed reports that she had previously cut department funding for use of the network as not accurate, but would not elaborate. States Attorney Joseph Corradino, referring to the underfunding and understaffing in the Police Department at the press conference, said the network is an example of federal authorities working with state and local law enforcement to reduce violent crime in the city. Actor Priyanka Chopra has shared multiple witty memes based on her ball-like dress on Twitter. The Quantico actor thanked her fans for making such creative memes and wrote, "Thanks for making my day guys!". Priyankemon, parachute, firecracker, a ball Virat Kohli is trying to catch are just some of the choicest memes that are making the rounds. The outfit that has started a meme fest is a Halpern studio outfit and Law Roach has styled it. The dress is called "Polka Dot Draped Orb" which is from Spring Summer 2021. Priyanka Chopra is not new to being a meme template. Social media was abuzz with Priyanka Chopra memes after her 2019 Met Gala dress caught everyone's attention. At that time, the former Miss World wore a Dior outfit with eccentric make-up, big, bushy hair and even a bindi. Twitter pointed out uncanny similarities between Priyanka's Met Gala look and Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter in Alice In Wonderland.Also read: Meet Dr Swati Mohan, Indian-American scientist who played key role in NASA's Perseverance landing Also read: Tiger Woods undergoes leg surgery after accident in Los Angeles The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company LAKELAND, Fla. -- Welcome aboard, Julio Teheran. The Detroit Tigers officially announced the signing of the 30-year right-handed on Tuesday. Its not clear how soon Teheran will report to spring training. When he arrives, hell be tossed into a crowded competition for a spot in the starting rotation. Were going to take a look at him, said new manager A.J. Hinch. Teheran signed a minor-league that will offer a $3 million salary plus significant incentives if he makes the big-league club. The Tigers will be looking for evidence that his miserable 2020 season for the Los Angeles Angels was an aberration and that hes ready to return to the way he pitched during seven seasons as a mainstay in the Atlanta Braves rotation. Prior to last year, he was logging quite a few innings and was a pretty reliable starter at the major league level, Hinch said. (His signing) adds to our competition and our depth...Im looking forward to meeting him and seeing what hes all about. I know hes a real professional and hes going to be prepared. Matthew Boyd, Spencer Turnbull, Jose Urena and Michael Fulmer probably have safe starting jobs, so Teheran would be competing against Casey Mize and Tarik Skubal for the one or possibly two remaining spots in the rotation. Daniel Norris and Tyler Alexander could also be in the mix but are more likely to end up in the bullpen. Teheran, a native of Cartagena, Colombia, averaged 190 innings per season from 2013-2019 but went 0-4 with a 10.05 ERA in 31 1/3 innings last season in Anaheim. I think last year he had to battle through a few different things. The ball just wasnt coming out the way it normally does, Hinch said. We feel like hes healthy and were going to see how effective he is. Ambitious NSW Senator Andrew Bragg isnt showing any signs of letting up in his assault on the super industry. Earlier this month, he took the fight to the ABC. In his sights, respected ABC finance presenter Alan Kohler, whose vast portfolio career has included a long stint as the ABC 7pm News voice of finance, and more recently, a commentary gig at Bruce Guthries industry super backed news outlet, The New Daily. Bragg has been outspoken criticising Aunty for releasing next to no detail on a content-sharing agreement with The New Daily struck last year. But hes also got concerns about Kohlers side gig, given widespread concerns that The New Daily is a propaganda outlet for the super industry, Braggs bete noire. The senator fired off a volley of questions to ABCs managing director David Anderson suggesting a conflict of interest. Senator Andrew Bragg. Credit:Peter Braig You know I question the integrity of this publication. It is hardly an unbiased news journal, Bragg said of the Daily. Given the ABC charter to be fair and balanced I question Mr Kohlers link to industry super and challenge whether this constitutes impartiality - especially in the murky commercial deal between the ABC and The New Daily. (The New Daily is not the only link between long-standing mates Kohler and Guthrie. In 2019 Kohlers finance reporter son Chris married Guthries journalist daughter Susannah. Cute, huh?) MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 24th February, 2021) President of Burkina Faso Roch Kabore on Wednesday expressed congratulations to Mohamed Bazoum, a veteran Nigerien politician who was elected as the new head of state, on his victory in the presidential election. The presidential election was held in Niger in two rounds, the first on December 27, 2020, and the runoff this past Sunday. The Independent National Election Commission declared the provisional results on Tuesday, according to which Bazoum, a candidate from the Nigerien Party for Democracy and Socialism (PNDS) ruling party, won the race with 55.75 percent of the vote. However, the results are yet to be confirmed by the country's Constitutional Court. "I extend my warm and fraternal congratulations to the elected President of Niger @mohamedbazoum. I assure him of my full readiness to work with him to consolidate the excellent relations of cooperation and friendship between our two countries," Kabore tweeted. In the first round of voting, Bazoum secured 39.33 percent of the vote while his main rival, Mahamane Ousmane, who served as Niger's president from 1993-1996 before he was ousted, received 16.9 percent. The latter, who received 44.25 percent of the vote in the runoff, said he rejected the results, claiming the victory to be his. Additionally, rallies against Bazoum's candidature occurred in some cities across the Western African nation. Outgoing Medibank Private boss Craig Drummond has warned hospitals will be put under immense pressure due to the nations ageing population unless there are more options for at-home and remote care. The $7.7 billion health insurer added 49,000 new policyholders to its books in the December half and said its net profit rose 26.8 per cent to $226.4 million. Mr Drummond, who will retire from Medibanks top job on June 30 to spend more time with family and focus on his new role as president of the Geelong Football Club, said the company was in strong financial shape and seeing strong demand from younger members. However, he warned the healthcare system would have to focus more on keeping patients out of hospital and deliver home and remote treatment to ensure systems were sustainable as the population aged. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company A woman in her early 30s, who gave birth to a son a month ago and has Covid-19, should be allowed to die against her family's wishes, a judge has decided. Mr Justice Hayden ruled that doctors can lawfully stop providing life-support treatment to the woman, who has an underlying health condition and is in an induced coma. A specialist told him that everything had been tried and the woman's chances of recovery were 'zero'. The judge considered the case at an urgent virtual hearing in the Court of Protection, where issues relating to people who lack the mental capacity to make decisions for themselves are analysed, late on Tuesday. He said the woman, a Muslim who was married and also had a daughter, could not be named. Mr Justice Hayden (pictured) ruled that doctors can lawfully stop providing life-support treatment to the woman, who has an underlying health condition and is in an induced coma Bosses at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust had asked him to rule that ending life-support treatment would be in the woman's best interests. The woman's husband and sister said she should be given more time and treatment should continue. They said Muslims believed that only God could end life. But the judge said evidence showed that doctors were no longer preserving the woman's life, but prolonging her death. He concluded that ending treatment would be in her best interests and said she should be allowed to die with dignity. Mr Justice Hayden said the woman's 'life and hopes' had been extinguished by 'this insidious virus', and a young family 'split apart prematurely'. 'This family is seeking a miracle,' he said. The Court of Protection and Central Family Court, in High Holborn, central London 'This is a very young mother in circumstances of almost-unspeakable sadness.' He added: 'It is a tragedy of an almost-unimaginable dimension.' Mr Justice Hayden said doctors had prepared a palliative care plan and the woman's family would be able to see her. 'The objective is not to shorten her life,' he added. '(But) to avoid the prolongation of her death.' The judge was told that the woman suffered from Addison's disease - a rare disorder of glands that produce essential hormones. He heard that she had developed Covid-19 while at home and been rushed to hospital a month ago when 32 weeks' pregnant. Doctors had delivered her son by caesarean section shortly after she was admitted. They said her pancreas had ceased to function and one lung had 'died'. 'Her chances of making any meaningful recovery are with the Covid are slim,' a specialist overseeing her care told Mr Justice Hayden. 'The feeling of the whole team is that she has reached the point where it is, in essence, zero.' He said CT scans showed 'essentially no normal lung function'. The woman's sister told the judge that the family was Muslim and believed that only God could end life. 'We believe in miracles,' she said. 'When God has written our death, that is when we will die.' She added: 'To unplug the machine, this is for us like asking someone to kill us.' The Centre has lifted the restrictions on grant of government businesses to private banks, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced on Wednesday. "Embargo lifted on grant of govt business to private banks. All banks can now participate," finance minister posted on Twitter. She further mentioned that all banks can now be equal partners in development of the Indian economy. "Private banks can now be equal partners in development of the Indian economy, furthering Govt's social sector initiatives, and enhancing customer convenience," Sitharaman said in a tweet. Only a few private banks including Axis Bank earlier permitted to take part in the government businesses. Commenting on the move, Uday Kotak, chief executive officer, Kotak Mahindra Bank said, "I welcome this progressive reform. It will enable the banking sector to serve customers better. Private and public sector must both work towards sustainable development of India." Axis Bank has a deep relationship with various central and state governments. We at Axis Bank are delighted with the announcement," Rajiv Anand, executive director - Wholesale Banking, Axis Bank said. The private banks are allowed to conduct banking transaction related to the government such as taxes and other revenue payment, facilities, pension payments, small savings scheme, etc. This move is expected to enhance customer convenience, spur competition and high efficiency in the standards of customer sevices, the department of financial services said in a statement. "The Centres move to lift the restrictions on grant of government business to private banks is a huge boost not just to the private banks but to the overall development of the country. Private banks have been faster in bracing and internalising newer technology and systems and this move will allow those processes to be efficiently used for Government spends and projects," said Anish Mashruwala, Partner, J Sagar Associates. Innovation from the private banks has changed the face of banking for the middle classes. If the government can now tap into these banks to solve problems for the bottom of the pyramid - we could be unleashing a tsunami of solutions for the underserved," said Mathew Chacko, partner, Spice Route Legal. There will be no bar on Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for authorisation of private banks for government businesses, including government agency businesses, the statement from the department of financial services added. The Centre has already conveyed its decision to RBI, it mentioned. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Liberal Cabinets Abstention From Genocide Vote Echoes History Commentary On Jan. 24, 1939, Liberal MP Pierre Gauthier issued a statement on what was then the intensifying plight of the Jewish people under Nazi rule. With remarkable callousness, he downplayed the need for Canada to do something about it, particularly regarding the question of accepting refugees, citing the countrys economic interests. It is an astonishing document. No doubt the systematic persecution endured by the Jewish race in Germany and Austria is bound to move us to pity, but precisely, the dominion government does not want this problem to grow into the question of sentiment, Gauthier wrote. Both wisdom and properly understood charity require the government to look first after the well-being of our Canadian population. In June that year, the MS St. Louis and its 907 Jewish refugees seeking a safe haven from the dangerous situation in Europe were denied entry to Canada. Stories of how Canadian public figures around the time of the Holocaust treated the reports of Jewish persecution inevitably come to mind when observing contemporary events. For despite all the constant commemorations and never again refrains, the experiences of the past seem to not have been as edifying as one would hope. When it comes down to it, some political leaders today remain just as hesitant to do what is right in the face of the Beijing regimes extensive campaigns of systematic barbarism. The Trudeau cabinets decision this week to abstain from voting on the Conservative motion to recognize as genocide the regimes crimes against the Uyghur minority group is one of its more shameful acts on the China question. The vote, in which Liberal backbenchers participated freely, led to Parliament establishing the clear consensus that Beijings crimes do constitute genocide, with the unanimous result of 266-0. Though only a non-binding motion, this is an illuminating moment, as it demonstrates where the majority of parliamentarians elected by the public stand when it comes to Chinas conduct. Participating in the proceedings on behalf of the government, Foreign Minister Marc Garneau announced the abstention and followed it up with the tiresome caveat that the government remains deeply disturbed by horrific reports of the human rights violations in Xinjiang and takes the claims of genocide very seriously. He then restated the governments naive insistence that Canada must work with others to ensure that these allegations can be investigated by an independent international body of legal experts who could impartially observe and report on the situation first-hand. The Chinese Communist Partys response to the vote should, once again, give those in government an idea of how co-operative the regime would be in any attempt to investigate these allegations and find evidence finally satisfactory enough for the government to make a judgment. On Feb. 23, the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa issued a statement that was yet another masterpiece of Maoist agitprop and genocide denialism. Unsurprisingly, the statement called out Canada for its hypocrisy, saying Canada should reflect deeply on the miserable experience of its indigenous people. It denied genocide with the claim that the Uyghur population has increased at a rate far more rapid than that of the whole population of Xinjiang between 2010 and 2018. And in classic CCP fashion, the statement accused Canadian politicians of manipulating Xinjiang-related issues under the pretext of human rights to interfere in Chinas internal affairs and earn political capital by playing the China card. The bald-face denials come despite statistics showing that Uyghur-majority regions have suffered some of most significant declines in birth rates across China due to forced sterilization and abortion, falling by as much as 24 percent in 2019, according to The Associated Press. In addition, there are credible allegations of Uyghurs held in massive camps being tortured, sexually abused, forced to perform slave labour, and killed for their organs, similar to other persecuted groups such as Falun Gong. But in the name of action on climate change or whatever the excuse of the day is, this is whom we must continue to engage with for the sake of loftily defined Canadian interests. To their shame, politicians dismissed the urgency of the Nazis persecution of Jews out of naivete regarding Hitlers regime and a narrow understanding of what Canadas priorities were. Similar equivocation toward the seriousness of the Uyghurs plight is ironically being displayed by the Liberal leadership who, with their constant pledge to extinguish hate wherever it persists, probably believe that had they been around in the Nazi era, they would have gallantly rallied the effort to confront Hitler. But faced with a situation similar to that of the1930s, they have continually failed to step up when it actually matters. Shane Miller is a political writer based in London, Ontario. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Two Democratic members of Congress penned letters Monday to a dozen cable providers demanding they account for "misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies" from "right-wing media outlets" they carry and the networks specifically named were Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News Network. What are the details? The letters from U.S. Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, both of California, were addressed to AT&T, Verizon, Roku, Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Charter, Dish, Cox, Altice, Alphabet, and Hulu. The letters leveled numerous accusations against the aforementioned news networks, including that their coverage helped the "radicalization of seditious individuals who committed acts of insurrection on January 6" at the U.S. Capitol. "Some purported news outlets have long been misinformation rumor mills and conspiracy theory hotbeds that produce content that leads to real harm," the letters said. "Misinformation on TV has led to our current polluted information environment that radicalizes individuals to commit seditious acts and rejects public health best practices, among other issues in our public discourse." Citing "experts" who claim "the right-wing media ecosystem is 'much more susceptible...to disinformation, lies, and half-truths,'" the letters said "right-wing media outlets" like Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN "all aired misinformation about the November 2020 elections." The letters also accused the networks of "spreading misinformation related to the pandemic." What do the Democrats want? Eshoo and McNerney demanded in their letters that cable providers explain "what moral or ethical principles (including those related to journalistic integrity, violence, medical information, and public health) do you apply in deciding which channels to carry or when to take adverse actions against a channel?" The letters also asked the cable providers to detail what steps they've taken to "monitor, respond to, and reduce the spread of disinformation" from news networks they carry, as well as any punitive measures they've taken against such channels and if they plan to carry networks like Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN once contracts expire. The letters were penned ahead of a hearing set Wednesday "Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media" to be hosted by a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, on which Eshoo and McNerney sit, CNBC reported. What was the reaction? Fox News told CNBC in a statement that "as the most watched cable news channel throughout 2020, FOX News Media provided millions of Americans with in-depth reporting, breaking news coverage and clear opinion. For individual members of Congress to highlight political speech they do not like and demand cable distributors engage in viewpoint discrimination sets a terrible precedent." CNBC said Comcast declined to comment, and representatives for the other cable providers to which letters were addressed didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. Republican Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr called the letters a "chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys," CBNC said, adding that Carr's fellow Republican Commissioner Nathan Simington reacted similarly. "The Majority is flirting with violating the First Amendment," a GOP aide for the House Energy and Commerce Committee told CNBC in a statement. "Should the government be pressuring private industries to censor legally protected content and suppress the freedom of the press? No. If a free and independent press is still valued and mainstream in America, this censorship campaign should alarm every single journalist and member of the media." Haven't we seen this movie before? The Democrats' letters mirror CNN's assertion last month that cable providers should "face questions for lending their platforms to dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories" and again the three named were Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN. CNN's Brian Stelter has been on the aforementioned warpath of late, specifically saying a few weeks back that "liar" Fox News' influence must be reduced through a "harm reduction model" which he said isn't censorship. Later Stelter interviewed a Democratic congresswoman who called for a "truth commission" to root out "extremist ideology" so Americans can mouth a "common narrative." In his chat with freshman U.S. Rep. Sara Jacobs of California, Stelter decried the "impact of cellphones and this constant connectivity, social networks and far-right television networks" all of which he said are "fueling a fire" of extremism. A New Jersey correctional police sergeant who was supposed to video record the forced removal of inmates from their cells at New Jerseys womens prison faces criminal accusations that he helped cover up a coordinated beatdown. Sgt. Matthew D. Faschan is the fourth officer at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility to face criminal charges in a widening probe into the Jan. 11 incident, during which prisoners say they were maced, punched and kicked while handcuffed. Faschan, 33, of Hackettstown, faces two counts of official misconduct and one count of records tampering, according to state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal. Faschan could not be reached at listed numbers. His attorney did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. The incident at the center of the probe was the removal of multiple inmates from a special wing of the prison known as the Restorative Housing Unit, or RHU. Such removals require oversight, including a video recording. Charging documents allege that Faschan purposely did not record key portions of the extractions, including the removal of an inmate who immediately complied but nonetheless was punched multiple times. A criminal complaint alleges Faschan later submitted an official report that stated he recorded the woman inflicting injuries upon herself. No such video exists, the attorney generals office said Tuesday. Two other sergeants Amir E. Bethea and Anthony J. Valvano as well as an officer, Luis A. Garcia, have already been charged for their alleged roles in the beatdown. State prosecutors say their investigation was hindered by officers and other prison officials who engaged in a coverup. Despite officers filing false reports and failing to properly videotape all of the cell extractions that took place, as required by Department of Corrections policies, we will not be deterred from identifying all of those responsible for these assaults, said Thomas Eicher, the head of the state Office of Public Integrity and Accountability, which is leading the probe. The prison, located in Hunterdon County, has a record of physical and sexual abuse and exploitation of inmates by prison staff and currently faces a lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice over widespread civil rights violations. The January incident has led to demands for the ouster of state Corrections Commissioner Marcus Hicks, including a bipartisan vote in the state Senate calling for his removal last week. Gov. Phil Murphy has said he was sickened by the allegations and commissioned an independent investigation into the January extractions but has said little about potential reforms. Adrian Ellison, the president of the prison systems internal investigators union, FOP 174, previously told NJ Advance Media that the Special Investigations Division used to be in charge of recording cell extractions. That would put people in the frame of mind that you had some independent oversight, he said. And the video was not just to protect inmates, but to protect the officer, too. If the inmate did something wrong, it would be documented. That power was taken away from internal investigators for budgetary reasons, Ellison said. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. NJ Advance Media staff writer Blake Nelson contributed to this report. S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Joe Atmonavage may be reached at jatmonavage@njadvancemedia.com. Have a tip? Tell us at nj.com/tips. On Wednesday, Welch, a Madigan ally, said another way for lawmakers to convince voters to support changing the tax system is to approve changes to the states government ethics laws to improve trust in public officials. That includes looking at changes such as making economic interest disclosures more transparent and barring legislators from working as lobbyists at other levels of government, he said. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Wednesday offered prayers at the holy Ganga Talao in Mauritius. S Jaishankar, who is on a two-day visit to the African nation, 'felt like homecoming' after watching Indian tradition and culture alive in Mauritius. External Affairs Minister also visited the 'World Hindi Secretariat' situated in the African country. One of the significant outcomes of EAM's visit to Mauritius is the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) signed on Monday. EAM visited Ganga Talao, offers prayers External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, after his visit to Ganga Talao, showed his gratitude towards FM Alan Ganoo, Culture Minister Avinash Teeluck and Agriculture Minister Maneesh Gobin for accompanying him to the holy place. EAM Jaishankar tweeted, "Offered prayers at the holy Ganga Talao this morning. Grateful to FM Alan Ganoo, Culture Minister Avinash Teeluck and Agriculture Minister Maneesh Gobin for joining me." Ganga Talao is also known as Grand Basin. It is situated in the middle of Mauritius as a lake pit in the remote mountainous region of Savne district. It is located 1,800 feet above sea level. Foreign Minister also thanked the Indian Community for keeping the 'faith & fervour' of the country alive in Mauritius. He tweeted, "Feels like homecoming. Thank the vibrant Indian community for keeping our faith & fervour alive in Mauritius. A shining example of all that India stands for peace, pluralism, shared progress & universal brotherhood - values more relevant than ever today." Jaishankar also visited the World Hindi Secretariat. After watching the amplification of Hindi in Mauritius, EAM Jaishankar said, "Working in the global promotion of Hindi, the World Hindi Secretariat is located in Mauritius. This reflects our civilizational relationship. I am happy that I got the opportunity to go here today." Offered prayers at the holy Ganga Talao this morning. Grateful to FM Alan Ganoo, Culture Minister Avinash Teeluck and Agriculture Minister Maneesh Gobin for joining me. pic.twitter.com/Gw7GLJqvxV Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) February 24, 2021 Also Read: India Signs Free Trade Pact With Mauritius, The First Of Its Kind With African Nation Also Read: India, Mauritius Ink Landmark Economic Cooperation And Partnership Agreement India signs Free Trade Agreement Mauritius India on Monday signed a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Mauritius. It is the first such arrangement that India struck with any African country. Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth hailed the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation & Partnership Agreement (CECPA) as far-reaching and said that it would unleash new as well as expanded opportunities in trade, goods & services, investment, economic cooperation & technical assistance. On February 22, in a joint statement, Mauritius PM said that the nation aspires to play a greater role in Indias engagement in Africa. Jugnauth said that CECPA will further encourage Indian entrepreneurs to invest not only in Mauritius but also in the entire region consolidating the joint ambition to make the African nation the centre of excellence. S Jaishankar also shared the information through his official Twitter handle, he tweeted, "Delighted to begin Mauritius visit with a meeting with FM Alan Ganoo. Reviewed our excellent bilateral relations & successful development partnership. Reiterated that India will be a ready partner in Mauritius economic recovery & revival efforts." (With inputs from ANI) Also Read: Cabinet Approves Trade Pact Between India, Mauritius Also Read: Jaishankar Inaugurates New Chancery Building Of Indian High Commission In Mauritius Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. SUVA, Feb. 24 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 24th Feb, 2021 ) :Fiji reported Wednesday one new imported COVID-19 case, a 30-year-old male who arrived in Fiji's third largest city of Nadi on Feb. 18 from Manila, the Philippines. The man returned a weak positive result during routine testing while undergoing the mandatory 14-day quarantine in Nadi. Based on the test result, and current lack of symptoms, he is considered a historical case, who was likely infected and recovered multiple weeks or months before entering Fiji. Management of this case will follow Fiji's standard protocol for positive cases. The man is now isolated at the Lautoka hospital, about 24 kilometers north of Nadi. Meanwhile, a 58-year-old female who arrived in Nadi on Feb. 18 from Panama City, Panama, also returned a weak positive test result during routine testing while undergoing the mandatory 14-day quarantine in Nadi. she had tested positive and was confirmed as a COVID-19 case in Panama in December 2020. She recovered and tested negative during subsequent tests, including a pre-departure test, before departing for Fiji. Based on the weak positive test results, her current lack of symptoms, and history of testing positive in Panama, it is considered a historical case, which will not be counted as a new case for Fiji. Currently, Fiji has had 57 COVID-19 cases in total, with one active case, 54 recoveries and two deaths. The last 39 cases have been international travel associated cases detected in border quarantine. It has been 312 days since the last case was detected outside border quarantine on April 18, 2020. A total of 29,626 laboratory tests have so far been conducted in Fiji, with a daily average of 160 tests per day over the last seven days, and a weekly average of 1,048 tests per week over the last two weeks. Fiji still maintains a strict travel restriction to date for foreign visitors alongside a nationwide curfew effective from March 30 last year. Authorities in Ho Chi Minh City have removed lockdown from the last location, as the city has gone 13 days without detecting any local COVID-19 infection. The lockdown was lifted from Block F of Carillon Apartment Complex in Ward 13, Tan Binh District at 3:00 pm on Tuesday. All residents living on the 15th floor of the apartment block previously tested negative for the novel coronavirus. The location was fenced off from February 9, just a few days before the Lunar New Year festival, after a man who works for national carrier Vietnam Airlines was confirmed as a COVID-19 patient. All residents at Carillon Apartment Complex were tested for COVID-19 following the detection of the case. Ho Chi Minh City recorded 36 community-based COVID-19 cases between February 6 and 11, all of whom were traced to a cluster at Tan Son Nhat International Airport. A total of 35 locations in 10 districts and Thu Duc City were sealed off to prevent the disease from spreading further into the community. Thanks to prompt and assertive measures, competent authorities have been able to put the cluster under control. The city has not recorded any local infection for 13 days, while lockdown has been lifted from all locations, according to the Ho Chi Minh City Center for Disease Control. Vietnam has documented 2,403 COVID-19 cases as of Wednesday morning, with 1,760 recoveries and 35 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Stock Market News Economic Forecast - China-India border dispute: Will the pullback of troops revive economic cooperation? 24-02-2021 03:21 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk The domestic equity benchmarks were currently at the day's high in the second half of the extended trading session. Trading resumed at 15:45 IST on the NSE. At 16:25 IST, the barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex, jumped 926.58 points or 1.86% to 50,677.99. The Nifty 50 index added 235.80 points or 1.60% to 14,943.60. In the broader market, the S&P BSE Mid-Cap index rose 0.71%. The S&P BSE Small-Cap index gained 0.89%. The market breadth was strong. On the BSE, 1831 shares rose and 1085 shares fell. A total of 168 shares were unchanged. NSE Update: The NSE and the BSE have extended trading hours till 5:00 PM today. Trading was halted on the NSE today morning due to a technical glitch. Meanwhile, all the segments on the BSE were operating as usual on Wednesday, 24 February 2021. Economy: In a tweet, the Office of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said: "Embargo lifted on grant of Govt business to private banks. All banks can now participate. Private banks can now be equal partners in development of the Indian economy, furthering Govt's social sector initiatives, and enhancing customer convenience." Buzzing Index: The Nifty FMCG index rose 0.09% to 33,054.75. The index has added 0.5% in two sessions. Britannia Industries (up 2.10%), Godrej Consumer (up 1.22%), Nestle India (up 0.98%) and Dabur India (up 0.89%) advanced. Jubilant Foodworks (down 4.12%), United Spirits (down 0.64%), Colgate-Palmolive India (down 0.56%) and Varun Beverages (down 0.24%) declined. Stocks in Spotlight: Nava Bharat Ventures soared 14.05% to Rs 66.95 after the company said its board will consider a share buyback on 26 February 2021. Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail (ABFRL) jumped 4.87% to Rs 176.45 after the company announced a strategic partnership with Indian designer Tarun Tahiliani to form a new entity that will soon launch a contemporary men's ethnic wear brand. ABFRL will hold 80% stake in the new entity while Tarun Tahiliani will hold the remaining 20%. The new brand aims to build a Rs 500 crore business in the next 5 years with more than 250 stores across the country. The brand will launch the first set of retail stores by September 2021. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) 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. Steven Keith is a food writer and restaurant critic known as The Food Guy who writes a weekly column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail and has appeared in several state, regional and national culinary publications. Follow him online at www.wvfoodguy.com or on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest as WV Food Guy. He can be reached at 304-380-6096 or at wvfoodguy@aol.com. (Newser) A mandate kicking off this week will put more money in the pockets of grocery workers in Los Angeles County for braving the pandemic to clock in. Starting Friday, national grocery and retail drug stores in unincorporated areas of the county have to start forking over $5 more an hour to their front-line workers as "hero pay," a hazard bonus that will be mandated for the next four months, ABC7 reports. With a 4-1 vote, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved the "urgency" ordinance, which applies to publicly traded union and nonunion chains that have at least 300 employees nationwide and more than 10 employees per store. The Los Angeles Times notes the move would affect about 2,500 hourly workers. "These workers have put their lives on the line since the beginning of the pandemic," Supervisor Hilda Solis tells City News Service. "Many are working in fear and without adequate financial support, while their employers continue to see profits grow." story continues below But while worker unions are smiling, grocery store associations and others aren't. Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who voted against the measure, says it applies to only a "small sliver" of essential workers, and that there could be "unintended consequences," such as stores slashing workers' hours, laying them off, or raising prices for customers to compensate for the new cost. GlobalData retail analyst Neil Saunders tells the Times that underperforming stores in rural spots, small suburbs, and low-income neighborhoods might end up shuttering. This could especially happen as restrictions loosen and people start heading back to restaurants, causing grocery sales to drop and stores to lose profits, says Burt Flickinger III of the Strategic Resource Group consulting firm. Some also argue the hazard pay should come from state and federal coffers, not the stores themselves. "The hero pay, ethically and financially, should come out of the COVID-19 relief bill," Flickinger says. (Read more Los Angeles County stories.) Let us know what you're seeing and hearing around the community. Submit here Moscow: Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his nations top counterintelligence agency on Wednesday (Moscow-time) to redouble its efforts to address what he described as Western attempts to destabilise Russia. Speaking at a meeting of top officials of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main KGB successor agency, Putin pointed at the so-called policy of containment of Russia, charging that it includes efforts to derail our development, slow it down, create problems alongside our borders, provoke internal instability and undermine the values that unite the Russian society. Vladimir Putin sees foreign interference afoot in Russia. Credit:AP The Russian president added that those activities by foreign powers, which he didnt name, are aimed at weakening Russia and putting it under outside control. The United States and its NATO allies have rejected similar previous claims by the Kremlin that they were seeking to undermine Russia. OKOLONA, Miss. (WTVA) -- Garbage services in several neighborhoods are now operational after last week's snow and ice prevented trucks from making their routes. "Bad backed up," garbage truck-driver James Jones Jr. said about the current situation of garbage pick-up services. Anne Nunn's empty garbage can sitting by the road after the crew collected her trash. Photo taken 02-23-21. Anne Nunn's empty garbage can sitting by the road after the crew collected her trash. Photo taken 02-23-21. There's currently much more garbage than normal for trucks to pick up along their routes. People have the previous week's garbage in addition to this week's. Jr. said when his truck fills up, he takes it to Houston to dump it. On Tuesday, he said he had to go to the dump twice in the same day -- and he wasn't finished with his route. Normally the garbage truck comes through Okolona two days a week, but this week, it'll likely be three. "Probably be here tomorrow." Okolona resident Anne Nunn said she had to take extreme measures. "It was bad to the point that we had to store it in our kitchen because of them not picking up," she said. Jones may have to work extra for a time, but he doesn't mind. "It's part of the job," he said. Jones said that once they get caught up, trash pickup should go back to normal. One of Editor & Publishers 10 That Do It Right 2021 New Braunfels, TX (78130) Today Mostly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High around 85F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph.. Tonight Mostly cloudy this evening. Scattered thunderstorms developing after midnight. Low 69F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50%. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. [February 24, 2021] Nicola Wealth and Hopewell Execute on Industrial Development Strategy in Southwestern US PHOENIX, Arizona, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Nicola Wealth Real Estate (NWRE) and Hopewell Development (Hopewell) are strategically developing three industrial properties in low-tax, low-regulation Southwestern states with high migration. NWREs focus is growing an industrial portfolio in target markets against the backdrop of the increasing demand for industrial buildings to house e-commerce and distribution operations. NWRE and Hopewell recently acquired the sites for North Valley Industrial Park in the Deer Valley submarket of AZ, and the South Valley Business Park in the Chandler submarket of AZ in 2019, with plans for delivering best in class mid-bay industrial developments. South Valley Industrial Park has broken ground, the project consists of two industrial buildings totaling approximately 145,000 SF completing Q2 2021. The North Valley Industrial Park is a multi-phase project with Phase 1 commencing April 2021, for the development of 131,000 SF over two buildings adjacent to the Deer Valley Airport. North Valley will complete Fall 2021. In addition, the Partnership has recently acquired an in-fill 8.5-acre site in the Airport submarket of Las Vegas. NWRE and Hopewell are obtaining entitlements to deliver approximately 150,000 SF of new generation product in the middle of this mature submarket. Las Vegas ground-breaking is slated for Q3 2021. Expanding NWREs industrial allocation within our funds involves two strategies; acquiring well located, well maintained, highly functional existing assets, and building to hold new generation product with trusted partners such as Hopewell explains NWRE Director of Acquisitions, Matthew Schaeffers. We remain focused on acquiring quality asses at accretive pricing within our target markets and are very excited about these three development projects. These projects present ideal opportunities to add much-needed supply to areas hungry for multi-tenant industrial buildings, says Justin LeMaster, Vice President US Industrial at Hopewell Development. We are deploying our fully-integrated and customized approach to commercial real estate development to efficiently deliver a highly desirable best-in-class product to the market. NWRE continues to pursue opportunities in all asset types in markets across North America, with a focus on acquiring income-producing properties and development sites. North Valley Leasing Inquiries Please Contact Cushman Wakefield: JOHN POMPAY +1 602 224 4422 john.pompay@cushwake.com WILL GROVES +1 602 682 8260 will.groves@cushwake.com South Valley Leasing Inquiries Please Contact CBRE: MIKE PARKER +1 602 735 5231 mike.parker6@cbre.com To learn more about the Nicola Wealth Real Estate funds* visit realestate.nicolawealth.com About Hopewell Development Headquartered in Calgary with offices in Toronto and Phoenix, Hopewell Development LP is the commercial development division of the Hopewell Group of Companies. Hopewell has enjoyed more than 25 years in the North American real estate sector. To date, Hopewell has developed (and is developing) over 25M SF of A-class industrial product in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Dallas/Fort Worth. About Nicola Wealth Real Estate Nicola Wealth Real Estate (NWRE) is the in-house real estate team of Nicola Wealth, a premier Canadian financial planning and investment firm with $9.2 billion (CAD) of assets under management. NWRE has an experienced and innovative team that sources and asset-manages a growing portfolio of properties in major markets across North America spanning a diversified range of asset classes which include office, retail, industrial, multi-family residential, self-storage, and seniors housing. With the acquisition of Blackwood Partners, the current real estate portfolio now exceeds $6 billion gross asset value. *This investment is generally intended for tax residents of Canada who are accredited investors. Some residency restrictions may apply. Please read the relevant documentation for additional details and important disclosure information, including terms of redemption and limited liquidity. Attachments South Valley Business Park North Valley Industrial Park Victoria Emslie Nicola Wealth 604-484-1286 vemslie@nicolawealth.com [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] President Joe Biden proposed multiple free college measures while on the campaign trail. Do any of them have a real shot? Some experts think so. FILE - In this Feb. 17, 2021 file photo, students walk on the Boston College campus in Boston. President Joe Biden campaigned on multiple tuition-free college proposals. But experts are divided on whether now is the time students could see a broad free college program. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File) President Joe Biden proposed multiple free college measures while on the campaign trail. Do any of them have a real shot? Some experts think so. The issue is bipartisan in its appeal, economically effective and supported by the leadership in todays Congress and administration thats (a) pretty good triple play, says Morley Winograd, president of The Campaign for Free College Tuition. Others are skeptical now is the time to move forward on free college. I have a really hard time seeing any sort of four-year free college program passing at this point, says Douglas Webber, associate professor of economics at Temple University. The first glimpse of a formal proposal will most likely be in Bidens upcoming budget, experts say. Heres what to look for. TUITION-FREE COMMUNITY COLLEGE IS MOST LIKELY Free college really means free tuition. Students would still have to pay for room and board, along with other costs of attendance such as transportation, books and supplies. The average cost for room and board is $11,386 at a four-year school and $7,636 at a two-year school, according to federal data. President Bidens free college proposals include: Four years tuition-free at public colleges for those whose family income is under $125,000. Two years of free tuition for low- and middle-income students attending minority-serving institutions. Tuition-free public community colleges. That last one is the easiest sell, experts say. Weve seen how much free community college has become more popular, says Wesley Whistle, senior advisor for policy and strategy with the Education Policy program at New America, a public policy think-tank . It became a drum and you hear it and that helps it pick up over time. The primary blocker for any tuition-free program is the cost, experts say, as any such program would likely be funded through a federal-state partnership. Community college is the cheaper bill to foot: The cost to fund tuition at public two-year schools is around $8.8 billion compared with about $72.5 billion at four-year public schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. HOW FREE COLLEGE MIGHT WORK Theres already a blueprint for tuition-free programs: Currently 15 states have a program in place, while several others have extensive scholarship programs. Some cities do, too. Most state programs, such as Tennessee Promise and the Excelsior Scholarship in New York, which both offer four years of tuition-free public college, are last-dollar. That means students must submit the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, and accept all need-based federal and state aid before the tuition-free benefit kicks in. Most experts say a federally enacted program would likely be first-dollar, covering tuition costs before any other aid is applied. That could increase the per-student impact of scholarships and state funding, says Edward Conroy, associate director of institutional transformation for the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice. If we get a federal program that says were going to make tuition free and you can still receive any state or federal grants on top of that, that would be a robust program, Conroy says. In that case, additional aid could go toward paying for additional expenses. PELL GRANT EXPANSION MAY BE EASIER Theres another path toward tuition-free college, though it doesnt have free in the name: the Pell Grant. The Pell Grant program provides students who have demonstrated need with free aid; for 2021-22, its up to $6,495. Though the Pell was meant to cover most college costs, it hasnt kept up the average tuition and fees at four-year public schools is $9,212, according to the most recent federal data. Most experts say doubling the maximum Pell Grant would effectively create free tuition and in some cases cover additional expenses. Biden has called for this, along with expanding eligibility to cover more middle-income students. Robert Kelchen, associate professor of higher education at Seton Hall University, says expanded Pell would be easier to pass than tuition-free college since the grant program already exists. Free college proposals are simultaneously blasted for not being generous enough and being too generous to students without demonstrated need, experts say. These criticisms make it more difficult to attain approval among both lawmakers and the public. Expanding the existing Pell Grant program could work to provide free tuition, but it lacks the appeal of a new and free program. From a messaging perspective, saying the Pell (Grant amount) is going up by, say, $2,000 might not have the same impact on students as Your tuition is covered, Kelchen says. HOW STUDENTS CAN CUT COSTS Tuition-free college policy could take a long time to pass through Congress if it can at all so students and parents may not see this benefit for many months or years. But there are a few existing strategies for getting a degree at a lower cost: Find out if your state already has a tuition-free program. Consider a public college unless a private school offers you more aid. Attend a two-year school, then make a plan to transfer credits and complete a four-year degree. Compare college cost, graduation rates and typical student loan payments using the U.S. Department of Educations College Scorecard. Submit the FAFSA and accept all need-based federal and state aid. Find scholarships using search tools. The U.S. Department of Labor has one. If your familys finances have changed, request a professional judgment to appeal your aid award. ________________________________ This article was provided to The Associated Press by the personal finance website NerdWallet. Anna Helhoski is a writer at NerdWallet. Email: anna@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @AnnaHelhoski. RELATED LINKS: NerdWallet: States with Free College Programs http://bit.ly/nerdwallet-free-college U.S. Department of Labor: CareerOneStop Scholarship Finder https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Training/find-scholarships.aspx U.S. Department of Education: College Scorecard https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/ The doctor who administered incorrect doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to two aged care residents in Queensland had not completed the compulsory vaccination training. Health Minister Greg Hunt has asked the Department of Health to take action against the doctor and Healthcare Australia, the company tasked with providing vaccinations within aged care facilities. Health Minister Greg Hunt said new information revealed the doctor had not completed the compulsory online training. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The aged care provider that runs the Brisbane facility where the incident occurred said they will also report the doctor to the medical regulator. Mr Hunt on Wednesday morning said the doctor had trained in Australia, was registered with the medical regulator and had undertaken the necessary COVID vaccination training. Cocaine worth an estimated 1.6 million has been seized The 20-kilo haul was discovered hidden inside an empty fuel tank A driver arrested after 1m worth of cocaine was discovered hidden in his van at Belfast port thought he was transporting cash, a court heard today. Laethian McCalla, 39, was detained as part of an operation where officers "completely ripped apart" his vehicle to find the drugs inside a fuel tank. The seizure on Monday has been described as one of the biggest of its kind by law enforcement in Northern Ireland in recent years. McCalla, of Arps Road in Wolverhampton, faces a charge of possessing Class A drugs with intent to supply. His vehicle was stopped by National Crime Agency (NCA) officers as it arrived on a ferry from Birkenhead. Belfast Magistrates' Court heard the van was taken to a compound where x-ray equipment was used during a 14-hour search operation. Expand Close Cocaine worth an estimated 1.6 million has been seized / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Cocaine worth an estimated 1.6 million has been seized "The vehicle was completely ripped apart, and 20 kilos of cocaine were found secreted in one of the fuel (tanks)," an NCA officer said. Although the drugs have an estimated street value of at least 1m, he suggested it could be "the tip of the iceberg". McCalla was said to have admitted making previous journeys to Northern Ireland, but denied knowing anything about the drugs haul. Defence solicitor Pearse MacDermott told the court: "It's accepted the items were heavily secreted in the van, but he thought he was driving cash." Bail was opposed amid claims the accused is connected to an organised crime gang, and was paid 1,500 to deliver the consignment. But Mr MacDermott argued that McCalla provided a full explanation of his intended route from Wolverhampton to Dungannon, Co Tyrone. "There are more sinister forces at work behind this, he was being used by other parties," he argued. Refusing bail, however, District Judge Fiona Bagnall cited the risk of re-offending. "By his own admission this isn't the first time he's undertaken this venture," she said. McCalla was remanded in custody to appear again in four weeks time. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 UP eases covid restrictions: Shops allowed to open on weekdays in districts with less than 600 active cases Punjab shamelessly protecting gangster Mukhtar Ansari: UP tells SC India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Feb 24: The Uttar Pradesh government today told the Supreme Court that the Punjab government is "shamelessly" protecting gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari, who is currently in a district jail in Punjab's Rupnagar in connection with an alleged extortion case. UP government slammed the Punjab government for not sending him to Uttar Pradesh to face trial in several criminal cases. A bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan and R Subhash Reddy took note of the submission of senior advocate Dushyant Dave, appearing for the Punjab government, seeking adjournment in the matter on personal grounds. BJP MLA accuses Punjab, Rajasthan govts of shielding Mukhtar Ansari, writes to Priyanka Gandhi Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Uttar Pradesh government, said he has no objection to Mr Dave's plea for adjournment. Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for Mukhtar Ansari, said that he (Ansari) is "small fry" being cornered by the "might of the state". To this, Tushar Mehta said, "You are such a small fry that a state (Punjab) is shamelessly protecting you." The Supreme Court has posted the matter for hearing on March 2. The top court was hearing a plea filed by Uttar Pradesh seeking a direction to the Punjab government and Rupnagar jail authority to immediately hand over the custody of Mukhtar Ansari to district jail Banda. It has also sought a direction to transfer the criminal proceedings and trial in the extortion case in Punjab to the special court in Allahabad. Mukhtar Ansari is lodged in district jail Rupnagar in Punjab since January 2019. In its affidavit filed in the Supreme Court, Punjab had referred to the Mukhtar Ansari's medical condition and said that he had been undergoing treatment at jail hospital as well as other hospitals from time to time since January 2019. While referring to the medical condition and advice of doctors, it has said that custody of Mukhtar Ansari could not be handed over to the state of Uttar Pradesh due to the specific advice of the medical officers/medical board/specialists from time to time. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 15:31 [IST] A Pennsylvania bird watcher had what he calls a 'once-in-a-lifetime' encounter when a Northern cardinal perched in a tree appeared to be both male and female. James R. Hill III has marveled at the feathered animals for 48 years, but on Saturday he saw a 'one in a million' bird with bright red like a male cardinal on one side and brownish white like a female on the other. Hill describes the rare cardinal as 'a bird divided right down the middle, half male and half female' that stood out as 'pretty unusual.' Its striking appearance is the result of double fertilization, in which a female egg cell that developed with two nuclei is fertilized by two sperm. The result is what's known as a bilateral gynandromorph, where the bird appears to be a male and female stitched together. Scroll down for video A Pennsylvania bird watcher had what he calls a 'once-in-a-lifetime' bird encounter when a Northern cardinal appeared to be both male and female perched in a tree Hill was notified by a friend about an unusual bird visiting feeders outside a home near Grand Valley, Pennsylvania 'that was half one species and half another.' 'This really piqued my interest since I wasn't sure if she was referring to a hybrid, or a much rarer gynandromorphic bird (a bird that is male and female),' Hill shared in a Facebook post. 'We immediately tracked down the homeowner by phone and were told it was a male Northern Cardinal that 'had some white on its breast.' Ah, I thought maybe it was leucistic, which means it has some albinistic feathering.' Cardinals are perching songbirds found in North and South America. Its striking appearance is the result of double fertilization, in which a female egg cell that developed with two nuclei is fertilized by two sperm Cardinals are best known for their bright red coloring, but this feature is specific to males. James R. Hill III has been an avid bird watcher for 48 years, but spotted the one in a million cardinal over the weekend. Female cardinals, on the other hand, have a much duller appearance Cardinals are best known for their bright red coloring, but this feature is specific to males. James R. Hill III has been an avid bird watcher for 48 years, but spotted the one in a million cardinal over the weekend Female cardinals, on the other hand, have a much duller appearance. This bird is one that does not migrate during the winter months, which is why Hill was able to capture stunning images of the rare creature. When Hill saw the cardinal he knew immediately that it was not a leucistic bird, but one with bilateral gynandromorphism. 'During our 1-hour stay, the bird came to the feeders only once (with 5 other cardinals), but thankfully it perched out in the open briefly in two other trees and I was able to shoot about 50 images,' he shared in the Facebook post. The result is what's known as a bilateral gynandromorph, where the bird appears to be a male and female stitched together Hill described it as 'a bird divided right down the middle, half male and half female' that stood out as 'pretty unusual' What is gynandromorph? A cardinal spotted recently in Pennsylvania that appears to be half-male and half-female has shed light on the phenomenon of gynandromorphs. They're not all that uncommon in the wild, though the coloration or markings of some species make the results more striking than others. A gynandromorph is an organism that has both male and female characteristics - or, a male-female chimera. It's often seen in insects, though gynandromorph birds, snakes, and other animals have been observed too. Advertisement Hill also notes a couple living 60 miles away near Erie, Pennsylvania observed a similar cardinal. Jeffrey and Shirley Caldwell snapped image of the stunning feathered creature, which were published in National Geographic and other bird enthusiast magazines. However, this led Hill to wonder if the bird seen in 2019 is the same one that perched in Green Valley. 'Could this bird be the same individual as the Erie, PA, bird? Possibly their bird was female on the left and male on the right, too,' he shared. 'The condition can be the other way around, with male left and female right.' Gynandromorphs are uncommon, but not unheard of. Dr. Daniel Hooper, who was a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in 2019 and who was contacted by National Geographic, said: 'They likely occur across all species of birds, but we're only likely to notice them in species where the adult males and females look distinct from each other, a trait known as sexual dimorphism.' 'Cardinals are one of the most well-known sexually dimorphic birds in North America their bright red plumage in males is iconic [with females being buffy brownish] so people easily notice when they look different.' Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has said Facebooks media blackout was unnecessary and heavy-handed, but that he believed the platform had moved on from such behaviour after discussions over the weekend. The Morrison government agreed to last-minute changes to its proposed media bargaining code on Tuesday in order to bring Facebook back to the negotiating table with news companies. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The amendments pave the way for Google and Facebook to avoid the code altogether if they can satisfy the government they have struck enough deals outside it. Mr Frydenberg said on Wednesday that negotiations between Facebook and the government had been complex and difficult, but he believed news companies would reach commercial deals with the tech giants, which was the purpose of the code. Tidal hydroelectric power plants of the future will be able to generate "green" electricity significantly more efficient by using optimized turbines. Engineers from the University Otto von Guericke of Magdeburg are developing turbine blades with built-in motors. These integrated drives ensure that during each revolution, the turbine blades adjust optimally to the water flow, and thus avoid the dangerous stall condition. This term describes the separation of flow away from the surface of turbine blades, airplane wings or rotor blades. Stall means that lift forces that power the turbines or keep a plane in the air suddenly drop, while the drag forces increase dramatically. In turbines, this leads to a loss of efficiency, and over longer periods of time, to material failures and fatigue fractures in the turbine rotors. "Until now, those stresses had to be compensated for with stronger components, using more or high-performance materials," explains fluid engineer Dr. Stefan Hoerner from the Institute of Fluid Dynamics and Thermodynamics. "From the economical and ecological points of view, both are rather expensive. With the new technology, it should become possible to actively control the flow around the blades and as a result design turbines to be lighter, more durable and thus more efficient." Through the movement of the blades, the integrated drives are able to influence and optimize the flow in such a way that they achieve maximum efficiency with minimum strain. "This translates in higher electrical output, and at the same time the structure can be designed to be more slender. In turn this helps to save materials and to increase the lifespan of the turbines in sustainable tidal or run-of-river power plants." The specially-developed drives are being designed and integrated into the turbine blades by the interdisciplinary team led by Dr. Hoerner and Professor Roberto Leidhold from the Institute of Electrical Energy Systems in the university's Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. Dr. Hoerner explains that they will be integrated within the blade itself. "In fluid mechanics terms this is useful, as in this way they do not generate any additional drag. In the model that we intend to test in our flow channel, it will be an additional challenge to design the motors so that they are very small and yet still strong enough. At their thickest point the blades are only a little thicker than a centimeter." For this reason, the design and stability of the reduced-weight turbine model will be tested with computer simulations before the practical test takes place in the water channel. "If this undesirable effect -- blade stall -- can be controlled and we are able to significantly increase the efficiency and lifespan of the turbines, we anticipate great interest in a broad industrial application of the technology in the pioneering industry of tidal energy," explains Dr. Hoerner. "The ecosystems of the sea coasts and rivers are already very heavily exploited by man. For this reason, every additional square meter on which we build must be utilized as well, and at the same time as sustainably, as possible. This will help to combat climate change and to sustainably use a source of renewable energy -- hydropower -- that until now has only be used to a limited extent." Dr. Hoerner also states that until now, conventional hydropower has often not truly been sustainable, since dam systems have great potential for ecological and social harm, such as loss of biodiversity, injuries to fish, disruption of sediment transport, and land loss. "This is why we are working on an unconventional technology that functions more like a wind turbine and is therefore considerably more sustainable." A lab-scaled demonstrator of this unconventional turbine should be available and tested within the next three years. The German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding the research project, which is entitled "Improved performance and fatigue strength of vertical-axis water turbines through active blade adjustment", to the tune of almost 700,000 euros. ### Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) The mountainous region of Cordillera is home to several remote and isolated areas making it a challenge to implement vaccine rollout, a regional health officer said. Dr. Anachris Kilakil, head of the Department of Health-Cordillera Administrative Region's Family Health Cluster, told CNN Philippines' Front and Center that the hard-to-reach communities will be prioritized. "The LGUs (local government units) are really planning to give the vaccines to the farthest areas first to ensure they are able to be vaccinated before they go into the capital towns and areas," Kilakil said. Vaccination sites will be set up at the nearest possible locations to the residents, she said. Under the government's priority list are health workers, indigent senior citizens, remaining senior citizens, remaining indigent population, and uniformed personnel, to be followed by other essential workers. Kilakil identified some of the challenge areas in Cordillera: Calanasan and Kabugao in Apayao; Kabayan, Bakun, Kibungan, and Buguias in Benguet; Balbalan, Pasil, Lubuagan in Kalinga; and Tinoc, Hungduan, Mayoyao, and Aguinaldo in Ifugao. "They have several municipalities that are really very isolated and very dependent on the weather conditions for operations on how we give the essential services," Kilakil said. "These areas have several rivers that you need to cross before you go to their other barangays." Cagayan Valley shares a similar problem, according to the DOH in the region. Dr. Rio Magpantay, director of DOH-Region 2, said some coastal areas can be reached through planes, but only if the weather permits. Other mountainous areas, like Nagtipunan, the farthest province in Quirino, can be reached through land travel if there are no rains that could trigger landslides. "And if it's going to be this first quarter, I guess the weather condition is better so we can be able to reach these particular GIDA (Geographically Isolated and Disadvantaged Areas)," he said. After some delays, the country is expecting the first batch of COVID-19 vaccines to arrive this month. These are the 600,000 doses of Sinovac's CoronoVac, which were donated by the Chinese government. It's unsure when exactly the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines from the World Health Organization-led COVAX facility will be delivered. The rollout was initially set for mid-February, but it was only then that the government submitted the required indemnity agreement. Officials earlier said the vaccines that can be kept at standard storage temperature of 2-8 degrees, including those from AstraZeneca and Sinovac, will be deployed to far-flung areas. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 06:32:27|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close ROME, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- When Luca Attanasio, Italy's ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo, was killed earlier this week while working in-country, the tragedy thrust an important foreign policy issue onto the table for a new Italian government struggling to focus on confronting the coronavirus pandemic and sparking economic growth. Minister of Foreign Affairs Luigi Di Maio went to the airport in Rome to receive the caskets holding the remains of Attanasio and Carabinieri Officer Vittorio Iacocacci, killed in the same attack (a third person, the Congolese driver of the car Attanasio and Iacocacci were in, also died in the attack). Statements of sympathy came from Italian leaders and from their counterparts abroad. Flags were hung at half-mast, and it was the top news story in Italy for two days. Di Maio called for investigations into the circumstances surrounding the attack. "The attack was a reminder that foreign affairs can become a major issue in an instant, with no warning," Vittorio Emanuele Parsi, director of the School for Economics and International Relations, told Xinhua. Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank (ECB), was installed as Italy's newest prime minister on Feb. 13. In that short span, his government has focused its attention on how to handle the coronavirus pandemic, including vaccine rollouts and updates to national health restrictions. On the economy, Draghi has focused on how to best spend more than 200 billion euros (243 billion U.S. dollars) in European Union recovery funds in order to help jump-start an economy that last year shrunk to the size as it was in 1998. Foreign policy did not appear to be a high priority -- at least to the casual observer. "Every government comes into power with the task of maintaining the country's standing in the world, but it would be easy to think this new government had more urgent priorities," Ferdinando Nelli Feroci, a former ambassador and president of Italy's Institute for Foreign Affairs, said in an interview. "But that is not the case." Nelli Feroci said that the other priorities -- the pandemic and the economy -- were inextricably tied to foreign affairs. He noted that coronavirus vaccines come from abroad and that international cooperation is "essential" to confronting the virus. The Group of 20 summit Italy will host this year, for example, will focus on international collaboration on international travel rules and policies aimed at getting vaccines to developing countries. Ditto for the economy, which is dependent on international commerce. "Italy would like for United States President Joe Biden to lower trade barriers for European goods put up under the previous administration, and it would benefit if some of the tariffs put in place between the United States and China were reversed," Nelli Feroci said. Parsi said the Italian government might even find itself playing a key role internationally due to the stellar reputation Draghi earned when he headed the ECB. There, he was credited with saving the euro currency from the credit crunch that gripped Europe in 2011 and 2012. "Every leader in the world knows who Mario Draghi is," Parsi said. "Many of the other leaders in Europe will probably be gone in a year or two. That could give Italy, led by a figure like Draghi, new relevance." Enditem [February 24, 2021] ZTE i5GC Enables Private Networks for Digital Transformation of Vertical Industries SHENZHEN, China, Feb. 24, 2021 /CNW/ -- ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, today announced at MWC Shanghai, the release of i5GC (industry 5GC) network solution oriented to private 5G networks for industry. The solution introduces 5G capabilities such as large bandwidth, low latency, high reliability and multiple connections into various industries, and integrates technologies such as AI, IoT, cloud computing, big data and MEC to enable the digitalisation of whole industries and build fully-connected intelligent private 5G networks for vertical industries. At present, public 5GC is oriented to consumer applications, so it cannot meet industry users' ultra-high requirements for security, latency, reliability, network control rights, energy consumption and usage environment. ZTE i5GC addresses this by deeply integrating and optimising 5GC functions. It uses 2U general servers to achieve the integration of multiple network functions (NF) and a plug-and-play one-stop deployment mode to achieve minimal space, minimal energy consumption and minimal operation and maintenance (O&M). This soution provides non-professional industry users with rapid and accurate 5G network access deployment and excellent service experience. In addition, ZTE i5GC can be flexibly customised according to a user's diversified requirements for security, traffic processing and autonomy, and provide different function combinations and deployment forms for different scenarios. For instance, the user plane function (UPF) is deployed to the edge, traffic is forwarded nearby, and user data is locally managed. In addition, ZTE i5GC employs a 3GPP service-based architecture (SBA) to seamlessly interconnect with a 5G public network. It can integrate third-party multi-access edge-computing (MEC) applications through open interfaces to achieve flexible expansion and rapid iteration of edge applications, so as to explore and breed 5G killer applications in the vertical field. Towards the construction of business-grade 5G networks, ZTE has implemented in-depth 5G applications for use in vertical fields such as mines, medical treatments and ports. For example, for a 5G smart mine project, ZTE uses i5GC to deploy a complete set of 5G networks underground, meeting the mine's compact space and explosion-proofing requirements, and achieving full coverage from key 5G networks. ZTE i5GC will continue to focus on industry projects, promote the understanding of industry requirements, work with enterprises and operators to build a 5G application ecosystem, help expand the 'blue ocean market' opportunity for 5G for business, and drive 5G large-scale commercial use and value monetisation. Media Contacts: Margaret Ma ZTE Corporation Tel: +86 755 26775189 Email: ma.gaili@zte.com.cn View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/zte-i5gc-enables-private-networks-for-digital-transformation-of-vertical-industries-301234250.html SOURCE ZTE Corporation [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Reliance Industries Ltd on Wednesday sought bids from buyers of coal gas it produces from CBM blocks in Madhya Pradesh at a minimum price of about $6 at the current oil price. Reliance sought bids for 0.82 million standard cubic meters per day of gas from the Sohagpur coal-bed methane (CBM) block, according to a notice inviting offer (NIO). Bids have been sought for supply of gas, which can be used in industries as fuel or feedstock as well as by city gas operators for supply as CNG to automobiles and piped cooking gas to households, for one year beginning April 1, 2021. Users have been asked to quote a percentage of Brent crude oil price they will be willing to pay for the gas. Reliance set 9.5% of Brent rate as the base or minimum price and asked bidders to "enter bids that are higher than or equal to it." At the current $65 per barrel Brent crude oil price, the price of gas produced from coal seams, called CBM, comes to $6.17 per million British thermal unit (mmBtu). "A bidder shall be required to quote the variable denoted as 'V' in percentage terms as a positive number" of the Dated Brent price, the notice said. Gas price will be "higher of (V per cent) x Dated Brent; or PPAC Price," it said. PPAC price refers to the rate the government fixes every six months for gas produced mostly by state-owned firms such as ONGC. That price for the six months ending March 31, 2021 is $1.79 per mmBtu. Reliance started commercial gas production from the CBM blocks in March 2017 and reached the peak of 3 mmscmd before the end of 2018. CBM is natural gas stored or absorbed in coal seams and contains 90-95% methane. The pricing formula notified on Wednesday is a variation over the 2017 formula when Reliance had sought bids in the form of a deductible from 12.67 per cent of prevailing Brent crude oil price plus USD 0.52 per mmBtu plus USD 0.26 per mmBtu. In that bidding for up to 3 mmscmd of gas, Reliance had outbid rivals including state-owned GAIL (India) Ltd to buy the entire volume. Earlier this month, Reliance and its partner BP plc of UK bid out 7.5 mmscmd of gas from its eastern offshore KG-D6 block by pricing the fuel at JKM (Japan Korea Marker). The JKM represents the price for spot LNG delivered in the Asian market and is now being widely used in the LNG industry as a marker for medium/ long term LNG contracts instead of traditional linkage to oil. In that auction, bidders were asked to "quote the variable denoted as 'V' in USD per million British thermal unit (mmBtu) terms." "The gas price (in USD/mmBtu (GCV)) shall be = JKM V," the bidding notice had said adding the 'V' could not be less than USD (-)0.30/mmBtu. Reliance bought two-thirds of the volume in that auction. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. PITTSFIELD The verdict holds, for now, in one of the most heinous murder cases in recent Berkshire County history. The state Supreme Judicial Court declined Tuesday to overturn David T. Chalues 2014 conviction for the murders of David Glasser, Edward Frampton and Robert Chadwell. We conclude that the verdicts of murder in the first degree are consonant with justice, and we decline to exercise our authority, the court said, to order a new trial or direct the entry of verdicts of a lesser degree of guilt. The SJC decision on Chalue means that state appeals have been exhausted for all three men convicted in the murders, including Adam Lee Hall and Caius Veiovis. The men took their victims to a remote place in the Berkshires, as Tropical Storm Irene drenched the region Aug. 28, 2011, and killed, beheaded and dismembered them. Though their state appeals failed, the men, all of whom were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, have other legal options. David F. Capeless before SJC Nov. 6 2020 David F. Capeless, in highlighted box at right, addressed justices of the Supreme Judicial Court in early November. He appeared to argue again Veiovis has taken his case to federal court. And Hall has filed a motion for a new Superior Court trial, in which he claims, among other things, that former Berkshire District Attorney David Capeless, who prosecuted the cases, was in league with the Hells Angels. Capeless and fellow prosecutor Joseph Pieropan have been named special assistant attorneys general to handle Veiovis case in federal court. This is important to us. Professionally, we have a personal stake in this, Capeless said Tuesday night. The important thing is that we have stayed with this. This doesnt end it. These were odious crimes that struck at the heart of our system of justice, Capeless said. Veiovis attorney has filed a brief in federal court, and Capeless and Pieropan, both working without pay, have responded to that. It isnt known whether the case will progress to oral arguments or be rejected. Halls motion for a new trial, a different legal route than the automatic appeal to the SJC, is pending. Capeless praised Pieropans commitment to seeing that the punishments hold, for the sake of the victims families, friends and the entire community. Joe has been with me through this, Capeless said. Hes done an incredible job. On Tuesday, the SJC rejected Chalues claim that the judge who presided at his trial erred in the way he spoke with a juror a claim that Capeless picked apart in a brief and in a November appearance before the justices. The Minister-designate for Sanitation and Water Resources, Cecilia Abena Dapaah has said a total of GHC 840 million was spent on the free water supply system introduced by the President as part of measures to cushion Ghanaians for the Covid-19 period. She made the statement when she appeared before the Appointments Committee of Parliament for vetting on Tuesday, February 23. She said about ten million people in urban areas benefitted from the intervention but could not readily provide the figure for beneficiaries of the intervention in rural areas. President Akufo-Addo announced the extension of the free provision of water and electricity for lifeline customers by three more months. According to him, the extension has become necessary to reduce the continued ravaging impact the Covid-19 pandemic has brought on Ghanaians. He made the announcement in his 21st COVID-19 update to the nation on Sunday, January 3, 2021. He said lifeline electricity consumers and households whose water usage do not exceed five cubic meters per month will not pay for the utilities in January, February, and March 2021. You will recall that, in our quest to help shield you from the effects of the virus, Government took the decision to provide relief to Ghanaians, which included the absorption of electricity and water bills. This relief package ended in December. However, with the continuing difficulties occasioned by the pandemic, I want to state that the Government intends to continue to support the most vulnerable in our society. Source: Emmanuel Akorli/Parliamentary Correspondent/Peace Fm Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Berlin: The European Unions chief said she would happily receive AstraZenecas coronavirus vaccine as officials rushed to find ways of ensuring doses refused by skittish Germans did not go to waste. President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen volunteered for the jab amid growing concerns that unfavourable comments by top European officials including French President Emmanuel Macron had slowed take-up of one of only three vaccines currently approved EU-wide. Earlier this month, Macron said Britain had taken a risk in authorising AstraZeneca so rapidly. A German official study also found evidence that, though effective, the vaccine has more severe side effects than its two main rivals. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says she would take the AstraZeneca dose. Credit:AFP I would take the AstraZeneca vaccine without a second thought, just like Modernas and BioNTech/Pfizers products, von der Leyen told the Augsburger Allgemeine. [February 24, 2021] Experience Matters: Miami Virtual Program, Arizona Now Accepting Enrollments for 2021-2022 School Year After an academic year like no other, Miami Virtual Program, Arizona (MVPAZ), a full-time online public-school program serving students throughout the state, is welcoming students in grades K-10 to enroll for the 2021-2022 school year, starting tomorrow. MVPAZ is the state leader in providing safe, alternative education options, while giving your student a personalized experience and providing them with what they need to succeed. MVPAZ is tuition-free to all students who reside in Arizona, staffed by state-licensed teachers, and is a state-authorized online public-school program authorized by Miami, Arizona Unified School District. They offer a personalized approach to learning, delivering rich, engaging curriculum designed to assist students who seek alternative pathways to education, who need some time for educational recovery, and who may eventually be college-bound. "One of the biggest things this pandemic showed us is that students, and parents, need consistency and continuity n their education," said Bouchra Bouanani, head of school. "Our world-class technology and student-focused curriculum, along with the support of data driven, inquiry-based and teacher led instruction, will give your children a reliable advantage they need to succeed throughout high school, and beyond." Students choose online school for a variety of reasons including advanced learning, a bullying-free environment, and the ability to support extracurricular pursuits or medical needs. MVPAZ's online platform gives students the opportunity to pursue their academic goals in a supportive environment and at an appropriate pace for their learning style. MVPAZ is now accepting enrollments for the 2021-2022 school year. Families are encouraged to attend an online information session hosted by the school. More information, how to enroll, and a schedule of upcoming events can be found here. About Miami Virtual Program, Arizona Miami Virtual Program, Arizona (MVPAZ) is an online public-school program of the Miami, AZ Unified School District that serves students in grades K-10. MVPAZ is tuition-free and provides families the choice to access the curriculum and tools provided by K12, a Stride Company (NYSE: LRN). MVPAZ's individualized approach gives Arizona students the chance to learn in the ways that are right for them. Stride offers learners of all ages a more effective way to learn and build skills for their future. For more about MVPAZ, visit https://mvpaz.k12.com/. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005010/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Jacom Stephens/Getty Image A Berkeley man accused of making death threats against the Asian community on social media ahead of the Lunar New Year was arrested on an outstanding warrant for gun charges Monday. He now faces hate-crime charges, according to authorities. Oakland police said they received tips from local news outlets on Feb. 11 about troubling statements made online by Reginald Jackson, 24, toward the Asian community. The flagged social media posts on Twitter and Instagram included references to beating up, robbing and blowing up Asians, according to a report from KGO-TV. Former US Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund is sworn in before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs & Senate Rules and Administration joint hearing in Washington, DC. Photo: Andrew Harnik - Pool/Getty Testifying for the first time about the insurrection at the US Capitol, former security officials blamed faulty intelligence for the disastrous failure to anticipate the violent intentions of the mob that invaded the building and interrupted the certification of the US presidential election. The officials, including the former chief of the Capitol Police, are blaming other federal agencies and each other for their failure to defend the building as supporters of then-president Donald Trump overwhelmed security barriers, breaking windows and doors and sending lawmakers fleeing from the House and Senate chambers. They said they expected the protests to be similar to two pro-Trump events in late 2020 that were far less violent. Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund described a scene that was like nothing he had seen in his 30 years of policing. When the group arrived at the perimeter, they did not act like any group of protesters I had ever seen, the ousted chief said, arguing that the insurrection was not the result of poor planning but of failures across the board from many agencies and officials. No single civilian law enforcement agency and certainly not the United States Capitol Police is trained and equipped to repel, without significant military or other law enforcement assistance, an insurrection of thousands of armed, violent and co-ordinated individuals focused on breaching a building at all costs, Mr Sund said. The joint hearing is the first time the officials have testified publicly about the events of January 6. In addition to Mr Sund, former Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger, former House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving and Robert Contee, the acting chief of police for the Metropolitan Police Department, are testifying. Mr Sund, Mr Irving and Mr Stenger resigned under pressure immediately after the attack on the Capitol. We must have the facts, and the answers are in this room, Senate Rules Committee chairwoman Amy Klobuchar said at the beginning of the hearing. Mr Sund told the lawmakers that he learned only after the attack that his officers had received a report from the FBIs field office in Norfolk, Virginia, that forecast in detail the chances that extremists could commit war in Washington the following day. The head of the FBIs office in Washington has said that once he received the January 5 warning, the information was quickly shared with other law enforcement agencies through the joint terrorism task force. Mr Sund said that an officer on the task force had received that memo and forwarded it to a sergeant working on intelligence for the Capitol Police, but that the information was not put forward to any other supervisors. Mr Sund said he wasnt aware of it. Senate Homeland chairman Gary Peters said the failure of the intelligence report to reach the chief was clearly a major problem. How could you not get that vital intelligence? Mr Peters asked. Mr Sund replied: That information would have been helpful. The officials have also disagreed on when the National Guard was called and on requests for the guard beforehand. Mr Sund said he spoke to both Mr Stenger and Mr Irving about requesting the National Guard in the days before the riot, and that Mr Irving said he was concerned about the optics of having them present. Mr Irving denied that, saying Mr Sunds account is categorically false. Safety, not optics, determined their security posture, he said, and the top question was whether intelligence supported the decision. We all agreed the intelligence did not support the troops and collectively decided to let it go, Mr Stenger said. He added that they were satisfied at the time that there was a robust plan to protect Congress. After smashing through barriers at the perimeter, the invaders engaged in hand-to-hand combat with police officers, injuring dozens of them, and broke through multiple windows and doors, sending lawmakers fleeing from the House and Senate chambers and interrupting the certification of the 2020 US presidential election. Five people died as a result of the violence, including a Capitol police officer and a woman who was shot by police as she tried to break through the doors of the House chamber with lawmakers still inside. The hearing is the first of many examinations of what happened that day, coming almost seven weeks after the attack and more than one week after the Senate voted to acquit former US president Donald Trump of inciting the insurrection by telling his supporters to fight like hell to overturn his election defeat. Thousands of National Guard troops still surround the Capitol in a wide perimeter, cutting off streets and sidewalks that are normally full of cars, pedestrians and tourists. Congress is also considering a bipartisan, independent commission to review the missteps, and multiple congressional committees have said they will look at different aspects of the siege. Federal law enforcement have arrested more than 230 people who were accused of being involved in the attack, and US President Joe Bidens nominee for attorney-general, Judge Merrick Garland, said in his confirmation hearing on Monday that investigating the riots would be a top priority. The hearing is the first of at least two public examinations of what went wrong on January 6. A second hearing will examine the response of the US Defence Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. Consulting giant McKinsey has attracted criticism over France's slow vaccine rollout after Emmanuel Macron gave the firm 2.83 million to handle logistics. The president signed contracts totalling 9.46 million with four large consulting firms, despite France's traditional pride for the quality of its vast civil service. Within weeks of those deals, Mr Macron was receiving flak for falling behind Germany and Italy in the vaccine stakes not to mention Britain which left them all in the dust. The multi-million euro contracts signed with McKinsey, to help ensure that doses of vaccines could be transported across France, were not initially disclosed to the public. When they did emerge, Mr Macron's critics reacted furiously to what they perceived was an over-reliance on expensive private corporations, made more glaring by the government's intention to keep the deals hushed. The woeful European vaccine rollout has been exemplified by France which has only managed to administer doses to 5.88 per 100 people. This compares to 27.3 per 100 Britons, 6.41 Germans, 6.77 Spaniards and 6.12 Italians French President Emmanuel Macron adjusts his face mask as he attends a video conference meeting held by the United Nations Security Council at the Elysee Palace in Paris on Tuesday Conservative party Les Republicains wrote a letter to the president citing McKinsey's recent 425 million pay-out to settle claims over its role in the opioid crisis in the United States. MP Constance Le Grip tweeted: 'What an admission of inefficiency and powerlessness! And all our state apparatus, what's the use of it?!?!' Her colleague Olivier Marleix said: 'Absolutely staggering! What does McKinsey have to do with this? We have a Department of Health, a Department of the Interior and a Department of Defence in crisis management... As long as we know how to mobilise them.' In addition to McKinsey, Paris hired IT consultancy heavyweight Accenture to oversee the vaccine campaign's digital systems, Citwell, a French firm, and the French arm of JLL, a London firm, were hired to help with 'logistical support and vaccine distribution.' Prior to those deals being revealed, Mr Macron had already been bombarded with criticism for months over his handling of the pandemic. He has angered sections of the public by imposing draconian lockdowns, including curfews and hefty fines for leaving home, while struggling to keep cases and deaths down compared to neighbours like Germany. Polls showed that during the first lockdown last spring, the majority of Germans, Britons and Italians believed their governments were handling the crisis well, while two-thirds of the French believed the opposite about Mr Macron's government. Mr Macron, a former investment banker, is not the only European leader to hire private firms to aid in its Covid-19 response and Britain and the United States have also hired McKinsey. London signed contracts worth 1.1 million with McKinsey so that it could support a task force advising ministers and to help determine NHS testing capacity. Boris Johnson's government also payed the Boston Consulting Group 10 million for 40 people to work on the country's test-and-trace system over four months. In the US, federal, state and city agencies have awarded McKinsey contracts worth more than 70 million. When the contracts came to light in January, the French government defended the decision saying that private firms 'support from the private sector in addition to our civil servants' expertise.' Government spokesman Gabriel Attal said: 'It's in this context that we used [McKinsey]. As you know logistics ... are central in the vaccination campaign.' 'Consultancy firms have been used for several years by multiple governments when they elaborate and implement big projects requiring strategic or logistical support and advice,' Attal said. McKinsey has so far declined to comment on the furore. But the spotlight on it and other expensive consulting firms has continued to grow as Mr Macron's popularity suffers amid the pandemic. Critics say the government has become overly reliant on consulting firms like McKinsey which lack accountability. In 2018, Paris signed a 860,000 pooled contract with McKinsey which made the firm available to French agencies for them to call on if needed and which meant the agencies would not have to seek bids on the work. The December contracts, and another signed last month, totalling 2.83 million, were part of that pooled agreement. McKinsey agreed to help the government define distribution routes for the Pfizer and Moderna jabs which present logistical complications because they must be kept at extremely cold temperatures during transportation and while they are stored. By the start of January, France had one million doses of vaccine ready to go, but they were not delivered quickly and Mr Macron's rivals and the media were soon alive to that failure. According to the most recent data, Britain has vaccinated 27.3 per 100 people, while France has only managed 5.88 per 100. This compares to 6.77 per 100 people in Spain, 6.41 in Germany and 6.12 in Italy. The French rollout was further dented by supply issues with the vaccine manufacturers but this was a global problem. It is not clear what role, if any, McKinsey had in France's slow rollout. But herein lies the issue. Frederic Pierru, a sociologist and researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, has studied the impact of consulting firms called in to support French healthcare. He said that these companies use models which they have applied to other industries but which do not always transfer over effectively to public health. 'Afterwards, the government doesn't go back to evaluate whether what the consultancies did worked well or not,' Mr. Pierru told The New York Times. 'It's too early to tell if McKinsey and others are adding value in this campaign,' he added. 'But I think we'll never really know.' Conservative politician Veronique Louwagie, who obtained the details of the contracts from the health ministry, said she wanted to 'sound the alarm' after her findings. 'Generally speaking, hiring consulting firms doesn't shock me too much,' she told Politico. But, she added, 'the frequency bothers me, the acceleration [in recent months] too ... The question today is: Is it normal for an administration such as the health one not to be able to fulfill a number of missions?' Mr Macron's government has signed at least 575 contracts with consultancy firms since October 2018, for services ranging from economic recovery plans to carbon neutral ambitions. Work for the public sector accounted for 10 per cent of profits for French consultancies in 2018, totalling 565 million. Those figures put France ahead of Italy and Spain, which started recruiting consultancies many years before, but behind Britain and Germany. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company While the President has the right to remove U.S. Attorneys, there is precedent for U.S. Attorneys in the Northern District of Illinois to remain in office to conclude sensitive investigations, the statement said. After our repeated calls, we appreciate that Mr. Lausch will be given this opportunity. NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- As Chief Executive Officers of New York's major health care systems, we would like to provide facts to clear up confusion in the public and the media regarding decisions to discharge patients to nursing homes during New York's spring coronavirus surge. Collectively, our hospitals treated more COVID-19 patients than any group of hospitals in the nation. Since the pandemic began, hospitals in New York State have safely cared for and discharged 135,000 COVID-19 inpatients. Every patient we treat is precious. We are particularly saddened by every patient that has passed away. This disease has taken a significant emotional toll on patients' families and on our hardworking and dedicated staff. Starting in late February and early March of 2020, New York hospitals mounted the largest mobilization of health care resources in our nation's history. We rose to the challengebut early in the pandemic it was not clear how many patients we would need to admit to our hospitals and not at all clear that we would not become overwhelmed and unable to safely care for our patients. With the Italian experience informing our planning and preparedness efforts, where hospitals were completely overwhelmed, we did everything possible to increase capacity. We cancelled thousands of non-urgent surgeries, procedures, and treatments. We significantly increased our bed capacity within days and were required to develop plans to increase capacity even more. Part of this effort was to discharge patients to non-hospital care settings where they could be safely cared for, including nursing homes. It is an everyday practice for hospitals to discharge stable, medically recovered patients to nursing homes so long as the nursing home can safely care for the patient. This is true even of infectious patients who are medically stable, if proper precautions are taken. Federal and NYS guidance make this clear. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services emphasized this on March 13, 2020two weeks before the New York State Department of Health issued its March 25th directivewhen it stated that nursing homes "can accept a resident diagnosed with COVID-19 and still under Transmission-Based Precautions for COVID-19 [from a hospital] as long as the facility can follow CDC guidance for Transmission-Based Precautions." The guidance emphasized: "Nursing homes should admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was/is present."1 The March 25th NYS directive closely adheres to this Federal guidance, stating that a resident cannot be denied admission to a nursing home based "solely" on a confirmed or suspected COVID-19 diagnosis, and made clear that precautions must be maintained.2 Nothing in either the Federal or State guidance and directives required nursing homes to accept patients that they could not safely care for. Indeed, the longstanding New York State regulatory requirement that a nursing home "shall accept and retain only those nursing home residents for whom it can provide adequate care" remained in effect.3 In addition, Federal regulations continued to require that nursing homes protect all residents and staff from communicable diseases.4 Experts from across the globe and our own CDC have concluded that COVID-19 patients are only contagious relatively early in their illness. The latest report from the CDC states that most adults with moderate COVID-19 disease "remain infectious no longer than 10 days after symptom onset."5 The CDC also states that, while there have been reports of potentially infectious virus in some adults with severe disease between 10 and 20 days after symptom onset, it was estimated that 88% and 95% of their specimens were no longer infectious after 10 and 15 days, respectively, following symptom onset. Many studies have also found that the maximum infectious period is within the first week of illness, with some studies finding maximum infectiousness occurring from 2-3 days before the onset of symptoms and 2-3 days after.6 In many cases, then, including residents in nursing homes, the time period of maximum infectiousness is prior to admission to a hospital, both during an asymptomatic period and 2-3 days after symptoms occur.7 In spring 2020, the average length of hospital stay for COVID-19 hospitalized patients discharged to nursing homes from our hospitals was nearly 10 days. This suggests that a great many recovering COVID-19 patients who were discharged from hospitals to nursing homes in New York were no longer transmitting the virus. Most, if not all, would have been admitted to the hospital once they were highly symptomatic, which would have been several days after first contracting the virus. They then would have spent many days in the hospital. Given that COVID-19 nursing home residents that were admitted to our hospitals had already, by definition, contracted COVID-19 in their nursing homes, discharging them back to their nursing homesso long as their nursing homes could properly care for them under Federal and State guidelines and with proper precautions--was a prudent and safe option, both for them and the other residents in their nursing homes. Steven J. Corwin, MD President and CEO NewYork-Presbyterian Kenneth L. Davis, MD President and CEO Mount Sinai Health System Michael Dowling President and CEO Northwell Health Robert I. Grossman, MD Chief Executive Officer NYU Langone Health Philip O. Ozuah, MD, PhD President and CEO Montefiore Medicine ____________________ 1 https://www.cms.gov/files/document/3-13-2020-nursing-home-guidance-covid-19.pdf 2 https://dmna.ny.gov/covid19/docs/all/DOH_COVID19%20_NHAdmissionsReadmissions_%20032520.pdf 3 Title 10 New York Codes, Rules, and Regulations, Section 415.26(i)(l)(ii) 4 42 U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Section 483.80 5 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/duration-isolation.html 6 See for example Luca Ferretti, et al., The Timing of COVID-19 Transmission, the Lancet, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3716879 7 David Grabowski, PhD, Professor of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, https://www.ahcancal.org/News-and-Communications/Fact-Sheets/FactSheets/Analysis-COVID-Outbreaks-in-Nursing-Homes.pdf SOURCE New York Hospital System CEOs Researchers have revealed a significant reduction in British pig farms' carbon footprint, a fall of almost 40 percent over the last 20 years. Indoor and outdoor-bred pigs saw reductions of 37% and 35.4% for global warming potential, commonly known as carbon footprint. The researchers, from the Institute for Global Food Security (IGFS) at Queens University Belfast, drew their conclusions from historic data on livestock systems across England, Scotland and Wales. The role of animal feed was found to be central to the environmental impact of pig farms accounting for between 75-80% of carbon footprint. Changes to feed ingredients, therefore, had the potential to significantly alter the carbon rating of pig farms and the industry as a whole. Specifically, the increasing trend of replacing soya imported from South America - which has a high footprint - with UK crops such as rapeseed and sunflower meal to feed pigs was found to have a major mitigating effect on environmental outputs. Advances in animal nutrition and feedstuff availability were also found to have had a beneficial effect, particularly the increased availability of synthetic amino acids and enzymes, the price of which decreased over the time period in question. When added to domestic feedstuffs like rapeseed, these supplementary ingredients increased nutrient availability and improved feed balance, which was found to have reduced nutrient excretion in manure whilst boosting animal productivity by as much as 30%. The study also found that such supplements in animal feed helped lower levels of phosphorous in run-off from pig manure by more than 20%, reducing the contribution of pig systems to freshwater pollution. Changes in animal performance due to breeding for leaner and faster growing pigs, increases in number of piglets born per sow per litter and reductions in overall mortality were also found to have contributed significantly to a reduced environmental impact. For example, advances in breeding leaner and faster-growing pigs alone was found to lower carbon footprint by 20%. The study was led by Prof Ilias Kyriazakis from IGFS in collaboration with other UK institutions, interrogating publicly available AHDB data from Great Britain from 2000-2020. The reason this research is so significant is that it shows an area of livestock farming where carbon footprint has been reducing over the past 20 years, almost under the radar," he said. We hear a lot these days about the need for farmers to reduce their carbon outputs for the sake of the environment, especially as it applies to beef and dairy cattle farming. "There is much more attention focussed on ruminant food systems as they produce higher GHG emissions." Kyriazakis said he believed there were important lessons to be learned from this study, not only for pig farming, but potentially for all livestock systems. "Some of the improvements identified in this study could potentially be applied to other animal systems, which would ultimately help move our collective agriculture systems towards a carbon-neutral model. The research has been published in the Agricultural Systems journal following peer review. We have to get back to doing jury trials, said Illinois Supreme Court Justice Michael Burke, who was at a Wednesday event showcasing the new courtroom. Most circuit courts have a plan to begin jury trials in the near future in person with social distancing and all the precautions in effect. MECOSTA COUNTY Nestle has entered into an agreement to sell its North America Water brands for $4.3 billion. One Rock Partners, LLC recently announced in a news release that one of its affiliates in partnership with Metropoulos & Co., has entered into an agreement to purchase Nestle Water North America. The transaction is expected to be completed in the Spring, at which time Dean Metropoulos will become the companys chairman and CEO. Metropoulos has a successful 40-year track record of transforming companies and reinvigorating brands. His company has invested in over 80 entities, accelerating revenue and earnings growth and propelling renewed prominence to such brands as Hostess and Pabst Brewing Company, the news release said. This is an important inflection point for the business as it transitions to an independent company and I look forward to collaborating with the management team to deliver unparalleled value to our customers, Metropoulos said. A spokesperson for NWNA told the Pioneer that all U.S. associates will transfer with the business and there are no planned reductions in force at this time. "This is a very complex transaction and many decisions will not be finalized until or after the closing. Our dedication to the communities where we live and work is very important to us. We are in the early stages of this transaction and it is too early to speculate on any potential operational changes. Until then, we will operate as usual, the spokesperson said. The Nestle Water bottling plant in Mecosta County employs around 280 local workers and provides an economic impact of $14.2 million annually, in the five-county region of Mecosta, Osceola, Montcalm, Newaygo and Kent counties, according to an economic impact study posted on their website. The companys economic contribution including monies spent on wages, vendors, donations, etc., totals $18.6 million. In addition, they provide nearly $2.4 million in state and local taxes. Mecosta County Community Development director Jim Sandy said facility is very important to the local economy. "They are a dynamic part of our economy," he said. "They provide a livable, family supporting wage for over 275 families in Mecosta and surrounding counties and they are the highest private sector tax payer in the county." He added that the plant in Stanwood is one of the most profitable and productive facilities in the companies portfolio, so it would be unlikely that they would see any change in operations. Statewide, the company provides around 765 jobs and $160 million in economic activity, including $5 million in state and local tax revenue. We look forward to working closely with our operating partners to accelerate the growth of NWNAs extraordinary set of attractive brands, while continuing to create value in the communities in which the company operates," One Rock managing partner R. Scott Spielvogel said in a news release. As a private company, the business is expected to have greater resources and flexibility to drive continued growth, strengthen operations and execute its mission, a spokesperson for One Rock said in the news release. One of the leading beverage companies in North America, NWNA has 27 production facilities and employees about 7,000 workers across North America. It currently sources water from 38 active springs throughout the United States. The company has come under scrutiny from environmental groups such as FLOW and Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation. Last year lawmakers considered, but ultimately dropped, legislation that would have banned companies from bottling ground water. NOVA has been ranked every year since 2011, and to make the top ten, ahead of so many other excellent colleges affirms how diverse our institution is and how responsive we are to the unique needs of students here, Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) has been named one of the top ten Military Friendly Schools by ViQtory, a military marketing and recruiting firm. Seeking to provide veterans and military spouses with the best possible education that fits in with their many other priorities, NOVA is proud to be ranked eighth in the nation out of 747 schools to receive this prestigious designation. The 2021-2022 Military Friendly Schools list will be published in the May issue of G.I. Jobs magazine and can be found at http://www.militaryfriendly.com. Institutions earning the Military Friendly School designation were evaluated using both public data sources and responses from a proprietary survey. Over 1,200 schools participated in the 2021-2022 survey. NOVA has been ranked every year since 2011, and to make the top ten, ahead of so many other excellent colleges affirms how diverse our institution is and how responsive we are to the unique needs of students here, said Takesha McMiller, director of military and veteran services. Military life is not easy and being able to sort out resources such as veterans benefits, tuition assistance, military dependent assistance and more has always been the Office of Military and Veterans Services highest priorities. NOVA serves over 5,000 military-affiliated students and their spouses in easing the transition from military life to civilian life while also assisting those on active duty. In providing an educational platform to success while helping these students access needed resources allows for peace of mind for these hardworking veterans, military servicemembers and their families. NOVA is committed to supporting entire military families, said Dr. Frances Villagran-Glover, vice president of student services at NOVA. As a military spouse, I recognize that these adult learners come to us with a wealth of experiences from their travels. We even have military students taking online courses while they are stationed abroad. It is fantastic that NOVA is recognized nationally for implementing systems that greatly increase student success. Methodology, criteria and weightings were determined by ViQtory with input from the Military Friendly Advisory Council of independent leaders in the higher education and military recruitment community. Final ratings were determined by combining the institutions survey response set and government/agency public data sources, within a logic-based scoring assessment. They measure the institutions ability to meet thresholds for Student Retention, Graduation, Job Placement, Loan Repayment, Persistence (Degree Advancement or Transfer) and Loan Default rates for all students and, specifically, for student veterans. Military Friendly is committed to transparency and providing consistent data-driven standards in our designation process. This creates a competitive atmosphere that encourages colleges to consistently evolve and invest in their programs. Schools who achieve this designation show true commitment and dedication in their efforts. Our standards assist schools by providing a benchmark that promotes positive educational outcomes, resources and support services that better the educational landscape and provide opportunity for the Military Community. - Kayla Lopez, National Director of Military Partnerships, Military Friendly Schools For more information on NOVAs programs geared toward military spouses, veterans and active duty service members, please contact, Takesha McMiller, director of military and veteran services at tamcmiller@nvcc.edu. For press inquiries, please contact Hoang Nguyen, public information officer at hdnguyen@nvcc.edu. For questions about Military Friendly Schools, please contact Kayla Lopez, national director of military partnerships at mf2021@militaryfriendly.com. Northern Virginia Community College is the largest institution of higher education in the Commonwealth of Virginia and one of America's largest community colleges. NOVA enrolls more than 75,000 students at its six campuses in Alexandria, Annandale, Loudoun, Manassas, Springfield and Woodbridge, and through NOVA Online. For more information about NOVA and its programs or services, call 703-323-3000 or visit the College's Web site, http://www.nvcc.edu. About Military Friendly Schools The Military Friendly Schools list is created each year based on extensive research using public data sources for more than 8,800 schools nationwide, input from student veterans, and responses to the proprietary, data-driven Military Friendly Schools survey from participating institutions. The survey questions, methodology, criteria and weighting were developed with the assistance of an independent research firm and an advisory council of educators and employers. The survey is administered for free and is open to all postsecondary schools that wish to participate. Criteria for consideration can be found at http://www.militaryfriendly.com The survey is administered for free and is open to all post-secondary schools that wish to participate for consideration. Criteria for the designation can be found at http://www.militaryfriendly.com. About VIQTORY Founded in 2001, VIQTORY is a service-disabled, veteran-owned small business (SDVOSB) that connects the military community to civilian employment, educational and entrepreneurial opportunities through its G.I. Jobs and Military Friendly brands. VIQTORY and its brands are not a part of or endorsed by the U.S. Dept of Defense or any federal government entity. Learn more about VIQTORY at http://www.viqtory.com. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked Lithuania to help speed up the supply of more COVID-19 vaccines to Ukraine. He said this at a meeting with Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis in Kyiv on Wednesday, February 24, the president's press service reported. According to the report, the sides discussed the situation in Ukraine and Lithuania in connection with the coronavirus pandemic and measures being taken by the leadership of both countries to overcome the pandemic and ensure the protection of citizens. "Volodymyr Zelensky asked for help in speeding up the supply of more vaccines and offered Ukraine's assistance in its mass production if necessary," the President's Office said. At the same time, Zelensky recalled that at the beginning of the pandemic Ukraine supported some EU countries by providing personal protective equipment and the assistance of health workers. Landsbergis is on a working visit to Ukraine on February 23-24. He said on February 23 that Lithuania was ready to share with Ukraine a surplus of the COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available. Vaccination against coronavirus in Ukraine started on February 24. Some 1,317,694 cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Ukraine as of February 24, including 5,850 new cases recorded on February 23. op According to a press release published by the French company MBDA on February 19, 2021, MBDA has been awarded a contract from the Egyptian Navy for the VL MICA NG (New Generation) air defence system to equip its Egyptian corvettes. According to a press release published by the French company MBDA on February 19, 2021, MBDA has been awarded a contract from the Egyptian Navy for the VL MICA NG (New Generation) air defence system to equip its Egyptian corvettes. Follow Navy Recognition on Google News at this link Vertical Launch MICA (VL MICA) (Picture source: MBDA) MBDA has been awarded a contract from the Egyptian Navy for the VL MICA NG (New Generation) air defence system to equip its Egyptian corvettes. Officially launched in October 2020, the VL MICA NG system is based on the integration of the MICA NG (New Generation) missile into the existing VL MICA point and close area air defence system. The VL MICA NG system offers improved capabilities to handle atypical targets (UAVs, small aircraft), as well as future threats characterised by increasingly low observable infrared and radio frequency signatures. Additionally, VL MICA NG will be able to intercept conventional targets (aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles) at longer distances. The Egyptian Navy already equips its four Gowind class corvettes, recently procured from the French Naval Group shipyards, with systems from the VL MICA family. The MBDA MICA (Missile dinterception, de combat et dautodefense / Interception, combat and self-defense missile) is a multi-target, all weather, fire-and-forget, short- and medium-range missile system. It is intended for use both from air platforms as individual missiles, as well as by ground units and navy ships, which can be equipped with the rapid fire MICA Vertical Launch System. It is fitted with a thrust vector control (TVC) system. There are two MICA variants: the MICA RF has an active radar homing seeker and the MICA IR has an infra-red imaging homing seeker. Both seekers are designed to filter out counter-measures such as chaff and decoy flares. A thrust vector control unit fitted to the rocket motor increases the missiles agility. The missile is capable of lock-on after launch (LOAL), which means it is capable of engaging targets outside its seekers at-launch acquisition range. Mounted on the MBDA Rafale fighter, the MICA IR can provide IR imagery to the central data processing system, thus acting as an extra sensor. MICA can also be employed as a short-range surface-to-air missile. It is available in a ground-based version, VL MICA, fired from a truck-mounted box launcher, and a naval version, VL MICA-M, fired from a ship-fitted vertical launch system. They welcome Ukraine's commitments to the International Monetary Fund. The Ambassadors of the G7 countries (the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan) have expressed support for the independent work of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU). They announced this on the official Twitter account of the UK Presidency of the G7 Ambassadors' Support Group in Kyiv. Read alsoNBU elaborates on banking sector in 2020: Shutdown of bank branches, lay-offs "G7 Ambassadors, in a meeting with NBU governor [Kyrylo] Shevchenko, welcomed the NBU's commitment to helping Ukraine drive banking and economic reform, and meet its commitments to the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and other international financial institutions. The G7 supports a strong and independent NBU that contributes to Ukraine's economic stability and prosperity for all Ukrainians," they said on Twitter on February 24. Previous developments On June 9, 2020, the IMF's Executive Board adopted an 18-month Stand-By Arrangement (SBA) worth SDR 3.6 billion, or about US$5 billion, aimed at helping Ukraine overcome the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. On June 12, Ukraine received the first IMF disbursement worth US$2.1 billion under the SBA. In late November, the Finance Ministry reported on the successful completion of talks with the IMF on benchmarks of the draft budget for 2021, which was one of the major prerequisites for starting the SBA review. On January 11, 2021, an IMF mission resumed work in Kyiv, they worked until February 12 but departed without any decision on the SBA review. G7 Ambassadors, in a meeting with @NBUkraine governor Shevchenko, welcomed the NBUs commitment to helping #Ukraine drive banking and economic reform, and meet its commitments to the IMF and other international financial institutions. 1/2 G7AmbReformUA (@G7AmbReformUA) February 24, 2021 Reporting by UNIAN [February 24, 2021] GRAPHISOFT Empowers Mission of 400 Forward as Official Software and Technology Partner BOSTON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- GRAPHISOFT, the global leader in Building Information Modeling (BIM) software solutions for architecture, has announced a new partnership between its North America office and 400 Forward aimed at diversifying the architecture and urban design professions by providing access to cutting-edge software and technology. A national non-profit organization, 400 Forward was founded to ensure that young black women interested in becoming architects receive the guidance, outreach, community engagement, and financial backing they need to succeed. Led by founder and CEO, Tiffany Brown, 400 Forward was named in recognition of the 400th black female becoming a licensed architect in the United States. 400 Forward has embarked on a mission to seek out and support the next 400 licensed, black women architects. As the software and technology partner for 400 Forward, GRAPHISOFT will empower the organization's chosen mentees with full access to an education version of Archicad and GRAPHISOFT Learn, the company's education and learning portal. Live, hands-on training with GRAPHISOFT experts on n on-going basis will strengthen the partnership. "We are extremely proud to be involved with this effort. Our long-standing commitment to education could not be better served," said Tracey Gatland, General Manager, GRAPHISOFT North America. "Ensuring equal access to and proficiency with the latest, proven technology in use today in the fields of architecture and design will create a sturdy foundation for 400 Forward to succeed in its goal of empowering the next generation of black female architects." "Our organization was born out of a realization that comprehensive programs that introduce black girls to architecture were lacking," said Tiffany Brown, 400 Forward Founder and CEO. "Technology resides at the heart of how architects coordinate projects. This partnership will help expand our outreach efforts and put powerful tools into the young hands that need it most." In recognition of Black History Month and to kick off its partnership with 400 Forward, GRAPHISOFT hosted a discussion with Brown about black women architects, the importance of access to training and tools, and how the AEC industry can increase the number of women of color in leadership roles. The full interview can be found here. ### About 400 Forward 400 Forward's goal is to support the career development of the next 400 women architects, with an underlying focus on African American girls through exposure, mentorship, and financial assistance. 400 Forward has been launched as a comprehensive program that introduces young girls to architecture, provides scholarships and wrap around services to college students, and pays for study materials and licensing exams for African American women in architecture. About GRAPHISOFT GRAPHISOFT empowers teams to create great architecture, through award-winning software solutions, learning programs, and professional services for the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction industry. Archicad, the architects' BIM software of choice, offers a complete end-to-end design and documentation workflow for architectural and integrated architectural and engineering practices of any size. BIMx, the most popular mobile and web BIM app, extends the BIM experience to include all stakeholders in the building design, delivery, and operations lifecycle. BIMcloud, the AEC industry's first and most advanced cloud-based team collaboration solution, makes real-time collaboration possible across the globe regardless of the size of the project and the speed or quality of the team members' network connection. GRAPHISOFT is part of the Nemetschek Group. To learn more visit www.graphisoft.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/graphisoft-empowers-mission-of-400-forward-as-official-software-and-technology-partner-301234925.html SOURCE GRAPHISOFT North America [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] She recently revealed she is expecting a baby boy with her fiance Ross Worswick. And Danielle Fogarty looked radiant as she displayed her growing baby bump while marking 22 weeks on Wednesday. The fashion entrepreneur, 29, uploaded a snap of herself posing for a mirror selfie as she placed a hand around her bump. Mother-to-be: Danielle Fogarty looked radiant as she displayed her growing baby bump while marking 22 weeks on Wednesday The social media star donned a black crop top and a matching pair of leggings while she styled her blonde locks into an updo for the post. Danielle then took a trip down memory lane as she shared a sizzling bikini snap taken in February last year in the Bahamas. The blonde looked incredible as she showcased her washboard abs in a dark green two-piece as she soaked up the sun on a boat trip. On Tuesday, Danielle uploaded a stunning black and white photo of herself cradling her bump in an open white shirt. Sizzling: Danielle then took a trip down memory lane as she shared a sizzling bikini snap taken in February last year in the Bahamas Alongside the snap, she wrote: 'Feeling so relieved that by the time my little boy is here we might be living in a normal world. Do you think I will be able to have one or two birthing partners at the end of June?' It comes after Danielle confirmed she is having a baby boy in a sweet Valentine's Day gender reveal. Danielle was every inch the stylish mum-to-be as she donned a glam Zimmerman mini dress and Aquazzura heels for the announcement. The beauty wore her blonde locks down and perfectly styled into bouncy curls as she posed with several blue and white balloons. Radiant: Danielle uploaded a black and white photo of herself cradling her bump in a white shirt as she hoped for a 'normal world' when her son is born Ross also got the blue-theme memo as he rocked a double denim ensemble and white t-shirt while cradling his fiancee's blossoming bump. Accompanying her post, excited star Danielle penned: 'Happy Valentines to the TWO men in my life. ITS A BOY!' While Danielle's beau shared the same stunning snaps to announced the news with his followers and wrote: 'Cooking up a KING. Its a BOYYY' Ross also shared a picture of two Nike trainers, a large white shoe for him and a small black and white one for his unborn son. It's a BOY! Danielle looked sensational in a blue wrap dress as she announced she's having a son in a sweet gender reveal on Valentine's Day The blonde beauty later took to Instagram Stories to thank her fans for all their lovely messages and said she's 'so excited' to start showing all the things she's got ready for her 'little man'. Danielle - whose father is motorbike star Carl Fogarty - announced she was pregnant on Christmas Eve, two months after Ross proposed during a romantic trip to Dubai. During a Q&A session with fans on Instagram in December, Danielle revealed that she wasn't pregnant when she got engaged in Dubai on October 3, explaining she thinks she must have conceived about a week later. She said: 'It happened probably a week after. It wasn't planned. I was off the pill for about three months just to see how my body would react. Mum and dad: Danielle and fiance Ross Worswick exuded happiness as they posed for a sweet shot, with Ross cradling the fashion entrepreneur's blossoming bump 'A little miracle happened! It was an amazing surprise. I found out about three or four weeks after we got back from Dubai. Speaking about finding out, Danielle said: 'I did a test because I was late and was super bloated, which I don't usually get. I was at work on my own and I did a test. 'Then I came home early and told Ross ''I don't think we can get married anymore'', I mean, because we were going to in 2021, and his little heart sank... Then I told him I was pregnant!' Love: Danielle and Ross shared a kiss as they announced the happy news with their followers In October, Danielle revealed she was engaged to her boyfriend, Ex On The Beach star Ross, after two years of dating. Danielle and Ross became an item back in August 2018 but have known each other for several years. The expecting mother was previously engaged to Jake Quickenden, but their three-year relationship ended in April 2018. Jake's girlfriend Sophie Church also announced her pregnancy in December. Researchers of the UMA identify favorable environmental areas for the outbreak of this virus, which is transmitted from birds to humans by mosquitoes Knowing the environmental and human-related variables that characterize the favorable areas for the incidence of the West Nile virus, a flavivirus that is transmitted from birds to humans by mosquitoes, is essential to identify those places in Europe at high risk of experiencing outbreaks, even before these are registered, thus enabling preventive measures to be taken. Researchers of the Biogeography, Diversity and Conservation Group of the University of Malaga have developed risk models for West Nile Fever, the disease caused in humans by this virus, which, based on historical incidence data, may predict areas of future outbreaks a year in advance, as well as detect their intensity. Artificial intelligence to develop risk models Particularly, using modelling based on fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence, they have analyzed the incidence of the disease in Europe in 2017 to explain and restate the "abnormally high" data of 2018, the year with the highest number of cases registered so far, a total of 1605. The results have been recently published in the scientific journal PLoS Negl Trop Dis. "Based on the analyzed data, we could successfully predict the places where the disease appeared, the intensity of outbreaks and the time they occurred", explains Raimundo Real, scientist of the Animal Biology Department of the UMA. This expert asserts that anticipating the possible incidence of the disease may lead to taking preventive measures specifically in risk areas. These measures include early spraying, advising the population on measures to avoid bites or controlling the water points where mosquitoes breed. Likewise, healthcare centers could be warned about the possible disease incidence in the area, contributing to early diagnosis and improving prognosis. Spatial and environmental variables For the development of the risk maps, the researchers used a spatial model related to bird migration routes, which act as reservoir of the virus. On the other hand, they determined that the environmental risk factors are high temperatures, presence of river courses, low altitude areas, which usually have a warmer climate and conditions of higher humidity, and the presence of certain livestock facilities, such as stables and poultry farms, which, as they assure, are the most favorable factors for the spread of the virus. "We have observed that high temperatures speed up the life cycles of mosquitoes, shortening their gonotrophic cycle -period between the time mosquitoes feed on blood and the time they feed again-, therefore, in warmer areas mosquito bite rate is also higher, facilitating the transmission of the virus", emphasizes the professor of the UMA. Early warning: basin scale Likewise, rivers are related to the presence and proliferation of mosquitoes, so rivers also contribute to a higher infection rate. "In 2017, the outbreaks began in the lower areas of large river basins and spread to higher areas, which highlights the importance of river basins in the propagation of outbreaks", says Raimundo Real, who adds that, consequently, the early warning should be based on a basin scale. This way, the Head of the Animal Biology Department of the UMA states that some Spanish provinces of western Andalusia, southern Extremadura and southwestern Castilla-La Mancha, especially the lowest areas of the Guadalquivir and Guadiana valleys, are European sites that are environmentally favorable for the transmission of the disease, which directly affects the human nervous system. ### The study "Predicting the spatio-temporal spread of West Nile virus in Europe" is part of the National Plan project "Analysis of risks in Spain associated with the changing biogeographical basis of zoonotic diseases in humans", which is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and the ERDF. The study has been also conducted in collaboration with the International Vaccination Center of Malaga of the Spanish Ministry of Health, Consumer Affairs and Social Welfare. Bibliography: The Perspective Atlanta, Georgia February 24, 2021 Dr. Togba-Nah Tipoteh Any commentary is useful to the extent that it can help people to learn how to use non-violence to solve a societal problem. This commentary is coming out at this time to help in calming the tensions about whether some persons have the morality to be credible to be elected or appointed to any position of trust. We can learn from Liberian culture. All the Liberian languages tell us that we all come from the same place. We are all children of the One and Only Creator, the Creator of the world and all human beings and non-human beings in the world. From this knowledge about our Common Creator, we learn how to respect one another. In each of the Liberian languages, this Creator has a name, as in the following examples: Nnangala in Kpelle; Kamba in Vehee (wrongly called Vai); Ahbie in Dahn (wrongly called Gio); Walla in Mahn (wrongly called Mano); Glaypor in Bassa, and Nyinhswa in Kraowihn (wrongly called Kru). Through the realization that we have the same Creator and, therefore, we are the same human beings, we know that we have equal inalienable rights, as found in the constitution of Liberia. From this knowledge flows the reality that humanity brings morality which brings credibility. The Youth of Madina, Cape Mount County, invited me to speak to their community about Credibility. The Youth chose the topic Credibility because they wanted to understand correctly how come they voted for some persons but when these persons got elected, they forget about the interests of the voters and focused on their own interests. I accepted the invitation of the Youth of Madina. What follows is the substance of the speech that I gave in Madina and the discussion on the speech. Humanity has to do with respect for a person, realizing that all human beings have the same Creator. Knowing the source of respect, a person realizes that honesty comes from the morality of humanity. With this respect, a person is prepared to live for others rather than live for himself or herself. It is this realization that leads a person to Community interest rather than Self Interest. It is essentially this record of service to the Community that a person has the makes the person credible. When this credibility is observed in the record of a person, the Vehee people say to the person: Kamba Mu Tayee Beh, meaning God Bless You. On the part of the Kissi people, they say Achaabor, meaning You have Done Well. A credible person is a good person, a person with a record of acting in the interest of voters, most of whom are poor, like the voters in Madina. What happened in the election in Madina was that the voters were driven by emotion and money rather than by reason, resulting in greedy persons getting elected. So, it is not surprising that these greedy persons did not care about the interests of the voters. The Medina Community Hall was jammed pack with hundreds of people, most of whom had just come from burying two persons who died a day before the speech. As most of the people in Madina were Muslims, their burials took place a day after death. Although condolences for the bereaved were in order, the people realized correctly they must draw inspiration from the good things that the dead persons did not complete. And central to the good things left undone was the interest of the Youth in knowing how to choose good leaders. Upon listening to my speech, a vigorous discussion followed and ended up with the admission by the Medina people that the voters were money-driven than reason-driven, resulting in the election of greedy persons. The persons who accompanied me to Madina were Mrs. Elithia Manning, Founding President-General of the Liberia Labor Congress; Sheikh David Kiazolu, Vice Chairperson of the National Muslim Council; Mr. Dempster Manangan, Secretary General of the Bong County Council of Chiefs and Elders; Mrs. Abigail Kofa, Women Chairlady, Borough of Krutown, and SheikhMamamudu Pusah, Susukuu Coordinator of Western Liberia. Sheikh Kiazolu, a Citizen of Madina goes to Madina almost weekly, helping people to know how to chose good leaders. Sheikh Pusah is often in various parts of Grand Cape Mount County, while a co-worker Mr. Gbanja Jeh, Head of Liberians United to Save Humanity, works out of his base in Than, Gola Konneh District of Grand Cape Mount County, in efforts to promote community development. Many persons consider the Vehee people to be lazy or weak because they are afraid to be confronted by the principled behavior of Vehee people due to their awareness and practice of Vehee culture in their drive to improve their living conditions. Witness the recent signing of a document by hundreds of Vehee Elders and Youth leaders, protesting the use of Vehee lands by Concessions without the approval of the Vehee people. It took the intervention of former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to calm the storm over the illegal occupation of Vehee lands. The Madina experience clearly shows that the Way Forward for the Better is the use of knowledge to raise awareness in ways that motivate people to take non-violent actions to change living conditions for the better. Baika-way, the Vehee language for thank you yah. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Father Michel Bineen Mukad was an administrator of St. Mary Our Lady of Ransom Catholic Church in Georgetown. (Provided) Sharon Steinmann / Bloomberg Lina Hidalgo may have just turned 30, but her achievements expand far beyond her years. The Harris County Judge has been named a "Leader" on Time Magazine's Time100 Next list. The ranking highlights 100 emerging leaders who are shaping the future, according to the publication, and selects recipients based on how they cope with crisis. The Pentecost University has resumed full academic work at the Pentecost Convention Centre (PCC) at Gomoa Fetteh in the Central Region. This was after the suspension of academic activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the closure of schools in March last year, the Church of Pentecost made the PCC available for the treatment of persons affected by the COVID-19. Reopening However, with the reopening of schools, the Pentecost University has admitted 88 fresh students for the School of Theology, Mission and Leadership, which is operated at the PCC. The fresh students took the matriculation oath administered by the Registrar of the university, Mr Foster Amoani. At the ceremony to admit the students last Wednesday, the Chairman of the Church of Pentecost, Apostle Eric Kwabena Nyamekye, said the facility was safe for the students to undertake their studies. He said although there were about 88 COVID-19 patients currently at the facility, the distance between where they resided and that of the students were far apart. We actually supported the government the first time we recorded the pandemic and when the country started recording the second wave, the government had to come back to us. The students are safe, they are about 700 metres apart with the patients, he said. Apostle Nyamekye said the church decided to offer its facility to the government because it was there to support humanity and do the work of God. Development He also asked the students to take their academic and spiritual development seriously for their total development and not only focus on one of them. A former Chairman of the Church of Pentecost, Apostle Dr Opoku Onyinah, said the students would be trained as ministers before they were allowed to go out to preach to the world at large. According to him, the training of pastors was very important since it offered them the opportunity to be taken through the rudiments of what they were going to do. In an address, the Vice Chancellor of the Pentecost University, Prof. Kwabena Agyepong-Kodua, charged the students to promote the institutions A+ agenda For us to possess the nations, we need to master what we have, master what others know, and present alternatives in very compelling, spiritual and knowledgeable manner, he told the students. The Officer in charge of Digital Media at the university, Mr Daniel Dickson-Dedzah, urged the students to be careful with what they put on the Internet. 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 Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... SANTA FE New Mexico lawmakers who run for federal office during a legislative session would have to report whos contributing to their campaign every 10 days under legislation moving forward in the Senate. The proposal, Senate Bill 359, is intended to close a loophole in state law. Lawmakers and the governor cant solicit campaign contributions for state office during a prohibited period each year, including the legislative session, a prohibition intended to discourage state officials from taking donations as theyre acting on legislation. Imposing a similar ban for federal office, however, might interfere with federal law. ADVERTISEMENTSkip ................................................................ Sen. Jacob Candelaria, an Albuquerque Democrat and sponsor of the bill, said his legislation would uphold the publics right to know whos contributing during a session to campaigns launched by state legislators or the governor. The bill comes as four legislators are campaigning to succeed U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland in the 1st Congressional District, a position she would vacate if confirmed as interior secretary in President Joe Bidens administration. The proposal cleared the Senate Rules Committee on a 10-0 vote and now heads to the Judiciary Committee. A father-of-two who agreed to hold over 178,000 of heroin and cannabis because he needed money to pay for his father's funeral has received a fully suspended sentence. Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard that Stephen Berrigan (44) agreed to hold the drugs in an act of desperation and had previously refused to hold drugs. Berrigan of St Marks Crescent, Clondalkin, Dublin pleaded guilty to possession of cannabis and heroin for sale or supply at his address on August 25, 2019. He has no previous convictions. Passing sentence on Tuesday, Judge Melanie Greally said Berrigan was in the throes of intense grief when he made the decision to involve himself in criminality and that this decision was made purely to finance part of his father's funeral. Judge Greally said the facility he provided was a very important and valuable facility for people involved in the distribution of drugs. She said the value of the drugs was large, particularly the value of the heroin. She said she took into account the very favourable evidence given by the prosecuting garda and his expectation that the accused is unlikely to reoffend. Judge Greally sentenced Berrigan to five years imprisonment, but suspended the entirety of the sentence on strict conditions. At a previous sentencing hearing, Garda Dominic Downing told John Byrne BL, prosecuting, that gardai went to Berrigan's home with a search warrant and Berrigan informed them they would find drugs in two vans parked in his driveway. Gda Downing said plastic bags containing two bricks of heroin and three packs of herbal cannabis were found in two separate vans. No drugs or drug paraphernalia were found inside the accused's home. The combined total value of both the heroin and the cannabis seized was 178,463. In interview with gardai, Berrigan said he had agreed to store the drugs in exchange for payment, though he did not know how much money he would receive. He said he had been approached previously to hold drugs and had refused but agreed after finding himself in need of money. Berrigan told gardai he had been working as a delivery man for a small bakery, but had been working less and earning less money after his father became seriously ill. He told gardai he had decided to move the drugs from his home into the two vans in his driveway. Gda Downing agreed with Anne-Marie Lawlor SC, defending, that her client's father had been diagnosed with cancer and died shortly thereafter in July 2019. He agreed this was an act of desperation by her client after he received a bill of 7,000 for his father's funeral. The garda agreed that Berrigan was at the very lowest end of the enterprise of possession of drugs and that there was nobody lower than him. He agreed the accused did not display any trappings of wealth. Gda Downing agreed the people involved in this offending represent a real threat to Berrigan and his two teenage children. Ms Lawlor said her client did not know the value of the drugs. She said her client had been living with his father for 10 or 11 years following the breakdown of his marriage and is a part-time carer for his brother who has Down Syndrome. DANBURY The state has a new tax commissioner. The state House approved former Mayor Mark Boughton to be head of the states Department of Revenue Services Its an honor to be able to serve the residents of Connecticut, so I look forward to it, Boughton said. Boughton has been serving as commissioner for about two months, but Wednesdays vote makes his position official. After leading the city for about 20 years, Boughton resigned as Danburys mayor in mid-December when the governor nominated him for the position. Gov. Ned Lamont reached across the aisle in picking Boughton, a Republican, who ran unsuccessfully three times for governor. Boughton served an unprecedented 10 terms as mayor and had already decided not to run for an 11th term when Lamont offered him the job. Boughton said he and the governor want to avoid raising taxes, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. We want to maximize the taxes that we have, make sure we collect everything that is owed to the state of Connecticut and make sure we do that with compassion given the challenges of COVID, he said. He said he has been working on various initiatives, including an online tax filing system. The goal is eventually to move all filings online, he said. The net result is that our residents will have a much easier time filing online, Boughton said. Boughton still lives in Danbury and is leading a committee working on the proposed $90 million career academy that he had championed as mayor. When police broke into Andrea Lynn Blankenship's home in Chickasha, Okla., on Feb. 12, they found her body stabbed and her chest mutilated. Earlier that day, the victim's neighbor admitted to breaking into Blankenship's home, cutting out her heart and taking it back to his uncle's house, police said. "He cooked the heart with potatoes to feed to his family to release the demons," an agent with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said to a judge in a request for a search warrant, which was reviewed by the Oklahoman. Lawrence Paul Anderson then allegedly killed his uncle and his uncle's 4-year-old granddaughter in a gruesome case that has rocked the city of 16,400 about 40 miles southwest of Oklahoma City. Anderson, 42, was charged Tuesday with three counts of first degree murder and two felony charges of assault and battery with a deadly weapon and maiming, court records show. Anderson was denied bond on Tuesday, and it's not clear whether he made a plea. Lawyers for Anderson did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Tuesday. Police have not said whether they suspect a motive in the slayings. Police first learned of the crimes on Feb. 9, when they received a 911 call from someone inside the home of Leon Pye, Anderson's 67-year-old uncle, OSBI said in a news release. Anderson had been staying with his uncle and aunt, 64-year-old Delsie Pye, after Republican Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt commuted his 20-year prison sentence. He was released on Jan. 18 after serving a little more than three years in prison, according to court records. According to OSBI, the person who called the police quickly hung up, prompting the dispatcher to alert Chickasha Police. Once they arrived at the home, police heard someone inside yelling for help and then found Leon Pye and his 4-year-old granddaughter, Kaeos Yates, who was visiting for the day, dead. His wife, Delsie, was maimed with stab wounds in both eyes, KFOR reported. Delsie and Anderson, who was also injured, were transported to a hospital for treatment, OSBI said. While in custody in the hospital on Feb. 12, Anderson admitted to killing Blankenship, 41, police said. Anderson said he had walked to her house and used his shoulder to slam into the back door to break it open. He then fatally stabbed her and "cut her heart out," he later told OSBI agents. Then he walked to his aunt and uncle's home, where he cooked it and tried to force them to eat it before attacking them, the Oklahoman reported. After he recovered at the hospital, police transported Anderson on Feb. 15 to Grady County Jail. Anderson is scheduled to return to court on April 1. Anderson has a lengthy criminal past, court records show. He first went to prison in 2006 and served two years for possessing crack cocaine with the intent to distribute and for attacking his girlfriend and pointing a gun at her. In 2012, he returned to prison with a 15-year sentence for another crack cocaine distribution charge, but was released early after less than six years. In 2017, he was sentenced to 20 years on drug charges and having a gun, which was in violation of his probation. That sentenced was commuted by Stitt last June to nine years before he was again released early. At a news conference on Tuesday, Grady County Republican District Attorney Jason Hicks condemned the governor's commutation and blasted the parole board for letting Anderson out. "I really think an offender such as this should have not ever been able to even apply for a commutation," Hicks said. A spokesman for Stitt did not immediately return a request for comment. Hicks added that the Oklahoma Department of Corrections warned in Anderson's application that he was a "high risk to offend." Hicks also said that he is considering capital punishment. "The death penalty is absolutely on the table," he said. In an interview with KFOR, Haylee Blankenship, Andrea Blankenship's 18-year-old daughter, remembered her mother as caring and "filled with so much love." Speaking for a family still in shock over the details of their loved one's death, the younger Blankenship hopes the district attorney pursues the death penalty. "I hope that he spends the rest of his life thinking about it until he gets his life taken, just like he took those people's lives," she said. "Theirs not to reason why...theirs just to do or die." Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade This awful quote refers to a communication error that sent a light brigade of 600 men to near certain death during the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. It also reflects the attitude of the megalomaniac class currently pretending to lead us. They care so little for the lives of the citizens of this country that they are formulating executive order policies to which, if one were to ask of any of them, "What does this do for our country's benefit?," there could be no answer. We no longer have permission to ask such questions. Has anyone ever asked President Biden the reasoning behind a single one of his signed orders? Those who have real questions have been ignored, canceled, or intimidated. His press secretary can't go from point A to point B on any questions asked her. She either needs to "circle back" or gives an inane obfuscating answer that leaves you scratching your head. Certainly, nobody dares to ask the president directly. We are all aware that his answers would not be forthcoming because he has not the remotest idea what he's signing. It's put on his desk, he reads his little note cards, and then he makes like an automaton and does the bidding of his advisers, with Kamala hovering over his shoulder like an enforcer. The only people who get to ask him questions, if and when he makes a public appearance, are fully vetted and follow the script so he can read the answer from his teleprompter. We watch the parade of paper in awe. We watch with alarm as everything Trump accomplished gets erased by each swipe of a pen. Gone are our energy independence and the sane energy policies that made us prosperous and self-sufficient. Gone is the rule that excludes China from our grid. Gone are the union jobs of workers who were building Keystone. Now, if we want oil to get from Canada to our refineries, the only way is via fossil fuelguzzling trains and trucks, both prone to disastrous accidents. What benefit to our country there? We watch as Biden's orders open the border, rendering helpless the agents who enforce our sovereignty. We puzzle endlessly over policies that let every person, regardless of health or intention, enter into the country and disappear from sight until they need "services." Yet we can't travel to visit our grandchildren. We're told in no uncertain terms that these people will get our tax money. We will pay for their children's education, their housing, and their health care, here in the land of milk and honey. Never mind that our cities are filled with people who have no job, no home, no hope. What benefit to our country there? Before the inauguration, I worried about the fence in D.C. I knew there was some bigger meaning than just protecting the Capitol for that single event. I felt that it was a threat to all of us. I've come to realize that the fence is a clear statement that the People's house excludes any but the elite, and then, only those elite who think a certain way. The new gated community, still guarded by thousands of troops, is a very exclusive enclave. We no longer have any rights; we've ceded them to those inside. The slap in the face to all of us is that, except in that enclave, the floodgates to the country are open. It's a clear message. Our ruling class could not care less about the country and its own citizens. There is no benefit possible from this policy. I would like to keep the optimistic attitude that this too shall pass, that the 2022 election will change the balance of power in D.C., that the pendulum will swing. The problem is, Democrats have shown that cheating during an election is too easily accomplished. They will no longer have to pretend fairness. They've already won that battle. Now it's up to the states themselves to extricate us from the clutches of the regime. Can they? They'd need to revise election policies back to sane levels, cleaning the voter rolls of dead people, non-citizens, and people at mythical addresses. They'd need to rule that the Facebook drop boxes are illegal. They'd need to reinforce rules that make voting in person the norm. They'd need to invest in voting equipment that can't be breached. They'd need to put the citizens of their state first. They need to do all that now, not sometime down the road, so that it is completed before the next election. Perhaps the best thing any of us can do is hound every one of our state representatives to get it done. There are some places (California, I'm betting, is one of them) where it will fall on deaf ears. But there are, I think, enough states where it could make a profound difference to the survival of the United States of America. Image: The Democrats' Great Wall. YouTube screen grab. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes [February 23, 2021] INVESTOR ALERT: Law Offices of Howard G. Smith Continues Investigation of Leidos Holdings, Inc. (LDOS) on Behalf of Investors Law Offices of Howard G. Smith continues its investigation on behalf of Leidos Holdings, Inc. ("Leidos" or the "Company") (NYSE: LDOS) investors concerning the Company and its officers' possible violations of federal securities laws. On February 16, 2021, Spruce Point Capital Management published a report alleging, among other things, that "Leidos' $1.0 billion levered acquisition of L3Harris' Security Detection and Automation business (SD&A) is experiencing significant problems, including product defects, that increase the likelihood of a material adverse effect." The report also alleged that the Company misstated revenue citing for example, a $6 million variance between the third quarter 2020 investor presentation and Form 10-Q, which "raises the possibility that Leidos has booked fake revenue, or is keeping two sets of books." On this news, Leidos' stock price fell $3.41 per share, or 3.14%, to close at $105.22 per share on February 16, 2021, thereby injuring investors. If you purchased Leidos securities, have information or would like to learn more about these claims, or have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests with respect to these matters, please contact Howard G. Smith, Esquire, of Law Offices of Howard G. Smith, 3070 Bristol Pike, Suite 112, Bensalem, Pennsylvania 19020 by telephone at (215) 638-4847, toll-free at (888) 638-4847, or by email to howardsmith@howardsmithlaw.com, or visit our website at www.howardsmithlaw.com. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210223006193/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form Fears of a Chinese military base at the Kiribati Government land near Savusavu on one of Fijis northern provinces have been laid to rest by the office of President Tenati Maamau. The [Kiribati] Government completely rules out the building of a military land or sea base on this land, the Presidents office said in response to email questions sent by Islands Business magazine. The focus of development in Natoavatu is for the agriculture sector only. The 5,460 acres of mainly hilly and jungle clad land on the west coastline of Savusavu harbor, on Fijis northern island of Vanua Levu was bought by the previous Kiribati government in 2014 for a report AUD$9.3 million (US$7.3 million) from the Anglican Church. Then President Anote Tong had wanted to explore options of commercial, industrial and agricultural undertakings on the land, which comes with a deep- water sea front. Fish canning was a venture the Tong Government was seriously pursuing at that time, working with its own tuna fishing company in Tarawa as well as with the Fiji Government owned cannery, PAFCO. The deal fell through when Tong completed his maximum allowed term as President in 2016, and was succeeded by the government of President Maamau. When President Maamau confirmed last week in Tarawa that his government was working with China on the development of its land in Fiji, it raised speculation that Beijing would develop the land and could possibly use it as a military base. This is not so, was the response of the office of the President of Kiribati when Islands Business emailed questions to Tarawa early this week. The assistance from the Chinese is being sought on the finalisation of the plan, in particular to provide advice on the agricultural activities being proposed for the land. They will not be directly involved in the development or any activity. The Chinese role as mentioned in the interview is to provide technical assistance and advice that will assist in finalising the Natoavatu plan. The focus of the Natoavatu plan is to develop the land through agricultural investments. The Presidents office did not specify the type of agricultural investments its planning in Natoavatu, except to say that it would produce agricultural produce for Kiribati. It adds that agricultural work will start as soon as the plan is ready. On the future of the 300 or so local families that currently reside on part of Natoavatu, the office of President Maamau said: The President refers to consultations with those residing on the land to assist to look after it. Asked whether the involvement of China in preparing the agricultural plan for Natoavatu was payback for all that China had invested in Kiribati since Maamau switched the countrys allegiance to China from Taiwan in September 2019, the office said: The purpose is to utilise the vast experience of China in the agriculture sector to guide the finalisation of our plan so that it is sound and implementable. The Kiribati relation with China is based on mutual respect and trust. All grants that have been provided are all done in a transparent manner, he said. SOURCE: ISLANDS BUSINESS/PACNEWS Next : Former Vanuatu Prime Minister Salwai appeals suspended sentence The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company The U.S. space agency NASA has released the first sounds ever recorded on Mars a light gust of wind on the planet's surface along with panoramic views from its Perseverance Mars rover. In a remote news briefing late Monday, NASA scientists released video taken by Perseverance as it descended to the surface of Mars last Thursday, deploying its red-and-white supersonic parachute by way of a rocket-powered hovercraft and lowering its wheels to the ground in a plume of dust and smoke. The footage was captured by cameras mounted at different angles of the landing craft as it passed through the planets thin atmosphere to gently touch down inside a basin called the Jezero Crater. Along with the video and still photos, NASA scientists also released the first ever audio recordings of wind from the surface. NASA scientist Dave Gruel noted the microphone picked up a gust of wind, along with a gentle whir sound from the rover itself. Gruel said their analysis indicated the sound came from a gust traveling about five meters per second. The chief imaging scientist behind the project, Justin Maki, told reporters, "This is it. This is Mars. We're here in our place that we're going to be exploring over the next months and coming years. Perseverance reached Mars last week after a nearly seven-month journey covering 472 million kilometers. Scientists hope to find biosignatures embedded in samples of ancient sediments that Perseverance is designed to extract from Martian rock for future analysis back on Earth the first such specimens ever collected from another planet. EDWARDSVILLE Working during a pandemic probably was the farthest from the minds of the current School of Nursing students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville when they arrived on campus for the first time. But thats exactly what they are doing as SIUE does its part to help the community in the fight against COVID-19. SON students have vaccinated more than 1,000 community members in Phase 1A and Phase 1B, including individuals in long-term care facilities, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, residential treatment centers, dentists, morticians, school nurses, EMS, first responders, grocery store workers and persons over 65. Typically, our nursing students get involved with immunizations like the flu vaccine every year. However, being in the midst of a pandemic, the students and faculty expanded their efforts into helping with COVID-19 vaccinations in the community. The students and faculty are excited to take part in this effort and to be part of the solution to the COVID-19 pandemic, said Amelia Perez, department chair for Family Health and Community Health Nursing at SIUE. Through participation in the vaccine clinics, the students are serving members of the community, while at the same time learning how large community health events such as the COVID-19 vaccination clinics, are coordinated and implemented. The School of Nursing has pledged to safely engage in COVID-19 vaccine administration, a commitment made by more than 220 schools of nursing nationwide and led by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). We are proud to join this national commitment to keep our communities safe, said SON Dean Laura Bernaix, Ph.D., RN. This initiative underscores the critical role schools of nursing play in immunization efforts. Amanda Ross, instructor in the Department of Family Health and Community Health Nursing, and colleague Cheryl Jackson, also an instructor in the Department of Family Health and Community Health Nursing, are leading students in the community health clinical. The students participating in the COVID-19 vaccination clinics are senior nursing students in their Care of Populations clinical course, Perez said. Ms. Ross and Ms. Jackson have built working relationships with the Madison County Health Department (MCHD) and East Side Health District (ESHD) as they have been conducting clinical experiences with their students at these agencies for several years. When COVID-19 community vaccination clinics were being planned, administrators from MCHD and ESHD reached out to Ms. Ross and Ms. Jackson to invite them and their students to participate in this effort. SON students have had the opportunity to work with diverse populations of individuals from Cahokia, Fairmont City, Washington Park, Smithton, East St. Louis and nearby communities. Through these vaccination clinic events, students are seeing first hand the importance of bringing health care to various sites in the community, thereby increasing accessibility to everyone, Perez said. For the students, participation in the vaccination clinics has been a humbling and rewarding experience. Ive always had a love of making people feel better, and nursing seemed like the best fit for me, said senior nursing major Caitlynn Elliott, of Sorento. This opportunity has solidified that decision because I feel like Im helping not only the whole world fight a pandemic, but also friends and family in my community. Nursing is an intense field that requires focus, intelligence and grit, combined with selflessness, compassion and courage, added Kylie Clemens, a senior nursing major from Rochester. Nurses are there in the best times and in the most challenging times. COVID-19 has posed many challenges for people around the world and providing a vaccine has given those people hope for the first time in over a year. I am nothing but grateful to have had this opportunity to vaccinate the people of Madison County. I am reminded of that every time an individual comes to my station, beaming with pride to be a part of this history-making moment. By the time the COVID-19 immunization clinics started in early February, School of Nursing students and faculty already had nearly a year of facing the challenges that come with learning and teaching during a pandemic. Those lessons have proved especially important as SON students assist local health departments while aiding in the immunization effort. Nursing students are our future workforce and the future of nursing, Perez said. They are ready to help during the pandemic, and are doing so using the appropriate personal protective equipment that is required, and following the CDC COVID-19 guidelines. Having SIUE nursing students participate in the vaccination clinics enables the public to get their vaccines in a timely manner. For example, a group of eight to 10 students can safely provide more than 60 vaccines per hour, Jackson added. The students have the opportunity to practice communication skills and health education skills with diverse populations. Theyre also learning how to organize large immunization clinics at the agency and at other sites. Theyve worked with the National Guard, and volunteer nurses from nearby communities. Ross explained that the Care of Populations course is designed to introduce students to nursing practice outside of the hospital setting. With this particular real-world scenario set during a pandemic, SON students are gaining real-world knowledge that will help them throughout their nursing careers. Participating in this community COVID-19 immunization clinic has allowed our nursing students the opportunity to see firsthand the difficult logistical challenges that vaccinating thousands of people can entail, Ross said. Through these clinic collaborations, students have the opportunity to serve the community by not only administering the vaccinations but also providing patient education related to the vaccine. Tube well irrigation in Gujarat, India. Credit: Meha Jain India is the world's second-largest producer of wheat and rice and is home to more than 600 million farmers. The country has achieved impressive food-production gains since the 1960s, due in part to an increased reliance on irrigation wells, which allowed Indian farmers to expand production into the mostly dry winter and summer seasons. But those gains have come at a cost: The country that produces 10% of the world's crops is now the world's largest consumer of groundwater, and aquifers are rapidly becoming depleted across much of India. Indian government officials have suggested that switching from groundwater-depleting wells to irrigation canals, which divert surface water from lakes and rivers, is one way to overcome projected shortfalls. But in a study scheduled for publication Feb. 24 in the journal Science Advances, a University of Michigan researcher and her colleagues conclude that a switch to canal irrigation will not fully compensate for the expected loss of groundwater in Indian agriculture. The authors estimate that if Indian farmers lose all access to groundwater in overexploited regions, and if that irrigation water is not replaced with water from other sources, then winter cropped acreage could be reduced by up to 20% nationwide. However, that scenario seems highly unlikely and was included in the study only as an upper-bound estimate. It seems more likely that any future groundwater shortfalls would be at least partially offset by increases in canal irrigation. But even if all Indian regions currently using depleted groundwater switch to canal irrigation, winter cropped acreage could still decline by 7% nationwide and by 24% in the most severely affected locations, according to the researchers. "Our results highlight the critical importance of groundwater for Indian agriculture and rural livelihoods, and we were able to show that simply providing canal irrigation as a substitute irrigation source will likely not be enough to maintain current production levels in the face of groundwater depletion," said study lead author Meha Jain of the University of Michigan. The study analyzed high-resolution satellite imagery and village-level census data and focused on winter cropped acreage. While nearly all Indian farmers plant crops during the monsoon to take advantage of seasonal rains, winter agriculture is mainly reliant on groundwater irrigation and now accounts for 44% of the country's annual cropped acreage for food grains. "These findings suggest that other adaptation strategies, in addition to canal expansion, are needed to cope with ongoing groundwater losses," said Jain, an assistant professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability. Maps showing state-by-state Indian winter cropped area loss estimates due to groundwater depletion in coming decades, with and without replacement by canals. Darker shades of pink and red indicate greater projected losses. The map on the left (A) shows projected winter cropped acreage losses if all critically depleted groundwater is lost, with no replacement. Map on the right (B) shows projected winter cropped acreage losses if groundwater irrigation is replaced with canals (using national-level regression coefficients). Credit: Jain et al. in Science Advances 2021. The possibilities include switching from winter rice to less water-intensive cereals, increased adoption of sprinklers and drip irrigation to conserve water in the fields, and policies to increase the efficiency of irrigation canals. While groundwater depletion is becoming a global threat to food security, and the extent of current and projected groundwater depletion are well documented, the potential impacts on food production remain poorly quantified. The study by Jain and colleagues is the first to use high-resolution empirical data, including census data about the irrigation methods used in more than 500,000 Indian villages, to estimate the crop production losses that may occur when overexploited groundwater is lost. The proliferation of deep (>100 feet) irrigation wells called tube wells since the 1960s has enabled Indian farmers to increase the number of seasons when crops are planted in a given year. This increase in "cropping intensity" is credited for much of the country's food-production gains. The researchers used satellite data to measure Indian winter cropped area, a key determinant of cropping intensity. They then linked the satellite data to census information about the three main types of irrigation infrastructure in India: shallow "dug wells," deeper tube wells and canals that divert surface water. Linking the two datasets allowed them to determine the relative efficacy of each irrigation method. That, in turn, enabled them to estimate potential future acreage losses and the ability of canal expansion to fill the gap. The study's worst-case scenario found that winter cropped area could decrease by up to 20% nationwide and by 68% in the most severely affected regions, if farmers lose all access to groundwater and if that irrigation water is not replaced from another source. The expected losses would largely occur in northwest and central India, according to the study. The researchers also found that increased distance from existing irrigation canals is strongly associated with decreased acreage planted with winter crops. In the future, a greater reliance on canals could increase inequities related to irrigation access, according to the authors. "This suggests that while canals may be a viable form of irrigation for those who live near canals, they may lead to more unequal access to irrigation across villages compared to wells, with negative impacts for those who live farther from canals," the authors wrote. In addition, the lakes and rivers that feed irrigation canals rise and fall in response to rainfall variability, unlike deep groundwater wells. So, a greater reliance on canal irrigation in the future would result in increased sensitivity to year-to-year precipitation fluctuations, as well as any long-term trends due to human-caused climate change. "Understanding the complex relationship between food security and water availability is crucial as we prepare for future rainfall variability due to global climate change," said co-author Gillian Galford of the University of Vermont. Explore further Changing rainfall patterns linked to water security in India More information: M. Jain el al., "Groundwater depletion will reduce cropping intensity in India," Science Advances (2021). Journal information: Science Advances M. Jain el al., "Groundwater depletion will reduce cropping intensity in India,"(2021). advances.sciencemag.org/lookup .1126/sciadv.abd2849 An Alabama school administrator currently working in Athens City Schools has been placed on leave following Tuesdays indictment on federal charges of fraud and conspiracy. Rick Carter is currently the director of planning for Athens City Schools. Carter, along with five other Alabama educators, was charged Tuesday in a years-long scheme where private school students were simultaneously enrolled in public virtual schools, in an apparent effort to funnel state education funds into individuals pockets. The Athens City City Schools community is shocked and very concerned to read Tuesdays release from the U.S. Attorneys office, Superintendent Beth Patton wrote in a statement released Wednesday. Related: 6 Alabama school officials charged with fraud, conspiracy in $7 million virtual schools scheme The district has been cooperating with federal and state education officials throughout the investigation, Patton said. Upon reviewing the allegations against Dr. Rick Carter, Athens City Schools has placed him on administrative leave until further notice. None of the other individuals charged in the indictment remain affiliated with Athens City Schools in any manner. Carter, who officials said enrolled private school students as full-time virtual public school students and falsified student records, was charged with conspiracy and also with 34 counts of aggravated identity theft and 86 counts of wire fraud. The former superintendent of Athens schools, Trey Holladay, was charged with more than 100 counts of fraud, including counts of wire fraud and identity theft, for his alleged part in the scheme. The Athens School Board has called a meeting at 7:30 a.m. Thursday at the high school to discuss the incident. Officials have said they will not take questions at the meeting. NEW DELHI : Power Minister R K Singh on Wednesday brushed aside apprehensions that water storage or dam projects, which also generate hydro electricity, harm environment, and urged experts to commission an authoritative and scientific study to find out the truth. Speaking at a symposium on sustainable development of dams and river basins, Singh said, "I have not seen science of environment being harmed. I see science of progress in this (water storage). Punjab and Haryana developed and they are where they are today because of Bhakra Nangal dam." He further said, "If you ask any person in Bihar, then his dearest wish is to construct large dams on the river Kosi in Nepal. Wherever we constructed large dams, we have improved the lives of people...generations. This is the message we need to convey." He brought attention toward pushback to water storage or dam projects in the country by NGOs (non-government organisations) or civil societies which claim that these would harm environment. The minister said, "In our country, there is a decade or two of push back (to water storage projects) by NGOs without any authoritative study that says that dams are harmful to environment." Currently, India is developing around 14,000 megawatts of hydropower generation capacity. He said, "In water resources, in the past decade also, we have faced headwinds in harnessing our water resources. There was concerted movement against harnessing the water, dams, against any project which sought to harness our water resources." He said the movement still persists. "That push back against dams still persists. That is something which we have to address." The minister urged all to first accept that humans have been harnessing water right from the time our civilisation began. "The earliest dam started on the Nile (in Egypt)...harnessing water was there before Christ (BC). It is not that it is happening now," he said. The minister stated that the proposition is that if some how you stop the natural flow of water, then it harms the environment. He added that the water storage projects do not stop the natural flow of the water and just the excess flow of water is harnessed through storage so that it can be used as and when needed. "Does that harm the environment? Is there any study? I think you need to commission a study and examine whether it actually harms the environment... I think we need to come out with an authoritative study on this," the minister said. The minister also said that in some areas, it is essential to set up water storage projects like Brahmaputra river. If India does not do it, its rival China would do it, he added. He said, "They (China) are planning construction of large dams. So, we have to start construction of large dams. If they construct large dams before us then they can squeeze our (water) supplies in Assam and North East." He also said every developed country has exploited 80-90 per cent of their hydro power generation potential. India needs balancing power for renewable energy, and the balancing power has to come from pumped hydro storage projects, he added. Currently, thermal power provides base load or balancing power because renewable energy like solar and wind energy does not generate power round the clock. Thus, there is a need for constant supply of power to the grid. The minister also said, "I believe that harnessing water resources and harnessing water resources are central to our lives and livelihoods.....since inception of civilisations." He said life flourishes beside the rivers valleys, as it was evident from any old civilisation like Indus Valley, and life started on earth because of water. The essential requirements for life are water and energy, he added. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. EDWARDSVILLE A Collinsville man was charged with aggravated DUI in one of numerous alcohol- and drug-related felony charges filed Tuesday by the Madison County States Attorneys Office. Darel L. Casillas Jr., 51, was charged Feb. 23 with aggravated driving under the influence, a Class 2 felony. The case was presented by the Collinsville Police Department. According to court documents, on Sept. 20 Casillas was found to be driving a vehicle while under the influence. It was noted that previous convictions for DUI in 1986, 1993 and 1996 in Madison and Calhoun counties. Bail was set at $60,000. Other drug- and alcohol-related felonies filed Feb. 23 include: Jamie R. Staggs, 44, of Granite City, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Glen Carbon Police Department. On Sept. 17 Staggs allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $15,000. Holly A. Davidson, 45, of Collinsville, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Glen Carbon Police Department. On Sept. 17 Davidson allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $15,000. David C. Whitehead, 47, of Edwardsville, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Glen Carbon Police Department. On Sept. 17 Whitehead allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $15,000. William P. House, 60, of Cottage Hills, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department. On Sept. 16 House allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $25,000. Donna M. Cole, 48, of the 2400 block of Bryan Street, Granite City, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department. On Sept. 15 Cole allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $25,000. Monte E. Ritchie, 30, of the 2800 block of Wayne Avenue, Granite City, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Granite City Police Department. On July 15 Ritchie allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $15,000. Marvie D. Simmons, 50, of Caseyville, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Granite City Police Department. On Oct. 25 Simmons allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $15,000. Christopher A Freeman, 30, of OFallon, Illinois, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Collinsville Police Department. On Feb. 22 Freeman allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $20,000. Raymond K. Fischer, 38, of Collinsville, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Collinsville Police Department. On Feb. 22 Fischer allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $25,000. Milissa M. Bell, 38, of Granite City, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Collinsville Police Department. On Feb. 22 Bell allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $15,000. Brittany N. Veach, 33, of Granite City, was charged with unlawful possession of a controlled substance, a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department. On Sept. 5 Veach allegedly was found to be in possession of less than 15 grams of fentanyl. Bail was set at $15,000. Larry G. Rhew Jr., 47, of Caseyville, was charged with unlawful possession of a controlled substance, a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department. On Sept. 21 Rhew allegedly was found to be in possession of less than 15 grams of fentanyl. Bail was set at $15,000. By Yingzhi Yang and Brenda Goh BEIJING (Reuters) - Beijing-based ByteDance plans to move the chief of its Chinese news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, Zhu Wenjia, to Singapore to head global research and development for its hit short video app TikTok, two people familiar with the matter said. The role is newly created and would be the first senior R&D position for TikTok. Zhu will be in charge of the app's product and technologies including its recommendation algorithms, the people said. His position will be parallel to TikTok's interim head, Vanessa Pappas, and will report ... As a family physician, Dr. Oliva Thiel dreamed of being a small-town doctor in a rural area who would care for a community and become immersed in it. After growing up in the suburbs of Trenton, she always knew that wasnt where she wanted to stay. I had never been to the Thumb prior to looking for a job, but when my husband and I came here, it just felt right, Thiel said. It feels good to be back in Michigan, closer to family. My husband, Andy and I are excited to raise our daughter here, close to the lake, she added. Thiel went to SVSU for her undergrad before attending Wayne State School of Medicine. Before moving back to the Thumb, she finished her residency at the Mayo Clinic in La Crosse, Wisconnsin. She began her current role as a family physician at McLaren Thumb Region in October 2020. I love the variety of my job because it challenges me, piques my curiosity, and is very rewarding, Thiel said. I am thankful that McLaren supports my passions in being a full spectrum family doctor. I love how each town in the Thumb has something different to offer, with its own local family shops and restaurants, she added. The community supports its own. Growing up, Thiel wanted to be a veterinarian with a love for health science and animals. Her career path changed in the eighth grade when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at the young age of 37. With four young children, it was a very difficult time for her and our family, Thiel said. As the oldest and with my interests, I was able to go to her appointments with her. She was lucky to have very wonderful physicians who took great care of her, she added. I realized if I could provide that type of care for someone elses mother or family member, what an honor and privilege that would be, and I never looked back. According to Thiel, practicing medicine in a smaller area involves a more personal experience, where you can run into your patients at the grocery store and share more of your lives with each other. I think servicing an area like the Thumb allows physicians to better care for someone, when you know what their family, job, and homes are like, Thiel said. I love being able to practice full spectrum medicine here, in a big city with so many other specialists and doctors to fill individual roles, a family physician might not provide pregnancy or hospital care. Thiel and her husband recently welcomed a new baby girl, who is now 2 months old. Spending time with family remains her number one priority. Although the pandemic makes it challenging, Thiel and her family are trying to be active as new members of the community. I love how the community has rallied around their own in these difficult times, Thiel said. The pandemic has made it more difficult to immerse myself in the community with safety measures but in time, I hope to be able to explore more, become more involved, and meet more people. Professionally, the pandemic has affected the way Thiel has started a new job and tries to build her practice. Being on the front lines has been an honor, but it is also difficult, and I want to recognize the other essential workers who risk their lives on a more regular basis than me, Thiel said. I feel very thankful to now be vaccinated to prevent spreading this disease to my patients or my patients or my family members. Personally, Thiel found out she was pregnant just before the pandemic started. It was difficult to go through a pregnancy during a pandemic and at times I felt like I was missing out on milestones and memories because of it, Thiel said. I miss being able to see friends and family and to have them meet my daughter. Everyone is making sacrifices and hopefully someday we will be able to do those things safely again, she added. Thiel encourages students interested in pursuing a medical degree to find what drives them in the field of medicine and hold onto it. The road is long and testing at times, but if you can stay focused on that driving passion, you will always remember that your work is helping others and making a difference, Thiel said. Remember that you are only human, and you cannot do it alone. Find a mentor in training that you trust and can turn to for support and find colleagues that build you up, help you celebrate your triumphs and commiserate in the losses, she added. It will help lighten the emotional and physical load when you need it. HAMILTON, ON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - The Centre for Probe Development and Commercialization (CPDC), a global leader in the development, production and commercialization of radiopharmaceuticals, is announcing today that the first patient has been dosed and imaged in a Phase 3 trial for [18F]PSMA-1007. This diagnostic imaging product is a positron-emitting tomography (PET) agent that targets Prostate Specific Membrane Antigen (PSMA), a protein that is overexpressed in prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is the most common malignancy in Canadian men, accounting for over 23,000 new cases per year and 4,000 deaths annually. Men with recurrent or persistent prostate cancer have poor outcomes, and there is an unmet need to accurately define the location and overall spread of disease in this population to help plan effective treatment. "We are excited to bring [18F]PSMA-1007 to Canadian patients as we believe that improved detection of disease in the pelvic region and areas of metastases by [18F]PSMA-1007 will lead to better outcomes in prostate cancer patient treatments." said CPDC's Interim CEO, Bruno Paquin. "We also express our appreciation to Drs. Joseph Chin (Professor of Urology and Oncology at Western University), Glenn Bauman (Chair/Chief, Cancer Care, London Health Sciences Centre), and Ur Metser (Division Head Molecular Imaging, Joint Department Of Medical Imaging at UHN) for their contributions to this program and look forward to working with them as investigators in this trial". "Imaging prostate cancer with PET imaging agents directed towards PSMA is an extremely exciting advance for the personalized care of men with prostate cancer. This Phase III trial will be crucial in providing information regarding the safety and accuracy of [18F]PSMA-1007 PET imaging and will pave the way to establishing this type of imaging as an approved standard of care imaging test in Canada for men with prostate cancer." said Dr. Glenn Bauman About [18F]PSMA-1007 [18F]PSMA-1007 is a positron emission tomography (PET) imaging agent that binds to PSMA. Published clinical data suggest that [18F]PSMA-1007 PET has the potential to improve the detection of recurrent prostate cancer with earlier detection and better localization of disease, thereby improving patient management. In addition, the lipophilic characteristics and hepatobiliary excretion of [18F]PSMA-1007 allow for improved imaging of local recurrence and pelvic lymph node metastases in the prostatic bed versus other [18F]PSMA-targeting agents. CPDC has licensed [18F]PSMA-1007 from ABX- advanced biochemical compounds GmbH (Radeberg, Germany) and holds the exclusive license to develop, manufacture, and distribute the imaging agent in Canada. About the Clinical Trial The Phase 3 clinical trial is a prospective, single arm, non-randomized, open label study that will enroll 100 men with suspected persistent or recurrent prostate cancer based on detectable levels of prostate serum antigen (PSA) and having negative or equivocal detection of disease by conventional imaging. The primary objective of the clinical trial is to evaluate the diagnostic performance of [18F]PSMA-1007 PET, by comparing the PET imaging results to a composite of clinical outcome information. Other objectives include assessing the safety of [18F]PSMA-1007 and the impact of [18F]PSMA-1007 PET on management of patients with recurrent prostate cancer. For additional information about the clinical trial, visit www.clinicaltrials.gov (NCT NCT04644822). About Centre for Probe Development and Commercialization (CPDC) The Centre for Probe Development and Commercialization (CPDC) is a Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR) located at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. CPDC is a private, not-for-profit company and global leader in the discovery, development and commercialization of next-generation radiopharmaceuticals that was created with the support of multiple stakeholders, including the Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE), McMaster University and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR). Since its foundation in 2008, CPDC has established a pipeline of products along with a robust and reliable global supply of innovative diagnostic and therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals used daily for the detection and treatment of human diseases such as cancer. For more information about CPDC, please visit: www.imagingprobes.ca or contact [email protected] SOURCE Centre for Probe Development and Commercialization Related Links www.imagingprobes.ca A tanker makes its way into Dublin port during rough seas near Poolbeg Lighthouse. Photo: Damien Storan. Almost 1,000 homes lost power, dozens of roads were closed due to flash flooding and thousands of acres of farmland were left under water as Ireland was battered by an Atlantic storm front with torrential rainfall and gale-force winds. Flooding was reported across Cork, Kerry, Waterford and Tipperary as almost 100mm of rain fell on mountains across the south west in just over 18 hours with around 80mm hitting low-lying areas. High winds also brought down trees and electricity poles as winds gusted to 100kmh. Worst hit by the power outages were Cork, Kerry, Waterford, Tipperary and Roscommon, with ESB repair crews beginning emergency work once conditions allowed. A road was also blocked in Tallaght, Dublin, by a fallen tree. Gardai confirmed the worst of the flooding hit rural roads, with councils having closed more than a dozen flood-prone routes on Monday night as a safety measure. The rivers Lee, Blackwater, Funshion and Suir all broke their banks under the deluge, with thousands of acres of farmland now under flood waters. The greatest concern is focused on the next 24 hours as the rainfall from mountain streams surges into major river drainage systems. The ESB began extra discharges from its Inniscarra Dam in Cork in anticipation of major water flows over the next 48 hours into the reservoir with flooding already downstream along the Lee Fields and Carrigrohane. Cork citys flood plan was activated and the Defence Forces were on standby together with emergency pumping crews. Read More Sandbags, gel bags and flood gates were erected around low-lying parts of Cork city centre. Cork City Council Director of Services David Joyce said that, so far, major property damage was avoided. There is a significant rain event happening which involves heavy pulses of rain coming across the south west, he said. That has led to significant surface water flooding and localised flooding. We are awaiting to see what will happen with the rainfall event this evening and the dams filling up. We will be working closely with the ESB to monitor the dams and to ensure that releases are matched to river levels across the city. Across Cork county, roads were flooded in Shanagarry, Cloyne, Dunmanway, Mallow, Cloghroe, Glanmire, Kanturk and Macroom. In Kerry there was heavy flooding on roads in Tralee, Fossa, Cahir, Beaufort and Kilgobnet. Gardai and the Road Safety Authority (RSA) pleaded with motorists to undertake only essential journeys and to drive with extreme care. Met Eireann said the weather will improve from this morning, but the 24-hour rainfall will result in significant flooding because of the saturated nature of the land and the already swollen levels of rivers and lakes. Meteorologist Elizabeth Coleman said localised flooding can be expected over the next 24 hours because of the sheer volume of rainfall. However, the good news is that Ireland can expect more settled weather from tomorrow on. The indications are that next weekend will see dry conditions, spells of good sunshine and milder temperatures. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Illinois Abolishes Cash Bail in Sweeping Criminal Justice Overhaul Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a sweeping criminal justice and police reform measure into law on Feb. 22 that includes making the state the first in the nation to completely abolish cash bail. Pritzker, a Democrat, said in a statement after signing the bill that this legislation marks a substantial step toward dismantling the systemic racism that plagues our communities, our state, and our nation and brings us closer to true safety, true fairness, and true justice. Proponents of the change have argued that cash bail unfairly affects poor defendants, while critics say it skews the scales of justice in favor of criminals and makes communities less safe. While there have been efforts in other states to get rid of cash bail, related reforms in New York and Alaska were later amended or reversed. Under the new law, called House Bill 3653, judges wont be able to set any kind of bail for defendants charged with crimes. Although defendants deemed to be flight risks or who pose a threat to public safety may be ordered to remain behind bars pending trial, the bill places an added burden on judges to justify such decisions. They will have to explain in writing why less restrictive conditions arent appropriate and there will have to be greater specificity provided in justifying assertions that a defendants pretrial release poses a real and present threat to the community. Opponents of cash bail have long argued that it has a disproportionately negative effect on people of color, leaving people who cant come up with the money to post bail languishing behind bars for weeks or months, disrupting their lives and those of family members. Spending even a few days in jail can result in people losing their job, housing, and even custody of their children, the left-leaning policy think tank Center for American Progress said in an analysis. Studies show that pretrial detention can actually increase a persons likelihood of rearrest upon release, perpetuating an endless cycle of arrest and incarceration. What is more, the cash bail system often leads to the detention of people who do not pose a threat to public safety. Besides eliminating cash bail, the bill contains a number of other measures, including requiring all police officers to wear body cameras by 2025, abolishing all chokeholds, banning departments from buying military equipment, and introducing new guidelines for decertification of officers, including allowing for anonymous complaints to be used against officers in disciplinary and decertification hearings. Illinois House GOP leader Jim Durkin called Pritzkers support of the bill an insult to our first responders, law enforcement, and the law-abiding citizens of Illinois who work to live free of violence and destruction from the criminal element. Its clear that Gov. Pritzker does not understand this bill and what it means to our criminal justice system. Ed Wojcicki, the executive director of the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police, released a statement calling the bill anti-police. He said it unfairly targets officers and attempts to punish them, not just make them accountable. The bill has serious flaws that have been well-documented in our fact sheets and updates, but today the bill became law, Wojcicki said. The public will learn more about these flaws when they see for themselves that common-sense tools needed by the police, states attorneys, and the courts have been stripped by this law. More than 90 Confederate monuments were taken down or moved from public spaces in 2020 following the death of George Floyd, according to new data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The latest data documents nearly 800 Confederate monuments that were in the U.S. at the beginning of that year, a number that dwindled to about 700 by the end of it. In August, the Montgomery, Alabama-based law center found 38 monuments had been removed in the nearly three months since May 25 when Floyd, a Black man, was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis who knelt on Floyd's neck as he repeatedly said he could not breathe. That number alone was notable, since it had previously taken years for the database to log a similar number of statue removals. An update to the "Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy" report released Tuesday found another 56 monuments were removed. As witnessed on Jan. 6 when an insurrectionist brazenly carried a Confederate flag through the halls of the U.S. Capitol, Confederate symbols are a form of systemic racism used to intimidate, instill fear, and remind Black people that they have no place in American society," SPLC chief of staff Lecia Brooks said in a statement. The SPLC firmly believes that all symbols of white supremacy should be removed from public spaces and will continue to support community efforts to remove, rename and relocate them. Statues of prominent figures in the Confederacy are a common sight in the South, and Virginia is home to the most Confederate symbols. The report comes the same day Virginia lawmakers approved a bill to remove a statue of segregationist Harry F. Byrd Sr., who served as Virginias governor and a U.S. senator, from the state capitol grounds. Byrd, a Democrat, ran the states most powerful political machine for decades until his death in 1966 and was considered the architect of the states racist massive resistance policy to public school integration. Story continues Like other symbols of the Confederacy, such memorials have been defended for generations as pieces of Southern heritage, or simply uncontroversial artifacts of history. But for many people, they are ever-present reminders of racial discrimination and violent oppression that has never gone away. Read more on race and identity: Sign up for USA TODAYs This Is America newsletter Nearly 2,100 remain: statues, symbols, placards, buildings and public parks dedicated to the Confederacy, although 168 of those symbols were removed in 2020, according to the SPLC. Just one of those symbols was removed before Floyd's death. Activists have long called for Confederate flags and symbols to be taken down, but the accelerated removal of statues was fueled by widespread protests against systemic racism and police brutality following Floyd's death, with more people linking Confederate monuments with white supremacy, according to Erin L. Thompson, a professor of art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Thompson said the movement experienced a similar spike in June 2015 when a white supremacist shot and killed nine Black parishioners during a Bible study meeting at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Interest in removing these statues also spiked in 2017 following the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which opposed the proposed removal of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, Thompson said. "Most of the time it seems like nobody cares about them, so it takes these real moments of reckoning, of change," she said. Some experts say it may be more difficult to remove the more than 700 statues that are left as widespread racial justice protests wane and lawmakers enact legislation to protect the remaining statues. Amid the protests, it may have been easier for authorities to remove controversial statues because they presented an immediate public safety issue, Thompson said. Thompson, who is writing a book on controversies over American monuments, said attention to Confederate monuments may be decreasing in the face of other crises and political pushback from state legislatures. Lawmakers in states including Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee have enacted policies to protect them. Thompson added that a number of private lawsuits against municipal governments have also prevented communities from removing the monuments. "In a number of states, it's just impossible to have a community referendum or even for communities to make their own decisions on this," she said. "State legislature are trying to make it impossible to take down the monuments really in any other way then violently during the protest." Thompson said statues often become a flashpoint amid historical protests, like the French Revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union, because they are much easier targets than the regime itself. She said it's not surprising that statues arguing that elite white men should hold the power in America became a rallying point amid the racial justice protests. "I think this is a real moment of change for art in America," she said. Contributing: The Associated Press Follow N'dea Yancey-Bragg on Twitter: @NdeaYanceyBragg This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Historic number of Confederate statues were removed in 2020: SPLC Zimbabwe First Lady congratulates Senator, Dr. Rasha Kelej for her nomination as The African Woman of the Year 2020 Globe Newswire AS Pro Kapital Grupp has not yet published audited annual report for 2020 (related notice: https://view.news.eu.nasdaq.com/view?id=b9a14c4af26fbcf29852a28f2d4144b75&lang=en). However, the Company is using unaudited financial statements as basis of preparation in this report. All details related to this issue can be find in Note 2 of the report. MANAGEMENT REPORT Chairmans summary Start of 2021 has been a dynamic working period. We have continued working on our developments, where we see remarkable results, but also had to face a setback as after reporting date the decision of the Supreme Court terminated reorganisation proceedings of our subsidiary AS Tallinna Moekombinaat which led to the permanent insolvency of the subsidiary. Real estate development We have continued construction of Ratsuri Houses and Kalaranna projects and preparing project documentation for the following development phases in Tallinn. In March we completed Ratsuri Houses in Kristiine City where we had booked or presold all 39 apartments already prior to the completion. All apartments were sold and handed over within March and April. Soon we start handing over apartments in two first buildings of Kalaranna project, where completion of eight buildings with the total of 240 apartments will be achieved step by step in four phases. Today we have reservations or presales concluded for 85% of premises. After reporting date, we concluded an agreement for sales of all business premises of Kalaranna project for 16.16 million euros (with VAT) including the option to sell also premises of the last phase, which we are preparing to launch in the near future. This year we have started with construction of the new project Kindrali Houses in Kristiine City, where two building complexes with 129 apartments will be raised by next summer. In this project we had booked or presold more than half of the apartments before signing the construction agreement. Today over 90% of the apartments have been booked or presold. In Riga we are selling our luxury product River Breeze Residence and prepare for the further development of Kliversala Residential Quarter. We have received a building permit for City Oasis residential quarter with 326 apartments a tranquil and green living environment in the city centre. We will be ready to proceed with construction activities as soon as the market situation becomes more favourable. Unfortunately, the Latvian real-estate market has not been as active as its neighbouring countries Estonia and Lithuania. However, we have observed some changes in the recent months and recovery of the market. In 2019 we completed five buildings in Saltiniu Namai Attico project in Vilnius with 115 apartments. Today we have only 5 apartments unsold. We are preparing for the following phase with city villas and commercial building and plan to start the construction this year. Our revenues from the sales of the real estate depend on the completion of the residential developments as the revenues are recorded at the moment notary deeds of sale are concluded. In 2021 we have already completed Ratsuri Houses project with 39 apartments and soon we start handing over exclusive homes in prime location of Kalaranna project. T1 Mall of Tallinn On 3 April 2020 Harju County Court initiated reorganization proceedings of the operator of T1 Mall of Tallinn - AS Tallinna Moekombinaat (TMK). Reorganization proceedings were terminated a year later by the decision of 26 April 2021 of the Supreme Court not to take TMKs appeal into proceedings. Without the reorganisation proceedings AS Tallinna Moekombinaat is not capable to fulfil its obligations and has become permanently insolvent. On 7 May 2021 Harju County Court appointed Kristo Teder as an interim bankruptcy trustee of TMK. Interim bankruptcy trustee presented to the court a written report and opinion on 27 May 2021. Based on the report the court will take a decision about the following proceedings. The management of TMK continues to operate T1 Mall of Tallinn in cooperation with the interim trustee in bankruptcy until appointment of bankruptcy trustee and declaration of insolvency. Supreme Courts decision as an adjusting event after balance sheet date requires writing-off investment into subsidiary. AS Pro Kapital Eesti has written off an investment into subsidiary in amount of 13.4 million euros due to negative equity of TMK and as a result of adjusting event also receivables in the total amount of 26 million euros as at 31 December 2020. When bankruptcy is declared and the Company loses control over subsidiary, TMK will not be consolidated into the group any more. Although discontinuing consolidation will influence consolidated results by 26 million negatively, it will have a positive effect to the Group financial results due to derecognition of negative equity of the subsidiary. Bankruptcy of TMK will not affect liquidity of the Group nor short-term cash flows. Long-term cash flows are influenced by uncollectable receivables to the Group. Adjusting event described above and writing off the debts of subsidiary on parent company level has triggered a non-compliance with financial covenants of secured bonds (Notes 9 and 19). Hotel operations Last year had a significant impact on PK Parkhotel Kurhaus in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, the hotel was closed from March until the end of June and due to new restrictions hotel is not operating since November 2020. The impact of COVID-19 has been 0.7 million euros in less hotel revenues in the first quarter of 2021 comparing to last year. However, due to governmental support, the net result was better by 30 thousand euros. We expect to reopen the hotel in the middle of June. In the following months we continue construction works of ongoing development projects and plan to start with the following phases. In spite of losing T1 Mall of Tallinn, our real estate development is doing well, the Company is a going concern and we have an optimistic view for the future. Paolo Michelozzi CEO Key financials The total revenue of the Company in the first quarter of 2021 was 6.6 million euros, which is an increase of 12% compared to the reference period (2020 3M: 5.9 million euros). The real estate sales revenues are recorded at the moment of handing over the premises to the buyer. Therefore, the revenues from sales of real estate depend on the completion of the residential developments. The real estate sales revenue was higher in 2021 due to completion of Ratsuri Houses project, where apartments were handed over to new owners during March-April. In 2021, the Company has continued with presales of current development projects: first phases of Kalaranna District and Kindrali Houses in Tallinn. The gross profit in the first quarter of 2021 decreased by 8% amounting to 2.0 million euros compared to 2.1 million euros during the same period in 2020. The operating profit in the first quarter of 2021 was 1.9 million euros compared to 0.3 million euros during the same period in 2020. The increase in operating result is mainly influenced by the sale of investment property. The net result in the first quarter of 2021 was -2.1 million euros compared to -4.0 million euros during the same period in 2020. The net result of the reporting period was influenced by the sale of the investment property, but as well in fewer administrative (decreased 27% compared to 2020 3M) and financial costs (decreased 6% compared to 2020 3M). Cash generated from operating activities in the first quarter of 2021 was -2.1 million euros compared to -4.0 million euros during the same period in 2020. The net result of the reporting period was influenced by the sale of the investment property, but as well in fewer administrative (decreased 27% compared to 2020 3M) and financial costs (decreased 6% compared to 2020 3M). Net assets per share on 31 March 2021 totalled to 0.20 euros compared to 1.19 euros on 31 March 2020. Key performance indicators 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited*) Revenue, th EUR 6 563 5 873 19 234 Gross profit, th EUR 1 974 2 137 6 775 Gross profit, % 30% 36% 35% Operating result, th EUR 1 897 346 -43 108 Operating result, % 29% 6% -224% Net result, th EUR -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Net result, % -32% -68% -309% Earnings per share, EUR -0.03 -0.07 -0.98 31.03.2021 31.03.2020 (Restated*) 31.12.2020 (Unaudited*) Total Assets, th EUR 185 287 207 361 179 048 Total Liabilities, th EUR 177 829 142 022 169 477 Total Equity, th EUR 7 458 65 339 9 571 Debt / Equity ** 18.44 2.10 14.15 Return on Assets, % *** Return on Equity, % **** -1.2% -1.9% -30.7% Net asset value per share, EUR ***** -24.8% -5.9% -141.2% * See Note 2 in the Consolidated Interim Report for I Quarter and 3 Months Of 2021 for details regarding the unaudited status of the report and restatement as a result of an error 2019 year end results **debt / equity = total debt / total equity***return on assets = net profit/loss / total average assets****return on equity = net profit/loss / total average equity*****net asset value per share = net equity / number of shares CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS Consolidated interim statement of financial position in thousands of euros 31.03.2021 31.03.2020 (Restated) 31.12.2020 (Unaudited) ASSETS Current assets Cash and cash equivalents 13 331 9 459 9 393 Current receivables 1 542 1 281 1 797 Inventories 61 481 40 329 58 352 Total current assets 76 354 51 069 69 542 Non-current assets Non-current receivables 3 715 2 942 3 517 Property, plant and equipment 6 717 7 100 6 745 Right-of-use assets 318 480 357 Investment property 97 814 145 406 98 512 Intangible assets 369 364 375 Total non-current assets 108 933 156 292 109 506 TOTAL ASSETS 185 287 207 361 179 048 LIABILITIES AND EQUITY Current liabilities Current debt 104 373 83 153 107 581 Customer advances 10 284 5 935 7 866 Current payables 24 011 10 837 22 211 Tax liabilities 1 280 849 458 Short-term provisions 471 329 459 Total current liabilities 140 419 101 103 138 575 Non-current liabilities Long-term debt 33 425 38 398 27 255 Other non-current payables 2 638 1 064 2 295 Deferred income tax liabilities 1 151 1 320 1 170 Long-term provisions 196 137 182 Total non-current liabilities 37 410 40 919 30 902 TOTAL LIABILITIES 177 829 142 022 169 477 Equity attributable to owners of the Company Share capital in nominal value 11 338 11 338 11 338 Share premium 5 661 5 661 5 661 Statutory reserve 1 134 1 134 1 134 Revaluation reserve 2 984 3 262 2 984 Retained earnings -8 031 47 647 47 647 Profit/ Loss for the period -1 951 -3 788 -55 678 Total equity attributable to owners of the Company 11 135 65 254 13 086 Non-controlling interest -3 677 85 -3 515 TOTAL EQUITY 7 458 65 339 9 571 TOTAL LIABILITIES AND EQUITY 185 287 207 361 179 048 Consolidated interim statements of profit and loss and other comprehensive income in thousands of euros 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited) CONTINUING OPERATIONS Operating income Revenue 6 563 5 873 19 234 Cost of goods sold -4 589 -3 736 -12 459 Gross profit 1 974 2 137 6 775 Marketing expenses -126 -161 -621 Administrative expenses -1 143 -1 562 -6 154 Other income 1 351 3 478 Other expenses -159 -71 -43 586 Operating profit 1 897 346 -43 108 Financial income 1 1 4 Financial expense -3 994 -4 244 -15 998 Profit / loss before income tax -2 096 -3 897 -59 102 Income tax -17 -69 -354 Profit / loss for the period -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Attributable to: Equity holders of the parent -1 951 -3 788 -55 678 Non-controlling interest -162 -178 -3 778 Items that will not be reclassified subsequently to profit or loss Net change in properties revaluation reserve 0 0 -278 Total comprehensive income / loss for the year -2 113 -3 966 -59 734 Attributable to: Equity holders of the parent -1 951 -3 788 -55 956 Non-controlling interest -162 -178 -3 778 Earnings per share for the period (EUR) -0.03 -0.07 -0.98 Consolidated interim statements of cash flows in thousands of euros 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited) Cash flows from operating activities Profit/loss for the period -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Adjustments for: Depreciation, amortisation of non-current assets 100 105 416 Gain from disposal of investment property -1 092 0 0 Loss from write-off PPE and intangible assets 0 0 8 Change in fair value of property, plant, equipment 0 0 -16 Change in fair value of investment property 0 0 43 128 Finance income and costs 3 993 4 243 15 994 Changes in deferred tax assets and liabilities -19 -27 -178 Other non-monetary changes (net amounts) 2 -1 -3 111 Changes in working capital: Trade receivables and prepayments 53 -409 -1 514 Inventories -3 129 703 -13 011 Liabilities and prepayments 3 506 1 336 10 025 Provisions 13 10 59 Net cash generated in operating activities 1 314 1 994 -7 656 Cash flows from investing activities Payments for property, plant and equipment -28 -10 -94 Payments for intangible assets -2 -2 -43 Payments for investment property -210 -302 -844 Proceeds from disposal of investment property 2 000 0 0 Interests received 0 1 1 Net cash generated in investing activities 1 760 -313 -980 Cash flows from financing activities Net proceeds from secured bonds 0 28 500 28 500 Redemption of convertible bonds -69 0 -33 Redemption of non-convertible bonds 0 -28 000 -28 000 Proceeds from borrowings 5 838 100 14 410 Repayment of borrowings -2 857 -648 -1 376 Repayment of lease liabilities -46 -48 -135 Interests paid -2 002 -2 742 -5 953 Net cash generated by financing activities 864 -2 838 7 413 Net change in cash and cash equivalents 3 938 -1 157 -1 223 Cash and cash equivalents at the beginning 9 393 10 616 10 616 Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the period 13 331 9 459 9 393 The full report can be found in the file attached. Allan RemmelkoorMember of the Board+372 614 4920prokapital@prokapital.ee Attachment PKG Q1 2021 ENG Private equity fund manager Capital today said that its bread and bakery platform Everfoods Asia, has sold to Moto Grupo Bimbo and its Indian subsidiary Ready Roti India. Grupo Bimbo is the largest baking company in the world, operating in 33 countries, including India, and has a diversified portfolio of over 13,000 products and more than 100 renowned brands. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. Everfoods acquired Modern from Hindustan Unilever in April 2016 and relaunched the iconic bread brand in June 2017 nationwide. Commenting on the transaction, Roshini Bakshi, Managing Director, Capital Asia, said We had a phenomenal experience in rejuvenating the legacy brand of Modern and bringing it to the dining table of consumers again. Modern has unlocked its potential through its portfolio expansion and wider reach thereby exhibiting tremendous growth. I wish Grupo Bimbo the best for future and hope they continue to grow bigger and better. Investec acted as a sole financial advisor to and on the transaction. Everstone recently said that it has reached an agreement to sell Everisean Everstone-controlled entity founded in partnership with Sudhir Agarwal-led Sunrise BPOto Brookfield Business Partners and its institutional partners. Founded in 2006 by Atul Kapur and Sameer Sain, Everstone has since emerged as a market leader. With a large institutional platform and a team of over 350 experienced professionals based in Singapore, India (Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru), London, New York and Mauritius, the firm manages assets in excess of $5 billion across private equity, real estate, green infrastructure and venture capital. LANSING, MI - Michigan released new data on the COVID-19 vaccine Tuesday, and the initial results exhibit disparities in race despite state efforts aimed at equitable access. Statewide data shows that as of Feb. 23, about 42% of all first doses administered went to white residents, compared to 3.7% for Black residents and 9.4% for residents of other races. About 44% of those with at least one vaccine dose did not report their race. Additionally, white residents account for more than 46% of all second doses administered in Michigan versus 2.68% for Black residents and 12.2% for other races. The race was unknown in about 37% of second doses reported. Asian, Pacific Islander and American Indian populations accounted for about 1% combined of first and second doses in Michigan. The chart below breaks down the data by race for first doses, or doses initiated, and second doses, or doses completed. The state also recorded the percentage of racial groups that have been vaccinated, so far. First shots were administered in about 8% of white Michigan residents, versus 4.1% of Black residents, 5% of Asian or Pacific Islanders and 5.4% of American Indian or Alaska Natives. That would mean white Michigan residents are about two times more likely to have received their first shot of the COVID-19 vaccine than any other race. For second doses, white residents are three times more likely to receive them both than Black residents. Women across the state have received significantly more vaccines than Michigan men. More than 18% of women (773,021) have received their first doses, versus 12% of men (478,472). For second doses, more than 10% of women have received their second shots (430,824) versus 6.2% of men (243,388). Equitable access to vaccination has been a focus in the Michigans vaccine strategy led by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Messages were left with Gilchrist and MDHHS spokeswoman Lynn Sutfin for comment on the new data. The state orders vaccines to be distributed across the state using the CDCs Social Vulnerability Index, which helps allocate doses to communities based socioeconomic status, household composition and disability, minority status, language spoken, housing type and transportation. Read more: Michigan adjusts how it allocates COVID-19 vaccines to communities Sutfin said earlier this month that the initial data reports would indicate lower vaccination rates per 100,000 residents in predominantly Black areas such as Detroit. She attributed the disparity at the time to unequal access to health care in general. This is why the state is using an equity lens in allocation strategy, including providing additional doses outside the allocation strategy to enable areas at disadvantage to catch up in vaccination, Sutfin said. Gilchrist, in particular, has prioritized providing vaccines to minority communities, saying on Feb. 5 that I think that we are certainly trying to put forth the biggest effort we can. When we talk about our plan we talk about having equity at the center of distribution, Gilchrist told MLive at the time. I think people have appreciated that thats our commitment and as we get more vaccines, well continue to work to get more into those communities. Gilchrist is chairman of the COVID-19 Task Force on Racial Disparities, which aims to reduce disparities and determine ways to provide vaccines to communities across the state. Coronavirus has killed 27 people in my life, Gilchrist said Feb. 11. I dont want it to get anybody else sick. Read more from MLive: Loopholes in COVID-19 vaccine rollout creates haves and have nots scenario in Michigan For Michigans older population, navigating vaccination options is complicated Upper Peninsula leads the way in coronavirus vaccinations [February 24, 2021] Sysdig Doubles Down on Open Source Commitment with the First eBPF Contribution to the CNCF Sysdig, Inc., the secure DevOps leader, today announced the company has contributed the sysdig kernel module, eBPF probe, and Falco libraries to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) contribution is the first eBPF project to be added to the CNCF and it is one of the largest eBPF code bases in the open. The contributed source code has taken more than 100,000 hours to write and with the announcement today, it has moved into the Falco organization. The contribution ensures Falco can continue its progress in becoming a foundational part of the cloud-native ecosystem. Falco, the only runtime security project in the CNCF, was contributed by Sysdig in October 2018. Falco has nearly 24 million Docker Hub downloads, an increase of nearly three million in the last two months, and a 300 percent increase over last year. Blog: Read about the engineering work that went into this contribution. Falco is used by more than a thousand organizations. Adopters include Logz.io, Sumo Logic, Shopify, and Rancher, now part of SUSE. Sysdig is committed to the open source community and open standards, and this move will ensure Falco is fully owned by the community. This contribution includes the core components at the base of Falco and open source sysdig and it will live in the falcosecurity github repository. Open source sysdig is an incident response and troubleshooting tool for containers, Kubernetes, and Linux. While there are other tools in the CNCF that help developers use eBPF, this is the first that uses eBPF. What this Means for the Community This contribution includes powerful security building blocks that implement a sophisticated and extremely efficient system call capture framework in the Linux kernel. It includes system call capture functionality with full support for capture file abstraction and a battle-tested kernel event enrichment library with more than 70,000 lines of code. The potential for this technology goes beyond Falco. By open sourcing this critical piece of the stack, the community can use it to build new container and cloud security products and create a more secure cloud environment for everyone. eBPF allows organizations to run programs in the Linux kernel without changng the kernel code or loading a module. This allows users to access kernel activity without risking system stability or security. While eBPF is a less intrusive way to extend the behavior of the Linux kernel, it is a technology with a steep learning curve. The technology Sysdig is contributing allows users to take full advantage of eBPF for a very important set of use cases - troubleshooting, performance analysis, forensics, and threat hunting - in a simple and well-packaged way. The Future of Security is Open Sysdig believes the future of security is open. Applying open source best practices to containers, Kubernetes, and cloud security provides transparency and a meritocracy, where the best ideas win. A distributed, coordinated ecosystem operating on top of agreed upon common standards will beat a single vendor operating behind closed doors. Open source security will be more secure, innovate faster, and organizations can adopt it knowing they are conforming to an accepted standard that will last. Falco by the Numbers Sysdig contributed Falco to the CNCF in October 2018. Falco moved to an incubation-level hosted project in January 2020. More than 600 contributors. More than 25,000 contributions. More than 10,000 code commits. What the Community is Saying "The donation to the CNCF by Sysdig sends a clear message of their commitment to open source and to the communities building upon their foundational components. This landmark contribution acts as a call to arms for others operating within the ecosystem to look inward at how they could take their collaboration and sharing to the next level," said Alex Jones, Vice President Site Reliability Engineer at JPMorgan Chase. "I'm really excited to see Sysdig double down on their commitment to working in the open through the CNCF. By completing the picture for Falco with all the dependencies, they ensure that there are clean lines between the project and the company and that it is an environment that everyone can build on and help grow," said Joe Beda, Principal Engineer at VMWare. "Sysdig continues to lead by example, demonstrating their commitment to the open source community by contributing their core drivers to the CNCF. Falco is a key tool in the CNCF landscape allowing end users to monitor their workloads in production like nothing else. As Booz Allen continues innovating for clients through open source capabilities, we can't wait to see the continued growth of the Falco project and this donation will help to increase trust and security for the community," said Steven Terrana, Chief Engineer at Booz Allen Hamilton (News - Alert) . "I am excited to see what the community builds with this massive collection of intellectual property," said Loris Degioanni, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Sysdig. "Sysdig was built on open source from day one and we have been working with eBPF since 2017. I believe this is the most sophisticated eBPF script on the planet and in the hands of the CNCF, it will touch a lot of lives." Learn More About the Contribution Blog post by Sysdig Founder and CTO Blog post by Falco maintainers Falco Resources Falco GitHub Learn more about the Falco community Meet the maintainers on the Falco Slack Website: Falco.org Falco on Twitter About Sysdig Sysdig is driving the secure DevOps movement, empowering organizations to confidently secure containers, Kubernetes, and cloud services. With the Sysdig Secure DevOps Platform, cloud teams secure the build pipeline, detect and respond to runtime threats, continuously validate compliance, and monitor and troubleshoot cloud infrastructure and services. Sysdig is a SaaS (News - Alert) platform, built on an open source stack that includes Falco and sysdig OSS, the open standards for runtime threat detection and response. Hundreds of companies rely on Sysdig for container and Kubernetes security and visibility. Learn more at www.sysdig.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005382/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. CAIRO Nearly a century since the world first learned about beer production in the days of the Egyptian pharaohs, a joint Egyptian-American archeological mission found what may be the oldest brewery in the world in the ancient city of Abydos. The mission, led by American researcher Mathew Adams from New York University and Deborah Fishak from Princeton University, made the discovery in south Egypt's Sohag governorate. Ashraf Okasha, the head of antiquities for the Abydos archaeological site, told Al-Monitor that the discovery marked a breakthrough in understanding beer production in Pharaonic Egypt. The discovery follows over 100 years of excavations in the area a British archeologist found evidence of beer production in the area in 1912 but did not locate the site. The brewery most likely dates back to the days of King Narmer, 5,000 years ago. Head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Mostafa Waziri was quoted as saying in a Feb. 13 Facebook post by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities that each of eight large sections had contained rows of earthenware pots supported by clay rings. The news also included comment from Adams, the American researcher, who said the brewery could have produced 22,400 liters of beer at a time, and its location suggests that the facility supplied funerary rituals for the first kings of Egypt. Evidence was found for the use of beer in sacrificial rituals in engravings found at the site. Okasha said that the archeological mission that made the discovery found substantial evidence of the brewery in 2013. Clay pots bearing evidence of use in beer production were found during the excavations of tombs constructed during Egypts Third Dynasty and the rest of the structure was excavated in recent months. Okasha explained that the brewerys high production capacity is illustrative of the kings of the First Dynasty in Ancient Egypt. He added that the excavation uncovered evidence of stages of beer production. Grains like barley were ground, mixed with water and heated in clay pots, where the mixture fermented. Okasha said that the site will be developed and opened for the public to visit. Egyptian archeologist Hussein Abdel Basseer said that the discovery sheds light on the lives of ancient Egyptians and their pioneering role in producing beer and shows that the Romans and Greeks did not beat them to the technology. A 2016 study by Manchester University showed that ancient Egyptians used grains to make beer and bread, which formed a large part of workers wages and diet and were used in funeral services and medical practices. The British Museum commissioned brewers to recreate Pharaonic beer in 2018. Food historian Tasha Marks said that beer was integral to ancient Egyptian life and consumed daily and profusely. Abdel Basseer said that the discovery completes the picture of ancient Egyptians relationship to beer. He noted that in 2014, a Japanese mission found the tomb of prominent brewer Khonsu Im-Heb, in the Ramesside era of the 18th Dynasty in Luxor, though the production process was still unknown. The government hopes such archaeological discoveries will help the recovery of the tourism sector, which has been struggling since the 2011 uprising and has further deteriorated under the coronavirus pandemic. Egypt had hoped to attract 12 million tourists in the fiscal year 2019-2020 before the coronavirus pandemic erupted, but received only about 3.7 million tourists between January and December 2020, according to Egyptian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Khaled al-Anani. Nevertheless, the government hopes that the discoveries announced in 2020 about Saqqara as well as the upcoming opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum and a royal procession of mummies to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization an event postponed due to the pandemic will contribute to the sector's recovery this year. Okasha said, Egypt's antiquities capture the world's attention and the discovery of new antiquities is an opportunity to stimulate tourism. The Boston College ski team competes in a pair of EISA carnivals over the next four days. The Eagles travel to Lake Placid for the St. Lawrence Carnival at Whiteface Mountain with the women's giant slalom on Thursday (Feb. 25) followed by the men's GS on Friday (Feb. 26). BC then hosts its first carnival in program history on Saturday (Feb. 27) and Sunday (Feb. 28) with slalom races at Proctor Academy in Andover, New Hampshire.Seniormade history two weekends ago as the first Boston College skier ever to reach the podium at an EISA event, doing so with second place at the EISA Burke Alpine Carnival hosted by UVM in Vermont. With temperatures dropping as low as -14 degrees at the starting gate, Biele competed in a pair of giant slalom races, placing fifth in the opening race and second overall in the second. The captain's fourth and final run of the day (1:02.90) was the fastest in the entire field at Burke Mountain.In the men's GS races the following day, freshmanled the Eagles with a pair of top-10 finishes in his EISA debut. Simmons was fourth overall in the first race following an incredibly consistent performance and finished eighth in the second event. Rookietook ninth place in the first men's GS race for the second-best male finish of the weekend. Biele and Simmons helped the Eagles finish third as a team in three of the four races, and second overall in the second women's GS race behind UVM.Boston College opened the 2019 EISA alpine season with the St. Lawrence Carnival at Whiteface in Lake Placid. The BC women's team took seventh place in the giant slalom with three top-40 finishers, led by Biele as a sophomore in 18th place overall. Current captainsandalso gained valuable experience on the Whiteface slopes at the carnival.Qualifying skiers will compete in the NCAA Championships next month, which is set to be hosted by the University of New Hampshire at Cannon Mountain on March 10-13. Theres so much we dont know, said Springfields Health and Human Services Commissioner Helen Caulton-Harris at the city council COVID-19 response committee meeting. Springfields city councilors met on Tuesday via Zoom to discuss the data sent by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health on the numbers of those vaccinated in the city. The state-run, super vaccination site at the Eastfield Mall submitted the numbers by zip code to the chair of the COVID-19 response team and Springfield City Councilor Jesse Lederman. The data showed that as of Feb.23, a total of 15,953 individuals had been vaccinated in Springfield with their first shot and 5,097 had received their second shot. In the area of 01101, a portion of downtown, the data Curative provided showed 187 residents received their first dose of the vaccine and a further 112 are fully vaccinated with their second dose. The problem is, according to Caulton-Harris, there are no residents recorded in this area. Any vaccinations from that zip code could potentially be employees of the casino, she mused unconvinced. Perplexed at the numbers provided, councilors and commissioner alike hoped that at least there would be something on race, age or equity shown. .@MassGovernor Baker: people say they have overwhelmingly positive experience at mass vaccination sites like Eastfield Mall & Fenway, All those sites do is vaccinate pic.twitter.com/HRZdUO1Cvn Jacquelyn Goddard (@JacqueGoddard) February 23, 2021 They were to be disappointed. Caulton-Harris stated that the data provided was fragmented and that there is no way of knowing on a city level who has received their vaccinations. The California-based private medical company, Curative, was been hired by the state to operate the Springfield site, one of multiple in Massachusetts and more than 15,000 nationwide. After issues over lack of staff and high demand, Gov. Charlie Baker ordered that 10 National Guard medical personnel be sent to the site to lend a hand. The governor has continued to promote the large-scale vaccination sites. Baker said Tuesday that hes heard overwhelmingly positive experiences about the sites. People are in and out in 30 minutes, and people think the experience is terrific, the governor said, adding people like that all those sites do is vaccinate people. Springfield City Councillor Tim Allen confirmed this with his own experience. He had gone for his vaccine appointment at 3 p.m. on Tuesday and said that he was actually taken and received his vaccination five minutes early. More information is needed to compare that data to the number of eligible people citywide and in each zip code to make it more meaningful, Allen added. New staff have been recruted to aid the people coming to the Eastfield Mall for their vaccinations. (Douglas Hook / MassLive) I want to be clear when I deal with data, I usually have a lot more factors than I have right now in order to get a comprehensive picture of what were dealing with in the City of Springfield, said Caulton-Harris. This data is quite fragmented and so I do not know how many vaccines have been given out globally, in the region or in the City of Springfield. She stressed that without the comprehensive data, she is not able to know who has received the vaccine and who hasnt. Total vaccines administered at the Eastfield Mall up to Feb. 16, was 13,688 doses, Lederman read from the Curative data. However, although the mall is within the city limits, it is not just for Springfield residents. While Allen was in the observation area after his shot, he sparked up a conversation with the person beside him. He was told that the man drove from Brewster. Over 160 miles and roughly 2.5 hours, one-way. On Feb. 16, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts announced that it will partner with the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers to contribute $1 million to fund free rides to and from COVID-19 vaccination sites across the state to support community health centers, underserved communities and vulnerable populations. MassHealth members are offered free Curb to Curb transportation services to and from vaccine appointments. Those using the service will need to know: Their MassHealth ID number. The location of your vaccine appointment. The date and time of your appointment. Where you want to be picked up by the driver. A phone number or email address where the driver can reach you. One of the 10 National Guards medical personnel stands outside the doors at the Eastfield Mall vaccination site. (Douglas Hook / MassLive) City Council Justin Hurst highlighted the disparity in the states vaccination data when it comes to minorities. Each Thursday, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health updates the number of people that have received vaccinations across the state. On Feb. 11, those identifying as Black that has received both doses of the vaccine amounted to 12,547. Those that have received their first dose came to 36,584 or 5.5% of those fully vaccinated. This is compared to 463,996 white Massachusetts residents that have received their first dose and 143,669 that are fully vaccinated, accounting for 63% of those to receive both doses. Caucasian Bay State residents are by far the most vaccinated in the state. According to the 2019 U.S. Census, 543,629 Black residents are living in Massachusetts, compared with 5.3 million white people. Caulton-Harris readdressed that the city has identified 10 schools that could be used as vaccination centers that are much better positioned for Springfield residents than the Eastfield Mall. She also reaffirmed that places of worship across the city have been offering their real estate for vaccination sites. By April she hopes students will be back to in-person learning which would make the idea of locating one of the sites at a school untenable. Have we made concrete decisions around which sites will stand up first, that answer is no, Caulton-Harris told MassLive on Feb. 12. I cant run a mass site, Mayor Domenic J. Sarno told MassLive on Feb. 11. But, if I can do targeted days for targeted populations in Springfield, [Health and Human Services Commissioner Helen Caulton-Harris] and I are more than willing and looking to do. They need more sites out in Western Massachusetts. Lederman previously wrote an open letter to Gov. Charlie Baker and Secretary of Health and Human Services Marylou Sudders to ask the state to prioritize a localized vaccine distribution plan that would ensure equity and access in the states vaccine distribution. The data we do have shows that while some Springfield residents are getting to the Eastfield Mall, others are experiencing barriers. Equitable supply of vaccinations throughout Springfield has to be a priority, said City Council President Marcus Williams. It is encouraging to see the COVID numbers begin to trend down, but if there happens to a be spike due to newer variants, capturing that data is all the more important and localized vaccine sites could help that effort. The call for an increased number of vaccination sites in the city and Western Massachusetts has been an issue since before the first super vaccination site and various officials have voiced their concerns. Bishop Talbert W. Swan, senior pastor at Spring of Hope Church Of God In Christ & president of the Greater Springfield NAACP pointed out during an online talk with State Sen. Eric P. Lesser on Feb. 12. This data gives us our first snapshot of the status of vaccination in Springfield, but more detailed data on a regular basis will be necessary to accurately assess and respond to the pandemic as we move through vaccination phases. The state should be providing this data regularly and publicly, said Lederman. Upon initial review, the fact that suburban zip codes topped the list at the mass vaccination site is a clear indicator of why the state must prioritize localized vaccine distribution in Springfield. The state should take steps to make this a reality immediately. Related Content: BRECKSVILLE, Ohio Failure to comply: Glen Valley On Jan. 26, police observed a gray Chevrolet Cobalt traveling 60 mph in a 35 mph zone on Chippewa Road. The officer then watched the Chevy turn right without using its signal onto Glen Valley. It was obvious that the Cobalt driver was attempting to elude the officer. What the driver apparently didnt know was that Glen Valley is a one-lane, dead-end and private road. From the Chevys tire tracks, the officer could see that the Cobalt had gone off the road a few times. The Cobalt ended up hitting a telephone pole, which resulted in downed wires. The officer reached the Macedonia driver, who was on his phone. After he handcuffed the driver, the officer asked him why he was driving so recklessly. The teenagers response was that he was trying to get to school. He later admitted that the real reason was that he didnt have a drivers license. The driver was cited for speeding, failure to comply, going through a stop sign, driving an unsafe vehicle and a willful disregard for safety. Read more from the Sun Star Courier. A train derailment in Perry County is impacting train traffic. The incident happened at around 6:30 p.m. Monday north of Newport, Perry County. The derailment occurred on the west side of the Juniata River near Old Ferry Road. An eastbound Norfolk Southern train derailed 15 cars, according to the company. The train was traveling from Chicago to Croxton, New Jersey. The cars involved in the derailment were intermodal cargo containers. Norfolk Southern said there were no injuries reported by the crew and no hazardous materials were involved. Norfolk Southern said that train traffic would resume later Tuesday evening at the earliest. The cause of the derailment is under investigation, Norfolk Southern said in a statement. Personnel from Norfolk Southern and other contractors arrived on scene last night and continue to work to clear the derailed cars and repair track damage. Train traffic is not expected to resume until later this evening at the earliest. Norfolk Southern said in a statement on Monday night that customers should expect transit and availability delays of at least 24 hours on shipments moving to and from Chicago, Kansas City and St. Louis. Pennsylvanian Trains 42 and 43 scheduled to operate on 2/23 are canceled due to an earlier Norfolk Southern freight derailment. No alternate transportation will be provided. Please call 1-800-872-7245 for assistance modifying reservations. Amtrak Northeast (@AmtrakNECAlerts) February 23, 2021 Amtrak announced on Monday night that two of its trains that were scheduled for Tuesday were canceled. Due to a freight train derailment west of Harrisburg (HAR), trains traveling in the area should expect delays, Amtrak said Monday night. Pennsylvanian Trains 42 and 43 that were scheduled to depart on 2/23 are canceled with no alternate transportation. Its not clear at this point if any trains will be impacted Wednesday. Amtrak officials couldnt be immediately reached Tuesday night. Lakhimpur Kheri : , Feb 24 (IANS) The four girls who went missing on their way to school on Tuesday, were found in Uttarakhand on Wednesday. SP Vijay Dhul said that the girls had left their homes to visit Uttarakhand. They were staying at a hotel under Muni ki Reti police station in Tehri Garhwal district. They have been safely recovered by a police team that went from here. The Uttarakhand police also helped in tracking down the girls. The police team is now bringing the girls back. According to the police, technical surveillance was used to track down the girls, three of whom are minors. One of the girls, 20, a student of Class 12, had left home with Rs 25,000 cash. She, along with three minor girls aged between 15 to 16 years, were seen boarding the bus. The SSP said, "The bus conductor, who identified the girls, said he had dropped them at Sitapur bus stand. It appears from the CCTV clips and the conductor's account, that the girls left home on their own. We do not see anyone accompanying them." The girls had all turned off their mobile phones and their last location was traced to Sitapur. The police scanned CCTV footages of the bus stand and railway station and coordinated with their counterparts in Sitapur and Lucknow in the search operations. Maze Runner star Dylan O'Brien is set to star with Oscar winner Mark Rylance in crime drama The Outfit. The actor, 29, who originated the character of Thomas in the hit movie franchise, is on board the project which will mark the feature directorial debut of screenwriter Graham Moore. The cast also includes The Dig's Johnny Flynn and Zoey Deutch, Deadline.com reported Tuesday. New movie: Maze Runner star Dylan O'Brien, pictured left in December 2018, is set to star with Oscar winner Mark Rylance, right in May 2008, in crime drama The Outfit In The Outfit, British actor Rylance plays a former Savile Row tailor who made a living making suits for the wealthy in London. Following a personal tragedy, however, he ends up in Chicago. There, in the Windy City, he runs a small shop in a rough part of town making clothes for a wealthy family of vicious gangsters. Filming is slated to begin in London in March, according to Deadline. Rylance, who won an Oscar for 2015's Bridge of Spies opposite Tom Hanks, was most recently seen as attorney Willliam Kuntsker in Aaron Sorkin's The Trail of the Chicago 7 on Netflix Famous face: O'Brien, 29, originated the character of Thomas in the hit movie franchise and starred in all three Maze Runner films as well as in the TV series Teen Wolf Supporting roles: Also joining the cast of The Outfit are Zoey Deutch, known for Netflix's The Politician and Set It Up, and Johnny Flynn who was most recently seen in Netflix's The Dig Rylance most recently starred in Aaron Sorkin's The Trial Of The Chicago 7 on Netflix. He won a best supporting actor Academy Award for 2015's Bridge of Spies opposite Tom Hanks. Moore, who won an Oscar for his adapted screenplay for 2014's The Imitation Game, is directing The Outfit from a screenplay he co-wrote with Johnathan McClain. In a statement, he said: 'If youd told me years ago, when Johnathan and I were first dreaming up this story, that Id get to direct my first film with a cast as exquisitely talented as Mark, Zoey, Dylan and Johnny, Id have said you were nuts. 'And honestly, if youd said that back then, you might have been. This film is such a deep labor of love for me and our whole team.' Man of words: The Outfit will mark the directorial feature debut of Oscar-winning screenwriter Graham Moore who co-authored the screenplay with Johnathan McClain St. Lukes University Health Network is giving eligible Lehigh Valley educators priority access to the COVID-19 vaccine. We recognize that getting our schools back to normal is a goal for every parent, teacher and child, Trevor Micklos, St. Lukes network vice president, said in a news release, Our hope is that by working to vaccinate educators over the next several months, we can ensure that our kids will be back to school as soon as possible. St. Lukes is dedicating weekly vaccine appointments to 78 schools in the region based on Pennsylvanias vaccine eligibility phases. To qualify for expedited access, educators must meet Phase 1A eligibility requirements age 16-64 with high-risk conditions or anyone over 65 and have listed their employer on their St. Lukes MyChart account. The health networks committed to providing area school districts with a potion of available appointments while continuing to provide equitable distribution of vaccine to everyone eligible in this phase, according to the release. (Cant see this map? Click here.) Pennsylvania estimates more than 4 million people currently are qualified to receive the two-dose vaccines, but the state has only received about 3.17 million doses through the end of this week. The current vaccination phase prioritizes people over 65, those with certain medical conditions, frontline healthcare workers and residents and staff in long-term care facilities. We want everyone to be vaccinated as quickly as possible, said John Hauth, St. Lukes senior network administrator, Our only limitation is the amount of vaccine we get from the state. Its not an instantaneous process, so it is important to remain patient. Each week, St. Lukes will notify eligible educators of available vaccine appointments. St. Lukes hopes this will help area schools bring students back to in-person learning. Several Lehigh Valley school districts have already begun outlining tentative plans to resume full-time instruction. Are you an eligible teacher? Create a St. Lukes MyChart here and select your employer. If you have any questions about the vaccine as it relates to your medical condition or situation, please speak with your health care provider before scheduling a vaccine appointment. If you have MyChart questions, go here or by call 1-866-STLUKES (785-8537), option 5. Due to an overwhelming demand, you may be place on a call back list. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to lehighvalleylive.com. Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com. Hyderabad, Feb 24 : In a shocking incident, an eight-year-old boy was kidnapped and murdered by unidentified people in Telangana's Mahabubnagar district, police said. The body of Santosh, who went missing three days ago, was found in a well near Janampet on Wednesday. The boy went missing while playing near his house in Janampet village of Moosapet mandal. His parents had lodged a complaint with the police. Police had launched a search for the boy but could not trace him. On Wednesday, the body of Santosh was founding lying in a well near the village. The boy was strangulated and the body was wrapped in a cloth and thrown in the well. Police shifted the body for autopsy. They registered a case and launched an investigation. Santosh's father Vishnu and mother Lakshmi alleged that someone among their relatives kidnapped and killed him. A police officer said they were investigating the case from all angles. Admin gears up as Hisar farmers get set to protest today Punjab MLA Navjot Singh Sidhu hoists black flag at his residence in support of protesting farmers Court seeks police response on Shantanu Muluk's anticipatory bail plea India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Feb 24: A court here on Wednesday sought response from the Delhi Police on the anticipatory bail application of Shantanu Muluk, who along with Disha Ravi is accused of sharing a 'toolkit' on social media related to the farmers' protest. Additional Sessions Judge Dharmender Rana, who granted bail to Ravi on Wednesday, posted Muluk's bail application for arguments on Friday. Muluk had got transit bail from the Bombay High Court on February 16 for a period of 10 days. During the brief hearing held through video-conferencing on Wednesday, the court also noted that Muluk has been granted protection from arrest till February 26. Farmers will gherao Parliament if govt doesn't repeal three agri laws: Rakesh Tikait The matter was adjourned after the public prosecutor said that the investigating officer of the case was not present today and "it would be better if the matter is heard in physical presence." Muluk, along with Ravi and another co accused Nikita Jacob, was booked for alleged sedition and other charges. Ravi was arrested by a Cyber Cell team of the Delhi Police from Bengaluru and brought to Delhi. Muluk and Jacob are currently on transit bail, while Ravi was granted bail on Tuesday after nine-day custody. If convicted for sedition, the accused may get a maximum jail term for life. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 12:30 [IST] This is the moment furious passers-by seize a massive knife from a 13-year-old boy after they allegedly caught him trying to rob phones from children. Footage filmed last Saturday in Rainham, East London, shows members of the public surrounding the teenager and demanding him to hand over the bladed weapon. The boy is seen lying on the floor and taking out a knife tucked away in his clothing, before a man wearing a hood holds it up to the camera and says: 'You think that's funny? Going around and robbing 12-year-old kids?' Police confirmed that a 13-year-old boy was arrested at the scene and has since been released under investigation. The boy, 13, is seen lying on the floor (pictured left) in Rainham, East London, and taking out a knife tucked away in his clothing, before a man wearing a hood holds it up to the camera (right) In the video, passers-by leave the knife in a car's windshield and exclaim 'look at the size of it', while a woman asks: 'What the f*** are you doing with that knife?' At one point, a man can be seen grabbing the boy's head and holding the knife up to his face, before others urge him to back away. The clip was posted to social media and captioned: 'In Rainham... he was robbing kids with that knife. 'One of the dads caught up with him.' The 13-year-old boy was taken to hospital for treatment where he remains, said the Met Police. A spokesman for the force told MailOnline: 'Police are aware of a video circulating on social media showing members of the public detaining a male who was seen to be carrying a knife in the street. Police confirmed that a 13-year-old boy, pictured above in stills from the footage, was arrested at the scene and has since been released under investigation 'The incident occurred in the Rainham area on Saturday, 20 February. 'The footage has been reviewed by officers from East Area BCU who are now investigating. 'One male, aged 13, was arrested at scene on suspicion of possession of points and blades, and robbery. 'He was taken to hospital for treatment where he remains. He has been released under investigation while enquiries continue.' Italy on Wednesday pressed the United Nations for answers about the attack on a U.N. food aid convoy in the Democratic Republic of Congo that left a young ambassador and his paramilitary police bodyguard dead. Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio told lawmakers in Rome that Italy has asked both the U.N. and the U.N. World Food Program to open an investigation into the security arrangements for convoy, which was attacked two days earlier. The minister said Italy also will spare no effort to determine the truth behind the killing of Ambassador Luca Attanasio and Carabiniere paramilitary officer Vittorio Iacovacci. A WFP Congolese driver, Moustapha Milambo, was also killed in the attack. The trip was undertaken at the U.N.s invitation, according to Di Maio. The two Italians had entrusted themselves to the protocol of the United Nations, which flew them on a U.N. plane from Kinshasha to Goma, 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) away, Di Maio said. The Italian embassy in Kinshasa, Di Maio noted, has two armored vehicles at the ambassador's disposal for moving around the city and the country. But for Monday's mission, to visit a WFP school food project in Rutshuri in eastern DRC, Attanasio was traveling in U.N. vehicles. A special team of Carabinieri investigators, dispatched by Rome prosecutors, arrived Tuesday in Congo on what Di Maio said would likely be multiple missions to determine what happened. (Image credit: AP) (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) Upstate New York was a hotbed in the 19th century for the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad. Names like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith are familiar. But there were also valiant figures from the region, white and Black, who fought for the end of slavery whose names have faded into history. During this Black History Month, after searching through old newspapers and websites, we take a look back at some of Upstate New Yorks forgotten abolitionists. *** When he died on Feb. 3, 1895 at Hyde Park, Massachusetts, the life of abolitionist Theodore Weld was remembered beautifully by the Brooklyn Sun. Too few of us even attempt to live up to our ideals, Welds obituary in the paper said, and the benefit we would accomplish never gets farther than the wish. Courage and earnestness, carelessness of the worlds scorn, patient waiting for the worlds better understanding, are elements in the making of men like Theodore Weld. Dr. Lyman Beecher, co-founder of the American Temperance Society, proclaimed that Welds powerful words were like logic on fire. Almost from the beginning, Weld seemed to care for the well-being of his fellow man. He was born in 1803 in Connecticut, the son of a minister. His inductee page on the website for the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum tells this story of Weld when he was just 6 years old. An African American boy named Jerry entered as a student in Welds common school. The teacher segregated Jerry from the rest of his class and treated him with casual cruelty. In an act of courage, Weld asked to be seated next to Jerry. He moved to Pompey, N.Y. in 1825 and would later enroll at the Oneida Institute, but he found that the school failed to live up to his ideological expectations. It was at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati that would see Weld become converted to the idea of immediate abolitionism. He and a group of like-minded students, known as the Lane Rebels, organized an anti-slavery society and began aiding the Black people of Cincinnati. When school officials tried to stop them, the rebels left the school. Weld became a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society and hit the road to convince people in the western states about the evils of slavery. William Lloyd Garrison wrote of the effectiveness of Welds message: Weld is destined to be one of the great men not of America merely, but of the world. His mind is full of strength, proportion, beauty, and majesty. There is indubitable evidence of intellectual grandeur and moral power. He was called the most mobbed man in America, and regularly faced down a shower of stones, tomatoes, and threats whenever he entered a city or town. On May 16, 1838, while speaking at an abolition convention in Philadelphia, which included his wife, Angelina Grimke, a mob burned down the venue, Pennsylvania Hall. The incident marked the last time Weld appeared as an anti-slavery lecturer, but he was not finished with the cause. Working with his wife and her sister, Sarah, Weld began his most influential endeavor. Pouring over 20,000 newspapers from the American South, they published a narrative which condemned slavery by using the words, actions, and stories of slave masters. He wrote in the introduction: We repeat it, every man knows that slavery is a curse. Whoever denies this, his lips libel his heart. Try him; clank the chains in his ears and tell him they are for him; give him an hour to prepare his wife and children for a life of slavery; bid him make haste and get ready their necks for the yoke, and their wrists for the coffle chains, then look at his pale lips and trembling knees, and you have natures testimony against slavery. The 1839 work, titled American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, would influence Harriet Beecher Stowe when she wrote Uncle Toms Cabin. It work laid out in black and white, and in vivid detail, the horrible life of the American slave. And unlike other personal slave narratives, which highlighted a single persons story, this documented the lives of many slaves, across many states and years. He and his wife would start their own school at their farm in Belleville, New Jersey, in 1848. He outlived nearly all of his fellow abolitionists, dying at the age of 91. Our series See all of our profiles of Upstates forgotten abolitionists here. Black History Month Black History Month in Upstate NY: Historical sites, monuments and more Black History Month movies: 20 great films to stream right now on Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video, more Peterboros Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum offers free daily videos during Black History Month CNY Jazz brings L.A. to Syracuse for Black History Month cabaret Send your ideas and curiosities to Johnathan Croyle at jcroyle@syracuse.com or call 315-427-3958. KANSAS CITY, Mo., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- A major auction in March will feature 879 acres of agricultural land in Cass County, Missouri. The land will be offered in a live auction (with optional online bidding) Tuesday March 30, with Schrader Real Estate and Auction Company conducting the event. The 26 tracts offered include tillable cropland (some irrigated), wooded recreation areas, five homes, and a 160,000 bushel grain setup, which will be offered separately from the land on which it is located. "This land is about 30 miles south of Kansas City and well suited for local operators and investors alike. It is a short distance from Belton, Missouri, and Olathe, Kansas. Bidders will be able to combine tracts and purchase just a few acres or even the entire property. Our system of bidding puts those seeking large and small amounts of land on an equal footing," said R.D. Schrader, president of the auction company. "The land is all contiguous, with a high percentage being tillable," Schrader. Land tracts range in size from approximately five acres to 167 acres. One tract has a 16,800-square-foot machine shed, of which approximately 4,800 square feet is insulated and heated. Schrader personnel will be available at the property to accommodate inspections and provide detailed information on March 4, 5, 18, 19 and 30. Visit www.schraderauction.com or call 800-451-2709 for specific times. The auction will begin at 5 p.m. Tuesday, March 30, at the Beck Event Space, 210 South Independence Street, Harrisonville, Missouri. Online bidding will be available to those who make arrangements a week in advance. Schrader Real Estate and Auction Company, based in Columbia City, Indiana, is a leading auctioneer of agricultural land and equipment throughout the United States. The company is a five-time USA Today/National Auctioneers Association Auction of the Year winner. For more information: Carl Carter, 205-910-1952 SOURCE Schrader Real Estate and Auction Company Related Links http://www.schraderauction.com An 8-year-old is working to combat child homelessness by starting her own organization and raising money to donate to shelters. Leticia Anderson said her daughter, Peyton, first became aware of the concept of homelessness through her own family. "It was my uncle. He was homeless for a while and she started doing research," Anderson said. "She was like, 'Oh my gosh, there's homeless children.'" "She did her own research and was like, 'I have to find a way to help," Anderson said. Peyton came up with the idea to make her own T-shirts and heart-shaped crayons for sale. She started her own business and called it Eye of a Child. The purpose: To raise money for donations for shelters housing homeless children and their families. "I learned there were also homeless children, more than 2.5 million children. Children that are just like me that are homeless," Peyton said. "I was like, yeah, no, that's not happening." Peyton started selling her items online and in her own pop-up shops around southeast Wisconsin. "It just kind of took off," Anderson said. "We've been in Mequon, in Thiensville, just a bunch of different places for her to have pop-up shops." This month, Peyton raised enough funds to donate $500 to Joy House, a Milwaukee women's shelter. She also asked for toy donations in lieu of gifts for her birthday and Christmas and donated all of the toys to Joy House as well. There were enough toys to go to each child living in the shelter. "Joy House is a shelter for women and women with children. Some of our women are victims of domestic violence, some have relocated from other cities, some have been evicted, some are struggling with alcohol or drug addictions," said Aurelia Brown, the director of Joy House. "To have someone so young, excited to be giving to individuals that are less fortunate than she is, is awesome. I'm hoping that it can be something that spreads," Brown said. "The money will go towards several things. Meals, birthday parties, toys, any of the needs that the families might have." Peyton said her next goal is to raise $1,000 for another women's shelter. To help Peyton reach her goals, you can donate through her Instagram account @_eyeofachild or her website. Vice Foreign Minister Choi Jong-moon speaks during the virtual meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Tuesday (Geneva time). Courtesy of Ministry of Foreign Affairs Second Vice Foreign Minister Choi Jong-moon has said that the tragedy surrounding victims of Japan's wartime sexual slavery must be addressed as a "universal human rights issue," vowing to continue Seoul's efforts to restore their dignity. Choi made the remarks in a prerecorded speech for the virtual high-level segment of the U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday (Geneva time), as the issue of the wartime sexual slavery resurfaced with a Harvard professor's much-criticized claim that the victims were voluntary prostitutes. "Current and future generations should learn valuable lessons from the painful experience of the 'comfort women' victims from World War II," Choi said, referring to the euphemism for the former sex slaves. "The tragedy of the 'comfort women' must be addressed as a universal human rights issue, and the recurrence of such grave violations of human rights in conflict must be prevented," he added. The comfort women issue gained renewed attention recently after J. Mark Ramseyer of Harvard Law School wrote an article casting the victims as willing prostitutes who worked under voluntary contracts. The issue also remains a thorn between Seoul and Tokyo, as a Korean court ordered Japan last month to make reparations of 100 million won (US$89,928) each to 12 former sex slaves without recognizing sovereign immunity in the trial. In his speech, Choi reiterated Seoul's "survivor-centered approach" to restore the honor of the victims. "The Korean government will keep endeavoring to restore the dignity and honor of the comfort women victims a dwindling number of elderly women in their 90s with a survivor-centered approach at the core," he said. The vice minister also stressed Seoul's "profound interest" in the human rights situation in North Korea, while noting that the humanitarian situation in the North could deteriorate due to economic sanctions, COVID-19 and natural disasters. "Concerns over the human rights situation should not hinder us from paying attention to the humanitarian situation in North Korea," he said. Choi went on to call attention to the tragedy of families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War, calling it one of the most urgent humanitarian and human rights matters. Touching on the unstable political situation in Myanmar, Choi reaffirmed South Korea's "utmost respect" for the Myanmar people's aspiration for democracy. "We hope that the issue will be resolved peacefully, in adherence with a lawful and democratic process," he said. (Yonhap) The is concerned that may impact financial stability in Asias third-largest economy, a view that could shape looming regulations on the asset that is breaking price-records around the world. The monetary authority has conveyed these major concerns to the government, Governor said in an interview to CNBC TV-18 Wednesday. Prime Minister Narendra Modis administration is proposing to prohibit all private in the country and create a framework for an official digital currency. The RBI had banned banks and other regulated entities from supporting crypto transactions in 2018 after digital currencies were used for fraud following Modis landmark demonetization program that replaced Indias cash with new bills in a bid to ferret out tax-evaders. The Supreme Court cut the curbs last year in response to a petition by cryptocurrency exchanges. Bitcoin, buoyed by a tide of monetary and fiscal stimulus across the globe, has had a volatile five-fold surge over the past year. The largest cryptocurrency rallied back above $50,000 on Wednesday after supportive comments from Ark Investment Managements Cathie Wood. Believers such as Wood see an emerging asset class being embraced by long-term investors, not just speculators. Critics, meanwhile, fear Bitcoin is a bubble that will inevitably burst. Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk in recent tweets said Bitcoin prices seem high, having earlier called it a less dumb version of cash. Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates cautioned about how investors can be swept up in manias. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Bitcoin is an extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The boss of Australias busiest airport says there will be no justification for state border closures once the countrys most vulnerable people have received a COVID-19 vaccination, and wants some international travel to resume when half the population has been immunised. Sydney Airport chief executive Geoff Culbert said he had received a promising response from the federal and NSW governments on his plan to open up travel in step with each phase of Australias vaccine rollout. We will be perceived as the best place in the world to study, the best place in the world to work, the best place in the world to holiday, he said on Wednesday after revealing a $145 million full-year loss at the ASX-listed airport. Qantas near-empty terminal at Sydney Airport on February 14. Credit:Edwina Pickles Theres a huge economic opportunity in this for the nation if we open up at the right speed. MINNEDOSA is a long way from Mars, but a company based in the town played a role in getting the Mars Perseverance rover safely onto the red planet. MINNEDOSA is a long way from Mars, but a company based in the town played a role in getting the Mars Perseverance rover safely onto the red planet. Canadian Photonic Labs supplied its Mega Speed high-speed cameras and software to help NASA test the landing decelerator and parachute system that was eventually used to get rovers onto the surface of Mars in one piece, said president Mark Wahoski. The cameras were mounted on a rocket sled used to test the decelerator. They captured images that are too fast for the human eye to see, he said. Personnel were at at the Supersonic Naval Ordnance Research Track in California to help set up the cameras and provide technical support. "When youre there, its an exhilarating thing because youre off on the control where the command post is. Its quite a process," said Wahoski. The Mars rover, which was launched on July 30, is the most sophisticated rover to land on the planet. "It will collect carefully selected and documented rock and sediment samples for future return to Earth, search for signs of ancient microbial life, characterize the planets geology and climate, and pave the way for human exploration beyond the moon," NASA says about the rover. Its a long journey from the test site on Earth to the red rock surface of Mars. Wahoski said testing started around 2011, but the Perseverance rover didnt touch down until approximately a decade later, on Feb. 18. "Its pretty rewarding because theres times where theres really a lot of pressure on you at the time when youre down there, and its all your equipment thats capturing all of this," he said. "That part is pretty stressful, but now it seems like "Geez, did we do that? and its pretty good for us and the guys who helped do that." Getting a robotic rover to Mars is a huge undertaking, Wahoski said, and his Minnedosa company was able to play a role in it. "Everything is travelling at about 20 times the speed of a bullet and you cant steer you have to point to something (during the launch) thats going to be where it is in nine months time. Its amazing," he said. Many probes dont make it to Mars, he said, so its a big deal when one lands successfully. "Its a long process, its not just come in and do one drivers test, kind of thing. Its over the years and sometimes it goes, sometimes it doesnt, but when you think about what they did, we just had one part, one small part," he said. Asked why NASA chose to go with Canadian Photonic Labs, Wahoski said, "They had other options and they had other companies trying to do it we just had the best solution." The firm has other aerospace projects in the works, Wahoski said. The company is currently helping Space X, Elon Musks spacecraft company, test part of its Star Link satellite internet system. Brandon Sun COLUMBUS, Ohio A man driving on Interstate 70 Monday morning was wounded when the driver of another vehicle pulled alongside and opened fire, police say. The victim, Bruce Powell Jr., 28, was taken to Grant Hospital in critical condition with multiple gunshot wounds, according to police. His condition was later upgraded to stable. Powell tells police he was driving east on I-70 near Alum Creek Drive just before noon when a blue Toyota SUV pulled up next to his vehicle. The male driving the Toyota then fired several shots at Powell. No arrests have been made in the shooting, which shut down a portion of Interstate 70 for nearly three hours, according to reports. More content on cleveland.com: Man robbed at gunpoint behind Akron nightclub, police say Cleveland police supervisor accused of misconduct, launching unauthorized investigation into deputy police chief Man killed in ATV, snowmobile crash on frozen lake near Akron Man dies in early morning crash on I-90 in Euclid, police say ADVERTISEMENT The Senate has confirmed Abdulrasheed Bawa as the substantive chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). The confirmation was done after a screening which lasted for over two hours. The screening exercise was done in plenary and was presided over by the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan. Mr Bawa was grilled by senators with about 15 lawmakers asking him various questions. The questions ranged from his past experiences, his relationship with his predecessors as well as his plans for the new position he has been appointed for. During the exercise, he denied the allegation of selling recovered properties while heading the EFCCs Port Harcourt office and said he has a good relationship with his predecessors. The screening comes one week after President Muhammadu Buhari conveyed a letter to the Senate seeking Mr Bawas confirmation as the EFCC boss. The president, in the letter, communicated his decision to appoint the 40-year-old. The appointment, he said, is in accordance with Paragraph 2(3) of Part1, CAP E1 of EFCC Act 2004. The presidents media aide, Femi Adesina, who made the first announcement on February 16, said the nominee is a trained EFCC investigator with vast experience in the investigation and prosecution of advance fee fraud cases, official corruption, bank fraud, money laundering, and other economic crimes. He has undergone several specialised training in different parts of the world, and was one of the pioneer EFCC Cadet Officers in 2005. He holds a B.Sc degree in Economics, and Masters in International Affairs and Diplomacy, Mr Adesina said. Mr Bawa will become the youngest man to head the EFCC and the first EFCC chairperson not to have been a police officer. More details later [February 24, 2021] Volta Industries Welcomes Google Executive Bonita Stewart to Board of Directors SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Volta Industries, Inc. (Volta), an industry leader in commerce-centric electric vehicle (EV) charging networks, announced today that Bonita C. Stewart, Vice President of Global Partnerships at Google Inc., is joining their Board of Directors. Ms. Stewart brings Volta more than three decades' experience leading multi-billion dollar operations, accelerating digital technology adoption and driving business transformation for major corporations in the IT, automotive and technology fields. As a former executive at DaimlerChrysler AG (now Daimler AG), she developed strategy and oversaw all interactive communications for the Chrysler Group brands and led innovative online initiatives to enhance consumer experience. In her current role as VP of Global Partnerships at Google, Ms. Stewart directs strategy, revenue and partner management for the largest U.S. publishers across search, mobile applications, commerce, news, broadcast, telecommunications and domains. "Bonita's leadership and expertise is a key addition to our Board," said Chris Wendel, Co-Founder and President of Volta. "Bonita ade an indelible mark on Chrysler by identifying disruptive technologies and bringing them into the industry at the outset. By learning to leverage these technologies and eventually becoming a market leader on digital technology adoption, Bonita had a transformational impact on the consumer experience across the automotive industry. Her perspective on Volta's Board will be invaluable, particularly as we accelerate our expansion and reach." Unique to the EV market, Volta's business model centers around evolving spending habits caused by the move to electric vehicles by building a charging infrastructure that reinforces desired behaviors at each location. Volta's charging stations feature large eye-catching digital displays that function as a sophisticated media network, providing brands a way to reach shoppers moments before they enter a store. These sponsor-supported charging stations provide energy to customers who are able to plug in their vehicles where and when they shop. Volta's business partners who choose to have Volta charging stations installed report an increase in spend, dwell time and engagement on site. Currently located in 23 states and over 200 municipalities, Volta's approach has gained significant acceptance and penetration in the market. "The transition away from gas to providing clean energy is consumer-centric and has a broader, climate-focused mission. I'm excited to join Volta as it helps anchor this transformational change," said Ms. Stewart. "Volta's model of charging your car where you already are is how the re-imagined fueling infrastructure should be built. Combining that infrastructure with programmatic advertising changes the model of how consumers fuel, disrupts the industry and provides great convenience for consumers." About Volta For over a decade, Volta has been building a nationwide electric vehicle charging network to drive the world forward. Named after Alessandro Volta, the inventor of the electric battery, Volta's award-winning charging stations benefit brands, consumers, and real-estate locations by providing valuable advertising space to businesses and free charging to drivers. Strategically located in places where consumers already spend their time and money, Volta's chargers are among the most used electric vehicle charging stations in the United States. Headquartered in San Francisco, Volta is bringing to communities the means of building a sustainable fueling network for the 21st century. To learn more, visit www.voltacharging.com. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/volta-industries-welcomes-google-executive-bonita-stewart-to-board-of-directors-301233720.html SOURCE Volta [ Back to the Next Generation Communications Community's Homepage ] India will start the next stage of vaccinating those above 60 years of age and those above 45 with comorbidities, such as diabetes and heart ailments, from March 1, the government announced in a Cabinet briefing on Wednesday. The vaccines will be given for free in over 10,000 government hospitals and will come for a price, which is yet to be decided, in more than 20,000 private centres. Around 270 million people are expected to be covered in the third phase of the vaccination drive. Of these, 100 million will be those aged above 60. The government is likely to put a cap on what the private sector would be allowed to charge for the jab. In the next 3-4 days, the health ministry will announce the price at which private hospitals would provide the vaccine, Union minister Prakash Javadekar told mediapersons. The health ministry will shortly announce the list of comorbidities that will be given priority for vaccinating those aged over 45. We wanted to build faith in the vaccine, that is why it was administered to health and frontline workers. We should be proud that our product is going all around the world. Most of us ministers will pay for the vaccine, IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said. ALSO READ: Coronavirus LIVE: Bengal makes negative Covid report mandatory for 4 states So far, more than 12 million Indians have received the Covid vaccine. These include health and frontline workers who were the top priority for the vaccination. With very few cases of adverse effects, the need of the hour is to accelerate the pace of inoculation in Phase 2. The private sector will continue to strengthen the governments capacity across the value chain of Covid-19 vaccine distribution and administration, testing and treatment to foster last-mile delivery, said Siddhartha Bhattacharya, secretary general, NATHEALTH-Healthcare Federation of India. The first phase of vaccination was expected to cover 300 million people including 10 million health care workers in both public and private space, and 20 million frontline workers including armed forces, police personnel, disaster management volunteers and municipal workers. So far, over 68 per cent of health and 42 per cent of frontline workers have received at least one dose of the vaccine. The Co-win system, which is a cloud-based IT platform that allows beneficiary registration, session microplanning and real-time reporting of vaccination, is likely to be tweaked to allow the population aged over 60 and those over 45 with comorbidities to register for the jab. The government also plans to issue a vaccination certificate to the beneficiaries through the app. Once a beneficiary is registered on the Co-Win system, the next step would be to verify their details through a photo identification document such as driving licence, PAN card, passport, pension document, voter ID, among others. The district administration will acknowledge the registration through an SMS and inform the beneficiary about the date and time of vaccination. It is a positive move to include the private sector, and we are keen to participate, a spokesperson of Max Healthcare said, adding, We await clarity from the government on how to take this forward in terms of required manpower and centres. We have the capability to ramp up our operations to provide coverage to a large spread of population. The government is also likely to soon take a decision on the interval between the two doses. Ryan has dedicated himself to servicing our clients at a very high level, and he has done so with his hard work and relentless attention to fine detail. GW & Wade, LLC, an independently managed financial advisory firm, is pleased to announce that Ryan Bartholomew, JD, LL.M has been named Principal. Bartholomew draws over a decade in wealth management and, in 2018, opened the firms third location in Reston, Virginia. His integrated, holistic approach to wealth management has made him an excellent Principal to continue to successfully lead GW & Wades expansion into the Washington D.C. and Northern Virginia markets. Ryan has dedicated himself to servicing our clients at a very high level, and he has done so with his hard work and relentless attention to fine detail, says Robert F. Bodio, Jr., JD, Principal & Counselor at GW & Wade. I am confident our Reston office will continue to grow and evolve under Ryans leadership. Since 2010, Ryan has used his proficiency in investment management, tax planning, and financial counsel to deliver objective guidance to clients across the country. During this time, he has been recognized as a Five Star Wealth Manager in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and in Boston. Prior to joining GW & Wade, Bartholomew specialized in estate and income tax planning, tax preparation, and estate administration at a law firm in Wellesley, Massachusetts. As a Principal of GW & Wade, Ryan will build on the impressive work he has done thus far establishing GW & Wades presence in Northern Virginia and the D.C. Metro Area. Ryan will continue to collaborate with clients, providing holistic and comprehensive guidance to help clients achieve their long-term financial objectives while also expanding the firms reach and client base. Our regional presence has also been strengthened by the recent addition of Sherman Moore, GW & Wades new VP of Client Development for the D.C. Metro market. Sherman previously spent more than 16 years as SVP and Regional Director of PNC Wealth Management. We were quite fortunate to find a candidate with Shermans talent and relationships in this market. He will play an essential role in Ryans efforts to expand the firms presence in the greater D.C. region. Jim Da Silva, Principal - Client Development. About GW & Wade, LLC GW & Wade, LLC is an independently managed financial advisory firm with $8.3 billion of assets under management (as of 12/31/20) headquartered in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with additional offices in Palo Alto, California and Reston, Virginia. For over 34 years, GW & Wade has served successful individuals and families, providing extensive tax planning, financial planning, asset management, retirement and estate planning. GW & Wade also provides equity compensation and tax planning services and seminars for the executive management teams of public and private companies. In 2020, GW & Wade was ranked as one of Americas Best RIA Firms by Barrons Magazine, a list that recognizes the premier independent advisors in the nation. Firms are ranked according to assets under management, revenue, and quality of the practice. Please see our awards and recognitions disclosure for Barrons and Five Star Wealth Manager Awards at https://www.gwwade.com/awards. To learn more about GW & Wade, visit https://www.gwwade.com. GW & Wade is an indirect, wholly-owned subsidiary of Focus Financial Partners, LLC Contact: Laurie Wexler Gerber, Director of Marketing lgerber@gwwade.com 781-239-1188 Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) speaks to reporters outside the White House on May 3, 2017. (Susan Walsh/AP Photo) Rep. Upton Censured by County GOP for Vote to Remove Greene From Committees Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) was censured by Republicans in his home district for his vote weeks ago to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from her committee assignments. Michigans Cass County GOP censured Upton for the vote, according to Upton in a series of Twitter posts on Feb. 23. Text of the resolution read: We believe Congressman Uptons vote is a betrayal of his oath of office and core values of the Cass County Republican Party. We believe this vote was not cast in accordance with the voice of the voters of Cass County and against our interest, according to Newsweek. Tonight, the Cass County GOP censured me for voting to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from the education committee, and in their resolution, they stated that her comments have not been out of line with anyone elses comments. Really? he wrote in response on Twitter. On his Twitter page, Upton then listed alleged statements that Greene made on social media before she was sworn into office. Does the Cass GOP really think someone like that represents Republican values and should be serving on the education committee? I served on that committee and met with Columbine school shooting survivors. She should not be on the education committee, and Congress was right to remove her, period, Upton wrote. Ten other Republicans voted to remove Greene from her assignments on the budget, education, and labor committees. In January, after Greenes social media posts came to light, House Democrats, along with some corporate media pundits, mounted a campaign against the Georgia lawmaker over comments she made on social media, and attempted to tie her to the QAnon movement and the breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, speaks during a press conference in Washington on Feb. 5, 2021. (Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images) Before the vote to strip her of her committee assignments, Greene appealed to her colleagues and distanced herself from the QAnon movement. These were words of the past, and these things do not represent me, Greene stated. They do not represent my district, and they do not represent my values. The move to censure Upton comes after he voted to impeach former President Donald Trump last month. House Democrats asserted that Trump was responsible for inciting a crowd at the Capitol on Jan. 6; Trump and his lawyers have denied the claims. Republicans like Upton in the House who voted to impeach Trump or voted to convict the president in the Senate have faced significant blowback from their constituents and local Republican Party organizations. Trump, as recent polls suggest, remains a very popular figure in the GOP. Of the seven Republican senators to convict Trump, five of them have been censured. Maines GOP is reportedly slated to hold a meeting by the end of the month about whether Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) should be censured. Utahs Republican Party issued a statement in early February saying that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) wont be censured. Cass County GOP officials didnt immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for additional details about the vote. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES WHITE ROCK, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / AZARGA METALS CORP. ("Azarga Metals" or the "Company") (TSXV:AZR) is pleased to announce that due to strong market demand Azarga Metals has increased its planned non-brokered private placement announced on February 17, 2021 from up to $500,000 to up to $1,300,000. On closing the private placement, the Company will issue up to 21,666,666 units at a price of C$0.06 per unit (a "Unit"). 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 Share of the Company at a price of C$0.12 per Share for a period of two years from the closing of the Offering. The Shares issued in connection with the Offering will be subject to a four-month and a day hold period. In addition, the Offering is subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. Finder's fees will be payable on the Offering. The Company intends to use the proceeds of the Offering to fund the cost of the PEA preparation on the Company's Unkur project and for general working capital purposes. About Azarga Metals Corp. Azarga Metals is a mineral exploration and development company that owns 100% of the Unkur Copper-Silver Project in the Zabaikalsky administrative region in eastern Russia. On completion of a first phase physical exploration program in 2016-2018, the Company estimated an Inferred Resource of 62 million tonnes at 0.53% copper and 38.6g/t silver for the project in the report entitled "Technical Report and Preliminary Economic Assessment for the Unkur Copper-Silver Project, Kodar-Udokan, Russian Federation" dated effective 30, August 2018 authored by Tetra Tech Mining & Minerals. AZARGA METALS CORP. "Michael Hopley" Michael Hopley, President and Chief Executive Officer For further information please contact: Doris Meyer, at +1 604 536-2711 ext. 6, visit www.azargametals.com or follow us on Twitter @AzargaMetals. The address of the head office of Azarga Metals is Unit 1 - 15782 Marine Drive, White Rock, BC V4B 1E6, British Columbia, Canada. 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. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available. Cautionary Statement: This news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on the Corporation's current expectations and estimates. Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "suggest", "indicate" and other similar words or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from estimated or anticipated events or results implied or expressed in such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others: the actual results of current planned exploration activities; conclusions of economic evaluations; changes in project parameters as plans to continue to be refined; possible variations in mineralization grade or recovery rates; accidents, labor disputes and other risks of the mining industry; delays in obtaining governmental approvals or financing; and fluctuations in metal prices. There may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to the inherent uncertainty therein. SOURCE: Azarga Metals Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631578/Azarga-Metals-Upsizes-Private-Placement EBay headquarters in San Jose, California / EPA-Yonhap By Kim Jae-heun Private equity fund (PEF) MBK Partners and local internet firm Kakao Corp. are tapped as two of the most viable candidates to possibly acquire eBay Korea, the country's No.2 e-commerce company that went up for sale last month. According to a source from the investment banking industry, eBay Korea's financial advisers Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have been distributing teaser letters to potential buyers. Soon, they will meet with shortlisted candidates to sign non-disclosure agreements and share details about the company. It has not been revealed how much eBay Korea's corporate value stands at currently, but it is estimated at around 5 trillion won ($4.5 billion). Kakao could have its e-commerce subsidiary Kakao Commerce acquire a controlling stake in eBay Korea. Kakao Commerce's main business is e-coupons used through the instant message application Kakao Talk. Last year, Kakao Commerce's gross merchandise value (GMV) stood at 3 trillion won and annual sales reached 300 billion won. The items traded on the Kakao Talk platform are e-coupons, not real products. Recently, Kakao Commerce started selling luxury goods online in an effort to expand its product line. If it takes over eBay, Kakao Commerce will not only increase the number of items on its platform, but also rise instantly to become the No.2 player in the local e-commerce market. MBK Partners wants to acquire eBay Korea and create synergy with its discount store retail chain Homeplus, another source said on condition of anonymity. Many local discount stores are showing a decrease in sales as customers flock to online merchants to buy products. MBK Partners wants to take this as chance to enter the online business. Also, it could make up for its weakness in the fresh food sector by allocating eBay Korea items through Homeplus. MBK Partners took over Homeplus in 2017 by spending 5.6 trillion won to acquire a 100-percent stake in the discount store chain. Another e-commerce firm Qoo10 has a high chance of purchasing eBay Korea. Qoo10 founder Ku Young-bae also established Gmarket, one of the leading e-commerce platforms owned by eBay Korea along with Auction. In 2009, Ku sold Gmarket to eBay Korea for $1.2 billion when its annual GMV marked 5 trillion won. Now, Ku wants to bring back its old platform and merge with Qoo10, an online marketplace based in Singapore where people can easily find Korean products and purchase them from overseas. Qoo10 operates in China, Singapore, Indonesia and Hong Kong and is currently the No.1 player in Singapore in terms of GMV. However, Qoo10 is said to own too little liquidity to acquire eBay Korea. Ku will have to raise funds by attracting financial investors to secure enough money. He can also approach PEFs to seek investments. Meanwhile, eBay Korea's sales account for 11 percent of eBay's overall revenue. The Korean branch's business performance has shown steady growth since 2017. Its sales stood at 951.8 billion won four years ago, but reached a historic high of 1.61 trillion won in 2019. eBay Korea's operating profit, however, has stagnated in the 60 billion won range in the same period. Even through a video screen, you could feel the warm fuzzies between President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the two met Tuesday for a symbolic rebooting of neighborly relations grown testy over the past four years. Biden recalled visiting Canada in 2016 when he was vice president and joked about his poor French. Trudeau said he welcomed partnership with the United States "to keep making sure we are pulling our weight around the world and making the world a better and safer place for everyone." The relief on Trudeau's masked face was obvious as he and Biden held the pandemic version of an Oval Office sit-down. Trudeau was in Ottawa and Biden in Washington, but the White House clearly intended the session to be intimate and celebratory, a sort of hug meant to salve Canada's wounded pride after the slights inflicted by President Donald Trump. "The United States has no closer friend - no closer friend - than Canada," Biden said. "That's why you were my first call," he added, and the first foreign leader to receive an invitation to the White House, even if conducted long-distance. Neither leader mentioned Trump by name during the portion of their long-distance meeting seen by reporters. They didn't have to. "U.S. leadership has been sorely missed over the past years," Trudeau said. He noted how differently the process of crafting a joint statement went this time: "It's nice when the Americans aren't pulling out all references to climate change, and instead adding them in." That was partly a reference to a disastrous 2018 meeting of the Group of Seven industrialized democracies hosted by Canada. Trump skipped the session on climate change and refused to sign onto a statement endorsing the Paris climate agreement. Trump pulled the United States out of that pact; Biden recently rejoined it. Trump's outburst at the time of that G-7 meeting included personally attacking Trudeau, tweeting after leaving the meeting that his Canadian host was "very dishonest" and "weak." The shock and hurt in Canada, the largest U.S. trading partner and a close ally, was hard to overstate. But for all the palpable relief Tuesday, several irritants remain between the two countries, and Biden added one more on his first day in office when he canceled the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. Ahead of the meeting, opposition lawmakers from across Canada's political spectrum called on Trudeau to push for an exemption from Biden's "Buy American" executive order on procurement, which could squeeze Canadian firms out of U.S. government contracts. Conservative Party leader Erin O'Toole also urged the prime minister to ask Biden to let Canada acquire its coronavirus vaccines from U.S.-based manufacturers. Canada has been obtaining vaccines from Europe, and recent shipments have encountered delays. "At a time when both our countries need to be focused on getting people back to work and returning to normal post-covid-19, Justin Trudeau needs to show Canadians he'll stand up for our interests and our jobs," O'Toole said in a statement. None of that appeared to dampen the mood Tuesday. The White House released a "road map" for U.S.-Canada relations, focused on a recovery from the pandemic, a reversal of the economic downturn and cooperation on climate change and other priorities. Among those is a recommitment to traditional alliances and international institutions such as the United Nations, NATO, the Group of Seven and the World Trade Organization. The United States and Canada also will work together to resume three-way meetings with Mexico, a White House statement said. Trudeau was just one of the traditional allies whom Trump publicly scorned, and both the Canadian and U.S. leaders were eager Tuesday to signal a clean break from the former president's tendency toward isolationism and protectionism. Trump had mused about sending troops to the U.S.-Canada border, for example, and ordered the manufacturing giant 3M to stop sending N95 masks to Canada, before reaching a deal with the company that would allow the protective gear to continue flowing. Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro even appeared to call into question the motives for Canada's contribution to the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan, in which 158 Canadian soldiers have been killed. The comments were "such an affront to Canadian contribution and Canadian loss," a deputy defense minister wrote to Canada's ambassador to the United States in an email obtained by The Washington Post through a public records request. Biden is now trying to make up for those years of tension. Even though it was the diplomatic equivalent of a Zoom meeting, Tuesday's session, as the first one-on-one with a foreign leader, was meant to reflect the resetting of a traditionally close relationship. The White House arranged the day with as many bells and whistles as could be managed virtually. After their private meeting, Biden and Trudeau appeared side by side on separate screens to make public statements. "Now that the United States is back in the Paris agreement, we intend to demonstrate our leadership in order to spur other countries to raise their own ambitions," Biden said. He made a point of condemning the detention in China of two Canadians caught up in a dispute over Canada's arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. "Human beings are not bartering chips," Biden said. Trudeau, who called Biden "Joe," added, "We're facing tough times, no doubt. But we're not facing them alone. Canada and the United States are each other's closest allies, most important trading partners and oldest friends." Still, Canada's relationship with the new administration got off to a bumpy start. On Biden's first day in office, he signed an executive order revoking the permit for Calgary-based TC Energy's Keystone XL pipeline expansion, which would carry Canadian crude oil from Alberta to Nebraska. The move was not a surprise, but Canadian officials had hoped for a chance to make their case. A senior U.S. official told reporters Monday that the United States considers the matter settled. "The decision will not be reconsidered. It has already been made," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the meeting. - - - Coletta reported from Toronto. The Washington Post's Cleve R. Wootson Jr. contributed to this report. It was volunteering on the Mabee Farm in Rotterdam that first gave Greg Hitchcock the idea for his documentary. He applied and soon won the Time for Reckoning Grant from the Center for Law and Justice and is now making a documentary on the Revolutionary War in the Mohawk Valley. I'm also trying to tie it into what we're doing to the Indigenous people now, because history resonates, he said. Even today, because of what happened back in the past, I do believe that it has an effect on our relations with minorities today. Hitchcock received the $1,000 grant on Feb. 10 and has begun putting together a production crew. So far, he has a director of photography, an editor, and a researcher. His researcher, David Cornelius, is a Native American with Algonquian, Mohican and Oneida ancestry and a degree in Colonial and Native American history. Darren Bonaparte, a Mohawk writer, artist, and cultural historian from the Akwesasne First Nations, feels that this story is one that needs to be told. To me, when people are taking a second look at the American Revolution, I try to get them to look with a little bit more detail, he said. Both the African American and the Native American people that were caught up in it. And it wasn't just, you know, a bunch of patriotic slave owners deciding they wanted their own country. People are being a little bit too quick to summarize a very complicated story. ... I get involved in a lot of these history projects. And I'm always trying to urge them to be a little bit more nuanced and I hope this current project is like that. The documentary is due in August, but despite the short timeframe, Hitchcocks biggest concern is the pandemic. He is doing his best to follow state and federal guidelines, but filming a documentary while social distancing isnt an easy task. Hopefully things will get better, he said. Because I would like to have a group of people to depict what life was like. And they cant do that wearing a mask. This project is different from Hitchcocks usual style of filmmaking. For one, he has a crew. There was one project that I did for the United Nations, he said, and it was about climate change in the Adirondacks. And I had to carry my camera up in the Adirondacks, interview people and get B-roll up there all by myself. But this is different, because it's opened up a lot of other talents that's really going to help me with my project because these people are professionals in their field. As he finalizes his script, Hitchcock is on the lookout for actors for re-enactments. He hopes to start shooting in the summer. The film will be about 30 minutes long, he expects. I believe it's gonna play a small role to help with the racism between Indigenous people and Caucasian people, Hitchcock said, and other people. And I can't change the whole system all at once with one documentary, but I'd like to play my part. And I believe that this could help. While researcher Cornelius is proud of his heritage and has made his career studying and researching it, he still has his doubts about the impact of what hes working on with Hitchcock. Check out the news you should not miss today: Politics -- The construction of the Vietnam Republic of Korea Friendship Village at a cost of VND1.3 billion (US$56,000), funded by the Korean Cultural Center, on Tuesday started in the south-central province of Ninh Thuan, the Vietnam News Agency reported the same day. Society -- Vietnam on Wednesday morning reported two new COVID-19 cases in the northern province of Hai Duong, increasing the countrys tally to 2,403, with 811 local transmissions since January 27, according to the Ministry of Health. -- As a sailor aboard an Indonesian cargo ship passing Vietnams waters died of an unknown reason, the Center for Disease Control in the southern province of Ba Ria Vung Tau took samples from 20 other crew members and found five positive for COVD-19 in the first test, the center said on Wednesday. -- A group of young people in Ho Chi Minh City had spent more than VND40 million (US$1,700) transporting agricultural products from the northern province of Hai Duong to the southern city before selling them at zero dong on Tuesday in the hope of easing the burden on farmers in the virus-hit locality. -- Ho Chi Minh City on Tuesday night removed a lockdown on Block F of the Carillon apartment building at 1 Tran Van Danh Street in Ward 13, Tan Binh District, the final location to be cleared after the city decided to isolate many venues in Thu Duc City and other districts between February 8 and 15 to prevent the spread of COVID-19. -- Saigon Railway Transport Joint Stock Company has recently canceled several of its trips as well as adjusting schedules on some routes between Ho Chi Minh City and Nha Trang and Da Nang due to a decrease in the number of passengers amid new COVID-19 outbreaks. Business -- The Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association has set an export target of $55 billion for the sector by 2025, the Vietnam News Agency reported on Wednesday. Lifestyle -- These days, local residents and visitors in Hanoi have been seen flocking to Bac Son and Hoang Dieu Streets in Ba Dinh District and Thanh Nien Street in Hoan Kiem District to contemplate white orchid tree blossoms in full bloom. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Just days after former state Rep. Michael Madigan handpicked his replacement to the Illinois House, state Rep. Edward Guerra Kodatt, D-Chicago, has stepped down and power broker Madigan has now backed Angelica Guerrero Cuellar. This morning, the House Clerk received Rep. Kodatts resignation, according to a statement from House Speaker Emanuel Chris Welchs office. In a joint statement with Chicago Alderman Marty Quinn late Tuesday from a Madigan spokesperson, Madigan suggested Kodatt resign after learning of alleged questionable conduct. After learning of alleged questionable conduct by Mr. Kodatt, it was suggested that he resign as state representative for the 22nd District, the statement said. We are committed to a zero tolerance policy in the workplace. Madigan did not elaborate on the nature of the conduct. Kodatt was selected Sunday, Feb. 21. Madigan has a weighted vote in the district that allowed him to select his replacement. The selection was not unanimous. There were two other candidates that were nominated Sunday by other Democratic party officials from the district. When a state Representative steps down before the end of their term, officials from the affiliated party in that jurisdiction select the successor. After a fair and robust process on Sunday, we are prepared to proceed with selecting a replacement for the 22nd District Illinois House seat from the pool of candidates who already presented to the selection committee, Madigan said in a statement as the ward committeeman. I believe the most equitable way to proceed is to nominate the candidate who received the second-highest vote count. It is my intention to nominate Angelica Guerrero Cuellar. Chicago Alderman Silvana Tabares nominated Cuellar on Sunday. Cuellar said shes a product of the community as the daughter of immigrants who moved to the southwest side of Chicago and works with a nonprofit company in West Lawn with a focus on contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ive seen the data, she said, noting the district is among the hardest hit by COVID-19. I understand my community. Cuellar said she supports the governors moves during the pandemic to order activity and businesses restrictions. It still needs to be necessary, she said. She also said shes applied to be a police officer with Chicago Police Department, but she would focus on the House role if asked to join CPD. My purpose is to do public service, and I think the 22nd District, this role is far greater in that, but will I continue having discussions and collaborations with CPD on maybe changes and how we work together, she said. The 22nd House District committee will meet at 10 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 25. Wealthy Los Angeles residents have been using special codes intended for black and Hispanic communities to book priority vaccine appointments even though they are not yet eligible for a shot, according to new reports. The codes were issued to organizations working with black and Hispanic communities which have been hardest hit by the pandemic in an effort to ensure equality in vaccine distribution, yet are now being misused by outsiders. Through messaging and social media, the codes have been widely distributed to people in richer and whiter communities who have since nabbed appointments, the Los Angeles Times reports. Some of those who scheduled appointments drove to Cal State Los Angeles and already received a shot, it added. It is not known how the codes were leaked out but several people who spoke to the Times claimed that they were sent to them by friends, with some receiving information about more than one code in the past week. Wealthy Los Angeles residents have been using special codes intended for black and Hispanic communities to book priority vaccine appointments at Cal State Los Angeles, pictured The new vaccine site, pictured, had used codes to set aside vaccines for seniors and for minority communities but the special codes were leaked to wealthy L.A. residents California has since been forced to cancel vaccine appointments made with some of the codes after being questioned by the Times about unfair use last week. Some people who spoke to the Times claimed that they believed the codes and related appointments were as part of a pilot program set up in new vaccine distribution centers. They claimed they did not realize they were doing anything wrong despite them not being eligible for the coronavirus vaccine under California state rules. 'Nobody thinks they're doing something wrong,' said one unidentified woman who claimed she had been sent a code by three different friends. 'They honestly have convinced themselves to believe that this is leftovers, that this is pilot testing, open to everyone.' The program had been established in California to allow those with the special access codes to schedule appointments on the My Turn vaccine website that had been reserved for black and Hispanic people. Every day a block of appointments was set aside for these communities at Cal State L.A. and the Oakland Coliseum, local organizations were told. Even with the codes which would also change depending on usage those intended to receive them were supposed to be eligible for a vaccine in order to be able to make an appointment. In California, it meant that even among communities of color, only healthcare workers and those older than 65 should have received the code. Cal OES spokesperson Brian Ferguson said that the code program initially appeared successful with over 2,000 community groups expressing interest to state officials. The program was established to allow those with the special codes to schedule appointments on the My Turn website that had been reserved for black and Hispanic people, pictured 'We have set aside a number of vaccines a day for local community organizations who can may serve non-English speakers, elderly people any number of people who may need a vaccine but may not be able to access it via an online system,' he said. 'Each group is allotted a group of appointments. Those individual community organizations may have 50 or 100 slots and there's an access code to access these appointments on the My Turn website. 'We have seen that some of these groups have forwarded those codes to their members and then those members are forwarding them to the wider public,' he admitted. 'When we identify that this is happening, we go ahead and cancel those appointments. That has happened in several cases.' The problems emerged last week when the Times highlighted how the codes were traveling far from their intended destination. One person who did not want to be identified had shared a code with the Times and said several friends had used it to receive a vaccine at the Cal State L.A. site. They described the friends as 'white' and 'in a bracket where they're very protected.' Another claimed that a doctor friend had shared the code with them. 'Apparently it's a new testing site that is "testing out their system" for a few days before they open up appointments for the elderly and sick, etc. Anyone can sign up if there are appointments available. Give it a try!' the sender wrote. The Times said that the code offered by the friend worked to schedule an appointment when it was tested on the MyTurn website. It said the purpose for the code and who it was intended for is not listed on the site. The problem emerged as identity is not verified at the site due to immigration status Severa of the wealthier Los Angeles County residents had driven to Cal State Los Angeles vaccination site, pictured las week, and already received a dose of the vaccine Another man told the San Francisco Gate that he was able to make an appointment at the Oakland Coliseum using a code sent in a text to several friends. The message had claimed there were extra vaccines in Oakland where appointments are opening up for anyone to receive these doses. He later canceled his appointment after the Times story broke and he learned that the claim about extra vaccines was bogus. The issue marks another blow for Governor Gavin Newsom and local public health officials who had been hailing the success of the program. Newsome has previously spoken about how the vaccine rollout in the state must be carried out 'through an equity lens'. Yet white and Asian communities in wealthier areas are still receiving a vaccine at faster rates, the Times reports. The issue marks another blow for Governor Gavin Newsom, pictured above In yet another vaccination site at a public housing facility in Boyle Heights that was intended for seniors only, more cases had emerged of people jumping the line this week. In Boyle Heights, nearly 20 percent of residents - or 17,062 people - have tested positive for the coronavirus, and 261 people have died making it one of the hardest hit areas in Los Angeles County. Yet, one of the people who had been able to make an appointment and travel to the center was from Beverly Hills. 'I can tell you I was very alarmed to hear that individuals had gained access from the code given hours before the pod was set up,' Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Hilda Solis told Los Angeles Daily News, but added that she was 'not surprised'. The same issue has been seen in the ability of large groups of predominantly white people to camp for hours outside of the south L.A. clinics in the hope of getting a standby vaccine at the end of the day. Ferguson claimed on Tuesday that the state had acted to stop the problem after it emerged that the codes were distributed to the more general public. 'In order to solve for that, we've taken steps to ensure we're auditing, monitoring how the codes are used very carefully,' he said, adding that as a new program, small issues needed to be worked out. He also claimed that some of the issues came as identities are not verified because of concerns over immigrant status. 'One of the reasons we're doing that is because the communities we're serving, we understand there may be folks who have different immigration statuses and we want to be cautious that we're not scaring or intimidating people,' said Ferguson. However, the issue has continued to anger some, including doctors working with black and Hispanic communities. Dr. Don Garcia, medical director at Clinica Romero, told the Times that it showed a direct link to the digital divide between the city's richer and poorer communities. 'People are getting greedy and butting in line, coming to be first in line and pushing out those who are dying and in most need,' he claimed. Chairwoman Solis agreed that the online appointment system was causing an unequal distribution that was mostly affecting communities of color. 'Here we are again in a situation where the lack of access to the internet is leaving people behind,' Solis said. 'And there are those who don't have the ability to sit at home and work on the internet because they have to go out and work to put food on the table. I am reminded that this is a society of inequitably and I hate to say it but discrimination.' According to figures released last week, black residents in Los Angeles County represent just 5.2 percent of all people who had received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine as of mid-February, while 33.5 percent were white, 23.1 percent Latino and 19.1 percent Asian. Only 24 percent of black residents age 65 and older have received at least one dose of the vaccine, compared to 42.8 percent of white residents 65 and up. So far, 25 percent or more of people in wealthier areas have received a dose, including Century City, Beverly Crest, Pacific Palisades, and La Canada Flintridge. While only about 9 percent of the residents in South L.A. and southeast Los Angeles County have gotten their first dose. Next week, California is set to expand its vaccine eligibility by 1.8million people to include teachers and other essential workers. Los Angeles County surpassed 20,000 coronavirus deaths Tuesday with 1.18million cases. Nationwide, cases have now reached 28.6million and 502,681 deaths. Vote Percentage of Parties in Puducherry2021: How did the parties fare Puducherry headed for Presidents rule after Congress loses power India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Feb 24: The Union Territory appears headed for President's rule as the Opposition parties are not keen on forming government in the Union Territoty. Opposition parties like BJP, AIADMK have are unwilling to form a government so close to the elections, and have decided to come to power through democratic manner. Reportedly, Puducherry Lieutenant Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan has recommended President's Rule. After staging a walkout from the Assembly before the motion seeking confidence vote was put up for voting in the House, Narayanasamy proceeded to the Raj Nivas and submitted his resignation to Lt Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan. Narayanasamy, accompanied by the remaining Ministers of his cabinet - R Kamalakannan, M O H F Shah Jahan and M Kandasamy - and legislators belonging to the Congress and DMK and the lone Independent member, had called on the Lieutenant Governor at Raj Nivas in the forenoon and handed over the letter. The lone member of Parliament (Lok Sabha) V Vaithilingam and PCC leader A V Subramanian too accompanied the Chief Minister. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 9:19 [IST] The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company 02/24/2021 Photo (c) fotograzia - Getty Images On Wednesday, Facebook announced that it plans to invest at least $1 billion on news content over the next three years. The announcement comes a week after Facebook blocked Australian users from viewing news on its platform in response to a debate with the Australian government over how much Facebook should pay news publishers for the right to surface links to their content. At the time, Facebook said the proposed law left it facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia. With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter, the company added. Less than a week later, Facebook ended up making a deal with the Australian government that will put news links back on Australian users feeds. Supporting news Facebook said it believes the debate was born from a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between Facebook and news publishers. If passed, the company said the Australian law would force Facebook to pay potentially unlimited amounts of money to multi-national media conglomerates under an arbitration system that deliberately misdescribes the relationship between publishers and Facebook. Its like forcing car makers to fund radio stations because people might listen to them in the car and letting the stations set the price, the company wrote. In order to support the news industry, Facebook has pledged to invest at least $1 billion in news over the next three years on top of the $600 million its already invested in the sector since 2018. Facebook is more than willing to partner with news publishers, Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs at Facebook, said in a blog post published on Wednesday. We absolutely recognize quality journalism is at the heart of how open societies function informing and empowering citizens and holding the powerful to account. Google, which has also expressed opposition to Australias proposed law, said it also plans to invest $1 billion in the news industry over the next few years. The business model for newspapers based on ads and subscription revenue has been evolving for more than a century as audiences have turned to other sources, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post. The internet has been the latest shift, and it certainly wont be the last ... We want to play our part by helping journalism in the 21st century. [February 24, 2021] Human Rights Council on the Right to Privacy Human Rights Council on the Right to Privacy OISTE.ORG to Address Virtually the 46th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council on the Right to Privacy March 3rd 2021 at 3 PM CET Privacy is as a basic, fundamental human right Geneva, February 24, 2021 The OISTE Foundation, a non-governmental organization, in special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC), will lead a virtual panel on the human right to privacy during the 46th Session of the Human Rights Council. Zoom Registration at: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_HXWDJD60SnWsYKdPaFHTJg Privacy is as a basic, fundamental human right. It is also an endangered right. New digital technologies track and scrutinize us all at this age of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2018). The digital economy considers every click, search or like as an asset to be monetized. Our lives, reflected in cyberspace, are plundered for behavioral data for the sake of a system that converts our freedom into profit. We are quietly being domesticated into accepting as normal that decision rights vanish before we even know that there is a decision to make. A new awareness infused by a human-rights based approach that consider each individual netizen as a dignified moral being, worth of respect, is required. Otherwise, our connectivity will continue to offer a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layerd with diminishment. Date & Time Mar 3rd 03:00 pm CET Title OISTE Foundation Webinar; The Human Right to Privacy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism Special Keynote by Pierre Maudet, Conseiller dEtat, State of Geneva, Moderated by: Carlos Creus Moreira, Secretary General of OISTE Speakers Navi Pillay, Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, OHCHR Hans-Christian Boos, CEO, Arago Sebastien Fanti, Swiss lawyer, Notary, and Data Protection Commissioner of the Swiss Canton of Valais Estelle Masse, Senior Policy Analyst and Global Data Protection Lead Access Now Alana Tart, Senior digital, technology and privacy lawyer PMI Steve Crown, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Human Rights Microsoft For these reasons, the Foundation OISTE, building upon the various resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Council touching on the protection and promotion of the right to privacy in the digital age has set up a panel to address, inter alia, the following issues: Identifying and clarifying principles, standards and best practices regarding the promotion and protection of the human right to privacy Reinforcing the principles of non-arbitrariness, lawfulness, legality, necessity and proportionality in communications surveillance by the State. Ensuring that profiling, automated decision-making and machine-learning technologies do proceed in accordance to agreed safeguards and do not affect the enjoyment of human rights Introducing a gender perspective and ensuring that there exists effective domestic oversight and remedies for the violation of the human right to privacy Addressing the issue of personal data management: often individuals do not provide their free, explicit and informed consent to the re-use, sale or multiple re-sales of their personal data Addressing the issue of human rights impacts of artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on examples of discrimination and bias The OISTE Foundation signed The International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance right after they were launched at the 24th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in 2013. OISTE invites other organizations to join: https://necessaryandproportionate.org/ About OISTE FOUNDATION Founded in Switzerland in 1998, OISTE was created with the objectives of promoting the use and adoption of international standards to secure electronic transactions, expand the use of digital certification and ensure the interoperability of certification authorities e-transaction systems. The OISTE Foundation is a not for profit organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, regulated by article 80 et seq. of the Swiss Civil Code. OISTE is an organization in special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC) and belongs to the Not-for-Profit constituency (NPOC) of the ICANN. Contact OISTE FOUNDATION Nicolas Ducor nducor@oiste.org [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. [February 24, 2021] Americans Trust Facebook More Than Other Popular Social Media Channels, Says 'Social Media Trust Survey' As social media companies continue to grapple with how to deal with misinformation about the election and pandemic, more Americans trust Facebook when compared with other popular platforms, including YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, according to the "Social Media Trust Survey" conducted in February 2021 by Engine Insights on behalf of Triunfo Partners. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005304/en/ Social Media Trust Survey finds that 25 percent of Americans say they trust Facebook the most, versus YouTube ( News Alert ) (15 percent), Instagram (9 percent), LinkedIn (7 percent), and Twitter (5 percent). At the same time, more than 30 percent of Americans say they don't trust any of the "Big Five" social media platforms. (Graphic: Business Wire) The survey finds that 25 percent of Americans say they trust Facebook the most, versus YouTube (15 percent), Instagram (9 percent), LinkedIn (News - Alert) (7 percent), and Twitter (5 percent). At the same time, more than 30 percent of Americans say they don't trust any of the "Big Five" social media platforms. With more than 2,000 respondents across the country and a margin of error of 2.19 percent, the Social Media Trust Survey validates the pervasive wave of distrust many people feel toward these platforms. "People have been serving up content to these channels for years without considering its effect, strengthening the breadth and reach of social media outlets that have become breeding grounds for misinformation and fake news," says Evan Pondel, founder and CEO of Triunfo Partners, a Los Angeles-based strategic communications firm, which does not represent any social media companies. "Historically, the gatekeepers and distributors of credible information were professional news outlets that employ reporters and editors to uphold the integrity of information. Today, social media companies are the primary gatekeepers, and the general public is publishing millions of pieces of content on a daily basis without proper checks and balances. "That means the onus is on consumers, executives, companies, politicians, organizations, academics, and anyone else with a reputation at stake, to monitor these channels for misleading and false information," Pondel says. In Social Media We Distrust Among the more nefarious activities playing out on social media are so called "First Amendment Auditors," some of whom operate under the guise of upholding First Amendment rights, but in reality, confront unsuspecting subjects in "gotcha videos" that are then posted online to extort money. "We are privileged to live in a country where freedom of speech is a fundamental right. The problem is, people are abusing this right on social media channels, harassing the innocent and disrupting businesses," Pondel says. "It is incumbent on management teams to have a communications plan in place to ensure social media channels serve as a resource to communicate with key audiences. "It is also important that business owners and employees know their rights with respect to social media and what is appropriate when it comes to posting about a company," Pondel says. News in Disguise While trust in certain social media channels will wax and wane, the fact that people utilize these channels to consume and broadcast information is unlikely to change. About half of U.S. adults (53%) say they get news from social media "often" or "sometimes," according to a Pew (News - Alert) Research Center survey conducted Aug. 31 - Sept. 7, 2020. Pondel says the convenience afforded by social media channels makes thumbing through an Instagram feed to read New York Times' headlines a lot easier than toggling between two different applications. "This convenience comes at a price. Illegitimate news on social media platforms is often camouflaged by legitimate posts from trusted news sources," Pondel says. "Reddit and Medium are perfect examples of the confluence of credible and uncredible information running on the same platform. A Wall Street Journal reporter may post an article adjacent to an article posted by a stock promoter. "For companies and executives, dedicating someone to monitor these channels is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity," Pondel says. Social Media Trust Survey Methodology The Social Media Trust Survey was conducted by Engine Insights among a sample of 2,006 adults 18 and older. The online omnibus study is conducted three times a week among a demographically representative U.S. sample. This survey was live Feb. 5 - Feb. 7, 2021. To view the full survey results, please email info@triunfopartners.com. About Triunfo Partners Triunfo Partners is a strategic communications, investor relations, and digital branding firm that advises senior management teams, boards of directors, governments, organizations and high-profile individuals. The firm specializes in programs that engage key stakeholders during critical moments, including product launches, management changes, crises, M&A transactions, initial public offerings, quarterly earnings cycles, shareholder activism, bankruptcy, political campaigns and philanthropic events. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005304/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Too early to speculate on whether President Xi would attend BRICS summit in India India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Feb 24: Reports had indicated that China's President Xi Jinping may visit India in the later half of the year to take part in the BRICS summit, which is being hosted by New Delhi. Reports of the visit by President Xi were triggered by the positive comments made by the Chinese spokesperson about relations with India. The spokesperson also expressed Beijing's support to host this year's summit. However there was no response to a direct question on President Xi's visit to Delhi. However officials OneIndia spoke with said that there is no decision as yet in this regard. it is speculation and nothing has been finalised as yet. The dates of the summit are set to be decided. Further no call has been taken as yet on whether the summit would be in the virtual or physical format. China backs BRICS meet in India All this would be decided only after consultations with Russia, China, South Africa and. Brazil, the official cited above said. Both President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping are not travelling outside their countries. China on Monday backed the BRICS summit to be hosted by India this year. Beijing added that it is willing to work with India and other member states to strengthen cooperation in various fields. The Chinese foreign ministry said that Beijing attaches great importance to the Brics cooperation mechanism and has always been committed to deepening the Brics strategic partnership and consolidating the positive momentum of Brics solidarity and cooperation. The foreign ministry also said that China supports India's hosting of this year's Brics conference, and is willing to work with India and other Brics countries to continue to strengthen communication and cooperation in various fields, consolidate the "three-wheel drive" cooperation framework of economics, politics, and humanities. The comments were made by foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin to a question whether the border standoff would affect the BRICS summit. In 2021, India had assumed chairmanship of the BRICS. On February 21, External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar launched the BRICS 2021 website. The backing of summit by China comes in the backdrop of the troop disengagement in the Pangong area following multiple rounds of talks by the military commanders of both sides. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 11:26 [IST] WiseTech Global: 1H21 revenue up 16%, EBITDA up 43% Underlying NPAT up 61%. 1H21 Revenue up 16%, EBITDA up 43% Sydney, Feb 24, 2021 AEST (ABN Newswire) - WiseTech Global Limited ( ASX:WTC ) ( FRA:17W ) ( OTCMKTS:WTCHF ) today announced its financial results for the first six months of the 2021 financial year ended 31 December 2020 (1H21). The Company reported Total Revenue of $238.7 million up 16% on the first half of the 2020 financial year (1H20). 1H21 Statutory Net Profit after Tax (NPAT) of $44.4 million was down 26% on 1H20 (1H20: $59.9 million) reflecting fair value adjustments from changes to acquisition contingent consideration. 1H21 Underlying NPAT of $43.6 million was up 61% on the prior corresponding period (pcp) (1H20: $27.1 million).Efficiency initiatives on track to deliver $10 million of cost reductions in FY21First half 2021 (1H21) overview- Total Revenue of $238.7 million, up 16% on 1H20- CargoWise revenue up 19% (1H21: $150.0 million; 1H20: $126.5 million), a testament to increasing customer usage of the CargoWise platform- Acquisition revenue1 of $88.7 million, up 12% on 1H202- Strategic investment (via in-house R&D and acquisitions) is driving CargoWise's revenue growth and market penetration delivering:o geographic expansion;o the addition of new functionalities and products; ando increasing momentum in the number of global customer roll-outs of CargoWise (eight new sign-ups since 1 January 20203: Aramex, Hellmann, deugro, CEVA Logistics, a. hartrodt, cargo-partner, Seafrigo Group and Hankyu Hanshin Express)- Organisation-wide efficiency initiatives including synergies from acquisitions delivered $6.1 million in cost reductions in 1H21 (net benefit $1.0 million post $5.1 million restructuring costs)- EBITDA of $89.2 million up 43% and EBITDA Margin up 7pp - reflecting continued revenue growth and cost reduction initiatives- Underlying NPAT4 of $43.6 million up 61%- Cash at 31 December 2020 of $251.4 million - 1H21 free cash flow of $48.7 million up 74% on 1H20- Fully franked interim dividend of 2.70 cents per share declared, payable on 9 April 2021WiseTech Founder and CEO, Richard White said, "Notwithstanding the subsequent waves of COVID-19 in major markets, our business has continued to deliver solid revenue and EBITDA growth in 1H21."Our strategic focus on 'Product, Penetration and Profitability' has enabled us to continue to expand the CargoWise ecosystem, increase our market penetration, with eight new global customer roll-outs signed since 1 January 2020 and deliver 61% growth in Underlying NPAT, demonstrating the step change in operating leverage that we are achieving by extracting acquisition synergies and implementing organisation-wide efficiencies."COVID-19 impact in 1H21As noted at the time of the Company's 2020 full year results (FY20), WiseTech saw volatility in global logistics markets during the early stages of the pandemic, with a marked slowdown in the movement of goods across all modes of transport. By mid-2020 however, the Company started to see a recovery, with momentum improving and resulting in 1H21 CargoWise shipment transaction numbers up 19% on 1H20. Mr White said, "We are continuing to see evidence of a 'goods-led' recovery in global trade, with consumer spending switching from services to physical goods, in response to COVID-19 mobility restrictions. This has had the effect of boosting demand for manufactured goods and global trade, driving an acceleration in logistics providers looking to replace legacy systems with integrated global technology such as CargoWise. This enables them to better plan, visualise and control their global operations, mitigate risk and more efficiently manage cross-border regulatory compliance." Throughout 1H21, and consistent with FY20, the Company did not receive any material benefit from any COVID-19 government support programs globally.Strong financial and operational performanceThe Company reported Total Revenue growth of 16% in 1H21 (1H21: $238.7 million; 1H20: $205.9 million) reflecting both growth from its CargoWise platform and acquisitions. Total Revenue in 1H21 was impacted by a $3.6 million unfavourable foreign exchange (FX) movement compared to a $4.6 million favourable FX benefit in 1H20. Excluding the FX impact, Total Revenue grew by 18% in 1H21 on the pcp.Revenue from the CargoWise platform grew 19% in 1H21 and was comprised of:o existing customer growth of $17.5 million (1H20: $17.0 million); ando new customer growth of $6.0 million (1H20: $7.3 million).Existing and new customer revenue growth in the half reflects:o increased usage through the addition of transactions, seats and new sites, the utilisation of additional products and modules and growth from industry consolidation; ando a price increase ($5.7 million in 1H21) to offset increased product investment in research and development (R&D), data centre hardware and cyber security.Excluding FX headwind of $1.4 million CargoWise revenue grew 20% in 1H21.Acquisition revenue9 grew 12% on the pcp, driven predominantly by the full-year impact of the five acquisitions completed in FY20. This growth was partially offset by a small delay in non-recurring services revenue due to COVID-19. It is noted that acquired businesses typically have higher levels of one-time licence (OTL) and/or support services revenue, as a result their revenues may be flat or reduce as they transition to the WiseTech commercial model. Excluding FX headwind of $2.3 million acquisition revenue grew 15% in 1H21.Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) grew 43% on the pcp to $89.2 million reflecting continued revenue growth and the benefit from cost reduction initiatives.WiseTech's investment in R&D increased 13% from $73.3 million in 1H20 to $83.0 million in 1H21.The Company achieved an EBITDA Margin of 37% for the half year, up seven percentage points (pp) on 1H20. This improvement reflected:o the impact of WiseTech's revenue growth; ando the benefits of cost reductions (partially off-set by restructuring costs).CargoWise's 1H21 EBITDA margin of 54% represents an increase of 5pp on 1H20. This improvement was driven by revenue growth from existing customers and the impact of reduced sales and marketing expenditure. In terms of the acquired businesses, significant progress has been made in implementing cost reduction initiatives to extract acquisition synergies and remove duplication.Due to significant fair value adjustments made to earn-out contingent consideration in 1H20, Statutory Net Profit after Tax (NPAT) decreased to $44.4 million in 1H21, down 26% on pcp. Underlying NPAT increased by 61% to $43.6 million in 1H21 and Underlying EPS of 13.4 cents per share was up 58% on 1H20.Strong balance sheet, cash flow generation and liquidityWiseTech's financial position is robust. Cash as at 31 December 2020 was $251.4 million (with no outstanding debt excluding lease liabilities). Coupled with an undrawn debt facility of $190.0 million and a further $200.0 million accordion facility, the Company has significant financial headroom.1H21 operating cash flows of $92.1 million were up 32% on 1H20 and the operating cash flow conversion rate was 103%. 1H21 free cash flow of $48.7 million was up 74% on 1H20, demonstrating the strength of the Company's highly cash generative operating model.Strategic update WiseTech's vision is to create the operating system for global logistics to drive efficiency and digital transformation. To achieve this, the Company's strategy is centred around Product, Penetration and Profitability (the 3Ps) with investment focused on:o in-house R&D and Product Development;o building in-house expertise through recruitment of technology and industry experts; ando strategic (foothold and adjacency) acquisitions delivering technology, geographic reach and skill sets to expand the CargoWise platform.Mr White said, "Our strategic investments are designed to build in-house capabilities and where appropriate to fast track the development of technology and know-how through acquisitions. These investments are inter-related and complementary and as such should be looked at holistically rather than on a piecemeal basis."Having completed 39 acquisitions since IPO in 2016, we have now assembled significant resources and development capability to fuel our CargoWise technology pipeline and therefore intend to slow our acquisition activity in the near term. Our focus going forward is on expanding the CargoWise ecosystem and extracting efficiencies across our business to maximise our operational leverage."Since listing on the ASX in 2016, WiseTech's strategic investments have delivered10o over 4,000 CargoWise product enhancements since FY16;o 207% growth in CargoWise revenue (FY16: $85.8 million; FY20: $263.0 million);o expansion of CargoWise EBITDA margins from 30% in FY16 to 54% in 1H21;o 54% growth in CargoWise Registered Users from 1H17 to 1H21;o growth in large global freight forwarders11 (20 at FY16 growing to 34 at February 2021);o a strong team of technology and industry experts (1,024 people at 1H21 up from 225 people at FY16); ando expansion of CargoWise's geographic footprint (from 136 countries at FY16 to 167 countries at 1H21).To read the complete release, including tables and figures, please visit:Investor PresentationPlease refer to the WiseTech Global 1H21 Results Investor briefing materials released today for detailed financial data and analysis.To view the investor presentation, please visit:Analyst Briefing The results presentation webcast to discuss WiseTech Global's 1H21 financial results will be held at 10.30am (Sydney time) today. The webcast and briefing audio will be available at:About WiseTech Global Ltd WiseTech Global Ltd (ASX:WTC) is a leading developer and provider of software solutions to the logistics execution industry globally. Our customers include over 17,000 of the world's logistics companies across 160 countries, including 41 of the top 50 global thirdparty logistics providers and all of the 25 largest global freight forwarders worldwide2. Our flagship platform, CargoWise, forms an integral link in the global supply chain and executes over 50 billion data transactions annually. At WiseTech, we are relentless about innovation, adding over 4,000 product enhancements to our global platform in the past five years while bringing meaningful continual improvement to the world's supply chains. Our breakthrough software solutions are renowned for their powerful productivity, extensive functionality, comprehensive integration, deep compliance capabilities, and truly global reach. For more information about WiseTech Global or CargoWise, please visit wisetechglobal.com and cargowise.com Andrew Harnik/Getty Nearly seven weeks after the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the people tasked with protecting the building on Jan. 6 testified for the first time about the failures that allowed a pro-Trump mob to overrun the seat of American government in an unprecedented disruption of democracy. But nearly every answer they gave about what happened that day just raised more questions. Over the course of four hours, the former chief of the U.S. Capitol Police, and the former security heads of the House and Senate, largely pointed the finger at each otheror blamed others not present at the hearingand, above all, minimized their own failures. Senators, meanwhile, struggled to make use of a golden opportunity for fact-finding, arriving at key questions late and leaving others untouched, while severalincluding those who amplified the election fraud claims that brought rioters to the Capitol to begin withpartook in the time-honored tradition of committee-room grandstanding. One, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), used the bulk of his time to read an account of Jan. 6 from a right-wing conspiracist that raised the discredited theory that Trump supporters were not responsible for the violence. By the end of the hearing, the Democrats running the show proclaimed it had been a constructive exercise that shed new light on what happened on Jan. 6. Some genuinely new information did surface: For example, Steven Sund, the former Capitol Police chief, said he had just learned that on Jan. 5, the force was sent an FBI report warning of violence around Trumps rallybut that the report didnt make it to his desk. Asked how authorities missed the other signs of brewing violence, authorities simply testified that the intelligence community hadnt sufficiently warned them about it. If nothing else, the first marquee hearing probing the Capitol attack made clear that obtaining the full picture of how and why Jan. 6 happened the way it did will be a difficult task. But the futility of questioning this particular set of witnessesall seeking to protect their reputations and deflect blamebecame clear early in Tuesdays hearing, as senators sought to establish a timeline for who requested help and when on Jan. 6. Story continues As the mob began breaching the Capitol perimeter, Sund said that he called Paul Irving, then the House sergeant-at-arms, at 1:09 p.m. to request they call in the National Guard. He alleged Irving told him that he was concerned about the optics of having Guard troops present and rebuffed him. Irving countered by saying he had no recollection of Sund calling him at that time, saying he was on the House floor overseeing the Electoral College certification process. He added it was categorically false that he would mention optics concerns in determining safety protocol at the Capitol. Under oath, both men stuck to their stories. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) attempted to sort it out but concluded, Whatever happened here doesn't seem to me to be in agreement with various timeframes. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) then asked that they both turn over their call records for investigation. Johnson Pushes Deranged Fake Trump Supporters Theory During Capitol Riot Hearing The witnesses could agree, however, that they all were not put in a position to succeed on Jan. 6 by intelligence agencieswho they alleged underestimated the threat, despite the open-source evidence and news reporting that strongly indicated that right-wing extremists were planning ambitious and violent acts in Washington on Jan. 6. Although it appears that there were numerous participants from multiple states planning this attack, the entire intelligence community seems to have missed it, claimed Sund. Without the intelligence to properly prepare, the USCP was significantly outnumbered and left to defend the Capitol against an extremely violent mob. Robert Contee, the acting chief of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and the fourth witness, also said that the FBI memo was sent out on Jan. 5 in the form of an email. The witnesses also expressed frustration that the National Guard was so slow to mobilize. Contee, whose officers arrived at an overrun Capitol to support the separate Capitol Police force, repeatedly said he was shocked at the Pentagons reluctance to mobilize the National Guard. When he asked, recalled Contee, in response there was not an immediate yes, and said Army officials countered by asking him about the optics of the situation. I was able to quickly deploy MPD and issue directives to them while they were in the field, and I was honestly shocked that the National Guard could notor would notdo the same, Contee added. The back-and-forth between Sund and Irving revealed, at the very least, the complicated process in place for requesting military assistance at the Capitol. No one person is responsible for security at the complex; instead, a secretive four-person board is, and its very existence slowed down the response on Jan. 6. Blunt called the structure totally unworkable for crises like the Capitol insurrection. The agencies blamed by the witnesses will get a chance to offer their version of events next week, when the FBI and the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security have been invited to testify in front of the same joint panel of the Senate Rules and Homeland Security Committees. But on Tuesday, senators largely shied from questions that the then-chiefs of the Capitol Police and D.C. Police would have been well-positioned to answer. Only Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) noted, late in the proceeding, that only 52 rioters were immediately arrested out of the hundreds who breached the Capitol, attacked police officers and media, and vandalized the complex. He drew a comparison to the militarized posture of the complex during the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020. Can you tell us how the Capitol preparations on January 6 differ from the protests over the summer? Padilla asked Sund. It doesn't matter the message of the person, responded Sund. We develop our information, we develop our intel and we base a response plan on that. He added that USCP officers only arrested six Black Lives Matter protesters, but many more were arrested around the city. Top Capitol Riot Police Throw Each Other Under the Bus Over Botched Jan. 6 Response No senator asked witnesses about another critical matter: the extent to which law enforcement, if at all, aided any of the insurrectionists. A USCP spokesperson said last week that six officers on the force have been suspended with pay due to their actions on Jan. 6, and another 29 are under investigation. Lawmakers, such as Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), have said they witnessed police officers taking selfies with rioters and giving them directions. Those questions are likely to become fodder for an investigative body sketched out by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), modeled after the 9/11 Commission, to investigate the insurrection. That effort might also be best-suited to ultimately confirm the disputed timeline of Jan. 6 and fully reveal the failures. For the time being, however, the three Capitol Hill authoritiesall of whom resigned after Jan. 6 seemed to caution lawmakers not to overreact too much by proposing reforms to the Capitols security protocol following the deadly riot. The very brief opening statement from Michael Stenger, the former Senate sergeant-at-arms, said we have to be careful of returning to a time when possibility rather than probability drives security planning." In his written opening statement, Sund said the USCP did not fail and that the force accomplished its mission on Jan. 6, placing the responsibility for the carnage on the alleged intelligence failures. Under questioning from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Sunds defiance wilted somewhat. Klobuchar noted that the authorities had enough intelligence to know they had to make additional preparations for Jan. 6. If the information was enough to get you to do that, why didn't we take some additional steps? she asked. Why didn't you and others involved be better prepared to confront the violence? Sund responded with the repeated declaration that they expanded the perimeter of the buildingthe one that was quickly breached by the mob. When Klobuchar pointed out that clearly was not enough, Sund said, that is now hindsight being what it is. Read more at The Daily Beast. Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now! Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more. A fraudster who has conned women out of 'tens of thousands of pounds' using online dating sites has revealed the key profile features he looks for when scoping out potential targets. The ex-prisoner, identified only as Jamie, spoke to BBC's File On 4 about how he convinced women to transfer him thousands of pounds while he was behind bars by pretending to be interested in them romantically. The 20-something, who operated using an illegal mobile phone in his cell, explained he seeks out 'older' and 'less attractive' women because they seemed more 'desperate'. He added phrases that indicate a woman wants to settle down - such as "looking for a relationship" or "I just want happiness" - makes them more likely to be targeted because they'll be less suspicious of attention. The ex-prisoner, identified only as Jamie, spoke to BBC 's File On 4 about how he convinced women to transfer him thousands of pounds while he was behind bars by pretending to be interested in them romantically. Stock image There has been an increase in the number of cases of so-called romance fraud - when a potential love interest cons you out of money - over the last year as lockdown has created the 'perfect landscape' for scammers, with people feeling lonelier and more isolated. Explaining how he chooses which women to target, Jamie said: 'If I was to go for an Instagram model, she's not going to give me any attention knowing I'm in jail. If I tell her to send money, she's not going to listen to me. 'It sounds bad but I'll look for a girl that looks like she's lonely and doesn't have attention. And if a good looking man pops up out of the blue and gives her attention, she'll do anything to keep that attention. He continued: 'I would go for older women. For them to be on a dating app means they are a bit desperate. I would look at their bio and the key words to me would be "looking for a relationship", "I just want happiness", something like that. 'Those kind of things. You can tell after a while, trial and error, you become an expert in it, to be honest [in] looking for the desperation.' Dating app signals that attract con artists Jamie said he was drawn to women who were 'older' and 'less attractive' who seemed like they 'didn't get much attention' from men because they would be more receptive to his advances. He added he has become an 'expert' in sniffing out desperation and is drawn to key phrases like: I am looking for a relationship All I want is happiness Advertisement Jamie explained how one woman transferred him 10,000 while he was in prison. 'With that specific girl (10,000), my mate put me onto her,' he explained. 'He said "there's this girl that's rich but she's not that nice looking"... So I said give me her number. At that time I had a phone in jail. 'At first I didn't tell her I was in jail because I didn't know how she would react. Then slowly, slowly, once I realised I'd got her, she likes me, I think the best thing to do is to tell her I'm in jail. 'She said "it's all good, I don't care, do you need money?" And I thought "alright, cool". From then I was getting 100 to 200... I don't chat to her anymore because she realised I was only in it for the money.' Jamie said he doesn't feel bad about what he does because he simply 'doesn't think' about the women involved. 'It's something that I used to do a lot because it's one of the easiest ways to get money,' he said, explaining why he targets women online. 'If you've got a girl there and she works and she's into you, why not ask her to send money over?' In 2020 there were nearly 7,000 reports of so-called romance fraud, costing the victims almost 70million. UK Finance says there was a 20 per cent rise in bank transfers relating to romance fraud during the pandemic. PC Bernadette Lawrie, Financial Abuse Safeguarding Officer for Surrey and Sussex Police, explained that while some types of crime have been impacted by lockdown restrictions, online crimes like romance fraud have been able to continue. She said: 'Lockdown has created the perfect landscape for fraudsters. It's a crime type that's enabled by the internet and therefore has been able to carry on despite the lockdown. 'Loneliness, isolation, removal of that physical interaction and social interaction for people has been so unprecedented. And obviously people have seen changes in their own personal relationships. So they've been resorting to online contact, online relationships, on a scale that we haven't seen before. 'So sadly coming hand in hand with a rise in online dating, you're going to have an increase in online dating fraud.' The Bollywood industry lost one of its finest gems, Sridevi on this day, three years ago. Her unfortunate demise on February 24, 2018, was not only left a deep void for Indian cinema but had also plunged her fans and all the members of the film fraternity into a state of gloom and shock. Today, while many of the late actor's fans are remembering her, Sridevi's daughter and actor Janhvi Kapoor has also shared a heartfelt message from her late mother on her social media. Talking about the post, Janhvi Kapoor took to her social media handle to share a note which was written by Sridevi presumably for a younger Janhvi. The note has the words, "I Love You My Labbu, You Are The Best Baby In The World." The Roohi actor captioned the post stating, "Miss You." One can also make out that the actor was called 'Labbu' lovingly by her late mother. Directors Karan Johar and Sashank Khaitan along with actor and Janhvi's uncle, Sanjay Kapoor reacted to the post by dropping several red heart emojis. The post will inevitably leave one teary-eyed. Take a look at the note shared by Janhvi from her mother. Not only this, filmmaker Gauri Shinde who had directed the Sridevi starrer English Vinglish had also reminisced about her first meeting with the legendary actor in her recent interaction with a daily. The filmmaker had also revealed how Sridevi's simplicity won her heart. Talking to The Times Of India about the same, the director said that she will never forget her first meeting with the Mr India actor, because it was more like a blind date for both of them, as they were meeting each other for the first time. Also Read: On Sridevi's 3rd Death Anniversary, Gauri Shinde Recalls Falling In Love With Her In The First Meeting Itself! Gauri Shinde further revealed how their first meeting felt like their souls were meant to meet. The filmmaker further heaped praises on the late actor remembering their first meeting. The director said, "She didn't know much about me, other than that I was Balki's wife. I call it a blind date because we really fell in love with each other. Sometimes you meet certain people, and you feel an instant click. It was that. As if our souls were just meant to meet, and to do something together, however dramatic it may sound. I absolutely love her; I don't say this because she is a star and I am in awe, but because I really liked her soul." Talking about Sridevi, the late actor was last seen in a cameo appearance in the Shah Rukh Khan starrer Zero. Her legacy is now being carried forward by her daughter Janhvi Kapoor's successful stint in the industry. Also Read: Sridevi's Death Anniversary: A Superstar On The Big Screen; A Super Mom In Real Life! The United States last year signed an agreement with the Taliban that contemplated the withdrawal of all U.S. and allied forces from Afghanistan by May of this year. At long last, it seemed that America's longest war, which began with the October 2001 invasion, might be coming to an end. But now President Joe Biden and America's NATO allies are pondering whether they might have to extend that deadline in light of the Taliban's undermining of the agreement and in hopes of pressuring it to engage in good-faith negotiations with the Afghan government. NATO countries have about 10,000 troops in Afghanistan, including 2,500 U.S. trainers, advisers and counterterrorism forces, a small fraction of the 100,000 Americans deployed at the height of the Obama administration's Afghan "surge" in 2010. The issue was discussed at last week's meeting of NATO defense ministers, though they made no decision about whether to seek to postpone the deadline. Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday that "there is still time to reach a political agreement to see progress before the deadline" of May 1. That, of course, would be ideal. But the United States and its allies should make it clear that they aren't bound by the May deadline if the Taliban doesn't abide by its obligations under the agreement. The case for a delay was made earlier this month in a report by the Afghanistan Study Group, a bipartisan panel commissioned by Congress to examine the Afghan peace agreement. The group cited the Taliban's failure so far to adequately distance itself from "groups or individuals threatening the security of the United States and its allies." Moreover, although the Taliban has refrained from launching attacks on U.S. forces since the agreement, it has continued military operations against Afghan security forces. Not surprisingly, negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government, which were supposed to follow the U.S.-Taliban agreement, have stalled. The study group acknowledged that "Americans generally agree that it is time to end this war" and it said that "a real opportunity to reach a peaceful resolution exists." But it warned that "withdrawing U.S. troops irresponsibly would likely lead to a new civil war in Afghanistan, inviting the reconstitution of anti-U.S. terrorist groups that could threaten our homeland and providing them with a narrative of victory against the world's most powerful country." Some of the study group's conclusions are debatable. For example, we question whether preventing the Taliban from capitalizing on a "narrative of victory" against the U.S. is sufficient reason to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The panel was more persuasive in arguing that a "rash and rushed approach could increase the chances of a breakdown of order in Afghanistan." But the argument that may appeal most to Biden is the panel's insistence that America's future in Afghanistan must be decided in collaboration with NATO allies that have also have been involved in that country. Biden has emphasized the importance of consulting with U.S. allies. We understand that to many Americans the study group's recommendations will sound like another appeal by the foreign policy establishment to prolong a military presence that has stretched on for decades without either a military victory or the transformation in Afghan society that some naively thought the U.S. could accomplish. We also recognize that postponing the withdrawal of U.S. forces isn't guaranteed to revive the peace process and that the Taliban might choose to fight on, assuming that the U.S. will leave eventually in any case. That's a real possibility, but for now the U.S. and its allies need to preserve the option of delaying withdrawal as a way to bring the Taliban to the table. Biden, a skeptic about U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan when he was vice president, said during last year's campaign that it was past time to end "forever wars." His administration retained former Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as President Donald Trump's representative in talks with the Taliban. Biden can make it clear that he still supports a negotiated settlement while also making it clear that the Taliban must negotiate in good faith. This editorial appeared at the Los Angeles Times and was distributed by Tribune Content Agency. Here's what you need to know: Wednesday, Feb. 24 The US is posed to pass an act incentivizing informants to share information regarding evasion of US or UN sanctions, writes The Syrian Observer. Two members of the US House of Representatives submitted a bill that, if passed, would help prosecute human rights violators and businesspeople in dictatorial countries who help them to evade US and international sanctions. Representative Joe Wilson, a Republican, and Representative Ted Deutsch, a Democrat, introduced a bill called the Bassam Barabandi Rewards for Justice Act. Barabandi is a dissident Syrian diplomat based in Washington, who, until 2013, served as consul and first secretary at the Syrian Embassy to Washington. The two representatives said in a joint statement, Congressman, Joe Wilson, and Congressman, Ted Deutch, reintroduced the Bassam Barabandi Rewards for Justice Act. This bill will incentivize informants to come forward with actionable information regarding evasion of US or UN sanctions by expanding the rewards for justice program at the State Department. In an exclusive interview with The Syrian Observer, Barbandi said that the bill, if approved, would be a way to make the sanctions more specific, targeting human rights violators and their supporters rather than targeting broad sectors of the population. Barabandi is a former Syrian diplomat who defected and worked to oppose the Assad regimes human rights abuses. In his time at the embassy, he provided information on regime activities and sanction evasion to Congress, US officials, and think tank scholars, said Congressman Wilson. I am grateful for Bassam, who inspired this bill, and has advocated expanding the US State Department Rewards for Justice program, incentivizing people around the world to provide information on sanctions violators to improve enforcement. The Syrian Observer asked Barbandi about the start of the project and its developments. He said that the idea started two years ago when he spoke with the Treasury Department about using the American law known as Rewards for Justice to make sure penalties affect violators and evaders and not the general Syrian public. However, Department of Treasury officials told Barabandi that they are an executive body and that the foundation work must be done at the legislative level. Barabandi added, we turned to the US Congress, and managed to convince two members, a Republican and a Democrat, to get broad support. Barabandi said that the bill was approved last year by the House of Representatives, but it was not taken to the Senate for approval due to the election season. Wilson and Deutsch reintroduced the bill, which they named after Barabandi, who was the inspiration for the project, in appreciation for his great efforts in protecting human rights. Barabandi told the Syrian Observer that the project was not specific to Syria, but rather an amendment to the Rewards for Justice Act that could be applied in more than one country around the world. He believes that the law could be applied in Russia, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and other places and, if passed, will be similar to the famous Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act. The US established the State Departments Rewards for Justice program in 1984. It is administered by the State Departments Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Under this program, the Secretary of State may authorize rewards for information that leads to the arrest or conviction of anyone planning, assisting, or attempting to carry out international terrorist acts against US citizens or property, in addition to information that prevents such acts from occurring in the first place and that leads to identifying or locating a major terrorist leader or disrupts terrorist financing. Since the launch of the program, the US has paid more than 150 million dollars in rewards to more than 100 people who provided information, sufficient to take legal action, that threw terrorists in prison or prevented acts of international terrorism around the world. In his interview with The Syrian Observer, Barabandi said that the team that worked on the project benefited from the precedent the US administration set in dealing with the North Korean government. In 1995, the US administration asked those with information about then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-ils evasion of US sanctions to share it with the US government. The administration was able to freeze a balance of 35 million dollars belonging to the late leader. Barbandi expects that the law will be voted on soon and then transferred to the Senate, where it will be shared with President Joe Biden to sign it. Barbandi believes that President Biden will sign the bill because it aligns with his political direction as well as that of his Vice President, Kamala Harris. SHREVEPORT, La. (AP) A former Louisiana community college comptroller has been sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty in what prosecutors say was years of fraud. Carol Bates also was ordered to repay nearly $287,000 to Bossier Parish Community College. She pleaded guilty in July to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. A news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Shreveport says Bates was sentenced Monday. Her sister, Audrey Williams, and two other women also have pleaded guilty. Prosecutors said the sisters recruited nine students and former students to get refunds to which they were not entitled, and got half and two-thirds of each payment. Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy-led Andhra Pradesh government on Tuesday sought an explanation from retired IAS officer of the state cadre Preeti Sudan on alleged misuse of her position during her tenure as Union secretary, Department of Health and Family Welfare, to derive personal gain. The order was issued by state Chief Secretary Aditya Nath Das and it asked the former Union Health Secretary to explain why disciplinary proceedings under relevant rules should not be initiated against her. Jagan Mohan Reddy govt issues order to retired IAS officer The Andhra Pradesh government has accused Preeti Sudan of violating the provisions of the All India Service (Conduct) Rules, 1968. It has also accused the recently retired bureaucrat of misusing her position "in order to derive personal gain, contrary to the rules, regulations and established practices." READ | Andhra CM Jagan Reddy Gifts Newly Built Antarvedi Chariot To Temple, Found Burnt In Sep The issue pertains to the conversion of extraordinary leave into earned leave/half-pay leave dating back to the years 2005 and 2006 as per IAS (Leave) Rules. Preeti Sudan, who was the then Managing Director of AP State Civil Supplies Corporation, had obtained a year-long extraordinary leave from March 1, 2005, to join her family in the United States. According to reports, she had subsequently applied for government permission to utilise her time in the USA to take up a study with the Development Research Unit of World Bank, where her husband Randeep Sudan, also of the IAS 1983 batch, was working on foreign assignments. However, her leave was further extended till May 31, 2006. READ | YSR Congress Leader Killed In Kakinada Preeti Sudan had retired from her service on July 21, 2020. The Under Secretary in the Union Department of Health and Family Welfare (vide an Office Memorandum No. A- 19011/1/2017-Estt.I, dated February 12, 2020) converted Preeti Sudan's extraordinary leave into earned leave/half-pay leave. Following that, ex-Union Health Secretary wrote a letter on February 25, 2020, stating there was no action due on the issues and "so the matter is closed at this end also." READ | Jagan Mohan Reddy Presented SKOCH Chief Minister Of The Year Award However, the AP government has now raised an objection saying the Under Secretary's office memorandum was "without competency under the influence of the Member of Service who was the Secretary to Government of India, Department of Health and Family Welfare at that time." Aditya Nath Das in his order to the retired IAS officer said that the state government, with the concurrence of the Government of India, Department of Personnel and Training, is the competent authority to convert the leave already sanctioned and the matter is under correspondence with them. He further said, "The Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India has no locus standi to take action." "She is, therefore, requested to submit her version within two weeks, as to why disciplinary proceedings under relevant rules should not be initiated. If no reply is received, it will be construed that she has no explanation to offer and further action will be taken based on the material available," the Chief Secretary added. READ | Andhra CM Jagan's Sister Sharmila Planning Telangana Political Entry; Meets YSR Loyalists System error error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. context: ... 21: 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: 28:
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He arrived in the seashore village near here and took off on the fishing boat. When he returned he said it has been on his bucket list for a long time to spend sometime with the fishers here. The Wayanad MP said he has been asking the leaders here to arrange for him to travel with the fisher folk. "Right from the time I hopped into the boat, the travel on the high sea till the time I got out -- it was all an experienced that taught me how difficult life is for a fisherman, who is engaged in a fight with the sea and finally the biggest profit is for someone else. "I saw for myself when the net was cast and later pulled out, there was just one squid -- I was expecting a net full of fish, but it was not to be," said Gandhi, as he engaged in a direct interaction with thousands of fishermen who had turned up on the seashore to hear him. "This one hour in the sea has made me respect you even more because your life is dangerous and risky and even though we all eat fish, not many think of the tough life that you have. Image Source: IANS News "First time I have realised the difficulties of yours to get the fish on others' plate," added Gandhi and asked the huge gathering of fisher folk to tell what they want. Replying to a question on what the former Congress President's plans were for the fisher folk, Gandhi said, "while the farmers have a dedicated ministry, the fishermen do not have". "I assure you that we will set up a dedicated ministry for looking after your needs. I will do my best to see how your life can be made easy. Image Source: IANS News "The Congress-led UDF here is now in the process of preparing a manifesto. I will ask the people engaged in preparing it to have a detailed conversation with you to know what you need and include it in the manifesto. Once included, I will assure you that it will be done," added Gandhi. To another question on the ill-effects of globalisation as a fisherman pointed out that it was during P.V.Narashima Rao's tenure when international trawlers first made appearance here, Gandhi said it's true that globalisation has ill-effects, but one should also look into the gains. The question came on the back of state party leader Ramesh Chennithala trolling the Pinarayi Vijayan government for an MOU with US firm EMCC. "While I was in the boat, I asked the fishermen, on how before the arrival of the fish finding device, they were fishing, they told me, it was difficult. I told them that with the arrival of the GPS, it has become easier to locate where they were in the sea. "What we should do is wherever globalisation helps us, rely on it and where it does not, don't use it," said Gandhi. He shared his conversation with one particular fisherman who was with him on the boat, who told him that he would not send his children to the seas, "as its risky business". "What our manifesto will do is to see that proper education facilities are provided to this community. We will also see what can be done to reduce the risk to the fishermen. "I assure you that when the UDF-led Congress returns to power, we will definitely do everything that can be done and there will be a separate page in the manifesto on what we will be doing for the fishermen and it will cover all that you have raised here and what I saw for myself," said Gandhi. Image Source: IANS News Gandhi who represents the Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency has been in the state since Sunday and has in a way launched the assembly election campaign, as the polls are likely to be held in April/May. He has covered several parts of the state and has promised to return to lead the campaign leading up to the state polls. -- Syndicated from IANS Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has joined the growing list of people who knew of an alleged rape in Parliament House before Scott Morrison. As Brittany Higgins reinstated her complaint to police over the 2019 incident, more details emerged about the knowledge of senior government ministers. Mr Dutton confirmed Australian Federal Police commissioner Reece Kershaw informed him about the alleged sexual assault on February 11, four days before the prime minister says he was told. Brittany Higgins (pictured) was allegedly raped in 2019 in Parliament House Minister Peter Dutton (pictured) said he knew about alleged assault before the PM did Mr Morrison said his office first knew of the allegation on February 12 but took almost three days to notify him. Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Philip Gaetjens, who is Mr Morrison's former chief of staff, is investigating if senior staff were aware earlier. Ms Higgins is adamant a key Morrison adviser 'checked in' with her via WhatsApp after Four Corners ran an expose on parliamentary culture in 2020. The man accused of the rape was sacked over a security breach for entering Parliament House on the night of the incident. At least two other staff now in the prime minister's office were involved in handling the security breach in 2019. Ms Higgins (pictured left) was a staffer for MP Michaelia Cash (pictured right) At the time of the assault Linda Reynolds (pictured) employed Higgins and the alleged rapist Employment Minister Michaelia Cash first spoke with Ms Higgins about the alleged rape on February 5 this year. Ms Higgins (pictured) made a formal complaint to police on Wednesday Defence Minister Linda Reynolds on Wednesday took medical leave after being under intense pressure over her handling of the complaint. Senator Reynolds, who was Ms Higgins' employer at the time of the incident, says she didn't tell the prime minister out of respect for her former staffer's privacy. The minister was due to face questions at the National Press Club but cancelled after being admitted to Canberra Hospital following advice from her cardiologist. She has been forced to correct the record as to how many times she met with police about the allegations in 2019. House of Representatives Speaker Tony Smith and Senate President Scott Ryan were told in 2019 about an incident at Parliament House. They were aware federal police may request CCTV footage concerning an alleged sexual assault but later learnt no complaint was being proceeded with and did not tell the prime minister. Prime Minister Scott Morrison (pictured) said he only knew about the assault on Feb 12, 2021 Mr Morrison has rejected suggestions there is a 'don't ask, don't tell' culture within the government. 'I have been open about what is a very sensitive matter, a truly very sensitive and serious matter,' he told parliament on Wednesday. He said a range of actions were being taken to address cultural issues in federal politics and ensuring staff had adequate support. Ms Higgins coming forward led to three other women saying they were also assaulted by the man. The former media adviser says she originally felt pressured not to pursue an investigation, fearing her job would be jeopardised. There are four inquiries stemming from the allegations, which have rocked federal parliament over the past 10 days. German health minister Jens Spahn is said to be 'fighting for his career' after overseeing a shambolic vaccine roll-out, clashing with Angela Merkel and failing to deliver on a promised rapid-testing scheme. Spahn, who only months ago was being feted by those marvelling at Germany's early success against the pandemic, has seen his approval rating slide five points in a month amid the vaccination chaos and a grinding two-month lockdown. Merkel's decision to postpone a major rapid testing roll-out which Spahn had promised to bring in on March 1 has prompted talk of 'revenge' in German media - after the chancellor accused him of trying to shift blame for the vaccine fiasco to Brussels. With Bild now describing Spahn as a 'ministerial flop', the 40-year-old - who was seen as an outside contender in the race to succeed Merkel as chancellor later this year - is said to be 'frustrated' and 'bewildered' by the setbacks to his career. Face to face: Angela Merkel, right, speaks to her under-fire health minister Jens Spahn on the benches of the Bundestag in Berlin This graph shows how the UK has outpaced the EU, including wealthy Germany, in administering the vaccines that will open the door out of lockdown Like the rest of the EU, Germany is lagging far behind the UK in its vaccine roll-out - with Merkel's government under fire for delegating the task to Brussels. While Britain has given out 27.0 doses per 100 people, Germany has managed only 6.2, only fractionally above the EU average. Spahn's promises of five million doses by the end of January and a jab for all care home residents by the middle of February were also not met. A leaked letter last month revealed how Spahn and some of his fellow health ministers had handed the vaccine task to the European Commission last June. But according to Bild, that led Merkel to suspect that Spahn had organised the leak in order to deflect blame for the slow progress being made in Germany. Merkel is since thought to have brought responsibility for the vaccine programme into the chancellor's office, limiting Spahn's authority. Spahn has also come under fire from rival parties including Merkel's Social Democrat coalition partners and the opposition Greens. And he suffered further humiliation this week when his plan to roll out rapid testing from March 1 was torpedoed by Merkel's office. The rapid-testing plan will now merely be discussed at talks between Merkel and state premiers on March 3, the chancellor's spokesman said. As recently as last week, Spahn had promised that the publicly-funded tests would be available from March 1 in pharmacies and local testing centres. 'These testing options can contribute to a safe everyday life, especially in schools and daycare centres,' Spahn had said. A two-month 'hard lockdown' has brought Germany's infection rate down, but progress has now stalled with cases on the rise again in the last week The death rate has fallen from its January peak but is still higher than during the first wave, when Germany was celebrated for keeping deaths low The government's popularity has also been hit by the prolonged lockdown which has turned Germany's success of last spring into a much bleaker picture this winter. After seeing fewer than 10,000 deaths during the first wave, Germany's death toll is now above 68,000 and a weeks-long decline in cases has now come to a halt. Spahn's approval rating, which was 65 per cent in November, has dropped to 51 per cent as of February - far below Merkel on 69 per cent. The various crises have also damaged Spahn's outside hopes of succeeding Merkel as chancellor when she ends her 16-year term in office later this year. At a party congress last month he suffered what was seen as an embarrassingly poor result in a deputy leadership election, although he did win one of the five slots. He was also criticised for an overly partisan speech supporting Armin Laschet, the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia who was elected CDU party chairman. Laschet's victory was not the final word on who will lead the party into the September election, and Spahn was still seen as one of the contenders. German soldiers prepare AstraZeneca vaccines at a former Berlin airport earlier this month, amid widespread reluctance to take the jab despite its proven effectiveness An economic liberal and openly gay Catholic, he was critical of Merkel's open-door policy during Europe's 2015 migrant crisis and was supported by some in the CDU. But recent polls have shown him performing poorly, with one showing only seven per cent saying he would have the best chance in the election. Hoping to turn around the vaccine drive, Spahn has now requested that the AstraZeneca shot be given to the police force and German army. The AstraZeneca vaccine has met resistance in Germany and other European countries after widely-debunked claims about its efficacy in older people. There have also been anecdotal reports that the AstraZeneca vaccine causes stronger side effects than other vaccines. Of the 1.5million AstraZeneca shots due to have been delivered by the end of last week, only 187,000 have been used so far, according to official figures. But German leaders have now launched a public relations push to reassure the public that the AstraZeneca shot developed at Oxford University is effective. 'The vaccine from AstraZeneca is both safe and highly effective,' Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said on Monday. 'The vaccine can save lives.' Spahn also wants to start administering vaccines at family doctors' practices as soon as three to five million doses are being delivered weekly. That would help ease potential bottlenecks at the regional vaccination centres that have been set up by Germany's 16 federal states. Merkel admits - 'We are in coronavirus third wave': Germany is in the grip of pandemic as it defends closing its borders and pleads with population to take AstraZeneca jab By Reuters and Charlotte Mitchell for MailOnline Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that Germany is now in the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, two sources told Reuters news agency. 'We are now in the third wave,' Merkel told lawmakers in her conservative party on Wednesday, according to two sources who attended the meeting. The chancellor is also said to have warned that any easing of lockdown measures introduced late last year and extended until March 7 would have to be done gradually. 'We cannot afford ups and downs,' Merkel told the meeting, suggesting she wanted any return to normal life to be done carefully so as to avoid having to reintroduce lockdown measures if infections start to rise again. The closure of all non-essential businesses and border controls with Austria and the Czech Republic, where there have been outbreaks linked to a more infectious variant of the virus, have helped Germany bring down new daily COVID-19 infections. Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that Germany is now in the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, two sources told Reuters news agency (File photo) But a slow vaccination roll-out and the risk of major outbreaks of fast-spreading variants already identified in Germany could make any easing of restrictions more difficult. During Wednesday's meeting, Merkel also said that making rapid tests more available and boosting testing capacity could make a return to normal more durable, according to the sources. The chancellor's reported comments came a day after her chief spokesman pleaded with citizens to take AstraZeneca's Covid vaccine after scaremongering about the jab led people to reject it. Steffen Seibert said on Monday that the British-made jab is 'both safe and highly effective' and will 'save lives' as he urged people to take it, just weeks after ministers wrongly claimed it doesn't work in older people. He spoke after it emerged Germans have been skipping vaccination appointments when they learned they would be given the AstraZeneca jab - hampering the country's already-slow roll-out. Meanwhile Health Minister Jens Spahn suggesting drafting in the army to give the shots to soldiers and police officers in an attempt to drive inoculation rates up. The UK has stormed ahead of France and Germany in its mass vaccination drive, with Europe's plans hampered by supply problems and scaremongering over foreign jabs European leaders including in France and Germany previously suggested the AstraZeneca's jab doesn't work in older people, but new data (above) shows it provides strong protection across all age groups Real-world data collected in Scottish patients suggested AstraZeneca's jab may actually be more effective at preventing severe Covid than the German-made Pfizer jab What Germany said about AstraZeneca's vaccine - then and now 25 Jan: German newspaper anonymously quotes a minister who said vaccine 'is only 8 per cent effective in the elderly' 28 Jan: Germany says over-65s should not take jab, because there is 'insufficient data to assess its efficacy' 11 Feb: Head of German hospital says 40 per cent of staff given AstraZeneca vaccine had side-effects 17 Feb: Health authorities in Germany's largest state insist AstraZeneca jab is 'not second-class' 18 Feb: German vaccine agency says jab is highly effective, though may cause slightly more side-effects 19 Feb: Health Minister Jens Spahn says it is a 'privilege' to be offered British jab, which is 'safe and effective' 22 Feb: Merkel's spokesman Steffan Seibert insists the vaccine is 'safe and effective' and will 'prevent deaths' Advertisement Spahn's ministry confirmed it had asked the army for help in setting up two vaccination centres in Bonn and Berlin for state employees in uniform. Figures showed that, of 1.5million AstraZeneca shots due to have been delivered by the end of last week, only 187,000 have been used as of Monday. The AstraZeneca vaccine has met resistance in Germany and other European countries after trials showed it to be less effective than Pfizer and Moderna shots. Research pushed by Germany's top vaccine agency also suggested the vaccine causes stronger side effects than other jabs. The research found that nearly a quarter of people receiving the AstraZeneca shot experienced flu-like symptoms, and around 15 per cent experienced shivers or fever - more than those reporting side effects from the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. But AstraZeneca says the reported side effects are in line with observations from its clinical trials Germany was also quick to downplay AstraZeneca's vaccine amid a row with the UK over jabs, but is now facing an embarrassing climbdown after data showed it may be more effective than the German-made Pfizer vaccine. Research conducted in Scotland on real-world Covid patients and released on Monday showed the AstraZeneca jab reduces the risk of being admitted to hospital by up to 94 per cent after just a single dose, compared to 85 per cent for Pfizer. The same research also showed that just one jab of either vaccine offers strong protection across all age groups, with up to 80 per cent effectiveness even in the over-80s within a month of being inoculated. The findings will also be embarrassing for French President Emmanuel Macron who previously said the AstraZeneca vaccine is 'almost ineffective' in the over-65s. Skepticism around the vaccine led France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway to recommend it only be used in younger people - despite the EU and WHO saying it was safe for everyone. But German leaders have launched a public relations push to reassure the public that the AstraZeneca shot, developed at the UK's Oxford University, works. Germany has so-far administered 5million vaccine doses, or around six for every 100 residents, relying mostly on the Pfizer vaccine. That puts it well behind the likes of the United Kingdom, which is relying heavily on the AstraZeneca jab, and which has inoculated more than 26 in every hundred people. Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert tweeted on Monday that the AstraZeneca jab is 'safe and highly effective' - just weeks after German ministers cast doubt on its effectiveness Seibert (right) spoke after it was revealed that Germans have been skipping vaccination appointments after it emerged they would be given the AstraZeneca jab It is now unlikely that Germany will have its entire adult population vaccinated by the end of the year, while the UK has vowed to offer every adult a jab by June 31. The UK's mass-vaccination plan also got underway early in the new year, but it will take until at least April for Europe to start administering similar numbers of jabs. The latest German government figures indicate that it will take delivery of at least 10 million further doses of vaccine by April 4. Spahn wants to start administering vaccines at family doctors' practices as soon as 3million to 5million doses are delivered weekly, he told a meeting of leaders of Merkel's conservative party earlier according to sources present. That would help ease potential bottlenecks at the regional vaccination centres that have been set up by Germany's 16 federal states. While coronavirus cases have fallen in recent weeks, the rate of decline has slowed with the seven-day incidence rate hovering at around 60 cases per 100,000. On Tuesday, Germany reported 3,883 new infections and 415 further deaths. Fears that new infections are being driven by more-infectious variants of the virus imported from overseas, Germany announced on Tuesday that it is expanding strict border checks with the Czech Republic and Austria until at least March 3. The checks were introduced on February 14 in a bid to reduce the spread of more contagious coronavirus variants that have taken hold in those areas. Data showing AstraZeneca's jab is effective will be embarrassing for the likes of Merkel (left) and Macron, after they cast doubt over it amid a row with the UK over jabs Britain has been pushing ahead with a mass vaccination drive that will see all adults offered a jab by June 31, while Europe's drive has yet to gather pace Germany is limiting entry to its own citizens and residents, truck drivers, health workers and a few others including cross-border commuters working in 'systemically relevant sectors.' All have to show a negative coronavirus test. German border police have turned back thousands of people since the checks started. Michael Roth, minister for Europe, on Tuesday rejected suggestions from Brussels that the rules aren't in-keeping with EU law. 'These measures obviously put a massive strain on border regions, commuters and the transport of goods and the single market, but the protection of our citizens is paramount,' he said ahead of talks with his EU counterparts. He indicated, however, that Germany was trying to prevent similar restrictions on its border with France. Germany is in close contact with French authorities to ensure coordination of border restrictions, Roth said, adding that Germany has so far not seen the new variants of the virus spread from France, unlike was the case with the Czech Republic. As she lay in an ambulance bleeding from her neck, a Winnipeg woman wondered why it was taking so long to leave for the hospital. As she lay in an ambulance bleeding from her neck, a Winnipeg woman wondered why it was taking so long to leave for the hospital. The woman the Free Press agreed not to use her name is speaking publicly for the first time after finding herself at the centre of a high-profile controversy in the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service related to the treatment she received on a critical-care call in the North End last fall. "That night was a low point for me," the 23-year-old Indigenous woman said, referring to Oct. 7, when she stabbed herself in the throat with a broken beer bottle while in the throes of a mental-health crisis. She was visiting a friends place at the time, and shortly after hurting herself, one of her friends called 911 for help. Several emergency units responded to the scene, including police, firefighters and paramedics. A third-party investigation found 'implicit racial bias' against the patient and 'racial animus' against the paramedic (a person of colour) likely impacted the actions of firefighters that night. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press files) "I struggle with some mental-illness problems I was going through tough times with personal friendships and relationships in my life. And I guess I wasnt taking care of myself," she said. But what happened after first responders arrived on scene that night has set off a firestorm of controversy, leading to media reports, press conferences with civic officials and a third-party investigation. The investigation was sparked after a paramedic accused two of his firefighter colleagues of failing to provide proper medical care and delaying the woman's transportation to hospital. The consultant hired by the city to investigate the accusation found "implicit racial bias" against the patient and "racial animus" against the paramedic (a person of colour) likely impacted the actions of firefighters that night. The investigator's final report into the matter also concluded that members of the firefighter crew conspired to lie in an effort to obstruct the probe. While the woman said she does not remember everything about that night, there are specific details seared into her memory. They are consistent with the evidence laid out in the final report, which the woman has not read in full. "The one paramedic, obviously, was good. But the rest, I barely even saw them. I did feel like the rest of the people around... I felt like they were being judgmental," she said. "It was their body language and them not even really caring to ask me anything I remember, specifically, most of them standing there with their arms crossed." The woman said she has been taken to hospital in ambulances before and always felt she received compassionate, timely care. But this time things were different. "I actually remember thinking, Why arent we going? I do remember the one paramedic, who was actually caring for me, I remember him trying to get someone into the ambulance but no one was going. I was kind of super-dizzy at that point," the woman said. "I just feel sad that something could have went wrong. If someone else was put into my shoes I would feel so sorry for them. The way that it all went down wasnt right. It wasnt good care at all. Its just upsetting." After a two-minute delay, one of the firefighters who is also certified as a primary-care paramedic got into the back of the ambulance so it could leave for the hospital, according to the final report. But the woman said the firefighter did not provide her with medical care, which meant she had to apply pressure to her own neck wounds a fact consistent with the findings of the investigation. The woman at the centre of a probe into racism in the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service said she has been taken to hospital in ambulances before and always felt she received compassionate, timely care. But this time things were different. (Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press files) "I cant remember the specifics but I do know for a fact that I was holding my own neck. I had a towel to my neck at first. I dont know if I got it switched out or something. If it did get switched out they made me hold it again after that," the woman said. "I just felt crappy. Honestly, in the moment, I was like, I did this to myself. Its my fault. But after the fact, it kind of makes me feel like they didnt want anything to do with me I remember being really dizzy and weak and I dont even know if I was holding my neck correctly." Once the probe into the incident got underway, the investigator tried contacting the woman by sending a letter to the home where she was when she injured herself. But since she doesnt live there, the woman said, she didnt know about the letter right away. The woman also said she was no longer on good terms with one of the people who lives at the home, so she was provided limited details about what the letter said. As a result, she did not participate in the investigation. No other attempts to contact her have been made by the city, she said, adding that to her, it feels like civic officials would have tried to "sweep it under the rug" if not for media coverage. "I would have liked for them to have actually contacted me Im another person involved in this. I just feel like my opinion is valid too," she said. The city said it won't comment on the incident while the matter remains under investigation. The woman said she is doing much better now as far as her mental health. She also said she is happy the incident has received the attention it has. "Im glad the topic is being talked about. I dont want this to happen again," she said. "For the people that did help me that night, I thank them for that, because Im still here and Im able to be better now." ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @rk_thorpe New Delhi, Feb 24 : The BJP will seek suggestions from two crore people in West Bengal for its election manifesto ahead of the Assembly polls. BJP chief J.P. Nadda will launch the 'Lokkho Sonar Bangla' manifesto crowd sourcing campaign on Thursday in Kolkata from party state unit headquarters. BJP co-in-charge for West Bengal Amit Malviya said through this campaign, the BJP will directly engage with the citizens of West Bengal in crafting a vision for the state for the next five years by inviting them to give their suggestions. "Two crore suggestions will be collected by the party and will be used in the creation of the BJP's manifesto for West Bengal," he said. The saffron party will use 294 specially designed LED 'raths', one for each Assembly constituency of the state. "Suggestions will be collected through 294 LED 'raths' travelling the entire state and suggestion boxes will be placed in each of these vehicles along with a mobile or tablet to video record people's aspirations," Malviya said. About 30,000 suggestion boxes will be placed across the state (100 in every constituency) to reach out to citizens in every corner of the states. "People can give a missed call on 9727-294-294 and record their aspirations. Citizens can also send their suggestions via Whatsapp or SMS on this number. They can also visit the especially designed website for the purpose or send their suggestions via email," he said. For the 'Lokkho Sonar Bangla' campaign to collect suggestions from the people for its manifesto, the BJP also held meetings with representatives of different communities. "West Bengal BJP will conduct meetings with representatives of various communities across the state to gather their suggestions for the betterment of West Bengal," Malviya said. In recent times, the BJP had sought suggestions for its election manifesto. For 2019 general election, the BJP crowd sourced suggestion for its manifesto. In the 2020 Delhi Assembly polls also the BJP took suggestions from common people. Polls for 294 seats in the West Bengal Assembly will be held in April-May. The BJP, riding high on its success in the last general election in the state, is leaving no stone unturned to uproot the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government. In 2019, the BJP won 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal. The U.S. Postal Service has been hit with a wave of criticism after it announced a multi-million-dollar hybrid upgrade on its trucks despite delays in delivery times and loss in revenue. The agency revealed on Tuesday that it has awarded a $482 million contract to Oshkosh Defense to finalize production for the next-generation postal vehicles, with the first new trucks expected to hit the roads in 2023. The contract, which could be worth more than $6 billion in total, allows for delivery of between 50,000 and 165,000 of the vehicles over 10 years, which will be a mix of internal combustion-powered and battery-electric vehicles. The deal was developed with the aim of reducing its costs and to transition away from greenhouse gas-emitting technologies to cleaner solutions. However, customers were angered by the money being spent on the upgrade instead of ensuring that mail is delivered on time. The upgrade comes as U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told lawmakers on Wednesday that U.S. mail system is losing $10 billion a year and urgently needs reform and legislative relief from Congress. The U.S. Postal Service has been hit with a wave of criticism after it announced a multi-million-dollar hybrid upgrade on its trucks despite delays in delivery times and loss in revenue. Pictured, the nee hybrid truck which will have more room for packages Social media users hit out at the money being spent on the upgrade, pictured 'Ppl just want their mail on time. USPS, y'all really think ppl care what you deliver the mail in?' Twitter user Shannon Sharpe asked when the new truck design was announced. Another user named Caleb Hull added: 'Everyone: stop losing our packages and costing us billions every year. Usps: introducing our new clown car'. 'They just need to start focusing on delivering s**t ON TIME lol I swear my packages are always late,' hit out @IsaacIniguez. Others questioned where the USPS received the money for the upgrade asking, 'I thought y'all were broke?' and 'isn't the USPS in massive debt always having the get bailed out?' 'Meanwhile I've been waiting on a key for our mailbox for two months now,' joked another Twitter user. 'USPS NEEDS TO UNVEIL MY MAIL,' wrote @SoloLeveling. User Ben Cornelius said he didn't care if the new trucks were 'ugly or sleek'. 'I just expect 1st class mail from my doctor's office 5 blocks away in less than 7 and 8 days, from Atlanta in less than 10 days, and 2-day Priority Mail from Peekskill in less than 5 days,' he wrote. 'It doesn't need to be sleek and cool,' another user agreed of the design. 'It needs to be able to carry a lot of mail, be fuel efficient, and have a low grille with good visibility so letter carriers won't be at risk of running over children. Check, check, check.' Customers were angered that USPS is spending millions on the new trucks Oshkosh Defense, a division of Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Corp., will assemble 50,000 to 165,000 of the new Next Generation Delivery Vehicles at its existing U.S. manufacturing facilities, USPS said Tuesday. It described the deal as the first part of a multibillion-dollar 10-year effort to replace its delivery vehicle fleet, part of an effort to make the USPS more environmentally friendly by switching a portion of its huge fleet to electric vehicles. The vehicles will be a combination of electric and gasoline powered, but the gasoline-powered new vehicles will have the ability to be retrofitted with new electric systems in the future. USPS also revealed a look at the new trucks which will have more room for packages and will be updated with modern safety and drivability standards like cameras, airbags, and collision avoidance systems. They also include a waste-high front hood that resembles the front beak of a duck in front of an extra-high windshield. It marks the first change for the iconic Grumman LLV mail truck that has been in use since the late 1980s. Yet customers were also less than impressed by the new design. 'Who made this vehicle? Pixar?' asked user Tyler David 'I drew cars like this when I was 9,' joked Casey Evan. Social media users also joked about the design of the new hybrid trucks Another user Kyle Swawayama compared it to an episode of The Simpsons as he wrote: 'idk sorta reminds me of the car build for homer'. 'USPS took all the money they used to spend on sorting machines and put it into reducing air resistance, so your mail will be two weeks late but one minute early,' added @Jrehling of the new design. The postal service last updated its mail-delivery trucks 30 years ago, and there have been major changes in the service's operations since then. Traditional mail volumes have declined, while the service now delivers millions of packages from online retailers like Amazon that did not exist when the previous mail vehicle was introduced. The upgrade comes as DeJoy admitted the mail system is losing $10 billion a year. 'I would suggest that we are on a death spiral,' DeJoy told the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform committee at a hearing Wednesday, who did not rule out changing first-class deliver standards or other significant changes. U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, left, unveils the new hybrid trucks on Tuesday DeJoy, a supporter of former President Donald Trump appointed to head the Postal Service last year, suspended operational changes in August after heavy criticism over postal delays. He plans to release a new 10-year strategic 'break-even' plan soon. Delays in paychecks and other mail deliveries by the Postal Service, or USPS, gained attention this summer as a record number of voters mailed in ballots to elect a new president. Last month, President Joe Biden vowed to replace the U.S. government's fleet of roughly 650,000 vehicles with electric models. And on Wednesday, DeJoy told lawmakers on Wednesday the Postal Service was committed to having electric vehicles make up 10 percent of its next-generation fleet. Some environmental advocates criticized the USPS decision not to buy an all-EV fleet after tge announcement Tuesday. Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, had urged Congress to give the USPS a 'modernization grant' of $25 billion to make 'long-overdue' investments in a clean postal fleet, electric-vehicle charging stations for local post offices and other improvements. Yet the choice of Wisconsin-based Oshkosh is a big miss for Ohio-based electric vehicle startup Workhorse Group, which put in an all-electric bid for the vehicles. DeJoy said the USPS had agreed to spend $500 million on the next-generation vehicles to make them convertible to EVs from internal-combustion models at a future date. 'Every vehicle could be converted to electric,' DeJoy said. Shares of Workhorse fell more than 47 percent Tuesday after the USPS award to Oshkosh Corp, which was up 4.4 percent. Workhorse said on Wednesday it had it had requested more information on the decision. ROCKVILLE, Md., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- RegeneRx Biopharmaceuticals, Inc. (OTCQB: RGRX) ("the Company" or "RegeneRx"), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on tissue protection, repair and regeneration, announced that the ARISE-3 Phase 3 clinical trial database evaluating RGN-259 eyedrops for the treatment of dry eye syndrome has been locked after collecting and verifying patient data from 20 U.S. clinical sites participating in the study. Database lock is a specific time point prior to unmasking the trial and after which no patient information may be modified. ReGenTree LLC, the U.S. joint venture company owned by RegeneRx Biopharmaceuticals, Inc. and GtreeBNT, a Korean biopharmaceutical company, is sponsoring the clinical trial and will unmask the study and begin the biostatistical analysis that will include not only primary endpoints, but also other pre-specified endpoints identified in the clinical protocol. GtreeBNT has previously stated that it has secured major intellectual property rights, including patents related to composition, formulation, and manufacturing process for RGN-259 eye drops. Last year RGN-259, a 43 amino acid peptide, was reclassified from a new chemical entity to a biologic by the FDA. Thus, it will require a Biologics License Application (BLA), rather than a New Drug Application (NDA) for marketing approval and receive 12 years of market exclusivity in the U.S. if the product is approved by the FDA. GlobalData, a well-known market research publisher worldwide, estimated that the dry eye market will reach $11.1 billion in 2028 in 9 major countries including the U.S. according to its market research report published in May 2020. Also, GlobalData expects that due to RGN-259's unique mechanism of action (MOA), it would garner significant market share during the forecast period after its market launch. "We are pleased that the ARISE-3 database is locked and undergoing statistical analysis. Topline results will be released soon and, hopefully, we will see a positive outcome in this very important clinical trial," stated J.J. Finkelstein, RegeneRx president and chief executive. About RegeneRx Biopharmaceuticals, Inc. RegeneRx is focused on the development of novel therapeutic peptides, including Thymosin beta 4 (T4) and its constituent fragments, for tissue and organ protection, repair, and regeneration. RegeneRx currently has three drug candidates in clinical development for ophthalmic, cardiac/TBI and dermal indications, four active strategic licensing agreements in the U.S., China, and Pan Asia (Korea, Japan, and Australia, among others), and the EU, and has patents and patent applications covering its products in many countries throughout the world. RGN-259, the Company's ophthalmic eye drop, recently complete a phase 3 clinical trial for dry eye syndrome in the U.S. and is expected to report top line results for the ARISE-3 clinical trial in early 2021. Forward Looking Statements Any statements in this press release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements made under the provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from historical results or from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this press release include, but are not limited to, competitive products, statements from us or our U.S. joint venture, or derived from independent market research reports regarding strategic and research partnerships, status of clinical trials, reclassification of our drug candidates from drugs to biologics, regulatory applications and approvals, the development and value of our drug candidates, and the use of our drug candidates to treat various conditions. All forward-looking statements are expectations and estimates based upon information obtained and/or calculated by the Company or its joint venture partner at this time and are subject to change. Moreover, there is no guarantee any clinical trial will be successful or confirm previous clinical results. Please view these and other risks described in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including those identified in the "Risk Factors" section of the annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019, and subsequent quarterly reports filed on Form 10-Q, as well as other filings it makes with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements in this shareholder letter represent the Company's views only as of the date of this release and should not be relied upon as representing its views as of any subsequent date. The Company specifically disclaims any obligation to update this information, as a result of future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. SOURCE RegeneRx Biopharmaceuticals, Inc. Related Links http://www.regenerx.com Dozens of dogs are bafflingly turning pink, green and blue in eastern Russia. Vice reported that they were seen in a derelict industrial unit in the city of Podolsk, some 25 miles south of Moscow. The peculiar occurrence happened in and around the town of Dzerzhinsk, about 242 miles east of Moscow, near the abandoned chemical plant of Dzerzhinskoye Orgsteklo, which once produced to radioactive hydrocyanic acid, which is also a main ingredient in the once widely used "Prussian blue" coloring. Experts think that this information may help clarify why certain pups are now blue through-and-through, including their excrement, according to vets. Dmitry Karelkin, head veterinarian of Zoozashchita veterinary hospital, reportedly blamed the blue hue on "some kind of chemical," without more precise information, and does not seem to have physically affected the animals. In the meantime, examiners from Nizhny Novgorod State University's Lobachevsky Research Institute of Chemistry, as well as the Commission for State Veterinary Surveillance, detected "no signs of irritating chemical burns." However, blood and stool examination findings did not indicate major toxicity. Reportedly, the blue dogs will remain under close surveillance for nearly 20 days. Meanwhile, according to East2West news agency, no announcements have been made to directly fix pooches that turn pink. Some are, however, pressing for an investigation into a chemical dump in another part of Dzerzhinsk, where, during the Cold War, 300,000 tons of radioactive waste were unloaded. Local news has implicated the nearby Kristall defense factory. East2West has stated that the allegations are considered 'exaggerated' by city administrators. Dogs also appear to turn pink, but authorities are still speculating about whether this could happen. Related Article: 205 China Dogs, Meant for Meat Trade, Rescued to Arrive in US for Adoption Health Risk The animals were otherwise safe and physically healthy, the state news agency RIA Novosti told the Russian Society for the Protection of Animals. Sergei Voskrensky, Minister for Regional Food and Agriculture, said the dogs are actually friendly and were rather very sweet. Only days after the pink ones were seen in a former chemical weapons-making town about 459 kilometers (285 miles) from Podolsk, the green dogs emerged. One of the most polluted areas in the country, Dzerzhinsk, was also where seven blue strays were found earlier this month. The pink ones were seen near the defense plant in Kristall, which produces explosives and ammunition, reports said. Near the decrepit Dzerzhinskoye Orgsteklo factory, once a large chemical processing facility producing hydrocyanic acid and plexiglass, a total of seven strays were caught with blue skin and hair coloring. Andrey Mislivets, the plant's bankruptcy manager, initially claimed that they had been contaminated with copper sulfate. He also revealed that the dogs' excrement had come out blue. Observation Officials have since played down the outbreak as being caused by 'dye.' Despite this, the 'blue dogs' remain under close monitoring, according to reports. 'The (blue) dogs are supervised,' said Karelkin 'They will stay with under monitoring for 20 days. Their skin and hair are all covered with the dye,' she added. Analysis of the dogs' blood and excrement was undertaken at the Lobachevsky Research Institute of Chemistry at Nizhny Novgorod State University and the Committee for State Veterinary Surveillance, it was announced. This found that the shocking coloring was not dangerous to their health. ALSO READ: [VIRAL] Woman Spends $50,000 Per Year to Give Shelter to 200 Abandoned Animals For the latest news from the animal kingdom, don't forget to follow Nature World News! Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Recent incidents highlight risks faced by migrant workers in Taiwan February 24,2021 | Source: New Bloom Two recent incidents highlight the dangers facing migrant workers in Taiwan, pointing to lax legal regulation and how that has resulted in dangerous and inhumane working conditions for migrant workers. The first incident in question took place in 2012 on the Ping Shin No. 101, a deep-sea fishing vessel registered to Kaohsiung, but only led to a sentencing last month. A Chinese captain working onboard the vessel was found guilty of murder after video footage was found of him ordering two Pakistani crew members to open fire on four Somali men that he believed to be pirates. The four men were fired upon and killed after the boat rammed their vessel, overturning it, while floating in the water. The incident only came to light after the phone in which video of the incident was recorded was apparently lost in a taxi cab, resulting in someone finding it and posting the footage online in 2014. The Chinese captain in question, Wang Fengyu, has been sentenced to 26 years in prison. It is not unusual for Chinese nationals to serve as crew members or captains of Taiwanese-owned fishing vessels. More generally, the incident points to the dangerous conditions that exist on the high seas for deep-sea fishermen, who are almost always migrant workers from southeast Asia. The high seas are often considered somewhat lawless, in which violence from captains against crew members is routine. Crew members have little ability to lodge complaints because of lacking access to the Internet or cell phone signal at sea. Likewise, vessels may only return to shore once every few years. Working conditions for migrant fishermen have been accused of being a form of modern slavery by international NGOs such as Greenpeace. To this extent, there have been past incidents in which fishermen died at sea, likely killed by their captains, and their bodies were disposed of at sea. The second incident took place among factory workers, another major category of migrant workers in Taiwan, alongside factory workers, and domestic caregivers. Domestic caregivers are sometimes known to transfer work to become factory workers, something that takes place if domestic caregivers leave their original place of employment if they suffer abuse. Abuse may include sexual harassment or assault, other forms of violence, or simply being forced to work around the clock with no breaks, as Taiwanese employers sometimes force the migrant workers they employ to do. As reported by migrant worker advocate Lennon Ying-dah Wong, the director of the Serve the People Associations Taoyuan-based shelter, the National Federation of Employment Service Association (NFESA) recently wrote the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) that coordinates Taiwans response to COVID-19 requesting that the CECC void the ability of migrant workers to shift employment. The NFESA claimed that this was a necessary measure during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in reality, the NFESA likely simply wished to use the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to weaken the ability to change workplaces, making it easier for employers to control their workers if they have no course of escape. According to Wong, the NFESA has taken advantage of the inability of many migrant workers to read Chinese by distributing Chinese-language letters that it claims states that migrant workers are no longer allowed to change employers. This is not the case, however, seeing as the CECC has denied the request by the NFESA, citing that this would be illegal. Nevertheless, it is likely that the NFESA may try to take its case to the Ministry of Labor, though the Ministry of Labor would possibly face scandal if it did, in fact, void this provision. Though not directly related, both cases point to the dire outlook for migrant workers in Taiwan. Migrant workers often face employers hoping to establish working conditions in which they have complete control of workers, without allowing them time off, without being allowed to travel as they see fit, or to transfer work. Nevertheless, there often is little political willpower to make changes to benefit migrant workers, except where this affects Taiwans international reputation. Migrant workers, after all, cannot vote, and so it proves difficult to motivate politicians to take action on their behalf, rather than stand on the side of their Taiwanese employers. Theme(s): Communities and Organisations. Islamic State's de facto leader in Germany has been jailed for ten years and six months for funding terrorism and radicalising youngsters in the country's mosques. A German court sentenced 37-year-old Iraqi Ahmad Abdulaziz Abdullah Abdullah, better known as Abu Walaa, who was accused of directing a jihadist network radicalising young people in Europe and helping them travel to Iraq and Syria. He was found guilty on Wednesday of belonging to a foreign terrorist organisation, helping to plan subversive violent acts and financing terrorism, with judges convinced that Walaa's network was sending young people to ISIS combat areas. The conviction marked the end of an 'special case' which was 'very long and very complex', judge Frank Rosenow said as he handed down the verdict after 245 days of hearings. A German court sentenced 37-year-old Iraqi Abu Walaa (pictured covering his face in court on Wednesday), who was accused of directing a jihadist network in the country radicalising young people in Europe and helping them travel to Iraq and Syria Abu Walaa was in the dock with three other men in a costly, high-security trial that began in 2017 in the northern German town of Celle. His three co-defendants were handed sentences ranging from four to eight years for supporting IS. Prosecutors had sought a prison sentence of eleven and a half years for Abu Walaa, while the defence had argued for an acquittal and criticised key witness testimonies. Abu Walaa arrived in Germany as an asylum seeker in 2001, and was arrested in November 2016 after a long investigation by Germany's security services. Based in a mosque in the northern city of Hildesheim, he is alleged to have recruited at least eight jihadists - most of them 'very young' - to IS, including a pair of German twin brothers who committed a bloody suicide attack in Iraq in 2015. Dubbed the 'preacher without a face' for his online videos in which he always appeared with his back to the camera, he is also alleged to have preached jihad at the now-closed Hildesheim mosque. He is said to have been the mosque's imam and leader of the now-banned association of 'German-speaking Islamic District Hildesheim', and organised 'Islam seminars' at mosques elsewhere in Germany. Pictured: Abu Walaa, who was found guilty on Wednesday of belonging to a foreign terrorist organisation, helping to plan subversive violent acts and financing terrorism, with judges convinced that Walaa's network was sending young people to ISIS combat areas Pictured: Iraqi defendant Abu Walaa, described as the Islamic State group's de facto leader in Germany, knocks on a glass pane as he arrives at court for the verdict of his trial on February 24, 2021 in Celle, central Germany. He was sentenced to ten years and six months in prison Among those who Abu Walaa allegedly helped radicalise was at least one of three teenagers who were convicted of a 2016 bomb attack on a Sikh temple in Essen, western Germany. Another terrorist with possible links to Abu Walaa was Anis Amri, the Tunisian who killed 12 people when he drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas market in 2016. Amri was allegedly in contact with Abu Walaa's co-defendant Boban Simeonovic, who is believed to have put the Tunisian asylum seeker up in his flat in Dortmund. Simeonovic was sentenced to eight years in prison on Wednesday. Amri, who was killed by police in Italy while fleeing police, also attended a Berlin mosque known for its links to jihadism at which Abu Walaa occasionally preached. A direct link between Amri and Abu Walaa remains unproven. The charge against the Iraqi preacher is largely based on the testimony of a security service informant who spent months collecting evidence. The informant was exempted from testifying in person before the court over fears that it would put his life in danger. Pictured: Representative of the Federal Prosecutor's Office Holger Schneider-Glockzin reads behind a glass pane in the court prior the trial of Iraqi defendant Abu Walaa Pictured: hmad Abdulaziz Abdullah A., also known as "Abu Walaa", arrives in a police car for what is expected to be a verdict in his marathon, four-year trial on terror charges at the Oberlandesgericht Celle courthouse on February 24, 2021 in Celle Another key informer was a disillusioned jihadist who agreed to cooperate after returning to Germany from IS-controlled territory, and told investigators how he had been part of Abu Walaa's network before travelling to Syria. Yet Abu Walaa's lawyer Peter Krieger insisted that these testimonies were untrustworthy, telling the court that the key witness was a 'notorious liar'. While German authorities now see far-right terrorism as the primary danger to domestic security, the threat of Islamist extremism remains. Two weeks ago, three Syrian brothers were arrested in Denmark and Germany on suspicion of planning bomb attacks. According to the interior ministry, German security forces have prevented 17 such attacks since 2009, the majority since a spate of successful attacks in 2016. Authorities believe there are 615 potentially dangerous Islamists currently living in Germany, five times as many as in 2013. Credit: CC0 Public Domain Prisons with more green space have lower levels of violence and self-harm, according to new research at the University of Birmingham and Utrecht University. The study is the first to attempt large-scale mapping of green space within prison environments and link it to well-being in a robust, statistically significant way. The results are published in Annals of the American Association of Geographers. The researchers used GIS mapping to identify the percentages of green space (such as trees, lawns and shrubbery) within prisons in England and Wales. They compared this with available data about incidents of self-harm, prisoner assaults on staff and violence between prisoners. They also drew on information about the age and function of individual establishmentsfor example their capacity, what the security level was, whether they accommodated men, women or young offenders, and whether they were purpose-built prisons, or converted from other types of buildings such as military bases. Their findings showed that taking all of these factors into account, prisons with a higher presence of green space had lower levels of self-harm, and lower levels of prisoner-on-prisoner violence and assaults on prison staff. The study is significant since it demonstrates that the beneficial effects of nature contact, already recognized in other institutional contexts such as hospitals and schools, are also to be found in prisons. Self-harm and violence are currently at very high levels in prisons in England and Wales, with over 61,000 incidents of self-harm in the 12 months to September 2019. Over the same period, there were more than 33,000 incidents of violence between prisoners, and more than 10,000 assaults on staff. While it is not possible to calculate the personal and emotional costs of these incidents, the costs of hospital treatment from self-harm amount to some 2.7 million, while the costs of litigation arising from violent incidents are also significant. Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service has not disclosed the full costs of legal actions, but has paid out 85 million in litigation claims between 2016 and 2019. The team's findings, shared with the Ministry of Justice ahead of publication, therefore show that through improving wellbeing, increasing green spaces within prisons should also help in terms of managing costs and minimizing staff absence. Lead researcher, Professor Dominique Moran of the University of Birmingham's School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, says: "Our evidence shows clear and demonstrable benefits from the presence of green space for prisoners in all categories of prison. It's clear that inclusion of green space should be a key design element for new prisons, and existing prisons should convert existing outdoor areas to provide more green space wherever possible." Explore further Widespread dispersal of prisoners revealed in new data More information: Dominique Moran et al. Does Nature Contact in Prison Improve Well-Being? Mapping Land Cover to Identify the Effect of Greenspace on Self-Harm and Violence in Prisons in England and Wales, Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2021). Dominique Moran et al. Does Nature Contact in Prison Improve Well-Being? Mapping Land Cover to Identify the Effect of Greenspace on Self-Harm and Violence in Prisons in England and Wales,(2021). DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1850232 Massachusetts cities such as Springfield and Worcester may receive more than $90 million through the American Rescue Plans $350 billion influx of COVID-19 aid to help state and local governments across the country recover from gutted tax revenues and layoffs brought on by the pandemic. The state should receive a total of nearly $8.3 billion according to President Joe Bidens $1.9 trillion plan, which is likely up for a House vote Friday and Senate vote by mid-March. U.S. Rep. Richard Neals office told MassLive Tuesday that Beacon Hill should see about $4.5 billion to help address the virus, while more than $3.7 billion will be spread across local governments throughout Massachusetts. Lawmakers estimate Springfield will receive about $90 million; Worcester more than $105 million; and Boston $400 million, according to data provided to MassLive on Tuesday by U.S. Rep. Lori Trahans office. The federal dollars follow months of pressure from Democrats to provide expansive aid to avoid further layoffs to educators, first responders and health care workers while helping towns, cities and states maintain critical services during public health and economic crises. City governments like Cambridge, Fall River, Lowell, Lynn, Somerville and New Bedford should expect between $50 million and $67 million. Arlington, Brockton, Brookline, Chicopee, Fitchburg, Haverhill, Holyoke, Lawrence, Malden, Medford, Newton, Pittsfield, Quincy and Waltham should receive between $22 and $45 million. Several towns, depending on size, should receive between $1 million and $5 million. Here is a tool where you can see how much the feds may send to your community government. Middlesex County will likely receive the biggest chunk of aid, at about $315 million. Worcester, Suffolk and Essex counties are all estimated to receive more than $150 million. Bristol, Hampden, Norfolk and Plymouth counties should see between $90 million and $138 million, while Barnstable, Berkshire, Franklin and Hampshire counties will get between $14 and $42 million in federal aid. For comparison with other New England states, lawmakers project Maine and Rhode Island will receive nearly $1.7 billion; New Hampshire $1.5 billion; Connecticut $4 billion; and Vermont about $961 million. Republicans have long balked at providing more aid to state and local government, painting the idea as bailouts for blue municipalities. But the $350 billion is not earmarked for states led by Democrats; portions will go to every state in the nation. For several months, both Democratic and Republican governors and mayors have called on Congress to approve more aid. There are very real issues that states and municipal governments have ... with almost everything associated with COVID, Gov. Charlie Baker said in a news conference last summer as the Trump administration and Congress were deadlocked over state and local aid. In an interview in December, Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno said the city was down nearly $7 million in revenue since the pandemic began, citing dips in a range of tax revenues, including from hotels. The city at that point had spent more than $17 million in state and federal grants and relief funding, and Sarno noted the money had been largely pumped out to the business community, nonprofits and social service agencies, not to plug budget gaps or to resolve financial mismanagement as some national Republican lawmakers have suggested. Whether youre a Democrat, Republican or independent, everybody is struggling, he said. Everybody needs assistance. This mapping of blue states and red states this is America. Everybody right now needs assistance. Sarno noted that a strong nationwide vaccination effort would help overcome the local and national economic turmoil. Last year, he said, not only governors but mayors were battling it out for (Personal Protective Equipment). It didnt make any sense. To have complete public consumer and business confidence, weve got punch this COVID-19 in the face and starve it, and then everything will look to rebound quickly, he said. To push Bidens plan through Congress, Democrats are using the annual budget reconciliation process, which only requires a simple majority vote, a move that sidesteps the need for Republican support and could get the bill on Bidens desk by mid-March. The state and local aid comes on top of other highlights in the 591-page bill, including $1,400 stimulus checks for tens of millions of Americans; hundreds of billions of dollars for vaccine distribution and to help reopen schools; a significant expansion of the child tax credit; $35 billion to help local governments boost small businesses; a $25 billion restaurant grant program; and additional jobless aid extended through Aug. 29 and increased to $400 weekly. Progressives also want to include a provision that bumps the federal minimum wage to $15, a move that a few conservative Democrats say threatens the entire package. State House News Service recently reported that Massachusetts has seen about $68 billion in federal aid since the pandemic began last year. Most of that money has gone to businesses, families, schools and unemployment benefits. Massachusetts House Speaker Ron Mariano said last weekend that while tax hikes were not on the table for the state, a boost in federal aid would help lawmakers sort out a budget that may be a little short. Related Content: The telecom regulator may consider lowering the minimum price for 5G spectrum if the government directs it to do so because of concerns that the pricing set for the airwaves could hurt the rollout of the latest wireless technology. The government has to take a call. If the telecom department feels that the reserve price should be lowered with reasons to support it, then the regulator may look into it," said a person directly aware of the telecom regulators stand on the issue. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) recommended a base price of 492 crore per MHz of spectrum in the 3,300-3,600MHz bands, ideal for 5G, in August 2018. Operators have, however, claimed the spectrum was overpriced and needed to be brought down substantially to make 5G services viable. The department of telecommunications (DoT) must give strong reasons to the telecom regulator to revise the current base price for 5G spectrum; else, it may become a compliance issue", with questions raised on the methods of Trai, the person cited above said on condition of anonymity. While telcos consider the base price for 5G spectrum exorbitant, compared with other countries, Trai believes the price is among the lowest in the world, according to a standing committee report tabled in Parliament earlier this month. The standing committee on information technology told DoT that long-term consumer benefit, rather than short-term revenue maximization, should be the guiding principle to fix the base price for 5G spectrum. Factors such as per capita income and average revenue per user (Arpu) should also be considered. While a date is yet to be announced for the 5G spectrum auction, 4G spectrum goes under the hammer on 1 March. With the spectrum (for 4G auction in March) priced at an eye-watering 3.92 trillion, the government is signalling that it cares much more about maximizing spectrum revenue than maximizing network quality," Deutsche Bank said in a 15 February report. According to brokerage ICICI Securities Ltd, Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Ideas earnest money deposits of 10,000 crore, 3,000 crore and 475 crore, respectively, indicate their potential spectrum payouts at 70,000 crore, 21,000 crore and 3,300 crore, in the March auction. The person cited above also said DoT will soon allocate spectrum on an administrative basis for 5G trials. However, he expressed doubts over the number of telcos that will be willing to buy spectrum for trials. DoT secretary Anshu Prakash told the parliamentary standing committee that the Centre will conduct the auction for 3,300-3,600MHz spectrum bands in the next six months. While there is no clarity on auction for 5G, telecom operators have started preparing their networks for a launch. Bharti Airtel recently said its network is fully ready for the technology. Rival Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd plans to roll out 5G later this year. Vodafone Idea has also said its network is ready for the rollout of 5G. Both Airtel and Jio are of the view that customers will experience high speeds and low latency of 5G only if the spectrum earmarked for the service is auctioned. The person cited above also saidTrai may soon float a consultation paper to tweak the right of way (RoW) rules, first introduced in November 2016 to ease the development of telecom infrastructure, keeping in mind the countrys evolving 5G ecosystem. The RoW policy is a framework that enables the setting up of towers, laying of fibre cables and improving coordination among private firms, states and local bodies. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Mumbai, Feb 24 : Actress Kangana Ranaut's much awaited film Thalaivi is all set to release in theatres on April 23. The makers made the announcement on Wednesday, on the occasion of the 73rd birth anniversary of actress-turned-politician J Jayalalithaa, whose life is depicted in the film. Tweeting the news, Kangana Ranaut wrote: "To Jaya Amma, on her birthanniversary. Witness the story of the legend, #Thalaivi, in cinemas on 23rd April, 2021." The tringual film will release in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. The film is directed by AL Vijay, and it also features Arvind Swami, Prakash Raj, Madhoo and Bhagyashree in key roles. The film will showcase the life of late former chief minister of Tamil Nadu, from her rise in the world of films as an actress to becoming a powerful politician. Kangana had earlier in the day, teased fans about the big announcement by posting on Twitter: "On #Thalaivi's 73rd birth anniversary, stay tuned as we make an important announcement at 6:35 PM today!" For the role, Kangana is said to have gained 20 kilos and undergone body transformation. Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin last night extended the country's coronavirus lockdown for another six weeks until at least April 5 as he appealed to a 'completely fed up' nation not to drop its guard against Covid. In a live TV address to the nation from Government buildings, the Taoiseach confirmed Level 5 measures inflicting huge damage to the economy will remain in place until after Easter amid fears of the UK variant. Refusing to give specific timelines for the wider reopening of society, Mr Martin said: 'I know that people are physically and emotionally exhausted by this pandemic. It has placed enormous pressure on each of us. 'Businesses and workers are deeply worried about the future. We are all completely fed up with the impositions on our lives.' But he went on to call the more infectious B117 variant that has spread from England since Christmas 'equivalent to a new virus almost, and it is a major problem'. 'It is critically important that we do not let our guard down. When we open things, we want them to stay open,' the Taoiseach added. Mr Martin spoke after his Cabinet published a new lockdown plan following weeks of haggling after many businesses have spent nearly a year closed. The Irish Government, which has imposed one of the toughest lockdowns in the world, has spent more than 10billion keeping shuttered firms on life support and wages flowing to more than 600,000 workers made redundant. Outlining his revised Living With Covid plan, most existing lockdown measures imposed in late December will be extended until after Easter. People will be instructed not to leave their homes except only for essential reasons and should not travel more than 5 kilometres from their households. Schools and childcare will be reopened gradually, with junior and senior infants among the first to return to the classroom on March 1. Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin last night extended the country's lockdown for another six weeks as he appealed to a 'completely fed up' nation not to drop its guard against Covid An empty shopping street in Dublin, Ireland, on January 23, 2021 GOVERNMENT PRESSED TO DELIVER 'SUSTAINABLE PLAN' TO SAFELY EXIT LOCKDOWN The Irish Government has been urged to deliver a 'sustainable plan' to safely exit lockdown. Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald described the announcement by Taoiseach Michael Martin that Level 5 restrictions will continue as 'difficult news for people'. She queried why no further detail around a plan to emerge from restrictions had been revealed. 'I have no confidence in this government, I fail to see given the level of chaos, confusion and rivalry, and dithering, a really toxic mixture that we have seen from this government, how anyone in real terms could have confidence in them,' she told RTE. 'They need to pull themselves together, give themselves a shake and what we need now is a steady, thoughtful, sustainable plan to get us out of these restrictions and to keep people safe thereafter. 'That means testing, tracing, vaccination and it also means that while people cannot stray beyond 5k from their house, people should not be coming in through our airports.' Labour Party leader Alan Kelly has criticised the 'absence of clear metrics and targets'. 'While the Taoiseach offered some clarity on school reopenings, there were no clear metrics or targets in his speech or the government document on the level of cases or hospitalisations we need to reach,' he said. 'There is no renewed commitment or proposals to aggressively suppress the virus in our community, and ensure that we eradicate outbreaks when they arise, and keep out new variants through mandatory hotel quarantine for all arrivals. No real lessons appear to have been learned from the experience and impact of new variants which tore apart the government's previous Living with Covid plan.' The Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI) also criticised the absence of a published plan on the way forward. The trade body said the lack of certainty around the reopening of pubs will 'prolong the anxiety and uncertainty' for thousands. VFI chief executive Padraig Cribben said government must provide hope. 'It's incredible the Taoiseach did not signal what would happen after April 5, especially after his recent vague comments that hospitality would remain shut until 'mid-summer',' he said. 'Over 50,000 people work in the pub sector so we hoped government would recognise the huge uncertainty swirling around the sector and outline a plan for reopening. 'The lack of detail about how the pub sector will reopen is completely unacceptable to our members and their families. 'They deserve a roadmap to reopening that explains what must happen to allow pubs commence trading.' Advertisement All those working from home must continue to do so, the Irish premier added. 'We want to reopen society as soon and as safely as possible, so if we can maintain downward pressure on the disease and keep our numbers low, we will then move into the next phase,' he said. Turning to the vaccination programme, the Taoiseach said more than 350,000 doses have been administered and a 'major ramping up' will commence. This will include small local GP surgeries and pharmacists, and community and regional vaccination centres. 'We are implementing a programme of vaccination on a scale that is unprecedented in the country's history,' Mr Martin said. 'By the end of March, we will have administered 1.25 million doses, then depending on vaccines arriving as scheduled, we would administer on average more than one million doses per month during April, May and June.' He said they aim to have administered first doses to 40 per cent of people over the age of 18 by the end of April, 64 per cent by the end of May and up to 82 per cent of adults by the end of June. A further 45 deaths of patients who tested positive for coronavirus in Ireland were announced on Tuesday, along with a further 575 confirmed cases of the virus. In his live TV address, the Taoiseach said a delay in the delivery of the AstraZeneca jab will not impact Ireland's plans to ramp up its vaccination programme. Mr Martin announced new plans for the programme with the aim to have administered first doses to 80 per cent of adults by the end of June. Prior to Mr Martin's address to the nation, AstraZeneca said it will deliver half of the expected delivery of vaccine doses to the EU in the second quarter of the year. The Taoiseach said this announcement has been factored in to the forecasts in his speech. By Tuesday, more than 350,000 vaccine doses had been administered. 'We are implementing a programme of vaccination on a scale that is unprecedented in the country's history,' Mr Martin said. 'By the end of March, we will have administered 1.25 million doses, then depending on vaccines arriving as scheduled, we would administer on average more than one million doses per month during April, May and June.' Reacting to news of the lockdown extensions, Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald called the announcement 'difficult news for people'. The Irish Government has been urged to deliver a 'sustainable plan' to safely exit lockdown. She queried why no further detail around a plan to emerge from restrictions had been revealed and said she had 'no confidence in this government'. 'I fail to see given the level of chaos, confusion and rivalry, and dithering, a really toxic mixture that we have seen from this government, how anyone in real terms could have confidence in them,' she told RTE. 'They need to pull themselves together, give themselves a shake and what we need now is a steady, thoughtful, sustainable plan to get us out of these restrictions and to keep people safe thereafter. 'That means testing, tracing, vaccination and it also means that while people cannot stray beyond 5k from their house, people should not be coming in through our airports.' Labour Party leader Alan Kelly has criticised the 'absence of clear metrics and targets'. 'While the Taoiseach offered some clarity on school reopenings, there were no clear metrics or targets in his speech or the government document on the level of cases or hospitalisations we need to reach,' he said. 'There is no renewed commitment or proposals to aggressively suppress the virus in our community, and ensure that we eradicate outbreaks when they arise, and keep out new variants through mandatory hotel quarantine for all arrivals. 'No real lessons appear to have been learned from the experience and impact of new variants which tore apart the government's previous Living with Covid plan.' The Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI) also criticised the absence of a published plan on the way forward.The trade body said the lack of certainty around the reopening of pubs will 'prolong the anxiety and uncertainty' for thousands. VFI chief executive Padraig Cribben said government must provide hope. 'It's incredible the Taoiseach did not signal what would happen after April 5, especially after his recent vague comments that hospitality would remain shut until 'mid-summer',' he said. People wearing face masks walk past a shuttered 'House of Ireland' shop in the city centre of Dublin, Ireland, on January 23, 2021 An ambulance drives down Grafton Street in Dublin's city centre as a nationwide lockdown remains in place. Picture date: February 5, 2021 'Over 50,000 people work in the pub sector so we hoped government would recognise the huge uncertainty swirling around the sector and outline a plan for reopening. 'The lack of detail about how the pub sector will reopen is completely unacceptable to our members and their families. 'They deserve a roadmap to reopening that explains what must happen to allow pubs commence trading.' This week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled No10's ultra-cautious blueprint back to normality, which could see all virus-controlling restrictions eased by June 21, if things go well. Schools will return on March 8, but there will be almost no further loosening of the draconian curbs before Easter. Nicola Sturgeon yesterday unveiled an even more cautious lockdown exit roadmap for Scotland, which will see the stay at home rule lifted and the return of some non-essential shops on April 5. The Scottish First Minister said the coronavirus situation in Scotland is 'still quite precarious'. But hopes of lockdown being drastically eased in the next few months could be dashed if Britain's vaccine roll-out fails to pick up pace. It has slowed down over the past month, with just 210,000 doses dished out on Monday in the UK - down a quarter on last Tuesday. It means around 335,000 Britons are getting inoculated for the first time each week, piling pressure on No10 to urgently ramp up the drive so that the path to freedom isn't threatened. Why lockdowns DON'T always stop thousands dying of Covid: Britain has had some of the toughest rules but ranks in the top five WORST death tolls... while Cuba's draconian measures helped it escape lightly Britain has endured some of the toughest lockdown restrictions in the world - but has still suffered the fourth highest death toll of the pandemic, data showed today. Oxford University researchers ranked the UK's curbs on daily life the sixth harshest out of 180 countries, after taking into account school and office closures, bans on social gatherings, international travel restrictions and orders to not leave the home. Only the Republic of Ireland was found to have tougher restrictions in Europe. Although its curbs are broadly similar to England's, the country has also stopped construction work and click-and-collect shopping. Germany, the US and France all had less stringent curbs on daily life. But when countries were ranked by Covid deaths per million people, the UK had suffered the fourth highest death toll, according to separate figures from OurWorldInData, despite having stricter measures than Belgium, Slovenia and the Czech Republic - the only countries where more people died of the virus. It had also suffered the highest fatality rate from the virus out of the top 10 countries with the harshest restrictions, although this may be because the lockdown became stricter only after cases had surged. The UK may have suffered more fatalities than other countries because of the rapid spread of the more infectious Kent variant, and after tens of thousands died in the darkest days of the first wave when potentially infected patients were discharged to care homes. Delays in taking action and differences in how the data was compiled between countries could may also explain the differences. The data does not show that lockdowns do not work because a lack of any restrictions, scientists estimate, would have killed tens of thousands more people. In Cuba, which had a lockdown ranked the toughest in the Oxford study, the death rate was 2.4 per 100,000 people, compared to 178 per 100,000 in the UK. The analysis comes after Boris Johnson yesterday unveiled his 'cautious' lockdown exit strategy which could see life in England return to something close to normal by June at the earliest. The PM's plan for easing restrictions will be split into four separate steps and will see the country treated as a whole, with no return to a tier system. Under the first stage, schools in England will reopen from March 8 - though the next stage of loosening won't be until March 29, when the formal Stay at Home edict is finally dropped. Shops, hairdressers and pubs must remain closed until April 12 at the earliest and international travel is completely off the cards until at least May 17. This map shows how lockdown rules differed between countries on February 17, with darker colours indicating harsher rules. Light blue shows a score up to 39.9 out of 100 - the least oppressive measures -, and dark blue shows from 40 to 59.9. Black shows between 60 and 69.9, purple shows between 70 to 79.9. The harshest rules are indicated by pink and red, showing countries scoring more than 80 in the analysis WHICH COUNTRIES HAD THE MOST SEVERE LOCKDOWNS? Country Score Covid deaths (per 100,000) Cuba Eritrea Ireland Honduras Lebanon UK Peru Lesotho Venezuela Zimbabwe --- Germany US France 90.74 89.81 87.96 87.96 87.04 86.11 86.11 85.19 84.26 84.26 --- 83.33 68.06 63.89 277 (2.4) 7 (0.2) 4,036 (82.3) 3,933 (41) 4,152 (60.6) 118,933 (178.4) 44,056 (137.7) 279 (13.2) 1,297 (4.5) 1,418 (9.8) 66,732 (80.4) 500,000 (152.3) 82,705 (123.5) Source: Calculated by the University of Oxford's Coronavirus Response Tracker. It is for restrictions as of February 17, the latest available. Advertisement The Oxford University tracker on restrictions scored each country on a scale of one to 100, with the higher figure indicating the most severe virus-controlling curbs. The team put Britain's Covid restrictions at 86.11 out of 100 by February 17, using the latest available data. Britain's lockdown was ranked harsher than France (63.89) and the US (68.06), and stricter than Germany's (83.33). Worldwide, Cuba (90.74), Eritrea (89.81), Honduras (87.96) and Lebanon (87.04) also had tougher measures, and Peru had the same score as the UK Britain's lockdown was ratcheted up over Christmas with the discovery of the Kent variant, which is believed to spread significantly faster than older versions of the virus. The variant - which was first detected in the UK and now makes up a majority of cases there - made controls that had worked against the old virus less effective, forcing ministers to impose tighter curbs. The Blavatnik School at Oxford University compiled the response tracker to compare shutdown measures imposed in different countries. They used 19 indicators for the scores - which also included closing public transport, restrictions on internal movement and income support. Restrictions were put into categories and each was given a number on a scale depending on how strict it was, then these were entered into a complex mathematical equation to produce a total score out of 100, with stricter rules producing higher numbers. Data on restrictions is collected from public sources by a team of more than a hundred students and staff at Oxford University. The project's lead researcher Thomas Hale told the Telegraph the UK's current high score was triggered by school closures. 'The UK has done a lot in this third lockdown and introduced some stringent measures,' he said. 'One of the main factors is the school closures, whereas most of Europe have tried to keep schools open. 'It would make sense for the UK to have a higher score as it has been hard hit and there have been stringent measures. 'If you take France, they have tried to make things work with a curfew rather than a blanket stay-at-home message. 'The French also have a wider definition of what is essential and no restrictions on being able to move around, whereas you obviously cant go to other parts of the country here.' WHICH COUNTRIES HAD THE HIGHEST DEATH TOLLS FROM THE VIRUS? Country Belgium Slovenia Czech Republic Britain Italy Portugal Bosnia, Herzegovina Montenegro United States Hungary Death toll per million 1,892 1,820 1,805 1,782 1,588 1,571 1,529 1,524 1,512 1,485 Source: OurWorldInData.com figures were used for this table to show the death rate from coronavirus per million people. This table excludes San Marino because of its small population Advertisement It comes after the PM unveiled his four-step roadmap to easing lockdown. Scotland and Wales yesterday allowed children up to the age of eight to return to school, and England is set to bring all pupils back to the classroom on March 8. Announcing his blueprint back to normality, the Prime Minister warned they would be led by the 'data not dates', but that he hopes to relax restrictions in five-week stages. Mr Johnson's plan will be split into four separate steps and will see the country treated as a whole, with no return to a tier system The loosening of England's third national lockdown, imposed amid a winter outbreak of coronavirus in January, will begin on March 8 when all schools across the country will return. A different set of rules are then due to be lifted every five weeks to allow four weeks to measure the impact of changes and to give a further week's notice before the next step comes into force. However, the Government has stressed that dates could change depending on the scale of the coronavirus outbreak. In his statement to the Commons, Mr Johnson said there are four tests for reopening the country: the success of the vaccine roll-out, evidence that Covid jabs are reducing hospitalisations, infection rates not putting 'unsustainable pressure' on the NHS, and whether the risks are 'fundamentally changed' by new variants. The changes must be gradual, Mr Johnson said, because a third wave of the virus is inevitable and it must be controlled because vaccines aren't perfect. Speaking from a Downing Street press conference last night Mr Johnson said: 'We're now travelling on a one-way road to freedom and we can begin safely to restart our lives, and do it with confidence. 'And I want to be frank about exactly what that means and the trade-offs involved. The vaccines reduce the danger of Covid, they save lives and they keep people out of hospital. But no vaccine against any disease has ever been 100 per cent effective. 'So, whenever we ease the lockdown whether its today or in six or nine months weve got to be realistic and accept that there will be more infections, more hospitalisations and therefore, sadly, more deaths, just as there are every year with flu. 'Even if we sustained the lockdown indefinitely, which would itself cost lives and do immeasurable harm to our children, we would not be able to eradicate this disease. 'And thats why its right, gradually, to replace the protection afforded by lockdown, with the protection of the vaccines. And our approach is to move with the utmost care.' Those seem not to have been enough when it came to this 2019 Ford F-450 Super Duty in King Ranch configuration. It was purchased new in 2019, modified, used for just 9,000 miles (14,500 km), and now listed for sale as part of a no reserve auction on Bring a Trailer The thing caught our eye and earned an entry in our Truck Month first of all because it is virtually new and then because it is no longer stock. And lastly, how often do we get to experience the vista of such a machine out in the open, beyond the official press photos and configurators?The truck is a dually powered by the carmakers 6.7-liter Power Stroke V8 paired with a six-speed automatic transmission and a dual-range transfer case. It was capable when new of developing 450 hp and 935 lb-ft (1,266 Nm) of torque. For this build, it was gifted with an aftermarket intake, a 5-inch exhaust, and a mild tune, but we are not told how much these upgrades improved the power ratings.The already imposing truck was made even more so after it got propped on a Carli Pintop leveling lift kit. It gives the machine an increase in ride height by 4.5 inches (114 mm) at the front and 2.5 inches (63 mm) at the rear. The body rests on 22-inch Fuel wheels wearing Toyo Open Country A/T tires.On the inside, there are only the stock amenities, including the seats upholstered in the two-tone saddle and brown Kingsville leather, branded with the Running W logo of Texas largest ranch, King Ranch. No changes seem to have been made here.The price of a brand new 2012 F-450 King Ranch starts at $77,310, but this older one has already drawn a $55,500 pledge from someone. With six days left in the auction, chances are it will go even higher. When you rent a McLaren 570 I & decide to race a Lamborghini I on the US-101 & crash ! Next time you should consider getting the rental insurance ! Luckily no one was seriously injured. pic.twitter.com/lJ5IO3Adub CHP Central LA (@CHPCentralLA) February 22, 2021 Should such a special place exist, the road there is paved with snarky remarks and burns from law enforcement . On social media, of course, because thats where all the action is. Cue to the California Highway Patrol, mocking a dude who rented out a McLaren in Oregon so he could race it on the highway against a Lamborghini.Spoiler alert: it seems that the Lambo won.CHP posted photos of the badly damaged McLaren and, while it does not offer specifics of what exactly went down, you can tell it was pretty bad. The McLaren is in very bad shape, and, all things considered, the driver should count himself lucky he wasnt hurt. Or that he didnt hurt anyone else.When you rent a McLaren 570 & decide to race a Lamborghini on the US-101 & crash ! Next time you should consider getting the rental insurance! Luckily no one was seriously injured, the CHP says in the accompanying tweet. Bonus points for the solid emoji game.Besides the fact that the car in question is a McLaren 720S , the part about not getting rental insurance is obviously a joke. The photos also show the Lamborghini at some distance, but the person standing in front of it blocks the view, and you cant tell whether it took any damage.CHP confirms for CBS Los Angeles that, indeed, the accident resulted in no injuries. It is believed the crash occurred in the Cahuenga Pass, right around Universal City. Police are yet to say what charges have been brought against the driver(s), but you cant put a fine on over-cockiness and recklessness. Researchers at Erasmus University Medical Center in The Netherlands have explored how and why new variants of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), have exhibited heightened infectivity. Study: Experimental evidence for enhanced receptor binding by rapidly spreading SARS-CoV-2 variants . Image Credit: Design_Cells / Shutterstock They suggest that increased viral transmissibility in SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern is because of greater binding of the viral spike protein to the human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (hACE2) receptor of host cells. The B.1.1.7 variant was initially detected in the United Kingdom and has grown to be the most prevalent strain after just a few months. It has a spike protein mutation called N501Y that is linked to higher infection rates and severe infection. Another variant with similar features, B.1.351, arose in South Africa and has three genetic mutations on the spike protein receptor-binding domain N501Y, E484K, and K417N that can have exhibited greater resistance to immune responses than previous strains. There are also concerns about an emerging double mutant E484K/N501Y. Here we report experimental evidence for the changes in receptor binding affinities due to individual and different combinations of these RBD mutations, wrote the researchers. Taken together, our results show that receptor binding domains from rapidly spreading variants of SARS-CoV-2 bind with increased affinity to the hACE2 receptor and that this is predominantly caused by the N501Y mutation. The study Experimental evidence for enhanced receptor binding by rapidly spreading SARS-CoV2 variants is available as a preprint on the bioRxiv* server, while the article undergoes peer review. Variant mutations cause molecular changes on receptor binding domain The researchers report that mutations in the receptor-binding domain of B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 change how the virus interacts with the human ACE2 receptors. Mutations in the variants affect molecular interactions in the receptor-binding domain. Asparagine 501 typically makes a single hydrogen bond across human ACE2 tyrosine 41. However, this was not observed with the new variants. Instead, tyrosine 501 creates a hydrogen bond with human ACE2 lysine 353. The receptor-binding domain Y501 can pull hACE2 Y41 closer through favorable van der Waals interactions. The new variant mutation E484K avoids unfavorable energy bonds by forming an ion-pair with glutamate 35 in the human ACE2 alpha-helix structure. A mutation on the residue 484 can cause a small stabilization for binding with human ACE2 receptors. N501Y enhances binding affinity for human ACE2 receptor The team next looked at how the mutation N501Y influenced binding affinity with the human ACE2 receptor. They investigated the rate and affinity constants between different SARS-CoV-2 variants and the human ACE2 ectodomain using human cells. Results showed the N501Y variant caused a 9.1-fold increase in binding affinity for human ACE2. The change in affinity is predominantly caused by a reduction in the dissociation rate constant, indicating the N501Y spike protein remains bound to the receptor for a longer time period than wild type RBD, increasing the chance to undergo the proper conformational change and induce membrane fusion and cell entry, explained the researchers. However, the E484K mutation by itself had little change in binding affinity, showing a 1.1-fold. The K417N in B.1.351 was found to be destabilizing as it destroyed a salt-bridge between human ACE2 by replacing lysine with a shorter asparagine. This translated to a slower binding and faster dissociation. The combination of all three mutations, as present in strain B.1.351 (first identified in South Africa), results in a 3-fold less stable complex than for N501Y alone due to the effect of K417N, but still 3-fold more stable than with wild type RBD. As the K417T mutation in strain P.1 (first identified in Brazil) will likewise destroy the intramolecular salt bridge, we expect an intermediate affinity for this variant. For the emerging double mutant E484K/N501Y, the researchers found it shared a similar binding affinity to N501Ys affinity towards human ACE2. The authors suggest this finding is most likely due to E484K having almost no effect on binding affinity. Given the negligible effect of E484K on affinity, the authors suggest the P2 variant, which only carries E484K on the spike proteins receptor binding domain, was most likely successful in spreading throughout Brazil because of its ability to evade the immune system rather than an increase in viral transmission. Effects of amino acid mutations on molecular interactions and strength of the interface between hACE2 and the SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding domain. (A) Location of residues N501, E484 and K417 indicated by blue spheres at the interface of SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding domain (white cartoon representation) and the hACE2 ectodomain (orange surface representation) in 6m0j.pdb [24]. (B) Details of the interactions with RBD N501 forming a hydrogen bond with hACE2 Y41, RBD E484 forming an ion-pair with hACE2 K31, and RBD K417 forming a salt-bridge (ion-pair plus hydrogen bond) with hACE2 D30. (C) RBD Y501 creates a new hydrogen bond and stacks its aromatic ring onto hACE2 Y41. (D) Possible new ion-pair between K484 and E35 across the interface. (E) Cartoon visualizing SPR setup using Biacore T100. (F) Sensorgrams for wild type RBD (colored) with fit of a 1:1 binding model (thin black lines). (G) Sensorgrams for N501Y with fit of 1:1 binding model (thin black lines). (H) Affinity of RBD mutants relative to wild type RBD. Need for more genomic surveillance The independent evolution of lineages containing mutations with different effects on receptor binding affinity, viral transmission and immune evasion underscores the importance of global viral genome surveillance and functional characterization, concluded the researchers. The total numbers of global cases are currently over 122 million. The United States leads the world with more than 28.2 million COVID-19 cases and over 500,000 deaths. By understanding the genomic makeup of new variants, scientists can help modify vaccines that target and neutralize the new variants and adapt new vaccine strategies. Doing so can help with ongoing efforts towards herd immunity. *Important Notice bioRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Colorado Springs, CO (80903) Today Considerable cloudiness with occasional rain showers. High 56F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.. Tonight Partly cloudy. Slight chance of a rain shower. Low 42F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. X-rays are used to study the atomic and microstructure properties of matter. Such studies are conducted with special accelerator complexes called synchrotrons. A synchrotron source generates powerful electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength equal to fractions of a nanometer. Some X-rays are reflected from the atomic planes of a crystal and some go through the crystal plane that plays the role of a beam-splitter (or the so-called semitransparent mirror). If the radiation passes through monochromators-optical devices that consist of two or more ideal crystals - its optimal exit wavelength can be regulated. The parameters of electromagnetic radiation depend on the material that the optical element is made of. By improving the properties of optical devices one can increase the quality and efficiency of X-ray research methods and use modern scientific unique megascience facility to their full potential. Most modern-day X-ray optical elements are based on silicon and germanium crystals. However, they get heated under the X-ray radiation from a synchrotron source, and high temperatures cause their crystal lattice to change leading to the distortion of the reflected beam. Optical elements made of artificial diamonds provide better beam quality, as their coefficient of thermal expansion and thermal conductivity are higher than in silicon elements. However, lab-grown diamonds contain not only carbon but also nitrogen. This inconsistency creates tension in the crystal and leads to uneven distances between the atoms. The cut of a crystal mainly depends on its internal structure, and the distribution of growth sectors (the areas that are formed when layers of substance grow on top of each other) correlates with the placement of nitrogen atoms. On the borders of these growth sectors, stress fields are formed. When a crystal is grown artificially, it is extremely difficult to control nitrogen level and distribution. Therefore, historically, the quality of plates made of nitrogen-bearing diamonds had been considered low for them to be used in optical elements. A team from BFU, together with their foreign colleagues, managed to disproof this belief and to obtain plates with sufficient defectless areas. The team used BARS, a unique device for the manufacture of ultrahard materials, to grow two synthetic diamond crystals at 1,500? and under the pressure of over 50 thousand atmospheres. The obtained crystals had almost perfect atomic grids. Then, small bits were chipped off from the crystals, and thin plates were made from them. First, their quality was assessed using X-ray examination, and after that, the plates were studied using the high-resolution diffractometry method on a synchrotron source. After scanning the plates, the team obtained high-resolution rocking curves--the charts that helped them evaluate the structural perfection of the crystals. "The deflection angle of a crystal towards radiation changes depending on the energy of the incoming beam and the plane that it reflects from. This angle is called the Bragg angle. We incline a crystal at this angle, reflected radiation hits a detector, and then we start rocking it. The rocking curve that we get shows the correlation between the intensity of the reflected radiation and the deflection angle of the crystal. Then we compare the rocking curve with a pre-calculated theoretical curve of a perfect crystal," said Anatoly Snigirev, the head of the International Science and Research Center "Coherent X-ray Optics for Megascience facilities", BFU. Having analyzed the charts, the team concluded, that although the crystal plates had many imperfections along the edges, there were large clear areas in their centers that accounted for over 50% of the total plate. Given that the defects usually become visible during the cutting and polishing of diamonds, the potential use of nitrogen-bearing diamonds in X-ray optics depends on improving these processes. Diamond crystals are needed for manufacturing of different optical elements, such as monochromators, beam-splitters, interferometers, and refractive lenses. The study was carried out jointly with colleagues from the V.S. Sobolev Institute of Geology and Mineralogy SB RAS (Russia, Novosibirsk) and the German Electron Synchrotron DESY (Germany, Hamburg). We are grateful to Nataliya Klimova, a scientific consultant and a junior researcher at the International Science and Research Center "Coherent X-ray Optics for Megascience facilities", BFU, for her assistance in preparing this article. ### This image from NASAs Hubble Space Telescope shows the heart of the globular star cluster Messier 92 (M92), one of the oldest and brightest in the Milky Way. The cluster packs roughly 330,000 stars tightly together, and they orbit the center of the galaxy en masse. NASAs James Webb Space Telescope will observe M92, or a similar globular cluster, early in its mission to demonstrate its ability to distinguish the light of its individual stars in a densely packed environment. Webbs high resolution and sensitivity will provide scientists a wealth of detailed star data relevant to many areas of astronomy, including the stellar lifecycle and the evolution of the universe. Credit: NASA/ESA; Acknowledgment: Gilles Chapdelaine The combination of high resolution and infrared-detecting instruments on NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will reveal stars that are currently hidden even from the powerful Hubble Space Telescope. The wealth of additional star data will allow astronomers to investigate a range of questions, from star birth to star death to the universe's elusive expansion rate. Early observations with Webb will demonstrate its ability to distinguish the individual light of stars in the local universe in a range of environments and provide astronomers with tools for making the most of Webb's powerful capabilities. "NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have been transformative, opening the door to the infrared universe, beyond the realm of red visible light. Webb is a natural evolution of those missions, combining Spitzer's view of the infrared universe with Hubble's sensitivity and resolution," says Daniel Weisz of the University of California, Berkeley, the principal investigator on Webb's early release science (ERS) program on resolved populations of stars. Webb's ability to resolve individual stars that are shrouded behind gas and dust in visible light will be applicable to many areas of astronomical research. The goals of this ERS program are to demonstrate Webb's capabilities in the local universe and create free, open-source data analysis programs for astronomers to make the best use of the observatory as quickly as possible. Data from the ERS programs will be available to other astronomers immediately, and archived for future research via the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). Insight into Dark Energy Webb's ability to pick out details for more individual stars than we have seen before will improve distance measurements to nearby galaxies, which Weisz says will be crucial to one of the biggest mysteries of modern-day astronomy: How fast is the universe expanding? A phenomenon called dark energy seems to be driving this expansion. Various methods for calculating the expansion rate have resulted in different answers, discrepancies astronomers hope Webb's data can help reconcile. "In order to do any of this science, calculating distances and then the universe's expansion rate, we need to be able to extract the light of individual stars from Webb images," Weisz says. "Our ERS program team will develop software that empowers the community to make those types of measurements." The Stellar Lifecycle Seeing more stars will mean more insight into their lifecycle. Webb will provide new views of the full range of stages in a star's life, from formation to death. NASAs James Webb Space Telescope is designed to observe infrared lightwavelengths of light that are beyond the rainbow visible to human eyes. Infrared lights longer wavelengths provide information that other wavelengths cannot, including star formation and other processes that take place behind thick veils of dust, which block the shorter wavelengths of visible light. Webb will detect a range of infrared light that overlaps with those observed by other NASA missions, but will also cover a significant portion of the infrared spectrum that they do not. This infographic highlights Webbs overlapping and complimentary spectrum coverage with two NASA missions: the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope. Webb features a combination of Hubbles imaging power and sensitivity with Spitzers infrared coverage, and goes beyond both to provide a wealth of new infrared data on the universe that is hidden beyond visible red light. Credit: NASA and J. Olmstead (STScI) "Right now we are effectively limited to studying star formation in our own Milky Way galaxy, but with Webb's infrared capabilities we can see through the dusty cocoons that shelter forming protostars in other galaxieslike Andromeda, which is more metal-richand see how stars form in a very different environment," Weisz says. Astronomer Martha Boyer, also on this observing program team, is interested in the insights Webb will provide toward the end of the stellar lifecycle, when stars become bloated, red, and dusty. "NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope showed us that dusty, evolved stars exist even in very primitive galaxies where they weren't expected, and now with Webb we will be able to characterize them and learn how our models of the star lifecycle line up with real observations," says Boyer, an instrument scientist on Webb's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) team at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. The Early Universe via the Local Neighborhood Resolving and studying individual stars is necessary for understanding the bigger picture of how galaxies formed and function. Astronomers then can ask even bigger questions of how galaxies have evolved over time and space, from the distant, early universe to the Local Groupa collection of more than 20 nearby galaxies to which our galaxy belongs. Weisz explains that even though this observing program will be looking locally, there is evidence of the early universe to be discovered. "We will have Webb study a nearby, ultra-faint dwarf galaxy, a remnant of the first seed-galaxies to form in the universe, some of which eventually merged to form larger galaxies like the Milky Way," Weisz says. "At great distances these types of galaxies are too faint for even Webb to see directly, but small, local dwarf galaxies will show us what they were like billions of years ago." "We really need to understand the local universe in order to understand all of the universe," Boyer says. "The Local Group of galaxies are a sort of laboratory, where we can study galaxies in detailevery single component. In distant galaxies we can't resolve much detail, so we don't know exactly what's going on. A major step towards understanding distant or early galaxies is to study this collection of galaxies that are within our reach." As the Webb mission progresses, Boyer and Weisz expect that astronomers will use the tools their team develops in unexpected ways. They emphasize that developing the program was an effort of the entire local-universe astronomy community, and they plan to continue that collaboration once the data come in. Their observing program team plans to host a workshop to go over the results of the program with other astronomers and tweak the software they've developed, all with the goal of assisting members of the astronomy community in applying for time to use Webb for their research. "I think that is really importantthe idea of working together to achieve big science, as opposed to a lot of us trying to compete," Weisz says. Explore further Simulations show Webb Telescope can reveal distant galaxies hidden in quasars' glare HONG KONG The orders seemed innocuous, even obvious: Primary school students in Hong Kong should read picture books about Chinese traditions and learn about famous sites such as the Forbidden City in Beijing or the Great Wall. But the goal was only partially to nurture an interest in the past. The central aim of the new curriculum guidelines, unveiled by the Hong Kong government this month, was much more ambitious: to use those historical stories to instill in the citys youngest residents a deep-rooted affinity for mainland China and, with it, an unwavering loyalty to its leaders and their strong-arm tactics. Students, the guidelines said, should develop a sense of belonging to the country, an affection for the Chinese people, a sense of national identity, as well as an awareness of and a sense of responsibility for safeguarding national security. The Chinese government, in its efforts to quash dissent, has imposed a strict set of restrictions on Hong Kong, including new rules this week to bar any candidates deemed disloyal to the Communist Party from elected office. Police in Colorado have discovered an abandoned car belonging to a woman who has been missing since early January, after reportedly confronting her fiance and his suspected lover about their affair. Marlena Mizell, 49, a mother of three and a grandmother, was reported missing by her family on January 2. She was last seen pumping gas at the Rainbow Grocery in South Fork at around noon. Her cellphone last pinged north of Dulce, New Mexico, which is 44 miles away from the location of her last sighting. Marlena Mizell, 49, was last seen leaving a gas station in South Fork, Colorado, on the noon of January 2. Mizell is a mother of three and a grandmother Mizell's daughters said on the morning of her disappearance, their mother went to confront her fiance (left) and a woman believed to be his lover about an alleged affair Mizell's blue 2011 Ford Focus hatchback with a Texas license plate was located in the South Fork area this week This map shows the location of Mizell's last sighting in South Fork and where her phone pinged for the last time in Dulce, New Mexico Earlier this week, authorities in Colorado confirmed that they located Mizell's blue 2011 Ford Focus hatchback with a Texas license plate in the South Fork area, but as of Wednesday they have yet to recover the vehicle due to inclement weather conditions, reported Del Norte Prospector. Last week, Mizell's grown daughters, Sarah Ferguson and Megan Mizell, revealed in an interview with Tyson Draper, the host of the YouTube show Tyger True Crime, that their mother vanished a day after disseminating nude photos of her fiance's alleged lover. Megan Mizell said she last spoke to her mother on the phone at 10.16am on the morning of her disappearance, and she said it was a 'semi-normal' conversation that lasted a couple of minutes. 'But at the very end she said, "I love you, Megan," in a way that I'm not used to, so that kind of raised some concerns with me,' she recalled. Megan said the family have since learned that less than 15 minutes after Marlena got off the phone with her daughter, she allegedly went to confront her fiance and a woman named Jennifer about their affair. Mizell's phone has not been answering and there has been no activity on her bank account Megan also claimed that on that same day, Jennifer went to pick up her husband from a halfway house, which coincided with Mizell's disappearance. The owner of the Rainbow Lodge cabins where Mizell had been staying staying saw her drive away at around noon, but said her fiance stayed there for the rest of the night, waiting for her to return. A month after Mizell's disappearance, her fiance, Kurt, posted a message on Facebook that read: 'My fiance has been missing now 30 days. It been a heart breaking crisis in our family and were all praying for her safe return. I pray every day God brings Marlena back to me , and her whole family safely and soon. We havent found any trace of her car, her, or anything she left out of here with, which is very Little.' Mizell's daughters said their mother was planning to return to her native Texas at the time she went missing. In describing her mother, Megan said she would not have shied away from a physical confrontation, if provoked. On February 14, Megan Mizell, Marlena's daughter, was interviewed by YouTube host Tyson Draper about her mother's missing person case Megan Mizell and her sister, Sarah Ferguson (right), have been raising awarness of their mother's disappearance on social media Mizell's daughters said her phone has not been answering and there has been no activity on her bank account. Police have not said whether they are suspecting foul play. So far, no one has been identified as a suspect or a person of interest, and no arrests have been made. Mizell was last seen wearing a black one-piece pants jumpsuit. She has brown hair and blue eyes, high cheek bones and scars on her chin and neck. She has two tattoos: a hummingbird near her stomach and a butterfly on her ankle. Mizell takes medication daily that she is without and may require medical attention. Anyone with information on the woman's whereabouts is being asked to contact the South Fork Police Department at 719-873-1040. A coronavirus outbreak at an ex-Army barracks which is used to house asylum seekers has seen almost 200 migrants test positive for the disease so far this year. Napier Barracks in Kent has been used as 'emergency' accommodation since September last year. Reports had suggested that at least 120 residents had tested positive for Covid-19 since the facility opened. But today it emerged that there were 178 positive tests in January alone with 19 more recorded in February to date, a total of 197 since the start of the year. The site has been used to house up to 400 people with the latest statistics showing just how significant the outbreak has been. Home Secretary Priti Patel blamed the numbers on people 'mingling' and failing to adhere to coronavirus rules. But critics said the statistics showed the dormitories used at the barracks are not Covid safe amid growing calls for the Government to close the facility. It came as Tory MPs called for all Channel migrants to face the same strict hotel quarantine rules as travellers arriving from 'red list' countries amid growing fears over rising Covid infection rates in France. Currently, Channel migrants arriving in the UK are placed in isolation upon arrival for 10 days at asylum facilities to stop the spread of coronavirus. But Conservative MP Tim Loughton warned the Home Office was placing those arriving illegally in an immigration centre which is 'not geared up to deal with boat migrants'. He told The Telegraph: 'Others have been at liberty to wander as they wish. Absolutely, they need to be subject to the same regime.' Some 178 asylum seekers housed at Napier Barracks in Kent tested positive for coronavirus in January Migrants pictured arriving in Kent yesterday were detained and searched by police before being taken into custody What are the rules for entering Britain? You cannot enter the UK if you've been in or through a country on the banned travel list (known as the 'red list') in the last 10 days, unless you're British, Irish or you have the right to live in the UK You must either quarantine where you're staying or in a managed quarantine hotel for 10 days What you need to do depends on where you travel in the 10 days before you arrive - if you travel in or through a country on the banned travel list within 10 days, you must stay managed quarantine hotel; if not, you can quarantine at home You need to provide your journey and contact details in the 48 hours before you arrive in the UK. You must do this by completing the online passenger locator form You'll need to show proof that you've completed the form when you arrive at the UK border as well as proof of a negative PCR or antigen test taken three days before departure You could be fined 500 when you arrive at the border if you cannot provide proof that you have had a negative coronavirus test You do not need a test if you're travelling within the UK, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey; from Ireland; from Ascension, Falkland Islands or St Helena; and children under 11 do not need a test After arriving at a quarantine hotel you will be tested on days two and eight of your stay using a PCR test self-administered in your room In Scotland, arrivals from all international destinations have to quarantine, even if they are not on the red list. Advertisement The Government has faced sustained criticism for using Napier Barracks to house asylum seekers. Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, today revealed the scale of the coronavirus outbreak at the facility. He told the Home Affairs Select Committee: 'I now have the numbers, so with apologies for not having them earlier, so in total in January there are 178 positive tests and 19 in February, leading to a total of 197 between the start of January and now.' Yvette Cooper, the Labour chairman of the committee, replied: 'Oh my god. You had 178 cases at a centre which had dormitory accommodation of over 20 people in those dormitories. 'Well that looks like pretty clear evidence to me that those dormitories were not Covid safe if you managed to generate within them 178 Covid positive cases. 'Presumably that will have affected staff who live in the local community as well. On what planet did you think in the middle of a Covid crisis it was safe or sensible to put over 20 people in a dormitory so they are all sleeping together in the same room with the same air overnight each night?' Mr Rycroft said the Home Office had been 'following the guidance at every stage and the guidance was to ensure there was as much space as possible, certainly at least two metres between beds and so on and we followed that guidance'. Ms Patel told the committee that the Home Office had followed advice from Public Health England 'to mitigate the risks of contracting Covid or spreading Covid'. She added: 'But at the same time chair you will recognise as well that within accommodation, contingency accommodation, initial accommodation for asylum seekers, people do mingle and people also, it is a fact when we look at what happened at Napier barracks a few weeks ago, people were also not following the rules and we also have to bear in mind that Covid, being as contagious as it is, spreads so we have spent a significant amount of time working with our stakeholders, Public Health England, Kent County Council, and obviously putting in mitigating measures to mitigate the risk while also undertaking the right kind of checks, the Covid test for moving people out of this facility as well.' It came after MPs expressed fears over the rising infection rates in France, where many migrants are setting off for the perilous journey across the Channel. Passenger from 'green list' Thailand forced to spend 1,750 on Quarantine Hotel after being 'assured by Emirates' it was fine to get connection in 'red list' Dubai A traveller returning from Thailand was forced to spend 1,750 on hotel quarantine after being given the wrong advice from his airline. Simon Kenway, from Blackpool, flew into Heathrow on Sunday evening after spending two weeks, plus a quarantine period, in Thailand. Thailand is not on the 'red list' of banned countries, so all returning passengers should quarantine at home. However, when Mr Kenway arrived in the UK he was pulled from the 'green list' queue and told he had to pay for quarantine in a hotel, because he had taken a connecting flight in Dubai - contrary to what he said Emirates had told him. Simon Kenway, from Blackpool, flew into Heathrow on Sunday evening after spending two weeks, plus a quarantine period, in Thailand Passengers who do not arrange a quarantine package prior to arrival in England face a penalty of up to 4,000, on top of the quarantine costs, meaning the airline's advice could have left Mr Kenway with a bill of thousands of pounds. Mr Kenway was first due to fly to Manchester but told he could not because the airport was not designated for quarantine. When rebooking his flight using the Emirates customer service online chat, Mr Kenway asked the representative to confirm he could quarantine at home. He said: 'After (I) arrive (in) Glasgow I go straight home for quarantine, yes?' - to which Emirates replied: 'Yes'. In a second chat, rebooking his flight, he asked again: '(I) arrive in London and go straight home for quarantine, same (as) before, correct?' - to which the online representative replied: 'Yes, same rules.' He was not told on either occasion that transiting through Dubai would require him to pay for hotel quarantine. The 34-year-old said: 'If they clearly stated I would be refused entry after transiting through Dubai, I would have paid another airline to take me home on a different route. 'It would have been a lot cheaper, less stressful and I would now be at home in quarantine.' However, when Mr Kenway arrived in the UK he was pulled from the 'green list' queue and told he had to pay for quarantine in a hotel Advertisement Dover MP Natalie Elphicke told MailOnline: 'So many personal sacrifices have been made with people across the land doing the right thing to control the virus. At this critical moment we cannot and should not take an unnecessary risk of mutant viruses coming in to the country, by whatever means, and undoing that hard work and national sacrifice. 'When people break into the country through the illegal routes like the Channel small boat crossings, we have no idea which countries have been travelled through and who they have been in contact with, from what countries, before the illegal crossing is made. 'People trafficking and illegal immigration is an international criminal activity across many borders. 'So it is only right and entirely sensible to manage that risk robustly and to require all illegal entrants to undergo the same strict quarantine requirements as for other, legal route, visitors from high risk countries.' France reported 24,116 new infections on Friday, an increase of nearly 4,000 on the previous Friday. The seven-day average of new infections rose above 19,000 per day after falling to about 18,300 a week ago. France also reported 571 new deaths from the virus, taking the cumulative death toll to nearly 84,000. Meanwhile, the EU-backed vaccine roll-out continues to crawl forward after it was announced last week that Pfizer had failed to deliver 10 million Covid jabs to the EU that were due in December in the latest blow to the bloc's supply following its row with the UK over AstraZeneca. In a clampdown introduced this month, travellers arriving from 'red list' destinations are forced to spend 10 days in quarantine at a Government-designated hotel before they are permitted to return to their home in the UK. It costs the travellers up to 1,750 each for a 'quarantine package', although the Government is paying the upfront cost and will bill them afterwards. It affects British arrivals from 33 countries deemed high risk because of the prevalence of nw coronavirus variants. Nationals of those countries are already refused entry to the UK and most direct flights have already been banned. The countries include all of South America, large parts of Africa - including South Africa - and the United Arab Emirates. Those in hotel quarantine must remain in their rooms, have meals and laundry placed outside their door, and can only leave to exercise or smoke under the supervision of security guards. The Home Office said all migrants arriving in the UK are placed in isolation upon arrival for 10 days and anyone who is symptomatic is taken to designated accommodation and tested. But Mr Loughton, MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, told The Telegraph: 'The Home Office needs to apply at least the same quarantine restrictions as they do for people from red-list countries, not least because of the infection rate in northern France. 'That's not happening. They have been sending them to Brooke House [Removal Centre near Gatwick] as well which is not geared up to deal with boat migrants.' A Home Office spokesperson said: 'Since the start of the year, through the joint operational and intelligence deployment shared by our two countries, the French authorities have prevented 70 per cent of attempted Channel crossings. 'The Government continues to undertake substantial measures to tackle this unacceptable problem of illegal migration. 'In January we introduced new rules which mean we can treat asylum claims as inadmissible if they have travelled through safe countries to get to the UK. 'Criminals are exploiting migrants for profit and are selling false dreams of life in the UK. That is why we are pursuing the facilitators behind these crossings, returning migrants who have no right to stay in the UK to safe countries and continuing to do everything we can to make this route unviable.' Yesterday, a group of around 20 migrants landed in a dinghy on a Kent beach on one of the busiest days for Border Force so far this year. Footage shows the group landing in a small boat before abandoning their life jackets and running towards the town of Walmer Footage taken at 7.30am showed the group landing in a small boat before abandoning their life jackets and running towards the town of Walmer, near Dover. The migrants - believed to be Vietnamese - split into groups that went in different directions before they were caught by police at around 8.30am, an onlooker said. Others were intercepted while making the treacherous 21-mile journey across the busiest shipping route in the world and brought into Dover Marina by Border Force. A large black rigid hulled inflatable boat was seen being towed in shortly afterwards. Monday saw a total of 49 arrivals. The Home Office said four boats were intercepted while French authorities prevented 126 people in eight incidents. It was the first time any migrants had made the dangerous crossing in a fortnight after being put off by dangerous conditions at sea caused by Storm Darcy. And it equalled the busiest day of crossings of the month so far which came on February 6 when 49 migrants also arrived. Many of the migrants on Monday appeared to be men of African origin with one young teenage boy spotted among the groups. Numbers yesterday are expected to exceed Monday's total of 49 arrivals. Pictured are the group being searched in Walmer The boat heading towards the shoreline shortly before those on board got off at Walmer beach Migrants being brought into Dover Marina on the back of a Border Force vessel last night Women were among those on board who were helped out onto the mooring and escorted up the gangway for processing February has seen 111 people successfully cross the Channel to the UK in eight boats so far. A total of 223 asylum seekers arrived last month in 15 boats. A record 8,410 migrants made the dangerous journey in 2020. Minister for Immigration Compliance and the Courts Chris Philp said in a statement on Monday night: 'Since the start of the year, through the joint operational and intelligence deployment shared by our two countries, the French authorities have prevented more than 70 per cent of attempted Channel crossings. 'Overnight a further 126 migrants were stopped from crossing from France to the UK. 'The Government continues to undertake substantial measures to tackle this unacceptable problem of illegal migration. 'In January we introduced new rules which mean we can treat asylum claims as inadmissible if they have travelled through safe countries to get to the UK. 'Criminals are exploiting migrants for profit and are selling false dreams of life in the UK. 'That is why we are pursuing the facilitators behind these crossings, returning migrants who have no right to stay in the UK to safe countries and continuing to do everything we can to make this route unviable.' NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AT&T Business continues its collaboration with Small Business Expo as the headlining sponsor for 2021. The Small Business Expo is America's biggest networking and educational event for small business owners and entrepreneurs. Visit the AT&T Business Exhibitor Booth at an upcoming Virtual Small Business Expo. Small Businesses have a number of ways to network and build their business network at the Virtual Small Business Expo, presented by AT&T Business. According to Zachary Lezberg, Founder and CEO, "We are incredibly excited to have AT&T Business return to work with us for a second year. Their National Presenting Sponsorship will once again be for our virtual expos but we WILL be returning to live events beginning August 25th in Chicago. AT&T Business has been an incredible champion of the small business community and we are very excited to have them on board again to help us execute these events and have the opportunity to showcase the amazing products they offer to small businesses." The AT&T National Presenting Sponsorship of Small Business Expo will include the following show dates: San Antonio - January 28 - Orange County February 11 National February 18 Charlotte March 4 National March 25 National May 6 St. Louis May 20 Nashville May 27 National June 17 Indianapolis June 22 Detroit July 8 Cleveland July 15 National August 5 National November 19 "At AT&T Business, we are here to help small businesses in a big way. They are our friends and our neighbors, and we are honored to support them through this ever-evolving business landscape with the resources and technology they need to succeed," said Stacey Marx, President, AT&T National Business & Channels. "By continuing our collaboration with Small Business Expo, we'll have even more opportunities to innovate and celebrate with these awesome champions in our community." In addition to networking, participants are invited to attend workshops which cover a wealth of business-critical strategies including sales and marketing, finance, SEO, social media, business planning and growth and much more. To register for a Small Business Expo event which is free to attend visit TheSmallBusinessExpo.com. About Small Business Expo Founded in 2008, SBE is America's biggest business networking event which targets companies with under 500 employees. SBE helps small businesses take their businesses and ideas to the next level, offering quality free content and providing a thriving venue for some of the most exciting business theories and innovations. MEDIA CONTACT: Jane Coloccia JC Communications 917-930-0062 [email protected] SOURCE Small Business Expo Related Links http://www.thesmallbusinessexpo.com Advertisement A frustrated hotel quarantine guest has protested against the scheme with a series of home-made signs reading 'HM Prison Heathrow' and 'What a way to spend your birthday' and 'Next time I'm coming home in a dinghy via Dover'. The unnamed man, who is staying at the Renaissance London hotel near Heathrow, showed off the posters today in the latest sign of growing rebelliousness among people who are angry about being cooped up for 10 days at a cost of 1,750 each. Dozens more guests were seen arriving at the site today - two days after police were called to a protest at the nearby Radisson Blu. More than 100 people a day are going into quarantine hotels, MPs heard today. It comes as a fire crew were called to the Novotel quarantine hotel at Heathrow after the fire alarm went off. The incident was a false alarm. The man, who is staying at the Renaissance London hotel near Heathrow airport, showed off the posters today through his window today The protest (pictured) is the latest sign of growing rebelliousness among guests who are angry about being cooped up for 10 days at a cost of 1,750 each A woman exercises in the hotel car park at the Radisson Blu Edwardian Heathrow. The testing centre pictured is for private clients - not for people quarantining, MailOnline understands Joggers in the Radisson Blue car park. Quarantining guests are allowed a brief period of exercise within the hotel grounds once a day A pigeon flies past a hotel room where a guest has put up a light-hearted sign reading 'I love isolation, wife's at home' Dozens more guests were seen arriving at the site today - two days after police were called to a protest at the nearby Radisson Blu What are the rules for entering Britain? You cannot enter the UK if you've been in or through a country on the banned travel list (known as the 'red list') in the last 10 days, unless you're British, Irish or you have the right to live in the UK You must either quarantine where you're staying or in a managed quarantine hotel for 10 days What you need to do depends on where you travel in the 10 days before you arrive - if you travel in or through a country on the banned travel list within 10 days, you must stay managed quarantine hotel; if not, you can quarantine at home You need to provide your journey and contact details in the 48 hours before you arrive in the UK. You must do this by completing the online passenger locator form You'll need to show proof that you've completed the form when you arrive at the UK border as well as proof of a negative PCR or antigen test taken three days before departure You could be fined 500 when you arrive at the border if you cannot provide proof that you have had a negative coronavirus test You do not need a test if you're travelling within the UK, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey; from Ireland; from Ascension, Falkland Islands or St Helena; and children under 11 do not need a test After arriving at a quarantine hotel you will be tested on days two and eight of your stay using a PCR test self-administered in your room In Scotland, arrivals from all international destinations have to quarantine, even if they are not on the red list. Advertisement The Radisson incident on Monday saw international travellers staging a peaceful protest in the car park when they were ordered back inside at the end of their 15 minute cigarette or fresh air breaks. In the footage police can be seen talking to the disgruntled guests, who are having to isolate for ten days after returning to Britain from one of 33 red list countries. One of those involved in the confrontation, businessman Wayne Kelly, told MailOnline: 'It was a beautiful and sunny day and people were fed up. 'We are already riled at being banged up in hotel rooms for very little reason and then the security guys started annoying us by forcing us back to our rooms.' Mr Kelly, 37, who works in real estate and is from Birmingham, added: 'People were out for some fresh air or a cigarette. 'To go out into the back yard, we already have to phone down and be escorted down by a security guard and then back up to the room again. 'When I got down there to have a cigarette, the atmosphere had got a bit heavy as some of the guys were not going to their rooms and saying they were being treated like prisoners. 'So I joined in and stayed out. It was all a bit ridiculous. But people are fed up of this. 'Our human rights are being abused. We should be allowed out 24/7 to get some air, especially when it is a lovely day.' Another protester added: 'Some of us are beginning to lose our nerve. I don't like being caged up when all I did was fly into my country and then find myself in this place with no choice.' Mr Kelly said the police chatted to them and the security officials and left soon after without any further action. 'The cops realised there had been no trouble and left. 'Once they had gone, we decided to go to our rooms as we had made our point. 'We have set up a group chat and there are 20 people in it and we had messages that they were only going to allow us out of the rooms for 30 minutes a day in two 15-minute breaks. That hasn't improved the atmosphere.' Travellers arriving in the UK from 33 red list countries are being charged 1,750 each to quarantine in a hotel for ten days. The first passengers arrived on Monday February 15 and they will be allowed to return home on Thursday. Arrivals who lie about where they have been - and their possible exposure to new Covid variants - could be jailed for a maximum of 10 years. And if they leave their hotel before the end of quarantine they could be fined up to 10,000. Both Scotland Yard and Radisson Hotels have been contacted for comment. Residents at the nearby Radisson Blu Heathrow hotel using their brief moments outside to stretch before going back to their rooms People arrive at the Renaissance London Heathrow Hotel, near Heathrow Airport, London, a Government-designated quarantine hotel being used for travellers to stay during a 10-day quarantine after returning to England from one of 33 'red list' countries A fire crew were called to the Novotel quarantine hotel at Heathrow after the fire alarm went off. The incident was a false alarm A food delivery worker arrives by scooter at the Renaissance London Heathrow Hotel, where guests have food brought to their rooms Travel agent Anthony Pium,30, of Leyton, East London, said: 'There was a stand-off between us and the security people. 'They wanted me to come inside after 15 minutes, but I stayed for nearly two hours. I kept telling them I was a hotel guest and not an inmate. 'The police were fine and chatted to us quite nicely and I appreciated that. 'People are getting more and more angry as the days go by. We need to be allowed home now.' Police officers were called to the Radisson Blu hotel at Heathrow on Sunday when guests having to isolate there for ten days after visiting red list countries refused to go to their rooms After being confronted by officers, the guests agreed to return to the hotel, having 'made their point' over their unhappiness at being cooped up at the hotel on a fine Spring day in London ANN ARBOR, MI Facing a pandemic-induced budget crunch, Ann Arbor officials are taking a close look at city expenses. They shifted attention this week to the citys future retiree health care and pension liabilities, which were over $200 million underfunded at the end of the last fiscal year last June, according to a new actuarial report. The citys actuarial consultants from Gabriel, Roeder, Smith and Co. gave a presentation on the ups and downs of the citys retirement system during a City Council budget work session Monday night, Feb. 22. The city had over 1,100 retirees or beneficiaries with annual allowances of $39 million as of last June, the report shows. Thats on top of 725 active city employees with annual pay of over $56 million. While the citys pension system had $520 million in assets, it had $614 million in longterm liabilities, meaning it was $94 million underfunded, the consultants told council. Meanwhile, the retiree health care fund had $199 million in assets and $306 million in longterm liabilities, leaving it $107 million underfunded, according to the report. An actuarial summary of Ann Arbor's longterm liabilities for city employee pensions and retiree health care, compared with current assets, showing over $200 million in unfunded future obligations.Gabriel, Roeder, Smith and Co. In both cases, liabilities went up more than assets last fiscal year, the consultants said, though they noted investment markets have since seen upward bumps. To get by financially as city revenues were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic this past year, the city suspended supplemental payments to the pension and retiree health care funds, making only minimum required payments. Looking ahead to the next budget year, City Administrator Tom Crawford has predicted a multimillion-dollar shortfall in the citys general fund. He told council in December the city could be looking at a $500,000 increase in pension costs and a $500,000 increase for retiree health care benefits, plus another $700,000 increase for medical insurance. Ann Arbor is still in relatively good shape and doing better than many other cities when it comes to managing retiree costs, though, the consultants told council this week. The funded ratio for Ann Arbors pension liabilities falls in the middle compared to other cites and counties in Michigan, and Ann Arbor is ahead of many local governments in funding retiree health care liabilities, the consultants said. About 22% of communities have no funds set aside for those future health care obligations and are paying as they go, while the average funded ratio is 36%, the consultants said. Over the last six years, the funded ratio for Ann Arbors future pension liabilities hovered between 84% and 88% (85% last June), while the funded ratio for future retiree health care liabilities ranged between 48% and 67% (65% last June). Its now estimated the city will contribute over $16 million to the pension system next fiscal year, and $13 million to the retiree health care trust. Both funds are projected to be fully funded by 2041 and 2036, respectively. Council Member Erica Briggs, D-5th Ward, asked Crawford if theres a point on the horizon when pension costs will put a particularly difficult strain on the general fund budget, which is used to fund police, fire and other city services. I would say its very challenging now, Crawford said, adding significant contributions need to be made until future liabilities are 100% funded, after which costs will be more moderate. About two-thirds of the $16 million for pensions comes from the general fund, while the rest comes from other city funds, Crawford said. MORE FROM THE ANN ARBOR NEWS: $5.1M from new Ann Arbor affordable housing tax could go toward downtown high-rise Ann Arbor may trim police and fire budgets while putting millions extra toward climate change 10,000 gallons of sewage spill on Ann Arbors Main Street Should police respond to mental health emergencies? Ann Arbor exploring alternatives How they voted: Ann Arbor City Council vote breakdown for February 2021 New Delhi: The government is ready to resume talks with protesting farmers if they respond to its offer to put the three contentious farm laws on hold for one-and-a-half year and work out the difference during that time through a joint committee, Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar said on Wednesday. Speaking on the sidelines of an event here, Tomar said the government is committed towards the interest of farmers and agriculture, and under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it is making efforts to double farmers' income and strengthen the Indian agriculture sector. Narendra Singh TomarThe minister was replying to a query on Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader Rakesh Tikait threatening to march to the Parliament on 40 lakh tractors if laws are not repealed. Whether the government is making any effort to resume talks with unions, Tomar said, "Bharat sarkar kisano se puri samvedana ke saath charcha karti rahi hai. Aaj bhi jab unka koi mat aayega, toh Bharat sarkar hamesha kisano ke saath charcha karne ko taiyaar hai (The government has been holding discussions with farmers sympathetically. Even today, whenever their response comes, the government is always ready to hold talks)." Farmers' protest In the 11th round of talks held on January 22, the government's negotiations with 41 farmer groups hit a roadblock as the unions squarely rejected the Centre's proposal to put three contentious laws on hold and form joint committee to find solutions. Lawyer Samuel Abu Jinapor, Minister-designate for Lands and Natural Resources, has called for the establishment of a Salt Development Authority in Ghana. He appeared before Parliament's Appointments Committee on Wednesday, February 24, 2021 where he was grilled by the members. A question on the exploitation of natural resources was posed to the Minister-designate and in response, he made reference to the importance of salt development in Ghana. According to lawyer Jinapor, salt is a very significant commodity that must be exploited to enhance Ghana's economic growth. ''The full value chain of salt has to be established here in Ghana. Mr. Chairman, for instance, you cannot build an integrated aluminium industry without salt. You cannot build the integrated iron and steel industry in Ghana without salt. The petrochemical industry cannot actually thrive without salt. So, salt is extremely important'', he said. He highlighted the duty of the Salt Development Authority stressing its mandate will be to build the salt value chain in the country. ''I think that it's gotten to a time where we probably should consider the establishment of a Salt Development Authority in Ghana whose mandate will be responsible for building the full value chain of salt in Ghana...I believe if we get this Authority in place where we can have a refinery for salt and a terminal for salt, it will help a great deal.'' 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. Featured Video Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Hubilo , the global virtual and hybrid events platform, has announced a $23.5 Million Series A investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital, alongside several industry experts and luminaries, including John Thompson, Chairman of the Board at Microsoft, and Chris Schagen, Former CMO at Contentful. This funding comes just months after Hubilo's $4.5 Million Seed round in November 2020. It is a reflection of the exponential growth in Hubilo's business and investor belief in Hubilo's vision for a category that represents the largest fraction of marketing budgets globally. Exactly a year ago, Hubilo witnessed its revenue as a successful in-person events company collapsing as the pandemic took hold. Hubilo rose to the challenge by doubling down on its virtual events platform, adding hundreds of features in less than a month to support the needs of the largest and most demanding conferences in the world. Customers responded very positively, citing the ease of use, expansive feature set, and white-glove support for why they selected Hubilo. As a result, Hubilo has emerged as one of the leading platforms serving the high-end of the virtual events and trade show market, growing its month over month revenue by over 50% consistently since enrolling the first customer for its virtual events platform in April 2020. CMOs widely acknowledge that Covid-19 has permanently disrupted the event landscape. Virtual events are a key part of how businesses connect with their customers, attracting a far broader set of attendees and speakers than physical events. There's also an increased sense of urgency around ensuring that physical events become hybrid with a digital overlay that brings the benefits of virtual events to the physical world. These two trends are resulting in a rapid shift of 10s of billions of dollars to virtual event platform providers. Hubilo is at the forefront of this transition and plans to build on its momentum by expanding its sales teams globally, with new offices in San Francisco and London and a rapid build-out of its sales, marketing and customer success teams out of those offices. The Series A funding will also help accelerate the development of Hubilo's platform, with an increased focus on enabling businesses to develop authentic connections with their customers, developing stronger long-term relationships. In the next few months, Hubilo plans on rolling out several features that will enable stronger attendee engagement and new monetization opportunities for organizers. So far, Hubilo has already hosted more than a million attendees on its platform - without the all too common "Zoom fatigue." Organizers see increased attendee engagement through built-in networking features including meeting tables, private rooms, meeting schedules, and gamification features, such as leaderboards. Organizers also love the one-click integration with existing go to market platforms, including HubSpot, SalesForce and Marketo, enabling them to demonstrate ROI through event data integrated with their existing workflows. These integrations ensure Hubilo's data-driven insights can help marketing and sales teams be more effective in connecting with their customers. "We've experienced remarkable growth over the last few months thanks to our vision of placing experience and intelligence at the forefront of virtual events," said Vaibhav Jain, Founder and CEO, Hubilo. "Our strategy, product features and platform intelligence are expanding the possibilities of what is achievable in the events space, and we're continually delivering greater value for event organizers, sponsors and other stakeholders. We're excited to welcome our investors onboard as we begin this next phase of global expansion." Guru Chahal, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, added, "Events are undergoing a massive secular shift in two ways; a dramatic increase in virtual events, and the rapid evolution of physical events to hybrid events, resulting in billions of dollars of marketing budgets getting reallocated to a new category of digital platforms. In our research, some of the most demanding customers worldwide made it clear that Hubilo was their trusted partner in both these categories, virtual and hybrid. We are delighted to lead Hubilo's Series A funding and use Lightspeed's global resources to support their exponential growth." In March 2021, over 4000 marketing professionals, 40 CMOs and 400 event industry professionals from around the world will come together for Hubilo's two-day Restart 2021 virtual event to build a more vital collective understanding of the power of experiential digital events and their benefits. About Hubilo : Virtual and hybrid event technology company Hubilo is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies today, globally. Hubilo has witnessed a revenue growth rate of over 10,000% in less than a year and has raised a seed round of $4.5 million and a Series 'A' round of $23.5 million from leading Venture Capital firms like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital, and several renowned angel investors. Hubilo is headquartered out of San Francisco in the US; with offices in London in the UK and Bengaluru in India with clients in the United States, Europe, APAC, Middle East and Africa. Hubilo's customers include names like United Nations, Roche, Informa Markets, Tech in Asia, Fortune, AWS, Siemens, Cognizant, Veritas Technologies, GITEX and several others. Led by Founders Vaibhav Jain and Mayank Agarwal, Hubilo is building out the world's most comprehensive digital platform to help businesses strengthen their relationships with their customers and partners through virtual and hybrid events. About Lightspeed Venture Partners : Lightspeed is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise, Consumer, and Health sectors. Since 2000, Lightspeed has backed entrepreneurs and helped build companies of tomorrow, including Snap, Affirm, AppDynamics, OYO, Nutanix, Byju's, and Udaan. Lightspeed and its affiliates currently manage more than $10 Billion across the global Lightspeed platform, with investment professionals and advisors in India, Silicon Valley, Israel, China, Southeast Asia and Europe. SOURCE Hubilo HISTORY People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia Grace Karskens Allen & Unwin, $39.99 Dyarubbin, an ancient river in New South Wales that early settlers mistakenly thought was two waterways what they called the Hawkesbury and the Nepean hosts one of the longest and most complex human histories on the continent. Likely the oldest artefact found on the east coast of Australia is a cobble chopper now housed at the University of Sydneys museum. Made from river stone, it dates back 50,000 years, demonstrating that Aboriginal people have lived alongside this river system since well before the last Ice Age. The river itself is older than the world heritage-listed Blue Mountains. More than 200 million years ago, this river flowed through Gondwanaland from a mountain range that is now in Antarctica. Aboriginal carvings seen by the Hawkesbury River. Credit:Rick Stevens The pre-colonial Aboriginal history of the river is a dynamic one, broadly outlined in an early chapter of Grace Karskens People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia. But her focus is on the period from the late-18th through the mid-19th centuries. Examining the arrival of white settlers, called emancipist farmers by Karskens this story of settlement is part of convict history, she insists the book describes in painstaking detail their misunderstandings of but also surprising commonalities with the Indigenous peoples of Dyarubbin, and how both peoples, white and black, were transformed through interaction. Prosecutors have dropped drink-driving and reckless-driving charges against Bruce Springsteen stemming from an incident in November, admitting that the rockers blood-alcohol level was so low that it didnt warrant the charges. Springsteen pleaded guilty to a third charge, consuming alcohol in a closed area, meaning the Gateway National Recreation Area. Better known as Sandy Hook, it is an Atlantic Ocean peninsula with views of the New York City skyline. Bruce Springsteen told the court hed had two small shots of tequila when a park officer stopped him. Credit:AP Facing a judge and more than 100 onlookers in a video conference on Wednesday (Thursdy AEDT), Springsteen sat next to lawyer Mitchell Ansell and admitted he was aware it was illegal to consume alcohol at the park. I had two small shots of tequila, Springsteen said in response to questions from an assistant US attorney. Pipeline 24 February 2021 Nobu Hospitality, the global lifestyle brand founded by Nobu Matsuhisa, Robert De Niro and Meir Teper, is delighted to announce its continuing global expansion into the "Gate to the World," Hamburg, Germany. The Nobu Hotel and Restaurant will be located within the Elbtower, a project by SIGNA Real Estate, one of Europe's leading property companies. The Elbtower will be a mixed-use development destination encompassing premium office space and the Nobu Hotel and Restaurant set within the tallest high-rise in the city. Rising 245m and 64 stories over the River Elbe, the Elbtower is designed by celebrated architectural firm, David Chipperfield Architects, and will complete the city's silhouette with its striking and curved facade. Forming a designed counterpoint to the famed Elbphilharmonie concert hall and serving as an entrance marker to the prestigious HafenCity district. The Elbtower will house the Nobu Hotel and Restaurant, the tower itself will be comprised of flexibly designed office spaces with unparalleled views of the city and beyond. The ground floors, with their innovative layouts, will form the hub of the Elbtower community and play a significant role in positioning the Elbtower as the most attractive place to work, sleep, eat and drink, shop and socialise in Hamburg. The offering will comprise of a variety of retail shops, restaurants, and co-working spaces. The Elbtower will add to The SIGNA Group's portfolio of exclusive real estate properties in prime city locations around Europe. The Nobu Hotel Elbtower Hamburg will offer 191 spaciously designed guest rooms and suites, a 200-seat Nobu restaurant, a stylish terrace bar and lounge with views of the River Elbe, and a state-of-the-art fitness and wellness facility. In addition to the restaurant and private dining rooms, the hotel will offer sophisticated event space for corporate and social gatherings as well as an outdoor terrace. Another highlight will be a Nobu private members club for the local community where members will benefit from a private lounge with a food and beverage offering, access to the hotel's fitness and wellness facility as well as exclusive members only events. Nobu is one of the world's most celebrated luxury hospitality brands renowned for its award-winning "new style" Japanese cuisine and exceptional hotel offerings in the world's most desirable locales, with heartfelt service, energized public spaces and instinctive design. Recognition honors companies who prioritize values-based decisions within their business and their overall commitment to integrity. BANGKOK, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Charoen Pokphand Group Company Limited, or C.P. Group, a Thai-Based conglomerate, has been recognized as one of the 2021 World's Most Ethical Companies by Ethisphere, an organization that measures and advances the standards of ethical business practices. C.P. Group has been recognized for the first time, and is one of 7 honorees in the Food, Beverage & Agriculture industry. There are 135 companies honoured this year, with awardees panning 22 countries and 47 industries. C.P. Group's businesses have prioritized the implementation of the Group's Corporate Governance Principles, in an effort to ensure that the Group's operations in every jurisdiction meet the highest levels of integrity and uphold the highest degree of accountability and transparency. These principles aim to empower the Group and its employees to deliver long-term value for all stakeholders for sustainable business growth and to be a responsible corporate citizen in every country the Group operates in. "Integrity has been embedded into our DNA and is the foundation for our ethics since we were founded 100 years ago," said Suphachai Chearavanont, CEO of Charoen Pokphand Group. "Being recognized as one of the World's Most Ethical Companies is a true honour, we're still on a journey and I am greatly appreciative of the collective efforts of all our employees." "While addressing the tough challenges of 2020, we saw companies lead - above all other institutions - on earning the trust of stakeholders through resilience and a commitment to ethics and integrity," said Ethisphere CEO, Timothy Erblich. "The World's Most Ethical Companies honorees continue to demonstrate an unwavering commitment to the highest values and positively impacting the communities they serve. Congratulations to everyone at Charoen Pokphand Group Company Limited for earning the World's Most Ethical Companies designation." Methodology & Scoring Grounded in Ethisphere's proprietary Ethics Quotient, the World's Most Ethical Companies assessment process includes more than 200 questions on culture, environmental and social practices, ethics and compliance activities, governance, diversity and initiatives to support a strong value chain. The process serves as an operating framework to capture and codify the leading practices of organizations across industries and around the globe. This year, the process was streamlined and question set expanded to gauge how applicants are adapting and responding to the global health pandemic, environmental, social, and governance factors, safety, equity, and inclusion and social justice. Honorees The full list of the 2021 World's Most Ethical Companies can be found at https://worldsmostethicalcompanies.com/honorees. About Company Charoen Pokphand Group Co., Ltd. serves as a parent company of C.P. Group. As a holding company, Charoen Pokphand Group Co., Ltd. holds shares of subsidiaries in Thailand and overseas. The Group operates across many industries ranging from industrial to service sectors, which are categorized into 8 Business Lines covering 14 Business Groups. Currently, the Group has investments in 21 countries and economies. About the Ethisphere Institute The Ethisphere Institute is the global leader in defining and advancing the standards of ethical business practices that fuel corporate character, marketplace trust and business success. Ethisphere has deep expertise in measuring and defining core ethics standards using data-driven insights that help companies enhance corporate character and measure and improve culture. Ethisphere honors superior achievement through its World's Most Ethical Companies recognition program and provides a community of industry experts with the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (BELA). More information about Ethisphere can be found at: https://ethisphere.com. Media Contacts Charoen Pokphand Group Media Contact Mr. Viranon Futrakul +662-858-6286 prcpgroup@cp.co.th Ethisphere Media Contact Clea Nabozny clea.nabozny@ethisphere.com Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1443719/CP_Group_Logo.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1443720/Ethisphere_Logo.jpg Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 19:23:16|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- China on Wednesday expressed firm opposition to British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab's remarks on Xinjiang at the 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), saying those words are obviously driven by "ulterior motives." Raab has called for UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet or another independent expert to be given "urgent and unfettered access" to Xinjiang and said that there should be a resolution at the council to this effect. "Britain's so-called remarks on passing a resolution are obviously driven by ulterior motives aimed at misleading the public, smearing China and undermining the cooperation between China and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a regular press conference. "We are firmly opposed to that," he said. "Britain's little trick cannot cheat the international community." Enditem HERZOGENAURACH (dpa-AFX) - German sportswear firm Puma SE (PMMAF.PK) reported Wednesday that its fourth-quarter net earnings increased 38.8 percent to 24.7 million euros from 17.8 million euros last year. Earnings per share were up to 0.16 euro from 0.12 euro last year. Operating result or EBIT improved 14.6 percent to 63 million euros. Gross profit margin improved to 48.0 percent from last year's 47.3 percent, mainly due to better sell-through, less promotional activity and good inventory management. Sales increased 2.8 percent on a reported basis and 9.1 percent at currency adjusted basis to 1.52 billion euros, despite COVID-19 related lockdown measures. Further, the company will propose a dividend of 0.16 euro per share for 2020 at the Annual General Meeting. Looking ahead, Chief Executive Officer said, 'The pandemic is unfortunately still here and impacting our business. We do expect the negative impact to continue through the first and parts of the second quarter, but expect to see an improvement in the second half of the year. I am convinced that 2021 will be a better year for us than 2020.' 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. COLUMBIA With an increase in online shopping amid a historic pandemic, more packages are being swiped even in broad daylight with cameras around from driveways, stoops and curbs by thieves. But several South Carolina lawmakers are looking to punish those crooks, hoping the state becomes the latest to enact porch piracy legislation that would make the act subject to stiffer prison time. People need to know that this type of conduct is not going to be tolerated, and as our economy continues to develop where were doing less and less brick-and-mortar shopping, that type of activity needs to be protected, state Rep. Cezar McKnight, D-Kingstree, told a House Judiciary subcommittee on Feb. 24. This is not just an issue around Christmas time. This happens far more than you would believe. Hes lead sponsor of the Defense Against Porch Pirates Act, which would create a new felony penalty for people convicted of such thefts. Initially seeking a mandatory minimum of five years in prison and fines of $5,000, McKnight said he was willing to amend the proposal, giving judges and prosecutors more flexibility in determining how a person should be punished. When we pass laws, there are going to be instances beyond our wildest imagination and we are elected solicitors to make those decisions, state Rep. Seth Rose, D-Columbia, said. Lawmakers adjourned debate on the issue to work out details of that language, but indicated early support for crafting some of kind statute that would protect victims of package theft. Union resident George Cleveland agreed that changes were needed. Typically, folks who go on peoples porches and steal packages are hooked on some kind of drug, he told lawmakers. "I'm not talking waive the punishment, I'm not talking away the restitution, but I think we need to have some kind of rehabilitative mechanism, as well. Under current law, package theft falls under the broader crime of petit larceny the same charge for shoplifting or writing a bad check as long as the goods stolen are worth less than $2,000. The maximum penalty for the misdemeanor is 30 days in prison and a $1,000 fine. Officials say package theft will become an even greater problem as consumer habits change in the age of coronavirus. Internet shopping rates are spiking, which means larger inventories. People living in rural areas that are far from major retailers are also susceptible given their isolated location. Between March and mid-April, e-commerce spending leapt by 30 percent compared to the same rate in 2019 as retail sales dipped by almost 9 percent, according to Rakuten Intelligence. McKnight said many people also get medications delivered to their homes, such as his father did. I believe the sanctity of someones home is sacred, and that extends to its peripherals. The front porch, the back porch, McKnight said. Palmetto State residents arent as afflicted by the problem as others, a recent analysis by Arkansas-based U.S. Packaging and Wrapping found. South Carolina ranked 49th nationally in package thefts per 100,000 people at a rate of 1.84 in 2019, the company found. And a survey by market insights firm C+R Research found that of 2,000 people nationwide, more than a third reported having a package stolen at least once within the last year, with an average replacement cost of $109. State Rep. Jeff Johnson, R-Conway and subcommittee chairman, said he was optimistic McKnights measure would advance once amendments are added. Biss had the broadest name recognition, having served in the Illinois House of Representatives for two years before being elected to the state Senate in 2012. He served six years before losing to Gov. J.B. Pritzker in a primary race for Illinois governor in 2018. Last March, Khaled Drareni, a prominent journalist in Algeria, was arrested. Since the start of concerted anti-government protests a year before, officials had repeatedly tried to intimidate Drareni out of covering them; on one occasion, they even tried to bribe him by offering him a plum job as head of state radio, but he stood firm. Drareni was charged with endangering national unity and security; in August, he was handed a three-year prison sentence that was later reduced to two years on appeal. Drareni founded the Casbah Tribune, an influential Algerian news site, and has also worked for French media, as a correspondent for TV5 Monde and for Reporters Without Borders. He quickly became an international symbol in the fight for press freedom: French TV anchors lobbied for his release outside the Algerian embassy in Paris; RSF stuck his face on a huge poster overlooking a highway in the city. He told me yesterday that he never expected or sought such a status. I just wanted to fight for a free and independent press, he said. Informing Algerians was my only goal. I was able to speak with Drareni because, five days ago, he was released. A throng of activists, journalists, and well-wishers gathered outside the prison where Drareni was being held; finally, he appeared, wearing a medical mask and flashing a victorious V sign with his fingers. Thirty or so activists, many of whom had been locked up due to their social-media posts, were freed at the same timepart of a wave of pardons granted by Abdelmadjid Tebboune, Algerias president, the night before. (Drareni, who wasnt legally eligible to be pardoned, was freed under a separate mechanism.) Tebboune had only just returned to Algeria from Germany, where he received two lengthy spells of treatment after contracting COVID-19 in the fall. As he announced the pardons, Tebboune also dissolved the lower house of Algerias Parliament, triggering legislative elections that are expected sometime in the coming months, and set in motion a reshuffle of his governmentthough the justice and communications ministers, who have played key roles in the suppression of protest and press freedoms, will stay in post. New from CJR: Journalists and the looming superstorm of climate disinformation The announcements came days before the second anniversary of the start of the protests that came to be known as the Hirak. (Hirak means movement.) The demonstrations, which began in the town of Kherrata and spread across the country, channeled popular opposition to the countrys ruling class, and in particular to the decision of Abdelaziz Bouteflikawho had, at that point, been president for nearly twenty yearsto seek a fifth term. (Bouteflika, who was then eighty-two, had rarely appeared in public since having a stroke in 2013; his brother was widely believed to be controlling the government in his stead.) Soon after the protests began, Bouteflika, who had already reversed his decision to run for reelection, resigned as military leaders turned on him, but true democratization did not follow, and protests continued every week. In December 2019, there was an election that Tebbounewho had close links both to the ancien regime and to the militarywon. Many Algerians viewed the vote as a sham and boycotted it; officials pegged turnout at 41 percent, and called that figure satisfactory. Tebbounes government continued to crack down on protesters, who continued to defy the official repression. In the end, the Hirak was suspended not by the state, but by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Throughout this period, press freedom suffered; between 2018 and 2020, Algeria, which never scored highly on Reporters Without Borderss press-freedom index, fell ten places to 146th (out of one hundred and eighty countries and territories in total). Before they arrested Drareni, officials detained other reporters including Sofiane Merakchi, a correspondent and producer for several foreign networks who was later convicted of import and customs crimes. In September 2019, Al Araby TV was ordered off the air after covering a protest that featured anti-military placards; in the run-up to Tebbounes election, Le Temps dAlgerie, a pro-government daily, suspended four staffers, one of whom had spoken out against the papers shameful editorial line encouraging voting en masse. After the pandemic hit, lawmakers passed a bill criminalizing fake news, the government blocked numerous independent news sites, and journalists found themselves targeted by intensifying campaigns of abuse on social media. Last summer, Moncef Ait Kaci and Ramdane Rahmouni, who worked for France 24, were detained and accused of lacking proper accreditations. In December, as speculation about Tebbounes illness swirled within Algeria, officials blocked three more news sites, including Drarenis Casbah Tribune. Algeria is not an outlier within its region: as I reported recently, press freedom has, broadly, been in retreat across the Middle East and North Africa in the decade since the Arab Spring protests ledwith varying degrees of brevity in different countriesto a flowering of hope. The protests in Algeria, while distinct from this broader context in many important ways, show that repression of speech is a universal tactic in the face of concerted demands for true democracy. Sign up for CJR 's daily email They also show, however, how many people are unwilling to abandon hope. In recent days, thousands of Algerians have taken to the streets again to mark the second anniversary of the Hirak; yesterday, dozens of students and activists in Algiers, the capital, defied a heavy-handed police presence to march through the city, chanting, among other things, in support of a free press and an independent judiciary. Drareni, for his part, has been spending time connecting with friends and family and thanking his supporters. He faces another milestone in his case tomorrow, when the Supreme Court will consider his appeal, but he intends to get back to work soon. Journalism is the only job I know, he told me, and Ill keep doing it until my last breath. He hopes, in the meantime, that the circumstances of his imprisonment and release will serve to bolster press freedom. I hope Im the last Algerian journalist to be imprisoned, he said. Below, more on press freedom in Algeria and around the world: Other notable stories: ICYMI: How to count half a million lost lives? Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJRs newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop. Daniel G. Abel, a politically connected lawyer who helped build class-action lawsuits over a fatal fire in Puerto Rico and a deadly chemical leak in India but was later disbarred after taking on increasingly quixotic cases, died Feb. 15 at Touro Infirmary, almost two months after he was hit by a car while walking across a street in downtown New Orleans. He was 74. His adopted son, Shane Gates, said Abel never fully recovered from the Dec. 19 crash, which sent him to a hospital, then to St. Margaret's at Mercy nursing home, then back to the hospital. Abel helped countless others through his legal career but ultimately got booted from the profession as his acuity faded, Gates said. It wasnt a Hollywood ending that he got; it was a Fargo ending, said Gates, referring to the Coen brothers film in which everything goes wrong for the protagonist. Abels parents raised him in Lafayette, where his father worked for city government and was a dean at what was then the University of Southwest Louisiana. He considered becoming a priest but instead completed law school at Loyola University, obtained his law license in 1984 and went to work for Wendell Gauthier, a legendary plaintiffs attorney. The Gauthier firm won big-dollar judgments sometimes in the tens of millions while representing victims of disasters. Those included the 1984 methyl isocyanate leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, which killed 3,000 people and sickened 200,000. Another was the 1986 Dupont Plaza Hotel fire in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which killed 98 people and injured 140 others. Yet another was the 1988 Shell Oil refinery explosion in Norco, which killed seven workers. Gauthier and Abel even sued gun manufacturers in 1999 over New Orleans perennially high rates of violence, but lost. Abel spearheaded the research and prepared many of the court filings for those cases, said his close friend, WWL television news anchor Eric Paulsen. Danny had a brilliant legal mind, Paulsen said. If there was a cause, Danny was there. If there was someone who needed help, Danny was there. He was that kind of guy. Abel invested his cut of the law firm's earnings in various interests, including luxury lodges and hotels in countries such as Canada, Costa Rica and Spain. He also went in with some friends and produced a cheese that sold well, Paulsen said. But Abels star dimmed the older he got. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Before becoming a lawyer, Abel worked as a Jefferson Parish Council aide. He was close friends with Aaron Broussard, a council member who later became parish president. That link drew unflattering attention during a federal corruption investigation that resulted in Broussard pleading guilty in 2012 to accepting bribes, stealing public money and providing a no-show job to his girlfriend, who would later become his wife. +8 'My faith was real': Aaron Broussard, out of prison, reflects on his past and future Standing in front of a silent television set at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta, Aaron Broussard watched as the images of President Barack Ob In his later years, Abel's clients became less sympathetic and less lucrative. There was the Slidell preacher convicted in 2012 of sex crimes against a 16-year-old girl, and the owner of a controversial home-elevation company who was accused of fraud. Slidell preacher given three-year sentence for sex crime against 16-year-old When state Judge William "Rusty" Knight set about sentencing a Slidell preacher convicted of sex crimes against a 16-year-old girl, the judge His cases were also increasingly implausible. An example that stands out was a New Orleans policeman's wife who questioned whether her husband really killed himself in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The widow was related to a teenager who was killed by police in the infamous Danziger Bridge shootings shortly after the storm. The police officer himself was related by marriage to Henry Glover, who was shot to death and whose body was incinerated by police in Algiers in another post-Katrina atrocity. Abel sought, unsuccessfully, to link these disparate events. Abel spent the final days of his legal career working out of a room at a Super 8 motel on Clearview Parkway in Metairie. The Louisiana Supreme Court indefinitely suspended him from practicing law in 2014, issuing an order that mentioned a threat of harm but otherwise provided no explanation. It disbarred him in 2019 over what the Supreme Court called a pattern and practice of filing frivolous and vexatious actions. He had filed motions and lawsuits that had no substantial purpose other than to embarrass, delay or burden a third person, costing judges, lawyers and clients time and money, the court ruled. Gates said the kindest act ever bestowed on him came from Abel, who adopted him in 2006. In 2014, Abel donated virtually all of the money he made and the property he acquired to Gates and his family. If that doesnt prove how much of a caring person he was, I dont know what to tell you, Gates said. Abel's survivors include Gates and two grandchildren. Funeral arrangements were incomplete Wednesday. New Orleans police cited the driver who hit Abel at the corner of Loyola Avenue and Poydras Street on the day of the accident. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. New Delhi, Feb 24 : The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the dissolution of the Puducherry Assembly based on the recommendation of the Lieutenant Governor, after the Congress-led government in the Union territory lost power ahead of a vote of confidence. Announcing the Cabinet decision here, Union minister Prakash Javadekar told reporters that the decision was taken as no party claimed to form a government in Puducherry following the resignation of the Chief Minister. "The L-G had recommended President's Rule in Puducherry, and the Union Cabinet has approved the same," the minister said. He said that after the President's assent, the Assembly will be dissolved and further necessary steps for administrative work in Puducherry would be taken soon. The development comes after Puducherry Chief Minister V. Narayanasamy resigned on Monday. After the dramatic walkout by Narayanasamy and his MLAs, Speaker V.P. Sivakozhundu had announced that the Congress government had lost its majority. Narayanasamy then drove straight to Raj Nivas to submit his resignation to Lieutenant Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan. Mumbai, Feb 24 : Actress Kirti Kulhari has commenced shooting for the third season of the web series Four More Shots Please in the city. In the forthcoming season, she will reprise the role of Anjana Menon, a lawyer and a single mother. Excited about reuniting with her co-actors, Kirti said: "Revisiting a role is a very different kind of a challenge for me. Four More Shots Please! season 3 is extra special and as the series progresses, the characters evolve. It is wonderful to have the character you're essaying grow over time. Most of all, I am thrilled to be back with the girls." The web series, which also stars Sayani Gupta, Bani J and Maanvi Gagroo, tells the tale of four unapologetically flawed women as they discover life while balancing friendship in Mumbai. Actress Tannishtha Chatterjee is on board to direct all episodes of the upcoming season. Kirti's other upcoming projects include the Hindi remake of the Hollywood blockbuster The Girl On The Train., Shaadistan, the web show Human and the short film Charu. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text The Ghanaian sole known survivor in the 2005 Gambia massacre, Martin Kyere is scheduled to testify at the current session of Gambias Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC). The hearings on the 2005 massacre of more than 50 West African migrants, including about 44 Ghanaians went on a break but resumed on February 22. Said to be the largest loss of life during the rule of former Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, about nine Nigerians, two Togolese, 44 Ghanaians, and nationals of Cote dIvoire, Gambia and Senegal were believed to have been killed over several days in July 2005. Among those scheduled to testify at the current session of the commission is Martin Kyere of Ghana, the sole known survivor. The upcoming hearing is expected to shed further light on the massacre and the said cover-up. Previous official attempts to investigate the killing were flawed. Ghana attempted to investigate the killings in 2005 and 2006, but was blocked by the then-Jammeh government. In 2008, the United Nations and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) formed a joint investigative team, which produced a report in April 2009 that was said to have concluded that the Gambian government was not directly or indirectly complicit in the deaths and enforced disappearances. It blamed rogue elements in Gambias security services acting on their own for the massacre. The UN/ECOWAS report has never been made public despite repeated requests by the victims and by five UN human rights experts. A 2018 report by TRIAL International and Human Rights Watch, based on interviews with 30 former Jammeh-era officials, found, however, that Jammehs closest associates in the army, the navy, and the police detained the migrants, and then the Junglers, a unit of Gambian soldiers operating under Jammehs orders, summarily executed them. TRIAL and Human Rights Watch also found that the Gambian government destroyed key evidence before the UN/ECOWAS team arrived. In July 2019, three former Junglers testified publicly before the Truth Commission that they and 12 other Junglers had carried out the killings on Jammehs orders. One of the officers, Omar Jallow, recalled that the operations leader told the men that the order from Jammeh is that they are all to be executed. I have been fighting for 15 years for truth and for justice for my companions who were killed, said Kyere. He had escaped from a moving truck carrying other detained migrants who were killed shortly thereafter. Since then he has been organizing the families of the victims. Kyere will be in Banjul for the hearings together with William Nyarko, executive director of the Africa Center for International Law and Accountability (ACILA), who coordinates the Jammeh2Justice Ghana campaign. 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 More than 300 automobiles were shipped from Japan to the China (Liaoning) Pilot Free Trade Zone recently and then forwarded to Kazakhstan by train. The shipment marks the start of normal operations of China's first transportation channel that combines ocean and overland segments linking East Asia with Central Asia. With this new channel, Japanese cars can be shipped to Dalian Port by sea. Then, after being reloaded onto a train at the port, they will go by rail to Horgos Port in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region for another transfer before moving to Central Asia. A car can be delivered to a customer within 30 days of leaving the factory, thus reducing costs. In the past, it has taken more than 80 days for Japanese cars to be moved to Central Asian countries via the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea and Russia. With the signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement, or RCEP, to service expanding trade between China, Japan, the Republic of Korea and other countries, the FTZ in Dalian, Liaoning province, initiated the "Japan-Dalian-Central Asia" transport mode for motor vehicles as a response to the market. The administrative committee of the FTZ created a team to coordinate various players customs, port company, railway company and other parties to make the logistics work for foreign customers. The first batch of Japanese cars moved through Dalian on Jan 29. New Orleans, LA -- A new study of how the 2020 major hurricanes and the COVID-19 pandemic affected each other as well as disaster response found that although prior experience enabled community-based organizations to respond to the pandemic, the pandemic is also creating new challenges to preparing for and responding to natural disasters. The research is published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, available here. "Two major crises hit Louisiana and coastal communities in the Southeastern United States in 2020 - a significant increase in the frequency and severity of hurricanes, and the COVID-19 pandemic," says Benjamin Springgate, MD, MPH, Chief of Community & Population Medicine at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 representatives of community-based programs in southern Louisiana. The participants ranged in age from 28 to 70. The majority (61.5%) were non-Hispanic white; 30.8% were Black; one participant (3.8%) was Latinx and one participant (3.8%) was Vietnamese. Three-fourths of the participants lived in Orleans Parish, and most represented local-level organizations. Participants represented 24 community-based agencies and organizations that provide a wide variety of services, including environmental and social justice issues impacting underserved communities, community health promotion, health and mental health services, disaster preparedness and recovery, funding of community initiatives, community development, faith-based services, affordable housing, child welfare advocacy and support, and criminal justice reform. "Local leaders noted that due to the pandemic, it is now harder to plan for evacuations in the event of a hurricane," adds Dr. Springgate. "Organizations find it is also more difficult to provide in-person client services and challenging to plan for providing food and other resources to residents who may shelter in place during a storm." The analysis also identified several strengths based on disaster preparedness experience and capabilities. "Local organizations identified several strengths based on their disaster preparedness experience - particularly that based on prior experience with hurricanes, they already had a framework for how to respond and adapt to the novel challenges presented by COVID," Dr. Springgate notes. The analysis shows that the increase in demand for disaster-related services has been accompanied by a decrease in the availability of services due to a decline in available financial resources as well as the constraints on services delivery imposed by protocols designed to prevent the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The authors conclude that despite the anticipated challenges to delivering services in response to a natural disaster, the networks of partnerships and prior experiences with disaster preparedness and response, along with certain features of the community that have fostered resilience to adverse events, represent key assets in coping with the pandemic and with the current hurricane season. Though limited to a particular setting with extensive experience with climate-related disasters and preparedness and response, the lessons for interaction with a pandemic context may have important implications for approaches in other areas to consider enhancing preparedness and response resources, training and partnerships. ### Other LSU Health New Orleans authors include Dr. Ashley Wennerstrom, Olivia Sugarman, Carter Pesson, Jessica E. Seay, and Caroline N. Stallard. Other authors were Lawrence A. Palinkas from the University of Southern California, Jill Hancock from Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Diana Meyers from St. Anna's Episcopal Church, Arthur Johnson from Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development, Mara Polk from National Alliance on Metal Illness-New Orleans, and Kenneth B. Wells from the University of California, Los Angeles. This research was supported by a grant from the National Academy of Sciences' Gulf Research Program (NCT03977844, B. Springgate, PI). After hearing vocalizations from the out-group, chimpanzees became more spatially cohesive and groomed one another more often Credit: Etsuko Nogami/KyotoU Kumamoto Sanctuary In the face of threats from other groups, humans become more cohesive and cooperative with their own, an association that Charles Darwin suggested could be an evolved capacity. Now a research group at Kyoto University has demonstrated experimentally for the first time that this propensity is shared with chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. "Despite the importance of understanding how humans can be cooperative with their in-group and still carry out acts of extreme out-group aggression, there has so far been little study on whether the association between these behaviors holds in non-human primates," says first author James Brooks. Building on field research that suggested chimpanzees were more cohesive in days and months when they had out-group encounters, the team tested the direct relation between out-group threat and in-group cohesion by simulating an out-group encounter and observing the subjects' behavior. Five groups of chimpanzees listened to vocalizations of unfamiliar individuals, along with a control of crow vocalizations. The team found that subjects who heard the out-groups became more vigilant and stressed, but instead of translating this into in-group tension, the chimpanzees drew closer to one another, engaged in more affiliative behaviors, and were less aggressive when given limited food compared to the control group. This suggests that in chimpanzees, as well as in humans, competition between groups fosters cohesion, and further that intergroup competition in human evolution may have led to our ability to maintain cooperation and tolerant relations in large groups in the presence of a common enemy. Chimpanzees showed elevated vigilance and stress but more social cohesion and tolerance within their own group Credit: James Brooks/Kyoto University "This is the first experimental evidence that humans share this propensity with chimpanzees," explains study supervisor Shinya Yamamoto, "but it remains to be tested whether this is due to both species' strong evolutionary history of intergroup competition or a more common trait shared with other great apes." The team is currently studying whether the same pattern is observed in bonoboshumans' other closest relativesthat are known for not committing lethal out-group aggression. The paper "Uniting against a common enemy: Outgroup threat promotes ingroup cohesion in chimpanzees" will appear 24 February 2021 in the journal PLOS ONE. Explore further Chimpanzee friends fight together to battle rivals More information: "Uniting against a common enemy: Outgroup threat promotes ingroup cohesion in chimpanzees" PLOS ONE (2021). Journal information: PLoS ONE "Uniting against a common enemy: Outgroup threat promotes ingroup cohesion in chimpanzees"(2021). journals.plos.org/plosone/arti journal.pone.0246869 WESTBOROUGH, Mass., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Cancer Society, a global organization leading the fight for a world without cancer, and the national convenience store retailer, EG America, are teaming up again to raise money for life-saving programs, research, and services that will help patients and families touched by this lethal disease. From February 24 through March 31, all EG America-operated locations will offer Guests an opportunity to donate $1, $5 or any amount they want to the American Cancer Society. EG America's family of more than 1700 stores includes Certified Oil, Cumberland Farms, Fastrac, Kwik Shop, Loaf 'n Jug, Minit Mart, Quik Stop, Tom Thumb, and Turkey Hill. COVID-19 has had a severe impact on early detection and treatment of cancers; during the height of the pandemic, an estimated 22-million cancer screenings were cancelled or missed while the number of women receiving breast health screenings dropped by 87%, resulting in later diagnosis and worse outcomes. The pandemic has also negatively impacted the American Cancer Society's ability to raise funds for its mission. But with help from partners like EG America, the American Cancer Society can continue to fund crucial cancer research, implement safety measures to provide transportation and lodging programs for cancer patients and build comprehensive strategies to get more people to return to screening. "Our 2020 partnership with EG America generated more than $250,000 in donations for critical programs and services," said Wayne White, EVP of the American Cancer Society. "This outcome not only shows the value of partnerships, but our steadfast commitment to fighting cancer during these trying times brought on by COVID-19. We are striving for similar success in our 2021 program with this important partner as we continue to fight cancer together." EG America President George Fournier said last year's success in raising more than a quarter million dollars could not have happened without dedicated Team Members and loyal Guests. And he's counting on the same support and effort this year. "We all know someone who has had cancer or who is fighting cancer it affects all of us in some way," said Fournier. "Raising money not only helps fight this insidious disease, but it's our way of supporting those who truly need it. The American Cancer Society has been doing tremendous work for decades; it's a privilege to be its partner." About EG Group Founded in 2001 by the Issa family, United Kingdom based EG Group is a leading petrol forecourt retail convenience operator who has established partnerships with many global brands. The business has an established pedigree of delivering a world class fuel, convenience and food-to-go offer. EG Group entered the US market through the initial acquisition of 763 Kroger C-Stores in April of 2018. EG Group has made a significant commitment to delivering a modern consumer retail offer creating a destination to satisfy multiple consumer missions. EG Group now operates nearly 5,400 stores, in 9 countries with over 35,000 associates. The business is regularly recognized for innovation and investment in convenience retail assets, the employees and the systems. Zuber Issa and Mohsin Issa, Founders and co-CEO's, EG Group, were jointly named the 2018 EY Entrepreneur of the Year in the UK.Further information is available at www.eurogarages.com. About the American Cancer Society The American Cancer Society is a global grassroots force of 1.5 million volunteers dedicated to saving lives, celebrating lives, and leading the fight for a world without cancer. From breakthrough research, to free lodging near treatment, a 24/7/365 live helpline, free rides to treatment, and convening powerful activists to create awareness and impact, the Society is attacking cancer from every angle. The Society does not endorse any product or service. For more information go to www.cancer.org Media Contact: Mary Wilson [email protected] SOURCE American Cancer Society North Central Region Palghar, Feb 24 : In a stunning revelation, the Palghar Police on Wednesday contended that the Indian Navy (IN) sailor who claimed to have been kidnapped and set on fire in a forest may have 'cooked up' the story as he was in heavy debt. A fortnight after the tragic death of the IN's Leading Seaman, Surajkumar M. Dubey, 27, the Palghar Police's detailed investigations have punched holes into his claims and allegations as per a 'dying declaration' recorded by the police before he succumbed to 90 percent burns on February 5 in a naval hospital in Mumbai. Palghar Superintendent of Police Dattatreya Shinde told mediapersons that from available evidence and CCTVs record in Chennai, Mumbai, Palghar, it appears that the deceased may have ended his own life ostensibly due a huge pile of unpaid loans. In his 'dying declaration' Dube had recounted a sensational story of how he travelled from Ranchi by plane on the night of January 30-31, how after landing at Chennai he was kidnapped by 3 persons, confined for 3 days for a ransom of Rs 10 lakhs before being brought to Palghar, where he was allegedly taken to a forested hillock and set on fire. "We had formed 10 teams to probe the matter. Lot of things have emerged. We are still investigating how and why he came from Chennai to Palghar, a distance of 1,480 kms," Shinde said. Detailing the investigations outcome conducted by the teams led by Deputy SP Dhanaji Nalawade, Shinde said that contrary to his kidnap claims, Dube was captured on CCTV sauntering out of Chennai Airport on January 30 around 10.50 p.m., later having dinner at Hotel Sarvesh, and walking around the Koyambedu bus station there. The following two days (January 31-February1), he checked into a lodge in Chennai, withdrew money from ATMs in Koyambedu, Arihant Tower, and on February 1 caught a bus to reach Vellore and stayed that afternoon in Popular Lodge before checking out in the evening. "Both places he registered in his own name. This is confirmed by the lodge staffers and CCTV footages we examined. Its not possible, as he claimed, that he was kidnapped and confined in some unknown location for three days," said Shinde. The sailor, working on INS Agrani in Coimbatore, was on 30 days leave but informed his father it was only 20 days, and then claimed to have extended by another 10 days, used a phone with a number not revealed to his family, and other such instances have also emerged. That evening (February 1), he had called up his cousin Chandankumar Dube, shouted 'Irfan, Irfan' imitating the voice of the alleged kidnapper, and then switched off the phone, creating doubts that he was held captive by the so-called 'Irfan', but his family members have identified the voice as Dube's, the officer added. He repeated the name of 'Irfan' again during his statement at the Dahanu Hospital, how he was driven in a SUV from Chennai to Palghar, a journey of at least 25 hours, but his claims didn't match with the evidence collected. "Moreover, in Palghar there are two coastal checkposts with 24-hours roadblock, security checks and CCTVs, but none have recorded any such SUV, proving something was amiss in Dube's claims," Nalawade said in his probe report. Around 5.30 a.m. on February 5, he went to the N & Sons Petrol Pump in Talasari, Palghar and purchased 3 litres diesel in 2 plastic bottles. The staff there indicated that a person matching his description had come there, and police are making further inquiries for foolproof verification. Shinde and Nalawade said that the forested hill of Vavji-Vaijalpada is very treacherous and it is impossible for any person to traverse it with hands-legs tied and blindfolded, beaten and burnt with petrol, but no such evidence came out in his medical examination. Investigations also confirmed the Palghar Police's earlier findings that he had piled up debts of over Rs 22 lakh through personal, family, in-laws and friendly loans which he blew up in the stock markets, also tried to get loans from 13 banks, but failed. "We are making further enquiries. Action will be taken against the bunker which sold him loose diesel unauthorisedly. The entire kidnap drama was meticulously planned by Dube himself given his naval training," Shinde said. After tying up a couple of loose ends, Shinde said the Palghar Police was confident of closing the 'extremely challenging case' very soon. (Quaid Najmi can be contacted at q.najmi@ians.in) The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company The time may be coming for critical metals and companies like Venture Minerals will be best placed to take advantage of the changing sector. I have been a fan of tin since about 2002, and tungsten in 2012, when I started to get serious about the corporate side of the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX). I was looking at several places, such as Tasmania, Indonesia, Malaysia and Burma. Tin has been one of the higher-priced metals, but the market has not been good. It was highly manipulated in the Malaysian dominance time and I think it has not been well since then. I do not know the reason for the recent rise in tin pricing but it seems to have a lot of legs as the spot price is nearly US$30,000 per tonne. This is definitely worth noting as the world prepares itself for the EV revolution. Andrew Radonjic shares the story of Venture Minerals Limiteds ( ) Mount Lindsay Tin and Tungsten project in the northwest part of Tasmania. What is unique about this project is that a bankable feasibility study was completed in 2012 which is the best proof of concept. If you want to know something about this project, you must make yourself a cup of good coffee and spend the next 45 minutes taking notes. You will not be disappointed as Andrew tells us all about the value that gave the company a A$100 million market capitalisation in 2012. This is a good time to download the first Ebook (FREE) from as it is all about VMS (Volcanogenic Massive Sulphides). PODCAST: About Andrew Radonjic Andrew Radonjic is a geologist and mineral economist with over 25 years of experience in mining and exploration, with a specific focus on gold and nickel in the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia. Radonjic began his career at the Agnew Nickel Mine before spending over 15 years in the Paddington, Mount Pleasant and Lady Bountiful Extended operations north of Kalgoorlie. He has fulfilled a variety of senior roles which gave rise to three gold discoveries, totalling in excess of 3 million ounces in resources and the development of over 1 million ounces. About Venture Minerals Venture Minerals Limited is exploring in Western Australia for copper-lead-zinc at the Thor Prospect, nickel-copper at the Odin Prospect, nickel-copper-cobalt at the Caesar Project, gold at the Kulin Project and zinc-copper-gold at the Golden Grove North Project. Recently the maiden drilling program at Thor intersected massive sulphides confirming the copper-lead-zinc target is a 20-kilometre VMS-style system. Thor is now a top priority target for Venture moving forward. Chalice Gold Mines ( ) has also recently committed to spend up to $3.7 million in Ventures South West Project, to advance previous exploration completed by Venture to test a Julimar lookalike nickel-copper-PGE target. The companys initial focus was on realising the full economic potential of the Mount Lindsay Tin-Tungsten Deposit in northwest Tasmania. The company has already defined one of the world's largest undeveloped tin deposits and has completed a feasibility study on Mount Lindsay. The emergence of tin as the metal most impacted by new technology through its use in Electric Vehicles has refocused Ventures approach to developing this asset and an underground scoping study is currently underway. Please let us know your thoughts and send us any comment to info@Samso.com.au. Remember to Subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Samso Media and our mail list to stay informed and make comments where appropriate. Other than that, you can also give us a Review on Google. For further information about Coffee with and Rooster Talks visit: www.samso.com.au Samso is primarily a consulting company that delivers digital information to the market in terms of creating organic content. Samso simplifies your story to customers or investors. Samso creates organic content for you to engage your audience and BRAND yourself to them. Samso provides bespoke research and presentation for clients to engage their customers or investors. 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There may be a conflict of interest present with commercial arrangements with companies and/or stock held. Samso or an associate may receive a commission for funds raised. Credit: 123rf.com Low-income livestock farmers in developing countries are often faced with a difficult dilemma: protect their animals from endangered predators, or spare the threatened species at the expense of their livestock and livelihood. A new paper by Rice University economist Ted Loch-Temzelides examines such circumstances faced by farmers in Pakistan. "Conservation, risk aversion, and livestock insurance: The case of the snow leopard" outlines a plan under which farmers can protect themselves from crippling financial losses while preserving and possibly benefiting from the lives of endangered predators. "These livestock owners often have very low incomes," Loch-Temzelides said. "The loss of even one animal can be financially devastating. They're faced with the difficult task of weighing conservation efforts against economic losses due to attacks on their herds. And this situation isn't limited to snow leopardsit applies anywhere large predators live near livestock." Loch-Temzelides proposes establishing community livestock insurance contracts for farmers in developing countries who don't have access to the types of policies available in more developed nations. Under these contracts, farmers would agree to share the cost of lost animals with other farmers in their community. For example: If one farmer in a community of 10 lost an animal valued at $100, each community member would lose the equivalent of about $10. By aiding conservation efforts, he added, farmers may stand to reap additional benefits. "Tourists around the world are willing to pay to see endangered species such as snow leopards in their natural habitats," Loch-Temzelides said. "And revenue from ecotourism can benefit communities and their residents significantly." While Loch-Temzelides' study focuses on Pakistan, he hopes community livestock insurance can be useful around the world. The study will appear in an upcoming edition of the journal Conservation Letters. Explore further Study examines conflict between farmers and livestock predators More information: Ted LochTemzelides. Conservation, risk aversion, and livestock insurance: The case of the snow leopard, Conservation Letters (2021). Journal information: Conservation Letters Ted LochTemzelides. Conservation, risk aversion, and livestock insurance: The case of the snow leopard,(2021). DOI: 10.1111/conl.12793 We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Tricare has announced the opening of a pilot program offering mental health treatment for victims of sexual trauma. The Sexual Trauma Intensive Outpatient Program, or IOP, is designed to help active-duty service members who have mental health conditions related to sexual trauma. The trauma need not be related to one's military service. Active-duty members stationed in the continental U.S. who are enrolled in any Tricare plan -- other than the U.S. Family Health Plan -- are eligible for the program. Participants must have a diagnosis from a Tricare-authorized or military mental health provider, a pre-authorization and referral, and live within daily travel distance of one of the locations where treatment will be provided. Since this is a pilot program, treatment will be offered only at the following locations: California -- Aurora Behavioral Healthcare at San Diego Hospital Colorado -- Denver Springs Help for Heroes in Englewood Mississippi -- Oceans Behavioral Hospital in Biloxi Texas -- Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio Texas -- Oceans Behavioral Hospital in Waco Utah -- Behavioral Health Strong Hope Military Program in Salt Lake City Washington -- Madigan Army Medical Center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord The pilot outpatient program, which runs through Aug. 31, 2021, will provide mental health care, support and other benefits to enrollees. Participants will also be given access to local community resources and support systems as part of their ongoing treatment. Anyone interested in the program should speak to their health care provider. Keep Up with Changes to Tricare and Your Other Benefits Want to know about changes in military benefits as they happen? Subscribe to Military.com to get the latest benefits news delivered directly straight to your inbox. Smartphone leaks are not new anymore when it comes to the grand launch of branded phones. Now, the latest news unveiled the upcoming release of the Oppo Reno5 K, the recent teaser product of the company. Oppo Reno5 K Revealed in China Last year, the revelation also linked Oppo Reno5 5G, which is believed to be a close resemblance of Reno5 K that is about to hit the market. The big difference that you could notice between the two Chinese smartphones is their processor. Reno5 5G relies on its Snapdragon 765G chip, while the Reno5 5K will be powered by Snapdragon 750G On Feb. 24, an unknown person from China hinted at the possible release of Reno5 K. As of now, the Dongguan-based electronics company declared that on Feb. 25, a day after the leak was spilled, the smartphone will be officially launched in the country. While it was compared to the Reno5 5G, you can choose either of the two colors: Starry Dream and Green, Gizmo China reported. What Specifications Should We Expect in Oppo Reno5 K? Based on China Telecom's product library, Reno5 K will be released under its model number of PEGM10. In addition, it was reported that it will come with an AMOLED screen, which also harmonizes with its fingerprint reading capability for the users. Furthermore, the upcoming smartphone will feature a punch-hole display which is measured at 6.43 inches. This can generate high-definition resolution at 1080 x 2400 pixels. If you are still looking for its much better features, you need to know that its Snapdragon 750G processor will be assigned for its capacity to handle all phone activities through apps. It was indicated along with the sm7225 model number in the same listing. Moreover, the PEGM10's lightning-fast charging capability at 65W will be run by a 4,300 mAh battery so it can fully charge your smartphone in less than an hour. Read Also: Nvidia Restores RTX 2060,GTX 1050 Ti Amid GPU Shortage: Should You Buy or Not? According to a report by GSM Arena, the Reno5 K will be having a 32-megapixel front camera, so if you are fond of taking selfies, this will be a go-to option for your choice of phones. Besides its front camera, its rear camera will be boasting a 64-megapixel camera, which will be partnered with its 8 ultra-wide megapixel lens, and two supplementary sensors of 2 megapixels. The Chinese listing also stated that the Oppo Reno5 K will come into two variations. The first one will be having 8GB RAM +128 GB for internal storage. The second variant will feature a much larger RAM of 12GB, with an addition of 256GB storage. The same source also noted that the product will come in two colors, with either Moonlight Black and Starry Dream, as the first official color. The second color was not stated since Aurora was removed. Meanwhile, the previous source from Gizmo China, the third color will be the Midnight Black. How Much Will the Oppo Reno5 K Cost? It is expected that the upcoming handheld device will cost lower than $417 (or 2,699 Yuan). If you will notice, this is also the same starting value of Oppo Reno5 5G, so the resemblance of Reno5 K to the previous version is really close. Related Article: Vivo iQOO Neo 5 With Ultrafast 66W Charger to Launch Next Month? Possible Specs Revealed! [Leak] This article is owned by Tech Times. Written by Joen Coronel 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Former Minister Bathabile Dlamini defies Constitutional Court Ms Dlamini has so far avoided all efforts at recovering legal costs she was directed to pay by the Constitutional Court over two years ago The Black Sash Trust, the Centre for Applied Legal Studies and Freedom Under Law are deeply concerned about Bathabile Dlaminis refusal to pay legal costs awarded against her for her role in the social grants crisis over two years ago. The former Minister of Social Development was ordered by the Constitutional Court in 2018 to pay a portion of the costs of litigation brought in an effort to protect the social grants system. She has so far defied the order and all efforts to recover these costs. In September 2018, the Constitutional Court handed down a historic ruling, for the first time holding a sitting cabinet minister personally responsible for their failures in carrying out their duties. The judgment related to litigation brought by the Black Sash Trust (represented by the Centre for Applied Legal Studies) and joined by Freedom Under Law. The Court found then-Minister of Social Development, Bathabile Dlamini, personally liable for her role in the crisis which led to the litigation. The judgment not only found the Ministers conduct had been reckless and grossly negligent it went one step further and ordered her to pay 20% of the legal costs of the Black Sash Trust and Freedom Under Law from her own pocket. The South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) and the Ministry of Social Development were directed to cover the remaining 80% of the costs. This sent an important message that public officials must be held to account for their actions, and was widely applauded given how the Ministers conduct had put millions of peoples lives and livelihoods at risk. Yet, while the government has paid their portion of these costs, former Minister Dlamini has avoided every attempt at recovering her share which amounts to about R55,000 for Black Sash and R600,000 for Freedom Under Law. Both organisations have tried without success to issue letters of demand to Ms Dlamini through her attorneys. Her response to these efforts was to change law firms. At this point, we are taking steps to approach the Sheriff of the Court to attach Ms Dlaminis property in order to recover our costs. The former Minister is continuing to avoid these efforts. Ms Dlaminis behaviour shows a blatant disregard for the Court, says Anesu Dera from the Centre for Applied Legal Studies. Personal cost orders are intended to hold officials accountable for their actions, yet how can they be effective if we cannot enforce them? The relatively small amount pales in comparison to the costs of the litigation overall. We have noted excuses published in the media for Ms Dlaminis refusal to pay, but have heard nothing from her directly, says Lynette Maart, national director of the Black Sash Trust. Ms Dlamini claims she has not received pension pay outs, but as a member of cabinet she would have earned a salary of over R2 million per year with perks and many expenses covered. In light of this, the costs we are asking for should surely not be out of her reach. For inquiries, please contact: From the Black Sash Trust Hoodah Abrahams-Fayker at hoodah@blacksash.org.za Lynette Maart at lynette@blacksash.org.za From the Centre for Applied Legal Studies Anesu Dera at Anesu.Dera@wits.ac.za Ariella Scher at Ariella.Scher@wits.ac.za From Freedom Under Law Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. There isn't a strong scientific argument for teachers to be prioritised for a Covid jab, the UK's chief vaccine adviser said today. Professor Anthony Harnden, deputy chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said data had shown categorically that school staff are not at an increased risk of catching or falling ill with the disease compared to their peers. He warned singling out professions could 'slow' and 'complicate' Britain's vaccine roll out, leaving people who are more vulnerable to coronavirus unprotected for longer. Professor Harnden said it meant the decision on who would be prioritised once over-50s have been jabbed would be a 'political' one, and reiterated the JCVI's decision was 'based on the science'. His comments will anger unions and senior Labour politicians, who have for months been calling for teachers, along with other key workers, to be bumped up the queue when extra vaccine capacity becomes available. Speaking to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Professor Harnden said: 'In terms of the disease, there isnt a strong scientific argument to immunise teachers [unless they qualify by age, or underlying health condition. 'In fact there are other occupational groups which are usually more at risk than teachers. 'So then it becomes a political decision, which is why the JCVI have decided that we'll be steering our advice based on science and it will be up to politicians to decide on what you do in terms of teachers. 'But I would say that one of the key reasons that this programme has been so successful is because it has been simple, it's been deliverable, and it has been rolled out very quickly and people understand it.' Professor Anthony Harnden, deputy chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said there isn't a strong scientific argument for teachers to be prioritised for a coronavirus jab Currently only people over 60, anyone over 16 with a serious condition, frontline NHS and care home workers and carers of disabled people are officially eligible to receive the vaccine in England. The devolved nations are working to slightly different schedules He added that picking out certain groups would make it more complicated, and risks slowing the programme down which would in turn mean exposing people to the virus when they otherwise might not have been. Professor Harden also told the committee the JCVI had decided the priority list for phase two of the vaccination programme and this is 'with ministers at the moment'. It is likely to continue on an age-based approach. Oxford University reveals it's working on a Covid vaccine PILL Britons could get their Covid vaccine in the form of a pill in the future, according to the lead scientist behind Oxford University's jab. Professor Sarah Gilbert told MPs today her team were focusing their efforts on new, injection-free ways to deliver the vaccine and stimulate a better immune response. The group are exploring delivering the jab using nasal sprays, in the same way the flu jab is given to children, or in tablet form, used in polio vaccination. Not only would it be great news for people who have a fear of needles, it could help alleviate supply issues that have hindered rollouts internationally. Professor Gilbert said using pills or nasal sprays may better target immune cells in the lungs, throat and nose, making them even more effective. She told the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee: 'As you know all the vaccines have been given at the moment as intramuscular injections. 'That is not necessarily the best way to provide protection against a respiratory virus infection, where we want the immune system to be active in the upper respiratory tract and then in the lower respiratory tract, which is where the virus is causing the infection. 'We have flu vaccines that are given by nasal spray and this could be a very good approach in the future to use vaccines against coronaviruses. 'It's also possible to consider oral vaccination where you take a tablet, that will give you that immunisation, and that would have a lot of benefits for vaccine rollout if you didn't have to use the needles and syringes.' Advertisement Only over-65s, anyone over 16 with a serious condition, frontline NHS and care home workers and carers of disabled people are officially eligible to receive the vaccine in England. The devolved nations are working to slightly different schedules. The priority list was drawn up based on how vulnerable people are to falling seriously ill and dying with Covid. After those groups are done, the priority list moves down by age. But today adults with learning disabilities were added to the top six priority groups after a campaign by Jo Whiley to get her sister jabbed. The JCVI, which decides on who gets the life-saving jabs first, said people with learning disabilities of any kind should be bumped up the pecking order. They will be added into priority group six, which includes all adults with a long-term health condition that puts them at higher risk of severe illness. BBC radio DJ Jo Whiley called for people with learning disabilities to get vaccines sooner after her 53-year-old sister, Frances, who has a developmental disorder and lives in residential care, was hospitalised with Covid-19 this month. Whiley praised today's policy change as 'absolutely crucial' and said she was 'delighted'. She said Frances is now back at home and is 'doing great'. Vaccinations in group six are next in line and they take higher priority than people aged between 50 and 64, who make up groups seven, eight and nine. Anyone who is on the GP Learning Disability Register will be eligible for a vaccine earlier than planned, the JCVI said, regardless of how severe their disability is. This register is open to anyone with a diagnosed learning disability. These include autism and Asperger's, William's syndrome, global developmental delay and cerebral palsy. People with Down's syndrome were already in the clinically extremely vulnerable group so part of the population targeted with vaccines by February 15. Public Health England said at least 150,000 people would now get a vaccine sooner than expected in order to 'prevent as many deaths as possible'. The Office for National Statistics revealed in a report this month that people with learning disabilities had an almost four times higher chance of dying if they developed Covid-19, compared to people without the difficulties. Professor Wei Shen Lim, Covid chief at the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said: 'The JCVI's advice on Covid vaccine prioritisation was developed with the aim of preventing as many deaths as possible. 'People who are severely affected by learning disabilities are at higher risk of death from Covid-19. 'As the severity of any disability may not be well recorded in GP systems, JCVI supports the NHS operational plan for anyone on the GP Learning Disability Register to be invited now for vaccination as part of priority group six, and to reach out in the community to identify others also severely affected by a learning disability but who may not yet be registered.' Until now, many people with learning disabilities other than Down's syndrome had not been included on the vaccination priority list. They would have been incorporated in the 'clinically extremely vulnerable' shielding group if they had other physical health problems, regardless of their learning disability, but may not have got priority access if they were otherwise healthy. Jo Whiley, 55, highlighted the gap in the rollout when she said she had been offered a vaccine before her sister, despite not being in a high risk group. And Frances, who is 53 and lives in residential care because of a developmental delay caused by Cri-du-Chat syndrome, became seriously ill with Covid-19 and was hospitalised earlier this month. Whiley said the family had discussed end-of-life care for Frances last week and feared she might die, but that her sister was discharged from hospital on Tuesday. She told the BBC today: 'This is a great day I am so relieved. I'm so happy for all those people who've been living in fear. 'I'm very grateful to the Government for listening, because it's a very complicated situation and it's very difficult to categorise people according to their disability, it's very, very tricky and that's become apparent I think over the past few months. 'And so this is clear, this encompasses everybody, and all those people who have been feeling very neglected, feeling like they don't matter, that we don't care, now know that we will be protecting them. 'This is absolutely crucial and I could not be more delighted. This is a massive step forward.' Tech darling Appen has moved to reassure investors that the slump in its full-year 2020 numbers is a temporary blip, citing its strong order book as a sign that it still has the goodwill of its major customers. Appen , valued at $2.2 billion, makes money by crowdsourcing labour for artificial intelligence/machine learning services for tech giants such as Google and Facebook. Its one of the five heavyweight technology stocks in the market but has run into turbulence as the pandemic forced its customers to press pause on projects. Appen chief executive Mark Brayan said its strong order book shows the slump in its AI business triggered by COVID is a temporary issue. Credit:Steven Siewert The pressure has led to Appen offering a weaker than expected outlook on Wednesday as its 2020 full year result missed earnings targets. The company reported an 11 per cent rise in revenue to $600 million, a 23 per cent rise in net profit to $50.5 million and a 5.5c per share dividend that will be paid March 19. But sales were below expectations across the business, according to RBC Capital. Appen shares closed 12 per cent lower at $17.81 compared to a high of $25.50 last week. A quarantine screening officer has been arrested following a Feb. 18, 2021 incident in Oakville. (Halton Police Photo) COVID-19 Quarantine Compliance Officer Charged With Extortion, Sexual Assault TORONTOA quarantine screening officer who allegedly demanded cash from a woman before sexually assaulting her at her home faces related charges, police said on Wednesday. The accused had been trained by the Public Health Agency of Canada as a designated screening officer under the Quarantine Act, Halton regional police said. According to a police statement, the accused was doing a quarantine compliance check at a home in Oakville, Ont., on Feb. 18. The accused informed the victim that they were in violation of the quarantine order and demanded that a fine be paid in cash, police alleged. When the victim declined to pay, she was sexually assaulted by the accused. Police said they arrested a man they identified only as Hemant, 27, of Hamilton, on Tuesday. He has been charged with sexual assault and extortion. The Public Health Agency of Canada said it was very disturbed by the alleged events and was cooperating with investigators. Police refused to disclose the name of the security company that employs the man, but said he had been suspended. The Public Health Agency said it had awarded contracts last month to four companies to conduct in-person compliance visits. Agency spokesman Eric Morrissette said trained and designated screening officers working under these contracts began in-person compliance visits on Jan. 29 in Montreal and Toronto. The national rollout began on Feb. 15 he said. Close to 30,000 compliance verification visits have been done so far, Morrissette said. Everyone entering Canada must isolate for 14 days. Designated screening officers visit quarantine locations to confirm people are where they said they would be on arrival in the country. Failure to comply can result in fines. However, screening officers are not police officers and have no authority to issue a ticket or arrest anyone. As a result, they should never be demanding payment during a quarantinecompliance check. To be designated, officers must be licensed security guards and have had a valid police background check. Training comprises online selfstudy courses related to the Quarantine Act and their duties and responsibilities. They must also pass an exam. The Public Health Agency listed the four companies under contract as the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires, G4S Secure Solutions (Canada) Ltd., Garda Canada Security Corporation (GardaWorld), and Paladin Risk Solutions. The investigation announced Wednesday was prompted by a complaint from the alleged victim, said Const. Steve Elms, a police spokesman, who had no other details. Elms said the accused is on bail pending a court appearance March 23 and apparently goes only by one name. Police said other people might have been victimized and urged anyone who might have had a similar experience to contact their local police. Issues have previously arisen with quarantine guards. Last year, private security contractors at a quarantine hotel in Melbourne, Australia, were accused of sleeping with guests, the Herald Sun reported. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close France's government has said it wants to 'rehabilitate' the AstraZeneca vaccine as EU leaders try to undo the doubts they sowed about the jab which have led to low uptake despite its proven effectiveness. The French health ministry admitted that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine had an 'image deficit' which had led to 'feeble' usage of the jab, with only 107,000 people immunised with it so far. It comes after Emmanuel Macron himself raised doubts about the jab's effectiveness and claimed that Britain had taken a risk by authorising it so soon, while French regulators refused to approve it for over-65s. Meanwhile the French government is considering new local restrictions to deal with a worsening Covid-19 situation as it scrambles to avoid a new national lockdown. 'We will use all possible levers to rehabilitate the vaccine,' the French health ministry said, according to Le Telegramme, days after real-world data in Scotland showed the AstraZeneca shot reducing Covid hospitalisations by 94 per cent. Germany's government is also pleading with people to take the AstraZeneca jab, while EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said that she herself would take it - despite her furious row with the drugmaker last month over missing shipments to the EU. That struggle is set to continue into the spring with as many as 90million doses missing from AstraZeneca shipments in the second quarter of 2021. An EU official involved in talks with the firm says AstraZeneca has warned that it may deliver only half of its promised 180million doses from April to June, having slowed supplies in January because of delays at a Belgian factory. The new shortage could hamper the EU's ability to meet its target of vaccinating 70 per cent of adults by summer - with Britain promising to offer one dose to 100 per cent by July 31. European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, pictured, says she would take the AstraZeneca vaccine despite feuding with the firm over supplies to the bloc This graph shows how the UK has outpaced the EU, including wealthy Germany and France, in administering the vaccines that will open the door out of lockdown The EU supply shortage is seen as one of the main reasons for a widely-criticised vaccine roll-out which is lagging far behind that in Britain. While the UK has handed out 27.0 doses per 100 people, the EU is lagging behind on 6.2 and has not significantly sped up its progress in recent weeks. Von der Leyen defended her policies by pointing out that the EU had handed out 27milion doses in total compared to 17million in Britain - but the bloc of 27 countries has a population more than six times larger. She also noted that Italy had given double-doses to more people than Britain, but it has handed out far fewer doses overall. Catching up to Britain will be made even harder if AstraZeneca shortfalls continue into the early summer, as an EU official told Reuters last night. Von der Leyen told the Augsburger Allgemeine that 'I would take the AstraZeneca vaccine without a second thought, just like Moderna's and BioNTech/Pfizer's products,' But she also continued to voice doubts about the UK's strategy of delaying second doses - a move approved by Britain's chief medical officers - as she claimed that the EU was 'catching up' in the vaccine race. AstraZeneca is producing vaccines at two plants in the UK, one in Belgium and one in the Netherlands, but is not exporting its British-made jabs under its contract with UK ministers - although it has offered the EU doses made in India and the US. The official said AstraZeneca planned to deliver about 40million doses in the first quarter, less than half the 90million shots it was supposed to supply. It was also due to deliver 30 million doses in the last quarter of 2020 but did not supply any shots last year as its vaccine had yet to be approved by the EU. All told, AstraZeneca's total supply to the EU could be about 130 million doses by the end of June, well below the 300 million it committed to deliver to the bloc by then. AstraZeneca did not deny the EU official's claims, but said it was striving to increase productivity in order to meet its 180million target. 'We are hopeful that we will be able to bring our deliveries closer in line with the advance purchase agreement,' an AstraZeneca spokesman said. Later in the day, the firm added that its 'most recent Q2 forecast... aims to deliver in line with its contract with the European Commission'. 'At this stage AstraZeneca is working to increase productivity in its EU supply chain and to continue to make use of its global capability in order to achieve delivery of 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter,' it said. A European Commission spokesman declined to comment on confidential talks but said the EU should have enough shots even if the AstraZeneca targets are not met. This woman received the AstraZeneca vaccine in a hospital in Madrid on Tuesday - but elsewhere there has been low uptake after European scaremongering about the product An EU regulator approved the AstraZeneca jab in late January but the ruling was overshadowed by a furious political row over the delayed shipments. After AstraZeneca warned of shortfalls but continued to supply Britain in full, the EU published its contract with the firm and claimed to have cast-iron commitments. Brussels also imposed export controls on jab shipments leaving the bloc, but was forced into retreat after initially saying they would apply to Northern Ireland. But AstraZeneca's CEO blamed the delays on the fact that the EU had not signed a contract until three months after Britain had tied up a deal last year. AstraZeneca is not exporting vaccines made in the UK, in line with its separate contract with the British government. But AstraZeneca has told the EU it could provide more doses from its global supply chain, including from India and the United States, an EU official said last week. AstraZeneca is now forecast to make up its shortfalls by the end of September, according to a German health ministry document. German officials expect to receive 34million doses in the third quarter, taking the country to its full entitlement of 56million out of the EU's 300million doses. The EU published its 42-page contract with AstraZeneca, pictured, at the height of a bitter row over shipments last month Despite its approval by EU regulators, the AstraZeneca vaccine has met with resistance in some countries - further slowing the European roll-out. Some countries including France and Germany have refused to approve it for over-65s because of limited trial data, despite the firm's assurances that it is effective. French president Emmanuel Macron added fuel to the fire by questioning the jab's effectiveness and claiming Britain had taken a risk by authorising it so soon. The effect of such scaremongering is that only 187,000 AstraZeneca shots have been administered in Germany out of 1.5million due to have been delivered by last week. German leaders have now launched a public relations push to reassure the public that the shot developed at Oxford University is effective. 'The vaccine from AstraZeneca is both safe and highly effective,' Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said on Monday. 'The vaccine can save lives.' Von der Leyen has now joined in that effort, saying that she herself would take the vaccine despite her earlier feud with the company. It comes as France may need to impose new local restrictions to deal with a worsening Covid-19 situation as it scrambles to avoid a new national lockdown, a government spokesman said Wednesday. Infections have reached worrying levels in several parts of the country, spokesman Gabriel Attal told reporters after a weekly cabinet meeting. The warning comes only days after the French Riviera was ordered into lockdown for the coming two weekends to contain Covid-19 which has been spreading faster in the tourist hotspot than elsewhere in France, and border controls were tightened. Attal said similar moves could become necessary elsewhere because of 'a worsening situation' that he said 'requires rapid and strong measures'. Within hours of that warning, Health Minister Olivier Veran said that the northern coastal city of Dunkirk would also be locked down at weekends, until further notice, after the infection rate there went over 900 for 100,000 people, close to nine times the national average. Like on the Riviera, the some 250,000 people in the city and surrounding area would be allowed to leave their homes only for specific authorised reasons, Veran said, calling Dunkirk's infection rate 'alarming'. But the list could lengthen further: Around 10 of France's 102 territorial areas known as departments were now in a 'very worrying situation', Attal said. 'We must continue all our efforts to avoid having to impose another national lockdown,' he said. There was 'obviously' no certainty that such a drastic measure could be avoided, he said, warning that the government would not hesitate to order such a move if it was deemed necessary. Prime Minister Jean Castex will host a news conference to update the country on the Covid situation on Thursday, Attal said. What IS behind Britain's vaccine drive slowing down? All the answers to your questions on the AstraZeneca/Pfizer supply issues which ministers say is to blame Britain's vaccine rollout has slowed down over the past month, with ministers and manufacturers pointing the finger at each other for the hold-up. With a successful immunisation drive crucial to Britain's hopes of restrictions getting eased drastically over the next few months, critics say it is vital the programme picks up speed to avoid Boris Johnson's ambitious plans getting derailed. Just 192,000 people were vaccinated on Monday and 142,000 on Sunday, in two of the lowest daily tolls since the mammoth NHS operation began to gather steam at the start of the year. Ministers have repeatedly blamed the supply of vaccines as being the 'rate-limiting factor' of the programme, and the UK's reliance on just two companies' jabs makes the situation precarious. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson today said there was 'no problem' with the supply chain and Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer, agreed that 'fluctuations' were anticipated. Officials say smaller deliveries were expected because Pfizer had to improve its key factory in Belgium at the start of the year, and AstraZeneca's production was slower to get off the ground than planned. However, both drug giants have insisted that there are no unforeseen issues with the supply chain, as Nicola Sturgeon said Scotland's rollout couldn't speed up until 'the supplies start to flow in greater volumes again'. And the concerns spread wider than Britain when an EU official revealed that AstraZeneca is now set to deliver only half of the planned doses to the continent in the second quarter of this year as the firm recovers from a row with the bloc earlier in the year about its supply commitments. Despite fears that deliveries are slowing down, Matt Hancock has promised 'bumper' weeks in March to compensate for the lag. Supply figures published by the Scottish Government in mid-January appeared to back his claims, which the number of doses being delivered next month set to be significantly higher. Here, MailOnline digs into why Britain's vaccination drive has slowed down: Delivery schedules published by the Scottish Government in January and later removed from its website showed a scheduled dip in stocks in February followed by a surge in availability in March What slowed down Pfizer's vaccine? One of the biggest hold-ups in vaccine delivery appears to have been Pfizer doing maintenance work at its manufacturing facility in Belgium. As part of preparing to produce hundreds of millions of doses for countries around the world, the company admitted in January that it would be delaying deliveries. A frustrated EU Commission said the delay was caused by 'modifications at the plant' and Pfizer planned to have finished them by mid-February. Pfizer confirmed the disruption would affect all countries in Europe and told the Financial Times: 'Although this will temporarily impact shipments in late January to early February, it will provide a significant increase in doses available for patients in late February and March.' The Scottish Government plans showed that the deliveries from Pfizer would fall by a third from around 128,000 doses in the final week of January to 80-83,000 per week throughout February before spiking back to 130,000 or more in March. Scotland gets around eight per cent of the UK's vaccine supply, suggesting the deliveries for the UK as a whole may have changed from 1.6million per week to 1m. Pfizer told MailOnline yesterday there were 'no UK supply challenges' and deliveries were arriving as planned. Pfizer had to make 'modifications' at its manufacturing facility in Belgium which led to delays to deliveries of the vaccine to countries all over Europe What slowed down AstraZeneca's vaccine? The UK's other major vaccine supplier, AstraZeneca, is making up for the majority of jabs being given out and is expected to be supplying 2million doses per week. This rapid pace of delivery came later than expected, however, which delayed the NHS's plans to roll it out to care homes and GP surgeries across the country. Mid-January had been the original target for two million per week, The Times reported at the start of the year, but this was pushed back by a month. In a briefing on January 13 AstraZeneca president Tom Keith-Roach said the commitment would be met 'on or before the middle of February'. AstraZeneca slashes EU delivery expectation by half AstraZeneca told the European Union yesterday it would not be able to deliver on the EU's vaccine orders amid supply issues. The firm had committed to supplying the bloc with 180million doses in the second quarter of 2020. But an EU official involved directly in talks with the firm, said the company had warned it could now only 'deliver less than 90million doses', according to Reuters. Britain has ordered 100million doses of the Oxford vaccine and it is one of two Covid jabs being rolled out on the NHS. Asked about the EU official's comment, a spokesman for AstraZeneca told Reuters yesterday: 'We are hopeful that we will be able to bring our deliveries closer in line with the advance purchase agreement.' Later in the day a spokesman in a new statement said the company's 'most recent Q2 forecast for the delivery of its COVID-19 vaccine aims to deliver in line with its contract with the European Commission.' He added: 'At this stage AstraZeneca is working to increase productivity in its EU supply chain and to continue to make use of its global capability in order to achieve delivery of 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter.' Earlier this week, AstraZeneca said that although there had been 'fluctuations' in supply at plants, they were still 'on track' with orders with no issues with delivery of the UK-manufactured vaccine. A spokesman for the European Commission, which coordinates talks with vaccine manufacturers, said it could not comment on the discussions as they were confidential. He said the EU should have more than enough shots to hit its vaccination targets if the expected and agreed deliveries from other suppliers are met, regardless of the situation with AstraZeneca. Advertisement The Scottish delivery figures show that AstraZeneca's supplies were also scheduled to be low in February. They would fall from a high of 261,000 doses in a week in late January to none at all in one week in the middle of the month, before escalating to more than 300,000 per week from the beginning of March. A spokesman for AstraZeneca said on Monday that although there had been 'fluctuations' in supply at plants, the firm was still 'on track' with orders. Why are the UK and Europe being affected differently? Pfizer's manufacturing issues appear to affect the European Union and Britain equally, but AstraZeneca's are different because it manufactures the vaccines in different places. The AstraZeneca vaccine is a natural product it is a genetically engineered virus made to look like the coronavirus so must be grown naturally. The cells needed to make the jab will only reproduce as fast as they naturally can, and astronomical quantities of them are needed, which means the process will always take a minimum amount of time. AstraZeneca says it takes three months, on average, to make each batch of the vaccine. Numerous ones are made at the same time but this means that there is an upper limit to how much or how fast one plant can make jabs. And the yields of these natural batches are also not entirely controllable the company said it had not produced as much as it had hoped at the start of the production. Low yields at major European supply plants in Belgium have devastated supply plans on the continent, but Britain makes its own supply in England where the success rate has been higher. Is there an easy solution? The UK's 'lumpy' supply cannot be improved easily because there is no quick fix for such a huge manufacturing operation. Other countries have vaccine orders of equal or higher priority Pfizer is being used widely in Europe, for example, and Moderna is still unavailable to the UK because it was later to place orders than the US and EU. And of the vaccines Britain is already receiving, manufacturing cannot be sped up infinitely. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, England's deputy chief medical officer, explained on Sky News today: 'There are always going to be supply fluctuations. 'These are new vaccines, by and large the manufacturers have not made them or anything like them before. 'The process of making a vaccine is one where, basically, you set the equipment up and leave it all to do its thing a bit like beer-making really. 'What you get at the end is not something that you can say is identical every time in terms of the yield, the amount of doses you can then make from that batch.' He added that it will take 'a few months' before the manufacturers can get into a steady routine, he said, and there were also 'global supply constraints'. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam (left), England's deputy chief medical officer, said 'There are always going to be supply fluctuations', and NHS chief Sir Simon Stevens (right) said the pace of vaccination could double in the second phase of the rollout Will the UK's vaccine rollout speed up? Ministers insist that the vaccination programme will speed up significantly in March when supplies become bigger and more regular. The Government is aiming to vaccinate everyone over the age of 50 by May, and Boris Johnson said he plans to offer a first dose to all adults in the UK by July 31. Moderna's vaccine, of which the UK is expecting seven million doses and has already approved for us, will start to be delivered from the end of March. Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, suggested the rollout could even go twice as fast in its second phase in order to keep reaching people at the same rate as now while also giving out the second doses to elderly people. 'Compelling' real-world data from Scotland shows one dose of either jab cuts risk of being hospitalised by up to 95% Covid vaccines being used in Britain are working 'spectacularly well' and cutting hospital admissions caused by the virus by as much as 95 per cent, according to the first real-world evidence of the roll-out. Researchers yesterday called the results 'very encouraging' and claimed they provided 'compelling evidence' that they can prevent severe illness. Scientists counted Covid hospital admissions in Scotland among people who had had their first dose of a jab and compared them to those who had not yet received a dose of either the Pfizer or Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. In a ray of hope for Britain's lockdown-easing plans, results showed the jabs slashed the risk of being admitted to hospital with Covid by up to 85 and 94 per cent, respectively, four weeks after a single dose. The study carried out by academics from the universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde, as well as Public Health Scotland was the first of its kind. But it currently doesn't have enough data to analyse how well the jabs prevent death or stop transmission of the virus. Lead researcher Professor Aziz Sheikh said: 'These results are very encouraging and have given us great reasons to be optimistic for the future. We now have national evidence that vaccination provides protection against Covid hospitalisations. 'Roll-out of the first vaccine dose now needs to be accelerated globally to help overcome this terrible disease.' Advertisement He said at a Downing Street briefing last week: 'In this next phase, the second sprint, actually we're going to be vaccinating a larger number of people than in the first sprint. 'And overall, although supply will vary week to week and we've got to adjust accordingly, we may be giving up to twice as many vaccinations overall given we've got to be doing second doses as well than we have done in the first sprint.' Health Secretary Matt Hancock also yesterday said vaccination figures would stay low for the rest of this week in an interview with LBC's Nick Ferrari. He said it will be a 'quieter week' for the vaccine rollout because of a drop in stockpiles, warning that the success of the drive was 'all about supply'. Mr Hancock added: 'We have got a quieter week this week and then we're going to have some really bumper weeks in March.' Pointing the blame at vaccine manufacturers, he also claimed there has been 'ups and downs' in the delivery schedule. Why is it important for the rollout to progress quickly? Britain's vaccination programme must go quickly because the country's entire route out of lockdown hinges on it. Boris Johnson's plans to lift lockdown rules are based on vaccinating the majority of people who are likely to die if they catch coronavirus. The more people who can be successfully vaccinated with at least one dose, the faster the rules can be loosened because the lower the death count of the third wave could be expected to be. A third wave of the virus is now inevitable, with cases expected to skyrocket when lockdown ends, but the impact of this will be more tolerable if the majority of adults in the country are immune to the virus. Professor Paul Hunter, from the University of East Anglia, said yesterday that Britain will struggle to stick to its plans if vaccination rates don't pick up 'very soon'. Professor Hunter pointed out that the rapid decline in positive coronavirus tests seen earlier in the lockdown appears to be levelling off now, and the number of people being vaccinated each day are dropping lower at the same time. He warned: 'Taken together, these two observations are concerning... 'If more of our vulnerable people were protected from severe disease through immunisation, then we could allow some increase in numbers without posing a substantial extra risk of severe disease and hospitalisation. 'However, a lot of people admitted to hospital with Covid are still not in the groups where vaccination has been completed. 'If vaccination rates do not pick up very soon, then we will struggle to give enough people their first dose before we have to allocate more and more of our available doses to people's second injections. 'This could lead to more potentially vulnerable individuals being unprotected for a lot longer than we had expected as we try to relax restrictions further. This would have the real potential to derail the UK's road plan for coming out of lockdown.' UPDATE: This story was first published on Feb. 9. CVS announced it will expand the COVID vaccine to six more states starting Feb. 25. Also, the company said it plans to contact Americans living in underserved communities to help them schedule vaccine appointments. You may now be able to get a vaccine from your local pharmacy. After weeks of vaccine distribution being largely limited to hospitals, health systems and local health departments, COVID-19 vaccines are rolling out at major pharmacies throughout the country, including the nation's two largest chains, CVS and Walgreens. While state-determined eligibility and availability will remain limited for the time being, experts say they're hopeful that the nation's established network of pharmacies will help speed up distribution amid consternation over the pace of the rollout so far. "I have no doubt" that it will, said Bunny Ellerin, director of the Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Management Program at Columbia Business School. She said that the major pharmacy chains are especially well-suited to handle the distribution campaign because they manage flu vaccinations for millions of Americans annually, giving them expertise that pop-up sites might lack. 'Looking down their nose at you': The GameStop frenzy showed a fresh contempt for hedge funds. So why do Americans hate them? Good signs for the economy: Companies are hiring more temps and giving workers more hours as they try to prepare for a reviving economy Florida Presbyterian Homes CEO Joe Xanthopoulos, dressed as Santa, receives a Pfizer Covid-19 vaccination from Walgreens Pharmacist Ericka Gutierrez at the Florida Presbyterian Homes in Lakeland, Florida, on Tuesday, Dec. 22. Throughout the country, vaccine eligibility is still limited to certain portions of the population and is determined by state health officials based on recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While it varies from state to state, eligibility generally currently includes certain older Americans and essential workers. Those eligibility restrictions will continue to apply to the pharmacy chains until states expand access, which is currently limited in large part due to an insufficient supply of vaccines. Story continues The rollout is taking place after the Biden administration activated the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program as part of the coronavirus vaccine effort, enabling distribution to retail locations throughout the country. In this initial phase, the CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have selected certain pharmacy chains to focus on specific areas of the country. Which states will offer CVS vaccinations? At CVS, which has nearly 10,000 locations, including pharmacies inside Target stores, vaccination appointments could be scheduled beginning Thursday, Feb. 11 for about 350 stores across 11 states: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. Appointments will begin Friday, Feb. 12. Appointments will be required. They can be set up at CVS.com or through the CVS Pharmacy app. Anyone without internet access can call (800) 746-7287. Time off for a vaccine: Should employers give workers paid time off or other incentives to get vaccinated? Child Tax Credit: Heres how the Democrats $3,600-per-child plan would work CVS is asking anyone interested in a vaccination appointment not to contact individual stores. "Because active stores will change regularly based on vaccine supply, CVS Health will not provide a full list of participating locations," CVS said. Which states will offer Walgreens vaccinations? At Walgreens, which has more than 9,000 pharmacies, vaccinations will be provided at certain stores in 17 states and jurisdictions beginning Friday, Feb. 12. Those include locations in Arizona, Chicago, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, New York City, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Vermont, Wisconsin and West Virginia. Appointments can be made at Walgreens.com/ScheduleVaccine. Eligible people can call their local pharmacy but wait times could be significant. Initial locations with available vaccines were chosen by the government to focus primarily on medically underserved areas, Walgreens spokesperson Rebekah Pajak said. Walgreens has also announced that it's partnering with Uber to provide free or discounted rides to vaccination appointments for up to 10 million Americans. Access to ride appointments will be provided when the vaccination is scheduled. The company is not providing walk-in appointments for now as it does during flu shot season. Other pharmacies chosen to deliver vaccines at certain locations include Walmart, Rite Aid, Kroger, Publix, Costco, Albertsons, Safeway and Meijer. Follow USA TODAY reporter Nathan Bomey on Twitter @NathanBomey. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: COVID vaccine appointments: CVS, Walgreens, pharmacies start process Washington Post reporters were named the winners of four George Polk Awards on Wednesday, including one for a series about the life of George Floyd, the Minnesota man whose death while in police custody sparked months of protests last year. The Post's reporting about politics, the pandemic and racial tensions at the Virginia Military Institute were also recognized by jurors in the annual competition, which is among the most prestigious in journalism and is considered a reliable forecaster of the Pulitzer Prizes. The awards this year were heavily weighted toward journalism about the pandemic; winners in seven of the 18 categories focused on some element of the coronavirus's devastating impact. Post reporter Stephanie McCrummen's dispatches about the changing cultural and political landscape in Georgia won in the political reporting category; Eli Saslow's interviews with people grappling with the pandemic were named the winner of a new oral-history category; and Ian Shapira's eye-opening stories about racism at VMI were recognized in state reporting. The Post's six-part series, "George Floyd's America," the winner in the justice-reporting category, was produced by a team of Post staff members. Based on more than 150 interviews, it documented how housing discrimination, inferior educational opportunities and police intimidation circumscribed Floyd's life leading up to his death in May. The Polk committee said the reporting provided an "uncanny match" to the themes raised by the national movement that arose following his death. The four awards tied The Post for the most received in one year by a news organization since the Polks were established in 1949 by Long Island University. They are named in memory of George Polk, a CBS News correspondent who was murdered while covering the Greek civil war the year before. The New York Times also won four, in 2017 and 2019. The Post was also involved in reporting, editing and publishing stories that were recognized with a special award to the late Regina Martinez, an investigative reporter for Proceso, a weekly publication in Mexico. "The Cartel Project," which linked Mexican politicians to drug dealers and documented the cover up of Martinez's murder in 2012, was produced by a global network of journalists organized by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based nonprofit group. Among the lead writers on the project was Dana Priest, a former Post staffer. Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said the awards were especially gratifying this year because they recognized the depth and range of the news organization's journalism, and because the reporting was conducted under the unusual circumstances of the pandemic. "We faced one enormous story after another," he said. "The staff rose to the occasion." Shapira's reporting about the mistreatment of black cadets at VMI prompted Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a VMI alumnus, to order an investigation. It also led to the resignation of the school's superintendent. The Polk committee created a new category of oral history to honor Saslow's "Voices from the Pandemic." The first-person interviews, the committee said, were crafted to reflect "a segment of the American populace coping with grief, fear, guilt, bitterness, frustration, tension, rejection and other emotions." Saslow also won a Polk Award in 2013. McCrummen's three profiles of Georgia residents "deftly (captured) Georgia's shifting political winds," the Polk committee said. Among the stories recognized was her profile of Kevin Van Ausdal, the Democratic opponent of congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, who promoted the extremist ideology QAnon and other radical misinformation. Among others Polk winners: the Atlantic magazine's Ed Yong, for his reporting about the coronavirus; a team of New York Times reporters (Ross Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire) for their investigation and analysis of former president Donald Trump's tax records; the staff of the Minneapolis Star Tribune for coverage of Floyd's death and its aftermath; and Dan Diamond of Politico for documenting the Trump administration's interference with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other sources of medical and scientific knowledge. Diamond has since joined The Post as a reporter. Another new Post reporter, Akilah Johnson, was a leading member of a ProPublica team that won a Polk Award for pieces that exposed the pandemic's disproportionate impact on Black Americans. [February 24, 2021] Nubeva Named Top 50 Company in TSX Exchange SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Nubeva Technologies Ltd. (TSX-V: NBVA), a developer of decryption software that broadens network traffic security and visibility, announced today that the Toronto Venture Stock Exchange has recognized Nubeva as a 2021 Top 50 Company. The Venture 50 is a ranking of the top performers listed on TSX Venture Exchange in each of five major industry sectors mining, energy & energy services, clean technology & life sciences, diversified industries and technology based on a ranking formula with equal weighting given to return on investment, market cap growth, trading volume and analyst coverage. We are honored to be recognized as a Top 50 company within the TSX Venture Exchange, said Randy Chou, CEO of Nubeva. Nubeva solves a core visibility requirement sought by network security and application monitoring technologies, and their enterprises customers. During the last six-plus months, we are starting to see material traction with our solutions. Nubeva introduced Session Key Intercept (SKI) in 2019. SKI is a breakthrough patented technology that fills the growing gaps of legacy decryption brought on by new standards, new network and application delivery models, and by the sheer scale of modern IT. This award is due to the dedication of our employees in landing several key customer relationships, said Juliet Jones, CFO at Nubeva. We have gained market validation in 2020 with five global enterprises in the aras of cybersecurity, network monitoring and the 5G space and this is just the beginning. With the increase in remote workforce, the adoption of 5G and the expansion of IoT, the monitoring requirements will continue to evolve exponentially. Nubeva joined the TSX Exchange in June 2018. The company licenses software as an OEM solution for next-generation decryption to offer a better, faster, and more secure alternative to legacy methods. About Nubeva Technologies Ltd. Nubeva Technologies Ltd. develops and licenses software for the decryption of TLS network traffic to enable deep packet inspection for security and application monitoring systems. The need to inspect data in motion is fundamental to network security and application monitoring and assurance. Nubeva solves the growing capability, performance, and complexity gaps introduced by modern TLS encryption and todays network and computing architectures. The shift to SaaS, the cloud, 5G, and stronger encryption practices like perfect forward secrecy and TLS 1.3 create new and unique challenges for in-line and out-of-band decryption and visibility solutions. Nubeva has evolved the TLS visibility option for the modern era of strong encryption in dynamic and distributed computing environments. Visit nubeva.com for more information. Forward Looking Statements This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws relating to the Company's business plans and the outlook of the cybersecurity industry. Although the Company believes in light of the experience of its officers and directors, current conditions and expected future developments and other factors that have been considered appropriate that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Actual results and developments may differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this release and the Company assumes no responsibility to update them or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances other than as required by applicable securities laws. The Company undertakes no obligation to comment on analyses, expectations or statements made by third-parties in respect of the Company, its subsidiaries, their securities, or their respective financial or operating results (as applicable). 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 additional information, please contact: Nubeva Technologies Ltd. Juliet Jones, Chief Financial Officer 1(844)538-4638 For More Information: Mary Korus Mkorus@nubeva.com 714-679-5280 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Mary from Kalamazoo, Mich. : "Like most veterans, my friends and family are scattered across the world. I'm grateful that my mom spells love Q.U.I.L.T. so I can read words from people who've left their footprints on my heart through the years. This is why my memory quilt is my most special someTHING. Thank you, USAA, for the opportunity to share it with others." : "Like most veterans, my friends and family are scattered across the world. I'm grateful that my mom spells love Q.U.I.L.T. so I can read words from people who've left their footprints on my heart through the years. This is why my memory quilt is my most special someTHING. Thank you, USAA, for the opportunity to share it with others." Matthew from Nashville, Tenn. : "Thanks USAA for assisting me in buying my dream vehicle so Rosco and I can have our outdoor adventures come to life!" : "Thanks USAA for assisting me in buying my dream vehicle so Rosco and I can have our outdoor adventures come to life!" Clarissa from Calif.: "I got to see snow for the first time as an adult, fell in love with it and have a blast every time a get a chance. Our family truck, Alba, is my one true love because she is a safe and reliable transportation when it's white out. My favorite is when she has a bed full of snow after winter storms, making a perfect spot to hang out and chill. I know firsthand how much USAA strives to offer the best services to our military families, and I'm grateful for everything they do to take care of what's most important to them." In a recent survey conducted by KRS Research, USAA found that many people own prized possessions they consider their One True Love. The survey found that more than half of Gen Z/Millenials admit they own something they would describe as their "true love" (the survey was conducted online with a demographically representative U.S. sample of 1,005 adults 18 years of age and older from January 6 to 8, 2021). While everyone has a prized possession, the survey also found nearly three-quarters of Gen Z/Millennials don't have their most prized possession covered by insurance. Everyone has a One True Love that is unique and invaluable. USAA would like to thank everyone who participated in the One True Love contest, and congratulate the winners! How the Contest Was Run Participants were 18 or older and submitted a short entry explaining their One True Love (non-human), accompanied with a photo, using the hashtag #USAAOneTrueLove on Twitter and Instagram. A panel selected nine finalists. The finalists were notified via Twitter and/or Instagram. The nine finalist photos were shared and voted upon by the public to determine the three winners, based on popular vote. The winners were notified via Twitter and Instagram. The One True Love contest was open to any US resident. Contest entry was only valid on Twitter and Instagram. Only self-submissions were considered for finalists or winners. Prize Package The winners will receive a photoshoot with their One True Love and a vacation prize package worth up to $5,000 for themselves and one other person, whenever travel safely resumes and up to two years from announcement of winner. About USAA Founded in 1922 by a group of military officers, USAA is among the leading providers of insurance, banking and investment and retirement solutions to nearly 13 million members of the U.S. military, veterans who have honorably served and their families. Headquartered in San Antonio, Tex., USAA has offices in seven U.S. cities and three overseas locations and employs more than 35,000 people worldwide. Each year, the company contributes to national and local nonprofits in support of military families and communities where employees live and work. For more information about USAA, follow us on Facebook or Twitter (@USAA), or visit usaa.com. Contact: USAA Media Relations [email protected] 210-498-0940 USAA on Twitter: @usaa SOURCE USAA Related Links http://www.usaa.com COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) Devontae Shuler scored 14 points and Mississippi beat No. 24 Missouri 60-53 on Tuesday night to sweep the season series against the sputtering Tigers. Romello White, Luis Rodriguez and Jarkel Joiner added 10 points apiece for Ole Miss (13-9, 8-7 Southeastern Conference), which beat then-No. 10 Missouri 80-59 earlier this month. Joiner hit six free throws in the final 46 seconds to seal the rematch as the Rebels held off the Tigers second-half charge. It was a good way for us to win it, Ole Miss coach Kermit Davis said. Its great to get Jarkel the ball. He and Devontae Shuler are our very best free-throw shooters. ... He just stepped up there and (hit) key free throws, one after the other. Kobe Brown led Missouri (14-7, 7-7) with 12 points while Mark Smith added 11. Jeremiah Tilmon had 10 points and 10 rebounds, his seventh double-double of the season. Ole Miss led by nine points at halftime and pushed ahead by as many as 13 early in the second half. But Missouri went on a 15-2 second-half run while the Rebels endured a brutal 8:26 stretch without a field goal, pushing the Tigers ahead 43-41 for their first lead with 9:25 left. Neither team led by more than a possession from there until Shuler and KJ Buffen hit consecutive buckets to give Ole Miss a four-point lead with 1:18 to go. The Rebels closed out the game with a 10-3 run. I think more than anything, it was getting stops, Missouri coach Cuonzo Martin said of his team's struggles in the closing stretch. Of course, make baskets, and then you try to get stops. ... It was a four-point swing, and then it kind of went from there. But of course, itd be getting stops, then making baskets. Ole Miss shot 3 for 11 from 3-point range (27%), its third consecutive game of 30% or worse from beyond the arc. But the Rebels were helped by getting 14 second-chance points off 15 offensive rebounds. Ole Miss also effectively contained Missouri guards Dru Smith, who was held to nine points, and Xavier Pinson, who matched a season low with two points. Story continues The victory was critical for the Rebels' NCAA Tournament hopes. That was huge for us, White said. I was locked in. I had great sleep, just prepared myself to have a good game today. I knew how big this game was, I just knew my team was together. SURE-HANDED SHULER Shuler is becoming one of the SECs most consistent players. After a four-point outing against Mississippi State last weekend ended a streak of 10 games in double figures, the senior returned to form. MISSISSIPPI BLUES Missouri has lost five straight games to teams from Mississippi dating back to last season. The Tigers' last victory over a team from the state was against Ole Miss on Feb. 18, 2020. BIG PICTURE Ole Miss: The Rebels have won five of six, their best stretch since starting the season 5-1. That run has included three wins against AP Top 25 teams on Feb. 2 against Tennessee and twice against Missouri. Missouri: Has lost four of its last five games as its NCAA Tournament stock continues to drop, with each of those losses to unranked foes. The Tigers 53 points tied a season low, and they shot 35% from the field, their second-worst performance of the year. UP NEXT Ole Miss: At Vanderbilt on Saturday. Missouri: Hosts Texas A&M on Saturday. ___ More AP college basketball: https://apnews.com/hub/college-basketball and https://twitter.com/AP_Top25 NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Healthfirst, one of the nation's largest not-for-profit health insurers, today provided insight into how it stepped up and returned $440 million to hospitals and providers in the state during 2020 as New York's health system faced the unprecedented challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the company announced that it achieved membership growth of 242,000, bringing total membership as of December 31, 2020 to 1,647,453 members and solidifying its position as the largest not-for-profit health insurer in New York (by revenue). Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic Healthfirst has seen increasing numbers of New Yorkers turn to its government-sponsored Medicaid and Medicare products. Medicaid growth was particularly strong as people faced significant economic hardship and job loss caused by the fallout from the pandemic. The company noted its unique relationship with the local health system and the trust it has built within the communities it serves. Under Healthfirst's unique value-based care model, incentives are aligned around trying to keep people healthy and ensuring that they have appropriate care. Healthfirst and its providers are aligned around the goal of quality care. Providers benefit if they improve the health of patients and reduce the effects of chronic disease. The value-based model rewards the health system and participating providers if patients are well cared for. "Healthfirst's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the amount of funding that we were able to return to the local health system, really points out how we are different from our competitors," said Pat Wang, President and Chief Executive Officer of Healthfirst. "Because we are sponsored by 15 of the largest hospital systems in New York, instead of pocketing profits, we give them back to the health delivery system. Our goals are to keep people healthy and the health system in New York strong." "During 2020, when hospitals and providers across New York faced record losses and had their business models upended, we were able to leverage our unique model and return a significant amount of surplus revenue "profit" to them," noted Wang. "This provided crucial funds at a critical time as they were caring for our members, their patients. We view this as a win/win for the state of New York, our members, and the hospitals and providers who take care of our members." "Our response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a community-based health plan was to do everything possible to support our members and the heroic hospitals and healthcare providers at the front lines of this crisis," said Jay Schechtman, MD, Chief Clinical Officer for Healthfirst. "We mounted a massive clinical response to the crisis. For our members, we leveraged data and analytics to identify needs for care management, supplies and equipment, prescription medications, telehealth access, and food resources. For hospitals and providers, we stayed very close to them as they were impacted so severely by the drop in healthcare utilization." Healthfirst was also able to maintain a strong level of investment throughout 2020 to help members keep healthcare close at hand. This investment included accelerating work and launching the Healthfirst NY Mobile App (available for iOS and Android), which offers members a personalized experience. Additionally, the company accelerated several other digital innovations and corporate initiatives during the year, including the launch of a virtual community office to provide enrollment and support services. About Healthfirst Healthfirst is one of the nation's largest not-for-profit health insurers, earning the trust of more than 1.6 million members by ensuring access to affordable and high-quality healthcare. Sponsored by downstate New York's leading hospital systems, Healthfirst's unique advantage is rooted in its mission to put members first by partnering closely with its broad network of providers on shared goals. Healthfirst is also a pioneer of the value-based care model, now recognized as a national best practice. For nearly 30 years, Healthfirst has built its reputation in the community for top-quality products and services New Yorkers can depend on. It offers market-leading products to fit every life stage, including Medicaid plans, Medicare Advantage plans, Long-Term Care plans, Qualified Health plans, Essential Plan, and individual and small group plans. Healthfirst serves members in New York City and on Long Island, as well as in Westchester, Rockland, Sullivan, and Orange counties. For more information on Healthfirst, please visit healthfirst.org. Contact: David W. Carter [email protected] (646) 491-1580 SOURCE Healthfirst Related Links https://healthfirst.org Photo: Twitter/Ministry of the Word Dorre Love is one the "street preachers" named in a police report that went before the Vancouver Police Board in January. None of the calls Vancouver police answered last year in the West End and in other parts of the city regarding allegations of street preachers broadcasting hurtful messages targeting the gay, transgender and other communities constituted hate speech. That was the conclusion of an investigation police conducted into 10 incidents that occurred between June and October 2020. The incidents involved at least two men using a microphone and an amplifier in separate events to allegedly spread views of a homophobic and transphobic nature. In one incident in August, sportscaster Justin Morrisette suffered a broken leg after he confronted Dorre Love, who has since been charged with aggravated assault. Loves next court appearance is scheduled for March 10. Police named Love and David Lynn as preachers in a report to the Vancouver Police Board in January. Both men were the subject of formal complaints lodged by citizens against the VPD who accused officers of not taking action against the men. Following the assault on Morrisette in the West End, police assembled their hate crimes unit, major crimes section and a legal advisor to discuss the incidents. These experts concluded that none of the alleged actions by the street preachers constituted a violation of Criminal Code laws concerning hate speech or promoting hate, said the report, which acknowledged the preachers views caused offence and emotional stress to many citizens and specifically to the 2SLGBTQ+ community. The report said police intervened in seven of the 10 calls to either curtail or stop behaviour by the street preachers that was unlawful or that had the potential to breach the peace, and where clear lawful authority existed. Police said two of the calls related to the arrest of Love for aggravated assault and an earlier incident for breach of the peace. Two other calls were determined to be unfounded or action not lawfully warranted. One call referred to the collective events of Lynn, who used a microphone and amplifier at the Commercial-Broadway transit hub on Aug. 31 before later baptizing people at Sunset Beach under the watchful eye of several officers. VPD personnel formed a perimeter around Mr. Lynn and his group in an effort to keep the groups separate and allow the religious ceremony to proceed as is required under Section 2(b) of the Charter, said the report, noting a crowd of demonstrators estimated at 300 people was at the beach. It must be remembered that the VPD has a responsibility to protect all involved in such situations, regardless of their personal views or feelings. The report noted efforts by the Toronto Police Service to respond to Lynn in 2019 by way of bylaw enforcement and arrest for causing a disturbance resulted in a stay of criminal charges. The report said there are no laws in Canada that police can or should exercise to prevent a person from expressing their constitutionally protected opinions or views. That includes religious and any other opinions even where such views are widely unpopular, distasteful, or even offensive in nature, as long as they do not incite hate or violent behaviour. The police investigation comes as city council prepares to vote Wednesday on setting a $250 fine and amending the noise control bylaw to prohibit the unauthorized use of a device that can amplify voice or musical instruments. The city staff report also recommends giving the city and police the authority to seize such a device. The report does not specifically mention Love or Lynn, or the nature of their broadcasts, but noted the city received numerous complaints about an individual on the streets of downtown Vancouver [in July and August 2020] using a microphone and amplifier to speak to the public. Both the volume and duration of the mans speech were reported to be a public disturbance, the report said. Coun. Pete Fry acknowledged a fine wouldnt prevent a person from expressing controversial views in public but believes allowing officials to seize amplification equipment could deter such activity. Fry said the bar is pretty high to prove a hate crime under Canadian law, with preachers realizing how far they can go before their speech is considered a crime. Fry was among the crowd of demonstrators when Lynn was at Sunset Beach. I was there to register my discomfort with that guys message, but also recognizing theres very little we can do about it within the context of the law, he said. Photo taken on Feb. 22, 2021 shows a screen displaying British Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressing the nation at 10 Downing Street, in London, Britain. (Xinhua/Han Yan) LONDON, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- As British Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled the "roadmap" to ease the current coronavirus lockdown, a British frontline doctor has urged continued vigilance and caution to avoid a resurge of infections. Johnson announced Monday that schools in England will reopen from March 8 as part of the four-step plan. Dr. Chandra Kanneganti, national chairman of the British International Doctors Association, said he believes that by remaining cautious the public can expect to be back to some semblance of normality in mid-June, as set out by the roadmap. "We just need to continue to be more vigilant as usual," Kanneganti, also a general practitioner (GP) in Stoke-On-Trent in northern England, told Xinhua in an interview. "It's about maintaining this kind of: cleaning our hands, the space and also checking regularly," he said. CONTINUOUS CAUTION NEEDED Since the start of this year, Kanneganti has been testing himself for the coronavirus twice a week to keep both himself and his patients safe. Although Kanneganti works in a profession that requires this diligence with testing, he said he believes that this cautionary approach should be adopted by most and is what is needed for Britain to win the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Compared to the previous easing of lockdown, Kanneganti said he believes the slower step-by-step process announced by Johnson on Monday is the right thing to do. "I think it's very cautious and that's probably what we need now," Kanneganti said. The slow and cautious approach allows doctors like him to meet vaccination targets easier, he said. "I think as long as we are careful in outdoor activities, we know that from evidence that the virus doesn't spread that extensively as indoors, and when you're outdoors and maintaining that kind of contact." About the reopening of all schools on March 8, a move some see as controversial, Kanneganti considered the benefits of easing restrictions on school and outdoor activity far outweigh the risks. "We're seeing the significant rise in depression, stress and anxiety in our patients," he said. "And definitely these kinds of activities will help to improve the physical and also the mental health as well." England is currently under the third national lockdown since outbreak of the pandemic in the country. Similar restriction measures are also in place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE WORKING Recently, Britain's estimated R-rate, also known as the coronavirus reproduction number, has fallen to between 0.6 and 0.9, showing that the ongoing lockdown is working. Kanneganti said he's seen that reflected in his day-to-day job. "Slowly but steadily, we are seeing patients come in with non-COVID symptoms and those who need investigating further for heart problems or breathing problems," he said. "I'm glad that people are coming out. And that message should go across that general practice is open, it was never closed." Meanwhile, a study led by Public Health Scotland showed Monday that the coronavirus vaccines being used in Britain could reduce the risk of hospital admission by up to 94 percent four weeks after the first dose. Four weeks after receiving the first dose, the University of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine appeared to reduce the risk of hospital admission by 94 percent, according to the study. Those who received the Pfizer-BioNTech jab had a reduction in risk of 85 percent between 28 and 34 days after the first dose, the study showed. Kanneganti, whose day-to-day has been filled with managing vaccinations at his clinic, described the research results as "really positive news". "(The vaccine news) is really important and it's really good to see the research led by Public Health Scotland. This was really really positive news," he said. "I think the most important thing is that once the second dose also goes, hopefully, we start in second doses of those who had the first dose in December, we're starting from next week, and we'll see much more of a major impact on direct hospital admissions," Kanneganti said. To bring life back to normal, countries such as Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the United States have been racing against time to roll out coronavirus vaccines. IMPACT OF DISINFORMATION However, a number of medical professionals are calling on social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to manage the spread of disinformation which they say disrupts their work. From groundless allegations that the virus originated in a lab in China, which was deemed "unlikely" by the World Health Organization (WHO), to the Anti-Vax movement, the spread of misinformation makes Kanneganti's job a lot more difficult. "They're causing this misinformation spread and also stopping those who genuinely should have been vaccinated, those vulnerable groups which should be vaccinated, they are not going for it because of misinformation," he said. For Kanneganti, it's forced him and other leading members in the Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire community to stand up and try and reassure people of the facts. Alongside that, Kanneganti said he believes that countries should not fight alone with coronavirus and the international community needs to work together to help formulate a global plan to normality. "We need to be thinking that a pandemic can happen anytime, anywhere. And every country should now speed up the processes of having the procedures in place. Something like this happens, how to close the border, and how to learn good lessons from countries who have succeeded in suppressing the virus," he said. "This is about all of us. All the countries need to sit together, be honest, and have a clear plan about how we all support each other," Kanneganti added. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) speaks during an event in New York City on Oct. 27, 2020. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images) AOC Among Democrats Upset With Biden Administration Reopening Trump-Era Migrant Facility Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and other Democrats this week expressed frustration with the Biden administration after it reopened a child migrant facility that was erected under the previous administration. This is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okayno matter the administration or party, the second-term congresswoman wrote in a tweet. She added that our fraught, unjust immigration system will not transform after only two months into the Biden administration. Thats why bold reimagination is so [important]. DHS shouldnt exist, agencies should be reorganized, ICE gotta go, ban for-profit detention, create climate refugee status & more, she said, referring to the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A Democratic socialist, Ocasio-Cortez is widely seen as the top lawmaker in the Democrats radical wing. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) also criticized the move, writing in a social media post that multiple administrations have made the callous choice to lock up thousands of children seeking refuge in the United States of America. As long as we see people seeking a better life as aliens instead of fellow human beings, our immigration system will continue to fail us, she added. Immigrants are officially referred to as aliens by the federal government. A staff member works in the infirmary, a series of tents, at a U.S. government holding facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, on July 9, 2019. (Eric Gay/AP Photo) Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) chimed in on Wednesday, writing in a tweet: The human rights of migrants and migrant children is not a partisan issue. The fact is this is shameful. @POTUS must reverse course. The facility in question is located in Carrizo Springs, Texas. It was built during the Trump administration and used briefly in 2019. Before reopening on Monday, it hadnt held migrants for nearly two years. The Department of Health and Human Services said the facility has capacity for approximately 700 children, but could accommodate more if additional structures were added. White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Tuesday defended the reopening after a reporter noted Bidens harsh criticism while President Donald Trump was in office of how child migrants, or unaccompanied minors, were being held in cages. We are in a circumstance where we are not going to expel unaccompanied minors at the border. That would be inhumane. That is not what we are going to do here, as an administration. We need to find places that are safe under COVID protocols for kids to be, where they can have access to education, health, and mental services consistent with their best interest. Our goal is for them to then be transferred to families or sponsors, she told reporters in Washington. Republicans also took issue with the reopening, primarily because of Democrats past rhetoric. Back in 2019, [Vice President] Kamala Harris referred to holding children at the border as a human rights abuse. Now that she and President Biden are in charge, a facility just REOPENED under their watch, Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) wrote on Twitter. What changed? "Ferrariman" Drives Off With GGPoker Super MILLION$ Title February 24, 2021 Matthew Pitt The GGPoker player known as Ferrariman entered a $1,000 satellite for the Super MILLION$ tournament and it turned out to be arguably the best decision they have ever made. Not only did they bank a $10,300 seat to online pokers biggest weekly tournament, they outlasted all 223-opponents and drove off into the sunset with the $452,885 top prize. GGPoker Super MILLION$ Final Table Results Place Player Country Prize 1 Ferrariman Austria $452,885 2 Wiktor Malinowski Macau $349,222 3 David Yan New Zealand $269,287 4 Yuri Dzivielevski Brazil $207,649 5 Mikita Badziakouski Costa Rica $160,119 6 Sam Greenwood Canada $123,468 7 Syntropy Hungary $95,207 8 Timothy Nuter Canada $73,415 9 Niklas Astedt Canada $56,610 All eyes were on Niklas Astedt at the start of the final table on February 23. The super-talented Swede is yet to win the Super MILLION$ despite reaching its final table nine times. Astedt sat down at this latest final table third in chips and in a great spot to take the tournament down. Battle Against ElkY and Fedor Holz in GGPoker's New Flip & Gos That never happened, however, and Astedt was the first player out of the door. Nothing went well for Astedt and he was down to only six big blinds on his final hand. Astedts tiny stack went into the middle with ace-six, and Mikita Badziakouski called from the big blind with the dominating ace-ten. Neither players improved their hand and Astedt busted. Canadas Timothy Nuter was the next player out of the door, busting during the 35,000/70,000/8,500a level. The action folded to Nuter in the cutoff and he min-raised with ace-ten. Yuri Dzivielevski woke up on the button with pocket queens and three-bet to 420,000. Both blinds ducked out of the way, but Nuter pushed all-in for 1,864,361 and was quickly called. Dzivielevskis ladies held and Nuter headed for the exits. Seventh place and the last five-figure prize of the evening went to Syntropy. Dzivielevski raised to 168,000 with ace-queen during the 40,000/80,000/10,000a level and instantly called when Syntropy jammed for 665,260 from the small blind with what turned out to be the ace-nine of clubs. The board flirted with rescuing Syntropy but they ultimately busted out. Greenwood Nets The First Six-Figure Prize Of The Evening Sam Greenwood helped himself to the $123,468 sixth-place prize. Greenwood lost a handful of key hands and found himself down to a mere 4.5 big blinds when he crashed out of the tournament. He shipped in his stack from the button with king-ten only to see Dzivielevski make the call from the big blind with jack-deuce of clubs. A jack and a deuce on the flop was enough to send Greenwood to the showers. Update: GGPoker Approved in PA, But Launch Not Imminent The table lost another superstar in the shape of Badziakouski. Wiktor Malinowski open-shoved from the small blind with ace-jack and Badziakouski called off his 12 big blind stack with ace-five. The five community cards were void of fives and the dangerous Badziakouski busted. Dzivielevski was the next player to fall by the wayside, much to the relief of the rest of the players at the final table. The two-time WSOP bracelet winner clashed in a battle of the blinds with Malinowski, the latter setting the Brazilian all-in for his last four big blinds. Malinowski showed ace-nine, Dzivielevski king-ten, and the formers hand held to reduce the player count by one. Heads-Up Is Set Start of the day chip leader, David Yan, was the next player to fall. Yans demise in third place earned him an impressive $269,287. Yan lost half his stack to Ferrariman in a battle of the blinds. The rest of his 11 big blind stack went into the middle of the felt with ace-nine against Malinowskis pocket kings, and heads-up was set. Malinowski went into the one-on-one battle with almost twice as many chips as Ferrariman but he couldnt get the job done. A superb heads-up battle ensued but Malinowski ran out of timebank at one stage, which handed an advantage to the satellite winner Ferrariman. The final hand took place during the 200,000/400,000/50,000a level and saw Malinowski limp with pocket sevens, Ferrariman raised to 1,400,000 with queens before calling when Malinowski shipped in the 22 big blinds he had behind. The board provided no drama, and Ferrariman turned his $1,000 satellite into a colossal $452,885 prize. Malinowski had to make do with the $349,222 consolation prize. No doubt plenty of that sum will find its way to the high stakes cash game tables. Super-Sized Super MILLIONS This Week This week's Super MILLION$ is super-sized with GGPoker increasing the buy-in to an eye-watering $25,500 and boosting the guarantee to $2.5 million as part of the Super MILLION$ Week. Satellites for the next edition of the Super MILLION$ are running at GGPoker right now. Head there and see if you can follow in the footsteps of some of the greatest players in the world and become a GGPoker champion. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. The simple fact that the AI Commission is led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt should trouble those who care for privacy, accountability, transparency, and individual liberty. In late January, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), or the AI Commission, released a draft of their upcoming report to Congress, rejecting calls to ban AI-powered autonomous weapons, characterized by critics as killer robots. While the AI Commission did briefly address privacy and civil liberties concerns, they ultimately called on Congress to double AI research and funding annually up to $32 billion a year by 2026. The report also failed to note clear conflicts of interest between the Commissions Chairman, and former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt. Opponents of the advancing AI-powered surveillance and police states include privacy advocates concerned about a future where law enforcement are wearing glasses equipped with facial recognition software powered by secret AI algorithms. The draft report addresses the surveillance concerns, stating, The stakes of the AI future are intimately connected to the enduring contest between authoritarian and democratic political systems and ideologies. The Commission also notes that AI-enabled surveillance will soon be in the hands of most or all governments and authoritarian regimes will continue to use AI-powered face recognition, biometrics, predictive analytics, and data fusion as instruments of surveillance, influence, and political control. The report correctly points a finger at Chinas authoritarianism and AI-driven surveillance state. However, the draft also attempts to paint the U.S. as a liberal democracy that uses such technologies for legitimate public purposes. compatible with the rule of law. The implication is that the enemies of the U.S. could use this technology for tyrannical purposes, but the U.S. and its allies would only ever use AI in the interest of preserving liberty. A responsible democracy must ensure that the use of AI by the government is limited by wise restraints to comport with the rights and liberties that define a free and open society, reads the draft. The U.S. government should develop and field AI-enabled technologies with adequate transparency, strong oversight, and accountability to protect against misuse. Taken at face value, these statements might offer a sense of reassurance. Unfortunately, we are speaking about the U.S. government and military, and these institutions do not have a history of transparency or accountability. Even more worrisome is the drafts mention of the urgent need to use AI for national security purposes, particularly against foreign and domestic terrorists operating within our borders. The draft encourages the DOD not to pursue their counter-terrorism goals without ensuring that security applications of AI conform to core values of individual liberty and equal protection under law. Despite the acknowledgement of privacy concerns, the bulk of the draft report was an endorsement of expanding the U.S. government and U.S. military research into AI. Robert Work, former Deputy Defense Secretary and the commissions vice chairman, said the commission is calling on the Department of Defense to achieve military AI readiness by 2025 with training and education for military members. The draft calls for the Secretary of Defense to establish AI readiness goals by the end of this year. The final version of the report is expected to be shared with Congress on March 1st. The Fight To Stop Killer Robots There are also fears that traditional policing involving human officers could be replaced with remote-controlled drones and robot officers powered by artificial intelligence that make decisions using a formula unknown to the public. Some critics had hoped for an outright ban on the technology, but the commission said they believe AI would make fewer mistakes in battle, leading to less deaths. Vice Chair Work said there was a moral imperative to at least pursue this hypothesis. Reuters reports that one of the members of the commission warned of pressure to build machines that react quickly, which could escalate conflicts. The panel endorsed the idea that only humans should make decisions regarding launching nuclear weapons, but said a ban on AI would work against U.S. interests and difficult to enforce. One of the main advocates for banning autonomous weapons is the organization Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) formed in October 2012 to ban fully autonomous weapons. They claim this would help retain meaningful human control over the use of force. The organization has been campaigning internationally for a treaty which would ban so-called killer robots. According to the coalition, 30 countries, 110 NGOs, and 4,500 AI experts are in support of their efforts to ban the technology. Mary Wareham, coordinator of Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, told Reuters that the commissions focus on the need to compete with similar investments made by China and Russia only serves to encourage arms races. Wareham is correct in her assessment given Vice Chair Works statement that it is a moral imperative for the U.S. military to pursue AI research under the assumption that AI-driven warfare would lead to less casualties. This mentality will all but guarantee that AI-related defense research will be funded to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars annually. The Electronic Privacy Information Center has been fighting to force the AI Commission to provide details regarding how they reach their conclusions, as well as seeking internal communications between Commission members. EPIC has won twice in its case against the AI Commission, forcing the Commission to hold public meetings and disclose thousands of pages of records. EPIC has called on the AI Commission to advise Congress, as the nations highest policymaking authority, to establish government-wide principles and safeguards for the use and development of AI. While EPIC has succeeded in revealing invaluable data about the work of the AI Commission, they also warn that there are already indications that the U.S. Intelligence Community has failed to invest in vital AI safeguards. Googles Eric Schmidt and Rebellion Defense The AI Commission was established by Congress in 2018 with the goal of review[ing] advances in artificial intelligence, related machine learning developments, and associated technologies and making policy recommendations to Congress and the President. The Commission has made promises of transparency and accountability, but has actually held most of its meetings and decision-making in secret. The simple fact that the Commission is led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt should trouble those who care for privacy, accountability, transparency, and individual liberty. Schmidt is known for being the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, however, his role with Google continues through the 2020s. Schmidt served as Executive Chairman of Google from 2011 to 2015 and then Executive Chair of Googles parent company Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017. Most recently, Schmidt has been a Technical Advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020. During this time period, Google has suffered multiple public relations nightmares, namely the fact that the Big Tech firm is infamous for gathering massive amounts of data from its users. There was the time that Google planned to launch a censored version of its search engine in China that would blacklist websites and search terms a move which Eric Schmidt said would help China be more open. There was also the Project Maven fiasco where it was revealed that Google was working with the Pentagon to develop AI that would analyze drone footage. After the news of Maven became mainstream, dozens of employees resigned in protest and thousands signed a petition asking Google to quit the project. Google ultimately caved and announced they would abandon Project Maven. More recently, an investigation by The American Prospect revealed that Schmidt has ties to a largely unknown AI contractor. The report notes that during the Obama administration Google representatives were seen frequently enough at the White House that some jokingly call the administration Google.gov, with more than 250 Google employees moving between the government and the company throughout Obamas presidency. Schmidt was one of these Google employees. From official positions, he has advocated for the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to adopt more machine-learning technology. Meanwhile, as a venture capitalist, he has invested millions of dollars in more than a half-dozen national-security startups that sell those very technologies back to the government, the Prospect writes. Specifically, Schmidt is one of the primary investors of AI contractor Rebellion Defense via his firm Innovation Endeavors. Rebellion states that its mission is to empower the mission of national defense through AI driven technology. The company brags that its team members were early-stage employees at Netflix, Amazon, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft, and many have spent time as civil servants at the U.S. Digital Service, Defense Digital Service, and the U.K. Government Digital Service (GDS). Rebellions co-founder and CEO Chris Lynch moved from the tech sector to D.C. in 2015 to run the Pentagons Defense Digital Service (DDS). While at the DDS Lynch worked under three defense secretaries before leaving in 2019 to launch Rebellion Defense. Lynchs move from Big Tech to Military-Industrial Complex and back to private sector is illustrative of the ongoing revolving door between private sector and government. The ease of access that Schmidt and his Google colleagues enjoyed during the Obama years appears to be returning in the early days of the Biden administration. The Prospect notes that in November, Rebellion was awarded a contract to create a single data-sharing network for the Air Force. Shortly after Biden was declared the next President, he began announcing his transition team. Big Tech companies were on the list, including Uber, Amazon, Google, and the relatively unknown Rebellion Defense. The presence of Eric Schmidt on the AI Commission and as a primary investor in an AI contractor for the military is a clear conflict of interest. Schmidts time at Google and his public statements have made it clear that he does not value privacy. Despite the AI Commissions draft report paying lip service to privacy protections, the American people should not expect the likes of Eric Schmidt or Rebellion Defense to protect them from the growing specter of AI-powered autonomous weapons. The activists had worked on behalf of several of the protesters in 11 provinces. Hundreds of Cambodian villagers dispossessed by land grabs protest outside the Land Ministry in Phnom Penh, Sept. 21, 2020. Land dispute victims from nearly half of Cambodias two dozen provinces gathered in their respective communities Tuesday as part of a solidarity protest demanding that the government drop charges against six activists arrested over the past three years after working on their behalf. In each location, between 10 and 20 people throughout 11 provinces displayed banners calling for the activists immediate release. Seong Sokhom, who represents a community embroiled in a land dispute in Kampong Speu province, told RFAs Khmer Service that in addition to calling for the release of the six activists, protesters were also urging the government to intervene with local authorities and provincial governments to resolve disputes, as well as to stop the military police and other security forces from intimidating and arresting villagers. He said the campaign was launched to show solidarity and advocate peacefully on behalf of local communities seeking resolutions to their disputes in a country where corrupt land grabs are common and a source of social friction. I am appealing to the court to stop arresting and charging land activiststhey are victims of land dispute and are being detained. Their families face hardship because they are losing their breadwinners, he said. I am asking the government to resolve these issues equally and the best way to do so is by negotiating with the villagers and community to understand their needs. The six activist detainees are representatives from Tboung Khmum and Sihanoukville provinces. They were arrested separately in 2019, 2020, and 2021 after demanding the return of land they say were taken by companies and the well-connected. In addition to the six in detention, nongovernmental organizations say there are at least 172 activists facing charges of incitement to commit a felony or provoke social disorder after demand the return of their land. RFA was unable to reach government spokesman Phay Siphan or Ministry of Justice spokesman Chhin Malin for comment on the days events. Coalition of Cambodian Farmers Community (CCFC) President Theng Savoeun told RFA that people are simply expressing their views and said he hopes the government will not interrupt their campaigns, but rather work to resolve their complaints. We are appealing to the ministries and especially the courts to provide justice to the victims and resolve their land disputes according to the law, to avoid violating their human rights, he said. A key source of social tension in Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries is the widespread practice of land grabs in which authorities seize land from people for development projects or foreign invested enterprises without paying them fair compensation for lost crops, property, and livelihoods. Villagers said the land campaign will progress step by step through smaller groups until we succeed in their goals. They also posted photos for the press Tuesday and planned to submit petitions to local authorities and relevant ministries. Youth activist Chhoeun Daravy, sporting a freshly shaved head, raises her hands in gratitude to supporters in Phnom Penh, February 2021. RFA Shaved head protest Meanwhile, several detained activists from environmental watchdogs Mother Nature and Khmer Thavrak shaved their heads Tuesday in what family members said was meant to convey a call for justice and freedom. Mother Nature activist Thun Rathas wife Bat Raksmey told RFA that her husband shaved his head to demand judicial independence and social justice. She said her husbands spirit remain strong and that he has not been cowed by his arrest. Bat Raksmey urged the court to release her husband, saying that detaining him will not benefit the government. The public has expressed support for my husband who loves the environment, she said. Even though he remains detained, continues to advocate in prison. His demands are righteous and lawful. Khmer Thavrak activist So Mettas sister Eng Vanndy told RFA that at first, she was surprised to learn that So Metta shaved her head, but later said she had come to appreciate what she called a sacrifice for social justice. What she has done was for the sake of freedom and natural resources, she said. Prison Department spokesperson Nuth Savna told RFA that prisoners have the right to shave their heads, but they should inform their prison directors to avoid allegations that they were forced to do so. They have the right to shave their heads to express themselves or for religious reasons, according to Article 29 of the Prison Law, he said. Soeung Sengkaruna, spokesperson for local rights group Adhoc, told RFA that the court should consider extending justice to the detained youths because they were working to protect the countrys environment and natural resources. Our constitution allows people who are unhappy to express themselves and to demand solutions from the state institutions, he said. The activists decision to shave their heads came after human rights defender and Khmer Thavarak campaigner Chhoeun Daravy shaved her head last week ahead of a court appearance. Reported by RFAs Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Joshua Lipes. NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, reminds purchasers of the securities of Decision Diagnostics Corp. (OTC: DECN) between March 3, 2020 and December 17, 2020, inclusive (the "Class Period"), of the important March 16, 2021 lead plaintiff deadline. SO WHAT: If you purchased Decision Diagnostics securities during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement. WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the Decision Diagnostics class action, go to http://www.rosenlegal.com/cases-register-2009.html or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] or [email protected] for information on the class action. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than March 16, 2021. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience or resources. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm has achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 3 each year since 2013 and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020 founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs' Bar. Many of the firm's attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers. DETAILS OF THE CASE: According to the lawsuit, defendants throughout the Class Period made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Decision Diagnostics had not developed any viable COVID-19 test, much less a test that could detect COVID-19 in less than one minute; (2) Decision Diagnostics could not meet the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's emergency use authorization testing requirements for its purported COVID-19 test; (3) accordingly, defendants had misrepresented the timeline within which Decision Diagnostics could realistically bring its COVID-19 test to market; (4) all of the foregoing subjected defendants to an increased risk of regulatory oversight and enforcement; and (5) as a result, defendants' public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages. To join the Decision Diagnostics class action, go to http://www.rosenlegal.com/cases-register-2009.html or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] or [email protected] for information on the class action. No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investor's ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/. Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Contact Information: Laurence Rosen, Esq. Phillip Kim, Esq. The Rosen Law Firm, P.A. 275 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor New York, NY 10016 Tel: (212) 686-1060 Toll Free: (866) 767-3653 Fax: (212) 202-3827 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] www.rosenlegal.com SOURCE Rosen Law Firm, P.A. Related Links www.rosenlegal.com Former First Majestic COO to Join Team VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / Vancouver, British Columbia -VanGold Mining Corp (the "Company" or "VanGold") (TSXV:VGLD) is pleased to announce that Ramon Davila has joined its Advisory Board. From 2004 to 2014 Mr. Davila was Chief Operating Officer and a member of the Board of Directors of First Majestic Silver Corp. Within that 10-year period, he led a team that created five new silver mining operations in Mexico, taking the company from two employees to more than 4000, growing First Majestic's production profile from zero to over 12 million ounces of silver equivalent production per year. At that time Mr. Davila was in charge of all aspects of First Majestic's mining and exploration operations, as well as all administrative and financial facets of their Mexican subsidiaries. In September 2016, Mr. Davila was appointed Minister of Economic Development for the State of Durango, Mexico - a post he held until June 2020. Mr. Davila is joining VanGold's Advisory Board that now consists of mining lawyer and entrepreneur Stuart 'Tookie' Angus; public company executive and financier John Budreski; and seasoned exploration geologist Greg Hawkins. Tookie Angus said: "VanGold's Advisory Board is well utilised by the Company. We are kept well informed of all aspects of the Company's progress, while advice from advisory board members is heeded and acted on. As a large shareholder, it is a pleasure to watch and to be a part of the Company's steady continuing advancement." Mr. Davila's other distinguished work experience includes long stints in charge of all Mexican operations for both Pan American Silver Corp. and Luismin SA. de CV., as well as 11 years with Industrias Penoles SA. de CV. where he started his career. His educational credits include graduating from the University of Guanajuato with a degree in Mining and Metallurgical Engineering as well as a Master of Science degree in Mineral Economics from the Colorado School of Mines. VanGold's Country Manager Gerardo Dorado commented: "I have known Ramon Davila for almost 40 years, since our days studying mine engineering at the University of Guanajuato. Ramon is somewhat unique, as a person combining the skills of a great miner with that of a great businessman. I am confident that his contributions will make all aspects of our company better. We are all very excited to have him as part of our team as we embark on this tremendous phase of growth for the Company through our proposed purchase of the El Cubo assets." To view a video summary of today's news release, please click the following link: https://youtu.be/2d7nogYtkOQ. VanGold's El Pinguico Project: El Pinguico is a high-grade gold and silver deposit that was mined from the early 1890s until 1913. Toward the end of that period it was mined exclusively by The Pinguico Mines Company of New York City, whose shares traded on the Boston and New York Stock Exchanges. The mining was done principally from the El Pinguico and El Carmen veins, which are thought to be splays off the Mother Vein, or 'Veta Madre'. The Veta Madre is associated with a mega fault that outcrops for 25 kilometres and is the most important source of precious metal mineralization in the region. Current geologic interpretation, based on regional mapping and projections from the Veta Madre developed at adjacent historic mine operations, suggest that the Veta Madre vein system may cross VanGold's property at depth, underneath the high grade El Pinguico and El Carmen veins. Very limited drilling has been done on the property and no drilling has yet attempted to encounter the Veta Madre at depth. The intersection of these major vein structures are excellent exploration targets and may result in zones of significant size and grades. Hernan Dorado Smith, a director of VanGold and a "qualified person" as defined by National Instrument 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects, has approved the scientific and technical information contained in this news release. About VanGold Mining Corp. VanGold Mining is an exploration and development company engaged in reactivating high-grade past producing silver and gold mines near the city of Guanajuato, Mexico. The Company's El Pinguico project is a significant past producer of both silver and gold located just 7 kilometers south of the city. The Company remains focused on the near-term potential for development and monetization of its surface and underground stockpiles of mineralized material at El Pinguico, and in delineating silver and gold resources through underground and surface drilling on projects located in this historic mining camp. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS "James Anderson" Chairman and CEO For further information regarding VanGold Mining Corp, please contact: James Anderson, Director, +1 (778) 989-5346 Email: james@vangoldmining.com Continue to watch our progress at: www.vangoldmining.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. Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains certain forward-looking statements and information, which relate to future events or future performance including, but not limited to, the successful acquisition of the El Cubo Complex on the proposed terms and estimated timing for closing thereof, the ability of VanGold to raise the necessary funding to purchase the El Cubo Complex on the terms and conditions contemplated, the ability of VanGold to successfully re-start the El Cubo mill, supply sufficient mineralized material from the Company's El Pinguico project and the El Cubo Complex for processing through the El Cubo mill at the projected rate to produce sufficient ounces of silver and gold to repay the proposed gold and silver loan, the ability to generate positive cash flow from the El Cubo mill as contemplated or at all, the exploration and development potential of the El Cubo Complex and the potential existence of mineral resources thereon, and the potential intersection at depth of the "Veta Madre" with the Company's El Pinguico and El Carmen veins. Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause future results to differ materially from those expected including, but not limited to, market conditions, availability of financing, currency rate fluctuations, actual results of exploration and development activities, unanticipated geological formations and characteristics, environmental risks, future prices of gold, silver and other metals, operating risks, accidents, labor issues, delays in obtaining governmental or regulatory approvals and permits, and other risks in the mining industry. There are no assurances that VanGold will successfully finance and complete the acquisition of the El Cubo Complex on the terms contemplated or at all or, if acquired, that the Company will be able to re-start the El Cubo mill to process mineralize materials in the amounts and at the costs anticipated. In addition, there is uncertainty about the spread of COVID-19 and the impact it will have on the Company's operations, supply chains, ability to access El Pinguico or El Cubo or procure equipment, contractors and other personnel on a timely basis or at all and economic activity in general. All the forward-looking statements made in this news release are qualified by these cautionary statements and those in our continuous disclosure filings available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances save as required by law. VANGOLD MINING CORP. PH: +1(778) 989-5346 E: info@vangoldmining.com W: vangoldmining.com CA: Suite 2820 - 200 Granville Street, Vancouver B.C. V6C 1S4 MX: Carretera - Guanajuato - Silao km 5.5, Int 4, Col. Marfil CP36250, Guanajuato, Gto., Mexico SOURCE: Vangold Mining Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631593/Ramn-Dvila-Added-to-VanGold-Advisory-Board Reporter Mary Schenk is a reporter covering police, courts and breaking news at The News-Gazette. Her email is mschenk@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@schenk). Dimitri Anthes received a text message from a trusted friend Monday afternoon, telling him that vaccines at the Oakland Coliseum were at risk of expiring and that anyone could sign up to get one using a special access code. So, Anthes, a self-described healthy, 32-year-old white man who lives in Oakland, said he logged on to the state of Californias vaccine registration website, filled out the questionnaire honestly, entered the code and got an appointment the following morning. Then, he sent the code to about a dozen friends. It was only after he received his vaccine around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday that he discovered something was amiss. The vaccine access codes created by California officials were intended to get individuals in underserved areas to the front of the line and combat inequities in vaccine distribution, according to Brian Ferguson, spokesperson for the California Office of Emergency Services. But the codes are being shared via text messages among people they werent intended for healthy, privileged and white and without the correct messaging about the intended recipients. Now, state officials are auditing their use and trying to put an end to the abuse of a system that started about a week ago. I had no intention of skipping the line or taking a vaccine before others in need. I thought I was taking a dose that would otherwise expire, Anthes said. I feel like a privileged asshole who gamed the system and then spread misinformation. I didnt know what I was doing. After hearing that he likely was not supposed to have used the code, Anthes said he called the state vaccination websites support team and was informed that he had indeed misused the code that was intended for people in need. Ferguson told The Chronicle on Tuesday afternoon that he had no idea why the codes were being distributed with a message that they were for extra doses at risk of expiring. Any text messages, emails or social media posts that claim such a thing should be questioned, he said. He said the state is working with two mass vaccination sites at the Oakland Coliseum and Cal State Los Angeles and about 3,000 community groups, giving each an unspecified number of slots apiece and a specific group code. The groups are supposed to share the code with individuals who would otherwise have a difficult time getting the vaccine. As part of the efforts at these sites, were really working closely with community groups to sign up groups who otherwise wouldnt be able to get vaccines, Ferguson said, noting that the Oakland Coliseum site is purposefully located in an area to help vaccinate African Americans and Asians. News of the misuse was first reported at the Cal State L.A. mass vaccination site by the Los Angeles Times on Monday. State officials said Tuesday they are invalidating codes they believe are being misused. In some cases, Ferguson said, the state has canceled appointments with a specific code that appears to have been used widely by the general public. The community groups are usually the first to notify us because the appointments they thought they had have been filled up, he said. At a news conference Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged the abuse in the system and said the state would be moving away from a group access code to individual codes for people in need. We dont like to see those abuses, he said. So were working through those things and were correcting for those. But many had already taken advantage of the codes. In the Bay Area, several people said they received and/or used codes that were circulated via text messages. Garen Checkley, a self-described 32-year-old white man who lives in San Francisco, said he received a text with a code and the message about extra doses being at risk of expiring. He and his partner promptly signed up to get the vaccine at the Coliseum later this week. Then, they saw the Times article and started to wonder whether the text was not correct and the vaccine access code was meant for someone else. So Checkley said he called the toll free number on the state vaccination website and confirmed that the codes were not being given out based on needing to fill vaccination slots. Both he and his partner then canceled their appointments. But the person who sent them the code also sent it to several other people. Checkley said he had seen news articles about vaccine doses going to waste, so he had no reason to suspect the information in the text wasnt right. For that reason, it wasnt surprising to see a text message from someone saying theres extra doses, he said. Neither Anthes, Checkley nor Ferguson know where the text messages originated. Despite the misuse, the community vaccination sites across the state appear to be working as designed, the state spokesperson said. But further misuse may be at play as people who sign up for vaccines are only required to show proof of identification at their appointment, not prove their eligibility. The only time they list the eligibility requirements they must meet is when filling out the questionnaire on the website. When you register on the site, you are filling out an official government document, he said. There could possibly be repercussions if youre not truthful. He did not specify what the repercussions would be, aside from what they might normally be for filling out a fraudulent government document. Meghan Bobrowsky is a San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer. Email: meghan.bobrowsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MeghanBobrowsky If you are looking for some warm comfort food this winter, Dennys has enhanced its menu with new flavors of its bowls and melts, a Slam It! sized Moons Over My Hammy and a new dessert that is warm and served in a skillet. The Slam It! Moons Over My Hammy sandwich has double the serving of ham, eggs and cheese. The new melts and bowls flavors are: Nashville hot chicken melt - Fried chicken breast tossed in Nashville hot sauce with Swiss cheese, tomato, pickles and mayo on grilled Texas toast, with wavy cut fries (or you can upgrade to seasoned fries, onion rings or fruit) The Big Dipper melt - Pot roast with melted Swiss cheese, caramelized onions and mayo on grilled Texas toast, served with French onion au jus for dipping and a side of wavy-cut fries Mama Ds pot roast bowl Slow-cooked pot roast atop red-skinned mashed potatoes with roasted carrots, celery and onions, smothered in rich gravy, paired with dinner bread Chicken addiction bowl Seasoned grilled chicken breast over whole grain rice and broccoli with grilled mushrooms and creamy Alfredo sauce, paired with dinner bread The new Skookie is a warm chocolate chip cookie that is filled with melted chocolate and served with ice cream and salted caramel in a skillet. At Dennys, our culinary innovation team is focused on crafting affordable, high-quality dishes that make comfort food available to everyone, said John Dillon, chief brand officer for Dennys, in a news release. Our team is constantly working to create new offerings that feed all the senses, fueling our customers bodies and souls by developing delicious and varied options that our guests have come to expect. READ MORE Its no secret that in New York City, like much of the country, Black and Latino people suffer from worse health outcomes than white people, or that women are less likely to participate in the labor force than men. These kinds of gaps in equitable access to health care, education, employment and more have only become more apparent and pronounced during the coronavirus pandemic. Now, a new city resource promises to make it easier than ever to observe just how pervasive some of those gaps are, with the eventual goal of eradicating those disparities. On Tuesday, the city launched EquityNYC, a website that pulls together data on social equity outcomes in areas including health, education and economic security with the data broken down by factors such as race, gender and income. The EquityNYC website highlights new data the most recent of it through 2019 that was collected this past summer and includes statistics on 45 equity outcome indicators that are required to be collected every year in the citys Social Indicators and Equity Report. This year, for the first time, that data is accessible not just in a written report, but in easy to read charts online. Obviously, as were working on equity, we also need to be thinking about accessibility, said Sara Shoener, special policy adviser in the Mayors Office for Economic Opportunity. So we always had user experience, making this digital, making this more interactive and easier for a nondata fluent audience to use in the back of our heads. And finally were able to launch it now. In addition to measuring those 45 more general metrics such as infant mortality rate and high school graduation rates the website also incorporates data on 65 different performance metrics from city agencies and services. Some of these metrics include breakdowns on recipients of child care vouchers or participants in the citys Summer Youth Employment Program. The website pulls from over 25 different city agencies and information from independent sources such as the New York University Furman Center, a housing research institute are cited in some graphs as well. The range of data available varies depending on the equity indicator. Only two years of data for broadband internet access are available: 2017 and 2018. But the areas that do include new data from 2019 offer some interesting insights. One metric measures diversity within city agencies themselves broken down by race, ethnicity and gender, as of fiscal year 2019. While racial diversity within the city governments workforce appears relatively strong, breakdowns by agency show variance. The Fire Department, for example, had the highest share of white members and among the lowest share of women. The share of Black employees was the highest in the city Department of Probation, where over 58% of employees identified as Black, African American or African. And while overall diversity in city agencies may be relatively good, clear gaps in leadership are apparent. The 35 city agencies whose workforce data is included on the site overwhelmingly have white people in leadership positions. Exceptions include the Administration for Childrens Services and the New York City Housing Authority, where the majority of employees in management positions identified as Black or Latino. Other metrics highlight disparities in the contracts that different city agencies award to minority- and women-owned business enterprises (or MWBEs). In fiscal year 2019, the New York City Commission on Human Rights awarded over 88% of its total prime contract awards to MWBEs, while the Department of Transportation awarded just over 5% to MWBEs. EquityNYC is a product of Executive Order 45, an order Mayor Bill de Blasio signed in 2019 that mandated the continuation and expansion of the Social Indicators and Equity Report, requiring the Office for Economic Opportunity to identify new metrics and data sources that could be incorporated into the report, disaggregated by race, gender, income and more. In addition to showcasing this data, the website links to city policies and programs relevant to each of the eight policy domains which include core infrastructure and environment, economic security and mobility, and housing. Racial and social equity is integral to creating a fairer city that works for all New Yorkers, Sideya Sherman, executive director of the citys Taskforce on Racial Inclusion and Equity, said in a statement. Equity NYC helps us better understand the magnitude of disparities and progress, so we can work collectively to shift policies and practices and develop strategies that get results. As Shoener sees it, EquityNYC has two audiences: the decision-makers who are creating those very policies and programs, and city residents who can use this data to learn about how the city is working and advocate for additional action. (Those who may not be able to benefit from the site include New Yorkers without broadband access or roughly 30% percent of city households, as one of the sites metrics tells us.) Color-coded, downloadable and relatively detailed charts make the data displayed on EquityNYC somewhat easy to observe. But New York City hasnt always had a strong track record with making easy to use digital products. Most recently, the citys vaccination sign-up websites have been slammed for not only being inaccessible and glitchy, but for their subpar design and user experience. And while the city keeps troves of public data accessible through its Open Data portal, those datasets are not always easy to read or analyze for people who arent data scientists. Shoener said that the conception of the EquityNYC site happened within the Mayors Office for Economic Opportunity, with the help of its Service Design Studio in thinking about the user experience, branding and scope of the website. Other parts of the office were brought in, including the tech and product team, and the data enterprise team, which has been responsible for building the data infrastructure for the site and answering data storage and privacy questions. Policy folks such as Shoener were tasked with thinking about the sites content, including figuring out what kinds of additional outcome and performance metrics would be incorporated in the site. Finally, the office outsourced the actual building and coding of the site to the vendor Blenderbox. What EquityNYC doesnt yet show is the profound impact the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to have on many of these indicators, because the most recent data only goes through 2019. But the Office for Economic Opportunity is already anticipating the impact of the pandemic and expanding what kind of data is collected and analyzed on the site in the months and years to come. One addition that could be coming next year is geographic analysis. Were going to be doing a lot of mapping, and were talking a lot with the infrastructure agencies about how to think about where the city is investing and where were seeing disproportionate outcomes, Shoener said. Switching to uAchieves automated degree audit solution will ensure we are compliant with Missouris statewide CORE 42 framework for core coursework and allows us to intuitively follow our student-centric guided pathways initiative - Scott Fiedler, Ozarks Technical Community College CollegeSource, the higher education industrys most trusted provider of transfer and degree achievement solutions, today announced increased demand among community colleges for its cloud-based uAchieve degree audit and academic planning solution. Institutions such Santa Fe Community College and Ozarks Technical Community College are among the latest community colleges adopting uAchieve to transform their student academic success. Since the pandemic, community colleges in particular have experienced a double-digit drop in enrollments, making it even more important for these institutions to find new ways to engage deeply with current and future students and remove roadblocks to their academic success, said Troy Holaday, president, CollegeSource. uAchieve was designed with this purpose in mind, offering institutions the ability to track students progress toward degrees and credentials at every turn, while handling the most complex curriculum requirements and empowering advisors to help students clear their individual paths to graduation. uAchieve is a comprehensive, cloud-based degree audit solution that ensures students and advisors have the information needed to make informed education decisions along their path of earning degrees and credentials. The solution provides tailored reports illustrating each students progress and outlines the remaining courses and other requirements needed to graduate. It also offers robust transfer articulation and evaluation capabilities to ensure all transfer credits are captured and accurately represented. uAchieves planner is the only system on the market that validates courses in a students plan in the background, each time a student views/updates their plan, making sure planned courses meet prerequisite and degree requirements, said Scott Fiedler, College Director of Admissions and Registrar, Ozarks Technical Community College. Switching to uAchieves automated degree audit solution will ensure we are compliant with Missouris statewide CORE 42 framework for core coursework and allows us to intuitively follow our student-centric guided pathways initiatives. Offering real-time integration with existing student information systems, uAchieve utilizes all relevant student data and facilitates multiple majors, minors, concentrations and other supplemental information. It also allows students to quickly view how their courses match alternate degree programs and offers what-if scenarios, which is particularly helpful for community college students who may be contemplating a degree change due to shifting life circumstances. For more information on CollegeSources uAchieve solution, please visit https://www.collegesource.com/products/uachieve/. About CollegeSource CollegeSource is the higher education industrys trusted provider of transfer and degree achievement solutions. For nearly 50 years, CollegeSource has led market-changing transformation by inventing and investing in technology solutions that aid the staff and students of higher education in their quest to plan and complete academic careers. As the archiver of the nations extensive higher education course catalogs, CollegeSources degree audit, academic planning, and transfer credit evaluation solutions are depended on by more than 2,000 institutions and millions of individuals worldwide. Founded and led by higher education and technology veterans, CollegeSource is a privately-held company based in San Diego with offices in Cincinnati, Ohio. For more information, please visit collegesource.com. Baker Hughes Co and AXA Group and 16 other companies recently quit work on Russias Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline and will not be sanctioned, according to a document the Biden administration sent to Congress last week which was seen by Reuters. Russian energy company Gazprom and its western partners are racing to build the pipeline to take Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea, and hope to finish it this year. President Joe Biden believes the pipeline is a bad deal for Europe. Related: Munich Re Stops Insuring Nord Stream 2 Pipeline on Fears of U.S. Sanctions Zurich Insurance to Stop Insuring Russias Nord Stream 2 Project: Sources Many U.S. lawmakers and officials say the pipeline would increase Russias political and economic leverage over Europe. The $11 billion pipeline, which would double the capacity of its existing duct, would bypass Ukraine through which Russia has sent gas to Europe for decades. That could deprive Ukraine and other Eastern European countries of lucrative transit fees and potentially undermine its struggle against Russian aggression. The United States, the worlds top gas producer, also would like to export liquefied natural gas to Europe as an alternative to Russian gas. The U.S. State Department told Congress on Friday it had designated the Russian ship Fortuna and its owner, KVT-RUS, for helping to build Nord Stream 2 under sanctions law that took effect this year. But the two had already been sanctioned by the Trump administration under previous law, and opponents of the project in Congress said sanctioning them again would not stop the pipeline. Last week U.S. representatives listed 15 ships that are possibly engaged in laying pipelines or related activities since Jan. 1 when the latest U.S. sanctions became law, including the Russia flagged vessels, the Ivan Sidorenko, and the Murman. Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, told reporters this week the fact that the companies quit with sanctions looming demonstrates that the legislative goals and our actions are having a good effect. He said the State Department continues to examine entities involved in potentially sanctionable activity. Price has also said sanctions are only one of many tools in response to Nord Stream 2. Baker Hughes, a U.S. oilfield service company, and insurance companies Tokio Marine Kiln Syndicates Ltd and Aspen Managing Agency Ltd, had no comment. The other companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A few of them, including Norways verification company DNV GL, and insurers Zurich Insurance and Munich Re, had already said they dropped out after U.S. pressure. German engineering group Bilfinger said in January it had withdrawn from work on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, on concerns about looming U.S. sanctions. Here is the full list of companies according to the document: AEGIS Managing Agency Ltd Arch Insurance Ltd Aspen Managing Agency Ltd AXA Group Baker Hughes Beazley Furlonge Ltd Bilfinger Canopius Managing Agents Ltd Chaucer Syndicates Ltd Chubb Underwriting Agencies Ltd DNV GL Hiscox Syndicates Ltd Markel Syndicate Management Ltd MS Amlin Underwriting Ltd Munich Re Syndicate Ltd Tokio Marine Kiln Syndicates Ltd Travelers Syndicate Management Ltd Zurich Insurance Group (Reporting by Timothy Gardner; additional reporting by Carolyn Cohn in London; Editing by David Gregorio and Marguerita Choy) Photograph: Pipes for the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea gas pipeline are stored on the premises of the port of Mukran near Sassnitz, Germany, on Friday, Dec. 4, 2020. The port of Mukran on the island of Ruegen is considered the most important transhipment point for the construction of the pipeline. Photo credit: Stefan Sauer/dpa via AP. Topics Carriers The Food and Drug Administration's staff released a briefing document on Wednesday endorsing Johnson & Johnson's one-shot coronavirus vaccine as safe and effective. The latest: Assuming the FDA issues an emergency use authorization "without delay," meaning as soon as this weekend, White House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients said J&J will have 3 million to 4 million ready for distribution next week. What's next: An FDA advisory panel will meet Friday to review the briefing document and vote on whether to recommend an emergency use authorization (EUA). The FDA will then decide on whether to accept the recommendation and issue the EUA, clearing the way for distribution in the U.S. to begin. Details: The shot was found to be 66.9% effective against moderate to severe/critical COVID-19 cases 14 days after vaccination, and 66.1% effective after 28 days. Against severe/critical cases, the vaccine was 76.6% effective after 14 days and 85.4% effective after 28 days. A large clinical trial showed no COVID-19 hospitalizations or deaths 28 days after patients received the vaccine. "The analysis supported a favorable safety profile with no specific safety concerns identified that would preclude issuance of an EUA," FDA staff wrote. The FDA analysis also offered a breakdown of the efficacy of the vaccine in Brazil and South Africa, where more contagious variants of the coronavirus have been dominant. United States : : Moderate to severe/critical: 72% Severe/critical: 85.9% South Africa: Moderate to severe/critical: 64% Severe/critical: 81.7% Brazil: Moderate to severe/critical: 68.1% Severe/critical: 87.6% Between the lines: Unlike Moderna and Pfizer's vaccines, which are the only two candidates that have received EUAs, the J&J vaccine is administered as a single dose and does not need to be stored at ultra-low temperatures meaning the logistics for mass distributions would be far simpler. The big picture: The U.S. government has struck an agreement with J&J to provide 100 million doses by the end of June. ALBANY As registration opened Wednesday for a mass vaccination site at the Washington Avenue Armory for Capital Region residents living in certain urban ZIP codes, advocates for healthcare equity worked to get the word out and help people sign up for appointments. Meanwhile, four more COVID-19 deaths were reported regionally. As of Wednesday evening, there were just a few vaccination appointments available for next week however, for dates from March 7 and stretching well into April, there were hundreds of appointments available on numerous days. The Federal Emergency Management Agency-run site is meant to serve residents in vulnerable populations who might not have ready access to the vaccine. Residents are eligible to register if they live in the Albany ZIP codes 12202, 12206, 12210, 12209, 12207 and 12222; the Troy ZIP code 12180; and the Schenectady ZIP codes 12307, 12308, 12305 and 12304. Residents in those ZIP codes must still meet the current New York criteria to be vaccinated, which includes being over age 65, having an underlying health condition, or being a certain essential worker. Once they get to the site on the day of their appointment, they must also have proof of residency, such as a driver's license or other ID card, lease agreement, or note from a landlord. Those eligible can register for an appointment at the state website here or by calling 1-833-697-4829. Several community leaders and organizations have been gathering residents' information and encouraging them to sign up for the vaccines in preparation for a mass vaccination site opening. County Legislator Carolyn McLaughlin said she has been especially concerned with residents who aren't computer savvy and have trouble accessing the registration process. She said she went by the Armory Wednesday morning and saw people lined up, thinking they could register there. "Something is wrong with this message, something isn't clear," she said. "There are people whose lives aren't centered around a computer." McLaughlin said she and other elected leaders in the city were working to ensure residents in the eligible ZIP codes know the vaccine is available to them. "I say for those who are computer literate, help someone else go into that link and register," she said. The Albany Public Library and the Alliance for Better Health will also be calling some residents to help them navigate the sign-up process. The Black Nurses Coalition had a virtual clinic and wellness check system prior to the pandemic, allowing them to stay in touch with residents. The coalition has used that and information gathered by canvassing neighborhoods to build a database of residents interested in getting the vaccine, said Brenda Robinson, the coalition's CEO. As the vaccines have become available, they've used their database to sign people up through the state and county registration systems, she said. "We're taking some of the burden off of the residents," she said. "People have been very responsive, a lot of folks in the community want to get the vaccine." Robinson said, adding that it has been a struggle at times, with the state's website crashing or being overwhelmed with requests. As the vaccines have become available, they've used their database to sign people up through the state and county registration systems, she said. "We're taking some of the burden off of the residents," she said. "People have been very responsive, a lot of folks in the community want to get the vaccine." Robinson said, adding that it has been a struggle at times, with the state's website crashing or being overwhelmed with requests. Albany County is also continuing to pre-register on its website residents who want to receive a COVID-19 vaccine but have not yet been able to schedule an appointment. Those who pre-register will be notified when appointments for which they are eligible become available. Four more deaths reported in Capital Region Albany County reported one new coronavirus death and four more hospitalizations on Wednesday. County Executive Dan McCoy said the woman who died was in her 90s. The countys death toll is 347. There are now 56 residents hospitalized, a decrease of four. Of those hospitalized, eight are in intensive care. The county also saw 85 new cases overnight. Of those, 34 had close contact with existing cases and 45 did not have a clear source of infection. Four are health care workers and two reported out of state travel. Schenectady County also saw one death, a woman in her 80's. The county's death toll is now 140. Saratoga County officials announced Wednesday that the county saw two more COVID-19 deaths, bring the county's toll to 145. County Board of Supervisors Chair Todd Kusnierz also announced that the county has 221 active cases with 17 people hospitalized. He also said that the county's rolling average is 2.6 percent. As of Feb. 23, 36,324 or 15.8 percent of Saratoga County residents have received one dose of vaccine. An additional 19,562 or 8.5 percent of county residents have received two doses of the COVID-19 vaccination. At the press conference, Kusnierz also said the Saratoga County Industrial Development Agency will be provided with an additional $250,000 to help the county's small businesses purchase personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves, install plexiglass dividers and new air filtration systems. Funds are available to businesses and nonprofits that are financially viable and employ less than 50. Applications for the grants can be found at https://www.saratogacountyida.org/. Grants are also available from the Clifton Park IDA for town businesses at https://www.cliftonpark.org/committees-commissions/industrial-development-agency.html Monoclonal antibodies LY-CoV555 and LY-CoV016 are administered as a cocktail for the treatment and prevention of COVID-19. They target the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike protein with high specificity, potentially neutralizing the virus. They have been shown to lessen viral load, and so have been approved for emergency use by the FDA in mild to moderate COVID-19 cases. However, the continuously changing genome of SARS-CoV-2 is likely to render such treatments ineffective eventually, meaning that new monoclonal antibodies specific to each strain may need to be developed. A new research paper recently uploaded to the preprint server bioRxiv* by Jesse D. Bloom et al. (22nd Feb 2021) aims to map all of the currently circulating SARS-CoV-2 lineages with resistance towards LY-CoV555 and LY-CoV016, and document the specific mutations that confer resistance, ultimately suggesting that future monoclonal antibody cocktails should target a more diverse range of epitopes. How was the study performed? The research group from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington firstly generated yeast cells expressing nearly four thousand possible amino acid mutations of the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of wild-type SARS-CoV-2 and sorted to select mutants capable of binding with the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor. Tagged monoclonal antibodies LY-CoV555 and LY-CoV016 were then added, allowing the amino acid sequences with the greatest affinity to be identified and sorted based on the intensity of fluorescence. The mutant amino acid sequences of the RBDs that did not bind with the antibodies were then identified and compared with known mutant amino acid sequences in extant SARS-CoV-2 strains, assisting in identifying the specific mutations that grant monoclonal antibody evasion. Which mutations allow escape from monoclonal antibodies? LY-CoV555 and LY-CoV016 bind to opposite sides of the receptor binding ridge, a dynamic region of the RBD that interacts with the ACE2 receptor. LY-CoV555 in particular was evaded by E484 mutants, that is, a change from the wild-type sequence having a glutamic acid in the 484th position. E484K had previously been highlighted as a mutation that allowed escape from this antibody in previous work, and the group added L452R and S494P to this list. Interestingly, the group found that when assessing the affinity of mutants that escape LY-CoV555 towards the ACE2 receptor, there was little difference from wild-type, which is in-line with the observation that the expression of the conformation of the RBD is not altered. Mutations that allow escape from LY-CoV016 were distinct from those that allowed evasion of LY-CoV555, with K417N/T mutation being found to be most impactful to the binding affinity of LY-CoV016. It was also noted that several single-site mutations allow escape from both monoclonal antibodies, including Q493, which is not located in the receptor binding ridge but in a region of overlap between LY-CoV555 and LY-CoV016 when they are bound. The group suggests that the replacement of the charge-neutral glutamine with a bulky positively charged residue such as lysine could negatively impact binding affinity towards the antibodies. Escape maps projected onto structures of the RBD bound by LY-CoV555 or LY-CoV016. In each structure, the RBD surface is colored by escape at each site (white = no escape, red = strongest site-total escape for antibodies or strongest per-mutation escape for cocktail, gray = no escape because no mutations functionally tolerated). Sites of interest in each structure are labeled. The structures are as follows: LY-CoV016 (PDB 7C01 [22]); LY-CoV555 (PDB 7KMG [4]); cocktail escape projected onto the 7KMG structure, with the LY-CoV016 Fab chain aligned from the 7C01 structure for reference. Which strains exhibit these mutations? The B.1.351 SARS-CoV-2 variant, first identified in South Africa in October 2020, contains combinations of key mutations E484K and K417N, suggesting that the antibody cocktail is unlikely to be effective against this variant. Similarly, the P.1 (formerly B.1.1.28.1) variant identified in Tokyo, January 2021, bears E484K and K417T mutations. Additionally, the B.1.429 variant, found in California in July 2020, exhibits the L452R mutation, allowing it to evade LY-CoV555. Importantly, several variants have been noted to adopt these mutations in cases of convergent evolution. The sporadic use of monoclonal antibodies is unlikely to generate a significant evolutionary pressure compared to vaccine or infection-induced immunity, and so the development of antibodies that target more conserved epitopes could prove a key strategy against the ever-changing SARS-CoV-2 virus. *Important Notice bioRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information. Page Content On February 22nd, the Honorable Minister of Justice Anna E. Richardson was invited to speak at the first joint (virtual) meeting held by the Rotary Club of St. Martin Sunset, Mid-isle and Sunrise. There was a total of 89 Rotarians present during the event which comprised of Rotarians from St. Martin, Vermont USA, Anguilla, Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Turks and Caicos, USVI, BVI, Haiti, Australia, Trinidad, and the UK. The Minister was asked to speak on the topic of the month Peace and Conflict Resolution/Prevention and provide insight to all Rotarians on ways the Rotary Clubs can assist the ministry in advocating peace, especially amongst to youth. The Minister opened her presentation by extending her heartfelt condolences to the Rotarian who recently fell victim to domestic violence and succumbed to her injuries after the assault. She stressed the importance of tackling domestic violence on the island and has set the enactment of the Domestic Violence (DV) Policy to a high level of importance. A taskforce was created between the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Public Health, Social Development and Labor (VSA) that has been focusing on the required steps to complete the draft DV policy. She further spoke on building safer communities and the role that we all must play in creating healthier communities. The Minister said: Partnerships on all levels must be engaged in which law enforcement, community organizations and individual residents are needed to develop safe and secure but vibrant communities. However, the role and responsibility that the criminal justice system has in building peace in our community is indispensable. Crime prevention and increasing the feelings of safety in our communities have been two of the main focal points of the Ministers campaign and efforts to build safer communities have been in the pipeline since the beginning of her tenure as the Minister of Justice. One way the Minister foresees increasing the safety in our communities is through the establishment of neighborhood watch programs in each neighborhood that devotes its time to crime prevention and community building. Collaboration between several actors in our community such as the district police officers, the community councils and the residents can significantly improve the overall quality of life in the neighborhoods by increasing the safety and security. Organizing structural (bike) patrols, promoting nonviolence, bringing awareness to crime prevention, and organizing community building activities will be the main tasks of the program. Another initiative geared towards promoting nonviolence and peace amongst the youth in our community that was mentioned during the presentation is the establishment of the Military Academy. Adolescence is a difficult period, and it is not uncommon for young men and girls to lose focus and fail to realize their full potential. Military academies are known to transform young people who might have deviated from the right path into well-rounded individuals who are prepared for responsible leadership. The Military Academy would inspire positive academic, physical, and spiritual growth in every young adult providing a distraction-free setting that allows the young adults to focus on their educational and personal development. The main mission would be to transform the young adults into disciplined, morally strong individuals. The young adults would also be involved in the communities by them participating in numerous community service projects, for example, keeping the community clean, promoting community enhancement, assisting with senior citizens, and helping the hungry. Building safer communities is a joint effort and the detention facilities also have an important role in crime prevention by preventing recidivism. Merely isolating offenders and extracting them from our society and thus providing safety to our communities is one aspect of the prison system, but it is not the only one. Rehabilitation programs during incarceration are equally, if not more important and greatly contributes to reducing re-offending than merely incarceration. The Miss Lalie Youth Care and Rehabilitation Center and the Point Blanche Prison are actively working on a new educational and rehabilitation program for the inmates that tackles the inmates criminogenic factors and stimulates safe reintegration into our society. The Rotarians in attendance expressed that the presentation was very insightful, informative, and addressed some of the key social ills that affect our community as well as the role members in our community should play to ensure a safer community. After the presentation, there was an open floor session where Rotarians were provided the opportunity to ask the Minister questions. The Rotary Clubs appreciated the Ministers attendance and expressed interest to work with the ministry on the pipeline initiatives. In closing, the Minister was presented with a certificate as a token of appreciation and the presidents thanked all members and guests for their attendance, whereafter the meeting was adjourned. Seguin, Texas (78155) Today Considerable cloudiness. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 84F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph.. Tonight Partly to mostly cloudy with scattered showers and thunderstorms developing overnight. Low around 70F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 40%. Subscribing to our services is a three step process. First you have to create an account and then you have to pick if you want to subscribe to digital and or print. Some people only want to be a digital subscriber to get access online and others want to also receive the print edition. If you are already a print subscriber and want online access, it is free, you simply have to create an online account and then attach your print subscription account number to the online account you create. Second Vice Foreign Minister Choi Jong-moon speaks during a virtual high-level meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council, Tuesday. Courtesy of Ministry of Foreign Affairs By Kang Seung-woo South Korea stressed, Tuesday, that Japan's wartime sex slavery issue must be addressed in a way that focuses on the victims, adding that Seoul will make efforts to restore their dignity. "It is crucial that we do not forget the victims and survivors of such violence. Current and future generations should learn valuable lessons from the painful experiences of victims of wartime sex slavery," Second Vice Foreign Minister Choi Jong-moon said during a virtual session of the United Nations Human Rights Council. "The tragedy of the comfort women must be addressed as a universal human rights issue, and the recurrence of such grave violations of human rights in conflict must be prevented." "Comfort women" is a traslated Japansese euphemism Korea uses to describe sex slaves . He added: "The Korean government will keep endeavoring to restore the dignity and honor of the sex slavery victims a dwindling number of elderly women in their 90s with a survivor-centered approach at the core." His remarks came as relations between Seoul and Tokyo have slumped to the worst level in years due to due to history-related issues, with wartime sex slavery taking center stage. According to historians, more than 200,000 women, mostly Koreans, were forced to provide sexual services in frontline brothels for Japanese soldiers from 1932 to the end of World War II, with dozens of the victims testifying that they were either deceived or coerced into sex slavery. The issue is now gaining recognition again after Mark Ramseyer, a Harvard Law School professor, wrote in an article that Japan's wartime sex slavery was voluntary prostitution in return for large advance sums with one- or two-year maximum terms. In addition, the Seoul Central District Court ordered the Japanese government last month to make financial reparations of 100 million won ($90,000) for each of the 12 former sex slaves who brought a case against Tokyo, leading to a strong backlash from the neighboring country. In 2015, the Park Geun-hye administration and Shinzo Abe Cabinet reached a deal to end their nations' dispute over Japan's enslavement of Korean women. It included Japan's responsibility for its wartime aggression and Abe's apology to the victims along with its contribution of 1 billion yen to a fund to be administered by the Korean government for the victims. However, the deal took flak for violating the principle of a victim-centered solution, not properly reflecting the opinions of the surviving women. Currently, the Moon Jae-in administration is also in the hot seat for its negligence toward human rights problems in North Korea, raising concerns from the international community, including the United States. Aware of the concerns and criticism, the vice minister said the government is focused on the matter, adding that the promotion and protection of human rights has been one of its top priorities. "We must all the more value the universality of human rights. Making no exception in this approach, our government has had profound interest in and concerns over the human rights situation in North Korea," Choi said. "We have been endeavoring to substantively improve the human rights of the North Korean people in cooperation with the international community." A Morris County school district is transitioning to full-time, in-person classroom instruction in less than four weeks. The K-12 Mount Olive district is moving forward amid the growing debate on how to expand access to school buildings amid the coronavirus pandemic and with many teachers in New Jersey lacking access to COVID-19 vaccinations. Mount Olive Superintendent Robert Zywicki said that full-time classroom instruction at all grade levels will begin March 22. Weve doing the next move in our return to normal, Zywicki told parents during a Facebook Live presentation Tuesday. Mount Olive drew statewide notice in early March 2020, about a week before all schools closed due to the pandemic, upon closing for a day in order to prepare for long-term virtual instruction. Until March 22, Mount Olive will remain on the hybrid classroom schedule that has been in place this year, except for seven weeks in December and January, when a surge in regional coronavirus cases and concerns about holiday travel prompted the district to switch to all-remote learning. There are six school buildings and 4,600 students in Mount Olive. The impending scheduling change will not impact Mount Olive students receiving full-time virtual instruction, about 40% of the districts enrollment. Zywicki said they will be given the option of returning to the classroom on May 1 but that the timeframe may be moved up, with high school seniors likely to be given priority. In his Facebook Live presentation, Zywicki outlined why the district is preparing to resume full-time, in-person instruction. He said he has received more than 80 questions from parents since the announcement was made on Monday. One of the key things that people keep asking is, why did this happen now, he told parents. Zywicki described the state health departments Jan. 19 announcement on modifying school quarantining guidelines as a seminal moment for us. It changed the quarantining from being that if theres one positive case in the classroom, that everyone, including the teacher, has to quarantine for 14 days to the actual CDC definition of, its within 6 feet for 15 minutes, Zywicki said, referencing the exposure threshold recommended by the federal Centers for Disease Control. As a result, Zywicki said the number of quarantining school employees in Mount Olive, including teachers, declined from 86 in January to 12 last week. Seventeen are in quarantine his week, he added. Another factor in moving to full-time instruction, Zywicki said, is that the Families First Coronavirus Response Act the federal law providing paid leave to teachers and many other workers that expired Dec. 31 is no longer in play. A lot of the staffing issues that we had in the fall, which were the result of the (law) that has now gone away, Zywicki said. Zywicki said that about 92 percent of the districts employees, including teachers, are currently working in-person. From a staffing and supervision perspective, were in a much better position, Zywcki said. The union representing the districts teachers, the Mount Olive Education Association, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Documented examples of coronavirus spread inside school buildings remains low in New Jersey. The state on Tuesday reported an additional eight new in-school outbreaks, bringing the total during the 2020-21 school year to 152 outbreaks and 737 cases involving students, teachers or other employees. Zywicki said there have been no documented cases of in-school transmission of COVID-19 in Mount Olive. The number of school districts offering in-person instruction, either via hybrid or full-time scheduling, has been on the rise this month in New Jersey. However, as of last week, only 98 of the states more than 700 school districts were offering full-time classroom instruction, with Zywicki noting in an interview Monday that many that are fully open such as Lafayette in Sussex County are smaller in size than Mount Olive and pose fewer logistical hurdles. On Monday, Mount Olive received 5,000 plexiglass dividers, which Zywicki told parents are being installed on every student desk and lunch table, as a supplement to the districts social distancing guidelines and other COVID-19 safety precautions. He told NJ Advance Media that the dividers were purchased for $165,000. To pay for them, the district used funding from the federal CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus package prompted by the pandemic and signed into law in March 2020. Even if were at 6 feet, were going to have the plexiglass dividers anyway. Were putting these in as an extra precaution, Zywicki told parents. Mount Olive also is doing weekly COVID-19 testing at schools. Please subscribe now and support the local journalism YOU rely on and trust. Rob Jennings may be reached at rjennings@njadvancemedia.com. Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance. We, however, have a request. As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed. Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard. Digital Editor Love Islands Greg OShea is to receive an award from his alma mater, University of Limerick, for outstanding achievement. The Limerick native (25) won the fifth series of Love Island in 2019 alongside Amber Gill. He graduated from University of Limericks School of Law in 2017 with a law degree and recently passed his FE-1 exams. The rugby sevens star is to be the first recipient of the Fellowship from the University of Limerick Law Society. He shared the news on his Instagram story, stating that he is very honoured to receive the award. The Society announced the news in a post that read: ULs own Greg OShea, law graduate and Society alum, will be the first recipient of the Fellowship of the University of Limerick Law Society. This award is being granted for outstanding achievement both inside and outside of Gregs chosen field. Expand Close Amber Gill and Greg OShea (Yui Mok/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Amber Gill and Greg OShea (Yui Mok/PA) Read More Greg will accept his award during a virtual ceremony on Wednesday 24th February and will also be interviewed by students. The news of his award comes after Gregs success in his FE-1 law exams. He received his results in January and passed with flying colours. The Love Island star said: They were the hardest exams I have ever done. Honestly, I have never been challenged more in all my life genuinely. Anyone who has done these exams know how hard they are, and I kept training and kept working my way through it. I'm not trying to be dramatic, but these are the hardest exams ever. The 25-year-old was delighted for himself: I honestly didn't think I would pass them. I just gave them a crack because I said I would try them and now I have passed them - I am so happy. I don't even want to be a solicitor right now in my life; I just did these exams as a back-up and because I said I would do them and I passed them all. PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc attended and delivered remarks at an open debate of the UN Security Council on addressing climate-related risks to international peace and security, which was held in the form of video conferencing yesterday. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc addresses the UNSC debate from Hanoi This is the first time the Vietnamese government leader has attended and spoke at an event in the framework of the UNSC, which demonstrates Vietnams responsible role and contribution to the joint effort of the international community to respond to climate change, a leading global challenge at present. In his remarks, PM Phuc underlined the grievous impacts of climate change on Earth the shared home of human kind, which have placed great burdens on the political and socio-economic life of many countries. They have caused unemployment and poverty, affected the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people, and risked creating instabilities or exacerbating present conflicts in many countries and regions, thus threatening international peace and security. He proposed that the UNSC, with its foremost mission being the maintenance of international peace and security, needs to galvanize collective and persevering efforts of the international community via four groups of measures to address climate-related risks. PM Phuc said a comprehensive and balanced approach is necessary in handling the connections between traditional and non-traditional security challenges, particularly in addressing the root causes of conflicts, such as poverty, inequality, power politics and unilateral interference and coercion. Strict adherence to the UN Charter and international law must truly become a standard of behaviour for countries in international relations, he said. The Vietnamese government leader asked the UNSC and the international community to allocate greater resources to support developing countries, least developed countries, small island developing states, and land-locked countries that are most detrimentally affected by climate change, and are also lacking expertise and resources, in order for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDG-2030), the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the Paris Agreement (COP-21) to be effectively implemented. He hoped that the UNSC will continue to enhance its early warning capacity, and bolster its role in mediating, preventing and resolving conflicts in all regions, including through enhancing cooperation with regional organizations. At the same time, PM Phuc stressed that in order to harmoniously manage the connection between climate change and security, it is necessary to continue upholding the principles of respect for the sovereignty, national ownership and principal responsibilities of states. The shared interests of communities and peoples, particularly vulnerable groups, must be placed at the heart of all national and global climate action strategies and plans, he said. PM Phuc took the occasion to affirm that active and effective response to climate change is both a major guideline and a strong political resolve by the Vietnamese Government. He stressed that Vietnam has made great efforts to fulfill its international commitments on climate change (SDG-2030 and COP-21). In this connection, we support all endeavours to address climate-related challenges at the UNSC and other multilateral forums, the PM said, pledging that Vietnam will work closely with other ASEAN members and support the cooperation between ASEAN and the UN. Climate change-related risks to international peace and security is an issue drawing great attention at the UNSC. Since 2007, the UNSC has organized nine debates on the issue, with a statement of the councils President adopted in 2011 on climate changes impact on maintenance of peace and security./.VNA In this file photo dated Friday, Feb. 5, 2021, Vials of the AstraZeneca vaccine and loaded syringes wait to be administered to homeless persons at the Welcome Centre in Ilford, east London. The World Health Organization Monday Feb. 15, 2021, granted an emergency authorization to the coronavirus vaccine made by AstraZeneca, a move that should allow its partners to ship millions of doses to countries worldwide as part of a U.N.-backed program to stop the pandemic.(AP Photo/Frank Augstein, FILE) Ghana has become the first country in the world to receive vaccines acquired through the United Nations-backed COVAX initiative with a delivery of 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine made by the Serum Institute of India. The vaccines, delivered by UNICEF, arrived at Accra's international airport early Wednesday and are part of the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines being sent by COVAX, an international cooperative program formed to make sure low- and middle-income countries have fair access to COVID-19 vaccines. COVAX is led by the United Nation's World Health Organization; Gavi, a vaccine group; and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI. Ghana is among 92 low-and middle-income countries that are receiving vaccines for free through COVAX. Another 90 countries and eight territories have agreed to pay if they choose to receive vaccines through COVAX. The West African nation of 30 million has recorded 81,245 cases and 584 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, according to figures from Ghana's Health Services Tuesday. Ghana's vaccination campaign will begin March 2 and will be conducted in phases among prioritized groups, beginning with health workers, adults of 60 years and over, people with underlying health conditions, frontline executive, legislature, judiciary, and their related staff, Ghana's acting Minister of Information Kojo Oppong Nkrumah said in a statement. "The government of Ghana remains resolute at ensuring the welfare of all Ghanaians and is making frantic efforts to acquire adequate vaccines to cover the entire population through bilateral and multi-lateral agencies," he said. In a joint statement, the country representatives of UNICEF and WHO described the arrival of the COVAX vaccines as a "momentous occasion" critical to bringing the pandemic to an end. "After a year of disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic ... the path to recovery for the people of Ghana can finally begin," said the statement. The COVAX shipment to Ghana is the start of what will be the world's largest vaccine procurement and supply operation in history, according to the statement. COVAX plans to deliver close to 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines around the world this year. "Today marks the historic moment for which we have been planning and working so hard. With the first shipment of doses, we can make good on the promise of the COVAX Facility to ensure people from less wealthy countries are not left behind in the race for life-saving vaccines," said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF's executive director. "The next phase in the fight against this disease can begin - the ramping up of the largest immunization campaign in history," said Fore. "Each step on this journey brings us further along the path to recovery for the billions of children and families affected around the world." Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. BAY CITY, MI - Bay County may be mostly white given its demographics, but the county is also home to a long standing civil rights group thanks to the areas background in the lumber and shipbuilding industry. According to the United States Census Bureau, those of Black or African American heritage make up only 1.8% of Bay Countys population. Meanwhile, Bay County is 94.6% white. But Bay City National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch President Darold Newton explained that the organization has had an over 100-year-old presence in the area. Were very proud of that, were very proud of the work that weve done over those 100 plus years, said Newton. While the Bay County NAACP branch was officially chartered last in 1956, the branch itself got its technical start in 1918, Newton said. He said that the group was founded as Blacks began making their way to the county in search of a better job market and economy to raise their families in. The Bay City area has the lumber and logging industry, which was big, and then when Defoe moved in with the shipbuilding they were hiring a lot of folks which Blacks were able to get decent jobs and provide for the welfare of their families and this was a nice area to do it, Newton said. While the lumber and shipbuilding eras of Bay City are long gone, the Bay City branch has continued to focus on community issues such as a commitment to education and the youth while striving for housing opportunities that are safe and affordable, explained Newton. As a part of its education-based initiative, the branch has a scholarship fund through the Bay Area Community Foundation that awards first-generation high school seniors a boost in funding to help them go to college. To pursue their endeavors there and bridge the gap and send them on to economic prosperity and a fulfilling life and that all starts with education, said Newton about the scholarship. In addition to raising funds for students looking to pursue new opportunities through education, the Bay City NAACP branch also hosts a variety of community events - when theres not a pandemic going on, that is. Unfortunately with the COVID outbreak and the pandemic, were practicing good safe measures and we werent able to do as many of the things that weve done, Newton said. In past years, the Bay City branch has hosted events such as free concerts, picnics, bookbag giveaways for schoolchildren and put on numerous educational activities for the youth such as putting on plays to keep them engaged. The organization has also made a practice of donating to local charities. Most recently, Newton said that the Bay City NAACP branch contributed to the Bridge the Gap Foundation in Saginaw, which in turn provided financial assistance for Tiffany Redfearn to help cover costs as she attended the police academy before recently being sworn in as one of Bay City Department of Public Safetys newest officers. Redfearn was sworn in on Monday, Dec 21, 2020 after she graduated from the Delta College Police Academy, according to the Bay City Department of Public Safety. Were very proud of that, said Newton. That added more diversity, whether it be ethnic or gender-based, to the department of public safety, and we thank Director (Michael) Cecchini to that and his commitment to diversity and inclusion. The Bay City NAACP branch also works to keep a sound relationship with local law enforcement while staying aware of the state of issues in the community, explained Newton. We want to make sure that we keep our eyes and ears on the pulse of whats going on out there now through politics and through law enforcement, through education as well as making sure we keep people abreast on the changes in this pandemic, he said. Keeping an NAACP branch up and running in a predominately white county for over a century has come with its own set of challenges, but Newton explained how communication is key. The difficulty is people fear what they dont understand, said Newton. Its been our goal to try to communicate and have dialogue with as many people as we can across the board. We invite them to our meetings, we would hope they would invite us. Newton invited people of all backgrounds to join up with a unified effort to get active and involved by saying its all hands on deck. When you start sharing information and dialogue, thats communication and out of that comes understanding, he added. We want to broaden our base here because basically the way the demographics are, and a lot of people, non-white I could say, tend to play an instrumental part in eradicating racism. Moving towards 2021 after nearly a century of existence, the NAACP is seeing a new generation of activists pop up. Newton contributed it to a common pain that they see and a common purpose to make things better, saying that activism at the end of the day is all about making the human condition better. You have to have a common goal and a common mission in order to defeat that which you are working to fight, he said. Newton gave the following words of encouragement to youth in the community as his organization keeps moving into the future. Set goals for themselves, value education, and just keep fighting hard because its very difficult for our youth out there at this particular time because they are fighting so many things that are against them right now - the economy, things of that nature which makes it difficult, he said. If they have that goal and that zest and zeal, go for it because they are our next generation. As Dr. King said, there are those that we will have to pass the baton on to and when we do, we have to ask that question, what are you going to do with it? More from MLive Flint mayor to honor 7 with awards and keys to the city during Black History Month Conversations about race part of Black History Month celebration at Spring Arbor University Artifacts being revealed as part of Black History Month celebration in Jackson Flint students virtually tour historically Black colleges and universities for Black History Month COLOMBO : Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, who is on a maiden official visit to Sri Lanka, has said that soon after he came into power in 2018, he approached India and told Prime Minister Narendra Modi that the way forward for the subcontinent is to resolve differences through dialogue, Dawn reported. Imran Khan, who addressed the Pakistan-Sri Lanka Trade and Investment Conference in Colombo, said the only way the subcontinent can tackle poverty is by improving trade relations. "Immediately when I came into power, I approached our neighbour India and explained to Prime Minister Narendra Modi that the way forward for the subcontinent is to resolve our differences through dialogue," he said. "I didn't succeed but I am optimistic that eventually sense will prevail. The only way the subcontinent can tackle poverty is by improving trade relations. Let us live like civilised neighbours as the Europeans live, " he added, according to Dawn. This remarks came a day after India had allowed Imran Khan's aircraft to use its air space on way to Colombo. Days before Pakistan Prime Minister's visit, Sri Lanka had cancelled his scheduled speech in Parliament. A report published in Colombo Gazette had said the Sri Lankan government cannot risk its relations with India when it is getting stuck in the Chinese debt-trap and India is providing COVID-19 vaccines. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Yes, no matter what Yes, but it depends on variety No, for medical reasons, uncertainty No, principle Vote View Results Lucknow, Feb 24 : In a landmark decision, women in rural areas in Uttar Pradesh will now get the ownership of their house. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has ordered that in the second phase of 'Mission Shakti', the registration of Gharauni (document certifying ownership of a residential accommodation in rural areas), will be done in the name of a woman in the family. The government spokesman said that this step will empower woman to a great extent and give them a sense of security and financial stability. The chief minister has also ordered setting up of a Mahila Thana in the rural areas for speedy redressal of complaints lodged by women. He also said that women self-help groups should be given the charge of maintaining community toilets in rural areas at the earliest. Programmes under the second phase of Mission Shakti will now begin from February 26 view of the International Women's Day on March 8. The chief minister has directed district magistrates to prepare a road map for the next year to continue the programme even after April 2021. Manoj Kumar Rai, director, women welfare department and nodal officer, Mission Shakti, said, "Women and girls still suffer discrimination and gender inequality. Effective communication helps overcome these situations." He said that a special social and behavioural change communication module has been prepared and public awareness programmes will be conducted through this in March. The discussion will also focus on the women cyber-crime cell, cyberbullying and cyber stalking, setting up a woman safety committee under community policing, facility for first aid at women help desks, release of very old inmates and those who are physically disabled from jail. The first branded residential development appeared in the 1920s on New Yorks Fifth Avenue, where the Sherry Netherland Hotel operated successfully alongside its own serviced apartments. The branded residence concept did not catch on until the mid-1980s, when Four Seasons sold out its hotel condominiums in Boston. Following Four Seasons, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company also entered the market. Currently, Marriott International is the worlds leading developer operating projects in 17 countries and territories. Marriott is expanding its overseas investment portfolio. It is worth noting that the branded residence projects are located in prime locations. According to the report Branded Residences: An Overview by property experts Chris Graham and Muriel Muirden, the formula for branded residences is Win-Win-Win. The tie-up between the property developer owning the prime location, and a luxury hotel brand is the first Win-Win step. When a homebuyer decides to invest in branded residences, they will be the third party in the formula. It is clear that homebuyers will be the winners. Location with guaranteed value The expression Location, location, location! is commonly used in the real estate industry, which highlights an important factor of property investment. What is a prime location? The question is not difficult to answer: right in the middle of downtown, in the heart of financial centres and surrounded by shopping malls. In this location, property prices likely never fall. According to a Knight Frank report in 2019, prices in prime locations in the worlds top cities for property such as London, Hong Kong, New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Sydney were increasing before the COVID-19 pandemic. The report predicted that these locations would not be affected in 2020 and will continue to appreciate by 5 per cent in 2021. How do luxury properties in prime locations retain its value even amidst a crisis? The main reason is that these areas have set the standard for a top-notch living environment and guarantee the most luxurious amenities, making people feel safe and secure. A crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic will only push propery prices in these areas higher. The first win-win-win formula in Vietnam In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnams most developed city, prime locations are at the heart of District 1 with a view of Saigon River. People can enjoy the fresh air and vibrancy of one of Southeast Asia's most dynamic cities. Many people assume that the area should be allocated for offices and mixed-used shopping mall developments. If there are luxury residential projects such as branded residences in that area, it will become a hotspot for wealthy Vietnamese. The win-win-win formula has been proven according to Savills statistics in 2019. Prices in the sector have nearly tripled in the last decade and are forecast to grow by a further 27 per cent in the next three years. Savills research reveals that there are 435 branded residence schemes. The projects are located in developed economies like Dubai, New York, Singapore, among others. Masterise Homes has teamed up with Marriott International to develop branded residences, the first of its kind in Vietnam. This development offers Vietnamese consumers the ownership and benefits of an asset class akin to mature markets around the world. More importantly, it also sets a new milestone for the Vietnamese economy, creating a unique position for the country to be on par with other developed markets globally. Some of the separatist weapons retrieved by gendarmes CIN Commandos of the National Gendarmerie have recovered no fewer than 22 pieces of firearms and assorted ammunition belonging to separatist fighters operating in the North West Region. Troops pulled out the weapons Tuesday, February 23, 2021, from an artisanal armory run by separatist fighters at Mile 24 along the road leading to Wum in Menchum Division, authorities announced. Territorial Administration Minister, Atanga Nji Paul said the arms recovery was possible thanks to information given to the Gendarmes by a "patriotic citizen". I think that this is a very important assignment. This patriotic Cameroonian informed the forces of law and order that there were arms hidden in the bush. And immediately, the Brigade Commander informed the Legion Commander that there is a discovery. And instructions were given and the gendarmes went and they have brought the weapons. These are dangerous weapons, said Atanga Nji. The Minister urged the population to collaborate with the forces of law and order because the terrorists must lay down their weapons for their own interest and the interest of the community. He assured the public that each time they share intelligence with administrative and security authorities, they will be protected and the information treated as confidential. Hear Atanga Nji: I want the population to copy this example. This is a patriotic Cameroonian who saw that weapons were hidden somewhere and informed the gendarmes and today we have collected the weapons. We will protect the source of the information and we are asking others to emulate it. Because at the end of the day, when weapons are dropped, we can say that is the best way to safeguard the community, to bring peace and development. Our main strategy is that things must come back to normalcy. Each one of us must take it as an important assignment. We have to work for the interest of the region. And if we all want a return to normalcy, we must work and collaborate with the forces of law and order. It is very important. I want the parents to educate their children. Parents must educate their children. If they come out of the bush, we will protect them and they will live to have a better future. The recovered weapons were presented to the media at the esplanade of the North West Governor's Office late on Tuesday. The Butcher Shop at B&B, 1814 Washington Ave., is one of Berg Hospitality's concepts in the neighborhood. The company plans two more restaurants, one in the Heights and one in Timbergrove. (Photo from Facebook) [February 24, 2021] Vdoo Launches integration with the Yocto Project TEL AVIV, Israel, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Vdoo, a leader in product security for embedded software, today announced its integration partnership with the Yocto Project (YP), an open-source collaboration project which enables developers to create custom Linux-based systems for an expanding array of uses, including embedded, IoT, connected edge, servers, and virtual environments. YP ecosystem members and participants include Intel, ARM, Wind River, Xilinx, Facebook, Comcast, Cisco, Microsoft, , Texas Instruments, Dell, LG Electronics, and more. Vdoo provides the Yocto Project vulnerability analysis for Poky builds produced by the community. The comprehensive analysis increases the depth and breadth of security coverage through the unique identification and qualification of known and unknown security weaknesses. As an automated process, Vdoo's analysis can be incorporated at any stage in the release cycle, expanding the capabilities and reach of the security domain expertise active in the project. Were delighted to offer our security platform to the Yocto Project, said Asaf Karas, Co-Founder and CTO of Vdoo. Vdoos automated security analysis will help the Yocto Projct community to accurately assess, prioritize and mitigate known or unknown issues at every stage of the development process. Many real-world device images built using Yocto Project are actually very similar, meaning a single vulnerability in the base image can expose thousands of systems, and attackers can more easily scale their attacks. Vdoo delivers the industrys leading automated product security platform for device manufacturers and deployers. Vdoos platform performs a complete security assessment in minutes, providing a comprehensive report identifying zero-day vulnerabilities, CVEs, configuration and hardening issues, standard non-compliance, and other security exposures with suggested prioritization and remediation mechanisms. About VDOO Vdoos automated approach to securing connected products has helped Fortune 500 manufacturers and service providers to scale up their product security capabilities across multiple lines of business, enabling them to significantly shorten their time-to-market, reduce resource requirements, increase sales, and lower overall risk profiles. Founded by a team of serial entrepreneurs with deep expertise in endpoint and embedded system security, Vdoo is a global company with offices in the U.S., Germany, Israel and Japan. For more information, visit www.vdoo.com About Yocto Project The Yocto Project is an open-source collaboration project hosted by the Linux Foundation that helps developers create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products, regardless of the hardware architecture. To learn more about the project or how to join, please contact pr@yoctoproject.org. For additional information about the project, please visit here . Vdoo Media Contact: Paula Brici Eskenzi PR paula@eskenzipr.com +1 949 677 6527 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] A Limerick man who told Gardai he was driving to the finish line at a sulkie race was disqualified from driving for no insurance at Portlaoise District Court last week. Dale McNamara (20) of 65 Delmege Park, Moyross, Limerick was charged with no insurance and no driving licence at Ballycarnan, Portlaoise on January 24 this year. He was not present in court and is on bail, the court heard. In Garda testimony the court was told that on January 24 2021 a report was received of a sulkie race on the Abbeyleix road. Gardai attended the scene and observed a few vehicles there. A male was hanging out of the passenger window of a VW Passat. When Gardai indicated to the driver to pull in and subsequently approached him and asked for a driving licence, the driver Dale McNamara said he did not have a licence on him. Later, he confirmed he did not have a driving licence. He told Gardai he was driving to the finish line. He said his girlfriend was in the back seat but she was afraid to drive. He was arrested and later released on bail. A certificate of insurance was asked to be produced to the garda station at Henry Street, Limerick. It had not been. For no insurance Judge Catherine Staines imposed a fine of 300 and disqualified him from driving for two years. The no driving licence charge was taken into consideration. Abdulrasheed Bawa, nominee for the position of chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), says he has never sold a s... Abdulrasheed Bawa, nominee for the position of chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), says he has never sold a single asset recovered by the commission. The nominee was accused of diverting assets seized by the anti-graft agency an allegation the commission denied. Speaking during his screening at the senate on Wednesday, Bawa said as head of the Port Harcourt zonal office, he did not have the power to sell any asset recovered under his watch. According to him, the power to dispose of any asset lies with the secretary of the commission. I never sold a single truck at the Port Harcourt office; the head office handled that at the time, the nominee told the senate. When I took over the Port Harcourt office, they had 34 convictions but when I got there, we recorded 216 convictions. Anybody that is familiar with the processes of the EFCC knows that the chairman doesnt have the power to sell an asset but the secretary of the agency. Bawa said if confirmed, he would work towards strengthening the anti-graft agency. Before we reposition, we need to know what the institution stands for. We would work on our standard operational procedures to improve on those procedures, he said. We are looking forward to an EFCC that when I give an (wrong) instruction to a junior officer; he will refuse it because that order contravenes the law. Remarks by H.E. Wang Yi State Councilor and Foreign Minister of the People's Republic of China At the High-level Segment of the 46th Session of The United Nations Human Rights Council 22 February 2021 Mme. President, Colleagues, It gives me great pleasure to speak at the 46th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council on behalf of the Chinese government. At this moment, humanity is still in a tough battle with COVID-19. The coronavirus is our common enemy, defeating the virus is our mission, solidarity and cooperation is our only option. The pandemic has afflicted calamitous impact on humankind. To date, COVID-19 has infected more than 100 million people, claimed over two million lives, and pushed 130 million people back into poverty. Global inequality is exacerbated, the North-South divide is widened, and the right to development is faced with new challenges. At the same time, racism and xenophobia are re-surfacing. Disinformation and hate speech are spreading. Certain countries are obsessed with politicizing the virus and stigmatizing other nations. Legitimate demand by developing countries for vaccines is not getting adequate attention, and their need is not met. How to promote and protect human rights in the face of these unprecedented changes around the world and this once-in-a-century pandemic? It is a big question that must be answered with deep reflection. China holds the following views. First, we should embrace a human rights philosophy that centers on the people. The people are what human rights are all about. The people's interests are where the human rights cause starts and ends. Increasing people's sense of gains, happiness and security is the fundamental pursuit of human rights as well as the ultimate goal of national governance. The people-centered philosophy means that the people should be the real masters of their country, and that they should take part in national governance and political consultation. It also means that the wealth gap should be narrowed, and that all-round development of the people should be promoted. Second, we should uphold both universality and particularity of human rights. Peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom are common values shared by all humanity and recognized by all countries. The UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have set out lofty ideals and basic principles for advancing human rights. They should be observed and delivered by all countries. On the other hand, countries differ from each other in history, culture, social system and level of economic and social development. Therefore they must promote and protect human rights in light of their national realities and the needs of their people. Third, we should systemically advance all aspects of human rights. Human rights are an all-encompassing concept. They include civil and political rights as well as economic, social and cultural rights. Among them, the rights to subsistence and development are the basic human rights of paramount importance. We should take coordinated, integrated and multi-pronged steps to advance all aspects of human rights in all dimensions and fields throughout the whole process. The scope of human rights is constantly evolving, and the right to health and the environmental right should also be given more prominence. Fourth, we should continue to promote international dialogue and cooperation on human rights. Protecting and promoting human rights is a common cause for us all. Global human rights governance should be advanced through consultation among all countries. And the benefits of human rights progress should be shared by people of all countries. Human rights are not a monopoly by a small number of countries, still less should they be used as a tool to pressure other countries and meddle in their internal affairs. All countries should abide by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, carry out human rights exchange and cooperation on the basis of equality and mutual respect, and jointly promote the sound development of the international human rights cause. Colleagues, This year is extremely important for China. We will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and start the new journey toward fully building a modern socialist country. Under the CPC leadership, we have embarked on the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics which is widely endorsed by our people, and found the path of human rights development that suits China's national conditions and needs. With all rural residents living below the current poverty line lifted out of poverty, we have met the target of eradicating extreme poverty set out in the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development ten years ahead of schedule, thus turning into reality the Chinese nation's dream of thousands of years. It is a milestone in our human rights achievement. China's poverty eradication is not just about higher income and living standards. More important, it is also about ensuring every individual's rights to education, healthcare and housing. China has put in place the world's largest social security system covering elderly care, healthcare, subsistence allowance and housing. With its GDP exceeding 100 trillion RMB yuan and long-term social stability, China has laid a solid foundation for advancing its human rights cause. Faced with the sudden onslaught of COVID-19, the Chinese government has followed the people-first approach, put the safety and health of every person front and center, and made every effort to safeguard the life and dignity of the people. We also launched a global emergency humanitarian campaign, the largest of its kind since the founding of New China, to extend a helping hand to the countries and international organizations in need. It was one of our concrete steps to honor our commitment to building a global community of health for all. Vaccines concern the rights to health, subsistence and development of the people, hence the priority of our current endeavors. Global distribution of vaccines must be fair and in particular, accessible and affordable to developing countries. As the first country that pledged to make vaccines a global public good, notwithstanding difficulties at home, China is providing free vaccines to 53 countries in need, and exporting vaccines to 22 countries who have made purchasing requests. The overwhelming majority of them are developing countries. We hope that all countries that have the capability will join hands and make due contributions. Colleagues, China supports more exchange and cooperation on human rights in the principle of mutual respect. But we oppose using double standards to make slanderous attacks on other countries, and we also oppose using human rights as an excuse to interfere in other countries' internal affairs. Xinjiang-related issues are in essence about countering violent terrorism and separatism. The Xinjiang region of China has been earnestly implementing the UN Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, drawing on similar practices of other countries and taking de-radicalization measures in accordance with law. All this is fully consistent with the principles and spirit of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. Thanks to the efforts of the local people of all ethnic groups, there has been no violent terrorist case for more than four years in a row in Xinjiang. The region now enjoys social stability and a sound development momentum. And the local people are living a safe and happy life. Between 2010 and 2018, the Uyghur population in Xinjiang increased by nearly 2.55 million, registering a growth rate of 25%. This is much higher than the 13.99% growth rate of the entire population in Xinjiang, and far higher than the 2% growth rate of the Han population in the region. Workers of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang can choose professions based on their own will, and enjoy labor rights and interests. Their personal freedom is never restricted. Xinjiang protects the freedom of religious belief for all ethnic groups in the region in accordance with law. There are more than 24,000 mosques in Xinjiang, and that's one mosque for every 530 Muslims on average. These basic facts show that there has never been so-called "genocide", "forced labor" or "religious oppression" in Xinjiang. Such inflammatory accusations are fabricated out of ignorance and prejudice. They are simply malicious and politically-driven hypes, and couldn't be further from the truth. The door to Xinjiang is always open. People from many countries who have visited Xinjiang have learned the facts and the truth on the ground. China also welcomes the High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit Xinjiang. The legislation on safeguarding national security in Hong Kong has plugged the long-existing legal loopholes in Hong Kong, and facilitated a major turnaround from turbulence to law and order. It is conducive to the steady and sustained implementation of the policy of One Country, Two Systems. It protects the lawful rights and freedoms that the residents of Hong Kong enjoy under the Basic Law. Nearly three million Hong Kong residents signed a petition in strong support of the legislation. Nearly 70% of the residents feel that Hong Kong is more secure and stable since the national security law took effect. All this speaks volumes about the extensive public support for the legislation. We have every confidence in the future of Hong Kong. Mme. President, Colleagues, We are at the beginning of the Chinese Lunar Year of the Ox. The ox symbolizes diligence and strength, and heralds a year of harvest and hope. Let us join hands to promote and protect human rights with the people-centered approach and facilitate the building of the community with a shared future for mankind. In conclusion, I wish this session of the UN Human Rights Council positive outcomes. Thank you. The company plans to have a starting inventory of 1 million cans to put into its retail and online channels Iron Energy is a market leader in Poland's energy drink market and is a leading brand in the Middle East Inc ( ) (OTC PINK:LHLNF) (FRA:LL1) announced Wednesday that it has ordered an additional ten containers of Mike Tyson-branded Iron Energy from FoodCare Group in anticipation of strong US sales over the next few months. The company plans to have a starting inventory of 1 million cans to put into its retail and online channels as part of an aggressive sales rollout. "Given the positive response from major American retailers, the company felt compelled to order these additional ten containers, LeanLife CEO Stan Lis said in a statement. We have projected ordering a minimum of 140 containers for the American market in 2021. We aim to also enter additional markets as the year progresses." LeanLife noted that suppliers are now required to use enterprise resource planning (ERP) software with electronic data interchange (EDI) connections, which allows for purchase orders and invoices to be seamlessly exchanged. To that end, the company purchased Microsoft Dynamics GP software, which it plans to commission and go live with this quarter to meet the requirements of major US national retailers. Microsoft Dynamics GP is a mid-market business ERP software package that has localizations for additional countries in South America, UK and Ireland, the Middle East, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, the company said. "The major benefits of EDI are speed, accuracy and demand, COO Gavin Mah said. EDI can speed up transaction processing over 50%, while reducing the chance of human error. Large retailers insist on EDI to make product purchases." Iron Energy is a market leader in Poland's energy drink market and is a leading brand in the Middle East, the company said. LeanLife believes the product will also appeal to North American consumers and quickly gain retail acceptance. The annual market value of the combined US and Canadian energy drink markets is estimated at more than US$14 billion. Red Bull is the market leader, followed by Monster and Bang. While Red Bull pursues a premium price strategy, the company noted previously, LeanLife will be aggressively priced and shelf-positioned to appeal to a broad consumer base. Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com Follow him on Twitter @andrew_kessel Emirates SkyCargo is underlining its commitment to the international food and beverage industry with its participation in Gulfood 2021, the worlds largest annual food and beverage trade exhibition in Dubai between February 21 and 25, 2021. The event brings together a wide range of participants from the food and beverage sourcing ecosystem from around the world, a WAM report said. The company in a press release said that Emirates SkyCargo has participated in previous editions of Gulfood and has also successfully introduced some of its small business customers from around the world to major food and beverage sourcing companies at the event. This year, Emirates SkyCargo will also be inviting some of its significant logistics partners and customers to jointly present logistics capabilities at its stand. "Emirates SkyCargo powers an important segment of the global cross-border logistics in trade of food and beverages, transporting fruits and vegetables, seafood, meat, food ingredients and ready to consume food and beverage items on its flights across six continents," it stated. During the pandemic year, Emirates SkyCargo continued the vital task of maintaining connectivity for food items, playing an important role in maintaining food security and providing a steady stream of income to communities exporting food and produce. "The air cargo carrier managed this feat despite numerous challenges, including the severe restriction of air cargo capacity during the initial stages of the pandemic due to the complete suspension of passenger flights," the air cargo company added. Overall, between January and December 2020, Emirates SkyCargo transported on an average over 600 tonnes of food and beverage items every day on its flights. The air cargo carrier helped bring in more than 125,000 tonnes of food into the GCC region helping maintain uninterrupted supply chains for food items during the Covid-19 pandemic. "Some of the diverse food items transported globally on Emirates SkyCargo included cherries and salmon from Chile, avocadoes and berries from Mexico, strawberries and sweet potatoes from Egypt, green beans and pineapples from Kenya, salmon from Norway, wine and cheese from France and Italy, coconuts and jackfruit from Thailand, mangoes from India, blueberries from the UK, meat from Australia and New Zealand and many others," With its global network spanning more than 130 cities and a modern fleet of all wide body aircraft, Emirates SkyCargo is well positioned to rapidly transport food and other perishables from one part of the world to another. With its specialised product Emirates Fresh, the air cargo carrier is also able to ensure that food items retain their freshness during the journey from origin to destination. Emirates flights facilitate an important trade lane for food exports between international markets, allowing food exporters to connect with customers in new and established markets. -- Tradearabia News Service To the Editor, At the end of the February 16th Wood River City Council Meeting Mayor Maguire invited residents to reach out and learn more about current city policies. I assume she made this offer as a way to talk with residents about her ideas for the city as she is running for re-election in April. Ironically, at the February 1st meeting, she was asked why questions cant be answered during the Citizen Comments portion of the meeting? Her response was the meeting is for legislative action and not a question-and-answer session. Ive attended most meetings over the last year, and there have been Q & A exchanges during the council meetings on some occasions, but since I started asking questions on December 16, 2019, it seems they are rare. The truth is, a lot of questions should be asked of Mayor Maguire, but dont except to learn much. Here is what I have learned. Mayor Maguire took an oath when she was sworn into office in 2017 to support the Constitution of the United States. Over the past year I have been interviewed numerous times for television and radio regarding the Save the Roundhouse referendum. On June 2, 2020, I was scheduled for and made my first radio broadcast on a local radio station. On June 1 2020, Mayor Maguire stated in a public Facebook post: Im going to radio station and speak with the manager in hopes he does not give air time to the disgruntled citizen who is attacking me as mayor. So much for my First Amendment rights, and so much for the mayors oath. In October, I posted an op-ed piece criticizing the City of Wood River for failing to seriously work with the YMCA in an effort to bring a new rec center to Wood River using a Public-Private Partnership as a means to control costs and offer more, improved services. A Public-Private Partnership was listed as a way to bring improvements to the city before using city resources and funds by residents at townhall meetings in 2018. The mayor responded with her op-ed in which she attributed statements and claims to me, taken out of context from my op-ed, which were patently false. She didnt stop there. She then altered a YMCA letter about efforts to partner with Wood River by inserting my name to make it appear that the YMCA had written the letter to be critical of me. The mayor had this altered letter published in the local newspapers. I could go on with the alarming actions and behavior of Mayor Maguire. She is uniquely unqualified to hold any elected office. If you wish to speak with the mayor about her policies, at least, now, you know what to expect. Bill Dettmers Wood River An international hottie reminds us that day drinking is the new normal as the pandemic persists and we take a peek at pop culture, community news and top headlines. Check-it . . . Road To Nowhere Rock Island Trail expected to open this spring Soon all 13 miles of the Rock Island Trail will be open to the public. There's no way Eric Burger was going to let a day like this go by without pulling out the bike and hitting the trail."I intend to do quite a few miles on it," Burger said. That's the plan for many walkers, runners and bikers once the trail opens."We're just kind of in a wrap-up and kind of punch list stage of the project," said Matt Davis, project manager for the Rock Island Trail.Davis is hoping for an April opening date. Local Booze Abuse Rises An adjacent crisis: Liver diseases on the rise during pandemic KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Doctors are sounding the alarm on a concerning crisis happening side-by-side with the pandemic. Alcoholic liver disease was already trending in the wrong direction in the United States before the pandemic. "I'd say over the last five to 10 years the incidence of alcohol cirrhosis has increased as well as the age we're seeing it at. Independence, MO Power Play Benefits PoFolk 'This helped out a lot': Independence electric customers gifted $200 credit INDEPENDENCE, Mo. - As the pandemic continues to take a financial toll on families, including people who have lost their jobs, city leaders in Independence are giving back. The City Council of Independence approved a utility credit for City of Independence electric utility customers amounting to $193.82. Hotness Debuts Natalie Roser Leaves Little To The Imagination In Thong Nude Lingerie In the caption, Roser joked that these were her audition photos for the third season of the Netflix show You. Within four hours, the slideshow has garnered more than 14,500 likes and upward of 220 comments. Roser's followers took to the comments section to engage with her, teasing her about her caption and showering her with compliments. GOP Reality Check Mitt Romney says Donald Trump would win Republican nomination if he ran in 2024 WASHINGTON - One of Donald Trump's most outspoken Republican opponents - Utah Sen. Mitt Romney - says the former president would win the GOP nomination in 2024 if he decides to go for it. "I don't know if he'll run in 2024 or not, but if he does, I'm pretty sure he will win the nomination," Romney said Tuesday at the DealBook DC Policy Project. AOC Wants More Cash AOC says GOP minimum wage compromise is 'legislated poverty' New York Democrat, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, rejected the GOP's latest attempt to counter Democrats calls for a $15 minimum federal wage, saying any attempt to lower the hourly figure was "legislated poverty." "When members of Congress fight to set the minimum wage below a living wage, they are playing a role in creating and preserving poverty in the United States," Ocasio Cortez said on twitter Tuesday. EATING HEART OUT?!? Oklahoma man accused of cutting neighbor's heart out, feeding it to his family An Oklahoma man suspected of murdering three people has confessed to killing his neighbor, cutting her heart out and then cooking it to feed his family, authorities said. Lawrence Anderson allegedly stabbed Andrea Lynn Blankenship, 41, to death in her Chickasha home on Feb. 9, The Oklahoman reported. Iran From Threats Iran limits UN nuclear inspections while inching closer to talks with US, others The U.S. and Iran are inching closer toward diplomatic talks over Tehran's nuclear program, even as the Iranian government moved further outside the original nuclear deal on Tuesday by curtailing international inspections of its nuclear sites. Vaxx Progress FDA staff endorses Johnson & Johnson's single-shot Covid vaccine for emergency use The Food and Drug Administration's staff endorsed Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use, a critical step in bringing a third shot to the U.S. marketplace. The staff report is meant to brief the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which will meet Friday to review J&J's request for emergency use authorization. Saving JoCo NextGen Johnson County sees 33% decline in teen suicides JOHNSON COUNTY, Kan. - Johnson County has seen a 33% decrease in teen suicides, bucking a national trend in 2020 that saw suicide as the second-leading cause of death for those between 10 and 34 years old. Health experts said that's due, in part, to a teen-led effort called Zero Reasons Why (ZRW). Winter Booze Chill Tap List | Springing Out of A Cold Snap With Beer Last week, I was hunkered down in the living room with no electricity during a historic cold snap. The faucets were running to keep the pipes from bursting, the fireplace was roaring, and there were blankets of snow as far as the eye could see. Spring Stalls Much cooler today with highs back to normal Cooler air moves in today to bring us back to normal No major storm systems in sight; Staying dry through the weekend Brief warm up Friday & Saturday KANSAS CITY'S MOST ACCURATE FORECAST Wednesday: Mostly sunny to partly cloudy and cooler following a cold front passage in the morning. Billie Eilish - ilomilo is the song of the day and this is the OPEN THREAD for right now. Latvia is concerned about violations of human rights in the occupied Crimea, in particular the rights of national and ethnic minorities, as well as Russia's militarization of the Crimean peninsula. Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said this at the ministerial panel discussion "International Response to Human Rights Violations in the Temporarily Occupied Crimea, Ukraine" on February 23, an Ukrinform correspondent reported. "The situation with human rights violations in the occupied Crimea, which is constantly worsening, is of particular concern. UN bodies confirm violence, capture of people, and disappearances in Crimea," Rinkevics said. He stressed that human rights violations among national and ethnic groups in the occupied Crimea are of concern. "Human rights abuses must be stopped and all those responsible for these actions must be held accountable. All cases of human rights violations in Crimea must be thoroughly investigated," the Latvian minister stressed. He noted that the growing militarization of Crimea is also of great concern. "Latvia once again calls on Russia for full and unrestricted access of international human rights observers to the illegally annexed territory," Rinkevics said. He added that the issues of the occupation of Crimea and the human rights situation must remain among the main priorities on the global agenda in the international arena. In this context, he welcomed the initiative to create the Crimean Platform - a consultative and coordination format for discussing issues of the occupied peninsula. As reported, the Crimean Platform is a new consultative and coordination format initiated by Ukraine to improve the efficiency of the international response to the occupation of Crimea, respond to growing security challenges, step up international pressure on Russia, prevent further human rights violations, protect victims of the occupying power and to achieve the de-occupation of Crimea and its return to Ukraine. The Crimean Platform is expected to operate at the level of heads of state and government, foreign ministers, in the dimension of inter-parliamentary cooperation and expert network. The Crimean Platform is to be launched officially at an inaugural summit in Kyiv in 2021. ish A Passaic County man used pepper spray on a woman driver in a road rage incident on Route 1&9 in Jersey City Tuesday morning, authorities said. Kevin Ortiz, 21, of Clifton, was charged with aggravated assault, possession of a weapon and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose after he admitted using the chemical irritant, according to Jersey City spokeswoman Kimberly Wallace-Scalcione and the police crash report. The 28-year-old victim, driving a Ford F-150 pickup truck, told police she was pepper-sprayed after she was involved in a crash with the driver of a 2020 Honda Accord, on the southbound side of the roadway just before the Tonnelle Circle at 7:37 a.m. Ortiz, the passenger in the Honda, told police he got out of the car, opened the door of the victims Ford F-150 pickup truck and used the pepper spray, the crash report said. The Honda driver, a 22-year-old Fairview woman, and Ortiz said the 28-year-old cut off their vehicle and then tossed something at them before suddenly stopping short, which they say caused the rear-end crash. A witness told police the driver of the Honda Accord stopped in the middle of the highway, then the front passenger exited and assaulted the woman in the pickup truck, but he did not see the pepper spray incident, the crash report said. The victim experienced discomfort in one of her eyes and refused medical attention. "Selling Sunset" star Chrishell Stause has finalized her divorce from "This is Us" star Justin Hartley. ADVERTISEMENT People confirmed this week that Hartley, 44, and Stause, 39, have settled their divorce and had a judge sign off on the documents Feb. 8. TMZ also reported the news Monday. RELATED LINK: 'DANCING WITH THE STARS' PROS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: WHO'S DATING OR MARRIED TO WHOM!? (PHOTOS) Hartley filed for divorce from Stause, who competed on Season 29 of "Dancing with the Stars" last fall, in November 2019 after two years of marriage. He listed their date of separation as July 2019. At the time, sources told People that Hartley and Stause were "fundamentally incompatible." "Chrishell is really ready to just settle down and be a wife and stay-at-home mom and was hoping to start a family relatively soon. Justin wants that but also doesn't think it has to happen in the near future and is at a point in his career where he wants to really be able to explore all the options that are coming his way," a source said. FOLLOW REALITY TV WORLD ON THE ALL-NEW GOOGLE NEWS! Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! Hartley was previously married to actress Lindsay Korman and has a 16-year-old daughter, Isabella, with his ex. He went Instagram official with his new girlfriend, actress Sofia Pernas, on New Year's Eve in December. "Last minutes of 2020 here in LA. Bring on 2021! Happy New Year!" Hartley captioned the post. Hartley plays Kevin Pearson on "This is Us," while Stause stars on the Netflix reality series "Selling Sunset." Twitter; Maricopa County Public Records Brittany Martie and Eric Maes An Arizona father who was arrested and charged with killing the mother of his baby son while kidnapping the boy earlier this month has died by suicide, according to the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office. On Feb. 9, Brittany Martie, 30, was picking up her 10-month-old son, Abel Maes, from a relative's house and putting him in her minivan when the baby's father, Eric Maes, 30, of Sun City, allegedly ambushed her, police said. RELATED: Arizona Mom Dies After Being Thrown From Minivan During 10-Month-Old Son's Abduction Maes, who did not have custody of the baby, jumped into Martie's minivan and sped away with the boy inside, said police. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Martie died when she grabbed onto the minivan to try and stop Maes from leaving. Police issued an AMBER Alert for Abel, who was found "in good health" early on Feb. 10 after officers received a report of an abandoned child 11 miles away from where he'd been taken, Peoria Police said. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. An alert for Martie's car, a 2010 Chrysler Town and Country minivan, was also sent out. The vehicle was found abandoned at a location just four miles away from Abel. RELATED: Az. Man Allegedly Admits to Intentionally Hitting Son's Mom with Car During Child Abduction Attempt Maes was arrested on Feb. 10 after leading officers on a short foot chase. He was initially charged with manslaughter. According to court documents obtained by the Arizona Republic, the charges were upgraded to first-degree murder, kidnapping, endangerment and theft of means of transportation after Maes allegedly told authorities he had intentionally driven his car into Martie. Maes allegedly admitted to knowing Martie would be picking Abel up from relatives who were babysitting the boy on Feb. 9 and waiting for her to arrive so he could jump in her car and take the child, court documents show. Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up for PEOPLE's free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases. Story continues On Feb. 13, Maes was rushed to a local hospital after he attempted suicide inside the jail where he was being held. On Thursday, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge dismissed the criminal charges Maes was facing, the Republic reports. The judge dropped the charges to allow Maes' family to make medical decisions for him since he was "medically incapacitated," according to the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, the Republic and Fox 10 report. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. The family said it was difficult for them to make decisions for Maes while he was still in police custody, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office said, the Republic reports. Maes is believed to have been left brain dead after the suicide attempt, the Republic reports. The following day, Maes died of his injuries in the hospital, according to the Maricopa County Medical Examiner, the Republic, AZ Family.com, and AZ Central.com report. The cause and manner of his death are still pending. Maes's friends and family were concerned about him in the weeks leading up to the events of Feb. 9, 12 News reports. Now that Abel will grow up without either parent alive, "This is something that's tragic for everyone involved," a friend told the outlet. Martie's friends and family are still mourning her loss and remember her as caring and strong. "She was this sweet, tiny, cute little thing, but she had strength like five times that," her longtime friend, Melanie Cowan, told the Republic. She said Maes had allegedly been controlling and sometimes violent with Martie, which police noted in the documents obtained by the Republic. "It was hard to talk to her the last few months because of Eric, and I know that he cut her off from everybody and I never knew if it was her I was talking to or it was going to be him," Cowan said, according to the Republic. Most recently, Cowan said Martie had taken steps to care for herself and her son, including starting a new job and finding a new safe place to live. "The raw strength she had for that baby I wouldn't expect anything else from her," Cowan told the Republic. "She went down fighting and that's not surprising." If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages. Following a probe into the series of coordinated Easter bombings in 2019 that claimed 279 lives, investigators have found that the ex-Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena should be prosecuted on grounds of negligence, along with his intelligence chiefs. A presidential commission of inquiry report, Tuesday, claimed that the Indian Intelligence had warned officials about the suicide bombing attacks following a tip-off at least 17 days earlier, and Sirisena, who was likely informed by his intelligence officers, refrained to heed the warnings. According to local reports, the commission was set up at the request of Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, leader of Sri Lankas top Roman Catholic Church. At least 440 witnesses were summoned to investigate the attack, whose responsibility was later claimed by the Islamic extremists, who targeted 3 churches and 4 hotels in the capital, Colombo, on Apr 21, 2019. Sirisena, who was discharged from the presidential seat, last year, is being held responsible for the deadly bombings in the report handed by the commission to the Sri Lankan parliament on February 23, local reports confirmed. The attackers had unleashed terror on the Christian churches that injured more than 400, according to police officers, the Colombo Hospital, and St. Sebastian Church's statement to local press. Read: Sri Lanka Orders 13.5 Mn AstraZeneca Doses, Likely To Drop Chinese Vaccines Read: India Allows Pakistan PM Imran Khan's Flight To Sri Lanka To Pass Through Indian Airspace One of the deadliest attacks As many as eight explosions rocked Sri Lanka in the islands one of the deadliest attacks, all just a few miles apart. In a statement issued following the terror attacks, Sri Lankas defense ministry revealed, that the explosive devices were detonated by suicide bombers, and 11 international tourists were among the casualties. At least 2 that were killed held dual citizenship from the US and the UK, as per the reports. The then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had condemned the bomb blasts saying that many US citizens were harmed, and several were among those that were killed. Currently, the ruling partys legislators in Sri Lankas parliament, the former President Sirisena had denied any knowledge of the attacks. Further, he made no comments on the outcome of the probe. The commission also charged the ex-presidents chief of intelligence, Nilantha Jayawardena, for negligence and failure to act to prevent the terror attack on the island nation despite Indian intelligences warnings communicated several days ahead since the incident. The report alleged, Sri Lankas ex-leader "diluted the weight of the intelligence" from India. Read: Centre Committed To Ensuring Tamil Refugees In Sri Lanka Live With Dignity: Rajnath Singh Read: Sri Lanka Approaches India For Support Ahead Of UN Human Rights Council Sessions In Geneva The same folks to bring you "Abrahamism"the idea that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are intricately connectedhave narrowed their sights on promoting Mary, the mother of Christ, as "a Jewish, Christian and Muslim woman," in the words of Catholic priest Fr. Gian Matteo of the Pontifical International Marian Academy. In a ten-week webinar series titled "Mary, a model for faith and life for Christianity and Islam," the academy will seek to present Mary as a bridge between the two religions. This is easier said than done at least for those still interested in facts. For starters, the claim that Mary was a "Jewish, Christian and Muslim woman" is only two-thirds true: yes, she was a Jew by race and background, and yes, she was a Christian in that she literally birthed Christ(ianity), but she was most certainly not a Muslim a term and religion that came into being 600 years after Mary died. Worse, far from being the Eternal Virgin, as she is for 1.5 billion Christians of the Catholic and Orthodox variety, Islam presents Mary, the Mother of Christ, as "married" to and "copulating" with Muhammad in paradise a depiction that would seem to sever rather than build "bridges." In a hadith that was deemed reliable enough to be included in the renowned Ibn Kathir's corpus, Muhammad declared that "Allah will wed me in paradise to Mary, Daughter of Imran," whom Muslims identify with Jesus's mother. (Note: The Arabic word for "marriage" (, or nikah, denotes "legal sexual relations," connotes the "F" word, and is wholly devoid of Western, "romantic," or Platonic connotations.) Nor is this just some random, obscure hadith. None other than Dr. Salem Abdul Galil previously deputy minister of Egypt's religious endowments for preaching affirmed its canonicity in 2017 during a live televised Arabic-language program. Among other biblical women (Moses's sister and Pharaoh's wife), "our prophet Muhammad prayers and be upon him will be married to Mary in paradise," Galil said. If few Christians today know about this Islamic claim, medieval Christians living in Muslim-occupied nations were certainly aware of it. There, Muslims regularly threw this fantasy in the face of Catholic and Orthodox Christians who venerated Mary as the "Eternal Virgin." Thus, Eulogius of Cordoba, an indigenous Christian of Muslim-occupied Spain, once wrote, "I will not repeat the sacrilege which that impure dog [Muhammad] dared proffer about the Blessed Virgin, Queen of the World, holy mother of our venerable Lord and Savior. He claimed that in the next world he would deflower her." As usual, it was Eulogius's offensive words about Muhammad and not the latter's offensive words about Mary that had dire consequences: he, as well as many other Spanish Christians vociferously critical of Muhammad, were found guilty of speaking against Islam and publicly tortured and executed in "Golden Age" Cordoba in 859. One expects that all of these "inconvenient" facts will be quietly passed over during the Pontifical International Marian Academy's webinars. And if they are raised, no doubt Christians will somehow take the blame, as almost always happens in academic settings. As one example, after quoting Eulogius's aforementioned lament against Muhammad's claim of being married to Mary, John V. Tolan, a professor and member of Academia Europaea, denounced it as an "outrageous claim" of Eulogius's own "invention." He then railed against the martyr not against his murderers or their prophet: Eulogius fabricates lies designed to shock his Christian reader. This way, even those elements of Islam that resemble Christianity (such as reverence of Jesus and his virgin mother) are deformed and blackened, so as to prevent the Christian from admiring anything about the Muslim other. The goal is to inspire hatred for the "oppressors[.]" ... Eulogius sets out to show that the Muslim is not a friend but a potential rapist of Christ's virgins. (Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination, p.93) As already seen, however, it is Muhammad himself not any "Christian polemicist" who "fabricates lies designed to shock," namely that Mary will be his eternal concubine. This, incidentally, is the main problem the purveyors of Abrahamism fail to acknowledge: Islam does not treat biblical characters the way Christianity does. Christians accept the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, as it is. They do not add, take away, or distort the accounts of the patriarchs that Jews also rely on. Conversely, while also relying on the figures of the Old and New Testaments primarily for the weight of antiquity and authority attached to their names Islam completely recasts them with different attributes that reaffirm Muhammad's religion as the one true and final "revelation," as opposed to Judaism and Christianity, whose biblical accounts on these figures are then seen as "distorted" because they are different from Islam's later revisions. Far from creating "commonalities," it should be clear that such appropriation creates conflict. By way of analogy, imagine that you have a grandfather whom you are particularly fond of, and out of the blue, a stranger who never even met your grandfather says: "Hey, that's my grandfather!" Then lest you think this stranger is somehow trying to become your friend he adds: "And everything you thought you knew about grandpa is wrong! Only I have his true life story." Would that create a "bridge" between you and this stranger? Raymond Ibrahim, author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute. Image: anujatilj via Pixabay, Pixabay License. BRUNSWICK, Ohio -- As tax season approaches and unemployment claims continue to rise due in part to COVID-19-related layoffs, area police departments are reporting a concerning increase in a new type of identity theft. Identity theft is a constant battle, and they are coming up with clever ways to do it, Brunswick Hills Township Police Chief Tim Sopkovich said of the roughly 10 to 12 reports of fictitious unemployment claims his department has received in the past month. With COVID, and the state receiving so many claims for unemployment benefits, (identity thieves) are thinking, why not file a claim? Sopkovich said. But I dont know how they are getting (victims) information; these people havent filed anything. It is not hard to find peoples information in this day and age, but some of these are elderly and havent worked in years. They are not on social media, so we dont know. Most often, Sopkovich said, victims are not aware of the fraudulent filing until they receive a 1099-G form from the state, reporting the unemployment benefits that were issued in their name. The question of where those illegally obtained benefits actually went, meanwhile, remains a mystery. What victims can do Police are advising victims to contact the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) or the Ohio Attorney Generals Office -- as well as checking their bank accounts and credit report information -- if they suspect that their personal information has been compromised in this way. The Attorney Generals Office has also created an information page devoted to unemployment fraud on its website, at https://www.ohioattorneygeneral.gov/Media/Coronavirus-Resources-Guidance#faq The attorney general recommends that if a person has not filed for unemployment benefits in 2020, but receives a 1099-G tax form, a letter from ODJFS stating that unemployment benefits have been applied for in their name, a US Bank ReliaCard for funds not recognized or expected or notification from an employer that ODJFS is inquiring about unemployment benefits not applied for, they should contact ODJFS immediately. They should also check their credit report, consider placing an Initial fraud alert on their credit report and consider placing a permanent security freeze on their credit report. Widespread problem Other area police departments have reported receiving a similar number of unemployment fraud reports as Brunswick Hills. James Drozdowski, public information officer for the Avon Police Department, said Feb. 4 that the department had taken 13 unemployment fraud-related reports since the beginning of 2021. Im sure other agencies in the county are getting these as well, Drozdowski said. Brunswick Police Lt. Robert Safran said the Brunswick Division of Police began to see the trend shortly before Christmas and has taken approximately 45 reports since then. With tax season coming, I expect to see it continue, Safran said. (And) it seems to be somewhat age related, with retired persons reporting the most. There have been instances, however, when a currently employed person has been victimized. But a company with a more robust human resources department can probably catch it, Safran said. I guess the question the state has to answer is where the money went. Victims, meanwhile, are questioning how this could affect tax filing this year, Sopkovich said. They have to determine how to pay taxes, because the State of Ohio is saying they were paid this money, he said. On its website, the Ohio Attorney Generals Office notes that it cannot help with filing taxes, directing victims instead to the Internal Revenue Service website. Silver lining and continued concern According to both Sopkovich and Safran, only victims names have been used to obtain unemployment benefits in the cases they have seen, with no instances thus far of victims bank accounts or other personal information being breached. But since law enforcement officials are unsure exactly how the information was obtained to begin with, it is still unclear how much information was obtained or how it could be used in the future. That is why we tell people to keep checking their credit reports and bank accounts, Safran said. Read more news from the Brunswick Sun. For Subscribers Why South Dakota county officials are shirking state-given water rights Grant County could be the thirteenth county to repeal their drainage ordinance in the past decade. A car has been completely destroyed in an arson attack in a Co Tyrone village on Tuesday evening. The fire was reported at 10.55pm on Main Street in Donaghmore, with the Black Honda CR-V car completely gutted by the blaze. The incident has been ruled as a deliberate ignition by the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service and the incident is being treated as arson. A male in dark clothing was seen running from the scene after the fire was lit. The PSNI are asking anyone who was in the area around the time of the incident to contact them on 101, quoting reference 2010 of 23/02/21. A report can also be submitted via http://www.psni.police.uk/makeareport/ or contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111. New Delhi, Feb 24 : Vedanta Limited has been conferred with the "CSR Shining Star Award" under the category of Child Development for Nand Ghar, Vedanta Group's flagship corporate social responsibility project. The recognition was given by Governor of Maharashtra, Bhagat Singh Koshyari in an award ceremony held at the Raj Bhavan, Mumbai on February 20. The award recognizes Vedanta's efforts towards the holistic development and growth of children contributing towards building a stronger and healthier nation. Speaking on receiving the award, Vedanta Director, Priya Agarwal said: "I am honored as well as humbled to receive the award for our Nand Ghars that are transforming the lives of rural women and children across the country. We are committed to fulfilling Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi's vision of eradicating child malnutrition, providing education and healthcare, and empowering rural women through skill development, and Nand Ghar will be the change agent for the same. I have no doubt in my mind that Nand Ghar will continue to create a better tomorrow for the children and their mothers at the grassroots level." The Nand Ghar journey began in 2015 with a vision to transform the lives of 8.5 crore children and 2 crore women across 13.7 lakh anganwadis. A dream project of Vedanta Chairman, Shri Anil Agarwal, Nand Ghar is a network of model anganwadis where the thrust is on inclusive development of children, women and local communities. The Nand Ghars are set up in collaboration with the Union Ministry of Women & Child Development. With more than 2,000 centres, the Nand Ghar project is now spread across 10 states -- Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Punjab, Assam, Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. The project aims to touch the lives of 4 million community members while directly impacting around 2 lakh children and 1.8 lakh women on an annual basis. Nand Ghars are equipped with solar panels to ensure 24 x 7 electricity, water purifiers, clean toilets and smart television sets, and have become a model resource centre for the local communities. Pre-school education is provided to children in the age group of 3-6 years. Nutritious meals and take-home rations are being provided for children, pregnant and lactating women. Primary healthcare services are rendered through mobile health vans and women are empowered through skilling, credit linkage and enterprise development. Vedanta Limited, a subsidiary of Vedanta Resources Limited, is one of the world's leading Oil & Gas and Metals companies. Burma Myanmars Key Parties Reject Regimes Election Body Invites to Meet The military council meeting on Feb. 16 in Naypyitaw. / seniorgeneralminaunghlaing.com Yangon The new Union Election Commission (UEC) formed by Myanmars military regime has invited political parties to a meeting on Friday. The invitation letter did not give an agenda and only asked the parties to say if they will attend. The Shan Nationalities League for Democracy (SNLD) told The Irrawaddy that the central executive committee decided not to attend the meeting. The SNLD won 15 seats in the Union Parliament and 27 Shan State parliamentary seats in the November general election. General secretary Sai Leik said: The SNLDs political stance and objectives totally contradict the military councils actions. He said it is too early to say whether the SNLD would contest any election arranged by the military, saying their political viewpoints are totally different. Sai Leik said the party accepted the voter lists for the 2020 election as accurate and legally sound. The Kachin State Peoples Party (KSPP), based in Myitkyina, Kachin State, will attend following an intense debate within the party, said vice-chairman Gungrawng Awng Hkam. We decided to attend the Friday meeting because we cant say for sure there wont be an election. We have to think how our party can survive and represent the people, he said. The KSPP said it only to listen to the military-appointed UEC but will not cooperate with the regimes State Administrative Council nor accept any council seats. The KSPP won a Lower House seat and three Kachin State parliamentary seats in the November general election, which Myanmars military refused to accept. The Kayah State Democratic Party, which won five Union seats and three state seats, said it has not been invited and is unlikely to attend. The party is based in Loikaw, Kayah State. We will have a central executive committee meeting to decide whether to attend the meeting. We will also consult with other ethnic parties. But we are unlikely to attend. Attending will cause us political problems, said Khu Theh Reh, the partys general secretary Amid protests against the military regime, the partys reputation will suffer and it will lose the peoples trust if it recognizes the militarys new UEC, said Khu Theh Reh. The Democratic Party for a New Society (DPNS), a Yangon-based party, which has been joining anti-regime demonstrations, said it will not attend the meeting. The Arakan League for Democracy said on Wednesday it will not attend Fridays meeting. The military seized power in a coup on Feb. 1, claiming the November general election that brought a landslide victory to the National League for Democracy (NLD) was marred by fraud. The regime has been attempting to prove its accusations against the NLD and the election commissioners it appointed. The junta says it will hold a new election within a year. The NLD has already declined its invitation to the meeting. The military has detained numerous election officials across the country. Of 93 registered political parties, over 30 parties, including the military-proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party, have supported the military coup. Most ethnic-minority parties in states and democratic parties in Bamar-majority regions refute the militarys accusations of electoral fraud. 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Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- MountainWest Capital Network (MWCN) announced the recipient of its annual Entrepreneur of the Year award, naming Hanko Kiessner as the 2021 honoree. Now in its 33rd year, MWCN's award recognizes a Utah entrepreneur who has built an industry-leading company, inspired others to pursue their own entrepreneurial vision, and gives back to the community. Kiessner is the co-founder and CEO of Packsize International, a Utah-based company that has grown rapidly to become the global leader in Right-sized Packaging on Demand. Packsize has held a ranking on MWCN's Utah 100 list 10 times. Packsize addresses a pressing need to reduce unnecessary air from corrugated shipping, an issue receiving greater visibility due to the recent exponential growth of e-commerce. The Packsize line of custom box-making machines, automated systems, software, and packaging workflow solutions help fulfillment centers and other businesses drastically improve their packaging efficiencies and reduce waste. After owning and operating paper goods and corrugated board businesses in his native Germany, Kiessner and his wife Laura decided to return to Utah, where they had met while attending the University of Utah. The Kiessners and their three children traveled by ship and train to arrive, temporarily moving into her parents' home where they founded Packsize, a corrugated packaging technology leader with operations in more than 28 countries. "Our theme for the award ceremony this year is 'Blue Sky Mindset,' and Hanko Kiessner embodies that ideal through his passion for the environment and his sustainable approach to business," MWCN's Entrepreneur of the Year Vice-Chair Jake Kastan said. "Packsize is a success because it solves a fundamental problem, and it's an industry leader because Hanko is always focused on innovation and improvement." Kiessner heavily invests time and resources in corporate social responsibility and is passionate about constantly advancing Packsize's products to minimize environmental impact. Packsize helps companies across several vertical markets reduce packaging waste. The company has an internal goal to be carbon net neutral by 2030. Kiessner is also a founder and board member of Leaders for Clean Air , a 501(c)(3) non-profit committed to improving Utah's air quality through implementing and promoting electric vehicle projects and technology. "A lot of people work in a job that they know is problematic and want to give back charitably as a way to compensate. My belief is that we can do both at the same time," Kiessner said. "This is a wonderful privilege to be named MWCN's Entrepreneur of the Year, and it really goes to my team of outstanding people who bring their best selves to work every day, and who have made this company such a success and a great place to work." Kiessner attended the University of Utah, where he earned a bachelor's degree in business administration, and an MBA from the David Eccles School of Business. After returning to Germany, he co-owned Skanwell Meyer GmbH + Co. KG and Busse & Niederstadt GmbH, both paperboard product companies. Since its founding in 1983, MWCN has been committed to recognizing entrepreneurial success. Entrepreneur of the Year is a key feature of MWCN's outreach to foster business relationships and recognize outstanding members of Utah's business community. Kiessner joins other entrepreneurial giants and pioneers who have also been named Entrepreneur of the Year since 1983. Past honorees include Dr. Steve Neeleman, Fred Lampropoulos, Ryan Smith, Jeremy Andrus, Aaron Skonnard, Peter and Nicole Mouskondis, Tom Dickson, Todd Pedersen, Josh James, Peter Metcalf, Larry H. and Karen Gail Miller, Alan E. Hall, Amy Rees Anderson, Kirk Benson, Dr. Ted Stanley, Ken Wooley, Dr. Hunter Jackson, David Evans, Ray Noorda, Dale Ballard, Dr. Dinesh Patel, Gary Stevenson, Scott Watterson, David Bailey, Hyrum Smith, Jerry Atkin, Sid Green, Steve Aldous, Spencer Kirk and Dave Spafford. About MountainWest Capital Network MountainWest Capital Network is Utah's first and largest business networking organization devoted to supporting entrepreneurial success and dedicated to the flow of financial, entrepreneurial and intellectual capital. Learn more at www.mwcn.org or connect on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. About Packsize Packsize is a multinational technology company that develops and infuses smart packaging systems, processes, and workflows into its customers' packaging environments. Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Packsize's Right-size Packaging On Demand systems, software, and services give businesses worldwide the ability to improve their customer satisfaction, enhance their brand value, and contribute to a regenerative society as a whole. Learn how to benefit from Smart Packaging for a Healthy Planet at packsize.com or call 801.944.4814. Follow Packsize on Twitter , LinkedIn and Facebook . SOURCE MountainWest Capital Network Related Links https://www.mwcn.org Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 A look at some of the major movers in London on Monday ( ) climbed 16% to 12.89p after it provided an update on its dispute with the Republic of Slovenia. The Republic of Slovenia has notified Ascent that it should be in a position to respond formally to the proposed settlement terms by March 19, and has asked the parties on the other side of the dispute to hold off any arbitration proceedings before then. Ascent and its partners have acceded to this request. 3.25pm: IAG higher after British Airways gets liquidity boost PLC ( ) was 3.0% higher at 1790.65p after it revealed that its British Airways arm has reached two financing arrangements that will increase total liquidity by 2.45bn. On December 31, the flag carrier received commitments for a five-year Export Development Guarantee term-loan of 2bn underwritten by a syndicate of banks, partially guaranteed by UK Export Finance (UKEF). The airline has also agreed with the Trustee of New Airways Pension Scheme (NAPS) to defer 450mln of pension deficit contributions due between October 2020 and September 2021, normally paid in monthly instalments of 37.5mln. 2.30pm: share price wilts after GardaWorld sticks to its guns PLC ( ) dived 9.8% to 242.6p after bidder GardaWorld refused to raise its offer from 235p per share. The decision appears to leave the way clear for Allied Universal, which has offered 245p a share for the security services firm that is still best-remembered for making a complete hash of its London Olympics gig. The shareholder hold-outs need to accept that they are unlikely to wring any more out of this particular bid, and accept the money on the table now, with the shares falling back sharply in early trade, suggested Michael Hewson at CMC Markets. 1.35pm: Directa Plus shares on a charge ( ), up 12% at 145p, was on a charge after signing agreements with NexTech Batteries, a lithium-sulphur (Li-S) batteries company. The graphene-based products producer and supplier inked a supply agreement and a strategic research & development agreement with the US firm. Direct Plus said these agreements follow on from the memorandum of understanding signed with the Nevada, US-based company in October. 12.40pm: makes the grade PLC ( ), up 11% at 86.5p, was wanted after it completed trials and tests for the manufacture of battery-grade spherical graphite. The trials and tests were conducted in tandem with a globally recognised German manufacturer of spheroidisation and micronisation equipment, achieving significant results in the end product. The company has commissioned development and optimisation for the first in a series of commercial-scale 3,000 tonne per year spherical graphite manufacturing plants with a German specialist and initiated discussions with prospective buyers, including automobile majors, battery and anode manufacturers. 11.45am: Echo Energy asks for more time to redeem its loan notes ( ) slipped 7.5% to 0.68p after it published plans to restructure its bond obligations. The upstream oil and gas company focused on Latin America wants bondholders to extend the maturity of the notes by three years to May 2025. It also wants to move all cash interest payments on the notes before the maturity date, i.e. pay all the interest due when the bonds are redeemed. 10.50am: Image Scan slumps as big orders dry up ( ) slumped 11% to 2.45p after it said in a trading update that the pandemic continued to hit its order intake. The specialists in the field of real-time X-ray imaging for the security and industrial inspection markets said the security business had been hit particularly hard, with larger, multi-unit orders by its government customers drying up. Smaller portable X-ray orders have continued to be received and have included several from significant new customers, such as the Royal Air Force order announced in January. 9.55am: Catenae soars as it is invited to participate in government's digital identity initiative ( ) shares shot up 42% to 2.7p after the company was asked to participate in a government digital identity scheme. The developer of a secure, blockchain-driven COVID passport system has been asked to participate in a government initiative to make it quicker and easier for people to verify themselves using modern technology. The consultation is being carried out by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) as it develops its Digital Identity Policy. 9.00am: Clear Leisure soars as it welcomes new substantial shareholder ( ) rose 32% to 1.65p after it took advantage of recent share price strength to tap the market again. Having raised 680,000 less than two weeks ago by placing shares at 0.6p, the company has raised 1mln, this time by placing shares at a penny each with an individual investor, John Story, giving him an 11.14% stake. Ordinarily, issuing shares at a discount would lead to the share price fall but Clear Leisures share price is currently defying gravity thanks to its cryptocurrency development plans. If involvement in cryptocurrency enterprises is a sure way at the moment to garner interest, so is any connection with coronavirus diagnostic tests, which explains the 15% rise to 210.9p for the share price of ( ). The company put out a statement noting the recent press speculation about the UK Government take-up of Avacta's lateral flow SARS-CoV-2 rapid antigen test and noted that the test in question was an anterior nasal swab test, not (as press reports asserted) saliva-based. Avacta continues to be in dialogue with the Department of Health and Social Care and with other organisations in the UK and abroad, with a view to the future supply of its rapid antigen test. It is prioritising the full clinical validation of its nasal swab-based SARS-CoV-2 rapid antigen test as a pre-requisite for CE marking and broad commercialisation. Proactive news headlines ( ), the developer of a secure, blockchain-driven Covid passport system, has been asked to participate in a government initiative to make it quicker and easier for people to verify themselves using modern technology. ( ) said it has signed a commercial supply and collaboration deal with ePIC Blockchain Technologies which it said will allow it to receive priority access to state-of-the-art ASIC mining machines. CentralNic Group PLC ( ) said it has agreed to acquire Wando Internet Solutions GmbH, a Berlin-based social marketing, display advertising and search engine marketing (SEM) advertising technology company, for an initial consideration of 5.4mln (4.7mln). Sativa Wellness Group ( ) said its Bath and Bristol Goodbody clinics booked up to 27,000 a day in Covid testing revenues in December as it announced the opening of a tenth in-pharmacy facility and plans for a further twenty. Base Resources Ltd ( ) generated revenue of US$72.8mln from its mining operations in Kenya in the six months to 31 December 2020. EBITDA came in at US$33.9mln, while net debt was cut by US$50mln. ( ) has received the processed high-resolution airborne electromagnetic and magnetics geophysics survey data and associated maps and report over the Dotted Lake property on the north limb of the Schreiber-Hemlo greenstone belt in Ontario, Canada. ( ) has helped create a joint venture to provide teleradiology reporting services and increased reporting capacity in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland. Condor Gold ( )( ) has started a 5,000 metre diamond drill programme at the Cacao prospect at the La India project in Nicaragua. Cacao is located four kilometres from the planned processing plant at the fully permitted La India mine. ( ) said it has signed a supply agreement and a strategic R&D agreement with NexTech Batteries Inc, a lithium sulphur (Li-S) batteries company based in Nevada, US. (LON:NQMI, ) said it has signed an agreement with Australian gold miner for the detailed evaluation and potential processing of lead and silver-rich stockpiles at the Sunbeam project, located at the companys Ukalunda tenement in North Queensland, Australia. ( ) has received ministerial consent for the transfer of title, being the final condition of closing on the acquisition of a 75% interest in the Eclipse gold project, located 55 kilometres north-east of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. "We are pleased to have now completed the acquisition of a 75% interest in Eclipse, said Empire director Mike Struthers. PLC ( ) said it has filed an application with OTC Markets Group Inc for its shares to be cross-traded on the OTCQB Venture Market under the ticker GULDF, which it said will make its shares more widely available to North American investors. ( ) said it had made a positive start to its current year as it swung into profit in its first quarter. In its results for the three months to December 31, the aquaculture specialist reported an adjusted operating profit from continuing operations of 1.3mln compared to a 1.1mln loss a year ago, while revenues climbed to 29mln from 24.7mln. ( ) financial results for 2020 confirmed strong growth in revenues and gross profit, which rose by 49% and 83% respectively. PLC ( ) has successfully completed trials and tests for the manufacture of battery grade spherical graphite, used in the anode of lithium-ion batteries. The trials and tests were conducted in tandem with a globally recognised German manufacturer of spheroidisation and micronisation equipment, achieving significant results in the end product. Chariot Oil & Gas Limited ( ) has inked a collaboration agreement with Subsea Integration Alliance for the Anchois gas development project in Morocco. (CVE:FO, ) told investors it is exiting non-core assets in Canada, assigning its interests to a large Canadian-based company. Litigation Capital Management Limited ( ) has secured a US$50mln credit facility to provide the company with additional investment capital that will be used to pursue growth opportunities. ( ) said its 18.8% stake in Pulsiv Solar is now valued at 4.1mln following the latters latest equity fundraising and debt conversion, up from 3.6mln at the end of June. VietNam Holding Limited ( ) said in its monthly investor report that business and consumer confidence continues to thrive in Vietnam, although there was a small wobble in January when profit-taking following a resurgence in coronavirus cases prompted profit-taking, resulting in the fund's net asset value (NAV) easing 1.7% over the course of the month. The NAV has rebounded in February. PLC ( ) has appointed Panmure Gordon as Nominated Adviser with immediate effect. Panmure Gordon will also continue to act as financial adviser and joint broker to the company. ( ) announced the appointment of Charles 'Chuck' Fremont Osborne Jr to the board with immediate effect. Fremont, who has been in the role of chief financial officer since April 2019, has "significant capital markets experience coupled with a strong knowledge of financial operations within the pharmaceutical industry", said chief executive Richard Hullihen. ( ) has hired New York-based EAS Advisors to introduce institutions and funding, as the explorer works to advance mining and exploration projects in sub-Saharan Africa. Silence Therapeutics PLC (LON:SLN) announced that the company's management will present business updates at two virtual investor conferences in March: the Cowen 41st Annual Health Care Conference at 10.20am on Monday 1 March; and the HC Wainwright Global Life Sciences Conference, on demand on Tuesday 9 March 2021. PLC ( ) announced on Friday the introduction of its share option plan 2021 for executives and selected senior management, designed to promote the retention, recruitment and incentivisation of the Company's leadership team. Up to 11,194,030 new ordinary shares may be issued under new options granted under the plan, which represents approximately 2.5% of the company's issued ordinary share capital. ( ) said that on 1 March 2021 it will publish its full year results for the financial year ended 31 October 2020. Get ready to do a little Total Concentration Breathing, people. It seems that U.S. fans of Demon Slayer (also known by its Japanese title, Kimetsu no Yaiba) will have to wait a little longer for a nationwide release of the animes movie. CBR reports that while the movie will get a one-week screening in Miami, Fla. at an extremely limited capacity, a greater wide-scale release is not ready just yet. Titled Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train, the movie picks off where the first season of the anime leaves off with Tanjiro, Nezuko (in basket, of course), Zenitsu, and Inosuke boarding a train for their next mission. And what is that mission, exactly? Well, to team up with the Flame Hashira, Kyojuro Rengoku, to help him kill a demon thats been murdering passengers on that train. Unfortunately for them, that demon happens to be Enmu, one of the lower ranking Twelve Kizuki who gained additional power by consuming Muzans blood which, as we all know, cant mean anything good for anyone human. Demon Slayer exploded into popularity as a manga series back in 2016 and became even more beloved on an international scale after it became adapted into an anime series. The anime is highly regarded as one the best of all time, and was even referenced at one point by Japans prime minister, Suga Yoshihide. While this U.S. screening of Mugen Train is incredibly brief, the same CBR article notes its for a very good reasonthe film needs to be publicly shared in this country in order to land a Best Animated Film nomination at this years Academy Awards. In order to satisfy yourself with some new Demon Slayer content, you can check out the recently-dropped teaser for season two below. FireAngel Safety Technology Group PLC - Coventry-based fire safety products firm - Wins contract to supply smoke, heat and carbon monoxide detector alarms to an unnamed social housing customer in Scotland. Says it will provide 4,000 properties with wireless interlinked mains- and battery-powered alarms over the next 18 months. Notes the contract follows new standards requiring all homes in Scotland to have smoke alarms fitted in living rooms, hallways and landings, as well as heat alarms in kitchens. All alarms are required to be interlinked so that they can be heard throughout the property, with a carbon monoxide alarm fitted wherever there are fixed combustion appliances. "This contract, following a hiatus caused by Covid lockdowns, is the latest in a series of agreements with housing providers following the implementation of the Housing Scotland Act. Whilst activity levels in the market remain slightly uncertain due to Covid restrictions, this contract is further evidence of us delivering against our connected homes strategy and it is encouraging to see growing demand for our life-saving technology," says Executive Chair John Conoley. Current stock price: 17.00 pence Year-to-date change: down 6.9% By Zoe Wickens; zoewickens@alliancenews.com Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved. Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Moneta Porcupine Mines Inc. (TSX: ME) (OTC Pink: MPUCF) (XETRA: MOP) ("Moneta" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that the Company has completed the acquisition of all the issued and outstanding shares of Northern Gold Mining Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of O3 Mining Inc. (TSXV:OIII) (OTCQX: OIIIF) ("O3 Mining"), which owns 100% of the Golden Bear assets, including the Garrison Gold project located adjacent to and contiguous with Moneta's Golden Highway project in the Timmins Gold Camp as previously announced on January 14, 2021 (Press release ME-PR 01-2021) (the "Transaction"). Under the terms of the Transaction, O3 Mining was issued approximately 150 million common shares of Moneta and currently owns approximately 27% of the outstanding Moneta shares. The shares are subject to a hold period ending December 31, 2022. Gary O'Connor, CEO of Moneta, commented, "Finalizing the acquisition of the Golden Bear assets with overwhelming support from our shareholders has transformed Moneta into one of the largest gold development companies in North America with a significant resource and land holding in Canada's most prolific gold mining camp. The Golden Bear assets, including the Garrison Gold deposits, occur adjacent to our flagship Golden Highway project and provide significant synergies and multiple options for the development of our gold resources. Moneta now holds 3,967,000 ounces of indicated gold resources and 4,399,000 ounces of inferred gold resources including both high-grade bulk tonnage underground deposits and near surface open pit resources. We are pleased to have a highly successful project development company as a partner. With the closing of the recent $22.6M financing, Moneta is well funded to test the expansion potential of the integrated project. With the completion of the current 70,000 m drill program, we plan to update the resource estimate later this year followed by an updated and expanded preliminary economic assessment study (PEA) on the combined projects." Jose Vizquerra, President and CEO of O3 Mining, commented, "O3 Mining is pleased to unlock value for our shareholders through our investment in, and support of, Moneta, and the future development of a large and long-life gold project in Timmins, Ontario - one of Canada's most productive gold camps. The consolidation of these two historically fractioned mining camps will allow for a more systematic exploration strategy going forward and will unlock value for our shareholders and Moneta shareholders alike as the project develops. We look forward to partnering with Moneta's management team, through our board representation, and being part of Moneta's growth story in the Timmins Mining Camp, in our role as a significant shareholder." Corporate Update Concurrent with the closing of the Transaction, the Board of Directors of Moneta will now be represented by Mr. Mark NJ Ashcroft, Mr. Rodney Cooper, Mr. Alex Henry, Mr. Gary O'Connor, Mr. Ian C Peres, and Mr. Josef Vejvoda, to be joined by O3 Mining nominees, Mr. Jose Vizquerra and Mr. Blair Zaritsky. Director biographies can be found at www.monetaporcupine.com and www.O3mining.com. The Board of Directors at Moneta wishes to thank retiring Moneta Board of Director members, Mr. Mark Wayne and Dr. Kevin Heather for their numerous contributions to the success of the Company. Mr. Alex Henry, Chairman of Moneta commented, "We are very grateful to have had Mark and Kevin serve on our board over the past several years. Their dedication and knowledge added significantly to Moneta's growth." Mr. Gary O'Connor, CEO added, "On behalf of our entire board, we are very grateful to Mark and Kevin for their vast knowledge and insight into the development of large gold projects and their efforts to help create one of the largest gold projects in North America today." Moneta also intends to consolidate its share capital on a 6 for 1 basis (the "Consolidation"), subject to the receipt of all necessary approvals, at its next annual general meeting "AGM". The Consolidation will require approval by not less than two-thirds (66 2/3%) of the votes cast by the Moneta shareholders present in person, or represented by proxy, at Moneta's next AGM. The Transaction was approved by written consent by a majority of holders comprised of more than 51.6% of Moneta shares on February 11, 2021 (see press release ME-PR 05-2021). In connection with the Transaction, the Board of Directors received a Fairness Opinion from Maxit Capital LP stating that, subject to the assumptions, limitations, and qualifications set out therein, the consideration to be paid by Moneta pursuant to the purchase agreement with O3 Mining is fair, from a financial point of view, to Moneta. As required under securities law, Moneta will file a Form 51-102F4 Business Acquisition Report ("BAR") within 75 days of the Transaction closing. The Company satisfied the escrow release conditions under the previously announced $3 million subscription receipt financing concurrently with the closing of the Transaction (see press release ME-PR 04-2021 dated February 04, 2021). As a result, the subscription receipts converted, for no further consideration, into 9,375,000 Moneta shares on closing. About Moneta Moneta holds 26,343 ha of prospective land in the Timmins Gold Camp including a joint venture with Kirkland Lake Gold Corporation (TSX: KL). The Company's flagship project, covering the Golden Highway and Garrison Gold Projects is located 100 km east of Timmins and hosts a total indicated resource of 3,967,000 ounces gold contained and a total of 4,399,000 ounces gold inferred at a 2.60 g/t Au at South West, 3.00 g/t Au cut-off for the other underground deposits and 0.30 g/t Au for the open pit deposits. The project includes a total of 3,335,000 ounces of open pit indicated resources contained within 116.7 Mt @ 0.89 g/t Au and 2,270,000 ounces of open pit inferred resources contained within 79.4 Mt @ 0.89 g/t Au. The project also includes 632,000 ounces of indicated underground resources contained within 4.9 Mt @ 4.05 g/t Au and 2,129,000 ounces of inferred underground resources within 15.7 Mt @ 4.21 g/t Au. Preliminary economic assessment ("PEA") studies were completed on the Garrison open pit resources and the South West underground bulk mining resource in 2020. The Garrison PEA highlighted open pit mining operation consisting of a 12-year mine life with an after-tax NPV5% of C$321MM, IRR of 33% and a 2.3 year payback. The project envisaged open pit mining producing 121,000 oz/pa in years 1 to 8 (94,000 oz/pa LOM), at a strip ratio of 2.7:1 at a cash cost of US$721/oz using a gold price of US$1,450/oz and an exchange rate of US$0.75/C$. The PEA on the South West gold deposit, one of 6 deposits located on the Golden Highway project, highlighted an underground bulk mining operation consisting of an 11-year mine life with an after-tax NPV5% of C$236MM, IRR of 30% and a 3.4 year payback, generating C$371MM LOM after-tax free cash flow. The project envisaged producing 76,000 oz/pa at a cash cost of US$590/oz at a gold price of US$1,500/oz and an exchange rate of US$0.77/C$. The open pit resources and new underground discoveries have not yet been subjected to a preliminary economic assessment study at Golden Highway. Moneta is currently drilling (70,000 m) the extensions of the resources in preparation of an updated resource estimate and combined PEA with an expanded scope and production profile. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT: Gary V. O'Connor, CEO 416-357-3319 Linda Armstrong, Investor Relations 647-456-9223 The Company's public documents may be accessed at www.sedar.com. For further information on the Company, please visit our website at www.monetaporcupine.com or email us at info@monetaporcupine.com. This news release includes certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements, collectively "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements are frequently identified by such words as "may", "will", "plan", "expect", "anticipate", "estimate", "intend" and similar words referring to future events and results. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to information with the future performance of the business, its operations and financial performance and condition such as the Company's drilling program and the timing and results thereof; and the ability of the Company to finance and carry out its anticipated goals and objectives. Forward-looking statements are based on the current opinions and expectations of management. All forward-looking information is inherently uncertain and subject to a variety of assumptions, risks and uncertainties, including the speculative nature of mineral exploration and development, fluctuating commodity prices, competitive risks and the availability of financing, as described in more detail in our recent securities filings available at www.sedar.com. Actual events or results may differ materially from those projected in the forward looking-statements and we caution against placing undue reliance thereon. We assume no obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75336 Washington: Anjali Bharadwaj, an Indian social activist working on issues of transparency and accountability, is one of the 12 "courageous" individuals named by the Biden administration for the newly-instituted International Anti-Corruption Champions Award. According to the State Department, Bhardwaj, 48, has served as an active member of the Right to Information Movement in India for over two decades. "The Biden administration recognises that we will only be successful in combating these issues by working in concert with committed partners, including courageous individuals who champion anti-corruption efforts and countries working to fulfil their commitments to international anti-corruption standards," US Secretary of State Tony Blinken said on Tuesday. For that reason, I am announcing a new International Anti-Corruption Champions Award, recognising individuals who have worked tirelessly, often in the face of adversity, to defend transparency, combat corruption, and ensure accountability in their own countries, he said. Bharadwaj is the founder of the Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS), a citizens' group with a mandate to promote transparency and accountability in government and encourage active participation of citizens. She is also a convener of the National Campaign for Peoples' Right to Information, which successfully advocated for the creation of an anti-corruption ombudsman and the Whistle Blowers' Protection Act, offering protection to those who expose corruption and abuse of power. Bharadwaj in a tweet said the honour is a "recognition of the collective effort of people and groups across the country who hold power to account". In addition to Bharadwaj, the other honourees are: Ardian Dvorani of Albania, Diana Salazar of Ecuador, Sophia Pretrick of Micronesia, Juan Francisco Sandoval Alfaro of Guatemala, Ibrahima Kalil Gueye of Guinea, Dhuha A Mohammed of Iraq, Bolot Temirov of Kyrgyz Republic, Mustafa Abdullah Sanalla of Libya, Victor Sotto of The Philippines, Francis Ben Kaifala of Sierra Leone, and Ruslan Ryaboshapka of Ukraine. "They inspire us and so many of their counterparts pursuing these ideals around the world. The United States enforces one of the most robust anti-corruption frameworks in the world, Blinken said. The US, he said, was the first to criminalise foreign bribery and, in partnership with foreign counterparts, has recovered and returned more than USD 1 billion in stolen public assets in the past two years alone. We use a range of tools to promote accountability for corrupt individuals, combat impunity globally, and engage in multilateral fora to fight corruption and strengthen citizen engagement, Blinken said. Pennsylvania GOP leaders are meeting Wednesday night to discuss a censure vote of U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey following his vote to convict former President Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial. Toomey, who lives in the Lehigh Valley, was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict former President Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial. The measure failed in the senate after failing to reach the required 67 votes. A lawless attempt to retain power by a president was one of the founders greatest fears, Toomey said after the vote, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. (Trumps) betrayal of the Constitution and his oath of office required conviction. Toomey, who previously announced he will not seek re-election next year, said he and other senators believed Trump incited the Jan. 6 mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol. Following the vote, several Pennsylvania county GOPs voted to censure Toomey. We did not send him there to vote his conscience, Dave Ball, chair of the Washington County Republican Party, told KDKA CBS 2. Then, last week, state party Chairman Lawrence Tabas scheduled a virtual committee meeting for Wednesday night to discuss issues arising out of the impeachment of Trump, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Ahead of the vote, former Lehigh Valley Rep. Charlie Dent said Wednesday morning on CNN that the Republican party was fractured beyond repair by Trump supporters. Former PA GOP Congressman @RepCharlieDent on CNN this morning discussing the state of the GOP. "We're fractured beyond repair and something's gotta give..." An indicator on where the @PAGOP stands may come tonight on whether or not they choose to censure @SenToomey @WLVRNews Brad Klein news (@BradKleinNews) February 24, 2021 The partys in a horrible place, Dent said, adding he didnt understand why candidates and likely-candidates would attach themselves to Trump now. Dents comments come as no surprise. After the second impeachment trial, Dent wrote the GOP may have lost its soul. It is now fractured between Trump supporters and those who want a clean break from him. Earlier this month, Dent said he and a group of about 120 Republicans discussed whether to create a new group separate from Trump. Clearly, there are a number of Republicans like myself and other Republican leaders, who want a clean break from President Trump, and we are kind of rallying around some core founding principles like truth and honesty, and democracy, and rule of law, Dent told CNNs Chris Cuomo. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to lehighvalleylive.com. Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Improving road safety in cities could result in a lower rate of violent crime, according to research from UCL. Experts analyzing crime and car accident data in Mexico City found a surprisingly high level of synchronicity between the two on a weekly cycle, suggesting that applying more resources to prevent road accidents would improve crime rates by enabling more efficient policing. For the paper, published today in Cities as Complex Systems special issue in PLOS ONE, experts plotted the time and locations of nearly one million car accidents and 200,000 violent crimes from January 2016 to March 2020 in Mexico City, creating a 'heartbeat' - so-called because of its resemblance to an electrocardiogramof the city. The pattern of crash and crime occurrences were similar day by day, repeating on the weekly cycle, the concept of which had previously been unexplored. Experts observed 'valleys' during the night and peaks in the evening, where at a city level, crime peaked at 7.5 times more than in the depth of valleys, and car accidents peaked at 12.3 times. Lead author Dr. Rafael Prieto Curiel (UCL CASA) explained: "Distinct parts of the city have different heartbeats in terms of crime and of crashes. A neighborhood with bars and restaurants has a different heartbeat than a residential neighborhood or one with offices or schools. The land-use of the region can help us explain why we observe distinct heartbeats and make projections and forecasts". Crime and road accidents have been observed and analyzed together before, but not in terms of cyclic behavior. The team analyzed both by capturing weekly occurrences of crime and accidents, using geotagged data capturing time and location. This created the heartbeat of the city. This heartbeat was then analyzed for a more specific location, relating to distance from the Mexico City Metro and other public transport stations, to create 'tiles' of the city. Nearby tiles were found to have similar heartbeats, in that they saw peaks and valleys in crime and crashes at similar times during the week. These peaks and valleys related to economic activities, such as residents commuting to work. The team further observed that crimes and crashes reach their respective intensity peak on Friday night and valley on Tuesday morning. The mathematical method the team used can be applied to other cities. Using the weekly cycle makes it easier to predict peaks and valleys in the near future, with potential implications on city policing. Whereas most cities have resourcesalbeit of differing levelsin place to tackle and prevent crime, road safety has had comparatively less resource attributed to it. Dr. Prieto Curiel added: "Focusing more on preventing road accidents would improve crime prevention in urban areas and give more resource to police tackling crime. Serious road accidents usually require the presence of police officers to divert traffic and secure the area. "Unfortunately, due to the temporal synchronization between crashes and crime, the times when more officers are engaged with road accidents is also when they are most needed due to the high levels of crime. Therefore, road accidents reduce the presence of police officers and could increase response time to other emergencies." Road accidents kill more than 1.35 million people around the world each year and 50 million people suffer non-fatal injuries in a crash. Three times more people are killed by cars than all types of crime and violence combined. Additionally, crime and road accidents are becoming a more relevant urban problem. In Mexico, some of its cities suffer nearly twice the number of crimes per capita than the national level, so most of the urban population fears crime, In the US, for example, 54% of road accident deaths in 2018 occurred in urban areas, up from less than 40% in 2000. 5 things you need to know Monday News The Robert Davis Scholarship campaign, which delivers financial aid to promising students in the United States, has announced that it will soon be seeking applicants for 2021. LAS VEGAS, NV / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / In the coming months, the Robert Davis Scholarship campaign will reopen for applicants. The award's winners will be granted a total of $10,000 scholarship to be applied towards covering expenses for their post-secondary education. The scholarship is named for and sponsored by Robert Davis, a renowned Las Vegas medical professional with a passion for education and academic excellence. As with previous years, qualifying individuals are required to be students of the United States who are enrolled in or planning to attend a college or university in the United States. The Robert Davis Scholarship is intended for students who demonstrate a spirit which mirrors Robert Davis's passion for self-improvement, selflessness and ingenuity. Specifically, successful applicants will be students who demonstrate a strong and consistent desire to utilize their unique skills in order to better the world around them. Specifics on the Robert Davis Scholarship guidelines and application process will be available in the coming months. Interested parties can stay up-to-date on the scholarship's upcoming open date and application procedure by periodically checking the Robert Davis Scholarship website for new information. About Robert Davis Robert Davis is a Las Vegas-headquartered medical professional and co-founder of RD Heritage Group. After achieving success in the fields of Medical Technology, Oil & Gas, Pharmaceuticals, Artificial Intelligence and beyond he has turned his attention towards giving back. As a result, he launched the Robert Davis Scholarship campaign, which provides outstanding students with the financial support they need to sharpen their skills and change the world around them. Outside of his long-standing background in the medical field and his decade of experience as an ER and Ambulatory Care Physician, Dr. Davis is also currently a hands-on investor who is passionate about providing resources in fundraising, marketing and international trade. Though raised in Michigan, Dr. Davis has called Las Vegas, Nevada home for the last 17 years. Contact Information: Robert Davis Website: https://robertdavisscholarship.com/ Email: apply@robertdavisscholarship.com SOURCE: Dr. Robert Davis View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631680/Robert-Davis-Scholarship-to-Reopen-for-2021-Applicants-in-the-Coming-Months One year after the Swatara Township Board of Commissioners unanimously rejected giving Mushroom Hill, LLC, a conditional use permit to construct a warehouse complex off Route 322, a Dauphin County judge sided with the applicant and appealed the commissioners vote. Commissioners are holding a special virtual meeting Thursday to review the decision of President Judge John F. Cherry. We were stunned, said Eric Epstein, a member of the Swarata Action Team. The team organized after learning of the proposed 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse complex. We believe the decision should be appealed by the commissioners, and at minimum, include the conditions that residents want to be attached to the application, he said. Hundreds of township residents attended the public hearing that took up four separate meetings. They provided testimony that pointed out concerns over environmental factors, traffic patterns, potential property damage during blasting, among several other items. At their request, residents also said they had a list of up to 13 conditions they wanted the developer to adhere to if the project moved forward. Cherry rendered his decision on Jan. 27. There was no dedicated meeting scheduled until tomorrow night, Epstein said. The first township meeting after the decision was canceled. The only other meeting included limited public discussion. The community has been left out of whatever conversations have been ongoing about the warehouse. Nearly 300 residents showed to voice their objection to a proposed warehouse complex project. Photo: Jana Benscoter, Dec. 18, 2019 Mushroom Hill, LLC, a group of investors from Conshohocken-based CRG Integrated Real Estate Solutions, made a request to the township in September 2019 for a conditional use permit. The permit was needed to construct four warehouses that crossed over into a zone that doesnt allow warehouses without it. Swatara Township staff didnt support the project. As part of their rejection, they noted that the applicant supplied deficient information and that details were lacking. Cherry didnt agree. He said Mushroom Hill did meet the townships requirements for a conditional use permit. We find that the Board erred in concluding that the Application of MH as filed, the testimony, and the exhibits provided at the hearing, failed to establish that the proposed use is eligible to be permitted by conditional use pursuant to the Zoning Ordinance, according to Cherrys decision. The Boards Finding of Fact support the conclusion that MH met those requirements. He said Mushroom Hill, LLC, identified that the use is a warehouse and that a warehouse is permitted as a conditional use in the General Commercial District. There were no deficiencies in the application, he said. Cherry added that when a conditional use permit is requested that special exception or conditional use proceedings involve only the proposed use of the land and do not involve the particular details of the design of the proposed development. Epstein countered that residents should have their say. No matter who is making the case, CRG did not meet its burden to demonstrate compliance with Swatara Townships requirements. CRG failed to provide and substantiate specific criteria as stated in the Ordinance, Epstein wrote in a statement to the township. If we are not a community of rules and regulations, what are we? Why do we have hearings if we are going to ignore sworn testimony? Throughout the public hearing process, Frank Petkunas, of CRG, explained to commissioners and residents that the occupant would employ between 300 to 400 employees, employee parking and loading docks would be located on Route 322 to minimize noise and that the idea is to offer space to companies that specialize in consumer, nondurable products. That information also was part of the application. Neither Petkunas nor the application named a tenant. Even without a tenants name, residents said they were uncomfortable knowing there would be a guaranteed increase in the number of tractor-trailers on Route 322 traveling in and out of the area. The proposed complex would be located between Route 322 and Chambers Hill Road. Swatara Township Commissioners will host a public hearing Wednesday to discuss a pending application to construct a warehouse off of Route 322. Photo: Smith Land & Improvement Corporation, Oct. 8, 2019. Since February 2020, commissioners and officials at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation agreed tractor-trailers are not allowed to travel on Chambers Hill Road. Details are important: It makes a difference if youre storing hazardous or medical waste rather than some vague product to be determined at a later date, Epstein said. The community should know what is being stored in their backyards before it shows up in unmarked packages. Commissioners followed the letter of the law and sided with keeping community standards that maintain the character of neighborhoods, he said. By not appealing the judges decision, Epstein added, that would be giving CRG a green light to take a wrecking ball to Chambers Hill despite a 5-0 decision based on facts and Swataras rules and regulations. More: Seven spots in Pa., including one in Harrisburg area, on list of top 100 truck bottlenecks Taiwan chipmakers are buying water by the truckload for some of their foundries as the island widens restrictions on water supply amid a drought that could exacerbate a chip supply crunch for the global auto industry. Some auto makers have already been forced to trim production, and Taiwan had received requests for help to bridge the shortage of auto chips from countries including the United States and Germany. Taiwan, a key hub in the global technology supply chain for giants such as Apple Inc, will begin on Thursday to further reduce water supply for factories in central and southern cities where major science parks are located. Water levels in several reservoirs in the island's central and southern region stand at below 20%, following months of scant rainfall and a rare typhoon-free summer. "We have planned for the worst," Taiwan Economy Minister Wang Mei-hua told reporters on Tuesday. "We hope companies can reduce water usage by 7% to 11%." With limited rainfall forecast for the months ahead, Taiwan Water Corporation this week said the island has entered the "toughest moment". Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC) , the world's largest contract chipmaker, this week started ordering small amounts of water by the truckload to supply some of its facilities across the island. "We are making preparations for our future water demand," TSMC told Reuters, describing the move as a "pressure test". The chip giant said it has seen no impact on production. Both Vanguard International Semiconductor Corporation and United Microelectronics Corp signed contracts with water trucks and said there was no impact on production. Vanguard said it has started a drill to truck water to its facilities in the northern city of Hsinchu. Taiwanese technology companies have long complained about a chronic water shortage, which became more acute after factories expanded production following a Sino-U.S. trade war. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 No Charges for Officers Involved in Daniel Prudes Death A grand jury in New York state on Feb. 23 voted against indicting police officers on charges related to the March 2020 death of Daniel Prude. Prude, 41, was pronounced dead a week after his arrest on March 23, 2020. His relatives had called the police for help when he was suffering a mental episode. Officers found him running naked in the street. He initially complied when officers asked him to put his hands behind his back to be handcuffed. Later, Prude sat up and began spitting at the officers while saying he had contracted the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as the novel coronavirus. Officers put a spit guard on Prude and pinned him to the ground face down for about two minutes to restrain him, after which he stopped breathing. Prude received CPR on the scene and was taken to hospital. He died seven days later, on March 30, after being taken off life support. A medical examiner concluded that Prudes death was a homicide caused by complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint. The report lists excited delirium and acute intoxication by the recreational drug phencyclidine, or PCP, as factors contributing to his death. In a Twitter post Tuesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose office took over the investigation, announced that her office concluded there was sufficient evidence surrounding Mr. Prudes death to present the case to a grand jury, and that it presented the most comprehensive case possible, but ultimately wasnt able to persuade the grand jury that the officers had committed a crime. New York State Attorney General, Letitia James, speaks during a news conference in New York, N.Y., on Aug. 6, 2020. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters) While I know that the Prude family, the Rochester community, and communities across the country will rightfully be devastated, we have to respect this decision, James wrote. The current laws on deadly force have created a system that utterly failed Mr. Prude and so many others before him. Daniel Prude was in the throes of a mental health crisis, and what he needed was compassion, care, and help from trained professionals, she added. Serious reform is needed in the Rochester Police Department and our criminal justice system as a whole. James said that moving forward, she will be pursuing a multifaceted approach, including legislation, to address the very issues that have prevented us from holding officers accountable when they improperly use deadly force. I will be unshakeable in my efforts to bring the change that is so desperately needed, she added. The officers involved in Prudes death; Troy Taladay; Paul Ricotta; Francisco Santiago; Andrew Specksgoor; Josiah Harris and Mark Vaughn, along with Sgt. Michael Magri, were suspended by Lovely Warrenthe mayor of Rochester, New York, after Prudes death became public. According to Rochester police chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan, they will all remain on leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation. The Epoch Times has reached out to the Rochester Police Department for comment. Mimi Nguyen Ly and The Associated Press contributed to this report. AWD SUV The Brat was made in the late 70s and 80s. It wasn't that powerful or all that practical but carried huge historical significance while also being a nifty little retro machine. Back then, Subaru wasn't the mass-market brand that appealed to every dog owner and college professor in the country. No, it made tiny little Japanese bubble cars and was hoping for some American cash.A pickup truck made out of an existing family car was their cheap solution, but there was a problem - the chicken tax. American manufacturers didn't want any new-fangled imports encroaching on their turf, so they lobbied for a large tax on imports. Defiant, Subaru installed rear-facing plastic seats in the back, transforming the Brat into a car, at least on paper.Oh, and by the way, it's not technically called the Brat, but the B.R.A.T. which is an acronym for Bi-drive Recreational All-Terrain Transport. And no, that's not their attempt at appealing to people with different sexual orientations; that's just how they saidin the old days.As you can probably tell just by the shape, Brats weren't powerful muscle trucks. The engines of choice were either a 1.6L or a 1.8L, both in the flat-4 configuration, and there was even room for a spare tire under the hood. Of course, the rascal was eventually discontinued, but Subaru tried once again to boost sales by offering a pickup.The Baja is pretty famous for something that was made only between 2002 and 2006. Essentially, this was an Outback with room for surfboards in the back. You couldn't fit an 8x4 piece of plywood, and prices were also pretty high, but that doesn't mean Subaru can't try again. Hyundai is going to launch the Santa Cruz pretty soon, and if that works, a brand new segment of-based small trucks will open up. It would be a shame not to have the Forester rugged reliability in there, just like what we see in this rendering by Kleber Silva. Back in 2014 France established a counterterrorism force consisting of 3,000, and later 4,000 French special operations and support personnel to pursue Islamic terrorists that move around in the western Sahel (semi-desert areas of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso). The Sahel is the dry area south of the Sahara Desert that stretches across northern Africa. The key to this counterterror operation was provision of sufficient air transport to quickly move troops to areas where there was an upsurge in Islamic terrorist activity, or to quickly move troops during wide area attacks on Islamic terrorist camps. These air mobility tactics worked. Captured Islamic terrorists as well as intercepted communications revealed that the local al Qaeda and ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) groups came to consider the French operation a major obstacle and threat. The French force was equipped with hundreds of armored vehicles, 20 transport and attack helicopters, six jet fighters and three large UAVs. There are also two twin engine C-160 air transports available for use within the Sahel. Supplies and reinforcements are regularly flown in using long-range transports, like the C-17, belonging to NATO allies like the U.S. and Britain. From the beginning the French force included a thousand French troops in Mali and the rest dispersed to other Sahel bases and ready to quickly move anywhere in the region that Islamic terrorist activity had been detected. The French assessment was that the Sahel was still troubled by thousands of Islamic terrorists and that this situation could not be taken care of quickly. In order to maintain pressure on the Islamic terrorists the French force organized cooperation with troops and police in all the nations covered. France also tried to get other NATO nations involved, but few were willing to contribute many, or any, troops to the Sahel counterterrorism effort. The Americans had some special operations troops in areas adjacent to Mali and also contributed UAVs and transports. Other NATO nations were persuaded to contribute a small force of four to six helicopters to support the 13,000 African peacekeepers in northern Mali. Each year a new air transport force comes to Mali, along with a few hundred troops to operate and maintain the helicopters. All these Mali peacekeeping operations were largely financed by EU (European Union) nations. In 2017 France persuaded the EU to finance the UN approved G5 Sahel Joint Force. This authorized five (the G5) Sahel nations (Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad) to form a separate counterterrorism force. The G5 also received some contributions from the United States. The idea for this G5 force has been around since 2015 but it was only by the end of 2016 that the countries involved agreed on the details. This included who would provide what in terms of the 5,000 soldiers and police needed and where they would be based. The G5 force would be stationed in three operational areas where troops familiar with local conditions would work. Sahel East consists of troops from Chad and Niger. Sahel Central is staffed by troops from Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso while Sahel West would mainly use troops from Mali and Mauritania. France helped getting some of the G5 force operational by the end of 2017. The G5 Force is part of French plan to shrink and eventually disband the French force that has been in the Sahel since 2013 and reduce the 13,000 strong UN peacekeeper force in northern Mali. The G5 nations already cooperated by sharing intelligence and providing quick access to their territory by the French force. In addition, the Americans provided satellite and UAV surveillance and other intel services, especially analysis and access to nearly all their data on Islamic terrorist activities in the region. The Sahel nations have few roads or railroads and air transportation is the main, and most expensive, way to move things around quickly. Air mobility is a major advantage because the Islamic terror groups survive largely by operating a smuggling operation for illegal drugs, weapons and illegal migrants moving north to the Mediterranean coast and then across the sea to Europe. This is a profitable trade as long as you have the trusted, and often armed, personnel in the several countries the smugglers must traverse slowly along the few roads. The Islamic terror groups establish business relationships with locals that includes assurances that there will be no unnecessary attacks on civilians and that jobs will be provided to locals who cooperate. Al Qaeda has come to dominate this smuggling operation because, unlike ISIL, they recognize the need to get along with Moslems, or even non-Moslems, who do not agree with Islamic terrorism. ISIL is more resistant to that sort of thing and only lets up the constant violence when the alternative is elimination of ISIL presence in an area. All this counterterrorism effort was meant to keep the Islamic terrorists in the Sahel weak and disorganized. So far that has worked, but these groups have been around since 2007, are still in business as gangsters smuggling drugs and illegal migrants north and receiving support from Islamic terrorists in Europe and the Persian Gulf. Islamic terrorists continue to carry out attacks in Mali (mainly the north) and in the G5 states to let the world know that Islamic terrorists were still present, and a threat to them throughout the western Sahel. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) The COVID-19 pandemic and its ensuing mobility restrictions have dramatically affected the economies of the world. In the Philippines, it has wreaked havoc on many industries, leading to retrenchments and closures of businesses. Unfortunately, this increased financial burden has subsequently raised incidents of fraud. According to reports, fraud activity more than doubled in 2020, and, sadly, the perpetrators are getting more creative with their modus operandi particularly because of the vulnerabilities of those new to online banking. In the Philippines, banks are duty-bound and regulated to employ best practices in order to keep our money safe. Thats why they always utilize up-to-date security features like two-factor authentication, one-time personal identification number (OTP), and encryption to make sure that our accounts are safe. In a manner of speaking, they must provide us with complicated locks to which only we possess the keys. If we inadvertently give these keys to anyone else, it may lead to unauthorized access to our accounts and the banks no longer having control over the transactions. Thats no reason to shy away from digital banking, though. Simply by being mindful of keeping our keys to ourselves," we can enjoy all the benefits of online and cashless transactions, relatively stress-free. Prep up your privacy Scammers usually wont take the direct approach. Breaking through bank security systems is one of the most difficult things to do, and they opt for the quickest way to get money by simply fooling the innocent. Accordingly, most fraudsters will always try to get our keys from us through social engineering, a form of psychological manipulation to get our pertinent information, and thus unlock the proverbial front door. Prevention, therefore, needs to start with regulating the flow of information, especially vital data that allows access to our accounts. One of the best ways to prevent easy access to our info is to make sure that our privacy settings display only the barest minimum information about ourselves on social media. There is certainly no practical need to state our full birthday, full address, e-mails, and phone numbers for the public to access freely. We should also never post any photos of our IDs, credit or debit cards, and any other personal effects that may contain information that can be used to open our accounts. Likewise, we should never share our credit and debit card information, CVVs, OTPs, and other vital information with anyone, not even to people who claim that they are from the bank. It cannot be over-emphasized that banks will never be the ones to initiate calls, messages, or emails requiring their account holders to divulge sensitive personal information. Always go to your banks official pages Given that scammers potentially have our contact information, some of them may already attempt to apply social engineering so that we can give them more to work with. Social engineering refers to the ways criminals manipulate people so they give up confidential information. Thus, it is important to know our banks respective official websites, contact information, and social media pages. It will at least help us identify if what we are receiving through our contact channels is coming from official sources. The moment that a bank, or someone claiming to be a bank, contacts us, we should be ready to verify by actually going to official channels. Again, we need to remember that banks will never ask us for our usernames, passwords, card verification values (CVVs), and OTPs, especially through email, social media, text, or phone. Banks will also never send us shortcut links via these channels for any sort of verification. As a rule, it is always prudent to check official channels the moment we receive unsolicited messages containing links of any kind. Know the tricks This one requires going the extra mile, but its also important to know what are the latest scams going around so we can identify if we are being targeted. Theres always a general pattern to how these scams work, especially on e-mail or SMS. It would usually involve a message saying that we need to reactivate our account, or a warning that our account may be compromised and verification is needed. These would also typically contain links to what may look like the banks pages, and ask for our username and password. When we receive something like this, never click on any link or take any other action until youve verified through your banks official channels if it is legitimate. Banks always advise us to go directly to their app or to manually type in their known legitimate website to ensure that we are going to the correct pages. There are other ways that these scams are being perpetrated, which is why the banking industry is also using aggressive information campaigns to inform people about them. One of these efforts is Scam Proof, a website from which we can learn about the latest scams. We can also report to the website our close calls or our misfortune of falling victim to a scam to ensure that the database is always updated. To reiterate, we also have a responsibility to keep our accounts secure. So we have to be mindful of the information we share and of the actions we do when it comes to our online financial transactions. If we can keep our accounts safe from fraudsters, we can then fully enjoy all the benefits and conveniences of digital and online banking. Immediately report possible fraud incidents to your bank Report fraudulent activities to Metrobank Contact Center at (02) 88-700-700, 1-800-1888-5775, or email us at customercare@metrobank.com.ph using "Report on Possible Fraud" as the subject. Join Metrobank in its fight against fraud. Visit https://metrobank.com.ph/fight-fraud for more tips, news, and advisories about fraud. Yes, no matter what Yes, but it depends on variety No, for medical reasons, uncertainty No, principle Vote View Results Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes The U.S. Air Force isn't ruling out bringing a new fighter jet into its inventory as it looks to replace older, fourth-generation F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft, according to the service's top general. As the service tries to determine the right mix of aircraft for its future inventory, it's considering the idea of a new fighter that falls somewhere between fourth- and fifth-generation airframes -- one that could easily be upgraded throughout its life, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown said last week. "Let's not just buy off the shelf; let's actually take a look at something else out there that we can build," Brown said during a Defense Writers Group virtual chat with reporters. He added that the service would want something that can be economically sustainable, produced quickly and has an open-architecture software system that can be rapidly modified to keep up with missions. Read Next: DC, Capitol Police 'Stunned' at Slow National Guard Response During Jan. 6 Riot His comments reiterated those of Dr. Will Roper, the former assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, and Mike Holmes, a retired general and former head of Air Combat Command. In recent months, both have spoken of wanting to bring in a new jet with a "family of systems" that lets it connect easily to other aircraft and fight alongside them. Roper told Aviation Week in January that the Air Force is weighing buying new F-16 fighters from Lockheed Martin as "a capacity solution" to increase its jet inventory. Lockheed moved its production line to its South Carolina plant in 2019 to centralize its manufacturing of F-16s, which have been updated since the last jet was delivered to the Air Force in 2005. But Brown said the F-16 may not be the best option. "I want to be able to build something new and different that's not the F-16, that has some of those capabilities, but gets there faster and features a digital approach," he said Feb. 17. Since the inception of the Joint Strike Fighter program, the Air Force has maintained that older Falcons should be replaced by the fifth-gen F-35 Lightning II, also made by Lockheed. The Air Force is the largest customer for the aircraft, with hopes to procure 1,763 F-35 A-variants. But in March 2020, Holmes hinted that there may be some wiggle room as the service assesses its inventory needs. "When [F-16s] need to be replaced, what am I going to replace them with?" Holmes said during the annual McAleese Defense Programs Conference at the time. The Air Force should also be thinking ahead, he said, citing the service's fighter road map, which roughly outlines where its aircraft inventory and platforms should be by 2030 and beyond. "What we're trying to work through is to think about it as a capability road map to say, 'What is going to do the mission we've been doing with fighters?' [and] work [that idea] into the future," he said. "The answer to, 'Is it manned? Unmanned?' [is] yes." So far, the service has not publicly moved away from the F-35 program. But according to Aviation Week, future budgets could limit its inventory. The magazine reported in December that the service might cap its total F-35 buy at 1,050 stealth fighters. Just how the service's fighter road map may develop is unknown. The Air Force is also considering how to work in the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, which defies the traditional categorization of a single platform, featuring a network of advanced fighter aircraft, sensors and weapons in a growing and unpredictable threat environment. The NGAD program could include fighters and autonomous drones fighting side-by-side. For example, the autonomous Skyborg -- which aims to pair artificial intelligence with a human piloting a fighter jet -- is intended for reusable unmanned aerial vehicles in a manned-unmanned teaming mission; the drones are considered "attritable," or cheap enough that they can be destroyed without significant cost. Meanwhile, the Air Force is already bringing in the Boeing-made F-15EX, the service's first fourth-generation fighter program in more than 20 years. In 2019, senior defense officials with the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office said they arrived at the F-15EX decision because the aircraft would help keep a diverse and "robust industrial base" while providing "a higher-capacity" combination alongside the F-35. The service awarded Boeing an estimated $1.2 billion contract last summer to acquire eight multirole F-15EX fighters -- considered "fourth-plus-generation" -- and associated development, test and certification and support equipment. Air Force officials have said the F-15EX's most significant upgrade will be its open mission systems architecture, which is in line with Brown's goals. "I realize that folks have alluded that it will be a particular airplane," Brown said of a future fighter. "But I'm open to looking at other platforms to see what that right force mix is." -- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214. Related: Air Force Generals to Elon Musk: The Fighter Jet Era Isn't Over Yet Whats new: The digital currency research institute of the Peoples Bank of China (PBOC) has joined an international research project for cross-border payments using central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), according to a Tuesday announcement by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), which jointly initiated the program with the Bank of Thailand in 2019. The project, renamed m-CBDC Bridge and currently in its second phase, aims to facilitate real-time cross-border foreign exchange payment-versus-payment transactions in a multi-jurisdictional context, and explore business use cases in a cross-border context using both domestic and foreign currencies. The HKMA, Hong Kongs de facto central bank, expects the projects findings to solve problems associated with cross-border fund transfers including inefficiencies, high costs and complex regulatory compliance. The background: In January 2020, the HKMA said that a proof-of-concept prototype had been developed successfully together with 10 banks from Hong Kong and Thailand. The PBOCs participation may be a sign that the central bank is speeding up the cross-border payment application of its own digital currency, as the Chinese mainlands focus in developing the digital currency has so far been on domestic use by consumers for retail payments. Along with the PBOC, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates has joined the second phase of the project, according to the HKMA. Quick Takes are condensed versions of China-related stories for fast news you can use. To read the full Caixin article in Chinese, click here. Related: Zhou Xiaochuan: Chinas Choices in Developing Its Digital Currency System Contact reporter Luo Meihan (meihanluo@caixin.com) and editor Marcus Ryder (marcusryder@caixin.com) Support quality journalism in China. Subscribe to Caixin Global starting at $0.99. Follow the Chinese markets in real time with Caixin Globals new stock database. Opinion Article 24 February 2021 More than ever, off-plan hotel leases[1] are making headlines in the leisure real estate industry. Stemming from real estate law professional practices, off-plan hotel leases reconcile the legal and financial interests of three distinct actors: the developer (seller), the investor (owner) and the operator (tenant). Advertisements In a nutshell, it is the owner who is at the hub of an off-plan lease agreement. The owner holds the land/ premises or negotiates an off-plan sale, and deals with the developer constructing the hotel or carrying out renovation work on its behalf. At the same time, the owner rents the premises under an off-plan lease to its tenant who will start creating the hotel business once the work has been completed. Off-plan leases are usually divided into two sections; the first covering the construction or renovation phase, and the second, the general and specific conditions of the agreement concluded with the hotel operator. The use of civil leases. Off-plan leases are generally commercial leases, although nothing prevents the conclusion of an off-plan lease agreement governed by the French Civil Code. This is the case, especially, when owners hold limited rights only over the building to be leased (for example, under an emphyteutic lease which prohibits commercial subletting). In the hospitality sector, owners should pay special attention to five key points in these complex and risky lease contracts that tie them to tenants over the long term. The importance of formalising the owner-tenant relationship from the beginning of the transaction In general, it is the hotel owner who is at the origin of the term sheet/ Letter of Intent (LOI) and who then presents the draft off-plan lease document to the tenant. The term sheet is prepared early on in the transaction and sets out the key points that must be agreed between the parties in the draft lease document and its appendices (in particular: plans, forecast accounts, the FF&E budget, guarantees, technical assistance, etc.). From this first stage onwards, the parties should try to be as clear-cut as possible with regard to a) the hotel project itself (e.g. number of rooms, category, F&B facilities, other amenities, etc.), b) the material, technical and financial investments required, and c) the expectations and contributions (financial, in particular) of each party involved in the project. Given the high financial stakes, owners must also ensure that the building permit is filed free of all claims. It is also in the interest of the parties to include in the term sheet a timetable for negotiating and/ or concluding, in parallel, a technical assistance agreement allowing the tenant (and, if applicable, its hotel franchisor with its own technical specifications) to oversee the construction and fitting-out of the hotel. The crucial issues to be negotiated - adjusted rent calculation, charges, capex and guarantee amounts The issue of rent negotiation. Off-plan lease agreements must include a clause covering the rental amount. Indeed, one of the main concerns for a hotel tenant is being able to adapt its finances to the anticipated rental amount and associated charges, and in this respect the owner and tenant will jointly agree on the level of rent (straight-line or not, fixed and/ or variable, to be negotiated). In practice, the two parties will compare the tenant's operating forecasts with those produced by the owner's advisors, ensuring a reasonable rent to hotel income ratio is respected. Rent to income criteria: should this ratio be overlooked when the rent is set, the owner may well find itself faced with a defaulting tenant. The tenant will no longer be able to pay the contractually fixed rent, on the basis of which the owner has determined its own financial obligations (bank loan or property finance lease) and potential profitability. Negotiations also focus on capex and how the cost of the renovation work, various expenses and any hotel upgrading [1] should be split between the parties. Consequently, the rental amount is not only determined on the basis of factors such as index-based evolutions (e.g. commercial rent index) and building depreciation rates, but also on the nature of the various points of sale (Rooms, F&B, Spa) and the proportion of rent applicable to each in accordance with forecast margins. It is also prudent for the owner to specify at the term sheet stage that the rent will be reduced from the date on which the lease is signed to the date on which the lease takes effect, since the period between the two may exceed two or three years, when allowing for the completion of construction or renovation work. Lastly, the owner may be required to grant a temporary reduction in the contractual rent over the first two or three years of the lease (in the form of a grace period) to help the hotel operator build up the hotel business. In the case of a major refurb of a hotel that has already been successfully operating for a while, the rent may be set purely on a variable basis, especially if the tenant is operating under an international franchise. However, the variable rent calculation method is not especially compatible with owners' financial obligations with regard to the fixed depreciation of their investments. The current practice is to insist on a Minimum Guaranteed Rent (MGR) aimed at securing the profitability of the investment, coupled with a variable rent component indexed to revenues. The tough negotiation surrounding guarantees in off-plan hotel lease agreements. The owner will require the tenant to provide guarantees concerning the regular payment of rent. Here, we refer to our article "The tough negotiation surrounding guarantees in off-plan hotel lease agreements".[2] In short, to guarantee the proper execution of the lease, the owner will request that the tenant provide a security deposit - often covering six months' rent or more - as well as a bank guarantee or a significant "first demand guarantee" to cover any default in the payment of rent and charges. These are standard guarantees in lease contracts. It is not uncommon for the parties to agree on a gradual decrease of guarantees during the term of the lease, even though the risk of default by the hotel tenant is generally greater in the first years of operation, since the tenant is building up its business with no real assurance as to the hotel's success. This round of negotiations also focuses on when the guarantees will be issued: the owner will seek their issuance on the date the lease agreement is signed, while the tenant's obligations covered by these guarantees will only take effect once the construction or renovation work has been completed and the hotel premises delivered. As specified in the article "The tough negotiation surrounding guarantees in off-plan hotel lease agreements", the so-called "good arrival" guarantee aims to cover the risk to the owner of a breach of contract by the future operator prior to the lease taking effect. Yet it is when the lease is signed and it is certain that the tenant will take over the hotel's operations that the owner incurs significant construction or renovation costs. The owner will thus be paid a "good arrival" guarantee if the tenant does not follow through with the lease once the construction or renovation work has been completed. The amount to be paid under this guarantee is all the more justified since it reflects the actual loss suffered by the owner, primarily due to having to find a new tenant, to not receiving any rent during this period and to having to carry out any readjustments and refurbishments requested by the new tenant. Owners are often seen to take a principled stance on requested guarantees, but pragmatic negotiations should prevail. As the subject is delicate, owners often postpone any discussion on this matter until the end of the negotiation process. The financial and practical issues concerning clauses covering FF&E and its financing FF&E refers to a hotel's furniture, fixtures and equipment, or the portable elements independent of the property itself that can be removed without damage. FF&E represents a significant expense in fitting out a hotel and is normally the responsibility of the tenant (to whom the hotel business belongs), whose job it is to furnish and equip the property. However, FF&E costs can be negotiated between the owner and tenant. The organisation and installation of FF&E by the tenant on completion of the construction or renovation work can be tricky, since the building has been finished but the lease cannot take effect until the premises have been fitted out and furnished. [3] Often, any finishing works falling under the responsibility of the owner (constructor) can only be carried out once the FF&E have been installed. Consequently, it is in the interest of both parties to specifically plan how the installation of FF&E will fit into the overall construction or renovation work. This necessitates the complex legal definition of the alternative or cumulative responsibilities of the various service providers that are working on the building site. To simplify this phase, some hotel owners prefer to take FF&E in hand from the outset, in consultation with the tenant. In this way, they are able to incorporate the installation of FF&E into the services that they have to provide, in order for the hotel lease to take effect as soon as the premises are completed. Of course, any services provided by the owner instead of and/ or for the tenant may be later reimbursed by the tenant, or incorporated into the rental amount. In any case, the owner will ensure that the lease contract clearly states that the renewal and maintenance of FF&E fall exclusively under the tenant's responsibility. The off-plan hotel lease contract is a long-term business arrangement that is based on a number of stages, including the execution, completion and acceptance of the construction or renovation work, as well as the delivery of the hotel premises and its authorisation to open to the public. The owner should thus provide in the appendix to the lease contract a schedule specifying each of these stages. It may also be worth attaching plans and providing for late penalties, so that each party involved in the transaction is kept accountable. That said, the future landlord (owner) should not be too unyielding when it comes to constructing the hotel. Updates should be incorporated into the schedule, as should the opportunity to apply for any amended building permits in consultation with the tenant (and/ or its franchisor). Owners calculate depreciation over the term of the lease fixed with tenants. The off-plan lease is concluded on the date the contract is signed or on the date, if applicable, the suspensive condition(s) is/ are fulfilled (e.g. obtaining a building permit free of all claims). It is difficult to predict with certainty how long the construction or renovation work will take, and consequently, the date on which the lease will take effect. The duration of the work can only be estimated in a lease contract, with (if applicable) clauses covering late penalty payments if the hotel premises are not delivered within the contractual timeframe agreed by the parties. Given this, when reference is made to the "term" of the lease, this means, in fact, the duration of the lease that kicks off upon completion of the construction or renovation work. Pursuant to Article L.145-4 of the French Commercial Code, the term of a commercial lease may not be less than nine years, and parties may also freely agree to a term that exceeds nine years. Since a hotel is considered a single-purpose building, the exceptions provided for by the Pinel Law in this respect are applicable, i.e. it is possible to sign a fixed-term lease, with no option for the tenant to terminate the contract at the end of each three-year period. Conversely, no legislative text governs the term of a civil lease. If a commercial or civil lease is granted for a term of more than 12 years, the lease must be registered with the French Land Registry. [4] The most sensitive negotiations surrounding the term of the lease are those focusing on when the lease should start. Owners consider it should take effect as soon as the construction or renovation work is finished and the regulatory building handover procedures are completed. However, a hotel is not like other commercial businesses. As a public access building [5] of a specific type, a hotel cannot begin operating until the tenant has obtained the necessary authorisation to open from the authorities. This authorisation is issued on the advice of the Safety Commission, who will visit the property when the work has been completed to ensure compliance with all legal and administrative requirements, especially with regard to fire safety and disabled access. Since the owner is required to deliver premises to the tenant that comply with the use for which they are intended, the tenant will seek to postpone the date the lease takes effect until official permission to open is granted, as this alone establishes whether the building can be used for a hotel operation. However, the Safety Commission may refuse to deliver this authorisation, either because the work carried out under the responsibility of the owner fails to comply with regulatory standards, or because the building fit-out work carried out by the tenant is unsatisfactory. In addition, the hotel operator is the only party that has the right to apply for authorisation to open the building to the public, and it can only do so if it is already leasing the premises. With regard to the lease start date, the parties should therefore seek to reconcile their conflicting interests: The owner - who has completed the work under its responsibility - wants the lease to take effect immediately, in order to receive rent as quickly as possible. The tenant - who does not want to be subject to the obligations of the lease - seeks to postpone the lease start date until such time it can begin operating (when official permission to open has been granted). These discussions are often time-consuming, and the lease start date is one of the toughest points to negotiate between owners, tenants and their advisors. The obligations and responsibilities of each party with regard to this particularly sensitive issue must be carefully discussed and set out when drafting the off-plan lease agreement. This article does not aim to provide an exhaustive discussion on the subject of off-plan hotel leases, as these agreements may differ greatly, depending on the context, the legal and financial arrangements being considered (property finance lease, lease-management agreement, management contract, etc.) and the type or category of hotel. Lastly, it is important not to lose sight of other contractual issues that may appear less important, but are nonetheless challenging to negotiate. These issues - which may be specific to hotels, related to technical issues (e.g. guestroom surface area tolerance) or generally applicable to commercial leases (e.g. allocation of expenses and works, regulatory compliance) - can have significant repercussions, given the long term nature of the majority of lease agreements. EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2021 Potential Moves To Restore Sanity in U.S.-China Relations Feb. 23 , 2021 (EIRNS)Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi gave the keynote speech Monday at the Lanting Forum, focussed entirely on U.S.-China relations. Wang addressed the urgency for a reactivation of dialogue between the worlds two largest economies after the disastrous breakdown in relations under President Trumps anti-China cabinet members Pompeo, Wray, Navarro, and others. The Global Times coverage of the event took note that President Joe Biden did not agree with allies at the G7 summit and Munich Security Conference on confronting China together. This must be surprising to most Americans, since the Western press only reported that Biden had reiterated the common complaints about both China and Russia and called for the allies to work together in confronting them. However, what went unreported from Bidens speech in the Western press was the following: It is not about pitting East against West. Its not about, we want a conflict. We want a future where all nations are able to freely determine their own path without a threat of violence or coercion. We cannot and must not return to the reflexive opposition and rigid blocs of the Cold War. Will Biden be able to implement such a retreat from the British imperial divide and conquer policies driven by British intelligence and their assets in the U.S. intelligence community, the media, and the Congress? A much stronger President, Donald Trump, who was elected on his promise to be friends with Russia and China, and to end the endless wars, was thoroughly stymied in that effort by the overwhelming power of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. Indeed, we stand at the brink of global nuclear war due to this McCarthyite madness. But the fact that Biden made such a sane statement about superpower relations must be taken seriously, as Chinas leadership has done, while we organize the required support among the population to bring that result about. The Global Times also took note that the Biden Administration has taken several steps to reverse the Pompeo attacks on China and Chinas sovereign interests, which change has also been ignored by the established media, as we expand in this Alert. The most critical issue standing in the way of such an opening to global cooperation among the worlds nations, to address the multi-pronged crisis of civilization, is that Joe Biden, and his entire team of controllers, have vigorously endorsed the genocidal Green New Deal, a policy to force governments to relinquish their sovereignty over their economies to the international banking establishment i.e., to the British Empire itself. As thoroughly documented in the EIR Special Report, The Great Leap Backward: LaRouche Exposes the Green New Deal, the central banks and the private mega-banks and non-banks are taking power over sovereign economies by determining which firms shall be allowed to attain credit and which shall not, based not on the potential productivity and profitability of a firms intention, but rather on the carbon emitted in the process, based on the fraudulent pseudo-science of anthropogenic climate change. Biden is not about to give up on this genocidal scheme, but the political crisis in the United States has reached such a point that the traditional institutions, including both political parties, are crumbling, just as the Western financial bubble has reached its breaking point. People of all political and social strata, of all races and nationalities, are now confronting the intentional destruction of the idea of progress itself, both in the U.S. and in Europe, under the Great Reset dictates of the bankers cartel centered at the World Economic Forum, with Prince Charles as their public figure promoting Malthusian depopulation. There is an ugly irony posed by the self-destruction of scientific economies on Earth while three nations are arrived at Mars, holding the promise of mankinds potential to be citizens of the Solar System, and even of the galaxy. One cannot get to Mars with windmills. One cannot even sustain the current world population with windmills. The Chicken Littles of the Green New Deal must look at Texas to see what their fantasies will bring to all of America and to the world. On Saturday, Feb. 27, the Schiller Institute will sponsor its second roundtable forum, on the danger of the anti-China and anti-Russia hysteria leading to war, and the equally deadly impact of the Green New Deal. Register and mobilize your friends and neighbors to attend, Winter Storm Smashes Green New Deal UtopiaGreat Power Cooperation Instead of War. A daughter of an excommunicated Mennonite farmer has alleged in her new memoir that her father was an 'abuser' who terrorized his wife and six children after he was shunned from their religious community in Central Pennsylvania. In her new book, From Plain to Plane: My Mennonite Childhood, a National Scandal, and an Unconventional Soar to Freedom, Patty Bear, 57, details how her father, Robert L. Bear, turned to violence after he was excommunicated from the Reformed Mennonite Church for questioning its leaders in 1972. 'My father was a domestic terrorist,' Patty told the New York Post. 'He took advantage because he knew we could not defend ourselves and would turn the other cheek.' Story: Patty Bear, 57, has opened up about her upbringing in her new memoir 'From Plain to Plane: My Mennonite Childhood, a National Scandal, and an Unconventional Soar to Freedom' Scandal: Patty's father Robert L. Beard (pictured) was excommunicated from the Reformed Mennonite Church in 1972 and was shunned by its members, including his wife Grace Reformed Mennonites share a theology related to the Amish. Their teachings are based on literal interpretations of the New Testament in the Bible. They dress in conservative, plain clothing and practice nonresistance. They won't sue in court, fight in a war, or practice self-defense. Big release: Patty's new memoir detailing her father's war with the church was published on Tuesday 'Reformed Mennonites are known as the Plain People of Pennsylvania, because of how [they] dress and live,' Patty wrote in her book. 'Simply, humbly, separate.' The author grew up on a 400-acre farm in Cumberland County with her parents and five siblings believing she would follow in her mother Grace's footsteps. Patty was just eight years old when her father was excommunicated from the church and formally shunned by its 70 or so members, including his wife, who sided with the ministers. In her book, she alleged her mother tried to observe the rules of excommunication while her father demanded conjugal rights as her husband, making their marriage an impossible one to endure. Even though her father had moved out of their house and into a trailer on their property, he would show up unannounced. Patty claimed he would chase her mother around the kitchen and tackle her, focusing his rage towards the church on her. She recalled one time how he burst into the bathroom to scream at her mother while she was bathing, and she ended up running out of the door naked. Looking back: Patty (pictured as a child) was only eight years old when her father was excommunicated. She alleged he would abuse his wife and torment his children Community: Patty's mom Grace is pictured walking behind Reformed Mennonite Bishop Paul Fehrman and his wife with her head down Allegations: In 1979, Robert abducted Grace from a farmer's market and admitted to the crime, but he was still acquitted, even after his wife accused him of raping her Patty said her father never physically abused her or her siblings, but she wrote in her book that he would enlist different kinds of torment. He would allegedly punish them by withholding money and shutting off the heat and electricity in their home in the winter as he waged a public war with the church. 'He regarded us as his property and assumed he held a "claim" on Mother similar to owning an animal,' she told The Post. 'He would shout at the ministers: "Give me back my heifer!"' Robert's battles with the Reformed Mennonite Church were highly publicized, and he was portrayed sympathetically in the media as a man who just wanted to see his wife and children. In a 1973 article published by the New York Times, the farmer was described as 'the model of rawboned American Gothic' and 'oddly cast as a heretic.' Patty recalled how Mennonite leaders would say Gale's decision to shun her husband was 'her own free will,' but they never clarified that she also would have faced excommunication if she did not. Moving on: Patty (pictured with her mother) chose not to officially join the Reformed Mennonite Church when she turned 18 Find her passion: Patty turned her back on her religion and attended the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado New woman: Patty is pictured in her high school graduation photo in 1982 (left) and in her graduation photo from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1986 (right) Gale, herself, never spoke to the press or commented on her husband's claims, even when a then-nine-year-old Patty begged her to share her side of the story. Patty said her mom told her that 'Jesus commands us to turn the other cheek.' The family ended up fleeing the farm, but they spent the next decade afraid of Robert, who allegedly broke into their new home with a sledgehammer and would threaten to kill them. Patty said he'd even go as far as kidnapping his wife and kids. In 1979, Robert was arrested for forcing Gale into his tuck at a farmer's market and holding her captive for nearly an hour. He represented himself at his trial and claimed he had abducted his wife with the goal of getting arrested in order to publicize his dispute with the Reformed Mennonite Church, according to the Washington Post. In the publication's 1979 article about the trial, Robert was described as bearing 'an uncanny resemblance to the late actor Gary Cooper.' Successful: Patty (pictured at Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi) went on to become a Gulf War pilot and later a United Airlines captain Act of love: Patty had her late mother's permission when she started writing her memoir The jury refused to convict him of the crimes Robert openly admitted to committing, even after Gale took the stand and accused him of raping her, and was acquitted. 'Not that they do now, but this happened when people didnt understand the dynamics of domestic violence,' Patty told the New York Post. 'But I despaired the failure of anyone to see the truth.' When the publication reached out to Robert, he denied the domestic abuse and rape allegations, saying the intercourse had with his wife was consensual. Grudge: Robert, 97, continues to wage war with the Reformed Mennonite Church and was arrested for vandalism in 2020 Patty explained that her family's experience made her question everything she knew about the faith she was born into. She didn't want to be subservient and treated the way other women in the community were. When it was time for her to formally join the Mennonite church as an adult, she opted to separate herself from the community. Instead, she attended the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Patty went on to become a Gulf War pilot and later a United Airlines captain. The mother of two, whose children are now adults, was laid off from United Airlines in the fall of 2020 and is no longer flying, the New York Post reported. Her father, however, has never let go of his grudge against the Reformed Mennonite Church and continues his war against the religious sect nearly 50 years after his excommunication. In 2017, the then-87-year-old was jailed for vandalizing a church. Three years later, he was arrested again for disorderly conduct after stapling his manifestos to a church. Patty, who said she had her late mother's permission to write her memoir, doesn't have any plans to forgive her father. 'He hasnt asked for it and he doesnt seem to feel he needs it,' she wrote in the book. 'Allowing myself to be angry is one of the more healing things I have experienced.' While the pandemic-induced downturn has eased stratospheric rents in San Francisco and other parts of the Bay Area, it has only exacerbated the underlying cause of unaffordable housing: a chronic shortage of homes and apartments. State statistics show 2020 marked yet another horrible year for housing construction in California, suggesting any immediate relief from the crisis will be fleeting at best. The continuing slump comes at a time of dramatically diminished attempts to address the shortage in the Legislature, which has struggled since 2017 to pass bills to boost the housing supply. Perhaps the best hope for turning around the states historical hostility to housing can be found in the most unlikely of places: the cities that have been hotbeds of housing obstruction. Since Gov. Gavin Newsom took office aiming to boost housing production to 500,000 units a year, construction has headed in the opposite direction. Just over 100,000 new housing units were authorized in 2020, according to a state Department of Finance report released last week, a drop of nearly 9% from 2019, which saw a decline of nearly 4% from the year before. Worse, last years decrease was driven by a precipitous 18.5% fall in new multifamily housing, the kind that is most likely to make a dent in the shortage and provide affordable housing near transit and jobs. Single-family housing, meanwhile, grew slightly even as prices put it further out of reach for most. While the number of Californians working shrank by 1.5 million during the year, the median single-family home price grew by more than 11% to nearly $660,000. While the trend is remarkably contrary to Newsoms goals, its not surprising given a series of implosions of housing legislation in Sacramento. Last years legislating began with the Senate killing a sweeping housing production bill by Sen. Scott Wiener, SB50, which would have ended single-family zoning statewide and allowed multifamily development near transit and job centers in the most populous counties. The session ended with a moderated housing package mired in squabbling between the Senate and Assembly. Last week, reflecting the shift toward more incremental measures, Wiener introduced a bill to limit local governments power to cap square footage in multifamily zones, a means of limiting apartment construction. Wiener, D-San Francisco, also has reintroduced a bill that would allow cities to streamline zoning for small multifamily developments, while state Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, has revived a proposal to allow up to two duplexes on most lots zoned for single-family homes. As the Legislature scales back its efforts to overcome local barriers to housing, a few cities are showing signs of acknowledging the need at long last. The Berkeley City Council, for example, was expected to consider a resolution by Vice Mayor Lori Droste on Tuesday night declaring its intent to eliminate single-family zoning by the end of next year. Its evidence of a surprising and heartening pro-housing shift for a city that, according to the resolution, invented single-family zoning a century ago to keep certain neighborhoods white, wealthy and free of what a former city attorney called the less desirable ... floating renter class. Sacramento, beset by Bay Area refugees, is considering a similar proposal. In San Francisco, meanwhile, Supervisor Rafael Mandelmans more modest proposal to roll back single-family zoning earned immediate blowback from his colleagues. Berkeley may open its borders to the less desirable, but dont count on San Francisco to join the enlightenment. This commentary is from The Chronicles editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters. Congress leader Vadra on Tuesday attacked the BJP-led government over the new farm laws, saying they had been "imposed" and the farmers will break the "arrogance" of the government. Addressing a 'Kisan mahapanchayat' in Mathura here, she said it is the duty of the government and the Prime Minister to listen to farmers and make an effort to resolve their issues. She said Mathura breaks arrogance of people. "Today BJP government is imposing such laws on farmers in its arrogance which will not benefit them. The message from Kisan mahapanchayat in Mathura is clear that the farmers will rest after breaking the arrogance of this government," she said. "It is duty of government and Prime Minister to listen to them and make an effort to resolve their issues. Using derogatory terms for farmers is a sin. Those who form government have the duty to listen to them," she added. said when a leader becomes arrogant, his policies also turn against welfare of people. "Just as Lord Krishna had deflated the ego of Lord Indra (the God of rain), the Prime Minister's ego will also be broken by him (Lord Krishna),'' she said. She also cited a line from a poem by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar. ''Jab naash manushya par chata hai, pahle vivek mar jata hai," she said, adding that "the government has lost its wisdom". The Congress leader also accused the government of selling public assets. ''Save the Govardhan Parvat, otherwise, the government will sell it also,'' she said sarcastically. The Congress leader alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has failed to fulfil the promises made to the people. (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 British Army could lose one third of its Challenger 2 main battle tanks as part of the government's ongoing Strategic Defence Review. The tanks - which were designed to counter the threat of a Cold War Soviet Union - were threatened with being retired to save costs. However, it is understood that officials are considering upgrading 150 of the 65-tonne weapon systems to prepare them for the next generation of warfare. The Government is planning to scrap 77 Challenger 2 main battle tanks, pictured, to pay for the upgrade of 150 others, it has emerged The Army is also considering scrapping its fleet of Warrior Armoured Fighting Vehicles ahead of schedule to replace them with the new Boxer APC The remaining Challenger 2 tanks will be upgraded with a new turret, barrel and technology According to The Times, the Ministry of Defence held meetings with ministers on Monday ahead of the publication of the strategic defence review, with sources claiming 'pretty painful' decisions will be made. Already, it is feared that army will lose 10,000 personnel over the next decade as part of the economy drive. The new defence review is expected to be published next month. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that the military is receiving more than 16bn in extra funding, though each branch of the military is making its case to avoid the worst of any downsizing. Some 1.2bn is being budgeted for the upgrading of the Challenger 2 to a Challenger 3 model, with each of the surviving tanks receiving a new turret and barrel. One defence source claimed the upgrade will turn 'this relic from the Gulf war... into something that can fight the next war'. The Government is planning to replace its aging fleet of Warriors with the Boxer, pictured General Sir Richard Barrons said: 'The army recognises they are in the foothills of a profound transformation. This will be an evolution from their way of working to a manned, unmanned and autonomous mix. The army is not in good shape and has been told to get smaller, all of this could make sense so long as we see the rest of the plan. Without that, this is just financially driven stupidity.' 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 The PM committed 16.5bn extra towards defence spending over the next four years. He told MPs that the UK will once again become Europe's leading naval power, while the RAF will also receive new high tech equipment. He also committed to a 'space command'. The PM claimed: 'The international situation is now more perilous and intensely competitive than at any time since the Cold War. 'Everything we do in this country every job, every business, even how we shop and what we eat depends on a basic minimum of global security. 'Our people are sustained by a web of lifelines, oxygen pipes that must be kept open open shipping lanes, a functioning internet, safe air corridors, reliable undersea cables, and tranquillity in distant straits.' Mr Johnson said the announcements mark the end of an 'era of retreat' and could help create 10,000 jobs a year. In a speech to the Policy Exchange think tank, General Sir Nick Carter, Chief of the Defence staff warned about the threat posed by 'authoritarian rivals' such as Russia and China. Gen Carter said the need to effectively integrate forces across land, sea, air, space and cyber meant some older capabilities would have to be discarded a move that would entail some risk. He said: 'This means that some industrial age capabilities will increasingly have to meet their sunset to create the space that is needed for sunrise. The trick is how you find a path through the night. 'We know this will require us to embrace combinations of information-centric technologies but predicting these combinations will be challenging. 'We will have to take risk, accept some failure and place the emphasis on experimentation.' Land Minister Byeon Chang-heum / Yonhap The land ministry said Wednesday it has selected new sites for its housing development project aimed at increasing supplies in urban areas and curbing housing prices. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said it has selected a vast area spanning 1,271 square meters in Gwangmyeong and Siheung in Gyeonggi Province as the site for approximately 70,000 new homes. The two satellite cities are located about 12 kilometers southeast of Yeouido, a major business district in eastern Seoul. About 18,000 units will be built in Busan, about 450 kilometers southeast of Seoul, and 13,000 units are planned in Gwangju, about 330 kilometers south of the capital, the ministry said. For the new site in the wider Seoul area, the ministry said it will establish an extensive train system accessible to the capital's center within 20 minutes and expand the highway infrastructure to reduce traffic congestion. "The government will develop transportation, infrastructure and self-sufficient functions to absorb part of demand for housing and jobs in city centers," the ministry said in a statement. Additional sites for 150,000 units will be unveiled in April after consultations with the provincial governments, the ministry said. The new sites are part of the government's broader plan to increase the number of new homes by up to 836,000 nationwide in the next four years. The supply plan includes 323,000 new units in Seoul, the hot spot of the real estate frenzy, and 293,000 in the surrounding Gyeonggi Province by 2025. Together with housing plans announced last year, the number of new units in the greater Seoul area, home to nearly half of the nation's 52 million population, will rise to over 2 million, the largest supply plan under the Moon Jae-in administration. The ministry has said the supply plan is aimed at providing affordable housing in big cities, which are convenient to live in thanks to their proximity to jobs, and quelling concerns among potential first-time buyers. The shift toward increased supply comes as soaring housing prices have shown no signs of a letup despite the government's efforts to stabilize the real estate market. (Yonhap) Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. OMAHA, Neb. and CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Buildertrend, the leading provider of cloud-based construction management software for homebuilders, remodelers and specialty contractors, today announced the acquisition of CoConstruct, a complementary provider of construction project management software for the residential construction industry. Funding for the acquisition is provided by a growth investment in Buildertrend by Bain Capital Tech Opportunities and HGGC. Existing CoConstruct investor Serent Capital is reinvesting in the combined company. Buildertrend Co-Founder and CEO Dan Houghton will lead the combined company alongside Co-Founders Steve Dugger and Jeff Dugger. CoConstruct Founder Donny Wyatt will serve as an advisor to lead integration efforts. CoConstruct Logo This transaction makes Buildertrend the largest construction management software platform dedicated to empowering independent and custom homebuilders, contractors and remodelers with the tools to better coordinate projects, control finances and communicate with clients and crews. The integrated, SaaS-enabled platform offers flexible project management, bookkeeping, supplies procurement, customer engagement and payments services to alleviate the most common pain points that lead to costly, uncoordinated projects and dissatisfied clients. The combined business served 23,000 clients, over 1.1 million users and facilitated over $200 billion in annual construction project value in 2020. "Our industry is one of the fastest growing in the U.S., yet it lags in digital innovation and relies on antiquated project management systems to overcome a complex value chain and fragmented contractor ecosystem," said Houghton. "This acquisition, together with continued support from our best-in-class set of enterprise software investors, positions Buildertrend to significantly expand our market share and continue delivering innovative, value-added solutions that improve client success and efficiency." CoConstruct was founded in 2005 in Charlottesville, Virginia with a mission to bring residential construction project management into the 21st century. The Company has been recognized as Constructech's #1 Software Platform for Construction Collaboration for over ten years in a row, reflecting its best-in-breed product pipeline that meets the growing demands of residential construction managers. Buildertrend clients will also realize cost savings and efficiencies with the integration of CoConstruct's October 2020 acquisition of CBUSA, the nation's largest homebuilder group purchasing organization. "It's rare to see two market-leading providers share a full-breadth of complementary operations and product capabilities, but each with their own unique ways of addressing customer challenges," said Wyatt. "We're thrilled to bring together our complementary approaches and build an even stronger platform with the combined teams' scale and shared culture of innovation." "Buildertrend and CoConstruct are award-winning companies that demonstrate to homebuilders, remodelers and contractors on a daily basis there is an alternative to the chaos of delayed and overbudget projects," said Phil Meicler, a Managing Director at Bain Capital Tech Opportunities. "We're proud to partner with Serent and HGGC to back the combination of these two companies, who are poised to disrupt the residential construction market," added Scott Kirk, a Partner at Bain Capital Tech Opportunities. Bain Capital has provided support and resources for the combination of a number of its portfolio companies with other leading market players, including A Cloud Guru with Linux Academy, Zelis with RedCard, Navicure with ZirMed to form Waystar, and HST with Casetabs. "We've had the pleasure of watching CoConstruct leverage an innate knowledge of the residential construction project lifecycle to build one of the most trusted platforms in the industry. We can't wait to now partner with Buildertrend to facilitate its next stage of growth," said Kevin Frick, a Partner at Serent Capital. Spurrier Capital Partners served as the exclusive financial advisor to Buildertrend. Cooley LLP served as legal advisor to Buildertrend. PricewaterhouseCoopers and Kirkland & Ellis LLP served as financial and legal advisors, respectively, to both Bain Capital and HGGC. Choate, Hall & Stewart and Polsinelli served as legal advisors to Serent Capital and CoConstruct. About Buildertrend Buildertrend is the #1 cloud-based construction management software used by homebuilders, remodelers and specialty contractors. The award-winning tool helps construction professionals complete more projects while reducing delays, eliminating communication errors and increasing customer satisfaction. Since 2006, more than one million users across more than 100 countries have chosen Buildertrend as their preferred platform for real-time collaboration throughout each stage of the construction process. To learn more about Buildertrend, visit buildertrend.com and @buildertrend. About CoConstruct CoConstruct is the highest rated construction project management software for home builders and remodelers, as ranked by Gartner's SoftwareAdvice.com, and has landed on the Inc. 5000 list for seven years running. The company's cloud-based construction estimating and project management tools help homebuilders and remodelers coordinate their projects, communicate better with clients & crews, and control the financials of their jobs. For more information on CoConstruct, visit www.coconstruct.com About Bain Capital Tech Opportunities Bain Capital Tech Opportunities (https://www.baincapitaltechopportunities.com/) aims to help growing technology companies reach their full potential. We focus on companies in large, growing end markets with innovative or disruptive technology where we believe we can support transformational growth. Our dedicated, tenured team has deep experience supporting growing technology businessesbringing together differentiated backgrounds in private and public equity investing as well as technology operating roles. We invest behind fundamental long-term tailwinds as technology penetrates across industries, creating a large and growing number of investment opportunities. Bain Capital Tech Opportunities focuses on five priority sub-verticals: Application Software, Infrastructure & Security, Fintech & Payments, Healthcare IT and Internet & Digital Media. About HGGC HGGC is a leading middle-market private equity firm with over $5.4 billion in cumulative capital commitments. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., HGGC is distinguished by its Advantaged Investing approach that enables the firm to source and acquire scalable businesses through partnerships with management teams, founders and sponsors who reinvest alongside HGGC, creating a strong alignment of interests. Since its inception in 2007, HGGC has completed more than 200 platform investments, add-on acquisitions, recapitalizations and liquidity events with an aggregate transaction value of over $28 billion. More information, including a complete list of current and former portfolio companies, is available at hggc.com. About Serent Capital Serent Capital invests in growing businesses that have developed compelling solutions that address their customers' needs. As those businesses grow and evolve, the opportunities and challenges that they face change with them. At Serent Capital, principals have firsthand experience capturing those opportunities and navigating these difficulties through their experiences as CEOs, strategic advisors, and board members to successful growing businesses. By bringing its expertise and capital to bear, Serent seeks to help growing businesses thrive. For more information on Serent Capital, visit www.serentcapital.com. SOURCE Buildertrend Related Links https://buildertrend.com WASHINGTON - Capitol security has always been partly about appearances, something that became clear again during Tuesday's Senate hearing on the lessons learned from the Jan. 6 riot as Congress certified the 2020 presidential election results. Even before all the details of that riot have come to light, a bipartisan group of lawmakers expressed alarm about the continued use of National Guard troops and barbed-wire fencing on the nearly 60-acre campus, warning against turning the nation's most important symbol of democracy into a military encampment. This push and pull - actual safety versus the importance of symbolic freedom - came to a head at Tuesday's hearing. Testimony showed that in the days leading to the attack, some officials wondered whether the threat was serious enough to warrant a stronger military presence on the intentionally open Capitol grounds. As the riot unfolded that afternoon, Pentagon officials expressed concern about the appearance of "boots on the ground." Then came the worst ransacking of the Capitol since the British troops attacked the building in 1814. A Capitol police officer and four others died because of the violence. Seven weeks later, many lawmakers are concerned about the optics of the ongoing military presence without a specific, clear threat of another attack. "No one has any idea why we have the National Guard here," Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said toward the end of Tuesday's hearing. Scott professed that he was "flabbergasted" that 5,000 Guard troops were still serving on a rotation protecting the Capitol. Other senators warned that this beacon of the free world must remain open to the public. "How do we allow the American people to go in the Rotunda, to tour the Capitol, to picnic on the grounds, to play with their kids?" Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, asked the security experts. "It seems to me that going forward, that's really one of the challenges. We want security, but we don't - I would hate to see the U.S. Capitol turned into a fortress." It was left to Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., chair of the Rules Committee, which co-hosted the hearing, to play the role of hardened realist, telling her colleagues that security measures had to change after the insurrection exposed so many weaknesses. "No, it does not have to be barbed wire, and of course, this is a public building and you want the school groups and you want the veterans and we want people to be able to visit here. But that doesn't mean that we don't make some smart security changes," she said. The pandemic has temporarily resolved those issues because the general public has been barred from the Capitol since March, when it became impossible to allow 10,000 to 30,000 visitors per day into the building. But congressional officials have refused to speculate about what conditions must be met before the general public will be allowed back to watch the House and Senate proceedings and to roam the office buildings to visit their members of Congress. The last great reckoning with congressional security came after the 2001 terrorist attacks. That prompted the push to turn the original proposals for the Capitol Visitors Center into a massive security facility. At more than 675,000 square feet, the three-level structure opened in 2008 and now houses the Capitol Police, two secure bunkers for intelligence briefings and other rooms that were designed to be evacuation sites for Congress in the event of an attack. Proposals then to set up security fencing fell by the wayside and instead led to the placement of bollards, steel posts drilled deep into the ground. They stand guard around the Congressional campus and federal buildings across Washington. But Jan. 6 showed the limitations of fighting the last war. Those protective measures were designed to deal with more traditional forms of terror, such as preventing suicide car bombers from driving onto the grounds or into federal buildings. As Steven Sund, the former Capitol Police chief, testified Tuesday, his force has trained for attacks like the 2008 Mumbai incident when 10 terrorists carried out shootings and bombings. No one prepared for how to handle an invading force of hundreds or thousands of fellow Americans trying to break into the Capitol and attack lawmakers. Even the supposedly mighty Capitol Visitors Center - with its open connection to the Capitol building through elevators and escalators - was breached Jan. 6. As this month's impeachment trial testimony showed, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and his security team first went into the visitors center, only to race away in the other direction when they came within sight of rioters. Now experts including Sund say the campus needs to buffer itself with secure windows and doors, and some form of fencing several blocks out. "There are options for maintaining an open environment, an open-campus type of environment, while putting some substantial physical security measures in place, both for the building, the skin of the building, as well as farther out," Sund told senators Tuesday. "You know, time and distance is our best friend. And the most important thing is to provide some kind of protection farther out." Those security measures eventually will run into a fight from local officials with the District of Columbia government, who are already bristling at the militarized setup around the Capitol. Since Jan. 6, troops have closed two major thoroughfares, Independence and Constitution avenues, for several blocks around the House and Senate, the sort of move that would radically alter the city's traffic grid if the barriers become permanent. "There needs to be a reimagining of the security posture there. Something certainly should be there, but I'm not exactly sure if the answer to that is razor wire and the deployment that we currently see," acting D.C. police chief Robert Contee testified Tuesday. Maybe the barbed wire will come down soon, but for now the National Guard is set to be on hand at least through mid-March, and, in her closing remarks, Klobuchar tried to brace her colleagues for a long period of tighter security measures. "We know after 9/11, the National Guard held for quite a while," she said. But that left many senators worried about the optics, unable to answer what they thought was a straightforward question. "How do we protect the Capitol from either an angry mob or probably more likely one or two or three malignant actors," King asked, "without turning it into a fortress?" Pakistan on Wednesday announced a $50 million Line of Credit (LoC) for Sri Lanka to help it step up its defence capabilities just days after India offered similar concessional loan facilities for two other Indian Ocean nations, Mauritius and Maldives. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan announced the new defence Line of Credit of $50 million for Sri Lanka, as he concluded his two-day visit to the island nation. A joint statement issued after Khans meetings with Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa noted that both sides had agreed to expand cooperation in the security sector. Pakistans move to step up defence cooperation with Sri Lanka comes at a time when India is trying to counter Chinas bid to spread its geopolitical tentacles in its maritime neighbourhood. New Delhi has been closely monitoring Islamabads bid to reach out to Colombo, as Khan apparently embarked on the visit at the behest of Pakistans iron-brother China. The 10-month-long military stand-off between the Indian Army and the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh prompted India to renew its focus on projecting itself as a net security provider for the Indian Ocean region. With External Affairs Minister S Jaishankars visit to Male and Port Louis from Saturday to Wednesday, India announced new credit lines of $50 million and $100 million for Maldives and Mauritius respectively to help them boost defence capabilities. New Delhi also signed an agreement with the Maldivian Government to develop, support and maintain a harbour at Uthuru Thila Falhu naval base in the island nation. India is also pursuing similar projects in Agalega Island of Mauritius and in Assumption Island in Seychelles, notwithstanding the Chinese Governments bid to scuttle them. Khan on Wednesday also called upon Sri Lanka to take advantage of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) for trade connectivity to Central Asia. Beijing has pledged over $70 billion to invest in the CPEC, which is proposed to link China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region and the port city of Gwadar in southern Pakistan. It is one of the flagship projects of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the cross-continental connectivity project launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping a few years back. New Delhi has been opposing the CPEC, because it passes through Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) areas, which India claims to be a part of its own territory and accuses Pakistan of illegal occupying. India itself was preparing to offer Sri Lanka a $50 million defence Line of Credit last year. But the talks between the two nations over the proposed soft concessional loan came under a shadow after the Sri Lankan Government of late scrapped a tripartite deal it had inked with New Delhi and Tokyo in 2019 to let India and Japan develop and run the East Container Terminal of the Colombo Port. New Delhi suspects that Beijing nudged the government led by Gotabaya and Mahinda Rajapaksa to scrap the deal. For many decades, the European order of aviation has had three certainties: the UK boasts the highest number of flights; London is the best-connected city; and Heathrow is the busiest airport for passenger numbers. The coronavirus pandemic, and the response to it, has wrecked that reliable trinity. And with ministers apparently uninterested in the fate of what was previously the worlds best aviation market in terms of choice, competition, value and safety it may mark a permanent change. I base that assertion on some remarkable research carried out by Ralph Anker, editor of The Anker Report an aviation newsletter and former network planner at easyJet and Go. He analysed a database of passenger statistics for well over 400 airports from April to December 2020, and compared it with the same spell in 2019. Mr Ankers conclusion: there are two mighty European aviation powers, and neither is the UK. Both are countries that straddle two continents, extending deep into Asia but with their busiest hubs within Europe. Turkey is the clear leader, ahead of Russia though data from beyond Moscow and St Petersburg is unavailable. Spain, Italy and France fill the next three places. In sixth: the UK, though it is almost a tie with Germany. Drilling down to city level, the December data show Istanbul and Moscow are almost embarrassingly far ahead of London. The Russian capital has a clear lead, with no other city apart from Turkeys largest coming close. Zooming in to individual airports provides an even more stark revelation of how devastating coronavirus has been to western European aviation. Even though Istanbuls shiny new airport has lost 68 per cent of its traffic, that is still a far better performance than most competitors. IST is top of the new European league. The Muscovite duo of Domodedovo and Sheremetyevo are effectively tied for second place. The highest of the former big four hub airports in western Europe is Amsterdam, in fourth. Then Istanbul pops up again, in the shape of Sabiha Gokcen (or SAW), across the Bosphorus on the Asian side of the water. London Heathrow takes sixth place, marginally ahead of Paris CDG, and Moscow pops up for a third time in the top 10 with Vnukovo in eighth place. Madrid, which Iberias parent IAG would like to feature as a European giant, is next. Frankfurt just scrapes in to complete the top 10. The second airport serving the French capital, Orly, makes 11th, with the airport serving Russias second city, St Petersburg, just behind it. Barcelona and Lisbon fight it out for the lucky 13th spot. Completing the top XV, the unfamiliar sight of Sochi: Russias Black Sea gem. Leading lights: Europes most successful airports in December 2020 (Ralph Anker) Northwest Europe has experienced a calamity in aviation business terms. The British government seems determined to ensure that continues for months to come. Boris Johnsons celebrated roadmap out of lockdown includes intricate details of what a spa may offer (neither a saunas nor a steam room) but exactly no information about when and how meaningful domestic aviation may begin. And a minimum of 12 weeks will have elapsed between the prime ministers announcement and when any of us can travel for fun. The opportunities that travellers have lost are shocking but far worse is the damage caused to the professionals who put UK aviation at the top of the European tree and kept it there. Transport secretaries, in my experience, generally have brief and forgettable careers. Not Grant Shapps. He will go down in aviation history as the man who presided over the wholesale destruction of an industry: not merely setting up a no-fly policy lasting for months, but then urging prospective summer travellers not to book. But perhaps they will look more kindly upon him in Istanbul and Moscow. One correction officer is dead and a second is seriously injured after an alleged attack Sunday, Feb. 21, 2021, by a prison inmate, Indiana State Police said. The attack occurred at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City at around 2:40 p.m., the agency said in a news release. (Don Knight/The Herald-Bulletin via AP, File) (Don Knight/AP) Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. An inmate in New Jerseys only womens prison was hospitalized with a concussion Thursday after an altercation with officers, according to officials and medical records, just a month after she reported being one of several women beaten by staff. Rae Rollins, who is 25 and transgender, told her attorney that officers at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Hunterdon County pushed her into a wall and maced her last week. The states largest corrections union said Rollins was the aggressor. Four officers and a supervisor were attacked and had to be treated for minor injuries, according to William Sullivan, president of NJ PBA Local 105. In response to questions about the newest incident, prison spokeswoman Liz Velez wrote only that The Department cannot comment on an active investigation or medical care. Rollins account of being assaulted by officers in January was the first allegation published by NJ.com about that incident, based on messages shed sent family and an interview with her mother, but her name had not previously been public. The allegations triggered a growing criminal probe and calls for the head of the prison system to resign. During a phone interview the day before her hospitalization, Rollins told NJ Advance Media she was comfortable with her name being used in the interest of a full accounting of what happened last month, and she gave previously unreported details about her experience. At least six women have said they were brutally attacked by staff during a series of cell extractions, including one who said she was sexually assaulted. Charges against a fourth officer were announced Tuesday and the governor has appointed an independent investigator all while state officials continue to negotiate reforms with the federal government in the wake of a U.S. Department of Justice report that found evidence of rampant sexual abuse behind bars. The growing scandal led a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the state Assembly to endorse impeaching Corrections Commissioner Marcus Hicks, and the state Senate voted overwhelmingly Friday for a resolution calling for Hicks to step down. Rollins said the January attack forced her to use a wheelchair to get around the facility, an account verified by other prisoners. On Feb. 18, she stood up from her chair during a disagreement with staff over who would help move her to another part of the prison, according to her lawyer, Oliver Barry. Officers later pushed her into a wall and used mace, he said. That same day she was admitted, treated and released from the Hunterdon Medical Center, according to Kathleen Seelig, a hospital spokeswoman. Seelig declined to give more details, citing patient privacy. But discharge paperwork obtained by NJ Advance Media shows that Rollins was diagnosed with a concussion, a hand contusion, elevated blood pressure, cervical strain and knee and wrist sprains. More details about the altercation are still not known. Barry said he planned to further investigate after meeting with Rollins on Tuesday, and he said she was still comfortable with her name being used. Youre lucky Rollins first entered the prison system on a robbery charge in June 2019, according to state records, and she said she was transferred to Edna in October. Her months at the womens prison have been tense, she told NJ Advance Media on Feb. 17. She was involved in a fight with another inmate in early January, according to records kept by the corrections union. Rollins said she was not seriously injured then. Rollins said officers had also gone into cells earlier in the year to remove some inmates shampoo and water bottles, which can be used to spray liquids at staff. The union has said officers have been hit with bodily fluids in recent weeks. Around midnight Jan. 11, officers in riot gear arrived on her hall, Rollins said. She believed it was for another routine search. Officers asked her to cuff up, she said, so she placed her hands behind her back and through the food port in her cell. After she was handcuffed, officers opened the door and she got on her knees facing away from them, she said. One officer then pushed her to the ground with a shield, and others began punching and kicking her, she said. Rollins said she was not fighting, but she heard at least one officer yell stop resisting. State officials have confirmed part of the incident was filmed, and Rollins said she believed the words stop resisting were an attempt to create an audio record that suggested she was fighting back. Rollins said she did try to get away after an officer wrapped his hands around her neck and squeezed, making her feel like she was going to black out. Officers also kicked her in the head about four times, she said. While cell extractions are common in some facilities, they rarely happen at the womens prison, according to Sullivan. During an interview earlier in the month, he said he hadnt reviewed any video or written testimony but said anything that went wrong may partially be due to officers lack of experience with extractions. Rollins echoed other inmates accounts that an associate administrator at the prison, Sean St. Paul, was present throughout. This is gonna happen every night until the officers feel comfortable, St. Paul allegedly said last month after the extractions, according to Rollins. Another inmate previously quoted St. Paul saying almost the exact same thing. Rollins said she asked St. Paul why he allowed the violent extractions. Youre lucky, St. Paul allegedly said. Did you know what happened to everybody else? St. Paul was suspended after the incident and has not responded to requests for comment, including a question Friday about the above quotes. Prison representatives have previously declined to comment on St. Pauls alleged role or provide more details about the incident, citing the ongoing investigations. Rollins said she was later diagnosed with nerve damage around her left knee, and is now undergoing physical therapy. An X-ray showed no broken bones but she now has persistent headaches and needs a wheelchair, Rollins said. She does have to walk on her own in the prisons recreation area, because wheelchairs are not allowed there, Rollins said. When asked what the atmosphere inside the prison has been like since the extractions, Rollins said she and other accusers were being filmed whenever they moved outside their cells. Its definitely more tense, the only difference is they feel like they cant do what they want at this moment because everythings under a microscope, she said the day before she was taken to the hospital. Theres pretty much nothin nobody can do at this point. NJ Advance Media staff writers Joe Atmonavage and S.P. Sullivan contributed to this report. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Blake Nelson can be reached at bnelson@njadvancemedia.com. Have a tip? Tell us at nj.com/tips. Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 3 mesi fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. The global adoption of gastric electric stimulators is projected to witness a surge in demand in 2019, representing a robust year-on-year growth of 6.6 percent , reach a valuation of approximately US $ 188.4 Million , during the same period. Persistence Market Research (PMR) has studied the global gastric electric stimulators market for a period of 8 years, 20182026, offering critical insights into demand-driving factors, shaping the adoption trajectory. The demand for gastric electric stimulators is likely to be driven by a host of pacesetters, including increasing minimally invasive procedures, rising reported cases of Gastroparesis, and favorable reimbursement schemes. Growing prevalence of Gastroparesisa condition characterized by severity of nausea and vomiting and composite quality-of-life (QOL)has been identified as the most critical demand generating factor, further making gastric electric stimulators the most preferred treatment alternative for such difficult-to-treat diseases. How About Looking Through The Sample Of Gastric Electric Stimulators Market Report? https://www.persistencemarketresearch.co/samples/25954 Company Profiles Medtronic Plc. IntraPace Inc. ReShape Lifesciences, Inc. Changzhou Ruishen Medical Equipment Co., Ltd Others. Enterra system, the most principal medical device used for treating Gastroparesis, globally, is approved by the FDA as a humanitarian use device, considering its applicability is treating or diagnosing a disease or condition affecting less than 4000 individuals a year in the United States. Moreover, the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG), although conditionally, recommends the use of gastric electric stimulators for patients with chronic, intractable nausea and vomiting due to Gastroparesis. The gastric electric stimulators, such as Enterra, is a battery-operated gastric neurostimulator, which is normally implanted under the skin in the lower abdomen region, Senior Analyst, PMR Considering the rareness of Gastroparesis combined with increasing prevalence of gastric-related conditions, investments in research and clinical studies have substantially increased in the recent years. Studies indicate that gastric electric stimulators have the ability to normalize symptoms, such as BMI, oral nutritional intake, and gastric emptying rates. Moreover, considered as an effective alternative to gastrectomy in patients with end-stage gastric dysfunction, demand for gastric electric stimulators is anticipated to increase 1.6x, through 2026. How About Step-By-Step Insights To Gastric Electric Stimulators Market? Look Through The Methodology Employed! https://www.persistencemarketresearch.co/methodology/25954 High-Frequency Gastric Electric Stimulators Gain Prominence According to the report, high-frequency gastric electric stimulators is gaining immense traction as one of the highly effective product type, versus low-frequency gastric electric stimulators. Apart from being less invasive and more patient-friendly in terms of insertion, high-frequency gastric electric stimulators are known to have a relatively longer battery life compared to low-frequency gastric electric stimulators. In addition, gastric electrical stimulation with high-frequency significantly improved the severity of nausea and vomiting combined with enhanced propagation velocity and slow wave amplitude. As per the report, high-frequency gastric electric stimulators with approximately 77 percent market share, is expected to ameliorate the treatment landscape for Gastroparetic patients. Although gastric electrical stimulation is the most viable treatment for chronic drug-refractory nausea and vomiting secondary to Gastroparesis of idiopathic or diabetic etiology, risks associated with Enterra Therapy remain exceptionally high, thereby limiting its adoption. Infection, bleeding, pain at the implant site, lead penetration, gastric and bowel perforation, and inflammation are some critical risks that often result in additional surgeries and unpleasant patient experience, Senior Analyst, PMR In the wheel of fortune analysis of various segments, PMR placed different segments including product type, end-user, indication, and region in various growth quadrants. While high frequency gastric electric stimulators is placed in the mature phase quadrant, low-frequency gastric electric stimulators are anticipated to showcase high CAGR, in the coming years. Since, the implantation of gastric electric stimulators requires precision, only hospitals having institutional review boards approval can use such stimulators on Gastroparetic patients. In terms of end-user, hospitals are projected to hold approximately 75 percent of the total market share. On the basis of indication, obesity, after Gastroparesis is expected to be the second most lucrative segment in the global gastric electric stimulators market during the forecast period. Want To Keep A Tab On The Latest Findings In The Gastric Electric Stimulators Market? Purchase Our Gastric Electric Stimulators Market Report Now! https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/checkout/25954 Regionally, North America retains its lead as the largest and most lucrative gastric electric stimulators market, with nearly 57 percent market share anticipated by the end of 2018. Growing investments in R&D activities, on-going innovations, and presence of key companies are some major factors creating attractive opportunities in the gastric electric stimulators market, across North America. The competitive landscape in the global gastric electric stimulators market is relatively consolidated, with key tier-1 players such as Medtronic Plc. contributing approximately 5o percent revenue share to the global gastric electric stimulators market, given their superior product offering and expansive regional presence. In terms of differentiation strategies, key companies are poised to enter into partnerships and collaborations to solidify their market presence. In addition, key companies are also strengthening their product portfolios by developing potential treatment options for gastrointestinal disorders. About Us: - The Washington State Supreme Court has ruled that an employer can be charged with a felony in connection with a workplace fatality. The recent decision clears the way for the King County Prosecutor to move forward with second-degree manslaughter charges against Phillip Numrich, owner of the now closed Alki Construction Co. in West Seattle. One of Numrichs employees, 36-year-old Harold Felton, was killed during a worksite trench collapse in 2016. Felton was working at a home in Seattle when the dirt walls of a seven-foot-deep trench he was in collapsed, burying him under more than six thousand pounds of mud and sand. Typically, the business faces a citation and fine when there are safety violations in connection with a workplace fatality, and not criminal action. There are times when a monetary penalty isnt enough, said Joel Sacks, Department of Labor & Industries director. An L&I investigation reportedly found shoring had been installed on only one side of the trench that collapsed, instead of on all four sides. There was also no ladder for entry or exit from the trench. Numrich reportedly told L&I investigators he knew his workers were digging in rain-soaked, type C loam-sandy, unstable soil, but it was the employees responsibility to know the dangers and determine when shore boards were needed. L&I cited and fined Alki Construction after finding a half-dozen safety violations. A trial date for Numrich is expected to be set in the coming weeks. Topics Commercial Lines Business Insurance Abuse Molestation Washington Our directory features more than 18 million business listings from across the entire US. However, if we're missing your business, add your business by clicking on Add Your Business. A Turkish court convicted an official from a private airline and two pilots Wednesday for involvement in former Nissan Motor Co. chairman Carlos Ghosn's dramatic escape out of Japan in 2019, and sentenced them each to four years and two months in prison. The court in Istanbul acquitted two other pilots of the charge of ``illegally smuggling a migrant.'' Two flight attendants also were acquitted of failing to report a crime. Ghosn, who was arrested in Tokyo on financial misconduct allegations in 2018, skipped bail while awaiting trial. He was flown from Osaka to Istanbul on a private plane and then transferred onto another plane to Beirut, where he arrived Dec. 30, 2019. He is believed to have hid inside a large box. The convicted pilots, Noyan Pasin and Bahri Kutlu Somek, had maintained their innocence throughout the trial. They, the other two pilots and the flight attendants all denied involvement in plans to help Ghosn flee and insisted they did not know that he was aboard their flights. The airline official, Okan Kosemen, claimed he was made aware that Ghosn was on the plane to Istanbul only after it landed. He admitted helping smuggle Ghosn onto the second, Lebanon-bound plane, but claimed he was threatened and feared for his family's safety. Turkish airline company MNG Jet has admitted that two of its planes were used illegally in Ghosn's escape, flying him to Istanbul, and then to Beirut. The company said its employee falsified flight records so Ghosn's name didn't appear. Kosemen and the two pilots are expected to appeal their convictions. Ghosn, who has French, Lebanese and Brazilian citizenship, led Japanese automaker Nissan for two decades. The 66-year-old is wanted on charges of breach of trust in misusing company assets for personal gain, and violating securities laws in not fully disclosing his compensation. He has said he fled because he could not expect a fair trial in Japan. Lebanon has no extradition treaty with Japan. In addition to his trial in Japan, the businessman faces legal challenges in France from his time at the helm of the Renault-Nissan alliance,, including allegations of tax evasion, money laundering, fraud and misuse of company assets Short link: Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. EMILY ST. LAWRENCE, Chariho girls lacrosse, senior: St. Lawrence tied a school record for goals in a game with nine in a win over Smithfield. St. Lawrence scored 17 goals for the week and has 32 for the season. CARLY CONSTANTINE, Stonington softball, sophomore: Constantine singled home Shea OConnor with the winning run to hand Waterford, the states No. 2 ranked team at the time, its first loss of the season. For the week, Constantine was 5 for 15. GREG GORMAN, Westerly baseball, junior: Gorman, a junior, hit a massive home run in a win against Barrington. The homer went over the fence in center field and landed in a nearby road. Gorman was 3 for 3 with four RBIs in the game. He is hitting .571 with 10 RBIs for the season. BRADIN ANDERSON, Wheeler baseball, freshman: Anderson, a freshman, pitched a complete-game shutout to beat Grasso Tech. Anderson struck out three to earn the first win of his varsity career. Vote View Results New Delhi, Feb 24 : India was second only to Japan in Asia Pacific in terms of number of cyberattacks that it faced in 2020, making up seven per cent of all attacks in the region, an IBM report said on Wednesday. Finance and insurance was the top attacked industry in India, followed by manufacturing and professional services, according to the 2021 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index released by IBM Security. Ransomware was the top attack type, making up roughly 40 per cent of attacks. In addition, digital currency mining and server access attacks hit Indian companies last year. "We also witnessed cybercriminals using relief efforts and public health information as spam lures including targeted attacks on critical components of the vaccine supply chain. These all remain issues in 2021," Sudeep Das, Security Software Technical Sales Leader, IBM Technology Sales, India/South Asia, said in a statement. "Hence, organisations need to harden their cloud environments with a zero-trust approach to their security strategy and leverage AI to monitor, detect and contextualize dynamic behaviors and movements across hybrid cloud environments, to verify the legitimacy (or lack of) of a threat and automate a response." The X-Force Threat Intelligence Index is based on insights and observations from monitoring over 150 billion security events per day in more than 130 countries. In addition, data is gathered and analysed from multiple sources within IBM, including IBM Security X-Force Threat Intelligence and Incident Response, X-Force Red, IBM Managed Security Services, and data provided by Quad9 and Intezer, both of which contributed to the 2021 report. The report revealed that the most successful way victim environments were accessed last year was scanning and exploiting for vulnerabilities, surpassing phishing for the first time in years. Europe experienced more attacks than any other region in 2020, with ransomware rising as the top culprit. In addition, Europe saw more insider threat attacks than any other region, seeing twice as many such attacks as North America and Asia combined. Shares on the BSE pared gains in early afternoon trade. Trading has been halted on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) due to technical glitches. At 12:20 IST, the barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex, jumped 231.40 points or 0.47% at 49,982.81. In the broader market, the S&P BSE Mid-Cap index rose 0.37% while the S&P BSE Small-Cap index added 0.70%. The market breadth was strong. On the BSE, 1,678 shares rose and 1,068 shares fell. A total of 137 shares were unchanged. NSE Update: Trading has been halted on NSE due to technical glitches as the live price quotes of spot Nifty and Bank Nifty indexes are not updating on NSE. In a tweet, NSE India on Wednesday notified: "NSE has multiple telecom links with two service providers to ensure redundancy. We have received communication from both the telecom service providers that there are issues with their links due to which there is an impact on NSE system." "We are working on restoring the systems as soon as possible. In view of the above, all the segments have been closed at 11:40 and will be restored as soon as issue is resolved," it added. Meanwhile, BSE announced that all its segments will operate as usual on Wednesday, 24 February 2021. Coronavirus Update: Total COVID-19 confirmed cases worldwide stood at 11,21,08,142 with 24,85,368 deaths. India reported 1,46,907 active cases of COVID-19 infection and 1,56,567 deaths while 1,07,26,702 patients have been discharged, according to the data from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. Stocks in Spotlight: Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders gained 1.30% after the company executed a Memorandum of Understanding with Mumbai Port Trust to further the economic growth of the region and the country under the Maritime India Summit 2021. Sanofi India rose 1.17% after the company reported a 26.4% jump in net profit to Rs 123 crore on a 12.8% decline in net sales to Rs 720.3 crore in Q4 December 2020 over Q4 December 2019. Profit before tax grew by 5.5% to Rs 170.2 crore in Q4 December 2020 from Rs 161.3 crore in Q4 December 2019. Current tax expense tumbled 35.5% year on year to Rs 46.7 crore in Q4 December 2020. Meanwhile, the company announced a final dividend of Rs 125 per equity share for the year ended 31 December 2020. It also recommended a special dividend of Rs 240 per equity share for the year ended 31 December 2020, after considering the closure of the slump sale transaction relating to Ankleshwar manufacturing facility. The final dividend and the special dividend, if approved by the shareholders, will be paid on or after 4 May 2021. Sun Pharma Advanced Research Company (SPARC) slipped 1.67% after the company said that the US drug regulator has ruled against its appeal related to Taclantis, its under-development product for the treatment of breast cancer. The Office of New Drugs (OND) of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) has denied the company's appeal of the Complete Response Letter in relation to the New Drug Application (NDA) for Taclantis. Taclantis is a novel formulation of paclitaxel developed with SPARC's proprietary Nanotecton technology. Paclitaxel is one of the most widely used cytotoxic agent and is approved for the treatment of breast cancer, ovarian cancer, non-small cell lung cancer and pancreatic cancer. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Wild Horizon/Universal Images Group via Getty Now that we're seeing some glimmer of light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, Texans are feeling a little bit of that wanderlust again. The good news for Lone Star State travelers is two of the top U.S. destinations to visit in 2021 are right in the heart of Texas, according to Travel & Leisure. Fort Worth and the Hill Country made the 50-location list. Fort Worth landed at the No. 15 spot. Some of the big draws to Fort Worth include the historic Fort Worth Stockyards, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and the creative art project Art Tooth. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Reports of Biden officials, including John Kerry with ex-Obama officials, have been in back channels talking to the Iranian Foreign minister. This, according to the source, was aimed at undermining the Iran Policy of the Trump Administration. Instead of working with the Trump administration, many Obama officials and those like Kerry have worked against American interests. Democrat politicians never acknowledged anti-establishment moves by Trump to cut their influence substantially. Biden administration members undermined Trump Sources alleged the now part of the Biden Administration members, including John Kerry, former Secretary of State, current special envoy on Iran policy Robert Malley undermine then president Trump's policy on Iran. They met with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif discussing things that should have been public knowledge, reported the Blaze. President Trump blasted John Kerry after reports that the former secretary of State has been holding talks with foreign leaders to preserve the Iran nuclear deal. https://t.co/HMi70vwGKU pic.twitter.com/VjzSphXAFJ CNBC (@CNBC) May 7, 2018 When we exposed the secret Iranian nuclear archive, we proved that any nuclear agreement with Iran is built on one big lie. Now even Iran acknowledges this. Soon will be revealed additional proofs that Iran has been lying this whole time. Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) July 1, 2019 The report came from the Washington Times that gave insight into what most Biden era officials represent. Actively undermining policies against a belligerent nation was not in America's interests, based on Iranian foreign policy. The reports allege that John Kerry kept his affiliation with Iran during the Trump administration. Sources alleged that ex-Obama officials made counter-diplomatic efforts to derail the Iran policy intentionally. These same people are now in the BIden administration that acted allegedly in their interests, allowing the belligerent Iranians to ignore the prior administration and 'collude' with ex-Obama officials. One intention of the talks with Biden Officials, including John Kerry, is the Democrats winning and returning to power. All these allegations were shared by unnamed national security and intelligence sources. They were pointing out the dangers represented by the Democrats occupying the White House. Also read: US Warning to Iran: Sends B-52 Carpet Bombers to See If Nukes Were Built An unnamed former senior U.S. official revealed to the Times that the undisclosed meeting undermines what Trump has done to shove Iran into a struggling corner. They crawl the negotiation in anticipation of Trump losing the elections and ex-Obama officials having a run in the White House again. All the meetings allegedly happened from 2017 to 2019 that had Obama officials conducting unsanctioned talks between Zarif and Malley. The Iran deal was shut down by former President Trump signed by the Obama administration. According to the Iran deal that was supposed to stop sanctions against the terror-sponsoring nation, they don't continue making nukes. Iran never intended to follow the agreement made by Obama that would never stick. That the Iranians would stick to good faith was one mistake the U.S. administration under Obama made. Kerry and the Logan Act All the meetings with Zarif were admitted by Kerry during the Trump administration early on. It resulted in the president calling the former secretary of state guilty of violating the Logan Act. The Iran discussions were not revealed, but Iran wanted to support a Democrat president should Trump be defeated. Overall, its appearance is dubious, and the alleged actions of the Democrats under the former Obama regime raise questions. In 2019, according to an outlet that told Trump wanted to ease tensions with a backchannel to Iran. However, the Democrats were in continuous contact with Iran after the failed request. According to Mark Dubowitz of Defense of Democracies, having ex-Obama officials now Biden Officials including John Kerry was against the sitting administration. Related article: Pentagon: USS Nimitz to Be in the Middle East to Deter Iranian Hostility @ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. [February 24, 2021] Wells Fargo Donates $500,000 for Winter Storm Relief in Texas The devastating effects of several winter storms have left millions of Texans dealing with costly home damages and limited access to food and water. To help aid in relief efforts, the Wells Fargo (News - Alert) Foundation is donating $500,000 to help individuals and families recover, including $50,000 to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief and $100,000 to Feeding Texas, a network of 21 food banks in the state. The remaining $350,000 will go to local nonprofits focused on repairing homes, particularly in low- and moderate-income communities, and community resiliency. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005985/en/ Wells Fargo is donating $500,000 to winter storm relief efforts and an inclusive recovery in Texas. (Photo: Wells Fargo) "The recent winter storms caused a wide path of destruction and emotional distress, and we want our customers, employees and communities we serve across the state to know we are here for them," said Nate Hurst, president of the Wells Fargo Foundation. "We hope our donation helps local nonprofits expand their work and facilitate an equitable recovery from the severe weather. Importantly, we also wanted some of our funding to help build resiliency for the future so communities can better withstand the impacts of climate change." Customer support Wells Fargo is committed to providing support to customers, clients and employees affected by these storms, including suppressing, waiving, or reversing certain fees, such as late fees. Payment assistanc and disaster relief options require that customers contact us. Customers who want to discuss their financial needs should call 800-219-9739. For up-to-date information on branch status, customers can visit our branch locator website. Additionally, customers may make donations to the American Red Cross* via Wells Fargo Online and with Zelle** in the Wells Fargo Mobile app. Donations will go towards Red Cross Disaster Relief to support disasters big and small, and countless other crises. Employee care Wells Fargo is also supporting employees through its We Care Fund, a special program that provides financial grants to employees to cover unforeseen expenses caused by a disaster situation or a financial hardship that is beyond their control. About Wells Fargo Wells Fargo & Company is a leading financial services company that has approximately $1.9 trillion in assets and proudly serves one in three U.S. households and more than 10% of all middle market companies in the U.S. We provide a diversified set of banking, investment and mortgage products and services, as well as consumer and commercial finance, through our four reportable operating segments: Consumer Banking and Lending; Commercial Banking; Corporate and Investment Banking; and Wealth and Investment Management. Wells Fargo ranked No. 30 on Fortune's 2020 rankings of America's largest corporations. In the communities we serve, the company focuses its social impact on building a sustainable, inclusive future for all by supporting housing affordability, small business growth, financial health and a low-carbon economy. News, insights and perspectives from Wells Fargo are also available at Wells Fargo Stories. Additional information may be found at www.wellsfargo.com | Twitter (News - Alert) : @WellsFargo. *The American Red Cross name, emblem, and copyrighted materials are being used with its permission, which in no way constitutes an endorsement, express or implied, of any product, service, company, opinion, or political position. The American Red Cross logo is a registered trademark owned by The American National Red Cross. For more information about the American Red Cross, please visit redcross.org. **Zelle may be used to send direct donations only to American Red Cross Disaster Relief. Donations to other charitable organizations are not available at this time. Zelle, Wells Fargo, and the American Red Cross are not liable for any failure, through no fault of theirs, to complete your transaction in the correct amount, or for any related losses. Zelle and the Zelle related marks are wholly owned by Early Warning Services, LLC and are used herein under license. News Release Category: WF-DAR View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005985/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] European Union Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager warned of potential antitrust action against Google or other U.S. technology giants if they threaten to pull out of markets. Vestager told the European Parliaments economy committee on Tuesday that there could be scope for investigating if its actually legal for a dominant provider to stop supplying" services, adding that the EU would have a number of tools to use." Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers Her comments follow controversy in Australia, where Google and Facebook Inc. have been lobbying against a proposed law to require the search and social media companies to pay publishers for the value stories generate on their digital platforms Google initially threatened to shut its search engine in the country before striking a deal with News Corp. Facebook had restricted news sharing on its site but ended its blackout earlier Tuesday after the government agreed to amend the legislation. Google declined to comment on the latest warning by Vestager, who has fined it more than $9 billion for antitrust breaches. Meanwhile, it confirmed a report by Reuters that it had received antitrust objections from French regulators over its alleged non-compliance with an order to pay publishers for news snippets. Alphabet Inc.-owned Google said it would review the statement of objections and will work closely with the French competition authority." Our priority is to comply with the law, and to continue to negotiate with publishers in good faith, as evidenced by the agreements we have made with publishers in the past few months," the company said. The French competition authority didnt immediately respond to a request for comment outside of usual business hours. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 24, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian ministry of emergency situations reports that some roads are closed or difficult to pass across the Republic due to weather conditions. The ministry told Armenpress that the Berd-Chambarak highway, the roads leading to the Amberd Fortress and Lake Kari in Aragatsotn province are closed. All roads in Syunik province are partly covered with clear ice. The Georgian side reports that the Stepantsminda-Lars highway is closed for all types of vehicles. Drivers are urged to use snow tires. Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan Utilizing advanced interior cleaning polymers and nanoparticles of SiO2, HydroInterior is an adaptive product that delivers superior results to help you maintain and enjoy your interior longer. HydroInterior can be used on a multitude of surfaces, including plastics, painted plastics, vinyl, imitation leather, plastic vinyl, door panels and more to clean up light dust, fingerprints, smudges, body oils and grime. Not only does it clean, but the durable UV protectants provide resistance against the sun to reduce fading, cracking and drying, and the ceramic self-cleaning properties help shed contaminants easier, reducing surface dust that can cling to your vehicle's interior surfaces for easier maintenance down the road. "Starting with HydroCharge, our first hydrophobic SiO2 ceramic spray coating launched in April 2019, the Chemical Guys Product Development Team has been feverishly working to expand our offering of user-friendly ceramic products that anyone can apply," said Chemical Guys' Chief Revenue Officer, John Mansfield. "HydroInterior is a testament to the team's efforts as we bring the superior protection of SiO2 ceramic technology to the inside of our customers' rides." HydroInterior is easy to apply and can be used as a first line of defense for interior UV protection. Spray the product directly onto a microfiber cloth and gently wipe the surfaces to remove dust and debris, avoiding navigation and/or touch screens, for a clean, even matte finish before topping off with your favorite Chemical Guys dressing. If your vehicle's interior hasn't been cleaned in some time, or has high levels of grime, you may want to give it a deep clean first by utilizing Chemical Guys Nonsense All Purpose Cleaner and a boar's head brush before following up with HydroInterior as an added layer of surface protection. Available for purchase on February 24 at ChemicalGuys.com and Detail Garage locations nationwide, HydroInterior will retail for $24.99. ABOUT CHEMICAL GUYS Driven by adventure, a passion for shine, and a love for the road ahead, Chemical Guys is a worldwide leader in automotive detailing products for car care enthusiasts and professionals. From exclusive small-batch waxes to cutting edge ceramic coatings, and specialty cleaners for exteriors and interiors, Chemical Guys sets the industry standard when it comes to product innovation, technological advancement and education. Based in Southern California, Chemical Guys has evolved from a handful of passionate car fanatics to a global lifestyle brand with the largest digital library of automotive detailing "how to" content available. Learn more and join the Chemical Guys family at ChemicalGuys.com. ABOUT DETAIL GARAGE Detail Garage is the country's fastest-growing car care superstore. The nationwide retail franchise is the ultimate destination for auto detailing supplies, equipment, car care accessories and training. By combining the highest-quality products with educational detailing classes, Detail Garage has become the country's go-to retail store for car care enthusiasts, passionate car owners, and detailing professionals. After launching its initial location in Southern California, the brand has quickly expanded to over 60 locations over the last 5 years throughout the US and Canada. To find a Detail Garage near you or for more information on products, training or franchising opportunities visit www.detailgarage.com. SOURCE Chemical Guys Related Links http://www.chemicalguys.com Bill and Karen Johns havent been able to shower for 12 days. The two have gone without electricity since the snow and ice storm two weekends ago knocked out power to more than 420,000 Portland General Electric customers in northwest Oregon at various points nearly half of the companys customers. Like many of the homes in their small unincorporated area of Clackamas County, the couple depend on electricity to pump water from their well. No water means no showers, using only bottled water for drinking and cooking, and flushing the toilet using jugs of pond water from generous neighbors. The couple, who live in Beavercreek outside Oregon City, were among the more than 6,000 homes and businesses still without power Tuesday in the region as electrical crews work around the clock to bring the lights back on. The stacks of wood on the front porch of Beavercreek residents Karen and Bill Johns, who have relied on the wood stove in their living room as the lone source of heat amid a power outage that has lasted nearly two weeks. Sean Meagher/The Oregonian To date, PGE has restored about 389 miles of transmission lines and brought power back to thousands of homes and businesses. They have fixed 9,806 wires down, 775 transformers and 686 poles. The company reported restoring more than 700,000 customer outages total, which includes customers who may have had more than one outage. But this last stretch is the hardest. Just down South Larkin Road from the Johnses, PGE crews were moving from pole to pole to replace blown fuses and re-energize power lines. One crew on nearby South Beavercreek Road started at 6 a.m., said Rich Johnson, a line manager for PGE in charge of all the crews in the area. Crews have been working 16 to 18 hour days since the start of the outages, and the days are starting to run together, Johnson said. A main transmission line carries power through the Beavercreek area, but tap lines that shoot off the main line serve only handfuls of residents. PGE crews work to fix the power lines along Beavercreek Road amid a power outage that has lasted nearly two weeks. Sean Meagher/The Oregonian Each damaged tap line thousands in Clackamas County alone must be individually repaired, Johnson said. A blown fuse may take 45 minutes to fix, but a downed pole can take an hour or two and a broken transformer even longer. Beavercreek was hit especially hard by trees that fell and damaged power lines, Johnson said. Hes seen large trees split in half, uprooted trees and even a whole front porch broken off a house because of the weight of snow and ice. This is by far one of the most significant events weve experienced within this organization with the number of poles and transformers weve replaced, he said. Its something you really cant prepare for. The Beavercreek United Church of Christ got its power restored after five days. The church has the only emergency food pantry in the area, and its been distributing food and hygiene supplies, said Skipper Maine, whos been a member of the church for 30 years. Maine remembers when the county was hit by fire evacuation warnings last fall, but its been even more difficult this time to help people because of the lack of power, internet and cell service, she said. We had a really hard time checking on people to find out if they even have need, Maine said. As for the Johnses, theyve been able to cope with the help of their neighbors. We feel lucky living out here, said Karen, 77. The two have been in their home for more than 20 years, but this is the longest theyve ever gone without power. Beavercreek residents Karen and Bill Johns have relied on the wood stove in their living room as the lone source of heat amid a power outage that has lasted nearly two weeks. One of their sons in Sherwood offered to let them come over for warm showers, but they didnt feel the need, said Bill, 79. Their wood stove keeps their house cozy and they can cook on it, too even meatloaf. A few days after their generator broke, a neighbor lent them a backup, allowing them to keep the fridge and lights on. We got heat, we got water, Bill said. We can read, Karen said, and we can really do anything we want to do. -- Jaimie Ding jding@oregonian.com; 503-221-4395; @j_dingdingding Nearly two out of three importers are suffering hold-ups of at least two days getting goods in the UK, according to a survey of 350 supply chain bosses. A new report warns the delays since the start of this year will result in post-Brexit stock shortages and price hikes for consumers. The delays are being caused by the time taken for customs officials to work through new post-Brexit paperwork, said the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS). The situation is only slightly better for exports, with 44 per cent experiencing delays of at least two to three days getting goods into the EU, said the report. A new report warns the delays since the start of this year will result in post-Brexit stock shortages and price hikes for consumers (pictured: cargo trucks in Dover last month) The CIPS said it has evidence of drivers being turned away at or before the border for not having the correct paperwork. The delays come despite the fact that many new import certifications are still yet to come into force, said the report. John Glen, of the CIPS, said: 'We are well into the second month of the new arrangements and the hope that delays at the border would reduce as freight volumes returned to normal and customs systems became used to the new processes has not come to pass. 'What is even more concerning is that the delays are continuing to get longer, putting more and more pressure on the UK's supply chains and affecting the timely delivery of much-needed goods. 'The paperwork required at the border is not going to change any time soon, so we should brace ourselves for these delays to continue for at least the next few months. 'New requirements for import certifications are also rapidly approaching and these will only add to the paperwork required, causing further delays for businesses. 'The knock-on impact of these delays will trickle far down the supply chain and ultimately result in stock shortages and inflated prices for consumers.' The report comes as a trade representative says businesses in Northern Ireland need 'certainty' around post-Brexit grace periods. Aodhan Connolly of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium said the Northern Ireland Protocol had produced the greatest disruption to commerce since the foundation of the state a century ago. Northern Ireland remains part of the EU's single market for goods. Food products entering from the rest of the UK must undergo EU import checks, and products of animal origin need vet certificates. Security officers pictured standing guard an an entrance to the Port of Dover in December last year, when EU countries imposed a travel bank from the UK amid the Covid-19 outbreak A lorry driver views the queue of lorries on the M20 as lorries wait to enter the Eurotunnel site in Folkestone, Kent, due to heavy freight traffic in December last year Supermarkets have been given a grace period until April where they do not need the certificates for most products and businesses, and British ministers want an extension. Mr Connolly, who represents companies such as Lidl, Asda and Sainsbury's, said: 'It has to lead to certainty, not just for Northern Irish businesses but for those people who want to invest in Northern Ireland.' The British Government is pressing the EU for an extension to grace periods on checks on supermarket goods in transit from the rest of the UK to Northern Ireland until 2023. A Government spokesperson said: 'We are introducing new import controls in three stages up until 1 July 2021 to ensure traders and hauliers have sufficient time to adjust to new processes. This decision keeps goods flowing into the UK and prevents disruption to supply chains. 'The latest available data shows that overall freight volumes between the UK and the EU are back to their normal levels, thanks to the hard work put in by traders and hauliers to prepare for the end of the transition period. 'Extensive support is available, including our 20 million SME Brexit Support Fund as well as webinars, helplines and guides for tailored information.' MIAMI, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Carnival Cruise Line has notified booked guests and travel advisors that its pause in operations from U.S. ports has been extended through May 31, 2021. A date for the return of guest cruising operations from U.S. ports has not yet been determined. Earlier in February, Carnival began providing more flexible options for guests booked into early summer so that they could cancel their reservation without penalty if they needed or wanted to make other plans. As it has done throughout the pause, Carnival is providing guests on cruises cancelled today the choice of a future cruise credit plus onboard credit package, or a full refund. "We continue to work on plans to resume operations and are encouraged by the focus to expedite vaccine production and distribution which are having a demonstrated impact on improving public health," said Christine Duffy, president of Carnival Cruise Line. "We appreciate the support of all of our guests, employees and trade partners who we know are looking forward to our return." SOURCE Carnival Cruise Line Related Links http://www.carnivalcorp.com By MICHAEL HILL and CAROLYN THOMPSON, The Associated Press Police officers who put a hood over the head of a mentally distraught Black man, then pressed his body against the pavement until he stopped breathing will not face criminal charges after a grand jury declined to indict them, New Yorks attorney general announced Tuesday. Daniel Prude, 41, died last March, several days after his encounter with police in Rochester, New York. Police initially described his death as a drug overdose. It went mostly unnoticed. But nightly protests erupted after body camera video was released nearly six months later following pressure from Prudes family. FILE In this file image taken from police body camera video provided by Roth and Roth LLP, a Rochester police officer puts a hood over the head of Daniel Prude, on March 23, 2020, in Rochester, N.Y. A grand jury voted not to charge officers shown on body camera video holding Prude down naked and handcuffed on a city street last winter until he stopped breathing. New York Attorney General Letitia James announced the decision Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021. (Rochester Police via Roth and Roth LLP via AP, File)AP Attorney General Letitia James, whose office took over the investigation, said her office had presented the strongest case possible to the grand jury, but couldnt persuade it that the officers had committed a crime. I know that the Prude family, the Rochester community and communities across the country will rightfully be disappointed by this outcome, said James, who traveled to Rochester to announce the grand jurys decision at a church near where Prude was fatally injured. She said she was bound to respect the grand jurys decision, but she also condemned a system that she said had frustrated efforts to hold law enforcement officers accountable for the unjustified killing of African Americans. New York State Attorney General Letitia James (AP Photo/Adrian Kraus)AP What binds these cases is a tragic loss of life in circumstances in which the death could have been avoided, said James, who, like the mayor of Rochester and the citys current and former police chiefs, is Black. One recognizes the influences of race, from the slave codes to Jim Crow, to lynching, to the war on crime, to the overincarceration of people of color: Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. And now Daniel Prude, she said. Lawyers for the seven police officers suspended over Prudes death have said the officers were strictly following their training that night, employing a restraining technique known as segmenting. They claimed Prudes use of PCP, which caused irrational behavior, was the root cause of his death. Calls were made to the officers attorneys. Matthew Rich, who represents four officers, said were still taking it in and that the attorneys would speak to the press later. Hundreds of protesters gathered Tuesday evening on the street where Prude was detained. Dianne Stengel places candles at the site of Daniel Prude's encounter with police officers a year ago in Rochester, N.Y., Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Adrian Kraus)AP The March 23 video of Prudes fatal encounter with officers was initially withheld by police in part because of concerns it would inflame street demonstrations occurring nationwide over George Floyds death. Ultimately released Sept. 4, it showed officers placing a mesh bag over Prudes head to stop him from spitting after they detained him for running naked through the streets. Prude had been evaluated at a hospital for odd behavior a day earlier, but he wasnt admitted. His family called police because they were concerned about Prudes safety after he bolted from the house. One officer pushed Prudes face against the ground, while another officer pressed a knee to his back. The officers held him down for about two minutes until he fell unconscious. He was taken off life support a week later. The system failed Daniel Prude again, Prude family lawyer Elliot Shields said of the grand jurys decision. It failed him on March 22 when he was released from the hospital. It failed him on the night of March 23 when the police used deadly force against him. And it failed him again today. Shields said Prudes brother, Joe Prude, was heartbroken. Officers Troy Taladay, Paul Ricotta, Francisco Santiago, Andrew Specksgoor, Josiah Harris and Mark Vaughn, along with Sgt. Michael Magri, were suspended after Prudes death became public. The officers will remain on leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation, according to Rochester police chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan. The Rochester police union said in a statement it would not immediately comment. The grand jury decision isnt likely to end scrutiny of the Rochester Police Department, which has been heavily criticized over the past year over numerous incidents involving allegations of excessive force. Rochesters mayor, Lovely Warren, who fired police chief LaRon Singletary over his handling of the Prude case, called the grand jury decision hard for many of us to understand. There are no words that can comfort a family who has lost their loved one in this tragic way, she said. Our actions going forward will ensure that Daniel Prudes death was not in vain. Some activists said that they never expected the officers to face charges. Historically, we can see when Black and brown people are killed across this nation, most times there is no indictment. However, it isnt any less offensive, any less hurtful, any less painful, said Ashley Gantt of Rochester, as she headed to protest the decision. Im disgusted. More: I am a child! Pepper spray reflects policing of Black kids Police and mental health: Would social workers accompanying police protect mentally ill, keep them out of jail? CANTON, Ohio, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- TimkenSteel Corp. (NYSE: TMST), a leader in customized alloy steel products and services, today announced it will increase base pricing on all special bar quality (SBQ) products by $40 per ton. This increase is applicable to orders not already covered by pricing agreements and is effective for shipments beginning April 5, 2021. All surcharge mechanisms remain in effect. About TimkenSteel Corporation TimkenSteel (NYSE: TMST) manufactures high-performance carbon and alloy steel products in Canton, OH serving demanding applications in automotive, energy and a variety of industrial end markets. The company is a premier U.S. producer of alloy steel bars (up to 16 inches in diameter), seamless mechanical tubing and precision components. In the business of making high-quality steel primarily from recycled materials for more than 100 years, TimkenSteel's proven expertise contributes to the performance of our customers' products. The company employs approximately 2,055 people and had sales of $1.2 billion in 2019. For more information, please visit us at www.timkensteel.com. SOURCE TimkenSteel Corp. Related Links http://www.timkensteel.com Knowing the environmental and human-related variables that characterize the favorable areas for the incidence of the West Nile virus, a flavivirus that is transmitted from birds to humans by mosquitoes, is essential to identify those places in Europe at high risk of experiencing outbreaks, even before these are registered, thus enabling preventive measures to be taken. Researchers of the Biogeography, Diversity and Conservation Group of the University of Malaga have developed risk models for West Nile Fever, the disease caused in humans by this virus, which, based on historical incidence data, may predict areas of future outbreaks a year in advance, as well as detect their intensity. Artificial intelligence to develop risk models Particularly, using modeling based on fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence, they have analyzed the incidence of the disease in Europe in 2017 to explain and restate the "abnormally high" data of 2018, the year with the highest number of cases registered so far, a total of 1605. The results have been recently published in the scientific journal PLoS Negl Trop Dis. Based on the analyzed data, we could successfully predict the places where the disease appeared, the intensity of outbreaks and the time they occurred." Raimundo Real, Scientist, Animal Biology Department, UMA This expert asserts that anticipating the possible incidence of the disease may lead to taking preventive measures specifically in risk areas. These measures include early spraying, advising the population on measures to avoid bites or controlling the water points where mosquitoes breed. Likewise, healthcare centers could be warned about the possible disease incidence in the area, contributing to early diagnosis and improving prognosis. Spatial and environmental variables For the development of the risk maps, the researchers used a spatial model related to bird migration routes, which act as reservoir of the virus. On the other hand, they determined that the environmental risk factors are high temperatures, presence of river courses, low altitude areas, which usually have a warmer climate and conditions of higher humidity, and the presence of certain livestock facilities, such as stables and poultry farms, which, as they assure, are the most favorable factors for the spread of the virus. "We have observed that high temperatures speed up the life cycles of mosquitoes, shortening their gonotrophic cycle -period between the time mosquitoes feed on blood and the time they feed again-, therefore, in warmer areas mosquito bite rate is also higher, facilitating the transmission of the virus", emphasizes the professor of the UMA. Early warning: basin scale Likewise, rivers are related to the presence and proliferation of mosquitoes, so rivers also contribute to a higher infection rate. "In 2017, the outbreaks began in the lower areas of large river basins and spread to higher areas, which highlights the importance of river basins in the propagation of outbreaks", says Raimundo Real, who adds that, consequently, the early warning should be based on a basin scale. This way, the Head of the Animal Biology Department of the UMA states that some Spanish provinces of western Andalusia, southern Extremadura and southwestern Castilla-La Mancha, especially the lowest areas of the Guadalquivir and Guadiana valleys, are European sites that are environmentally favorable for the transmission of the disease, which directly affects the human nervous system. KYODO NEWS - Feb 24, 2021 - 11:19 | All, Japan Shinkansen bullet train services between Tokyo and northeastern Japan resumed Wednesday, 11 days after they were disrupted due to a powerful earthquake that hit the Tohoku region. The Tohoku Shinkansen bullet train line connected the capital with the region for the first time since the magnitude-7.3 temblor on Feb. 13 damaged electricity poles and bridges in some areas along the line. Its operator East Japan Railway Co. said the total number of high-speed trains on the line will initially be limited to about 80 percent of the pre-quake level with services expected to return to normal in about a month. Since the trains have to slow down on sections of the track that were recently repaired, the journey from Tokyo to northeastern Japan's Sendai or Morioka station will take about an hour longer than normal. JR East suspended all bullet train operations between Nasushiobara Station, Tochigi Prefecture, and Morioka Station, Iwate Prefecture, on Feb. 14. Some services on the line have since resumed, with bus, airplane and local railway operations offering passengers alternative transportation services. Around 40 people lined up at the Sendai Station ticket office before it began operations Wednesday morning. "I was afraid I could not take a shinkansen train (due to congestion) so I began waiting in a line around 5 a.m.," said Kiyotaka Saito, 59, who works in Sendai and was heading to his home in Tokyo. "Since I was unable to return home for a while because of the quake, I'd like to do some domestic chores." The Feb. 13 quake caused injuries to more than 180 people in 10 prefectures of northeastern and eastern Japan, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. It also caused power and water outages across a wide area and damaged over 2,600 houses across Fukushima, Miyagi and Yamagata prefectures, the agency said. While a tsunami did not occur, the earthquake came just weeks before the 10th anniversary of the magnitude-9.0 quake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan in March 2011, leaving around 16,000 people dead and triggering the Fukushima nuclear crisis. Related coverage: Most Japan bullet train services disrupted by quake to resume Feb. 24 Japan PM Suga refuses to move into official residence despite criticism Post-Fukushima reactor halt produces inexperienced nuclear plant workers in Japan Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Photo taken on July 14, 2020 shows the Golden Bauhinia Square in south China's Hong Kong, July 14, 2020. (Xinhua/Wu Xiaochu) HONG KONG, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- After "patriots governing Hong Kong" was stressed at a high-level symposium on Monday, celebrities here said the principle should be the basic political ethic in Hong Kong and called for more efforts to improve related systems for steady and sustained implementation of "one country, two systems." Tam Yiu-chung, a member of the Drafting Committee for the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), said the spirit of the principle is reflected in the drafting of the Basic Law and has shown its significance since Hong Kong's return to the motherland. The principle has never changed but anti-China disruptors took advantage of the imperfect related systems to bring chaos to Hong Kong, Yip Kin-ming, a Hong Kong member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said. "Patriots governing Hong Kong" is the precondition of effective governance in Hong Kong and accurate implementation of "one country, two systems," he said. The Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong said in a statement that to improve related systems of "patriots governing Hong Kong" concerns the success of "one country, two systems," the fundamental interests of the country, and Hong Kong's long-term prosperity and stability. Since Hong Kong's return to the motherland, anti-China disruptors and "Hong Kong independence" radicals have entered the power structure of the HKSAR through loopholes in the electoral systems to obstruct the policies of the government and damage the well-being of Hong Kong people. The Hong Kong Coalition also said unpatriotic people who enter the power structure will completely deny "one country, two systems," the Constitution and the Basic Law, resist the central authorities, and collude with foreign forces, which will seriously jeopardize Hong Kong's stability and threaten the national sovereignty, security and development interests. Given the significance of the principle to Hong Kong's future, appeals have been rising in Hong Kong to improve related systems as soon as possible. The Business and Professionals Alliance for Hong Kong voiced full support for the principle and called for specific measures to improve electoral systems at various levels so that Hong Kong's democratic system will advance in a healthy and smooth manner. The HKSAR should improve the electoral systems to ensure candidates recognize the constitutional order of the country and Hong Kong, genuinely safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interests, and fully protect Hong Kong's prosperity and stability, Yiu Chi-shing, president of the Hong Kong Association for Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China, said. In a joint statement, pro-establishment Legislative Council (LegCo) members also called for efforts to improve Hong Kong's electoral system, with the Constitution and the Basic Law abided by, the central authorities fully respected and the executive-led system genuinely enforced. Take a look at various places in the world, bearing loyalty to the country is the most basic political ethic for politicians. Maria Tam Wai-chu, deputy director of the HKSAR Basic Law Committee under the National People's Congress Standing Committee, said more than 150 countries required public officers to swear to safeguard the national sovereignty, abide by constitutions and protect national interests. "It is natural for people entering the power structure in the HKSAR to love the country and Hong Kong," she said. President of the LegCo Andrew Leung Kwan-yuen said it is also a basic principle in many countries that key public posts are held by patriots and he believes that most Hong Kong people are patriotic and will actively contribute to the governance of Hong Kong. As anti-China disruptors have become the agents of foreign forces in Hong Kong, it is welcomed and supported by Hong Kong people to expel them out of the governance structure, Ng Woon-yim, chairman of the Hong Kong Federation of Fujian Associations, said. As coronavirus that emerged from Wuhan wreaked havoc across the world, fingers were pointed at China. Theories about the origin of the virus were abound, including one that stated the coronavirus was leaked from a lab in Wuhan. However, Dominic Dwyer, Director of Public Health Pathology, NSW Health Pathology at the Westmead Hospital and University of Sydney, who was part of the WHO team that visited Wuhan to determine the emergence of the virus has said it is unlikely the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Dwyer also said that it is unlikely that the COVID-19 virus emerged from the wet markets of Wuhan. In a piece on The Conversation, authored by Dwyer, he said that the team visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology and found it to be an "impressive research facility" that appeared to be "run well". He said that they spoke to the scientists there and heard that blood samples of the scientists were taken regularly and stored. "No evidence of antibodies to the coronavirus was found. We looked at their biosecurity audits. No evidence," he said. Dwyer also said that they looked at the closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 -- the RaTG13 virus -- that was detected in caves in Southern China where some miners had died seven years ago. "But all the scientists had was a genetic sequence for this virus. They had not managed to grow it in culture. While viruses certainly do escape from laboratories, this is rare. So, we concluded it was extremely unlikely this had happened in Wuhan," he concluded. Speaking about the Wuhan wet market, believed to be the origin of the virus, Dwyer said that they visited the now-closed market. Some of the stalls sold domesticated wildlife products including bamboo rats, civets and ferret badgers. He said that there is evidence to show that some of the domesticated wildlife could be susceptible to SARS-Cov-2 but none of the samples taken from animals in the market after its closure tested positive. None of the initial 174 cases had visited the market, including patient zero. Dwyer said that the market could, however, have led to the spread of the virus considering its poor ventilation, drainage as well as daily footfall of 10,000. "The market in Wuhan, in the end, was more of an amplifying event rather than necessarily a true ground zero. So we need to look elsewhere for the viral origins," he wrote in the piece. Speaking about the cold chain hypothesis that states that the virus might have originated elsewhere via farming, catching, processing, transporting, refrigeration or freezing of food, Dwyer wrote, "Was that food ice cream, fish, wildlife meat? We do not know. It is unproven that this triggered the origin of the virus itself. But to what extent did it contribute to its spread? Again, we do not know." The team of investigators had 17 Chinese and 10 international experts along with seven other experts and support staff from various agencies. Dwyer said that their mission to China was only Phase One. The official report of the mission will be published in the coming weeks. Also read: Health Ministry confirms two new COVID-19 strains; says variants not behind spike in Maharashtra, Kerala Also read: Now, 179 COVID-19 testing kits available in India; about 40 indigenous Sorry! This content is not available in your region ADVERTISEMENT Facebook Inc on Wednesday pledged to invest at least 1 billion dollars in the news industry over the next three years, days after a high-profile stand-off with the Australian government over paying news outlets for content. The social networks commitment to the news industry follows Googles 1 billion dollars investment in 2020, as technology giants come under scrutiny over their business model as well as the proliferation of misinformation on their platform. Facebook on Tuesday restored Australian news pages, ending an unprecedented week-long blackout after wringing concessions from the government over a proposed law that will require tech giants to pay traditional media companies for their content. The brief blackout shocked the global news industry, which has already seen its business model upended by the tech giants. In a blog detailing its version of the showdown, Facebook said the news ban was related to a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between the company and news publishers. It also acknowledged that some non-news content got inadvertently blocked when it banned all news content. Facebook said on Wednesday it had already invested $600 million in the news industry since 2018. The social media company added it was in active negotiations with news publishers in Germany and France for a deal to pay for content for its news product, where users can find headlines and stories next to a personalised news feed. (Xinhua/NAN) Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release SubCategory Select Sub-Category ALTON YWCA Alton will host an Awareness Session at 2 p.m. Saturday, March 6, via Zoom. The program is made possible by a Healing Illinois grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services. The event will be facilitated by Dr. Jennifer Hernandez, a special ed teacher of 15 years who has primarily taught students with emotional disturbance, mental illness and incarcerated youth in secondary alternative settings. In the last three years of her tenure in special education, she was a special education administrator in the Ferguson-Florissant School District. She was a witness and student advocate in the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown. She is currently teaching at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in the Secondary Program for Teaching and Learning. She focuses on anti-bias/anti-racism training for in-service educators and teacher candidates to address racism and all forms of oppression in public education. Attendance is limited to 25 persons; early registration is recommended. To register for the free event, visit https://tinyurl.com/rr4hdw67 or call 618-465-7774 or email info@metroeastywca.org. For the Right Perspective & Competitive Insights Get a Free Sample Report Delivered Instantly The 120-page report analyzes the military robots market by product (airborne military robots, naval military robots, and land-based military robots) and geography (North America, APAC, Europe, MEA, and South America). The report offers competitive intelligence about market leaders, key industry opportunities, trends, and threats impacting the growth of the market. Also, the report includes information on marketing, brand, strategy and market development, sales, and supply functions. Download Free Sample Report The military robots market is driven by advances in naval warfare domain. In addition, the development of multi-mission robots is anticipated to boost the growth of the military robots market. Countries across the world are securing their territorial waters and maritime borders due to the rising incidence of militant intrusions and attacks. This is increasing investments in the enhancement of offensive and defensive capabilities of naval fleets. For instance, in June 2020, FLIR Systems was awarded a USD 10 million contract to deliver dozens of its SkyRaider UAS to the US Marine Corps. Such developments are expected to foster the growth of the global military robots market during the forecast period. Buy 1 Technavio report and get the second for 50% off. Buy 2 Technavio reports and get the third for free. View market snapshot before purchasing Major Five Military Robots Companies: BAE Systems Plc BAE Systems Plc operates its business through segments such as Electronic Systems, Platforms & Services (US), Air, and Maritime. The company offers robotic technology demonstrator which has advanced capabilities and is adaptable for future weapon systems, sensors, and other payloads. Boston Dynamics Inc. Boston Dynamics Inc. operates its business through the Unified segment. The company offers military robots under the brands, Spot Classic, Wildcat, LS3, and others. Elbit Systems Ltd. Elbit Systems Ltd. operates its business through the Unified segment. The company offers unmanned ground vehicles and robotic devices for a variety of land-based missions. General Dynamics Corp. General Dynamics Corp. operates its business through segments such as Aerospace, Combat Systems, Information Technology, Mission Systems, and Marine Systems. The company offers unmanned underwater vehicle under the brand, Bluefin. Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. operates its business through the Defense, space, and electronics products segment. The company offers ground robotic solutions for heavy-duty, highly maneuverable combat and combat support complex missions under the brand, RoBattle. Register for a free trial today and gain instant access to 17,000+ market research reports. Technavio's SUBSCRIPTION platform Military Robots Market Product Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2020-2025) Airborne - size and forecast 2020-2025 Naval - size and forecast 2020-2025 Land-based - size and forecast 2020-2025 Military Robots Market Geography Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2020-2025) North America - size and forecast 2020-2025 - size and forecast 2020-2025 APAC - size and forecast 2020-2025 Europe - size and forecast 2020-2025 - size and forecast 2020-2025 MEA - size and forecast 2020-2025 South America - size and forecast 2020-2025 Are you a start-up willing to make it big in the business? Grab an exclusive Report Related Reports on Industrials Include: Global Military Aircraft Battery Market Global military aircraft battery market is segmented by type (lithium-based batteries, nickel-based batteries, and lead-acid batteries) and geography (North America, APAC, Europe, MEA, and South America). Click Here to Get an Exclusive Free Sample Report Global Military Heads-up Display Market Global military heads-up display market is segmented by geography (Americas, EMEA, and APAC) and product (wearable military HUD and platform-based military HUD). Click Here to Get an Exclusive Free Sample Report News Insight: https://newsroom.technavio.com/news/military-robots-market About Technavio 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. Contacts Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: https://www.technavio.com/report/military-robots-market-industry-analysis SOURCE Technavio Pharmacies, GPs and healthcare organisations will be banned from displaying advertisements identifying whether they are using the Pfizer or AstraZeneca product in the national COVID-19 vaccine rollout. The Therapeutic Goods Administration, the federal body that regulates medical drugs and devices, has released strict guidelines stopping organisations from developing their own ads for coronavirus vaccines. A used COVID-19 vaccine vial seen at the COVID-19 surge centre in Canberra on Tuesday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Businesses involved in the rollout are welcome to use government-approved materials to inform the public of vaccine availability but must be careful not to add the tradename and/or active ingredient of the specific vaccine or other information that might enable consumers to identify the particular vaccine or the manufacturer of the vaccine. Individuals receiving vaccines will be able to get information on the brand of vaccine they are receiving, but providers will not be able to promote that they are using a particular brand, or compare one product over another. Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. Four board leaders of Texas' embattled power grid operator said Tuesday they will resign following outrage over the deaths of at least 30 Texans when more than 4 million customers lost power during deadly Winter Storm Uri last week. All of the board directors stepping down, including Chairwoman Sally Talberg, live outside of Texas, which only intensified criticism of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). The other board members are vice chairman Peter Cramton, Terry Bulger and Raymond Hepper. Talberg lives in Michigan and Bulger lives in Wheaton, Illinois, according to their biographies on ERCOT's website. The members stepping down, including Chairwoman Sally Talberg (left), live outside of Texas, which intensified criticism of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Another member is vice chairman Peter Cramton (right). Talberg lives in Michigan and Cramton lives in California The other members include Terry Bulger (left) and Raymond Hepper (right). Bulger lives in Wheaton, Illinois, and Hepper lives in Maine A University of Pennsylvania law school biography shows that Hepper lives in Maine. The social media account for Cramton, who is an economics professor at the University of Maryland and the University of Cologne, Germany, shows that his location is Del Mar, California. 'To allow state leaders a free hand with future direction and to eliminate distractions, we are resigning,' wrote Talberg, Cramton and directors Bulger and Hepper in a joint resignation. 'Our hearts go out to all Texans who had to go without electricity, heat and water during frigid temperatures and continue to face the tragic consequences of this emergency,' they added. Cramton declined comment when contacted Tuesday. The other board members did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Craig Ivey, former president of Consolidated Edison of New York who was nominated to fill a board vacancy effective February 16, withdrew before he could be seated, according to the notification. Ivey cited concerns over out-of-state directors in his letter. A spokesman for the Public Utility Commission (PUC) of Texas declined immediate comment on the resignations or when the regulator would seek to appoint new members. The PUC appoints the 15-member ERCOT board. There have been dozens of deaths linked to the severe cold and the state has launched investigations into what caused power generators, electrical transmission systems to shut. At the peak, more than 4.3 million people in the state were without power Texas Governor Greg Abbott welcomed the resignations, noting ERCOT has assured it had adequate power ahead of the storm. The Republican governor has put much of the blame for the outages (pictured on February 15) on ERCOT and called for investigations The resignations were disclosed the same day ERCOT was hit with a proposed class action lawsuit in a Texas court by customers who claim they lost power and drinkable water because of its failure to ensure the grid could function properly despite the bad weather. There have been dozens of deaths linked to the severe cold and the state has launched investigations into what caused power generators, electrical transmission systems to shut. At the peak, more than 4.3 million people in the state were without power. Texas Governor Greg Abbott welcomed the resignations, noting ERCOT has assured it had adequate power ahead of the storm. The Republican governor has put much of the blame for the outages on ERCOT and called for investigations. 'The lack of preparedness and transparency at ERCOT is unacceptable, and I welcome these resignations,' Abbott said in a statement. 'The State of Texas will continue to investigate ERCOT and uncover the full picture of what went wrong, and we will ensure that the disastrous events of last week are never repeated,' the governor added. Traffic is sparse on the snow-covered Interstate 45 near The Woodlands Parkway following an overnight snowfall in The Woodlands, Texas, on February 15. The bad weather knocked out power to more than 4 million people The problems were wider than ERCOT, including power plants that were knocked offline by the extreme cold and natural gas producers didn't protect wellheads from freezing But the problems were wider than ERCOT, including power plants that were knocked offline by the extreme cold and natural gas producers didn't protect wellheads from freezing. ERCOT president Bill Magness has said Texas' power grid - which is uniquely isolated from the rest of the US - was on the brink of collapse in the early hours of February 15 as power plants froze in the cold and a record demand for electricity to heat homes overwhelmed the system. He has defended the outages as a necessity, while Abbott has accused ERCOT of misleading Texas about the readiness of the grid as the storm approached. After ERCOT removed board members' information from the website, Magness conceded it was public information in a call last week with reporters but did not describe the nature of the threats. 'It was a security, safety idea,' Magness said. The resignations are effective Wednesday, a day before Texas lawmakers are set to begin hearings over the outages in the state Capitol. Historic snowfall and single-digit temperatures in Texas last week left millions without power and water for days. The storm was part of any icy blast across the Deep South that is blamed for at least 80 deaths. In an interview with a Russian media outlet, President Assad has said that Syria will not enter peace negotiations with Israel, unless it returns occupied lands writes SANA. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said during an interview aired on Thursday that regaining occupied Syrian territories is the major precondition for peace negotiations with Israel. Assad made the remarks during an interview with Russias Rossiya Segodnya news agency. Syria can establish normal relations with Israel only when we regain our land, he stressed. However, we have seen no Israeli official who is ready to move one step forward towards peace, the Syrian president said. Following is the full text of the interview, as published by SANA. Question 1: Mr. President, thank you very much for giving us this opportunity to have this interview at these days when we remember that five years ago the Russian assistance came to Syria. So, after five years of the Russian military operation, nowadays can you say that the war in Syria now is over? President Assad: No, definitely not. As long as you have terrorists occupying some areas of our country and committing different kinds of crimes and assassinations and other crimes, its not over, and I think their supervisors are keen to make it continue for a long time. Thats what we believe. Question 2: And what moments of heroism of the Russians do you recall and keep in your heart? Which of them do you consider worth telling to your grandchildren, lets say? President Assad: There are so many, and I remember some of them, of course. After five years of this cooperation between the Syrian and the Russian army in a vicious war, I think heroism is becoming a collective act; its not individual, its not only a few cases of heroism that you remember. For example, if you think about military aircraft pilots the air force, Russian pilots kept flying over the terrorists on a daily basis, risking their lives, and you had a few aircrafts that had been shot down by the terrorists. If you talk about the other officers, they are supporting the Syrian army not in the rear lines, but in the front lines and as a consequence you had martyrs. What Im going to tell my grandchildren someday is not only about this heroism, but Im also going to talk about these common values that we have in both our armies that made us brothers during this war; these noble values, faithful to their causes, defending civilians, defending the innocent. Many things to talk about in this war. Question 3: And what moment does symbolize for you a turning point during this conflict, during this war? President Assad: Its been now nearly ten years since the war started, so we have many turning points that I can mention, not only one. The first is in 2013 when we started liberating many areas, especially the middle of Syria, from al-Nusra. Then in 2014, it was in the other direction when ISIS appeared suddenly with American support and they occupied a very important part of Syria and Iraq at the same time; this is when the terrorists started occupying other areas, because ISIS was able to distract the Syrian Army from fulfilling its mission in liberating the western part of Syria. Then the other turning point was when the Russians came to Syria in 2015 and we started liberating together many areas. In that stage, after the Russians came to Syria to support the Syrian Army, Id say the turning point was to liberate the eastern part of Aleppo; this is where the liberation of other areas in Syria started from that point. It was important because of the importance of Aleppo, and because it was the beginning of the liberation the large-scale liberation, that continued later to Damascus, to the rest of Aleppo recently, and other areas in the eastern part of Syria and the southern part. So, these are the main turning points. If you put them together, all of them are strategic and all of them changed the course of this war. Question 4: I now will turn to some actual news, and we in Russia follow what now is happening in the region of the Armenian and Azerbaijanian conflict, and definitely Turkey plays a role there. Is it negative or positive, that is not for me to judge, but I would like to ask you about Turkeys and Erdogans policies. So, in recent years, Turkey has been trying to maximize its international influence. We all see its presence in Libya, its intervention into Syria, territorial disputes with Greece, and the now open support to Azerbaijan. What do you think about that kind of behavior of Ankara and Erdogan personally, and should the international community pay more attention to this sort of neo-Othmanism. President Assad: Lets be blunt and clear; Erdogan has supported terrorists in Syria, and hes been supporting terrorists in Libya, and he was the main instigator and initiator of the recent conflict that has been going on in Nagorno-Karabakh between Azerbaijan and Armenia. So, I would sum his behavior as dangerous, for different reasons. First of all, because it reflects the Muslim Brotherhood behavior; Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist extremist group. Second, because hes creating war in different areas to distract his own public opinion in Turkey from focusing on his behavior inside Turkey, especially after his scandalous relations with ISIS in Syria; everybody knows that ISIS used to sell Syrian oil through Turkey under the umbrella of the American air forces and of course the involvement of the Turks in selling this oil. So, this is his goal, and this is dangerous. So, whether the international community should be aware or not, the word international community in reality is only a few countries: the great powers and rich countries, and lets call them the influencers on the political arena. The majority of this international community is complicit with Turkey in supporting the terrorists. So, they know what Turkey is doing, they are happy about what Turkey is doing, and Turkey is an arm for those countries in fulfilling their policies and dreams in this region. So, no, we cannot bet on the international community at all. You can bet on the international law, but it doesnt exist because theres no institution to implement the international law. So, we have to depend on ourselves in Syria and on the support of our friends. Question 5: So, more about this conflict. There were reports that some terrorists from the groups that were fighting previously in Syria are now being transferred to this conflict zone between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Can you confirm that? Do you have any information about fighters going from Syria to? President Assad: We definitely can confirm it, not because we have evidence, but sometimes if you dont have evidence you have indicators. Turkey used terrorists coming from different countries in Syria. They used the same method in Libya; they used Syrian terrorists in Libya, maybe with other nationalities. So, its self-evident and very probable that they are using that method in Nagorno-Karabakh, because as I said earlier, they are the ones who started this problem, this conflict; they encouraged this conflict. They want to achieve something and theyre going to use the same method. So, we can say for sure that theyve been using Syrian and other nationalities of terrorists in Nagorno-Karabakh. Question 6: Lets turn now to the relations between our countries, Russia and Syria. Are there any plans for your contacts or meetings with President Putin? President Assad: We have regular contact, mainly over the phone, whenever something new happens or whenever there is a need for these conversations. Of course, were going to talk in the future, were going to meet in the future, but that depends on the political situation regarding Syria. And as you know now because of the Coronavirus the whole world is paralyzed, so in the near future I think the conversation will be on the phone. Question 7: And will you raise the question of the new credits for Syria? For new loans? President Assad: In our economic situation, its very important to seek loans, but at the same time, you shouldnt take this step without being able to pay back the loan. Otherwise its going to be a burden, and its going to be a debt. So, it has two aspects. Talking about loans is in our minds, and we discussed it with our Russian counterparts, but we have to prepare for such a step before taking it seriously, or practically, lets say. Question 8: Recently, the delegation from Russia came, and Vice Prime Minister Borisov was here. Is now Syria interested in buying anti-aircraft systems like S-400 or demanding for additional S-300? President Assad: Actually, we started a plan for upgrading our army two years ago, and its self-evident that were going to do this upgrade in cooperation with the Russian Ministry of Defense, because for decades now, our army depends fully on Russian armaments. But there are priorities, its not necessarily the missiles, maybe you have other priorities now regarding the conflict on the ground. So, theres a full-scale plan, but we have to move according to these priorities. Usually we dont talk about the details of our military plans, but in general, as I said, its upgrading the army in every aspect of the military field. Question 9: You definitely follow the presidential campaign in the United States. And do you hope that the new US President, regardless of the name of the winner, will review sanctions policies towards Syria? President Assad: We dont usually expect presidents in the American elections, we only expect CEOs; because you have a board, this board is made of the lobbies and the big corporates like banks and armaments and oil, etc. So, what you have is a CEO, and this CEO doesnt have the right or the authority to review; he has to implement. And thats what happened to Trump when he became president after the elections Journalist: He used to be CEO for many years before. President Assad: Exactly! And he is a CEO anyway. He wanted to follow or pursue his own policy, and he was about to pay the price you remember the impeachment issue. He had to swallow every word he said before the elections. So, thats why I said you dont expect a president, you only expect a CEO. If you want to talk about changing the policy, you have one board the same board will not change its policy. The CEO will change but the board is still the same, so dont expect anything. Question 10: Who are this board? Who are these people? President Assad: As I said, this board is made up of the lobbies, so they implement whatever they want, and they control the Congress and the others, and the media, etc. So, theres an alliance between those different self-vested interest corporations in the US. Question 11: So, Trump pledged to withdraw American troops from Syria but he failed to do that. Now hes been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Do you think if he manages to bring American troops home, is he going to be awarded that Nobel Peace Prize? President Assad: Hes nominated? Journalism: He is nominated. President Assad: I didnt know about this. If you want to talk about nomination for peace, peace is not only about withdrawing your troops; its a step, its a good step, and its a necessary step. But peace is about your policy, its about your behavior. It means to stop occupying land, to stop toppling governments just because they are not with you, to stop creating chaos in different areas of the world. Peace is to follow the international law and to support the United Nations Charter, etc. This is peace, this is when you deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama had this prize; he had just been elected and he hadnt done anything. The only achievement he had at that time maybe, was that he moved from his house to the White House, and he was given a Nobel Prize. So, they would give it to Trump for something similar. I dont know what is it, but definitely not peace. Question 12: So, Trump acknowledged recently that he intended to eliminate you personally, and that the Pentagon Chief Mattis persuaded him not to do so. Did you know about that at that time, and were some measures undertaken to prevent it? President Assad: Assassination is American modus operandi, thats what they do all the time, for decades, everywhere, in different areas in this world, this is not something new. So, you have to keep it in your mind that this kind of plan has always existed for different reasons. We have to expect this in our situation in Syria, with this conflict, with the Americans, they occupy our land, and they are supporting the terrorists. Its expected; even if you dont have any information, it should be self-evident. How do you prevent it? Its not about the incident per se its not about this plan regarding this person or this president, its about the behavior. Nothing will deter the United States from committing these kinds of vicious actions or acts unless theres an international balance where the United States cannot get away with its crimes. Otherwise, its going to continue these kinds of acts in different areas, and nothing would stop it. Question 13: And were there any other attempts on you during your presidency? President Assad: I didnt hear of any attempt, but as I said, its self-evident that you have many attempts, or maybe, plans to be more precise. I mean, lets say, were they active or on hold? Nobody knows. Question 14: Now I turn back to the situation in Syria, and will you run for presidency in the year 2021? President Assad: Its still early to talk about it because we still have a few months. I can take this decision at the beginning of next year. Question 15: Interesting. And have you congratulated Mr. Alexander Lukashenko with his inauguration in Belarus, and do you probably see similarities between political technologies that were used by the UK and the US to support Belarusian opposition, and those methods that were used against Syria and against the Syrian state in information war? President Assad: I did send a congratulation letter to President Lukashenko and thats normal. With regards to whats happening in Belarus: regardless of the similarities between the two countries Syria and Belarus or the differences, regardless of whether you have a real conflict or an artificial one in a country, the West as long as it hasnt changed its hegemonic policy around the world is going to interfere anywhere in the world. If you have a real problem in your country, whether its small or big, its going to interfere. And if its domestic, theyre going to make it international just to interfere and meddle in your affairs. If you dont have problems, theyre going to do their best to create problems and to make them international again in order to meddle in your affairs. This is their policy. So, its not about whats happening in Belarus. Like any other country, Syria, Belarus, your country, every country has their own problems. Does the West have the right to interfere or not? Thats what we have to oppose. So, going back to your question, yes, its the same behavior, its the same strategy, its the same tactics. The only difference is the branding of the products, different headlines. They use certain headlines for Russia, others for Venezuela, another one for Syria, and so on. So, its not about Belarus; its about the behavior of the West and its about their strategy for the future, because they think with the rise of Russia, with the rise of China, with the rise of other powers around the world, this is an existential threat for them, so the only way to oppose or to face this threat is by creating chaos around the world. Question 16: So, you have already mentioned the Coronavirus and it affected all humankind. Was someone from the government infected, or maybe you personally? President Assad: Thank God, no. And I dont think anyone from our government has been infected. Question 17: Thats good news. And would you personally like to take the Russian vaccine? President Assad: Of course, in these circumstances anyone would love to be vaccinated against this dangerous virus. But I think its not available for the international market yet, but were going to discuss it with the Russian authority when its available internationally to have vaccines for the Syrian market. Its very important. Journalist: Yes, and Russians have already suggested that it can be available for our international partners President Assad: They said in November it could be available. Question 18: So, you will be asking for the Russian vaccine? President Assad: Yes, definitely, its a necessity at these times. Question 19: And in what amount? President Assad: That depends on how much is available and we have to discuss the amount that we need with the health authority in Syria. Question 20: So, you are going to have negotiations in detail with the Russian authorities. President Assad: Definitely, of course. Everybody in Syria is asking about the Russian vaccine and when its going to be available. Question 21: Now, on the backdrop of the pandemic outbreak, does the public demand to change the constitution still exist? Because Coronavirus created a new paradigm in the world, and certainly in politics. So, the problems and the Geneva talks cast doubts on the question whether the need to change the constitution still exists. What do you think about that? President Assad: No, theres no relation between the Coronavirus and the constitution. We changed the constitution in 2012 and now we are discussing the constitution in the Geneva talks. We had a round of negotiations nearly one month ago. So, the Coronavirus delayed those rounds, but it didnt stop them. Ultimately, the Geneva negotiations are a political game, its not what the public the Syrians, are focused on. The Syrian people are not thinking about the constitution, nobody is talking about it. Their concerns are regarding the reforms we need to enact and the policies we need to change to ensure their needs are met. This is what we are discussing at the moment and where our concerns are, and where the government is focusing its efforts. Question 22: So, you say that the Geneva talks should continue, and the constitution on the agenda, and still there should be more discussions? President Assad: Yes, of course. We started and were going to continue in the next few weeks. Question 23: Will Syria decide to conduct a trial against the White Helmets, and do you think that there should be a sort of international investigation on their activities, probably under the UN umbrella? President Assad: When there is a crime, you dont take the knife or the weapon to trial, you send the criminal to trial. In this case, the White Helmets are just the tools or the means the weapon thats been used for terrorism. They were created by the United Kingdom, supported by the United States and of course France and other Western countries, and used directly by Turkey. All these regimes are the real father and mother of the White Helmets, so they have to be held accountable even before the White Helmets themselves. Now, the question is do we have international laws to pursue such procedures? No, we dont. Otherwise, the United States wouldnt get away with its crimes in Iraq for example, in Yemen, or in different areas. Not only the United States, but also France, the UK and different countries, and the US in Syria. But you dont have these institutions that could implement such laws, as I mentioned earlier. So, no, we have to focus more on the perpetrators, the real perpetrators, the real supervisors. They are the Western countries and their puppets in the region. Question 24: But should probably any step be undertaken concretely toward the White Helmets? Because they are still active? President Assad: Yes, of course, they are criminals. Im not saying anything different. Before they were the White Helmets, they were al-Nusra; there are videos and images of all those criminals, so they have to be tried in Syria. But when you talk about the White Helmets as an institution, its made by the West. So, they are criminals as individuals, but the White Helmets is a Western institution an extremist terrorist organization based on al-Nusra organization. Question 25: You say that the presence of the US and Turkish army in Syria is illegal. What will you do to stop it? President Assad: It is an occupation and, in this situation, we have to do two things: the first is to eliminate the excuse that theyve been using for this occupation, which is the terrorists in this case ISIS. Most of the world now knows that ISIS was created by the Americans and is supported by them; they give them their missions, like any American troops. You have to eliminate the excuse, so, eliminating the terrorists in Syria is priority number one for us. After that, if they, the Americans and the Turks, dont leave, the natural thing that will happen is popular resistance. This is the only way; they wont leave through discussion or through international law since it doesnt exist. So, you dont have any other means but resistance and this is what happened in Iraq. What made the Americans withdraw in 2007? It was because of the popular resistance in Iraq. Question 26: So, what do you think about the agreement between the US and the Syrian Kurds in terms of extracting oil? And will you undertake any measures against it? President Assad: This is robbery, and the only way to stop this robbery is to liberate your land. If you dont liberate it, no measure will stop them from doing this because they are thieves, and you cannot stop a thief unless you put him in prison or you deter him somehow by isolating him from the area where he can commit his robbery. So, the same thing has to be done with those thieves. They have to be expelled from this region; this is the only way. And the Syrian government should control every part of Syria, so the situation will return to normal. Question 27: How do you assess the situation in Idlib? How is Syria going to resolve the problem of expelling terrorists from there, and how many of them fight now there, how many terrorists, to your assessment? President Assad: Since 2013, we adopted a certain, lets say, methodology in dealing with these areas where the terrorists control mainly the civilians or the cities. We give them the chance to give up their armaments and in return they are granted amnesty from the government; that has succeeded in many areas in Syria. But if they dont seek reconciliation, we have to attack militarily, and thats what happened in every area we have liberated since 2013. This methodology applies to the areas where there were national reconciliations and the fighters were Syrian. However, Idlib is a different case; most of the foreigners in Syria are concentrated in Idlib, so they either go to Turkey this is where they came from, or came through, or they go back to their countries or they die in Syria. Question 28: In Europe? President Assad: Mainly in Europe. Some of them came from Russia, from Arab countries, from so many countries around the world. All those Jihadist extremists wanted to come and fight in Syria. Question 29: So, now this area is under the, lets say, the supervision and the common operations by Russians, by Turks, sometimes by Americans. Do you see that this cooperation is efficient, and how this experience can be used in the future? President Assad: No, I dont think its efficient for a simple reason: if it was efficient, we wouldnt have gone to war recently in many areas in Aleppo and Idlib. Because the Turkish regime was supposed to convince the terrorists in that area to withdraw and pave the way for the Syrian Army and the Syrian government and institutions to take control, but they didnt. Every time they give the same commitment; they havent fulfilled any of their promises or commitments. So, no, I wouldnt say this cooperation was effective, but lets see. They still have another chance to withdraw the terrorists north of the M4 in Idlib. This is their latest commitment in agreement with the Russian side, but they havent fulfilled it yet. So, lets wait and see. Question 30: Do you consider the possibility of negotiations with Israel in terms of, you know, stopping the hostile activities? And is it possible that in the future Syria will establish diplomatic relations with Israel, as several Arab countries did recently? President Assad: Our position is very clear since the beginning of peace talks in the nineties, so nearly three decades ago, when we said peace for Syria is about rights. Our right is our land. We can only have normal relations with Israel when we have our land back. Its very simple. So, it is possible when Israel is ready and Israel is not ready. It has never been ready; weve never seen any official in the Israeli regime who is ready to move one step towards peace. So, theoretically yes, but practically, so far, the answer is no. Question 31: So, this news from other Arab countries who have established recently, I thought probably can be an impetus for Syria and Israel to start negotiations, but as I understand there are no negotiations between your countries underway at the time. President Assad: No, there is none, nothing at all. Question 32: You have already mentioned the enforcement of your armed forces. What are the obstacles for it? Do you see any obstacles for enforcing your armed forces? President Assad: When you talk about big projects, you always have obstacles, but you can overcome these obstacles; nothing is impossible. Sometimes it could be financial, sometimes it could be about priorities, sometimes it could be about the situation on the ground. This is the only obstacle. Otherwise, no, we dont have any obstacles. We are moving forward in that regard, but it takes time. Its a matter of time, nothing more. Question 33: Some international players say that Iranian withdrawal from Syria is a precondition for economic restoration of the country and cooperation with the Syrian government, of the Western governments and probably the businesses. Will Syria agree with this condition, and will it ask Iran to withdraw, if ever? President Assad: First of all, we dont have Iranian troops and thats very clear. They support Syria, they send their military experts, they work with our troops on the ground, they exist with the Syrian Army. But lets take one practical example: nearly a year ago, the Americans told the Russians to convince the Iranians that they should be 80 kilometers away from the border with the Golan Heights that is occupied by the Israelis. Although there were no Iranian troops, the Iranians were very flexible, they said ok, no Iranian personnel will be south of that line and the Americans said that if we can agree upon this, we are going to withdraw from the occupied eastern part of Syria on the borders with Iraq called al-Tanf. Nothing happened, they didnt withdraw. So, the Iranian issue is a pretext for occupying Syrian land and supporting terrorists. Its used as a mask to cover their real intentions. The only way for them to implement what they are saying is when Syria becomes a puppet state to the United States. Thats what they want, nothing else. Everything else they talk about is just lies, false flag allegations. So, I dont think theres any real solution with the Americans as long as they dont want to change their behavior. Question 34: And the last question: is there anything that you are proud of, and anything that you are sorry for doing or not doing? President Assad: During the war? Journalist: During your presidency. President Assad: You have to differentiate between the policies and between the implementation. In terms of policies, from the very beginning we have said were going to listen to the Syrian people and thats why we reformed the constitution in 2012. We have said were going to fight the terrorists and we are still doing that after ten years. We have said that we have to preserve our independence national independence and thats what we are fighting for, and we have to make alliance with our friends. So, regarding these policies, I think we were right. Not trusting the West? We were right on many fronts. In terms of implementation, its about the tactics, its about many things that you may say were wrong. For example: were the reconciliations wrong? Because in some areas those people who had amnesty, didnt go back to the rule of law. So, you can say this is wrong, but in reality, those reconciliations were very important steps. I dont think that in the policies we were wrong. You have many mistakes regarding the implementation anywhere and sometimes on a daily basis. Journalist: Ok, Mr. President, our time is running out, so again, thanks a lot for this frank and lengthy interview. President Assad: Thank you. Thank you for coming to Syria. Journalist: Thank you very much. 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. Sorry, no valid subscriptions were found for this Publication. Please select from an option below to start a subscription. SUBSCRIBE TODAY! 24 Hour Access 63% of Biden voters reject that God is 'all powerful,' 'perfect and just' creator: survey Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A new post-election survey reveals that a majority of those who voted for President Joe Biden don't believe "God is the all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect and just creator" who rules over everything in Heaven and Earth today. The Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University released the fourth in-depth report about its 2020 Post-Election Survey last week. The survey was conducted between Nov. 4 and 16, 2020. The latest installment of the survey focuses on the views of Biden's voters as compared to the views of Americans who voted for former President Donald Trump as well as voters and adults as a whole. More votes were counted in the 2020 presidential election than any other in U.S. history. Former Vice President Joe Biden got over 81 million votes, the most votes for any presidential candidate, to President Trumps 74 million, the second-most votes in an election. Their totals also broke the record of votes cast for former President Barack Obama, who received 69.5 million votes in 2008. Biden voters make up a plurality of those surveyed by the Cultural Research Center, accounting for 426 of the 1,000 respondents. Measured at 387, Trump voters were slightly less represented in the sample. While 65% of Biden voters describe themselves as Christian, most (56%) said they see themselves as "spiritual but not religious" and 57% said they were not "deeply committed to practicing" their religion. Additionally, most of the Biden voters held views that were at odds with the teachings of Christianity. For example, 68% of Biden voters believe that "The Holy Spirit is not a living entity but is a symbol of God's presence, power, or purity." Sixty-three percent of Biden voters rejected the notion that "God is the all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect and just creator of the universe who rules that universe today" and 72% said that they believe that "a person who is generally good, or does enough good things for others, will earn a place in Heaven." Only 30% agreed that the Bible "is the actual or inspired Word of God and contains no errors." Seventy-five percent of Biden's voters cite something other than the Bible as their most trusted source of moral guidance. Most Biden voters who fit into this category identified their feelings, experiences, friends and family as their sources of moral guidance. Biden voters were more likely than adults in general to believe that "having faith matters more than which faith you have," with 79% of Biden voters and 74% of all adults agreeing with that statement. Biden voters were less likely to identify as Christian than adults as a whole and Trump voters. Seventy-five percent of Biden voters believed that "identifying moral truth is up to each individual; there are no moral absolutes that apply to everyone, all the time." Among all adults, 67% said the same. When asked if they believe that "all religious faiths are of equal value," 68% of Biden voters answered in the affirmative compared to 62% of all adults and 56% of Trump voters. On social issues, Biden voters held divergent views from the adult population as a whole as well as their Trump-voting counterparts. Regarding the issue of abortion, a supermajority (60%) of Biden voters believe that the Bible is ambiguous on the matter, along with a narrow majority of adults as a whole (51%) and a minority of Trump voters (41%). Forty-two percent of Biden voters agree that "the marriage of one man to one woman is God's only acceptable plan for humanity, for all cultures on earth" while majorities of all adults (54%) and Trump voters (69%) believe that God's plan for humanity requires the upholding of traditional marriage and the nuclear family. The idea that only those who have confessed their sins and accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior will go to Heaven when they die has 15% support among Biden voters, compared to 24% of all adults and 34% of Trump voters. Thirty-seven percent of Biden voters see God as "the all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect and just creator of the universe who rules that universe today" while 47% of all adults and 60% of Trump voters hold the same view of God. It also found that 31% of Biden voters are active in a Christian church compared to 42% of Trump voters. The share of those who identify as theologically conservative stands at 25% among Biden voters and 42% among Trump voters. One-quarter (25%) of Biden's voters accept the teaching that "absolute moral truths exist and are defined in the Bible," as opposed to 43% of Trump voters. The report also included data about the religious demographics of the supporters of the two major presidential candidates. A plurality of Biden's voters (29%) "don't believe in God/care about God/think God's existence is knowable" while 27% attend a Protestant church, 21% attend a Catholic church, 13% "attend a Christian church, type undetermined" and 9% are non-Christians. Meanwhile, those who attend a Protestant church constitute 42% of Trump's supporters, while Catholics made up 21%, and those who "attend a Christian church, type undetermined" were 13%, non-Christians were 7%, and those who "don't believe in God/care about God/think God's existence is knowable" comprised the rest of his voters at 18%. Overall, Protestant voters surveyed favored Trump over Biden by a 14-point margin (47% to 33%), while the so-called "Don'ts" faith segment preferred Biden to Trump 45% to 25%. George Barna, the director of the Arizona Christian University's Cultural Research Center who conducted the study, warned: "If our government denies the core principles on which it was founded which were originally derived from the Bible in favor of an inconsistent patchwork of modern philosophical preferences, the result will be chaos, constant disputes, and widespread dissatisfaction." According to Barna, "A strong and thriving society requires a stable foundation of truth on which to make just and appropriate decisions. The more the United States puts distance between itself and its moral and spiritual moorings, the less likely we are to have an effective vibrant government and a healthy and vibrant way of life." Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. New Delhi: The Union Health Ministry has deputed high-level multi-disciplinary teams to as many as 10 states to work closely with the states and UT administration and determine the cause for the recent surge in the number of coronavirus cases. The three-member multidisciplinary teams will be sent to Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Jammu and Kashmir for requisite COVID-19 control measures to break the chain of transmission and to support them in public health measures for targeted COVID response and management, according to the official release. "The Centre has also written to Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab and Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir which have been witnessing a rise in daily COVID cases, along with decreasing proportion of RT-PCR tests and rise in positivity in some districts," the release stated. The health ministry advised states and UTs for regular critical review of the emerging situation with district officials concerned. The Union Health Secretary has also requested the Chief Secretaries of these ten states and UTs to provide time to these high-level central teams to debrief the respective Chief Secretaries at the conclusion of their state visits. The Health Secretary in his letter to seven states like Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab, and Jammu and Kashmir urged them to focus on undertaking aggressive measures to break the chain of transmission and to ensure that RT-PCR testing is increased. "The Centre has reminded the states and UTs that any laxity in implementing stringent measures to curb the spread, especially in view of a new strain of virus observed in certain countries, could compound the situation," the official release read. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 00:56:57|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BENI, DRC, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- At least 24 people were killed in three different attacks that took place overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri, both in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), according to the local authorities source. According to local authorities in Beni, the rebels first attacked the village of Kisima on Tuesday evening and killed eleven civilians and subsequently burned down a few houses. The same assailants later launched an attack near the center of Oicha and shot dead two other civilians before retreating into the surrounding forest. According to civil society in Beni territory, the results of these two attacks are still provisional as some civilians have not been found since the attack on Tuesday. In the neighboring province of Ituri located on the border with the city of Beni, eleven people were killed and a dozen houses burned down on the same Tuesday night during an incursion by another local militia called Congo Patriotic and Integrationist Force in the village of Mugangu, according to the military authorities. According to the army spokesman in Ituri Jules Ngongo, the militiamen armed with rifles and bladed weapons stormed this area located about twenty kilometers from the city of Bunia, before the intervention of the army in the area. Security sources also indicate that the militiamen opened fire on the local population and set 19 houses on fire. The bodies of the populations with heads off were discovered after the withdrawal of the militiamen on the morning of Wednesday. Military officials in the area say they have deployed and launched a pursuit against these rebels by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) and the local militia in Ituri. The ADF-Ugandan rebels operating in the two provinces of Ituri and that of North Kivu have been active in this part of the country for decades and have increased attacks against the civilian population since last year. Enditem Hi Rosie, I can see you're thinking of leaving us,' a customer services adviser called Ann wrote via the live chat service on my broadband provider's website. 'Yes, I've been trying to speak to the call centre but I've been on hold for 42 minutes.' 'I understand that,' came the message back. But did she? Robo helpers: The use of chatbots has become far more widespread as companies struggle to keep up with a surge in enquiries from customers during the pandemic The chances are high that 'Ann' was not a real person and was, instead, a chatbot an automated answering service which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to read written messages, calculate what a customer wants, then answer their questions. Automated chat services are usually accessed via a pop-up on the company's website or through messaging on social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. Live chat channels can be manned by real people, but chatbots are increasingly common. They could be involved in up to 85 per cent of all our customer service interactions with companies, according to U.S. technology firm Gartner. Their use has become far more widespread as companies struggle to keep up with a surge in enquiries from customers during the pandemic, at a time when many have fewer staff manning their call centres due to social distancing rules. Use of live chat soared during each coronavirus lockdown, according to call answering service Moneypenny, which uses real people to man phones and live chat services for thousands of UK businesses. Some firms have even removed details of their email addresses from websites or stopped answering phones, meaning chat is now the only way to get in touch. And that's likely to remain the case beyond the pandemic, as chat services are much cheaper for businesses to run than call centres. When it works well, live chat is quicker than email and easier than making a phone call. Research shows younger customers prefer to use live chat and one U.S. survey found more than half of all consumers prefer contacting customer services via a chatbot if it saves them ten minutes. But another U.S. survey found 86 per cent of customers still prefer to interact with a human - and only 30 per cent believe chatbots make solving problems easier. And nearly half of 5,000 consumers in Europe, the U.S. and Australia surveyed in 2018 said automated chatbots were 'annoying', while 80 per cent said they were 'too impersonal'. One in five would prefer companies stop using them altogether. Something the studies do agree on is that customers are only happy using live chat services if they actually resolve their problems unfortunately, that is often not the case. Sainsbury's chatbot had no sympathy Selina Kindrat Pang, 37, tried to contact Sainsbury's when her grocery delivery went astray but found its Facebook chat function 'useless'. Selina, who is pregnant and shielding, was left 153 out of pocket and with no food for the week for herself, her husband and her three-year-old daughter. Selina Kindrat Pang who is pregnant and shielding, was left 153 out of pocket and with no food for the week for herself, her husband and her daughter (file picture) Instead of finding help, the Sainsbury's chatbot repeatedly sent a message, starting: 'We've been able to identify hundreds of thousands of people for priority delivery...' The student midwife, from Barnet, North London, says: 'It was stressful and upsetting getting the same robotic messages back every time. Sainsbury's failed to deliver any kind of customer service.' Several calls to Sainsbury's also failed to resolve the issue, so Selina bombarded the supermarket with messages on Twitter. She finally got a refund three weeks after the failed delivery. A spokesman said: 'We're in touch with Ms Pang to apologise and have provided a full refund as well as a gesture of goodwill.' Going round in circles 'Chatbots are great at providing quick, simple, factual information,' says Nigel Cannings, co-founder of technology company Intelligent Voice. 'But they are not designed to solve complex problems and complaints that require a little 'out of the box' thinking by a human.' And customers who deal with a chatbot that cannot understand their problems can end up feeling like they're banging their head against a wall. Take parcel courier Hermes, which has come under fire from frustrated customers on social media who claim it takes them in a 'loop' of questions without answering their queries and only provides information that is already available on its website. Twitter users describe the chatbot as 'like [talking to] a brick wall' and 'poorly designed', saying it makes it 'impossible' to speak to a real person. It appears unable to answer the most-asked question by Hermes customers: 'Where is my parcel and why is it delayed?'. Money Mail asked Hermes to comment on the allegations but the company did not reply. Consumers can get even more frustrated when chatbots fail to answer their questions and then prevent them from contacting a real person who might be able to help. Sainsbury's has been accused of having a chatbot that rarely connects shoppers to a human. Ikea's chatbot has regularly come under fire, with customers complaining online it 'doesn't know anything' and is 'the antithesis of artificial intelligence'. Sainsbury's says its chatbot is designed to 'answer frequently asked questions and direct customers to a member of the team where this is needed'. Customers who deal with a chatbot that cannot understand their problems can end up feeling like they're banging their head against a wall Ikea says its chatbot is 'designed to provide simple answers to customers' queries' and there were other ways customers can get in touch, including calling or live chat with a person, if it could not help - though it admitted that these did get full at 'peak periods', despite it taking on more customer service staff since the start of the pandemic. 'Most customers are contacting customer services because they need to actually speak to someone who understands their specific problem - so being fobbed off by an automated chatbot that can only handle simple queries is no use at all,' says Martyn James, of consumer complaints service Resolver. Resolver has handled around half a million complaints since lockdown began, and incredibly more than half - 260,000 - involved customers not being able to call, contact or email a business, including thousands which specifically cited 'chatbots' as part of the problem. 'A lot of customers give up after being sent round in circles by useless chatbots, which, of course, then means the company doesn't have to deal with their complaint. 'Chatbots should only be used to accentuate customer service they should never be a blocker designed to stop people taking things further,' he adds. No human touch? Frustratingly it can be hard to know whether the messages you receive through live chat are sent from a real person or a bot. Businesses use all sorts of tricks to make customer service chatbots seem real, such as giving them a human name and using friendly language, exclamation marks and emojis - which can be all the more infuriating when they fail to answer your questions. In my chat with, 'Ann', for example, she responded to my answers to security questions with 'Cool!', 'Brill!' and 'Thank you very much [with a smiley face emoji]'. Some are programmed to wait a certain number of seconds before sending a message so it looks like a human is typing. Others use artificial intelligence to send more personalised messages to customers who have contacted the service before, such as: 'Good to speak with you again Rosie, how can I help you this time?.' 'Small details like these often put customers at ease and make conversations feel slightly less transactional,' wrote Bruce Hogan, chief executive of technology research firm SoftwarePundit, in a report. But many customers hate it if chatbots pretend to be a real person, says Sarah Cantillon, partner at digital media agency Movement. 'There is nothing more grating than when hoping to speak to a real person, you are confronted with a bot wasting your time with false friendly language - and, worst of all, pretending to be a human,' she adds. She believes chatbots work best if it's clear they are automated and don't try to mislead customers. PS: But sometimes they can make life simple First-time buyer Ela Bayraktar, 26, used chat services to take out a mortgage on her flat in Wrexham Some customers, however, find it easier to deal with online chat robot or not. First-time buyer Ela Bayraktar, 26, used chat services to take out a mortgage on her flat in Wrexham and found it easier than speaking over the phone. Ela, a marketing executive, bought her home in autumn 2020 and didn't have time to wait for Covid-19 restrictions to end so she could see a mortgage provider face-to-face. Instead, she applied through online mortgage broker Habito using its live chat service. She first entered some basic answers into an automated form but was then connected to a real mortgage broker on live chat who helped her apply. She was able to upload all the necessary documents online and the broker carried out identity checks over live chat and email. 'I didn't need speak to anyone on the phone at any point in the process - it was all on chat as it was so quick and easy,' she says. Even when live chat is manned by real people, often they are still using chatbot technology to save typing time. Chatbots can assist customer service advisers with basic checks including security details, or sending holding messages such as 'Please wait while I check for you'. All this makes it quicker for advisers to deal with each customer, so they can handle multiple queries at once - up to ten times as many as email or phone, according to Moneypenny. So even if you are speaking to a real person on live chat, it's likely they are assisted by a chatbot. Some responses will be automated and you're likely to be competing for their attention with a handful of other customers at the same time. Too few staff trying to handle a large volume of enquiries is likely to be why a Moneypenny survey found nine in ten customers have had delays starting a live chat conversation since lockdown began. Other common complaints include the conversation cutting out or restarting if you don't respond quickly enough - sometimes within just a few minutes. This can be particularly difficult for disabled or elderly people who need longer to type or think about answers. So when do chatbots work? 'If you are looking to find out simple information like what your balance is or how you pay a bill, chatbots cut out the need to interact with a human,' says Nigel Cannings. 'They're also good at gathering information that can be later assessed by a human.' Ms Cantillon from Movement agrees bots can help save time for both the customer and the adviser when it comes to 'tasks that require form filling - such as booking plane or train tickets and hotels'. She cites the example of ChatBotlr from the Marriott Hotel Group, which answers simple questions from guests via Facebook Messenger, text or the messaging service Slack. Another positive example is shoe store Foot Locker, whose live chat tells users they are talking to a bot, asks three simple questions and if it can't solve the problem connects customers to a real person. Having a written record of customer service conversations can also help consumers - you can copy and paste any chat conversation into a document on your computer to save for future reference. This can prove invaluable if you later need evidence of what was discussed, for example, when making a complaint. Chatbots are also getting more sophisticated - and more human. Mr Cannings says the newest technology can pick up on customers' emotions - and detect fraudsters. And if you can't stand talking to a chatbot, there may be a way around it. Typing 'Can I speak to a human?', reportedly connects you to a real person in Amazon's customer services chat, for example. Some chatbots may connect you to a person if they detect you are writing angry messages. But all of this only helps us as consumers if chatbots are used to supplement, rather than replace, human customer service. 'A good chatbot should identify if it can help in no more than three questions - and if it can't, it needs to connect you to someone who can,' says Mr James. 'Today's chatbots might be able to answer simple questions but they can't address the emotional complexity that comes with a complaint.' moneymail@dailymail.co.uk CAMBRIDGE, MA / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / IIOT-OXYS, Inc. (OTC PINK:ITOX) announced the execution of a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with a New England based biotechnology start-up. Cliff Emmons, CEO of IIOT-OXYS, Inc., stated, "This customer manufactures novel medical device implants, which are currently undergoing clinical trials. The company has been operating for over a decade and received significant funding within the past year to fund operations, clinical trials, and regulatory approval of their devices. Our customer engagement process consists of several steps, the first being the execution of an NDA, which then allows us to quickly define a problem statement of interest to the client, which then leads to a definition of scope of work for the first contract. We are very pleased to be working with this innovative company that can leverage our technology to ensure the quality and productivity of their manufacturing processes. We look forward to working with their domain experts to see where our edge computing and machine learning algorithms will add the most value to their biomanufacturing products and processes." "This is the second such agreement within the past two months, which continues to represent an expansion of our current pharmaceutical intelligent manufacturing segments. As previously disclosed, in Q1 of 2020 we successfully completed a pilot program with a Fortune 500 Pharma company, and signed a collaboration agreement with Aingura IIoT, S.L. These two accomplishments have allowed the Company and its partner to prepare use cases to renew engagements with all of the Company's earlier prospects and reach out to new ones. Our sales and marketing efforts continue to result in expanding our key targeted markets and serving a diverse group of clients. We expect these agreements to lead to new business in due time," continued Mr. Emmons. Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements that reflect Management's current views about future events and financial performance. Forward-looking statements often contain words such as 'expects,' 'anticipates,' 'intends,' or 'believes.' Our forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results and events to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties that could adversely affect us include, without limitation, the loss of major customers, our failure to obtain new contracts, our inability to patent products or processes, our infringement of patents held by others, our inability to finance our business and the other risks and uncertainties that are discussed in our most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements in this news release are made only as of the date of this news release. We undertake no obligation to update our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. About Us IIOT-OXYS, Inc. is a technology company at the intersection of IIoT, AI & Machine Learning, Edge Computing and Manufacturing Operations. We provide actionable mission-critical insights for the Medical/Pharmaceutical, Manufacturing, Agriculture, Defense, and Structural Health, and other industries. IIOT-OXYS, Inc. edge computing open-source hardware and proprietary ML algorithms employ our Minimally-Invasive Load Monitoring (MILM) technology to simply gather data and gain insights to monitor, scope, move from preventive to predictive maintenance, and even optimize development and manufacturing processes. For additional information visit www.oxyscorp.com CONTACT: Clifford L. Emmons CEO IIOT-OXYS, Inc. contact@oxyscorp.com www.oxyscorp.com SOURCE: IIOT-OXYS, Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631693/IIOT-OXYS-Inc-Enters-into-NDA-with-New-England-Based-Biotech-Start-Up Every comment uttered by politicians on schools returning is being closely scrutinised. They must know this, so it was incredible to have Stephen Donnelly on Claire Byrne Live saying negotiations on what classes were returning were still ongoing, when hours earlier it had been referred to as a done deal. I went to bed early so missed the drama, but when I switched on my phone yesterday morning it took me a while to catch up on the angry messages and discover actually everything was OK: Donnelly had clarified it on Twitter, and the phased reopening was on track. Actually I should make a clarification myself, because everything is far from OK. Emotions are running high on the schools issue because most secondary pupils wont return until April 12. This means that after a disrupted 2020 these children will have had just six weeks of learning in their classroom between Christmas and September. This is going to have shocking implications. How could it not? It makes perfect sense for younger children to go back as soon as possible; the early years in secondary are just as crucial. My mum is a retired teacher and she always maintains the Junior Cert is so important as it sets the tone for future learning. The Irish Youth Foundations (IYF) mission is to level the playing field between children living in disadvantage and their peers. Read More Sarah Edmonds of the IYF tells me second year is such an important juncture for engagement. In normal times it is challenging to keep many vulnerable children engaged with school and a positive transition to secondary school is a crucial time, with second year in particular very important. We dont have any hard research yet on the fallout, but we fear it could be a lot worse than expected, she said It is scary how our youth workers have lost contact with so many children and young people they support as a result of the pandemic. There are 16-year-olds who will now be working with their youth worker and school completion officer in a whole different way. It will no longer be attempting to keep them in school, but it will be now responding and supporting them when they get into trouble, she said. In addition, there are thousands of children with additional needs in mainstream classes who have not yet returned despite being promised they would be prioritised. Why promise one thing and then turn on the radio silence? If you are looking to upset people this is a sure way to do so. A parent told me her school had rung her to say her son, who has autism, was going back only to be told a week later the deal is off. That caused the most distress in her house. She is now delighted her child will return on March 1, but feels sorry for so many other parents who do not have this hope. Over-promising and under-delivering has not just been limited to the schools as the vaccination communication has also caused a lot of anger. People are frustrated and sloppy communications will upset them. Tempers fray because parents are worried about their kids and they feel distrustful of commitments made. Another issue upsetting parents is the rolling reviews of the impact of reopening after each phase. So what does this mean that the next phase wont be let back if numbers rise? Many parents also tell me they are letting their teenagers hang out with their friends now anyway as the alternative is for them to be left sitting in their room playing video games all day. They see it as the lesser of two evils. Go to a park or a playground and you can see the playdates have ramped up again with younger children. Research already tells us the pandemic has negatively impacted the mental health of children and young people and school closures cause impairment to the physical and mental health of children. A systematic review concluded that school closures as part of broader social distancing measures are associated with a range of emotional, behavioural and restlessness/inattention problems and overall psychological well-being. Ask parents what they think of the above and many will confirm that they have these issues in their homes. We need to take a helicopter view and try to protect everyone in this pandemic are we not in this together? Every single death from Covid is heartbreaking and everything must be done to protect our elderly who are most at risk. But there must be a better way to manage this than keeping children out of school. Could we follow other countries and bring back secondary kids part-time? To leave so many of them out of school until mid April is playing a dangerous game. The Tanaiste said that people had grounds for optimism despite facing the strictest restrictions for another six weeks. Tanaisate Leo Varadkar has said there are grounds for optimism for the Irish people despite the country remaining in the highest Level 5 restrictions until at least April 5. Last night, Government revealed their revised plan for living with Covid-19 which involves a cautious and phased approach to reopening society, which will see businesses closed for another six weeks at least. Mr Varadkar acknowledged that people were depressed, anxious and fatigued due to the length of the current lockdown, but said there was cause for hope. There are grounds for optimism; this virus is in retreat. Its in retreat around the world, the number of new cases every day across the world has halved in the last month or so. Read More The number of cases in Ireland every day is down considerably. The number of people in hospitals and ICU are all falling and that is due to what people have been doing, he told RTEs Morning Ireland. The Tanaiste said people need to stick with the plan for the next number of weeks to drive numbers down to much lower than they are now, and also to give hospitals a rest and the breathing space they need. Mr Varadkar admitted that the governments commitment to having 60pc of adults fully vaccinated by June was based on certain assumptions such as supply and also authorisation being granted for use of Johnson & Johnsons vaccine. A fifth vaccine, CureVac, may also become available later this year which isnt factored into the plan, giving Government possible headroom in their rollout projections. The Tanaiste said the Government is confident that Ireland will go from about 100,000 vaccines a week to 250,000 per week in April; That is a huge scale-up. Mr Varadkar said that if everyone over 60, and everyone under 60 with a chronic condition is vaccinated, that is actually 98pc of the job in terms of deaths and hospitalisations. We may really see the vaccine making a difference in people getting sick and deaths as opposed to cases, in May or June. That could put us in a position to make decisions that we cant make now, the Tanaiste said. Government will reassess all the metrics of the disease in early April and then assess the situation every three or four weeks with regard to relaxing restrictions or not, the Tanaiste confirmed. Mr Varadkar said the PUP, CRSS and Employee Wage Subsidy schemes were extended until June 30 in an attempt to give people and businesses receiving them security rather than signalling no businesses would be opening before then. He said there were six elements to The Path Ahead document, with the return of schools, childcare and regular healthcare the first port of call. Next week we will see kids in their uniforms walking to school, that is going to lift my spirits. Its a strange thing to lift the spirits but it will be a great thing to see that kind of normality again. The vaccine programme is being sped up, that is going to be really encouraging too, seeing 100,000 people a week getting their vaccine, the Tanaiste said. There are four tests we are going to apply, based on advice from our public health doctors and scientists. The first one is, are case numbers falling, and is the R number still at or below one? The second is what do our hospitals look like? Are the numbers in hospitals and in ICUs lower than they are now. Over the course of the next month we would like to see the number of people in hospital and in ICU fall to half of what it is now, but it isnt just about any one number, it is about the trends, Mr Varadkar said. The Tanaiste said it was also really important that the vaccination programme remains on track and were it to fall behind schedule, it would cause us to reassess. The final point of concern is new variants. He said it cant be exactly measured whether variants of concern are circulating in the community or the effect they were having on the overall profile of the virus. The Tanaiste admitted that the continued opening of schools is contingent upon case numbers, hospital numbers and vaccination progress being maintained in the coming weeks and months. The last time schools went back in September we didnt see a significant increase in the number of cases, so that gives us some reassurance. The difference this time is the B117 variant and that does seem to behave differently, among children as well as among adults. If it turns out that the return to schools causes a significant spike in infection, then we wont hesitate to make the right decision, which would be to defer that [reopening], Mr Varadkar said. The Tanaiste said there would be clear messaging to parents that this was about kids returning to school and not an opportunity to catch up with other parents. It looks like the next episode of NCIS will be Maria Bellos (Jack Sloane) last. Ahead of season 18, Bello announced she would be leaving the CBS procedural. The plan was for her to appear in eight episodes before her official exit. That would make the upcoming episode True Believer Bellos swan song. Now the question is how long will producers wait to replace the popular character? Mark Harmon and Maria Bello on the set of NCIS | Monty Brinton/CBS via Getty Images CBS has revealed the plot of Maria Bellos final NCIS episode Currently, NCIS is in the middle of a three-week break from airing new episodes. When the show returns, CBS has revealed that Sloanes final episode will see her and Gibbs (Mark Harmon) in Afghanistan. When Sloanes name is discovered in Afghanistan at the site of an abandoned bus with a dead driver, Gibbs accompanies her on a trip to find a group of girls who were kidnapped from the bus, the episode description reads. Also, McGee, Bishop, and Torres track down a hacker who emailed compromising information to the Taliban. OPINION: Should #NCIS replace Maria Bello's Jack Sloane in Season 18 or not? https://t.co/8k3Stp2DfI TV Insider (@TVInsider) July 27, 2020 During her three seasons on NCIS, Sloane has had a will they, wont they storyline with Gibbs. Many fans are wondering exactly how the character will exit the show. One of the biggest questions is whether or not they will see a long-awaited kiss between the two popular characters. Of course, the biggest mystery of all is whether or not Sloane will get a happy ending on a beach in Costa Rica. Or, will they choose to kill off the character? No matter what, producers have promised that Sloane will get the worthy ending that she deserves. Has CBS already found Sloanes replacement? In early February, NCIS star Wilmer Valderrama (Nick Torres) posted on Instagram that he would be reuniting with a former co-star. Valderrama posted a pic of himself with Zane Holtz, who he worked with on the vampire horror From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series back in 2016. In the caption, Valderrama revealed that Holtz would soon be appearing on NCIS. Together again, ladies & gentlemen meet Federal Agent Sawyer.. @zaneholtz, welcome to the #NCIS Team long way from Dusk and Vampires, Valderrama wrote. #NCIS Fans Think Wilmer Valderrama Leaked Major Casting Update for Mario Bello's Jack Sloane Replacement https://t.co/Mpt4NAiKid pic.twitter.com/2ABaZaL3Tu PopCulture.com (@PopCulture) February 16, 2021 RELATED: NCIS Season 18: Will Gibbs and Sloane Finally Get Together Only to Be Torn Apart? Immediately, fans started speculating that Holtzs character could be Sloanes replacement on the NCIS team. However, Holtzs appearance on the CBS procedural will be brief. TV Lines Matt Webb Mitovich says that the rumor Holtz would replace Bello is a big ol false. Mitovich reported that Holtz is simply guest starring as Special Agent Sawyer in a single upcoming episode where the NCIS team has to play nice and work with other agents. Rather, Zane Holtz is simply guest-starring as Special Agent Dale Sawyer in an upcoming episode where the team has to play nice and work with other agents. NCIS co-showrunner says they dont feel the need to replace Sloane right away NCIS co-showrunner Steven Binder has addressed the idea of Sloanes replacement. He says that they dont feel the need to immediately replace the character. We have a core team, and I think it was a function of Maria that we were able to find so much to give her to do If its not Maria [playing the forensic psychologist role], then I dont know if we need to necessarily fill it right away, Binder explained. CBS did cut their order for season 18 of NCIS down to just 16 episodes. Which means they dont have a lot of time to explore a lot of major storylines. However, if there is a season 19, its very possible that they will introduce a new agent and change things up. Maria Bellos final episode of NCIS reportedly airs Tuesday, March 2 on CBS. Last week, Paul Givan MLA, introduced his Severe Foetal Impairment Abortion (Amendment) Bill, onto the floor of the Assembly. It is a Bill which should be supported by all those who care about the disabled in our society and strive to create a better rights-based culture for them. The bill aims to prohibit abortion on the grounds of serious disability, such as Downs syndrome. Under legislation imposed on Northern Ireland by Westminster during the dying days of the previous Parliament, abortion is legally permitted in certain circumstances here. One of those circumstances, which the Bill attempts to address, is Regulation 7 (1) (b), which egregiously permits abortion up to term, in cases of severe foetal impairment where if the baby were born, it would suffer from such physical or mental impairment as to be seriously disabled. It should be borne in mind, that this Bill does not seek to amend the abortion law, which permits abortion in cases of fatal foetal abnormality. Previously in June 2020 the Assembly debated a DUP motion, that focussed on the same issue of Regulation 7. The Assembly voted 46 to 40 in favour of rejecting this provision in the Abortion Regulations. The motion received support right across the parties in the Assembly with the exception of Sinn Fein, who strangely tabled their own amendment, which in substance actually agreed with the DUP motion. In other words, there was widespread cross-party agreement, that Regulation 7 went too far in permitting the abortion of a seriously disabled child right up to birth. Although Sinn Fein have not yet made their party position public, it would be surprising given their attitude in the June 2020 debate, if they were not to support Paul Givans amendment. Apart from a few mavericks in the main parties, it was only the Greens and People before Profit MLAs, that supported the retention of this horrific discriminatory legislation against unborn disabled babies. Leaving aside the barbaric nature of Regulation 7, which many ordinary people find abhorrent, there are compelling human rights reasons under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, for removing this provision. As the late Lord Kerr, highlighted in his judgment in the 2018 Supreme Court case on abortion law in Northern Ireland, the Assembly is forbidden by the Northern Ireland Act 1998, to make laws contrary to the UN Convention on the Disabled. He went on to say: The UN Convention is based on the premise, that if abortion is permissible, there should be no discrimination on the basis that the foetus, because of a defect, will result in a child being born with a physical, or mental disability. He referred to this as a weighty factor to place in the balance and one not present in cases of Fatal Foetal Abnormality, rape or incest. Lord Kerr also pointedly referred to the committee, that monitors compliance with the UN Convention and their consistent criticism of any measure, which provided for abortion in a way that distinguishes between the unborn on the basis of physical or mental disability. The UN Committee on the Convention has continued to be critical of the current abortion law in Britain, as it applies to the unborn disabled child. This monitoring committee, that assesses compliance, has recommended that the UK s laws on abortion be amended without legalising selective abortion on the grounds of foetal deficiency. There is little doubt that under the Convention that Regulation 7, undemocratically imposed upon us by Westminster, is incompatible with the UN Convention, which is judiciable under our own domestic law. MPs both here and in Britain, were forewarned at the time of the passage of the Westminster legislation about this potential incompatibility. Paul Givans amendment gives the Assembly the opportunity to remove this discriminatory provision against the unborn disabled child and bring our law into line with the UN Convention. This sensitive matter of abortion law is now exclusively a matter for our local legislature, as has long been established by the European Court in its case law. You do not have to be pro-life to support this amending legislation. Those, who are pro-abortion, can without prejudice to their deeply held position, support this Bill and also oppose this discriminatory regulation. This is a humane and reasonable amendment, that gives due recognition to the human rights of the disabled in our community. For the time being the overall issue of abortion still remains to be addressed. I doubt if Paul Givan would want to be compared to the conscience-stricken Sir Thomas More in his struggle with Henry VIII, but he might agree with him whenever he said: What you cannot make good, make it as little bad as possible. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Stanford University officials announced Tuesday that they are transforming their 52-year-old program of African and African-American studies into a full-fledged academic department. The move comes after Stanfords Black Student Union and Black Graduate Student Association created a petition last summer urging Stanford to make the change, following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. The groups noted that elite universities had such a department. At Stanford, African and African-American studies has been a program for more than half a century and resides in the School of Humanities and Sciences. A department, unlike a program, is an administrative organization that can search for and hire its own faculty. More than 5,600 people signed the petition. The university did then what universities often do: It formed a task force. That group, including many professors, considered how race and its effects on society should be studied on campus. Then, last Thursday well before the May deadline the group recommended that Stanford create the new department and form another committee to develop details, including a timeline for making it happen. Provost Persis Drell and Debra Satz, dean of the School of Humanities & Sciences, told the campus Monday that they accepted the recommendation. They were joined by Claude Steele, a Stanford professor emeritus and expert in the psychology of race, who called the move a big deal and very significant in higher education. In responding to this national moment and reckoning in this area of racial justice and racial inequality, I think it is new for Stanford to step into a leadership role like this, Steele said. I appreciate that. On Twitter, students were nothing sort of jubilant. COVID Resources Coronavirus Map Tracking COVID-19 cases across the Bay Area and California. We won! a Stanford University doctoral student exulted on Twitter. Were getting a Black Studies Department at @Stanford! The tweet from the racial justice researcher whose Twitter handle is @Scholar_Auntie, received nearly 70,000 likes, 3,689 retweets, and 278 comments by Tuesday afternoon. A retiree, @BoomerHarz, wrote: Glad you won. To which @Missy113008 replied: Everyone won! African American history is American history. If Americans had a better idea of the contributions of African Americans, the perceptions and stereotypes may have been broken for many a long time ago. @DreamDaddyDisco posted an American flag icon and wrote: 100%!!! ... Its a step in the right direction, and Im immensely proud that the tides are turning. At Stanford, establishing the new department will take time. Drell told the campus that faculty who want to become part of an African and African-American studies department will have to develop a proposal for it, and that probably wont happen until next year. That proposal must be reviewed by the dean and advisory board before going to the Board of Trustees for consideration. Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov New Delhi, Feb 24 : Former Delhi Police Commissioner Bhim Sain Bassi is being considered for the post of Lt Governor of Puducherry but the government is "bit wary", sources said. The post fell vacant after incumbent, former top cop Kiran Bedi was suddenly removed on February 16 this year. Bassi's five year tenure at the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) will end on February 28. Before joining as a UPSC member, Bassi, a 1977 batch IPS officer of the Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territories (AGMUT) cadre, headed the Delhi Police from August 2013 to February 2016 and had a controversial tenure with frequent run-ins with the Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP government. Bassi's tenure, especially towards the end, had come for criticism after the arrest of Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU) President Kanhaiya Kumar over the sedition row. Bassi also had been "considered" to replace current Delhi Lt Governor, Anil Baijal but "nothing materialised", sources said. They said that he did not have a good working relationship with 1985 batch IPS officer S.N. Shrivastava, the current Commissioner of Delhi Police, when he was heading the force. Bedi was suddenly removed as Puducherry Lt Governor on February 16 this year, and Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan was given additional charge of the Union Territory. Bedi's removal came as the Congress-led government in the Union Territory slipped into a minority after another of its legislators resigned, reducing its tally in the assembly. Bedi was long at loggerheads with Chief Minister V. Narayanasamy. After she was removed, Narayanasamy had said, "Due to pressure from us, the Government of India has removed Dr Kiran Bedi. This is a great victory for the people of Puducherry." But on February 23 this year, the Narayanasamy government fell as he resigned ahead of the confidence vote in the Assembly with the coalition ministry reduced to a minority. The country's first woman IPS officer and BJP's Chief Ministerial candidate in Delhi in 2015, Bedi was appointed Puducherry's 24th Lt Governor on May 28, 2016. Bedi, a 1972 batch AGMUT cadre and due to retire in 2009, quit in 2007 when she was serving as Director-General of the Bureau of Police Research and Development after 1974 batch officer Y.S. Dadwal was made the Commissioner of Delhi Police. She termed Dadwal appointment as "blatantly unfair" and vowed to fight the "injustice" done to her. (Sumit Kumar Singh can be reached at sumit.k@ians.in) -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text [February 24, 2021] AIG Retirement Services Study Finds Strong Awareness but Minimal Understanding of Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program AIG Retirement Services, a leading retirement plan provider for tax-exempt and public sector employers, today announced the results of a new study looking at how nonprofit and public service employees think about student loan debt, student loan forgiveness and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program. Millions of public sector and nonprofit workers including teachers, healthcare workers and first responders may be eligible for student loan forgiveness through PSLF, but confusion around the program appears to be undermining its efficacy. While 90% of public service employees with college debt indicate awareness of the program, 70% exhibit only a minimal understanding of its rules and requirements. This gap is important because more than one in six American adults carry a federal student loan, according to the most recent figures from the New York Federal Reserve's Center for Microeconomic Data published in 2018.1 The Federal Reserve estimates that total student debt is $1.7 trillion,2 and $500 billion in new debt will be incurred over the next five years, according to a 2020 report from the Congressional Budget Office.3 "The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program is a powerful tool for Americans who have chosen to spend their careers dedicated to service and community," said Rob Scheinerman, Chief Executive Officer, AIG Retirement Services. "It is encouraging to see strong awareness of this important program but concerning to see such high levels of confusion around the rules and requirements. There is an excellent opportunity to close this knowledge gap and help public service employees take control of their student loan debt and improve their financial security." Student Loan Debt the Top Cause of Financial Stress; PSLF a Financial Lifeline for Public Sector Employees Student debt ranks as the top cause of financial stress for public service employees who are carrying loans from their college years. Nearly eight in ten (78%) characterize student loan debt as a major financial burden. Further, two out of three (66%) name student loans and the corresponding monthly payments as a financial worry, beating the next highest concern by an enormous 22 percentage points (credit card debt at 44%). With these concerns as the backdrop, public service employees see the PSLF program as a lifeline critical to their financial wellbeing. Over one out of three (34%) say it will be the only way they will be able to pay off their debt in a reasonable amount of time, and 64% say it will reduce financial stress. Furthermore, a significant number of public service employees would use the money otherwise spent on monthly student loan payments for other significant financial responsibilities-over half (51%) say that they would most likely use the funds to pay off other debt; 47% would contribute to retirement savings and investments; and 43% would add to their emergency savings fund. Despite Support for PSLF, Program Barriers Persist There is clear support for the PSLF program, with 68% of respondents indicating they are likely or very likely to work toward meeting its qualifications. Three out of four (77%) expect to tell others about the program, and 84% find the program appealing with half of those saying it is very appealing. But despite this enthusiasm, there are significant hurdles to successfully participating in the program. The survey respondents indicate that the top barrier to achieving loan forgiveness through PSLF is confusion about the program (34%). Other challenges are maintaining qualification over time (34%) and the number of required payments (31%). The PSLF program's own reporting shows how these expected barriers have played out as the vast majority of program applicants have had their efforts to seek loan forgiveness rejected. As of November 30, 2020, the Department of Education reports that less than 3 percent of those who have sought relief from the PSLF program have been approved.4 Opportunity for Public Service Employers to Improve Financial Security for Employees Despite these clear challenges, opportunities remain. There is a substantial opportunity for public service employers to help their employees take conrol of their student loan debt. Only 12% of public sector employees who are carrying student loan debt receive information from their employer about the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. AIG Retirement Services, in collaboration with the social impact technology firm Savi, last year launched an online tool that public sector employers can provide to their employees to simplify the forgiveness process. The end-to-end digital solution helps with determining qualification for student loan forgiveness, calculating potential savings, navigating through the enrollment process and maintaining program eligibility. "We understand the long-term impact student loan debt can have on financial and retirement security, which is why we are proud to be working with Savi to help employers empower their workforce to take control of their student loan debt," Scheinerman continued. "The new program can chart the path for nonprofit and public service employees to loan forgiveness, helping to improve their financial future and creating enhanced flexibility around other goals, including saving for retirement." Study Methodology The AIG Retirement Services survey was conducted by Dynata and fielded in October and November 2020, drawing responses from 664 public sector employees, ages 21-67, having federal student loans for which they make payments themselves, and working a minimum of 30 hours a week in government, healthcare, education and the nonprofit field. To see more findings from the student loan forgiveness survey and related analysis, visit lifeandretirement.aig.com/employers/lp/the-public-service-loan-forgiveness. 1 Center for Microeconomic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/topics/student-debt 2 Consumer Credit G.19. Federal Reserve. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g19/current/default.htm 3 Income-Driven Repayment Plans for Student Loans: Budgetary Costs and Policy Options. Congressional Budget Office. https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2020-02/55968-CBO-IDRP.pdf 4 Federal Student Aid Portfolio Summary, Office of Federal Student Aid, U.S. Department of Education, https://studentaid.gov/data-center/student/portfolio About AIG Retirement Services For more than half a century, AIG Retirement Services has served as a leading defined contribution retirement plan provider for tax-exempt and public sector employers, including healthcare, K-12, higher education, government, religious, charitable and other nonprofit organizations. AIG Retirement Services has more than $100 billion in total assets under administration, managing thousands of plans serving approximately 1.8 million participants. It includes the VALIC family of companies: The Variable Annuity Life Insurance Company and its subsidiaries, VALIC Financial Advisors, Inc. and VALIC Retirement Services Company. Additional information can be found at www.aig.com/RetirementServices. About AIG American International Group, Inc. (AIG) is a leading global insurance organization. AIG member companies provide a wide range of property casualty insurance, life insurance, retirement solutions, and other financial services to customers in approximately 80 countries and jurisdictions. These diverse offerings include products and services that help businesses and individuals protect their assets, manage risks and provide for retirement security. AIG common stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Additional information about AIG can be found at www.aig.com | YouTube (News - Alert) : www.youtube.com/aig | Twitter (News - Alert) : @AIGinsurance www.twitter.com/AIGinsurance | LinkedIn (News - Alert) : www.linkedin.com/company/aig. These references with additional information about AIG have been provided as a convenience, and the information contained on such websites is not incorporated by reference into this press release. AIG is the marketing name for the worldwide property-casualty, life and retirement, and general insurance operations of American International Group, Inc. For additional information, please visit our website at www.aig.com. All products and services are written or provided by subsidiaries or affiliates of American International Group, Inc. Products or services may not be available in all countries and jurisdictions, and coverage is subject to underwriting requirements and actual policy language. Non-insurance products and services may be provided by independent third parties. Certain property-casualty coverages may be provided by a surplus lines insurer. Surplus lines insurers do not generally participate in state guaranty funds, and insureds are therefore not protected by such funds. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005592/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Marvel Studios Many eagle-eyed Marvel fans have made a habit of pausing scenes in order to pick out hidden Easter eggs and clues that might reveal something about the future of the "Marvel Cinematic Universe." Disney and Marvel's latest creation, "WandaVision," is no exception. Welcome to Morningstar.co.uk! You have been redirected here from Hemscott.com as we are merging our websites to provide you with a one-stop shop for all your investment research needs.To search for a security, type the name or ticker in the search box at the top of the page and select from the dropdown results.Registered Hemscott users can log in to Morningstar using the same login details. Similarly, if you are a Hemscott Premium user, you now have a Morningstar Premium account which you can access using the same login details. The company is excited to welcome a nationally recognized key opinion leader to its Medical Advisory Board with the inclusion of Dr. Bob Bartlett. Dr. Bartlett has 30+ years of clinical and corporate experience in the wound healing and healthcare industry. He currently serves as the Chief Medical Officer for Swift Medical and is the President of the Board for the Academy of physicians in Wound Healing. Dr. Bartlett is a Magna cum Laude graduate of the University of South Alabama School of Medicine. He holds multiple certificates, including Certified Physician Executive, Certified Wound Specialist, and Hyperbaric Medicine. Educationally, he has trained more than 6,000 healthcare professionals in wound care and hyperbaric medicine. "The addition of Dr. Bob Bartlett to CutisCare's Medical Advisory Board furthers our commitment to provide mentorship and education to providers. Ensuring that continued education, thought leadership, and the best practices in wound care are disseminated to our partners' providers," said Jim Patrick, CutisCare Board Chairman and CEO. About CutisCare Headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, CutisCare works with hospitals, academic medical centers, and hospital systems to design customized outpatient wound care and hyperbaric oxygen (HBOT) solutions. With more than 60 years of combined management experience, a commitment to research, and driven by ethics and a culture of compliance, CutisCare collaborates with its partners to reach and heal people with chronic wounds. To learn more about CutisCare, visit https://cutiscareusa.com/. http://www.cutiscareusa.com/ Media Contact: Kelly Caceres, 9044460708, [email protected] SOURCE CutisCare LLC Related Links cutiscareusa.com Anjali Bharadwaj, an Indian social activist working on issues of transparency and accountability, is one of the 12 anti-corruption champions announced by the Biden administration. "The Biden administration recognises that we will only be successful in combating these issues by working in concert with committed partners, including courageous individuals who champion anti-corruption efforts and countries working to fulfil their commitments to international anti-corruption standards," US Secretary of State Tony Blinken said on Tuesday. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers For that reason, I am announcing a new International Anti-Corruption Champions Award, recognising individuals who have worked tirelessly, often in the face of adversity, to defend transparency, combat corruption, and ensure accountability in their own countries," he said. According to the State Department, Bhardwaj has served as an active member of the Right to Information Movement in India for over two decades. The 48-year-old activist is also the founder of the Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS), a citizens' group with a mandate to promote transparency and accountability in government and encourage active participation of citizens. She is also a convener of the National Campaign for Peoples Right to Information, which successfully advocated for the creation of an anti-corruption ombudsman and the Whistle Blowers Protection Act, offering protection to those who expose corruption and abuse of power. Bharadwaj in a tweet said the honour is a "recognition of the collective effort of people and groups across the country who hold power to account". In addition to Bharadwaj, the other honourees are: Ardian Dvorani of Albania, Diana Salazar of Ecuador, Sophia Pretrick of Micronesia, Juan Francisco Sandoval Alfaro of Guatemala, Ibrahima Kalil Gueye of Guinea, Dhuha A Mohammed of Iraq, Bolot Temirov of Kyrgyz Republic, Mustafa Abdullah Sanalla of Libya, Victor Sotto of The Philippines, Francis Ben Kaifala of Sierra Leone, and Ruslan Ryaboshapka of Ukraine. "They inspire us and so many of their counterparts pursuing these ideals around the world. The United States enforces one of the most robust anti-corruption frameworks in the world," Blinken said. The US, he said, was the first to criminalise foreign bribery and, in partnership with foreign counterparts, have recovered and returned more than USD 1 billion in stolen public assets in the past two years alone. We use a range of tools to promote accountability for corrupt individuals, combat impunity globally, and engage in multilateral fora to fight corruption and strengthen citizen engagement," Blinken said. This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Around 500 cases of black fungus in Delhi, injections in short supply: Kejriwal COVID-19 Vaccine: Sputnik V-makers have agreed to supply jabs to Delhi, says Kejriwal Not the time to fight with state governments: Arvind Kejriwal on West Bengal chief secretary transfer After AAP gains in civic body polls, Kejriwal to hold road show in Gujarat India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Feb 24: Delhi Chief Minister and AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal will hold a road show on February 26 in Gujarat, where his party registered impressive gains in the civic body polls. In a tweet in Hindi, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief thanked the people of Gujarat for ushering in an era of "new politics" in the state. Farm laws like death warrant for farmers: Kejriwal after meeting protesting farmers Party leaders said Kejriwal will hold a road show in Surat, where the AAP has won 27 seats in the municipal polls. "AAP National Convenor Shri @ArvindKejriwal will visit Gujarat on 26th Feb, 2021. He will thank the people of Gujarat for believing in AAP's Model of Development, in a grand Road Show," a tweet from the official handle of the AAP said. The AAP, which had fielded 470 candidates across six corporations, won 27 seats in Surat. Its workers celebrated the poll results by cutting cakes. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 10:02 [IST] Richard Wilson was first inspired to write poetry during a trip he took to Europe shortly after leaving the U.S. Navy. Wilson, who served on a ship in the South China Sea during the Vietnam War, was 22 and alone on the trip. He remembers he felt a need to express the thoughts and emotions he felt as he visited places filled with history and culture. Since he had no traveling companion, he decided to express himself through poetry. Now, almost 50 years later, he works to share his appreciation of poetry with his English students at North Huron High School. Wilson, a lifelong resident of Elkton, entered teaching at the age of 55, when he found the demands of his work as carpenter became too physically demanding. After working as a substitute teacher, he attended Saginaw Valley State University part-time and obtained his teaching certificate. He landed a job at Port Hope, where he taught for eight years until he eventually moved over to North Huron. As an English teacher, Wilson said he appreciates the preciseness poetry requires of those who write it. It really sharpens your focus on language and vocabulary and sound, and that makes you a better writer, he said. Wilson said it can be a challenge to get teenagers inspired about poetry, and thats why he uses song lyrics to gain their interest. He said people can have preconceived notions about poems, and he likes to offer examples of how they can be used to tell stories as well as convey emotion. He mentioned a song by music legend Bob Dylan, a ballad entitled Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, which Wilson said reads like a Western movie, one filled with characters focused on revenge and longing. You can basically throw the rules of grammar right out the window when you write poetry, he said, laughing, which is something the kids like because they hate grammar. Thats why he finds it particularly rewarding when one or two of his students inevitably express a new-found appreciation for poems. He said he enjoys it when a student who was in a previous class of his asks whether poetry will be included in his course that year. Another of Wilsons passions is hiking. For him, its a solitary pastime that can last for a month at a time. His current favorite place to hike is the Wind River Range in northwestern Wyoming, which is filled with spectacular views of majestic mountains and clear, blue skies. The thing about the mountains is, they humble you, he said. It awes you. The value is, it puts everything into perspective, and it gives you a tremendous sense of peace and calm, and thats invaluable, especially in the world that we live in. Machine learning aids in simulating dynamics of interacting atoms LOS ALAMOS, N.M., February 23, 2021--A revolutionary machine-learning (ML) approach to simulate the motions of atoms in materials such as aluminum is described in this week's Nature Communications journal. This automated approach to "interatomic potential development" could transform the field of computational materials discovery. "This approach promises to be an important building block for the study of materials damage and aging from first principles," said project lead Justin Smith of Los Alamos National Laboratory. "Simulating the dynamics of interacting atoms is a cornerstone of understanding and developing new materials. Machine learning methods are providing computational scientists new tools to accurately and efficiently conduct these atomistic simulations. Machine learning models like this are designed to emulate the results of highly accurate quantum simulations, at a small fraction of the computational cost." To maximize the general accuracy of these machine learning models, he said, it is essential to design a highly diverse dataset from which to train the model. A challenge is that it is not obvious, a priori, what training data will be most needed by the ML model. The team's recent work presents an automated "active learning" methodology for iteratively building a training dataset. At each iteration, the method uses the current-best machine learning model to perform atomistic simulations; when new physical situations are encountered that are beyond the ML model's knowledge, new reference data is collected via expensive quantum simulations, and the ML model is retrained. Through this process, the active learning procedure collects data regarding many different types of atomic configurations, including a variety of crystal structures, and a variety of defect patterns appearing within crystals. ### The paper: Automated discovery of a robust interatomic potential for aluminum, Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21376-0 The funding: This work was funded in part by the Los Alamos National Laboratory Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program and computer time was provided by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Sierra Supercomputer during its open access period. About Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is managed by Triad, a public service oriented, national security science organization equally owned by its three founding members: Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS), and the Regents of the University of California (UC) for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns. LA-UR-21-21717 This story has been published on: 2021-02-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Owl Rock Capital Corporation (NYSE: ORCC, or the "Company") announced today that leading independent proxy advisory firms, Institutional Shareholder Services ("ISS") and Glass Lewis & Co. ("Glass Lewis"), recommend that the Company's shareholders vote "FOR" (i) the Company's entry into an amended and restated investment advisory agreement (the "New Advisory Agreement") between the Company and Owl Rock Capital Advisors LLC (the "Adviser") and (ii) a proposal to adjourn and reconvene the Special Meeting of Shareholders (the "Special Meeting") should additional support be needed to approve the New Advisory Agreement (the "Special Meeting Proposals"). The Special Meeting Proposals are a result of the recently announced Business Combination Agreement executed between Owl Rock Capital Group ("Owl Rock") and Dyal Capital Partners ("Dyal"). The combined business will be the surviving entity in a merger with Altimar Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: ATAC) (the "Transaction"). The Transaction, if consummated, will result in an indirect change of control of the Adviser and the subsequent assignment and termination of the Company's current investment advisory agreement (the "Existing Advisory Agreement"). In recommending that the Company's shareholders vote "FOR" the Special Meeting Proposals, including the New Advisory Agreement, ISS and Glass Lewis both cited that the terms of the New Advisory Agreement are identical to the terms of the Existing Advisory Agreement. ISS also referenced that the day-to-day management of the Adviser and the investment objective of the Company will not change as a result of the indirect change of control of the Adviser or the Company's entry into the New Advisory Agreement. With the Special Meeting approaching on March 17, 2021, the Company reminds shareholders that their vote is very important regardless of the number of shares they own and urges all shareholders to vote by one of the methods described in the proxy statement before 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on March 16, 2021. Additional information on the proposed Transaction, including links to the proxy for each fund, can be found at www.owlrock.com/proxy. Shareholders who have questions about the definitive proxy statement or voting their shares should contact the Broadridge Proxy Services Center at 855-200-7549. About Owl Rock Capital Corporation Owl Rock Capital Corporation (ORCC) is a specialty finance company focused on lending to U.S. middle-market companies. As of December 31, 2020, ORCC had investments in 119 portfolio companies with an aggregate fair value of $10.8 billion. ORCC has elected to be regulated as a business development company under the Investment Company Act of 1940, as amended. ORCC is externally managed by Owl Rock Capital Advisors LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser that is an affiliate of Owl Rock Capital Partners. Owl Rock Capital Partners, together with its subsidiaries, is a New York based direct lending platform with approximately $27.1 billion of assets under management as of December 31, 2020. Forward-Looking Statements Certain information contained herein may constitute "forward-looking statements" that involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors and undue reliance should not be placed thereon. These forward-looking statements are not historical facts, but rather are based on current expectations, estimates and projections about ORCC, its current and prospective portfolio investments, its industry, its beliefs and opinions, and its assumptions. Words such as "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "will," "may," "continue," "believes," "seeks," "estimates," "would," "could," "should," "targets," "projects," "outlook," "potential," "predicts" and variations of these words and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, some of which are beyond ORCC's control and difficult to predict and could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or forecasted in the forward-looking statements including, without limitation, the risks, uncertainties and other factors identified in ORCC's filings with the SEC. Investing in unseasoned companies and in sponsors of alternative investment platforms carries significant risk. Operating results in a specified period will be difficult to predict. The performance of Dyal and Owl Rock, and thus ORCC, will depend upon their success in structuring, distributing and operating alternative investment vehicles, including current and potential future vehicles, which will impact the operating results of each of Dyal, Owl Rock, ORCC, the investment vehicles they manage or expect to manage, and the investments such vehicles make or expect to make are and will be subject to various risks relating to such entities' operations, including, but not limited to: weaker-than anticipated market acceptance of products and services; disruptions in technology development; an inability to successfully manage expanding operations; an inability to attract and retain key management and technical personnel; competition posed by established enterprises; changes in accounting rules or government regulation; weakness in the applicable industries as well as the U.S. and global economy; currency fluctuations; and the effects of other geopolitical events. Each of Dyal, Owl Rock, ORCC, the investment vehicles they manage or expect to manage, and the investments such vehicles make or expect to make is subject to the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of which is particularly difficult to forecast. Because all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, actual results of the Dyal, Owl Rock and ORCC may differ materially from any expectations, projections or predictions made or implicated in such forward-looking statements. Investors and prospective investors are therefore cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. None of Owl Rock, Dyal or ORCC commits to update or revise the forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required by law. Additional Information and Where to Find It In connection with the Transaction which will result in the indirect change in control of the registered investment advisers (the "Owl Rock Advisers") to ORCC, Owl Rock Capital Corporation II, Owl Rock Capital Corporation III and Owl Rock Technology Finance Corp. (the "Owl Rock BDCs"), each Owl Rock BDC has filed a proxy statement in definitive form (each, the "Proxy Statement") with the SEC that contains important information about the proposed transaction and related matters, and delivered a copy of the Proxy Statement to its shareholders. INVESTORS OF THE OWL ROCK BDCs ARE URGED TO READ CAREFULLY AND IN THEIR ENTIRETY THE PROXY STATEMENT (INCLUDING ANY AMENDMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS THERETO), AND OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS THE OWL ROCK BDCs WILL FILE WITH THE SEC WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE, BECAUSE THEY CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROPOSED TRANSACTION AND RELATED MATTERS. Investors may obtain a free copy of these materials and other documents filed by the Owl Rock BDCs with the SEC at the SEC's website at www.sec.gov or at Owl Rock's website at www.owlrock.com or www.owlrock.com/proxy/ or, for Owl Rock Capital Corporation, at www.owlrockcapitalcorporation.com. Investors and security holders may also obtain free copies of the Proxy Statements and other documents filed with the SEC from the Owl Rock BDCs by contacting Investor Relations at (212) 651-4705. Participants in the Solicitation The applicable Owl Rock BDCs and their directors, executive officers, employees and other persons may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from the shareholders of the applicable Owl Rock BDCs' common stock in respect of the change in control transaction. For information regarding the Owl Rock BDCs' directors and executive officers, please see: Owl Rock Capital Corporation's definitive proxy statement filed with the SEC on April 17, 2020, in connection with its 2020 annual meeting of shareholders; Owl Rock Capital Corporation II's definitive proxy statement filed with the SEC on April 17, 2020, in connection with its 2020 annual meeting of shareholders; Owl Rock Technology Finance Corp.'s definitive proxy statement filed with the SEC on April 17, 2020, in connection with its 2020 annual meeting of shareholders; Owl Rock Capital Corporation III's registration statement on Form 10 filed with the SEC on July 17, 2020. Other information regarding persons who may be deemed participants in the proxy solicitation and a description of their direct and indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, is contained in the Proxy Statements. The Proxy Statements may be obtained free of charge from the sources indicated above. Investor Contacts Investor Contact: Dana Sclafani 212-651-4705 [email protected] Media Contact: Prosek Partners David Wells / Josh Clarkson / Andrew Chironna [email protected] SOURCE Owl Rock Capital Corporation Dictionary.com has decided to change the definition of "court-packing," while China seeks a new definition of human rights. So what's the big deal? Definitions do change over time. Let's see what might be wrong with the idea. I've always wanted to be able to play the oboe, but I'm lazy and too cheap to take oboe lessons. I can, however, play the piano, so perhaps there's a workaround. You'd think it would take eons for a piano to evolve into an oboe, but you'd be wrong. From this moment on, that bulky, quarter-ton black object in the corner of my living room is an oboe. There I can play the oboe. That's as long as no one else agrees I look dotty, so I malign anyone who still insists it's a piano as an oboephobic ignoramus. After a while, even the holdouts cave and start referring to that pile of polished ebony as an oboe. Now for the next step. The New York Philharmonic advertises auditions for second oboe, and I apply. When I show up with my seven-foot instrument, they inform me that they're seeking an oboist, not a pianist, but I insist: I am an oboist, and this is my oboe. While waiting for security to escort me out of the building, I suggest that I might file a complaint against them for othering me and my atypical oboe; it might be easier for them to let me audition than to send their lawyer to the EEOC to unpack my truth. After my audition, they thank me politely, commend my mastery of the legal/regulatory system, and promise to apprise me of the result within the week. My oboe-movers pack it up and take it home. My next project will be an oboe debut at Carnegie Hall. Don't worry about what the critics will write as you can see, I'll know how to handle them. Fortunately, I cannot impose my delusion on anyone. A piano will remain a piano. But what about court packing? Intellectual influencers have fomented many deliberate shifts of meaning, and their widespread use in the press and popular culture makes it difficult to discuss important ideas rationally which is the whole idea. "Affordable" housing, for example, was once called "subsidized." While a reasonable case can be made against subsidies, only a grinch can object to making housing affordable. So it becomes tricky to ask the malodorous question of whether the house that is affordable to the person living in it is also affordable to the person being forced to help pay for it. The ability to make fine distinctions used to be called "discrimination," but the word now refers to something that will put you in legal difficulties. This shift of meaning has killed two birds with one stone, er, has had a dual effect: while we mustn't discriminate against people by subset (is it still okay to refuse to rent your spare bedroom to a prostium, sex worker?), we also mustn't make fine cultural distinctions, since someone's self-esteem might take a hit. "Mass incarceration" is another of these concepts. China's round-up of Uighurs is actual mass incarceration. Jailing criminals, even thousands of them, for their criminal activities is not. Before heading off to the big house, each alleged perp will have been tried and found guilty. In other words, each case will have been tried individually the very opposite of "mass incarceration." But in 2021, anyone wishing to toss felons in the poky is Hitler's evil twin. Back to court-packing. When one person thinks the term refers to filling naturally occurring vacancies with justices who are philosophically simpatico, while the other thinks it means creating and filling new seats on the court, how can intelligent discussion take place? That is the point to make intelligent discussion difficult if not impossible. From redefining words, it's just a baby step to redefining actions: if a society decriminalizes, say, sex with children, the deed remains as loathsome as before, but because of a change of definition, it's no longer a crime and begins to lose its stigma. And if the concept of human rights no longer forbids ethnic cleansing, well, that's how a piano becomes an oboe. Image: PxHere. The northern province of Hai Duong, the countrys current largest hotspot of COVID-19, plans to conduct large-scale testing for the novel coronavirus, using Realtime-PCR technology, from February 24. The move aims to measure the spread of COVID-19 in the province to help it respond better to the disease while identifying safe areas to boost economic recovery. People targeted by the testing are divided into three groups: the high-risk group who are people from Chi Linh and Hai Duong cities, and Kim Thanh and Cam Giang districts; the medium-risk including people from the districts of Kinh Mon, Nam Sach and Binh Giang; and the low-risk comprising those from Ninh Giang, Thanh Ha, Tu Ky, Gia Loc and Thanh Mien. Hai Duong now has six labs for COVID-19 testing using Realtime-PCR, located in the provincial Centre for Disease Control, General Hospital, Hospital for Tropical Diseases, Childrens Hospital, Tuberculosis and Lung Disease Hospital, and the Hospital of Hai Duong Medical Technical University. The province is now capable of collecting 50,000 to 60,000 samples and processing as much as 8,500 individual test samples on a daily basis. The results normally come out after 24 hours. Hai Duong recorded 625 cases of COVID-19 as of 16:00 on February 23, making it the hardest hit by the pandemic in the country to date./. VNA Editorials represent the institutional view of the newspaper. They are written and edited by the editorial staff, which operates separately from the news department. Editorial writers are not involved in newsroom operations. Bhopal, Feb 24 : In the middle of the debate these days in Madhya Pradesh about drug de-addiction and liquor ban, Brahminpura village in Guna district stands out as an example of how the villagers have succeeded in making prohibition a success. In Brahminpura village, women raised their voice for prohibition. As a result of this, alcohol is not consumed or served during wedding ceremonies or any other social events in the village. A person who comes to the village after drinking liquor is fined Rs 500 to Rs 1,000. The prohibition campaign was started by a woman identified as Krishna Bai along with other women residing in the village. Krishna Bai said a meeting was held 12 years ago against substance abuse in which it was decided that if any individual comes to the village after drinking alcohol, then a fine between Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 would be imposed on them. She says that if a person worships at home in the morning and evening and spends time with his/her children, then he would never ever resort to consuming alcohol. Despite launching this campaign, many a times the wedding guests came to the village after consuming liquor so hefty fines were imposed on them. Komal Sharma, a resident of Brahminpura village, says that even after requesting wedding guests several times not to consume liquor, they were then fined on being found intoxicated. Such people were also not allowed to participate in the marriage rituals of the bride and the groom. Now, whenever a wedding procession arrives in the village, no one is found consuming liquor. The people of the village have also formed a team which keeps a close watch on the wedding guests. So far, more than Rs 15,000 have been recovered from those found consuming alcohol and this money has been spent on worship in the temples, conducting 'yagnas' and 'havans'. Superintendent of Police, Rajiv Kumar Mishra, said Brahminpura is a village which comes under the Netakhedi panchayat, where there is complete prohibition and a fine is imposed on those found consuming alcohol. This has set an example and other people should learn from this village. For the last few days in Madhya Pradesh, the political atmosphere has changed drastically due to drug de-addiction and prohibition campaigns. Former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Uma Bharti has also announced to start a liquor ban campaign on March 8 on the occasion of Women's Day. Senior Congress leader and State unit President Kamal Nath has also advocated liquor prohibition. At the same time, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is emphasizing on launching a public awareness campaign for imposing prohibition. By Sandhya Raman, CQ-Roll Call WASHINGTON Growing behavioral health needs and existing workforce inadequacies are amplifying calls for Congress to provide additional resources to address a national mental health crisis exacerbated by COVID-19, the economic recession, and social isolation. The pandemic has stressed the nations behavioral health infrastructure at a time when the country has seen increases in overdose deaths, suicides, and reports of anxiety and depression. A study published in JAMA Psychiatry this month on almost 190 million emergency visits during the pandemic found that visit rates for mental health conditions, suicide attempts, and drug overdoses were higher from mid-March through October 2020 than in the same period of 2019. The authors say their findings suggest the need for prevention, screening, and interventions at all societal levels, and the importance of longitudinal surveillance to monitor the long-term impacts of COVID-19. Public health experts, advocates and government officials have been sounding alarms about the secondary health effects of the pandemic and recession since early last year, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data underscored the pressing nature of the problem. Shawn Ryan, chair of the Legislative Advocacy Committee at the American Society of Addiction Medicine, said that so far, the government has poured relatively small amounts of funding into a concern that requires a more sustained solution. In reality, you know, the state and federal federal initiatives to address this issue have not been commensurate with the substantial nature of the problem, said Ryan. Aid package A $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package proposed by President Joe Biden would provide $4 billion for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Health Resources and Services Administration. That would build on $4.25 billion for mental health provided in the year-end spending package for fiscal 2021. The 2021 appropriations funding included money for community mental health grants, Certified Community Behavioral Health Centers, and to support the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (800-273-8255). Congress provided a total of nearly $4.7 billion to SAMHSA last year for behavioral health, a House Appropriations Committee aide confirmed. That number includes $425 million from the second COVID-19 relief law and the $4.25 billion in the December supplemental. The second COVID-19 relief law also included provider relief funding, and in October, the Department of Health and Human Services opened up $20 billion to support health care organizations including mental health and addiction recovery treatment providers. This year, the most likely legislative vehicles for mental health and addiction-related provisions are COVID-19 relief proposals. The House Energy and Commerce Committee held a budget reconciliation markup earlier this month for its portion of the package. The public health portion of the package included elements of provisions pushed by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., that would provide $80 million to increase training and strategies to address suicide and burnout among health care workers. It also contains $20 million for an educational CDC campaign on mental health care needs of providers and first care responders and $40 million for grants to promote mental health wellness among medical professionals. The Medicaid portion of the Energy and Commerce package includes a provision from Rep. Paul Tonko, D-N.Y., that would restart Medicaid benefits for incarcerated individuals 30 days before release. Recently released individuals face an exponentially higher risk of dying of a drug overdose. The Medicaid section would also include a provision that would incentivize state Medicaid programs to fund mobile crisis intervention services. Medicaid is the largest payer of mental health services in the United States and also is critical in funding substance use disorder treatment. Experts have also highlighted Bidens executive actions that would roll back restrictions on Medicaid, including initial steps earlier this month to block approvals for state Medicaid work requirements or state acceptance of capped funding for added flexibility. One of the challenges that weve had with mental health and substance use is, for most of our history, mental health and substance use has been a states responsibility, financed mostly through state general funds and more recently Medicaid dollars, said Chuck Ingoglia, president and CEO of the National Council for Behavioral Health. David Lloyd, national policy adviser for The Kennedy Forum, a behavioral health nonprofit, emphasized that expanding Medicaid would increase access to treatment. Focus on addiction Some lawmakers have also pushed for more funding targeted specifically at addiction, as the number of overdose deaths has increased significantly during the pandemic. Last year, a House-passed COVID-19 relief package that the Senate did not pass would have provided $8.5 billion for mental health, but some Democrats have sought more. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Rep. David Trone, D-Md., in letters to House and Senate leadership, have called for $10 billion for SAMHSA to fund treatment. Some say there is a possibility for other avenues outside of reconciliation and appropriations packages to change policy. What Im hearing from folks is there is broad recognition to do more about mental health and substance use, said Ingoglia. Andrew Kessler, founder of Slingshot Solutions, which specializes in behavioral health policy consulting, said that while a COVID-19 related package is the most likely vehicle, he sees an appetite for a substance use disorder package centered around larger policies such as legislation to build on a major 2016 addiction law known as the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., want to update the law. Senate Democratic and GOP aides confirmed a revised bill is in the process of being reintroduced this year. Kessler suggested that the reintroduction of this legislation could serve as the catalyst for an even larger behavioral health package that could become law. National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors Executive Director Rob Morrison also said it was important to re-examine existing drug policy laws to ensure they are working. I think going back to those provisions is important, some of which may not have been funded, some of which are expiring, which are just getting off the ground. And I think theres so much just to review. We think thats an important component of moving forward, said Morrison. There are many other moving pieces, including ways to expand the behavioral health workforce and ensure access to treatment. Ryan said that includes policies such as loan repayment programs and funding that would make it easier for medical professionals to specialize in addiction medicine. We have a fairly significant workforce disparity, he said. Getting more folks directly involved in primarily treating substance disorder is going to require continued policy work and funding. Advocates also want to expand the Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics program, which ensures patients receive services regardless of their ability to pay. The Biden administration has shown signs that it sees a need for more policies related to mental health and drug addiction. The White House has announced several senior staff but a permanent Office of National Drug Control Policy director has not been named, and is traditionally named after other high-level officials. In February, the ONDCP identified five priorities for drug control policy for the first 100 days of the administration, signaling the importance of combating the drug crisis. ONDCP sketched out plans to introduce policies to expand the addiction workforce, emphasize harm reduction strategies, increase prevention efforts, expand treatment, and confront issues related to racial equity. The Biden administration has been pretty clear that this is a priority, said Kessler. Oregon YouthLine: 877-968-8491 or text teen2teen to 83983 (YouthLine is a free, confidential teen-to-teen crisis and help line) National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800-273-8255 (The free hotline is staffed 24/7, and the Lifeline website has many resources). A Nepalese youth was arrested for allegedly smuggling narcotics with a street value of over Rs one crore, police said on Wednesday. A joint team of the local police and the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) arrested the youth, Roshan Dhamal, in Rupaideeh area here during routine checking on the Indo-Nepal border. "The security personnel seized 118 grams of smack from the possession of Dhamal, a resident of Nepalgunj," Superintendent of Police Vipin Mishra said. "The recovered contraband is said to be worth Rs. 1.18 crore," the SP said, adding that they are investigating his links in India. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Statement Delivered By Minister Simon Coveney at UNSC Open Debate on Climate and Security Statement Thank you very much Dominic, Let me start by congratulating you, and the United Kingdom, on your presidency of the Council, and for hosting this very important debate at such a high level. I would like also to thank Secretary General Guterres for his remarks and his leadership on this issue, and of course I want to thank the briefer, Nisreen Elsaim, for her important testimony. Through a lifetimes work, David Attenborough has brought into our homes the wonder, but also the vulnerability, of our planets rich biodiversity - a common heritage, and we owe it to future generations to protect and preserve it. Climate change is the defining challenge of our generation. Unaddressed, it will impact every part of our planet. No aspect of our societies will be untouched. We need urgent and collective action by all pillars of the multilateral system, including this Council, if we are to meet this challenge. How we respond today will determine our shared future tomorrow, and we all have a role to play. Ireland, along with the rest of the EU, will not be found wanting. Ireland will transition to a net zero economy by 2050. My country, like all others, is already feeling the impacts of climate change. We are taking mitigation actions. But these actions alone will not safeguard our future and we know that. As Prime Minister Johnson has said, we must scale up our investments in Adaptation and Resilience if we are to protect the poorest and most vulnerable from the effects of climate change, especially in Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States. Countries like Ireland that have the means have a responsibility to act first. In doing so, we must consider the quality of our climate finance as we work to increase its quantity. In this regard, in the lead up to COP26 and beyond, we must listen to and be guided by the voices of those most affected by climate change, particularly those in Least Developed Countries and in Small Island Developing States. But we must also go beyond listening and promote the critical role of these countries in decision making processes on climate. In this vein, we have been pleased to work closely with the UK on the Adaptation and Resilience agenda through the LIFE-AR Initiative. This initiative, led by Least Developed Countries, aims to sustainably increase the proportion of climate finance that reaches the local level for vital adaptation activities, from an estimated 10% today to 70% by 2030. Mr President, Urgent action is needed to combat the effects of climate change on our environment, and on our complex global eco-system. We look forward to the COP 26 negotiations in Glasgow later this year, where we hope real progress can be made, building on the achievements of the Paris climate agreement. Climate change has many complex impacts, not least on international peace and security, the very business of this Council. This is the core of our debate today. It is clear that climate change is already causing upheaval, affecting people and security and the stability of societies across the world. This is the testimony we hear daily from around the world from small island states, from African partners, from regions affected by devastating forest fires or floods. We have seen in the Sahel, particularly in the countries around Lake Chad, how conflict and climate combine to diminish the availability of, and access to, natural resources. This amplifies tensions between farmers and others, which in turn causes and triggers violence. Across the Horn of Africa, the multiple and repeated shocks of drought and flooding undermine community resilience and livelihoods, creating drivers which armed groups exploit for influence and recruitment. This Council has mandated peacekeeping missions in eight of the fifteen countries most susceptible to climate risk, and if that doesnt send us a message I am not sure what will. Mr President, The relationship between climate and security works in complex ways. Political instability undermines efforts to build climate resilience, and the impact of climactic shocks is compounded when institutions are strained or broken. We need to address these linkages between climate, insecurity and peace as part of our conflict prevention and peacebuilding efforts and responsibilities on this Council. And we need to further build on our collective understanding of these linkages to enable us to take effective action. Ireland is proud to join the Weathering Risk Project to help guide our action on the Security Council and beyond. We are keen to understand better not just how climate change contributes to insecurity but how climate action can build peace. And to use this understanding as we prioritise Climate and Security during our time on the Council. We are chairing the Informal Expert Group of Member States on this topic, together with Niger. This group provides a vital platform for sharing information on the why and how of climate action in the context of building and sustaining peace. We will partner with Nauru and Germany, as Chairs of the Group of Friends of Climate and Security. While the Council must take action, it is essential to work with the wider community of nations as we do so. Mr President, Irelands core message today is that the inclusion of climate in Security Council discussions and actions will strengthen conflict prevention and support peacebuilding efforts. Climate action alone, of course, will not deliver peace. We recognize that. But without climate action, we will have a less sustainable peace in many parts of the world. Ireland will take a practical and action-orientated approach. We recognise that our peacekeepers are already responding to climate related crises. Where climate related security risks exist, peacekeeping operations need to be underpinned by clear mandates and sufficient resources. We also recognise the gender dimensions of climate change, with women and girls most vulnerable to its effects, but they are also critical to our response to climate change and we must ensure the full, equal and meaningful participation of women in decision-making processes related to climate issues and the management of natural resources. We must also engage deeply with young people, who have shown solidarity and extraordinary leadership at times on climate change on a global scale. But in listening to and understanding the concerns and insights of future generations, we cant abrogate our responsibility to provide leadership today. Mr President, The worlds response to the climate emergency can also be a cause for hope, which is needed right now. The vast majority of UN member States wish to work together to ensure that we address one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced. We can and must work in a way that addresses the threats to global peace and security from climate change, enhancing global cooperation as we do so. Climate change challenges all of humanity. But I am optimistic and drawing from the words of James Joyce: I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. Starting afresh today, lets work together. This is an important year for climate action, particularly in the build up to COP26. Thank you Previous Item | Next Item Now in its 21st year, the Time 100, is Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. While that may be a small swath of the cosmos, it's formidable among spaces with living organisms. Time decided its list might benefit from expansion, so the Time 100 Next list was hatched to honor "100 emerging leaders who are shaping the future." And among Time's 100 Next most influential people of 2021, Harris County Judge Linda Hidalgo makes the cut. Which is a pretty great distinction for a local elected official. You can read the by-the-book account of Hidalgo's work here. She's the county judge for the third largest county in the United States, which is pretty impressive. She was elected in 2018 and has spent a fair portion of her term overseeing the city's doings during a crisis with the pandemic. Her leadership over the past year is part of why Time honored her, looping in Beto O'Rourke to write an essay about Hidalgo. She's part of an interesting list that includes people under the categories of "artists," "leaders," "phenoms," "innovators" and "advocates." Hidalgo is among 22 leaders including Senators Ben Sasse (essay by Mitt Romney), Raphael Warnock (essay by Bernice A. King) and Jon Ossoff (also Bernice A. King). O'Rourke wrote: "Lina Hidalgos persistence, tenacity and intelligence were clear from the moment I met her on the campaign trail in Texas in 2017. At the time, she was running for Harris County judge, and I was running for the U.S. Senate. I soon realized that she also had an extraordinary level of humility that is rare to find in somebody pursuing public office. "At 27, Hidalgo was elected to be the chief executive of a county that has more people in it than in the state of Nevada. Now 29, she is doing an incredible job as judge, as evidenced by her efforts to quickly respond to COVID-19Harris County announced a mask mandate in April 2020, but a statewide policy didnt follow until Julyas well as to expand her constituents access to the ballot box. Early-voting sites offered by the county nearly tripled last year. "Its hard to imagine a tougher set of circumstances to confront in your first term in office, but she has really distinguished herself and makes us proudnot just as Democrats but as Texans. Thats what leadership looks like." Among the artists: actor John David Washington (written about by Spike Lee), musician Luke Combs (written about by Garth Brooks), actor Florence Pugh (written about by Lena Heady), musician Phoebe Bridgers (written about by Carmen Maria Machado), actor Lakeith Stanfield (written about by Boots Riley), filmmaker John Wilson (written about by Jud Apatow) A toddler saved his father from death after accidentally calling 911, reports say. Deputies responded to a 911 hang-up call last week in Hernando County, Florida. They believe a toddler accidentally called 911 as his father lay unconscious on the floor which led to saving his father's life, according to WTSP-TV. Hernando County Sheriff's deputy, Nathan Kent, told the station that hang-up calls are quite common for them as they get "quite a few of them due to people having disabled cell phones and their kids play with them." According to Deputy Kent, the toddler "tried typing the password [on his father's cell phone] and it had 30 attempts that was the wrong password," and it may have been accidental that the child hit the button. Deputy Kent also recounted that the dispatchers could only hear a kid playing from the call, so their initial thought was that it was just another accidental 911 hang-up. But as a precaution, they answered the service call. When the authorities arrived on the scene, the first thing he noticed was a toddler with no clothes on, walking around the parking lot of the apartment without adult supervision, The Blaze wrote. "Having a kid myself, I was more concerned, 'Hey, why is there an unsupervised kid' and then that's when I started looking around and I saw the apartment complex door open with a bunch of kid toys," Deputy Kent said. Upon approaching the residence, Deputy Kent yelled out to see if anyone is in need but he did not get any response. "Looked in, didn't see anybody, see anything, so I thought, 'Well, let's walk in here and see where they are'. And that's when I was walking in the back of the apartment complex in the master bedroom and saw the gentleman laying on the floor," he said. "Advised dispatch, 'We have an unconscious male'." Deputy Kent went on to perform chest compressions on the child's father who was, at that time, unresponsive and without a pulse, according to a press release from the Hernando County Sheriff's Office. After several rounds of compressions, the man gasped for air and began breathing again. "That's when fire rescue walked in and saw everything, so I just thought, 'Let me try to keep the kid calm so this isn't very tragic for him'," Deputy Kent said. Paramedics soon arrived on the scene and rushed the child's father to a nearby hospital for treatment and observation. Additional deputies on the scene went on to contact the child's family who responded to the apartment and took the child in their custody. The release noted, "Hospital staff advised the man was having a medical episode but would make a full recovery." Deputy Kent also took the opportunity to emphasize the importance of teaching children to prepare for such emergencies. "My biggest thing is teaching your kids what to do in times like this, saying 'Hey if something happens, go to a neighbor, get my phone, call somebody, try to have some kind of setup just like a fire drill," Deputy Kent said. Australias stock market closed at a three-week low on Wednesday as traders continued to rotate out of sectors that did well during the pandemic, particularly technology. Investors were also locking in gains from mining stocks after four weeks of strong gains and digesting recent earnings announcements. The ASX 200 fell 0.9 per cent on Wednesday. Credit:Peter Braig And the Australian dollar reached fresh three-year highs of US79.45, raising concerns about off-shore earnings. The S&P/ASX 200 closed 0.8 per cent lower at 6781.4. The index has been stuck between 6500 and 7000 points for two-months. The technology sector fell 2.7 per cent and was down 8 per cent for the year after a stellar performance in 2020. BHP shares declined 3.1 per cent to $48.86, but were still 12 per cent higher than three weeks ago. Rio Tinto declined 2.7 per cent to $126.45, but was still $15 higher than the start of the month. Overall the heavyweight mining sector declined 2.7 per cent. Telstra dropped 3 per cent after going ex-dividend and Afterpay dropped 3 per cent to $134.36. The financial sector dropped 0.4 per cent. Only the consumer staples and utilities sector finished in green with Woolworths up 1 per cent on strong results. Rising oil prices continue to fuel expectations inflation could be on the move. Wages growth came in at 0.6 per cent, slightly higher than predicted, adding to the inflation argument. The ASX declined along with major Asian bourse despite Wall Street providing a positive lead after US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said the central bank would continue supporting economic growth and had a strong appetite for inflation. He has reassured equity markets that financial conditions will remain very supportive for a while yet, Nomura Australia investment strategist Andrew Ticehurst said. (But) if central banks are just going to stay very cautious and keep rates very low, then the risk is that this spills into higher asset prices, like house prices, he added. New Zealands central bank on Wednesday said it too would remain supportive, but sounded very uncertain, Mr Ticehurst added. Both Australia and New Zealand have strengthening currencies, which makes economic recovery harder. Betashares ETFs senior economist David Bassanese said two factors were behind the Australian dollars rise, but essentially the Australian dollar was benefitting from the post-COVID reflation trade. The US dollar is still on the nose globally, Mr Bassanese said. It has been weakening since the world and markets started to recover from COVID. The second thing is Iron ore prices have been incredibly strong While he does not think the Aussie will get close to parity, like it did from 2011 to 2013, it would all depend on the US dollar value and iron ore prices. Investors globally are looking for market exposure outside the US, outside the big FAAANG stocks, and that has been putting pressure on the US dollar and benefitting the Aussie. Hong Kongs market dropped sharply after the governments annual budget revealed a rise in stamp duty on stock trading. Chinas stock market has declined this week after a five day Lunar New Year holiday. A court here on Wednesday sought response from the Delhi Police on the anticipatory bail application of Shantanu Muluk, who along with Disha Ravi is accused of sharing a "toolkit" on social media related to the farmers' protest. Muluk, along with Ravi and another co accused Nikita Jacob, was booked for alleged sedition and other charges. Additional Sessions Judge Dharmender Rana, who granted bail to Ravi on Wednesday, directed police to file reply toMuluk's bail applicationand posted the matter for arguments on Thursday. Muluk had got transit bail from Bombay High Court on February 16 for a period of 10 days. During the brief hearing held through video-conferencing on Wednesday, the court also noted that Muluk has been granted protection from arrest till February 26. The matter was adjourned after the public prosecutor said that the investigating officer of the case was not present today and it would be better if the matter is heard in physical presence. In his application, Muluk has said that he merely created the toolkit with information on the agitation, which was then edited by others without his knowledge. According to the police, the 'Toolkit' was a sinister design to defame India and cause violence. The application further said that that Muluk did not access the document after January 20. The applicant (Muluk) helped collate information about the site of farmers' protests and formulate it in the form of a map for easy reference. The toolkit clearly shows that there is absolutely no connection with their social media support for the farmers protests, and with any violence whatsoever, it said. The application said there was absolutely nothing in the toolkit that advised doing anything unlawful and that all it talked about was social media and offline peaceful protests and contacting elected representatives. In response to the allegation put forth by the police on his links with the Canada-based Khalistani organisations 'Poetic Justice Foundation' and Sikhs for Justice, the accused said that he has never had any contact with any person outside India in relation to the toolkit. "There may be differing views on 'internationalising' a protest, but the same is certainly not illegal. Applicant as a climate activist perforce campaigns with activists internationally. Simply talking to persons from outside India cannot be criminalised," the application said. The application further claimed that he did not know about the co-founder of Poetic Justice Foundation, MO Dhaliwal and nothing objectionable was said in the zoom call on January 11, of which they both were part of. "There were some 70 odd persons on the call of whom the applicant did not know anybody apart from his colleague Nikita Jacob. Some people spoke there but nobody said anything that was divisive on the Zoom Call so the applicant had no reason to suspect anyone or anything," he said. Muluk and Jacob had joined the investigation at Delhi Police's Cyber Cell office in Dwarka on February 22, and were later confronted with Disha Ravi. Ravi was arrested by a Cyber Cell team of the Delhi Police from Bengaluru and brought to Delhi. Muluk and Jacob are currently on transit bail, while Ravi was granted bail on Tuesday after nine days of her arrest. If convicted for sedition, the accused may get a maximum jail term for life. (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.) NEW DELHI : More than 7,000 SARS-CoV-2 mutations have been documented but that doesnt translate to variants, say scientists, emphasising the distinction between the two and cautioning that the spike in cases in some states is likely due to non-adherence of COVID-19 appropriate behaviour. If safety protocols are not followed, new versions that can spread faster or dominate the previous version could emerge, they warned as worries mounted over a recent study showing 7,684 mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 genome in India. Though the study from Hyderabads CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology is alarming and led to panic in some quarters, some mutations are only to be expected. According to Rakesh Mishra, CSIR-CCMB director and study co-author, 7,684 mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 genome were documented from the data analysis of 6,017 genomes sequenced so far. That doesnt mean 7,000 variants are going around in the country. This only shows that the virus is mutating as expected, and we have documented what these mutations are," Mishra told PTI. He added that it is difficult to say right now how many variants there are in the country. A mutation means a change in a nucleic acid base or amino acid molecule, and a virus containing this change is termed a mutant, explained virologist Upasana Ray. Mutations eventually accumulate to generate variants that differ from the original virus more and more, and so, a variant can have limited or even cumulative mutations, she added. While it is not surprising to find many new mutations, it is important to sequence and documents them, said the senior scientist at Kolkatas CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology. Not all mutations would even linger around in the population for long. Some remain, some fade off," Ray told PTI. Mutation is not unique to SARS-CoV-2, she said. The longer a virus stays in the population and spreads, the more the mutations and hence more variants. If a virus attains a significant degree of change from its original form so that there is a major change in antigenic epitopes, it has a chance to escape the immunity offered by the existing vaccines," Ray said. An epitope is the part of virus cells that is recognised by the immune system. The analysis by CSIR-CCMB found that novel variants worrying many countries globally have so far only low prevalence in India. These include the variants with the immune-escape E484K mutation and the one with the N501Y mutation found to have a higher transmission rate. While the E484K mutation is found in both the South African and Brazil variant lineages, the N501Y mutation is found in the UK variant. But the low prevalence in the country might be simply because not enough sequencing has been done, the authors of the study said, calling for robust sequencing of coronavirus genomes across India. Noted virologist Shahid Jameel said there are currently 5,261 SARS-CoV-2 sequence entries from India in the GISAID database, a global science initiative that provides genomic data of the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. With 11 million confirmed cases, that is a sequencing rate of under 0.05 per cent," Jameel, director, Trivedi School of Biosciences, Ashoka University, told PTI. In his view, there isnt enough information on mutations, especially variant lineages in India, due to low sequencing. In the absence of that, I would say the surge is most likely due to non-adherence to COVID appropriate behaviour," Jameel added. There are only four patients from Maharashtra recently in whom a mutation called E484Q has been seen. This change is not as drastic as E484K, which is found in the South African and Brazil variant lineages. Since clinical and epidemiological correlations have not been done yet, we cant say if this is the cause of rising cases. Unless we see more of this, four cases are not enough to make that claim," Jameel said. He, however, cautioned that it is important to understand that more transmission will increase the chances of mutations developing. So Covid appropriate behaviour also cuts down on the development of variant viruses," he said. Mishra agreed that the current surge in certain states is less likely due to some new variant, and more likely due to people ignoring COVID protocols. I dont see any recent superspreader events till now, because whatever sequencing has been done doesnt point to any new fast-spreading variant in the country," he added. Mishra also emphasised that the findings do suggest the likelihood of new variants arising if continuous mutations in the virus genome are discovered. Sequencing of the genome to look for mutations is to keep a track of the virus genome so as to check what this will hold for vaccine and drug efficacy. For example, the UK variant has around 17 mutations in its genome," he said. Ray said even vaccination can put a virus under stress and change it to a form (variant) that can evade the immune response, adding that the chance of this is low if mass immunisations are done faster. According to Jameel, a mutation is a normal consequence of a virus multiplication, but it is hard to say what is a normal number. The spike protein changes -- due to mutation in the spike gene -- have not shown anything that would compromise vaccine efficacy," he noted. The spike protein helps the virus enter human cells. There has been a rise in the number of daily infections in five states: Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Punjab, and Madhya Pradesh in the past few days. Of these, Maharashtra and Kerala are the most worrying, accounting for about 75 per cent of the total active COVID-19 cases in the country. The N440K and E484Q variants of SARS-CoV-2 have been detected in Maharashtra, Kerala, and Telangana. Also, three other mutated strains -- one each from the UK, South Africa, and Brazil are already present in the country," NITI Aayog Member (Health) V K Paul said in a press conference in New Delhi on Tuesday. But there is no reason for us to believe presently, on the basis of scientific information, that they are responsible for the upsurge of the outbreak in some districts of Maharashtra and Kerala," Paul said. With 13,742 new infections, India's COVID-19 count has gone up to 1,10,30,176 while recoveries are at 1,07,26,702, according to Union Health Ministry data updated on Wednesday. There are 1,46,907 active cases of coronavirus infections in the country, which comprises 1.33% of the total caseload, the data stated. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? 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Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company The international community must do more to protect Crimean Tatars in Crimea occupied by Russia. "The persecution of Crimean Tatars gives cause for great concern. They have difficulties in obtaining education and meeting their religious needs. The international community must do more to protect them and their rights. The coordinated response of the international community will give efficiency and effectiveness," Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Turkey Yavuz Selim Kiran said at a ministerial panel discussion "International Response to Human Rights Violations in the Temporarily Occupied Crimea, Ukraine" on February 23, an Ukrinform correspondent reported. Support for Crimean Tatars and non-recognition of the annexation is both a moral and a legal obligation, he stressed. "This issue must remain a top priority on the global agenda. Therefore, we support the initiative to create the Crimean Platform. We hope that this initiative will increase international support," said the Turkish diplomat. He reminded that Turkey had become a refuge for more than 3 million Crimean Tatars so the protection of their rights was very important for Turkey. "Crimean Tatars have suffered a lot throughout their history. Their deportation was one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. After years of wandering, they were able to return home, but the 2014 annexation brought new suffering. The situation with respect for human rights is deteriorating, the leaders of the Crimean Tatar people cannot visit their homeland," said the Deputy Foreign Minister of Turkey. The Turkish diplomat also noted that the UN had not coped with many of the challenges that have arisen recently, including Russia's occupation of Crimea. He stressed that Turkey did not recognize the annexation of Crimea and advocated the restoration of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity. As reported, on January 14, the European Court of Human Rights upheld Ukraine's lawsuit against Russia over human rights violations in the occupied Crimea. Russia's planned armed aggression against Ukraine began on February 20, 2014 with a military operation by the Russian Armed Forces to seize part of Ukraine's territory - the Crimean Peninsula. Subsequently, Russian regular troops and Russian-led militants occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. As reported, the Crimean Platform is a new consultative and coordination format initiated by Ukraine to improve the efficiency of the international response to the occupation of Crimea, respond to growing security challenges, step up international pressure on Russia, prevent further human rights violations, protect victims of the occupying power and to achieve the de-occupation of Crimea and its return to Ukraine. The Crimean Platform is expected to operate at the level of heads of state and government, foreign ministers, in the dimension of inter-parliamentary cooperation and expert network. The Crimean Platform is to be launched officially at an inaugural summit in Kyiv in 2021. ol Kolkata/New Delhi/Dhanbad, Feb 24 : The story of absconding coal mafia kingpin Anup Majhi aka Lala, who is named in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) FIR in an illegal coal smuggling case seems to be inspired from a Bollywood crime thriller where the role of Rs 20 note becomes instrumental in the safe passage of trucks laden with coal, officers related to probe said on Wednesday. A senior police officer in Jharkhand's Dhanbad district related to the investigation of the illegal coal smuggling case, told IANS on condition of anonymity, "It seems Majhi was inspired from several crime thrillers in Bollywood where the villains or criminals used Indian currency notes a signal as a receipt for the safe passage of their smuggled items." He said that the truck drivers associated with Majhi carried a Rs 20 note which used to be a signal for the others. "The Rs 20 note recovered from the drivers was a kind of signal. One of the angles point it towards the safe passage of the coal from Dhanbad to West Bengal and another angle can be a message to other mafias that they should not operate in their areas," he said. He said that the Rs 20 note used by Majhi's gang was from a specific note series, about which the other groups had little idea. If the trucks of other syndicate tried to enter that route then they could be easily identified as the notes handed over to them might be from another series, he pointed out. The official said that the code in the form of value of Indian Currency used to change from time to time to keep the idea of receipts secret from other syndicates. The CBI had registered a case against the alleged kingpin of the pilferage racket Majhi, Eastern Coalfield Ltd General Managers Amit Kumar Dhar and Jayesh Chandra Rai, ECL chief of security Tanmay Das, area security inspector Kunustoria Dhananjay Rai, and SSI and security in-charge Kajora area Debashish Mukherjee. Following the FIR, the CBI also questioned West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee's nephew Abhishek Banerjee's wife Rujira Banerjee and her sister Menka Gambhir in connection with the case earlier this week. Meanwhile, Dhanbad Senior Superintendent of Police Anees Vikrant Minz told IANS, "We were able to track the smuggling racket in the month of November last year." He said, the police got a tipoff that coal smuggling will start from November 1 and the police made a plan to seize the vehicles engaged in the smuggling of coal. "We also got success after some vehicles of the gang were seized," the Dhanbad SSP added. Explaining the modus operandi, he said that Majhi's people used to come to Jharkhand from the West Bengal side. And they use to operate through receipts. When further pressed, he said that nine vehicles of the gang were seized from Dhanbad between November 4 to 5. He said that seven trucks were seized in Nirsa area while two in Govindpura area of Dhanbad. He also said that the Dhanbad Police also laid a trap on the Grand Trunk road that connects Delhi with Kolkata with a fake traffic jam to trap the vehicles of the syndicate without giving out any clue. "Through the fake jam on the highway we were able to seize more trucks as it was said that few of the vehicles had skipped the police trap," he added. IANS tried to speak to several police officers in West Bengal's Asansol, Purulia and Durgapur. However, they remained tightlipped about the details of Majhi's modus operandi and citing the CBI investigation. The CBI probe into the illegal coal smuggling case has brought the spotlight turned on the illegal coal mining empire in West Bengal's infamous Raniganj-Asansol belt that remained a hotbed of illegitimate operations of coal for over four decades. According to sources in the agency, the sleuths have allegedly found documents linking Majhi and his close associate and another alleged coal mafia kingpin Joydev Mondal to an illegal coal empire worth over Rs 15,000 crore. According to agency sources, they virtually operate a parallel administration in the colliery belt in connivance with top politicians, local administration and the ECL authorities. Sources in the agency said that Majhi allegedly owns 20 industrial units in and around Durgapur and Asansol. He also owns two holiday resorts and a number of properties in Kolkata and Delhi. Majhi also teamed up with alleged cattle smuggler Enamul Haque, arrested by the CBI last year. He worked with Haque using his network in North Bengal to transport illegal coal to Murshidabad, Malda, Dinajpur and beyond to Bangladesh. According to West Bengal police sources, the entire syndicate of illegal coal handling takes place in an organised manner. The three-layered mechanism of operating the illegal coal mining in the ECL leasehold area is divided into three different parts. First, illegal rat-hole mining that mostly takes place in abandoned ECL collieries, secondly, operating depots to stockpile the illegal coal and the third and final part is transportation of those illegally-mined minerals. All big players are involved in the third part as the key profits lie there. Insiders say that at least 35,000 people are directly employed in about 3,500 illegal coal mines in the Asansol-Raniganj area, while another 40,000 get indirect employment. The workforce is mostly drawn from the neighbouring impoverished pockets of Jharkhand. Only 5 per cent of the total manpower associated with the organised illegal mining syndicate is local. The ECL mining leasehold area is 753.75 Sq-km and surface right area is 237.18 sq-km in West Bengal and Jharkhand. The Raniganj Coalfield is spread over the Burdwan, Birbhum, Bankura and Purulia districts in West Bengal. The network of illegal coal transportation has a close nexus with local police administration as they take care of its smooth operation in the entire corridor. Sources said that the coal extracted from these illegal mines sells for Rs 300-400 a tonne, which is way cheaper than the actual price, and they cater to all sponge iron, ferro alloy, glass factories and brick kilns across Bengal and other states. The large stretch of the Raniganj-Asansol belt is under the coal mafia's control. There have been incidents of miners getting trapped in these mines and being killed. (Anand Singh can be contacted at anand.s@ians.in) New York, Feb 25 : Two Senate committees unexpectedly postponed on Wednesday preliminary votes on confirming Neera Tanden, the embattled Indian American nominee for a cabinet position, as the powerful director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). With the votes uncertain for her confirmation by the full Senate after a key Democratic Party Senator Joe Manchin opposed her, the Homeland Security and Budget Committees delayed the preliminary votes on approving her nomination that were scheduled for Wednesday. Democratic Senator Gary Peters, who heads the Homeland Security Committee, said the delay was because "people needed a little more time to assess it." Cabinet members and other senior officials have to be confirmed by the Senate and before that committees dealing with the areas of the nominees would have to give their approval. He said that discussions were continuing on her nomination. While there were media reports speculating that the postponement was a prelude to withdrawing her nomination, President Joe Biden's Spokesperson Jen Psaki said he stood by her. At her daily briefing, she downplayed the postponement saying that efforts were underway to get Senate support for her. If Tanden manages to get through the Senate and is confirmed, she would be the second Indian American to be a member of the US cabinet. The director of the OMB arguably holds the most powerful cabinet post as the official framing of the $5 trillion US budget that determines the allocations for the various departments and vetting policy and appointments. In the 100-member Senate that is evenly divided between the Democrats and Republican, Manchin refusing to back her tilts the balance away from the Biden nominee. The administration is trying to get at least one Republican to support her, but so far four of the seven considered likely to vote with the Democrats have said that they would not support her. Tanden has a history of intemperate Twitter attacks on politicians of all parties, which was cited by Manchin and the Republicans as the reason for opposing her. She deleted about 1,000 tweets and has apologised for them. One of those she attacked, Senator Bernie Sanders, is the chair of the Budget Committee. He ran unsuccessfully against Hillary Clinton in 2016 for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Tanden was Clinton's campaign adviser. Democrats have accused the Republicans of following double standards because they have stood by Trump who fired a steady stream of virulent tweets against his adversaries. (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter at @arulouis) Nagarjuna is game for a makeover for his role in his upcoming film under new-age filmmaker Praveen Sattaru. Apparently, Nag will feature as an ex -RAW agent who turns Chief Security Officer (CSO) on a mission. An excited Praveen Sattaru, who commenced shooting for the action-entertainer on Monday, tells us that his first day of working with Nag was super cool. Hes a stunner; his charm and the effortless ease with which he gets into the role is too good, enthuses Praveen. He says Nag will be seen performing high-octane stunts in the movie. According to the director, the action sequences in the film will be on par with Hollywood standards. In Tollywood, we have tried to adopt scripts and narrative styles from Hollywood, but we have seldom succeeded. I believe the trick lies in identifying and adapting the narrative style of our films to the Hollywood style of film-making, explains the director. I believe one of the main reasons Nag Sir gave me the opportunity was that he liked the way I sketched his role. The intense emotional arc his character undergoes caught his attention. And of course, the script, which he believed is gripping, explains the Garuda Vega helmer. Nag will be seen as a 45-year-old man. His look will be stunning and the effort Nagarjuna Sir has been putting in is truly inspiring, asserts Praveen, signing off. Gurugram, Feb 24 : The Haryana government's decision to reopen schools for classes 3 to 5 from February 24 has received a mixed response from the private schools in Gurugram. Parents have expressed concern over the surge in Covid-19 cases in several parts of the country. Schools in Haryana and the rest of the country were closed in March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic with classes being conducted in online mode. The education department has issued an order saying that schools could function for the specified classes from 10 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. While some schools announced that they would welcome students after having put in place measures to keep them safe from Covid-19 infection, others have said they would not do so until all parents are comfortable with the decision. "Some school managements claimed that the classes for primary students are now over. We are not opening the school for the primary students yet as the classes are now almost over and we would be closing the school like every year by mid-March for summer break," said Rupa Chakravarty, Director at Suncity Schools. Schools will have to follow all Covid-19 related guidelines and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) before starting operations, said a senior education department official. A few school managements were seen following Covid-19 protocols and students were allowed entry only after proper screening, wearing face masks and sanitization. They said that those with high body temperature will not be allowed to enter the school premises. It is mandatory for students and staff to wear masks and sanitise their hands. The classrooms are being sanitised regularly. "We have adopted all precautions in view of the Covid-19 pandemic for the senior secondary students. We are doing the same for junior classes as well. We have installed sanitizers and screening machines to avoid the infection. We have come up with a seating arrangement to maintain social distancing," said the Principal of a private school. According to the state government's guidelines, the students need to carry their Covid-19 negative test report with them before entering the school premises and the Covid test should be conducted within 72 hours prior to their entry into the school premises. It is also mandatory for students to carry a consent letter signed by their parents declaring they don't have any problem with their children attending physical classes, the guidelines said. In case any student tests Covid-19 positive, the protocols laid down by the government would be followed. "We have asked the parents to give consent for students of classes 6 to 8 for the upcoming session in April. For the primary classes 3 to 5, we would not be calling the students to the school due to increasing Covid-19 cases. We have started the first phase of calling students and the second phase will begin in April. We are fully coordinating government protocols amid Covid 19," said Alka Singh, Principal of Blue Bells Model School in Sector-4. Parents, too, seemed wary of physical classes. Aman Yadav, Father of a class 4 student of a private school in Gurugram, said, "He is not interested in sending his child to school in view of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The number of cases is increasing day-by-day, so sending children to school is not safe." Schools in Haryana had reopened for senior secondary students in December 2020. The students of classes 6 to 8 were allowed to attend school from February 1 this year. Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19) New Delhi, Feb 24 : The Enforcement Directorate (ED) carried out searches at various premises of Amar Chand Gupta, Ram Laal Gupta, Raj Kumar Gupta and other family members in connection with its probe into a money laundering case for siphoning off loan amount of Rs 605 crore by Shree Bankey Bihari Exports Limited (SBBEL). An ED official said the agency sleuths carried out searches at several locations on Tuesday. The ED had registered a case of money laundering on the basis of the CBI FIR against SBBEL, its Directors Amar Chand Gupta and others and other unknown public servants or persons for fraud of Rs 605 crore. The official said that during the investigation, it was gathered that SBBEL had diverted loan funds through its sister units and also by employing the modus operandi of showing bogus and fictitious sale or purchase transactions. He said that the primary security had also been disposed by it without depositing the sale proceeds in the loan account. The official claimed that it was also gathered that the books of accounts had been secreted in various premises wherein business was being carried out by these persons namely Amar Chand Gupta, Ram Laal Gupta and Raj Kumar Gupta in the name of other family members. "In order to uncover the trail of proceeds of crime and to recover documentary and electronic evidence, searches at residential and business premises of the directors and the entities being run by them along with residence of one key employee were conducted," the official said. He said that during searches, various incriminating documents, laptops, mobile phones and digital storage devices indicating number of entities controlled by them to facilitate money laundering have been found. The official said that besides the Rs 605 crore loan siphoning case, the financial probe agency is also probing money laundering on the basis of two other FIRs registered by the CBI against two other group companies for bank fraud of Rs 100 crore each. "Thus, the total amount of proceeds of crime involved in these cases is Rs 805 crore by these persons," the official added. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said she looks forward to assisting in bringing accountability, transparency and oversight of COVID-19 relief in her appointment to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. Malliotakis (R-Staten Island/South Brooklyn) was the only freshman member of congress appointed to the subcommittee. The committee will examine the efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and transparency of the use of taxpayer funds and relief programs to address the coronavirus crisis, including through Federal agencies, state and local government entities, financial institutions and other private businesses, contracts, grants, loans, loan guarantees, investments, and cooperative agreements. The subcommittee will also examine preparedness, economic impact on individuals, disparities, policies, and all other issues related to COVID-19. Republican Whip and Ranking Subcommittee Member Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) said the committee will be looking into the Cuomo administrations decisions on nursing homes, and called Malliotakis participation invaluable in the push for these answers. Malliotakis also said that the investigation into deaths at nursing homes in New York is a priority, and shes also concerned about $1 trillion from the last COVID-19 relief package that has not yet been spent while another $1.9 trillion relief package is in the works. As we look to continue to help struggling Americans and small businesses holding on by a thread, it is imperative that relief funds are spent appropriately and actually get to the people. Congress must come together to pass tailored legislation that expands vaccine manufacturing and distribution, reopens our schools and helps get Americans back to work, Malliotakis said. She said constituents have raised concern about where their taxpayer money is going and want to make sure the government is spending it appropriately. And, vaccine production and distribution is a concern she shares with her constituents. Its supposed to be an emergency relief bill and I dont think congress took the time to focus on whats needed and where the money should go, she said, adding that less than 1% of money in the $1.9 trillion relief package is earmarked for vaccine production and distribution. Its so irresponsible to pass this massive package when over $1 trillion isnt COVID-related. Malliotakis penned a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo asking them not to raise income taxes and the property tax levy if they receive federal aid -- New York is currently set to receive $50 billion -- and use a portion of the funds to stop the toll increases and provide relief to the small businesses they shut down. Shes yet to receive a response. When asked how she would vote on the relief package, she said, Lets see what happens over the next couple of days and if I get a commitment from the mayor and the governor. The worst thing the governor and mayor could do is accept the federal aid and still move forward with their anticipated toll and tax increases. It would not only be double-dipping on the part of the city and state governments, but it would be a slap in the face to our middle-class families who are struggling to get by during this pandemic and cant afford increases to their daily cost of living, she said in a recent op-ed for the Advance/SILive.com. FOLLOW KRISTIN F. DALTON ON TWITTER. French actor Gerard Depardieu has been charged for the alleged rape and sexual assault of a 22-year-old actress at his Paris mansion in 2018, it was reported last night. The Paris public prosecutors office opened a preliminary investigation in the summer of 2018 into the allegations against Mr Depardieu but it was subsequently dropped for lack of evidence. The inquiry resumed last summer and Mr Depardieu (72), was charged in December. Mr Depardieu, Frances most famous actor, is the latest high-profile figure to be charged for rape as movements against sexual abuse pick up pace in the country. The woman, an actress and dancer according to French media, accuses him of raping and assaulting her several times at his mansion in Paris. She filed the complaint at a gendarmerie in Lambesc, near Aix-en-Provence, southern France. Mr Depardieus lawyer, Herve Temime, said the actor, who is free but under judicial supervision, completely rejects the accusations. She reportedly claimed the events took place at the screen icons hotel particulier town mansion in Pariss central 6th arrondissement on August 7 and 13. According to a source close to the investigation, Mr Depardieu is friends with the young womans father and had taken her under his wing, giving her tips on her acting career. She studied in a school where he gave lessons. According to her agent, the actress has been destroyed by the saga. She reportedly alleged that he abused her during an informal rehearsal for a play. Her lawyer was not available for comment. Mr Depardieu has appeared in around 170 films, including Jean de Florette, Green Card and Asterix et Obelix. He has had run-ins with the law in the past regarding drink-driving. The charges come in the wake of a string of sexual abuse accusations against high-profile figures in France. Last week, a former French minister, Georges Tron, was sentenced and imprisoned for the first time in modern French history over the gang rape and sexual assault on an employee. The past few months have seen the emergence of #MeTooInceste and #MeTooGay, under which survivors told their stories of abuse. India on Wednesday turned the table on Turkey and Pakistan, slamming the two nations for raising the issue of Jammu and Kashmir at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). New Delhi also dismissed the statement made by Yousef A Al-Othaimeen, Secretary-General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), at the UNHRC, referring to the human rights situation in Jammu and Kashmir. We reject the factually incorrect and unwarranted references to India. We regret that the OIC countries continue to allow Pakistan to misuse OIC platforms to indulge in anti-India propaganda, said S Pujani, Second Secretary of the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations offices in Geneva. She was making a statement at the 46th session of the UNHRC, exercising Indias right to reply to the allegations made by Pakistan, Turkey and the OIC. As a country with one of the worlds worst human rights records, Pakistan would do well to put its own house in order, before venturing to point a finger at India, she said, referring to violence, institutionalized discrimination and persecution of the minorities in the neighbouring country. She cited a report published by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan to point out that an estimated 1,000 women, mostly aged between 16 and 25 years from minority communities were subjected to abduction followed by forced conversion and forced marriage in that country every year. She also noted that Shias, Hazaras and Ahmadiya communities had continued to face persecution, state-condoned violence and discrimination in Pakistan. Earlier, speaking at the 46th session of the UNHRC, Shireen Mazari, Minister for Human Rights of Pakistan, alleged that India had exploited the Covid-19 pandemic to accelerate the pace of its colonization project in Jammu and Kashmir. Turkeys Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu too referred to alleged human right violations in Jammu and Kashmir during his speech at the UNHRC and called upon the Government of India to ease current restrictions in the Union Territory. He also called for resolution of the issue of J&K as per the UN Security Councils resolutions. As regards the remarks made by Turkey, we find them completely unacceptable. It is ironical for a country which has trampled upon its own civil society to pass unjustified comments on others internal matters, Pujani said, presenting New Delhis statement at the UNHRC in response to the remarks made by Cavusoglu. As far as the subject of UN Resolutions is concerned, we would advise Turkey to practise what it preaches by first implementing those UN Resolutions that apply to it. COVID-19 case counts and hospitalizations are plummeting. Vaccine distribution is accelerating. After nearly a year, it seems we have finally reached the beginning of the end of the pandemic. As things continue to wind down, we're starting a series called "Pandemic Exit Interviews" a weekly series with a person of local interest who played a central role in the pandemic. We'll ask each figure to share what they've learned, what they regret and where they see things going from here. Read the first installment here: Only one thing shocked UCSF's Bob Wachter about the pandemic Dr. Monica Gandhi is not your typical epidemiologist in the era of COVID-19. While the vast majority of experts in her field call for the most stringent business closures and other mitigation measures, Gandhi a professor of medicine at UCSF has called for a "harm reduction" approach that also considers other risks beyond COVID-19 infection when making public policy. That view has not been a popular one among policymakers and experts in her city and state. But Gandhi is confident that one day, she'll be vindicated. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. SFGATE: You are one of the few "harm reductionists" in public health. Can you describe the difference between the harm reductionists" and the lockdownists, as you've referred to them in the past? Gandhi: I would say that harm reductionists like myself believe we cant completely keep people away from each other, and that using really extreme language like "stay-at-home order," or "see no one else" does not take into account human nature, loneliness and the economic reality that a lot of people need to go to work to survive. I've long been concerned that the public health messages are only tailored to people who can work from home, people who work in tech and people with intact families and no need to see other people. Harm reductionists believe we should be giving messages that acknowledge some people will need to take some risks regarding COVID-19, and we should try to tell them how to keep safe in situations when in they're in public or seeing others. San Francisco was a place of harm reduction when it came to HIV and sexual health. Therefore, I was surprised that there were so few scientists in San Francisco (out loud, anyway) speaking of the need for harm reduction in San Francisco when it came to COVID-19 protection. SFGATE: The lockdownists have much more power than the harm reductionists do in public health, and have at times expressed scorn for those with different opinions. Can you speak to what it's been like to receive blowback for your views? Gandhi: I have been surprised by the party lines that were drawn in terms of how to respond to pandemic, as opposed to having everyone take in new data as it comes, incorporate the data and then make decisions that can change over time. It seems that we decided early on that there's only one way to respond, and any dissent from standard messaging was met with dismay and criticism. For example, in terms of the winter lockdown in California, I was dismayed by the degree of profound shutdowns for outdoor playgrounds, outdoor dining and also this idea that no one from two households could see each other. It was those three things that concerned me, since we knew outdoor spaces were safe, and going into holiday season, loneliness and the desire to see loved ones is a real phenomenon. And when I spoke out about that, I took a lot of criticism for not toeing the party line. What I was trying to do was use harm reductionist principles, use the science we have that masks and distancing work, and then make recommendations along those lines. What surprised me was this: My impulse in speaking out came out of a concern for the economic situations of the working class and the impacts on health that come from economic insecurity on things like housing and hunger. And those questions of, "How are they going to feed their families?" were met by scientific community with, Well deal with that later, we're only thinking about the virus right now." And I was surprised by that. SFGATE: What would you say is the most important thing youve learned during the pandemic? Gandhi: I have learned a lot about nonpharmaceutical interventions to mitigate COVID-19 risk. I have thought deeply about the impact of mask wearing, as well as what distances are required to keep people safe, and how inexact the distancing science is. I have also learned a lot about the need for ventilation and the incredibly reduced transmission rates outside versus inside, and how prohibiting outdoor activities is counterproductive. I have also learned a lot about the vaccines and their efficacy. And I'm surprised that the messaging today is all about how the vaccines dont cover the variants, which is misleading. We should be spreading more optimism and talking less about mutations. The vaccines are effective at preventing severe disease even against variants, so it's very important not to panic. SFGATE: Can you elaborate on that? Gandhi: The best way to think about it is that all the vaccines down the line will offer 100% protection against hospitalization from COVID-19. During the trials, anyone who got hospitalized received the placebo in their arms. The Johnson & Johnson trial was conducted at a time the variants were circulating in both the U.S. and Latin America. We can also quantify that 95% of the virus in South Africa when the trials were going on was the B.1.351 variant and despite that, the Johnson & Johnson single dose still offered 100% protection against hospitalization and 85% protection against severe disease, which is where you're at home but not feeling well. It was the same across the board whether it was South Africa, the U.K. or Latin America. The difference in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is in mild disease; it had less efficacy against mild disease when dealing with the South African variant. This kind of incredible efficacy is done by T cell responses, which are long-lasting and prevent the scariest thing about COVID-19, which is severe illness. Ive been surprised by all the doom and gloom messaging about the variants and the vaccines, and Im concerned it will lead to vaccine hesitancy. We should be pushing more optimism about the vaccines. SFGATE: Whats the biggest thing you regret doing, saying or believing during the pandemic? Gandhi: Ive been extremely consistent on multiple messages around the benefits of masks and not closing schools. I was very consistent in saying we should not close schools, and once they were closed, I called for reopening them. If I do have any hesitations, it's that it has been difficult to not be fully embraced by the rest of the scientific community when I message the nuanced ways of learning about the virus. Its been very difficult, and I've felt attacked at times. When the outdoor dining thing came up, part of me wondered if I shouldn't message anything and just be quiet. But I talked to a lot of people including friends, and someone said to me, "When you look at yourself in mirror when this all over, you'd rather be the person who took the trouble in the short run but was seen as being right later on." SFGATE: What would you say was your lowest point during the pandemic? Gandhi: There were two low points: One was being piled on by multiple sides since I dont toe the party line either way. I've already talked about the larger scientific community, but I also get lots of angry emails from anti-mask people about being pro-mask and "wanting to smother children" with masks. The second low point was early on watching what was happening in New York, and wanting to go there while feeling completely helpless as a doctor. I remember being nonfunctional just watching the news one day. Those were two lowest points Ive had. SFGATE: In last week's installment, your colleague Dr. Bob Wachter delivered a pretty strong defense of the city of San Francisco's response to the pandemic, defending the fallout from prolonged closures by stating, "There are at least a few thousand people in San Francisco that are alive today that would not be if we didnt respond way we did." Do you agree or disagree with his argument? Gandhi: I would say that San Francisco did extremely well in controlling the severity of illness, and I'm not even sure its all the Department of Public Health's doing. We have the natural advantage of ventilation by virtue of our geography, so we had ventilation, mask wearing and lots of lockdowns, which gave us a fantastically low death rate. However, San Francisco has been one of those cities where our response to other aspects besides COVID-19 has been worse than other places. So economics, school closures, mental health, substance abuse, homelessness and overdose deaths. I'm concerned that the overemphasis on COVID means that we will have deal with the fallout for years to come. For example, I fear we have set back students in low-income communities greatly. In my mind, given the fact that vaccines are here, and given the fact that San Francisco has low disease severity, we should turn our attention at this point to all of the other collateral damage that occurs from business and school shutdowns and pay attention to that damage. SFGATE: Do you believe we're truly near the end? Gandhi: Yes. I truly believe we're panicking way too much about the variants. It's quite common for any RNA virus to mutate at high rate. I'm extremely optimistic that all of the vaccines will prevent severe illness even against variants. To me, severe illness is why we started paying attention to COVID-19 in first place. Otherwise, we would have never even noticed an odd stray cold virus that came out of Wuhan. We need to keep our eye on the most important thing about this pandemic: severe illness and death. We should be focusing less on variants, and more on the mass vaccination required to completely end the pandemic before the end of the year, which is something I believe we will accomplish. Bhubaneswar, Feb 24 : The opposition parties on Wednesday cornered the Odisha government over the border dispute issue with Andhra Pradesh and other states. Participating in an adjournment motion over the border dispute issue, leader of opposition Pradipta Kumar Naik said Odisha has border disputes with four states over 96 villages. "We don't see any action by the state government to resolve the issue. In Kotia panchayat, the dispute is over 21 villages and Andhra Pradesh conducted panchayat polls there," said Naik. Informing that there are no basic facilities including road and drinking water, the leader of opposition said the villagers are alienating Odisha as the state government has neglected them. On the other hand, the Andhra Pradesh government is providing better facilities to them, he added. Opposition chief whip Mohan Charan Majhi said due to negligence and lack of foresight by the state government, neighbouring states are intruding into the territory of Odisha. Participating in the motion, Congress MLA Tara Prasad Bahinipati said the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) is only concerned about the party. "Under BJD rule, land and water are not safe. Why did the state government not deploy police and direct that the villagers can't vote when Andhra Pradesh conducted polls in Kotia? An all-party meeting should be called to discuss the issue," said Bahinipati. Replying to the adjournment motion, Revenue and Disaster Management Minister Sudam Marndi said Odisha is facing border disputes with four states in seven districts. The districts are Koraput, Balasore, Mayurbhanj, Ganjam, Gajapati, Keonjhar and Nuapada. On the Kotia issue, the Minister said the state government has moved the Supreme Court by filing a contempt petition and sought four weeks time from the apex court to reply to the claims made by Andhra Pradesh government. The Minister said the Andhra Pradesh government has submitted an affidavit on this matter on February 17. However, the Odisha government has sought four weeks time from the apex court to submit a counter-affidavit. Feb. 23Portland councilors are expected to begin a public discussion about whether the city should maintain its restrictive policy for providing clean syringes to intravenous drug users during the coronavirus pandemic. Mayor Kate Snyder said in an email Tuesday morning that she has requested a "management update" on the city-run Needle Exchange from staff for the March 1 City Council meeting. And the council's Health and Human Services Committee is expected to hold a workshop in the coming weeks on the exchange's policy allowing clients to receive only the same number of clean needles as the used needles they turn in, unless they qualify for an exemption. Snyder's request comes after a dozen residents spoke during a council meeting Monday to urge councilors to hold a workshop and public conversation about the Needle Exchange program. The Press Herald reported last month that Portland was the only syringe services program in the state not taking advantage of an executive order from Gov. Janet Mills that relaxed regulations amid the pandemic. The order, issued last March, allowed but did not require the state-regulated programs to provide as many clean syringes as people needed during the pandemic, regardless of the number of used needles they returned. It also allowed programs to increase hours and expand mobile outreach, which was previous limited to certain locations. The goal was to ensure people had life-saving supplies, while also limiting personal interactions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Portland is the only municipality in the state running a syringe services program, which is a proven harm-reduction strategy to prevent the spread of other diseases and infections, such as HIV and Hepatitis C. The other programs are run by nonprofits. State officials have said Portland is the only program maintaining the 1:1 exchange rule. Since the Jan. 18 story, city officials have defended their decision to keep their 1:1 policy and have met in private with the city attorney to discuss the city's legal rights and duties associated with the program. The city said it has reaffirmed its 1:1 exchange policy with staff and volunteers after an audit showed workers have not been following the policy for years. The city said it distributed nearly 150,000 more syringes than it collected last year. Story continues City Hall Communications Director Jessica Grondin said Tuesday that the city's audit showed that the program had not been complying with its 1:1 exchange rule since 2016 and was providing supplies to noncertified exchange programs. She said the city has worked with the state to file corrected reports for those years. Other controls have been put in place, she said, including separating the operating and reporting duties to create an internal system of checks and balances and conducting a weekly audit of inventory. Grondin said said Portland's program currently operates 40 hours a week, seven days a week, at two locations, which staff believes is enough to meet client needs. She said the city has expanded its mobile syringe service program to homeless encampments throughout the city. The city has also been surveying clients about needle use. Of 182 clients surveyed, 80 percent report not reusing or sharing needles since their last visit, 17 percent report reusing and 3 percent report sharing, according to Grondin, who noted staff is also researching current best practices for harm reduction. "Public Health staff are undergoing literature review of syringe services best practices, including 1:1 policies and (the) relationship to overdose rates, infection rates, and community needle waste," Grondin said, stressing that Mills' order was not a mandate and is only in effect during the coronavirus public health emergency. Meanwhile, the council itself has yet to have a public discussion about policy. Mayor Snyder has said that the issue is an operational one for city staff, rather than a policy decision of the council. Twelve people urged the council during an open public comment period at Monday's meeting reconsider its position and to hold a public session about the 1:1 policy, which several described as antiquated. Several noted that waiving the requirement during the pandemic was recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and supported by harm-reduction advocates. Mill's order allowing programs to waive the restriction was also applauded by the American Medical Association, which urged other states to follow. Dr. Kevin Sullivan, a primary care physician and addiction treatment provider, urged councilors to hold a public discussion about the policy, saying that he's seen an increase in abscesses among his patients one of several conditions caused by reusing and sharing needles. Sullivan said a needs-based exchange policy could reduce infections and emergency rooms visits at a time when hospitals are stretched thin because of the coronavirus. "I see my patients suffering and all I can do is advocate for them," Sullivan said. Other Portland residents wanted councilors to go on the record with their opinions. "So far, the City Council has only heard the views of city staff to the best of my knowledge and I would like to know the views of the City Council," said Molly Kravitz. Kate Vaughn also urged the council to break its silence. "We are the only exchange program in the whole state that's chosen to hang on this policy," Vaughn said. "And I haven't heard a good rationalization for why. I think we deserve to know why." At least two city councilors are ready to discuss whether the city should move to a needs-based exchange, as opposed to the 1:1 policy. "There's a pretty vigorous debate on both sides of those terms about what's a more effective public health strategy," City Councilor Mark Dion said during the HHS committee's Feb. 9 meeting. "There seems to be some merit in terms of the efficacy of a needs-based plan of care and that's where I will be coming from. ... We need to fully explore that." Councilor Belinda Ray also said Feb. 9 she's interested in "having a bigger conversation around this," since she has been pressed by friends and constituents. The councilors' comments came after brief presentation by Kristen Dow, the city's health and human services director. A discussion of the needle exchange program was not on the Feb. 9 agenda, but was briefly discussed as part of a general update of HHS programs. Dow said that in January the city had made 819 exchanges, giving out 821 more syringes than it collected (30,006 versus 29,185). Although the city reaffirmed it's 1:1 requirement following the audit, Dow noted that the city will provide a kit of 10 needles to certain individuals who show up without turning in any dirty needles. Dow said in an email Tuesday that prior to the executive order, only new clients could receive a starter pack of needles. But the city expanded that in response to the governor's order to include homeless individuals either staying in the shelter or in an encampment, people recently released from an institution or who had their supplies confiscated, and others who present without needles to exchange. Dow also emphasized an increase in the number of discarded needles found in public during the committee's Feb. 9 meeting. In 2020, public works staff reported collecting 6,240 used syringes in public, up from only 598 in 2015, she said. Only 1,732 syringes, or roughly 29 percent, were retrieved from community sharps disposal bins throughout the city. Dow said Tuesday that the city collected 4,008 syringes from public places in 2019, but did not say what percentage was found in sharps containers. The city is currently surveying clients about their needle use and staff is reevaluating where it places the sharps disposal bins, she said. It's unclear when the HHS committee will hold its workshop. Committee Chairman Tae Chong said in an interview Tuesday that details about the committee workshop, including the panelists and the date, are still being finalized. But he expects to invite someone from the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention to discuss the rationale behind the governor's order and have city staff explain why it's choosing not to lift its 1:1 policy. Chong noted that Portland is only 5 percent of the state's population, yet it distributes about half of the clean syringes in the state. If access to clean syringes is a problem, he said other communities should stand up exchange programs, rather than relying on Portland. And he would like to see Mills encourage hospitals to operate exchange services, not only to increase access, but also to provide additional health care to clients and to destigmatize the service. "I hope people realize this is a state issue and we as a community and state leaders need to address it rather than people thinking that if Portland changes this one policy it's going to change all of those numbers because it's not," Chong said. SK, Micron, Kioxia boast advanced stacking technology By Baek Byung-yeul Samsung Electronics has held a solid lead in the NAND flash memory chip market with more than a 30 percent share. But rival companies appear to be challenging Samsung's technological competence as they are starting to show better workmanship. NAND flash memory is a type of non-volatile storage technology that does not require power to retain data. With IT devices and servers for data centers requiring bigger storage capacity, stacking as many thin layers as possible has become a top priority for NAND flash chip makers. Samsung has yet to announce its latest NAND stacking technology that goes beyond its current 128-layer chips, while competitors such as SK hynix, Micron and Kioxia are racing to reveal cutting-edge designs. This has prompted analysts to believe that the memory chip giant may be losing its technological edge. Last November, U.S. chip maker Micron announced the development of the industry's first 176-layer NAND flash chip. SK Hynix followed by unveiling its own 176-layer chip in December. Japan's Kioxia also announced recently that it succeeded in developing 162-layer 3D NAND together with Western Digital. They said the new product is 40 percent smaller than previous 112-layer technology and can provide more density and lower read latency. Jim Handy, a semiconductor industry analyst at Objective Analysis, said Samsung's leadership in the NAND flash industry won't change anytime soon, but agreed that it is losing competence in terms of stacking up more layers. "Yes, Samsung is behind its competitors. This is not the first time that Samsung has fallen behind its competition in NAND flash. I remember in 2012 when Samsung had the least advanced process at 27-nanometer while everyone else was shipping 24-nanometer or 25-nanometer parts," the analyst told The Korea Times. Asked why Samsung has not announced its new NAND flash that has higher stacks than 162 or 176 layers, Handy pointed out the company has depended too much on a single-deck technology while its rivals split their stacks into two decks. "As far as I know, having higher stacks is the most efficient way to increase storage capacity. Samsung has been pursuing a more difficult path. The company increases its layer count by using a single-deck approach while others have migrated to two decks. In theory, a single deck should be less expensive to produce, but it takes longer to develop, and this appears to be why Samsung has fallen behind," he said. Samsung expects demand for NAND chips to rise this year as more smartphones will be sold, while prolonged social distancing measures will also boost sales of IT devices such as laptops. For server demand, data centers will increasingly order NAND chips this year as well. To better compete with its rivals, Samsung is also preparing to launch a seventh-generation V-NAND using a double-deck approach, according to the firm's Chief Financial Officer Choi Yoon-ho. "To give you an update on our NAND, our single stack sixth-generation V-NAND has already completed a ramp-up. And this year, we will be scaling up production. Also in the next generation, that's the seventh-generation V-NAND, we are planning to adopt a double stack for the first time," Choi told investors in January. "This will give us the advantage of having the smallest stack height in the industry. And on top of that, by using the know-how we've accumulated working with single stack, we expect to maintain outstanding cost competitiveness even with multi-stack on seventh-generation V-NAND." Despite the company's vision, the analyst said it remains to be seen whether Samsung can see markedly better results with the new approach. "It is more difficult to develop a single-deck device, and that has slowed Samsung's progress. Samsung has stated that it will use a two-deck approach for its seventh-generation V-NAND. Since Samsung is not already producing a two-deck NAND, it must learn how to do something that its competitors already understand very well," Handy noted. But he has not changed his view that Samsung will continue to lead the NAND market. "Samsung is maintaining its market share leadership. This is the company's main focus, so I don't think that will change. In technology, Samsung sometimes leads and sometimes follows. Today the company's NAND technology is behind that of some of their competitors," the analyst said. Watch out for YMTC The analyst said there is no doubt that Samsung will maintain its leadership in the NAND flash business, but, in the long run, the biggest threat to the Korean company could be Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), the largest memory chip maker in China. YMTC wowed the memory chip industry last year by announcing the development of a 128-layer 3D NAND. The company did not officially announce it is capable of mass-producing the product, but the successful development of the 128-layer NAND could increase its presence in the industry. On the back of the Chinese government's push to make the country one of the leaders in the chip industry, YMTC is expected to achieve steady growth, the analyst said. "Samsung's biggest long-term threat in NAND flash is YMTC in China. YMTC has an incredible source of capital for financing new production facilities, and is not required to be profitable," he said. "Whenever the company learns how to produce NAND flash in high volumes, it will grow rapidly by taking market share away from other NAND flash makers. When this happens I believe that Samsung may lose its No.1 ranking." The question of why anybody should give a hoot about the Golden Globe Awards has always lurked in the background of the annual extravaganza. Over the years, reports have called for more transparency from members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which nominates and votes on winners in the TV and movie categories. Given how bizarre Golden Globes choices often are, rumors have circulated that HFPA members are a bit too influenced by factors that go beyond artistic merit, i.e., parties, junkets, and opportunities to take photos with stars. Now, as we prepare for the return of Golden Globes hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and the 2021 awards TV ceremony on Sunday, Feb. 28, the old complaints about the Globes, and its teensy, 90-odd membership ranks, have gotten a new coat of paint. A much-discussed recent story in the Los Angeles Times has served to remind people of the HFPAs status as a punchline (even by awards show hosts, such as Ricky Gervais), with the group at once fawned over, derided and grudgingly tolerated, as the article says. The piece goes into detail about the HFPAs financial situation, including allegations that the nonprofit has improperly funneled money to some members. (How to watch the 78th Annual Golden Globe Awards online: Livestream on Fubo TV, which offers a 7-day free trial; or stream the awards the following day on Peacock) Representatives of the HFPA have denied suggestions of unethical behavior, including allegations that members accept money to try and persuade colleagues to vote for specific projects, despite their lack of quality. The Los Angeles Times article includes quotes from anonymous members of the HFPA who object to some of the groups practices. In one example mentioned in the story, 30 HFPA members flew to France to visit the set of Emily in Paris, a lightweight Netflix series that has done well for the streamer, but received generally unenthused reviews. During that 2019 trip, the piece goes on to say, HFPA members were treated to a two-night stay at the five-star Peninsula Paris hotel, where rooms currently start at about $1,400 a night, and a news conference and lunch at the Musee des Arts Forains, a private museum filled with amusement rides dating to 1850 where the show was shooting. Related: Netflix dominates Golden Globe nominations with Mank, The Trial of the Chicago 7 When the Golden Globes nominations were announced in early February, one of the more baffling decisions was honoring Emily in Paris with nominations for best TV musical or comedy series, and for its star, Lily Collins. The Times story quotes an HFPA member who says of the Emily in Paris nominations, There was a real backlash and rightly so that show doesnt belong on any best of 2020 list. Whether the HFPA will make changes in how it does business is anyones guess. After all, the Golden Globe Awards show has, through the years, been telecast, then booted off TV because of scandalous accusations, then brought back. The show has now become a glitzy wingding, known for wisecracking hosts, lots of big names showing up, an embrace of both movies and TV, and a party atmosphere, where the stars kick back glasses of adult beverages and let their hair down. The best you can say for the Golden Globes Awards show is that it doesnt take itself too seriously. But theres serious money involved, as marketers play up Golden Globe nods to promote movies and shows, and hopefully steer them toward Oscar and Emmy nominations, which are taken more seriously than the Globes. As anyone who hasnt spent the last year in a sensory deprivation tank knows, however, TV awards shows are among the countless rituals of life that have been forced to adapt to the COVID era. That means we cant expect the usual gaggle of fancy-dressed celebs to gather at tables in the Beverly Hilton hotel ballroom, and eat and drink while the show goes on. Reflecting our current remote reality, the 78th Golden Globe Awards is going to look different. The good news is that Fey and Poehler, who have demonstrated their hosts-with-the-most chops in three earlier outings, are back to host for a fourth time. But instead of joining forces on the same stage, Fey and Poehler will preside over a bicoastal show. Fey will host from New Yorks Rainbow Room, and Poehler will be at the Beverly Hilton hotel, in Beverly Hills. Nominees are expected to Zoom in from all over the place, which has become the new norm for awards shows. Sometimes, that looser arrangement can lead to fun, spontaneous moments, as when a joyful Zendaya, surrounded by an equally giddy group, won the Emmy as best lead actress in a drama for Euphoria, in the revamped September awards show. Other times, the remote arrangement hits a few snags. During that same Emmy broadcast, viewers watched what felt like an endless array of awards for Schitts Creek, accepted by cast members who had gathered at an events space in Toronto. While fans of the much-loved show may have rejoiced to see Eugene Levy, Catherine OHara, Dan Levy and Annie Murphy in their victory-lap sweep, it also felt a bit claustrophobic, as if we were stuck at the Toronto bash, and couldnt leave. We dont know if Fey and Poehler can recapture their comic magic when hosting from different coasts. But theyll have help, with announced presenters including Anthony Anderson, Tiffany Haddish, Kate Hudson, Margot Robbie, Kenan Thompson, Awkwafina, Kevin Bacon, Sterling K. Brown, Michael Douglas, Cynthia Erivo, Annie Mumolo, Joaquin Phoenix, Kyra Sedgwick, Susan Kelechi Watson, Kristen Wiig, Renee Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones. And who knows? Since the Globes are hardly an arbiter of artistic achievement, the Los Angeles Times investigative piece may give Fey and Poehler some fresh, juicy material. If anybody can celebrate and make fun of an institution at the same time, its these two. The 78th Annual Golden Globe Awards will air live from 5-8 p.m. PT Sunday, Feb. 28 on NBC. The show will be available to stream the next day on Peacock. Subscribe to our free weekly What to Watch newsletter. Email: -- Kristi Turnquist kturnquist@oregonian.com 503-221-8227 @Kristiturnquist President Joe Biden gave a warning to China on behalf of the Canadians, promising Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau he would help get two imprisoned Canadians back from the Chinese. 'Human beings are not bartering chips,' Biden said, addressing reporters and Trudeau through a video screen. 'You know, we're going to work together until we get their safe return.' Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were detained by the Chinese in December 2018 and charged with spying last June. They were detained just weeks after Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer for Huawei, was arrested in Vancouver, as she's wanted on multiple charges, including bank fraud, in the U.S. President Joe Biden (right) stands alongside a vertical TV screen where Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (left) waits to give his remarks after the two leaders held virtual bilateral talks Tuesday from Washington and Ottawa respectively President Joe Biden told China to free two Canadians Michael Spavor (left) and Michael Kovrig (right) who were imprisoned by China in the weeks following Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou's arrest in Canada over U.S. charges MEANWHILE IN OTTAWA: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (right) stands alongside a television screen beaming in remarks from American President Joe Biden Reporters take photos of President Joe Biden as he listens to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speak at the conclusion of their virtual talks from the White House's East Room When it was Trudeau's turn to speak, the Canadian leader thanked Biden for this comments. 'I would like to thank President Biden for his support for the release of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor from arbitrary detention in China,' Trudeau said. The imprisoned Canadians were one of an assortment of issues to two world leaders talked about in Biden's first 'bilat' with a world leaders. Thanks to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Biden chose to hold the meeting with Trudeau and their teams virtually. 'The United States has no closer and no more important friend than Canada,' Biden said. During statements made at the conclusion of the meetings from the White House's East Room, where Trudeau beamed in on a vertical television screen, Biden called the pandemic an 'immediate priority,' and pledged that the two countries would work together strengthening the supply chain. Trudeau noted that that work would benefit 'the people hardest hit.' Biden also said that the two countries 'agreed to double down' on climate change. Earlier, when reporters were in the Roosevelt Room at the beginning of the meeting, Trudeau said Canada was 'really excited' to be working with the U.S. again on climate change. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is photographed speaking on the phone with newly sworn-in president, Joe Biden, on January 22. Trudeau was the first leader Issues on table for Biden and Trudeau: climate change, COVID pandemic and vaccine, Keystone XL pipeline, Biden's 'Buy American' policy, and China Joe Biden met with Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when he was vice president in December 2016 Former President Donald Trump had pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, and had previously referred to global warming as a Chinese 'hoax.' Biden announced the U.S. would be rejoining Paris on day No. 1. 'U.S. leadership has been sorely missed over the past years,' Trudeau also remarked. Throughout the day, he would repeat his English comments in French. As reporters were leaving the Roosevelt Room, Biden could be heard telling the Canadian leader he tried for five years to learn French. 'Every time I tried to speak it I made such a fool out of myself,' the president said. Biden's Secretary of State Tony Blinken, however, is fluent. Blinken, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris and national security adviser Jake Sullivan sat in on the session with Trudeau, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau and Canada's ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman. A San Antonio woman pleaded guilty to her role in defrauding an area bank of millions of dollars. Phyllis Jo Martinez, 79, on Tuesday entered a guilty plea to a single count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud in a case involving the former president of a Bank of San Antonio subsidiary. She also had been indicted on one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, but that was dropped as part of her plea agreement. Martinez is scheduled to be sentenced May 25. She faces the possibility of up to 30 years in prison, up to three years of supervised release and a maximum $1 million fine. She also will be required to make full restitution. The Bank of San Antonio revealed in August that it had uncovered a $13.2 million Ponzi-style fraud scheme involving Ronald Wayne Schroeder, the former president of its Texas Express Funding LLC factoring subsidiary. On ExpressNews.com: 5 indicted in alleged scheme defrauded San Antonio bank Schroeder is accused of using proceeds from the alleged scheme to buy automobiles, recreational vehicles, an airplane, a boat and a beach house. He faces three counts of bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Martinez and Schroeder were among five people indicted by a federal grand jury in November. The others are Martinezs son, Ryan Martinez, Jill Martin Alvarado and her husband Rigo Alvarado. Martinez is the first of the five defendants to plead guilty. Court records show Jill Alvarado also has entered into a plea deal, though no hearing has been set in the matter. She was indicted on the same offenses as Phyllis Martinez. We appreciate her quick acceptance of responsibility, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Blackwell said of Martinez after the hearing. The proceeding was conducted by U.S. District Judge Jason Pulliam via Zoom. Bobby Barrera, Martinezs lawyer, couldnt immediately be reached for comment. SA Inc.: Get the best of business news sent directly to your inbox Martinez is the former owner of a cleaning company called Nerd Factory LLC. According to the redacted indictment, she assisted Schroeder in providing false and misleading invoices to financial institutions to factor. Factoring involves advancing cash to companies in return for acquiring the debts owed to them at a discount. Companies get money quickly instead of waiting for customers to pay their bills. The factoring firm in this case, Texas Express Funding makes money on the difference between what it acquired the debts for and what the customers owe on the invoices. Schroeder would submit misleading information to financial institutions, resulting in payments to Nerd Factory, the Alvarados company and a fake company that the U.S. attorneys office has said Schroeder created to steal money for himself. Some of the money that went to Nerd Factory was returned to Schroeder for his own benefit, the indictment stated. The alleged conspiracy began in 2017 and continued through November, the indictment stated. Schroeders lawyers previously said he was cooperating and would continue to work with the government to rectify the situation. pdanner@express-news.net A Lagos-based lawyer and activist, Dele Farotimi, said he has petitioned the State Security Service (SSS) and the Lagos State Police Command over threats to assassinate him by top officials in the government. Mr Farotimi disclosed this while addressing the press at a briefing at Lekki, Lagos, on Tuesday. I have told the law enforcement officers, I have sent them my petition clearly and I have requested protection from the Nigerian state, he said. Mr Farotimi said someone who was privy to the plan to assassinate him disclosed the plan. He said he would not reveal his identity to the media but has named him in the petition submitted to the authorities. He said the person was privy to certain discussions at certain levels warned me that the threat was not an empty one. The threat was specific and names were mentioned. A lawyer and critic Mr Farotimi did not disclose the names of those who are allegedly threatening his life. On Monday last week, I have been hearing hint that a lot of powerful people are pissed off with me particularly because of what I have been saying about the #EndSARS protests, the killings at the Lekki Toll Gate and the planned reopening of the tollgate plaza. I was aware that I had offended a lot of powerful people but by Tuesday last week, I got a phone call giving a specific and clear warning. We will all die, that is the only thing that is certain for all who draw breath, the lawyer said, adding that he will be 53 years at his next birthday. Mr Farotimi is known to be very critical of government policies, often calling out the politicians he deems corrupt and not fit for office. The activist said he belongs to the Radical Agenda Movement in the Nigerian Bar Association (RAMINBA), headed by Adeshina Ogunlana, another lawyer. My activism did not start yesterday; the threats did not start yesterday. But this particular threat is coming as a function of my role in questioning the rationale behind the rush to reopen the tollgate. Not just open, I am diametrically opposed to the existence of that toll gate, I have always been, but the events of 20th of October hardened my position. Left to me, I would not have raised this, but my friends encouraged me to speak up, making reference to Bola Ige, who was murdered in his bedroom, and the assassination of former Editor and Founder of Newswatch Magazine, Dele Giwa, who was said to have briefed his lawyer on a Friday and was bombed on a Sunday. Mr Farotimi said his firm objection to the recent directives to reopen the Lekki toll plaza and the information he has about the shooting incident of October 20, 2020 at the Lekki toll gate has made him a threat to the government. I have never for once sought anything from my public advocacy, I do not desire political office, I am not looking money and I am not chasing clouts. This is about the future, when I open my mouth and I am speaking, I am speaking for those who do not have a voice, he said. Mr Farotimi said if should happen to him, the public should look no farther than the persons he had mentioned in my petition to the DSS and Nigerian Police. Certain persons amongst my friends, key members of my family and associates from way back are fully aware of the facts, I have shared the facts with them so that should anything happen, they know who to allocate the guilt to, he said. In Lagos state, there is a fusion between the criminal elements and the ruling class, I say that without any equivocation. Let people not look further than the hegemony ruling this state and the persons I have specifically mentioned in my petition if anything should happen to me. When PREMIUM TIMES contacted, Muyiwa Adejobi, the Lagos Police spokesperson, said he has not seen Mr Farotimis petition. ADVERTISEMENT I will have to find out, because the command receives a lot of petitions every day, Mr Adejobi, a chief superintendent of police, said. We will need to trace his own petition to know if action has been taken on it, the police spokesperson said. In 2019, Mr Farotimi published a book titled Do Not Die in Their Wars to highlight the political trajectories of Nigeria and how the state powers are corrupt on their own and also running in a corrupt system. Denton, TX (76205) Today Scattered thunderstorms. High near 75F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Locally heavier rainfall possible.. Tonight Showers and thundershowers this evening will give way to steady rain overnight. Low 64F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected. Locally heavier rainfall possible. Visibility for availability of vaccines for entire month of June provided in advance to States/UTs: Centre Expert panel reviews EUA application for Sputnik V vaccine; seeks immunogenicity, safety data India pti-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Feb 24: An expert panel of India's Central Drug Authority which reviewed the application of Dr Reddy's Laboratories seeking emergency use authorisation for the COVID-19 vaccine Sputnik V on Wednesday recommended that the firm present immunogenicity and safety data, sources said. Dr Reddy's Laboratories on February 19 said it had approached drugs regulator DCGI for emergency use authorisation (EUA) for the Russian vaccine. "The Subject Expert Committee (SEC) on COVID-19 of the CDSCO which discussed the application by Dr Reddy's Laboratories seeking emergency use authorisation for COVID-19 vaccine Sputnik V on Wednesday asked the firm to submit immunogenicity and safety data as per the protocol approved by the CDSCO. Once it submits these data, its EUA application will be considered," a source said. The drug major on Wednesday presented the safety profile of phase 2 study, and interim data of phase 3 trial, the source said. Meanwhile, the SEC also asked Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech to submit efficacy data of Covaxin on adults before seeking permission to conduct phase-3 clinical trial on children aged 5-18 years. Adar Poonawalla hails first supply of COVID-19 vaccine under COVAX initiative In September last year, the Hyderabad-based firm Dr Reddy's partnered with the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) to conduct the clinical trials of Sputnik V and for its distribution rights in India. The vaccine is undergoing phase 3 clinical trial in India. The Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) has already given the EUA nod for two COVID-19 vaccines -- Covaxin of Bharat Biotech and Covishield of Oxford-AstraZeneca, being manufactured by Serum Institute of India in Pune. The vaccines are being administered to healthcare and frontline workers across the country. Sputnik V has demonstrated an efficacy rate of 91.6 per cent in the interim analysis of phase 3 clinical trial, which included data on 19,866 volunteers in Russia, the statement said. The vaccine also maintained a consistent efficacy at 91.8 per cent even among the group of 2,144 volunteers over 60 years old. "The efficacy of Sputnik V was reported to be 91.6 per cent by the Lancet, which is an impressive development in the fight against COVID-19. The initiation of the EUA process will be a critical step forward for us in ensuring speedy access to the Sputnik V vaccine in India,' Dr Reddy's Laboratories co-chairman and managing director G V Prasad said. Sputnik V developed by the Gamaleya National Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology was registered by the Ministry of Health of Russia on August 11, 2020 and became the world's first registered vaccine against COVID-19 based on the human adenoviral vector platform. Sputnik V has already received approval in 26 countries and has been administered to more than 2 million people worldwide. For teachers working in schools, life is not about ATARs or NAPLAN results or school rankings, or even school sectors. For those outside of education, these are easy political sticks to wield above our heads. In reality, our goals are to keep young people alive, keep them safe, and keep them educated. In that order. The extent of peer-on-peer assault in this country and the number of sexual assaults against adolescents, within any community, is breathtaking. To assume this only begins when a child turns 18 is naive. Yes, it happens at the school level, and yes, it happens in any school anywhere. Teachers goals are to keep young people alive, keep them safe and keep them educated. In that order. Credit:iStock It happens within schools, between schools, and between schools and the community. If you ever want to know whats actually going on, ask any teacher, especially those who are trained in wellbeing. We are the ones who are desperately picking up the broken hearts, trying to hold lives together, and doing our best to remind young people that everything will be OK. Sexual assault is a cultural issue; not a school sector, or a it would never happen here, or but my kid is a good kid issue. That someones abuse would be categorised by what they wore, how much they had to drink, or what school they went to is profoundly not the point. It might not be the blockbuster set that he is used to, but we wager that none of those could hold a candle anyway to the stunning setting of Ross Castle, which served as the setting of Lucas Machowski's newest project, a short film in which Dunkirk actor, Barry Keoghan, stars. Filmed back in October 2018, Lucas has finally gotten around to releasing the film, which sees soon-to-be star of the Marvel film 'The Eternals' and 'The Batman', Keoghan, take centre stage in a medieval themed production. The film sees Keoghan, dressed as a warrior and armed with a deadly longsword on his back, making his way on foot around Ross Castle and through the forest surrounding it; it is left unclear throughout the film to the viewer as to whether he is the hunter or, in fact, the prey. Speaking to The Kerryman about the film and how he managed to secure one of the film industry's fastest-rising stars, Lucas explained all. "Myself and my friend, Paudie Healy, he was the one who introduced me to Barry and his girlfriend, Shona. We met in one of the pubs here in Killarney when he was down there for a few weeks," he said. "We got to chatting and he asked if we could do something together, like a project, and I asked him what he would like to do. He mentioned getting a sword and going to the forest to film something. So, I explained to him the idea that I had," Lucas said. Expand Close Killarney photographer and filmmaker Lucas Machowski pictured with star Barry Keoghan after the filming of Lucas new short film which was shot at Ross Castle and the surrounding forest. Photo by Paudie Healey / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Killarney photographer and filmmaker Lucas Machowski pictured with star Barry Keoghan after the filming of Lucas new short film which was shot at Ross Castle and the surrounding forest. Photo by Paudie Healey "I told him that, when we were in the forest, we would film it like someone or some thing would start chasing him and that they would then meet up in the end. "He loved the idea! He said that it was f**kin' awesome," Lucas laughed. "We started filming there at Ross Castle from sunrise, and we though that it would take maybe two to three hours to get everything we needed, but we actually ended up spending like seven or eight hours," said Lucas. After keeping the footage on his hard drive for over a year, Lucas said that, a few weeks ago, he finally decided to fish it out and put the finishing touches to it, publishing the finished product on his Facebook page last week. He said that the reaction so far has been amazing and far beyond what he expected it to get. "Honestly, I never expected the great feedback that we have been getting online," said Lucas. "People love it. They keep asking me, 'what was chasing him?', and I have to laugh and tell them that we actually never came up with an answer. We prefer to leave it up to people's imaginations." And what does the star of the show, Barry, think of the piece? Lucas said that it has gotten the Dublin actor's seal of approval: "He loved it, he really did. I sent him a longer version of it just before he left and he said that really enjoyed it." Joe Biden was in the Roosevelt Room at the White House (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) United States president Joe Biden has had his first bilateral meeting with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau virtually, with the coronavirus pandemic stripping the occasion of its customary Oval Office fanfare. The two leaders Mr Biden in the Roosevelt Room at the White House and Mr Trudeau in the prime ministers office in Ottawa delivered friendly opening remarks in front of the media. The United States has no closer friend, no closer friend, than Canada, Mr Biden said. Mr Trudeau, in turn, commended Mr Biden for quickly rejoining the Paris climate accord, a worldwide pact to curb climate emissions that Donald Trump walked away from early in his term. The prime minister, who had a frosty relationship with Mr Trump at times, said: US leadership has been sorely missed over the past years. And I have to say as we were preparing the joint rollout of the communique on this, its nice when the Americans are not pulling out all the references to climate change and instead adding them in. In remarks at the end of the talks, Mr Biden for the first time publicly spoke out against the detention of two Canadian citizens imprisoned in China in apparent retaliation for Canadas arrest of a top Huawei executive. Human beings are not bartering chips, Mr Biden said of the two Canadians. We are going to work together until their safe return. Mr Trudeau, for his part, publicly thanked Mr Biden for his support in seeking the mens release. Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig were detained in China following the arrest of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou in Canada after the US requested her extradition to face charges that the Chinese telecom company executive committed wire and bank fraud and violated US sanctions on Iran. She denies the allegations. China lashed out at Canada last week for joining the US and 56 other countries in endorsing a declaration denouncing state-sponsored arbitrary detention of foreign citizens for political purposes. Expand Close The meeting did not have its usual pomp and protocol (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press via AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The meeting did not have its usual pomp and protocol (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press via AP) In pre-pandemic times, the Biden-Trudeau meeting would have been held with far more fanfare but with both leaders stressing caution to their citizens, Mr Biden and Mr Trudeau set aside the typical protocol in favour of talks by video conference. US presidents traditionally invite the Canadian prime minister for their first meeting with a world leader. The two leaders agreed to a road map outlining how the neighbouring countries will work together to fight Covid-19, curb climate emissions and pursue other shared priorities. Mr Trudeau again raised with Mr Biden the idea of allowing Canada, which is struggling to vaccinate its population, to buy vaccines produced in the US, according to a senior Canadian government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail the private talks. Mr Trudeau brought up the issue when the two leaders spoke by phone last month, Mr Bidens first call to a foreign leader as president. But Mr Bidens first priority remains ensuring every American is vaccinated, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said ahead of the meeting. Mr Bidens team offered the same message to Mr Trudeau privately. The prime ministers office said in a statement that Mr Biden and Mr Trudeau discussed how the pandemic will not end until everyone, everywhere has access to a vaccine and the importance of avoiding measures that may constrain the critical trade and supply-chain security between our countries. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. A 61-year-old man has allegedly been caught with 'significant' amounts of child abuse and bestiality material after a police raid on his Hobart home. Investigators seized a mobile phone and a laptop on Tuesday, and will allege that folders found on the phone contain child abuse material and bestiality content. Police also seized a number of items from the boot of the accused's car, which police suspect may prove he planned to commit more offences. A 61-year-old man has allegedly been caught with 'significant' amounts of child abuse and bestiality material after a police raid on his Hobart home (stock image) The man has been charged with possessing child abuse material and bestiality product and if convicted is facing up to 15 years in jail. He appeared in the Hobart Magistrates Court on Tuesday and was granted conditional bail to reappear on March 30. His home was searched following reports to the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation via the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States. Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release SubCategory Select Sub-Category Representatives of the space industries of Ukraine and Greece have discussed common interests in the field of space exploration and use during a video conference. "The representatives of leading enterprises and institutions of the space industries of Ukraine and Greece presented their opportunities and exchanged proposals for scientific, technical and industrial cooperation in space exploration and use for peaceful purposes in the areas of space technology design, satellite data acquisition and processing, space research, international cooperation in the field of space activities," the press service of the State Space Agency of Ukraine (SSAU) informs. In particular, Acting Head of SSAU Mykhailo Lev noted that Ukraine participated in a number of international space projects. According to him, Ukraine has significant experience, scientific and technological developments, personnel and production facilities that contribute to the development of space activities. In particular, the production of launch vehicles, satellites and their components, reception and processing of satellite data by ground infrastructure, space research and science, materials science, education. As reported, Ukraine actively develops international cooperation in the space industry. In particular, in November 2020, the State Space Agency of Ukraine signed an agreement within the NASA Artemis program on the principles of cooperation in civil exploration and use of the Moon, Mars, comets and asteroids for peaceful purposes. ol Obinwanne Okeke has been ordered to restitute about $10.7million which he fraudulently obtained from identified victims of his at least five years of wire fraud in the U.S and other places, PREMIUM TIMES reports. A judge of the Eastern District of Virginia, Rebecca Smith, while sentencing him to 10 years in jail on February 16, also ordered the forfeiture of his identified assets to the U.S government. The assets include his white gold emerald cut engagement ring with small accent diamonds. The other forfeited assets are two cars back home in Nigeria, and N280,555,010 translating into about $700,000 which the Nigerian government had seized from him. The fraud U.S authorities said Mr Okeke and his co-conspirators, who remain at large, through subterfuge and impersonation, engaged in a multi-year global business email and computer hacking scheme that caused a staggering $11 million in losses to his victims. Mr Okeke, 31, also known as Invictus Obi, had in June last year pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud. His guilty plea which helped him to have one of the two counts initially filed against him dropped, conceded to making a restitution and forfeiture of his seized assets. Sentencing PREMIUM TIMES on Thursday exclusively obtained courts Restitution Order and Consent Order of Forfeiture which are part of the sentencing documents signed by the judge and the parties to the case. Apart from the judge, others who signed the two documents are, the Acting United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Raj Parekh, Mr Okeke, and his defence lawyer, John Iweanoge. Restitution to three victims Pursuant to 18 U.S.C 3663A(a)(1), the defendant is ordered to pay restitution in the total amount of $10,679,166.54 jointly and severally with any other defendants who are ordered to pay restitution for the same losses, the restitution order read in part. Attached to the document is a list of three victims of Mr Okekes fraud. They are: Unatrac Holdings LLC in Washington DC, which was duped $5,429,166.54; Orient Insurance PJSC, duped $5million, and QBE European Operations which lost $250,000 to the fraudsters. The court ordered that all the payments for the restitution which shall be made to the Clerk of Court shall distribute the funds to Unatrac first and to the remaining victims on a pro rata basis. The court waived interest on the amount to be restituted by the convict and ordered that no delinquent or default penalties will be imposed except upon Order of the Court. Forfeiture order In the consent forfeiture order, the judge gave a monetary judgment capturing the total $10,679,166.54 to be restituted by Mr Okeke. This implies that the U.S authorities will be able execute the order as the courts final judgment for the forfeiture of any assets in which Mr Okeke has interests to raise the money for restitution. According to the court, the sum shall constitute a monetary judgment against the defendant in favour of the United States, and shall be offset after final forfeiture and liquidation of all of assets seized from Mr Okeke. Some of Mr Okekes assets already ordered in the document for forfeiture is 18kt white gold emerald cut engagement ring with small accent diamonds and containing GIA number 2287567161. ADVERTISEMENT This ring was seized from the defendant at the time of his arrest, the document explained. The court also ordered to the forfeiture of the U.S government, Approximately 280,555,010Nigerian Naira (approximately $700,000 U.S.) seized from the defendant by the Nigerian authorities in light of his arrest on the charges in this case. Proceeds from the sale of the defendants 2018 Toyota Camry and 2017 Toyota Hilux. It added, The defendant agrees to sell these two vehicles, located in Nigeria, and send the proceeds to the U.S. Marshals Service. The defendant shall remit these proceeds to the U.S. Marshals Service within six months of the date of this order unless the defendant obtains an extension by written agreement with the government. The United States shall seize all forfeited property and shall take full and exclusive custody and control of same. U.S. assets also forfeited The document also gave an indication without giving details that Mr Okeke may have assets in the U.S. that could be taken over by the government authorities in executing the monetary judgment of the court. With respect to the monetary judgment described in paragraph (1)(a) above, the United States may collect this monetary judgment by all lawfully available means, including but not limited to forfeiture of direct proceeds and substitute assets. Insofar as the United States seeks forfeiture of substitute assets, the defendant agrees and the court finds that one or more of the criteria set forth in 21 U.S.C. 853(p)(1) are present here and the United States may therefore seek forfeiture of substitute assets pursuant to 853(p). But the court directed that in executing the forfeiture order on such assets in the U.S, the authorities shall to the extent practicable, provide direct written notice to any persons known to have alleged an interest in the seized property, and shall publish notice of this order in accordance with Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 32.2(b)(6). The court added that any person, other than Mr Okeke, asserting any legal interest in the property may, within 30 days of the publication of notice or the receipt of notice, whichever is earlier, petition the court for a hearing to adjudicate the validity of their alleged interest in the property. It also ordered: Following the Courts disposition of all timely petitions filed, a final order of forfeiture shall be entered. If no third party files a timely petition, this order shall become the final order of forfeiture, as provided by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 32.2(c)(2), and the United States shall have clear title to the property, and shall dispose of the property in accordance with law. Profile Mr Okeke is the founder of Invictus Group, which he claimed to have business interest in oil and gas, agriculture, and real estate, among others. He is said to have a degree in International Studies and Forensic Criminology and Masters of International Relations and Counter-Terrorism Studies from Monash University in Australia Mr Okeke, an businessman with international fame, was featured on the Forbes Africa Magazine in June 2016 cover. Arrest He was arrested on August 6, 2019, on a criminal complaint for computer and wire fraud to defraud Unatrac Holding Limited which is headquartered in United Arab Emirates (UAE). Operatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) nabbed him at Dulles International Airport, Virgina, as he prepared to depart the U.S after a visit to witness the birth of his 19-month-old daughter born on July 15, 2019. Charged On September 9, 2019, he was charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit computer fraud. Mr Okeke, who initially denied the charges, later entered into a plea bargain agreement with the U.S authorities and pleaded guilty to Count 1 on June 18, 2020. The guilty plea helped Mr Okeke to secure the withdrawal of the second charge that carries lesser sentence and fines. After devastating summer bushfires the state government turned to the carrot and the gun, seeking to feed starving native animals and cull feral animal competition at 330 sites to help wildlife recover. It has now developed a five-year restoration strategy, to be released on Thursday, that details how it will extend the assistance and identify key ecosystems most at risk as the climate warms. A brush tail rock wallaby in the Blue Mountains with a food drop. The NSW government is looking at longer-term strategies to assist the recovery of wildlife after the 2019-20 bushfires. Looking beyond the medium term, we know that bushfires are likely to become more frequent and severe, Matt Kean, the Energy and Environment Minister, said, noting that National Parks staff alone fought 519 fires as blazes scorched 38 per cent of the National Park estate. [T]he actions in this plan will help build the skills, knowledge and systems that governments, landholders, wildlife carers and scientists will need to meet the longer-term conservation challenges we face, he said. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is jumping on the minimum wage bandwagon and will introduce an alternative to Democrats' proposal on Wednesday that would use federal dollars to increase low-earning workers' income, Axios has learned. Why it matters: Hawley, a Trump-style Republican who's considered a likely 2024 presidential contender, is breaking with the mainstream GOP orthodoxy in suggesting that he believes the federal minimum wage is too low. He's known now for his role in objecting to the certification of President Biden's election, but as a likely 2024 candidate, his proposal is worth watching for what it says about the shifts in Republican ideas. The politics: Hawley plans to pitch "The Blue Collar Bonus" as a populist, pro-worker proposal. Hawley's team estimates it would likely cost roughly $200 billion, something traditional Republicans will balk at, though it hasn't been officially scored. Hawley told Axios he also would support a $15 minimum wage for workers of large corporations that generate at least $1 billion in annual revenue. The measure would also benefit low-wage workers who have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. The bill: Hawley is proposing a three-year program that would increase worker wages in 2021, paid by taxpayers rather than employers. Those making below $16.50 per hour would receive a refundable tax credit worth 50% of the difference, paid out in quarterly installments. The $16.50 could increase over time, as it would be tied to the Consumer Price Index. The credit would only apply to 40 hours or less of weekly work. Only American workers with valid Social Security numbers would be eligible, meaning non-U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants would be excluded. Between the lines: Hawley's plan would immediately be implemented in the 2021 tax year, expiring in 2024. The Democrats' plan to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour would be phased in by 2025. Same for a $10 per hour proposal released Tuesday by GOP Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). Biden has promised to promote a standalone bill to raise the minimum wage. What he's saying: "The bill is targeting folks who are making $34,000-$35,000 a year and less," Hawley said. "This is targeted toward people who have been the hardest hit, who are trying to get back on their feet." "Federal policy has helped create, over the last 30-40 years, flatlined wages for blue collar workers," he added. "We need to have a broader discussion about a number of those policy choices. A lot of it has to do with our trade policies, and the policies that we pursued with globalization, that have been very bad choices." Foreseeable problems: The subsidy would disproportionally benefit those in states that have kept their minimum wages low. It's also an incredibly complicated bill, which could make it difficult for workers to properly estimate their take-home. What's next: The Senate parliamentarian will decide as early as today whether Democrats provision can be included in the COVID stimulus package and voted on through budget reconciliation. MANZINI - Set aside E2 billion for civil servants salary review! This was said by the Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) to the Minister of Finance, Neal Rijkenberg, who is expected to deliver his third budget speech tomorrow. The teachers union said this through its statement, which was released by the Secretary General, Sikelela Dlamini, where he highlighted what they expected from the 2021/22 National Budget. The secretary general said as a trade union that represented about 16 000 educators in the country, they awaited the national budget to be presented to Parliament with bated breath. He said they were aware that the current global challenges posed by the outbreak of COVID-19, coupled with the ground realities of a stunted economic growth, demanded unmatched innovation on the side of government. Critical He said their focus as SNAT was the capacitation of critical sectors of the economy in a manner that would not render government, an upholder of the Constitution and the decisions of the courts, ultra vires in the implementation of its due legal mandate. Dlamini said the 2021/22 financial year would be a year in which there would be a salary review exercise for all employees under the employ of the government. He said this was because when the collective agreement that effected the recommendations of the 2016/17 salary review exercise was signed in 2016, government committed that the next similar exercise would be done during the upcoming financial year. To further strengthen her commitment to this just cause, government agreed that the 2016 collective agreement be made an order of the court so that it can be given a force of law. This was done on July 6, 2016, the unionist said. He said since they believed that government was defender number one for human and workers rights, it should ensure that the order of the court was not tampered with. Fortunately, he said talks at the joint negotiations forum (JNF) were underway, in preparation for the 2021/22 salary review exercise. Since a sum of E850 million was used to implement recommendations of the 2016/17 salary review, albeit partially, for the 2021/22 financial year, we expect that a total of E2 billion be set aside by the minister of finance to cater for this exercise, the secretary general of the teachers union said. Dlamini said this money would be used to also normalise the many grievances that arose as appeals to the 2016/17 salary review exercise, such as normalising the salaries of school head teachers and deputies in both primary and secondary schools. He said the money would also be used to normalise the salaries for heads of department in schools, housing allowance, commuting allowance, introduction of the medical aid for government employees and hardship allowance for all civil servants who worked in remote areas. According to the unionist, all these issues were raised as recommendations by the 2016/17 salary review which could not be implemented by government at that time as it cited cash liquidity problems. Reviewed The teachers unions secretary general further said in August 2020, government also entered into a collective agreement with public sector associations (PSAs), which was to the effect that during the 2021/22 salary review, all the aforementioned allowances would indeed be reviewed. He said the wage bill should not be an excuse because they believed it was increased by ghost employees, something which government had been failing to address since 2013, when former Minister of Finance Majozi Sithole admitted that it was huge. Consequential to that, in the same year, he said there was a skills audit exercise which sought to identify causes of the massive wage bill, chief among which was the issue of ghost employees in the civil service. Unfortunately, the unionist said the report of that exercise was never published, yet taxpayers monies were used to conduct it. Therefore, he said as SNAT, they were tired of that chorus by the ministers of finance, including the current one, who also sung it when he delivered the 2020/21 national budget. He said this time around they expected a clear report in terms of how this issue would be addressed in 2021/22 so that there could be enough resources that could be available to fund other equally important public services. Moreover, he said they were of the ardent view that the minister, who was a business magnate, would be able to grapple with the ground realities of their socio-economic landscape as people and present a budget that would have a human face on it. He does not need to be a Harvard University graduate to know that the rough waters in which the ship he is steering is sailing demands that individual workers and citizens need improved salaries so as to be able to reinvigorate the already ailing economy. Function The appropriate remuneration of the over 44 000 civil servants, including members of the security forces, shall surely function as a game changer to all the problems that we are facing as a country, he said. It is worth noting that the other unions under the PSAs banner concurred with SNAT. They also highlighted that they had mentioned before that they expected the 2021/22 salary review to double salaries of the least paid civil servants. Currently, the least paid civil servants are pocketing about E3 000 per month and PSAs said a clearly crafted salary review report was expected to peg entry level salaries at E6 000. Srinagar: Scores of Pakistan Administered Kashmir (PAK) origin women, married to former militants from this side of Kashmir, along with their children on Tuesday staged a protest here at press Enclave Srinagar, demanding travel documents to visit their families. Holding placards and raising slogans, the protesting women were chanting slogans like We Want Justice and We Want Travel Documents. The protesting women said they have been protesting and demanding the issuance of travel documents for a long now, but to no avail. If the government is not ready to accept us, the Government should send us back to Pakistan, as marrying Kashmiri men is not a crime, they said. The aggrieved women said that, We havent committed any crime by marrying Kashmiris? The government is not considering us as humans. We are being treated worse than cattle, they said. We want the Government of India to confirm our identity. If we are Indians then give us a passport to travel and if we are not Indians then send us back from where we have come, they said. The protestors said we are not demanding stars from the Government of India. We are just asking them to provide us with the documents so that we can reach family members, they said. They also said that they have protested several times in the past but the government has not bothered about their miseries. If our demand will not be fulfilled we will continue our protest, they said. The aggrieved women further said that after arriving in the valley under the governments rehabilitation policy the authorities have failed to rehabilitate them. This has caused us immense hardship, they said. Not a single family has been rehabilitated so far by the government and all of their tall claims have fallen short, they said. The protesting women said that so far the government has not initiated any process regarding the rehabilitation policy since no travel documents nor passports or any other related document is awarded to any of the family. Notably, several former militants returned to Kashmir via Nepal with their families after the Omar Abdullah government in 2010 announced a rehabilitation scheme for surrendered. SAO PAULO, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Gerdau S.A. (NYSE: GGB, BM&Fbovespa: GGBR3, GGBR4) -- The consolidated EBITDA amounted R$ 3.1 billion in 4Q20, almost 3 times higher than 4Q19. The net debt LTM EBITDA ratio decreased to 1.25x in the end of December 2020, from 1.67x in the end of 2019. Free Cash Flow amounted R$ 2.4 billion in the 4Q20. The only steel producer as a component of the Carbon Efficient Index (ICO2) at B3. The Company also reached B- rating at CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) Climate Change module. Additional Information Gerdau S.A. informs that it is filling today its 4Q20 results at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and at the Comissao de Valores Mobiliarios (CVM), which are available at Gerdau's website. To access this document, please click on https://ri.gerdau.com/en/notices-and-results/results-center/ The 4Q20 Valuation Guide is also available at Gerdau's website https://ri.gerdau.com/en/financial-information/valuation-guide/ SOURCE Gerdau S.A. Related Links www.gerdau.com.br A trial date has been set for former state Sen. Sam McCann, who was indicted Feb. 3 on federal charges accusing him of fraudulent use of campaign funds, money laundering and tax evasion. McCanns trial date has been set for April 6, with a pre-trial date of March 25. During a hearing Tuesday before Judge Eric Long, the former senator pleaded not guilty to nine separate counts. Counts one through seven involve fraudulent misuse of campaign money and providing false reports to the IRS. Counts eight and nine involve money laundering and tax evasion, willfully evading taxes in 2018 and preparing false reports, Long said. If convicted, McCann could serve upward of 45 years in prison and incur $1 million in fines. McCann requested and was granted court-appointed counsel after telling the court he is unemployed with $53,000 in debt and $500 in his checking account.. He was granted bond on the condition that he not leave the state except for medical visits to St. Louis and to pick up his wife, who is working in Washington. D.C. He must surrender his Firearm Owners Identification card, all weapons 75 guns were found during a search of McCanns residences and his passport. The indictment is not the first time McCann has drawn scrutiny regarding misuse of funds. A federal grand jury also subpoenaed emails and mileage reimbursements of the former state senator. In January 2019, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois requested tax records and records of payments made to McCann from 2011 to 2018, with questions regarding a reimbursement to himself from campaign money for more than $38,000 for mileage claims stating that he traveled 66,000 miles in 2015. McCann, 51, was senator for the 50th District originally the 49th District until boundaries were redrawn in 2013 representing Morgan, Greene, Pike, Scott and Calhoun counties and portions of Jersey, Macoupin, Madison and Sangamon counties from 2011 until he left the Republican Party in 2018 and ran for governor under the self-formed Conservative Party. He received just 4.2% of the total vote in November 2018, losing to Democrat J.B. Pritzker. The rhetoric weaves between cooperative and competitive, leaving the question of what and who to believe. When China began three days of military exercises in the South China Seas Gulf of Tonkin back in January, some observers speculated that Beijing was testing the new Biden administration. Harsh words from Beijing accompanied the exercises, with Chinas foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin declaring the drills were necessary measures to resolutely safeguard national sovereignty and security. Even against this backdrop, Chinas official position is that it remains committed to a peaceful resolution of the South China Sea issue. And the rhetoric China employs at different times does make for a fascinating contrast. For example, Chinas Foreign Ministry asserted in July 2020 that China is not seeking to become a maritime empire and that it treats its neighbouring nations on an equal basis and exercises the greatest restraint. How then should we make sense of the mixed messages coming from Beijing? Most China experts find discourse to be informative if not about Chinas intentions, then at least about its aspirations. But which statements are indicative of Chinas true position? I argued recently in research for the Wilson Center that scholars need to evaluate the content and specificity of Chinese national discourse in addition to the position of the author or speaker involved. To that end, I analysed all public speeches made by members of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party from 2013 to 2018. Xi Jinping led both of the Politburos I studied, and each had 25 members. Since some members served in both, this yields speeches by 39 unique individuals. Ambiguity suggests the leadership wants to have maximum flexibility and avoid being boxed in by its aggressive rhetoric. The speeches related to the South China Sea could be separated into those that mentioned cooperative themes and those with competitive themes. Cooperative themes have two subcategories, cooperation and political solutions. Competitive themes have five subcategories: sovereignty, military, freedom, tension and non-regional countries/the United States. In what might appear good news for regional stability, Chinas leaders used more cooperative discourse in public statements about the South China Sea than competitive themes. This might be taken to indicate a willingness to compromise with other claimants a feature that is especially evident during the first year of each new Party Congress, namely 2013 and 2018. However, one of the tenets of deriving intentions from discourse is that not all leadership statements are created equal. We need to consider personal power, accountability and reputation for honesty. This means that statements by Xi, who is described as having more power and more personal authority than any post-Mao leader, take precedent. So here is the bad news. My analysis showed that Xis statements accounted for 42.7% of the competitive themes mentioned, even though he is only one of 39 leaders during this period. There are additional reasons to discount Xis cooperative statements: his reputation for dishonesty. Fiery Cross Reef, South China Sea (Google Earth, Maxar Technologies, SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, GEBCO) In September 2015, Xi made a public statement at the White House promising not to militarise the artificial islands China had been building in the South China Sea. Xi stated that relevant construction activities that China is undertaking do not target or impact any country, and China does not intend to pursue militarisation. While the language at the time was deemed new, the pledge remained unclear. Then and subsequently, Xi did not promise to freeze dredging, island-building or activities in the region, nor did he offer any clarity about what militarisation meant. In May 2019, thenChairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford said that China had clearly walked away from that commitment given the 10,000-foot runways, ammunition storage facilities, routine deployment of missile defence capabilities, aviation capabilities and so forth on the islands. My analysis in a previous Interpreter article shows that China has indeed militarised these islands to establish control over the islands and the surrounding waters. Interestingly, Chinas foreign ministry also makes more competitive statements than cooperative statements, contrary to what might be the expectation that professional diplomats would lean towards negotiations and reassurance. If soothing language was supposed to mask Chinas intentions, ministry statements would be the most likely source. But instead, China seems to prioritise articulating its position on sovereignty and issuing threats to those who violate it over reassurance. None of this means China will use force in the South China Sea. Xis statements calling for a tough stance to protect Chinas perceived sovereignty in the South China sea lack specificity there are no allusions to a timeline or preferred methods. Such ambiguity suggests the leadership wants to have maximum flexibility and avoid being boxed in by its aggressive rhetoric, even if it is popular with the Chinese public. And the Chinese leadership undoubtedly prefers to use diplomatic, legal and economic tools to establish sovereignty over these waters. But my analysis suggests that China will be unlikely to make the compromises necessary on its expansive territorial claims in these waters to facilitate a viable diplomatic resolution. Instead, Chinas leaders hope that political, economic and military power will convince other countries to accommodate Chinas position without a fight. And if the other claimants concede to Beijing, it will be harder for the United States or Australia to push back on Chinas position. Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a Foreign and Defense Policy Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Her book, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime (Cornell University Press 2019), won the American Political Science Association's Best Book in International Security (pre-tenure faculty member). This article appeared originally at Lowy Institute's the interpreter. A small village in Normandy is resisting Elon Musks plans to beam high-speed internet to its residents through SpaceXs Starlink satellite constellation. Saint-Senier-de-Beuvron is one of the proposed sites for the installation of a Starlink antenna, which will capture signals from space and transmit them to users via cables. The village, which is less than 12 miles (20km) from the Mont Saint-Michel World Heritage Site, has a population of just 350 but residents are pushing back against SpaceXs proposed Starlink station. There are currently more than 1,000 Starlink satellites in low -Earth orbit providing broadband coverage to early users in North America and the UK, with plans to build a constellation of up to 40,000 satellites over the coming years. Earlier this week, Mr Musk said Starlinks coverage would extend to most of Earth by end of year, all by next year. The firms website states that its service is ideally suited for areas of the globe where connectivity has typically been a challenge, claiming that Starlink can deliver high-speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable or completely unavailable. Yet some residents of Saint-Senier-de-Beuvron say that such coverage is not necessary. The risks from electromagnetic waves is something weve already seen with high-voltage power lines, which have disturbed lots of farmers in the area, Francois Dufour, a retired farmer and Greens council member, told AFP. Social networks, internet they already exist. Why do we need to go look for internet on the moon? The village of St Senier de Beuvron in Normandy (Google Maps) The village issued a decree in December to block the construction of a Starlink antenna, which had already received regulatory approval from Frances national radio frequency agency ANFR. This refusal was based on a technicality, which SpaceX contractor Sipartech said could easily be overturned. Were not attacking Elon Musk, said Anne-Marie Falguieres, who lives 60m from a proposed ground station site. Were not technophobes... But these antennas are completely new, at least in France, and we want to know if theyre dangerous or not. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed a decree "On Ukraine's withdrawal from international treaties concluded within the Commonwealth of Independent States," the presidential press service has reported. According to the report, Ukraine withdraws from two agreements on airspace. In particular, according to the decree, Ukraine withdraws from the Agreement on Civil Aviation and the Use of Airspace, which was signed in Minsk on December 25, 1991 by Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine. Under this agreement, the airspace of the signatory states is considered as a single airspace. The parties to the agreement also established the Council on Aviation and the Use of Airspace and the Interstate Aviation Committee, which implements the Council's decisions. In addition, according to the decree, Ukraine withdraws from the Agreement on the Use of Airspace, signed in Tashkent on May 15, 1992. With this document, the governments of Azerbaijan, Russia, Belarus, Tajikistan, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Ukraine agreed that member states would provide airspace over their territory for the activities of the Armed Forces of the Commonwealth and would not take measures that lead to disruption or complication of their proper functioning. In his decree, the president instructed the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry to inform the Council on Aviation and the Use of Airspace of Ukraine's withdrawal from the Agreement on Civil Aviation and the Use of Airspace. As was reported earlier, Ukraine has already withdrawn from many agreements within the CIS. op Syrias ambassador to the Russian Federation intends to be vaccinated with a Russian vaccine against the coronavirus Sputnik V. The Arab republics embassy in Moscow told TASS on Wednesday, News Front reports. Mr. Ambassador intends to be vaccinated with the Russian Sputnik V vaccine and is waiting for the Russian Foreign Ministry to set a date for the vaccination, the diplomatic mission pointed out. The embassy also informed that some employees of the diplomatic mission have already been vaccinated with Sputnik V. [February 24, 2021] Toshiba to Showcase Quantum Key Distribution at Singapore's SupercomputingAsia 2021 SINGAPORE, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Toshiba will be presenting the company's flagship Quantum Key Distribution cybersecurity solution at SupercomputingAsia conference on 4 March 2021. Mr Taro Shimada, Executive Officer and Corporate Senior Vice President, and Chief Digital Officer, Toshiba Corporation, will share about the challenges and opportunities of quantum key distribution to protect critical information and potentially enable disruptive technologies, giving birth to the quantum internet era. With significant advancements in quantum computing and a constant state of data proliferation, complex large-scale computing tasks will accelerate the need to provide real customer value. The digital ecosystem is expected to experience increasing volumes of activities where data is gathered, analyzed and exchanged by a network of organizations to generate insights, applications and services. But against this backdrop, the rise of supercomputing will challenge the security of existing encryption methods, exposing vulnrabilities and security risks in this data-driven world. National governments, financial sectors, healthcare, telecommunications, utilities & infrastructure markets will require a fast, secure and reliable transmission of data to power economies. Toshiba's quantum key distribution is a solution to address this imminent need for data protection. Quantum key distribution applies the laws of physics and quantum mechanics to generate an un-hackable crypto algorithm, preventing cyberattacks where cybercriminals steal customer's data and intellectual property. Using photons of light to physically transfer confidential data between entities, this technology enables safe transfer of information with real time detection of unauthorized attempts to intercept, access or corrupt data. The quantum key distribution market is expected to grow to approximately $20 billion worldwide in financial year 2035*. Leveraging technological foundations, Toshiba aims to capture approximately 25% of the market (approximately $3 billion) in financial year 2030 by deploying quantum key distribution services in Japan and other countries. Feasibility studies and trial tests are underway to make the quantum key distribution commercially viable. Toshiba is collaborating with Singapore's SpeQtral to help governments and enterprises learn, consider, plan and deploy quantum key distribution solutions for quantum secure communication network in Southeast Asia. Singapore has identified cybersecurity as one of the key drivers in accelerating digital transformation. As digital economies emerge from the acceleration of technological adoption, integration of emerging telecommunications infrastructures and deployment of 5G networks, quantum key distribution is an important factor to realize safe data communications. In Japan, Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation has been awarded a contract from Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology to deploy and manage the quantum key distribution systems that will be installed at multiple locations on their network. Previously, Toshiba and its partners have demonstrated world's first development of quantum cryptographic communication technology applied system for genomic medicine. In the UK, Toshiba Europe Ltd., in collaboration with BT Group plc., has enabled the first industrial deployment of a quantum-secure network between two smart production facilities. In the US, Toshiba has participated in a demonstration by Verizon Communications Inc. in alliance with Quantum Xchange. Mr Taro Shimada remarked, "We believe that industries including financial, healthcare and manufacturing sectors, will benefit from quantum key distribution to provide ultra-secure communications. High Performance Computing organizations and data centers will also require secure internal networks which carry sensitive data performed by supercomputers remotely to various organizations. This will be more apparent as these industries move towards smarter technologies including artificial intelligence and near-future adoption of quantum computing to support mission critical applications." As digital dependency and resilience is vital in today's world, organizations will have to assess enterprises dependence on cryptography and future proof communications for critical assets. Toshiba aims to deliver quantum key distribution which is a vital cornerstone of network security, inevitably contributing to a vibrant landscape to increase efficiency, drive innovation, and enhance real value for customers, clients, and consumers. Note: * Toshiba's long term estimates based on short to mid-term estimates by research firms SOURCE Toshiba [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] From the University of Washington, located in the State of Washington, comes news of leftist students wanting to tear down a statue of George Washington: The University of Washingtons Black Student Union has garnered nearly 8,000 signatures on a petition that demands the school remove a statue of George Washington, the schools and the states namesake. Why? The usual: Statues in place at the University of Washington are preservers of our dark past. The George Washington statue, in particular, symbolizes a man who owned over 300 Black slaves and profited from their labor. This is not a history that should be glorified and celebrated as it perpetuates white supremacy and preserves its historical imposition. Thus, the George Washington Statue, along with all others that symbolize racist figures, should be removed from the University of Washington. This is the stupidity to which we have all grown accustomed, although carried to an absurd degree here. But I think this comment is worth making: if you believe this is really about statues, you are sadly mistaken. These far-left students have their training wheels on now, but they are being groomed for their real task: not just changing the names of the University of Washington and Washington State, which flows inexorably from the destruction of Washingtons statue, but, far more important, the discrediting and hence abandonment of our Constitution. After all, the Constitution was created by a convention over which George Washington presided, and James Madison, its principal draftsman, was another slaveholder. Q.E.D. Nonsense about race is the bludgeon with which the Left intends to deprive the rest of us of our freedoms. If the Constitution were a species, it would be on the endangered list. This item is available in full to subscribers. Attention subscribers We have recently launched a new and improved website. To continue reading, you will need to either log into your subscriber account, or purchase a new subscription. If you are a digital subscriber with an active subscription, then you already have an account here. Just reset your password if you've not yet logged in to your account on this new site. If you are a current print subscriber, you can set up a free website account by clicking here. Otherwise, click here to view your options for subscribing. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company New Delhi: Pakistan has extended a $ 50 million line of credit for defence to Sri Lanka , a joint statement issued by the two sides said Wednesday, at the end of a two day visit to Colombo by Pakistans prime minister Imran Khan. During the visit, the Pakistani delegation also invited Colombo to use its Gwadar port part of the multi-billion dollar China-Pakistan-Economic Corridor (CPEC) -- for trade with China and Central Asia. This is Imran Khans second visit to a country in Pakistans neighbourhood. Last year in November he had visited Afghanistan. For Sri Lanka, the visit is the first visit by a head of government since the covid-19 pandemic erupted last year. The visit is also important for Colombo coming as it does as Sri Lanka is bracing for the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva to slam it for alleged war crimes carried out in the last phases of the civil war in 2008-09. Sri Lanka had also caused a major flutter in the Islamic world by saying that Muslims who have died due to covid-19 cannot be buried but their bodies needed to be cremated. This was later withdrawn. Both sides expressed satisfaction at the existing bilateral cooperation in the field of defence and noted that the elevation of staff-level talks to Defence Dialogue has further provided an opportunity to expand security sector relations," a joint statement issued at the end of Khans visit said on Wednesday. Prime Minister Imran Khan announced a new $50 million defence credit line facility. The two sides stressed the need for stronger partnership for supporting and coordinating with each other in dealing with matters related to security, terrorism, organized crime and drug and narcotic trafficking as well as intelligence-sharing," the statement added. Interestingly, Pakistans extension of the line of credit to Sri Lanka comes close on the heels of India extending $ 50 million line of credit to neighbouring Maldives for strengthening navy capabilities and $100 million to Mauritius for shoring up coastal defences. Earlier in the day, at a business meet that was attended by Khan and Sri Lankan prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, Pakistans Abdul Razak Dawood, adviser to the Pakistan prime minister on Commerce and Investment said that Pakistan had trading agreements with Afghanistan and Uzbekistan as it had with Sri Lanka. Uzbekistan had offered Pakistan a land port to send Pakistani goods onwards to Central Asia, he said. Why should we not do the same ...open a facility at Gwadar" to facilitate exports of Sri Lankan goods to Central Asia, Dawood said. The Gwadar port is connected to Chinas Xinjiang province by the CPEC which in turn is a strand of the ambitious multi-billion dollar Belt and Road Initiative launched by China in 2013. In the context of regional connectivity, Prime Minister Imran Khan highlighted the opportunities presented by China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship project of BRI, for regional economic growth and prosperity," the joint statement said. The development comes as India is trying to get work restarted on Chabahar port in Iran which New Delhi sees as a route to landlocked Central Asia and Afghanistan bypassing Pakistan. Chabahar is situated in Sistan and Baluchestan province in south Iran on the Gulf of Oman. Pakistans Gwadar is about 70 kilometers to the west along the coast. Afghanistan is connected to the port through its land border with Iran, and India via the sea. The first phase of Chabahar port was inaugurated in December 2017. Indias plans to develop the port, first made public in 2003, had run aground repeatedly due to the waxing and waning of tensions between the US and Iran. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Would you like to receive breaking news notifications from The Post and Courier? Sign up to receive news and updates from this site directly to your desktop. Breaking News Columbia Breaking News Greenville Breaking News Myrtle Beach Breaking News Aiken Breaking News Click on the bell icon to manage your notifications at any time. Success! Please click the 'Allow' button in the 'Show Notifcations' alert in your browser if one is available. Thank you for signing up! Please enable notifications in your browser and reload the page. A voter advocacy coalition is urging Oneida County leaders to set higher standards when appointing election commissioners, after violations of election law and other errors were uncovered during court proceedings in the 22nd Congressional District race. Let NY Vote consists of more than 100 organizations, including Indivisible Mohawk Valley, working to improve elections and promote voter equity and accessibility. Both Oneida County Board of Elections commissioners stepped down from their roles last week after Oneida County Executive Anthony Picente and the State Board of Elections called for their resignation. Let NY Vote wrote a letter to Picente and the Oneida County Board of Legislators Monday, asking to implement minimum qualifications for the new commissioners, including education requirements, as well as knowledge or experience with election law and administration. --- Read the full letter below: Dear Oneida Elected Leaders, Let NY Vote is a statewide coalition of over 100 groups fighting to improve our elections by making registering and voting more accessible and equitable for every eligible New Yorker. Our coalition includes organizations with activists and members in Oneida County, including the undersigned Indivisible Mohawk Valley. The egregious election administration failures and deficiencies revealed by the lawsuit involving the congressional election in NY CD-22, particularly those in Oneida County, are unacceptable. We were relieved to learn that the two Oneida County Election Commissioners have resigned. You must now confirm new Election Commissioners nominated by the Democratic and Republican Oneida County party chair holders. Oneida County voters deserve an efficient and trustworthy election administration that is voter-centered. We urge you to not only fully fund the county board of elections, but during this process also hold a high bar of standards for the most capable individuals who would bring to the job these qualifications, at a minimum: Bachelors degree or equivalent experience in business administration, public administration or related field Knowledge and experience with election administration (New York experience desirable, but not required) or demonstrated ability to quickly get up to speed on detailed legal requirements Supervisory experience Project management experience preferred Familiarity with data management systems and best practices Dedication to voter-centered elections and excellent customer service Ability to work with the public and local/state government officials Ability to work independently Ability to prioritize tasks in a dynamic environment Ability to adhere to schedules and timelines. Excellent time management skills required Ability to maintain a fiduciary relationship to Oneida County's voters. Valid drivers license Registered Oneida county voter or eligible to become one if moving to accept this position. We hope that you share our dedication to repairing the damage done to citizens faith in the Oneida Board of Elections ability to efficiently run fair, accessible and secure elections where every vote is counted. We are happy to discuss our recommended qualifications with you and to assist in any appropriate manner. --- The Oneida County party committees must choose nominees for each commissioner position, and send them to the Board of Legislators for approval. The county Republican Committee is accepting applications for consideration until Thursday, Feb. 25. The Communist Party of China (CPC) celebrates its centennial this year. In his New Year speech on December 31, President Xi Jinping described the Party as a gigantic vessel that leads China forward steadily with people's expectations and the hope of the nation. Let's watch this video, and follow the voice of President Xi, to review the history of the Party's 100-year struggle and strive. Mangrove forests with greater species diversity can store more carbon, according to new research published in the British Ecological Society journal Functional Ecology. Researchers studying mangrove forests in Hainan Island, China, have found that species diversity in mangrove forests enhances both biomass production (the quantity of organic matter) and soil carbon storage. The findings highlight the impotence of conserving mangrove biodiversity as a nature-based solution to mitigate climate change. The East side of the island was found to have the highest mangrove biomass, diversity and carbon storage, with a mean of 537 tonnes of carbon per hectare (Mg C ha-1). This compared to a mean of 328 Mg C ha-1 across the entire island, and the world mangrove forest mean of 386Mg C ha-1. This is the first study based on an intensive field study to verify the positive effect of biodiversity on mangrove biomass and carbon storage. Mangroves grow in tropical regions and are one of the most carbon rich ecosystems on the planet. There are over 70 different species worldwide with 27 of these in China and 26 in the areas studied by the researchers. Because of the large representation of mangrove species in the study area, the researchers believe the results can be applied to other regions of China and the rest of the world, especially other Asian countries which have similar mangrove species diversity. The researchers also found that areas with high soil nitrogen content and annual rainfall had higher mangrove biomass and carbon storage potential, indicating that both soil fertility and climate factors determine areas of high mangrove diversity and carbon storage. Dr Guanghui Lin of Tsinghua University and one of the authors of the study, said: "Our findings suggest that mangrove forests with greater diversity also have higher carbon storage capacities and conservation potential. Thus, mangrove biodiversity conservation is crucial for ensuring mangrove forests are able to mitigate climate change. We can increase mangrove diversity through restoration and conservation projects, especially those that promote local native species." Professor Xiaoshan Zhu, also of Tsinghua University and another author of the study, said: "Worldwide, particularly in developing countries such as China, mangroves have been lost or degraded over the last several decades. Restoration of mangrove forests and their habitats are urgently needed not only for preservation of biodiversity but also to increase carbon storage potentials." Another benefit of increasing mangrove species diversity is that it will help to maintain the stability of mangrove ecosystems against disturbances like climate change and extreme weather. This in turn ensures mangrove forests continue to provide a habitat for the hundreds of species that rely on them. Mangrove forests consist of trees, shrubs and other woody plants growing in the tidal zones of tropical and sub-tropical coastlines. They provide numerous ecological services including water purification, coastal protection, habitat provision and carbon storage. The 26 mangrove species found on Hainan Island, where the researchers conducted the study, ranged from 30m tall trees such as Sonneratia and Bruguerria species, to shrubs of only a few meters such as Avicennia marina. A higher diversity of mangrove species leads to a more complex ecological community that can access more of the resources available. This is why species diversity leads to a faster accumulation of mangrove biomass. In the study the researchers conducted an intensive field survey of mangrove biodiversity and carbon storage along the entire coastline of Hainan Island, which has nearly 20% of China's mangrove forest area. Between 2017 and 2018 they collected data from 234 10m2 field plots along 30 transects distributed across the four main mangrove sites on the island. In each plot they collected data on the size, density and number of mangrove species, as well water and soil salinity and pH. They then calculated the carbon storage of the plant biomass using known carbon concentrations for each species and soil carbon and nitrogen content using soil samples from each of the 30 transects. A limitation of the study was that it was restricted to an isolated island. The authors are now compiling data for the rest of China and other countries with mangrove forests around the world. "This will allow us to test the relationship between plant species diversity and mangrove carbon storage found in this study." said Dr Guanghui Lin. ### Dean of the School of Performing Arts at the University of Ghana, Professor Kofi Agyekum, popularly known as Opanyin Agyekum has vehemently condemned the advocacy of homosexuality and its practice in Ghana. Speaking on Peace FM's "Kokrokoo", Opanyin Agyekum expressed utter shock that a man or woman would desire to have same sex affairs. He questioned the conscience of those who have sexual affections for the same sex stressing engaging in homosexuality is either "sickness" or "madness". "It baffles me that a man will make up his mind that he doesn't like any woman from the many women in this world and due to human rights desires to marry his fellow man. The same way it shocks me that a woman will express her sexual interest in fellow woman despite the lot of handsome and muscular men in the world. If this is not sickness, then it's madness," he said. He made these comments following the setting up of homosexuals office in Accra. The office establishment has stirred emotions with the Christain Council and Islamic leaders as well as a large section of the Ghanaian populace calling on the government and the National Security to immediately shut down the office. Opanyin Agyekum agrees with those speaking against homosexual acts, emphasizing it shouldn't be encouraged in the country. "Even a male dog doesn't mate a male dog. I haven't also witnessed a cock having sex with a cock. Even with a cock, when it's on heat and sees a hen with its chicks, the cock doesn't attempt to have sex with the hen," he stated. "Ghana's culture and norms frown on the act," he added. 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. Featured Video [February 24, 2021] Morgan Properties and Olayan America Acquire Massive 14,414-Unit Portfolio for $1.75 Billion Morgan Properties, the nation's largest private multifamily owner, announced today it has acquired, in partnership with Olayan America, a portfolio of 48 apartment communities and 14,414 units in 11 states for $1.75 billion. The Morgan Properties and Olayan America joint venture purchased the North Star Portfolio ("North Star") from STAR (News - Alert) Real Estate Ventures, a joint venture between El-Ad National Properties, LLC and Yellowstone Portfolio Trust. The North Star acquisition is the largest multifamily transaction this year and Morgan Properties' largest deal since acquiring the Morgan Communities portfolio of 95 apartment communities and 17,500 units in 8 states for $1.9 billion in 2019. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005622/en/ Keswick Village: Conyers, GA (Photo: Business Wire) "The North Star investment is a strategic transaction for Olayan America, and provides access to some of the best multifamily markets in the nation. It speaks to the strength of our partnership with Morgan Properties and our continued confidence in the multifamily sector," said Erik Horvat, Managing Director and Head of Real Estate at Olayan America. "Olayan America prides itself on its ability to move quickly and capitalize on these unique investment opportunities." Since 2014, Morgan Properties and Olayan America have closed 13 transactions (for $4.3 billion in total acquisition volume) to acquire a workforce housing portfolio of over 110 properties and 35,000 units in 14 states, all of which are managed and operated by Morgan Properties. In October of 2020, Morgan Properties and Olayan America bought the Threshold Portfolio, an 18-property, 3,256-unit multifamily portfolio in the Carolinas for $323 million. "The North tar acquisition is a major milestone for our organization and a testament to our conviction in the fundamentals of class B multifamily," says Jonathan Morgan, President of Morgan Properties JV. "This transaction establishes us as the second largest multifamily owner in the country and the nation's largest private owner. Morgan Properties' growth has been unprecedented in the multifamily industry. We have acquired $9 billion of assets and over 70,000 units since 2012. While most of our competitors remain defensive and on the sidelines, Morgan Properties continues to play offense. North Star was right in our wheelhouse given the barriers to entry and we pounced on the opportunity to secure it. We are excited to grow our geographic footprint and enter Florida, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana and Michigan. We value our partnership with Olayan and are thrilled to close another monumental transaction together." "The North Star transaction played to our strengths and we knew we were one of the only groups in the country that could bring it to fruition," says Jason Morgan, Principal at Morgan Properties. "It is a daunting task for most buyers to acquire geographically diverse portfolios and incorporate the properties into their operational platform, but this is one of Morgan Properties' core competencies. The Morgan Communities transaction set precedent for our North Star acquisition given its complexities, assumable debt similarities and size. Due to our long-term hold philosophy, we can pursue transactions encumbered by long-term debt in which the seller is unwilling or unable to defease. As a result, we are able to acquire properties at a discount to the broader market. Morgan Properties has acquired over $5.5 billion of assets across 40,000 units in the last two years alone in mostly off-market transactions. Our team is looking forward to hitting the ground running." North Star consists of 48 apartment communities and 14,414 units in 11 states including Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Maryland. The portfolio averages 300 units per property and an average vintage of 1985. Unit concentrations are in suburban Baltimore (2,566 units), Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL (1,972 units), suburban Atlanta (1,180 units), Lafayette, LA (972 units), suburban Chicago (762 units), Dallas (744 units), and Boca Raton, FL (712 units). Morgan Properties and Olayan America have solidified their strong market presence in the Mid-Atlantic Region, while greatly expanding their concentration in the Southeast, Southwest and Midwest. They plan to invest an additional $100 million for enhancements and amenity upgrades to the properties of the North Star portfolio. With the North Star acquisition, Morgan Properties and Olayan America entered five new states including Florida, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Michigan. Morgan Properties has a proven track record in South Florida, where the shifting demographic trends are enticing people and businesses to relocate. Morgan Properties and Olayan America look forward to growing their portfolio in each of these markets. As part of the North Star acquisition, Morgan Properties hired 400 new employees to join its growing organization, while creating two area vice president positions, 14 regional management positions and 70 corporate positions. The Company has decided to open a regional office in Boca Raton to better serve its expansion in the Southeast Region. About Morgan Properties Established in 1985 by Mitchell Morgan, Morgan Properties is a national real estate investment and management company headquartered in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Jonathan and Jason Morgan (News - Alert) represent the next-generation leaders growing the platform and overseeing the business operations. Morgan Properties and its affiliates currently own and manage a multifamily portfolio comprised of 357 apartment communities and over 90,000 units located in 20 states, primarily in the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast Region. The Company is the nation's largest private multifamily owner and the second largest apartment owner in the country. Morgan Properties is the largest multifamily owner in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York. With over 2,500 employees, Morgan Properties prides itself on its quick decision-making capabilities, strong capital relationships and proven operational expertise. Learn more about Morgan Properties at www.morganproperties.com. About Olayan America Olayan America is a division of The Olayan Group, a private, multinational enterprise with an actively managed portfolio of international investments and diverse commercial and industrial operations. Founded in 1947, the Group today has offices in Liechtenstein, Athens, London, Luxembourg, Riyadh, Singapore, Vienna and New York, where Olayan has had a continuous presence for more than 50 years. Investing both directly and in partnership with leading developers, the Group has a diverse real estate portfolio that includes commercial, residential, and mixed-use properties. Learn more about The Olayan Group at: www.olayan.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005622/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Pennsylvania movie theaters ditch mask mandate Three chain movie theaters have announced that masks are no longer mandatory for moviegoers who have been vaccinated against coronavirus. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. 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Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Rugby league boss Peter Vlandys ambitious plan to appoint NSWs most senior police officer to the games commission was scuppered before it even reached Macquarie Street. There was no approval documentation before Premier Gladys Berejiklian or Police Minister David Elliott for Police Commissioner Mick Fuller to sit on the board of the Australian Rugby League Commission when details emerged last week that Vlandys was spruiking his likely appointment. Peter Vlandys and Mick Fuller. Credit:Janie Barret, Jessica Hromas Aware of the plans, Elliott one of Fullers most ardent backers saw no problem with his commissioner being on the board, under the remit of cleaning up bad behaviour. The minister was also convinced the appointment would have the support from those within the government, including Berejiklian. The Premier, on the other hand, had been left with the impression that Fuller was simply considering a volunteer role mentoring young league players, not a board position. Over 621 miles below the western United States lies what geologists believe are the remains of a lost ocean, sinking toward the center of the Earth. These fragments of the Earth's crust formed the westernmost portion of North America during the Mesozoic Era, but researchers don't have a clear explanation of their origin. A team of geoscientists at the University of Houston led by Lorenzo Colli, assistant professor in the UH College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, has been awarded 2.5 million Central Processing Unit (CPU) hours by the National Science Foundation for use of its high-end computing system, Stampede2, to investigate this "geologic conundrum." Stampede2, the flagship supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, is considered one of the most powerful in the world. It provides scientists computing resources vital to achieving research goals. The monetary value of these awarded resources is more than $2 million. That amounts to one year of continuous research - priceless for Colli and collaborators Jonny Wu, assistant professor, and doctoral student Spencer Fuston in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. The UH researchers will use Stampede2 to simulate mantle convection, or the churning of hot ductile rocks in the Earth's deep interior, through geologic time, which will take them back 230 million years ago to the Triassic period. "We can build a plate reconstruction that we think fits where this 'lost ocean' is positioned, and how long the remains have been there," Fuston explained. "Then the supercomputer will simulate our plate reconstruction all the way to the present day and will allow us to compare against what the Earth's mantle looks like in present day." This information could help address heated debates related to the configuration of lost ocean basins that were present offshore in western North America during the time of dinosaurs. These topics are key to mineral and hydrocarbon exploration. "The research will also allow us to improve our models and better understand how the Earth's interior behaves," said Colli. "In the long term, the data will help us in dealing with earthquake forecasts and assessing the risk of earthquakes." ### When Cuba expanded private enterprise in 2010, Marta Castaeda and her husband were granted a license to open up their own pizzeria, which they called "A Mi Manera" or "My Way." Despite working out of less than ideal circumstances, Castaeda found a creative way to deliver pizzas from the ovens on her roof to customers on the ground. Years later, after Castaeda's husband passed away, her friend Marta Del Barrio joined her in keeping the dream of Cuban flying pizzas alive. Now, this would be a perfect solution for owning a business in a pandemic! Press Release February 24, 2021 HONTIVEROS: INSURANCE SUBSIDY KEY TO ASF INFECTION CONTROL AND TO BOOSTING OF LOCAL SUPPLY OF PORK Senator Risa Hontiveros has urged the Department of Agriculture (DA) to incentivize and compensate commercial farms that will observe bio safety protocols in their farms in a bid to prevent further spread of African Swine Fever (ASF). DA Secretary William Dar had confirmed to Hontiveros that they will be proposing to other cabinet members the expansion of insurance coverage under the Philippine Crop Insurance Corporation (PCIC) to include commercial farmers and coverage for five (5) million pigs. Hontiveros also pushed for free insurance coverage over the next two years for farms inside ASF-free areas and potential green zone areas that can level up compliance with infection control regulations. This, according to her, will not only provide relief to commercial farmers, but also be a key instrument for ASF recovery. "Win-win solution ito. The insurance subsidy will not only be a relief measure for hog raisers but also be an instrument of recovery. Mapipigilan din ang pagkalat ng ASF na pinakamalaking obstacle sa supply problem na nagpapataas ng presyo ng karneng baboy. This will also serve as a common ground that can start to bring goodwill back between the DA and the private sector," she said. At present, commercial hog raisers are not included under the insurance program of PCIC, and have not received support from the government commensurate to their huge losses. With limited resources, according to Hontiveros, the commercial farms are having a hard time following safety protocols and installing systems for infection control exacerbating the pork supply problem. She adds that "the lack of insurance cover also undermines the objective of early detection because hog raisers who fear their pigs might be culled have a tendency to, instead, dispose of them cheaply and fast to buyers." "Sa ibang mga bansa na may ASF, gaya ng Vietnam, mas kaya ng malalaking producers ang pag-monitor at pagsunod sa biosafety protocols. Dito sa Pilipinas, karamihan ay maliliit na backyard farmers, pero hindi sapat ang tulong na binibigay ng gobyerno. Kaya dapat ilibre na ang insurance at isama sa mabibigyan ng P10,000 insurance payout ang mga commercial farms na nasa loob ng green zones ng DA," she said. The Senator hopes that immediate action will be taken such as allocating additional funds to PCIC, and including insurance payout to cover as much of the loss as possible for farms that will repopulate within the green zones in DA's proposed 2022 budget. "ASF ang major contributor kung bakit mataas ang presyo ng karneng baboy. Kaya dapat maagapan ang lalong pagkalat nito. Hindi ito kakayanin lang ng maliliit na hog raisers, kailangan ng kagyat at malawakang tulong mula sa gobyerno na makakarating hindi lang sa iilan, kundi sa lahat," she concluded. SHANGHAI, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CooTek (Cayman) Inc. (NYSE: CTK) ("CooTek" or the "Company"), a fast-growing global mobile internet company, today announced that the Company will present and meet with institutional investors at the following virtual investor conferences. For more information on CooTek presentations, please visit investor relations website https://ir.cootek.com, or contact [email protected]. Diamond Virtual Conference Presentation on February 24, 2021, EST. Registration: https://www.diamondequityresearch.com/conferences Maxim Group's Emerging Growth Conference Presentation on March 18, 2021, EST. Registration: https://www.m-vest.com/events/2021-emerging-growth-virtual-conference ICA The Future of Asia Conference 1-on-1 and group meetings from March 29 to April 2, 2021, HKT. Registration: https://www.icascheduling.com/eventweb.php?pid=bjRiMWFtMGs&rid=O2JkZ2ZqYzk0OQ The Company's management will participate in virtual meetings with institutional investors throughout these events. For additional information, please contact your respective institutional sales representative at each sponsoring bank. About CooTek (Cayman) Inc. CooTek is a fast-growing mobile internet company with a global vision, offering mobile applications. Our mission is to empower everyone to enjoy relevant content seamlessly. The Company's user-centric and data-driven approach has enabled it to release appealing products to capture mobile internet users' ever-evolving content needs and helps it rapidly attract targeted users. CooTek has developed and brought to market content-rich mobile applications, focusing on three categories: online literature, scenario-based content apps and casual games. For more information on CooTek, please visit https://ir.cootek.com. For investor enquiries, please contact: CooTek (Cayman) Inc. Mr. Robert Cui E-mail: [email protected] ICA (Institutional Capital Advisory) Mr. Kevin Yang Phone: +86-21-8028-6033 E-mail: [email protected] SOURCE CooTek (Cayman) Inc. Related Links https://ir.cootek.com COLUMBIA Unless South Carolina's public health agency is forced to change the rules, teachers and other essential workers could become eligible for COVID-19 vaccines in mid-March, the department director told legislators Feb. 23. The state Department of Health and Environmental Control plans to move to the second eligibility phase once residents 65 and older no longer fill available appointments. "My goal is no open appointments," DHEC Director Edward Simmer told a House panel. "We estimate were at least two to three weeks away from having open appointments because there are still that many seniors in line who want this vaccine and cant get it right now because we dont have enough." Summer is the earliest that South Carolinians who are not listed as essential workers or have underlying health conditions could become eligible for the vaccine, DHEC has said. At Simmer's urging, the House panel delayed voting on measures that would force DHEC to make K-12 school employees immediately eligible. It's unclear when or if the panel will consider the legislation again. It is unlikely to advance any further. The bill, passed by the Senate two weeks ago, probably couldn't become law until mid-March anyway. The meeting came a week after the proposal to prioritize educators brought a parade of advocates for other groups before the panel to ask that they get priority status, too. The 1.3 million South Carolinians currently eligible for a shot as part of the initial Phase 1A include anyone 65 and older, health care workers, and medical first responders. Nearly 560,000 residents had gotten at least their first shot by Feb. 23, according to DHEC. They include people who weren't supposed to get one yet, though how many is unclear. For example, law enforcement officers and firefighters who are not directly involved in emergency medical care are supposed to wait until the next phase, though many have already been vaccinated. DHEC officials have acknowledged confusion over the eligibility categories. But they're clamping down on rule-breakers. On Feb. 23, Horry County Fire Rescue became the first vaccine provider to have its future allocations withheld. Beyond teachers and day care workers, the next phase, dubbed 1B, is also set to include bus drivers, grocery store clerks, and manufacturing employees an estimated 573,500 people in all. State Superintendent Molly Spearman said educators at least need a special status within that phase. "Theres nothing to ensure well get the first appointments. Well be ready to go and knocking on your door but theres no priority set in that 1B group," she told Simmer. "Everybodys going to be chomping at the bits together. Id like for us to have some priority." Sign up for updates! Get the latest political news from The Post and Courier in your inbox. Email Sign Up! The panel's chairman, Bluffton Republican Rep. Bill Herbkersman, asked Spearman and Simmer to work together on a plan. As a visible argument for vaccinating seniors first, Simmer pointed to a bar graph showing that 82 percent of the more than 8,000 South Carolinians who have died with COVID-19 were 65 and older. It's a statistic that Gov. Henry McMaster, who has the last say in vaccine eligibility rules, has cited repeatedly in refusing calls to add educators to Phase 1A. The average age of a teacher in South Carolina is 43, according to the state Education Department. Certainly, people younger than 65 "can get COVID and die from COVID," Simmer said. "There is risk there, but its much lower risk than for our seniors. Thats why its very important to us and were recommending we do seniors first." The legislation passed by the Senate would add about 150,000 people to the eligibility list, as it includes all K-12 public and private school employees, as well as day care workers. But less than 60 percent of public K-12 employees, or roughly 71,000, are currently willing to roll up a sleeve, Spearman said. Every school district has partnered with a vaccine provider to get shots in arms as soon as their employees are eligible, she said, noting 30 states have already put teachers on the list. "I never intended to pit one group against the other. My intent is to take away any excuse of a school person saying, 'We cant open up.' They need to be open," Spearman said. "If something doesnt happen pretty soon, schools going to be out. Were running out of time." Even while recognizing the legislation wouldn't require it, Simmer gave a scenario for what could happen if the state halted all appointments and designated two weeks' allotment to K-12 employees, to cover first and second doses. "We estimate we'd have an extra over 400 hospitalizations among seniors just by that two-week delay, an extra 3,500 cases among seniors," he said. "Let's vaccinate the folks at highest risk first, help save their lives as much as we can." Before all South Carolinians are eligible for the vaccine, the state has phase 1C that includes anyone 16 and older with a specific set of underlying health conditions including cancer and kidney disease, and essential employees working in transportation and logistics, food service, housing construction, information technology, the legal field and the media. Phase 1C is estimated to start in late spring. HK shares plunge 3% as investors decry tax hike The Hang Seng Index plunged 3 percent to below the 30,000 mark as investors booed a controversial decision to raise Hong Kong's stamp duty on equity trades. Image: Shutterstock Hong Kong shares plunged almost three percent on Wednesday as investors reacted to a controversial proposal to increase stamp duty on equity trades. The Hang Seng Index started the day slightly higher but started falling right before financial secretary Paul Chan presented his budget in which he said stamp duty on stock trades would rise from 0.1 to 0.13 of the transaction value. The bourse plummeted by more than 1,100 points at one stage before recovering to end the day 914 down at 29,718 on a record turnover of HK$353 billion. The stock exchange operator, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, was the days biggest loser, plummeting 8.8 percent despite announcing record earnings for last year. Meituan and Cnooc each lost about seven percent. But Sino Biopharmaceutical bucked the trend and put on 2.5 percent to become the winner of the day. Utilities CLP Holdings, Hong Kong and China Gas Company and Power Assets outperformed as well and gained between 0.8 and 2.3 percent. Markets across the border also headed south, with selling accelerating towards the end of the day amid concerns over high valuations and policy tightening. The Shanghai Composite Index tumbled two percent in its biggest daily percentage loss in seven months. The blue-chip CSI300 index shed 2.6 percent and the Shenzhen Composite retreated two percent. Other regional markets were also under pressure as high US treasury yields hampered appetite and investors continued to worry about high stock valuations. The Nikkei in Japan fell 1.6 percent. Seoul's Kospi suffered a 2.5 percent drop. Taiwan gave up 1.4 percent. Australi fell 0.9 percent. But Singapore put on 1.3 percent. remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen placed on a keyboard in this illustration taken on March 25, 2020. (Dado Ruvic/Illustration) Facebook to Invest $1 Billion in News Industry After Australia Row Facebook on Wednesday pledged to invest at least $1 billion in the news industry over the next three years, days after a high-profile stand-off with the Australian government over paying news outlets for content. The social networks commitment to the news industry follows Googles $1 billion investment last year, as technology giants come under scrutiny over their business model as well as the proliferation of misinformation on their platform. Facebook on Tuesday restored Australian news pages, ending an unprecedented week-long blackout after wringing concessions from the government over a proposed law that will require tech giants to pay traditional media companies for their content. The brief blackout shocked the global news industry, which has already seen its business model upended by the tech giants. Prime Minister Scott Morrison in the House of Representatives in Canberra, Australia, on Feb. 18, 2021. (Sam Mooy/Getty Images) In a blog detailing its version of the showdown, Facebook said the news ban was related to a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between the company and news publishers. It also acknowledged that some non-news content got inadvertently blocked when it banned all news content. Facebook said on Wednesday it has already invested $600 million in the news industry since 2018. The social media company added it was in active negotiations with news publishers in Germany and France for a deal to pay for content for its news product, where users can find headlines and stories next to a personalized news feed. By Ayanti Bera and Munsif Vengattil This item is available in full to subscribers. Attention subscribers We have recently launched a new and improved website. To continue reading, you will need to either log into your subscriber account, or purchase a new subscription. If you are a digital subscriber with an active subscription, then you already have an account here. Just reset your password if you've not yet logged in to your account on this new site. If you are a current print subscriber, you can set up a free website account by clicking here. Otherwise, click here to view your options for subscribing. Kidnapped dogs and goats were used to test TNT explosive devices this was too cruel to watch. Kidnapped dogs were used to check weight to detonate land mines! Thousands and dogs and goats fell victim to the LTTE by Shenali Waduge A 11 minute youtube video has been released of LTTE well-timed and poses questions for the international entities and individuals holding candles to LTTE. The footage shows LTTE children and adults in training how many of them are alive today. Click on the image to watch the Documentary Can the government issue a notice for all those living to present themselves or the OMP office or Reconciliation Ministry must also request them to appear and register with them. How many of these LTTE trainees including children are alive today? How did they die? How many died during LTTE training? How many died being shot trying to flee LTTE? How many died during hostilities with a national army? The videos show the deplorable manner LTTE are shooting dead civilians. Are these Sinhala villagers? Where did these shootings take place? The manner these civilians are shot at close range is shocking and shows how gruesome LTTE is. All those holding memorials for LTTE and the LTTE overseas brats appearing on videos calling for Tamil Eelam must look at the number of children LTTE had stolen from their parents to turn into gruesome murderers. How many Tamil children did LTTE steal from Tamil parents? Have the LTTE promoters including the White Nations of the world have no feeling for these children denied fundamental right to education, to freedom, to live with parents? Are the Tamil parents not happy now that LTTE is no more they do not have to fear their children being kidnapped? Just count the kids on this video Just think about what these kids had to go through Just think how devastating it would have been for kids to hold a gun instead of a pen Just think how life had been for these children Just think how kids were asked to make bombs banned by international law With the defeat of LTTE in May 2009 there are no more LTTE child soldiers With the defeat of LTTE in May 2009 there are no kids making bombs for LTTE With the defeat of LTTE in May 2009 there are no kids denied their right to live like a child With the defeat of LTTE in May 2009 there is no fear of kids garlanded with cyanide capsules With the defeat of LTTE in May 2009 the Tamil child is free from LTTE Why are the rights activists for children silent on bringing criminal charges against Adele Balasingham? Why are the rights activists silent on LTTE using children to make bombs? The video shows another side of the LTTE a side no one had earlier seen. LTTEs treatment of domestic animals is too shocking. To have pet dogs also kidnapped from Tamil homes shows another ugly side of the LTTE. Kidnapped dogs and goats were used for target practice Kidnapped dogs and goats were used to test TNT explosive devices this was too cruel to watch Kidnapped dogs were used to check weight to detonate land mines! Thousands and dogs and goats fell victim to the LTTE Look at the manner LTTE used innocent animals with no voice for their vicious ends. This is the LTTE that the UNHRC want to white-wash of crimes and crimes against humanity. Where are the foreign animal activists why are they silent? Wwould like to know how many of these LTTE children remain alive today? What are they doing now that LTTE is no more? What is their story We would also like to know about the parents in these video footage, what do they feel now that the LTTE is no more? How many of these parents lost their children to LTTE? We would like to know how many of these LTTE trainers are around have they changed their ways, have they run away to foreign climes? Click on the image to watch the documentary How many are today living overseas under false names? How many of these LTTE trainers were helped out of the country by western NGOs and western governments? How many of these LTTE trainers are still nursing separatism and terrorist tendencies? How many of these LTTE trainers are having their identity kept hidden by foreign governments? How many of these LTTE trainers have been given asylum/refugee status by western countries? The western governments who have been sponsoring resolutions against Sri Lanka conveniently ignore the fact that with the end of LTTE, the Tamil parents do not fear their children being kidnapped, there are no more child soldiers, thousands of pet dogs and goats have been saved from being killed there is so much that the whole country can feel happy about, but the countries drafting resolutions at UNHRC want Sri Lanka to continue to live under LTTE terror, want LTTE to prevail and want Sri Lanka to be punished for eliminating LTTE. From the video clip and the manner that western governments are behaving using the UNHRC, we can only say that they are no better than the LTTE and they are no friend of Sri Lanka. In place of Mullaiwaikkal Memorials for LTTE dead there must be a Memorial for the LTTE Child Soldier to remind the world what the CHILD went through the horrendous CHILD ABUSE by LTTE and the fact that these children are now SAVED from LTTE for good. TORONTO and LONDON, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Maru Group ('Maru'), the global insights Software and Advisory Services company, has announced the launch of Brand Health Tracking, a combined System 1 and System 2 research solution designed to deliver actionable data with agility and speed. Powered by HUB, Maru's proprietary software, Brand Health Tracking solution enables businesses to take real-time, tangible action from brand health research. HUB combines tracking data with all other research to provide total visibility of results in real-time, while the software's System 1 and System 2 methodologies deliver a unique and holistic view of brand performance. Ged Parton, CEO of Maru Group, explains, "We've put together this solution to satisfy the client need for tracking data delivered efficiently at speed. Our tracking programs deliver holistic data to clients rapidly, effectively real-time, saving weeks versus legacy programs because of our proprietorial software." Parton added, "I am super excited by the decision-making benefits to our clients of this combination of our brilliant software, System 1 based apps, and the deep expertise of our advisory people." Todd Trautz, Chief Innovation and Solutions Officer expanded, "Traditionally brand health trackers tend to focus on a multitude of metrics, often without taking into account the role that brand plays in consumer decision making, that can take weeks to analyze. This results in a wealth of brand health data that's very difficult for business leaders to act upon." "Our Brand Health Tracking solution closes the gap between what consumers Say versus what they Do by accurately capturing how consumers make decisions using our System 1 and System 2 method. With our software, we can uncover the emotional and rational pathways that drive brand choice and enable better, more informed, more confident decision-making in real-time with a completely new approach to brand health measurement," Trautz added. Maru's Brand Health Tracking approach is another Software & Advisory Services solution from the company used by Maru clients on major multi-market programs. About Maru Group SOFTWARE + ADVISORY SERVICES Maruhelps its clients make informed decisions in real-time by combining proprietorial software, deep industry experience, unique IP in System 1 apps, and access to the best minds in research across a number of geographies. Our flexible service model means our clients can choose to self-serve in this platform directly to create, launch and analyze projects; or choose to utilize knowledgeable support from insights experts. Dr. Christian Sandrock said some of his COVID-19 patients at University of California Davis are tired and short of breath. They cant smell or taste. Theyre forgetful and depressed months after developing the disease. Sandrock contrasts their ills with what people undergo after receiving COVID-19 vaccines such as one developed by Pfizer-BioNTec. The federal Food and Drug Administration said side-effects include pain at the injection site, tiredness, chills, fever and headache that are worse after the second dose and typically last for several days. As a scientist, as a parent, if I had to choose between a vaccine ... versus the long-term effects were seeing with COVID, I would always choose a vaccine, Sandrock said in an online briefing with reporters on Wednesday. A professor of pulmonary and critical medicine, Sandrock cataloged a broad array of post-COVID symptoms that he said probably have a shorter list of causes. Merely being in an intensive care unit for any condition not just COVID-19 can lead to a syndrome marked by fatigue, forgetfulness, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. COVID-19 patients can develop blood clots in major vessels, which result in stroke or embolisms; but the disease also might block smaller vessels, the capillaries. The smaller blockages could explain, Sandrock said, why patients labor to breathe and their hearts race after they walk a few steps, why they report brain fog and feel chest pain. Autoimmune reactions like those seen in lupus or arthritis might drive sleep disturbance, fatigue and depression, he said. Loss of taste and smell could be direct effects of the virus on tissues in the central nervous system. While tracing causes, researchers also are logging the prevalence of lingering effects that they call post-COVID syndrome. In a study published Jan. 16 in the Lancet, 76% of patients reported at least one symptom persisted six months after hospitalization in Wuhan, China. Muscle weakness, fatigue and sleep difficulties were most common, but other conditions included rashes, hair loss and joint pain. Sandrock pointed to a European study that found 50.9% of people had symptoms 90 days after infection. The study looked at hospital patients but also people who had COVID-19 but werent hospitalized. Dr. Hana Akselrod has been studying variants of COVID-19, including one, first found in the United Kingdom, which is 50 to 74% more transmissible. South Africa stopped administering the AstraZeneca vaccine to which its viral strain is particularly resistant, said Akselrod, professor of medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. She mused on the possibility that one vaccine might work on all variants of the virus and all other coronaviruses. That indeed is the holy grail, Akselrod said. Developing a universal vaccine will take time, she said while pointing out that researchers have been trying to concoct universal flu and HIV vaccines for decades. Meanwhile, exiting vaccines and public health measures give the United States a chance to tamp down COVID-19 before new variants become established. We have a window of opportunity, Akselrod said during the briefing arranged by SciLine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. ... We are going to need to keep paying close attention to personal protection, to ventilation, to effective masking to reducing public gatherings and doing all the public safety measures we have been doing. Phuket police officer faces attempted murder charge over Bangla shooting PHUKET: The drunken Phuket police officer who shot a noodle vendor on Bangla Rd, Patong, early yesterday morning will face at least three charges, including attempted murder, the Phuket Provincial Police chief has confirmed. patongpolicecrimealcoholviolence By The Phuket News Wednesday 24 February 2021, 12:21PM Phuket Provincial Police Deputy Commanders Col Arrayapan Pukbaukhao and Col Chaiwat Ui-kham, and current Patong Police Chief Col Sujin Sujin Nilabodi, visited Mr Aroon and his wife at Vachira Phuket Hospital yesterday afternoon. Photo: PR Phuket Phuket Provincial Police Deputy Commanders Col Arrayapan Pukbaukhao and Col Chaiwat Ui-kham, both former Patong Police Chiefs, visited Mr Aroon and his wife at Vachira Phuket Hospital yesterday afternoon. Photo: PR Phuket Phuket Provincial Police Commander Maj Gen Pornsak Nuannu late yesterday explained that he has ordered investigating officers to prosecute the shooter, Cpl Pornthep Channarong, with every criminal charge that can be applied. I have already ordered Patong Police to process him three charges: attempted murder, carring a firearm in a public area without necessary reason, and firing a weapon in a public area, Maj Gen Pornsak said. I have also already reminded the chief of every police station across the island to take care of their subordinates discipline and raised the issue about carrying firearms. Carrying firearms is to prevent any type of crime that may happen, not to commit a crime by themselves like this incident. If I see any police doing such a thing, I will decisively proceed in terms of both officer discipline and criminal charges, he said. Cpl Pornthep is now in custody of Patong Police for questioning. At this stage, he told us that on that night he drank to celebrate his transfer. He and Mr Aroon had never known each other. For Mr Aroon, he is still in a worrying condition and under close care at Vachira Phuket Hospital, Maj Gen Pornsak added. Phuket Provincial Police Deputy Commanders Col Arrayapan Pukbaukhao and Col Chaiwat Ui-kham, both former Patong POlice Chiefs, and current Patong Police Chief Col Sujin Sujin Nilabodi yesterday afternoon visited the noodle vendor, Aroon Thongplab, at Vachira Phuket Hospital. The officers also presented a vase of flowers to Mr Aroons wife. The police commanders offered her words of comfort and promised that police action in the case would proceed seriously and in a straight-forward manner. At 8:30am today (Feb 24), Region 8 Police Commander Lt Gen Kitrat Panpetch also visited the hospital to present a gift basket to Mr Aroons wife Phuket Provincial Police yesterday revealed through a statement that Lt Gen Kitrat had already ordered a disciplinary investigation into the incident and ordered for Cpl Pornthep to be dismissed from the Royal Thai Police. I came to visit Mr Aroon and cheer up his relatives. I want his relatives and people to not be worried about this case, as we will proceed this case decisively, Lt Gen Kitrat said today. I do not compromise in dealing with our officers in incidents like this, and I can confirm that he already has been dismissed from the Royal Thai Police, he said. The incident was caused by an officer who did something wrong that our organisation does not want. We are a big organisation with more than 200,000 officers under our control. Our officers are not all bad like this, he said. At the hospital late yesterday, Mr Aroons wife, told reporters, I have seen the CCTV footage of the incident, and I cannot accept that. I have never seen anything like this, and it should not be a police officer committing crime like this. My husband has been working so hard for the past six years for me and our children. We have a 4-year-old daughter and 3-month-old son, she said. Normally, he works as a motorbike taxi driver, but a few days ago he went to help his mum to sell noodles. He was shot while he was walking back from collecting a noodle bowl, she explained. Mr Aroons wife also left her husbands hospital room to pray to the Buddha image at the hospital. She wished for more people to donate blood to help her husbands recovery. For his condition, the doctor told me that the bullet went through his lung. He lost a lot of blood. We need a lot of Type B blood for him, she said. The Vachira Hospital blood centre is on the 4th floor of Vachira Phuket Hospital. to contact, call 076- 361- 234 ext. 1285 or visit their Facebook page. Alternatively, blood donations can be made through the Thai Red Cross Phuket Regional Blood Centre, located at 38/193 Rattanakosin 200 Pi Rd in Talad Neua, Phuket Town. Call 076-251178 or 081-9588854. Public journalism What next The lapses included factual inaccuracies in reports on allegations of police killings as well as reports on alleged illegal deportations of Zimbabweans . Another major story was about an alleged rogue unit within the South African Revenue Service.The panel found that the newspaper had failed in the most basic tenets of journalistic practice.These failures included not giving any or adequate opportunity to affected parties to respond to the stories pre-publication. Others included failing to seek credible and sourced validation of the allegations made against individuals.The panel concluded that the failures had caused great emotional and financial harm to the people concerned, their families and their careers.The newspaper has since apologised for the reports, and retracted them.Having ethical lapses on such a major scale can only further erode the publics trust in the media. More recently, investigative journalist Jacques Pauws admission that allegations he had previously made in a Daily Maverick column were based on distorted facts led to a widespread outcry. It was pointed out that Pauw not only undermined his own credibility, but also further eroded trust in journalism.It is clear that South African journalism has much work to do to rebuild this lost trust. Not only for their own sake, but in view of the growing crisis of disinformation. The panels report refers to the Global Disinformation Index which suggests that 41% of South Africans distrust the media. And a worrying 70% have problems distinguishing news from fake news.So, how should this rebuilding of trust be done? Clearly not by merely superficially papering over ethical cracks, nor overhauling the well-functioning media regulatory system . While apologies for and corrections of mistakes are important to show public accountability, journalists should also recommit to the principles underlying these processes.The countrys press code highlights the public interest as the central guideline. This entails, aside from striving for truth, avoiding harm and acting independently, the reflection of a multiplicity of voices in the coverage of events, showing a special concern for children and other vulnerable groups, and being sensitive to the cultural customs of readers and the subjects of reportage.This emphasis on diversity of voices and awareness of social context should be the starting point for any attempt to regain the publics trust. As the code states at the outset:One way of doing this is to adopt an ethics of listening . I explore this in my new book The Ethics of Engagement The central theme of my argument is that journalists must reach beyond their usual audiences to include those that normally appear only on the margins of media coverage. And they must review how those voices are reported, and how they appear in the media.This approach will result in a more genuine dialogue and an approach thats more participatory. This could, in turn, contribute to a thorough reassessment of the medias relationship with the public in a way that could rebuild trust.There are some examples of how this could be done. For instance Heather Robertson, former editor of The Herald newspaper in South Africas Eastern Cape Province, conducted a series of listening exercises attended by community members, opinion leaders and journalists. Some interesting case studies can also be found in Australia, where community media journalists, media scholars and activists teamed up to design a listening programme To some extent these projects are similar to the much older tradition of public journalism . It provides that the media should address citizens not merely as spectators or victims, but empower them to solve their problems. One way this was done was to host public discussions and facilitate meetings to support deliberative democracy. More recently, the potential for digital media platforms to connect journalists to audiences has also been explored.Applying this approach in South Africa would have major benefits. The country is socially polarised and highly unequal. Making the extra effort to actively listen to voices outside the journalists normal target audiences, especially marginal voices, would transform the narratives being shared.This would help journalists gain wider social legitimacy among those who may feel the media is disconnected from their everyday lives.But ethical listening doesnt merely accommodate voices from marginalised communities, only to treat them as victims or as objects of pity.Instead, it requires a fundamental revision of the relationship between journalists and their various audiences, one in which power relations are radically revised or overturned. A more reciprocal relationship with their divergent audiences would require journalists to let go of their desire to control the narrative, or tendency to listen only to obtain answers to questions already formulated.Of course this does not mean that journalists no longer have any say over their reporting. Nor that they dont have to take any ethical responsibility for the questions they ask. The difference in this kind of listening is that it creates a true dialogue, in the sense that the responses are allowed to alter, shift and speak back to the original agenda rather than made to fit into it.Listening can, therefore, be seen as fundamental to democratic politics because it constitutes a public sphere premised on participation, tolerance and inclusion.The panels report identified much larger, systemic problems in the wider South African media landscape. These include revenue challenges to media outlets, shrinking resources for training and for the effective exercise of editorial checks and balances. It also listed the pressure, fuelled by social media, to break stories ever faster amid competing misinformation and disinformation narratives as well as societal pressures.Linked to the rebuilding of trust should be a strong commitment to support community media and the public broadcaster to add to the diversity of voices.There can be little doubt that ethical lapses have added significant dents to the publics trust in the media.An appropriate response to the ethical problems plaguing the South African media requires thinking about the question of ethics as a more radical project one which requires a reaffirmation of journalisms central values, a recommitment to media diversity, and exploration of new practices that can reconnect journalists to citizens.These are the tasks that journalists need to take seriously if they are to restore relationships of trust with the public.This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article Beyond barbecues and ceremonies: Recognizing Memorial Day For many, Memorial Day weekend is about gathering with family and grilling or attending a parade. Some find a more personal way to honor the holiday. ARISS contact is scheduled for students at Estes Park Elementary School, Estes Park, Colorado, USA Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) has received schedule confirmation for an ARISS radio contact with astronauts. ARISS is the group that puts together special amateur radio contacts between students around the globe and crew members with ham radio licenses on the International Space Station (ISS). This will be a multipoint telebridge contact via amateur radio between students from the Estes Park Elementary School following Covid guidelines and Astronaut Shannon Walker, amateur radio call sign KD5DXB. Students will take turns asking their questions. The downlink frequency for this contact is 145.800 MHz. Amateur radio operators, using the call sign N0FH in Estes Park, CO, will serve as the relay amateur radio station. English is the language expected to be used during the contact. The ARISS radio contact is scheduled for February 26, 2021 at 10:09 am MST (Estes Park, CO), 17:09 UTC, 12:09 pm EST, 11:09 am CST and 9:09 am PST). The public is invited to watch the livestream at: https://youtu.be/AnPkH2eJM-A Estes Park Elementary School (EPES) (about 480 students, grades pre-K 5) is a rural, public school located at the base of the Rocky Mountain National Park. In preparation for the ARISS contact, the schools 5th grade students (about 80 students) have participated in a year-long Space Exploration unit of study. However, the opportunity to view the ARISS contact will be a district-wide and community event, including all 1,140 students in the public school district. The school partners with the Estes Park Memorial Observatory (EPMO), which is also part of the schools campus. EPMO provides facilities for their volunteers to conduct lectures regarding the basics of astronomy and features of planets, nebula and galaxies that the students or visitors will be observing online and when they can move to the dome for hands-on viewing. EPES implemented a variety of STEM-based cross-curricular topics/activities that included Introduction to Amateur Radio. Members of the Estes Valley Amateur Radio Club (N0FH) and retired Astronaut Loren Shriver have been an integral part of these activities; allowing the students to follow SpaceX Expedition 64, the ISS crew members, as well as the mission progress of the Mars Rover, Perseverance. The amateur radio club members will partner with the observatory and the elementary school to assist with the ARISS contact. As time allows, students will ask these questions: 1. What happens when it's your birthday in Space? 2. After using VR goggles to explore the ISS here in school, we wonder if you have VR goggles up there to "visit" Earth, for example if you were homesick? 3. Why don't they let kids in space? 4. How do capsules, satellites, or cargo "attach" to the ISS so people and supplies can come aboard and leave? 5. What kind of data is the ISS collecting on the sun? 6. How has COVID-19 affected you/your trip to space? 7. Have you ever had any unexplained sightings or communication while on the ISS? 8. What are your personal goals for your time in space? 9. What made you want to go to space? 10. What is your favorite research experiment that is currently being conducted on the ISS, and what data are you hoping to obtain from it? 11. What information have you gathered from studying animals (such as ants or bees) on the ISS? Have they ever gotten out 12. Have you made up any new game to play that only works in space? 13. How do you drive/control the ISS? 14. Can you tell us about a time that you were scared or worried while in space? 15. What happens if you get seriously sick or injured on the ISS? 16. What's the farthest away someone has gone on a spacewalk? 17. Do you have designated people to perform experiments on the ISS, or does everyone take part of that? 18. What is the most awesome sight that you have seen on Earth, or in space, from the ISS? ARISS Celebrating 20 Years of Continuous Amateur Radio Operations on the ISS About ARISS: Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) is a cooperative venture of international amateur radio societies and the space agencies that support the International Space Station (ISS). In the United States, sponsors are the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (AMSAT), the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the ISS National Lab-Space Station Explorers, and NASAs Space Communications and Navigation program. The primary goal of ARISS is to promote exploration of science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics topics by organizing scheduled contacts via amateur radio between crew members aboard the ISS and students. Before and during these radio contacts, students, educators, parents, and communities learn about space, space technologies, and amateur radio. For more information, see www.ariss.org Media Contact: Dave Jordan, AA4KN ARISS PR Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. Search on Amateur Radio on the ISS and @ARISS_status. A strategist provides the decision-maker with at least three options: the most likely option, the least likely option and the most dangerous option. This methodology applies to all strategists, regardless of their disciplinenational security, diplomacy, economics, health care, home affairs. The essence of their tradecraft is to analyse, assess and advise so leaders can make informed decisionsand then act. For those who grew up during the Cold War and its dogma of mutually assured destruction (MAD) between the Soviets and the US, nuclear weapons were the worlds most destructive threat. Without question, for most strategists, they were the most dangerous option and, on several occasions, also the most likely option. Still today, theres no denying the catastrophic effect of a nuclear weapon. However, to a nation such as Australia, is the detonation of a nuclear device our most likely threat? Our most dangerous threat? We live in an age of cybernetics and the internet of everything. All things seem to be connected and dependent on digital technologies, and those dependencies disrupt all aspects of truth and veracity. Smartphones, messaging apps and social media shape our public, political and national security environments, to the point that we must ask ourselves as a nation: Whats the most likely and whats the most dangerous threat to our sovereignty? Is it a nuclear detonation, a physical invasion, or something else? Nuclear weapons remain the most physically destructive instruments of war ever invented, but, as the Cold War showed, they also have a stabilising effect because they make conflict escalation, potentially, too costly. In many respects, the fear of MAD remains the check and balance for those nations with a nuclear capability today. In addition, due to MADs global implications, a robust indications and warning system, especially among the Five Eyes nations, to monitor and detect activities associated with nuclear devicesbe it armament, delivery system or developmentis in place. Even the threat of a loose nuke or a terrorists dirty bomb is scrutinised almost hourly by those in Russell and the Pentagon, and tabletop exercises to prepare them for the most likely and most dangerous options occur regularly. The fact is, a Cuban missile crisistype event is not Australias, or its Five Eyes partners, most likely threat now or in the near term. If not a nuclear or physical threat, then, what is the most likely threat to Australia? Is it the release of a chemical or biological weapon, such as Covid-19, if its done with malice and forethought by a nation-state or a terrorist group? What about the threat from cyberattacks or information warfare? Could implanting malware like WannaCry, which crippled the UKs national healthcare system, or NotPetya, which affected the power-distribution systems of the Netherlands and Ukraine, be construed as being as destructive to a nation as a nuclear blast? Or what about Secondary Infektion, which used social media to incite public and political discontent in Europe and the US? Most strategists would argue that biological or information warfare is in the grey zone of conflict, referring to it as hybrid or political warfare. But is a Twitter or malware bomb any less destructive in its magnitude of effects than a nuclear bomb? Is destructive power in 2021 based solely on kinetic yield? How do you measure the fallout from attacks like WannaCry or Secondary Infektion and their non-kinetic effects on globalisation, economies, governance and healthcare systems? In 2021, the Five Eyes adversaries are truly embracing the Clauzwitzian adage that war is politics by other means. Instead of being fixated on enriching uranium and deploying mobile nuclear delivery systems, theyre focused on weaponising the other components of national powerdiplomacy, information, culture, economics and the rule of law. Theyre employing innovative combinations of economic espionage and supply-chain manipulation to access our critical infrastructures. They steal our intellectual property and industrial secrets through malicious influence campaigns using information operations and political subversion to sow divisions in our society, undermine confidence in our democratic institutions and weaken our alliances. Today, we are more likely to be affected by the burst effects of a Twitter or malware blast much more than by a nuclear or conventional blast. Even more alarming is that, unlike the indications and alerts associated with a nuclear attack, all a nation-state or terrorist group needs is access to an internet connection and some disruptive messaging or malware and the strike can commence with virtually no warning. The fact is that Australias adversaries are effectively utilising the entire spectrum of conflict to pursue their national interests against us, carefully weighing their objectives while avoiding direct military action. To them, violating our nations sovereign cyberspace or electromagnetic spectrum is not considered an aggressive act. Why? Because we continually allow them to do it. But how is that different from violating our territorial waters or airspace? So, in 2021, Australias most likely threat is probably from an information-warfare system, such as a Twitter or malware bomb. Its least likely threat: an atomic or physical attack. And its most dangerous threat: leaders and decision-makers who fail to act on that which is most likely. The Telegraph Benjamin Netanyahu, Israels longest-serving prime minister, was closer than ever on Sunday night to finally leaving office. A series of extraordinary political twists have produced a diverse coalition containing left-wing parties, right-wing parties that support the West Bank settlement movement, centrist parties, and the party that represents the Islamic Movement in Israel, whose voters are mostly Palestinian-Israelis. What they all have in common is their revulsion for Benjamin Netanyahu, who is standing trial on a string of corruption charges. The government has not yet been sworn in, and the Israeli political system is used to seeing Netanyahu wriggle out of every political crisis at the last minute. But this time, most of the players believe, his chances are slimmer than ever. The change coalition, as it is known, looked like a non-starter a week ago. Its designated leader, former defence minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of the Yamina right-wing party, announced that the renewed fighting with Gaza and the riots in Israel between Arabs and Jews had convinced him that this coalition stood no chance. A few days ago, it became clear once more that there was no chance of Netanyahu establishing a right-wing government, and Bennett resumed talks with the chief architect of the alternative government-in-waiting, the chairman of the centrist Yesh Atid Party, Yair Lapid. On Sunday night, Bennett appeared on live TV and said that he would form a positive-minded government that would appeal to all Israelis, and which would be more right-wing than the current government. He thanked the left for its generosity, but promised that the new government would not relinquish territory or pursue unilateral withdrawals. From these remarks, it is easy to understand the challenges facing the new government: it brings together progressive left-wing parties with a religious right-wing party, all headed by a prime minister who will control just six seats in the 120-seat Knesset. This government patently is making no pretence of pursuing a peace process with the Palestinians, and it is also clear that it cannot propose sweeping reforms in the domain of religion and state, a critical issue for so many Israelis. The fall of Benjamin Netanyahu cannot be chalked up to the strength of the Israeli centre-left, which remains a minority in Israeli society, but to the rise of the a conservative right which opposes his rule, and identifies his brand of leadership as Bibism: a cult of loyalty to the leader himself above all other ideological principles. Israel has been dragged through four election cycles in the last two years, and in none of them did the bloc of parties that support Netanyahu manage to obtain a majority in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. In the last election, a centrist party joined forces with Netanyahu to form a government that was supposed to include a rotating premiership between Netanyahu and his rival Benny Gantz; but Netanyahu violated the agreement the moment he signed it and pushed the country toward elections, because he refused to relinquish his seat not even in two years time. In the fourth elections, it turned out that again that Netanyahu had no majority, and two right-wing parties announced that they would not support him. They have just been joined by the party of the prime minister-in-waiting, Naftali Bennett. These right-wing parties decided to abandon Netanyahus bloc for a host of reasons, but the commonly cited reason is their leaders intense lack of trust in Netanyahu, their sense that the country has had enough of his long rule, and a consensus that his government is crippled by chronic decision-making difficulties and that it sows division and that preventing a 5th election in two years is of paramount importance. If a new government is indeed formed in the next week, it will turn out that Netanyahu was not replaced because of the left, but because of a growing agreement on the right flank of Israeli politics that its time for change. Nadav Eyal is a leading Israeli journalist and columnist for the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot Flash Mohamed Bazoum, the candidate of Niger's ruling Party for Democracy and Socialism (PNDS-TARAYYA), won the second round of the presidential election on Sunday, according to the provisional results announced Tuesday evening in Niamey by the president of the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) Issaka Souna. Bazoum won the election with 2,504,459 votes, or 55.75 percent of the total votes, against 1,985,736 votes, or 44.25 percent of the total, to his challenger Mahamane Ousmane of the Democratic and Republican Renewal, said Souna. The number of voters who cast their ballots is estimated at 4,487,195, out of more than 7.4 million registered voters, a turnout of 62.91 percent, said Souna. The provisional results will be sent to the constitutional court for final validation. Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Aranjin Resources Ltd. (TSXV: ARJN) (the "Company" or "Aranjin") is pleased to announce the commencement of drilling program at its Bayan Undur ("BU") project. Over $10m worth of historical drilling and associated analysis at the BU project has now been reviewed. As a result of this analysis, the Company plans to start with one deep hole at a highly targeted area of the BU project in April 2021. The BU project is located in the Bayan Undur soum of Bayankhongor province. The Company owns a 100% interest in the BU project which consists of 4 mining licenses. The ongoing restrictions related to the COVID-19 have delayed progress on license acquisition but the Company expects to have an active exploration program in 2021. We expect to have an update on the pending acquisition of the Baruun Tal project in H1 2021. Executive Chairman of Aranjin Resources Ltd, Matthew Wood commented, "We are very excited to announce the commencement of the Spring drilling program at our BU project in Mongolia. We also continue to review several highly prospective licenses as we look to build our copper exploration portfolio in Mongolia." Resignation of Director The Company announces that Mr. Gizman Abbas has resigned as a director of the Company. The Company wishes to thank Mr. Abbas for his strong contributions and wise counsel throughout the years. On behalf of the Board Matthew Wood Executive Chairman Aranjin Resources Ltd. +1.647.981.1703 NEITHER TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75349 Paul Scheele, of Oneonta, is a retired professor of political science at SUNY Oneonta. He taught there from 1964 to 1998, focusing on the presidency, Congress, public policy and political interest groups. The refusal of such a huge number of Republicans, otherwise intelligent and fair-minded people, to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election presents a serious problem for the country and a very puzzling question: Why? Are they so mesmerized by the claims of former President Donald Trump that real-world facts mean nothing? Or are they so addicted to the power of the presidency that they refuse to surrender it? Or are they simply so ill informed about how our elections are conducted, and how this particular election was conducted, that they dont understand what actually happened? Those who study mass communication have called false claims such as Trumps about the election the big lie. Despite the fact that accurate information about the voting process is readily available, for many citizens the process remains a mystery. So, a brief review may be in order. First, the method by which votes will be recorded is chosen by state or county legislatures in open session all over the country. Both the casting and the counting of ballots are overseen by voting precinct officials representing both major parties. In every one of the seriously contested states Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin statewide recounts were conducted. Every recount confirmed the original tally with only minor exceptions. Nevertheless, Trumps supporters filed more than 60 lawsuits in the battleground states challenging the election outcome, citing serious irregularities but little evidence. All but one of those lawsuits were dismissed for lack of evidence. Citing irregularities and making charges do not constitute proof. Courts demand evidence, and so must we. The secretaries of state and the governors of every state, Republican and Democratic, certified their elections as accurate. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA) is the federal office most responsible for overseeing the security of national elections. The director of CISA, Christopher Krebs (a Trump appointee), declared that no evidence was found of significant fraud or election irregularities in any state. Krebs described the election as the most secure in American history. Attorney General William Barr, appointed by Trump, declared that the Department of Justice, including the FBI, found no evidence of fraud of any consequence in the election, and the Trump-appointed Secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, agreed. Both Barr and Wolf stated that Joe Biden had won the election. All of the major TV networks, all of the nations largest newspapers, periodicals, and news services called the election for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Yet, in spite of the overwhelming agreement among officials that Biden won the election, the repeated claims of one man, Donald J. Trump, that he had won the election, and even won it in a landslide, millions of votes more than Biden, these lies brought the nation to the brink of constitutional crisis. Undaunted, and pursuing his baseless charges, Trump attempted to strongarm the Republican governor and Republican secretary of state of Georgia to find me 11,000 votes to give him Georgias electoral votes, They refused. On Jan. 5, Trump tried to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to commit an unconstitutional act the following day (when the entire Congress met to count the Electoral College votes and certify the winner). Trump asked Pence to throw out enough Electoral College votes which Biden had won to allow Pence to declare Trump the election winner. Pence refused. The following day, Trump even helped induce a violent attempt at revolution, to stop Congress from certifying Biden as the winner; the ensuing riotous mob stormed the nations Capitol, resulting in the deaths of five people and injuries to scores more, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the Capitol building. How can this be? How can one man have such great power and influence? The answer lies in the power of the big lie. Those who study human behavior have noted the power of the big lie for more than a century. Joseph Goebbels, Hitlers Minister of Propaganda, was a master of it. The idea is simple: a big lie, repeated often enough, can persuade people that it is true. Donald Trump, whom the Washington Post reported as having told more than 30,000 lies or gross exaggerations while in office, has used the big lie effectively to persuade 70 percent of Republicans that the election was fraudulent, and that in fact he, and not Joe Biden, won it. How do we counter the big lie? That can only be done by the big truth, that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and that Donald Trump lost, endlessly repeated by as many sources as possible. Most Republican leaders in Congress have stated publicly that Biden won. Almost all Republican members of Congress and all but a small handful of Trump loyalists admit privately that Biden won. Now if they would only say that publicly. Related: In politics, the big lie is the one we tell about each other LEWISTON - The Idaho North Central District of Public Health is asking people aged 65 and older who have not yet received their COVID-19 vaccination to call Public Health Office at 208-799-3100 to set up an appointment. Appointments will be at the Public Health Office located at 215 10th st. Lewiston, Idaho. These appointments are for residents of Clearwater, Idaho, Latah, Lewis and Nez Perce Counties aged 65 and older. Appointments will be on a first come first serve basis. WHAT TO EXPECT AT YOUR VACCINATION APPOINTMENT You will receive a vaccination card that says which COVID-19 vaccine you were given as well as the date and location it was administered. You should also receive a fact sheet with additional information about the COVID-19 vaccine you are getting. There are fact sheets for each COVID-19 vaccine with information about the risks and benefits of that particular vaccine. Allow time to stay at the vaccination site for 15-30 minutes after getting vaccinated to make sure you dont have a reaction that needs medical attention. AFTER YOU GET VACCINATED COVID-19 vaccines may cause mild to moderate reactions, including pain or swelling at the injection site, muscle pain, headaches, and mild to moderate fevers. These are normal signs the body is producing an immune response. You may report adverse events following vaccination at https://vaers.hhs.gov/. It takes time to build protection and immunity after getting a vaccine. A person is considered immune two weeks after receiving the second dose of COVID-19 vaccine. If the vaccine youre getting requires two doses, you should get both doses unless a healthcare provider or doctor tells you not to. If you have not received 2 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine and you have symptoms of COVID-19, you should get tested. While scientists learn more about the protection that COVID-19 vaccines provide under real-life conditions, it is up to everyone, including vaccinated people, to continue to do all the other measures to help stop this pandemic: wear a mask, stay 6 feet apart from people who dont live in your home, wash your hands often, and stay home when youre sick. To learn more about who is currently eligible to receive the vaccine, Idaho residents can visit https://healthandwelfare.idaho.gov/covid-19-vaccination. Preston is chief legal counsel for a top-tier international defence company with widespread global operations She is past co-chair of the American Bar Association, International Section's Defense and Aerospace Committee, and former vice-chair of its Anti-Corruption Committee Micro Systems Inc ( ) (OTCQB:KWEMF) announced Wednesday that international business and trade lawyer Elisabeth Preston has joined the board of directors and will also serve as the company's corporate secretary. "The entire board extends a very warm welcome to Elisabeth, said David Luxton, executive chairman, in a statement. We are all well acquainted with her by reputation, and I have had the pleasure of working with her directly in other high-growth defence industry ventures, where she was a valued colleague and demonstrated an exceptional breadth of knowledge and skills." The company said that Preston is chief legal counsel for a top-tier international defence company with widespread global operations. As an international business and trade lawyer, with significant transactional experience in many jurisdictions, her experience spans more than 30 years advising companies as an executive in areas relating to governance, cross-border marketing, strategic relationships, major commercial transactions and financings to fund growth. Preston also has assisted companies to pursue and secure major contracts and to resolve complex international agreements. She has worked intensively in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, procurement law, anti-corruption compliance, industrial security, export control and controlled goods as well as labour and employment law. She has also frequently acted as counsel on security-sensitive issues and is one of Canada's top authorities on ITAR regulations and compliance in the defence industry. also noted that Preston's practice has also included advising public companies as chief legal officer, general counsel and in private practice. She has taken several client companies public, and has deep knowledge of the investment banking community, investor relations guidance and public company disclosure and best practices in continuous disclosure. She was also previously the managing partner of a major Canadian law firm's busy Ottawa office. She is past co-chair of the American Bar Association, International Section's Defense and Aerospace Committee, and former vice-chair of its Anti-Corruption Committee, and is continuously in demand as a speaker on topics of interest to in-house counsel of global enterprises. The company said that Preston was granted 300,000 stock options exercisable at $1.78 per share on or before February 23, 2026. Contact the author: patrick@proactiveinvestors.com Follow him on Twitter @PatrickMGraham Kim Sung-kyu, CEO of the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, speaks during a press conference held to introduce this year's performance schedule and strategies at the art complex in Seoul, Monday. Yonhap By Park Ji-won The Sejong Center for the Performing Arts unveiled its 2021 event schedule focused on holding offline performances despite the pandemic. Kim Sung-kyu, CEO of the art complex, announced Monday that the center will showcase up to 56 shows, 393 performances and seven exhibitions this year, which will be presented starting with "Romeo and Juliet" by its art troupe Seoul Metropolitan Opera on March 25 to 28. "We have been thinking about how to present online shows in this era of COVID-19. We came to the conclusion that we need to focus on offline venues by taking advantage of our theaters," Kim said during a press conference announcing this year's performances and strategies at the art complex in Seoul, Monday. The Sejong Center, meanwhile, decided not to sell package tickets this year due to the possibility that shows may be canceled depending on the pandemic situation. Stressing that he's most looking forward to Vienna Philharmonic's classical concert conducted by Riccardo Muti on Nov. 14, Kim said, "The Sejong Center is consulting with the foreign ministry to lift the two-week self-isolation period on artists coming from overseas so that the show would not be canceled." The first-ever Hong Kong Week 2021@Seoul, which will last for 10 days from Aug. 27, will feature performances by eight art troupes including the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra's Mahler's Symphony No. 1 and Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5, the play adaptation of "the Orphan of Zhao," the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra's classical concert and the Hong Kong Ballet's "Alice." The musical adaptation of Tim Burton's film "Beetlejuice" will be premiered in June for the first time in the world. "NEXT ART: Fantastic Tour to Pop Art and Media Art" by British pop artist Philip Colbert will be held from March 13 to May 2. "League of Legends Live: The Orchestra" concert, which was canceled last year due to the spread of the virus, will be held during Nov. 27-28 through both online and offline channels. Sorry! This content is not available in your region Varavara Rao fit to go back to jail from hospital: NIA tells HC Varavara Rao seeks HC nod for cash bonds in lieu of sureties for bail India oi-Deepika S Mumbai, Feb 24: The counsel of poet-activist Varavara Rao, who has been granted interim bail for six months, on Wednesday sought permission from the Bombay High Court to deposit cash bonds instead of two sureties that the HC ordered as one of his bail conditions. Rao, 82, an accused in the Elgar Parishad-Maoist links case being probed by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), was on Monday granted bail by the HC which asked him to furnish a personal bond of Rs 50,000 and two sureties of the like amount. Senior advocate Anand Grover told a bench of Justices S S Shinde and Manish Pitale on Wednesday that the process of obtaining sureties was slow. Grover asked if he could submit cash bonds before the special NIA court now to secure Rao''s release on bail, and complete the formalities for the sureties subsequently. Grover told the bench that the process of obtaining sureties was taking longer owing to restricted work in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The bench, however, said it could not grant the prayer without hearing the NIA. It directed Grover to file an application for the same and mention it for urgent hearing on Thursday morning. HC grants interim bail to poet Varavara Rao in Bhima Koregaon case On Monday, the bench led by Justice Shinde granted interim bail for six months to Rao on medical grounds. It imposed several conditions on his release, including a direction to him to remain in the city, within the jurisdiction of the NIA court here. Rao is currently admitted in the Nanavati Hospital here and will be discharged and released on bail if his health condition is stable and once the bail formalities are completed. The case pertains to alleged inflammatory speeches made at the ''Elgar Parishad'' conclave held in Pune on December 31, 2017, which, the police claimed, triggered violence the next day near the Koregaon-Bhima war memorial located on the outskirts of the western Maharashtra city. The police have claimed the conclave was organised by people with alleged Maoist links. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 17:06 [IST] Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 21:17:17|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close TASHKENT, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Uzbekistan will conduct COVID-19 vaccinations on a voluntary basis, a top Uzbek official said Wednesday as the Central Asian nation prepares to start mass vaccinations. "Vaccination in our country will be carried out on a voluntary basis. If a person refuses to be vaccinated, no measures will be taken against him (or her)," Uzbek Deputy Prime Minister Behzod Musayev told deputies in a meeting, of which excerpts were broadcast on local television. No officials or employers have the right to dismiss a person from work if he or she refuses to be vaccinated, he added. According to Uzbek officials, the first stage of the mass vaccination campaign will cover 4.1 million people, and deputies proposed to vaccinate elderly and disabled persons, employees of the healthcare and education systems, as well as members of law enforcement bodies first. So far, Uzbekistan has registered 79,749 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 622 related deaths. Enditem The Minister-designate for Railways Development, John Peter Amewu, has noted emphatically that his predecessor, Hon. Joe Ghartey did marvellously well as far as the development of the railway sector in Ghana is concerned. According to Mr Amewu, Hon. Ghartey and his then team at the Railways Development Ministry laid a solid foundation for Ghanas railway sector. Joe Ghartey and the other teams have done quite marvellously for this country, According to Mr Amewu. He made the commendation in Parliament on Wednesday, February 24, 2021, during his vetting as Minister-designate for Railways Development. Mr Amewu, a former Energy Minister and Member of Parliament for Hohoe Constituency in the Volta Region informed the House that Hon. Ghartey tremendously worked during his tenure to positively transform the rail sector. He assured the lawmakers and indeed the entire country that he will continue where Hon. Ghartey left off. Hon. Ghartey had earlier wished Mr Amewu well, expressing profound confidence in his ability to succeed when he is finally given the nod. It would be recalled that a few weeks ago, a senior law lecturer, Moses Foh Amoaning, also praised Hon. Ghartey for what he considered to be the tremendous work he did in the railway's sector of Ghana. Speaking on Metro TVs Good Evening Ghana with broadcaster Paul Adom Otchere, on Thursday, January 28, 2021, Lawyer Foh Amoaning says Hon. Ghartey laid a solid foundation for the development of Ghanas railway sector. "They have laid a solid foundation and I thought that Joe was going to be allowed to grow it. I don't know how Amewu is going to fare over there," he stressed. Hon. Ghartey was the Minister of Railways Development from 2017 to 2021. 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. Featured Video By Kang Seung-woo Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong and his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif spoke on the phone Wednesday about the issue of Tehran's assets frozen in two Korean banks, according to the foreign ministry. Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong / Korea Times file Human bones found washed up on an isolated beach belong to a man who mysteriously vanished four months ago, DNA testing has revealed. A forearm was discovered by a local on Maslin Beach in Adelaide on February 16 before detectives scouring the sand for clues found a rib the next day. On Thursday, police confirmed the forearm belonged to local man Jesse Corigliano-Quealey, who went missing from the area on October 9, 2020. DNA examinations confirmed the forearm bone belonged to local man Jesse Corigliano-Quealey The 30-year-old disappeared after he dropped his car off at the local mechanic, leaving behind his wallet, keys and phone. Police said his identity was confirmed through DNA testing after the bones were examined by Forensic Services. Detective Chief Inspector Scott Fitzgerald said last week the member of the public who discovered the first bone took it home to show a family member. 'One of his relatives with medical training believed it might have been human, and it was presented to us yesterday (Wednesday) morning,' he said last week. 'We suspect that bone is a human bone which is relatively recent in the scheme of things, even up to a couple of months or a year old the advice we have received is, it is not an ancient bone.' South Australian Police said Mr Corigliano-Quealey's death is not being treated as suspicious. This matter is being investigated by Southern District CIB, which is preparing a report for the State Coroner. South Australian police said the 30-year-old was went missing from Maslin Beach last year on October 9 New Delhi: Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi on Friday condemned the attack on Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhis vehicle, alleging that BJPs goons attacked the leader with cement bricks. He said it should be condemned unequivocally. Singhvi said that the SPG personnel who were with Rahul Gandhi also sustained injuries. The Congress leader questioned, Are we reaching a space in our democracy where political opponents are not going to be allowed to practice democratic politics? Reacting on Twitter, Congress spokesperson RS Surjewala said it was disgusting and disgraceful that Rahul Gandhis car attacked by BJP goons in Banskantha of Guajart. Rahul Gandhi was attacked with cement bricks by BJP goons,SPG with him suffered minor injuries;should be condemned unequivocally: AM Singhvi pic.twitter.com/Fer2LxqY8j ANI (@ANI_news) August 4, 2017 Rahul was visiting Banskantha to meet flood- hit people of the state. He also met people of Jalore in Rajasthan. #Visuals Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi's car attacked by unknown persons in Gujarat's Banaskanta pic.twitter.com/AXsgCM4Tlq ANI (@ANI_news) August 4, 2017 Also Read: Rahul Gandhi attacked on Gujarat visit, says 'Narendra Modi's slogans, black flags, and stones cannot stop us' For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. A firearm, ammunition and a quantity of suspected drugs was seized by police in west Belfast on Tuesday evening. Detectives from the Paramilitary Crime Task (PCTF) searched the property as part of an ongoing operation into suspected drugs criminality linked to the INLA. During the search of the property, the officers seized a firearm, ammunition, a Taser, suspected cocaine, amphetamine and cannabis alongside a quantity of cash. A 23-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of possession of a class A drug, possession of a class B drug and firearms offences and possessing criminal property. The male is currently in custody at this time. Speaking after, PSNI Detective Inspector Hamilton said: I am pleased to report the seizure of this firearm and ammunition to the people of west Belfast and indeed the wider community. We have removed the ability of these criminals to terrorise members of the community and our city is undoubtedly a safer place today as a result. Drugs cause untold harm in our communities and last nights search is further evidence that PCTF are proactively pursuing drug criminals who prey on vulnerable members of our community. We will continue to listen to the public and act on the information they provide us, to target those criminals, involved in the sale and supply of illegal drugs at every opportunity. I would encourage members of the public with information regarding criminal activity to call 101, or you can submit a report online using our non-emergency reporting form via http://www.psni.police.uk/makeareport/ . The independent charity Crimestoppers can also be contacted anonymously on 0800 555 111 or online at http://crimestoppers-uk.org/. Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the long-serving Saudi oil minister who masterminded an OPEC embargo that plunged western economies into recession in 1973, has died at the age of 90, Saudi state TV reported on Tuesday. Yamani became Saudi oil minister in 1962, a rare instance of someone from outside the Royal Family being promoted to such a position of influence. He would go on to drive Saudi Arabia's emergence as an oil powerhouse over a period in office spanning nearly a quarter of a century. It was in the 1970s that he became an international figure, reviled in the West for masterminding an oil embargo after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cut off crude supplies to the United States and other industrialized nations as punishment for their support of Israel. In just a few months, the price of crude oil quadrupled from $3 a barrel to $12. Gasoline rationing was introduced in the United States, as well as a nationwide 55 mph speed limit on roads. Looking back at the crisis, Yamani told CNN in 2010 that "the Arab oil [embargo] was meant, and I was behind it, not to hurt the economy, just to attract the international public opinion that [there] is a problem between the Palestinians and the Israelis." Yamani's stated goal at the time of the embargo was to force Israel to withdraw from occupied Palestinian territory. But the rapid rise in oil prices was an enormous windfall for OPEC members. "Unfortunately, money is very attractive, members in OPEC, they love money and revenue. And this is why they push the price up as quickly as possible and they paid the price for what they did," Yamani said. The former oil minister told CNN that he didn't regret the embargo. But he did have misgivings about OPEC's subsequent efforts to dictate prices. "I regret what OPEC did. You cannot really manage the price. It was a mismanagement of price, a mismanagement of power," he added. At that time, OPEC controlled about 80% of global output, a far cry from its diminished status today. (Based on its own forecasts for 2021, OPEC's market share has shrunk to around 30%).The US State Department's official history of the crisis says it "triggered a slew of US attempts to address the foreign policy challenges emanating from long-term dependence on foreign oil." Those efforts included boosting domestic supply, and in 2019 the United States became the world's biggest oil producer. Urbane, elegant and fluent in English, Yamani attended Harvard Law School before being plucked from obscurity by the future King Faisal to lead the Saudi oil ministry. At the time, Saudi Arabia was a mid-ranking producer. Within a decade, it would be a behemoth. One of Yamani's enduring achievements was to increase Saudi Arabia's ownership of (and revenues from) the kingdom's crude output, which had long been dominated by the western consortium that made up Aramco. In 1975, Yamani witnessed the assassination of his mentor, King Faisal, by a disaffected prince. It was a traumatic year for the young minister. On December 21, 1975, he and other OPEC oil ministers were taken hostage in Vienna by a group led by Carlos the Jackal, the most notorious international terrorist of the era. A statement from the attackers demanded a role "for the Arab people and other peoples of the third world" in dealing with oil resources. The terrorists got the Austrian government to provide a plane to take them and several of the ministers to Algiers. Carlos planned to kill both Yamani and Iranian Oil Minister Jamshid Amuzegar but he ultimately agreed to release them after Algerian mediation. Yamani's fall from grace stemmed from King Fahd's demand in 1986 that he secure an increase in Saudi Arabia's export quota within OPEC and get the cartel to set a price of $18 a barrel. He was unable to deliver the King's goals and was dismissed soon afterward. In his later years, Yamani said the price of oil had been distorted by speculation, leading to volatile swings. And it wasn't just speculation. He told CNN: "Don't forget that politics is important. Anything can happen and it can either ruin the oil business or bring it up." While remaining involved in the world of energy, Yamani also indulged his passion for watches, poetry and preserving Islamic texts. He was a deeply religious man and the son of a celebrated religious scholar. Yamani exploited the opportunities of Saudi Arabia's unique position as an energy producer at a time when the United States, Europe and Japan all needed vast quantities of its oil. In his CNN interview in 2010, he said oil would remain part of the energy mix despite the rise of renewable sources, but acknowledged it wouldn't go on for ever. "The stone age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil." [February 24, 2021] LOGIX Announces the LOGIX Texas Metro Fiber Network to Deliver Dense Last Mile Connectivity for Wholesale Carriers LOGIX Fiber Networks, a Texas-based fiber provider and business connectivity company, recently announced the launch of the Texas Metro Fiber Network, a last mile wholesale network platform to deliver rapid, reliable, and secure connectivity for wholesale carriers in the top major metros across Texas. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005196/en/ The Texas Metro Fiber Network delivers rapid, reliable, and secure connectivity for wholesale carriers in the top major metros across Texas (Graphic: Business Wire) The Texas Metro Fiber Network offers a dense metro fiber footprint that reaches thousands of enterprise buildings. In addition, LOGIX provides long-haul routes between Dallas, Ft. Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio, and supports critical cross-border connectivity going to South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley. "LOGIX's purchase of Alpheus Communications (News - Alert) in 2017 was a catalyst for LOGIX's wholesale network platform," said LOGIX CEO Craig Collins. "Since that time, we have expanded our presence across Texas to deliver metro access, regional transport, and quality networking solutions to thousands of businesses in Texas. The LOGIX Texas Metro Fiber Network is the next evolution of our platform which provides last mile of connectivity for carriers in metro areas." The LOGIX Texas Metro Fiber Network: Breadth and Depth 285,000 miles of fiber miles of fiber 25,000 on-net and near-net buildings in footprint on-net and near-net buildings in footprint 6,800 route miles of fiber 4,000 metro miles 2,800 long haul miles route miles of fiber Connectivity to 200+ COs / carrier POPs COs / carrier POPs On-net in 100+ data centers in the ajor markets of Texas. Deep Texas Roots LOGIX has provided carrier-grade, fiber network services to Texas businesses for more than 35 years and operates the state's largest independently owned network. LOGIX is a pure business-to-business fiber provider, its network has plenty of capacity to help carriers and enterprises reach the growing business market. An experienced team of experts ensures the LOGIX Texas Metro Fiber Network delivers the reliability and seamless connectivity customers expect. From carrier operations, sales, billing support and 24/7 customer service, LOGIX provides top-tier, local expertise and support for wholesale carriers seeking the best network solutions in Texas. Metro Scope of Connectivity With 285,000 fiber miles to more than 200 COs and carrier POPs, 25,000 near-net and on-net buildings wired with Logix fiber across major cities in Texas, the LOGIX Texas Metro Fiber Network delivers metro access, fiber infrastructure, speed, and reliability to wholesale business customers at an extremely competitive price. "The LOGIX Texas Metro Fiber Network is the largest and most competitive independently owned business-to-business connectivity platform in Texas," added Scott Brueggeman, Chief Marketing and Sales Officer at LOGIX. "Our strength is the combination of providing business network solutions in dense metro areas together with our in-demand long haul routes across the state's top markets and to the southern border. No competitor delivers the breadth and depth of enterprise buildings in metro areas like LOGIX. And we've recently sharpened our pricing further, so our rates are extremely competitive across our product portfolio and footprint." Data Centers Across Texas With connectivity to more than 100 on-net facilities in Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi, McAllen, and Laredo, the Texas Metro Fiber Network provides high-quality transport solutions backed by extraordinary customer care. Additionally, the LOGIX Texas Metro Fiber Network's resilient data centers puts LOGIX in a unique position to support mission critical IT infrastructure and cloud computing solutions through SSAE 18 compliant facilities for colocation and disaster recovery. Texas Metro Fiber Network Offerings Fiber Last-Mile Service : Supported by 285,000 miles of fiber : Supported by 285,000 miles of fiber Colocation: Availability in top Texas metro markets Availability in top Texas metro markets Connected2Fiber (C2F): Member of C2F, a location engagement platform for network buyers and sellers. Carriers can quickly see LOGIX's fiber footprint, products and pricing. (C2F): Member of C2F, a location engagement platform for network buyers and sellers. Carriers can quickly see LOGIX's fiber footprint, products and pricing. Data Centers : 100+ on-net data center locations support mission critical information technology functions and cloud computing solutions through SSAE 18 compliant facilities for colocation and disaster recovery. : 100+ on-net data center locations support mission critical information technology functions and cloud computing solutions through SSAE 18 compliant facilities for colocation and disaster recovery. Managed Wavelength : High bandwidth availability and cost-effective alternative to constructing, lighting, and managing dark fiber networks. : High bandwidth availability and cost-effective alternative to constructing, lighting, and managing dark fiber networks. Metro Ethernet : Point-to-point, point-to-multi-point, and any-to-any WAN connectivity with scalability from 1Mbps to 100 GigE. : Point-to-point, point-to-multi-point, and any-to-any WAN connectivity with scalability from 1Mbps to 100 GigE. Fiber Internet : Densest regional network in Texas and provides 25,000 near-net and on-net locations with symmetrical Internet access from 10 Mbps to 100 Gbps. : Densest regional network in Texas and provides 25,000 near-net and on-net locations with symmetrical Internet access from 10 Mbps to 100 Gbps. SONET/TDM : Direct fiber connections to over 180 central offices in Texas metro markets. : Direct fiber connections to over 180 central offices in Texas metro markets. Dark Fiber: Dark fiber solutions provide unlimited access to important metro areas and throughout Texas. About LOGIX Fiber Networks LOGIX Fiber Networks is the largest independent fiber network provider in Texas, providing highly secure fiber-based data, voice services, and data center access to over 10,000 enterprise and carrier customers and connecting over 100 data centers across Texas. With a 35-year history and known for its outstanding Texas-based customer service, flexible and fast connectivity options, and best-in-class reliability due to its built-for-business fiber network, LOGIX offers a broad range of business voice and data options. Services include Business Voice, Business Internet, Business Ethernet, Business Wavelength, Business Voice Cloud, Business Voice Trunks, Data Centers, and Cloud Connect. For more information call 281-336-9006 or visit logix.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005196/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 The upcoming 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference on February 25-28, the theme of which is "America Uncancelled," has removed renowned rapper Young Pharaoh from its list of panelists for his anti-semitic views. "We have just learned that someone we invited to CPAC has expressed reprehensible views that have no home with our conference or our organization. The individual will not be participating at our conference," the CPAC 2021 said in its Twitter account on Tuesday morning. We have just learned that someone we invited to CPAC has expressed reprehensible views that have no home with our conference or our organization. The individual will not be participating at our conference. CPAC 2021 (@CPAC) February 22, 2021 Young Pharaoh was originally scheduled to be one of the six panelists for CPAC 2021's Sunday afternoon forum on "Please Check The Number And Dial Again: Doubt, Dysfunction, and the Price of Missed Opportunities." The Blaze reported that he was removed from the panelists due to his anti-Semitic sentiments that included Judaism being a "complete lie" that is "made up for political gain" and that "Jewish people are 'thieving fake Jews.'" In addition, as per the Daily Beast, Young Pharaoh also said that "there is no historical or scientific evidence proving the existence of Jews or Judaism" and even attacked Ben Shapiro for his Jewish faith. He also tweeted false claims about the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and the COVID-19 vaccines' effect on one's genetic makeup. "I am unaware of this person or their opinions. Happy to dig into it," American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp told the Daily Beast regarding Young Pharaoh. The American Conservative Union is CPAC 2021's organizer. Media Matters for America reported on Young Pharaoh's online history to CPAC 2021's organizer, The Blaze said. They actually describe the rapper as an "online commentator who has dabbled in conspiracy theories." Media Matters for America is a left-wing progressive watchdog monitoring conservative news outlets for what it calls "misinformation." Young Pharaoh, Pharaoh Aten in real life, is the owner of five YouTube Channels with a main account having 554K subscribers. This account contains a string of "expose documentaries" against Judaism and Islam, among others. While his instagram account, which has 282K followers, provides "lectures," describes himself as a "Polymath/ Philosopher/Artist," and presents himself as a proud "descendant of ancient egyptian heritage manifesting today in the form of an aten egyptian" and, as such, must not be referred to as "black." According to Meaww, the 27-year old Aten "consistently posts content propagating conspiracy theories on QAnon, Pizzagate, George Floyd's death" and "lists a number of videos with scientifically unfounded subjects such as genetic reincarnation." His Twitter, which is suspended "shows how he perpetuates conspiracy and racism with recurring posts highlighting his anti-Semitic sentiments." In his YouTube Live on Tuesday, Young Pharaoh discussed why he was "disinvited" from the CPAC 2021 event. He said, in between a string of cusses, that he never intended to come to the event and that it was CPAC who invited him. He said that he was "not hurt" by it and that he wasn't even going there "because of religion." He said on Twitter, before it was suspended and before going live in YouTube, that it is "censorship at its best." "All because I said: 'I do not believe in the validity of Judaism and am willing to place $50,000 on myself to debate the top Jewish Rabbi.' Now I'm no longer invited to CPAC, racist, dictatorship, Young Pharaoh," he retorted as per Newsweek. Sacha Baron Cohen has claimed he 'can't' return to the role of Borat as he fears for his life, after nearly being shot at a pro-Trump gun rally in the film's sequel. The comedian, 49, spoke on NPR's Fresh Air on Wednesday, claiming his days getting in disguise were over as he felt his luck would 'run out' eventually. He also claimed he only recreated the character in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm as he wanted to 'take a stand' against President Donald Trump, and persuade people to vote against him in the 2020 election. 'At some point, your luck runs out': Sacha Baron Cohen claimed on Wednesday he 'can't' reprise Borat role in future as he fears for his life after nearly being shot while filming sequel When asked if he'd consider going undercover again, Sacha reflected: 'I think I'd be mad to. I was so angry with what was going on in America. And I'm not an American citizen, but I was scared for America. 'I was scared for the rest of the world because I knew that if - I felt that if democracy was completely dismantled in America, then other democracies around the world would follow suit, and other authoritarian leaders would do the same. 'And I felt I had to take a stand. So no, I can't do this again. Firstly, just practically, at some point, your luck runs out.' At the Trump rally he attended in the sequel, the crowd quickly realised Sacha was mocking them and angrily turning on him, forcing him to flee the stage, before barricading himself in his trailer and speeding away. Return: Sacha said he only recreated the character in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm to 'take a stand' against President Donald Trump and persuade people to vote against him in 2020 Of the incident, he said: 'You know, escaping from that gun rally - you know, I spoke to the security guard afterwards and he just said, listen, a few seconds later and this could have ended very differently. 'If I hadn't have had a security guard who luckily grabbed the hand of, you know, somebody who reached for his gun, who knows? 'Maybe that guy would have tried to shoot me. Maybe he was just waving me to intimidate me. 'But at some point, your luck runs out. And so I never wanted to do this stuff again (laughter). But no, I can't.' Dangerous: At the Trump rally he attended the crowd angrily turned against him, and he said it 'could have ended very differently' if his bodyguard hadn't stopped a man with a gun In late 2019 Sacha revived the beloved character for last year's Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, the sequel to 2006's Borat. He plays a bumbling Kazakh journalist who travels to America to learn more about their culture in the hilarious and at times unbelievable mockumentaries. Of why he went back to the role, he claimed: 'I didn't want to do Borat again. I didn't want to go undercover again. 'I felt I had to do anything I could to remind people of what, in 90 minutes, in a humorous way, of what Trump had done the prior four years, and I felt I had to try and infiltrate his inner circle, which we did do with Rudy Giuliani and Mike Pence. 'We felt we had to do that. I felt I had to get this movie out before the election. But, yes, maybe I'm crazy.' Another clip from the film quickly went viral as it showed an embarrassing moment involving Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani. 'Borat's' 'daughter Tutar' played by Maria Bakalova was interviewing Giuliani for a segment - one that he assumed was a real interview - in a hotel. During that sequence he can be seen lying back on a bed and putting his hand down his pants as 'Tutar' adjusted his mic - he says, because he was just fixing his shirt. Concerns: Sacha said of going undercover, 'At some point, your luck runs out. And so I never wanted to do this stuff again (laughter). But no, I can't' Of the ethics of deceiving people with the characters, Sacha said: 'When you're doing stuff like a gun rally and you could get shot, then morally it's very clear. 'Or if you're undermining one of Trump's inner circle, whose sole aim is to undermine the legitimacy of the election, then, yeah, that's moral. I mean, look at what Rudy did post Borat coming out. 'He spread this big lie that Trump had won the election. And that lie is so dangerous and so misleading that it led to the attack on the Capitol and it hasn't ended.' Morals: Of the ethics of deceiving people with his roles, Sacha (pictured in a Trump mask) said: 'When you're doing stuff like a gun rally and you could get shot, then morally it's very clear' He went on: 'So the morality of seeing how Rudy would react when he was alone in a room with an attractive young woman, I think that morality is pretty clear. 'I think it's evidence of the misogyny that was trumpeted by the president and was almost a badge of honor with his inner circle. 'What we did with Rudy was crucial. I mean, we made the movie to have an impact on the election... So ethically, I can stand by that all day long.' Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Arla's milk price from March will increase by 0.5 eurocent as demand continues to be stronger than expected, the co-op says. The price increase means Arlas conventional milk price will be 30.03 pence per litre from next month. The co-operative's organic milk will see an increase to 38.39 pence per litre. Arla Foods amba board director, Arthur Fearnall said the current outlook remained stable with the potential for positive development. "Global milk production is mixed with Europe and Oceania experiencing limited growth," he explained. "Both North and South American markets continue to grow strongly, however, this growth appears to be having little impact on global demand or prices "Demand for commodity products remain strong, meaning that prices for all categories, whether cheese, powders or butter remain firm. "Overall, demand continues to be stronger than expected and therefore market sentiment has remained positive." Alice Swift, UK Agriculture director at Arla said farmers were facing pressure from rising costs for purchased feed, straw and fertiliser on the back a long wet winter. "As a cooperative, ensuring the most value for our farmer owners for the milk they produce is crucial to our commercial decisions, and will continue to be our priority, he said. Arla farmers are paid on constituents via a manufacturing schedule: for ease of comparison, the liquid price is 28.94 pence per litre based on 4% fat and 3.3% protein. Manufacturing price based on every other day collection, top quality, one million litres, 4.2% butterfat, 3.4% protein. New Delhi: As the new Citroen C5 Aircross SUV is all set to make its debut in the Indian market, an interesting trivial of how Former President of France Charles de Gaulle had once survived an assassination bid onboard a Citroen vehicle. Several assassination bids were attempted on President Charles de Gaulle. However, this particular story dates back to 1962, when President Charles de Gaulle was on board his presidential automobile --Citroen DS 19 --a.k.a La Deesse (The Goddess). He was targeted for assassination by the Organisation armee secrete (OAS), in retaliation for his Algerian initiatives. On August 22, 1962, Charles de Gaulle along with his wife were riding from the Elysee Palace to Orly Airport on his black Citroen DS limousine. It was then that 12 OAS gunmen opened fire on the car with a hail of 140 bullets which shattered the cars rear window and punctured all the four tyres. But Charles de Gaulle and his wife had a narrow escape because of the superior suspension system of the Citroen DS 19. Although limousine went into a front-wheel skid, President de Gaulles chauffeur managed to accelerate out of the skid and drive to safety, all thanks to the cars superior suspension system. Both De Gaulle and his wife came out unharmed. Two of the presidents motorcycle bodyguards, were however killed in the bullet fire. Live TV #mute Transaction failures on Unified Payments Interface ( UPI ) are on the rise, with state-run banks leading the way. However, according to National Payments Council of India (NPCI), transaction failure due to customer errors were higher than the number declines due to a technical snag. Technical declines occur due to network or system errors, while business declines happen when a wrong pin or incorrect beneficiary account details are provided by the customer. View Full Image Seven of the 10 lenders seeing maximum business declines in Jan were state0owned entities led by Canara Bank Seven of the 10 lenders reporting the highest number of business declines in January were state-owned entities led by Canara Bank, which witnessed 16.74% business declines and 2.14% technical failures on 81.7 million transactions, or a success rate of a little over 81% for all UPI transactions as a remitter bank. NPCI data showed that 29 of the 30 banks it provides data for saw a higher rate of business declines compared to technical failures. Only Union Bank of India reported a higher number of technical failures than declines in January. According to experts, the customer profile of PSU banks may be the reason behind the frequent transaction failure, which is beyond lenders control. The average age of public sector bank customers is higher than those who have accounts in private banks, and most are relatively new to digital transacting, they added. While covid-19 forced customers across age groups to use online payments platforms, users, especially the elderly, are finding it challenging to navigate the digital landscape. There are gaps in digital and financial literacy in the country, and government schemes of incentives and education need to continue," said Vivek Belgavi, partner and fintech leader, PwC. Belgavi said the next phase of growth in transactions will come from new-to-digital users who start using UPI and FASTags. These digital pools will drive up transaction volumes. To support these volumes, digital infrastructure for banks have to be overhauled. Investment in this space has lagged due to fuzziness in cloud regulation and data localization, among others." The Reserve Bank of India had said that a digital payment boost must be accompanied by financial literacy. The regulator said in its recent booklet on payment systems that a well-informed customer base will facilitate faster migration away from cash and paper-based payments systems. To achieve this, it is RBIs endeavour to enhance customer awareness through structured electronic banking awareness and training programmes, in collaboration with all stakeholders," the RBI said in a report on 25 January. Experts said that banks must analyse the data on declines and identify patterns and causes behind it. It is important to identify the customer demographics, usage patterns and follow the data trail with a focused team to provide detailed data analytics and meaningful inferences," said Mahesh Ramamoorthy, managing director, banking solutions, FIS India. Industry watchers also said that the mobile apps of public sector banks are not as user-friendly as those of private-sector lenders. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Israel hopes to prevent personal tension between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden over their differences on the Iranian nuclear question by delegating talks on the topic to their senior staff, an Israeli official said, Reuters reported. Netanyahus foreign-policy fortunes have waned since Biden succeeded Republican president Donald Trump, who withdrew the United States from world powers 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, deeming it too advantageous for Tehrana view Israel shared. Biden, a Democrat, wants to rejoin the deal. That has set the stage for possible new strains in the US-Israel alliance. On Monday, Netanyahu conferred with Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi to present a united Israeli front on Iran. An official briefed on Mondays meeting said it was agreed that Israeli misgivings about, and proposed improvements to, the deal would be relayed by Netanyahus National Security Council to the counterpart National Security Council in the White House. The intent is to work everything out at that level, and to keep that communication channel open, the official said on Tuesday on condition on anonymity. (TNS) Almost a third of the board members who lead the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, manager of the state's power grid, will resign Wednesday, a week after a historic winter storm caused statewide blackouts, disrupted water supplies and left dozens of people dead.Chair Sally Talberg, vice chair Peter Cramton, and board members Raymond Hepper, Terry Bulger and Vanessa Anesetti-Parra will step down at an emergency meeting, according to an ERCOT filing Tuesday with the Public Utility Commission, which oversees the grid operator.Craig S. Ivey, who was set to fill the open 16th seat on the board is withdrawing his candidacy, according to a letter he sent Tuesday to the PUC. "We look forward to working with the Texas Legislature, and we thank the outgoing Board Members for their service," ERCOT said in a statement released Tuesday afternoon.Officials with ERCOT did not return phone calls and emails seeking comment. The PUC directed questions to ERCOT. Soon after the resignations were announced, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement critical of the nonprofit organization, which assured Texans before the storm that it could keep the power on despite concerns of massive demand for electricity."When Texans were in desperate need of electricity, ERCOT failed to do its job and Texans were left shivering in their homes without power," Abbott said. " ERCOT leadership made assurances that Texas' power infrastructure was prepared for the winter storm, but those assurances proved to be devastatingly false. The lack of preparedness and transparency at ERCOT is unacceptable, and I welcome these resignations."The five departing board members all live out of state.Talberg lives in Michigan and joined ERCOT's board in January 2020, becoming chair in early February. The former Michigan utility regulator also was a senior consultant at Public Sector Consultants and an advisor to the PUC. She has a master's degree in public affairs from the University of Texas, according to ERCOT's website.Cramton, of Del Mar, Calif., joined ERCOT's board in October 2015. He is an economics professor at the University of Maryland and the University of Cologne. He studied electricity market design and serves as an economist and advisor to startups in finance, insurance and communications.Bulger, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Wheaton, according to ERCOT, has more than 35 years of experience in banking. He chairs ERCOT's finance and audit committee.Hepper, who lives in Lewiston, Maine, according to his LinkedIn profile, was the former general counsel for ISO New England, which operates the electric grid and wholesale markets across six states in the Northeast. He chairs ERCOT's human resources and governance committee.Anesetti-Parra, who lives in Ontario, Canada, is vice president of regulatory and compliance for Canada-based Just Energy. She has more than 19 years of experience in retail energy, according to her LinkedIn profile.In a joint resignation letter, Talberg, Cramton, Bulger and Hepper said they will begin the process of reviewing the events leading up to the power crisis."We want what is best for ERCOT and Texas," they wrote.Crampton refused to comment when reached on Tuesday. Efforts to reach the other board members were unsuccessful.At its current size, the board requires fifty percent of seated directors for a quorum. With the departure of the five seated members, the board will have 10 members. The board can continue to conduct business as long as there are three members, ERCOT said.ERCOT's independent board members those unaffiliated with various energy-related stakeholders are nominated by a committee using an executive search firm and must have experience in one or more of the following: corporate leadership, regulations of utilities, risk management, information technology and in professional disciplines of finance, accounting, engineering or law. Residence in Texas is preferred, but not required, according to ERCOT's bylaws. Board members serve three-year terms and must be approved by the PUC, whose commissioners are appointed by the governor.Texas created ERCOT in 1970 to ensure that the state's power utilities followed standards established by the North American Electric Reliability Council.One of three power grids across the U.S. and Canada, ERCOT serves about 26 million customers over 75 percent of the state. Far Western Texas, parts of the Panhandle and a narrow swath along the border with Louisiana are on other grids. About 700 generation units, including wind turbines, natural gas- and coal-fired power plants, nuclear plants and solar installations provide the state's power.ERCOT also acts as a financial middle-man for wholesale buyers and sellers in the system, collecting payments from power buyers and paying those that generate it. Health chiefs in Belgium are concerned that 15 million fabric masks given to pharmacists may be toxic and cause pneumonia. According to a preliminary report carried out by Sciensano, the Belgian Institute for Public Health, the masks contain nanoparticles of silver and titanium dioxide that when inhaled could damage the respiratory tract. The face masks were made in Asia by Luxembourg-based company Avrox. Health chiefs in Belgium are concerned that 15 million fabric masks given to pharmacists may be toxic and cause pneumonia (File image) Two toxicologists warned that those who wear the masks could develop pneumonia, according to a report in Dutch-language newspaper HLN. The nanoparticles of silver and titanium dioxide are used to whiten the fabric of the face masks. 'Sooner or later you can ingest these nanoparticles, especially if the mask is washed and worn regularly. The nanoparticles of silver and titanium dioxide are used to whiten the fabric of the face masks (File image) 'They can easily end up in the lungs and blood,' toxicologist Alfred Bernard said. Sciensano released a press statement after the results of the report were leaked, saying that they should be interpreted with caution as it was only the 'first phase' of the study. 'These are the first results of the first phase of a study and it is important to interpret them with caution. 'Based on the current data, it cannot be determined whether these nanoparticles actually come out of the masks and to what extent the users are exposed to them.' Brian Linden (1st L) from the US lives in an ancient township in Dali city, southwest Chinas Yunnan province. (Photo/Xinhua) Brian Linden from the US lives in an ancient township in Dali city, southwest Chinas Yunnan province, and is dedicated to integrating ethnic culture into tourism. Linden, who runs Linden Centre, a boutique hotel in Xizhou town, fell in love with China during a journey he made here in 1984. In 2004, he and his wife moved to a village in Xizhou, once an important hub of the ancient Tea Horse Road. While in Xizhou, Linden's attention was captured by the Yang family compound, a building with distinctive Bai architecture features. Hiring local builders, Linden turned the compound into a boutique hotel and a place for cultural exchange. Every year, Linden invites foreign students to Xizhou to learn about the local culture, ecology and customs. His reason for doing so is that the Western world has many misunderstandings of China, and he felt obliged to let the world see the real China. Linden (2nd R) talks with visitors at Linden Centre, a boutique hotel in Xizhou town. (Photo/Chinanews.com) When the hotel stopped operations in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Linden said it was time that he slowed down a little bit and do things in a more down-to-earth way. During the suspension, he renovated the hotel and started writing about his experience in rural China. Linden also led his team in building an adobe house that combines traditional and modern artistic elements with the aim of revitalizing adobe houses, which are rarely seen today, and increasing the appeal of rural tourism through promoting ethnic culture and rural lifestyles. He believes that its necessary to strike a balance between development and environment, adding that human beings should learn from the selfless ox and respect nature and traditional culture, instead of placing itself above nature. 2021 is the year of the ox, the second sign in the Chinese zodiac cycle. The ox has always been an important animal in Chinas farming culture, signifying diligence, perfection and selflessness, said Linden, adding that the soul of Chinese culture lies in rural China, and that the beautiful scenery, culture and connections between the people are what make Chinas countryside so attractive. The era of foldable phones is here, and it is not until 2020 where the first Samsung Galaxy Fold debuted but was initially recalled due to cracking screens that cannot withstand the folding action. Samsung aims to make its Galaxy Fold 2 and Z Flip more known to users by allowing a 100-day free trial, while Huawei has debuted its foldable with a massive price tag. Initially, it was Huawei and Samsung who have been competing over the market of the first foldable phones as they were announced last 2019 and made a debut shortly. However, Huawei's device was just a prototype that shows promising tech with it, while Samsung immediately released theirs and have faced massive factory defects that crack the screen. Fast forward two years later, both Asian technology conglomerates are back to fighting over the foldable smartphone market with its new releases debuting for people to see and experience for themselves. While Samsung's Galaxy Fold 2 and Z Flip are older than Huawei's release, the South Korean tech giant is still campaigning for the device. Read Also: Nvidia RTX 3060 Pre-Order Now Available: Price, Specs, and Everything You Need to Know! Samsung Galaxy Fold 2 and Z Flip: Open for 100 Days Free Trial Samsung's "Buy and Try" campaign has reached another milestone and now, it looks at an extension to return the smartphones after purchasing them, with a full refund available to users depending on the phone's condition. According to The Verge, users are now given the extension of 85 days from the previous 15 days for the program to try the smartphones. Anybody is eligible to try the smartphones under the program, and primarily, those are the two foldable smartphones in Samsung's lineup, with the Galaxy Fold 2 and Galaxy Z Flip which are both 5G capable. The Galaxy Fold 2 is originally priced at $1,999.99 but could be reduced up to $1,499.99 with its trade-in program, while the Galaxy Z Flip is at $1,199.99 and is eligible for a trade-in for as low as $649.99. How Does It Work? Users can utilize the "Buy and Try" program as long as they originally buy the smartphone from either a Samsung official store or the company's official online store which holds the program. Users would now have more than three months to try the phone and use it but are only given 100 days to return the phone and receive a full refund on the device. Huawei Foldable Phone Debuts Massive Price Tag, Without an App Store On the other hand, according to Android Police, Huawei has debuted its latest iteration of the Mate Folding phone called the Mate X2 that is currently available and released in China earlier today. This precedes the original Mate X Foldable smartphone which has been on par with Samsung's original Galaxy Fold, in which the former was more popular and tough over the latter. However, according to the report, Huawei's Mate X2 is an expensive foldable smartphone from the Shenzhen-based company, and it still does not have Google's suite of applications and the Play Store built-in. This is because of the Huawei-US ban that stripped the company of Google and other American-designed products on theirs. Related Article: 'The Great Suspender' Extension Alternatives: 5 Malware-Free Chrome Extensions! This article is owned by Tech Times Written by Isaiah Alonzo 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. New Delhi: Amid a spike in coronavirus infections in five states, the Delhi government is likely to make it mandatory for travellers coming from high-risk states, including Maharashtra, Kerala and Punjab, to show negative Covid-19 test report on arrival in the national capital. Sources said that the Delhi government is likely to issue an order in this regard amid a surge in the cases of coronavirus disease in some areas. Travellers from Maharashtra, Kerala and Punjab are among the five high-risk states who will be required to show a negative COVID-19 test report before entering the national capital. They said an official order will be issued later in the day and it will be effective till March 15. People travelling in flights, trains and buses from these states will have to produce negative test report before entering Delhi, they said. The requirement of the negative COVID-19 test report is likely to be implemented from Friday night, officials said. The issue had also been discussed in a meeting of the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) on Monday. Maharashtra is showing a daily surge in COVID-19 cases, according to an official of the Union Health Ministry. Kerala is showing an incremental decline, but the daily cases in absolute numbers are still high over there. Punjab, with its daily increase in cases, is also a cause of worry. Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh are also showing an increase in daily cases, the central office had said on Tuesday. Delhi recorded 145 fresh COVID-19 cases and two new fatalities on Tuesday, while the positivity rate stood at 0.25 per cent, authorities said. With this, the toll from the coronavirus infection has gone up to 10,903 and the case tally rose to 6,38,173. Live TV A woman was left fighting for life after she was allegedly attacked with what police believe was a hammer at a luxury five star hotel in Sydney's CBD. Emergency services rushed to the Primus Hotel in Pitt Street around 11pm on Tuesday night to reports the woman had been seriously injured in a hotel room. She was treated for head lacerations by paramedics at the scene, where disturbing images showed the woman hooked up to a respirator before being stretchered into an ambulance. The woman was rushed to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in a critical condition. It is understood she is now in a stable condition. Police have not yet revealed whether she knew her alleged attacker - who remains on the run as of Wednesday morning. A woman is fighting for life in hospital after she was allegedly assaulted with a hammer in a hotel room on Tuesday night. She's pictured on a stretcher being treated by paramedics Police remained at the Primus Hotel on Wednesday, where a woman was allegedly attacked by a hammer late Tuesday night. Pictured are forensic police taking away evidence Detectives remained at the 1930s style hotel on Wednesday morning searching for clues and collecting evidence being taken away for forensic examination. An elevator was seen cordoned off with police tape. Primus Hotel is a luxury five star hotel where rooms cost around $300 a night. Daily Mail Australia has contacted the hotel for comment. A worker at a construction site next door described the chaotic scene when she began her shift at 6:30am this morning. 'Everyone was talking about it,' the traffic controller told Daily Mail Australia. 'We heard that someone had come into the hotel with a hammer and hit a woman over the head. 'There were police, news reporters and forensic investigators running in and out of the hotel and it was pretty much chaos at that time.' The young woman said guests she spoke to 'didnt hear anything last night' and were shocked to find out about the grisly incident. 'Its very scary to know that something like this can happen where you work,' the traffic controller said. 'Ive never experienced a scene like this, but what do you expect when you work in the city?' The alleged assault occurred at the Primus Hotel, (pictured) a five star hotel in Sydney's CBD Detectives remained at the 1930s style hotel on Wednesday morning. Pictured is an officer at the Primus Hotel One woman described her stay as 'lovely' but told the Daily Telegraph she 'would think twice before staying here again.' A tradesman also working nearby at the same construction site on Tuesday night said he was asked by police if he'd seen a man fleeing from the hotel. 'We were told it may have been a suicide and there was a standoff with police then it all changed and police asked if we had seen anyone rush out of the hotel,' he told the publication. Inquiries into the incident continue. Police urge anyone with information to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. Police said the woman was found seriously injured in a hotel room. Pictured is one of the 172 rooms at the Primus Hotel Foley Wines Limited today announced a 5.8 % decrease in reported after tax profit of $2,566,000. Ongoing impacts of the global pandemic impacted the key channels of restaurants, hotels and airlines for its premium brands, with total cases sales down 7 % to 281,000. Compounding the situation was logistic issues which meant long delays to shipping products around the world, without these delays, the company believes case sales would have been much closer to last years volume. New Zealand performed well notwithstanding the challenges of Covid-19 with case sales up 8 % to 92,000. The key December period in particular was a standout with Foley Wines brands growing 14% compared with a 3.2% decline in the still wine category. The New Zealand market is responding positively to the companys sustainability practices, particularly around using New Zealand recycled glass along with the latest initiative using labels made from a sugar cane which is a highly renewable material. Last year during lock down the company announced that it would be building a new purpose-built wine barrel facility, distillery for Lighthouse, tasting room and restaurant in Martinborough. This project is progressing well with the barrel facility on track for completion in March and the restaurant is on track for this summer. The company believes that this investment is critical in continuing to develop its Martinborough brands into household names over time. Mark Turnbull, Foley Wines CEO said while the last 9 months has been challenging, we are committed to our strategy of building brands that satisfy the needs of discerning retailers and restaurants around the world. We believe building brands is the best way to create long term value for our shareholders, our growers and the broader New Zealand economy. In the past year we have secured some strong new routes to market for our premium portfolio, which under pins the quality of our portfolio as well as reinforcing the appeal of our rather unique business model here in New Zealand. Please see the links below for details: FWL NZX Results Announcement HYE 31Dec20 24Feb21 Media Release Foley Wines Half Year Announcement December 2020 Foley Wines Limited Half Yearly Report 31 December 2020 Source: Foley Wines Limited Comments from our readers No comments yet Add your comment: Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. Anti-spam verification: Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process. Related News: Me Today Limited (NZX: MEE) Full Year Results to 31 March 2021 31st May 2021 Morning Report The a2 Milk Company Limited (NZX: ATM) Media Reporting Regarding Potential Class Action Synlait Milk Limited (NZX: SML) Forecast Milk Price Update General Capital Limited (NZX: GEN) Continues on Its Strong Growth Path Third Age Health Services Limited (NZX: TAH) Announces Preliminary Full Year Result EROAD Limited (NZX: ERD) Better Positioned for Future Growth Green Cross Health Limited (NZX: GXH) Full Year Results to 31 March 2021 28th May 2021 Morning Report Radius Residential Care Limited (NZX: RAD) Announces First FY Results as a Listed Company Actor Bryan Brown brought some star power to the corridors of Parliament House on Wednesday as the star of 1988s biggest film Cocktail (the actors finest performance, FACT) joined Screen Producers Association representatives to lobby for an extension to JobKeeper as the industry continues to be crushed by COVID social distancing rules. And for a catch-up with his former Two Hands cast mate Perin Davey, now better known as Nationals senator for NSW. Bryan Brown and Scott Morrison. Credit:Illustration: John Shakespeare But Browns presence wasnt the only event lifting spirits. Education Minister Alan Tudge hit a milestone on Wednesday, turning 50. A giant balloon arch mounted outside his office by some enthusiastic staffers inside the Liberal ministerial wing indicated he was in the mood to party. But if only that were the case. I am trying to pretend that my birthday is not happening, he told CBD. Perhaps he should follow the lead of first-term MP Katie Allen. The paediatric allergy specialist turned 55 and marked the occasion with a hefty looking lemon-meringue tart in her office with staff. Meanwhile, the National Press Clubs last-minute cancellation of Defence Minister Linda Reynolds appearance due to her sudden hospitalisation forced a quick pivot in the kitchens. The clubs chef offloaded to the public all the West Australian champagne-poached rock lobsters prepared for the event at the bargain basement price of $10 a pop. By 1.30pm they had sold out thats 220 crustaceans snapped up in 72 minutes. Silver linings. Just one in six black British people believe tearing down statues is a legitimate form of protest, a new study has revealed today. According to the report, only 16 per cent of black British people believed toppling statues was a permissible form of protest. The figures indicate that the hard-left elements of the Black Lives Matter movement are at odds with much of wider black British society in how to tackle systemic injustice. Protesters throwing the statue of Edward Colston into Bristol harbour during a Black Lives Matter protest rally Students march past Oxford University's Oriel College and the statue of Cecil Rhodes The poll also found that while 29 per cent of the British population believe the UK is a racist society, this rises two-fold to 58 per cent among people from black British backgrounds. The research, which was commissioned by the Henry Jackson Society think thank, questioned 1,000 people from the general population and 550 black Britons. It also found that some 52 per cent of black British people disagree with the view that police brutality is not a problem in the UK compared to just 22 per cent of the wider population. This comes in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement last summer, when monuments of controversial figures came under the microscope. The BLM movement gained momentum across the world following the police killing of George Floyd in the United States. The death reverberated across the world, and spurred activists in the UK to topple and deface statues of historical figures. After Edward Colston's statue was thrown into Bristol Harbour, there was a wave of attacks from vandals on various monuments across Britain including a statue to Winston Churchill in Westminster Square, London. The organisation which claims to be the face of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK said it was, 'guided by a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people in Britain'. But few black British people agree with the movement's radical politics, according to the findings. A statue of Thomas Guy is displayed at Guys Hospital in London. He founded Guys hospital and made his fortune from business involving selling slaves Canterbury Cathedral (pictured) has won praise for resisting calls to remove statues with historic links to slavery despite calls by Justin Welby to look at them 'very carefully' Tate Britain's Rex Whistler restaurant could close after a mural featuring enslaved children was labelled 'offensive' by the gallery's ethics committee. 'The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats' was commissioned by the Tate in 1926 and covers the restaurant named in honour of the eponymous British artist, who died on the battlefield in the Second World War. In America, BLM activists have also lobbied to 'defund the police'. But the latest research suggests fewer than one in five black British people support reducing investment for their own police force. Some 25 per cent support replacing capitalism with a socialist economy, compared to 23 per cent of the wider population. The research, presented in a report titled 'BLM: A voice for all black Britons?', compared a nationally representative UK general population poll of 1,000 respondents and 550 black Britons. Dr Rakib Ehsan of the Henry Jackson Society, said: 'With nearly six in 10 Black Britons believing that the UK has a fundamentally racist society, improvements must be made to strengthen our multi-racial democracy. 'While much work has to done on social cohesion, equality of opportunity, and police-community relations, the radical views associated with the BLM movement are unrepresentative of mainstream Black British opinion. 'The dismantling of market capitalism and defunding police forces are far beyond the traditional racial-fairness issues we need to address as a nation.' Gardai are investigating after a Dublin beauty salon opened to the public yesterday, with the owner arguing she has a constitutional right to earn a living. Christine McTiernan who runs C&N Beauty Room in Balbriggan took a stand because she believes small businesses should be allowed to operate despite lockdown restrictions requiring all non-essential retail to remain closed. Ms McTiernan said her salon had been inundated with calls and was booked up within hours. I received calls from people in Galway, Wicklow and all over. The reaction has been phenomenal and the support has been great. People have been telling me fair play, she said. This is for me. I have to do what I have to do to pay my bills. I have to put food on the table, I have to pay my rent. It is for survival. This is the reason why Im doing this because I have to survive. However, as businesses are currently not allowed to open under Level 5 restrictions, gardai called to the salon to request Ms McTiernan to close. A Garda spokesperson said: Gardai attended a retail premises on Dublin Street in Balbriggan and are investigating alleged breaches of public-health regulations. A file will be submitted for the Director of Public Prosecution. A number of fixed-payment notices will be issued, where appropriate, for breaches of travel restrictions for non-essential reasons. Read More Business owners have hit out at the Governments handling of the Covid-19 pandemic after Cabinet agreed to keep the country in lockdown until at least April 5. TV chef Paul Treyvaud said his aunt-in-law passed away after contracting Covid-19 last year, yet hes determined to open his restaurant in July, regardless of public health regulations. Mr Treyvaud (46), who has appeared on Virgin Media One and hosts Treyvaud Travels on Amazon Prime, said on Twitter: I have decided I am opening my restaurant July 1, no matter what. That gives them four months to sort out everything. Ive done everything Ive been told to do. 55k came in from the UK with the variant, now over 1500 from Brazil. The problem is no longer us. Its an incompetent Gov. The tweet has gone viral with thousands of retweets and likes. The businessman, who runs Treyvauds restaurant in Killarney, Co Kerry, says he will open up and is prepared to be arrested. Mr Treyvaud, originally from south Dublin, told the Irish Independent: Im not saying Ill open now its not safe. But Im giving four months for the Government to get this (virus) under control. And if not, I will open up in July. My wife lost her aunt to Covid-19 last year and my wife got it too, so I know how bad this is. I fully understand and I commiserate with anyone whos lost anyone to Covid-19. But we cant just look at the Covid situation here we must look at everything Covid has done, destroying livelihoods. Im not an anti-vaxxer but if businesses cant open in rural Ireland to get July and August trade, so many will close. Obviously no one wants to be arrested, or anything like that to happen. But Im prepared to put my neck on the line for my business, 100pc, and to save my livelihood and the livelihoods of my staff. They (the Government) didnt listen to Australia, who told us to put everyone in mandatory quarantine. Anushka Sharma and Virat Kohli's pregnancy was celebrated by India with full gusto considering that both the celebrities are much beloved. The actress gave birth to a daughter last month and after a while, the couple announced that they had named her Vamika. Now, according to media reports, the actress has left the city with Vamika for the first time since her baby's birth to cheer on Virat Kohli as India plays against England in Ahmedabad's Narendra Modi Stadium. Both mother and daughter arrived in the city early this morning. Kohli was also on paternity leave for the past few months. Virushka, as the couple is fondly known as, have always been a private couple and had requested that the media extend the privacy to their daughter as well. The paparazzi, in a surprising show of unity, had also refrained from clicking and publishing images of baby Vamika. "We have lived together with love , presence and gratitude as a way of life but this little one, Vamika has taken it to a whole new level! Tears, laughter, worry, bliss - emotions that have been experienced in a span of minutes sometimes! Sleep is elusive but our hearts are SO full. Thanking you all for your wishes, prayers and good energy (sic)," Sharma had posted on her Instagram feed while announcing her baby's name. Mumbai: Amid the rising COVID-19 cases in the state, a night curfew will be imposed in Maharashtra's Solapur district from Thursday (February 25, 2021). The night curfew will be imposed from February 25 till March 7. The step has been taken to check the surge in the coronavirus cases in the district. Maharashtra reported over 8,000 fresh cases in the last 24 hours. The state has far witnessed a total of 21,21,119 COVID-19 cases. The last time it had reported 8,142 cases was on October 21, 2020, after which the numbers had declined, health officials told PTI news agency. On February 22 and 23, the state had reported 5,210 and 6,218 cases, respectively. Today, newly 8807 patients have been tested as positive in the state. Also newly 2772 patients have been cured today. Totally 2008623 patients are cured & discharged from the hospitals. Total Active patients are 59358.The patient recovery rate in the state is 94.70% Rajesh Tope (@rajeshtope11) February 24, 2021 The Pune circle -- which covers Solapur and Satara districts, besides Pune -- recorded a rise of 1,811 COVID-19 cases. Meanwhile, the district administration in Maharashtra's Latur has decided to implement 'Janata curfew' on February 27 and 28 in view of the rising COVID-19 cases. While making the announcement, Latur collector Prithviraj BP appealed to the citizens to observe the Janata curfew to break the virus chain and requested them not leave their homes during the weekend, except in case of emergency. "Only essential services will remain functional during the Janata curfew," he said during his video address. "The situation in the district is under control and there is nothing to panic. The administration is ready to handle the situation, the collector informed. "But to prevent the spread of the virus, the citizens are requested to avoid stepping out, except for essential services, on Saturday and Sunday. We can break the virus chain through it," he added. Live TV Two years later, the law was found to be unconstitutional. As a result, Williams would be required to serve only 50% of his sentence before being eligible for release something Kley said he did not know at the time of the plea deal. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes In June 2020, Belgium received a delivery of 15 million cloth masks from a company based in Luxembourg. Residents could pick up the masks for free in local pharmacies. The masks sold by a company called "Avrox" are now suspected of being potentially harmful. According to a confidential report from the Belgian Institute for Public Health, the fabric contains nano silver and titanium dioxide, which can be toxic if they are released. These nano particles, which are supposed to have an antibacterial effect, can be particularly harmful to people already struggling with respiratory problems. While the Institute refused to comment on the report in front of the cameras of Belgian broadcaster RTBF, it did state in a press release that the study is not available to the public at the moment. The Institute explained that there are still uncertainties as to whether the nano particles are actually being released. While Avrox is based in Luxembourg, the masks were manufactured in Asia. Belgium still has around three and a half million of these masks in stock. Police have arrested two witchdoctors in Mitooma district, Uganda for allegedly raping a female student of Kampala International University (KIU) and stealing Shs2.9 million from her. The victim, a Social Work and Social Administration (SWASA) student, had reportedly gone to the witchdoctors shrine to ask for a charm to stop her boyfriend from dating another girl. Spokesperson of the Greater Bushenyi Regional Police, Martial Tumusiime, identifies the suspects as Nazario Bazarwa, 72, and his assistant, David Bamwetaki, all residents of Nyantoma parish Kashenshero sub-county in Mitooma district. The police spokesman says the two men told the student to spend the night in the shrine and that medicine would be administered in her private part the following morning. However, during the night, the duo reportedly turned on the girl and raped her. Tumusiime says that the two have been charged with rape and obtaining money by false pretence and the file is already at state attorneys office. Source: LIB 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 Its an honor to receive this recognition, said Ramana Reddy, CEO of EnSoftek. Being on this list lets me know that our team and solutions are providing real value to our customers, year over year. EnSoftek, a leading provider of health record (EHR) solutions, is pleased to announce the Portland Business Journal has ranked it as one of the top 15 Bioscience and Tech Firms in Oregon and SW Washington. EnSoftek has been a fixture on the list since the first edition in 2018. Its an honor to receive this recognition, said Ramana Reddy, CEO of EnSoftek. Being on this list lets me know that our team and solutions are providing real value to our customers, year over year. EnSofteks DrCloudEHR is an innovative, state-of-the-art enterprise EHR solution deployed nationwide. Its design supports the healthcare systems growing focus on data exchange, coordination of care, and elimination of information gaps that could adversely affect positive health outcomes. While the past year was challenging for many businesses, EnSoftek has experienced continued growth with sales to government, for-profit, non-profit, and university behavioral health care and human services providers. DrCloudEHR offers innovative and assistive solutions that deliver easily-accessed, value-based, and consumer-focused care when and where its needed, said Adam Feldman, SVP Business Development. Were excited to offer an EHR solution with fully integrated Telehealth and Unplugged features that help increase access to mental health care during a time when it is needed more than ever. About DrCloudEHR and EnSoftek, Inc. Currently in use in 26 states throughout the country, DrCloudEHR from EnSoftek is a meaningful use stage 3 certified (supporting Interoperability), native cloud electronic health records (EHR) system designed for behavioral health and human services organizations. DrCloudEHR features anytime, anywhere access that helps our customers deliver better services, improve patient care, engagement, health outcomes, and provide better overall patient satisfaction. It has become the preferred solution for behavioral health, health and human services, and integrated care providers. EnSoftek provides diversified enterprise IT solutions to both public and private sector enterprises. Follow us on https://twitter.com/drcloudehr, https://www.linkedin.com/company/drcloudehr/, and https://www.facebook.com/DrCloudEHR/ http://www.drcloudehr.com | http://www.ensoftek.com. Illinois is ranked as the second-most corrupt state in a new University of Illinois at Chicago report. A good-government reform group says lawmakers must pass reforms that make themselves uncomfortable to regain the publics trust. Using statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, researchers at the university determined that in the decades since 1976, Illinois had more corruption convictions per-capita than any other state except Louisiana. The statistics do not completely reflect it, but 2019 was a highly explosive year, during which some of the most important political corruption in the history of Chicago and Illinois was exposed, researchers said. Bombshell corruption news reports that year dethroned the city's most powerful alderman, upset Chicago's mayoral election campaign, torpedoed the most powerful and well-known candidate, and threatened the political existence of speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives and chairman of the State Democratic Party, Michael Madigan. In his State of the State and Budget Address last week, Gov. J.B. Pritzker made ethics reforms a priority. Nobody should hold the title of both legislator and lobbyist at the same time, Pritzker said. We need meaningful disclosure of conflicts of interest. We must end the General Assemblys revolving door allowing legislators to get paid as lobbyists the day after they leave office. Restoring the publics trust is of paramount importance, he said. His request last year was derailed as members of a task force on ethics and lobbying reforms blamed COVID-19 for not advancing substantive changes. Reform For Illinois Executive Director Alisa Kaplan said the revolving door ban cant be just six months as has been proposed before. Its got to be one-to-two years. She said there are other areas where surface changes on economics disclosures wont be enough. She said lawmakers must dig deep. Real meaningful reform that makes hard choices and may even hurt a little bit, it may hurt legislators a little bit, it may hurt their pocketbooks, it may mean more oversight for them, it may challenge them in ways they havent been challenged before, Kaplan said. One reform the governor didnt mention that must pass is giving the Legislative Inspector General more independence to investigate claims against lawmakers. Its completely toothless right now because [the Legislative Inspector General] has to ask legislators for permission to do everything, to conduct investigations, to publish reports, to subpoena witnesses, to do everything, Kaplan said. Any reforms must make lawmakers uncomfortable, or they wont be meaningful, she said. If were going to move forward and were going to rebuild trust with the Illinois public, they're going to have to make those hard choices, she said. Neither the Illinois House nor Senate have any committee hearings scheduled. Theyve canceled in-person session days this month. Mumbai: The body of one of the two revellers who died after falling into a 600-foot deep valley in Amboli Ghat in Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra was recovered on Friday. A video of their fall had gone viral on social media, even as rescue teams were trying to locate the bodies for the last four days. The incident took place at Kawale Saad Point in Amboli Ghat, a popular picnic point. Imran Garadi (26) and Pratap Rathod (21), who were part of a group of seven, fell into the valley on July 31, said Sunil Dhanawade, Senior Police Inspector of Sawantwadi police station. As the rain and mist made it difficult to retrieve the bodies, police roped in some trekkers for the recovery operation. The body of Pratap Rathod who hailed from Beed was recovered at around 1 pm on Friday, police said. The two victims and their friends worked at a poultry farm in Kolhapur. On July 31, while others left the Kawale Saad Point after spending some time, Garadi and Rathod lingered. When they didn't join the group, their friends approached Sawantwadi police. Police found out about the mishap from local people. The viral video shows the two men, bottles in hand, climbing the railing around the edge of the valley and backtracking once or twice. Then the two are seen standing on the edge, beyond the railing, and slipping down. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. CERRO GORDO COUNTY, Iowa One person is taken to the hospital after a two-vehicle collision Tuesday afternoon. The Cerro Gordo County Sheriffs Office says it happened just after 2 pm at the intersection of Thrush Avenue and 200th Street, southeast of Mason City. The Sheriffs Office says Alice Hearn, 44 of Dumont, was southbound when she tried to pass a garbage truck driven by Dustin Fratzke, 25 of Mason City. As Fratzke tried to turn east onto 200th Street, he was struck by Hearn. The Sheriffs Office says Hearn was taken to MercyOne North Iowa Medical Center for treatment of her injuries. This collision remains under investigation. The Iowa State Patrol. Rockwell Fire Department, Rockwell-Swaledale EMTs, mason City Fire Medics, and Iowa Vehicle Enforcement assisted at the scene. COVID-19 can spread from asymptomatic but infected people through small aerosol droplets in their exhaled breath. Most studies of the flow of exhaled air have focused on coughing or sneezing, which can send aerosols flying long distances. However, speaking while near one another is also risky since the virus can be ejected by merely talking. In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, scientists in Japan use smoke and laser light to study the flow of expelled breath near and around two people conversing in various relative postures commonly found in the service industry, such as in hair salons, medical exam rooms, or long-term care facilities. In this study, electronic cigarettes were used to produce artificial smoke consisting of droplets about one-tenth micron in diameter, similar to the size of a virus particle. The liquid used in these vaping devices, a mixture of glycerin and propylene glycol, produces a cloud of tiny droplets that scatter light from a laser, allowing visualization of airflow patterns. We analyzed the characteristics of exhalation diffusion with and without a mask when a person was standing, sitting, facing down, or lying face up." Keiko Ishii, Study Author, Aoyama Gakuin University To study the effect of speech on exhalation, the word "onegaishimasu," a typical Japanese greeting in a business setting, was uttered repeatedly while filming the resulting vapor cloud. The experiments were carried out in a hair salon at the Yamano College of Aesthetics in Tokyo, with postures chosen to simulate typical customer service scenarios, including shampooing where a customer is lying back and the technician is standing and leaning over the customer. "A significant amount of similar face-to-face contact would occur not only in cosmetology but also in long-term and medical care," said Ishii. The experiments revealed the exhaled air from an unmasked person who is speaking tends to move downward under the influence of gravity. If a customer or patient is lying below, they could be infected. When a mask is worn while standing or sitting, the vapor cloud tends to attach to that person's body, which is warmer than the surrounding air and flows upward along the body. If the technician is leaning over, however, the aerosol cloud tends to detach from that person's body and fall onto the client below. The investigators also experimented with face shields and found it can prevent any aerosols that leak from around the technician's mask from traveling down to the customer. "The face shield promoted the rise of the exhaled breath," said Ishii. "Hence, it is more effective to wear both a mask and a face shield when providing services to customers." [February 24, 2021] theSkimm Launches SkimmU, New Virtual Course Series to Help Women Take Control of Their Finances Amid the "Shecession" theSkimm, the female-founded, mission-driven company dedicated to helping a generation of women live their smartest lives, today announced the launch of SkimmU, a free virtual course series tackling the crucial life lessons your alma mater never prepared you for. The first SkimmU series is designed to help women take control of their finances amid the "shecession," the recession that is disproportionately impacting women amid the pandemic. Registration for SkimmU opens at SkimmU.theSkimm.com on February 25, with the first course kicking off on March 25. By enrolling in SkimmU, attendees will have the opportunity to join engaging sessions led by industry pros and theSkimm's finance editor, participate in Q&As, access networking opportunities, and learn via thoughtful coursework. The inaugural series will break down complex finance topics and give attendees the information they need to meet their next money goal - whether that's tackling the way they think about money, starting a side hustle, budgeting or navigating investing. "Millennial women are now facingtheir second 'once-in-a-lifetime' financial crisis. And the impact is even more profound for women of color," said theSkimm's co-founders and co-CEOs Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg. "Pre-pandemic, women made up the majority of the workforce. They were making strides in pay disparity, working their way up to leadership positions, and getting elected to office. But COVID and the ensuing shecession has impacted a lot of their hard-earned progress and impacted their bank accounts. Our goal with SkimmU is to provide all women with actionable information they can use to take control of their money." SkimmU launches as an extension of the company's Skimm Money vertical, created to help millenial women make confident decisions that drive toward long-term financial health. The SkimmU series will consist of the following free, 45-minute courses: Psychology of Money, led by Marsha Barnes, CEO and founder of The Finance Bar Budgeting for the Big Stuff, led by Shannon McLay, CEO and founder of The Financial Gym Starting Your Side Hustle, led by Tonya Rapley, author, entrepreneur, and owner of Club Loofah Investing 101, led by Farnoosh Torabi, financial author and host of the podcast So Money The semester will conclude with an exclusive commencement ceremony during a special live taping of the "Skimm'd from the Couch" podcast. For more information on SkimmU and to enroll in the series, please visit SkimmU.theSkimm.com. About theSkimm: theSkimm is a mission-driven digital media company giving millennial women the information they need to live their smartest lives. Since launching in 2012, theSkimm has become a trusted source for a community of millions of Skimm'rs by seamlessly integrating into their existing routines, fundamentally changing the way its audience consumes news and makes decisions. theSkimm's flagship product, the Daily Skimm, remains the fastest-growing newsletter on the market, while the company continues to innovate, finding new ways to Skimm everything from finance and careers to voting, wellness and downtime. theSkimm's product suite has expanded to two top-rated podcasts, "Skimm This'' and "Skimm'd From the Couch," theSkimm mobile app, Skimm Money and Press Pause newsletters, and Skimm Studios for innovative in-house video and audio content. theSkimm's first book, How to Skimm Your Life, was released in June 2019 and debuted at #1 on The New York Times Best Seller list. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005306/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Last Wednesday, Austin residents entered their third day of frigid temperatures, powerless homes and frozen pipes. Shelves in grocery stores were bare, schools had transformed into warming centers and local hospitals struggled after losing water pressure and heat. Winter storms were battering the state. But one city homeowner had escaped the misery: Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was nearly 1,300 miles away in Salt Lake City, where water flowed freely and electricity pumped warm air indoors. Paxton traveled to Utah's capital with his wife, Republican state Sen. Angela Paxton, and met with Utah Republican Attorney General Sean Reyes "various times" between Wednesday and Friday, a spokesman for Reyes told The Washington Post. Paxton's trip out of state during the historic crisis has attracted ire from state Democratic leaders, who last week scorned Republican Sen. Ted Cruz for his own effort to escape the storms by heading to Cancun with his family. "They don't believe in governance, and couldn't care less about the people they're supposed to represent," tweeted Democrat Julian Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and housing secretary under President Barack Obama, referring to Paxton and Cruz. The news has added fuel to the outrage being thrown at GOP leadership in the state, with critics accusing Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican-controlled state legislature of not cold-weatherproofing the state's power grid and ignoring warnings of its fragility for decades. Paxton is also being compared to Cruz and the embattled Abbott, who aside from falsely blaming the outage on frozen wind turbines has been largely inconspicuous during the state's crisis. Paxton made national headlines last year when he filed a long-shot lawsuit seeking to overturn the presidential election results in four key swing states that Democratic candidate Joe Biden won. The Supreme Court dismissed the case in December. The attorney general faces several legal challenges of his own. In July 2015, he was indicted on charges of felony securities fraud. Numerous legal challenges have pushed off a trial. Last October, seven of Paxton's high-ranking staffers accused him of bribery and abusing his office by cozying up to wealthy donors. On Feb. 11, the Associated Press reported the FBI was looking into Paxton's million-dollar Austin home as part of the probe based on the staffers' allegations. News of Paxton's trip to Utah, which was first reported by the Dallas Morning News, cited campaign spokesman Ian Prior, who said the Texas attorney general met with Reyes to discuss "an antitrust lawsuit several states are pursuing against Google." Prior said Paxton attended a "demonstration of a police training program." It is unclear when Paxton left Texas. Representatives for Paxton and Reyes did not specify whether the meetings were planned before the storms hit. A spokeswoman for Angela Paxton, meanwhile, told the Morning News that the state senator joined her husband "on a previously planned trip to Utah which included meetings that benefit her efforts to promote human dignity and support law enforcement," without providing further details. Texas Democrats on Monday blasted Paxton for the Utah trip, linking his conduct to Cruz's trip to Mexico. Paxton "joins Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz in either fleeing their responsibilities for Texans or fleeing the state entirely," Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said in a statement. "This is a pattern." He added, "Texas Republicans do not give a damn about the people they were elected to represent, and they continue to focus on issues that don't affect the lives of everyday Texans to gaslight them into thinking they are doing their jobs." Both Cruz and Paxton are listed among the speakers at this week's Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando. Former president Donald Trump is expected to address attendees on Sunday. In this file photo, Saudi Oil Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani listens to newsmen's questions during a news conference at Doha, Qatar, after he arrived to attend OPEC meeting, on Dec. 14, 1976. (AP Photo, File) Long-Serving Saudi Oil Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani Dies at 90 DUBAI, United Arab EmiratesAhmed Zaki Yamani, a long-serving oil minister in Saudi Arabia who led the kingdom through the 1973 oil crisis that shattered the West and once found himself held hostage by the assassin Carlos the Jackal, died Tuesday in London. He was 90. Saudi state television reported his death, without offering a cause. It said he would be buried in the Muslim holy city of Mecca. Known for his Western-style business suits and soft-spoken, measured tones, Yamani helped Saudi Arabia command a dominating presence in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries from its birth. The kingdom remains a heavyweight in the group even today and its decisions ripple through the oil industry, affecting prices from the barrel down to the gasoline pump. To the global oil industry, to politicians and senior civil servants, to journalists and to the world at large, Yamani became the representative, and indeed the symbol, of the new age of oil, author Daniel Yergin wrote in his seminal book on the oil industry The Prize. His visage, with his large, limpid, seemingly unblinking brown eyes and his clipped, slightly curved Van Dyke beard, became familiar the planet over. Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi Arabian oil minister is pictured at a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria in New York on Dec. 11, 1973 (Harry Harris/AP Photo File) Yamani became oil minister in 1962 and would lead the ministry until 1986. He served a crucial role in the nascent oil cartel OPEC as producers around the world began to try to dictate prices to the world market previously dominated by the economic policies of Western nations. OPECs current secretary-general, Mohammad Sanusi Barkindo, and the cartel offered their deepest and heartfelt condolences on the passing of one of the most respected and recognized industry leaders. Yamani was the first Saudi representative on OPECs board of governors in 1961. From his position, he became known not for the hysterics that accompanied years of turmoil across the wider Middle East, but an ever-calm negotiating style that Saudi ministers after him sought to mimic. But that style for an oil kingpin known by the honorific the Sheikh would be tested by the times, which included upheaval in the global energy market. That was especially true in the 1973 Mideast War, in which Egypt, Syria, and its allies launched a surprise attack on Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. When the United States under President Richard Nixon moved to support Israel, Arab producers in OPEC agreed to cut their supply by 5 percent a month. When Nixon continued his support, the decision gave birth to what would become known as the oil weapona total embargo on the United States and other countries. Prices in the United States would rise by 40 percent, leading to gasoline shortages and long lines at the pump. Oil prices globally would quadruple, leading to the wealth now seen across the Gulf Arab states today as the Wests economy suffered. Speaking to Danish television at the time, Yamani allowed himself to be blunter than usual. I think what we have as an oil weapon is far more greater than what we did. What we did was nothing at all. I think we can cut down production to let us say 20 [percent]. Instead of 25 [percent], it will be 80 [percent]. You think that Europe or Japan or the United States can survive with this? he asked his interviewer. Yamani added: Your whole economy will collapse all of a sudden. If the Americans are thinking of a military action, this is also another possibility, but thenthis is a suicide. In 1975, Yamani twice found himself a part of major historical events. He stood just outside the room when a nephew of King Faisal assassinated the monarch in March. In December, Yamani was among those taken hostage at OPEC headquarters in Vienna, an attack that killed three people and saw 11 OPEC ministers and dozens of others seized. The attack ended up with all the pro-Palestinian militants and those held hostage released. Afterward, Yamani described Carlos, a Venezuelan whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, as a ruthless terrorist who operates with cold-blooded, surgical precision. From that moment on, Yamani traveled with an entourage of bodyguards everywhere he went. Anis Naccache, a former pro-Palestinian militant who participated in the 1975 OPEC raid, died Monday in Syria at age 69 after battling the coronavirus. Yamani also oversaw what would become the full nationalization of the Arabian American Oil Co. after the 1973 oil crisis. Today, its better known as the Saudi Arabian Oil Co., or Aramco, a major employer for the kingdom and its main source of revenue. In 1986, Saudi King Fahd dismissed Yamani with a terse statement carried by the state-run Saudi Press Agency. At the time, it was believed that Yamani disagreed with the king in his insistence OPEC work out a permanent system of production quotas and that the kingdom would be given a bigger share of the total. Saudi Arabia ultimately went along with another interim arrangement. Yamani was born in Mecca in 1930, when camels still roamed the streets of the holy city. His father and grandfather were religious teachers and Islamic lawyers. He ultimately studied at New York University and Harvard. Twice married, he is survived by multiple children and grandchildren. By Jon Gambrell VISAKHAPATNAM: Top Telugu Desam leaders discussed prospects of their candidates in the ensuing GVMC elections here on Wednesday in the backdrop of several contesting candidates withdrawing their nominations and joining the ruling party. State president of TD Kinjarapu Atchannaidu, the in-charge for Visakhapatnam political affairs N Chinarajappa and MLC Buddha Venkanna were present. Visakhapatnam North MLA Ganta Srinivasa Rao, who recently sent his resignation letter to the Speaker quitting the Legislative Assembly, did not attend the meeting and deputed his nephew and in-charge for north constituency, G Vijay. Initially Peela Srinivasa Rao, younger brother of former Anakapalle MLA Peela Govinda Satyanarayana, was tipped to be the mayor but in the meeting three more names were put forward, including former MLA Gandi Babji, Kaki Govinda Rao and Mohammed Nazir. But the party leaders tentatively decided to propose the names of Peela Srinivasa Rao and Gandi Babji as both of them have wide networks in the city. The party high command will announce the mayoral candidate in a day or two, Atchannaidu told the meeting. He said that he will carry the list of all the candidates and names of two candidates vying for mayoral post to the party headquarters and discuss it with party boss N Chandrababu Naidu. The coordination committee formed on the occasion found that in many wards where their winning prospects were bright, more than one candidate had filed papers. Names of the final candidates will be announced soon, he said. He said Naidu will campaign twice in Visakhapatnam. Throughout the pandemic, the press has been excoriatingly harsh on a governor who was slow to act, unnecessarily endangered the lives of the elderly, alienated experts and cooked the numbers. It just thought the governor in question was Floridas Ron DeSantis rather than New Yorks Andrew Cuomo. After it has become clear that Cuomos handling of the pandemic was not just criminal in the metaphorical sense but perhaps in the literal sense, the press has begun, only reluctantly and belatedly, to abandon its long-running Cuomo hagiography. It never made any sense to lionize Cuomo at the expense of DeSantis, except that one had a D after his name and the other didnt, and one hated Donald Trump and the other didnt. The national media also labor under the assumption that New York must be competent while the Sunshine State is the preserve of the embarrassingly boorish Florida Man. Finally, the media loved the way Cuomo talked about the pandemic at his take-charge press conferences. This was taken as the opposite of Trumps approach, which it was Cuomo talked a good game while utterly botching the substance of the response, and Trump talked irresponsibly about the pandemic while handling the substance pretty well (or, certainly, not as badly as advertised). All this meant that the press made both Cuomo and DeSantis into something they were not a hero and a villain, respectively when it should have been obvious all along that this wasnt remotely justified. From the outset of the pandemic, New York state has had the highest number of deaths of any state and still does (47,000), and the second-highest deaths-per-million of anywhere in the country. In contrast, Florida is right around the national average for deaths-per-million. Journalists brushed right by these top-line numbers in the interest of their tendentious narrative-building. They erupted in outrage when DeSantis was allegedly slow to close the beaches last March but didnt dwell much on Cuomo saying, when the virus was already spreading throughout his state: The facts defeat fear. Because the reality is reassuring. They accused DeSantis of unnecessarily endangering seniors when the Florida governor took steps to protect nursing homes, and Cuomo, infamously, ordered nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients. They claimed DeSantis was rejecting the science by, among other things, pushing to reopen the schools, an approach that has proved out. Meanwhile, experts have fled the New York public health bureaucracy in response to Cuomos highhandedness. They bought the bogus story of a Florida data manager who was supposedly persecuted for blowing the whistle on the states manipulation of its COVID numbers, when, of course, this is exactly what Cuomo was doing. And so, the medias anointed hero of the pandemic who wrote a book on his own exemplary pandemic response, who won a Grammy, who was elevated to an authority with the standing to comment on how the country was handling COVID-19 is facing calls to resign or face impeachment and is the subject of multiple investigations while his routine bullying of critics is now out in the open. Not only are none of these things happening to DeSantis, his policy of avoiding strict lockdowns, which occasioned so much criticism, has avoided the educational and economic downsides of Cuomos policies. According to Florida data, the state offers more in-person education than any other state, and it has a lower unemployment rate than the national average and other populous states. This matters greatly to the well-being of Floridians. All of this said, the virus has presented enormous challenges and excruciating choices to policymakers across the country. Its not healthy to be overly invested in red-state-versus-blue-state comparisons. But the media gleefully went all-in on this game and managed to pump up the wrong governor and run down the wrong one, in a failure for the ages. @RichLowry Kenyas covid-19 positivity rate over the past week has sparked concern among experts who attribute the surge in infections to a relaxation of containment measures. Over the last six days, the average national positivity rate has remained consistent at above 5 percent. At least 24 patients have also succumbed to the disease over the same period, compared to the previous weeks numbers where deaths were not recorded on some days. The positivity rate has remained over five percent, which is above the green zone, and we are currently in the orange zone, said Dr Ahmed Kalebi, the CEO of Pathologists Lancet Kenya. Once we get to 10 percent, we will be in the red zone, which is the danger zone. We have persistently remained in the orange zone for more than a week and this is a cause for concern. According to the expert, the rise in infections is due to people relaxing public health containment measures. The positivity rate for Covid-19 is 6.1 percent (for Sunday), a clear sign of increased community spread and relaxation in our public health containment measures, added Dr Andrew Sule, the Board Chairman of Health Rights Advocacy Forum. Dr Sule said the trend is a cause for concern; he advised the Health ministry to be on the lookout especially in counties bordering Tanzania. On Tuesday, Kenya announced 194 new infections taking the total confirmed infections to 104,500. 10 patients died bringing the cumulative fatalities to 1,837. London: The team behind the Oxford jab have launched research on whether the vaccine could be taken as a pill - a medical breakthrough that could make annual coronavirus inoculation programs faster, cheaper and more widespread. Professor Sarah Gilbert, the lead developer behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine being rolled out around the world including in Australia, said a product delivered via nasal spray could also be a game changer in the race for second generation vaccine products. As you know all the vaccines have been given at the moment as intramuscular injections, Gilbert said on Wednesday local-time. That is not necessarily the best way to provide protection against a respiratory virus infection, where we want the immune system to be active in the upper respiratory tract and then in the lower respiratory tract, which is where the virus is causing the infection. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan Jeyhun Bayramov met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Turkey Mevlut Cavusoglu on February 23 as part of his working visit to Ankara, according to the MFA press service. At the meeting, which was attended by large delegations from both sides, an exchange of views on the current situation in the region and the bilateral cooperation agenda took place. New realities and opportunities for cooperation in the region after the 44-day Patriotic War, the implementation of the trilateral statements of November 10, 2020 and January 11, 2021 were discussed. It was stressed once again that brotherly Turkey is ready to participate in the process of restoration and construction of the liberated territories of Azerbaijan. The importance of the start of joint activities on January 30, 2021, of the Turkish-Russian Monitoring Center for maintaining peace in the region, was emphasized. The sides stressed the importance of expanding cooperation within international organizations. At the meeting, other issues of mutual interest were also discussed. A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers said a raid on the headquarters of a major opposition party in Georgia and the arrest of the partys leader was profoundly troubling and called for his immediate release, along with all other political prisoners. Two senators and two members of the House of Representatives issued a statement on February 23 after Nika Melia, the leader of the major opposition party in the South Caucasus nation -- the United National Movement (ENM) -- was detained when police stormed his party's offices in a dawn raid. The Georgian governments decision to violently raid the United National Movement headquarters to arrest its leader, Nika Melia, and dozens of activists is profoundly troubling, the statement said. The corrupt use of Georgias law enforcement and judiciary to execute politically motivated actions jeopardizes what remains of Georgias democracy and its Euro-Atlantic path. The statement was released by Senator Jim Risch (Republican-Idaho), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Senator Jeanne Shaheen (Democrat-New Hampshire), chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Europe and Regional Security Cooperation; and representatives Adam Kinzinger (Republican-Illinois) and Gerry Connolly (Democrat-Virginia), co-chairs of the House Georgia Caucus. They called for the immediate release of all political prisoners, including Melia and Giorgi Rurua, adding that all political parties in Georgia must cease provocations and negotiate a peaceful resolution to this crisis. More than a dozen people were injured as law enforcement raided the ENM headquarters, spraying what appeared to be chemical irritants into the offices where party leaders, as well as representatives of other opposition parties, had been shielding Melia for several days. Melia was arrested over allegations that he incited violence at protests nearly two years ago. He has dismissed the charges as politically motivated. International rights group Amnesty International called the heavy use of force to take Melia into custody before a court has heard his appeal a troubling indicator. "Arresting him, let alone violently, before the appeal has been considered shows the Georgian authorities flagrant disregard for the rule of law and authority and integrity of the judiciary, and suggests the arrest is politically motivated," Amnesty said in a statement. Melia's arrest came days after Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia resigned following a disagreement over whether to take the prominent politician into custody. Gakharia had said that Melia's arrest was unacceptable if it threatened to fuel political divisions in the Caucasus country of 3.7 million people. The political scene in Georgia has been on the brink of crisis since October elections dominated by the Georgian Dream party but which independent monitors say were marred by irregularities. With reporting by RFE/RLs Georgian Service, Reuters, Apsny, OC Media, Interpressnews, and AFP The views expressed by public comments are not those of this company or its affiliated companies. Please note by clicking on "Post" you acknowledge that you have read the TERMS OF USE and the comment you are posting is in compliance with such terms. Your comments may be used on air. Be polite. Inappropriate posts or posts containing offsite links, images, GIFs, inappropriate language, or memes may be removed by the moderator. Job listings and similar posts are likely automated SPAM messages from Facebook and are not placed by WFMZ-TV. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Comparing car insurance quotes before renewal can help drivers save insurance money. Visit our website and find more tips about saving money on car insurance, said Russell Rabichev, Marketing Director of Internet Marketing Company. In most cases, drivers are purchasing car insurance policies that are valid for one year. The insurers will notify the policyholders whenever their policies are about to expire. 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In some cases, drivers who updated their policies with the correct info received an increase in the price of insurance, without receiving any explanations from their insurers. In these cases, drivers are the victims of price optimization. This approach is used by insurers on policyholders that they consider they are less likely to check insurance offers from other companies. Consider bundling policies. Check if the current insurer is offering bundling discounts. Usually, policyholders can bundle different types of policies like car insurance with homeowners insurance, renters insurance, life insurance, or health insurance. In some cases, the discounts can be as large as 20%. Obtain multiple car insurance quotes and compare them. Online car insurance quotes will help drivers find better insurance deals. Also, online quotes are customizable and drivers can compare multiple insurance plans with the coverages and options they want. For additional info, money-saving tips, and free car insurance quotes, visit http://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. Talal Barazi has been named as the Minister of Local Trade and Consumer Protection, but before that he was a highly contentious Governor of Homs, where he was disliked in equal measures by both sides. In Brief On May 11, 2020, the Syrian president dismissed Atef al-Nadaf, Minister of Local Trade and Consumer Protection, and replaced him with the Governor of Homs Talal al-Barazi. Talal Barazi is unique in that he is reviled by both Syrian regime loyalists and the opposition. Despite this, he remained in his position as Governor of Homs for six years before Assad handed him the Local Trade Ministry. Barazis governorship of Homs saw the collapse of the citys opposition, the collapse of historic neighborhoods and the exit of fighters. But that has not made him a hero in the eyes of regime loyalists, who have gone out into the streets chanting: The people want the fall of the governor. Background Talal Barazi was born in Hama city in 1963. The two neighboring citiesHoms and Hamaare known for competing with one another, and it is rare for someone born in one to be appointed governor of the other. Barazi earned a BA in economics and a diploma in business administration at the University of Damascus. He founded the Talal Barazi International Foundation in 1997, and serves as both general manager and a founding partner in the Bawadi Projects Company, in which he owns 250 shares. Barazi is a member of both the Damascus Chamber of Commerce and Damascus Chamber of Industry, in the cinematic and television sectors. He has also been a member of the Arab Management Association, in Cairo, since 2001. Barazi served as Governor of Homs from 2013 to 2020, as well as board chairman of Damascus International for Technical Production. He is also an administrative consultant in the Sharjah Airport International Free Zone. Barazi was previously elected chairman of the Board of Directors of the Syrian Expatriates Association in Dubai and the Northern Emirates. The problematic governor When the name Talal Barazi comes up in Syria, all that comes to mind is a persona that has been transformed over the past seven years into an example of how much criticism is allowed to loyalists. This circle belongs only to the Assad regimes government and its ministers, and is far from the president and his military institutions and security branches. Yet despite criticism towards Barazi, he remained steadfast in his position as Homs governor. Indeed, Assad stood by Barazi in recent years despite voices calling for the latters ouster. Loyalists loathe him Chanting the people want the fall of the governor, residents of the generally pro-regime al-Zahraa neighborhood of Homs expelled Barazi from their streets in February 2016 as he visited the area following an explosion there that killed 50 people. It wasnt the first time this had happened. Similar incidents also occurred in 2014 and 2015. The pro-regime street in Homs saw rising anger from 2014-2016 amid a series of explosions that riled their neighborhoods. Residents placed blame mainly on Barazi, as well as local heads of security branches. The Assad regime managed to isolate most of those accused of responsibility, while keeping Barazi as governora move that was mired in controversy and whose scope is still unclear. It seems that Assad may have stood by Barazi to avoid caving to popular demands, which could have opened the doors to other protests on all kinds of other issues, such as corruption. Expelling Old Homs Barazis name circulated in 2014 as he expelled residents and fighters from the old districts of Homs to the citys rural northern countryside. It was the first displacement campaign of its kind in Syria since the start of the Syrian revolution in 2011. May 2014 saw the signing of an agreement stipulating the expulsion of residents and fighters in Old Homs to the northern Homs countryside. Barazi was the agreements godfather, with UN participation and Russian-Iranian presence. At the time, a group of opposition leaders, activists and notables in Homs met with a high-ranking Iranian officer in the presence of Muhammad Deeb Zeitoun, head of the Political Security Division, and Barazi. They agreed on a mechanism for expelling residents from the besieged neighborhoods. Barazi didnt stop at Homs Old City. Three years later, in May 2017, he turned to the al-Waer district, whose residents and fighters were expelled to northern Syrias Idleb and rural Aleppo governorates. Man of the stage Barazi could be nicknamed the man of the stage, as his name crops up time and again at various pivotal stages in the history of Homs governorate: after 2011, the displacement of fighters and residents in both the old city districts and al-Waer, and even during the campaign to ease sectarian tensions in the city. Homs is considered one of Syrias most tense cities for sectarian conflict, amid Alawi-Sunni fighting tied to the demographic nature of the area. Barazi began to work towards easing sectarian tensions under the banner of reconciliation, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood and village to village from 2016-2019, and calling for residents to stand with the Syrian state. He stressed a unified social fabric that distinguishes Homs governorate. To this effect, Barazi played on local tribal dynamics and a number of religious figures in Homs, including Sheikh Issam al-Masri, Sheikh Ali Doum and Sheikh Muhsen al-Khudhur, as well as a main actor, the Russian Reconciliation Center in Hemeimeem. Meanwhile, Barazi began talking about the reconstruction of Homs destroyed neighborhoods. He promoted the actual start of this campaign, holding a series of meetings with UN delegations, whose programs entered projects for rebuilding infrastructure in destroyed districts. 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. Please purchase a subscription to continue reading. If you have a subscription, please Log In . Your current subscription does not provide access to this content. If you believe you've gotten this message in error, please Log In. Send to Email Address Your Name Your Email Address Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Email check failed, please try again Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / February 25, 2021 / 2020 has been a memorable year for Ryvu. Menarini, the partner sponsoring SEL24/MEN1703 development, completed the Phase I part of the Phase I/II trial in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) and presented the first ever data with an in-house developed asset. In April 2020, Ryvu signed a discovery agreement in inflammatory diseases with Galapagos. Ryvu could receive up to 53.5m (1.5m paid upfront). On the internal R&D front, the company has terminated two preclinical stage projects for strategic reasons (A2A/A2B antagonist and SMARCA2 inhibitor) and submitted a clinical trial application to start a new Phase I/II trial with SEL120 in solid tumours. Notably, the FDA granted an orphan drug designation for SEL120 in AML in March 2020. The share issue in July 2020 will support existing plans for the next two years. Our updated valuation of Ryvu is PLN1.17bn or PLN63.6/share vs PLN68.9/share previously. Our valuation of Ryvu is PLN1.17bn or PLN63.6/share, vs PLN1.10bn or PLN68.9/share previously. The R&D assumption changes had a slight net negative effect, which was partially offset by higher net cash after the recent share issue. The main changes include the removal of the A2A/A2B antagonist and SMARCA2 inhibitor projects, while we have added a new indication - TNBC - for SEL120. Click here to view the full report or here to sign up to receive research as it is published. All reports published by Edison are available to download free of charge from its website www.edisongroup.com About Edison: Edison is a leading research and investor relations consultancy, connecting listed companies to the widest pool of global investors. By focusing on the volume and quality of investors reached - across institutions, family offices, wealth managers and retail investors - Edison can create and gauge intent to purchase, even in the darkest pools of capital, and then make introductions via non-deal roadshows, events or virtual meetings. Having been the first in-market 17 years ago, Edison now has more than 100 analysts covering every economic sector. Headquartered in London, Edison also has offices in New York, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Tel Aviv and a presence in Athens, Johannesburg and Sydney. Edison is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Edison is not an adviser or broker-dealer and does not provide investment advice. Edison's reports are not solicitations to buy or sell any securities. For more information, please contact Edison: Jonas Peciulis +44 (0)20 3077 5728 healthcare@edisongroup.com Learn more at www.edisongroup.com and connect with Edison on: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/edison-group-/ Twitter www.twitter.com/Edison_Inv_Res YouTube www.youtube.com/edisonitv SOURCE: Edison Investment Research Limited View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631623/Ryvu-Therapeutics-RVU-Rebalancing-RD-Pipeline-Towards-Clinical-Stage ROME, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) -- key parts of the economy in both Italy and China, according to participants at the latest Italy China Foundation conference -- will play a major role in the continued development of economic ties between the two nations, participants said. The foundation's latest report, entitled "The Role of SMEs in Relations Between Italy and China: Scenario Analysis and Indications of Partners and Businesses," looks into opportunities for economic cooperation for small- and medium-sized businesses in Italy and China after the coronavirus pandemic. The 90-minutes "virtual" conference brought together over 80 analysts, consultants, foundation associates, and owners of SMEs. Li Bin, minister counselor for economic and commercial affairs at the Chinese Embassy in Italy, told participants that "China remains an immense market for Italian companies that seek to seize the opportunity." Italy China Foundation President Mario Boselli made a similar point, predicting that China would be a "key partner" for Italy's post-pandemic economic recovery. "I think 2021 will be a turning point for the health of many economic operators, with opportunities to be seized in the renewed context of a China that promotes domestic consumption and fosters strong economic relations." The report noted that SMEs generate 60 percent of China's gross domestic product (GDP), and are responsible for 80 percent of the country's urban employment and 80 percent of its exports. Similarly, while 3.5 percent of the Italian companies exporting to East Asia are SMEs, they are responsible for more than half of the country's overall exports. The Los Angeles Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee is meeting this Thursday to organize the opposition to school reopenings throughout LA County. Register and invite your coworkers to attend the meeting! In California, there is a concerted push by the corporate media and both big business parties to reopen schools statewide. Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom aims to resume in-person instruction by April, in line with the Biden administrations timeline and as part of a broader effort to completely reopen nonessential workplaces across the state. The mainstream media is fabricating the false narrative that the overwhelming majority of parents demand that schools reopen. Headlines in the Los Angeles Times and other papers have highlighted the position of a right-wing minority of parents calling for reopening, while exploiting the mental health crisis facing students as a battering ram for this campaign. Other columns have questioned the need for vaccinating teachers and downplayed the new and more infectious COVID-19 variants spreading throughout the country. A father helps his child with a mask in front of Bradford School in Jersey City, New Jersey on June 10, 2020 (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File) The mainstream media has given amplified coverage to the so-called #ReOpen movement, which advocates for an immediate return to in-person instruction through protests, media circuses, and performative legal action. Contrary to the narrative that this campaign is being led by disgruntled parents, in reality it is led by the Republican Party and prominent conservative personalities. Not coincidentally, state Republicans have gathered an estimated 1.7 million signatures in favor of a recall vote for Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, which they have fueled in part through demands for reopening schools. Over the winter, California became the epicenter of the global pandemic, averaging more than 40,000 new cases each day from December through January. By the end of this week, the state will hit the grim milestone of more than 50,000 deaths, with more than 3.54 million cases reported in the statea case total larger than Germany, Canada, and Japan combined. Los Angeles, the most populated county in the state with roughly 10 million residents, has reached more than 1.18 million cases alone, and 19,904 deaths as of today. Following the betrayal by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) earlier this month, which resulted in school reopenings beginning last week, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has emerged as the most significant battleground in the fight to reopen schools. Other major cities on the West Coast led by Democrats that are pressing to reopen schools include Long Beach, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Portland and Seattle, each of which would set a precedent and lead to further reopenings throughout the surrounding regions. On the legal front, the right-wing Center for American Liberty attempted last month to revive a lawsuit against Newsom in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals which presses for school reopenings. The suit and the appeal were filed by the Centers CEO and Founder, Attorney Harmeet Dhillion, who also happens to be a well-known Republican National Committee (RNC) Committeewoman and a regular guest on Fox News. The suit, Brach v. Newsom, was first launched last August and argues that Newsom breached constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection by issuing a school closure order last July. The case, closed in December 2020, is being revived to bring further media attention to the manufactured GOP fiction that there exists massive anger against distance learning during the pandemic. The Republican Party believes that the issue of school reopenings could be their ticket to regaining seats in Congress that they lost in 2020 and 2018. Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, Chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, stated in a recent press conference, I made a big deal out of the fact that messaging has to be about schools as we go forward. The GOP is also funding advertisements denouncing Democrats for being insufficiently aggressive in reopening schools. The Los Angeles Times reported heavily on a poorly attended protest staged in front of the West LA Federal Building last week, which claimed to represent at least 20 different LAUSD schools, as well as schools in the more affluent Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. According to video and photo documentation, the crowd numbered no more than one hundred attendees. This was followed by a protest by a few dozen parents who conducted a Zoom blackout in which they did not allow their children to participate in their virtual classes for the day. It is no coincidence that the kind of attendees at these events are largely from affluent areas that have been able to mostly avoid the devastation of the pandemic. Parents from the wealthiest zip codes in the United States, such as Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Malibu, and the Pacific Palisades, were in attendance at these events and are the most frequently cited in articles claiming parents want in-person instruction. More common, though receiving significantly less media coverage, are protest events opposing reopening, such as a recent car caravan rally in Los Angeles on February 20 called Not My Child, Schools Arent Safe. The event, whose organizers falsely framed school reopenings as a racial issue, was supported by more than 200 students, teachers, and parents. One teacher interviewed by local news at the event expressed the sentiment of many teachers, stating, We miss our kids, we want to return to work. We just want to wait until its safe for everybody. While there have been difficulties in adapting to online education, parents have expressed overwhelming support for teachers and most are carrying through with online education knowing that this prioritizes the health of their families, school workers and educators. According to data gathered this month, the vast majority of parents currently believe that their children are receiving the kind of education they prefer during the pandemic. In a national poll by the University of Southern California, called the Understanding America Study, the data revealed that 75 percent of parents are satisfied with the type of instruction their child is receiving at present, with almost 90 percent satisfaction among parents whose children are in fully online instruction. According to another poll, the National Parents Union Survey, 42 percent of parents list no new cases of Covid-19 being reported in [their] area as an absolute necessity in order for them to feel safe sending their student to school. Forty-two percent of parents also would choose online-only education as their preferred method of instruction for the rest of the school year. The poll found that 71 percent of parents also believe that the quality of their childs education is currently excellent or good. It is of note that 54 percent of parents polled also regularly worry about being able to make ends meet during the present crisis. The real push to reopen schools is not coming from parents, but from pro-corporate agenda of both big business parties, supported by the trade unions at the local, state and national officials. The ruling class and the political stooges of the financial elite choose not to follow science-based policies to stop the pandemic. Instead, they do everything they can to reopen the economy before the pandemic is contained, sacrificing the lives of workers and their families in the process. In California, the Democratic Party is relying on the manufactured opposition of the Republicans and the media as a pretext to implement school reopening policies that the Democrats fully support. Governor Newsom announced this week that the state would put aside 10 percent of vaccine doses for teachers, as a performative measure to meet the calls by teachers unions for school staff to be fully vaccinated before students return to campus. Newsom recently hailed thousands of campuses that have reopened for not waiting around, cynically stating that this homicidal policy would support working women and single moms in particular. The Democratic Party elite has its cross-hairs set on LAUSD, the second largest district in the country with 665,000 students. While LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner recently stated schools would reopen no later than April 9, Newsom has urged, we can do this now. Newsom also asserts that perfect safety in schools should not be used as an excuse to remain closed in the middle of a pandemic. Teachers must come to understand that in their efforts to prevent deadly school reopenings, they are in a fight against the entire capitalist system. Every arm of the ruling class and its state apparatus, as well as the media and the trade unions, are being deployed as a bulwark to get teachers to accept the reasonable risk of death. We urge California educators, parents, and other sections of workers to join and help build independent rank-and-file committees throughout the state, as part of an expanding network of such committees across the US and globally. These democratic organizations fight to put the lives of teachers, students and families first. They are preparing for general strike action to close all schools and nonessential workplace, while providing full economic security for all workers affected, until the pandemic is contained. Register and invite your coworkers to attend the next meeting of the Los Angeles Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee this Thursday! The ex-fiancee of Married At First Sights star Jake Edwards has broken her silence after publicly accusing him of cheating on her. Jake, who married Perth businesswoman Beck Zemek on Monday night's season premiere, was slammed by ex Paige McCuskey in brutal Instagram posts. Paige took aim at Jake as she said she wouldn't be watching this season, adding she won't be 'wasting' her energy with it. Hitting back: Furious ex-fiancee of Married At First Sight star Jake Edwards, Paige McCuskey, broke her silence on Wednesday, since her cheating claims were made public 'I am not watching MAFS and have no intention to. I don't want to waste my energy on it so please stop sending me everything you see,' she wrote. Paige explained she had edited her captions almost a year ago with her appearing to be over her old fiance. 'I edited those captions 12 months ago because I don't believe in deleting photos from my past, it's that simple,' she wrote. Breaks silence: 'I edited those captions 12 months ago because I don't believe in deleting photos from my past, it's that simple,' she explained Paige hit the headlines with the captions following Jake's wedding to Perth businesswoman Beck Zemek on Monday night. While Jake's official bio states he simply 'fell out of love' with Paige, she has claimed he was actually deceitful and cheated on her during their four-year romance. Paige edited the captions of several photos of the couple in happier times, adding unflattering remarks about Jake and his alleged behaviour during their relationship. Taking a swipe: Paige updated the caption beneath this photo of the former couple kissing at a friend's wedding in November 2017. It was originally captioned 'my rock' but now states 'Edit: ehhkkkk also other people's rocks' A post from August 2017 showed Paige and Jake sharing a tender kiss. The original caption read 'LOVE', but Paige has since updated it to 'Edit: deceit.' She also edited the caption beneath a photo of the former couple kissing at a friend's wedding in November 2017. 'Deceit': Paige edited the captions of several photos of the couple in happier times, adding unflattering remarks about Jake and his alleged behaviour during their relationship It was originally captioned 'my rock' but now states 'Edit: ehhkkkk also other people's rocks'. Elsewhere, the blonde recently tweaked the caption beneath a photo of herself and Jake posing in a car. 'Amazing night with my boy doing footy the fancy way. So good to have you home,' the original post read. 'Who knows what you were doing when you were away': Elsewhere, Paige recently tweaked the caption beneath this photo of herself and Jake posing in a car Paige has since added: 'Edit: Who knows what you were doing when you were away?' Perhaps the most brutal comment, however, was left beneath a photo of the pair snorkelling. 'Should [have] held him under the water,' she wrote. 'Should of held him under the water': Perhaps the most brutal comment, however, was left beneath a photo of the pair snorkelling. 'Should [have] held him under the water,' Paige wrote Paige and Jake dated for about three years before getting engaged during a romantic trip to Fiji in December 2018. They had planned to wed in December 2019, but broke up weeks before walking down the aisle. Although Jake didn't specifically acknowledge his-ex's Instagram captions, speaking on Nova 96.9's Fitzy & Wippa show on Monday, he said: 'We split 12 months before the show.' Case of the ex: Paige and Jake dated for about three years before getting engaged during a romantic trip to Fiji in December 2018 'We haven't been in contact at all and I don't think they'll be any need for me to reach out. The reason [I didn't tell her I was doing MAFS] was because I know the relationship we had at the time.' 'I was convinced she'd make me feel really terrible for doing something like this. So I probably would have pulled out.' It comes after a friend of Paige's told the So Dramatic! podcast she was 'devastated' to learn her ex-fiance would be appearing on Married At First Sight just months after he was supposed to marry her. Upset: It comes after a friend of Paige's told the So Dramatic! podcast she was 'devastated' to learn her ex-fiance would be appearing on Married At First Sight 'Who could possibly get ready for a wedding when he was supposed to be marrying the love of his life nine months prior? It's just selfish. Paige is devastated,' they said. 'I can't believe he would go on a show so quickly after what he did to her.' Married At First Sight continues Thursday 7.30pm on Channel Nine (CNN) The surface of Mars is a harsh frozen desert, but some microbes from Earth could temporarily survive there, according to a new study. And the researchers didn't even have to send microbes to Mars to find out. The two planets may not seem very similar, but our stratosphere -- a layer of the atmosphere 20 miles above the Earth's surface -- has some qualities in common with Mars. Our home planet's stratosphere experiences low air pressure and high levels of radiation, and it's dry and cold -- much like the surface of the red planet. Using the MARSBOx, or the Microbes in Atmosphere for Radiation, Survival and Biological Outcomes Experiment, scientists at NASA and the German Aerospace Center collaborated to send four types of microbes into the stratosphere on a balloon. The study published Monday in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. "If a microbe can hack it up there, above much of the protective ozone layer, it just might be able to survive -- however briefly -- on a journey to the surface of Mars," said study coauthor David J. Smith, MARSBOx co-principal investigator and researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center, in a statement. Microbes, or microorganisms, have an expansive reach on Earth. It's estimated that there are 1 trillion species of them on our planet. They can also be found living in harsh environments under varying extreme conditions. Scientists at NASA need to know if these microbes could survive on Mars as they continue to send robotic explorers to the red planet on behalf of humans. That's why the mission teams behind these rovers, like the recently landed Perseverance rover, take the cleanliness of these machines very seriously before they're launched to Mars. Perseverance is the cleanest yet. It's searching for signs of ancient life on Mars, and microbes from Earth could present a false positive during this search, or they could contaminate our planetary neighbor. To test the likelihood of microbe survival on Mars, the research team placed millions of microbes, including dried and dormant fungal and bacteria spores representing four species of microorganisms, on quartz discs. These discs were placed inside aluminum boxes designed by the study collaborators at the German Aerospace Center. A mixture of gases similar to those in the Martian atmosphere, which is dominated by carbon dioxide, was pumped into the boxes. A large science balloon carrying the experiment was released from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, on September 23, 2019. Shutters were used to help shield the microbes from the sun during ascent and descent. But once they reached the Earth's stratosphere 24 miles up, the shutters opened and exposed them to the harsh radiation there. The microbes were exposed to this for more than five hours, along with temperatures averaging negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit. In the stratosphere, there is a thousand times less pressure than we experience at sea level, as well as very dry air. When the experiment returned to the ground, the scientists determined that two of the four species survived the journey, proving that these two could temporarily endure the harsh conditions of Earth's stratosphere and, potentially, the Martian surface. "This research gives us a better understanding of which microbes could linger in environments once assumed to be lethal, like the surface of Mars, and gives us clues about how to avoid unintentionally bringing tiny hitchhikers with us to off-world destinations," said study coauthor Ralf Moeller, MARSBOx co-principal investigator and head of the Aerospace Microbiology Research Group at the German Aerospace Center, in a statement. The surviving species included Staphylococcus capitis and Salinisphaera shabanensis. The first is a bacteria associated with human skin and the second is a bacteria that can be found in deep-sea brine pools. Aspergillus niger, a fungus that is used in the production of antibiotics, was dried to send it on the experiment, and it was also able to be revived once it returned from Earth's stratosphere. "Spores from the A. niger fungus are incredibly resistant -- to heat, harsh chemicals, and other stressors -- but no one had ever studied whether they could survive exposed in space or under intense radiation like we see on Mars," said co-lead study author Marta Cortesao, a doctoral student at Aerospace Microbiology Research Group at the German Aerospace Center, in a statement. "The fact that after their MARSBOx flight we could revive them demonstrates they are hearty enough to endure wherever humans go, even off-planet." It's possible that Aspergillus niger has a sunscreenlike pigmentation or a cellular structure that protects itself. "This experiment raises a lot of questions about what genetic mechanisms are key to making microbes able to survive," Cortesao said. "Do they carry ancient evolutionary traits that provide them the ability to withstand harsh conditions, or does the adaptation to their current environment provide protection for many other environmental challenges?" Future research could help scientists better determine why these microbes survived. A follow-up flight is being planned for MARSBOx in Antarctica, where both radiation from the sun and galactic cosmic rays from space are even more similar to Mars. "These balloon-flown aerobiology experiments allow us to study the microbe's resiliency in ways that are impossible in the lab," Smith said. "MARSBOx provides an opportunity to predict survival outcomes on Mars and help establish the limits of life as we know it." In the meantime, these findings could assist with planning future missions to Mars. "The renewed focus on Mars robotic and human exploration amplifies the need for additional Mars analog studies in the coming years," the authors wrote in the study. "With crewed long-term missions to Mars, we need to know how human-associated microorganisms would survive on the Red Planet, as some may pose a health risk to astronauts," said co-lead study author Katharina Siems, a doctoral student in the German Aerospace Center's Aerospace Microbiology Research Group, in a statement. "In addition, some microbes could be invaluable for space exploration. They could help us produce food and material supplies independently from Earth, which will be crucial when far away from home. Microorganisms are closely-connected to us; our body, our food, our environment, so it is impossible to rule them out of space travel." This story was first published on CNN.com A Martian experiment in our sky: Earth microbes could temporarily survive on Mars, study says The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company UPPSALA, SWEDEN - LIDDS AB (publ) announced today that a patent application related to NanoZolid for treatment of brain cancers was filed to the European patent office. The patent application relates to a method to treat brain cancer with intratumoral depots providing a controlled drug release at the tumor site. Advances in treatments of malignant brain tumors have only modestly improved survival rates of patients. LIDDS can with the NanoZolid technology expand its platform to brain cancer by circumventing the blood-brain barrier and to increase the drug distribution within the tumor area. "It is with excitement that we file a patent in this important area with a large unmet medical need," said Monica Wallter, CEO of LIDDS. "Our favorable preclinical results on the NanoZolid carrier in brain tissue, together with the drug release characteristics that we can obtain with our technology, form the basis for this invention. I am hopeful that this development and potential commercialization will bring new hope to brain cancer patients". The application describes treatment methods with NanoZolid formulations that are administered transcranially with minimally invasive image guided injection techniques to form intratumoral depots that administer substances to the tumor while minimizing damage on the surrounding healthy brain tissue. The NanoZolid technology can be applied to a large number of relevant active substances. For more information, please contact: Monica Wallter, CEO, +46 WEST HAVEN Westies will get to celebrate the citys 100th anniversary twice. Thats because the West Haven Centennial Committee one of two in the city has decided to bump events to 2022 because the pandemic limits so many activities. There are two such committees in the city the one postponing events is run by citizens, not the city. The citys committee of a similar name still is celebrating the 100th this year. The city was incorporated as a town in 1921. The uncertainty regarding Covid restrictions on outdoor gatherings, combined with the manufacturing and distribution delays of vaccines to achieve the desired herd immunity, prevents the opportunity to facilitate the Celebration that the residents deserve, committee Vice Chairman Darryl Cummings said in a statement. We believe the residents will understand the postponement and embrace the Celebration, regardless of when it is held. He said the committee is toying with putting a twist in the name and calling it something like Centennial 2.0, Centennial Plus One or Centennial 21/22. There was controversy in December between Cummings group and the city because the citys centennial committee had the same name and Cummings said it would lead to confusion among residents and businesses looking to donate. Cummings group had threatened action, including possibly seeking an injunction, if the city didnt change its name, as Cummings said his group incorporated the name first. At the time the demands of the citizens group arose, city officials said West Haven is facing challenges that are much more important than this, and the city didnt have the resources to waste in the matter. Mike Last, a member of the city committee and Democratic Party chairman, said the city is now using the name City of West Haven Centennial Celebration Committee. Mayor Nancy R. Rossi couldnt be reached for comment on the name change or the citizen committees schedule change. Cummings said the name wasnt a consideration in the event postponements. In 2022, we believe we will be clear of any Covid related restrictions, wont have to experience the current obstacles and interference, and look forward to an equitable collaboration with the new administration for this momentous Celebration, Cummings said in his statement. He said in the statement that pre-celebration fundraisers will happen in spring 2022 and there will be a 10-week schedule of events celebrating each decade since West Havens incorporation. The celebration will culminate with an international festival with a parade, fireworks, music and food focusing on West Havens future. Other events, including the Centennial Gala, the Senior Ms./Mr. Centennial Pageant, Centennial Kite Festival and Hot-air Balloon launch will occur throughout the festival, he said. We believe the restrictions will be lifted prior to June 2022 and, as importantly, are sure that a viable collaboration will be more successful with a new administration, Cummings said in the statement. Cummings was chairman, but he gave that job up for now, he said, because he will be working out of state for six months, visiting West Haven intermittently. Pat Libero is the new committee chairwoman. The city is kicking off commemorative events for three consecutive weekends beginning June 24. West Haven, incorporated as Connecticuts youngest city in 1961, is also one of the states oldest communities, according to the city. In 1648, West Haven, then known as West Farms, was settled by farmers from the New Haven Colony. West Farms became the separate parish of West Haven in 1719 through a petition granted by the state General Assembly. In 1822, the parish united with North Milford to form the town of Orange before separating from Orange in 1921 to become the town of West Haven, the city said in a statement. Credit: CC0 Public Domain Researchers at Karlstad University, Uppsala University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York have found that exposure to bisphenol F (BPF) during early pregnancy can be linked to poorer cognitive function in children at seven years of age. BPF has replaced bisphenol A (BPA) in a wide range of products as the EU has banned BPA in products for children. This study is the first to show that prenatal exposure for the substitute chemical BPF is associated with impaired cognitive development in children. It has long been known that BPA is a hormone-disrupting chemical, affecting e.g., children's neurological development, contribute to infertility, and increase the risk of hormone-related cancer. Therefore, since 2011 there has been a ban within the EU against using BPA in e.g., baby bottles and children's toys. In addition, the switch to BPA-free materials has begun in various parts of the food industry (baby food jars, drink bottles and other household utensils) and a switch to BPA-free cash receipts. Taken together, these changes mean that exposure to BPA has decreased. But as BPA has been phased out, a number of other bisphenols have been introduced in consumer products, such as BPF and bisphenol S (BPS). However, experimental studies in animals and cell models have shown that the replacement chemicals BPF and BPS have similar endocrine disrupting effects as BPA, and can therefore probably also be important for e.g., neurological development. Unfortunately, studies that have examined the effect of the substitute chemicals in humans are very limited and BPF have not been studied. The purpose of the present study was therefore to investigate whether exposure to these three chemicals during early pregnancy could be linked to children's cognitive development at school age. Three bisphenols (BPA, BPF, BPS) were measured in 803 women in week 10 of the pregnancy in the Swedish SELMA study and the children's cognitive ability was examined with a so-called WISC test (IQ) at seven years of age. The results were controlled for important background variables such as the mothers smoking, education, IQ, etc. and the children's sex, birth weight, prematurity etc. The results showed that prenatal exposure to BPF was associated with cognitive function in children at seven years of age. An increased exposure corresponding to the difference between the 25% lowest exposed and the 25% highest exposed mothers was linked to approximately two units lower IQ in the children. This is an effect that is not visible in an individual child but which is a significant effect at group level. "We are not really surprised by these results," says Carl-Gustaf Bornehag, professor and project manager for the SELMA study, at Karlstad University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "Experimental studies have shown that both BPF and BPS can have similar properties to BPA. Results again show that one must be careful before introducing new chemicals." "The study raises concerns," says Elin Engdahl, researcher at Uppsala University and co-author of the study. "Exposure to BPF increases because the chemical now replaces, for example, BPA in a wide range of common products and materials. I think that more responsibility should lie in proving that chemicals are safe before they are released on the market." Explore further Chemicals in consumer products during early pregnancy related to lower IQ More information: Carl-Gustaf Bornehag et al. Prenatal exposure to bisphenols and cognitive function in children at 7 years of age in the Swedish SELMA study, Environment International (2021). Journal information: Environment International Carl-Gustaf Bornehag et al. Prenatal exposure to bisphenols and cognitive function in children at 7 years of age in the Swedish SELMA study,(2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2021.106433 Provided by Karlstad University Millionaire minister Robert Jenrick has been forced to pay back more than 100 he claimed for driving between his constituency and Westminster after it emerged he took the train and claimed for both. The Communities Secretary launched the Government's 3.6billion towns fund in Newark in September 2019 - and it was later to receive millions from the scheme. But he later claimed 122.40 for a 272-mile round trip up the M1 from London, at the same time as claiming for a 159 rail ticket. The double-claim was investigated by the parliamentary watchdog Ipsa after it was raised by a constituent. A spokesman for Mr Jenrick said: 'As IPSA said, it was a genuine administrative error from his office and, when brought to his attention, it was repaid.' Mr Jenrick claimed 122.40 for a 272-mile round trip up the M1 from London, at the same time as claiming for a 159 rail ticket. The Communities Secretary launched the Government's 3.6billion towns fund in Newark in September 2019 - and it was later to receive millions from the scheme. Mr Jenrick and wife Michal in his Newark constituency It is not the first time Mr Jenrick's Nottinghamshire seat has landed him in hot water. Last April he faced accusations of breaking lockdown rules by driving 150 miles to his Grade I listed country mansion in Herefordshire from London. He claimed the property was his family home, but his website said at the time that he split his time between London and a house in Newark. Neighbours at the 1.1million Herefordshire residence insisted they rarely saw him. He also faced calls to quit unless he can offer a 'very good explanation' about a 40 mile trip to drop supplies at his parents' house in Shropshire when neighbours said they were already delivering essentials. And in October the minister faced calls for an investigation over how a town in his constituency received 25million from the Towns Fund, which was designed to help the poorest areas of Britain. The Communities Secretary confirmed he and a junior minister approved payments to towns in each other's seats but insisted it was all above-board. Newark was chosen by Mr Berry to get cash from the 3.6billion Towns Fund, which is supposed to help 101 of the worst 'left-behind areas' of England. But Newark is only the 270th most deprived area in the country, according to the Times. Mr Jenrick said there was 'nothing to see here' when he appeared on television at the time. He insisted there was a 'robust and fair' methodology behind the Government's Towns Fund and dismissed allegations that he had any involvement in Newark's selection as 'completely baseless'. Nearly half of Trump voters would leave GOP, support Trump-backed third party: survey Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A new poll has found that a plurality of Republicans would abandon the GOP and join a third party backed by former President Donald Trump if he decided to create one. A survey of 1,000 Trump voters conducted last week by Suffolk University and USA Today revealed that the former president, who received more votes than any Republican presidential nominee in U.S. history in the 2020 presidential election, remains popular among the people who supported him. When asked if they would support a hypothetical third party created by Trump over the Republican Party, 46% answered in the affirmative. By contrast, 27% of those surveyed said they would not abandon the GOP in favor of the hypothetical Trump-backed third party. Brandon Keidl, a 27-year-old Trump supporter from the key battleground state of Wisconsin, fell into the former group, explaining that Republicans dont fight enough for us and we all see Donald Trump fighting for us as hard as he can, every single day. Keidl slammed establishment Republicans, arguing that they just agree with establishment Democrats and everything, and they dont ever push back. Fifty-four percent of respondents expressed stronger loyalty to Trump than the Republican Party, while 34% said their loyalty rested with the GOP. While the prospect of a third party emerging is unlikely, the poll illustrates that Trump voters still want the former president to play a role in GOP politics going forward. This could spell trouble for the 10 House Republicans and seven Senate Republicans who voted to impeach and convict Trump for what they deemed as "inciting an insurrection" at the United States Capitol last month. With more than a year left until the 2022 midterm elections, several of the House Republicans who voted to impeach the former president are already facing pushback. Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Wash., Peter Meijer, R-Mich., Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., Tom Rice, R-S.C., and David Valadao, R-Calif., have already attracted at least one primary challenger following their decisions to vote in favor of impeachment. Eighty percent of Trump voters surveyed by Suffolk and USA Today said that they would be less likely to vote for a Republican candidate who supported the former presidents impeachment, while 6% said that a candidates support for impeachment would make them more likely to vote for that person. In January, Rasmussen released the results of its national telephone and online survey of 1,000 likely U.S. voters, which found that "53% of GOP voters say its a good idea for Trump to start a third party." However, it also found that 30% of Republicans said a third party "would be a bad idea, and 17% are not sure." Trump is scheduled to make his first public address since his term ended on Jan. 20 at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which is taking place in Florida this week. He is expected to address the future of the Republican Party at the annual gathering of grassroots conservative activists. In addition to asking Trump supporters for their thoughts about a potential third party, the Suffolk and USA Today poll asked whether they thought the party should become more loyal to Trump, even if that means losing the support of establishment Republicans. Half of those surveyed said that the Republican Party should become more loyal to Trump, while 19% believed that the party should align itself with establishment Republicans. Fifty-nine percent of Trump voters want him to run again in 2024, compared to 29% who do not. If he did run, he would receive the support of 76% of those who voted for him in the Republican primary. His support among his voters would increase to 85% support in the general election, according to the survey. Most Trump voters surveyed (73%) believe that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected. Sixty-two percent think that congressional Republicans should do their best to stand up to Biden on major policies, even if it means little gets passed, while 26% said that congressional Republicans should do their best to work with Biden on major policies, even if it means making compromises. When asked for their thoughts about impeachment, 4% of respondents said the impeachment trial made them less supportive of Trump, while 42% said it made them even more supportive of the former president. The remaining 54% said that Trumps impeachment did not affect their support of him. More than 90% of respondents rejected the premise that Trump incited an insurrection at the Capitol. While Democrats and critics of former President Trump have worked to tie Republicans and Trump supporters to the Q-Anon, most of the Trump supporters surveyed have either never heard of it (43%) or are undecided (21%). Just 4% of Trump voters expressed a favorable view of QAnon, while 31% said they had an unfavorable view of it. (TNS) It is not a coincidence that an Internet search for, say, "new cars" will result in car ads constantly popping up during your online adventures. The same probably goes for uranium ore (yes, it is available on Amazon) but we haven't tried that one.Personal information is routinely tracked, sold for big profits and exploited by digital companies and sometimes governments. Profiles of your interests and searches are compiled and used to aim targeted ads and political propaganda at what is assessed to be a receptive audience. The connectivity of the Internet means that our every online keystroke likely is being tracked; and the advent of smartphones means that now even our movements likely are being recorded.World Wide Web, indeed. And we all are caught in it to one extent or another.There is nothing inherently wrong with this; nobody is forcing you to purchase uranium ore, regardless of how many ads you see. And there are benefits, with products and information that might interest you automatically delivered to your computer screen.But consumers should be provided with tools to control where their information goes and how it is shared. The most tech savvy among us know how to protect their online privacy. The rest of us have little ability to do so and little understanding of how it works.Because of that, the Legislature should consider the Washington Privacy Act, Senate Bill 5062, which currently is in committee. The measure would give Washington residents the ability to access, transfer, correct and delete data that Big Tech companies such as Google and Facebook compile. It also would give them the right to opt out of targeted advertising and the sale of their personal data.Similar laws have been passed in Europe and some U.S. states including the enormous consumer market of California. But no such law exists in Washington, although bills have been introduced each of the past three years.Ideally, Congress will adopt a national standard for protecting consumer data and striking a balance between the needs of citizens and the needs of corporations. Several bills have been introduced in Washington, D.C., in recent years, but they have languished.A federal law would be preferable to multiple and inconsistent efforts at the state level. But with Congress demonstrating no interest in addressing something that impacts every facet of American life, states must take the lead.Aswrote editorially, SB 5062 "strikes a smart balance between industry flexibility and protecting consumers. For example, rather than allow consumers to sue companies, thereby creating a field day of class action lawsuits that ultimately reward only lawyers, it instead gives enforcement authority to the state attorney general."As the text of the bill reads: "The ability to harness and use data in positive ways is driving innovation and brings beneficial technologies to society. However, it has also created risks to privacy and freedom."A 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 81 percent of American adults believe the risks of corporations collecting data about them outweigh the benefits. An equal 81 percent said they have little or no control over the data collection.Washington lawmakers should put that power in the hands of the public. As lead sponsor Sen. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, said: "In today's era, consumer data privacy is the soul of economic, social and consumer value, and it goes to the core of our treasured constitutional rights and interests." A 28-year-old Birmingham man has been charged in a January shooting that left one person dead and another injured. Birmingham police on Wednesday announced the arrest of Jamarcus Desean McIntyre. He is charged with murder in the Jan. 14 slaying of 31-year-old Dequaris Lydel Williams and attempted murder in the wounding of a second victim. He is also charged with shooting into an occupied vehicle. It was Just before 9 p.m. that night when Birmingham police and Jefferson County sheriffs deputies responded to the Shell station at 4141 Pinson Valley Parkway on a report of two people shot. Both victims were taken by Birmingham Fire and Rescue Service to UAB Hospital where Williams was pronounced dead at 12:53 a.m. Friday. Birmingham police Sgt. Rod Mauldin said the call originated at 5315 Pinson Valley Parkway. The victims had driven themselves to the Shell to summon help. Mauldin said the preliminary investigation indicates and argument took place prior to the shooting. Authorities have not disclosed the nature of the argument or said whether the victims and the suspect knew each other. McIntyre was booked into the Jefferson County Jail on Feb. 18 on unrelated charges of first-degree assault and failure to appear in court on another felony charge. His bonds on the new cases total $240,000 but he is being held without bond for the failure to appear warrant. ROCHESTER, Minn. - College can be financially challenging for numerous University of Minnesota students. Beginning in the fall, it will be financially easier for lower-income students whose families annual income is $50,000 or less. Under a new program called Promise Plus, students whose families income is $50,000 or less will be eligible for tuition-free education. "This is something that has been kicked around and considered at the university for several years," explained University of Minnesota Rochester Chief Academic Officer Jeffrey Ratliff-Crain. "Those students who would already be receiving the pell grant, other state grants, and others, this is to close any gap between whatever the financial aid did in the beginning and what the constant tuition would be." Promise Plus is an extension of the University's U Promise scholarship program, which grants students whose families earn less than $120,000 annually a guaranteed, multi-year scholarship. While students are happy about the program, others like Kaleb Soehl wish it was available to more students. "It would be a great opportunity for everyone in every community because there are plenty of people who can't afford to go to college because of their income or their parent's income," explained Soehl. Other students like Allyssa Ludington think it's a great idea. "I'm really excited about it for incoming students," said Ludington. "I think it's a really great opportunity that could have been started earlier. It definitely helps the university be more in line where other universities are." The program will be open to students who attend all of the University of Minnesota's Campuses. There are also other tuition programs at the university in the works. Supreme Court to Consider Trump-Era Public Charge Rule That Biden May Dump The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the federal governments appeal of a lower court decision against a Trump-era public-charge rule that requires prospective immigrants to be able to support themselves financiallywhile the Biden administration is considering rescinding the rule. The case, known as U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) v. New York, court file 20-449, began when Donald Trump was president. The petition of certiorari was granted on Feb. 22. Apart from the state of New York, the other governmental respondents are Connecticut, Vermont, and New York City. Several advocacy groups, including Make the Road New York and Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc. also are respondents. New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, told The Epoch Times she was optimistic the rule would be changed. Our immigrant neighbors seeking to make a better life for themselves deserve more than living in the shadows and on the streets, James said in an emailed statement. Yet, the former administrations efforts to only allow those who meet narrow economic criteria to gain a path to citizenship is a clear violation of our laws and our values. We look forward to working with the Biden Administration to end this Trump era policy that changes the definition of public charge. Jonathan Hillel Hurwitz, counsel of record for the advocacy groups, told The Epoch Times, We will not be commenting. The public-charge principle, that is, the idea that immigrants should have to demonstrate they can get by without becoming wards of the government, has been part of the American experience for centuries, as The Epoch Times previously reported. Public-charge provisions have been part of U.S. immigration law since at least 1882. One of the earliest known public-charge laws in colonial Massachusetts was enacted in 1645. By the end of the 1600s, many American colonies screened would-be immigrants and required bonds for those believed likely to become public charges. But left-wing advocacy organizations attacked the Trump administration for formally defining the concept of the public charge, which they consider to be cruel and xenophobic, and aimed at drastically curtailing the flow of immigrants to the United States. The rule didnt affect those who already possessed green cards or who have become U.S. citizens. Asylees, as well, were exempt from the rule. The rule as presently constituted may not exist much longer and the high court case rendered moot if the Biden administration decides to change course and rescind the rule. Earlier this month, President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14012, which directs three lead agenciesthe State, Justice, and Homeland Security departmentsto review the rule and consult with the Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development departments about the effects and implications of public charge policies. Within 60 days of the order, the lead agencies are required, among other things, to recommend steps that relevant agencies should take to clearly communicate current public charge policies and proposed changes, if any, to reduce fear and confusion among impacted communities, and produce a report for the president. The Supreme Court recently granted Biden administration requests to cancel scheduled hearings on Trumps border wall and the remain in Mexico asylum policy. The current legal case, which was one of many lawsuits filed across the country against the rule, dates back to 2019. District Judge George B. Daniels of New York, a Clinton appointee, issued a nationwide injunction against the rule on Oct. 11, 2019, after determining that it was repugnant to the American Dream, unlawful, arbitrary, and capricious, and that the parties challenging it have raised at least a colorable argument that the rule may discriminate against individuals with disabilities. He wrote that the federal government failed to articulate why they are changing the public charge definition, why this new definition is needed now, or why the definition set forth in the Rulewhich has absolutely no support in the history of U.S. immigration lawis reasonable. On Dec. 2, 2019, the federal district judge denied a request by DHS to lift the injunction, pending appeal. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit refused to lift the injunction on Jan. 8, 2020. But the Supreme Court voted 54 on Jan. 27, 2020, to stay the injunction issued by Daniels and allow the public-charge rule to be enforced, pending disposition of the governments appeal in the 2nd Circuit. In an opinion concurring with the decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch used the opportunity to criticize the practice of granting nationwide injunctions, as happened in the case at hand, and express hope that courts will address the practice in the future. The real problem here is the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases before them. Whether framed as injunctions of nationwide, universal, or cosmic scope, these orders share the same basic flawthey direct how the defendant must act toward persons who are not parties to the case, Gorsuch wrote. Equitable remedies, like remedies in general, are meant to redress the injuries sustained by a particular plaintiff in a particular lawsuit. When a district court orders the government not to enforce a rule against the plaintiffs in the case before it, the court redresses the injury that gives rise to its jurisdiction in the first place. But when a court goes further than that, ordering the government to take (or not take) some action with respect to those who are strangers to the suit, it is hard to see how the court could still be acting in the judicial role of resolving cases and controversies. Injunctions like these thus raise serious questions about the scope of courts equitable powers under Article III of the Constitution, he wrote. With school openings in Detroit, Dearborn, and other districts in Michigan scheduled for March 1, the date recommended by the administration of Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, teachers and students iwill be confronted with another serious health threat in addition to COVID infection: unsafe water. A recent article posted on the Chalkbeat.org website detailed the hazards posed by water that has been sitting stagnant in schools pipes, in some cases since last March. The report points to the alarming dangers of unsafe drinking water in Michigan public schools and provides yet another example of the dangerous consequences of the drive to reopen schools. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the threat of contaminated water provides one more reason why schools should remain virtual through the end of the school year. In a glaring example of ruling class indifference to the lives and health of educators and students, Michigans state government recommends, but does not require, that school water pipes be thoroughly flushed with fresh water at the end of summer vacation, a period of about 10 weeks. Many of the schools that are proposed to reopen have sat unused for 11 months. The dangers that can be remediated by the methodical flushing of pipes include removal of bacteria, such as legionella, and lead, which can be leached from the pipes. The World Socialist Web Site spoke with Elin Betanzo, an environmental engineer who heads the consulting firm Safe Water Engineering and who played a critical role in exposing the lead-in-water poisoning in Flint. In 2015 she alerted her long-time friend, pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, to test children for lead at a time when all public officials were declaring that the water is fine. Flint residents protest unsafe water (WSWS credit) Flint is known the world over for the water crisis that began there in 2014, with the impact continuing up to the present day. For 18 months lead-contaminated water poisoned men, women and children while public officials and the media claimed the water was safe for drinking, cooking and bathing. Thirteen Flint residents officially died from Legionnaires disease; however, one study suggests that 119 deaths attributed to pneumonia during the time the city relied on the contaminated Flint River water were likely due to undiagnosed Legionnaires disease. Betanzo spoke about the dangers of reopening school buildings where the water pipes have been stagnant since last March. In Michigan, and in the entire country for that matter, there is no requirement for safe drinking water in public schools, she said. Theres no definition of what is compliant, nor are there procedures to mandate regular testing or measures to carry out methodical flushing. Reopening the schools after they have been closed for many months, with only minimal maintenance, will have serious and possibly deadly consequences. When new water isnt pumped into school pipes for weeks at a time, necessary anti-corrosive treatments dissipate, allowing bacteria to form and lead to get into the water. Lead is a dangerous neurotoxin that can attack any system in the body when ingested, even in low doses, stunting developmental growth and impacting behavior. An estimated 9,000 Flint children were poisoned by lead. Most school plumbing systems in Michigan contain some lead, Betanzo said. No amount of lead is safe; period. In addition to lead poisoning, Betanzo warned, Micro-organisms grow in stagnant water, such as legionella. The symptoms of Legionnaires disease are very similar to COVID-19 because it is contracted through inhalation and affects the lungs. Who wants this to happen to a child? It is not only the children who are impacted, but those who are 50 years old and up who are at risk, which means the teachers and school staff. Were not being pro-active on requiring safe water in the schools where children normally spend so much of their lives. In the Chalkbeat article, Betanzo is quoted as saying that [d]uring the extended shutdown, there may not be corrosion control treatment left. If a school is opening and expecting kids to be drinking the water, they should have been flushing 12 weeks prior. A recent survey of 252 Michigan school administrators found that most of the schools involved (51 percent) either do not flush their pipes or dont know whether they flush their pipes. Michigan has 587 school districts, the majority of whose plumbing systems contain lead. An educator in the Birmingham, Michigan district told the WSWS, The timing of a full face to face return in March in our district coincides with a letter sent to all families detailing the remaining high levels of legionella, especially found in the two high schools at BPS (Birmingham Public Schools). The chlorine treatment did little to reduce the legionella. At Groves and Derby, 79 and 18 taps of Legionella pneumothorax were found. This is especially concerning as this is the type that causes Legionnaires disease, a disease with symptoms similar to COVID. So kids are returning to buildings where they may be afraid to wash their hands and where there is no potable water. Not a safe combination during this pandemic, especially as new, more contagious variants continue to invade our community. Of course, the fact that teachers and children returning to Michigan schools this year will likely be exposed to unsafe water begs the question of whether they should be returning in the first place. The science says they should not. The primary study that the advocates of school reopening rely on, the Journal of American Medicines Wisconsin study, is seriously flawed in that it has no way of estimating the spread of COVID from asymptomatic carriers. More recent international studies have established that children contract the virus at the same rate as young adults, are often asymptomatic, and do spread the disease to their teachers, families and communities. Although the political establishment and media pundits cynically bemoan the harms of virtual learning, the real purpose of reopening schools during the pandemic is to warehouse children in order to free parents to return to unsafe working conditions to produce profits for corporations. The unprecedented levels of corporate debt accumulated during the pandemic and the massive stock market bubble must be paid back by the intensified exploitation of the working class. As Betanzo points out, the threat of contaminated water from pipes that have been sitting unused for almost a year is not unique to Michigan schools, but will be replicated in other states in the absence of federal regulation of water safety. Another social crime is in the making. The lack of resources expended to update or rebuild dilapidated water systems in public school buildings in Michigan and throughout the country is the predictable result of the prioritizing of profits over human lives. Given the unsafe, potentially deadly, quality of the water in schools, as well as the certainty of in-school transmission of COVID-19, it would be criminal to reopen school buildings this year. To defend themselves against the back-to-school policy, a policy correctly condemned by the British Medical Journal as social murder, teachers must have new organizations of struggle. These organizations must take the form of rank-and-file safety committees that are completely independent of the teachers unions, such as the Michigan Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which are working hand in glove with the political establishment in many US states and internationally, but must multiply and grow to give educators the unity they need to battle the considerable political and economic forces arrayed against them. Teachers, join or build a rank and file safety committee in your school to defend your students, yourselves and your communities. As part of the Hindsight Project, Pakistani American filmmaker Amman Abbasi will work on Bismallah Blues, a coming-of-age portrait of a first-generation Pakistani student who must navigate the transition to college as she and her family wrestle with contemporary Southern culture and how to maintain their own traditions in small town Arkansas. (Cammmedia.org photo) Elly Miles broke down in tears as she confirmed her long-rumoured split from Frazer Neate in December. And on Thursday, The Bachelorette star revealed she was no longer on speaking terms with her ex-boyfriend. 'Frazer and I don't talk. Once that was over, it was over and that's the way it's going to stay - we're done,' the registered nurse, 26, told Who magazine. 'We don't talk': The Bachelorette's Elly Miles has revealed she is no longer on speaking terms with her ex-boyfriend Frazer Neate after rumours he cheated on her Elly went on to reveal she was still in touch with The Bachelorette runner-up Joe Woodbury, saying they 'are really good mates'. Elly had confirmed her break-up with Frazer Neate in December. In an emotional video shared to Instagram, she wiped away tears as she revealed she'd split from the concreter and hinted at possible infidelity in their relationship. Done! 'Frazer and I don't talk... we're done,' the registered nurse, 26, told Who magazine on Thursday. Pictured: Elly and Frazer in the finale of The Bachelorette 'I honestly gave everything I had to that show and to him and so for it to not work out, it's pretty devastating,' she sobbed. 'It's a bit of a quick turnaround I guess to go from thinking you found the person you wanna be with forever to being single again. 'I know I'm gonna be fine though. I wasn't happy for a little while there, and I know from my end I gave it absolutely everything I had.' It's over! Elly broke down as she confirmed her long-rumoured split from Frazer in December Elly choked back tears as she addressed the rumours of cheating that had been reported in the media since The Bachelorette finale in early November. 'I know there's a lot of allegations towards Frazer about cheating on me and stuff. Whether it's true or not, I don't know, that's not the reason we broke up,' she said. 'He says it's not true but f**k, who knows, honestly,' she added. Elly and Frazer met on the most recent season of The Bachelorette, which concluded in November. They dated long distance for a few months before splitting up. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Lucknow, Feb 24 : The exodus from the Congress continues unabated in Uttar Pradesh. The state Congress general secretary Brahma Swaroop Sagar has now resigned from the party, alleging groupism and indiscipline. Sagar, who was given the important organisational assignment, left the party on Tuesday, the day when Priyanka Gandhi Vadra was addressing a 'Kisan Panchayat' in Mathura. Sagar was in the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) earlier and had joined the Congress ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Though he lost the elections, Sagar was given the important assignment in the party. Sources said that the party's increasing reliance on turncoats is responsible for the exodus. "This trickle will soon turn to stream as the next Assembly elections approach. Leaders now see no future in the Congress because there is no dialogue with the leadership and the functioning has become completely centralised. Priyanka Gandhi has eyes and ears only for her coterie," said a disgruntled party leader. Some of the leaders who have parted ways with the Congress in recent times, are all those who were welcomed from other parties. Qaisar Jahan, Ramakant Yadav, Savitribai Phule, R.K. Chaudhary, Jai Narain Tiwari and Virendra Singh are those who have left Congress to join the Samajwadi Party. R. Chaudhary was a cabinet minister in the Bahujan Samaj Party government before he joined the Congress. Tiwari was a minister in the Kalyan Singh government and was a member of the breakaway BSP group called Jantantrik BSP. Chaudhary told reporters that the Congress has become 'directionless' and 'delusional', and they were feeling 'suffocated' in the party. New IT unit created to steal the secrets of western pharmaceutical companies. Alarm already launched by the Southern Parliament. Seoul Intelligence: cyber-attacks from the North increased by 32%. Kim Jong-un interested only in US and European drugs. Seoul (AsiaNews / Agencies) - A new North Korean unit for online piracy recently breached Pfizer's computer system: the aim was to steal secrets related to the development of the Covid-19 vaccine. This episode was reported today by Daily NK on the basis of information obtained from a high-level source of the Kim Jong-un regime. The news confirms what Ha Tae-kyung, a member of the Intelligence Committee of the South Korean Parliament, declared on February 16 after having witnessed a briefing by the secret services. But while the Seoul parliamentarian made direct reference to a hacker attack in Pyongyang on Pfizer, the intelligence agents in the South then specified that they had only provided a general picture of the situation. They found that North Korean hacker attacks grew 32% from a year ago, including those to steal data on coronavirus vaccines, but did not name a specific pharmaceutical company among the North victims. According to the North Korean source contacted by Daily NK, it is unclear what Pyongyang's Unit 325 was able to take from Pfizer's computers, which created a coronavirus vaccine together with Germany's BioNtech. To immunize the population, Kim is interested in European and US drugs, more than Chinese and Russian ones. People all across Houston and Texas took massive hits during the historic winter storm, and farmers were no exception. The state suffered from major power outages, which in turn led to a loss of heat, food, water and lack of access to resources. Unfortunately, crops and livestock were not spared. Constant Ngouala lost 80 percent of his crop at his Plant It Forward site in Southwest Houston, per the Houston Chronicle's Emma Balter. In Needville, Jennifer Plihal and Peg Turrentine of Three Sisters Farm lost nearly 100 percent of their crop and a number of plants that had to be moved from a greenhouse after the power died. With the extended forecast of below 20 degrees, we knew there was nothing we could do to save it, said Plihal, as reported by Balter. We didnt even cover anything. REBUILDING TEXAS: Communities of color have a long road to recovery after Texas winter storm Plant It Forward president Liz Vallette said the damage they suffered is worse than when Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, as reported by Balter. But it did help them prepare. Thomas Garcia-Prats, operates Finca Tres Robles in Second Ward, an urban farm he says has "very little support or network," according to Balter. He's suffered from the loss of his entire crop before. "USDA doesnt have crop insurance for farms of our size," he said. "According to the TDA and our appraisal district, Im not even considered an agricultural operation." Stacey Roussels goats had six babies at All We Need in Needville during the winter storm. All of the goats remained in good health, but a 14-year-old sow named Mamma Pig died from the cold. The Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) is in charge of the State of Texas Agriculture Relief Fund (STAR) in times of disaster. They've currently raised $120,000 for farmers' relief, but the fund is not designed for crop or animal loss, according to Balter. VANCOUVER, BC, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - CuePath Innovation Ltd ("CuePath", or "the Company") announced today that the Company has signed a service agreement ("the Agreement") with Hero Home Care, a British Columbia-based at-home care provider for seniors and chronic health patients. The Agreement makes CuePath's Medication Adherence as a Service a standard offering for Hero Home Care's growing client population in need of a simple, effective, and affordable solution to managing complex medication regimes at home. Through this Agreement, CuePath and Hero Home Care will deploy cutting edge smart packaging technology with data analytics to serve a vulnerable population of at-home patients using their existing pharmacy blister packs. No change in behaviour is required allowing for easy adoption of this service. "This is a very timely and necessary partnership as it will allow us to more safely care for vulnerable seniors living at home throughout this pandemic", said Danny Birch, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Hero Home Care. "CuePath's easy-to-use and in-expensive smart blister packs combined with a 24/7 monitoring service will allow us to manage our clients' medications and daily routines remotely, helping keep seniors safe and healthy in their own homes. This technology will also allow us to reach seniors living in remote communities where there is a significant lack of caregivers to provide the care they need." "Our Agreement with Hero Home Care represents a Made-in-BC solution to the global challenge of supporting people through this pandemic in the safest place they can be - at home" said Ken Piaggio, CEO of CuePath Innovation. "Our CueCare Plus Medication Adherence Service has shown value to both Canadian and US-based Home Care Agencies, and we now have significant interest from a number of large players in both markets. To meet our short-term manufacturing scale-up needs, we plan to announce a Series A growth-stage financing round in Q2 2021." About CuePath CuePath is a Vancouver-based company providing real-time Medication-Adherence-as-a-Service (MAAS) to North American Home Care Agencies and their patients. CueCare Plus detects and helps resolve prescription medication adherence problems before they start, reducing the need for health care workers to provide in-person medication adherence services. CuePath's proprietary printed electronic sticker is easy for pharmacists to apply to the back of conventional prescription drug blister packaging. Along with a low-cost plug-and-play internet gateway, the CuePack reminds patients who take their medication late, at the wrong time, or who forget altogether, first electronically by our reminder alert system, and then by our CueCall in-person call. Home Care Agencies receive weekly medication adherence reports on each patient and can prioritize providing additional home care support services accordingly. www.cuepath.com About Hero Home Care Hero Home Care is a Canadian owned and operated home care business servicing communities throughout Greater Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. What started over a decade ago with two people trying to find care for their loved ones has evolved into one of Vancouver's most trusted home care agencies delivering over 1,000,000 hours of in-home care. Hero Home Care provides personalized home care solutions that can range from only a few hours a week to as many as 24 hours per day. To learn more about Hero Home Care or to arrange a free in-home Care Consult visit their website at www.herohomecare.ca or give them a call at 1-888-988-9913. Danny Birch Managing Partner Hero Home Care www.herohomecare.ca CuePath Innovation Ken Piaggio CEO SOURCE Thompson Planning Group Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Hes a living Hollywood legend with an Oscar, Golden Globes and Emmys under his belt. And Al Pacino was seen dining outdoors at celebrity hotspot Il Pastaio in Beverly Hills, California on Tuesday, alongside a younger female companion. The Godfather star, 80, smiled as he dined, wearing all black. Icon: Al Pacino was seen dining outdoors at celebrity hotspot Il Pastaio in Beverly Hills on Tuesday, alongside a younger female companion At one point he was seen speaking on the phone wearing headphones while seated at his table. The Scarface actor wore tinted wayfarer spectacles, and had his hair swept back away from his face. When he got up to leave, he put on a black N95 face mask as protection against the coronavirus pandemic. Masked up: The Godfather star, 80, was wearing all black for his lunch outing At one point: Pacino was seen speaking on the phone wearing headphones while seated at his table His dining companion wore a blue and white gingham tank top. Pacino is confirmed to star in three buzzworthy upcoming film titles. The biggest is certainly Gucci, the true crime story of how Patrizia Reggiani plotted to kill her ex-husband Maurizio Gucci, the grandson of the renowned fashion designer. In conversation: The Scarface actor wore tinted wayfarer spectacles, and had his hair swept back away from his face When he got up to leave: He put on a black N95 face mask as protection against the coronavirus pandemic In-demand actor: Pacino is confirmed to star in three buzzworthy upcoming film titles Lady Gaga is attached to play the murderess, and other creme de la creme Hollywood names are joining her including Pacino, Jared Leto, Adam Driver and Jeremy Irons. Gucci is currently in pre-production, and is expected to be ready by Thanksgiving according to its IMDb page. Al will also be appearing in historical drama Axis Sally, about an American woman who broadcast Nazi propaganda during WWII. Additionally, the octogenarian film icon will be portraying King Lear in a film adaptation of the classic Shakespeare play. At lunch: The biggest is certainly Gucci, the true crime story, which will see Pacino sharing the screen with Lady Gaga, Adam Driver and Jared Leto Pacino has also found himself in the midst of speculation about a potential appearance in the final two episodes of Marvels WandaVision series on Disney+. Recently, a video of actor Paul Bettany surfaced at Esquire.com, in which he teased that a certain character has not yet been revealed in the MCU played by an actor that he has wanted to work with all of his life. Fans have begun speculating whether this means Pacino will show up, portraying the devilish Marvel villain Mephisto. While it remains to be seen if there is any truth to the rumor, it would make sense, as Pacino has portrayed similarly satanic roles, most famously in 1997s The Devil's Advocate. Every year, Florida lawmakers gather in Tallahassee to debate state policy, amend existing laws and pass new ones, and put together a state budget. This year will be no different, though the COVID-19 pandemic will be looming large over all of these discussions. All of this gets done during a 60-day legislative session, which starts on March 2. (Well get more into important dates later.) Lawmakers, however, have been holding committee meetings and voting on measures since November. So, a view of the issues gnawing at lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis has already emerged. And the Republican majority in the Legislature will have better chances at passing its priorities, after increasing its numbers this past election cycle. Here is what you need to know, as you follow along the legislative process: Five issues to watch: COVID-19 response Florida is coming off a year defined by the coronavirus pandemic, and lawmakers will have a chance to address some of the issues the public health crisis has exposed across the state. So far, the Republican majority has rushed to shield businesses from lawsuits related to COVID-19. House Speaker Chris Sprowls has made the liability bill a top priority, along with a measure (HB 9) that would crack down on scammers who provide fraudulent information about COVID-19 vaccines. Many state lawmakers have promised to fix the states beleaguered unemployment system, which crashed amid the pandemic leaving thousands of people without access to state aid. Democrats have filed legislation to address the issue, but no leadership-backed proposals have been filed on the matter yet. DeSantis also wants state lawmakers to look at legislation that would limit local governments emergency pandemic orders. A small group of Republicans, meanwhile, is looking at whether the governors executive powers should be limited nearly a year into the public health crisis. The governors priorities When DeSantis wants to draw attention to something, he makes it known through press conferences. Story continues Since September, the governor has held three news conferences to tout three proposals: an anti-riot measure, a bill that would curb the influence of large technology companies, and an election package. The riot bill (HB 1) was DeSantis first priority. He proposed the idea in the heat of the 2020 campaign as he tried to deliver Florida to then-President Donald Trump and following police brutality protests across the nation. DeSantis has acknowledged that Black Lives Matter protests in Florida were largely peaceful and that the anti-riot bill is meant to prevent the kind of civil unrest seen in other parts of the country. Critics of the bill have said the measure is destined to pass because DeSantis, Sprowls and Senate President Wilton Simpson have prioritized it. What the final product would look like? That remains to be seen. The governor, a staunch Trump ally, is also pushing legislation that would protect candidates like Trump from being banned on social media. The proposed bill, which is still being drafted, asks the Legislature to impose penalties for social media companies whose algorithms are perceived to favor one candidate over another. It builds on SB 520 that would require platforms to give a 30-day notice to a user whose account has been disabled or suspended and explain why the user was being punished. Lastly, DeSantis has said he plans to target several issues this session: mail ballots, drop boxes, special interest groups involvement in elections and the signature-matching process. Below we delve more into the election law changes the GOP is eyeing. Election laws targeted Florida Republicans took a victory lap in the aftermath of the 2020 election. For once, the Sunshine State was not the punch line of election dysfunction jokes. Yet one of the hottest issues this legislative session will likely be changes to the states election process. DeSantis, and top Republican leaders, have acknowledged the 2020 election went smoothly. However, they want to target the use of drop boxes to collect vote-by-mail ballots and would prohibit volunteers from collecting mail-in ballots from people outside of their immediate families, or what they call ballot harvesting. The state already prohibits people getting paid to collect vote-by-mail ballots. After a record 4.8 million Floridians voted by mail in November, one bill that is moving in the Senate would add a hurdle to voting by mail in future general elections. If SB 90 becomes law, it would restrict vote-by-mail applications to one election cycle and specifically require everybody who received a mail ballot last year to re-apply in 2022. Under current state law, voters requesting a mail-in ballot receive them for two cycles of general elections. Education policy amid a pandemic Schools remain in the grips of the coronavirus pandemic since schools shut down and learning was disrupted last spring. Many struggles continue whether financial, social or academic and local school officials and education groups have high hopes that state lawmakers will prioritize those schooling issues. So far, Republican lawmakers have proposed enhancing early learning programs and continuing remote learning options without impacting district funding. But the main issue facing lawmakers is whether the state should fund districts based on actual student attendance counts or use some other formula for the next school year. This year, the Legislature set its education budget based on enrollment forecasts that did not anticipate the pandemic. Even as those projections fell short, the state did not cut funding for districts. But decreased numbers nearly 88,000 fewer students statewide have raised the possibility of budget cuts for districts. Facing a multibillion-dollar budget shortfall For the first time since the Great Recession, the Legislature is facing a budget shortfall that could force spending cuts in education, healthcare and other social programs. Floridas revenue drop wont be as bad as the Great Recession, state economists have said. But the state is facing an estimated $2.75 billion shortfall. DeSantis has proposed a rosier-than-expected state budget for the next fiscal year that avoids laying off scores of employees or dipping into state reserves. His proposed $96.6 billion budget is $4.3 billion more than the budget Florida lawmakers passed last year. It maintains, and in several cases exceeds, last years funding in key areas, including education and the environment. But DeSantis proposed budget for the 2021-22 fiscal year, which begins July 1, is advisory only. Lawmakers are the ones who ultimately write and pass the state budget. How they plan to fund education, healthcare, the environment, prisons and everything that is state government will be a must-watch this year. Five lawmakers to watch: Senate President Wilton Simpson State Senator Wilton Simpson, May 1, 2019 Senate President Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, is the leader of the Florida Senate for the 2021-22 term. Simpson, 54, played a key role in fundraising and backing Republican Senate candidates this past election cycle and helped solidify the GOPs control of the upper chamber. During his term, he will oversee the Senates redistricting efforts for congressional and state legislative districts a role that gives him a great deal of political clout. He is a multimillionaire who has built his wealth with the family business, an egg farm in Trilby and an environmental cleanup company with operations throughout the Southeast. Simpson turned his family egg farm into a multimillion-dollar operation with factory-like precision, producing tens of millions of eggs that are sold in grocery stores throughout the state, including in Publix. Simpson is a reliable big-business conservative. In 2018, he was instrumental in enacting the Legislatures gun restrictions and school safety measures after the Parkland massacre, even though his name wasnt on it. Simpson was adopted at age 6 and has made it a legislative priority to improve the states child welfare system. House Speaker Chris Sprowls Florida Rep. Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor House Speaker Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, is the leader of the 120-member Florida House of Representatives for the 2021-22 term. Sprowls, 37, led fundraising and Republican strategy in the 2020 election that allowed the GOP to make significant gains in the House. Republicans now lead the chamber 78-42. He will also oversee the Houses redistricting efforts of both congressional and state legislative districts. His district in northern Pinellas County with his home city of Palm Harbor makes him only the second House speaker from Pinellas after Rep. Peter Rudy Wallace in 1995. Sprowls, the son of a New York City police detective and an office manager, graduated from the University of South Florida and got a law degree from Stetson University, and served as an assistant state attorney for the Sixth Judicial Circuit, which covers Pinellas and Pasco counties. He said his job in the Sixth Judicial Circuit dramatically shaped the way he approaches problems: analytically, with an eye toward the long term. Senate Minority Leader Gary Farmer Sen. Gary Farmer, D-Lighthouse Point Sen. Gary Farmer, a Broward County Democrat, leads the Democratic caucus in the Florida Senate. Farmer, 56, a trial attorney who lives in Lighthouse Point, has served in the Senate since 2016, representing eastern Broward County. Farmer led the Senate Democratic campaign during the 2020 election cycle, which resulted in Democrats losing one seat in the chamber. After the Democrats losses, Farmer faces an uphill battle getting party priorities passed in the Republican-dominated chamber. Ahead of session, Farmer has called on lawmakers to fix the states unemployment system and has urged lawmakers to work across the aisle to tackle other problems caused by the pandemic. House Minority co-leaders Evan Jenne and Bobby DuBose Rep. Evan Jenne, D-Dania Beach State Reps. Evan Jenne, D-Hollywood, and Bobby DuBose, D-Fort Lauderdale, will serve as co-leaders of House Democrats, the minority party in the chamber. In 2019, they reached an unusual agreement to share power to unite the caucus. It was determined that Jenne would handle policy issues and the duties of leading the legislative caucus, while DuBose would handle the campaign arms of the party and lead Democrats 2020 election efforts. State Rep. Bobby DuBose, D-Fort Lauderdale House Democrats are going into session with fewer numbers after suffering painful losses during the 2020 election cycle. They lost three incumbents, two open seats, and a handful of races that they had deemed flippable Republican House districts, and gains made in the 2018 election were lost. Jenne, 43, and DuBose, 50, have both served as members of the Florida House since 2014. Both represent districts that include parts of Broward County. Prior to serving in the Legislature, DuBose served on the Fort Lauderdale City Commission, and rose to the post of vice mayor. Jennes family is well-known in Broward County. His dad, Ken, was a longtime politician and sheriff in the county. Orlando state Rep. Anna Eskamani Rep. Anna Eskamani prepares for session in her office at the Florida State Capitol on April 3, 2019, in Tallahassee. Orlando state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a rising star in the Florida Democratic Party, over the past year has landed in the national spotlight as she openly flirts with a possible run for Florida governor. Eskamani, 30, is the daughter of Iranian immigrants and a tough critic of DeSantis and at times, members of her own party, including Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and former state Democratic Party Chair Terrie Rizzo. She is arguably the most prominent member of the partys progressive flank, along with her close friend, state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, also an Orlando Democrat. While both are members of the minority party in the House, they have a proven ability to navigate the complexities of the GOP-dominated Legislature. Throughout the pandemic, Eskamani has been critical of the states beleaguered unemployment system. Ahead of the legislative session, she has filed legislation that would raise weekly unemployment benefits from $275 to $500. The measure is unlikely to pass or even get heard by a committee in the Republican-dominated Legislature. But you can expect her to make noise about the issue this year. Five words and phrases to know Preemption: When this term is used, it is always related to stripping the authority of local governments to regulate a specific item or issue. Preemption bills surface in Tallahassee every year. In 2020, the Legislature preempted Key Wests sunscreen ban. The year before that, DeSantis flexed his veto power on a preemption bill that would have barred local government from banning plastic straws. And this year, lawmakers are proposing a slew of new preemption bills, including ones that deal with vacation rentals, seaports, and school board salaries. Temporarily postponed: The term seems self-explanatory. But behind the scenes, when a lawmaker says a bill has been temporarily postponed or TPd it means the bill is in danger. Yes, sometimes it means the committee ran out of time and the bills hearing was postponed. But most of the time, what it really means is that there is a problem with the measure. It means the sponsor of the proposal needs to fix the issue, that there is some arm-twisting going on or that the bill is dead. Balanced budget: The Florida Constitution only requires the Legislature to pass one bill every year: a balanced budget. What does that mean? It means lawmakers are required to craft and pass a state budget that does not spend more money than the state brings in. Unlike the federal government, the state cannot have a budget deficit. The House and Senate figure out how much money each area of state government should get by looking at figures provided by state economists in March. They use those figures to balance out and craft the budget. Lobbyist: A person who is paid to try to influence the governor and members of the Legislature. They must register with the state and disclose their compensation amounts. You can find who is lobbying what and how much they are getting paid at floridalobbyist.gov. The Florida House also has a lobbying disclosure database that allows you to see who is lobbying for what when measures start moving in the Legislature. Super-majority vote: Florida requires a super-majority vote, or a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to raise taxes or state-mandated fees. That provision is relatively new. In 2018, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment that required the super-majority vote. The higher threshold means it only takes a third of members in either the state House or Senate to block any future tax increase or repeal existing exemptions. Republicans have controlled the Legislature for decades and have long pushed to cut taxes, not raise them. But in 2009, Republicans did agree to major tax hikes when struggling to balance the budget because of the Great Recession. This term may come up this year, as lawmakers try to balance a budget amid revenue shortfalls because of the pandemic. Key session dates March 2: The official start of the 2021 legislative session. On this day, the House and Senate typically hold a festive joint session in the House chamber to hear the governors State of the State address. But this year, it will be different. The Senate will stay in its chamber during the session opening and will watch DeSantis address on a big video screen. The Senate public seating gallery will be closed as a pandemic-related precaution. Sergeant at Arms for the House, Russell Hosford, and Tim Hay for the Senate, drop handkerchiefs during the sine die ceremony, Saturday, May 4, 2019 to end the annual legislative session in Tallahassee. Sine die is a Latin term that means a meeting is adjourned indefinitely or without a future date. April 30: It is the 60th and last day of the regular legislative session. It is also known as sine die. In Latin that means without day and it features a dropping-the-handkerchief ceremony in the state Capitol. The tradition entails the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms dropping handkerchiefs at the moment that both chambers agree to adjourn. In pre-pandemic years, the event has drawn large crowds. Lawmakers, lobbyists, presiding officers and the governor, everyone gathering to see the handkerchief drop. That tradition, however, was less boisterous as the pandemic was taking hold last year. January 11, 2022: If one of the issues youre watching doesnt make it this year, theres always next year! Lawmakers will be back in Tallahassee to begin the next legislative session on January 11, 2022. That means the Legislatures official business will be done in March, just in time for the 22 campaign season. How to find and contact your lawmaker So, youve done your homework and really want to tell your lawmakers how you feel about a bill. Thats understandable. Here is where you can find them. Florida House members can be found at myfloridahouse.gov/representatives. And Florida senators can be found at flsenate.gov/Senators. When you find your county, you will find your lawmaker, their office phone numbers and information about the bills they are sponsoring and the committees they sit on this year. Those links will show you the full rosters in both chambers. It shows the counties each lawmaker represents. If you dont know the names of your senator or representative, check your voter registration card for your district numbers and look them up that way on the House and Senate lists, or go to myfloridahouse.gov/FindYourRepresentative and enter your address to find a list of all your elected state and federal officials. This works for non-voters, too. During a meeting with Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) Kyrylo Shevchenko, the G7 Ambassadors to Ukraine welcomed the NBU's commitment to banking and economic reform, as well as Ukraine's fulfillment of its obligations to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). "G7 Ambassadors, in a meeting with NBU Governor Shevchenko, welcomed the NBU's commitment to helping Ukraine drive banking and economic reform, and meet its commitments to the IMF and other international financial institutions," the G7 Ambassadors to Ukraine said in a statement on Twitter on Wednesday. The diplomats said the G7 supports strong and independent NBU, which will contribute to the economic stability of Ukraine and the prosperity of all Ukrainians. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company France on Tuesday summoned Pakistan charge d'affaires to protest comments by President Arif Alvi on the new anti-radicalism bill introduced in the French Parliament. This development took place in light of the Pakistan President addressing an event on Sunday. France on Tuesday summoned Pakistan charge daffaires to protest comments by President Arif Alvi on the new anti-radicalism bill introduced in the French Parliament. Amid the ongoing faceoff between the two countries, France has asked Islamabad to adopt a constructive attitude to bilateral relations. This development took place in light of Pakistan President addressing an event on Sunday where he urged the political leadership of France not to entrench the discriminatory attitudes against Muslims into laws. Alvi further cautioned that doing so would lead to serious repercussions in the shape of hatred and conflict. The President was commenting in reference to an anti-radicalism bill passed by the French parliaments lower house. This bill received an overwhelming majority that would strengthen oversight of mosques. The French Foreign Ministry expressed surprise and disapproval over Alvis remarks. The French Ministry further clarified that the bill does not include any discriminatory provisions and rather is guided by the fundamental principles relating to the freedom of religion. Alvi said in a recently held international conference on religious freedom and minorities rights said that the French enactment was not in accordance with the Unified Nations sanction and repudiated the soul of social amicability that Europe earlier imparted to its general public. Previously tense situation in Islamabad had arisen as protesters attempted to march towards the French Embassy to protest against French President Emmanuel Macron. The Islamabad Police used to tear gas shells to prevent the mob from reaching the French Embassy. Egypt's deputy foreign minister on Tuesday criticized what he called a "polarization" in the United Nations' Human Rights Council (UNHCR). Alaa Roushdi made the remarks in an online meeting of the United Nations' top human rights body. He said that some unnamed members had used the forum to "impose controversial views and understandings, and to exchange accusations based on shadowy unverified information." Egypt's government has faced criticism for its human rights record by UN bodies and members of the council, for its detention and persecution of political dissidents, and the alleged use of torture against detainees. Human Rights Watch estimated in 2019 that there were 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt. The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Egypt third, behind China and Turkey, in detaining journalists. The country's president, Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi, maintains that it has no political prisoners and that its widespread crackdown is aimed at fighting terrorism. However, those in prison include civil society members, rights workers and political activists, many on terror charges, for breaking a ban on protests or for disseminating false news. Others remain in indefinite pretrial detentions. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) When Xi Jinping became China's top leader in 2012, he inherited a mission China had striven to achieve for generations, which is eradicating absolute poverty. The entire system was mobilized to help the rural indigent population, with more than 250,000 teams dispatched to offer on-the-ground support and over 3 million people sent to countryside as special commissioners for poverty relief. "Through eight years, under the current standard, China has eradicated extreme poverty for the nearly 100 million rural people affected," Xi said in the New Year speech that rang in 2021. BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) Poverty plagued China for thousands of years. Through generations of struggle after the founding of New China in 1949, the country had lifted 700 million out of penury by the end of 2012. By then, China still had nearly 100 million people living under the poverty line, one ninth of the world's total. About 100,000 villages were yet to be connected by paved roads; some 4,000 villages had no access to electricity; and 8.3 percent of the country's rural households eked out a living in ramshackle, grass-thatched mud huts. In November 2012, Xi Jinping became China's top leader, and he inherited a mission China had striven to achieve for generations, which is eradicating absolute poverty. The Communist Party of China (CPC) aimed to reach the goal by the end of 2020. "To achieve this goal, China has to lift 10 million people out of poverty every year," said Eduardo Regalado, senior researcher at Cuba's International Policy Research Center. "That is, 20 people every minute." Xi Jinping (R), general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the CPC Central Military Commission, visits the family of Tang Rongbin, an impoverished villager in the Luotuowan Village of Longquanguan Township, Fuping County, north China's Hebei Province. Xi made a tour to impoverished villages in Fuping County from Dec. 29 to 30, 2012. [Xinhua/Lan Hongguang] Targeted Poverty Alleviation At the end of 2012, Xi braved the ghastly winter temperatures to visit the villages of Luotuowan and Gujiatai, impoverished places set deep in the Taihang Mountains of Hebei Province. It was the first of a myriad of inspection tours dipping into the country's underdeveloped regions for Xi as the top Chinese leader. Chatting with villagers, Xi was particularly concerned with difficulties they faced in their daily lives, such as problems concerning their income, food, education and medical care. The austere living conditions were astounding. With similar hardship still haunting tens of millions of impoverished people in rural areas, Xi knew there was no time to spare. While the entire nation held its breath waiting for his answer, Xi's commitment to this seemingly insurmountable task was never in question. He knew what it was like to be hungry. "Meat would not grace our tables for months at a time," Xi once said, referring to the days when he was sent to Liangjiahe Village in northwest China's Shaanxi Province as a farmer some five decades ago. "How I wished to treat my fellow villagers to meat at least once." From a junior local official to China's top leader, Xi always held dear the wish he had made. Ensuring the rural poor improve their lot has been his motivation all along. Reviewing the whole situation, Xi determined that China had entered the most difficult stage of relieving poverty, and the root cause of every household's destitution needed to be identified before any targeted approaches could be formulated. It was during a visit to Shibadong Village in Hunan Province that he proposed a targeted approach to address poverty. "We should seek facts from truth; guidance and development must reflect the local conditions," Xi said. "This is what I mean by targeted poverty alleviation." Chinese President Xi Jinping (C), also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of Central Military Commission, talks with local villagers and cadres at Shibadong Village in Paibi Township of Huayuan County in the Tujia-Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Xiangxi, central China's Hunan Province, Nov. 3, 2013. [Xinhua/Wang Ye] In an effort to meticulously tackle impoverishment in various locations, the authorities need to have a full grasp of the conditions on the ground. Therefore, China launched an unprecedented project to compile a database of every single underprivileged citizen. In 18 months, the country had a complete nationwide register of its poor population. It was the first time in history that an all-encompassing poverty database had been compiled. "Precision poverty targeting is supporting the government in targeting the remaining poor in the last mile," said Jim Yong Kim, former president of the World Bank. 'A Soldier's Pledge' In November 2015, Xi led a conference on poverty alleviation and development, the largest of its kind ever held. The heads of 22 provincial-level regions in the central and western parts of China signed liability pledges to eradicate poverty in their purview on time, said Liu Yongfu, former director of the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development. "Xi Jinping took a liability pledge at the meeting, and said it is just like a 'soldier's pledge' and we must keep our word," Liu recalled in an interview. "Should tasks not be finished on time, the signatory would be held accountable," Xi was quoted as saying. Xi, too, had nothing to fall back on. The entire system was mobilized to help the rural indigent population, with more than 250,000 teams dispatched to offer on-the-ground support and over 3 million people sent to countryside as special commissioners for poverty relief. While they have brought about transcendental changes for those in dire need of help, 1,800 of them lost their lives in the line of duty. To uncover the root causes of underdevelopment and advise on solutions, Xi pushed on unabated with inspection tours, visiting some of the poorest places in China. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, listens to the poverty-alleviation work about relocation of residents from poor areas as he visits Huopu Village of Jiefang Township in Zhaojue County of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China's Sichuan Province, Feb. 11, 2018. [Xinhua/Xie Huanchi] Ahead of the Chinese Lunar New Year in 2018, Xi traveled 2,200 km from Beijing to Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province to review plans for the relocation of communities. Eleven out of the 17 counties in the prefecture were flagged as key locations in the state's poverty alleviation work. "Not a single ethnic group, family or person should be left behind," Xi said. Locked in rough, unforgiving mountain terrain, Atulie'er Village in Liangshan, known as the "cliff village," was emblematic of how difficult it would be for the country to fulfill its poverty-free pledge. Due to the village's isolated location, precariously perched with near-vertical cliffs both above and below, villagers had to use a series of handmade ladders to scale the 800-meter-high cliff. "I saw that children had to climb the unsteady vine ladders on the cliff with no safety measures whatsoever. It made me feel heavyhearted and concerned," Xi said. Two years later, all 344 of the cliff village's former residents left the village in the clouds and moved down to safer ground. Bidding farewell to their former houses, the villagers moved to brand-new apartments. Children resumed their study in bright classrooms, without the need to scale daunting cliffs on the way to class. The village has since seen over 100,000 visitors every year, generating substantial income for the locals. As tourism becomes a pillar industry of the local economy, penury is resigned to history. At the end of 2019, China's rural underprivileged population had fallen to 5.51 million. An end to poverty was within reach. "It is difficult to recall or identify any parallel achievement," said Guy Ryder, director-general of the International Labour Organization. Sprinting the Last Mile In early 2020, the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic dealt a heavy blow to the economy of China and the world. "For the first time in thirty years, poverty is rising," said Antonio Guterres, UN secretary-general. While most people assumed China's goal to lift all its people out of poverty by 2020 would take a back seat, Xi took a tougher path. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, delivers an important speech at a symposium on securing a decisive victory in poverty alleviation in Beijing, capital of China, March 6, 2020. [Xinhua/Ju Peng] In March 2020, Xi presided over an unusual symposium attended by officials ranging from country leaders to local officials. Xi stressed that lifting all rural residents living below the current poverty line out of poverty by 2020 was a solemn promise made by the CPC Central Committee, and it must be fulfilled on time. "There were only 300 days left, and Xi said this meeting had to be held as soon as possible for another round of deployment and mobilization," said Chen Songbai, deputy Party chief of Zhaojue County, Sichuan Province. "He had a very grave look on his face when he said it." Although fiscal revenue was at a low ebb in 2020, Xi pointed out that funding was key to achieving poverty alleviation. Instead of reducing investment, the central government's special fund for poverty reduction reached 146.1 billion yuan (about 22.4 billion U.S. dollars). There was also a one-off supplementary injection of 30 billion yuan. Xi's decision recharged the campaign and the whole society played its part. Once again, the have-nots knew that they would not be left behind under any circumstance. Over the past eight years, the rural landscape has been completely reshaped. More than 9.6 million people suffering from intractable destitution have been relocated from uninhabitable areas. All villages in the country are connected to the network of paved roads. Every rural household is connected to the power grid. More than 100,000 countryside schools have been renovated or rebuilt, providing tens of thousands of rural children with a chance to carve an alternative future. Aerial photo taken on Nov. 11, 2020 shows photovoltaic power generators in Hongni Village in Pingshun County, north China's Shanxi Province. [Xinhua/Cao Yang] Along the path to zero poverty, Xi made plans and decisions that have changed the fate of millions of Chinese families for the better. The path has been littered with bumps and holes, yet he held on to his original motivation. "Through eight years, under the current standard, China has eradicated extreme poverty for the nearly 100 million rural people affected," Xi said in the New Year speech that rang in 2021. China has ended the poverty that plagued the country for thousands of years, but it merely marks another beginning the beginning of more miracles yet to be worked, and a path toward an even brighter future. Video reporters: Rao Liwen, Wu Di, Hou Xuejing, Shen Cheng, Xue Chen, Mu Yu, Gao Bo, Han Fangfang, Tao Liang, Kong Zhangyan, Ming Dajun, Guo Xinhui, Bai Xu, Yue Dongxing, Mao Pengfei, Gao Bingnan, Du Yang, Ling Xin, Zhu Wanjun, Zhu Xiaoguang, Yang Yi (Source: Xinhua) This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here. Like so many Indigenous people in Colombia, Luis Fernando Arias suffered acutely from the armed conflict that tore his nation apart for decades. Paramilitary fighters in 2001 rolled into his community and killed his grandfather. Three years later they killed an uncle of his and threatened his father, forcing his family to flee to the capital, Bogota. He had to live with all the pain of the Indigenous people in the country, his father, Jaime Arias, said in an interview. But he wasnt scared. It gave him strength to fight. It was from that moment he wanted to fight for the rights of his people. Luis Arias rose to become senior adviser to the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia, an influential voice for Indigenous rights, peace and environmental preservation. His role effectively made him its president. Restaurants will no longer be allowed to sell pre-packaged meals through arrangements with supermarkets and other outlets, as Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley definitively closed this loophole yesterday. Rowley said this would not be allowed to continue, as it defeats the purpose of the public health regulations. Restaurants and street food vendors were among those businesses ordered to close to limit the movement of people and curb the spread of Covid-19. To continue, please log in, or sign up for a new account. We offer one free story view per month. If you register for an account, you will get two additional story views. After those three total views, we ask that you support us with a subscription. A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much! KYODO NEWS - Feb 25, 2021 - 05:57 | All, World, Coronavirus The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden said Wednesday it will deliver more than 25 million free masks to communities still lacking affordable access to the basic protection against the coronavirus pandemic. In Japan last year, the government's distribution of two washable cloth face masks per household -- which earned the nickname "Abenomask," meaning "Abe's mask," after then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe -- backfired due to the masks' poor quality and slow delivery to the public. A White House official said the masks to be distributed in the United States will be "high-quality, American-made" cloth masks. They will be delivered to over 1,300 community health centers serving people in poverty so that individuals can pick them up, and also handed out through food distribution points. Recipients will be encouraged to take an individually wrapped package of two masks for each person in their household, according to the White House. In an effort to tackle the pandemic that has killed more than half a million people in the United States, the Biden administration has continued to encourage people to "mask up." Under the administration of Biden's predecessor Donald Trump, masks became a divisive issue depending on political affiliation. Republican Trump repeatedly downplayed the threat of the pandemic and showed reluctance to wear a mask. As a result of the upcoming Democratic administration's actions, an estimated 12 to 15 million Americans will receive masks, the White House said. HOUSTON (AP) A student accused of fatally shooting 10 people at a Texas high school in 2018 will spend up to another 12 months at a state mental health facility as doctors say he remains incompetent to stand trial, his attorney said Tuesday. Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 20, has been receiving mental health treatment at the North Texas State Hospital in Vernon since early December 2019. He was initially committed for 120 days. But doctors in March 2020 determined he was still incompetent and he was ordered to stay another 12 months, said Nick Poehl, one of Pagourtzis attorneys. Were nearing the expiration of that and so thats why the hospital sent us a report indicating he still is not restored to competency. So, we just reupped for up to another 12 months, Poehl said. An order continuing Pagourtzis hospitalization was to have been signed by Judge John Ellisor on Tuesday. Poehl said he could not discuss specific details of Pagourtzis treatment due to privacy issues. But he said his clients treatment has been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. In terms of the normal resources and tools that the hospital can bring to bear for the last year or thereabouts, some of that has been curtailed. That just doesnt affect him but affects every patient there, Poehl said. The hope is as we head back toward normal, some of that will improve. The issue of Pagourtzis competency relates to his current state of mind and not his state of mind at the time of the shooting, Poehl has said. A spokesman for the Galveston County District Attorneys Office, which is prosecuting Pagourtzis, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment. Pagourtzis is charged with capital murder for the May 18, 2018, attack at Santa Fe High School, which is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Houston. Because he was 17 at the time of the attack, he is not eligible for the death penalty. His trial had been set to start in February 2020. Pagourtzis also faces federal charges in a sealed criminal case. ___ Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70 A wanted man posted photos to Facebook from inside his luxury five-star hotel room with the caption 'game over' on the same night he allegedly attacked a woman with a sledgehammer. Cops have issued a warrant for the arrest of 41-year-old Matthew Donaldson for attempted murder following the incident at the Primus Hotel in Pitt Street, Sydney's CBD, on Tuesday night. Donaldson is believed to be in the New South Wales Blue Mountains region and armed with a gun, with the public warned not to approach him but to contact Triple Zero immediately. 'Detectives from Sydney City Police Area Command are conducting inquiries to locate him and are appealing for public assistance,' NSW Police said in a statement. 'Donaldson is described as being of Caucasian appearance, approximately 182cm tall, solid build, with light brown hair. It's believed he may be in the Blue Mountains area and may be armed with a firearm.' A warrant has been issued for the arrest of Matthew Donaldson (pictured) for attempted murder after an alleged assault at a hotel in Sydney's CBD Donaldson had posted this image to his Facebook account from the inside of his hotel room in at the Primus Hotel in Sydney's CBD on Tuesday with the caption 'Game over' Donaldson's post prompted a friend to comment 'What game are you playing?' to which he replied 'Life or death, I lost' Officers raided a home at Kingswood, in Sydney's west, late on Wednesday afternoon as they continued their manhunt for Donaldson. At 9.17pm on Tuesday night, less than two hours before police arrived at the hotel to find the seriously injured woman, Donaldson posted pictures from inside the Primus Hotel room where he had checked into for one night with the caption 'Game over'. When one friend commented 'What game are you playing?', Donaldson replied 'Life or death, I lost'. Donaldson's Facebook is littered with posts about UFC and his love of video games. Emergency services had rushed to the Primus Hotel about 11pm on Tuesday to reports a woman had been seriously injured in a hotel room. The woman, a Belarus national aged in her early 30s, was treated for head lacerations by paramedics at the scene, where disturbing images showed the woman hooked up to a respirator before being stretchered into an ambulance. She was rushed to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in a critical condition but she is understood to be now in a serious but stable condition. Investigators say it was likely the pair had never met before the alleged attack, with Donaldson meeting the woman in the hotel foyer before taking her up to his room. A woman was rushed to hospital after she was allegedly assaulted with a sledgehammer in a Sydney hotel room on Tuesday night. She is pictured on a stretcher being treated by paramedics Police remained at the scene throughout Wednesday after a woman was allegedly attacked. Pictured, forensic police taking away evidence Detectives stayed at the 1930s-style hotel on Wednesday searching for clues and collecting evidence being taken away for forensic examination, with an elevator seen cordoned off with police tape. Primus Hotel is a luxury five-star hotel where rooms cost about $300 a night. Daily Mail Australia has contacted the hotel for comment. A worker at a construction site next door described the chaotic scene when she began her shift at 6:30am on Wednesday. 'Everyone was talking about it,' the traffic controller told Daily Mail Australia. 'We heard that someone had come into the hotel with a hammer and hit a woman over the head. 'There were police, news reporters and forensic investigators running in and out of the hotel and it was pretty much chaos at that time.' The young woman said guests she spoke to 'didn't hear anything last night' and were shocked to find out about the grisly incident. 'It's very scary to know that something like this can happen where you work,' the traffic controller said. The alleged assault occurred at the Primus Hotel (pictured) a five-star hotel in Sydney's CBD Detectives remained at the 1930s style hotel on Wednesday morning. Pictured is an officer at the Primus Hotel Police said the woman was found seriously injured in a hotel room. Pictured is one of the 172 rooms at the Primus Hotel 'I've never experienced a scene like this, but what do you expect when you work in the city?' A tradesman also working nearby at the same construction site on Tuesday night said he was asked by police if he had seen a man fleeing from the hotel. 'We were told it may have been a suicide and there was a standoff with police then it all changed and police asked if we had seen anyone rush out of the hotel,' he told The Daily Telegraph. Inquiries into the incident continue. Police urge anyone with information to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. LAS VEGAS, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Lee Business School Finance Department at UNLV is hosting a virtual commercial banking "Speed Dating" internship event on March 3, 2021, from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. The event format will enable all intern applicants to interview with each bank offering an internship this summer. The internships will be paid and qualify for three school credits. Valley Bank of Nevada is one of the banks participating in this event. Other banks include Bank of George, Credit One, Meadows, Nevada State, Toyota Financial Savings, and Western Alliance Bancorporation. Additional institutions may also be added. This is the third year that Valley Bank has participated. The students will be interviewed by Roger Mellies and Paul Dreschler, both of whom are SVP/Commercial Loan Officers at Valley Bank of Nevada, and each have over 30 years of banking experience. These internships will be an excellent way for students to gain practical experience and introduce themselves to potential employers. All of the participating banks have expressed their intent to use the internships to identify future full-time employees. The intern event is part of the Lee Business School Finance Department Commercial Banking Program. The Commercial Banking Program has been designed in partnership with the local banking community to develop a pipeline of trained talent for the banking industry by combining formal learning, industry experience and professional mentoring. The program's main elements are course-work specifically designed to develop banking skills, practical industry experience through a paid internship, and mentoring provided by bank executives. If you would like to participate in the event please send your resume to Darwin Hopwood at [email protected] by Thursday, February 25. Please include the "Intern Event" in the subject line of your email. Established in 2005, Valley Bank of Nevada is known for providing business and consumer banking services designed to restore the traditional values of service and quality the banking industry was built on. Dedicated to increasing the financial health and stability of communities through supporting small businesses, Valley Bank of Nevada has two valley locations, in Henderson and in North Las Vegas. The bank's philosophies are built upon the time-tested principles of service, integrity and commitment to success. Visit ValleyBankNV.com for more information. For more information, press only: Julie Goe, Marketing Director Valley Bank of Nevada 702-259-2658 [email protected] SOURCE Valley Bank of Nevada Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday mounted a blistering attack on the opposition. Replying to the debate on the Governor's address, the Chief Minister slammed the opposition for raising objections over the Governor's delay of a few minutes in coming to the Assembly for her address on February 18. "There should be respect for those occupying constitutional positions. They do not belong to one party but are above political lines. The tendency to attack such persons is a matter of concern," he said. In an obvious reference to the Samajwadi Party without taking its name, Yogi Adityanath said, "There is a new culture of wearing caps of different colours." Recalling an incident, he said at a function he once saw a two-year-old boy point towards a leader who was wearing a cap of a particular colour and saying, "Mummy, dekho wo goonda (look he is criminal)." "Caps of different colours make the Vidhan Sabha look like a drama company," he said. The Chief Minister, without taking names, also criticized the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) over its allegations of a scam in the purchase of oximeters and PPE kits. "When we probed the matter, we found that these items were purchased at a much higher rate in Delhi. When we told them (AAP), they have been quiet after that," he said. The Chief Minister then said that those who reached Parliament from Uttar Pradesh, are now ridiculing the state in Kerala. "Who is insulting UP and Amethi? Who has the time to visit Italy but not Amethi? Who is now visiting temples in UP?" he asked, even as Congress members made feeble attempts to protest. Yogi Adityanath said the Congress had turned the pandemic into a joke when it said it wanted to send 1,000 buses for migrant workers. "We checked and found that they had given registration numbers of scooters and three-wheelers. Is this not a joke on the people? If they had the buses, why did they not use them to send children from Kota?" he said. In his speech, the Chief Minister listed in detail the steps taken by his government to deal with the pandemic and also efforts made to improve the condition of farmers. High-profile and multi-million-euro cases of foreign dirty money being laundered through Irelands international financial services are likely to be the tip of an iceberg, an anti-corruption body said. In a new report, Transparency International (TI) Ireland called for the establishment of a national anti-corruption bureau, the banning of concealed investment structures and additional resources for the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau. The report, Safe Haven? Targeting the Proceeds of Foreign Corruption in Ireland, follows a number of relatively recent court cases involving the laundering of bribes and embezzled State assets through funds managed in Irish-based banks and insurance funds. These include: In summer 2015, US authorities brought proceedings to freeze between $100m and $300m of corrupt payments from Uzbekistan through funds managed by Bank of New York Mellon in Dublin. The funds were held on behalf of companies owned by Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of former Uzbek president Islam Karimov. The case is ongoing; In August 2020, the Government announced it had reached an agreement with the Nigerian government to return about 5.5m. This followed a case taken in 2014, in which the Criminal Assets Bureau obtained a proceeds of crime order to freeze US$6.5m worth of investments, managed by HSBC Life (Europe) Ltd. They were held for the benefit of Mohammed Sani Abacha the son of former Nigerian president and dictator Sani Abach; In 2014, CAB obtained a proceeds of crime order to freeze assets linked to alleged corruption on the part of the former governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand, Juthamas Siriwan. Ms Siriwan was accused of receiving kickbacks to award the Bangkok International Film Festival to a US company. The frozen funds, worth 250,000, were held in investments by HSBC Life (Europe) Ltd in the name of the former governor and her daughter. I think these cases are likely to represent the tip of an iceberg, said John McDevitt, chief executive of TI Ireland and report editor. When you consider that Ireland is a major player in international financial services, hosting 250 of the worlds leading financial services companies, with 2.8trn in net assets in funds domiciled in the country, the risk that many of these assets are the proceeds of corruption is extremely high. The report raised concerns about particular forms of investment in the country Special Purpose Vehicles (which include Section 110 companies used to avoid tax on investments) and Irelands immigrant investor Golden Visa programme (which allows wealthy foreigners to secure residency visa in return for 1m minimum investment). TI Ireland also flagged concerns about the potential use of new investment liability partnerships which do not currently have to file beneficial ownership details. It said similar schemes had been used to launder the proceeds of corruption and organised crime on an industrial scale. To continue, please log in, or sign up for a new account. We offer one free story view per month. If you register for an account, you will get two additional story views. After those three total views, we ask that you support us with a subscription. A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much! "Coral reefs are some of the most valuable ecosystems on Earth. Not only do they provide food and protection for sea life, they also play an important role in the development of new medicines to treat cancer, arthritis and other viruses and diseases," said Sea & Shoreline's President Carter Henne. "By installing mooring buoys, it will decrease the dependency on coral reefs for anchoring purposes, allowing them to flourish." "We are thrilled to partner with Sea & Shoreline and our community on this effort to protect these fragile underwater communities and ensure their growth, survival and enjoyment for years to come," said Ann Helmers, President of Friends of John Pennekamp. The Ocean Reef Conservation Association, Ocean Reef Club, Ocean Reef Community Association, and Ocean Reef's Rod & Gun Club provided funding for the project. "Ocean Reef strives to be a good neighbor to our State and National Parks; the conservation effort ensures the natural environment surrounding us remains healthy and thriving," said Jack Salisbury, the Association Chairman. "Our organization was eager to support Friends of Pennekamp's initiative to preserve this park that so greatly enhances life for all visitors and residents of the Florida Keys." Since its inception in 2015, Sea & Shoreline's unparalleled experience with scientifically validated methods of aquatic restoration has proven successful across more than 150 environmental projects. The company continues to be the industry leader in rehabilitating threatened and corrupted aquatic environments. Other current and upcoming projects include the restoration of nearly 50 acres of seagrass habitat within the Kings Bay Restoration Project in Crystal River, FL., a coral aquaculture nursery in Barbuda, creation of oyster reefs for the City of Naples, and seagrass restorations in the Indian River Lagoon and the Caloosahatchee River. ABOUT SEA & SHORELINE Sea & Shoreline, LLC is a Florida-based aquatic restoration firm with two decades of experience restoring fresh and saltwater habitats to healthy and self-sustaining ecosystems. Sea & Shoreline has completed over 150 habitat restoration projects. Services include dredging, seagrass, oyster reef, coral reef, and propeller scar restorations, living shorelines, vegetated retaining walls, wetland plantings, and seagrass mitigation banking. For more information, please visit seaandshoreline.com. About Friends of John Pennekamp The Friends of John Pennekamp and Dagny Johnson Key Largo Hammock Botanical State Park is a volunteer non-profit corporation supporting conservation and stewardship, and enhancing exceptional environmental, educational, and recreational experiences at John Pennekamp and Dagny Johnson State Parks. This is accomplished through events and activities, special work projects, outreach programs, educational activities and communications, and through fund raising activities such as memberships, donations, and grants to seek additional funds to augment the state parks' existing funding to maintain, enhance, and expand the parks' services to the public and the conservation of the natural areas of the two parks. For more information, please visit pennekampparkfirends.org. Contact: Heather Herold [email protected] (321) 626-6760 SOURCE Sea & Shoreline, LLC Related Links http://www.seaandshoreline.com/ Surge in Covid-19 cases in Zamboanga probably from new strains THE SURGE in Covid-19 cases in Zamboanga City may have been caused by new s... Incorrect dosages of coronavirus vaccine given to two residents of a Brisbane aged-care facility have prompted health authorities to reassure the public that the rollout is proceeding safely as planned. An 88-year-old man and a 94-year-old woman were given an excessive amount of the vaccine at the Holy Spirit Nursing Home at Carseldine in Brisbanes north and the doctor involved has been temporarily stood down. The residents were reportedly given up to four times the standard dose of the vaccine. Credit:File Image/ Bloomberg Nine News is reporting the pair was given four times the recommended dose and the elderly man was admitted to hospital as a precaution. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk called for national cabinet to meet as soon as possible in the wake of the incident. NASHUA, NH / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / Unified Office, a leading managed services provider offering reliable, hybrid cloud-based virtual communications and business analytics to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), announced today that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Unified Office to its 2021 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500 list in the Pioneer 250 Category. The list, released annually, recognizes the leading North American solution providers that have demonstrated innovative and forward-thinking approaches to managed services. These services help end users improve operational efficiencies and navigate the ongoing complexities of IT solutions, while maximizing their return on IT investments. With cutting-edge approaches to delivering managed services, MSPs have become an integral part of the success of businesses worldwide. They help empower organizations to leverage complex technologies, keeping a strict focus on their core business without straining their budgets. CRN's 2021 MSP 500 list identifies the market's key managed services players who are setting themselves apart with best-of-breed solutions that provide the business outcomes customers need. "We are honored to once again make CRN's MSP 500 list, this year in the Pioneer 250 category," said Ray Pasquale, Founder and CEO of Unified Office. "This award is a testament to the innovation that Unified Office brings to the marketplace. Unified Office helps channel partners offer their customers high quality, reliable VoIP services along with valuable differentiated products beyond voice, including real-time analytics, IoT, AI, and a host of other services." Unified Office's own patented Highest Quality Routing Protocol (HQRP ) OTT transmission technology eliminates dropped and clipped calls and choppy video without having to incur the expense of legacy T1 access lines and other legacy techniques. Unified Office helps channel partners digitally transform themselves and their customers so they can thrive in today's world of ever-accelerating change. "Effective MSPs enable companies to focus on their core objectives while improving the quality and reliability of their cloud computing capabilities," said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. "The solution providers on CRN's 2021 MSP 500 list deserve recognition for their innovative and forward-thinking approaches to managed services, and the ability to optimize operational efficiencies and systems to maximize return on investments." The MSP 500 list is divided into three sections: the MSP Pioneer 250, recognizing companies with business models weighted toward managed services and largely focused on the SMB market; the MSP Elite 150, recognizing large, data center-focused MSPs with a strong mix of on-premises and off-premises services; and the Managed Security 100, recognizing MSPs focused primarily on off-premises and cloud-based security services. The MSP 500 list will be featured in the February 2021 issue of CRN and online at www.CRN.com/msp500. About Unified Office Unified Office, Inc. is a leading provider of SDN-based, hybrid cloud, managed, Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and Unified Communications services to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Unified Office's Total Connect Now? service architecture was purpose-built to deliver the highest quality of experience and availability, leveraging the latest in extensible business VoIP communications technology and cloud-based infrastructure to enhance SMB workforce productivity. Their cloud-based intelligent network incorporates Unified Office's unique adaptive Highest Quality Routing Protocol (HQRP) for end-to-end service quality, and Business Continuity "shadowing" to ensure high availability operation over one or more redundant broadband links. The Unified Office Visual Performance Suite and IoT service platform provides a real-time view of changes in operational performance levels and actionable intelligence for SMBs, store managers and business owners, enabling them to readily determine real-time business performance, take immediate actions, and apply continuous operational improvements. This results in higher customer satisfaction, increased customer retention, and increased revenues and profitability. For more information visit www.unifiedoffice.com. 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 unequalled channel experience, we draw from our deep knowledge to envision innovative new solutions for ever-evolving challenges in the technology marketplace. www.thechannelcompany.com Follow The Channel Company: Twitter, LinkedIn , and Facebook. 2021. CRN is a registered trademark of The Channel Company, LLC. All rights reserved. Unified Office Contact: Cathy Clarke CNC Associates Tel: 617-527-2089 Email: cathyc@cncassocs.com The Channel Company Contact: Jennifer Hogan The Channel Company jhogan@thechannelcompany.com SOURCE: Unified Office View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631056/CRN-Names-Unified-Office-to-Its-2021-MSP-500-List-In-the-Pioneer-250-Category The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Chandigarh, Feb 24 : The Punjab Water Resources Department on Wednesday signed an agreement for the construction of powerhouses of the Shahpurkandi dam project. It was signed in the presence of Water Resources Minister Sukhbinder Singh Sarkaria and Principal Secretary Water Resources Sarvjit Singh, by OMIL JV Executive Director, Bharat Kothari, and Chief Engineer (Dams) S.K. Saluja. The construction of powerhouses of 206 MW would be commissioned at a cost of Rs 621 crore in 36 months. The electromechanical work is being executed by BHEL. On completion, the project will generate 1,042 MU power annually of Rs 415 crore. The project would help improve the irrigation system and clean power generation in the state, said Sarkaria. Almost 60 per cent work of the dam has been executed. Principal Secretary Sarvjit Singh said the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and the National Wildlife Board have accorded approval for the area falling in Jammu & Kashmir. The project would benefit 37,000 hectares in both states. The Shahpurkandi project will also allow the Ranjit Sagar Dam to run as peaking station giving additional benefit of more than Rs 100 crore annually, besides increasing tourism potential in the border districts of Punjab and in Jammu & Kashmir, said Chief Engineer Saluja. Travellers arriving in Australia from New Zealand face tighter restrictions in NSW, Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania in response to a growing COVID-19 outbreak in Auckland. At least eight cases have been linked to a cluster at a high school in Auckland that was discovered on February 14 and triggered a snap three-day lockdown in New Zealands largest city. The cluster emerged days after quarantine-free travel between Australia and New Zealand resumed. Credit:Getty Images The cluster was discovered days after quarantine-free green flights from New Zealand to Australia resumed. NSW Health is contacting travellers who have arrived on quarantine-free flights from New Zealand since Saturday, February 20, to check if they had been to any venues of concern visited by an infectious person. Washington/United Nations: The US has informed the United Nations (UN) that it will withdraw from the historic 2015 Paris climate agreement but would still take part in negotiations to protect its own interests. The formal notification to the UN comes two months after President Donald Trump announced his intention to leave the accord, fulfilling a longtime campaign promise and rejecting appeals from other world leaders to stay in the deal. But according to the terms of the pact, the US cannot fully withdraw until November 4, 2020, which would be a day after the next presidential election is held in the US. This means the next US president can still rejoin the agreement. Reacting to the US' notification, UN chief Antonio Guterres urged it to re-engage with the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The Paris climate deal aims to prevent the Earth from heating up by 2 degrees Celsius since the start of the industrial age. The US is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China. Trump drew international condemnation in June when he first announced the US intention to withdraw. He said the deal "punished" the US and would cost millions of American jobs. The State Department on Friday said that the US submitted a communication to the UN, in its capacity as a depositary for the Paris agreement, regarding the US intent to withdraw from it as soon as it is eligible to do so. As the president indicated in his June 1 announcement and subsequently, he is open to re-engaging with the agreement if the US can identify terms that are more favourable to it, its businesses, its workers, its people, and its taxpayers, it said in a statement. The US supports a balanced approach to climate policy that lowers emissions while promoting economic growth and ensuring energy security, it said. "We will continue to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions through innovation and technology breakthroughs, and work with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently and deploy renewable and other clean energy sources, given the importance of energy access and security in many nationally determined contributions," the state department said. However, the US will continue to participate in international climate change negotiations and meetings, including the 23rd Conference of the Parties (COP-23) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, to protect US interests and ensure all future policy options remain open to the administration, it said. "Such participation will include ongoing negotiations related to guidance for implementing the Paris agreement," it added. The UN spokesperson, however, said that UN Secretary- General Guterres "welcomes any effort to re-engage in the Paris Agreement by the United States". "The secretary-general received, in his capacity as Depositary of the Paris Agreement, a communication from the Permanent Representative of the US expressing the intention of the US to exercise its right to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, as soon as it is eligible to do so under the Agreement, unless it identifies suitable terms for re-engagement," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. "It is crucial that the US remains a leader on climate and sustainable development. Climate change is impacting now," Dujarric said, adding that the UN Chief looks forward to engaging with the American government and all other actors in the United States and around the world to build the sustainable future for our children and future generations. Also read: Earth's temperature likely to rise 2 degree Celsius by the end of this century, says study Paris agreement: Govt, business leaders to endorse climate accord despite Trumps withdrawal For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, in Washington on Aug. 18, 2020. (Brendon Fallon/The Epoch Times) Conservative Groups to Start New Election Transparency Initiative Two conservative groups, Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) and American Principles Project (APP), announced on Tuesday in a joint statement that they will start a new election transparency initiative to be led by Ken Cuccinelli, former deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration. Im proud to join SBA List and APP to act quickly to defeat the efforts of Democrats in Washington to federalize election laws through H.R.1 while simultaneously going on offense at the state level to rally the grassroots around meaningful reforms, Cuccinelli said in the statement. Cuccinelli joined the Heritage Foundation on Feb. 1. He was Virginias Attorney General from 2010 to 2014. Enactment of H.R.1, the For the People Act of 2021, would institutionalize on a nationwide basis controversial registration and voting procedures that were hastily enacted in six contested states in 2020. The most notable provisions of H.R.1 include nationwide online voter registration with minimal verification requirements; same-day registration; automatic voter registration unless an individual specifically requests not to be registered; legalization of ballot harvesting, and making it illegal to disclose how an individual responded when asked if they are a U.S. citizen when registering to vote. SBA Lists ability to win elections for pro-life candidates is predicated on a transparent, fair elections process, said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA List. The integrity of our electoral system was severely compromised in 2020 when pro-abortion Democratsutilizing the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuseweakened state laws that ensure free and fair elections. While we vigorously oppose efforts to federalize election laws through bills such as H.R.1, we must also rally activists in battleground states to ensure pro-abortion Democrats cannot make their control of government permanent, Dannenfelser added. SBA List is a pro-life organization with a mission to end abortion by electing pro-life national leaders and advocating for laws that save lives. President Donald Trump attended SBA Lists annual gala in 2018. US President Donald Trump (L) and Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony List, talk during the Susan B. Anthony List 11th Annual Campaign for Life Gala at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, on May 22, 2018. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images) The joint statement indicated that one of the initiatives priorities would be to oppose H.R.1 and defend filibuster and current Senate reconciliation rules to prevent Democrats agenda of passing H.R.1 and packing the Supreme Court. Simultaneously, the initiative will mobilize grassroots in key Senate battlegroundsespecially West Virginia, Arizona, and Montana, where senators have indicated they oppose the removal of the filibusterand push for state-based reform laws, primarily in swing states in 2020 and with a GOP-controlled legislature. The coalition we form will not only include national and state pro-life groups but will extend to the broader conservative and Republican-aligned groups, many of which are focused on defeating H.R.1, added Terry Schilling, President and Executive Director of APP. The APP calls itself Americas top defender of the family. Initial funding of the initiative will be $5 million, RealClearPolitics reported. Mark Tapscott contributed to this report. The entrance to Camp VI, a prison used to house detainees at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on March 5, 2013. (Bob Strong/Reuters) GOP Lawmaker Introduces Bill to Prevent Transfer of Gitmo Detainees to US Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) has introduced legislation that would prohibit the transfer or release of individuals detained at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cubawhich houses suspected and convicted terrorists, as well as others believed to pose a major security riskinto the United States. The White House has said President Joe Biden plans to close the military prison, a move long championed by groups concerned about the humane treatment of detaineessome of whom have been incarcerated for long periods without trialbut opposed by those who argue the inmates are so dangerous as to warrant extraordinary security measures. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay has long housed the most dangerous enemy combatants captured by our United States military, Duncan said in a Feb. 23 statement. It is commonsense policy that we keep these terrorists far away from American citizens and out of our judicial system. The Guantanamo Bay detention center was opened in January 2002 to hold people suspected of ties to al-Qaida and the Taliban. At its peak in 2003, it held nearly 680 prisoners; just 40 detainees remain. Nine of them have been charged or convicted by military commissions. The facilitys most notorious inmate is accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. About two dozen inmates havent been charged but are deemed too dangerous to release. Six others have previously been cleared for release by a government panel yet remain jailed with no arrangements for transfer. Bidens aides have begun a formal review, reviving the Obama-era goal of closing the controversial site, aiming to do so before Biden leaves office, the White House said in early February. Former President Barack Obama ran into intense domestic political opposition when he sought to close the facility, a notorious symbol of Americas fight against terrorism. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), the first co-sponsor of Duncans bill, decried the Biden administrations plans to close the facility. Moving some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world to U.S. soil is unacceptable and irresponsible, Mace said in a statement. Regrettably, the Biden White House has announced its plan to move forward with closing the prison at Guantanamo. Any plan to transfer these prisoners to the U.S., such as the Obama-era proposal to transfer the prisoners to the Charleston Brig, is unacceptable. These terrorists are the worst of the worst and should not be held on American soil. During his presidential campaign, Biden said he supported closing the facility, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also said so in written testimony for his Senate confirmation. Guantanamo has provided us the capability to conduct law of war detention in order to keep our enemies off the battlefield, but I believe it is time for the detention facility at Guantanamo to close, Austin said. National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne confirmed to Reuters in early February that the review of the Guantanamo facility was underway. We are undertaking an NSC process to assess the current state of play that the Biden administration has inherited from the previous administration, in line with our broader goal of closing Guantanamo, Horne told Reuters, which was the first to report about the review. The NSC will work closely with the departments of Defense, State, and Justice to make progress toward closing the GTMO facility, and also in close consultation with Congress. Obamas Guantanamo closure policy, which was opposed by Republicans, was reversed by former President Donald Trump as soon as he took office in 2017. Reuters contributed to this report. .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... There are many reasons New Mexico is the Land of Enchantment. Its abundance of UNESCO World Heritage sites is one of them. It is one very prestigious list on which our states No. 1 ranking is a good thing. This comes up because last summer my wife and I visited San Antonio, Texas, for the first time. Our initial interest for traveling there was to see the Riverwalk. But, in the end, I was more intrigued by the citys San Antonio Missions, a national historic park spread out over several miles. It includes the ruins of five Spanish churches and their fortress-like surroundings. The Alamo is one of them, but I found some of the other missions to be much more interesting. Anyway, last summer, San Antonio was all abuzz because the missions trail had just been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. ADVERTISEMENTSkip ................................................................ I had been introduced to its World Heritage program by my Daughter No. 2, who makes it a point to visit them when her travels take her near one. I also started keeping track of how many I had been to, so it was a pleasant and unexpected surprise to be able to add San Antonios new site to my count 13 in the U.S., nine elsewhere. The World Heritage designation is not easy to come by. It took San Antonio nine years to win the honor, and dignitaries from around the world attended the induction ceremonies. The program is intended to bring special attention to and encourage preservation efforts for the best of both human-built and natural places around the globe. You might call it Earths Greatest Hits. If you want to see the complete list, go to whc.unesco.org/en/list. There are 1,031 World Heritage sites around the world, including such bucket-list places as the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and Machu Picchu in Peru. All three of those places are still on my big-wish list. There are 23 World Hertiage sites in the United States. Youve probably been to some of them. They include places with familiar names like Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon, the Everglades and the Statue of Liberty. Some sites, like Yellowstone, are shared by more than one state. California has two sites. Texas finally has one. But enchanting New Mexico has three more World Heritage sites than any other U.S. state. They are Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Taos Pueblo and Chaco Culture National Historical Park. If threes not impressive enough, a fourth New Mexico site is under consideration for inclusion White Sands National Monument. You would think every New Mexican has been to these four New Mexico treasures at least once, but I know people who havent. Im sure you do, too. But if you have been, then you would likely agree that these are very special places both geographically and culturally and are worth protecting for future generations. All four offer breathtaking experiences, and people travel here from all over the world to visit them. But New Mexicans are privileged in a sense, because all four sites are easy to get to if you have a car. And entry is cheap. The farthest trip from Albuquerque would be Carlsbad Caverns, and thats just about 300 miles away. Heck, I have known frugal people who have packed a lunch, visited the caverns and returned home to Albuquerque on the same day. Its a bit of a haul, but it can be done. (A warning: Right now, the elevators at Carlsbad Caverns are out of service, and you have to hike in and out of the cave entrance. Thats the equivalent of walking on a winding ramp down and then up an 80-story building. Its doable, but you might want to check on that before heading out if that is a concern. The projected elevator reopening is the end of May). As far as the cost goes: Regular entry to the caverns is $10 for those 16 and older, kids are free; Chaco Canyon is $16 a carload or $8 for an individual; Taos Pueblo is $16 for adults, $14 for students 11 and up, and free for kids 10 and under; and White Sands is a measly $5 for those 16 and older, free for kids. Senior citizens and other discounts may also apply. Of course, each site has its own website with complete information about how to get there and what youll find: Carlsbad Caverns National Park: www.nps.gov/cave Chaco Culture National Historical Park: www.nps.gov/chcu Taos Pueblo: taospueblo.com White Sands National Monument: www.nps.gov/whsa Now that the weather is also starting to feel New Mexico enchanting and with the current low price for gasoline an in-state road trip makes more sense than ever this year (and believe it or not, the state Tourism Department has no idea that Im writing this column). When was the last time you visited them? UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to editorial page editor Dan Herrera at 823-3810 or dherrera@abqjournal.com. ST PAUL, Minn. - A second House committee approved a bill Tuesday that would legalize recreational marijuana in Minnesota. The measure will now be considered in several other committees before it is sent to the House floor. During a hearing preceding the 7-5 vote by the House Labor, Industry, Veterans and Military Affairs Finance and Policy Committee, House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler argued that Minnesota's marijuana laws are broken. "We criminalize responsible adults who use cannabis for their own purposes," Winkler said passionately. "We criminalize people who use cannabis for their health benefits. We criminalize veterans who use cannabis as an alternative to opioids, and we criminalize countless African Americans." More than a dozen witnesses testified before the committee Tuesday including labor leaders. Robert Lopez spoke for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, saying his union was in favor of the bill. He pointed out what his union sees as the pro-worker language in the measure. "UFCW supports HF 600 because it includes strong labor peace language which is good for cannabis workers and the industry," Lopez said firmly, pausing briefly before continuing. "It is no surprise that multiple other states have chosen to include labor, peace agreements for cannabis licensure. California and New Jersey and New York all require cannabis operators to sign agreements requiring labor peace." The UFCW represents cannabis workers in other states that have legalized marijuana. The union sees the fledgling industry as a potential job creator in Minnesota. Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. Sorry! This content is not available in your region At its first in-person meeting since the pandemic took off a year ago, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Executive Committee decided to cut ties with two churches whose pastors had been convicted of sexual offenses as well as two LGBT-affirming churches. But it was leaders concerns over ongoing tensions within the denomination that stirred Southern Baptists during the two-day gathering at its Nashville headquarters. Southern Baptists in large part are ready to walk into the future. But we are spending a lot of time tolerating those who would rip us apart, said SBC president and Executive Committee member J. D. Greear during remarks Monday night. Brothers, lets just call it: These things are demonic. During his presidency, Greear led the charge to stand by abuse victims in the wake of a watershed 2019 Houston Chronicle investigation, but some advocates are still disappointed that the denomination has not been more proactive in disaffiliating with pastors who mishandle abuse allegations or compiling a database of abusive leaders. Though the disfellowshipped congregations represent a tiny proportion of a denomination with over 47,000 churches, its the biggest batch to be considered no longer in friendly cooperation with the SBC since it launched new efforts to improve its response to abuse. This is the second year that the denominations repurposed credentials committee has been tasked with making recommendations about churches status in the SBC. In 2020, the committee recommended one church lose its place in the convention due to past abuse by its pastor. This year, the committee recommended four. The SBC does not make public how many churches were reported to the committee for inquiry. Antioch Baptist Church in Sevierville, Tennessee, knowingly employs as pastor a man convicted of statutory rape, and West Side Baptist Church in Sharpsville, Pennsylvania, knowingly employs as pastor a registered sex offender, the committee found. Both were disfellowshipped for violating SBC beliefs on sexual abuse. West Side Baptists website, which identifies the congregation as an independent Baptist Church, hints at its pastors past. Over 29 years ago Pastor David lived as a great sinner and rebel, the site says. But Christ Jesus is a great Savior! Today Pastor David has gone from disgrace to amazing grace and now has served the Lord Jesus Christ at West Side for 18 years. David Pearson is listed on Floridas sex-offender registry as having been convicted of sexual assault of a child in Texas in 1993. Towne View Baptist Church in Kennesaw, Georgia, and St. Matthews Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, were disfellowshipped for holding membership and leadership standards [that] affirm homosexual behavior. Because SBC churches are autonomous, the move to disfellowship means they lose their place in the conventionthey can no longer send messengers to the annual meeting to participate in denominational businessbut churches can continue to operate, maintain their leadership, and keep their buildings either independently or under other denominational networks. Towne View Baptist plans to affiliate with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Over the past year, in the midst of the pandemic and the political tension around the presidential election, SBC divides around racial and cultural issues have been put on display and overshadowed ongoing efforts to improve abuse responses. The denomination publicly debated whether critical race theory (CRT) is taking hold at its seminaries and entities, with a robust condemnation of the theory by top leaders resulting in some black pastors exit. A network of conservative leaders is gaining momentum and calling out what they see as a liberal shift among certain entity heads. A recent report called out the work of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and its president, Russell Moore, a critic of President Trump, as a significant distraction. The Executive Committee heard the report on Tuesday but opted not to take any action on the recommendations for further ERLC oversight. Outgoing president Greear, speaking to the 86-member group Monday night, offered a full-throated sermon suggesting their fighting over secondary issues and their failure to adequately address racism were hurting their gospel mission. The reality is that if we in the SBC had shown as much sorrow for the painful legacy that racism and discrimination has left in our country as we have passion to decry CRT, we probably wouldnt be in this mess, said Greear, who is completing a third year as president after the 2020 elections werent held due to COVID-19. Every lie weakens our resolve in getting the gospel to the nations, he said, and every moment I engage in a silly argument or spend time debunking untruths is a moment I am not focused on the Great Commission. Executive Committee president Ronnie Floyd likewise referenced concerns over this sound of war in the camp of Southern Baptists, saying, While we hear and see how the American culture is so out of control, my friends, our own culture within the Southern Baptist family is also out of control. After the two speeches, the Executive Committee unanimously adopted an expansion plan called Vision 2025. It would increase full-time Southern Baptist international missionaries from 3,700 to 4,200, boost the number of congregations by 5,000, and seek to reverse the decline in baptisms among teens. While the denomination has seen growth outside its Bible Belt strongholds, including new church plants led by non-Anglo pastors, its membership decline continues to accelerate. The SBC is slated to hold its annual meeting in June in Nashville. With reporting by the Associated Press. The Palestinian economy minister and government spokesman has tested positive for the novel corona-virus RAMALLAH, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 24th Feb, 2021 ) :The Palestinian economy minister and government spokesman has tested positive for the novel corona-virus. The Ministry of Economy announced late on Tuesday that Khaled al-Osaily had contracted the virus, adding that he "is in good health," without disclosing further details.??????? Palestine, so far, has recorded 199,769 corona-virus cases, including 3,000 deaths, and 184,210 recoveries. Lawyer for Alpha Lotto Limited, Ato Conduah has admonished Ghanaians to support and protect indigene businesses. According to Lawyer Conduah, it is unfortunate that Ghanaians like to blackmail and condemn indigene businesses whilst expatriates take advantage. Lawyer Conduah was speaking during a media briefing to set the records straight regarding some press statement trying to tarnish the image of Alpha Lotto. Private lotto operating company, Alpha Lotto Limited, has responded to claims that its operations are illegal and noncompliant with the National Lottery Authority (NLA)s laid-down requirements for registration and licensing. A rejoinder issued by the management of Alpha Lotto Limited indicated that its attention had been brought to a statement purported to have been issued by the Public Relations Unit of the National Lottery Authority (NLA), as published via several media platforms, to the effect that "the only operational and functional official shortcode of the National Lottery Authority (NLA) is 959 and that any other platform operating digital is fraudulent and illegal". Alpha Lotto Limited noted that it is licensed by the NLA to operate VAG 5/90 Fixed Odd Games and does not operate the shortcode 595 intended for NLA's 5/90 games. The rejoinder further stated: Alpha Lotto Limited does not operate NLA's games under Act 722 (2006). Alpha Lotto Limited, per its licence, operates its own games under Act 844 (2012), on its independent platform and marketed through shortcode 896", the company said, adding: Alpha Lotto Limited's operation is fully compliant with NLA's registration and licensing conditions" Source: Peacefmonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Irish Community Rapid Response air ambulance was tasked to more than 20 emergency incidents in Limerick during 2020, which was its first full year in operation. In addition to responding to 21 call-outs in Limerick, 46 patients from across the region were transported to University Hospital Limerick on board Helimed92. The charity-led Air Ambulance, which based in Rathcoole in North Cork, works in tandem with the National Ambulance Service to provide both paramedic support and transport to hospital for seriously ill patients. Overall, it was deployed to 490 incidents across 13 counties during 2020. New figures show July was the single busiest month, with the Air Ambulance being tasked a total of 59 times. Road traffic accidents account for the most incidents, with a total of 94 taskings throughout the year. Amongst the other incidents responded to were: cardiac arrests (81) general trauma calls (74) general medical calls (73) farming accidents (46) falls from heights (29) While Cork, Kerry and Waterford were the counties most likely to require the service, the Air Ambulance also provided support in Tipperary, Clare, Wexford, Leitrim, Kildare, Kilkenny, Offaly, Roscommon, Galway and Limerick. Commenting on the annual report, ICRR Chief Executive Micheal Sheridan said: "The statistics show the demand that exists for an air ambulance based in the south of the country. The ICRR Air Ambulance is airborne in under four minutes of being tasked by the National Ambulance Service, and is thirty minutes away from most of the areas within its catchment. Dozens of lives have been saved as a result of the hard work of the crew, and care administered in a timely manner to hundreds of others. Ireland needs this service, and this service needs the continuing support of our community fundraisers and corporate supporters. From its base, the air ambulance can put a 25,000km2 area within 30 minutes of emergency medical care. It is staffed by advanced paramedics and EMTs from the National Ambulance Service while the running costs are funding through donations and fundraising. Director of the National Ambulance Service, Martin Dunne, says the service is a great resource. The ICRR Air Ambulance has been a great addition to our emergency response capacity. Our dispatch teams have the option of either the Aer Corps service from Tullamore, or the ICRR service from North Munster. This provides much needed and timely support to our on-road response teams operating across the country. Equally, the provision of these services ensures that critically ill patients can be brought to emergency trauma centres faster, which improves the likelihood of a successful outcome. The ICRR Air Ambulance currently has two helicopters at its medical aerodrome in Rathcoole, County Cork, only one of which is operational at any one time, the other acting as a backup. A new faster helicopter with longer range capacity is due to be delivered later in the year. We already possess an additional helicopter asset, and we know that there will always be a demand for the service across the country. A priority for us in 2021 is to work with other partners to ensure everyone on the island of Ireland is within 30 minutes of an air ambulance service either provided by ICRR or the Irish Aer Corps, said Mr Sheridan. ICRR recently launched its new Further Faster campaign to help raise the 1.5 million needed this year to fund the service and its new Air Ambulance helicopter. The appeal started with its 310,000 steps challenge Marching Through March where the public and companies are asked to participate in the challenge and to fundraise. Full details are available at icrr.ie (Newser) A landmark decision in Koblenz, Germany, on Wednesday marks the first time a court outside of Syria has ruled in a case involving officials with Bashar al-Assad's regime who are accused of committing crimes against humanity. The Guardian calls it "a historic first victory for efforts worldwide to bring legal accountability for atrocities committed in Syrias long war," which has been ongoing for a decade. Eyad al-Gharib, 44, a former colonel in the Syrian intelligence service, was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison for "aiding and abetting crimes against humanity through torture and the deprivation of liberty," per the judge, as quoted by NPR. He helped transport 30 detained protesters to a prison in Damascus known as al-Khatib, or Branch 251, that employed torture. More: Gharib defected in 2012 and was given asylum in Germany in 2019. He was arrested there that same year under the principle of "universal jurisdiction"; though crimes in violation of international law were committed elsewhere, victims and defendants were in Germany, explains the AP. story continues below As one Syrian human rights lawyer puts it, this case proves "there is no safe place to flee to." CNN explains that the Commission for International Justice and Accountability has since 2012 been recruiting and training "document hunters"Syrians who are advised by former war crimes investigators and lawyers on how to spirit government documents out of the country. CIJA provided evidence in Gharib's case. Gharib went on trial along with Anwar Raslan, a more senior official who was head of investigations at al-Khatib; his trial is set to run for another 8 months. Gharib has testified against Raslan and tied him to more than 10 prisoner deaths. The Washington Post reports the court found electric shocks, beatings, severe psychological abuse, lack of food or medical care, and inhumane conditions occurred at Branch 251. One Syrian who testified called the prison "hell" and said that at one point he was kept with 87 other people in a space measuring about 230 sq. feet. Steve Kostas, legal officer for the Open Society Justice Initiative, provided his take: "This verdict is against a single individual and hes been, I think correctly, referred to as a relatively small fish. But the evidence in the case in order to prove the crime against humanity involved demonstrating the role of the entire Syrian government intelligence agencies going up to the highest levels." But the head of the Washington-based Syria Justice and Accountability Center tells the AP that putting defectors like Raslan and Gharib behind bars could actually be seen by Assad as pleasing, "because this will deter anyone else from defecting or joining the opposition or supplying information to human rights groups." Other rights groups have noted that defectors may not be aware that info provided in their asylum applications can be used against them. (Read more Syria stories.) A few hundred people marched in Barcelona on Tuesday and clashed with police briefly in the eighth night of protests against the jailing of a Spanish rapper Pablo Hasel. Tuesday's protesters began as usual by listening to rap music in a city square before marching towards a police line and throwing glass bottles, rocks and other objects at them. At least one person was injured in the clashes. Police responded, charging back at protesters and chasing then in vans. The protest was quickly dispersed. The imprisonment of Hasel for his music praising terrorist violence and insulting the Spanish monarchy has set off a powder keg of pent-up rage this week in Spain bringing thousands to the streets for different reasons. The majority march under the banner of freedom of speech, but Hasel's lyrics also tap into a debate about the role of Spain's parliamentary monarchy after financial scandals involving the royal house. There is also a minority of protesters who seem bent on violence and fighting with the police. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. BERLIN, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Sentiment of Germany's manufacturing industry "improved noticeably" as the ifo index for export expectations rose from 7.5 points in the previous month to 10.7 points in February, the ifo Institute said on Tuesday. The ifo export index that reflects German companies' export expectations for the next three months climbed to the highest level since September 2018, according to the monthly ifo survey among 2,300 German manufacturers. "China's good economic situation and an increase in U.S. production are helping German exporters," said President of the ifo Institute Clemens Fuest in a statement. Although the United States remained Germany's biggest export market last year, exports declined by 12.5 percent year-on-year, reaching 103.8 billion euros (126.2 billion U.S. dollars) in 2020, according the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) on Monday. China ranked second among Germany's biggest export markets, according to Destatis. Unlike all other major markets, German exports to China were almost unaffected and only decreased by 0.1 percent year-on-year to 95.9 billion euros. According to the German Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Association (ZVEI), China even expanded its position as the German electrical industry's biggest export market last year. With an increase of 6.5 percent to 23.3 billion euros, the Chinese market "developed more dynamically" than before the COVID-19 pandemic. The chemical industry in Germany and manufacturers of machinery and equipment also expected "significant export growth," the ifo Institute said. Automotive manufacturers in Germany similarly "put a three-month lull behind them and are once again expecting more orders from abroad." However, Germany's furniture and clothing industries would "still face difficulties" in the international market and companies expected a "significant decline in sales," the ifo Institute said. The Association of the German Furniture Industry (VDM) said last week that sales of the industry declined by 3.7 percent year-on-year to 17.2 billion euros last year and the domestic market "proved to be significantly more stable for the industry than exports." The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company This is a story about the history and future of an evil town. Cerro Gordo is a settlement of bloodstained brothels, skeletons and busted up pianos on the wind-battered southern slope of the Inyo Mountains, overlooking Death Valley. It was once the most violent town in America. Into this haunted high desert comes an interloper, an entrepreneur, an adventurer or a TikTok star, depending on who you ask. I dont have an exit plan. Dying here is the exit plan, Brent Underwood tells me from somewhere above the accidental tomb of 30 immigrant miners. Underwood and a partner bought Cerro Gordo two years ago, and despite the pandemic, snowstorms and a historic fire, he wont be leaving, maybe ever. In fact, hes still planning on opening a hotel there this summer. Long before it was a town, Mexican prospectors first explored the mountain they called Cerro Gordo, meaning fat hill, in search of silver in the 1860s, back when California was still a wilderness beset by violent men hunting for treasures. An early group was attacked by Native Americans on the hill, and three of the five prospectors were killed. It would be the first of many, many murders at Cerro Gordo. In 1863, 35 Paiute Indians were chased down the mountain into the now-parched Owens Lake by white soldiers and massacred as they tried to swim away. A silver vein was unearthed in the hills in 1865, and the town soon became the largest producer of the precious metal in California. It would make $50 million in todays money from its rich mines over its brief, fiery history. Miners sent their precious metal from the smelters down the hill on wagon trains with a 20-mule team. The ore would cross Owens Lake via steam boats and travel on to Los Angeles, which at the time was itself not much larger than the mining town. Cerro Gordo brought so much money to the city that the Los Angeles News wrote in 1872, To this city, Cerro Gordo trade is invaluable. What Los Angeles now is, is mainly due to it. It is the silver cord that binds our present existence. Should it be unfortunately severed, we would inevitably collapse. In its heyday, Cerro Gordo had 4,000 residents and 500 buildings, including seven saloons and three brothels, though it never had a church or schoolhouse. I used to watch Gunsmoke as a kid, Underwood says. My grandfather had dementia and would watch it on repeat. Now, Im here in this old mining town. There was a murder a week here and rumors that Butch Cassidy hid out in the hotel, and fortunes were gained and people died, he says. Its like living that childhood fantasy. Brent Underwood / Courtesy It was the closest real-life town to Hollywoods Wild West. Shootouts were common. No one escaped the bloodshed. Two children died after getting trapped in a steamer trunk; and when 30 immigrant miners from China were entombed in a collapsed mine shaft, no one went down to retrieve the bodies. In 1874, the LA Evening Express described it as a disagreeable burg, full of stout, warm-hearted go-ahead men who are tearing fortunes out of the bowels of the earth. By 1880, only a decade after its rowdy peak, the silver ran dry and the smelters were shuttered. A fire ravaged the saloons, brothels and main mineshaft, and the boom turned to bust. By the 1890s, Fat Hill had gone to the ghosts. The last reported gunfight in Cerro Gordo occurred on Dec. 29, 1892. French-Canadian engineer and former postmaster of the town Billy Crapo shot and killed the new postmaster Henry Boland and a friend over an election dispute as they walked by his house next to the American Hotel. A posse left Keeler, the town nine miles down the hill, the next morning to find Crapo and claim the $500 price on his head. In the 1910s, the town enjoyed a brief second boom when zinc was discovered in the hills, but by 1938, the last resident left, and Cerro Gordo sat still on the mountain, uninhabited for more than half a century. Underwood, 32, is a son of schoolteachers, born and raised in Tampa, Florida. While he has become known as a mine shaft explorer, cabin rebuilder and ghost town heir, his background is in marketing, banking and publicity stunts. In 2016, Underwood published a photo of his foot on Amazon to show how few sales it took to become a "#1 Best Seller" on the site. The stunt was widely covered in the press, and Amazon later said they were changing their algorithm because of the publication. He was running a highly rated hostel in Austin, Texas, when the opportunity arose to buy Cerro Gordo. Underwood and his business partner Jon Bier, founder of a boutique PR agency, bought the entire town for $1.4 million. The purchase included 336 acres and 22 buildings, the most historic of which was the towns ornate centerpiece, the American Hotel, said to be the oldest hotel in California east of the Sierra Nevada. CNBC reported that the new owners would likely turn the town into a retreat center for conferences, workshop events and film shoots. Some in the community (the closest town, Lone Pine, an hour down the mountain, has a population of around 2,000) were wary of a millennial outsider with a background in marketing stunts buying up the entire historic town. Social media posts at the time vilified Underwood as a trust-funder hobbyist taking over the town on a whim. Its not a get-rich-quick scheme, Im not flipping the place. Im like, here, he says. When we bought the town we were very much outsiders moving into a very proud part of the country. Everyone in Owens Valley has a history or story about Cerro Gordo. But everyone sat on the sidelines and watched. Underwood traveled to the town at the start of the pandemic, for what was intended to be a short trip, after shutdown forced the closure of the hostel in Austin. He has a knack for making headlines, and his story was told widely after a snowstorm on the mountain isolated him there for months instead of weeks. Brent Underwood, trapped in a town with only ghosts for company, a Guardian headline read. Man forced to quarantine in ghost town with gruesome past, led the New York Post. Im from Florida and Texas, Im not used to snow. I came in my little truck and got stuck, he says, Now its been 10 months and Im still standing in this cabin. Underwood says that the enforced longevity of that first stay enabled him to feel at home in the ghost town. During that time there was a change in myself. Theres no running water here, everything is different, and youre very aware of that for the first week, but then theres a hump and I started getting a little more comfortable, he says. I found all these new passions and interests that I didn't know I had. Those passions include photographing the stars, exploring dangerous long-abandoned mine shafts for treasure, searching for elusive $100,000 original Levis and becoming a YouTube and TikTok star. This post of Underwood rifling through broken bottles before finding a full bottle of whiskey has nearly 12 million views. His first video, I Spent My Life Savings On An Abandoned Ghost Town, has amassed more than 6 million views. Its so creative and fun to connect with everyone. I get to chat with everyone from all over the world about something I love, Brent says. The majority of viewers seem to be families and I love that, its sparking people to explore things with their kids and go down rabbit holes. I ask him if hes monetized his rise to social media stardom. I must have mentioned Levis a hundred times, I tried to get them to sponsor me but it didnt happen. I stood in here in Levis right now that I bought myself, he laughs. Underwood did say that he recently started adding ads to his YouTube channel. Underwood is building a museum in the town to showcase all his finds. Everything I find I add to the museum here, I take that very seriously, he says. I see it as a race against time, these mines will collapse, and everything in them will dissolve and turn to dust. He is also aware that they may collapse while he is in them, though that hasnt stopped him yet. My reminder that I'm going to die every day is the graveyard here and the miners below me, he says, its weirdly motivating. The winding mountain path, known as Yellow Grade Road, from Lone Pine to Cerro Gordo switches back and forth as it climbs the hill, cutting through stacks of rusty rock and sand. From the town its possible to see visitors arriving long before they make it up to the first cabin. These visitors have become more frequent since Underwood started documenting his adventure online. Im the only person living here full time, but we get volunteers to help with certain projects. Theres a man in the high desert with a mobile concrete plant that hes offered to bring over so we can use the sand here, rather than bring it up the mountain, Underwood says. As if getting stuck in a ghost town during a pandemic and becoming a viral hit wasnt enough, Underwoods story took another headline-grabbing turn last summer when Cerro Gordo was met again with fire and fury. On June 15, 2020, the midsummer heat warmed Death Valley to a typical 100 degrees and a fierce wind blew off Mount Inyo peak from the north. And exactly 149 years after it opened, the American Hotel in Cerro Gordo burnt to the ground. It was probably the most devastating day of my life, Underwood recalls. I couldn't even talk about it for the first few weeks. You are literally watching your life savings and hopes and dreams burn in front of you. Underwood woke at 3 a.m. to see the hotel, the ice house and Billy Crapos home all engulfed in flames, fueled by furious winds. The propane tanks in the hotel then exploded, laying waste to the plot. He believes the cause of the fire was likely electrical, with centuries-old wiring running through desert-baked wooden walls insulated with old newspaper. It was a bad combination, he says. Although he also speculated that it may have been caused by a ghost, and reported that a shadowy apparition was seen the night before in the hotel kitchen. The Lone Pine Fire Department did not reveal the conclusion of the investigation into the fire to SFGATE, though it is believed to have not ignited in the American Hotel itself, but in Crapos house next door. Underwood set up a GoFundMe the morning after the fire asking for $500,000 to rebuild the American Hotel. We really need help, the fundraiser pled. ... We have the original plans and blueprints for the hotel and what we are planning on doing with the raised funds is make it better than ever, bring it back to a version of the glory days. No, it wont be original wood, but it will be the original design and up to modern code, so people can actually stay in the American Hotel." The fundraiser also likens the hotels restoration to that of one of the wonders of the world. Many historical relics, like Machu Picchu in Peru, are partly restored and partly original, which makes visiting and celebrating history and culture easier. The GoFundMe is currently at about $86,000. What am I going to do? Go back to Austin with my tail between my legs? Underwood says. I became borderline obsessed with making sure that the American Hotel will stand here again, and that gave me a guiding light and kept me here. Brent Underwood / Courtesy I ask Underwood if, outside of ghost stories, he believes that there is a dark fate looming over people like him who try to make their home in the town. No one is going to escape death. So what are you going to do with the time you are given? Its forced me to confront the question what do I want to do? What do I want to accomplish in my life? Ive become more comfortable over these 10 months with the answer to that being Cerro Gordo. Underwood thinks about dying a lot. Though in his early 30s, he sometimes sounds like an old scarred cowboy entering his final years, reckoning with death. I ask him if the isolation welcomes those existential thoughts before their time. Maybe. When I was in Austin I'd keep busy to avoid sitting with thoughts like that, he says. Id keep busy with random stuff. Up here I don't have that. I cant just go to the store to distract myself, its a three-hour round trip. So I get or have, I don't know if its 'get' or 'have,'" he thinks for a moment, I get to sit with those thoughts. Underwood doesnt have too much time to think over the coming months, after repeatedly telling his millions of viewers and subscribers that he plans on opening the rebuilt American Hotel and the town to visitors in August 2021. Now millions of people know thats my intention, it's holding me accountable, he laughs. A cynical mind may see the last year as nothing more than a perfectly executed marketing campaign. Millions of people across the world are counting down the days to the opening of a very Instagrammable six-room hotel in the middle of nowhere. (Underwood also plans on setting up campsites and smaller cabins for visitors.) Though Underwood has mixed feelings about his town opening to outsiders. Ive grown to love Cerro Gordo and my life up here. Part of that is me being alone, he says, realizing that his goal may end all that. Im striving towards this goal to open it up to everybody and then my life will fundamentally change. So I think about that a lot. Im working towards this thing Ive made public. How will my life change this summer? He says, I will no longer be able to explode dynamite wherever I want on any given Wednesday. Underwood finds it easier to imagine dying in Cerro Gordo than a life after the ghost town. When will Cerro Gordo be done? I dont think it will ever be done. I could do this for the rest of my life. A town forever defined by greed, murder and fire maybe has a way of holding you in its grip. In the shifting sands of the high desert, youre only a hero in Cerro Gordo until you're not. As the posse made their way up the Yellow Grade Road to find murderous Billy Crapo in 1892, the newspapers reported that the fugitive would be a hard man to take. Nothing has been heard of Crapo since he disappeared from Cerro Gordo, the Inyo Independent wrote. He is as completely lost as if he had gone into a tunnel and pulled the hole in after him. BRIDGEPORT Superintendent Michael Testani assured the community Monday that a large vaccination hub at Central High School poses no threat to student health. Members of the board of education raised parents concerns at Mondays school board meeting that a recently expanded clinic at the schools gymnasium puts children at risk of contracting COVID-19. The conversation throughout the community is saying that these are the same buildings that our students are entering in, said Bobbi Brown, vice chairman of the board. And individuals who may possibly have COVID are in the same buildings that our children are in. Testani defended the decision to use the gym as a vaccination site while school is in session, reminding people of the safety measures already in place and emphasizing the value of faster vaccine distribution. City officials initially opened a COVID-19 vaccine clinic at Central High School on Wednesdays and Saturdays, when students werent in the building. As of this week, St. Vincents Medical Center is now inoculating eligible groups at the hub on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday as well, when students learn in-person but dont use the gym. Around 1,000 people a week were expected to be vaccinated at the site, officials said. Letters went out last Wednesday to Central High School families, alerting them to the increased use of the site but said that it would not impact the school day in any way, shape or form, said Testani. Were working closely with our department of public health. Were now working also with St. Vincents and Hartford Healthcare in getting the vaccine distributed throughout the community, he told the school board. He called the school gymnasium an ideal location for a vaccination site because it has convenient parking for older and disabled populations. People who are at the high school for their appointments can enter and leave the clinic from the parking lot. Once theyve completed their 15 minutes after their administration of the dose, (they) can go back out into the outdoors and never have to step foot inside a hallway or anywhere else in the building, Testani said. Physical education is held in classrooms and possibly outside this year, and the gym is sanitized at the end of each day, he said. Theres also plenty of space to spread out. In a building that could hold 2,000 students, were running roughly around 300 kids in in-person attendance at this point in the year, he said. So it is completely isolated away where any students or staff members would be anywhere remotely near the gymnasium area. Testani told school board members and those watching via video that the gym is a vaccine site only. There was some misinformation a couple of weeks ago provided that we were doing testing at the school. That would never happen in one of our buildings. In contrast to people at testing sites, those at vaccine hubs have no reason to believe they are currently sick with COVID-19. We really need to do this for our community, and also to get back to normal so our kids can get back to school, Testani said. Remote learning is not working. It has been a method to provide teaching and learning to students during a worldwide pandemic, but this should not be considered a viable option when in-person learning is what our kids need and what our kids need to get back to. Bridgeport is lagging behind in the number of folks who have been inoculated thus far compared to other towns in the state, he said. And we need to close that gap quickly in order for our folks here in Bridgeport to be completely protected from the coronavirus. Bridgeport, where 20 percent of the population is non-Hispanic white, has ranked near the bottom in terms of percentage of the population that has received a shot, according to state data. We dont want to be left behind, Testani added. As we continue to be left behind with funding and other resources, our community needs to make sure that they get the proper healthcare that they deserve. Are there no other buildings in the city but the school for vaccination? asked board member Albert Benejan. Theres no cost to us, said Testani. Were just trying to be a good partner in trying to stop the spread and get our community back to some sort of normalcy sooner than later. The importance of getting this done, I see, is more important to our children and their education than anything else. And thats why Im more than happy to be a partner in this endeavor, he said. As the Philippines adjusts to the ever-changing challenges of Covid-19 evident through a renewed rise in stay-at-home orders the nation is embracing digital at speed and scale. Since lockdown in mid-March, the population has turned to technology en masse to overcome social and economic disruptions, emphasised through a sharp spike in digital payments, transactions and engagements. Such a shift in mindset places the CIO at the centre of national change, as businesses reassess technology priorities, operational processes and business model frameworks. While digital transformation has always been on the agenda of the Filipino government and businesses, the pandemic has greatly accelerated the pace of this transformation, observed Walter So, country manager of Philippines at VMware. VMware Walter So, Country Manager of Philippines at VMware With the Filipino economy predicted to reach $28 billion GDP by 2025, forward-thinking CIOs are pressing ahead with plans to enhance digital transformation efforts in a move designed to strengthen resilience, accelerate innovation and reposition for future growth. Across verticals ranging from education to healthcare we have seen organisations of varying sizes adopt a digital-first agenda to support a sudden remote workforce during the past year, added So, when addressing Filipino technology executives during CIO Executive Forum. Organisations that have made this transformation are well placed to support the remote workforce. Strengthened digital capabilities will also enable them with the speed, agility and scalability needed to adapt and thrive in the post pandemic environment. Despite the ongoing challenges of Covid-19 both economically and socially overall technology spending across the country has remained unchanged during the past 12-18 months. According to Global Data findings, the majority of CIOs continue to allocate similar investment levels across different technology segments at pre- and post-pandemic stages. Specifically, the enterprise increased budget for digital transformation initiatives from 44 percent to 50 percent in 2020, emphasising a sizeable shift in business behaviour. But legacy infrastructure and the successful inculcation of a digital-first mindset remain key challenges for many local CIOs embarking on digitalisation, So cautioned. Since the start of the pandemic and subsequent government lockdowns Filipino CIOs have prioritised upgrading and updating organisational limitations within the context of technology, supported by a legacy refresh strategy to ensure continuity. After successfully stabilising business operations, CIOs must now catalyse a fundamental mindset shift within the organisation, So advised. The role of the CIO will become critical as technology leaders take a step back, rethink and embrace next-generation solutions to strengthen digital foundations and develop a holistic digital strategy. The key to achieving this is the ability to foster a culture of innovation that empowers the workforce with the right mindset and tools to rethink how they can continue to drive better digital experiences for employees and customers. Digital innovation in action Since launching to the market almost 40 years ago, Union Bank of the Philippines has continually embraced an innovative mindset to empower entrepreneurs with technology-based products. Fast forward to 2021 and the Pasig-based business is leading the way in driving digital banking adoption, aligned to the belief of president and CEO Edwin Bautista that no one gets left behind. Our journey towards sustainability was revitalised with our chairmans key mandate for the bank to become a technology company, recalled Dennis Omila, CIO of Union Bank of the Philippines. Since then, UnionBank has been at the forefront of digital transformation. As outlined by Omila recently ranked no.7 in the CIO50 ASEAN 2020 UnionBanks digital transformation strategy is anchored around the three core pillars of technology, process and people. By fortifying these, we are able to deliver digital assets that provide a delightful customer experience, Omila added. We continue to trailblaze digital banking in the Philippines with the goal to power the future of banking for Filipinos. With such radical transformation starting more than four years ago, UnionBank views people development as a way of future-proofing the organisation in the months and years ahead. This creates opportunities for UnionBankers to thrive on collaboration and diversity by building a culture of innovation and committing to enhancing employee experience, Omila said. We surpassed the challenge of digitise or perish and have decided to go agile to drive innovation everywhere to future-proof employees and compete in an environment of increasing complexity and disruption. Meanwhile at Philippine Airlines operating in a sector severely impacted by Covid-19 the pandemic has offered a silver lining through highlighting the need to accelerate on-going automation and digital transformation initiatives. Our drive for enhanced collaboration and efficiency was accelerated by most employees working from home, acknowledged Wilson Go, CIO of Philippine Airlines. We continued to operate and collaborate with automation also becoming more relevant as we became less reliant on paper. In addition, Go cited agile development and deployment as significant contributors in addressing ongoing business challenges created by the pandemic. This was exemplified by the One Stop Shop (OSS) approach created in collaboration with private sector partners and the Filipino government to improve passenger experience levels during testing upon arrival from overseas. Aside from making the process more orderly and efficient, test results were returned within 24-48 hours versus 96 hours or more prior to the OSS, Go added. This translates to significant expense savings and helped put our Kababayan back into the arms of their family sooner. Alongside enhancements from a testing perspective, Go and his department have also maximised the opportunity to update, upgrade, enhance and replace existing tools and applications. We intend to come out of this situation a stronger, better and more customer centric airline, he stated. Driving digital best practice In looking ahead, So of VMware outlined six best practices for Filipino organisations to prioritise when driving digitalisation in 2021 and beyond, kick-started by a lead with IT philosophy. 2021 will be a watershed year for organisations to achieve breakthrough innovations with new IT delivery models, he advised. The goal is to increase the speed of the organisation while fuelling business results without jeopardising future flexibility or resiliency. This is where cutting edge innovations come in to play to define the future business state, reshape long-term customer engagement models, expand the effectiveness of employees and even define marketplaces and industries. Secondly, a new approach to business continuity is required given current plans are generally developed for short-term disruptions with predictable outcomes and identifiable timelines. CIOs need a new approach to business continuity planning, So explained. One that can simulate multiple scenarios from a disruption perspective by capturing, integrating and analysing organisational data. Adapting to a permanent remote workforce environment also ranks as a leading action item for businesses, underpinned by strengthening governance policies, tools and practices to ensure applications, devices and networks are secure by design. Fourthly, CIOs must continue driving strategic discussions towards building organisational resilience with the aim of measuring, monitoring and reporting on the business impact of IT. The aim? To build trust from leadership, stakeholders and employees. Adopt a people-first approach, So added. Filipino businesses must continue to focus on the mental health of employees with empathy, frequent communication and staff surveys. For IT staff, setting the right expectations for timelines on delivery and support will be crucial in the months ahead. Finally, So advocated the importance of businesses embracing the hybrid workforce in recognition that employees working in both the office and via remote teams will become the new norm. Filipino CIOs need to understand how this will shape the future and while cost reduction is a priority, decisions should be made according to overall business impacts, he summarised. Approximately, 17% of marketers use pay-per-click (PPC) ads for lead generations, and by current projections that percentage is growing. In fact, search engine advertising is expected to reach $132 billion by 2022. DesignRush, a B2B marketplace connecting brands with agencies, ranked the top agencies that offer PPC and broader paid media expertise to help businesses increase lead conversion rates. The top-ranking PPC agencies of February 2021 are: 1. Ignite Visibility ignitevisibility.com Launched in 2013, Ignite Visibility is a full-service digital marketing agency based in San Diego. Ignite Visibility offers a variety of digital marketing services including SEO, paid media, social media and email marketing, CRO, Amazon marketing, digital PR, creative services, website development and design. 2. Tillison Consulting tillison.co.uk Tillison Consulting is a multi-faceted digital marketing agency founded in 2007. Specializing in SEO, PPC, digital marketing strategies, training and social media, Tillison Consulting aids their clients to improve businesses on a local, national and international scale. 3. ProStrategix Consulting prostrategix.com ProStrategix Consulting is a New York-based consulting firm that helps small businesses market their business. Backed by the expert-level team, ProStrategix Consulting provides brand strategies, brand messaging and implementation services with the goal of getting practical results. 4. DYNAM IDEAS - dynamideas.com Expertise: PPC, Advertising Agency Services, Web Design & Development and more 5. Touchline Marketing - touchlinemarketing.com Expertise: PPC, SEO, Digital Marketing and more 6. TechBear.com - techbear.com Expertise: PPC, SEO, Web Design & Development and more 7. Manush Digitech - manushdigitech.com Expertise: PPC, SEO, Social Media Marketing and more 8. E29 Marketing - e29marketing.com Expertise: PPC, Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing and more 9. B-Young Social Media Co. - b-young.me Expertise: PPC, Digital Marketing, Inbound Marketing and more 10. Eco York - ecoyork.com Expertise: PPC, SEO, Web Design & Development and more 11. Tulumi - tulumi.com Expertise: PPC, SEO, eCommerce Marketing and more 12. onePRgroup - oneprgroup.com Expertise: PPC, SEO, PR and more 13. Ten Thousand Foot View - tenthousandfootview.com Expertise: PPC, SEO, eCommerce Marketing and more 14. Eviblu - eviblu.it Expertise: PPC, SEO, Inbound Marketing and more 15. White Rabbit - whiterabbit.nz Expertise: PPC, SEO, Content Marketing, Email Marketing and more 16. Lifted Websites - liftedwebsites.com Expertise: PPC, SEO, Web Design and more 17. Allinclusive. - new.allinclusive.agency Expertise: PPC, SEO, Creative Agency Services and more 18. Promodo - promodo.com Expertise: PPC, SEO, eCommerce Marketing and more 19. BoTree Digital - botreedigital.com Expertise: PPC, Social Media Marketing, Web Design & Development and more 20. GoDaddy Dave Premier Marketing Agency - godaddydave.com Expertise: PPC, PR, Web Design & Development and more Brands can explore the top-ranking PPC agenncies by location, size, average hourly rate and portfolio on DesignRush. About DesignRush: DesignRush.com is a B2B marketplace connecting brands with agencies. DesignRush features the top agencies around the world, including the best Digital Agencies, Logo Design, Branding, Digital Marketing, Website Design, eCommerce Web Design Companies and more. Denton, TX (76205) Today Scattered thunderstorms. High near 75F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Locally heavier rainfall possible.. Tonight Showers and thundershowers this evening will give way to steady rain overnight. Low 64F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected. Locally heavier rainfall possible. Profile: Henny Selig, Solution Owner at Signavio Women are underrepresented in the tech sector myth or reality? Three years ago, we launched a diversity series aimed at bringing the most inspirational and powerful women in the tech scene to your attention. Today, wed like you to meet Henny Selig, Solution Owner at Signavio. A research study by The National Center for Women & Information Technology showed that gender diversity has specific benefits in technology settings, which could explain why tech companies have started to invest in initiatives that aim to boost the number of female applicants, recruit them in a more effective way, retain them for longer, and give them the opportunity to advance. But is it enough? Three years ago, we launched a diversity series aimed at bringing the most inspirational and powerful women in the tech scene to your attention. Today, wed like you to meet Henny Selig, Solution Owner at Signavio. Todays Woman in Tech: Henny Selig, Solution Owner at Signavio Henny Selig is Solution Owner at Signavio. She makes sure that customers can implement Signavios software products as seamlessly as possible. Together with her team, she creates ready-made software content and partner integrations. This is a new and strongly growing area at Signavio that Henny is currently building up. Previously, she worked as a technical consultant for Signavio and SAP. She holds an M.Sc. Data Science degree from the universities KTH in Stockholm, Sweden and UNS in Nice, France. When did you become interested in technology? Already at school I noticed that I like STEM subjects. I was fortunate to be accepted into a program at Femtec, which aims to get young women interested in technology. This helped me to overcome my own prejudices against STEM courses. The fact that I decided to study computer science only came in the last year of school. With the realization that our world increasingly consists of software, my interest grew immensely. I discovered how diverse and exciting the field is. I first did a dual bachelors degree in business information technology at SAP. That gave me the opportunity to work in various departments of a software company. There I learned that there is much more to successful software than just programming. After a few years as an SAP consultant, I decided in my mid-20s to pursue further education in other European countries with a Masters degree in Data Science. This path led me to my current employer Signavio. After two years in technical consulting, with a lot of customer contact and travel time, I can now bring my engineering experience to Signavio. We are currently building up a new division that brings the engineering and customer perspective closer together. This is exactly where I move in my world: customer perspective and technical expertise. Did you receive support from your family and friends? Do you have a role model? In Berlin, there is an initiative that regularly invites successful women from tech, start-ups, and other fields to talks in order to create role models for other women. There are many negative examples that show that homogeneous tech teams do not represent the totality of people in their developed products. In this context, I was particularly inspired by the conversation with Obi Felten, the chief strategist of Google X. But I also enjoy learning from everyday encounters. There are colleagues from whom I learn communication methods, workshop skills, or their way of analysing problems. I was also lucky to always have excellent colleagues and superiors. Feedback is one of the most valuable forms of support for me. A day in Hennys life I am Solution Owner at Signavio, which means I make sure that our customers achieve the greatest possible success with Signavios software. At the beginning of 2019, we introduced the Solution Engineering area at my suggestion. Signavio offers business software that customers can use individually to optimize their own processes. As a consultant, I have often solved similar problems with our products at different customers. We use these overlaps to develop solutions that allow customers to implement our software much faster. My working day is very diverse. I hardly do any programming myself, but meanwhile I organise a team and their projects. This includes prioritizing topics, defining internal processes, managing expectations, and responsibilities, as well as building the team and communicating with customers and partners. In the companies mentioned, I was always one of the first to work with new technology in the customer environment. Parallel to my Masters studies I founded a small start-up. The basic idea was that secure and non-traceable communication on the Internet requires some expertise, which not everyone has. Especially journalists, activists or lawyers have to communicate with their clients in a trustworthy way and ensure informants, although they are rarely IT experts. Together with a fellow student, we have developed a device that handles the encryption of data and communication without requiring any further knowledge. We were the winners of a start-up grant at the TU Berlin. After a few months and a working prototype, we decided to abandon the project for the time being for personal reasons. But I wouldnt want to miss this experience, because I learned a lot from it. Why arent there more women in tech? Unfortunately I havent found the reason for this yet but more role models and mentors would certainly help. I am convinced that everyone can do something, men as well as women, to make it easier for women in the tech industry. I am thinking, for example, of obvious disrespect for female managers, engineers, or other Women in Tech. I know from conversations with colleagues that many men also feel uncomfortable when they witness sexist comments, but often feel they should not interfere. Recommendations for action that are as concrete as possible help the awkward witnesses in these situations, such as a simple questioning. Everyone should feel obliged to react here, regardless of gender. Would our world be different if more women worked in STEM? Technical innovations such as the Internet and artificial intelligence already affect each of us today, more than we realize. These technologies can lead to unprecedented justice in the world if we use them properly. But they also carry great risks, for example when data protection is undermined or AI delivers distorted results. There are many negative examples that show that homogeneous tech teams do not represent the totality of people in their developed products. I am thinking, for example, of the development of safety features in cars that were designed for the average European man, or Google Photos, which originally had problems correctly recognising people with dark skin colour. Diversified teams achieve better results, and success is often more sustainable (economically and environmentally). Even if we can get more women to work in tech, the challenge remains to keep them there. Most of the women in my environment, who started their careers in very technical professions, have moved into interface areas such as product management or project management in less than ten years (as I did). These areas are important and the positions are challenging, but it means that well-trained experts are lacking elsewhere. Lets hope that this development will increasingly extend to other diversity areas, such as gender and skin color. I hope that the diversity debate will soon be history! While we are making progress in the number of female STEM students and in many other areas, there is always news that makes me sad. These range from the low proportion of women in start-ups to the reports in recent years about women-unfriendly corporate cultures in Silicon Valley. But I remain optimistic. Examples like Sheryl Sandberg or Marissa Mayer inspire many young women and men. I now see cultural diversity everywhere: in most software companies, people from all over the world work together. Lets hope that this development will increasingly extend to other diversity areas, such as gender and skin color. Did someone ever try to stop you from learning and advancing in your professional life? There is no path without stones and that would be boring. Since I have very high quality standards for my work, I often get in my own way. But the day has only 24 hours, so you have to learn to decide which stones to avoid and which to build something new from. Prejudices against women in IT are still present. This starts with the reaction to the choice of studies (Why computer science? There are only nerds there.), affects professors at universities (No womens teams, please, Ive had bad experiences with that), and continues in everyday professional life (Oh, youre not the assistant?). This has spurred me on to constantly prove that I am good at what I do. Through this drive I was often better than others. I can imagine that many women in the tech industry feel the same way. It took me a few years to understand that we women dont have to be better or worse, and certainly not the same as men. We should learn, be proud of who we are and what we achieve. What advice (and tips) would you give to women who want a tech career? I know many great people in tech, as well as many organizations and volunteers who want to help women get started. I can only advise all women to accept this support and pass it on to the next generation after a successful start. More Women in Tech: For even more Women in Tech, click here OLNEY, Ill. (WTHI) - Class in the welding building at Richland County high school was a little loud Tuesday morning. The sounds of MIG welders were replaced with livestock. FFA member Dane Stever says, "It really looked like something I wanted to be a part of. It's definitely opened up a lot of opportunities and new experiences and i've got to meet a lot of new people." That's Dane Stever with his friends Lucy the cat and Richard the chicken. Stever has been in FFA for a few years now. Tuesday he introduced his friends to the youngsters of Richland County. Stever says, "It's been really good to get to see all the kids and kind of teach them about some of these animals." Illinois is in the top ten of agriculture-producing states in the country according to the USDA. The USDA says the agriculture industry has been on the rise since the 1990s. FFA member Jenna Bare says, "Agriculture is definitely something that makes the world go round. People need to be aware of how much agriculture does help society." It's serious business. But Tuesday morning wasn't so serious. Kids got the chance to meet animals from the farm. All in hopes that the experience will spark a passion in the industry with the youth. Stever says, "It was definitely interesting to be able to explain what they like, what they do, and just what they are." For more information on FFA: Click Here In fact, there is a caricature, a junta, an anti-democratic, and an anti-popular police state regime in Armenia. Today [PM] Nikol Pashinyan had organized a "police rally" in the center of Yerevan. In addition to the fact that it is a disgrace in itself, it was also a confession-demonstration of the self-destruction of Pashinyan and his "[My] step team." The thing is that in the past, Nikol Pashinyan and his "step members" used to talk about the large number of police officers, the danger of turning Armenia into a police state, and so on, in the most scurrilous ways, whereas Nikol Pashinyan himself turned Armenia into a ruined, failed country where he still remains in power only with the help of the police-state regime. Analyst Armen Hakobyan wrote about this on Yerevan.Today website. Moreover, Pashinyan himself, as we see, surrounds the "walkway" with several thousand policemen to walk 100-150 meters in the center of the capital. By the way, in the pastthat is, at the time when Nikol Pashinyan was an oppositionist and shouted about the police statehe and others like him were actively accompanied by the ambassadors of the United States, Great Britain, the representatives of the EU, the CoE [(Council of Europe)]; in general, organizations representing "international human rights." They are stubbornly silent now. They are silent like a courtesan. Yes, like a courtesan, not a partisan. What's really going on? First of all, it should be noted that since March 2020, the country was under a state of "emergency" for half a year, as if to fight the [corona]virus. In fact, on September 27, 2020, the [Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh)] war broke out and martial law was declared. On November 9, the war ended with Nikol Pashinyan's capitulation act secretly signed behind the people., whereas the martial law continues for the fourth month already. On what grounds? None. The government says that you know the [army] General Staff wants that, as if there is still a danger of resumption of hostilities. However, let us remind both our government and the ambassadors of the bastions of democracy that, for example, in Georgia, during the 2008 hostilities, martial law was imposed for only 15 days, and in Ukraine, martial law was maintained for only 30 days during all that time. And the only reason, in my opinion, is that Nikol Pashinyan thinks that under martial law, being surrounded by police, he will extend his rule for still some time, perhaps fulfilling some of his commitments assumed before the Turkish-Azerbaijani tandem and to complete the absolute destruction of Armenia. What is noteworthy? There is unprecedented police boundlessness in Armenia, absurd and unfounded "martial law," persecution of opposition figures, active citizens, and public figures is being carried out on the orders of the government on trumped-up charges. On Nikol Pashinyans direct instruction, the police use violence against demonstrators in most brutal manners, Andranik Kocharyan, a senior representative of the government, disrespectfully threatens to shoot peaceful demonstrations by people, they are detainingunder the fight against fake [social media accounts]analysts, arrest a media manager, open a [criminal] case against the prime ministerial candidate of the opposition, and constantly threaten by the lips of various-caliber figures of the government. All this happens almost every day, after the end of the war, there is no political solution; power is kept only by police solutions. And the once most attentive US embassy ever, the representatives of the European Union and the Council of Europe are strangely silent. They don't even make a noise. Why? That is, we can safely assume that in the past they were overactive not because they are advocates of democratic approaches, freedoms, human rights, their countries, and Armenia a member of the Council of Europe, but because they needed it that way to impose something on todays/read former/authorities. Or we can assume that the ambassadors are additionally funded by our hostile countries in order not to hinder the Nikol state, to prolong it as much as possible, to destroy Armenia and the people. Maybe their silence is concrete silver, perhaps reflected in their bank accounts? Otherwise, if it is neither one case nor the other, then how to explain the ambassadors' silence towards this number of injustices? By the way, if I am not mistaken, it is in the functions of the Council of Europe to monitor and respond if a state of martial law is maintained in a member state after the cessation of hostilities, effectively restricting civil rights and freedoms. In our country, I repeat, it is maintained for almost 4 months. And, you ask, where is that reaction? No, it's not that the hope is on their talk. But who are they after this silence of theirs? Armen Hakobyan Rishi Sunak will extend the stamp duty holiday until the end of June to boost the housing market, it was reported last night. Last July the Chancellor exempted most buyers from the levy if they completed their transactions before March 31, 2021 - saving people up to 15,000 - and leaving would-be homeowners racing to meet the deadline. But sources have told The Times he is now preparing to use his Budget next week to extend the holiday by another three months. The policy covers the sale of property worth up to 500,000, and would cost around 1billion to implement. It comes amid concerns that not extending the holiday would create a cliff edge, jeorpardising hundreds of thousands of sales. Rishi Sunak is considering extending the stamp duty holiday until the end of June to boost the housing market, it was reported last night Recent analysis by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) think tank said the tax break had propelled house sales to their highest level since before the 2007 financial crisis Recent analysis by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) think tank said the tax break had propelled house sales to their highest level since before the 2007 financial crisis. After an initial slump in sales between April and June 2020, the number of transactions increased from 132,090 in the second quarter to 225,870 in the third quarter and 316,300 by the end of quarter four - the highest level since 2007. The think tank's research shows that stamp duty revenues actually rose by 27 per cent in Q3 compared to Q2, from 1.1billion to 1.35billion, and suggests they will rise again in Q4 given the continued increase in transactions. The CPS is calling on ministers to either permanently increase the threshold on primary residences to 500,000 - at a cost of 3billion - or abolish it altogether. Jethro Elsden, CPS data analyst and the report's author, said scrapping the holiday would be a 'sledgehammer blow to the housing market' The Chancellor is also set to extend the furlough scheme until the end of June, costing 4billion a month. The business rates holiday for the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors will also be expanded at a cost of 1billion a month, the Times said. And the VAT cut for hospitality and tourism would also last until the end of June, costing 200million a month. Mr Sunak is also said to be considering putting up corporation tax to as much as 25 per cent over the course of the Parliament. Setting out his roadmap to lift all lockdown by June 21, Boris Johnson (pictured with the Chancellor) assured that some financial support would continue. He said: 'We will not pull the rug out' The Chancellor, who recently marked one year in the job, will next Wednesday unveil the Government's spending plans for the year. Government borrowing this financial year has hit 270.6billion - a reflection of the unprecedented peacetime spending to mitigate the economic harm of lockdown. Setting out his roadmap to lift all lockdown by June 21, Boris Johnson assured that some financial support would continue. He said: 'We will not pull the rug out.' But pre-Budget speculation has centred on possible tax rises to get the finances on a more even keel. The Conservative 2019 election manifesto pledged no rises in the Treasury's three biggest revenue raisers: income tax, VAT and national insurance. If he sticks to this commitment, Mr Sunak will likely have to look to other means of generating revenue, with economists touting a possible Capital Gains tax hike. Yet the CPS has warned that raising taxes could suffocate businesses and hinder growth. It instead advises the Chancellor to cut taxes to stimulate business innovation, drawing on the lessons of post-war booms. A spokesman for The Treasury said they can not speculate on tax ahead of fiscal events. Rishi Sunak could boost economic growth by cutting taxes in his upcoming Budget, new study claims By Jason Groves, political editor, for the Daily Mail Rishi Sunak should slash taxes in next weeks Budget to boost growth, a study says today. The Centre for Policy Studies urges the Chancellor to learn the lesson of history and avoid tax increases in the wake of a major economic disaster. Mr Sunak is said to be preparing to unveil plans for a rise in corporation tax in the Budget next Wednesday to reassure financial markets that he is committed to restoring order to the UKs battered public finances. Chancellor Rishi Sunak, pictured, is preparing his budget next week which will outline the government's intentions to return the economy to normality after Covid-19 Part of the government's plan for recovery is believed to involve massive spending on infrastructure projects He has also hinted that an increase in fuel duty may be needed after a year in which tax revenues have plunged and spending has soared. But the report from the Centre for Policy Studies warns that the lessons of major crises, such as world wars, is that countries should slash taxes to encourage business investment. The centre-Right think-tank said the US had enjoyed near miraculous growth after the Second World War at the same time as slashing public spending by two-thirds. By contrast, the UK suffered years of austerity by maintaining high spending and trying to protect domestic industries from competition, it said. Report author Jethro Elsden said: A key lesson from post-war recovery is that interventionist, high-spending policies lead to lower and slower economic growth. Rather than maintaining big government after the pandemic, what we need is a smaller state which intervenes less and to give the private sector the resources, support and certainty it needs to power the country back to growth. Whitehall sources yesterday indicated that the Chancellor will extend the 50billion furlough scheme and other Covid support until at least the end of June in line with the Governments roadmap for unlocking the economy. Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg also suggested that public spending was likely to remain high in the short term, with the Chancellor expected to unveil new investment in infrastructure alongside record spending on Covid next week. A Melbourne man has become the first Australian to be convicted of JobKeeper fraud after pretending to operate a business in order to receive more money from the government during the coronavirus pandemic. Raed Saleh, 33, was convicted in the Heidelberg Magistrates Court on Wednesday after pleading guilty to three counts of recklessly making a false statement to the Australian Taxation Office in an attempt to receive $6000 in JobKeeper payments. The Mernda man was fined $3000 and ordered to pay $3000 in compensation and $282 in costs. According to the ATO, Saleh applied for and lodged two months of JobKeeper claims online, saying he had lost 30 per cent of business revenue the threshold for the payment in May and June. He claimed he was a sole trader. But, the ATO said, he didnt have a genuine business and already had a job, having agreed to be nominated by his full-time employer for the allowance. (@FahadShabbir) Nicosia, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 24th Feb, 2021 ) :Thousands of Cypriot protesters have staged large demonstrations in past weeks, angered by months of lockdown, economic woes and a string of corruption scandals, as well as a rare police crackdown. "There is a general frustration and I find the climate has been quite explosive," said human rights lawyer Achilleas Demetriades. "A lot of people have lost trust in the state." He was speaking after authorities deployed baton-wielding riot police and a water cannon in the capital Nicosia earlier this month to break up a largely peaceful anti-government rally. As the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the holiday island's economy, a lack of government support has left many "choosing between buying bread and paying bills," said musician Anastasia Demetriadou. The 25-year-old became an inadvertent symbol of the protests after being hit in the face by a water cannon at a demonstration on February 13, leaving her facing emergency surgery to save her left eye. The heavy-handed police action compounded widespread anger over what many see as a bungled and authoritarian response to the pandemic, with the Mediterranean island now in its second prolonged lockdown since March last year. There has also been outcry over a so-called "golden passport" scheme, under which Cyprus issued thousands of passports to investors in exchange for an investment of 2.5 million Euros ($3 million). Popular discontent at the scheme, frowned upon by the European Union, reached boiling point after the speaker of parliament was filmed allegedly agreeing to help facilitate a passport for a fictitious businessman who supposedly had a criminal record. The scheme has since been scrapped and speaker Demetris Syllouris resigned in October. But the Phileleftheros daily reported he would receive a golden handshake of 100,000 euros and a monthly pension of 5,000 euros -- plus generous stipends for a secretary and a car. To cap it all, the powerful Orthodox church earlier in February controversially demolished four listed buildings without legal permission, amid works for a new cathedral in Nicosia's historic old city. For Cypriots struggling to make ends meet, all these scandals have become symptomatic of state graft and impunity. "There's so much corruption in Cyprus," musician Demetriadou told AFP, adding she had been shocked by the passports scandal. "People just don't go to vote because they don't trust the government anymore." At a first protest on February 13 a few hundred people defied the pandemic ban on gatherings to protest in a Nicosia park. Despite the presence of children and people in wheelchairs, the police -- dressed in full riot gear -- put on a show of force, deploying a water cannon. As Demetriadou danced in the street, police fired a water cannon, first at her feet and then at her head. "I never in my life imagined that they would hit my face," she told AFP. "I thought I had lost my eye." As she waits to find out whether she will fully recover her sight, Demetriadou is planning to sue the police. Cypriot authorities have launched an independent probe. Neither the police nor the justice ministry would comment to AFP, citing the ongoing investigation. But lawyer Demetriades said he had not seen such tactics in over three decades of practising in Cyprus. "The police used disproportionate and unwarranted force," he said. "This is not something we're used to." Last weekend, Cypriots held the biggest demonstration Nicosia has seen in years, with AFP estimating some 5,000 people marched peacefully through the capital. While dozens of police lined the route, they stood well back. No riot police or water cannon were visible. Demonstrators almost all wore masks and organisers with megaphones urged them to maintain social distancing. So far over 33,500 cases of Covid-19 have been registered on the southern Greek Cypriot part of the island, with some 230 deaths. A mass testing programme is in place, but vaccinations have been slow to take off amid a shortage of supplies to EU nations. Teacher Maria, 54, whose son was arrested at the previous protest, said she was "very upset, very angry, at the lack of transparency of this government.""I am really angry that they get away with anything and everything," she said. "We are supposed to be a European country, this is absolutely unacceptable." FOREST CITY, Iowa The Winnebago Industries Foundation is contributing half-a-million dollars to support the John V. Hanson Career Center. North Iowa Area Community College (NIACC) is teaming up with the Forest City, Garner-Hayfield-Ventura, Lake Mills and North Iowa Community School Districts on the project. Plans are for the Career Center to provide high school students with key educational opportunities in high demand and well-paying areas related to advanced manufacturing, construction trades, IT and healthcare. Our region is rich in talent. We see these vital educational opportunities as having great alignment with the current and future needs of the North Iowa area and Winnebago Industries, says Huw Bower, President, Winnebago Outdoors. This multi-year support from the Winnebago Industries Foundation to area education totaling $500,000 represents a portion of the ongoing and long-term commitment of Winnebago Industries to be an integral part of our North Iowa communities. Students will earn college credit by enrolling in NIACC classes at the Career Center. Organizers say this comes at no cost to the student or their parents and textbooks, tools, and equipment are also provided to the students. We are thrilled to have Winnebago Industries as a partner in the John V. Hanson Career Center, says NIACC President Steve Schulz. Their involvement underscores the importance of this work and how strong partnerships with local industry can create opportunities for students and provide a pipeline to the local workforce. We look forward to the many work-based learning opportunities our students will have with Winnebago Industries. The John V. Hanson Career Center is scheduled to open beginning in the fall of 2021 and will accommodate a minimum of 80 students per semester. Frontiers in Drug Design and Discovery is a book series devoted to publishing the latest and the most important advances in drug design and discovery. Eminent scientists have contributed chapters focused on all areas of rational drug design and drug discovery including medicinal chemistry, in-silico drug design, combinatorial chemistry, high-throughput screening, drug targets, and structure-activity relationships. This book series should prove to be of interest to all pharmaceutical scientists who are involved in research in drug design and discovery and who wish to keep abreast of rapid and important developments in the field. The tenth volume of this series brings together reviews covering topics related to the treatment of neoplasms, systems biology, respiratory diseases among others. Topics included in this volume are: Recombinant Protein Production: from Bench to Biopharming Plant Virus Nanoparticles and Virus like Particles (VLPs): Applications in Medicine MAO Inhibitory Activity Of 4, 5-Dihydro-1 HPyrazole Flavonoids Antagonize Effects of Alcohol in Cultured Hippocampal Neurons: A Drug Discovery Study Hybrid Smart Materials for Topical Drug Delivery: Application of Scaffolds ### About the Author: Prof. Atta-ur-Rahman, Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Cambridge University (1968) has 1,232 international publications (45 international patents and 341 books). He received the following awards: Fellow Royal Society (FRS) London (2006), UNESCO Science Prize (1999), Honorary Life Fellow Kings College, Cambridge University (2007), Academician (Foreign Member) Chinese Academy of Sciences (2015), Highest Civil Award for Foreigners of China (Friendship Award, 2014), High Civil Award Austria ("Grosse Goldene Ehrenzeischen am Bande') (2007), Foreign Fellow Chinese Chemical Society (2013), Sc.D. Cambridge University (UK) (1987), TWAS (Italy) Prize (2009). He was the President of Network of Academies of Sciences of Islamic Countries (NASIC), Vice President TWAS (Italy), Foreign Fellow Korean Academy of Science & Technology, President Pakistan Academy of Sciences (2003-2006) and (2011 - 2014). Dr. Atta was also the Federal Minister for Science and Technology of Pakistan (2000 -- 2002), Federal Minister of Education (2002) and Chairman Higher Education Commission/Federal Minister (2002-2008), Coordinator General of COMSTECH (OIC Ministerial Committee) (1996-2012), and the Editor-in-Chief of Current Medicinal Chemistry. Dr. M. lqbal Choudhary is a Professor of Organic/Bioorganic Chemistry and Director at the International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences (H. E. J. Research Institute of Chemistry and Dr. Panjwani Center for Molecular Medicine and Drug Research) and Coordinator General of COMSTECH (OIC Ministerial Committee). He is among the most prominent scientists of Pakistan, recognized for his original contributions in the fields of natural products and bioorganic chemistry. He has written and edited 27 books, most of which have been published in USA and Europe. He is also the author of over 1000 research papers and chapters in top international science journals of the West as well as 27 US patents (H-index: 70 & Citations: 29,500). Dr. Choudhary is also the Volume Editor of many international book series and journals. He has served as a visiting faculty in many prestigious universities of the world including Cornell University (New York), Purdue University (Indiana), Pennsylvania State University (Pennsylvania), Scripps Institution of Oceanography (San Diego, California), The University of Rhode Island (Rhode Island), and other top Universities. Keywords: drug design, drug discovery, medicinal chemistry, neoplasms, systems biology, respiratory diseases, Biopharming, Antidepressants, Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 18:38:47|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close -- To prevent the sporadic resurgence of COVID-19, China encouraged people to stay put over the holiday this year, which lasted from Feb. 11 to 17. Thanks to the stay-put measure, many enterprises were able to continue holiday production or resume production quickly after the holiday break. -- Apart from boisterous production activities, construction of new projects continued or started during the holiday across the country, injecting new impetus to China's economy. By Xinhua Writers Liu Fangqiang, Li Hua, Wang Hao HEFEI/XI'AN/TAIYUAN, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Moving back and forth on an automobile assembly line, Zhang Tianshun was conducting function tests for vehicles before they roll off the production line. "My job is to check the functionality of seven parts of the car, including four windows, front and rear wipers and the sunroof. It takes two minutes to test a car for my part, and I need to handle about 200 cars per day. It's even busier than before the holiday," said the young man. Photo taken with a mobile phone shows employees working on the production line at Hefei Changan Automobile Co., Ltd. in Hefei, east China's Anhui Province, Feb. 17, 2021. (Xinhua/Liu Fangqiang) It was the first time for Zhang to spend the Spring Festival, or China's Lunar New Year, away from his hometown of Zhumadian City, central China's Henan Province. The 19-year-old works at Hefei Changan Automobile Co., Ltd. in east China's Anhui Province. Zhang received a combined subsidy of nearly 3,000 yuan (about 465 U.S. dollars) from Hefei City and the company for not leaving during the holiday. To prevent the sporadic resurgence of COVID-19, China encouraged people to stay put over the holiday this year, which lasted from Feb. 11 to 17. EARLIER WORK RESUMPTION Aerial photo taken on Feb. 21, 2021 shows the International Container Terminal of Hefei Port in Hefei, east China's Anhui Province. (Xinhua/Cao Li) The car plant resumed production on Feb. 14, after a three-day break, when most people were still celebrating the holiday. More than 1,700 employees, or 85 percent of its staff, clocked in on the first day of work, including over 800 migrant workers who stayed during the holiday. The manufacturing capacity has returned to the pre-holiday level, with 600 to 700 vehicles rolling off the production line per day, according to the company. "Another production line resumed operation on Feb. 17, whose capacity is around 300 units a day. Cars coming from this assembly line will be exported to Saudi Arabia, Chile and Brazil," said Xue Wen, an engineer with the company. Factories across China are traditionally shut down for a couple of weeks after the Chinese Spring Festival holiday. Thanks to the stay-put measure, many enterprises were able to continue holiday production or resume production quickly after the holiday break. Like the auto factory, China Baowu Taigang Stainless Steel Precision Strip Co., Ltd. in north China's Shanxi Province also saw bustling production activities during the holiday, with more than 100 employees remaining on duty around the clock to handle increasing orders. The company specializes in producing wide super-thin precision stainless steel strips, or "hand-tearable steel," which can be used in folding screens, solar photovoltaic substrates, automobile airbags, high-end coating materials, as well as military and aerospace fields. Video screenshot shows an employee showing the wide super-thin precision stainless steel strips, or "hand-tearable steel," at China Baowu Taigang Stainless Steel Precision Strip Co., Ltd. in Taiyuan, north China's Shanxi Province, Feb. 18, 2021. (Xinhua/Wang Hao) During this Spring Festival, the company received a large order from abroad, greatly boosting the morale of employees, said Qu Zhanyou, director of the company's sales department. In the workshop of LONGi Solar Technology Co., Ltd. in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, over 200 skilled workers were busy manufacturing solar photovoltaic modules after the holiday to complete their orders on time. Solar modules of nearly 2 square meters were churned out after a dozen of steps including cutting, welding and pressing. "The output is expected to reach 120,000 modules in February, up by about 50 percent compared with the same period of last year," said Xie Shundong, general manager of the company's Xi'an module plant. BUSTLING CONSTRUCTING ACTIVITIES Apart from boisterous producing activities, construction of new projects continued or started during the holiday across the country, injecting new impetus to China's economy. On Feb. 18, the first workday after the holiday, Anhui announced that a total of 272 projects started construction in the province, with a total investment of over 133 billion yuan, of which 45.3 billion yuan is expected to be implemented this year, according to the provincial development and reform commission. Employees work at the construction site of the first phase of the subway Line 8 in Hefei, east China's Anhui Province, Feb. 21, 2021. (Xinhua/Cao Li) The bustling construction scene can also be seen at the High-tech Zone of Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi Province, where manufacturers and engineers were busy moving in and installing the equipment to make final preparations for a new Samsung semiconductor memory chip production line. The first phase of the project was put into production in 2014, with an investment of more than 10 billion U.S. dollars. Construction of the second phase of the project started in 2018, with an investment of approximately 15 billion U.S. dollars. "More than 1,000 equipment manufacturers and engineers are adjusting equipment on site every day to prepare for the operation," said Sang Hyun Yi, vice president of Samsung China Semiconductor Co., Ltd. With the help of the Chinese government, Samsung's memory chip project has withstood the test of the epidemic, achieving an output value of 73.6 billion yuan in 2020, an increase of 43 percent from 2019. During the epidemic, in order to ensure the smooth construction of the second phase of Samsung's memory chip project, Shaanxi Province specially opened up a "green channel" for international chartered flights to receive more than 3,000 equipment installation engineers for Samsung. Since the beginning of this year, the first phase of the project has been operating smoothly. The second stage of the second phase is advancing steadily, which will come into mass production within the year. At present, all Chinese employees and foreign technical personnel have returned to their posts, Yi said. (Chen Shangying and Lyu Mengqi also contributed to the story. Video Reporters: Li Hua, Cao Li, Chen Shangying, Liu Fangqiang; Video editor: Zhang Yichi) (TNS) -CHICAGO In search of a COVID-19 vaccine for her dad, Amber Dow was hitting one dead end after another.Retail pharmacy websites declared appointments unavailable. Slots at local medical centers kept disappearing before she could type in any information.Then she received a private Facebook message from a stranger: Go to the Jewel-Osco website right now. Enter your ZIP code. Its in Palatine.She immediately followed the instructions and snagged one of the grocery stores last few open spots that day. Her father, 80-year-old Duane Dow, got his first shot on Wednesday.The tip came from the Facebook site Chicago Vaccine Hunters, a group of more than 10,000 members who collect and share information on where to get vaccinated in real time, as new locations and time slots emerge.I was stunned, said Amber Dow, 44, of the West Lakeview neighborhood. I was encouraged by the display of common humanity and compassion and desire to be of service, without any expectation of anything in return. It was just purely to give.With COVID-19 vaccine in short supply, more locals are turning to social media for help as they scour the internet for available immunizations.On Reddit, hundreds of posts offer tips and instructions for signing up for the shot in the Chicago area, from step-by-step guides for enrolling at different pharmacies to clues on best times to check various websites. Another Facebook group, Midwest Vaccine Hunters, has more than 1,700 members from across the region.Similar sites are sprouting up in Minneapolis, Baltimore, Colorado and other parts of the country. The website www.vaccinehunter.org also offers advice from across the nation.As for Chicago Vaccine Hunters, the Facebook page began earlier this month with general tips and advice, but evolved into individuals helping one another directly, in many cases even booking appointments for those who cant do so on their own.Everyones helping each other out in different ways, said Chicago resident Roger Naglewski, who created the site earlier this month.A group of about four dozen volunteers began working directly with other members to track down open slots for them. Naglewski estimated these helpers dubbed vaccine angels have hunted down more than 200 vaccine appointments for other members, mostly for seniors with limited technology or difficulty traversing the online maze of pharmacies, government agencies and health care providers.When Amber Dow joined the Facebook site, she was expecting general information or to be steered in the right direction.She was stunned when Gladys Rosas, another member she had never met in person, reached out and sent specific open appointments tailored to her location and availability. Rosas had also combed the internet to help several relatives get vaccinated and wanted to share her expertise.It was an unexpected human connection amid an otherwise confounding and impersonal process.Over a series of private messages, Dow shared with Rosas that her father, who had some heart problems, was being discharged from the hospital shortly and she wanted him inoculated as soon as possible. She was worried about his health already, and the thought of him catching COVID-19 was terrifying.Im in health care so I know how important it to help folks like your dad get this vaccine, responded Rosas, a physical therapist who lives in north suburban Morton Grove.The next day, Dow sent a photo of her dad at the grocery store post-vaccination, reiterating their thanks. Duane Dow, a longtime Chicago-area sportscaster, said he feels terrific knowing he has greater protecttion against the virus.I didnt expect anyone to individually help me at all, his daughter said. I was just so taken aback by how big her heart was.Rosas said shes continuing to help others get vaccinated.I know how scary it can be when you have family members that are in the high-risk group and you want to do what you can to protect them, she said. Ive still been checking the site to do the same for others.Unprecedented timesRequests for help or new tips are posted periodically on Chicago Vaccine Hunters, as members figure out a best time for fresh appointments or a new location offering doses.I have gotten lucky with Walgreens around 1:30 in the afternoon. Try and have several ZIP codes to try between.I just got (an) appointment at Loyola for March 5 online. Thanks to the beautiful person who put the info on here.Its a late notice but I have to cancel my fathers (appointment) at Jewel-Osco today at 10 a.m. He had a stroke yesterday and is in the hospital. Want someone to take his spot. Will be canceling in few min if anyone wants it. Thanks!Naglewski organized the site in early February, initially thinking it might attract a couple hundred members. In less than two weeks, membership grew exponentially; some posts talked about starting similar sites in other cities across the country.Its really exploded more than I ever thought, he said.While the process of tracking down doses can be maddening, Naglewski believes seeing posts about others finding appointments or getting their first shot offers some encouragement to those still searching.People get frustrated, he said. Its like grabbing concert tickets you cant click the button fast enough. When I see people get discouraged, I think its important to give people some hope.He added that he doesnt blame government agencies or the retailers providing immunizations for the convoluted process.This is really unprecedented times, he said. I dont think there was a playbook for how to manage this virus. So I think theyre doing the best they can under some really tough circumstances.This includes a team of members who banded together to find appointments for seniors, sometimes booking them directly for those who need help, sometimes tracking down appointments and then walking the fellow member through the process.Many of those helped by the Facebook site lack smartphones or have spotty internet, tools critical to accessing vaccine. Some struggle to stay awake until midnight or early hours of the morning, when some retailers offer new appointments.If we didnt have those angels out there helping senior citizens, there might be hundreds without appointments, Naglewski said.One member recently posted concerns about the potential for scammers to target the site, cautioning membership to be wary and never give out sensitive information like a Social Security number.I think its important for people to be very careful and cautious, Naglewski said, adding that members seeking help dont have to give any personal information to get assistance, if theyre uncomfortable doing so.In general, the Illinois attorney generals office advises the public to ignore unsolicited online, phone and text offers for the COVID-19 vaccine.Hang up on any calls, including robocalls, which direct you to take immediate action or provide personally-identifiable information, such as your Social Security number or bank account number, the agency said. Do not buy any kind of COVID-19 vaccine or treatment on the internet or from an online pharmacy. You should not have to pay any amount of money out of pocket in order to receive the vaccine. Everyone eventually will be able to receive the vaccine, even if they do not have health insurance.Success storiesKarolina Ash joined Chicago Vaccine Hunters recently, and with the sites help, found two appointments in early March for her parents.I was elated, said Ash, 35, of the Old Town neighborhood. I was just so grateful to give them some autonomy back in their life, to give my mother something that gave her peace of mind.Soon she began hunting for appointments for other seniors, joining the vaccine angel team through the Facebook site.Because not everyone has a daughter, she said. To see senior citizens scrambling for vaccine shots has been very humbling.So far, shes found appointments for five people directly.After receiving the first shot, one woman publicly thanked Ash for her assistance on the Facebook page.This group has done so much for so many, and my only payback is to try and help others in any way I can, she posted on the site. My wish is for everyone on this page to have their own success story to post!On Friday, Illinois surpassed 2 million COVID-19 vaccinations administered statewide, according to public health officials. About half a million people have received both doses, not quite 4% of the population.To Ash, each person who gets immunized is one more step toward herd immunity and a potential end to the pandemic. She longs to safely get together with family and friends, and attend large public events and community gatherings once again.It gives me hope that were all going to get to go somewhere and do something together soon, she said. Maybe well have a festival. Maybe well have the Taste of Chicago again. I cant wait to not be afraid of people. And I cant wait for people to not be afraid of me.___2021 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. This month, Hearst Television is celebrating Black history by having courageous conversations. The fight for civil rights and justice goes back generations and has looked different each decade. Were speaking with community leaders, elders those who have lived through victories and troubled times, to talk about their experiences, and compare them with what we still struggle with today. From Baltimore to the White House, Larry Gibson overcame poverty and segregation to become a lawyer, who, in the wake of the civil rights movement, helped to free a group of falsely accused protesters. It was film that revealed the truth about what happened decades before cellphone video would become the catalyst to today's movement. "The civil rights movement uprising began in earnest about the time that I went to college with the city movements. I delighted in coming back to Baltimore to demonstrate the sit-in in restaurants," Gibson said in an interview with Tre Ward, a reporter with sister station WBAL-TV. In 1967, Gibson earned his law degree from Columbia University in New York, one year before an American tragedy changed his plans. " During that year, Martin Luther King was assassinated. People reacted many ways to the assassination of Martin Luther King. Some people left the country. Some other people joined various kinds of organizations," Gibson said. "My principle was, 'I'm not going to work for the man! What's the largest Black law firm in town?'" One particular case brought Gibson back to Baltimore, where he grew up. "I guess the police just got tired of this embarrassing demonstration. They came across the street toward the demonstrators, said leave and when they didn't, they arrested them. They were charged with, the leaders were, with inciting a riot," Gibson said. "A cameraman called me he was then living in Philadelphia he said, 'Mr. Gibson, I've been following this trial and what the police officers are saying happened is not true. I was there, but also, I filmed it.'" The video vindicated the demonstrators in 1970, decades before cellphone video would capture multiple arrests, sparking a nationwide movement. "Freddie Gray, after he had been arrested, should've been brought right down this street here, right down Mount Street to this station, if he was going to be arrested, at all," Gibson said. With his history in civil rights, Gibson shared what he thinks when he sees the recent uprising and police officers, in many of the cases, not convicted. "Things are changing, and I think they are probably changing positively. There were many demonstrations where the overwhelming majority of the people were not African Americans. There were demonstrations around the world, inequities, and more and more Americans are understanding that it is not enough to just individually not discriminate, but that the necessity that they get involved in dealing and addressing the issues of the systemic racial issues. Improvements are occurring. Things are getting better, but we still have a ways to go," Gibson said. Gibson also served as associate deputy attorney general under the Carter administration. He's currently a law professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, where he once taught the late Rep. Elijah Cummings. Young told the cops more than 43 times that they were in the wrong house but they didnt ask her name or admit to her that they knew they were at the wrong home for more than 40 minutes, the lawsuit alleges. Branch Challenges Students to Rely on Christ During Feb. 24 Chapel Message February 24, 2021 William Duce Branch, assistant professor of preaching and Bible as well as undergraduate chapel coordinator for The College at Southeastern in Wake Forest, North Carolina, delivered the chapel message Feb. 24 in Raley Chapels Potter Auditorium. He taught from Revelation 3:7-13. Branch is also a Christian hip-hop artist known as The Ambassador, who has recorded independently and as a founding member of The Cross Movement. Branch noted how God urges us to, Rely on the loyal one in order to remain His faithful ones. The loyalty of Christ is rooted, and is at the root of, our faithfulness to Christ, he added. He discussed how when we follow Jesus, we leave our past behind and place our loyalty and trust in Him. He knows about your weakness. Regardless of where you come from, regardless of where you live, regardless of who your parents are. Often, when you come to Christ, you start playing for the outsider or the visiting team. He also challenged students to live their lives for Christ and to show their faith through the manner in which they conduct themselves. Theres nothing that will say you dont know Jesus, like not living like Jesus. Loyalty looks like doing what He says, and then telling people who He is. Branch began his studies at Philadelphia Biblical University (formerly Philadelphia College of Bible), ultimately graduating with a bachelors degree from Lancaster Bible College. He then earned a Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary and is currently working toward a Ph.D. at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He went on to co-plant and co-pastor an urban church in North Philadelphia. He is married to Dean Michelle Branch and they have four children. Officials from UAE and Qatar met Monday for the first time in Kuwait to discuss mechanism for the implementation of the January AlUla Declaration that put an end to years of diplomatic crisis between Qatar and its Gulf neighbors. The two sides discussed joint mechanisms and procedures for implementing the al-Ula statement, UAEs news agency WAM said in a statement. They emphasized the importance of preserving Gulf kinship and developing joint Gulf action in the interest of GCC countries and their citizens, and of achieving stability and prosperity in the region. The two delegations according to the agency also thanked Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for their contributions towards healing the crisis. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain and Egypt in January agreed to end the dispute with Qatar. The two sides signed the AlUla Declaration during the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit held in KSA. The Saudi-led group severed ties with Doha in 2017 and imposed a sea/air/land blockade over accusation that the tiny Gulf country sponsored terrorism. Qatar vehemently denied any wrongdoing. Following the AlUla Declaration, Qatar and Saudi Arabia restored their diplomatic and trade ties. Egypt too resumed cooperation with Qatar in all aspects. Written by: Jaber Ali on February 23, 2021. on February 24, 2021. Deputy Head of the President's Office of Ukraine Ihor Zhovkva and Italian Ambassador Pier Francesco Zazo discussed ways to further develop the Ukrainian-Italian partnership, the website of the President of Ukraine reported. "Zhovkva thanked Zazo for the continued support of Italy in the issues of restoring Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as for supporting our country's initiatives to deepen cooperation with the EU and NATO," the presidential press service reported. The deputy head of the President's Office noted the high dynamics of bilateral contacts in the last year and the successful interaction of countries in overcoming the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, during the meeting, Zhovkva discussed with the Italian Ambassador the ways of further development of the Ukrainian-Italian partnership and activation of trade, economic and investment cooperation. An exchange of views took place on the measures of political dialogue for 2021 and further steps to intensify trade, economic and investment cooperation between Ukraine and Italy. Particular attention was paid to the current epidemic situation in Ukraine and Italy and the acceleration of Ukraine's access to certified vaccines against COVID-19. The French Institute in Romania is organizing together with Campus France Romania the Virtual Fair of study programs in France and of French-language university courses in Romania, the French Institute in Romania said in a release on Wednesday, according to AGERPRES. "Le salon virtuel des etudes en France et des formations francophones en Roumanie" - running between February 25 and March 5 - is intended not only for high schoolers, students and parents, but also for education professionals. The event presents the programs offered by several higher education institutions in France, the French-language university courses available in Romania and the double degree programs between Romania and France. The guest schools include the National Graduate School of Chemistry of Rennes, CESI Ecole d'Ingenieurs - a private higher-education institution with 25 campuses in France, the hospitality business management school Vatel Bordeaux - ecole de tourisme et hotellerie, EDHEC Business School operating from campuses in Lille, Nice, Paris, but also in London and Singapore, the French - Romanian Law College of European Studies that offers a double bachelor's degree from the Law Faculty of the Bucharest University and the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, the Faculty of Economics of the West University of Timisoara, the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, which offers bachelor's and master's programs in French. The workshops for youth cover a variety of fields: engineering, medicine, political science, law, business management, tourism, communication, languages and arts. There will also be days dedicated to medical studies or artistic fields, with several guest schools, but also webinars on application procedures and possibilities for the funding of studies. The fair will be also attended by Romanian students and former French Government scholarship holders, members of the France Alumni Roumanie network who will interact with students and share their international experiences. The League of Romanian Students in France will host a webinar on the many facilities for students in France such as low-fare public transportation, the 1-euro meals in university restaurants for all students, social and financial aid from the French state. Participation in webinars and workshops is free, and registrations are open at: http://bit.ly/Salonvirtuel. The detailed program is available at https://www.facebook.com/events/133054888686842 and at https://www.facebook.com/CampusFranceRo. EMILY ST. LAWRENCE, Chariho girls lacrosse, senior: St. Lawrence tied a school record for goals in a game with nine in a win over Smithfield. St. Lawrence scored 17 goals for the week and has 32 for the season. CARLY CONSTANTINE, Stonington softball, sophomore: Constantine singled home Shea OConnor with the winning run to hand Waterford, the states No. 2 ranked team at the time, its first loss of the season. For the week, Constantine was 5 for 15. GREG GORMAN, Westerly baseball, junior: Gorman, a junior, hit a massive home run in a win against Barrington. The homer went over the fence in center field and landed in a nearby road. Gorman was 3 for 3 with four RBIs in the game. He is hitting .571 with 10 RBIs for the season. BRADIN ANDERSON, Wheeler baseball, freshman: Anderson, a freshman, pitched a complete-game shutout to beat Grasso Tech. Anderson struck out three to earn the first win of his varsity career. Vote View Results A gun and drugs, as well as a taser and a quantity of cash, has been found by police investigating suspected drugs criminality linked to the INLA. The search was undertaken at a property in west Belfast by members of the Paramilitary Crime Task Force (PCTF) who were assisted by officers from West Belfast Local Policing Team. Officers seized suspected cocaine, amphetamines and cannabis in the search. A 23-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of possession of a class A drug and possession of a class B drug as well as firearms offences and possessing criminal property. He remains in custody. Read More Detective Inspector Hamilton said: I am pleased to report the seizure of this firearm and ammunition to the people of west Belfast and indeed the wider community. We have removed the ability of these criminals to terrorise members of the community and our city is undoubtedly a safer place today as a result. Drugs cause untold harm in our communities and last nights search is further evidence that PCTF are proactively pursuing drug criminals who prey on vulnerable members of our community. We will continue to listen to the public and act on the information they provide us, to target those criminals, involved in the sale and supply of illegal drugs at every opportunity. The detective added: I would encourage members of the public with information regarding criminal activity to call 101, or you can submit a report online using our non-emergency reporting form via http://www.psni.police.uk/makeareport/ . The independent charity Crimestoppers can also be contacted anonymously on 0800 555 111 or online at http://crimestoppers-uk.org/. Snow blanketed millions of rooftops across the nations most prolific energy-producing state. Inside those homes, nearly 5 million unwitting Texans shivered in the dark for days without power, with no indication of when it would be restored. Told to expect rolling blackouts, some Texans power was rolled off not for a few minutes or hours, but for days. Texas rarely gets the kind of weather we experienced last week, but that is no excuse for our failure to deliver electricity a most basic government function to our citizens. This is not an issue of convenience, but of health and safety. What happened last week in Texas is shameful. We are still assessing damage and learning the full extent of the causes and effects of the power failures during last weeks storm, but what we do know for certain is that Texas should have been prepared. In February 2011, a winter storm sharply increased demand for power in a few parts of the state. Because power generation was not keeping up with the demand, rolling blackouts were instituted. After it was over, the Legislature interrogated the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, and the Public Utility Commission, or PUC. They promised to do better. We moved along. A decade later, we are in the same position. To ensure this never happens again, we must take a multipronged approach. First, the Legislature must ensure better leadership with regard to power supply and electric reliability. Then, we need to revisit the structure of our power market and prioritize winterization of all generation sources. To deal with massive utility bills created by this storm, the Legislature must help customers pay for exorbitant energy costs assessed during the extreme weather. This can be accomplished by using the states rainy day fund to offset costs and working with the power industry to negotiate a settlement that covers costs while avoiding an adverse impact on ratepayers. There is no question that we in state government are responsible for this colossal failure. The Legislature can fix this by placing ERCOT and the PUC under immediate Sunset review for a forensic audit. The governor, who holds the power of appointment, should purge PUC and ERCOT leadership and replace them with engineers, accountants, power-generation experts and customers who reside in Texas. Finally, the Legislature should pass a bill to shift the PUC from an appointed board to an elected one to ensure its commissioners are directly accountable to voters. The Texas power market operates as energy only, which encourages scarcity because generators are paid only when they provide power. A capacity market encourages reliability and incentivizes building capacity needed to address extreme weather. We need to evolve into a market that provides both reliable and affordable power, like a capacity market. Texas has used inexpensive power to attract businesses from all over the world, but after last week's debacle, businesses will remain unwilling to locate here until we shore up reliability. Reliability can be assured by requiring a defined reserve capacity for each generator. Undoubtedly, reliability would have saved lives and hardship during the storm. Though Texas rarely experiences cold weather like last week, the infrequency of such weather does not excuse allowing all power generators, from natural gas to nuclear to wind, to fail. ERCOT indicated sustained low temperatures caused power generators of every source to freeze, with tens of thousands of megawatts falling offline simply because we failed to weatherize our power-generation capacity. Weatherization will require a significant financial investment, but it will ensure Texans have heat and water during the inevitable next winter storm. Local utilities should be required to bear this burden as well. We will request CPS Energy leadership to use part of its earnings to offset the cost of customers bills. CPS Energy and other local utilities must use this experience to learn how to improve their service delivery. CPS Energys emergency protocols should be refined to ensure that if they are needed, rolling blackouts are conducted equitably across our community. Some ratepayers experienced elongated outages, for more than three days straight, while others experienced no interruption in power. There must be a better way to distribute outages if they are absolutely required. Part of the improved protocol should prohibit CPS Energy from cutting power from SAWS pump stations. Backup generators at pump stations need to be part of a contingency plan to avoid the complete loss of water supply to citizens. Finally, improved communication to customers who were stuck in freezing homes is imperative. Ratepayers should have been told how long to expect power outages and when restoration would occur. A lot of blame is being cast in every direction. It is time for the Legislature to accept responsibility for millions of Texans going without power. We must make these structural changes to protect our citizens and our economic development efforts. Now that the snow has melted, its time to go to work. We can do better than this, Texas. Lyle Larson, a Republican, represents part of San Antonio in the Texas House of Representatives. A 7million Vincent Van Gogh drawing, once looted by the Nazis from a Jewish banker, is being sold by a British family of art collectors who fear they will be hit by Rishi Sunak raising capital gains tax. The sketch on paper, called La Mousme, makes up 16million worth of works by celebrated artists including Lucien Freud and Henry Moore being sold off by the Gibson family. The 'astonishing' Van Gogh portrait of a young girl was produced by the Dutch master in 1888 before being bought by a German-Jewish banker called Kurt Hirschland in 1920. He and his family later moved to Amsterdam after Adolf Hitler came to power. Following the German invasion of Holland in May 1940, the drawing was seized by the Nazis as part of their mass looting of fine art for the Third Reich. In 1956 the drawing was restituted to the Hirchlands and remained in the family until it was bought by London art dealer Thomas Gibson in 1983. Mr Gibson and his three sons, Miles, Sebastian and Hugh, have decided to sell the exquisite work along with seven others ahead of an expected increase in capital gains tax in the next Budget in response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The 'astonishing' Van Gogh portrait, titled La Mousme, (pictured) was produced by the Dutch master in 1888 La Mousme was one of a series of reed pen drawings produced by Van Gogh in the artist commune of Arles in the south of France. It is a drawn copy of his oil painting of the same name that today hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The drawing is said to be one of the finest works on paper of Van Gogh's career. Current owner Thomas Gibson, 77, said: 'I started buying important works of art as soon as I could afford to, which was in the mid-70s. The drawing is said to be one of the finest works on paper of Van Gogh's (pictured) career 'I had favourite artists, and I had always been interested in works on paper, and felt that I could get much more value for money in this medium. 'I bought the (Van Gogh) work from Paul and Helen Hirschland in 1983. 'The simple fact is that it is almost certainly, at least in my opinion, the most significant drawing by Van Gogh in private hands. 'To be candid, nearly all the works offered for sale belong to my children and I think there was an anxiety that capital gains tax might be increased substantially during the next budget, and as the likelihood these works would be sold anyway after my death, I think my boys and I decided it was probably a good time as any to sell now as there is currently such a dearth of decent material on the market.' La Mousme was loaned by the Gibson family, who own the Thomas Gibson Fine Art gallery in Mayfair, London, to Tate Britain in 2018. A spokeswoman for Christies, which is selling the eight works, said it was an 'exceptional' work. London art dealer Thomas Gibson, 77, (pictured) purchased the La Mousme in 1983 and later loaned it to Tate Britain in 2018 Mr Gibson and his three sons, Miles, Sebastian and Hugh (pictured), have decided to sell the exquisite work along with seven others ahead of an expected increase in capital gains tax in the next Budget in response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic Giovanna Bertazzoni continued: 'With an astonishingly perceptive range of strokes, lines and dots that dance upon the surface of the paper, this work shows Van Gogh's innate ability at capturing the very essence of his subject. 'A work of exquisite quality, La Mousme brings together the artists' passion for Japan, his masterful draughtsmanship as well as his obsession for portraiture.' Also in the sale from the family collection is a monochrome gouache painting by the Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte. The 1954 work depicts two bowler hatted men who've been turned to stone. It is valued at 2.5million. A self-portrait by Lucian Freud he painted in watercolour in 1974 is tipped to sell for 1.7million. The 1954 gouache painting (pictured) by the Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte, which depicts two bowler hatted men who've been turned to stone, is valued at 2.5million A self-portrait (pictured) by Lucian Freud he painted in watercolour in 1974 is tipped to sell for 1.7million A 1941 work (pictured) by the English artist Henry Moore of two sleeping figures in the London Underground during the war and produced in wax crayon, watercolour and pen and ink is also valued at 1.7million A 1941 work by the English artist Henry Moore of two sleeping figures in the London Underground during the war and produced in wax crayon, watercolour and pen and ink is also valued at 1.7million. Ms Bertazzoni added: 'What unites these works is the lifelong passion of this collector who strove to seek out these treasures. The rarity and condition of these works is incomparable.' The sale takes place in New York on March 1. The highest price paid for a Van Gogh drawing is 6million for his Olive Trees with Les Alpilles in 1999. La Mousme has been given a pre-sale estimate of between 4.9million to 7million. Advertisement An art collection worth an estimated $150 million that belonged to the late Texas oil and ranching heiress Anne Marion is going up for auction this spring in New York. Sotheby's said Wednesday that Marion's private collection of more than 200 objects includes works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Franz Kline. Marion, who founded the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, died last year of lung cancer at the age of 81. Marion and her fourth husband, John Marion, a former Sothebys chairman and auctioneer, established the museum in 1997. Sotheby's said three masterworks at the heart of the collection are expected to each sell for over $20 million. They are: Warhol's 'Elvis 2 Times,' Richard Diebenkorn's 'Ocean Park No. 40,' and Clyfford Still's 'PH-125 (1948-No. 1).' Many of the pieces have not been seen by the public for decades, Barrons reports. Michael Macaulay, Sotheby's senior international specialist for contemporary art, said: 'This is a constellation of masterpieces that haven't been seen on the market for several decades in most cases. The quality of the work, the provenance of the work, the exhibition history of the work, is truly exceptional and top tier.' Andy Warhol's Elvis 2 Times 1963, Silkscreen ink and silver paint on linen is expected to go for $20-30 million. Texas oil and ranching heiress Anne Marion's art collection worth an estimated $150 million is going up for auction this spring in New York Roy Lichtenstein's Girl with Beach Ball II 1977, Oil and Magna on canvas has an estimate of $12-18 million. Sotheby's said Wednesday that Marion's private collection consists of more than 200 objects Franz Kline's Mister 1959, Oil on canvas has an estimate of $15-20 million. Many of the piece have not been seen by the public for years Marion, who founded the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, died last year of lung cancer at the age of 81. Marion and her fourth husband, John Marion, a former Sothebys chairman and auctioneer, established the museum in 1997 Following her death, former President George W. Bush described Marion as 'a true Texan, a great patron of the arts, a generous member of our community and a person of elegance and strength' in a statement. In a statement Sotheby's said it 'is honored to present works from the collection of legendary philanthropist and collector Mrs. John L. Marion'. They add: 'A testament to her taste and foresight, the present selection of works encapsulates the essential achievements of Post-War Abstract painting, and places these masterpieces in dialogue with the very best of American Pop. 'Taken together, the collection reflects myriad developments that took place over the course of the Twentieth Century, and testifies to its creator's extraordinary vision. 'While the heart of the Collection is devoted to giants of twentieth-century American art Warhol, Still, Diebenkorn, Kline, Motherwell, Lichtenstein, Hofmann, Francis, Noland, Louis and many more it also spans Old Masters (all of which were displayed in Mrs. Marion's palazzo-like home in In Indian Wells), Jewelry, and sensational abstract by Gerhard Richter.' Amy Cappellazzo, Chairman of Sotheby's Global Fine Arts Division, said: 'Anne Marion was a true art collector and had an eye for quality. She was brave in everything she did, from her choice in artwork to her sense of design and color. 'Unpretentious and proud of her rancher legacy and lifestyle, Anne was a boldhearted Texan through-and-through.' Clyfford Still, PH-125 (1948-No. 1) 1948, Oil on canvas Estimate $25-35 million; In a statement Sotheby's said it 'is honored to present works from the collection of legendary philanthropist and collector Mrs. John L. Marion' Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 40 1971, Oil on canvas Estimate $20-30 million; Sotheby's said: 'While the heart of the Collection is devoted to giants of twentieth-century American art Warhol, Still, Diebenkorn, Kline, Motherwell, Lichtenstein, Hofmann, Francis, Noland, Louis...it also spans Old Masters, Jewelry, and sensational abstract by Gerhard Richter' Eighteen-Karat Gold, Diamond and Enamel Bracelet by Schlumberger for Tiffany & Co. Estimate $25-35,000, left; Turquoise, Enamel and Diamond Bastille Cuff-Bracelet, David Webb Estimate $15/20,000, right Marion, the great-granddaughter of Capt. Samuel Burk Burnett, was the heiress to the historic Four Sixes Ranch in King County in West Texas. Sotheby's said the masterworks that formed her art collection were featured in her Fort Worth home, which was designed by architect I.M. Pei. Sotheby's said that a number of other works from her collection will be gifted to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. WHO WAS ANNE MARION? Anne Marion was a prominent Texas rancher, oil heiress and patron of the arts who helped fund the Georgia O'Keefe Museum in Sante Fe, New Mexico. Born Anne Burnett Hall, on Nov. 10, 1938, in Fort Worth, Marion represented the fourth generation of the renowned Burnett family. Her father, James Goodwin Hall, was a stockbroker, pilot and horse breeder. Her mother, Anne Valliant Hall, was a rancher and horse breeder. She grew up in Fort Worth and in Guthrie, in northern Texas, where the Four Sixes ranch is headquartered. Just like her mother, she would marry four times. The first three marriages ended in divorce before she married John Marion in 1988. Their marriage came eight years after Marion inherent the Four Sixes ranch in 1980, following her mother's death. Anne Marion died on February 11, 2020 in Palm Springs, California, from throat cancer. She is survived by her husband, John, her daughter, Anne Windfohr Grimes, four stepchildren, one grandchild and seven step-grandchildren. Advertisement As well as the O'Keeffe museum in New Mexico, which grew from having 50 paintings when it opened in 1997 to some 2,500 items today, Marion was also a benefactor of the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art in Texas. Marion served as chairman of the O'Keeffe museum for 20 years and was appointed chairman emeritus in 2017. Additionally, Marion was an honorary trustee of Texas Christian University, contributing to a number of projects over the years, including to the development of the campus' medical school. She also served as director of Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth, later becoming the namesake of the Marion Emergency Care Center at the hospital. In December last year her legendary 6666 ranch went on the market for $192.2 million. The ranch between Lubbock and Dallas boasts more than 142,000 acres and had been owned by Marion's family for 150 years. It is renowned for breeding horses and its owners the Burnett family made its fortune in cattle and oil after founding the ranch in 1870. It was bought by Captain Samuel 'Burk' Burnett, who went on to became 'one of the most influential and prosperous cattlemen in the history of Texas' after starting with 100 head of cattle that he branded '6666'. Friends with Theodore Roosevelt, Cpt. Burnett even had a local town - Burkburnett - named after him at the president's suggestion in 1910. The listing marks the first time in the ranch's history that it has been put on the market. The ranch, in Guthrie, Texas, was owned by Anne Marion, 81, for 40 years after she inherited it from her great-grandfather. Just as her mother had, the heiress married four times, with the first three marriages ended in divorce. She married Mr Marion in 1988. She is also survived by her daughter Windi Grimes, the great-great-granddaughter of old Burk Burnett who founded the ranch in 1870. Burnett, who started out herding his father's cattle along the Chisholm Trail to Kansas, ended up running an operation which owned some 20,000 livestock in Texas, Oklahoma and even Mexico. The former estate features 'the finest ranch house in West Texas' which was built in 1917 - the stately home which still stands tall on the property. There have been a number of famous guests to visit the property, including Roosevelt, Wild West actor Will Rogers and the Indian Chief Quanah Parker. As well as beef, the the ranch also became renowned for its breeding of horses, specifically American Quarter Horses used as racehorses or for ranch work. Two-time world champion 'Dash for Cash' was reared at the property. When oil was discovered in Burkburnett in 1918, Burnett saw his wealth increase even further - with 56 oil rigs swiftly installed to exploit the land's resources. Within a short time, Burkburnett had become 'the world's wonder oilfield', transforming the area from a 'sleepy farm town' into a 'boom town' which even helped to inspire a Hollywood movie of the same name. Burnett became president of the Ardmore Oil Milling and Gin Company and expanded his property empire further by buying land in Fort Worth. Burnett's father-in-law, the banker Martin B. Loyd - whose daughter Ruth married the rancher when he was 20 - also named Burnett to his First National Bank of Fort Worth. The couple had three children together, two of whom died young. Only their son Tom lived on to have a family and build his own ranching business. Burnett and Ruth later divorced, and he married Mary Couts Barradel in 1892. They had one son, Burk Burnett, Jr., who died in 1917. Five years later, in 1922, Burnett Sr. would die too, aged 73. At the time of his death his wealth was estimated to be $6million, which is roughly the equivalent of nearly $100million today. Former first lady Laura Bush, right, views a bronze titled,'Passing Times' by Veryl Goodnight, as Anne Marion, rear left, looks on, Thursday Feb. 20, 2003, at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas The legendary '6666' Texas ranch is on the market for $192.2 million after the death of its owner oil heiress Anne Marion The estate, with over 142,000 acres, has been owned by Marion's family for 152 years. The listing marks the first time in the ranch's history that it has been put on the market The ranch also features multiple barns, pen areas and stalls for the horses. The pastures on the property range from around 900 acres to almost 10,000 acres each. The home contains 13 bedrooms, 13 baths, three powder rooms, two kitchens, dining room and three fireplaces As one of the largest ranches in Texas, it runs 20 miles long and around 12 miles wide. Over 140,000 acres of the ranch has been left untouched and various rivers run through the property. The lower valley areas of the property have a variety of trees including soapberry, willows and hackberry. The ranch also features multiple barns, pen areas and stalls for the horses. The pastures on the property range from around 900 acres to almost 10,000 acres each. The home contains 13 bedrooms, 13 baths, three powder rooms, two kitchens, dining room and three fireplaces. The estate also features the famous loft barn, which provided the backdrop for Marlboro cigarette adverts in the 1960s and '70s. There are two bunk houses, several horse sheds and a shop building. There is also a round pen, dog kennel, two laborer houses and about 20 employee houses. In addition, the property features a 3,600 square foot enclosed airplane hanger as a private landing strip. In the Horse Division, a 17,000 square foot main office building stands tall next to various properties including three stables, and various barns for the horses. There is also a new 48,750 square foot covered arena. Tralee Chamber Alliance (TCA) has set out an ambitious plan to tackle, what it calls, the "growing crisis of commercial vacancy" in Tralee town centre. Last October and November - with help from Munster Technological University Students and Kerry County Council's - the chamber carried out an extensive survey to gauge the use and occupancy of every premises in the town centre. The initial results of the survey - which will be released in sections over the next five weeks - make for stark reading. The study found that almost one in five town centre properties (19 per cent) are currently lying idle while a quarter of the 261 ground floor retail units in the town centre are empty. The study - which looked at ground and first floor units - also found that of the 414 residential properties in the town centre, one in five were vacant. TCA say the situation in Tralee is at 'tipping point' and they are calling for urgent action to deal with the crisis. Among the measures sought by the Alliance are the use of compulsory purchase orders to allow the amalgamation and development of long vacant, derelict properties and the prioritisation of town centre locations for any new public service offices in the Tralee area. Expand Close The former Dunnes Stores outlet on Bridge Street / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The former Dunnes Stores outlet on Bridge Street The Alliance also wants the Council to take legal action against the owners of long-term vacant properties to ensure they are either sold or redeveloped and put back into use. A specific example used was the former Dunnes Stores outlet on Bridge Street which has been vacant for over a decade. The Dunnes unit was previously raised during a Seanad debate on the need to reform Ireland's commercial rates in early 2017. On that occasion Fine Gael senator Martin Conway said "the existence of this vacant unit in the centre of Tralee is choking development in the area." In March 2019 several Tralee Municipal District councillors hit out at Dunnes over the chain's handling of the vacant unit. Labour's Cllr Terry O'Brien, now Mayor of Tralee, accused the retail giant of holding the town to ransom and said it was time that the council "put the squeeze on Dunnes". A tough legal approach to long-term vacant units is strongly endorsed by TCA President Kevin McCarthy who says action is urgently needed if the town centre is to be rejuvenated. "The time for inaction on town centre vacancy has passed. The full report is based on factual information collected over the past number of months. By releasing the report over a number of weeks we are looking to start a collective conversation, and will be working with all the stakeholders, public representatives and businesses of the town to finally solve this problem and support the re-emergence of our town," he said. "We have begun discussions with our public representatives seeking support for the measures needed for Tralee." The Chamber Alliance solutions 'Town Centre First' policy for public sector offices "The relocation of public service staff to new buildings on the outskirts of the town has had a detrimental effect on vacancy levels. All public sector bodies associated with Tralee must consider the town centre first in facilitating their additional office space requirements, with a policy of re-purposing existing vacant properties." If necessary, force building sales "Vacant properties and lands currently lying idle in the urban core should be earmarked and prioritised for significant redevelopment or demolition and construction as appropriate. "As much of the property stock in Tralee town centre is in such poor repair, aged or unfit for modern purposes, particular focus should be provided on the amalgamation of properties on a street-by-street basis in the town centre where considerable vacancy exists, with support from local authorities to enable alternate use, redevelopment or in specific circumstances the use of Compulsory Purchase Orders to support private development" Legal action to ensure vacant properties used, sold or developed "Specific legal action must be taken by the Local Authority, to ensure long-term strategic buildings/sites are actively sold and redeveloped, and in the interim all commercial rates are levied and paid. "Specific examples include the former Dunnes Stores building on Bridge Street; the former Old Oak Bar on Rock Street, the former FAS and Albany buildings on Castle Street and the vacant derelict site on John-Joe Sheehy Road (opposite Austin Stack Park) which are all roadblocks to town centre redevelopment." Main findings of vacancy survey Total ground floor units - 697 Vacant ground floor units - 132(19%) Total first floor units in Tralee - 568 Vacant first floor units - 109 (19%) Total retail units in Tralee - 281 Vacant retail units - 68 (24%) Town centre residential units - 414* (*285 located on first floor level) Vacant residential units - 82 (20%) Ground floor retail units - 261 Ground floor 'services' units - 266 Ground floor 'services' unit usage Financial and business - 69 Medical and health - 39 Leisure Services - 122 Public Services -29 Religious - 7 First floor units most common usage Services -159 - 17 vacant (11%) Storage/Warehouse - 105 - 17 vacant (16%) Residential - 285 - 71 vacant (25%) * All figures provided by Tralee Chamber Alliance The high-level recommendations which were the outcome of the discussions will be shared with the Indian Government To chalk out solutions and to address the key challenges of rare diseases in India, Government of Karnataka along with People to People Health Foundation (PPHF), a public health organisation working towards better healthcare, organised the third edition of Rare Disease Consultation under the initiative titled Blueprint of Rare Diseases in India. The virtual conference was aimed at prioritising access, investment, awareness, policy framework and partnerships on rare diseases in the southern states of India. The event was co-powered by Takeda Pharmaceutical and supported by Japan Embassy. Eminent personalities and leading policy experts during the virtual conference underlined the need for increasing collaboration, commitment and frameworks to address challenges posed by rare diseases in the country. The high-level recommendations which were the outcome of the discussions will be shared with the Indian Government to strengthen the national framework on rare diseases in different regions. Dr Laxmikant Palo, CEO, PPHF, said, India has done commendable work under various health areas and should be open and flexible for learning from other health models when it comes to rare diseases. Dr Arundhati Chandrashekhar, IAS, Mission Director, NHM, Karnataka, said, Thorough planning, timely management, genetic counselling and antenatal screening are essential to control, treat and prevent rare diseases in India. By working collaboratively with all stakeholders, we can make sure that patients with rare diseases get better access to healthcare solutions for overall well-being. Gopal Agrawal, Head of Access Markets Transformation, ICMEA, Takeda, said, "Blueprint for Rare Disease is one of such initiative that will help us move closer to our mission of better and healthier life for patients. The event also received support from Institute of Child Health, Kolkata, GRID Council, LSDSS, ORDI, RDIF and Cure SMA Foundation of India. Ukraine to export shell eggs to Ethiopia The country is also mulling such exports to Ghana, Morocco, Algeria, Angola, and RSA. Reporting by UNIAN If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Washington, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 24th Feb, 2021 ) :President Joe Biden declared Canada and the United States best friends Tuesday, while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the friendship "extraordinary" in a virtual meeting turning the page on the turbulent Donald Trump era. "The United States has no closer friend than Canada," Biden said, setting the tone for the get-together conducted by video link between the White House and Trudeau's office in Ottawa. Although Covid-19 restrictions kept the two leaders apart physically, they went out of their way to demonstrate that the giant neighbouring countries are back to their traditional closeness after the tension of Trump's "America first" policies. "We have a robust agenda today and we're all best served when the United States and Canada work together and lead together," Biden said in public remarks before heading into closed-door talks. Repaying the compliment, Trudeau said they would work "together to get through Covid, but also to make sure we're pulling our weight around the world and making the world a better and safer place for everyone." Trudeau thanked Biden -- who has put the United States back into the Paris climate accord on reducing global carbon emissions -- for his policies on global warming. "US leadership has been sorely missed over the past, uh, past years," he said in a not so hidden dig at Trump. The White House is touting that Tuesday's extensive talks will provide a "roadmap" for better relations. Trump, who recategorized Canada and other US allies as competitors, had a sometimes tense personal relationship with Trudeau. By contrast, Trudeau was the first foreign leader to phone Biden after he won the November election and Trudeau was the first foreign leader the Democrat called after getting into the Oval Office. The White House emphasized how US-Canada ties play an important role in multilateral settings, from the G7 to NATO, the Five Eyes intelligence alliance and the WTO. But while Canada is looking forward to more predictable behavior from its largest trading partner, Biden has already introduced his own new source of friction by canceling the cross-border Keystone XL pipeline project, citing environmental concerns. Flash Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah on Tuesday held a meeting with visiting senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi, during which the two sides hailed the deep-rooted friendship and solid political mutual trust. Yang, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, conveyed Chinese President Xi Jinping's cordial greetings to the Kuwaiti emir, and warmly congratulated Kuwait on celebrating its 60th National Day and the 30th anniversary of liberation. Yang noted that the China-Kuwait relations have stood the test of time thanks to the unswerving strategic mutual trust and sincere friendship, which is a vivid manifestation of "a friend in need is a friend indeed." China's "dual circulation" development pattern, in which domestic and overseas markets reinforce each other, and Kuwait's "2035 National Vision" have great potential for synergy, providing a powerful driving force for pragmatic cooperation between the two countries, he said. On the occasion of celebrating the 50th anniversary of the establishment of China-Kuwait diplomatic ties, China is willing to work together with Kuwait to consolidate strategic mutual trust, promote high-quality joint construction of the Belt and Road Initiative, expand cooperation in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, enhance people-to-people exchanges, and deepen China-Kuwait strategic partnership in the new era, the senior Chinese diplomat said. China appreciates Kuwait's positive role in promoting stability in the Gulf region, and is willing to strengthen communication and coordination between the two countries in international and regional affairs, Yang said. China welcomes Kuwait to continue playing a positive role in pushing forward the negotiations on clinching a free trade agreement between China and the Gulf Cooperation Council, he added. For his part, the Kuwaiti emir asked Yang to convey his sincere regards to President Xi Jinping. He spoke highly of China's development achievements and the fruitful achievements in Kuwait-China cooperation in various fields, stressing that the two sides enjoy deep-rooted friendship, solid mutual trust and broad prospects for cooperation. The Kuwaiti leader also sincerely wished the Chinese people success in gaining more brilliant achievements in development under President Xi's leadership. On the same day, Yang also met with Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Ahmad Nasser Al-Mohammad Al-Sabah. Fiscal Y-T-D Sales Total $4.3 Million CHICO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / AmeraMex International, Inc. (OTCQB:AMMX), a provider of heavy equipment for logistics companies, infrastructure construction and forestry conservation, announced that it has received an equipment order totaling $325,000. Sales, year-to-date, total $4.3 million. The order is for a 95,000-pound capacity Taylor THDC955 Forklift (converted from a container handler) and a Taylor 20,000- pound capacity T-250S Forklift. The equipment is shipping to a dry port in the Midwest by the end of the first quarter. A dry port (sometimes referred to as an inland port) is an inland intermodal terminal directly connected by road or rail to a seaport, operating as a center for the transshipment of sea cargo to inland destinations. The Taylor THDC 955, a 95,000 LB base capacity unit, handles loaded containers or ISO tanks, can stack five containers high, is equipped with a 20'-40' Spreader, a M11 Cummins Diesel engine, and AC cab unit with joystick controls. About AmeraMex International AmeraMex International sells, leases, and rents heavy equipment to companies within multiple industries including construction, logistics, mining, and lumber. AmeraMex, with a US and international customer base, has over 30 years of experience in heavy equipment sales and service. Follow AmeraMex on Twitter @ammx_intl and visit the AmeraMex website, www.AMMX.net or www.hamreequipment.com for additional corporate information, online heavy equipment inventory/ pricing and videos. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical facts included in this press release are forward-looking statements. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "plan," "potential," "continue" or similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements include risks and uncertainties, and there are important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Investors are encouraged to review the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Investors should not place any undue reliance on forward-looking statements since they involve known and unknown, uncertainties and other factors which are, in some cases, beyond the Company's control which could, and likely will, materially affect actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements. Any forward-looking statement reflects the Company's current views with respect to future events and is subject to these and other risks, uncertainties and assumptions relating to operations, results of operations, growth strategy and liquidity. The Company assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future. Investor and Media Relations McCloud Communications, LLC Marty Tullio, Managing Member Office: 949.632.1900 or Marty@McCloudCommunications.com SOURCE: AmeraMex International, Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631452/AmeraMex-International-Receives-Order-Totaling-325000 Williamstown DIRE Committee Chair Reports on Talk with Acting Police Chief WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. The chair of the town's committee on diversity, equity and inclusion Monday reported to his colleagues that he had a long conversation with the town's acting chief of police and that future dialogues between the committee and Police Department are planned. "This past weekend, I had an extensive meeting with Lt. [Michael] Ziemba," said Mohammed Memfis, the chair of the Diversity, Inclusion and Racial Equity Committee. "We met for a very long time and talked about a host of issues. "One of the things that was really clear from the conversation that was explained by Lt. Ziemba is that DIRE has played an exceptional role for the WPD in terms of understanding the importance of lenses and understanding how saying things, doing things that seem so minor, seem so normal for one individual could be quite the opposite for another and how various perspectives and identity influence lenses, outlooks and what a person's perception might be especially in interactions with law enforcement, public safety and so on." Ziemba also told Memfis that he would like to promote transparency in the force by creating a website that gives more information about the officers and the department's policies and procedures. As for those policies and procedures themselves, Memfis said Ziemba is working to bring them into alignment with the police reform bill recently passed on Beacon Hill, and wants input from the DIRE Committee on future policy revisions. "There was a resolution that we passed on one particular policy on professional standards and investigations," Memfis said. "That is a policy that should be updated relatively soon. It's pretty much already drafted. [Ziemba] pulled it up on his laptop and showed me the new, revised policy with all the tailoring to Williamstown. As soon as that's approved by whoever becomes the chief, that will become policy. It was great to see that our resolution was responded to. "Even more important is a conversation we had about policies and procedures and how they're updated from now on. The idea Lt. Ziemba had was that there should be a formalized stream so whenever the Williamstown Police Department has a policy they're planning to update or change or create, there be a consultation with DIRE so we can provide direct feedback, suggestions, points of clarifications on any sort of policies and procedures that are going through the police department that are within the scope of something that we think is material to our committee. "I think that could be really productive for us going forward." On the broader topic of reimagining what public safety looks like in the town of 7,700, Ziemba told Memfis that he welcomes a townwide conversation about how to expand capacity for social workers to respond to calls currently handled by the police. "[Ziemba] expressed a dire need for the presence of more public health clinicians to deal with some of the public safety issues that have traditionally been addressed with police officers," Memfis said. "He said that calls that would have required that kind of support 10 years ago happened maybe once a week. Now, it's like once or twice a day. "And those resources are being shared across the region, so you can often find yourself in situations where it's difficult to pull in someone who may be already occupied with something else." While Memfis characterized his meeting with Ziemba as productive and an opening for future cooperation between the DIRE Committee and the department, some of his colleagues were more cautious. "I'm wondering if in this work you're doing, Mohammed, have you included the union person who smacked us around, who ridiculed us in a very nasty way in the paper that then the Board of Selectmen co-signed?" Bilal Ansari asked. "I'm wondering if the police union person can write an apology, can write a statement of acknowledgement that our work is valuable, that our work is not trying to harm the Williamstown Police Department. Can he come and join the narrative, not just leave Mike Ziemba out there but join that work so we can collectively work toward restorative healing?" Aruna D'Souza echoed that sentiment. "I think that outreach is fine, but outreach when this is still sitting on the table, when the police union actually spoke about members of this committee in ways that I think increased hostility toward members of this committee in intangible and, in some cases, tangible ways, that needs to be addressed," D'Souza said. Andrew Art said he believed the October letter from the local police union was not just the work of one officer but had been widely circulated in the department before it was sent to the Select Board. Memfis said the union's letter was a topic of discussion in his meeting with Ziemba and that, personally, he laughed it off at the time. "As I explained to Lt. Ziemba, my primary focus right now is on the decisions that are being made now and will continue to be made in the future and what effects and consequences they'll have for the town and people who live in it," Memfis said. "The inappropriateness of that letter was made clear, and issues dealing with the police union will continue to be central to discussions that we have with the WPD moving forward." Memfis said he hopes to have the police participate in DIRE Committee meetings down the road and that he hopes the collaboration will continue with whoever the town hires as an interim police chief and, ultimately, permanent police chief. In other business on Monday, the DIRE Committee discussed an email it received from a member of the LGBTQIA-plus asking the panel to be more inclusive in its efforts at inclusion. Memfis and other members of the committee talked about how intersectionality of discrimination plays a role in harming members of the community in different ways. "Even within a specific group and a person's identity, there's the concept of intersectionality that exists, which means that you can be gay, you can be trans, but then there's this other layer of, if you're Black, you may have a different experience or if you're not a U.S. citizen who is living in the United States with those identities, you may have a different experience," he said. The email was referenced a couple of different times during the meeting. "I would welcome to hear from people about the types of things they think our committee should be focused on," Art said during a different agenda item. "If they think our agendas have been too narrow ." "Two hundred years," Ansari interjected. "Eight months, we've been talking about race, and people are tired already." D'Souza said that all equity work intersects. "The assumption that if we're working on racial equity we're not also working on LGBTQIA-plus equity is belied even within the terms of our committee itself," D'Souza said. "It drives me nuts. I think that if one takes intersectionality seriously, it means that when we're looking at inclusion, we need to be thinking about all of those things at once. If our work on racial equity was ignoring or downplaying the needs of people of color who are queer or gay, lesbian, trans, whatever, that would mean we're doing bad work on racial equity." And the committee heard a proposal from member Kerri Nicoll to formally reach out to the community and ask how Williamstown could be safer and more inclusive for all people. "My basic idea is to get feedback from as many people as possible in our community on three open-ended questions that focus on inclusion: What do you think it means for a community to be inclusive? Do you feel included in our community and why or why not? What is one step you think our community can take to be more inclusive?" Nicoll said. Nicoll asked her colleagues for input on the best way to ask those questions either in a survey or in focus groups. The consensus was that the committee should pursue both tracks: having in-depth conversations with residents but also supplementing that input with data from a broader survey. For business leaders it can seem that every few months a hot new tech trend hits the market. This solution is often positioned as something you really need to know about or your business will fall hopelessly behind. Invariably it is cloaked in complex jargon or buzzwords that can make the average person entirely unsure what exactly it is that they are missing out on. With so much hype and complexity floating around, sometimes the most useful thing to do is to go back to basics and explain things as clearly as possible and, crucially, why it could matter to your business. Enter: GitOps GitOps is an approach your development team can take to effectively manage Kubernetes clusters and delivering applications. That in and of itself is probably not that useful a definition, so lets drill down into what each segment of the term means. Firstly, what is Git? Git is an open source software for coordinating work among developers. It enables version control when they are working on the same code. This is important because oftentimes numerous developers are working on the same project at the same time or separate projects are using the same code base. Also, if a project changes or someone makes a terrible error, you can roll back to an earlier version. Next up, Kubernetes - which is an open source container management system. A container is a package of code which also contains everything needed to run the application including settings and tools. We dont need to go into too much detail, but what you need to know is that Kubernetes can make development faster, more efficient, less heavy on your tech infrastructure and it is ideal for cloud computing. However, for containers to be stable, scalable and secure, they need to be managed. For example, if one container fails, you want an identical one to automatically take its place or your application will be buggy and crash-ridden. This is where Kubernetes comes in, it makes that and a whole host of other processes happen that make containers work in practice. So what we have here is essentially two big systems for developing, launching and maintaining an app for your business - Git and Kubernetes. The natural question is how do you ensure that Git and Kubernetes can work together? After all, as weve touched upon, version control in development is incredibly important. Without it, things can go wrong quickly. This is where GitOps comes in. Git is used as the single source of truth to manage Kubernetes and application delivery. If theres a divergence on Kubernetes, a well-functioning GitOps process will alert your IT team and enable safeguards such as the automatic roll back of Kubernetes to kick in. This may sound like an incremental benefit, but in practice it means your dev and IT teams gain huge advantages in terms of simplifying operations, time savings in development and greater stability in your companys infrastructure. The long-term result could be significant time and cost savings for the average business. Not to mention, greater user experience for their team and customers, with product and service updates more reliable and easier to implement. It also plays a very important role in enabling companies to become cloud native. Of course, understanding the theory is one thing, but how do you actually get GitOps? In practice, it is an extension of your DevOps function. We wont go too far into the long grass of what is technically required, save to say that it means designing and implementing a whole host of best practice procedures which your infrastructure team adheres to. Numerous solutions are now available that work in conjunction with GitOps. From a business decision making standpoint, what is required is determining whether your company would benefit from a GitOps approach. This means deciding whether, for example, your business strategy involves becoming cloud native, what your application delivery pipeline looks like and if you have plans to update or upgrade your infrastructure. By engaging with your DevOps or IT teams you can decide if adopting GitOps is the right next step for your business. From there, it is a matter of planning the most efficient way to make it happen. This could involve instructing external consultants, leveraging the existing knowledge of your team - supplement with training, hiring a specialist or a combination of all three. For senior decision makers, GitOps may seem like an opaque, technical consideration that is only of interest to their IT teams. However, the reality is that it could play a critical role in enabling your business to achieve its commercial goals. After all, for nearly every business, its infrastructure and ability to develop, deploy and scale new apps and solutions is fundamentally linked to its success. Understanding how GitOps could make life easier for your business is well worth the time - your DevOps team will thank you for it. (Natural News) The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is bankrolling an activist educational group that believes math is racist and that arriving at an objective answer is an example of white supremacy. (Article by Paul Joseph Watson republished from Summit.news) Yes, really. A conglomerate of 25 educational organizations called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction asserts that asking students to find the correct answer is an inherently racist practice. The organizations website lists the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as its only donor. In fact, over the past decade, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded over of $140 million to a variety of groups associated with Pathway. Their antiracist resources are at the epicenter of a new training course for teachers offered by the Oregon Department of Education throughout the state, reports National File. Three of the most prominent organizations receiving grant money from the Gates are The Education Trust, Teach Plus, and WestEd, all non-profit 501c organizations. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is bankrolling a group of activists who believe math is racist. They chide the concept of mathematics being purely objective as unequivocally false & argue focusing on the right answer is an example of white supremacy. https://t.co/ZdTx7WXhDm (((Jason Rantz))) on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) February 18, 2021 A guidebook for teachers produced by Pathway called Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction ludicrously claims that mathematics is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views. Teachers are instructed to blame non-white students getting answers wrong on white supremacist practices, which are truly to blame for the underachievement of minorities. As we have previously highlighted, following on from universities, schools have now become breeding grounds for this kind of intersectional insanity. Earlier this week, we reported on how the principal of East Side Community School in New York sent white parents a manifesto that calls on them to become white traitors and advocate for full white abolition. Last year, we revealed how children at an elementary school in Virginia are being taught that traits such as objectivity and perfectionism are racist characteristics of white supremacy. Meanwhile, school districts across America are eliminating grading standards in order to combat racism. The move was announced in San Diego after it was revealed that just 7% of D or F grades are handed out to white students, while 23% went to Native Americans, 23% of failing grades went to Hispanics and 20% went to black students. As Allie Beth Stuckley notes, I dont know. Maybe the people who dont want black and brown kids to learn math correctly are the *actual* white supremacists. I dont know. Maybe the people who dont want black and brown kids to learn math correctly are the *actual* white supremacists. https://t.co/q54VFP1bv8 Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) February 18, 2021 Read more at: Summit.news and EducationSystem.news. No media source currently available The URL has been copied to your clipboard The code has been copied to your clipboard. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced plans Monday to begin easing coronavirus lockdown measures. As Henry Ridgwell reports from London, Johnson credited Britains rapid vaccination program for allowing the country to begin reopening. Britain's vaccine rollout has slowed down over the past two weeks with ministers and manufacturers pointing the finger at each other for the hold-up. With a successful immunisation drive crucial to Britain's hopes of easing restrictions over the spring, critics say it is vital the programme picks up speed to avoid Boris Johnson's ambitious plans getting 'derailed'. Just 192,000 people were vaccinated on Monday and 142,000 on Sunday, in two of the lowest daily tolls since the mammoth NHS operation began to gather steam at the start of the year. A further 327,000 were done yesterday; down on last Tuesday. Ministers have repeatedly blamed the 'lumpy' supply of vaccines as being the 'rate-limiting factor' of the programme, and the UK's reliance on just two companies' jabs makes the situation precarious. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson today said there was 'no problem' with the supply chain and Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer, agreed that 'fluctuations' were anticipated. Officials say shrinking deliveries were expected because Pfizer had to improve its key factory in Belgium at the start of the year, and AstraZeneca's production was slower to get off the ground than planned. However, both drug giants have insisted that there are no unforeseen issues with the supply chain, as Nicola Sturgeon said Scotland's rollout couldn't speed up until 'the supplies start to flow in greater volumes again'. And the concerns spread wider than Britain when an EU official revealed that AstraZeneca is now set to deliver only half of the planned doses to the continent in the second quarter of this year as the firm recovers from a row with the bloc earlier in the year about its supply commitments. Despite fears that deliveries are slowing down, Matt Hancock has promised 'bumper' weeks in March to compensate for the lag. Supply figures published by the Scottish Government in mid-January appeared to back his claims, with the number of doses being delivered next month set to be significantly higher. Here, MailOnline digs into why Britain's vaccination drive has slowed down: The UK has one of the most advanced vaccination programmes in the world, reaching 18million people already, but Sunday and Monday saw its progress slow down Delivery schedules published by the Scottish Government in January and later removed from its website showed a scheduled dip in stocks in February followed by a surge in availability in March What slowed down Pfizer's vaccine? One of the biggest hold-ups in vaccine delivery appears to have been Pfizer doing maintenance work at its manufacturing facility in Belgium. Pfizer is the longest-running supplier of vaccines to the UK and has been shipping its jab since it became the first in the world to go into use in December. As part of preparing to produce hundreds of millions of doses for countries around the world, the company admitted in January that it would be delaying deliveries. A frustrated EU Commission said the delay was caused by 'modifications at the plant' and Pfizer planned to have finished them by mid-February. Pfizer confirmed the disruption would affect all countries in Europe and told the Financial Times at the time: 'Although this will temporarily impact shipments in late January to early February, it will provide a significant increase in doses available for patients in late February and March.' The Scottish Government plans showed that the deliveries from Pfizer would fall by a third from around 128,000 doses in the final week of January to 80-83,000 per week throughout February before spiking back to 130,000 or more in March. Scotland gets around eight per cent of the UK's vaccine supply, suggesting the deliveries for the UK as a whole may have changed from 1.6million per week to 1m. Pfizer told MailOnline yesterday there were 'no UK supply challenges' and deliveries were arriving as planned. Pfizer had to make 'modifications' at its manufacturing facility in Belgium which led to delays to deliveries of the vaccine to countries all over Europe What slowed down AstraZeneca's vaccine? The UK's other major vaccine supplier, AstraZeneca, is making up for the majority of jabs being given out and is expected to be supplying 2million doses per week. This rapid pace of delivery came later than expected, however, which delayed the NHS's plans to roll it out to care homes and GP surgeries across the country. Mid-January had been the original target for two million per week, The Times reported at the start of the year, but this was pushed back by a month. In a briefing on January 13 AstraZeneca president Tom Keith-Roach said the commitment would be met 'on or before the middle of February'. AstraZeneca slashes EU delivery expectation by half AstraZeneca told the European Union yesterday it would not be able to deliver on the EU's vaccine orders amid supply issues. The firm had committed to supplying the bloc with 180million doses in the second quarter of 2020. But an EU official involved directly in talks with the firm, said the company had warned it could now only 'deliver less than 90million doses', according to Reuters. Britain has ordered 100million doses of the Oxford vaccine and it is one of two Covid jabs being rolled out on the NHS. Asked about the EU official's comment, a spokesman for AstraZeneca told Reuters yesterday: 'We are hopeful that we will be able to bring our deliveries closer in line with the advance purchase agreement.' Later in the day a spokesman in a new statement said the company's 'most recent Q2 forecast for the delivery of its COVID-19 vaccine aims to deliver in line with its contract with the European Commission.' He added: 'At this stage AstraZeneca is working to increase productivity in its EU supply chain and to continue to make use of its global capability in order to achieve delivery of 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter.' Earlier this week, AstraZeneca said that although there had been 'fluctuations' in supply at plants, they were still 'on track' with orders with no issues with delivery of the UK-manufactured vaccine. A spokesman for the European Commission, which coordinates talks with vaccine manufacturers, said it could not comment on the discussions as they were confidential. He said the EU should have more than enough shots to hit its vaccination targets if the expected and agreed deliveries from other suppliers are met, regardless of the situation with AstraZeneca. Advertisement The Scottish delivery figures show that AstraZeneca's supplies were also scheduled to be low in February. They would fall from a high of 261,000 doses in a week in late January to none at all in one week in the middle of the month, before escalating to more than 300,000 per week from the beginning of March. A spokesman for AstraZeneca said on Monday that although there had been 'fluctuations' in supply at plants, the firm was still 'on track' with orders. Why are the UK and Europe being affected differently? Pfizer's manufacturing issues appear to affect the European Union and Britain equally, but AstraZeneca's are different because it manufactures the vaccines in different places. The AstraZeneca vaccine is a natural product it is a genetically engineered virus made to look like the coronavirus so must be grown naturally. The cells needed to make the jab will only reproduce as fast as they naturally can, and astronomical quantities of them are needed, which means the process will always take a minimum amount of time. AstraZeneca says it takes three months, on average, to make each batch of the vaccine. Numerous ones are made at the same time but this means that there is an upper limit to how much or how fast one plant can make jabs. And the yields of these natural batches are also not entirely controllable the company said it had not produced as much as it had hoped at the start of the production. Low yields at major European supply plants in Belgium have devastated supply plans on the continent, but Britain makes its own supply in England where the success rate has been higher. Is there an easy solution? The UK's 'lumpy' supply cannot be improved easily because there is no quick fix for such a huge manufacturing operation. Other countries have vaccine orders of equal or higher priority Pfizer is being used widely in Europe, for example, and Moderna is still unavailable to the UK because it was later to place orders than the US and EU. And of the vaccines Britain is already receiving, manufacturing cannot be sped up infinitely. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, England's deputy chief medical officer, explained on Sky News today: 'There are always going to be supply fluctuations. 'These are new vaccines, by and large the manufacturers have not made them or anything like them before. 'The process of making a vaccine is one where, basically, you set the equipment up and leave it all to do its thing a bit like beer-making really. 'What you get at the end is not something that you can say is identical every time in terms of the yield, the amount of doses you can then make from that batch.' He added that it will take 'a few months' before the manufacturers can get into a steady routine, he said, and there were also 'global supply constraints'. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam (left), England's deputy chief medical officer, said 'There are always going to be supply fluctuations', and NHS chief Sir Simon Stevens (right) said the pace of vaccination could double in the second phase of the rollout Will the UK's vaccine rollout speed up? Ministers insist that the vaccination programme will speed up significantly in March when supplies become bigger and more regular. The Government is aiming to vaccinate everyone over the age of 50 by May, and Boris Johnson said he plans to offer a first dose to all adults in the UK by July 31. Moderna's vaccine, of which the UK is expecting seven million doses and has already approved for us, will start to be delivered from the end of March. Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, suggested the rollout could even go twice as fast in its second phase in order to keep reaching people at the same rate as now while also giving out the second doses to elderly people. 'Compelling' real-world data from Scotland shows one dose of either jab cuts risk of being hospitalised by up to 95% Covid vaccines being used in Britain are working 'spectacularly well' and cutting hospital admissions caused by the virus by as much as 95 per cent, according to the first real-world evidence of the roll-out. Researchers yesterday called the results 'very encouraging' and claimed they provided 'compelling evidence' that they can prevent severe illness. Scientists counted Covid hospital admissions in Scotland among people who had had their first dose of a jab and compared them to those who had not yet received a dose of either the Pfizer or Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. In a ray of hope for Britain's lockdown-easing plans, results showed the jabs slashed the risk of being admitted to hospital with Covid by up to 85 and 94 per cent, respectively, four weeks after a single dose. The study carried out by academics from the universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde, as well as Public Health Scotland was the first of its kind. But it currently doesn't have enough data to analyse how well the jabs prevent death or stop transmission of the virus. Lead researcher Professor Aziz Sheikh said: 'These results are very encouraging and have given us great reasons to be optimistic for the future. We now have national evidence that vaccination provides protection against Covid hospitalisations. 'Roll-out of the first vaccine dose now needs to be accelerated globally to help overcome this terrible disease.' Advertisement He said at a Downing Street briefing last week: 'In this next phase, the second sprint, actually were going to be vaccinating a larger number of people than in the first sprint. 'And overall, although supply will vary week to week and weve got to adjust accordingly, we may be giving up to twice as many vaccinations overall given weve got to be doing second doses as well than we have done in the first sprint.' Health Secretary Matt Hancock also yesterday said vaccination figures would stay low for the rest of this week in an interview with LBC's Nick Ferrari. He said it will be a 'quieter week' for the vaccine rollout because of a drop in stockpiles, warning that the success of the drive was 'all about supply'. Mr Hancock added: 'We have got a quieter week this week and then we're going to have some really bumper weeks in March.' Pointing the blame at vaccine manufacturers, he also claimed there has been 'ups and downs' in the delivery schedule. Why is it important for the rollout to progress quickly? Britain's vaccination programme must go quickly because the country's entire route out of lockdown hinges on it. Boris Johnson's plans to lift lockdown rules are based on vaccinating the majority of people who are likely to die if they catch coronavirus. The more people who can be successfully vaccinated with at least one dose, the faster the rules can be loosened because the lower the death count of the third wave could be expected to be. A third wave of the virus is now inevitable, with cases expected to skyrocket when lockdown ends, but the impact of this will be more tolerable if the majority of adults in the country are immune to the virus. Professor Paul Hunter, from the University of East Anglia, said yesterday that Britain will struggle to stick to its plans if vaccination rates don't pick up 'very soon'. Professor Hunter pointed out that the rapid decline in positive coronavirus tests seen earlier in the lockdown appears to be levelling off now, and the number of people being vaccinated each day are dropping lower at the same time. He warned: 'Taken together, these two observations are concerning... 'If more of our vulnerable people were protected from severe disease through immunisation, then we could allow some increase in numbers without posing a substantial extra risk of severe disease and hospitalisation. 'However, a lot of people admitted to hospital with Covid are still not in the groups where vaccination has been completed. 'If vaccination rates do not pick up very soon, then we will struggle to give enough people their first dose before we have to allocate more and more of our available doses to peoples second injections. 'This could lead to more potentially vulnerable individuals being unprotected for a lot longer than we had expected as we try to relax restrictions further. This would have the real potential to derail the UKs road plan for coming out of lockdown.' A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind. IF you have absolutely no urgent or emergency need to be outdoors today, then remain at home. Should you take a chance and decide to tempt fate, then it may most likely result in you being stopped and questioned by police officers and members of the Defence Force, or even find yourself charged and taken before a court. I pastor an American Baptist church in a small town in rural Illinois. When the current building was dedicated in 1968, there were more than 300 members. By the last 1990s, there were about a hundred. When I became the pastor in 2006, just 50. Now, on a good Sunday I can look out from the pulpit and see 20 souls in the seats. Where did they all go? I became a social scientist, in part, to try to figure that out. In my forthcoming book, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, And Where They Are Going, I document in detail how and why so many Americans are now counted among the ranks of religiously unaffiliated in the United States. What I discovered was that while many people have walked away from a religious affiliation, they havent left all aspects of religion and spirituality behind. So, while growing numbers of Americans may not readily identify as Christian any longer, they still show up to a worship service a few times a year or maintain their belief in God. The reality is that many of the nones are really somes. Nones by Belonging Religious disaffiliation is at an all-time highclaimed by nearly a quarter of the populationwhen measured through surveys on religious belonging. The General Social Survey, for example, asks a common version of the question: What is your religious preference? Respondents can choose from a long list of options, including no religion. In 1972, just 1 in 20 Americans had no religious affiliation. That share inched up only marginally for the next two decades, before beginning its climb in the 1990s. The unaffiliated jumped about 4 percentage points between 1993 and 1996, up to nearly 1 in 6 (nearly 15%) by the new millennium. The number of respondents indicating they had no religion continued to grow, reaching 1 in 5 in 2012 (19.6%) and close to 1 in 4 (23.7%) in the most recent wave of the survey available. Theres ample evidence emerging that the GSS undercounts the share of Americans who have no religious belonging because some survey respondents may be more reluctant to indicate to a live interviewer that they are religiously unaffiliated. Still, all surveys agree on this pointthose without a religious tradition are growing every year, the so-called rise of the nones. In my book, I note how the only other religious tradition to change in size in a significant way are mainline Protestants (such as United Methodists and Episcopalians). The data indicates that many nones are people who were raised in one of these traditions, but walked away from it as adults. Nones by Behavior While belonging is the most popular way to measure religiosity, there are other dimensions of religious life. If we believe actions speak louder than words, we may look to whether religious behavior has shifted as dramatically. A good place to look is church attendance. Social science knows that communal worship gatherings are crucial for generating social capital, providing theological education, and encouraging the faithful to remain devoted to the tenets of their faith tradition. Like religious affiliation, religious attendance in the US has been declining since the 1970s, but incrementally. In the 1970s, about 3 in 10 Americans indicated that they attended worship services at least once a week. At the other end of the spectrum, about 2 in 10 said that they never or rarely attended church services. The percentage of Americans who fell into this lowest category of church attendance stayed stable through the 1980s then incrementally increased from that point forward. By the 2010s, nearly a third of all Americans said that they never attended church or attended less than once a year. At the same time, the share of Americans who were weekly attenders has decreased slowly. Between the 1990s and the 2010s, the share in this top category dropped about 2.5 percentage points. Currently, about a quarter attend weekly or more, and two-thirds attend a worship service at least once a year. What is driving this drop in attendance? For decades, social scientists believed that young people would drift away from religion in early adulthood, but then come back to church when they got married, had children, and settled down. That was true for Baby Boomers, but now the data indicates that among younger age cohorts, thats not occurring as much. More young people stop attending church in their 20s and never return. Nones by Belief The final dimension of religiosity is religious belief. These questions are notoriously difficult to ask on surveys, but the GSS began to explore the topic in 1988. Respondents can select among six options to the question Which statement comes the closest to expressing what you believe about God? They range from I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it, to an atheist option, I dont believe in God, and one that would describe an agnostic belief, I dont know whether there is a God, and I dont believe there is any way to find out. Its reasonable to assume that those who chose either the atheist or agnostic options would be counted as a none when it comes to religious belief. In 1988, just 5.1 percent of Americans chose the atheist or agnostic option on the survey. Twenty years later, that had increased to 8 percent, with 3 percent choosing the atheist option. From that point forward, the share who held to these beliefs has drifted up to about 11 percent in the last two waves of the survey. Combining the Three Bs A majority of Americans across faiths (60%) cant be classified as a none by any measurebelonging, behavior, or belief. But among 40 percent who have disaffiliated in at least one of the three, few can be categorized as nones across the board. Image: Ryan Burge The Venn diagram illustrates how the remaining 40 percent of the population is situated around these three dimensions of religion. Note that behaviornot attending churchis the most common reason why someone would fall into the notes. Forty percent of the nones overall dont attend church but still identify with a religious affiliation and believe in God at some level. Another quarter of the nones neither go to church nor indicate an affiliation with any religious group (the intersection of the green and yellow circles), but still have a belief in God. Those two groups represent two-thirds of the nones. No wonder research has shown that the unaffiliated in America are just as likely to return to church and reclaim a Christian identity as they are to become self-identified atheists and agnostics. In my book I write that nearly 20 percent of people who identified as nothing in particular had changed their affiliation to Christian just four years later. And this nothing in particular category represents nearly 1 in 5 Americans. The harvest is plentiful! For the remaining two factors, its clear that belonging is the next to fall by the wayside, followed by religious belief. Only a quarter of all nones indicate an atheist or agnostic view of God (all those represented by the red circle). The center of the Venn diagram indicates that just 15.3 percent of the population that are nones on one dimension are nones on all dimensions. That amounts to just about 6 percent of the general public who dont belong to a religious tradition and dont attend church and hold to an atheist or agnostic worldview. As Ed Stetzer wrote last year, It would be a mistake to dismiss 25 percent of the population as unreachable or act as though they were all atheists. It would also be a mistake to think church as usual will appeal to the nones. He told church leaders: The unaffiliated arent the unreachable. But for leaders to engage this growing segment of the population, in their communities and hopefully in their churches, they must get an accurate picture of the range of religious unaffiliation in the US. Understanding the composition and trajectory of this group is crucial, but its incredibly easy to overgeneralize about a group based on what it is not rather than what it holds in common. I wish I could give churches a simple checklist of things pastors can do to bring the nones back into their congregations, but there are at least 60 million adult nones in the United States and 60 million reasons why they left organized religion. Trying to understand this group from a sociological perspective is a good start, but Christians need to be willing to listen to the nones themselves. Conversing with the nonesin a non-judgmental way that seeks to understand their concerns and baggageis the best approach that the church can take to address this significant shift in the American religious landscape. Ryan P. Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. His research appears on the site Religion in Public, and he tweets at @ryanburge. [ This article is also available in Portugues, , and . ] [February 24, 2021] Confluent Appoints Ingram Micro as Singapore Distributor, Helping More Enterprises Harness the Full Power of Event Streaming SINGAPORE, Feb. 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Confluent, Inc., the event streaming platform pioneer, announced today that it has teamed with global technology provider Ingram Micro to deliver its market-leading event streaming platform to more customers in Singapore. By harnessing the power of data in motion, event streaming enables companies to deliver the next generation of applications across a number of use cases including customer experience, fraud detection, supply chain optimization, patient monitoring, fleet management, IoT sensor Ingestion and Cyber security. Current Confluent customers in Singapore and across APAC include Bank Rakyat Indonesia, DBS Bank, Disney + Hotstar, and SGX (Singapore Exchange). "Our agreement with Ingram Micro is an important milestone in supporting the increasing demand for event streaming platforms in Asia," said Damien Wong, Vice President of Confluent APAC. "Through this relationship, more companies in Singapore - and further throughout Asia in the near future - will be able to harness the full power of data in motion at massive scale." Ingram Micro is the world's largest technology distributor, with deep expertise in technology solutions, mobility, cloud, and supply chain solutions, enabling its business partners to operate efficiently and successfully in the markets they serve. Ingram Micro operates in 160 countries, including China Hong Kong, Singapore, and across Southeast Asia. "We're excited to partner with Confluent so our customers can advance their digital transformation initiatives," said Francis Choo, VP & CCE, ASEAN HK, Global Partner Engagement - APAC, Ingram Micro. "Ingram Micro will leverage our position as a market leader in value distribution with a vast infrastructure and go-to-market (GTM) expertise to deliver a joint GTM strategy in Singapore and the rest of Asia, helping organizations solve fundamental problems and enacting true transformation via event streaming." /p> Singapore , the Confluent and Ingram Micro agreement also spans China Hong Kong, Indonesia , Malaysia and Thailand and will extend to other parts of Asia this year. Confluent started operations in Asia Pacific in 2018 to meet the rapidly growing demand for event streaming in the region. Confluent has offices globally and in the Asia Pacific region, offices in Singapore, Australia, India, China Hong Kong and South Korea. The Rise of Event Streaming and Confluent In the digital economy, data is always in motion, powering rich customer experiences and efficient, data-driven applications. If you've ever found a new favorite series on a streaming service thanks to the service's recommendation or received a credit card fraud alert on your phone the moment the activity occurred, you've been a part of this shift. Customers have grown to expect these personalized real-time experiences, which is why every company's ability to adapt to this new reality is critical today. Yet, while the imperative for businesses to quickly adapt to this new paradigm has changed, most organizations' infrastructure has not. Organizations are held back from delivering these experiences by the limitations of batch processing and legacy platforms - these companies have to get better, or they'll get beat. The solution is an architecture that supports data in motion - event streaming, a category of computing that enables any business to stream, store, and process data in real time. This infrastructure is now a required part of the stack for modern application. Confluent was created by the original founders of Apache Kafka to ensure that any company can harness the power of event streaming at scale. Confluent launched the industry's first event streaming platform built for the enterprise. In 2020, Confluent brought the core attributes of cloud computing to event streaming through Project Metamorphosis. Now, it's easier than ever for companies to realize the full power of event streaming - when it serves as a central nervous system for the entire organization. With event streaming acting as a central nervous system, all the data within an organization becomes instantly available to all applications and people in real time. As a result, new business can be uncovered, customer experiences exceeded, and new operational efficiencies realized. Additional Resources: See how Confluent is helping its customers transform their businesses: https://www.confluent.io/customers/ Learn more about Confluent: https://www.confluent.io/ Follow Confluent on Twitter: https://twitter.com/confluentinc Press Contact for APAC: Jessica Schwarze at jschwarze@confluent.io About Confluent Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka, pioneered the enterprise-ready event streaming platform. With Confluent, organizations benefit from the first event streaming platform built for the enterprise with the ease of use, scalability, security, and flexibility required by the most discerning global companies to run their business in real time. Companies leading their respective industries have realized success with this new platform paradigm to transform their architectures to streaming from batch processing, spanning on-premises and multi-cloud environments. Confluent is headquartered in Mountain View and London, with offices globally. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud at www.confluent.io/download. Confluent and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Confluent, Inc. Apache and Apache Kafka are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. No endorsement by the Apache Software Foundation is implied by the use of these marks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Media Contact Information Jessica Schwarze jschwarze@confluent.io Related Images confluent-appoints-ingram-micro-as.jpg Confluent appoints Ingram Micro as Asia Distributor Derk van Ogtorp, Alliances Director, APAC at Confluent; Damien Wong, VP, APAC at Confluent; Francis Choo, VP & CCE, ASEAN HK, Global Partner Engagement - APAC, Ingram Micro; and Eunice Lau, Managing Director, Singapore, Ingram Micro SOURCE Confluent [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Beyond barbecues and ceremonies: Recognizing Memorial Day For many, Memorial Day weekend is about gathering with family and grilling or attending a parade. Some find a more personal way to honor the holiday. New Independent Chair of Isle of Man Safeguarding Board Lesley Walker as the new Independent Chair for the Isle of Man Safeguarding Board. Ms Walker, a qualified social worker with 35 years safeguarding experience, will take up the post in April. She brings extensive experience of chairing Safeguarding Boards, Partnerships and panels in England and Northern Ireland and most recently held the position of Independent Chair and Scrutineer for the West Sussex Safeguarding Childrens Partnership. Working with Mrs Walker, the Board will continue to work to empower people of all ages to safeguard themselves, and support the minority who are at risk. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) Two policemen were killed during a shootout between members of the Quezon City Police District and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency near a mall in Quezon City on Wednesday. The shootout followed a drug bust near the Ever Gotesco Mall along Commonwealth Avenue. National Capital Region Police Office chief Brigadier General Vic Danao said two QCPD officers were killed and one was badly wounded. He added that three PDEA agents were also hospitalized. Danao also said no civilians were harmed during the incident. The NCRPO chief described the shootout as a "misencounter," adding this is not the first time such an "unfortunate" incident has happened. The Philippine National Police and PDEA will create a joint body to investigate the shootout. "PNP Chief, Police General Debold Sinas, appointed the CIDG as the lead investigating body while the RD, NCRPO has been designated to speak on any updates from the PNP in order to keep the public updated with accurate and relevant information," the PNP said in a statement. "The PNP and PDEA both agree and assure the public that the incident, while serious, will in no way affect the continuing operational relationship and coordination they have long firmed up in the fight against illegal drugs," it added. Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra has ordered the National Bureau of Investigation to conduct a parallel investigation into the alleged "misencounter" between the police and PDEA agents. This will be separate from the joint PNP-PDEA investigation body announced by Sinas. The mall management said it immediately secured all access points to the building to ensure the safety of shoppers. "The management is closely coordinating with the PNP (Philippine National Police)," Ever Gotesco said in a Facebook post. Meanwhile, Quezon City Mayor Joy Belmonte asked residents to avoid posting online any unverified information regarding the incident. Cal Bank has partnered with Saham Insurance to unveil a new product targeted at customers of the bank and particularly the medium enterprises' sector. The new partnership by Cal Bank and Saham which has been made available to customers on the banks digital platforms will improve insurance penetration in the country. This is due to the role the bank will be playing in getting its customers to buy an insurance product from Saham. At the launch of the product in Accra, the Managing Director of Cal Bank, Philip Owiredu explained the category of customers to be insured under the policy. Saying the product is made available to all their customers, but particularly, car and homeowners including Small and Medium Enterprises, due to the kind of operations they are involved in. He noted that buoyant insurance industry is critical to the growth of the Ghanaian economy especially in this time of COVID- 19 pandemic and that Cal Bank is demonstrating its readiness to partner with insurers to support its relevance for national development. Managing Director of Saham Insurance, Mabel Nyarko Pobley explaining the need for everyone to have an insurance policy, she said the partnership is necessary because it will increase insurance penetration in the country. She also assured customers of enhanced offerings and customer-centric services under the new partnership. The Commissioner of National Insurance Commission, Mr Justice Yaw Ofori on his part said the contributions of the bancassurance sub-sector is increasingly growing and having a significant impact on the insurance industry and remains an attractive business arrangement as it enables both the insurers and banks leverage. 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. Featured Video Prisoners could jump the queue for coronavirus vaccinations when the next phase of the rollout begins - but teachers will be made to wait, it emerged last night. A potential loophole for criminals was revealed as officials prepare to publish their recommendations on the jab priority list for adults aged under 50. Key workers such as teachers, who are set to return to schools on March 8, are not likely to be bumped up the queue. But it is understood local areas will have the flexibility to vaccinate prisoners in large groups if necessary to make the exercise easier while the wider population is likely to receive jabs according to age. This is not a formal recommendation by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which draws up the suggested priority order for jabs. Prisoners could jump the queue for coronavirus vaccinations when the next phase of the rollout begins. A potential loophole for criminals was revealed as officials prepare to publish their recommendations on the jab priority list for adults aged under 50. (Above, file image of a member of prison staff) It is understood local areas will have the flexibility to vaccinate prisoners in large groups if necessary to make the exercise easier while the wider population is likely to receive jabs according to age. (Pictured, members of the public queue to receive their coronavirus vaccine at Basingstoke Fire Station, in Hampshire) But a Government source said it was an informal guideline. However, there was confusion last night over the exact policy which will be adopted after health officials insisted prisoners will receive jabs by age groups. Any guidance that an entire prison population can be jabbed at the same time opens up the possibility that inmates will be vaccinated before the general public. A Department of Health spokesman said: 'Prisoners will not be prioritised for vaccination. They are being vaccinated in line with the priority groups set out by the independent JCVI no faster and no further than the general public. 'The rollout of vaccines in prisons will continue to follow this independent advice.' Meanwhile, JCVI deputy chairman Professor Anthony Harnden said that giving workers such as teachers and police priority in the vaccination order would slow down the rollout. There have been growing calls for people at greater risk of catching the virus, including teachers, police, shop workers and taxi drivers, to be placed at the top of the queue when vaccines are rolled out to under-50s. Any guidance that an entire prison population can be jabbed at the same time opens up the possibility that inmates will be vaccinated before the general public. (Above, a member of the public is given a Covid jab in the back of a taxi in a pop-up vaccination site in Holland Park, west London) But Professor Harnden told the Commons science and technology committee yesterday: 'One of the key reasons that this programme has been so successful is because it has been simple, it's been deliverable and it's been rolled out very quickly and people understand it. 'If you start picking out certain groups, it will make it more complicated. The risk of doing that is slowing the programme down.' JCVI deputy chairman Professor Anthony Harnden (above) said that giving workers such as teachers and police priority in the vaccination order would slow down the rollout The JCVI was responsible for drawing up the original list of nine priority groups, which includes the most clinically vulnerable and all over-50s, who should be vaccinated by the end of April. It has now written up its recommendations for the vaccination order in under-50s, which have been submitted to ministers. The Department of Health said: 'We are following advice from the independent JCVI to vaccinate the most vulnerable people first.' However, last night it emerged that healthy people in their 20s have already had jabs in some parts of the country in a vaccine 'postcode lottery'. Some GPs are offering it to people outside the high-risk priority groups because they have run out of eligible patients who want it. The NHS says only people older than 64 or in the top six groups -such as NHS staff, care home residents and the clinically vulnerable should currently be vaccinated. But family doctors in areas with high vaccine 'hesitancy' have started to invite younger patients for the jab to avoid wasting precious supplies. Ellie, 28, of Balham, south London, told the i newspaper she was called to get the vaccine this month. She said: 'I called my GP and asked if I should definitely come for the vaccine, saying it didn't seem right that I was getting it. They just said "It's your lucky day make sure you turn up".' Famous TikTok star Sameer Gaikwad died by suicide at his residence in Pune's Wagholi on Sunday (February 21, 2021). He was 22. The video creator was quite famous amongst the youth. He used to share a lot of thought-provoking videos on his Instagram handle. But now, news of his sudden death has indeed left the fans in shock. According to Loksatta report, Sameer Gaikwad hanged himself from the ceiling of his house located in Nikasa Society, Wagholi, Pune. After learning about the same, his brother Prafull Gaikwad informed Lonikand Police Station. Sameer's family members took him to the Lifeline Hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival by the doctors. The cops have started the investigation, as they have not yet found the exact reason behind his suicide. The police officer told the portal that they have not found any suicide note. For the unversed, Sameer Gaikwad had shared a video on the same day of his death on Instagram. Hence, his fans are in shock after learning about his death. Several fans also expressed grief on social media over his demise. Talking about his family, the late TikTok star is survived by his mother, father and brother. He was a student of Wadia College, Pune. More details about his death case are yet to be revealed. May Sameer Gaikwad's soul rest in peace! 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. Also Read : TV Actor Indira Kumar Dies By Suicide In Chennai Also Read : Marathi Actress Mayuri Deshmukh's Husband Ashutosh Bhakre Dies By Suicide At The Age Of 32 EDWARDSVILLE In 2019, more than 900 cats and dogs were relinquished to Madison County Animal Control for euthanasia because their owner didnt have the financial resources to continue caring for their pets. Many of those people were low-income seniors, and the Edwardsville Rotary Club, Partners for Pets and Main Street Community Center are teaming up to make sure that doesnt have to happen. The Rotary Club has awarded a $5,000 grant to Partners for Pets to cover the cost of 10 clinics, which include services such as vaccines and spaying/neutering. The grant is for low-income residents of District 7 as well as seniors affiliated with Main Street Community Center. Were really excited to do this because we see a need for it, said Erika Pratte, director of Partners for Pets. Madison County Animal Control gets lots of owner surrenders and its usually not because people dont love their pets; its because they cant afford their pets. Were excited to combine two areas that really need attention in our community, which are animals and seniors. Were also excited to be working together with Main Street Community Center and we feel like we are starting to make a difference. For the Edwardsville Rotary Club, the grant is also a perfect way to make a difference in the community. I received a letter from Erika Pratte of Partners for Pets, which had recently hired a veterinarian who works solely for them, so now they are able to provide low-cost clinics, including vaccines and spay/neuter, to low-income families and elderly people in our community, said Gina Grebing, a board member for the Rotary Club. Thats where the partnership with Main Street Community Center comes in. They asked us if we could sponsor a years worth of clinics and we happily gave them $5,000 and we hope to do it next year as well. The grant enhances what was already a solid working relationship between Partners for Pets and Main Street Community Center. In 2020, Partners for Pets and Main Street Community Center started collaborating to provide pet food to the senior citizens affiliated with the center. We started to notice a need for veterinary care, Pratte said. Our goal was to provide a vaccine clinic, but due to COVID, Partners didnt have the extra funding for that clinic to be free and neither did Main Street Community Center. A lot of the seniors didnt have the funds to pay for clinics even at a reduced cost, so we started brainstorming about how we could provide this service. Me and Patty Barney, who is the president of our board of directors, applied to receive funding from the Edwardsville Rotary Club to provide veterinary care. We were awarded a grant of $5,000, not only for the vaccine clinics for also spaying and neutering services. Sara Berkbigler, director of Main Street Community Center, said that many seniors that the center services through its home-delivered meal and commodity food box programs have pets. For those people, animals can be an irreplaceable part of their lives, especially during a pandemic. We are thrilled to hear about this grant being awarded to Partners for Pets, Berkbigler said. We have a wonderful partnership with their organization, as they provide pet food monthly to our low-income seniors. The benefits of having a pet are wonderful for seniors. They provide vital companionship and help with feelings of isolation not only during the pandemic but at all times since they are often living alone with limited mobility or without independent transportation. Berkbigler notes that the cost of keeping pets healthy is not cheap and can be difficult on a fixed income. Many of those we serve are surviving on social security only less than $1,000 a month, Berkbigler said. This program will be a wonderful way to help seniors keep their pets healthy and alleviate the stress and financial burden of vaccination. We are grateful to the Edwardsville Rotary Club for all they do for our community and to Partners for Pets for working with us to help our local senior community. Grebing, meanwhile, knows from her own experiences how important a pet can be to seniors, especially those on a limited income. This is great for a lot of seniors in the community, especially now when their pets may be their only companion, Grebing said. I also deliver Meals on Wheels for the community center to the May Building, and when people have a pet, many of those pets are treated like children. As someone who deals with pets and pet adoption every day, Pratte knows how much animal companionship can mean to people. Thats why she is so grateful to the Edwardsville Rotary Club for the grant and Main Street Community Center for the work it does for seniors in the community. Especially when you are by yourself, a pet is more than just a companion, its a purpose, Pratte said. Even if you are not necessarily alone, pets become part of your family, and its devastating when you fall on times where you cant afford to care for them. A lot of these people will care for their pets before they care for themselves. If we can have anything to do with it, thats a decision that we dont want anyone in our community to have to make. The Cross Border Workers Coalition (CBWC) has written to the Minister for Finance, Paschal Donohoe, requesting a meeting to examine current remote working tax legislation in the Republic of Ireland. The Coalition was set up in response to the fact that employees who live in the Republic of Ireland but work in Northern Ireland are largely prohibited from remote working and are subject to a double tax on their income should it be determined that they have worked from home or within the Republic of Ireland. The North West-based campaign group have urged the finance minister to work with them to achieve a permanent, pragmatic solution to this urgent problem faced by cross-border workers. The letter is co-signed by the Coalitions Steering Group, which includes representatives from businesses and trade bodies across the North of Ireland such as Allstate NI and the Londonderry Chamber of Commerce. Paul Quinn, co-chair of the Cross-Border Workers Coalition, said: In December 2020, speaking in the Dail Eireann, Finance Minister Donohoe committed to meet with our representatives to discuss remote working tax rules for cross-border workers directly. "This offer was most welcome and reflected the importance of this pressing issue facing businesses across the North of Ireland. This letter sent today represents the next step in our campaign to tackle the unfair, out-of-kilter remote working tax legislation faced by cross-border workers. "By meeting and working with us, we hope that Minister Donohoe will bring forward a practical solution to this issue that works for everyone, he said. Sir Starmer's Labour leadership took a fresh hit today as a new poll revealed he is less popular than Boris Johnson in the eyes of the public for the first time. The Opposition Leader's approval rating with the public now sits at 0, meaning the public is equally split over whether they approve, disapprove or are indifferent to his efforts. The findings in the survey by Redfield and Wilton Strategies show Sir Keir's approval rating fell 7 per cent in the past week. The poll was taken on Monday February 22, the day Mr Johnson unveiled his strategy for taking England out of lockdown during the spring. His personal rating rose to 3 per cent, having been increasing from minus territory since the start of the year. This suggests he is reaping a minor 'vaccine bounce' in the polls as more and more people get Covid jabs. However, the poll found that both men lag way behind Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who has a net approval rating of +30 per cent. The poll also revealed a rise in support for the Tories. Redfield and Wilton put them up 2 per cent on 43 per cent, while Labour slipped 1 per cent to 37 per cent. The Government's net competency rating also rose to -5 per cent, up from -13 per cent three weeks ago. The findings chime with a previous poll last week, as Mr Starmer attempts to stamp his authority on a party becoming restless amid his failure to capitalise on Tory failures during the lockdown. A Savanta ComRes survey put his net favourability at minus four, down two points in the past month, while Mr Johnsons rose from minus eight to minus two in a month. The Labour leader also fell further behind on the question of who would make the best prime minister, with 27 per cent choosing him (down from 31) compared with 43 for Mr Johnson (up from 38). The signs of a vaccine boost for Mr Johnson came as Gavin Williamson claimed coronavirus vaccine supply issues are not to blame for Britains roll-out suffering its worst slump in a month. The Education Secretary insisted today there was 'no problem' with deliveries of doses and said 'there will always be some days' when uptake dips lower. Figures show just 150,000 Covid vaccines jabs were dished out in the UK on Sunday, the worst daily output since the scheme began to pick up pace last month. And just 210,000 doses were administered on Monday, down by more than a quarter on the previous week. Despite the concerning trend, Mr Williamson said he had 'every confidence' the mammoth NHS operation would be 'rebounding back very shortly'. The comments contradicted Matt Hancock who revealed yesterday a European-wide vaccine supply shortage could lead to 'quieter' weeks ahead for Britain's jab drive. And Jonathan Van Tam also weighed in today, saying the dip has come about as a result of 'supply fluctuations'. One of the main problems is thought to be lower than expected output at manufacturing sites in AstraZeneca's supply chain on the continent. The British drugmaker, which manufactures Oxford University's Covid jab, has told the European Union it will only be able to deliver less than half of its contracted supplies before summer, raising fears the UK's orders could also be affected. Almost 18million Britons have already received a first dose of a Covid vaccine and Boris Johnson has put a successful jab roll-out at the heart of his lockdown-easing plan. As long as the operation continues successfully, all restrictions could be dropped in England by June 21, but any hiccups along the way could threaten that target. The Government has pledged to offer first doses to all over-50s by April 15, with all remaining adults set to be reached by the end of July. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. SHINee's back! The quartet's new album "Don't Call Me" has seen significant success not only in South Korea but all over the world! SHINee Releases New Album as a Full Group after Almost Three Years On Feb. 22, the "Princes of K-pop" made their long-awaited comeback with the release of their seventh full album titled "Don't Call Me." This album, which is the group's first one in two years and six months, consists of nine songs of different genres. Kenzie, Rodnae 'Chikk' Bell, and Dwayne 'Dem Jointz' were the ones responsible for the composition of the title track, also titled "Don't Call Me." It is a dance song with an addictive melody and is based on hip hop that makes use of vocoder effect together with 808 bass sounds and other distinct synth sounds. Kenzie was also the one who wrote the lyrics of SHINee's "Don't Call Me," which conveys the emotions of someone who was betrayed by love. The music video for the title track was also dropped on the same day as the single's official release. In just 16 hours and two minutes, the MV exceeded five million views, becoming SHINee's fastest music video to attain the feat. SHINee Tops iTunes Charts across the Globe and other International Charts with New Album Following its launch, SHINee's new album rocketed to No. 1 on iTunes Top Album charts in at least 46 different countries including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and more. Considering this, it's no wonder why the album hit No. 1 on the worldwide iTunes Album chart. "Don't Call Me" was also well-received in China that the album climbed up to the top of the digital album sales charts on the country's QQ Music and Kuwo Music. Japanese SHAWOLs (SHINee's fan club) also showed support to the group's new release, which has now claimed the No. 1 spot on the country's Line Music Album Top 100 chart. In addition to this, SHINee's "Don't Call Me" has reached the first position on Apple Music Album chart in two countries, Hong Kong and Taiwan. SHINee Charts on the Global Digital Artist Rankings + New Song Enters Domestic and International Charts Since SHINee's new album is receiving lots of love from fans all over the world, the same thing happens to the album's title track, also titled "Don't Call Me." The song ranked No. 1 on Korea's real-time music charts such as Genie, Bugs, and Vibe. It also made it to MelOn's daily chart, claiming the No. 25 spot, as well as to FLO at No. 13. #SHINee are killing it at #7 on the Global Digital Artist Rank as their brand new album #Dont_Call_Me tops iTunes charts in the US and 43+ countries! 7143 https://t.co/TwoDraNluG pic.twitter.com/Gj6Bznewng World Music Awards (@WORLDMUSICAWARD) February 22, 2021 On top of that, SHINee's new song becomes a new entry to the worldwide iTunes Song chart, coming in eighth place. This is the quartet's highest position on the said chart. Meanwhile, on the Global Digital Artist Ranking, the "Princes of K-pop" is at No. 7, showing how well SHINee's "Don't Call Me" is doing on the world's major music sites such as iTunes, Apple Music, YouTube, and Spotify. Congratulations, SHINee! For more news updates about other K-Pop news, always keep your tabs open here at Kpopstarz. Owned by Kpopstarz Written by Mhaliya Scott New Delhi: Israeli police has revealed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is suspected of crimes involving fraud, breach of trust and bribes in two corruption cases. Police have been questioning Netanyahu for months over the cases but have released few details. It released a gag order Thursday night on reporting the details of talks that are underway to enlist a state witness. The document says the cases involving Netanyahu deal with a suspicion of committing crimes of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Netanyahus office has repeatedly denied wrongdoing over the investigations, portraying the accusations as a witch hunt against him and his family by a hostile media opposed to his hard-line political views. A statement from his office Thursday night said, We completely reject the unfounded claims against the prime minister. It said the allegations are part of a campaign to replace the government and there will be nothing, because there was nothing. ALSO READ: PM Modi-PM Netanyahu joint statement: India, Israel ink 7 pacts One investigation, dubbed File 1000, reportedly concerns claims that Netanyahu improperly accepted lavish gifts from wealthy supporters, including Australian billionaire James Packer and Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan. The second investigation, File 2000, reportedly concerns Netanyahus alleged attempts to strike a deal with publisher Arnon Mozes of the Yediot Ahronot newspaper group to promote legislation to weaken Yediots main competitor in exchange for more favorable coverage of him by Yediot. READ: PM Modi, Israel PM Netanyahu set to address joint press conference Netanyahu, who took office in 2009, has long had an image as a cigar-smoking, cognac-drinking socialite, while his wife, Sara, has been accused of abusive behavior toward staff. Opponents have portrayed both as being out of touch with the struggles of average Israelis. With PTI inputs For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. credit: The Advocate As the pandemic enters its second year, two recent stories used to justify increasing public surveillance seem almost too incredulous to believe. Two years ago, I reported on an absurd claim about how the Riverhead Police Departments' surveillance drones could be used to create a "community connection." Splitting Riverheads current police foot patrol sector into two sectors would create more of a community connection in the area that the officers are patrolling," Supervisor Laura Jens-Smith said. "Theres more eyes and ears in the area, and hopefully that will lead to more people coming to shop and recreate in downtown more. In my story I noted how the Department of Justice's guidebook the "Community Policing & Unmanned Aircraft Systems: Guidelines to Enhance Community Trust" was designed to help law enforcement convince the American public to accept surveillance drones. "The Police Foundation, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, has developed this guidebook to help public safety agencies successfully assess the appropriateness of acquiring a sUAS in their jurisdiction, all the while ensuring public support, avoiding public-relations pitfalls, and enhancing community trust along the way." A recent Fox 5 DC story about traffic cameras could rise to the top of my absurd reasons to convince the public to accept more police surveillance. A police watchdog group from Arlington, Virginia seems to have applied all that they have learned about convincing the public to accept police drones and applied it to traffic cameras. (To learn more about Arlington police drones click here.) "The Arlington Police Practices Group formed after the summer of racial reckoning and calls to root out racism in the justice system." "Among the most notable, the group suggested more automatic traffic enforcement, aimed at taking the possibility of racial bias off the table by reducing the need for traffic stops." So let's think about the Arlington Police Practices Group's reasoning for a moment. Does anyone really think that giving law enforcement more ways to surveil people of interest or people of color will actually reduce racial bias? The claim made by the Arlington Police Practices Work Group which is made up of law enforcement and private citizens does not pass the smell test. Having cameras basically removes the human element. It's just a machine. It clocks you going too fast or it clocks you going through an intersection too late into the light cycle," Allison Carpenter, traffic subcommittee chair said. So, let's play along and say we believe their claim that adding more speed cameras will help reduce racial bias traffic stops. Law enforcement can use always-on traffic cameras to track a motorist's movements throughout a city. Police can ask private companies like Redflex, Verra Mobility or Xerox for specific details about a motorists' driving history. Traffic cameras record all of a drivers' personal information; license plate numbers, names and addresses of the driver[s] and where and when they arrived at a specific location. High definition traffic cameras could also be equipped with facial recognition, making it easy for law enforcement to ID and target specific individuals. It is also extremely hard if not impossible, to fight electronic speeding or red-light camera citations. Courts across the country have denied motorists' claims that speed cameras are unconstitutional. It gets even harder for motorist's to prove that police departments are not using speed and red-light cameras to generate huge profits. Not surprisingly, Scott Wanek the president of Arlington Coalition of Police, said they were not thrilled with the idea of replacing police officers with more surveillance cameras. Wanek said the police were not thrilled about the possibility of limiting traffic enforcement, which he argues helps prevent more serious crimes. Were taking a lot of illicit firearms and drugs out of vehicles on traffic stops, he said. I havent heard a way to effectively replace that." And in Litchfield Park, Arizona a city manager made an absurd claim that installing license plate readers would help the community maintain a "safe lifestyle." Interim City Manager Matthew Williams stressed Tuesday the cameras will not monitor speed or traffic signals, and the technology does not use facial recognition. Williams says the system will help the community maintain a "safe lifestyle." There are a couple of things that I should point out about Litchfield Park. Number one, it is almost entirely composed of affluent White people according to a 2010 Census. "The racial and ethnic composition of the population was 74.3% non-Hispanic white, 3.5% black or African American, 1.0% Native American, 4.1% Asian, 0.1% non-Hispanic from some other race, 2.8% two or more races and 15.4% Hispanic or Latino." And number two: Litchfield Park plans on sending all the information that 32 Flock Safety license plate readers collect to the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. This is the same office that was run by 'America's toughest sheriff' Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Claiming that Flock Safety's "Total Analytics Law Officers Network" or national license plate tracking network will help affluent people "maintain a safe lifestyle" is infuriating. As I wrote about last year, Flock Safety's license plate tracking program is built on fear. Flock Safety's claim that it is possible to leverage technology to eliminate crime is based on stoking the publics' fear that no one would dare commit a crime in their neighborhood if police surveiled everyone 24/7. It is also worth noting that Flock Safety's "ethically-designed" data can also be used to send immigration-related alerts to Fusion Centers. It seems that not even a pandemic can stop law enforcement's desire to surveil and track everyone. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Manchin says President Joe Bidens $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill is too big, and he wants to cut it. He says he strongly opposes a $15 federal minimum wage, one of Bidens top campaign promises. He announced last week that he wont vote to confirm Bidens nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, because her campaign-year tweets struck him as too partisan. He waited until Wednesday to say hed support Bidens choice for interior secretary, Deb Haaland, because she has advocated tough regulation of coal and natural gas, two important industries in West Virginia. Colour-changing pellet company hoping for online success Richard Baldwin and his business partner Dylan Collins had a bit of a Eureka! moment when they decided to start up a new company, DR Flame, offering colour flame pellets. DR Flame turned into reality after the pair had a rather alarming close encounter with the wrong side of the law. In 2019 they were helping out friends at a farm in Kingsclere that was licensed to grow marijuana for medicinal purposes, when they were raided by the police and taken to Basingstoke police station. Once the misunderstanding had been cleared up they were all free to go, but it left Mr Baldwin and Mr Collins feeling they wanted to be masters of their own destiny. It made me realise that unless you are captain of your own ship, you might get steered into some pretty rocky waters, said Mr Baldwin. Mr Baldwin, who has a degree in modern languages and lived in Amsterdam, Holland, for many years working as a translator, grew up in Thatcham and met Mr Collins when they were both at Kennet School. He said: Ive always been in touch with Dylan and, when I moved back to England, we looked at starting up a business together. We are both particularly interested in horticulture, but then Dylan hit on the idea of making colour flame pellets for indoor and outdoor fires. We knew you could buy sachets that you could throw on a fire and get a few minutes of colour, but by creating these pellets we can supply a third of a kilo bags that will last two to three hours across four evenings. We are able to produce about 600 to 700 bags a day. The pellets are more eco-friendly and the colour in the flames looks better and is more constant. The pair knew nothing about creating the pellets so had to go back to basics, experimenting until they got the right mix. They hired a small workshop in Chapel Row and invested in a pellet machine and started to make the colour-changing briquettes. Each colour is a challenge. We researched on the internet and combined different fuels with the colourants until we got the right mix. It was important to maintain good quality in the visual experience for the consumer. The colours currently on offer are blue and green, but Mr Baldwin says they are looking at finding ways to add more colours into the mix. Unfortunately this was all just before the coronavirus pandemic hit. When the first lockdown came we had some difficulty in getting supplies, said Mr Baldwin. But weve soldiered on and I think we are the only people possibly in the world who make these pellets. Mr Baldwin says that being slightly older, he is 50 and Mr Collins is 52, means they are more relaxed about how the future plays out. You dont have the same weight of responsibility. When you are younger you worry more about success and how to go about things. We are just seeing where it takes us, but we are also fairly confident that we will be able to build on our original products. Mr Baldwin, who is also currently a stay-at-home dad looking after his five-year-old daughter, said: Dylan and I work well together he is the practical, creative one and I deal more with the business side of things. The website went live in January this year and the pair are hoping that their colour-changing pellets will soon be adding a variety of colour to fires across the country. For more information visit https://colouredflames.com/ Welcome to Morningstar.co.uk! You have been redirected here from Hemscott.com as we are merging our websites to provide you with a one-stop shop for all your investment research needs.To search for a security, type the name or ticker in the search box at the top of the page and select from the dropdown results.Registered Hemscott users can log in to Morningstar using the same login details. Similarly, if you are a Hemscott Premium user, you now have a Morningstar Premium account which you can access using the same login details. When prosecutors filed felony homicide charges against a 14-year-old girl this week in connection with the stabbing death of her disabled sister, the case went straight to adult court. It was filed in criminal court without any testimony or deliberation, because thats the way the law is written in Pennsylvania. Juveniles ages 10 and up accused of murder start out in adult court and the only way to get the case into juvenile court is if the defense attorney can convince a judge it is in the public interest. Pennsylvania is among about a dozen other states where the burden of proof is automatically placed on a juvenile who has been charged with murder. In many other states, when juveniles are charged with crimes, the burden is on the prosecutor to prove the suspect should be certified to stand trial as an adult. Pennsylvanias law means Claire Miller, 14, of Manheim Township, who is accused of stabbing her older sister in the neck early Monday, is currently being treated as an adult, including having her name and mugshot released to the public and spending her incarceration in the county prison without bail. Prison officials said Tuesday they have her alone in a cell in the female unit of the prison, where she will not interact with any adult prisoners. She is being constantly observed by a camera in the cell and a dedicated staff member, said Deputy Warden William Aberts. Aberts said her case represented the first time they had a juvenile female locked up at the prison. They do not have dedicated space for female juveniles, he said. She has a preliminary hearing scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Friday. Miller is among the youngest defendants charged with criminal homicide in Central Pa. in recent memory. A 13-year-old boy was charged with homicide in Franklin County last year after being accused of fatally shooting his 9-year-old brother in the head after a disagreement over a game. Paperwork has been filed to move that case to juvenile court. A 10-year-old boy was charged with murder in 2014 in Wayne County after police say he beat a 90-year-old woman at his grandfathers house who had yelled at him. His case eventually was moved to juvenile court. Those shocking cases, like the Miller case, spurred national news coverage because of the defendants young age and circumstances of the killings. Police have not revealed a possible motive in the death of Helen M. Miller, 19, who had cerebral palsy and used a wheelchair. The coroners office on Wednesday completed an autopsy and said Helen Miller died from multiple stab wounds. Police said they were called to the familys ranch home in the 1500 block of Clayton Road just after 1 a.m. Monday by Claire Miller, who told dispatchers: I killed my sister, according to court records. When officers arrived, Claire was in front of the house and waved them to the house. She repeatedly said, I stabbed my sister, according to court records, and appeared to be trying to wash blood from her hands in the snow. Inside, officers found Helen Miller lying on her back in a bedroom with a pillow over her face. When an officer removed the bloody pillow, he saw a large knife in Helens neck, just above her chest. The sisters parents were asleep during the stabbing, police said. Online property records show the Miller's home in Manheim Township. The ranch home was owned by an Irrevocable Trust set up in Helen Miller's name by her parents. Attorneys say its likely given Claire Millers age that her attorney would eventually petition the court to try to get her decertified and move her case to juvenile court, where the focus is on treatment and rehabilitation. In that scenario, evaluations will be done to determine whether the prosecutor will fight or agree to move the case. The court considers several factors when deciding whether to transfer a case including: how the alleged offense impacts the community, any threats the child poses to the public or any individuals, the nature of the alleged offense, the degree of the childs culpability, adequacy of alternative dispositions, and whether the child appears amenable to treatment or rehabilitation by considering the childs age, mental capacity, maturity, prior criminal record/delinquency history, degree of criminal sophistication, etc. If Claire Millers case is moved, due to the confidential nature of the juvenile system, it is unlikely any further information would be released about the case. But if the case remains in adult court, Claire Miller could be facing a murder charge that could at least carry a sentence of 10 years in prison. In the last decade, the U.S. Supreme Court determined it was unconstitutional for mandatory life sentences to be administered to people who are charged as juveniles. Claire Millers defense attorney did not return a message from PennLive Tuesday. Pennsylvanias system for direct filing all juveniles charged with murder and all juveniles at least 15 years old charged with certain other violent crimes is controversial. Opponents argue that many of the cases end up back in juvenile court anyway, but then the youths have been harmed from the prosecution and being jailed in adult prisons for weeks or months. In Dauphin County on Tuesday, officials said they had seven juveniles incarcerated on various crimes. They are housed in protective custody blocks and are only out of their cells when other juveniles are, according to the county spokesman. While juveniles accused of murder and violent crimes go straight into the adult system, not all homicide deaths qualify. For example, a 14-year-old boy was charged with involuntary manslaughter last year in connection with the shooting death of his friend Tyrone Gibson, 14, in Harrisburg. But that case started and stayed in the juvenile system because prosecutors determined the appropriate charge was involuntary manslaughter, a first-degree-misdemeanor, which does not qualify as an exclusion from juvenile court like murder charges. Claire Miller, 14, is charged with criminal homicide after police said she confessed to stabbing her sister. Helen Miller, 19, was found in her bed with a knife in her neck: https://t.co/OOTaaSMVDp@HeavySan #Pennsylvania #crime pic.twitter.com/0diHU4Qofy Erin Laviola (@ErinLaviola) February 22, 2021 Prior to her arrest, Claire Miller was in ninth grade at the Lancaster Country Day School, a few blocks from the home. A spokesperson for the Manheim Township School District told Lancaster Online Tuesday that Helen Miller received educational services through the district. A family directory for the HMS School in Philadelphia, which is intended for children with cerebral palsy, also listed Helen Miller as one of about 40 students. Tom Quinn, president of the school, told ABC27 in an email that Helen Miller was a student and participating in the schools program virtually. The 2,500-square-foot home where the sisters lived with their parents was owned by the Helen M. Miller Irrevocable Trust and purchased for $495,000 in Helens name in 2005. Parents of children with special needs often use trusts like this to protect assets and provide for long-term care for their children. READ: Harrisburg logged more killings in 2020 than in 30 years; Cumberland County homicides doubled READ: Family of 2 kids who died after being found unconscious in Pa. home were known to CYS Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 15:31:20|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close CONAKRY, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Guinea on Tuesday launched a vaccination campaign in Conakry and Gbeke in southeastern N'Zerekore administrative region, according to the health ministry. The 11,500 doses of vaccines that arrived Monday in Conakry were distributed among the various localities which had reported positive cases or contacts of patients, said a statement of the health ministry. In the N'Zerekore region, 3,500 doses of vaccines will be sent to immunize confirmed cases, contacts and their families in rural areas in the southeast of the country. In Conakry, the campaign was launched in Dubreka, located more than 50 km north of Conakry, where 11 of the 31 contacts registered had received their doses of vaccines. In the coming days, more than 495 contacts identified in the outbreak of Ebola will receive vaccines delivered to Guinea by the World Health Organization. At present, four vaccination teams have been deployed in the field, three of which are working in the forest region and one in Conakry. The vaccination campaign will help contain the Ebola virus in targeted areas and limit the spread of the virus to regions not yet affected, Minister of Health Remy Lamah said, adding that more than 70 percent of Ebola patients will be cured after receiving the injection of the vaccines. Official data shows that Guinea had confirmed 17 Ebola cases so far, six of whom have died. On Feb. 14, the Ministry of Health confirmed that there was an Ebola outbreak in the N'Zerekore province and reported seven confirmed cases, including three deaths. From 2013 to 2016, three countries in West Africa including Guinea were hit by an Ebola outbreak that claimed more than 11,000 lives. Enditem SEATTLE (AP) A berry grower will pay $350,000 to Washington state Attorney General Bob Fergusons office due to an ex-managers assaults and alleged sexual harassment of female employees over at least seven years. The Seattle Times reports the money, agreed to in a consent decree filed simultaneously with a civil complaint this week in Walla Walla Superior Court, will go to several women harmed while working on a blueberry farm near the Tri-Cities operated by Great Columbia Berry Farms, according to Fergusons office. The company violated the Washington Law Against Discrimination and the federal Civil Rights Act by letting the conduct continue, Ferguson charged in the complaint. Great Columbia Berry Farms denied the states allegations in the consent decree. We were disturbed and shocked when we learned that an employee engaged in criminal conduct and the employee was dismissed, president and CEO Steve Erickson said in an email. Great Columbia chose to enter the consent decree to resolve issues with the victim of the crime and move forward without engaging in adversarial litigation. At the Great Columbia Berry farm, manager Jose Luis Contreras Ramirez, 45, hired and fired employees and gave job assignments, according to Fergusons office. When employees rejected his advances, he retaliated, Fergusons office said. In 2019, Contreras Ramirez was arrested and charged with two counts of rape, harassment and indecent exposure for conduct involving one worker, according to law enforcement documents. Contreras Ramirez denied the rape accusation and pleaded guilty last year to three counts of felony assault. Law enforcement documents show several employees complained of Contreras Ramirezs behavior. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Boris Johnson today revealed Rishi Sunak is considering rolling out lower rates of alcohol duty for pubs than for supermarkets as the Chancellor prepares to unveil his Budget on March 3. Tory MPs have urged the Government to treat pubs differently to large retailers to stop them being 'undercut by cheap supermarket booze'. Mr Johnson said at PMQs at lunchtime that a review into so-called 'differentiation' has been carried out and Mr Sunak is 'looking very closely at the findings'. It came amid claims that Mr Sunak will extend the stamp duty holiday until the end of June to give a boost to the housing market. Last July the Chancellor exempted most buyers from the levy if they completed their transactions before March 31, 2021 - saving people up to 15,000 - and leaving would-be homeowners racing to meet the deadline. But sources told The Times he is now preparing to use the Budget to extend the holiday by another three months. The policy covers the sale of property worth up to 500,000, and would cost around 1billion to implement. Critics believe that failing to extend the holiday would result in a cliff edge, jeopardising hundreds of thousands of sales. Conservative MPs are hoping Mr Sunak will use the Budget to bring forward a range of measures to give Britain a boost in the spring as lockdown rules are lifted and families and businesses look to recover from the pandemic. Chancellor Rishi Sunak will unveil his latest Budget next week on March 3 amid reports he will extend a stamp duty holiday Tory MP Giles Watling raised the alcohol duty issue at PMQs and said: 'My right honourable friend will know that pubs have been closing all over Britain for decades now, tearing the hearts out of communities. 'This terrible pandemic has made things even worse but part of the problem is undercutting by cheap supermarket booze. 'Now we are out of the EU surely we can do as we please on beer duty. 'Differentiation in favour of on sales could deliver great benefits to pubs in communities like Clacton at nil cost to the taxpayer. 'Will my right honourable friend commit ministers to look at this differentiation proposal?' Mr Johnson replied: 'He makes an extremely good point which I am sure will be heard with great interest around the country. 'There is just such a review being carried out after consulting pub owners and brewers and others and I know that the Chancellor is looking very closely at the findings.' Changes to the alcohol duty system to help pubs would be welcomed by many Tory MPs, as would an extension to the stamp duty holiday. Recent analysis by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) think tank said the tax break had propelled house sales to their highest level since before the 2007 financial crisis. After an initial slump in sales between April and June 2020, the number of transactions increased from 132,090 in the second quarter to 225,870 in the third quarter and 316,300 by the end of quarter four - the highest level since 2007. The think tank's research shows that stamp duty revenues actually rose by 27 per cent in Q3 compared to Q2, from 1.1billion to 1.35billion, and suggests they will rise again in Q4 given the continued increase in transactions. The CPS is calling on ministers to either permanently increase the threshold on primary residences to 500,000 - at a cost of 3billion - or abolish it altogether. Jethro Elsden, CPS data analyst and the report's author, said scrapping the holiday would be a 'sledgehammer blow to the housing market'. The Chancellor is also set to use the Budget to extend the furlough scheme until the end of June, costing 4billion a month. The business rates holiday for the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors will also be expanded at a cost of 1billion a month, the Times said. And the VAT cut for hospitality and tourism would also last until the end of June, costing 200million a month. Mr Sunak is also said to be considering putting up corporation tax to as much as 25 per cent over the course of the current Parliament. Recent analysis by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) think tank said the tax break had propelled house sales to their highest level since before the 2007 financial crisis Sir Keir Starmer today told the PM that 'now is not the time' for tax rises ahead of the Budget. Sir Keir told the Commons: 'Turning to next week's Budget, now I don't expect the Prime Minister to pre-empt what's in the Budget. If I want that, I can read it on the front page of The Times. 'But can the Prime Minister at least agree with me today that now is not the time for tax rises for families and for businesses?' Mr Johnson responded: 'The Budget is happening next week, it's not a date that is concealed from (Sir Keir), he knows when it is but it's preposterous for him to talk about tax rises when he stood on a manifesto only a year ago, little over a year ago, to put up taxes by the biggest amount in the history of this country. 'It is the Labour Party, his Labour council in Camden, that puts up taxes across the country, that is the way Labour behave and it's thanks to prudent fiscal management by this Government that we've been able to fight this pandemic in the way that we have.' The Milky Way could be full of rocky worlds covered in oceans and continents similar to the Earth - raising the possibility the galaxy is teeming with alien life, study claims. All rocky planets within the galaxy could have the same building blocks as Earth at their core, originally forming from tiny particles of ice and carbon, according to researchers from the GLOBE Institute at the University of Copenhagen. For a planet to have life - as we know it - liquid water has to be present, but current theories suggest it arrived on Earth by chance from a distant icy comet. Now, Danish scientists say the water was there from the start, and the same applies to Venus and Mars - both of which may have had surface water in the distant past. Using a computer model, Anders Johansen and his team calculated that a planet around a young star could start forming from ice pebbles after about 5 million years. The study indicates that it was millimetre-sized dust particles of ice and carbon which are known to orbit around all young stars in the Milky Way that 4.5 billion years ago accreted in the formation of what would later become Earth. All rocky planets within the galaxy could have the same building blocks as Earth at their core - originally forming from tiny particles of ice and carbon, according to researchers from the GLOBE Institute at the University of Copenhagen This isn't the first study to suggest that Earth may have formed quickly from the build up of small particles, but is the first to suggest these particles were ice and carbon, contributing to the arrival of all water on Earth - and other terrestrial planets PEBBLE ACCRETION: PLANETS FORM FROM ICE AND CARBON University of Copenhagen researchers created a terrestrial planet formation model based on Pebble Accretion. This is a process that sees terrestrial planets form from tiny millimetre sized pieces of ice and carbon. It happens around the water ice line in the protoplanetary disc that forms around a young star. This is between the current orbits of Earth and Mars, researchers found. About five million years after the star first forms the terrestrial planets begin to come together from collections of these tiny pebbles. Earth reached 60% of its current mass at about five million years after the protoplanetary disc began to dissipate, they found. The model is an alternative to the leading theory that collisions from planetary embryos led to full size planets we know today. Advertisement 'All our data suggest that water was part of Earth's building blocks, right from the beginning, said Professor Johansen, adding that the decisive point for whether liquid water is present is the distance of the planet from its star. 'And because the water molecule is frequently occurring, there is a reasonable probability that it applies to all planets in the Milky Way,' he added. The theory, called 'pebble accretion', is that planets are formed by pebbles that are clumping together, and that the planets then grow larger and larger. 'Up to the point where Earth had grown to 1% of its current mass, our planet grew by capturing masses of pebbles filled with ice and carbon,' said Johansen. Earth then grew faster and faster until, after five million years, it became as large as we know it today - along the way, the temperature on the surface rose sharply. The ice in the pebbles started to evaporate on the way down to the surface as it heated up - so that, today, only 0.1% of the planet is made up of water, even though 70% of Earth's surface is covered by water, the authors explained. Johansen and his team put forward the theory of pebble accretion a decade ago and believe this new study confirms their initial idea. The water molecule H2O is found everywhere in our galaxy, and this theory therefore opens up the possibility that other planets may have been formed in the same way as Earth, Mars and Venus, Johansen speculated. 'All planets in the Milky Way may be formed by the same building blocks, meaning that planets with the same amount of water and carbon as Earth,' Johansen said. 'Thus potential places where life may be present - occur frequently around other stars in our galaxy, provided the temperature is right', he says. If planets in our galaxy had the same building blocks and the same temperature conditions as Earth, there will also be good chances that they may have about the same amount of water and continents as our planet, the authors believe. Professor Martin Bizzarro, co-author of the study, says their new model shows that all planets get the same amount of water when they first form around a star. 'This suggests that other planets may have not just the same amount of water and oceans, but also the same amount of continents as here on Earth. It provides good opportunities for the emergence of life', Bizzarro said. A protoplanetary disc forms around a young star from the left over gas and dust used in the star formation - this can then come together to form planets There is a 'great divide' in the solar system between the gas and ice giants at the outer edge and the terrestrial worlds closer to the Sun. Researchers from Copenhagen believe terrestrial planets likely formed from an 'ice wall' just before this great divide If, on the other hand, it was random how much water was present on planets, the planets might look vastly different. Some planets would be too dry to develop life, while others would be completely covered by water. 'A planet covered by water would of course be good for maritime beings, but would offer less than ideal conditions for the formation of civilisations that can observe the universe', says Johansen. Johansen and his research team are looking forward to the next generation of space telescopes, which will offer far better opportunities to observe exoplanets orbiting a star other than the Sun, and even planets currently being formed. 'The new telescopes are powerful. They use spectroscopy, which means that by observing which type of light is being blocked from the planets' orbit around their star, you can see how much water vapour there is. It can tell us something about the number of oceans on that planet', he says. A unique restaurant concept, Frame in Hazel Park doesnt have a set menu, only offers on site dining a few days a week, and has a hidden entrance located inside another restaurant. Frame was part of our search for Michigans Best Outdoor Dining, and is a place with constantly changing food offerings made by visiting chefs, and super charming yurts outside to enjoy a meal in. It is one of the most interesting dining experiences in metro Detroit right now. Its been incredibly fun, said Ryan Waldman, director of experiences and programming at Frame in Hazel Park. Waldman is instrumental in planning the rotating list of guest chefs that come to share their culinary passion at Frame. Its a revolving creative hub, a chef incubator, and an otherwise awesome experiential place, Waldman said. There are two different concepts going on at this location, neighborhood hangout Joebar and Frame, which is more like a speakeasy. Joe Vaughn, a food and lifestyle photographer in metro Detroit, is the creative director for both Joebar and Frame. He owns the restaurants with his wife, Cari, who is also the director of business for the restaurants. Waldman stressed that despite the name, Joebar is not an ego play for Vaughn. He wanted to create a space for every neighborhood Joe. He wanted to create a space that people feel comfortable in, people feel supported in. We just want it to be a chill neighborhood spot. Frame has a slew of canvas sided yurts outside lining the street, and these coveted spots are open by reservation only. They added the yurts in the fall of 2020. Plan ahead, because once Frame announces a new dinner chef lead dinner series, its going to sell out quick, and this is the only way to reserve a yurt. In the before times, Frame offered indoor dining for about 50 people at a time. Frame has chefs in residency on a rotating basis. They offer dining Thursday through Sunday, and you can book a ticket for an experience in one of the yurts. Every reservation must be made for six people, so you might as well bring some friends along. The price will depend on the chef in residence, and the menu they are presenting. You can add a full drink pairing with your menu if you wish for an additional charge. In the next few months, Frame will host dining events that include a night in Buenos Aires with their very own Chef Michael Barrera, the art of Japanese sushi with Chef Nick George of Dr. Sushi, and a special May the 4th Be With You dinner with Chef Nikita Sanchez. The restaurant provides support to the visiting chefs in the form of staffing, ordering of product, and planning the menu and experience. But, for the most part, these chefs come in and they know what theyre doing, Waldman said. Frame has been focusing on hosting local Detroit area chefs over the last few months, offering many who may be in between jobs, or stymied by the pandemic, a place to showcase their skills. We need to lift up our local area, said Waldman. And still foster talent from all over the United States. Canvas sided yurts line the street next to Frame in Hazel Park. The restaurant shares kitchen space with Joebar.MLive.com If you cant make a reservation, you can still enjoy some delicious cuisines from Frame at Home on Wednesdays, something that developed during the first Michigan restaurant shut down that features special menus to take out and enjoy at home. Place your order, and try the entire tasting menu from the comfort of your own home. All the deliciousness that Chef has prepared, Waldman said. Changing up the entire business model wasnt exactly easy. It brought to light a lot of new challenges, Waldman said about offering this type of take out. It was incredibly important to the restaurant to maintain not just the visible appeal of the dishes, but also the form, the taste, the temperature, and the creativity of each and every dish. It provided a very unique opportunity. The last few months have given the restaurant the opportunity to fine tune their process, from what they offer, to how they package it. Frame at Home typically offers food made by in house Chef Barrera, and might feature anything from pot pies, to Mardi Gras delicacies. We are actively creating the programming here, Waldman said. Frame brings in a guest chef almost every weekend, so the theme and the menu changes. Book your reservation ahead of time, often months in advance.Frame Courtesy Photo, used with permission. At Frame, you have to pay for the whole yurt, which seats six guests. You can bring friends, or just enjoy on your own, but the fee is the same. Waldmans advice is you should bring six people. Tickets range from $50 to $100, depending on the menu offered. Its a prix fix menu, and usually offers multiple courses. Sister restaurant Joebar also offers some outdoor dining, with an open air, yet partially enclosed patio for dining. There is no charge for the patio here, and no minimum spend. Joebar is decidedly casual, with easy comfort food available. We have been blessed with a staff that has created a space that if I was a local Hazel Park resident, I would feel very comfortable here. Joebar offers a variety of daily specials, including the incredibly popular Happy Deal on Tuesdays. For $10, you get a fabulous burger or chicken sandwich, hand cut fries, and a Miller High Life, the champagne of beers, and an adult toy. They recommend you pre-order this special, as its so popular it tends to sell out. Overall, these two restaurants are doing something right, and totally different in Hazel Park. People just feel comfortable here, Waldman said. The menu changes with each and every guest chef, who each pick a theme for their meals. Pop-ups from Detroit area chefs, guest stints from chefs from all over, themed dinners, and holiday meals have all been offered at Frame.Frame Courtesy Photo, used with permission. The yurts at Frame get redecorated with every new menu, to follow the theme, and to create a truly unique dining experience.MLive.com Plan your visit to Frame ahead of time, and gather up a few friends. Each reservation is for six people.Frame Courtesy Photo, used with permission. The search for Michigans Best Outdoor Dining is sponsored in part by Warm Fitness. Frame 23839 John R Rd #2, Hazel Park, MI 48030 For more info: https://www.framehazelpark.com/ or https://www.facebook.com/frametable See the upcoming list of guest chefs here. Guest chefs are booked weeks in advance, you'll want to place your reservation as soon as someone is announced in order to get a spot at Frame.MLive.com More Michigans Best Outdoor Dining Stories: Enjoy a Six Feet of Separation burger at this Michigans Best Outdoor Dining Winner Third Nature Brewing Company built for outdoor dining, and a pandemic Jackson Outdoor Dining poll winner Cherry Creek Cellars thrilled to be nominated The NODE gets the nod as Michigans Best Outdoor Dining for Kalamazoo and SW Michigan This igloo village in Detroit has a unique business model and delicious, healthy food How this tiny village made its local bar the Best Outdoor Dining spot in Northern Michigan YORKs yard offers fire pits, food trucks and DJs outside in Ann Arbor Ann Arbor outdoor dining poll winner has enticing dishes, great ambiance The ultimate date night is at Muskegons Best Outdoor Dining Greenhouses sprouted at Dexter Beer Grotto for outdoor dining crowd An Up North lodge in the middle of nowhere is the U.P.s Best Outdoor Dining A Michigan-made yurt village can be found at this spot in Chelsea CHICAGO, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Elements Global Services, the global human resources technology provider and pioneer of the direct Employer of Record (EOR) model, has launched Venture Global, a holistic solution dedicated to the unique needs of venture capital funds, private equity firms and organizations involved in mergers, acquisitions and divestitures. The custom program offers financial service entities innovative solutions under one platform, ranging from hybrid payment systems and specialized Human Resources Management to consulting services and compliance guidance. Venture Global Venture Global combines Elements' best-in-class direct global EOR service with specialized expertise in human capital management, entity management, acquisition, investment, mergers and acquisitions and finance. It is powered by Expandopedia, Elements' global business intelligence platform, as well as ApprovPay, a proprietary global payroll and benefits management platform. Additionally, the platform provides venture capital funds and private equity firms of all sizes a speed-to-market solution that enables them to expand their portfolio of companies in over 135 countries worldwide, at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional entity set up in foreign countries. In addition, Venture Global ensures each company is operating within full compliance of local labor laws and HR and payroll requirements. "Since its inception, Elements' mission has been to simplify global expansion for our clients. We do that by not just responding to their needs, but getting ahead of them," said, Rick Hammell, CEO and founder of Elements Global Services. "Venture Global is the culmination of years of successful partnerships with companies changing and growing through mergers, acquisitions and divestitures. It is the natural progression of our efforts to become their first and only stop in their journey towards global expansion and employment." Small- to medium-sized startups and venture capital portfolio companies will also have access to tailored support through Venture Global. The platform is designed specifically to assist with businesses planning and the process of global expansion by simplifying the human complexities of global and local M&A deals and divestitures. "Venture Global connects startups to a whole new ecosystem. Elements can provide focused services and a level of expertise to startups, their funders, and the M&A departments they may not traditionally have access to. More so, we are able to focus on onboarding to ensure employees are managed well, while companies can focus on the day-to-day operations," added Hammell. The program is the latest in a series of launches by Elements as it evolves its business to focus on innovative HR tech solutions. It will be run out of Elements' San Francisco office. About Elements Global Services Elements Global Services is an award-winning Employer of Record & tech-enabled services company. Elements provides 100% direct Employer of Record services in over 135 countries, covering everything from payroll, benefits, HR, local compliance to visa & mobility. Elements has a global network of offices and employees delivering innovative solutions to its growing customer base. Elements' Direct Employer of Record model helps companies expand, onboard, manage & pay employees worldwide. Visit http://www.elementsgs.com or connect on LinkedIn and Twitter. Media Contacts: Talal Awartani, PR & Communications Manager [email protected] Jackie Dadas-Kraper, PR Director IDPR (248) 842-0597 [email protected] SOURCE Elements Global Services remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. The new collaboration adds to Falck's drone initiative, Vertical, which aims to assess the potential of drone technology in the prehospital and ambulance services of the future. With Kitty Hawk's Project Heaviside, the company plans to test and evaluate new technologies on a large scale, making emergency healthcare more accessible and affordable. Kitty Hawk brings a world-class team with decades of experience in commercial aviation, aerospace, automotive engineering, flight test and industrial design to the partnership. Project Heaviside is designed to be fast, small, and exceedingly quiet. Kitty Hawk has built 13 prototypes of the eVTOL aircraft and has completed over 700 test flights. "The agreement with Kitty Hawk takes us to the next level in our commitment to integrate eVTOLaircraft into our ambulance operations. Kitty Hawk brings the technology, while we at Falck contribute with our ambulance service area as a use case. This combination gives us the best conditions to investigate how we can jointly unleash the potential of new technology and develop the ambulance-borne health solutions which are likely to set the standard in the near future," said Jakob Riis, CEO of Falck. "We are excited to be working with Falck to collaborate on bringing our Heaviside aircraft for emergency services, first in Denmark and then to other areas, " said Sebastian Thrun, cofounder and CEO of Kitty Hawk. "Falck is an innovative leader in the area and this agreement marks a first and important step in making eVTOL available to more people." The priority of the new partnership is to develop a framework for the integration of Heaviside into emergency services. This will enable eVTOL aircraft to be an addition to Falck's services, increase flexibility and reduce emergency response time, and overall contribute to Falck's continuous development of their services within the prehospital and ambulance area. Falck expects to introduce Heaviside in a close collaboration with customers in Denmark, Europe followed by the United States. About Falck We care for the well-being of people and excel in saving and improving lives of people in urgent need. This has made Falck an international leader in emergency response and healthcare. For more than a century, Falck has worked with local and national governments to prevent accidents, diseases and emergency situations, to rescue and assist people in emergencies quickly and competently and to rehabilitate people after illness or injury. Falck operates in 30 countries and has more than 27,000 employees. About Kitty Hawk Kitty Hawk was founded in 2010 with the mission to free people from traffic. The company, located in Palo Alto, designs, develops and builds ground breaking all-electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft. Contacts Falck Media +45 7022 0307 [email protected] Kitty Hawk [email protected] SOURCE Falck President Joe Biden s nominee to run the CIA told lawmakers Wednesday that he would keep politics out of the job and deliver unvarnished intelligence to politicians and policymakers. I've learned that politics must stop where intelligence works begin, William Burns told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That is exactly what President Biden expects of CIA. Burns said the president "wants the agency to give it to him straight, and I plan to do just that and to defend those who do the same." The comments from Burns were aimed at drawing a contrast with the prior administration, when President Donald Trump faced repeated accusations of politicizing intelligence and he publicly disputed the assessments of his own intelligence agencies, most notably about Russian election interference. Burns is a former ambassador to Russia and Jordan who served at the State Department for more than 30 years under both Democratic and Republican presidents. His well-known status in diplomatic circles makes his confirmation likely. He acknowledged that he would be returning to government at a time of diverse international security threats, including from China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Burns appeared before the committee one day after members held a hearing on Russian hacks that targeted the U.S. private sector and federal government agencies. He said that intrusion was a very harsh wake-up call about the vulnerabilities of supply chains and critical infrastructure and that the CIA had to work even harder to detect and prevent cyberoperations from abroad, to help attribute blame and to develop its own capabilities. He also said that "outcompeting China" would be a core national security priority in the coming years. Marcy DuBois didn't begin sinking right away. Shortly after the coronavirus pandemic hit in March, she lost her job working the door at Bourbon Cowboy in the French Quarter. For a while, the extended federal unemployment payments helped keep her afloat. But as the months wore on and the additional benefits expired, paying her $685 monthly rent got tougher, and DuBois fell further and further behind. Today, DuBois, 33, owes $4,160 in back rent for the one-bedroom in Algiers' Parc Fontaine Apartments where she lives with her 2-year-old son. Her landlord contends she's on the hook for another $250 in late fees and $187 in court costs. She also owes $384 in electricity bills. DuBois now works as a pizza delivery driver, but can only manage about three nights a week because child care is expensive and she has no family in the city. Her tip money goes into the gas tank and the rest is handed over to the babysitter. Her paychecks, which are never more than a couple of hundred dollars every two weeks, cover the rest. Honestly, I know theres a big consensus that people like us need to get off our butt and work, but its not like that, DuBois said. "We cant make what we used to, and we cant afford the bills like we used to. Now, thanks to the coronavirus aid package passed by Congress in December, DuBois and thousands of others across the state could soon see the crushing weight of debt lifted off their shoulders. DuBois is one of about 4,000 people who have signed up for New Orleans' rental assistance program in the last week, hoping to tap into the first infusion of what is expected to be about $26 million in cash from the U.S. Treasury Department's $25 billion rental assistance program. Orleans is the first parish to have its program up and running, but it is expected to soon be followed by Jefferson, St. Tammany and a few others. There will also be a program at the state level to handle parishes not large enough to set up their own programs. Jefferson is expecting $28.7 million and St. Tammany will get $17.3 million. Marjoriana Willman, director of the Mayors Office of Housing Policy and Community Development, said latest round of funding could end up helping between 5,000 and 7,000 New Orleans households, and the landlords who are owed the rent. But she realizes it will only scratch the surface. We know that people are desperate, she said. There were 48,600 people unemployed in the New Orleans metro area in December, compared to 23,000 in February 2020, and the number of jobless peaked at 106,000 in April, according to federal labor statistics. Public-policy nonprofits estimate roughly 140,000 Louisiana households spend more than a third of their income on rent, making them vulnerable to eviction. Locally, thats 29,372 families in New Orleans, 17,059 in Jefferson Parish and 4,173 in St. Tammany Parish. The city's program, which can be applied for in the coronavirus section of the ready.nola.gov website, is going to pay all past-due rent for qualified applicants, plus one additional month going forward. The guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department allows for up to three months in advance, but given that demand will far outstrip supply, the city decided to pay just one month to help reach more people, Willman said. The city also decided not to use any of the money to pay residents' past-due utility bills, even though the Treasury funds are approved for that purpose as well. Willman said the city is working with applicants to get all the necessary supporting documents and once that happens, it will be 10-14 days for payments to be made directly to landlords. Id say in the next two to three weeks, money will start rolling out the door, she said. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Willman said about 10% of the applications received so far are from people outside of Orleans Parish, but those folks will have to go through their own parish or state. There have been a couple of other surprises as well. Willman was expecting the average need would be about $5,000 but, thus far it has been about $2,000, which she attributed to people forgoing other needs as they tried not to fall too far behind on their rent. Folks have forgone a lot of their essential needs to pay as much rent as possible and stay housed, Willman said, noting the application includes a section where people can write about the specifics of their circumstances. Also, while the program allows both landlords and renters to apply, Willman said the response so far has been almost entirely from renters, at about 90%. The program is not entirely first-come, first-served. Willman said about a third of the $26 million is being set aside to go toward targeted communities where people lack the savvy or internet access to come forward to claim the money. The city is also working with eviction court to catch renters who could lose their housing because they're not covered by the eviction moratorium. For her part, DuBois said she is glad to have a shot at being made whole. But the Illinois native has learned not to consider anything a sure thing in Louisiana until it comes through. "With my luck here, in New Orleans, it's only good news once it gets approved and goes forward," she said, noting she was one of the 4,000 who tried to apply for an earlier state program last year that has been roundly criticized as being slow and poorly implemented. "There have been so many things I've applied for or tried applying for that's it's taken so long to hear back or not get approved that I've just lost hope in everything." The last 12 months, she said, have been exhausting. And the stress of the crime in her neighborhood, the threat of COVID-19 and falling behind on the rent quickly began giving her migraine headaches, the first of which laid her out on the floor for hours. Terrified, she went to the doctor, who told her she should try to cut down on her stress. Like many, DuBois has internalized the stigma of collecting unemployment, and said once the $600 per week in additional benefits ran out she figured she should find work. But that's when the harsh realities of child care set in and she found out how limited her prospects were. Hes all I have," she said of her son. "I dont have any family here. DuBois said she plans to move in with a friend in Texas later this spring, where she hopes to find a better life for her and her son. I think New Orleans is great," she said, "but for me, its not a place to raise a family." The AstraZeneca/Oxford Covid-19 vaccine is a key piece in the global treatment puzzle European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen insisted Wednesday that problems dogging vaccine supplies to the EU can be resolved, after AstraZeneca said it could deliver only half of its expected amount in the second quarter. AstraZeneca said Tuesday it would look to make up the shortfall from supply chains other than those that now serve the 27-nation European Union. A spokesman for the British-Swedish drugs group told AFP that AstraZeneca was "working to increase productivity in its EU supply chain" and would use its "global capability in order to achieve delivery of 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter. "Approximately half of the expected volume is due to come from the EU supply chain" while the remainder would come from its global supply network, he added. Ahead of a virtual EU summit on the Covid-19 pandemic, von der Leyen sought to calm impatience over the bloc's stuttering vaccine roll-out. "Vaccine manufacturers are our partners in this pandemic and they have also never faced such a challenge," she told the German regional daily Augsburger Allgemeine. "New questions are always arising that we can generally resolve amicably," she said, adding that she was "optimistic". Von der Leyen advocated "working together with the companies to ensure global production is improved". The announcement follows controversy over first-quarter deliveries of the AstraZeneca-Oxford University jab to the EU, which has caused tension between the bloc and the pharmaceutical company. Diplomatic tensions Before the EU approved the vaccine in late January, the company sparked fury among European leaders by announcing that it would miss its supply target of 400 million doses due to a shortfall at the firm's European plants. The disagreement also caused diplomatic tensions with Britain, which definitively left the EU after 40 years of membershipwith Brussels implicitly accusing AstraZeneca of giving preferential treatment to Britain at the bloc's expense. The UK government has vaccinated millions of Britons with the AstraZeneca jab since late last year. But the company only began shipping it to the EU in early February, after the bloc's drug regulator took its time issuing a recommendation. The AstraZeneca vaccine has suffered a number of setbacksit was temporarily excluded from South Africa's immunisation campaign because of concern it was less effective against new virus variants there. Meanwhile Germany's vaccine commission recommended it only for people aged 18 to 64 years old. German demand for the jab has been affected as a result. Some 1.4 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccines have been delivered but on Tuesday, official data showed only 239,000 had been administered. Recently however, World Health Organization experts recommended it for use with people aged over 65 and in settings where new strains of the virus are circulating. The shot forms the bulk of doses being rolled out around the worldespecially in poorer countriesunder the Covax programme. It has drawn praise for its low cost relative to rivals and lighter logistics requirements because it can be stored in a regular refrigerator. On February 11, AstraZeneca said its annual profit had doubled in 2020. Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak 2021 AFP Options: Sarah Sharkey is a software engineer who helped consult on the design of the new UL course At school I had a passion for maths and problem solving but if youd asked me at that time what software engineering was, I would have drawn a blank. In an all-girls secondary school there simply wasnt much exposure to an engineering career path. Today, Im a software engineer at Stripe in Dublin, having recently graduated in computer science. I got into the area by signing up for an offsite computer science workshop in transition year, and loved it . I could deploy the same thinking I did in maths, but I was solving practical problems and seeing instant results on screen. I decided this was something I wanted to pursue. Read More Since graduating, Ive realised how many career options there are for software engineers. You can basically work anywhere in the world that uses technology, and you can have a real impact in solving some of the worlds most pressing problems. Most fifth-year students may not think that studying computer science could allow them to help fight the climate crisis or improve access to financial services around the world. But as the internet economy grows and software becomes more central, the opportunities are endless. If I had the choice at the time, Immersive Software Engineering would have been a dream course for me. To learn by building technology rather than just studying the theory, to put your skills to the test in a real working environment, to create a startup of your own; these experiences are priceless. If youve worked hard and are aiming for high points in your Leaving Certificate, you might be tempted to put medicine, actuarial science or law on your CAO form. But if your strengths are in problem solving and creative thinking, consider software engineering. Studying software engineering gives you the freedom to follow your passions and put your creativity to work. Sarah Sharkey is a software engineer who helped consult on the design of the new UL course. By Mo Xiaoliang and QianXiaohu BEIJING, Feb. 24 -- The 36th Chinese naval escort taskforce held a joint naval exercise with the Singapore navy in waters near Singapore on February 24, according to the PLA Navy Spokesperson Senior Captain Gao Xiucheng. The joint exercise mainly practiced training subjects among the fleet formations such as rendezvous, maneuver and separation of the ships, as well as communication, joint search and rescue and other operations. Senior Captain Gao Xiucheng said that the exercise resulted from a consensus reached by the navies of the two countries to enhance mutual trust, deepen friendship, promote cooperation and jointly promote the building of a maritime community with a shared future. Scott has chronicled the COVID fiasco here in Minnesota in his Coronavirus In One State series. Now that the focus has shifted to getting at-risk people vaccinated, our state government is finding new ways to drop the ball, or worse. I got an email today from a guy who said that he had started to fill out the Minnesota Department of Healths online vaccine sign-up form, but discontinued the effort when he had to answer seemingly-irrelevant questions about his race and sexual orientation. I was surprised and checked it out. This is what I found: These are, indeed, required fields, as I found when I tried to proceed with the registration without filling them out: Why does the State of Minnesota need to know your race, gender and sexual preference before scheduling you for a covid shot? There are only two possibilities: either the state intends to use this information to discriminate in distributing the vaccine, or else it is collecting irrelevant information for some collateral and likely nefarious purpose. That question was answered earlier today when the Tim Walz administration announced plans to expand vaccination efforts to low-income groups and minority communities, i.e., its intention to discriminate. And while it apparently wasnt covered in todays announcement, it is reasonable to conclude that the Walz administration intends to discriminate in favor of gay and transgender residents as well. Otherwise, why ask the question? It isnt easy to lower my opinion of the Walz administration, but its invidious discrimination in the distribution of the covid vaccine did just that. Asylum-seekers at an informal camp in Matamoros, Mexico. IOM/Alberto Cabezas MATAMOROS, Mexico UN agencies today will begin to prepare individuals and families in the informal camp in Matamoros, Mexico for entry to the United States in line with the U.S. plan to terminate a policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) that forced asylum-seekers to wait for their U.S. immigration hearings in Mexico. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, on Wednesday begins in-person registration of an estimated 750 people who have been living in the informal camp at Matamoros. A first group could be permitted to enter the United States later this week, pending authorization from U.S. authorities, who decide who will enter and when. In addition to registration by UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) is conducting COVID-19 tests to ensure protection of public health while the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) is ensuring humane treatment of children and their families. This action from UN agencies comes at the request of the U.S. and Mexican governments to assist with the re-entry into the United States of an estimated 25,000 people who have active immigration proceedings in the U.S. but were returned to wait in Mexico under the MPP program. Both governments have prioritized the Matamoros camp due to the difficult humanitarian conditions there. Other individuals with active MPP cases residing outside the Matamoros camp will also be processed. Following termination of the MPP program, a first group with active MPP cases entered the United States on February 19 at the San Ysidro port of entry between Tijuana and San Diego. UNHCR, IOM and UNICEF support the termination of the MPP program and the addressing of the grave humanitarian situation of the thousands of people who have been waiting at the United States-Mexico border since as early as 2019. In coordination with U.S. authorities, UNHCR established a website www.conecta.acnur.org through which people with active MPP cases are registering for processing. The website was launched February 19 and registered around 12,000 people in its first three days of operation. The website has been supplemented by alternative registration channels including email, social media and telephone channels. In addition to COVID-19 testing, IOM is also responsible for coordinating the transportation of persons to designated ports of entry. So far, no cases of COVID-19 have been detected. UNICEF offers support for the most vulnerable child protection cases, defending family unity and offering information to families and children. The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Mexican Red Cross together offer free telephone calls to allow asylum-seekers to maintain contact with their families before crossing into the United States. UNHCR, IOM and UNICEF reiterate that, according to the new U.S. government policy, all persons with active cases under the MPP program will be able to enter the country to continue their immigration proceedings and lodge asylum claims. The dates and points of entry to the United States for persons who have already completed registration are determined by the U.S. government. All individuals who qualify will be processed based upon the order determined by the U.S. and not based on the date when they pre-register with UNHCR using the website or the hotline. For more information, please contact: STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- While you can have catered affairs -- from weddings to Sweet 16s -- come March 15 across New York state, there are a whole host of detailed guidelines that catering hall owners, party hosts and guests will have to follow. In fact, theres a lot of new guidance -- from the creation of dancing zones to mandatory table seating -- that now comes with having an affair in the Empire State. Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Monday that catered affairs, such as weddings of up to 150 people or 50% capacity of a catering hall space, can happen come March 15. Thanks to the hard work and commitment of all New Yorkers, our infection rate is now the lowest weve seen in three months, and accordingly we will now be reopening various recreational activities across the state, including billiard halls, weddings and movie theaters in New York City, said Cuomo on Monday. As our infection rate continues to fall, and the vaccination rate continues to climb, we will keep reopening different sectors of our states economy and focus our efforts on building our state back better than it was before, he added. THE NEW GUIDANCE The state has released a long list of strict guidelines venues have to adhere to, including: 1. All patrons must be tested for COVID-19 prior to the event with either a PCR test within 72 hours of the event or a rapid test within six hours of the event. All attendees must present proof of the negative diagnostic test result (e.g., mobile application, paper form) to designated employees or event staff prior to, or immediately upon, arrival to the event, said the state, noting that catering facilities may offer to perform Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-authorized antigen testing for attendees within six hours of the event on premises. 2. The catering hall can allow guests who have been vaccinated to enter without a COVID-19 test. Attendees may provide proof of having completed the COVID-19 vaccination series at least 14 days prior to the date of the event. However, as [Department of Health] DOH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] continue to evaluate the effect of immunization on potential COVID-19 transmission, diagnostic testing is still recommended, and venues may choose to require testing, said the state. 3. There must be assigned seating. Responsible parties must assign each attendee to a table or area, where they must be seated while eating or drinking for the duration of the event. To the extent practicable, individuals should be seated at a table or area with members of their same immediate party/household/family, said the state. 4. Masks need to be worn at all times for the duration of the event, except when guests are eating. 5. No one can congregate beyond their assigned tables. Responsible parties must ensure that attendees are not congregating, except when seated at their assigned table. Attendees should only be standing when necessary (e.g., enter/exit, restroom, use of staffed buffet), when essential to the event (e.g., entrance of bride and groom), or when permitted, said the state. 6. Live music performers and other entertainers, particularly if unmasked or playing a wind instrument, must be separated from attendees by either 12 feet or an appropriate physical barrier, said the state. 7. Only the guests of honor may participate in ceremonial dances with members of their immediate household, as long as they maintain six feet of separation from other attendees throughout the dance. 8. Dancing zones must be delineated. Attendees may dance with only members of their same immediate party/household/family who are seated at their table in designated and clearly marked areas or zones that are assigned to them and spaced, at least, six feet apart from any other dancing areas or zones, and any tables. Ideally, each dancing areas or zones should not be less than 36 square feet, said the state. Attendees must wear face coverings while in their assigned dancing area or zone and cannot enter, use, or otherwise visit other dancing areas or zones. 9. Contact information for tracing must be provided. For any event conducted pursuant to this guidance, Responsible Parties must require each attendee [or, if attendee is a minor, an adult from their party/household/family] in attendance to sign-in before or immediately upon arrival to the event, providing their full name, date of birth, address, email and phone number for use in potential contact tracing efforts, said the state. More extensive guidance can be found here. *** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK *** FOLLOW TRACEY PORPORA ON FACEBOOK and TWITTER President Klaus Iohannis will participate on Thursday and Friday in an extraordinary meeting of the European Council via videoconference, according to the Presidential Administration, as reported by AGERPRES. Featuring on the agenda of the discussions are the coordination of the European Union amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and action in the area of health, with emphasis on lessons learned from the current crisis, strengthening the EU resilience in health and crisis management for the future establishment of a European health union, as well as international healthcare co-operation. Also discussed will be defence and security issues, in particular EU co-operation and EU-NATO complementariness, along with the Southern Neighbourhood of the European Union - a strategic debate based on a joint communication of the European Commission and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy on a renewed partnership with the Southern Neighbourhood. On Tuesday Iohannis met, via videoconference, European Council President Charles Michel and other European leaders in preparation for the incoming European Council meeting. Supreme Court Asked to Clarify If Hot Pursuit Allows Warrantless Entry The Supreme Court should make clear the extent to which the doctrine of hot pursuit applies in cases in which an individual is charged with a minor offense, the justices heard in oral arguments. Hot pursuit is a legal doctrine that allows police to enter a premises without a warrant when delay would endanger their lives or the lives of others and lead to the escape of the alleged perpetrator. The case law about hot pursuit is well-developed for serious criminal offenses but is less than clear about misdemeanors. The case known as Lange v. California, court file 20-18, is an appeal of a ruling by the California Supreme Court. The petition for a writ of certiorari was granted on Oct. 19, 2020. Only 60 minutes were scheduled for oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Feb. 24, but the telephonic hearing lasted 112 minutes. In October 2016, petitioner Arthur Lange was driving home in Sonoma, California, listening to loud music and honking when a California Highway Patrol officer began following him, intending to conduct a traffic stop. The officer testified in court that he thought the music and honking violated the California Vehicle Code. The noise infraction was subject to a base fine of $25 or $35, according to the petition. The officer followed Langes station wagon but didnt activate his siren or overhead lights. When Lange neared his homes driveway, the officer turned on his overhead lights. Lange began to close his garage door but the officer left his squad car and put his foot under the door to prevent it from closing and then entered the garage. The officer asked Lange, Did you not see me behind you? Lange said he hadnt. The officer said he could smell alcohol on Langes breath and charged him with driving under the influence and operating a vehicles sound system at excessive levels. Lange moved to suppress the evidence obtained after the officer entered his garage, arguing that his warrantless entry into his home violated the Fourth Amendment. The trial court rejected Langes argument that the exigent circumstance of hot pursuit should be limited to true emergency situations, not the investigation of minor offenses, and the state Supreme Court agreed. Langes lawyer, Jeffrey L. Fisher, told the justices that the police officer involved in the case had overreached. Police officers may not enter a persons home without the approval of a magistrate unless an emergency leaves no time to seek a warrant, Fisher said. So the key question here is whether probable cause to believe a person has committed a misdemeanor and retreated automatically gives rise to an exigency requiring immediate action. The governmental interest in investigating minor offenses is not always or even usually strong enough to support home entries unsanctioned by judicial officers, he said. Such invasions can be wholly out of proportion with minor nonviolent offenses. There are many nonthreatening reasons why people sometimes step inside or continue into their garages when pursued by officers. Teenagers are sometimes frightened or confused and wish their parents to be present for any questioning. Women driving alone are sometimes afraid to stop on dark roads and occasionally are not even sure those following them are police officers. And residents of certain communities often wish to avoid having others see them interacting with the police, particularly when theyre likely to be asked to identify perpetrators of other more serious offenses. Police can simply knock on the door, Fisher said. It is not too much to ask for officers to procure a warrant before breaching the Fourth Amendments most sacrosanct space. On behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice, Erica Ross urged the justices to recognize at least a general presumptive rule that when a misdemeanor suspect tries to thwart a lawful public encounter by moving the encounter to a residence, an officers decision to follow him is reasonable. Several justices said during the hearing that drawing the line between felonies and misdemeanors was difficult. Chief Justice John Roberts asked Ross how far police could go in such circumstances. So we think that there are three primary limits, Ross said. The first is that the manner of entry itself must be reasonable. The second is that the scope of the entry has to comport with this courts cases essentially saying that its not going to be a full-blown search of the entire residence. And, third, of course, officers in this context, as in all others, cant use excessive force. Lawyer Amanda Rice, appointed by the Supreme Court to act as a friend of the court and argue in support of the state court ruling, said the Supreme Court has never suggested that the hot pursuit exception turns on the classification of the underlying offense. It should now expressly hold that it does not. The exception protects important law enforcement interests that categorically outweigh privacy interests when a suspect decides to flee. The bodies of the Italian ambassador and the Carabinieri police officer killed in an attack in Congo arrived in Italy on Tuesday night. Italy's Ambassador to Congo Luca Attanasio and his bodyguard Carabinieri officer Vittorio Iacovacci were fatally shot in eastern Congo on Monday when driving in a World Food Programme (WFP) convoy. They were travelling from Goma, the regional capital in the east, to visit a WFP school project in Rutshuru. A Congolese driver was also killed in the attack on the convoy. Attanasio, who was shot in the abdomen, was transported to the U.N. Mission in Congo hospital where he died from his wounds, according to Congo's interior ministry. The driver and police officer died at the scene. Italy's Prime Minister Mario Draghi, Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio and Defence Minister, Lorenzo Guerini, paid tribute as the bodies arrived at Rome's Ciampino airport late at night. Italy's Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday it will spare no efforts in finding out exactly what happened in the tragic attack. Di Maio is scheduled to brief Parliament on Wednesday on the attack. Rome prosecutors have opened an investigation, which is done whenever an Italian citizen is killed overseas. (Image Credits: AP) (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) New Delhi: 7th Pay Commission latest update -- Bringing respite to contract workers working under the Samagra Shiksha - an overarching programme for the school education and members of the Welfare Society the Jharkhand state government has created a welfare fund for them. The fund will be useful for paying insurance benefits to teachers, KGV, BRP-CRP personnel of Rs 5 lakh. Employees will be covered for group insurance accidental insurance scheme. There will be an annual premium amount of up to Rs 80,000 per person. Employee will get death benefits for sum assured of Rs 5 lakh. Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren said that arrangements have been made to provide loan assistance to the members of the welfare fund for amount ranging between Rs 50,000 to Rs 2 lakh for the marriage of the daughter of the members. Members can also avail loan for higher education of their children. The state government has created fund pool of Rs 10 crore, while the loan will be given from the interest amount. A loan fund policy has also been introduced for treatment of critical illnesses. Workers with a work tenure of 5 years will get Rs 25,000; between 5-10 years of tenure will be provided Rs 50,000; workers with work tenure of between 10-15 years will be provided Rs 75,000; and workers with above 15 years of work tenure will be provided Rs 1 lakh loan. Longtime Southern department store retailer Belk Inc. has completed its trip through bankruptcy in accelerated fashion, emerging with $450 million less debt just hours after seeking protection from creditors. In what was a remarkably speedy turnaround, the struggling North Carolina chain obtained a judge's approval of its "Chapter 11" restructuring named for a section of the U.S. legal code less than 24 hours later after it filed the paperwork Feb. 23 in Texas. "This is a rare Chapter 11, your honor, where everyone wins," Belk lawyer Steven Serajeddini said at a hearing in Houston in front of U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Marvin Isgur. "Nobody wanted to see a liquidation here," the attorney added. Belk had said that no store closings or layoffs were planned as part of its bankruptcy. Still, filings that were distributed to lenders suggested that cuts could be announced afterward. Charlotte-based Belk met its previously stated goal for an expedited "prepackaged, one-day" reorganization. The company has said the plan had "near unanimous" support from all lenders, which enabled Isgur to approve it without having to consider time-consuming legal objections. Belk warned that it would seek bankruptcy protection about a month ago. The company employs about 17,000 workers and operates more than 290 department stores in 16 states, including 35 locations in South Carolina. The reorganization will provide the retailer with $225 million in fresh capital, cut its debt load to about $1.46 billion and extend loan repayment deadlines to mid-2025. The fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic forced Belk's hand, company finance chief William Langley said in a court filing. Sign up for our new business newsletter We're starting a weekly newsletter about the business stories that are shaping Charleston and South Carolina. Get ahead with us - it's free. Email Sign Up! Many traditional brick-and-mortar retailers and shopping centers in the U.S. were forced to shut their doors last March as the virus began to spread. The health crisis also has pummeled apparel sales and has kept some shoppers from visiting malls. As a result, Belk suffered "drastic declines in sales," which tumbled 32 percent from March through December compared the same period of 2019, according to Langley. Last year, the company furloughed workers as the pandemic set in and cut senior staff pay up to 50 percent during the temporary store closures. It also eliminated an undisclosed number of jobs in July, mostly at its headquarters. "Despite proactive steps taken by Belks board and management team before and during the COVID-19 pandemic ... the massive and ongoing revenue and liquidity declines necessitate a realignment of the capital structure and immediate liquidity infusion," Langley said in explaining why the company had no choice but to file for bankruptcy. The plan calls for Sycamore Partners, a private equity firm that bought Belk for $3 billion in 2015, to retain control while also transferring a large stake of the business to the lenders that agreed to forgive the $450 million in debt. The reorganization buys the retailer time and gives it some breathing room as it seeks to rebuild its business. CEO Lisa Harper said Belk has repositioned itself "to pursue our growth initiatives and move the company forward from a strengthened financial foundation. .... We have a bright future ahead, and Im looking forward to growing our more than 130-year legacy as a trusted retailer for many years to come. Founded in 1888 by William Henry Belk, the merchandiser has been catering to Palmetto State shoppers since the early 1890s. It expanded to downtown Charleston in 1926, when it opened a store at 232 King St. Three generations of the Belk family ran the business until they sold to Sycamore Partners more than five years ago, saying at the time that the deal would ensure the company would survive "in our increasingly competitive and changing industry landscape. But the buyout loaded the retailer with more than $2 billion in debt at time when mainline department stores were losing sales to specialty shops and online rivals. EDWARDSVILLE The importance of elections and the long road for the right to vote will be highlighted in a special exhibit from the Smithsonian Institution that will come to the Madison County Historic Museum in July. Voices and Votes: Democracy in America is tentatively set to be on display July 17 Aug. 21 in the atrium at the Madison County Administration Building. The exhibit, part of the Smithsonians Museum on Main Streets program, was originally set to appear in June, but has been pushed back because of the coronavirus, according to Madison County History Museum Superintendent Jon Parkin. Five kiosks will cover the 200-plus years of democracy in America, he said. From the birth of our republic in the late 18th century, up until the present. He called it an ambitious display. We need to know the history of our republic in terms of voting, how we got here and what were the contributing factors, he added. This was obviously put together before the run-up to the last election, and some of the differences that were expressed in interesting ways and other events. I think if this exhibit was produced today it would have a different look and a different focus. According to information provided by the Smithsonian, Voices and Votes: Democracy in America examines questions stemming from the leap of faith taken by the American revolutionaries who established a government that entrusted the power of the nation not in a monarchy but in its citizens. Who has the right to vote? What are the freedoms and responsibilities of citizens? Whose voices will be heard? The display is divided into five sections: The Great Leap, which details the context and main controversies behind voting in the United States; A Vote, A Voice, a look at how the right to vote expanded from just propertied men to include those originally shut out of voting; The Machinery of Democracy, a look at the institutions that have developed to support voting, from parties to political conventions; Beyond the Ballot, focusing on the First Amendment and the many ways citizens can make their voices heard; and Creating Citizens, which looks at basic questions about what it means to be a citizen and how to balance rights and responsibilities. Voices and Votes is based on a major exhibition at the Smithsonians National Museum of American History called American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith. It includes a number of dynamic features, such as historical and contemporary photos; educational and archival video; engaging multimedia interactives with short games and additional footage, photos, and information; and historical objects like campaign souvenirs, voter memorabilia, and protest material. More Information Five themes of 'Voices and Votes: Democracy in America' The Great Leap: "The Great Leap" introduces visitors to the context and controversies behind America's democratic system, posing questions such as: What inspired the writers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Just how revolutionary was our new democracy led by the people? Who would be included as "the people?" How would they make their voices heard? A Voice, A Vote: We have a diverse body of voters today, but not every American has had the right to vote. When America was founded, voters made up a small fraction of the population. The founders only saw a world where propertied men voted on behalf of everyone else. Over the years, those shut out of the polls showed their desire to be heard. The fight for fair representation brought struggle and changes to our country. The Machinery of Democracy: We participate in the political system through state and national parties, nomination conventions, and stumping for our candidate of choice. These informal institutions and activities not specified in the Constitution but nevertheless are part of the machinery that keeps democracy running, getting people to go out and vote. Beyond the Ballot: Americans of every ethnicity, class and state share the revolutionary spirit of rising up and speaking out. The First Amendment guarantees this right to peaceably assemble and petition the government. Whether by carrying signs, petitioning with our feet or lobbying representatives, there are many ways citizens can make their voices heard. Creating Citizens: What does it mean to be a citizen? What are the rights and responsibilities of American citizens? Does America need a shared national identity? These are basic questions that our founders left unanswered. In schools, public forums and popular culture we debate whose history gets to be told. The conflict between multiculturalism, assimilation and discrimination plays out every day in America. We must balance our rights as well as our responsibilities as citizens. Source: The Smithsonian Institution. See More Collapse Voices and Votes also offers an exciting educational component called American Experiments. This companion traveling trunk will have a collection of activities designed to engage visitors inside the exhibition as well as students in the classroom. Parkin said the Smithsonians exhibit will not include any artifacts, but the County Museum may supplement the display with some of its own. Although the Smithsonian would have the artifacts to support that, they would be fragile and desirable by a lot of people, he said. This is really more images and narrative. I think there will be a couple of opportunities for interactive elements for people to share their thoughts. Were still looking at ideas, he said, noting many of the countys voting-related items deal with the womens suffrage movement. He also said they were looking at other ways to promote the display, but the ongoing pandemic makes solid planning difficult at this stage. Partners in bringing the exhibit to Madison County include Illinois Humanities, the County Museum and the Smithsonian. It is also set to be on display at the General John A. Logan Museum in Murphysboro, the Savanna Museum and Cultural Center in Savanna, the Bryan-Bennett Library in Salem, the Jacksonville Area Museum in Jacksonville, and the Vespasian Warner Public Library District in Clinton. For information visit https://www.ilhumanities.org/program/museum-on-main-street/, or https://museumonmainstreet.org/. The Bronx Parent Housing Network, one of New York Citys major providers of homeless shelters, came under fire after the New York Times found that its leader had allegedly sexually abused and harassed shelter residents and employees. Now, City & State has learned that his successor no longer works for the network. The last president and CEO, Victor Rivera, was fired in response to the allegations and other accusations that he engaged in financial misconduct during his tenure, and the nonprofit has now had to retain an external, independent investigator at the citys direction. The shelter providers board of directors unanimously appointed attorney Ululy Rafael Martinez as its new president, according to an announcement made in early February. But City & State has learned he is no longer involved with the organization. As we stated when we referred these matters for investigation and took our own disciplinary action, including to direct the organizations board to retain independent investigators: any new appointment of a senior leader at the organization must be approved by (the Department for Social Services), Isaac McGinn, a spokesman with the city Department for Social Services, which oversees the Department of Homeless Services, said in a statement. Therefore, (Bronx Parent Housing Network) staff did not and do not have the authority to fill this role unilaterally, so Mr. Martinez has not filled that role. Furthermore, Mr. Martinez no longer has a role at the organization. Martinez told City & State in an email that his hiring had always meant to be temporary. When the (Bronx Parent Housing Network, or BPHN) board of directors hired me as President, it was for the specific purpose of working with (the Department of Homeless, or DHS) and assisting with external investigations, he wrote. Once I worked with DHS to facilitate an agreement between the board and DHS that designated an Interim CEO to oversee the operations of DHS, my work was done. The city directed the nonprofit to appoint Daniel Tietz as its interim CEO. Tietz has previously been tasked with overseeing another embattled homeless shelter provider, recently serving as the court-appointed receiver for the nonprofit Childrens Community Services. City records indicate that Martinez had been advising the Bronx Parent Housing Network on compliance and the corrective action plan the city placed on the nonprofit in 2018, which the Times found was still violated after its imposition. The corrective action plan prohibited the use of certain vendors and mandated that it strengthen its fiscal policies to deal with conflicts of interest. But Riveras wife went on to become vice president of the security company the nonprofit used and the organization went on to award $184,000 in maintenance contracts to a friend of Riveras, the Times reported. It also leased at least two shelter buildings from a company owned by a former business partner who worked with Rivera, who through his lawyer denied any relationship to the company, according to the Times. Martinez had been marked as a subcontractor for the network under Checkbook NYC, but all of the subcontracts are either being reviewed or have been rejected. The Department for Social Services did not answer questions related to why they are being reviewed or have been rejected. Martinez told City & State he had been retained by the nonprofits board of directors in 2018 to assist with issues raised in the corrective action plan, where he helped the board draft policies and procedures on conflict of interest, nepotism, whistleblower and executive compensation. Policies and procedures are not sufficient by themselves to ensure a culture of compliance; and when it became clear through the NYT investigation that revealed the depth and scope of the crisis facing BPHN was far greater than any of the Board members or I had previously realized (as a result of Mr. Rivera's determined efforts to conceal his wrongdoings). Nine subcontracts, amounting to $1.4 million in total, are logged as starting as of June 1, 2018 and largely were related to providing compliance services in accordance with (the corrective action plan) and other matters. These were all rejected. But eight other similar subcontracts collectively amounting to the far reduced amount of $160,000 total were also noted to have started on July 1, 2019. These are all currently under review, and also relate to executing a compliance plan for Bronx Parent Housing Networks board of directors. Martinez has also previously served as the board chair of another shelter provider in New York City, the Neighborhood Association for Inter-Cultural Affairs also known as NAICA. That organization is currently in the middle of a legal battle with another homeless services nonprofit, Aguila. The latter has accused NAICA of committing fraud in an attempt to acquire Aguila without its board of directors approval. In Aguilas lawsuit and a letter sent to the attorney generals office, the nonprofit said Martinez acted as an attorney for both parties during the initial negotiations. This attempt at joint representation is an unwaivable conflict of interest, breach of the attorney Disciplinary Rules and ethical obligations, the letter reads, according to the Daily News. He cannot impartially represent both sides of the transactions while serving as the board chair of one of the entities. NAICA has filed its own lawsuit against Aguila, arguing that the merger agreement was validly approved and authorized and accusing Aguilas leader of gross negligence, mismanagement. Martinez disputed the letters claims. Both organizations signed an engagement and joint representation consent letter that authorized me to represent both parties in the transaction, he said in an email. Both parties were aware and agreed to have me represent them in the transaction and the steps I took were in line with my attorney disciplinary rules and ethical obligations. Currently a Democratic district leader in the Bronx, Martinez has worked as deputy chief of staff to former New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and as chief of staff for the Bronx Democratic County Committee. Editor's note: This story was updated with the name of the latest CEO at the network, Daniel Tietz, an additional comment from Ululy Rafael Martinez. Following the adoption of the anti-separatist law in the French National Assembly, Higher Education Minister Frederique Vidal has continued to defend the governments measures announced over the past week to bring universities into line with the law. Vidal proposed to investigate all university research in France and to take action against academics guilty of supposed separatism and Islamo-leftism. Vidals proposal highlights the anti-democratic character of the anti-separatism law. It restricts religious freedom, overriding the 1905 secularism law in France. It contains a far-reaching attack on the right to association, as all associations are kept under constant threat of dissolution for the actions of their members. In the context of universities, the law is now being used to impose the political criteria of the extreme right on academic researchers. Above all, this is aimed at suppressing a growing political radicalization among students and in the working population over the coronavirus pandemic and the policy pursued by the French ruling class. More than 600 university higher education lecturers have already signed a statement demanding Vidals resignation. Published in Le Monde, it denounces Vidals project and the governments indifference to the fate of students, who have been cut off from casual employment during the pandemic and been forced by the lack of government support to turn to charities for food and other essentials. The violence of the law underscores the cowardice of a minister who remained silent about the distress of students during the pandemic, just as she was deaf to our questions about a law on research programs that was massively rejected by researchers, they write. Deploring the intellectual poverty of Vidals arguments, culling from the repertoire of the extreme right an imaginary Islamo-leftism, while threatening intellectual repression, they write: Frederique Vidal jumps on the conspiracy theory of Islamo-leftism and accuses us of rotting the foundations of the university. She wants to launch an investigation, threatens to divide and punish us, to create suspicion and fear, and trample on our academic freedoms. We consider such a minister unworthy of representing us and we strongly demand her resignation. Vidals proposal highlights the dictatorial nature of the projects of the entire ruling class and the need for a political mobilisation of the working class. The right wing and the Macron government openly demand the repression of so-called Islamo-leftism. The Stalinist French Communist Party and Jean-Luc Melenchons Unsubmissive France (LFI) voted for large portions of the law in the Assembly. Just like the coronavirus pandemic itself, the anti-separatist law can only be fought with a mobilisation of workers independent of the trade union apparatuses and the establishment political parties. French President Emmanuel Macron attends a video-conference meeting with World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus amid the COVID-19 outbreak. (Christian Hartmann/Pool via AP) Large sections of academics are aware that Macron is working to rehabilitate the political traditions of European fascism. His lead collaborator is Gerald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior and former supporter of the far-right Action Francaise. Sorbonne President Jean Chambaz linked the hunt for Islamo-leftism to the campaign by the Nazis and Action Francaise against communism and the Jews in the 20th century. On France Info, Chambaz called for denouncing this kind of position. He added: Islamo-gauchism is an absolutely imprecise term, coming from extreme right-wing circles, taken up by certain Republican deputies who would like to ban the teaching of certain disciplines at the university. ... It makes me think more of the slogans of the 20th century denouncing Judeo-Bolshevism. Confronted with the opposition of students and teachers toward Macrons policy of herd immunity to permit the coronavirus to spread, Chambaz was compelled to implicitly denounce the government. Responding to Vidals claim that Islamo-leftism is gangrene for society, Chambaz said: What is the real gangrene for society? It is discrimination, ghettoization, social inequality in access to employment, in access to education, to culture, and the failure of public policy in this area over the last 50 years. The essential issues involved in the anti-separatist law and, more broadly, the pandemic, are becoming increasingly clear. The European Union is hostile to the basic health measures that have stopped the virus in China and Taiwan. The ruling class has maintained corporate production at all costs, even if it is not essential for the 2 trillion in capital provided by the EU in bailouts to banks and big business. This has been at the cost of almost 800,000 lives and has permanently undermined the economy and the social conditions of workers and young people. To impose this policy over social opposition, the ruling class is moving to create an authoritarian regime, in continuity with Macrons brutal police crackdown against the yellow vests. The fear of a political radicalisation of young people and a social explosion dominates all the European governments. In Spain, the coalition government of the Social Democrats with Podemos, the Spanish ally of Melenchons LFI, has thrown rapper Pablo Hasel into prison for denouncing the monarchy. In the United Kingdom, the right-wing government is establishing a freedom of speech commission that would impose financial penalties on universities that allow protests against academics tied to the government. In France, the Macron government is continuing its effort to bring universities into line. The Minister of National Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, has called Islamo-Leftism an undeniable social fact, and Darmanin has claimed that the university and public services are affected by Islamism sometimes aided by leftists. This weekend, Vidal confirmed to the Journal du Dimanche that the government would not abandon its plan against the universities. Hypocritically declaring her commitment to academic freedom, Vidal let it be known that the investigation is aimed against a political radicalisation in the universities. There will indeed be an inquiry, she declared, insisting on her willingness to quantify things, to get out of the feeling and the presupposition about the entry of Islam into the universities. She went on to say that the target of the investigation would not be Islamo-leftism, but any radical thought: When I use the term Islamo-leftism, used by the journalist who interviewed me, I have in mind all the forces of radicalism in our society. This comment, presented as a denial to reassure the JDD and its readers, in fact underlines the anti-democratic nature of Macrons projects. Far from limiting the number of subjects or theories that the state is to monitor and suppress, Vidals comment expands them. It is known that Macron was personally terrified by the yellow vest protests and the growth of strikes in France throughout 2018. Historical studies of working class movements, revolutions, and a broad array of political theories opposed by the extreme right and the police could be targeted. Vidal added that no topic would be banned so long as it did not provoke political militancy or activism. She said: One can obviously do postcolonial studies in France or work on intersectionality. The whole issue is to distinguish between the work of scientists and those who use this work to carry an ideology and nurture activism. In reality, the pandemic and the increasingly overt authoritarian character of the bankrupt capitalist system underscore the necessity of a mass political intervention by the working class and youth. This is inseparable from a broad movement to the left by the population against the defenders of the political establishment, including their pseudo-left variety, who have supported the policies of herd immunity and the police state that has been built up in Europe over decades. The defence of academic freedom against Vidal is inseparable from a renewal of the working class struggle for socialism. Reliance Industries has invested $100 million in early stage VC fund Kalaari Capital through its digital arm, Jio Platforms. The company will also invest an additional capital of $100 million in Kalaari within the next year. This marks RILs maiden investment in a VC fund and the deal is slated to be one of the the largest commitments by an Indian conglomerate in a VC firm. Interestingly, the move comes after RILs acquisition of Kalaari backed startups such as Urban Ladder and Zivame. Founded by technopreur Vani Kola in 2006, Kalaari Capital invests in early stage technology startups. The VC fund came in the limelight for backing startups such as SnapDeal, Dream11, CureFit, InstaMojo, Signzy among various others. The fund currently manages asset worth $650 million. The VC fund has last raised capital in 2015 when it had picked up $290 million. The Bangalore based VC fund has been on the lookout to raise its fourth fund for over a few years. In January 2019, Vani Kola had said that the fund was targeting $200 million but no further announcements were made. A Reliance spokesperson said in an email response to a leading daily, Reliance remains committed to supporting the build-up of a thriving startup ecosystem in India, particularly in digital enablement space, and will continue to explore various avenues to do so. Hyderabad, Feb 24 : Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy's sister Y.S. Sharmila on Wednesday interacted with students and youth here as part of consultations before announcing her political plans in Telangana. Sharmila, who has been meeting loyalists of her late father and former Chief Minister of undivided Andhra Pradesh Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy in Telangana, held a meeting with university students and unemployed youth at her Lotus Pond residence. She took their feedback about her plans to enter Telangana politics and enquired about their problems, especially the ones relating to fee reimbursement and jobs. Some of the students, who interacted with Sharmila, later told the media that they want 'Rajanna Rajyam' in Telangana so that the fee reimbursement scheme is implemented properly and they get the jobs. 'Rajanna Rajyam' is a reference to the rule of Rajasekhara Reddy in undivided Andhra Pradesh between 2004 and 2009 when he implemented a plethora of welfare schemes for various sections of the society. The youth alleged that the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) used the students for its interests but ignored their problems after coming to power. They recalled that the students and youth were benefited from the schemes launched by YSR during his rule. The students said Sharmila assured them that she will work to ensure that the schemes launched by YSR to ensure education to every poor student and to provide jobs to unemployed youth are implemented in Telangana. She told the students that as their sister, she will strive to work for their welfare. She recalled that YSR ensured that no student is forced to discontinue education for lack of money to pay the fee. Sharmila said the fee reimbursement scheme of YSR ensured quality education to lakhs of students and many secured good jobs. She said YSR has a special place in the heart of Telugu people. She said it was due to efforts of YSR that every district got a university. She underlined the need to bring back 'Rajanna Rajyam' to fulfill the aspirations of youth. YSR's daughter began the process of consultation on February 9 by holding a meeting with YSR loyalists from Nalgonda district. Last week, she met YSR loyalists from Hyderabad and Rangareddy districts to seek opinion on her intention to form a new political party in Telangana. "There is no Rajanna Rajyam in Telangana. I want to bring it," she had told YSR loyalists. She plans to hold similar meetings with YSR loyalists from other districts to know ground realities and understand the situation before announcing her next course of action. As the YSR Congress Party has distanced itself from Sharmila's move, it is being speculated that she is likely float a new party in Telangana. Acharya Balkrishna, Managing Director of Patanjali Ayurved has defended Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan's presence at the press conference where the company had announced Coronil's CoPP certification by WHO-GMP. He also said that he was disappointed by the Indian Medical Association's comments on Coronil kit. Balkrishna added that Dr Harsh Vadhan did not endorse any ayurvedic medicine nor did he undermine modern medicine. "Our Honourable Health Minister never undermined modern medicine, rather his presence in the event showed his sincere efforts as a health minister to provide acceptability to other forms of medical systems," he said. The Patanjali MD said that they were saddened to see that some of the current healthcare professionals are less engaged in scientific research and understanding. He said it is due to such situations that blunt statements were made by the IMA that claimed that Coronil was a "falsely fabricated unscientific product". "It is beyond us to comprehend the serious and extremely offensive comment," he said, adding that all their research has been published in peer-reviewed journals. Balkrishna said that the medicines introduced during the press conference have been validated through in-depth in-vitro and in-vivo biological and chemical studies, along with randomised clinical trials. Rigorous norms of biological and clinical research were followed, he said, adding that the formulations are based on the ancient knowledge of Ayurveda. Also read: Yoga guru Ramdev releases research paper on Patanjali's 'evidence-based' medicine Coronil Harsh Vardhan's presence was meant to send a message to billions of Indians that there are other forms of medicine based on scientific evidence, other than modern medicine. "Dr Harsh Vardhan didn't endorse any ayurvedic medicine, neither, did he undermine the modern medicines. He has done what a health minister should do: raise the awareness of his countrymen in the face of a persistent crisis," he said. "We believe there is nothing unethical about it," said Balkrishna. "We have shared all our research data with Ministry of Ayush, Govt of India. The ministry has approved and categorically agreed for Coronil as medicine for COVID-19 management," he stated. Balkrishna further added, "WHO - Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) compliant Certificate of Pharmaceutical Product (CoPP) licence has been issued to Coronil by the Drug Controller General of India, Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) as per the defined quality parameters," he added. On Friday, yoga guru Baba Ramdev released a research paper by the Patanjali Research Institute on the "first evidence-based corona medicine" on the Ayurveda immunity booster -- Coronil. Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan and Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari were also present at the event. IMA questioned the accuracy of the kit as well as the presence of the Health Minister in the event and said, "Being Health Minister of the country, how justified is it to release such falsely fabricated unscientific product to people of the whole country... can you clarify the time frame, timeline for the so-called clinical trial of this said anti-corona product? The country needs an explanation from the minister. The Indian Medical Association will also write to National Medical Commission for seeking suo moto explanation for his blatant disrespect to the code of conduct of Medical Council of India." Also read: Patanjali clarifies on Coronil efficacy as WHO says it's 'not certified' Also read: IMA appalled over Patanjali's WHO certification claim on Coronil; demands explanation from Harsh Vardhan Please purchase a subscription to continue reading. If you have a subscription, please Log In . Your current subscription does not provide access to this content. If you believe you've gotten this message in error, please Log In. Peter Capaldi has signed and donated a script of one of his last Doctor Who episodes to an online charity auction. The one-off shooting script for the series 10 finale The Doctor Falls has been signed and personalised by the Glaswegian actor who played the 12th incarnation of the titular character. It will be auctioned off at the first virtual version of the annual Capital Sci-Fi Con, which takes place on Saturday March 13 in aid of Childrens Hospices Across Scotland (CHAS). Peter Capaldi with his signed script for the episode The Doctor Falls (CHAS/PA) Capaldi said: I am delighted to donate this personalised shooting script for The Doctor Falls by Steven Moffat to be auctioned for CHAS at Capital Sci Fi Con. Reading the full script gives an insight into Stevens beautiful work and this truly is an amazing collectors item for Doctor Who fans. I hope it helps raise lots of vital funds for CHAS, an incredible charity that helps so many vulnerable children and their families across Scotland. The former Doctor appeared at the 2019 convention in Edinburghs Corn Exchange and donated another script to help the charity last year. Capaldi added an illustration to the one-off script for the episode Heaven Sent which raised 4,460. Another script donated by Peter Capaldi raised 4,460 for the charity last year (Lesley Martin/CHAS/PA) Other auction items this year include a dressing gown worn by Emma Thompson in Men in Black 3 and a personalised video from Sabrina the Teenage Witch actress Melissa Joan Hart. Fiona Leslie, senior community fundraiser at CHAS, said: We are absolutely delighted and privileged that Peter is once again supporting CHAS through Capital Sci-Fi Con which is now in its sixth year. Since 2016 the Cons organiser Keith Armour and his team have raised a phenomenal 312,000 for CHAS and we are indebted to them for their determination in ensuring this years event could still go ahead virtually after it became clear a physical event wasnt going to be possible because of the pandemic. With Keiths vision and support from stars like Peter we hope sci-fi fans from across the world will join in the fun online to raise funds to help children with life-shortening conditions and their families across Scotland. Stay tuned to the Capital Sci-Fi Con website for the auction link going live in early March plus further updates. Tickets for the Virtual Capital Sci-Fi Con 2021 cost 3 and are available now at https://www.capitalscificon.co.uk. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Majid Al Futtaim, the leading shopping mall, communities, retail and leisure pioneer across the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, today (February 24) reported a revenue of AED32.6 billion ($8.87 billion) and ebitda of AED3.8 billion, representing declines of 7% and 19%, respectively, driven by the impact of Covid-19 pandemic. Announcing its audited operational and financial results for 2020, Majid Al Futtaim said the companys assets decreased 6% to approximately AED59.1 billion. On its real estate unit's performance, the group said compared to 2019, Majid Al Futtaim Properties registered a decline of 24% in revenue and 21% in ebitda, standing at AED3.5 billion and AED2.3 billion, respectively. The shopping malls business too saw a decline in revenue due to temporary asset closures across the region, the proactive decision to forego tenant rent payments during closure periods and rent relief mechanisms to support tenants. During the second half of the year, the business experienced a gradual recovery in footfall as the economy started to reopen. Majid Al Futtaim Hotels too experienced a 60% drop in occupancy rates due to asset closures for a prolonged period, and reduced demand as a result of border closures, travel restrictions and lower capacity. On its retail business, Majid Al Futtaim said in 2020, its Carrefour business recorded a revenue decrease of 1% standing at AED28 billion, while its ebitda grew by 14% to AED1.6 billion. The retail pioneer pointed out that the Covid-19 pandemic had resulted in business interruptions, such as temporary asset closures, travel and movement restrictions, and supply chain challenges, and when combined with more cautious consumer sentiment, resulted in varying degrees of impact across the company. Amid government-mandated closures and lockdowns, it had to forego rent at its 27 shopping malls across five markets to ease the financial burden on its tenants, while stores were temporarily closed. CEO Alain Bejjani said: "Despite the extraordinary events of 2020, Majid Al Futtaims full year performance demonstrated the resilience of our people and business model, diverse portfolio, operational agility, proactive investments and prudent financial risk management." "The pandemic has not only been a financial crisis, but an even bigger crisis of trust. We have built our organisation to withstand adverse economic conditions, so our primary focus was on acting swiftly to protect our customers and employees, as we worked diligently to restore trust and maintain non-negotiable commitments to our sustainable business practices," he stated. Bejjani said: "The fact that we have experienced growth in some of our businesses during a year of unprecedented disruption is a testament to the importance that should always be placed on people, the planet and our collective progress. For me, this is stakeholder capitalism in action, and it makes me optimistic about our future." During the second half of 2020, restrictions began to ease and there was a gradual recovery across various industries, as consumers gained confidence in public health measures implemented across markets in which the company operates, he explained. Majid Al Futtaims quality assets, the resilience of its business model and the ongoing success of its diversification efforts, in addition to the companys unwavering commitment to financial discipline, contributed to these results, he added. From the onset of the pandemic, Majid Al Futtaim had adopted a stakeholder-first strategy, including strengthening its engagement with governments across all markets in which the company operates to identify and implement measures to minimise the spread of the virus and overcome supply challenges derived from the pandemic. "In order to guarantee a sustainable supply of fresh fruit and vegetables across the country, we had partnered with the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment in the UAE, to boost the availability of locally grown produce across Carrefour UAE stores, by opening new distribution channels for more than 6,000 small and medium-sized local farmers," he added. U.S. President Joe Biden / AFP Sorry! This content is not available in your region A drive-by shooting has rocked a Victorian suburb after a gunman opened fire next to a major road during peak hour. Detectives have launched an investigation into a drive-by shooting on Tuesday evening at Patterson Lakes in Melbourne's south, with the culprit still on the run as of Wednesday morning. One man has been rushed to hospital after he was shot in the lower body from a moving vehicle at about 6pm as he walked through a Thompson Road car park. Some reports indicate the Patterson Lakes incident happened in a car park opposite Coles (pictured) where after-work shoppers would have been gathering Some reports indicate the car park in question is opposite a Coles supermarket which would have been packed with after-work shoppers. 'The exact circumstances surrounding the incident are being investigated but investigators believe it is a targeted shooting,' police said in a statement. 'There is no ongoing risk to the public.' Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. Lauren Van Wagoner married her boyfriend when she was just 17. Growing up in a religiously conservative home in small-town Alabama, Van Wagoner and her boyfriend came under pressure to wed after both families found out theyd had sex. They were Mormons and feared being ostracized. The decision permanently altered the course of Van Wagoners life. Suddenly saddled with the responsibilities of adulthood, she had four children before divorcing 12 years later. Kansas is among the dozens of states that continue to allow people under 18 to marry. Marriages of 15-year-olds are allowed with a judges permission while 16-and-17 year-olds can wed with various combinations of parental and judicial permission. Alabama requires those between the ages of 16-18 to have parental consent to wed. But Van Wagoner, a Shawnee, Kansas resident who owns a political consulting firm, wants a change. Rep. Stephanie Clayton, an Overland Park, Kansas Democrat, introduced a bill on Van Wagoners behalf Tuesday that would raise the minimum marriage age to 18 with no exceptions. I think because we had been married so young, I literally did not know how to live without him, said Van Wagoner, who moved to Kansas in 2013. There was a sense of codependency that was there. Claytons bill appears to mark the first attempt in recent years at changing the minimum age in Kansas. Until 2006, the state allowed children of any age to marry with parental permission. The Legislature and then-Gov. Kathleen Sebelius set a minimum age of 15 after a pregnant 14-year-old Nebraska girl came to Kansas to marry a 22-year-old man. The measure is one of many across the country attempting to raise the minimum marriage age over the past decade. Bills have failed in at least 10 states, however, according to a group that advocates against child marriage. The measures are driven by both a growing recognition of the dangers of child marriage and an ongoing national conversation about consent and sexual assault. Missouri was one of the easiest states for weddings at 15 until Gov. Mike Parson signed a bill banning the practice in 2018. The change followed reporting by The Star showing the state had become a destination for 15-year-old brides. Obviously, there are instances where the minors are giving consent. But sometimes, minors are not really able to fully consent to these marriages, Clayton said. Sometimes its done by coercion by their parents and its one thing for parents to make decisions about children that are in effect while those children are minors. But marriage is oftentimes forever. Invoking the Virgin Mary It isnt clear how many child marriages occur in Kansas. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment, which releases annual marriage statistics, doesnt specifically report the number of marriages involving people under 18. The agency instead reports the number of marriages of people ages 15 to 19. In 2019, 309 Kansas grooms and 675 brides were ages 15 to 19 about 6 percent of all people who were married in the state that year according to KDHE statistics. The number of young couples getting married has dropped in recent decades. Nearly 12 percent of all Kansas brides were under 20 in 1997. By 2019, only 4.4 percent were under 20. Four states Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Minnesota have banned marriage for individuals under 18. Bills to end or limit child marriage have failed or are still pending in at least 20 states, according to Unchained. If Kansas were to do this, it would join a very short list of places with 18 as the absolute minimum, said Nick Syrett, a University of Kansas professor who wrote a book on child marriage. Arguments against abolishing marriage for people under 18 often center on sex, Syrett said. They include beliefs, typically put forward by conservatives, that girls who become pregnant should be able to marry to legitimize the child or that marriage can resolve other tough situations. When Kansas lawmakers in 2006 debated setting a minimum age for marriage, then-Sen. Kay OConnor, an Olathe Republican, invoked the Virgin Mary in arguing against the change. Every family has their own circumstances. Sometimes the best decision is to allow the marriage to go forward, she said at the time, according to the Lawrence Journal-World. Arguments also exist on the left in favor of allowing minors to marry but are less common, Syrett said. It is sometimes framed as a reproductive rights issue or as a way for foster children to be emancipated from bad foster parents. OK, I can be married, this is cool. Van Wagoner, who crossed over from Alabama into Florida to get married, said she was happy with the decision at the time. I loved my church, I loved my religion, so I agreed to it, she said. Of course, Im 17. Im like, OK, I can be married, this is cool. The couple eloped at a courthouse on Nov. 3, 2006. She wore the same dress her mother wore to her own wedding. There was no crowd, just her now ex-husband and her mother. Looking back, Van Wagoner said she wasnt in the right place to make that kind of decision. Not everyone agreed with her at the time, either. She recalled how a close friend voiced concerns and how one of her teachers had cried. The marriage lasted 12 years and produced four children, but fell apart after her husband, Colby Van Wagoner, an EMT in Jackson County, Kansas pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal drug charges. He had been stealing morphine from vials and replacing it with saline solution. He was sentenced to five years of federal probation. Van Wagoner said sometimes she daydreams about what might have happened if she hadnt gotten married so young. She had thought of owning a dance studio and attended college for a semester before dropping out under the weight of juggling household responsibilities and her studies as an 18 year old. Van Wagoner ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat in 2016 against Republican Rep. Francis Awerkamp in House District 61. She is currently completing a data analytics program at the University of Kansas. Her children are four, six, 10 and 11 with the oldest turning 12 this Friday. This is what I have and I have to find joy in that and I have to find thankfulness in that, and I think that I have, Van Wagoner said. Im very, very grateful for my four kids. I would not take that back, she said. However, if I can stop it from happening to someone else, from someone else from going through what I went through, it would definitely make me feel better about my situation, knowing something good came out of everything that I went through. ___ (c)2021 The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Mo.) Visit The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Mo.) at www.kansascity.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Gov. Tom Wolf discussed the proposed severance tax on the natural gas industry during a virtual briefing Monday while unveiling a plan to get Pennsylvanians back to work. His proposed $3 billion Back to Work PA plan could be funded by taxing the natural gas industry at a rate of 2.8%. The proposed tax would bring in about $300 million a year in revenues that could enhance initiatives and create programs to address barriers holding back our workforce, Wolf said. The plan calls for taking out a $3 billion, 20-year bond. While Wolf said workers have always had barriers to overcome to be successful, the COVID-19 pandemic created significant new hardships. Our goal continues to be to lower those barriers to make it easier for business owners and workers to succeed in Pennsylvania, he said. Wolf said that his plan would foster economic recovery by investing in businesses, workers and communities. Back to Work PA will assist the workers and business owners who have been most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic using an extraction tax on the natural gas industry to fund a $3 billion investment in Pennsylvanias economic future, he said. Wolf proposed the severance tax in addition to an impact fee that the natural gas industry already pays. Revenue from a severance tax could be used to help fund programs to help bolster existing businesses, improve workforce training, reduce inequities that hold Pennsylvanians back, attract business to Pennsylvania and create new jobs, Wolf said. Department of Community and Economic Development Secretary Dennis Davin said other states have benefited from a severance tax on the natural gas industry by using the revenue toward education and to improve roads and bridges. Pennsylvania is the second largest natural gas producing state in the country after Texas, and Davin said Pennsylvania produces much more natural gas than we can utilize. More than 75% of what is produced in Pennsylvania goes to markets outside of the state, he said. We have this resource at our fingertips. Its the money we need to position Pennsylvania for a strong recovery and it should be used to our collective benefit, Davin said. There has never been a more urgent need for us to act to fix the devastating impact this pandemic has had on our families and our businesses. George Stark, director of external affairs at Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., however, called the proposed tax punitive and he said he hopes its not enacted. Given the pandemic, the loss of jobs and those struggling financially, a tax increase on energy is the wrong move at the wrong time, he said. Have You Seen This? Baby calmed by Imperial March Supreme Court to weigh Trump HHS rule stripping abortion clinics of Title X funds Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments over the legality of the Trump administrations "Protect Life Rule" barring Title X funding for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. In an order issued Monday, the high court consolidated three cases regarding the Title X funding dispute: American Medical Association v. Cochran, Oregon v. Cochran, and Cochran v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore. At issue is whether the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services acted lawfully when the Trump administration barred Planned Parenthood and other clinics that provide abortions from receiving Title X family planning funds. In February 2019, HHS announced a finalized federal rule forbidding the use of Title X funds to perform, promote, refer for, or support abortion as a method of family planning. Pursuant to congressional mandate, family participation is to be encouraged, particularly in services involving adolescents. And, from the start, Congress was clear that Title X funds cannot be used to support abortion, stated HHS at the time. This final rule ensures that grants and contracts awarded under this program fully comply with the statutory program integrity requirements, thereby fulfilling the purpose of Title X, so that more women and men can receive services that help them consider and achieve both their short-term and long-term family planning needs. Later that year, Planned Parenthood withdrew from the Title X federal family planning program because of the requirement that clinics that receive the funds cant refer patients or instruct patients on how to access abortion. Abortion rights advocates consider the regulation to be a gag rule. By March of that year, multiple lawsuits were filed by California, 21 other states plus the District of Columbia and by Planned Parenthood and the American Medical Association. We welcome the U.S. Supreme Courts decision to review the Ninth Circuits erroneous opinion upholding a Trump administration rule that imposed drastic changes on the Title X federal family planning program, a joint statement from the American Medical Association, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association, American Civil Liberties Union and Essential Access Health states. This rule continues to bring immense harm to people across the country who depend on affordable reproductive health care like birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and STI testing and treatment, among other essential health services that Title X provides. The organizations claim that the rule disproportionately impacts Black and Brown patients who are more likely to face the worst health and economic impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life activist group Susan B. Anthony List, said she is confident that the high court will rule that the Trump administration and future administrations have the right to "disentangle Title X taxpayer funding from the abortion industry." Abortion is not family planning and a strong majorityof Americans including 65% of Independents and nearly one-third of Democrats oppose taxpayer funding of abortion," Dannenfelser said in a statement. "The Protect Life Rule honors their will and the plain language of the Title X statute by stopping the funneling of Title X taxpayer dollars to the abortion industry, without reducing family planning funding by a dime. In June 2019, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals granted a stay on three injunctions made by lower courts against the new Title X rule. But last September, the 4th Circuit upheld a lower court decision against the HHS rule in a vote of 9-6. Circuit Judge Stephanie Thacker, an Obama appointee, wrote in the majority opinion that the rule on Title X funds failed to recognize and address the ethical concerns of literally every major medical organization in the country, and it arbitrarily estimated the cost of the physical separation of abortion services. Several medical organizations submitted comments to HHS about the Final Rule, and all of them stated that the Final Rule would violate the established principles of medical ethics, noted Thacker. Lisa Moran, Pearse View, Longford Town, Longford / Edgeworthstown, Longford The death occurred, peacefully, in the presence of her family and in loving care of the staff of the I.C.U. Mullingar Regional Hospital, on Sunday, February 21 of Lisa Moran, Pearse View, Longford and formerly of Killsallagh, Edgeworthstown. Sadly missed by her loving partner Patrick and son James, her parents Seamus and Moira, brother Damian, sister Paula, grandmother Kathleen, Damian's partner Madeleine, Paula's partner Gary, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, relatives, friends and neighbours. Rest in Peace. Lisa's funeral cortege will leave her mother's residence at Killsallagh, Edgeworthstown, at 11.40am on Friday, February 26 to arrive at St. Mary's Church, Edgeworthstown, for funeral Mass at 12 noon. Cremation afterwards in Lakelands Crematorium, Cavan. Funeral Mass will be streamed live on https://churchtv.ie/edgeworthstown.html Given the current exceptional circumstances and in accordance with government guidelines and social distancing protocols, and to protect the welfare of everyone dear to Lisa and her family, her funeral service will be restricted to family only. Those who would have liked to attend but are unable to, may leave a personal message for Lisa's family in the condolences section below. The family appreciates your support and sympathy at this time. Donations if desired in lieu of flowers to Diabetes Ireland at https://www.diabetes.ie/ Brigid Catherine Gordon (nee Connaughton), Kilmovee, Mayo / Newtowncashel, Longford / Ballaghaderreen, Roscommon The death occurred, peacefully at her home, surrounded by her loving family, on Sunday, February 7 of Brigid Catherine Gordon (nee Connaughton), Oldfield Road, London and formerly Elfeet, Newtowncashel, Co Longford. Sadly missed but remembered with love by her husband Andy, daughters Louise, Brenda and Hannah, granddaughter Evie, brothers Gerry, Pat and Fr. Vincent (Ardagh), extended family, nieces, nephews, cousins and friends. May She Rest in Peace. Catherine will be removed from The Sharkey Funeral Home, Ballaghaderreen on Monday (March 1, 2021) at 11.30am to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Kilmovee arriving for Mass of the Resurrection at 12noon followed by interment in Naomh Mobhi cemetery. However, in line with Government and H.S.E advice regarding public gatherings, a small private funeral will be held. The Gordon family would ask that over the coming days, everyone who knew her would take some time to light a candle or say a prayer in her memory. For those who would have liked to attend the Mass but cannot due to the current restrictions, Funeral Mass can be viewed here Kilmovee Parish church webcam or via Facebook. Family flowers only, please. The Gordon family understands and appreciates that people would like to offer their condolences, we would suggest you use the private on-line condolence page https://www.sharkeyfuneraldirectors.ie/bgordon In keeping with HSE, NPHET and Public Health guidelines, attendance at funerals is limited. Please respect the privacy of the family during this difficult time. If you would like to pay your respects along the way, please join the static Guards of Honour as the funeral cortege makes its way. Please ensure you maintain the recommended social distancing at all times keeping to the 2-metre apart guideline. Eddie Clouder, Rathcline, Lanesboro, Longford / Newcastle, Dublin The death occurred, in the loving care of the staff of Tallaght Hospital, on Tuesday, February 16 of Eddie Clouder, Rathcline, Lanesboro, Co Longford and late of Peamount Hospital, Newcastle, Co Dublin. Deeply regretted and sadly missed by his loving family Carmel, Pat, Marian, Dolores and Seamus (Reilly) extended family, friends and the wonderful staff of Peamount Hospital. May he rest in Peace. Funeral Mass on Thursday, February 25 at 12 noon in St Marys Church, Lanesboro, burial afterwards in Rathcline Cemetery. Due to government and HSE restrictions Eddies Funeral Mass will be private to family only. Those of you who would like to attend Eddies funeral but due to current restrictions cannot, please leave a personal message in his memory in the condolences section on RIP.ie. Eileen Wright (nee Grealy), Gurteenorna, Newtownforbes, Longford The death occurred, peacefully, on Sunday, February 21 of Eileen Wright (nee Grealy), Gurteenorna, Newtownforbes, Longford. Predeceased by her beloved husband William. Eileen will be sadly missed and remembered with love by her family, son John, daughters Olive and Louise, grandchildren Allison, Sarah, Emma, Celine, Killian, Laura, Nathan, Cathal and Clodagh, daughter-in-law Margaret, nieces, nephews, relatives and friends. May she rest in peace. Eileens funeral cortege will leave Glennons Funeral Home on Wednesday, February 24 at 12.30pm to arrive at St Marys Church, Newtownforbes for Mass of the Resurrection at 1pm, interment afterwards in Newtownforbes Cemetery. Given the exceptional circumstances and in accordance with government guidelines and social distancing protocols and to protect everyone dear to Eileen and her family, the Mass will be restricted to 10 people only. The Mass will be streamed live please click here. Those who would have liked to attend but due to the current restrictions are unable to, may leave their personal messages in the condolences section on RIP.ie. The family very much appreciates your support and consideration at this time. If you wish to have a death notice published on www.longfordleader.ie you can email it to newsroom@longfordleader.ie And if you wish to submit an obituary for publication in the Longford Leader, you can submit it along with a photograph of the deceased to newsroom@longfordleader.ie To sign up for the FREE Longford Leader daily newsletter CLICK HERE or on the image below; aclyn McGowan, 36, from Perth and Kincross, kept up pretence for nine months A stalker who harassed her Tinder date by donning a prosthetic baby bump and faking a pregnancy for months did it for revenge when he dumped her after a one-night stand. Jaclyn McGowan, 36, from Perth and Kinross, Scotland, kept up the pretence for nine months as she tried to dupe Jamie Aitken and his family into believing she was carrying his child. McGowan told police that after their one-night stand she had taken a pregnancy test, showing her to be pregnant. She had a miscarriage a week later but did not inform Mr Aitken. At Perth Sheriff Court, McGowan's solicitor said she had been angry about the way the brief one-night relationship in June 2019 had been abruptly ended. McGowan pleaded guilty to causing fear and alarm by stalking over nine months and was today sentenced to 150 hours of community service. Jaclyn McGowan (above), 36, from Perth and Kinross, Scotland, kept up the pretence for nine months as she tried to dupe Jamie Aitken and his family into believing she was pregnant The court was told that she had garnered pity from Mr Aitken's parents and had partially turned them against their son as a result of the elaborate scheme. McGowan was almost rumbled when she was spotted looking 'slim and not visibly pregnant' at the trampoline park where Mr Aitken's brother Corrie worked. She should have been eight months pregnant at the time. To try and cover her tracks, she purchased a prosthetic baby bump, called to ask the park if it was suitable for pregnant women, and turned up looking 'heavily pregnant' a few days later. Sheriff Lindsay Foulis said the unusual offence was considered to be at the lower end of what could be described as stalking as she ordered her to carry out 150 hours unpaid work in the community. Fiscal depute Tina Dickie said: 'Jamie Aitken said the messages and whole situation were causing disruption to him and his family and he stated he felt like she was turning his family against him. 'The mother states that she and her husband had spoken about the situation and they were concerned at first but began to feel excited at the prospect of having a grandchild and were embracing the whole situation. 'His mother soon realised the accused had an intense dislike for Jamie although she came across as quite nice and polite to her.' Mrs Aitken told police: 'She was so convincing I believed her that Jamie was not being supportive and ended up feeling very sorry for her and angry at Jamie.' Mrs Dickie told the court McGowan and Mr Aitken spent a single drunken night in a hotel after meeting on Tinder and exchanging messages for a few weeks. She said: 'After this event the accused and Mr Aitken continued to message for several days. The accused asked Mr Aitken to meet up again. However, he declined.' The court heard how McGowan repeatedly approached members of his family to discuss her 'baby' and turned up at his brother's workplace appearing to be heavily pregnant. The court was told that McGowan had purchased a fake baby bump which she was wearing under her clothing at the time. McGowan told police that after their one-night stand she had taken a positive pregnancy test. She had a miscarriage a week later but did not inform Mr Aitken (pictured above) McGowan's deception was so detailed that she had even given the non-existent baby a name and was discussing due dates with various people. She said her actions were to hurt Mr Aitken for the way he had acted when the relationship ended. Solicitor Mike Tavendale, defending, told the court: 'It was a one night stand and was quite obviously an unsatisfactory one. 'Jamie Aitken was extremely drunk and it was immediately regretted by my client and that was simply reinforced in the days following, particularly when she found out she was pregnant. 'Mr Aitken made it abundantly clear to her he did not want a child and wanted nothing to do with it. From that point matters go downhill. 'She then has a miscarriage but maintains the pretence and from there on she gets caught up in the lie. It gets to the point where it is very difficult to go back.' The fake pregnancy was eventually exposed after the due date of March 20 last year came and went with no birth. McGowan was later interviewed by police and made a full confession. 'She did not give a reason for doing this other than that she wanted to hurt Jamie Aitken for how the relationship ended.' McGowan, above, pleaded guilty to causing fear and alarm by stalking over nine months and was today sentenced to 150 hours of community service She admitted that between 1 June 2019 and 29 February last year she engaged in a course of conduct which caused fear or alarm to a man and members of his family. McGowan admitted stalking Mr Aitken by pretending she was pregnant with his child during the bizarre sequence of events. She sent him a picture of a cot and requested he give her 300 to pay for it, and advised him that she was having miscarriages. She sent him numerous messages to say he would play no part in her baby's life and then she contacted his mother Wendy Aitken. McGowan told Mrs Aitken she was pregnant with her grandchild and sent scan photos and details of fictitious pregnancy-related appointments to her. McGowan, who had a very brief relationship with Mr Aitken last summer, told his mother her son would not attend pre-natal appointments with her. She also went on to tell Mrs Aitken that the baby would be her grandson, was going to be called Noah, and was due to be born on 28 March 2020. She carried on the act by telling Mrs Aitken she would be able to play a part in bringing her 'grandson' up after his birth. McGowan targeted other members of the family and told Corrie Aitken that she was carrying his brother's unborn child. She admitted turning up at Corrie's workplace - Ryze Trampoline Park in Dundee - and telling him that he could 'play a part in the boy's life.' McGowan admitted turning up at the trampoline park 'whilst wearing a prosthetic baby bump.' The court was told that McGowan - who had worked abroad during part of the period - was likely to lose her job as a result of the conviction. At Perth Sheriff Court (pictured above), McGowan's solicitor said she had been angry about the way the brief one-night relationship in June 2019 had been abruptly ended Mr Aitken said: 'She was full of stories of how I didn't want to have anything to do with this 'baby'. It was all lies. 'She was sending me abusive messages, refusing to have anything to do with me but telling my family I was trying to get out of my responsibilities. 'She tried to pit my own family against me. She drew my parents in with her lies. She just concocted this whole world. 'It went on for months, and I didn't have a decent night's sleep throughout because I was so worried and confused about everything. 'How could one human being do that to another? I don't even know why she targeted me.' He added: 'I wish I'd never met her. I'm embarrassed and upset about it all, and I just want to forget it happened, but I do think it's important to speak out so she cannot do this again.' He met McGowan through Tinder in the spring of 2019 and they met for the first time when she came to Dundee to meet him after he had been at a family wedding. Mr Aitken said: 'Maybe she's been scarred by something from her own life, but it still doesn't explain what she did.' Sheriff Foulis said: 'It seems to me that these actions fall on the less serious category but certainly don't diminish your actions. 'You pleaded guilty to causing fear and alarm over a period of nine months, so when I say it is on the less serious side, none the less I have to bear that in mind.' He noted McGowan had not contacted Mr Aitken for nine months before he filed a police report and that the crown was also not seeking a non-harassment order. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. The Ministry of Transport will hand over the Cat Linh-Ha Dong urban railway to Hanoi authorities on March 31 for commercial use under the direction of the Prime Minister. A representative of the Ministry of Transports Railway Project Management Board told VietNamNet that the concerned parties are working hard to complete the acceptance and safety assessment to report to the State Acceptance Council. The French consultant will soon complete the safety assessment report. "Although the French experts have returned home, their representatives in Vietnam are closely observing this project to complete the report," said the representative of the Railway Project Management Board. For the Chinese experts who are present in Vietnam now to perform the acceptance work, if necessary, the General Contractor will send more experts to Vietnam in the coming time. Mr. Vu Hong Truong, General Director of Metro Hanoi, said that the parties are implementing the handover of the Cat Linh Ha Dong project under the direction of the Ministry of Transport and the People's Committee of Hanoi. It is scheduled that the hand-over minutes will be signed on March 31. After that, the project will be put into commercial operation in accordance with the direction of the Prime Minister. The railway project of Cat Linh - Ha Dong has been delayed many times. In addition to the impact of the Covid-19 epidemic, problems occurring during the implementation process are the cause of the tardiness. According to the Prime Minister's approval document and the Ministry of Transport's decision to adjust the progress of the project issued in December 2020, the deadline has been adjusted to March 31, 2021. Vu Diep Cat Linh-Ha Dong Urban Railway project consultant lacks fire safety certification The Chinese consultant firm for the Cat Linh-Ha Dong Urban Railway project does not have fire safety consultation and supervisory certification granted by a Vietnamese authority, Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 20:24:44|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close RIYADH, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Secretary General of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Nayef Al-Hajraf has called for the participation of GCC countries in any talks on Iran's nuclear deal, Al Arabiya News reported Wednesday. Hajraf made the call during his meeting with the ambassadors of the European Union in Riyadh on Tuesday, noting the Iranian nuclear negotiations are related to regional security and stability. The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has signalled to Iran its willingness to return to talks to revive the nuclear deal former President Donald Trump abandoned in 2018. GCC countries did not take part in the talks that led to the 2015 international agreement on Iran's nuclear program. Enditem Voddie Baucham reveals he was within an hour or so of death in heart failure battle Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Beloved Southern Baptist preacher Voddie Baucham Jr. said a series of setbacks to his treatment for heart failure, including multiple weather delays, left him within an hour or so of death. In a statementreleased on Instagram Sunday, the father of nine, who previously detailed how the winter storm that devastated Texas delayed his journey to the Mayo Clinic in Florida, said he and his wife, Bridget, can only continue to marvel at the Lords providence and rejoice in His goodness that kept him alive during the ordeal. My condition is much improved, and we have a clear, aggressive, and promising treatment plan, Baucham wrote. According to the doctor that brought me in (actually, his wife picked us up and rushed us to the E.D., but that's another story for another time), I was in the final stages of a catastrophic event, and within an hour or so of death. When we look back at the amazing work of the missionary doctor in Lusaka who stabilized me (and saved my life), the GoFundMe, canceled flights, weather delays, my vitals during the Joburg to Doha flight, a last-minute itinerary change to Jacksonville, and the fact that Mayo was expecting and waiting for me upon arrival (including the paramedic who checked me in and said, Im trying not to go all fan-girl right now, it is impossible to deny the hand of our Sovereign God and the way he shepherded us. Baucham, 51, first announced his battle with heart failure just over a week ago on social media. The founder of Voddie Baucham Ministries, who is also a board member of Founders Ministries and founding faculty member of the Institute of Public Theology, said he felt unwell at the end of a preaching tour this winter in Zambia before realizing he had heart trouble. I thought I had just worked too hard (17 preaching dates in 18 days, 7 sessions the last 3 days, etc.). However, as it turns out, I was experiencing heart failure! he noted in his statement. He said he first noticed the symptoms at the end of December when he and his wife returned to Dallas after her mother's passing. I experienced fatigue, and shortness of breath, among other things. However, I chalked it up to traveling with heavy bags and restrictive masks (not the trifecta of a hereditary heart defect, last Februarys mysterious pneumonia, and untreated sleep apnea), he noted. News of Bauchams illness has attracted global attention and support. He explained Sunday in his post that he was receiving care from some of the top doctors in the world in the field of heart failure at the Mayo Clinic. A GoFundMe campaign raising funds to cover his medical expenses was inching towards $1.4 million in donations as of Monday morning. The Lord uses Voddie to feed my soul and I'm sure, the souls of countless others. I'm praying for God to mercifully heal him and allow him to stay here amongst us a good while longer. Please Lord Jesus! wrote Kathleene Gabriel, one of the more than 12,500 donors to the campaign. Reacting on Twitter to Bauchams latest update, Thomas Ascol, president of Founders Ministries who also serves as senior pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Florida, wrote on Twitter Sunday night: God is writing a great story in our brothers life. Keep praying! CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa A man suspected of stabbing two women, one fatally, before being shot by police has died. The Cedar Rapids Police Department says Arnell States, 39 of Cedar Rapids, was shot by an officer on Saturday after States allegedly stabbed two women. One victim, Katrina Latrese Brinson, 34 of Cedar Rapids, died as a result of her injuries. The second victim was treated at the hospital and released. On Saturday, a police officer responding to a 911 call about a disturbance at the Rodeway Inn on 16th Avenue SE encountered the two female victims. They directed the officer toward States, who was running from the scene. Authorities say the officer gave chase and eventually wound up shooting States. The Cedar Rapids Police Department says States died from his wounds on Tuesday. An autopsy will be performed by the State Medical Examiner. The officer who shot States remains on paid administrative leave and the officers name will not be released until after an interview by the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. ADVERTISEMENT The Lagos Metropolitan Area Transport Authority (LAMATA) has said the Lagos Blue and Red rail lines will be operational by December 2022. The General Manager of the agency, Abimbola Akinajo, made the disclosure during a visit by the officials of the Office of Transformation, Creativity and innovation, (Office of Head of Service) on Wednesday, in Lagos. Mrs Akinajo said that LAMATA was working assiduously to ensure the delivery of the rail lines to passenger operation by December 2022. These two lines will change the transport landscape of Lagos when operational. We have a transport master plan which speaks to the vision of Gov. Babajide Sanwo-Olu on transportation, she said. We have six rail lines and one monorail, 14 Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridors, over 20 water routes and we are sure that when all of these are properly harnessed, Lagos will join the league of cities with an efficient transport system. We have advertised four other rail lines for the private sector to invest. We are working on the private sector so they could bring in about 1,500 high capacity buses by 2022. We would be launching our First Mile Last Mile scheme very soon. We are working on the construction of two interchanges at Mile 2 and CMS. We want to ensure that Lagosians travel in comfort. The general manager affirmed that it was working toward a connected Lagos with the various transport projects implemented through it by the state government. She explained that the vision of an intermodal integrated transport system was meant to create choices for the Lagos commuters without stress. Mrs Akinajo said LAMATA had opened up 57 routes for operators which include the two main transport unions, the National Union of Road Transport Workers and the Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria. She noted that they are currently operating on the Oshodi Abule Egba BRT corridor and other standard bus routes. However, Mrs Akinajo told the officials that LAMATA needs to increase its manpower as the transport networks unfold and an office complex to accommodate its staff. The Lead Consultant, Abdurrahman Lekki, described LAMATA as a transport agency pivotal to the Traffic Management and Transportation; Health and Environment; Education and Technology (THEMES) agenda of the state Governor Sanwo-Olu. Mr Lekki advised the agency to ensure that a broad spectrum of stakeholders in the transport sector were carried along to guarantee success of government plans. (NAN) SAGINAW, MI - Betty Williams, a longtime Bay City educator who ran Saginaws Magic Kitchen & Catering for decades, died Monday, Feb. 22 at age 78. Williams and her husband Lee moved from Arkansas to Saginaw for work, but they made the city their home and never left, their daughter LeAndrea Fisher said. They started Magic Wash and Dry in 1987, replacing the dry cleaning business with a kitchen after a fire in 1994 and giving birth to a soul food staple. Williams would want to thank the Saginaw community for how much a part of it she felt, Fisher said. They had no desire to leave here, the investment that they made in their time is because they believed in this community, Fisher said. I believe that she would want to thank them for their support throughout the years, in allowing her to serve. While she served many at their business over the years, including at a car wash, barbershop and beauty store the family added, Williams would most want to be remembered for her charitable service, Fisher said. A woman of faith, Williams Christian principles were the foundation of her life, Fisher said, leading her to spend decades donating food and getting involved with local organizations. For more than 20 years Betty and her husband ran a free Thanksgiving dinner program for those in need, she told MLive in a 2013 feature. Williams past community involvement includes being on the Saginaw Chamber of Commerce board, as well as Positive Results Downtown and Junior Leadership. She also completed the 1,000 Leaders initiative and served on a committee for Vision 20/20. There were so many things that she lent her time to that spoke to what she valued, and I think she would like to be remembered for the difference she made in those areas, Fisher said. My mother was always thinking of others, it was exemplified in her choice to be an educator for more than 40 years. Williams teaching career at Bay City Public Schools inspired Fisher to follow in her footsteps; shes taught at Detroit Public Schools for more than 20 years, she said. My first year of teaching was her last year of teaching, Fisher said. She was ever the teacher, teaching recipes, protocol, and how you recreate those wonderful recipes in the kitchen. A public viewing for Williams will be held this Sunday at Evans Brown Funeral Home in Saginaw, Fisher said. A private funeral service is scheduled for Monday, March 1. Read more: Black History Month: Saginaws Betty Williams brings culture to the community through food, business ventures Former Saginaw mayors family legacy shows the importance of education It takes a village to raise a child Saginaws board of education Mattie Thompson says India, and on Wednesday deliberated on ways to enhance trilateral cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region. An India-France- Trilateral Senior Officials' Meeting was held with the three sides taking stock of the progress made on the outcomes of the foreign secretary-level Trilateral Dialogue held in September last year, including on maritime security, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR), blue economy, protection of marine global commons, combatting illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing and cooperation in multilateral fora. The Indian side was led by Sandeep Chakravorty, Joint Secretary (Europe West), Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), while the French side was led by Bertrand Lortholary, Director (Asia and Oceania). The Australian side was led by Gary Cowan, First Assistant Secretary (North and South Asia Division), and John Geering, First Assistant Secretary (Europe and Latin America Division). At the meeting, they discussed the next steps to be taken for furthering trilateral cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region, the MEA said in a statement. The meeting comes amid China's growing military assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region, which has become a major talking point among leading global powers. (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.) Shannon & Wilson Vara Brennan Harney Shannon & Wilson, a geotechnical and environmental consulting firm, promoted these people to office manager in the following cities: Mike Harney in Seattle, Kyle Brennan in Anchorage, Alaska and David Vara in Denver, Colorado. Harney is a geotechnical engineer and vice president. He works on civil engineering and construction projects involving a range of soil and rock types. His geotechnical engineering experience includes studies and recommendations for projects including fish passage facilities; trenched and tunneled pipeline installations; wastewater, stormwater and water supply facilities; commercial and industrial buildings; road, railroad and light rail transit alignments and bridges; and highway and railroad embankments. Brennan is a geotechnical engineer and vice president. He has experience in geological and geotechnical engineering for projects in Alaska. His experience includes road and rail infrastructure; pedestrian walkways, trails and bridges; pavement analysis and remediation; utilities and power generation/distribution; new building development; and airports and seaports. Vara is a geotechnical engineer and senior associate with a experience on transportation and infrastructure projects, including major rail, roadway and bridge projects; evaluation and remediation of geohazards; water and wastewater plants; and design of shoring systems. GOVERNMENT received a total of $7.37 billion from oil, gas and quarrying/mining companies in fiscal 2018, with the largest payment of $2 billion coming from majority State-owned National Gas Company (NGC). However, for the period 2019 to 2020, unaudited figures indicate a declining trend in revenue. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he is asking the chambers top Republicans and Democrats to draw up legislation aimed at improving U.S. competitiveness with China in manufacturing and technology, including bolstering the supply of American-made semiconductors. The outline Schumer set down Tuesday calls for emergency funding for programs included in a recent defense-policy bill that authorized federal incentives to promote semiconductor manufacturing and research in the U.S., but provided no money for the grants and tax credits lawmakers say is necessary to attract investment. The issue has taken on new urgency with a global chip shortage thats forced some U.S. carmakers to idle plants and that threatens to spread to the electronics industry. Right now semiconductor manufacturing is a dangerous weak spot in our economy and in our national security, Schumer said at a news conference at the Capitol. That has to change. We cannot rely on foreign processors. The announcement comes a day before President Joe Biden is scheduled to meet with a group of lawmakers from both parties at the White House to discuss the semiconductor shortage, according to two people familiar with the matter. The meeting is expected to accompany Bidens signing of an executive order aimed at strengthening supply chains for microchips and other vital products, one of the people said. The review is expected to take several months, before recommendations are issued. Foreign Competition The U.S. still leads the world in chip design, but manufacturing has largely been ceded to foreign firms. Oregon is a major exception -- semiconductor production is among the states major economic engines. Intels most advanced factories are in Hillsboro, where it makes leading-edge microprocessors PCs, laptops and data centers. Qorvo makes advanced communications chips in Hillsboro, while Microchip and ON Semiconductor make analog chips in Gresham for automotive, industrial and defense applications. The supply-chain executive order and any funding Congress approves for semiconductor manufacturing wont have much effect on the immediate shortage. That will require leaning on producers in Taiwan and elsewhere overseas to allocate supply to U.S. electronics makers. Schumers plan also listed possible sanctions or other steps directed at trade with China and concerns about intellectual-property theft. It would aim to encourage allied approached towards China, as seen in recent years with U.S. and U.K. efforts to redline Chinas telecoms giant Huawei Technologies Co. All of these have bipartisan support, Schumer said. I want this bill to address Americans short-term and long-term plan to protect the semiconductor supply chain and keep us No. 1 in things like AI, 5G. Schumer said he hopes to have the legislation on the Senate floor for a vote this spring. The tough-on-China approach to boosting U.S. supply chains and manufacturing is also one way that senators could open the door to bipartisan talks on a robust infrastructure bill that Biden says will be his priority once the $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief package clears Congress. $3 Trillion Democrats need at least 10 Senate Republicans to join them on an infrastructure bill if they want to avoid using the budget-reconciliation process. That fast-track procedure, which Democrats are using for the relief bill, would likely involve cutting critical elements of the legislation, because theyd probably not qualify as largely fiscal measures. Democrats say they are hopeful they can get GOP support. Senator Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said Monday he thinks there could be 60 votes the threshold needed to pass in the chamber on an economic package as large as $3 trillion. However, to get those votes, he said the Senate needed to move forward with a plan to restore the lawmaker-directed spending custom known as earmarks that was banned a decade ago. We can create much more bipartisan appropriation bills and infrastructure bills with earmarks, Durbin told reporters. Everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. I think Joe Biden a product-slash-creature of the Senate would understand that as well as anyone. Any bill would likely direct billions of dollars in spending to fund research and key technology. Schumer and Senator Todd Young, an Indiana Republican, have pushed legislation that would provide $100 billion to the National Science Foundation and create regional technology centers funded by the Commerce Department to attract investment in their areas. Representatives Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California, and Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican, have pushed that idea in the House. -- Bloomberg News EPIC Insurance Brokers and Consultants announced organizational and restructuring changes across the company. Tom ONeil has been named president of EPIC and will work directly with CEO Steve Denton to grow the business across its entire platform from Private Client to Large Complex Risk in both Property & Casualty and Employee Benefits. ONeil previously led the West and Northeast regions and integrated several large acquisitions that expanded the overall footprint of EPIC. EPIC has more than 2,600 employees in 80 offices across the U.S. Main offices are in San Francisco and Atlanta. In conjunction with leadership changes, the company is being restructured into three regions: Northeast, Midwest/Southeast and West. These decisions showcase careful succession planning and leadership depth across EPIC, said Denton. Further, they provide the best structure for innovation and continued growth, and delivery of all of our capabilities to our clients. Northeast: Len Scioscia will lead as president. Scioscia joined the firm through the Prime Risk Partners acquisition in 2019; he was previously CEO of Cook Maran. Midwest and Southeast: Adam Meyerowitz will lead as president. Meyerowitz also joined via the Prime Risk Partners acquisition and was co-founder and president of the organization. West: KJ Wagner will lead as president. Wagner joined in 2018 to build EPICs presence in the Southwest region and previously held senior leadership positions with Willis Towers Watson. Additional personnel announcements: Chief Growth Officer and President of Financial Services: Phil Moyles has been named to these roles, where his responsibilities will include driving innovation and organic growth throughout EPIC. He joined EPIC in 2018 through the acquisition of Vanbridge where he continues as CEO. National Risk Management and Specialty Practice: Marc Kunney and Scott Davis will co-lead as presidents, working to deliver large account and industry specialty resources to brokers and clients. National Employee Benefits Practice: Craig Hasday will continue as president, coordinating Regional Employee Benefits Operations, Shared Services Platform and National Employer Consulting Resources. Scott Schanen will continue as president of National Employer Consulting, focused on consulting for large employers. National Placement and Carrier Relationships: Jason Walker has been named senior vice president to oversee the placement of key accounts and develop new and existing relationships with EPICs trading partners. The following corporate changes have also been recognized: Sapana Nanuwa joins Galway Insurance Holdings, the parent company of EPIC, as managing director, Marketing, Branding & Communications. Karman Chan joins Galway as chief financial officer. Frank Mammaro has been named chief financial officer of EPIC, and will report to Chan. Kevin Grady has been named chief diversity officer of EPIC, in addition to his role as managing principal with EPIC IMPACT. John Gaffney has been named chief of staff of EPIC. Sawsan Nina Mahmud has been named director of administration of EPIC. Topics Leadership Facebooks brief but tempestuous standoff with the Australian government over a world-first pay-for-news law is only the start of a string of regulatory battles that the worlds biggest social network faces in 2021. Mark Zuckerberg started the year on the offensive, blocking news across Rupert Murdochs home turf of Australia to fend off demands that Facebook pay media companies for content shared on its platform. On Tuesday, Zuckerberg struck a compromise after 11th-hour talks with the government on the legislation thats also aimed at Google and is expected to pass Australias parliament this week. But a regulatory domino effect is already underway, with publishers pressuring the European Union to emulate Australias approach. With the prospect of more assertive regulation and even Apple questioning Facebooks longstanding model of using data to better target advertising, the social media platforms way of doing business faces being upended. Also Read: Facebook to restore Australian news pages after tweaks to news legislation US legislators are voicing the loudest concerns about Facebook, with Rhode Island Congressman and Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline tweeting that the company is not compatible with democracy. Congress is holding hearings this week to consider tougher antitrust measures to rein in the powers of the company and other tech giants. Australias Prime Minister Scott Morrison, meanwhile, said hes discussed Facebook with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Canadian leader Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron and the UKs Boris Johnson, whose government plans to conduct antitrust probes into its operations. Facebooks Australia face-off could backfire across the globe Facebook has struggled to shake off deep-seated distrust since the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed failings in safeguarding personal data. It courted fresh controversy this January when WhatsApps privacy policy was updated to help it share more information with its parent, leading to several lawsuits and a flood of users joining rival messaging services Telegram and Signal. Facebooks abrupt move to cut off news sharing in Australia -- jeopardizing credible sources of information about the coronavirus during a crucial time in vaccine rollout -- was widely criticized. But the high stakes gambit did help it wring some concessions from the government, which announced key amendments to the planned law on Tuesday. Crucially, Facebook and Google can decide what commercial deals to cut with news publishers, and will only face forced arbitration as a last resort. Also Read: Australia won't change planned content laws despite Facebook block The lesson for regulators and governments around the world is, Facebook is a formidable foe thats willing to pull out the big guns to get what it wants, former Facebook Australia and New Zealand Chief Executive Officer Stephen Scheeler said in a phone interview Wednesday. The Silicon Valley firm has the power to essentially undermine a government position on a topic. Among its other battles, the company has been hit with a lawsuit by the US Federal Trade Commission alleging a multi-year course of illegal conduct and anticompetitive behaviour. An unfavorable ruling in that case could ultimately force Facebook to sell off Instagram. And Zuckerberg, along with the leaders of Twitter and Alphabet, will be answering US legislators questions in March about the spread of misinformation online and the responsibility of platforms to curtail it. Zuckerberg, Pichai, Dorsey due back for new grilling in Congress In response to mounting criticism, Facebook last year set up an Oversight Board of academics, lawyers, journalists and human rights advocates to review its content decisions and try to tamp down concerns about its influence. The boards rulings are binding: its reversed a number of the companys decisions and next on its agenda will be to judge the validity of former President Donald Trumps indefinite suspension from Facebook and Instagram. Outside of elected officials, the social network is involved in another thorny dispute with a rule-setting body of sorts: Apple. The iPhone maker plans changes to privacy rules on its mobile devices that will require explicit permission before software makers can collect certain data and track user activity across apps and websites. Also Read: Australia says Facebook back at the table after blocking pages Facebook, which relies on such information to fine-tune its ads, has been fighting the move in the public arena, taking out full-page advertisements in US newspapers and presenting itself as an advocate for small businesses. Meanwhile, the Australian legislation could serve as a global benchmark for how to force tech titans to the negotiating table and pay the traditional media for their news content. Johan Lidberg, an associate professor at Melbournes Monash University who specializes in media and journalism, said hes been inundated with calls from overseas publishers who want to talk about what actually happened in Australia and how did it come about. The next two years are going to be fascinating to watch, he said. Facebook will have to make some fundamental choices, because it is not long-term sustainable to have such dominance by so few players in the marketplace. This week, Walmart will host a COVID-19 Community Vaccine Clinic in Pottsville. Walmart made the announcement on Tuesday stating that the clinic will begin administering Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines inside the Fairlane Village Mall. Eligible patients can schedule a vaccine appointment by phone at 1-800-753-8827. Vaccines will be available to those who meet the current phase of vaccine eligibility Pennsylvania. Insurance is not require, there is no cost to receive the vaccine, and appointments for second vaccinations will be made during the first appointment. Walmart anticipates these events will take place over the next couple weeks as allocation allows. Walmart is holding vaccine events in locations that prioritize access for those deemed most vulnerable, as well as operation capabilities. "We have two goals as we administer vaccines: first, to get as many shots in eligible arms as possible so we can start the process of reopening our country, and second, ensuring equitable vaccine access across the communities we serve, " said Dr. Cheryl Pegus, Executive Vice President, Health & Wellness. "We will continue finding new ways to increase vaccination access for our customers as we work towards the eventual end of the pandemic." Walmart is partnering with the CDC and states to move as quickly as possible to help administer vaccines to eligible populations in 35 participating states, Puerto Rico, and District of Columbia. Michigan reported 1,316 new coronavirus cases and 34 new deaths Tuesday, Feb. 23. Of the 34 deaths reported Tuesday, 18 were previous deaths identified during a records review. The state is averaging 922 new COVID-19 cases per day and 31 new deaths per day over the last week. The weekly average for cases has been increasing over the past three days. Since the pandemic began, Michigan has reported 582,719 confirmed coronavirus cases and 15,396 deaths tied to COVID-19. The state has also reported 56,993 probable cases and 984 probable deaths, in which a physician and/or antigen test made a COVID-19 diagnosis, but without confirmation by PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test. (The above chart shows Michigans 7-day rolling average of new confirmed coronavirus cases. You can put your cursor over a bar to see the number. You also can click on the option just below the headline to see the actual number of new cases reported by day.) Of Michigans 83 counties, 67 reported new cases over the last two days. Wayne County led in new cases with 207, with the next closest being Oakland with 160 and Macomb with 130. Other top reporting counties for cases included Kent with 105, Jackson with 55, Ingham with 54, Washtenaw with 53, Genesee and Ottawa with 42 each and Kalamazoo with 33. In terms of counties with new deaths, Saginaw led with seven, while Wayne and Macomb reported five each. Other counties reporting news deaths include Oakland with three and Livingston, Calhoun and Monroe with two. Jackson, Lenawee, St. Clair, Berrien, Cass, Chippewa, Clinton and Huron reported one new death each. (The above chart shows Michigans 7-day rolling average of deaths involving confirmed coronavirus cases. You can put your cursor over a bar to see the number. You also can click on the option just below the headline to see the actual number of new deaths reported by day.) Hospitals across the state were treating 876 patients with confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19 on Monday, including 207 patients in intensive care units. Thats down from Feb. 16 when hospitals were treating 926 patients with confirmed or suspected coronavirus cases, with 240 patients in ICUs. Of the 24,554 diagnostic tests processed Monday, 4.14% came back positive. The average positivity rate over the last week is 3.7%. As of Monday, Michigan had administered more than 1.94 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine. That includes about 1.26 million first doses, and 680,961 second doses. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines recommend two doses administered weeks apart. Case reporting Below is a chart showing new cases reported to the state each day for the past 30 days. This is based on when a confirmed coronavirus test is reported to the state, which means the patient first became sick days before. You can call up a chart for any county, and you can put your cursor over a bar to see the date and number of cases. (In a few instances, a county reported a negative number (decline) in daily new cases, following a retroactive reclassification by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. In those instances, we subtracted cases from the prior date and put 0 in the reported date.) The next chart below shows new cases for the past 30 days based on onset of symptoms. In this chart, numbers for the most recent days are incomplete because of the lag time between people getting sick and getting a confirmed coronavirus test result, which can take up to a week or more. You can call up a chart for any county, and you can put your cursor over a bar to see the date and number of cases. For more statewide data, visit MLives coronavirus data page, here. To find a testing site near you, check out the states online test finder, here, send an email to COVID19@michigan.gov, or call 888-535-6136 between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays. Read more on MLive: In raw numbers, COVID-19 has been the deadliest event in Michigan history Tuesday, Feb. 23, coronavirus data by Michigan county: 27 counties averaging less than one new case a day Dont fall for this COVID-19 vaccine appointment phone scam making the rounds in Michigan See which businesses in your county got help from Michigans $55 million COVID-19 aid program Vietnam on Monday announced its candidacy to join the U.N. Human Rights Council, but claims by the countrys foreign minister that the one-party communist state fully protects human rights and fundamental freedoms drew swift scorn and disbelief from rights experts. Rights and freedoms can be protected and promoted only when a country defends itself against epidemic disease, foreign minister Pham Binh Minh told a high-level meeting of the Geneva-based Rights Councils 46th Regular Session. [This] is the best way to ensure that each and every member of the society can fully enjoy their human rights, Pham said, quoted by Vietnamese state media. We continue to put emphasis on the protection and promotion of all human rights and fundamental freedoms of our people, even in this most difficult of times. Membership in the UN Human Rights Council is being sought by Vietnam for the 2023-2025 term, Pham said, adding that Vietnam has been endorsed as the ASEAN candidate for this post in competition with candidates from other countries in the U.N.s Asia-Pacific representational grouping. Nguyen Van Dai--a Vietnamese lawyer and democracy advocate now living in Germanyvoiced surprise and concern at Phams announcement, calling Vietnam Southeast Asias most oppressive state. Surely, Vietnam cant run for [membership on] the Human Rights Council, Nguyen told RFAs Vietnamese Service. For the last four years, Vietnam has become Southeast Asias most oppressive country, even replacing Burma as the country holding the most political prisoners. In addition, Vietnams trade partners like the European Union, the Federal Republic of Germany, the United States, and Australia have frequently called on it to release the activists now being held in Vietnams prisons, and to improve its record on human rights, he said. Significant violations In an annual report examining the rights records of countries around the world, the U.S. State Department this year said that Vietnam had been responsible in 2019 for significant violations of human rights, including unlawful or arbitrary killings by the government; forced disappearance; torture by government agents; [and] arbitrary arrests and detentions. Restrictions on freedom of expression on the internet and in the press were also seen, along with substantial interference with the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, the State Department said. Vietnams already low tolerance of dissent deteriorated sharply last year with a spate of arrests of independent journalists, publishers, and Facebook personalities as authorities continued to stifle critics in the run-up to the ruling Communist Party Congress in January. Reporters Without Borders ranked Vietnam 175 out of 180 in its 2020 World Press Freedom Index. Around 25 journalists and bloggers are being held in Vietnams jails, where mistreatment is common, the Paris-based watchdog group said. Other countries widely condemned for rights abuses at home, and currently serving as member states on the Council, include China, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, and Eritrea. The United States, which left the Rights Council in June 2018 after objecting to what then-President Trump called the groups unfair and disproportionate targeting of Israel in Council resolutions, has meanwhile now expressed its intention to returnfirst as an observer in the next two-year term and eventually as a full member. Government defense rejected Vietnamese rights activist Pham Le Vuong Cac meanwhile rejected a government defense submitted to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights on Feb. 4 of actions taken by authorities following a deadly land clash a year earlier at the Dong Tam commune outside Hanoi, in which village elder Le Dinh Khinh was shot dead by police. Kinh, 84, was killed during the early-morning Jan. 9, 2020 raid on the village by 3,000 security officers intervening in a long-running dispute over a military construction site about 25 miles south of the capital, Hanoi. Les sons, Le Dinh Chuc and Le Dinh Cong, were later sentenced to death for murder in connection with the deaths of three police officers who were killed in the clash when they were attacked with petrol bombs and fell into a concrete shaft while running between two houses. They were among a group of 29 villagers tried for their roles in the incident. Other punishments handed out by the court included a life sentence and other sentences ranging from six years to 15-months probation. Writing on Feb. 4 in response to concerns expressed by the Special Procedures Branch of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Vietnams permanent mission to U.N. offices in Geneva said the trials had been handled as a normal criminal case, with the rights of defendants ensured and all procedures carried out according to Vietnamese law. Authorities mass arrest of Dong Tam villagers, including Kinhs wife Can Thi Theu, and of independent journalist Pham Doan Trang, who had posted articles about the deadly raid, had completely violated international standards of human rights, though, Pham Le Vuong Cac said. Its nothing new for Vietnam to argue against concerns criticizing its detention of activists. It has been the governments policy for a long time not to be silent, but to speak up to assert its own view of things, he said. When a country becomes a member of the U.N., it should comply with the provisions of international law," Pham said. While all land in Vietnam is ultimately held by the state, land confiscations have become a flashpoint as residents accuse the government of pushing small landholders aside in favor of lucrative real estate projects, and of paying too little in compensation to farming families displaced by development. Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Huy Le. Written in English by Richard Finney. A former childcare worker has been sentenced to six years jail for the manslaughter of a three-year-old boy found on a school bus in Cairns, north Queensland. Michael Glenn Lewis was handed down the sentence on Wednesday and will be eligible for parole in 18 months. Maliq Nicholas Floyd Namok-Malamoo, known as Meeky, was found still strapped in a baby car seat after being left on a minibus at Goodstart Early Learning in Edmonton, near Cairns, on a hot day last February. Maliq Nicholas Floyd Namok-Malamoo, known as Meeky, was found still strapped in a baby car seat on a minibus at Goodstart Early Learning in Edmonton, near Cairns. Bus driver and manager Lewis, 45, and Goodstart employee Dionne Batrice Grills, 34, were charged with manslaughter over the toddler's death. Ms Grills appeared in Cairns Courthouse in January where her manslaughter charge was dropped after Magistrate Kevin Priestly found she did not have duty of care for the child. Mr Priestly said a reasonable jury would not find her guilty based on the evidence as there 'was a possibility and probability' she left the bus first, leaving duty of care to Mr Lewis. Police had alleged the pair collected Meeky and brought him to the centre earlier in the day but didn't bring him inside with them. Cairns Magistrates Court previously heard Mr Lewis allegedly told ambulance officer Jeremy Neal: 'I can't believe I have done this,' Cairns Post reported. He then allegedly said: 'I thought I'd done the headcounts. I have had meetings all day. I thought there was a funny smell in the car when I was driving to the school'. Mr Neal also claimed Mr Lewis said 'I'll never see my kids again. What's going to happen now? They're going to come and kill me. My boss said don't talk to the police'. Ambulance officer James Andrews claimed Mr Lewis repeatedly said his life would be 'over,' and expressed sadness that his 'best mate' had died. More than 500 mourners farewelled Meeky at his funeral two weeks after the tragedy. A national child care provider, Goodstart reviewed its procedures and introduced a national compulsory refresher training for staff in the wake of the tragedy. Goodstart Early Learning overhauled its procedures in the wake of the tragedy in Cairns. It led to new designated roles in the bus system; where staff members were assigned to be a driver, supervisor or checker. Each have their own roles and duties to make sure kids get on and off the bus safely with the supervisor responsible for making sure no children are left on the bus before getting off. The checker is responsible for inspecting the bus after it returns to the centre, then double-check the attendance roll and check off children. Meeky's lifeless body was found in the child care minibus (pictured), almost six hours after he was allegedly collected from his home last February WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to fall across the United States, albeit at a slower pace in recent days. A total of 55,058 COVID patients are currently admitted in U.S. hospitals, according to COVID Tracking Project. This is the lowest figure since November 6. Almost 20 million Americans, or around 6 percent of the total of population, have so far been fully vaccinated, according to the U.S. collaborative volunteer-run effort to track the pandemic. With 2350 new deaths, the total U.S. COVID-19 fatalities rose to 502660 in the last 24 hours, as per Johns Hopkins University's latest data. 71180 new cases of coronavirus infections were reported in the country in the same period, taking the national total to 28261589. Tuesday, during his weekly call with governors, White House COVID Coordinator Jeff Zients announced the fifth consecutive week of vaccine supply increases. States will receive 14.5 million doses this week, up from 8.6 million doses per week when President Joe Biden took office. That's an increase in vaccine allocations of nearly 70 percent during the Biden administration. Zients conveyed to the governors that COVID vaccine allocation through the Retail Pharmacy Program will be increased by 100,000 doses this week. 'Thanks to the President's efforts, we are also on track to have enough vaccines for 300 million Americans by the end of July,' White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in a routine Press Briefing. Infectious diseases experts predicted that new variants of Coronavirus will likely drive a new wave of transmission in the U.S. in the spring. Trevor Bedford, associated with the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said the UK variant, called B.1.1.7, could 'result in more of a wave' around April or May. In a positive news outside the U.S., the World Health Organization has reported a sixth consecutive week of declining coronavirus cases globally. COVID cases across the world fell by 11 percent in the week leading up to February 21, while new deaths during that period dropped by 20 percent, the UN health agency said. WHO expressed concern over many countries reporting increase in cases of new Covid-19 variants. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de The three lead characters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's "Spider-Man" franchise have posted three different photos containing different titles of the third instalment of the film. Before this, there were no initial discussions from the MCU or Marvel team, and it seems like the lead characters have been trolling and trying to throw fans off-course. The popular web-slinging hero from Marvel Comics has landed a feature film from its original creators back in 2017, during which it debuted with the "Spider-Man: Homecoming" title signifying his return. The webhead also had its sequel to the movie almost two years later, titled "Spider-Man: Far From Home," which featured the hero on a trip to Europe. There was already a pattern of having a "Home" on the title of the Spider-Man films in the MCU, and the next phase of Marvel, a.k.a. Phase 4, had fans contemplating and guessing what the next title would be. However, several jokes and memes were thrown on the Spider-Man titles because of the lockdown restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Read Also: 'Valheim:' How to Defeat the Drake Dragon and Obtain a Drake Trophy for Helmet Crafting!-Guide MCU's Spider-Man 3 Title While there are no announcements to the "Spider-Man" franchise's next "home" themed title, especially with the San Diego Comic-Con and other conventions yet to take place, its stars and leads spearhead new suggestions. The mainstay artists of the "Spider-Man" franchise include Tom Holland (who plays the live-action Peter Parker), Zendaya (as the love interest of Spidey Mary Jane Watson), and Jacob Batalon (as Parker's BFF Ned). The trio has simultaneously posted three Instagram photos that contain movie stills of the lead characters in the franchise, along with a combined title card of the new Spidey flick. However, the three posts featured different titles, which somehow throws off the fans on what the real title would be once it is announced. "Spider-Man Phone" Home by Tom Holland Tom Holland went with the title called "Spider-Man: Phone Home" which still contains the special traditional element of Spidey's return to the MCU. The post has garnered a lot of interactions, likes, and comments that have people speculating whether Holland's post was real or a confirmation of the third film. 'Spider-Man Home' Slice by Zendaya On the other hand, MCU Spider-Man's "MJ," Zendaya, posted a different title card on Instagram, and it said "Spider-Man: Home Slice." Comically, Holland commented on the post and said he would be called "Jon (Favreau)" to clarify the real title of the third movie. "Spider-Man Home Wrecker" by Jacob Batalon Lastly, Jacob Batalon--the character who plays Peter Parker's trusty sidekick and best friend, Ned--posted a third title called "Spider-Man: Home Wrecker." Tom Holland, Zendaya, and other stars of the MCU Spidey franchise act surprised on the comments section on Batalon's post, as the trio has posted three different titles for the movie. Related Article: 'Star Wars: Hunters' Nintendo Switch Game Announced Taking Place Between Episode VI and VII A man has been charged with murdering a woman found dead in west London. Police were called to the address in Ealing at 3.45pm on Monday following reports of an unresponsive woman who was pronounced dead at the scene. Met Police says formal identification is yet to take place but they are 'confident' the victim is Anna Ousyannikov, 48. Her next of kin have been informed and are being supported by specialist officers. Met Police say they are confident the victim is Anna Ousyannikov, 48, and specialist officers are with her next of kin Police were called to an address in Ealing at 3.45pm on Monday and launched a murder investigation Forensic teams were seen near the property in west London on Monday The Metropolitan Police has now revealed Curtis Brown, who is also 48, has been charged with murder and is due to appear at Uxbridge Magistrates' Court today. A spokesman said: 'Detectives investigating the death of a woman in Ealing have charged a man with murder. 'Curtis Brown, 48, is due to appear at Uxbridge Magistrates' Court on Wednesday, 24 February. 'Police were called at 3.45pm on Monday, February 22, to reports of an unresponsive woman at a residential property. A 48-year-old woman was pronounced dead at the scene. A police officer outside the property in west London on Monday where the victim's body was found A forensic officer near the scene in Ealing on Monday where the victim, said to be Anna Ousyannikov, was found 'While formal identification is yet to take place, officers are confident that the victim is Anna Ousyannikov. Her next of kin have been informed and are being supported by specialist officers.' Several police cars were parked outside the home in west London on Monday and forensic teams were seen going into the property. Anyone with information is asked to contact police on 101 or tweet @MetCC and quote CAD 4360/22FEB. Information can also be provided to Crimestoppers, anonymously, by calling 0800 555 111. North Wales health board expecting an increase in the numbers of vaccines available from early March This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Feb 24th, 2021 The deputy chief executive of the North Wales health board says they are expecting an increase in the numbers of vaccines available from early March. It comes after a national shortage, caused by central vaccines production capacity, saw a drop in the number of vaccines being administered across the UK. Earlier this week Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (BCUHB) became the first in Wales to administer more than 200,000 vaccines, which includes both first and second doses. Work has also started to administer second doses of the Pfizer vaccine to those who were vaccinated at the start of the rollout in December. In north Wales, as of 21 February: 213,107 COVID-19 vaccines had been administered Of these, 174,870 vaccine doses went to individuals in the top four priority cohorts (both first and second doses) Last week (14 21 February), 19,621 people received their first vaccination 91 per cent of priority groups 1 to 4 had been vaccinated or have been offered an appointment. 63 per cent of those in priority group 5 had been vaccinated. When 80 per cent of this cohort is reached in the coming days, the health board will start to vaccinate those in priority group 6 However just 136 vaccines were administered across the region on Sunday. This has now increased to 880 as of yesterday, however this is still below the numbers being carried out prior to the vaccine shortage. The supply issue has meant that the local vaccination centre, on the Wrexham Glyndwr University campus, is only operating at one day a week for the next fortnight. In an update Gill Harris, deputy chief executive of BCUHB, said that although supplies are limited this week, from next month there is expected be an increase in the number of vaccines available, She said: This will enable us to ramp up the numbers of vaccinations we give in order to reach the next target set by Welsh Government to complete the vaccination of cohorts 1 to 9 by the end of April. Over 60 per cent of the over 65s have also now been vaccinated. When GP surgeries take delivery of further AstraZeneca vaccines over the coming days, they will continue to vaccinate priority group 5 before moving on to priority group 6. We have been working hard to ensure that no-one from priority groups 1 to 4 has been left behind. However, we still have a small number of people who we have not been able to reach. Anyone in these groups who has not been contacted should call 03000 840004 to arrange an appointment. As has been announced at a Wales wide level, the supplies of vaccine available to all Health Boards will again be lower this week compared to what we received earlier in the programme. This is due to production levels centrally. This week we will receive a total of 26,380 vaccines (16,380 doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 10, 000 of the AstraZeneca vaccine). The Pfizer vaccines will be used primarily for second doses. In order to prevent vaccine wastage, we have finalised a standby list agreed with partners of staff who will be called upon if any spare vaccines become available at the end of each day. These staff may be called upon to attend one of our Mass Vaccination Centres at short, and occasionally very short notice. This standby list will not be opened up to the general public. Discussions are ongoing at a national level to finalise the criteria for non-paid carers who are included in priority group 6. We expect an update on this later this week. Ms Harris added: Since the beginning of the vaccination programme, we have been working with various groups to understand the barriers that might cause difficulty for some people in receiving the vaccine. Many groups such as people with disabilities, those with sight and hearing problems, those with cultural or language barriers, travelling communities and the homeless, already experience inequalities. GPs have also been using their knowledge of their registered patients to ensure that vaccinations have been administered to the right groups. To ensure easier access and more equitable access of the vaccine, a Task and Finish Group has been established. About 1,000 U.S. Army soldiers in Alaska are wearing special wrist devices that track daily strain and stress as part of a study to measure the mental health of troops operating in extreme cold environments. Paratroopers from the 25th Infantry Division's 4th Brigade Combat Team at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, have teamed up with WHOOP, a Boston-based human performance company, in a six-month study with the University of Queensland. The study is designed to gather physiological data to "uncover insights that will create a blueprint for how soldiers train, fight, and manage stress in the most extreme military conditions," according to a news release from WHOOP. Read Next: Why It's Going to Be Much Harder to Make Expert Under the Marines' New Rifle Qual Standard "Previous research has typically focused on investigating stress in laboratory settings using standardized stress tasks," Kristen Holmes, vice president of Performance Science at WHOOP and principal investigator on the study, said in the release. "We are carrying this study out in the field to better understand how personal, psychological and situational factors can impact a soldier while training during extreme Arctic conditions," she said. "We are proud to support our troops in an innovative way, and this data could be a critical tool for the military to improve soldier resiliency at a time when mental health issues and suicide rates are higher than ever." The Army has struggled with morale issues unique to Alaska. A military behavioral health team conducted a review in 2019 that looked at 11 suicides at Fort Wainwright between January 2014 and March 2019, but failed to pinpoint definitive causes. Military commanders in January ordered alcohol sales to cease after 10 p.m. at Elmendorf-Richardson and Wainwright in an effort to control drinking-related mental health issues such as suicide. For this study, soldiers in Alaska are wearing the WHOOP Strap 3.0, a 24/7 health monitor built to withstand the rigors of military use, according to the release. The device is waterproof and features a five-day battery life but does not have a wireless signal, GPS or geolocation capabilities, the release states. The research project will analyze personalized data such as heart rate variability, resting heart rate, cardiovascular strain and respiratory rate. Leaders from the squad level and above will have access to the data collected to monitor the daily strain, recovery rates and sleep quality of their paratroopers to get a truer picture of readiness levels, according to the release. "Imagine as a squad leader that you have a paratrooper that has had an abnormally low recovery for several days," 4th BCT's Command Sgt. Maj. Alex Kupratty said in the release. "Maybe your platoon has been in the field for weeks, or the paratrooper just returned from an Army school. Now, you have the data to better help them recover, or to adjust your training to match the team's needs." The paratroopers themselves will also have immediate access to their own data to help them make better decisions to improve their personal performance, the release states. "WHOOP provides seamless and highly reliable biometric capture, thereby producing objective measures of sleep quality and recovery, which are of central importance to our research," William von Hippel, lead investigator on the study and professor at The University of Queensland, said in the release. "Once the data are analyzed, we hope to uncover insights the military could leverage to enhance training regimens and maximize soldier preparedness." This is not the first study using high-tech wrist sensors that has involved soldiers. About 530 members of 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York, are participating in a yearlong human performance study that has them wearing special watches and rings that track not just their physical exertion, but also how their heart rate responds to stress. The division partnered with the Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center and the Army Medical Research and Development Command as part of the Measuring and Advancing Soldier Tactical Readiness and Effectiveness (MASTR-E) program. -- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com. Related: Army Using Wearable Tracking Devices to Learn How Soldiers Perform Under Pressure Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. If you'd like to leave a comment (or a tip or a question) about this story with the editors, please email us We also welcome letters to the editor for publication; you can do that by filling out our letters form and submitting it to the newsroom. The European Investment Bank (EIB) has invested almost EUR 8 billion in Ukraine since 2007, including more than EUR 1 billion last year. "Since 2007, we have invested almost EUR 8 billion in Ukraine. In fact, Ukraine has attracted more than 60% of our total loans in the Eastern Partnership countries. Last year alone, we invested in Ukraine a record sum of more than EUR 1 billion," EIB Vice-President Tereza Czerwinska said at the All-Ukrainian Forum "Ukraine 30. Infrastructure", an Ukrinform correspondent reports. She noted that the EIB had focused its assistance on supporting the eastern regions of Ukraine last year. In particular, the Bank provided financial assistance for the reconstruction of roads in Luhansk region. Other areas of investment include modernization of public transport in some Ukrainian cities, improvement of energy efficiency in public buildings, digitization, innovation and business recovery after the coronavirus crisis. According to Czerwinska, the EIB will continue to provide financial support in 2021 as a EUR 50 million package of assistance to overcome the coronavirus crisis effects has already been signed. EIB Vice-President Kris Peeters noted that the Bank had allocated a total of EUR 2 billion to Ukraine for the development of transport infrastructure. In particular, the EIB is investing in the modernization of the Beskydy railway tunnel, the expansion of the Boryspil International Airport, the development of a road network and environmentally friendly public transport. In 2021, the EIB intends to focus on loans for digital technology, he noted. As reported, on February 12, Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal and EIB President Werner Hoyer agreed on the allocation of EUR 50 million for the purchase of vaccines and refrigeration equipment for the network of vaccination centers. The Guarantee Agreement for the Development of the Boryspil Airport was also signed, providing for a EUR 270 million loan for the reconstruction of the flight zone No. 2. In December 2020, the European Investment Bank and the Government of Ukraine concluded three loan agreements worth EUR 640 million on the implementation of priority projects in the field of infrastructure and transport. ol Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Hyderabad: A high-power delegation from Ukraine led by its Health Minister Dr Maksym Stepanov visited the Bharat Biotech facilities and held discussions to secure supplies for COVID-19 vaccine Covaxin on Wednesday (February 24, 2021). The three-member delegation visited the Bio-Safety Level 3 manufacturing facility and discussed opportunities for Bharat Biotech's intranasal vaccine for COVID-19, the pharma company said in a press release. "It was an absolute privilege to host the Honble Minister of Health from Ukraine Dr Maksym Stepanov at our state-of-the-art facility and showcase our world-class capabilities in the manufacture and supply of vaccinesand research and product development. We discussed potential timelines for the supply of Covaxin to Ukraine on a priority and the prospects of a partnership for our BBV 154 intranasal vaccine," Krishna Ella, Chairman and Managing Director, Bharat Biotech International Limited said. As one of India's top vaccine makers, BBIL is at the forefront of humanity's battle against COVID-19 and stands fully committed to meeting the vaccine requirements of various countries promptly and efficiently," he said. Stepanov said his team had a very good interaction with the members at Bharat Biotech and it was a great experience to take a tour of the facility and inspect its impressive manufacturing capabilities. "We will soon firm up the Covaxin delivery plan for the mass vaccination of our people, and further strengthen our partnership on intranasal vaccine supplies after initial results from its phase 1 trials," he said. Covaxin finished Phase-3 trials and is currently being used as part of the nationwide immunization programme for frontline workers after the Central Licensing Authority has granted permission for the sale or distribution of Covaxin for restricted use in emergency situations. The European Commission on Wednesday said it would create an arsenal of data tools to anticipate and adapt to the increasing impacts of climate change. As European Union countries attempt to eliminate their net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, they will still face decades of climate-related impacts, locked in from previous years' emissions. Last year was Europe's hottest on record, rounding out the world's hottest decade. As temperatures climb, the EU expects its economic losses from weather and climate stresses - already roughly 12 billion euros ($14.6 ... HOUSTON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- As communities across Texas recover from the state's historic winter storm that caused blackouts and disrupted water supplies, charitable organizations are partnering with businesses to bring bottled water to those who still do not have clean water that is safe to drink. Since the crisis began, Convoy of Hope, the Springfield, Missouri faith-based non-profit organization, has delivered bottled water by the millions, including more than 360,000 donated by Ashley HomeStore, to those in Texas without access to drinkable water. To date, more than 50 Convoy of Hope tractor-trailers have made their way to Texas where volunteers continue to hand out bottled water to families in the state's large, metropolitan settings and its small, rural areas. "These are the communities where we live and work," says Brittany Graham, community engagement specialist for Ashley HomeStore. "In times of crises, we want to help." While water supplies were disrupted, countless Texas families also lost water due to broken pipes. When power was lost, so too was everything in their refrigerators. Some Texas residents have been without adequate drinking water for more than a week. "It's absolutely heartbreaking, but just as we did after Hurricane Harvey and other natural disasters, we will help our fellow Texans," Graham adds. While the emphasis of the relief efforts is on water, Convoy of Hope trailers also were packed with food, blankets, lanterns, and cleaning supplies. To learn more about Convoy of Hope and how to get involved, visit www.ConvoyOfHope.org. SOURCE Ashley HomeStore Shauna Niequist apologizes for her silence following father Bill Hybels' downfall Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Shauna Niequist has apologized for failing to speak out after her father, Bill Hybels, the founding pastor of Willow Creek Community Church, was accused of decades of sexual misconduct. In a lengthy Instagram post Monday, Niequist, a popular author and ministry leader, addressed the allegations along with a simple image that features the phrase An apology. I apologize for my silence & for all that it communicated. Im so sorry. I continue to grieve alongside every person whos grieving, she wrote. Niequist, whose husband, Aaron Niequist, formerly served as a worship leader at Willow Creek, said that the season in which her father retired from his position at the church after he was accused of sexual misconduct shook her to the core, causing her to shut down. Wise people encouraged me to take some time to grieve & listen & recover. They were right--silence was necessary for me initially, but I extended that silence too long, she admitted. I now understand that my silence communicated to many that I defend my fathers actions and his ongoing silence. I dont. I grieve both of those things. I now understand that my silence allowed many people to assume that I dont care about the people he hurt. Thats not true, & thats something I regret so deeply. Im so sorry. Niequists social media post comes after she and her husband have been criticized for not speaking out against her fathers actions. In 2018, The Chicago Tribune published an investigative piece documenting allegations of sexual misconduct against Hybels, presenting various allegations, including suggestive comments, extended hugs, an unwanted kiss and invitations to some women to hotel rooms. Hybels, who served as head of Willow Creek for over four decades and oversaw the church as it grew into a multi-site megachurch, denied the accusations. However, weeks after the story emerged, Hybels resigned from his role at the church. The following February, the Independent Advisory Group released an investigation report concluding that the allegations against Hybels were credible and criticized his leadership style. Several publishers, including Tyndale House and InterVarsity Press, pulled Hybels books after evidence of his inappropriate behavior toward women emerged. Women, some of them church employees, said Hybels had invited them to hotel rooms or made suggestive comments about their appearances. One woman alleged the pastor kissed her against her wishes. According to another account, Hybels allegedly engaged in oral sex with his former assistant. In her statement Monday, Niequist said she remains in relationship with my dad. I love him, & I always will. I cant apologize for his choices, but I do apologize for mine, she explained. I cant make amends for his actions, but today Im taking the first step in making amends to the people Ive wounded by my silence. The bestselling author admitted that in this area of her life, she has been living according to my fear, not my values. I carry so much regret, & I apologize. I know it might not make sense that someone who writes for a living, literally, could find herself so unable to say what needed to be said. But thats the truth. I was wounded, & I waited too long, she wrote. Hybels is among a slew of high-profile Christian leaders who have lost their ministry positions in recent years due to revelations of sexual abuse and other sinful behaviors. In an interview with The Christian Post, megachurch pastor and bestselling author Michael Youssef of The Church of The Apostles in Atlanta stressed that such cases reinforce that accountability must be a significant pillar of ministry. Accountability is a word that's almost a dirty word among some of the celebrity preachers, and that's got to come back, he said. Whether a church has 10 members, 100 members or 10,000 members, he must have accountability. This is a word that is lost in todays churches and must be returned to our vocabulary. We have put these people on a pedestal, Youssef stressed. Weekly, I tell my congregation, If you're here because of me, go somewhere else. If you want to worship Jesus, then, welcome. We are about Jesus. We're not about the preacher. We're not about celebrities because that is deadly as far as the Gospel of Jesus Christ is concerned. Youssef warned that pastors should never get to the point where they can say, I trust my own judgment. Because you cannot, Youssef said. Scripture tells us the heart is deceitful above all. So what do you do? You build a wall around those areas that are going to cause your downfall. Credit: CC0 Public Domain A team of engineers has identified the 'violent' physical processes at work inside the lungs which cause wheezing, a condition which affects up to a quarter of the world's population. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, used modelling and high-speed video techniques to show what causes wheezing and how to predict it. Their results could be used as the basis of a cheaper and faster diagnostic for lung disease that requires just a stethoscope and a microphone. Improved understanding of the physical mechanism responsible for generating wheezing sounds could provide a better causal link between symptoms and disease, and help improve diagnosis and treatment. The results are reported in the journal Royal Society Open Science. At some point, most of us have experienced wheezing, a high-pitched whistling sound made while breathing. For most people, the phenomenon is temporary and usually the result a cold or mild allergic reaction. However, regular or chronic wheezing is often a symptom of more serious conditions, such as asthma, emphysema, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or certain cancers. "Because wheezing makes it harder to breathe, it puts an enormous amount of pressure on the lungs," said first author Dr. Alastair Gregory from Cambridge's Department of Engineering. "The sounds associated with wheezing have been used to make diagnoses for centuries, but the physical mechanisms responsible for the onset of wheezing are poorly understood, and there is no model for predicting when wheezing will occur." Co-author Dr. Anurag Agarwal, Head of the Acoustics lab in the Department of Engineering, said he first got the idea to study wheezing after a family vacation several years ago. "I started wheezing the first night we were there, which had never happened to me before," he said. "And as an engineer who studies acoustics, my first thought was how cool it was that my body was making these noises. After a few days however, I was having real trouble breathing, which made the novelty wear off pretty quickly." Agarwal's wheezing was likely caused by a dust mite allergy, which was easily treated with over-the-counter antihistamines. However, after speaking with a neighbour who is also a specialist in respiratory medicine, he learned that even though it is a common occurrence, the physical mechanisms that cause wheezing are somewhat mysterious. "Since wheezing is associated with so many conditions, it is difficult to be sure of what is wrong with a patient just based on the wheeze, so we're working on understanding how wheezing sounds are produced so that diagnoses can be more specific," said Agarwal. The airways of the lung are a branching network of flexible tubes, called bronchioles, that gradually get shorter and narrower as they get deeper into the lung. In order to mimic this setup in the lab, the researchers modified a piece of equipment called a Starling resistor, in which airflow is driven through thin elastic tubes of various lengths and thicknesses. Co-author and computer vision specialist Professor Joan Lasenby developed a multi-camera stereoscopy technique to film the air being forced through the tubes at different degrees of tension, in order to observe the physical mechanisms that cause wheezing. "It surprised us just how violent the mechanism of wheezing is," said Gregory, who is also a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalene College. "We found that there are two conditions for wheezing to occur: the first is that the pressure on the tubes is such that one or more of the bronchioles nearly collapses, and the second is that air is forced though the collapsed airway with enough force to drive oscillations." Once these conditions are met, the oscillations grow and are sustained by a flutter mechanism in which waves travelling from front to back have the same frequency as the opening and closing of the tube. "A similar phenomenon has been seen in aircraft wings when they fail, or in bridges when they collapse," said Agarwal. "When up and down vibrations are at the same frequency as clockwise and anticlockwise twisting vibrations, we get flutter that causes the structure to collapse. The same process is at work inside the respiratory system." Using these observations, the researchers developed a 'tube law' in order to predict when this potentially damaging oscillation might occur, depending on the tube's material properties, geometry and the amount of tension. "We then use this law to build a model that can predict the onset of wheezing and could even be the basis of a cheaper and faster diagnostic for lung disease," said Gregory. "Instead of expensive and time-consuming methods such as X-rays or MRI, we wouldn't need anything more than a microphone and a stethoscope." A diagnostic based on this method would work by using a microphoneearly tests were done using the in-built microphone on a normal smartphoneto record the frequency of the wheezing sound and use this to identify which bronchiole is near collapse, and whether the airways are unusually stiff or flexible in order to target treatment. The researchers hope that by finding changes in material properties from wheezing, and locations that wheezes come from, the additional information will make it easier to distinguish between different conditions, although further work in this area is still needed. Explore further In lung disease, crackling and wheezing can be more than just a sign of sickness More information: An Experimental Investigation to Model Wheezing in Lungs, Royal Society Open Science, royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.201951 Journal information: Royal Society Open Science An Experimental Investigation to Model Wheezing in Lungs, LONDON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/-- Last week, the Commonwealth of Dominica's Ministry of Education concluded a Professional Development Training programme for its teachers. Focusing on upskilling and maintaining the high standard of education, teachers underwent workshops in incorporating technology in the classroom and teaching English as a second language for its Haitian, Spanish and Chinese student population. Despite the pandemic, education has remained high on the government's list of priorities. In recent years, Dominica has invested up to $26 million in the education sector, contributing towards the repair of 15 schools damaged by Hurricane Maria and the Education Mentorship Programme which connected 169 students with mentors. Funds were derived directly from Dominica's Citizenship by Investment (CBI) Programme, an initiative that promotes second citizenship to wealthy foreigners once making an investment in either a government fund or buying pre-approved real estate. Established in 1993, Dominica's CBI Programme is considered the world's best route to second citizenship and has been ranked as the top Programme by the Financial Times' PWM for the last four consecutive years. Those who become citizens of Dominica through this route gain access to a long-list of visa-free destinations that is only anticipated to grow, including major education and business hubs across the globe. Additionally, benefits include alternative business prospects and a second home for you and your family. Economic citizens also gain access to higher quality education both in Dominica and abroad. The small island recently opened a state-of-the-art veterinary school which is listed by the American Veterinary Medical Association and offers students the chance to do a third of their training in either Canada, the US or the UK. Similarly, the Caribbean is home to many other well-respected medical schools with links to the United States. "Our literacy rate in Dominica is 96%. Every child in Dominica has access to primary, secondary and tertiary education. We have 100% access to these layers of education in our country. Education in Dominica is free to all our citizens," Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit has highlighted in a recent webinar. Alternatively, Dominica has sponsored students who wish to study abroad, particularly in countries like Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Due to Dominica's status in the Commonwealth, citizens also stand to benefit from options exclusive to those from the 54 member states. "In the UK, Commonwealth citizens are eligible for various scholarships for master's degrees and PhD courses which often cover tuition fees, living allowance, and travel," said Natasha Jones, a legal assistant at CS Global Partners. +447867942505, pr@csglobalpartners.com, www.csglobalpartners.com Childrens Minister Roderic OGorman has said an extension to the Mother and Baby Homes Commission would serve no practical purpose now that audio recordings of survivors testimony have been recovered. The Social Democrats tabled a motion to extend the commission by a year to give survivors more time to ask questions about their testimonies before it is dissolved at the end of this month. In the commission report it is claimed that witnesses were told that audio recordings of their testimony would be destroyed to protect individuals identities. However, this is disputed by some survivors. Are survivors now to take that leap of faith that every single last testimony is available, but they are all intact? That there is no possibility that any survivor, when they go to get access to their own story, will be turned away empty-handed? Jennifer Whitmore, Social Democrats Recordings the commission stated had been deleted last July were recovered last week amid a huge public outcry. During a debate on the motion on Wednesday, Mr OGorman said the Government would not put down a counter motion. He said his department will be ready to start providing personal data to those who request it under GDPR when my department becomes data controller on the dissolution of the commission at the end of this month. He added: The commission has repeatedly stated that this process and the associated actions are carried out with the knowledge of survivors and I know that it documented this in its final report. It is clear that some survivors do not share this view. I hope that the retrieval of the recordings now offers reassurance to those survivors. Mr OGorman said that given these developments it is not clear what practical purpose can be achieved by extending the term of the commission. However, the Social Democrats continued to push for an extension to the commission so survivors can seek answers to their outstanding questions. TD Jennifer Whitmore, the partys spokesperson on children, told the Dail the commissions report reached conclusions that were not only contested by many survivors, but which displayed an insensitive narrative of women, calling into question the validity of womens and survivors experiences. She welcomed the fact that the audio recordings had been recovered but said an extension was absolutely still needed. She added: Considering that only last week the minister stated that the commission believe they were acting in good faith when they destroyed the testimonies. And considering that only two days ago the commission reported in the media, saying that we are struggling with the view that the recording shouldnt be retrieved for legal and moral reasons. Are we now, and are survivors now, to take that leap of faith that every single last testimony is available, but they are all intact? That there is no possibility that any survivor, when they go to get access to their own story, will be turned away empty-handed? Cork South-West TD Holly Cairns said the miraculous recovery of the recordings had raised more questions than answers. She said: If the commission is dissolved at the end of this week, who will be left to answer these questions? In the DAil now, the Minister said: aThere is no practical reason to extend the commission.a #Stand4Truth #ExtendTheCommission https://t.co/BvOqDRTVjM Holly Cairns TD (@HollyCairnsTD) February 24, 2021 Will the minister and his department, or will you pass the buck on to the non-existent commission? She added: Judicial reviews are a basic entitlement. Survivors and adopted people are entitled to challenge the findings and recommendations of this report. If they choose to do this, how can they bring a judicial review application against a commission that no longer exists? MBABANE - National Treasury and the Central Bank of Eswatini (CBE) should be working with commercial banks in the kingdom to provide government-guaranteed loans for MSMEs. These are micro, small and medium-sized businesses (MSMEs) that may not be able to meet their financial obligations during the lockdown and when the economy eventually reopens. This is a call that has been made by a group of the Federation of Eswatini Business Community (FESBC) experts ahead of the Finance Minister Neal Rijkenbergs budget speech tentatively set for tomorrow. FESBC says the countrys loan guarantee arrangement should make a projected E1 billion in new loans available to existing MSMEs customers in the posts pandemic era, of which E200 million should be made available in the second phase of 2021. Eligible When it comes to the key features, FESBC said Eswatini MSMEs and businesses with an annual turnover of less than E100 million, which are in good standing with their commercial banks, should be eligible for the bank loans in the post-pandemic era. Funds borrowed by MSMEs can be used for operational expenses including salaries, rent and lease agreements, and supplier contracts. Loans should cover up to three months of operational costs and will be drawn down monthly through 2021 to 2022. Banks should not be obliged to extend COVID-19 loans, and those that do should use their normal risk-evaluation and credit-application processes. MSME business owners may be required to sign surety for the loan, suggested FESBC. Each MSME and business, according to the federation, may accept only one COVID-19 loan. Loans should be offered at a single agreed lending rate, which tracks the repo rate, by all participating banks, said FESBC. FESBC further recommended a six-month repayment holiday commencing from the first draw down, although interest will accumulate from the date on which the first draw down occurs. Repayments Interest and capital repayments should start after six months, and businesses should have a maximum of 60 months to repay the loans, stressed FESBC. Due to the second wave of COVID-19, an ongoing FESBC survey has established that approximately 60 per cent of MSMEs and companies expect to report at least a 10 per cent decrease in revenue and earnings this year. Eswatinis phased approach to resuming normal economic activity is informed by international experience. The country has high levels of poverty and comorbidity, and living conditions make social and physical distancing highly challenging. The longer that our economic growth remains weak, however, the greater the risk that there will be permanent destruction of supply-side capacity with profoundly negative implications for household incomes and welfare this year, said FESBC. Last year tested almost every facet of our lives, and this year has certainly brought more challenges with the winter storm. The challenges of virtual learning and school closings as a result of COVID-19 have not gone away. Due to these unforeseen circumstances, many schools across the state are seeing a decline in enrollment because of valid choices made by many parents. However, the declining number of students in the classroom could potentially lead to lasting financial damage to our school systems if we do not act. Earlier in the pandemic, Texas established a hold harmless funding policy, which funds schools at their pre-pandemic levels, even if enrollment and attendance decline. While weve understandably seen a drop in school attendance over the last year, expenses related to things like video conferencing, PPE and infrastructure to support social distancing have risen. The hold harmless funding allows our schools to be better prepared to safely open, reduce the spread of the virusand help students recover from learning loss. Without this funding, school districts across the state stand to lose millions of dollars, tightening an already constricted budget. This critical funding is set to expire if our lawmakers do not intervene to extend the hold harmless policy. As a father and as a law enforcement leader, I am deeply concerned about what losing this safeguard could mean for Texas kids. We all know that access to high-quality education is absolutely crucial for our childrens development and future success. What you may not know is that it is also key to reducing crime and increasing our public safety. Kids who graduate from high school are less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system later in life. For example, according to a report from Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, a national law enforcement group, a moderate increase in high school graduation rates can reduce violent crime by 20 percent. I have been a proud member of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids for several years now and have experienced first-hand the power of high-quality education and mentorship for at-risk youth. Maintaining school funding and resources during this stressful time can help increase positive outcomes for our kids and keep them engaged in their schoolwork and out of trouble long after this pandemic is over. Adequate school funding is one of the most important ways to keep kids engaged in their learning, especially now. The pandemic has only emphasized the need for more school resources, like high-quality teachers and counselors, more flexible school meal options, and the technology required for digital learning. With COVID-19 case numbers remaining significant across the country, we need stable funding now more than ever to prevent pandemic-induced learning loss and keep kids on track to graduate. It is unfair to students, parents, and educators to cut this vital funding when we arguably need it the most. To prevent COVID-19s influence from extending even further into the future, we must prioritize, not decrease, our investments in our kids and schools. I am urging our lawmakers at the state legislature and state education agency to consider the long-term consequences of letting hold harmless funding expire. Now is the time to act to ensure the funding remains through the pandemic, for the sake of our students, teachers and communitys future. We do not want this public health crisis to become a public safety crisis down the line. Gonzalez has been the Harris County Sheriff since elected in 2016. He is a member of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids and resides in Houston. MALARIA DENGUE TB PLAY SECOND FIDDLE TO COVID-19 Although India has worked relentlessly towards developing innovative testing solutions for COVID-19 throughout last year, the timely detection of a number of other infectious diseases has been sidelined. In India, the range and burden of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, filariasis, leprosy, HIV infection, typhoid, hepatitis etc., are enormous. In fact, inadequate containment of the vector has resulted in recurrent outbreaks of dengue fever and re-emergence of chikungunya virus disease and typhus fever. If India can develop more than 20 different diagnostic tests or devices in a single year to fight COVID-19, many more such innovations can be brought to effectively detect other infections looming in our country. Environmentally sound farming for the betterment of humanity AeroFarms is on a mission to transform agriculture with environmentally responsible farming that enables local production at scale and nourishes communities across the globe with safe, nutritious and delicious food. The company has been leading the way for indoor vertical farming and agriculture, from genetics to post harvest. AeroFarms has grown more than 850 different varieties of crops, and the company now sees the potential to extend into other markets, such as pharmaceutical, cosmeceutical and nutraceutical. This broad vision is all part of the AeroFarms commitment to making the world a better place. AeroFarms is currently developing of the worlds largest indoor vertical farm of its kind in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The farm will be dedicated to state-of-the-art research and development (R&D) and commercialization of relevant local crops using AeroFarms expertise and proprietary indoor vertical farming technology.[1] As part of the Abu Dhabi project, AeroFarms expects to partner with major international companies, local universities, and AgTech startups to help solve some of the most pressing agriculture needs of our time. This work is all part of the humanitarian focus that pervades AeroFarms culture. The company collaborates on scientific research with several universities, along with the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, a nonprofit funded by the U.S. Farm Bill. At the same time, AeroFarms is an active participant in World Economic Forum groups and events, including its Circular Economy Taskforce. Growing high-quality, nutritious leafy greens, herbs and more without sunlight, soil or pesticides and with 95 percent less water than conventional field farming requires tight control and close monitoring of operations using patented aeroponic technology and data-driven insights for a new level of precision. This is fully controlled agriculture, says AeroFarms Co-Founder and CEO David Rosenberg. Controlling the temperature and humidity to what the plants want allows us to manage the issue of seasonality in the field, and to grow 12 months a year, 365 days a year. The customer always gets fresh produce harvested at its peak flavor great tasting, safe food. AeroFarms crops get an ideal amount of moisture and nutrients misted directly onto their roots, which dangle in a chamber below a growing cloth medium. They also get an ideal spectrum of LED lighting to match the plants needs throughout a 12- to 16-day growing cycle. AeroFarms precision growing algorithms allow just-in-time growing for its selling partners all year round. Once the plants reach maturity, they are harvested and packaged onsite and then distributed to local grocery stores. The close proximity of the farm to consumers greatly reduces transportation costs and spoilage. Running this operation at scale takes a huge amount of technology, making AeroFarms a digital, data-driven company as well as an agricultural company. AeroFarms operations are fueled by proprietary growing systems, custom and open source software, computer vision systems, sensors on connected devices, and back-end servers that continuously collect and analyze images and data to inform the algorithms that help optimize the growing conditions for plants. Dell Technologies Working with Dell Technologies The complexity and intensity of the technology, and the integration of that technology, is high, Rosenberg says. And as such, its important to partner with the right players. We are constantly partnering with parties on improving technology. One of those partners is Dell Technologies. AeroFarms captures data from sensors located throughout the farm and leverages a wide range of Dell products and services, from Dell IoT Edge Gateways to Dell Latitude Rugged Tablets to Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. The team also leverages cloud resources, while continually growing its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. We have worked closely with Dell Technologies to develop the tools to wirelessly track and monitor our product throughout the growing process, from seed to package, Rosenberg says. Dell Technologies understands our IoT infrastructure and integration needs, and we see the opportunity to collaborate on additional solutions as we build our indoor vertical farms in major cities around the world. To Learn More Find out more in the case study, Taking vertical farming to global heights. Watch videos on the Dell Technologies Aerofarms page. Unlock the value of data with Dell Technologies and Intel. [1] AeroFarms news release, AeroFarms to build worlds largest R&D Indoor Vertical Farm in Abu Dhabi as part of USD $100 million AgTech investment by Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO), April 9, 2020. A burglar who was spared a prison sentence because of injuries he suffered when he was accidentally shot in the face by a garda, has been jailed by the Court of Appeal. The three-judge court agreed with the Director of Public Prosecutions that the sentencing judge was unduly lenient in suspending the entirety of the sentence imposed on Tomas Mikalajunas. President of the Court of Appeal Mr Justice George Birmingham said Mikalajunas had travelled to Ireland to carry out well-planned burglaries of high-end goods, and imposed a sentence of two years and nine months. Mikalajunas (41), a native of Lithuania who had an address at Cluain Arra, Gortboy, Newcastle West, Co Limerick, sustained "life-changing injuries" in the shooting in 2016. Detailing the background to the case Mr Justice Birmingham said Mikalajunas and an accomplice carried out a "professionally and carefully planned burglary" on a pharmacy in Kinsale on January 30, 2015. They used a modified, reinforced Audi to force in the front of the premises before three men, wearing balaclavas and gloves and carrying torches, entered. They stole high-end perfumes, particularly targetting Chanel products, and made off with e60,000 worth of goods. The perfume was shipped to Lithuania where it was sold at markets. The second burglary was in 2016 at a boutique in Adare, Co Limerick that specialised in high-end fashion. e80,000 worth of clothes was taken and although they were retrieved by gardai the following day, they had been kept in conditions that meant they were unusable. The owner of the boutique was uninsured and suffered a devastating loss, the judge said. Following that burglary gardai identified a Toyota Corolla that was associated with the gang and on June 28, 2016 it was spotted driving from Newcastle West. A high-speed chase ensued during which the suspects' car exceeded speeds of 120km/h on rural roads. Gardai managed to stop the car but as one garda got out of the patrol car his service firearm accidentally discharged, hitting Mikalajunas in the right side of the face. He required extensive therapy to regain his mobility and speech and still has difficulty eating solid food. A bullet fragment close to his spine restricts his neck movements preventing him from returning to his former job as a truck driver. Mikalajunas made full admissions to gardai and pleaded guilty to two counts of burglary and one of criminal damage. Having heard the medical evidence the sentencing judge at the Circuit Criminal Court imposed a prison sentence of five years and six months, suspended in its entirety. Mikalajunas has since returned to Lithuania and followed today's court proceedings by video link. Mr Justice Birmingham said the offences were "very serious" and he noted that Mikalajunas appeared to travel to Ireland on both occasions specifically to carry out burglaries. While he said it was appropriate to take the injuries into account, he said it was excessive to suspend the entire sentence. Taking the sentence of five years and six months as the starting point, he said it would be appropriate to suspend half and therefore he imposed a sentence of two years and nine months with no part suspended. He imposed a concurrent sentence of two years for criminal damage. The president sat with Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy and Mr Justice Seamus Woulfe. A former deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist Party has called on the Executive to help the Republic ramp up its Covid vaccination programme. Lord Kilclooney, a life peer who is no longer a member of the UUP, was speaking after it emerged that close to 25% of our population have received their first dose of a vaccine compared with less than 4% across the border. Latest figures show that just over 468,000 people here have had their first jab and more than 31,000 have received their second. However, in the Republic some 310,900 vaccines - 113,291 of them second jabs - have been administered, according to data up to February 20 compiled by the Irish Times. In a tweet Lord Kilclooney said the Executive should ask the Irish Government how it could help increase its vaccination levels. Expand Close Lord Kilclooney / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Lord Kilclooney Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph, he said: "Some 96% of the population in the Republic have not been vaccinated and we have freedom of movement on this island. So, it is important for the health of people in Northern Ireland also to help as many people get vaccinated as we can. "It hasn't dawned on anyone that I live near the border, so I am very conscious of this issue. I just hope [the Executive] investigates the possibility of assisting the Republic's vaccination programme... but of course the decision at Stormont depends on the availability of extra vaccine doses, and I do not know whether we have that or not." SDLP's health spokeswoman Cara Hunter said it had always advocated a whole-island approach to tackling the pandemic. "There is no screen at the border that prevents transmission of the virus so it's important that we work steadily to vaccinate everyone in Ireland," she said. "Closer coordination is clearly needed to eradicate the threat we're facing. That should involve vaccination cooperation and a mass testing and tracing initiative to prevent recurrence." Alliance's health spokeswoman Paula Bradshaw said: "Alliance is already on record as being supportive in principle of the UK and Ireland working together to deliver completion of the vaccination programme as quickly as possible across the entire Common Travel Area." The vaccine rate in Britain is 25.4% for England, 25.7% for Scotland and 26.8% for Wales. Meanwhile, Taoiseach Micheal Martin has confirmed that the highest level of coronavirus restrictions will continue in the Republic until April 5 at least. He made the announcement in a live address outlining the revised Living With Covid plan. Level 5 measures are to remain in place until after Easter. The plan includes the phased reopening of schools and childcare, with some pupils set to return to the classroom on March 1. Leaving Certificate students are also to return to the classroom next week. The Taoiseach said the situation will be reviewed on April 5. He said they aim to have administered first doses to 40% of people over the age of 18 by the end of April, 64% by the end of May, and up to 82% of adults by the end of June. Mr Martin said the Republic is "driving down the levels of infection", but said the emergence of the UK variant had made the situation very different to what it was several months ago. The stage 2 pilot test will help finalise process engineering related matters and completion of the program will assist the company accelerate project funding and commence plant construction. BGRIMMs large-scale graphite pilot plant being used for the tests. ( ) has started a three-month 60-70 tonnes, large-scale pilot, metallurgical test program on graphite from its Maniry Project in Madagascar. The stage 2 pilot test will finalise all process engineering related matters as part of the companys definitive feasibility study (DFS) with results to finalise DFS processing-related parameters. Graphite concentrate produced will be used to help finalise binding offtake and downstream arrangements. The test program is planned to be completed next quarter and will assist the company to fast-track project funding and commence plant construction. DFS progress continues The company anticipates that the test-work results will confirm the world-class status of the Maniry Graphite Project. BlackEarth managing director Tom Revy said: Over the past 12 months, BlackEarth has continued to progress the DFS and the board is pleased with what has been accomplished to date. As part of this, the value of stage 2 piloting cannot be underestimated given the importance of the results to the Maniry development program and ultimately the potential value it can realise for shareholders. Test-work at Maniry Project The company has signed a contract with BGRIMM to complete the planned test program which will comprise several activities including: The stage 2 large-scale pilot test program will use approximately 60-70 tonnes of Maniry graphite material; The outcomes will be used to optimise the Maniry flow sheet, provide final equipment specifications, and the results will also provide significant input into the projects final environmental and social impact assessment; and The program will also be used to generate substantial concentrate which will assist in finalising off-take and downstream arrangements. The stage 2 pilot program follows the successful earlier pilot works undertaken by both BGRIMM and ALS (Perth). Social and community activities In a response to a famine faced by villages around the Maniry Project, BlackEarth has sent 4 tonnes of food supplies to the area to assist local villagers. The company will continue to monitor the situation and plans to provide ongoing assistance to those most in need. I know what the constituents are looking for. I know how to serve their needs, Kodatt said Sunday. I found out (about Madigans resignation) just like everybody else and decided to throw my hat in the ring. Im ready for the challenge and excited to step up for this opportunity. MASON CITY, Iowa - The pandemic brought many area events to a halt last year. Now, two of them are poised for a return. For those that have missed the sweet sounds of music, the North Iowa Band Festival is set to return on Memorial Day weekend. Traditions like the parade, Stu Nevermann Run, live concerts, marketplace and carnival will be a part of this year's festivities. One noticeable change this year is that there will be no handouts and candy distributed along the parade route due to safety reasons. In addition, organizers are in close contact with city and county officials to make sure it's a safe celebration for participants and spectators alike. Chamber of Commerce President & CEO Robin Anderson says organizers are wanting to focus on the festival's original intent: showcasing student bands. She adds that there already is a band director from outside North Iowa that's inquiring to see if his group can join the parade. "He's going to try to convince his school administration and board that they should be able to participate. It really warmed my heart because he said his students have missed so much, and they have been working so hard. If they have to get up super early in the morning and come on a bus all the way to Mason City so they can have the experience of marching in the parade, they're going to do it." While the original plan was to utilize the theme set for last year, which was in the hopes of convincing actor Hugh Jackman (who is starring in a Broadway remake of The Music Man) to be the festival's grand marshal, Anderson says the theme was changed to "Banding Together and Marching Forward," in light of the events of the past year. "We should remember this past year and everything that has happened, and what we're going through even now." Parade forms for participants will be available online beginning March 1. Keeping with the theme of music, another yearly event is coming back for 2021 - the annual Dancing for the Dream. The dance benefits 43 North Iowa, whose mission is to assist people with mental health issues and disabilities find their way through employment and life opportunities. Instead of being held in March, the dance is being pushed to June 5, and will be held at the Surf Ballroom. In addition, most of the dancers that originally signed up for last year are coming back for this year's dance. Executive Director John Derryberry says the extra time allows for more planning among organizers, as well as feedback from the Surf and CG Public Health, to have a top notch experience. "What types of social distancing do we need to have in place, how many people can we allow in the Surf Ballroom and have it be a safe environment for everyone. All those questions will have the answers over the next couple of months." This is also the first time Derryberry is participating in the annual dance. "I have heard that it's usually a packed house, and it's an event that people really, really like to attend. I'm excited to see the event, get together with people and raise money for all that we do at 43 North Iowa. It's great that we're getting to the point where we can do these things again." Derryberry says they're looking at outdoor venues in the event that the dance needs to be moved. Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick this week announced a plan to replace the citys police department with a new Department of Community Solutions and Public Safety. The proposal, part of a statewide police reform effort, is now up for public comment and requires legislative approval. If passed, the city would install a civilian department leader to oversee two divisions, an unarmed force of community solution workers, and an armed division focused on responding to and investigating crimes. Officers would have to reapply to keep jobs as armed public safety workers with the city. The proposal acknowledges that in some ways, the measures would defund the police, but ultimately, just as much of the citys funding and resources, if not more, would go toward public safety. The proposal calls for the city to reallocate the police departments $12.5 million budget which includes 63 sworn officers but would not reduce overall funding. In a statement, Myrick said the proposal was the result of a community dialogues, in meetings and protests especially over the last several months and years. The men and women of the Ithaca Police Department have performed their duties with admirable skill and professionalism, but for too long the answer to every human behavioral problem in our City has been to call the police, Myrick said. He called that practice impractical and cumbersome, and said it exacerbates homelessness, mental illness and addiction. Myrick unveiled Ithacas plan in a 98-page draft report, that also covers police reform efforts in surrounding Tompkins County. The reforms are part of a statewide reform effort authorized by executive order last year by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Police departments across New York state are required to develop reform and reinvention plans by April 1 if they wish to retain state funding. While the proposal covers reform efforts in all of Tompkins County, the county has no plans to eliminate its police department, the sheriffs office, or require town or village departments to disband. Instead, the county will undertake several other reform efforts including training, and a pilot program for responding to non-emergency calls. Tompkins County and Ithaca worked with the Center for Policing Equity, a national research center, on its reform plans. In a magazine article, GQ called the Ithacas plan the most ambitious effort yet to reform policing. Myrick himself has not been shy about radical ideas. In a biography posted on the citys website, Myrick touts overhauls of city government, communications strategies and storm water utilities as successes of his administration. In 2016, he announced he wanted to make Ithaca the first city with a supervised injection facility, a place for people with opioid addiction to use heroin in the presence of a nurse. Myrick is Ithacas first Black mayor and was the youngest mayor elected in New York state when he first won election in 2011. Many cities across the country, including Minneapolis, Baltimore and Portland, have taken steps toward defunding or disbanding their police departments in recent years, especially after George Floyd was killed during an arrest by police officers in Minneapolis last May. Camden, N.J. dissolved its police department in 2013. Tompkins County posted its entire police reform plan and a space for public comment on its website. Contact Julie McMahon: Email | Twitter | 315-412-1992 The cocktail of beneficial bacteria passed from mother to infant through breast milk changes significantly over time and could act like a daily booster shot for infant immunity and metabolism. The research, conducted by scientists from Montreal and Guatemala and published in Frontiers in Microbiology, has important implications for infant development and health. Researchers discovered a range of microbiome species never before identified in human milk. Until now, relatively little was known about the role microbiome bacteria play in breast milk. These bacteria are thought to protect the infant gastrointestinal tract and improve aspects of long-term health, such as allergy prevention. Some bacterial species we observed in our sample breast milk had a common function in destroying foreign substances or xenobiotics and could play a role in protection against toxins and pollutants." Emmanuel Gonzalez, Co-Author, Bioinformatics Specialist, McGill University The discovery sheds light on how mothers help lay the foundation for infant immunity. Differences between early and late lactation To learn more about the human milk microbiome, the scientists analyzed breast milk samples using high-resolution imaging technology, originally pioneered by McGill University and the University of Montreal to detect bacteria on the International Space Station. They analyzed breast milk samples of Mam-Mayan mothers living in eight remote rural communities in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. This gave them a unique window to observe the human milk microbiome over time, specifically between early and late lactation (6-46 days versus 109-184 days). Unlike most mothers in North America, nearly all Mam-Mayan mothers breastfeed for the World Health Organization's recommended period of six months. In North America, only 26% of mothers do so. "This longer feeding time allowed us to observe important changes in the bacteria provided to infants over time, which could impact long-term health," says Gonzalez. The genomic technology used by the scientists revealed a range of microbiome species shared among Mam-Mayan mothers, providing a glimpse of a diverse community of bacteria being passed on to infants. "Studying microbiomes of diverse communities is important in order to understand the variation present in humans," says co-author Kristine Koski, an Associate Professor in the School of Human Nutrition at McGill. "Most human milk microbiome studies have been conducted with mothers from high income countries, generating an incomplete picture of the important bacteria passed to infants during early development." Working alongside underrepresented communities will be essential in getting an accurate picture of the human milk microbiome and the factors that shape it, according to the scientists. They hope that these discoveries will help encourage more inclusive and more robust research. By Bailey Aldridge, The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) (TNS) Members of the U.S. Navy will retake their oaths to the U.S. Constitution as part of the Pentagons efforts to address extremism within its ranks. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin signed a memo earlier this month requiring commanding officers and supervisors at all levels to hold a stand-down day within the next 60 days to discuss extremism in the ranks with their personnel. Leaders have the discretion to tailor discussions with their personnel as appropriate, but such discussions should include the importance of our oath of office; a description of impermissible behaviors; and procedures for reporting suspected, or actual, extremist behaviors in accordance with the DoD, the memo says. The stand-downs are the first part of an initiative to better educate ourselves and our people about the scope of this problem and to develop sustainable ways to eliminate the corrosive effects that extremist ideology and conduct have on the workforce, the memo says. The Navy is the first military branch to publicly announce its plans to comply with the requirement, according to American Military News. Commanding officers are required to hold the stand-down by April 2, during which they are to conduct a group re-administration and reaffirmation of the oath of office/oath of enlistment, a Sunday message from Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. John Nowell Jr. says. All uniformed and civilian personnel will be required to take the oath, American Military News reports. As public servants, we took an oath to the Constitution and we will not tolerate those who participate in actions that go against the fundamental principles of the oath we share, particularly actions associated with extremist or dissident ideologies, the message says. There will also be a review of the meaning of the oath and actions that betray the oath, the letter says. Commanding officers are also provided with resources and a discussion guide but have the discretion to tailor discussions with their personnel as appropriate. Typically, stand-downs are held to address safety protocols after accidents but have also been used to address other issues, such as sexual assault, Military.com reports. The stand-downs come as The New York Times reports investigators are looking into how many current and former military members may have been involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, during which a mob in support of then-President Donald Trump stormed the building as Congress was certifying the election results. A CNN analysis found that a disproportionate number of people arrested so far in connection with the attack have ties to the military. An NPR analysis found nearly 1 in 5 people charged seemed to have a military history. Pentagon officials have said they are still investigating extremist behaviors among members, NPR reports. Princeton, N.J.The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) announced today the nine communities chosen as finalists for the 2021 RWJF Culture of Health Prize. The Prize honors communities working at the forefront of advancing health, opportunity, and equity for all. The coronavirus pandemic and growing inequity across the nation underscore the importance of community conditions and collective efforts for all residents to have a fair and just opportunity for health. The following nine finalist communities are one step closer to the national Prize: Anne Arundel County, Md. Bastrop County, Texas Freehold Borough, N.J. Green Bay, Wis. Howard County, Md. Palm Beach County, Fla. Rocky Mount, N.C. Salinas, Calif. Thunder Valley Community-Oglala Lakota Nation (Oceti Sakowin Territory) RWJF Culture of Health Prize communities offer important examples of places where partners are coming together to cultivate a shared commitment to equity so all residents can thrive, said Richard Besser, MD, RWJF president and CEO. We look forward to connecting and speaking with residents and community leaders in each finalist community to learn more about how they are achieving meaningful and lasting change. To earn Prize finalist status, communities had to demonstrate how their efforts reflect the six Prize criteria: Defining health in the broadest possible terms. Committing to sustainable systems changes and policy-oriented long-term solutions. Creating conditions that give everyone a fair and just opportunity to reach their best possible health. Maximizing the collective power of leaders, partners, and community members. Securing and making the most of available resources. Measuring and sharing progress and results. 2021 Prize finalist communities will participate in a series of virtual community reflection conversations with leaders, residents, and representatives from the Prize program. The Foundation will also be evaluating the 2020 Prize finalists over the next several months. The process of choosing 2020 Prize winners was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 finalists are Addison, Ill.; Alamosa County, Colo.; Chickaloon Native Village (Alaska); Douglas County, Kan.; Drew, Miss.; National City, Calif.; Tulsa County, Okla.; and Worcester, Mass. The 2020 and 2021 Prize winners will be announced this fall. The winners will receive a $25,000 prize and opportunities to share their story and lessons learned with the country. Learn more about the previous 44 Prize winners at www.rwjf.org/prize. The Prize is a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. About the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute The University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute advances health and well-being for all by developing and evaluating interventions and promoting evidence-based approaches to policy and practice at the local, state, and national levels. The Institute works across the full spectrum of factors that contribute to health. A focal point for health and health care dialogue within the University of Wisconsin-Madison and beyond, and a convener of stakeholders, the Institute promotes an exchange of expertise between those in academia and those in the policy and practice arena. The Institute leads the work on the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps and the RWJF Culture of Health Prize. For more information, visit http://uwphi.pophealth.wisc.edu. About the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation For more than 45 years, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has worked to improve health and health care. We are working alongside others to build a national Culture of Health that provides everyone in America a fair and just opportunity for health and well-being. For more information, visit www.rwjf.org. Follow the Foundation on Twitter at www.rwjf.org/twitter or on Facebook at www.rwjf.org/facebook. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 00:55:34|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- South African Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology Blade Nzimande and other experts on Wednesday dispelled the COVID-19 related fake news including that the 5G causes COVID-19. Nzimande made the remarks while speaking at a virtual seminar to dispel myths about vaccines and variants. He said misinformation and propagating of fake news have affected the government's quest to vaccinate people. "Among these are the 5G myths that have led to cell phone towers being destroyed in some parts of our country. The public must be informed that the COVID-19 virus is purely biological and has no roots in any fourth industrial revolution technology like 5G," said Nzimande. He said while people are being killed by COVID-19, fake news make them doubt the usefulness of vaccines and other public health interventions. Nzimande said the vaccines have been in use for over 200 years across the world and people should embrace them. Gadisi Nthambeleni, scientific officer from the University of Cape Town, said there is a need to educate those who are "anti-vaccine" to accept it. He said people in the country were vaccinated against tuberculosis, measles and other infections and should be aware of the benefits of vaccines. "People have to be educated about the benefits of vaccines. The government should answer the questions which the people have about vaccines to educate them. Some believe in the myth that vaccines are here to depopulate the country. This vaccine is here to help and not destroy," he said. Over 10 experts addressed the seminar, sharing myths and truths about the COVID-19 and the variant. A World Health Organization representative also addressed the conference. Enditem The United States Food and Drug Administration says Johnson & Johnsons one-shot vaccine is safe and protects against severe COVID-19 disease. The agency released documents Wednesday in preparation for a meeting Friday to decide if it will approve the vaccine for emergency use. The Johnson & Johnson, or J&J, large Phase 3 trials involved almost 44,000 volunteers. The vaccine appeared to work best in the United States with an efficacy rate of 72 percent. In Brazil the rate was 68 percent. And in South Africa, where a fast-spreading coronavirus variant was first identified last October, the rate was 64 percent effective. That is up from the 57 percent reported earlier by the drug maker. The FDA also examined the vaccine in connection with coronavirus variants, especially those found in Brazil and South Africa. The independent scientists found that 28 days after vaccination the efficacy rate increases to as high as 87 percent. Volunteers in the trial reported only minor side effects from the shots such as pain, fever and headache. By early February, there was no COVID-related deaths in the group of volunteers receiving the vaccine. There were seven deaths in the study group that received a placebo, a shot filled with an inactive substance. The J&J vaccine can be stored at normal refrigeration temperature easing distribution operations. The two-shot vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, already approved for emergency use, require extreme cold storage. J&J told Congress at Tuesdays hearing that it expected to provide 20 million shots by the end of March and 100 million by summer. Worldwide, the company said it aims to produce around one billion vaccines by the end of the year. In other vaccine news, Ghana received the first transport of coronavirus vaccine from the United Nations-backed COVAX program on Wednesday. The organization said it shipped 600,000 treatments of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to the African country. It expects to send some to the Ivory Coast later this week. And COVAX hopes to provide at least 2 billion shots to other poor countries. Im Caty Weaver. Hai Do wrote this story for Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor. ____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story refrigeration - n. the process of keeping food, drink or medicine cold in order to preserve it distribution - n. the act of delivering something to people or places Watch out, Marveltheres a new universe coming to town. Disney is reportedly creating brand new content for its Disney+ streaming service based upon its Magic Kingdom theme park. The Hollywood Reporter states that sources close to the matter explain that the first installment to kick off this universe will be called The Society of Explorers and Adventurers, and follows characters from the park and its classic films which are living in an alternate reality. The same Hollywood Reporter article confirms that Ron Moorea screenwriter best known for his work on the Star Trek TV franchisehas been tapped to help develop this Magic Kingdom universe. I decided to go there mostly because my childhood was built around a lot of things that were Disney, said Moore of the job on The Hollywood Reporters podcast. The opportunity to get to work on a lot of the classic IP that Disney has and things in their library that meant so much to me as a child growing up and that I have shared with my children ultimately was just something I couldnt pass up. Nerdist notes that creating more content for TV is certainly a good move for Disney at the moment, especially given the success of original Disney+ series such as WandaVision and The Mandalorian. It may also be worth saying that the media company may be looking for ways to sustain this momentum as the Marvel Cinematic Universe is entering its senior Phase 4. Further information regarding the Magic Kingdom Universe remains pending. PRIMARY and Secondary Education minister Cain Mathema yesterday blamed sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by Western countries and lack of staff supervision by headmasters for the poor pass rate recorded in the last public examinations. Mathema said this in a ministerial statement which he issued in the National Assembly following a public outcry over poor Grade 7 results released early this month. Teachers unions and civic groups recently accused government of neglecting the education sector, hence the poor results. But Mathema said the high failure rate in the Grade 7 examinations was expected as the COVID-19 pandemic had also severely affected the smooth flow of the education calendar. Buhera Central MP Matthew Nyashanu (Zanu PF) had asked him to explain the high failure rate by Grade 7 pupils in the 2020 examinations after pupils registered a 37,11% pass rate, with some schools at 0% . Nyashanu also alleged that there was laxity at schools by teachers to properly instruct the students, adding that the teachers were abandoning pupils. Clearly, this is an element of indiscipline on the part of the schools administrators if they are not making sure that teachers and other school employees do what they are supposed to do. We are very clear on that one, and we will do the best we can to make sure that this indiscipline does not prevail in our schools, Mathema said. Having said that, we also need support from the international community in education as well, but as long as there are sanctions, we will have a big problem. We already have a challenge because of the economic sanctions that were imposed on our country. As for the teachers being paid in US dollars, well, that decision is made by the relevant authority, that is, the Ministry of Finance. It is definitely not feasible at the moment. We cannot pay them as we just said the economy is not performing. Early this month, Presidential spokesperson George Charamba torched a storm after he blamed teachers for the below par performance by Grade 7 pupils. He said better results could have been achieved if the majority of teachers were dedicated to duty. Charamba also labelled some union leaders as criminals bent on tarnishing governments image instead of promoting development of the education sector. His accusations came after the Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union of Zimbabwe and the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe accused government of neglecting basic school infrastructure and denying rural schools access to e-learning facilities. Asked whether it made sense for Grade 7 pupils who failed to proceed to Form 1, Mathema said they would continue as it was not a terminal examination. Zimbabweans need to know that the Grade 7 examination is not the old Standard Six certification, which was a terminal examination that could give candidates or students avenues to professions. The Grade 7 examination marks the end of primary school by measuring what candidates know and are able to do. After this examination, all students are absorbed in the secondary education system because the Grade 7 examination is not a terminal examination, but a formative one which gives information to receiving teachers in the secondary school system, he said. But Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Primary and Secondary Education chairperson Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga said normally when a child failed Grade 7, they were also likely to fail their O Level examinations. Mathema said the country needed at least 3 000 more schools and more teachers, adding that recently 3 000 teachers were employed into the system. On boarding school places, Mathema said the country only had 24 600 places at boarding schools throughout the country both at public, private and mission schools. We had over 300 000 learners who sat for Grade 7 examinations, and there is need for more investment, both in the public and private sector so that those parents who want their children to go to boarding schools will let them go, he said. Government yesterday indicated that it was looking at ways to open schools in a safe environment following a drop in COVID-19 infections and deaths. This was revealed by Information minister Monica Mutsvangwa during her post-Cabinet media briefing. Regarding primary and secondary education, the responsible ministry continues to work with the Ministry of Health and Child Care to prepare for the inevitable reopening of schools, Mutsvangwa said. Meanwhile, the training of school health co-ordinators and the assessment of the schools preparations for the resumption of learning is ongoing. Government is doing its best to ensure that adequate precautionary measures are taken before schools are reopened. Pertaining to the COVID-19 rollout programme which was launched last Thursday, and commenced on February 22, Mutsvangwa said government would guarantee that there was a steady flow of vaccine doses to ensure that all the targeted groups received the jabs. The Republics of India and the Russian Federation have donated COVID-19 vaccines to the tune of 75 000 and 12 000 doses to Zimbabwe, respectively. The vaccines come on the backdrop of another 200 000 doses donated by the Peoples Republic of China. She said the Information ministry had also included journalists in phase one of the inoculation exercise, where they will be considered as essential services as they played a crucial role in providing information that saved lives. Similarly, the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructural Development has requested the Minister of Health to designate the roads sector as an essential service under the lockdown regulations, she said. Newsday Family of 11-y-o boy who died trying to stay warm during Texas freeze sues power company for $100M Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin The family of a Texas boy who died while trying to stay warm inside their home after they lost power during a snowstorm a week ago is now suing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas and Entergy Corporation for $100 million, accusing them of gross negligence. Maria Elisa Pineda, 34, a Honduran immigrant and mother of the deceased 11-year-old, Cristian Pavon Pineda, told the Houston Chronicle that her son died on Feb. 16, less than 24 hours after seeing snow for the first time. Everything was well. He was happy that day. He was not at all sick, she told the Chronicle. Pineda said she recorded video and took pictures of her son in a red hoodie playing outside their Conroe mobile home that lost power when the snowstorm hit on Feb. 15. The frolicking only lasted for about 30 minutes as his gloves had gotten wet. By 11 p.m., Pineda said Cristian, who shared a bed with his 3-year-old stepbrother, went to bed under a pile of blankets in an attempt to stay warm, according to the lawsuit cited by ABC News. He never woke up the following day, even though his stepbrother did. This is a young man who died for no reason other than corporate decisions," the Pineda family's attorney, Tony Buzbee, told ABC News. "There are a lot of decisions that were made a long time ago that led to the death of this young man. That is unacceptable." Buzbee represents seven families of more than 30 people who died as of Sunday, reportedly due to the impact of the snowstorm in Texas. "Cristians lawsuit is the first and his lawsuit should be the first," Buzbee said. "This kid is going to change Texas and God bless him for that. While an official cause of death is pending for the 11-year-old, his family insists that he froze to death, the Conroe Police Department said. In a statement to ABC13, Entergy said in reaction to the lawsuit that: "We are deeply saddened by the loss of life in our community. We are unable to comment due to pending litigation." ERCOT, which manages the flow of electric power to more than 26 million Texas customers, representing about 90% of the states electric load, also responded in a statement defending their grid operators' decision to cut power during the storm. "We haven't yet reviewed the lawsuits and will respond accordingly once we do. Our thoughts are with all Texans who have and are suffering due to this past week. However, because approximately 46% of privately-owned generation tripped offline this past Monday morning, we are confident that our grid operators made the right choice to avoid a statewide blackout, their statement said. More than $88,400 has been raised in a GoFundMe campaign to help transfer Cristians body back to Honduras to allow his extended family to see him before he is buried. We are trying to raise funds to be able to transfer the body to Honduras. His wish was to see his grandparents again and that is what the mother wants to fulfill, the campaigns organizer, Jaliza Year, wrote. A memorial service is also expected to be held for Cristian at The Woodlands First Baptist Church. The pastor handling the arrangements was not immediately available for an interview when contacted by The Christian Post on Tuesday. remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Sorry! This content is not available in your region MOSCOW Major opposition parties in the South Caucasus nation of Georgia vowed on Wednesday to boycott Parliament until the government releases a prominent opponent detained recently. The instability adds yet another country to a growing list of former Soviet republics gripped by political tensions, street protests or outright war. Just in the past few months, demonstrations have shaken the government in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan has endured its third post-Soviet revolution, and Azerbaijan and Armenia have fought a vicious war over a breakaway enclave. Though politics in Georgia, a country of just over four million people, have always been sharp-elbowed, the arrest of the opposition leader, Nika Melia, suggested an alarming pivot to more repressive policies by the governing party, Georgian Dream. A major fire broke out in a heap of dried wooden pallets at the Media Junction in the Ga West District of the Greater Accra Region on February 22. The incident was said to have occurred at around 4:45 pm. The fire subsequently spread to one womans Tilapia Stall. Speaking to an eyewitness, she said they tried to call the Ghana Fire Service who could not arrive at the scene early enough. Fortunately, one of the neighboring factories, Twellium Industrial Company, which is about 1.0km away from the junction sent over their Fire Truck to save the situation. Onlookers say the Twellium Fire engine worked tirelessly to bring the fire under control till the Ghana National Fire Service Luckily there were no casualties reported. Residents and Witnesses have commended Twellium Industrial Company Limited greatly for their act of benevolence and Professionalism to help stop the fire and have encouraged other companies to do the same as it has turned out to be important to have a fire truck at the factory. The reason behind this fire disaster has not been known so far. An inquiry is under process. Source: peacefmonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The views expressed by public comments are not those of this company or its affiliated companies. Please note by clicking on "Post" you acknowledge that you have read the TERMS OF USE and the comment you are posting is in compliance with such terms. Your comments may be used on air. Be polite. Inappropriate posts or posts containing offsite links, images, GIFs, inappropriate language, or memes may be removed by the moderator. Job listings and similar posts are likely automated SPAM messages from Facebook and are not placed by WFMZ-TV. Mr. Sund testified that the F.B.I. report reached the Capitol Police the day before the attack, but not him directly. He said that an officer assigned to a law enforcement joint terrorism task force received the document and sent it to an unnamed intelligence division official on the force. It did not go any further than that, Mr. Sund said. Robert J. Contee III, the chief of Washingtons Metropolitan Police Department, who also testified, argued the F.B.I. should have more urgently flagged the information with a phone call, rather than an after-hours email. Though the F.B.I. bulletin has received widespread attention, it was but one piece of a broader mosaic of publicly available information indicating that the Trump supporters who planned to demonstrate in Washington on Jan. 6 stoked by Mr. Trump and his allies were primed to storm the Capitol and, in some cases, to commit violence. And the former Capitol security officials assertions about a lack of intelligence seemed at odds with closed-door testimony last month from the acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda D. Pittman. She told a House committee that the department knew there was a strong potential for violence and that demonstrators would be armed, but that it failed to take preventive steps. Chief Contee also laid the blame for the slow deployment of the National Guard on the Defense Department, noting that the Army had expressed reluctance to send in troops even as the violence escalated. In written testimony, Mr. Sund reported that a top general said in a 2:30 p.m. call on Jan. 6 that he did not like the visual of the military guarding the Capitol and that he would recommend the Army secretary deny the request even after the mob had breached the building. I was stunned at the response from Department of the Army, Chief Contee testified Tuesday. In response to questions from Mr. Peters and Ms. Klobuchar, the three former security officials all confirmed that they believed the siege was coordinated. These people came with equipment, climbing gear, Mr. Sund said, adding that two explosive devices placed near the Capitol distracted the authorities. Mr. Contee noted that there was evidence the attackers used hand signals and coordinated their use of irritants, like bear spray. By Ruth Anderah A wife has forgiven her husband in court who said to have been stealing her money while away abroad. The wife through a state attorney Viola Tusingwire tendered in a letter before the court indicating that they have settled and are no longer interested in the matter. A 61-year-old Fred Kaliba a businessman and a resident of Kulambiro Village in Kampala had been battling with charges of theft of his wifes $30465(about shs 111.7m) from her account in KCB bank. The prosecution says Kaliba between the year 2013 and 25th August 2015 at Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) in Kampala stole cash $30465 the property of his wife Winfred Kaliba. According to Winfred, her husband has been withdrawing money from her account using her ATM card while she is away in the United States for green pasture. The Canadian Press As COVID-19 vaccine supplies ramp up across the country, most provinces and territories have begun planning to give second doses in the coming weeks. More than 23 million people across Canada have now had at least one dose of a vaccine. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says by the summer, Canada will have enough vaccines so that every eligible resident will have gotten their first dose, and by September, it will have enough doses for everyone to be fully vaccinated. The National Advisory Committee on Immunization has recommended that Canada turn toward the ultimate goal of fully immunizing the population, now that supplies of COVID-19 shots are increasing. The advisory panel said those at highest risk of dying or becoming severely ill should be prioritized for second shots, either after or alongside first doses for anyone else who is eligible for a vaccine. Since the novel coronavirus is still circulating in Canada, NACI is still recommending that the second dose be received up to four months after the first dose, in order to maximize the number of people who get at least one shot. Here's a list of the inoculation plans throughout Canada: Newfoundland and Labrador All people in the province aged 12 and older can now book an appointment for a first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. So far 2.19 per cent (11,446) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- Nova Scotia Appointments for an initial COVID-19 vaccine shot are now open to people 12 years of age and older. Currently, the Pfizer vaccine is the only one approved for use in children aged 12 and up. The Moderna vaccine is only available for those 18 and older. Under the province's accelerated vaccine plan, someone who received their first dose of vaccine on March 22 and is due for a second dose on July 5 will now be able to reschedule their second appointment for as early as the week of June 20. The province has stopped the use of AstraZeneca's vaccine as a first dose. The Health Department says the decision was based on "an abundance of caution'' due to an observed increase in the rare blood-clotting condition linked to this vaccine. The department also says it will reschedule anyone who was to receive AstraZeneca to instead be inoculated with Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna "in a timely manner." --- Prince Edward Island In Prince Edward Island, residents as young as 16 can book a COVID-19 vaccine. People 16 years and older who have certain underlying medical conditions, pregnant woman and eligible members of their household can also get a vaccine. So far 8.11 per cent (12,868) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- New Brunswick Residents in New Brunswick aged 12 to 17 are now eligible to book an appointment for a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Officials also say residents 55 and older who received an Astra-Zenaca vaccine for the first dose at least eight weeks ago can now get a second dose of the vaccine with informed consent. So far 5.08 per cent (39,633) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- Quebec In Quebec, all residents 12 and older can book a COVID-19 vaccination appointment. The province's health minister says Quebecers 12 to 17 years old will be fully vaccinated by the time they return to school in September. Quebec also says it will shorten the delay between first and second doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to eight weeks from 16 weeks. The province says more than 5.8 million doses of vaccine have now been administered, with more than 58.1 per cent of the population having received at least one dose. --- Ontario All adults in Ontario can now book COVID-19 vaccine appointments. People turning 18 in 2021 can book Pfizer-BioNTech shots. Youth aged 12 and older can also book appointments across Ontario. They can book through the provincial online portal, call centre and through pharmacies offering the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the only shot authorized by Health Canada for use in youth aged 12 and older. Ontarians, meanwhile, are getting the option to shorten the interval between COVID-19 vaccine doses. Most people are being scheduled for doses four months apart, but officials say the new interval could be as short as 28 days. The plan will start with seniors aged 80 and older this week and the province will later offer second shots based on when people received their first. People will keep their original appointments if they dont re-book. The province aims to see all eligible Ontarians fully vaccinated by the end of September. Ontario is also resuming use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine but only as a second dose. Those who received the first dose of AstraZeneca between March 10 and March 19 during a pilot project at pharmacies and some doctor's offices in several Ontario communities will be first in line to receive their second dose. Ontario says more than 10 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have now been administered across the province. So far 4.68 per cent (687,894) of the population has been fully vaccinated --- Manitoba Manitoba is using the Pfizer vaccine for everyone aged 12 and up, and the Moderna vaccines for people aged 18 and up. These are available through a few channels including so-called supersites in larger communities. The province is also allowing anyone 40 and over to get an Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine through pharmacies and medical clinics, subject to availability. People 30-39 can get a shot if they have certain underlying health conditions such as chronic liver failure or severe obesity. The province has opened up second-dose appointments to all Indigenous people aged 12 and up, to people with certain medical conditions such as severe heart failure and Down syndrome, and anyone who received their first dose on or before March 29. Provincial health officials say they now expect 70 per cent of Manitobans aged 12 and older to get a dose by the end of June. So far 7.75 per cent (106,678) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- Saskatchewan Saskatchewan says it reached the step two threshold of its reopening roadmap released last week, with over 70 per cent of residents age 30 and older having received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. That means restrictions will begin to be relaxed June 20, which includes easing capacity limits on retail, personal care services, restaurants and bars, although they must still maintain physical distancing among occupants or have barriers in place. The rules also raise caps on private indoor gatherings to 15, while capacity limits jump to 150 for both public indoor gatherings and all outdoor assemblies, whether public or private. Premier Scott Moe says once 70 per cent of the entire adult population is vaccinated, Saskatchewan can move to the third step of its plan and remove almost all of the remaining public health orders. Saskatchewan residents aged 12 and older are now eligible to book their first COVID-19 vaccine appointment. A school immunization program for those aged 12 to 18 will be introduced in June, but eligible residents of that age can also be immunized at clinics offering the Pfizer vaccine. Anyone 85 and older or anyone who received their first vaccine dose before February 15 can now book their second dose. Anyone diagnosed with cancer and solid organ transplant recipients will be receiving a letter of eligibility in the mail which will allow them priority access to a second dose. There are drive-thru and walk-in vaccination clinics in communities across the province. The province says 6.60 per cent (77,767) of the population has now been fully vaccinated. --- Alberta Every Albertan aged 12 and older is now eligible for a vaccine. As of May 27, 60.3 per cent of Albertans over the age of 12 had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The milestone means the province's second stage of easing restrictions can begin on June 10. It is subject to hospitalizations being below 500 and trending downwards. Some of the restrictions that would be lifted include allowing outdoor gatherings including weddings and funerals with up to 20 people. Restaurants would be allowed to seat tables with up to six people, indoors or outdoors. Retail capacity would also increase, and gyms could open for solo or drop-in activities with three metres of distancing. Dr. Deena Hinshaw, the province's chief medical officer of health, has said people who are immunocompromised can book a second dose three or four weeks after their first shot. All other Albertans are eligible to get their second dose three to four months after the first. For the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, the province lowered the minimum age to 30. They are, however, reserving the remaining supply for second doses when people are eligible. More than 250 pharmacies are offering immunizations. So far 8.82 per cent (388,200) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- British Columbia British Columbia is setting an end-of-summer target for everyone in the province to receive their second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has also announced a decrease in the time between the first and second dose of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, cutting the interval to eight weeks from 16 weeks. But the interval for people who received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as a first dose and are waiting for their second AstraZeneca shot may take longer. Henry said the province is waiting for results from international data on AstraZeneca, including the effectiveness of mixing vaccine shots and ongoing concerns about rare blood clots. Henry said the rollout of second doses will be similar to the first dose, with those at the greatest risk at the top of the list. Seniors, Indigenous people and those who are clinically extremely vulnerable were to start getting their invitations to book a second shot by the end of May. The province will try to ensure that everyone gets the same vaccine they were first administered, but a shortage of the Moderna vaccine may mean people will have to substitute it for a Pfizer shot. Henry said the National Advisory Committee on Immunization has reviewed the evidence on using different vaccines and has updated the guidance, confirming that while it is preferable to have the same product, it's not always possible. Pfizer and Moderna are the same type of vaccines. Families can get vaccinated together in B.C. as the government allows youth between the ages of 12 and 17 to get their COVID-19 shot. The shots will be administered at community clinics instead of in schools based on feedback from families, with 310,000 children in B.C. eligible to get the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which has been approved for that age group. As of Friday, about 3.1 million doses of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines had been administered in B.C., which means about 63 per cent of those eligible have got their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. So far 3.14 per cent (160,885) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- Nunavut Chief public health officer Dr. Michael Patterson says Nunavut has placed an order for doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine with the federal government to vaccinate people ages 12 to 17 in the territory. The Moderna vaccine is currently the only one available in Nunavut. Nunavut has opened vaccinations to anyone 18 and older. It is also offering shots to rotational workers coming from Southern Canada. In the territory, 36.44 per cent (14,113) of the population has now been fully vaccinated. --- Northwest Territories The Northwest Territories is now offering vaccinations against COVID-19 to young people between 12 and 17. The territory, which has only been using the Moderna vaccine, recently exchanged some of that for doses of the Pfizer product, which Health Canada has now approved for anyone as young as 12. So far 51.74 per cent (23,344) of the territory's population has been fully vaccinated. --- Yukon The territory is now vaccinating children aged 12 to 17. The government says clinics in most communities will be held in schools, while those in Whitehorse can get their shot at the Coast High Country Inn Convention Centre. The children will be getting the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The territory says because of limited supply and stricter handling requirements, the vaccine will only be available for a short time. It says second doses for those 12 to 17 will start on June 23 and medical travel will be supported for youth who aren't able to make the clinic date in their community. The Moderna vaccine is available to adults 18 years of age and older. The government says 59.34 per cent (24,763) of the population has now been fully vaccinated. --- This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 31, 2021. The Canadian Press Prime Minister is planning to visit and on Thursday. This will be his second visit to in less than two weeks, which is gearing for assembly elections. The PM will dedicate to the nation and lay the foundation stone for multiple infrastructure projects worth over Rs 12,400 crore in Coimbatore, where BJP enjoys a good vote bank. It may be noted, BJP joined hands with ruling AIADMK in for the upcoming election. On February 14th, Modi visited Chennai personally and shared stage with Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Paniswami to inaugurate various projects. Three days later from New Delhi, he dedicated two oil and gas projects to the nation and laid foundation stone of Rs 31,500 crore grassroot refinery to come up in Southern Tamil Nadu. During his visit on Thursday, the PM will dedicate Neyveli New Thermal Power Project to the nation. It is a lignite-based power plant designed for power generation capacity of 1000 MW, and has two units of 500 MW capacity each. Built at a cost of about Rs 8,000 crore, the pit head power plant will utilise lignite as fuel from the existing mines of Neyveli, which have sufficient lignite reserves for meeting the lifetime requirement of the project. The plant has been designed for 100% Ash utilisation. The power generated would benefit Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Puducherry, with Tamil Nadu having the major share of about 65%. Modi will also dedicate to the nation the 709 MW Solar Power Project of NLCIL, established over an area of about 2,670 acres of land across the districts of Tirunelveli, Tuticorin, Ramanathapuram and Virudhunagar. The project has been set up at a cost of over Rs 3,000 crore. He will lay the foundation stone of the extension, renovation and modernisation of Lower Bhavani Project System. The Bhavanisagar dam and the canal systems were completed in the year 1955. The Lower Bhavani System comprises Lower Bhavani Project Canal System, Arakankottai & Thadapalli Channels, and Kalingarayan Channel. It irrigates over 2 lakh acres of land in Erode, Tiruppur and Karur districts. The extension, renovation and modernisation of Lower Bhavani System has been taken up at a cost of Rs 934 crore under NABARD Infrastructure Development Assistance. The main objective is to rehabilitate the existing irrigation structures in the system and increase the efficiency of the canals. Apart from lining of the canals, repair and reconstruction of 824 sluices, 176 drainages and 32 bridges will also be taken up. Modi will also inaugurate the 8-laning of Korampallam Bridge and Rail Over Bridge (ROB) at V.O.Chidambaranar Port at Thoothukudi. It is one of the major ports in India. At present, 76% of the cargo is transported through road from/to the port using the existing Korampallam bridge, which was constructed in early 1964 with a 14 metre wide carriageway. An average of about 3000 heavy loaded cargo trucks move daily over this bridge, creating heavy congestion over the road and consequent delays and increase in turnaround time. In order to provide seamless evacuation of cargo and to avoid traffic congestion in the port area, the project of 8-laning of the existing Korampallam bridge and Rail Over bridge has been implemented. It involves widening on either side of the bridge and adding two lanes (8.5 m) on either side, along with widening the existing bituminous road on either side from TTPS Circle to City Link Circle. Constructed at a cost of about Rs 42 crore, the project has been implemented with funding support under the Sagarmala programme. Later in the afternoon, he will be going to Puducherry, which saw a political turmoil after the Congress government fell early this week. Earlier, Tamilsai Soundararajan replaced Kiran Bedi as lieutenant governor (LG) of with who was moved to the Union Territory from her position as Telangana governor earlier this week. The PM will lay the foundation stone for 4 laning of NH45-A 56 kms Sattanathapuram Nagapattinam package of Villupuram to Nagapattinam project covering Karaikal District. The capital cost to be incurred in this project is about Rs 2426 crore. He will also lay the foundation stone of the Medical College Building at Karaikal New Campus- Phase I, Karaikal District (JIPMER). The estimated cost of the project is Rs 491 crore. He will lay the foundation stone for development of Minor Port at under Sagarmala Scheme. Estimated to be built at Rs 44 crore, it will provide connectivity to Chennai and facilitate cargo movement for industries in Puducherry. He will also lay the foundation stone for various projects. A montage of microscopic images that show the stages of the cell cycle, in which a single cell duplicates its DNA and eventually divides into two "daughter" cells. Staining shows the cell nucleus in blue, and the microtubules in red. Credit: KTH Royal Institute of Technology/SciLifeLab With the hope of contributing to the fight against cancer, researchers in Sweden have published a new molecular mapping of proteins that regulate the cell division processidentifying 300 such proteins. The release of the data, which was published today in the scientific journal, Nature, is significant because it helps bring medical research closer to the point of being able to target specific proteins to treat cancer. Identifying and understanding what characterizes these proteins is important, says co-author Emma Lundberg, a professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology whose research group at Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Stockholm contributed to the mapping of these proteins. The long-term hope is that doing so will lead to progress in development of tailor-made cancer drugs and treatments, adapted to the specific anatomical condition of the individual patient in relation to the underlying disease, Lundberg says. In addition to the 300 newly-identified proteins, the researchers report that 20 percent of the human proteome (all protein molecules that the genome encodes for) indicates cell-to-cell variation, that is, fluctuation in gene expression within otherwise identical cells. This information presents medical research with new insights into the cell cycle, in which a balance is moderated between those proteins which promote cell proliferation and those which inhibit it. Lundberg says the work is now incorporated into the open-access research database, the Human Protein Atlas. "Our hope is that this provides a valuable resource for a better understanding of, among other things: cell-to-cell variation, the human cell cycle, and the newly-identified proteins in the cell cycle and their role in the formation of tumors," she says. In order to identify the cell cycle-specific proteins, the researchers used so-called immunofluorescent microscopy. The researchers then combined the collected data with RNA sequencing of individual cells to describe the temporal presence of RNA and proteins throughout the cell cycle. Explore further First comprehensive map of subcellular localization of proteins reveals new insights More information: Spatiotemporal dissection of the cell cycle with single-cell proteogenomics, Nature (2021). dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03232-9 Journal information: Nature Spatiotemporal dissection of the cell cycle with single-cell proteogenomics,(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03232-9 Two people have died this month after being taken to the Harris County Jail, including a 57-year-old homeless man who was processing into the lockup on a drug charge. Israel Iglesias, 57, was charged on Feb. 1 with felony delivery of a controlled substance for an alleged drug deal on Oct. 20, 2020, according to court records. He was brought to the Harris County Joint Processing Centers intake area on Feb. 8 and was awaiting a medical evaluation when he experienced a medical episode, said Jason Spencer, spokesman of the Harris County Sheriffs Office, which operates the jail. He died the next day. Another inmate died a week later in a separate incident on Feb. 17, one day after he was involved in an altercation with a detention officer, Spencer said. Houston police officers say Iglesias delivered 0.6 grams of methamphetamine to undercover narcotics officers, who had been conducting an investigation at a homeless camp in the northside. The officers arrived at the camp, 700 Booth St., after receiving a narcotics complaint, according to charging documents. Authorities saw Iglesias and asked him where they could buy methamphetamine, and Iglesias said he could get some from another man in the camp. After the officers gave Iglesias city of Houston money, he went to another tent and came back with a clear bag of what appeared to be methamphetamine, the officers said. They gave him a tip, later tested the substance and determined it was methamphetamine, they alleged. He was being held on a $1,500 surety bond, meaning he would typically have to pay $150 to be released. Iglesias had been convicted in Dec 1983 of burglary in Wisconsin, and again in 2004 on assault of a public servant in Webb County. He had an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement hold in 2009. Spencer said a second inmate, who is still unidentified, was found unresponsive in a Harris County Jail cell on Feb. 17. The cause of death is currently unknown and will be determined by an autopsy. The man, who was in his early 20s, was involved in an altercation with a detention officer the night before, according to the sheriffs office. The officer reported he struck the man in self-defense around 6:45 p.m. after the defendant attacked him inside the downtown jail at 701 San Jacinto. The man fell to the floor and was taken to the jails medical clinic, sheriffs office Spencer said. He was evaluated and determined to be healthy enough to return to his cell. He was pronounced deceased the next day at the hospital at 1:27 p.m. Houston police will investigate the death, as required by state law. samantha.ketterer@chron.com This story has been updated to reflect the allegation that Iglesias delivered the methamphetamine. Itanagar, Feb 24 : Buddhist monks in Arunachal Pradesh's Tawang have again strongly opposed the state government's fresh push for hydro power projects in the northeastern border state. The Save Mon Region Federation (SMRF), an organisation of Buddhist monks, in a statement, said that the proposed plants would not only affect the nesting grounds of the endangered black-necked crane but also threaten several holy Buddhist pilgrimage sites in the western region of Arunachal Pradesh. The statement said that most of the hydro power projects are proposed in the Tawangchu and Nyamjangchu river basins, a habitat of the black-necked crane, which is considered a holy embodiment of the 6th Dalai Lama who was from Tawang. "The power projects would damage the geographically-volatile and highly-seismic Tawang region. The villagers of the 27 villages would also be affected if the dams and reservoirs were constructed for the power projects," the SMRF said. The National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) has proposed to set up two hydro power projects with proposed generation capacity of 600 MW and 800 MW in Tawang district. Chief Minister Pema Khandu, on a number of occasions, has emphasised that works of under construction and proposed power projects must be stepped up for the betterment of the state and the country. The Union Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER) Ministry, in a tweet last week said: "With an aim to ensure infrastructure development in the northeastern region, Govt. of India undertakes a massive project to transform the future of hydroelectric power in Arunachal Pradesh." Official documents of North Eastern Electric Power Corporation (NEEPCO) said that there is a potentiality to generate around 70,000 MW of hydro power in Arunachal Pradesh, which is considered as a "power house of India". Both power projects have faced stiff resistance since 2011 from the monks of Tawang monastery and local villagers. In May 2016, two people including a Buddhist monk were killed and 10 injured in police firing at an anti-dam gathering in Tawang. One of the power projects (600 MW capacity) has been on hold following a complaint the SMRF lodged with the National Green Tribunal complaining of fraudulent studies behind preparation of the planning of the project. The SMRF statement reiterated its earlier allegation that the signatures of the leaders of the "Gram Sabha" for the Tawang Chu Stage-II were obtained fraudulently by the NHPC. It also said that the Arunachal Pradesh government should learn from the disaster at Uttarakhand's Chamoli district, where the hydroelectric project was completely destroyed by a deadly flash flood triggered by an avalanche on February 7. "Development cannot happen at the cost of environment... The government is wilfully blind to such risks and continues to actively promote massive hydro power projects. The people of Arunachal Pradesh have been struggling for years against dams and other forms of extractive development," it said. Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Edith Lois Dekich, of Ringgold, Georgia, 88, passed to her eternal home on February 21, 2021, at her residence. She was the daughter of the late Brown and Texie Hicklen. She was preceded in death by her husband, Milan Hall Dekich and her grandson, Kirk Wayne Alexander. Survivors include her three sons, Dr. Mark Anthony Dekich and wife Tess, Dr. Milan Brown Dekich and wife Barbara, Philip Neal Dekich and wife Barbara; daughter, Donna Ruth Alexander and husband Roger; eight grandchildren. Visitation will be at Heritage Funeral Home East Brainerd Chapel on Feb. 26, at 9 a.m. with the funeral service officiated by Dr. Milan Dekich following at 11 a.m. Interment will follow at the Chattanooga National Cemetery. Please visit Loiss tribute page at heritagechattanooga.com to live stream the funeral service and send condolences to the family. In lieu of flowers, the family request that memorial contributions in Loiss honor to the Fairview Church of God, Attn: Children's Camp Fund, 4154 Huckaby Bridge Road, Falkville, Al. 35622. Pallbearers will be Mark Dekich, Milan Dekich, Neal Dekich, Michael Dekich, Roger Alexander, Jimmy Martin. Honorary pallbearer will be Don Troup Ron Bridges. She was a devoted wife, loving mother, beloved grandmother, faithful friend, and blessing to everyone who knew her. She always had a song in her heart that she would willingly sing to anyone at any time. Her bright and cheery personality brightened the day of everyone around her as her unquenchable faith and love for her savior Jesus Christ was an encouragement and testimony to all of us. Proverbs 31:28-31 28 Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: 29 Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all. 30 Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. 31 Honor her for all that her hands have done, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate. If you have an event you'd like to list on the site, submit it now! Submit The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Efforts to ensure LGBT+ people are represented at the highest levels of government have stalled under Boris Johnson, according to the UKs first openly gay male MP. Lord Chris Smith said the glass ceiling in parliament had well and truly been broken in terms of gay and lesbian members of the Lords and Commons but claimed progress had since slowed. The glass ceiling in the cabinet has been broken by quite a number of us over the years, he said. Sadly at present they seem to want to put it back in again. Lord Smith, a former Labour cabinet minister, who revealed in 2005 he was HIV positive before standing down the same year, told the BBC in an interview to mark LGBT+ History Month that the prime minister had a blind spot on the issue. He encouraged Mr Johnson to look to the greater talent that is out there, saying it would include some people who happen to be lesbian or gay. He described the lack of openly LGBT+ cabinet ministers as a matter of great regret and urged the prime minister to bring in a more diverse team in the next year or two. A government spokesperson told the BBC the prime minister was committed to doing more to make sure the government fully represents the people it serves. Lord Smith of Finsbury, who as culture secretary introduced free admission to British museums and galleries, spent 12 years as the only openly gay MP in the Commons after his election in 1984. Chris Smith outside his home in 2005 after announcing he was HIV positive (The Independent) Labours 1997 victory made him the first known gay man to hold office in the cabinet. There had been other gay MPs and cabinet ministers, but they had all kept their sexuality secret. A trailblazer who has long campaigned on LGBT+ rights, Lord Smith broke another social barrier when he induced the Commons authorities to recognise his partner, Dorian Jabri, who was granted privileges previously only offered to the legal wives or husbands of MPs. Speaking to The Independent in 2005 after revealing his HIV diagnosis, he said there was still quite a lot of prejudice around even though it was just like any other illness. Recommended MPs urge government to bring forward legislation banning gay conversion therapy In a 2013 debate on whether to allow same-sex marriage in England and Wales, he said: My Lords, I happen to be gay. I was made this way. It is something I share with hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens who are worthwhile, virtuous, hard-working, responsible, loving members of society. I was proud to be part of the government who brought in so many changes for the better for lesbians and gay men and eliminated so many discriminations and inequalities. Some hurdles remain, however, and this is the highest of them. At least 45 openly gay, lesbian or bisexual MPs were elected to parliament in the 2019 election. The Scottish National Party has the highest proportion, with nine of its 47 MPs identifying as LGB. However there is not a single openly transgender MP. Lord Smith said that was a glass ceiling which still needed to be broken. The first openly lesbian MP, Maureen Colquhoun, died earlier this month at the age of 92. The former Labour MP had her relationship with Barbara Todd exposed by the Daily Mail in 1975. She faced the threat of deselection by her local constituency party and then lost her seat in the general election four years later. The Independent contacted the government for further comment. The German government is preparing to give 70 million euros a year to a foundation run by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). The Desiderius Erasmus Foundation will be able to spread its far-right propaganda with taxpayers money. According to the guidelines of the German parliament (Bundestag), a parliamentary group is entitled to state funds for its own foundation if it has been represented in parliament for more than one legislative term. The AfD entered the Bundestag for the first time in 2017 and, according to the guidelines, is eligible for financing following the Bundestag elections to be held in September this year. The party, which has described the Nazi regime as a speck of birdshit in over a thousand years of successful German history and called the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a monument of shame, can use the funding to influence research and teaching at universities, promote a new generation of party leaders, spread its far-right propaganda and support its co-thinkers all over the world. Party-affiliated foundations are not allowed to directly finance election campaigns and other party activities. They are allowed, however, to maintain their own study centres and information portals, organise training courses and meetings, and support party-affiliated students with generous scholarships. Such foundations also play an important role in foreign policy. They maintain dozens of subsidiaries internationally, sponsor co-thinkers and interfere in day-to-day politics in other countries. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation of the SPD, for example, is active in 100 countries, employs 600 people and supports 3,000 students with scholarships every year. The situation is similar for the CDUs Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the CSUs Hanns Seidel Foundation, the FDPs Friedrich Naumann Foundation, the Greens Heinrich Boll Foundation and the Left Partys Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. In 2019, the German government supported party foundations with a total of 542 million euros. This is almost three times the total 194 million euros that flowed into the coffers of various Bundestag parties in the form of election campaign subsidies and other aid. Funding for the foundations stems from the budgets of various ministries. The foreign and development ministries pay for international activities, the education ministry for scholarships, and the interior ministry for political education. In addition, the foundations receive lump-sums that are not tied to specific projects. These proceeds are used, for example, to organise study trips abroad, social discussion evenings etc. The inclusion of the Desiderius Erasmus Foundation in the illustrious circle of government-financed party foundations will enable the AfD to spread its fascistic propaganda with state funds. There is no doubt about the extreme right-wing credentials of the foundation. According to Saba-Nur Cheema, the educational director of the Anne Frank Educational Centre, the leadership of the Desiderius Erasmus Foundation is made up of race theorists and conspiracy ideologists, volkisch pseudo-scientists and hard-core, right-wing extremists from the milieu of the Identitarian movement and Gotz Kubitscheks Antaios publishing house. Foundation President Erika Steinbach (Image: German Bundestag / CC BY-SA 3.0) The chairwoman of the foundation is Erika Steinbach, who headed the revanchist Federation of Expellees from 1998 to 2014 and sat in the Bundestag for the CDU from 1990 to 2017. At the beginning of 2017, she quit the CDU to protest against the acceptance of refugees in Germany. Steinbach is notorious for her relativisation of Nazi crimes. Last year, she attracted attention because she denounced Kassel district president Walter Lubcke on Twitter for accommodating refugees in the region. Four months later, Lubcke was murdered by a neo-Nazi. The familys lawyer accuses Steinbach of complicity in Lubckes death. With state funding, the AfD Foundation will be able to finance the work of postgraduate students and other students in departments of far-right professorssuch as the Berlin historian Jorg Baberowskiwho are intent on rehabilitating National Socialism. Baberowski defends the Nazi apologist Ernst Nolte, dedicated his last book to the Nazi crown jurist Carl Schmitt, and seven years ago declared that Hitler was not vicious. When the AfD Foundation was founded in 2018, it came as no surprise that Baberowski was proposed as a member of the board of trustees, along with the social democratic racist Thilo Sarrazin. Far right professors are already mobilising at universities. Only a fortnight ago, 70 academics, including Baberowski, founded a Network for Academic Freedom , which denounces any criticism of right-wing and historical revisionist positions as an attack on academic freedom. There is no legal basis for the financing of the AfD foundation; such funding relies only on guidelines issued by the Bundestag. A majority in the Bundestag has until now opposed any legal regulation of state subsidies to party-affiliated foundations. The decision as to whether the AfD Foundation will receive the state funds rests with the Bundestags budget committee and there is every indication the committee will approve the funding. Such an approach would be in line with the previous attitude of the Bundestag parties towards the AfD, which has been deliberately built up and promoted by the ruling class. The AfD has already received huge amounts of funding from the state. In 2018 and 2019, for example, the AfD received more than 10 million euros in state support each year. This does not include the lucrative parliamentary remuneration, expense allowances, other benefits and staff salaries paid to all deputies. The German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) welcomed the heads of the AfDs parliamentary group to his official residence after the last federal election, and the Bundestag parties elected AfD representatives to head important parliamentary committees. Once again there was no legal basis for these measures, just as the AfD has no legal right to funding for its foundation; the only justification are the guidelines of the Bundestag. One consequence of this support for the AfD is that the head of the Bundestags budget committee, which decides on funding for foundations, is the AfD deputy, Peter Boehringer. Eleven other AfD representatives also sit on the committee, including former CDU deputy Martin Hohmann, a close friend of Erika Steinbach. The German government has failed to respond to protests against the state funding of the right-wing extremists. Meron Mendel, director of the Anne Frank Educational Centre in Frankfurt, reports in the taz newspaper that he has not even received an acknowledgement from the ministers office in response to a petition with 6,000 signatures he sent to the Ministry of the Interior. If, contrary to expectations, the Bundestag fails to immediately provide funding for the foundation, the AfD is likely to sue for state subsidies at the Federal Constitutional Court. It has undertaken such appeals on two other occasions, but in cases involving much smaller sums. Both of the AfD appeals were turned down by the Court, but only on purely formal grounds. The court did not rule on the substance of the cases. Ultimately, the state funding of the far-right is not a legal, but a political question. For years, the AfD, whose leading personnel is largely recruited from other Bundestag parties and the state security agencies, has been systematically promoted by the ruling elites. The ruling Grand Coalition (Social Democratic Party and the conservative CDU and CSU) has largely adopted the AfDs policies of repelling and repressing refugees and building up state and military forces at home and abroad. In Thuringia, the CDU and FDP formed an alliance with the AfD to elect a state premier, who only resigned following nationwide protests. At universities, far-right professors like Baberowski are defended by all of the political parties. The Socialist Equality Party, however, which criticised Baberowski for trivialising the role of Hitler and which fights for a socialist program against capitalism, fascism and war, has been placed under surveillance by Germanys domestic intelligence agency (Office for the Protection of the Constitution, BfV). While the AfD Foundation can look forward to receiving millions from the state treasury, the Berlin finance office has withdrawn non-profit status for the Association of Those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime (VVN-BdA), which includes Auschwitz survivors such as Esther Bejarano. Accused of alleged left-wing extremist influence, the existence of the organisation is now under threat. The reason for the official support for the AfD and its foundation is growing social polarisation, which is being further exacerbated by the Corona crisis. Faced with the threat of class struggles, Germanys establishment parties are closing ranks and moving collectively to the right. As was the case in the 1930s, the international ruling class is again turning to authoritarian forms of rule. Subscriber content preview By JILL LAWLESS Associated Press LONDON Britain plans to use its presidency of the Group of Seven economic powers to push for an internationally recognized system of vaccine passports that could allow world travel to resume, though Prime Minister Boris Johnson acknowledged Tuesday that the idea raises complex ethical issues. The British government previously said it was not considering issuing vaccine passports to people who had been inoculated. But it has now set up a review into COVID status certification that will examine ways people can prove they don't have the coronavirus, either through vaccination or by showing a negative test result. . . . Denton, TX (76205) Today Scattered thunderstorms. High near 75F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Locally heavier rainfall possible.. Tonight Showers and thundershowers this evening will give way to steady rain overnight. Low 64F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected. Locally heavier rainfall possible. Given the year we have all had and the changes in working patterns we have had to adopt, IT professionals could be forgiven for being unsettled in their work. For many though, 2020 has been a year of growth and acceleration. As we have seen in our analysis of compensation and job opportunities, it's a really good time to work in tech. The rapid adoption of cloud, the increase in application development, the focus on collaboration tools and communication, and the growth of ecommerce, data science and business analytics has meant there has been plenty of demand for IT skills and services. As one McKinsey survey found, as a result of COVID-19, "companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years and the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has accelerated by a shocking seven years." Technology change, it seems, is for the long haul but it's easy to suggest that IT professionals should be grateful, while other industries suffer and job losses mount. The reality is that now technology is more business critical than ever before and IT professionals are on the frontline, not just keeping the lights on across a wide range of industries but also managing expectations of change and increasing demands for automation. So, are IT professionals happy in their work? The 2021 IDG Insider Pro and Computerworld IT Salary Survey of 1,172 IT professionals asked 'how satisfied are you today with your total compensation package given your base salary, bonuses and benefits in relation to your job responsibilities?' Over half of respondents were either very satisfied (16 percent) or satisfied (42 percent), which when compared with our 2020 survey showed little change. Clearly the current climate has done little to alter how people feel about their work, although we did find that the percent of job changes due to layoffs doubled in the 2021 survey. With 20 percent neither satisfied or dissatisfied and 20 percent either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied, there remains a significant number of IT professionals that are not content in their current roles, or within their current working environments. In some instances, there is proportionately more dissatisfaction within certain roles, such as help desk and enterprise application integration, two areas that would no doubt have been affected considerably by the pandemic. There are also notable differences in age groups with, in general, older workers (age 45+) reporting higher levels of satisfaction. So, what does this mean in terms of job movement? Is dissatisfaction leading to a desire to move jobs? Available for hire We asked our survey about their job search status plus any key reasons behind their decisions to perhaps move on to pastures new. The numbers looking for a new position in another company, either actively (14 percent, compared with 12 percent last year) or passively (35 percent, the same as last year), roughly match the number of IT pros dissatisfied in their current role. Six percent, meanwhile, are looking for new positions within their current organization. Just under half (45 percent) are not looking to move anytime soon. Those workers in the 18-34 age group are the most likely to be actively looking for a new job at another organization (22 percent versus 12 percent of those between 35-44, 14 percent of those 45-54, and 9 percent of those 55 and over). That's not that surprising given the traditional structure of roles and acquisition of skills. So, what are the key reasons for looking for alternative employment? Top of the list, unsurprisingly, is looking for higher compensation (61 percent, up from 59 percent last year), followed by seeking career advancement (47 percent) and looking for more interesting or challenging work (38 percent). Those seeking a more diverse workplace has doubled this year, from 5 percent in 2020 to 10 percent in 2021, with just under a quarter (21 percent) seeking more responsibility. Interestingly, especially during these uncertain times, job stability is not a particularly big issue. Just 14 percent of respondents (the same figure as the 2020 survey) cite job stability as a reason for looking for new employment. It suggests that their current roles are not under threat and given the reasons we have outlined above, in terms of reliance on IT and industry acceleration, this is perhaps fair. Certainly, when we asked what matters most about your current work, stability was the second highest factor on the list at 36 percent (compared with 38 percent in 2020). No surprise, base pay dominated at 40 percent (compared to 37 percent last year). The potential for career advancement and development was more likely to be mentioned this year (24 percent) compared with last year (19 percent). Perhaps a reflection of current, pandemic-induced working practises, one of the biggest declines was job atmosphere/community at 20 percent, down from 27 percent last year. Vacation time (22 percent, down from 27 percent last year) and commute distance/location (10 percent, down from 17 percent last year) were also notable changes. In terms of demographics, we found that job stability was more important to middle management (43 percent) and that more females (33 percent) than males (22 percent) cited potential for career advancement and development as a key factor. "I want to create a more defined role that utilizes my strengths to influence, support and deliver operational technology across the business and manufacturing," said a female IT director from New York. "This means, aligning the business with a value-add process structure through technology, SCADA systems on the plant floor," adding, on a personal level, she would like this year to continue developing and improving project management capabilities. IT workloads are on the rise With the increase in expectations and acceleration of digital transformations across industries, it is perhaps no surprise that so many IT professionals are predicting rising workloads. Over the next 12 months, 59 percent of respondents expect IT workloads to increase. Last year, this figure was still high (55 percent) but no one could really have foreseen what was to come. Now, we understand the growing importance place on tech and what this will mean to workloads in future. "2021 will challenge us to keep-up with newer tech," said one Maine-based application developer, "and I will be looking for a compensation increase once the pandemic subsides and business resumes to pre-pandemic levels." That may be wishful thinking. IT professionals face a myriad of challenges in the coming months, of which keeping up with technology advancements is the most obvious. In fact, 44 percent cited it as their top challenge, although this was a reduction on last year's survey when it topped the poll with 54 percent. Interestingly, all top four challenges from last year's survey dropped this year. Aligning IT to the business fell from 38 percent to 35 percent, IT talent shortage fell from 37 percent to 30 percent and gap between skills required and training available fell from 34 percent to 29 percent. The main reason for this is the impact of COVID-19. The addition of a pandemic-related challenge a change in work schedules due to COVID was chosen by 28 percent of IT pros, while economic challenges rose from 16 percent in last year's survey to 29 percent in this years survey. This was fairly even across age groups, except for the 1834-year-olds, of which less than a quarter (23 percent) saw the economy as a major challenge. But while youthful optimism blunts the realities of economic pressures, this age group did see issues ahead with a mismatch between required skills and training (35 percent). Only the 35-44 age group was more concerned at 36 percent. Senior IT leaders, by contrast, cited IT talent shortages (43 percent) and alignment of IT with the business (48 percent) as major challenges for 2021. As one India-based data center manager put it, "I'm looking for opportunities that offer more learning and more challenges in the job where I can grow professionally." That pretty much sums it up for most respondents. Throw-in increased compensation and you have a full house. For most IT pros, the prospects are good but in a time of continued skills shortages and increased demands for IT, employers need to be more aware of what it takes to keep most, if not all of their IT staff happy. [ Still to come this week: detailed analysis of technology certifications, and how to get your hands on the full Salary Survey 2021 data set. ] EMPLOI Precedent : Chef d'equipe de la Promotion en Sante Publique (PHPTL) Ellen DeGeneres surprised Jim Mattress Mack McIngvale with $20,000 for his Winter Storm Community Outreach fund, courtesy of Shutterfly. McIngvale stopped by The Ellen DeGeneres Show virtually Wednesday to talk about his work to help Houstonians recover from last weeks winter storm. Russian MPs propose criminal sanctions for humiliation of Great Patriotic War veterans RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov 17:13 24/02/2021 MOSCOW, February 24 (RAPSI) Russian lawmakers have drafted a bill on criminal punishment for insulting veterans of the Great Patriotic War, according one of the amendments authors Irina Yarovaya. The MPs propose to qualify distribution of knowingly false statements about veterans as one of the forms of Nazism rehabilitation. The initiative in particular envisages criminal sanctions for disparagement of the veterans honour or dignity, Yarovaya has stated. Chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee Vladimir Shamanov, head of the State Duma Committee for Information Policy, Technologies and Communications Alexander Khinshtein and his deputy Sergey Boyarsky are among other sponsors of the document. ScottishPower said it helped 300,000 customers who struggled with their energy bills last year (Joe Giddens/PA) ScottishPower has said electricity usage dipped last year in its retail section, as the Covid-19 pandemic changed habits across the country. Electricity use was down 6%, while gas use dropped 3%. While many people worked from home during the period, increasing their domestic consumption, factories and offices were empty for significant periods, so they used less energy. Business electricity use fell by 13%. But changes to domestic energy consumption did not make people more likely to leave the energy supplier. It had 4.7 million retail customers at the end of December, unchanged on a year earlier. Many customers have also struggled to pay their bills, as those on furlough only took home 80% of their previous salaries while many others lost their jobs. Chief executive Keith Anderson said: As we have all spent much more time at home, energy has become even more important. At ScottishPower weve had to pull together and work together with our employees, customers and suppliers to support the communities we serve. Throughout the pandemic we supported over 300,000 of our customers by offering help with their bills and options on how to pay. ScottishPowers unique position in the UK - operating across networks, renewables and retail sectors means every aspect of our businesses can support the race to net-zero and the green recovery as we emerge from the pandemic Keith Anderson, ScottishPower He told the PA news agency that by keeping the retail business, which is currently facing challenges, it will complement renewable generation and the networks business, which are growing. We are still absolutely convinced that the retail sector will turn into a sector based around services, linked to the transition to a hydrogen economy, electric transport and electrification of heat, he said. Earnings before income, tax, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) increased by 46% at ScottishPowers renewables business to 674.6 million. The same measure rose 2.7% at the energy networks division to 889.8 million and 130% in the retail business division to 220 million. However, the Ebitda figure does not account for many costs, including the cost of customers who cannot pay their bills. The business will unveil further figures in April. ScottishPower announced it will start adding solar panels to one of its Cornwall wind farms, creating the first site where the two technologies are paired with battery storage. Engineers will install up to 10 megawatts (MW) of panels at the Carland Cross site, which houses 20MW of wind turbines and 1MW of batteries. Mr Anderson said: Its really innovative stuff that were doing here and we think it is a big bit of unlocking the road to net-zero by using multiple bits of technology on sites to get the absolute maximum out of our renewable energy. Keeping all three elements on the same land optimises the use of grid cables leading to the wind farm, rather than requiring miles of extra wires to connect three different sites. The land itself can still be used for other purposes in Cornwall it houses a broccoli farm. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, pictured in June 2020, spoke with his Australian counterpart about online platform regulation Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Australian counterpart Scott Morrison plan to coordinate their efforts to make tech giants pay media outlets for their content, Ottawa said Tuesday after a conversation between the two leaders. "The prime ministers noted the growing cooperation between Canada and Australia on the regulation of online platforms," a statement from the Canadian prime minister's office said. "They agreed to continue coordinating efforts to address online harm and ensure the revenues of web giants are shared more fairly with creators and media." Their conversation, which took place Monday, came after Facebook blocked Australian users from accessing news content on its platform in response to a regulatory bill being considered in the country's Parliament. The US social media giant announced Tuesday, however, it would remove the news ban after the move sparked outrage in Australia and internationally. The Australian bill, the first of its kind in the world, is vehemently opposed by tech titans thanks to provisions which would govern the online financial relationship between such companies and media. Prime Minister Scott Morrison, pictured in March 2020, has angrily accused Facebook of making a decision to "unfriend" Australia Canada, the European Union and others have also sought to regulate major tech sector players, especially Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple, including via France's 2019 tech tax. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has led the effort to establish such a tax at the international level. Explore further Australia and Facebook in talks over sweeping news ban 2021 AFP Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Immigrants line up in the dining hall at the U.S. government's newest holding center for migrant children in Carrizo Springs, Texas, on July 9, 2019. (Eric Gay/AP Photo) Biden Administration Reopens Trump Migrant Facility President Joe Bidens administration has reopened a facility for holding minor migrants that was built during the Trump administration, despite Biden decrying the use of such facilities several years ago. The facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, was reopened to add capacity, where these children can be provided the care they need while they are safelybefore they are safely placed with families and sponsors, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. She called it a temporary reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic and said the administration intends to close it. The Department of Health and Human Services directed The Epoch Times to a Feb. 22 press release that announced the reopening of the facility. In the update, the agency said updated safety measures amid the pandemic made it necessary to reactivate the temporary facility for the placement and care of unaccompanied children. Minors began arriving at the facility on Monday, for the first time since 2019. The facility will hold approximately 700 children between the ages of 13 and 17 who will have completed quarantine for COVID-19. As of Feb. 18, the agency was caring for 6,800 unaccompanied children. The length of care is on average 42 days. Both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in 2019 decried the Trump administrations holding of minors in what they referred to as cagesthe same types of holding areas used during the Obama administrationa reporter noted to Psaki. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas looks on as President Joe Biden signs an executive order on immigration, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Feb. 2, 2021. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo) Joe Biden said, Under Trump, there have been horrifying scenes at the border of kids being kept in cages. And Kamala Harris said, basically, babies in cages is a human rights abuse being committed by the United States government. So how is this any different than that? he asked. We very much feel that way, Psaki responded. Let me be clear here. One, theres a pandemic going on. Im sure youre not suggesting that we have children right next to each other in ways that are not COVID safe, are you? she added, claiming this is not kids being kept in cages despite the facility being opened and used under the previous president. This is a facility that was opened thats going to follow the same standards as other HHS facilities. It is not a replication. Certainly not. That is never our intention of replicating the immigration policies of the past administration, she continued. But we are in a circumstance where we are not going to expel unaccompanied minors at the border. That would be inhumane. That is not what we are going to do here, as an administration. We need to find places that are safe under COVID protocols for kids to be, where they can have access to education, health and mental services consistent with their best interest. Our goal is for them to then be transferred to families or sponsors. Lawmakers reacted swiftly, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Anyone want to post odds on the media dedicating weeks of non-stop coverage about how Biden is locking up children in cages? he said, referring to how outlets heavily covered criticism of the Trump administrations migrant policies. Theyre not kids in cages anymore. Theyre kids in migrant facilities. What changed? added Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) earlier this month blamed the Biden administrations orders and promises on the surge in people arriving at the southern border. Tragically, as a result of the promise of amnesty, more unaccompanied children are being put into the custody of human traffickers and facing horrific abuse, he wrote in a tweet. (Reuters) - GameStop Chief Financial Officer Jim Bell will resign on March 26, the video game retailer said on Tuesday, with the departure coming weeks after big bets by individual investors triggered massive price swings in the company's stock. Bell's resignation was not because of any disagreement with the firm, the company said. GameStop said it intends to appoint Chief Accounting Officer Diana Jajeh to the role of interim CFO, if a permanent replacement is not in place at the time of Bell's departure. The company has begun a search for a permanent CFO and ... The New York City Department of Education is involved in a controversy about the Wakanda salute. It draws attention to the character of the people running that department. Unfortunately, it is necessary to explain that what is to follow is not satire. It is a recording of actual events reported in the "mainstream" media. It concerns two New York City school superintendents who claim they were fired for not giving the "Wakanda" salute. The "Wakanda" crossed arm salute originated from the comic bookinspired movie Black Panther. In the 2018 movie, the cross-arm motion represented Black empowerment. Karen Ames is suing the New York Department of Education for $150 million because she claims she was fired for age, sex, and ethnic bias. Ames had been praised by the newly appointed New York City Schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, for her success in raising math scores. Carranza was appointed New York City Schools chancellor by Mayor de Blasio in March 2018. Ames now claims she was fired after sharing a Holocaust story and refusing to perform the "Wakanda" salute. Ames claims she was forced to take a demotion in order to preserve her pension. She says she was targeted because she is over 40, and Jewish. Ames says she was grilled about her "ethnic background" and criticized by a colleague for sharing her grandparents' experience during the Holocaust in Poland. She claims she was "admonished" for declining a request to take part in the comic book movieinspired "Wakanda Forever" salute to "black power." In August 2018, Ames was summoned to DOE headquarters, where Cheryl Watson-Harris, Carranza's top deputy, handed her a termination letter. Watson-Harris told her the department was "was moving in a new direction." Watson-Harris has subsequently moved to DeKalb, Georgia, where she was hired as superintendent with an annual salary of $325,000. That is $75,000 less than the president of the United States receives. In addition to being terminated, Ames's colleagues were prohibited from communicating with her, and staff were ordered to "eradicate" any reference to Ames. Ames was sent down the 1984 memory hole. Ames had attended an "implicit bias workshop" where superintendents were asked to tell their personal stories. When she related a story about her Jewish grandparents' situation during the Holocaust, a colleague, Rasheda Amon, informed her, "That is not about being Jewish! It's about black and brown boys of color only." Apparently, her personal story did not include "black or brown boys of color." A second NYC superintendent was also terminated. Rafaela Espinal, former head of New York's Community School District 12, was fired because she declined to take part in a group "Wakanda Forever" salute to black power. She was criticized by Bronx superintendent Meisha Ross Porter, who frequently asked gatherings of DOE administrators to do the "Wakanda Forever" salute. Porter allegedly referred to the 1960s Black Panther Party when encouraging staff members to make the gesture. She told them about her father's involvement in the Black Panthers. Porter was later promoted to executive superintendent. Espinal, who identifies as an Afro-Latin, claims that a fellow DOE administrator told her she wasn't "black enough" and she should "just learn to be quiet and look pretty." Obviously, she was not told that by a white male, because that certainly would have made the front page. Espinal was fired in August 2018 because she did not fit into the department's new agenda. She was one year short of earning a lifetime DOE pension and accepted a lower-level position in order to keep her benefits. She is also suing the New York City Department of Education for $40 million. A DOE spokeswoman told the New York Post that the department is committed to a "safe, inclusive work environment" and denied any claims of discrimination. She asserted that the "Wakanda Forever" salute is a symbol "used to represent the Bronx," not black power. But is it possible that this gesture could be easily misinterpreted? Apparently, that was Espinal's problem. People frequently misinterpret gestures. Some people have been fired for making the "OK" gesture or even cracking their knuckles. YouTube screen grab. John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (Algora Publishing). He has a Master of Arts degree in international relations from St. Marys University. He is retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. He is featured on the BBC's program Things We Forgot to Remember. A judge will rule next week whether a Winnipeg man, who was identified on security video by his own family members, is the same man who attacked a 15-year-old boy with a hammer, embedding it in his skull. A judge will rule next week whether a Winnipeg man, who was identified on security video by his own family members, is the same man who attacked a 15-year-old boy with a hammer, embedding it in his skull. Jerry Kipling, 30, stood trial this week accused of attacking the boy after striking up a conversation while in line at a Selkirk Avenue pizza restaurant on May 30, 2020. According to an agreed statement of facts provided to the court, the boy and his attacker had struck up a conversation when the attacker showed the boy the contents of his backpack, including a hammer and what appeared to be a knife. The two "appeared to be getting along and were laughing," before the boy collected his order and made his way towards the exit. Thats when the attacker followed him and hit him in the head with the claw end of the hammer. The handle of the hammer broke off, leaving the claw end embedded in the boys skull. The attacker picked up the hammer handle and ran from the store. "The force of that blow must have been extremely powerful," Crown attorney Ari Millo told provincial court Judge Murray Thompson in a closing argument Tuesday. "This was a completely unprovoked attack on an unarmed 15-year-old boy in broad daylight that had disastrous consequences for the victim." While the court will never know why the boy was assaulted, there is no question Kipling was his attacker, Millo argued, pointing to the testimony of an aunt and cousin who both identified Kipling as the man caught on security video at the Pizzarama restaurant and other surveillance video in the area. Marie Kipling, the accuseds aunt, contacted city police when she saw a security video picture investigators had distributed of the attacker, Millo said. "Marie Kipling had no doubt whatsoever that this was her nephew Jerry Kipling," Millo said. "When she had an opportunity to observe the surveillance, that concrete ID did not change in the slightest. Defence lawyer Mike Cook argued the evidence of the family members, while strong, was not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Cook said the case against his client was weakened by security video that showed a suspect with no tattoos on his arms. When arrested two weeks after the attack, Kipling had a cross tattoo on his forearm. While he could not rule out Kipling getting the tattoo after the attack, "I suggest maybe we just have the wrong guy," Cook said. The boy spent three weeks in hospital and underwent two surgeries, with at least one more still to come, medical records provided to the court show. The boy, who has not yet returned to school, "maintained excellent brain function throughout his convalescence," but has lost strength in his right arm and hand as a result of the attack, the report said. Thompson will deliver his verdict March 5. dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca Time lapse of the Super Soaker launch. Three rockets launched with the mission, two using vapor tracers to track wind movement and one releasing a water canister to seed a polar mesospheric cloud. The green laser beam visible at the top left is the LIDAR beam used to measure the artificial cloud. Credits: NASAs Wallops Flight Facility/Poker Flat Research Range/Zayn Roohi Since the late 1800s, observers have searched the polar skies for elusive, high-flying clouds that shine in the darkness. These polar mesospheric clouds, or PMCs, are wispy swarms of ice crystals that form in the late spring and summer over the North and South Poles. Observers spot them best in the twilight hours, when the Sun illuminates them from beyond the horizon against a dark sky. More than just a pretty sight, they also hold clues to what's going on in Earth's atmosphere. "What has attracted a lot of interest in these clouds is their sensitivity - they're occurring just on the edge of viability in the upper atmosphere, where it's incredibly dry and incredibly cold," said Richard Collins, space physicist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and lead author of the paper. "They're a very sensitive indicator of changes in the upper atmosphere - changes in temperature and/or changes in water vapor." Collins and his collaborators suspected that PMCs could be associated with cooling in the upper atmosphere - and he set out to try to understand the microphysics of the process. In a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, they shared results from NASA's Super Soaker mission, a small suborbital rocket launched in Alaska, showing that water vapor in our upper atmosphere can precipitously lower the surrounding temperature and initiate one of these bright shining clouds. To test this out, they decided to release a small amount of water and create their very own PMC. They specifically launched at a time - January in the Arctic - which is typically inhospitable to the formation of PMCs, hoping they could nevertheless catalyze one. "We wanted to make sure to avoid mixing artificially created and naturally occurring PMCs," said Irfan Azeem, space physicist at Astra, LLC in Louisville, Colorado and principal investigator of the Super Soaker mission. "That way we could be confident that any PMC we observed was attributable to the Super Soaker experiment." The Super Soaker rocket launched in the early morning hours of January 26, 2018, from Poker Flat research range in Fairbanks, Alaska. It reached an altitude of about 53 miles when the team triggered the explosion of their cannister of about 485 pounds of water. Eighteen seconds later, the beam from a ground-based laser radar detected the faint echo of a PMC. The researchers plugged those measurements into a model that simulated PMC production. They wanted to know how the air where the water was released would have had to change in order to create a PMC like the one they observed. "We don't have direct temperature measurements of the cloud, but we can infer that temperature change based on what we think is required for the cloud to form," Collins said. The model showed that significant cooling must have happened. "The only way with the amount of water present that we could get a cloud form was to say that in the body of the cloud, there was a temperature drop - about 45 degrees Fahrenheit ( 25 degrees Celsius) in temperature." Simply introducing water to the region, the results suggested, led to a significant local temperature drop. "This is the first time anyone has experimentally demonstrated that PMC formation in the mesosphere is directly linked to cooling by water vapor itself," Azeem said. The paper goes on to connect the results to the reality of space traffic, as water vapor is a common byproduct of satellites and rocket launches. In the days of the space shuttle, for instance, a single launch was responsible for about 20% of the PMC ice mass observed in a season. But more water vapor won't mean temperature dropping without bounds, Collins explains. PMCs act like a thermostat. As the water vapor freezes, it turns into ice crystals. But those ice crystals absorb heat even better than water in vapor form. As the ice crystals heat up, they eventually sublimate back into vapor, and the cycle repeats. "And so there's a yo-yo back and forth, regulating the temperature of the change produced by the injected water vapor," Collins said. Still, increased water vapor will affect how and when PMCs form. For those looking to predict PMC formation, keeping track of both natural and human-injected water vapor will be key to success. "It depends on the amount of space traffic, on what happens if the water vapor budget up there increases," Collins said. "If we had a major amount of new traffic then we're no longer in an ambient natural environment and we would have to start modeling this." Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. Over 100 Congress members urge Biden admin. to strengthen US ties with Armenia Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A bipartisan group of over 100 members of Congress is urging the Biden administration to hold Azerbaijan, Russia and Turkey accountable for the recent fighting with Armenia that displaced thousands and killed hundreds. The United States cannot allow Russia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan to solely dictate and dominate the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, reads a bipartisan Armenian Caucus letter co-signed by 101 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The conflict started in the 1980s when the Soviet Union began to fall apart. The Nagorno-Karabakh region is recognized internationally as part of Muslim-majority Azerbaijan even though it has a majority Armenian population and is controlled by ethnic Armenians. While Russia brokered a ceasefire in 1994, clashes reignited last September, with both sides accusing each other of targeting civilian communities. The fighting ended in November with Armenia agreeing to a peace deal brokered by Russia. This agreement brought an end to the fierce combat, but it has done little to address the immediate and significant problems of feeding, sheltering, and ensuring the safety of thousands of displaced families during the COVID-19 pandemic, the lawmakers contend in the letter dated last Friday. In violation of the ceasefire, Azerbaijan also refuses to free dozens of Armenian prisoners of war and apprehended civilians, which illustrates how this agreement fails to address the structural issues that have caused uncertainty and fueled the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict for decades. There remain several important issues that must be resolved and many critical questions that must be answered before a binding and durable peace settlement can be reached. Armenians recognize the region as the Republic of Artsakh, which Armenians say is part of their ancestral homeland. We urge you to identify ways we can provide additional economic assistance to Armenia to support its democracy and development as well as respond to the significant number of displaced people who have fled the conflict in Artsakh, the letter reads. We also request that your Administration identify ways in which our economic, cultural, and other ties to Armenia can be improved to benefit Armenia and the large Armenian American diaspora in the United States. According to the legislators, those steps should include the formal recognition of the Armenian Genocide by President Biden on April 24 to follow in the footsteps of both the House and Senate who passed resolutions recognizing the fact of the Genocide during the 116th Congress. The Armenian genocide refers to the Ottoman Empires alleged systematic extermination of its minority Armenian subjects in their historic homeland within Ottoman Turkey and of those who lived in other parts of the territory constituting present-day Turkey. According to estimates, about 1.5 million people were killed in the genocide, which lasted from 1913 to 1923. Some historians see the genocide as a precursor of genocides the world witnessed later, including the Holocaust. According to The Wall Street Journal, about 2,855 Azeri soldiers were killed in the recent six-weeks fighting, which also reported that Armenia said more than 3,000 of their troops died. The total number of civilian casualties is reportedly around 150. Armenian Caucus founding Co-Chair Frank Pallone, D-N.J. New Jersey, who spearheaded the letter, said he appreciates the overwhelming bipartisan support we received for this letter. It shows how important these issues are to the U.S. Congress, especially in the aftermath of the unprovoked Azerbaijani and Turkish attacks on Artsakh last fall, Pallone added. The U.S. can and must do more to help the thousands of displaced families from Artsakh that fled to Armenia because of the war and to pressure the Azerbaijani government to release the dozens of prisoners of war it continues to hold. All of this has caused a great deal of uncertainty in the region and continues to threaten Armenias young democracy. The Armenian Council of America welcomed the letter. We applaud Armenian Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Frank Pallone for his steadfast leadership, as well as Caucus leaders Reps. David Valadao, Jackie Speier, Gus Bilirakis, Adam Schiff, and all of the signatories for coming together in this important effort to urge the Bidens administration to work closely with Americas democratic allies Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh, as they face an existential threat from the Islamist armies of Turkey and Azerbaijan, the council said in a statement. This month, a bipartisan coalition of 54 Senators also sent a letter to President Joe Biden, expressing their concern over a deteriorating human rights record in Turkey. However, the U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern noted that the letter failed to mention the domestic crackdown on Christianity, by which the government has systematically deported Christians from Turkey. Last October, an estimated 100,000 people marched through the streets of Los Angeles, California, to call for an end to the fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia. We stand with our brothers and sisters in Armenia & Artsakh, & the diaspora in L.A., Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti tweeted at the time. We need our national leadership to step up & help bring peace to the region. Turkey must disengage. On Oct. 8, Schiff, who was at the protest, spoke with Armenian Ambassador Varuzhan Nersesyan about the military campaign that was being aided and abetted by Turkey and the foreign fighters it is bringing in from Syria. They also discussed the deliberate bombing of a historic Armenian Church, the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral, in the city of Shushi. Schiff vowed that not one dime more of U.S. aid will be sent to Azerbaijan or Turkey. For decades, through the OSCE Minsk Group, the United States has supported a peaceful, democratic, and negotiated resolution to the dispute surrounding Nagorno Karabakh, Schiff said. We have persisted in this policy even as Azerbaijan launched countless assaults and as their leadership frequently threatened war to redraw the line of contact by force. Sars-Cov-2 mutations found in Maharashtra, Kerala samples India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Feb 24: Scientists globally have been worrying about some mutations of Sars-Cov-2. Officials say that samples of E484K and N440K have been taken from some people in Kerala and Maharashtra. The numbers refer to the change in the pathogens protein, which can tweak its structure. At least one of these changes, E484K has been established to reduce the efficacy of the vaccines and make the immunity from a previous infection ineffective, a report in the Hindustan Times said. "There is no direct relation between the recent surge in Covid-19 cases in Maharashtra and some other states where the mutations N440K and E484K," the report said while citing Dr. Balram Bhargava, director general of the ICMR. A new COVID-19 challenge: Mutations rapidly popping up along with cases Dr. Bhargava also said that these two virus strains have been detected in other countries too and are not specific to India alone. They have been found earlier in some states in India earlier as well, he also said. The South African variant has nine mutations that change its structure, including E484K that occurs in the spike protein, the component of the virus which plays a role in entry into host cells, the report also said. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 8:31 [IST] Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. HERNDON, Virginia, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- On February 16, 2021, Codan Limited announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire 100% of the shares in U.S.-based company, DTC, from a private equity company. The acquisition is expected to be completed by April 30, 2021, subject to regulatory conditions typical for transactions of this nature. DTC is an established commercially-off-the-shelf technology provider of high bandwidth wireless communications with capabilities in MIMO Mesh networks and next generation software defined radios that stream data across its self-forming and self-healing networks. DTC is a trusted and long-term supplier for more than 20 key U.S. government agencies, as well as the "Five Eyes" intelligence communities, including Military, Special Forces, Border Control, First Responders and Broadcasters. DTC is headquartered in the U.S., with locations in the UK and Denmark. Codan's Chief Executive Officer, Donald McGurk, said "The acquisition of DTC is consistent with Codan's well-publicized strategic growth plan for our Tactical Communications business. This is focused on providing total voice, data and video communications solutions by transitioning from a traditional voice-only platform." Codan's President for Tactical Communications, Paul Sangster, said "DTC is an important strategic acquisition for us and brings complementary capabilities to our existing tactical communications solutions. We will be able to add immediate value by integrating DTC's and Codan's sales and marketing teams as we open new geographic routes to market. Over the long term, our combined engineering capabilities will allow us to bring unique communications solutions to a diverse global customer base from military to security to broadcasting." DTC's Chief Executive Officer, Juan Navarro said "Codan is a perfect fit for DTC given our shared dedication to meeting our customers' mission critical communications needs. DTC's product portfolio is complementary to Codan's Tactical Communications solutions across the markets we jointly serve. We believe that there is excellent cultural alignment, and DTC looks forward to working with Codan to effect a seamless integration into the Codan group." About DTC Headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, DTC is a world leader in Commercial-off-the-Shelf ("COTS") mission critical tactical communication solutions for the Military, Law Enforcement, Intelligence Agencies and Unmanned Systems. DTC's differentiated Waveforms deliver the greatest range and throughput with the lowest latency, yielding secure real-time situational awareness in the most challenging environments. Contact Elaine Wilde, DTC Marketing M: 703-307-0520 E: elaine.wilde@domotactical.com About Codan Codan is a global technology company that develops robust technology solutions to solve customers' communications, safety, security, and productivity problems in some of the harshest environments around the world. Media Contact Francesca Doyle, Codan Communications Marketing M +61 407 095 986 E: francesca.doyle@codancomms.com Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/540657/DTC_Communications_Logo.jpg The French filmmaker Julie Delpy is still best known as an actor, but shes been building a varied and impressive filmography as a feature writer and a director since the early part of the century. Her new picture, My Zoe, in which she also stars, is an unusually compelling domestic drama with sharp ears, a sharp eye, and up to a point, sharp teeth. Delpy plays Isabelle, a geneticist living in Berlin with her young and adorable daughter Zoe. Her ex-husband, James (Richard Armitage), seems a perpetual and arbitrary thorn in her side, constantly needling her about visitation days and the competence of babysitters. The bickering doesnt stop when disaster strikes. While their daughter has surgery to relieve the pressure on her brain caused by an aneurysm, Isabelle and James argue about their married sex life. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) Special Envoy to China and columnist Ramon "Mon" Tulfo, who recently admitted having received shots of the COVID-19 vaccine made by China's Sinopharm last year, disclosed on Wednesday that "thousands" of government officials have also been inoculated by his source despite the absence of regulatory approval in the Philippines. Tulfo said he was not aware of the exact number but he was told that officials from the executive, legislative, military, police and local government received the same vaccine he got in October 2020. He mentioned that Cabinet secretaries and members of the Presidential Security Group, as earlier reported, were vaccinated. "Legislative, Executive, and police, miiltary, yes," Tulfo told CNN Philippines' News Night. "I'm not aware of the numbers but I was told that it's by the thousands." He did not reveal where and from whom he received the doses but shared that the vaccination took place in a private property and his supplier was "a philanthropist." Tulfo added that he received the first dose alongside a former provincial governor, and the second dose with a police official, whose names he refused to disclose. Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration allowed the President's security to use the unregistered Sinopharm vaccines through a "compassionate permit" in the absence of Emergency Use Authorization. However, Tulfo said that at the time of his vaccination alongside other state officials, he was not aware of the permit. Only three manufacturers have been granted Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA US' Pfizer BioNtech, UK's AstraZeneca and China's Sinovac. Regulators and health officials have repeatedly warned against the use of unregistered vaccines due to the potential health risks. Conflict of interest Tulfo said he accepted the unregistered vaccines because he was applying to be a local distributor for Sinopharm. He denied that this venture would be in conflict with his position as envoy to China, by arguing that he did not use his position to get the supplies. Tulfo said he is not even sure if he is still an envoy since he was unable to have his appointment renewed when it lapsed supposedly in March 2020. He was also not informed if the appointment was revoked. "The appointment was neither revoked or renewed so I was in limbo," said Tulfo. FDA Director General Eric Domingo said the agency will investigate Tulfo for using smuggled vaccines. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. A once bustling five-star resort in Bali is now unrecognisable as the Covid-19 pandemic forces tourists out of the island and luxury hotels are left abandoned. The Padma Resort in Legian, on the island's west coast, stretches more than 6 hectares, boasts five swimming pools, multiple restaurants and overlooks the beach. Usually at this time of year the resort would be at almost full capacity but as the global pandemic continues to wreak havoc across Indonesia, the hotel now stands empty. A once bustling five-star resort in Bali is now unrecognisable as the Covid-19 pandemic forces tourists out of the island and luxury hotels are left abandoned (pictured Padma Resort in Legian on New Year's Eve) The Padma Resort in Legian, on the island's west coast, stretches more than 6 hectares, boasts five swimming pools, multiple restaurants and overlooks the beach Ross Taylor, the president of the Western Australia based Indonesia Institute said he has been in talks with the owner of the Padma Resort, and fears it'll be sometime before Australians are allowed to visit. 'I was talking to the owner yesterday and he was saying it's really eerie because the five swimming pools are just lying idle,' Taylor told The West Live. 'There's not one room taken, it's just deadly quiet, and he said at this time of year, normally, they'd be running at 98 per cent capacity.' Some living in the Indonesian island have been lucky enough to visit the Padma Resort and have the luxury hotel all to themselves. Photos which are in stark contrast to a pre-Covid life show visitors swimming in the many pools at the resort that are now completely deserted. Entry to Indonesia is only open to foreign nationals already holding a valid stay permit who must return a negative coronavirus test before they fly and quarantine for 14 days upon their arrival. For a country that relies heavily on tourists to stay afloat, the pandemic has left many locals and businesses struggling to make ends meet. Travellers are seen enjoying a dip in the pool at the Padma Resort on Bali's west coast before coronavirus hit Usually at this time of year the resort would be at almost full capacity but as the global pandemic continues to wreak havoc across Indonesia, the hotel now stands empty Mr Taylor said while the resorts may be empty, most hotels had been using the time off to renovate and revamp their venues for when tourists are finally allowed back in. 'So what their plan is in Bali is once we get over this COVID issue ... is to bounce back better and stronger than before,' he said. But he expects lounging around at Bali resorts won't be a reality for Australians until at least next year. Bali officials are now asking the Indonesian government to explore the possibility of 'travel corridors' with certain countries. These could include opening up travel with low-risk countries that have successfully administered mass vaccination programs such as China. Travellers would need to be vaccinated and return a negative Covid-19 result before arriving in Bali. Bali has had more than 32,000 coronavirus cases and 881 deaths. Indonesia has had more than 34,000 deaths (pictured tourist at Padma Resort) Authorities have also pushed for tourism workers to receive the vaccine first as 130,000 doses were delivered to the island this week as part of the second phase in Bali's capital Denpasar. Bali has had more than 32,000 coronavirus cases and 881 deaths. Indonesia has had more than 34,000 deaths. The Indonesian government predicted $14billion was lost from tourism in 2020. Foreign tourist arrivals in Indonesia slumped 89.22 percent year-on-year to 164,970 in August 2020. Meanwhile, Bali arrivals plunged 100 percent to just 12. Pre-COVID, more than a million Australians travelled to Indonesia each year and made up more than a quarter of Bali tourists. International holiday bookings surged by as much as 600% after Britain laid out plans to gradually relax coronavirus restrictions, giving battered airlines and tour operators hope that a bumper summer could come to their rescue. EasyJet said flight bookings from Britain jumped over 300% and holiday bookings surged by more than 600% week on week after the government indicated on Monday that travel could restart from mid-May. Holiday company TUI UK said that its bookings surged 500%, while holiday and budget airline group Jet2 said its bookings were up 600%. This summer is make-or-break for many airlines and holiday companies which are struggling to survive with close to a year of almost no revenue due to pandemic restrictions. Without it many will need extra funds after burning through cash reserves. Bookings flooded in on Monday evening and Tuesday despite ongoing uncertainty over exactly how and when international routes can reopen, helping some share prices. Shares in easyJet were up 3% in mid-morning trading, paring earlier gains of as much as 11%. While British tourists are some of the biggest spenders in Europe, the presence of a more infectious variant of coronavirus in the UK could alarm some countries. France and Spain have shut their borders to most UK travellers due to variants. UK holidaymakers will know more on April 12 when the government publishes a travel review. It has said that a lockdown ban on most international travel will stay until at least May 17. That should give airlines time to plan their summer schedule, a process which takes months. EasyJet said trips to beach destinations such as Malaga, Alicante and Palma in Spain, Faro in Portugal and the Greek island of Crete were the most popular destinations with holidaymakers keenest to travel in August, although July and September were also popular. TUI said destinations in Greece, Spain and Turkey were the most booked overnight, with people opting to go from July onwards. July and the start of school holidays was also popular for Jet2, which said mainland Spain and its islands, plus Portugal, Greece, Cyprus and Turkey were the biggest destinations. Travel site Skyscanner said flight bookings made on Monday were 69% higher than the previous day, with visitors to its flight checking website jumping 55% immediately after UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's announcement of a roadmap for easing lockdown restrictions. Spain was the top destination. "Our data shows that travellers are very well tuned into any updates about restrictions. We are seeing this latest news translate into a surge in travel demand," said Skyscanner flights chief Hugh Aitken. Britain's route back to normality is helped by rapid progress with its vaccine plan. Over 17.7 million people, or a quarter of the population, have already had a first dose of the jab. The government is also considering options for vaccine passports. The airlines and travel companies hope such progress will mean that from May 17 the UK will end its holiday ban and remove a 10-day quarantine requirement, a big deterrent for holidaymakers, and some of its COVID-19 testing rules. Led by founder and CEO, Tiffany Brown, 400 Forward was named in recognition of the 400 th black female becoming a licensed architect in the United States. 400 Forward has embarked on a mission to seek out and support the next 400 licensed, black women architects. As the software and technology partner for 400 Forward, GRAPHISOFT will empower the organization's chosen mentees with full access to an education version of Archicad and GRAPHISOFT Learn, the company's education and learning portal. Live, hands-on training with GRAPHISOFT experts on an on-going basis will strengthen the partnership. "We are extremely proud to be involved with this effort. Our long-standing commitment to education could not be better served," said Tracey Gatland, General Manager, GRAPHISOFT North America. "Ensuring equal access to and proficiency with the latest, proven technology in use today in the fields of architecture and design will create a sturdy foundation for 400 Forward to succeed in its goal of empowering the next generation of black female architects." "Our organization was born out of a realization that comprehensive programs that introduce black girls to architecture were lacking," said Tiffany Brown, 400 Forward Founder and CEO. "Technology resides at the heart of how architects coordinate projects. This partnership will help expand our outreach efforts and put powerful tools into the young hands that need it most." In recognition of Black History Month and to kick off its partnership with 400 Forward, GRAPHISOFT hosted a discussion with Brown about black women architects, the importance of access to training and tools, and how the AEC industry can increase the number of women of color in leadership roles. The full interview can be found here. ### About 400 Forward 400 Forward's goal is to support the career development of the next 400 women architects, with an underlying focus on African American girls through exposure, mentorship, and financial assistance. 400 Forward has been launched as a comprehensive program that introduces young girls to architecture, provides scholarships and wrap around services to college students, and pays for study materials and licensing exams for African American women in architecture. About GRAPHISOFT GRAPHISOFT empowers teams to create great architecture, through award-winning software solutions, learning programs, and professional services for the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction industry. Archicad, the architects' BIM software of choice, offers a complete end-to-end design and documentation workflow for architectural and integrated architectural and engineering practices of any size. BIMx, the most popular mobile and web BIM app, extends the BIM experience to include all stakeholders in the building design, delivery, and operations lifecycle. BIMcloud, the AEC industry's first and most advanced cloud-based team collaboration solution, makes real-time collaboration possible across the globe regardless of the size of the project and the speed or quality of the team members' network connection. GRAPHISOFT is part of the Nemetschek Group. To learn more visit www.graphisoft.com SOURCE GRAPHISOFT North America Related Links http://www.graphisoft.com Phuket to receive first delivery of COVID vaccine PHUKET: Phuket will receive its first 4,000 doses of the Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine by the end of this month, Vachira Phuket Hospital Director Dr Chalermpong Sukontapol has announced. COVID-19Coronavirushealthtourismeconomics By The Phuket News Wednesday 24 February 2021, 07:17PM Dr Chalermpong announced the news earlier today (Feb 24). Screenshot: PR Phuket / Phuket Radio Thailand Dr Chalermpong, who sits on the Phuket Communicable Disease Committee, which oversees all matters relating to COVID-19 in Phuket, announced the news during a press conference earlier today (Feb 24). For the vaccine, we have good news that the Sinovac vaccine has now arrived in Thailand. The first 200,000 doses of the vaccine already arrived yesterday [Feb 23], Dr Chalermpong said. Its our good luck that every type of vaccine coming to Thailand will be provided to Phuket. Not every province, but only selected provinces, including Samut Sakhon as the highest control area, he added. After Bangkok and the Greater Bangkok control areas, Phuket is classified as an area to help move the national economy, and society along with Chon Buri, Surat Thani [including Koh Samui], and Chiang Mai, he said. At first, we [Phuket] will receive 4,000 doses of vaccine, Dr Chalermpong added. The remaining 1.8 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine for Thailand will arrive in country on April 1 and May 1, Dr Chalermpong explained. For the Sinovac vaccine, we will receive a total of 68,000 doses for Phuket, he confirmed. Regarding the following delivery of vaccine doses to Thailand, Dr Chalermpong continued, The second delivery, which will come from AstraZeneca, we will receive around June to August. We will receive about 40 million doses, and about 30 million doses around September to December. In total, Thailand will receive about 63 million doses of vaccine, which can serve the national goal to vaccinate half of the population. Thailand has a population of about 66 million. If we can provide vaccines to 33 million people, it is considered as comprehensive, he said. A person will need to receive two injections, Dr Chalermpong made clear. For the first delivery we already know how many doses of vaccine we will receive, but for the second delivery, we still do not know. That is under the consideration of the central vaccine management [sic], Dr Chalermpong explained. For the private sector that wants to purchase vaccines by themselves, at this stage the CCSA has asked them to wait until the first delivery has been made. After that, there is the potential to ease measures and allow them to purchase vaccines and open the island to foreign tourists in October, he said. If about 80-90% of people in Phuket are vaccinated and the coming tourists are also vaccinated, there is a high possibility to make this happen, he concluded. JERSEY CITY, NJ / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / Revenued is a pioneering small business financing company that so far has over 30,000 second-round Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans approved by the SBA. The firm recently conducted an informal survey to help it better understand and improve the PPP application process. After contacting more than 200 business owners who have begun but not yet completed a full application, they discovered that: 40% didn't have the required documentation or were confused as to what was needed. 33% applied with another lender. 22% didn't think they would be eligible for PPP funding. 17% thought they lacked time to complete the application. Of the fully completed second-round PPP applications submitted to the Small Business Association (SBA) through the Revenued platform, only about 10% were rejected because the SBA already received their application from another lender. In the first round of PPP, all the funds were exhausted early in the program and multiple applications through different lenders were common. In contrast, funds for this round are less than half allocated, and multiple applications are rarer. According to Revenued, the data above indicates that potential borrowers are confused about eligibility and documentation. With these findings in mind, Revenued has introduced required documentation guidelines, how-to web pages, and video tutorials to assist borrowers through the application process. So far, these tools, along with the merchants' ability to schedule one-on-one meetings with underwriters, have boosted application completion by over 25%. Revenued's proprietary underwriting software has been significantly enhanced since the first funding round and streamlines the PPP application process using automation. "While I can't imagine how lenders are confirming revenue drops manually, the complexity of this PPP round means that fintech is critical but not a silver bullet," says Revenued CEO Solomon Lax. According to Lax, the key to helping clients apply for PPP funding is fintech software working in tandem with borrower education and personalized underwriter consultations. Revenued's software can instantly confirm revenue drops using uploaded bank statements. It can also streamline the submission and validation of relevant tax forms. On the other hand, standard bank PPP underwriting is largely manual. When coupled with borrower confusion, a manual process is a prescription for a painfully slow PPP deployment. Lax says that Revenued's automated underwriting software greenlights PPP applications within minutes and has been processing up to 5,000 a day. "The key is having a frictionless process for a borrower that shows up with the right documentation like tax forms or bank statements," he says. "If an applicant has the correct documents and everything is legible, it goes through from beginning to end in 10 minutes." Revenued is a technology platform that scores and processes small business credit. The company was beta testing a business card built for businesses with non-prime credit scores. That's when COVID-19 struck, and everything came to a halt. Revenued shifted its focus to PPP when it became clear that federal funding would become the most pressing need for small businesses. The company teamed up with a leading fintech bank to underwrite and process PPP loan applications. "We came together and were able to quickly transition our system to process PPP applications during a challenging time for businesses nationwide," Lax says. "The result has been powerful." With only days to implement updated PPP guidelines before the new program rolled out, Revenued re-developed its existing technology to streamline the application process. In the initial PPP round, Revenued's system processed more than 180,000 applications and helped fund nearly $2 billion in financing for small businesses. The quality and speed of its approval process have propelled its fintech banking partner onto an SBA list of the top 15 PPP lenders. As of Feb. 17, 2021, Revenued has helped it process more than 52,000 loans, totaling over $2.1 billion in funding. About Revenued Revenued is an alternative financing company that leverages underwriting software to help small businesses access crucial funding. Through its affiliate company Pearl Capital, Revenued has provided more than 30,000 businesses with over $350 million in financing. Revenued will be using its robust underwriting software to launch the new Revenued Business Card in the coming months. First Name: Jake Last Name: Lerner Email Address: press@revenued.com Company Name: Revenued City: Jersey City State: New Jersey Country: USA Telephone: (347) 584-8653 Website: www.revenued.com Related Links Revenued website SOURCE: Revenued View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631633/Revenued-Simplifies-PPP-Loan-Application-Process via Forum Asia February 22, 2021 Re: Coalition of 22 Organizations Calls for New UN Human Rights Council Resolution to Protect Human Rights, Justice, and Accountability in Sri Lanka To the Member States of the Human Rights Council: We, the undersigned organizations, urge the Member States of the Human Rights Council to pass a strong resolution at the 46th Session, affirming an international commitment to protect human rights and justice in Sri Lanka, with a particular focus on victims. The deteriorating human rights and accountability context in Sri Lanka is documented in detail in the High Commissioner for Human Rights damning January 2021 report1 as well as a joint assessment released by ten UN Special Procedures mandates earlier this month.2 The High Commissioner highlighted that nearly 12 years on from the end of the war, domestic initiatives for accountability and reconciliation have repeatedly failed to produce results.3 Just as concerning, the High Commissioner stressed the emergence of early warning signs of a deteriorating human rights situation and a significant heightened risk of future violations.4 Given the Government of Sri Lankas failure to comply with the States human rights obligations and implement agreed-upon accountability efforts and the need for urgent preventative action, it is essential that a new resolution detail immediate, concrete, and independent international efforts, including enhancing monitoring by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), creating an independent international mechanism to collect and preserve evidence of past and ongoing violations and abuses, and prioritizing support to civil society initiatives. Multiple UN bodies and dozens of civil society organizations have documented grave human rights violations and abuses in Sri Lanka. The 26-year war between the Government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) witnessed serious violations including allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by both parties. The toll on civilians was particularly high in the final stage of the conflict, when tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed, primarily by Government forces shelling of No Fire Zones.5 Following the end of the war, the country remained over-militarized and human rights abuses continued, including extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence, and harassment and persecution of journalists, activists, and government critics.6 Sri Lankas Tamil and Muslim populations have disproportionately suffered from these continuing violations and abuses, as they face institutionalized discrimination and higher levels of targeted state-sponsored violence.7 Sri Lankas domestic accountability efforts have failed. As noted by the High Commissioner, numerous commissions of inquiry established by successive governments have failed to credibly establish the truth and ensure accountability8 and domestic investigations have failed to bring a single emblematic case . . . to a successful conclusion or conviction.9 Furthermore, despite co-sponsoring HRC Resolution 30/1 in 2015, which provided a comprehensive roadmap of measures to ensure justice and accountability, the Government of Sri Lanka remains in a state of denial about the past, with truth-seeking efforts aborted and the highest State officials refusing to make any acknowledgment of past crimes.10 The High Commissioner highlighted how the failure to deal with the past continues to have devastating effects on tens of thousands of survivors.11 In the past year, prospects for domestic justice and accountability efforts in Sri Lanka have dimmed entirely. Gotabaya Rajapaksa the former Secretary to the Ministry of Defense who oversaw the brutal end to Sri Lankas war was elected President in November 2019. As one of its first acts on the international stage, the new Rajapaksa administration announced its withdrawal from HRC Resolution 30/1, part of a series of steps that led the High Commissioner to conclude that [t]he Government has now demonstrated its inability and unwillingness to pursue a meaningful path towards accountability for international crimes and serious human rights violations.12 The Government has also proactively obstructed or sought to stop ongoing investigations and criminal trials to prevent accountability for past crimes,13 promoted credibly accused war criminals, increased militarization of civilian institutions, reversed Constitutional safeguards, increasingly employed and promoted majoritarian and exclusionary rhetoric, increased surveillance and obstruction of civil society, and exacerbated human rights concerns.14 In a joint assessment released earlier this month, ten UN Special Procedures mandates echoed the High Commissioners concern that the human rights and accountability context had further regressed in Sri Lanka, concluding, [t]here is little hope that any domestic accountability measures will progress or achieve any degree of credibility.15 They emphasized the extremely disheartening fact that their conclusions echo those of UN experts in 2009, who found impunity has been allowed to go unabated throughout Sri Lanka. The fear of reprisals against victims and witnesses, together with a lack of effective investigations and prosecutions, has led to a circle of impunity that must be broken.16 We share the High Commissioners and Special Procedures concerns that continued reliance on the Government of Sri Lanka to improve human rights and accountability will prove futile and dangerous. As both history and recent events in Sri Lanka have shown, if left unchecked, the Government will be emboldened to continue its abuses and further entrench impunity. Given Sri Lankas long history of violations and failed domestic efforts to advance justice, and the warning signs of increased future abuses, it is critical that the Human Rights Council pass a strong resolution affirming its commitment to meaningful justice and accountability for serious human rights violations and abuses and crimes under international law in Sri Lanka. We join the High Commissioner and Special Procedures mandates in calling on Member States to pass a new resolution that strengthens the High Commissioners monitoring and reporting on Sri Lanka, prioritizes support to civil society initiatives assisting victims and their families, and establishes and supports a dedicated capacity to collect and preserve evidence.17 The dedicated capacity should come in the form of an independent international investigative mechanism. We also join the High Commissioners call for Member States to pursue alternative avenues for accountability and justice, including taking steps towards the referral of the situation in Sri Lanka to the International Criminal Court, the pursuit of investigation and prosecution of international crimes in national courts using extraterritorial and universal jurisdiction, and the imposition of targeted sanctions, including asset freezes and travel bans against State officials accused of grave human rights violations.18 A strong resolution with concrete action by the Human Rights Council and UN human rights bodies will not only signal to the Government of Sri Lanka that continuing impunity and abuses are not acceptable, but will also affirm for survivors that the United Nations is committed to securing justice for the harms they experienced. Signed, Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM ASIA) Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect (ICRtoP) International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) International Service for Human Rights (ISHR) European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) Franciscans International Freedom from Torture Free Press Unlimited Human Rights Watch (HRW) People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL) REDRESS Reporters without Borders (RSF) Sri Lanka Campaign University Network for Human Rights World Federalist Movement/Institute for Global Policy (WFM/IGP) World Organization Against Torture (OMCT) 1 See Promoting reconciliation, accountability and human rights in Sri Lanka: Report of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/46/20 (27 January 2021) (hereinafter OHCHR 2021 Report). 2 Sri Lanka: Experts dismayed by regressive steps, call for renewed UN scrutiny and efforts to ensure accountability (UN Special Procedures Assessment), Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (5 February 2021) (hereinafter UN Special Procedures Assessment), available at https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=26715&LangID=E; see also Sri Lanka: Experts dismayed by regressive steps, call for renewed UN scrutiny and efforts to ensure accountability (UN Special Procedures Press Statement), Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (5 February 2021) (hereinafter UN Special Procedures Press Statement), available at https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=26725&LangID=E. 3 OHCHR 2021 Report, supra note 1, at para. 52. 4 Id. at para. 53. 5 Id. at para. 9 (citing Report of the Secretary Generals Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka (31 March 2011) and Report of the OHCHR Investigation on Sri Lanka (OISL), U.N. Doc. A/HRC/30/CRP.2 (16 September 2015)). 6 OHCHR 2021 Report, supra note 1, at paras. 13, 38, and 55. 7 Id. at paras. 31, 53; see also Report of the Special Rapporteur on minority issues on her mission to Sri Lanka, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/34/53/Add.3 (31 January 2017). 8 OHCHR 2021 Report, supra note 1, at para. 8. 9 Id. at para. 49. 10 Id. at para. 52. 11 Id. at para. 57. 12 Id. at para. 56. 13 Id. at para. 26. 14 Id. at Part III. 15 UN Special Procedures Press Statement, supra note 2. 16 Id. 17 See OHCHR 2021 Report, supra note 1, at para. 61; see also UN Special Procedures Assessment, supra note (recommending the [e]stablish[ment of] an impartial and independent international accountability mechanism which would seek to build upon the work conducted by different UN mechanisms by investigating, compiling, and analysing information collected from an international criminal law perspective). 18 See OHCHR 2021 Report, supra note 1, at paras. 59, 61. ** For further information, please contact: UN Advocacy Programme Manager, FORUM-ASIA, adam[at]forum-asia.org Handguns are the weapons of choice for violent criminals in the United States, including in more than 70% of all murders, according to Department of Justice statistics. Regardless of Second Amendment politics, everyone has an interest in keeping guns out of the hands of violent criminals. Doing so does not infringe upon anyones legitimate right to own a gun. Arrests last Wednesday in Montgomery County illustrate yet again, however, the need for the state Legislature to act in that regard, just as a series of gun-trafficking arrests in Lackawanna County over the last year has done. The Montgomery County district attorneys office announced the arrests of 14 people in a multi-county gun trafficking ring an investigation that arose from an investigation of yet another gun-trafficking ring. Four people were charged with buying 31 weapons from multiple licensed gun dealers in Montgomery and Lancaster counties, which then were distributed by the ring to people with criminal records who could not legally buy a handgun. Only two of those guns have been recovered. Such straw purchases, in which legally eligible buyers buy multiple weapons and sell them to people who cant legally buy them, are a major means of supplying deadly weapons to criminals. Investigators also recovered several kits to assemble ghost guns, which contain no serial numbers and require no purchaser background check because they are not sold as a completely assembled product. But are just as deadly as any other gun in the wrong hands. Ghost guns are illegal in New Jersey and several other states but not in Pennsylvania. To counter straw purchases and make it as difficult as possible, the Legislature should limit handgun purchases to one per person, per month. That does not diminish anyones right to gun ownership but would help cut off the pipeline to criminals. Likewise, it should require gun owners to report to police when their weapons are lost or stolen, another means to deter illegal transfers. Lawmakers also should outlaw ghost guns, so that deadly weapons at least can be traced through the system when they are used in violent crimes. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) President Rodrigo Duterte accused New People's Army rebels of kidnapping children in Mindanao. In a post-disaster briefing for Tropical Storm Auring held on Tuesday at Surigao del Sur, Duterte said the rebels took away the children from their parents which aggravates the insurgency problem in the region. "Itong mga NPA, kinukuha nila yung mga anak, dinadala nila sa ibang lugar. Kunin ninyo yung bata, isauli ninyo sa nanay pati sa tatay (These NPA rebels take away their children and brought to other places. Take these children, return them to their mother and father) because a child, a minor should not be separated from the family home," said Duterte. The President also encouraged uniformed personnel to take the children home, even without the presence of a search warrant. "Puntahan mo sa loob kunin yung mga bata at isaoli mo sa magulang at isauli mo at the earliest opportunity," he said. [Translation: Go inside and get the children and return them to their parents at the earliest opportunity.] Ending children kidnappings is one way of addressing insurgency in Mindanao as Duterte vowed to repair barangay roads to promote economic development in the region. He also instructed Agrarian Reform Sec. John Castriciones to distribute unutilized lands of the government. Duterte made his remark after the recent rescue of 19 Davao del Norte-based Lumad children in a top Cebu school last February 15 from alleged kidnapping by a militant group. Authorities reported that parents say their children were taken by members of the Salugpungan Ta' Tanu Igkanogon without their consent and were told they would be brought to Davao City for their schooling. They were instead found to have been staying at a retreat house of the University of San Carlos-Talamban Campus in Cebu since 2018, police said. In 2019, 55 schools operated and owned by the Salugpungan Ta' Tanu Igkanogon Community Learning Centers in the Davao region were shut down by the Department of Education for allegedly teaching "left-leaning ideologies." Salugpungan claimed its schools were established to give indigenous groups in remote areas access to education. Lawmakers, especially from the Makabayan bloc, are calling for an investigation into the rescue which the police insists as a legitimate operation. UNITED NATIONS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 25th February, 2021) Portugal has sent a letter to the United Nations officially nominating incumbent Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as a candidate for a second term, Guterres' spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters on Wednesday. "The government of Portugal has written to the President of the General Assembly and the President of the Security Council officially nominating Antonio Guterres as a candidate for a second term as Secretary-General," Dujarric said. According to the selection process, a candidate's country of origin must submit a letter of endorsement to participate in the election. Guterres, who has been serving as the UN chief since January 1, 2017, has one challenger. Earlier in the month, a UN Development Program employee Arora Akanksha, 34, sent a letter to UN General Assembly President Volkan Bozkir notifying him about her intention to compete for the position Secretary-General. Reporter Ben Zigterman is a reporter covering business at The News-Gazette. His email is bzigterman@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@bzigterman). "Greater diversity in our company and in the hemp industry may not happen swiftly, but working together with The 40-acre Co-op on our new 'Seeding Our Future, Together' mentor program is a way to move forward by sharing our knowledge, our science, and our cultivation expertise with Black farmers and other agricultural leaders in the black community," said Deanie Elsner, President and CEO of Charlotte's Web. In 1920, there were nearly a million Black farmers in the United States. Today the number is 45,508. And that accounts for just 1.3% of the nearly 3.4 million farmers in the country, according to a 2017 census by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Those troubling statistics inspired Angela Dawson, a hemp farmer, to take societal change into her own hands to reverse those numbers. She founded the Minneapolis-based co-op in 2019. "This is the beginning of an important shift in the industry and we intend to use this momentum to create lasting and impactful change," said Dawson, Founder and President of the 40-acre Cooperative. The 40-acre Cooperative (FAC) will advise on the expertise most relevant and timely for their cooperative members and staff. FAC will also educate Charlotte's Web employees and leadership team on challenges and opportunities for the Black hemp farming and manufacturing community beginning with a Charlotte's Web employee Lunch and Learn with Angela Dawson on Feb. 26, 2021. The 40-acre Cooperative is a swiftly growing and entrepreneurial organization whose mission aligns with the Charlotte's Web's vision of a healthier planet for everyone. As part of "Growing Our Future, Together" Charlotte's Web will donate some of its U.S. patented Lindorea hemp seed to 40-acre Cooperative farmers for the 2021 growing season planting. "This collaboration is important for our entire hemp industry so it may achieve a wider potential for innovation through diversity. Our Charlotte's Web Cultivation Team is excited to share our knowledge of organic hemp farming, and we know we will also gain knowledge from our work with the 40-acre Cooperative and its farming members," said Jared Stanley, Chief Cultivation Officer for Charlotte's Web and co-founder. About The 40-acre Cooperative: Founded in 2019, 40-acre Cooperative is a Minnesota-based and farmer owned cooperative focusing on bringing equity and innovation to Black, Indigenous and other farmers with a mission to promote agricultural development and economic equity for socially disadvantaged farmers. The co-op provides training, supplies and leadership specifically focusing on resource gaps with its members in seven states. About Charlotte's Web Holdings, Inc. Charlotte's Web Holdings, Inc., a Certified B Corporation headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, is the market leader in the production and distribution of innovative hemp-derived cannabidiol ("CBD") wellness products under a family of brands which includes Charlotte's Web, CBD Medic, CBD Clinic, and Harmony Hemp. The Company's premium quality products start with proprietary hemp genetics that are 100-percent American farm grown and manufactured into whole-plant hemp extracts containing a full spectrum of naturally occurring phytocannabinoids including CBD, CBC, CBG, terpenes, flavonoids and other beneficial hemp compounds. Charlotte's Web product categories include CBD oil tinctures (liquid products), CBD gummies (sleep, stress, inflammation recovery), CBD capsules , CBD topical creams and lotions , as well as CBD pet products for dogs . Charlotte's Web is the number one CBD brand in the USA and distributed through more than 22,000 retail locations, select distributors and online through the Company's website at www.CharlottesWeb.com . Charlotte's Web was founded by the Stanley Brothers with a mission to unleash the healing powers of botanicals through compassion and science, benefiting the planet and all who live upon it. Charlotte's Web is a socially and environmentally conscious company and is committed to using business as a force for good and a catalyst for innovation. The Company weighs sound business decisions with consideration for how its efforts affect employees, customers, the environment, and diverse communities. The rate the Company pays for agricultural products reflects a fair and sustainable rate driving higher quality yield, encouraging regenerative farming practices, and supporting U.S. farming communities. Management believes that its socially oriented and environmentally responsible actions have a positive impact on its customers, suppliers, employees, and stakeholders. Charlotte's Web donates a portion of its pre-tax earnings to charitable organizations. SOURCE Charlotte's Web PR Marketing Japan's top government spokesperson says measures against the coronavirus will be eased in stages even if the government lifts an emergency declaration earlier than initially planned. Chief Cabinet Secretary Kato Katsunobu spoke to reporters on Wednesday. Later in the day, Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide will meet the minister in charge of the country's coronavirus response, Nishimura Yasutoshi, and health minister Tamura Norihisa. They are expected to discuss whether the emergency declaration can be lifted for three prefectures in western Japan and two others in the country's central region before it is due to expire on March 7. Kato said an expert panel will also meet on Wednesday afternoon to discuss the situation in those prefectures. He said that based on the talks, the government will make a comprehensive decision on whether to lift the declaration. Kato added that the prefectures will need to take a step-by-step approach to relaxing anti-virus measures until they are in stage two, even if the state of emergency ends early in those areas. He said requests for shorter business hours at bars and restaurants will remain in place for the time being. Indias federal government has stepped in to mediate a dispute between the state of Gujarat and solar power developers over the provinces plan to backtrack on bids for a 700 megawatt project because of high tariffs and invite fresh ones. Certainly it is creating some disturbance in the renewable energy market," Amitesh Kumar Sinha, joint secretary at the ministry told reporters in New Delhi about the initial discussion the ministry has had with the coastal state. We will take up this issue further. Well handle it." Gujarat Urja Vikas Nigam Ltd., the parent body for electricity development in the state, had awarded the contracts to firms, including ReNew Power, Tata Power Co. and state-run SJVN Ltd. for building solar capacity at tariffs of as much as 2.81 (4 cents) a kilowatt-hour. The states attempt to override an existing accord to search for lower auction prices is the latest in a series of such breaches that have roiled the countrys renewable energy industry. The development is set to sour the mood of investors that were slowly emerging from a similar crisis when the southern state of Andhra Pradesh sought to renegotiate old contracts saying they were exorbitantly priced." The success of Indias renewable energy industry is based on investors confidence in the governments policies," said Subrahmanyam Pulipaka, chief executive officer at industry lobby group National Solar Energy Federation of India. If sanctity of contracts is breached, this can hurt that confidence and seriously affect Indias renewable energy journey." The industry lobby group has approached the federal and the state governments to resolve the matter, Pulipaka said. The 700 megawatt project is part of a 1 gigawatt solar park planned at Dholera, a low-lying wasteland surrounded by water bodies and frequently swamped by floods. While 300-megawatts of projects have been awarded, the state was struggling to attract bidders for the rest because of the geological challenges of the site, which would require higher costs of installation. To accommodate these challenges, Gujarat Urja Vikas or GUVNL, put a higher price ceiling of 2.92 rupees a kilowatt hour on auctions conducted last year. A few months later, solar power auctions, including one conducted by Gujarat, saw a plunge in prices, nudging the state utility to consider seeking fresh bids in the interest of electricity consumers, according to an order by the state regulator, which approved the plan. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Colombo, Feb 24 (PTI) Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Wednesday called on Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa during which they discussed bilateral ties and common areas of interest, such as trade and tourism which could benefit both countries. Khan, who is here on a two-day visit, called on Rajapaksa at the Presidential Secretariat in Colombo and held a one-on-one meeting with him. 'Had a productive discussion with #Pakistani PM @ImranKhanPTI this morning. The discussions were mainly focused on common interests such as Trade, Tourism & adoption of technology in Agriculture which both countries could positively leverage on,' President Rajapaksa tweeted after the meeting. The President and the Prime Minister of Pakistan had a long discussion on bilateral relations. The Pakistani leader said the talks were highly productive, Colombo Page reported. The two leaders also discussed how to exchange technical knowledge to promote agriculture in the two countries. The two leaders stated that their goal was to uplift the agrarian economy in a way that would provide higher incomes to farmers and subsidized prices to consumers. Khan said that Pakistans agricultural economy is very similar to that of Sri Lanka. Pakistan is a major player in Sri Lankas export sector. The President and the Prime Minister of Pakistan also focused on the potential for trade promotion and expansion of investment opportunities between the two countries, the newspaper said. With the control of the COVID pandemic, President Rajapaksa invited the people of Pakistan to visit Sri Lanka. Khan, in an address following his meeting with his Sri Lankan counterpart Mahinda Rajapaksa on Tuesday, said that his maiden visit is aimed at strengthening the bilateral relationship. Khan said that he was looking forward to enhancing trade ties with Sri Lanka through the multi-billion dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The CPEC, which connects Gwadar Port in Balochistan with China's Xinjiang province, is the flagship project of Chinese President Xi Jinping's ambitious BRI. Story continues Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, who is accompanying Khan, said Pakistan has offered Sri Lanka a credit line of USD 15 million for defence cooperation, according to media reports from Pakistan. 'Defence and security cooperation to end the menace of terrorism are of equal importance to both Pakistan and Sri Lanka,' Geo News quoted Qureshi as saying. The two sides also discussed ways to enhance bilateral trade and investment during the visit, Qureshi said. He said that trade between the two countries was below potential even though a free trade agreement existed. Pakistan is also looking at ways to promote tourism, Qureshi said, noting that it had several Buddhist sites that would be attractive to Sri Lanka's citizens, Dawn newspaper reported. PTI NSA AKJ NSA NSA Joe Manchin announced Wednesday he will vote to confirm Representative Deb Haaland for secretary of the Interior Department after claiming last week he was undecided over her nomination. 'With respect to Representative Haaland and her confirmation hearing, while we do not agree on every issue, she reaffirmed her strong commitment to bipartisanship, addressing the diverse needs of our country and maintaining our nation's energy independence,' Manchin said in a statement Wednesday. 'I believe Deb Haaland will be a Secretary of the Interior for every American and will vote to confirm her,' the West Virginia centrist Democrat assured. Manchin threw Haaland's nomination into chaos last week as he revealed he was unsure if he would vote to confirm her or not to President Joe Biden's cabinet. Haaland support more green energy initiatives, and Manchin represents a state rooted in natural energy industry. If confirmed, Haaland would make history as the first ever Native American cabinet secretary. West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin announced Wednesday that he will vote to confirm Rep. Deb Haaland as Joe Biden's secretary of the Department of the Interior after previously expressing doubt Manchin, who chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said Haaland proved in Tuesday's confirmation hearing her 'commitment to bipartisanship' If confirmed, Haaland would make history as the first Native American to head a presidential cabinet agency With a 50-50 split Senate, any Democratic defector essentially holds 'veto power' over the Party's initiatives. Manchin has also effectively ended Neera Tanden's chances of being confirmed as Biden's director of the White House Office of Management and Office. He said last Monday he would vote against her for a slew of 'toxic' tweets she sent attacking fellow lawmakers. Two separate Senate committees postponed their confirmation vote on Tanden. Joe Biden blamed Donald Trump's resistance to a presidential transition when he was asked if he's disappointed that more of his cabinet nominees haven't been confirmed by the Senate. 'I blame it on the failure to have a transition that was rational,' Biden said on Wednesday. Female Democratic lawmakers accused Manchin of a 'double standard' this week after coming out against Tanden and expressing doubt over Haaland yet supporting Donald Trump's cabinet nominees. 'There's a double standard going on,' California Representative Judy Chu told Politico Monday. 'Her nomination is very significant for us Asian American and Pacific Islanders.' 'I do believe that this double standard has to do with the fact that she would be a pioneer in that position,' the head of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus continued of Tanden, the daughter of immigrants from India. A confirmation hearing for Haaland, who represents New Mexico in the House of Representatives, was held Tuesday before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which Manchin chairs. A spokesperson for Manchin said Monday that he and Haaland met over Zoom to discuss her nomination. Manchin expressed the day before the hearing that he was undecided on whether he will vote to confirm Haaland to the ire of progressive female lawmakers. 'Jeff Sessions was so openly racist that even Reagan couldn't appoint him,' Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter Monday. 'Manchin voted to confirm him. Sessions then targeted immigrant children for wide-scale human rights abuses w/ family separation.' She added: 'Yet the 1st Native woman to be Cabinet Sec is where Manchin finds unease?' Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii listed Tanden, Haaland and Health and Human Services pick Xavier Becerra as nominees 'being scrutinized more heavily.' 'There seems to be a pattern here,' Hirono said of the minority picks for cabinet positions, adding that if Tanden's nomination falls, Biden's nominee for trade representative, Katherine Tai, would be the 'the only Asian woman in the Cabinet.' Manchin's announcement came as he essentially sunk OMB nominee Neera Tanden's confirmation chances by saying he would vote against her for her 'toxic' tweets against lawmakers Joe Biden still isn't backing down on his embattled budget nominee Neera Tanden even as two Senate committees postponed votes on her confirmation claiming they 'need more time to assess it.' 'We are committed to continuing to fight for all of our nominees,' White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Wednesday, 'continuing to do the outreach needed, to answer questions, to address concerns anyone has, to reiterate the qualifications of all of the nominees that the president has put forward. And to do due diligence in fighting for the team he's nominated.' Psaki suggested the postponements are promising, claiming Democratic leadership is 'conveying clearly that they want to continue to do work to build support for her nomination.' Bernie Sanders, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, announced Wednesday morning he is postponing a vote on confirming Tanden to head the White House Office of Management and Budget. The Budget Committee was meant to meet to further Tanden's confirmation Wednesday, but Sanders will now hold that vote at a later, unspecified date. The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee also postponed their vote on Tanden's nomination. 'We're just, some members wanted some more time to kind of review it, so we're just going to give them more time,' Michigan Senator Gary Peters, chairman of the committee, told reporters at the Capitol Wednesday. 'Is that Democrats on your committee?' a reporter pushed. Senators Bernie Sanders, chair of the Budget Committee, and Gary Peters, chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, both postponed their respective panels' hearings to vote on confirming Tanden 'I don't want to get into specifics but people needed a little bit more time to assess it,' he said, adding that his committee has not rescheduled a vote on Tanden's nomination. Tanden has faced backlash for transparency and unity issues after deleting more than 1,000 tweets before her nomination, which were found to personally attack politicians on both sides of the aisle including Sanders. Her confirmation was effectively sunk after Democratic centrist Senator Joe Manchin said last week he would vote against her over her 'toxic' tweets. During a confirmation hearing earlier this month, Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana brought up Tanden's attacks against her own party. 'The comments were personal,' Kennedy, who sits on the Budget Committee, said when interacting with Tanden. 'I mean, you call Senator Sanders everything but an ignorant sl*t.' 'That is not true,' she pushed back before expressing regret for her tweets. As OMB head, Tanden would regularly interact with Biden as chair of Budget. The independent Vermont senator reminded her of their past at her hearing earlier this month. 'Your attacks were not just made against Republicans,' he said. 'There were vicious attacks made against progressives, people who I have worked with, me personally.' Top ranking Budget Committee Republican Lindsey Graham read one of Tanden's tweets during her hearing, which referenced the bitter 2016 nomination fight between Hillary Clinton and Sanders. 'Russia did a lot more to help Bernie than the DNC's random internal e-mails did to help Hillary,' Tanden wrote, siding with Clinton. President Biden said Tuesday that still believes there is a 'good shot' that Tanden will be confirmed to head his Office of Management and Budget despite Senator Joe Manchin effectively sinking her chances by announcing he will vote against the nominee. 'We're going to push. We still think there's a shot, a good shot,' Biden said at the end of a round table at the White House on Tuesday when asked about his confidence in Tanden's nomination. Senator Shelley Moore Capito became the latest Republican moderate to announce Tuesday that she will not cross the party line to help confirm Biden's cabinet pick. Capito joined her West Virginia Democratic colleague Manchin, as well as Republican Senators Mitt Romney and Susan Collins, in coming out against the budget nominee. Tanden's nomination was supposed to move out of committee on Wednesday with a subsequent Budget vote. Her nomination is expected to fail in the Appropriations Committee, where Senators Manchin, Collins and Republican Lisa Murkowski all serve. With Manchin's opposition, Democrats need one Republican to vote in favor of Tanden's nomination to get her on Biden's cabinet as a permanent fixture. One last hope could be Alaska Senator Murkowkski, a moderate who voted for Trump's impeachment conviction earlier this month along with fellow Republicans Romney, Collins and four others. But the senator has remained undecided or at least kept her thinking on the matter to herself. 'When do you expect to make a decision on the Tanden nomination,' a reporter asked Murkowski at the Capitol Tuesday. 'I've got time,' she said back. Psaki said repeatedly that Biden's confidence in Tanden to run the OMB has not changed despite revelations of her deleting more than 1,000 tweets personally attacking lawmakers before she was nominated to the cabinet post. In her tenure, Tanden has served as a staffer to Hillary Clinton since her 2000 election to the Senate and later in her 2008 presidential run, and again in 2016 when Clinton defeated Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination and was ultimately bested by Donald Trump. Tanden also helped draft the Affordable Care Act during Barack Obama's presidency. Earlier this month, Tanden appeared before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Senate Budget Committee the next day. During those hearings, she repeatedly expressed remorse for her Twitter activity. She said she deleted the tweets because she did not agree with the tone. Following Manchin's opposition to Tanden's nomination, which effectively killed her chances of confirmation, two key Republican senators, who often skirt the party line, followed suit Romney of Utah and Collins of Maine. Manchin announced on Friday that he would oppose Tanden running OMB, citing the 'toxic' impact of her tweets insulting fellow lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Then on Monday the West Virginia centrist Democrat revealed he is undecided about Haalan, who will appear before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which Manchin chairs, for her confirmation hearing Tuesday. It was the first major party defection of the young Biden administration. The Office of Management and Budget touches on nearly every aspect of major policy. 'The OMB needs steady, experienced, responsive leadership. I will vote against confirming Ms. Tanden,' Collins, who represents Maine, released in a statement Monday. 'Congress has to be able to trust the OMB director to make countless decisions in an impartial manner, carrying out the letter of the law and congressional intent,' Collins wrote in her statement denouncing Biden's pick. 'Neera Tanden has neither the experience nor the temperament to lead this critical agency. Her past actions have demonstrated exactly the kind of animosity that President Biden has pledged to transcend.' 'In addition, Ms. Tanden's decision to delete more than a thousand tweets in the days before her nomination was announced raises concerns about her commitment to transparency,' she continued. 'Should Congress need to review documents or actions taken by OMB, we must have confidence that the Director will be forthcoming.' A spokesperson for Romney released a statement Monday, as well, saying: 'Senator Romney has been critical of extreme rhetoric from prior nominees, and this is consistent with that position. He believes it's hard to return to comity and respect with a nominee who has issued a thousand mean tweets.' Tanden in a now-deleted tweet called Collins 'the worst' and attacked her in another tweet for her questioning of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing. 'Susan Collins' terrible treatment of Dr. Ford should haunt Collins the rest of her days,' Tanden tweeted during Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, when Blasey Ford raised allegations against him. She also deleted a slew of other offensive tweets aimed at lawmakers from both parties including several directed toward Sanders and his supporters. The White House, however, is not backing down on Tanden's nomination instead bolstering support for her confirmation. 'Neera Tanden is an accomplished policy expert who would be an excellent Budget Director and we look forward to the committee votes this week and to continuing to work toward her confirmation through engagement with both parties,' Psaki said Monday. With a 50-50 split Senate, Manchin holds a lot of power as the most centrist left-leaning senator. Collins and Romney are two GOP senators who occasionally vote with Democrats most recently both voted in favor of Donald Trump's impeachment conviction. No other Democrats have said if they plan to vote against Tanden's nomination. Tande's social media activity includes calling Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, 'Moscow Mitch' and saying 'vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz.' 'I have carefully reviewed Neera Tanden's public statements and tweets that were personally directed towards my colleagues on both sides of the aisle from Senator Sanders to Senator McConnell and others,' Manchin said in a statement. 'I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget,' he continued. When Biden picked Tanden, chief executive of the left-leaning Center for American Progress think tank in Washington, Republicans pointed to her past strong comments on Twitter, such as referring to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell as 'Moscow Mitch' and saying 'vampires have more heart than (Senator) Ted Cruz.' In addition to calling Cruz a vampire, she once referred to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell 'Voldemort' from the Harry Potter series. UTICA, N.Y. -- After nearly a full year of learning in front of a computer screen, students in Utica are set to return to classrooms in two weeks. In a meeting tonight, the Utica City School District Board of Education approved a plan to allow K-6 students to learn in person twice a week starting March 8. The plan, laid out by District Administrative Director Steven Falchi, splits elementary school students into two cohorts, with one attending in person on Mondays and Tuesdays, and the other on Thursdays and Fridays. All students will be remote on Wednesdays. In-person students will not change classrooms throughout the day, and lunch will be brought back to the classrooms to eat. Specialized instruction such as in music will also be brought to classrooms. Buses will be limited to one-third of capacity, with a Vice President from Bernie Bus Service pledging to work with the district to provide suitable transportation for all students. The board also voted to give Superintendent Bruce Karam the authority to reopen middle and high schools at his discretion. Karam stated that he would like to see middle schools go hybrid two to three weeks after elementary schools, and for high schools to follow "shortly after" to ensure smoothness in the system. Falchi proposed hybrid formats for middle and high schools, with the middle school format identical to the elementary school plan, and for high school students to be split into five cohorts and to come into school once a week instead of twice. Mom Doctor Warns Parents of Social Media Dangers After Straight-A Son Dies of Drug Overdose Celebrity therapist and relationship expert Dr. Laura Berman has shared a public warning for parents about social media after her son died in what appears to be a tragic accidental drug overdose. Her son was lured into drug use through social media, she says. My beautiful boy is gone, she wrote on Instagram on Feb. 7. 16 years old. Sheltering at home. A drug dealer connected with him on Snapchat and gave him fentanyl-laced Xanax or Percocet (toxicology will tell) and he overdosed in his room. The therapist warns parents to monitor their teens social media use to keep them safe. We watched him so closely, she said in the post. Straight A student. Getting ready for college Please watch your kids and WATCH SNAPCHAT especially. Thats how they get them. According to CBS, Berman has asked Snapchat to cooperate with the police investigation into her sons sudden death. The social media company said not only will they cooperate, but they have a zero tolerance policy and prohibit users from exploiting the platform for illegal purposes. Still, their policies did not manage to prevent the tragic, unexpected death of young Sammy Berman. My heart is completely shattered and I am not sure how to keep breathing, the mother shared on Instagram. I post this now only so that not one more kid dies. She later revealed to Good Morning America that she believes Sammy thought hed experiment with something and had no idea it would kill him. He was playing video games with his friends, he was totally fine, she added. And then an hour later, I went in to talk to him about this internship that he wanted to do, and he was unconscious on the floor, not breathing. The grieving mom is still waiting on a toxicology report, which will reveal the exact drugs her son took before overdosing. (Illustration Postmodern Studio/Shutterstock) By sharing her story, Berman hopes more parents will become aware of the dangers social media can pose to children. She explained she thought her son should have social media time to at least stay connected during lockdown and feel less isolated. I had no idea that there were dealers on there, she said. The Santa Monica Police Department stated, A preliminary investigation leads us to believe prescription drug use may have been involved. But they did not comment on the Snapchat platform or the role it played in Sammys tragic accident. The social media app said in a public statement that they are heartbroken by his passing. We have no higher priority than keeping Snapchat a safe environment, they shared. We will continue to invest in protecting our community. According to ACT for Youth, 9 out of 10 teens utilize social media, with Snapchat ranking third in preferred apps, following YouTube and Instagram. Researchers report that the internet poses a plethora of risks for teens; by age 18, one in five teens have already been exposed to unwanted sexual material online. Monitoring apps such as Bark and Norton Family enable parents to keep tabs on their childrens mobile activity while still allowing them to stay connected with friends. Share your stories with us at emg.inspired@epochtimes.com, and continue to get your daily dose of inspiration by signing up for the Epoch Inspired newsletter at TheEpochTimes.com/newsletter COLUMBUS, Ohio Ohios $3.6 million centralized vaccine signup system, which is under development by business and government contactor Accenture, is necessary because the website created for the federal government had significant operational issues, according to Gov. Mike DeWines office. The state originally planned to go with a coronavirus vaccine system developed for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by contractor Deloitte. However, there were concerns with it, said DeWines spokesman Dan Tierney. It was being tested through November, he said. And in December the state made the decision that there were going to be significant operational issues with the federal system, and it would not work for Ohio. Tierney didnt go into details about problems with the system, except to say that the Accenture system is compatible with systems many hospitals, clinics and other vaccine providers use. It also works well on mobile devices, he said. Officials in other states have reported website crashes on the federal system, technological glitches and other problems. South Carolina officials found it canceled appointments and couldnt differentiate between first and second doses. Vaccine clinic staff in Connecticut and Virginia reported that they were locked out of the system. A local health district director in Maui, Hawaii instructed his employees to keep track of vaccinations on paper forms since the system was causing so many problems. Tierney said that over 40 states have also opted against the federal system, which left them scrambling to develop their own. The Ohio Department of Health sent cleveland.com/ The Plain Dealer a copy of the states contract with Accenture, which was competitively bid. The state is paying at least $3.6 million for the program, and the cost is likely to be higher. The contract The six-month contract was signed on Jan. 14 by Ohio Department of Health Director Stephanie McCloud and an Accenture managing director. Included in the $3.6 million price is 2 million appointments, which would cover just 1 million Ohioans, since the current approved vaccines require two doses. The price goes up once the state exceeds 2 million. For instance, if 2.2 million appointments are made, the state would be on the hook for the extra 200,000, at a cost of 20.9 cents an appointment. As more appointments are made, the states costs ratchet downward -- from 20.9 cents per appointment for 2 million to 3 million appointments to 14.9 cents per appointment for 8 million to 10 million appointments. We do estimate more than 1 million Ohioans using the system, Tierney said. We hope that as many Ohioans as possible will choose to be vaccinated and will take advantage of the states streamlined scheduling tool. The system that Accenture is developing for the state has several extra services that would come with an additional cost. We are exploring purchasing additional features and services, such as the virtual assistant, Tierney said, which would help Ohioans who are trying to figure out the website. The contract comes with customer support for the Ohio Department of Health for the six-month duration, starting with 42 full-time equivalent employees in the first month and decreasing to 14 by the sixth month. Additional help is available at different rates, depending on the problem and whether the person helping is in the U.S. or other part of the world. Security The contract says Accenture will comply with the states system securities plan, the federal governments cloud services standards and the federal health care privacy law known commonly as HIPAA. Accenture is a large contractor in Ohio and holds the license to the much maligned Ohio Benefits system, which many people -- from users, advocates of the poor to even a cabinet-level director in state government have said is riddled with errors and glitches. Accenture says the signup system being implemented in Ohio is used with success in three other states, a Canadian province and by the Australian Government Department of Health for administering the flu vaccine. Timeline In the contract, Accenture set up a timeline, with the website to go live before mid-March. But its unclear whether the state will be able to adhere to that. DeWine, in previously discussing the system, said that its taking some time for the vaccine providers to upload their information. When the system ultimately goes live, Ohioans will be able to type in a ZIP code and find appointments within 20 miles. DeWine has said the system needs to be populated with available appointments and other information from vaccine providers. Some providers are using their own systems and are having to migrate onto the states system. And providers have told the state they have created waiting lists for older Ohioans in the eligible groups to get shots, and they want to adhere to that list, which may not happen if other Ohioans are able to jump into the portal. That work of populating the system with COVID-19 vaccine provider information continues, and there is no definite date for when the site will go live, Tierney said. We are actively working with providers to add appointment availability, as the program works best when more providers with appointments are added to the system, he said. It will launch when determined that an adequate number of providers have added appointment availability. Alphabet Inc.s Google is trying to draw more people to its payment app and keep them there longer with features such as a reward system, new financial management services and a format for listing payments that evokes text-message conversations. The Google Pay app will eventually offer Plex, mobile checking and savings accounts being introduced by Google in partnership with 11 banks and credit unions. It positions the mobile app and Google Pay to solve for a broader set of a customers financial needs beyond payments," said Ross Cosner, vice president and analyst at Gartner Inc. Googles redesigned app, which arrived in November, comes at a time when its digital wallet competitors are rapidly expanding both users and functionality. PayPal Holdings Inc. has its own app with features like a payment installment plan, and the companys peer-to-peer payment system, Venmo, offers check cashing and a physical credit card with a QR code . Many of these apps also include some of the same features as Google Pay. Venmo provides users a social-media like feed of their friends payments, for example, complete with emoji and stickers, and offers a cash-back reward system. Intuit Inc.s Mint offers users insights into their money, such as tracking spending in a certain category. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the use of digital wallets on mobile devices and other forms of contactless payments. The number of people using digital wallets at a point-of-sale system is expected to increase to 93 million this year from 86.9 million in 2020, according to June estimates from research firm eMarketer. The design of the Google Pay appincluding illustrations, the threaded payment conversations," and a muted color paletteaims to make it feel less transactional and more about building relationships with people and businesses in the app, said Mike Holzer, director of user experience at Google Payments. It reflects this very conversational type of interaction," Mr. Holzer said. The app also tries to channel the stories" format of short vertical videos that are popular on social media platforms. The stories-like images offer users a snapshot of coming bills and bank fees. Google Pay has about seven types of these stories," which are personalized according to a users spending, said a Google spokesperson. Other options let users connect the app to their Gmail and Google Photos accounts to search for receipts and categorize transactions. Some of these user experience additions can make the app feel more personal than others, experts say. Threaded transactions feel chat-based, a design element that many people are familiar with, said Chelsea Matthews, founder and executive creative director at Another Creative Inc., a creative agency. It feels a bit more native than the way things are very transaction-oriented on Venmo," she said. The illustrations in the app are vibrant and give it a more friendly feel than many payment apps, said Jess Jaime, senior designer at Jaime Studio, a design agency. Google Pay lags behind its more established rivals and the question remains as to whether the new features are enough to help it catch up. The app had 1.35 million average monthly active iOS users in 2020, compared with 26.8 million for Cash App, 13 million for PayPal, and 11.4 million for Venmo, according to Gartner analysis of SensorTower Inc. data of the top five iOS payment apps. Google faces a similar challenge on Android devices, with 1.33 million average monthly active users, compared with 12.4 million for Cash App, 12.2 for PayPal and 10.7 million for Venmo, according to Gartners analysis of SensorTower data. And because Google Pays capabilities function best when users allows the app to access their Gmail and Google Photos accounts, it may face additional hurdles, said Jenny Nicholson, executive director, brand experience at McKinney Ventures LLC., an advertising agency. Google faces a series of antitrust lawsuits, including one filed by the Justice Department in October. Google has responded in posts online, saying its free products help people and small businesses, and that the Justice Departments suit is deeply flawed." People like that they can use Google for so many purposes but can be nervous about giving up even more information to the company, Ms. Nicholson said. Does Google have the kind of trust where people want to connect all of their financial information to Google?" she said. Google Pays Mr. Holzer said the app was designed with privacy principles such as transparency and control in mind. The integrations with Gmail and Photos are off by default and need to be activated by users who are interested. We have seen from our experience around the world that when we build features that are truly helpful for our users and provide transparent controls for them, adoption does follow," Mr. Holzer said. This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. On Either Side of the Window, an ongoing series by internationally celebrated photographer Rania Matar Since its launch, 'The Pandemic Lens' has blossomed into an artful contemplation of life, disease, waiting, heroism, and mortality during COVID-19. - Art Critic Cate McQuaid, Boston Globe A new online arts and literary publication, THE PANDEMIC LENS has emerged, serving as a virtual creative diary of life in the time of corona by more than 100 photographers, artists, writers, and other creatives from across the globe, including the U.S., Italy, U.K., Germany, France, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and more. The site was inspired in June 2020 after Cambridge-based photographer Steve Bennett ventured out of his house for the first time in weeks with camera in hand to document how life had changed in his neighborhood. His photoblog soon morphed into The Pandemic Lens, which quickly went viral and, as Boston Globes art critic Cate McQuaid proclaimed, blossomed into an artful contemplation of life, disease, waiting, heroism, and mortality during COVID-19." During the first wave of safer at home isolation, I found myself turning inwards for creative inspiration, shooting macro photographs and reprocessing older images. But by late spring, I had a yearning to see what life on the street looked like when restrictions slowly lifted. As I spent more time capturing images of people and shops in the area, I began posting them on The Pandemic Lens site as a way to bear witness to the time of corona, says photographer Steve Bennett. I then began inviting artists, photographers, musicians, and writers from around the globe to help document the shared crisis. SEE FOR YOURSELF: Click on the video link below to get a glimpse into some of the extraordinary reflections as told through the impassioned art, imagery, and essays of The Pandemic Lens: ABOUT THE PANDEMIC LENS The Pandemic Lens began three months into the first pandemic wave by photographer Steve Bennett. Since then, more than 200 contributions have been posted to date, including: Somerville Theater - Where it all started when photographer Steve Bennett took his first stroll during lockdown Masks of Boston - Weekly contributions shared by noted documentary photographer Katherine Taylor (left--Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley) America Disrupted - Watercolors inspired in isolation by NY Times best-selling author and artist Jay Samit (Disrupt You) In the Time of Corona: The Gossamer Veil by abstract landscape paintings by artist Tanya Hayes Lee. They Never Lose Optimism - Stunning captures by Italian photographer Gianluca Federighi of the remarkable resolve of Tuscan community I Am a Nurse Powerful essay by Roberta Gately, a nurse, former humanitarian refugees aid worker and novelist (Lipstick in Afghanistan) On Either Side of the Window: Portraits During Covid-19- An ongoing series by internationally celebrated photographer Rania Matar. Steve Bennett and other artists are available for interviews. # # # Website: http://www.PandemicLens.com Instagram: @ThePandemicLens Facebook and Twitter: @Pandemic Lens Contact: Cynthia Lieberman, LieberComm, liebermanc@gmail.com | 818-368-3808 02/23/2021 Attorney General Steve Marshall visited the Alabama Investigator Academy's first day of classes on Feb. 23. Photo by Matt Reynolds. Alabama law enforcement personnel will now have access to better training in investigations following the establishment of the Alabama Investigator Academy. A partnership between the Center for Best Practices in Law Enforcement at Jacksonville State University and the Alabama Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission (APOSTC), the program is the first of its kind in the state. I am pleased to support the new Alabama Investigator Academy and look forward to its contributions toward enhancing the effectiveness of criminal investigations and prosecutions within our state, said Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who visited the academy on its first day of classes at JSUs Fort McClellan campus in Anniston on Feb. 23. The state certified academy will provide law enforcement participants 80 hours of specialized training in investigations, covering topics such as crime scene procedures, death investigation, interviewing techniques, criminal law procedures, case file preparation and courtroom testimony. With the curriculum accredited by APOSTC, Alabama is now one of only two states providing a state certified training program in investigations. For years, Jacksonville State with the support of the Alabama Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission has been a center of excellence in hosting the successful Northeast Alabama Law Enforcement Academy, and more recently the Center for Best Practices in Law Enforcement, Marshall said. Accordingly, thousands of Alabama law enforcement officers are employing the skills and techniques learned at JSU to protect our communities. Therefore, it is fitting that the university will partner with APOSTC to raise training to the next level, incorporating comprehensive training for Alabama law enforcement investigators covering all aspects of a case, from processing a crime scene to testifying in court. More than 25 officers from across the state are participating in the academys first session. Two to three sessions will be hosted per year, with the next scheduled for July. The curriculum is taught by national experts in the field, led by faculty from the JSU Department of Criminal Justice and Forensic Investigation. I would like to express my gratitude to APOSTC, Attorney General Marshall, the university administration and the Alabama State Legislature for supporting this much needed training curriculum, said Kaleb Littlejohn, director of the Center for Best Practices in Law Enforcement. We are excited for the opportunity to give back to all law enforcement officers statewide. Established in 2017, the JSU Center for Best Practices in Law Enforcement provides free supplemental training in emerging trends to police officers and other law enforcement personnel across the state. Since 2018, the center has provided training to more than 1500 officers, with courses such as Community Policing: Winning Back Your Community, Interviewing Strategies, Statement Analysis, and Taking the Lead: Courageous Leadership for Todays Public Safety. Officers interested in signing up for training should visit the JSU Continuing Education website at www.jsu.edu/ceo or contact Kaleb Littlejohn at CBPLE@jsu.edu. On Demand We have a new story every day on the front page of thephuketnews.com. Also like us on our Facebook page (facebook.com/thephuketnews) and be the first to watch all the new stories. Finally you can watch any segment, any time by going to thephuketnews.com/tv where all the stories are listed for you to enjoy. All our programs can be enjoyed in High Definition when watching on the internet. In-Room VDO [February 24, 2021] Cogeco Inc. and Cogeco Communications Inc. Schedule the Release of their Financial Results for the Second Quarter of Fiscal 2021 and Related Conference Call MONTREAL, Feb. 24, 2021 /CNW Telbec/ - Cogeco Inc. (TSX: CGO) and Cogeco Communications Inc. (TSX: CCA) plan to release their financial results for the second quarter of fiscal 2021, ending February 28, 2021, on Tuesday, April 13, 2021, after market closing. The companies will hold a conference call on Wednesday, April 14, 2021 at 11:00 a.m. (Eastern Daylight Time) to discuss their financial and operating results. A live audio webcast will be available on Cogeco's web site at https://corpo.cogeco.com/cca/en/investors/investor-relations/. The webcast will be available on Cogeco's website for a three-month period. Members of the financial community will be able to access the conference call and ask questions. Media representatives may attend as listeners only. Please use the following dial-in number to have access to the conference call 5 to 10 minutes before the start of the conference: Canada/USA Access Number: 1-877-291-4570 International Access Number: 1-647-788-4919 In order to join this conference, participants are required to provide the operator with the name of the company hosting the call, that is, Cogeco Inc. or Cogeco Communications Inc. SOURCE Cogeco Inc. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is slamming President Joe Bidens administration after the U.S. reopened an emergency migrant facility for children near the Mexico border. U.S. Health and Human Services said its housing teenagers who cross the southern border unaccompanied by a parent at a tent facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas. The first teens arrived at the facility Monday, roughly two years after it was converted into a holding facility surrounded by wire fence under President Donald Trump. This is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay - no matter the administration or party, AOC wrote on Twitter. Our immigration system is built on a carceral framework. Its no accident that challenging how we approach both these issues are considered controversial stances. They require reimagining our relationship to each other and challenging common assumptions we take for granted. Its only 2 mos into this admin & our fraught, unjust immigration system will not transform in that time. Thats why bold reimagination is so (important). DHS shouldnt exist, agencies should be reorganized, ICE gotta go, ban for-profit detention, create climate refugee status & more. The Associated Press reports HHS, which operates long-term facilities for immigrant children apprehended by the Border Patrol, said it reopened Carrizo Springs because its other dormitories are almost at full due to reduced capacity amid the coronavirus. The HHS says it will provide up to 700 children, ages 13 to 17, with beds before eventually placing them with sponsors. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki called it a temporary reopening during Covid-19, telling reporters Tuesday the Biden administration plans to close it but currently needs to ensure that we can follow COVID protocols as unaccompanied minors come into the United States. The emergency facility and others, like in Tornillo, Texas, and Homestead, Florida, were widely criticized by Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez during the Trump administrations policy of family separation at the border. Photos went viral showing children without their parents at the U.S. Border Patrols McAllen Processing Center, which is currently closed for renovations that will remove large cages formed by chain-link fencing. Fox News points out Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris previously spoke out against kids in cages and family separation, calling it a human rights abuse being committed by the United States government. Psaki denied a change in stance by the Biden administration. Let me be clear here, one, there is a pandemic going on, Psaki said. This is not kids being kept in cages. Thats never our intentionof replicating immigration policies of the past administration, she continued. But we are in a circumstance where we are not going to expel unaccompanied minors at the border. That would be inhumane. That is not what we are going to do here as an administration. We need to find places that are safe and mental services consistent with their best interests. HHS spokesman Mark Weber told The Washington Post that the department would put unaccompanied minors in permanent centers, but because theres not enough space for social distancing and other Covid-19 protocols, theyre temporarily using influx shelters like Carrizo and Homestead. A watchdog report last month found more than 5,500 children were separated from their family members in 2018 during a Trump-era zero tolerance enforcement policy for migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. The Department of Justice rescinded the memo shortly after Biden took office, and said the DOJ would return to its longstanding previous policy and instructing prosecutors to act on the merits of individual cases. As the day progressed at Business Bar, tables alternately filled with Mason jars of iced coffee and breakfast sandwiches, then eye-catching cocktails and taco plates. The constant throughout: laptops, notebooks and phone chargers. Business Bar is the newest addition to Freret Street, and it brings something altogether different to the restaurant row lining this busy Uptown stretch. It was designed to serve the increasingly blended worlds of work time and downtime. It also reflects modern times, conceived and developed during the pandemic as many more professionals and students work remotely. Its the latest venture by two young entrepreneurs, Jade Newman and Jessica Robinson. They call the concept a "restaurant and workstation," imbuing a casual cafe with amenities tailored to mobile working. We're always looking for what's missing, what people need, where theres a void that we can fill, said Newman. Part of it is just letting people know this is possible, that theres a place designed for them where they can feel comfortable popping open the laptop. Business Bar opened late in February in the space that had been home to Bar Frances, a bistro that closed early in the pandemic. Some key pieces to putting the business in Business Bar are high-performing Wi-Fi, copious outlets and a mix of bar top and counter perches for solo outings and conference tables for small meetings, which are available to reserve. The restaurant will soon offer printing services. Other parts of the concept show more in the programming. Business Bar will soon begin hosting entrepreneur power hours, or happy hours with guest speakers with expertise in fields like accounting or finance. +21 The pandemic changes routines, but New Orleans keeps its coffee shop rituals strong The stage was quiet at Tipitinas, but around one corner of the famous Uptown music hall there were the steam whistle sounds of an espresso ma The concept is built around business, though this venture got its start through a friendship. Newman and Robinson are New Orleans natives who each started in different careers and came together through their own businesses. Newman runs Southern Girl Property Management, with clients around the country. Robinson is founder of JusTini Cocktails, a cocktail catering service. They run a small events space together, Space Seven, in the Ninth Ward. Whatever they do, though, their lives always seem to glimmer between work time, social time and family time. We are full of life, we're social, but we're real businesswomen and we dont stop, said Newman. They've seen how networking and sharing knowledge propelled their own careers, and with Business Bar they hope to create a space to facilitate that for others. Food and restaurant news in your inbox Every Thursday we give you the scoop on NOLA dining. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Business Bar is Newmans first foray into the restaurant business; for Robinson, its the fulfillment of a long-term goal by different means. Its been my dream to open a bar, but with the pandemic, I thought at first maybe that was over, Robinson said. But it came down to rebranding, refocusing that dream. This is our purpose. We only had one choice, and that was to pursue it. Their chef at Business Bar is Lawrence Amour, whose menus for breakfast, lunch and dinner are concise and built around the business theme. Dishes are designed for people who may be multitasking at the table and don't want anything too heavy or intricate. The dishes also have to be feasible for takeout, an important part of the business plan. In the morning, theres oatmeal, avocado toast and breakfast sandwiches with hot sausage, egg and cheese on brioche; lunch and dinner menus have entree salads, fries and Brussels sprouts, flatbreads, tacos, grilled or fried chicken bites and a lamb chop platter. The bar mixes drinks that Robinson has developed through JusTini, including a roster dubbed rise and grind cocktails" made with espresso, a bottomless sparkling wine flight with different juices to mix in and bottled cocktails to go. A frozen cocktail called the CEO is a potent mix of gin, watermelon and rose. Across the restaurant, theres a mix of gleaming marble and bare wood. A large bar anchors the dining room and the covered patio facing Freret Street feels like a front porch on the bustling street. On this porch though, even when the drinks go around, the laptops are out. Business Bar 4525 Freret St., (504) 581-8667 Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. +21 Crawfish gave New Orleans restaurants a pandemic lifeline. Can they repeat this season? The crowds that normally pack Frankie & Johnnys Restaurant for po-boys and beer between parades were missing this Carnival season. The wi +13 New Orleans first brewpub reopens with old world approach for a new world of beer Pouring a pilsner direct from the brewing tank one recent morning, Crescent City Brewhouse founder Wolfram Koehler described a beermaking proc Windhoek (Namibia) 24 February 2021 (SPS)- The President of Namibia, Dr. Hage G. Geingob, addressed a message to the President of the Saharawi Republic, Mr. Brahim Ghali, received Today, congratulating him for the celebration of the 45th Anniversary of the proclamation of the SADR. Let me take this opportunity, on behalf of the Government and people of the Republic of Namibia, to extend Your Excellency and the brave people of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, warm congratulations on the 45th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic on 27 February 1976, President Geingob said. He reaffriemd Namibias governments commitment and support towards finding a just, lasting and mutually acceptable political solution that will provide for the self-determination of the peoples of Western Sahara in accordance with the United Nations resolutions. (SPS) 090/500/60 (SPS) FUZHOU, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- An analysis of sequenced genomes of ancient East Asians and present-day groups showed strong genetic links between ancient Taiwan groups and Tai-Kadai speakers in the Chinese mainland's southern areas and Hainan Island. The finding was published in the journal Nature on Tuesday. A group of international researchers reported genome-wide data from 166 East Asians dating back 8,000 to 1,000 years from sites across the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, Mongolia, Russia, and Japan, and from 383 samples of 46 present-day groups from the Chinese mainland and Nepal. They found people from Taiwan 3,300 to 1,200 years ago derived about 75 percent ancestry from a lineage also common in modern Austronesian and Tai-Kadai speakers, suggesting Austronesians, including modern indigenous Taiwan groups, share the same ancestry with Tai-Kadai people in the mainland's southern areas and Hainan Island. Wang Chuanchao, an anthropologist at Xiamen University and co-author of the article, said they extracted and sequenced DNA of 46 individuals from two Iron Age sites in Taiwan, adding that it is also the first DNA study of ancient people in Taiwan. The study shows ancient Taiwan people also derived about 25 percent ancestry from a northern lineage related to but different from Yellow River farmers. "It explains why foxtail millet, which was domesticated in the northern part of the Chinese mainland, appeared relatively early in the Taiwan Neolithic Tapenkeng culture," Wang said. Wang noted this provides direct evidence that Austronesian speakers, who live across a wide swath of islands in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific, originated on the Chinese mainland. Austronesian refers to a family of languages spoken in the area extending from Madagascar eastward through the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago to Hawaii and Easter Island and including almost all the native languages of the Pacific islands. The article was co-authored by 85 researchers from 43 institutions across the world including Xiamen University, Harvard University and Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. A serial burglar who has been stealing from National Youth Service (NYS) personnel at the NYS headquarters in Ruaraka pleaded guilty before a Makadar court. Stephen Ochieng admitted to stealing and handling stolen goods belonging Anthony Munene Njeru. The suspect broke into Njerus house at dawn and stole underwear, a subwoofer, and a claw hammer, all valued at Sh4,900. A guard at the NYS headquarters spotted the thief and raised an alarm leading to his arrest. At the time, shortly before 5 am, Njeru was still asleep and unaware that his house had been broken into and his underwear stolen. In court, Makadara chief magistrate Heston Nyaga remembered convicting Ochieng for a similar offence in 2016 and described him as the spiderman of NYS. He must be another Spiderman after the one who has tormented the residents of Kilimani in Nairobi only that this one can be termed as the Spiderman of NYS, Nyaga noted Having proven that the previous term has not taught him a lesson, I think a larger sentence may do so, he added. The court sentenced Ochieng to three years in jail. Interestingly, three of his accomplices are serving death sentences for robbing him. They had reportedly disagreed on a sharing formula after a successful heist at NYS in 2016 before his accomplices armed themselves and violently robbed him. In the 2016 case, Ochieng had admitted to charges of stealing a TV and a mobile phone valued at Sh55,000 from Fridah Opiyo Odongos house and was jailed for two years after being arrested while selling the items to a police officer. The convict is said to have been brought up inside the NYS headquarters where his father worked before he retired. Police gather outside Adamson BBQ following the arrest of owner Adam Skelly in Etobicoke, Canada, on Nov 26, 2020. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press) Toronto Bills BBQ Restaurant Owner $187,000 for Costs Spent Enforcing Its Closure The city of Toronto is asking the owner of an Etobicoke barbecue restaurant to pay $187,000 in costs it incurred when police tried to enforce COVID-19 lockdown orders at his business last year. In November 2020, Adam Skelly, the owner of Adamson Barbecue, flouted the citys COVID-19 restrictions that prohibited bars and restaurants from providing dine-in services. Toronto police called on the business multiple times in attempt to enforce the rules, and Toronto Medical Officer of Health Dr. Eileen de Villa eventually ordered the closure of the establishment located on Queen Elizabeth Boulevard. Skelly, at a press conference last week, said that his lawyers are preparing for a constitutional challenge against the Ontario Reopening Act, which will be the most broad and vast challenge against the emergency order ever seen in Canada, he said. The government is completely overreaching in an effort to close down small businesses and destroy our economy, and there seems to be a larger globalist agenda at play, said Skelly. On Nov. 26, 2020, a day after the restaurant was shut down, Skelly and his supporters sought to break into his establishment from an adjoining area separated by a wall and reopen for business. He was then arrested and charged with a number of criminal and non-criminal offences, including trespassing and obstructing the police. Toronto city spokesperson Brad Ross told CP24 on Monday that the city had sent a demand letter to Skelly in December 2020 asking him to pay $187,000 in costs the city incurred in trying to to prevent him from reopening is restaurant. Ross said that if Skelly refuses to comply, the city will pursue legal actions with the next step, which would be filing a formal statement of claim. Skelly has raised roughly $335,000 through Go Fund Me, and has so far spent $10,000 on criminal proceedings, which he said should be thrown out right away. This is a civil issue, not a criminal issue, Skelly said. In addition, the department's new rules said someone confirmed to be positive "has 90 days of immunity and will not be quarantined during their period unless they develop symptoms." If someone is completely vaccinated, are within three months "following receipt of the last dose in the series" and has stayed asymptomatic since their current exposure, they don't have to quarantine for 90 days after that second dose, the guidelines said. They need proof of receiving two vaccines. While the recent quarantine protocols make a difference, O'Brien said, he is hoping the state or the CDC soon make further statements that will make it easier to "have more students in a more normal schedule for kids," specifically the idea of softening social distance requirements from 6 feet in schools to 3 feet. "We rely heavily on electronics right now, We would like to have more face-to-face instruction and less electronics," O'Brien said. "If it was 3 feet, we would move down that pathway." He also praised the efforts of the Cayuga health department director Kathleen Cuddy and the department's staff overall for their efforts over the last several months. Auburn Enlarged City School District Superintendent Jeff Pirozzolo has publicly advocated for that social distancing reduction as well, and talked about the idea earlier this week with Dr. Betty A. Rosa, the state education commissioner. Pirozzolo said that Rosa said she and her team have been discussing that concept with Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office and will continue to do so. Staff writer Kelly Rocheleau can be reached at (315) 282-2243 or kelly.rocheleau@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @KellyRocheleau. Concerned about COVID-19? Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Piers Morgan has installed a panic button in his bedroom following death threats made against him. The Good Morning Britain presenter, 55, contacted police last week after receiving horrifying threats online. Writing in her Telegraph column, Piers' journalist wife Celia Walden, 45, told how the police visited their home and a security engineer installed a panic button should they need to contact authorities immediately. Security: Piers Morgan has installed a panic button in his bedroom following death threats made against him Piers was sent a message on Instagram from a user that read: '@PiersMorgan your a marked man, calling the police, big tech or beefing up your security isn't going to stop us getting to you, this isn't a threat Piers it's a promise, your getting killed. [sic]' This was followed by another message directed at the broadcaster's son Spencer which said: 'Watch your back @spencermorgan if you don't get your dad, you're getting it or your mum is'. Discussing the threats, Celia wrote: 'It was only when I was told my phone number would be listed with a 'rapid response' unit specialising in death threats, and a security engineer came to install a panic button by our bed that would have the police there within four minutes, that a trembly feeling started up in my stomach. 'I thought about the nine-year-old [daughter Elise] I'd told to stay in her bedroom until "Daddy's work colleagues have gone" and composed a convincing lie for when, as she inevitably did, my daughter asked what the contraption in our bedroom was for.' Threats: Piers' wife Celia Walden told how the police visited their home and a security engineer installed a panic button should they need to contact authorities immediately Celia added she worries about older family members who may not realise how common social media threats are and would fear for her and Piers. The journalist also said she became 'incensed' at the idea she may have to look behind her every time she goes out to exercise. Celia called for an end to social media anonymity to help combat threats made by trolls and noted Facebook is helping police to track down the IP address of the person who made the post. She wrote: 'Here we are, about to enter the second year of this waking nightmare and trying every day to quash the personal challenges and sadnesses we're all facing, while somewhere in a basement, behind their anonymous egg-shaped profiles, these human vermin can think of nothing better to do than spread poison, and deliberately instil fear in others.' Celia wrote: 'A security engineer came to install a panic button by our bed that would have the police there within four minutes, that a trembly feeling started up in my stomach' Piers was told in a comment on an Instagram post he shared of him and son Spencer at Kensington's Holland Park, that he was a 'marked man'. The presenter brought the messages to the attention of his 7.7 million Twitter followers, writing: 'Another day, another death threat' and asking fans to help track down the person behind the account. He then revealed that further steps have been taken and that he had involved the Metropolitan Police. He wrote: 'UPDATE: I've reported these death threats to @metpoliceuk and look forward to hearing back from them. Shocking: The Good Morning Britain host was told in a comment on an Instagram post he shared of him and son Spencer at Kensington's Holland Park, that he was a 'marked man' The commenter added that contacting the authorities or beefing up his security 'isn't going to stop us getting you' and warned: 'This isn't a threat Piers it's a promise, your (sic) getting killed' Piers wrote on Wednesday: 'UPDATE: I've reported these death threats to @metpoliceuk and look forward to hearing back from them. I'm also keen to hear what steps @instagram @ Facebook are taking to identify the person who made the death threats on their platform & has now deleted their account' 'I'm also keen to hear what steps @instagram @ Facebook are taking to identify the person who made the death threats on their platform & has now deleted their account.' When it was suggested by one follower that the police report would not result in any action, Piers responded: 'Well they're definitely taking this seriously.. they're round my house now taking a statement.' A Met Police spokesman told the Daily Star: 'We have received a report of malicious communications relating to messages sent on social media. Enquiries are ongoing.' Riots at three jails in Ecuador left at least 50 inmates dead and several injured on Tuesday, authorities reported as the nation battles severe prison overcrowding and frequent violence between rival gangs. The national police said on Twitter the death toll stood at more than 50 prisoners after unrest at facilities in the provinces of Guayas, Azuay and Cotopaxi. Ecuadors President Lenin Moreno, also on Twitter, attributed the riots to criminal organizations engaged in simultaneous acts of violence in several prisons. The authorities, he said, are acting to retake control. The police did not state whether order had been restored after violence broke out at prisons in the port city of Guayaquil in the southwest, and at Cuenca and Latacunga in the Andes. Police commander Patricio Carrillo reported unrest at several prisons in the South American nation, and said the situation is critical. Interior Minister Patricio Pazmino, meanwhile, tweeted that a centralised command post has been set up to respond to what he said was concerted action by criminal organizations to generate violence in penitentiary centres. In December, riots in Ecuadorian jails sparked by gang rivalry left 11 prisoners dead and seven injured. A 90-day state of emergency in the countrys jails, ordered by Moreno to bring mafia groups under control in a bid to reduce violence, was lifted in November. There are some 38,000 prisoners in Ecuador, a country of 17 million people. Inmate disputes left 51 dead in 2020, according to police. In order to reduce prisoner numbers amid the coronavirus epidemic, the government commuted the sentences of people convicted of minor offences, reducing overcrowding from 42 percent to 30 percent. SOURCE: AFP Major General Rafiq Shahadah has been a prominent figure in Syria for decades and has been linked to numerous crimes and corruption. In Brief A new Office Manager to President Assad has been appointed recently. Background Major General Rafiq Shahadah is an old guard officer, and has been one of the most prominent of their number in Syrias new phase. He commanded Hafez al-Assads guard brigade at the rank of brigadier general until 2000, when he was transferred to Political Security, where he headed the branch in the al-Maysat area of Damascus. He then was appointed head of the Military Security branch in Tartous and Head of Branch 293, concerned with officers affairs under the authority of the Military Intelligence Directorate based in Damascus. The Syrian Revolution When the Syrian revolution erupted out in 2011, Rafiq Shahadah was working as head of the Security and Military Committee in Homs, and served as deputy head of the Military Intelligence Directorate, headed by Major General Ali Mamlouk. Major General Rafiq Shahadah is considered to be directly responsible for the Clock Square massacre in Homs, which killed and wounded hundreds of the citys residents. He was also responsible for the violations committed by security forces in Homs province, especially in Baba Amr, Talbeesa, and al-Rastan. As a result of the Crisis Cell bombing in 2012, Major General Rafiq Shahadah was appointed as head of the Military Intelligence Directorate following Major General Ali Mamlouk, who became head of the National Security Bureau. While he headed this agency one of the strongest and most numerous of the regimes security agencies Shahada and his men carried out various violations and criminal acts against Syrians. He has been implicated in the killing, arrest and disappearance of tens of thousands of Syrians, and his forces were accused of raping women in the Military Intelligence Directorates basements, and of the deaths and arrest of hundreds of officers and soldiers on the charge of opposing the regime or on suspicion of defection. In March 2015, he was accused of killing Major General Rustum Ghazaleh, head of the Political Security Directorate at that time, after he was beaten by Shahadahs men after a dispute related to corruption. Consequently, he was released of his duties and put at the disposal of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Armed Forces, Bashar al-Assad. In July 2016, The New York Times published a report about the details of the suit brought by the family of the journalist Marie Colvin (Case 1:16-cv-01423) before a federal court in the American capital, Washington, D.C., against the Syrian Arab Republic on Jul. 7, 2016. The journalists relatives accused ten Syrian officials, most prominently Maher al-Assad, Ali Mamlouk, and Rafiq al-Shahadah of killing Colvin in the Baba Amr district on Jan. 22, 2012, as well as the French photographer Remi Ochlik, when regime forces bombarded one of the buildings which the correspondents were using as a media center. A man of controversy Rafiq Shahadah is considered one of the most controversial officers in the regimes ranks, as he has been deeply involved in corruption and has exploited his position to serve his personal interests. His son, Mudar, was appointed to the Syrian Foreign Ministry and was made a diplomat working in the Syrian embassy in London. When this embassy was later closed, he was transferred to the embassy in Ukraine, and it is worth noting that his education did not exceed high school. He has two brothers, the journalist Sharif Shahadah and another serving as an officer in the Syrian army. General Shahadah has been subject to US Treasury Department sanctions since 2017, along with 17 officials in the Syrian regime and six other entities under regime authority for their role in carrying out the regimes monstrous crimes against the Syrian people. This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Syrian Observer. MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) A vote on lottery and casino legislation is being delayed in the Alabama Senate. Republican sponsor Sen. Del Marsh said Tuesday that he plans to work on the proposal over the next two weeks. He said one issue under discussion is increasing the number of casino sites from eight to 10. Marsh said one idea is to allow one site in each of Alabama's seven congressional districts plus three Native American sites. Alabama is one of five states without a state lottery. Alabamians last voted on gambling in 1999 when they defeated a lottery proposed by then-Gov. Don Siegelman. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer lambasted Sen. Ron Johnson Wednesday after the Wisconsin Republican read a statement at a hearing on Capitol security that suggested 'agents provocateur' kick-started the MAGA riot. Schumer's statement which accused the Trump loyalist with spreading 'mindless garbage' without naming him came as an eyewitness to the events at the Capitol told DailyMail.com he did not mean to suggest the riot was a 'false flag' operation carried out by left-wing agitators, as some Trump loyalists have suggested. The witness, J. Michael Waller, stood by his statement that Johnson, who has previously denied that the Capitol riot was an armed insurrection, read into the record at the hearing, which also uncovered intelligence failures leading up to the riot. 'Blaming the January 6th attack on 'provocateurs' and 'fake Trump protestors' is mindless garbage,' said Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer Wednesday, after he called out Sen. Ron Johnson for his comments at a Tuesday hearing Waller wrote about several groups of people approaching the Capitol on Jan. 6th among them people he identified as 'Antifa-types' without confirming it or speaking to them. 'They were wearing MAGA and Trump hats and clothing and they were wearing their hats backwards. They acted in sort of a paranoid way. They didn't fit in,' he told DailyMail.com Wednesday. 'They struck me as Antifa types or left-wing,' he said. But critically, he said he did not witness those small groups of people he suspected commit any violence. 'I expected to see trouble from them but I didn't see them cause any trouble at all,' he explained. He blasted media reports after Johnson's statement for 'making it look like he and I were both alleging this was a false fledge operation when neither one of us alleged that.' Another group he saw included 'uniformed, organized physically fit males who appeared to have had military training or were combat vets who were very well organized and had a strong sense of purpose.' As he wrote about in an article that Johnson read from, he saw these people, later revealed to be 'Oath Keepers,' spurring on the crowd with slogans that he took to be a coordinated action. Waller is an analyst for the Center for Security Policy who published his own eyewitness account of event, which was then carried in the Federalist. Schumer said on the Senate floor Wednesday that 'Regrettably, the hearing also revealed that there are still members of the Senate Republican minority who are willing to continue the campaign of misinformation, deception, and conspiracy that helped fuel the attack on January 6th in the first place.' 'So let me be very clear: blaming the January 6th attack on 'provocateurs' and 'fake Trump protestors' is mindless garbage. It has no basis in fact. Perpetuating and giving a platform to those lies is a preposterous contribution to a Senate hearing devoted to Capitol security,' he fumed. 'Everyoneeveryoneneeds to move forward by sticking to the facts and engaging in a very serious discussion about the security of the Capitol complex.' At the hearing, Johnson read sections of Waller's account that referenced 'agents provocateur' who turned 'unsuspecting marchers into an invading mob' during on January 6th. He spoke after former Capitol Police chief Steven Sund described his officers being overrun by a MAGA mob armed with flags, poles, and bear spray, and himself testified that some rioters were outfitted for war. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) floated a conspiracy theory by reading from a witness to the Jan. 6th riot who wrote there were agents-provocateur within the crowd that triggered the riot Johnson read directly from the Federalist article. The account concluded that a small group of armed attackers who 'probably' planned the event and led other rioters to take part. 'He said the mood of the crowd was positive and festive,' said Johnson, reading from Waller's account as he joined a crowd marching to the Capitol. 'Of the thousands of people I passed or who passed me along Constitution Avenue, some were indignant or contemptuous of Congress, but not one appeared angry or incited to riot,' Waller wrote in the Federalist. He said many were 'families with small children, many were elderly, overweight, or just plain tired or frail, traits not typically attributed to riot prone.' 'Many wore pro police shirts or carried pro police black and blue flags,' according to passages Johnson read. 'A very few didn't share the jovial, friendly, earnest demeanor of the great majority. Some obviously didn't fit in,' he continued. Sen. Johnson read from an account by J. Michael Waller about what he saw at the Capitol Jan. 6th Johnson read from a piece by J. Michael Waller, an analyst for the Center for Security Policy who produced his own eyewitness account of the event claiming there were 'agents provocateur' behind the Jan. 6 riot Johnson read the statement after other Trump loyaists promoted narratives that left-wing forces infiltrated or caused the MAGA mob riots The account read by Johnson describes different groups within the protests outside the Capitol A protester holds a Trump flag inside the US Capitol Building near the Senate Chamber on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC 'He describes four different types of people,' said Johnson: plainclothes militants, agents provocateurs, Trump supporters, and then a disciplined uniform column of attackers. 'I think these are the people that probably planned this,' he said. The statement Johnson read described D.C. police as their 'usually detached selves,' and said he noticed 'no police at all' on Capitol grounds. 'The openness seemed like a courtesy gesture from Congress,' Waller wrote. 'Everyone squeezed closer and closer together with mostly high spirits.' Several times Waller identified himself as within earshot of flare-ups. 'Some trouble began up in the front' near the inaugural platform, he said, 'but we cannot see what was happening.' Then there was a 'scuffle' and people started chanting 'USA, USA.' He described a group of 'plainclothes militants,' adding they 'fit right in with MAGA people.' Then he said police fired tear gas into the middle of the crowd, which 'changed the crowd's demeanor.' 'The pro police crowd when from disbelief to confusion to anger,' according to the account Johnson read. 'I'll stop right there. The last five pages is titled provocatuers turning unsuspecting marchers into an invading mob,' Johnson added, before asking a few questions of witnesses. The article Johnson read from described the supposed agents-provocatuer as 'scattered groups of men exhorting the marchers to gather closely and tightly toward the center of the outside of the Capitol building and prevent them from leaving.' It claimed there were 'fake Trump protesters,' described as 'a few young men wearing Trump or MAGA hats backwards and who did not fit in with the rest of the crowd in terms of their actions and demeanor, whom I presumed to be Antifa or other leftist agitators.' The passages read by Johnson came as yet another person picked up by the FBI claimed to have Trump sympathies. Thomas Webster, a former NYPD officer, surrender to agents in New York Monday. Prosecutors say Webster, a former Marine, attacked a Capitol Police officer with a pole. His defense lawyer said he wasn't part of any group and that he went at the behest of the former president of the United States. The Souther Policy Law Center describes the center as having 'gone from a respected hawkish think tank focused on foreign affairs to a conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement in the United States.' Johnson also said he found videos of incident 'sickening' and blasted the 'reprehensible racial slurs' rioters can be heard hurling at police. Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who co-chaired the hearing, blasted the claim afterwards as 'disinformation.' 'As our hearing concludes, I want to make one thing clear: 'provocateurs' did not storm the Capitol. They were not 'fake Trump protestors.' The mood on January 6th was not 'festive.' That is disinformation.' Thousands of incarcerated people in Arizona have been kept behind bars by a software glitch, according to a report by KJZZ broadcast Monday. Anonymous whistleblowers from the Arizona Department of Corrections whistleblowers leaked details about the situation to the Phoenix NPR member station. Arizona has the fifth highest imprisonment rate in the country, and its incarcerated people are mostly nonviolent drug offenders. In 2019, the state Legislature passed a law aiming to change that by providing a way for nonviolent criminals to secure early release. For every seven days spent in a GED or substance abuse treatment program, an incarcerated person can shave three days off a sentence. In 2019, the Arizona Mirror estimated that under the law, nearly 7,000 incarcerated people could become eligible for early release, allowing them to shorten the length of their sentence by up to 70 percent. But so far, that hasnt happenedand software may be to blame. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The Arizona Correctional Information System manages much of the lives of people who are incarcerated. But this software is known to be full of glitcheswith more than 14,000 bugs documented in its years of use, according to KJZZs sources. The system has messed up tracking inmate health care, financial accounts, and religious affiliation. A man who was formerly in the Arizona prison system has tweeted about his experience with this: I went to get religious accommodation for something and they stated my preference did not match my religious request. He wrote, Even though I had paper proving my preference. They went with the computer. Now whistleblowers within the Arizona Department of Corrections have told KJZZ that the new rules around earning early release havent been integrated into the tracking software. As a result, ACIS has failed to identify which inmates are eligible for the early release program and calculate their new release date. Advertisement In October, employees within the corrections department sent an internal change request to higher ups, detailing the need to adjust the ACIS software so it functioned in accordance with the law. Regarding the new early release date system, the report states: Currently this calculation is not in ACIS at all. ACISs parent company wrote in an email to Gizmodo that these change requests are how new laws are usually integrated into computer systems. It maintained that its software doesnt have a bug but just hadnt been adjusted properly. The company didnt address the miscalculations in the other aspects of the system or acknowledge that the change request was never implemented. Advertisement Instead of creating the new calculation or using a new system, department leaders reportedly asked everyone to keep the issue quiet. We were told Were too deep into ittoo much money had been spentwe cant go back now, the whistleblowers reported. $24 million had been spent implementing ACIS software. A whistleblower estimated that fixing the glitch responsible for miscalculating early release dates and eligibility would take more than 2,000 expensive hours of reprogramming. Advertisement But Darrell Hill, policy director of the Arizona ACLU, told Slate that Arizona paid the Department of Corrections millions of dollars to implement the ACIS software program. So, it rings hollow that they needed more money to fix this program, he said. Furthermore, according to a study reported by the Arizona Capitol Times on Tuesday, effective early release programs could save Arizona more than $1.4 billion over the next 10 years. A spokesperson for the Department of Corrections confirmed to KJZZ that the ACIS system does not currently calculate release dates in accordance with the parameters established by the new law. But the spokesperson says the department has the situation under control by manually tracking inmate program eligibility completion and release dates earned. Advertisement The idea that prison employees have been manually counting early release dates (in what, a spreadsheet?) for nearly 2 years is insane, Gizmodo journalist Dell Cameron tweeted in response to this. Advertisement The department said that no ones early release has been delayed and that theyve manually identified 733 eligible people who werent currently enrolled in the early release program. According to the 2019 laws FAQ sheet, only the computer system can determine someones eligibility for the program. But whistleblowers told KJZZ that there are probably thousands of eligible incarcerated people who have been missed. Its been a comedy of errors at the Department of Corrections and it has been for a number of years, Hill said, adding that KJZZs report demonstrates the need for greater transparency, accountability and oversight into what the administration is doing. Advertisement In response to the KJZZ article, the House Appropriations Committee in Arizona met on Tuesday and passed a bill to create an oversight committee for the Arizona Department of Corrections. There are folks sitting in DOC right now that should be out because they have met their time or dont have the resourcesor theyre on an antiquated systemto get these folks out of prison, Rep. Walt Blackman, a Republican, said as he rallied support for the bill. The states oversight committee is a first step, but the underlying, technological problem is a national one. I imagine this is an incredibly common pattern in government softwarea bill gets passed, but updating the software to make new calculations based on that bill is delayed for months if not years, data scientist Simon Willison tweeted. Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Its quite possible that, until two days ago, [President Joe] Biden had no idea what the Jewish National Fund is. Now, however, the old, established organization has turned itself into a major nuisance for his presidential agenda. With this sarcastic note, Alon Pinkas, the former Israeli consul general in New York, concluded an article he wrote for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that was published Feb. 14. His remarks referred to a dramatic decision made by the group, which was created in 1901 with the mission of purchasing lands for Jews to settle in Ottoman Palestine. Over the years, and after the establishment of the state of Israel, it continued to purchase land throughout the country for Jewish settlement (as opposed to West Bank settlements). Today, the Jewish National Fund owns 15% of all the land in Israel. Throughout its history, the fund raised money from rich Jewish donors across the Diaspora, who regarded its mission as a worthy act necessary to redeem the Land of Israel. Once the State of Israel was created, the Jewish National Fund became a powerful arm of the ruling center-left Mapai party (later Labor) and an icon for parties on the Israeli left. As right-wing rule became increasingly entrenched over the last decade, the fund turned into a major arena for political and ideological clashes between the two conflicting worldviews. Representatives of the right in the groups governing bodies gained more and more control over the organization, with the goal of taking everything the fund had done until then far beneath the radar (through a subsidiary company) into official Jewish National Fund policy. As of this month, it has become an organization devoted to the advancement of Jewish settlement in the West Bank. This dramatic shift culminated with a formal decision made Feb. 14 by the funds executive board. It changed the groups official policy and reorganized its activity in the West Bank. This included expanding efforts to purchase land there for the purpose of Jewish settlement. According to these changes, the fund would purchase private land as part of its redemption of the land policy, with a preference given to properties in major areas of Jewish settlement: Gush Etzion, the Jordan Valley, the area surrounding Jerusalem, the Benjamin region, southern Mount Hebron and along Highway 5 and the Green Line. This is an enormous victory for the settlers. From now on, they have a steady foothold in the Holy of Holies of historic Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. The ultimate symbol of pioneering and building up the country and of the lefts past glory has been turned into an executive arm of the settler movement. The decision revealed what everyone already knew: The Jewish National Fund (JNF) had turned into a right-wing, pro-settler organization. Inevitably, the decision was celebrated by the leaders of the settler movement and their representatives in the Knesset. The head of the Religious Zionism party, Bezalel Smotrich, tweeted, Excellent! This was one of our demands in the coalition agreements for national institutions. Finally, the JNF is back to its old self, focusing on its historic role: redeeming the Land of Israel for Jewish settlement. This is Zionism 2021. How does this impact Biden? While his official foreign policy does not seem to prioritize diplomatic negotiations with the Palestinians, the White House cannot ignore this rather esoteric decision made in some remote corner of the Middle East by an antiquated, archaic organization. Why? Because the decision itself is harmful to any efforts to reach a two-state solution, which is part of the overall vision for the region, as expressed by Biden and his new administration. Whether the president agrees or not, the Jewish National Fund decision has become his headache. And his administration responded accordingly. Even before the provocative decision was finalized and formalized, the State Department issued formal criticism of the move. State Department spokesman Ned Price said, We believe it is critical to refrain from unilateral steps that exacerbate tensions and that undercut efforts to advance a negotiated two-state solution. He said such steps could include the annexation of territory, settlement activity, demolitions, incitement to violence [and] the provision of compensation for individuals in prison for acts of terrorism. Reform Jews in the United States, who have a representative on the Jewish National Fund board, also tried to block the initiative before it was formally approved. A statement released in the name of the Union for Reform Judaism leader, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, said his movement opposes the expansion of the settlements because it puts the possibility of a two-state solution at risk. We love and support the Jewish and democratic State of Israel which is why we will continue to strongly oppose policies that undermine the safety, security and moral character of our Jewish homeland. Jacobs made it perfectly clear that the Reform movement does not intend to stand idly by. It plans to pursue different political and legal channels, and to recruit the Jewish community to fight this decision. He added that the timing of the decision, just after Biden entered office, could pose a risk to the good relationships Biden is trying to build. Defense Minister Benny Gantz also tried to block the decision. He appealed to fund Chairman Avraham Duvdevani (who is identified with the right-wing and religious Zionist camps) in a letter, saying the decision was especially sensitive and that its impact should be considered because it could have international implications in terms of the relationship between Israel and the Biden Administration and between Israel and the Diaspora. But, as seen, the pressure and condemnations had no impact. The decision was made. If Benjamin Netanyahu really wanted to stop it, he could have done so easily, but thats the last thing the prime minister would do one month before an election when he so desperately needs every vote on the right. At the same time, Netanyahu is also signaling to Biden that despite the chilly reception he seems to be receiving from the White House, he does not intend to bend, certainly not now, after the International Criminal Court in the Hague ruled that it would allow an investigation into Israels activities in the West Bank. Politically, the Jewish National Fund decision actually serves Netanyahus interests as leader of the right. Another person alarmed by the decision but unable to stop it is Rabbi Gilad Kariv, a representative of the Reform movement on the Board of the World Zionist Organization and a Labor party candidate for the Knesset. This is a significant threat to our national institutions in general and the Jewish National Fund in particular, he said. The far right is continuing its incessant efforts to establish facts on the ground, which will impede any progress on the diplomatic front. Meretz party chair Nitzan Horowitz also recognized the ominous nature of the decision. The right is turning the Jewish National Fund into the Settlement National Fund. The JNF is not some company charged with destroying a potential political solution and any chance for peace that comes with it, he tweeted. The problem is that political circumstances are not acting in the interest of anyone opposed to the decision. All polls show that the center-left parties will suffer a thrashing in the upcoming election and that their representation in the Knesset will hit another low. The East Ridge Police Department in partnership with Speedway Corporation will participate in a Fill-A-Cruiser event on Saturday. The event will be held in the parking lot of Speedway, 4222 Ringgold Road from noon-3 p.m. Residents are encouraged to bring non-perishable food items and assist in filling an East Ridge Police cruiser to help those in need. Police Officers will be at the location to accept donations, and you can remain in your car if you choose. All donations will be taken to the East Ridge Food Pantry to benefit those in our community. Getting children to go to bed can be a challenge, but now scientists have crafted the 'perfect bedtime routine' for youngsters aged between two and eight. University of Manchester psychologists set out to scientifically define a 'good bedtime' by scoring different routines and activities over a period of seven days. They found that a combination of activities including the obvious like brushing teeth or reading a bedtime story were essential, but it also helped to talk to children. The authors say parents should aim to score over 50 points from various activities to achieve and effective bedtime routine on consistent basis. University of Manchester psychologists set out to scientifically define a 'good bedtime' by scoring different routines and activities over a period of seven days WHAT BEDTIME ACTIVITIES ARE WORTH The team defined six core activities for a good bedtime routine. They gave each activity a score, and 50 points are required for a 'good bedtime routine'. Failing to complete an activity results in points being removed. Brushing teeth before bed 35 points Time consistency for going to bed 20 points Book reading before bed 15 points Avoiding food/drinks before bed 10 points Avoiding use of electronic devices before bed 10 points Calming activities with child before bed including bath/shower, signing, talking etc. 10 points Advertisement Brushing teeth before bed scores 35 and going to bed at the same time every night scores 20, which if done consistently over seven days would get parents to over 50. But the authors say a combination of methods could work - including reading a book (15 points), avoiding food and drink before bed (10 points) and handing over all electronic devices before drifting off to sleep (10 points). However, if you make an activity part of your regular routine then fail to do it one day - you lose points and would need to make it up with extra activities. For example, if you set out to read a book or share a story before bedtime every night you gain 15 points, but failing to do it loses you 15 points. Study authors worked with 59 UK experts to determine the activities and definition of a 'good sleep' for children in the two to eight age bracket. Study lead author, Dr George Kitsaras, said bedtime routines are a vital family activity with important knock on implications for wellbeing and health. 'Organisations as diverse as the Book Trust to the BBC and the NHS are all engaged in this debate- but up to now, there has been no real scientific consensus to inform them; we need untie the conflicting signals and messages parents receive. 'This lack of a clear consensus-based definition of limits health professionals' ability to communicate best practice effectively with families. 'Our definition considers the parental stresses and difficulties that might arise at bedtime while incorporating best practice and available scientific advice. 'This study for the first time provides that expert and scientific guidance.' Psychologists, dentists, public health specialists and other experts from education, health visiting and sleep research participated in what is known as a Delphi Process, a method of achieving wider consensus through rounds of questions. Dr Kitsaras added: 'All activities around bedtime matter for children's development and wellbeing. From the wide range of activities around bedtime, our experts considered toothbrushing to be the most important to remember each night.' They found that a combination of activities including the obvious like brushing teeth or reading a bedtime story were essential, but it also helped to talk to children He said there were strong links between inadequate oral hygiene and dental decay, so that was added as a high scoring element of the new routine. 'Washing or having a shower each night before bed, on the other hand might be a common practice for families but our experts considered it to be part of a wider umbrella of child-parent interactions,' Kitsaras said. This was rather than as a standalone practice that needed to specifically targeted. 'I have no doubt the debate will continue and our definition might even be refined as more people engage with it.' This process and subsequent results have some limitations, the authors explained. The definition remains deliberately broad, and as a consequence does not consider the specific bedtime routine requirements of children with learning disabilities, health conditions and/or children in care. The findings have been published in the journal PLOS One. A330 Preighter Conversion Turnkey Solution Ready for Immediate Deployment Regulatory News: AKKA Technologies (Paris:AKA) (BSE:AKA) (ISIN:FR0004180537), European leader in engineering consultancy and R&D services in the mobility sector together with Avianor, an affiliate of DRAKKAR Aerospace Ground Transportation, worked collaboratively since May 2020 to support airlines in the demand for cargo conversion solutions. Since the release of the most recent regulation in October 2020, AKKA and Avianor combined their efforts in order to be compliant with the necessary requirements to obtain the EASA STC (Supplemental Type Certificate) for the A330. Avianor's STC for main deck cargo conversion obtained from the Transport Canada Civil Aviation (TCCA) was the foundation, complemented by AKKA's operational capabilities and airworthiness that enabled the company to fulfill the requirements of the EASA. Currently, local civil aviation authorities allow operators to fly on cargo modification for a limited time. This new EASA STC 10075624, available in three weeks' time, will offer operators the opportunity to be fully compliant with new EASA specifications allowing continued flight until the end of the year. For those ready to convert their A330 passenger fleet to cargo, Avianor and AKKA are the first in the world to provide the only turnkey certified solution with immediate deployment capabilities. "Working in partnership with AKKA over the course of several months to successfully obtain the first ever EASA STC certification of this kind allows us to meet the needs of operators across the world. Temporary passenger-to-freight solutions continue to be carried out, and this turnkey EASA-certified solution makes it easier to implement for operators and substantially extend its duration, making the business case compelling. This fits well with the wide range of options that Avianor can provide with TCCA, FAA and EASA operators." said Matthieu Duhaime, President and COO, Avianor "This achievement results from AKKA's and Avianor's combined expertise and demonstrates our common will and capability to support the aviation industry by bringing the pragmatic solution expected by the market. This first success paves the way for further fruitful collaboration creating value for our customers" added Pierre-Yves LAZIES, Vice President of Aviation at AKKA France About Avianor Avianor, an affiliate company of DRAKKAR Aerospace Ground Transportation, specializes in maintenance, modifications and aircraft completion, including a highly skilled internal engineering support team. Avianor has positioned itself as a vertical integrator in the marketplace. The company occupies over 200,000 square feet of hangars, repair shops, fabrication facilities and warehouse space at Mirabel Airport (YMX) and employs more than 350 people. For more information, please visit www.avianor.com. Follow us on LinkedIn. About AKKA Technologies AKKA is the European leader in engineering consulting and R&D services in the mobility segment. As an innovation accelerator for its clients, AKKA supports leading industry players in the automotive, aerospace, rail and life sciences sectors throughout the life cycle of their products with cutting edge digital technologies (AI, ADAS, IoT, Big Data, robotics, embedded computing, machine learning, etc.). Founded in 1984, AKKA has a strong entrepreneurial culture and is pursuing its fast-paced growth and international development in line with its CLEAR 2022 strategic plan. With 22,000 employees, who are passionate about technology and dedicated to advancing the future of industry, the Group recorded revenues of 1.8 billion in 2019. Following the completion of the friendly take-over bid of Data Respons launched in January 2020, AKKA now holds 100% of the company's shares; with the success of this operation, AKKA leverages the most comprehensive portfolio of digital solutions in Europe to harness the growing demand from its customers in the mobility sector. AKKA Technologies is listed on Euronext Paris and Brussels Segment A ISIN code: FR0004180537 For more information, please visit www.akka-technologies.com Follow us on: twitter.com/AKKA_Tech View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005799/en/ Contacts: Avianor Media Relations Rosalie Cote Senior Director Communication Marketing Tel.: +1 514-806-0798 Rosalie.cote@drakkar.com AKKA Investor Relations Stephanie Bia Group Communications Investor Relations Director Tel: +33(0) 6 47 85 9878 stephanie.bia@akka.eu FTI Consulting akka@fticonsulting.com Media Relations, France Emily Oliver Tel.: +33 1 47 03 68 65 Police are taking part in Truck Driver Appreciation Week being rolled out this week at locations throughout New Zealand. The initiative is led by NZ Truck and Driver and supported by trucking industry partners Road Transport Association, My Trucking, National Road Carriers, Eastland Wood Council, Tairawhiti Road Transport, and Police. We are really pleased to take part in this long running positive initiative that recognises the trucking industry for the valuable contribution made to New Zealands economy, says Inspector Mike Brooklands, Manager Commercial Vehicle Safety Team. When we engage with truck drivers its normally to ensure they and their truck are safe to operate on our roads. "This week we will be reminding truck drivers of their safety responsibilities but also acknowledging the important role they play. Road safety is a critical health and safety at work issue so by focussing on the safety of commercial vehicles (driver and truck) we are achieving safer roads for all road users. As a Road to Zero partner we want a New Zealand where no one is killed or seriously injured in road crashes. Trucking companies have a duty of responsibility to ensure their vehicles are safe and not put their drivers and other road users at risk. Truck drivers also have a responsibility themselves to check that the truck and trailers are safe to operate by holding the correct RUC-COF and registration, and ensure loads comply with the permitted gross vehicle weight allowed and other load regulations. "And of course, have the appropriate class of drivers licence and the correct endorsements for dangerous goods carriage. While trucks are not involved in significantly more crashes per km than other vehicles, truck crashes are more likely to be fatal (accounting for over 20 per cent of road deaths). CVST staff will be at the CVST/weigh pit sites identified within the 15 Truck Driver Appreciation Week locations. Before giving out an appreciation gift bag CVST staff will be conducting breath screening tests, checking logbooks and undertaking level three inspections. A scientist uses a microscope to look at cells containing the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 in a file photo taken at the Stabilitech laboratory in Burgess Hill south east England on May 15, 2020. (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images) CCP Virus Strain Survives on Fabrics for About 3 Days, Study Finds A new study in the UK has found viruses similar to the strain of the CCP virus that causes the disease COVID-19 can survive on several common fabrics used in the health industry and transmit to other surfaces. When the pandemic first started, there was very little understanding of how long coronavirus could survive on textiles, Microbiologist Dr. Katie Laird at De Montfort University (DMU) in Leicester said in an interview. Our findings show that three of the most commonly used textiles in healthcare pose a risk for transmission of the virus, she continued. If nurses and healthcare workers take their uniforms home, they could be leaving traces of the virus on other surfaces. Dr. Lairdwho led the research groupworked together with virologist Dr. Maitreyi Shivkumar and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Lucy Owen. The scientists study involved testing a model of a coronavirus with a very similar structure and survival pattern to that of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, or SARS-CoV-2, by adding droplets on polyester, polycotton, and 100 percent cotton and then monitor the stability of the virus on the different fabric materials. Results in the research concluded that between the three fabrics used in the test, polyester posed the greatest risk for transmissioneven after 72 hours with the possibility to transmit to other surfaces, scientists warned in the study published on the DMU website. The coronavirus used in the test remained up to 24 hours on full-cotton samples that were contaminated by the droplets and just six hours on polycottona blend of polyester and cotton with ratios of each material varying, 65 percent cotton and 35 percent polyester is the most popular combination. A scientist is seen working in a file photo taken at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, west of London on June 24, 2020. (Steve Parsons/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) Upon concluding the study, the team of scientists started to find what is the most reliable way to wash the clothing to fully remove the virus contaminating the fabrics. The next stage of our work was to evaluate the infection control risk of washing healthcare uniforms contaminated with coronavirus, Dr. Laird said. Once we had determined the survival rate of coronavirus on each of the textiles, we turned our attention to identifying the most reliable wash method for removing the virus, she added. For the most commonly-used healthcare textile, 100 percent full-cotton, the research found after using a detergent and a temperature above 152.6F completely eliminated the virus. Investigating the tolerance of the virus to heat alone, findings showed that coronavirus was stable in water up to [140F], but was inactivated at [152.6F], the research stated. The team next looked at the risk of cross-contamination and found there was no risk of transmitting the virus when clean items were washed together with those contaminated. While we can see from the research that washing these materials at a high temperature, even in a domestic washing machine, does remove the virus, it does not eliminate the risk of the contaminated clothing leaving traces of coronavirus on other surfaces in the home or car before they are washed, Dr. Laird warned. This research has reinforced my recommendation that all healthcare uniforms should be washed on site at hospitals or at an industrial laundry, the microbiologist advised. These wash methods are regulated and nurses and healthcare workers do not have to worry about potentially taking the virus home. Dr. Laird said the findings of the study have since been shared with industry experts across the UK, USA, and Europe and were met with a positive response. Textile and laundry associations around the world are now implementing our key messages in their guidance for healthcare laundering, to prevent further transmission of coronavirus, she said. From NTD News ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 24th Feb, 2021 ) :President Dr Arif Alvi on Wednesday called for removing disparity among different streams of education in the country by ensuring implementation of Single National Curriculum (SNC). He said the focus of education system should be on character building, and promoting critical and creative thinking among students. The president stated this at a briefing given by the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training here at the Aiwan-e-Sadr. The meeting was attended by Minister for Education Shafqat Mehmood, Minister for Science and Technology Chaudhry Fawad Hussain, Minister for Human Rights Dr Shireen Mazari, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Ali Muhammad Khan, Parliamentary Secretary for Education Ms Wajeeha Akram and Secretary Education Mrs Farah Hamid Khan. Highlighting the importance of education, the president said it was essential to provide quality and research-based education which could play a significant role in the socio-economic development of the country. The Ministry of Education briefed the meeting about the development of SNC, which was designed in consultation with all the federating units and other stakeholders, including private sector and religious schools (Deeni Madaris). It highlighted that the SNC had been developed in accordance with the International standards to meet the educational requirements of the country. The meeting was apprised that the SNC was designed in three phases which would be implemented in all streams of education. Initially, the new scheme of education would be introduced for the students from Grades 1-5 during the Academic Year 2021-22. Similarly, the process of development of SNC for phase-2 (6-8) and phase-3 (9-12) had already been started. The meeting was informed that the development of SNC was driven by the key considerations like teachings of Quran and Sunnah, constitutional framework, national policies, aspirations and national standards, alignments with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets, visions of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Allama Muhammad Iqbal, and focus on values. The president appreciated the efforts of the Ministry of Education and congratulated its entire team for designing a comprehensive Single National Curriculum. \932 Indonesias foreign minister is scheduled to travel to Myanmar this week, a report said Tuesday, as Jakarta rejected claims it was endorsing a plan by the junta to hold new elections. Retno Marsudi was to make an hours-long trip to Naypyitaw on Thursday in what would be the first known visit by a foreign envoy since the Feb. 1 military coup, according to Reuters, which cited a Feb. 23 letter from the Ministry of Transport and an official who authenticated it. The news service also quoted Ministry of Foreign Affairs Teuku Faizasyah as saying that Retno was in Thailand on Tuesday. The spokesman did not did not immediately respond to a request from BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, for comment about the Reuters report. In Myanmar, an activist group rejected the purported visit by Jakartas top diplomat. A diplomatic delegation led by the Indonesian foreign minister visiting Myanmar in the current political crisis is tantamount to recognizing the military junta, Future Nation Alliance said in a statement on Tuesday. We strongly oppose and condemn Indonesia for sending a government envoy to Burma for official communications with the coup regime. After seizing power on Feb. 1, Myanmars military promised to hold democratic elections within a year. In the days leading up to the coup, the generals had made veiled threats that they might take such action over claims of fraud in the Nov. 8 general election, which Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy swept, as confirmed by Myanmar polling authorities. Earlier on Tuesday, demonstrators gathered outside the Indonesian Embassy in Yangon to reject reports that Indonesia was urging countries in the region to send monitors to ensure that the generals hold fair and inclusive elections. During a news conference in Jakarta, Faizasyah said that Retno was still looking for a regional consensus on Myanmar but that nothing had been decided. He said Indonesia was not pressing for member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to send election monitors to Myanmar. That is not Indonesias position, because our focus is on how to reach a peaceful settlement in Myanmar that is inclusive and involves all parties, Faizasyah said. I categorically say that such a plan of action doesnt exist, because the fact is that currently the foreign minister is still trying to forge a common position with other ASEAN foreign ministers, he said. Indonesia, the largest country in ASEAN and one of the blocs founding members, has been on a diplomatic push to get Southeast Asian members more involved in addressing the coup in Myanmar. Last week, Retno visited Brunei, this years ASEAN chair, and Singapore. While in Singapore, Retno and her counterpart there, Vivian Balakrishnan, urged parties in Myanmar to work toward a peaceful resolution and national reconciliation in Myanmar, including a return to its path of democratic transition, the Singaporean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. Balakrishnan stressed that there should be no violence against unarmed civilians. In particular, live rounds should not be fired on unarmed civilians under any circumstances, the statement said. US, G7 nations react Meanwhile, other nations continued to pile pressure on Myanmar to release those detained during the coup, and to condemn subsequent crackdowns on anti-coup protesters. The foreign ministers of the U.S. and the other Group of Seven countries Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom along with the high representative of the European Union called for the unconditional release of those detained arbitrarily, including State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, in a statement issued on Tuesday. We condemn the intimidation and oppression of those opposing the coup. We raise our concern at the crackdown on freedom of expression, including through the internet blackout and draconian changes to the law that repress free speech, the statement said. We continue to call for full humanitarian access to support the most vulnerable, the statement said, while deploring the use of live ammunition against unarmed people as unacceptable. In Myanmar, at least three people have been shot dead by security forces in protests since the coup, as demonstrations continued demanding an end to military rule and the release of elected government officials, according to media reports. For its part, U.S. President Joe Bidens administration has been working to set up a foreign ministers meeting with ASEAN to address the situation in Myanmar, according to Nikkei Asia. The United States is committed to working with the international community, including our ASEAN partners, to press the military to reverse its actions and restore the democratically elected government, a State Department spokesperson told BenarNews, adding, we have no meetings to announce at this time. We stand with the people of Burma and call on the Burmese military to respect the results of the election on November 8, 2020, the spokesperson said. In remarks to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the military takeover and called for the release of all detainees. We see the undermining of democracy, the use of brutal force, arbitrary arrests, repression in all its manifestations. Restrictions of civic space. Attacks on civil society, the U.N. chief said. Today, I call on the Myanmar military to stop the repression immediately. Release the prisoners. End the violence. Respect human rights, and the will of the people expressed in recent elections, Guterres said. Sino-Indonesian talks Chinas government meanwhile said it supported an ASEAN foreign ministerial meeting on Myanmar and was ready to play a role in the process, officials said after weekend talks between Retno and her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi. No other country would care about the situation in Myanmar and expect for its resumption and maintenance of peace and stability more than China and ASEAN, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement posted on its website. The continuing turbulence in Myanmar is neither in the interests of Myanmar and its people, nor in the common interests of other regional countries. Both the military of Myanmar and political parties shoulder the important responsibility for the countrys stability and development, it said. Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service. Across Massachusetts, hospitals are seeing a dramatic decline in the number of COVID-19 patients as more and more residents get vaccinated and cases plummet. At Massachusetts General Hospital, the states largest hospital, there were 66 admitted COVID patients, with 19 in the ICU as of Monday, according to hospital officials. A little more than a month ago, MGHs COVID patient load was nearly double that, and community hospitals in the region were having to redirect their sick to larger facilities amid the so-called second surge. After the post-holiday spike in cases and hospitalizations, MGH officials last month were ready for yet another projected surge in viral activity heading into February and March given the troubling data indicating the extent of transmission within the surrounding communities. Instead, the opposite happened. The rate of admission has gone down, Dr. Peter Dunn, vice president of procedural services, health care system engineering and capacity management. And the number of COVID patients leaving MGH is now outpacing new admissions a sign that the virus is, once again, in decline. And it will slow down even more as our numbers continue lowering, Dunn said. In fact, if you look at all of the curves around the world, theyre all on the decline. Elsewhere in Massachusetts, doctors and health experts are seeing the same trend. Things are way down, said Douglas T. Golenbock, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Immunology at UMass Medical School. People are really beginning to feel like were over the surge right now. Across the UMass Memorial Health Care system, there are a reported 52 patients being treated for COVID-19 as of Tuesday. Experts say the decline in hospitalizations is clearly tied to the fall in new cases. And, given the heightened concern over the potential spread of highly infectious COVID variants, the sudden weakening of the virus has come as a surprise to some experts. Of course, with the vaccine rollout underway, communities across the state are starting to build up to a level of immunity that some experts say could be playing an important role in halting transmission rates. That in combination with more restrictions on businesses at a time when the state was coming off the holiday surge has helped to calm viral activity. The main story here has to do with fewer gatherings, the effects of the vaccine and the fact that part of the community is now immune to COVID-19, said Dr. Armando Paez, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Baystate Medical Center. A graph showing new COVID-19 hospital admissions at Baystate Health. Baystate Health facilities housed 81 COVID patients, 10 of whom are in intensive care as of Tuesday about half as many observed at the height of both the spring and winter surges. We should be optimistic about the future, and in my opinion, were going to get to some level of normalcy by the end of the year, Paez said. Others have expressed like optimism, making even bolder predictions amid the COVID slowdown. Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he expects COVID to be mostly gone by April. There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection, Makary wrote, citing a 77% drop in cases nationwide. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. That the pandemic could end in April is too soon for Paez. But with confidence in the mass production of a slew of COVID vaccines, albeit tempered by the concern over COVID variants, he doubts there will be a third surge after numbers come all the way back down. Statewide, there were roughly 879 COVID patients hospitalized as of Tuesday, which state health officials say represents about a 65% census reduction from the peak in January. Related Content: Freshwater is accumulating in the Arctic Ocean. The Beaufort Sea, which is the largest Arctic Ocean freshwater reservoir, has increased its freshwater content by 40% over the past two decades. How and where this water will flow into the Atlantic Ocean is important for local and global ocean conditions. A study from the University of Washington, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that this freshwater travels through the Canadian Archipelago to reach the Labrador Sea, rather than through the wider marine passageways that connect to seas in Northern Europe. The open-access study was published Feb. 23 in Nature Communications. "The Canadian Archipelago is a major conduit between the Arctic and the North Atlantic," said lead author Jiaxu Zhang, a UW postdoctoral researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies. "In the future, if the winds get weaker and the freshwater gets released, there is a potential for this high amount of water to have a big influence in the Labrador Sea region." The finding has implications for the Labrador Sea marine environment, since Arctic water tends to be fresher but also rich in nutrients. This pathway also affects larger oceanic currents, namely a conveyor-belt circulation in the Atlantic Ocean in which colder, heavier water sinks in the North Atlantic and comes back along the surface as the Gulf Stream. Fresher, lighter water entering the Labrador Sea could slow that overturning circulation. "We know that the Arctic Ocean has one of the biggest climate change signals," said co-author Wei Cheng at the UW-based Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Atmosphere Studies. "Right now this freshwater is still trapped in the Arctic. But once it gets out, it can have a very large impact." Fresher water reaches the Arctic Ocean through rain, snow, rivers, inflows from the relatively fresher Pacific Ocean, as well as the recent melting of Arctic Ocean sea ice. Fresher, lighter water floats at the top, and clockwise winds in the Beaufort Sea push that lighter water together to create a dome. When those winds relax, the dome will flatten and the freshwater gets released into the North Atlantic. "People have already spent a lot of time studying why the Beaufort Sea freshwater has gotten so high in the past few decades," said Zhang, who began the work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "But they rarely care where the freshwater goes, and we think that's a much more important problem." Using a technique Zhang developed to track ocean salinity, the researchers simulated the ocean circulation and followed the Beaufort Sea freshwater's spread in a past event that occurred from 1983 to 1995. Their experiment showed that most of the freshwater reached the Labrador Sea through the Canadian Archipelago, a complex set of narrow passages between Canada and Greenland. This region is poorly studied and was thought to be less important for freshwater flow than the much wider Fram Strait, which connects to the Northern European seas. In the model, the 1983-1995 freshwater release traveled mostly along the North American route and significantly reduced the salinities in the Labrador Sea -- a freshening of 0.2 parts per thousand on its shallower western edge, off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, and of 0.4 parts per thousand inside the Labrador Current. The volume of freshwater now in the Beaufort Sea is about twice the size of the case studied, at more than 23,300 cubic kilometers, or more than 5,500 cubic miles. This volume of freshwater released into the North Atlantic could have significant effects. The exact impact is unknown. The study focused on past events, and current research is looking at where today's freshwater buildup might end up and what changes it could trigger. "A freshwater release of this size into the subpolar North Atlantic could impact a critical circulation pattern, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which has a significant influence on Northern Hemisphere climate," said co-author Wilbert Weijer at Los Alamos National Lab. ### This research was funded by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and NOAA. Other authors are Mike Steele at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory and Tarun Verma and Milena Veneziani at Los Alamos National Lab. For more information, contact Zhang at jiaxuzh@uw.edu. Cleveland City Schools will host an event to distribute the first dose of COVID-19 Vaccines to their employees on Saturday. The Tennessee Department of Health released the Vaccine statewide to be distributed to the 1b group, K-12 and Child Care Staff, on Feb. 22. Cleveland City Schools is partnering with Cherokee Pharmacy to administer COVID-19 Vaccines this Saturday from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. (by appointment only) in the parking lot between Ross Elementary and Yates Primary Schools. "Cleveland City Schools is providing this Saturday vaccination site as an alternative to allow our staff to be vaccinated as quickly as possible and avoid disruptions to student instruction," officials said. All Cleveland City Schools employees were given the opportunity to sign up to receive the vaccines. Kelly Kiser, director of Human Resources for Cleveland City Schools, shared this about the upcoming event, Cleveland City Schools continues to seek ways to provide for the needs of both our staff and our students during this unprecedented pandemic. We appreciate the support of Cherokee Pharmacy and the work that has taken place to make this opportunity available to our staff. Laura Hudson, Coordinated School Health, indicated, Cleveland City Schools has focused on implementing as many mitigation strategies as possible to decrease the spread of COVID-19 since the pandemic began. By providing the opportunity for our staff to receive the vaccine in a timely manner, we are able to promote a safer school environment. We appreciate Cherokee Pharmacy partnering with us to make this process a very accessible opportunity for our staff. The second dose of vaccines for these recipients will be administered in March by Cherokee Pharmacy using a similar distribution plan. Although Jenkinson has been a familiar face on screens for years in everything from Bogan Pride, to Offspring, The Ex-PM, Doctor, Doctor and as top dog Allie Novak on Wentworth Amazing Grace is her first series lead. The show is even named after her character. No pressure, then. I dont feel like any show relies on just one person, she says. And I dont think any show is led by just one person. From the outside, perhaps, when people watch the show it may appear that way. But from the inside, I feel Im one of very, very many people who are essential to this process. Amazing Grace ticks lots of boxes with independent and forthright mid-wife Grace (Kate Jenkinson) discovering her long-lost daughter, played by Alexandra Jensen. Credit:Tony Mott Its a fine line in deflection - all she will admit to is waking up slightly earlier, and more frequently than I would have on other shows - but there is no skirting around the fact Jenkinson holds the centre of Amazing Grace. Shes incredibly likeable on screen and has the knack of making even the most over-dramatic birthing scenes look real. To do that, Jenkinson spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos of women in labour, as hands-on research was limited due to the pandemic because the cast were unable to go into hospitals and see the real thing in action. She also had the help of the shows consulting midwife Jess Moran, who said the trick to looking like a real midwife was keeping calm. You have to remain calm, no matter what the situation, even if it is an extreme situation, even if its life and death, you have to remain completely calm, she says. Because your concern, primarily, is the woman who is giving birth and then the baby second. And that, for me, is something I was always conscious of, because as a theatre nerd and an actor, you want to lean into the drama of it, but a good midwife should do the opposite. And the other trick? Strong glutes. I feel like midwives spend their lives squatting, waiting for that baby to drop. Its not all squidgy babies and happy endings, though. Theres trauma at the heart of Amazing Grace - stillbirth and miscarriage - topics many still find difficult to talk about. Its the reason the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, wrote about her miscarriage in The New York Times last year, in effort to break the stigma that still surrounds mentioning it in anything other than hushed tones. At the heart of Nines new drama are topics that many find difficult to talk about, such as stillbirth and miscarriage. Credit:Tony Mott Trauma, in general, is something thats not really talked about, she says. And thats a real shame, because its dangerous to deny people grief. Things are changing slightly, but I remember very much being brought up with this kind of idea that you shouldnt indulge in sadness and if youre going through grief, or going through a bad time, the dialogue you hear is, Get over it, pull up your socks. And thats a shame because we all go through it. And its something we all experience and are unified by it. Jenkinson came to Amazing Grace after four years on Wentworth, Foxtels gritty reimagining of Prisoner. In it, she plays Allie Novak, a former ice-addicted prostitute who has clawed her way to top dog in a teal tracksuit in the womens prison. The show is midway through its last season - the final episodes are due to air later this year - and so far weve seen Novak cut off a fellow prisoners finger and maybe get stabbed to death? Possibly, is all shell give away. The success of Wentworth, with its back-from-the-dead plotlines, screwdriver stabbings, prison fires and sieges, was not a surprise, says Jenkinson, who was a fan of the show even before she was cast. Ive always thought that Wentworth has skated a really, really fine and enjoyable line between melodrama and gritty reality. And I, personally, really like that line. Because there are moments that are so outrageous, but you can lean into it because of the world that has been created. And I dont think people watch television - like drama, scripted narrative television - to see regular everyday life. They tune in to see drama. And thats why a character like Grace, the most interesting thing about her is how flawed she is. Her failures are more interesting than her successes. And I feel that about most characters. Still, Im guessing Grace isnt cutting anyones finger off in this? Not yet, she says, laughing. But theres still time. Now Jenkinson has ticked off the two big TV staples - medical drama and prison drama - is there anything left shed like to do? I do love a half-hour punchy sitcom, and I feel like after Wentworth and now this show, which turns out to be far more tragic than I thought, I would love to do something silly and purely, purely comic. Four Australian states have shut their borders with New Zealand after a spike in coronavirus transmission in Auckland. Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales have already ended quarantine-free travel for travellers from New Zealand after a cluster of Covid-19 infections linked to an Auckland high school grew by three cases. Tasmania on Wednesday night announced it would only welcome travellers who had been in the Auckland region in the past two weeks if they had an essential reason to travel to the state. Tasmania, Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales have all imposed restrictions on travellers from New Zealand after a Covid-19 outbreak in Auckland. Pictured: NZ travellers arrive in Brisbane on Jan 7, 2021 'Public Health Services is contacting people who have been in New Zealand in the past 14 days and have recently arrived in Tasmania to ensure they have not been in one of the newly declared hot spots in New Zealand,' Tasmanian Director of Public Health Dr Mark Veitch said. Queensland was the first of the states to end quarantine-free travel for trans-Tasman travellers and re-impose mandatory hotel quarantine. Authorities in the Sunshine State are also asking all travellers who have been in New Zealand since February 21 to get tested and isolate until they get their results. Domestic travellers wear face masks as they arrive at New Zealand's Wellington International Airport on August 12. Only trans-Tasman travellers with an essential reason can enter Tasmania This also applies to anyone who has entered from February 6 who has not already had a test after entering Queensland. Victoria meanwhile said from Wednesday night all travellers from New Zealand would have to undergo 14 days of hotel quarantine. 'All flights arriving from Auckland into Victoria will be regarded as "red zone" arrivals and anyone arriving will be required to enter mandatory hotel quarantine for 14 days,' the Victorian Department of Health said. New Zealanders travelling to NSW will also have to go into hotel quarantine. NSW health officials are contacting anyone in the state who has been in New Zealand since February 20 to ensure they haven't been to any of the Auckland venues exposed to the virus. Thousands of New Zealanders were forced into quarantine after two new cases of coronavirus were diagnosed on Tuesday night, all linked to a cluster based around Papatoetoe High School. The two new cases were siblings of a high school student who tested positive on Tuesday, with one a teenage worker at a Kmart n Auckland's east. The students have tested positive with the highly infectious 'mutant' UK strain of the virus. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern revealed the infected teenager had been handling clothes, among other small tasks, during her Kmart shifts last week. 'She was doing things like folding clothes, doing a bit of the click-and-collect work,' the prime minister said. 'She wasn't a cashier, but we are being very cautious.' More than 600 people were tested at Papatoetoe High School on Tuesday. NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (pictured) said a new case on Tuesday night worked at Kmart New Zealand passengers arrive at Brisbane and are quarantined on Dec 16, 2020 At the same time, New South Premier Gladys Berejiklian has called for Ms Ardern to open a trans-tasman bubble with Australia and let Aussies enter her country. 'I've always hoped Prime Minister Ardern would return the favour to NSW because we've certainly been accepting New Zealanders since October/November last year,' Ms Berejiklian said at a press conference on Tuesday. 'I've always been robust and confident about our ability to have a transtasman bubble. I hope that happens sooner rather than later. There's no reason why it can't.' New details have emerged about the case of a New Jersey corrections officer who has been charged with shooting his girlfriend and her best friend to death last week. John Menendez, 23, of West New York, was reportedly enraged that the victims had gone on a girls' trip to Cancun for Valentine's Day without him, and that his partner had been ignoring his calls. Menendez faces two counts of murder stemming from the deaths of his girlfriend, Anna Shpilberg, and her best friend, Luiza Shinkarevskaya. The women, who were both 40, had each been shot in the head and were found on February 16 in different areas of Newark. The shootings occurred shortly after Menendez had picked up the women at Newark Liberty International Airport when they returned home from their trip, according to court documents. New Jersey corrections officer John Menendez, 23 (left), faces two counts of murder stemming from shooting deaths of his girlfriend, Anna Shpilberg (brunette), and her friend Luiza Shinkarevskaya, (blonde) both 40 Friends and relatives said Menendez was furious because Shpilberg had gone on a trip with four female friends to Cancun, Mexico, for Valentine's Day (pictured on vacation with Shinkarevskaya) Shinkarevskayas cousin, Mishel Chan-Min, told NJ Advance Media that Menendez, whom she characterized as extremely controlling and possessive, was 'furious and he was upset' over the getaway, which Shpilberg had planned with her four female friends after living for a year under COVID restrictions. Menendez was said to have told Shinkarevskayas boyfriend that 'he cant believe they went on vacation and that Anna was going to hear it from him when she got off the plane.' Shinkarevskayas boyfriend reportedly tried to diffuse the tension and offered to pick up his girlfriend and Shpilberg from the airport, but Menendez insisted that he was 'fine.' Menendez (center) was described as possessive and controlling, seldom letting Shpilberg (left) out of his sight. Shinkarevskaya is pictured on the right Shpilberg (left) and Shinkarevskaya (right) were shot in the head minutes apart in Newark, New Jersey, on February 16 Menendez picked them up in his girlfriend's car at the airport and drove them to a parking lot where Shinkarevskaya had left her vehicle. The Hudson County corrections officer then allegedly shot the woman in the head and left her bleeding on the sidewalk in the 100 block of Haynes Avenue. He then drove to Edison Place and Bruen Street near Newark Penn Station, where Shpilberg was found dead from a gun shot wound to the head in the passenger seat of her car just before 10pm. Menendez, who had blood on him, walked up to a Newark police officer who was sitting in his patrol car near the scene and confessed to the shootings, telling him: 'I killed both of them. Just arrest me, bro.' After he was read his Miranda rights, Menendez was quoted as saying: 'This is crazy. I cant believe I did this.' The gun Menendez allegedly used to shoot both women was found near Shinkarevskaya's body, authorities said. During his interview with police, Menendez said 'Anna had been ignoring his calls. He said he lost it and killed them,' according to a probable cause affidavit. Shpilberg and Shinkarevskaya came to the United States as children from their native Ukraine and previously lived in Brooklyn, New York Shpilberg lived in Randolph, New Jersey, and worked as a dental hygienist in Staten Island. Shinkarevskaya lived in Riverdale, New Jersey, and worked as an ultrasound technician Friends have said the two women came to the United States as children from their native Ukraine and previously lived in Brooklyn, New York. Shpilberg lived in Randolph, New Jersey, with her teenage son, Daniel, and worked as a dental hygienist in Staten Island. Shinkarevskaya lived in Riverdale, New Jersey, with her partner of 11 years, Joe Hernandez, and worked as an ultrasound technician in Manhattan. She was her parents' only child. People who knew Shpilberg and Menendez said he would incessantly call her whenever they were apart. Fabian Goni, Shpilberg's ex-fiance, said that Menendez constantly demanded that she tell him where she was and even expected Shpilberg to send him video as proof of her whereabouts. Chan-Min, Shinkarevskaya's cousin, said he hardly ever left Shpilberg's side. 'He was always there,' she told NJ.com. Any step that she took, he was there. So I was just surprised that she went without him.' Photos that Shpilberg and Shinkarevskaya sent their loved ones from their final trip reportedly showed the women posing up in matching red bikinis on the beach in honor of Valentine's Day and playfully modeling sombreros over drinks. Chan-Min recalled that she first met Menendez with Shpilberg at a beach more than a year ago and thought he 'seemed off.' Shpilberg lived with her son in New Jersey and worked as a dental hygenist in Staten Island Shpilberg is survived by her 15-year-old son, Daniel (pictured together) She explained that beyond the 13-year different between the couple, there was something about Menendez that struck her as weird. 'His energy was off, like he was there but not really there at all,' she recounted. Menendez remained in the Essex County Jail as of Tuesday, pending a detention hearing that is scheduled for March 2. Friends of the two victims have launched separate GoFundMe campaigns to help their families financially, including one raising money towards a college fund for Shpliberg's 15-year-old son. 'Words cannot accurately describe Daniel's grief right now,' the campaign's description reads. 'His future is uncertain but his main wish is to continue his life in Randolph, the only home he knows, surrounded by his friends, classmates, and neighbors.' On the second anniversary of the PM-Kisa today, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the BJP government is doing everything possible to double the income of farmers. In a series of tweets, the Prime Minister said his government has the "honour of ushering a historic increase in minimum support price (MSP)" for procurement of crops. Our Government had the honour of ushering a historic increase in MSP. We doing everything possible to double the income of farmers. You can find insightful content on the NaMo App, offering a glimpse of the work done for farmers. #KisanKaSammanPMKisan pic.twitter.com/pHxqY3NBPq Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 24, 2021 "Over the last seven years, the Government of India has taken many initiatives for transforming agriculture. From better irrigation to more technology, more credit and markets to proper crop insurance, focus on soil health to eliminating middlemen, the efforts are all-encompassing," said PM Modi. "On this day, 2 years ago the PM-Kisan scheme was launched with an aim to ensure a life of dignity as well as prosperity for our hardworking farmers, who work day and night to keep our nation fed. The tenacity and passion of our farmers are inspiring," he added. Over the last 7 years, the Government of India has taken many initiatives for transforming agriculture. From better irrigation to more technology, more credit and markets to proper crop insurance, focus on soil health to eliminating middlemen, the efforts are all-encompassing. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 24, 2021 Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers The Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) scheme, provides income support to all small and marginal landholder farmers' families with cultivable land holding up to two hectares across the country. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. The Missourians Opinion section is a public forum for the discussion of ideas. The views presented in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missourian or the University of Missouri. If you would like to contribute to the Opinion page with a response or an original topic of your own, visit our submission form IT services major on Wednesday announced the appointment of Ren Mulder as Country Head and Managing Director of its operations. Prior to joining Wipro, Mulder served in leadership roles with Siemens, Swisscom, T-Systems and DXC Technology in as well as in countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and the Czech Republic. Mulder has proven experience in leading large organisations and has a successful track record of driving growth, building profitable businesses and creating sustainable and successful relationships with customers, partners and local authorities, said in a statement. He will leverage his broad experience to guide Wipro's clients through their digital transformation journeys, it added. " is an important market for Wipro, with a solid customer base and growing demand for digital transformation as expand their offerings. I welcome Ren to and am confident his depth of knowledge and breadth of experience will bring immense value to the team and expand our presence in the country, Wipro CEO Europe Pierre Bruno said. Mulder said he looked forward to leveraging his industry experience to help further clients' digital agenda and strengthen Wipro's footprint in Switzerland. (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.) Republican Study Committee says that Biden's $1.9 Trillion Stimulus Bill is not as benevolent as it seems citing there is a plan by the Democrats with not-so-obvious items. The $1.9 Trillion Stimulus Bill is one of the most generous amounts to be passed. But that might come with some hitches that are not 100% pandemic related. Biden's bill packed with interesting items According to the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the biggest caucus conservative group on Capitol Hill has released a critical bombshell. They outlined a fact sheet that they call a list that Democrats want to keep hidden from the critical public. The $1.9 trillion stimulus bill should be passed, and anything that can delay is not wanted, said the Epoch Times. Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), the new chairman, sent a memo to RSC members that alert them to hidden additions. These are special interest pork and other liberal goodies buried in the bill. Allegedly, the items are not out there to have it pushed without question. These specific items should have been highlighted for transparency on the Democrat's part. .@RepJimBanks to guest host @cvpayne: The $1.9 trillion relief bill is a bailout full of kickbacks to Democrat special interest groups that gave them power pic.twitter.com/JMUJTf4A2X Neil Cavuto (@TeamCavuto) February 22, 2021 Last Friday, the DEMS presented the bill with 591-pages called the "American Rescue Plan Act of 2021." Democrats on last Friday unveiled the full text of the 591-page bill (pdf), titled the "American Rescue Plan Act of 2021." Republican Study Committee said that from the $1.9 trillion, only 1% would be spent on vaccines and another 5% for public health. In an interview with Fox News, he gave these statements. Also read: Australian Senator Asks US Embassy About Biden's Real Stance on Uyghur Genocide Only1 percent of this $1.9 trillion will go toward vaccines and 5 percent overall of this entire package is geared toward public health efforts directly related to the pandemic," Banks said in an interview with Fox News. Biden's bill is a payout Jim Banks slammed Biden's stimulus bill as a "kickback" for the DEMS to payout those groups that helped them. He cited $10 million to labor unions, planned parenthood, and even allowances to non-deserving illegal families. He said that it gets worse as Nancy Pelosi allotted $200 million to construct a tunnel from San Francisco to Silicon Valley. Most of the money will go to sustaining groups, partial to Democrats, but it is a hidden agenda. According to the Fact Sheet that Democrats giving $50 million of tax money for alleged EPA environment justice grants is more ominous. Many of these groups are hard left from which DEMS get much support. Under this qualification, that satisfies the DEMS "left's social justice agenda." Basing loan forgiveness and subsidies on race and ethnicity is synonymous with pushing the leftist agenda. About $600 is earmarked for extra paid leave for federal employees and postal workers. The RSC alleges the bill will keep schools closed. Overall, the bill does have sections that are made to satisfy the Democratic agenda. What the bill allots to recipients The payout goes on with $130 billion on top of the $110 billion for schools, whether open or closed. Even labor unions are opposed to open schools with access to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). All these weren't acceptable to the RSC. According to the Republican Study Committee, one of the doubtable aspects is to fund colleges with Confucius Institutes. The Trump administration refuted Confucius Institutes, but Biden is paying them. Related article: Meghan McCain Suggests Dr. Fauci Be Replaced by Another Virus Expert @ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. [February 24, 2021] Homewood Building Supply Expanding in Sacramento Market American Construction Source (" ACS (News - Alert) "), a leading national building materials distribution platform for custom home builders and repair and remodel contractors, today announced expansion investments at Homewood Building Supply ("Homewood") in the Northern California greater Sacramento metro market. "ACS is expanding capacity at Homewood to better service our growing portfolio of local and regional customers," said James Drexinger, CEO of ACS. "Homewood has built strong relationships among the network of building professionals who understand the Sacramento market. I am confident the local Homewood team will do a great job of ensuring area builders and contractors continue to receive the support and extensive product knowledge needed to make their jobs easier." "Demand for our products and services continues to grow. We are more than doubling Homewood's capacity to support the growth opportunity resulting from the suburban shift of housing construction," said Sam Dawson, ACS Division President. "The Homewood team, better serviing customers at scale, is sure to create value, and help our professional builder and remodeler customers address the increased demand for new and improved housing across the broader Northern California market." Homewood Lumber is adding a new distribution location in Elk Grove, CA (News - Alert) which features rail access and 25 acres of yard and warehouse space. Homewood Door, Window, and Millwork is moving from Loomis, CA to Roseville, CA where there is a purpose-built 19,000 square foot manufacturing facility, featuring an additional 9,000 square feet of product displays and office space. Homewood Truss in Olivehurst, CA is upgrading equipment and technology to double output capacity. Homewood Lumber moved in the second half of 2020 from Loomis, CA to a larger location in Rocklin, CA with 15,000 square feet of expanded product displays and a 5-acre lumber yard offering easier in/out access. Technology efficiencies at all locations are enabling the current number of team members to support the increase in demand. About Homewood Building Supply Serving customers for nearly 30 years, Homewood Building Supply has three locations plus a distribution facility in the greater Sacramento area which supply lumber, building materials, doors, windows, millwork, and trusses to building professionals. Homewood serves local custom, regional, and national production homebuilders, residential and commercial contractors, and DIY customers. Learn more online at www.hbs-lbm.com. About American Construction Source (News - Alert) American Construction Source is the sixth-largest LBM distributor in the U.S. with 70+ locations in 9 states serving the needs of custom home builders, repair & remodel contractors, and DIY consumers. ACS provides lumber and building materials businesses the resources, leverage, and focus to make their ideas happen. Recognizing the value and heritage of deep, local customer relationships as a strong foundation for growth, ACS best practices are designed to leverage shared strengths, drive operational excellence, and motivate performance to create a leading building products distributor with a national footprint and the industry's best customer experience. ACS is backed by Angeles Equity Partners and Clearlake Capital Group. Learn more online at www.acs-lbm.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005310/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Three Weird to Wacky Facts About Depoe Bay, Central Oregon Coast Published 02/22/21 at 6:36 PM PDT By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff (Depoe Bay, Oregon) All that rugged beauty and dense recreational opportunities of the central Oregon coast's Depoe Bay can easily fire up the imagination, with those expansive views, tirelessly explosive waves, and the craggy rock features that are so distinctive. Yet there's more beneath the surface. Sometimes quite literally, like hundreds of meters below. Here's three things you did not know about this beloved place. Two Depoe Bay Parks Have the Same Name. If you're bouncing around the little Oregon coast town and spot a place called Depoe Bay Scenic View Area not just once but twice, you may think you're seeing double. A true quirky, oddity of the town: there are two parks with that same name. Except technically, according to City Hall, they don't have that name. One is the newish park built about 2016 along Coast Ave., near the fire station, about where Graham St. is. It's hidden in a wall of bushes behind a part of downtown, but there's a random plaque reading Depoe Bay Scenic View Area. Head through the bushes and you come out into a nifty little secret viewpoint with a bench. The other park is found at what is known as North Point, off Vista St. at the northern edges of town. There is an official park entrance and then a couple of accesses between homes. This all leads to one of the more spectacular spots on the Oregon coast, with a magnificent set of cliffs where interesting things happen. (See Depoe Bay North Point) Apparently, according to city superintendent Brady Weidner, they technically don't have names. The plaques are just a kind of designation, saying this is a viewpoint. North Point is actually simply known as North Point and has been for decades (just like there's a South Point). The other is known as Graham St. Park by city officials, so they know which area everyone is referring to. See the Depoe Bay Virtual Tour for complete info on most of these parks Legend of Little Flying Men of Devil's Punchbowl. One of the kookiest little legends of the entire Oregon coast lies hidden in history, and apparently really never caught on. It was about the 1880s when a man named Dope Spencer, who was of a local tribe, owned a lot of land in the area that would later become Otter Rock. He had a weird encounter in that tiny, now-inaccessible cave that lies directly below the Inn at Otter Crest hotel complex. He claims to have ventured there after dark and suddenly was hit by a group of little flying men who came streaming out of the cave. Spencer ran screaming for his life and forever clung to this paranormal tale of small, airborne man-critters. His family steered clear of it after dark for the rest of their lives. The real explanation? Bats. But neither Spencer nor his family bought that, and relatives decades later claimed we believe it to be so because Dope told us it was so. Freaky Bubble Basalts of Depoe Bay. Those smooth, rounded basalt rocks that typify much of Depoe Bay are a surprising bit of geology. For one thing, according to Dr. Scott Burns, professor of geology at Portland State University, they're about 17 million to 14 million years old he's carbon-dated them himself. These blobs of Depoe Bay are called Pillow Basalt because of their shape. In this case, lava oozed up from the bottom, and when it hits the water it cools faster, forming these domes. Sometimes, another surge of lava would come up and break through that hardened shell and create another lobe on top of that, thus making odd, random shapes. Over the eons, land rose and fell, then did it again over and over. Time and tides smoothed over the edges. Depoe Bay's pillow basalts are unique to the Oregon coast there's not a lot of it. And there's a very weird reason why (see pillow basalts of Depoe Bay). Another freaky fact: Dr. Burns said scientists think those basalts go hundreds of meters deep. They're that big. STAYING HERE Hotels in Depoe Bay - Where to eat - Depoe Bay Maps and Virtual Tours MORE PHOTOS BELOW More About Oregon Coast hotels, lodging..... More About Oregon Coast Restaurants, Dining..... Coastal Spotlight LATEST Related Oregon Coast Articles Back to Oregon Coast Contact Advertise on BeachConnection.net All Content, unless otherwise attributed, copyright BeachConnection.net Unauthorized use or publication is not permitted FAYETTEVILLE, Ark., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Charter schools are more cost-effective and yield a greater return-on-investment than traditional public schools in seven cities featured in a new report by a research team based at the University of Arkansas. "Making it Count: The Productivity of Public Charter Schools in Seven U.S. Cities" examines cost-effectiveness and return-on-investment (ROI) in Camden, Denver, Indianapolis, Shelby County (Memphis), New Orleans, San Antonio and Washington, D.C., finding that charter schools yield more learning per education dollars spent in each major city. Across the seven cities, on average, charter schools produce higher student achievement gains than traditional schools, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In reading, charters average 5.92 points higher per $1,000 funded than traditional schools, making charters 43 percent more cost-effective in reading. In math, charters average 6.26 points higher per $1,000 funded, making them 43 percent more cost-effective in math. "Charter schools are proving capable of accomplishing more despite the funding disparity between charter and traditional schools reaching a record-high of 33 percent," said Patrick J. Wolf, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor and 21st Century Chair in School Choice, Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas. "Policymakers should consider charters' success and explore legislation to invest in all students equally, regardless of whether they attend a public charter or traditional public school." Charter schools deliver a greater ROI in all seven cities. Charters' ROI exceeds that of traditional public schools by an average of 46 percent over the course of a 13-year investment in a K-12 education. Camden ranks first, with charter schools delivering an ROI that is 139 percent greater than traditional schools, followed by Indianapolis (104 percent greater), New Orleans (66 percent greater) and Denver (59 percent greater). The report finds that charter schools generate greater lifetime earnings per student than traditional schools. On average, each dollar invested in a student's schooling in traditional public schools yields $5.46 in lifetime earnings. That same dollar invested in a charter school student yields $8.00 in lifetime earnings. This report is second in a series of three and follows " Charter School Funding: Inequity Surges in the Cities ," which found that across 18 major cities, public charter schools received 33 percent less funding compared to traditional schools. Contact: Kristin Costa [email protected] 408.500.8555 SOURCE University of Arkansas Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. A civil servant was issued with a verbal warning after his bosses at the Department of Agriculture discovered that he was part of a Beef Plan movement delegation involved in talks with the then Minister for Agriculture. Now, a State workplace watchdog has rejected the civil servants claim that he was penalised for being a member of the Beef Plan Movement by the Department of Agriculture for highlighting work and safety practice issues. In the case, the part-time farmer and employee of the Department of Agriculture was issued with a verbal warning after his bosses became aware that he was a member of the Beef Plan Movement where he had not obtained prior approval. The Department instituted disciplinary proceedings after it emerged that their employee was part of a Beef Plan Movement delegation involved in discussions in September 2019 with the then Minister, Michael Creed and Department officials in relation to the establishment of a new beef producer organisation in order to collectively negotiate beef prices with meat factories. The warning to the civil servant stated that he must not make representations, nor must he be engaged in, or connected with any activity which would in any way conflict with the interests of the Department. The Department issued the verbal warning to the Veterinary Laboratory Attendant in October 2019 after finding that he breached the Civil Service Code of Standards and Behaviour. The code stipulates that civil servants may not at any time engage in, or be connected with, any outside business or activity which would in any way conflict with the interests of their Department. In his case before the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC), the civil servant claimed that he was penalised in retaliation for him making claims of unsafe work practices which has damaged his health. The Department is separately rejecting this contention and in his findings, WRC Adjudication Officer, Eugene Hanly has found that the Departments disciplinary action against the employee was not penalisation for making a complaint rather it was a normal and unrelated exercise of management within this employment. Mr Hanly stated that he has found no evidence to support the civil servants claim that the issuing of the verbal warning was done in retaliation to his workplace claims about health and safety. Mr Hanly found that the Department of Agriculture acted reasonably in how they dealt with the matter. He stated that the Dept initially sought to deal with it informally, seeking assurances from him to cease his involvement in the Beef Plan Movement and that this was rejected by the civil servant and part-time farmer. The Department stated that the disciplinary processes were appropriately applied and carried out in this case and that the sanction handed down a verbal warning, expired in April 2020. It also stated that it is now completely removed from the complainant's record and it had no adverse impact on any aspect of the complainants duties, privileges or remuneration during its period of effect. On behalf of the Department employee, Des Fagan of FORSA told the WRC as a part-time farmer there are implications for him due to the nature of the restrictions imposed by the verbal warning. Mr Fagan stated that the warning could mean that he is not permitted to make claims arising from his farming interests to the Department. The civil servant also made other claims to the WRC and Mr Hanly has dismissed all of them. Register with JOC.com and receive 5 free pieces of content for the first thirty days. After thirty days, you will receive 3 pieces of content and after sixty days you will receive 1 piece of content. To receive full access, Subscribe Today . You can also subscribe to our daily newsletter. Register In August 2019, Ms. Perry told the police she believed that Mr. Warner was building bombs in the R.V. parked outside his house on Bakertown Lane, and Mr. Throckmorton told the police that Mr. Warner was capable of building explosives. Officers went to his home but neither the Nashville police nor the F.B.I. pursued an investigation. A police and municipal review committee is now scrutinizing why. Image An image of Mr. Warner from surveillance footage released by the F.B.I. Credit... F.B.I. via Associated Press Ms. Perry, through lawyers, declined to comment. Ms. Deck, 44, first met Mr. Warner several months later, when he came into the South Nashville Waffle House where she worked. The first time I met him, I just thought his cornbread wasnt really done in the middle and he was off a little bit, she said. She described two distinct sides to him. There was the man who spent countless hours glued to his computer, steeping himself in eccentric plots. But there was also the man who fixed the windshield wipers on her Nissan pickup, repaired her computer, paid the tab for dozens of other diners at the Waffle House and took her Yorkie, Bubba, for walks in the park. But when Ms. Deck began frequenting Mr. Warners two-bedroom duplex in the Antioch area of Nashville, he told her that no one had visited for 20 years. His distrust of the government dated to roughly the same period, as he subscribed to the 9/11 conspiracy theory that it was an inside job rather than a terrorist attack by Al Qaeda. It seemed to Ms. Deck that he started on the path that led him to downtown Nashville at least 20 years ago. He kept saying, 9/11 is what did it for me, she said. Mr. Warner grew up in Nashville, attending local Catholic schools as a young boy. He served two years in the Navy, in the mid-1970s. He never mentioned his family except for a dead brother, Ms. Deck said. His mother and sister declined to be interviewed. NEW DELHI : Heres a list of top stocks that could be in focus on Wednesday: Tata Consumer Products: The Tata Group company will be included in the benchmark Nifty 50 index, with effect from 31 March, 2021, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) said. The company had reported a 25.26% rise in consolidated net profit to 237.03 crore for the third quarter ended December 2020, on the back of higher sales in branded business. UPL Ltd: The agrochemical maker said the fire that broke out at its plant in Gujarat had killed two and injured 26. Five workers were still missing. The fire may have been caused due to an electric short circuit, it said in a regulatory filing after market hours. State Bank of India: The lender has shelved plans to hive off its super app Yono. It will instead build the app into a wider platform that can be used by rival lenders and add more capabilities to it. GAIL India: The state-owned gas company will be excluded from the Nifty 50 index with effect from 31 March, 2021, the National Stock Exchange said on Tuesday after revising the index maintenance guidelines, criteria and methodology. NTPC: The company has signed a share purchase agreement to buy GAIL's 25.51% stake in Ratnagiri Gas and Power Pvt Ltd, commonly known as Dabhol project. After the transaction is complete, NTPC would have 86.49% stake in the RGPPL. NTPC also said it has raised 900 crore through issuance of unsecured, redeemable, taxable, listed, rated non-convertible debentures. Telecom companies: The telecom regulator may consider lowering the minimum price for 5G spectrum if the government directs it to do so because of concerns that the pricing set for the airwaves could hurt the rollout of the latest wireless technology. Jet Airways: The consortium chosen to resurrect the airline has proposed to invest 600 crore in the first two years in the grounded airline to repay creditors and acquire an 89.79% stake in the carrier. the consortium plans to replace 11 existing older planes owned by Jet with six narrow-body Boeing 737 planes, which will be used to initially operate on domestic routes and further extended to short-haul international destinations. United Spirits: The liquor maker is initiating a strategic review of select popular brands in the country, it said on Tuesday. This comes as it chases more profitable growth by way of premiumizing its portfolio of brands while sharpening its focus on core popular liquor and pricey global spirits here. USLs popular portfolio comprises around 30 brands and the strategic review will look at approximately half of it by volume. Sanofi India: The pharma company has approved a special dividend of 240 per share for the year ended 31 December. It has also approved a final dividend of 125 per share for the same period. The company reported a net profit of 123 crore, up 26% for the quarter ended December, while revenue from operations declined to 720 crore from 826 crore. Sun Pharma Advanced Research Company: The US FDA has ruled against its appeal related to Taclantis, its under development product for treatment of breast cancer. The Office of New Drugs (OND) of the US FDA has denied the company's appeal of the Complete Response Letter in relation to the new drug application for Taclantis. Coal India: The board of directors is scheduled to meet on March 5, 2021 to consider and approve payment of second interim dividend for 2020-21. The company has fixed March 16, 2021 as the record date for the payment of dividend, if declared by the board. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. After a year of job uncertainty and salary cuts, the start-up ecosystem is stepping up its plans as many large firms look to scale up their business. According to a survey by Scalar, venture capital-funded start-ups, especially in edtech, logistics, and gig economy, will be key drivers of the job market in 2021. Live learning platform Vedantu planned to hire 1500 employees in FY 2020-21 and has achieved most of this They plan to further hire 200-300 employees across all levels, with domain expertise in the fields of technology, product, finance, strategy and human resource this year. Due to the tremendous potential of online learning in current times, it is our duty to ensure that all students and teachers get perfect experience of our product. Hence, we are ramping up our across domains from Indias premium B-schools and engineering institutes, said Vamsi Krishna, chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder, Vedantu. Mumbai-based start-up Lido Learning is looking to hire close to 1,000 employees in the next one month. The recruitment will be diverse, spanning across roles like tutors, customer support personnel, and sales and marketing executives. This is in addition to building strength for the existing teams. There has been a big surge in start-up hiring in the past two-three months, and it is not only limited to fintech or All segments, including consumer tech, SaaS (software as a service), gaming, and media tech, are now picking up, said Anshul Lodha, regional director at global recruitment consultancy Michael Page. ALSO READ: India Inc likely to offer average salary increment of 7.7% this year The outbreak of Covid-19 impacted most start-ups as their business contracted and many had to resort to job cuts. For instance, food tech platform Swiggy, which handed pink slips to over 1,400 employees after the pandemic broke out last year, has gone back to the 2019 hiring plans for the March quarter, with an increased focus on technology and product functions. Attracting the right talent in engineering, product, data science & ML is our primary focus while also strengthening our business category and supply chain teams for our new initiatives. This would be a mix of both entry-level roles (15-20 per cent) and lateral hires, said Girish Menon, head of HR at Swiggy. The need to hire aggressively also comes on the back of fundraising that start-ups have seen amid rising demand. Walmart-backed PhonePe has managed to reach the milestone of 1 billion monthly payment transactions. PhonePe has about 700 positions to close in 2021. Despite the lockdown, our headcount grew by 700 people across roles since the end of February 2020, taking our employee strength to 2,240, said a spokesperson for PhonePe. The Tiger Global-backed start-up is also expanding its offline merchant network to 25 million (currently at 16 million) by the end of 2021 across rural and semi-urban areas. This expansion will be creating 10,000 jobs across 5,500 talukas, wherein people will be hired from the locally available talent pool to service the merchants. Fintech unicorn Razorpay will be hiring 650 employees across its engineering, products, customer experience, sales and marketing teams in the next 10 months, to meet the growing payment and banking needs of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and freelancers. The Bengaluru-based startup onboarded 550 employees in 2020. According to Teamlease, fresher hiring is expected to be higher this year, given that the 2020 pass-out intake just started around November-December 2020 and the activity has increased in Q1 of 2021. Fresher hiring is expected to more than double compared to last year. Lateral is also in the positive trajectory; some of the roles that laterals are preferred are full stack developer, content writers (mostly copy writers), whereas for roles of testing, sales, teachers and digital marketing, are open to take freshers, said Kaushik Banerjee, vice president and business head of Teamlease & Freshersworld. IPO-bound Zomato, which laid off 13 per cent of its 4,000 workforce last year due to Covid impact, is planning to hire 400 people this year, according to reports. Online grocery platform Grofers, another start-up which is drawing up IPO plans, has an ongoing talent reinforcement, primarily in technology, supply chain and demand functions. Our focus continues to build high-performing teams across the organisation with a blend of fresh perspective and diverse experience, said Ankush Arora, head of HR, Grofers. The nurses at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, have been working since November 2019 without a contract. On February 10, they gave their overwhelming approval for strike action for safer working conditions and patient outcomes, with 89 percent of 800 voting in favor. When negotiations resumed on February 11, management left the table after five minutes. Since that time, the nurses have been left in limbo. There has been no indication that the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) is preparing to call a strike. The MNA would be contractually required to issue a 10-day strike notice to the hospital. The nurses chief concern is that more nurses must be hired to staff the medical-surgical floor. Medical-surgical nurses attend to patients who have the highest needs and morbidity after patients in intensive care. The medical-surgical patient-to-nurse ratio at St. Vincent Hospital is currently five-to-one. Nurses want it lowered to four-to-one. While the industry standard typically falls between four and five, mandated ratios of four-to-one have been proven to result in thousands fewer patient deaths. Saint Vincent Hospital, Worcester, Massachusetts (Credit: Terageorge~commonswiki) Catharine Mysliviec, a nurse of 14 years who works on the medical-surgical unit at UMass Memorial Medical Center, wrote a letter to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette on Friday supporting the St. Vincents nurses. She explained that ratios are critical because nurses spend more time with patients than any other provider during their hospitalization. Every second a nurse spends with a sick patient is potentially the difference between life or death. She wrote, We are there to monitor your condition minute by minute so we can spot any change in your condition and take immediate steps to initiate actions that can mitigate a preventable downturn in your status, or even save your life. US hospitals universally refuse to prioritize health care professionals time with their patients because it negatively affects their bottom line. However, health care systems across the country have been profiting off of the pandemic. They have received millions in bailouts through the CARES Act, while health care workers are forced into unsafe conditions and overworked, with thousands contracting the deadly coronavirus. On the day St. Vincent nurses voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, the owner Tenet Healthcare, which is based in Dallas, Texas, announced profits of $414 million for 2020. On February 1, 2021, just days after management made its last, best, and final offer to the nurses, shares of Tenet rose to $49, from $31 on February 1 of last year. Funds totaling $3 billion from the CARES Act, along with nurse furloughs, layoffs of essential support staff and unsafe staffing levels have helped Tenet improve its cash position during the greatest public health emergency in over a century. In the event of a strike, management says the hospital will remain fully operational and ... continue to provide excellent patient care uninterrupted. Although it will be costly, to avoid a long-term investment in more permanent nurses, Tenet and CEO Carolyn Jackson will expend large amounts of money on traveling nurses in order to break the strike and secure future profits. Well before COVID-19 began to spread in Massachusetts in early 2020, St. Vincent nurses were caring for more patients than was safe. In February, 70 percent signed a petition calling for safer staffing levels and an end to a punitive management culture. Weeks before the first surge, more than 200 nurses from every unit of the hospital joined negotiations to testify on the impact staffing levels were having on patient care. They spoke of numerous falls, of the abandonment of suicidal patients and of the onset of preventable complications and death. When the novel coronavirus was unleashed, it exposed inadequate stocks of personal protective equipment, leaving nurses ill-equipped for the influx of diseased and highly contagious patients. Contrary to the needs of its workforce amidst a pandemic and in order to maintain its balance sheet after halting elective procedures, the hospital furloughed nurses and began flexing staff, a practice that amounts to operating a skeleton crew. Nurses responded by passing a vote of no confidence in CEO Jackson, but management did nothing to address their concerns. Throughout the course of the pandemic, the nurses have filed over 500 official reports documenting cases of what they deemed unsafe conditions. In the month of January alone, the countrys deadliest month of the pandemic, they filed 76 such reports. Nurses who spoke to the Boston Herald described conditions that kept them up at night: patients waiting hours to be fed or given pain medication, developing preventable bedsores and soiling themselves when bathroom assistance was not available. Jackson maintains that the hospital is able to provide safe and excellent care, but nurse Marlena Pellegrino, co-chair of the MNA bargaining committee, describes the situation differently: Our COVID floors right now are drowning. Our emergency rooms are drowning. Our ICUs are drowning. Dominique Muldoon, who has been at St. Vincents for over 23 years, told the Herald, Ive just never seen it so bad. The staffing and everything [have] just deteriorated to the point where we dont feel safe doing our jobs. For months now, nurses have made great sacrifices. They have been exposed to and infected by the novel coronavirus, and they have lived in quarantine away from their families. They have gone beyond their scope of practice to serve as grief counselors and conduits for dying patients isolated from their loved ones; and they have demonstrated their resolve to improve their working conditions. And following the policy of their union, they have filed hundreds of safety complaints and have approached hospital management with their concerns, to no avail. In December at the beginning of the holiday surge in cases, more than 400 nurses held an informational picket to call for improved staffing. Since January, they have been holding daily pickets to generate support. Some 100 nurses have had enough, leaving for hospitals that take better care of their workers and patients. Those that remain, describe the decision to authorize the strike as heart-wrenching. Over recent decades, the MNA has been working to achieve their goal of safer patient limits through legislative efforts. This is in keeping with the unions perspective. The Massachusetts Nurses Association, which describes itself as the largest union of registered nurses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Its 23,000 members advance the nursing profession by fostering high standards of nursing practice, promoting the economic and general welfare of nurses in the workplace, projecting a positive and realistic view of nursing, and by lobbying the Legislature and regulatory agencies on health care issues affecting nurses and the public (emphasis added). Conspicuously absent from these principles is any intention of fighting to defend its membership through mobilizing nurses, in alliance with health care workers in Massachusetts and beyond, in a political struggle against the mega-hospital chains and the two big business parties that represent their interests. On Thursday, Democratic Senator Ed Markey joined picketing nurses, saying, I join you in your frustration, and I raise my voice with you. You deserve better working conditions, better staffing, so you can continue to do Gods work here on Earth and in the hospital, so you can give your absolute best in patient care to every single person who needs it in Worcester. Through Marlena Pellegrino, the union replied, We are thrilled that Senator Markey is taking the time to join us ... as we continue our daily effort to educate the public to help us convince our employer to finally put a concern for our patients and community over Tenets concern for profits. David Schildmeier, MNA director of public communications, told the Telegram & Gazette that the union hopes that St. Vincent management and Tenet Healthcare will hear the message and aid nurses. It is a foregone conclusion that the MNAs slavish appeals to the health care behemoth, which has profited off of mass suffering and death in the pandemic, will fall on deaf ears. As the pandemic persists and capitalism profits from the exploitation of workers and mass death, it is critical that health care workers, who have witnessed the worst and bear the scars to prove it, enter the struggle for a society organized on the basis of social need, not private profit. The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party call on St. Vincent nurses to form an independent rank-and-file committee to link their fight up with nurses and health care workers across the country and internationally who are demanding better working conditions and patient care. This struggle must be organized independently of the unions and the Democratic Party. Sign up for the WSWS Health Care Workers Newsletter to find out how to carry forward these policies. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company In an inter-connected world of technologies, applications and devices, cyber security or rather cyber insecurity, has come to hang like the proverbial albatross around our necks. And in recent years, India has been one of the worst victims of ever-growing cyber-attacks. Yet, giving up internet technologies is simply a non-starter. So, the only way out is to fight the battle head-on and take it all the way to the enemys camp. And there is one man who is doing just that. Meet Khushhal Kaushik, the Founder-CEO of Lisianthus Tech, a Gurgaon-based cyber security firm that offers a range of highly specialized cyber security services from security audit services to security assessment to training and certification. But make no mistake. Khushhal is not your regular tech prodigy with a romanticized dream-like personal story who makes that initial splash, but often vanishes into obscurity in no time without a trace. Khushhal belongs to a different pedigree, a different league altogether. After all, it is not easy to getting selected as the first Indian cyber security expert to be featured by UNESCO back in 2018. And for his achievement, the Andhra Pradesh government had honored him at a special function held at the iconic Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi. But Khushhal hasnt stopped. The same UNESCO is featured second expert research paper by Khushhal in feb-2021. And that is not all. Khushhal has been recognized and profiled as the future of cyber security in India in prominent media publications by a former US Department of Defense veteran and navy analyst with over 30 years experience in cyber security. Consider this. How many Indian cyber security experts get to have a personal interaction with no less than the former Head of the Technology Department in the National Information Security Authority or NISA, a subdivision of the Prime Ministers Office in Israel. We all know Israel as one of the most technologically-advanced countries in modern era. And thats not enough. Impressed by our desi expert, the veteran Israeli cyber security man had even invited Khushhal to come to Israel and set up a cyber security R&D lab at one of the leading universities in his country. Speaking of universities, not all Indian cyber security experts get invited by top foreign universities to lecture, collaborate and share knowledge on a wide array of issues surrounding cyber security. But Khushhal has again been an exception. Northwestern University in Chicago is one such university which had invited Khushhal for a detailed presentation on ways to address cyber security and also to get his insights on starting a course on Ethical Hacking & Cyberspace Security. Notably, the university counts among its alumni Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex and George RR Martin, the celebrated novelist-screenwriter whose work was adapted into the blockbuster web series Game of Thrones. Within India, Khushhal has been invited by several universities to pick his brain on the subject with Punjab University being one among many. True to his global fame as a cyber security expert, Khushhal has rubbed shoulders with the whos who of international politics, industry and science and technology. From Prime Minister of Canada to Deputy Prime Minister of Uganda to Minister for Innovation, Science & Economic Development, Canada, Khushhal has been personally recognized and acknowledged by each of these global figures 1. In a major development marking yet another global milestone for Khushhal, he has been appointed Advisor-Cyber Security by BRICS CCI, the collective commerce and industry body of BRICS, a prominent politico-economic voice on the international diplomatic arena. That a powerful body such as BRICS which contributes to nearly one-third of the world economy and one-tenth of global trade has placed its trust in Khushhal for cyber security says a lot of the latters personal credibility and standing. Very recently in November 2020, Khushhal was duly given a letter of appreciation by the Republic of Panama for solving an e-mail hacking case in less than half an hour! Notwithstanding these professional attainments, what has concerned Khushhal the most is that despite India being a considerable software power, our country is reckoned in relatively modest terms when it comes to cyber security. Khushhal wants to change precisely that perception through his ventures and initiatives on global platforms. And within the country, it must be remembered that as a starry-eyed young Information Technology graduate pass out from a top engineering school, Khushhal had turned down innumerable lucrative offers from top multinationals. Opting to take the road less travelled, instead he had founded Lisianthus Tech. However, for Khushhal, Lisianthus Tech is not a company. It is a dream vehicle which would help him translate his vision of making cyber security a common conversational subject around the world and India into a reality. For this, he expects the government and the Indian private sector to collaborate with special focus on research, innovation and above all, training for all. As such, he wishes that cyber security be made a part of primary, secondary and senior secondary school level curricula. At the same time, he also suggests the nurturing of local developers only which would make India a self-reliant cyber secure nation. During his journey, he and his firm have become a partner of choice for countless government organizations, agencies and private corporations. For his exemplary professional achievement and contribution to nation-building, Khushhal has also been honored with the Glory of India Award 2020 by the Indian Achievers Awards Forum, an award which in the past has been bestowed on iconic Indians such as Kiran Bedi, former IPS officer and Lt. Governor of Puducherry, and Sushil Kumar, the Olympian, besides many others. However, Khushhal is not done yet. Still in his early 32, he still has a lot to offer. After all, putting India on the global cyber security map is an ongoing endeavor. India needs him. (Disclaimer: This is a featured content) Sony officially announced today the FX3 (model ILME-FX3) camera that combines the best of Sonys industry-leading digital cinema technology with advanced imaging features from Alpha mirrorless cameras to create the ultimate cinematic look. The Most Compact and Lightweight Cinema Line Camera and First Choice for Creators Who Strive for New Cinematic Freedom As the latest addition to Sonys Cinema Line, the FX3 delivers a cinematic look and professional operability and reliability all in one device that answers the needs of young creators who are looking for new ways to express their creative vision. The new model provides outstanding image quality and usability for small scale and one-person shooting. The FX3 boasts first-class focus performance, optical image stabilization, handheld shooting design and advanced heat dissipation for extended recording times. All this in a compact, lightweight body that provides the performance and mobility to meet the growing demands of todays content creators. The FX3 was designed to turn creative vision into reality, said Ryo Ochi, General Manager, Digital Imaging Division, Sony Electronics Asia Pacific. It allows creators to bring their visual expression into the world of cinema through immersive content. We will continue to support the worlds creators through Sonys Cinema Line Series. Cinematic Look The FX3 flaunts Sonys industry-leading image sensor technology to achieve high processing speeds and outstanding image quality. The full-frame, back-illuminated Exmor R CMOS sensor full-frame 10.2-megapixel (approx. effective) count for movie recording (and 12.1 effective megapixels for stills) and the BIONZ XR image processing engine team up to ensure high sensitivity with low noise. The standard ISO range is 80 to 102,400 (expandable to 409,600 when shooting a movie), and dynamic range is an impressively wide 15+ stops. In response to a growing need for a more expressive depth, the FX3, along with FX9 and FX6 Cinema Line cameras, allows users to create a cinematic look without post-production using S-Cinetone. Based on the color science inspired by Sonys flagship VENICE camera, S-Cinetone delivers natural mid-tones, plus soft colors and smooth highlights that are essential to cinematic look. Create movies with in-camera 4K recording at up to 120 frames per second. Extraordinarily smooth slow-motion imagery (up to 5x) at QFHD (3840 x 2160) resolution with autofocus provides new expressive capability. Designed for Comfortable Solo-Shooting The most compact and lightweight Cinema Line camera is ideal for handheld shooting, gimbal and drone-mounted work. It weighs just 715 grams, including the battery and memory cards, and the body is 77.8 mm high, 129.7 mm wide and 84.5 mm deep without protrusions. The camera grip has been carefully designed to provide optimum flexibility, stability and comfort for long shoots. Designed for mobility and efficiency, the FX3s body features five thread holes (1/4-20 UNC) to easily attach compatible accessories while remaining light enough for handheld shooting and making it easy to carry and set up. The supplied XLR handle unit securely attaches to the body via the Multi Interface Shoe without any special tools and provides three additional thread holes for accessories: two on the top and one on the end. External monitors, recorders, wireless microphone receivers, the accessory shoe kit (cold shoe plate), or other add-ons can be securely attached. To enable high quality audio, the XLR handle unit includes two XLR/TRS audio inputs to the FX3. With an optional XLR microphone, digital audio data can be directly transferred to the camera for outstanding audio quality. Camera settings provide audio recording formats, including 4-channel 24-bit recording. Because the XLR adaptor is integrated into the handle and does not require any additional cables or batteries, it offers stress-free set up. The FX3 offers Fast Hybrid autofocus (AF) by using the 627 points focal plane phase-detection system during movie recording. The camera is further enhanced with Touch Tracking (Real-time Tracking) where simply touching the desired subject on the monitor screen initiates auto focus and tracking on that subject. Precise and smooth focus is maintained with Real-time Eye AF technology that pinpoints eye even when subjects are looking down or up at steep angles. Additionally, other AF features have been included and refined in response to feedback from professional users, including AF Transition Speed, AF Subject Shift Sensitivity, intuitive control and AF support when focusing manually. These AF features have been implemented in the FX3 to ensure stable, flexible and precise focusing in any situation and are easy to operate for solo shoots. The FX3 features 5-axis optical in-body image stabilization - highly effective for handheld shooting. A high precision stabilization unit and gyro sensors have made it possible to provide an Active Mode that is dedicated to movie shooting in each format, including 4K. In-body image stabilization means that effective stabilization can be achieved with a wide range of lenses, including E-mount lenses that do not include stabilization of their own. In addition, the FX3 records image stabilization metadata that can be done more practical adjustment during post-production using Catalyst Browse/Prepare. Expandability and Operability for Content Creators Operability No compromises have been made when designing the FX3 in terms of professional control and operability. The buttons frequently used in movie shooting such as ISO, iris, and white balance adjustment are located on the grip and on the top of the body. The design allows solo creators to control the buttons with one hand. In addition, 140 functions assignable to 15 custom keys allow for ultimate efficiency. The zoom lever located on the top of the grip not only controls compatible powered zoom lenses, but also allows Clear Image Zoom to be also used with unpowered zoom and prime lenses with less image degradation reducing the number of lenses required for many projects. This lever also enables smooth zooming that is difficult for manual zoom-ring control. Recording lamps (tally) are provided on the upper front and rear of the camera, so that operator can easily distinguish when the camera is rolling. A side-opening vari-angle touch-panel LCD monitor allows for easy operation and is suitable for gimbal-mounted shots, complicated angles, handheld operation and more. Flexible Exposure Mode allows the FX3 to have a similar Auto/Manual switch operation as other FX series cameras for aperture (iris), shutter speed, and ISO, which can be set independently. A short press of the assigned custom buttons enables switching between locking the dial / Manual, and a long press on the custom buttons allows on-off switching of Auto setting. Reliability Creators need more than just refined features and performance; they also need reliability and durability. The FX3 combines a fan for active cooling with effective heat dissipation resulting in uninterrupted 4K 60p recording without thermal shutdown. The newly developed fan provides high-efficiency cooling. The new camera also features a dust and moisture resistant design and durable magnesium alloy chassis. Moreover, USB PD (Power Delivery) supports fast charging for uninterrupted recording. Expandability The FX3 is compatible with several recording functions including S-Log gamma with S-Gamut.Cine color space to preserve rich color and gradation, that can record in a high dynamic range and wide color gamut. It also supports internal recording in XAVC S and XAVC S-I formats in 4K (QFHD) and FHD, and XAVC HS (MPEG-H HEVC/H.265, 4K only) format. 4K 60p video in 10-bit 4:2:2 or 16-bit RAW format can be output to an external device via the FX3 HDMI Type-A jack. The FX3 also offers fast, future-oriented media slots that contributes to unprecedented shooting freedom with two CFexpress Type A cards. The same data can be simultaneously recorded to both cards for backup, and a relay mode will automatically switch to the second media card when the first media card becomes full during recording. The new camera has been developed with advanced connectivity features to better assist professional creators with high-speed wireless LAN functionality (2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band) and wired LAN connection via a compatible USB-to-Ethernet adaptor. This FX3 also supports remote shooting from PC by Imaging Edge Desktop application Remote via Wi-Fi, or Superspeed USB 5Gbps connection over USB Type-C terminal. Pricing and Availability The FX3 will be available in the Philippines soon. People wearing face masks as a precaution against the coronavirus stretch at a park in Seoul, Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021. AP South Korea's daily new coronavirus cases bounced back to over 400 on Wednesday on continued cluster infections across the country ahead of the country's COVID-19 vaccine rollout this week. The country reported 440 more virus cases, including 417 local infections, raising the total caseload to 88,120, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA). Wednesday's daily caseload is a sharp rise from 357 cases amid unrelenting group infections. The figures hovered above 600 last week before falling below 500 over the weekend. The country added three more deaths, raising the total to 1,576. The fatality rate came to 1.79 percent. The latest rebound is attributable to the eased social distancing scheme that has been in place since last week after the Lunar New Year's holiday, which ran from Feb. 11 to 13. The country decided to apply Level 2 distancing for the Seoul metropolitan area, which houses half of the nation's 52 million population. Level 2 is one notch lower than the previous Level 2.5 under the five-tier system. Under the new guideline, set to run through Sunday, restaurants and bars in Seoul and the surrounding Gyeonggi Province are allowed to remain open for an hour longer until 10 p.m. Bans on gatherings of five or more people, however, are in place nationwide. Health authorities plan to announce new guidelines for the following weeks no later than Saturday. Small business owners strongly call for further eased virus curbs, but health authorities may opt to extend the current curfews given a wide array of cluster infections nationwide. More behind the cutPolice gave testimony, while Hitler Junior blamed Pelosi, and Senator Johnson claimed they were imbedded aNteEfA lefties. Continuing to spread conspiracy theories and facing no accountability. Fucker Carlson claimed there was no evidence of white supremacy and he couldnt find Mr QAnon on any website (maybe he should ask his now-fired former writer who was a member). Hearings are pointless (except they allow the public to hear witness testimony), but theyre partisan from Congress so it should only be judicial. Meanwhile, Fled Coup was texting, and others were doodling during witness testimony, and it gives GQP a forum to still perpetuate lies and conspiracies.Some discussion on 2024 GQP candidates. Sunny drags FL Gov DeSantis. The idea T45 would return to ballot is nauseating, Romney sending a warning signal. MAM rambles 4ever, Whoopi challenges her, MAM pouts. ZZZzzz.Dr Hasan Gokal joined HCPHD (Harris County Public Health Department) as the emergency response physician for the Office of Preparedness. He was also the medical director for the covid vaxx rollout for the county. He had one vial with 10 doses left that wouldve spoiled in 6 hours. No one internally needed them. So, he contacted people he thought would be in the eligible category, and administered the vaxx so it didnt go to waste. One who received a dose was his wife who has a lung condition. She wasnt one of the original ten he contacted, but one person didnt show, and he had 20 mins shelf life left, so she became the last dose. He filled out the paperwork, fully transparent. A week later, he was fired under the pretense that he broke protocol. Backlash ensued, he wouldve had to otherwise throw them away. Despite a judge dismissing charges against him as being baseless, the DA in Harris County still plans to present charges before a Grand Jury for theft by public servant. Panel is livid and bewildered that he would be fired, and charged with a crime. Being a doctor while not white. Omg.In related news, Oregon health workers administer Covid-19 vaccines in snowstorm to stranded motorists . Wtf @ Texas!Linsey Davis is the new weekend co-anchor for ABC World News Tonight, the first Black woman to host a Network News show. She also moderated two of the Democratic Primary debates, and an anchor for GMA. She also wrote, which is her third childrens book. The 4 Ps hit us.andemic,olice brutality,rotests, and an Imotus leader. They talk about current events, marriage, family, parenting, children.William Wells Brown was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian in the United States. Born into slavery in Montgomery County, Kentucky, near the town of Mount Sterling, Brown escaped to Ohio in 1834 at the age of 19. He settled in Boston, Massachusetts, where he worked for abolitionist causes and became a prolific writer. While working for abolition, Brown also supported causes including: temperance, women's suffrage, pacifism, prison reform, and an anti-tobacco movement. His novel Clotel (1853), considered the first novel written by an African American, was published in London, England, where he resided at the time; it was later published in the United States. He is thought to be the first Black man to publish a novel, a play, and a travel book. You can read more about William Wells Brown here +++++++++++++++Neera Tanden, who is nominated for OMB, is still getting pushback from hypocrites who voted for and continue(d) to support a long line of trolling white men. The panel debates whether (a) the Biden admin should take the high road and hold their nominees to a higher standard, eg think before you post vs (b) whats good for the goose is good for the gander, get over it, the Rs are way worse, and youre being misogynistic and racist.[Whoopi had tech issues] Merrick Garland nominee for AG, plays clip of his narrative where US took in his Jewish family. It packed an emotional punch. The panel sings his praises, how he represented himself, despite earlier McConnell refusal to consider him for SCOTUS. Garland has bipartisan support, then and now. More discussion about racial equality and racial equity, plays clip. Senator Tom Cotton -even his name is a parody.Constance Baker Motley was a key strategist of the African-American civil rights movement, lawyer, judge, state senator, and Borough President of Manhattan, New York City. She obtained a role with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund before entering law school as a staff attorney and continued her work with the organization for more than twenty years. She argued 12 landmark civil rights cases in front of the Supreme Court, winning nine. She was a law clerk to Thurgood Marshall, aiding him in the case Brown v. Board of Education. Baker Motley was also the first African-American woman appointed to the federal judiciary, serving as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. You can read more about Constance Baker Motley here Mostly funny segment. On the one hand, the pandemic is reality and it shouldnt be ignored, but at the same time, we all crave escapism. The panel likes Bridgerton, The Real Housewives franchise, Bridgerton soft core p0rn, The Flight Attendant, true crime eg The Cecil Hotel, Bridgerton EP5, The Morning Show, Fargo (w Chris Rock), Mars Rover Landing (that Whoopi says looks like her nekkid). Everyone is laughing, but MAM has no chill. Sara was funny.Joy = no, but she has pastry fat ass dna. Sara = no, feels more nurture than nature, more discipline than organic. Sunny = no, shes notoriously jealous. MAM avoids the answer. Likes that Whoopi isnt married because she doesnt want anyone in her house.Andra Day is promoting. First starring role, rave reviews, awards buzz, on cover of W magazine. Didnt see herself as an actor, didnt want to diminish Billie. Talks about Billie being a lifelong idol. Talks about training and transforming herself to play her. Billie is considered godmother of civil rights movement, they talk about her history, and narratives in the film that she learned about. The film is on Hulu. Then she singsSource links are below each video or section Citing the danger of new coronavirus strains spreading in Europe, Slovakia tightened border controls on Wednesday as it battles one of the highest coronavirus mortality rates in the world Bratislava, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 17th Feb, 2021 ) :Citing the danger of new coronavirus strains spreading in Europe, Slovakia tightened border controls on Wednesday as it battles one of the highest coronavirus mortality rates in the world. The health ministry said anyone crossing Slovakia's borders will have to self-isolate for 14 days upon arrival and some less frequented border crossings will be closed altogether. "The new regime on borders is intended to prevent the spread of novel coronavirus mutations," Health Minister Marek Krajci said earlier. Slovakia on Monday had already begun closing some smaller border crossings with Poland to passengers and goods traffic. There will be exceptions to the new regime for cross-border workers but a negative PCR test not older than 72 hours will still be required. Slovakia has registered 23 Covid-related deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in the last 14 days -- the second highest level in the world after Portugal, according to an AFP tally. Since the start of the pandemic, Slovakia has registered 111 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, putting it 16th in the world and 10th in Europe. An EU member of 5.4 million people, Slovakia has borders with Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Ukraine. The Czech Republic is also experiencing stricter border checks after Germany banned travel from there and from Austria's Tyrol region over a surge in coronavirus variants. HERNDON, Va., Feb. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- On February 16, 2021, Codan Limited announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire 100% of the shares in U.S.-based company, DTC, from a private equity company. The acquisition is expected to be completed by April 30, 2021, subject to regulatory conditions typical for transactions of this nature. DTC is an established commercially-off-the-shelf technology provider of high bandwidth wireless communications with capabilities in MIMO Mesh networks and next generation software defined radios that stream data across its self-forming and self-healing networks. DTC is a trusted and long-term supplier for more than 20 key U.S. government agencies, as well as the "Five Eyes" intelligence communities, including Military, Special Forces, Border Control, First Responders and Broadcasters. DTC is headquartered in the U.S., with locations in the UK and Denmark. Codan's Chief Executive Officer, Donald McGurk, said "The acquisition of DTC is consistent with Codan's well-publicized strategic growth plan for our Tactical Communications business. This is focused on providing total voice, data and video communications solutions by transitioning from a traditional voice-only platform." Codan's President for Tactical Communications, Paul Sangster, said "DTC is an important strategic acquisition for us and brings complementary capabilities to our existing tactical communications solutions. We will be able to add immediate value by integrating DTC's and Codan's sales and marketing teams as we open new geographic routes to market. Over the long term, our combined engineering capabilities will allow us to bring unique communications solutions to a diverse global customer base from military to security to broadcasting." DTC's Chief Executive Officer, Juan Navarro said "Codan is a perfect fit for DTC given our shared dedication to meeting our customers' mission critical communications needs. DTC's product portfolio is complementary to Codan's Tactical Communications solutions across the markets we jointly serve. We believe that there is excellent cultural alignment, and DTC looks forward to working with Codan to effect a seamless integration into the Codan group." About DTC Headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, DTC is a world leader in Commercial-off-the-Shelf ("COTS") mission critical tactical communication solutions for the Military, Law Enforcement, Intelligence Agencies and Unmanned Systems. DTC's differentiated Waveforms deliver the greatest range and throughput with the lowest latency, yielding secure real-time situational awareness in the most challenging environments. Contact Elaine Wilde, DTC Marketing M: 703-307-0520 E: [email protected] About Codan Codan is a global technology company that develops robust technology solutions to solve customers' communications, safety, security, and productivity problems in some of the harshest environments around the world. Media Contact Francesca Doyle, Codan Communications Marketing M +61 407 095 986 E: [email protected] SOURCE Domo Tactical Communications (DTC) Related Links domotactical.com For tonight we take a peek at pr0n hottie Alexis seemingly defying stereotypes and gravity as she shows off some of her many talents in addition to this glimpse at pop culture, community news and top headlines. Potholes popping up early after days of freezing temps, snow and ice in Kansas City KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Potholes, a seasonal threat, are making their debut after days of freezing temperatures, snow and ice in the metro. Many people said they are excited for the warmer weather, but not what the winter weather is leaving behind. Kansas City Best Shot Kansas City VA Medical Center says it has administered more than 20,000 vaccine doses since December CAPITOL RIOT. BUT WE BEGIN WITH A COVID-19 VACCINE UPDATE. GOOD AFTERNOON, EVERYBODY. I'M KRIS KETZ. KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI, IS TEAMING UP WITH WALMART AND THE YMCA TO VACCINATE MORE THAN 3,000 HIGH-RISK RESIDENTS IN THE NEXT 6 WEEKS. ACCESS TO VACCINE IS AN ISSUE IN THE CITY, BUT KMBC 9'S MICHEAL MAHONEY REPORTS, IT'S NOT EVERYWHERE. Sign Of The Times Meeting discusses local control of billboards, features new city manager By Kathy Feist Center Planning and Development, which advocates for neighborhoods in the south Kansas City area, will hold a virtual meeting Tuesday, February 23, starting at 7 pm. The organization will feature a Q&A with City Manager Brian Platt, a crime report from South Patrol spokesperson Aaron Whitehead, and an update on a residential area. Pr0n Is Problematic The problem with the pornography industry | The McGill Tribune Content warning: This article includes mentions of sexual violence and discrimination. A December 2020 New York Times article by Nicholas Kristof exposing Pornhub's refusal to take down videos depicting rape and child abuse has sparked international outrage. Since then, credit card companies like MasterCard and Visa have cut ties with the ... Prez Trump Plots Imminent Social Media Comeback Trump wants back on Facebook and Instagram, appeals suspension to Facebook Oversight Board The Facebook Oversight Board, which will decide whether Donald Trump's indefinite suspension should be lifted, received an appeal on behalf of the former president arguing for his Facebook and Instagram accounts to be restored. Top Doc Blames Prez Trump For Divisive Mask Debate Fauci Says Trump's 'Denial and Lack of Facts' Contributed to Magnitude of U.S. Covid Death Toll Dr. Anthony Fauci has been reluctant to blame former President Donald Trump for how the coronavirus devastated the United States so badly, but he said Tuesday that the former president's denialism about the pandemic contributed to the death toll. Iran From Debate House GOP warns Biden against lifting sanctions on Iran House Republicans are warning President Biden against lifting any sanctions against Iran as the administration reengages in negotiations with the country over its nuclear program. Insurrection Questions FBI alert about possible 'war' against Congress reached D.C. and Capitol Police on eve of attack, deepening security questions Around 7 p.m. on Jan. 5, less than 24 hours before an angry mob overran the U.S. Capitol, an FBI bulletin warning that extremists were calling for violent attacks on Congress landed in an email inbox used by the D.C. police department. That same evening, a member of the Capitol Police received the same memo. No Shame In Game 'Wheel of Fortune' host Pat Sajak faces backlash for making fun of contestant with a speech impediment "Wheel of Fortune" host Pat Sajak upset a number of viewers on Monday when he seemingly mocked a contestant with a speech impediment. The longtime game show host was trying to keep things light during Monday's show as he was introducing contestants. While doing so, Sajak spoke with contestant Chris Brimble. Chiefs Heiress Competes Gracie Hunt, Clark Hunt's daughter, announces Miss Kansas USA 2021 bid by: Travis Meier Posted: / Updated: KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Gracie Hunt, daughter of Kansas City Chiefs CEO Clark Hunt, has announced her bid for Miss Kansas USA in 2021. "I'm so excited to announce that I will be competing for Miss Kansas USA this April!" Gracie Hunt tweeted. Bet On The Dotte Wyandotte Nation set to open casino near Wichita Wyandotte Nation set to open casino near Wichita The Wyandotte Nation plans to open a new main casino next week near Wichita. The Crosswinds Casino will open next Tuesday in Park City. Cool Down Tomorrow Not as mild Wednesday as high tops out near 45 degrees Hide Transcript Show Transcript STRONG ON THE WIND SPEEDS. 66 IN THE NEXT HOUR, 61 BY 6:00 P.M., IN THE 50'S BY 7:00 AND BEYOND AND FEW CLOUDS, REMAINING DRY AND GETTING COOL. THAT IS NOT EVEN JACKET WEATHER AT 9:00. WE FALL INTO THE 32 DEGREE MARK BY THAT TIME. And this is the OPEN THREAD for right now. The Central Drug Standard Control Organisation's (CDSCO)Subject Expert Committee has asked Dr Reddy's Laboratories to present additional data of immunogenicity while reviewing its application for Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) of Russian Covid vaccine Sputnik V in India, sources said. Dr Reddy's had applied for EUA before the CDSCO, and its application was reviewed by the SEC on Wednesday, a source told IANS. Meanwhile, the committee has also asked Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech to submit efficacy data of Covaxin before seeking its trial on children. The firm had sought permission from the Drug Controller General of India to conduct vaccine's trial on the children. In September 2020, Dr Reddy's partnered with the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) to conduct the clinical trials of the Sputnik V and for its distribution rights in India. The vaccine is currently undergoing the Phase 3 clinical trial in India. (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.) Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Phillips 66 Partners Files 2020 Form 10-K Phillips 66 Partners LP (NYSE: PSXP) ("the Partnership") has filed its annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended Dec. 31, 2020, with the Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC (News - Alert) ). The filing can be viewed through the "Investors" area of the Partnership's website at www.phillips66partners.com by selecting the "SEC Filings" link under the "Financial Information" tab, as well as on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Unitholders may request a hard copy of the report, which includes the Partnership's audited financial statements, free of charge. Requests should be submitted in writing to Phillips 66 - 411 S. Keeler Ave., Bartlesville, OK 74003. About Phillips 66 Partners Headquartered in Houston, Phillips 66 Partners is a growth-oriented master limited partnership formed by Phillips 66 to own, operate, develop and acquire primarily fee-based crude oil, refined petroleum products and natural gas liquids pipelines, terminals and other midstream assets. For more information, visit www.phillips66partners.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224006037/en/ Thiruvananthapuram, Feb 24 : Veteran Congress leader and former Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy on Wednesday arrived in Chennai for talks with DMK chief M.K. Stalin, ahead of Assembly polls in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, presently in Kerala attending to his Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency, asked Chandy to head for Chennai to begin talks with the DMK. Speaking to IANS over phone from Chennai, Chandy said he had just arrived and his first task is to meet with all the top Congress leaders in Tamil Nadu. "Tomorrow I am meeting Stalin and we will have wide ranging talks as the elections are round the corner. We are very confident of doing well," said Chandy. In the 2016 Assembly polls, the DMK had contested 178 seats, while the Congress fought on 41 seats and won just eight, in the 234-member Tamil Nadu Assembly. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Residents evacuate their flooded homes in Gresik, East Java, Indonesia on December 15, 2020, as the rainy season brings floods to many areas in Jakarta and Java. (Photo: AFP/VNA) Jakarta The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Russia have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to promote and develop their engagement in the area of disaster management. The agreement was signed by Secretary-General of ASEAN Dato Lim Jock Hoi and Minister of the Russian Federation for Civil Defence, Emergencies and Elimination of Consequences of Natural Disasters Yevgeny Zinichev. The MoU aims to enhance cooperation between the two sides in areas such as risk assessment, emergency response, and capacity building, since first engaging on this issue in 2012. This agreement also marks a significant milestone in ASEANs longstanding and multifaceted dialogue relations with Russia, which dates back to 1991. ASEAN countries are located in one of the most disaster-prone regions in the world, ranging from earthquakes, floods, landslides and typhoons. The wide geographic stretch of incidences, and increasing frequency of disasters require ASEAN to enhance the regions readiness and emergency response capacity. BOSTON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Archer Roose, one of the leading canned wine companies in the U.S., announced today the appointment of Alicia Towns Franken as Vice President of the Wine Portfolio for the organization. With over 25 years in the hospitality industry, Alicia Towns Franken has an extensive track record launching successful wine programs nationwide through her ongoing wine consulting work. Alicia also continues to participate in seminars, tastings and panel discussions in the wine industry around the country. Alongside launching successful wine programs, Alicia has been a champion in promoting diversity within the wine sector. In addition to decades of knowledge, she brings her lived experience as a Black woman, mother and work as a non-profit board member of Wine Unify , to elevate and influence the experience for diverse members of the wine community. "I am truly excited to be joining Archer Roose during a time of such tremendous growth for the company," said Franken. "I look forward to working alongside such an incredible leadership team to help take Archer Roose to the next level of success in 2021 and beyond." "We couldn't be happier to have Alicia now on board," explains Marian Leitner-Waldman, Founder of Archer Roose. "Alicia's approach to curating wines has always been to inspire and delight drinkers. Combined with her long-standing experience within the wine industry, we are excited to scale up the business and carve out our own voice as thought leaders in this highly competitive sector." About Alicia Towns Franken A successful wine educator and consultant with her own business, Towns Franken Consulting, Alicia Towns Franken brings over 25 years of experience in the industry. Alicia is currently on the boards of Wine Unify, The Esplanade Association, the Advisors of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and serves on the Leadership Council of The Posse Foundation. About Archer Roose Archer Roose takes pride in the craftsmanship of our wine. We return to the foundation of wine as it was - garnering relationships with the winemaking community, preserving terroir, and sourcing the highest quality wine with the highest quality grapes. But we also shape the foundation of wine as it should be - with mindfulness to the planet and to the lifestyles of those who drink them. We create the new tradition, fitting Archer Roose wines into the modern lifestyle for the modern drinker. For more information, please visit www.archerroose.com and check out our Instagram and Facebook . Press Contact Taylor Foxman [email protected] 609-432-2237 SOURCE Archer Roose Closing borders at this point in the pandemic is not effective, according to a senior Irish public health official with the European Commission, who also said Ireland benefitted from joining the EU vaccine deal. John Ryan, director for public health with DG-SANTE the European Commission's directorate-general for health and food safety said he doubts Irish people will be able to travel to Greece or Spain this summer, but that it is important to keep borders open for essential travel. We are not thinking that closing frontiers is the solution its a solution if you have no cases in your own country," he said at an online event hosted by European Movement Ireland and the European Commission Representation in Ireland on the EU vaccines strategy. "Borders are not the best place to carry out public health measures." Boosting screening and contact tracing is more effective at this point, he said. Speaking at Tuesday's online event on the EU vaccines strategy, John Ryan emphasised the importance of boosting screening and contact tracing. Picture: European Commission Mr Ryan said Ireland has benefitted from the joint approach to vaccines a small population size would make it difficult to order them alone, as the US has done. He dismissed fears that the rollout is going too slowly, saying: "We are not sitting on a stockpile of vaccines, we are sitting on a promise of a stockpile of vaccines." It is not correct to say the US or the UK invested more in the vaccine process, he said. Much of the EU money has gone into research and cannot be measured only by the cost paid per dose. Dr Nuala O'Connor administering the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine to Cathy Daly, 96, and her husband Tim Daly, 94, at Elmwood Medical Practice, Frankfield, Cork. Picture: Larry Cummins The European Commission aims to have 70% of the adult population in the EU vaccinated by the end of August, and 80% of healthcare workers vaccinated by the end of March. Agreements for 2.3bn doses are in place for six vaccines, although only three are approved so far. Mr Ryan said neither the Russian vaccine-makers nor the Chinese have applied for approval in the EU. Ireland's vaccine rollout Figures for vaccination up to last Wednesday show Ireland at 5.4% of the population vaccinated compared to 10.8% in Malta, and 6.9% in Denmark. However, other countries including Holland, Lithuania, and Luxembourg have a lower percentage complete to this point. The vaccine rollout is different in each country, with some offering drive-in clinics, or vaccinating in disused concert halls. Vaccination priorities The priority lists are also different, and he said calls in Ireland for Travellers to be prioritised echo the debates in other countries around marginalised groups. And Mr Ryan warned: There has been a huge vaccine hesitancy movement developing over a few years. We saw this two years ago when there were huge measles outbreaks in Europe including in Ireland. Separately, the EU justice commissioner yesterday said Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, and Sweden have 10 days to justify their ramped-up border restrictions. It is a necessity to go back to a coordinated approach, he said. Monica Eggert: I know it may sound cliched, but Ive always been a creative, artistic person. Ive always loved everything related to telling a story not only movies but also comic books, theater To create something that might make the audience feel emotion is so powerful, but the creation process itself already brings me joy. I studied animation in my hometown of Barcelona and worked for almost one year on a 2d series. Ive also done some freelance work related to animation and illustration. However, I still consider myself as a student looking for my way into this industry. I hope Ill find it! The idea to make this demo reel came from different factors. I was lucky to be chosen by my mentor Daniel Martinez Lara to do a workshop where you explore your skills and interests, and create your demo reel from zero with his feedback and supervision. His school, Pepe School Land (PSL), has this vision to encourage students to create and develop projects, and it was my love for storytelling and this fantastic opportunity to learn more with him that really pushed me to do this. The project may have been big, but it may also have been the only opportunity to do something like this, because in the future I would already have professional shots to include. Also, lesson number one when youre doing a demo reel: stand out! To catch the recruiters attention, not only do you need to have good animation, you also need something that might be remembered a highlight. For me, animation and all these artistic mediums really make sense when youre telling a story, even if its a very simple one: theres always a character, an emotion. Why not apply that to the demo reel itself? So, after doing loads of storyboards and animatics, I ended up choosing this idea (which was actually the first I had). It was really focused on the people who would watch it, the character situation and jokes were relatable to this world, and, above all, it really defined me as an artist. Ive always had a special love for 2d. Thats why it was my first choice. But some studios and individuals are really pushing 3d into new styles and experimentation, and thats why Im becoming more and more interested in this technique. I first studied 2d at Barcelonas 9Zeros school, where I need to express a big thank you to Felip Orozco, who sadly passed away during my time there. He was my big inspiration for 2d: he showed me that the most important thing is to really love and have a passion for what you do. When I went to PSL and learned 3d, I realized that, even though the two techniques have specific things you must master (like strong drawing skills for 2d and all the technical computer stuff for 3d), animation is animation, after all, and you can apply what you learn in one technique to another. At least that is my experience! My dream job is to do something that really gives me personal rewards and happiness. With this demo reel project I have reaffirmed that, right now, this kind of creation is what is giving me that. So I dont discard wanting to direct someday, and Im willing to explore the possibilities of my skills on my exciting new journey, in which storyboarding is also a great option! One things for sure: Ill continue creating, even if its on personal projects. Im currently working on an exciting comic series project with Jordi Muntaner it might be out soon and it makes me pretty excited! Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has admitted he knew about an alleged rape at Parliament House but chose not to tell the prime minister about it to avoid compromising a potential police investigation. Former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins has made a formal complaint to police that she was raped by a colleague at Parliament House in 2019. Mr Dutton has confirmed Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw informed him about the alleged assault on February 11, four days before the prime minister says he was told. Peter Dutton (pictured) has said he was briefed on the allegations from Brittany Higgins by the AFP but chose not to tell Scott Morrison because the case was 'she said, he said' Former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins has made a formal complaint to police that she was raped by a colleague at Parliament House in 2019 Scott Morrison believes the culture within Parliament House has to change as he and his government remain under scrutiny over the handling of the matter (pictured with Ms Higgins) Ms Higgins spoke to police on February 5, with the AFP then informing Mr Dutton because it was a politically sensitive investigation. He decided not to tell Scott Morrison because it was an operational matter for police. 'I took a decision that I wasn't going to disclose that to the prime minister,' Mr Dutton told reporters in Canberra on Thursday. 'I think that was the right decision.' 'And there are other matters, unrelated to this, obviously, that I was briefed on during that discussion with the commissioner on the 11th.' 'And I wasn't provided with the 'she said/he said' details of the allegation. It was at a higher level.' With the male at the centre of the allegation yet to be interviewed by investigators there are arguably no 'she said/he said' aspects to the case at this stage. Mr Dutton regularly receives briefings from Mr Kershaw. 'I don't instruct him how to conduct his investigations, I don't impede his investigations, I don't seek to influence his investigations,' the minister said. Mr Dutton decided to tell Mr Morrison's office about the rape allegations on February 12 after media inquiries. 'There were media inquiries that came into the Government. And I formed the judgement at that stage that my chief of staff should inform the Prime Minister's Office, which took place,' he said. 'The Prime Minister has been very clear about his frustration and anger at the fact that he wasn't provided with information earlier by his office.'. Ms Higgins revealed the sexual assault allegation last week and on Wednesday reinstated her complaint. Ms Higgins' partner Mr Sharaz (pictured) is a journalist with extensive experience working for SBS, Sky News and regional broadcaster Win Three other women have since alleged they were assaulted by the same man. He was sacked as a ministerial adviser because of a security breach on the night of Ms Higgins' alleged rape. Mr Morrison said his office first knew of the allegation on February 12 but staff took almost three days to notify him. Cabinet ministers Michaelia Cash and Linda Reynolds were also aware before the prime minister. Senator Reynolds, who employed Ms Higgins at the time of the alleged assault, is now on indefinite medical leave after advice from her cardiologist. Brittany Higgins (pictured) claimed she was assaulted by a male colleague inside their boss Defence Minister Linda Reynolds' office in 2019 when she was 24 She was admitted to Canberra Hospital hours before she was due to appear at the National Press Club. Mr Morrison and Mr Dutton are standing by the minister. 'These are all high-pressure jobs. And Linda has been under pressure over the course of the last couple of weeks, and she obviously has a pre-existing medical condition. She's done the right thing in seeking medical attention for that. And I hope that she's back at work as quickly as possible.' Mr Dutton said. Senator Reynolds has been under intense pressure about her handling of the issue and was forced to correct the record about how many times she met with police in April 2019. Ms Higgins is hopeful the 'terrible situation' will lead to fundamental reform of the laws around employing staff and cultural change 'I genuinely hope Linda Reynolds is okay and wish her all the best with her recovery,' she tweeted. The issue has dominated the parliamentary sitting fortnight with a slew of inquiries initiated to look at complaints processes and culture. Mr Morrison has rejected suggestions there is a 'don't ask, don't tell' culture within the government. 'I have been open about what is a very sensitive matter, a truly very sensitive and serious matter,' he said. Labor leader Anthony Albanese is set to continue pressuring the government about the prime minister's knowledge of the incident on Thursday. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 25) The Department of Health is asking the help of the Department of the Interior and Local Government in vaccinating children against measles, rubella, and polio. Health Secretary Francisco Duque III cited on Wednesday the need for coordination with local governments, especially in areas where children have not been vaccinated. "We just want to make sure that while we start rolling our vaccines against COVID-19 ay hindi tayo magkakaroon ng sabay na measles, rubella, and polio outbreaks (we will not have measles, rubella and polio outbreaks at the same time)," said Duque during the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases meeting. When asked by President Rodrigo Duterte about the severity of the three diseases to children, Duque claimed its health impact is comparable to that of getting infected with COVID-19. "Sa mga bata, kasing delikado lalo na ang measles (For the children, measles is as dangerous [as COVID-19]). In 2019, we had 800 deaths among children," Duque told the President. Duque hopes the DILG and local governments will spend the last days of February in strengthening immunization efforts through the vaccination drive implementation and information dissemination activities. The DOH first implemented its nationwide Measles Rubella - Oral Polio Vaccine Supplemental Immunization Activity in October last year. Children from 9 to 59 months old will be given the measles-rubella vaccine, while those 0-59 months old will be provided with the oral polio vaccine. The World Health Organization describes polio as a highly infectious viral disease without a cure but it can be prevented by multiple doses of vaccines. The disease reemerged in the Philippines in September last year, nearly two decades after it was eradicated in the country. The DOH recently confirmed the 17th polio case in the country, a one-year-old boy in Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija. He suffered from fever and "sudden onset of weakness" on the left lower limb. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases in the world. It can cause high-grade fever, rashes, cough, eye infection and can lead to complications such as pneumonia, ear infection, blindness, severe diarrhea, and swelling of the brain. The WHO defines rubella as an acute, contagious viral infection transmitted by airborne droplets when infected people sneeze or cough. It can cause mild fever and rash in children and adults, infection during pregnancy, miscarriage, fetal death, stillbirth, or infants with congenital malformations. [TW: Mentions of school bullying] It's official: the forthcoming KBS 2TV drama "Dear.M" will postpone its premiere due to the school bullying controversy of one of its lead actress, Park Hye Soo. According to reports released on Feb. 23, Park Hye Soo has officially filed a legal complaint against the offenders for spreading false rumors of her school bullying online. Though an online user denied that he/she was referring to Park Hye Soo, the actress still pursued her legal actions. This issue has caused a lot of unfortunate things to happen, including the cancellation of Park Hye Soo's upcoming drama "Drear. M" scheduled promotions. Park Hye Soo's Supposed Bullying Victim Recently Held an Interview with News Outlet Recently, the actress's alleged bullying victim held an interview with a Korean media outlet and discussed her bullying experience with Park Hye Soo. The victim claimed she is the representative of a "Park Hye Soo's Victim's Association." The victim shared, "Those school bullying victims will always be reminded of their bad experiences whenever they see their perpetrator on TV." In the interview, the victim also shared their message to Park Hye Soo, "Park Hye Soo had good grades and strong familial ties so she could evade the controversy back in the days. Now, she's hiding behind her big-time agency. All we want is for her to acknowledge her fault and issue a sincere apology. Honestly, we don't want to see her appearance onscreen. Other victims feel the same way too. She owes us an apology, and she should admit to her faults and reflect upon her past." 'Dear.M' Officially Postponed its Premiere Due to the Bullying Controversy of Park Hye Soo KBS has officially announced that they will delay the premiere of their upcoming drama "Dear.M". KBS released their statement asking the viewers who have been anticipating the drama to understand the current situation. The drama was originally scheduled for release on Feb. 26. This is also to closely review the recent issue that the "Dear.M" cast member (Park Hye Soo) was involved in, as well as to improve the quality of the show. "Dear.M" Synopsis "Dear.M" is a college-romance drama that stars talented actors namely Park Hye Soo, Jung Jaehyun (NCT), Roh Jeong Eui, and Bae Hyun Sung. The series follows the life of four students at Seoyeon University as they search for "M" who authors a community article. One day, their college life changes when an anonymous confession is published on Seoyeon University's student forum. Coming from different departments of the university, the four characters, Ma Joo Ah (Park Hye Soo), Cha Min Ho (Jaehyun), Seo Ji Min (Noh Jung Eui), and Park Ha Neul (Bae Hyun Sung) decides to uncover the identity of "M." These four students will experience the university-life as they deal with love, friendship, and more. Stay tuned in Kdramastars for updates on "Dear.M"! Kdramastars owns this article. Written by Liza Parker Kinshasa, DR Congo (PANA) - The National Network of DRC Rights NGOs (RENADHOC) Tuesday called on the international community to back the Congolese government in its fight against armed groups, a statement issued and sent to PANA here said New Delhi, Feb 24 : The Delhi High Court on Wednesday expressed shock at the alleged murder of an undertrial inside Tihar jail. The father of the victim Dilsher Azad moved the court seeking Rs five crore as compensation for the custodial death. "It is shocking," Justice Prathiba M. Singh said while hearing the matter. The judge said such incidents are only seen in fiction. "I do not know how something like this can happen," Justice Singh added. The Delhi Police has been directed to file a status report within three days, while Delhi government, Tihar Jail's Director General and the Superintendent have been asked to clarify whether any case and chargesheet have been filed. Dilsher was an undertrial prisoner in Tihar Jail since September 2019. On November 30, 2020, his father received a call from police officials informing him about the death of his son. Mayor Sylvester Turner on Tuesday promised Houston residents they will not have to pay exorbitant water bills for burst pipes or leaks after last weeks freeze. The goal is for you to not be encumbered with high water bills, Turner said at a news conference Tuesday. In fact, you will not be encumbered with high water bills. The mayor instructed Public Works to bring an item regarding the adjustment of customer bills to City Council in the next couple weeks, said Alanna Reed, a Public Works spokeswoman. The plan, as of now, would be to charge those customers the lower amount of either their last meter reading or the 12-month average for their account. It is not clear yet how the city will identify those customers, or whether it preemptively will change the bill amount or ask residents to inquire about an adjustment when they receive it. Turner said if residents do end up receiving a higher-than-usual bill, they should reach out to Public Works. Youre not going to be responsible for high water bills because of what happened last week, Turner said. District I City Councilmember Robert Gallegos proposed the idea at a special council meeting Friday. Gallegos said Tuesday he was encouraged the mayor was pursuing the idea. He said he has received several reports of water gushing from water mains in his district, or folks returning home to find flooded floors. Its stories like that that we have to consider. These individuals are struggling with COVID, or unemployment, or what have you, and we do not need to be sending them a large water bill, Gallegos said. I can imagine, in a situation like this, the horror stories. Public Works has received 9,000 calls for different forms of water service as of Monday, according to Reed. Officials have cautioned that the number of burst pipes and leaks is much higher than that, due to the number of people who shut off their water and pursued repairs without reporting damage to City Hall. The promise of an average water bill could give residents peace of mind as they begin to recover from the storm, with property damage expected to reach tens of millions of dollars in the area. Stephanie Gutierrez is one such resident who saw water rush into her southeast Houston home last week. She had been staying with her mother and returned home with her daughters last Tuesday to see if the power had been restored. It had, but about 45 minutes after they arrived, Gutierrez said her daughters noticed water coming from behind the baseboards. Soon, she said, it was coming from everywhere. A pipe had burst, inundating much of the house with water. She said nearly the entire house sustained some form of damage, and it is too early to tell how much it will cost to recover. She said Tuesdays news that she would not have to worry about her water bill did provide some comfort. Any little help, really its going to go a long way, Gutierrez said. The city and county also have launched a relief fund to help people who cannot pay for repairs. The fund is accepting donations and has raised $5 million as of Tuesday, Turner said, though it is not accepting applications yet. More information is available at WinterStormReliefFund.org. Those who need relief can text HOUSTONFREEZE to 898211 for updates. We are still focused on their needs, Turner said. The city is not just going to move forward and leave them behind. Skyrocketing electric bills are a concern for many, as well, especially those with variable rate plans, which can increase or decrease with the market at the retailers discretion. The wholesale price for electricity, which usually goes for about $25 per megawatt hour, peaked at $9,000 during last weeks catastrophe. The Public Utility Commission said Sunday it would prohibit retail electricity providers and utilities from disconnecting power or assessing late fees as state leaders try to address the financial issues. Turner has called on the state to cover customers massive bills if electricity providers do not do it themselves. Reed emphasized that people still will need to pay water bills on time to avoid late fees. They can be made online or through an automated phone system at 713-371-1265. Customer service representatives are available at 713-371-1400. Staff photographer Elizabeth Conley contributed to this report. dylan.mcguinness@chron.com JACKSON, Miss. (AP) The Mississippi House has voted to phase out most of the state's personal income tax, cut the grocery tax in half and increase many other taxes. House Bill 1439 passed 85-34 Tuesday. It will go to the Senate for more work in coming weeks. The bill would increase the general sales tax from 7% to 9.5%. It also would increase other sales tax rates on items including cars, trucks, mobile homes, cigarettes, alcohol and farm equipment. Critics say increasing the sales tax rate disproportionally affects people with lower incomes, but Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn says it puts consumers in control. Page Content Is the California Supreme Court about to make it more difficult to dispose of whistleblower retaliation claims? That may well be the case. The California Supreme Court has agreed to answer the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' question about California law and unlawful retaliation against an employee in Lawson v. PPG Architectural Finishes, Inc. In particular, the 9th Circuit asks the California Supreme Court to set the evidentiary standard for whistleblower retaliation claims brought under California Labor Code section 1102.5. The Lawson case involves a manufacturer of paint, stains, caulks and other products. The plaintiff was a territory manager whose duties included merchandising products to home improvement stores and ensuring that the company's displays were stocked and in good condition. The plaintiff was allegedly directed by his supervisor to handle a product in a way that fraudulently removed a slow-selling product from its inventory. The plaintiff told his supervisor he would not do this and reported the directive to the company's ethics hotline on two separate occasions. The second report to the ethics hotline resulted in an investigation. At the same time, the plaintiff received poor ratings for his work, was put on a performance improvement plan, and eventually terminated. The plaintiff alleged in his complaint against the company, filed in the U.S. district court, that he was retaliated against as a whistleblower. The trial court in Lawson applied the McDonnell Douglas test which employs burden-shifting between the plaintiff and the employer. The McDonnell Douglas test originated in the context of Title VII, the federal statute governing workplace discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. The trial court concluded that the plaintiff failed to carry his burden to raise triable issues of fact regarding pretext and granted the employer's motion for summary judgment. The plaintiff argued in his appeal to the 9th Circuit that the trial court should have applied the evidentiary standard outlined in California Labor Code section 1102.6. That section states that once it has been demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence that the whistleblower activity was a contributing factor in the retaliation against the employee, the employer's burden of proof is to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that the alleged action would have occurred for legitimate, independent reasons. The 9th Circuit noted in its question to the California Supreme Court that application of the McDonnell Douglas test to whistleblower claims under Labor Code section 1102.5 "seems to ignore [a] critical intervening statutory amendment" by which the California Legislature established the evidentiary burdens of the parties participating in a civil action or administrative hearing involving a violation of the statute. Though this statement by the circuit seems like a decision, the 9th Circuit pointed out three published California appellate court decisions that expressly applied McDonnell Douglas after the amendment. This contradiction between California's statute and the court rulings is the root of the 9th Circuit's question. Critically, if the California Supreme Court rules that the evidentiary requirement under Labor Code section 1102.6 applies, disposing of whistleblower retaliation claims prior to trial will become extremely difficult due to the high evidentiary standard applied to the employer. Arthur K. Cunningham is an attorney with Jackson Lewis in Orange County, Calif. 2021 Jackson Lewis. All rights reserved. Reposted with permission. As the University of Georgias Student Government Association continues to campaign, the executive tickets met for a virtual debate Wednesday night where they discussed COVID-19, diversity and inclusion and mental health. NEW YORK -- A former New York City police officer has been charged with using an aluminum pole to attack a U.S. Capitol officer during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol building by supporters of former president Donald Trump. Thomas Webster, 54, was ordered detained by U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Krause at an initial appearance in White Plains, New York. Webster, who is also a former Marine, surrendered to authorities in New Yorks Hudson Valley on Monday, after the FBI had sought the publics help in finding him. A federal prosecutor said the married father of three was seen on captured on video at the Capitol where he assaulted a police officer with the pole and his bare hands, ripped off the officers protective gear, and shouted obscenities. These videos shocked the conscience, Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Gianforte said, adding that there had been a look of pure rage on the defendants face. His teeth were gritted. Websters lawyer argued that the defendant had gone to Washington merely to protest. Krause agreed that Webster was not a flight risk, but said he would pose a danger to the community if released. As a judge, I certainly have the utmost respect for peoples constitutional rights to protest and to speak out in whatever way they see fit, Krause said. But what we see in this video ... goes well beyond First Amendment speech and moves into criminal activity. More than 200 people have been charged for their roles in the Capitol riot, which left five people dead and caused members of Congress to flee. The assault followed a speech by then-Republican President Trump to his supporters where he challenged the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Democrat Joe Biden won. Among them is the Agreement on Civil Aviation and the Use of Airspace. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed decree No. 70/2021 on Ukraine's withdrawal from international treaties concluded within the framework of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). This was reported by the press service of the Office of the President of Ukraine. Read alsoUkraine, Slovakia sign documents on cross-border cooperation, use of airspace In particular, according to the decree, Ukraine is withdrawing from the Agreement on Civil Aviation and on the Use of Airspace, which was signed in Minsk on December 25, 1991, by Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine. Under the agreement, the airspace of the signatory states is considered as common airspace. The parties to the agreement also created the Council for Aviation and the Use of Airspace and the Interstate Aviation Committee, which implements the decisions of the Council. In addition, according to the presidential decree, Ukraine is no longer a signatory to the Agreement on the Use of Airspace, signed in Tashkent on May 15, 1992. "By this document, the governments of Azerbaijan, Russia, Belarus, Tajikistan, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Ukraine agreed, in particular, that the participating states will provide airspace over their territory for the activities of the CIS Armed Forces, but [they will] not take actions leading to the disruption or complication of their normal functioning," it said. In his decree, the Ukrainian president tasked the Foreign Ministry to notify the Council on Aviation and the Use of Airspace of Ukraine's withdrawal from the Agreement on Civil Aviation and the Use of Airspace. Reporting by UNIAN Local Businessman Donates Tablets for ERS Local businessman Mr Jamie Perez has kindly donated 5 Samsung tablets to the Elderly Residential Services (ERS) through the Office of Civil Contingencies. These tablets have been a lifeline to many residents who could only communicate with their loved ones via these means for a number of months now. Mr Perez said; Most of my close family have been affected by COVID-19 throughout the last couple of months. My parents were serious enough to be hospitalised and I thought it was a small gesture to give back to our elderly after such a bad period for them. Minister for Health and Care, the Hon Samantha Sacramento MP, said: I am extremely grateful to Mr Perez for the very generous donation of 5 Samsung tablets to the Elderly Residential Services. These will help continue to connect ERS residents with their loved ones remotely in what are very difficult times for all. On behalf of all the residents at ERS, thank you! Senegal, on February 23, kick-started its ambitious mass inoculation drive with Chinas Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine. The country received 200,000 doses of the Chinese vaccine last week. Additionally, the Western African country is also expecting to receive vaccine shots as a part of WHOs COVAX programme which aims to provide vaccines to lower-income nations. According to the official data, Senegal has reported a total of 33,242 cases as of now, out of which 832 have lost their lives. Meanwhile, health authorities in the country revealed the priorities in the vaccination drive stating that frontline healthcare workers would be the first ones to receive the shots. It would be followed by over 60 years old, and those with comorbidities. On Tuesday, the countrys health minister became the Senegal resident to get a vaccine shot. Hailing the beginning of the inoculation drive, Senegals health minster it was a historic day for the country. The country is currently negotiating with Russians to secure doses of its Sputnik V vaccine. Senegal is one of seven countries -among the 54 countries of the African continent- to start the vaccination against COVID-19, the minister was quoted as saying by AP. La vaccination est lun des meilleurs moyens de stopper la Covid 19. Se faire vacciner cest se proteger et proteger les autres. Continuons a respecter les mesures barrieres. Stop COVID, ensemble nous vaincrons.#msas #COVID19sn #Senegal pic.twitter.com/eVFD23KFmR Abdoulaye Diouf Sarr (@abdioufsarr) February 23, 2021 Read: 3 Teens Arrested In House Fire That Killed 5 From Senegal Read: Virus Vaccines Arrive In Senegal From China Morocco begins inoculation A few weeks ago, another African country- Morocco began the COVID-19 inoculation drive in the country after receiving its share of vaccines from China's Sinopharm and British firm AstraZeneca. In the initial phase of the campaign, the vaccine will be offered first to health care workers, security forces and people aged 75 years or older. Morocco's vaccination drive is being dubbed as Africa's one of the most advanced COVID-19 inoculation programmes. Read: Senegal Kicks Off COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign The vaccination drive in the country officially began after Morocco's King Mohammed VI received the first shot of the vaccine to build confidence around the vaccines among the members of the general public. The King received the jab at his palace in the city of Fez. Morocco recently received its first batch of vaccine doses from Sinopharm and AstraZeneca. Read: Morocco Kickstarts Nationwide Vaccination Drive; Essential Workers, Elderly First In Queue (With inputs from AP) Image Credits: AP While oils dizzying collapse is still fresh for many traders, rumblings are starting to emerge that by the end of next year prices could once again top $100 a barrel. Azerbaijans Socar Trading SA predicts global benchmark Brent could hit triple digits in the next 18 to 24 months, and Bank of America sees potential spikes above $100 over the next few years on improving fundamentals and global stimulus. Speculators are also getting in on the action, increasing bets in the options market that oil will reach the vaunted level by December 2022. The views are ultra bullish, but they highlight increased confidence in the oil market after Brent rallied more than 200% after hitting an 18-year low during the pandemic. Demand has bounced back in key Asian markets, while OPEC+ is withholding barrels and a lack of investment is keeping shale supplies at bay. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. this week lifted its third-quarter forecast by $10 to $75 a barrel. Option bets on oil prices rising above $100 for the December 2022 Brent contract have jumped in recent days, with open interest on the calls rising from 500 to 3,950 in the past week. The $100 mark occupies a special place in the mind of many traders, as oil hovered around that level for several years in the early part of last decade as strong demand from emerging markets enticed drillers into ever more expensive locales, from deep ocean beds to Canadas remote tar sands. That era ended in 2014, when U.S. shale firms proved they could pump massive amounts at far lower costs. But while the vaunted price level has been out of the markets reach since then, it hasnt been out of traders minds. It was just a little more than two years ago that major trading houses made $100 projections that ended up falling far short. Forecasts for $100 are far from the current consensus. The median analyst forecast compiled by Bloomberg has Brent staying below $65 a barrel through 2025. And there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of such a resurgence. For one, the OPEC cuts that have limited supply are artificial, and the cartel has enough spare capacity to meet any shortfall should demand rocket following a worldwide recovery from the pandemic, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. The descendants of a 17th century benefactor of one of Cambridge University's richest colleges have criticised bosses' plans to move a memorial of their ancestor due to his alleged slavery links. Jesus College, which is worth 344 million, plans to move the funeral monument to Tobias Rustat from its chapel because it is 'celebratory'. Rustat, an advisor to King Charles II, was one of Jesus' biggest benefactors - he donated 2,000, the equivalent to 450,000 today, to fund scholarships for the children of Anglican priests. However, he was a major investor in slave-trading enterprise the Royal African Company. But Stephen Hemsted and his three brothers, Rustat's tenth great nephews, have lodged a complaint with the college and are arguing that the Company was not the source of money he gave to the institution. They told The Times that they regarded Rustat as a 'distinguished ancestor' and added there was 'no justification' for removing the memorial. The college's plans come as other prominent historical figures with alleged slavery links have been re-examined since the Black Lives Matter protests last year. The University of Cambridge's Jesus College is removing the memorial to 17th benefactor Tobias Rustat, who was involved with the slave trade Mr Hemsted said of Rustat: 'It's clear that the bulk of his wealth came from things [that were] nothing to do with slavery, so the money that was given to Jesus College clearly has nothing to do with slavery.' What the inscription on Rustat's memorial says TOBIAS RUSTAT, YEOMAN OF THE ROBES TO KING CHARLES THE SECOND, WHOM HE SERVED WITH ALL DUTY AND FAITHFULLNESS, IN HIS ADVERSITY AS WELL AS PROSPERITY. THE GREATEST PART OF THE ESTATE HE GATHERED BY GOD'S BLESSING, THE KING'S FAVOUR, AND HIS INDUSTRY, HE DISPOSED IN HIS LIFETIME IN WORKES OF CHARITY; AND FOUND THE MORE HE BESTOWED UPON CHURCHES, HOSPITALLS, UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES AND UPON POOR WIDOWS AND ORPHANS OF ORTHODOX MINISTERS, THE MORE HE HAD AT THE YEAR'S END. NEITHER WAS HE UNMINDFUL OF HIS KINDRED & RELATIONS, IN MAKING THEM PROVISIONS OUT OF WHAT REMAINED. HE DIED A BACHELOUR THE 15TH DAY OF MARCH, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1693. AGED 87 YEARS. Advertisement He added: 'We think it's a mistake to try to link his investment in the Royal African Company to this memorial and the bequest he made to Jesus College. 'There seems to be no justification on slavery grounds for removing the memorial.' Mr Hemsted has proposed to the college's master, Sonita Alleyne, that a notice be put in the chapel explaining both Rustat's generous donations and his links to the slaving company. He said the college's plan was to remove the memorial entirely and instead have a plaque at the entrance warning people they were stepping into 'a place where Tobias Rustat had put money'. Rustat's memorial was commissioned by the man himself. It is prominently displayed in Jesus College's chapel. However, the college needs the permission of the Church of England to move the memorial because it sits in a Grade I listed religious building. Rustat's name name appears on the charter for RAC and he donated 400 into the company - the equivalent of almost 100,000 today. Historian William Pettigrew previously said the RAC 'shipped more enslaved African women, men and children to the Americas than any other single institution during the entire period of the transatlantic slave trade'. Investors would have been fully aware of the company's activities and how they made their profits. The memorial to him says he served 'King Charles the Second' with 'all duty and faithfullness [sic]'. It adds that he 'disposed in his lifetime in workes of charity and found the more he bestowed upon churches, hospitalls, universities and colleges and upon poor widows and orphans of orthodox ministers, the more he had at the year's end.' Rustat died in 1693 at the age of 87. In May 2019, Jesus College set up a Legacy of Slavery Working Party (LSWP), which recommended that Rustat should not be celebrated by the college. The College Council decided the memorial represents a celebration of Rustat, 'which is incompatible with the chapel as an inclusive community and place of collective wellbeing.' The college is taking the memorial to Tobias Rustat out of its chapel because it is 'celebratory'. Rustat (depicted above) had serious involvement in the Royal African Company, which was a slave trading enterprise It also emerged last year that a statue commemorating Rustat - which overlooks The Old Schools at the University of Cambridge, the original site of the University library which he financed - could also be removed. Rustat gave the library an endowment of 1,000 - equivalent to approximately 240,000 in today's money - to be spent on books of its choosing. As a result, Rustat was later memorialised by the small, late 19th century stone statue. A Jesus College spokesman said: 'Following the public notice of our application to the Diocese of Ely to relocate the memorial to Tobias Rustat, Jesus College is considering various options for relocating the memorial to a more fitting educational space within the College.' The spokesman denied claims that the memorial is being moved to a disused wine cellar. Many historic institutions around the UK have been looking at how to deal with their links to slavery following the Black Lives Matters protests earlier this year. Protestors toppled the statue of renowned slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol. Colston was a contemporary of Rustat Since the toppling of Colston's statue many institutions have removed statues and renamed buildings due to historic figures' involvement with the slave trade. Earlier this month, the British Empire was branded 'far worse than the Nazis' during a controversial debate about wartime Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill's legacy at another Cambridge college. In May 2019, Jesus College set up a Legacy of Slavery Working Party (LSWP), which recommended that Rustat should not be celebrated by the college During the online debate, at Churchill College, participants discussed 'The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill' and looked at his 'backward' views on empire and race. It was held as part of a year-long 'inclusivity' review. Contributor Kehinde Andrews, a professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, said: 'The British Empire was far worse than the Nazis. They lasted longer and killed many more people.' On Churchill, he added: 'There is no debate. His white supremacy is pretty much on record and the question here is why does Churchill still hold the level of popularity that he does? 'It's almost like he's been beatified a saintly figure beyond reproach.' Professor Andrews has previously accused Britain of being 'built on racism' and called RAF airmen who bombed Nazi Germany war criminals. He also belittled Sir Winston's contribution to Britain, saying: 'Was it Churchill out there fighting the war? I'm pretty sure it wasn't. I'm pretty sure he was at home. 'I'm pretty sure that if Churchill wasn't in the war it would have ended the same way.' THE Taoiseach has criticised Labour Party leader Alan Kelly in the Dail after he raised the arrival into Ireland of 2,000 people from Brazil in the space of one month. Micheal Martin said he though it a bit populist and wrong to speak of the 2,000 Brazilians coming into the country at a time when Irish people are told to stay within five kilometres of home. The clash came after Mr Kelly branded the Governments latest Covid plan laughable". He said: Two thousand Brazilians come to this country, quoting figures released to the Sunday Independent. Can you tell the public out there, who are limited to within five kilometres, that it was necessary for 2,000 Brazilians to come into this country to work in low-paid employment, Mr Kelly asked. Was that absolutely necessary? Read More The Taoiseach responded: Many of those are Irish. Many, many could be Irish resident. I don't know the exact make-up of the 2,000, but there's a Brazilian community in Ireland, and for quite some time, Deputy. I think you should reflect on that. People leave and come back in. There will be a need for mandatory quarantining and we have provided for that for people from Brazil, South Africa and other countries, as designated on public health advice. Mr Kelly told the Fianna Fail leader that his whole strategy was now reliant on the vaccines, but many suggestions in relation to the roll-out had not been taken on board. Meanwhile Denmark and Germany had bought extra vaccines through an EU framework as a result of Greece and Portugal not taking them up. He asked why Ireland had not also sought more. There is nothing new in the new strategy that we didn't know about, he said. It's basically a wing and a prayer. And it's totally reliant on vaccines. There was nothing to give people hope, he said. The people are in despair. I have never in my political career felt the despair I have over the last number of weeks, particularly given all the communications failures. And my real issue is that there are no new tools to suppress the virus. Theres nothing in the plan to suppress the virus its just a wait for the vaccines. And the reason why is because you don't have confidence that you will be able to keep the variants out. It was unfortunately the case that there is now a Californian version of the virus. You know you won't be able to deal with community transmission as quickly as we need, and public health teams simply aren't resourced enough, Mr Kelly said, calling also for a survey of why businesses are sending so many people into work. But Mr Martin said the means needed for the suppression of the virus hadn't changed. Observing social distancing and other rules was what drives down virus levels. He accused Mr Kelly of changing his own position every single month. He added: Whats important is vaccination is working. Already in our hospital care settings it is having a dramatic effect on reducing infection among frontline healthcare workers. We are one of the few countries that targeted that area, in terms of the vaccination programme, and it is working. It's having a real impact, and it will have an impact on older people and on those who are most vulnerable. And we have now given a higher priority now to adults with underlying conditions, who are most vulnerable to the disease. We are bringing legislation in in terms of mandatory quarantine. And that legislation will give the authority to the minister to add designated countries as recommended by public health. The bill will have the capacity to facilitate the addition of more countries as well. The Taoiseach did not answer Mr Kelly's question as to why Ireland had not sought to buy more vaccine under the EU framework. The best bang for your buck! This option enables you to purchase online 24/7 access and receive the Sunday, Tuesday & Thursday print edition at no additional cost * Print edition only available in our carrier delivery area. Allow up to 72 hours for delivery of your print edition to begin. Print edition not available for Day Pass option. Investigations editor Larry Parnass, investigations editor, joined The Eagle in 2016 from the Daily Hampshire Gazette, where he was editor in chief. His freelance work has appeared in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Hartford Courant and CommonWealth Magazine. Tom Holland revealed new details about his highly-anticipated third Spider-Man movie on Tuesday night, but unfortunately the title wasn't one of those details. Holland raised eyebrows and made headlines earlier on Tuesday when he posted a new photo from the Spidey sequel on Instagram, plus what appeared to be the 'new title' for the sequel, Spider-Man: Phone Home. However, other co-stars like Zendaya and Jacob Batalon chimed in with similar titles on social media, with Jimmy Kimmel even joining in on the fun, though it's unclear when the real title will be unveiled. No title: Tom Holland revealed new details about his highly-anticipated third Spider-Man movie on Tuesday night, but unfortunately the title wasn't one of those details Fake title: Holland raised eyebrows and made headlines earlier on Tuesday when he posted a new photo from the Spidey sequel on Instagram, plus what appeared to be the 'new title' for the sequel, Spider-Man: Phone Home The 24-year-old actor has gained a reputation over the past few years for leaking plot details to Marvel films, but he's seemed to get better with practice. Fallon asked him about the swirling rumors about Jamie Foxx returning as his Electro character from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and previous Spider-Man stars Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield returning as well, but he shot those rumors down. 'It would be amazing if they were, because they haven't told me that yet. And I am Spider-Man, and I've read the script from the beginning to the end so it would be a miracle if they could have kept that from me,' Holland said. Reputation: The 24-year-old actor has gained a reputation over the past few years for leaking plot details to Marvel films, but he's seemed to get better with practice Fallon did add that the Marvel bosses like Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige have 'kept things' from him, which Holland said was 'really frustrating.' 'I'm a trustworthy member of the Avengers and I havent really spoiled anything... well there's a few things, but no big things,' Holland admitted. While he didn't reveal the title, he did confirm that his younger brother Harry Holland will have a part in Spider-Man 3. Frustrating: Fallon did add that the Marvel bosses like Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige have 'kept things' from him, which Holland said was 'really frustrating' 'Yes, in Cherry, he has a small cameo and he plays a character called the shaky kid, and he's a drug dealer so we kind of have this idea that in every film I would be in that Harry would reprise his role as the shaky kid,' Holland said. Holland added that in his brother's brief Spider-Man role he gets 'flipped upside-down' after Spider-Man 'webs him.' 'Then he's swinging back and forth while I'm having an argument with someone, and he's kind of swinging through the frame and I've obviously done that for years, being upside-down is second nature to me now, so I know how difficult it can be so the beginning of the day, I was, like, "Making the takes extra, extra long. Just to see how long it would take before he blacked out,"' Holland said with a laugh. Brother cameo: Holland added that in his brother's brief Spider-Man role he gets 'flipped upside-down' after Spider-Man 'webs him.' Holland joked that he would pretend to forget his lines to prolong his brother hanging upside down, but he added by the end of the day, 'he can hardly speak anymore.' 'It's a funny scene, though, and it was really fun for me to get to share that moment with him. I'm sure my mom and dad will be really proud,' Holland joked. Holland added that he's been filming the Spider-Man sequel in the same place where he originally auditioned to play Peter Parker in 2016's Captain America: Civil War. Funny scene: 'It's a funny scene, though, and it was really fun for me to get to share that moment with him. I'm sure my mom and dad will be really proud,' Holland joked 'Yeah, it's an interesting feeling because I walk on stage, and I have that moment of panic, of like, I haven't got my lines I'm going to ruin the audition, I'm not going to get the part. Then I sort of look back at my trailer, which is now way bigger than it used to be. And I go, "Oh, I'm okay, I'm on the third one, I'm fine,"' he joked. After debuting in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a memorable cameo in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, Holland starred in 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming, followed by 2019's Spider-Man: Far From Home. Since 'home' is an integral theme in all of the Spider-Man movies, Holland, Zendaya and Batalon decided to share their own home-centric titles, with Zendaya's Spider-Man: Home Slice and Batalon's Spider-Man: Home Wrecker, along with a new photo from the sequel, which is still filming in Atlanta and slated for release on December 21. Jimmy Kimmel even got in on the fun, with a title Spider-Man: That's So Kraven, hinting that the long-rumored character Kraven could make an appearance. Z's title: Since 'home' is an integral theme in all of the Spider-Man movies, Holland, Zendaya and Batalon decided to share their own home-centric titles, with Zendaya's Spider-Man: Home Slice Jacob's title: Batalon's fake title wasSpider-Man: Home Wrecker, along with a new photo from the sequel, which is still filming in Atlanta and slated for release on December 21. Jimmy's title: Jimmy Kimmel even got in on the fun, with a title Spider-Man: That's So Kraven, hinting that the long-rumored character Kraven could make an appearance While the titles Holland, Zendaya and Batalon appeared to be fake, the photos they shared were real, featuring all three actors. As for when the real title is unveiled, that is currently unclear, but since Kimmel posted his own title, it's possible the real title may be unveiled on his show. While Holland isn't scheduled to appear on Kimmel this week, Friday's lineup was said to be 'TBD' so it's possible the reveal could happen then. Real pics: While the titles Holland, Zendaya and Batalon appeared to be fake, the photos they shared were real, featuring all three actors Real title: As for when the real title is unveiled, that is currently unclear, but since Kimmel posted his own title, it's possible the real title may be unveiled on his show Holland also revealed in another interview with Yahoo! that he has been working on one fight scene for over a month, and it's quite the spectacle. 'I saw an edit three or four days ago of a fight scene that weve been shooting for about a month. And it is easily the most impressive fight scene Ive ever seen in a superhero movie,' Holland said. 'I was blown away by it. From the work that the stunt boys have done, to the work that some of the actors and myself have done on set, its just been incredible, and Im really, really excited for people to see it,' he continued. ROME, FEB 24 - Late Italian ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo Luca Attanasio and his police escort Vito Iacovacci were killed in an attempted kidnapping that tragically ended in a firefight and were not executed by their captors, according to an autopsy on Wednesday. The pair, along with their World Food Programme Congolese driver Mustapha Milambo, were attacked on the way to inspect a WFP school feeding scheme in North Kivu. The DRC government has blamed the attack on Rwandan Hutu rebels, who have said Congo and Rwanda troops are to blame. It had previously been reported that Attanasio and Iacovacci had been taken into the forest by their kidnappers who then executed them. (ANSA). Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. Fans of The Beatles can now study for a master's degree in the Fab Four at the University of Liverpool, to explore the 'deep and lasting relationship' between the band and the city. The MA, The Beatles: Music Industry and Heritage, is aimed at students from around the world with an interest in the music and creative industries, as well as those employed in museums and galleries, the arts, and tourism and leisure sectors. The band are the best-selling recording artists of all time, selling an incredible 1.6 billion singles in the US alone and still make millions of pounds every year, even though their last album release came more than half a century ago. The course lasts 12 months for full-time students and 24 months for those studying part-time, and costs 9,000 in fees. The Beatles, pictured together in the 1960s, are one of the most iconic music acts of all time Fans of The Beatles can now study for a master's degree in the Fab Four at the University of Liverpool A statue of The Beatles by sculptor Andy Edwards was unveiled at Pier Head in Liverpool in 2015 The Beatles perform onstage at the Cavern Club in February 1961 in Liverpool, where students can now study their success The course description says students will have the chance to visit and explore sites in Liverpool and Merseyside which featured in the group's early years, as well as interact with the tourism and heritage sectors and hear from guest lecturers Dr Holly Tessler, programme leader and Beatles expert, said: 'I'm absolutely delighted that we are able to bring formal study of The Beatles to the University of Liverpool's Department of Music and Institute of Popular Music - the world's first specialist centre for the study of popular music. 'What makes this MA unique is its focus on The Beatles in a future-facing way, considering the legacy's influence on the music and creative industries, in popular culture, and within heritage, culture and tourism in the 21st century. 'This MA is as much about the wider study of Liverpool's - and Britain's - heritage, tourism and culture sectors as it is about the role The Beatles played in them.' The course description says students will have the chance to visit and explore sites in Liverpool and Merseyside which featured in the group's early years, as well as interact with the tourism and heritage sectors and hear from guest lecturers. Dr Mike Jones, a member of the Beatles Legacy Group - which seeks to establish the economic value of Beatles tourism to Liverpool's economy, said the MA would explore the 'deep, significant and lasting relationship' between the band and the city. He added: 'Liverpool should be regarded not just as the birthplace of The Beatles, but their cradle. 'What The Beatles took to the world was, in part, Liverpool's unique culture.' Students of the postgraduate qualification will also consider how the band's influence could be replicated in different places, industries and contexts around the world, the university said. WASHINGTON - William Burns, a veteran diplomat who in his career helped lead secret negotiations with Iran and served as the U.S. ambassador to Russia, received a warm reception Wednesday from the Senate Intelligence Committee at his confirmation hearing to become the next CIA director. The notably uncontentious hearing focused on threats from China and Russia and gave Burns the opportunity to showcase his three decades of experience in foreign policy, when he often worked closely with the spy agency. No senator raised even a hint of opposition to Burns's nomination. At times, members were more interested in his views on what U.S. policy ought to be toward foreign adversaries than how he would organize the CIA to tackle those challenges. As Burns noted, the CIA doesn't make policy, it supports those who do. But Burns, who most recently served as the deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration, would bring a rare combination of policymaking experience and deep familiarity with intelligence to the job of CIA director. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the committee's vice chairman, praised Burns's "lengthy and distinguished career," and said he expected to work with Burns "as a partner for the CIA's work as our nation's first line of defense." A full Senate vote on his nomination could come next week, congressional officials said. Burns would take over the CIA at a moment of transition, as the agency emphasizes espionage against nation-states after nearly two decades of counterterrorism operations, which some current and former officials have said drained too many resources and distracted the CIA from its classic spying mission. "Today's landscape is increasingly complicated and competitive," Burns said in his opening remarks. "It's a world where familiar threats persist - from terrorism and nuclear proliferation, to an aggressive Russia, a provocative North Korea and a hostile Iran. But it's also a world of new challenges, in which climate change and global health insecurity are taking a heavy toll on the American people; in which cyberthreats pose an ever-greater risk to our society; and in which an adversarial, predatory Chinese leadership poses our biggest geopolitical test." Burns paid special attention to China. "If confirmed, four crucial and interrelated priorities will shape my approach to leading CIA: China, technology, people and partnerships," Burns said. Burns would assume leadership of a workforce that has been battered by four years of intense political conflict, in which President Donald Trump regularly accused career intelligence officers and their superiors of conspiring against him and trying to undermine his administration. When President Joe Biden nominated Burns last month, he emphasized what he called their shared belief "that intelligence must be apolitical and that the dedicated intelligence professionals serving our nation deserve our gratitude and respect." Burns pledged to ensure that politics doesn't influence the agency's work. "That is exactly what President Biden expects of CIA. It was the first thing he told me when he asked me to take on this role," Burns told lawmakers. "He said he wants the agency to give it to him straight - and I pledged to do just that, and to defend those who do the same." He also promised to investigate the source of a series of mysterious illnesses suffered by U.S. intelligence officers and diplomats that some believe may have been caused by microwaves aimed at American personnel. Russia is a leading suspect, U.S. officials have said. "I will make it an extraordinarily high priority to get to the bottom of who's responsible for the attacks ... and to ensure that colleagues and their families get the care they deserve," Burns said. Some former intelligence officers, including those who say they were victims of the attack, have complained that they didn't get assistance with treatment and medical bills from the previous CIA director, Gina Haspel, and other top agency leaders. "Given his long record of taking care of his people at the State Department, Burns can quickly regain the trust of the workforce by making this issue a priority," Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer, who believes he was targeted in a Russian attack, wrote recently. The committee chairman, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., noted that the committee had included provisions in previous intelligence budgets to support health care for victims. Burns was asked about past controversies at the agency that occurred when he served in senior positions at the State Department, notably the CIA's use of harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists. "I believe that waterboarding does constitute torture under the law," Burns said of the most controversial tactic. And he said that as long as he was in charge at the CIA he would ensure "those enhanced interrogation methods are never used again." But he said that intelligence officers who were involved in the interrogation and detention program shouldn't face actions that would "prejudice their careers," because at the time they were acting at the direction of the president and CIA leadership. Burns has never held a position in the intelligence community, but his career in the Foreign Service placed him at the center of major foreign policy decisions and sensitive negotiations for decades, and he regularly interacted with intelligence officials. Current and former intelligence officers have enthusiastically greeted the nomination. Robert Richer, a former No. 2 in the CIA's clandestine service, served with Burns in two overseas postings, including in the Middle East. "I saw a man who was multidimensional, a man who listened, including to contrary views, and was able to take multiple inputs of information and process them," Richer said when Burns was nominated. Burns "knows the building," Richer said, referring to CIA headquarters. Burns retired in 2014 after a 33-year career in the Foreign Service. Lawmakers encouraged Burns to aggressively confront Russia, which has interfered in U.S. elections and is blamed for a massive breach of American computer systems. Burns also has extensive experience with Iran, playing a key role in the Obama administration's efforts to forge a nuclear deal that was scrapped by Trump. With Jake Sullivan, Biden's White House national security adviser, Burns helped lead back-channel conversations with Iran that led to the 2015 agreement signed with the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany. Burns told senators that Iran must never be allowed to possess a nuclear weapon. Beyond barbecues and ceremonies: Recognizing Memorial Day For many, Memorial Day weekend is about gathering with family and grilling or attending a parade. Some find a more personal way to honor the holiday. A Subject Expert Committee of the Central Drug Standards Control Organisation is scheduled to meet on Wednesday to discuss Dr Reddys application seeking emergency use approval for the Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine candidate. Dr Reddys Laboratories Ltd had last week applied to the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) for an emergency licence for the Russian vaccine. It had partnered with the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) in September 2020 to conduct clinical trials for Sputnik V. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers The lab is currently conducting a phase 2 and 3 bridging study with around 1,500 participants, aimed at proving that the vaccine provides protection in the Indians. A phase 3 study in Russia, published in The Lancet, showed the vaccine had an efficacy of 91.6%. The trial had included data on 19,866 volunteers, who had received both the first and second doses of the vaccine. The vaccine's less effective than those developed by Pfizer and Moderna, which have efficacy of 95% and 94%, but significantly higher than that of the jab developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca. The Oxford vaccine is manufactured in India by Serum Institute of India under the Covishield brand. The vaccine received approval in Indian in January, along with harat Biotech Internationals Covaxin. Bharat Biotech chairman and managing director Krishna Ella has said that he expects efficacy data to be out by March. The two-dose Sputnik V vaccine was originally developed by Russias Gamaleya National Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology and is being commercialized globally by the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF). RDIF had in September signed a pact with Dr Reddys, wherein the Indian drugmaker would conduct the bridging study and distribute doses to 100 million people if it were granted a licence. This was later increased to 125 million. Indias Hetero Biopharma is also contracted to manufacture the vaccinewith a capacity of 100 million doses per annum through another pact with RDIF. The Russian sovereign fund is also in advanced talks with Panacea Biotec for manufacturing the vaccine. RDIF plans to manufacture 300 million doses of the vaccine in India. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Mangawhai Beach Schools new building will be built in the style of a marae. Mangawhai Beach School students expect to move into new classrooms in June. The new school building built in the style of a marae is one of a series of projects designed to cope with the schools rapidly expanding roll. Once complete, temporary Portacoms currently located in the staff carpark, will be removed. Also nearing completion is a new concrete bike track, which is just awaiting final markings before students are allowed to use it. The track can be used for bicycles, skateboards and scooters. A new turning bay for buses is complete, improving safety for the 400 plus students who travel to school by bus. Other completed projects include new drainage, installation of water tanks and new decks. Principal Aaron Kemp says the school will soon start fundraising for a new swimming pool. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Posted Wednesday, February 24, 2021 8:12 am OLYMPIA The Washington Senate passed a bill Tuesday that would require police officers to intervene and report when they see another officer use excessive force, part of Democrats' sweeping police accountability package. The bill passed on party lines, despite Republican opposition to the bill's "ambiguity." "This is about empowering officers," Sen. Manka Dhingra, D-Redmond, said during the floor debate. "It's about making sure that when they intervene, they have the training that allows them to do it well." The bill, which heads to the House, requires a peace officer to intervene when they see another officer use excessive force and report another officer's wrongdoing to the officer's supervisor. Wrongdoing is defined as "conduct that is harmful or contrary to law or a violation of professional standards or ethical rules," according to the bill. If the bill passes the House, the Criminal Justice Training Commission, the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, and other law enforcement organizations will be required to adopt written policies on the duty to intervene and ensure all officers receive training on it. The Criminal Justice Training Commission has already identified the training course it plans to use and given it to some officers, Dhingra told Senate Ways and Means Committee members. Republicans had concerns about the language of the law being too broad and introduced amendments that would have further defined certain portions of the bill, and specified which law enforcement officers would be required to intervene. The amendments would have offered more clarity for police officers, said Sen. Phil Fortunato, R-Auburn. "What a police officer doesn't need is ambiguity," Fortunato said. Sen. Mike Padden, R-Spokane Valley, introduced an amendment that would have created a "clear, objective standard" for excessive force in attempt to give better guidance to law enforcement officers. "Without them, we have anarchy," Padden said. "That is a concern of mine where we're headed." Ambiguity in the bill was a concern brought forth by law enforcement organizations in committee hearings as well. Representatives from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, the Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs and the Washington State Patrol Troopers Association testified in the "other" category. They were in support of creating a consistent statewide policy to intervene but thought some areas needed better definitions. Sen. Jeff Holy, R-Cheney, said the bill puts everybody at risk and "scares cops." "It's going in the wrong direction," he said. Democrats argued in the floor debate that the bill does provide enough guidance for law enforcement officers, and requiring a statewide training system would help alleviate some of the ambiguity. Dhingra said she has worked with law enforcement agencies on this bill, and it would give good officers the "tools to stop the bad apples." Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, said many officers are put in positions where they feel like they can't do anything to confront another officer. This bill would help fix that, he said. Supporters say this bill is a step forward, but more needs to be done to fully address the institutional racism in the state. "One too many times Black people are faced with intense, fast-evolving situations involving law enforcement," Sakara Remmu, of the Washington Black Lives Matter Alliance, told the Senate Law and Justice Committee last month. Remmu said it is "absolutely necessary" for officers responding to intervene and stop excessive use of force. Both chambers will vote on other police reform bills throughout the coming weeks, before the house of origin cutoff on March 9. Other bills involve limiting the use of certain police tactics, such as chokeholds, and giving more transparency and civilian oversight in the police collective bargaining process. Responding to artificial intelligence's exploding demands on computer networks, Princeton University researchers in recent years have radically increased the speed and slashed the energy use of specialized AI systems. Now, the researchers have moved their innovation closer to widespread use by creating co-designed hardware and software that will allow designers to blend these new types of systems into their applications. "Software is a critical part of enabling new hardware," said Naveen Verma, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton and a leader of the research team. "The hope is that designers can keep using the same software system - and just have it work ten times faster or more efficiently." By cutting both power demand and the need to exchange data from remote servers, systems made with the Princeton technology will be able to bring artificial intelligence applications, such as piloting software for drones or advanced language translators, to the very edge of computing infrastructure. "To make AI accessible to the real-time and often personal process all around us, we need to address latency and privacy by moving the computation itself to the edge," said Verma, who is the director of the University's Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. "And that requires both energy efficiency and performance." Two years ago, the Princeton research team fabricated a new chip designed to improve the performance of neural networks, which are the essence behind today's artificial intelligence. The chip, which performed tens to hundreds of times better than other advanced microchips, marked a revolutionary approach in several measures. In fact, the chip was so different than anything being used for neural nets that it posed a challenge for the developers. "The chip's major drawback is that it uses a very unusual and disruptive architecture," Verma said in a 2018 interview. "That needs to be reconciled with the massive amount of infrastructure and design methodology that we have and use today." Over the next two years, the researchers worked to refine the chip and to create a software system that would allow artificial intelligence systems to take advantage of the new chip's speed and efficiency. In a presentation to the International Solid-State Circuits Virtual Conference on Feb. 22, lead author Hongyang Jia, a graduate student in Verma's research lab, described how the new software would allow the new chips to work with different types of networks and allow the systems to be scalable both in hardware and execution of software. "It is programmable across all these networks," Verma said. "The networks can be very big, and they can be very small." Verma's team developed the new chip in response to growing demand for artificial intelligence and to the burden AI places on computer networks. Artificial intelligence, which allows machines to mimic cognitive functions such as learning and judgement, plays a critical role in new technologies such as image recognition, translation, and self-driving vehicles. Ideally, the computation for technology such as drone navigation would be based on the drone itself, rather than in a remote network computer. But digital microchips' power demand and need for memory storage can make designing such a system difficult. Typically, the solution places much of the computation and memory on a remote server, which communicates wirelessly with the drone. But this adds to the demands on the communications system, and it introduces security problems and delays in sending instructions to the drone. To approach the problem, the Princeton researchers rethought computing in several ways. First, they designed a chip that conducts computation and stores data in the same place. This technique, called in-memory computing, slashes the energy and time used to exchange information with dedicated memory. The technique boosts efficiency, but it introduces new problems: because it crams the two functions into a small area, in-memory computing relies on analog operation, which is sensitive to corruption by sources such as voltage fluctuation and temperature spikes. To solve this problem, the Princeton team designed their chips using capacitors rather than transistors. The capacitors, devices that store an electrical charge, can be manufactured with greater precision and are not highly affected by shifts in voltage. Capacitors can also be very small and placed on top of memory cells, increasing processing density and cutting energy needs. But even after making analog operation robust, many challenges remained. The analog core needed to be efficiently integrated in a mostly digital architecture, so that it could be combined with the other functions and software needed to actually make practical systems work. A digital system uses off-and-on switches to represent ones and zeros that computer engineers use to write the algorithms that make up computer programming. An analog computer takes a completely different approach. In an article in the IEEE Spectrum, Columbia University Professor Yannis Tsividis described an analog computer as a physical system designed to be governed by equations identical to those the programmer wants to solve. An abacus, for example, is a very simple analog computer. Tsividis says that a bucket and a hose can serve as an analog computer for certain calculus problems: to solve an integration function, you could do the math, or you could just measure the water in the bucket. Analog computing was the dominant technology through the Second World War. It was used to perform functions from predicting tides to directing naval guns. But analog systems were cumbersome to build and usually required highly trained operators. After the emergency of the transistor, digital systems proved more efficient and adaptable. But new technologies and new circuit designs have allowed engineers to eliminate many shortcomings of the analog systems. For applications such as neural networks, the analog systems offer real advantages. Now, the question is how to combine the best of both worlds. Verma points out that the two types of systems are complimentary. Digital systems play a central role while neural networks using analog chips can run specialized operations extremely fast and efficiently. That is why developing a software system that can integrate the two technologies seamlessly and efficiently is such a critical step. "The idea is not to put the entire network into in-memory computing," he said. "You need to integrate the capability to do all the other stuff and to do it in a programmable way." ### In addition to Verma and Jia, the authors include Hossein Valavi, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton; Jinseok Lee, Murat Ozatay, Rakshit Pathak and Yinqi Tang, graduate students at Princeton. Support for the project was supported in part by the Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science through the generosity of William Addy '82. Some regional NHS sites have started dishing out Covid jabs to healthy people in their twenties, it emerged today in another example of the UK's vaccine postcode lottery. Despite national guidance stating only the top six priority groups should currently be invited for the jab, there have been growing reports of younger Brits who don't have underlying conditions and are not frontline NHS or social care staff receiving their first dose. Examples have been most common in London, which is seeing the poorest uptake of anywhere in Britain, but there has also been anecdotal evidence of it happening in parts of Manchester, Scotland and Wales. GPs in the capital are believed to be moving down through the priority groups to use up doses that would otherwise go to waste. But it's not clear why others are ignoring Government guidance or if admin errors are contributing to the problem. Ellie, 28, from Balham, London, got her first injection in mid-February, despite having no underlying health woes. When she asked why she was being selected ahead of more vulnerable people, she was told it was her 'lucky day'. Rhiannon Williams, 32, a journalist at The i newspaper, revealed today she was given her first vaccine in Tower Hamlets, East London, after a 'very surprising' appointment invitation, despite having no known risk factors. She told the paper: 'At first I assumed I might have something in my health history I wasn't aware of that bumped me up the list, but when I called up to ask the surgery said it was merely working its way through its patients. 'Either way, I'm grateful to have received my first jab and would urge anyone else to follow NHS advice and to accept an invitation for a vaccine when offered.' Currently only people over 64, anyone over 16 with a serious condition, frontline NHS and care home workers and carers of disabled people are officially eligible to receive the vaccine in England. The devolved nations are working to slightly different schedules. The priority list was drawn up based on how vulnerable people are to falling seriously ill and dying with Covid. Only a handful of healthy people in their twenties and younger have fallen victim to the disease. The increasing number of younger people skipping the queue comes despite the national roll-out suffering its worst slump in over a month. A total of 350,000 doses are being administered each day on average the fewest since mid-January - and just 150,000 Covid vaccines jabs were dished out in the UK on Sunday, the worst daily output since the scheme began to pick up pace last month. The Government has pledged to offer first doses to all over-50s by April 15, with all remaining adults set to be reached by the end of July. It is thought that examples of younger people being invited for their jabs has been more common in London due to the poor vaccine uptake in the capital. Gavin Williamson claims Britain's lagging Covid vaccination drive ISN'T down to lack of jabs Gavin Williamson has claimed coronavirus vaccine supply issues are not to blame for Britain's roll-out suffering its worst slump in a month. The Education Secretary insisted today there was 'no problem' with deliveries of doses and said 'there will always be some days' when uptake dips lower. Figures show just 150,000 Covid vaccines jabs were dished out in the UK on Sunday, the worst daily output since the scheme began to pick up pace last month. And just 350,000 doses are being administered each day on average the fewest since mid-January. Despite the concerning trend which scupper Britain's hopes of being released from lockdown restrictions over the coming months, Mr Williamson said he had 'every confidence' the mammoth NHS operation would rebound back 'very shortly'. His comments contradicted his health counterpart Matt Hancock, who claimed yesterday that a supply shortage could lead to 'quieter' weeks ahead for Britain's jab drive. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam England's deputy chief medical officer also waded into the issue today, saying the dip was down to 'supply fluctuations'. He added that making vaccines was likely brewing beer because not every batch yields the same amount. Pfizer yesterday insisted its vaccine deliveries are on track. The pharmaceutical giant which manufactures one of the two vaccines being administered in Britain told MailOnline there were 'no supply challenges' and deliveries were arriving as planned. One of the main problems is thought to be lower than expected output at manufacturing sites in AstraZeneca's supply chain on the continent. The British drugmaker, which manufactures Oxford University's Covid jab, has told the European Union it will only be able to deliver less than half of its 180million contracted doses before summer. But it has insisted it is on track with UK deliveries. Almost 18million Britons have already received a first dose of a Covid vaccine and Boris Johnson has put a successful jab roll-out at the heart of his lockdown-easing plan. As long as the operation continues successfully, all restrictions could be dropped in England by June 21, but any hiccups along the way could threaten that target. The Government has pledged to offer first doses to all over-50s by April 15, with all remaining adults set to be reached by the end of July. Advertisement Official figures released last Thursday show Westminster Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), the local health board in charge of NHS services in that part of London, has only dished out first doses to 60 per cent of over-70s. All ten areas with the worst uptake are in the capital, according to MailOnlines analysis of that data. Health chiefs fear vaccine hesitancy among black, Asian and ethnic minority (BAME) groups is behind the poorer uptake in London's culturally diverse boroughs. As more and more anecdotal reports of younger people getting vaccinated roll in, Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham over the weekend called for the roll-out to be widened nationally to lower age groups because half of appointments at a mass vaccination centre in his region are going to waste. It comes amid a row about what is behind the vaccine roll out slump. Gavin Williamson today claimed supply chain issues were not to blame. The Education Secretary insisted today there was 'no problem' with manufacturing and said 'there will always be some days' when uptake dips lower. Mr Williamson said he had 'every confidence' the mammoth NHS operation would rebound back 'very shortly'. His comments seemingly contradicted his health counterpart Matt Hancock, who claimed yesterday that a supply shortage could lead to 'quieter' weeks ahead for Britain's jab drive. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam England's deputy chief medical officer also waded into the issue today, saying the dip was down to 'supply fluctuations' but he expects the roll-out to pick up pace again soon. Pfizer yesterday insisted its vaccine deliveries are on track. The pharmaceutical giant which manufactures one of the two vaccines being administered in Britain told MailOnline there were 'no supply challenges' and deliveries were arriving as planned. One of the main problems is thought to be lower than expected output at manufacturing sites in AstraZeneca's supply chain on the continent. The British drugmaker, which manufactures Oxford University's Covid jab, has told the European Union it will only be able to deliver less than half of its 180million contracted doses before summer. But it has insisted it is on track with UK deliveries. Almost 18million Britons have already received a first dose of a Covid vaccine and Boris Johnson has put a successful jab roll-out at the heart of his lockdown-easing plan. As long as the operation continues successfully, all restrictions could be dropped in England by June 21, but any hiccups along the way could threaten that target. In contradiction with Gavin Williamson's comments, Jonathan Van Tam reaffirmed minister's repeated explanation that the dip in daily vaccine rollout has come about as a result of a fall in supply. He said: 'That's really very simple to explain. There are always going to be supply fluctuations. 'These are new vaccines and by and large the manufacturers have never made them or anything like them before. You do get batch size variations and that's natural.' Professor Van Tam said the UK is in 'a great place in the world' despite global restraints and that he expects the rollout to pick up pace again. Nicola Sturgeon yesterday claimed stockpiling was partly to blame for the slowing down of the vaccination drive. Scotland's First Minister claimed there had been a 'temporary dip' in supply during her daily press briefing. Gavin Williamson has claimed there are no coronavirus vaccine supply issues after Britain's roll out suffered its worst slump in a month New hope for summer trips abroad in vaccine passport app Holidaymakers could be offered a phone app 'within weeks' that would enable them to prove they have tested negative for Covid or been vaccinated. The International Air Transport Association, which is in talks with the UK Government, yesterday revealed plans to go live with its digital Travel Pass next month. The development is a boost to the millions of Britons hoping for a foreign holiday this summer after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a roadmap for reopening foreign travel on Monday. Mr Johnson has asked a new taskforce to look into how holidays can safely be resumed, with 'vaccine passports' seen as one potential long-term measure. Popular holiday destinations such as Greece, Cyprus, Spain and the Canary Islands have already expressed interest in the idea. IATA's app will be capable of verifying if a passenger has had the Covid-19 tests or vaccines required to enter a country. It would also prove they were administered by an approved authority and store the information on individual phones rather than in a centralised database to better protect privacy. Vinoop Goel, IATA's regional director of airports and external relations, said: 'The key issue is one of confidence. Passengers need to be confident that the testing they've taken is accurate and will allow them to enter the country. 'And then governments need to have the confidence that the tests passengers claim to have is one which is accurate and meets their own conditions.' He added: 'The plan is to go live in March, so basically we expect to have a fully functional working system over the next few weeks.' IATA stressed the app would not be live for use next month as a 'vaccine passport', partly because Britain does not currently issue proof of vaccination in digital format. But it is understood this is one of the issues being worked through by the new Department for Transport-led travel taskforce raising the prospect of British holidaymakers using such an app this summer. The UK's vaccine credentials, which are currently given in paper format, would need to be 'digitalised', IATA said. One way this could be done is if health authorities began issuing QR codes which could be scanned and uploaded into apps as proof that both doses of the vaccine had been given, along with information about where it was given, which jab was received and who it was administered by. The industry sees digital passes as an essential part of reopening air travel, as many countries still have strict restrictions or quarantines, which could be lifted for those who can prove they have been inoculated. Singapore Airlines was the first airline to start trials of the IATA Travel Pass in December. Etihad, Emirates, Qatar Airways and Air New Zealand are among the others conducting trials. Other airlines are also trialling different apps which could end up being used for 'vaccine passports'. British Airways is trialling one called VeriFLY and expanded the trial last week to cover all inbound flights to the UK, in addition to all outbound flights to the US. It is currently only used to verify a negative Covid test result. Advertisement But she also said the 'need to reserve stock so that second doses can be offered to people who received their first dose in December' was having an effect. No10's top scientific advisers say it is crucial Britons get their top-up jab no later than 12 weeks after their first dose. The UK drew criticism in January when it pushed back giving second doses of both vaccines from three weeks to three months. The advice was made by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. Its goal was to get wider coverage more quickly. Government figures show another 1.8million second doses have to be dished out between now and April 11 to meet its 12-week second dose schedule. Around 2.4million Britons had received their first jab by January 11, when national daily figures were first released. Only 640,000 vulnerable Britons have so far had both inoculations, meaning some 1.8million still need to get their booster dose before April 11. Some will need to receive booster doses even sooner, if they were inoculated early on in the scheme, which began on December 8. With 46 days to go until April 11, it means around 40,000 doses per day have to be reserved for top-ups if the rate is stable. Britain is currently dishing out 350,000 vaccines per day on average, meaning the second doses will soon take-up one-tenth of the current operation. Some local NHS chiefs are already working off their own agenda, with 15 per cent of over-70s in Portsmouth having already received their top-ups by February 14. In contrast, rates are almost 300 times lower in Morecambe Bay, where just 0.05 per cent of elderly residents at the top of the queue have had both jabs. It came after AstraZeneca reportedly told the European Union yesterday it would not be able to deliver on the EU's vaccine orders amid supply issues. The firm had committed to supplying the bloc with 180million doses in the second quarter of 2020. But an EU official, involved directly in talks with the firm, said the company had warned it could now only 'deliver less than 90million doses', according to Reuters. Britain has ordered 100million doses of the Oxford vaccine and it is one of two Covid jabs being rolled out on the NHS. Asked about the EU official's comment, a spokesman for AstraZeneca told Reuters yesterday: 'We are hopeful that we will be able to bring our deliveries closer in line with the advance purchase agreement.' Later in the day a spokesman in a new statement said the company's 'most recent Q2 forecast for the delivery of its COVID-19 vaccine aims to deliver in line with its contract with the European Commission.' He added: 'At this stage AstraZeneca is working to increase productivity in its EU supply chain and to continue to make use of its global capability in order to achieve delivery of 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter.' Earlier this week, AstraZeneca said that although there had been 'fluctuations' in supply at plants, they were still 'on track' with orders with no issues with delivery of the UK-manufactured vaccine. A spokesman for the European Commission, which coordinates talks with vaccine manufacturers, said it could not comment on the discussions as they were confidential. He said the EU should have more than enough shots to hit its vaccination targets if the expected and agreed deliveries from other suppliers are met, regardless of the situation with AstraZeneca. The EU official confirmed that AstraZeneca planned to deliver about 40 million doses in the first quarter, again less than half the 90million shots it was supposed to supply. AstraZeneca warned the EU in January that it would fall short of its first-quarter commitments due to production issues. It was also due to deliver 30 million doses in the last quarter of 2020 but did not supply any shots last year as its vaccine had yet to be approved by the EU. All told, AstraZeneca's total supply to the EU could be about 130 million doses by the end of June, well below the 300 million it committed to deliver to the bloc by then. The arrival of fewer AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines in the European Union in the second quarter has been factored into Irish forecasts that were updated on Tuesday, Prime Minister Micheal Martin said after Reuters reported the shortfall. [February 24, 2021] Tipalti Grows Revenue by More Than 85%, Increases Annualized Transactions to More Than $18 Billion Tipalti, the leading global payables automation platform, announced it grew its revenue by over 85% in Q4 2020 relative to Q4 2019. Tipalti continued its rapid growth surpassing $18 billion in annualized transactions in the second half of 2020, up from $11 billion in the first half of the year. The company grew its revenue and workforce rapidly, while maintaining its industry-leading 98% customer retention rate. Tipalti added 160 employees in 2020, bringing the total number of employees to over 400 globally. It plans to hire an additional 350 employees in 2021. Recent notable hires include the appointment of Doug Inamine as Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) and Amisha Gandhi (News - Alert) as Senior Vice President of Marketing. Doug Inamine brings to Tipalti his substantial prior experience leading the HR function in private and public multinational technology companies. Prior to Tipalti, he was the CHRO for Coupang, an e-commerce start-up based in South Korea, where he led the Human Resources team through an aggressive growth phase as the company expanded its global footprint. He previously served as the Chief People Officer for Kabam, a mobile gaming startup. Amisha Gandhi brings more than 15 years of marketing and communications experience to Tipalti in her role as SVP of Marketing. Prior to Tipalti, she was Vice President of Influencer Marketing & Communicationsat SAP (News - Alert) . At SAP, she pioneered the Global Influencer Marketing program, developing it from a pilot program to a full-scale marketing function across the company. Gandhi will lead Tipalti's marketing team in strategy and execution across North America. "Tipalti's growth is a clear indication that businesses are increasingly digitizing their finance operations to support remote work and scalability, which will continue long after the pandemic," said Chen Amit, CEO and Co-founder of Tipalti. "We are proud to support our customers as they modernize their financial operations by automating the entire payables process to make it easier, more efficient, and safer." Tipalti raised a $150M Series E funding round in September 2020 to help accelerate growth, bringing its valuation to over $2 billion. Tipalti was also named a leader in both the IDC Marketscape: Worldwide SaaS (News - Alert) and Cloud-Enabled Midmarket Accounts Payable Applications 2020-2021 Vendor Assessment report and in the Spend Matters AP Automation SolutionMap. Tipalti's achievements last year were recognized with multiple awards, including: Inc. 5000 fastest-growing private companies list and the Deloitte (News - Alert) 500 fastest growing technology companies list for the third consecutive year in a row, making Tipalti one of only 24 companies to have achieved this honor TrustRadius' 2021 Best AP Automation Solution award APPEALIE SaaS Customer Success award Cloud Awards' Best SaaS Business Accounting or Finance Solution award CPA Tech Advisor Innovator of the Year award 2021 Fortune Best Workplaces in the Bay Area award About Tipalti Tipalti comes from the Hebrew expression for "We handled it." Tipalti is the only company handling both Accounts Payable and Mass Pay for mid-market companies across the entire cycle: funding global entities, onboarding the global supply chain, streamlining invoice workflows, and reconciling data.. Tipalti enables high-growth companies to scale quickly by making payables strategic with operational, compliance, and financial controls. Companies can efficiently and securely pay thousands of partners and vendors in 196 countries within minutes. Tipalti customers such as Amazon Twitch, Boxed, GoDaddy, Oscar Insurance, Roku, Wordpress.com, and ZipRecruiter typically reduce operational workload by 80 percent and accelerate the financial close by 25 percent, while strengthening financial controls and spend visibility. For more information, visit tipalti.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005261/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] India faced the second highest number of cyberattacks in Asia Pacific in 2020 after Japan, accounting for 7% of all attacks in the region. Finance and insurance were the most targeted sectors followed by manufacturing and professional services, said IBMs new report on Wednesday. The pandemic-led shift to remote working and learning has triggered a wave of new cyberattacks targeting poorly secured or vulnerable devices and end points. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers According to IBM's 2021 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, published February 24., ransomware was the most widely used attack, accounting for roughly 40% of all attacks detected in India. The soaring cryptocurrency prices, particularly Bitcoin, have also led to a spike in mining of cryptos. Also referred to as cryptojacking, in this attack, hackers remotely control thousands of devices to use their computing power for mining cryptocurrencies. Indian companies were also targeted by server access attacks in 2020. Though attacks were detected throughout the year, highest number of attacks on companies in India was reported between May and July. This was a transition phase for several companies coming out of the pan India lockdown. The 2020 threat landscape in India was largely shaped by the pandemic. As the pandemics timeline of events and progress unfolded, so did attack trends shift," Sudeep Das, security software technical sales leader, IBM Technology Sales, India/South Asia said in a statement. Das adds, in 2020 we also saw cybercriminals using relief efforts and public health information as spam lures and carry out targeted attacks on critical components of the vaccine supply chain. As per news reports, pharmaceutical companies and vaccine researchers working on development and clinical trials of covid-19 vaccines were targeted by state sponsored cyberatatcks in 2020. Indian pharma company Dr Reddys was hit by a cyber attack in October. IBMs report shows that globally attackers went after hospitals, medical and pharmaceutical manufacturers, as well as energy companies involved in the covid-19 vaccine supply chain. Das feels, these issues will persist in 2021. Europe experienced more attacks than any other region, accounting for 31% of total attacks. Most companies in the region were targeted by ransomware attacks. As per the report, ransomware were responsible for nearly one in four attacks across the globe in 2020. Sodinokibi was the most commonly used ransomware group in 2020. According to IBM X-Forces estimates, the group made over $123 million during the year as two-third of its victims paid ransom. The findings of IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index are based on data generated from monitoring of over 150 billion security events per day across 130 countries. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. President Uhuru Kenyatta has reiterated Kenyas strong commitment to advancing Africas agenda at the UN Security Council especially on matters of climate change and security on the continent. At the same time, the President rallied the Security Council to support more mitigation and adaptation measures in Africa saying effects of climate change are having adverse socioeconomic impacts on the continent. As a start, we can recognize that persistent droughts, constant sea level rises, and increasingly frequent extreme weather patterns are reversing economic growth and development gains achieved over decades. The result is increased fragility to instability and armed conflict that then come to the attention of this Security Council, the President said. President Kenyatta warned that the Security Councils mandate of maintaining global peace and security will become harder in coming years if the threat of climate change is not addressed adequately. Rather than wait for a future tipping point, we must redouble the efforts to direct all the resources and multilateral frameworks of our rules-based international order to mitigate the effects of climate change, President Kenyatta said. The President spoke Tuesday evening at State House, Nairobi during a virtual UN Security Council open debate hosted by the United Kingdom on the nexus between climate and security. President Kenyatta said Africa will suffer the worst consequences of climate change and told the Security Council to make the continent a top priority in its climate and security strategies. Listen to us Africans when we tell you that the link is clear, its impact tangible, and the need for solutions urgent. Africa unfortunately will suffer the worst consequences of climate change despite being the least responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions, he said. Separately, President Kenyatta has identified climate, biodiversity and nature, and pollution and waste management as the three planetry crises that threaten the worlds future. Speaking when he delivered the key note address at the start of events to mark 50 years since the creation of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), the President said adverse weather and climatic occurrences are a warning sign of a bleak future and proposed change of tact in addressing environmental matters. This commemoration is an opportunity for introspection and correction. We should take transformative remedial actions, make correct financial and social decisions and change course where necessary, President Kenyatta said, adding that the world must commit to the promotion of sustainable development and protection of biodiversity. In the recorded video address, President Kenyatta said Kenya was a proud host of UNEP and assured the international community of countrys full backing of the global environment agenda. The environment holds and can provide solutions to most of the challenges we face as humanity. In this regard, Kenya has firmly anchored the environmental pillar in our Countrys blueprints for development; the Kenya Vision 2030 and the Big Four agenda, the President said. A series of celebrations to mark the founding of UNEP on 15th December 1972 will be held over the next two years. COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday threw his support behind his former Ohio campaign chairman as the next chairman of the state Republican Party days before the party is scheduled to vote to pick a new leader. In a statement, Trump said Bob Paduchik has his full and complete endorsement to replace Jane Timken, who resigned as chairman of the Ohio Republican Party earlier this month to focus on her run for the U.S. Senate. Paduchik, a longtime Ohio political operative with close ties to the numerous elected officials, ran Trumps successful state campaigns in 2016 and 2020. He also held the number-two position at the Republican National Committee during the Trump era, leaving at the end of 2018 to take a position with the Trump campaign. Bob loves our country and the Great State of Ohio, Trump said in the statement released by Save America, the former presidents official political action committee. He will be an outstanding Chairman! The move almost certainly clinches the job for Paduchik, who had been considered the favorite anyway. Paduchik also has the quiet support of Gov. Mike DeWine, a political tightrope given the tension between him and the former president. It also is a sign that Trump plans to continue taking a hands-on role with the Republican Party during his post-White House life. The state GOPs central committee is scheduled to hold a virtual meeting on Friday to officially select a chairman. The only other declared candidate is John Becker, an arch-conservative former state lawmaker from the Cincinnati area who left office due to term limits at the end of 2020. Becker said in an interview he still plans to run, although he considers it unlikely he will win. He said hed expected the party establishment to ignore his candidacy, and was impressed that Paduchiks allies pulled Trump into the contest. Becker said hes trying to represent the Trump supporters that make up the the GOPs grassroots base. People like to have choices. Having one name on the ballot means there isnt one, Becker said. This forces Paduchik to work for it. He was working before, but maybe this makes him sweat more than I anticipated. And now that theyve brought Trump to the table, maybe that says they really fear me. Since leaving the RNC, Paduchik occasionally has gotten more involved with state issues, including joining the intense lobbying effort in favor of House Bill 6, the nuclear bailout bill. Michael McGovern, managing director of the liberal activist organization ProgressOhio, in a Wednesday statement said Paduchiks ascendance shows the Ohio GOP is continuing its commitment to FirstEnergy, the company federal investigators said bribed Republican former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder to secure the bills passage. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 25) Only one out of five adult Filipinos is willing to be inoculated with COVID-19 vaccine, according to a recent survey by the OCTA Research group published on Wednesday. The latest results from OCTA's Tugon ng Masa survey, conducted from Jan. 26 to Feb. 1, showed that only 19% of adult Filipinos want to get vaccinated even with the availability of a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine. The figure was lower than the 25% tally in the same OCTA survey conducted in December 2020. The latest OCTA Research survey also revealed that 46% of adult Filipinos are not willing to get vaccinated while 35% are still undecided. Concerns regarding the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines are the primary reasons why many Filipinos who took part in the OCTA survey don't want to get inoculated. The survey also showed that only a quarter of Filipinos in Metro Manila and Mindanao, 25% and 26% respectively, are willing to be vaccinated. About 14% are in favor of vaccination in Balance Luzon and 20% in the Visayas. Among social classes, around 23% in Classes A, B, C and E and 18% in Class D are willing to get immunized by a COVID-19 vaccine. More than half of Filipinos, or 58%, said they don't trust COVID-19 vaccines coming from China. Vaccines coming from the United States are still the preferred choice of Filipinos with 41%, followed by the United Kingdom with 25%, India with 17%, and China with 13%. A Pulse Asia survey released last Jan. 7 netted the same result as OCTA's surveys, where 47% of Filipinos said they would not get vaccinated against COVID-19 due to safety concerns. An online survey spearheaded by University of Santo Tomas researchers also got the same result, showing that nine out of ten Filipinos have many concerns about the COVID-19 vaccines. The arrival of COVID-19 vaccines in the Philippines from the World Health Organization's vaccine-sharing initiative COVAX facility has been delayed to March, pending the passage of an indemnification law that will ensure public officials and employees, contractors, manufacturers, and volunteers who are duly authorized to carry out the vaccination program enjoy immunity from suit. READ: Congress OKs bill to set indemnity fund, expedite vaccine rollout President Rodrigo Duterte will be among the first to receive the vaccine in the country given his status as a senior citizen, a priority sector in the government's vaccination plan, according to Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque. He likewise said earlier that Duterte prefers a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine brand. The Philippine national government targets to procure some 140 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine to immunize up to 70 million Filipinos this year. Among those in the vaccination priority list are medical frontliners, senior citizens, persons with co-morbidities, and the indigent population. The Vietnam Buddhist Sangha (VBS) has let people make their offerings via Momo e-wallet at several pagodas as a safe and appropriate method given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Venerable Thich Duc Thien, vice-president and general secretary of the VBSs Executive Council, confirmed to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Monday that the new method is being piloted at Phuc Khanh Pagoda in Hanoi, Yen Tu Pagoda in Quang Ninh Province, Bai Dinh Pagoda in Ninh Binh Province, Tam Chuc Pagoda in Ha Nam Province, Phat Tich Pagoda in Bac Ninh Province, and Dai Tue Pagoda in Nghe An Province. The trial began during the recent Lunar New Year (Tet) holiday, which ended last week, at a time when the complicated pandemic has resulted in the temporary closure of pagodas and religious activities in several provinces and cities. This approach will also help publicize the amount of money offered, a way to promote transparency in the receipt of offerings. During the pilot period, the VBS will pool feedback from local residents before deciding whether to apply the electronic offerings to other pagodas nationwide. According to Venerable Thich Dao Hien, deputy head of the executive board of the Buddhist Sangha in Quang Ninh Province, the alternative is suitable at large-scale pagodas, while it is unnecessary to apply it at small establishments. Related problems should also be taken into consideration as scammers may take advantage of this to trick local residents, Hien advised. This method may only be viable during serious pandemics such as COVID-19, he said, adding that making offerings the conventional way is still preferred. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Seoul: South Korean auto giant Hyundai Motor on Tuesday unveiled the IONIQ 5, the first model embedded with its own electric vehicle (EV) platform, as it strives to morph into a future mobility solutions provider. The IONIQ 5 midsize crossover utility vehicle is the first model equipped with Hyundai Motor Group's own EV-only electric-global modular platform (E-GMP), Hyundai said in a statement. Hyundai said that it will launch the IONIQ 5 in Europe next month, in Korea in the second quarter and in the US and other markets later this year. "The production of the IONIQ 5 begins in Hyundai's Ulsan plant next month. The company aims to sell 70,000 units globally this year, including 26,500 units in domestic market, and 100,000 units next year," Hyundai Motor President and Chief Executive Chang Jae-hoon said in an online press conference. The all-electric car is priced at 50 million won to 55 million won ($45,000-$49,500). With government subsidies, it can be purchased for around 40 million won. Among other features, the E-GMP's flat battery and long wheelbase allow for a more spacious and customisable interior for passengers and cargo, unlike crossovers with internal combustion engines and conventional steer-by-wire systems, the CEO said. The IONIQ 5 is available in two versions: The long-range model with a 72.6 kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery and the standard model with a 58 kWh battery. The long-range version can travel up to 430 km on a single charge and charge 80 per cent of the battery capacity within 18 minutes, the automaker said. The all-electric model boasts "user-friendly" functions such as the gear selector located behind the steering wheel, the sliding centre console which offers passengers more flexibility in front seats and the vehicle-to-load (V2L) function which serves as a charger on wheels. The V2L function allows customers to charge electric devices such as coffee machines and electric bicycles, reports Yonhap news agency. It also comes with advanced safety features such as lane-keeping assist, blind-spot collision avoidance, safety exit assist and rear cross-traffic collision-avoidance assist systems. The IONIQ 5's signature design elements include Parametric Pixels, the smallest unit of digital imaging. The company plans to apply the design language to future models to be released under the IONIQ battery electric vehicle brand. Hyundai said it will receive pre-orders for the IONIQ 5 from Thursday in the domestic market. To strengthen its presence in the eco-friendly vehicle market, Hyundai also plans to introduce the IONIQ 6 midsize sedan in 2022 and the IONIQ 7 large SUV in 2024. It will begin using alphanumeric names like its bigger rivals, such as BMW, whose models are named Series No. 1-8. Live TV #mute Hyundai's independent Genesis brand also plans to launch an all-electric model this year and will eventually fill its lineup with zero-emission models in the future. Facebooks brief but tempestuous standoff with the Australian government over a world-first pay-for-news law is only the start of a string of regulatory battles that the worlds biggest social network faces in 2021. Mark Zuckerberg started the year on the offensive, blocking news across Australia to fend off demands that Facebook pay media companies for content shared on its platform. Mark Zuckerbergs Facebook is under global regulatory pressure. Credit:Bloomberg On Tuesday, Zuckerberg struck a compromise after 11th-hour talks with the government on the legislation thats also aimed at Google and is expected to pass through parliament this week. But a regulatory domino effect is already underway, with publishers pressuring the European Union to emulate Australias approach. With the prospect of more assertive regulation and even Apple questioning Facebooks longstanding model of using data to better target advertising, the social media platforms way of doing business faces being upended. HARTFORD A father and son from California who defrauded Affordable Care Act programs in 12 states, including Connecticut, were sentenced Tuesday in a case believed to be the first of its kind, according to federal officials. Judge Aliv W. Thompson in Hartford sentenced 63-year-old Jeffrey White to 36 months in prison and 35-year-old Nicholas White to 13 months in prison. Both will serve three years of supervised release once they get out of prison. The two each pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud on Oct. 12, 2018. The two men, residents of Twin Peaks, Calif., devised the scheme that was likely the first involving the fraudulent enrollment of individuals on ACA plans, U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham said. The Whites conspired to defraud health care plans under Obamacare in Connecticut and other states by enrolling in plans in states where they did not live, officials said. They even created resident leases using fake landlords in various states. In Connecticut, authorities said, they chose locations in Danbury, Farmington, Hartford and Norwalk. Authorities said the two choose plans in states that paid the highest amount of substance abuse treatment. The father and son also used an online application to get false cellphone numbers to provide for the ACA plans, with area codes that made it seem like the individuals lived at the fake addresses. If anyone in the ACA program called the number, it would ring to a phone controlled by the two men, authorities said. To enroll in these Obamacare programs, the Whites paid the insurance premiums and also paid to have them brought to California to be placed in expensive residential substance abuse treatment programs, officials said. Those programs then billed the ACA plans. The treatment programs paid the Whites thousands of dollars in kickbacks for every referral, authorities said. Authorities said some programs even arranged for the Whites to get a percentage of the money the treatment programs obtained from the ACA health insurance plans. The father and son admitted their scheme led to more than $27 million in losses from plans around the country. Other than Connecticut, authorities said the duo targeted plans in Arizona, California, Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas. The judge ordered the Whites to pay restitution of $27,617,000, even though they only profited about $1 million from the scheme, officials said. The two, who are free on bond, were told to report to prison later this year. Nicholas Whites sentence will begin May 5 while Jeffrey Whites sentence will begin Aug. 24. Which sectors in Vietnam are dominated by Thai companies? Shoppers look at fruits at the Central Group Vietnam's Big C supermarket in Hanoi. Photo by Reuters/Kham. Though Thailand is not the largest foreign investor in Vietnam, its companies dominate a number of sectors like retail, beverage, packaging, livestock, and solar energy. In the last decade .their investments in Vietnam swelled by an average of 13 percent a year. By the end of last year their total investment was only around $13 billion, not enough to put Thailand in the top five list, but still managed to have large market shares in several sectors by concentrating their investment in a handful of sectors. In the retail sector, some leading supermarket chains are controlled by two Thai companies, Central Group and TCC Group. Central Group, Thailands leading retailer, which belongs to the Chirathivat family, started off in Vietnam as a fashion merchandiser in 2012, distributing products from brands such as SuperSports, Crocs and New Balance. In 2015, it acquired a 49 percent stake in electronics retailer Nguyen Kim through its subsidiary Power Buy. In the same year, it bought out supermarket chain Lan Chi, which operates mainly in northern rural areas. In 2016, it bought supermarket chain Big C Vietnam from France's Casino Group for over $1 billion. TCC Group, owned by the third richest man in Thailand, Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi, bought convenience store chain FamilyMart in 2012 and renamed it Bs mart. In 2016, it bought wholesale chain Metro Cash & Carry Vietnam for 655 million ($796 million) and rebranded it as MM Mega Market Vietnam a year later. TCC Group also dominates the beverage industry after acquiring a 53.59 percent stake in Vietnams top brewery, Sabeco, in 2017. Fraser and Neave, Limited, a food and beverage company also owned by Sirivadhanabhakdi, is the biggest foreign shareholder in dairy behemoth Vinamilk. Siam Cement Group (SCG), which dominates the packaging industry, recently signed an agreement to buy 70 percent of Duy Tan Plastics, the largest manufacturer of rigid plastic packaging products in Vietnam. It now owns eight packaging companies in the country. SCG has over 20 subsidiaries in the cement and building materials, chemicals and packaging industries. In the livestock industry, Thailand's largest private company Charoen Pokphand Group (CP) has been dominating the market for years. In 1993, it established CP Livestock Co and later changed its name to CP Vietnam Corporation (CPV). In 2019, its revenues topped VND65.5 trillion, or 10 times that of the largest local rivals. The solar energy sector has also attracted a number of Thai investors. Super Energy Corporation has been acquiring stakes in solar power plants in Ninh Thuan and An Giang provinces since 2018. In March 2020, it announced plans to invest over $456 million in four solar plants with a total capacity of 750MW in Binh Phuoc Province. Another Thai energy firm, Gulf Group, owns a 90 percent stake in two solar power plants, TTC 1 and TTC 2, in the southern province of Tay Ninh. Thai companies have a geographical advantage over their counterparts from Europe, South Korea or Japan, while the two countries are culturally similar. Thai investors strategy has been to target top companies in Vietnam or those with a competitive advantage, and take them over through mergers and acquisitions. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Illustration of the Lucy mission's seven targets: the binary asteroid Patroclus/Menoetius, Eurybates, Orus, Leucus, Polymele, and the main belt asteroid DonaldJohanson. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab On Feb. 22, 1906, German astrophotographer Max Wolf helped reshape our understanding of the solar system. Again. Born in 1863, Wolf had a habit of dramatically altering the astronomy landscape. Something of a prodigy, he discovered his first comet at only 21 years old. Then in 1890, he boldly declared that he planned to use wide-field photography in his quest to discover new asteroids, which would make him the first to do so. Two years later, Wolf had found 18 new asteroids. He later became the first person to use the "stereo comparator," a View-Master-like device that showed two photographs of the sky at once so that moving asteroids appeared to pop out from the starry background. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that on Feb. 22, 1906, Wolf made another important discovery: an asteroid with a particularly unusual orbit. As Jupiter moved, this asteroid remained ahead of Jupiter, as though it was somehow trapped in Jupiter's orbit around the Sun. German astronomer Adolf Berberich observed that the asteroid was nearly 60 degrees in front of Jupiter. This specific position reminded Swedish astronomer Carl Charlier of a peculiar behavior predicted by the Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange over 100 years earlier. Lagrange argued that if a small body (such as an asteroid) is placed at one of two stable points in a planet's orbit around the Sun (called the L4 and L5 Lagrange Points), the asteroid would remain stationary from the planet's perspective due to the combined gravitational forces of the planet and the Sun. Charlier realized that Wolf's asteroid was actually caught in Jupiter's L4 Lagrange point. Until Wolf's discovery, Lagrange's prediction had only been a mathematical exercise. Now, these astronomers had photographic proof that Lagrange was right. Eight months later, one of Wolf's graduate students August Kopff discovered an asteroid in Jupiter's other stable Lagrange point L5, as well as another asteroid caught in L4 a few months afterward. Once three of these Lagrange point-inhabiting asteroids had been discovered, astronomers began wondering what to call them. At this point, most asteroids were given the names of women from Roman or Greek mythology, unless their orbits were particularly strange. The asteroids in question certainly had bizarre orbits, so Austrian astronomer Johann Palisa suggested the names Achilles, Patroclus, and Hektor after characters from The Iliad. Achilles was a nigh-invulnerable Greek hero (except for his heel), and Patroclus was a friend of his. Hektor, prince of the Trojans, eventually killed Patroclus, and Achilles exacted revenge by killing Hektor. The recently discovered asteroids were then given Iliad-inspired names. As astronomers continued discovering asteroids hiding in Jupiter's Lagrange points, they continued naming them after heroes of the Trojan War and began referring to them as "Trojan asteroids." ("Trojan asteroids" would eventually refer to asteroids inhabiting any planet's stable Lagrange points, though names from The Iliad are reserved for Jupiter's Trojans.) It later became convention to name Jupiter's L4 asteroids after Greek characters and Jupiter's L5 asteroids after Trojan characters, so L4 and L5 became the "Greek camp" and the "Trojan camp" respectively. Palisa apparently did not foresee this tradition, for his naming of first three asteroids led to a Greek "spy" residing in the Trojan camp (Patroclus) and a confused Trojan (Hektor) who probably wandered into the Greek camp hoping to order some of their famous custom-built wooden horses. No spacecraft has ever been to this population of small bodies, called the Trojan asteroids. Now, a new NASA Discovery Program mission called Lucy will fly by seven Trojan asteroids, plus a main belt asteroid, to survey the diversity of this population in a single 12-year record-breaking mission. The Lucy spacecraft launch window opens Oct. 16, 2021. Explore further Jupiter's Trojan asteroids offer surprises Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Footage shows the traffic chaos after gunshots were heard and police attended a shooting incident at a shopping mall in the Quezon City area of Manila, the Philippines, today (February 24). Officers from the Quezon City Police District arrived at the building along Commonwealth Avenue after reports of a shooting at a fast-food restaurant. Philippine Red Cross (PRC) chairman and Senator Richard Gordon said two policemen were injured in the armed encounter. He said: "Several gunshots were heard near the overpass at Ever Gotesco Mall at around 6:00 PM. "Two PNP officers were reportedly wounded. "We already coordinated with QC Police Stations 5 and 6 and dispatched [a] medic team to provide immediate assistance. "Keep safe everyone." Officials have not yet released details of the identities of people involved but Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) teams are present at the scene. OTTAWA Canadian military support began Tuesday for a northern Manitoba reserve struggling with a staggering rise in COVID-19 cases. "Some of them arrived by ground at 8 oclock this morning," Pimicikamak Chief David Monias told the Free Press, sounding relieved as he drove the local airport to welcome a large Canadian Armed Forces plane. The military confirmed sending eight medical staff from Ontario, and 17 general duty personnel from CFB Shilo, most of whom arrived around 3 p.m. on a C-130 Hercules airplane. Pimicikamak is the sixth Manitoba reserve to welcome military help for COVID-19 outbreaks. The Cree community, also known as Cross Lake, had counted 258 infections, as of Monday. The local public-health unit reported an infection rate that has risen by 87 per cent in just 10 days. The band says it has 8,000 residents, but officially reported 6,200 last month. Its reserve sits some 530 kilometres north of Winnipeg. The Forces said its staff will integrate with the local command post, do wellness checks on locals, and set up an isolation site. The soldiers will do "limited civilian patient care" before handing it over to local nurses. "CAF support has been requested for a period of two weeks but will continue until the situation has stabilized and is manageable through local and provincial resources," wrote spokeswoman Jessica Lamirande. Help will also come soon from First Nations leaders. Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak said it has accepted the bands request for a deployment of its mental health teams, with logistics being sorted out Tuesday. Monias had sought help for "issues such as anxiety, depression and suicide ideation," in his written Monday update to the band. He also requested help from the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, asking for 30 people to help with roles civilians can undertake but didnt specify what type. The AMC confirmed it will send support, but did not immediately have details. In an online update Monday evening, Monias wrote most of the positive cases would be flown out of the community, which is a common practice meant to keep patients close to hospitals in case they need acute care. He wrote 14 charter flights had been schedule for the day. As of Monday, 205 locals had gotten the required two doses of the Moderna vaccine, while 80 had their first shot, all within the community. dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca On Tuesday, the Senate Homeland Security Committee and the Senate Rules and Administration Committee held a joint hearing on the security failures that allowed the US Capitol building to be overrun by a pro-Trump mob headed by far-right militia groups and white supremacists on January 6. The testimony of former and current police officials at Tuesdays event, the first public congressional hearing into the attempted coup, highlighted their complete failure to respond to clear warnings contained in their own intelligence assessments and those of the FBI of a violent and a coordinated attack on the Capitol. Former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund testifies before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs & Senate Rules and Administration joint hearing on Capitol Hill, Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021, to examine the January 6th attack on the Capitol. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool In the course of the hearing, the heads of Metro D.C. Police and the US Capitol Police at the time of the insurrection admitted that their departments possessed intelligence reports warning of a violent attack on Congress in advance of the storming of the Capitol. But in the place of any serious explanation for the stand-down of security forces in the face of numerous threats to Congress from fascistic forces mobilized by former President Donald Trump, the Democratic chairs of the two committees suggested a narrative of intelligence or communications failures, which began to fall apart even as the hearing progressed. The witnesses were the former chief of the Capitol Police, Steven Sund, the acting chief of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, Robert Contee, the former Senate sergeant-at-arms, Michael Stenger, and the former House sergeant-at-arms, Paul Irving. For the first time, Sund acknowledged in his testimony that the Capitol Police were sent a copy of an explicit warning issued by the FBI office in nearby Norfolk, Virginia the day before the attempted coup, stating that violent Trump supporters were coming to D.C. and talking about waging war. The FBI memo cited direct threats from pro-Trump elements on an unnamed online message board. The posters made clear they were coming to D.C. to take Congress hostage in order to overturn the results of the election. Images retrieved from the message board and included in the FBI memo included maps of the tunnels under the Capitol complex along with rally points in states such as Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and South Carolina for the insurrectionists to meet up prior to heading to Washington. In January, the Washington Post obtained a copy of the memo, which read, in part: An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal. Acting D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief Contee acknowledged that his police department also received the FBI memo in the form of an email. He testified that it did not occur to him that the email from the FBI on the eve of the January 6 Save America march was a priority. Sund acknowledged that the intelligence bulletin had been relayed to the Capitol Police through its Joint Terrorism Task Force on January 5, but claimed that neither he nor anyone else in the police leadership saw the memo. Sund said he became aware that the memo had been received by the intelligence department within the Capitol Police less than 24 hours prior to the congressional hearing. Homeland Security Committee Chairman Gary Peters (Democrat of Michigan) questioned Sund as to why the FBI memo was not relayed to him after it was received by his departments intelligence department. Sund could not provide an explanation, merely saying, I know that is something that is going to be looked at. I think that information would have been helpful to be aware of. In a statement released on Tuesday, the FBI said the Norfolk memo was shared with the FBI Washington Field Offices Joint Terrorism Task Force within 40 minutes of its being issued, and was posted on the Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal, to which law enforcement agencies across the country have access. The Norfolk memo was also shared with the FBI field office in D.C. and agents in that office were briefed within an hour of its arrival, FBI Assistant Director in Charge Steven M. DAntuono told the Post. Peters also referenced an internal intelligence document produced by the Capitol Police on January 3. The memorandum warned that unlike previous Make America Great Again rallies held in November and December, which resulted in numerous arrests, stabbings and assaults by Proud Boy fascists on counter-protesters, the pro-Trump mob assembled on January 6 would not be targeting counter-protesters, but rather members of Congress. Peters quoted the memo as warning that Congress itself is the target, that members of the Proud Boys and other extremist groups would be in the crowd, and that Trump supporters saw the January 6 congressional certification of the Electoral College vote as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election. Sund admitted to seeing the report on January 3, but testified that the only action he ordered the Capitol Police to take in response was to expand the perimeter around the Capitol complex. Despite the mountain of evidence that actionable intelligence was directly sent to the various police agencies charged with defending the Capitol in advance of the attack, the testifying police chiefs maintained there was an intelligence failure. In a written statement to the committees, former House Sergeant-at-Arms Irving said, The intelligence was not that there would be a coordinated assault on the Capitol, nor was that contemplated in any of the inter-agency discussions that I attended in the days before the attack. Irving added that the Capitol Police had previously assessed the potential for civil disobedience as remote or improbable. Under conditions of direct incitement by then-President Trump and his political allies within the Republican Party, following months of lies about a stolen election, and in light of documents warning of a violent assault on Congress, the assertion that the problem was a lack of intelligence lacks any credibility whatsoever. Moreover, in their testimony on Tuesday, both Sund and Contee said they were baffled by the Pentagons failure to immediately respond positively to calls from the police departments and others to authorize the deployment of National Guard troops to repel the mob and protect Congress. In the event, no National Guard troops reached the Capitol until close to 6 p.m., hours after the insurrectionists first breached the Capitol. Metro Police Chief Contee testified that he heard Sund on the phone pleading with several Army officials for Guard support, and that he was stunned at the response Sund received. Entirely absent from the Democratic senators questions was any discussion of the political aims of the insurrectionistsnamely, to block the certification of the Electoral College vote, overturn the results of the election and maintain Trump in power as president-dictator. Nor was there any mention of the political complicity of the bulk of the Republican Party and its leadership in Trumps plot to overturn the election, including the refusal of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for weeks to acknowledge Joe Bidens victory and Vice President Mike Pences support until the last minute for Trumps big lie. The hearing was held less than two weeks after 43 of the 50 GOP senators voted to acquit Trump in the impeachment trial. Among the Republican senators participating in the hearing were those who directly facilitated the attempted coup by opposing the certification of the election results, including Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Cindy Hyde-Smith and Rick Scott. Instead of calling out their Republican colleagues, the Democrats, in line with the ceaseless calls for unity and defense of a strong Republican Party from the Biden White House, continued their cover-up of the vast scale of the coup conspiracy and the role of the Republican Party as an incubator of fascist forces. Amy Klobuchar, the chair of the Senate Rules Committee, set the tone in opening the hearing by praising the bipartisan spirit that had characterized its preparation. Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware offered the failure to connect the dots excuse used in the official cover-up surrounding the 9/11 terror attacks, suggesting that the virtual absence of security for the Capitol was the result of a failure to communicate. Improved coordination among the many modes of transportation could improve the access and ridership across all modes, according to a new report by the Transportation Research Board.The study is seen as particularly prescient as regions and transit organizations emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has reshaped lives and jobs across all communities.If cities and communities could take a more proactive approach to mobility in their cities, and keep transit and all the other new modes coordinated I think that would be a huge step, said Gary Thomas, chair of the team who authored the report and president and CEO of Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) Rather than having these individual silos that forces the consumer, at the end of the day, to really pick a bus, a train, a scooter, a bike, a ride-hailing type vehicle; but if you could come up with a platform where everybody was coordinated and working together, and really working toward the benefit of the consumer how can we make this work best, he added.A central goal ought to be furthering the use of shared mobility as part of a larger mission to reduce single-occupancy car trips, if the nation is to have any sizable impact on traffic congestion, air quality and climate change, Thomas and others argue.Weve got to continue to think about shared-use mobility, said Thomas.As the country emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic , now is the time to press the reset button, and put the nations transportation policymaking and thinking on a more sustainable, shared and less car-intensive trajectory, say experts.I spent 40 years of my life trying to get people out of cars, and onto public transportation. And in the last year, we just gave it all back. And the last thing we possibly want is a car-led recovery, said Leon Daniels, the former director of Surface Transport at the Transport for London, which manages public transit in the British capital.We have to work doubly, triply hard to get people back out of their cars, and onto public transportation, Daniels said during a recent panel discussion about reshaping the transportation industry in 2021, organized by transit and transportation technology firm Optibus.In the U.S., transportation, planning and other officials as well as residents marveled at how quickly the highways emptied out nearly a year ago when the country hunkered down to combat the spread of the coronavirus. Today, traffic has mostly returned in many cities, although the patterns are different. The morning peak is not so busy. However, the challenge to reduce congestion remains a top goal among policymakers, because any declines in traffic congestion last year will be short-lived without concerted efforts to curb it.The cars didnt disappear, Thomas remarked. Theyre maybe parked in driveways now, or wherever they are. But they didnt go away. So all of those cars that caused all of that congestion and air-quality issues, theyre still there.To ensure transit riders of the past do not take to their cars in the future, transit needs to double down and do the work it has always done, said Chris Van Eyken, a senior program associate at the TransitCenter, a transit think tank.We have to provide high-quality service so that people who want to ride can ride, and get where they want to go safely, fast and comfortably, said Van Eyken, a panelist on the Optibus webinar.If the message among transportation planners points toward enhanced coordination among all forms of shared mobility, it may help to know how much of the total transportation pie it makes up and how much it could stand to increase with improved interoperability through tech or policy developments like mobility-as-a-service (MaaS).Public transit only makes up 2.5 percent of trips nationwide. That number climbs to 5 percent in the largest metro regions. And as much as micro-mobility has grown in use increasing 60 percent from 2018 to 2019 it still only makes up a tiny percentage of total trips, according to the TRB report.Just how much have devices like scooters cut into personal car use?A survey of scooter users in 18 metro regions found that 41 percent of those trips would have been made via car had the scooters not been available. Which is why improved coordination and interoperability among these modes and others particularly public transit has the potential to further push this needle away from personal car use, said Thomas.If were all working together, this is how we can all benefit, rather than each of us doing our own thing, he offered.It should be public transit, said Thomas, to take the lead on how transportation should evolve, post-COVID.We felt that public transit would best be suited to be the convener, said Thomas, adding, public policy needs to be driven with a central mission where were strongly encouraged to all work together. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) President Rodrigo Duterte was puzzled over the Food and Drug Administration's recommendation not to use China's Sinovac vaccines on health workers and senior citizens despite granting its emergency use authorization, Malacanang said on Wednesday. In a briefing, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque shared Duterte's concern on why Sinovac is not being recommended for vaccination priority groups, when it was the World Health Organization that had set the minimum 50% efficacy threshold for COVID-19 vaccines. He stressed, however, that Duterte respects the recommendation of the experts. "Naiparating ni Presidente 'yung kanyang pagtataka kung bakit may ganitong colatilla. Nirerespeto po ng Presidente ang opinyon ng mga experts. Kaya let the colatilla remain," Roque said. "Pero...ang tanong niya ay bakit kinakailangang magcolatilla kung ang WHO mismo ang nagsabi 50% efficacy is acceptable?" [Transalation: The President has forwarded his concern on why this kind of colatilla exists. The President respects the opinion of the experts. So let the colatilla remain. But...he is asking why is there such colatilla if the WHO itself said that the 50% efficacy is acceptable.] Brazilian researchers previously reported that Sinovac is only over 50% effective based on the country's trial data. Sinovac's general manager, Helen Yang ,said in the Malacanang briefing that the Brazil trial was conducted on health workers exposed to COVID-19, which is considered a high-risk group in a complex and endemic environment. Sinovac received its EUA on Monday, but FDA Director General Eric Domingo advised against using the vaccine on healthcare workers and elderlies due to low efficacy rate in clinical trials. FDA recommended that the vaccines only be used on healthy people aged 18-59. Domingo told CNN Philippines in a separate interview that authorities still have to test whether a 50% rate would be more effective in specific priority groups than others since the country intends to prioritize health workers and senior citizens over other groups for inoculation. Duterte willing to welcome Sinovac's arrival While no date has been set yet for Sinovac's rollout, Duterte himself has expressed his intent to personally welcome its arrival as a show of "debt of gratitude," Malacanang added. "Unang una po, talagang sinabi ng Presidente na nais niyang salubungin ang pagdating ng Sinovac. Pilipino tayo, tumatanaw tayo ng utang na loob," Roque said. [Translation: First of all, the President really said that he wants to personally welcome the arrival of Sinovac. We are Filipinos, we recognize debt of gratitude.] Duterte, who has long been vocal about his warm ties with China, only wanted to thank Beijing anew for coming to the rescue as the Philippine government grapples with the pandemic, Roque said. "Wala naman pong epekto iyan sa mga issue na meron tayo sa ating bilateral relations sa Tsina. Nagpapasalamat lang po ang Presidente. Dahil sa panahon ng pagsubok, Tsina na naman ang nagdeliver," he reasoned, noting that Filipinos are not an ungrateful people. [Translation: This has no effect on any issues that we have concerning our bilateral relations with China. The President just wants to thank them. Because in a time of need, China delivered.] Sinovac's Yang said they are doing their best to ship the promised 600,000 doses to the country within the week. Starry-eyed Afterpay investors might not know that the buy now, pay later behemoths $38 billion market valuation is largely based on the potential of a US business that the company does not entirely own. A big part of the capital raising announced by the company on Thursday - it will sell up to $1.5 billion worth of convertible notes that can be traded for shares down the track - will be used to fix this anomaly and give the company greater exposure to the worlds biggest economy. The deal to buy out investors in its US subsidiary will be highly accretive for Afterpay says its chief executive, Anthony Eisen. Credit:Sam Mooy When Afterpay announced plans to enter the lucrative market in 2018 it effectively gave venture capital group Matrix Partners a 10 per cent stake in its US operations for as little as $US100,000. Matrix invested $19 million in total into Afterpay but only $100,000 directly into the US subsidiary. The $19 million investment three years ago has now delivered Matrix an interest in Afterpay worth $1.46 billion. Technically speaking, the $US100,000 stake in the US business is now worth $1.07 billion. Matrix was a key adviser to Afterpay for its US plans and the cash from the venture fund underpinned the companys eventual foray into the lucrative market. Afterpay earmarked another 10 per cent of the equity in the US business for employees who received lucrative options to jump ship from top tech companies to join the Aussie startup. The latest capital raising will allow Afterpay to buy back around one-third of Matrixs underlying interest in the US business for $373 million. Matrixs remaining interest in the US business, plus shares it acquired in 2018 as part of the deal, are currently worth $1.08 billion based on the proposed US transaction and the current share price. Another $225 million of Afterpays raising is earmarked for US employees who want to cash out their options in the US subsidiary rather than receive shares and options in the ASX listed mothership. Afterpay says the deal will lift its share of the US subsidiary from 80 per cent to as high as 93 per cent depending on the uptake of its offer by staff. Read the full story here GREENWICH First responders got a warm thank you from seniors at a residential community in the Riverside section of Greenwich this week. Hill House residents presented GEMS first responders with a plaque, honoring them for their service during a short ceremony Tuesday. An Australian man has sparked a fierce debate online after asking if people would consider sharing a quarantine hotel room to save $1000 each. The man said he had heard of solo travelers meeting at airports and striking up a deal to bunk together for the two weeks of mandatory quarantine. 'This appeals, yet I'm reticent to commit to two weeks with someone I barely know,' he said. 'Has anyone done this, or knows anyone who did this, and how did it work out?' An Australian man has sparked a fierce debate online after asking if people would consider sharing a quarantine hotel room to save $1000 each (stock image) Others also appeared to be wary of the plan, with many agreeing it isn't worth the $1000 saving. 'I couldn't think of anything worse I would rather pay double than share with a stranger,' one woman said. Poll Would you quarantine with a stranger to save $1k? Yes No Only one of the same sex Would you quarantine with a stranger to save $1k? Yes 10 votes No 19 votes Only one of the same sex 4 votes Now share your opinion 'This sounds dangerous, I would be worried about my safety and privacy,' one woman said. Some were worried arrangements could increase the risk of spreading the virus. 'You are also potentially putting yourself in a room with someone who has Corona, no thank you,' said one woman. While others were more concerned about the practicalities of the idea. 'You could be stuck in a single room with someone who snores, is abusive, smells or is generally awful,' one woman said. 'You might have to share a bed. You might not like the standard of their personal hygiene or hygiene in the hotel room. They might have annoying habits or hog the TV or have four-hour long showers,' said another. 'My ocd would probably kick in and id get annoyed at them being a potential slob or not putting the loo seat down,' one woman admitted. Some people said the arrangement would end in the people sleeping together, killing each other or both. 'You would have to be pretty desperate to save $1000, or want to hook up,' one woman said. One woman even admitted she has decided to quarantine in a different room to her boyfriend of two years because even 14 days with him would drive her crazy. 'I would have the same concerns with my husband of 40 years,' one woman said. However the idea of sharing the time with another person appealed to some people who admitted they struggle to be alone. '$1000 is a lot of money. And what an opportunity for a crazy, wild adventure,' one woman laughed. 'Imagine if I found the love of my life on the way home what a story,' said one woman. Others said they would only agree if their quarantine buddy was 'attractive'. 'For real, this could be an amazing deal with the right person,' one woman said. 'I would quarantine with an attractive stranger and if it didn't work I would tell the hotel we broke up and then get another room,' one man said. The rooms all vary in size - with some people complaining they have no floor space Some parents joked people could quarantine with their families for the discount. 'You're welcome to quarantine with my three children. They are 3, 5 and 7. Impeccably behaved. Never fight. Neat and tidy. Hardly ever complain. I'll even foot the whole bill,' one mum laughed. And some admitted they were also torn. 'It might or might not be worth saving the $1,000. You'll either never speak to them again or become best friends,' one man said. One woman said it is a smart woman for people heading to Darwin - as the accommodation is in a work camp and couples or people travelling together are given their own rooms. One man shared this photo of his hotel room - which was 'small for two people' Another couple revealed they had the penthouse with balconies, two lounge rooms and two baths rooms - so could 'spread out' 'So you would save money and not have to compromise on space,' she said. And many people agreed that while they would never want to be in the situation where they had to quarantine with a stranger they would be happy to watch it on live television. 'They could call it Quarantined at First Sight,' one man suggested. 'I would definitely watch the highlight reel of that show,' one person agreed. 'I love trash TV. I would watch it,' said another. Melissa Caddick's husband has lost his wife, his $1,700-a-week living allowance, his prized $300,000 super car - and now his personalised numberplates. Anthony Koletti's distinctive puppy-themed plates, '2 PAWS', are now back on the market and are advertised for $479 on the NSW Government's MyPlates website. The plates were an apparent reference to Mr Koletti and his missing wife's two pet dogs as well as a nod to his DJ moniker, Paws Off Productions. Daily Mail Australia has established that Mr Koletti's Audi R8 - his pride and joy - was seized by the receivers reviewing his wife's assets in January. That left the husband of Sydney's alleged runaway conwoman with less impressive wheels: a Mercedes AMG cla45 - originally valued at about $55,000. The latest blow comes amid a stream of bad news for Mr Koletti, 38, as a Federal Court judge axed the living allowance supporting him and his teenage step-son. Meanwhile, provisional liquidators poring over Caddick's financial affairs today claimed they could not find one example of a genuine investment for her clients. What once was: Melissa Caddick's husband Anthony Koletti's $300,000 Audi R8 was seized by receivers last month and now its special feature number plates are up for sale For sale: Mr Koletti's distinctive plates - which share a similar name to his DJ side-hustle Paws Off Productions - are on the market Mr Koletti's DJ business was called 'Paws Off Productions' and his car was emblazoned '2 PAWS' - in what may be a tribute to the couple's two dogs Caddick is accused of sending her clients mocked up CommSec documents, account numbers and all, showing the incredible returns she was making them. In a statement on Wednesday, Bruce Gleeson from Jones Partners confirmed the existence of 'hundreds of false bank statements, share contracts and share trading statements' in Caddick's files. 'In nearly all cases the transactions referred to in the documents and the purported shareholdings deemed to be held by the investors were fictitious,' he said. None of the CommSec paperwork was the real deal, the receiver claimed, adding they believe she used Excel spreadsheets to allegedly mock them up. Caddick is believed to have made more than $20million from her long-running alleged scam. Investigators believe some of the funds were used to fuel her lavish lifestyle, including designer clothes, bespoke jewellery and overseas holidays. But not much has been left behind for her investors - or for Mr Koletti and Caddick's son to live off. The man who has pored through Melissa Caddick's financial documents - provisional liquidator Bruce Gleeson - said her supposed transactions were nearly all fictitious Anthony's axed allowance Earlier this week, lawyer Stephanie Fendekian for ASIC told Justice Brigitte Markovic that Caddick's bank accounts, where Mr Koletti's allowance was sourced from, had just $5,600 left. Justice Brigitte Markovic ordered Mr Koletti's $1,700 payments stop when those funds ran out. Allowances such as these are standard practice when someone's assets are frozen, as Caddick's have been since early November. Mr Koletti was originally granted an $800 per week stipend but the court heard in December that this was insufficient. In early December, the house husband said he had just $1.95 in the bank. His allowance was hiked to $1700 after brother-in-law Adam Grimley tallied Caddick's family's costs at approximately $21,612 per month. Riding high: Mr Koletti behind the wheel of an Audi years before his wife vanished Furious investors revolted over the allowance, arguing potentially ill-gotten gains shouldn't be used to prop up the Caddick family's princely lifestyle. There is no suggestion Mr Koletti played any role in her disappearance or knew of her alleged financial trickery. And Caddick's parents, too, may have been victims of their daughter's alleged scam, according to a letter tendered with the court this week. Michael Hayter, a lawyer for the receivers, requested Mr Grimley send details of monies that Caddick had 'invested in shares' on the family's behalf, but are unaccounted for. Joy ride's over: Mr Koletti, a former hairdresser at Joh Bailey's Bondi Junction branch, has lost his right to a $1700-a-week allowance Where is she? Melissa Caddick has been missing since last November. Above, she's curled up on the couch with husband Anthony Koletti The last known of Melissa Caddick - at her $6.2million Dover Heights home during an ASIC/AFP raid 'Could Mr Adam Grimley urgently provide to us details of the monies he and his parents have paid Ms Caddick to invest in shares which have not been returned to them,' Mr Hayter asked in the February 1 letter. Caddick had purchased her elderly parents a penthouse apartment in Edgecliff, after convincing them to sell up their family home in the city's south. The home was mortgaged and what happened to the proceeds of the sale of their house is unclear. Right now, Caddick's parents face a more pressing issue. They could be evicted from their property, with investors calling for their daughter's property portfolio to eb sold off. ASIC seized a number of luxury items including jewellery and designer clothing from Caddick's $6.2million Dover Heights home on November 11, the day she was last seen. Five long term homeless people have been given homes with back up support in Laois for the first time by the Peter McVerry Trust. Entrenched rough sleepers have been given housing in five locations in Laois in 2020, along with "wraparound supports" to ensure that the vulnerable people with complex needs can manage to remain off the streets again. The Peter McVerry Trust this week announced that it has met its Housing First target in the Midlands for 2020. In its first year after signing a new three-year contract, the national housing and homeless charity has created 11 Housing First tenancies across the Midlands. In Laois their target has been met and more than doubled. "For Housing First in year one (2020) of the three year contract was 2 tenancies. We exceeded this target by securing 5 Housing First tenancies in the county last year," a spokesperson confirmed. Pat Doyle is CEO of Peter McVerry Trust. We are delighted to have reached our target for Housing First across the Midlands in 2020, with the support of Westmeath, Offaly, Laois and Longford county councils and the HSE. We are working hard to not only meet our targets but exceed them. Housing First is a housing service for entrenched rough sleepers which puts housing front and centre and focuses on getting each individual a key to the door. This model is different because it shifts away from the emergency hostel model and provides wraparound supports once a person is housed, to make every success of each new tenancy generated. It is hugely successful at not only providing housing for complex cases but ensuring they remain housed years later," the CEO said. The Midlands Housing First contract is 5% of the national target and comes in under the Housing First National Implementation Plan, which is led by Bob Jordan, National Director of Housing First, and is funded through Rebuilding Ireland. On future plans for the region, Pat Doyle said it aims to offer another 23 tenancies in the midlands by 2022. Our target up to the end of 2022 for the Midlands Housing First contract is to generate a minimum of 34 new tenancies. Over the next two years, we will continue to work with the most vulnerable people impacted by homelessness in each of the four counties in the Midlands to get them off the street, out of hostels and into a secure home of their own. In Co. Westmeath last year, three Housing First tenancies were secured, also meeting the target set for the county for 2020. Mick, one of the three tenancies secured, received the keys to his own home in Kilbeggan in December last year after spending three years in homelessness: I found out Christmas week, the day before Christmas Eve from the keyworker that she had a surprise for me. She had an apartment for me to move into for Christmas so I was over the moon. I wouldnt be able to do anything and everything on my own so its true Ive a good keyworker and its through the Peter McVerry Trust that I got housed. Im in my own apartment and I can look after myself. See the Peter McVerry Trust website here. Brazil 's health regulatory agency said Tuesday it had approved the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for widespread use, as the country races to secure enough doses to contain one of the world's worst outbreaks. "It gives me great pleasure to announce that after a 17-day review, (regulators) have granted the first approval in the Americas for widespread use of a vaccine against Covid-19," said Antonio Barra Torres, the director of federal health regulator Anvisa, underlining that the approval was definitive and not only for emergency use. However, the vaccine is not yet available in Brazil, which is so far using two others: Chinese-developed CoronaVac and one developed by Oxford University and British-Swedish pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca. The approval came a day after media reports said Pfizer representatives had told Brazilian senators that the country's regulatory requirements were excessively strict. Pfizer has objected to the government's insistence on the right to hold the company liable for any side effects the vaccine may cause. Anvisa's statement did not mention the issue, which has been a sticking point in Brazil's negotiations with Pfizer. The US company says it offered Brazil around 70 million doses of the vaccine in August, but that negotiations broke down over the liability issue. President Jair Bolsonaro, whose critics accuse him of fueling anti-vaccine skepticism, joked at one point of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, "If it turns you into an alligator, that's your problem.... They (the companies) don't want to hear about it." The far-right leader faces criticism for his handling of the pandemic, including vaccine shortages that have forced several cities to halt their immunization drives after a little over a month. Brazil has vaccinated about 5.9 million people so far, or 2.8 percent of its population of 212 million. More than 247,000 people have died of Covid-19 in Brazil, the second-highest death toll, after the United States. - Next step: secure doses - Anvisa had previously granted only emergency approval for Covid-19 vaccines, allowing the public health system to administer them to high-risk groups such as health workers, the elderly and indigenous communities. Definitive approval will allow the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to be sold commercially and administered to all populations in Brazil -- if the country strikes a deal to secure it. The vaccine's "safety, quality and effectiveness were verified and confirmed by Anvisa's technical team," Torres said in the statement. "We hope other vaccines will also soon be evaluated and approved." The vaccine from American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech is based on novel mRNA technology. It delivers instructions to the body to help the immune system identify and destroy Covid-19 molecules. Clinical trials found it is more than 95 percent effective, the best results so far for a vaccine against the new coronavirus. This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 23:34:36|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- China believes that the United States' return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and lifting of sanctions against Iran holds the key to breaking the impasse on the Iranian nuclear issue, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Wednesday. Iran announced on Tuesday that it would immediately restrict on-site inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). On the same day, foreign ministers of France, Germany, and Britain issued a joint statement saying they deeply regretted Iran's move. In response, spokesperson Wang Wenbin said China attaches great significance to the Iranian nuclear issue. It has always actively promoted the relevant political and diplomatic settlement process, and upheld the international nuclear non-proliferation regime as well as peace and stability in the Middle East. China has played an important role in pushing the JCPOA back on track. At the foreign ministers' meeting on the Iranian nuclear issue in December last year, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi stressed that all parties should unswervingly preserve the JCPOA, fairly and objectively resolve differences on compliance issues, properly handle regional security issues and promote the unconditional U.S. return to the deal at an early date. The spokesperson said China will continue to preserve the JCPOA, and work for the resumption of full and effective compliance at an early date to maintain peace and stability in the Middle East. He noted that the current Iranian nuclear issue is at a critical juncture, and opportunities and challenges coexist. He said China has always believed that the U.S. return to the JCPOA and lifting sanctions on Iran holds the key to breaking deadlock. China appreciates the reaching of a temporary bilateral technical understanding on the safeguards issue between Iran and the IAEA, and noticed that both sides have spoken highly of the result, he said. China hopes that relevant understandings would be faithfully implemented, and calls on other parties to play a constructive role in this regard, he added. Enditem The Arizona Department of Corrections is depriving inmates of freedom theyve earned. Its $24 million tracking software isnt doing what its supposed to when it comes to calculating time served credits. Thats according to whistleblowers whove been ignored by the DOC and have taken their complaints to the press. Heres Jimmy Jenkins of KJZZ, who was given access to documents showing the bug has been well-documented and remains unfixed, more than a year after it was discovered. According to Arizona Department of Corrections whistleblowers, hundreds of incarcerated people who should be eligible for release are being held in prison because the inmate management software cannot interpret current sentencing laws. KJZZ is not naming the whistleblowers because they fear retaliation. The employees said they have been raising the issue internally for more than a year, but prison administrators have not acted to fix the software bug. The sources said Chief Information Officer Holly Greene and Deputy Director Joe Profiri have been aware of the problem since 2019. The management software (ACIS) rolled out during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday weekend, which is always the best time to debut new systems that might need a lot of immediate tech support. Since its rollout, the software has generated 19,000 bug reports. The one at the center of this ongoing deprivation of liberty arose as the result of a law passed in June of that year. The law gave additional credit days to inmates charged with low-level drug offenses, increasing the credit from one day for every six served to three days for every seven. Qualified inmates are only supposed to serve 70% of their sentences, provided they also complete some other prerequisites, like earning a GED or entering a substance abuse program. That law hasnt been implemented in the Arizona prison system because the $24 million software cant seem to figure out how to do it. To be sure, legislation that changes time served credits for only a certain percentage of inmates creates problems for prison management systems. But thats why you spend $24 million buying one, rather than just asking employees if theyre any good at Excel. But thats what has actually happened. With the expensive software unable to correctly calculate time served credits, prison employees are doing it by hand. Department sources said this means someone is sitting there crunching numbers with a calculator and interpreting how each of the new laws that have been passed would impact an inmate. It makes me sick, one source said, noting that even the most diligent employees are capable of making math errors that could result in additional months or years in prison for an inmate. What the hell are we doing here? Peoples lives are at stake. Hundreds of inmates are affected. A spokesperson for the prison system says the DOC has identified 733 inmates who qualify for the increased time served credits. But that number is still likely on the low end since the software is incapable of accurately identifying qualifying inmates, much less accurately calculating the length of time they have left to serve. Meanwhile, the bug thats killing freedom remains unpatched. And it appears the softwares many other bugs are making time spent in prison even more dangerous and miserable than it already is. Medical information goes missing or fails to transfer correctly when inmates are moved. Rival gang members have been placed in the same cells. Head counts are inaccurate. Inmate property and commissary funds are routinely recorded incorrectly. Prison is already a miserable experience. Those trying to turn their lives around and engage in the rehabilitative process most prisons consider to be ancillary at best are being punished for trying by a system that is failing everyone who uses it or is affected by it. The Orange Police Department is investigating a Tuesday afternoon shooting that sent two Orange teenagers to the hospital. A 13-year-old girl and 15-year-old boy suffered non-life-threatening gunshot wounds, Orange Police Captain Robert Enmon said. Police arrived to the 200 block of West Decatur Avenue Tuesday afternoon after reports of shooting. When officers arrived on scene, they found the 13-year-old girl outside of the home with a gunshot wound to the leg. She was taken to a Beaumont hospital. The 15-year-old was shot in the shoulder and taken by private vehicle to a hospital in Sulphur, Louisiana. Both teenagers lived in the neighborhood. Orange police still do not have a motive or suspect, but Enmon said after investigators spoke with bystanders they believe the boy was the target of the shooting. Enmon and investigators do not believe those responsible for the shooting are from Orange. Enmon and Orange Police asking anyone with information to call the department at (409)-883-1026. The story will be updated with more information jorge.ramos@beaumontenterprise.com twitter.com/byjorgeramos Sterling made fresh gains and shares in sectors battered by the pandemic rallied as investors welcomed the plan to ease lockdown rules albeit slowly. As Goldman Sachs declared the UK economy was 'well positioned for a near-term rebound', the pound rose above $1.41 for the first time since April 2018 and topped 1.16 for the first time since March last year. It came as travel and airline stocks made gains, on hopes that families would get away on holiday this summer. As Goldman Sachs declared the UK economy was 'well positioned for a near-term rebound', the pound rose above $1.41 for the first time since April 2018 But analysts warned that hospitality firms 'still have a long way to go before they can really open' due to the cautious timetable outlined by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. British Airways owner IAG, Easyjet, Wizz Air and Tui were among the winners after Johnson hinted that international travel could resume on May 17, sparking a surge in holiday bookings. Also on the rise was Upper Crust owner SSP, which jumped 17 per cent, and WH Smith, which was up 7.2 per cent. Both have many outlets at travel hubs such as airports and train stations. Tui said bookings for foreign trips jumped 500 per cent, while Thomas Cook revealed traffic to its website was up 100 per cent, with bookings flooding in for countries such as Greece, Cyprus and Mexico. Tour operator Jet2 said summer bookings had leapt 600 per cent. At the same time airline Easyjet reported a 337 per cent rise in flight bookings and a 630 per cent jump in holiday bookings for locations such as Alicante, Malaga, Palma, Faro and Crete. Oliver Blackbourn, fund manager at Janus Henderson, said: 'The news will be the light at the end of the tunnel for the services side of the economy, where the restrictions have been devastating.' Overall, the FTSE 100 rose 13.70 points to 6625.94 and the FTSE 250 added 76.63 points, at 21,057.72. The two indices were unloved during 2020 but have risen steadily this year as the rapid vaccination rollout has drawn overseas investors to the UK. Cecilia Mariotti, analyst at Goldman Sachs, said: 'The FTSE 100 has been the best-performing equity market since the start of the year. 'Considering the vaccine rollout and the decrease in infection rate and potential for an expansionary March Budget, the UK is well positioned for a near-term rebound.' But others were frustrated that the UK is not moving faster out of lockdown, adding that over-caution is likely to hurt the hospitality sector. Neil Wilson, analyst at Markets, said: 'Hospitality businesses still have a long way to go before they can really reopen. The Government ought to be loosening up quicker since the data has been so encouraging. 'The economy will have been out of kilter for 15 months by June and even then foreign travel, a rich source of income, will still likely be severely curtailed. 'The hope is that this is the final push and we will never return to lockdowns they have been hugely and irreversibly damaging to some of the most vulnerable.' (Natural News) In the early days of Bidens presidency, his administration is already creating brand new definitions for terms like domestic terrorism. (Article by Travis republished from WeLoveTrump.com) Apparently, the events of the short Capital riot on January 6th are absolutely domestic terrorism, while the year long rioting and assaults on federal buildings in Portland by Antifa is not. Thats right, Democrats have introduced yet another double standard. This one comes from Joe Bidens pick for Attorney General, Judge Merrick Garland. Garland, who has openly called the Capital riot domestic terrorism, was questioned by Josh Hawley on whether or not the attack last year on a Portland courthouse was as well. Garlands immediate reaction was akin to that of a deer in the headlights. He then suggested that because the courthouse was not open, the attacks may not have been domestic terrorism at all. Merrick Garland: Portland Riots May Not Be Domestic Terrorism Because Courthouse Was Closed https://t.co/z54hNyENmD Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) February 23, 2021 Breitbart has more on Garlands double standard response: Judge Merrick Garland told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday that Antifas attacks on the U.S. courthouse in Portland last year may not have been domestic terrorism, because unlike the Capitol riot, they took place at night when the court was not in operation. Garland, who is President Joe Bidens nominee for U.S. Attorney General, was questioned at his confirmation hearing by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO): Sen. Hawley: Let me ask you about assaults on federal property in places other than Washington, DC Portland, for instance, Seattle. Do you regard assaults on federal courthouses or other federal property as acts of domestic extremism, domestic terrorism? Judge Garland: Well, Senator, my own definition, which is about the same as the statutory definition, is the use of violence or threats of violence in attempt to disrupt the democratic processes. So an attack on a courthouse, while in operation, trying to prevent judges from actually deciding cases, that plainly is domestic extremism, domestic terrorism. An attack simply on a government property at night, or any other kind of circumstances, is a clear crime and a serious one, and should be punished. I dont know enough about the facts of the example youre talking about. But thats where I draw the line. One is both are criminal, but one is a core attack on our democratic institutions. Heres video of the question from Hawley, and Garlands response: NEW Biden AG pick Merrick Garland says #Antifa attacks on federal courthouse may not be domestic terrorism because they happened at night.pic.twitter.com/4Q8o0tHt8Z Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) February 22, 2021 Notable exchange btwn Sen. Hawley and Garland Hawley asks if attacking courthouses is domestic extremism/terrorism, re: Portland. Garland draws a line between attacking federal property at night/generally and, in a clear nod to Jan. 6, doing it to stop judges from hearing cases Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) February 22, 2021 Merrick Garland, questioned by @HawleyMO, just tried to differentiate between the Capitol riot (domestic terrorism) and the attacks on the Portland courthouse (extremism) by saying one was during the day to disrupt a government function and one was at night #GarlandHearing Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) February 22, 2021 If I break into a closed bank and clean it out, does that mean it's not bank robbery? The Cincy Buckeye (@CincyBuckeye) February 23, 2021 When I watched the AG nominee Garland say that the ANTIFAS attack on the Federal Courthouse in Portland was not a domestic terrorist attack because it was carried out at night, it was as if his hand came out of the computer screen and violently slapped my intelligence. Emilson Nunes Costa (@EmilsonNunesCo2) February 23, 2021 Today, Merrick Garland: Refused to say if men should play in women's sports Refused to say illegal border crossings should remain a crime Refused to say ANTIFA engaged in domestic terrorism in Portland Don't let the media lie to you, Biden's pick for AG is NOT a moderate. Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) February 23, 2021 This was a stunningly stupid answer by Garland, and one that does not inspire confidence in his potential role as Attorney General. This is especially disturbing because Garland promised to defend the Portland courthouse against anarchists when questioned by Senator Lindsey Graham: Sen. Lindsey Graham to Judge Merrick Garland: "Do you promise to defend the Portland courthouse against anarchists?" pic.twitter.com/6pRID0KZrM The Hill (@thehill) February 22, 2021 So, does this mean Garland will only protect the federal courthouse in the day time? This is not the answers Americans want from someone who is likely to be Bidens new Attorney General. Merrick Garland claiming #Antifa attacks on Portland, OR federal courthouse weren't domestic terrorism because they were "at night" is an eye-rolling distinction w/o a difference. Typical lawyer parsing of facts, which is why people hate lawyers. https://t.co/c4D4SAfpla Scott St. Clair (@PiperScott1949) February 23, 2021 @SenatorHagerty I just watched excerpts from Garlands questioning he doesnt know enough about the protest and riots in Portland and all the other cities last summer? He hasnt thought about the border crossings be any legal?? Hes too stupid to be a AG Melanie Miller White (@MelanieMillerW3) February 23, 2021 So just so were clear This may not be domestic terrorism. Still confused? Yeah, so are we Read more at: WeLoveTrump.com and AntifaWatch.news Myanmar refugees seized in Kangar, Malaysia in March 2019 (Photo: VNA) Kuala Lumpur A Malaysian court has allowed a temporary stay of deportation of 1,200 Myanmar nationals who were scheduled to be sent back homeland on February 23, according to an insider. The stay was granted until 10am on February 24, when the court will hear the groups application for judicial review to suspend the deportation, said New Sin Yew, a lawyer for Amnesty International and Asylum Access. The 1,200 detainees, including asylum seekers and children, were scheduled to leave on February 23 afternoon in three navy ships sent by Myanmars military. The court issued the temporary halt due to current political tension in their homeland. Myanmar nationals constitute the biggest population of emigrants in Malaysia. After a childhood in Paris, Eliza headed to the Balkans where she rediscovered her Yugoslavian origins. She began her artistic journey at the School of Fine Arts in Skopje, Macedonia, and then returned to the French capital to continue her training. There she discovered the work of Pierre Soulages (twentieth century). The French painter and engravers way of working the material through the privileged use of black fascinated her. The colours of William Lakin Turner (English landscape painter, nineteenth and twentieth centuries), the light of Gustav Klimt (Austrian Symbolist painter, nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and the compositions of Serge Poliakoff (French painter, twentieth century ) also weigh in among her influences. A graduate of the Paris School of Fine Arts in 2002, the artist became interested in other artistic disciplines such as graphic design, lithography and etching. The latter, a technique based on prints, is particularly captivating for her. She likes to take the principles and apply them to her art. The prints in Elizas oil painting leave printed textures, shapes and colours. Her backgrounds are almost translucent thin papers, which create, with the repetition and accumulation of the prints, an effect of transparencies. Inspired by her family history and her time in the land of her roots, the painter is passionate about orthodox religious art. This aspect of the Macedonian culture is a common thread in her artistic research. Admiring religious monuments and the spiritual energy they emit, Eliza is influenced by the characteristic icons of Eastern Christianity. The passage of time and the mark it makes on these theological works are at the heart of her material work. HARTFORD - The CT League of Conservation Voters recently released the Connecticut delegations scores on the League of Conservation Voters 2020 National Environmental Scorecard. The scorecard is the primary yardstick for evaluating the environmental records of every member of Congress and is available for download in both English and Spanish at scorecard.lcv.org, according to a statement. President Biden has wasted no time putting climate at the top of his agenda. We are proud to have representatives that will fight for our future alongside this new administration, said CTLCV Executive Director Lori Brown. Our entire House and Senate delegation Senators Blumenthal and Murphy, and Representatives DeLauro, Himes, Courtney, Larson and Hayes have all stood up for our health and our environment. They worked every day to protect our communities from toxic PFAS pollution, to secure full funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and to fight repeated efforts to weaken our nations core environmental laws, Brown said. But the federal government cannot do this alone. Now with partners in the White House and Congress, there has never been a more important time to build support for clean energy to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and to put an end to new fossil fuel infrastructure. Our state leaders can help put us on the path to a clean energy future, said Brown. The 2020 Scorecard measures votes cast during the second session of the 116th Congress. In Connecticut, all five House members earned 100 percent, and senators scored high marks among their peers, according to the statement. The full delegations scores for 2020 are: U.S. Sen. Blumenthal, 92 percent; U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, 85 percent; U.S. Rep. John Larson, 100 percent; U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, 100 percent; U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, 100 percent; Rep. Jahana Hayes, 100 percent; Rep. Jim Himes, 100 percent. During an incredibly difficult and unprecedented year and with the most anti-environmental president ever, pro-environment members of the 116th Congress paved the way for transformational action on climate and environmental justice, said LCV Senior Vice President of Government Affairs Tiernan Sittenfeld. The 2020 Scorecard includes 21 House votes that advanced pro-environmental and pro-democracy bills, provisions, and government funding. In the Senate, for the fourth year in a row, the majority of the 13 scored votes were extreme and partisan nominations both to the federal bench and the Trump administration. For the first time, the 2020 National Environmental Scorecard includes votes on removing public monuments to racism and policing and criminal justice reform, according to the statement. The same damaging system, racism, is at the root of climate injustice, environmental injustice, and police brutality. The 2020 Scorecard therefore includes votes that reflect LCVs belief that these struggles are intertwined and must be addressed together, according to the statement. According to members, LCV has published a National Environmental Scorecard every Congress since 1970. The scorecard represents the consensus of experts from more than 20 respected environmental and conservation organizations who selected the key votes on which members of Congress should be scored. LCV scores votes on the most important issues of the year, including energy, climate change, environmental justice, public health, public lands and wildlife conservation, democracy, and spending for environmental programs. The votes included in the Scorecard presented members of Congress with a real choice and help distinguish which legislators are working for environmental protection. More information on individual votes and the Scorecard archive can be found at scorecard.lcv.org. Earlier this month, LCV released a new report examining the environmental records of members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC), Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), collectively referred to as the Tri-Caucus. Using data from LCVs National Environmental Scorecard, the report details how members of the Tri-Caucus were champions of strong environmental policies that address environmental injustice, helped chair a record number of hearings about climate change, and led on many of the critical pro-environmental bills during the 116th Congress, according to the statement. Their hilarious portrayal of the joys and frustrations of life with family and neighbours made Birds of a Feather a huge hit. But now it has been reported that Pauline Quirke's, 61, friendship with her co-stars ended after an 'astonishing' face-off with Lesley Joseph, 75, outside TV studio toilets, which reportedly left Linda Robson, 62, believing the pair 'will never speak again'. According to the report, the women were 'basically pulled apart' by Teddington Studios' crew members who were left 'stunned' over the alleged incident. What!? It has been reported that Pauline Quirke's, 61, friendship with her Birds of a Feather co-stars ended after an 'astonishing' face-off with Lesley Joseph, 75, outside TV studio toilets A source told The Sun: 'The nadir came during one astonishing row at Teddington Studios, culminating in Pauline and Lesley squaring off, noses centimetres apart, outside the women's loos. 'They were basically pulled apart by stunned crew members. The insider explained how the friendship crumbled from that point, and claimed: 'Linda doesn't believe they'll ever speak again.' MailOnline has contacted Pauline Quirke and Lesley Joseph's representatives for comment. Face-off? According to the report, the women were 'basically pulled apart' by Teddington Studios' crew members who were left 'stunned' over the alleged incident (Pictured in 2012 on stage in Birds of a Feather play at The New Victoria Theatre in Woking) Pauline and Linda played sisters in the hit comedy, and as real-life childhood best friends appeared to be a perfect fit for the roles. But the frequent on-screen bickering between their characters Sharon Theodopolopodous and Tracey Stubbs appears to have exploded into the actors' real lives, prompting fears for the future of the long-running programme. This weekend, The Mail on Sunday revealed that a seemingly irreparable rift has developed between Pauline and Linda, whose friendship of 50 years once helped cement their reputation as among the UK's most popular double acts. The end? The insider explained how the friendship crumbled from that point, and claimed: 'Linda doesn't believe they'll ever speak again' (Pictured in 2014) Insiders said there have been 'real and tense issues' which resulted in Pauline refusing to take part in the 30th anniversary show, which aired in 2019. At the same time, Linda grew closer to co-star Lesley, who plays man-eating neighbour Dorien Green, and the pair decided not to ask Pauline to take part in 2020's Christmas special. The fall-out seemingly marks an end to Pauline's much-loved character of Sharon, whose recent absences have been explained by the character heading off on a cruise. One friend said: 'Both Linda and Lesley were saddened that Pauline didn't want to return to make a 30th anniversary episode. Linda and Pauline used to be very close, less so Pauline and Lesley. 'I think Pauline resented the attention that Lesley got and it was very tense and difficult to navigate at times. 'Pauline wasn't approached about the Christmas special. The atmosphere on the set had previously become difficult, there were real and tense issues.' The trio shot to fame in 1989 when Birds Of A Feather began on BBC1. Following the lives of two sisters who move in together after their husbands are jailed for armed robbery, it ran for nine years. Linda Robson and Pauline Quirke, 1993 It was later revived in 2014 on ITV by its original writers and creators Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran. The Christmas special pulled in an impressive 7.9 million viewers, and it is understood that Linda and Lesley are keen to continue with the Essex-set show. But sources say ITV are not convinced they want to make another series. Claims of Pauline's allegedly 'demanding' and 'difficult' behaviour on set were blamed as factors for the original fall out, and in a bid to secure the future of the show, a new character called Jordan dubbed a 'mini-me' of Sharon was introduced. The friend added: 'It appears that Sharon has been replaced by another character so that the show can go on. It is all very sad. Pauline and Linda have been friends for more than half a century and, of course, Lesley has known the women for at least 30 of those years.' To complicate matters, Pauline's son Charlie also stars on the show as Travis Stubbs, Tracey's youngest son. He appeared in the Christmas special and at the time ITV tried to explain her absence. A spokesperson said: 'Unfortunately, Pauline Quirke will not be taking part as she's stepping back from acting to focus on her 200 nationwide performing arts academies.' In the show, only a photograph of Sharon was seen and the storyline was written to say that she was on a cruise, during which she had met a Costa Rican hunk and married him. Irreparable: Over the weekend, The Mail on Sunday revealed that a seemingly irreparable rift has developed between Pauline and Linda Last year, Linda described her long friendship with Pauline, saying: 'We were friends from ten years of age. We went to the same primary school and we started taking acting classes together. 'We were known as the real kids, or the cockney kids off the street. We've both been really good friends, and we're still working 52 years later.' Linda and Lesley revealed in an interview with bingo company Mecca that they had met up during the pandemic when restrictions allowed, but there was no mention of Pauline. The two women declined to comment at the time. Pauline Quirke's spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. Small changes to people's writing style can reveal which social group they "belong to" at a given moment say psychologists. Groups are central to human identity, and most people are part of multiple groups based on shared interests or characteristics - ranging from local clubs to national identity. When one of these group memberships becomes relevant in a particular situation, behaviour tends to follow the norms of this group so that people behave "appropriately". The new study - by Lancaster University, the University of Exeter, Imperial College London and University College London - demonstrates that group normative behaviour is reflected in a person's writing style. It also shows that assessing writing style can reveal - with an accuracy of about 70% - which of two groups affected a person while they were writing a particular piece of text. The paper, published in the journal Behavior Research Methods, is entitled: "ASIA: Automated Social Identity Assessment using linguistic style." Professor Mark Levine of Lancaster University said: "Our work shows that it is possible to see changes in the way people are thinking about themselves - just from the way they write. These identity traces seem to be present even when we control for the topics that people are writing about - or where they are doing the writing. The ASIA tool kit is an important advance in our ability to study the way psychological identity plays a role in shaping behaviour." To demonstrate their method, researchers studied how people who are parents and feminists change their writing style when they move from one identity to another on anonymous online forums such as Reddit, Mumsnet and Netmums. "People are not just one thing - we change who we are, our identity, from situation to situation," said Dr Miriam Koschate-Reis from the University of Exeter. "In the current situation, many people will need to switch between being a parent and being an employee as they are trying to manage home schooling, childcare and work commitments. "Switches between identities influence behaviour in multiple ways, and in our study we tracked which identity was active by focussing on language. "We found that people not only change their writing style to impress their audience - they change it based on the group identity that is influencing them at the time. "So, when we asked people in an experiment to think about themselves as a parent, their language patterns reflected this." The study avoided "content" words (a parent might mention "childcare" for example) and focussed on stylistic patterns including use of pronouns, "intellectual" words and words expressing emotions. Commenting on the possible uses of the new method, Dr Koschate-Reis said: "We are currently focussing on mental health. "It is the first method that lets us study how people access different group identities outside the laboratory on a large scale, in a quantified way. "For example, it gives us the opportunity to understand how people acquire new identities, such as becoming a first-time parent, and whether difficulties 'getting into' this identity may be linked to postnatal depression and anxiety. "Our method could help to inform policies and interventions in this area, and in many others." Group identities have been found to affect thoughts, emotions and behaviour in many settings - from work contexts to education to political activism. Research is ongoing to understand how much control we have over switches between different identities - most of which are thought to be triggered by the social context. Dr Koschate-Reis said it might be possible to manipulate the cues that trigger an identity switch by going to a location associated with the identity. For example, students might find it easier to write in an "academic style" when they are in the library rather than the local coffee shop. ### The study was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). In times of peril, many people may seek comfort in their faith. The COVID-19 pandemic is no different. It has been divisive on physical, social and political fronts, but still the Athens LGBTQ community have found support and unity in their churches. (Newser) President Bidens first bilateral meeting with Canadas Justin Trudeau since taking office was high on policy, low on pomp, and featured a very large swipe at Biden's predecessor as the coronavirus forced the two leaders to convene virtually Tuesday rather than gathering with customary Oval Office fanfare. The two leadersBiden in the Roosevelt Room at the White House and Trudeau in the prime minister's office in Ottawadelivered friendly opening remarks in front of the media, with flags from both countries on display at both ends of the long-distance conversation, the AP reports. The United States has no closer friend, no closer friend, than Canada, Biden said. Trudeau, in turn, commended Biden for quickly rejoining the Paris climate accord, a worldwide pact to curb climate emissions that former President Trump walked away from early in his term. More: The prime minister, who had a frosty relationship with Trump at times, worked in a jab at Trump as he praised Biden. US leadership has been sorely missed over the past years, Trudeau said. And I have to say as we were preparing the joint rollout of the communique on this, its nice when the Americans are not pulling out all the references to climate change and instead adding them in. story continues below In remarks at the end of the talks, Biden for the first time publicly spoke out against the detention of two Canadian citizens imprisoned in China in apparent retaliation for Canadas arrest of a top Huawei executive. Human beings are not bartering chips, Biden said of the two Canadians. We are going to work together until their safe return. Trudeau, for his part, publicly thanked Biden for his support in seeking the mens release. The two leaders agreed to a road map outlining how the neighboring countries will work together to fight COVID-19, curb climate emissions, and pursue other shared priorities. Trudeau again raised with Biden the idea of allowing Canada, which is struggling to vaccinate its population, to buy vaccines produced in the US, according to a senior Canadian government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail the private talks. Canada currently is getting vaccines shipped from Pfizer and Moderna plants in Europe. For full details, click here . (Read more Justin Trudeau stories.) LinkedIn today announced the findings of the latest LinkedIn Workforce Confidence Index, a fortnightly pulse on the confidence of the Indian workforce. Based on the survey responses of 1,752 professionals, findings from January 1-29 reveal that professionals in India are confident about career progress despite growing uncertainties about the job market and financial future in the current environment. 80% of professionals are confident about skilling opportunities, while 79% are confident about the strength of their CVs. However, the latest edition of the Workforce Confidence Index shows a dip in Indias overall confidence, as the composite score dropped from +58 in December 2020 to +54 in January 2021. The survey attributes this dip in optimism to the workforces growing concerns about the status of the pandemic, surmounting expenses, and job availability in the present economic climate. This professional uncertainty comes right after the year-end holiday season, when Indias hiring rate dropped to 17% year-over-year in December 2020, according to the latest edition of LinkedIns Labour Market update. While the job market looks bleak, entrepreneurship looked up for Indian professionals last year. The Labour Market Update spotlights the rise of entrepreneurship in India, as findings from LinkedIn's study show a 10% growth in members with the title founders or co-founder on their profiles from January to December 2020 on LinkedIn. This uptick in new entrepreneurs was particularly strong in the fields of Mental Healthcare, E-Learning, and Online Media. "Skills are expected to become the new professional 'currency' this year as workers from different generations rely on learning new skills to future-proof their careers, at a time when industries continue to strengthen their remote operations. Employees from traditional sectors such as Corporate Services, Healthcare, and Software & IT industries are found to be most confident about the future of their employers, as companies continue to adopt newer technologies, and revamp their talent strategies. Reimagining employee skills and roles to welcome the post-pandemic ways of working will be crucial to building resilience for companies across sectors," says Ashutosh Gupta, India Country Manager, LinkedIn. The Workforce Confidence Index shows that while India remains resilient, professionals from different generations have contrasting reasons to stay confident in these testing times. While 92% of Gen X and 98% of Baby Boomers say the strength of their work experience and academic qualifications makes them more confident, 86% of Millennials state they are more inspired by opportunities to grow their skills and climb the ladder. Further, 80% of Gen Z professionals say that the likelihood of progressing their careers makes them more confident today. According to the Workforce Confidence Index, professionals working in Corporate Services and Finance industries in India saw the highest surges in employer optimism. At a time when companies continue to strengthen their remote capabilities and revamp their talent strategies, findings show that the Employer Confidence Index (ECI) score of the Corporate Services industry rose from +37 in October 2020 to +54 in January 2021, which indicates a boost in demand for these services, and the sectors future growth possibilities. The Finance industrys ECI also jumped from +20 in October 2020 to +41 in January 2021, a possible indication of how Indias rapidly growing fintech landscape sharpens its focus on alternative financial services in the age of digital transformation. Overall, professionals from Corporate Services (+54), Healthcare (+49), and Software & IT (+47) industries are the most confident about the future of their employers. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. ROME, FEB 24 - Milan prosecutors said Wednesday that Italy's top food-delivery firms, Uber Eats, Glovo-Foodinho, JustEat and Deliveroo, have been notified that they must hire 60,000 riders on labour contracts for "continuous, coordinated" workers and stop using them as self-employed freelancers. Milan Chief Prosecutor Francesco Greco told a press conference that food-delivery riders in Italy have "labour conditions that deny them a future". Greco's department said six officials from these companies had been put under investigation because the situation regarding the riders was "clearly illegal". Greco said the riders should be considered "citizens" not "slaves". He also stressed the vital role the riders have played in enabling many businesses in the catering sector to survive during the COVID-19 lockdown and subsequent restrictions. The prosecutors said the food-delivery firms were facing a total of 733 million euros for failing to respect safety regulations. The press conference was called to announced that Milan prosecutors have launched an investigation into the taxes of the Italian branch of Uber Eats, which was put into administration last year for allegedly running a 'gangmaster' system of worker exploitation. Earlier this month Uber Eats said that it had a adopted a new protocol to protect the health and safety of its food-delivery riders in Italy. The new protocol will see the company provide safety equipment such as helmets free to riders and lay on free training courses for them too, among other things. Uber Eats said it was the "first company in Italy to apply a package of clear procedures and concrete initiatives" of this kind. (ANSA). Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Its not particularly happy news, said Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University who was not involved in the new research. But just knowing about it is good because then we can perhaps do something about it. Dr. Nussenzweig said he was more worried about the variant in New York than the one quickly spreading in California. Yet another contagious new variant, discovered in Britain, now accounts for about 2,000 cases in 45 states. It is expected to become the most prevalent form of the coronavirus in the United States by the end of March. Researchers have been scrutinizing the genetic material of the virus to see how it might be changing. They examine genetic sequences of virus taken from a small proportion of infected people to chart the emergence of new versions. The Caltech researchers discovered the rise in B.1.526 by scanning for mutations in hundreds of thousands of viral genetic sequences in a database called GISAID. There was a pattern that was recurring, and a group of isolates concentrated in the New York region that I hadnt seen, said Anthony West, a computational biologist at Caltech. He and his colleagues found two versions of the coronavirus increasing in frequency: one with the E484K mutation seen in South Africa and Brazil, which is thought to help the virus partially dodge the vaccines; and another with a mutation called S477N, which may affect how tightly the virus binds to human cells. Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. Minnedosa is a long way from Mars, but a company based in the Westman town played a role in getting the Mars Perseverance rover safely onto the Red Planet. Advertisement Advertise With Us Minnedosa is a long way from Mars, but a company based in the Westman town played a role in getting the Mars Perseverance rover safely onto the Red Planet. Canadian Photonics Labs supplied their Mega Speed high-speed cameras and software to help NASA test the landing decelerator and parachute system eventually used to get rovers onto the surface of Mars in one piece, said company president Mark Wahoski. The cameras were mounted on a rocket sled used to test the decelerator and captured images that are too fast for the human eye to see, he said. Personnel were also onsite at the Supersonic Naval Ordnance Research Track in California to help set up the cameras and with technical support. "When youre there, its an exhilarating thing because youre off on the control where the command post is. Its quite a process," said Wahoski. The Mars Perseverance Rover launched on July 30, 2020 and is the most sophisticated rover to land on the planet, according to NASA. "It will collect carefully selected and documented rock and sediment samples for future return to Earth, search for signs of ancient microbial life, characterize the planets geology and climate, and pave the way for human exploration beyond the Moon," the rovers press kit reads. Its a long journey from the test site on Earth to the red rock surface of Mars. Wahoski said testing first started around 2011, but the Perseverance rover didnt touch down until approximately a decade later, on Feb. 18. Mark Wahoski holds up one of the worlds smallest cameras, made by his firm Canadian Photonic Labs in Minnedosa in 2006. Wahoski said testing first started for the Mega Speed high-speed cameras and software in 2011, but the Perseverance rover didnt touch down until approximately a decade later, on Feb. 18. (File) "Its pretty rewarding because theres times where theres really a lot of pressure on you at the time when youre down there, and its all your equipment thats capturing all of this," he said. "That part is pretty stressful, but now it seems like "Geez, did we do that? and its pretty good for us and the guys who helped do that." Getting a robotic rover to Mars is a huge undertaking, Wahowski said, and his Minnedosa-based company was able to play a role in it. "Everything is travelling at about 20 times the speed of a bullet and you cant steer you have to point to something (during the launch) thats going to be where it is in nine months time. Its amazing," he said. Many probes dont make it to Mars, he said, so its a big deal when one lands successfully, like the most recent rover. "Its a long process, its not just come in and do one drivers test kind of thing. Its over the years and sometimes it goes, sometimes it doesnt, but when you think about what they did, we just had one part, one small part," he said. Asked why NASA chose to go with Canadian Photonics Labs, Wahoski said its because the company is so good at what it does. "They had other options and they had other companies trying to do it we just had the best solution," he said. Canadian Photonic Labs has other aerospace projects in the works as well, Wahoski said. The company is currently helping Space X, Elon Musks spacecraft company, test part of its Star Link satellite internet system. dmay@brandonsun.com Twitter: @DrewMay_ Shares of advanced nearly 5 per cent in morning trade on Wednesday after the bank said it will allot shares worth Rs 5,500 crore to the government in lieu of capital infusion. After opening in the green territory, the bank's shares rose 4.98 per cent to hit the upper circuit limit at Rs 17.48 a piece on the BSE. The scrip hit its upper trading limit on the NSE as well, with a gain of 4.80 per cent at Rs 17.45. An extraordinary general meeting (EGM) of the shareholders of the bank is scheduled on March 25, 2021 for preferential issue of equity shares to the government up to Rs 5,500 crore, the bank said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday. The EGM, the bank said, will take place through video conferencing and other audio visual means for passing the resolution for issuing shares to the government. In September, the government had approved a Rs 20,000 crore fund as part of the Supplementary Demands for Grants for 2020-21, for capital infusion into (PSBs). Of this, Rs 5,500 crore was approved to be infused into (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.) Christians in Indonesia are now feeling disappointed after President Jokowi's failure to deliver on his promise of better religious freedom. During the presidential election in 2019, Indonesian Christians had high hopes when they voted for Joko "Jokowi" Widodo who was incumbent presidential candidate by that time, the International Christian Concern reported. In a country which houses one of the largest Muslim population in the world, Christians in Indonesia have suffered a tide of persecution not only for a few years but decades. With a moderate stance on Islam and a firm supporter of Indonesia's philosophical foundation of "Pancasila," Jokowi won the support of Christians with 92 percent who cast their ballots in his favor his opponent former army general Prabowo Subianto who is in ally with hardline Islamists. Almost two years after the election, many Christians find themselves increasingly disappointed as victims of blasphemy accusations continue to rise. Christians seem to be the only victims of the one-sided blasphemy law which punishes those who "blaspheme" against Muhammad or Islam but there's no law against Muslims who blaspheme against Jesus or Christianity. Those convicted under the law face years of imprisonment as punishment. Even worrisome is the fact that the parliament wants to expand the blasphemy law and criminalize it. If this happens, a religious leader who "blasphemes" during a religious service and those who persuade someone to convert from Islam will be punished. Obtaining building permits for churches are still a problem and discrimination among Christians in the country is still pervasive despite the promise of a better religious freedom. The ICC has recorded three Christian churches with building permit issues in September alone. Even worse is the fact that government is shutting down thousands of churches and other places of worship causing Christians to suffer more without a place to express their faith and exercise religious freedom. While he was running for presidency, Jokowi pledged to abolish the unlawful decree of closing places of worship. But until this day, Indonesia's president has failed to follow through his promise. More than all the church closures and persecution, Christians also suffer from violence and seeming lack of justice. In September, ICC reported that a Protestant pastor was allegedly tortured and shot in a pigpen by the Indonesian Army in their search for missing weapons and separatists in the Papua province. Despite the shocking news of the pastor's brutal death, Jokowi and officials in Jakarta did not seem to respond to the murder and all seemed quiet. However, there was instant uproar in the country when a Muslim cleric was stabbed by a young man. Not a day after the incident, Jokowi immediately acknowledged the stabbing incident which happened around the same time that the pastor was killed and pledged to thoroughly investigate the incident. With all these issues, Christians in Indonesia slowly find their faith in the government, most specially from their president Jokowi, eroding. With his failure to deliver on his promise to bring religious freedom and justice to all the citizens of Indonesia, Christians feel like they are now left to fend for themselves and fight against the abuse that their own government - despite the president's promises - has brought upon them. English French Italian EssilorLuxottica Board of Directors proposes nominees to the new board Charenton-le-Pont, France (February 24, 2021 6:45pm) During its meeting today, the EssilorLuxottica Board of Directors decided to propose the nomination of the following individuals to compose its future board: Mr. Leonardo Del Vecchio, as non-independent director Mr. Francesco Milleri, as non-independent director Mr. Paul du Saillant, as non-independent director Mr. Romolo Bardin, as non-independent director Ms. Juliette Favre, as non-independent director Mr. Jean-Luc Biamonti, as independent director Ms. Marie-Christine Coisne, as independent director Mr. Jose Gonzalo, as independent director Ms. Swati Piramal, as independent director Ms. Cristina Scocchia, as independent director Ms. Nathalie von Siemens, as independent director Mr. Andrea Zappia, as independent director Resolutions will be submitted to shareholders vote at the Companys 2021 Annual General Shareholders Meeting. Any other resolutions will be decided upon during a meeting of the Board of Directors to be held in March. The mandates of the directors representing employees, Ms. Delphine Zablocki and Mr. Leonel Pereira Ascencao, will expire on September 20, 2021 and are not up for immediate renewal. We are very pleased to be able to put forward such remarkable candidates today, who stand out for their vast experience, extensive business acumen and established reputations gained throughout their respective careers serving as executives or board members of leading global companies across geographies and industries. Among them, we also welcome candidates who are both eminent executives as well as members of three important entrepreneurial families. We are fully confident in all of the candidates ability to make significant positive contributions to further accelerating the integration and ensuring the continued success of the Company, commented Leonardo Del Vecchio and Hubert Sagnieres, respectively Chairman and Vice Chairman of EssilorLuxottica. EssilorLuxottica is a global leader in the design, manufacture and distribution of ophthalmic lenses, frames and sunglasses. Formed in 2018, its mission is to help people around the world to see more, be more and live life to its fullest by addressing their evolving vision needs and personal style aspirations. The Company brings together the complementary expertise of two industry pioneers, one in advanced lens technology and the other in the craftsmanship of iconic eyewear, to set new industry standards for vision care and the consumer experience around it. Influential eyewear brands including Ray-Ban and Oakley, lens technology brands including Varilux and Transitions, and world-class retail brands including Sunglass Hut and LensCrafters are part of the EssilorLuxottica family. In 2019, EssilorLuxottica had over 150,000 employees and consolidated revenues of Euro 17.4 billion. The EssilorLuxottica share trades on the Euronext Paris market and is included in the Euro Stoxx 50 and CAC 40 indices. Codes and symbols: ISIN: FR0000121667; Reuters: ESLX.PA; Bloomberg: EL:FP. CONTACTS EssilorLuxottica Investor Relations (Charenton-le-Pont) Tel: + 33 1 49 77 42 16 (Milan) Tel: + 39 (02) 8633 4870 E-mail: ir@essilorluxottica.com EssilorLuxottica Corporate Communications (Charenton-le-Pont) Tel: + 33 1 49 77 45 02 (Milan) Tel: + 39 (02) 8633 4470 E-mail: media@essilorluxottica.com Attachment There is a sense of inevitability around banning political donations from property developers in Western Australia but it may not be the wisest decision, the opposition planning spokesman says. Tjorn Sibma told an event hosted by architecture industry bodies Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, Australian Institute of Architects and the Planning Institute of Australia in Perth on Tuesday that governance risks should be dealt with in a serious and methodical way. Opposition planning spokesman Tjorn Sibma. Credit:Peter de Kruijff I think the biggest risk to governance in planning decisions does not actually exist at the political level but in the ranges of gifts, donations, trips that kind of largesse which basically goes largely undeclared, he said. It is the mid-level bureaucrat be it state or local government that actually has the capacity to drive the potential for an end outcome. If you would like to know more about the WSD Engineering, Inc. lawsuit, please contact Attorney Jackland K. Hom today by calling (619) 255-9047. The San Francisco employment law attorneys, at Zakay Law Group, APLC and JCL Law Firm, APC, filed a class action complaint alleging that WSD Engineering, Inc. failed to accurately and timely pay employees wages. The WSD Engineering, Inc., class action lawsuit, Case No. RG21086699, is currently pending in the Alameda County Superior Court of the State of California. A copy of the Complaint can be read here. According to the lawsuit filed, WSD Engineering, Inc. allegedly violated California Labor Code Sections 201, 202, 203, 204, 206.5, 226, 226.7, 510, 512, 558, 1194, 1197, 1197.1, 1198, and 2802 by failing to: (1) pay minimum wages; (2) pay overtime wages; (3) provide required meal and rest periods; (4) reimburse employees for required expenses; (5) provide accurate itemized wage statements; (6) provide wages when due; and (7) timely pay earned wages. Under California law, every employer shall pay to each employee, on the established payday for the period involved, not less than the applicable minimum wage for all hours worked in the payroll period. Hours worked is defined in the applicable Wage Order as the time during which an employee is subject to the control of an employer and includes all the time the employee is suffered or permitted to work, whether or not required to do so. WSD Engineering, Inc.'s employees were from time to time required to perform work before and after their scheduled shifts, as well as during their off duty meal breaks. However, WSD Engineering, Inc. failed to fully compensate its employees for all of the time they spent working off-the-clock. If you would like to know more about the WSD Engineering, Inc. lawsuit, please contact Attorney Jackland K. Hom today by calling (619) 255-9047. Zakay Law Group, APLC and JCL Law Firm, APC are employment law firms with offices located in California that dedicate their practices to helping employees and consumers fight back against employers and corporations for unfair employment practices. If you need help collecting unpaid wages, overtime pay, discrimination, harassment, and other types of illegal workplace conduct, contact one of their attorneys today. ***THIS IS AN ATTORNEY ADVERTISEMENT*** Israeli nationalist hardliner Naftali Bennett (left) has said he will join a governing coalition that could end the rule of the country's longest-serving leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right). 'I will do everything to form a national unity government with my friend Yair Lapid (inset), so that, God willing, together we can save the country from a tailspin and return Israel to its course,' Bennett said after a meeting with his own party, Yamina. Centrist Lapid has been tasked with forming a new cabinet by Wednesday 11:59pm local time (2059GMT). He and Bennett have until then to complete a deal in which they are expected to each serve two years as prime minister in a rotation agreement. The announcement by Bennett brings Netanyahu's rivals a step closer towards ending his 12-year rule. Bennett, a former Netanyahu aide turned rival, said he had made the decision to prevent Israel from sliding into a fifth consecutive election in just over two years. He added that there was no feasible way for the hard-line right wing to form a governing majority in parliament. 'A government like this will succeed only if we work together as a group,' he said. Everyone 'will need to postpone fulfilling all their dreams. We will focus on what can be done, instead of fighting all day on what's impossible,' he said. Netanyahu responded to the news by saying that a Lapid-Bennett government would weaken the country and insisting that a right-wing government is still a possibility. * Username This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. Choose wisely! One day, upon leaving a store, my roommate Rebekah stopped to chat with a young couple begging for money. She learned their names, where theyd come from in the world before immigrating to Canada, and that they were expecting their first baby. She learned that money was tight and that they needed extra cash to pay for legal costs associated with their immigration process. I dont know if she gave them money that night, but I do know she came home and told me and a few other friends about their predicament. Eventually we came up with the $1,000 they needed. A few months later, the couple and their new baby came to dinner at our apartment. This wasnt unusual for Rebekah and me. Over the 10 years of our friendship, first as neighbors on the 15th floor of our Toronto high-rise, and now as roommates, weve invited hundreds of people in for dinner, some friends, some neighbors, some complete strangers. Being willing to offer this kind of hospitality has been part of a long lesson God has been teaching me in response to a question I asked almost 20 years ago. What does it mean to love my neighbor? Why is this commandment so important? On the night the young family came to dinner, we sat around the table and shared stories about our lives. We ate good food and enjoyed the gift of chocolates theyd brought to us. At one point, the young mother needed a place to breastfeed her baby, so I brought her down the hall to one of our bedrooms, settled her in and left. I never worried about whether she would steal from us, left alone like that. Besides, if she did, would it really matter? At the end of the evening, Rebekah packed up food to send home with the family. Once again, I was glad to share the excess of what we had in our cupboards. And then, all of a sudden, I wasnt. I watched as Rebekah packed the food in a canvas bag imprinted with the name of a fancy cheese shop in our city. Id received it once when shopping at the little boutique, likely having spent enough money to warrant a gift of their specially branded bag with its signature mouse and bold yellow and brown design. Not that bag, I protested inwardly. I love that bag. But I knew enough to keep silent. I knew my protestation was selfish. Embarrassingly ridiculous. Even weird. Why was I so attached to a shopping bag? Recently, I visited the cheese shop where they display those bags on the wall behind the cashier. I looked up and thought about the bag I no longer owned. I wished I still owned it, wished Rebekah had not so easily given it away. And then I felt ridiculous again. Why am I holding on to the memory of owning that bag? Why cant I let it go? It wasnt until recently that I worked out the lesson God was patiently waiting for me to consider. Once again I am reminded that there is still so much for me to learn about what it means for me to truly love my neighbor and not to be satisfied with my own ways of engaging to notice, to serve, be kind to, to encourage, even to invite home for dinner. How far does such love take me? Am I prepared to go beyond my own self-determined limits? Why, I am now wondering, did that bag cause me to think about my own loss of a material possession rather than remembering that young family? Why did I equate the bag with something I had to give up rather than using it as a prompt to pray for the family and others like them? What kind of hold does a possession as small as a bag have on me and what does it take to let it go? As is often the case with neighbors, the young family eventually disappeared from our lives. We interacted for a few months, and then they moved on. I dont know where went or how they are coping. But as Ive thought about them, Ive sensed God asking me to practise loving these particular neighbors by praying for them. Not every day, but whenever I think about that bag. Im relieved by this invitation to pray. I suspect it will help me loosen my grip on the things that, without me even realizing it, limit my capacity to love my neighbors. Lynda MacGibbons book, My Vertical Neighborhood: How Strangers Became a Community (IVP), releases March 30, 2021. She lives in Toronto where she works with InterVarsity Canada and blogs at lyndamacgibbon.com. Another 8,489 people in Britain have tested positive for Covid-19, bringing the total number of cases in the country to 4,134,639, according to official figures released Tuesday. The country also reported another 548 coronavirus-related deaths. The total number of coronavirus-related deaths in Britain now stands at 121,305. These figures only include the deaths of people who died within 28 days of their first positive test, the Xinhua news agency reported. The latest figures were revealed as nearly 18 million people in Britain have been given the first jab of the vaccine. Following his announcement of the roadmap out of lockdown on Monday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Tuesday that he is "hopeful" that all restrictions in England will be removed by June 21. "I'm hopeful but obviously nothing can be guaranteed and it all depends on the way we continue to be prudent and continue to follow the guidance in each stage," he said during a visit to a south London school. "That's why it's so important to proceed in the cautious way that we are," he said. England is currently under the third national lockdown since the outbreak of the pandemic in the country. Similar restriction measures are also in place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Also on Tuesday, Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced the roadmap out of the coronavirus lockdown with four people from two households being allowed to meet outdoors from March 15. The British government is only responsible for coronavirus restrictions in England. The devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are responsible for their own policies in relation to public health matters. To bring life back to normal, countries such as Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the United States have been racing against time to roll out coronavirus vaccines. --IANS int/rs (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.) Escherichia coli. Credit: Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID, NIH International travelers are particularly vulnerable to virulent strains of drug-resistant bacteriaoften picking up several different types during a trip through spending time in the company of other tourists, a new study reveals. The global spread of intestinal multidrug resistant gram-negative (MDR-GN) bacteria poses a serious threat to human health worldwide, with MDR clones of E.coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae threatening more antibiotic resistant infections around the world. Researchers monitored a group of European travelers visiting Lao People's Democratic Republic for three weeksanalyzing daily returns of information and stool samples to build a comprehensive picture of the tourists' gut health. Bacterial strains colonized multiple travelers staying at the same hotels and spending time in each other's company. In one exceptional instance, two participants staying in separate accommodation shared an identical strain after one took a shower in the other's bathroom. The international group of researchers, led by scientists at the Universities of Basel, Birmingham, Helsinki and Oslo, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute have published their findings in The Lancet Microbe. Alan McNally, Professor in Microbial Evolutionary Genomics at the University of Birmingham and a senior author of the study, commented: "International travel is strongly linked to the spread of MDR-GN bacteria, with transmission highest in India and Southeast Asia, Africa and South America. Travelers visiting these high-risk regions are at substantial risk of acquiring the bacteria. "Colonization by MDR-GN bacteria is a highly dynamic process. We found constant 'competition' between circulating strains acquired by individual hosts and the travelers' 'native' bacteria. Travelers can pick up the bacteria even during short visits and further spread the strains after returning home." The impact of travel on the global spread of multidrug-resistant E. coli is well documentedup to 80% of travelers returning from high-risk regions are colonized by MDR-GN bacteria, with colonization lasting up to a year. Previous traveler studies only analyzed pre- and post-travel samples, rather than the actual travel period. Researchers found that, of the group of 20 European volunteers visiting Laos, 70% had been colonized at the end of the study. Daily sampling revealed that all participants had acquired extended-spectrum beta-lactamases (ESBL) at some time point during their overseas stay. ESBL enzymes create resistance within the body to most beta-lactam antibiotics, including penicillins, cephalosporins, and aztreonam. Infections with ESBL-producing organisms have proved difficult to treat. All but one participant acquired multiple strains of bacteria with 83 unique strains identified (53 E. coli, 10 Klebsiella, 20 other ESBL-GN species) and some of these strains being shared by as many as four subjects. Study co-senior author Jukka Corander, Associate Faculty at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK, and professor at Faculty of Medicine at the University of Oslo commented: "Our study reveals the true scale and complexity at which drug-resistant bacteria colonize the intestinal tract during travel, demonstrating that it has been seriously underestimated previously. "In addition, several of our participants lost some of their travel-acquired ESBL-GN strains while still abroadindicating that previous studies solely employing pre- and post-travel sampling have under-reported the extent to which travelers are colonized by ESBL-GN." Explore further Even short travel can spread colistin-resistant bacteria More information: Intestinal multidrug-resistant bacteria contracted by visitors to a high-endemic setting: a prospective, daily, real-time sampling study, The Lancet Microbe, www.thelancet.com/journals/lan (20)30224-X/fulltext Intestinal multidrug-resistant bacteria contracted by visitors to a high-endemic setting: a prospective, daily, real-time sampling study, Gardai are investigating after a Dublin beauty salon opened to the public yesterday, with the owner arguing she has a constitutional right to earn a living. Christine McTiernan who runs C&N Beauty Room in Balbriggan took a stand because she believes small businesses should be allowed to operate despite lockdown restrictions requiring all non-essential retail to remain closed. Ms McTiernan said her salon had been inundated with calls and was booked up within hours. I received calls from people in Galway, Wicklow and all over. The reaction has been phenomenal and the support has been great. People have been telling me fair play, she said. Read More This is for me. I have to do what I have to do to pay my bills. I have to put food on the table, I have to pay my rent. It is for survival. This is the reason why Im doing this because I have to survive. However, as businesses are currently not allowed to open under Level 5 restrictions, gardai called to the salon to request Ms McTiernan to close. A Garda spokesperson said: Gardai attended a retail premises on Dublin Street in Balbriggan and are investigating alleged breaches of public-health regulations. A file will be submitted for the Director of Public Prosecution. A number of fixed-payment notices will be issued, where appropriate, for breaches of travel restrictions for non-essential reasons. Business owners have hit out at the Governments handling of the Covid-19 pandemic after Cabinet agreed to keep the country in lockdown until at least April 5. TV chef Paul Treyvaud said his aunt-in-law passed away after contracting Covid-19 last year, yet hes determined to open his restaurant in July, regardless of public health regulations. Mr Treyvaud (46), who has appeared on Virgin Media One and hosts Treyvaud Travels on Amazon Prime, said on Twitter: I have decided I am opening my restaurant July 1, no matter what. That gives them four months to sort out everything. Ive done everything Ive been told to do. 55k came in from the UK with the variant, now over 1500 from Brazil. The problem is no longer us. Its an incompetent Gov. The tweet has gone viral with thousands of retweets and likes. The businessman, who runs Treyvauds restaurant in Killarney, Co Kerry, says he will open up and is prepared to be arrested. Read More Mr Treyvaud, originally from south Dublin, said: Im not saying Ill open now its not safe. But Im giving four months for the Government to get this (virus) under control. And if not, I will open up in July. My wife lost her aunt to Covid-19 last year and my wife got it too, so I know how bad this is. I fully understand and I commiserate with anyone whos lost anyone to Covid-19. But we cant just look at the Covid situation here we must look at everything Covid has done, destroying livelihoods. Im not an anti-vaxxer but if businesses cant open in rural Ireland to get July and August trade, so many will close. Obviously no one wants to be arrested, or anything like that to happen. But Im prepared to put my neck on the line for my business, 100pc, and to save my livelihood and the livelihoods of my staff. They (the Government) didnt listen to Australia, who told us to put everyone in mandatory quarantine. Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Egypt's pharmaceutical authority on Wednesday approved the use of the Sputnik V and AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccines, a month after the North African country kicked off its inoculation campaign. The drug body had "provided emergency authorisation for the use of the two vaccines, Sputnik V, and AstraZeneca... imported from South Korea", it said in a statement on its Facebook page. The agency had previously given emergency authorisation for the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine and the AstraZeneca jab produced in India and marketed under the name Covishield, it added. Russia's sovereign wealth fund RDIF said in a statement that "Egypt is the 35th country in the world to approve Sputnik V". Egypt began its COVID-19 immunisation programme on January 24, becoming one of the first countries in Africa to vaccinate its citizens, with a doctor and a nurse receiving the Sinopharm jab. The Arab world's most populous country, with over 100 million people, received its first batch of the Sinopharm vaccine in December, and its first doses of the Anglo-Swedish AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine at the end of January. Egypt has officially registered more than 179,000 cases of the novel coronavirus and over 10,400 deaths. Health officials have warned that low testing rates mean the real number could be at least 10 times higher. Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak 2021 AFP Forum speaker to focus on human rights in times of crises On March 16 at 4 p.m. Flagler College Forum on Government and Public Policy will host Emily Fishbein, a Southeast Asia Rainforest Journalism Fund grantee of the Pulitzer Center. She will deliver a virtual lecture "Tracking Human Rights During a Crisis. This event is free and open to the public virtually. This event is free and open to the public virtually by visiting this link. Fishbein is a grantee reporter based in Myanmar since 2015. Her many stories and projects include A Distant Peace: Voices From Rakhine state, Myanmar project covering Rakhine: Where the Military Is More Feared Than the Coronavirus and In Myanmars Rakhine State, Trust in Armed Group Grows as Election Hopes Fade. Shes also co-author on two articles covering jade mining as part of the project, Buried Hopes: Stories from Kachins Jade Mines. Previously, she worked with refugees in the country. She is financially supported by the Rainforest Journalism Fund of South East Asia. Flagler College Forum on Government and Public Policy has invited nationally-recognized journalists and commentators to St. Augustine since 1998 in order to discuss issues of importance in regional, state and federal government. At this time, all Forums will take place virtually via the following link. Forums are free and open to the public for virtual participation. If you are a person with a disability and need reasonable accommodations, please contact Phil Pownall at 904-819-6460. Sign Language Interpreters are available upon request with a minimum of three days notice. Call 904-826-8677 or visit here for more information. Tagged As U.S. aims to return to U.N. rights body, shield Israel FILE PHOTO: UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - U.S. President Joseph Biden's new administration said on Wednesday it would continue its international re-engagement by seeking election to the U.N. Human Rights Council where it will press to eliminate a "disproportionate focus" on ally Israel. Under former President Donald Trump's more isolationist approach, Washington quit the council in 2018 but the Biden government has already returned as an observer. "I'm pleased to announce the United States will seek election to the Human Rights Council for the 2022-24 term," Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the council by video. "We humbly ask for the support of all U.N. member states in our bid to return to a seat in this body." Elections for three-year membership on the 47-member council are due at the U.N. General Assembly in October. Britain, China and Russia are among members, as are the Philippines and Venezuela who are under formal scrutiny by the Council. "Those with the worst human rights records should not be members of this Council," Blinken added. 'CALL OUT ABUSES' The council, set up in 2006, has a stand-alone item on the Palestinian territories on its agenda every session - the only issue with such treatment - which both Democratic and Republican administrations have opposed. It routinely adopts resolutions condemning alleged violations by Israel in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. "As the United States re-engages, we urge the Human Rights Council to look at how it conducts its business. That includes its disproportionate focus on Israel," Blinken said. "We will continue to call out abuses in places like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Iran," he added. Blinken reiterated the U.S. call on Russia to release opposition figure Alexei Navalny as well as hundreds of others detained during protests. He said Washington would denounce atrocities in Xinjiang, China's western region where activists and U.N. experts say 1 million Muslim Uighurs are held in camps. And he acknowledged rights issues at home, saying the United States would work to combat both systemic racism and economic injustice. (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Michael Shields and Andrew Cawthorne) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is facing a lawsuit from the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN). Del Bigtree, the founder of ICAN has decided to urge the federal agency to remove the statement on its website claiming vaccination never causes autism in children. According to Bigtree, the statement was taken down from the CDC website on Aug. 27, 2020, and added back again shortly after ICAN issued a press release about the change on Jan. 25. Bigtree claims the statement is inaccurate as no studies conducted by the organization prove that vaccines given to infants do not cause autism. The United States of America has reported a sudden increase in children suffering from a neurological developmental disorder. Bigtree claims that the neurological problem diagnosed within six months to one year of the babys birth has a link to vaccination provided immediately after birth. He alleges that five vaccines injected three times within six months of a babys birth can increase the neurological disorder. They are: Diphtheria Tetanus DTap (Acellular pertussis) IPV (polio) Hepatitis B Hib (Haemophilus Influenzae type B) PCV13 (Pneumococcal conjugate) Bigtree claims to disprove that autism and vaccination have no link. CDC provided studies after a request from FOIA (Freedom of Information Act). But, the studies submitted have not addressed the concerns raised by ICAN regarding the five vaccines. While CDC assures the vaccines are safe and the adjuvants used in vaccines will only boost the immune system response. But, ICAN feels the common adjuvant, aluminum can have harmful effects on the baby. CDC has refused to perform studies as suggested by ICAN, which became clear after the meeting conducted on 30th May 2017 to discuss vaccine safety. To strengthen their claim, Bigtree also points to the temporary taking down of the CDC webpage stating the safety of the vaccines. Replying to the allegation, the CDC spokesperson informed the agencys strong stand on vaccines and autism. Responding to the statement of temporary taking down of the CDC website, the official spokesperson discharged it as a misunderstanding. The website remained temporarily unavailable due to website updating and formatting. To avoid any confusion, CDC has added the headline back on the webpage. But, experts like Mark Sadaka who has handled vaccination cases as the vaccine injury lawyer feels CDC must make changes to the language used to present the information to the public. Adding the information regarding the lack of studies on the effects of vaccines within the first six weeks of babies will eliminate any confusion and lawsuits. Such lawsuits and complications can put distrust in the minds of people in the USA as the country recommends vaccines to children and adolescents. Meanwhile, there are currently no such laws in India that would protect victims of the COVID-19 vaccine side-effects. As experimental COVID vaccines have been fast tracked with secret agreements by govts to protect the pharma companies from liabilities, the US government paid over $57 million in compensation for vaccine injuries and deaths till March 2020 alone. Meanwhile, there are currently no such laws in India that would protect victims of the COVID-19 vaccine side-effects. New Delhi, Feb 24: Several dying small scale industries in India are looking at a comeback with Prime Minister Narendra Modis thrust on Aatmanirbhar Bharat that also focuses on import reduction. Sentiments are also rapidly changing as the country hopes to register growth in the third quarter of the current financial year. Sample this. Firozabad, in Uttar Pradesh, is known for its glass and glassware industry. Thousands of micro units dealing in manufacturing of glass bangles, bottles, artefacts, tumblers besides chandeliers, have suffered for years as cheap imports of these items from China have had a severe impact on their livelihood. However, now with a drastic drop in imports of these items from China, these small manufacturers are re-looking at reviving their businesses. While they are yet to get their act together, there is a sense of positivity. "Sentiments have taken a positive turn. While we cannot yet say that things are moving, the sentiment has turned positive and that is critical. There is a sense of exuberance and confidence that they can replace the Chinese made goods," Anil Bhardwaj, secretary general, Federation of Indian Micro and Small and Medium Enterprises (FISME) told India Narrative. The association has zeroed in on the cluster manufacturing chandeliers. "We are looking at reviving the chandelier makers," he said. Similarly, in Panipat, many small mink blanket makers had nearly perished, once again for the same reason that they could not withstand Chinese competition. However, this winter has been a different story for them. The sale of these blankets has been "extremely good" with no competition from the Chinese. The country's micro small and medium enterprises (MSME) industry is the backbone of the economy. India Briefing, a platform providing insights on doing business in India noted that the MSME base is the largest in the world after China. "The sector provides a wide range of services and is engaged in the manufacturing of over 6,000 products-ranging from traditional to hi-tech items," India Briefing website said, adding that there are about 63.05 million micro industries, 0.33 million small, and about 5,000 medium enterprises in the country. Experts said that the Centre's thrust on the 'Make in India' project has led to several small-scale businesses dealing in a variety of items such as toys, lights, home decoration items, mobile phone accessories, apparel and footwear among others which have been facing serious competition from Chinese made goods are now set for a revival. Sources said that domestic orders for such items are also rising. "The Aatmanirbhar Bharat programme has been just launched, so to expect it will bear fruit is illogical. The programme is robust, it will take some time before results show," an insider said. Turnover for traders only during the festive season-beginning the festival of Rakshabandhan till December-is estimated at Rs 60,000 crore of which over two-thirds went into the Chinese kitty, the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) said. Last year, there was no import of any item for the festive period from China. "We have not sourced any item related to the festive season from China this year as we are promoting our own artisans. This has proved to be beneficial for thousands of local craftsmen. Our endeavour is to primarily engage women and women's self-help groups (SHGs) for this," Praveen Khandelwal, secretary general, CAIT said. However, imports of other critical input items and raw materials from China have not been curtailed to ensure that Indian manufacturers do not face any hurdle. Jobs data indicate a revival The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) data for the month of January showed that the country's unemployment rate fell to 6.5 per cent from 9.1 per cent in December last year. According to the data monitoring think tank, rural unemployment fell from 9.15 per cent in January to 5.83 per cent. CMIE said that about 12 million additional people were employed in January at 400.7 million as compared to 388.8 million in December last year. This has been the highest since the Covid-19 induced lockdown was imposed in March 2020. Importantly, the rise in January employment trend has compensated for the loss in the past three months. Caveat While the economy is showing signs of revival, apprehensions remain. With the rising number of fresh Coronavirus cases in states like Maharashtra and Kerala along with a few more, concerns for a possible second wave of the pandemic have set in. Delhi has issued a fresh notification making it mandatory for travellers coming in from Maharashtra, Kerala, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab to get a Coronavirus test done. "We understand there is some apprehension but there will be no lockdown though there could be restrictions in movements and meetings," a government source said. An analyst also noted that due to availability of the vaccine, the spread is unlikely to impact normal life and business as it did last year. "We have the vaccines now. So it is a very different situation from last year..there is no point in spreading fear," he said. The MSME sector, which employs about 11 crore people, in India is crucial for job creation. It is also key for economic revival, especially after a shocking 23.9 per cent economic contraction in the first quarter and 7.5 per cent in the second quarter. (This content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative/ As a leading light of the contemporary art scene, Grayson Perry Turner Prize-winner, potter and cross-dresser extraordinaire is no stranger to controversy. In fact, it's fair to say he thrives on it. This time, however, it's possible he may have bitten off slightly more than he can chew. Talking with Twiggy about 'cultural conditioning' on her podcast, Perry got on to the subject of class. The working classes, he said, spend their money very differently from the middle classes. When it comes to taste, they tend to like very different things. As a leading light of the contemporary art scene, Grayson Perry Turner Prize-winner, potter and cross-dresser extraordinaire is no stranger to controversy 'A traditional working-class person wants you to notice every damn penny they've spent,' explained Perry on the podcast Tea With Twiggy. 'And it's going to be on gold and high-tech things. 'They want to spend it on their clothes, on their car, on their hair, make-up, tattoos. Things you can see out in the world.' By contrast, he explained, the middle classes spend most of their money on their houses, and leave 'their curtains open' so that passers-by can admire what a 'lovely kitchen island they've got'. Predictably, the armies of the professionally offended have rounded on poor Perry, accusing him of all sorts of terrible stereotyping and prejudice. I listened to the podcast, and it was actually rather interesting: two genuine working-class people (as opposed to the pretend types we're so used to hearing from these days) who obviously don't give two hoots what anyone thinks about them, discussing everything from PG Tips to posh dinner parties. But we live in an age when everything is taken out of context, and sensitivities are such that openness and honesty matter less than political correctness. This is a great shame, because it means we have so few interesting conversations. The truth is: Perry is right. Class is a huge determiner of how a person spends their cash. What's really interesting, though, is why. Both he and Twiggy belong to that 1960s and 1970s generation where being working class was rather cool. And it still is, which is why so many posh people (embarrassingly) spend so much time pretending to be from the wrong side of the tracks. Talking with Twiggy about 'cultural conditioning' on her podcast, Perry got on to the subject of class But for many, the reality of being working-class means being stuck in menial, poorly paid work with very few prospects. Feeling that people are looking down on you and judging you. And wanting to show the world that you are just as good as the rest, if not better. The middle classes don't have this problem. No one criticises our lifestyle or suggests we might be getting above our station for wanting our kids to go to university or for shopping at Waitrose. These things are expected. We have absolute confidence in our status, and no need to prove it to anybody. In fact, the middle or upper classes will often deliberately downplay the outward signs of success. They will drive ancient, beaten-up cars and dress deliberately shabbily. That's because that frayed shirt collar or moth-eaten old jumper does not, to them, represent any kind of threat. If they wanted new clothes, they could easily afford them; it's just that appearance doesn't matter so much because their status is not a source of anxiety. They don't have to wear their confidence on their backs; to them it's like a second skin. But if you're working class, a frayed collar or a hole in your shoe represents something far more tangible. It is the prospect of failure, forever snapping at your heels. That is why showing the world your success is so important: it helps make it real, both to yourself and to others. Acknowledging this is not an insult to either party. Perry is not being a snob or a bigot. He's just recognising the differences that still exist in society today and having, unlike so many, the courage to admit them. Carrie speaks her mind, but she's no Lady Macbeth I try to stay out of the soap opera that is No 10 these days (been there, done that, found better ways of destroying my sanity), but I can't just stand by. I really don't know Carrie Symonds at all (contrary to the nonsense that is occasionally printed); but I do know something about what happens to female partners of politicians when they dare to express an opinion about anything other than flower arranging. I really don't know Carrie Symonds at all (contrary to the nonsense that is occasionally printed); but I do know something about what happens to female partners of politicians when they dare to express an opinion about anything other than flower arranging And it quite honestly beggars belief that in this day and age there are still only two narratives: Stepford Wife or Lady Macbeth. The idea that Carrie Symonds is the latter simply because she occasionally has the odd idea or suggestion is absurd. The PM like every one of his predecessors has all kinds of advisers, male and female, colleagues and friends, elected and unelected. Whom he chooses to heed is up to him. Just because Carrie speaks her mind does not make Boris her poodle, even if reports are true that she has groomed his lockdown hair. Awful as it must have been to be on board that United Airlines flight from Colorado to Honolulu, what amazed me even more than the terrifying footage of the blazing engine was the fact that the pilots managed to bring the aircraft down safely with all 231 passengers unharmed. All part of the job, I guess, but still, astonishing and an example of the kind of everyday heroism we all take for granted. Tom's close-knit family British Olympic diver Tom Daley is the latest celebrity to take up knitting during lockdown, posting various colourful creations which even extend to swimming trunks on his Instagram account, while using his two-year-old son, Robbie, as a mini clothes-horse (right). Funny, isn't it, how all these things our grandmothers thought of as chores not just knitting, but also sewing, baking and cleaning have become fashionable lifestyle choices for the younger generation? Not me. I don't have the patience (or the eyesight) for knitting, sadly. British Olympic diver Tom Daley is the latest celebrity to take up knitting during lockdown Plus I am ever mindful of the crocheted bathing costume I was given around age ten, courtesy of my great aunt Nancy, a prodigy with needles. Lovely when dry, bit of a shocker in the water and definitely not something you'd want to show the Olympic Committee! Reality of clockdown Where do you stand on the timetable for lifting the lockdown? I'm just grateful that there is any kind of end in sight, even if it's much further away than I would have liked. But I am surprised that a fifth of the public believe the roadmap is too fast. I can only assume these are the people who have been largely financially unaffected by the lockdown, that is to say those whose jobs, income and pensions are not reliant on the real economy. The rest of the country small businesses, the hospitality industry, the self-employed, those on zero-hours contracts are not so insulated. For them, a few days either way will make the difference between getting out in one piece and going under once and for all. Not very much that the Duchess of Sussex does is left to chance, so what could she possibly mean by choosing a 2,500 Oscar de La Renta dress embroidered with lemons for her first appearance since THAT pregnancy appointment? How does the saying go? When life gives you lemons . . . make lemonade. Looks like she and Harry are going to squeeze every last drop out of this one. Not very much that the Duchess of Sussex does is left to chance, so what could she possibly mean by choosing a 2,500 Oscar de La Renta dress embroidered with lemons for her first appearance since THAT pregnancy appointment? Scientists have discovered that people with children perceive the passage of time faster than those without. Asked how quickly the past decade had gone by, parents were significantly more likely to say 'fast' or 'very fast' compared with non-parents. Quite why this is is not entirely clear but it's undeniably true. It seems only yesterday that my two were adorable bundles, and now they're hulking great teenagers (still occasionally adorable, but you know what I mean). Guess it's true what they say: time really does fly when you're having fun. Either that, or it could just be all the gin! A Virginia budget amendment that would have held back millions of dollars in pledged funding to Metro unless the transit agency renamed a station to include Capital One bank is being dropped, the state senator who wrote the measure said Wednesday. Virginia Sen. Janet Howell, D-Fairfax, said she is pulling the amendment from the budget bill that would have made $165 million to $175 million in committed capital funding for Metro contingent upon the transit system renaming the McLean Metro station as "Capital One Hall-McLean station." "This was always meant to be a crowbar amendment to get (Metro's) attention," Howell said in an email Wednesday. "Obviously I was not seriously going to cut (Metro) by millions. We have reached a compromise: improvements will be made to the station and I will drop the amendment." Jeff McKay, D-At Large, chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, said the compromise includes Metro adding wayfinder signs inside the McLean station that point travelers to Capital One Hall, a performance venue the bank is building a quarter-mile from the site. Metro also will expedite construction of an additional entrance that Capital One paid for that will give Capital One Hall patrons better access to the station, McKay said. Metro will no longer be required to rename the station to receive its allotment of regular dedicated funding from Virginia, McKay said. The amendment was filed after Metro rejected Capital One's request to rename the station for free earlier this year, only to tell the company that it might reconsider through a paid sponsorship or sale of naming rights. Metro has not sold renaming rights in its history, and any such agreement would be a first for the agency. Howell said she initially filed the amendment because she thought the transit agency was trying to "extract" money from Capital One. She argued that the performance venue fit Metro's criteria for renaming because it will be a regional draw. Capital One is headquartered near the station, and the Fortune 100 company is expected to open the 1,600-seat performance theater on its grounds this fall. Minister-designate for Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Abu Jinapor has called for the implementation of the new Lands Act. Samuel Abu Jinapor appeared before the Appointments Committee in Parliament on Wednesday, February 24. Speaking before the Appointments Committee, he stated he will be working with the new Act when approved by the Committe to become the sector Minister. ''Mr. Chairman, I want to submit that [the implementation] the effective implementation of this new Lands Act (Act 1036) will go a great way of improving the administration of land in our country...We will require to make sure that we publicize it. 1. We have to get the country to be aware of it, to know about the implications of the provisions of this Act. We must have a strategy and a policy to ensure that this Act is well implemented'', he stated. Parliament passed the Land Bill last year to reform land administration in Ghana and is aimed a revising and consolidating the laws on land. The former Deputy Chief of Staff held that the Act will help address all land entitlement issues and other related matters regarding lands. He said; ''...literally all the funny difficult issues relating to land administration [seems to have been], this Act seems to have intervened in almost all of them.'' He also added that he will reduce the number of days it takes for a person or investor to acquire a land entitlement. ''Mr. Chairman, I will endeavor to do that'', he pledged. 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. Featured Video New Delhi: Former Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu is set to contest with former West Bengal governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi for the post of Vice-President of India today. Members of Parliament will use special pens for marking their choice in the election to be held between 10 AM and 5 PM. The counting of votes will commence after polling and the results will be declared by 7:00 PM. Venkaiah Naidu appears to have an edge over Gopal Krishna Gandhi in the polls as the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has majority in the 545-member Lok Sabha. Know all about Gopal Krishna Gandhi Gopal Krishna Devdas Gandhi, the opposition's candidate for the Vice-Presidential elections, is the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. The weight of the surname notwithstanding, the former bureaucrat and diplomat has sought to emerge in recent times as the nations conscience keeper. ALSO READ: Vice Presidential Poll 2017: Know all about M Venkaiah Naidu The retired IAS officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre, who served as Indias high commissioner to South Africa, Lesotho and Sri Lanka and as ambassador to Norway and Iceland, has held academic and titular posts in bodies such as the Indian Institute for Advanced Study in Shimla. More recently, he joined the privately-run Ashoka University on the outskirts of Delhi as guest faculty. Married to Tara Gandhi and father of two daughters, he was earlier secretary to the Governor of Tamil Nadu, to the Vice President and to the President of India. Fond of Carnatic classical and popular Hindi music, the soft-spoken and mild-mannered retired bureaucrat, whose editor father Devdas was the Mahatmas youngest son, studied at Delhis Modern School and graduated in English from St Stephens College. READ: Vice Presidential Poll 2017| NDAs Naidu to face Oppns Gandhi Gandhi had almost emerged as the Oppositions Presidential candidate choice but the NDAs nomination of Ramnath Kovind, a Dalit, had forced the joint front of the Congress-led parties to field another prominent Dalit face, Meira Kumar. He is also a prolific writer and has penned several volumes on Gandhi, a play in verse on Dara Shukoh and a Hindi translation of Vikram Seths - A Suitable Boy. Further, Gandhi has also been a columnist in newspapers. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. She's been keeping busy in the current coronavirus crisis by working on projects like Mother/Android and the new Tom and Jerry flick. And Chloe Grace Moretz put on a stylish display as she stepped out to grab some food at Valley Village, Los Angeles, on Tuesday afternoon. The actress, 24, looked effortlessly chic in an oversized brown pinstripe blazer that she teamed with a pair of straight-cut jeans for her outing. Chic: Chloe Grace Moretz putr on a stylish display in a brown pinstripe blazer and jeans as she stepped out in Valley Village, in LA, on Tuesday to grab some food Chloe complemented her casual chic look by wearing a black logo T-shirt, while she boosted her height in a pair of Louis Vuitton heels. She put her personal items in a green pleated designer bag that had a gold chain-link handle, and she kept safe amid the Covid-19 crisis by wearing a black face mask. The Miseducation of Cameron Post star styled her blonde locks into loose waves that cascaded over her shoulders, and wore burnt orange eyeshadow to highlight her blue eyes. Stunning: The Miseducation of Cameron Post star styled her blonde locks into loose waves that cascaded over her shoulders, and wore orange eyeshadow to highlight her blue eyes Stylish: Chloe complemented her casual chic look by wearing a black logo T-shirt, while she boosted her height in a pair of Louis Vuitton heels Looking good: Chloe put her personal items in a green pleated designer bag that had a gold chain-link handle, and she kept safe amid the Covid-19 crisis by wearing a black face mask In November, the 5ft4in leading lady was hard at work on her new film Mother/Android and took to her Instagram Story to share a photo of the back of the military truck from the set. The shot appeared to have been taken during a break in the action, considering she was wearing a protective mask and her on-screen jacket was shed. 'Last day on the set of #MotherAndroid,' she wrote along the bottom of the picture taken on an old cobblestone, brick street in Boston. Take five: In November, Chloe was hard at work on her new film Mother/Android and took to her Instagram Story to share a photo of the back of the military truck from the set Principal photography for the film, which is the directorial debut feature for Project Power screenwriter Mattson Tomlin, began in September 2020. The storyline follows Georgia (Moretz) and her husband Sam (Algee Smith), as they go on a treacherous journey to escape their country, while in the midst of an unexpected war with artificial intelligence, according to Deadline. All the high-octane action goes down in the days just before the arrival of their first child. Eventually the couple must face No Man's Land a stronghold of the android uprising, in hopes of reaching safety before Georgia give birth. Chloe is next going to be seen acting alongside cartoon characters Tom and Jerry in a new live-action flick which sees her get roped into the rivals' longtime feud. Thriller: In the film, Moretz's character and onscreen husband escape their country when they're caught in an unexpected war with artificial intelligence Jaipur, Feb 24 : Industry players have welcomed the Budget announced by Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Wednesday. "The Rajasthan Budget 2021-22 is an exemplary budget in extraordinary times and lays a strong foundation for the sustainable development of the state," said Ashok Kajaria, Chairman, FICCI Rajasthan State Council & CMD, Kajaria Ceramics Ltd on Wednesday. "The Right to Health Bill providing universal health coverage is a great step towards achieving the target of Nirogi Rajasthan. The strengthening of institutional framework for healthcare and education will help improve the social indices of Rajasthan," he added. Kajaria also shared that the Greater Bhiwadi Industrial Township, Mewar Industrial Cluster and new industrial areas in 64 sub-divisions would strengthen the industrial infrastructure and help leverage benefits of DMIC to the state. He welcomed the idea of promoting the state as an investment destination through domestic and international roadshows. 2% reduction in stamp duty for flats up to Rs 50 Lakhs till 30 June and stamp duty rationalization for affordable housing would help revive the real estate sector. Tourism Development Fund of Rs 500 Crores with Rs 200 crore for branding would help resurrect the sector which has been severely affected by the pandemic said Randhir Vikram Singh, Co-Chairman, FICCI Rajasthan State Council & CMD, Mandawa Hotels. "Development of Shekhawati and Godavan Tourism Circuit, Dhola Maru Tourist Complex and development of various other destinations would help in creating new locations and unleashing the vast potential of the sector," he added. New Delhi: Chinese telecommunications equipment firm, Coolpad has announced the launch of its latest smartphone, the Note 5 Lite C. The device will go on sale in the Indian market from, August 5, 2017. Priced at Rs 7,777 it will be exclusively available offline at 3,000 multi-brand stores across eight states in India including Delhi-NCR, Haryana, Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra. Another feature that makes this device peculiar is that it is also the first smartphone from the company to run on Android 7.1 Nougat out of the box. As far as design is concerned, the CoolPad Note 5 Lite C, will come with 5-inch HD display with a pixel density of 294 PPI. It will sport a metallic finish with the fingerprint scanner at the back below the camera sensor. Read more: Reliance Jio Phone pre-booking begins from August 24 The phone is powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 201 clocked at 1.1-GHz along with Adreno 304 GPU along with 2 GB of RAM with 16 GB internal storage and an expandable microSD card slot. It also holds an 8-megapixel rear camera with autofocus, f/2.4 aperture, and flash support. At the front, there is a 5-megapixel sensor with f/2.4 aperture as well. It will be made available in two color variants- Grey and Gold. Coolpad has also confirmed that it will launch an annual flagship smartphone on August 20 which will be made available on Amazon India exclusively as well. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. SOCIAL media users are under criminal investigation for identifying a 15-year-old boy charged over a knife attack on a mother-of-two who died after a stabbing in Dublins IFSC. A judge has warned that they can face prosecution for breaking reporting restrictions. Urantsetseg Tserendorj (48) originally from Mongolia but living in Dublin with her family for a number of years, was rushed to the Mater Hospital following an attack on Jan. 20 last. The incident happened at 9.30pm near the CHQ building at Custom House Quay, as the office cleaner was making her way home from work. She remained in a critical condition for two weeks before she passed away on Feb. 3. Her husband Ulambayar stayed by her bedside and close family members flew over from Mongolia. The boy, who cannot be named because he is a minor, was arrested and remanded in custody after a brief court appearance on Jan. 23. He made no reply when charged with assault causing harm, attempted robbery and unlawful possession of a knife as a weapon at the CHQ Building, in the IFSC in Dublin 1. He was aged 14 at the time of the incident and could face possible further charges. The teen appeared before Judge Bernadette Owens at the Dublin Childrens Court today. It was his first court appearance since Urantsetseg Tserendorj died. Detective Garda Mark Barry asked to address the court in relation to people breaking the anonymity rule in cases involving juveniles. He told Judge Owens there has been alleged breaches of section 93 of the Children Act, in relation to WhatsApp and Facebook messages in relation to the case. An investigation has started at Store Street Garda station, he added. He confirmed that messages could have identified the boy who told the court that he was not aware this had happened. The teens solicitor had reported it to gardai, Judge Owens was told. She thanked the garda for bringing this to the courts attention. Citing section 93 of the Children Act, she repeated that nothing should be reported that would lead to the boy being identified. People will be aware that in other cases, there have been prosecutions taken when there have been breaches of section 93, she warned. Directions from the Director of Public Prosecutions are awaited and the garda file has not been received yet, said State solicitor Mairead White. She asked for a four-week adjournment. Defence counsel Alison Fynes said the boy, whose mother was present for the hearing, was anxious to progress matters and every effort should be made for the case to be expedited. The State solicitor pointed out that the alleged offence happened just over a month ago. There was no application for bail and the boy was remanded in continuing custody to appear again in March. About three dozen members of Mongolian community gathered in the square across from the courthouse holding placards on the morning of the teens latest hearing. He has not yet indicated how he will plead. Section 93 of the Children Act states that no report shall be published or included in a broadcast which reveals the name, address or school of any child concerned in the proceedings or includes any particulars likely to lead to the identification of any child concerned in the proceedings. Surgeons in Darwin have been given a slap on the wrist for using endoscopy equipment to steal chocolate from the hospital's vending machine. 'Theft is a crime and next time the police will be notified,' the note taped to the vending machine by the hospital's theatre committee threatened. A endoscopy is a procedure that allows surgeons to look inside the body using a long, flexible tube with a bright light and a video camera on the end. Surgeons in a Darwin hospital have been warned not to use their endoscopy equipment to steal chocolate from a vending machine Patients will undergo an endoscopy to diagnose diseases and to screen for and prevent cancers in body parts such as the esophagus, stomach, and colon. The instrument the poster suggests was used to steal the chocolate is called an endocatch, a polyurethane net used to isolate and contain specimens during surgery. Pictured: An 'endocatch' used during an endoscopy procedure The photo attracted hundreds of comments from Reddit users who were divided on whether the poster was a practical joke, or cause for concern. The person who shared the image captioned it: 'I hope those surgeons in Darwin are sterilising their instruments first'. Some commenters said they were impressed by the doctors' ability to manoeuvre the chocolate bars using the surgical tools. 'I'd be quietly impressed and reassured if I knew my surgeon was able to extricate a chocolate bar from 3ft with 2x 90 bends.. one posted. Other Reddit users were concerned the endoscopy instruments were not being sterilised correctly. 'I just hope they sterilise the endoscope afterwards. I'm not really concerned about the vending machine getting sepsis', one user wrote. 'I'm not sure what worries me most, that people actually tried doing this or that so many have been doing it that a sign was needed', another added. A endoscopy is a procedure that allows surgeons to look inside the body using a long, flexible tube with a bright light and a video camera on the end 'I should hope so, Gastroenterologists make $200k, they can buy the damn chips', a commenter replied. 'I'd love to work there, that's my kind of humour', another user shared. But many commenters were more concerned about the outrageous prices of items in the vending machine. 'When a 64oz coke is 4 dollary-doos, I'll risk the write up', one comment read. 'Theft is a crime... $2.50 for a bag of air? Pretty damn criminal', another user shared. Brattleboro, VT (05301) Today Some clouds. Low 44F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Some clouds. Low 44F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. President Biden blocked the Keystone pipeline from Canada to the U.S., ostensibly due to environmental concerns and claims about global warming, even though the long planned project had cleared all environmental hurdles. Yet the Biden State department just effectively approved an energy pipeline from Russia to Germany. According to the Wall Street Journal: The State Department in a report to Congress didn't name new companies as targets for sanctions related to an $11 billion pipeline designed to transmit Russian natural gas to Germany, allowing work on the pipeline to continue unabated for now. Some Republican lawmakers criticized the State Department over the Nord Stream 2 report, which was required by Congress, and both Republicans and a key Democrat requested an explanation of the administration's position. Count that as a win for pipelines for others, just not us. The rest of the press is focusing on Biden making his "decisions," but with this news, the direction of this administration is clear. It is clear that jobs in Europe and Russia are more important to Biden than jobs in the United States. Energy from fossil fuels is also OK in Europe, just not here. Therefore, when Biden blocked the Keystone pipeline, it was purely catering to his special interest groups and had zero to do with science. When is a journalist going to ask global warming "czar" John Kerry, Joe Biden, and all the other Cabinet members for one piece of scientific evidence to support the radical leftist policies that will destroy the U.S economy by making energy prohibitively expensive, especially for the poor? Maybe they can start with asking if a one- to two-degree rise in temperatures over 140 years after a little ice age ended would be normal and cyclical. I would love to see their answer. Aren't journalists curious? Image: OpenStreetMap users via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Last December someone on social media suggested that Charlize Theron would be the perfect person to star in a lesbian remake of Die Hard. At the time, the 45-year-old Academy Award winner quipped in response that she would be up for the role and in a new interview with Vanity Fair published Tuesday, Theron is doubling down. 'I mean, it's a great idea,' she said. 'That's why I replied on Twitter. Because I just thought that was kind of brilliant.' Remake: Charlize Theron doubled down on her desire to replace Bruce Willis as the lead character in a lesbian reboot of Die Hard, in a new interview with Vanity Fair published Tuesday The initial tweet from a fan posted on December 5, 2020 read: 'Lesbian Christmas rom coms are all well and good but what I REALLY want is a Die Hard where Charlize Theron goes on a rampage to save her wife' Charlize quote tweeted the post responding 'where do I sign' and suggested that her fan start pitching Hollywood producers. When asked about the possibility, in her recent interview, Theron seemed more than game to step into the role first made famous by actor Bruce Willis. 'The fact that it would be two women,' she said, 'I was like, 'Yeah, sign me on.' Good idea! Last December someone on social media suggested that Charlize Theron would be the perfect person to star in a lesbian remake of Die Hard Die Hard, starring Willis as NYPD officer John McClane, premiered to tepid reviews in 1988. However, in years since, the holiday season action flick has become a classic, amassing a legion of dedicated fans and several sequels. In the movie McClane is visiting his estranged wife (Bonnie Bedelia) in Los Angeles at her office holiday party when terrorists, led by late actor Alan Rickman, start causing havoc. With nothing but his wits, an infamous air shaft and an LAPD ally on the ground, McClane goes toe-to-toe with the terrorists in order to save his wife. Most die hard Die Hard fans will argue that since the plot of the film is centered on the activities at the Nakatomi Plaza Christmas party, it is indeed a holiday film. 'I mean, it's a great idea,' she said. 'That's why I replied on Twitter. Because I just thought that was kind of brilliant. The fact that it would be two women. I was like, "Yeah, sign me on."' Theron should have no problem stepping into the role should a remake ever be on the horizon as she has already proved her action chops in films like Mad Max and Atomic Blonde. Charlize's interview was included in the 27th annual Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair which was released on Tuesday morning and offered a wide array of talent. Along with Theron, there was heartthrob Michael B Jordan of Creed and Black Panther fame as well as Zendaya of Euphoria and Awkwafina from Ocean's Eight for one of their most diverse covers ever. Artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari directed 10 photo shoots across four continents. They used 'modern techniques' that allowed VF to minimize on-set personnel and maximize COVID-19 protocol. Iconic: Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis as NYPD officer John McClane, premiered in 1988 and became a holiday cult-classic and spurred several sequels Also included on the cover are Sacha Baron Cohen (The Trial of the Chicago 7, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), Maya Rudolph (Saturday Night Live, Big Mouth), Michaela Coel, (I May Destroy You), Spike Lee (Da 5 Bloods, David Byrne's American Utopia), LaKeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah) and Dan Levy (Schitt's Creek). Theron said on Instagram: 'The 27th Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue, aka a collection of people I am absolutely obsessed with. So honored to be in their company.' In her interview the Oscar winner talked about releasing The Old Guard straight to Netflix. 'Somehow it was meant to come out in [2020],' Theron says of The Old Guard, which hit Netflix last summer. 'And it was meant to just be on people's TVs. In the end, that's why I think it was so successful. It thematically speaks to things that people were going through. And so part of me is like, "So what if it wasn't on a big screen?" I'm not mad at the fact that probably more people saw The Old Guard than any other movie that I've ever made, outside of Fast & Furious, in a theater.' Health advocates have identified the media as a crucial component in human capital development in Nigeria through proper, accurate and balanced reporting of critical issues. To remind the media of this role, the Human Capital Development Network (HCDN), a coalition of development partners and Civil Society Organisations, this week in Abuja organised a one-day media orientation parley. Held under the theme, Catalysing the Media as Partner for Human Capital Development in Nigeria, the organisers said it was put together to boost the knowledge and skill set needed by journalists for raising the accountability bar for efficient investment in human capital development agenda across all levels and sectors. According to the World Economic Forum in the preface to its 2016 Human Capital Report: A nations human capital endowment the knowledge and skills embodied in individuals that enable them to create economic value can be a more important determinant of its long-term success than virtually any other resource. The document echoes the opinion of many experts and advocates, such as American billionaire investor and philanthropist, Bill Gates, who, during a visit to Nigeria in 2018, faulted President Muhammadu Buharis economic plans, as not human-oriented. Mr Gates said the plans could not meet the basic needs of Nigerians. The philanthropist and founder of Microsoft Corporation said while the governments Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) identifies investing in our people as one of three strategic objectives, the execution priorities do not fully reflect peoples needs, prioritising physical capital over human capital. Mr Gates urged the government to maximise the countrys greatest resource, which is the people. Lending credence to the billionaires observations are Nigerias abysmal yearly performance on the Human Capital Development index (HCI) of the World Banks Human Capital Development Project. HCI measures how much human capital a child is expected to acquire by age 18, against the risks of poor health and poor education in the country where she lives. The country was rated 152 out of 157 in 2018 with an HCI score of 0.34 (out of 1) despite its vast natural resources. Two years later in 2020, Nigeria recorded a score of 0.36, indicating that a child born in Nigeria will be 36 per cent productive as compared to how it would have fared if it enjoyed complete education and full health. Impediments to human development Making a presentation at the media parley, Gafar Alawode, a consultant with the Development Governance International (DGI), listed several impediments to human capital development in Nigeria. They include an uncontrolled population growth, inadequate investment in health and education, and unemployment, among others. President Buhari, in April 2017, unveiled the ERGP (2017-2020) as a four-year economic plan to propel Nigeria towards human development and growth. ERGP, built on the 2016 Strategic Implementation Plan (SIP), is a short-term plan aimed at tackling corruption, improving security and rebuilding the economy. It seeks to build on the SIP by restoring growth, investing in people, and building a globally competitive economy. While there was a marginal improvement in human capital development through some programmes of the ERGP, many Nigerians believe the plan has not lived up to expectation. ADVERTISEMENT Mr Alawode said advancing HCD requires investment from the very beginning of life through the provision of adequate nutrition and care for mother and child from childbirth. A human being becomes healthy, knowledgeable and educable when he gets the right care and nutrients that will help in the development of the brain, he said. The expert also presented a cycle of what is needed to develop Nigerians to their full potential. He said the challenge of unemployment in Nigeria can also be attributed to the fact that many young people lack the education and skill set necessary for employment. Role of Media Moji Makanjuola is the Executive Director of International Society for Media in Public Health (ISMPH), an organisation promoting critical reporting of health-related issues, especially those affecting children. She said brave, critical, and balanced reporting will generate conversations capable of putting the government under pressure to improve HCD in all sectors and levels. Making a presentation at the event, Mrs Makanjuola said good journalism backed with research is vital in monitoring the programmes and targets of the government aimed at improving HCD. She urged journalists to ask critical questions and raise the accountability bar in reporting HCD issues. Some journalists at the event highlighted some challenges they face in trying to hold the government accountable. She noted that most government institutions are still not providing the media critical information even though the government promised to uphold the Freedom of Information Act, which was signed into law a few years ago. Recommendations The conveners of the event, Mr Alawode; Juliana Abude from the Legislative Advocacy Initiative for Sustainable Development (LISDEL) and Ms Aanu from the Centre for Accountability and Inclusive Development (CAAID) issued a statement at the end of the event. The statement contained the following recommendations: 1. The federal government, through the Human Capital Development Core Working Group under the National Economic Council, should fast track the process of engagement with the lower tiers of government, to engender HCD as a development policy objective. 2. Increase investments across the health and education sectors, evidenced by timely release of budgetary allocations, full release and cash backing of appropriated sums and effective utilisation of such funds. 3. Government at all levels should see the current security challenge ravaging all parts of the country as a consequence of under-investment in the human capital of the citizenry and therefore consider HCD investment as a potent intervention towards accelerated growth shared prosperity enhanced productivity of the citizenry, and enduring peace. 4. Ensure greater transparency and accountability in social investment especially for health and education expenditures. 5. Foster citizen participation in the design, implementation and evaluation of HCD-related interventions to enhance ownership of such interventions at the grassroots. 6. We call on the three arms of government at both Federal and State levels to engender HCD as policy objectives for national progress and deploy available resources towards design and implementation of policy thrust articulated in Nigerias HCD vision document. 7. Various Ministries, Department, and Agencies (MDAs) of government should work together to ensure synergy in the design and implementation of HCD related policy thrust across sectors. 8. The Nigeria Governors Forum should ensure the state Governors include HCD on their priority agenda, follow-up on implementation and encourage knowledge-sharing amongst the governors. 9. The Media and Civil Society should raise and sustain the accountability bar for HCD policy action and ensure that the government across all tiers make adequate budgetary provision for HCD-related policy thrusts without compromising the efficiency of resource utilization. The CSOs should scrutinise the manifestoes of the political parties for HCD-related content and demand reprioritisation of HCD action. 10. Religious and traditional leaders should support with awareness creation and encourage their subject and followers to support the HCD vision. This media orientation parley provides an opportunity for us to discuss and reflect on HCD as the future of the country, and we hope the engagement will serve as the beginning of a robust and enduring partnership that will harness and align all available resources towards accelerating the attainment of Nigerias HCD quest, the statement highlighted. The family of Malcolm X held a news conference on Saturday, February 20, to reveal the deathbed confession of an undercover police officer about his involvement in a New York Police Department (NYPD) and FBI conspiracy to assassinate the famous black nationalist leader. Raymond Wood was an undercover cop with the NYPD for seven years in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 2011, after a cancer diagnosis and when he believed he was near death, he composed a letter explaining his role at the time of the assassination. He asked his cousin, Reginald Wood, to reveal the contents of the letter only after his death, which did not take place until nearly ten years later. The elder Wood wrote, I was a black New York City undercover police officer between May of 1964 through May of 1971. I participated in actions that in hindsight were deplorable and detrimental to my own black people. Under the direction of my handlers, I was told to encourage leaders and members of the civil rights groups to commit felonious acts. Malcolm X waiting for a press conference to begin on March 26, 1964 (U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress) Wood specifically recounted that his superiors instructed him to involve two of Malcolm Xs key bodyguards in a felonious federal crime so that they could be arrested by the FBI and kept away from managing Malcolm Xs door security on Feb. 21, 1965, at the public meeting where Malcolm X was killed. At that time, I was not aware that Malcolm X was the target, Wood wrote. The two men on the security detail were charged in connection with a phony plot to bomb the Statue of Liberty. They were taken into custody days before the event. Last weekends news conference took place at the site of the old Audubon Ballroom in upper Manhattan, only one day before the 56th anniversary of the killing of Malcolm X as he began to speak to the assembled audience on that Sunday afternoon. The site has since been partially restored as the Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center. In attendance this past Saturday were three of Malcolm Xs six daughters. The meeting was opened by Benjamin Crump, the attorney who represented the family of Trayvon Martin following his death at the hands of self-styled vigilante George Zimmerman in 2013, and who has since been prominent in many investigations of police violence, including the deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd. The family is calling for a full probe. Ilyasah Shabazz, one of Malcolm Xs daughters, told the news conference, Any evidence that provides greater insight into the truth behind that terrible tragedy should be thoroughly investigated. It has long been widely and very strongly suspected that both the NYPD and the FBI had a hand in the killing of Malcolm X, who was under massive surveillance, especially in the year since his public break with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI). The police sent agents into the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), which he had founded after this split. One year ago, Netflix aired a six-part series, Who Killed Malcolm X? which deepened suspicions of state involvement in the killing, very likely utilizing elements within the Nation of Islam. Louis Farrakhan, then a prominent young Black Muslim leader and today the leader of the NOI, had written two months before the assassination that Malcolm X was a traitor and that such a man is worthy of death. At the same time, two of the three Black Muslims convicted of the killing and sentenced to long prison terms have persistently maintained their innocence. In his deathbed letter, Raymond Wood wrote that Khalil Islam, also known as Thomas Johnson, was later arrested and wrongfully convicted to protect my cover and the secrets of the FBI and NYPD. Johnson, paroled in the mid-1980s, died in 2009. Wood added, I am aging and in failing health; recently I learned about the death of Thomas Johnson and [am] deeply concerned that with my death his family will not be able to exonerate him. It is my hope that this information is received with the understanding that I have carried these secrets with a heavy heart and remorsefully regret my participation in this matter. It is very likely that the assassination of Malcolm X was a complex operation consisting of different elements. Woods role was only part of the conspiracythe necessary weakening of door security on the fateful day. Very soon after Malcolm X began speaking there was a disturbance created in the hall, and then a man rushed forward and shot Malcolm once in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun as two others charged the stage firing semi-automatic handguns. While the FBI declined comment, the office of the Manhattan District Attorney as well as the NYPD responded to the latest revelations with carefully worded, evasive and hypocritical statements. After the showing of Who Killed Malcolm X? Democratic District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced a reopening of the investigation into the murder. After the February 20 news conference, the DAs office announced that review of this matter is active and ongoing. The NYPD, meanwhile, which is directly implicated in Malcolm Xs murder, said it has provided all available records relevant to the case to the District Attorney. The Department remains committed to assist with that review in any way. Alongside the necessary fight to reveal the truth about the killing of Malcolm X, some broader political conclusions must be drawn. Malcolm X was a marked man, not when he was in the Nation of Islam, but only after he left it and began, even in the most limited fashion, to acknowledge that racial separation was not the answer to racism, and that skin color was not the source of inequality and injustice. The lesson is not a new one but is underscored: Left-wing organizations must maintain the highest vigilance in relation to the various state agencies whose job is to employ infiltration, provocation and murderous violence to defend the outmoded system of capitalist exploitation. Even as San Francisco moves to expand vaccine eligibility Wednesday to 168,000 teachers, grocery store employees and emergency responders who live or work in the city, some may find they cannot get their first-dose shots for another two or three weeks. This is because, like many health departments and providers across the state, San Francisco is prioritizing second-dose shots. That means they are giving second shots to people who got their first shots a few weeks ago, and delaying appointments for first shots until they get more vaccine. Both vaccines currently available in the United States, made by Pfizer and Moderna, are given in two shots, 21 or 28 days apart. About 91,000 San Franciscans are due to get their second dose in the next two to three weeks, according to the department of public health. San Francisco projects that in the next two weeks, the number of first-dose appointments will decrease significantly compared to the last two weeks. High-volume vaccination sites that get vaccine supply from regional health care providers are similarly delaying first-dose appointments until they get a new influx of vaccine. The vaccination site at City College, run by San Francisco and UCSF, is only doing second doses this week, except for Thursday, said UCSF spokeswoman Kristen Bole. Next week will also be second doses only, unless UCSF receives additional vaccine. Sutter Health is suspending first-dose appointments at all of its nine large-scale Northern California vaccination sites, including at SF Market in the Bayview, due to a lack of vaccine. It will reopen appointments as soon as more vaccine is made available to us, said Sutter spokeswoman Monique Binkley Smith. People may have more luck making first-dose appointments at the Oakland Coliseum, which gets its vaccines directly from the federal government. This is in part because it opened last week, whereas other sites that have been open for several weeks are now doing more second doses than first. San Franciscos Moscone Center, which uses vaccines from Kaiser, will also do first-dose and second-dose appointments once it reopens Thursday, according to a Kaiser spokesman. The Moscone site has been closed since mid-February because of low vaccine supply. While the delays in first-dose appointments may be frustrating, this cadence was expected. These are challenges with any two-dose regimen, said Dr. Matt Willis, health officer for Marin County, which during the leanest weeks has done far more second doses than first doses and at times worried it didnt even have enough second doses for everyone. But its not a surprise. The challenge arises when thats combined with unpredictability of supply. And scarcity ... Its an operational reality. Most providers have not been setting aside second doses this strategy would have significantly slowed their ability to vaccinate as many people as possible, fast but rather getting as many first doses into arms as possible. Some providers say they are expected to use up all doses each week to receive more. Weve been I think its the practice in most jurisdictions treating our doses as doses and vaccinating as many new (people) as we can, Willis said. And as that second-dose timing rolls around, thats when we have to rob from the first dose, from potentially newly vaccinated people to make sure were covering the second dose. Catherine Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Cat_Ho Less than a decade ago, the sector accounted for just 1.6% of exports, but this share has undergone a fivefold increase. While businesses around the world are struggling amid unprecedented challenges of the COVID crisis, Ukraine's IT sector stands strong. Recently released annual figures for the Ukrainian IT industry underline its world-beating performance, with its exports up by 20.4% in 2020, as per the National Bank, Peter Dickinson wrote for the Atlantic Council. The sector's annual exports exceeded US$5 billion mark, for the first time ever, following a $853 million increase on year. Based on these recent figures, the Ukrainian IT industry now accounts for 8.3% of total exports, which makes the IT sector one of the key engines driving the economy and places it closer than ever in terms of significance to such heavyweights as agriculture and metallurgy. Less than a decade ago in 2013, the IT sector accounted for just 1.6% of Ukrainian exports, but this share has now undergone a fivefold increase. "What helped achieve this years impressive results? Minimum red tape, the professionalism of Ukraines IT specialists, and a stable industry-wide tax policy, says the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, Andy Hunder. He believes that sustainability of further industry expansion will depend on the approach the government adopts towards the sector. "It is vital to ensure sustainable and transparent conditions for the IT sector to stimulate further growth and development. Namely, this means preventing increased regulation. It is also essential to guarantee IT companies freedom of their activities, business models, and forms of interaction with human capital. IT companies must be safeguarded from unlawful interference in legitimate business activities. Read alsoUpdate on average salaries in Ukraine IT industryCurrent projections indicate that Ukrainian universities will be producing around 20,000 IT specialist graduates annually by 2024. However, this figure is significantly lower than the anticipated industry requirement of 30,000 to 50,000 new specialists per year. With approximately 200,000 IT specialists, the sector is already a significant employer, particularly among younger Ukrainians. However, diversification away from the current emphasis on outsourcing has long been a topic of discussion among IT professionals. Ukraine has earned a reputation in recent years as one of the worlds leading IT outsourcing destinations, but many feel it is time for the country to move up the tech food chain. This progress will depend on a number of factors including investment, government regulatory interventions, and a sufficient supply of qualified young professionals entering the industry. Despite these challenges, the current outlook remains highly favorable. With a growing global reputation and soaring export figures, Ukraine's IT industry is the standout performer as the country looks towards a post-pandemic economic recovery. Background In October 2020, Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov said the ministry aimed to increase the share of IT and creative industries in the country's GDP from the current 3%-4%, to 10%. Reporting by UNIAN "As always, we strive to identify individual reporters who do significant work, not just the news organizations themselves," said John Darnton, curator of the awards. "We have never seen a story on the scale of the pandemic. In large part it fell to the press to inform the public about it and the press performed admirably. Our eight Polk winning entries represent the best of the best." Four of the 2020 George Polk Award winners reported on the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at police hands in Minneapolis and Louisville. Others detailed President Donald Trump's controversial tax returns, delved into the complexities of the elections in Georgia, and revealed highly questionable practices by Facebook. Still others exposed racial discrimination at the Virginia Military Institute, documented how federal land grant universities were created on land taken from Indigenous peoples, and completed the investigation of a Mexican drug cartel that was started by a reporter assassinated in 2012. The George Polk Awards were established in 1949 by LIU to commemorate George Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war. The awards, which place a premium on investigative and enterprising reporting that gains attention and achieves results, are conferred annually to honor special achievement in journalism. Long Island University Board of Trustees Chair Eric Krasnoff stated, "Now in its 73rd year, the George Polk Awards in Journalism chronicles an unbroken chain of journalistic excellence, integrity and bravery. Honest and independent reporting is our best hope to nurture and sustain an equitable democratic society. LIU is proud and humbled by its role in curating these proceedings." Beijing-based reporter David Culver, producer Yong Xiong and photo journalist Natalie Thomas of CNN receive the award for Foreign Reporting for giving much of the world its first on-the-scene look at the dangers posed by the coronavirus and the Chinese efforts to control its spread. Tapping into independent sources they developed during a trip to Wuhan that was cut short when the government ordered a lockdown of the city, the CNN crew did much of its early reporting from an enforced 14-day quarantine site. Ed Yong of the Atlantic has won the Science Reporting award for his clear and insightful analysis of factors behind the spread of Covid-19 and failed efforts to bring it under control. Yong's March 25 account, "How the Pandemic Will End," correctly predicted its inordinately severe impact in the U.S., a circumstance his August 4 story, "How the Pandemic Defeated America," explained in devastating detail. The award for Medical Reporting goes to Dan Diamond of Politico for multiple accounts of Trump Administration interference with the Centers for Disease Control and other sources of medical and scientific expertise. Among the actions he revealed were efforts to reduce Covid-19 testing, pour $300 million into a celebrity ad campaign, send seniors $200 drug discount cards, ignore a "pandemic playbook" inherited from the Obama Administration and install a spokesman at the Department of Health and Human Services with orders to withhold or revise reports that did not hew to the official line. Helen Branswell of the Boston-based science and medical news site STAT wins the award for Public Service for relentless coverage of all aspects of the pandemic that became must reading for the medical community and the general public. From her first posting January 4 alerting readers to a "growing cluster of unexplained pneumonia cases"in Wuhan to her December 31 take on experts' frustration over how little they knew about a new variant of the virus, Branswell tracked the spread of the virus in 161 articles more than three a week that were almost uniformly timely and astute. The award for Health Reporting goes to ProPublica for two series examining the pandemic's disproportionate impact on Black Americans and meatpacking workers. Using data and anecdotal evidence, a team of reporters revealed high rates of infection in Black communities because of limited access to proper medical care. In another series, reporters Michael Grabell and Bernice Yeung found global corporations exposed low-wage food handlers to conditions that caused widespread Covid-19 outbreaks, even lobbying the federal government to declare them essential workers. Eli Saslow of the Washington Post has been recognized in a first-time category, Oral History, for "Voices from the Pandemic," 25 compelling personal narratives he crafted based on extensive interviews with individuals deeply affected by the virus. Saslow chose each to represent a segment of the American populace coping with grief, fear, guilt, bitterness, frustration, tension, dejection and other emotions, relating their stories in their own words while keeping his role invisible to the reader. Matthias Gafni, Joe Garofoli and Tal Kopan of the San Francisco Chronicle have been honored with the Military Reporting award for disclosing the Pentagon's punishment of Navy Captain Brett Crozier who sought to evacuate nearly 5,000 sailors in tight quarters aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt to protect them from exposure to Covid-19. The Chronicle story forced the Acting Navy Secretary to resign and called into question the military's approach to the pandemic. In the end a crewmember died and a thousand others tested positive for the virus, including Crozier, who lost his command, was almost reinstated and finally lost it for good. The award for Magazine Reporting goes to Katie Engelhart of the California Sunday Magazine for "What Happened in Room 10?". Focusing on one room in the Life Care Center of Kirkland, Washington, scene of the nation's first deadly Covid-19 outbreak, which led to 46 deaths, Engelhart's seamless 17,000-word narrative was at once riveting storytelling and a deft analysis of what went so wrong in nursing homes across the country. Luke Mogelson of The New Yorker has received the award for National Reporting for three magazine articles putting his extensive experience as a foreign war correspondent to use with firsthand accounts of domestic upheaval that sometimes turned violent. He produced probing portraits of Black Lives Matter activists in Minneapolis, anti-lockdown militia members in Michigan and competing left and right militants on the streets of Portland. The staff of the Minneapolis Star Tribune has won the Local Reporting award for coverage of the death of George Floyd and its aftermath, starting with spot-on deadline work by police reporter Libor Jany and then delving into the background on Floyd and the officers indicted for killing him. Other articles explored the unsavory history of a precinct, destroyed by protestors, that was considered a breeding ground for renegade cops. The articles portrayed an ineffective police disciplinary process and reported on attempts to rethink the role of police and pick up the pieces in neighborhoods ravaged in the protests. "George Floyd's America," a six-part series by a team of Washington Post reporters illustrating how uncanny a match Floyd's life and death were for the national movement he came to symbolize, has won the award for Justice Reporting. Based on more than 150 interviews, the Post series detailed how entrenched poverty, structural racism, inferior education, police intimidation and a rigged criminal justice system dogged Floyd's life from beginning to end. The award for Television Reporting goes to correspondent Roberto Ferdman and his VICE News Tonight crew for breakthrough coverage of the shooting death of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor in a "no-knock" police raid in Louisville and the investigations that followed. Their reports revealed a pattern of over-heavy police enforcement amid a culture that condoned misconduct and called into question official accounts of the raid and ensuing probes, including a highly suspect grand jury investigation. The award for Political Reporting is presented to Stephanie McCrummen of The Washington Post for deftly capturing Georgia's shifting political winds in three perceptive profiles in the run- up to the election. One highlighted the conversion of a suburban woman whose turn away from President Trump presaged his ultimate defeat. Another portrayed the re-election of a 76-year-old Democrat-turned-Republican sheriff as a reflection of resistance to change in the rural South. And the third chronicled the collapse of a Democratic Congressional campaign against a far-right conspiratorialist whose outlandish views would soon make her a pariah for many colleagues on Capitol Hill. The award for Business Reporting goes to Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed News for a series demonstrating how Facebook exposes the public to disinformation, fraud and violence. They found the $800 billion social media giant was slow to remove extremist content, fired a whistleblower who determined it favored right-wing publishers and disregarded another who detailed how fake accounts were undermining the democratic process in India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador as well as the U.S. In one egregious example, Mac and Silverman revealed that Facebook ignored 455 requests to remove an event page urging militants to bring weapons to a Wisconsin protest where two people were later shot to death. Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire of The New York Times are honored with the Financial Reporting award for accessing and analyzing a trove of Donald Trump's income tax information, a reportorial coup suggesting why Trump went to such lengths to hide it from public view. They reported that in 11 years before 2017, he paid no federal income tax, benefitting from such questionable write-offs as $70,000 for hair care, over $2 million in property taxes on a family retreat and almost $800,000 in "consulting fees" paid to his daughter. Perhaps their most stinging revelation was the amount Trump remitted in each of two years he did pay tax: $750. Ian Shapira of the Washington Post has won the award for State Reporting for laying bare overt racism at the state-supported Virginia Military Institute. Among other things, he persuaded aggrieved Black cadets to open up about their experiences at the hands of whites. His series of articles led Governor Ralph Northam (an alumnus) to order an independent investigation. They pressured VMI's board to remove a statue of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson and forced the resignation of VMI's superintendent, who was succeeded by the first Black to lead the 181- year-old institute. The Education Reporting award goes to Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone of the Colorado- based regional magazine High Country News for "Land Grab Universities," the result of a two- year investigation exploring the dark side of a federal initiative considered a hallmark achievement, the 1862 Morrill Act. The law transferred nearly 11 million acres to the states to fund the establishment of 52 land grant colleges. Nearly all that acreage, now worth an estimated half-billion dollars, was seized from 250 Indigenous nations, the magazine found. Its well- documented account sent shockwaves through campuses across the country where students and faculty demanded that institutions like MIT, Cornell and Cal-Berkeley find ways to right a 150- year-old wrong. A Special Award is presented to the late Regina Martinez of Proceso magazine and Forbidden Stories a global network of investigative journalists whose mission is to continue the work of reporters threatened, censored or killed. Eight years after the 2012 murder of Martinez, journalists following her leads produced "The Cartel Project," which linked politicians to drug traffickers in the state of Veracruz and discovered that she had been preparing to publish an explosive report about thousands of individuals who had mysteriously disappeared. Forbidden Stories reporters interviewed sources who had never spoken on-the-record, revealing how local authorities sabotaged the investigation into Martinez's death and put a scapegoat behind bars without proof a tactic similar to one used by the Greek government in the aftermath of George Polk's murder. "This year, the outstanding reporting of these distinguished journalists told unprecedented stories of the greatest challenges our society has faced in generations," said Long Island University President Kimberly R. Cline. "Long Island University is honored to recognize this year's George Polk winners and their exceptional work as part of this long-established tradition." George Polk Award winners are traditionally honored at a luncheon ceremony in New York in the spring, where each briefly describes their reporting, following an evening seminar on LIU's Brooklyn campus that delves more deeply into some of their stories. Because of the pandemic, this year's luncheon has been cancelled, though winners will record remarks on a video that will be available on the Polk site. A Webinar, titled "The Press & the Pandemic," will be aired at 6 pm on April 8. Laurie Garrett, the award-winning science writer, will moderate a discussion with three of the current Polk winners: David Culver, Helen Branswell, and Ed Yong. About Long Island University (LIU) Long Island University, founded in 1926, continues to redefine higher education, providing high quality academic instruction by world-class faculty. Recognized by Forbes for its emphasis on experiential learning and by the Brookings Institution for its "value added" to student outcomes, LIU offers over 250 degree programs, with a network of 270,000 alumni that includes industry leaders and entrepreneurs across the globe. Visit liu.edu for more information. SOURCE Long Island University Related Links www.liu.edu Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 02:54:24|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close Former U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) chief Steven Sund attends a joint hearing of "Examining the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol" before Senate committees in Washington, D.C., the United States, on Feb. 23, 2021. Steven Sund, who stepped down after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, blamed the insurrection on the unpreparedness of the intelligence community Tuesday when testifying before Senate committees. (Andrew Harnik/Pool via Xinhua) WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Former U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) chief Steven Sund, who stepped down after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, blamed the insurrection on the unpreparedness of the intelligence community Monday when testifying before Senate committees. "A clear lack of accurate and complete intelligence across several federal agencies contributed to this event," said Sund, telling members of the Senate committees of Rules, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that while USCP "properly planned for a mass demonstration with possible violence," it hadn't been informed in advance by any intelligence agency of the full extent to which the attack was planned and coordinated. "Based on the intelligence that we received, we planned for increased level of violence at the Capitol and that some participants may be armed, but none of the intelligence that we received predicted what actually occurred," Sund said, adding "what we got was a military-style coordinated assault on my officers and a violent takeover of the Capitol building." "Although it appears that there were numerous participants from multiple states planning this attack, the entire intelligence community seems to have missed it," Sund said in prepared opening remarks. Capitol Police Captain Carneysha Mendoza, another witness invited to testify at the joint hearing who has been a member of the USCP for almost 19 years, said while defending the Capitol during the siege, she sustained chemical burns on her face that "still have not healed to this day," adding that she believed the rioters deployed military-grade CS gas inside the Capitol building -- including in the rotunda -- making it "a lot worse inside the building versus outside, because there's nowhere for it to go." Mendoza's testimony was later echoed by Sund, who called the rioters "criminals" who came to the Capitol "prepared for war." He said that he believed there was "significant coordination" by the rioters to carry out the attack, adding "you're bringing climbing gear to a demonstration. You're bringing explosives. You're bringing chemical spray, such as what Captain Mendoza had talked about. You're coming prepared." Robert Contee, the acting chief of the D.C. police department, told lawmakers in his testimony that the Defense Department was "reluctant to send the D.C. national guard to the Capitol" at the time of the attack. "I was stunned at the response from Department of the Army, which was reluctant to send the D.C. National Guard to the Capitol," Contee said in prepared remarks as he joined the hearing remotely. "I was able to quickly deploy (D.C. police) and issue directives to them while they were in the field, and I was honestly shocked that the National Guard could not - or would not - do the same," the acting chief said. Contee also mentioned other limitations on the part of D.C. police, including no jurisdiction to patrol or make arrests in the Capitol without an explicit request from the Capitol Police. That request, according to Contee, came from Sund just before 1 p.m. on Jan. 6, and the D.C. police arrived on the scene "within minutes." On the subject of requesting the assistance from the National Guard, Sund said in his opening remarks that he has no authority to do that absent an emergency declaration from the Capitol Police Board, an assertion challenged by Senator Amy Klobuchar, who asked Sund to specify the "rule, regulation or authority" on which he based his view. "I'd have to go back and look at the specific rule, but it's a standard - it's a standing rule that we have," Sund responded. "It's kind of interesting because it's very similar to the fact that I can't even give my men and women cold water on an excessively hot day without declaration of emergency." "I think in exigent circumstances there needs to be a streamlined process for the Capitol Police chief, for Capitol Police, to have authority," Sund told the senators. Sund and former House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving offered conflicting accounts of the specific timing of their phone conversation on the day of the attack about sending National Guard troops to the Capitol, prompting Senator Rob Portman to request that the two provide the relevant phone records, which he believed "would clear up some of the confusion." A mob of former President Donald Trump's supporters violently breached the Capitol building on Jan. 6, disrupting the then ongoing congressional joint session to confirm Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election. The insurrection, condemned as an unprecedented attack on American democracy and the peaceful transfer of power, resulted in five deaths and led to the impeachment of Trump by the House, which charged him with "incitement of insurrection." So far, federal prosecutors have charged at least 238 people for their alleged roles in the riot and opened over 400 criminal investigations. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced last week that Congress will establish an independent committee to investigate the insurrection, resembling the one set up after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001. Enditem Advertisement Experts are struggling to explain why new cases of COVID-19 are declining much more slowly in New York City than across the rest of the country. As of Wednesday, the seven-day rolling average of daily new cases was down just 3 percent in New York over the past two weeks, compared to a decline of 37 percent in the same period nationwide. The city was still averaging well over 3,000 new cases of coronavirus per day, down from the peak of 6,000 in early January but roughly flat with the beginning of February. Meanwhile, nationally new cases have plummeted to less than 70,000 per day, from the January peak of more than 250,000, spurring questions about what is going wrong in New York. 'Its always tricky to attribute a rise or fall in cases to one specific event,' Suzanne Judd, a PhD epidemiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham's School of Public Health, told DailyMail.com. Judd offered several theories, including that different variants of the virus are more prevalent in New York City, that the current surge in the city started later than in the rest of the country, and that vaccine rollout could be proceeding at a different pace in New York. The seven-day rolling average of daily new cases was down just 3 percent in New York over the past two weeks Pressed on the issue, Mayor Bill de Blasio and his advisers blamed everything from 'historical injustice like racism and poverty' to the city's density, and claimed that the city's testing capabilities were detecting cases that would go unnoticed elsewhere. Historic winter storms may have reduced transmission in many parts of the country Over the past several weeks, much of the country was battered by several rounds of winter storms, leaving more than three-quarters of the country covered in snow, with temperatures falling well below zero degrees Fahrenheit all across the Great Lakes and Plains regions. While New York City also got its share of the snow, life in the city was barely affected compared to vast swathes of the Midwest and South. Life in Texas was most notably thrown into chaos, but throughout the Plains, Ohio River Valley, and much of the South, roads were impassible and many people spent more than a week riding out the storms at home. Trapped at home by the snow, those who were unwittingly contagious with asymptomatic cases could have been unintentionally forced into quarantine, slowing the spread of the virus. Snow accumulation is seen across the US on February 17. Rounds of winter storms could have reduced transmission by forcing people to stay in their homes A map from COVID Act Now shows current per capita trends of new cases for each state At one point in mid-February, Georgia, South Carolina and Florida were the only contiguous states that had no significant snow accumulation. Notably, all three states have seen their cases drop more slowly than the national average in the past 14 days. Meanwhile, in New York City, the trains kept running and fleets of plows quickly cleared the streets. However, Judd expressed doubt that the storms were the sole explanation for the differences between the New York and the rest of the country. 'It is unlikely that the weather event alone explains the differences,' she told DailyMail.com. 'A forced quarantine in some places (Texas) would explain a decrease in those areas but here in Alabama we did not experience the same extreme weather. We only had about six hours of snow so that wouldnt explain why we, too, are seeing a decrease in cases,' said Judd. Alabama has seen new cases drop 45 percent in the past two weeks, an even quicker pace than the national average. Variant strains could be to blame for slower drop NYC On Tuesday, the New York City Health Department released a report suggesting that the B117 UK variant of coronavirus accounted for 6.2 percent of cases in the city, up from 2.7 percent in January. The UK variant has been estimated to be as much as 70 percent more contagious than prior strands of the virus, and a high prevalence of the B117 strand could be driving higher case numbers in New York. The city's surveillance testing suggests that there may be thousands of previously unknown variant cases in the city. Based on confirmed detection of the variant, Florida had previously been thought the be the nation's hotspot. But Florida has seen daily new cases fall by 22 percent in the past two weeks -- slower than the national average but far quicker than New York City. NYC officials argue their higher rate of testing reveals more cases than elsewhere At a press conference on Tuesday, de Blasio was asked why New York City was seeing cases drop so much more slowly than the rest of the country. 'We're a really tough place in terms of just how many people here, the density of this city, the fact that no matter how hard we're fighting, there's still a legacy of lots of poverty and lots of folks who didn't get health care for generations,' the mayor responded. 'So, there's challenges for sure, but I feel very good about our ability to turn it around with intensive vaccination if we can get supply,' he added. Dr. Jay Varma, a top pandemic advisor to de Blaiso, chimed in: 'Of course we know that New York City is a more vulnerable place, density of population, historical injustice like racism and poverty.' He also argued that New York City is simply better at detecting mild and asymptomatic cases than the rest of the country. 'New York City continues to perform more testing per capita than any other place really in the country of similar size and, and larger than more places do on the world. So, by definition, you're going to end up counting more cases,' said Varma. 'That's why we also look at, you know, percent positivity. And we see also that our percent positivity has continued to decline, although maybe not as precipitous as it has in some other places,' he added. New York City is testing around 64,000 to 65,000 people a day over the last seven days, according to city data, or about 2.5 percent of the 1.2 million to 1.3 million tests being done nationally over the same time frame, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project. Fujitsu Contributes to UNICEF Global Project Ensuring that AI Deployments Reflect Childrens Rights News facts: Fujitsu is participating in a pilot project implementing UNICEF AI policy guidance and reporting back to inform future versions of the document Fujitsu will test the guidance with a deployment in Finland that leverages Artificial Intelligence and predictive analysis to identify young people at risk of social exclusion Underlines Fujitsus implementation of its AI Commitment and efforts to build responsibility into its work in the field of AI Munich, February 24, 2021 - Fujitsu Finland is participating in a UNICEF global pilot project to explore and refine approaches to protecting and upholding child rights in a world where the use of Artificial Intelligence is becoming more commonplace. Fujitsu is implementing the UNICEF Policy Guidance on AI for Children as part of an existing AI deployment in Finland and sharing first-hand experiences from the field to inform future versions of the guidance. The intention is to help businesses and governments ensure that future AI solutions are in the best interests of children. Artificial intelligence is driving innovation and delivering value and for businesses in all sectors. However, this powerful technology also potentially poses risks for children and their rights, such as privacy, safety and security. AI is increasingly being used to make decisions that affect the well-being of children, from the education they receive to decisions on family housing. However, most AI policies, strategies and guidance today do not take the needs of children into account. To tackle this growing problem, UNICEF has drafted approaches that protect and uphold childrens rights to help fill this gap, compiling them into its AI Policy Guidance. The latest phase of this exploration focuses on a collaboration with 13 diverse international government and business pilot partners, including Fujitsu, that are interested in bringing a child-centered lens to generally-accepted AI policies and practices. Fujitsu is committing to implement the guidance. Fujitsu is testing the guidance in an AI solution called Nuora, developed in collaboration with the Finnish Eksote South Karelia Social and Health Care District. By leveraging AI-powered predictive analytics based on Fujitsu's XpressWay for AI solution, Nuora identifies and analyzes the factors that cause social exclusion. It can currently identify approximately 90% of the young people at risk of social exclusion and flag at risk individuals, improving early, targeted intervention and reducing healthcare and associated costs. Ilona Ylinampa, Head of Information Management from Fujitsu Finland comments: AI is increasingly being implemented in toys, interactive games, and mobile devices, with its algorithms guiding childrens choices of everything from what to look at to who to connect with. It also supports a great deal of decision-making that affects children. We wanted to contribute to this valuable project, bringing Fujitsus decades of experience in the field of AI to help ensure that businesses and governments alike have a strong foundation to ensure that AI is being implemented with childrens privacy, safety and security taken into account. And, by ensuring that we can build trust in the decisions that AI makes for this vulnerable group, the technology has the potential to benefit not only individuals but society as a whole. Jussi Kivipuro, Development Director at UNICEF Finland, says: "The widespread deployment of AI provides many new opportunities to advance the well-being of children, but it also increases associated risks. Guidance is needed urgently, as AI is already embedded in children's everyday lives. Our pilot partners are helping UNICEF to take the guidance to the next level by committing to apply it in their own context in a safe and responsible way. They are openly sharing their findings about how it was used, what worked and what did not. Fujitsu outlined its commitment to ethical artificial intelligence that is collaborative and human centric in its AI Commitment document1. This aims to build responsibility into Fujitsus work in the field of AI through five critical pillars: providing value to customers; human-centric AI; striving for a sustainable society through AI; AI that respects and supports decision making; and emphasizing transparency and accountability for the technology. Participation in the UNICEF pilot project is the latest opportunity to put this commitment into action. Fujitsu is also a founder partner of the AI4People global forum, creating a platform for different stakeholders in shaping AI to discuss its social and ethical implications. The company is also closely engaged with the recently established EU AI Alliance, formed directly to contribute to the EU debate on AI and ensure good policies. The human rights of children and the ethical implementation of AI also form part of Fujitsus broader commitment to Responsible Business2. Notes to editors 1 Fujitsu announced the Fujitsu Group AI Commitment in March 2019 to express its approach to AI ethics in a concrete and easy to understand manner, based on over 30 years of R&D and AI implementation. Fujitsu announced the Fujitsu Group AI Commitment in March 2019 to express its approach to AI ethics in a concrete and easy to understand manner, based on over 30 years of R&D and AI implementation. 2 The Fujitsu Group promotes its Sustainability activities based on the Fujitsu Way which aims to make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation. https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/csr/ Online resources Fujitsus 2020 Technology and Service vision: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/vision/ Read the Fujitsu blog: https://blog.global.fujitsu.com/ Follow Fujitsu on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Fujitsu_Global Follow us on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/fujitsu Find Fujitsu on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/FujitsuICT Fujitsu pictures and media server: http://mediaportal.ts.fujitsu.com/pages/portal.php For regular news updates, bookmark the Fujitsu newsroom: https://www.fujitsu.com/emeia/about/resources/news/newsroom.html About Fujitsu Fujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company offering a full range of technology products, solutions and services. Approximately 130,000 Fujitsu people support customers in more than 100 countries. We use our experience and the power of ICT to shape the future of society with our customers. Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) reported consolidated revenues of 3.9 trillion yen (US$35 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2020. For more information, please see Fujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company offering a full range of technology products, solutions and services. Approximately 130,000 Fujitsu people support customers in more than 100 countries. We use our experience and the power of ICT to shape the future of society with our customers. Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) reported consolidated revenues of 3.9 trillion yen (US$35 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2020. For more information, please see www.fujitsu.com Public Relations International Corporate Communications E-mail: public.relations@fujitsu.com All other company or product names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. Information provided in this press release is accurate at time of publication and is subject to change without advance notice. Date: February 24, 2021 City: Munich Help India! Shalini S, TwoCircles.net Kerala: After the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act in the upper house (Rajya Sabha) of Indias parliament on December 11, 2019, widespread protests erupted across the country with many sections of society calling it discriminatory and divisive. The Pinarayi Vijayan led LDF (Left Democratic Front) Kerala government was one of the few states to oppose the controversial CAA-NPR-NRC triumvirate. Now, a year later, the same government is summoning activists and people who protested against the law in the state. The activists have accused the LDF government of witch hunting, of having double standards and selective Islamophobia. Support TwoCircles Recently, the Court of Judicial First Class Magistrate of Kozhikode, Kerala, sent out summons to over 46 activists and scholars who extended their solidarity for the anti-CAA protest held on December 17, 2019. The activists were summoned to appear in front of the magistrate on February 16, 2020, under the charges of abetment (109 IPC), member of the unlawful assembly (143 IPC), guilty of rioting (147 IPC), danger or obstruction in a public way read with every member of unlawful assembly guilty of the offence committed in prosecution of a common object (283 r/w 149 IPC). Talking to TwoCircles.net, N.P. Chekkutty, a veteran journalist pointed out the double standards of the LDF government, that says one thing and does something else. The charges against him are baseless as he was not present in Kozhikode during the protest, Chekkutty said. Along with NP Chekkutty, some other prominent figures who were summoned are TT Sreekumar (Professor at EFLU), KK Baburaj, KP Sasi, PA Pouran, Hashim Chendampally, Gomathi, Nasar Faizt Kudathai (State secretary of Samastha Kerala Sunni Youth Movement), welfare party Leaders (WPI) Hameed Vaniyambalam and K Ambujakshan, Social Democratic Party (SDPI) leaders Tulasidharan Pallikal and Ashraf Moulavi, Students Islamic Organization (SIO) leaders Salih Kottapilly and Nahas Mala (ex-president of SIO National Committee). Peter Thomas, a fierce advocate of the fishing communitys rights in the state, who had succumbed to Covid-19 in early October last year, is also on the list of the accused. The protests on December 17, 2019, was jointly organized by Welfare State Party (WPI), the Social Democratic Party of India, the Dalit Human rights Movement (DHRM) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) expressing Dalit Muslim affinity. The mainstream parties, Left parties and other organizations did not join the demonstration due to the involvement of SDPI and its alleged extremist views. Pinnarayi Vijayan had criticized SDPI last February saying, There is a group named SDPI in our state who are thinking in an extremist way. It has been brought to the governments notice that SDPIs members were trying to infiltrate the protests in many places and divert the issues. CM Vijayan accused SDPI of spreading communal hatred during the protests. Mainstream parties have taken a stand that they wouldnt support SDPI and PFI (Popular Front of India) protests. The demonization of these two parties has been taking place for a while. Do we have any proof that these organizations are doing extremist activities which they are accused of? My stand is against CAA, so I have been a part of many such protests, why should this protest alone be singled out?, an activist, who was part of the protests, told a news outlet. According to a report by The Telegraph, a writer who declined to be named, called it selective Islamophobia, adding, The CPM can organize strikes on anything. But they feel threatened when the Welfare Party or the SDPI do the same. They identify these two small parties with Muslim extremism. The police statement says that the charges were levied for not seeking prior permission for the protest as per the court order, however, The State WPI president Hameed Vaniyambalam said the Kozhikode administration had denied permission for the December 17 protest despite allowing anti-CAA demonstrations by other groups on other dates. On February 14, 2021, Pinarayi Vijayan had reiterated that the state will not allow this disaster (CAA), opposing the Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who while addressing a rally in West Bengal, had said that the act will be implemented effectively after the Covid-19 vaccination campaign. BEIJING, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- YishengBio Co., Ltd. ("YishengBio", the "Company") announced today the closing of a US$130 million in Series B funding round. The new investment was co-led by Oceanpine and OrbiMed. After completing the Series B funding round, the company's institutional investors include: OrbiMed, Oceanpine, EightRoad, F-Prime Capital, 3W Capital, Hillhouse Capital, Adjuvant Capital, MSA Capital, AIHC, Epiphron Capital, Superstring Capital, Haitong International, etc. This round of funding will strongly support the expansion of the company's R&D center, accelerate our commercialization strategies including the clinical development of multiple vaccine candidates and the construction of biologics production facilities in China and Singapore. CEC Capital was the company's exclusive financial advisor in Series B funding round. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Tian Yuan Law Firm acted as the international legal counsel and legal counsel in China of YishengBio respectively. Sidley Austin LLP acted as the legal counsel of OrbiMed and Adjuvant Capital. Han Kun Law Offices acted as the legal counsel of Oceanpine Capital. YishengBio is a global, fully integrated biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Beijing. The company is engaged in discovering, developing and commercializing innovative biotherapeutics for cancers and infectious diseases using novel PIKA immunomodulating technology. YishengBio operates in China, USA, and Singapore with over 500 employees. YishengBio's YSJA rabies vaccine is the first alum-free lyophilized rabies vaccine launched in China. The rabies vaccine has been commercialized in China and has served over 16 million patients for post-exposure protection against rabies. The novel PIKA immunomodulating technology platform is a new immunomodulation technology developed by YishengBio. Its proprietary PIKA technology augments both innate and adaptive immune responses through the TLR3, RIG-I and MDA5 pathways. With the PIKA immunomodulating technology platform, YishengBio has developed a series of new immune drugs and innovative vaccine products and has obtained over 60 patents for its PIKA immunomodulating technology across more than 30 countries and regions. Being able to accelerate post-exposure immune protection, PIKA rabies vaccine has the potential to lead in the rabies vaccines market in the future. The product has been cited as a novel vaccine by the World Health Organization and classified as a therapeutic biologics product by the China National Medical Products Administration. The product is planned to enter into its global multi-center Phase III clinical trial. Other products in clinical development include YS-ON-001 for the treatment of advanced solid tumors, YS-HBV-001 for hepatitis B and PIKA YS-SC2-010, a prophylactic and therapeutic vaccine candidate against Covid-19 virus. PIKA YS-HBV-002 for chronic HBV and PIKA YS-ON-002 for solid tumor, among others, are product candidates in preclinical and discovery stages. "We are very pleased to have the support of healthcare investors in the Series B investment," said David Shao, CEO of YishengBio. "We believe their investments in YishengBio reflects the confidence in our development of novel PIKA immunomodulating technology, the revenue potential of YSJA rabies vaccine, and the market prospectus of our innovative vaccine pipeline. This new round of capital will accelerate the building of our management and R&D teams and will facilitate the growth of our pipeline and construction of production sites both at home and abroad. YishengBio is committed to providing more innovative, safer and more effective vaccines and biologics for doctors and patients all over the world." Dave Chenn, CEO and Managing Partner of Oceanpine Capital, the lead investor on YishengBio's series B investment, said, "The COVID-19 epidemic has triggered abrupt development in vaccine research around the globe, which has been a focus of our investment in healthcare sector. Specializing in the development of innovative vaccines and therapeutic biologics for infectious diseases and cancer, YishengBio boasts a management team of comprehensive and complementary capabilities in the vaccine industry and commercialization. The YSJA rabies vaccine is well received by the market as a quality product and the in-house developed competitive PIKA technology has been applied to the development of a new generation of antiviral vaccines. We are optimistic about the future of YishengBio. Oceanpine is very excited to be the lead investor in the Series B investment to grow and thrive with the company and partners, and to help accelerate YishengBio in becoming a world-leading biopharmaceutical company." Iris Wang, Managing Director of Orbimed Asia-Pacific, said, "Chinese biotech companies are playing an increasingly significant role in the innovation era of the whole world. As an existing shareholder of YishengBio, we are very glad to support the company's strategy in developing and commercializing innovative vaccines and therapeutic biologics once again and are very confident in the execution capability of the management team." Xiao Zhang, Managing Director of CEC Capital, said, "We are delighted to support YishengBio's seried B investment. Vaccines and healthcare sectors have long been the focus of global investment and YishengBio is well-sought after company in innovative vaccines and biologics. We recognized the talented management team and strong capability. We look forward to seeing new milestones by YishengBio after this investment." About YishengBio Co., Ltd. YishengBio Co., Ltd. is a global, fully integrated biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Beijing. The Company is engaged in discovering, developing and commercializing innovative biotherapeutics for cancers and infectious diseases using the novel PIKA immunomodulating technology. It developed a PIKA immunomodulating technology platform and a series of preventive and therapeutic biologics targeting Rabies, Hepatitis B, Shingles, influenza, Coronavirus. The company operates in China, USA and Singapore with over 500 employees. About Oceanpine Capital Oceanpine Capital is an institutional growth equity investment company, with a perspective of achieving successful growth over the long term. The company invests innovative and disruptive growth companies in both TMT and healthcare sectors, i.e., DeepTech areas, which are the driving force of the future economy in the New Norm. We believe in long term value investing and provide strategic resources and operational support to entrepreneur partners, and therefore foster their further growth. About OrbiMed OrbiMed is scouting the globe for innovations that will help ensure humanity lives healthier, longer and more productive lives. It manages over $13 billion across public and private company investments worldwide. The company has been investing globally for over 20 years across the healthcare industry, ranging from biopharmaceuticals to medical devices, diagnostics, and healthcare services. Its investment covers from early-stage private companies to large multinational corporations. Its team has over 80 distinguished scientific, medical, investment and other professionals. Its offices are located in New York, Herzliya, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Shanghai, Mumbai, etc. About CEC Capital Founded in 2000, CEC Capital Group is a leading investment bank in China. The company invests on the TMT, consumer and healthcare sectors, which separated into 19 market segment teams. SOURCE Yisheng Biopharma Co., Ltd. Positive trend confirmed in 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic ALPHEN AAN DEN RIJN, Netherlands, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Hyva, a global leader in loading and unloading hydraulic solutions serving the commercial vehicle and environmental services industries, is appointing Alex Tan as its new CEO starting March 1st. He succeeds Marco Mazzu, who is appointed as Chairman of the Board. Alex was appointed the Managing Director of Hyva China in 2004 and has since led the business with distinction, overseeing its meteoric growth from inception to market leadership. He was appointed Head of Hyva Asia in 2011 and also assumed global responsibility for Hyva's waste management line of business in 2015. He said: "I am honoured to be given the opportunity to lead the company that has been my life for 21 years. Hyva's success has been achieved through the strong entrepreneurial spirit of our people and our focus on our customers and their success. I wish to retain these qualities even as we strengthen our capabilities in innovation and new product development to support our customers effectively in the face of rapidly developing new technologies and digitization in our industry." The current CEO, Marco Mazzu, will be moving into the role of Chairman. Before Hyva he covered senior leadership positions for the previous 20 years in the automotive, commercial vehicles and agricultural equipment industries across four different continents: "I am honoured to have led the Hyva Team for the last six years and helped reposition the company and our global organization and business processes. I am proud of the great results and accomplishments achieved by the company in this time. I have worked with Alex for six years, and I know he will lead Hyva to new great achievements." Hyva's Board of Directors said in a statement: "We would like to extend our thanks to Marco for a job well done. He joined Hyva as it faced a tumultuous time in many of its key markets and has since overseen a tremendous improvement in the Company's operating and financial performance, which was sustained during 2020 despite the disruptions caused by COVID-19. We would also like to welcome and congratulate Alex on his appointment as CEO. Alex has a proven leadership track record of driving excellence. As a Hyva insider, he brings a deep knowledge of our products, markets, and customers to the job. We wish him all the best." The company has a worldwide footprint in all major markets, with a longstanding presence in the fast-growing Asia Pacific region. Hyva provides solutions to more than 20,000 customers and is world leader in front-end tipping cylinders with over 40% global market share. The company operates in more than 110 countries with over 3,500 employees around the world. The Group encompasses more than 30 subsidiaries across Europe, Asia, the Americas and MEA, with a vast sales and service coverage and a well-equipped manufacturing base of 12 production facilities in Brazil, China, Germany, India, and Italy. Throughout the challenging time of the Coronavirus pandemic, Hyva managed in protecting the health of its employees and kept up with servicing its clients worldwide across the four lines of business: Tipping Solutions, Cranes, Container Handling Solutions and Waste Handling Solutions. Visit www.hyva.com. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1441194/Hyva_1.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1441195/Hyva_2.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1441196/Hyva_Logo.jpg For further information: Marcello Laugelli marcello.laugelli@omnicomprgroup.com +393358438856 Pauline Campbell, mum of the late Tracey Campbell Fitzpatrick of Nurney, Co. Carlow, pictured holding a picture of her daughter on leaving the Four Courts The HSE and a hospital have apologised in the High Court to the family of a 36-year old mother who died less than three hours after giving birth to her second child. Tracey Campbell-Fitzpatrick died in the early hours of Easter Monday 2016 after suffering a massive post-partum haemorrhage within minutes of the birth of her son Max at St Lukes General Hospital in Kilkenny. On Wednesday, her husband and family settled an action over her death against the HSE and the hospital. The settlement includes 700,000 for the care of Ms Campbell Fitzpatricks son Max who is now almost five years of age. The hospital manager, in the letter read to the court, gave an unreserved apology for the failings in the care afforded to her at the hospital. I further apologise for the distress experienced by your family as a result of this tragic loss. The letter extended deepest sympathy to Ms Campbell Fitzpatricks family on behalf of hospital staff . We understand this apology cannot negate the adverse effect that the loss of your daughter, mother and sister has had on all your lives for which we are truly sorry, it concluded. Mr Justice Kevin Cross was told liability was admitted in the case when it went to mediation. Outside court , Ms Campbell Fitzpatricks father James Campbell said his daughter was a fantastic mother, wife, daughter and sister and her death was unnecessary. This will not bring our Tracey back to us but at least we have uncovered the truth, he said. Referring to an admission of liability in the case, Mr Campbell said the family had been put through hell for the past five years in their fight for this truth. The truth is all that matters now, he said. It is our hope that the HSE has learned from the horrendous failings in Traceys care to ensure greater patient safety in the Irish maternity services for all expectant mothers. Traceys husband Bernard Fitzpatrick, Nurney, Co Carlow had on behalf of the family sued the HSE . It was claimed that the young mother suffered a severe post partum haemorrhage and for lack of effective intervention, she bled to death. It was further claimed there was a delay in the recognition of post partum haemorrhage and a failure to have appropriate staff in place in time and a failure to transfuse blood in a timely manner. The family s counsel Aongus OBrolchain SC told the court there were a number of gushes of blood during the time following Maxs birth at 12.55am on March 28, of 2016, and also a trickle between gushes. By about 1.25am her blood loss was estimated at 1.2 litres. A decision was made to transfer her from the labour suite to the operating theatre for examination under anaesthetic, but she collapsed on the trolley on the way . She suffered a cardiac arrest at 2.30am and the resuscitation team worked on her for over 70 minutes but she was pronounced dead at 3.45am. Counsel said it was their case if there was intervention at an earlier stage as Ms Campbell Fitzpatrick was losing blood she would have lived. Approving the settlement Mr Justice Cross offered his sincere sympathy to the Campbell and Fitzpatricks family on their loss. He said while nothing could replace the loss of a wife, daughter, mother and sister the family had received an acknowledgement by the HSE in relation to liability. The judge said it was a very good settlement. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Hyderabad, Feb 24 : At a time when spurt in Covid-19 cases in some states, including Maharashtra have raised fears of a second wave, Telangana has stopped issuing daily media bulletins on the pandemic. Director of Public Health G. Srinivasa Rao said instead of daily bulletin, the department will issue it once a week. The move has come as a surprise to people as the bulletin was helping them to keep track of the situation on daily basis. The bulletin was containing vital information like number of new cases and deaths reported, number of tests conducted, recoveries, district-wise daily count of cases and bed status in government and private hospitals. Only two days ago, health minister Eatala Rajender had said that the health department was on alert following an advisory from the Centre. He also revealed that they were focusing on districts bordering Maharashtra where there is a spike in cases. Stating that there is no major spike in cases in the state, the director of public health said in case of any significant development, the media will be informed. He justified the move to stop issuing daily bulletins saying the department can use human resources for Covid-19 vaccination drive instead. The health department had started issuing daily bulletins since March last year. However, as the information provided then was not comprehensive, Telangana High Court while hearing Public Interest Litigations (PILs) had pulled up health authorities. Following directions of the high court, the department started issuing comprehensive media bulletins, giving all vital statistics including the list of government and private testing centres, hospitals, bed occupancy and containment zones. The number of daily Covid cases in Telangana has increased from single digit in March-April to nearly 3,000 in August-September. The numbers have been on decline for last 3-4 months. The state on an average was logging 150-170 cases during the current month. However, the department had reduced the number of daily tests since the launch of vaccination for healthcare and frontline workers last month. Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19) Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi (left) talks with Myanmar Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin, as Thai Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai listens, during a meeting at Don Mueang International Airport in Bangkok, Feb. 24, 2021. Updated at 3 p.m. ET on 2021-02-24 Myanmar must listen to its people, Indonesias top diplomat told her counterpart from Naypyidaw in Bangkok on Wednesday, as they held the first known face-to-face meetings between a senior junta member and foreign governments since the Feb. 1 Myanmar coup. Foreign ministers Retno Marsudi of Indonesia, Don Pramudwinai of Thailand and Wunna Maung Lwin met briefly at Don Mueang International Airport after her planned trip to Myanmar had to be postponed, she told an online press conference after the gathering. Retno said she told Wunna Maung Lwin that the wishes of the Myanmar people must be heard, and called for an inclusive democratic transition process. [W]e need to create a conducive situation through dialogue, reconciliation, and trust-building, she said. The safety and welfare of the people of Myanmar is of paramount importance. She called on all parties to refrain from violence and urged the military rulers to allow humanitarian access and visits to detainees. Retno said she was also in intensive communication with the Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, or CRPH, a shadow parliament formed by Burmese lawmakers elected in the November 2020 vote, which the junta claims was marred by fraud. Myanmars envoy also met Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha in a closed-door session on Wednesday. We, as friends, have to listen to one another. However, [we] give them moral support, Prayuth told reporters after the meeting. As an ASEAN country, we have to encourage cooperation and offer good wishes that everything [in Myanmar] comes back to normalcy, he said. Myanmar trip postponed Indonesia, the largest country in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and a founding member of the bloc, has been on a diplomatic push to get neighboring countries more involved in addressing the coup in Myanmar. Last week, Retno visited Brunei, this years ASEAN chair, and Singapore. She had been due to make an hours-long trip to Naypyidaw on Thursday, in what would have been the first known visit by a foreign envoy since the coup, but it had to be delayed, she said. This postponement has not dampened the intention to establish communication with all parties in Myanmar, including with the Myanmar military and the CRPH, Retno said Wednesday. Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah said the time was not ideal for a visit. In Myanmar on Tuesday, the activist group Future Nation Alliance rejected the purported visit, calling it tantamount to recognizing the military junta by embarking on official communications with the coup regime. Yan Myo Thein, an independent political analyst in Yangon, said neighboring countries should use approaches in their diplomacy with Myanmar that reflect the will of its people. The international community including ASEAN should primarily find an approach as close as possible to the desires of the Myanmar population, he said. The results of the November 2020 elections have clearly shown the will of the people. It is irrefutable. A fine line On Feb. 1, Myanmars generals seized power from the elected government and arrested civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and others. The military declared a one-year state of emergency to deal with allegations of voting fraud tied to the Nov. 8 general election, which Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy handily won, according to polling authorities. The country has since been gripped by a civil disobedience movement and huge anti-coup protests that have continued to swell despite internet blackouts, curfews and the use of lethal force against demonstrations. Security forces have used live ammunition against protesters, killing at least four people and injuring dozens. A protester shot in the head in Naypyidaw on Feb. 9 died in hospital, while two others hit by gunfire in Mandalay on Feb. 21 also died. Police also shot dead a night watchman in Yangon. The Group of Seven industrial democracies on Tuesday deplored the Myanmar militarys use of violence against protesters. We condemn the intimidation and oppression of those opposing the coup, said the G7 and the EUs high representative, in a joint statement that also scorched a crackdown on free speech. Use of live ammunition against unarmed people is unacceptable, the statement said. Anyone responding to peaceful protests with violence must be held to account. Also on Tuesday, demonstrators gathered outside the Indonesian Embassy in Yangon to reject reports that Jakarta was urging countries in the region to send monitors to ensure that the generals hold fair and inclusive elections. Indonesias Ministry of Foreign Affairs later denied it. That is not Indonesias position, because our focus is on how to reach a peaceful settlement in Myanmar that is inclusive and involves all parties, said Faizasyah, the ministry spokesman. I categorically say that such a plan of action doesnt exist, because the fact is that currently the foreign minister is still trying to forge a common position with other ASEAN foreign ministers. Indonesia should be cautious in its Myanmar diplomacy and avoid offending the junta, said Mohammad Hasan Ansori, program and research director at the Habibie Center, a Jakarta think-tank. From experience, including on the issue of the Rohingya, talking with the Myanmar military is not easy. Retno has to tread a fine line giving encouragement the ASEAN way, Hasan told BenarNews. Myanmar has a lot of respect for Indonesia. Indonesia is acting in good faith, treating Myanmar as a friend. It wants to help, not intervene in its internal affairs, he said, referring to a core founding principle of ASEAN that members of the bloc do not interfere in the domestic matters of other states within the grouping. The Myanmar service of Radio Free Asia (RFA), a sister entity of BenarNews, contributed to this report. The year 2020 tested us beyond measure; however 'Hope' is the power that gives us the confidence to start afresh. Catch Salt & Spices set the theme of optimism for 2021 with a year-long campaign, Umeedon Ka Saal, a salutation to positivity of new beginnings. The brand will be introducing exciting offers and initiatives to engage with the consumers round the year. Umeedon Ka Saal will be driven to uplift the overall sentiments of consumers, employees and the trade partners with an essence of coming together and experiencing the joy of better things. The theme will be central to all brand activities that will keep the consumer involved - engaged and cheerful, all through 2021. The campaign kicked-off with a digital film, Catch Umeedon ka Saal that is being promoted across social and digital platforms. The film showcases the play of emotions expressed beautifully through cooking various dishes for the people we love. It captures the Happy Home Moments, revolving around food that addsn taste and excitement to our lives. It promises that whenever someone hopes from the heart, we will add flavours to the experience with the finesse of our brand Catch. Commenting on the campaign, Mr. Rajneesh Goel, Business Head, DS Spiceco Pvt Ltd, said, UMEEDON KA SAAL, will help the brand create a stronger bond with the current as well as potential consumers. The brand will fulfil the culinary expectations of the consumers by bringing them a plethora of offers to enhance the flavours and taste of their dishes with unmatched deals from Catch. This campaign reinforces our commitment to our consumers that in the year of hope, we will stand with them with our range of quality products and matchless offers . The brand will reach out to its consumers by leveraging different media platforms like TV, Digital, Radio, Print and through on-ground activations all-round the year . As a part of the 360 degree campaign, the Catch portfolio would also be amplified with exciting new products to keep the spirit of optimism kindled. The spice box is an integral part of Indian cooking and it contains myriad spices which vary from region to region across the entire country. Culinary tradition in India reflects the quality, freshness and aroma of spices which lend a unique flavours to the dishes. Catch is committed to this quest for quality. With a presence of nearly three decades in India, Catch Spices is today a household name, synonymous with and quality and innovation. From pure spices to whole ones, sprinklers to blended spices, Catch covers the entire spectrum for home and professional cooking in India. Today, the Catch brand offers an enviable range of whole, pure and blended spices, sprinklers and grinders for Indian dishes and international cuisine. The Catch spices are rich in aroma, freshness and adhere to the highest quality standards which involve the best processes of production, packaging and delivery to customers. CHARLOTTE, N.C., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Duke Energy Foundation has awarded two Duke Energy Renewables grants in the amount of $20,000 each to Feeding Texas and the American Red Cross of Central and South Texas. These funds will provide support services, including food, water, shelter and other necessary resources to Texans who have experienced rolling blackouts, drinking water advisories and historically low temperatures caused by the recent polar vortex that impacted the state. "Texans have endured many challenges over the last several weeks, from gas shortages, water advisories, access to food and rolling blackouts," said Chris Fallon, president of Duke Energy Renewables. "We value our community partners and are comforted to know that our contributions are helping improve access to community resources and services for the citizens of Texas, particularly during this time of need." Thousands of Texans sought relief at local shelters and obtained services, including water, ready-to-eat meals and emergency supplies supported through the American Red Cross of Central and South Texas, and will continue to do so as recovery efforts from the winter storms continue. "Duke Energy and the American Red Cross have been partnering to serve communities for over a century. The American Red Cross of Central and South Texas is very grateful to Duke Energy for their gift. Through their support much needed supplies, including blankets, cots and meals will be provided to those in need," said Sunny Howard, Regional Chief Development Officer, The American Red Cross of Central and South Texas. Feeding Texas is also playing a key role in supporting the needs of Texans, particularly as the area and its citizens recover from the recent winter storm blast. The funds provided by Duke Energy to Feeding Texas will provide over 200,000 meals to Texas citizens. "The pandemic already pushed more Texans than ever to access food assistance from food banks. But the need is even higher as we strive to help Texas families recover from the impact of the recent winter storms," said Celia Cole, chief executive officer at Feeding Texas. "We are grateful for Duke Energy's support in helping Texas food banks keep their communities nourished through this crisis." The Feeding Texas network consists of 21 food banks serving all 254 counties in the state. Texas is home to over 50% of Duke Energy Renewables' solar, wind and storage assets. Currently, it operates nearly 1,500 MW of wind, 500 MW of solar and a 36 MW battery storage facility, which are managed by nearly 100 employees based in the state. Duke Energy Foundation The Duke Energy Foundation provides philanthropic support to meet the needs of communities where Duke Energy customers live and work. The Foundation contributes more than $30 million annually in charitable gifts and is funded by Duke Energy shareholder dollars. More information about the Foundation and its Powerful Communities program can be found at duke-energy.com/foundation. Duke Energy Renewables Duke Energy Renewables, a nonregulated unit of Duke Energy, operates wind and solar generation facilities across the U.S., with a total electric capacity of 3,000 megawatts. Duke Energy is one of the nation's top renewable energy providers on track to own or purchase 8,000 megawatts of wind, solar and biomass energy by 2020. The power is sold to electric utilities, electric cooperatives, municipalities, and commercial and industrial customers. The unit also operates energy storage and microgrid projects. Visit Duke Energy Renewables for more information. Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK), a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., is one of the largest energy holding companies in the U.S. It employs 30,000 people and has an electric generating capacity of 51,000 megawatts through its regulated utilities, in addition to Duke Energy Renewables' capacity. Duke Energy was named to Fortune's 2019 "World's Most Admired Companies" list, and Forbes' 2019 "America's Best Employers" list. More information about the company is available at duke-energy.com. The Duke Energy News Center contains news releases, fact sheets, photos, videos and other materials. Duke Energy's illumination features stories about people, innovations, community topics and environmental issues. Follow Duke Energy on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. Media contact: Jennifer Garber 800.559.3853 Email: [email protected] SOURCE Duke Energy Related Links www.duke-energy.com Chinas breakthroughs in high-tech industry reflect progress in becoming manufacturer of quality Photo taken on May 24, 2019 shows a worker of TISCO tearing up a piece of 0.02-mm-thick ultra-thin stainless steel strip in Taiyuan. (Xinhua/Cao Yang) Thanks to Chinas efforts to break through the bottleneck of core technologies and industries, the country has made multiple breakthroughs in its manufacturing industry, gaining momentum and confidence as it builds itself into a manufacturer of quality. In 2020, the worlds thinnest stainless steel was independently developed by Shanxi Taigang Stainless Steel Precision Strip Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of Chinese leading stainless steelmaker Taiyuan Iron and Steel Group in north Chinas Shanxi province. With a thickness of 0.015 mm, the ultra-thin stainless steel can be easily torn off by hand, and can be used in the manufacturing of new energy vehicle batteries. A winner of the Sixth China Grand Awards for Industry, the steel was praised by Chinese president Xi Jinping during an inspection tour to Shanxi last year. However, achieving such a breakthrough was not easy. For a long time, China relied on imports of the material, which costs hundreds of yuan (one yuan is about $0.15) per gram. In order to crack this tough nut, the Chinese company carried out over 700 experiments, solved over 170 thorny problems related to equipment and 450 technical problems, producing 0.02-mm ultra-thin stainless steel. Last year, it successfully produced 0.015-mm stainless steel. It is a timely breakthrough, as there is high demand in many emerging industries such as aerospace, nuclear power, and new energy for the product. The companys success is a reflection of the better-than-expected growth of the countrys iron and steel industry. In 2020, key steel enterprises in China registered an overall sales revenue of 4.7 trillion yuan (about $727.6 billion), up 10.86 percent year on year despite the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic. This achievement can be largely attributed to Chinas sound industrial system, and innovation and cooperation among upstream and downstream enterprises. Over the past year, the sales of products, including ultra-thin stainless steel, high-quality bearing steel and steel pinion, have all increased, meeting the demands of clients, stabilizing steel production capacity, and expanding the market. Amazon joined Google and NVIDIA in the cloud gaming ring last year with the launch of Luna. However, with the service starting life in early access through a small invite-only trial in the US, rollout has been slow. But, four months after its launch, Luna is now taking another small step toward expanding its audience. As part of the latest stage of its early access program, Amazon is now offering the gaming service to all US users of its Fire TV products in the hopes of capturing gamers who prefer the big screen experience. The Verge points out that Fire TV users can jump right in if they download the app and grab a 7-day free trial to the Luna+ channel, which otherwise costs $6 per month. That gives you access to a revolving lineup of games including Control, Metro Exodus, Sonic Mania, and GRiD. From there, Amazon is hoping to turn you into a Luna lifer, with the option to also sign up to the Ubisoft+ channel, where you can instantly play the likes of Assassins Creed Valhalla and Watchdogs: Legion. Compatible devices include the Fire TV Stick Lite, Fire TV Stick (2nd & 3rd generation), Fire TV Stick 4K, Fire TV (3rd generation), Fire TV Cube, Toshiba Fire TV Edition, and Insignia Fire TV Edition. And Luna in early access supports a resolution of up to 1080p and 60fps though you need a recommended internet speed of at least 10 Mbps. As with Stadia and GeForce Now, you can play Luna using compatible third-party Bluetooth controllers. But if you want to try Amazon's own controller, which it claims can reduce latency by 20 to 30 milliseconds, you can also now grab that without an invitation for $70. Note, you can still apply for an invitation to use Luna on PC and Mac and through web apps on iPhone and iPad. DUP MP Sammy Wilson has hit out at the BBC for refusing to reveal how much it has spent on face masks. Mr Wilson claimed the broadcaster had been spending extensively on measures to combat Covid-19, including bleepers to alert staff if they come within 2m of each other. The DUP MP said that he had contacted BBC Director General Tim Davie over the issue but that he had received a response in which the BBC "refused to reveal the cost of the equipment which was purchased" for reasons of commercial confidentiality, though it "has admitted that it has purchased proximity devices". A BBC spokesperson said last night it made "no apology for protecting hard working staff against the virus". The East Antrim MP accused the BBC of making "derogatory comments on the cost of face masks purchased by MPs for people coming into their public offices". It emerged in December that Mr Wilson made a 48.56 expenses claim for face masks. The official register of MPs' expenses showed Mr Wilson submitted a claim last May for Covid-19 face masks for face-to-face meetings and for "MP travel to Westminster" to attend the Commons. A DUP spokesperson said the masks were bought for the use of constituents and staff. Mr Wilson has been photographed on a number of occasions either not wearing a face covering or not wearing one correctly. Before the wearing of face masks became mandatory in enclosed public spaces and on public transport Mr Wilson said there was no proof they protected against the virus, comparing them to "muzzles". The DUP MP said that he understood the cost of face masks and other equipment bought by the BBC to protect against Covid-19 had been "extremely high", and accused the corporation of a lack of transparency. The East Antrim MP accused the publicly-funded broadcaster of hiding "behind a veil of secrecy while expecting every other private and public body to be totally transparent". "I can only conclude from the unwillingness of the BBC to reveal the information, which it would expect others to reveal if it were carrying out an investigation, that it is embarrassed by the expenditure which it has engaged." It was revealed earlier this week that the BBC has sent almost a million letters to homes in Northern Ireland since the first lockdown threatening people with heavy fines for not having a licence, which costs 157.50 annually. More than 1,000 people have been taken to court since last March. The DUP MP said it was "always easy to spend money when it can be extracted from the public under the threat of criminal prosecution". He added that "since the BBC is now responsible for 10% of criminal court cases in its pursuit of people who do not pay TV licences, we know how far the organisation will go in extracting money". A BBC spokesperson said that the "overwhelming majority of our staff are working from home, but for those needed in a BBC building to keep our services on air through the pandemic we have measures in place to help them stay safe". "They are doing a difficult job and it is the right and responsible thing to do." New York, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market Research Report by Point of Sale, by Platform, by Type, by Power Source, by Mode of Operation - Global Forecast to 2025 - Cumulative Impact of COVID-19" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p06027999/?utm_source=GNW Market Statistics: The report provides market sizing and forecast across five major currencies - USD, EUR GBP, JPY, and AUD. This helps organization leaders make better decisions when currency exchange data is readily available. 1. The Global Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market is expected to grow from USD 4,323.98 Million in 2020 to USD 5,935.48 Million by the end of 2025. 2. The Global Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market is expected to grow from EUR 3,791.34 Million in 2020 to EUR 5,204.34 Million by the end of 2025. 3. The Global Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market is expected to grow from GBP 3,370.51 Million in 2020 to GBP 4,626.67 Million by the end of 2025. 4. The Global Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market is expected to grow from JPY 461,478.23 Million in 2020 to JPY 633,466.12 Million by the end of 2025. 5. The Global Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market is expected to grow from AUD 6,278.99 Million in 2020 to AUD 8,619.10 Million by the end of 2025. Market Segmentation & Coverage: This research report categorizes the Aircraft Ground Support Equipment to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following sub-markets: Based on Point of Sale, the Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market studied across Equipment and Maintenance Services. Based on Platform, the Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market studied across Commercial and Military. Based on Type, the Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market studied across Fixed and Mobile. Based on Power Source, the Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market studied across Electric, Hybrid, and Non-electric. Based on Mode of Operation, the Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market studied across Autonomous GSE, Conventional/Manned GSE, and Remotely Operated GSE. Based on Geography, the Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market studied across Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The Americas region surveyed across Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and United States. The Asia-Pacific region surveyed across Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. The Europe, Middle East & Africa region surveyed across France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom. Company Usability Profiles: The report deeply explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market including AERO Specialties, Inc., Air T, Inc., Alvest Group Co., AMSS GSE, Avia Equipment Pte Ltd, Carolina GSE, Inc., Cavotec SA, Charlatte America, China International Marine Containers (Group) Co., Ltd, Curtis Instruments, Inc., DOLL Fahrzeugbau GmbH, Flightline Support Ltd., GATE GSE, Hydraulics International, Inc, HYDRO Systems KG, Imai Aero-Equipment Mfg. Co., Ltd., JBT Corporation, Mulag Fahrzeugwerk Heinz Wossner GmbH u. Co. KG, Rheinmetall AG, STANGCO Industrial Equipment, Inc., Textron, Inc, TLD, Tronair, Inc, Tug Technologies Corporation, and Weihai Guangtai Airport Equipment Co., Ltd.. Cumulative Impact of COVID-19: COVID-19 is an incomparable global public health emergency that has affected almost every industry, so for and, the long-term effects projected to impact the industry growth during the forecast period. Our ongoing research amplifies our research framework to ensure the inclusion of underlaying COVID-19 issues and potential paths forward. The report is delivering insights on COVID-19 considering the changes in consumer behavior and demand, purchasing patterns, re-routing of the supply chain, dynamics of current market forces, and the significant interventions of governments. The updated study provides insights, analysis, estimations, and forecast, considering the COVID-19 impact on the market. FPNV Positioning Matrix: The FPNV Positioning Matrix evaluates and categorizes the vendors in the Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market on the basis of Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) that aids businesses in better decision making and understanding the competitive landscape. Competitive Strategic Window: The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies. The Competitive Strategic Window helps the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. During a forecast period, it defines the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisition strategies, geography expansion, research & development, and new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth. The report provides insights on the following pointers: 1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on the market offered by the key players 2. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyzes the markets 3. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new product launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments 4. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players 5. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and new product developments The report answers questions such as: 1. What is the market size and forecast of the Global Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market? 2. What are the inhibiting factors and impact of COVID-19 shaping the Global Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market during the forecast period? 3. Which are the products/segments/applications/areas to invest in over the forecast period in the Global Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market? 4. What is the competitive strategic window for opportunities in the Global Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market? 5. What are the technology trends and regulatory frameworks in the Global Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market? 6. What are the modes and strategic moves considered suitable for entering the Global Aircraft Ground Support Equipment Market? Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06027999/?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. __________________________ Who will be the next CM of Assam? Sarbananda Sonowal or Himanta Biswa Sarma? Amit Shah's 100 plus target in Assam is meant for us: Baghel India oi-Deepika S Guwahati, Feb 24: Ridiculing Union Home minister Amit Shah''s setting a target of winning 100 plus seats in Assam, Congress leader Bhupesh Baghel has said he is actually speaking for us like it happened in Chhattisgarh where his "mission 65 plus" came true for the opponent. The Congress-led Grand Alliance will sweep the upcoming elections to 126-member Assam Assembly with three-fourth majority as the people are looking for ''parivartan'' (change) from the BJP government, the Chhattisgarh Chief Minister said. Baghel a close confidant of Rahul Gandhi has been appointed as the Observer by the All India Congress Committee for its Assam unit for the state polls due in March-April. "Amit Shah went to Chhattisgarh and said 65 plus. I had told then that 65 plus he is saying for us. The result came and we won 68 seats, which have become 70 now. "So, Amit Shah is saying it for us in Assam too where we will get 100 plus," Baghel told PTI in an interview. EC to finalise schedule for upcoming polls in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry today In 2018, the BJP had set a target of winning over 65 seats under its ''mission 65 plus'' in the Chhattisgarh assembly polls, but interestingly, the Congress had registered a landslide victory in over 68 out of 90 assembly segments. Talking about the poll scenario in Assam, he said "People are looking for a ''parivartan'' because they are not happy with the government''s works. The promises made were not fulfiled. The BJP showed dreams, which were not realised. People are feeling cheated." Big promises made by the BJP on a range of issues like implementation of Assam Accord, publishing a correct National Register of Citizens (NRC), tea workers'' wage, sealing of Bangladesh border and expressway on both sides of Brahmaputra were not fulfilled, he added. " Assam is going to see the next government by the Grand Alliance. We will form the government with three-fourth majority," Baghel asserted. The Congress, which was in power for 15 years in Assam since 2001, has formed a Grand Alliance with AIUDF, CPI, CPI (M), CPI(ML) and Anchalik Gana Morcha (AGM) to fight the upcoming Assembly election against the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The 2016 elections in Assam gave a fractured mandate and no party got an absolute majority. The Congress had won 26 seats, while the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) bagged 13. The BJP became the single largest party with 60 MLAs, while its allies Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and Bodoland People''s Front (BPF) had won 14 and 12 seats respectively. The ruling coalition also had the support of an Independent MLA. Continuing his tirade against the BJP and its leadership, Baghel alleged that Assam Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is "lying and misleading" people on sensitive issues,including Citizenship (Amendment) Act and Clause-6 of Assam Accord. Reacting to Sarma''s statement that the rules of CAA, when framed, will have "striking balance" between advantages given to Hindu immigrants and interest of the Assamese people, the Congress leader said, "CAA is prepared for national implementation. How can the state change it? "Himanta Biswa Sarma is lying and misleading the people only for the election.Lok Sabha passed the CAA and the Government of India will implement it. That is why we are opposing it." Baghel also slammed Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal-led state government for not implementing Assam Accord and its Clause-6, while asserting that the Congress is fully committed to the historic document. On failure of sealing the border with Bangladesh, he said, "Why have they not done it in five years? The government has committed fraud with peoples'' sentiment. They have tried to dismantle the cultural heritage of Assam. That is why our slogan is ''BJP bhagao, Assam bachao''." Countering BJP''s allegation of Congress indulging in minority politics along with AIUDF, Baghel questioned how many illegal immigrants have been deported during the tenure of BJP governments at the centre and state. "Just see how many were deported during Congress period and BJP period, and you will know who is doing appeasement. They only do lip politics and then forgets it after grabbing power," he added. Assam Congress chief Ripun Bora had last month claimed that only 1,822 foreigners were deported from across the country from 2014 to 2017 and as per the reply of the Home Minister in Parliament the figure of deportation stood at 82,728 foreigners during UPA tenure from 2005 to 2013. On the NDA''s charge of Congress forming a communal alliance with AIUDF, Baghel said, "BJP is unnecessarily shouting against AIUDF and our alliance. It''s a six party alliance and they are silent on CPI, CPI(M), CPI(ML) and AGM." He further said that all the alliance partners fought separately in the last election and BJP got the benefit. "So, we have decided to unite all the votes against BJP to win and it is simple mathematics," he added. On the charge of Congress becoming a Muslim party due to joining hands with AIUDF, Baghel said, "Why don''t BJP talk about their achievements of the last five years? Let them talk about what they have given to Assam and its farmers, tea workers, poors and youths. "What did they do to save the Assamese culture? The question is how to save Assamese culture. It''s very rich. People from all caste, creed, race and religion live here with brotherhood. But, they are into divide and rule politics between Hindu and Muslim. This is the face of BJP, which never seeks votes on their performance." Baghel also pointed out that BJP itself has tied up with AIUDF to rule the zila parishads in several districts, including Darrang, Karimganj and Nagaon. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 15:03 [IST] VANCOUVER, BC, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd. ("West Fraser" or the "Company") (TSX andNYSE: WFG) announced today that it has entered into an automatic share purchase plan ("ASPP") with a broker in order to facilitate repurchases of West Fraser's common shares (the "Shares") under its previously announced normal course issuer bid ("NCIB"). West Fraser previously announced that it had received approval from the Toronto Stock Exchange ("TSX") to purchase up to 6,044,000 of its Shares, representing approximately 5% of the Company's issued and outstanding Shares, during the 12-month period commencing February 17, 2021 and terminating February 16, 2022. The Company will make purchases pursuant to the NCIB on the open market through the facilities of the TSX, the New York Stock Exchange ("NYSE") or Canadian or U.S. alternative trading systems, if eligible, in accordance with the requirements of the TSX and applicable securities laws. Under the ASPP, West Fraser's broker may purchase Shares from the date of the ASPP until the end of the NCIB, including at times when the Company ordinarily would not be active in the market due to insider trading rules and its own internal trading blackout periods. Purchases will be made by West Fraser's broker at such prices, parameters and trading instructions as determined from time to time in the discretion of the Company in compliance with the applicable securities rules and as set out in the ASPP. Outside of these blackout periods, Shares may continue to be purchased in West Fraser's discretion, including under the ASPP, subject to applicable law. The ASPP has been entered into in accordance with the requirements of applicable securities laws. The Company West Fraser is a diversified wood products company producing lumber, OSB, LVL, MDF, plywood, pulp, newsprint, wood chips, other residuals, and energy with facilities across Canada, in the southern United States and in Europe. Forward-Looking Statements This News Release contains certain forward-looking statements about potential future developments, in particular those relating to the intent of West Fraser to purchase and cancel Shares, the price of West Fraser Shares in comparison to West Fraser's assessment of their value, the number of Shares that may be purchased and the terms of West Fraser's normal course issuer bid and to the purchase of Shares of West Fraser by its agent for the normal course issuer bid pursuant to the terms of the automatic share purchase plan. These forward-looking statements are presented to provide reasonable guidance to the reader. Their accuracy and the actual timing of such purchases depend on and are subject to a number of assumptions, risks and uncertainties and other factors, including West Fraser's results of operations and changes in general market conditions. Accordingly, readers should exercise caution in relying upon forward-looking statements and West Fraser undertakes no obligation to publicly revise them to reflect subsequent events or circumstances except as required by applicable securities laws. SOURCE West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd. Related Links www.westfraser.com Five officials will resign from the board overseeing the Texas power grid after it was pushed to the brink of collapse by the recent winter storm, leaving millions without electricity during some of the coldest temperatures the state has experienced in a generation. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the board that governs the flow of power for more than 26 million people in the state, has been blamed for the widespread outages, prompting the governor, lawmakers and federal officials to begin inquiries into the systems failures, particularly in preparation for cold weather. The five board members, who intend to resign at the conclusion of a meeting scheduled for Wednesday morning, were all from outside of Texas, a point of contention for critics who questioned the wisdom of outsiders playing such an influential role in the states infrastructure. In a statement on Tuesday filed with the Public Utility Commission, four of the board members said they were stepping down to allow state leaders a free hand with future direction and to eliminate distractions. In a footnote, the filing added that a fifth member was also resigning. The Bank of England governor lashed out at the EU today, suggesting it could be breaking the law by attempting to force City firms to relocate to the eurozone in order to keep trading within the bloc. Andrew Bailey said that a row with Brussels over 'equivalence' rules for financial service masked a resurgence of a 'location policy' designed to weaken a powerhouse of the UK economy. He addressed MPs on the Treasury Committee this afternoon, days after it was revealed Europe's top banks are being asked to justify why they should not have to shift clearing of euro-denominated derivatives worth billions of euros from London to the EU. December's Brexit deal did not include an agreement on financial services including clearing house trade in euros on the London Stock Exchange that amounts to more than 150billion every day. Last November Rishi Sunak unilaterally allow financial services firms from the EU to do business in post-Brexit Britain and bemoaned the failure of the EU to strike a similar deal for the City since 2016. Mr Bailey said the EU had first suggested a location policy when the euro currency was launched in 1999, but 'Brexit has obviously been in a sense a stimulus to revive this debate'. 'The issue of location policy is not a new one in that sense, we have been aware of it. What has been most notable in the last few days is how it seems to be coming to the surface. The timing isn't that surprising given where we are. 'It would be very controversial in my view because legislating extraterritorially is controversial anyway, and obviously of dubious legality frankly. Andrew Bailey said that a row with Brussels over 'equivalence' rules for financial service masked a resurgence of a 'location policy' designed to weaken a powerhouse of the UK economy. He addressed MPs on the Treasury Committee this afternoon, days after it was revealed Europe's top banks are being asked to justify why they should not have to shift clearing of euro-denominated derivatives worth billions of euros from London to the EU 'Probably therefore the more likely way to do it would be the second way, that in itself is controversial, which is to say to firms 'you need to move this business into our area and if you don't we'll think of something else to do'. 'That would be very controversial, frankly I think it would be a very serious escalation of the issue.' Trading in EU shares and derivatives has already left Britain for the continent after the UK's full departure from the bloc's single market on December 31. The EU is now targeting clearing which is dominated by the London Stock Exchange's LCH arm. Clearing houses stand between the two sides of a trade to ensure its smooth completion. They have also long been a battleground between Britain and EU lawmakers, with Paris and Frankfurt keen to exploit Brexit to challenge London's dominance of the financial markets. EU leaders believe the bulk of the clearing for its currency should reside in the eurozone and be regulated by its own European Central Bank. Some 75 per cent of euro clearing positions at clearing house LCH are not held by EU counterparties and the EU should not be targeting them, Bailey said. 'I have to say to you quite bluntly that that would be highly controversial and I have to say that that would be something that we would, I think, have to and want to resist very firmly,' he said. Brussels has given LCH permission to continue clearing euro trades for EU firms until mid-2022, providing time for banks to shift positions from London to the bloc. The Romanian Orthodox Church marked the commemorative year of the Romanian philanthropists (2020) through concrete activities, said Patriarch Daniel in his opening remarks at the National Church Assemblys meeting at the Patriarchate Palace on Wednesday. We did not start with the history of philanthropists, but with the deeds of philanthropy, because it was necessary to show by deeds how important philanthropy is, said His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel, referring to the Churchs philanthropic work last year. In 2020, the Church invested 38 million euros in philanthropy. An increase of 17.6% (5.7 million euros) compared to 2019. It was a great effort, but it showed the Churchs concern for helping those in need, His Beatitude said Feb. 24. The year 2020, marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions imposed in this context, subjected the entire Romanian society to a special test. During this time, the Romanian Orthodox Church worked with great devotion and dedication, multiplying prayer, social-philanthropic acts and measures to protect peoples health. The Romanian Orthodox Churchs Patriarch explained that liturgy must be completed with philanthropy, and philanthropy must be enlightened and sanctified by the liturgy. The Romanian Orthodox Church marked the commemorative year of the Romanian philanthropists (2020) through concrete activities, said Patriarch Daniel in his opening remarks at the National Church Assemblys meeting at the Patriarchate Palace on Wednesday. We did not start with the history of philanthropists, but with the deeds of philanthropy, because it was necessary to show by deeds how important philanthropy is, said His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel, referring to the Churchs philanthropic work last year. In 2020, the Church invested 38 million euros in philanthropy. An increase of 17.6% (5.7 million euros) compared to 2019. It was a great effort, but it showed the Churchs concern for helping those in need, His Beatitude said Feb. 24. The year 2020, marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions imposed in this context, subjected the entire Romanian society to a special test. During this time, the Romanian Orthodox Church worked with great devotion and dedication, multiplying prayer, social-philanthropic acts and measures to protect peoples health. The Romanian Orthodox Churchs Patriarch explained that liturgy must be completed with philanthropy, and philanthropy must be enlightened and sanctified by the liturgy. JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- To meet the needs of an industry primed for exponential growth, ATP Flight School has increased airline pilot training operations in Jacksonville, FL, with a newly opened 3,000 sq. ft. expansion at Jacksonville Executive at Craig Airport (JAXEX). Students at ATP's Jacksonville location flew over 10,000 hours in 2020 training to become airline pilots. Headquartered in Jacksonville Beach, ATP is the nation's largest flight school, specializing in accelerated airline-oriented pilot training. The Jacksonville Executive training center is one of the busiest in ATP's nationwide network of 50-plus locations, with students at Jacksonville flying over 10,000 hours in 2020. The expansion doubles ATP's operational footprint at the airport and comes ahead of unprecedented demand for airline pilots. Mandatory airline pilot retirements combined with COVID-related early retirements are expected to outpace the current capabilities of the training industry. ATP is rapidly increasing capacity in Jacksonville to accommodate this growth. ATP's training center expansion not only puts Jacksonville at the center of addressing the looming pilot shortage but makes Jacksonville Executive at Craig Airport the premier destination for aspiring airline pilots. "ATP has taken a forward-thinking approach to address the looming pilot shortage in the aviation industry," Jacksonville Aviation Authority (JAA) CEO Mark VanLoh said. "Their growth will help train the next generation of airline pilots and make JAXEX an essential destination for their education." Students at the new facility will utilize over 5,400 sq. ft. of classrooms, study areas, briefing rooms, and simulator space in ATP's accelerated Airline Career Pilot Program. Fast track students can go from zero experience to commercial pilot in just nine months. College students can train on a flexible 18-month timeline while attending anyone of Jacksonville's colleges. As students become airline pilots, they first gain experience as certificated flight instructors (CFI). The Jacksonville location is home to ATP's exclusive CFI Academy and Flight Instructor Indoctrination programs focused on this pilot development. The addition of physical training space at Jacksonville Executive increases the capacity and throughput for the rest of the nationwide network. The delivery of 25 factory-new Piper Archers will complement the training center expansion and build ATP's training capabilities throughout 2021. An 18,350 sq. ft. onsite maintenance center cares for the fleet and serves as a hub for ATP's 14 other maintenance bases across the country, ensuring unsurpassed aircraft availability to keep students training on-time. "For over 30 years, Jacksonville's talented community has been instrumental in the growth of ATP and developing the nation's airline pilots," said Michael Arnold, director of marketing, ATP Flight School. "We're proud to continue investing in Jacksonville, working together to expand access to this rewarding career and help airlines meet their future demand for quality pilots." Class dates at the Jacksonville training center start each Monday. To schedule a tour or Introductory Training Flight, call 904-595-7950. For more information, visit ATPFlightSchool.com. Media Contact Michael Arnold Director of Marketing ATP Flight School 904-595-7950 [email protected] Related Images atp-flight-school-training-center.jpg ATP Flight School Training Center at Jacksonville Executive at Craig Airport (JAXEX) Students at ATP's Jacksonville location flew over 10,000 hours in 2020 training to become airline pilots. Related Links ATP Flight School Airline Career Pilot Program SOURCE ATP Flight School Tunisia releases media mogul and politician Karoui on bond Jailed in late December 2020 (ANSAmed) - TUNIS, FEBRUARY 24 - Tunisia's judicial authorities on Wednesday decided to release the media mogul and founder and chief of the Qalb Tounes party Nabil Karoui on bond. Karoui stood as a candidate in the 2019 presidential elections and had been in jail since December 24, 2020. The news was announced by his lawyer Nazih Souii to the Nessma television channel. Karoui was arrested on December 24, 2020, after being questioned by a judge on charges of tax evasion and money laundering for which he had previously been detained on August 23, 2019 to October 9, 2019. At that time the country's Court of Cassation had ordered his release, conditional on the assessment by judges of the final report on the matter drawn up by a pool of three experts. The experts said that Karoui had not provided evidence of the provenance of 143 million dinars. Local sources say that the bond set for Karoui's release was very high, at several million dinars. (ANSAmed). (ANSA). Geneva, Switzerland (PANA) - Several thousand people fleeing escalating violence in Ethiopias Benishangul Gumuz region have sought safety in Sudans Blue Nile State over the last month, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Tuesday The two leaders agreed on further steps to counter the Russian gas pipeline project. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda have discussed by phone the issues of energy security in Europe, including the Nord Stream 2 project. "This project is, in fact, a trap for the whole of Europe. It cannot be allowed. Further boosting of sanctions against this project is a guarantee of Europe's energy security," Zelensky told Duda, according to the Ukrainian president's press service. Read alsoExperts suggest Nord Stream 2 implications for Ukraine The leaders coordinated steps to further oppose the Nord Stream 2 project and agreed to involve the international community in this process as much as possible, it said. Duda agreed with Zelensky that every effort should be made to prevent the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The two presidents also discussed measures taken in Ukraine and Poland in the context of combating the COVID-19 pandemic. Zelensky informed Duda on the arrival of the first batch of the Indian-made AstraZeneca vaccine for the immediate launch of a vaccination campaign in Ukraine. Zelensky thanked Duda for the initiative to provide Ukraine with 1.2 million doses of AstraZeneca, which Poland plans to receive as part of joint EU procurements. The Ukrainian president stressed that this step is a strong signal of solidarity with Ukraine, and expressed the hope that Ukraine will be able to receive that vaccine in March, after the preparation and conclusion of relevant contracts. A separate topic was the discussion of a number of infrastructure projects near the border between Ukraine and Poland. In particular, the construction and repair of roads and modernization of checkpoints. The parties agreed to continue an active political dialogue this year, paying special attention to the economic component and the implementation of joint projects. Zelensky invited Duda to visit Ukraine and personally take part in events dedicated to the 30th anniversary of Ukraine's independence, as well as in the Crimean Platform Summit. Nord Stream 2: Background The Nord Stream 2 project envisages the construction and operation of two gas pipeline branches with a total throughput capacity of 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year from the coast of Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany. It should connect Russia's Ust-Lug and Germany's Greifswald. This new pipeline bypassing Ukraine is to be built next to the existing Nord Stream 1 pipeline. The construction of the pipeline was expected to be completed before the end of 2019. The pipeline will be 1,220 km long. The project is being implemented by Russia's Gazprom in alliance with European companies ENGIE, OMV, Royal Dutch Shell, Uniper, and Wintershall. Ukraine stands against the construction of Nord Stream 2 as it will most likely lose its status of a gas transit country, while its potential revenue losses are estimated at US$3 billion annually. The project is also highly criticized by the U.S., Poland, and the Baltic States. On November 4, 2020, the media reported that U.S. Congress wanted to expand sanctions against Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream. On December 6, 2020, United States Charge d'Affaires to Germany Robin Quinville called on the EU and Germany to declare a moratorium on the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. On December 9, 2020, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with expanded restrictions against the Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. On December 11, 2020, the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline resumed. On December 29, 2020, it became known that the House of Representatives overcame the then President Donald Trump's veto on the U.S. defense budget with sanctions on Nord Stream 2. The United States is urging European allies and private companies to halt works on Nord Stream 2, and is preparing broader sanctions against the Russian project in the coming weeks. The U.S. Senate approved the U.S. defense budget for the fiscal year 2021, which provides for new sanctions against Russia's Nord Stream 2. On January 7, 2021, a fund was established in Germany to support the completion of the Nord Stream 2 project. On January 13, 2021, the U.S. Department of State notified European companies involved in the construction of Nord Stream 2 of the risk of imposing new sanctions. On February 22, 2021, the United States imposed new sanctions on the Russian FORTUNA vessel building Nord Stream 2. As of February 23, 2021, eighteen European companies at once refused to complete the construction of Nord Stream 2 over the U.S. sanctions. Reporting by UNIAN Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 Director Anees Bazmee Confirms Tabu Will Join Kartik Aaryan And Kiara Advani In March Kartik Aaryan and Kiara Advanis Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 has been making headlines since the past few months because of date issues. The team was supposed to resume shooting in October 2020 post the lockdown but it was pushed to November and then to January. Reports also suggested that Tabu, who will be seen in a pivotal role, will shoot only after getting vaccinated. But it was recently revealed that Kartik and Kiara will resume shooting this week in Manali. So does that mean Tabu will be joining them or not? View this post on Instagram A post shared by Tabu (@tabutiful) Well, in a chat with Pinkvilla, director Anees Bazmee confirmed that Tabu has given her dates for the much awaited horror comedy and will join the team in March. He shared, Yes, she has. I am shooting in Manali right now, from here Ill come back to Mumbai where we will continue shooting for the film. In Mumbai, we will start shooting from March 3 or 4, and whenever Tabu will have her scenes she will join us too. Everyone has given their dates for March. View this post on Instagram A post shared by KARTIK AARYAN (@kartikaaryan) The director further shared that after wrapping up the schedule in Mumbai, the team will return to Lucknow, where they had began the shooting of Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 last year. The film is all set to hit theatres on 19th November this year. Are you excited? Russia must stop creating security challenges in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov regions, including militarization of Crimea, military aggression against Ukraine and international law violations on the occupied peninsula. The ongoing Russian militarization of the Crimean peninsula continues to negatively impact the security situation in the Black Sea region and beyond, Ambassador Silvio Gonzato, Deputy Head of the European Union Delegation to the United Nations, said at the UN General Assembly meeting on February 23. The EUs representative called on Russia to refrain from impeding the lawful exercise of navigational rights and freedoms to and from the Sea of Azov. Russia's unjustified use of force on 25 November 2018 near the Kerch Strait, the construction of the Kerch Bridge without Ukraines consent, and the opening of its railway section in December 2019 are violations of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, which we have repeatedly condemned, Gonzato reminded. At the same time, he pointed out the deteriorating human rights situation on the occupied and militarized Crimean peninsula. Residents of the peninsula face systematic restrictions of human rights and fundamental freedoms, the Ambassador said. The Deputy Head of the European Union Delegation to the United Nations stressed that, in accordance with UN General Assembly resolution 75/29 adopted last December, it was crucial that the regional and international human rights monitoring mechanisms, as well as the non-governmental human rights organisations, have unimpeded access to the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol. Journalists, other media workers, human rights defenders and defence lawyers should be able to work independently and without undue interference and intimidation, he noted. Gonzato also called on the Russian Federation to stop changing the demographic structure in Crimea by the resettlement of its own civilian population to the peninsula. Last but not least we also expect Russia to take measures to improve the environmental situation in Crimea, which has considerably worsened, he added. ol Union minister Prakash Javadekar said on Wednesday that people above 60 years of age and those above 45 years of age with comorbidities will be vaccinated across 10,000 government and over 20,000 private vaccination centres from March 1. "The vaccine will be given free of cost at govt centres," Javadekar said, adding that those who want to get vaccinated from private hospitals will have to pay. "The amount they would need to pay will be decided by the health ministry within 3-4 days as they are in discussion with manufacturers & hospitals," Javadekar added. From March 1, people above 60 years of age and those above 45 years of age with comorbidities will be vaccinated at 10,000 govt & over 20,000 private vaccination centres. The vaccine will be given free of cost at govt centres: Union Minister Prakash Javadekar#COVID19pic.twitter.com/Rxhkkk8eSC a ANI (@ANI) February 24, 2021 Besides, speculations are rife that the government might engage private firms and institutions to cover a much larger target population of 27 crore individuals, though Javadekar didn't divulge any such details. Niti Aayog member (health) Dr VK Paul had recently said that in the next phase of vaccination, private sector participation would be on a large scale. A total of 1,19,07,392 vaccine doses have been administered so far, of which 1,61,840 were vaccinated on Tuesday. The Centre aims to vaccinate 30 crore people from priority groups first. These 30 crore Indians come from three groups - 1 crore healthcare providers, 2 crore frontline workers, and 27 crore people over 50 and under 50 with co-morbidities. Earlier this month, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan had said in the Lok Sabha that phase 3 of vaccination against Covid-19 will start in March. Phase 3 will cover 27 crore people aged 50 years and above along with those with comorbidities. Meanwhile, the Union health ministry on Tuesday also asked Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and Chhattisgarh to expedite the vaccination of healthcare and frontline workers so as to confer immunity in the shortest possible time-frame in the wake of a rising trend of COVID-19 cases and positivity rate in some districts. In a letter to the Maharashtra government, Additional Secretary in the health ministry Manohar Agnani said a rising trend of COVID-19 cases and the positivity rate has been observed in six districts -- Pune, Nagpur, Mumbai and Suburban, Amravati, Thane and Akola -- over the past few days. Similar letters were sent to Madhya Pradesh and Punjab. In connection with a blast at a quarry in Chikkaballapura in which six people were killed, five people have been arrested. Two police officials have also been suspended in connection with the blast case, according to a PTI report. Among those arrested are Raghavendra Reddy, one of the two partners of the quarry. He was arrested from the Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. Others arrested are said to be employees linked to the quarry. They are- Venkatashiva Reddy, Praveen, Mohammed Riyaz Ansari (driver) and Madhusudan Reddy, police said. GS Nagaraj, another partner of the quarry, is still on the run, and police are looking for him. Gudibande police station circle inspector Manjunath and sub-inspector Gopal Reddy were kept under suspension pending inquiry, on charges of dereliction of duty, officials said. According to senior officials, despite earlier complaints against owners of the company involved in quarrying for illegal blasting and storage of explosives, the police officials had failed to arrest them. Six people were killed when the gelatin sticks they were trying to hide exploded accidentally at a stone quarry site at a village in Chikkaballapura district early Tuesday. The incident comes close on the heels of a similar blast at a quarry site in Shivamogga on January 22, which left six dead. Merciless action will be taken, says CM Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa has said "merciless" action will taken against those involved in illegal acts that led to the blast at a quarry in Chikkaballapura killing six people. "What would you have done if you were in my place?" he said when asked why the government was not alert following a similar explosion at a quarry in Shivamogga last month, killing an equal number of people. "What can you or I do? What would you have done, if you were in my place? Tell me. Did we ask them to do things early in the morning?" Yediyurappa said. Chikkaballapura district in-charge minister K Sudhakar said the owners had instructed the workers to shift the explosives to a remote place fearing action by authorities who were on a drive inspecting mining sites and quarries after the Shivamogga incident. Besides, a case was already booked against them after a raid recently. The unfortunate incident took place when the explosives were being shifted, the minister said. During preliminary investigation, police came to know that the explosives were stored in a place about 1500 metres from the quarry and after the recent raid, the owners had instructed the workers to dispose it in the nearby forest, he said. "As per the statement of the driver who had survived this blast and experts who inspected the spot, the workers had lit a campfire and disposed the explosives nearby which has led this incident," the minister added. Mines and Geology Minister Murugesh Nirani said there was no question of shielding anyone involved in the case. "The culprits will be punished as per the law. Government will not tolerate illegal activities and the guilty must pay the price for playing with the lives of innocent people.We will take action based on the probe report," he said. With agency inputs Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. (FEE) President Biden has proposed $1.9 trillion in additional COVID-19 spending. Hes asking Congress to authorize another round of checks, more expanded unemployment benefits, a $15 minimum wage, and much, much more. Over the weekend, House Democrats finally released the text of the 600-page bill meant to make Bidens broad COVID proposals a legislative reality. Critics and economists have already attacked the proposal on the merits of its main provisions and staggering overall cost, arguing it would break the budget, incentivize unemployment, and fail to stimulate the economy. However, theres a much simpler objection to this legislative bonanza: its full of unrelated pork and political priorities. Here are 10 crazy examples of waste and partisan kick-backs that have nothing to do with COVID-19 but are in the new bill. 1. $1 Billion for Racial Justice for Farmers The $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus package being pushed by President Biden puts more than $1 billion toward socially disadvantaged farmers and related groups including an equity commission, agricultural training and other assistance to advance racial justice in farming, Fox News reports. 2. $50 Million for Environmental Justice Grants The legislation allocates $50 million for environmental justice grants via the Environmental Protection Agency. The Republican Study Commission decried these grants as a thinly-veiled kickback because much of this money will end up going to left-wing political groups. 3. $112 Million for California Transit Project In an expenditure with zero apparent connection to COVID-19, the new bill allocates $112 million for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) expansion program. The money would largely go to a specific underground rail project in Silicon Valley for which planning has been going on for several years but hasnt yet broken ground, Fox Business reports. 4. $10 Million for Native American Language Preservation Slipped into the seemingly endless bill text is a $10 million appropriation to ensure the survival and continuing vitality of Native American languages during and after the public health emergency. 5. $200 Million for Museum and Library Services Museums and libraries are, for the most part, closed across the country. Yet under this bill, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (did you even know that was a thing?) would be allocated $200 million in taxpayer money. 6. $750 Million for Global Health One might expect the US Congresss COVID-19 legislation to focus on, well, the US. But the new legislation allocates a whopping $750 million for the Centers for Disease Control to spend on global health problems and vaccination efforts in other countries. 7. $750 Million for Native American Housing The bill also allocates $750 millionon top of existing and prior fundingfor housing assistance and supportive services programs for Native Americans. 8. Expansion of Obamacare Subsidies House Democrats have long sought to expand Obamacare subsidies and eliminate caps that prohibit them from going to high-income individuals. Unable to find the votes to do so via the normal legislative process, theyve simply slipped this partisan priority into their COVID relief legislation. 9. Billions for Public Schools Whether They Reopen or Not The behemoth legislation doles out $129 billion for K-12 schools, ostensibly earmarked for helping them reopen. But its actually just a handout for teachers unions and public schools. They get the money regardless of whether they reopen or not, and much of it is allocated for spending in 2022 through 2028, long after the pandemic. 10. Countless Pet Projects for Powerful Lawmakers There are too many in the bill to count, but one glaring example of the corruption and cronyism peppered throughout this bill comes courtesy of the $1.5 million it allocates for the Seaway International Bridge. The bridge connects New York to Canada and is a priority for New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Wall Street Journal notes. Rampant Corruption is a Feature of Big Government, Not a Bug One would like to think that this bill and its untold billions in waste, corruption, and pork are an unusually egregious example of Congressional dereliction. Unfortunately, this kind of dysfunction is par for the course. Corruption is a feature, not a bug, of big government spending programs. Why? Well, any time you concentrate massive spending power in the hands of a relatively small number of people with little oversight from the public, corruption is almost certain to ensue. There is no such thing as a just and fair method of exercising the tremendous power that interventionism puts into the hands of the legislature and the executive, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises once wrote. In many fields of the administration of interventionist measures, favoritism simply cannot be avoided. Think about it like this. Is there any politician in the world you would trust to dole out $1.9 trillion of your money honestly? As Mises argued, one check on this behavior is public scrutiny. Corruption is an evil inherent in every government not controlled by a watchful public opinion, he wrote. Mises was indeed right that sunlight can often keep the worst abuses of the political class at bay. But in cases like this COVID legislation, politicians are able to get away with it by burying the corrupt spending in a 600-page bill that few beyond congressional aides and journalists will ever actually read. The average voter does not have the time to read this legislation even if they had the inclination. If it took them one minute to read each page, thats 600 minutes, or 10 hours of their time they would have to sacrifice to really give Congresss latest big spending legislation full scrutiny. And Congress passes bills this lengthor even longerall the time! So, unfortunately, given the sheer volume of expenditure and legislation our massive federal government is engaged in, rigorous public oversight is all but impossible. And as long as politicians are left to dole out trillions behind closed doors, corruption will inevitably ensue. The only real solution to this corruption is to shrink the government itselfand leave fewer of our resources for unscrupulous politicians to squander. All my weight was on my right ankle, as I fell, slipping on the freshly washed single step. Lying there, sizing up the pain in my ankle, estimating the weeks before I could run again, if it was broken, I remembered that the last I had a broken bone was also in the same town. Forty years ago, playing basketball in the wide corridor of a school, I had smashed my hand against a concrete pillar in the momentum of throwing the ball. The school is still there. Smaller than in my memory, but looking better. I had run past it in the morning, as also past other buildings still standing not only in my memory. The small town peeps out from the city it has become, if you knew it. Back on my feet, the ankle was sore, but not broken. We drove out of the city on one of the many highways which by force of use have become navigable only by dumper trucks. Cars are tossed around from one crater to the next, the only escape from which is to find a string of winding narrow rural roads, too small for dumpers, even if it doubles the drive to your destination. Which we did. In a mere 5km, the dust clouds, grey wraith-like trees and tall chimneys were a distant dystopia. Instead, we were in the intimately familiar jungle of my memory. Alive, silent, unerased by developments over these past 40 years. The driver lost control on a sharp but not blind bend, and the car skidded in to a 6-foot deep ditch. It didnt overturn, all of us had seatbelts, and no one was hurt. That was third time lucky in three hours: averting a dumper that seemed intent on crushing me while running in the morning, an ankle unbroken after my slip and fall, and now escaping unhurt with the car in a trench in a jungle. Despite the loose mud, we got out without much difficulty, though with the drivers brashness chastened; a good outcome of the three days spent in this wilderness of paradoxes. In ten minutes, the dystopia that we had left behind was upon us. We were forced for a few kilometres on another dumper-ridden highway lining the side of a gigantic hole mined for coal. Back in the deep quiet, at our destination, we sat in a glade. Outside the government school shut by the pandemic, like all others in the country. A bunch of people from the village and some of us from outside. They could not figure out how the pandemic found its way to them, 80km inside the jungle. Over 100 had tested positive through the year, but with no fatalities, fortunately. Fear was still around. But their chronic troubles were because of the whiplash effect of the country-wide lockdown. While the crops this season have been good, the debts incurred from April to July, including for survival and sowing the kharif crop, weigh them down. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has played saviour, but it is not enough. In mid-February, when we sat in that glade, they had no idea what to do next. Only on schools were they clear: It makes no sense to keep them shut, when the kids play together all the time; look there." We drove 10km to another school, built within a thick treeline beside an incongruously large playground, overlooking a hill with similar thick foliage. The children had all gathered under the trees and the teachers were teaching. This school was shut. But the teachers had decided in June that it was illogical to believe that classes would increase the risk of infection within their community. So, without opening the school, they had restarted classes in the open. Monsoon and winter had disrupted their efforts for weeks, so they dreaded the onset of the searing heat come March, and were desperate for schools to reopen. That evening, back in the city, our hotels glitzy lobby was teeming. People waited for elevators to go up to the ballroom to celebrate a childs birthday. There were no masks visible. We fled to the open-air restaurant for dinner. Next morning, I again ran 12km. Later, in the shower, the soot inside my throat and nose streamed out. The soot-laden air had choked my breath, but the quantity that had got into me was still surprising. It stained a white towel even after the shower. We went to another mohalla class, and another, and then another. Each echoed the same cry: Please open the schools." That afternoon, we sat down with three people who work in villages in that pristine jungle. Forty-five 12-14-year-old girls have been trafficked from those 15 villages in the past two years," and they narrated the details. The lucky ones are bonded labour in Delhi homes, they said, and the unlucky ones are in Mumbai brothels. They were not abducted but lured. The seduction of lipstick and dresses that they had seen on TV. Parents paid bribes of a few hundred rupees and had their conscience settled by promises of good work in the city. Only ten girls have been rescued and retrieved in these couple of years. What do we do when a father on his way to bring back his daughter can be stopped with a bottle of whisky?" The soot seems deep. Even in that pristine jungle. Even when you dont see it. Even when you cant feel its choke-hold. That is perhaps the price for the small-town transforming into a city. A bargain worse than Faustiantrading not your own, but the souls of the most vulnerable. Who am I (or you) to judge? Who else will? Because the father is unable to, and the daughter cannot. Anurag Behar is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. PHOENIX, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Freddy Saavedra, founding attorney at Saavedra Law Firm, PLC, a personal injury and civil litigation law firm based in Phoenix, Arizona, was selected as a 2021 Super Lawyers Rising Star in the area of Personal Injury by Thomson Reuters. This is his third consecutive recognition. Civil Litigation and Personal Injury Attorney Freddy Saavedra founder of Saavedra Law Firm, PLC. Legal.Better. Though Super Lawyer recognition in each state is limited to only five percent of lawyers, no more than 2.5 percent may be named to the Rising Star list. The selection for both, Rising Star and Super Lawyers is the same with one exception: the lawyers eligible for inclusion in Rising Stars must be either 40 years old or younger or in practice for 10 years or less. Saavedra Law Firm, PLC is a civil litigation law firm representing businesses and consumers in business disputes, breach of contract claims, and personal injury claims. While their office is located in Phoenix, Arizona, Saavedra Law Firm provides services to clients throughout Arizona. The firm provides legal representation to clients in both English and Spanish. Freddy Saavedra practices in the areas of civil litigation, personal injury, and social security disability. He is a graduate of the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. Mr. Saavedra is also a U.S. Army Veteran, having served 11 years in the Army with deployments to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq. Mr. Saavedra is a Martindale-Hubbell AV rated attorney as well as a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. He is a lifetime member of Disabled American Veterans. Super Lawyers, a Thomson Reuters business, is a rating service of outstanding lawyers from more than 70 practice areas who have attained a high degree of peer recognition and professional achievement. The annual selections are made using a patented multiphase process that includes a statewide survey of lawyers, an independent research evaluation of candidates and peer reviews by practice area. The result is a credible, comprehensive and diverse listing of exceptional attorneys. SOURCE Saavedra Law Firm, PLC Related Links www.azlegalfirm.com A Vermont DMV employee uses the UbiDuo 3 to communicate with a customer. "This is a wonderful and cornerstone moment in enhancing the lives of the people of Vermont. The Vermont DMV's inclusion of the UbiDuo 3 across the state shows their dedication to the wellbeing of their citizens." - sComm CEO Jason Curry The Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and sComm today announced that they have launched the use of new devices that will enable people who are deaf or hard of hearing to communicate easily and effectively with staff at all DMV locations. This is another exciting step in the modernization of Vermonts DMV, said Commissioner Wanda Minoli. Our focus is always on providing superior customer service, and these devices will allow for a much better experience for Vermonters who are deaf or hard of hearing. The devices, called UbiDuo 3, contain two keyboards with two small screens to enable the customer and the DMV employee to communicate while opposite each other on either side of the service counter. The DMV partnered with sComm, the leading developer of the UbiDuo, to meet the Departments goal of providing barrier-free, face-to-face customer service at all branch offices statewide. The UbiDuo enables people who are deaf or hard of hearing to communicate with others without a sign language interpreter by using two-way, simultaneous, real-time keyboards. People who are deaf or hard of hearing and hearing people can now talk to each other face-to-face and interact simultaneously by using this device. A federal grant award from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) in the amount of $22,954 was used to purchase 11 UbiDuo devices. Flyers have been posted at all DMV locations to inform customers that the devices are available. All branch counter supervisors have completed a training on how to use the UbiDuo3. A fresh internal dispute has erupted within one of Australias largest unions as the construction division of the CFMMEU makes a bid to claim members from the rival mining division. The dispute comes before a key vote next week on whether the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union will split under new federal government laws. For more than 18 months the union has been mired in dysfunction over the alleged misogynistic conduct of John Setka, secretary of the Victorian construction division, who was convicted in 2019 of harassing his wife via text message. John Setka is a key player in the battles within the CFMMEU Credit:Eddie Jim Now a notice sent to national executive members and obtained by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald reveals the construction division wants the right to represent workers who could also be members of the mining division. JOHN CALDON: 1947-2021 John Robert Caldon, investment banker and entrepreneur, rose from humble beginnings in Yorkshire to revolutionise investment banking in Australia. But that was only one huge impact he had on his adopted land. Born on February 24, 1947, the youngest of two sons to a nurse and ex-navy small businessman, Grace and Harry Caldon, in the small village of Drighlington in Yorkshire, he stood out from a young age. He won academic competitions and a scholarship to study at the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, an independent private school for boys in Wakefield, 19 kilometres from home. He won another scholarship to study classics (Greek and Latin) at St Catharines College, Cambridge, 1965-68, and gained an MA with highest honours. John Caldon made an enormous contribution to Australian business. Credit:SMH Protest, flower power, the 1960s era of student revolt, was not of much appeal. He could not afford the indulgence. He wanted to get on with life. On graduation, good with numbers, he joined an accounting practice and married childhood sweetheart Pauline nee Shaffrey, a nurse, in Ireland in 1969. Former Chief Executive Hiroto Saikawa told a Japanese court Wednesday he believed the compensation for his predecessor was too low by standards, and so he supported Ghosn's retirement packages to prevent him from leaving. Mr. Ghosn had outstanding abilities and achievements, Saikawa said, testifying in Tokyo District Court in the criminal trial of Greg Kelly, a former senior executive at Motor Co. We needed to prepare for Mr. Ghosn's eventual retirement to keep him motivated and to have him continue to work for Nissan, he said in answer to a prosecutor's questioning. Saikawa worked closely with Ghosn and succeeded Ghosn as CEO in 2017. After Ghosn was arrested in November 2018, he denounced Ghosn. Saikawa resigned in September 2019 after questions over his own compensation surfaced. He denied wrongdoing and was not charged. He struck a sympathetic tone Tuesday, telling the court he signed several draft documents on remuneration packages for Ghosn, including retirement pay, consultant fees and a non-compete agreement to prevent him from moving to a competitor. Saikawa said he signed the first such document in front of Ghosn, and others with Kelly, who was overseeing the compensation efforts. Kelly is asserting his innocence in the trial that began last year. Kelly, an American, has been charged with financial misconduct in failing to fully disclose Ghosn's future compensation. Besides Ghosn and Kelly, no one else at has been charged. Ghosn led Nissan for two decades, salvaging the Japanese automaker from the brink of collapse. He is accused of under-reporting his income by about 1 billion yen ($10 million) a year over several years and of breach of trust. When asked why he signed the documents, Saikawa said he trusted Kelly. He is an expert and a professional, and he was coming up with the proposals with an understanding of the overall process. If he was saying it, there could be no mistake, Saikawa told the court. Witnesses and prosecutors have said Ghosn took a pay cut to about half of what he'd been getting after the law started requiring such disclosures to securities authorities in 2010. Ghosn also says he is innocent. He fled while out on bail in late 2019, and is now in Lebanon, which has no extradition treaty with Separately, is seeking the extradition of Michael Taylor and his son Peter Taylor, accused of smuggling Ghosn out of They are now being held in a suburban Boston jail. Earlier this month, a US judge cleared the way for the two to be handed over to Japan. Kelly's trial, before a panel of three judges, is expected to last for several more months. More than 99 per cent of Japanese criminal trials result in convictions. Nissan, who has been charged as company, has acknowledged guilt. But it also is still standing trial, as is standard in Japan. (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.) Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Hyderabad: The upcoming Legislative Council elections for the two graduate constituencies will be an acid-test for ministers and TRS MLAs engaged as election in-charges in their respective districts. The party leadership has made it clear that ministers who fail to ensure victory for party candidates will be taken to task. Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao has put the responsibility for ensuring the party's victory on in-charge ministers and MLAs of the respective districts. TRS working president K.T. Rama Rao's comments at the 'poll strategy meeting' at Telangana Bhavan on Wednesday have quickly become a hot topic of discussion in TRS circles. Rama Rao met senior leaders to devise the poll strategy for the Hyderabad-Ranga Reddy-Mahbhubnagar MLC election. The meeting was attended by ninisters, MLAs and MLCs under GHMC limits. Ministers Talasani Srinivas Yadav, Ch Malla Reddy and Sabitha Indra Reddy were present on the dais along with Rama Rao. Rama Rao told ministers Sabitha and Talasani that the party fared badly in their constituencies in the recent GHMC polls and this should not be repeated in the MLC polls. These elections will impact the party's future and no complacency will be tolerated, he said. Many saw this as a hint that the TRS high command would even think of removing non-performers from the Cabinet and reward performers with berths. A Cabinet reshuffle is expected any time after the party's plenary on April 27. The TRS has appointed the three ministers as party in-charges for the Hyderabad-RR-Mahbubnagar MLC election and ministers Errabelli Dayakar Rao, Satyavathi Rathod, Puvvada Ajay Kumar, G.Jagadish Reddy, V Srinivas Goud and S Niranjan Reddy for the Warangal-Khammam-Nalgonda constituency. The task is even tougher for the Warangal-Khammam-Nalgonda in-charges as the seat is held by the TRS and the party cannot afford to lose this. Party high command is keen on TRS winning the Hyderabad-RR-Mahbubnagar seat, held by the BJP, at any cost to avenge the party's recent electoral setbacks at the hands of the BJP in the Dubbak Assembly bypoll and the GHMC elections. Chandrashekar Rao and Rama Rao are giving utmost importance to MLC polls for first time in the backdrop of the BJP's growing might in Telangana state. They reckon that the results of these elections will impact the upcoming Nagarjunasagar Assembly bypoll and the Warangal and Khammam municipal corporation polls as also the elections to a few municipalities in April. All the nine ministers and MLAs in the respective districts remain focused on MLC polls since October last and have been undertaking extensive campaigning along with the contesting candidates to ensure the party's victory. Jim Mattress Mack McIngvale got some love on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Wednesday, as he updated a national audience on how Houston is faring after a winter storm left millions of Texas without power and water last week. As he has done in past disasters, the Gallery Furniture store owner opened his store last week so residents could use it as a warming shelter and get a free meal. McIngvale told DeGeneres that about 1,000 people came inside his store Tuesday to get warm and have a meal and he estimated about 300 or 400 people stayed the night inside the store. BIG WINNER: Mattress Mack won how much with his Super Bowl bet? This is a big store, McIngvale said during his four-minute interview conducted remotely. Weve got lots of couches and mattresses for people to sleep on. We were expecting a lot (of people), but we got even more than we expected. This is nothing new for Gallery Furniture, as McIngvale opened the doors to his business as the city struggled during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. My parents taught me when I was a little child, that the essence of living is giving, McIngvale told DeGeneres. Weve always had a saying here at Gallery Furniture that we have a responsibility for the well-being of the community, so if something bad happens, we want to be one of the first businesses to act because its our job to help the community, not just take money out of the community. We dont want to necessarily make a lot of profit, we want to make a big difference in the community and make the community a better place, and when people are hurting, whether theyre going to drown during Hurricane Harvey or theyre going to freeze to death during this winter storm, its our responsibility to step up and take a leading position. After the interview, DeGeneres unveiled a $20,000 check from Shutterfly to Mattress Mack's Winter Storm Community Outreach, which is still helping to provide residents with food and water as the city recovers from the winter storm. According to KHOU 11, which airs "The Ellen DeGeneres Show", H-E-B also donated $1 million to Feeding Texas, which is a statewide network of food banks to help try to end hunger in the state. "I was a bit starstruck to be on the Ellen show to be honest with you," McIngvale said in an interview on KHOU's local newscast after the show aired. "I was quite nervous, but I made it through." Sorry! This content is not available in your region A real estate agent has revealed her top tips for buying property as sea changers drive up prices in suburban and rural areas. Sammi Russo, a self-described 'high-energy' agent from the tiny Victorian town of Nagambie, said it was important for buyers to stick to their budgets. 'My biggest advice would be when you're jumping on real estate.com is to add in all your filters in the app and on the website,' she told Daily Mail Australia. 'Don't go over your personal limit, don't jump too high into debt.' Real estate agent Sammi Russo (pictured) revealed her top tips for buying property Because of the increased demand in some markets, buyers should consider looking at less desirable properties rather than taking on a mortgage they can't afford. The agent said people moving away from cities was pushing up sales in regional towns and causing homeowners to increase auction reserves above the listed price. 'If they (homeowners) do get 60 people through each open home they're more than likely going to bump up their reserves,' she told Daily Mail Australia. Ms Russo also said many buyers miss out on their dream homes because they don't build a relationship with the agent or wait too long to respond to calls and emails. 'I also see a lot of people miss out on the home because they've never contacted the agent back,' she said. 'I'll take them through on a Monday. I ring them the next day ... and they don't answer my call, they don't return my emails and then the ring me on a Friday and say yes we want to make an offer. 'Whereas I've already spoken to someone the day before who wants to make an offer, it's accepted and we're doing contracts.' Ms Russo (pictured in a TikTok video) explained why it seemed agents were under-quoting The real estate agent said it was important to be prepared for a house to sell at an auction for more than the price guide listed by the agent. 'We as agents have to have comparable sales around the vicinity of the home to justify our reasoning for that price guide, but its up to the owner at the end of the day,' she explained. Ms Russo's other top tips for home buyers include making sure finance is pre-approved, doing a thorough building inspection and checking for first home buyer incentives and any stimulus offered by local councils. REAL ESTATE AGENT'S TOP TIPS FOR BUYERS Homes in some markets are being sold at higher prices than listed because of buyer demand, not because the agent is under-quoting Set search filters with your maximum price and don't look above that limit Keep your cool at auctions and don't let your emotions take you over budget Build a relationship with the agent and let them know you're interested Reply to the agent's calls and emails straight away so you don't miss out Do a building inspection before buying older houses Check for first home buyers incentives from the local council Buy a less desirable property you can afford other a 'dream' home you can't Advertisement Homicide detectives have opened a probe into the murder of a woman, her son, and her boyfriend, whose bodies were found Tuesday at Rikana, Jogoo Road. Police identified the woman as Charity Cheboi, who worked at the Registrar of Persons office in Mathare, Nairobi County. Neighbours indicated they last saw the woman and her son on Sunday while the man was reportedly seen on Monday. Their bodies were discovered after the boys school contacted his father to find out why he had missed school on Monday. Unable to reach his sons mother on phone, the father went to the house but no one opened it. The bodies of the woman and her son were found on the floor in the bedroom and had started decomposing whereas that of the man had not. It was found in the bathroom with hands and legs tied. Police noted there were signs of a serious struggle in the house before the three were murdered. Photos by Douglas Okiddy/the Star 23 tonnes of cocaine seized in Europe's biggest haul The cocaine was found in tin cans from Paraguay and was destined for the Netherlands. Photo: AFP Germany and Belgium have seized 23 tonnes of cocaine in a record haul of the drug in Europe, German customs said on Wednesday. "The enormous amount of cocaine would have brought in several billion euros (dollars) in street sales," the customs office said in a statement. German officers had discovered 16 tonnes of cocaine hidden in containers from Paraguay at the port of Hamburg on February 12. Joint investigations into the stash with Dutch officers led authorities to swoop on another 7.2 tonnes in cocaine at the port of Antwerp in Belgium, German customs said. Dutch police said they arrested a 28-year-old man early on Wednesday in the Netherlands in connection with both hauls totalling 23 tonnes. Investigators also searched two premises - one in Rotterdam and another in a nearby village. Dutch police said the illicit cargo intercepted was all bound for "the same destination in the Netherlands". "The seized mega shipments to the Netherlands together form an absolute record. Never before has so much cocaine been intercepted at once," they said in a statement. Customs officers at the busy port in Hamburg had decided to take a closer look at the Paraguayan containers after noticing "clear irregularities" with its contents - tin cans that were meant to be filled with putty. "Beyond a layer of genuine goods packed just behind the container door, numerous tin cans were in fact filled with other goods," said customs. Investigators ordered the containers unloaded, and found the cocaine stash in over 1,700 tin cans. "This is the largest amount of cocaine ever seized in Europe and one of the largest single seizures worldwide," German customs said, referring to the Hamburg haul. In all, 102 tonnes of cocaine headed for the European continent were intercepted last year by an international law enforcement project co-implemented by the UN. (AFP) Yes, no matter what Yes, but it depends on variety No, for medical reasons, uncertainty No, principle Vote View Results A 6-year-old boy was severely injured during a blaze at a migrant camp northwest of Athens, Greece's fire service said late Tuesday. The fire service said firefighters had to be accompanied by police to get into the camp after residents initially prevented them from entering. The facility is near the town of Thebes, some 90 kilometers (55 miles) from the Greek capital. A fire service statement said eight firemen with four fire engines were finally able to extinguish the blaze in a building in the camp. It said the boy had already been pulled out of the fire by camp residents and was not breathing, but it was unclear whether rescuers were able to revive him. The child's nationality was not released. The cause of the fire was not immediately known. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Vietnam has been witnessing robust digital transformation in areas where local tech companies like Viettel, FPT, and the Be Group, to name just a few, have secured a strong foothold in the domestic market. A staff of Viettel introduces about the tech giant's two "Make in Vietnam" technologies - Cyber Callbot and eKYC (Know Your Customers), a solution for customer identity verification. (Photo: VNA) The National Forum on Developing Vietnams Technology Companies was held in Hanoi last December, spotlighting digital transformation, tech companies, and Make in Vietnam technologies. In remarks at the forum, Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung said we have heard and spoken a lot about success stories in foreign countries, and now it is time for us to tell Vietnamese stories. Many Vietnamese tech companies found how to create breakthroughs in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution between 2018 and 2020. From a small construction company founded more than 30 years ago, the military-run mobile network operator Viettel has transformed itself into one of Vietnams largest telecom groups and established a trusted name not only locally but also overseas. Viettels annual revenue now stands at 20 billion USD, with annual profit at more than 1.74 billion USD, said Deputy Director General Nguyen Thanh Nam. The company has remained among the worlds top 500 largest brands, he noted, adding that it also ranked top in Southeast Asia and 28th globally in the field of telecommunications. With strong telecom networks, Viettel has focused its efforts on developing an ecosystem of various made-in-Vietnam technologies serving multiples areas, ranging from finance and health care to education and smart cities. Viettel has successfully developed its own core technologies for 5G networks. Last year it became the sixth provider of 5G devices globally. It has now geared up to expand the 5G network for commercial use this year. Last year, at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the group was one of the first in the country to launch a telehealth service, called Viettel Telehealth, allowing people to access health care services online. During the two months after launch, it was used by more than 1,000 clinics throughout the country and more 4,000 commune and ward-based medical stations are expected to adopt it in the near future. Aware of the importance of digital transformation in Vietnam when the pandemic caused an unprecedented shock to the global community in early 2020, Truong Gia Binh, Chairman of telecom group FPT, called on the business community to keep themselves updated on digital trends. IT workers in Vietnam are now as capable as those from many developed countries, Binh said. With such a workforce, Vietnam will be able to satisfy demand for digital transformation both at home and abroad. FPT is ready to stay ahead and together with other major tech companies in the country to lead technological trends, he added. Digital technologies bridge gaps between sectors, countries, and enterprises, and result in the growth of the digital economy with great future potential, said Nguyen Hoang Phuong, Director General of the Be Group, a ride-hailing service provider. If local companies do not stand up and dominate core businesses, they will lose in their own backyard, Phuong said. Vietnamese people must create their own technologies and digital ecosystem to become competitive and reach out to the world. The Be ride-hailing app holds a market share of some 30 percent in Vietnam and is locked in competition against foreign rivals like Grab and GoJek. The company is eyeing the development of a network of convenient transport, logistics, finance, and tourism services combined in one single app, she revealed./. VNA Multiple Defence sources aware of behind-the-scenes efforts to protect whistleblowers said at least two of the soldiers who were issued termination notices allegedly engaged in war crimes on the orders of more senior soldiers, and in both cases, these alleged crimes would never have been discovered without the disclosures, the sources said. Some soldiers suspected of repeatedly lying about their own involvement in war crimes have also been issued termination notices, but were given no support from the Inspector-General. The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have confirmed this by speaking to more than a dozen serving and former special forces insiders. In November, General Burr and Defence Force Chief Angus Campbell both publicly praised the role of special forces soldiers who disclosed alleged war crimes to Justice Brereton, who led the Inspector-Generals inquiry. Justice Brereton ultimately found that Australian special forces soldiers allegedly committed up to 39 murders and recommended that up to 19 current or former soldiers should face criminal investigation, possible prosecution and be stripped of their medals. Justice Brereton warned in his November report that too often ... have the careers of whistle-blowers been adversely affected. He urged the Defence Force to promote cleanskin whistleblowers those who had observed or disclosed alleged war crimes but not participated in any alleged summary executions. Chief of the Defence Force Angus Campbell is yet to act on that recommendation. Justice Brereton also urged General Campbell and General Burr to consider special treatment for those whose conduct is such that they cannot be rewarded by promotion, but who, having made disclosures to the Inquiry in protected circumstances when they reasonably believed they would not be used against them, and whose evidence was ultimately of considerable assistance to the Inquiry, ought not fairly be the subject of adverse administrative action. Again, it will be an important signal that they have not been disadvantaged for having ultimately assisted to uncover misconduct, even though implicating themselves. General Angus Campbell. Credit:Getty Images When he announced Justice Breretons findings in November, General Campbell described being deeply appreciative of people who came forward to speak with concern of what they had seen, in some cases of what they had participated in. It was a very brave thing for them to do, because in the climate and the culture I have described, they would have been very concerned for doing so, he said in comments which suggested General Campbell was aware that key whistleblowers had also disclosed their own wrongdoing. But since then, senior officers working under General Burrs ultimate command have, in at least three cases, disregarded the advice from the Inspector-General and issued termination notices that inform a soldier they will be sacked unless they provide mitigating circumstances. The question of how to deal with special forces veterans who have admitted to egregious acts is not simple. Even considering their assistance to the inquiry, their alleged conduct may be so serious that it warrants dismissal. However, that is the same workplace penalty suffered by SAS and commando soldiers who have been found to have repeatedly lied about their own role in war crimes only to have it disclosed by others. Loading The tension comes amid confusion about how the federal police and Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions will work with the new Office of the Special Investigator, which was announced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison in November to help prosecute those accused of war crimes. The Office of the Special Investigator (OSI), led by former Victorian judge Mark Weinberg, is analysing what information from the Brereton inquiry can be used in criminal prosecutions and what must be withheld because it was obtained under a special power that gives immunity to those who confess to wrongdoing. However, the OSI is at risk of replicating steps already taken by the Australian Federal Police, which was referred war crimes allegations by Justice Brereton in 2018. Federal police agents have spent almost three years investigating former special forces soldier and Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith, who is accused of multiple war crimes, and are also investigating serious allegations against another soldier known as Soldier C. The Nature of Cities Festival Opens Coordinated by North American Team between NY and Canada opened online on Monday, February 22nd. What kind of webinar can connect attendees from 65 countries, translate content into 20 languages, and start minimally with 1400 attendees an open world wide webinar that invites a I will show you mine if you show me yours technique to engage in relinquishing what doesn't work and repairing what needs immediate help. Whether zoom, talking stick, presentations, plenaries or open space, the world of place based learning, ecological inquiry, new designs for the future is on exhibit and streaming solutions, queries, and projects with room to participate, witness and marvel at the diverse presentations held in cyberspace about the nature and built world in a time of recognized climate change and COVID-19 disruption. Perhaps it is because the Anthropocene age is upon us and in the wildness still within our hearts and within our curiosity, hearts and dreams, that humanity will not go down without a playful, serious, and deeply inquisitive exploration of other options. It is not trivial but thrilling that we still have the choice to renew, retrieve and revive our spirits, health, and horizons with events such as this Festival and its program offerings. Created by invention and collaboration this Festival of self-expression and hard studies is a celebration of possibilities, presented by sponsors, countries, artists, scientist, dreamers, realists, and visionaries ensemble offered as a third round of speeches, papers, practice and seed sessions. Curated and presented by its North American US and Canada team, the programs will evolve to new questions, answers, friendships and findings where Nature central and where we live round the world part of the answer. This is the 3rdNature of Cities Festival originated in previous festivals in Paris and in Dublin now lively in session between February 22-25 online at https://www.thenatureofcities.com under the Direction of David Maddox. Although there are 470 cities that took the vision of the Climate and new options for energy use, livability, justice resiliency, and conservation sparked by the Paris Accords; still with extreme weather, melting ice caps, wildfires, pollution and COVID pandemic causing upheaval and unexpected tragedies still Houston, Boston, Paris, Los Angeles are sharing their findings, their questions, and asking for humanitarian aid and immediate response to the dangers at hand and the mettle to drive our economies and learn how to live together, work together and evolve for a healthier environment, and a renewed culture for the sake of equity, clean habitat, renewed vigor, and protection of the sacred and irreplaceable assets each city sustains and may very well hold the zest that will pull us all through to better times. To make this more down to earth and personal, at the moment, we are waiting for our host and on chat or talking by microphone. There are some logistical problems and now Nick Sseggobe is our leader. We have just had an amazing conversation in a seed session about Education and how we can update our inherited concepts to meet the needs of the present time and move into a positive and rewarding future. It was moving, current, informative, and eye opening. This unity in diversity brought history, herstory and health and wellbeing to bear in a delightful exchange. The issues of Tanzania seemed at first so informed by history, culture, language that I might in my present location truly understand and despite the distance, the differences, and the issues the participants soon resolved my doubts. We found a common concern for the future and for a better world back and behind this conference took hold and with a Zoom window and chat box into each other's worlds we, as a group, felt incredibly lucky to be able to address the questions posed by our host. Please find out more about this terrific conference and how you might participate, volunteer, join, host, or donate. With weather, waste, pandemic, water, air, and distribution or economic, social or political interruptions, it seems all the more important to learn to explore a culture of collaboration to retain what is good, repair the past to benefit the future and find a climate that supports life, culture, wellbeing beyond dominance in a manner that will restore Nature and include Nature and with these new-found values ourselves. The participants were in Tanzania, France, the Republic of Ireland, Los Angeles, Egypt, Uganda, Ghana, the Netherlands and more. Some of us had immigrated to jobs, schools, or cities. It was and is fascinating and buoyed by consumer electronics and IT tools uniting us this week. Thank you to Joseph Agyei Danquah in his Decolonizing and Greening the Curriculum of Schools: Lessons from Tanzania's Education for Self-Reliance Policy Seed Session with Maria Panta, Carmen Bouyer, David Nyaluke, Carolina Castagna with a generous and eye-opening impact for all who participated. In keeping with including Nature in cities and Nature in our experience, I will take part in co-hosting How Climate Change can empower new horizons in hybrid arts in education and stimulate resiliency, at 9:15pm EST February 25th with the mission Earth team from the University of Toledo, CommonGroundNi.org and Pauric Dolan presenting about our experiences and opening up the conversation to hear about the experiences with Citizen Science, GLOBE, and guided science and arts experiences with the Zoom community the evolves. Closing Event about Urban Forestry in Manhattan- The Oldest Tree in New York City Eco-Project At the Nature of Cities Festival closing event, we will visit an urban forest project at the oldest tree in Washington Square Park. Check out its legacy at one of the links below and/or find out about The Nature of Cities Festival as a passionate presentation by the U.S. and Canadian team and the creative sponsors that make it possible. Background Information: GLOBE: Elementary GLOBE - Elementary GLOBE - GLOBE.gov NASA Science Nuggets: Climate Change Research Initiative Educator Ambassador Program https://www.facebook.com/globemissionearth/ Elizabeth Joyner partnered with the GSFC/GISS Office of STEM Engagement to present to 23 teachers participating in the NASA GISS Climate Change Research Initiative Educator Ambassador Program on Dec. 8, 2020. She featured the My NASA Data Earth System Data Explorer (visualization tool), as well as other NASA Earth data resources which support climate change instruction. 12112020_czajkowski_earth.pdf (nasa.gov) Trees Around the GLOBE Campaign: Trees Around the GLOBE Campaign - Join us! - Trees around the GLOBE - GLOBE.gov Thank you to Harrison Owen and Abbott Publishing and a reminder: Welcome to Open Space! - OpenSpaceWorld.ORG (Conference in Berlin, Germany in 2021). A partial list of TNOC sponsors: www.fs.fed.us/nrs/contact/?str... www.nrs.fs.fed.us/nyc/ www.utah.edu/ www.fs.usda.gov/ www.fordfoundation.org/ www.iucn.org/commissions/world... www.bullitt.org/ wup.imiscloud.com/ www.theintertwine.org/ urbangreenspaces.org/ olemiss.edu/ Information: Home The Nature of Cities The Nature of Cities - Home | Facebook Young Environmental Journalists: Young Reporters for the Environment (yre.global) Young Journalists in training: Cleveland Charter High School (clevelandhs.org) IYMS | Home Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, the worlds largest hotel franchising company by number of properties with over 8,900 hotels across nearly 95 countries, today announced the debut of its La Quinta by Wyndham brand in the Middle East with a new 100-room property in Dubai. Expected to open in March 2021, La Quinta by Wyndham Dubai Bur Dubai will be centrally located in the historic Bur Dubai district. Wyndham continues to expand the La Quinta brand a leading upper-midscale brand with nearly 940 hotels offering contemporary design, thoughtful amenities and friendly service throughout the world. This hotel marks the 75th La Quinta property to open since Wyndham acquired the brand in 2018. La Quinta has now expanded to nine countries: Canada, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Turkey, New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. The brand has also announced plans to open eight new La Quinta hotels in the Dominican Republic. The new Dubai property is located in one of the citys bustling commercial hubs offering easy access to leisure attractions, including the Dubai Cruise Terminal at Port Rashid, The Dubai Mall, the Dubai Frame and Jumeirah Mosque, as well as business hotspots such as the Dubai World Trade Centre and the citys financial district. The newly refurbished hotel will boast contemporary guestrooms and elegant interiors, combining Dubais traditional trading colours with a modern twist that replicates the citys lively scene. La Quinta by Wyndham Dubai Bur Dubai will also offer a 100-sq-m event and meeting space and a host of additional amenities, including an outdoor pool with pool deck, a spacious spa with sauna and steam room, and a modern fitness centre. Other features will include all-day dining, a lounge, coffee shop, 24/7 room service, and speciality restaurants serving Indian delicacies and international menus. A 24-hour business centre, childrens play area and pool, dedicated retail space, ample parking, and a local shuttle add to the hotels positioning as ideal for business or leisure. Dimitris Manikis, President Europe, Middle East, Eurasia and Africa (EMEA), Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, said: We are on a strong growth trajectory for La Quinta by Wyndham, and this latest addition further highlights our commitment to expand the brand in EMEA and around the world. Dubai is one of the most sought out destinations for travellers from all corners of the globe, making it the ideal location to launch La Quinta in the market. This property perfectly complements our portfolio of over 60 hotels in the Middle East and Africa and we look forward continuing to grow our robust pipeline in the region. Wyndham hotels in the Middle East and around the world participate in Wyndham Rewards, the worlds most generous hotel rewards programme with more than 30,000 hotels, vacation club resorts and vacation rentals worldwide. TradeArabia News Service She is the daughter of iconic supermodel Kate Moss. And Lila Moss was keen to show off her own modelling credentials on Wednesday, as she posed up a storm for a mirror selfie which she shared to Instagram. The rising star, 18, who modelled alongside her mum in the Fendi runway show last month, showcased her midriff in a knitted crop top and pyjamas. Wow! Lila Moss was keen to show off her own modelling credentials on Wednesday, as she posed up a storm for a mirror selfie which she shared to Instagram Lila wore the white bralet with a pair of white silk button down pyjamas, which boasted coral piping around the edging of the garments. The star showcased her natural beauty by going make-up free and wearing her blonde locks in a loose, carefree fashion. She accessorised the chilled out look with a chain necklace and a pair of small hoop earrings. Writing over the image, Lila said: 'Good morning. In love with these silk pyjamas from @_noemotions_.' Model material: The rising star, 18, who modelled alongside her mum in the Fendi runway show last month (pictured), showcased her midriff in a knitted crop top and pyjamas Lila added that she thought the sleepwear was perfect for lockdown. Lila stormed the runway with her mum Kate for designer Kim Jones's first couture catwalk show for Fendi in Paris for Fashion Week in January. Models stayed socially distanced from one another amid the coronavirus pandemic as they stood inside giant perspex letters which spelled out the word 'Fendi'. British designer Kim, who joined Italian fashion house Fendi as its lead designer for womenswear in September 2020, and continues to fulfil his role as artistic director at Dior Men's. Showing her the ropes: Lila stormed the runway with her mum Kate for designer Kim Jones's first couture catwalk show for Fendi in Paris for Fashion Week in January. Great idea: Models stayed socially distanced from one another amid the global coronavirus pandemic as they stood inside giant perspex letters which spelled out the word 'Fendi' The fashion expert succeeds the late Karl Lagerfeld in his Fendi role, which the designer held from the mid-1960s. Chanel designer Karl sadly passed away aged 85 from complications of pancreatic cancer on February 2019. Croydon native Kate told Vogue ahead of the show: 'I always wanted to wear his [Kim's] menswear and now hes making womenswear!' The blonde was one of Joness muses for the latest collection, and one of his best friends, and the publication notes that she modelled his clothing at Charleston, in the March 2021 issue. * Username This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. Choose wisely! The Kojensi platforms attribute-based access control (ABAC) and sharing polices are designed to provide more complete and effective control over information. The new agreement has an initial total value of $44,412. archTIS Ltd ( ) has entered a 12-month agreement with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) for the companys Kojensi SaaS platform. The OAIC is an independent agency within the Attorney Generals portfolio, with primary functions around privacy, freedom of information and government information policy and responsibilities including conducting investigations, reviewing decisions, handling complaints and providing guidance and advice. Kojensi is a platform designed to share and collaborate on sensitive and classified information for both government and industry to help mitigate threats when sharing information across enterprise boundaries. This new agreement has an initial total value of $44,412, including support services. Value-for-money solution The agreement validates the companys longer-term strategy to move toward a more predictable annual recurring/higher-margin revenue model across a more diversified customer base. archTIS chief executive officer Daniel Lai said: As part of its remit, the OAIC conducts activities that require the sharing of sensitive and classified information with other agencies and industry. Because Kojensi is accredited by the Attorney General's department for use with both government and industry, it is an attractive value-for-money solution for the OAIC. The contract also confirms archTIS strategy of supporting clients with their growing information and cybersecurity needs via the active management of electronic materials being transferred between external and counterpart organisations. A week after the abduction of 27 schoolboys and 15 others at Government Science College, Kagara in Niger State, the suspected kidnappers have demanded direct negotiation with the parents of the victims for the ransoms . The development is contrary to the position of the federal and state governments that they are negotiating with the kidnappers and hope to secure the release of the victims soon. The suspected leader of the kidnappers was reported to have spoken with a representative of the parents on the phone for about eight minutes on Monday. He was also reported to have given conditions for cessation of criminality in Rafi Local Government Area where Kagara is located. The area has been under the siege of bandits who have been killing, kidnapping and stealing there without let. Sources, who spoke with PREMIUM TIMES on the development, named the suspected leader engaged in the telephone conversation as Dogo Gide. They described Mr Gide as the leader of a group of bandits operating in Niger, Zamfara and Birnin Gwari in Kaduna State. The sources said the suspect also claimed responsibility for a bank robbery last year in Kagara town and demanded the dissolution of vigilante groups in the state as a condition for peace. PREMIUM TIMES reported last September how a police officer and five others were killed in Kagara town in the bank robbery. The suspected outlaw was also said to have demanded negotiation between the state government and bandits as was controversially initiated by Zamfara governor, Bello Matawalle. You Hausas and the educated ones among you are responsible for my radicalism, compelling me to reside in the forest, the suspect was quoted to have told the negotiator (name withheld for security reason). If Niger needs peace, this is the right time for that. From Niger to Ilorin, I can prevail on my lieutenants to stop the attack. Otherwise, even if I die, others will continue from where I stop. But I can ensure that nobody attacks Kagara again. He asked the Niger State government to emulate its Zamfara State counterpart by negotiating a settlement with the bandits. In the rainy season, we attacked Kagara and robbed a bank and kidnapped many residents and what did you do? You cannot do anything. And for these schoolboys, I can continue to hold them hostage till next year, the suspect said. Ransom The negotiator told the suspect that the parents had agreed to pay N2.7 million to secure the release of the 27 schoolboys. However, the suspect reportedly asked for the phone contacts of their parents so he could negotiate ransom with each of them directly. This appears to contradict the official position that the federal and state governments were already into negotiation with the abductors. Abubakar Gumi, the Islamic scholar who had recently been meeting bandits in the forests of Zamfara and Niger States, had also said the bandits were not kidnapping for money and had agreed to release their captives without collecting ransoms. When contacted on Wednesday, the state government insisted it was still making efforts for the unconditional release of the schoolboys and without payment of ransom. ADVERTISEMENT Governor Abubakar Bellos spokesperson, Mary Noel-Berje, reminded PREMIUM TIMES that the government had earlier secured the release of travellers earlier abducted in the same area, saying this was done without payment of ransom. Asked if the government was aware that the parents and the kidnappers were talking, the official said: Off course, the parents of the abducted schoolboys are also making their efforts to secure the release of the schoolboys because of the apprehension that followed the incident. But for government, the issue of ransom payment was not discussed. The governor and other officials at Government House are having sleepless nights while making efforts to rescue the schoolboys and we are hoping and praying that they will be rescue soon. Mrs Noel-Berje declined to set a time frame for the release of the schoolboys and others who are into their second week in captivity. I cannot say exactly when they will be rescued and reunited with their parents, but efforts are on for the unconditional release as we did to rescue the bus passengers, she said. Mr Gumi was not available to provide comments for this report. PARAMARIBO (Reuters) - Suriname launched a coronavirus vaccination campaign on Tuesday with a small batch of donated doses, as the South American nation seeks a steady supply of inoculations. The impoverished country, which has a population of about 600,000, has reported 8,869 cases of COVID-19 and 168 deaths. It hopes to bring in 400,000 doses by the end of the year. It began the inoculation effort with 1,000 doses provided by Barbados and is expecting to receive a donation of 50,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from India as early as this week, Public Health Minister Amar Ramadhin said. "We look forward to negotiating with the Indian government because we know there are more vaccines on their way," said Ramadhin, a physician who was himself vaccinated in a televised broadcast. "We will use the power of negotiation and friendship between India and Suriname." About a quarter of Suriname's population is of Indian descent. Suriname made a $750,000 down payment in 2020 to the World Health Organization-backed vaccine distribution network, COVAX, with the hope of receiving up to 20,000 Pfizer Inc vaccines in early February. That delivery was delayed and Suriname is now expected to receive doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the first quarter. It also hopes to receive 10,000 doses through an agreement between the African Medical Supplies Platform, a nonprofit initiative of the African Union, and the Caribbean Community, a regional cooperation organization. The vaccinations will first focus on about 1,500 healthcare workers, followed by 2,000 residents of retirement homes. Indigenous people are also a priority. Air travel is limited to returnees and those with urgent travel needs. Weekend lockdowns remain in place, although schools opened their doors last week for the first time in 2021. (Reporting by Ank Kuipers; Writing by Brian Ellsworth; Editing by Mark Heinrich Peter Cooney) Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. ADVERTISEMENT The Lagos State government, through the Ministry of Health, said it has shut 16 unregistered pharmacies and patent medicine stores in Ajeromi-Ifelodun Local Government Area of the state. This was contained in a statement released by the spokesperson of the Lagos Ministry of Health, Tokunbo Ogunbanwo. The exercise was carried out by the Lagos State Taskforce on Counterfeit, Fake Drugs and Unwholesome Processed Foods, in accordance with the provisions of Section C34 of the Counterfeit, Fake Drugs and Unwholesome Processed Foods Miscellaneous Provision Act of 1999. Speaking on the sealing of the stores, the Commissioner for Health, Akin Abayomi, said the affected pharmacies and patent medicine shops were sealed for offences hinged on operations without licence, engaging unqualified persons to man and dispense drugs to unsuspecting citizens, operating beyond scope through the sale of ethical products and displaying and storing drugs in unconducive environments, which compromises the potency of the drugs, rendering them ineffective. Mr Abayomi said the state government is combating the sale of fake drugs and illegal drug shops, emphasising that only licensed patent medicine vendors are authorised to sell drug products in their original and approved pack size as produced by the manufacturing companies. He said the operation of the task force will be intensified until operators in the sector adhere strictly to the provisions of the law on running of pharmacies and patent medicine shops, in order to safeguard the health of the citizenry. Also, the Ministry of Health said it has commenced the renovation of general hospitals across the state, in a bid to revamp health facilities. Mr Abayomi disclosed that two health facilities; Ebute Metta and Harvey Road Health Centres, have been approved for renovation in 2021. He said the renovation would address the issues of design faults, drainage, patient flow, staff flow, water collection, infection prevention compliance or non-compliance, energy and ventilation. Mr Governor already knows the state of the General Hospitals and his mandate is that we do a deep refurbishment in all the general hospitals and bring them all to (a) standard that is acceptable (internationally). So, instead of repairing the general hospitals in little pieces every year, we are coming to a number of hospitals every year to do a complete refurbishing so that by the time we finish, it will look like a brand new hospital and we wont need to come back to that hospital for a number of years, and then, we move on every year to refurbish six-seven or eight hospitals; that way in two or three years, we would have covered most of the hospitals in Lagos State, Mr Abayomi said. The commissioner added that a total of eight hospitals have been earmarked for renovation in 2021, but the exercise will start with two. Lagos State has 27 general hospitals. He said world-class medical infrastructures and renewable energy like solar, inverters and natural ventilators will be introduced in the hospitals. We are trying to keep the hospitals low energy and low carbon footprints. We dont want the Medical Director to spend their IGR on diesel and fueling generators, the commissioner said. So, where we can cool a building down naturally and use renewable energy like solar or naturally ventilators or inverters, we would do that, just to bring down the carbon footprints of all our medical infrastructure and reduce the use of fossil fuel, and generally redesign the building or rehabilitate it to be a lot cooler. We are also paying attention to sanitation; toilet, wash hand basins and we are making sure that all the fittings are robust, strong and dependable, so that for five-ten years, none of the replacement will suffer underlying disrepair, he said. Murals by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (the Bharatiya Janata Partys student wing) cover the outside of the social sciences building at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India. Credit: Aidan Milliff Why do some people fight and others flee when confronting violence? "This question has been bothering me for quite some time," says Aidan Milliff, a fifth-year doctoral student who entered political science to explore the strategic choices people make in perilous times. "We've learned a great deal how economic status, identity, and pressure from community shape decisions people make while under threat," says Milliff. Early in his studies, he took particular interest in scholarship linking economic deprivation to engagement in conflict. "But I became frustrated by this idea, because even among the poorest of the poor, way more people sit out conflict instead of engaging," he says. "I thought there must be something else going on to explain why people decide to take enormous risks." A window on this problem suddenly opened for Milliff with class 17.S950 (Emotions and Politics), taught by Roger Petersen, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science. "The course revealed the cognitive processes and emotional experiences that influence how individuals make decisions in the midst of violent conflict," he says. "It was extremely formative in the kinds of research I started to do." With this lens, Milliff began investigating questions anew, leveraging unusual data sources and novel qualitative and quantitative methods. His doctoral research is yielding fresh perspectives on how civilians experience threats of violence, and, Milliff believes, "providing policy-relevant insights, explaining how individual action contributes to phenomena like conflict escalation and refugee flows." First-person accounts At the heart of Milliff's dissertation project, "Seeking Safety: The Cognitive and Social Foundations of Behavior During Violence," are connected episodes of violence in India: an urban pogrom in Delhi in which nearly 3,000 Sikhs died at the hands of Hindus, sparked by the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards; and the bloody, decade-long separatist civil war by Sikh extremists in Punjab that began in the 1980s. In search of first-person testimony to illuminate people's fight-or-flight choices, Milliff lucked out: He located taped oral histories for a large population of Sikhs who had experienced violence in the 1980s. "In these 500 taped histories, people described at a granular level whether they organized to defend their neighborhoods, hid in houses, left the city temporarily or permanently, or tried to pass as Hindu." He also pursued field interviews in California and India, but didn't get as far as he'd hoped: "I arrived in India last March, and was there for two weeks of an intended three-month stay when I had to return due to the pandemic." This setback did not deter Milliff, who managed to convert the oral histories into text and video data that he's already begun to plumb, with the help of natural language processing to code people's decision-making processes. Among his preliminary findings: "People typically appraise their situations in terms of their sense of control and of predictability," he says. "When people feel they have a high degree of control but feel that violence is unpredictable, they are more likely to fight back, and when they sense they have neither control nor predictability, and more easily imagine being victims, they flee." A Chicago launchpad Milliff drew inspiration for his doctoral research directly from an earlier graduate project in Chicago with the families of homicide victims. "I wanted to learn whether people who become angry in response to violence are more likely to seek retribution," he says. After taping 90 hours of interviews with 31 people, primarily mothers, Milliff shifted his focus. "My initial assumption that everyone would get angry was wrong," he says. "I found that when people suffer these losses, they might get sad instead, or become fearful." In unsolved homicides, family members have no perpetrator to target, but instead turn their anger at government that's let them down, or worry for the safety of surviving family members. From this project, Milliff took away a crucial insight: "People respond differently to their tragedies, even when their experiences look similar on paper." Political violence and its consequences seized Milliff's interest early on. For his University of Chicago master's thesis, he sought to understand how many long-running, brutal independence movements fizzle out. "I came away from this program believing that I'd enjoy the day-to-day work of being a professional political scientist," he says. Two research experiences propelled him toward that goal. While in college, Milliff assisted in the National Science Foundation-sponsored General Social Survey, a national social survey headquartered in Chicago, where he learned "how a big quantitative data collection exercise works," he says. Following graduation, a fellowship at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace immersed him in South Asian military conflict and Indian domestic politics. "I really enjoyed working on these issues and became greatly interested in focusing on the political situation there," he says. Attracted by MIT's security studies community, especially its commitment to research with real-world impact, Milliff came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, primed to delve deeper into the subject of political violence. He first had to navigate the graduate program's thorough quantitative sequence. "I came to MIT without having taken math after calculus, and I honestly feel fortunate I ended up somewhere that takes the classroom portion of training seriously," he says. "It has given me new tools I didn't even know existed." These tools are integral to Milliff's analysis of his singular datasets, and provide the quantitative foundation for informing his policy ideas. If, as his work suggests, people in crisis make decisions based on their sense of control and predictability, perhaps community institutions could bolster citizens' abilities to imagine concrete options. "Lack of predictability and a sense of control encourage people to make choices that are destabilizing, such as fleeing their homes, or joining a fight." Milliff continues to analyze data, test hypotheses, and write up his research, taking time out for biking and nature photography. "When I was headed to graduate school, I decided to take up a hobby that I could do for 15 minutes at a time, something I could do between problem sets," he says. While he acknowledges research can be taxing, he takes delight in the moments of discovery and validation: "You spend a lot of time coming up with ideas of how the world works, diving into a pit to see if an idea is right," he says. "Sometimes when you surface, you see that you might have come up with a possible new way to describe the world." Explore further Pandemic response creates perfect storm for self-harm and domestic violence This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching. (Alliance News) - Calisen PLC on Wednesday said it has rescheduled its scheme sanction hearing relating to its GBP1.43 billion takeover by Coyote Bidco to March 11. The Manchester-based smart energy provider said last Friday the hearing, which is to approve the acquisition, would be held on March 16. This has been brought forward as a result of an updated timetable of for the implementation of the scheme. Should the deal be approved at the hearing, the suspension of Calisen shares is now due to occur on March 12. The shares de-listing date is expected to be March 15. Calisen said last Friday the deal was approved by the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine without any conditions. In early February, the deal was approved by Chinese regulators, which followed EU, UK and Australian regulators giving the deal the green light in mid-January. The board of Calisen agreed unanimously to the offer in early December, considering it "fair and reasonable", with shareholders set to receive 261 pence per share in cash. The deal represents a 50% premium to the firm's three-month volume weighted average closing price the deal before the deal was announced of 174p. Shares in Calisen were down 0.2% at 260.60p in London on Wednesday. Coyote is a consortium made up of two parts: Global Energy & Power Infrastructure Fund III and a series of West Street funds, which are managed by Goldman Sachs. The first half, Global Energy & Power, is acting on behalf of its investment manager BlackRock Alternatives Management and its co-investor Ninteenth Investment Co, an indirectly wholly-owned subsidiary of Mubadala Investment Co PJSC. The second half of the consortium is made up of West Street International Infrastructure Partners III AIV, West Street Global Infrastructure Partners III AIV, West Street European Infrastructure Partners III AIV, Broad Street Credit Holdings Europe Sarl and GLQ Holdings. "Bidco believes that Calisen represents an attractive opportunity to invest in the energy transition sector via one of the largest owners of smart meters in the UK with strong growth potential and opportunities to expand into adjacent sectors," Coyote said last Friday. By Zoe Wickens; zoewickens@alliancenews.com Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Researchers for the first time analyzed genes in more than 34,000 people with glaucoma across multiple ancestries and found 44 new genetic variants that may lead to new treatment targets. In the largest genome-wide association study of glaucoma comparing the genes of 34,179 people with the disease to 349,321 control subjects, an international consortium of researchers identified 44 new gene loci and confirmed 83 previously reported loci linked to glaucoma. Loci are considered "genetic street addresses," denoting a specific location on a gene. The study's authors hope the identification of these genes will lead to new treatment targets for this incurable eye disease that is a leading cause of blindness worldwide. "These new findings come out of the highest-powered genome-wide association study of glaucoma to date, and show the power of team science and using big data to answer questions when research groups around the world join forces," said co-senior study author Janey L. Wiggs, MD, PhD, Associate Chief of Ophthalmology Clinical Research at Mass Eye and Ear, and the Paul Austin Chandler Professor of Ophthalmology and Vice Chair of Clinical Research at Harvard Medical School. "The number of genes identified will lead to the discovery of new biological pathways that can lead to glaucoma, and in turn, new targets for therapeutics," added Dr. Wiggs, the Associate Director of the Ocular Genomics Institute at Harvard Medical School and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. The findings were published February 24 in Nature Communications. Glaucoma affects more than 75 million individuals worldwide, including about 3 million people in the United States, and these numbers are expected to increase with the aging population. Glaucoma causes irreversible damage to the eye's optic nerve. This damage is often painless and hard to detect as it begins, but over time can lead to vision loss. Primary open angle glaucoma is one of its most common forms of the disease and is highly hereditary, but the genes involved in the disease have been poorly understood. First cross-ancestry comparison of glaucoma genes For the first time in a glaucoma genome-wide association study, a cross-ancestry comparison was performed looking at genetic data from people of European, African and Asian descent. The researchers found the majority of loci that contribute to glaucoma were consistent across all three groups. Previous studies had mostly looked at gene data from people of European descent. "Glaucoma rates are highest in African and Asian ancestry groups, but the largest genetic studies of glaucoma in the past focused on people of European ancestry," said lead author Puya Gharahkhani, Associate Professor in the Statistical Genetics group at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia. "Those studies showed genetic tests could be used to help identify who would benefit from sight-saving early monitoring or treatment, but because of the narrow scope of the genetic data, we weren't sure until now that the genetic indicators were true for people of different ancestries. The cross-ancestry data improved fine-mapping of causal variants linked to glaucoma. By integrating multiple lines of genetic evidence, the researchers implicated previously unknown biological processes that might contribute to the development of the disease. Genetic findings may lead to better testing and clinical trial targets Future initiatives for the research group will focus on using these genetic loci to improve screening and diagnosis of glaucoma, and one day, to develop new treatments. Previous studies from the group used genes identified to develop polygenic risk scores, which are estimates of a person's disease risk. This new study can add a larger collection of genetic variants to improve this risk score's specificity. Such information can be important for screening patients who might be at risk for glaucoma, and for allowing patients with glaucoma to better understand their disease course based on their genetic profile. Studies are planned to identify how patients at higher genetic risk fare clinically, such as determining if polygenic risk score is linked to a need for eye drops or surgery. Another future avenue for the research is identifying new causal genes and mechanisms for glaucoma, and using that information to develop therapeutic approaches to target those genes. The risk loci identified include genes that are highly expressed in relevant eye tissues, nerves, arteries and other tissues related to glaucoma. Current glaucoma treatments are aimed at reducing eye pressure in order to slow the disease's progression and prevent permanent damage to the optic nerve, however no treatment can stop or cure glaucoma. While some current clinical trials are looking at treatments for certain genes, these new findings might increase the amount of targets and more precise treatments. "Glaucoma is one of the most strongly genetic human diseases, which is why we are looking at the genetic architecture of the disease to find clues on how to prevent and treat it," said Professor Stuart MacGregor, the head of QIMR Berghofer's Statistical Genetics group and co-senior researcher on the study. "We're hopeful that understanding the biological processes and knowing which genes control them could help scientists develop new drugs in the future." ### The research was an international effort that included researchers from Australia, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Singapore, Japan, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Switzerland, Tanzania and the United States. The research included samples from the U.S.-based NEIGHBORHOOD consortium, a National Eye Institute collaborative research effort led by principal investigator, Dr. Wiggs. This new study included 10 times more glaucoma cases and controls included than an earlier study from the group. The NEIGHBORHOOD consortium receives funding support from the National Eye Institute (NEI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (P30 grants EY014104, R01 EY015473, and R01 EY022305). In addition to Dr. Wiggs, a Mass Eye and Ear co-author on the paper is Ayellet V. Segre, PhD, a genetic biostatistician and Assistant Professor and member of the Ocular Genomics Institute at Harvard Ophthalmology. About Mass Eye and Ear Massachusetts Eye and Ear, founded in 1824, is an international center for treatment and research and a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. A member of Mass General Brigham, Mass Eye and Ear specializes in ophthalmology (eye care) and otolaryngology-head and neck surgery (ear, nose and throat care). Mass Eye and Ear clinicians provide care ranging from the routine to the very complex. Also home to the world's largest community of hearing and vision researchers, Mass Eye and Ear scientists are driven by a mission to discover the basic biology underlying conditions affecting the eyes, ears, nose, throat, head and neck and to develop new treatments and cures. In the 2020-2021 "Best Hospitals Survey," U.S. News & World Report ranked Mass Eye and Ear #4 in the nation for eye care and #6 for ear, nose and throat care. For more information about life-changing care and research at Mass Eye and Ear, visit our blog, Focus, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. About Harvard Medical School Department of Ophthalmology The Harvard Medical School Department of Ophthalmology is one of the leading and largest academic departments of ophthalmology in the nation. Composed of nine affiliates (Massachusetts Eye and Ear, which is home to Schepens Eye Research Institute; Massachusetts General Hospital; Brigham and Women's Hospital; Boston Children's Hospital; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Joslin Diabetes Center/Beetham Eye Institute; Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System; Veterans Affairs Maine Healthcare System; and Cambridge Health Alliance) and several international partners, the department draws upon the resources of a global team to pursue a singular goal--eradicate blinding diseases so that all children born today will see throughout their lifetimes. Formally established in 1871, the department is committed to its three-fold mission of providing premier clinical care, conducting transformational research, and providing world-class training for tomorrow's leaders in ophthalmology. Boris Johnson has come under pressure to get workers back to the office and save struggling town and city centres. The Prime Minister this week outlined his plan to lift lockdown in four stages between early March and late June. But while the blueprint includes the reopening of shops and hairdressers in April along with pubs and restaurants serving outdoors advice to work from home will last until at least June 21. Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week outlined his plan to lift lockdown in four stages between early March and late June Alistair Elliott, senior partner and group chairman at property agent Knight Frank, said: 'It is excellent news that lockdown is beginning to ease, however, we now cannot waste any time in rescuing our town and city centres. 'Despite a number of positive announcements, it remains very disappointing that the Government has yet to fix a date for when people will be encouraged back to the workplace. 'Many of the businesses which the Prime Minister has announced can reopen will require the return of commuters to make this viable. 'It is also particularly pertinent given that mental health problems appear to be growing and mass working from home is an ongoing struggle for businesses. Industry now needs to be given clear guidance on how employers can re-engage their workforce.' Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show 44 per cent of workers travelled to work at last once in the week to February 14. Some 37 per cent worked exclusively from home, the highest proportion since June. Brian Bickell, chief executive of Shaftesbury, which owns shops, offices, restaurants and flats in London's West End, said: 'City centres desperately need the return of office workers to get their economies working again and many people have had enough of working from home.' HP hasn't made a gaming-focused acquisition since Voodoo, but it's clearly ready to branch out. The company has reached a deal to buy Kingston-owned HyperX for $425 million. The move ideally boosts HP's PC division by giving it a wide selection of gaming accessories, including keyboards, mice, headsets and microphones. This gives HP access to console gear, too. Notably, this doesn't include HyperX's memory and storage businesses those will remain under Kingston's wing. HP expects the deal to close sometime in the second quarter of 2021. The purchase comes amid consolidation in the PC gaming world. Corsair, for instance, has been snapping up companies ranging from system builder Origin PC through to gamepad veteran Scuf. HP will clearly profit more if you buy a headset alongside an Omen laptop, but this also keeps a lid on gaming-focused rivals like Corsair. It could also give HP an edge over PC heavyweights like Dell and Lenovo that have limited or non-existent gaming accessory catalogs. Teenage Engineering will get to oversee design over at Carl Peis Nothing company. It has been announced that Nothing partnered up with Teenage Engineering, and Carl Pei shared some more information. Teenage Engineering looks to bring its design expertise to Nothing Carl Pei praised Teenage Engineerings designers and creatives. He said that they, in collaboration with Mr. Pei and Nothings employees, created a product map that is unique and true to Nothings vision. For those of you who dont know, Teenage Engineering is a well-known audio company from Sweden. This company actually takes a lot of pride in its designs, and usually differentiates quite a bit in that regard. Advertisement The company was founded back in 2005, and has released a number of extremely well-known products in the audio world. Its very first synthesizer, the OP-1, is very well-known until this day. As is its successor, the OP-Z, which arrived in 2018. The very first product from Carl Peis new company is expected to arrive in the summer. The company will release a pair of wireless headphones, though its products wont be limited to audio products. They may be at first, but Nothing has a lot wider product portfolio in mind. Nothing did acquire Essential quite recently Nothing acquired Essential quite recently, mainly for the patents, though. Essential, as most of you know, is the ex company from Andy Rubin, the father of Android. Its a company behind the Essential PH-1 handset, which was a sight to behold back when it launched. Advertisement Lets hope that Nothing will be able to come up with new and innovative designs, and that well start seeing non-audio products in the near future as well. Until then, we can look forward to the aforementioned pair of headphones. Carl Pei managed to get some huge names from the industry to invest in the company. He also plans to allow regular consumers to invest in the company so early in its lifetime. Credit: CC0 Public Domain The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering released a report, "The Power of Virtual Communities," which examines the role online groups play in creating opportunities for people to build new kinds of meaningful communities they often could not form in real space. This first-of-its-kind research was built on interviews with 50 Facebook community leaders in 17 countries, 26 global experts from academia and industry, unique access to Facebook's underlying research and an original global survey conducted by YouGov of 15,000 people in 15 countries who are currently members of online and in-person communities, which found that in 11 of those countries the majority of people said that the most meaningful communities to which they belong are primarily online. "Around the world, people who are otherwise voiceless in physical space are becoming powerful leaders of groups that confer a true sense of meaning and belonging for their members," said Beth Simone Noveck, director of The GovLab. "This brief report, which tells the stories of several of those leaders and how they govern global communities is, we hope, the beginning of greater and much needed study of online groups and their impact on social and political life." Many of these Facebook groups cut across traditional social groupings and bring together people around a shared trait or interest: Female IN (FIN), created as a safe space for women in the Nigerian diaspora to discuss and seek support for problems associated with such challenges as relationship struggles, health issues, abuse, grief and loss. Female IN grew by word-of-mouth into a 1.8 million-person community with members in more than 100 countries. Surviving Hijab encourages its 920,000 female members to take up or continue wearing the Muslim head covering in the face of political and social criticism.Blind PenPals enables its 7,000 blind and visually impaired members to share stories and advice. Canterbury Residents Group acts as a public square in the British city of Canterbury and has 38,000 members, about the same size as the city's population. Subtle Asian Traits, which began as a modest initiative among nine young Australians of Chinese background to share funny memes about their Asian heritage, has expanded to a group of 1.82 million people who discuss and share the experience of growing up Asian in mostly majority-White societies. The GovLab's report findings note that: Membership in online communities confers a strong sense of community, the lack of physical proximity notwithstanding. Online groups are a still fluid form of human organization that in many cases attract members and leaders who are marginalized in the physical societies they inhabit, and who use the platform to build new kinds of communities that would be difficult to form otherwise. Many of these groups have counter-cultural norms and are what political scientists might call "cross-cleavage" communities. These groups cut across traditional social groupings, and bring together people normally divided by geography around a shared trait or interest. The flexible affordances of online platforms have enabled new kinds of leaders to emerge in these groups with unique skills in moderating often divisive dialogues, sometimes among millions of members. Most groups are run as a labor of love; many leaders are neither trained nor paid and the rules that govern their internal operations are often uncodified and the hosting platformin this case Facebookholds significant power over their operations and future. These groups, some of which have huge memberships, remain emergent and largely unrecognized: they are outside traditional power structures, institutions and forms of governance. More research is needed to understand whether and how these groups will operate as genuine communities over the long term, especially given the tensions that derive from conducting public life on a private platform such as Facebook, and how such groups and their leaders can be supported to ensure they provide maximum voice, participation and benefit to their members Further, results from the YouGov survey and the interviews with group leaders indicated that the three most essential traits and behaviors for leaders to exhibit were welcoming differences of opinions, being visible and communicating well, and acting ethically at all times. This report, published in six languages, further shines a light on the role leaders have and why it is important to further support them in running their community. Explore further Members face 'Catch-22' challenges joining online communities More information: The Power of Virtual Communities: The Power of Virtual Communities: virtual-communities.thegovlab.org/ A Buffalo police officer appears to shove a man who walked up to police, in Buffalo, N.Y., on June 4, 2020. (Mike Desmond/WBFO via AP) Elderly Man Pushed by Buffalo Officers Sues City After Grand Jury Dismisses Charges An elderly man who was pushed by police officers in New York last year is suing the city after a grand jury dismissed charges against the law enforcement officials. Martin Gugino, 75, is seeking a jury trial and damages, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court. In the 55-page filing, Guginos attorneys argue Buffalo officials violated the mans constitutional rights by imposing a week-long curfew and selectivity enforcing it against peaceful protesters, including him. Mere minutes after the 8 p.m. city-wide curfew, three of the Defendants, Police Officer Robert McCabe, Police Officer Aaron Torgalski and Police Officer John Losi, unlawfully, unreasonably and forcibly assaulted Plaintiff, Martin Gugino, by shoving him without warning in violation of his clearly established constitutional rights guaranteed under the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the suit states. Following the unlawful assault, several members of the [emergency response team] walked by without care as Plaintiff, Martin Gugino, lay unconscious on the sidewalk, blood pouring from his fractured skull. Prosecutors charged McCabe and Torgalski on June 6, 2020, with second-degree assault after reviewing video footage and witness statements of their encounter with Gugino in Niagara Square two days prior. But a former FBI agent who trained officers said Gugino, who was hospitalized with what his attorney described as traumatic brain injuries, got away lightly because of how he approached the officers. A grand jury earlier this month dropped the charges. Erie County District Attorney John Flynn said he had done everything possible to bring a strong case against the officers but added that he did not believe their actions rose to the level of a felony. Richard Weisbeck, who is helping represent Gugino in the new suit, said in a statement: Gugino became the victim of police brutality at the very moment he was peaceably and constitutionally protesting against police brutality. By assaulting Martin Gugino as he peacefully protested in Niagara Square, the City and BPD attacked Martin Guginos most fundamental rights as an American. If any one persons rights are suppressed by the state, it harms all of us by eroding the foundation of our constitution, added Melissa Wischerath, another lawyer. An attorney for the city wasnt listed on the court docket. The city didnt respond to an inquiry, nor did the Buffalo Police Department. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. (Newser) Poet, publisher, and bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who helped launch and perpetuate the Beat movement, has died. He was 101. Ferlinghetti died at his San Francisco home Monday, the AP reports. The cause was lung disease. Ferlinghetti was known for his influential bookstore, City Lights, an essential San Francisco meeting place for the Beats and other bohemians in the 1950s and beyond. Its publishing arm released books by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S Burroughs. The most famous release was Ginsbergs anthemic poem, "Howl." It led to a 1957 obscenity trial that broke new ground for freedom of expression. Few poets of the past 60 years were so well known or influential as Ferlinghetti. His books sold more than 1 million copies worldwide, a fantasy for virtually all of his peers. Although he never considered himself one of the Beats, he was a patron and soulmate and, for many, a lasting symbolpreaching a nobler and more ecstatic American dream. story continues below "Am I the consciousness of a generation or just some old fool sounding off and trying to escape the dominant materialist avaricious consciousness of America?" he asked in Little Boy, a stream of consciousness novel published around his 100th birthday. As the internet, superstore chains, and high rents shut down booksellers in the Bay Area, City Lights remained a thriving political and cultural outlet, where one section was devoted to books enabling "revolutionary competence." Employees could take the day off to attend an anti-war protest. "Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical," Ferlinghetti said in 2013. "Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic." He called his style "wide open," and his work was often lyrical and childlike: "Peacocks walked/under the night trees/in the lost moon/light/when I went out/looking for love," he wrote in "Coney Island." Ferlinghetti also was a playwright, novelist, translator, and painter. (Read more obituary stories.) Felix Salgado Macedonio, a gubernatorial candidate in Mexico's Guerrero state, is photographed in Acapulco in 2007. (Ana Francisca Diaz / AFP/Getty Images) As it became clear last fall that Mexican Sen. Felix Salgado Macedonio would be running for governor of Guerrero state, Basilia Castaneda decided to go public with her accusation of rape. She told police that back in 1998, when she was a 17-year-old political activist, she found herself alone with him at his Acapulco home. "Without saying anything he started attacking me," she explained to Milenio newspaper, adding that when it was over he threw a 100-peso bill about $10 at the time in her face. Four other women have also come forward to accuse Salgado of sexual assault, including one who told police she was drugged and raped by the politician in 2016. Those allegations didn't stop Mexico's ruling political party from officially making Salgado its gubernatorial candidate this month. In the face of feminist opposition, Salgado's candidacy has become a major political liability for President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has stood by his longtime friend and political ally. The accusations have bitterly divided Morena the center-left party Lopez Obrador founded in 2011 with hundreds of members, including many of its highest-profile women, demanding the party withdraw its support and Salgado be removed from the ballot. "Side with history, side with the victims, side with women," a coalition of female party leaders said in a statement last week. But Lopez Obrador has refused to budge, repeating Salgado's claim that the accusations are nothing more than partisan political attacks. When there are elections ... its about discrediting the opponent in one way or another, the president, widely known by his initials, AMLO, said at a recent news conference, describing Salgado as the victim of "media lynching." Asked about the rape accusations during another news conference, Lopez Obrador grew angry, shouting, "Enough already!" His quick dismissal of the women's sexual assault claims has enraged members of Mexico's ever-more visible feminist movement. Story continues Women march in Mexico City, on February 14, 2020, during a protest against gender violence. (PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images) The president has a habit of rejecting any criticism as an unwarranted attack from his political enemies. But that sort of response falls flat when the critique comes from women complaining of violence, political analyst Denise Dresser recently wrote in Americas Quarterly. The growing number of women calling for an end to gender-based violence in Mexico represents "the one true thorn in AMLOs side: a singular political movement that he does not seem to understand, cannot control and will be unable to suppress," she wrote. Carlos Bravo Regidor, a professor at the public research center CIDE in Mexico City, said that the president is under increasing pressure to recognize their grievances and heed their demands. "Feminists within and outside of Morena are fighting to make the president feel that if he doesnt back down, he will have to pay a price," Bravo said. Many feminists had high hopes for Lopez Obrador. The long embattled leftist, who ran for president two times before winning election in 2018, vowed complete gender parity in his Cabinet a promise he fulfilled. But months after taking office, he angered activists by shuttering shelters for domestic violence victims and closing public day-care centers, part of a broader austerity plan. Then a series of gruesome incidents in Mexico City thrust the issue of violence against women into the national spotlight. A teenage girl said she had been raped by four police officers. A man apparently killed and skinned his 25-year-old girlfriend. And then the body of a 7-year-old named Fatima who had gone missing was discovered disemboweled in a garbage bag. Lopez Obrador blamed the crimes on the "neoliberal" governing model of his predecessors. Failing to acknowledge the national crisis an average of 11 women are killed each day in Mexico he also downplayed a surge in calls to a government hotline for female victims of violence, saying 90% of such calls "are false." In response, hundreds of thousands of women from across the political spectrum demonstrated in Mexico City in March. The following day, women across the country skipped work in a national strike, with some of Mexicos largest companies showing their support by giving female employees the day off. After female protesters seized control of Mexicos National Human Rights Commission in the fall, ripping paintings of revolutionary heroes off the walls and declaring that building would become a shelter for female victims of violence, Lopez Obrador was incensed. Of course I dont like it, he said of the protest, highlighting the protesters' defacement of a particular painting. The activists said the presidents focus on property destruction rather than on their demands simply proved their point. Gender violence activist Yesenia Zamudio throws office supplies out a window at the National Human Rights Commission office, which protesters have been occupying since Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell) (Rebecca Blackwell/AP) Protesters say they have taken increasingly militant actions because they have yet to see real change. While the #MeToo movement in the United States spurred many women here to denounce men in positions of power for alleged assaults, few of those cases resulted in dismissals or other major consequences. An investigation by the news site Animal Politico found that from 2014 to 2018 just 5% of rape and sexual assault allegations resulted in a criminal sentence. Salgado has not been charged with any crime. The accusations against him started coming to light at the end of last year, just as he prepared to accept the nomination as Morena's gubernatorial candidate in Guerrero. Born in a notoriously lawless region of the state known as the Tierra Caliente, or Hot Lands, Salgado is a flamboyant character, known for driving a Harley-Davidson and for dabbling in music he famously recorded a cumbia in 2012 for Lopez Obrador. In a 2017 radio interview, Salgado described himself as a "womanizer, partier, gambler [and] drunk," saying he was too old to change: "A tree that grows crooked never straightens its trunk." During his more than 30-year political career, he served as mayor of Acapulco, a state representative, a congressman and a senator. Basilia, the woman who said Salgado raped her in 1998, said that she tried to report the assault at the time but that a clerk at the prosecutor's office advised against it. "This person is very influential, very powerful," she said the man told her, according to her interview with Milenio. "Go home, live quietly and forget about this." She went on to become a prominent leftist activist in Guerrero, eventually helping Lopez Obrador establish his party as a powerful political force there. Salgado joined the party in 2018 and won a seat in the Senate once again. In fall last year, once it became clear that Salgado would seek the governorship, Basilia went to police. By then, newspapers had started carrying stories about another rape accusation against Salgado. A woman who worked for Salgado when he briefly ran a newspaper in Acapulco had gone to police in 2016 to say that he had drugged and raped her. She said Salgado recorded a video of the first attack and used it as blackmail to rape her on at least two more occasions. The investigation went nowhere. The top prosecutor in the state at the time, Xavier Olea, recently told journalists that his office dropped the case after the governor of the state asked him to not arrest Salgado. The prosecutor's office has since reopened the case. Other allegations have also become public in recent months, including a sexual harassment claim filed by a woman who worked for Salgado while he was mayor of Acapulco in 2007. The well-known Guerrero writer Marxitania Ortega wrote a Facebook post that Salgado assaulted her at a book event several years ago. "He was drunk, and when he approached me he did it in the worst way, lewd and with an improper hug, to say the least," she said. She said she saw Salgado do the same thing to a friend on another occasion. As the accusations against Salgado mounted, anger rose within Morena about Salgado's nomination. The party cannot remain silent in the face of possible cases of rape," said Citlalli Hernandez, Morena's secretary general. Women take part in a protest during a march to demand justice for femicide victims in Mexico City on Nov. 1, 2020. (Claudio Cruz / AFP/Getty Images) The decision even came under criticism from Lopez Obrador's interior secretary, Olga Sanchez Cordero, who is known for being fiercely loyal. "Unrestricted respect for the right of women to live without violence is a necessary condition for an elected official," she said. Women play a growing role in Mexican politics. Thanks to a 2014 constitutional reform calling for parity in the legislature, just under 50% of elected leaders in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies are now women. Paola Zavala Saeb, a human rights attorney and feminist activist, said that representation means that for the first time women are being heard. "Before we couldnt do it because we didnt have these microphones," she said. Aimee Vega Montiel, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Mexico, said that after decades of activism spurred in part by the slayings of hundreds of women in the border city of Juarez beginning in the 1990s Mexico's feminists have finally shown "that violations of women's rights are not normal and are not natural." For Basilia's part, she said she hopes that Lopez Obrador will drop support for Salgado. She, too, has been a loyal supporter to Lopez Obrador throughout his political career. "I hope the president ... can understand that this is not a lie," she said. Then she made a direct plea: "Mr. President, don't protect a rapist." Cecilia Sanchez in The Times' Mexico City bureau contributed to this report. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Woori Financial Group Chairman Son Tae-seung / Courtesy of Woori Financial Group By Park Jae-hyuk The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) may readjust its punishment of Woori Financial Group Chairman Son Tae-seung which the regulator had already given him pre-notification of regarding his failure to prevent Woori Bank's mis-selling of Lime Asset Management funds that caused huge losses for investors last year. It was initially planning to suspend Son from work, which would mean he would be prohibited from working for any financial company for five years. However, the financial overseer has apparently taken into account Woori Bank's efforts to compensate the investors as a mitigating factor. Representatives from the FSS' financial consumer protection department will attend a final hearing to determine the specifics of sanctions on the bank, Thursday, and express their opinions on the bank's efforts, said sources familiar with the issue. Woori Bank agreed last year to return the principal to those who invested in Lime's Pluto TF-1 fund. It is also expected to accept the latest FSS recommendation that it and the Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK) pay up to 78 percent of the losses of customers who invested in Lime's other funds. "We respect the recommendation," a Woori Bank official said. "We will hold a board meeting early next month to discuss the recommendation and make a decision on how best to protect our customers." Last year, the FSS softened its sanctions on KB Securities CEO Park Jeong-rim over her responsibility for the company's mis-selling of Lime funds, after the brokerage accepted its recommendation on compensation. Former IBK CEO Kim Do-jin, who received a prior notice of heavy punishment last month for the same reason, also received lighter punishment earlier this month after the state-run bank began to compensate victims. Shinhan Bank CEO Jin Ok-dong / Courtesy of Shinhan Bank In our pursuit to provide safe environment solutions, we have released a line of bacterial products for farming operations that we are excited to bring to farmers via the Agrellus platform. We believe our 100% organic product will create success for many farmers all across the nation." Agrellus, the most efficient online marketplace where buyers and sellers control the best value in agricultural input is pleased to be working with Micro-Mac International and their manufacturing offices near Austin, Texas where they produce a line of unique soil products. "For almost 40 years Micro-Bac has been committed to serving ranchers and oil producers with our innovative microbiological products explains Braden Gilbert, VP of Sales. In our pursuit to provide safe environment solutions, we have recently released a line of bacterial products for farming operations that we are excited to bring to farmers via the Agrellus platform. We believe our 100% organic product will create an abundance of success for many farmers all across the nation." Agrellus has built a specific set of features that help the Ag distribution channel accelerate unique and practical agricultural inputs into its Marketplace of retailers across the United States. The eCommerce and Commercial Markets teams are committed to providing professional assistance to growers in the community where Ag retailers serve them best. The mission of Agrellus is to keep products moving through the local marketplace, because its neighbors who help neighbors, near home, that drive success in the agriculture business. 1Source Ag is just another example of excellence as they supply agricultural inputs in the Illinois region out of Toluca. Agrellus is excited to partner with Dan Reichman and team for years to come as they support growers throughout the region. About Agrellus, Inc. (a Delaware corporation) Agrellus is a unique digital Agricultural Inputs Marketplace, delivering the most efficient process and competitive value on agricultural inputs through certified retailers in the local community. American farmers experience dynamic cost savings from trusted retailers with the most comprehensive inventory of agricultural input products, every hour of every day. Spoiler alert: This chapter of the Jersey City Free Public Library story ends with the director quitting to take a similar post in his Ohio hometown. Dayton, Ohio officials announced Jeffrey Trzeciak as the new library director there on Tuesday after serving 15 months as head of the Jersey City library system. Trzeciak replaced Priscilla Gardner, who the main branch is named for after her 17 years as director. Director Trzeciak has been an exceptional leader for JCFPL during an incredibly challenging time, library spokesman Shane Smith. We are grateful for all the good work he has helped the library do for the community during COVID. The staff and board of the Jersey City Public Library wish Jeffrey the best in Dayton and all his future endeavors. In a press release issued by the Dayton Metro Library, Trzeciak said he expects to start his new job in mid-April. Smith said an interim director will be announced soon and a search for a new director will commence. The position in Dayton, a city of 140,000, comes with an annual base salary of $190,000 and $6,300 a year in vehicle and dining expenses, the Dayton Daily News reported. Trzeciak earned $180,000 annually in Jersey City, with an incentive bonus of $15,000 his first year and $20,000 per year thereafter. Trzeciak grew up in Dayton and began his library career at the Dayton Metro Library while completing his undergraduate degree from the University of Dayton, officials there said. It is quite an honor to be named Dayton Metro Librarys next executive director, said Trzeciak, who was selected from a pool of 30 candidates. Ive always dreamed of returning to my hometown and the institution that launched my career. Dayton Metro Library has an excellent reputation for community support and responsive service, and Im committed to build on that foundation. Trzeciaks departure is the second Jersey City has suffered to an out-of-state municipality. Business Administrator Brian Platt left the city last year to take a similar position in Kansas City, Missouri. The news comes on the same day the Jersey City City Council is expected to vote on awarding the library $5 million $3.4 million no longer needed for other projects, and more than $1.6 million from its capital fund for the continued renovation and restoration of the main library on Jersey Avenue. We are grateful for Mr. Trzeciaks contributions to our expansive library system, especially amid the challenges brought about by this pandemic, Jersey City spokeswoman Kimberly Wallace-Scalcione said. We wish him the best of luck as he returns to his hometown where he will be a great asset to their library and to the overall community. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company The World Health Organizations global vaccine-sharing scheme COVAX delivered its first COVID-19 shots on Wednesday, as the race to get doses to the worlds poorest people and tame the pandemic accelerates. A flight carrying 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India landed in Ghanas capital Accra, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations childrens agency UNICEF said in a joint statement. The delivery comes almost a year after the WHO first described the novel coronavirus as a global pandemic and eight months after the launch of the COVAX initiative, aimed at pooling funds from wealthier countries and non-profits to develop a vaccine and distribute it equitably around the world. The shots, part of an initial tranche of deliveries for several low and middle-income countries, will be used to kick-start a vaccination drive that will prioritise frontline health workers and others at high risk of infection, according to Ghanaian health officials. This is a momentous occasion, as the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccines into Ghana is critical in bringing the pandemic to an end, Anne-Claire Dufay of UNICEF Ghana and WHO country representative Francis Kasolo said in the statement. The only way out of this crisis is to ensure that vaccinations are available for all. More than 80,700 people in Ghana have been confirmed infected and 580 have died, according to a Reuters tally. Health minister-designate Kwaku Agyeman Manu led a delegation to receive the vaccines at the airport. EQUITABLE DISTRIBUTION The roll-out in Ghana is a milestone for COVAX, which is trying to narrow a politically sensitive gap between the millions of people being vaccinated in wealthier countries and the comparatively few who have received shots in less developed parts of the world. It plans to deliver nearly 2 billion vaccine doses this year, including 1.8 billion to poorer countries at no cost to their governments, and to cover up to 20% of countries populations. But it will not be sufficient for nations to reach herd immunity and effectively contain the spread of the virus. The African Union (AU) has been trying to help its 55 member states buy more doses in a push to immunize 60% of the continents 1.3 billion people over three years. Last week, its vaccine team said 270 million doses of AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson vaccines secured for delivery this year had been taken up. China has donated small batches of its Sinopharm vaccine to countries including Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea. And Russia has offered to supply 300 million doses of its Sputnik V vaccine to the AU scheme along with a financing package. But many countries are largely reliant on COVAX. On Tuesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged wealthy nations to share vaccine doses with COVAX, saying the goal of equitable distribution was in jeopardy. So far 210 million doses of vaccine have been administered globally but half of those are in just two countries, Tedros said in Geneva. More than 200 countries are yet to administer a single dose. COVAX is co-led by the WHO, the GAVI vaccines alliance, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and UNICEF. It was launched in June 2020 to try to prevent poorer countries being pushed to the back of the queue for COVID-19 vaccines as wealthier nations bought up billions of doses for their populations. COVAX said this month that it had allocated the first tranche of 330 million doses of vaccines for 145 countries, including several in West Africa. Africas reported COVID-19 death toll surpassed 100,000 last week, a fraction of those on other continents but rising fast as a second wave of infections overwhelms hospitals. Short link: The Board of the Abbey Theatre today announced the appointment of Donegal woman Caitriona McLaughlin as its new Artistic Director. Wicklow man Mark OBrien has been appointed to the role of Executive Director. The appointments follow the decision by the board of the Abbey Theatre in July 2020 to hold an open competition to fill two distinct leadership roles to deliver on the Abbey Theatres strategy and ambition over the next five years. The two new Directors will join the Abbey Staff in early May. A statement on the Abbey Theatre's website says of Ms McLaughlin: "Caitriona is a highly-distinguished, award-winning theatre director, who has been an Associate Director at the Abbey since 2017. "As Artistic Director, she will lead on the objectives relating to Art and Audience in the Abbey Theatre strategy. Over the last number of years, she has directed in London, Dublin, and New York. Recent productions at the Abbey include The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh; Citysong by Dylan Coburn Gray (ITTA nomination Best New Play); and On Rafterys Hill, by Marina Carr for which she won Best Director at the 2019 Irish Times Theatre Awards." Ms McLaughlin said: We are in a time of profound and existential change; but also one of potential and renewal. I am thrilled to be taking up this position at this pivotal moment, and fully embrace both the responsibility and opportunity of it. "We need to find and champion new voices and new ways of seeing. This means identifying combinations of characters we are yet to meet on our stages, having conversations we are yet to hear whilst also engaging in an interrogation of our classical canon with an urgency and curiosity about what makes it speak to this moment. "Our stories teach us what it is to belong, and what it is to be excluded and exclude. "My journey as Artistic Director begins with these twin impulses, and with two questions: 'Who were we, and who are we now?' Caitriona McLaughlin was born in Donegal and studied science at the University of Ulster before moving into theatre. Since 2017 she has been Associate Director at the Abbey Theatre, where her productions include: The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh (with Conall Morrison); Citysong by Dylan Coburn Gray (ITTA nomination Best New Play); On Rafterys Hill by Marina Carr, (for which she won Best Director at the 2019 ITTA); and Two Pints by Roddy Doyle, which toured widely in Ireland and the USA. She has also worked with theatre and opera companies on both sides of the border, including Wexford Opera, Hot for Theatre, INO, The Local Group, and Landmark, and she was the director on OCasey in the Estate, a TV documentary shown on RTE. Prior to moving into directing, with Patrick McCabes Frank Pig Says Hello at the Finborough Theatre in London in 2003, Caitriona worked as a drama facilitator in Northern Ireland, working with young people and in conflict resolution. In London, she directed numerous productions, focusing primarily on new writing, and collaborated with the Royal Court in sourcing and developing a new theatre space. She was awarded a Clore Fellowship in 2007 and subsequently spent six summers with LAByrinth Theatre Company in New York developing new plays for Artistic Directors John Ortiz and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, at their Summer Intensive. During this time Caitriona also directed a number of plays in New York including Killers and other Family (part of the OBIE award-winning Hilltown Plays) and plays at Atlantic Theatre, Rattlestick, and Bard Summerscape. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Huawei Technologies has been replaced in some European 5G network buildouts. Photo: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg Europe is falling way behind the US and China in financing 5G technology, according to a study by the European Investment Bank (EIB). Startups developing 5G applications are lacking between 4.6bn and 6.6bn a year in early- and growth-stage financing, according to the study, published yesterday. This gap could represent a major challenge for the evolution of 5G in Europe, and poses the risk of Europe being left behind in the race for 5G leadership, said the joint EIB-European Commission report. The report blames risk aversion and a lack understanding of 5G technologies from both private and public investors for the financing gap. And it says there are too many tech hubs in the EU compared to the US, where San Francisco and New York are the go-to cities for investors. In the EU, startups are scattered across 15 countries, including Ireland, which is listed as a medtech and hardware hub. In the European VC [venture capital] market, most fund managers focus on a single country or region, rather than the whole continent. For that reason, they remain relatively small and struggle to gain the scale necessary to attract long-term financial investors, the report says. It also name-checks US mobile network provider Airspan as a new challenger to the main mobile providers in Ireland. The company won a bid for a 15-year licence on Irelands 3.6 GHz spectrum in 2017, alongside Vodafone, Eir and Three. The report says Airspan is one example of a potential player that can move up the value chain to provide both civil infrastructure and connectivity. Irelands three main mobile providers have launched their 5G offerings over the last year, with Three Ireland the most recent to do so last October. It followed a late switch away from Chinese tech giant Huawei to Swedens Ericsson, as a result of geopolitical tensions. Fifth-generation mobile technology allows for faster data transfers and larger volumes of traffic than 4G, enabling more devices to connect and talk to each other. Advanced 5G technology should be able to power self-driving cars, remote surgeries and factories, and holographic communications. The report comes the same day the EU announced a 900m investment in a new public-private partnership to boost 5G deployment and 6G research. Gettyimagesbank South Korea reported the first natural decline in population last year as the number of deaths outpaced that of newborns amid the country's rapid aging and chronic low birth rate, data showed Wednesday. The number of newborns came to a record low of 272,400 last year, down 10 percent, or 30,300, from a year earlier, according to preliminary data provided by the Statistics Korea. Last year, an all-time high of 305,100 people died, up 3.4 percent, or 10,000, from the previous year. This resulted in a decline of 33,000 in the country's population. The number of deaths topped that of newborns here in what's called a "dead cross" phenomenon for the first time since 1970, when the statistics agency began compiling related data. This means the country's population will naturally decline. South Korea is struggling with a decline in childbirths as many young people delay marriage or give up on getting married or having babies amid a prolonged economic slowdown. "A natural fall in the population could accelerate as the number of marriages sharply declined last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which will likely reduce childbirths further," Kim Su-young, a Statistics Korea official, said at a press briefing. The country's total fertility rate the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime hit a new record low of 0.84 in 2020, down from 0.92 the previous year. It marked the third straight year that the rate dropped below 1 percent. South Korea was the only country whose total fertility rate stayed below 1 percent among 37 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). As of 2018, the average fertility rate among OECD nations came to 1.63. The country's crude birth rate the number of births per 1,000 people per year also reached an all-time low of 5.3 last year, down from 5.9 the previous year. A fall in the fertility rate is feared to accelerate the country's so-called demographic cliff: a major drop in the working population amid the low birth rate. The country is also expected to cross the threshold of a super-aged society in 2025, in which the proportion of those aged 65 or older will hit 20 percent of the total population. South Korea became an aged society in 2017. The government earlier forecast the country's total population, currently estimated at 51.6 million, to peak in 2028 and start to fall the following year. The total population is calculated based on the number of childbirths and deaths and the immigration trend. (Yonhap) Killeen, TX (76540) Today Mostly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 82F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph.. Tonight Thunderstorms likely this evening. Then a chance of scattered thunderstorms overnight. Low 66F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%. Locally heavier rainfall possible. (Sharecast News) - Latin America-focussed upstream oil and gas company Echo Energy updated the market on operations at its Santa Cruz Sur assets, onshore Argentina on Wednesday, reporting that following continued improvements in market conditions, it had agreed with the Santa Cruz Sur partners to capital expenditure to upgrade and debottleneck the existing liquids pipelines in the assets. The AIM-traded firm said that would accelerate the return to full oil production, and bring the remaining volumes previously shut in in the second quarter of 2020 back online. It said the pipeline upgrades would also provide additional capacity for future production enhancement projects that had been identified in the company's opportunity portfolio at Santa Cruz Sur. Capital expenditure net to Echo's 70% working interest of around $0.28m would be injected by the company to replace and upgrade parts of the infrastructure primarily in the Chorrillos, Campo Molino and Cerro Convento fields, with installation expected to take about 45 days from the conclusion of successful procurement. It said 10 individual upgrade projects would be completed to enable the upgrade of around 23 kilometres of pipeline. Echo said it expected that, once the pipelines were fully operational, gross daily liquids production would be restored to levels of between 480 and 600 barrels of oil per day, or 336 to 420 barrels per day net to Echo. The actual level of production resumed would be dependent on reservoir behaviour and pressure build-up, since the element of production was shut in in April. In light of current attractive market conditions, the infrastructure project was considered an "attractive investment" with the ability to result in "strong" cash flow generation and a short payback period of months, the board said. On the production front, Echo said daily operations in the field at Santa Cruz Sur were continuing with the delivery of produced gas to customers as expected. Production levels remained in line with the company's expectations, with average daily production net to Echo's 70% interest throughout 2020 of 1,966 barrels of oil equivalent per day, including 10.2 million standard cubic feet of gas per day. Total cumulative production from Santa Cruz Sur during 2020 net to Echo was 720,000 barrels of oil equivalent, including 3,750 million standard cubic feet of gas, with 2021 production remaining "strong". Gross cumulative production from Santa Cruz Sur for the period from 1 January to 14 February was 116,040 barrels of oil equivalent, or 81,230 barrels net to Echo. Given the indications of an improving macroeconomic outlook and, specifically, the increase in oil prices from the start of 2021, Echo said there had been an increased demand for Santa Cruz Sur oil, resulting in improved pricing and, as a result, more frequent oil sales. Oil sales to date in 2021 had totalled 17,600 barrels net to Echo. "We are very pleased to be making continued progress across the portfolio as market conditions continue to improve," said chief executive officer Martin Hull. "The company's investment in improved and renewed infrastructure at Santa Cruz Sur is both consistent with Echo's commitment to HSE in the field and provides additional capacity for the opportunities the portfolio holds to increase production and revenue." Hull said that, with stable production and several growth opportunities to pursue, the board felt "positive" about the company's prospects for 2021, especially having announced progress in the restructuring of the company's balance sheet earlier in the week. "With a firmer financial footing and material operational upside which we are actively pursuing, I look forward to updating shareholders with further good news in due course." At 1238 GMT, shares in Echo Energy were flat at 0.63p. Proudly smiling on graduation day at The Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham in 1984, these four friends had their whole nursing careers ahead of them. Now, after serving the public for four decades, they have reached retirement age and can think about drawing on their hard-earned NHS pensions. But unlike her colleagues in the photograph, Debbie McGinty (far left) has had to keep working because she was excluded from the NHS pension scheme when she went into practice nursing. High hopes: Newly qualified nurses, from left, Debbie McGinty, Alison, Claire and Helen together after graduating in 1984 Practice nurses are at the forefront of the UK's world-beating vaccination drive to protect the nation from coronavirus. They have gone beyond the call of duty to help inject more than 18 million of us and return the country to health. Yet thousands of GP nurses are facing a poorer retirement than their NHS colleagues because they were excluded from the pension scheme for years. Money Mail is calling for a fairer pension deal for these nurses, who missed out on as much as 100,000 in retirement because they were considered privately employed by GPs. Many NHS nurses agreed to take up new positions in local health centres in the late 1980s and early 1990s - but because they were then working for GPs, they had to drop out of the NHS pension scheme. And while GPs themselves were allowed to keep paying into the scheme, practice nurses were not allowed back in until 1997. By then, many had missed out on more than ten years' investment in their retirement fund. Campaigners say the vital role of practice nurses in the pandemic has reignited the sense of injustice. Exposed: Money Mail's first headline on nurse pensions inequality, June 2019 Debbie, who now lives in Coventry, was excluded from contributing to the NHS scheme for seven years after starting work as a practice nurse in 1990. As a result, not only does she have a smaller retirement fund than her friends, but she couldn't retire at 55 last year because she didn't pay into the pension scheme for more than five years. Debbie, who had wanted to take her pension and help care for her elderly parents, says: 'I felt completely naive and devastated that, after dedicating my whole working life to caring for others in an NHS role, this was how I was treated. 'My dear friends who I had trained with - but who didn't go into practice nursing until later - are now enjoying the benefits of retirement, or taking their pension and continuing to work in the NHS. I can't help but feel discriminated against.' Debbie's friend Alison, 55, (second left) was able to retire with her pension last year after a career as a palliative nurse. She says: 'If you are caring for NHS patients, you should have been allowed to stay in the NHS scheme. It is grossly unfair that Debbie wasn't allowed to do that at the time.' Meanwhile, Claire (second right) also worked as a practice nurse but started in 1995, so was still able to access her pension at 55. She says: 'Debbie has given as much as I have to the NHS, so why should she be treated any differently?' Helen, 55, took her pension last September but still works part-time in Coventry. Front line: Practice nurses are now at the forefront of the UK's world-beating vaccination drive to protect the nation from coronavirus She switched to practice nursing in 1996 and says: 'It wasn't made clear to Debbie and many others at the time she joined general practice that it wouldn't be classed as the NHS in terms of pension contributions.' We launched our Money Mail campaign for practice nurses more than 18 months ago and it received support from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN). Dame Donna Kinnair, chief executive and general secretary of the RCN, says: 'Nurses working in general practice are the bedrock of health and care. 'Now the Covid-19 vaccination programme is being rolled out, they are leading the way again in setting up and running vaccination clinics.' Joanne Hamilton, 55, missed out on eight years in the scheme after signing up to be one of the first practice nurses in Dudley, in the West Midlands. The married grandmother, who is now helping to vaccinate vulnerable NHS patients in their homes, says: 'Practice nurses are key to the delivery of this vaccine but we were denied those years of paying into a pension that GPs could. It is just so unfair.' S ome practice nurses have told Money Mail they were never informed that they would be excluded from the NHS pension scheme, while others said they didn't realise the implications. Jane Hughes, 64, started work as a practice nurse in Dudley in 1991 after working as district nurse for 15 years. She has been a nurse for nearly 48 years but, because she was barred from the NHS scheme for six years, she has had to keep working to make up her pension shortfall. The married mum-of-one has vaccinated hundreds of patients this year. She says: 'I love what I do but if I had stayed in a hospital or as a district nurse, I would have a bigger pension. ' A Department of Health spokesman says: 'We are thankful for the vital role NHS staff are playing in the coronavirus vaccination programme. 'In recognition of their crucial role assisting general practitioners, more than 50,000 GP practice staff were admitted into the NHS Pension Scheme in 1997. 'To make sure pension contribution rates for existing members of the NHS scheme are protected, it is not possible to allow these staff to backdate their pension.' b.wilkinson@dailymail.co.uk Feb. 24JUNEAU Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy's chief of staff, Ben Stevens, is leaving the administration to take a job with ConocoPhillips Alaska, the governor's office said in a written statement Wednesday morning. Stevens will become vice president of external affairs and transportation at ConocoPhillips Alaska, the announcement said, and his last day will be announced soon. ConocoPhillips Alaska spokeswoman Natalie Lowman said Stevens will start his new job Monday. ConocoPhillips is the largest oil producer in Alaska. "Ben's job responsibilities will include government relations, village outreach, community investment, media and advertising, and management of ConocoPhillips Alaska's pipeline business including its interest in (the trans-Alaska pipeline). We welcome Ben to ConocoPhillips Alaska and believe he will be a valuable addition to the Alaska business unit leadership team," she said by email. Stevens will be replaced on an acting basis by Deputy Chief of Staff Randy Ruaro, the governor's office said. Stevens has worked in the Dunleavy administration since December 2018. First working as a policy adviser, he became the governor's top aide in July 2019, replacing Tuckerman Babcock. Under Stevens' tenure, the governor's administration shifted: Its proposed budgets lack the steep cuts that prompted the creation of a recall campaign against the governor. Office of Management and Budget director Donna Arduin was replaced, and the state's revenue commissioner also left the administration. During a texting scandal that led to the resignation of Attorney General Kevin Clarkson, Stevens advised a state employee to keep quiet about the issue. A former president of the Alaska Senate, Stevens left office following the Veco scandal. He was never accused of a crime, but he collected more than $240,000 in consulting fees from Veco for unspecified work during his six years in the Senate, and during a 2007 trial, a Veco vice president testified that he had bribed Stevens and another senator. Before joining the Dunleavy administration, Stevens held a variety of roles in private industry, including president of Cook Inlet Tug and Barge. This is a developing story and will be updated. In 2015, the world witnessed a major international accord that was adopted by all nations across the globe. This was the Paris Agreement in France designed to address climate change and its negative impacts. The agreement includes commitments from all major emitting countries to cut their climate pollution and to strengthen those commitments over time. The Paris Agreement is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, on climate change mitigation, adaptation, and finance, signed in 2016. Against this background, Ghana has taken a giant leap towards dealing with climate and environmental pollution through the use of Electric Buses for its public transport system. According to the Minister-designate for the Ministry of Transport, Kweku Ofori Asiamah at his vetting before the Appointments Committee of Parliament on Tuesday 23rd February 2021, Ghana is on the move to secure electric buses. He explained that Ghana as a signatory to the PARIS AGREEMENT is on the path to ensure that better climate standards are put in place. With the Electric Buses, we will have reduced harmful exhaust emissions, which is good news for our health. The better air quality will lead to less health problems and costs caused by air pollution. Electric vehicles (EVs) themselves emit no greenhouse gases (GHGs). Electric cars run very quietly, especially when running fully on battery power. Electric cars can be powered naturally with renewable resources like solar, wind, and water power. Gasoline, however, is created using oil, which is a natural resource, but not renewable. Electricity is also cheaper than gas. Electric cars typically cost one-third the cost of gas-powered vehicles to run. Many electric vehicles also use regenerative braking to add to the energy the car needs to run, which is completely cost-free, the minister explained. He further disclosed that Ghana is in talks with the Green Climate Fund (GCF) to fund the procurement of electric buses. The GCF is a unique global platform to respond to climate change by investing in low-emission and climate-resilient development. GCF was established by 194 governments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in developing countries, and to help vulnerable societies adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change. 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. Featured Video Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. CHARLOTTE, N.C., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The following is a statement from Sarah Verardo, CEO of The Independence Fund, a national nonprofit serving catastrophically wounded Veterans and their families. She is also the wife and caregiver of retired Army SGT and David Willis, State Representative for NC House District 68 representing Union County. Representative Willis is a vocal supporter of the troops and an advocate for military and veteran families. North Carolina is home to more than 736,000 Veterans. More than 155,000 of those Veterans have a disability incurred in service to our nation. We owe them a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid. But we owe it to them as a state to make payments on that debt. An Alive Day marks the day a Service Member nearly died in combat, but through the modernization of battlefield medicine, grit, determination, and camaraderie, Service Members are surviving wounds what could have killed them just a decade earlier. Home to some of the finest military installations in the country, North Carolina breeds our nation's frontline war heroes. The freedom of many is protected by the bravery of a few. That bravery shines especially brightly in North Carolina. On April 24, 2010, Waxhaw, North Carolina resident Michael Verardo suffered catastrophic and life changing injuries in Southern Afghanistan. SGT. Verardo was awarded his first Purple Heart just two weeks earlier when he was riding in the turret of a M-ATV as the gunner and the vehicle hit a buried improvised explosive device (IED). SGT Verardo was ejected out thirty feet and medically evacuated. While recovering in Kandahar, Verardo requested to be returned to his unit as their casualty count was high, and he wanted to help continue the mission. On his very first foot patrol, just two weeks later, Verardo was hit again, this time with life changing consequence. The IED ripped off his left leg, much of his left arm, left him with severe burns, facial damage, and in need of a field blood transfusion in order to be kept alive. Verardo's military brothers loaded him onto the medical evacuation, believing it was the last time they would see him, as the injuries were not conducive to life. Verardo clung to life aboard the medical flight, flatlining several times, and staying in a comatose state through Germany and ultimately reached his final destination of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he remained on status: death imminent. Verardo survived, and April 24, 2021 will mark eleven years of life for him post-Afghanistan. Like many of our nation's most catastrophically wounded heroes, the fight is lifelong, and the family fights right beside them. SGT. Verardo has endured one hundred and twenty surgeries and years of speech, visual, physical, and occupational therapies. He lives at home with his wife and three daughters where he requires full-time care. For heroes like Verardo, the battlefield may be in the past, but the battle rages on at home. Verardo earned two Purple Heart medals on behalf of a grateful nation. What he and others like him continue to give, deserves our endless respect. Under the proposed "North Carolina Wounded Heroes Day," North Carolinians will join together to honor the sacrifices made by our state's heroes. State Representative David Willis and State Senator Todd Johnson led the charge to introduce the bill in honor of wounded Heroes in North Carolina, identifying SGT Verardo's Alive Day, April 24, 2010 as the day to recognize all North Carolina wounded Veterans. In a time where so much divides us, let us remember that it is the most sacred duty of all Americans to support those who allow us the freedom to disagree. We urge all North Carolinians to honor the sacrifices made by our wounded Veterans, and join together to ensure their heroic stories are never forgotten. SOURCE The Independence Fund Related Links independencefund.org | By Laura Lee The greatest predictor of an individuals health status is their health literacy skill the ability to understand basic health information needed to make well-informed health decisions. The American Medical Association reports that 75 percent of patients who reported being in poor health also tested poorly in health literacy. Jocelyn Wang, 2L, is a 2020-2021 President's Fellow. And while personal health literacy plays an important role in healthy outcomes, organizational health literacy the degree to which service providers communicate clearly and provide tools for patients to make informed health-related decisions is equally important. Health literacy is a consideration for nearly every student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), whose mission is to improve the human condition through education, research, clinical care, and service. Thats why the 2020-2021 Presidents Symposium and White Paper Project is engaging nine students from the schools of dentistry, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, social work, and public health from UMB and the University of Maryland, College Park in a yearlong interprofessional research project to explore health literacy as a social determinant of health. This year's topic centers on expanding the University's role in improving the relationship between provider and patient, therefore, allowing patients to be well-informed and active decision-makers in their health and the health of their families. On Feb. 9, Christopher R. Trudeau, JD, associate professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's Bowen School of Law, spoke to students as part of the Presidents Symposium Series, a collection of talks designed to unravel the various factors that make health literacy a social determinant of health. Trudeau, a leading expert in the legal aspects of health literacy in clinical and research settings, was eager to share his thoughts on how to support health literacy through law and policy change. A passionate proponent of clear language and what he called health understanding, Trudeau examined during his hourlong talk how providers can use regulatory trends in health literacy to advocate for changes within their own organizations. We know that people struggle with forms and processes, said Trudeau, who published the first U.S. study measuring the publics preferences for legal communication in 2012. A lawyer himself, he lamented how informed consent forms are written by lawyers for lawyers, and are often incomprehensible to the patient signing on the dotted line. The typical informed consent form is unreadable for any level of reading, he continued. This presents a problem that Trudeau believes can be solved in part at the policy level. The regulatory push for health literacy is a global movement that has been on the agenda of the World Health Organization for nearly two decades. Several countries have national health literacy policies including China, New Zealand, Australia, and Scotland. The United States is making progress in this arena by mandating clear language in government communication. Trudeau pointed to the 2010 passage of the Plain Writing Act, which requires federal agencies such as the Social Security Administration, Veterans Health Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to use clear government communication that the public can understand and use. He suggested leaning on such policies when initiating changes to health care communication on an organizational level. No matter what youre trying to do, he said, youre going to find some policy statement on a federal level and on a state level that supports what youre doing. Jocelyn Wang, 2L, is a Presidents Fellow working on the health literacy project. She said Trudeaus policy talk rang especially true to her as a law student and will add another dimension to the recommendations she and her peers include in their White Paper presentation to the University community in April. We will definitely be implementing the information he provided about how health literacy policies positively impact the patient and the service provider into our suggestions, she said. The Presidents Symposium and White Paper Project is a joint initiative of the Presidents Office and the Intercultural Center. Past White Papers have explored Implementing Core Values, Addressing Gun Violence, and Global Literacy. The next talk in the White Paper Symposium Series takes place March 8 during which University System of Maryland Chancellor Jay A. Perman, MD, will moderate a panel of nationally recognized experts in health literacy. Register here. ROME - The mafia is taking advantage of the COVID crisis to get into the Italian health sector and the green economy, the anti-mafia investigative directorate (DIA) said Wednesday. "There are serious risks of infiltration, and money laundering and corruption are growing," the DIA said in a new report. The COVID pandemic is a "great opportunity" for Italy's mafias and the speeding up of bidding procedures has brought "high risks of mafia infiltration into the legal economy, especially in the health sector," it said. It is also "exceedingly likely" that the mafias - 'Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra, and Camorra - will try to intercept funding for major public works and the conversion to the green economy, it said. The three mafias have reined in their staples of drug trafficking, extortion, and robberies during the pandemic and upped activities of money laundering in northern and central Italy, as well as vote buying and corruption in the south, the report said. 'Ndrangheta, from Calabria, is Italy's richest and most powerful mafia thanks to its control of the European cocaine trade. Cosa Nostra is its older Sicilian cousin. The Camorra is based in and around Naples but like the other two syndicates operates all over Italy and abroad. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) The Department of Foreign Affairs has raised the alert status for Filipinos in Myanmar to the second level amid the political crisis in that country. In a public advisory on Wednesday, the DFA said this is to ensure the safety of the remaining 1,273 Filipinos there. Alert Level 2 means restricting non-essential movements, avoiding places of protest, and preparing for possible evacuation. Only returning overseas Filipino workers with existing contracts shall also be allowed to travel to Myanmar. "The Department reiterates its advice to Filipinos in Myanmar to exercise due caution, monitor developments through reputable sources, avoid places of protests, and observe the guidance of the Philippine Embassy in Yangon," the DFA said. According to a CNN report, activists in Myanmar have called for a historic strike after police opened fire on those protesting the February 1 military coup, leaving at least two dead. The military warned it could use lethal force against protesters. The protests and civil disobedience movements against the coup have been the largest in Myanmar in decades, with thousands calling for State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi's release from detention, and for power to be handed back to civilian control. READ: Huge demonstrations across Myanmar despite military's warning that protesters could 'suffer loss of life' Private equity has succeeded in exploiting economic choke points in much narrower sectors of the economy than experts in monopolies typically study. Health care is an idea area in which to exploit the leverage of providers compared to patients. You cant haggle over which ambulance comes to fetch you. Similarly, most who get an operation or need ongoing treatments, like dialysis or chemotherapy, will use a facility nearby, which means private equity can create local oligopolies. Not only do private equity owners jack up prices (see Eileen Appelbaum on how private equity negotiates higher fees for outsourced physician practices) but they also lower service levels, as an important new study confirms. An important study by Atul Gupta, Sabrina T. Howell, Constantine Yannelis, and Abhinav Gupta, published by the Becker Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago, covering approximately 7.4 unique Medicare patients in nursing homes to understand the impact of private equity buys of 1,674 nursing homes from 2000 to 2017. Weve embedded it below and encourage you to read it and circulate it widely. The study is very carefully done. It looks at changes in care and health/mortality in nursing homes after private equity acquisitions. That makes it apples to apples, since the acquired homes were already for profit institutions. The authors also adjusted for consolidations within nursing home chains (they compared consolidation within PE deals with consolidation of non-PE owned for profit homes) and changes in patient composition post purchase. The findings are damning: A key measure of patient welfare is short-term survival. We find that going to a PE-owned nursing home increases the probability of death during the stay and the following 90 days by 1.7 percentage points, about 10% of the mean. This estimate implies about 20,150 Medicare lives lost due to PE ownership of nursing homes during our sample period. We use the observed age and gender distribution of Medicare decedents to estimate the corresponding implied loss in life-years 160,000. Using a conventional value of a lifeyear from the literature, this estimate implies a mortality cost of about $21 billion in 2016 dollars. To put this in perspective, this is about twice the total payments made by Medicare to PE facilities during our sample period, about $9 billion. Later in the paper, the authors underscore the significance of the 1.7% increased odds of dying in the first 90 days: In the context of the health economics literature, this is a very large effect. Why did this happen? The private equity firms cut on patient care, in particular nurse staffing levels. Keep in mind that nursing homes in the US treat both short-term patients as well as long-term residents. We find that PE ownership leads to a 3% decline in hours per patient-day supplied by the frontline nursing assistants who provide the vast majority of caregiving hours and perform crucial well-being services such as mobility assistance, personal interaction, and cleaning to minimize infection risk and ensure sanitary conditions. Overall staffing declines by 1.4%. Nurses are the biggest operating cost, typically representing 50% of total non-overhead expenses. The cut in service ironically hurts older but relatively healthy residents the most, those with low disease burdens. The authors argue that sicker residents required levels of care that could not readily be reduced. So the ones that took the hit were the seemingly sounder patients, who wouldnt have a new ailment or injury attended to as quickly as in a non-PE owned nursing home. The authors found corroborating evidence of the decay in care standards: To ensure the effect is not spurious, we study other measures of patient well-being using the same IV approach. We find that going to a PE-owned nursing home increases the probability of taking antipsychotic medications discouraged in the elderly due to their association with greater mortality by 50%. Similarly, patient mobility declines and pain intensity increases post-acquisition. Finally, the amount billed per 90-day episode increases by 11%. Taken together, these results suggest that PE ownership decreases nursing home productivity, as measured by our proxies for quality output per dollar spent. The increased use of anti-psychotics is alarming. Thorazine is often abused in institutional settings to zombify troublesome residents. Thorazine is also used as an alternative to opioids to manage very severe pain. The study notes that CMS found that the PE-owned nursing homes report pain intensity, so the higher thorazine/antipsychotic use could also be an effect of higher injuries or other deficiencies in care generating higher pain levels (note that higher pain is reported in the face of increased antipsychotics use could therefore indicate even more severe underlying increases in pain). Another indicator is the decline in CMS five-star ratings after PE acquisitions and their lower level overall: PE targets are slightly larger, have fewer staff hours per resident, and a lower Overall Five Star rating. At the sector level, ratings and staffing have secularly increased over time. For staffing, this reflects more stringent standards from regulators over time. As the PE deals occurred primarily later in the sample, it is therefore remarkable that they have lower measures of quality on average. Panel B shows that demographic measures are similar across the types of facilities, such as patient age and a high-risk indicator. PE-owned facilities bill about 10% more per stay than non-PE facilities. Finally, the authors present evidence of looting: A puzzle is why nursing homes are attractive targets given their low and regulated profit margins, often cited at just 1-2%. Using CMS cost reports, we find that there is no effect of buyouts on net income, raising the question of how PE firms create value. There are three types of expenditures that are particularly associated with PE profits and tax strategies: monitoring fees charged to portfolio companies, lease payments after real estate is sold to generate cash flows, and interest payments reflecting the importance of leverage in the PE business model (Metrick and Yasuda, 2010; Phalippou et al., 2018). We find that all three types of expenditures increase after buyouts, with interest payments rising by over 300%. These results, along with the decline in nurse availability,suggest a systematic shift in operating costs away from patient care. Not surprisingly, the article points out that the ability of private equity to degrade care on a systematic basis points to deficiencies in regulation. It also calls for more strict antitrust scrutiny of health care acquisitions. And this carefully documented paper underscores another sorry fact: private equity does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Create your account: sign up and get ahead on news and events NO INVESTMENT ADVICE The above has been published by Proactive Investors Limited (the "Company") on its website and is made available subject to the terms and conditions of use of its website (see T&C ). ... NEW DELHI : In October last year, Indias foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla and Army chief Manoj Mukund Naravane teamed up for a visit to a crucial neighbourMyanmarthat raised eyebrows due to its rarity. The uncommonness of the visit underlined the state of politics in Myanmarwhere the military and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), co-existed in an uneasy space till the military retook power on 1 February. The Shringla-Naravane visitseen as prescient given the military takeoveralso reflected India s strategy to deal with Myanmar: engage the military while being supportive of democratic forces. Its a policy that has worked for New Delhi since the early 1990s. India has been cognisant of the power centres in Myanmarthat power has been with the military and that the civilian institutions are gradually coming into their own," said Harsh V Pant, a professor of international relations at the London-based Kings College. Therefore, India has been balancing its outreach to both sides and it seems like a sensible idea given our interests in Myanmar," he said. View Full Image Deepening ties A resurgence of the insurgency in the northeast and an assertive China which has been making increasingly determined inroads into Indias periphery are Indias main concerns. In fact, some analysts have pointed out that Suu Kyi has been on more cordial terms with China than the Tatmadaw (the army) given the latters suspicions about Beijings tacit support for rebel groups such as the Arakan Army. This puts a question mark on how close Beijing and the new regime will get to each other. But tightening global sanctions could potentially force a rethink. The militarys takeover also comes at a time when New Delhis efforts to get Indian industry to do business in Myanmar was just starting to pay off. There are currently over 100 private Indian companies in the country, with investments to the tune of $1.2 billion. Trouble in Myanmar In the days since the military takeover, three pro-democracy protesters have died. There is no sign of a let up in protests. The crowds joining in only seems to be getting bigger and, among them, are members of the minority groups and the revered Buddhist monkssuggesting broad-based support across society. According to the military and its head, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the November 2020 elections in which Suu Kyis NLD won more than 80% of the vote was flawed. It said it was forced to step in because Suu Kyis government had failed to investigate allegations of fraud. Analysts, however, hold the view that Min Aung Hlaing was more worried about the marginalization of the military since the army backed Union Solidarity and Development Party was trounced by the NLD for the second time in 2020. In the 2015 polls too, the NLD had won by a landslide. Predictably, the developments have drawn global condemnation. The US, UK and Canada have called for an immediate restoration of democracy and swiftly backed it up with targeted sanctions. The European Union is expected to follow suit. China, which is heavily involved in infrastructure projects in Myanmar (as well as its 5G telecom network, according to the New York Times), has been largely silent, citing its policy of non-interference. Its state-backed media referred to the military takeover as a cabinet reshuffle". Of the total foreign direct investment in Myanmar, China accounts for over 25%. Analysts, however, are divided over whether the military takeover will mean the rekindling of familial ties" between the Myanmar and China. For one, military leader Min Aung Hlaing is widely seen to be suspicious of Beijings possible support to Kokang rebels, who are ethnically Chinese, as well as others. The Myanmar-Russia defence relationship has also been deepening in recent yearsan effort by the army to swing away from Beijing. But biting sanctions can bring the Tatmadaw back into the Chinese orbit, analysts say, which will be worrisome for New Delhi. The generals would not like to turn to China for support in the first instance, but forced to a corner, (they) may have no choice," said Gautam Mukhopadhaya, a former ambassador to Myanmar. The West has always been more aggressive in imposing sanctions on Myanmar," said former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal. Their stakes in Myanmar cannot be compared with ours. For us, Myanmar is a direct neighbour," he said. The stakes for India Chinas primary interest in Myanmar is to pursue its strategic and economic projects under the Belt and Road Initiative and the China-Myanmar economic corridor that includes the Kyaukphyu deep sea port," said Mukhopadhaya. The port, seen as a key outcome of Chinese president Xi Jinpings visit to Myanmar in January 2020, is of strategic significance as it will give Beijing a foothold in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Suu Kyis government had greenlighted the port project. If built, it will be the third Chinese-built port in Indias immediate neighbourhoodafter Gwadar in Pakistan and Hambantota in Sri Lanka. Myanmars entry into the ASEAN in 1997 meant that the economically vibrant grouping is at Indias doorstep. Its a linkage that Delhi values greatly, given its priority to develop the northeast with help from ASEAN. But for that, keeping a lid on insurgency is a prerequisitefor which Myanmars generals hold the key. In the late-1980s, India was firmly backed Aung San Suu Kyi. In 1993, Suu Kyi was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru award for international understanding. But almost immediately after, New Delhi changed tack when the insurgency in its north-eastern region took a serious turn, coinciding with a blow-up of militancy in Kashmir. New Delhi concluded that it needed to befriend the Tatmadaw since insurgents from the north-east were using Myanmar as a base to launch attacks against India. Some groups also used Myanmar as an escape route to China. With the Myanmar military in its corner, New Delhi launched coordinated joint operations against the insurgents in the mid-1990s. And these have continued. Today, there is substantial military cooperation between the Myanmar and Indian armies to curb militancy," said G Parthasarathy, another former Indian ambassador to Myanmar. A person familiar with the matter said Indian security personnel have handed back or even killed Arakan rebels crossing into India for shelter, just as the Myanmar Army has handed over or eliminated Indian separatists hiding there. The tricky act of cooperating with the Burmese military while simultaneously nudging the country towards a democratic transition has been a 30-year tightrope walk that India has indulged in. There have been many conversations (about democracy) but they have always been quiet ones," said a person who did not want to be named. As we have said in the past, we do not believe in megaphone diplomacy," said the person, referring to the global condemnation of the generals. We have always felt that these and (the) sanctions are counterproductive." Economic links Indias use of development projects as the main instrument of its diplomacy to engage the then military government began after the pro-democracy agitation of 1988," recalled the former ambassador Mukhopadhaya. This has expanded over time, especially over the last 10 years." The Indian foreign ministry says that around $1.7 billion has been spent in development partnership, which include connectivity and infrastructure projects like the Kaladan multi-modal transit transport project connecting Kolkata port to Sittwe port in Myanmar. Another major connectivity project is the India-Myanmar-Thailand trilateral highway, which is to be later extended to Vietnam. Most of the big-ticket economic investments in Myanmar have been shepherded by Indias state-backed firms, primarily in the area of energy. Private firms had, for long, been reluctant to get caught up in the crosshairs of international sanctions. But this had just started to change. The India private sectors presence went up after 2016, when the last round of sanctions imposed by the US on Myanmar was lifted. Nearly all of the 100 Indian com panies have a presence in Yangon, Mayanmars financial, commercial and logistics nerve centre. A decade of peace and democratic stability had begun to transform Yangons skyline, with glitzy hotels and a newly established stock exchange vying for attention. Irrespective of which side comes on top in the street protests, stability is likely to go for a toss in the near term. I am not sure whether I should stay or plan to come back home," said an Indian consultant based in Yangon since 2018 who did not wish to be named. Everything seemed to be going well. I dont know when the company I work for will re-open," he said by phone from Yangon. For India, private sector involvement is crucial to supplement government investments as a counter to Chinas efforts to co-opt Myanmar into its multi-billion-dollar BRI. We have been pushing Indian industry to look at the opportunities in Myanmar. Our embassy in Myanmar has hosted business delegations from India. This (turn of events) is unfortunate," one of the officials cited above said of the uncertainty. Going forward, Indias well-entrenched dual track approach wont sit well with new allies like the Quad, a grouping of US, Japan, Australia and India. The new Biden-led US administration has forcefully come out against the military takeover. Most notable has been the US reference to Myanmar as Burma", the name the country was known by before 1990 when the military changed it. Its unfortunate that the first major crisis in Asia for the Biden administration and the (Yoshihide) Suga government (in Japan) is in Myanmar," said Michael Jonathan Green, an analyst on Asia and Japan at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank. Because Myanmar is the place where India, the US and Japan always fight like siblingsan old sibling rivalry about who has the best approach to Myanmar. Its really unfortunate that the test of Quads commitment to democratic principles is Myanmar because it brings out the worst in all four countries," Green said in a webinar on the Quad last week. Parthasarathy is of the view that Indias national interests should be paramount. We are reaping the dividends now of befriending the military for decades. Even now, the task (of eliminating insurgencies) is not over," he said. New Delhi should not let considerations about the US stand in the way of Indian interests, he said. For now, the protesters and the military seem to be exercising restraint. The Myanmarese military are very disciplined, guided by the ideology that they are the custodians of the state and the people are their children," Rajiv Bhatia, a former Indian ambassador to Myanmar, said. On the other side is a mostly young population, exposed to some level of democracy and new technology. There are three possible outcomes," Bhatia said. The military will prevail, the people will prevail or, the third, an impasse, he said. For anyone wanting to know how this will endkeep a close eye on the crowd size on Myanmars streets. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Never miss a story! Stay connected and informed with Mint. Download our App Now!! INSN-Brena Medicine Director Franklin Aranda emphasized that only at the COVID-19 contingency area of this institution 70 minors have been hospitalized so far this year, of whom 2 were transferred to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) due to their critical condition. Additionally, the physician explained that during the first wave of the pandemic the number of hospitalized patients amounted to 514. "Out of the total, 33 were diagnosed with multisystem inflammatory syndrome. In addition, 15 patients were admitted to ICU, of whom 8 required mechanical ventilation," he noted. Dr. Aranda advised parents and caregivers to strengthen prevention measures for themselves and their children, such as frequent hand washing, physical distancing, correct use of face masks and face shields when outside and in public transportation, as well as avoidance of crowds. The physician remarked that if a COVID-19 case is identified at home and the child develops a cold or abdominal pain within the first 15 days, he or she must be taken immediately to a health facility to receive medical care. This happened to Ayse, who at her young age of 4 years has had to fight for her life. The girl was discharged after 4 days in ICU. The minor came to the triage area on February 13, where she was diagnosed with multisystem inflammatory syndrome associated with COVID-19, which is why she was transferred to ICU on the same day. Thanks to timely treatment and constant monitoring by healthcare workers , she left ICU to continue her recovery in the contingency area. Ayse is currently at home in Lima's Carabayllo district along with her family. (END) NDP/SRE/RMB/MVB Loading... Considering the increase in COVID-19 cases among minors, the Ministry of Health (Minsa) through the National Children's Health Institute (INSN) in Lima's Brena district called on parents to take extreme preventive health measures and avoid overexposing their children so as to protect them in the context of the pandemic.Publicado: 23/2/2021 Grant Projects UNO- Ualikhanov Kokshetau State University (UKSU) in Kazakhstan Partnership The goal of this project, UNO-KSU Partnership Building through Enhancement of English and STEM Teaching is to build a partnership between University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) and Ualikhanov Kokshetau State University (KSU), a regional university in North Kazakhstan, to enhance teacher preparation, teaching methodology, and pre-service teacher training to support English language teaching and learning, including STEM. CAS and colleagues from International Professional Development (IPD) are working together on the curriculum portion of this grant and they are presenting seminars on leadership and teaching excellence for the professors at KSU. During this time, the UNO team is working on adjusting the original project because of COVID-19. The UNO team is offering many virtual modules to make sure that the KSU professors are fully engaged and that the goals of the project are met. The UNO team is also engaging in different webinars to provide information to the broader KSU community. The Partnership 2020: Leveraging USIndia Cooperation in Higher Education to Harness Economic Opportunities and Innovation Projects will strengthen the strategic partnership between the US and India through tieups in higher education, research on key issue areas, related economic growth, and peopletopeople linkages. The results of this project will include: (1) at least four new or enhanced tieups between US and Indian universities with each one engaging businesses, civil society, and state and local governments in an area of strategic applied research; (2) a catalog of current USIndia university partnerships; (3) a practical guide for universities to use in building successful partnerships; and (4) policy recommendations for US and India to use higher education partnerships to harness economic opportunities. Currently, the UNO team is working on monitoring and evaluating 15 different sub grants that we have awarded thus far. Most of our time is spend on reporting progress and working with UNOs grants accounting team to make sure that these grants are moving forward given all the uncertainty due to COVID-19. UNO-Pakistan Excellence and Achievement (TEA), English Language Teacher Exchange Pakistan Excellence and Achievement (TEA) English Language Teacher Exchange, with a budget of $1,445,241.00, is funded by the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. The project is designed to promote the development of English language skills, knowledge of current English Language Teaching (ELT) pedagogies, and the leadership skills of a select number of Pakistani high school English language teachers through a blend of classroom and field experiences. This will include community engagement activities and opportunities to network with English language teaching peers at the University of Nebraska Omaha. The number for the target audience is 106 participants. All participants will be visiting UNO and will stay in Omaha for six weeks attending lectures on pedagogy, leadership, professional development, technology and teaching management systems in addition to other fundamental skills that will improve their teaching competences. Due to Covid-19, the visit of participants is delayed until June-July 2021 but virtual sessions are to kick off in February 2021. Community Engagement CASA Immersion Seminars This one-week seminar provides custom-designed programs to participants from various federal agencies who are engaged in Afghanistan and the CASA region. It is offered on campus and involves faculty from various UNO colleges. CAS has trained more than 600 participants in the last 10 years. Faculty from UNO College of Arts and Sciences, UNO College of Business Administration, College of Communication, Fine Arts and Media and International Programs offer academic contents. Community and Civic Education on Central Asia and South Asia (CASA) Region The Community and Civic Education on Central Asia and South Asia (CASA) Region is designed for Nebraska community schools. It is an effort to provide information on the region from experts who have worked in these regions. In the series of these guest lectures, the first free Zoom meeting will introduce Social Studies Teachers (Grades 6-12) from the Lincoln and Omaha areas to the many resources available to them regarding Central and South Asia via The Center for Afghanistan Studies. The topics will include history, current events, human and physical geography of Afghanistan and the neighboring regions. The purpose is to assist Teachers in developing their curriculum according to the Nebraska State Social Studies Standards, as well as provide their students a meaningful and relevant education experience utilizing the unique resources and talents of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at UNO. Other schools invited to attend include Bellevue, Burke, Creighton Prep, Elkhorn, Marian, Mercy, Millard, Papillion-La Vista, Pius X High School (Lincoln, NE), Ralston and Westside (District 66). This event will be hosted by Robert Holbert and Hanif Sufizada from The Center for Afghanistan Studies. Media Engagements and Analysis Contributions by Sher Jan Ahmadzai, Director Center for Afghanistan Studies: Sher Jan Ahmadzai appeared in several talk shows with Voice of America Ashna TV and Radio, Voice of America Deewa TV and Radio, Voice of America Pashto TV and Radio, Radio Liberty, BBC, and Radio Television of Afghanistan on the inauguration of President Joe Biden, the new administration and its prospects for Afghanistan and the region. In addition to appearances and interviews, Mr. Ahmadzai also wrote a piece published by The Conversation: Afghanistan peace talks begin but will the Taliban hold up their end of the deal? Contribution by Hanif Sufizada, Coordinator for Education and Outreach Programs The Importance of Central Bank Governors and their Qualifications-a Comparative Analysis, Published in Dari language in local newspaper in Afghanistan The Taliban are megarich here is where they get the money they use to wage war in Afghanistan , published in The Conversation Learn more about Center for Afghanistan Studies and follow us on Facebook. Oman has banned travelers from 10 countries from entering its territory for a period of 15 days as part measure to curb the spread of the Covid-19. Gulf states coronavirus committee, Zawya reports, announced the directive noting that the move particularly targets certain mutated strains. The ban will go into effect from Thursday and concerns Sudan, Lebanon, South Africa, Brazil, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia. The Gulf country Monday reported 26 new cases, bringing the infection toll at 139,692. 1,555 people have died from the disease so far in the Sultanate. Rardin got a job working at a ball bearing company. There was a boss, an assistant, a stockboy, and Rardin. The boss left when he got a promotion, the assistant got drafted, and the stockboy was terrible, so I fired him, Rardin recalled. Her next few jobs were with companies that made automotive parts. The union guys were not nice to women, but I put up with that, Rardin said. I was what they called the senior counter man. I would look up the part somebody wanted for such-and-such a car. She got married after the war to a comedian/master of ceremonies. It lasted for 15 years but Rardin knew it was over after eight. The two remained friends. Meanwhile, her career was taking off. After a stint as regional manager for the department store I. Magnin, Revlon hired her in 1959, making her the companys first female executive. Despite the rampant sexism that pervaded the business world during the Mad Men era, I never had a problem, Rardin said. Yeah, they made their passes and they belittled me, but I just didnt let it affect me, she said. In the days of two-martini lunches, Rardin could throw back drinks with the best of them. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Haiti - UN : Intervention of the United States at the Security Council on the situation in Haiti Intervention at the Security Council by Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis Acting Alternate Representative for Special Political Affairs of the American Mission to the United Nations on the situation in Haiti Remarks by Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis : [...] Thank you, Mr. President. And thank you, Special Representative La Lime, for your updates on the situation in Haiti, and for the extensive efforts and those of your entire team. Ms. Roc, thank you for your briefing, and for reminding us of the urgent need to focus on the challenges faced by Haitis young people. President Moise, we welcome you to the Council, and we appreciate your participation today. Let me begin with something we all know: legislative elections were due in Haiti in October 2019. Both before and after that date, members of this Council repeatedly called on Haitis political stakeholders to come together, to set aside their differences, and to find a way forward to address Haitis most pressing challenges. They chose not to do so; however, ultimate responsibility for creating an atmosphere conducive to free and fair elections, and then conducting those elections, must rest on the government. The United States is disturbed that Haitis prolonged period of rule by decree continues. We believe decrees should be limited to actions necessary for essential functions, safety, and the conduct of elections. However, recent actions unilaterally removing and appointing three supreme court judges, creating a national intelligence agency, and actions constraining the role of Haitis independent audit agency risk damaging Haitis core democratic institutions. Once again, we urge the Government of Haiti to hold overdue legislative elections as soon as possible in order to restore the parliaments constitutional role. The Haitian people deserve the opportunity to elect their leaders and to restore Haitis democratic institutions. While we recognize that an enormous amount of work remains to be done, 2021 must be the year of both legislative and presidential elections in Haiti. At the same time, we applaud the Government of Haiti for its decision in September to increase the budget of the Haitian National Police, which has long suffered from a lack of resources. Despite this increased focus on law enforcement, however, as weve heard, gang violence continues to be a serious problem, as kidnappings rose by over 200 percent in 2020, and homicides are also on the rise. We urge Haitian authorities to redouble their efforts to investigate and prosecute violent crime, including sexual and gender-based violence, to strengthen community policing practices, and to safeguard the human rights of residents of gang-controlled neighborhoods. We are also troubled by an ongoing lack of accountability for human rights violations and abuses. In December, the United States sanctioned three former Haitian officials under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act for their role in the 2018 La Saline attack, in which at least 71 people were killed. But La Saline, Bel Air, and the assassination of Monferrier Dorval in August all highlight the urgent need to end impunity, beginning with concrete actions to protect citizens from violence through effective policing and timely adjudication of criminal cases. The development and implementation of a national strategy for the investigation, prosecution, and adjudication of cases of serious crimes, with support as appropriate, is also worth considering. The United States continues to encourage and promote the development of an independent, credible, and effective judicial sector in Haiti. We are concerned about executive orders undermining the judiciary and intermittent strikes by key judicial actors, which continue to negatively affect the functioning of the judiciary and limit the numbers of hearings and judicial proceedings held. A fully functioning judicial sector is essential to the tasks of taking on impunity and corruption, and to reducing endemically high levels of prolonged pretrial detention. All of this takes place against the backdrop of an economic downturn in Haiti, further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Economic instability, recurring fuel shortages, and acute food insecurity have combined to undermine progress towards development and worsened an already grave humanitarian situation. On January 11, the United States announced an additional $75.5 million in development assistance to Haiti. This new funding will be used to implement USAID programs in Haiti in a wide range of areas, including health, education, food security, agricultural development, water and sanitation, and governance. Together with the Government of Haiti, civil society, and our partners, we will continue working towards sustainable development and to help keep Haiti on the path to self-reliance. Let me conclude by reiterating the need to bring the current period of rule by decree to a swift conclusion. It is only through the presence of a stable, democratic, and fully representative government that issues such as violence, corruption, and civil and human rights abuses can be meaningfully addressed. The United States will continue to stand with Haiti as it builds a better future. Thank you." See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-33083-haiti-flash-intervention-of-president-moise-before-the-un-security-council.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-33058-haiti-un-human-rights-violation-very-concerning-indicates-the-binuh-report-on-the-situation-in-haiti.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-33046-haiti-un-mounting-insecurity-indicates-binuh-report-on-the-situation-in-haiti.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-32896-haiti-usa-$755-million-additional-aid-for-haiti.html https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-31661-icihaiti-pelerin-5-assassination-of-the-president-of-the-bar-of-port-au-prince.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-31905-haiti-flash-assassination-of-me-dorval-killers-and-accomplices-identified.html HL/ HaitiLibre Chennai: ICICI Bank today announced the launch of a Common Payment Card System (CPCS) in partnership with the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) and Chennai Smart City Limited (CSCL) to provide citizens with a one-stop solution for making various kind of payments within the city and beyond. Called Namma Chennai Smart Card , the Rupay powered co-branded, contactless prepaid card, will facilitate various digital payments like tax and utility bill payments at the GCC centres. Additionally, the prepaid card facilitates retail payments within Chennai as well as in retail stores and e-commerce websites across the country. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K. Palaniswami unveiled the Namma Chennai Smart Card in the presence of Vetrivel G., Zonal Head - Institutional Business & GBG, ICICI Bank; Maddipatla Himadar, Zonal Head- Retail, ICICI Bank and other senior officials of the Bank. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers Speaking about the partnership, Sudipta Roy, Head- Unsecured Assets, ICICI Bank, This new proposition aims at offering unparalleled convenience to the residents of Chennai and is a significant step towards transforming it into a Smart City. This is a testament to our constant efforts at creating a less-cash ecosystem across the country, thereby encouraging our customers to adapt to digital modes of making payments." This new initiative will make Chennai a part of the list of international cities that offer a Common Payment Card platform to its residents for making seamless payments for an array of services within the city. With the Namma Chennai Smart Card, residents will be able to undertake the following activities: Payments at GCC centres: Residents can use the card to make tax/ utility bill payments at the GCC centres. This facility will be available in a few weeks. Residents can use the card to make tax/ utility bill payments at the GCC centres. This facility will be available in a few weeks. Shop online and at stores: Armed with the card, residents can purchase goods from retail stores, pay for movie tickets, dine and shop online on e-commerce websites across the country. Armed with the card, residents can purchase goods from retail stores, pay for movie tickets, dine and shop online on e-commerce websites across the country. Manage card online: The card is backed by various features, which residents can manage seamlessly online on a dedicated customer portal. Additionally, in the coming days, residents will also be able to reload the card digitally through UPI on the customer portal or the iSmart City app. The card is backed by various features, which residents can manage seamlessly online on a dedicated customer portal. Additionally, in the coming days, residents will also be able to reload the card digitally through UPI on the customer portal or the iSmart City app. Avail exciting offers: Customers will also get exciting discount offers on the card around the year, which will be promoted in the coming days on the Banks website. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. You may have noticed something odd about the Sunday Times Bestseller list lately. Next to James Patterson, Barack Obama and other luminaries appears my book, entitled Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship. It appears that my book has gone viral among a new generation of young women, who are sharing their feelings about it on the social media video app TikTok and sending it shooting up the charts. So why has it struck a chord with Gen-Z women? Before I answer this question, I would like to describe how women often behave with men. Imagine that gender roles were reversed. Imagine men cooked, cleaned and spent ages in front of a mirror trying to look sexy. Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl, A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship by Sherry Argov is back on the best seller lists (file image) Imagine men wanted commitment after a week, and texted a woman 12 times a day to say 'I miss you XOXO' with pink heart emojis. Pretend men said things such as, 'Where is this relationship going?' and 'My biological clock is ticking'. Try to visualise your lover joining a pole-dancing class so he can do an act for you wearing silk boxers and thigh-high boots. Now hold that thought. Because this is how women are taught to behave with men. I wrote two bestselling books Why Men Love Bitches (2003) and Why Men Marry Bitches (2017) specifically for women who are too nice, needy, nurturing or available. Which is lots of women, because that is how we have been socially conditioned to behave. Until recently, my readers were mostly women in their 30s, 40s and 50s. Before writing the books, I interviewed hundreds of men young, old, rich, poor, married, single, highly educated and working-class to uncover all their male secrets. The book (pictured) has now gone viral among a new generation of young women online I asked them questions such as: 'What really attracts you? Have you ever ignored a woman on purpose? Did her response push you away or make you want her more? What wins your respect? Does this affect your sexual desire? What is a mental challenge?' And the most obvious question: 'Why do men love bitches?' I soon realised that women have been completely misled. Overwhelmingly, men agreed they were secretly attracted to strong women far more than to subservient yes-women. When a woman stood up for herself, that was often the moment a man realised he was falling in love with her. For centuries, women were taught that as long as they were beautiful and performed the right bedroom tricks, a man would pay all the bills and look after them. I never understood why a man would leave a beautiful woman who would do anything to please him, in favour of a seemingly less attractive woman who appeared to be less accommodating. But men explained it to me and I shared their insights in my book. The way men described it, some women's behaviour gave out a clear message to them. It said: 'I don't have my own opinions, including about my own worth. You are the centre of my world.' In my conversations with men, a woman's desirability had nothing to do with whether she wore Louboutins or Jimmy Choos, or was brunette or blonde. If she gave off the smell of desperation, he would soon tire of her, even if at first he found her attractive. One man I spoke with recalled how he fell for his wife the first time they were intimate. But it wasn't the sex that won him over, it was her independence and emotional self-control. He picked her up, took her out to dinner and they returned to his flat for their first night of passion. When he woke at 5am, she'd gone. Concerned, he got in his car to look for her and found her nearby, walking briskly to a bus stop. She very sweetly told him she had to work that day, so she was on her way home to change. She didn't need him to drive her anywhere. Of course, he insisted. By the time she had fastened her seatbelt, she had also secured his respect. Her behaviour said: 'I like you but I don't need you' and, more importantly, 'My life matters to me and I won't prioritise you over my basic needs.' This is a very different message to that given out by a woman who calls in sick to work and serves him breakfast in bed, followed by two hours of cuddle-time. To men, that says: 'I need you too much.' It suffocates them. For today's young women, my book contains advice they may not have heard before. Depressingly, social media and life online generally can be a deeply insecure place for Gen-Z girls. Online dating has made it easy for men to get sex with the swipe of a finger. Teenage girls are 'sexting' naked photos to teenage boys, while some online dating sites rate women by how 'hot' they are. Men have coined a phrase to describe what has replaced actual dates the euphemistic 'Netflix and chill'. When young women discover my advice anew on TikTok, it may be the first time they have read about dignity, confidence, self-worth and not giving themselves away to boys prematurely. And those are important lessons. My message? Don't be afraid to stand up for yourself. No man will make you happy, but the right man will add to your happiness. The less needy you are, the more he will want you. Men love the 'mental challenge', as they put it, of an independent woman. Never let anyone shake your faith in yourself. Acting like a bitch doesn't mean being mean. It means having the ability to stand up for yourself. Many TikTokers have contacted me. For example, Sarah Elizabeth asked: 'If you have already been 'too nice', is there any chance to implement the advice of the books after you have made all the mistakes? Is it ever too late?' I explained that men can be bored one minute and intrigued the next. I remember being on a radio show in London and I asked the male host to describe the one behaviour from a woman that would instantly turn him off. 'Constant contact,' he said. If a woman kept texting him for no reason, he would view her as being too needy. I then asked him: 'What if you suddenly stopped hearing from her?' Instantly, he replied: 'I'd call her straight away.' My books tell teenage girls what an overly protective father would say. Teenagers are inclined to ignore parental advice but I come at it like a friend, not a parent. Even so, the effect of my books was summed up perfectly by a father who happened to read one of them before giving it to his daughter. He playfully said: 'I'd want my daughter to read your books but I would never want my wife to read them.' Press Release Nokia selected by Globe Telecom to rollout 5G in the Philippines in three-year deal Supports network modernization and 5G rollout plan in key geographic areas Nokia to supply its AirScale portfolio for superior connectivity experiences 24 February 2021 Espoo, Finland Nokia today announced that it has been selected by Globe Telecom in a three-year deal to upgrade its existing 4G network, as well as expand the geographical reach of its 5G network at over 1,000 sites in the Philippines. The deployment will cover the second and third largest islands of Mindanao and Visayas and will begin in Q2 2021 with completion expected in 2023. Under the terms of the agreement, Nokia will provide equipment and services from its comprehensive 5G AirScale portfolio to build out the Radio Access Network (RAN), including base stations and other radio access products. Globe Telecom will also use Nokias high-capacity AirScale massive MIMO Adaptive Antenna solution, which utilizes the latest 64TR radios, to boost coverage and performance. Utilizing the new 3.5GHz spectrum band for dense urban coverage, Globe Telecom will be able to provide end-users with high peak speeds typical on 5G network. The deal will also see the expansion of the existing FDD/TDD LTE network infrastructure. These solutions will enable Globe Telecom to roll out 5G services across the two major islands of the Philippines and offer customers superior speeds, capacity, and lower latencies while reducing complexity. Nokia will provide its NetAct solution for network management and seamless daily network operations as well as deliver digital design and deployment and optimization and technical support services. Nokia is an existing partner of Globe Telecom and provides a wide range of solutions including wireless, IP, optical, and fixed network products, and services. Ernest Cu, President and CEO, Globe Telecom, said: Were pleased to continue our partnership with Nokia to deliver compelling 5G experiences to our customers. We are going full steam ahead in delivering 5G in more areas, as this technology brings us closer to our goal of providing #1stWorldNetwork in the Philippines. Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks, Nokia, commented: Its exciting to be part of this project to deliver 5G services to citizens across the Philippines and see our industry-leading 5G RAN solutions underpin the network. The expanded and upgraded 5G network will deliver exciting new solutions to even more people and businesses and our technology will play a fundamental role in delivering these compelling connectivity experiences. Resources: Webpage: Nokia AirScale Webpage: Nokia 5G RAN About Nokia We create the critical networks and technologies to bring together the worlds intelligence, across businesses, cities, supply chains and societies. With our commitment to innovation and technology leadership, driven by the award-winning Nokia Bell Labs, we deliver networks at the limits of science across mobile, infrastructure, cloud, and enabling technologies. Adhering to the highest standards of integrity and security, we help build the capabilities we need for a more productive, sustainable and inclusive world. For our latest updates, please visit us online www.nokia.com and follow us on Twitter @nokia and @NokiaNAM. .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... Copyright 2021 Albuquerque Journal SANTA FE Gov. Michelle Lujan Grishams recent suggestion that this might not be the right time for New Mexico lawmakers to pass bills imposing new requirements on businesses including mandatory paid leave and a higher minimum wage surprised advocates who say such measures are needed to protect front-line workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. And backers of the bills, which have already drawn fierce debate during the 60-day legislative session, said Tuesday that they would keep pushing the measures despite the governors remarks. Rep. Christine Chandler, D-Los Alamos, who is sponsoring two paid leave bills, said she understands Lujan Grishams concerns but pointed out the Legislature has advanced several pandemic relief measures aimed at helping hard-hit restaurants and other businesses. ADVERTISEMENTSkip ................................................................ Weve been investing a lot in businesses during the session, Chandler said. Were supporting businesses, and were supporting employees, too. Other Democratic lawmakers were more direct, with Sen. Jacob Candelaria, D-Albuquerque, who has clashed with the Governors Office in recent months, calling the governors comments shameful in a social media post. Gov.s objections During a news briefing last week, Lujan Grisham said in response to a question about business leaders concerns about worker-focused bills that she largely agrees with the measures guiding philosophies. She also said they could make New Mexico businesses even stronger in the long run. I would say the debates and efforts are good, Lujan Grisham told reporters. The effort today to make that law? Premature. Specifically, the Democratic governor cited concern about small businesses ability to hire employees after the pandemic. State officials have cited estimates that New Mexico will not return to pre-pandemic employment levels until late 2023. Business leaders have made similar arguments in rallying against the Democratic-backed proposals advancing at the Roundhouse, saying they would hurt employers who are already struggling to stay open. Terri Cole, the president and CEO of the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, said she was encouraged by Lujan Grishams comments, noting the governors general clout in influencing legislative debate and her ability to veto bills. We welcome the governors help on the tax increases, mandates and increased regulations in the bills that are moving through the Legislature, Cole told the Journal. She also said that business groups have expressed a willingness to help craft a statewide paid leave policy but that their offers have largely been rebuffed by advocates. Paid leave plans The two paid leave bills that have advanced at the Roundhouse have drawn support from front-line workers who have testified they feel compelled to work even when sick to avoid losing wages. One of the bills, House Bill 20, applies to paid sick leave and would give employees, regardless of a businesss size, the ability to use up to 64 hours of accrued paid leave per year. The other bill, House Bill 38, deals with family and medical leave. It would create a new state fund that employers and workers would both pay into, starting in June 2023. Starting in January 2024, the fund would pay for employees to take up to 12 weeks of paid leave per year to deal with serious medical issues or the birth or adoption of a child. That bill recently hit a speed bump after it was sent to a House budget committee for further review due to cost concerns. Specifically, a fiscal analysis of the legislation estimated it would cost the state nearly $70 million in the coming fiscal year. In response, Chandler said some changes will be made to the measure, including adding an appropriation to cover the projected cost. Im still very excited about the bill, she said Tuesday, describing it as a game changer for workers who currently dont have access to paid leave. She also disputed claims the paid leave bills would impose a significant burden on businesses. In addition to paid employee leave, other bills that have drawn scrutiny from business groups include legislation raising New Mexicos minimum wage which is already scheduled to rise to $12 per hour by 2023 proposals dealing with environmental regulations and legal liability for hospitals and businesses. Federal law requires all employers with 50 or more workers to offer up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year so that employees can care for a newborn child or a seriously ill family member. Several states, including California, New Jersey and New York, have enacted laws requiring paid leave, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In New Mexico, Bernalillo County has also adopted a paid time off ordinance, though it only applies to unincorporated parts of the county. Meanwhile, a coalition of roughly 20 business groups from around New Mexico launched a campaign last week urging lawmakers to focus on economic recovery and not on business requirements and regulations. The 60-day session ends March 20. A new ECU scholarship supports students with disabilities. | Photo: Cliff Hollis Steve and Bonnie Smith created a scholarship endowment for students with disabilities. | Photo: Contributed Steve and Bonnie Smith created a scholarship endowment for students with disabilities. | Photo: Contributed This post appears here courtesy of ECU News Services . The author of this post is Erin Ward Senior theatre major and aspiring actor Haley Sanders loves creating magic for audiences under the dazzling lights of the stage. A double concentration in professional acting and theatre for youth allows her to gain experience in all aspects of theater in both college and community settings.But off the stage, natural light and fluorescent light like the ones in many classrooms cause Sanders physical pain. Called cone-rod dystrophy, the eye disorder means she has extreme sensitivity to light in addition to difficulty seeing certain colors.Sanders said.School is also difficult because she struggles to see computer screens and paper worksheets when the light in the room is too bright. Adaptive technologies like inverting color settings on her phone and computer help with the strain but don't eliminate it.Sanders is one of 1,870 students registered with East Carolina University's Disability Support Services , an office that is committed to providing accessible technology and educational resources. ECU works to comply with accessibility standards to enable all users to fully participate. In addition, Sanders is the first recipient of the Stephen C. and Bonnie S. Smith Endowed Scholarship. The scholarship is awarded to students with a diagnosed disability.Sanders said.Alumnus Steve Smith '72 and his wife, Bonnie, created the scholarship in honor of Steve's younger brother. Bill Smith, also an ECU alumnus, was born with cerebral palsy but never let it stop him from living a full life. Cerebral palsy is a motor disorder that affects a person's ability to move and maintain balance.Steve Smith describes his brother as extremely capable and hardworking. After graduating from ECU in 1976, Bill Smith went on to get his master's degree in health care administration from the University of Maryland. He married and became a homeowner and father. But he still faced discrimination.Steve Smith said.Bill Smith died in 2008 of pancreatic cancer at age 54. Steve and Bonnie Smith established the scholarship to honor Bill and everything he had to overcome in his life. They also want to bring attention to the needs of the disabled.A year before his death, Bill Smith spoke at an event for the Easter Seals, a nonprofit organization for disabled children that provided him with his first pair of leg braces. In an article recapping the event, Bill described his experience living with cerebral palsy (CP).he said.Steve and Bonnie Smith hope that, like Bill, students with disabilities can live their lives as normally and successfully as possible, which includes getting a college education.For Sanders, her time at ECU has been filled with performances, collaborations with students on campus and in other countries, and work that inspires children through theater. After graduation, she plans to move to Atlanta to start a career on stage and screen.Nothing, especially not a disability, will stop her from pursuing her dreams. China's unpredictable political moves in relation to coking coal from Australia have driven some Chinese steel mills to look elsewhere to secure supplies of the steelmaking raw material, sources told Fastmarkets this week. Several Chinese mills have added two vessels of premium hard coking coal in yearly contracts with a North American supplier, they said. This is likely to cause even thinner spot liquidity in non-Australian coking coal in 2021, an end user from South China said. A trader added that the reduction in spot liquidity would also squeeze reselling margins, with a few traders having already exited the coking coal trading arena. The fallout from the growing tensions between the two nations over the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, along with Australia's call for a boycott of Chinese technology firm Huawei, has not been insignificant. And one effect has been the reshaping of metallurgical coal trade flows, which has reduced supplies for Chinese steelmakers and has resulted in a spike in seaborne coking coal prices. An increase in the the supply of Australia-origin coal cargoes to the spot market has been observed by market participants since Chinas unofficial ban on Australian coal in October and the improving weather conditions expected in Queensland, Australia in March are expected to further boost the availability of spot cargoes. Even though several vessels unloaded last week, there remains a need for end users to resell Australian coal cargoes, some of which are still anchored along China's coast, sources told Fastmarkets this week. Some cargoes are looking for new buyers... as most cargo owners do not expect the ban to be lifted in the first half of 2021, a trader source from Hebei province said. Buyers from Japan and South Korea have showed only limited demand for Australia-origin premium low-volatile coking coal (PLV) from Chinese sellers. We normally depend on contractual cargoes and have limited port or plant capacity to store spot cargoes, a mill source from South Korea said. But a major Australian miner has started selling PLV cargoes at bargain prices to term customers in Japan, a Tokyo-based trader told Fastmarkets. There is very little chance [of Japanese steelmakers] taking cargoes from China, he added. San Francisco: Poet, publisher and bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who helped launch and perpetuate the Beat movement, has died. He was 101. Ferlinghetti died at his San Francisco home Monday (US time), his son Lorenzo Ferlinghetti told The Associated Press Tuesday. The cause was lung disease. His father died in his own room, holding the hands of his son and his sons girlfriend, as he took his last breath, his son said. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, left, and Allen Ginsberg at the dedication of the Jack Kerouac Commemorative, in Massachusetts in 1988. Credit:AP Lorenzo Ferlinghetti said his father loved Italian food and the restaurants in the North Beach neighbourhood where he made his home and founded his famous bookstore. He had received the first dose of the COVID vaccine last week and was a month shy of turning 102. NEW HAVEN Marianne Maloney does not have second thoughts about working past retirement age. Maloney, 72, is a math teacher at New Haven Academy and chief steward of the citys teachers union. When people in Connecticut over the age of 65 became eligible for COVID-19 vaccination appointments on Feb. 11, she jumped at the opportunity and called the Fair Haven clinic on the day it opened and received the first of her two shots. They were busy but they were very efficient about it. It was a pleasure, she said. Contributed photo On Monday, Gov. Ned Lamont announced a change in the eligibility for vaccination appointments. On March 1, residents as young as 55 will be eligible for vaccination as well as all teachers and child care providers. Maloney believes that the decision to include teachers is a positive one for the benefits it will have for both teachers and students. I have heard a lot of excitement from our field of teachers the rank and file about, How do I do this? When will it happen and how will it work? Theres a lot of excitement out there, she said. Maloney, who sits on the states American Federation of Teachers PreK-12 council, was privy to the state unions advocacy to have teachers made eligible for vaccinations without using age as a requirement. Our first duty is to keep those kids safe, and every teacher is exposed to every single student. We can pod the kids and put them in cohorts, but the teachers move everywhere, she said. We feel very strongly this is a really good strategy for keeping our kids safe, but the secondary idea is if part of our class quarantines its challenging for the students, but if the teacher quarantines the entire class suffers. Maloney said the teaching profession also is generally an older field, with many teachers deferring retirement for years. She said the virus has caused many older teachers to consider whether their love of teaching is worth risking their lives. We dont want to retire, we want to be with the kids and serving. If we have to risk our lives to do that, its going to be a harder decision, especially because many of us have family responsibilities as well, she said. Vaccinating teachers, she said, can help to assuage those fears and keep a strong teacher corps in Connecticut schools, where students can have physical interaction in school buildings. In many districts in the state where students have returned to schools, some have found their mode of instruction changing frequently entire schools and classes have transitioned from in-person to remote instruction abruptly because of positive cases or teachers in quarantine after potential exposures. In the city of New Haven, only students up to fifth grade have had the option to be in their schools since Jan. 19, although district leadership has identified March 4 as the date for students from sixth through eighth grades to return to their buildings. For a high school teacher like Maloney, there is not a known return date, but she believes it would be to the advantage of her students for them to return. An essential piece of what we do, much more so in a literature class or science or history than in math, but I need to hear what theyre thinking, she said. Maloney said that she has experience knowing whether students grasp the material just from looking at their eyes something that can get lost in virtual instruction. brian.zahn@hearstmediact.com At least 1,000 engineers worked on supply chain hack, tech exec says The scope and scale of the SolarWinds supply chain hack was made plain by Microsoft President Brad Smith when he told senators that the company estimates the breach likely took "at least a thousand" skilled and capable people to pull off. The hack leveraged flaws in IT management software from SolarWinds and products from other vendors to inject malware into computer networks, and has affected nine federal agencies and 100 private companies. Microsoft analyzed all of the engineering required for the attack and determined it took the work of at least a thousand very skilled, capable engineers. So we havent seen this kind of sophistication matched with this kind of scale," Smith told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Many private- and public-sector cybersecurity experts have laid the blame for the attack at Russias feet. "We went through all the forensics. It is not very consistent with cyber espionage from China, North Korea or Iran, and is most consistent with cyber espionage and behaviors we've seen out of Russia," Kevin Mandia, CEO of FireEye, said at the Feb. 23 hearing. George Kurtz, president and CEO of Crowdstrike, added that while his company could not corroborate an attribution to Russia, he has not seen evidence to contradict it. The White House has continued to say the campaign is "likely Russian in origin," but is waiting to complete a formal investigation before using more specific language. FireEye, which is credited with discovering the initial breach, has been more cautious, saying that the hack was likely the work of a state or state-sponsored actor. Gregory Touhill, the federal government's first chief information security officer and a retired Air Force brigadier general, said in January that formal attribution requires a level of proof that can stand up in court. "When it comes to attribution, what the intelligence and law enforcement community has to do is literally trace it all the way back to the root," he said. Public and private investigators have to gather evidence that "will hold up in court. That's the realm that [FireEye] and others are dealing with. Those who don't have to prove it in court can say whatever they want." In addition to the issue of attribution, multiple senators quizzed the technology executives about stepping up requirements for breach reporting and whether companies would need liability protections to take on that obligation. "The time has come to go in that direction," Smith said in response to a question from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). "We should notify a part of the U.S. government that would be responsible for aggregating threat intelligence and making sure it is put to good use." Mandia agreed with Smith's comments and added that the information shared would need to be confidential because of how quickly circumstances change in the aftermath of an attack. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the White House is planning to sanction Russia in response to the hack and other belligerent acts. The Post's reporting also added NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration to the list of agencies compromised. SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna said Monday during an event hosted by a Washington think tank that he feels his company has an "obligation" to speak publicly about the breach because "this is not a one company issue." This article was first posted to FCW, a sibling site to GCN. The price of Bitcoin exploded and exceeded $30,000 in January 2021 as a result of almost a year-long bullish cycle. Consequently, the demand for BTC has proliferated. Individuals, as well as organizations, and businesses want to invest in BTC. If you are also are looking to get BTC, it's very important to take the time and learn more about Bitcoin and blockchain technology. A good place to start is by learning how new BTC are created. Keep reading to find out more. Blockchain Technology Before we dive in, we will explain what blockchain technology is and why it is an essential component of the crypto world. Blockchain technology is a great innovation as it is the Bitcoin. Created by Satoshi Nakamoto, it ensures full transparency of the system, fast transactions over the internet, without any help or interference of middlemen. That said, it functions perfectly well without financial institutions or authorities. This is a peer-to-peer network where the growing list of records is distributed across computer systems all around the world. Hence it is impossible for someone to control the network, cheat, or hack, the blockchain network. Because there is no designated entity that approves the transactions or secures the network, these activities are facilitated by the so-called miners. They complete two crucial tasks. The miners process and approve the transactions in the network, and with that, they also ensure the network remains safe. How Exactly Are New BTC Generated? This leads us to the main output of bitcoin mining. The miners discover new BTC by solving difficult math puzzles. Today the mining is increasingly competitive because as more miners join the network, the level of difficulty of mining increases. Hence, the rate at which new BTC are discovered is very predictable. Otherwise, the miners get block rewards for their work. But, it should be noted that Nakamoto limited the number of BTC to 21 million. And because everything is completely transparent, users know the exact number of BTC in circulation. To date, 18.5 million BTC have been mined. Bitcoin Halving Moreover, the halving splits the block reward that miners receive in half. The event occurs after 210,000 BTC are mined. This event has a great impact on the supply of BTC. As the reward is decreasing, fewer miners will work on the network. As a result, the number of new BTC is cut in half. The halving also influences the price of Bitcoin due to the decreased supply of BTC. According to the previous data, the price rises after each halving. Bitcoin Investments As we mentioned before, mining is not very profitable; while the price of Bitcoin continues to rise; a lot of people choose to obtain BTC on online trading sites. A great platform is the Bitqs app. This is an auto-trading robot, which means beginners are more than welcome to check out the platform, as they don't have to have great knowledge of this topic to trade here. Moreover, users on the site can earn up to 1,200 on the platform. It's also worth mentioning that the site offers an excellent education center where members can access top tutorials and trading guides. If you want to register on the site, you need to deposit as little as $250. What Happens to Bitcoin After All BTC Are Mined? First and foremost, the block rewards will cease to exist, and miners will receive transaction fees for their work. They also get transaction fees now, but the main part that makes mining profitable is again the block reward. This is why, even now, miners work in mining pools and farms, because it is very costly to mine on your own. As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies get more popular, mining will only get more competitive. The Price of Bitcoin As we can see, the price of Bitcoin is very much affected by the interaction of supply and demand. When it comes to the supply, the rate at which new BTC are created, as well as the number of BTC, it all influences the price of Bitcoin. Otherwise, we can safely say that as the price continues to rise, the demand will likely increase even more for Bitcoin, which will further fuel the interest for BTC beyond the crypto community. When it comes to future predictions about Bitcoin, they are very optimistic. In fact, a lot of experts think that the price will surpass $100,000 in 2025. Others hope that it will break $50,000 in 2021. On the other hand, Bitcoin has also put in the spotlight other cryptocurrencies and even prompted some organizations to develop their own cryptocurrency. For example, China has launched its first digital cryptocurrency Yuan. All in all, right now, the world of crypto is definitely full of possibilities for businesses and individuals. Its just such a tragedy to think that these buildings were built by the faithful and the communities that surround them with pennies, nickels and dimes, Miller said. " ... We should be thinking better of how we handle them. We shouldnt be selling them at top dollar. We should be giving them away. We should be finding new uses for them. Its six months now since William Grant announced the closing of the old Bonded Warehouse Visitor Centre at Bury Quay, Tullamore. The company that makes the world-famous and second-largest selling Irish whiskey, Tullamore DEW is going to concentrate its energies on a new visitor centre at the 201417 purpose-built Tullamore DEW distillery at Clonminch and understandably so. The idea of a visitor centre at Bury Quay was conceived in the early 1990s as a way of attracting visitors to Tullamore town. Tullamore had been designated an industrial heritage town in 1990 and EC tourism funds were available. The idea that a new distillery would open in Tullamore was not on the radar. Thanks to the work of Irish Mist (Bill Jaffray), Cantrell & Cochrane (owners of the DEW brand from 1993 to 2010), Tullamore Town Council and Offaly History the idea came to fruition in the year 2000 and the visitor centre was opened. C & C had put in about 500,000 plus the building (the late Frank McGovern and Tony OBrien being the captains here), Bord Failte 300,000 and the council the balance with the total costs at 1.2m. This included a liquor licence for 90,000. Two County Managers and a Town Clerk played great developmental roles to ensure it was successfully completed as did the staff and franchisees subsequently. The centre was based on three themes: the Grand Canal story, Tullamore town story, and the Irish Mist/Tullamore DEW story. Things went well. The council took a keen interest and was a guarantor for losses, but none arose so far as I know. All the partners on the no fees board took a great interest and the centre went well even with traffic rumbling outside the door. A number of people took the restaurant franchise and the place acquired a good reputation for food. Following on the purchase of the Tullamore DEW brand (and for a while the Irish Mist brand) by William Grant the centre was closed for a major refurbishment, the rat run on the quay was also closed and in 2012 the centre reopened to a great welcome. The old themes and most of the associated museum items and exhibits were dropped and a more high-quality themed bar was developed with the emphasis on food and drink. The centre was a warm taste-filled exhibit rather than a museum of whiskey. Fast forward to September 2020 and the shock announcement of its closing. For Offaly History it was a huge disappointment. We had great and always kind near neighbours who were proud of their flagship project. Every Tullamore publican was and is proud to be associated with our historic legacy built on the smartness of our Gaelic ancestors, the O Molloys and opened as a distillery in the year 1829 when Catholics were allowed into the House of Commons. Something which the same O Molloys had worked for. The closing of the Bond was a death in our history family. Offaly History had been talking of opening on to Bury Quay with a book barrow and awnings and looking forward to more engagement with visitors and sales (of course). At one time we were dubbed the cultural quarter with a new arts centre coming (2013), the Comhaltas Centre, Tullamore DEW and Offaly History with a bridge and board walk to link all. Great work was done in that nine years from 2012 but now after a 4 million spend on upgrading the building and the towpath it is back to the drawing board for the centre. It must be said immediately that it was money well spent and helped to bring the distillery to Tullamore with its c.75 million spend and 80 jobs. What can we do with the Old Bond created by Daniel E. Williams in 1897 and who will be 100 years dead this year? What would he have done? A few readers of this article in draft have helped with suggestions: Williams would have been generous as William Grant are today. What matters to that successful entrepreneur is to find a suitable use for the building that will promote Tullamore. A sustainable enterprise in the Old Bond may still be a restaurant, bar and gift shop allied to attractions in that building in the form of the Tullamore Story and from time to time contemporary exhibitions. Would there be room for a Grand Canal Museum at a time when canalways (as much as greenways in Tullamore) are the focus. The Bond was built beside the canal because it used the canal barges to get product in and out. Tullamore was the lead town on the Grand Canal for its 160 years of trade. The resolution of the Bond can be cast with the plans for the harbour. There is synergy there. Could we link the Bond with Patrick Street and shopping when the old Williams/Quinnsworth buildings and yard are redeveloped? Could part of it be used as a hub? So much talk of it now. Perhaps Transition Fund money could be found to get this idea working. What about display and storage on upper floors of the material culture of Offaly the things that were made here and that we are not saving and displaying. The Little Museum of Dublin is a great success because it is innovative and not stuffy. Many is the good display we had of real things in the old pre-2010 Old Bond. OR we can do nothing and pass up an opportunity. It is watershed time for Tullamore. A new Arts Centre is coming on stream at significant costs. It will need voluntary effort to stay open. It will be the same with the Old Bond. It will not be about profit, but it must be sustainable. Our collective effort can add real value and improve our community. We cannot expect William Grant or Offaly County Council to do things for us, but they will help. For now we need time to develop ideas, to see how the harbour plan and the canalways will work out and how the Old Bond can integrate into this and the new enhancements planned for Tullamore which have and will cost a great deal of money. The Bond must also be seen as part of the bigger picture for Tullamore. There have been lots of ideas bandied about some good some not so good. Like most county towns Tullamore is rapidly falling behind but some midland towns are breaking the mould (Athlone, Portlaoise & Kilkenny ) and will thrive at the cost to other midland towns. So what will lift Tullamore again? One comment was .... not any one thing but the sum of many. Take our tourism potential: Charleville Castle, Charleville Estate, Durrow Abbey, Grand Canal Greenway, Grand Canal Harbour (West), TDEW, Irish Mist, Egan Whiskey, Kilbeggan Whiskey (our own whiskey trail), history of Bord na Mona, our historic monastic sites plus all the other fantastic sites/ attractions outside the town but still within the county which other towns outside the county seem to promote more than we do! So is the Old Bond one of these sums of many? With the development of the town greenway imminent and plans a foot for the harbour getting the redevelopment of the Bond right is critically important. An application should be made to Offaly Local Development Company for research funding to develop a scoping /business plan. If successful, this should pave a path for further funding and could also trigger the stimulus for a greater tourist plan incorporating the other sites as mentioned above. Plans are under consideration for Tullamore as we read recently in the press. The totality of these plans could be presented in a Zoom meeting which can hold several hundred muted viewers who can make comments via Chat. Fergal MacCabe has been assiduous in his attention to a plan for Tullamore and has a 2017 study Improve the Centre-Expand to the South- Suggestions for a New Plan for Tullamore which proposed that the future of the Bond Store and our own OHAS premises lay in a total comprehensive development of the north west quarter of the town. The Chamber of Commerce have had proposals. So too did the Rotary Club with its Tullamentary idea some years ago to bring people from the city back to this town. All more relevant today with home working and the creation of better open spaces and arts facilities in Tullamore. The Bond has a place here. Key buildings in Tullamore (some of which have already been missed unfortunately) need to be examined and ambitious plans chartered and evaluated. Look at Temple Bar now and before 1985 when there was nothing but one vegetarian restaurant. The Bond is the immediate issue of concern but must be seen as part of the bigger picture for progress in Tullamore. Comments coming in included the following: a role for Durrow Abbey and Charleville. In the Church Street OConnor Square link is there a role for the Methodist church? In the development of the town park and Acres Folly could new links be opened via Bridge Centre and the town hall? What of the Mr Price Crawford Building? Might tax incentives be available to restore the facade and make it a residence again. Finally, one councillor remarked that effective local government can be greatly enhanced in this new era where online presentations can be made to a large and interested audience. It seems that a discussion which started about The Bond has morphed into bigger issues. That can only be healthy as planning for a vibrant town is the key. In the words of the Grand Canal Company directors when they chose to build the Grand Extension from Tullamore to Shannon Harbour via The Vale of the Brusna, in March1801, it is time for the Maturest Deliberation!. by Silvina Premat Hwang Doo-Jin was sentenced to 12 years in prison for attempted murder of his partner. Local bishops urge people to avoid prejudice and abuse. The conviction has been appealed. There are fears of discrimination because the accused belongs to a small immigrant community. Argentina (Asia News) In a rare initiative, the Catholic Church of Argentina has called on the countrys justice system to treat a South Korean man like everyone else. Hwang Doo-Jin, 66, has lived in Puerto Madryn, in the south of this country, for almost ten years. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison for attempted murder of a woman. His lawyer has appealed the sentence this week to the Superior Court of Justice in Chubut Province. We ask that his journey through the justice system be free of snags, that the charges against him correspond exactly to his actions and that any latent discriminatory bias be eliminated by considering him as part of an invisible minority that is easily the victim of discrimination, prejudice and abuse, reads a statement from the Pastoral Commission of Migrants and Itinerants of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Argentina, to which the bishops of the Diocese of Comodoro Rivadavia agree. Hwang was arrested three years ago after a confusing incident in his house involving an Argentine woman with whom he had lived for a year and a half and who accused him of planning to murder her. Hwang has always denied the charges. According to his lawyer, Hwang's evidence and arguments were not taken into account and this is why he appealed the court decision twice. Hwang came from South Korea to Argentina as a missionary for an Evangelical Church, leaving behind a son and three grandchildren. In Argentina he worked as an acupuncturist and is described by those who know him as a peaceful, serene man, good-mannered with everyone even though he did not manage to learn Spanish language to communicate fluently with Argentinians. Sister Cecilia Lee, a Franciscan nun who acted as interpreter for the defence at Hwangs trial, told AsiaNews that cultural differences and his difficulty in communicating were serious obstacles in his relationship with the woman who accused him. Lee is also from Korea and has lived in Argentina since 1976. She is the one who got bishops migrants commission involved in the Hwang case. What we want is justice to be done on the basis of what actually happened. If he is guilt of any injury then he deserves his punishment, but he should not be accused for something that did not occur, said the nun. She notes that there is a lot of pressure since this is considered gender-based violence, an issue that is highly topical and in which many do not want to get involved. The press release, signed by Bishop Emeritus Juan Carlos Romanin of Rio Gallegos, alludes to concepts found in the encyclical Fratelli Tutti. It notes that the invisibility of Hwang's Doon-Jin case confirms what the Pope says about migrants: No one will ever openly deny that they are human beings, yet in practice, by our decisions and the way we treat them, we can show that we consider them less worthy, less important, less human (Fratelli Tutti 39). The statement goes on to say that despite the existing legal framework, he (Hwang) like many migrants around the world is likely to suffer some form of discrimination, if not abuse. Svante Myrick, mayor of Ithaca, NY. Andy Katz/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick plans to propose a plan to replace the city's police with a civilian-led agency, GQ reported. The plan was created as part of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's executive order for New York cities to review their police departments. The proposal includes an agency with armed "public safety workers" and unarmed "community solution workers." Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories. The mayor of Ithaca, New York, is set to propose a plan to abolish the city's police force and replace it with a new civilian-led agency, GQ reported Monday. According to a nearly 100-page report reviewed by GQ, Ithaca mayor Svante Myrick will suggest abolishing the city's current police department and replace with a "Department of Community Solutions and Public Safety." The plan would replace the department, staffed with 63 officers that costs $12.5 million a year to run, with an agency with armed "public safety workers" and unarmed "community solution workers," all under the helm of a civilian director of public safety rather than a police chief, GQ reported. "IPD currently spends one third of its time responding to calls for service that essentially never lead to arrests," Myrick wrote in the report's introduction, according to GQ. "Those calls, as well as a majority of patrol activity, can and should be handled by unarmed Community Solution Workers well trained in de-escalation and service delivery. This will allow our new Public Safety Workers to focus on preventing, interrupting and solving serious crime." The main goal of the plan is to reduce the number of encounters between civilians and armed officers, GQ reported. Service calls will be evaluated to determine whether an armed or unarmed respondent is necessary for the situation, or if it should be outsourced to a different public entity entirely. GQ also reported that calls regarding mental health crises will be "outsourced to a standalone unit of social workers based on the CAHOOTS program pioneered in Eugene, Oregon." Story continues In an interview with GQ on Sunday, Myrick told the publication that he acknowledged his plan is a "radical thing for a city and a mayor to do." "Everyone wants the police to perform better when they show up, everybody wants that," Myrick told GQ. "What this plan is saying is that we also want the police to show up less - and that's a radical thing for a city and a mayor to do." The proposal was made as part of an executive order signed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo requiring New York cities to conduct comprehensive reviews of their police departments. Last summer, the Black Lives Matter protests prompted by the death of George Floyd renewed calls for police reform - namely, defunding and abolishing police departments. Advocates for defunding the police demanded that funding be diverted from the police department and instead given to social programs and development, Insider's Ellen Cranley reported. While some departments have seen large budget cuts in the wake of the protests - including $150 million in cuts for the Los Angeles Police Department and the Austin Police Department, respectively- the move of abolishing and recreating police departments has been more or less unprecedented prior to Myrick's proposal. In order to move forward with implementing the plan, it would need approval from the city council, which the mayor said, he believes, will happen. Myrick was elected as mayor in 2011, becoming the city's first Black mayor and youngest mayor at the time at 24 years old. Myrick, now 33, has been at odds with Ithaca's police union in previous years, raising the question if the union will support his plan to reform the department, which he hopes to have up-and-running by summer 2023. "I do think it will be a big battle," Myrick told GQ. "Fox News will lose their s---." Read the original article on Business Insider The American people have spoken. Polls show the vast majority, around three-fourths, want immigration reform. Theyve been saying so for more than a decade and the calls have only gotten louder. Congress needs to finally listen. Some Republicans in Congress will not be able to. Theyve become deaf to anything but the nativism that has seized much of the party. These immigration hardliners must not, however, be allowed to spoil the chance for true reform, as they have so often in the past, including under Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Instead, the voices of moderate Republicans, and those from states such as Texas where the benefits of immigration are so vibrantly on display, must join with Democrats to reach a filibuster-proof majority. Surely, 10 Republicans are willing to compromise. Surely, 10 Republicans are willing to do something thats both popular and which makes moral and economic sense. President Joe Biden has taken the first step in making reform a priority. Legislation he supports, the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, has been presented in the House and the Senate. The bills centerpiece would offer a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States and other groups, including those with Temporary Protected Status, which allows immigrants from countries that have experienced natural disasters or civil strife to stay legally. That protected group, along with dreamers brought as children, and farmworkers, would immediately be allowed to apply for permanent residency and could become citizens after three years. Millions more would be eligible to apply for citizenship in eight years. Applicants would have to pass background checks, pay taxes, and have been in the United States as of Jan. 1 a requirement meant to avoid encouraging further illegal immigration. This would immediately bring out of the shadows millions who already work, pay taxes and contribute to our economy and provide a pathway toward full integration. The proposal also attempts to address the underlying causes of the recent wave of migration from Central America by increasing aid to those countries, expanding transnational anti-gang task forces and allowing Central Americans to seek protection in the U.S. from their home country. It would also make desperately needed improvements to U.S. immigration courts, adding judges, staff and investments in technology steps conservatives such as Sen. Ted Cruz have urged previously as a way to clear backlogs that delay cases. True to Bidens word, the bill despite being a Democratic proposal includes priorities long espoused by Republicans, such as the border security measures ranging from modernizing ports of entry to detect drug smuggling to new tools for prosecuting trafficking networks. We have an historic opportunity to finally enact bold immigration reform that leaves no one behind, addresses root causes of migration, and safeguards our countrys national security, said U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, who introduced the Senate version of the bill. We have a moral and economic imperative to get this done once and for all. The bill isnt perfect. It could be tougher on employers who illegally hire workers who are undocumented one of the main drivers of illegal immigration and the bill fails to address guest worker programs that would help meet the need for agricultural, construction and high tech workers. But this is a smart, good-faith effort that deserves consideration and support by a broad coalition of lawmakers. Polls show 77 percent of Americans believe immigration is good for the country and more than 70 percent back a plan for legal status for undocumented immigrants. In Texas alone, undocumented immigrants paid an estimated $2.6 billion in federal taxes and $1.6 billion in state and local taxes in 2018, according to the American Immigration Council. Texas DACA recipients and DACA-eligible immigrants paid an additional $244.7 million in state and local taxes. At least one-fifth of business owners in Texas big cities are immigrants; in the Houston area, its more than half. Addressing the moral case for reform how we allow millions of families to live in fear while we benefit from their labor is also smart politically, says Ali Noorani, head of the centrist National Immigration Forum. Part of the reason why the suburbs, particularly white women, shifted away from Republicans was the treatment of immigrants and refugees by the Trump administration, he says. Republicans must act soon, or be left behind. Many Democrats are ready to push piecemeal reforms forward without Republican support. But the bigger opportunity is for Democrats to win over 10 or more Republican senators and pass a comprehensive bill. The proposal Biden backs has baked-in compromises with Republicans, and liberals will have to accept less than theyd hoped for. There is room for still further compromise. But the framework for finally addressing the millions of American residents who yearn to be citizens, and already do so much for the nation, is before us. Through the years, Congress has let too many opportunities for reform pass by without action. This time must be different. Bubble Tea in a plastic cups. (PHOTO: Getty Images) SINGAPORE A bubble tea store owner accused of molesting two female employees at his outlet was cleared of all charges on Wednesday (24 February). Tan Kah Heng, 55, was given a discharge amounting to an acquittal on eight molest charges by District Judge Christopher Goh following the close of his trial. One charge of molest was earlier withdrawn. Tan was accused of touching the buttocks of two girls, then 16 and 17, while they worked at his store, located in an MRT Station, between October and November 2017. He contested nine charges of molest, three of which related to him touching and smacking the 16-year-old's buttocks and hugging her body from behind. The remaining four stated that he brushed the 17-year-old girl's buttocks. The 16-year-old girl was hired on 20 October 2017 and was paid $9 an hour. She later recommended her secondary school friend, the 17-year-old girl, to the job. The older girl was hired in end-October 2017. Both were in charge of taking orders, making drinks and general cleaning. The two were scheduled for work based on a weekly roster and their salaries paid in cash depending on the number of hours they clocked. Ahead of the verdict, Tan's lawyer, Chia Boon Teck, argued that the two alleged victims and the outlet's store manager had colluded to frame his client as a result of their dispute and unhappiness with him over their salaries. He pointed out that all three women had contradicting testimonies, and that the two alleged victims had been driven to file police reports because of salary disputes. He described the 16-year-old victim's testimony as "incredulous and unreliable", adding that she had "embellished her testimony". While the girl had stated that Tan had touched her buttocks in her police statement, she later changed her evidence to a "grab and squeeze" in order to "up the stakes" against Tan. Chia also pointed out several instances of the 16-year-old giving different accounts, such as when she told her parents about the molest, when her father had prepared a calculation of the salary owed to her, and when she told her parents about the salary dispute. Story continues On the 17-year-old, Chia said that she had "flip-flopped" on the dates she went to work and manipulated them so that they were consistent with the period of alleged molest. As for the store manager, the defence lawyer submitted that she was not an objective or impartial witness as she had her own salary dispute with Tan. This was her catalyst for colluding with the two girls to file a police report, according to Chia. Judge's comments In acquitting Tan, DJ Goh pointed to the inconsistencies of the two alleged victims testimonies. "Allegations of sexual misconduct are easy to make and, in most cases, difficult to disprove. Hence it is not surprising that a victims evidence should be unusually convincing. In this case, they were not," said the judge. While the younger alleged victim made a police report on 15 November 2017, she had been unable to provide the dates or the timing of the molest incidents that allegedly happened two to three weeks earlier. Even though the younger girl confirmed in court that two acts had occurred on 12 November 2017, she was then confronted by documentary evidence showing that she did not come to work that day. The girl's reaction was also not consistent with one who had been molested, said the judge. Even though she claimed she was shocked, the girl had been able to work long hours even after the acts, and did not tell anybody about the incident. "She did not inform her parents of anything until at least two weeks later (after the police report was made). Even then, the evidence suggests that she was more concerned about the non-payment of her salary, rather than the acts of molest," said DJ Goh. The judge said the older girl's evidence was even less convincing and she was even more vague about the dates of the offences. At the close of its case, the prosecution withdrew one of the charges as the older girl had set out a totally different story. Like the younger girl, the 17-year-old did not react in a way that suggested anything untoward had happened to her in conversations with the younger girl, the judge said. Stay in the know on-the-go: Join Yahoo Singapore's Telegram channel at http://t.me/YahooSingapore Related story Bubble tea shop owner accused of molesting two female employees claims trial Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 ABUJA, Nigeria - Ghana became the first country to receive a shipment of coronavirus vaccines from a global effort to equitably distribute doses after a plane landed Wednesday with 600,000 AstraZeneca shots. The rollout is an early step toward getting doses to low- and middle-income countries cut out of the global vaccine race. But the timing and the relatively modest supply - enough for 1% of Ghana's population - reflect major challenges in the immunization effort. More than 190 countries signed up to participate in Covax, a multilateral effort to develop and distribute coronavirus vaccines, but the initiative has struggled to secure enough because wealthy countries snapped up a disproportionate share of early supply. President Joe Biden last week pledged $4 billion to the effort, reversing the Trump administration's decision to opt out. Yet the United States and other wealthy countries have so far resisted calls to give doses, rather than funding, to countries in greatest need. "So far, 210 million doses of vaccine have been administered globally - but half of those are in just two countries," WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday in Geneva. "More than 200 countries are yet to administer a single dose." Covax aims to distribute 2.3 billion doses by the end of 2021 - a significant amount but still well short of demand. Ghana, a country of 31 million people, was selected as the first recipient after sending a rollout plan to Covax showing that its health-care teams and cold chain equipment were ready to support a quick distribution. The Ivory Coast and other countries in the region are expected to soon receive similar shipments soon. The doses touching down in the capital, Accra, came from the Serum Institute of India, the world's largest vaccine manufacturer. Boxes of vaccines left Mumbai on Tuesday for Dubai, where a logistics crew picked up hundreds of thousands of syringes, before hurtling toward Africa's west coast. "In the days ahead, front-line workers will begin to receive vaccines, and the next phase in the fight against this disease can begin - the ramping up of the largest immunization campaign in history," Henrietta Fore, the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund, said in a statement. The organizations running Covax - the World Health Organization, the Coalition Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance - have tried to secure funding, particularly after the Trump administration spurned the effort, in part because of its feud with the WHO. The effect of the Biden administration's support probably will be felt over the mid- to long-term but probably will not help with the urgent and immediate task of getting doses to front-line workers in low- and middle-income countries. French President Emmanuel Macron last week suggested that the United States, Europe and other wealthy buyers should give 4% to 5% of their current vaccine supplies to developing nations in an immediate show of goodwill and commitment. But the United States has steered clear of making any commitment, focusing instead on vaccination efforts at home. The African Union is pushing to inoculate 60% of the continent's 1.3 billion people over the next three years, but soaring global demand - coupled with the weaker buying power of poorer nations - have delayed this objective. The body said it has obtained 670 million doses of AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson vaccines for 54 countries. Several countries are negotiating vaccine packages with China and Russia. Most still rely on the Covax support. Health officials warn that uneven access to vaccines will prolong the pandemic, spawning variants that are harder to tame. The variant identified in South Africa, which is far more transmissible, has been detected in Ghana and several other nations, fueling devastating second waves across the continent. "There is so much stress now with the second strain of this disease," said Rebecca Kumah, a nurse who treats covid-19 patients in Accra. "The fight is still on. As health-care workers in the line of duty, the vaccines are a great relief." By Wednesday, Ghana had recorded more than 80,700 coronavirus cases and 580 deaths. Ghana plans to first protect the vulnerable: health-care personnel, the elderly and those with medical conditions that increase their risk of serious illness. The first shots will be administered early next week. More than 300,000 community health workers have received vaccine distribution training in the coronavirus era, health officials said. The goal is to eventually vaccinate 20 million people, Kwame Amponsa-Achiano, Ghana's program manager for immunization, told reporters this month. It is unclear how long that effort could take. "There is hope in sight," said Juliette Tuakli, a public health physician and pediatrician in Accra. "People have underestimated the enormous mental health toll covid has taken on everyone. We never thought we'd be dealing with this a year-plus later." CID detains Bangladeshi national in Jakir Hossain bomb attack case India oi-Vicky Nanjappa Kolkata, Feb 24: The West Bengal CID has detained a Bangladeshi national in connection with the blast in Murshidabad's Nimtita Railway Station in which state minister Jakir Hossain and over 20 others were injured, an official said on Wednesday. Hossain, Trinamool Congress MLA and the minister of state for labour, was waiting at platform number 2 to catch a train to Kolkata around 10 pm on February 17 when the blast occurred, seriously injuring him and the others. Bengal elections 2021: Bihar model of polling to be followed "We have detained one person and investigation is underway," a senior CID official said. Hossain and the other injured persons are undergoing treatment at a state-run hospital in the city. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 15:19 [IST] The 2022 Toyota Tundra packs some amazing changes that are expected to compete with other high-end pickup trucks! This new monster truck is expected to hit the market later this 2021. According to Power Nation TV's latest report, different Toyota dealerships across the United States are already leaking some important details about the upcoming 2022 Toyota Tundra. Those fans who are familiar with this powerful pickup know what it is capable of. Read Also: Foxbody Ford Mustang Rendering Shows Hood's Huge Ram-Air Scoop and Other Stunning Design Changes Toyota was able to produce 2-million mile Tundra's, making the brand world-renowned in the automotive industry. Once the new 2022 Toyota Tundra is released in the market, rumors claimed that the giant car manufacturer will stop producing the classic V8 model. On the other hand, here are the specific details of the upcoming Toyota truck. Toyota Tundra's Coil Springs and More Motor Trend reported that the new 2022 Toyota Tundra is also called "Toyota New Global Architecture-F or TNGA-F. This new powerful pickup truck is expected to have its body-on-frame underpinnings benefit from great use of high-strength steel and other weight-saving materials. On the other hand, the next-gen Tundra will also adopt coil springs to go with its live rear axle just like Ram 1500. These new coil springs will replace the vehicle's leaf springs. 2022 Toyota Tundra spied testing with its production body for the very first time. The pickup truck will ride on top of the companys all-new F1 architecture and it will likely be powered by the Lexus LS hybridized 3.5-liter twin-turbo V6 engine. #Toyota #Tundra pic.twitter.com/n871yp4fLZ Cole Marzen (@cole_marzen) November 20, 2020 Meanwhile, the 2022 Tundra is also expected to improve its maximum 1,730-pound payload and 10,200-pound towing figures. This new feature will likely arrive since Toyota has to compete with other light-duty rivals, which offer capacities that far outstrip those dated numbers. Truck's First Look The leaked images of the upcoming Tundra model revealed that it will have the latest Entune infotainment technology. This includes an available 12.0-inch touchscreen infotainment system and a large head-up display unit. On the other hand, its full Safety Sense suite of goodies is also expected to be offered by the new model. Aside from these, the next-gen Tundra will also include automatic braking, automatic lane centering, lane-keep assist, advanced radar cruise control and more. However, Toyota's innovation might not arrive in the company's San Antonio, Texas, factory. Although this is the case, the model is still expected to arrive in the United States by the end of 2022. You can watch the video below to have a sweet look of the upcoming 2022 Toyota Tundra. Once the Toyota's new pickup truck arrives, it is expected to costs around $30,000. However, the company might also offer entry-level models, which will have lesser advanced features. Related Article: 2022 Toyota Tundra Sees Early Positive Impressions; 'World-Beater' and 'Best in Class' Remarks Bagged (Newser) About 5.6% of American adults place themselves under the LGBTQ umbrellaa record number, per the latest Gallup poll. That's up one full percentage point from the last Gallup survey on the topic using 2017 data, which saw 4.5% of adult Americans identifying as LGBTQ. The poll, which conducted 15,000-plus telephone interviews with Americans over the age of 18 throughout 2020, found that of those who said they were LGBTQ, nearly 55% considered themselves to be bisexual, 25% said they were gay, 12% or so identified as lesbian, and just over 11% said they were transgender. A 3.3% demographic used other non-hetero terms to self-identify, such as "queer" or "same-gender-loving." Per the Gallup survey, 1 in 6, or 15.9%, of adults in Generation Z (those ages 18 to 23 in 2020) said they're LGBTQ. That numbers drops significantly in older generations: For respondents born before 1965, for example, only 2% or less identified as LGBTQ. story continues below It's "generational shifts in awareness and acceptance" pushing those numbers upward, says Ineke Mushovic, executive director of the Movement Advancement Project nonprofit. "The younger generations havent experienced this level of fear where often being in the closet felt less like a choice and more like a survival mechanism," Mushovic tells USA Today, recalling tearful conversations she's had with older members of the LGBTQ community who had a much more difficult time coming out in years past. Gallup editor Jeffrey Jones tells NBC News that it may even be easier for younger people to speak openly in LGBTQ polls themselves than it is for older people who still feel the topic is "taboo." A National LGBTQ Task Force rep tells USA Today that representation in politics, the media, and elsewhere has also helped. However, a long path ahead remains: Even with President Biden on board to fight for the LGBTQ community, advocates note there's still much discrimination to combat. (Read more LGBTQ stories.) Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The government plans to utilise more private hospitals in order to increase the speed and coverage of covid-19 vaccination in India . Currently, over 10,000 hospitals (private and government combined) are being used for administration of covid-19 vaccines. Out of the 10,000 hospitals that are being used for administering the covid-19 vaccines each day, at least 2,000 hospitals are from private sector," Rajesh Bhushan Union Health Secretary said. This shows how essential is the private sector and it plays the role of a force multiplier which is acknowledge by the government. In the coming days, more private sector hospitals will be utilized to increase the vaccination coverage and speed," Bhushan said adding that the private sector is playing a vital role in many of the governments health programmes. Outlining the role of private sector in healthcare, Bhushan said that out of the 24,000 hospitals under the Centres Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Aarogya Yojna which are providing cashless treatment, over 11,000 hospitals are from the private sector being involved for last two years. The Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS) is also completely based on private sector leaving the dispensaries. More than 800 private hospitals are already a part of CGHS. The private sector has a larger role to play in the nationwide covid-19 vaccination program," said Bhushan. Private sector has also shown its willingness and intent to support and augment governments capacity across the value chain of covid-19 vaccine distribution and administration. The National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for covid-19 (NEGVAC) had met industry representatives in November last year to assess private sector capabilities and capacities for the procurement, distribution, and inoculation of the covid-19 vaccine. FICCI has submitted a detailed plan outlining what support private sector, including healthcare, can provide, through the FICCI-EY Strategy paper on Protecting India - Public Private Partnership for vaccinating against covid-19, submitted to NEGVAC In December 2020. According to the white paper, India may need 1.3 lakh-1.4 lakh vaccination centers, 1.0 lakh healthcare professionals (as inoculators) and 2.0 lakh support staff/ volunteers for mass-inoculation of prioritized individuals (30 crore people as identified by the government, includes healthcare professionals, frontline workers, people above 50 years and also people with co-morbidities) by August 2021 and the entire adult population (80 crore) by the end of 2022. The white paper further said that to meet the demand of 1.3 lakh-1.4 lakh centers, 60% of the existing public health infrastructure will have to house a vaccination center. Against the requirement of 1.0 lakh inoculators, the public sector can potentially provide 60,000-70,000 (10% of the nurse/ANM capacity in public sector) of them. This could lead to a capacity constraint especially in key states such as Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. ADVERTISEMENT The Ekiti State Council of Traditional Rulers has urged Governor Kayode Fayemi to join the 2023 presidential race, saying he is well-qualified for the job. The position of the monarchs was contained in a statement by Ajibade Olubunmi, special adviser on media to the chairperson of the State Council of Obas, in Ado Ekiti on Wednesday. According to him, the traditional rulers took the decision at their statutory monthly meeting in Ado Ekiti, after listening to a four-man voluntary organisation known as our belief project, led by Aloba Abejide. Towards this, the Obas said they would send a delegation at the appropriate time to prevail on him to contest for the position. Abejide had pleaded with the traditional rulers to call on the governor to make up his mind early and declare his intention to contest in the 2023 Presidential election. ALSO READ: Ekiti APC chieftain endorses Fayemi for 2023 presidency The State Chairman of the traditional rulers council who is also the Alawe of Ilawe Ekiti, Oba Adebanji Alabi, who welcomed the team to the council meeting, spoke at length in tandem with complimentary remarks from several traditional rulers, on what they described as sterling qualities of the governor. The challenges confronting Nigeria would definitely need a young, dynamic, energetic and brilliant person like Fayemi who has the wherewithal to be a good president, he said. (NAN) A college student who was found naked and severely burnt along a national highway in India has said she was set on fire by a gang of men who had attempted to rape her. The unnamed woman was discovered lying along a national highway in Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh, police said on Wednesday. Superintendent of Police S Anand said the woman told investigators that three men had tried to rape her in a field near Rai Kheda village on Monday. When they did not succeed, they poured kerosene on the woman and set her alight. The second-year BA student was admitted to a district hospital and later referred to the Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Hospital in Lucknow, where she continues to receive treatment, The Hindustan Times reported. A college student who was found naked and severely burnt along a national highway in India has said she was set on fire by a gang of men who had attempted to rape her. She is receiving treatment at the Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Hospital in Lucknow (pictured) CCTV footage showed the woman coming down alone from the third floor of her college building. 'Investigations with the help of CCTV footage have found that the girl went out of the college campus from a broken outer wall about 20 minutes after entering the premises and was seen walking alone on a canal road,' Anand said. He added that the woman said she did not know how she got from the third floor of the college building to the hospital and that she had made several changes to her statements. Prior to exiting the campus, the woman was seen talking to her friends outside a classroom and visiting a library, Anand said. Three teams have reportedly been deployed to investigate the incident. Another is guarding the woman at the Lucknow hospital where she is undergoing treatment after suffering burns to 72 per cent of her body. More than a dozen college students have reportedly been questioned in connection with the investigation, including friends of the woman. Another person, who is a resident of the woman's village and whom she called on the day of her alleged attack has also been questioned, Anand said. Asif Ali, a resident of the village where the woman was found said locals covered her up with a stole before calling police. The unnamed woman was discovered lying along a national highway in Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh on Monday Anand said that some tumblers had been discovered in the field where the woman said the attack took place but there was no obvious sign of alcohol. The incident is the latest in a long line of violent attacks against women and girls in India, where violence against women in endemic. In 2019, the country recorded 88 rape cases per day, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. Uttar Pradesh, where the college student was attacked, was the state with the second most reported cases at 3,065, coming behind only Rajastan, which had almost 6,000. The figures are thought to represent just the tip of the iceberg as many rapes and sexual assaults are believed to go unreported due to social stigma and a lack of faith in police. Bill Gerritsen, an avid sailor who emigrated from the Netherlands to America in 1957, graduated from Oregon State University with a degree in mechanical engineering, and moved to Southern California to work on the Apollo program, where he met his wife, Penny, has completed his new book From the Log of True Grace: a heartwarming reflection on two years of indelible family memories aboard their sailboat. In 1979 Bill and Penny purchased a 38 ft sailboat. It took a year to get built and finally delivered. After sailing around the Southern California islands for a year, Penny suggested that they quit their jobs, take their sons JJ (15), and Dan (11) out of school and go sailing. And so, began a two-year adventure. Down the coast of Mexico, exploration of Cocos Island, several months in Costa Rica and Panama. One of the highlights was crossing the Panama Canal. After spending a short time in the western Caribbean, they returned to the Pacific side and after stopping at Cocos Island once more, headed for home. Spending time in a relatively confined space was not easy. The schooling was especially delicate. Fights and arguments were a nearly daily occurrence. However, each of them stood their required watches and could be counted on when tough conditions happened. Published by Page Publishing, Bill Gerritsens engrossing tale is a must-read for sailing aficionados! Readers who wish to experience this engaging work can purchase From the Log of True Grace at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes Store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble. For additional information or media inquiries, contact Page Publishing at 866-315-2708. About Page Publishing: Page Publishing is a traditional, full-service publishing house that handles all the intricacies involved in publishing its authors books, including distribution in the worlds largest retail outlets and royalty generation. Page Publishing understands that authors should be free to create, not mired in logistics like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes, and so on. Pages accomplished writers and publishing professionals allow authors to leave behind these complex and time-consuming issues and focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com. On Tuesday, a Delhi court granted bail to Bengalurus climate activist Disha Ravi, 10 days after she was arrested for her alleged role in the creation and dissemination of a toolkit for an ongoing protest against Indias farm laws that was tweeted by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. The Delhi Police had accused the 22-year-old of being a key conspirator in the production of an online document that it claimed had links with a secessionist movement and was therefore a threat to the nation. Ravi was slapped with charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy. The courts judge Dharmender Rana, however, dismissed the prosecutions contention for its scanty" evidence and ordered her release. While sighs of relief were heaved among citizens who care for the rule of law, details of the courts order deserve a spotlight of their own for the example they set of how the presumption of innocence must prevail as a principle and how repeal-worthy colonial-era laws such as sedition should be interpreted. At a time when law-enforcers display a proclivity to summon our harshest legal provisions to criminalize and muzzle dissent with alarming frequency, the ruling reaffirms the inviolability of our cherished freedoms and draws a red line for state authority. Especially notable was the clarity with which the order in Ravis favour struck a blow on behalf of our rights to free expression, non- violent dissent and free association, all of which are vital to democracy. The offence of sedition cannot be invoked to minister to the wounded vanity of governments," the court said. This is a significant pushback, given the alacrity with which politicians in power tend to brand their critics as anti-national". Far too often has Indias ruling dispensation sought to conflate the country with itself. The court also extolled those who raise their voice. Citizens are conscience keepers of government in any democratic nation. They cannot be put behind bars simply because they choose to disagree with state policies," said the order, adding that an aware and assertive citizenry, in contradistinction with an indifferent or docile citizenry, is indisputably a sign of a healthy and vibrant democracy." As for the absurdity of guilt imputed through association, it clarified that anyone may have interacted with someone of dubious credentials"; As long as the engagement/interaction remains within the four corners of law, persons interacting with such persons, ignorantly, innocently, or for that matter even fully conscious of their dubious credentials, cannot be painted with the same hue." Welcome as this enunciation of principles is, justice in the country would mean little if they are not applied equally to all cases. On this score, of equality under the law, India seems in need of course correction. Many protesters languish in lock-ups on allegations that, prima facie, seem as flaky as those levelled against Ravi. Parallels have also been drawn with the case of Safoora Zargar, a student who was pregnant when arrested last year and spent weeks behind bars before she got bail. She too was charged with a grave offence, though the public record of her actions suggests all she did was protest a discriminatory law on citizenship. As the Delhi court observed on Tuesday, we need to value our diversity of views, just as we have for millennia. To make this point, it cited a Rig Veda verse: Let noble thoughts come from all directions." Indeed. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Applications for the second round of Paycheck Protection Program forgivable loans are open through March 31, but will only be open to the smallest of the small businesses for the next two weeks. Joe Bidens administration announced this week a two-week window where only businesses with 20 employees or fewer could apply for the loans, starting Wednesday, Feb. 24. This will give lenders and community partners more time to work with the smallest businesses to submit their applications, the Small Business Administration said in a news release. Per CNBC, 98% of small businesses have 20 or fewer employees, but such businesses have received only 45% of the PPP funding so far. PPP loans are available to small businesses with 500 or fewer employees although only businesses with 300 or fewer are eligible for the money if they received PPP funding in the first round. More than 127,000 Michigan businesses got a combined $16 billion in PPP funding in the first round ranging from $20 to $10 million. The average amount was $126,000. The new focus on businesses with 20 employees or fewer will help minority-owned businesses, Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilchrist II said in a statement. While more than 100,000 PPP loans have helped provide relief to Michigan businesses already, we know that many of our states smallest businesses did not have access to this program, particularly businesses owned and run by Black entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurs of color, Gilchrist said. Oftentimes, these businesses have anchored neighborhoods for generations, and there remains a significant need for additional resources to support these local entrepreneurs and innovators. The two-week window for smaller businesses isnt the only tweak. A new formula will allow sole proprietors, independent contractors and self-employed people get more PPP money. Business owners with non-fraud felonies on their record will now be eligible for funding also a change from the first round. RELATED STORIES See which businesses in your Michigan community received $150K or more in PPP loans Business leaders to Whitmer: Its time to let employees work in offices again Feds send Michigan money to find unemployment fraud See which businesses in your county got help from Michigans $55 million COVID-19 aid program .... .... That my friends, is us, America's conservatives and civilian gun owners. Not only must Americans accept that Trump is an insurrectionist, but they must also believe gun owners are insurrectionists, too. Until U.S. gun owners are neutralized, the left cannot take total power. We must now be transformed from racists into violent, dangerous revolutionaries; Media and Big Tech have the dominating power to make that real in the eyes of ignorant Americans. The gun control crowd has tried to demonize us in the past as a danger to society, and now they are having another go at it. Our guns and the role we might play in protecting the Constitution have become a crucial detail on their way to total power. We bring a great amount of uncertainty to the situation in which the Democrats find themselves. There is a strong legal historical precedent to disarming people who are a danger to the state. Even Justice Amy Barrett, protector of gun rights, writing as dissenting Circuit Court judge, acknowledged that, "There are obvious reasons why the government would take guns away from those bent on overthrowing it" It would benefit our new Socialist government if the masses agreed with them about the dangerousness and untrust-worthiness of American civilian gun owners. So the path to the destruction of civilian gun owners as a defending force is to twist away the truth and create a fearful lie of evilness. History truly appears to be repeating itself! ..... Wayne County Caretaker Found in Contempt for Providing Unlicensed Adult Foster Care Wayne County Caretaker Found in Contempt for Providing Unlicensed Adult Foster Care Ryan Jarvi 517-599-2746 Attorney General February 24, 2021 LANSING A woman has been found in contempt for violating a court order and providing unlicensed adult foster care services at a Wayne County facility, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and LARA Director Orlene Hawks announced today. Mylaya Hightower appeared in Wayne County Circuit Court before Judge Dana Margaret Hathaway in late January for a show cause hearing. Judge Hathaway found Hightower in contempt for violating an October 2019 permanent injunction, which barred her from providing unlicensed adult foster care. The court also fined Hightower $1,000. This case was referred to the Attorney Generals office by the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA), which discovered Hightower was willfully violating the permanent injunction in a follow-up investigation at her Detroit facility. This defendant not only neglected to abide by the states licensing regulations that govern adult foster care, but chose not to follow a specific directive from the court, Nessel said. My office will continue to work in tandem with LARA to enforce the laws of this state and pursue legal action when appropriate to ensure compliance. Michigans regulatory structure provides protections for Michigan residents who require adult foster care services, Hawks said. When a care provider is not properly licensed by the state or is acting in violation of those professional parameters, there is risk to the people using that service and we must act to protect those individuals. In October 2019, the court entered a permanent injunction prohibiting Hightower from providing adult foster care without a license at any location within the state, as required under the Adult Foster Care Facility Licensing Act. Hightower was never licensed by the state to provide adult foster care. In February and December 2017, LARAs Bureau of Community and Health Systems received complaints that she was providing unlicensed adult foster care. LARA investigated and substantiated both complaints. LARA provided Hightower an opportunity to apply for a license or cease operation, but she did neither. As a result, LARA referred the matter to the Attorney Generals office, which led to the October 2019 permanent injunction. Professor Yaw Gyampo has warned the proponents of homosexuality to stop their ''crude'' move because no matter what they do, the people of Ghana will reject homosexuals and their act. In a statement copied to Peacefmonline, Prof. Gyampo says the imposition of homosexuality in Ghana will not succeed. ''In Ghana, apart from our religious and cultural upbringings that frown on LGBT, we are merely a Transitional Democracy. I therefore expect those trying, surreptitiously and openly to arrogantly impose such crude and and unorthodox carnal tendencies on us, to tone down, because they simply cant work with us. With or without God; with or without Government, the people would reject such an arrogant imposition'', his statement read. Read full statement below: Stages of Democratic Progression and Human Rights An extensive search of the Political Science literature on Democracy show that there are four main stages of Democratic Progression. Each stage has an implication for human rights. The First Stage is called Authoritarianism. This is simply explained in terms of a system of government, that favours or enforces strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom and human rights. The exercise of Political Rights as well as Economic, Social and Cultural (ECOSOC) Rights, are either non-existent or not tolerated under Authoritarianism. Regimes in Ghana, that exhibited authoritarian tendencies include the Nkrumah regime and the other military interventions that punctuated our efforts at democratization. The Second Stage of Democratic Progression is called Transitional/Electoral Democracy. Countries under this democratic phase extol the virtues of Political Rights. Here, the main focus is the conduct of periodic elections, regardless of whether they are free and fair. The rights to free speech, form or join a political a party of ones choice are hesitantly guaranteed. However ECOSOC rights are either non existent or completely under-developed. These rights are therefore not asserted by the citizenry, and even when they are granted on a very infinitesimal scale, they are subserviently perceived by the citizenry as privileges, for which some ignorant people tend to be overly grateful to politicians. The Third Stage is called Liberal Democracy. As Transitional Democracies grow for, say, over 200 years, ECOSOC rights become fully developed and are fully accessed as of rights by the citizenry. In addition, the exercise of Political Rights are fully developed to the point that elections are seamless and they are by default, free, fair, peaceful and transparent. All other political rights are fully developed and guaranteed. The Fourth Stage is called Advanced Liberal Democracy. At this stage, all the features of the Third Stage are fully consolidated. In addition, citizens at this stage claim ownership and access to ALL and everything they can claim to be a right, sometimes beyond the imagination of normal human reasoning, (particularly among the citizenry of the First Three Stages of Democratic Stages). It is at this stage of Democratic Progression that human beings can openly sleep with animals and insist they have the right to do so. It is at this Stage that LGBTs thrive and impose responsibility on the State to guarantee them as rights. In Ghana, apart from our religious and cultural upbringings that frown on LGBT, we are merely a Transitional Democracy. I therefore expect those trying, surreptitiously and openly to arrogantly impose such crude and and unorthodox carnal tendencies on us, to tone down, because they simply cant work with us. With or without God; with or without Government, the people would reject such an arrogant imposition. Yaw Gyampo A31, Prabiw P.A.V. Ansah Street Saltpond & Suro Nipa House Kubease Larteh-Akuapim 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. Featured Video Sorry! This content is not available in your region BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (Purdue Sports) No. 11 Purdue (7-4) continued its winning tradition by securing their eighth consecutive win at Indiana (2-9) in sweeping fashion (25-20, 25-17, 25-14). With the victory, Purdue moves to 71-34 all-time against the team down south, with the Boilermakers taking 17 of the last 19 in Bloomington. The Boilermakers registered a .256 hitting clip while holding Indiana to a .089 attack %. Additionally, No. 11 Purdue held the Hoosiers to just 34.0 points, a season-low. Leading the charge for No. 11 Purdue was junior Grace Cleveland, who's efficient evening ended with a .500 attack % (12 kills, 3 errors on 18 swings) and five block assists. With the output, the Bloomington, Illinois, native recorded her fifth consecutive match with three errors or less. Joining Cleveland with five blocks was middle blocker Jael Johnson. The junior added three kills on the night. Emma Terwilliger set a career-high four service aces in the match, with three coming in a consecutive fashion during set two. Set 1 (25-20) With the rivals trading points for the majority of the set, senior libero Jena Otec kept the Boilermakers alive on multiple plays on her way to tallying six of her 11 eventual digs in the first set. Purdue pulled away after back-to-back kills by Maddie Koch led to a 5-1 run and a 22-18 score, the largest lead of the match thus far. The defensive set included six Boilermaker blocks. Set 2 (25-17) After knotting the score five times over the first 10 combined points, a pair of consecutive kills by freshman Taylor Trammell spurred on a five-point unanswered Purdue run. The Boilermakers maintained a steady lead for the remainder of the set, with its largest lead of the set 22-10, in part thanks to three straight aces by Emma Terwilliger. Set 3 (25-14) Despite IU coming out with a 4-5 lead over Purdue, the Boilermakers responded with a 9-1 to catapult the team past its host. Caitlyn Newton recorded Purdue's first three points over six plays and went on to post seven kills with just two errors on 13 hits in the set (.385 hitting %). Up Next No. 11 Purdue and Indiana will battle in West Lafayette on Sunday, February 28 at 4:30 p.m. ET on Big Ten Network for the rights to the traveling trophy, the Monon Spike. Currently, Purdue will look to defend the Spike, having won it for 12 consecutive years and 16 of the 17 Spike matches. The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved President's Rule in Puducherry after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies did not stake claim to form government in the union territory, according to a report. The decision came after the fall of the Congress government in Puducherry, just three months before the assembly election. Chief Minister V Narayansamy-led Congress government lost the floor test held in Puducherry Assembly earlier this week. Ending speculation, Puducherry Lieutenant Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan has recommended President's rule in the UT, as per reports. The President's Rule in the UT was imposed after the Opposition showed no interest in forming the government after the resignation of Narayanasamy as the CM. The Congress-DMK coalition fell to a minority after five MLAs from the Congress and its ally, the DMK quit. Two of the MLAs who quit Congress have switched to the BJP and more are expected to follow. The spate of resignations that began in mid-January reduced the strength of the Puducherry Assembly to 26. The Narayanasamy government had 12 MLAs, including the Speaker of Puducherry Assembly on its side. The Opposition led by the All Indian NR Congress of former Chief Minister N Rangasamy had 14 on its side. Narayansamy has blamed former Lt Governor Kiran Bedi and the central government for the political crisis in Puducherry. President Ram Nath Kovind had accepted the resignation of Narayanasamy and his council of ministers. The Union Territory is likely to go to assembly polls in April-May. The dates are yet to be announced. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Tamil Nadu and Puducherry on February 25. He will inaugurate and lay the foundation stone of various development initiatives in Puducherry and lay the foundation stone of multiple infrastructure projects worth over 12400 crores in Coimbatore. A PMO release said Prime Minister will dedicate to the nation the Neyveli New Thermal Power Project. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. MBABANE The Minister of Information, Communication and Technology Princess Sikhanyiso was conspicuously missing from the State Opening of Parliament last Friday. This stood out because the princess had been reserved a seat next to the Acting Prime Minister Themba Masuku and Finance Minister Neal Rijkenberg, who were the only legislators seated in the first right-hand row next to His Majesty King Mswati III. Name tags were allocated for each of the only 25 legislators who were allowed inside the House of Assembly in observance to the social distancing rules during the State Opening. As a result, the reserved seat remained unoccupied throughout the two- hour event. Meanwhile, the minister, according to her Private Secretary Bernhard Reck, was unfortunately not able to make it to the official opening of Parliament because of matters beyond her control that made it impossible for her to attend. Reck, through a WhatsApp message, said the minister, however, did manage to follow all proceedings virtually. The ministers assistant had been asked if it was true that the princess could not be part of the State Opening because she had arrived after all the gates had been closed by security personnel, which is the norm when Their Majesties attend events. Prevented However, Reck said the princess was not prevented from entering Parliament, instead, she had matters which were not specified that were beyond her control. The princess is also a member of the Senate and other senators observed the proceedings virtually from the Senate chamber. It should be noted that emakhosikati and emazinyane were also not in attendance and the seats normally occupied by the princesses and princes were only occupied by Liqoqo Chairperson Paul Dlamini and senior member of the royal family Prince Masitsela. On another note, the substantive minister has not been in Parliament since early last year as she was reported to be on leave. Since then, the Minister of Commerce, Industry and Trade Mancoba Khumalo has been doubling as also the minister of ICT. However, the instrument allowing him to act elapsed at the end of January. Meanwhile, Section 72 of the Constitution states that where a minister is absent from Eswatini or is by reason of illness or any other cause unable to exercise the functions of the office, the minister may after consultation with the prime minister delegate those functions. It states that the delegated functions should be maker in writing for a period not exceeding six months. However, Khumalo has acted for more than 12 months. As the leading home service provider in Phoenix, AZ, we strive to recommend only the highest quality of water filtration products to our customers. Tucker Hill Air, Plumbing & Electric, a commercial and residential plumbing and HVAC service provider, announced it has been certified by Environmental Water Systems (EWS) to install and service EWS filtration appliances. The certification will give homeowners peace of mind knowing they can trust Tucker Hill, Air, Plumbing & Electric technicians to install and service all types of EWS filtration products, which include whole home filtration, sink filtration and specialty filtration. Speaking about the certification, Tucker Hill, Air, Plumbing & Electric CEO Jeremy Prevost said, As the leading home service provider in Phoenix, AZ, we strive to recommend only the highest quality of water filtration products to our customers. We are confident in the durability and quality of EWS filtration systems and have decided to train our technicians to properly install and service them. Todays tap water contains a dangerous mix of chlorine or chloramine, pesticides, obesogens, pharmaceutical residues and other contaminants that increase the risk of health conditions. With thousands of understudied and unregulated contaminants in tap water, a home filtration system is more important than ever. For over 30 years, EWS has been providing high quality, long-lasting water filtration systems. EWS home filtration appliances are engineered and manufactured in the US to ensure each product meets the companys standards for quality, value and longevity. The EWS Spectrum whole home filtration system is the exclusive water appliance trusted by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), The New American Home and the International Builders Show. EWS Vice President Mark Truncale said, We are thrilled to be associated with Tucker Hill Air, Plumbing & Electric and look forward to providing products their customers can rely on. Customers are encouraged to call Tucker Hill Air, Plumbing & Electric to learn more about EWS water filtration systems and to schedule installation or service. To learn more about Environmental Water Systems, visit https://www.ewswater.com/. To learn more about Tucker Hill Air, Plumbing & Electric, visit https://tuckerhillaz.com/. About Tucker Hill Air, Plumbing & Electric: Tucker Hill Air, Plumbing & Electric is the industry leader in the Phoenix market for light commercial and residential HVAC, plumbing and electrical services. The companys licensed, bonded and insured technicians are available 24/7 and are highly trained, experienced and have passed a background check. Tucker Hill Air, Plumbing & Electric specializes in residential and commercial maintenance, repairs and installation of all air conditioning, heating, plumbing and electrical systems. The company is committed to industry leading customer service and provides daily training for both technicians and office staff. Tucker Hill Air, Plumbing & Electric is dedicated to serving seniors with honesty and professionalism. YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 24, ARMENPRESS. Science, especially natural and technical science, can ensure Armenias long-term development, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said during the discussion of the science development prospects in the country. He reminded that the Parliament has approved at first hearing the law on Higher Education and Science and in this context he considered it necessary to discuss the mechanisms through which science is financed in Armenia. How, with what mechanisms and volumes to ensure the science funding so that it will create a result and reach the people who deal with science and how to ensure the effective continuation of the work of famous scientists. This is really a serious and fundamental issue and today we must try to propose solutions on this matter, Pashinyan said. Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan A 30-year-old Filipino-American from Antioch, California is dead after the police kneeled on the back of his neck when they tried to subdue him during a mental health episode, several media reported early this week. Angelo Quinto, a Navy veteran who was born in the Philippines, had a mental health crisis on Dec. 23, spurring his sister to call the police for help. When the police arrived in his home, Quinto was holding on to his mother Maria Quinto-Collins, and refused to let her go. The cops allegedly didnt try to understand the situation and immediately grabbed Quinto from his mother. They allegedly pinned Quinto to the floor and knelt on the back of his neck for several minutes, and he passed out after. Read: The world has marched for black lives. Why hasnt Hong Kong? A video shared by Quinto-Collins showed her son lying unconscious on the floor, with blood oozing out of his mouth. His body was then carried out of the home by the police. He was brought to a hospital, where he died three days later. In a wrongful death suit filed on Feb. 18, Quintos family said that he had been suffering from anxiety, depression, and paranoia for the previous few months. His lawyer, John L. Burris, said that the police were not wearing body cameras when they took Quinto from his home. Read: Husband of missing Fil-Am Maya Millete reportedly uncooperative as search continues These Antioch police officers had already handcuffed Angelo but did not stop their assault on the young man and inexplicably began using the George Floyd technique of placing a knee on the back and side of his neck, ignoring Mr. Quinto pleas of please dont kill me,' Burris said in a press conference. The Antioch police have yet to issue a press statement regarding Quintos death, and the official reason behind it has yet to be made public by the coroners office. Meanwhile, the Contra Costa County District Attorneys office is investigating the incident. This article, Fil-Am veteran with mental health issues dies after police knelt on his neck, originally appeared on Coconuts, Asia's leading alternative media company. BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, February 24, 2021 -The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering released a report, "The Power of Virtual Communities," which examines the role online groups play in creating opportunities for people to build new kinds of meaningful communities they often could not form in real space. This first-of-its-kind research was built on interviews with 50 Facebook community leaders in 17 countries, 26 global experts from academia and industry, unique access to Facebook's underlying research and an original global survey conducted by YouGov of 15,000 people in 15 countries who are currently members of online and in-person communities, which found that in 11 of those countries the majority of people said that the most meaningful communities to which they belong are primarily online. "Around the world, people who are otherwise voiceless in physical space are becoming powerful leaders of groups that confer a true sense of meaning and belonging for their members," said Beth Simone Noveck, director of The GovLab. "This brief report, which tells the stories of several of those leaders and how they govern global communities is, we hope, the beginning of greater and much needed study of online groups and their impact on social and political life." Many of these Facebook groups cut across traditional social groupings and bring together people around a shared trait or interest: Female IN (FIN), created as a safe space for women in the Nigerian diaspora to discuss and seek support for problems associated with such challenges as relationship struggles, health issues, abuse, grief and loss. Female IN grew by word-of-mouth into a 1.8 million-person community with members in more than 100 countries. Surviving Hijab encourages its 920,000 female members to take up or continue wearing the Muslim head covering in the face of political and social criticism. Blind PenPals enables its 7,000 blind and visually impaired members to share stories and advice. Canterbury Residents Group acts as a public square in the British city of Canterbury and has 38,000 members, about the same size as the city's population. Wife of Drug Kingpin El Chapo to Remain in Jail WASHINGTONA federal judge has ordered the wife of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin El Chapo Guzman to remain temporarily jailed after she was arrested and accused of helping her husband run his multibillion-dollar cartel and plotting his audacious escape from a Mexican prison in 2015. Emma Coronel Aispuro, 31, appeared by video conference for an initial court appearance before a federal magistrate judge in the District of Columbia. The judges order came after Coronels attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, said he would consent to her temporary detention after her arrest at Dulles International Airport in Virginia. U.S. Magistrate Judge Robin Meriweather explained the charges to Coronel, who spoke to the judge through a Spanish interpreter. She said prosecutors had provided sufficient reason to keep Coronel behind bars for now and noted that her attorney had consented to the temporary detention. Prosecutor Anthony Nardozzi said the U.S. government believed that Coronel should remain jailed, arguing that she worked closely with the command-and-control structure of the Sinaloa cartel, particularly with her husband. Nardozzi said she conspired to distribute large quantities of drugs, knowing that they would be illegally smuggled into the United States. Nardozzi said Coronel had access to criminal associates, including other members of the cartel, and financial means to generate a serious risk of flight. If convicted, she could face more than 10 years in prison. Her arrest was the latest twist in the bloody, multinational saga involving Guzman, the longtime head of the Sinaloa drug cartel. Guzman, whose two dramatic prison escapes in Mexico fed into a legend that he and his family were all but untouchable, was extradited to the United States in 2017 and is serving life in prison. Mexican drug trafficker Joaquin Guzman Loera, aka El Chapo (C), is escorted by marines as he is presented to the press in Mexico City, on Feb. 22, 2014. (Alfredo Estrella /AFP via Getty Images) And now his wife, with whom he has two young daughters, has been charged with helping him run his criminal empire. In a single-count criminal complaint, Coronel was charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and marijuana in the United States. The Justice Department also accused her of helping her husband escape from a Mexican prison in 2015 and participating in the planning of a second prison escape before Guzman was extradited to the United States. As Mexicos most powerful drug lord, Guzman ran a cartel responsible for smuggling mountains of cocaine and other drugs into the United States during his 25-year reign, prosecutors said in recent court papers. They also said his army of sicarios, or hitmen, was under orders to kidnap, torture, and kill anyone who got in his way. His prison breaks became the stuff of legend and raised serious questions about whether Mexicos justice system was capable of holding him accountable. In one case, he escaped through an entry under the shower in his cell to a milelong lighted tunnel with a motorcycle on rails. The planning for the escape was extensive, prosecutors say, with his wife playing a key role. Court papers charge that Coronel worked with Guzmans sons and a witness, who is cooperating with the U.S. government, to organize the construction of the underground tunnel that Guzman used to escape from the Altiplano prison to prevent his extradition to the United States. The plot included purchasing a piece of land near the prison, firearms, and an armored truck and smuggling him a GPS watch so they could pinpoint his exact whereabouts so as to construct the tunnel with an entry point accessible to him, the court papers say. Guzman was sentenced to life behind bars in 2019. Coronel, who was a beauty queen in her teens, regularly attended Guzmans trial, even when testimony implicated her in his prison breaks. The two, separated in age by more than 30 years, have been together since at least 2007, and their twin daughters were born in 2011. Her father, Ines Coronel Barreras, was arrested in 2013 with one of his sons and several other men in a warehouse with hundreds of pounds of marijuana across the border from Douglas, Arizona. Months earlier, the U.S. Treasury had announced financial sanctions against her father for his alleged drug trafficking. After Guzman was rearrested following his escape, Coronel lobbied the Mexican government to improve her husbands prison conditions. After he was convicted in 2019, she moved to launch a clothing line in his name. Mike Vigil, the Drug Enforcement Administrations former chief of international operations, said Coronel has been involved in the drug trade since she was a little girl. She knows the inner workings of the Sinaloa cartel. He said she could be willing to cooperate. She has a huge motivation, and that is her twins, Vigil said. By Michael Balsamo Confronted by a rise in suicides amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Japan has just appointed its first Minister for Loneliness. I hope to carry out activities to prevent social loneliness and isolation and to protect ties between people, says the new minister, Tetsushi Sakamoto. But Japan isnt the first. Britain announced the worlds first minister for loneliness, Tracey Crouch, in 2018. When I interviewed her the next year, she told me: When I was appointed, the number of people that were coming forward and saying, Thank you, I have felt enormously lonely, but Ive been too afraid to say it is something that shows that we should be talking about loneliness and we shouldnt be ashamed. What we should be ashamed of is if we dont have a framework around them to support them. Governments around the world are increasingly worried about loneliness. Credit:istock The crushing effects of isolation have been compounded by COVID lockdowns, but they predate the virus and the worlds advanced economies have been wondering for some years what to do about this other pandemic loneliness. A 2019 report in Scientific American found that almost half the US population across all ages felt alone. It cited research findings that prolonged isolation had been estimated to shorten life span by 15 years, equivalent in impact to being obese or smoking 15 cigarettes per day. The Harris County Sheriff's Office is investigating a deputy after a video surfaced showing him pulling his gun and threatening to kill a motorist on Monday. George Dickerson and his coworker merged onto the South Loop from US-59 Monday afternoon when he was caught in a funeral procession, ABC13's Mycah Hatfield reports. He attempted to pass the procession and entered the lane occupied by two officers on motorcycles. IN TEXAS: Turns out Texans don't save money under our deregulated electricity market Dickerson said the officer in front of him slammed on the brakes, causing Dickerson and the deputy behind Dickerson to do the same. The deputy behind him then parked and pulled out his gun "in the middle of the freeway." "He went around the truck, stopped and parked in front of us," Dickerson told ABC13. "I'm in the left lane in the middle of the freeway and he gets off his bike with his gun drawn and comes at me, and as soon as I see his gun drawn, I put my hands in the air and said, 'I don't want any trouble.'" The deputy can be seen in the video with his gun drawn as he opens Dickerson's truck door while Dickerson has his hands up. "I'll I'll f------ kill you," the deputy can be heard saying in the video. "Do that s--- again, and I'll f------ kill you." The department has not identified the deputy. WAIT: Looking for an affordable generator? There's a sales tax holiday soon in Texas "I was terrified," Dickerson told ABC13. "I had a gun to my face. He's threatening to kill me because I stopped my truck. I didn't want to hit this guy. I stopped my truck and he is threatening to kill me because he thought I did it intentionally, I guess." Dickerson's coworker captured the exchange on video. The video has since been posted several times on Reddit. The Harris County Sheriff's Office told ABC13 that the deputy has been placed on administrative leave. The office wrote on Twitter that anyone with information on the incident should contact its Internal Affairs Division. As of Feb. 23, Dickerson had not heard from the sheriff's office, according to Hatfield. "What are they doing out there if they're pointing guns at regular citizens?" Dickerson told ABC13. NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Titan HST, a leading provider of next-gen emergency response systems, announced the use of its emergency mass communication system at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa to help safeguard students and faculty in the event of on-campus emergencies, natural disasters and COVID-19 exposures. As the nation looks to open back up from the pandemic lock-down, the need for an effective outbreak mitigation tool is crucial, and Titan HST has provided Vanguard with a turnkey solution for communicating to and screening on-campus students and employees. Titan HST allows Vanguard University to pre-screen all students currently living on campus during the pandemic for symptoms, instantly identify and notify anyone exposed to an infected individual and implement density monitoring to set maximum occupancy levels by area. Titan then generates reporting to verify that all areas have been properly sanitized. If there is a confirmed case on campus, Titan HST allows the University to track the precise location of the infected individual and quickly implement quarantine and risk mitigation procedures. Vanguard University has also been leveraging Titan HST as a texting app to deliver food to students in quarantine on campus, making two-way communication with students easier than ever. "Titan HST has been a critical app for our campus that allows us to streamline important and urgent information to students and staff in the event of an emergency," said Kent Ferrin, director of Campus Safety, Vanguard University. "We were previously using a system that was not interactive, whereas Titan HST enables communication between students in need and Campus Safety for immediate response. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, Titan HST has been a critical component of our workflow to facilitate contact tracing and quickly and efficiently message everyone in emergency situations. Having Titan HST in place and being prepared for any scenario gives us a sense of calm." Vanguard University staff and students have also utilized Titan HST for stranger alerts or notifications regarding suspicious person(s) on campus, as well as flood and earthquake warnings and other safety issues. The Titan HST system helps organizations reduce emergency response time through a host of cutting-edge technology features, including: Anyone with a cell phone, smartphone or computer can access the Titan HST mobile app or the text- or web-based platform. can access the Titan HST mobile app or the text- or web-based platform. Multi-lingual, real-time translation allows users to speak to first responders or system administrators to tell them the specifics of their emergency and get help immediately. Titan HST currently supports nearly a dozen languages, including English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Arabic. Titan HST also meets accessibility requirements for users that are deaf, blind, visually impaired or motor impaired. allows users to speak to first responders or system administrators to tell them the specifics of their emergency and get help immediately. Titan HST currently supports nearly a dozen languages, including English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Arabic. Titan HST also meets accessibility requirements for users that are deaf, blind, visually impaired or motor impaired. Augmented reality enables emergency responders to scan buildings or underground areas to find those in need, even in no-visibility conditions such as through crowds at night, or when trapped in a subway or flooded building. enables emergency responders to scan buildings or underground areas to find those in need, even in no-visibility conditions such as through crowds at night, or when trapped in a subway or flooded building. Mesh Networking for off-network use along with Redundant Connectivity with cellular, Wi-Fi, and LAN coupled with redundant broadcast notification methods (app push notification, text messages, e-mail, web notification, robotic calls and voice-recorded calls) ensures that high volume messages get through via multiple channels. with cellular, Wi-Fi, and LAN coupled with redundant broadcast notification methods (app push notification, text messages, e-mail, web notification, robotic calls and voice-recorded calls) ensures that high volume messages get through via multiple channels. Enhanced geo-redundant infrastructure is designed to maximize the likelihood of emergency notifications going through, even when there is a local emergency such as an earthquake or power outage. Titan HST's secure server infrastructure is multi-region available with 99.999 percent minimum uptime, maximizing the system's availability during the worst emergencies. is designed to maximize the likelihood of emergency notifications going through, even when there is a local emergency such as an earthquake or power outage. Titan HST's secure server infrastructure is multi-region available with 99.999 percent minimum uptime, maximizing the system's availability during the worst emergencies. Crowdsourced data provides administrators and emergency personnel with information regarding emergency SOS alerts and community safety check-in status. Users can also provide updated information in real time during an emergency by commenting on broadcast message sent by administrators. provides administrators and emergency personnel with information regarding emergency SOS alerts and community safety check-in status. Users can also provide updated information in real time during an emergency by commenting on broadcast message sent by administrators. Secure infrastructure and user data with end-to-end encryption ensure security efficacy by incorporating dozens of industry best practices and proprietary security measures independently reviewed by external third parties. "We are thrilled that Vanguard University has chosen to utilize Titan HST. I personally witnessed several emergency situations during my college years, and those experiences stuck with me. I have been on a mission ever since to improve emergency communication and make safety accessible to all," said Vic Merjanian, CEO of Titan HST. "The response to emergencies on college campuses and elsewhere has been tragically inadequate. Lives are saved when response time is reduced. Titan HST reduces administration response time by 50 percent on average, enabling users to instantly communicate campus emergency alerts, lockdowns and broadcasts, survey users for their safety status and location, deliver real time instructions to individual users, and provide site-specific emergency materials." Schools and high-occupancy venues across the country have implemented the Titan HST end-to-end security solution to maximize safety. From major voting sites during a tumultuous election to sporting facilities, Titan HST is becoming the standard for effective mass communication in crisis, as well as an outbreak mitigation tool. As Titan continues to help the nation open back up from a pandemic lock-down, its solution will become that much more crucial. For more information, visit www.titanhst.com. About Titan Health & Security Technologies, Inc. Titan HST is a California-based tech company providing a patented comprehensive emergency alert and mass notifications system for businesses, governments and schools. The mobile app allows users and emergency personnel to communicate emergency information instantly including GPS coordinates, text, audio, pictures and videos increasing information dissemination and reducing emergency response time. Using multi-lingual real-time translation, augmented reality, and crowd sourced data, Titan HST's mobile two-way communication platform serves the needs of workplaces, campuses and governments around the globe. For more information, please visit www.titanhst.com. About Vanguard University Founded in 1920, Vanguard University is a private, Christian, comprehensive university of liberal arts and professional studies that encompasses more than 2,100 students from every region in the country, over 30,000 alumni worldwide, 100 full-time faculty, over 30 undergraduate programs, and six graduate degree programs. A hallmark of a Vanguard education is collaborative scholarship in the arts and sciences which foster the intellectual development, moral maturity and spiritual vitality of its students for the public good. Rooted in a strong academic tradition and commitment to student success, Vanguard University is recognized by the US News & World Report 2020 rankings as a first-tier regional university in the West, a Best College in the West for Veterans and a Best Value School. Vanguard is also among the top five most diverse Christian colleges in the country. In addition, nearly half of its students are the first in their family to attend college. For more information, visit www.vanguard.edu. SOURCE Titan HST Related Links http://www.titanhst.com The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Purchases made via links on our site may earn us an affiliate commission An Australian doctor has revealed the four circumstances that require a 'double appointment' with your GP. Dr Preeya Alexander, a Melbourne practitioner who shares health advice on Instagram as 'The Wholesome Doctor', says single slots that typically last for 10 to 15 minutes are not long enough to adequately deal with certain issues. In an Instagram post uploaded on Tuesday, she advised back-to-back consultations for women in the early stages of pregnancy, patients seeking mental health care plans or full-body skin checks and anyone with multiple issues to discuss. Dr Preeya Alexander (pictured) says single slots that typically last for 10 to 15 minutes are not long enough to adequately deal with certain issues According to Dr Alexander, even routine visits for repeat prescriptions can run longer than 15 minutes if the GP covers all bases. She says an appointment regarding the pill should involve questions to ensure the patient is safe to continue taking that form of oral contraceptive, as well as checking blood pressure and ensuring there are no adverse side effects. During these appointments, Dr Alexander says she also checks that patients are up to date with cervical cancer screening, if they are in the relevant age category, along with sexual health screening if the person is sexually active. 'It's not just writing the script and "see ya later"- a single appointment is easily filled especially when we start doing ANY preventative health stuff,' she wrote. While she acknowledged that every GP treats patients differently, Dr Alexander says anyone presenting with more than two minor health issues needs a double session to give them the service they deserve. Her post, which has garnered almost 500 'likes' since it was shared less than 24 hours ago, has sparked passionate responses from followers, with many complaining that their local GPs are not as diligent as Dr Alexander. According to Dr Alexander (pictured), even routine visits for repeat prescriptions can run longer than 15 minutes if the GP covers all bases 'I once asked to book a long appointment, I said it was for mental health and I knew from experience Id need a longer appointment,' one person replied. 'The receptionist told me she wouldnt do it and the GP would decide, so essentially Id have to book a regular consult to then be told to book a long appointment, or have the GP squeeze what I needed into one appointment.' Others thanked Dr Alexander for teaching them that it was possible to book back-to-back sessions in the first place. Dr Alexander advises back-to-back sessions for women in the early stages of pregnancy (left) and patients seeking mental health care plans (right) 'I never knew to book double appointments until I came to your clinic! Now I have moved interstate but always book a double if I have a couple of things to discuss and the GP is always grateful,' said one woman. Another said she wished she lived in Melbourne so she could see Dr Alexander as her GP. A third added: 'You are clearly an awesome, caring, comprehensive GP with an eye on prevention. Not all are the same. Thank you for caring!' We can all agree, surely, that its bad optics for an elected official to leave the state they represent while its in the midst of a crisis. And optics, in such a situation, arent merely a matter of public relations. I would say that one of the roles of a leader is to serve as an anchor during times of crises, said L. Douglas Kiel, professor of public affairs and administration at the University of Texas at Dallas, on Tuesday. One doesnt have to be an expert in leadership to know that, he continued. Its kind of common sense. This is not a very high bar that needed to be met, Kiel added. Some of our state leaders could use such a reminder. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, has said that his decision to fly with his family to Cancun on Wednesday afternoon for a little vacation was obviously a mistake. Its a mistake you shouldnt dwell on, though, according to the Republican lawmaker, who booked a return flight back to Texas shortly after landing in Mexico, at which point photos had already gone viral of him toting a well-stuffed roller bag at the airport. I want to diagnose the media, Cruz said Monday, in an interview with right-wing radio host Dana Loesch. The media is suffering from acute Trump withdrawal, where for four years every day they could foam at the mouth and be obsessed with Donald Trump, and now that he has receded from their day-to-day storyline, they dont know what to do with themselves. The coverage of his ill-fated beach vacation, he continued, is a bit much. In another interview, with the podcast Ruthless, Cruz also lamented that one of his wife Heidis friends had leaked screenshots of the group chat messages in which she proposed the Mexico trip. It's a sign of how ridiculously politicized and nasty and just yknow, heres a suggestion, just dont be a--holes! Like, just treat each other as human beings, Cruz said. Good advice. The senator should look in the mirror next time he issues it. Cruz is one of several elected officials in Texas who have found themselves roundly lambasted after leaving the state during the midst of last weeks crisis. Attorney General Ken Paxton skipped off to Utah at some point midweek with his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton. He had meetings with Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, according to the latters office, on Wednesday and Friday. The Paxtons, through their respective spokespeople, have declined to specify whether taxpayers funded this trip although it would be naive to assume that we didnt. In a series of tweets Monday, Paxton asserted that he and his wife decamped only after sitting in a dark house for the better part of 72 hours, and that he effectively had no alternative. From my dark home, I pledged to go after price gougers, I opened an investigation into (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) and other power companies, Paxton tweeted. I had previously planned meetings in Utah to meet with the Utah Attorney General on imminent legal issues that required my physical presence to complete. Actually, according to his own office, Paxton issued civil investigation demands to ERCOT and 11 other power companies on Friday in other words, after leaving his dark home and arriving safely in Utah. And its not clear why his meetings with Reyes needed to be conducted in person, or why they couldnt be postponed. But such details may be irrelevant, from Paxtons perspective. While the media does its job to drum up controversies by writing stories to generate clicks and revenue, I will continue to do my job to enforce the law and ensure that law enforcement has all the tools to keep Texans safe, added the attorney general. Even before the latest controversy, Paxton was under indictment, charged with several violations of state securites law, as well as under federal investigation due to allegations by whistleblowers that he has abused his office. He, like Cruz, could take a lesson from state Rep. Gary Gates, a Republican who represents House District 28 in Fort Bend County. Gates, like Cruz and Paxton, has received some backlash since it became known that on Wednesday he took a private plane to Orlando, Fla. So many of the constituents were in the same predicament and they did not have the chance to take a flight and leave town, said Cynthia Ginyard, the chair of the Fort Bend Democratic Party, in an interview with KPRC. Thats true. But Gates has responded by addressing the questions his critics raised, rather than scolding them for asking. In a lengthy email to Ginyard, which his office forwarded to me, Gates ran down the situation. His wife is recovering from a bout of chronic bronchitis; an adult daughter, who lives with them, has special needs. On Tuesday, they lost power, and their house flooded. On Wednesday, Gates lost access to internet and cellphone service. That meant he couldnt communicate with staff, constituents or the roughly 25,000 tenants in the 8,500 apartments he owns in the Houston area, most of whom had also lost essential services. In light of all of that, he decided to work remotely for a couple of days. Leadership is not always about making a choice for public appearances, Gates argued. Fair enough, although Ginyard wasnt persuaded that Gates decision was the right one. My position is this: We all know its standard protocol that the captain remains on the ship, she told me Tuesday. That is standard protocol, and it should be. For leaders to be there during a crisis shows that they grasp the seriousness of the situation, and are doing whatever they can to help Texans respond to it. One of the things that helped Texans make it through the last wretched week, frankly, was the fact that we saw so many men and women at all levels of government or simply in their capacity as private citizens rise to the occasion in various ways. The elected officials who had other priorities last week may not appreciate the ensuing scrutiny, but they shouldnt dismiss it as idle carping about mere optics. erica.grieder@chron.com A visitor takes pictures of logos of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games during the Beijing Olympic Expo on Aug. 8, 2018. (Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images) Johnson Indicates UK Wont Boycott Beijing Winter Olympics Over Uyghur Abuse Britain doesnt favour sporting boycotts, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Feb. 24 when asked if he thought the UK should boycott the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics over the abuse of Uyghurs. At the Prime Ministers Questions in the House of Commons, Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, said: Today, millions of Uyghur people in China live in fear under a cruel regime. The BBC, international media, and human rights NGOs are all reporting on forced labour camps, women being raped and sterilized, and families being separated. This is a genocide happening in front of our eyes. Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, poses before members of the media in London on Aug. 27, 2020. (Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images) He asked if Johnson agrees that unless China ends this genocide, Britain and Team GB should boycott the Winter Olympics in Beijing next year. Johnson responded by saying that Davey was absolutely right to highlight the appalling campaign against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. We are leading international action in the U.N. to hold China to account, and well continue to work with the U.S., friends and partners around the world to do just that. But he said the UK is not normally in favour of sporting boycotts, and thats been the longstanding position of his government. Police patrol a village in Hotan prefecture, in Chinas Xinjiang region, on Feb. 17, 2018. (Ben Dooley/AFP via Getty Images) Britain has taken steps to address the human rights situation in Xinjiang, where the United Nations estimates that up to a million Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims are incarcerated in re-education camps. Last month, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab announced a series of measures to prevent British organisations from being complicit in rights violations against Uyghurs. Addressing the U.N. Human Rights Council on Feb. 22, Raab condemned the Chinese regimes deteriorating human rights situation and urged Beijing to give the United Nations urgent and unfettered access to Xinjiang. But Johnson has refused to follow the United States in declaring Beijings abuse of Uyghurs genocide. He told Parliament on Jan. 20 that the attribution of genocide is a judicial matter, though he said he personally regards whats happening to the Uyghurs as utterly abhorrent. Last month, Johnsons government instructed lawmakers from the ruling Conservative Party to vote down an amendment to the Trade Bill that would have given UK courts power to revoke trade deals with countries responsible for genocides. British lawmakers from both the ruling and opposition parties have said that targeted Magnitsky sanctions should have been imposed on Chinese officials responsible for the abuse in Xinjiang. In July 2020, the UK government introduced new sanctions to target individuals involved in human rights abuses or organised crime. But so far it has not used the new policy tool to target Chinese officials. Lily Zhou and Cathy He contributed to this report. The post-Trump economy impacts the low-end of the Kansas City news game exceptionally hard as readers are no longer motivated to open their wallets now that the supreme MAGA leader no longer occupies the White House. To wit . . . THE KANSAS CITY DONATION NEWS MODEL HAS QUICKLY DRIED UP!!! Apparently, upbeat news items touting the leadership of Prez Biden haven't sparked the same emotion which GRABBED local news readers during Prez Trump's tenure. Of course we know all about the low-end of the cowtown news game and we didn't really need any help crafting a post on the topic. HOWEVER, this tidbit was confirmed to us by a fellow local news traveler asking about economic opportunity in another writing avenue . . . We did our best to offer help and merely inquired about a local publication that cast aside this tireless worker despite claims that the publication was supposedly doing well with support from readers. Here's the word . . . "It's over. After the election there wasn't any more money coming in. You can't blame COVID either because people were donating right and left when the lockdowns started. This is like second depression for local news. Things were never good but there was a hope that 'memberships' would provide some stability since the bottom fell out of advertising. That didn't turn out to be true. "People loved supporting editorials and reporting taking on (Prez) Trump and his KC supporters. Now the demand is gone." That's kinda sad and the only hope is this dire situation is the return of MAGA to the political discourse. Meanwhile, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is the new local bad guy but he doesn't have the same kind of super-villain clout of the former Commander-In-Chief. Full Disclosure: On less than three occasions this blog begged for money online just like every other purveyor of the written word and the response was about three times better than what I expected. Just like politicos, there is always money out there for people who are willing to provide written support for the powers that be . . . But that's not really a viable biz model, just a good hustle that's subject to shifting political winds, very much like everything else. Hint: Yes, things are changing soon on this blog as well. But they always have "evolved" slowly. In the final analysis we share this bit of bloggy bad news if only to provide a glimpse at the adventures of workers at the bottom level of journalism manufacturing who are only a tad more cleaver than so many social media denizens who give their labor away for free in hopes that content creation leads them to untold riches. Good luck! Developing . . . Films have ways of tangling your expectations, unlike other art forms. Perhaps this is due to their time-based, immersive quality or because of the profound ways they can viscerally grip you and elevate the medium in unexpected, transcendent directions. Its difficult to place ones finger on the exact reasoning since the very medium in part defies verbal explanation. Nonetheless, when the moment happens, the countless hours, days, and years of wading through mediocre films wash away to remind you of what drew you to the art form in the first place. Minding the Gap provides such a rewarding moment. Straight from its opening, Minding the Gap reveals a skilled filmmaker behind the camera. After a failed attempt to climb a rickety fire escape, three boys skateboard down the ramp of a parking garage and out into the streets of the rust belt town of Rockford, Illinois. The camera deftly follows their movements, imminently tracking each bob and weave. They skate under the closed gate of the garage with the camera mimicking their actions. Whoever is behind the camera effortlessly frames the boys graceful skating and fully anticipates their movements. The camera exposes an intimacy between filmmaker and subject from the outset. Not surprisingly, we soon discover that the filmmaker, Bing Liu, has been friends with them since childhood. Although many skate films are populated with deft footage of skateboarders in motion, Minding the Gap pays painstaking attention to details where the action is not located. The camera lingers on the thick, well-worn, wooden green and purple door of a local skate shop that serves as a hub where this community of skaters congregates. At another moment, the camera briefly traces over the worn groves endless boards have etched upon the stone surfaces of a local park. The documentary exposes the textures of everyday life that define this skating community. The film ostensibly is about the surrogate family that the skating community fosters among a diverse group of boys. This is not unique for skate films. Stacy Peraltas Dogtown and Z Boys (2001) covered similar terrain in 2001. But as Minding the Gap continues, its narrative mines the underlying causes and similarities that draw these boys together: dysfunctional family lives populated by absentee or abusive fathers and mothers who struggle under the wake of the emotional and physical violence that defines their homes. The film chronicles the abuse the boys suffered and the ongoing violence that they endure, and even more troublingly, the violence they perpetuate themselves at times. Liu can offer such intimate, detailed portraits both because of his emotional connections with those he films and through his unassuming disposition that allows him to ask in unthreatening ways deeply personal and intrusive questions. At one moment, he asks Roberta, one skaters mother, if she has a new man in her life. She sits in her living room smiling to herself at first and then attempts to respond. Off-camera we hear her new mans voice intruding, objecting that the questions are too personal. He finally cuts her response short by announcing, Roberta, five minutes is up. Even before the cameras presence, this guy cannot modulate his controlling, abusive behavior, leading the viewer to question: what occurs when there are no cameras present? Similarly, Liu provides a painfully intimate interview with his own mother who endured repeated violence from her husband and who also beats his stepchildren, Liu among them, regularly as well. He asks her how she could endure such treatment. She responds, like many of those abused, that he had good sides to him as well. But she generously answers Lius questions and holds herself accountable for allowing the abuse to happen as she breaks down during the interview and insists she will do anything, including this interview, to make amends with her son. The conversation is gut-wrenching in its honesty and the graceful way Liu inquires about the abuse without ever being accusatory. We witness a mutual understanding being forged between mother and son. She asks him about his attitude towards his stepfather: When you think about him, you get angry, right? He replies, Not necessarily. I feel shaky and anxious. I dont really think about him too much. She insightfully responds, If you dont think about it, I dont think thats going to work. In many ways, this line drives the entire film that plunges into the traumas and resentments that define all of the characters familial and interpersonal relationships. Zack, an older friend of Bing and the other skaters and who serves in part as a pseudo older brother for them, perpetuates the cycle of abuse towards his girlfriend. The pressures of having a baby at a young age, being economically unstable with precarious employment, and living in a town that youth are quickly fleeing since to remain is a death sentence of abuse, poverty, and drug addiction Zack descends into alcoholism and resentment against Nina, his girlfriend. Liu perfectly captures the couples untenable life and increasing pressures in a single shot of their living room. The couple sits on a dilapidated couch. A coffee table littered with glasses and other abandoned items presses into their knees. A babys crib squats against the table and couch. The camera films uncomfortably close to the couple, suggesting the rooms lack of space. The home is a pressure cooker where personal space doesnt exist, allowing tensions to run high. Later on in the film, we hear Nina screaming on a video recording one of Zacks friends took of her wanting to kill Zack. But soon after, Nina explains her side of the story: Zack beat her before that moment, which his friend conveniently didnt capture. Zack becomes increasingly visibly drunk throughout the film, his behavior more erratic. Liu eventually questions Zack during a two-hour drunken interview by films end where Zack admits, Sometimes bitches need to get slapped. At this precise moment, the film cuts to Lius reaction, looking on in shock. But the cut is deceptive. We soon realize that Lius reaction isnt over Zacks comment but is from footage of him hearing about his mothers abuse when interviewing her. But Lius reaction encompasses both moments: the shock of belatedly confronting a reality that was always hidden in plain sight. The editing masterfully weaves how these two moments of the past and present converge. These histories of personal violence come from a larger context and much longer history that shapes the lives of many barely surviving in Rockford, Illinois who sadly and tragically take out their frustrations upon those they love. The film doesnt excuse the abuse, but it situates it within a life of endless poverty where the only escape is to leave. Liu escapes to California. Keire, the one Black friend of the group of skateboarders, flees to Arizona, which we learn from him during the films audio commentary. Zack remains. Tellingly, based on the films audio commentary between him, Bing, and Keire, Zack fails to acknowledge his abusive behavior and the toxic masculinity that still defines his life. This is a shame since the ending of Minding the Gap suggests Zack might finally be reckoning with his behavior. He drunkenly talks to Bing on a hillside overlooking a river and reflects, I cant let myself think the reason I struggled so hard is because I fucking suck. Thats what the drinking is about. I just want to hide. I just want to run away. And he fears what his abusive impact will be upon shaping his son. But during the 2020 commentary, Zack backtracks, suggesting that Nina was lying about the abuse and the proper way to deal with anything is to suppress ones emotions. Keire pushes back, suggesting that Zack was abusive and how he believes Nina. Keire regrets an earlier instance within the film when he thinks Zack would be incapable of such behavior since, ultimately, anyone can be violent, given the right conditions. Tellingly, Zack says he gets so much shit for saying, sometimes bitches need to get slapped. But he thinks its because he said bitches, not because of his approval of violence against women. Keire keeps trying to press Zack into understanding that thats a misogynistic comment reflecting abusive behavior without reducing Zack into being nothing more than an abuser. Yet Zack dismissively replies, People are just pussies nowadays. The films audio commentary is deeply unsettling, not simply because Zack remains unrepentant and unaccountable for his past behavior. Still, were seemingly eavesdropping in on dialogue among a group of people who used to be friends but really only have a documentary uniting them together and nothing more. The commentary is full of uncomfortable silences and, in many ways, undermines our assumptions yet again. Just as one might wrongly have dismissed Minding the Gap as being nothing more than a mindless skate film, one might equally assume that Zack might be more reflective and redeemable after having such a cathartic moment by the end of the documentary. But life doesnt operate in such an Aristotelian dramatic fashion where catharsis leads to changing ones behavior. People have an amazing ability to continue along with their shitty ways, despite showing glimmers of hope and self-reflectivity. Keire is the emotional center of the film. Hes the only character who remains close with his mother and extended family. We often catch him playing with younger cousins. Hes a sensitive person who deals with awkwardness and anger through an inordinate amount of laughter. As mentioned earlier, hes the only Black character of the crew of skaters. Although race is barely remarked upon by the characters, racism has ways of rearing its head periodically. For example, in one scene, Kerie hangs out with Zack and a few other white friends in the backyard drinking and smoking weed. Zack and his white friends huddle around a cell phone, watching footage of some racist comedian spouting the n-word. Keire stands to the side. He looks into the fire, disturbed, dazed, viscerally feeling separated from his adopted community. The sequence testifies to Lius perceptive gaze that catches the fleeting details occurring away from the action that allows us briefly into the inner lives of the people hes filming. Minding the Gap is not a treatise on working-class life and race in the United States. But through its painstaking attention to detail, it details how poverty and race impact peoples lives and the immense amount of effort it takes to escape from a dead-end, dysfunctional environment. For those who proclaim that people are solely responsible for their lifes choices, Minding the Gap shows what costs come with attempting to break cycles of violence, poverty, and addiction. It means splitting from your family, abandoning your friends, and ultimately reclaiming a sense of agency that much of your life had attempted to crush. This is the secret of skateboarding in Lius: it provides a temporary sanctuary from these crushing pressures when you can momentarily feel weightless, free from your past and where the future briefly hangs as free in the air as your board. Whether you come down smoothly or crash into the pavement is irrelevant for that temporary feeling of abandon. Tellingly scrawled in marker across Keires board is the motto: This Device Cures Heartache, which in many ways encapsulates the entire skating endeavor of these boys. But skateboarding alone is not enough. Minding the Gap ends on a positive note with Kerie escaping Rockford to move to Denver, Colorado. But, again, we see the emotional costs. He lies with his mother and cousins on a bed. She asks quietly and unconvincingly if he cant wait until next week to move. He cries as he hugs her. We watch him chip away ice from a mini-fridge that he struggles to lodge in the backseat of his beat-up car. Clothes and boxes are stacked inside the car, blocking its side windows. We watch him ride off down the street. In the Criterion Blu-ray extras, we learn the Keire has been thriving. Tony Hawk, skateboard guru, reflects upon how he found Keries skateboarding style so majestic that he has sought out Keire to make commercials and skate videos with. In the audio commentary, Keire mentions that he has a girlfriend and is a musician in Arizona. Yet, he notes, the mini-fridge he lugged all the way to Denver didnt work when he finally plugged it in at his new home, beautifully crystalizing a final metaphor regarding our futile desire to carry the past with us as we pursue new, unexpected directions in our lives that no longer have any place for it. During a December visit to New York City, writer E. Jean Carroll says she went shopping with a fashion consultant to find the best outfit for one of the most important days of her life - when shell sit face-to-face with the man she accuses of raping her decades ago, former US President Donald Trump, Reuters reported. The author and journalist hopes that day will come this year. Her lawyers are seeking to depose Trump in a defamation lawsuit that Carroll filed against the former president in November 2019 after he denied her accusation that he raped her at a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. Trump said he never knew Carroll and accused her of lying to sell her new book, adding: Shes not my type. Carroll, 77, a former Elle magazine columnist, seeks unspecified damages in her lawsuit and a retraction of Trumps statements. It is one of two defamation cases involving sexual misconduct allegations against Trump that could move forward faster now that he has left the presidency. While in office, Trumps lawyers delayed the case in part by arguing that the pressing duties of his office made responding to civil lawsuits impossible. The only barrier to proceeding with the civil suits was that hes the president, said Jennifer Rodgers, a former federal prosecutor and now an adjunct professor of clinical law at the New York University School of Law. An attorney for Trump and another representative of the former president did not respond to requests for comment. Trump faces a similar defamation lawsuit from Summer Zervos, a former contestant on his reality television show The Apprentice. In 2016, Zervos accused Trump of sexual misconduct, saying that he kissed her against her will at a 2007 meeting in New York and later groped her at a California hotel as the two met to discuss job opportunities. Trump denied the allegations and called Zervos a liar, prompting her to sue him for defamation in 2017, seeking damages and a retraction. Zervos and Carroll are among more than two dozen women who have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct that they say occurred in the years before he became president. New Delhi: Veteran BJP leader Venkiaha Naidu was elected as the Vice President of India on Saturday by the Members of Parliament. Naidu received 516 out of electoral college of 785 votes, while his opponent Gopal Krishna Gandhi got 244 votes, 14 MPs abstained from voting. Here are the live updates: #8:50 PM Venkaiah Naidu elected as next Vice President of India: 'Humbled by honor bestowed on me' -Humbled by honor bestowed on me: Naidu -As chairman of Rajya Sabha I will uphold dignity and decorum of the house with cooperation of all members: Naidu -Particulary over whelmed as the honor has been conferred on a common man like me with a background of agriculture: Naidu #WATCH: #VicePresident elect #VenkaiahNaidu with his wife Usha at their residence in Delhi after winning the elections. pic.twitter.com/fSeqAuW0uw ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 Delhi: PM Modi & BJP President Amit Shah felicitate Vice President elect #VenkaiahNaidu on winning election #VicePresidentialElection pic.twitter.com/xtnaC8xGep ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 #8:00 PM: Honor for me to become VP from a family of an ordinary farmer.This speaks for the beauty & strength of our democracy, tweets Venkaiah Naidu #8:00 PM: Congratulate Shri #VenkaiahNaidu on his election as VP of India. I wish him success in future endeavors, tweets HM Rajnath Singh #8:00 PM: Great symbol of cross party acceptance of leadership & wisdom. Future of Rajya Sabha is safe in his (V Naidu) hands: Union Min Piyush Goyal With all humility, I express my gratitude to every MP who supported my candidature cutting across party lines. M Venkaiah Naidu (@MVenkaiahNaidu) August 5, 2017 I promise to uphold the Constitution and the high standards set by my esteemed predecessors. M Venkaiah Naidu (@MVenkaiahNaidu) August 5, 2017 #7:45 PM: Venkaiah Naidu to go to Bengaluru tomorrow, then to Tirupati for darshan. Swearing-In as VP in August 10th: Sources #7:45 PM: Congratulate Venkaiah Naidu ji on being elected VP of India. My best wishes for success in your new responsibilities, tweets Odisha CM #7:44 PM: Congratulate V.Naidu Ji, our next VP; wish him well. In tradition of democracy, GK Gandhi Ji fought with dignity for certain ideals: WB CM #7:20 PM: Congratulations to Venkaiah Naidu Garu on being elected Indias Vice President. My best wishes for a fruitful & motivating tenure, tweets PM #7:20 PM: I am confident Venkaiah Naidu will serve nation as a diligent & dedicated Vice President, committed to the the goal of nation building: PM #7:20 PM: Thank those who voted for me;was expecting handsome performance by united vote of opposition parties & I'm more than satisfied: GK Gandhi Congratulate #VenkaiahNaidu Garu on his victory, wish him all the best for his new office: Gopalkrishna Gandhi #VicePresidentialElection pic.twitter.com/MiBx12O3J4 ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 Opposition will never compromise on ideology whether we face defeat or victory. Thank all those who voted against NDA: GN Azad, Congress pic.twitter.com/ucCN3ZvLjC ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 #7:10 PM: NDA's Venkaiah Naidu is India's new Vice-President, wins with over 500 votes; Gandhi gets 240+ votes #6:10 PM: Vice Presidential elections: Vote counting begins, NDA's Venkaiah Naidu poised to win #6:00 PM:14 MPs absent from voting; 2 from BJP, 2 from INC, 2 from IUML, 4 from TMC, 1 from NCP; 1 from PMK & 2 Independent #5:20 PM: Counting for Vice Presidential Election to begin at 6 pm. #5:00 PM: Voting for Vice Presidential Election ends. Total 771 out of 785 votes polled, 98.21% poll percentage recorded. #761 out of 785 votes polled till 3 PM # 713 votes polled till now. the results will be out by today evening. # The picture will be clear by this evening, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said after casting his vote. Picture will be clear by this evening: Home Minister Rajnath Singh on #VicePresidentialElection pic.twitter.com/zosdCdQZ4s ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 # Not only here but whenever voting takes place, every citizen should vote: Sachin Tendulkar, RS MP Not only here but whenever voting takes place, every citizen should vote:Sachin Tendulkar,RS MP after casting vote #VicePresidentialElection pic.twitter.com/6vJm7yPpLV ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 # Rajya Sabha MP Rekha and Lok Sabha MP Dimple Yadav cast their vote for Vice Presidential Election at the Parliament. #Delhi: Rajya Sabha MP Rekha and Lok Sabha MP Dimple Yadav after casting their vote for #VicePresidentialElection at the Parliament. pic.twitter.com/TaAOutDyjb ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 # Delhi: Voting underway for Vice Presidential Election in Parliament; Congress president Sonia Gandhi cast her vote. Delhi: Voting underway for #VicePresidentialElection in Parliament; Congress president Sonia Gandhi cast her vote. pic.twitter.com/yoHuVM3EBO ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 # Former PM Manmohan Singh, Congress VP Rahul Gandhi, former deputy PM Lal Krishna Advani at Parliament #VicePresidentialElection: Former PM Manmohan Singh, Congress VP Rahul Gandhi, former deputy PM Lal Krishna Advani at Parliament. pic.twitter.com/7WokgSGHd3 ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 # I think we will miss him (Venkaiah Naidu) in one place, but you will see more in action in another place: Goa CM & RS MP Manohar Parrikar I think we will miss him (#VenkaiahNaidu) in one place, but you will see more in action in another place: Goa CM & RS MP #ManoharParrikar. pic.twitter.com/MFOC3hHHqd ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 # Voting underway for Vice Presidential Election in Parliament; MPs cast their vote. # Voting underway for Vice Presidential Election in Parliament, PM Narendra Modi cast his vote. Voting underway for #VicePresidentialElection in Parliament, PM Narendra Modi cast his vote. pic.twitter.com/EkndDuBQK0 ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 # Can't call it 1 sided as there were 2 candidates, Meiraji got a lot of votes but only one emerges as winner: Gopalkrishna Gandhi on Pres polls Can't call it 1 sided as there were 2 candidates,Meiraji got a lot of votes but only one emerges as winner:Gopalkrishna Gandhi on Pres polls pic.twitter.com/xLHN0X9PBl ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 # It is a fight based on constitutional principles, where I maintained complete civility & same has been done from another side too: G Gandhi # NDA's candidate is an experienced person, no competition as such between us, only technically there is: Opposition VP candidate Gopalkrishna Gandhi # MPs have started arriving to cast their votes in Parliament. #VicePresidentialElection: MPs arrive to cast their votes in Parliament. pic.twitter.com/BwYbFBQEEy ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 # NDAs candidate M Venkaiah Naidu reached Parliament to cast his vote. #Delhi: NDA's Vice Presidential candidate Venkaiah Naidu reached Parliament to cast vote #VicePresidentialElection pic.twitter.com/CeqGzi2zs3 ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 # Voting to elect Indias next vice-president begins in Parliament: TV reports # I am not contesting against anybody, individual or party; I'm contesting for Vice President of India: Venkaiah Naidu # Delhi: NDA's Vice Presidential candidate Venkaiah Naidu reached Parliament to cast vote # I am a non-party man. Majority of parties in India are supporting my candidature, confident that they all will vote in election: Venkaiah I have written a polite letter to everybody, response is very good.Confident that they all will support me:NDA's VP candidate Venkaiah Naidu pic.twitter.com/2Iwjt8AftO ANI (@ANI_news) August 5, 2017 # Voting yet to take place, I am going to cast my vote: Venkaiah Naidu, NDA's Vice Presidential candidate For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. She's rarely spotted without her beloved dog Kuma. And Helena Christensen penned a gushing tribute to her pooch to mark her 5th birthday on Instagram on Tuesday, saying Kuma 'saved my spirit'. The Danish supermodel, 52, celebrated the occasion by sharing a series of throwback snaps with the Australian Shepherd. Pucker up! Helena Christensen posted a gushing tribute to her beloved dog Kuma to mark her 5th birthday and even gave her a kiss in a post she shared on Instagram on Tuesday Helena wrote: 'This little angel is 5 today. I never had a dog before her and had no idea how much love and joy these four-legged friends bring into our lives. 'Kuma is so smart, loyal, protective, incredibly loving and more than anything, very funny. She makes us laugh all day long. 'I was going through a rough time when we got her and its fair to say she pretty much saved my spirit. 'They say we dont deserve dogs and perhaps thats true, but I will do my damn best to deserve Kuma every single day shes with me '. 'We don't deserve dogs': Helena gushed over her pet in the post and added that Kuma makes the family 'laugh all day long' Birthday girl: The Danish supermodel, 52, shared a series of snaps of her and the Australian Shepherd and praised her pet for being 'smart' and 'loyal' In one photo, Helena cosied up to Kuma and even gave her a kiss as she praised her 'smart' and 'loyal' pet. The mother-of-one sported a pink top and showcased her svelte pins as she puckered up to the dog. She wore her chestnut tresses in plaits and posed with her eyes closed as Kuma gave her a peck. In another photo, Helena fixed the camera with a smile as she and Kuma, who has one blue eye and one brown, sat in front of a scenic skyline. The Copenhagen native also included a snap of the pet and her 21-year-old son Mingus, who gaze at the camera as they share a stick between their mouths. Helena shares her son with The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus, who now has a two-year-old daughter with Diane Kruger. Sweet: Helena cuddled into her pet in one snap and wrote that her four-legged friend 'saved' her spirit Puppy dog eyes: The Copenhagen native also included a snap of the pet and her 21-year-old son Mingus, who gaze at the camera as they share a stick between their mouths A couple of years ago Helena, who has also broken into photography, gushed in the Guardian that she and Mingus are 'so in love' with Kuma. 'Getting our dog was absolutely the best thing I have done in my life besides having my son,' spilled the fashionista. 'Mentally, she makes me feel so much better. She sleeps in the bed with me. When Im on trips I listen to recordings of her snoring.' Helena revealed to the newspaper: 'If I am feeling anxious, like at an airport, I listen to it over and over. Its like meditation.' (Natural News) Four people in Oregon tested positive for the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) even after having been vaccinated, state public health officials reported on Friday, Feb. 12. The news makes Oregon one of the first few states to confirm breakthrough cases. These are people who test positive for the coronavirus at least 14 days after receiving the second and final dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Patrick Allen, director of the Oregon Health Authority (OHA), said such cases are to be expected because both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are only roughly 95 percent effective. Therefore, some people who received either vaccine may very well still get infected. Officials said two of the cases are in Yamhill County, while the other two are in Lane County. The four showed mild or no symptoms at all, leading officials to suggest that the vaccine could have still reduced the severity of their infection. Dean Sidelinger, the OHAs state health officer, said Oregon could see more breakthrough cases. Nevertheless, getting as many Oregonians as possible vaccinated remains a critical objective, he added. But even with the states aggressive vaccination efforts, public health officials said coronavirus cases are likely to rise as communities open activities. As such, Oregonians are still advised to wear face masks, avoid or limit outdoor gatherings and practice social distancing when inside establishments. Health experts are monitoring the four cases and have started genome sequencing. Results may come as early as next week. Oregon now has confirmed cases of U.K. variant Currently, 10 percent of Oregons population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. More than 17,000 Oregonians are being vaccinated each day, on average, but authorities hope to get this up to 25,000 due to the presence of the coronavirus variant B.1.1.7 in the state. B.1.1.7 is the more contagious variant first seen in the United Kingdom last December. Last month, around 10 states reported confirmed cases of the variant, which had been linked to a total of 144 infections at the time. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Feb. 14 that there are 1,173 cases of the U.K. variant in 40 states. Two other variants, B.1.3.5.1 and P.1, have also been linked to infections in a few states. B.1.3.5.1 was first detected in South Africa last December when coronavirus cases there surged. Meanwhile, the P.1 variant, which is now one of two Brazilian variants, was detected late last month amid a surge of cases in the city of Manaus. As of Feb. 15, a total of 17 cases of the South African variant have been confirmed in California, Illinois, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. Only three infections in two states were linked to the Brazilian variant. Sidelinger worries that both variants of the coronavirus could be detected soon in Oregon. Unfortunately, given the novel nature of the known variants so far, experts know very little about their effects and their transmissibility. (Related: Mutated form of SARS-CoV-2 now predominates global infections.) One of the prevailing concerns regarding the emergence of these new variants is whether they will undermine vaccination efforts. Scientists now know that the U.K. variant is more transmissible. It remains unclear whether it is deadlier than the original strain, but English health experts are of the idea that it is. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told CBS News on Feb. 14 that the U.K. variant might become the dominant strain in the U.S. by the end of March, according to their latest projections. Currently, only about four percent of coronavirus cases in the country are linked to B.1.1.7. In light of the new variants spreading in some states, the CDC emphasized the importance of compliance with public health mitigation strategies, such as mask-wearing, social distancing and vaccination. Some states, including Iowa and Montana have eased some of their restrictions, which Walensky said is a mistake. Go to Pandemic.news for more articles with updates on the coronavirus pandemic. Sources include: TheEpochTimes.com 1 TheEpochTimes.com 2 Advertisement Congress on Tuesday held a candlelight vigil for the more than 500,000 Americans who lost their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic as daily deaths nearly double while hospitalizations continue to fall. Images from the vigil show House Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing alongside Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Several members of Congress were seen standing behind them on the stairs of the US Capitol. All of the politicians were seen holding candles as they observed a moment of silence to honor the 502,594 Americans who died from COVID-19 since the pandemic hit the US last year. On Tuesday, the daily death toll climbed higher than the day before when the U.S. recorded an additional 2,196 fatalities, according to the COVID Tracking Project. The increase in deaths could be attributed to delays in reporting in Texas due to the recent storm. The number of new daily cases rose slightly to 67,879. Meanwhile, hospitalizations have continued to decrease, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project. On Tuesday, the US reported 55,058 hospitalizations. However, the COVID Tracking Project noted that hospitalizations are falling at a slower pace than in recent days. Congress is currently working on a $1.9trillion COVID-19 economic relief plan, which is being proposed by a thin Democratic majority in the House and Senate. Congress on Tuesday held a candlelight vigil for the more than 500,000 Americans who lost their during the COVID-19 pandemic as daily deaths nearly double while hospitalizations continue to fall Images from the vigil show House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (pictured) standing alongside Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Several members of Congress were seen standing behind them on the stairs of the US Capitol All of the politicians were seen holding candles as they observed a moment of silence to honor the 502,594 Americans who died from COVID-19 since the pandemic hit the US last year Congress is currently working on a $1.9trillion COVID-19 economic relief plan, which is being proposed by a thin Democratic majority in the House and Senate Tuesday's vigil came just a day after President Joe Biden addressed the 'grim, heartbreaking milestone' of pandemic deaths in the White House Cross Hall. 'We often hear people described as ordinary Americans. There's no such thing,' he said Monday evening. 'There's nothing ordinary about them. The people we lost were extraordinary.' 'Just like that,' he added, 'so many of them took their last breath alone.' The COVID-19 death total in the United States had just crossed 400,000 when Biden took the oath of office. An additional 100,000 have died in the past month. The death toll from the pandemic climbed a bit higher on Tuesday when the US recorded an additional 2,196 deaths, nearly double that reported on Monday, when the US recorded 1,235 new deaths. Meanwhile, hospitalizations have continued to decrease, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project. Hospitalizations have declined drastically since last month when the US saw several days in which hospitalizations reached more than 130,000. On Tuesday, the US reported 55,058 hospitalizations. However, the COVID Tracking Project noted that hospitalizations are falling at a slower pace than in recent days. The death toll from the pandemic climbed a bit higher on Tuesday when the US recorded an additional 2,196 deaths, nearly double that reported on Monday, when the US recorded 1,235 new deaths. Linda Flowers visits her father's grave, Bishop James N. Flowers, who passed away from Covid-19 in April 2020, at a cemetery in Hyattsville, Maryland, on Tuesday Meanwhile, hospitalizations have continued to decrease, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project. Bryanna Danas, 14, pays her respects at the burial site of her father, Gregory Blanks, 50, who died from complications from the coronavirus disease Hospitalizations have declined drastically since last month when the US saw several days in which hospitalizations reached more than 130,000. On Tuesday, the US reported 55,058 hospitalizations However, the COVID Tracking Project noted that hospitalizations are falling at a slower pace than in recent days Infections have also stayed on a steady decline with 67,879 new cases reported on Tuesday. With the constant decline in cases, some states have started preparing the reopening of businesses like movie theaters. In New York City, Gov Andrew Cuomo said movie theaters can open their doors again at limited capacity starting March 5. Movie theaters can only operate at 25 per cent capacity, with no more than 50 people per screening, Cuomo said Monday. In the coming days, indoor dining in New York is expected to increase to 35 per cent capacity. As of Tuesday afternoon, 13.3 per cent of Americans have had one or more doses of COVID-19 vaccines. More than 64 million doses have been administered, according to Bloomberg data. More than 28.2 million people in the US have been infected with the virus since it hit the US last year But back-to-back winter storms threw a wrench in the rollout. From February 10 to 18, the US was giving an average of 1.6 or 1.7 million shots a day. By Monday, that figure was down to 1.4 million doses a day. Keeping pace in the vaccine race is more critical than ever as fast-spreading variants threaten to reverse the promising trends in US coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths, officials like Dr Anthony Fauci and CDC director Rochelle Walensky have warned in recent weeks. What's more, limited supply of the two approved COVID-19 vaccines hampered the pace of vaccinations even before last week's snow, ice, and power outages hit. Vaccine makers told Congress on Tuesday that they will considerably boost the US supply in the coming weeks as well. Biden has said that every American who wants a vaccine will be able to get one by the end of July. But demand continues to outpace limited supplies distributed by the US government. Pfizer and Moderna will deliver at least another 135 million doses of coronavirus vaccines over the next five weeks. The two companies have considerably ramped up their production of vaccine doses and found solutions to previous manufacturing issues that caused bottlenecks in production. And Johnson & Johnson said it is ready to ship four million doses of its vaccine upon emergency FDA authorization - which could come as soon as Friday - and could deliver 20 million doses by the end of next month. In a span of five days last week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered two diametrically opposed messages to Washington, highlighting his vacillations on ties with the United States and, more generally, with the West a balancing act that he can no longer sustain. In a Feb. 15 speech following the deaths of 13 Turkish captives at the hands of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a designated terrorist group, Erdogan fired a broadside at Washington for siding with terrorists, incensed with a US condemnation of the executions that seemed to take Turkeys version of the events with a grain of salt. Referring to the PKK and its Syrian affiliates, Erdogan said, You claim to not side with terrorists, to not side with the PKK, the YPG and the PYD, but you are clearly siding with and standing behind them. He charged that the United States had delivered thousands of truckloads of ammunition to terrorists in northern Iraq. Then, in a video address to the American Turkish community Feb. 20, Erdogan upheld the strategic cooperation between the two countries. We believe that our common interests with America outweigh our disagreements by far. We are willing to further strengthen our cooperation with the new American administration, based on a long-term perspective and a win-win approach, he said. Such dizzying turnabouts have less to do with Turkish-US ties and more with Turkeys domestic politics and Erdogans indecision. To start with, it is worth noting that one can no longer speak of a Turkish foreign policy as we knew it. Since Turkeys 2018 transition to an executive presidency system tailor made for Erdogan, what Ankara has pursued is hardly a national foreign policy, but rather foreign relations designed to protect and strengthen Erdogans political standing at home, very much in the style of public relations. To better understand Erdogans contradictions, one needs to view Ankaras diplomatic choices not as foreign policy but calculations to ensure Erdogans political survival or publicity stunts to boost his image at home. Ankaras strategy to play the United States and Russia against one another in crisis regions such as Syria, Iraq, Libya, the eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea basin and Nagorno-Karabakh, taking advantage of grey areas in US-Russian ties, has come to an end as a result of more assertive moves by the United States, Russia and Europe and, most critically, the change of guard in Washington. The Joe Biden administration and the Kremlin are both signaling that the time has come for Erdogan to choose his side. Yet Ankara seems confused on whether it should make a decisive turn toward the United States and Europe, Turkeys traditional allies, or opt for closer partnerships with Russia and China, as the countrys vocal Euroasianists preach. In a rift that has grown increasingly visible since last year, Erdogans supporters are split on which direction would better serve his interests at home. In February 2020, for instance, Burhanettin Duran head of the pro-government think tank SETA and a member of a foreign policy board advising the president wrote that the United States should become more active in Syrias rebel-held province of Idlib to curb Russia. The article, penned amid Turkish-Russian tensions in Idlib at the time, prompted harsh response by the daily Aydinlik, the mouthpiece of Turkeys Euroasianists, who have ardently backed Ankaras rapprochement with Moscow. And after Bidens victory in the US elections, Duran wrote that new geopolitical equilibriums were forcing Ankara and Washington to cooperate, urging the two sides to turn over a fresh leaf. Evidently, Duran and a number of other foreign policy experts close to Erdogan believe that leaning to the United States and Europe and keeping transactional ties with the West will best serve Erdogans domestic agenda. In a reflection of this thinking, Ankara seems to be trying to leverage the crisis with Washington over its purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense systems to extract concessions that would play into its hand at home. From Ankaras perspective, a good give-and-take would see it give up on the S-400s in return for a free hand to pursue the PKK in Iraq and Syria. Such military operations promise the biggest gains in domestic politics. The option of leaning to the United States and Europe, however, is a nonstarter with the governments de facto ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which has trapped Erdogan into a nationalist and isolationist discourse as well as Euroasianist and anti-Western cliques. In intriguing timing in early February, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu a figure close to the MHP who has become the cheerleader of Turkeys nationalists in recent years accused Washington of being the real culprit behind the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, just as presidential aides were scrambling to arrange a phone call between Erdogan and Biden. Soylus abrupt outburst apparently sabotaged the effort, with Washington denouncing the allegations as unfounded and irresponsible claims inconsistent with Turkeys status as a NATO ally and strategic partner of the United States. Given Erdogans ample record of pragmatic U-turns, many observers expect he will ultimately opt for fence-mending with the United States and Europe, though with a view of pursuing businesslike, transactional ties rather than a committed alliance. Skeptics, on the other hand, believe he has reached a point of no return in an anti-Western Euroasianist shift that is also authoritarian and isolationist. This author, however, believes that Erdogan is still undecided, struggling to accept that 2021 will be his moment of truth; hence his frequent vacillations, which exact a price on the whole nation as Turkeys international credibility and predictability suffer. Some idea of Erdogans intentions is likely to emerge soon. His Justice and Development Party (AKP) will hold a grand convention March 24 to elect its leaders for the next three years. The new leadership will shape AKP policies ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for 2023. Erdogan is also reportedly planning to replace some ministers and party leaders in the run-up to the convention. All those changes will offer ample clues about which direction Erdogan is taking. Turkey watchers will remember the international media debates several years ago on whether Turkeys axis was shifting under Erdogan. Fasten your seatbelts, well know the answer this year. Nairobi, Kenya (PANA) - President Uhuru Kenyatta has reiterated Kenya's strong commitment to advancing Africa's agenda at UN Security Council especially on matters of climate change and security on the continent Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 19:12:51|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Beijing Metro Line 11, the branch line for the Beijing Winter Olympics, is scheduled to be completed at the end of this year. The subway line, located in Shijingshan District of western Beijing, is totally underground with a length of about 4.2km and four stations. The Shougang Station is near the Winter Olympic venue, Shougang Ski Jumping Platform. Zhao Junsong, the project leader, said, "Fifty percent of the structural construction has been completed. The workers even didn't stop work during this year's Spring Festival." Enditem Michigan Tech is a new participant in CyberCorps, a scholarship program for cybersecurity students funded by the National Science Foundation. Michigan Technological University is one of the six latest universities to join the National Science Foundation (NSF) CyberCorps: Scholarship for Service (SFS) program, a nationwide program to recruit and train the next generation of information technology professionals, industrial control system security professionals and security managers. As a participating university, Michigan Tech will receive a five-year, $3.3 million NSF grant to provide up to three years of full scholarship support for 20 undergraduate and graduate students. In return, following graduation, recipients must work in a cybersecurity-related job for federal, state, local or tribal government for a period equal to the length of the scholarship, among other requirements. The U.S. is facing a significant shortage of well-trained and well-prepared cybersecurity professionals, said Yu Cai, professor of applied computing and the principal investigator of the grant. Michigan Tech has developed a national and international reputation in cybersecurity education, research and outreach activities. We are thrilled to be part of the solution to the nations cybersecurity workforce challenge. Applications for Michigan Techs 2021-2022 cohort are now being accepted. Application guidelines and requirements can be found on the SFS Program at Michigan Tech web page. The deadline to apply is June 1, 2021. Student informational sessions will be announced shortly. The SFS program at Michigan Tech involves multiple programs and departments, including the College of Computing and its Department of Applied Computing and Department of Computer Science, the College of Engineerings Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the College of Businesss Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems program. The SFS program is also partnering with the Pavlis Honors College to engage SFS scholars in a blend of faculty mentoring, peer mentoring and customized pathways. Michigan Tech joins 78 current CyberCorps: Scholarship for Service universities across the country. In its announcement, NSF noted that Michigan Tech has a long history of K-12 outreach, which it expects to leverage as part of its project. Superior Ideas CS4All: Bringing Computer Science to K-12 Students Computer Science is essential for every 21st century student, yet K-12 teachers have little support for getting up to speed in this field. Our program brings the teaching expertise... See Project Michigan Technological University is a public research university, home to more than 7,000 students from 54 countries. Founded in 1885, the University offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, and social sciences. Our campus in Michigans Upper Peninsula overlooks the Keweenaw Waterway and is just a few miles from Lake Superior. Ghana has become the first country in the world to receive vaccines acquired through the UN COVAX initiative, with a delivery of 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca jab from the Serum Institute of India. The vaccines, delivered by UNICEF, arrived at Accra's Kokoto International Airport and are part of the first wave of Covid-19 jabs that COVAX is sending to several developing countries. Ghana is among 92 low and middle-income countries that are receiving the doses for free through the scheme, which aims to ensure wider access to vaccines around the world. Another 90 countries and eight territories have agreed to pay to receive vaccines through COVAX. Ghana has become the first country in the world to receive vaccines acquired through the UN COVAX initiative, with a delivery of 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca jab from the Serum Institute of India The vaccines, delivered by UNICEF, arrived at Accra's Kokoto International Airport and are part of the first wave of Covid-19 jabs that COVAX is sending to several developing countries Ghana is among 92 low and middle-income countries that are receiving the doses for free through the scheme. Pictured: Airport staff unloading the vaccines at Kotoka International Airpoty in Accra today Ghana, with a population of 30 million has recorded 81,245 coronavirus cases and 584 deaths in the pandemic, according to figures from Ghana's Health Services Tuesday. Ghana's vaccination campaign will begin March 2 and will be conducted in phases among prioritised groups, beginning with health workers, adults of 60 years and over, people with underlying health conditions, frontline executive, legislature, judiciary, and their related staff, said Minister of Information Kojo Oppong Nkrumah. 'The government of Ghana remains resolute at ensuring the welfare of all Ghanaians and is making frantic efforts to acquire adequate vaccines to cover the entire population through bilateral and multi-lateral agencies,' he said. Ghana's vaccination campaign will begin March 2 and will be conducted in phases among prioritized groups. Pictured: Airport transport the shipment of Covid-19 on dollies today The UK foreign secretary Dominic Raab hailed the historic delivery as a 'huge step forward in ending this pandemic'. Britain has committed 548 million to the programme and has promised to donate the majority of any surplus vaccine stocks. Mr Raab said: 'Today's rollout of vaccines to the world's most vulnerable countries is a huge step forward in ending this pandemic. 'As one of the biggest donors to Covax the UK is ensuring that more than one billion vaccine doses will be sent to 92 countries so that no one is left behind in this global fight. 'We will only save lives and reduce the risk of future infections if we prevent the virus spreading in the world's developing countries.' The COVAX shipment to Ghana is the start of what will be the world's largest vaccine procurement and supply operation in history In a joint statement, the country representatives of UNICEF and WHO described the arrival of the COVAX vaccines as a 'momentous occasion' critical to bringing the pandemic to an end. 'After a year of disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic ... the path to recovery for the people of Ghana can finally begin,' said the statement. The COVAX shipment to Ghana is the start of what will be the world's largest vaccine procurement and supply operation in history, according to the statement. COVAX plans to deliver close to 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines around the world this year. 'Today marks the historic moment for which we have been planning and working so hard. With the first shipment of doses, we can make good on the promise of the COVAX Facility to ensure people from less wealthy countries are not left behind in the race for life-saving vaccines,' said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF's executive director. 'The next phase in the fight against this disease can begin - the ramping up of the largest immunization campaign in history,' said Fore. 'Each step on this journey brings us further along the path to recovery for the billions of children and families affected around the world.' NYU Tandon researchers join collaboration with Politecnico di Torino revealing that after spread, travel bans are of limited value in thwarting the spread of COVID-19 BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - Travel bans have been key to efforts by many countries to control the spread of COVID-19. But new research aimed at providing a decision support system to Italian policy makers, recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, suggests that reducing individual activity (i.e., social distancing, closure of non-essential business, etc.) is far superior in controlling the dissemination of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The research, which has implications for the United States and other countries, found that limiting personal mobility through travel restrictions and similar tactics is effective only in the first phases of the epidemic, and reduces in proportion to the spread of infection across a population. In the study, "Modelling and predicting the effect of social distancing and travel restrictions on COVID-19 spreading" the researchers, led by Alessandro Rizzo, visiting professor in the Office of Innovation at NYU Tandon and professor at the Politecnico di Torino, and Maurizio Porfiri Institute Professor of mechanical and aerospace, biomedical and civil and urban engineering at NYU Tandon and a member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), detail a data modeling framework for isolating the differential efficacy of different COVID-19 intervention policies. Since their method benefits from a low computational load (it can easily run on a personal computer), it can be a valuable decision support system to policy makers, toward the implementation of combined containment actions that can protect citizens' health, while avoiding total closures, with all their economic, social, and psychological consequences. "While this project was focused specifically on Italy, the results are revelatory for virtually any country relying on travel restrictions to stem the spread of the pandemic. We look forward to using US data to tune the model and give specific answers to combat this delicate phase of the pandemic," said Porfiri. Added Rizzo, "We are particularly satisfied with this model, as it provides very detailed answers even though it relies only on aggregated sources of data - a further guarantee of people's privacy." The work includes a realistic representation of demographic data and travel patterns of both commuters and those taking long-distance trips, using only aggregated and publicly available data, without resorting to individual tracking devices. It follows upon a study on the spread of Covid-19 in New Rochelle, New York predicting the diffusion of COVID-19 in medium sized cities and provinces, published as the cover of Advanced Modeling and Simulations (Wiley), The investigators, including Francesco Parino of Politecnico di Torino and Lorenzo Zino of the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, also found that selective lockdown policies, for example restriction only on the activity of the elderly, seems not to have a great effect on the overall transmission of the epidemic. Deploying their algorithmic framework to model scenarios in which restrictions are lifted, discovered that restrictions on social activity must be gradually removed to avoid a second wave, while the timing and swiftness of removal of travel restrictions seem not to have a great effect on the transmission. In view of the scarce resources and the inherent slowness of vaccination campaigns, the research group is now engaged in the use of the model to assess the effect of different vaccination policies, toward the definition of vaccination rollouts that will aim at providing an optimal outcome in spite of the limited resources in terms of vaccine doses and operators. ### The U.S. National Science Foundation (CMMI-1561134 and CMMI-2027990), Compagnia di San Paolo, MAECI ('Mac2Mic'), the European Research Council (ERC-CoG-771687), and The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO-vidi-14134) provided generous support for this research. 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. A January 2014 merger created a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences as part of a global university, with close connections to engineering programs at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai. NYU Tandon is rooted in a vibrant tradition of entrepreneurship, intellectual curiosity, and innovative solutions to humanity's most pressing global challenges. Research at Tandon focuses on vital intersections between communications/IT, cybersecurity, and data science/AI/robotics systems and tools and critical areas of society that they influence, including emerging media, health, sustainability, and urban living. We believe diversity is integral to excellence, and are creating a vibrant, inclusive, and equitable environment for all of our students, faculty and staff. For more information, visit engineering.nyu.edu. If you dont like a question that people keep asking you, maybe the solution is to answer it. Just get it over with. Put all doubt to rest and move on. If thats your approach, your name is not Steve Scalise, and you are not the second-ranking Republican in the United States House of Representatives. Scalise, R-Jefferson, was asked a very simple question by host Jonathan Karl on Sundays This Week show on ABC News. But clear this up for me, Karl said. Joe Biden won the election. He is the legitimate president of the United States. The election was not stolen, correct? Yes, Bidens the president, Scalise conceded in a petulant tone youd expect more from a teenager than a senior government official. But he refused to answer the second part, even when Karl circled back and asked it again. He would not say former President Donald Trumps claim that the election was stolen is false, as has been confirmed repeatedly by state officials and many, many judges, including Trumps own appointees. He would not admit that the president he spent four years tirelessly defending lied to his followers, tried to bully state officials into changing results, and pressured members of Congress and even his slavishly loyal vice president to violate their oaths and change the outcome. Nor, also under direct questioning, would he directly blame Trump for the deadly result of all this lying, the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. You know, the one that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Trump was practically and morally responsible for provoking, even though McConnell found a technicality on which to hang his vote to acquit at impeachment. Theres only one explanation for Scalises misdirection, his deluge of words in response to Karls query about how bad Biden is, none of which were responsive. Scalise has no interest in putting the matter to rest. He wants the fiction to live on. Consider his assertion that millions of people are still concerned about problems with the election. Of course they are, because the leaders of their own party are telling them to be and then seizing on that concern to justify pushing legislation in key states to make it harder for voters that lean Democratic to participate next time. And consider his alleged reason for the concern, that the Constitution says state legislatures set the rules for elections. That was one of the many arguments Republicans threw at us during the period after the election, when they challenged results in a select few swing states that Trump lost even though most scholars and judges dont interpret it to mean the courts play no role. If Scalises argument were about principle rather than situational advantage, he might also have flagged his own win in Louisiana, because this was one of the states in which a federal judge dictated appropriate accommodations for voter access during the pandemic. He did not. Scalises stance also marks him a leading loyalist to the Trump wing of the party, a position that demands absolute devotion. Others have tried to have it both ways, yet still landed on the former presidents bad side. Trump is furious at McConnell for his post-impeachment comments, despite the acquittal vote. He abandoned Vice President Mike Pence to the angry mob because Pence acknowledged he did not have the power to overturn the Electoral College vote, and wouldnt go through the motion of trying. Hes still apparently irritated at House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the only member of the GOP House caucus to outrank Scalise, who briefly criticized Trumps behavior before waffling. That leaves Scalise as pretty much the highest-ranking Republican who remains all in, no matter the mainstream criticism he attracts, no matter the damage Trumps dishonesty has done to our democracy, and no matter how much more it might do if wide swaths of the electorate continue to wrongly believe that their votes didnt count. Karl didnt ask Scalise why, but the answer is obvious: Clearly he has other priorities. KYIV -- Few patriots would appreciate an outsider comparing a chunk of their country to finger food. But when Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny did just that to Ukrainians in 2014 -- saying that Moscow-annexed Crimea wasn't just "a sausage sandwich to pass back and forth" -- it struck an especially sensitive nerve, considering his country had just dismembered theirs. Fast forward nearly seven years: Amid the anti-corruption campaigner's momentous new confrontation with the Kremlin, which landed him in prison and sparked protests across Russia, many in Ukraine haven't forgotten that comment -- or others they see as hints that Navalny might not be Kyiv's strongest ally if he's ever in charge of the huge country next door. Viewed from Kyiv, it's almost as if Navalny were two people, not one. On the one hand, he is a staunch opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose country has seized control of the Crimean Peninsula and supported militants who hold parts of eastern Ukraine and are fighting government forces in a simmering war that has killed more than 13,000 people since 2014. Remarks That Rankled The other Navalny, to some in Ukraine, is a Russian nationalist whose remarks, particularly in the past, have deeply rankled. The result is a range of responses to the 44-year-old who, particularly since his return to his homeland in January after treatment abroad for a poisoning he blames on Putin, is the Russian president's most prominent foe. "It's interest, it's a feeling of danger, it's slight hope, it's distrust -- a sort of very complicated cocktail," said Ivan Yakovina, a Russian-born commentator for the Ukrainian newsweekly NV. It was not his only comment on Ukraine, or on Crimea for that matter, but the remark Navalny made in an interview with the Ekho Moskvy radio station in October 2014, seven months after Russia seized the peninsula, has become a focal point for criticism for many in Ukraine. It's one of a number of comments in which he has put forth positions more subtle than Putin's or the "Crimea is ours" mantra of Kremlin cheerleaders -- for example, Navalny prefaced the "sausage sandwich" remark by saying that the Black Sea peninsula was seized through "egregious violations of all international regulations" but they rankle nonetheless. Also unsettling for many in Ukraine was a 2018 tweet in which he blasted Putin for policies he said resulted in the Orthodox Church of Ukraine breaking off from the Russian church, saying the president "and his idiots" had "destroyed in four years what was created over centuries" and calling him an "enemy of the Russian world." Fueling Suspicions Combined with his past association with nationalist politics in Russia -- an issue that came to the fore on February 23, when Amnesty International revoked his "prisoner of conscience" designation over past remarks -- Navalny's pronouncements have fueled suspicions that he espouses the same sort of attitude toward Ukraine as the government he is fighting. Although he has condemned Russian aggression against Ukraine and drawn attention to his local roots he has family in a village outside Kyiv and spent portions of his youth there -- he has not been as supportive of Ukraine's plight as many Ukrainians might have liked. Since his near-fatal poisoning in Siberia last August, many headlines, opinion columns, and talk shows in Ukraine have posed what they put as a central question: Is Navalny good for Ukraine? Speaking on Ukrainian television shortly after Navalny was arrested upon return to Russia last month, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba supported protesters' calls for his release and echoed a sentiment shared by many of his compatriots, saying, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Yet he also cautioned against romanticizing Navalny as a figure and insisted he would need to apologize on behalf of his country and work to return Crimea if he were to end up in a position of power. "There should be no illusions here," Kuleba said. No Interest? Whatever mistrust Ukrainians harbor toward Navalny is likely rooted in the broader dynamics between the two countries, experts say. The complex and often strained relationship between Ukraine and Russia, its ruler under tsars and the Soviet state, has long colored domestic and foreign politics on both sides of the border. Many Ukrainians are doubtful about Russia's potential to democratize and mend fences with its neighbors, according to Taras Berezovets, a Crimean-born political analyst in Kyiv. "This postimperial trauma affects all our feelings about Russians and Russian politicians," he said. But the possibility of political change in Russia may be one reason many Ukrainians have followed the dramatic developments since Navalny's return to Moscow with interest. According to the BBC, nearly 10 percent of the more than 100 million views of Navalny's recent bombshell investigation into a billion-dollar Black Sea palace allegedly built for Putin came from Ukraine. We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has charged a Providence real estate management company with refusing to rent to families with children in violation of federal law. D&D Realty Management LLC posted a Facebook advertisement for completed remodeled students apartments HUD said in a statement Tuesday. HUD alleges when its sent people to D&D Realty Management to ask about available units and mentioned that they had children, they were told on several occasions that they couldnt have children in the apartments. Meanwhile, potential tenants without children were shown available units and offered the opportunity to rent. Alexander Friedman, an attorney for D&D Realty Management, said Theres no merit to these allegations. A U.S. administrative law judge will hear the charge unless any party elects for the case to be heard in federal court, HUD said. If the administrative law judge finds that discrimination has occurred, the judge may award damages to the complainant. The Fair Housing Act makes it unlawful to refuse to rent to a family because of children under the age of 18, except in certain housing for older people. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. United States President Joe Biden spoke to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday in a virtual meeting wherein the leaders affirmed their bilateral relationship. They also discussed matters surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and other issues. Biden, Trudeau's Pledges On Tuesday, Biden and Trudeau sought to turn the page from the Trump era. They underscored the countries' deep ties and vowed to work together on the novel coronavirus and climate change in their first bilateral meeting. According to Biden via an electronic video link with the Canadian leader and top aides, "The United States has no closer friend, no closer friend than Canada. That's why you were my first call as president (and) my first bilateral meeting," reported Nation News. Biden granted him at least one of the items on top of his priorities list: a pledge to help get two Canadians out of prison in China. According to Biden on Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who are languishing behind bars, "Human beings are not bartering chips. You know we're going to work together until we get their safe return," reported CP 24. Canada is usually a United States president's first foreign stop. Trudeau was Biden's first bilateral meeting with a foreign leader since his tenure last month. Trudeau was also the first world leader to congratulate Biden on his presidential victory. The camaraderie between the two leaders was evident as they hosted an hours-long, virtual meeting with key advisers. They repeatedly referred to one another as "Joe" and "Justin," the two seemingly hope to bring a similar fellowship in bolstering U.S. and Canada relations as part of the Biden administration's goals. Also Read: House Democrats Reveal a $1.9 Trillion COVID-19 Relief Bill That Includes Minimum Wage Increase They have agreed to be mindful of the bout against the coronavirus, economic recovery following pandemic strain, and the global climate threat. Dubbed the new "Roadmap for a Renewed U.S.-Canada Partnership," Trudeau stated such objectives are based on the two nations' "shared values" and will guide efforts in the upcoming years. According to Trudeau, following the meeting, amid the coronavirus, climate change, and rising inequality, the call to action is now. The top priority remains to keep the public safe and to end the pandemic. During the meeting, the Canadian PM told Biden that U.S. leadership has been "sorely missed" last year. According to the White House, to bolster alliances, the blueprint calls for a revamp of the North American Leaders' Summit as a "recommitment of solidarity" between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. He thanked Biden for stepping up in a large effort to tackle climate change. According to Trudeau addressing Biden, "I have to say, as we are preparing the joint rollout and communique from this one, it's nice when the Americans aren't pulling out all references to climate change and instead adding them in. So we're really excited to be working with you on that," reported AA. They also discussed refugees and migration topics, strengthening democracies at home, and fighting for democratic values globally. Related Article: Stimulus Checks Are Out, but You Didn't Receive Yours? Here's What to Do @ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. DNY59/iStockBy EMILY SHAPIRO, ABC News (BUFFALO, N.Y.) -- The 75-year-old man shoved to the ground by Buffalo, New York, police during a George Floyd protest has filed a lawsuit against the mayor and the city as well as the police commissioner, deputy commissioner and several officers. According to the lawsuit, Martin Gugino was seriously injured on June 4, suffering a fractured skull after his head struck the pavement. He was released from the Erie County Medical Center on June 30. Felony assault charges against two officers were dismissed by a grand jury earlier this month. In a press conference, Erie County District Attorney John Flynn defended charging the officers, but said grand jurors made the decision after viewing video of the incident. Flynn also said Gugino broke the law that day by being out past curfew but he should not have been shoved. As of earlier this month, the officers remained suspended pending an internal affairs investigation. In response to news of the grand jury's decision, John Evans, president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, said the officers "were simply following departmental procedures and the directives of their superiors to clear Niagra Square despite working under extremely challenging circumstances." Minutes after Buffalo's 8 p.m. curfew went into effect on June 4, officers "unlawfully, unreasonably and forcibly" assaulted Gugino, the lawsuit filed Monday said. The suit alleges that an officer shoved him after emergency response team members said to "push him." Members of the militarized emergency response team who were on scene to enforce the curfew then "walked by without care" as the 75-year-old "lay unconscious on the sidewalk, blood pouring from his fractured skull," the suit said. The suit claims that a detective tried to check on Gugino, but another officer stopped him. Among other claims, the suit seeks to hold Buffalo liable for "concealing, excusing and/or condoning the unlawful use of force" and references a statement released by the police department that said one protester was injured after he tripped and fell. The mayor said in a statement that Gugino was "knocked down" after a "physical altercation." The lawsuit also claims Gugino's constitutional rights were violated, including his rights to freedom of speech, peaceful assembly and freedom from the unlawful use of force by government agents. The lawsuit blames the police commissioner for failing "to prevent the unlawful and unconstitutional conduct" and the mayor for making "the final decision to declare a state of emergency and impose a curfew." In an interview with USA Today in August, Gugino said he could not remember falling to the ground and hitting his head. Gugino told the newspaper, "Im not scared of the policemen, but the system is screwed up." ABC News has reached out to the Buffalo mayor's office, Buffalo Police Department and city of Buffalo for comment. Gugino's attorney is requesting a jury trial. Copyright 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved. Flash Another 8,489 people in Britain have tested positive for COVID-19, bringing the total number of coronavirus cases in the country to 4,134,639, according to official figures released Tuesday. The country also reported another 548 coronavirus-related deaths. The total number of coronavirus-related deaths in Britain now stands at 121,305. These figures only include the deaths of people who died within 28 days of their first positive test. The latest figures were revealed as nearly 18 million people in Britain have been given the first jab of the coronavirus vaccine. Following his announcement of the roadmap out of lockdown on Monday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Tuesday that he is "hopeful" that all coronavirus restrictions in England will be removed by June 21. "I'm hopeful but obviously nothing can be guaranteed and it all depends on the way we continue to be prudent and continue to follow the guidance in each stage," he said during a visit to a south London school. "That's why it's so important to proceed in the cautious way that we are," he said. England is currently under the third national lockdown since outbreak of the pandemic in the country. Similar restriction measures are also in place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Also on Tuesday, Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced the roadmap out of the coronavirus lockdown with four people from two households being allowed to meet outdoors from March 15. The British government is only responsible for coronavirus restrictions in England. The devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are responsible for their own policies in relation to public health matters. To bring life back to normal, countries such as Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the United States have been racing against time to roll out coronavirus vaccines. Indonesia began new diplomatic efforts Wednesday to end Myanmars political crisis, as protests continued in Yangon and other cities. Protestors are calling for the countrys new military government to step down and for Aung San Suu Kyis elected government to be returned to power. Indonesias Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi traveled to Bangkok, Thailand, where she held talks with Myanmars recently named foreign minister, Wunna Maung Lwin. Thai Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai also took part in the talks. Indonesia is seeking to build an effort with neighboring countries to end the political crisis in Myanmar that began with a military coup on February 1. Speaking to reporters after the talks, Marsudi said she had expressed her countrys concern about the situation in Myanmar. We asked all parties to exercise restraint and not use violence ... to avoid casualties and bloodshed. She noted the need for negotiation and trust-building to resolve the crisis. Indonesia and others members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are hoping to convince Myanmars military to take actions to ease tension in the country and avoid violence. The association believes negotiating with the military leaders will be more successful than sanctions, or other strong measures suggested by some Western nations. However, there is worry among some pro-democracy activists that Indonesias efforts to negotiate with Myanmars military may legitimize the coup government. Reuters news agency reported this week that Indonesia had proposed sending ASEAN observers to make sure military leaders fulfill their promise to hold fair, new elections. Protests in Myanmar continued on Wednesday, with a tense standoff taking place in Mandalay, the countrys second-largest city. Armed police blocked the path of about 3,000 teachers and students for two hours. The teachers and students had played protest songs and listened to anti-coup speeches. On Saturday, police and soldiers shot dead two people in Mandalay as they broke up a strike by port workers. Earlier in the same week, police used batons against demonstrators during a protest in front of a state bank. Also Wednesday, about 150 people from a Christian group gathered in Yangon, Myanmars largest city, to call for a return to democracy. The group also called for the release of Suu Kyi and other civilian leaders who have been held since the coup. International pressure against the coup also continues. More than 130 pro-democracy groups released an open letter Wednesday to the United Nations Security Council calling for a halt to worldwide arms sales to Myanmar. The letter said Myanmars citizens have lost their democratically elected government and are experiencing human rights violations. Myanmars military has a long history of committing human rights abuses. The letter also states that the sale of military-related equipment to Myanmar could provide the means to further repress the people of Myanmar in violation of international humanitarian and human rights law. In addition, the letter says any Security Council measures should be followed up with monitoring and enforcement. China and Russia, both members of the security council, are among the top sellers of arms to Myanmar. It is expected that they would veto any effort by the U.N. to enforce a multi-nation arms ban. Im Susan Shand. The Associated Press and the Reuters News Agency reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it for Learning English. Bryan Lynn was the editor. ________________________________________________________________ Words in This Story coup - n. a sudden attempt by a small group of people, often military members, to seize and takeover the government of a country often involving violence sanction - n. restrictions, usually limiting trade, that are meant to cause a country to obey international law legitimize v. to make legitimate: in accordance with law or established requirements baton n. a heavy stick that is carried by police officers and is used as a weapon monitor v. to watch, observe, listen to, or check (something) for a special purpose over a period of time We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section, and visit our Facebook page. McDonald's is secretly collecting 'strategic intelligence' on workers advocating for a $15 minimum wage, a bombshell new report in Motherboard claims. The expose, which was published Wednesday, cites several sources who claim the company has a 'team of intelligence analysts in Chicago and London keeping an eye on the activities of Fight For $15 labor organizers across the world' with the aim of identifying 'which McDonald's workers are active in the movement'. The Fight For $15 campaign started back 2012, when a group of fast food workers in New York took strike action demanding to be paid $15 per hour. The movement quickly spread to several other states, resulting in widespread walk-outs among McDonald's workers and others employed in the service industry. Fight For $15 soon become a powerful political force, and several states have now adopted that amount as a minimum hourly wage. However, the federal minimum wage still stands at $7.25 per hour and McDonald's has publicly expressed its opposition to paying a $15 per hour to all of its employees across the US. According to documents obtained by Motherboard, one of the goals of the intelligence team is to figure out 'how and where Fight For $15 will attack the [McDonald's] brand'. McDonald's is secretly collecting 'strategic intelligence' on workers advocating for a $15 minimum wage, a bombshell new report in Motherboard claims. Pictured: Demonstrators participate in a protest outside of McDonald's corporate headquarters in Chicago in January The Fight For $15 campaign started back 2012, when a group of fast food workers in New York walked took strike action demanding to be paid $15 per hour. It is now a large nationwide movement. Pictured: striking McDonald's workers demanding a $15 minimum wage demonstrate in Las Vegas in June 2019 In order to do this, the intelligence agents have allegedly trawled through social media accounts examining profiles of McDonald's workers who may be involved in the movement. The analysts have also purportedly used a 'social media monitoring tool to collect and scrape data'. Two people formerly employed in McDonald's corporate offices told Motherboard that the analysts have 'attempted to use the tool to reconstruct the friends lists and networks of workers involved in the labor movement [by] using fake Facebook personas'. 'The entire thing was messed up,' one of the sources told Motherboard. 'A company should be working with employees and the people that drive the business, not building an intelligence program directed at reporting on those same people.' A demonstrator is pictured participating in a protest outside of McDonald's corporate headquarters in Chicago in January. McDonald's has publicly expressed its opposition to paying a $15 per hour to all of its employees across the US According to Motherboard, 'the intelligence team's surveillance efforts also included keeping an eye on the public social media accounts of prominent labor movement leaders'. McDonald's spokesperson Jesse Lewin has denied the accusation. In a statement, he told Motherboard that the fast food giant 'has never used fake social media accounts to actively gather information, including labor activity'. However, Lewin admitted that the company does have an intelligence division devoted to identifying any threats to the safety of the company's restaurants, patrons and workers. 'For example, we have a responsibility to monitor for labor protest activity that may have the intended purpose to disrupt restaurant operations that could put crew and customer safety at risk,' Lewin stated. 'This is not unusual for a large multinational corporation like ours.' Moreover, he insisted 'none of the business intelligence work is related to labor relations.' Meanwhile, activists say they are disappointed by McDonald's failure to support a wage hike, particularly as the company publicly professes to being for social justice. 'I think what's frustrating is that McDonald'sto put it very simplyis not putting their money where their mouth is,' one former employee told Motherboard. 'They might say 'We support black lives' or change their logo. But what is it doing structurally to help black lives, and to show that they matter, not through PR, but through supporting workers?' WASHINGTON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) today announced the winners of its highest award in safety, the 2021 TOP SAFETY PICK+. All tested Mazda vehicles made the list for the second year in a row. These vehicles include the Mazda3 Sedan and Mazda3 Hatchback, Mazda6, CX-3, CX-30 (built after September 2020), CX-5 and CX-9. To qualify for the 2021 TOP SAFETY PICK+ award, Mazda vehicles earned good ratings in each of the Institute's six crashworthiness evaluations: moderate overlap front, driver-side small overlap front, passenger-side small overlap front, side, roof strength and head restraint tests. Mazda vehicles also earned advanced or superior ratings for front crash prevention in both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-pedestrian evaluations and good or acceptable headlight ratings. "With safety a top priority for Mazda, we are proud to have every Mazda vehicle tested earn the coveted 2021 IIHS TOP SAFETY PICK+ award. This accomplishment stems from our committment to our owners," said Mazda North American Operations President Jeff Guyton. "Our customers have come to expect Mazda's dedication to providing advanced safety technologies paired with dynamic styling, which give them a confident and more enjoyable driving experience." Mazda's i-Activsense is an umbrella term covering a series of advanced safety technologies which make use of detection devices such as milliwave radars and cameras. They include active safety technologies that support safer driving by helping the driver to recognize potential hazards, and pre-crash safety technologies which help to avert collisions or reduce their severity in situations where they cannot be avoided. Mazda's i-Activsense advanced safety technologies include Advanced Smart City Brake Support with Pedestrian Detection, Smart Brake Support with Collision Warning, Smart Brake Support, Mazda Radar Cruise Control with Stop & Go Function, Blind Spot Monitoring with Rear Cross-Traffic Alert, Lane Departure Warning System with Lane-Keep Assist, Driver Attention Alert, High Beam Control, Adaptive Front-Lighting System, and Traffic Sign Recognition. To learn more about Mazda's i-Activsense advanced safety technology, please visit the MazdaUSA.com website - https://www.mazdausa.com/why-mazda/safety. The IIHS is an independent, non-governmental safety-testing organization, funded by the insurance industry. For more information, visit https://www.iihs.org/ratings/top-safety-picks. Mazda North American Operations is headquartered in Irvine, California, and oversees the sales, marketing, parts and customer service support of Mazda vehicles in the United States and Mexico through approximately 620 dealers. Operations in Mexico are managed by Mazda Motor de Mexico in Mexico City. For more information on Mazda vehicles, including photography and B-roll, please visit the online Mazda media center at InsideMazda.MazdaUSA.com/Newsroom. Follow MNAO's social media channels through Twitter and Instagram at @MazdaUSA and Facebook at Facebook.com/MazdaUSA. SOURCE Mazda North American Operations Related Links https://www.mazdausa.com Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. By Wang Zibing and Luo Qiyan CHENGDU, Feb. 23-- Staff from the People's Armed Forces Department (PAFD) and Public Security Bureau (PSB) of Lezhi County in Southwest Chinas Sichuan Province showed up at the site of the spring recruitment physical examination, reminding young people to sign up for enlistment through official channels on February 22. "The enthusiasm for joining the military has continued to rise in recent years, and it has also attracted many lawbreakers," said Deng Kai, a recruitment official. During the military recruitment work last year, public security authorities received reports that there had been some lawbreakers promising affirmed enlistment at targeted troops at the cost of RMB 20,000 yuan. However, the victims, who had paid the money, did not even pass the medical examination and thus ended up with nothing. To reduce such fraud cases in military recruitment work this year, the Lezhi County PAFD coordinated the relevant departments to conduct comprehensive publicity on the recruitment policy and procedures through radio, TV and social media platforms. At the same time, they issued the Six Common Scams in the Recruitment Season brochure to analyze the military-related fraud cases in recent years. Along with some other measures, they tried to convince young people and their parents that it does not cost any money to join the army and to serve the country, thereby raising their awareness of the fraud prevention. It is learnt that the Lezhi County PAFD had selected 69 overseers to conduct open and unannounced visits to ensure transparency, fairness, and justice in all sections of military recruitment, including registration, physical examination, political review, pre-service training, and candidate selection. Rugby league boss Peter Vlandys ambitious plan to appoint NSWs most senior police officer to the games commission was scuppered before it even reached Macquarie Street. There was no approval documentation before Premier Gladys Berejiklian or Police Minister David Elliott for Police Commissioner Mick Fuller to sit on the board of the Australian Rugby League Commission when details emerged last week that Vlandys was spruiking his likely appointment. Peter Vlandys and Mick Fuller. Credit:Janie Barret, Jessica Hromas Aware of the plans, Elliott one of Fullers most ardent backers saw no problem with his commissioner being on the board, under the remit of cleaning up bad behaviour. The minister was also convinced the appointment would have the support from those within the government, including Berejiklian. The Premier, on the other hand, had been left with the impression that Fuller was simply considering a volunteer role mentoring young league players, not a board position. Hebrews: discipleship when winning feels like losing The blue glaze of the TV beckoned us on a chilly Monday night. I shifted in my seat, balancing my Bible, a notebook, and a glass of hot tea. Peering over his glasses, the commanding teacher walked us through plans for reinventing our finances. We would come out of this class astute with wealth and thus demonstrate true obedience to God. Our small group listened intently as he quoted Hebrews 12:22, Now, discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. We wanted the self-discipline that led to financial prosperity. We wanted this training in wisdom. This wisdom is often entangled in American culture where nearly any financial gain signals success. Abundance of wealth becomes the proof of wisdom and out of this develops the path of discipleship. To be sure, there is wisdom in understanding the use of finances. American society is built on a game of advertising, consumption, and debt. It is beneficial to understand and resist this game. But what happens when our resistance is not built on the discipleship of Jesus? Hebrews is written to an audience torn between two cultures: the dominant Roman culture and the tolerated Jewish subculture. Sandwiched between these is the newly forming community of Christianity, born out of the experience of divine power through Jesus. This experience initially propelled them into new community despite the cultural shame of rejecting their previous way of life.[1] This new community countered Roman and Jewish cultures, facing disgrace and resisting pressure to conform.[2] Now, in Hebrews, the resistance of these Christians has waned, the loss of status and honor has mounted. This community faces deep questions of whether the hostility they experience is worth it; some have abandoned the community. Those who have fallen away have succumbed to the pressure to return to a more acceptable way of life. [3] In context, Hebrews is a message of Christian endurance, a willingness to remain separate from the surrounding cultures and persist faithfully in the truth. Hebrews guides Christian communities toward perseverance by reminding them of the superiority of Jesus. Jesus life is an example of faithfulness that meets with extreme resistance, to the point of death, and yet he is undeterred.[4] He is their example even though they have not yet experienced the same level of hostility. They follow his path. Because of Jesus faithfulness, they are now adopted as Gods legitimate sons and daughters. This unparalleled gift of adoption will result in them entering into Gods rest (4:1) when they inherit salvation (1:14) at the future return of Jesus (9:28). For the author of Hebrews, the only appropriate response to this lavish gift of God is gratitude expressed as perseverance. Both communally and individually they are to praise the generosity of God, express loyalty to God above other powers, and willingly perform the good deeds God asks of them.[5] They are to meet together in community, affirming the truth and encouraging one another (10:23-25). They are to boldly approach God in prayer, asking for resources and support (4:16).[6] They are to work together to relieve the pressures that weigh on the community (6:9-10). As members of Gods household, their attitudes and their actions express gratitude.[7] This gratitude to God does not assure their prosperity; the surrounding cultures remain hostile. Yet, God is not impotent. Even in hostility, God can transform, inverting evil into a path for receiving honor. God gives their suffering recognition and dignity.[8] Those who perpetuate hostility are not let off the hook, it is still sinful (12:3). God surpasses any evil power, though deliverance may not be revealed until on the other side of death.[9] What does Hebrews 12:22 mean in light of all of this? It is not a verse offering a path to earthly prosperity. It is a verse about perseverance and the high cost of following Jesus. It is about faithfulness to God above all, even earthly success. Without the clear message that sometimes winning feels like losing in this world, we are missing the discipleship of Hebrews. Without this message, we are in danger of falling away. Bibliography deSilva, David A. Hebrews. In Hebrews, the General Epistles, and Revelation, edited by David A Sanchez, Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, and Margaret P Aymer, 87114. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016. Accessed February 13, 2021. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=1370555. [1] David A deSilva, Hebrews, in Hebrews, the General Epistles, and Revelation, ed. David A Sanchez, Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, and Margaret P Aymer (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 88, accessed February 13, 2021, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=1370555. [2] Ibid., 99. [3] Ibid., 88. [4] Ibid., 106. [5] Ibid., 111. [6] Ibid., 9798. [7] Ibid., 95. [8] Ibid., 94. [9] Ibid., 99. Holding off the rise of superbugs could be achieved by 'resuscitating' old antibiotics, with The University of Queensland researchers leading an international project to help combat the growing threat. CARB-X, a global non-profit partnership funding the world's largest antibacterial development pipeline, has funded the $AU2.9m project at UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB). Associate Professor Mark Blaskovich, Dr Alysha Elliott and Dr Johannes Zuegg will assess which antibiotics that are losing their effectiveness could be revived by combining them with a compound from a new family of antibiotics. "We are running out of time to outsmart the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria, the sort of infections that can cause deadly bacterial sepsis, pneumonia, urinary tract and wound infections," Dr Blaskovich said. "Compounds from a group known as the Octapeptins could be the spark the older drugs need to reinvigorate them as they act to disrupt the bacteria's cell membrane--making it easier for the antibiotic to gain access." Dr Elliott said these 'potentiators' had been shown to help some antibiotics regain their activity against bacteria which have developed high levels of drug resistance, and reduce the amount of the antibiotic required to effectively kill bacteria by up to 100-fold. "The benefit is that we can potentially restore the use of cheap generic antibiotics that are widely used in low and middle income countries, where there are high levels of drug-resistant bacteria," Dr Elliott said. "We will also share our expertise and technologies with researchers in countries such as Pakistan, Nepal, Egypt, Nigeria, Brazil, Thailand and Indonesia so they can genetically sequence resistant bacteria strains in real-time as they emerge." Dr Blaskovich said resistance to current antibiotics was increasing at an alarming rate, highlighting the urgent need for innovative solutions. With time of the essence, we are appreciative of the support of CARB-X to accelerate UQ's IMB Centre for Superbug Solutions' many-pronged attack on this global threat to human health." Dr Mark Blaskovich, University of Queensland The current project builds on the first Australian and first University CARB-X award to the Centre for Superbug Solutions in 2020 to develop the Octapeptin class as a stand-alone antibiotic treatment, led by Prof Matthew Cooper and Dr Karl Hansford along with Dr Blaskovich. CARB-X receives its funding from the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the Wellcome Trust in the UK, Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the UK Global Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Innovation Fund (GAMRIF), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Funding contributions by GAMRIF are earmarked by CARB-X to fund projects that focus on specific antibacterial priorities, and the UQ IMB Octapeptin LMIC project is one such project. GAMRIF funding allocated to CARB-X is focused on innovative research and development in the field of AMR, specifically in underinvested areas for LMICs, where the burden of AMR is greatest. U.S. President Joe Biden's administration is facing a backlash after reports revealed that his administration opened its immigration facility for children. Biden reopened a tent housing facility that is housing up to 700 immigrant teenagers. Lawyers and human rights activists accuse the current administration of breaking a campaign promise to establish more immigration changes, according to a One America News Network report. Critics have also said that the reopened facility is hypocritical as Biden has yet to launch a plan for public schools in the U.S. to get back in the classroom. Related story: Asylum Seekers Forced to Wait in Mexico Due to Delays to U.S. Entry White House's Defense Press secretary Jen Psaki then defended the move on Wednesday, saying that the move was to ensure the health and safety of the children. [The Department of Health and Human Services] took steps to open an emergency facility to add capacity where these kids can be provided the care they need before they are safely placed with families and sponsors," Psaki was quoted in The Hill report. The White House press secretary added that it is a temporary reopening during COVID-19, noting that their intention is very much to close it, but they want to ensure that they can follow COVID-19 protocols. Psaki said that the Biden administration does not expel unaccompanied minors who arrived at the border. She said that they are transferred to the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is an additional Texas facility needed to accommodate migrant children in accordance with social distancing guidelines during the pandemic. HHS said that there are around 6,800 unaccompanied children in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. "Our goal is for them to then be transferred to families or sponsors," Psaki was quoted in a report. She added that this is their way to ensure that kids are not in close proximity and they are abiding to the health and safety protocols. "Kids in Cages" Meanwhile, Psaki rejected comparisons that housing kids at the 66-acre sit were similar to holding kids in cages. The press secretary said that this was never their intention of replicating the immigration policies of the previous administration. However, she also noted that they are in a circumstance where they are not going to expel unaccompanied minors at the border as it would be inhumane. The Trump administration was intensely scrutinized in 2018 when it imposed a "zero tolerance" policy, which caused thousands of migrant children to be separated from their parents and held in warehouse facilities. Former President Donald Trump eventually relented on the policy after images of children behind metal fencing caused public outrage. Biden has repeatedly criticized Trump for separating families and failing to reunite them, claiming during their presidential debate that migrant children were "ripped from their parents' arms and separated." Immigration lawyer, Linda Brandmiller, said that the move was a huge step backwards, adding that it is unnecessary, costly, and goes against everything Biden promised he was going to do. She added that the locations of these shelters are in the middle of nowhere and is troubling, claiming that this was deliberately done to shelve the children in places that are not only not readily accessible, but also not accessible to anyone who cares about the children's welfare, according to an Independent report. Related article: Pathway to Citizenship: Biden Sends Immigration Bill to Congress for 11 Million Illegal Migrants Even after a year to forget in 2020, Red Sox designated hitter J.D. Martinez believes his best years are ahead of him. As he enters his 10th major-league season, the 33-year-old envisions himself being able to play into his 40s. Martinez, a three-time All-Star entering his fourth year with the Red Sox, worked out this winter with Twins slugger Nelson Cruz, who, at ages 38 and 39, has been an MVP contender in each of the last two seasons. In an age in which designated hitter are playing for longer and longer, Martinez hopes he can play into his 40s. I feel, at least, like Im in one of those unique roles where I could do the same thing, Martinez said Tuesday. I feel healthy. I feel like I take good care of myself and study enough where I could keep myself as a certain level. Those guys give me motivation. Martinez said he picked the brain of Cruz, who re-signed with the Twins for his 17th big-league season earlier this year, while hitting in Miami over the off-season. He wanted some tips on how to stay productive as an aging slugger, noting that Red Sox legend David Ortiz, who retired after his age-40 season, is another example. Martinezs contract with the Red Sox expires after 2022, at which point he will be 35. Its clear that he expects to be seeking another contract at that point, even after signing a five-year, $110 million deal as a 30-year-old in 2018. After playing for the Astros, Tigers and Diamondbacks in the beginning part of his career, Martinez believes he has found a home in Boston. He called the Red Sox a special organization and said he has hoped to retire a member of the club since he signed his deal three years ago. Anytime you get to go into one of those franchises, its just a family at that point, he said. Especially when youve been there for a while and you win, you become one of those names where youre known forever. Everyone in Red Sox history will forever know David Ortiz and Pedro Martinez and guys who have been here for years. Its one of those things where that would obviously be a dream. Related links: J.D. Martinez thinks he can help Boston Red Sox newcomer Franchy Cordero (from Andrew Benintendi trade); Hes got some really good talent Boston Red Soxs J.D. Martinez says its time for universal DH in baseball: Everybody wants offense J.D. Martinez, Boston Red Sox DH: Chip on my shoulder is back entering 2021; I wasnt really prepared for last year A GP who gave two elderly care home patients four times the recommended dose of the Covid-19 vaccine had not been trained in how to administer the jab and has been stood down from the vaccination programme. A 94-year-old woman and an 88-year-old man were given too much of the Pfizer vaccine on Tuesday, the second day of Australia's vaccination rollout. The pair, who are residents at the Holy Spirit Nursing Home Carseldine in Brisbane, suffered no adverse effects but are being monitored in hospital. The two elderly people given an incorrect dose of the Pfizer vaccine re residents at the Holy Spirit Nursing Home Carseldine in Brisbane (pictured) Health Minister Greg Hunt on Wednesday morning said the doctor was registered and had taken the necessary online training provided by the Australian Board of Nursing. But he later told Parliament that Healthcare Australia, a company contracted by the federal government to give vaccines in aged care homes, had informed him the doctor had not been trained. 'The revised advice is that on further investigation Healthcare Australia has advised he had not completed the required training,' he said. 'I have asked the Department to take action against the company and the doctor for what is a clear breach on both fronts. 'This is being investigated by Healthcare Australia and we're expecting a report later today.' Minister Hunt has apologised to the families of the elderly patients for the bungle. He also said the doctor has been stood down by Healthcare Australia. It is not clear how the doctor got the dosing so wrong. One theory is that he gave two doses of the vaccine to each patient consecutively, instead of three weeks apart. Deputy Chief Medical Officer Professor Michael Kidd, who is investigating the incident, said it is possible up to four times the recommended dose was given to each patient. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said her government was only informed about the overdose late on Tuesday night. 'Although this happened yesterday morning, Queensland authorities were only advised late last night,' she said. 'Discovering these details now is simply not good enough.' Minister for Health Greg Hunt addressed the nation's vaccine rollout and bungle on Wednesday morning (pictured) The premier said she would write to the prime minister to demand a National Cabinet meeting as soon as possible. 'I want to know what training is provided to the people the Federal Government is employing to administer the vaccines in our aged care facilities,' she said. On Wednesday morning Minister Hunt held a presser conference to explain what happened. 'There has been one case, following all the safeguards we put in place, of what has been defined as an adverse administration,' he said. 'Basically, a doctor gave an incorrect dose to two patients yesterday. I think it's very important that we're up-front. 'The safeguards that were put in place immediately kicked into action.' Mr Hunt said a nurse on the scene identified that a higher than the prescribed amount of the dose was given to the two patients. Two elderly people have been given an 'excessive amount' of the Covid vaccine in a jab bungle in Queensland. Pictured: Medical workers prepare the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine at the Hyatt quarantine hotel in Perth on Monday An 94-year-old woman and an 88-year-old man were given more than the prescribed amount of the Pfizer vaccine on Tuesday - the second day of Australia's Covid vaccination rollout. Pictured: Health signage is seen at Gold Coast University Hospital on February 22 He thanked the nurse for her 'strength of character and her professionalism'. The health minister said they would review the event and circumstances surrounding the error. 'But the most important thing is that we engage in the transparency,' he said. Mr Hunt said authorities are still investigating how much of the vaccine was administered, after it was reported the two residents were given four times the recommended dose. 'It hasn't been confirmed, because it's actually really hard to be able to tell what was in the needle, but it couldn't have been more than [four times],' he said. 'In relation to the individual doctor, we'll leave that to the investigation as to whether or not they either did not understand or did not complete it, but it was a serious breach in terms of following the protocol.' AUSTRALIA'S VACCINE ROLLOUT: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW Australia's coronavirus vaccination rollout began on February 22. The vaccines will become available in phases, with priority groups who are at a higher risk of Covid-19 first in line for the jab. This includes: Quarantine and border workers, frontline healthcare workers and aged and disability care residents and staff. Around 60,000 Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine doses will be administered to the priority population. The rollout begins with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and will include the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine from March 2021. The Australian Government has secured more than 150 million Covid-19 vaccine doses. Both the Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccines require two separate doses for a person to be fully immunised Pfizer/BioNTech 21 days apart, and AstraZeneca 12 weeks apart. Two elderly people in Brisbane were given four times the recommended dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Tuesday. The Pfizer vial contains enough for around about six doses. Advertisement Mr Hunt said the latest advice - which he was given five minutes before a press conference on Wednesday morning - was that the pair had not experienced an adverse reaction. 'It is in line with the fact that significantly higher doses were used as parts of clinical trials around the world,' he said. 'The rollout continues. There will be cases. There will be challenges. 'This has happened in other jurisdictions overseas.' Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly also noted that other countries, including Germany and the UK, have experienced similar bungles in their coronavirus vaccine rollout at aged care facilities. 'The side effect profile was minimal particularly in the older people. That gives us hope,' he said. Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly is seen at a press conference on Wednesday, where the government addressed a coronavirus vaccine bungle in Queensland Medical workers prepare the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine at the Hyatt quarantine hotel in Perth on Monday The Pfizer vial contains enough for around about six doses. Lincoln Hopper, the CEO or St Vincent's (Holy Spirit) Care Services, said the doctor who wrongly administered the vaccine would be reported to the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. 'Yesterday was very distressing to us, to our residents and to their families,' he said. 'This incident is extremely concerning. It's caused us to question whether some of the clinicians given the job of administering the vaccine have received the appropriate training. 'Certainly, health authorities and contracted vaccination providers should be re-emphasising to their teams the need to exercise greater care so an error like this doesn't happen again.' An ambulance is seen at the entry to the Holy Spirit Nursing Home in Brisbane on Wednesday after news broke that two residents were given an incorrect dose of the Covid vaccine Male cockroaches benefit from a hidden physical trait in the fight for a female, according to a new study a larger respiratory system. Biologists from Anglia Ruskin University filmed aggressive interactions between male Madagascan hissing cockroaches. When two males were put together in containers, the one with the larger respiratory volume tended to be the dominant fighter, they found. The study authors say these 'super athletes' may benefit from greater oxygen intake, helping them prevail in physical mating battles. But initially, in the eyes of its opponent, the 'super athlete' appears at first glance to be an even match. Photograph of a male wide-horned hissing cockroach (Gromphadorhina oblongonota). Researchers say: 'the ability to effectively deliver oxygen to the tissues may enhance fighting ability by allowing longer-lasting aerobic respiration' 'Our study found that some cockroaches have much larger respiratory capacities than others, allowing them to dominate these contests,' said study author Dr Sophie Mowles at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU). 'The increased ability to effectively deliver oxygen to their body tissue may enhance the fighting ability of these dominant males. 'When studying contest behaviour it is important to consider not just the physical weaponry used by species, or the combative behaviours they employ, but also the underlying physiology that allows this energetically costly behaviour to take place.' Animal contests are usually won by the larger opponent, and smaller males often avoid a physical fight if it detects the rival has the clear physical advantage. 'Larger size confers greater advantage during fights, including greater muscle power and thus greater strength,' Dr Mowles and her colleagues say in their research paper. However, when competitor size is similar, what's giving one male the advantage over the other become harder to establish. For their study, the experts actually used two species of Madagascan hissing cockroaches the wide-horned cockroach (Gromphadorhina oblongonota) and the flat-horned cockroach (Aeluropoda insignis). Rise of the SUPER cockroach: Pest is becoming 'near-IMPOSSIBLE' to kill Cockroaches are stepping up their defences against the poisons designed to kill them. A 2019 study found that German cockroaches, the most common species of the insect in the world, are developing cross-resistance to numerous insecticides. Not only were researchers in some cases unable to reduce cockroach numbers during a six-month study period, even when combining different insecticides, but they found the insects' resistance increased up to six-fold within one generation. 'This is a previously unrealised challenge in cockroaches,' said Purdue University professor Michael Scharf. Read more: Cockroaches are quickly becoming even HARDER to kill Advertisement In all, 46 G. oblongonota males were used, resulting in 23 contests, while for A. insignis there were 38 males, resulting in 19 contests. Cockroaches were closely matched for size so there were no visible differences in their fighting capabilities what's known as their resource holding potential (RHP). Contests were carried out in clear acrylic chambers between 9am and 3pm under red lighting to promote natural behaviours in these nocturnal animals. Generally, male wide-horned hissing cockroaches use their pronotal horns as they compete for females through vigorous contests, often butting and flipping their male opponents onto their backs. Encounters also involve 'low aggression' behaviour including repeated approaches towards the opponent, which may retreat or adopt a low posture to guard against being overturned. During the battles, actions reflecting these dominant and submissive behaviours were scored for each animal. Interactions were recorded and terminated after 20 minutes had elapsed or once a clearly dominant individual emerged. This was defined as when one cockroach ('the subordinate') attempted to escape the other, necessitating the separation of the contestants for ethical reasons. Few individuals flipped their opponent during encounters, but G. oblongonota was more likely to do this than A. insignis. Following the fights, computerised tomography (CT) scans of each cockroach were carried out, allowing the researchers to study their whole body, including the size of their respiratory system. A CT scan of a male wide-horned hissing cockroach (Gromphadorhina oblongonota) showing the full respiratory volume. Highlighted are the sclerotized fourth spiracles, which these cockroaches use to produce their hiss Researchers noted: 'To undergo X-ray computed tomography, the subject must remain still and thus it was necessary to kill the cockroaches prior to scanning. 'Cockroaches were humanely killed by freezing at -80C [-144F].' Crucially, they found significant differences in the respiratory volumes of the G. oblongonota cockroaches, and these were directly associated with their fighting prowess. The dominant individuals were found to have larger respiratory volumes compared to their similarly-sized submissive opponents. Of the G. oblongonota encounters, the individual with the larger respiratory volume won 14 out of 23 times (61 per cent) of the time. Researchers also calculated a value that took into account their respiratory volume compared with their body volume. The individual with the larger respiratory volume for their size won 17 our of 23 times (74 per cent of the time). 'That latter value respiratory volume/body volume was the most important' Dr Mowles told MailOnline. 'What we found in this species was that if they had a larger respiratory volume than expected for their size, they were more likely to win their fights. 'So, it's not just about being bigger, and thus having the insect equivalent of larger lungs', it's about being a better individual.' Shot from the video, showing a contest between two male wide-horned hissing cockroaches (Gromphadorhina oblongonota). The dominant animal is see flipping over the 'subordinate' As for A. insignis, researchers found dominant and subordinate individuals did not differ in respiratory capacity. G. oblongonota is a much more aggressive species than A. insignis, with more elaborate weaponry for use in aggressive encounters. 'In the other species, their respiratory volumes did not affect fight outcomes at all (and they were less aggressive in their encounters overall),' said Dr Mowles. Researchers think G. oblongonota the larger and more aggressive species of the two has a greater relative investment in its respiratory system. Greater relative respiratory volumes of G. oblongonota may be required to fuel more vigorous, and potentially energetically demanding, behaviour. 'We found that G. oblongonota individuals that had the ability to effectively deliver oxygen to the tissues may enhance fighting ability by allowing longer-lasting aerobic respiration,' they say in the paper, which is published in Animal Behaviour. Last month, Laurence D. Fink, BlackRocks chief executive, wrote that the company wanted businesses it invests in to remove as much carbon dioxide from the environment as they emit by 2050 at the latest. But crucial details were missing from the pledge, including what proportion of the companies BlackRock invests in will be zero-emission businesses in 2050. On Saturday, in response to questions from The New York Times, a BlackRock spokesman said that the companys ambition was to have net zero emissions across our entire assets under management by 2050, The New York Timess Peter Eavis and Clifford Krauss report. As the biggest companies strive to trumpet their environmental activism, the need to match words with deeds is becoming increasingly important. Household names like Costco and Netflix have not provided emissions reduction targets. Others, like the agricultural giant Cargill and the clothing company Levi Strauss, have struggled to cut emissions. Technology companies like Google and Microsoft, which run power-hungry data centers, have slashed emissions, but are finding that the technology often doesnt exist to carry out their moonshot objectives. It is my hope that Christians will realize that if we come together as one body, set aside denominational differences, doctrine differences, ethnic differences and cultural differences that we can control what happens in governments... Author Terry Warren urges Christians to stand together against the devils tactics in One Body: Gods Desire for the Church is Unity! The Greatest Weapon The Church has to Defeat the Devil($14.49, paperback, 9781662807626; $6.99, e-book, 9781662807633). Dr. Warren has watched special interest groups chip away at Christian liberties little by little because they work together, without the division that plagues the Body of Christ. Division is one of the devils strongest weapons against Gods people, but unity is also one of Gods strongest defenses. It is my hope that Christians will realize that if we come together as one body, set aside denominational differences, doctrine differences, ethnic differences and cultural differences that we can control what happens in governments, reinstate morals and values into our societies, communities and families and bring back the Godly principals that made America great, said Warren. Dr. Terry Warren is currently the founder and senior Pastor of Olive Press International Ministries based in Palm Springs, California, a non-denominational, multicultural church. Since 1990, Dr. Warren has traveled to Europe and several countries in Africa to share the gospel and do humanitarian work, including South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Ghana as well as others. ### Xulon Press, a division of Salem Media Group, is the worlds largest Christian self-publisher, with more than 15,000 titles published to date. One Body is available online through xulonpress.com/bookstore, amazon.com, and barnesandnoble.com. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Ms. Boylan wrote that in her early days working for the Cuomo administration, her boss at Empire State Development had once told her that the governor had a crush on me. She added that Mr. Cuomo had gone out of his way to touch me on my lower back, arms and legs. His senior staff began keeping tabs on my whereabouts, she wrote, publishing an email from 2016, in which a top aide to Mr. Cuomo asked Ms. Boylans boss if she was going to be attending an event. The attention from the governor also included a private invitation to his office in late 2016, Ms. Boylan said, when she says he showed her a cigar box Mr. Cuomo said he received from President Bill Clinton when he served in his administration, as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The two-decade-old reference to President Clintons affair with Monica Lewinsky was not lost on me, she said. In October 2017, Ms. Boylan wrote, the governor joked that they should play strip poker while on a flight back from an event in Western New York. The two were in close quarters, sitting across from one another on the plane, with a press aide and a state trooper sitting nearby. Ms. Boylan said she replied: Thats exactly what I was thinking, in a sarcastic manner. I tried to play it cool, she wrote in the essay, which was published on Medium. But in that moment, I realized just how acquiescent I had become. Kilogram silver and multi-gram gold values from surface samples extend zones. Fully funded drill program is set to resume early in the spring. Well funded with ~$3.1M in working capital. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Mountain Boy Minerals Ltd. (TSXV: MTB) (FSE: M9UA) ("Mountain Boy" or the "Company") reports results from its 2020 exploration program on the American Creek Project in BC's Golden Triangle. The program, which wrapped up in early November, included 2,100 metres of a planned 4,000-metre drill campaign. Drilling will resume in the spring with the additional information in hand from the program just completed. Three target areas spanning 2.5 kms were tested, two for the first time. Results provide encouragement to resume the program as soon as possible in the upcoming season. Lucia Theny, VP Exploration, stated: "While precious metal assays from these initial drill results are not high, most of the holes encountered precious and base metal values and provided important geological information that will guide future work. Arrangements are now in place to begin the next phase as soon as conditions allow." Wolfmoon Area Wolfmoon, a new discovery in 2019, was tested with the first 5 holes of the program. The drilling was intended to follow-up on surface samples with high gold and silver values coincident with chargeability anomalies from the Induced Polarization survey. Drilling at Wolfmoon confirms the presence of polymetallic mineralization close to surface (see table of significant values below), but further interpretation will be required to identify areas of greater vein density in advance of the next phase of drilling. Surface sample 71545 was taken 2 kilometres to the north-northwest of the Wolfmoon zone and returned 1,488 grams per tonne silver, 1.14% lead, 0.54% zinc and 3.05 grams per tonne gold, demonstrating considerable strike length to this style of mineralization. This grab sample and other notable samples are listed in Table 2 below. Mountain Boy Area Historically, the High-Grade Vein had the best silver values in the Mountain Boy Mine and, drilling in 2006 yielded 6 holes with kilogram-plus silver values. Steep terrain in the vicinity of the vein makes logistics difficult. Three holes were drilled from a pad 140 metres to the north and 100 metres higher in elevation of the 2006 holes. The holes were targeting the shallow dipping structure that in part controls the mineralization. The first hole failed to reach target depth due to faulting and broken rock. Holes MB-2020-002B and MB-2020-005 intersected low-grade polymetallic mineralization, including low-grade gold, but did not encounter significant silver mineralization. The two holes intersected mineralization 30 and 60 metres north of the 2006 drilling. The geological team interprets that drilling intersected one of the controlling structures for mineralization but has not intersected the ore shoot within the structure. It is now hypothesized that the high-grade mineralization is controlled by the intersection of steeper structures cross cutting the identified shallow dipping vein structure. Drilling in 2021 will test this premise and attempt to determine the orientation of the high-grade ore shoots. Other local vein sets in the area will also be further evaluated for the potential to host similar mineralization. The mineralization encountered in the 2020 drilling occurs as opaque, iron-black, fine grained material with a hardness of approximately 3 on the Mohs hardness scale. The sulphides occur in quart-barite vein hosted breccias, massive sulphide veins and wisps and stringers. The mineralization from the 2020 program visually resembles the mineralization from the 2006 program that yielded kilogram silver values. The expectations based on previous drilling and the similarity in appearance of silver sulphides and iron rich zinc sulphides led to a misinterpretation of the sulphide species. The next phase of drilling for this target will incorporate the improved knowledge of the structures in the area. In addition, plans are progressing to explore from underground. Four Bees Area Hole MB-2020-004 was drilled to test the Four Bees target, a vein in the MB-Silver area. The drill hole intersected 6 metres of 59.23 grams per tonne silver, including 2 metres of 101 grams per tonne silver. Several encouraging surface grab samples were collected from this target, including C0034472 with 685 grams per tonne silver, 1.01% copper, 1.05% lead and 5.4% zinc. The hole was drilled from the MB Silver mine road using a track mounted drill. The hole is interpreted to have been drilled parallel and below the main vein. A helicopter drill pad is in place to further test this target. Drilling on the Upper Ruby Zone intersected significant zinc values including 2.75% zinc, 0.8% lead and 0.35 grams per tonne gold over 1.8 metres. This was the first test of this newly discovered target, located 430 meters north of the historic mine area. On a bench above the historically mined area, surface samples returned gold and copper values including sample 71681 at 4.8 grams per tonne gold, 4.5% copper, and 32 grams per tonne silver. The relationship of this mineralization to the silver and base metal mineralization at the historic mine site will be examined in the upcoming season. Upcoming Drilling Plans The Company is fully funded for the completion of its planned drill program as well as further work this spring and summer. The current working capital position stands at approximately $3.1 million. In addition to more diamond drilling, the Company plans on initiating environmental assessment and baseline water studies as well as investigating the feasibility of opening up the old underground workings at the Mountain Boy Mine. Lawrence Roulston, CEO, stated, "We would like to have seen better numbers from these first few holes but the results are in line with other early-stage drill programs. The geological information from these holes will be extremely valuable in guiding our next phase of drilling, which will get underway as soon as conditions permit. Evidence suggests that this is a large and robust mineralizing system, similar to others in the Golden Triangle, and we are now much closer to understanding this system. We are also continuing to advance our four other projects in the Golden Triangle and will have results to announce shortly." QA/QC Procedures: The core is flown from the drill site to a core logging facility in Stewart, BC, where it is logged and split using a diamond saw. Samples are then bagged with security tags and shipped to the MSALABS prep lab in Terrace, BC. Pulps are then sent the MSALABS' Langley location for analysis. MSALABS is an accredited lab with both ISO 17025 (Testing and Calibration Laboratories) and ISO 9001 (Quality Management Systems) accreditation. Samples will be analyzed using MSALABS's Fire Assay method (AuAg-12) with an AAS finish for gold and silver and by a 48-element four acid digest ICP-AES analysis (IMS-230). In addition to the MSALABS Laboratory quality assurance / quality control (QA/QC) protocols in place, Mountain Boy Minerals implements its own internal QA/QC program that includes the insertion of sample blanks and standards in the field. Table 1 High Grade Hole ID From To Width Au (ppm) Ag (ppm) Cu (ppm) Pb (ppm) Zn (ppm) MB-2020-001 107.36 107.8 0.44 0.217 5.55 217 2653 25200 MB-2020-002 42 45 3 0.576 0.31 3 35 223 MB-2020-002 50.28 51.9 1.62 0.127 1.54 14 788 2688 MB-2020-002B 155 159 4 0.066 6.99 692 1284 10819 MB-2020-002B 192 195 3 0.128 0.31 19 110 1033 MB-2020-002B 207 210 3 0.000 45.80 68 34 168 Upper Ruby Hole ID From To Width Au (ppm) Ag (ppm) Cu (ppm) Pb (ppm) Zn (ppm) MB-2020-003 14 23 8.97 0.000 45.72 403 343 562 MB-2020-003 61.18 80.5 19.32 0.000 0.71 10 430 1733 MB-2020-003 80.5 84.58 4.08 0.152 6.32 206 4756 12855 including 1.8 0.350 11.41 416 8127 27500 Four Bees Hole ID From To Width Au (ppm) Ag (ppm) Cu (ppm) Pb (ppm) Zn (ppm) MB-2020-004 86 113 27 0.000 21.56 17 136 125 including 6 0.000 59.23 16 242 156 2 0.000 101.00 25 91 107 Wolfmoon Hole ID From To Width Au (ppm) Ag (ppm) Cu (ppm) Pb (ppm) Zn (ppm) WM-2020-001 5 6.55 1.55 0.126 1.33 27 116 665 WM-2020-001 27.6 29.2 1.6 0.682 12.28 196 1040 3676 WM-2020-001 39.2 40 0.8 0.264 33.43 87 1267 583 Table 2 Sample ID Target Zone Type (m) Au (ppb) Ag (ppm) Cu (ppm) Pb (ppm) Zn (ppm) C0034471 MB Silver Four Bees grab 43 179 1391.5 3251.7 5770 C0034472 MB Silver Four Bees grab 150 685 10100 10500 54000 C0034473 MB Silver Four Bees grab 52 143 1938.2 6843.3 31000 71682 MB Silver MB Bench 194 18.68 2296.8 290 62 71685 MB Silver MB Bench chip 1 1265 13.08 3655.6 90.6 128 71681 MB Silver MB Bench 4757 32.26 44850 24.8 92 71781 MB Silver MB Bench 203 27.86 48450 59 46 71782 MB Silver MB Bench 3271 15.32 16640 43.7 100 71783 MB Silver MB Bench 172 5.15 2226.6 133.4 98 71784 MB Silver MB Bench 7 0.47 121.9 58.8 179 71785 MB Silver MB Bench 1988 18.7 767.2 71.1 6 A00217653 MB Silver float 212 159 554.7 246500 18500 71516 Wolfmoon grab 65 20.68 2305.3 244.3 201 71752 Wolfmoon grab 19700 2446 3297.6 18000 143 71545 North Wolfmoon Grab 3058 1488 186.6 11400 15400 71655 East Wolfmoon Grab 0.2 951 279 895.9 4104.7 90 71656 East Wolfmoon Grab 148 12.37 37.2 86.9 111 71506 East Wolfmoon grab 0.1 18 267 205.1 530 481 71728 East Wolfmoon Grab 186 344 2690.2 5416.8 1159 71629 Grab 233 38.02 18.9 47200 129800 71512 Lucky Jim Joven Grab 190 61.6 273 9387 55300 71515 Lucky Jim Grab 199 5.52 391.6 3239.1 16900 71549 Ruby Upper Ruby grab 9 248 901.3 200.5 435 The technical disclosure in this release has been read and approved by Andrew Wilkins, B.Sc., P.Geo., a qualified person as defined in National Instrument 43-101. On behalf of the Board of Directors: Lawrence Roulston President & CEO For further information, contact: Nancy Curry VP Corporate Development (604) 220-2971 NEITHER TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE. This news release may contain certain "forward-looking statements". Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date of this news release and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75273 Aesthetics Biomedical Inc. (ABM), a regenerative aesthetics medical device and topical skincare company announces additional scientific findings for its patented skincare product, SoME Skincare that confirm earlier findings. (J Drugs & Dermatology Vol 19, Issue 12, Dec 2020). SoME Skincare is the first in its class, utilizing personalized autologous platelet rich plasma (PRP) in a topical skincare product for ninety (90) days of home use. An earlier controlled, double blinded, eight-week study demonstrated, tolerability and efficacy of the topical product for facial rejuvenation. (J Cosmetic Dermatol Vol 18, Issue 5, 2019). The earlier data reported that the patented cosmetic base when combined with autologous PRP demonstrated increased efficacy with continued twice/day use. Dermatologist evaluation identified visible clinical improvement for signs of facial aging at four (4) weeks, with enhanced performance observed at eight (8) weeks (e.g. luminosity, radiance, smoothness, reduction in redness and skin lightening) vs. the control base alone. Biopsies revealed enhanced collagen and elastin expression including up-regulation of the type 1 collagen gene observed with the SoME Skincare base + PRP vs. the SoME Skincare base alone. The recent findings demonstrated that the clinical efficacy was more robust at one hundred and twenty (120) days of daily use for all clinical end points, including identifiable reduction in fine lines and wrinkles. Comparable clinical, histological and biochemical results were observed with either 60mls or 20mls collection of whole blood. This fact improves the overall utilization of the product in the physicians office. The patented cosmetic base is formulated to preserve viable platelet function for ninety (90) days of home use. As a point of care product, the patient goes to their physician office, blood is drawn and centrifuged to obtain PRP. 3mL of PRP is then added to each of three 1oz cosmetic base bottles providing for ninety (90) days, twice/day home use. The patient receives a mini refrigerator to store the product. The removal of the product from the refrigerator and applied to the skin provides a temperature change which activates and degranulates the platelets with ensuing release of growth factors and other biomolecules into the skin. Both light and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) demonstrated platelet activation and degranulation with product treatment. Enzyme linked assays demonstrated that the SoME Skincare product could prevent release of key growth factors, for upwards to ninety (90) days. The product is well tolerated by all skin types; the preservative system is effective against bacteria, yeast and viruses, including HIV. Other in-office aesthetic treatments can be used concurrently with SoME Skincare. The new patent provides broader protections for the promotion of this novel technology that stands alone among the competition. We remain very excited with the most recent findings that supports the performance of our SoME Skincare product and its growing adoption into aesthetic physician practices. We strongly believe a solid science foundation, coupled with product performance provides our physician community and patients with an exceptional topical product to address anti-aging and other aesthetic conditions. Further, we are moving forward in 2021 on multiple international registrations to bring SoME Skincare into the global marketplace," says MaryAnn Guerra, ABMs President/CEO. Conducting double-blinded, split face, controlled clinical studies is a compelling way to evaluate the performance of a new topical skincare product. Dermatologist evaluation, histology, biochemistry and molecular approaches coupled with patient feedback, provides, multiple data sets to understand the mechanism of action, and provide improvements with follow-on products, says Lawrence Rheins PhD, ABMs Chief Scientific Officer. Consumers want personalized, natural products that perform, physicians, want to better understand the products performance. SoME Skincare product provides both," says Rheins. ABOUT AESTHETICS BIOMEDICAL Aesthetics Biomedical Inc., headquartered in Phoenix, Ariz., is committed to the development and distribution of novel aesthetic devices, products, and services in the global market. Aesthetics Biomedicals innovation center is a leader in breakthrough technologies and combination therapies for its clients, physician network and the aesthetic arena, creating novel patient treatment experiences that benefit from ongoing research, approved clinical indications for use, as well as a personalized approach designed for consumer benefit. Visit http://www.AestheticsBiomedical.com or http://www.SoMESkincare.com The UN nuclear watchdog said on February 23 that it is "deeply concerned" that Iran secretly kept "undeclared nuclear material" at an "undeclared location" as the agency warned that Tehran continued to exceed "many limits" set by its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also confirmed in a pair of reports that Iran was already enriching uranium up to 20 percent purity, and that its enriched-uranium stockpile had reached 14 times the limit established by the 4-year-old Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA). "The agency is deeply concerned that undeclared nuclear material may have been present at this undeclared location and that such nuclear material remains unreported by Iran under its safeguards agreement," the IAEA said. Iran "has yet to provide answers" on the discovery of "anthropogenic uranium particles" found at two sites inspected last year. IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi then reiterated that Iran "needs to give answers" on the traces "in places they shouldn't be." He said the process with Tehran "has not yielded positive results for now." The IAEA's warnings followed condemnation hours earlier by Britain, France, and Germany of Tehran's decision to abandon a snap-inspections regime and reduce transparency this week as part of a mounting standoff over the fate of the JCPOA. Iran confirmed on February 22 that it had ended its implementation of an Additional Protocol allowing for surprise inspections of nuclear-related sites. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also vowed "not to back down on the nuclear issue" and floated the possibility of escalating uranium enrichment to 60 percent, far above the 3.67-percent limit in the JCPOA and three times the 20 percent it announced a month ago. Related: Gas Companies Hit the Jackpot On Deep Freeze Diplomatic maneuvering has intensified since Joe Biden was sworn in as U.S. president in January pledging to revive Washington's participation in the agreement, which the previous U.S. administration abandoned in 2018. "We...deeply regret that Iran has started, as of today, to suspend the Additional Protocol and the transparency measures under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action," the British, French, and German foreign ministers said in a joint statement. "We urge Iran to stop and reverse all measures that reduce transparency and to ensure full and timely cooperation with the IAEA," they added. Reuters quoted an unnamed senior diplomat on February 23 as saying Iran is producing around 15 kilograms a month of uranium enriched to 20 percent. Grossi has laid out details of a deal he worked out with Iranian officials last weekend to preserve some monitoring for up to three months beyond Tehran's deadline for nixing the snap inspections. He described a system whereby data and "key activities" would be monitored and stored but not made available until after the period in question. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said a recent law handed down by the hard-line parliament had gone into effect early on February 23 barring Iran from sharing surveillance footage of its nuclear facilities with the IAEA. In a sign that the nuclear issue is further pitting hard-liners against President Hassan Rohani's administration, lawmakers in Iran's parliament on February 22 objected to the government's decision to allow the continued IAEA monitoring even under the modified regime. The White House has said that its European allies are awaiting a response from Iran on an offer to host an informal meeting of current members of the JCPOA. The United States and other governments have accused Iran of secretly trying to build a nuclear-weapons capability, a charge that Tehran has consistently rejected despite years of what the IAEA said was obfuscation and deception. By RFE/RL More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Argonaut Resources NL (ASX:ARE) is an Australian Stock Exchange listed mineral exploration and development company with projects in South Australia, Queensland, Laos and Zambia. Argonaut Resources acquires package of three South Australian licences prospective for uranium Argonaut Resources NL (ASX:ARE) has acquired a package of highly prospective uranium exploration licences known as the Frome Project south of Lake Frome in South Australia. The project includes three highly prospective licences in the Frome Embayment area of South Australia, which is arguably the most prospective region in Australia for sandstone-hosted uranium deposits. This area hosts the Beverley deposit and Four Mile in the northwest and the Honeymoon, Goulds Dam and Oban deposits in the southeast. Importantly, the area is nearby to existing, licensed uranium production sites such as Honeymoon, Four Mile and Beverley where uranium production is by in-situ recovery (ISR). Tenure and prospectivity Argonaut holds a 100% interest in two large exploration licences, both greater than 950 square kilometres, and a third licence via an option, sale and milestone agreement. This agreement provides for the acquisition by Argonaut of a 100% interest of a third similarly large exploration licence, currently in the application stage. Resuscitationist Yevhen Gorenko, who works in the Cherkasy Regional Hospital, has become the first person vaccinated in Ukraines massive COVID-19 campaign. "As across Ukraine, we will have a cascade model of vaccination, which provides for the work of mobile teams in certain chain order. We strictly monitor the temperature range for vaccine storage from + 2 to + 8C," Head of the Cherkasy Regional State Administration Oleksandr Skichko posted on Facebook. Skichko stressed that "coronavirus vaccination is voluntary and free of charge. It will take place in 5 stages: at the 1st stage, health workers and staff providing care for COVID-19 patients will be vaccinated, the 2nd stage - people at extremely high risk of getting the infection (social workers, people over 80 years old, other health workers), 3rd stage - people at high risk of getting the infection and those who work in the State Emergency Service, Security Service, police, educational institutions, 4th stage - people aged 60-64 years, adults with comorbidities, 5th stage - other categories of the population." Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal reminded that the vaccination campaign started in Ukraine on February 24 as vaccines from the first batch have already been delivered to the regions. "Yesterday, the first batch of 500,000 vaccines arrived in Ukraine, which has already been sent to the regions. The vaccination campaign will start in Ukraine today," Shmyhal said. As reported, on February 23, 500,000 doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca (Covishield) vaccine, purchased at the expense of the state budget, were delivered to Ukraine. They were purchased through the Crown Agents British procurement agency. In total, Ukraine intends to purchase 12 million doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca and NovaVax at public expense. On February 23, Deputy Health Minister - Chief Sanitary Doctor of Ukraine Viktor Lyashko announced that the coronavirus vaccination campaign would begin in Ukraine on February 24. "Kyiv city and Kyiv region, Chernihiv region, Cherkasy region, Zhytomyr region, Vinnytsia region will be the first to receive the vaccine. Vaccination begins after the vaccine is delivered," Liashko said. ol After the success of Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme in bringing investments in mobile phone (handsets and components) manufacturing, the Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the PLI scheme for IT hardware products. The target IT hardware segments under the proposed Scheme include Laptops, Tablets, All-in-One Personal Computers (PCs) and Servers. The scheme proposes production linked incentive to boost domestic manufacturing and attract large investments in the value chain of these IT Hardware products. The total cost of the PLI scheme for IT hardware is approximately Rs 7,350 crore over 4 years. The scheme intends to provide incentives between 4-1 per cent on net incremental sales (over base year i.e. 2019-20) of goods manufactured in India and covered under the target segment, to eligible companies, for a period of four years. As per the Cabinet statement, the scheme is expected to lead production worth Rs 3.26 lakh crore and exports worth Rs 2.45 lakh crore in four years. It is expected to bring additional investments of Rs 2,700 crore, earn direct and indirect revenue around Rs 15,760 crore and create 1.80 lakh jobs in four years. Based on initial success of the PLI scheme for mobile phones and specified electronic components, 10 target sectors along with specific product lines having high growth potential were identified by NITI Aayog for implementation of PLI Schemes. PLI Scheme for IT hardware is a further step in that direction. It comes in close wake of Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for telecom and networking products that was approved by Union Cabinet last week. PLI scheme for mobile phones and specified electronic components was launched last year during the middle of pandemic to establish India as a hub of electronic manufacturing. "It has been a huge success in terms of interest received from global as well as domestic mobile manufacturing companies. 16 companies were approved under the first round of the PLI scheme for large scale manufacturing of mobile phones and specified electronic components," as per the Cabinet statement. The scheme was announced in April 2020; last date for application was July 31, 2020 and the scheme commenced on August 1, 2020. All this happened during the most challenging times of COVID-19, when the economy and manufacturing was under severe stress. The government claimed that in the last 5 months of scheme operation and despite challenging times, the applicant companies, including top global mobile phone companies, produced goods worth Rs 35,000 crore and invested Rs 1,300 crore under the Scheme. Additional employment generation during this period stands at around 22,500 jobs, the Cabinet said. Another scheme for promoting manufacturing of electronics components called SPECS has also received 22 applications. Good atmosphere created by the Union Budget was being questioned as to how these Budget announcements will be achieved. Success of PLI shows how these announcements have been implemented, it added. "The proposed scheme is likely to benefit major global as well as domestic manufacturers of IT hardware products namely Laptops, Tablets, All-in-One PCs, and Servers. This is an important segment to promote manufacturing as there is huge import reliance for these items at present," the Cabinet said. PLI Scheme is conceived in a manner that incentives are payable by government only after investment has been done, employment has been generated, production and sales targets have been met. As more coronavirus vaccines are distributed, cases are trending down across the country, including within Humble ISD and the Lake Houston area. However, data on COVID-19 may be delayed or not correctly reported due to last weeks Texas winter storm, according to Harris County Public Health. Lake Houston area zip codes have reached over 17,000 confirmed cases as the country surpassed 500,000 deaths from COVID-19, according to data from Harris County Public Health. STORM: Sugar Land mom shares grief, memories after fire during freeze kills her 3 kids and mother By Feb. 23, there were 17,344 confirmed cases and nearly 170 deaths in the Lake Houston area zip codes according to data from Harris County Public Health. More Information Data on the coronavirus as of Feb. 23 from Harris County Public Health can be viewed by zip code. These zip codes cover the Lake Houston area. 77396 4339 confirmed cases 260 active cases 32 deaths 77346 4554 confirmed cases 313 active cases 28 deaths 77338 3365 confirmed cases 197 active cases 55 deaths 77339 947 confirmed cases 77 active cases 28 deaths 77345 478 confirmed cases 21 active cases 0-5 deaths 77044 3,661 confirmed cases 253 active cases 22 deaths Totals July 31: Total: 2,928 cases, 51 deaths Aug 31: 4,572 confirmed cases, 80 deaths Oct. 26: 7,818 confirmed cases, 116 deaths Nov. 24: 9,127 confirmed cases, 129 deaths Dec. 30: 11,878 confirmed cases, 143 deaths Jan. 26: 15,632 confirmed cases, 159 deaths Feb. 23: 17,344 confirmed cases, 165-170 deaths See More Collapse Meanwhile, Humble ISD reported 42 active student cases (0.12 percent) and 29 active staff cases (0.39 percent) as of Feb. 23. There have been a total of 1,631 student cases and 716 staff cases since public reporting began on Aug. 11. This represented a steep decline from Feb. 2, when Humble ISD reported 325 active student cases (0.91 percent) and 109 active staff cases (1.45 percent). However, there were no in-person classes last week due to the Texas winter storm and the district had its annual one-week break in February the week prior. Testing locations Kingwood has a free testing site this week at the Kingwood Community Center, 4102 Rustic Woods, from Feb. 23 Feb. 27 open 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. from the Houston Health Department. The closest mega testing location this week to the Lake Houston area is hosted by the Houston Emergency Operations Center is at Houston Community College - North Forest, 6010 Little York Road, open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., according to a press release from the Houston Health Department. The Texas Department of Emergency Management also has a testing site at HCC - Northeast Campus, 555 Community College Drive, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday according to the City of Houston press release. For free testing locations, visit the Harris County Public Health website here and the Houston Emergency Operations Center here. To view a map of provider locations for a vaccine if you qualify, visit the interactive website here. Vaccine distribution The Houston Health Department and Harris County Public Health have partnered to aid the FEMA-supported COVID-19 mass vaccination site opening at NRG Park to serve those who qualify on the COVID-19 vaccine waitlist. About 12.3 percent of residents in Harris County over the age of 16 have at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 210,679 people have been fully vaccinated according to the Houston Chronicle data team. The vaccination site will be able to provide 6,000 shots per day for three weeks before making a transition to second doses for another three weeks, according to the press release from the City of Houston. Our nationally-recognized COVID-19 response, led by the Houston Health Department, focuses on access and equity, Mayor Sylvester Turner said in a press release. By collaborating with partners and following the data, we can direct people from our most affected and vulnerable communities to the NRG Park site while simultaneously continuing to offer vaccine directly in communities. LOCAL: Barbecue community feeds Houston after historic freeze savannah.mehrtens@chron.com The people of Myanmar may have got online later than most others, but their enthusiasm for the internet has the zeal of the converted. Communications on Facebook and Twitter, along with secure messaging apps, have united millions in opposition to the coup. Daily street protests against the military have gathered strength in recent days, despite fears of a bloody crackdown. Demonstrators have rallied at Chinas diplomatic missions in Myanmar, accusing Beijing of exporting the tools of authoritarianism to its smaller neighbour. Armoured vehicles continued to be seen on the streets of Myanmars capital on Tuesday, but protesters turned out despite the military presence. Credit:Getty Images Huawei and ZTE, two major Chinese companies, built much of Myanmars telecommunications network, especially when Western financial sanctions made it difficult for other foreign firms to operate in the country. Myanmars two foreign-owned telecom operators, Telenor and Ooredo, have complied with numerous demands from the military, including instructions to cut off the internet each night for the past week, and block specific websites, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. All the while, the military has placed officers from its Signal Corps in charge of the Posts and Telecommunications Department, according to two people with knowledge of the departments staffing. A 36-page draft cyber security law that was distributed to telecoms and internet service providers the week after the coup outlines draconian rules that would give the military sweeping powers to block websites and cut off access to users deemed troublesome. The law would also allow the government broad access to users data, which it stipulates the internet providers must store for three years. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video The cyber security law is just a law to arrest people who are online, said Ma Htaike Htaike Aung, the executive director of MIDO, a civil society group that tracks technology in Myanmar. If it goes through, the digital economy will be gone in our country. When the draft of the law was sent for comment to the foreign telecoms, the companies representatives were told by the authorities that rejecting the law was not an option, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations. Those people and others with knowledge of the ongoing attempts to crack down on the internet in Myanmar spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities of the new regime. Loading The draft law follows a years-long effort within the country to build out surveillance capabilities, often following cues from China. Last year, Telenor, a Norwegian-owned company, raised concerns about a government push to register the identities of individuals who buy mobile phone services, which would allow authorities to link names to phone numbers. The campaign in Myanmar has thus far been unsuccessful, though it bears similarities to Chinas real-name registration policies, which have become a keystone of Beijings surveillance state. The program reflected Myanmars ambitions but also just how far away it is from achieving anything close to what China has done. In recent years, Huawei surveillance cameras made to track cars and people have also gone up in the countrys biggest cities and in Naypyitaw, the underpopulated capital. A top cyber security official recently showed off photos of such road monitoring technology on his personal Facebook page. A Huawei spokesman declined to comment about the systems. For now, even as anti-Chinese protests mount over fears of an influx of high-tech equipment, the Tatmadaw has ordered telecom companies to use less sophisticated methods to hamper internet access. The method of choice is to decouple website addresses from the series of numbers a computer needs to look up specific sites, a practice akin to listing a wrong number under a persons name in a phone book. Loading Savvier internet users skirt the blocks with virtual private networks or VPNs. But over the past week, access to some popular free VPNs has been hindered. And paid services, which are harder to block, are unaffordable to most people, who also lack the international credit cards needed to buy them. Still, for one of Asias poorest countries, Myanmar has developed a surprisingly robust technical command. Over the past decade, thousands of military officers have studied in Russia, where they were schooled in the latest information technology, according to educational data from Myanmar and Russia. In 2018, the Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications, which was then under a hybrid civilian-military government, diverted $US4.5 million ($5.6 million) from an emergency fund to use for a social media monitoring team that aims to prevent foreign sources who interfere and incite unrest in Myanmar. Loading Thousands of cyber soldiers operate under military command, tech experts in Myanmar said. Each morning, after the nightly internet shutdowns, more websites and VPNs are blocked, showing the soldiers industriousness. We see a military that has been using analog methods for decades but is also trying to embrace new tech, said Hunter Marston, a South-east Asia researcher at the Australian National University. While its applied in a haphazard way for now, theyre setting up a system to sweep up anyone who posts anything even remotely threatening to the regime. Zaw Thurein Tun, of the Myanmar Computer Professionals Association, said that he was sitting at home, browsing the internet shortly after the coup, when a clutch of men arrived to arrest him. Other digital activists had already been detained across the country. He ran. HOUSTON (AP) A student accused of fatally shooting 10 people at a Texas high school in 2018 will spend up to another 12 months at a state mental health facility as doctors say he remains incompetent to stand trial, his attorney said Tuesday. Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 20, has been receiving mental health treatment at the North Texas State Hospital in Vernon since early December 2019. He was initially committed for 120 days. But doctors in March 2020 determined he was still incompetent and he was ordered to stay another 12 months, said Nick Poehl, one of Pagourtzis attorneys. Were nearing the expiration of that and so thats why the hospital sent us a report indicating he still is not restored to competency. So, we just reupped for up to another 12 months, Poehl said. An order continuing Pagourtzis hospitalization was to have been signed by Judge John Ellisor on Tuesday. Poehl said he could not discuss specific details of Pagourtzis treatment due to privacy issues. But he said his clients treatment has been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. In terms of the normal resources and tools that the hospital can bring to bear for the last year or thereabouts, some of that has been curtailed. That just doesnt affect him but affects every patient there, Poehl said. The hope is as we head back toward normal, some of that will improve. The issue of Pagourtzis competency relates to his current state of mind and not his state of mind at the time of the shooting, Poehl has said. A spokesman for the Galveston County District Attorneys Office, which is prosecuting Pagourtzis, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment. Pagourtzis is charged with capital murder for the May 18, 2018, attack at Santa Fe High School, which is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Houston. Because he was 17 at the time of the attack, he is not eligible for the death penalty. His trial had been set to start in February 2020. Pagourtzis also faces federal charges in a sealed criminal case. ___ Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70 Danbury schools Superintendent Sal Pascarella co-wrote a letter on behalf of a number of Connecticut school districts calling on Gov. Ned Lamont to supply their districts with more state aid after he put a hold on scheduled increases to the districts grant money. The letter states the superintendents opposition to Lamonts pause in state funding escalations in his proposed biennial budget, which would take more than $109 million away from Connecticuts 53 Alliance District and urban schools, they claim. The letter is co-authored by superintendents from Danbury, Meriden, Vernon and East Hartford and signed by numerous district leaders including those from Bridgeport, New Haven, Norwalk, Stamford, Middletown and Torrington, among others. As such, we urge you to reconsider this strategy and reinstate the original phase-in schedule for all Alliance Districts, the letter read. Alliance Districts are identified by the state as eligible for additional funds and are historically under-performing. This shift will allow us to fund our general budget obligations, help cushion distressed municipalities from large tax increases, and avoid utilizing one-time federal funding intended for COVID-related purposes to fund ongoing operations, it continued. The state conceived a grant formula to give Alliance District schools and others in some urban districts representing fiscally challenged communities state funding to address a persistent state achievement gap, according to the letter. These schools are typically awarded an increase in grant money annually to help provide vital services to students. However, Lamonts pause will discontinue the planned increases leaving these schools at a loss. Danbury was scheduled to see an increase of more than $2.5 million for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years. Lamonts spokesman Max Reiss said more $440 million in federal funding is available to school districts across Connecticut including the states Alliance and urban districts. Connecticut districts are also preparing to receive their slice of a federal COVID-19 relief grant, which they can use to supplement missing grant money for the next two years by infusing millions of federal relief dollars into their budgets for COVID-related expenses. These funds can and should be used for school leaders to provide the resources necessary to address the needs of the districts and focus on learning loss and recovery as well as continued safe reopening, Reiss said. The governors budget mitigates the need for broad-based tax increases, relying on federal aid and partial use of the states Budget Reserve Fund while the states economy and revenues continue to recover. While this aid helps relieve some pressure in the interim, superintendents said it will be burdensome to their long-term fiscal plans. By pausing the ECS increase formula [grant money increases] and supplanting this phase in approach with funds not intended for general budget activities, Connecticut adopts a financial strategy that will create large-scale disruptions for fiscal year 2024, the letter read. Using the federal aid from Congress will add to their current budgets, but leave a hole when that aid is no longer available in two years, forcing them to seek local and state help in filling their budgetary gaps. When districts mitigate the large financial shortfalls associated with using the one-time funding from Congress, local governments will have to navigate the following three ripple effects. Districts will either lean on already economically challenged municipalities to subsidize their funding, seek massive increases in state aid, or be pushed to reduce supportive programs for students in the aftermath of the states grant cuts, the letter said. While we recognize that there are no easy answers, we are eager to engage with you and your team on helping design a sustainable, long-term financial plan that can preserve our states commitment to equity, stimulate academic recovery and best utilize the federal dollars, the letter stated. Reiss said as the budget process continues, the administration will continue to engage with local stakeholders, those who work with students, and the General Assembly on a sustainable path forward. Party-goers in New South Wales can take to wedding dance floors across the state from Friday after Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced a widespread easing of coronavirus restrictions. Ms Berejiklian on Wednesday said singing and dancing at weddings would be allowed again as the state went 38 days without a single local case of Covid-19. From Friday at 12.01am, 30 people can also sing in choirs and congregations as long as they wear a mask. Households will be allowed to welcome 50 visitors but stand-up drinking will remain banned in indoor venues until March 17. Weddings can still only host 300 people but Ms Berejiklian said that limit would be eased in three weeks as long as there are no further outbreaks of the virus. Dancing at weddings - until now considered to be too high risk - will be allowed again in New South Wales from Friday. File image WHAT'S CHANGING IN NEW SOUTH WALES From Friday, February 26 at 12.01am: Up to 50 people allowed inside a home Dancefloor gathering limits will be capped at 30 people at weddings, with rotation on and off the dance floor Up to 50 people can gather for gym classes (up from 30) as long as the four square-metre rule is followed Up to 30 people can sing in choirs and congregations if masks are worn and four square-metre rule is in place One hundred per cent capacity allowed at cinemas From March 17: If current trend continues, patrons can stand and drink indoors at pubs Advertisement Ms Berejiklian pictured addressing the media on Wednesday. She has also eased restrictions on gym classes - which can now host up to 50 people Singing and dancing were banned on December 20 as NSW battled against an outbreak of Covid-19 infections on Sydney's Northern Beaches. Restrictions on gym classes have also been eased and can now host up to 50 people as long as the four-square metre rule is followed. Ms Berejiklian said the easing of capacity limits was a step forward towards a new 'Covid normal'. But she said the changes were conditional on people in NSW social distancing when gathered together in large groups. 'Make sure no-one comes into your house with symptoms who has not been tested and ensure there is good ventilation and distancing. Please be careful if you are taking up this opportunity,' she said. 'Even though we are easing restrictions it is more important than ever before to make sure we get tested if we have the mildest of symptoms.' Commuters wearing face masks outside St. James Station in Sydney on January 4. Households in NSW will be allowed to welcome 50 visitors from Friday at 12.01am Patrons from March 17 can stand up when drinking at indoor venues. Pictured are diners at a Sydney bar on February 12 NSW Health said one case of the virus was found in a returned traveller in hotel quarantine overnight following 17,917 tests in the past 24 hours. More than 3,200 people have so far received the Covid-19 vaccine in NSW. 'We're nearly there in terms of what burdens we're imposing on the community, but we're also at a critical stage in the pandemic,' Ms Berejiklian said. DNR drafts walleye management plan for inland waters, seeks public input DNR drafts walleye management plan for inland waters, seeks public input Feb. 23, 2021 A healthy, abundant walleye population is a big part of Michigans fisheries. These native fish provide exciting opportunities for world-class recreational fishing and play an important ecological role as a top predator. Though several local, regional and Great Lakes-centric walleye plans exist, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources has drafted the first statewide walleye plan focused on inland waters and is asking the publics help in finalizing it. The draft version of the Management Plan for Walleye in Michigans Inland Waters is available for review and written comment through April 1. All comments should be sent via email to DNR-Walleye@Michigan.gov. Seth Herbst, the DNRs aquatic species and regulatory affairs manager, is leading the initiative. He said this draft plan was developed to guide the departments management effort toward maximizing both angler satisfaction and the ecological benefits of walleye fisheries. Walleye is a high-priority species for management in Michigan because of its ecological, social and cultural significance, Herbst said. Walleye fishing is a big draw for anglers. Although walleye reside in the Great Lakes, rivers and inland lakes, Herbst said this draft plan takes a narrow focus on inland waters primarily inland lakes because the walleye management in those other bodies of water is primarily addressed in various other existing management or rehabilitation plans. The new walleye management plan for inland waters aims to provide an overview of: The status of the species in Michigan. The biology and ecology of inland walleye populations. Angler perceptions about walleye management and fishing opportunities. A brief description of previous management efforts. The plan also identifies several management goals that broadly address social and ecological characteristics of walleye fisheries, because both elements are key to successful future species management. The DNR Fisheries Division developed the draft Management Plan for Walleye in Michigans Inland Waters with assistance from Michigan State University Fisheries and Wildlife Department faculty and in consultation with Tribal governments. Learn more about the walleye species and management efforts at Michigan.gov/Walleye. Michigan's annual fishing license is valid from March 1 of a given year through March 31 of the following year. Visit Michigan.gov/Fishing for all the information you need to get started. An accompanying photo is available below for download. Caption information follows. Walleye - August 2019: A young boy shows off a walleye caught on one of Michigan's inland lakes. Right now, the Michigan DNR is asking for public input on a new draft plan for walleye management on the state's inland lakes. Brattleboro, VT (05301) Today Some clouds. Low 44F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Some clouds. Low 44F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Hyderabad, Feb 24 : Ukraine's Health Minister Maksym Stepanov on Wednesday visited Bharat Biotech's manufacturing facility here and held discussions on supplies of the company's Covid-19 vaccine Covaxin for his country. A three-member led by the minister took a tour of the world-class Bio-Safety Level 3 manufacturing facility of Bharat Biotech, which has developed India's first indigenous vaccine for Covid-19. The delegation, that included Deputy Health Minister Igor Ivashchenko, and Ukraine Embassy's Head of Trade and Economic Department Ivan Konovalov had discussions with Bharat Biotech's leadership to secure the supplies of Covaxin to Ukraine. Bharat Biotech International Limited Chairman & Managing Director Dr Krishna Ella said it was privilege to host the Health Minister from Ukraine "at our state-of-the-art facility and showcase our world-class capabilities in the manufacture and supply of vaccines and research and product development". "We discussed potential timelines for the supply of Covaxin to Ukraine on a priority and the prospects of a partnership for our BBV 154 intranasal vaccine. There is a lot of interest in Covaxin worldwide," he said. Stepanov said that his nation and India have a long history of cooperation in various fields. "We look forward to benefiting from India's vast capability in the manufacture of vaccines to effectively combat the Covid-19 pandemic at home. We had a very good interaction with the team at Bharat Biotech and it was a great experience to take a tour of the facility and inspect its impressive manufacturing capabilities. We will soon firm up the Covaxin delivery plan for the mass vaccination of our people, and further strengthen our partnership on intranasal vaccine supplies after initial results from its phase 1 trials," he said. Bharat Biotech is India's leading vaccines and bio-therapeutics manufacturer. It has more than 145 global patents, a wide product portfolio of more than 16 vaccines, four bio-therapeutics, registrations in more than 123 countries and WHO Pre-qualifications. Located in Hyderabad's Genome Valley, the hub for the global biotech industry, Bharat Biotech has delivered more than 4 billion doses of various vaccines around the world till now. It continues to lead innovation and has developed vaccines for influenza H1N1, rotavirus, Japanese encephalitis, rabies, chikungunya, zika and the world's first tetanus-toxoid conjugated vaccine for typhoid. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 17:29:01|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects poverty alleviation work in a tea farm of Laoxian Township, Pingli County of Ankang, northwest China's Shaanxi Province, April 21, 2020.Xi visited Shaanxi Province on an inspection tour from April 20 to 23, 2020. (Xinhua/Yan Yan) BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Eliminating poverty, improving people's livelihoods, and realizing common prosperity are the essential requirements of socialism. Since the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) National Congress, the CPC Central Committee, with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core, has placed poverty alleviation in a prominent position, put forward new thoughts and ideas, and made new decisions and arrangements to advance China's poverty relief campaign. Here is a look at China's efforts to fight poverty. In this file photo taken on Dec. 30, 2012, Xi Jinping (R) visits an impoverished villager in the Luotuowan Village of Fuping County, north China's Hebei Province. (Xinhua/Lan Hongguang) -- December 2012 During his visit to impoverished villages in north China's Fuping County, Chinese President Xi Jinping said the most arduous and heavy task facing China in completing the building of a moderately prosperous society is in the rural areas, especially the poverty-stricken regions. -- March 2013 While joining deputies in panel discussions at the annual session of the National People's Congress, Xi said poverty alleviation should not be like "killing fleas with a hand-grenade" or resort to indiscriminate measures. The poor population should be accurately identified, assisted and managed. -- November 2013 During an inspection tour in central China's Hunan Province, Xi visited Shibadong, a Miao minority village labeled "poor" at the time, where he put forward the concept of "targeted poverty alleviation." The term refers to measures that include a system to keep track of every household and individual in poverty to verify that their treatment is having the desired effect. -- April 2014 The State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development issued a work plan on the registration of the poor population, mobilizing millions of grassroots cadres across the country to carry out poverty identification. During the process, 128,000 villages, 29.32 million households, and 89.62 million people were identified as poor, according to national standards and procedures on poverty reduction. A database was established for every single impoverished person. -- October 2014 China observed the first National Poverty Relief Day on Oct. 17. -- January 2015 Xi said no single ethnic minority group should be left behind in the country's building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects. -- February 2015 During a meeting with Party chiefs of 24 counties and cities from Shaanxi and Gansu provinces and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Xi said a well-off society is incomplete if people in old revolutionary base areas cannot shake off poverty. Chinese President Xi Jinping addresses the 2015 Global Poverty Reduction and Development Forum in Beijing, capital of China, Oct. 16, 2015. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei) -- October 2015 Xi delivered a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the 2015 Global Poverty Reduction and Development Forum, saying that China has lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty in the past 30 years, and China was the first developing country to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) target of reducing the population living in poverty by half ahead of the 2015 deadline. While striving to reduce poverty at home, China has also actively supported the cause in other developing countries. Over the past 60 years, China has provided 166 countries and international organizations with nearly 400 billion yuan in assistance. -- November 2015 Xi led a conference on poverty alleviation and development. The conference, attended by senior leaders of the CPC Central Committee and the central government, and major provincial-level officials, was the first such high-level meeting ever held at the time. Officials made a "soldiers' pledge" to the central leadership. -- February 2016 During a trip to Shenshan Village, a poverty-stricken village in the city of Jinggangshan, in Jiangxi Province, Xi met with villagers and the village party chief to learn about the progress that had been made in poverty relief through "precision" measures. "Not a single family living in poverty is to be left behind on our path to combating poverty," Xi told the Shenshan villagers. -- July 2016 Xi urged developed regions in the east to help their partner regions in the west better fight poverty at a national conference on poverty alleviation through east-west cooperation in Yinchuan, capital city of China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. -- August 2016 During an inspection tour to Qinghai Province, Xi said relocation is an effective way to relieve poverty, and stressed the importance of listening to what the villagers want and letting them participate in planning their new villages. Xi said that the building of new villages should be integrated with measures to promote production and employment, improve basic public services and protect ethnic, regional and cultural features and styles. -- End of 2016 The Shibadong Village, the birthplace of "targeted poverty alleviation," dropped its "poverty-stricken" label in 2016. -- February 2017 Jinggangshan, the heartland of the early revolutionary activities of the CPC, announced that it had been officially taken off the list of impoverished areas. -- October 2017 The 2017 Global Poverty Reduction and Development Forum kicked off in Beijing. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres sent a letter of congratulation to the meeting commending China's poverty-reduction strategy. He said that China had lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and China's poverty-alleviation experience could provide useful lessons for other developing countries. -- February 2018 The number of rural people living in poverty had dropped from 98.99 million at the end of 2012 to 30.46 million at the end of 2017, and 68.53 million people had been lifted out of poverty in the past five years, a reduction of about 70 percent. -- End of 2018 The Dulong ethnic minority group in China's Yunnan Province announced that it had been officially taken off the list of impoverished areas in 2018. When answering a letter from the Dulong people, Xi said that "poverty eradication is only the first step, better days are yet to come." -- May 2019 Yan'an, a former revolutionary base of the CPC, was officially taken off the list of impoverished areas. -- June 2019 Huang Wenxiu, who led the poverty-alleviation efforts in a village in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, died in a rain-induced flash flood on June 17, 2019, at the age of 30. Over the past eight years, over 1,500 poverty-alleviation cadres in the country had died in the battle against poverty. -- March 2020 A symposium on securing a decisive victory in poverty alleviation was held in Beijing, the largest of its kind since the 18th CPC National Congress. -- March 2020 The country's poverty-alleviation tasks were near completion, as the number of impoverished people fell to 5.51 million at the end of 2019, and the poverty headcount ratio was down to 0.6 percent from 10.2 percent during the period. Of all the 832 nation-level poverty-stricken counties, only 52 remained to be removed from the poverty list. -- May 2020 The registered poor households of the village of Atulieer atop a cliff in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, in China's Sichuan Province, moved to a newly built community. Since 2016, more than 600 billion yuan had been invested in building new homes for 9.6 million people struggling in extreme poverty. -- May 2020 The Huanjiang Maonan Autonomous County in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region was removed from the country's impoverished county list. In an instruction on poverty elimination among the ethnic group, Xi called on the Maonan people to take poverty elimination as a new starting point for a better life, and continue with efforts to make their lives more prosperous. -- October 2020 China's Tibet Autonomous Region accomplished the historical feat of eradicating absolute poverty. By the end of 2019, Tibet had lifted 628,000 people out of poverty and removed 74 county-level areas from the poverty list. -- October 2020 Xi urged continuous efforts to win a complete victory in the battle against poverty as China marked the seventh National Poverty Relief Day, saying that 2020 was the decisive year for completing the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects and eradicating poverty nationwide. -- November 2020 China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, with over 25 million people of various ethnic groups, bid farewell to absolute poverty, with the last 10 impoverished counties managing to end absolute poverty. -- November 2020 Xihaigu, once one of the world's most uninhabitable places due to harsh environment, achieved a historic feat in eliminating absolute poverty, with the last poor county in the region removed from the country's list of poverty-stricken counties. -- November 2020 China announced that it had removed the remaining 52 impoverished counties from the poverty list, marking the removal of all 832 on the list, a globally significant milestone in poverty reduction for the world's most populous country. -- December 2020 In a letter of congratulations to the International Forum on Sharing Poverty Reduction Experience held in Beijing, Xi said that the cause of poverty reduction is facing severe challenges as the COVID-19 pandemic rages across the world, and China is willing to work with all countries to promote international poverty reduction and build a community with a shared future for humanity. Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a New Year speech Thursday evening in Beijing to ring in 2021. (Xinhua/Ju Peng) -- December 2020 While delivering a televised New Year speech to ring in 2021, Xi said China had secured a great historic achievement for fully building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and a decisive victory in poverty eradication. In 2020, after eight years of efforts, all of China's nearly 100 million impoverished rural residents living below the current poverty line had shaken off poverty. Israel, a major operator of American military equipment and platforms, will be importing even more equipment top-of-the-line air force hardware and more from the United States. In a recent tweet, the Israeli Ministry of Defense announced a large acquisition deal signed with the U.S. saying Following gov. approval of the IDF acquisition plan, the MOD has begun to construct procurement programs. These are conducted with US Military channels, utilizing Foreign Military Financing. The first LOA was signed over the weekend for the procurement of 2 Boeing Tanker Jets. The tankers would in all likelihood be KC-46 aircraft, a Boeing project that has been described by one Air Force general as a lemon due to astronomical cost overruns and mechanical issues with the new tanker design. Instead of opting for a rear-facing window with which to direct the tankers refueling boom, the KC-46 opted for a complex camera and computer system that required an expensive redesign to ensure safe operation. In addition to the KC-46, Israel is preparing to likely procure a third F-35I squadron and a heavy-lift capability. Similar processes will be launched to acquire a third F35 squadron, heavy-lift Helicopters to replace the CH53 Yasur fleet, advanced munitions and more. Coming Soon to the Israeli Air Force: More F-35s? The F-35I is the Israeli version of the United States F-35 stealth fighter and the only export version that has been cleared for customization by the United States. In addition to supporting Israeli software, the Israeli Air Force would eventually like to integrate conformal fuel tanks onto the stealth fighters airframe to extend range without compromising its stealth characteristics. It has been suggested that Israeli KC-46s could also be tailor-made to Israeli specifications like the F-35Is have been, which may circumvent the design issues experienced by the platform, although that remains to be seen. The IDF underlined the closeness of the U.S.-Israeli defense relationship, stating that the procurement plan based on U.S. security assistance is crucial to strengthening the IAF and for the IDFs QME (Qualitative Military Edge) in the decades to come. Israeli currently operates CH-53 a powerful though somewhat aged heavy-lift cargo and assault helicopter. It is unclear which direction Israel will go for their heavy lift replacement. The Israeli Minister of Defense Bnei Gantz emphasized the importance of this deal for Israel, stating, I welcome the progress in procurement, which is critical at this point in time. This is a plan that is a cornerstone of the IDFs security concept. I would like to thank our great friend, the United States, for her support of the State of Israel, at all levels. We will continue to work to complete the agreements that will allow the IDF to fulfill its mission, and move forward with the tasks facing us in various arenas, near and far. Caleb Larson is a Defense Writer based in Europe. He holds a Master of Public Policy and covers U.S. and Russian security, European defense issues, and German politics and culture. This article appeared originally at 1945. If you have an event you'd like to list on the site, submit it now! Submit Sorry! This content is not available in your region PITTSFIELD Anyone who witnessed a road rage incident Tuesday afternoon is being asked to contact the Pike County Sheriffs Department with information. Deputies determined the confrontation started near the 1300 block of West Washington Street about 12:45 p.m. Tuesday and the vehicles traveled on U.S. 54 to Illinois Route 106, where one of the vehicles struck the other. She is one of the world's most recognisable supermodels. And it's clear to see why, judging by Naomi Campbell's latest fashion shoot for i-D magazine's Spring issue, shot in Kenya over the Christmas period. Naomi, 50, showcased her jaw-dropping figure as she went topless in just a pair of pants and a dramatic feathered headdress while frolicking in the sea. Jaw-dropping: Naomi Campbel went topless in her latest fashion shoot for i-D magazine's Spring issue, shot in Kenya over the Christmas period Naomi appeared in high spirits as she flashed a beaming smile for the camera and displayed her naturally stunning good looks. The media personality, who is the cover star for the The Utopia in Dystopia Issue, wore her raven locks in long flowing braids. Another snap of Naomi offered a distinctly 1970s vibe as she lounged among the shrubbery wearing a colourful floral robe with black feathered cuffs. 70s chic: Another snap of Naomi offered a distinctly 1970s vibe as she lounged among the shrubbery wearing a colourful floral robe with black feathered cuffs Amazing: Naomi showcased her jaw-dropping figure as she went topless in just a pair of pants and a dramatic feathered headdress while frolicking in the sea Breathtaking: Other images from the stripped back shoot show Naomi flaunting her assets in two silver chain looks, including one decorative body chain and skirt Other images from the stripped back shoot show Naomi flaunting her assets in two silver chain looks, including one decorative body chain and skirt. Naomi worked a series of eye-catching looks throughout the shoot, including a bejewelled colour block jumpsuit which featured targets covering her boobs. The star lay sprawled on the grass and sported glamorous make-up with a more cropped wig with some strands tied into braids. Work it: Naomi worked a series of eye-catching looks throughout the shoot, including a bejewelled colour block jumpsuit which featured targets covering her boobs Free! Naomi looked amazing in a huge coat and high waisted pants while she also sported a flowing dress in another shot Ride it: As well as shooting beside the sea and against a woodland backdrop, Naomi also took to the streets on a quad bike while wearing an asymmetric white dress As well as shooting beside the sea and against a woodland backdrop, Naomi also took to the streets on a quad bike while wearing an asymmetric white dress For her i-D cover story, the model discussed the beauty of her utopia, Kenya, and why representation behind the lens in fashion matters. Speaking on working with people of colour on the shoot, Naomi said: 'I'm proud, humbled and happy to be part of a shoot with young creatives that are all my skin colour It's very rare that this has happened to me. Cover girl: For her i-D cover story, the model discussed the beauty of her utopia, Kenya, and why representation behind the lens in fashion matters Speaking on working with people of colour on the shoot, Naomi said: 'I'm proud, humbled and happy to be part of a shoot with young creatives that are all my skin colour It's very rare that this has happened to me' 'Luis is the third photographer of colour I've worked with in my whole career in fashion.' Naomi revealed that while she had been in Kenya she had visited the orphanage she is linked to as she didn't want to 'let the children don't' despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. She said: 'I want to reach as many people as I can. I want to spread awareness. There's a part of me where, if I love something, I want the world to know about it. The Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park officially became part of the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom in 2020. The National Park Service operates a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program to coordinate preservation and education efforts nationwide and integrate local historical places, museums, and interpretive programs associated with the Underground Railroad into a mosaic of community, regional, and national stories. Several of the national military parks units and outlying areas met the criteria, and after months of research and documenting the historic connections to the Underground Railroad, the park was accepted as part of the Network to Freedom. On Feb. 26, 1869, Congress passed the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution, granting African American males the right to vote. This Friday at 2 p.m. there will be a virtual ranger-led program premiering on the parks Facebook Page (www.facebook.com/chickamauganps) and YouTube Channel (www.youtube.com/chchnps) that focuses on several of the parks stories pertaining to the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. For more information about programs at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, contact the Chickamauga Battlefield Visitor Center at 706-866-9241, the Lookout Mountain Battlefield Visitor Center at 423-821-7786, or visit the park website at www.nps.gov/chch. When Matthew Langsam was contemplating his major creative work for design and technology in the HSC, he had no idea a pandemic was looming that would make his project a lot more relevant. Mr Langsam, a Cranbrook graduate, dreamt up a portable breathing apparatus to improve his grandmothers safety and quality of life. Matthew Langsam and Genevieve Bryant show off the fruits of their labour. Credit:Louise Kennerley The oxygen device features at the SHAPE exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum in Ultimo where 42 HSC art and design students work goes on display from Saturday. My grandmother suffered immensely with her oxygen tubing and her walking ability, he said. A former relief teacher who was caught with child abuse videos while working at seven schools has 'monumentally stuffed up his life', a court has been told. Dylan McCrossin appeared before the District Court in Adelaide on Wednesday for sentencing submissions after pleading guilty to three counts of possessing child exploitation material. Defence counsel Craig Caldicott told the court McCrossin did not expect leniency from the court but asked for him to be given a suspended prison term or serve his sentence on home detention. Dylan McCrossin (pictured) has pleaded guilty to to three counts of possessing child exploitation material Mr Caldicott said the 39-year-old was hugely remorseful and said his initial lack of complete honesty with police could be explained by seeing 'his life flash before his eyes'. 'He's monumentally, to use the vernacular, stuffed up his life,' counsel said. McCrossin was caught with more than 40 videos and images on a laptop and a desktop computer. The prosecution has asked he serve an immediate prison term and said most of the material on his laptop involved children under the age of 14. Judge Ian Press will sentence McCrossin in April. Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. The Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture will be involved in the distribution of more than 25 million American-made cloth masks in both adult and kid sizes. The White House estimates they will reach 12 million to 15 million people. [February 24, 2021] Segra Enters Agreement Making BioAgronomics Group's Premium Cannabis Cultivar Portfolio Available to Licensed Producers Across Canada and Select International Markets VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Segra International Corp., an AgTech firm focused on cannabis tissue culture and BioAgronomics Group, an internationally recognized cannabis breeding and consulting company, are pleased to announce that they have entered into an agreement to distribute numerous premium cannabis cultivars within the Canadian Market. Through decades of genetic selection and intensive breeding efforts by world-renowned industry experts, including Robert Clarke and Mojave Richmond, BioAgronomics Group has developed a portfolio of proven classic and proprietary cannabis cultivars. Now, through Segras Plant Tissue Culture technology, this premium genetic catalog will be available to Canadian Licensed Producers and select international markets for the first time. BioAgronomics Group is thrilled to be joining forces with Segra International to advance the Canadian cannabis industry through providing high-quality, unique cultivars, commented Robert Clarke, co-founder of BioAgronomics Group. We expect this partnership will lead to increased access to popular and agronomically productive cannabis cultivars for licensed growers in Canada and internationally. In addition to the carefully selected classic cultivars curated by BioAgronomics Group specialists, Segra will also be able to supply proprietary and exclusive cannabis varieties from the BioAgronomics Group portfolio. These proprietary genetics were bred for potency and novel cannabinoid and terpene profiles, as well as ideal crop morphology and heightened pathogen resistance. Preparing BioAgronomics Groups proven cultivars utilizing Segras tissue culture technology will ensure consistently high-performing plants that offer high yields of enhanced THC and terpene content. As with all Segra tissue culture products, the plantlets arrive as verified clean stock. Segra and BioAgronomics Group are pleased to offer these premium cultivars in our effort to help growers start with better genetics to realize higher profits. We are incredibly excited at the opportunity to partner with the team of industry-recognized experts at BioAgronomics Group and offer their cultivars, through tissue culture, to Canadian producers, said Segra CEO Jamie Blundell. BioAgronomics Group has a tremenous amount of experience developing premium cannabis cultivars for commercial production, and were honored that they are trusting Segra with their valuable genetic IP. Partnerships with leading experts and breeders, like BioAgronomics Group, combined with the benefits and biosecurity of plant tissue culture, will help producers dramatically improve financial performance as the industry and consumer preferences continue to evolve. To learn more about our partnership and how Segra and BioAgronomics Groups Tissue Culture plantlets can improve your output and reduce risk, please contact Segra at info@segra-intl.com. About BioAgronomics Group: BioAgronomics Group is a team of experts working within the rapidly evolving cannabis fiber, food, and medicine business sectors. Founded by notable author and ethnobotanist Robert C. Clarke and Mojave Richmond, BioAgronomics Group provides experienced consulting and assistance to companies navigating the multifaceted cannabis industry. In addition, we offer IP-protected cultivars for licensing to growers supplying the emerging cannabis market worldwide. Wherever your company is based and whatever your individual needs, we are here to assist you. Learn more at www.bioagronomics.com. About Segra: Segra is an agriculture technology company offering plant tissue culture and DNA fingerprinting services to accelerate the advancement of the cannabis industry. The companys proprietary technologies empower its clients to drive financial performance and mitigate risk while exploring the next frontier of optimized cultivation practices for the rapidly evolving cannabis consumer. Segra has developed industrial-scale laboratories to produce disease-free, robust, and DNA-fingerprinted cannabis plantlets for licensed producers globally. To support this vision, Segra has assembled a world-class team of specialists in the fields of agronomy, molecular genetics, plant tissue culture, and regulatory compliance. Learn more at?www.segra-intl.com For Further Information: Carson Otto Carson.otto@segra-intl.com ? Forward-Looking Information This news release includes statements containing certain forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities law (forward-looking statements). Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as plan, continue, expect, project, intend, believe, anticipate, estimate, may, will, potential, proposed and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions may or will occur. These statements are only predictions. Various assumptions were used in drawing the conclusions or making the projections contained in the forward-looking statements throughout this news release. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. The company is under no obligation, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable law. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] On Monday afternoon Eva Longoria Baston, well-known Hollywood actress and Texas-native, helped out the San Antonio Food Bank after the city was hit hard by the devastating winter storm. The actress took a tour of the facility and helped distribute supplies to three San Antonio area residents who were in desperate need of food and water by delivering their groceries in person, according to the San Antonio Express-News. RELATED: Eva Longoria lends San Antonio Food Bank Monday a hand after Texas winter storm The San Antonio Food Bank expressed how grateful they where to the well-known actress in a tweet Tuesday afternoon. "Thank you @EvaLongoria for touring our facility, and helping us to deliver food to home-bound seniors. Your presence and commitment to fighting hunger in our community were uplifting for our staff and to those we serve." READ MORE: Beto O'Rourke is asking others to join his San Antonio wellness check canvassing Scroll through the photos to see Eva Longoria Baston helping San Antonians. Global law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLP Vice Chair Lori G. Cohen will present the inaugural Lori G. Cohen Emerging Women in Healthcare Award at the American Heart Associations 2021 Atlanta Heart Ball, to be held virtually on Feb. 25 from 7:00 p.m. 8:00 p.m. The Lori G. Cohen Emerging Women in Healthcare Award will be presented annually to an Atlanta-area healthcare resident who has demonstrated a remarkable commitment to improving health in our community. Cohen, who in addition to her role as vice chair of the firm also serves as co-chair of the firms Global Litigation Practice, and chair of Greenberg Traurigs Trial Practice Group, served as chair of the 2020 Heart Ball and has supported the American Heart Association for many years. Health care and medical issues have been at the heart of my career as a trial attorney, Cohen said. The mission of the American Heart Association is so important to me, as is my passion for mentorship and fostering leadership potential particularly in women. I couldnt be more proud of all that the Lori G. Cohen Women in Healthcare & Philanthropy Award represents - outstanding commitment to improving the health of this community through volunteerism, leadership, and a passionate drive that far exceeds the expectations of ones medical training. Greenberg Traurig is also a sponsor of the annual Heart Ball. The campaign supports the American Heart Associations lifesaving mission to fight heart disease and stroke, while celebrating the foundations success in driving change, funding science, and improving behaviors to help every heart. About Greenberg Traurig, LLP: Greenberg Traurig, LLP (GT), has approximately 2200 attorneys in 40 locations in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. GT has been recognized for its philanthropic giving, diversity, and innovation, and is consistently among the largest firms in the U.S. on the Law360 400 and among the Top 20 on the Am Law Global 100. The firm is net carbon neutral with respect to its office energy usage and Mansfield Rule 3.0 Certified. Web: http://www.gtlaw.com New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday (February 24) dismissed a plea seeking an extra attempt for (Union Public Service Commission) UPSC civil service exams. The petition sought relaxation for UPSC aspirants who exhausted their last attempt in October 2020. A bench comprising Justices AM Khanwilkar, Indu Malhotra, and Ajay Rastogi had reserved judgment in the case on February 9. The petitioners cited difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdown to make their case for an extra attempt. They argued that their preparation was hampered because of the pandemic. Earlier, the central government had agreed to offer an extra chance provided they met the age criteria. But the petitioners demanded relaxation in age as well. The UPSC Civil Services Prelims 2021 notification was scheduled to be released on February 10, 2021, but was delayed. With the apex court's verdict out, the commission is expected to release the notification of the exam soon. Live TV Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Deborah Barrera was still in shock Tuesday hours after her grandson Jayden Rico, 10, was shot Monday night at her West Side apartment. You never thought it would happen to you or your family, Barrera said. At 9:49 p.m. Monday, San Antonio police received a call for a shooting in progress at an apartment in the 1700 block of South Hamilton Avenue. According to a police report, a juvenile was playing with a gun when it went off and struck Jayden. After the shooting, the juvenile ran away from the scene, investigators said. Jayden was taken to University Hospital in critical condition, police said. Police are investigating the incident as an accidental shooting. On Tuesday, family members said Jayden is expected to be in the hospital for the next two to three weeks. Hes in a lot of pain, Barrera said. Jaydens grandmother said a relative had come to the apartment with a backpack to spend the night. On ExpressNews.com: 'I have this fear that if I get COVID, I'm going to die' - San Antonio health care workers plead for vaccine According to family members, Jayden was walking into a room when the relative was taking the gun out of the backpack. The gun went off and a bullet hit Jayden, piercing his intestine. It continued through him and went into a wall, Barrera said. Nobody knew that he had a gun, she said. Several other children, including Jaydens siblings, witnessed the shooting, she added. Family members said the relative panicked and left. As of Tuesday, Jayden has been in and out of consciousness because of the anesthesia, his grandmother said. Family members said his mother asked him if he knew what occurred. They said he told her he remembers everything. He said he just wished it wasnt him, his grandmother said. Family members describe Jayden, a student at Las Palmas Elementary School, as quiet, shy and a good kid. He enjoys staying indoors and watching television, even when all the other children are playing outside, his grandmother said. Because of COVID-19 restrictions, only one family member can visit Jayden. His mother has been by his side all day, his grandmother said. Shes been in and out of it, hysterically crying, Barrera said. On ExpressNews.com: Couple accused of starving and abusing 9-year-old girl who weighed only 35 pounds Barrera said she hopes to visit her grandson when he is more alert. Jaydens aunt Linda Barrera, 38, said its a lesson learned. Parents need to be more concerned about what their children do, she said. They get a hold of a gun, she added, this is what happens. Another innocent child is going to get hurt. The police department has not said whether the juvenile who fired the shot had been taken into custody or if charges will be filed. Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release SubCategory Select Sub-Category Google has informed users of its Play Music service that it will delete all of their data today, 24 February 2021. This includes your music library with any uploads, purchases, and anything youve added from Google Play Music, the company said. It warned that after today there will be no way to recover the data. The company is encouraging subscribers to switch to YouTube Music. Those who have already migrated have the option to transfer their data from Google Play Music again in the event that they made any changes that have not yet been synchronised with YouTube Music. If you would like to download your Google Play Music library and data, you can do so with Google Takeout before February 24, 2021, the company stated. RIP Google Music: May 2011 February 2021 The precursor to the Google Play Music streaming service, simply called Google Music, launched in beta form during May 2011. Initially only available in the United States (though the geoblocking was only a minor technical hurdle), Googles approach was to allow users to upload their own music. Why go through the headache of securing the streaming rights from copyright holders when you can enable users to essentially create their own personal streaming service from music they already own? This core free cloud locker for music service remained part of Google Play Music until its demise. For many years it was the platforms major differentiator from its competitors. However, with the launch of YouTube Red (now YouTube Premium), Googles competitive advantage has become bundling music streaming with YouTube Premium. YouTube Premium lets you remove the ads from YouTube for R110 per month. In 2013, Google announced the addition of All Access to its recently rebranded Google Play Music service. This added a Spotify-like music streaming component to the service. No longer would you have to buy and upload your music, now you could get access to an all-you-can-eat library of music from the top labels in the business. Google Play Music officially launched in South Africa on 8 December 2015. The days of using a VPN to sign up for the service were over, and Google offered an introductory price of R49 per month for access to its premium music streaming service. This was R10 per month cheaper than its competitors, and if you signed up during the launch window your cheap price was locked in for as long as you kept your subscription active. Finally, in August 2020, after years of rumours and speculation, Google announced that Play Music was being shut down. In South Africa and New Zealand, the shutdown happened in September 2020, while elsewhere in the world it stopped working in October. Here lies Google Music, May 2011 February 2021. Ten years is an aeon in the world of high technology, but you were still shuffled off to the Big Data Centre in the Sky too soon. Now read: The best music streaming services in South Africa on Wednesday said it has extended USD 100 million loan to on behalf of India for defense-related procurements. Export-Import Bank of India (Exim Bank), on behalf of the Government of India, has extended a line of credit (LOC) of USD 100 million to the Government of the Republic of for the purpose of financing procurement of defense items from India, said in a release. The LOC agreement for this was signed on February 19, 2021, through exchange between Renganaden Padayachy, Minister of Finance, Economic Planning and Development, and Gaurav Singh Bhandari, Chief General Manager, With the signing of this loan agreement, Exim Bank till date has extended six LOCs to Mauritius, on behalf of India, taking the total value of LOCs extended to USD 764.80 million. The soft loans to Mauritius cover projects in sectors including defense, connectivity and infrastructure sectors such as Metro Express Limited, Social Housing, among others, Exim Bank said. Also, with this loan pact, Exim Bank has now in place 269 LOCs, covering 62 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), with credit commitments of around USD 26.64 billion, available for financing exports from India. Besides promoting India's exports, Exim Bank's LOCs enable demonstration of Indian expertise and project execution capabilities in emerging markets, said the lender. (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.) Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Management Tanden's bid to lead OMB in doubt as Senate committees postpone votes Tanden in December 2020. (Photo credit: John Smith Williams/Shutterstock.com) Two Senate committees postponed scheduled Wednesday votes on the nomination of Neera Tanden to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden will need Republican votes to win Senate confirmation, and so far none appears to be forthcoming. Tanden's nomination has been in trouble because of the nominee's history of launching Twitter barbs at political opponents of both parties while she was president of the liberal think tank, Center for American Progress. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), a critical swing vote, announced last week that he would vote against Tanden's nomination if it reached the floor of the Senate. Several potential supporters across the aisle, including Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) have indicated their opposition to her nomination. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) a member of the Senate Homeland and Government Affairs Committee -- one of the committees set to vote on Tanden's nomination has yet to disclose how she plans to vote. Sen. Lisa Murakowski (R-Alaska), a potential crossover vote, has declined to answer questions from the press on her vote. President Joe Biden told reporters on Tuesday that he thought the administration had a "good shot" at getting her confirmed. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki tweeted support for Tanden this morning after the Senate Budget Committee and the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee meetings were delayed. "Neera Tanden is a leading policy expert who brings critical qualifications to the table during this time of unprecedented crisis," she wrote. "She has a broad spectrum of support, ranging from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to labor unions, and has a strong record of working with both parties that we expect to grow in President Biden's cabinet." Some observers are sensing a double standard at play, especially considering the intemperate social media habits of former President Donald Trump and some of his nominees. "We can disagree with her tweets, but in the past, Trump nominees that they've confirmed and supported had much more serious issues and conflicts than just something that was written on Twitter," Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) said in an interview with Politico. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who served as OMB director under the George W. Bush administration, said that Tanden's Twitter history would make it harder for her to lead a critical agency that is at the heart of government operations. "I believe that the tone, the content, and the aggressive partisanship of some of your public statements have added to the troubling trend of more incivility and division in our public life. And in your case Im concerned that your personal attacks about specific senators will make it more difficult for you to work with them," he said in a statement after her confirmation hearing. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. LAKE FOREST, Calif., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- U-Haul of Lake Forest at 23211 Olive Ave. closed its retail showroom and ceased most on-site services on Feb. 22. The location served self-movers in and around the Lake Forest community for 24 years. The Olive Avenue store had operated on two parcels of land: a 16,500-square-foot tract with the retail building, which U-Haul plans to maintain for future use; and a 7,000-square-foot tract the Company had been leasing, but will no longer do so. Local residents can continue to have all their moving needs met just 0.3 miles away at U-Haul Moving & Storage of Lake Forest at 25290 Jeronimo Road, former site of Laguna Hills Nursery. The new store offers truck and trailer sharing, moving supplies and boxes, towing equipment and professional hitch installation, U-Box portable storage containers and more. U-Haul Moving & Storage of Lake Forest also has 1,133 self-storage units for rent with climate-control options and high-tech security features at affordable price points. Propane will soon be available on the 3.08-acre lot. Contact the store at (949) 768-4681 or stop by to see general manager Philip Guerra and his team. Hours of operation are 7 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday-Thursday and Saturday; 7 a.m.-8 p.m. Friday; and 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. Reserve equipment at uhaul.com or contact Reservations at 1-800-GO-UHAUL. Local U-Haul Companies are always exploring opportunities for growth as they pursue means to better serve the needs of customers, but sometimes find it necessary to close or relocate stores. 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 other new or existing U-Haul stores. As a result of the closing showroom and services at 23211 Olive Ave., 14 Team Members were let go. 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. About U-HAUL 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. Contact: Andrea Batchelor Jeff Lockridge E-mail: [email protected] Phone: 602-263-6981 Website: uhaul.com SOURCE U-Haul Related Links www.uhaul.com France has confirmed that Iran detained a French tourist in May 2020 on vague security-related charges. The Foreign Ministry said on February 24 the French national was under consular protection and the French Embassy maintained contact with him and his family. The confirmation came after multiple media outlets reported on the 35-year-old tourist's arrest. The detainee's lawyer, Saeed Dehghan, told Reuters that the man, identified only as Benjamin, was being held at Vakilabad prison in the northeastern city of Mashhad. "He was detained nine months ago and he faces contradictory and false charges," Dehghan said. In separate comments to AP, Dehghan denied reports Benjamin had been arrested for flying a drone in the desert. He said his client operated a helicam, or a remote-controlled mini-helicopter used to take video or pictures. The arrest comes as the United States and European parties to Iran's 2015 nuclear deal are trying to restore the accord that was abandoned in 2018 by former U.S. President Donald Trump. Iran's security agencies regularly detain foreigners or dual nationals, mostly on espionage charges. Critics say Iran uses such arbitrarily detentions as part of hostage diplomacy to extract political concessions from Western countries, which Tehran denies. Iran also complains its citizens have been detained in the West for violating sanctions, which it deems illegal. In March 2020, France and Iran conducted a prisoner exchange, swapping French academic Roland Marchal for Iranian engineer Jalal Ruhollahnejad, who had been detained over alleged violations of U.S. sanctions against Tehran. Based on reporting by AFP, AP, and Reuters Belfast City Council is drafting bye-laws which could prevent anti-abortion groups displaying graphic images in parts of the city centre. Alliance councillor Michelle Kelly, who has suffered three miscarriages, raised the issue with the council's legal services department, which is drawing up the proposals. "One in four women suffer miscarriages and they should not have to be traumatised by graphic images of foetuses when they are shopping on a Saturday afternoon," she said. Earlier this month, Belfast businesswoman Barbara Whearty called on the council to stop anti-abortion groups displaying such images. Ms Whearty, who had suffered a miscarriage, was speaking after charges against her of unlawfully assaulting two members of the Youth for Life wing of Precious Life were dismissed. Councillor Kelly said: "I've had three miscarriages. One was early, but two were later. I last miscarried the day before my election to council in 2019. "A few weeks later, I was in town and ran into graphic imagery displayed at the anti-abortion stall in Cornmarket. It was deeply upsetting and brought back everything that I'd gone through. "It's ridiculous that women who have suffered miscarriages are exposed to this. I now have to avoid that area of town completely. I support the right to protest, but it must not involve retraumatising anyone." Ms Kelly raised the issue with the City Solicitor. "The council's legal services department is currently drafting bye-laws which would prohibit the display in designated areas of images which would likely deter other people from using or enjoying that public space," she said. Ms Kelly explained that legislative change would also be needed by Stormont's Department of Communities. "An attempt to regulate the display of these images will likely be tested under Article 10 of the Human Rights Act permitting freedom of expression," she said. "My attitude is 'bring it on'. Freedom of expression does not mean freedom from responsibility or consequences. Freedom of expression should not give anyone the right to retraumatise those who already have been through heartbreaking experiences." Ms Kelly said she expected the draft bye-laws to come before the council's strategic policy and resources committee in the next few months. "They will then go before a full council meeting, and I'm confident that they will pass," she said. "This is something that should have happened a long time ago, I'm committed to keep working at it until the law is changed." A council spokeswoman said: "Council officers are working on a set of bye-laws to address a range of issues in Belfast city centre. A draft of the proposed bye-laws will be brought before elected members for consideration in due course." A Department of Communities spokeswoman said: "The department has not received any correspondence from Belfast City Council regarding council bye-laws." Earlier this month, Ms Whearty recalled how she had been "completely overwhelmed" when she saw "these words 'Abortion Won't Unrape Her' and shockingly graphic images of foetuses in various stages of development". Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 [February 23, 2021] Proxtera and Tazapay Partner to Propel Cross-Border Trade for SMEs SINGAPORE, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Proxtera, a network of business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces that facilitates cross-border trade for small-medium enterprises (SME), and Tazapay, a digital escrow service for cross-border trade, today announce their partnership to launch Proxtera Protect, Powered by Tazapay to provide international buyers and sellers with a secure and protected payment service to streamline global trade. In partnership with Proxtera, Tazapay will provide a digital escrow service for both buyers and sellers connected via participating platforms on the Proxtera network. Many businesses already use Proxtera to identify new trade partners and connect to discuss, negotiate and finalize trade terms. Through Proxtera Protect, Powered by Tazapay, SMEs will be able to complete transactions through the secure escrow payments service, providing both buyers and sellers with a critical layer of protection and confidence when doing business with a new partner. "Tazapay is committed to solving a long-term problem for SMEs, which is that they are often restricted from growing their number of trading partners due to lack of trust around shipments and payments," said Rahul Shinghal, CEO of Tazapay. "This hinders business success, and Proxtera is similarly focused on providing SMEs with options and tools that allow them to work with a wide range of business partners and drive growth. We're pleased to power Proxtera Protect and grow alongside Proxtera as both entities focus on their missions to elevate the loca economy by empowering SMEs with global trade opportunities." The global pandemic has exacerbated the challenge for SMEs with regard to cross-border payments. Over the last year, new trading partners have not been able to meet to build trust, causing an increased number of deals to fall through and lost time and resources on both sides. Tazapay solves this problem by offering secure digital background checks and an escrow service to hold funds until such time that both parties have confirmed delivery and receipt of the goods. Proxtera Protect also ensures that monies are returned should shipments not arrive. "Proxtera's mission is to unlock new trade and business opportunities for SMEs around the world, and Proxtera Protect, Powered by Tazapay is a critical component to bridge the trust gap that hinders cross-border trade," said Shirish Jain, program director at Proxtera. "With the addition of trusted partners such as Tazapay, Proxtera can deliver on its promise to provide SMEs a wealth of business tools and opportunities at their fingertips, opening up pathways to growth and driving economic recovery to help businesses thrive in the 'New Normal'." Proxtera has already helped to connect approximately 300,000 SMEs to new trading partners across Singapore, Philippines, India, and Kenya; and offers a host of digital tools and services that help SMEs more quickly access, evaluate and act on business opportunities. SMEs can join the Proxtera network via its eCommerce platform partners to benefit from new business opportunities. Upon identifying a potential opportunity, they can leverage Proxtera Protect, Powered by Tazapay's market leading infrastructure to finalise the escrow terms and subsequently make and receive payments securely. About Proxtera Proxtera is on a mission to connect the small and medium enterprises of the world by creating an open connector for B2B marketplaces, trade associations, and providers that service SMEs. Proxtera was launched in 2020 and is the commercialisation of Business sans Borders (BSB) an initiative of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Infocomm Media Development Authority ("IMDA") that was launched in 2018. Proxtera enjoys support from corporate investors, professional investors, and Singapore government agencies. Find out more at www.proxtera.com or via email contact@proxtera.com. About Tazapay Tazapay is a secure digital payments platform for SMEs engaging in cross-border trade. It provides secure digital escrow to help reduce risk and increase confidence for both parties in a transaction and offers background to ensure more transparent trading. Founded in 2020 by former executives from companies including Stripe, PayPal, Grab and Standard Chartered, Tazapay has raised more than $3 million in funding from partners including Sequoia and Saison Capital. Find out more at www.tazapay.com. SOURCE Proxtera [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Awkwafina is back at work in New York City. The 32-year-old actress was seen on on the set of her hit TV series Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens on Wednesday. The star bundled up for the chilly weather in a long chic brown coat and light colored wide leg jeans. Back to work: Awkwafina was seen on on the set of her hit TV series Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens in New York City on Wednesday She layered up underneath her coat with a white turtleneck sweater and striped black blazer. The Oscar-nominated star walked through a snow-lined park in maroon-colored boots and kept her hands warm in a pair of gray knitted gloves. Awkwafina looked camera ready with her hair styled into a trendy wavy 'do. She carried a large gray leather bag for the cold set. The New York native donned a hilarious array of awkward faces for the solo scene, which found her strolling through Flushing Meadows Corona Park in the Queens area of New York City. Staying warm: The 32-year-old actress bundled up for the chilly weather in a long chic brown coat, light colored wide leg jeans, a white turtleneck sweater and striped black blazer Stylish set: The Crazy Rich Asians star looked camera ready with her hair styled into a stylish wavy 'do. She carried a large gray leather bag for the cold set The hit Comedy Central series stars the funny woman as a 20-something Queens resident who strives for a larger-than-life existence. Awkwafina serves as the show's star and creator, and a premiere date for the upcoming second season has yet to be announced. The shoot came just one day after Awkwafina was revealed as one of the cover stars of Vanity Fair's latest Hollywood issue. Funny lady: The New York native donned a hilarious array of awkward faces for the solo scene, which found her strolling through Flushing Meadows Corona Park in the Queens area She was joined by the likes of Charlize Theron, Michael B Jordan and Zendaya for the historic cover. Artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari directed 10 photo shoots across four continents for one of the famed magazine's most diverse covers ever. They used 'modern techniques' that allowed VF to minimize on-set personnel and maximize COVID-19 protocol. Joining the A-list: Awkwafina was revealed as one of the cover stars of Vanity Fair's latest Hollywood issue, joining Michael B Jordan and Zendaya for one of their most diverse covers ever In the past, the VF Hollywood issue tended to feature white stars such as Nicole Kidman, Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, Reese Witherspoon and Sandra Bullock with little diversity. But this year is very different. Also included on the cover are Sacha Baron Cohen (The Trial of the Chicago 7, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), Maya Rudolph (Saturday Night Live, Big Mouth), Michaela Coel, (I May Destroy You), Spike Lee (Da 5 Bloods, David Byrne's American Utopia), LaKeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah) and Dan Levy (Schitt's Creek). Fashion statement: The starlet posed in head-to-toe Prada, including a purple taffeta top and pleated pants as well as a swiss cheese-looking turtleneck sweater from the brand Awkwafina shared the stunning image on her Instagram account, revealing how grateful she was to be part of the all-star ensemble. 'I am extremely thrilled and honored to be included in the 27th @vanityfair Hollywood issue - alongside these absolute legends. Check out the full #vfhollywood portfolio and salute to Maurizio Cattelan & Pierpaolo Ferrari for shooting this insane cover!,' she captioned the post. The Crazy Rich Asians starlet posed in head-to-toe Prada, including a purple taffeta top and pleated pants as well as a Swiss cheese-looking openwork viscose turtleneck sweater from the brand. She was all smiles as she carried the final orange floral 'O' from the cover's Hollywood display. Inside the issue, the Farewell actress was seen swinging from a glistening chandelier above a stunning body of water. 'Really trying to light up the room! Thank you @vanityfair for having me in the 27th VFHollywood issue,' she captioned the bright image on her Instagram account. Awkwafina kept it light in a Robert Wun gown that featured every color of the rainbow. The star touched on forging a new path for Asian American performers. 'You don't want to represent swaths of people,' she says. 'But if there are not that many of us, then some people are going to think that what they see onscreen is what we are. That's why the solution isn't more of meit's more people who are different,' she told the magazine. Next role: Awkwafina will next be heard in the Disney animated film Raya And The Last Dragon, which will be released theatrically and on streaming platform Disney+ on March 5 Disney's latest: The action-packed fantasy film follows a lone warrior who must track down the legendary last dragon to save her land from evil monsters Spirit animal: The comedian provides the voice of Sisu, a goofy dragon who can transform into a human and is the last of her kind Awkwafina will next be heard in the Disney animated film Raya And The Last Dragon. The action-packed fantasy film follows a lone warrior who must track down the legendary last dragon to save her land from evil monsters. The comedian provides the voice of Sisu, a goofy dragon who can transform into a human and is the last of her kind. Ensemble piece: Raya And The Last Dragon also features the vocal talents of Kelly Marie Tran as Raya, as well as Gemma Chan, Daniel Dae Kim and Sandra Oh Voice work: Awkwafina previously lent her voice to films like The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, The Angry Birds Movie 2 and Storks. This marks her first time in a Disney film Raya And The Last Dragon also features the vocal talents of Kelly Marie Tran, Gemma Chan, Daniel Dae Kim and Sandra Oh. It will be released theatrically and on streaming platform Disney+ on March 5. Awkwafina will next be seen presenting at the 78th Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, joining stars like Margot Robbie, Tiffany Haddish, Anthony Anderson, Kate Hudson and Kenan Thompson for the award season kickoff event. She received a trophy at the 2020 ceremony for her acclaimed work in the family drama The Farewell. Vincent Muscat, one of the three presumed murderers of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, has been sentenced to 15 years in jail after pleading guilty at the latest hearing into her killing in 2017. The International and European Federations of Journalists (IFJ-EFJ) welcomed the decision and urged the authorities to continue to pursue others involved in her murder. Muscat, an alleged hitman in a contract to kill the journalist, is believed to have negotiated a more lenient sentence in exchange for supplying state prosecutors with information on others involved. Daphne Caruana Galizia's reporting focused on high-level corruption, including investigations into the Panama Papers in 2016. She was murdered in a car bombing on 16 October 2017 not far from her home in northern Malta. Almost two years later, on 16 July 2019, brothers Alfred and George Degiorgio, and Vincent Muscat were charged in connection with her assassination. All of them have previous criminal records. Muscat pleaded guilty after his request for a full pardon last month was unsuccessful. Besides them, Maltese tycoon Yorgen Fenech was also alleged to have been involved in the murder due to an investigation Caruana Galizia was carrying out into his company 17 Black located in Dubai, UAE with links with the Maltese government. On 20 November 2019, Fenech was arrested while he was leaving Malta on his private yacht. Three days later, he demanded legal immunity before revealing what he knew about the case, according to AFP. While his case hasn't been heard by the court yet, Caruana's family considers him as the mastermind behind her murder. He denies involvement in the murder. On 23 February 2021, Maltese police also arrested brothers Adrian and Robert Agius, and associate Jamie Vella, three men suspected of having supplied the bomb used to kill Caruana Galizia. They had previously been arrested and released without charge in 2017. After Muscats conviction, Caruana Galizias family expressed their hope that his decision to accept his part in the journalists murder means further steps to achieving total justice can be achieved, taking into account that her murder was intentional and could have been prevented. In a statement read by her familys lawyers, they claimed that a person who has admitted his involvement in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia has denied her right to life and has denied her right to enjoy her family, including her grand children who were born after she was killed. EFJ General Secretary, Ricardo Gutierrez, said: "We hope that this step in the right direction will be confirmed by the identification of the real instigators of the brutal assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. The credibility of the Maltese authorities is at stake." IFJ General Secretary, Anthony Bellanger, said: This conviction is an important step to end impunity in Daphne Caruana's murder and we call on the Maltese justice to punish all those who are behind her murder. We call on Maltese authorities to provide the necessary safety environment so that journalists are no longer subject to threats and intimidation while carrying out their duties. Recently, the Health Commission of Anhui Province and 7 other government departments jointly issued the Implementation Opinions Regarding the Establishment and Improvement of the Health Service System for the Elderly (hereinafter referred to as the Implementation Opinions), a sign showing the province's determination to better allocate healthcare resources to build a more age-friendly society. According to previous statistics, as of the end of 2019, the number of senior citizens who aged 60 or above in Anhui reached 11.72 million, accounting for 18.41% of the permanent resident population, 0.31 percentage points higher than that of the whole country. The province's population of 65 years old or above was 8.868 million, accounting for 13.93 percent of the permanent resident population and 1.33 percentage points higher than the national proportion. "As people's general lifespan prolongs, various chronic health conditions have become prevalent among older adults in recent years. These chronic conditions can be difficult to cure and require a large amount of time for after-care, meaning a huge burden for many families who take care of elderly members at home in terms of both time and financial status. For senior citizens, especially those partially or completely disabled, appropriate healthcare services are in urgent need now." said Chen Jin, director of the department of geriatrics and deputy chief physician of Hefei Second People's Hospital. Released jointly by 8 different government sectors, the Implementation Opinions is Anhui's first guiding document regarding the elderly healthcare service system. It aims at tackling problems in the current system including unbalanced and inadequate development, and lack of resource supply. "By 2022, our goal is to ensure that at least 50% of secondary and tertiary general hospitals set geriatrics departments, 90% of Chinese medicine hospitals set preventive treatment departments, over 80% of general hospitals, rehabilitation hospitals, nursing homes and community medical institutions have age-friendly environments, and all nursing homes are capable of providing multiple types of healthcare services." said Cui Lijun, member of the leadership and deputy director of the Health Commission of Anhui Province. In the meantime, the document shows that Anhui will provide at least one health examination opportunity to every senior citizen and at least twice of combined medicaland elderly care services to partially or completely disabled elderly people per year. The province will also be committed to improve relevant vocational training by encouraging colleges to offer courses in geriatrics, nursing, rehabilitation, hospice care, etc. In addition, retired doctors and nurses will also be encouraged to work in health and elderly care institutions to fully integrate resources for the system. "We will focus on four aspects: strengthening disease surveillance and intervention, promoting mental health of older adults, implementing public geriatric care management projects, and transforming the social environment into a more age-friendly one. By 2022, the rate of elderly residents who receive health management services will exceed 75%" said Cui. PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Integrated Ventures, Inc, is pleased to confirm that on 02/18/21, the Company has executed $7.0 million Preferred Equity Investment Agreement with BHP Capital NY, Inc. As of 02/23/21, INTV has received a funding in amount of $3.0 million and plans to purchase 1000+ miners, manufactured by Canaan and MicroBT. Due to terms of this capital raise, the Company has canceled all outstanding Preferred Class C shares, originally registered on 01/18/21. Under terms of this new funding agreement, BHP Capital NY, Inc will have a right to purchase up to 4,000 of newly registered Preferred Class D shares, valued at $1,000 and convertible at fixed price into common shares. In addition, the Company had issued BHP Capital NY, Inc, five year warrants, priced at 0.60 cents, with right to convert into common shares. If exercised, the Company will receive an additional investment, in the amount of $3.0 million. The Company plans to issue Form 8K by 02/26/21, with an additional details, regarding this investment. Steve Rubakh, CEO of Integrated Ventures, adds the following commentary: "We would like to thank BHP Capital NY, Inc for continuing support. Our mining business is currently generating daily revenues (based market pricing of BTC and ETH), ranging between $9,000 and $9,500, which equates to annual revenues, in amount of $3.2+ million, with margins above 65%." About: Integrated Ventures, Inc is Technology Portfolio Holdings Company with focus on Hosting, Development Of Blockchain Applications and Cryptocurrency Mining. For more details, please visit the Company's website: 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: Steve Rubakh +1 (215) 613-1111 [email protected] SOURCE Integrated Ventures, Inc Related Links https://www.integratedventuresinc.com Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who is charged under a new national security law, was denied bail due to the risk of his committing further offences. On February 23, the Hong Kong High Court Judge Anthea Pang announced her decision and said that that she is not satisfied that there are sufficient grounds for believing that Lai will not continue to commit acts endangering national security if bail is granted to him. It is worth noting that prosecutors have accused Lai of breaching the law over statements he made on July 30 and August 18, in which they allege he requested foreign interference in Hong Kongs affairs. Lai, a prominent face in Hong Kongs pro-democracy movement, has been arrested and released several times. Initially, detained in December last year, Lai was freed on bail. However, last week, the government critic was again sentenced to prison by the city states top court. According to ANI, Lai has been accused of conspiracy to assist an offender", and "conspiracy to collude with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security" - a crime carrying a maximum sentence of life in prison. Lai has been a frequent visitor to Washington, meeting with officials, including former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to rally support for Hong Kong democracy, prompting Beijing to label him a traitor. He is currently remanded in the maximum-security facility. READ: Lam Backs Hong Kong Electoral Changes Excluding Opponents READ: Hong Kong Leader Backs Reforms To Keep Out ''hostile'' People Jimmy Lais arrest Jimmy Lai, who is the founder of the clothing company Giordano and popular newspaper Apple Daily, has been jailed under the draconian National Security Law for supporting the pro-democracy camp. The 72-year-old businessman-turned social activist has been under custody since August last year as he was arrested a month after Beijing passed the National Security Law in Hong Kong. China has garnered a lot of flak from the international community since it passed the controversial National Security Law on June 30, 2020. So far, several social activists, mostly pro-democracy advocates, accused of endangering China's national security have been charged under the law. The United States and several other western nations, including Britain, the former coloniser of Hong Kong, have strongly condemned the implementation of the law, which sparked widespread protests in the city. (Image: AP) READ: COVID-19: Hong Kong Leader Carrie Lam And Other Officials Get China's Sinovac Vaccine READ: Hong Kong Activist Jimmy Lai Applies For Bail Again Finley Quaye, 46, admitted throwing a road sign through a bus door during a fare row (pictured attending court in 2019) Troubled 90's pop star Finley Quaye has notched up yet another conviction - this time for throwing a metal road sign through a glass bus door during a fare row. Now living in a modest hostel in Hammersmith the 46-year-old Brit Award-winner appeared today at Westminster Magistrates' Court. Edinburgh-born Quaye, whose hits include 'Sunday Shining' and 'Even After All' got into a row with the driver of the bus in Hammersmith and threw food all over the interior. He pleaded guilty to causing 249.14p worth of criminal damage on June 17, last year and was bailed until March 24 for a pre-sentence report. The court heard Quaye, who has multiple alcohol-related convictions, tried to use his card to pay the fare, but there was a disagreement. He started shouting and swearing at the driver and after throwing around the food, exited the bus and walked around to the drivers' side to continue the row. Quaye picked up a metal road sign and threw it through the glass door of the bus, damaging it completely. The pop star previously faced Westminster Magistrates' Court in October 2019 and was spared jail after threatening to shoot a bar manager and 'get a grenade' after a gig. The court heard Quaye, who has multiple alcohol-related convictions, tried to use his card to pay the fare, but there was a disagreement (pictured at Westminster Magistrates in 2019) Quaye punched Robert Jenei in the face, attacked a car and snarled racist abuse after playing at London's Troubadour on September 8 2019. He was let off with 200 hours of unpaid work, a 525 fine and a 12-month rehabilitation requirement. At the 2019 sentencing district judge Michael Snow asked Quaye if he had any work coming up, Quaye replied: 'No, not for lack of trying.' The judge said: 'If you go around thumping managers in the face I don't suppose you are going to get much work.' Edinburgh-born Quaye, whose hits include 'Sunday Shining' and 'Even After All' got into a row with the driver of the bus in Hammersmith. Pictured at the 1998 BRIT Awards Quaye poses with his Best British Male Solo Artist award at the 1998 Brit Awards ceremony Quaye's 1997 album Maverick a Strike went double platinum and in 1998 he won the Best British Male Solo Artist at the BRITs. He was praised for his laid-back synergy of musical styles combining styles like roots reggae and trip-hop. Quaye also has a notable musical heritage as son of composer Cab Kaye and half-brother of Elton John's guitarist Caleb Quaye. 5 things you need to know Monday News SAN POSSIDONIO, Italy, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- G21 S.r.l., a bone cement manufacturer company, is pleased to announce the clearance of SpaceFlex Shoulder as a completion of its existing Spaceflex line: Hip and Knee. "The achievement of this result for G21 S.r.l. means being able to offer a dedicated treatment of each infected joint," says Filippo Foroni, Executive Vice President of G21 S.r.l. "Since we set up the company in 2009, we are committed to provide our patients with better health conditions. The addition of SpaceFlex Shoulder to our product portfolio represents a user-friendly solution for complex issues." About G21 S.r.l. G21 S.r.l. offers a range of products for both orthopedics and minimally invasive spine surgery. G21 S.r.l. provides bone cement for orthopedics with different levels of viscosity for the making of temporary prothesis for the treatment of infections and septic revisions. G21 S.r.l. supplies bone cement for vertebral consolidation for the performing of minimally invasive spine surgeries such as vertebroplasty and kyphoplasty procedures. SpaceFlex Shoulder is officially available on the US Market. The company's website for new releases and further information is www.g-21.it https://www.linkedin.com/company/g21-srl Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1442833/G21_SpaceFlex_Shoulder.jpg Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1442832/G21_Logo.jpg The national security and defense advantages the U.S. has long enjoyed are dwindling, an issue aggravated by a world brandishing complex threats, a retired Navy vice admiral told a virtual crowd in Aiken on Wednesday. The distance we enjoyed in the Cold War, and certainly in the last two decades with terrorism, the distance of our strength versus others has atrophied, said Charles Munns, an Aikenite who advises the Defense and Energy departments. While we are still near the top, while we are still in a pretty good spot, that distance between us and our competitors has shrunk. Contemporary competition, he continued, resembles the Cold War but now stretches across multiple countries and multiple fronts. Munns specifically mentioned Russia and China the former blamed for the sweeping SolarWinds hack and election interference, and the latter considered a menace to American intellectual property and economic vitality. Many diffuse capabilities have to be dealt with today: cyber, counter-space, stealth, special operations forces, hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence and so on and so forth, Munns said, addressing the early morning Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness get-together known as Up & Atom. So, its a complicated world. Such a tangled international landscape, Munns suggested Wednesday, demands collaboration. Anyone who thinks we any one country can do this alone doesnt understand the world today, the retired vice admiral said. In an interview with the Aiken Standard earlier this month, Munns said U.S. security benefits from our participation in the world organizations and orders, and that clearly includes treaties. Now, every treaty can be improved, and we should always work on improving them. But to not have them? That allows other countries to do things they otherwise wouldnt. In tackling China, Munns said this week, an agenda of confront, compete and cooperate could be the solution. CHICAGO (dpa-AFX) - Following the United Airlines flight 328 engine failure involving Pratt & Whitney 4000-112 engine, Boeing Inc. has recommended suspending all 777s powered by the similar PW engines. The grounding of the 777s in operation, including 69 in-service and 59 in-storage, will continue until the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration or FAA identifies the appropriate inspection protocol. On Saturday, United Airlines flight 328 bound to Honolulu, Hawaii experienced a right engine failure causing an in-flight engine fire shortly after take-off from Denver International Airport. The airplane returned safely to Denver, and none of the 229 passengers or 10 crewmembers were injured. The National Transportation Safety Board or NTSB, which is investigating the incident, attributed fan blade damage for the engine failure. In its preliminary report, the agency stated that most of the damage was confined to the number 2 engine, with minor damage to the airplane. Investigators continue to examine the engine, airplane and the photographs and video taken by passengers aboard United flight 328. According to NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt, a preliminary assessment has revealed that damage to a fan blade is consistent with metal fatigue. Besides NTSB, the investigating parties include the FAA, United Airlines, Boeing, Pratt & Whitney, the Air Line Pilots Association, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The FAA earlier issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive or AD that requires U.S. operators of airplanes equipped with certain Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engines to inspect these engines before further flight. Japan's Transport Safety Board is also investigating an incident in December 2020 when two damaged fan blades were reported in a Japan Airlines Boeing 777 with a PW4000 engine. Boeing, in its statement following the United incident, said it supports the decision by the Japan Civil Aviation Bureau, and the FAA's action to suspend operations of 777 aircraft powered by Pratt & Whitney 4000-112 engines. The company continues to work with regulators as they take actions while these planes are on the ground and further inspections are conducted by Pratt & Whitney. Pratt & Whitney, which is owned by Raytheon Technologies Corp., also has recommended that airlines increase inspections. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX BOEING-Aktie komplett kostenlos handeln - auf Smartbroker.de The Northern Youth for Peace and Development (NYUPED) has declared support for Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia to lead the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the 2024 presidential elections. The Group said Dr Bawumia was well accepted in both Christian and Muslim communities, and would be the best candidate to lead the New Patriotic Party (NPP) as the flagbearer in 2024. Addressing a press conference in Accra on Tuesday, Mr. Prince Adams, the Executive Director, NYUPED, expressed concerns about an alleged campaign against Dr Bawumias image, which rendered his personality as redundant and inconsequential in the Party. He asked those against the Presidential prospects of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia for 2024, to desist from such campaigns and allow for a level playing field in the run-up to the Partys national congress. Mr Adams stressed that the Youth of the Northern Region had decided to take up the challenge to defend and prove to all that, Dr Bawumia was the one suitable to take over from President Nana Akufo-Addo. There is no general rule of first come, first serve in the leadership of the Party, or a convention on which ethnic or religious group assumes a position or role. The rule is that, the most competent person is placed ahead of his competitors, he stressed. The Executive Director stated that, in the current political dispensation, nobody should set aside Dr. Bawumia because the effect of such a decision would spell an electoral disaster for the NPP in 2024. He said in 2008, the NPP had only four seats in the Northern Region, in 2012, the seats increased to 10 while in 2016, the seats further increased to 12 and in 2020, the Party had 16 seats in the Region due to the influence of Dr Bawumia, stressing, he was the best candidate for the Party for the 2024 presidential election. 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 Tattoos may be about self-expression, but that doesnt mean the art is without repetition - especially when a design, style, or symbol becomes popular. While each tattoo is technically unique, there are some trends that verge on overdone - which no one understands more than the artists that draw them each day. Although it may be a fine line between popular and cliche, these are the tattoos that tattoo artists want you to potentially reconsider before you ink them onto your body forever. The Deathly Hallows from Harry Potter It makes sense to want to display your love for a favourite band or book or song permanently, but sometimes everyone else has the same idea. The Harry Potter books may have been a life-changing series, however, there are numerous other motifs throughout the eight books, apart from the Deathly Hallows symbol, that can show off your love just as well. Breast cancer survivor gets double-mastectomy tattoos Show all 6 1 /6 Breast cancer survivor gets double-mastectomy tattoos Breast cancer survivor gets double-mastectomy tattoos Art helped Ms Black to cope with her treatment. She is pictured here with an Alice in Wonderland 'Drinke Me' bottle painted on her head, symbolising the drugs she took but didn't understand. Lillyan Ling Breast cancer survivor gets double-mastectomy tattoos Nikki as she waits to be tattooed Breast cancer survivor gets double-mastectomy tattoos Comedian Nikki Black before being tattooed Breast cancer survivor gets double-mastectomy tattoos Nikki being tattooed at The Gilded Lily Design Breast cancer survivor gets double-mastectomy tattoos Ms Black mid-way through her tattoo Breast cancer survivor gets double-mastectomy tattoos Nikki Black after being tattooed According to the artists at Good Times Tattoo in London, the Deathly Hallows is the most frequently tattooed tattoo - apart from Iron Man. Tourist landmarks The Empire State Building may be majestic to behold but chances are the offices within are not that tattoo-worthy. The same is true for most other tattoos relating to cities or tourist destinations. As one of the most common requests Stefan Dinu, tattoo artist at London Inkaholics, sees, chances are any tattoo of a landmark has been done in thousands of variations before. Finger tattoos Not only do finger tattoos fade, but they are also highly-visible - something to think about if youve never gotten a tattoo before. Many artists refuse to tattoo the area due to the likelihood of it fading away, prompting Dinu to tell The Independent: I would like all tattoo enthusiasts to stop requesting finger and hand tattoos as their first tattoo. Anything you found on Pinterest Some of the most common tattoo requests come from the internet, according to Naresh, a tattooer of 30 years and owner of Flamin Eight in London. He told The Independent: The internet being what it is, it does tend to drive trends in what people think they want so we are often re-imagining themes that are brought to us by our clients on their phones. The artists at Good Times agreed, telling us they would like people to stop requesting Pinterest-type tattoos which are sure to fall out of style. Childs name While the sentiment is nice, the trend is also sadly overdone. It is unlikely you will forget the names of your children, whether they are inked into your skin permanently or not, so it is a tad unnecessary. Roses Although beautiful, roses are some of the most-commonly tattooed flowers - a characteristic that makes them seem slightly less interesting. For the artists at West 4 Tattoo in New York City, roses are one of their number-one requests. However, as the artists told us there is something so timeless and beautiful about them, they dont mind. If you do want to get a tattoo, taking the time to come up with something original will make it all the more special - and most tattoo artists are more than happy to help. After all, it will be with you forever. This article was originally published in March 2019 Dean Martin used to end his weekly variety show by inviting his television audience, in that faux-drunken drawl, "Keep those cards and letters coming in..." I was too young at the time to understand, but it was practical political advice. A group of us friends, ten neighbors in suburban Boise, Idaho, trade insights personal anecdotes, interesting snippets from the news, and political commentary virtually every day, usually several times per day. When frigid weather makes chatting on the front porch or over the back fence burdensome, we remain connected by way of the texting and messaging app Telegram. Our ages range from 17 to 75, most of us much closer to the latter, but the three 20-and-unders keep our conversation grounded in a way that only knowing-that-younger-ears-are-listening can. With more than 20 years of formal education, 27 years of practicing law, and five years teaching critical thinking at a major university behind me, I had arrogantly assumed there would be little to learn and much to teach within the group. Boy, was I wrong! Luke, 20, for example, has taken us all to school on a variety of matters of modern life cryptocurrencies, monetizing and demonetizing social media accounts, doxing, de-platforming, and even day trading. He has also renewed my curiosity about Gramsci, Gentile, and Mussolini, causing me to dust off volumes I've rarely opened over the last 40 years. This morning's lesson, though, came from Paulette, a Canadian-born immigrant who grew up with modest means and now, thanks to decades of hard work, lives comfortably in our fairly affluent enclave composed largely of political refugees from California. Paulette's incomplete post-secondary education is well disguised, for her native intellect, academic curiosity, and enviable reading habit have erased the barriers we college types from the 1970s have been taught to expect (and perhaps secretly crave to condescendingly tolerate). In Tuesday's opening salvo, I posted to our group American Thinker's warning from Peter Barry Chowka, "Red Alert: Democrats take first steps to censor conservative TV channels OANN, Newsmax, and Fox News." Paulette responded tersely, "Time to make calls & write letters." Simple enough, I thought upon receiving her reply. And then wondered, "To whom?" when it occurred to me that almost every elected official in Idaho is simpatico with our cause. I needn't, surely, remind them. (I realize that mine is a dubious assertion, given the legion of sellouts among Republican elected officials, but I have to trust that nothing is more basic than First Amendment principles, and even sellouts have penultimate straws at which they know they must stop.) Since my early childhood in the 1960s, we've been told, when a public situation troubles us, to write to our representatives, to hold their feet to the fire, to be vigilant and heard. Those weren't bad lessons, I suppose, unless as a result we have groomed ourselves to look primarily to elected officials for solutions. Surely, mayors and councils should hear it from us about our concerns from potholes and speed traps to graffiti and trash pickup. But one has to wonder in this day of caucus-determined voting on unread 5,000-page bill packages, written by lobbyists who expect the votes they've paid for, whether "writing my representative" is still meaningful. In a way, we have become too civilized. The threats of yore tar, feathers, and a rail are hollow now. Today's politicos are savvy, even though rarely smart, and know they cannot take a wrecking ball to the Constitution through direct action. (They leave that to the courts.) Instead, they co-opt corporations that are well positioned to carry out the executions. To the cable providers, for example, they pose a series of questions about the "morality" of allowing access to conservative voices. With each question, a subtext emerges. It's always a variation on a theme: "You know, of course, we regulate crucial resources that are vital to your company's success. Prospectively, we will do everything we can to prevent them from becoming scarcer." (If it were a mobster movie, it would be less clunky. "Nice company you got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.") In light of how this latter-day protection racket actually works, Paulette's dictum has led me to begin researching the identities of the corporate boards and major shareholders of companies targeted to do the dirty work of Democrat politicians. "Time to make calls & write letters," indeed! Our subtext needn't be any subtler than the congressfolks' variety. "We're on to you!" we need to tell them. "You need consumers more than you need politicians." Our point would be unquestionably true. The elected officials can threaten their business, but without a willing market they have no business to protect from those crooks in office. I know what you're thinking: we are conservatives, we don't do boycotts. But is it really a boycott to stop doing business with those who actively work to defeat the principles you hold dear? We wouldn't bat an eye at a customer who refuses to patronize the restaurant that canceled her reservation to seat the vicar, or condemn the client who drops his broker for fudging on commissions. Is it wrong to leave one's abuser? You get the point. Dino might smile that crooked smile and let loose in song, "Everybody needs somebody...sometime... Ladies and gentlemen, keep those cards and letters coming in..." And the best part is, unlike our forebears, we don't need tar and feathers at the ready anymore. If these corporate executives, officers, and directors don't respond appropriately to our pleas, demands, and remonstrations, we can always turn to Luke, 20, and let the doxing begin. Photo credit: YouTube screen grab. Flash The European Union (EU) and Italian flags in Brussels flew at half-mast on Tuesday as a tribute to Luca Attanasio, the Italian ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), who was killed in an attack in the African country. Attanasio and two others in his entourage died in the attack during a humanitarian trip in a United Nations convoy in the east of DR Congo on Monday. Carly Nzanzu, governor of North Kivu, a province in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, said that the rebels stopped the convoy with bullets and ordered the passengers on board, including the ambassador, to get off the vehicle. "According to the testimonies we have gathered from the survivors, the rebels wanted money from the ambassador. They took all the passengers to the bush. And a few minutes later they killed the Congolese driver and then the bodyguard of the ambassador on site," said the governor. DR Congo authorities on Monday evening identified rebels of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) movement as being responsible for the ambush. has provided clarifications to the queries posed by the assessors of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an inter-governmental body which sets anti-money laundering standards. The assessors commended the island nation for the sustained progress made in implementing the action plan despite the pandemic. This has raised hopes that the country will be able to come out of the grey list some time this year, said experts. The observations were made during a virtual meeting held last month between and the African Middle East Joint Group. The next plenary session will be held this month during which the second progress report will be considered along with the report of the assessors. In November, submitted to the FATF its second progress report that detailed the measures taken to implement the FATF action plan. "Mauritius has taken steps towards improving the Anti-Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) regime, by developing a risk-based supervision plan for global businesses and management companies, the FATF had said in a note last year. ALSO READ: IIFL bid wins Karvy's 1.1 million demat customers, Axis takes trading a/cs It had asked the country to continue working on its action plan to address strategic deficiencies, by focusing on five aspects that include implementing the risk-based supervision plan effectively for the Financial Services Commission, and ensuring access to accurate basic and beneficial ownership information by competent authorities. Mauritius has obtained technical assistance from the EU-funded AML/CFT Global Facility and the German government (through German Development Agency, GIZ) to support implementation of the FATF Action Plan. Mauritius meets 53 out of the 58 recommended actions, including the big six recommendations, and there is an agreed timeline to cure the identified shortcomings. The FATF has already rated the banking framework in Mauritius as largely compliant, based on the control measures implemented for cross-border transactions. In February, Mauritius was put on the list of jurisdictions that required increased monitoring. This list is often referred to as the grey list. Jurisdictions under increased monitoring actively work with the FATF to address strategic deficiencies in their regimes. These are done to counter money-laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing in a more efficient manner. Mauritius is the second-largest foreign portfolio investor in India, with assets under custody totalling Rs 4.59 trillion as of January 31. Buona, which employs about 1,000 people, has not laid off any workers during the pandemic, Buonavolanto said. The company received a loan of about $3 million in April through the federal Paycheck Protection Program, enacted by Congress last spring to assist businesses during the pandemic. The loan was used to help save 500 jobs, according to data from the U.S. Small Business Administration. Michigans lame duck legislative session days in the weeks after an election are known for late nights, last-minute amendments with little time for review and bitter partisan battles over dozens of bills at once. On Wednesday, the Michigan House cleared a resolution to overhaul how lame duck works, voting 102-7 to require a two-thirds vote on any bill taken up after November general elections in even years. Because House Joint Resolution A would change the state Constitution, the proposal requires two-thirds approval in both the House and Senate to pass. It would then go to the ballot for a vote in the next scheduled statewide general election in 2022. The resolution is sponsored by Michigan House Speaker Jason Wentworth, R-Clare, and is part of his overall push to improve government transparency and ethics laws. He and other supporters of the lame duck change have said it would help prevent term-limited lawmakers from making major partisan policy changes at the last minute. On the House floor, Rep. Terry Sabo, D-Muskegon, said regardless of which party holds majority control in the Legislature, preventing a flurry of partisan action prior to the end of any legislative session is a good move for the state. We have a problem when it comes to transparency and trust, and this is a great step out of many to help fix that, he said. Ive seen over the years, some pretty terrible lame duck activity...its just not the way the state government should be operating. The resolution was supported in the House by all but seven House Republicans and now heads to the Senate for further review. Related: Michigan House Speaker requiring ethics training for lawmakers as part of government transparency push Wentworth told MLive last week he and other House lawmakers will be backing a variety of government transparency reform proposals this session, including House 4001, which would prohibit state lawmakers from voting on bills that could personally benefit them, their families or any entities in which they have a stake. Legislation aimed at improving government transparency, including a plan to subject the governors office to the Freedom of Information Act and create a separate system for the public to request legislative documents, have previously seen significant support in the House, but have petered out in the Senate. Wentworth said last week hes open to changes that could help alleviate concerns of some lawmakers, but plans on throwing his full weight behind it to get substantial changes through. This is not something Im just going to let go by the wayside, he said. This is going to be a continual focus for me until we get this to the governors desk. Michigan is one of the only states in the country that doesnt subject its Legislature or governors office to the Freedom of Information Act and doesnt require lawmakers to disclose potential financial conflicts of interest. On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Rep. David LaGrand, D-Grand Rapids, introduced legislation that would require elected officials in Michigan to disclose their financial records. Read more on MLive: Elected officials in Michigan would disclose financial records in new House bill 50 states of financial disclosure: How Michigan stacks up Proposed financial disclosure requirements for Michigan officials clear first step in committee process New Michigan House Speaker names ethics reform as top priority Is 2019 the year Michigan officials can agree to open their records to the public? Michigan lawmakers say they want financial transparency, but few are releasing records Gettyimagesbank Choi Sang-min, the father of a nine-month-old baby living in the southwestern city of Gwangju, was surprised when his boss recently just signed off without ado on papers he had submitted requesting parental leave. "It was not what I'd expected. Because I heard that when a male colleague applied for parental leave a few years back, he was called in to the boss' office 'to have a word' with him," the 37-year-old college employee said. "All I did was go and tell him, do the paperwork. That was it," he said. It was not much different for Yoon Hyo-suk, a father of two who decided to take a year off from work at an advertising agency in Seoul in July 2019 to "take the baton" from his wife and look after the kids, who were aged five and two at the time. "Some people, of course, tried to talk me out of it, but there was no more gossiping about why a man was taking leave to take care of his kids," Yoon said. "I realized there were so many other men like me taking leave and coming back the next year. It has become almost like a routine," he said. Fathers choosing to be away from work for child-rearing are no longer considered a peculiar breed in South Korea. Their decisions are fairly easily accepted at workplaces and the cases are getting more common, backed by the growing positive view of fathers actively engaging in parenting, alongside expanded government benefits. Data by the Ministry of Employment and Labor show that 27,423 working fathers, excluding those in the public service and education, took long-term parental leave in 2020, up 23 percent from the previous year. Fathers accounted for 24.5 percent of the total number of parents on parental leave, a big jump from the 2017 figure of 13.4 percent, apparently driven by the surge in child-rearing demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic. "The younger the age group you belong to, you don't perceive raising a child as husbands helping their wives, but as a shared duty that you do together," Kwon Me-kyung, a research fellow at the Korea Institute of Child Care and Education (KICCE), said. A recent study by the KICCE found that 18.6 percent of 1,000 married couples with one child or more said that the father in their household either has taken parental leave or is planning to do so. The percentage was higher among those in their 20s with 30.4 percent, 23.6 percent for people in their 30s and 14.2 percent for the group in their 40s. For Choi, the decision was half voluntary and half inevitable. "My wife is having a hard time taking care of the baby alone and we're a single-income family," he said. "But I want to be as progressive as possible in doing my part in raising our child. So I've been saving up to prepare for the time I'll be away." South Korea first introduced the parental leave in 1987 for mothers only with a child under age 1, before it was opened to fathers from 1995. But the allowance programs had not been properly established until the early to mid 2000s. In an effort to encourage more people to take parental leave, the government introduced a "bonus system" in 2014 of giving a larger monthly allowance if the second parent of a family takes time off after their spouse uses it up. The second parent on parental leave can receive up to 2.5 million (US$2,260) in monthly allowances in the first three months, while the maximum allowance for those on such leave for the first time in their families is 1.5 million won per month. Since February last year, a mother and father are allowed to take leave together. Starting next year, the upper limit of the first three-month allowances will increase to 3 million won per parent. "The focus of policy support has moved on from helping women have more children and helping them keep their work-home balance, to providing as much benefits to fathers so as to encourage them to participate in child-rearing," Jung Jae-hoon, a social welfare studies professor at Seoul Women's University, said. Industry circles have jumped on the bandwagon, with large enterprises taking the lead in encouraging male employees to take parental leave. Retail giant Lotte Group has made it compulsory for male employees with children to take time off. "We cannot say that fathers taking parental leave have become a general trend, but we're certainly going in that direction," Jung said. Under the current system, parents working in the private sector, with one child or more under the age of 9 or below elementary school third grade, are eligible for parental leave for up to 12 months. There were only 819 men who took parental leave in 2010. It went up steadily to 3,420 in 2014, 7,616 in 2016 and 17,665 in 2018, according to the labor ministry. The COVID-19 outbreak has added to the growth. The number of fathers who applied for the parental leave bonus surged 52.8 percent to 7,338 in the first half of 2020, ministry data showed. Kwon of the KICCE noted that the government's latest blueprint for child-rearing support underlines "quality of life." "I think there is a realization that the value and joy of raising children have been overlooked. So what the authorities are trying to do is to enable working parents to spend more time with kids without having to worry about the financial shortfall," she said. Yoon, the father of two from Seoul, recalled that being with his kids during the period of leave as "one full hectic and miserable year," but said it was worth the time. "I think I might use the remaining one year before it's too late. I've become better at knowing what they want, what they like and don't like, and getting closer to them," he said. "That's not something that you can learn from someone or anywhere else." (Yonhap) The survey data really drives home how essential it is that companies embrace channels and tools that will allow for seamless collaboration both within and outside the organization. STACK Construction Technologies [STACK] announced today the release of its first annual preconstruction technology report. Were excited to release the findings from this report to provide some insight on the state of preconstruction in the wake of a unique and challenging year, said Phil Ogilby, Founder and CEO of STACK. Surveying nearly 1,000 preconstruction industry professionals primarily subcontractors, general contractors, and material suppliers and manufacturers on business trends, technology usage, and workflow processes, the report indicates that despite challenges, the industry as a whole, and construction technology adoption in particular, are moving in a positive direction. The survey asked the status of revenue and project volume over the course of 2020. Nearly a quarter of respondents reported that their project volume had decreased, and many cited the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic challenges as the reason behind stalled growth. However, the vast majority indicated steady volume or increased growth, and many of those respondents also mentioned the pandemic, but with a positive outlook for their businesses due to economic stimulus packages. One fascinating result from the survey is that preconstruction professionals work in a wide variety of ways. For nearly every question in which multiple responses were permitted, respondents selected more than one option. Survey participants are using many methods and tools to get the job done, demonstrating that as the market changes, industry professionals adapt, but they do it in their own way, with the understanding that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, preconstruction success means recognizing that in order to support the workflow of unique businesses, the collection of tools that are the best of their kind and how they interact may be equally, if not more, important than seeking out a single solution that does everything, but sub-par. Construction technology adoption varied among survey participants, but one clear finding shows that most use some form of technology in their role, with 85% indicating they use at least one software tool, and 29% reporting that their tech usage had increased in the past 12 months. More than 75% believe that software provides a strategic advantage for their business. Another key insight from the report includes the importance of collaboration and relationships in the industry. The survey data really drives home how essential it is that companies embrace channels and tools that will allow for seamless collaboration both within and outside the organization, said Ogilby. As the industry continues to evolve, successful contractors will seek out those solutions that allow remote teams to connect with each other seamlessly, and were proud to be at the forefront of that movement. Because STACK is web-based and runs entirely in the cloud (meaning access anytime, anywhere, from any device) and is built with an open API, it powers real-time connectivity, increased efficiency, and integrated workflows. For more information, and to read the full report, visit: https://www.stackct.com/stacks-1st-annual-preconstruction-technology-report/. ABOUT STACK CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGIES STACK Construction Technologies is the industrys leading cloud-based software solution for preconstruction professionals. STACK provides a centralized hub where plans, specs, and other construction documents can be stored, evaluated, measured, and shared. STACK delivers easy-to-use takeoff, estimating, and proposal solutions for thousands of subcontractors, general contractors, suppliers, and manufacturers to ultimately improve project outcomes and profitability. Our solution powers seamless plan and document management, real-time collaboration, and a more efficient digital preconstruction workflow. For more information on how STACK software is helping preconstruction teams gain visibility, insight, and alignment throughout the bid process, visit stackct.com. Edith Snoek is from Gorinchem, the Netherlands. Always ""busy creating,"" she is very attentive to the world around her. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Art in The Hague she devoted herself entirely to painting. The artist finds inspiration while strolling down the street, reading the newspaper or by the exciting sight of a picture, a movie, or on reading a poem. The verses of ""Girls Playing"" by Dutch poet Willem Wilmink perfectly reflect the artists work and thinking. The author speaks of a man with gloomy thoughts, who, on crossing a group of girls playing together, opens his eyes to the beauty of the world and finds faith in the future. Children are indeed the main characters in Ediths works. She is constantly searching for their images in the media, deconstructing their faces and behaviour. Sometimes naive, sometimes vulnerable, these representations are, for her, a real ""bank of iconographic"" data. Excited by her discoveries and memories, Edith goes back to her studio. In this way Edith takes us into a world of picturesque scenes, peaceful atmosphere and wilderness. Her world is full of children, deer, rabbits ... These beings are captured, still, calm and quiet. They appear to be wrapped in a ghostly mist. This blurring is deliberately accentuated by layers of acrylic paint with which the artist covers her sketches. She manipulates shades of white and has chosen to use clear colours to best express the purity and innocence. Through her paintings, Edith Snoek sends us a deeply sincere message of peace and love. This fulfilled mother and grandmother looks towards the future with confidence and optimism. She wants to convey her vision of a world that, despite often developing negatively, is primarily majestic. MOVIE THEATERS! DANCING! OH MY. (Hot Zone) MOVIE THEATERS ARE COMING BACK! Dancing at catered events to return; nursing home visitations, and latest numbers. (Hot Zone) Posted by Staten Island Advance on Tuesday, February 23, 2021 STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. The coronavirus pandemic has turned our world upside-down. We need information like we never have before. How many new cases were there on Staten Island today? How many deaths? How many people have been released from the hospital? What are President Joe Bidens plans to end the pandemic? What are Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio doing to keep New Yorkers safe? More importantly, when are we going to get back to normal, whatever normal is? Its almost too much to keep up with. So every day around 4 p.m., Mark Stein and I take to Facebook Live to give you all the Island information you need. You can then look for this written wrap-up on SILive.com at the end of the day. Well give you the numbers and all the latest news. Well answer your questions. Well follow up on your news tips. Well share the good news too, the way that the Staten Island community is coming together in this time of crisis. Or well just share this strange and unique pandemic moment with you, as fellow Staten Islanders. On Monday, Mark and I talked about how vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna said that they had each solved various supply problems and that they would together be ready to deliver 220 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine by the end of March. Meanwhile, Cuomo said that New York City residents would soon be allowed to go to the movies again, as well as to make visits to nursing homes. The governor also gave the thumbs-up for socially distant dancing at catered events. On Staten Island, seven fewer people were reported to be in borough hospitals with coronavirus versus the tally on Monday. Were all in this together. Well all get through this together. A significant date in the history of the University of the South at Sewanee has almost been unnoticed in the long history of the school that was originally chartered in 1858, survived the burning of the school during the Civil War and the second founding on March 22, 1866 and its growth to the present which has earned the school on the Cumberland Plateau recognition as one of the outstanding liberal arts universities in the nation. Prior to advent of radio and television coverage, a special visitor came to Sewanee on Nov. 9, 1911 with very little fanfare but at the request of a Sewanee graduate. Major Archie Butt was the Military Aide to President William H. Taft and persuaded his Chief to make a stop on his trip from Nashville to Birmingham for a speaking tour. He was traveling on the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad which would travel through the Cowan railway tunnel several times a day. After transferring to the Mountain Goat Railroad and making a stop at Sewanee, the train would continue to Monteagle and several other stops at the coal mining towns of Tracy City, Coalmont, Gruetli-Laager and Palmer. The Mountain Goat Railroad was constructed in 1853 as a spur of the Nashville and Chattanooga line and would carry coal and passengers until 1885 when it was decommissioned. President Taft disembarked at the Sewanee depot from the Mountain Goat at 8:15 a.m. It was a typical fall day at Sewanee with a fine drizzle falling and the unpaved street from the railroad station to the University rough and muddy. Local hack operator Harry Hoskins had decorated one of his rigs in red, white and blue bunting for the President to ride in but an alternative source of travel was used when the only automobile on the mountain was commandeered from its Tracy City owner who happened to arrive on the scene. President Taft, Bishop Gailor, Vice Chancellor William Bonnell Hall and two Secret Service men rode in the automobile while Major Butt and additional Secret Service agents rode in the Hoskin hack. The opportunity to participate in the protection and safety of the President by the local Volunteer Police almost got out of hand. One observer raised the question of whether Sewanee was attempting to honor the President or whether the crowd was following in the wake of a wonderous caravan. The uniforms of the volunteer law enforcement personnel were described as picturesque and Police Chief McBee had deputized 12 men to assist him in protecting the President. Several rode on stately horses and the Chief donned a uniform remnant of King Charles the First, complete with a Vandyke beard and buskin leather boots. Armed with the nether portion of a billiard cue, he had a sackful of handcuffs attached to the knob of the saddle of his horse. Carrying four revolvers about his person he was a living protector under Tennessee law. Prior to the Presidential train, Chief McBee handed out to his volunteers as many guns and ammunition as their clothing would hold. The pageantry and appearance of the horses aroused such admiration that offers to buy the steeds came in on the telegraph wire which, if they had been accepted, would have brought more money to the mountain. From the porch of the chapel Mr. Taft gave a short speech expressing his appreciation of Sewanee and his good wishes for her future. The President then visited the library with the Vice Chancellor and a few of the University faculty and their families. A pleasant and informal reception was held at the request of the President as he had asked that his visit be entirely without ceremony and a compliment to Major Butt. Although one observer described the Presidents visit as the greatest day of Sewanee political history, it did not get much publicity as the Associated Press reporter travelling with President Taft was ignored until the entire ceremony was half over and he refused to leave the train car after being snubbed. One negative incident did occur as one Sewanee resident, an avowed and dedicated Democrat, refused to go to her window to review the parade as it passed her house because he was a Republican President. * * * 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) President Donald Trump speaks to supporters from The Ellipse near the White House in Washington, on Jan. 6, 2021. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images) Trump Appeals Suspension to Rejoin Facebook, Instagram Former President Donald Trump has submitted a statement of appeal to an oversight board funded by Facebook in a bid to rejoin the platform. The decision is expected to take around two and a half months. Former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who is a co-chair of the oversight board, told UKs Channel 4 News that they are currently looking into the appeal concerning Trumps Facebook and Instagram accounts. The board was set up to be an independent group to hear users appeals and is comprised of 19 former politicians, journalists, and academics. Its a very high profile case but that is exactly why the Oversight Board was created in the first place, Thorning-Schmidt said. In a statement to The Epoch Times, the board confirmed that a user statement has been received in the case before the Oversight Board concerning President Trumps Facebook and Instagram accounts. We will have no further comment concerning that statement until the Board has issued its decision, they added. Trumps office did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times request for comment. Thorning-Schmidt said that the board has 90 days to render a decision, adding that although the members would like to expedite the process, the time frame is necessary to allow for translations and experts to share their opinions. The board is also reviewing public comments on Trumps appeal. Thorning-Schmidt said they have already received thousands of public comments in this case. Facebook suspended Trump indefinitely in early January following the breach of the U.S. Capitol. The Silicon Valley company was not the only platform to ban Trump amid a campaign these companies say is to remove harmful content from their platforms. Twitter, Google, Snapchat, Twitch, and other platforms also suspended Trumps access around the same time. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg justified his companys censorship by claiming the risks of Trump using the platform through Inauguration Day were too great. We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete, Zuckerberg said in a statement at the time. On the day that the Capitol was breached as Congress was gathered to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, Trump made two posts on Facebook that the company found objectionable and removed, publicly citing Trumps use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government. In both of the posts, one being a video, Trump told his supporters that we have to have peace and told them to go home. Facebook said it removed the two posts for violating its Community Standard on Dangerous Individuals and Organizations under its policy prohibiting praise, support, and representation of events that Facebook designates as violating. Later, after reviewing Trumps communications outside the platform, Facebook determined to extend the block indefinitely. Trump said last week that he was looking into options to return to social media including joining an existing platform or creating his own. He has, however, ruled out re-joining Twitter, which he called very boring after many conservative users departed from the platform after his permanent ban. Perceived unbalanced moderation of users content by social media companies has raised concerns over First Amendment rights and a lack of checks and balances for decisions made by Big Tech companies. Congress is looking to hold Big Tech companies accountable for their actions and has been seeking to legislate a new antitrust law. On Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced a March 25 hearing with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who will be expected to testify on misinformation on online platforms. Tom Ozimek contributed to this report. Peggy Fitzpatrick Tatum recently spent two weeks trying to book an appointment to get the COVID-19 vaccine before eventually landing a date. Tatums decision to get the vaccine may raise some eyebrows. The 65-year-old retired federal employee is the great-granddaughter of one of hundreds of Black men in Macon County, Alabama, who were part of a controversial U.S. Public Health Service study on syphilis, commonly known as the Tuskegee Study or Tuskegee Experiment, which began in 1932 and lasted 40 years. Blacks and Latinos have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus in terms of hospitalizations and deaths, according to health experts. Yet, theyre also receiving COVID-19 vaccinations at significantly lower rates than whites. A big reason is lack of trust in medical research systems and the government. Some list the Tuskegee Experiment as reason for their hesitance. According to a June 2020 Pew Research Center study, Black adults were more hesitant to trust medical scientists, embrace the use of experimental medical treatments and sign up for a potential vaccine to combat the disease. I do think they are using Tuskegee as an excuse, and it brings about fear and some anxiety for people, said Tatum, who was raised in Tuskegee and now lives in metro Atlanta, in a recent interview with the AJC. In a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll, 30% of Black respondents said the main reason they wouldnt get the COVID vaccine is they distrust the health system. About 22% were concerned about side effects. Thirty-seven percent said they wanted to know more about the vaccines effectiveness. Those facts are not lost on many in the community, as Black physicians, civic organizations and faith-based groups work to educate Black people about the vaccines. Were at a different place from Tuskegee and also from other injustices and unethical medical behavior as far as research goes on human subjects, said Dr. Lilly Immergluck, a professor at the Morehouse School of Medicine. National and international guidelines have come from lessons learned in history. The protections that humans have in clinical research, to me, evolved from that situation (Tuskegee) along with some others. The way to be empowered is to get correct information, she said. Were asking people to go to the people they trust in their communities, their circles, their networks and their health care providers. But she makes it clear that its not just vaccine hesitancy that could account for lower numbers. Is the root cause for the low number truly because people dont want it or is it an access issue, a distribution issue or an inequality of distribution issue that needs to be addressed? Tatum is a board member of the Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit which was formed in 2014 to bring together Tuskegee Experiment descendants, provide scholarships, educate people about the study and tell the story of the men and their legacy. Several group members have spoken out recently about the COVID vaccines and shared that they plan to take them. Their work has been in the spotlight more as people debate whether to take the vaccines. Recently, Tatum and other descendants were part of a panel discussion on the syphilis study for a Chicago-based talk show when someone asked why, given their family histories, they would take the COVID vaccines. She told them she was raised by her grandparents and when she was younger, whenever a vaccine became available whether for mumps or chickenpox, they would go down to the community clinic and get the shots. My grandmother never thought about any harm the vaccines would do to us, but she trusted in the Lord that it would do us all the good, Tatum said. Many times, people on social media harken back to the syphilis study. Tatum doesnt go as far as to encourage others to take the vaccines; she just wants them to educate themselves before making a decision. Back then, they didnt understand what was going on, she said. Now you can ask questions. You can watch experts on the news 24/7. Tatum admits that she was hesitant at first, but the more she researched the vaccines, the more comfortable she felt. She was only 2 years old when her great-grandfather died and can only piece together what he was like from other family members. Papa Willie, as he was known, was a hardworking family man and sharecropper who lived right outside of Tuskegee in a community called Cotton Valley. Lillie Tyson Heads father, Freddie Lee Tyson, was also part of the study. Today, she advocates for people, particularly Blacks, to get vaccinated. In Macon County, the men were not treated or informed they were in a study, said Head, 78, president of the Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation and a Virginia resident. We, on the other hand, in this time and age, we have more information at our disposal about the vaccine. I do hope my African American brothers and sisters will take the vaccine if they are able to do it, Head told the AJC. The retired educator and her husband are scheduled to take their second COVID vaccine dose in March. Head was not born when her father, then a sharecropper, was in the Tuskegee Study. The family found out after her brother read about the study in the news. Of course, you can imagine it was quite a shock. There were so many questions and Daddy didnt know the answers either. He only knew that a lady would come around and draw blood. Despite that legacy, Head is speaking out. This is an opportunity for us to ensure that our safety and our health is being addressed, she said. ____ (Staff writer Eric Stirgus contributed to this article.) ____ TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENT TIMELINE AND IMPACT 1932 The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, an experiment overseen by the federal government, begins. About 400 African American men in the Alabama community with syphilis are deliberately left untreated so doctors could study the disease. 1940s Some of the physicians involved in the Tuskegee experiment also take part in similar experiments in Guatemala, infecting prisoners and mental patients with syphilis. July 25, 1972 An Associated Press article exposes the Tuskegee Experiment and a federal investigative panel is convened. The experiment is ended three months later. 1974 $10 million settlement is reached with the Tuskegee victims and their families and offers to provide medical benefits. The U.S. government orders new guidelines to protect human subjects in government-funded research projects. February 1997 HBO film Miss Evers Boys telling the story of the study is released. (The experiment is also mentioned in a 1992 song by rap artist C.L. Smooth and in a 2015 episode of the sitcom Blackish.) May 16, 1997 Then-President Bill Clinton holds White House ceremony apologizing to five Tuskegee Experiment survivors and announcing plans to create Tuskegee Universitys National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care. January 2004 The last Tuskegee study participant dies. 2010 Then-President Barack Obama apologizes for the syphilis experiments in Guatemala. December 2017 Pew poll finds just 15% of Black people trust the government in Washington all or most of the time, lower than any other racial group. December 2020 Pew poll finds just 42% of Black Americans said they would get a COVID-19 vaccine when made available. ___ 2021 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Visit at ajc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. KYODO NEWS - Feb 24, 2021 - 18:22 | World, All Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin kicked off the country's largest COVID-19 immunization exercise on Wednesday by becoming the first to get the vaccine jab. The cancer-survivor was calm as he received his first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in an event telecast live from a coronavirus vaccination center in the federal administrative capital Putrajaya. "I am confident the vaccine is safe and effective. Looking at my condition thus far, praise be to God," he said after the jab. He urged all Malaysians and foreigners residing here to come forward to receive the free vaccine so that the country can break the chain of infection. Muhyiddin will receive his second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine within 21 days to complete the inoculation process. Related coverage: 1st batch of coronavirus vaccine arrives in Thailand Malaysia purchased 32 million doses of the vaccine from the U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. The first batch of 312,390 doses arrived Sunday. The country also has deals with other vaccine suppliers, including Britain's AstraZeneca Plc and companies in China and Russia. It has secured enough doses for its entire population of 32 million people. Health workers and other front-line workers will be inoculated in the first phase, followed by senior citizens and high-risk groups. Those in the general public aged 18 and older will be after that. The entire program is expected to run through February next year. Malaysia reported 2,468 new virus cases on Tuesday, with 14 deaths. The country has logged a total of 288,229 cases and 1,076 fatalities. COLLEGE PARK, Md., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Women business leaders will share insights via a panel discussion and virtual networking, as the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business hosts Women Inspire, via Zoom, from 6-8 p.m. Thursday, March 4. In its 10th year, the annual event celebrates Maryland Smith alumnae leaders in business and encourages participants to strive to reach their full potential. The 2021 program's featured speakers and honored guests are Maryland Smith graduates Wendy Sanhai, PhD, EMBA '09, specialist leader at Deloitte Consulting, and Ali von Paris '12, CEO and founder of Route One Apparel. The pair will give insights in a panel discussion moderated by Nicole M. Coomber, assistant dean of Smith's Full-Time MBA Program. This year's event "builds on a tradition of showcasing fearless Maryland Smith alumnae succeeding at every level in business and influencing future leaders," says event organizer Mark Forrest, program director for Maryland Smith's Office of Alumni Relations. "From finance to marketing to business development and all areas in between, the list of past Women Inspire honorees is filled with Smith alumnae leaders in a variety of disciplines," Forrest says. "This year's honorees will expand that list of disciplines and continue to raise the bar of excellence for business leaders." Following a one-hour discussion, a special virtual networking hour will take place, with attendees welcome to enter breakout rooms catering either to specific industry groups or general networking. The networking event, Forrest says, provides an opportunity for attendees to glean insights from their peers, discuss important issues and celebrate each other's accomplishments. "The virtual networking hour will be similar to the reception that normally takes place at an in-person Women Inspire program," Forrest says. "We hope attendees will use the hour to connect with fellow leaders, forge new contacts, and engage in thoughtful conversation around being successful business leaders." For more information and to register, go to the Women Inspire homepage at https://go.umd.edu/Sag. Contact: Greg Muraski, 301-892-0973, [email protected] SOURCE University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business ALBANY An Albany landlord has been charged with kidnapping after allegedly tying up two tenants with zip ties and tape, placing pillowcases over their heads and driving them at gunpoint to a rural cemetery in Columbia County where he dumped them in the snow before dawn on Sunday, according to law enforcement sources and police records. The landlord, 48-year-old Shawn Douglas, allegedly was armed with a firearm throughout the incident and may have received help from two other suspects, according to police records. No other arrests have been reported. The alleged kidnapping unfolded between and 1 and 8 a.m. on Sunday. The incident began at the multi-unit Grandview Terrace residence where Douglas and his two tenants have resided in the city's South End. Douglas, who police records indicate has been arrested previously for charges ranging from assault to violating an order of protection, has owned the residence since 2006, according to property records. The tenants were a 21-year-old woman and a 32-year-old man. They could not be reached for comment. Douglas had apparently grown frustrated because he had been unable to evict the tenants due to COVID-19 restrictions, law enforcement sources said. The tenants were both sleeping at the time that he is accused of attacking and tying them up. The 32-year-old male tenant was allegedly punched and kicked by Douglas and two others before being tied up. Police reports on the incident do not provide any details on the other suspects. After the man and woman were bound, Douglas allegedly loaded them into what they told police was a Dodge Durango. With the help of the two other unidentified suspects, they drove the man and woman to a motel that the victims told police may have been in Colonie. From there, they were driven to the isolated cemetery in Ghent, a rural town in Columbia County about 35 miles southeast of Albany. Police reports indicate Douglas left them tied up in the snow-covered cemetery and drove away. The woman was able to untie herself and walked to a nearby residence to summon help. By allegedly leaving the pair tied up and abandoning them in the wintry conditions, Douglas "did expose the victims to a risk of serious physical injury," a police report states. Douglas was arrested Monday afternoon and arraigned on charges of second-degree kidnapping. He was being held at Albany County jail Tuesday afternoon on $50,000 bond. New Delhi, Feb 24 : The Supreme Court has upheld the appeal of National Spot Exchange Limited (NSEL) seeking direction to the Securities and Appellate Tribunal (SAT) for hearing its plea in the "Not Fit and Proper" case against brokers. The apex court has rejected the opposition put up by senior advocate and former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram on behalf of brokers, and directed SAT to allow NSEL, part of 63 moons technologies, to present its appeal in the case. Following the NSEL crisis in 2013, brokers evaded scrutiny and punitive action until 2015 when their involvement was unearthed by forensic auditors of Economic Offences Wing of Mumbai Police. The probe found five leading broking firms - Motilal Oswal Commodities, India Infoline Commodities, Phillip Commodities, Anand Rathi Commodities and Geofin Comtrade - guilty of various malpractices. These brokerages were accused of offering assured returns, KYC manipulation, client code modification, infusing 'benami' funds by creating fictitious client accounts and luring clients to trade on NSEL through funding by their NBFC arm. After the report by the EOW-Mumbai and complaint filed by NSEL, the market regulator SEBI had ordered its own probe, found the brokers guilty of malpractices and finally declared them "Not Fit and Proper" to function in the commodity segment in 2019. The SEBI order was challenged by these brokers in SAT and since NSEL was an affected party and the SEBI failed to consider all the allegations and material in the complaint filed by it against the brokers, NSEL filed an appeal at SAT, the company said in a statement. However, SAT had rejected NSEL appeal on the technical ground of delay. The Supreme Court on Tuesday restored the appeal by NSEL before the Securities Appellate Tribunal in a case related to 'Not Fit and Proper' brokers in the Rs 5,600-crore NSEL payment scam. A bench led by Justice R.F. Nariman while condoning the delay in refiling of the appeal by NSEL asked it to deposit Rs 20,000 with the SC legal aid service committee. NSEL expressed its surprise over Chidambaram's appearance for the brokers despite having been personally involved in the matter as the then finance minister and now being faced with a Rs 10,000 crore suit by 63 moons Technologies Limited, the parent company of NSEL. It was under Chidambaram's tenure as Finance Minister that the Forward Market Commission (FMC) applied 'Not Fit and Proper' clause on NSEL and its promoter entities. "The same Chidambaram is now applying a different yardstick for the brokers by defending them from 'Not Fit and Proper' in the same NSEL payment crisis case," NSEL stated. The exchange has been stating in various forums that Chidambaram is the brain behind the NSEL payment default crisis, along with two bureaucrats K.P. Krishnan, who was the then Joint Secretary in Department of Economic Affairs, and former FMC chairman Ramesh Abhishek. By abruptly closing the fully functioning exchange, the company alleged, the trio had triggered the payment default, with the intention of killing the competition to National Stock Exchange in which Chidambaram had multiple vested interests, NSEL added. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes A pizza box sized solar panel in orbit is producing enough electricity to power an iPad, according to a succesful test of the technology by the US Navy. The Photovoltaic Radiofrequency Antenna Module (PRAM) was launched in May 2020 attached to a drone that loops around the Earth every 90 minutes and is designed to harness light from the sun to convert to electricity. The 12x12 inch panel is an early experiment for a technology that could one day harness solar radiation from the sun and beam it to anywhere on the Earth. It is designed to make the best use of light in space, which doesn't have to pass through the atmosphere where it loses energy before reaching the ground. The Pentagon one day envisages an array of panels in space that could send power to even the most remote parts of the planet and create a new global power grid. No details on timelines or costings have been revealed as part of the study. A number of nations are working on the concept of a space based power generator, including this concept design by JAXA, the Japanese space agency The Photovoltaic Radiofrequency Antenna Module (PRAM) was launched in May 2020 attached to a drone that loops around the Earth every 90 minutes and is designed to harness light from the sun to convert to electricity SPACE-BASED SOLAR POWER (SBSP) The idea of Space-Based Solar Power stations have been around since 1941. Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov first wrote about them in the short story Reason. This is one artists impression, produced for NASA, of what a space solar array might look like. The idea would involve capturing the rays and beaming them down to the Earth In the story he wrote about a space station that transmits energy collected from the Sun to various planets using microwave beams. There were a number of concept designs from the 1970s but non were deemed economically viable. The basic concept involves a space station with a solar array to convert solar energy into electrical energy. Then it would use a microwave transmitter or laser emitter to transmit the energy to a collector on the Earth. The UK has joined Japan, China, Russia and the US in pursuing the idea of space based power generation. As of 2008, Japan made the idea of space solar power a national goal. Advantages of the technology include the fact it is always solar noon in space with a full Sun. Collecting surfaces could also receive more intense sunlight than on Earth. However they would be large satellites, costing a lot of money to launch - although launches have become cheaper thanks to commercial firms. Advertisement 'To our knowledge, this experiment is the first test in orbit of hardware designed specifically for solar power satellites, which could play a revolutionary role in our energy future,' said Paul Jaffe, PRAM principal investigator. 'Some visions have space solar matching or exceeding the largest power plants today - multiple gigawatts - so enough for a city,' he told CNN. While this test technology can't 'beam power' to the planet below, future versions could do just that - as the technology has already been shown to work. 'The unique advantage the solar power satellites have over any other source of power is this global transmissibility,' Jaffe said. 'You can send power to Chicago and a fraction of a second later, if you needed, send it instead to London or Brasilia.' The use of solar energy to operate satellites began at the start of the space age with Vanguard I, the first satellite to have solar cells. The concept of using solar panels in space, where the energy levels are higher, then beaming that power to the Earth isn't a new concept. It's an idea first conjured by science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov in 1941 in his science fiction short story Reason where it was revealed a station a mile across was used as an 'energy converter' to gather sunlight and beam it across the solar system. Japan, China, Russia, the UK and the US are all pursuing the idea of space based power generation and Japan has it listed as a national goal. This current experiment focuses on the energy conversion process and resulting thermal performance, a Navy spokesperson said. The hardware will provide researchers with temperature data, along with its efficiency in energy production that will drive future space solar development. The point of this study is to determine whether space solar technology can be delivered at an economically viable price-point, the team said. Jaffe explained that 'building hardware for space is expensive' but that the costs are starting to come down, especially over the past decade. This module is sat on the highly secretive US' X-37B space plane - in fact the module is the only aspect of the mission widely known - but future versions could be in a geosynchronous orbit around the Earth. Researchers say the device could send power from space, as much as Gigawatts to power a whole city - and send it to hard to reach places such as remote installations and UAVs The technology in the 12 inch by 12 inch device includes a sun sensor, solar array and electronics control. Future versions could beam power back to the Earth That is a 'high Earth orbit' that allows a satellite to match the rotation of the planet below. usually about 22,230 miles above the equator. It is useful for monitoring weather, communications satellites and even surveillance. On the ground the team are testing future versions to ensure they can still operate under intense heat likely found 22,000 miles from the Earth. 'The next logical step is to scale it up to a larger area that collects more sunlight, that converts more into microwaves,' Jaffe said. Once they have a panel that can operate at heat in high orbit, they will begin working on a version that can send the collected energy back to Earth. That means finding a way to control the destination and microwave beam so they don't fire it at the wrong target. A technology called 'retro-directive beam control' allows them to send a pilot signal up from destination antenna on Earth to space as a form of 'targeting control'. Jaffe told CNN that using this technique would ensure no microwaves were being sent until it was clear the receiver was online and ready to operate. In a paper published in the IEEE Journal of Microwaves, Jaffe and colleagues examined the feasibility of 'power beaming' and shared some of the results of the early study involving the pizza box-sized experimental solar panel. In the paper the authors wrote that power beaming can bring electrical power from easy to produce places, to those areas where it is difficult to generate energy. This could include unmanned aerial vehicles, balloons, remote installations such as forward operating bases or even in industrial applications. Jaffe and colleagues claim it could also be used as an 'enabling technology' for sixth generation wireless communications due to come online in the next decade. Findings from the original study and a review of power beaming have been shared in a paper published in the IEEE Journal of Microwaves. Earlier, many leaders from Rangareddy and Warangal joined the party in the presence of Bandi Sanjay Kumar. (DC Image) HYDERABAD: Telangana BJP is to go full-throttle with its election campaign for the Nagarjuna Sagar by-elections, Warangal and Khammam municipality and the graduate MLC constituencies from Thursday. The partys state office-bearers met here on Wednesday in the presence of in-charge Tarun Chugh and state president Bandi Sanjay Kumar. The State chief said that 40,000 activists have been trained for campaigning in MLC elections with each candidate covering 25 votes in the two segments. The activists will also collect details and contact numbers of the unemployed youth. Chugh stated that several Union ministers and national leaders are likely to come for electioneering. The meeting discussed the Gurrampodu land issue and about leaders who had joined the BJP from other parties. Chugh warned leaders against indulging in group politics. The party will conduct district and mandal level office-bearers meeting from 26 to March 3 and organise training programmes in all districts before March 15. The party will send 20 party observers to Tamil Nadu during the Assembly elections. Shasakta mandal, Sakriya booth samithi, and Phase Pramukh appointments would be done before December 25, it was resolved. The April 6 party establishment day would be marked by massive programmes, including highlighting about the schemes and their implementation by the Centre. The party hoped that they would win the MLC seats on a note as impressive as their showing in the GHMC elections. Senior leaders DK Aruna, Vivek Venkataswamy, MPs, former MPs and MLAs and other key leaders participated in the meeting. Earlier, many leaders from Rangareddy and Warangal joined the party in the presence of Bandi Sanjay Kumar. That release could not be found. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. With its seemingly endless saga of mismanagement and irregularities, the Club has been in the limelight a lot, unfortunately. (Image: delhigymkhana.org.in) The capitals Gymkhana Club, the 107-year-old watering hole favoured by the high and mighty of currently beleaguered Lutyens Delhi, is back in the news. With its seemingly endless saga of mismanagement and irregularities, the Club has been in the limelight a lot, unfortunately. The present crisis has emerged after the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) dissolved the Clubs governing council and appointed M.M. Juneja, director general of the ministry of corporate affairs, as administrator to oversee the clubs functioning even as the legal case continues. Among Mr Junejas first actions after his appointment sent a notice to all members to clear pending dues amounting to Rs 1.2 crores! This is the first time in the Clubs history that an administrator has been appointed to run its affairs. Mr Juneja has been given the mandate to introduce the best practices that can bring the club to the 21st-century norms. The current imbroglio dates back four years when the ministry of corporate affairs decided to open an inquiry into the Clubs management after the growing number of complaints and court cases against the Club. The petition was filed early last year at the NCLAT in which the ministry sought to take over the Club management. It seems to have got its way, for now. Other clubs in Lutyens Delhi are trembling now that serious action has begun. Any guesses about whos next? DKB is listening to your chatter, so send it in ED on an expansion spree As it seeks to become nimbler as well as to strengthen its reach due to growing responsibilities, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) is on an expansion spree. This requires more officers for new zonal and sub-zonal offices. The agency, a part of the revenue department of the Union finance ministry, is responsible for enforcing economic laws and fighting economic crime. But with a wider jurisdiction now with new responsibilities under the FEMA, PMLA and FEO acts, it will need to expand its footprint. According to sources, the expansion will involve a considerable restructuring of its cadre strength. At present, ED has a sanctioned strength of 2,064 posts including five special directors and 27 joint directors. Since there is a shortage of officers for even the sanctioned posts, there is a greater urgency for selecting more officers to fill existing vacancies as well as for the new offices. Apparently, there is a move to create new posts of additional/joint directors and deputy directors for the new zonal and sub-zonal offices. Recently, ED promoted 10 assistant directors as deputy directors of enforcement. They include P. Radhakrishnan, P. Vinod Kumar, P. Nandini, Rajesh Kumar, M. Nair, Shubhendu Parthi, Diptesh Mondal, Benjamin S.N. Chattair, Padma, V.G. Thomas and Krishna Jain. The agency has also recently opened two new zonal offices in Bhopal and Gurugram and raised the status of sub-zonal offices in Raipur and Bhubaneshwar to zonal offices. It has also opened several sub-zonal offices across the country. Former Bihar DGPs political career still at start line The political ambitions of the high-profile former DGP of Bihar Gupteshwar Pandey have been thwarted, yet again. Though Mr Pandey waited patiently for his hoped-for induction into the NDA government, chief minister Nitish Kumar has instead appointed another former IPS officer, Sunil Kumar, as a cabinet minister in the state with the excise and prohibition portfolio, barely a few months after his retirement. Mr Pandey shot into the headline with his comments during the furore over actor Sushant Singhs suicide. Even as the controversy raged, Mr Pandey took voluntary retirement and joined the Janata Dal (United) Party hoping to get a party ticket. However, the ticket went to the BJP candidate under the seat-sharing agreement within the NDA. This denied, many were certain that Mr Pandey would be inducted into the Nitish Cabinet sooner than later. But Sunil Kumar has pipped him to that. Neither has Mr Pandey been made an MLC either. Curiously, this was Mr Pandeys second attempt at a career in politics. In 2009, he had taken voluntary retirement in the hope of getting a BJP ticket, which he was denied. Luckily for him, Nitish Kumar allowed him to withdraw his resignation from the IPS and subsequently even elevated him as state police chief. Will Mr Pandeys patient wait fructify or has he run out of options? Well wait and see. Share a babu experience! Follow dilipthecherian@Twitter.com. Lets multiply the effect. PHEV Electric Vehicle SUV kW kWh EV NVH For now, the Outlanderretains the design of the third generation, but Mitsubishi compensates for the aging looks with an upgraded powertrain, more electric range, and better value. To be more precise, the Outlander Plug-in Hybridcomes with powertrain revisions, a larger battery pack, more performance, and the same pricing as before kicking off at $36,295.Under the hood, customers will find a revised 2.4-liter gasoline engine thats good for 126 hp and 148 lb-ft (201 Nm). The previous models 60-(80-hp) rear-axle-mounted electric motor was ditched in favor of a more powerful 70-kW (94-hp) unit for a new total system output of 221 horsepower, which is 31 more ponies than before.Better yet, the battery pack now has 13.8(instead of 12 kWh), so the zero-emission driving range has grown slightly from 22 to 24 miles (35 to 39 km). In addition, the Outlander PHEV can sustain a higher top speed inmode, up from 79 to 83 mph (127 to 134 kph). Owners should also find the 2021 Outlander PHEV a more refined vehicle, thanks to claimed improvements in terms of(noise, vibration, and harshness) levels.Also new for the 2021MY are the Sport and Snow driving modes, while the company added a new Limited Edition (LE) grade in between the SEL and GT trims. Last but not in the very least, the technology upgrades (the bigger battery, in particular) positively influence the available federal incentives for the year, with Mitsubishi claiming a tax credit of $6,587, up $751 compared to the 2020 model year. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Over 1,700 tins of wall filler were filled with cocaine. Photo: Zollfahndungsamt/Reuters. Over 16 tonnes of cocaine were seized in Hamburg port, making it the single-largest drug seizure ever-destined for the Netherlands. The 16.17 tonnes of cocaine were found in over 1,700 tins of wall filler which had arrived on a container ship from Paraguay and was destined for the Netherlands. The German Customs Office told AFP: This is the largest amount of cocaine ever seized in Europe and one of the largest single seizures worldwide. "The enormous amount of cocaine would have brought in several billion euros (dollars) in street sales." Prosecutors said a 28-year old Dutchman had been arrested on Wednesday who was registered as the recipient of the containers in which the drugs were found. In the Belgian port of Antwerp, over seven tonnes of the drug was found hidden in a container filled with wood blocks which had been shipped from Panama. This was also destined for the Netherlands, Dutch prosecutors said. The two shipments together represented a street value of roughly 600 million euros, the prosecutors said, making it the biggest catch of cocaine headed for the Netherlands ever. On Tuesday, Dutch customs officers announced the largest heroin haul ever found in one bust in the Netherlands - more than 1,500 kg of heroin discovered in the port of Rotterdam. With additional reporting from Reuters. For anyone who really wants to understand the history of urban leadership in Kansas City, this is a worthwhile and essential conversation. Description . . . Alvin Brooks mark on civil rights history in Kansas City on the citys history in total is indelible. Born into poverty and a racist society, he became a trailblazing police officer and detective, city councilman, and mayor pro tem. Amid decades of advocacy for equal rights, violence prevention, and criminal justice, he founded the AdHoc Group Against Crime and chaired the local chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). In recognition of his lifetime of activism, community building, and public service, President George H. W. Bush named him as one of Americas 1,000 Points of Light. Brooks, now 88, joins Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas in an online discussion of his remarkable career and life, marking the launch of his new autobiography Binding Us Together: A Civil Rights Activist Reflects on a Lifetime of Community and Public Service. The event also commemorates Black History Month in February. Lucas likewise rose from impoverished beginnings, earning academic scholarships to high school, college, and law school at Cornell University before returning home to Kansas City and serving four years on the city council. He was elected mayor in 2019. The presentation is co-presented by PNC Bank and Rainy Day Books. Take a look . . . Hopefully, more for the morning update . . . STAY TUNED!!! Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt called on the US government to fast track development of emerging technology including artificial intelligence (AI) to catch up to China's lead. The United States is "one or two years ahead of China, not five or 10" and "the Chinese are well ahead in areas like face recognition," said Schmidt at a Tuesday hearing held by the Senate Armed Services Committee on emerging technologies and their impact on national security. "Because of the diffusion of the technology, you have to expect that anything that's invented in the open source AI world will immediately be adopted by China. So the threat is very, very real," said Schmidt, who is also the chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, established in 2018 through the John S. McCain National Defence Authorisation Act. Get the latest insights and analysis from our Global Impact newsletter on the big stories originating in China. Eric Schmidt (at left) and Brad Smith, president of Microsoft Corporation, listens on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday during a hearing on emerging technologies and their impact on national security. Photo: AP alt=Eric Schmidt (at left) and Brad Smith, president of Microsoft Corporation, listens on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday during a hearing on emerging technologies and their impact on national security. Photo: AP The swift advances in Chinese artificial intelligence were partly due to the country's supportive policy including its "Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan" introduced in 2017. Its massive population and weak data privacy laws also allowed China easy deployment of such technology. "The government will need to help with some forms of funding, and we need to let the private sector build those things and make it successful," said Schmidt. "The private sector is America's great strength. We move faster and globally than any government could and we need global platforms or be forced to use the Chinese ones which is a disaster," he said. Story continues Schmidt stressed that "urgency" should drive the policy, regardless whether the focus is on the public funding or private-sector initiatives. Technology competition between the US and China heated up in 2018. That year, America's national defence strategy identified 14 categories of emerging technologies including semiconductors, quantum computing, biotechnology, hypersonics, 5G, and artificial intelligence. By the end of 2020, the Commerce Department expanded that list to 37 categories. Products that fall under these groups are under restriction as exports to China as they are considered crucial in shaping the future national security. "I'm worried that we do not understand the competitive threat from China to what we're trying to do," said Schmidt, who is now co-founder of Schmidt Futures, his philanthropic initiative to promote emerging technologies and science. "There's a set of tech platforms which are going to happen, but they're going to happen first in China unless we have a more concerted effort in America," said Schmidt. "I'd like to see a national list of key technology platforms that we collectively agree must emerge using Western values, and must be the ones being used by our partners," he said. "These are contests of values as well as investments. And it's important that American values, the things that we hold and cherish so deeply, are the winners in all of these technological areas," he added. This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright 2021 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2021. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 16:34:54|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close VIENTIANE, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Local authorities across Laos continue to implement preventive measures and closely monitor people entering the country to prevent a second wave of COVID-19 outbreak. People entering Laos especially returning workers will be sent to quarantine centers for 14 days, and the temperature of each person entering the country must be checked, Deputy Director General of the Department of Communicable Disease Control under the Lao Ministry of Health Latsamy Vongkhamsao told a press conference in Lao capital Vientiane on Wednesday. A total of 2,335 people has been quarantined at 27 accommodation centers across the country. The National Taskforce Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control urged everyone to continue to regularly wash their hands with soap, and to wear a face mask when going outside their homes and in crowded places. People must also continue to practice social distancing. As of Wednesday, Laos has tested 111,757 suspected cases with 45 cases testing positive, and 42 patients have recovered. The other three infected cases are treated in a designated hospital in Lao capital Vientiane. Laos announced its first two COVID-19 confirmed cases on March 24 last year. Enditem The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will conduct simultaneous purchase and sale of government securities for an aggregate amount of Rs 15,000 crore each on March 4. The central bank will purchase and sell government securities through multiple price auction method. "On a review of current liquidity and financial conditions, the Reserve Bank has decided to conduct simultaneous purchase and sale of government securities under Open Market Operations (OMO) for an aggregate amount of Rs 15,000 crore each on March 04, 2021," the central bank said in a release. While RBI will purchase four government securities using the multiple price auction method, it will sell two government securities. Also read: RBI to conduct special OMO of Rs 10,000 crore on February 25 "The Reserve Bank will continue to monitor evolving liquidity and market conditions and take measures as appropriate to ensure orderly functioning of financial markets," it said. Earlier this month, the RBI had announced simultaneous purchase and sale of government securities under OMO aggregating Rs 10,000 crore each on February 25. RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das, in his address after the meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee on February 5, had said that the central bank will continue to maintain an "accommodative liquidity stance" to support growth in the economy battered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The RBI's market operations amid the pandemic have dispelled illiquidity fears and bolstered financial market sentiment, he said. On government's market borrowing, Das said, the central bank will ensure "orderly" completion of Rs 12 lakh crore borrowing programme in a non-disruptive manner. The government raises money from the market through bonds and treasury bills to fund its fiscal deficit. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her Budget speech, had pegged India's fiscal deficit at 6.8 per cent of GDP in financial year 2021-22, down from 9.5 per cent in 2020-21. Also read: RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das raises 'major concerns' about cryptocurrency Today, leading smart device company OPPO hosted a flash charging partner conference at Mobile World Congress, Shanghai (MWCS). The event took place on the OPPO stand, alongside a host of innovations in device charging, 5G connectivity and smart technology. Leading partners from sectors including consumer electronics and chip manufacturing, as well as experts in charging technology from CCTL (China Telecommunication Technology Labs), came together to discuss the future of flash charge technology. Meanwhile, numerous examples of cutting-edge charging products feature on OPPOs stand, including the 125W flash charger, which can charge a 4,000mAh phone battery to 100% in just 20 minutes. This is joined by 65W AirVOOC wireless flash charge productswhich charges the same battery in as little as 30 minutesand products from several partners who have licensed OPPOs proprietary technologies. Elsewhere at MWC Shanghai, Henry Tang, Vice President of OPPO Research Institute, was invited to speak about 5G innovation at the 5G Innovation and Investment Summit: At OPPO, we firmly believe that 5G will change how we all live. As coverage and capacity expand, well see new applications flourishing in numerous areas, bringing unexpected experiences to consumers. Were already involved in the development of a global 5G standard, and will continue to explore new 5G devices and deployments, from TV to CPE to AR. OPPOs MWCS stand features an array of innovative technologies across four zones, including the flash charge area. The Smart Home of the Future shows how OPPOs IoT products can make our homes smarter and more connected than ever before. The unique 5G CPE, Omni, powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X55 5G Modem-RF System sits at the heart of this area, capable of turning 5G signals into stable, high speed Wi-Fi connections through two proprietary antenna systems. The O-Reserve 5G antenna system uses the Sub-6GHz 5G spectrum, automatically choosing four of its eight antennae at a time to get the best possible signal. At the same time, the O-Motion 360 technology can fully rotate its antennae, automatically ensuring the CPE is positioned for optimum 5G millimeter wave signal reception. OPPO, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and Ericsson recently completed successful tests of 5G millimeter wave technology with the Omni, achieving downlink speeds of 4.06Gbps. Visitors to the OPPO booth can learn more about Omnis antenna systems and other 5G technologies. They can also experience Augmented Reality (AR) shopping and gaming in this area. The Futuristic Technologies area lets MWCS guests get up close to the OPPO X 2021 concept phone, which features a screen that unrolls from 6.7 to 7.4 inches. Here they can also see how fast and easy charging is with OPPOs new Wireless Air Charging technology, which can deliver up to 7.5W of charging power. This latest innovation uses magnetic resonance to remove some of the inconvenience of other wireless charging technologies, working as soon as devices are within 10cm of the charging mat. The Reno 5 Series is also on display in a smartphone area, including the Reno5 Pro+ 5G Artist Limited Edition. Designed in collaboration with graphic artist Joshua Vides, this beautiful device changes the color of its rear panel from silver to blue with a simple tap, thanks to its electrochromic glass. "If there's one thing that can get me to take off my mask, it's the data from the wastewater," one MU scientist said. Amanda Burke covers Pittsfield City Hall for The Berkshire Eagle. An Ithaca, New York native, she previously worked at The Herald News of Fall River and the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise. Find her on Twitter at @amandaburkec. Kansas City government, box store and social service collaboration offers a glimpse at urban core efforts to speed up distribution of the stalled pandemic cure. Check the presser shared a few moments ago . . . Mayor Quinton Lucas, Walmart, and the YMCA of Greater Kansas City have announced a COVID-19 vaccine partnership that will start this weekend and happened every week for the next six weeks. This should lead to more than 3,500 Kansas Citians in zip codes with the lowest life expectancy getting vaccinated, a release from the city said. Walmart will host the clinics at a Kansas City YMCA location, using a vaccine allotment provided directly to Walmart by the federal government. The vaccines do not pull from and will not change Kansas Citys weekly vaccine allotment from the state. Eligible Kansas Citians will be notified of this vaccination opportunity by the Kansas City Health Department, the release from the city continues. For safety and security reasons, the particular YMCA location will be disclosed only to those eligible to receive a vaccine through this partnership. Due to a very limited supply of COVID-19 vaccines, walk-ups will not be accepted. Kansas Citians interested in receiving a COVID-19 vaccine should complete the Citys online interest form in English or Spanish, or call 311. As my office and the City continue our work to ensure equitable vaccine distribution, I am proud this vaccine allotment through our partnership with Walmart will be getting to Kansas Citians who need vaccines the most, said Mayor Lucas. The Kansas City Health Department has identified and has begun notifying eligible Kansas Citians of this opportunity via email and phone call, to ensure those without regular access to internet who need a vaccine will not be skipped over. As we continue vaccine rollout, we will not leave anyone behind. I thank Walmart, the YMCA, and our COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force for their quick and diligent work, and I look forward to continued partnerships such as this moving forward. Check the links . . . KCTV5: KCMO partners with Walmart for multi-week vaccination event KMBC: Kansas City, Missouri, Walmart partner on targeted, multi-week COVID-19 vaccination event Developing . . . Subscribing to our services is a three step process. First you have to create an account and then you have to pick if you want to subscribe to digital and or print. Some people only want to be a digital subscriber to get access online and others want to also receive the print edition. If you are already a print subscriber and want online access, it is free, you simply have to create an online account and then attach your print subscription account number to the online account you create. Early studies show the coronavirus variant thats spreading widely across California is somewhat resistant to antibodies that fight off infection, but the vaccines still should offer plenty of protection, infectious disease experts say. Antibodies generated by the vaccines, or by previous coronavirus infection, were two to four times stronger against earlier versions of the virus compared to the new variant, scientists at UCSF found in laboratory studies. They released preliminary results this week. The finding is disappointing, but not cause for alarm, said scientists involved with the study as well as outside observers. The vaccines are extremely powerful, and even with a drop in antibody strength, they likely will be about as effective against the variant as they are against the original version of the virus they were designed to fight. If there is a reduction in effectiveness, the vaccines still should prevent almost all cases of severe illness and death, even from the new variant. In my opinion it will make no difference in terms of the efficacy of the vaccine, said Raul Andino, a UCSF virologist who led the variant antibody research. I would say there is nothing to be afraid of just now. The California variant is now dominant in much of the state; there are technically two variants, known as B.1.429 and B.1.427, but they are nearly identical and carry the same key mutations. Scientists generally are studying them as a singular variant. Two teams of UCSF scientists released study results this week showing for the first time that the variant appears to be more infectious than earlier coronavirus versions, and that it may also cause more serious illness and be resistant to antibodies. All of the results suggest this variant is worrisome and should be closely monitored. That its so widespread should remind people to stay vigilant about wearing masks and keeping social distance, even as the winter surge fades and the state reopens, experts warn. But the antibody research in particular is important to put in context, scientists say. The research itself is critical: If variants appear able to evade vaccines, public health officials want to know that right away. The vaccine manufacturers, too, need to know if they should update their formulas to better match new variants. The California variant along with one from South Africa could render the vaccines marginally less effective in subtle but important ways. As with so many aspects of this pandemic, scientists wont have all those answers until theyve done more research. Studies in South Africa have shown that vaccines work somewhat less well against a different variant there. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, for example which the Food and Drug Administration is considering for emergency authorization is about 64% effective in South Africa and 72% effective in the United States. Moderna updated its vaccine to better match the South Africa variant after studies found it was less effective; the new version is still under review. Similar studies havent been done yet for the California variant. For now the only sign that there may be trouble is antibody resistance in the lab, but that doesnt mean the vaccines wont work in real life. Antibodies are the immune systems most powerful response to disease-causing pathogens. They are specialized proteins let loose by the immune system to target and kill invaders. When someone is infected with a virus or other pathogen, the immune system learns from that experience and if it encounters the same virus again, it will quickly gather an army of antibodies. Vaccines similarly prime the immune system to release antibodies. The vaccines used in the United States trigger huge antibody responses that are about 95% effective at killing the coronavirus. To understand antibody effectiveness against the new variant, UCSF scientists did a common experiment called a neutralization assay. They collected antibodies from people who had been infected and others who had been vaccinated, and diluted those antibodies to varying degrees. They let samples of the California variant and a non-variant virus soak in the various antibody dilutions for half an hour. Then the antibody-soaked viruses were mixed with cells in petri dishes to test whether the viruses were still alive and infectious. Scientists focused on how much the antibodies could be diluted and still manage to kill, or neutralize, the virus. The UCSF team found that antibodies generated by the vaccines could be diluted twice as much against the original virus as they could against the California variant. Antibodies from people who were previously infected could be diluted four times as much. In other words, the antibodies were stronger against earlier versions of the virus compared to the new variant. Similar studies from South Africa found antibodies to be six to 10 times stronger against the original form of the virus compared to the variant there. The California variant should cause concern, but certainly not like South Africa, said Dr. Jay Levy, an infectious disease expert at UCSF who said he found the results released this week reassuring. The vaccines will work, unless it mutates to become worse. Youre still neutralizing the virus. There are several caveats to these early results, the most important of which is these are laboratory experiments that analyze interactions between the virus and antibodies in a highly controlled setting. In real life, the body mounts a complex immune response to the virus. That may be further helped or hindered by environmental factors that cant be replicated in a lab. Vaccine effectiveness is nuanced too. The vaccines in use in the United States are nearly 100% effective at preventing hospitalization and death from COVID-19, but its unclear how well they protect against asymptomatic disease. Vaccinated people may still be carriers of the virus. Its also not yet known how long vaccine protection lasts. The key takeaway remains: Everyone should get vaccinated when their turn comes, said Bali Pulendran, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford. If you asked me, would you take the vaccine in the hope that it might offer some protection against variants? he said. My answer would be a resounding yes. Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @erinallday Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. COLUMBIA With an increase in online shopping amid a historic pandemic, more packages are being swiped even in broad daylight with cameras around from driveways, stoops and curbs by thieves. But several South Carolina lawmakers are looking to punish those crooks, hoping the state becomes the latest to enact porch piracy legislation that would make the act subject to stiffer prison time. People need to know that this type of conduct is not going to be tolerated, and as our economy continues to develop where were doing less and less brick-and-mortar shopping, that type of activity needs to be protected, state Rep. Cezar McKnight, D-Kingstree, told a House Judiciary subcommittee on Feb. 24. This is not just an issue around Christmas time. This happens far more than you would believe. Hes lead sponsor of the Defense Against Porch Pirates Act, which would create a new felony penalty for people convicted of such thefts. Initially seeking a mandatory minimum of five years in prison and fines of $5,000, McKnight said he was willing to amend the proposal, giving judges and prosecutors more flexibility in determining how a person should be punished. When we pass laws, there are going to be instances beyond our wildest imagination and we are elected solicitors to make those decisions, state Rep. Seth Rose, D-Columbia, said. Lawmakers adjourned debate on the issue to work out details of that language, but indicated early support for crafting some of kind statute that would protect victims of package theft. Union resident George Cleveland agreed that changes were needed. Typically, folks who go on peoples porches and steal packages are hooked on some kind of drug, he told lawmakers. "I'm not talking waive the punishment, I'm not talking away the restitution, but I think we need to have some kind of rehabilitative mechanism, as well. Under current law, package theft falls under the broader crime of petit larceny the same charge for shoplifting or writing a bad check as long as the goods stolen are worth less than $2,000. The maximum penalty for the misdemeanor is 30 days in prison and a $1,000 fine. Officials say package theft will become an even greater problem as consumer habits change in the age of coronavirus. Internet shopping rates are spiking, which means larger inventories. People living in rural areas that are far from major retailers are also susceptible given their isolated location. Between March and mid-April, e-commerce spending leapt by 30 percent compared to the same rate in 2019 as retail sales dipped by almost 9 percent, according to Rakuten Intelligence. McKnight said many people also get medications delivered to their homes, such as his father did. I believe the sanctity of someones home is sacred, and that extends to its peripherals. The front porch, the back porch, McKnight said. Palmetto State residents arent as afflicted by the problem as others, a recent analysis by Arkansas-based U.S. Packaging and Wrapping found. South Carolina ranked 49th nationally in package thefts per 100,000 people at a rate of 1.84 in 2019, the company found. And a survey by market insights firm C+R Research found that of 2,000 people nationwide, more than a third reported having a package stolen at least once within the last year, with an average replacement cost of $109. State Rep. Jeff Johnson, R-Conway and subcommittee chairman, said he was optimistic McKnights measure would advance once amendments are added. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 19:37:09|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close NAIROBI, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on Tuesday evening reiterated his government's commitment to advancing Africa's agenda at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), particularly on climate change and security on the continent. "Listen to us Africans when we tell you that the link is clear, its impact tangible, and the need for solutions urgent," Kenyatta said during a virtual UNSC open debate on the nexus between climate and security. He warned that the UNSC's mandate of maintaining global peace and security will become harder in the coming years if the threat of climate change is not addressed adequately. In a statement issued after the meeting, Kenyatta rallied the UNSC to support more mitigation and adaptation measures in Africa, saying the effects of climate change are having adverse socioeconomic impacts on the continent. "As a start, we can recognize that persistent droughts, constant sea level rises, and increasingly frequent extreme weather patterns are reversing economic growth and development gains achieved over decades," he said. "The result is increased fragility to instability and armed conflict that then come to the attention of this Security Council," the president added. Noting that Africa will suffer the worst consequences of climate change, he told the UNSC to make the continent a top priority in its climate and security strategies. "Rather than wait for a future tipping point, we must redouble the efforts to direct all the resources and multilateral frameworks of our rules-based international order to mitigate the effects of climate change," he said. Meanwhile, Kenyatta has identified climate, biodiversity and nature, as well as pollution and waste management as the three planetary crises that threaten the world's future. Enditem Gov. Gavin Newsom signs Immediate Action Budget bills View Photo Sacramento, CA A new California stimulus relief package, movement into less restrictive tiers and a push to reopen schools. A $7.6 billion coronavirus relief package was signed on Tuesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, one day after it passed the state Legislature by a wide margin. The new laws will give at least $600 one-time payments to 5.7 million people while also setting aside more than $2 billion in grants for struggling small businesses. The package will give up to $25,000 grants to small businesses with revenues between $1,000 and $2.5 million. As millions of Californians are struggling to make ends meet amid the devastating impacts of this pandemic, we are taking immediate action in partnership with our legislative leadership to provide families and businesses the relief they need, said Governor Newsom. This critical assistance including childcare, relief for small business owners, direct cash support to individuals and households, financial aid for community college students and more will help keep our communities afloat as the state continues to confront the immense challenges of this moment. State lawmakers are targeting the money to reach the pockets of people who were left out of previous federal stimulus checks, including immigrants. Those eligible for the money should receive the funds between 45 days and 60 days after getting their state tax refunds, according to the Franchise Tax Board. Most people eligible will get the $600 payments by claiming the California earned income tax credit on their state tax returns. This generally covers people who earn $30,000 a year or less. How is the state paying for the stimulus, with nearly 40 million residents it has lots of wealthy people less impacted by the pandemic and who continue to pay taxes. That has resulted in an estimated $15 billion one-time surplus to spend this year, a number that could grow even higher later this year once more people file their tax returns. Additionally, Newsom continues to insist that classrooms will reopen very, very shortly. For weeks, the governor has been working with lawmakers on a deal to reopen schools to salvage what is left of this academic year. At a news conference yesterday, he stated a deal is being negotiated, which he hopes to announce soon. Newsom would not say whether he would consider forcing schools to reopen or use his emergency powers to suspend local bargaining if teachers refuse to go back to school without being vaccinated first. And after months with little change, also on Tuesday five of Californias 58 counties have advanced to a lower tier with fewer business restrictions. The change allows restaurants to reopen for limited indoor dining, while fitness centers, movie theaters, and museums are among those that can reopen indoors with safeguards. The five include Marin and San Mateo counties in the Bay Area, and more rural counties Humboldt, Shasta and Yolo. Newsom says another eight counties are likely to move to new tiers next week. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) Two policemen were killed during a shootout between members of the Quezon City Police District and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency near a mall in Quezon City on Wednesday. The shootout followed a drug bust near the Ever Gotesco Mall along Commonwealth Avenue. National Capital Region Police Office chief Brigadier General Vic Danao said two QCPD officers were killed and one was badly wounded. He added that three PDEA agents were also hospitalized. Danao also said no civilians were harmed during the incident. The NCRPO chief described the shootout as a "misencounter," adding this is not the first time such an "unfortunate" incident has happened. The Philippine National Police and PDEA will create a joint body to investigate the shootout. "PNP Chief, Police General Debold Sinas, appointed the CIDG as the lead investigating body while the RD, NCRPO has been designated to speak on any updates from the PNP in order to keep the public updated with accurate and relevant information," the PNP said in a statement. "The PNP and PDEA both agree and assure the public that the incident, while serious, will in no way affect the continuing operational relationship and coordination they have long firmed up in the fight against illegal drugs," it added. Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra has ordered the National Bureau of Investigation to conduct a parallel investigation into the alleged "misencounter" between the police and PDEA agents. This will be separate from the joint PNP-PDEA investigation body announced by Sinas. The mall management said it immediately secured all access points to the building to ensure the safety of shoppers. "The management is closely coordinating with the PNP (Philippine National Police)," Ever Gotesco said in a Facebook post. Meanwhile, Quezon City Mayor Joy Belmonte asked residents to avoid posting online any unverified information regarding the incident. New Ford Explorer King Ranch Edition 2021 Ford Explorer King Ranch edition introduces a rugged, premium appearance and brings the King Ranch name to Americas all-time best-selling SUV line Explorer King Ranch features a refined interior with rich Mesa Del Rio leather, real wood appliques and meticulous attention to detail Explorer King Ranch is the latest addition to the Explorer lineup and celebrates 20 years of Fords collaboration with the legendary south Texas cattle ranch DEARBORN, Mich., Feb. 24, 2021 Ford Explorer, Americas all-time best-selling SUV1, adds the first-ever King Ranch edition to its stable, giving midsize SUV customers an all-new rugged, premium appearance with the uncompromising quality, craftsmanship and authenticity of the iconic Texas ranch. In 1853, Captain Richard King bootstrapped the King Ranch in the harsh landscape of southern Texas until it became a shining example of agricultural and livestock innovation and success, said Lee Newcombe, Ford Explorer marketing manager. Ford Explorer families can now enjoy a piece of the King Ranchs renowned craftsmanship and the multigeneration legacy that still thrives 168 years after its founding. Customer feedback and market insights have demanded a more refined interior for Explorer. Explorer King Ranch will now deliver with premium touches and mahogany-colored Mesa Del Rio leather seats with perforated front and second rows with the legendary King Ranch Running W logo. The center console is crafted with a Mesa Del Rio leather armrest and King Ranch logo insert. The refinement continues in the cockpit with leather door trim rollovers, a leather-wrapped and stitched instrument panel combined with Sapele wood appliques as well as a leather-wrapped steering wheel with Norias stitching and a Sapele wood insert. Introducing King Ranchs specialty leather, genuine wood, crafted details and signature colors to Ford Explorer elevates the SUVs brand, said Janet Seymour, Ford color and materials manager. The warm, earthy Norias colorway, natural open pore wood appliques and rope perforation design on the seats are just a couple ways we were able to bring the King Ranch lifestyle to a whole new group of customers. Complementing the refined interior is an available Premium Technology Package featuring multi-contour seats with active motion massaging functionality, a 10.1-inch center stack portrait touch screen with swipe and pinch-to-zoom capability as well as a 14-speaker B&O Sound System by Bang & Olufsen specially tuned to Explorers interior. Outside, Explorer King Ranch comes decked out with a unique Stone Gray-painted mesh grille insert, 20-inch aluminum wheels with Running W center cap, liftgate scuff plate and quad chrome exhaust tips. Capping it all off is signature King Ranch badging. The standard 3.0-liter EcoBoost under the hood produces 365 horsepower and 380 lb.-ft. of torque with four-wheel-drive and rear-wheel-drive configurations offered, combined with a 10-speed automatic transmission with SelectShift capability. A standard Class III Trailer Tow Package enables towing capability of up to 5,600 pounds. In addition to Ford Co-Pilot360 technology2 standard on all Explorer models, Explorer King Ranch comes standard with Ford Co-Pilot360 Assist+, featuring Adaptive Cruise Control with Stop-and-Go and Lane Centering, Evasive Steering Assist, a voice-activated touch screen navigation system with pinch-to-zoom capability, SiriusXM Traffic and Travel Link and Speed Sign Recognition. Improving Americas all-time best-selling SUV Ford has engaged with owners to constantly innovate Explorer and move Americas all-time best-selling SUV forward. For 2021, the company is responding to customer demands with not only the King Ranch edition but the introduction of the available XLT Sport Appearance Package, new interior trim finishes and new exterior colors, with numerous enhancements to the interior including brighter paints, elevated finishes and higher-quality materials for a brightened, more premium ambience. Two decades of rugged luxury The introduction of Explorer King Ranch marks 20 years of Fords relationship with the iconic Texas cattle ranch, beginning with the 2001 F-150 King Ranch, when Ford and King Ranch teamed up to build a more upscale western-themed truck. The 2001 F-150 King Ranch was based on the newly introduced F-150 SuperCrew. It featured a leather-covered front console with the King Ranch brand, and front and rear King Ranch leather captains chairs, as well as F-150 King Ranch branding throughout the interior and exterior. Since then, five generations of Ford F-150, four generations of Ford F-Series Super Duty and three generations of Ford Expedition have worn the King Ranch badge. Today, workers at the Texas ranch use a fleet of more than 300 Ford trucks to get the job done every day. The Explorer King Ranch edition will start at $52,350 MSRP for rear-wheel-drive configuration and $54,350 MSRP for four-wheel drive. It will be available in dealerships this spring. # # # 1Based on IHS Markit, 1946-Current US Total New Cumulative Registrations, for all vehicles identified as SUVs. 2Driver-assist features are supplemental and do not replace the drivers attention, judgment and need to control the vehicle. It does not replace safe driving. See Owners Manual for details and limitations. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. People travelling in flights, trains and buses from these states will have to produce negative test report before entering Delhi, they said The requirement of the negative COVID-19 test report is likely to be implemented from Friday night, officials said. (PTI file photo) New Delhi: Amid a spike in coronavirus infections in some states, the Delhi government is likely to ask travellers from five states, including Maharashtra, Kerala and Punjab, to show negative COVID-19 test report before entering the national capital, officials said on Wednesday. They said an official order will be issued later in the day and it will be effective till March 15. People travelling in flights, trains and buses from these states will have to produce negative test report before entering Delhi, they said. The requirement of the negative COVID-19 test report is likely to be implemented from Friday night, officials said. The issue had also been discussed in a meeting of the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) on Monday. Maharashtra is showing a daily surge in COVID-19 cases, according to an official of the Union Health Ministry. Kerala is showing an incremental decline, but the daily cases in absolute numbers is still high over there. Punjab, with its daily increase in cases, is also a cause of worry. Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh are also showing an increase in daily cases, the central official had said on Tuesday. Delhi recorded 145 fresh COVID-19 cases and two new fatalities on Tuesday, while the positivity rate stood at 0.25 per cent, authorities said. With this, the toll from the coronavirus infection has gone up to 10,903 and the case tally rose to 6,38,173. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. ADVERTISEMENT The anti-graft agency, ICPC, has tasked Akwa Ibom residents to take more interest in monitoring constituency projects sited in their communities. The ICPC Commissioner in Akwa Ibom, Shola Shodipo, said this in Uyo on Wednesday at a capacity-building workshop. The workshop with the theme Say No Campaign, to Deepen Local Oversight and Budget Tracking at the Grassroots Level was sponsored by MacArthur Foundation. Mr Shodipo told the participants that until they took ownership of constituency projects located in their communities, it would be difficult to monitor such projects. He said politicians were not philanthropists, as many of them borrowed a lot of money to fund their elections and would like to recoup while in office, hence the need to track constituency projects. He said projects belonged to the citizens, and, therefore, are not gifts or donations by political representatives. The aim is to spread development to all nooks and crannies of the country through the intervention of the peoples representatives in the legislature who expectedly should be in tune with their areas of need. Help yourselves to ensure that projects delivered are durable and of the right quality. Take ownership of constituency projects by showing interest in the selection, execution and use. You should, therefore, work with them to make sure projects reflect your needs, he said. Mr Shodipo said the ICPC campaign tagged My Constituency, My Projects initiatives launched in 2019 was to remediate observed lapses in the execution of constituency projects. Ezenwa Nwagwu, facilitator of the programme, urged the citizens to get involved in project monitoring as doing so would ensure accountability. One of the participants, Joy Okoye, urged government agencies to make proposed projects public for easy monitoring. (NAN) We couldnt find anything at this address. Please check the URL or go to the homepage Lawrence Paul Anderson (pictured) allegedly confessed to killing his neighbor, cutting out her heart and feeding it to his family before murdering his uncle and a four-year-old girl A repeat felon has confessed to killing his neighbor, cutting out her heart and feeding it to his family before murdering his uncle and a four-year-old girl, Oklahoma authorities say. Lawrence Paul Anderson, 42, allegedly stabbed the neighbor, Andrea Lynn Blankenship, to death at her home in Chickasha on February 9. He then went back to his house and stabbed three people - his uncle, aunt and their granddaughter - the same day, according to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. Police were called to the home and found the uncle, 67-year-old Leon Pye, and the child, Kaeos Yates, injured. She was pronounced dead in an ambulance en route to the hospital. The aunt, Delsie Pye, was also stabbed in both eyes but survived. In an interview with investigators Anderson revealed the gruesome final meal he fed his family after murdering Blankenship. 'He cooked the heart with potatoes to feed to his family to release the demons,' an OSBI agent wrote in a court filing. Oklahoma authorities said Anderson stabbed the neighbor, Andrea Lynn Blankenship (pictured), to death at her home in Chickasha on February 9 He then went back to his house and stabbed three people - his uncle, aunt and their four-year-old granddaughter - the same day, according to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. The uncle, 67-year-old Leon Pye (left), dead and the child, Kaeos Yates (right) were killed The aunt, Delsie Pye (right), was also stabbed in both eyes but survived Anderson had been staying at his aunt and uncle's home in Chicksha (pictured) after he was released from prison last month The triple murder sparked outraged after it emerged that Anderson had been released from prison early in January, the Oklahoman reported. He was sentenced to serve 20 years behind bars for gun and drug offenses in 2017 before Governor Kevin Stitt commuted the sentence to nine years at the recommendation of the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board. He was released on parole last month and had been staying with his aunt and uncle. Grady County District Attorney Jason Hicks charged Anderson with three counts of first-degree murder and two felony charges of assault and battery with a deadly weapon and maiming on Tuesday. Anderson sobbed in court during his initial appearance Tuesday, telling the judge: 'I don't want no bail, your honor. I don't want no bail.' He is being held without bond and Hicks said the death penalty 'is on the table'. Investigators said Anderson confessed to cutting out Blankenship's heart and cooking it for his family to eat to 'release the demons' Officers with the Chickasha Police Department discovered the two murders in the Pyes home at 214 W Minnesota Ave on February 9 after Delsie called 911. Anderson was arrested at the home after officers 'observed [him] throwing up in the living room into some pillows,' the OBSI agent wrote in a request for a search warrant. Blankenship's murder wasn't discovered until two days later after investigators interviewed him at a hospital where he was being treated for undisclosed injuries. 'He confessed to going to 227 West Minnesota Avenue, Chickasha,' the agent wrote, referring to Blankenship's home. 'He used his shoulder to knock in the back door. There were two German Shepherd dogs in the house. Anderson advised he killed the female resident and cut her heart out.' Blankenship, 41, was identified as the victim on Friday. A GoFundMe campaign to cover her funeral costs has raised over $4,000 as of Wednesday. In the search warrant request, the agent said investigators wanted to collect 'pots, pans and any utensils for cooking' as evidence from the Pye home. Investigators are working to determine whether Anderson was under the influence of drugs at the time of the stabbings, the Oklahoman reported. Anderson's attorney, Al Hoch, indicated that he will seek a mental evaluation to determine whether his client is competent to stand trial. Kaeos' parents, Tasha Yates and Taranzo Pye, shared their heartbreak at their daughter's death in an interview with KFOR on February 11. 'Tell your kids you love them, do everything with them that you possibly can,' Taranzo said. 'Because you never know when they might be taken away from you.' He said of Anderson: 'He ruined everything. He ruined my whole life.' The girl's mother, Yates, said: 'For me right now, it's just like random bursts of sorrow, complete sadness that overtakes you. My little soul is broken, my baby.' Four-year-old Kaeos (pictured) died en route to the hospital with stab wounds Kaeos' parents, Tasha Yates and Taranzo Pye, shared their heartbreak at their daughter's death in an interview with KFOR on February 11 (pictured) Anderson has spent much of the past 15 years in prison, state records show. In 2006 he was sentenced to four years for attacking his girlfriend and pointing a gun at her and for possessing crack cocaine with intent to distribute. He was released after serving less than two years in prison in that case. Anderson landed back in lockup in 2012 when he was sentenced to 15 years for selling crack cocaine near a Chickasha elementary school. He was released after five years and four months in 2017 with 20 years probation. Less than five months after that release, Anderson was arrested for confronting a woman with a handgun in a church parking lot. Police later found a vial of PCP in his underwear. A judge revoked his probation in full and sentenced him to 20 years in prison for new drug and gun crimes in December 2017. At the time of that sentencing, Anderson reportedly told the judge he was taking bipolar medication. He served just over three years before being released last month when the governor commuted his sentence. We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form A reopening proposal in a South Bay school district that would provide just one hour of on-campus instruction per week has sparked outrage among parents, who are staging a rally Friday calling for more in-person learning. The two high schools serving 3,500 students in the Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District have been shut since the pandemic began in March. A group of parents have been pushing since late summer to begin reopening schools. In late January, Superintendent Michael Grove sent an email to the community introducing the proposal in which all students could return to campus for a portion of the day in morning and afternoon cohorts. In the following weeks, further details were discussed by the school board and shared. But parents said they were shocked when the district this week announced the agreement it had reached with its teachers union. The school reopening controversy was just the latest in the Bay Area. The slow pace in the San Francisco Unified district has prompted a lawsuit by the city attorney and helped fuel an effort to recall three board members. In the Oakley district in the East Bay, the entire school board resigned after members were caught on camera disparaging parents who wanted to reopen schools. Research has confirmed that school closures have caused learning loss and damaging mental health effects for teenagers, putting more pressure on school districts to reopen. However, battles have erupted over many elements of such plans, including vaccinations, logistics and timing. Under the plan for Los Gatos and Saratoga high schools, one cohort of students would come in from 9 to 10 a.m. on Wednesdays, and the other would come in from 1 to 2 p.m. the same day. The plan would allow students and staff to safely return to campus and have time to learn safety protocols and transition to hybrid learning, Grove said an email Tuesday to The Chronicle. But Suzanne Nestor, a leader of a parent coalition pushing for reopening whose daughter is a ninth-grader at Los Gatos High School, called the plan absurd and a total joke. Its a slap in the face to parents desperate to have kids on campus for months now, Nestor said. They keep saying they want to give kids a chance to get back on campus, but one hour a week is useless. What kids need is regular social interaction with their peers. You would spend as much time getting to and from campus than you would spend being there. Rob Gabel, a parent with a sophomore and senior at Los Gatos High, said he thinks the plan makes no sense. The only reason I can think of is it runs out the clock on the school year, he said. If you do the math, by June its over. Combined with no written plan for (the next phase), its a little frustrating as a parent. I dont want to put anyone at risk, but I dont want to be the last school in the state to reopen. Mike Roberts, a parents coalition founder whose child is a freshman at Los Gatos High, said the plan is a waste of time. There is still no plan as to what the students will be doing on campus for this one hour a week, he said. Its outrageous. During the Feb. 9 board meeting, Kristofer Orre, a teacher on special assignment for the district, said the hour-long periods would allow teachers to do social and emotional community building activities, re-teach topics that are harder to address virtually, and run hands-on activities with safety protocols. This plan would be implemented only after either Santa Clara County moves to the states red reopening tier and all staff have the opportunity to be vaccinated at the recommended doses, or the county moves into the orange tier, in which case staff vaccinations would not be a condition. The district would provide at least two weeks notice to prepare for returning to campus. Grove said the district anticipates being in under the plan, known as Phase 3A, for a short time estimated at three weeks so staff and students can practice being back in person before transitioning into Phase 3B, a full hybrid model where students would return to campus two days a week. He said ideally, Phase 3B would be implemented shortly after spring break, which runs April 5-9. The K-8 Los Gatos Union School District has allowed K-6 students to return to campus in phases, with the youngest and some sixth-grade students being allowed to go back Feb. 1, and older students returning on Feb. 8. K-5 students in the Saratoga Union Elementary School District are in hybrid learning, and sixth-grade students are scheduled to return to campus starting March 4. The states school reopening map shows most Bay Area public high schools still in distance learning. Grove said the high school plan was developed with input from district and site staff, board of trustees, and an advisory committee including staff, students, parents and representatives from employee associations. Our staff continue to have serious concerns about their own safety, as well as the safety of their families, said Carrie Bosco, associate superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the district, during the school boards Feb. 9 meeting. Waiting until vaccinations are in place or until we are in the orange tier mitigates those risks. Grove said educators will be eligible for vaccines starting on Feb. 28, so he is hopeful those who want can get vaccinated by the end of March or early April. The academic year for both schools ends June 3. Santa Clara County was still in the purple tier after this weeks latest assignments. Amy Obenour, president of the Los Gatos Saratoga High School District Teachers Association, said in a statement Tuesday: No one wants to be back in classrooms with students more than educators, who know there is no equal substitute for regular in-person learning. Phase 3A is the first step to safely bring students back to campus. Our team is working collaboratively with the district to ensure when we bring more students back, we need to do it in a manner that ensures the health and safety of all students and staff. School board members did not respond to a request for comment. Cynthia Zhang, a senior at Saratoga High School who is the student body president, said during the board meeting that she liked the 3A plan. I like how slow it is, she said. Not only for the anxiety around the health and safety, but also because as a student, frankly, I think stamina for going to school and building up that endurance is something that isnt really talked about, but I think it is really important in easing back into that. Nestor said her daughter used to love going to school, but its now hard for her to get motivated to learn remotely. She said her daughter laughed out loud at the proposal. But Nestor plans to send her daughter to school if the 3A plan is implemented because, she said, it is still an opportunity to do something. The parents coalition is hosting its socially distanced rally to reopen schools Friday at Los Gatos High School at 4:30 p.m. Kellie Hwang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kellie.hwang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KellieHwang Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 A top Sri Lankan minister has made a fervent appeal to the member states of the UNHRC to reject the impending resolution on the island nation's human rights accountability and reconciliation, terming it a "pure political move" against the country. Addressing a Council (UNHRC) session virtually on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunawardena urged that the resolution be rejected by the council and brought to a closure. The minister described the impending resolution as unsubstantiated and a pure political move against Gunawardena's remarks followed the country's rejection of the UN rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet's report which had called for drastic measures such as targeted sanctions and criminal court procedure against those allegedly responsible for rights violations during the last phase of the armed conflict with the LTTE in 2009. A draft of the resolution is expected to be tabled at the UNHRC sessions on Wednesday, officials here said. The officials said they believe that the nature of the resolution would be identical to the 30/1 resolution passed in 2015 which the then government had co-sponsored. The current government elected in November 2019 withdrew from co-sponsorship of the resolution last year. The draft resolution is expected to include moves by the Office of the High Commissioner to enhance its monitoring and reporting on the human rights situation in Sri Lanka, including progress on reconciliation and accountability. It is also expected to present a written update to the Human Rights Council at its 49th session, and a comprehensive report including further options for advancing accountability at its 51st session, both to be discussed in interactive dialogues. The current government's election mandate given by the people of was meant to withdraw from the previous resolution while remaining engaged with UN mechanisms. Sri Lanka has reportedly lobbied some 18 member states for the appeal for rejection. Early this week, Foreign Ministry Secretary Jayanath Colombage said a special written request had been forwarded to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking India's support on behalf of Sri Lanka to defeat the resolution. His comments came after the UNHRC Core Group on Sri Lanka, in a joint statement, said a resolution would be moved next week to focus on Sri Lanka's rights accountability. The Sri Lanka Core Group consists of the UK, Germany, Canada, Malawi, North Macedonia and Montenegro. The previous Sri Lankan government, headed by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, had co-sponsored the resolution in 2013, calling for accountability in alleged war crimes committed by the government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during the final phase of the near-three-decade-long civil war in May 2009. The current government, led by Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, has officially withdrawn from the resolution. (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.) Ominique Garner, a grassroots cannabis activist in Massachusetts, is urging cannabis businesses across the state to sign an equity pledge, committing to using their resources to fight for an industry that supports people and communities harmed by the war on drugs. Companies who are willing to commit to a simple set of statements, such as protecting local and statewide social equity priority periods for cannabis licenses, avoiding predatory lending practices, and pledging not to engage in anti competitive cabals aimed at destroying all delivery operator licensees, will make it clear to the wider community that, when the chips are down, a fair and equitable market come before their own corporate profits, said Garner, of A.V. Rose Farms, one of the oldest Black-owned family farms in Southeastern Massachusetts. Garner said that as of Friday, more than 50 companies have signed on to the pledge so far, including cannabis retailers and cannabis business applicants, as well as ancillary businesses. There hasnt been transparency throughout the industry and equity hasnt been shown in these businesses, Garner said. In Massachusetts, the Cannabis Control Commission, which regulates the medical and recreational industries, has two equity programs: economic empowerment and social equity. The economic empowerment program was created to offer a prioritized review and licensing for applicants in communities disproportionately impacted by high rates of incarceration and arrest for marijuana offenses. The social equity program offers training and technical assistance for communities impacted by the war on drugs. Even with those programs, the cannabis industry in Massachusetts is largely white. A lack of financing is among the reasons more equity businesses are not yet open. But, the start of cannabis delivery in Massachusetts should help give more equity companies a seat at the table. There are two new license types for delivery, one that allows businesses to act as a courier and another that allows businesses to purchase and warehouse products and then deliver and sell. Both those license types are limited to equity applicants for the first three years. Garner said she believes predatory deals are among the top reasons that economic empowerment and social equity businesses havent opened yet. Even when the CCC makes a window more available and more accessible to us, like the wholesale delivery operator license, we were happy about that but still our community, were locked out because of big businesses praying on us, Garner said. The pledge indicates that some equity delivery companies have reported that some retailers or cultivators have openly suggested they would refuse to do business with equity delivery operators. Garner said theres concern that after the three-year exclusivity period, larger operators will drop the equity partners they used for delivery. If we change laws and when we make regulations to make them more equity, to make it easier, we have to make sure were specific about it so were not broadening disparities, Garner said. Devin Alexander, who is trying to open a delivery business called Rolling Releaf, is among the people who have signed the pledge thus far. Just for transparency, just to promote equity, Alexander said. The more people who take the equity pledge, well have something to stand by. Thats really what it comes down to. I support all equitable practices across the state. Among the commitments of the pledge are to not support any public policy that opposes or undermines equity priority periods on a municipal, state or national level; to express support for local and statewide equity priority periods; to recognize that waiving license fees for equity applicants is not a substitute for equity priority periods; and to affirm that equity priority periods are not racially discriminatory against non-equity owned companies. Garner said she starting thinking about the pledge long before the Commonwealth Dispensary Association filed a lawsuit last month, centered around the wholesale delivery license. The CDA had argued that the license type violated the CCCs own regulations but later dropped the suit, citing the best interest of the industry and our members, as several dispensaries pulled memberships and consumers discussed a boycott. This is a commitment to your community. This is a commitment that you already had and you should have had from the very jump when you decided to be in this industry. This industry was built on the backs of people that still to this day are getting locked up for this plant, Garner said. The pledge also notes a lawsuit from medical dispensary Revolutionary Clinics against the city of Cambridge. The suit, centered around an ordinance that benefits equity applicants, was also dropped last month. A.V. Rose Farms, which is located in Rochester, is not a cannabis business but signed on to the pledge anyway. Garner said she wanted to start the pledge before she gets her own cannabis company started. Theres no end date to the pledge, Garner said, and businesses will be asked to sign as they open. Related Content: Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Dmytro Razumkov speaks for amending the law on sanctions. "We need [...] to amend the law on sanctions so that no one has any discrepancies and that the NSDC has such powers in full. Then it would be an effective mechanism," Razumkov told Interfax-Ukraine. The chairman of the Verkhovna Rada confirmed that at the NSDC recent meeting he voted "for" the decision to impose sanctions against a number of legal entities and individuals, but expressed a separate opinion on this issue. "Yes, indeed, it was so. Why? The reason is that this decision concerned both citizens of Ukraine and citizens of the Russian Federation. And you know about my first vote [Razumkov abstained in the vote for the introduction of sanctions against three television channel]. This concerns the legal position. Whether we like it or not, it should be legal, regardless of where the decision is made, in the Verkhovna Rada, at the NSDC meetings or in any other department," the spokesperson of parliament said. According to Razumkov, that is why he outlined his position: if you follow the path of sanctions, then in parallel you must go through the courts, or amend the law on sanctions. He drew attention to the existence of an opinion that it is possible to apply sanctions to Ukrainian citizens on an equal basis with foreign ones associated with terrorist activities. "However, if we raise with you the transcript of the meeting of the Verkhovna Rada, when the law on sanctions was considered (August 2014), then the wording clearly sounds that the citizens of Ukraine are not subject to sanctions," the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada said. PRESS RELEASE SOCIETA EDITORIALE IL FATTO S.P.A. THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS CONVENES THE SHAREHOLDERS' MEETING TO APPROVE THE AMENDMENTS TO THE BYLAWS AND THE PROPOSAL TO AUTHORISE THE PURCHASE AND DISPOSAL OF TREASURY SHARES Rome, 24 February 2021 - Societa Editoriale il Fatto S.p.A. ("Societa" o "SEIF"), media content provider and publisher of several editorial and multimedial products, company whose shares are traded both on AIM Italia, a multilateral trading system organized and managed by Borsa Italiana S.p.A. and on Euronext Growth Paris, hereby announces that the Company's Board of Directors met today to convene the shareholders' meeting to approve the amendments to the company's bylaws and the proposal to authorise the purchase and disposal of treasury shares. The shareholders' meeting will be held on 15 March at 11:30. The notice of call of the shareholders' meeting will be published within the terms of the law. Notice of call of the Extraordinary Shareholders' Meeting to approve the amendments to the Bylaws, aimed at adapting them to the new provisions of the AIM Italia Issuers' Regulations and to the most recent emergency regulations The Company's Board of Directors has resolved to propose to the Extraordinary Shareholders' Meeting the amendment of Art. 5 (Share Capital and Shares), 9 (Identification of Shareholders or Bondholders), 13 (Takeover Bid and Neutralisation Rule), 14 (Shareholders' Meeting Competencies), 15 (Notice of Call), 18 (Intervention by Telecommunication Means), 19 (Representation at the Shareholders' Meeting), 21 (Shareholders' Meeting Quorum), 24 (Requirements of Professionalism, Integrity and Independence of Directors), 25 (Appointment and Replacement of Directors), 26 (Board Meetings), 33 (Board of Statutory Auditors), 34 (Appointment and Replacement of Statutory Auditors). The amendments are aimed at adapting the Bylaws to some recent regulatory changes, also in the light of new practices that have developed in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to implement some recent provisions introduced by Borsa Italiana S.p.A. in the AIM Italia Issuers' Regulations with notice no. 17857 of 6 July 2020, which the Company is required to implement. Notice of call of Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting to approve the proposal to authorise the purchase and disposal of treasury shares The Board of Directors also resolved to present to the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting the proposal for authorisation to purchase and dispose of treasury shares, aimed at enabling the liquidity provider activities related to the admission to trading of the Company's shares on Euronext Growth, managed by Euronext Paris S.A.. It should be noted that the previous authorisation resolved by the Shareholders' Meeting on 12 July 2019, with an 18-month period of validity as regards the acts of purchasing of treasury shares, has expired last 12 January 2021. The authorisation is requested in order to grant the Board of Directors the right to carry out the purchase, in one or more tranches, to an extent freely determinable by the Board, up to a maximum number of shares not exceeding 3% of the share capital. The Board of Directors proposes that the purchase price of treasury shares be identified from time to time by the appointed intermediary, in compliance with the regulatory requirements of Regulation (EU) No. 596 of 16 April 2014 on market abuse, Delegated Regulation (EU) No. 1052 of 8 March 2016 or accepted market practices in force from time to time including the regulations promulgated by the Autorite des marches financiers or ESMA. With regard to the sale of treasury shares, this will be carried out at the price or, in any case, according to criteria and conditions determined by the Board of Directors or the intermediary appointed within the framework of the liquidity contract. Such transactions shall be carried out taking into account the methods used, the trend of share prices during the period preceding the transaction and the best interests of the Company. The authorisation to purchase treasury shares is requested for a period of 18 months, i.e. the maximum period allowed under Article 2357, paragraph 2, of the Italian Civil Code, starting from the date of the shareholders' resolution approving the proposal. Differently, the authorisation to dispose of any treasury shares purchased and/or already owned by the Company is requested without time limits. Please note that the Company currently holds 2.415.728 treasury shares in its portfolio. This press release is available on the Company's website www.seif-spa.it in the "Press Releases" section of the Investor Relations area. *** SOCIETA? EDITORIALE IL FATTO S.P.A. (SEIF) is an independent media company, founded in Rome in 2009 and led by Cinzia Monteverdi, Chairman and CEO. The company publishes several editorial and multimedia products, including Il Fatto Quotidiano, founded by Antonio Padellaro and directed by Marco Travaglio, the website ilfattoquotidiano.it and the monthly magazine FQ Millennium, directed by Peter Gomez, the publishing company Paper First and the TV and multimedia content platform Loft. Recently, SEIF has undertaken a process of diversification to become more and more a media content provider at 360 degrees, starting a strategy of development of its products in digital key and data driven. For further information: Press Office Close to Media - Company founded by Elisabetta Neuhoff Via Caradosso 8 - 20123 Milano Tel: 02.70006237 Fax: 02.89694809 www.closetomedia.it Luca Manzato I luca.manzato@closetomedia.it Sofia Crosta I sofia.crosta@closetomedia.it Nomad Alantra Capital Markets Via Borgonuovo, 16 - 20121 Milano tel. +39 02 63671613 mail: stefano.bellavita@alantra.com SEIF - Investor relations 06 32818514 - ir@seif-spa.it Cinzia Monteverdi (CEO) ir@seif-spa.it Luigi Calicchia (CFO) l.calicchia@seif-spa.it ------------------------ This publication embed "Actusnews SECURITY MASTER ". - SECURITY MASTER Key: nG9tZ5tmZpjJy3JqYcqbaGZsmmtmlpHKaGaamWSaZpmcbW+UyGdob8fJZm9plWhm - Check this key: https://www.security-master-key.com. ------------------------ Copyright Actusnews Wire Receive by email the next press releases of the company by registering on www.actusnews.com, it's free Full and original release in PDF format:https://www.actusnews.com/documents_communiques/ACTUS-0-68030-seif_cos_24022021_eng.pdf An embargo on private-sector to carry out government-related transactions including taxes and pension payments has been lifted, the ministry said on Wednesday, which analysts said was a positive for these lenders. "The government on Wednesday has lifted the embargo on private sector (only a few were permitted earlier) for the conduct of government-related banking transactions such as taxes and other revenue payment facilities, pension payments, small savings schemes, etc. This step is expected to further enhance customer convenience, spur competition and higher efficiency in the standards of customer services. Private sector banks, which are at the forefront of imbibing and implementing latest technology and innovation in banking, will now be equal partners in development of the Indian economy and in furthering the social sector initiatives of the government," said Ministry of in a statement. With the lifting of the embargo, there is now no bar on RBI for authorisation of private sector (in addition to public sector banks) for government business, including government agency business. The government has conveyed its decision to RBI. Consequently, the bank stocks rose on Wednesday. HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank were among the top gainers, closing 5% and 4% higher, respectively. Axis Bank too rose 5%. "A late surge by bulls across financials post lifting of the embargo on the grant of GOI business to took indices up 2 per cent when trade time was extended till 5.00 pm," said S Ranganathan, Head of Research at LKP Securities. Equity benchmark Sensex soared 1,030.28 points and the Nifty rallied over 270 points on Wednesday, tracking strong buying in financial stocks, after trading hours were extended following a technical glitch at NSE. After resumption of trade at 3.45 pm, NSE Nifty zoomed 274.20 points or 1.86% to end at 14,982. Similarly, the 30-share BSE index settled 1,030.28 points or 2.07% higher at 50,781.69. Axis Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack, surging around 5%, followed by HDFC twins, ICICI Bank, Bajaj and SBI. US President would not be okay if the ruled Afghanistan, the has said, underlining that there is an ongoing process of considering the next steps to ensure peace in the war-torn country. The US and the reached an agreement in February 2020 that called for a permanent ceasefire, peace negotiations between the and the Afghan government, and a withdrawal of all foreign forces by May 1. There are about 2,500 US troops currently in the country. The Taliban had their ouster at the hands of US-led troops in 2001. I don't think he would say he'd be okay with that, Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Tuesday when asked if Biden is okay with the Taliban ruling Afghanistan. But again, there's an ongoing process of considering the next steps in Afghanistan. That's an ongoing discussion, and I'm not going to get ahead of where that sits at this point in time, Psaki said. Separately, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said that Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has been in constant communication with Afghan partners about the ongoing review process and how they are working their way through that. We are mindful of looming deadlines here and everybody shares the sense of alacrity when it comes to working our way through this review but we want to do it in a thoughtful, deliberate way, to make sure that whatever decisions are made, they're the best ones, that are in our best national security interests and certainly the security interests of our allies and partners, and that includes the Afghan people, he said. Meanwhile, during a Congressional hearing General (rtd) Joseph F. Dunford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told lawmakers that Talban gets its financial support from drug trade. We know that the Taliban have had sanctuary in Pakistan. We know that they have an active diplomatic effort travelling to Moscow, travelling to Beijing, travelling to other countries. We know they travel in the Gulf. We know Iran has provided some material support, he said. The Taliban, he said is a Sunni terrorist organisation. There's no question that the Taliban originates from the madrassas in Pakistan, he said in response to a question. Dunford told lawmakers that the terrorist threat has been reduced because of the US trained Afghan forces and continued US military presence. We believe that the threat can reconstitute itself in a period of about 18 to 36 months and present a threat to the homeland and to our allies, he said adding that the Afghan forces are highly dependent on US funding, as well as operational support. They will remain so for some time. The probability of civil war is high in the wake of a precipitous US withdrawal, he said, adding that Afghanistan meets the definition of a fragile state. Despite very real challenges, with support, the Afghan government can deliver minimally effective governance. Dunford, who chairs Afghan Study Group of the US Institute of Peace, told lawmakers that the Taliban were not meeting the conditionality of the February 2020 agreement. That was as a result of not seeing a broad reduction in violence and as a result of not seeing the Taliban demonstrate the will or capacity to prevent Al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a platform. We are not advocating for a unilateral declaration that we remain behind after the first of May. We're recommending that the Taliban actually hear that same message from other regional stakeholders, not the least of which is China, Russia and Pakistan, he said. We do think that continued negotiations with the Taliban to highlight the fact that we remain committed to the February 2020 Agreement. We have demonstrated that, by drawing down to 2,500, we remain committed, 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.) New Delhi: Twenty-seven law enforcement officers were left injured on Tuesday after clashes broke out between the supporters of Serhiy Sternenko, former head of the Odessa cell of the banned extremist organization 'Right Sector' and the police. The incident occurred near the Presidential office in Ukraine's capital Kyiv after a district court sentenced Sternenko to seven years in prison on charges of abducting Lyman village council deputy Serhiy Scherbych. "During the action, the participants used spray and flares. They did not react to the police officers' warning not to commit offenses, so verbal skirmishes turned into clashes. As a result, 27 police officers and National Guard servicemen received eye burns," the city police said in a statement on Facebook. On Monday, Prymorsky District Court of Odesa passed the verdict in the kidnapping case. According to a court order, half of all property of the activist was also seized. Sternenko's supporters formed a human chain near the courtroom to stop the paddy wagon in which the activist was being taken. They allegedly threw smoke bombs at the security officials. Live TV Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Ukraine and Lithuania have great prospects for the development of trade and economic relations, Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal has said. He said this at a meeting with Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania Gabrielius Landsbergis in Kyiv on February 24, Ukrinform reports with reference to the Government portal. In particular, Shmyhal noted huge prospects for the dynamic development of trade and economic relations between Ukraine and Lithuania and called for continued joint work in this direction within the Ukrainian-Lithuanian Intergovernmental Commission on Trade, Economic and Scientific-Technical Cooperation. The PM stressed that he personally and the President of Ukraine intend to take part in the fourth Ukraine Reform Conference in Vilnius. "We expect that in the near future the Republic of Lithuania will propose a date for the Conference," he said. Shmyhal thanked the Lithuanian side for its clear and consistent support of Ukraine on all topical issues, primarily in countering Russian aggression. The PM reminded about the creation of the Crimean Platform, which aims to de-occupy Crimea, and noted that the first summit is scheduled for August 23 this year. In addition, Shmyhal told Landsbergis that Ukraine had launched a campaign to vaccinate the population against COVID-19 and stressed that this was the only way in the world to overcome the pandemic. "Vaccination is free and voluntary, and we will provide the vaccine to everyone wishing," he stressed. In turn, Landsbergis noted Lithuania's readiness to provide Ukraine with part of the vaccines within the initiative of the European Commission for the Eastern Partnership countries. As Ukrinform reported, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania Gabrielius Landsbergis is on a working visit to Ukraine on February 23-24. ish Bachelor star Tara Pavlovic will soon welcome her first child with husband Nick Shepherdson in the coming months. And the 30-year-old proved she still has her sense of humour as she joked about her enlarged chest on Tuesday. Taking to Instagram, Tara complained about the humid heat while poking fun at herself and her buxom assets. Buxom: Bachelor star Tara Pavlovic, 30, (pictured) has made fun of her enlarged chest as she complained about the heat on Wednesday while at home in Queensland 'This angle really does them justice,' she wrote, remarking on herself. She went on to complain about the intensity of the heat. 'I've always struggled with the heat. I've never been great in the heat but holy sh*t. Holy sh*t. This heat is insane.' Busting out! 'This angle really does this justice,' she said, remarking on herself. She went on to complain about the intensity of the heat 'I feel like I'm in a sauna every second of the day and I just can't escape it.' Tara announced she is pregnant back in October. She shared a drone clip of her and Nick sitting on a beach while spraying Champagne with the words written in sand: 'Baby Shep due May 2021.' 'Nick and I are so excited to finally share that we are expecting a little baby BOY in May 2021,' Tara captioned the short clip. Baby bundle! Tara announced she is pregnant to her new husband Nick Shepherdson (both pictured) on Instagram in October, only a month after getting married 'We are both so grateful and we just can't wait to meet the little fella,' she added. Tara joked about her unborn baby being like her husband. She continued: 'Not going to lie, if he is anything like Nick, I am already worried about his teenage years.' Announcement: Tara shared a drone clip of her and Nick sitting on a beach while spraying Champagne with the words written in sand: 'Baby Shep due May 2021' Tara and Nick tied the knot in an intimate ceremony in September, after being forced to postpone their wedding in April due to the pandemic. Tara gushed over Nick as she announced the news, before revealing that they fed guests McDonald's at the ceremony. 'I finally got to marry my best friend yesterday, I love you Nick,' she captioned a picture of their wedding rings. Pastor Jack Hibbs, Senior Pastor, Calvary Chapel Chino Hills Supports the 'Religion is Essential Act' "The 1st Amendment right of Californians to freely practice their religion has been infringed upon by Governor Newsom's unconstitutional state mandates" NEWS PROVIDED BY Calvary Chapel Chino Hills Feb. 24, 2021 CHINO, Calif., Feb. 24, 2021 /Christian Newswire/ -- Pastor Jack Hibbs Supports Senator Brian W. Jones' (R-Santee) Bill 397, "Religion is Essential Act." "Senator Brian Jones has my complete support in his effort to codify religious services as essential services in the State of California. It's regretful that the Church, established by Jesus Christ at the inception of His ministry, must now be legislatively recognized in legislation due to the over-reaching actions of Governor Gavin Newsom. "Clearly, the Governor has favored secular assemblies including mass protest on the streets, crowded 'big box' stores, and failed to follow his own mandates and dined indoors with friends." stated Pastor Hibbs. "In his efforts to protect the health and safety of the public, he obliterated the First Amendment's free exercise of religion. Governor Newsom has clearly failed the churches of California." Specifically, Jones' SB 397 would: Require that the Governor and local governments treat religious services as an essential service (just like retail) during any declared state of emergency; and Prohibit the state and local governments from discriminating against a religious organization during an emergency; and Require the state and local governments to permit religious services to continue operating during an emergency; and Prohibit the state and local governments from enforcing a health, safety or occupancy requirement that imposes a substantial burden on a religious service during an emergency; and Allow a religious organization that has been subject to state or local government overreach to file a claim for relief in an administrative or judicial proceeding. "It is essential that the doors of the church be kept open for the preaching of the Word as commanded by God to serve the spiritual needs of the men, women, and children in our communities," stated Pastor Hibbs. SB 397 is co-sponsored by Real Impact, Capitol Resource Institute, California Family Council, and Judeo-Christian Caucus. It is supported by Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, Alliance Defending Freedom, The Salt & Light Council, and it is awaiting assignment to a Senate policy committee for a hearing. SOURCE Calvary Chapel Chino Hills CONTACT: Gina Gleason, 909-393-7100, gina.gleason@calvarycch.org Related Links https://calvarycch.org/ Ahead of TN polls, Sasikala signals truce with AIADMK; says Jayalalithaa's followers should unite India oi-Madhuri Adnal Chennai, Feb 24: Expelled AIADMK leader V K Sasikala on Wednesday appealed to ''true followers'' of late party supremo J Jayalalithaa to join hands and post a spectacular victory in the coming Tamil Nadu assembly elections. Her appeal, days after returning to Tamil Nadu after serving a four year prison sentence in an assets case, appeared to be a signal for truce with the ruling AIADMK ahead of the polls, likely in April. After paying floral tributes to a portrait of Jayalalithaa here on her 73rd birth anniversary, Sasikala recalled the late leader''s famous quote that even after her lifetime, the AIADMK would continue to work for the people for centuries to come. ''True followers'' of Jayalalithaa should come together and remember that the goal is winning it big in the assembly elections, she said without naming anyone and while addressing Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam cadres who gathered for the anniversary event. Expressing confidence that her pitch for unity would be reciprocated by the late leader''s loyal followers, Sasikala said she would throw her weight behind them. She appealed to them to ''work like a bee'' unitedly for poll victory. Sasikala's nephew and AMMK leader TTV Dhinakaran, when asked on Sasikala''s assertion, said she only underscored unity. If her reference was to the AIADMK or the AMMK, Dhinakaran, who is the party general secretary said, "you have to ask her." Jayalalithaas 73rd birth anniversary: AIADMK's Sasikala plan big to mark the day In 2017, Sasikala and Dhinakaran were ousted from the AIADMK after the factions led by chief minister K Palaniswami, earlier chosen by her for the top post before proceeding to serve her jail term, and Panneerselvam merged burying the hatchet. Senior AIADMK leader and Fisheries Minister toeing the party stand of not accommodating Sasikala and relatives said her invite would not apply to his party and it meant only the AMMK. Asked about Sasikala's unity line, political analyst Sumanth Raman said the AMMK leadership appeared to work out some kind of an interim arrangement with the ruling party for the elections so that there is no split of votes. "I see this as a temporary kind of truce," he told PTI adding based on the poll outcome, the AMMK may rethink its strategy. Notably, Dhinakaran told reporters that preventing the DMK from coming to power was his party''s goal. Appearing to be accommodative towards the AIADMK, in the same breath he said, "we need not even talk about others." He, however, hit out at the AIADMK government for the rising debt and poor financial health. The AMMK leader asserted that the front to be led by his party would be the primary force in the upcoming polls. He said, after sharing seats with ''allies,'' his party would contest in the rest of the constituencies. The AMMK's general council and executive council meets are scheduled to be held tomorrow through video conferencing. Dhinakaran had till recent times maintained that the AMMK''s goal was ''retrieving'' the AIADMK (bringing the party back to the leadership of him and his aunt). Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam is the AIADMK coordinator, the numero uno position in the party and Chief Minister K Palaniswami is the co-coordinator, next in its hierarchy. Wary of the Sasikala factor, the AIADMK has already asked its party workers to light a lamp this evening in their respective houses and take a vow to be loyal to the party and protect it. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 19:42 [IST] A University of Queensland researcher Dr Anthony Romilio examined a 4600-year-old Egyptian painting last year and a speckled goose caught his eye. He said that the bird was strange but beautiful. He further added that it was quite unlike modern red-breasted geese as it had distinct, bold colours and patterns on its body, face, breast, wings and legs. According to a press release by the University of Queensland, he said, The painting, Meidum Geese, has been admired since its discovery in the 1800s and described as Egypts Mona Lisa. Extinct species discovered He told that no bones from the modern red-breasted geese have been discovered on an Egyptian archaeological site. He said, Apparently no-one realised it depicted an unknown species. Artistic licence could account for the differences with modern geese, but artworks from this site have extremely realistic depictions of other birds and mammals. Read: Scientists Say Strange Movement Of Gas Clouds Linked To Huge Black Hole (Meidum Geese, Chapel of Itet, mastaba of Nefermaat and Itet (Dynasty 4), Meidum, Egypt. Image Credits: uq.edu.au) (Image Credits: uq.edu.au) There have been previous instances where extinct animals had been identified in ancient art. However, not all species have been scientifically confirmed. Romilio said that bones of a similar but not identical bird have been found on Crete. Talking from a zoological perspective, he said that the Egyptian artwork is the only documentation of this distinctively patterned goose. It now appears to be globally extinct. Read: Libya's New Interim Leader Meets With Egyptian President As per Romilio, Egypt was not always predominantly desert and had a biodiverse history, rich with extinct species. Egypts ancient culture merged when the Sahara was green and covered with grasslands, lakes and woodlands, teeming with diverse animals. Talkin about art, he said, Art provides cultural insight, but also a valuable, graphical record of animals unknown today. These animals include the predecessor of modern cattle, the auroch (Bos primigenius), and previously unknown forms of gazelle, oryx, antelope and donkey. It is with the help of these ancient animals representations that one can recognise the biodiversity thousands of years ago that co-existed with humans. Read: Egypt Releases Journalist Mahmoud Hussein, Detained Since 2016 Also Read: Archaeologists In Egypt Discover Mummy Buried With A Golden Tongue (Image Credits: Unsplash) Beyond barbecues and ceremonies: Recognizing Memorial Day For many, Memorial Day weekend is about gathering with family and grilling or attending a parade. Some find a more personal way to honor the holiday. WASHINGTON, D.C. and BANGALORE, India, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Quona Capital , a venture firm focused on financial inclusion in emerging markets, today announced it has been selected for ImpactAssets prestigious IA 50 Impact Fund listing for the second consecutive year. The listing, made up of private debt and equity impact investing fund managers, represents a broad range of geographies and impact areas of focus. More information is available here . Quona Capital invests in financial technology companies that are expanding access to financial services for underserved consumers and small businesses in Latin America, Africa, India and Southeast Asia. The first Quona fund was sponsored by nonprofit financial inclusion pioneer Accion and was deployed in a strong portfolio of investments with two exits to datethe sale of Coins.ph to Go-Jek , and the IPO of IndiaMart , a B2B e-commerce company in India. In 2020, the firm closed its second fund with $203 million in commitments from a variety of global asset managers and insurance companies, investment and commercial banks, as well as university endowments, foundations, family offices, and development finance institutions. The ImpactAssets 50 2021 (IA 50) is a free online database for impact investors, family offices, financial advisors and institutional investors that features a diversified listing of private capital fund managers delivering social and environmental impact as well as financial returns. This year marks the tenth edition of the IA 50, and despite a tumultuous year, total assets under management (AUM) among selected fund managers jumped to a record $228 billion in 2020, up from $181 billion in 2019. By comparison, in the IA 50s inaugural year, assets totaled just $6.8 billion. We are thrilled to be included once again in the IA 50, said Quona co-founder and Managing Partner Monica Brand Engel. ImpactAssets has done important work identifying a great swath of impact investors who are working to deliver positive impact on the world as well as positive returns for investors. ImpactAssets is focused on fostering deep impact investing with innovative investment solutions, resources and education, said Margaret Trilli, President and Chief Investment Officer of ImpactAssets. The IA 50 is a cornerstone of our efforts to help investors gain access to the resources they need in order to help double the impact of their capital. Quona was selected for the IA 50 on the basis of several criteria, including: First-mover advantage: Quona is one of the first investors focused exclusively on emerging market fintech, which has produced unparalleled sector and operational expertise in the firm, noted Engel. Global footprint: Ganesh Rengaswamy, co-founder and Managing Partner who leads Quonas Asia investments, believes the firms global/local footprint is another key differentiator. Quona has team members in the U.S., Mexico, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Nigeria, enabling the firm to support its portfolio by making connections across emerging and developed markets, and facilitating the cross-pollination of ideas, best practices and strategic relationships among potential partners, investors, and acquirers, he said. Diversity and experience: Our team speaks a total of 14 different languages, said Jonathan Whittle, co-founder and Managing Partner of the firm. Our collective backgrounds as founders and builders of financial technology businesses in Quonas target markets, as well as our work in venture, private equity, investment banking and microfinance, bring unique expertise to bear for our portfolio companies, and unique insights for our investors. Stats for Stories Investment Targets: In 2020, the global pandemic and subsequent economic downturn affected communities worldwide, and IA 50 fund managers focused on some of those hardest hit. A total of 63% of managers targeted investment in rural communities, while 54% specifically benefited people of color and 48% were focused on advancing women-led businesses. Two-thirds (67%) of managers said their firm focused on underdeveloped markets where the market is relatively new, emerging, or subject to systemic challenges. Impact and Financial Return: Impact fund managers remained focused on delivering both positive impact and investment performance. A total of 87% of IA 50 fund managers targeted market rate or above rates of return and 92% delivered either in line or above their target returns. About Quona Capital Quona Capital is a venture firm focused on fintech for inclusion in emerging markets. Quona partners have deep experience as investors and operators in both emerging and developed markets, and look for entrepreneurs whose companies have the potential to provide outstanding financial returns and promote breakthrough innovation in financial inclusion. Quonas global team has supported more than 30 financial technology companies expanding access for underserved consumers and small businesses in Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Quona got its start through a strategic relationship with Accion, a global nonprofit with a pioneering legacy in microfinance and fintech impact investing. For more information, visit quona.com . Quonas most recent impact report can be found here . About the ImpactAssets 50* The IA 50 is the first publicly available database that provides a gateway into the world of impact investing for investors and their financial advisors, offering an easy way to identify experienced impact investment firms and explore the landscape of potential investment options. The IA 50 is intended to illustrate the breadth of impact investment fund managers operating today, though it is not a comprehensive list. Firms have been selected to demonstrate a wide range of impact investing activities across geographies, sectors and asset classes. About ImpactAssets ImpactAssets is a nonprofit financial services firm that increases the flow of capital into investments delivering financial, social and environmental returns. ImpactAssets $1.4 billion Donor Advised Fund and field-building initiatives enable philanthropists, other asset owners and their wealth advisors to advance social or environmental change through impact investment and philanthropy. Learn more at www.impactassets.org . *The IA 50 is not an index or investable platform and does not constitute an offering or recommend specific products. It is not a replacement for due diligence. In order to be considered for the IA 50 2021, fund managers needed to have at least $25 million in assets under management, more than three years of experience as a firm with impact investing, documented social and/or environmental impact and be available for US investment. MEDIA CONTACT: Shannon Austin for Quona Capital +1.703.338.8813 shannon@quona.com Yangon: The chorus of banging pots and pans begins in Chinatown at about 8pm. The district in Myanmars commercial city of Yangon is normally festooned with bright red lanterns to celebrate Chinese New Year. But when the Year of the Ox arrived in mid-February, the usual festive atmosphere was gone - replaced by a tension in the air. Demonstrators display a picture of Chinese president Xi Jinping, with a message requesting not to support military coup during a protest against the military coup in Mandalay, Myanmar. Credit:AP Here, and across the country, swelling ranks of young ethnic Chinese protesters are joining mass rallies against the junta that abruptly deposed Aung San Suu Kyis government. Many are united by rumours that China is helping the regime install a repressive new internet system that will severely restrict online freedoms behind a Great Firewall. Eager to show opposition to Beijing meddling, they gather outside the embassy, some displaying posters reading Myanmar-born Chinese oppose the military coup. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Spending his weeklong Spring Festival holiday visiting relatives, setting off firecrackers, eating local specialties and lazing in the warm sunshine, Balthazar Boyer was able to feel the familiar festive ambiance of Wuhan. "It was a very pleasant week off. This Spring Festival was completely different to the last one," said Boyer, 39. Unlike last year, when he and his family spent the holiday anxiously in quarantine at home, they were delighted to celebrate together with family and friends this year, embracing normality in the megacity that was once hard-hit by COVID-19. Boyer, the general manager of a French company's China office, has lived in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, for nearly 20 years. He settled in the city after acquiring his master's degree in law from Wuhan University and marrying a local woman. Two weeks after Boyer and his wife returned to Wuhan from a family visit in France in January of last year, the city announced suspensions of public transportation as well as outbound flights and trains to fight the epidemic. Though the French government organized several evacuations for its nationals in Wuhan, Boyer and his wife chose to stay. "Why would we leave? Wuhan is our home," said Boyer, adding that he was confident in the Chinese government's response. That year, the family spent the Lunar New Year holiday at home, watching the news every day to keep themselves updated. "Balthazar's birthday coincided with last year's Spring Festival holiday, but we were in no mood for a celebration," said Boyer's wife, Hu Fan. The couple's anxieties and concerns gradually eased as they learned that medics nationwide were rushing to assist Wuhan, temporary hospitals were being built and infections were dropping. Their worries were also eased as their community organized group purchases to provide substantial daily necessities. "I received so many kinds of foods besides what was needed for our daily meals -- I could even try to cook different cuisines," said Hu. As Wuhan gradually regained its vitality, their lives also returned to normal. When Boyer resumed his business, he required all his employees to maintain social distancing and wear masks at work. "I can feel that Wuhan is recovering in all respects," said Boyer. Though shadowed by the pandemic in 2020, his optoelectronics business in Wuhan was just as profitable as it was in 2019. Boyer and Hu were fully prepared to celebrate the Spring Festival this year, which fell on Feb. 12. "We thoroughly cleaned our house ahead of the festival, hoping to sweep away all the bad luck of last year and welcome the good luck of the Year of the Ox," said Hu. On the first day of the new year, the family visited Hu's parents in the suburbs of Wuhan, where they enjoyed a meal together. "Our baby received gifts of money from relatives, and we were really happy because it was the first time he has been immersed in the traditional ambiance of the Chinese New Year since he was born," said Hu. The family also welcomed friends into their home. Boyer returned to his office on Feb. 18, the first working day after the festival. "There are so many things to do and prepare. I think my career will go well this year," he said. To curb the spread of COVID-19, many in China chose to follow the government's recommendation and stay put for the festival, including Boyer and Hu. Looking ahead for the Year of the Ox, Boyer expects to travel to other Chinese cities -- and abroad, if the pandemic eases. "I would like to go back to France to see my parents, whom I haven't seen for more than a year," he said. During the historic winter storm that nearly toppled the Texas grid, Texans were asked to conserve energy in the hope of avoiding blackouts. Quickly it became apparent that they were being asked to do the impossible. Indoor temperatures rapidly dropped into the 30s and 40s as outages hit, and during the periods in which heat was on, temperatures barely climbed into the 50s in many homes. Calls for residents to conserve energy proved to be paradoxical considering that many of the buildings lack sufficient insulation and other necessary features to do so. Imagine if Texas homes and buildings were more energy efficient. Their demand on the system could have been reduced up to 50 percent, resulting in less severe outages. More weather-proof homes would be warmer during outages and there would have been fewer burst pipes and the resultant water shortages and contamination. With any luck a winter storm of this scale wont be repeated in our lifetimes, but with climate change the risk of extreme weather is ever-present, so we must seize every opportunity to reduce our energy consumption. Energy efficiency upgrades to homes and buildings reduce consumption by as much as one-third to one-half. Energy efficiency creates resilience while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which is why it needs to be a public policy priority. Energy efficiency projects enhance home and building value, create decent jobs and help businesses reduce utility costs. That makes them more competitive, which is why countries from China to Mexico, India, Brazil and South Africa prioritize energy efficiency. Residential and commercial buildings account for 40 percent of US energy demand more than industries (32 percent) or transportation (28 percent), and for 74 percent of all electricity use. Energy gained through energy efficiency is also significantly cheaper than new power generation from any fuel source. Based on available technologies, energy efficiency could contribute 57 percent of CO2 reductions by 2030 in the U.S. Texas leads among U.S. states in energy consumption, and is the fifth largest energy consumer in the world. While Texas introduced energy efficiency requirements in its codes during the past decade, those codes apply only to new buildings. This is true for the U.S. more generally; according to the Federation of American Scientists, current and proposed policies focus primarily on setting minimum standards for new homes through building codes. As we emerge from the current crisis, Texas can look globally at more than 20 years of international experience for guidance in energy efficiency. For example, starting in 1998, I led a first-of-its-kind energy efficiency and renewable energy program at the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank. The program initially focused on retrofitting buildings in Eastern Europe built during the Soviet era without sufficient insulation. As too often is the case, increasing energy prices represented a disproportionate burden on low- and middle-income families and small businesses, providing the impetus for IFCs program. Implemented energy-efficiency measures not only reduced utility bills significantly, they also improved the comfort levels and square footage price of retrofitted homes. Additionally, small businesses reduced their energy bills and improved their competitiveness. New jobs were created by the energy and other service companies implementing the energy efficiency measures. And banks financed these projects with the invisible collateral of savings rather than hard collateral, without a single default in the $330 million portfolio of close to one thousand projects financed during the course of the program. At the Hunt Institute for Engineering & Humanity, we build on such international experiences and best practices, leverage technologies and convene stakeholders to foster such systemic sustainable solutions that improve both resilience and livelihoods. In our work we have found that there is great potential for economically viable energy-efficiency improvements in Texas. Although Texas currently ranks 29th among states in energy efficiency, it leads in the U.S. in potential for economical energy-efficiency improvements and residential energy-efficiency improvements. With its can-do spirit, Texas can harness the momentum of the 2021 freeze and transform the markets for energy efficiency. Experience suggests that energy efficiency can be a driver of resilience and economic progress, but it takes a multifaceted, comprehensive approach supported by smart policies policies that include both sticks and carrots that go beyond building codes to empower stakeholders through information, training and education as well as incentivizing energy-efficiency improvements. When done right, the rewards of energy-efficiency measures are significant, including reduced household utility bills, improved health and comfort, reduced energy poverty, more competitive small businesses, up to 30 decent jobs created for every million dollars invested, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and improved resilience in the face of climate events and price shocks. Texas has many of the puzzle pieces to lead the way so long as stakeholders can join forces towards a common goal that just took a very clear shape thanks to the storm of 2021. Csaky is the executive director of SMUs Hunt Institute for Engineering & Humanity and co-founder of the Inclusive Economy Consortium. The ruling in Rajasthan welcomed the state presented on Wednesday by Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot as a welfare-oriented one while the opposition termed it disappointing. leaders said every section has been appropriately focused in the The BJP leaders, though, said it did not live up to the expectations of people. Health Minister Raghu Sharma praised the budget, saying that it is an unprecedented one for overall development. He said the dedicated to health will fulfill the dream of a healthy Rajasthan. Sharma said several innovations in medicine and health have been announced in the budget. We will present a unique example in the country by bringing a bill to provide the Right to Health to All. He described the Universal Health Care scheme as unprecedented from the point of view of health rejuvenation at a cost of Rs 3,500 crore from the upcoming financial year. Under this scheme, each family in the state will get the benefit of a medical insurance scheme of Rs 5 lakh. PCC chief and Education Minister Govind Singh Dotasra said a commendable budget has been presented by CM Gehlot, which is all-inclusive and development oriented. To ensure the state moves ahead on the path of progress, announcements have been made in the budget keeping the public interest paramount, he said in a statement. Energy Minister B D Kalla and Transport Minister Pratap Singh Khachariyawas also welcomed the budget. The budget is an example of excellent financial management which will push development in the state, Kalla said. BJP state president Satish Poonia said the budget is nothing more than a cut and paste job as new schemes have been announced just like past budgets, which hardly gets realised on the ground. "There is a huge contrast in announcements and their realisation. The budget is just like a cut, copy and paste job. It is a cosmetic budget, which has a good face but intentions are not good," Poonia said. He said the budget did not mention regularisation of contractual workers and protesting unemployed youth. Overall, the budget has failed to live up to the expectations of people, he added. Leader of Opposition Gulab Chand Kataria said old announcements made in previous budgets for his own constituency have not even started and new have been announced. "It has become their hobby to make announcements. They are only misleading people as they do not have a proper budget. This budget is nothing more than a bundle of lies," Kataria said in a press conference. Former chief minister Vasundhara Raje said there are promises in the budget but no will is visible. She claimed that several schemes in the budget were those introduced by her government when she was in power. The senior BJP leader, in a statement, said people had expected relief from VAT on diesel and petrol but the state government disappointed them. On the other hand, leaders in the state have termed it a holistic budget, which has taken care of all sections of the society. (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.) Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) The camp of detained Sen. Leila de Lima maintained she did not receive 1.4 million worth of drug money from the late drug lord Jaybee Sebastian when she was Justice Secretary. Atty. Boni Tacardon, De Lima's lawyer, emphasized that convict Joel Capones' testimony showed he had selective memory. "May mga natatandaan syang mga petsa, mga sirkumstansya, mga personalidad pero marami rin syang hindi natatandaan, lalo na kung ang tinatanong namin yung mga bagay na may tendency na sumira sa kredibilidad nya bilang isang testigo," said Tacardon. [Translation: He can remember some dates, circumstances, and personalities but he cannot recall many things, especially when we ask things that have the tendency to taint his credibility as a witness.] Tacardon also denied that De Lima came alone inside the New Bilibid Prison (NBP), stating that she needed to be accompanied by the Bureau of Corrections director when doing inspection inside the national penitentiary. During the hearing at the Muntinlupa City Regional Trial Court Branch 256 on Tuesday, Capones elaborated how De Lima received the money from Sebastian in a meeting inside NBP's Bahay na Bato in March 2014. "He delivered first the money to Jaybee Sebastian, 1.4 million. Jaybee Sebastian then gave the money to then Secretary De Lima. It was part of the testimony," said lead prosecutor Sonny Ocampo. Capones mentioned in last week's hearing of the same case that Sebastian asked him to be part of the illegal drugs trade inside the NBP to raise funds for the senatorial candidacy of De Lima. De Lima's camp also filed a motion to include Capones as a respondent to the case, instead of being just a witness, citing his knowledge in the NBP illegal drug trade operations. De Lima marks her fourth year of detention today at the Philippine National Police Custodian Center over charges of involvement in illegal drug trade inside the NBP. Last week, the detained senator was acquitted in one of her three drug cases by Muntinlupa Regional Trial Court Branch 205. Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. On Tuesday, Facebook said it will lift the ban on Australian news and pay local media companies for content. Facebooks ban came in response to Australian legislation that would force tech giants like Google and Facebook to pay for news content shared on their platforms. Instead, Google and Facebook will pour tens of millions of dollars into the struggling news sector to avoid being subjected to mandatory payments that could cost them vastly more. Facebook has announced its first proposed its first deal with Australian media company Seven West and is reportedly pursuing commercial deals with other local news organisations. The company is expected to launch a dedicated news product featuring Australian content later this year. William Easton, Managing Director, Facebook Australia & New Zealand said Were pleased that weve been able to reach an agreement with the Australian government and appreciate the constructive discussions weve had with Treasurer Frydenberg and Minister Fletcher over the past week. We have consistently supported a framework that would encourage innovation and collaboration between online platforms and publishers. After further discussions, we are satisfied that the Australian government has agreed to a number of changes and guarantees that address our core concerns about allowing commercial deals that recognize the value our platform provides to publishers relative to the value we receive from them. As a result of these changes, we can now work to further our investment in public interest journalism and restore news on Facebook for Australians in the coming days. Both companies have two months to reach further agreements that would stave off binding arbitration. Current drill results continue to expand Serra Alta resource by intersecting strong values with significant visible gold over broad zones of mineralization. Cerrado to start trading Thursday February 25th on TSX Venture Exchange: Symbol: TSXV: CERT. Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Cerrado Gold Inc. (TSXV: CERT) ("Cerrado" or the "Company") is very pleased to announce additional drill results from a further six drill holes from its ongoing 17,000-metre definition drilling program at the Serra Alta deposit, at its Monte do Carmo ("MDC") Project located in Tocantins State, Brazil. The drill results highlighted in this release are from drill holes: FSA 99, FSA101, FSA102, FSA104, FSA 105 and FSA 106. Additional drill results will be announced as assays are made available over the next few months. Drill Hole Highlights: FSA102 True thickness 41.96 metres at 1.82g/t Au, from 114.30m to 161.60m including true thickness 11.44 metres at 4.86g/t Au, from 129.70m to 142.60m, FSA105 True thickness 6.30 metres at 3.09g Au/t, from 37.60 to 43.90m FSA106 True thickness 14.15 metres at 5.98g/t Au, from 103.85m to 118.00m including true thickness 2.00 metres at 37.85g/t Au, from 116.00m to 118.00m Mark Brennan, Co-Chairman and CEO commented: "Based upon the exceptional mineralization intersected to date, we remain highly confident that the drill program continues to support our objective of expanding and upgrading the known resource at Serra Alta. We expect the results from this Phase 1 drill program should support the Company's target to grow the resource at Serra Alta to our 1.5MM ounce target by the end of March 2021. A Phase 2 drill program is expected to commence immediately following this program in April and is targeted to grow the resource base to between 2.0-2.5MM oz by year end. " He continued, "In addition, ongoing regional surface mapping and other work continues to develop additional targets within the same geological environment to expand the overall resource potential on the greater Monte Do Carmo property. We plan to drill a good number of these regional targets in the Phase 2 program, which we believe will demonstrate the compelling district potential that we see clearly at Monte Do Carmo." The drill results reported in this press release were received through February 20th, 2020 and represent complete results for FSA 99, FSA 101, FSA102, FSA 104, FSA 105 and FSA106. The results indicate that these drill holes have been successful in confirming and expanding the mineralization. As of Friday February 19th, 2021, Cerrado has completed 12,231 metres of its ongoing Phase I drill program targeting 17,000-metres and is on track to complete the program by the end of March 2021. Subsequent to the completion of this Phase 1 drill program, the company anticipates that it will commence a further 14,000-metre, Phase 2 drill program, focused on further resource expansion and the drilling of several satellite targets with the aim to further expand the resource potential at the Monte Do Carmo project. The current drill holes intersected broad zones of hydrothermal alteration with abundant points of visible gold. The alteration is typical for the Serra Alta deposit, including the abundance of quartz veinlets, potassic & chloritic alteration, including sulphides (pyrite, sphalerite, and galena) with visible gold. To date, the bulk of the drill results reported fall within the limits of the open pit outlined in the Preliminary Economic Assessment ("PEA"), to constrain the current resources defined at the Serra Alta deposit at its Monte Do Carmo gold project in Tocantins State, Brazil (See SEDAR filing December 6, 2018). Drill Hole Location Map To view an enhanced version of this image, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/6185/75384_133e281304a6d95d_002full.jpg Drilling The first phase of the current drill program at Serra Alta, which began at the end of September 2020, follows the success of the 2018 drill program which resulted in a maiden NI 43-101 compliant resource estimate with an effective date of December 5, 2018 of an Inferred Mineral Resource totaling 813,000 oz of gold contained within 13,639,000 tonnes grading 1.85 g/t Au (see Sedar Report filed December 6, 2018. This new Phase I program is expected to consist of approximately 17,000-metres of drilling; mainly step-out and downdip to define additional ounces and a modest amount of infill drilling to upgrade a portion of the resource base to the Measured and Indicated Mineral Resource categories, focusing on the known Serra Alta deposit. This deposit is 1.5 kilometres long, 400m wide, and remains open along strike and at depth and represents only the first of four known additional targets which are targeted to grow the resource base on the overall Monte Do Carmo project land package. The drilling and supporting assay results will build upon the success of Cerrado's earlier drilling program. Cerrado is targeting to define a resource between 1.2 million and 1.6 million ounces at an average grade of between 1.5 g/t to 2.0 g/t Au. Cerrado expects this program to be completed by end of March 2021. Investors are cautioned that this resource target is conceptual in nature at this time and there has been insufficient exploration to define a new mineral resource. It is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource. Tables 1 summarizes the drill hole information. Table 2 summarizes the significant assay results. Table 1. Drill hole information Hole_ID Easting Northing Elevation DEPTH (m) dip() Azimuth FSA-99 820,557.50 8,809,673.30 568.17 474.97 -40.66 110 FSA-101 820,670.82 8,810,545.33 660.95 651.08 -45.82 85 FSA-102 820,607.10 8,810,339.07 582.37 520.56 -31.39 63 FSA-104 820,136.36 8,809,686.60 414.40 306.90 -31.66 110 FSA-105 820,307.34 8,809,456.06 504.62 227.85 -34.55 100 FSA-106 820,417.65 8,809,976.65 460.08 411.86 -32.29 105 Table 2. Drill Hole Composites To view an enhanced version of this Table, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/6185/75384_cerradotable.JPG Quality Assurance and Quality Control Analytical work was carried out by ALS international lab (ALS). The facilities of the prep lab are located in Goiania, Brazil 835 km from MDC and alternatively in Belo Horizonte, Brazil 1,110 Km from the MDC project. MDC sends out their samples to ALS international labs (ALS) with the prep lab located in Goiania or alternatively in Belo Horizonte. ALS lab sends the prepared aliquots for analytical assay to their lab in Lima, Peru where the prepared samples are systematically analyzed for gold (ppm) by fire assay (Au-AA24) or gold (ppm) by metallic screen (Au-SCR24)). Randomly the ICP (Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry) is done for trace elements in 4 acids (hydrofluoric, perchloric, nitric and hydrochloric) digestion (ME-MS-61). ALS has routine quality control procedures which ensure that every batch of samples includes three sample repeats and at least two commercial standards and two blanks. Cerrado used standard QA/QC procedures, when inserting reference standards and blanks, for the drilling program. The Reference material used are from CDN Resource Laboratories Ltd. and ITAK (Instituto de Tecnologia August Kekule Ltda.) Brazilian supplier included in the batches following MDC internal protocols. Review of Technical Information The scientific and technical information in this press release has been reviewed and approved by Robert Campbell, P.Geo., Vice President, Exploration for Cerrado Gold Inc., who is a Qualified Person as defined in National Instrument 43-101. For further information please contact Mark Brennan CEO and Co Chairman Tel: +1-647-796-0023 mbrennan@cerradogold.com Nicholas Campbell, CFA Director, Corporate Development Tel: +1-905-630-0148 ncampbell@cerradogold.com About Cerrado Gold Cerrado Gold is a private gold production and exploration company with gold production derived from its 100% owned Minera Don Nicolas mine in Santa Cruz province, Argentina. The company is also undertaking exploration at its 100% owned Monte Do Carmo project located in Tocantins, Brazil. For more information about Cerrado Gold please visit our website at www.cerradogold.com Disclaimer 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. This press release contains statements that constitute "forward-looking information" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation, All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release. Any statement that discusses predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions, future events or performance (often but not always using phrases such as "expects", or "does not expect", "is expected", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", "plans", "budget", "scheduled", "forecasts", "estimates", "believes" or "intends" or variations of such words and phrases or stating that certain actions, events or results "may" or "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken to occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release include, without limitation, statements regarding the business and operations of Cerrado Gold. In making the forward- looking statements contained in this press release, Cerrado Gold has made certain assumptions, including, but not limited to the potential to expand and upgrade the known mineral resources at its Serra Alta project. Although Cerrado Gold believes that the expectations reflected in forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that the expectations of any forward-looking statements will prove to be correct. Known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements and information contained in this press release. Except as required by law, Cerrado Gold disclaims any intention and assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect actual results, whether as a result of new information, future events, changes in assumptions, changes in factors affecting such forward-looking statements or otherwise. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75384 BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- China strongly condemns a violent attack in which the Italian ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was killed, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Tuesday. Italian Ambassador Luca Attanasio and two others died in the attack during a humanitarian trip in a United Nations convoy in the DRC's eastern province of North Kivu on Monday. "We are shocked at the news, strongly condemn the armed attack on diplomatic personnel and offer condolences to the Italian side," Wang said at a press briefing. He said State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will soon send a message of condolences to Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio over the ambassador's death. "We hope the DRC will take effective measures to improve the security situation in its eastern region and protect the safety of Chinese nationals, including Chinese diplomats in the country," said Wang. Advertisement A homegrown coronavirus variant that emerged in California early last year is more contagious and avoids antibodies generated by vaccines more easily than earlier strains of the virus, two new studies finds. The variant, known as B.1.427/B.1.429 - also sometimes called CAL.20C/L452R - is believed to be behind the dramatic spike in cases and deaths that were seen over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays in California. One of the new studies found that the variant makes twice as many virus particles inside a person's body and that cases are doubling roughly every two-and-a-half weeks. The other found that infections of the variant increased by more than 200 percent in a San Francisco neighborhood over the last few months, and that it increases the risk of a household member becoming infected. Researchers have been worried about the U.K variant, known as B.1.1.7, due to warnings from experts that it would become the most dominant strain in the U.S. by next month, with 204 cases already in California. But the California variant is just as concerning and could account for 90 percent of the state's infections by the end of March, scientists told the Los Angeles Times. This sets in motion a potential 'nightmare scenario' of two strains meeting in one person, exchanging mutations and turning into an even deadlier coronavirus variant. As the U.S. sees a decline of cases, hospitalizations and deaths across the country, some are worried the new variant will reverse the trend and create a surge in the coming weeks. California's homegrown variant, called B.1.427/B.1.429, currently makes up 50% of all cases in the state and is estimated to make up 90% of all cases by the end of March (above) One study found the variant makes twice as many virus particles inside a person's body and is more resistant to antibodies, which is why it is believed to be responsible for California's sure seen over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays (above) Researchers has been worried about the U.K variant, known as B.1.1.7, with 204 in California (above) but now fear a potential 'nightmare scenario' of two strains meeting in one person, exchanging mutations and turning into an even deadlier coronavirus variant 'The devil is already here,' Dr Charles Chiu, a professor of laboratory medicine and infectious diseases expert at the University of California, San Franciso, told the Los Angeles Times. 'I wish it were different. But the science is the science.' The variant was first identified in May 2020 and was virtually nonexistent until October. However, by December, 36.4 percent of all virus samples from Cedars-Sinai Los Angeles patients were linked to the strain, according to a statement from the hospital. By early February 2021, the variant was found in half of all samples tested in Los Angeles. In one of the studies, which is expected to be posted to server medRxiv.org later this week, Chiu and his colleagues looked at 2,172 samples of the virus collected between September 2020 and January 2021 across California. Over the course of September and October, the researchers saw no signs of B.1.427/B.1.429, as seen in previous studies of the variant. However, by January, it accounted for more than 50 percent of all the genetically analyzed coronavirus samples. Chiu told the Los Angles Times that the virus appeared to be more transmissible than prior strains by between 19 percent to 24 percent. In one instance, a nursing home outbreak, B.1.427/B.1.429's rate of spread was six times higher than variants seen in the early days of the pandemic. The researchers estimated that cases of the variant are now doubling in The Golden State every 18 days, reported The New York Times. The virus has been found in at least 40 U.S. states and 19 countries including Australia, France, the UK, Norway and Taiwan, but has only really surged in California Another study found that in the Mission District neighborhood of San Francisco found that, in late November, the variant made up just 16% of virus samples and, by January, it made up 53% of samples. Pictured: Dr Rafik Abdou checks on a COVID-19 patient at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in the Mission Hills section of Los Angeles, November 2020 In lab studies, the researchers analyzed genetic material found on nasal swabs that were used to perform coronavirus tests. They found that B.1.427/B.1.429 produced a viral load that was twice as high as those created by other variants. In addition, the California variant was more effective at evading antibodies created by survivors of COVID-19 or produced by vaccines. Levels of antibodies produced in response to the California variant were two-fold lower. This means it is not as successful as other variants like the one seen in South Africa, at evading immunity, The New York Times reported. According to a site run by Scripps Research, the variant has been found in at least 40 U.S. states and 19 countries including Australia, France, the UK, Norway and Taiwan. However, it makes up just one percent of all cases worldwide and has only really surged in California. 'This variant is concerning because our data shows that it is more contagious, more likely to be associated with severe illness, and at least partially resistant to neutralizing antibodies,' Chiu said, according to Science Magazine. The new variant 'should likely be designated a variant of concern warranting urgent follow-up investigation.' In another study that has not yet been published, Dr Joe DeRisi, the co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, and his colleagues looked at how the variant spread in the San Francisco neighborhood of the Mission District, which has primarily Hispanic residents. In late November, the variant made up just 16 percent of virus samples. By January it made up 53 percent, The New York Times reported. What's more, they found the virus was more infectious. In a study of 326 households, they found that person had a 26 percent risk of getting infected if someone if their house had an earlier strain of the virus, But if someone had B.1.427/B.1.429, other household members had a 35 percent risk of falling ill. 'What we see is a modest, but meaningful, difference,' DeRisi told The New York Times. 'Just by random chance, a bad wedding or choir practice can create a large frequency difference.' The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Ahead of West Bengal elections 2021, TMC worker killed, 2 injured in bomb attack India oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P Kolkata, Feb 24: An activist of the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) was killed and two others were injured when bike-borne assailants attacked them with bombs and bullets in Paschim Medinipur district ahead of West Bengal elections on Tuesday night. According to reports, Shoubhik Dolui and two other TMC workers were sitting on a culvert in Abhirampur village under Narayangarh police station area at around 9 pm when three men came on a motorcycle and hurled a bomb towards them. Sars-Cov-2 mutations found in Maharashtra, Kerala samples The police also said that the attackers fired at 24-year-old Dolui before fleeing from the spot. When the three were taken to a hospital in Kharagpur, Dolui was declared dead on arrival while the two others were shifted to Medinipur Medical College and Hospital in a serious condition, he said. Local TMC leaders charged the BJP with being involved in the attack. The saffron party's district president Samit Das, however, claimed that it was the result of the TMC's infighting. Tension prevailed in the area where a large contingent of police was sent. Assembly election is due in the state in April-May. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 8:36 [IST] Ghana has today become the first country outside India to receive AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine doses manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII) under the COVAX Facility. Serum delivered 600,000 doses of Covishield vaccines from Pune to Accra in Ghana. The vaccines arrived on a flight from Mumbai, via Dubai, where the flight also collected a shipment of syringes from a Gavi-funded stockpile at UNICEF's regional supply hub. This is the first batch shipped and delivered in Africa by the COVAX Facility as part of an unprecedented effort to deliver at least 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2021, said the World Health Organisation. A day ago, a top WHO official also had said Serum would soon deliver vaccines for over 25-30 countries. "This is a historic step towards our goal to ensure equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines globally, in what will be the largest vaccine procurement and supply operation in history," said WHO. COVAX is co-led by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), working in partnership with UNICEF as well as the World Bank, civil society organisations, manufacturers, and others and plans are to supply the vaccines to over 90 poor and developing countries. Adar Poonawalla, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of SII, had tweeted on Sunday asking other countries and governments to wait for the vaccine supplies, as Serum Institute of India has been directed to prioritise the huge needs of India and along with that balance the needs of the rest of the world. India is preparing to launch second phase of vaccination drive, covering its 27 crore elderly people, soon. In the first phase over 1.17 crore doses of Serum and Bharat Biotech's vaccines have been administered so far to over a crore of healthcare and frontline workers. Serum had received an 'at-risk' funding of about Rs 1,300 crore from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi during the early stages of vaccine development for Covishield and another vaccine being developed with Novovax. Serum's plans were to reserve half of initial production for India and send remaining doses to COVAX as per the arrangement. ALSO READ: More COVID-19 vaccines on the way; Serum, Dr Reddy's, Biological E in advanced stages ALSO READ: Covaxin phase-3 data likely to be out in 2 weeks: Bharat Biotech Joe Biden isn't backing down on embattled budget nominee Neera Tanden as two Senate committees postponed votes on her confirmation and the Government Affairs Committee Chairman said Democrats 'need more time to assess it.' 'We are committed to continuing to fight for all of our nominees,' White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Wednesday, 'continuing to do the outreach needed, to answer questions, to address concerns anyone has, to reiterate the qualifications of all of the nominees that the president has put forward. And to do due diligence in fighting for the team he's nominated.' Psaki suggested the postponements are promising, claiming Democratic leadership is 'conveying clearly that they want to continue to do work to build support for her nomination.' Bernie Sanders, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, announced Wednesday morning he is postponing a vote on confirming Tanden to head the White House Office of Management and Budget. The Budget Committee was meant to meet to further Tanden's confirmation Wednesday, but Sanders will now hold that vote at a later, unspecified date. The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee also postponed their vote on Tanden's nomination. 'We're just, some members wanted some more time to kind of review it, so we're just going to give them more time,' Michigan Senator Gary Peters, chairman of the committee, told reporters at the Capitol Wednesday. 'Is that Democrats on your committee?' a reporter pushed. 'I don't want to get into specifics but people needed a little bit more time to assess it,' he said, adding that his committee has not rescheduled a vote on Tanden's nomination. Senator Bernie Sanders, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, announced Wednesday he is postponing the vote to further Tanden's nomination to head the White House Office of Management and Budget Tanden's past tweets have personally attacked Sanders, who she would regularly interact with if confirmed as head of the White House budget office Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chair Gary Petters, who also delayed the vote on Tanden, said Wednesday: 'People needed a little bit more time to assess' her nomination Tanden has faced backlash for transparency and unity issues after deleting more than 1,000 tweets before her nomination, which were found to personally attack politicians on both sides of the aisle including Sanders. Her confirmation was effectively sunk after Democratic centrist Senator Joe Manchin said last week he would vote against her over her 'toxic' tweets. During a confirmation hearing earlier this month, Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana brought up Tanden's attacks against her own party. 'The comments were personal,' Kennedy, who sits on the Budget Committee, said when interacting with Tanden. 'I mean, you call Senator Sanders everything but an ignorant sl*t.' 'That is not true,' she pushed back before expressing regret for her tweets. As OMB head, Tanden would regularly interact with Biden as chair of Budget. The independent Vermont senator reminded her of their past at her hearing earlier this month. 'Your attacks were not just made against Republicans,' he said. 'There were vicious attacks made against progressives, people who I have worked with, me personally.' Top ranking Budget Committee Republican Lindsey Graham read one of Tanden's tweets during her hearing, which referenced the bitter 2016 nomination fight between Hillary Clinton and Sanders. 'Russia did a lot more to help Bernie than the DNC's random internal e-mails did to help Hillary,' Tanden wrote, siding with Clinton. President Biden said Tuesday that still believes there is a 'good shot' that Tanden will be confirmed to head his Office of Management and Budget despite Senator Joe Manchin effectively sinking her chances by announcing he will vote against the nominee. 'We're going to push. We still think there's a shot, a good shot,' Biden said at the end of a round table at the White House on Tuesday when asked about his confidence in Tanden's nomination. Senator Shelley Moore Capito became the latest Republican moderate to announce Tuesday that she will not cross the party line to help confirm Biden's cabinet pick. Capito joined her West Virginia Democratic colleague Manchin, as well as Republican Senators Mitt Romney and Susan Collins, in coming out against the budget nominee. Tanden's nomination was supposed to move out of committee on Wednesday with a subsequent Budget vote. Her nomination is expected to fail in the Appropriations Committee, where Senators Manchin, Collins and Republican Lisa Murkowski all serve. With Manchin's opposition, Democrats need one Republican to vote in favor of Tanden's nomination to get her on Biden's cabinet as a permanent fixture. Some of Tanden's tweets specifically called out Bernie Sanders, his supporters and other figures within the progressive movement One last hope could be Alaska Senator Murkowkski, a moderate who voted for Trump's impeachment conviction earlier this month along with fellow Republicans Romney, Collins and four others. But the senator has remained undecided or at least kept her thinking on the matter to herself. 'When do you expect to make a decision on the Tanden nomination,' a reporter asked Murkowski at the Capitol Tuesday. 'Well, she's supposed to move out of committee today, is that right?' the Alaska Republican posed. 'Tomorrow.' 'Well, I've got time then,' she shot back. It now appears she has more time than she thought to make a decision with Sanders' postponing the vote in the Budget Committee on Tanden. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Biden has been working those on Capitol Hill to try and garner some Republican support for Tanden. She said he has held talks with dozens of senators on Tanden's nomination. Psaki also said Biden's confidence in Tanden to run the OMB has not changed despite revelations of transparency and unity issues related to her deleting more than 1,000 tweets personally attacking lawmakers before she was nominated to a cabinet post. Tanden, during her confirmation hearing earlier this month, apologized for her previous tweets. In her tenure, Tanden has served as a staffer to Hillary Clinton since her 2000 election to the Senate and later in her 2008 presidential run, and again in 2016 when Clinton defeated Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination and was ultimately bested by Donald Trump. Tanden also helped draft the Affordable Care Act during Barack Obama's presidency. Earlier this month, Tanden appeared before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Senate Budget Committee the next day. During those hearings, she repeatedly expressed remorse for her Twitter activity. She said she deleted the tweets because she did not agree with the tone. Following Manchin's opposition to Tanden's nomination, which effectively killed her chances of confirmation, two key Republican senators, who often skirt the party line, followed suit Romney of Utah and Collins of Maine. Manchin announced on Friday that he would oppose Tanden running OMB, citing the 'toxic' impact of her tweets insulting fellow lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Then on Monday the West Virginia centrist Democrat revealed he is undecided about Haalan, who will appear before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which Manchin chairs, for her confirmation hearing Tuesday. It was the first major party defection of the young Biden administration. The Office of Management and Budget touches on nearly every aspect of major policy. Democratic centrist Senator Joe Manchin effectively sunk Tanden's nomination last week when announcing he would vote against her confirmation over her 'toxic' tweets 'The OMB needs steady, experienced, responsive leadership. I will vote against confirming Ms. Tanden,' Collins, who represents Maine, released in a statement Monday. 'Congress has to be able to trust the OMB director to make countless decisions in an impartial manner, carrying out the letter of the law and congressional intent,' Collins wrote in her statement denouncing Biden's pick. 'Neera Tanden has neither the experience nor the temperament to lead this critical agency. Her past actions have demonstrated exactly the kind of animosity that President Biden has pledged to transcend.' 'In addition, Ms. Tanden's decision to delete more than a thousand tweets in the days before her nomination was announced raises concerns about her commitment to transparency,' she continued. 'Should Congress need to review documents or actions taken by OMB, we must have confidence that the Director will be forthcoming.' A spokesperson for Romney released a statement Monday, as well, saying: 'Senator Romney has been critical of extreme rhetoric from prior nominees, and this is consistent with that position. He believes it's hard to return to comity and respect with a nominee who has issued a thousand mean tweets.' Tanden in a now-deleted tweet called Collins 'the worst' and attacked her in another tweet for her questioning of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing. 'Susan Collins' terrible treatment of Dr. Ford should haunt Collins the rest of her days,' Tanden tweeted during Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, when Blasey Ford raised allegations against him. She also deleted a slew of other offensive tweets aimed at lawmakers from both parties including several directed toward Sanders and his supporters. The White House, however, is not backing down on Tanden's nomination instead bolstering support for her confirmation. 'Neera Tanden is an accomplished policy expert who would be an excellent Budget Director and we look forward to the committee votes this week and to continuing to work toward her confirmation through engagement with both parties,' Psaki said Monday. With a 50-50 split Senate, Manchin holds a lot of power as the most centrist left-leaning senator. Collins and Romney are two of the few Republican senators who occasionally voted with Democrats most recently both voted in favor of Donald Trump's impeachment conviction. No other Democrats have said if they plan to vote against Tanden's nomination. Manchin and Collins are close. In 2020, the West Virginia senator endorsed Collins' reelection and they also worked together on the most recent COVID-19 relief package. Manchin has also entertained moderates, including Collins, on 'Almost Heaven' his houseboat docked in the Potomac. In the 2020 election, the Senate became split down the middle giving any Democratic defector veto power over legislation they don't like and effectively making moderate Manchin the most influential lawmaker in the upper chamber. Biden told reporters as he returned to Washington from a trip to Michigan Thursday he was not pulling her nomination. 'I think we are going to find the votes and get her confirmed,' he said. Tanden has been criticized by Republicans over her past harsh comments on social media, such as calling Mitch McConnell, the party's leader in the Senate, 'Moscow Mitch' and saying 'vampires have more heart than (Senator) Ted Cruz.' 'I have carefully reviewed Neera Tanden's public statements and tweets that were personally directed towards my colleagues on both sides of the aisle from Senator Sanders to Senator McConnell and others,' Manchin said in a statement. 'I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget,' he said. Manchin cited Tanden's 'public statements and tweets' in his decision not to confirm. 'I recognize the concern. I deeply regret and apologize for my language, and some of my past language,' Tanden said at her confirmation hearing. When Biden picked Tanden, chief executive of the left-leaning Center for American Progress think tank in Washington, Republicans pointed to her past strong comments on Twitter, such as referring to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell as 'Moscow Mitch' and saying 'vampires have more heart than (Senator) Ted Cruz.' In addition to calling Cruz a vampire, she once referred to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell 'Voldemort' from the Harry Potter series. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Neighbours living next to a hoarder whose home is infested with hundreds of giant rats have been begging the local council to intervene for hour years to clean up the place. Residents in the street in Hasting, on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, are terrified the rodents and other vermin crawling inside a home filled with garbage will soon spread to their houses. Lee-Anne McGuinness has lived next door to the 'rat house' for four years and said 'everything moves' inside the property. Pictured: The hoarder home on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula. Garbage is piled up to the front door Pictured: Rats in the window of the hoarder house. Residents say they run up the curtains 'There's just too many of them,' she told A Current Affair on Tuesday. 'At night time when they come out there is just how many and they just jump in this tree, they just walk all along the ledges [in the home], up the curtains, along the bottom.' The single mother said she tried to ask Mornington Peninsula Shire Council if it could organise for authorities to check on the male home owner, but 'no one would do it'. Ms McGuinness was concerned that once the rats food supply runs dry, they would 'turn' on the owner. She also explained the stench is so bad out the front of the property 'I couldn't fathom what it'd be like inside'. Pictured: Rats swarming the home, which is piled high with rubbish, blocking the entrance Another neighbour was worried the vermin will start breeding in her roof and chewing on the electric wires. 'We're talking thousands of dollars we're going to have to find to get that fixed,' she said. A third resident Sam has lived on the street for more than a decade, but says the infestation is so bad she wants to sell her home or rent it out. 'Do you reckon anyone's going to want to live in it now?' She asked. 'I don't. No way. It's disgusting.' Sam said she emailed the council in 2019 to complain about the rodents, with photos, but claimed nothing was done. She told the council the rubbish, which is piled high against the front door and blocks the entrance, was a fire hazard. Vermin lines the gutter of the hoarder house on the Mornington Peninsula. Neighbours try and bait the pests, but there are too many Pest controller Troy Dawson told the program that rats tend to emerge at night because they feel safer. Pictured: A rat on the property 'If the council had done something when I first rang, I don't think there'd be rats there now,' she said. Pest controller Troy Dawson told the program that rats tend to emerge at night because they feel safer. 'If you are seeing them during the day, there's a high-level infestation,' he said. He explained young male rats are kicked out of the nest at six weeks old to breed, and said colonies can quickly grow into the millions if left untreated. Sam said she emailed the council in 2019 to complain about the rodents, with photos, but claimed nothing was done. Pictured: Rats lined up underneath the awning of the home A spokesperson for Mornington Peninsula Shire Council told Daily Mail Australia it has organised for the property to be cleaned. 'A clean-up of the property began on Monday 22 February with all rubbish, long grass and rat harbourage removed,' the spokesperson said. 'Specialist cleaners will be engaged to clean the inside of the house now that the outside space has been cleared of rubbish and safe access has been established.' 'The pest control program will continue until the property is clear.' They also said outreach services have been trying to engage with the home owner. Jammu and Kashmir: Wetlands Threats and Management by Tina Bhat February 24,2021 | Source: Daily Excelsior The unique climatic conditions of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir support numerous wetlands. These wetlands offer socio-economic and ecosystem services in the form of water supply, commercial fisheries, agriculture, energy resource, wildlife habitat, recreation, tourism, cultural heritage, water purification, flood control ,water supply, environment restoration etc. Indeed, the most parts of the region are entirely dependent on wetlands for food, domestic, agricultural and industrial requirements. They also serve as a means of livelihood for rural population and are greatly valued by many cultures. The term wetland is composed of two independent words namely wet and land which primarily gives the idea of a land absorbed with water and supporting a great variety of flora and fauna. The wetland world encompasses all areas with water covered periodically, seasonally, or on a permanent basis such as flood prone areas located near river banks, rice paddies, swamps or lakes. The wetlands can also be explained as land transitional between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem where the water table is usually at or near the surface or the land is covered by shallow water. Further, wetlands facilitate in regulating global climate change through sequestering and releasing a major portion of fixed carbon in biosphere. These wetlands also play a pivotal role in resolving the water crises worldwide. One of the most important benefits that wetlands provide is their capacity to maintain and improve water quality. Accordingly, healthy wetlands have a rich natural diversity of plants and animals that act as filtering systems, removing sediment and pollutants from water. However, the role of wetlands to sustain and improve water quality is under threat due to excessive human interface having a significant impact on water flows, nutrient balance and biodiversity. Kashmir popularly known as Paradise on Earth for its beauty is replete with diverse types of fresh water bodies and bestowed with large number of impressive wetlands like Haigam Rakh, Mirgund, Shalbug etc. These wetlands not only help in decreasing the probability of floods but are extremely useful in removing pollutants from water, protect shorelines, habitat for wildlife etc. Sadly, the famous wetlands of the valley including Dal Lake, Anchar, Wular, Haigam, Malgam, Hokersar and Kranchu lakes etc. face a serious threat from anthropogenic activities like increasing human settlements, urbanization, siltation, expansion of agricultural fields and the expansion of roads. The major wetlands of Jammu and Kashmir include: Hokersar: The Hokersar wetland in Kashmir popularly known as the Queen of Wetlands was recently in news for being on the brink of extinction due to encroachment activities. This wetland is filled with the migratory birds who prey on fish and insects in this protected territory. Hokersar is an important shelter for migratory species during winters. Hokersar plays a vital role by performing as a flood controlling pools. Sadly, all kinds of waste generated by the people are dumped into this Wetland. Also, the encroachments result in the change of mud flats and grasslands into the agricultural lands thereby, dividing the habitat into small portions which affects the population of birds in the wetland. Furthermore, discarding domestic waste into the wetland has resulted in the excessive weed growth. Gharana: Gharana wetland is located along the border in RS Pura tehsil of Jammu district about 30 kms from Jammu near Gharana village. Gharana wetland is a Border Tourism Site nestled between the India-Pakistan. It has been the winter destination for Siberian birds. It is also known as the bird- watchers paradise The most of the inhabitants around Gharana belongs to economically poor section. Their main occupation is agriculture. The local residents bath and wash their cattle in the wetland water. The major problems faced by this wetland are dumping of solid waste, sewage etc. The use of fertilizers and manures in fields ultimately finds way to the wetlands and result in eutrophication. Further, fuel wood harvesting poses a greatest threat to the tree diversity of this wetland. Also, the woes of world famous Gharana wetland remained unaddressed even after numerous directions from the State. Manibugh: Manibugh is situated near Pampore district of Kashmir and is the breeding ground and the meeting point of many birds. This wetland is identified as low water levels since they are surrounded by cultivation areas which wash organic and inorganic constituents in wetland. Mirgund: Mirgund wetland of Kashmir is a shallow temporary wetland. Sukhnag and other adjacent channels are the rich source of fresh water supply used to irrigate the adjacent paddy fields. This wetland is extremely useful for harvesting grains and other livestock. Further, this wetland has not only fluvial type of fresh water origin but also promotes a rich aquatic culture. Regrettably, humanity is losing this pool to farming expansion. Hygam: Hygam is one of the famous wetland areas in district Baramulla in Kashmir. Hygam Wetlands has dense settlements and the people in this area are dependent on fishery business. This wetland is of strategic significance for the national and international tourists for habiting rich source of natural beauty in the waters. The lush green grass under blue sky and waters with the snow capped mountains have an alluring impact on the tourists. Besides, Hygam wetlands have the rich source of aquatic culture attracting photographists. Surinsar-Mansar: Mansar Lake is situated 62 km from Jammu. This wetland is revered through ages due to its religious importance and scenic beauty. It is rich in micronutrients which turns it an attractive habitat, breeding and nursery ground for migratory birds. The migratory breeding birds visiting this wetland during winters include Night Heron, Grey Heron, Indian Coot, Indian White Wagtail, Rufous Black Shrike etc. A number of trees like Pinus roxburgii, Acacia nilotica, Mangifera indica, Calotropis, Morus nigra, Solanum nigrum, Adhatoda vesica and ornamental plants like Vinca rosea, Bottle brush, Thevetia, Tradescantia etc. add to its beauty. However, illegal occupation of wetland areas by unauthorized persons has resulted in the shrinking of these wetlands. The water body is slowly poisoned by the use of pesticides in the surrounding farmland, direct influx of untreated sewage water and solid waste generated by eateries and hotels. The plastic bottles and polythene bags litter the lake at several places and fishes and freshwater turtles can be seen scavenging on the plastic waste. Presently, the wetland ecosystems are under tremendous stress due to massive land system changes and infrastructure development, as well as intensification of agricultural and industrial activities. Henceforth, there is a growing voice that draws the attention of the Government leading to adoption of various policies and approaches for conservation, protection, and management of wetlands. Therefore, devising safe and effective science-based and technologically sound strategies for by the state and territory Governments primary plays a vital responsibility for maintaining adequate quality wetlands with the support of jurisdiction-specific guidelines, regulations, policies, processes and standards. However, the various approaches to maintain and/or improving the quality of wetlands include: regulating high value wetlands through environmental assessment, legislation and processes to review potential developments, monitoring and assessment to determine whether the condition of wetlands is improving or declining, effective management such as on-farm nutrient management and salinity management aimed at reducing water quality pressures, rehabilitation and restoration of wetlands etc. Significantly, therefore, the preservation of these wetlands calls for efforts by the UT Government and other stakeholders including local residents, researchers, academicians, NGOs etc. in the following ways: * Research and/ or academic fraternity can contribute significantly by raising awareness, capacity building events and activities encouraging the protection of these wetlands. * The local residents also play a pivotal role in collecting and analysing data pertaining to the existing conditions of the wetlands and biodiversity supported by them. * Setting up of eco-development community across different districts at state level. Thus, local residents can be held responsible for conservation and management of these unique biodiversity hotspots. * The members of the community should develop a scientific acumen enabling them to counter the environmental challenges. * Reducing the use of chemical argo chemicals/ fertilisers in the field around the wetlands. * Further, Government interventions play a central role in building awareness in developing scientific citizenship behaviour for attaining sustainable success of wetlands. * The Government should impose strict regulations and thus, local residents should be held liable for illegal practices i.e. filling, cleaning or disposing off wastes in the wetlands. The Government should restore the encroached areas of wetlands. Development of the appropriate forum responsible for resolving the conflicts on wetlands issue must be set up. * The State Government must allocate appropriate funds towards the preservation of these wetlands. * Restoration strategy calls for collaboration with the Government, researchers, and other stakeholders should set principles for establishing priorities and decision making for effective long term conservation strategy. Further, these restoration goals require intensive planning, leadership, funding and active involvement from all the stakeholders. * Directing the Pollution Prevention Programme through environmental awareness programme. On the basis of the foregoing discussion, it may be inferred that wetlands are among the most productive life support systems in the world and are of immense socio-economic and ecological importance to mankind. They are critical for the maintenance of biodiversity and perform a pivotal role in the biosphere. The wetlands are also termed as Earths kidneys as they provide almost similar functions of sustaining the balanced and healthy ecology by absorbing wastes and sustainable management of water and sanitation for humanity. Bug Busters employee, Bob, donates a coat. "As a company, we've always recognized the importance of giving back to our community, including our veterans and active-duty service members," said Bug Busters CEO Court Parker, "This distinction as a PestVets Company is certainly something to be proud of." While the coronavirus has made it difficult for some organizations to give back, the pest control industry here in the Peach State has found a way. Late last year, the GA PestVets committee held a coat drive alongside pest control companies from across the state. Bug Busters, Inc., headquartered in Woodstock, was one of them. In December 2020, Bug Busters joined pest control companies statewide and the GA PestVets committee to participate in a coat drive benefitting the Cherokee County Homeless Veterans Program. As a company, Bug Busters and its employees contributed over 80 coats to the over 1,000 total coats donated and distributed across the state. Fresh off of their participation in the coat drive, Bug Busters is now being recognized by the National Pest Management Association (NPMA) and the PestVets Council as a PestVets Company. This is due to their enhanced commitment to the hiring of and their participation in acts of service benefitting veterans and active duty service members of the United States military. "As a company, we've always recognized the importance of giving back to our community, including our veterans and active-duty service members," said Bug Busters CEO Court Parker, "This distinction as a PestVets Company is certainly something to be proud of." Bug Busters, Inc. has been serving the Southeast since 1984. With branch offices in Georgia and Tennessee, they offer environmentally-friendly pest control solutions to protect customers' homes, businesses, families, and pets. The correspondent in Tangier of German Die Welt paper, Alfred Hackensberger, has published an article on the successful unfolding of the vaccination campaign underway in Morocco, describing the Kingdom as the champion in North Africa. While Germany and other European countries slide through the second wave in lockdown, Morocco is well on the way to vaccinate itself out of the crisis, writes the German Die Welt paper, highlighting Moroccos exemplary management of the vaccination campaign against the Covid-19 virus, stressing that the Kingdom has overtaken Germany in terms of vaccination. The author noted, with supporting figures, that Morocco administered an average of 173,920 doses per day against only 126,806 doses in Germany. Now Morocco is a big step ahead of Europe. Once again, this has to be said, because the kingdom did a lot better than its European neighbors during the pandemic. The journalist who visited the King Fahd Health Center in Tangier, among others, hailed the whole organization of the immunization process, the great rush of citizens to the vaccination centers, the perfect handling of the medical staff, and how citizens can get a vaccination appointment simply by sending an SMS. While Europe is stranded in a second wave of confinement, the North African Kingdom is on track to get vaccinated out of the crisis and life in Morocco is almost as before. The journalist also referred to the declining number of new cases and fatalities recorded in Morocco. 500 new infections and a dozen deaths, these are figures that will make Germany and many other countries in the European Union jealous, Hackensberger wrote. As to the reasons behind Moroccos success, the journalist listed a clear strategy, temporary isolation measures, as well as a high level of public confidence. All this has enabled the Kingdom to overcome the second wave of the pandemic. He also quoted Hicham Sbai, professor at the School of Medicine of Tangier, saying, when asked about the success of Morocco, that this success is explained by the swift and anticipated reaction of the Kingdom and a strategy involving all institutions and all stakeholders at national and regional level. Several media in Europe, which is dragging behind in terms of vaccination, have praised Moroccos performance. The vaccination campaign in Morocco was launched on Jan.28 and as of Feb.24 nearly 3 million people have received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine while the second dose was administered so far to 37,310 people. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. "This ranking is testimony that our model can withstand a difficult environment, especially with the buy-in from those who execute it. Wild Birds Unlimited is again being honored as one of the worlds top franchises. The Indiana-based bird feeding and nature specialty supply franchise earned its latest recognition on the Entrepreneur Franchise 500 list. Wild Birds Unlimited is ranked No. 186 in the newly released rankings for 2021, thanks to consistent brand strength and continued growth. Despite competing against a record number of applicants for the 2021 list, the most recent placement marks WBUs ninth Top-200 ranking in the last 10 years. Every recognition is an honor, but few lists are as widely respected as the Franchise 500, said WBUs Chief Development Officer Paul Pickett. We couldnt be prouder of our franchisees for their effort to pivot successfully during 2020, and couldnt be more thankful to the new franchisees who believed in our brand enough to join in our growth last year. This ranking is testimony that our model can withstand a difficult environment, especially with the buy-in from those who execute it. The Entrepreneur Franchise 500 rankings are compiled after analysis of more than 150 data points, on which each franchise is given a cumulative score. The key factors of evaluation include costs and fees, size and growth, support, brand strength, and financial strength and stability. The 500 franchises with the highest cumulative scores earn their ranking on the list. To view Wild Birds Unlimited in the full ranking, visit http://www.entrepreneur.com/franchise500. Results can also be seen in the January/February 2021 issue of Entrepreneur, available on newsstands January 26. ### About Wild Birds Unlimited Wild Birds Unlimited is the original and largest franchise system of backyard bird feeding and nature specialty stores with more than 340 locations throughout the United States and Canada. Wild Birds Unlimited specializes in bringing people and nature together with bird feeding and nature products, expert advice and educational events. Wild Birds Unlimited has consistently ranked in the top 10 in the overall category for more than 10 years on Franchise Business Review's prestigious Franchisee Satisfaction Awards. Visit our website and shop online at http://www.wbu.com. To learn how you can open your own Wild Birds Unlimited, visit http://www.wbufranchise.com. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgeralds canonical portrait of Jazz Age high society and corrupted American dreams, is coming to animation. An adaptation of the 1925 novel, which finally entered the public domain on January 1st of this year, is in the works at DNEG Feature Animation, with William Joyce set to direct. Here are the details: Reinhard Distinguished - BHPian Join Date: Nov 2010 Location: Pune Posts: 4,015 Thanked: 12,691 Times View My Garage re: Hyundai customers can now buy 'Shield of Trust' package that covers 14 wear & tear parts So on similar lines of what Tata has been selling since some years now as "P2P - Promise To Protect". I think more and more car-makers will join this band-wagon in near future for more revenue generation. Personally I never see the value of such schemes. Often these end up being revenue generators for dealerships / ASCs. Since with upfront payments done for parts - customers happily agree for part replacements - even when they might really not be needed in due course. 1. They don't hesitate to agree for part replacement. 2. They will even ask for part replacement since they have paid already. Its also a lump-sum payment in advance that the car-maker gets. In the big picture, these are good incomes for the carmakers. I'd rather end up paying a bit more, but only when I really need a part to be replaced. Barring mobile/broadband & insurances - I just don't like anything pre-paid! (Natural News) President Joe Biden has urged Americans to wear face masks through next year during his visit to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) complex in Bethesda, Maryland on Thursday, Feb. 11. Biden said doing so might save a significant number of lives. Were on track to cross 500,000 dead Americans this next month, Biden said at a news conference with NIH Director Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci. And in light of the new strains of the Wuhan coronavirus that have reached the United States, masking is still the easiest thing to do to save lives, Biden asserted. [Its] a pain in the neck, but its a patriotic responsibility. However, it is worth noting that he had promised a much shorter mask timeline last December. In an interview with CNNs Jake Tapper, Biden had said he will ask the public to mask for 100 days following his inauguration. Constitutional experts had asserted back then that even the president has no legal authority to force Americans to wear face masks if they choose not to. But Biden asserted he would set an example by wearing a mask. Furthermore, Biden said his administration has finalized deals for 100 million more doses of both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccines. These new orders come on top of doses scheduled to be delivered in March. That means were now on track to have enough supply for 300 million Americans, said Biden. The vaccine manufacturers had also agreed to expedite the delivery of the new doses by a month. The doses are now scheduled to be delivered in May instead of June. To date, 10.5 percent of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. About 26 million doses of the vaccine have been administered during Bidens first three weeks in office. Less optimistic timelines Even with the new vaccine deals, Fauci remains cautious. Fauci, Bidens chief medical adviser, said the country may reach herd immunity by fall if the general public starts getting vaccines no later than June. But Fauci expressed concerns that new coronavirus variants like B.1.1.7 could further stretch that timeline. Herd immunity occurs when a significant portion of a population becomes immune to a disease and the risk of transmission drops. It can be achieved through vaccination or natural infection. However, Biden himself admitted in a CBS News interview that it will be very difficult to achieve herd immunity by June. In fact, officials within Bidens administration said it is likely the U.S. will not reach herd immunity and return to some semblance of normalcy until Thanksgiving given the current pace of vaccinations. Members of Bidens own COVID-19 response team are even warning the White House that Bidens vaccination timeline is unrealistic. Officials said the governments less optimistic timelines for herd immunity are mostly driven by the potential fragility of the vaccine supply chain and the emergence of more infectious strains. Sharon Peacock, director of the COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium, said the coronavirus vaccines were so far effective against the B.1.1.7 strain in the United Kingdom. But new mutations might undermine the effectiveness of the shots administered thus far. Peacock told the BBC that the B.1.1.7 variant is concerning because it would circulate for months, only to begin mutating again. The new mutations could greatly affect vaccination efforts towards herd immunity. Therefore, health officials emphasized that current protocols like social distancing and mask-wearing will have to remain in force until the U.S. has achieved herd immunity against COVID-19. Fauci also warned that the country will only fully contain the problem if the pace of vaccinations increases worldwide as well. The Biden Administration is also currently working with pharmaceutical companies to create vaccine booster shots for the new variants. Officials are also looking into building new infrastructures to ramp up testing. (Related: Evidence emerges that COVID tests are faulty. FDA and CDC admit as much.) Go to JoeBiden.news for more articles with updates on Joe Biden and his administration. Sources include: DailyMail.co.uk BBC.com MayoClinic.org Southeast Texas has received and distributed its third 11,000-dose COVID-19 vaccine shipment since two cities, four counties and a private health-care provider joined together to get area residents vaccinated. The doses were distributed Wednesday morning, and public health agencies have been hard at work putting shots in arms and trying to make up for time lost during last weeks freeze. As of Wednesday morning, more than 18,000 doses had been administered, in addition to the 17,000 that were administered across the region before the coalition was formed. The region is about six days, or 5,000 doses, behind because of last weeks winter weather, said Jefferson County Emergency Management Coordinator Mike White. More Information Southeast Texas COVID-19 doses issued and administered as of Wednesday: Beaumont - 8,500 issued; 5,387 administered Port Arthur - 6,500 issued; 2,573 administered Hardin County - 5,200 issued; 2,181 administered Jasper County - 5,200 issued; 3,742 administered Newton County - 900 issued; 300 administered Orange County - 4,500 issued; 2,988 administered Riceland Healthcare - 3,100 issued; 1,057 administered See More Collapse Related: Bars open, business occupancy expands as COVID-19 cases fall However, he said, state officials say the whole state largely is behind because of the weather. Due to the fact were behind, and some jurisdictions more than others, we have the option to request Texas military forces to come in, he said. Ive already spoken with those jurisdictions, and if thats what they need, we can put in a request to the state for that assistance. Jefferson County Judge Jeff Branick said Port Arthur was particularly behind largely because of last weeks near-total loss of water service in some parts of the city. When vaccines were distributed on Wednesday, slight changes in the number of doses allocated to each jurisdiction were made to allow others to catch up. Top hits: Get Beaumont Enterprise stories sent directly to your inbox The county also is working on a plan to use the mobile medical unit to administer vaccinations to rural county residents who couldnt otherwise get to a vaccine site, said County Commissioner Everette Bo Alfred. The county already has a list of residents 65 and older who live in those areas and are expected to be the mobile units first priority, White said. As of Wednesday, more than 50,000 individuals had joined the combined vaccine waiting list. Additional residents signed up with their respective jurisdictions before the waiting list was set up. But at this time, Hardin County Health Department, which also serves Orange County, and the Jasper-Newton County Public Health District have integrated those lists with the one coming from the regional waiting list, according to the judges from each county. kaitlin.bain@beaumontenterprise.com twitter.com/KaitlinBain One of the architects of the Good Friday Agreement Lord Trimble has joined forces with unionist leaders in a legal challenge against the UK government over the Northern Ireland protocol. The former first minister joined with Arlene Foster and a cross-party group who are hitting back at the arrangements governing post-Brexit trade. Lord Trimble, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the historic 1998 peace accord, confirmed to The Telegraph that he would join the action if it ended up in court. The group also includes UUP leader Steve Aiken, TUV leader Jim Allister, DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds, the party's Westminster leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and chief whip Sammy Wilson, as well as former Brexit Party MEP Ben Habib, Eurosceptic peer Kate Hoey. As well as raising concerns about how the protocol flies in the face of the Act of Union 1800 and the Good Friday Agreement, they are also challenging the way in which Northern Ireland will be asked to provide consent for the protocol continuing or ending in 2024. They have instructed John Larkin QC, the former attorney general of Northern Ireland, to seek a judicial review, and have issued a letter before action. The group has sent a letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson in which they claim the protocol is causing "immense" economic damage and is "nothing less than vassalage". They warned of the "pernicious constitutional damage" it has caused and added they will make good on their intention to bring a judicial review unless "you take immediate action to settle a new arrangement for Northern Ireland". Later on Wednesday, Michael Gove is due to resume talks with his EU counterpart Maros Sefcovic as part of the UK-EU joint committee which presides over the arrangements for Northern Ireland and the Brexit deal. Mrs Foster and deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill will also take part in the meeting. Speaking to the BBC's Good Morning Ulster, the DUP leader said she will point out the "untold damage" caused by the protocol to the trading relationship in the internal UK market, contrary to the Internal Market Bill. She said she wants Vice-President of the European Commission Maros Sefcovic to acknowledge the damage caused. "When we push him about the protocol, his answer is more protocol," she said - adding that the extension of current grace periods will only serve as a "sticking plaster". The UK government is seeking to extend a number of grace periods for supermarkets, parcel couriers, chilled meat products and medicines until 2023 in a bid to ease obstacles to trade from GB to NI. "The European Union makes much of the fact that they want to protect the Belfast Agreement, they would do well to listen to the architect of the Belfast Agreement David Trimble as to how he views the protocol and [its] damage," she said. "They have irreparably damaged the east-west [relationship] and what they need to do is recognise that and replace the protocol." Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he is prepared to override the protocol in the event of a failure to reach a compromise with the EU, but that ministers hope to resolve the problems under the existing agreement. Mr Sefcovic said the EU would be open to "pragmatic and flexible solutions" to problems with the protocol, but reiterated that it was a "two way street" and the UK would be expected to step up checks at the border. He warned that "not everything can be solved", adding that there were "inevitable consequences of Brexit." Michael Gove has also confirmed the UK would agree to extend the deadline for approving the Brexit trade deal until April, after the EU requested more time for it to be ratified. The European Commission chose to provisionally apply the treaty before January after a deal was struck at the last-minute. They must now make sure it is fully ratified. NI Secretary of State Brandon Lewis, however, has said the protocol is going nowhere reiterating it was important the government made it work in a "positive" way for business. Shares of Isgec Heavy Engineering, on Wednesday, were up 5 per cent at Rs 487.50 in intra-day trade on the BSE after the company said it has bagged orders for two gas fired boilers from public sector refinery. The stock of the industrial machinery manufacture was trading close to its 52-week high of Rs 488, touched on February 8. The two gas fired boilers will supply steam to the whole petrochemical unit in this green field project. This order continues Isgecs track record of being a leading supplier for the refinery & petrochemical industry and is one more step in its resolve towards strengthening the Make in India initiative of the Government of India, the company said in a exchange filing. Isgec manufactures process equipment, presses, iron & steel castings, and boiler pressure parts. Isgecs EPC portfolio includes turnkey projects for setting up air pollution control equipment, boilers, power plants, sugar plants, distilleries, factories, industrial water treatment facilities, and bulk material handling facilities. Earlier this month, the company said it has recently received two orders one for a Cement Waste Heat Recovery Boiler (CWHRB), and another for conducting Remnant Life Assessment (RLA) study. The company did not disclose the size of the orders. The order for CWHRB is from a leading cement manufacturer for their plant site in Meghalaya. The company said it is committed towards the utilization of waste energy and supporting the cement Industry to generate clean or green power. The second order is for conducting the RLA study has been received from a steel major in Jharkhand for their 3 Boilers. Indian Boiler Regulations 1950 have set certain guidelines under rule 391A, which not only help users to ensure the health of their Boilers, but also ensure safe operation of the Plant. Isgec is certified by the Central Boiler Board to conduct RLA studies under these norms, the company said in exchange filing. In the past one month, the stock has outperformed the market by surging nearly 35 per cent, against 2.4 per cent rise in the S&P BSE Sensex. Let us know what you're seeing and hearing around the community. Submit here Now Open 24 February 2021 On the heels of rapid development, Clarion Pointe, a midscale select-service brand extension franchised by Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH), kicked off the year with the milestone opening of its 25th hotel: the Clarion Pointe in Statesville, North Carolina. The brand now boasts nearly 50 hotels open or in the pipeline, with recent openings in Franklin, Tennessee; Rock Hill, South Carolina; and Beckley, West Virginia; and additional openings anticipated this year in Tallahassee, Florida; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Syracuse, New York. Located at 715 Sullivan Road in Statesville, North Carolina, just outside the Charlotte metropolitan area, this 104-room Clarion Pointe in Statesville allows travelers to the area to be ideally situated near top attractions such as Lake Norman, the largest manmade lake in North Carolina; the Charlotte Motor Speedway; local breweries, and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Like all Clarion Pointe hotels, the brand's newest addition is influenced by the Clarion brand promise of creating social environments while transforming properties with a more modern guest experience. Hotels are specifically designed to appeal to savvy travelers seeking to make the most of their experience, in destinations that are ideally situated near their favorite attractions. Clarion Pointe allows travelers to optimize their stay with "focal pointes," such as: Contemporary design touches that guests will want to share with friends, such as signature murals in the lobby and guestrooms inspired by local points of interest. Thoughtful food and beverage selections, starting with a complimentary breakfast and coffee, all the way through craft beer, select wine and small bites available for purchase in the marketplace. Technology with on-demand connectivity to work or chill out, including 49-inch TVs with casting capabilities and free, streaming-strength Wi-Fi to stream shows from personal devices. Dedicated workout space featuring all the modern essentials, like cardio equipment and a strength-training station, to stay fit to the core. All Choice-branded hotels are participating in Commitment to Clean, an initiative that builds upon the strong foundation of franchisees' longstanding dedication to cleanliness with enhanced training and best practices for cleaning, disinfecting and social distancing. For more information on Commitment to Clean, visit https://www.choicehotels.com/about/commitment-to-clean-hotels. The Clarion Pointe in Statesville was developed by Tika Shah and Jigar Majmundar of Shrina, Inc. For more information on development opportunities, visit choicehotelsdevelopment.com/clarion-pointe. UKs Heathrow Airport Says Passenger Numbers Fell to 1970s Levels Britains Heathrow airport says that 2020 was one of its most challenging years, with passenger levels not seen since the 1970s. Announcing its 2020 financial results on Wednesday, the airport said it suffered an annual loss of 2 billion ($2.8 billion) after overall revenue fell by 62 percent as a result of the devastating impact of COVID-19. 2020 has been one of Heathrows most challenging years, with 2bn in losses. We need next weeks #Budget to support #aviations recovery by extending furlough and providing 100% business rates relief. Read more here: https://t.co/1lUmlofN3f pic.twitter.com/D0QqQHyDki Heathrow Airport (@HeathrowAirport) February 24, 2021 Passenger numbers collapsed to 22.1 million, more than half of whom travelled in January and February 2020, before the first national CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus lockdown was imposed. 2020 has been one of our most challenging yearsbut despite 2 billion of losses and shrinking to passenger levels we havent seen since the 70s, I am hugely proud of the way that our colleagues have kept our passengers safe and the UKs hub airport open for vital supplies throughout, said Heathrow CEO John Holland-Kaye. The airport said it supports Prime Minister Boris Johnsons plan to restart travel and the economy. Under the UK governments lockdown exit plan, published on Monday, international travel will be able to resume on May 17 at the earliest. A general view of aircraft at Heathrow Airport in London, England, on Oct. 11, 2016. (Jack Taylor/Getty Images) Getting aviation moving again will save thousands of jobs and reinvigorate the economy, said Holland-Kaye. Heathrow said it needs more support from the Treasury as government policies over recent months have effectively closed borders. Holland-Kaye added, We need next weeks Budget to support aviations recovery by extending furlough and providing 100 percent business rates relief. He said that the prime minister will have the unique opportunity to secure global agreement on a common international standard for travel when he hosts the G7 in June. Also on Wednesday, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said that the airline industry is expected to remain cash negative throughout 2021. With governments having tightening border restrictions, 2021 is shaping up to be a much tougher year than previously expected, said Alexandre de Juniac, IATAs director-general and CEO. A functioning airline industry can eventually energize the economic recovery from COVID-19. But that wont happen if there are massive failures before the crisis ends, he said. He called on governments to offer more financial support to keep the industry afloat. If governments are unable to open their borders, we will need them to open their wallets with financial relief to keep airlines viable, he said. The LSU Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to split an $810 million energy deal between two contractors, Enwave Energy Corp. and a joint venture that includes Baton Rouge businessman Jim Bernhard and the national firm Johnson Controls Inc. The LSU board did not disclose the price of the deal during the meeting, but LSU officials confirmed it afterward. The agreement calls for the university to pay Enwave $27 million per year over the next three decades. How much money Enwave makes off the deal will fluctuate annually based on natural gas prices and the price of the energy Enwave produces for LSU, said LSU spokesman Ernie Ballard. Enwave will pay Louisiana Energy Partners the name of the joint venture between Bernhard LLC and Johnson Controls directly, instead of LSU paying both entities, Ballard said. +2 LSU board set to approve huge energy deal next week as two companies negotiate to share it The LSU Board of Supervisors will determine the fate next week of a lucrative energy contract that multiple board members say is likely to be The agreement calls for Enwave to operate and maintain LSU's energy plants for the next 30 years. The company will also provide financing for initial improvements to LSU's energy plant and distribution systems, which LSU will pay back later on. Louisiana Energy Partners will design and build LSU's energy plant and distribution systems. If more upgrades and infrastructure are needed in the future, Enwave will have the chance to finance them. Louisiana Energy Partners will also have the chance to design, build and finance future building mechanical system upgrades in the future. LSU will now create a cooperative endeavor agreement including the university, the LSU Real Estate and Facilities Foundation, Enwave and Louisiana Energy Partners over how to modernize aging campus energy systems that heat, cool and power the university. +8 How an LSU energy contract has spurred licensing complaints, political pressure and more After a tumultuous year on LSUs campus, an effort to modernize the energy systems that the university pays $32 million a year to power has be LSU board members billed the agreement as an important cost-savings measure for LSU going forward. The university budgets $30 million annually for utilities, operations and maintenance. Ballard said that the $27 million annual payments to Enwave position LSU to save $3 million annually over 30 years or a $90 million cost savings total. He said the project will not affect tuition and student fees. This is exactly the way its supposed to work, said Robert Dampf, the LSU board chairman during the meeting. He said board members used their expertise to help negotiate with the two companies and to bring the deal over the finish line. The process for awarding the contract has been steeped in both secrecy and controversy for several months. LSU held no public talks with either contractor during their negotiations, and the university also never publicly released its criteria for awarding the contract despite taxpayers and students footing the bill. +2 Both contenders for major LSU energy deal lack contractor's license, board says The two entities vying for a lucrative, long-term contract to power LSUs energy systems both lack a contractor's license, the Louisiana State Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Consultants from the firm KPMG, hired by LSU, warned the board in September that LSU was unlikely to get the best possible deal or the best expertise on building and maintaining energy systems without inviting public bids. The consultants said they had already reached out to several companies that expressed interest in bidding on the project. While KPMG consultants have been deeply involved in the process, none spoke or made a public recommendation for the deal on Tuesday. And nearly a year ago, Interim LSU President Tom Galligan noted that "bidding is usually not a bad thing, when he spoke of the energy contract. But the board rejected the advice. Instead, board members voted five months ago to conduct a 90-day negotiation period with the two outfits that already have existing cooperative endeavor agreements with LSU. Those two outfits were Enwave and Louisiana Energy Partners. +3 In LSU's Drake Davis case, witnesses said they feared wealthy businessman's retaliation When LSU Police investigated allegations in 2018 that a football player was abusing the tennis player he was dating, multiple witnesses told o Enwave runs the energy systems for LSU Health Sciences in New Orleans. We look forward to bringing the same success weve seen in New Orleans to this project and continuing to create benefits for the state, said Enwave president and CEO Doug Castleberry in a news release Tuesday. And Bernhard's companies have done plenty of work for LSU and other state offices in the past. Bernhard Mechanical LLC, then run by Jim Bernhard's brother, Kenneth, contracted with LSU in 2003 to build a cogeneration plant on campus. The plant is still operating today, but its construction resulted in a major lawsuit between LSU and Bernhard Mechanical, along with a state Ethics Board scandal. Our long-standing relationship with LSU gives our team deep insight into the universitys facilities and their energy systems, said Bernhards CEO, Ed Tinsley, in a news release. As a company with deep roots in Louisiana, we share the Baton Rouge community and its history and future. Any promise made to LSU is a promise made to our own family. Two months before LSU started negotiating with Bernhard and Enwave, Gov. John Bel Edwards offered Jim Bernhard an appointment to the LSU Board of Supervisors. But Bernhard, a major supporter of the governor and political donor to the Democratic Party, turned down the seat without explanation. Sitting on the LSU board would have prohibited him from doing business directly with the university. During the negotiation process, Bernhard's companies filed a complaint against Enwave with the Louisiana State Licensing Board for Contractors, alleging Enwave did not have a contractor's license. The licensing board's executive director said last month the joint venture between Bernhard and Johnson Control also lacked a contractor's license "in accordance with its legal entity name. However, the contractor's license issue did not end up sidelining either candidate from receiving the LSU deal. Liberal MP Pam Damoff responds to a question during Question Period in the House of Commons in Ottawa, Canada, on May 9, 2019. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press) Commons Committee Censures Firearms Group Over Dangerous Comments Firearms Group Maintains 'Nothing Said Advocated Violence Against Anyone' A parliamentary committee has censured a firearms group over dangerous comments made by its president, an accusation he rejects, about the federal governments recent gun control legislation. The Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security voted on Feb. 22 to condemn comments made by Sheldon Clare, president of the National Firearms Association (NFA), on Bill C-21, the new firearm legislation tabled by the Liberal government on Feb. 16, during a video podcast hosted by the NFA last week. The motion, initiated by Liberal MP Pam Damoff, was endorsed by all parties except the Conservatives, whose committee members abstained from voting. During the committee meeting, Damoff cited the video podcast in which Clare recounted a conversation with someone who suggested Canadians should construct guillotines in response to such government tyranny. I had a call from a person today who suggested that we needed to revisit our old woodworking and metalworking skills and construct guillotines again. And that would really be the best kind of committee of public safety, to get that re-established. If they want to make it about public safety, that was the way. The sound of this persons voice is not one that is joking. He was not joking, Clare said during the video podcast. I dont think they understand that this is not New Zealand, this is not the United Kingdom, this is not Australia. This is a country made up of people who have been here for thousands of years and are aboriginal people. Immigrants from Europe who fled tyranny, who fought against tyranny, and have no truck with tyranny and they know tyranny when they see it and this my friends, is tyranny, he said, referring to the bill. Damoff told the committee that this kind of language is dangerous. Sharing these comments on their platform can lead to violence. As we saw in the United States, the storming of the U.S. Capitol by an armed mob was spurred on by similar language. These calls for violence against those who want a safer community are not tolerable, and it is incumbent on all of us to condemn them, she said. I think we need to take a stand. We need to shut down this kind of language, this way of talking and thinking thats ok to talk about building guillotines and laughing about those kinds of comments in a public forum, she added. A gun owner holds a sign as they participate in a rally organized by the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights against the governments new gun regulations, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Sept. 12, 2020. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press) Clare retorted the views that his comments were advocating violence. Ive merely related comments from upset people who have a real big problem with tyranny. And I think that the virtue-signaling woke liberal left has a problem with being called out as being tyrants, he told the Global News on Feb. 19. The NFA president also released a statement in response to the committee motion on Feb. 22. I make no apology for any comments made during our NFA Talk podcastlike them or notwe have the right to free speech, at least for now, Clare said. Nothing said advocated violence against anyone. The firearms license, registration, and classification system are all failed Liberal gun control and warrant challenging. The May 1, 2020 Order in Council and Bill C-21 proposing a sweeping theft of peoples lawfully obtained property is also unacceptable, he added. The NFA maintains that our strong Canadian firearms heritage and culture matters, and we shall continue to defend it with vigour. Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs said her party takes threats against politicians extremely seriously, citing examples of threats she and her staff have received in the past. But she suggested that if Clares comments constitute a threat, they should be investigated by the appropriate authorities and discussed only behind closed doors by committee members. She also suggested Clares comments may have been taken out of context. Liberal committee chair John McKay told Stubbs that the authorities have in fact been informed about Clares comments. With files from The Canadian Press Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi received a call from US President Joe Biden on Feb. 23 the first call from Biden to an Arab leader and the second call to the Middle East after Israel. Discussions centered on bilateral relations, strengthening and developing partnerships, cooperation on supporting security and peace in the region, and continuing their partnership in fighting the Islamic State (IS), according to a tweet by Kadhimi. Selecting Iraq as the first country to contact in the Arab world indicates that Iraq remains at the top of the US priority list in the Middle East. This comes despite the fact that the United States is reducing its troops in Iraq as part of the US-Iraq strategic dialogue that began in 2020 to build a comprehensive framework between the two countries. US military forces in Iraq were cut to 2,500 within about 6 months after it was more than 5,000. This number is the lowest level in the nearly two decades the United States has been in Iraq, according to the Pentagon. The US troop reduction reflects "the increased capabilities of the Iraqi security forces," said former US Secretary of Defense Chris Miller. The two leaders' focus on supporting the region's security and peace and continuing the fight against IS shows there is no change in US policy in Iraq in terms of counterterrorism and maintaining security. This also reinforces Miller's statement last January that US troop reduction "does not equate to a change in US policy," adding, "We will continue to have a counterterrorism platform in Iraq to support partner forces with air power and intelligence." This comes in conjunction with NATO's Feb. 22 decision to expand the activities and increase the size of NATOs training mission in Iraq. Allied defense ministers [decided to increase] the size of NATO's [training mission in] Iraq from 500 personnel to around 4,000, and to expand training activities to include more Iraqi security institutions and areas beyond Baghdad, NATO's statement read. The above information supports Kadhimi's statement after talking to Biden that strategic dialogue continues to serve as a roadmap for the future. In fact, strategic dialogue has reduced tension in the region without affecting the security status or harming Iraq's relationship with the United States, which already seems stronger and more strategic under Biden when compared with the former president, Donald Trump, whose interest in Iraq was mostly due to his agenda against Iran. In terms of Iraq's security situation, Iraq has already proven its ability to take on IS recently, despite the reduction of US troops. Several high-ranking IS commanders were killed over the last few months by Iraqi forces, and a number of successful operations were launched in different parts of Iraq. A military operation occurred last week in Tarmiyah in northern Baghdad, killing IS wali Shukor al-Mashhadani and destroying sleeper cells there. Last month, IS's highest commander in Iraq, Abu Yasser Al-Issawi, who serves as deputy caliph in the organization, was also killed. A large IS network was destroyed last December in southern Mosul by counterterrorism forces, killing dozens and cleansing the entire area. Despite the abovementioned facts, rockets being fired at US facilities remains a big challenge for the Iraqi government in terms of maintaining its relationship with the United States. Iraqi security forces captured Hosam Azergawi the engineer of the rocket attacks last December that targeted US facilities, embassies and bases along with other militants who were arrested during the investigation. The rocket attacks stopped after Azergawi's arrest but began again last week, as unknown militias attacked a US base in Erbil's international airport Feb. 16 and the US Embassy in Baghdad Feb. 22. But Biden does not appear willing to give up on Iraq for the recent security breaches, and the two leaders agreed that people responsible for the recent rocket attacks against Iraqi and coalition personnel "must be held fully to account," according to a White House statement. "Iraq will not be an arena for settling scores, and the absurd missiles are an attempt to impede the government's progress and embarrass it. But our security services will reach the perpetrators, and they will be brought before the public opinion," Kadhimi said Feb. 23 in a Cabinet meeting. In terms of the economy, the United States is a key member of the Iraq Economic Contact Group that was formed last October to support Iraq during an economic crisis. The European Union, Japan and Saudi Arabia, among others, are members of this group. Iraq prepared last year its first financial and fiscal reform plan known as the White Paper; the second part of the White Paper was released early this month. This year's budget is also the first budget formed based on an economic reform plan. As a result of Iraq's economic reform, Standard & Poor's credit rating has reaffirmed Iraq's ratings as Stable. This is a massive plus for Iraq and confirms the international financial market's support of Iraq's economic policies. In terms of foreign relations, Iraq's recent openness to the world and its active diplomacy has created a more stable status for the country in the region and the world. Iraq has kept its strategic relationship with the United States a top priority in spite of the militias' actions. Moreover, the Iraqi government has improved its relationships with Jordan and Egypt as part of the New Levant, a term used by Kadhimi during his trip to Jordan last year. Simultaneously, Iraq is improving its relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf in general by getting them to invest in the country, connect power grids and participate in other projects. This has not come at the expense of Iraq's relationship with Iran, which continues to grow. The Iraqi government is signing the Basra-Shalamcheh rail connection next week, connecting Iran's Shalamcheh border crossing to the port of Basra in southeast Iraq, as a sign of the growing relationship between the two countries. All of the above indicates that Iraq will remain at the core of US policy in the Middle East despite the great challenges both countries face in maintaining their strategic relationship due to the ongoing conflict in the region between different axes. An Alabama House committee held a public hearing this morning on a bill that would remove the requirement that people give an excuse to cast an absentee ballot. The Constitution, Campaigns, and Elections Committee heard from officials for and against the bill by Rep. Laura Hall, D-Huntsville. Committee Chair Bob Fincher, R-Woodland, said the committee would vote on the bill next week. Grace Newcombe, communications director for Secretary of State John Merrill, spoke in favor of the bill. Rep. Adline Clarke, D-Mobile, also spoke in favor and read a letter from the president of the League of Women Voters of Alabama, Barbara Caddell, urging lawmakers to approve the change. Pike County Probate Judge Michael Bunn, Houston County Circuit Clerk Carla Woodall, and Randolph County Circuit Clerk Chris May spoke in opposition to the bill. Alabama law now requires voters to check a box on the absentee ballot application saying they will be out of town on election day, or cannot go to the polls because of sickness or physical infirmity, their work schedule, or for other reasons. Newcombe said the excuse requirement serves no purpose, partly because there is almost no effort to verify the legitimacy. Last year, Merrill issued an emergency rule because of the COVID-19 pandemic that effectively waived the excuse requirement. The rule allowed any voter to vote absentee by checking the box that says I have a physical illness or infirmity which prevents my attendance at the polls. As a result, Alabama voters shattered the record with more than 300,000 absentee ballots during the general election, more than triple the previous high of 88,000 set in 2012. But Newcombe said theres no indication the surge in absentee ballots caused problems with fraud or counting votes on election day. The surge in mail-in ballots in some states was one of the issues raised by the Donald Trump campaign and Trump supporters as they made claims the election was stolen. The outcome in Alabama was not questioned. Trump carried the state with 62% of the vote. Newcombe said a requirement for a photo ID with the absentee ballot application, approved by the Legislature in 2019, and the witness requirement for the application and witness or notary requirement for the ballot are effective safeguards against fraud. Since April of 2015, the secretary of states office has reviewed 1,572 complaints of voter fraud that resulted in only five convictions of absentee voter fraud, Newcombe said. The witness and notary requirements, not the excuse requirement, were important in those cases, she said. Bunn, the probate judge in Pike County, said elimination of the excuse requirement was a step toward reducing election integrity and could lead to the elimination of other requirements. In a vacuum it may sound fine. But its death by a thousand cuts, Bunn said. May said he has been circuit clerk in Randolph County and has been the absentee election manager for the county for 25 elections. He said the infrequency of absentee ballot fraud cases shows the laws in place now are effective. Its all part of a proven process that works, May said. By removing that excuse or reason, you weaken that process. Why do we need to make changes to a system and a process that works? He might be eligible to receive a full months salary for his two days of work, which would be about $5,788, according to Comptroller Susana Mendoza. She introduced legislation to end the practice that allows state legislators to claim a month of salary for one day of work a loophole that has encouraged lawmakers on their way out to resign at the beginning of the month and collect pay for the remainder. Army Maj. Gen. Scott Efflandt, who was fired as commander of Fort Hood, Texas, last year after a soldier's brutal murder, has been reassigned to U.S. Army North -- but not in the leadership job that was first announced. The Army initially said Tuesday that Efflandt would be deputy commanding general of ARNORTH. But on Wednesday, Army spokeswoman Cynthia Smith issued a follow-up statement saying he will instead be the special assistant to ARNORTH's commanding general, Lt. Gen. Laura Richardson. "This is a temporary reassignment pending final outcome of the AR 15-6 investigation," Smith said. Read Next: Military Leaders Given 2 Weeks to Show Their Sexual Assault Prevention Efforts Are Working Last September, the Army replaced Efflandt as Fort Hood's acting commander and launched a new investigation into the chain of command's actions relating to the murder of Spc. Vanessa Guillen. Guillen, a 20-year-old soldier with the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, was allegedly murdered and dismembered by Spc. Aaron Robinson in April 2020. Her remains were discovered and identified months later; Robinson took his own life July 1 when police approached him. A civilian from nearby Killeen, Texas, 22-year-old Cecily Aguilar, has been charged with allegedly helping Robinson dispose of Guillen's body. The murder prompted widespread outrage at how the military had repeatedly failed to protect Guillen before her death and drew renewed attention to the broader problem of sexual assault and harassment in the military. Her family said she had been repeatedly sexually harassed in her workplace, but little was done to help her. An independent review of Fort Hood's culture, released in December, found its leaders allowed a command climate to fester in which sexual assault and harassment were commonplace and victims were forced to slip into "survival mode." A bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Reps. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., and Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., introduced the "I am Vanessa Guillen Act" to reform how the military handles reports, investigations and prosecutions of sexual assault and harassment cases. The Army fired 14 leaders at Fort Hood, as well as Guillens entire chain of command, including leaders at the squad, platoon, company and battalion level, as part of disciplinary actions following the release of the Fort Hood Independent Review Committee report. Efflandt had also previously been slated to take over leadership of the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, which would have been a key command milestone in his career. However, that transfer was put on hold last summer as the investigation into systematic problems at the base continued. -- Stephen Losey can be reached at stephen.losey@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StephenLosey. Related: Army Replaces Fort Hood CO, Names 4-Star to Lead Vanessa Guillen Murder Investigation * Username This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. Choose wisely! WASHTENAW COUNTY, MI Effective immediately, a persons immigration status does not matter to the criminal justice system in Washtenaw County. Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit announced Wednesday, Feb. 24 that his office will not coordinate with federal immigration enforcement efforts, nor will it report noncitizen civilians, crime survivors, witnesses or defendants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), issuing a new policy directive on how his office will handle cases where previously a persons immigration status would be in question. Todays policy directive, fundamentally, is about building trust in our immigrant communities, Savit wrote in an announcement. We know that a fear of collaboration with federal law enforcement makes noncitizens less likely to report serious crimes. That makes all of us less safe. The policy also advises assistant prosecutors to avoid case outcomes which will adversely affect a defendants immigration status and to instead consider alternative dispositions for lower-level charges. Additionally, the new policy prioritizes the issuance of special T-Visas for noncitizen victims of human trafficking and U-Visas for noncitizens who affirmatively assist law enforcement investigations. We are going to do everything in our power to protect noncitizensmost prominently trafficking victimswho come through our system, Savit wrote. That is why we are drawing a line in the sand and not collaborating on federal immigration enforcement efforts. It is also why we are prioritizing the issuance of special visas for noncitizen crime survivors. The policy update, which is 75 pages in its entirety, includes the Prosecutors Guide for Fair and Appropriate Policies and Practices for Noncitizen Defendants and Victims created by the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, a legal resource center for Michigans immigrant communities. In announcing the policy change, Savit highlighted several Michigan criminal cases where individuals were deported for minor offences including the case of Jimmy Aldaoud. Aldaoud, a diabetic 41-year-old Detroit man and refugee, was deported to Iraq in 2019, dying two months later after being unable to get insulin in Baghdad. Savit, who was elected in 2020, has issued a variety of new policy changes in the prosecutors office including the ending of cash bail and the rescinding of zero-tolerance policies. New Michigan prosecutor has lenient policies on everything from drugs to prostitution. But is it allowed? Legal experts asked about the wave of policy changes concluded the changes fell well within a prosecutor right to use discretion. To read the immigration policy in its entirety, click here. To review all of Savits policy directives, click here. More from The Ann Arbor News: In-person learning coming to Ann Arbor Public Schools in March Homewood Suites hotel with solar panels, electric charging stations to open in Ann Arbor Over $200M in unfunded liabilities highlighted in Ann Arbor pension and health care report LOS ANGELES, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- New survey data from SimplePractice , an EngageSmart healthcare solution and leading EHR platform for private practice, shows that therapists are under more pressure than ever before to keep up with client demand, and with rising levels of depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders in both their patients and themselves. While not surprising, the data does speak to specific areas of concern to therapists that could be addressed with changes to policy specifically regarding mental health services and telehealth coverage, as well as improved access to childcare and social services for therapists and their patients, respectively. The annual State of the Profession survey from SimplePractice was conducted between January 11 - 21 of this year and features the observations of more than 2,400 therapists, psychologists, and counselors nationwide. Question topics included the use of telehealth in response to the pandemic, post-pandemic plans and concerns, insurance and patient payment options, and other areas pertaining to the business, well-being, and state of therapy in early 2021. Burnout on the Rise Compared to the last SimplePractice State of the Profession survey in late 2019, professional burnout among therapists in early 2021 has increased significantly from 14% to 20% in a little over a year. While the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly played a large role, deeper dives into the data reveal some key differences among respondents: Reports of burnout were more prevalent in younger age groups, with 27% of 35 & under saying they "often" or "always" have feelings of professional burnout. Burnout is more likely when a providers' clients are almost all affected by a social situation(s) (poverty, unemployment, lack of education, drug addiction, etc.). Corresponding to the points above, 19% of early-career therapists reported that half or more of their clients are affected by a social situation compared to only 15% of mid and late-career therapists. At the same time, more therapists than ever reported that they would recommend the profession to younger people, which has typically been a key indicator of job satisfaction. 87% said they would recommend their profession to young people. Telehealth, Insurance Coverage a Looming Concern Responses to the survey included 1,800 written comments that reflect a high level of anxiety regarding continued patient insurance coverage for telehealth once the pandemic is over. This corresponds to other data points revealed in the survey that show most respondents plan to continue offering telehealth: 62% of respondents accept some or all clients that use insurance to pay or their services 88% of respondents said they plan to continue offering telehealth services post-pandemic. What makes this noteworthy is that 64% had never even used telehealth before the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey closed with this open-ended question: "Please share any closing thoughts (For example, how this unprecedented period has been for you; how it has impacted on your practice? What have you learned? What keeps you up at night?)" Most comments emphasized that telehealth had not only saved their livelihood but allowed their clients to continue treatment. A sampling of written responses to the question above include the following from two different respondents: "My business would've failed without telehealth as an option." "If insurance companies had not allowed telehealth, I'd be in a bad financial situation." These findings are noteworthy because many mental health professionals had voiced concerns about the effectiveness of remote therapy compared to in-person sessionsdespite the growing research that says otherwise. Over 165 comments mention letting go of office leases in the last year and having no place to practice (or the ability to pay for office space) outside the home, making telehealth more vital than ever to the livelihood of many practitioners. Supporting the needs of therapists must be priority says CEO Howard Spector "We've known for years that the people who have dedicated their lives and careers to the mental health and well-being of others are too often disregarded when it comes to their own needs as clinicians and small business owners," says SimplePractice CEO Howard Spector. "I can only hope that this dataalong with so much other research and evidence out there to back it upwill help to finally put these front-line workers on the priority list for support from policymakers, insurance carriers, and even public perception. The work they do is important in 'normal' times and beyond critical in the midst of the largest pandemic the world has seen in the last 100 years." Additional highlights from the SimplePractice State of the Profession survey include: A shortage of other mental health professionals and limited internet connectivity in rural areas are concerns for therapists in rural areas, which speaks to both the importance of continuing telehealth coverage and improving broadband in communities across the country. Therapists with more children at home reported higher levels of anxiety and challenges in finding space to work within their own homes; this speaks to wider challenges faced by working parents in the midst of the pandemic. Many questions from SimplePractice's last State of the Profession survey in the late 2019 were repeated for a comparative data sample and based on the standard State of the Profession physician survey. Findings also closely reflected those of the American Psychological Association's November 2020 survey of 1,800 mental health professionals, which also showed an increase in patient anxiety in depression and an increase in practitioner burnout. Access to the full range of survey data is available upon request. A full report with additional data points from the survey will be released in e-book form this spring. For more information, contact the SimplePractice team at [email protected] . About SimplePractice SimplePractice, an EngageSmart solution, gives health and wellness practitioners everything they need to succeed as entrepreneurs. With telehealth, scheduling, billing, form intake, continuing education, and more all available on one elegant, HIPAA-compliant, and HITRUST-platform, SimplePractice is the leading cloud-based EHR software for private practitioners. More than 75,000 practitioners trust SimplePractice to run their business, advance in their profession, and increase their capacity to help others, all without sacrificing the quality of life and control over their own destiny that should come with running a private practice. For more information on SimplePractice, visit SimplePractice.com and join the conversation on LinkedIn , Facebook and Twitter . Methodology The State of the Profession survey was conducted online within the United States from January 11 through January 21, 2021. A randomly selected sample of SimplePractice customers were invited to participate. In total, 2,461 respondents completed the survey. This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of sampling error can be calculated. Media Contact: Katie Jacobs/Nicole Bestard Quarter Horse PR [email protected] SOURCE SimplePractice Related Links www.simplepractice.com COLUMBIA Another Midlands school district is considering whether to add its name to the hundreds nationwide suing e-cigarette manufacturer Juul. Richland One trustees voted unanimously Feb. 23 to let Superintendent Craig Witherspoon gather information on legal costs and other details related to possibly joining a class-action lawsuit. Trustees could authorize taking legal action against the manufacturer next month. If that happens, the 24,000-student district would join several others in the Palmetto State suing Juul, including Greenville County and Lexington One. Trustees in Richland County School District Two considered such a move earlier this month, but deadlocked on a 3-3 vote despite support from Superintendent Baron Davis. Plaintiffs have said Juul's products are harmful to students, driving up health care costs and disciplinary problems within school districts. According to Drugwatch, a Florida-based consumer advocacy group, 758 class-action suits have been filed against Juul as of July, with many claiming its marketing practices target minors. Company officials have denied the allegations. But the health effects of e-cigarette consumption are clear, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported. A February 2020 agency report found more than 2,800 people across the country were hospitalized because of lung complications tied to e-cigarettes, with 68 deaths. And a 2019 survey of youth tobacco use concluded that 22 percent of South Carolina teens used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days. Juul launched an assembly plant in Lexington County in May 2019 to make e-cigarettes, a project that was expected to employ about 500 people. But the company closed it down in November, citing poor market conditions among strong political pushback. The closure also affected Flex, an international electronics manufacturer that was a subcontractor to the vaping company with a West Columbia site next to the Juul plant near the Columbia Metropolitan Airport. Before the Juul deal, Flex had about 230 full-time employees producing products for other industries. New Delhi: The Union Cabinet approved a proposal to impose President's Rule in Puducherry on Wednesday, after the Congress-led government in the union territory lost a vote of confidence motion in Puducherry Assembly. Announcing the Cabinet's decision, Union Minister Prakash Javadekar said that the decision was taken as no party had claimed to form a government following the resignation of Chief Minister V Narayansamy. In Puducherry, the CM has resigned and nobody has claimed to form the govt & therefore the LG has recommended suspending the 14th Assembly. Now, our approval will be sent to the President. After his approval, the Assembly will stand dissolved: Union Minister Prakash Javadekar pic.twitter.com/xKtVimaeW4 ANI (@ANI) February 24, 2021 Earlier this week, the Congress government led by V Narayansamy lost the floor test, which led to the Lieutenant General recommending a President's Rule in the UT and the Union Cabinet has approved the same, the Union Minister said. After the President's nod, the assembly will get dissolved, Javadekar said, while adding that further necessary steps for administrative work in Puducherry would be taken soon. He also noted that the model code of conduct was expected to come into effect soon after the Election Commission announces the dates for elections there, along with four states. On Monday, Puducherry Chief Minister V Narayanaswamy submitted his resignation to Lieutenant Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan as his government lost the majority ahead of the floor test in the Assembly. Speaker VP Sivakolundhu announced that the Chief Minister could not prove his majority in the Assembly and adjourned the house sine die. Earlier, Lieutenant Governor Kiran Bedi was removed from the position and Telangana governor Tamilisai Soundrarajan directed the chief minister to prove his majority in Assembly. Puducherry is likely to go to assembly polls in April-May. Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) -Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. (TSX: AVL) (OTCQB: AVLNF) ("Avalon" or the "Company") is pleased to report on its Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance ("ESG") Risk Rating following an independent audit of the Company's business practices and policies performed by Sustainalytics, a Morningstar company, as first announced on November 3, 2020. Avalon's overall management of material ESG issues is strong. No events or policies were identified that may negatively impact stakeholders, the environment or the Company's operations. Sustainalytics is a leading ESG research, ratings and data firm. It assesses ESG risks of companies on a scale of 0-100, with 0 indicating the lowest risk. In January 2021, Avalon received an ESG Risk Rating of 28.9 in its industry, Diversified Metals, and ranked among the top 5% of 150 industry companies analyzed globally. Avalon is among a growing number of companies focusing exclusively on clean tech minerals development assessed per the Sustainalytics' ESG Risk Ratings methodology. It is due to this focus on a variety of rare metals and minerals that it was classified as part of the Diversified Metals industry group. While this relative ranking for Avalon is derived from a total score comparison with other companies in the industry, the five peers identified in the summary ESG Risk Rating report are meant to provide an overview per the market cap range than any direct score impact on Avalon's score. While Avalon was classified as part of an industry group that includes mainly producing mining companies, this simply reflects the fact that Sustainalytics has not previously provided an ESG risk rating for a development stage company focused on critical minerals like Avalon. Sustainalytics' ESG Risk Ratings provide investors with third-party validation of the company's sustainability performance, along with insights into why certain ESG issues are considered material for a company and how well a company is managing those risks. The benefits of obtaining an ESG Risk Rating include the ability to provide better access to ESG investment capital, and the ability to gain commercial benefit from the rating externally with creditors, suppliers and other stakeholders. Comments Avalon's President and CEO, Don Bubar, "Avalon is pleased to be formally recognized as a leader in ESG performance. This third-party validation of our business model for sustainable development of critical minerals for clean technology will be an asset for us going forward, both in attracting capital to and in attracting downstream consumers of our products looking for sustainably produced materials." About Sustainalytics Sustainalytics, a Morningstar Company, is a leading ESG research, ratings and data firm that supports investors around the world with the development and implementation of responsible investment strategies. For more than 25 years, the firm has been at the forefront of developing high-quality, innovative solutions to meet the evolving needs of global investors. Today, Sustainalytics works with hundreds of the world's leading asset managers and pension funds who incorporate ESG and corporate governance information and assessments into their investment processes. Sustainalytics also works with hundreds of companies and their financial intermediaries to help them consider sustainability in policies, practices and capital projects. With 16 offices globally, Sustainalytics has more than 650 staff members, including more than 200 analysts with varied multidisciplinary expertise across more than 40 industry groups. For more information, visit www.sustainalytics.com. About Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. is a Canadian mineral development company specializing in sustainably-produced materials for clean technology. The Company now has four advanced stage projects, providing investors with exposure to lithium, tin and indium, as well as rare earth elements, tantalum, cesium and zirconium. Avalon is currently focusing on developing its Separation Rapids Lithium Project near Kenora, Ontario while looking at several new project opportunities, including re-activating its 100%-owned Lilypad Cesium-Tantalum Project in northwestern Ontario. Social responsibility and environmental stewardship are corporate cornerstones. For questions and feedback, please email: Donald Bubar Avalon President and CEO ir@AvalonAM.com. This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements that no events or policies were identified that may negatively impact stakeholders, the environment or the Company's operations, that the benefits of obtaining an ESG Risk Rating include the ability to provide better access to ESG investment capital, and the ability to gain commercial benefit from the rating externally with creditors, suppliers and other stakeholders and that the risk rating will will be an asset for Avalon, both in attracting capital to and in attracting downstream consumers of Avlaon's products looking for sustainably produced materials. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "potential", "scheduled", "anticipates", "continues", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "scheduled", "targeted", "planned", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be" or "will not be" taken, reached or result, "will occur" or "be achieved". Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of Avalon to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions management believes to be reasonable at the time such statements are made. Although Avalon has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from expected results described in forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to the parties not successfully negotiating a definitive purchase and sale agreement, the TSX not approving the transaction, the transaction not being completed on the terms set out herein, or at all, the expected benefits of the transaction and future opportunities arising out of the proposed acquisition not being realized, unanticipated market conditions, as well as those risk factors set out in the Company's current Annual Information Form, Management's Discussion and Analysis and other disclosure documents available under the Company's profile at www.SEDAR.com. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Such forward-looking statements have been provided for the purpose of assisting investors in understanding the Company's plans and objectives with respect to its proposed acquisition of 2333383 and may not be appropriate for other purposes. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Avalon does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that are contained herein, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75338 remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Completion of research and development phase for HaluGen's Psychedelics Genetic Test Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Entheon Biomedical Corp. (CSE: ENBI) (FSE: 1XU1) ("Entheon" or the "Company"), a biotechnology company focused on developing psychedelic medicines to treat addiction, provides a production update on HaluGen Life Sciences Inc. ("HaluGen"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Entheon, which is in the business of developing and commercializing a genetic test designed to identify specific DNA biomarkers in order to gauge the risk and potential of adverse reactions toward hallucinogenic drugs. Following the Company's announcement dated January 14, 2021, detailing Entheon's acquisition of HaluGen, the Company confirms that HaluGen's proprietary psychedelics genetic test kit and technology platform has completed research and development and is nearing commercial production. In tandem with its research and development partner, Lobo Genetics Inc. ("Lobo"), HaluGen has successfully developed a turn-key operation to build, order, ship, process and deliver its Psychedelics Genetic Test. HaluGen's platform builds upon Lobo's existing genetic testing capabilities for both research and direct to consumer applications and is the industry's first comprehensive pre-screening genetic test for psychedelics. HaluGen's technology platform also includes five pre-screening assessment surveys encompassing mental health, family history and lifestyle risk factors. By combining both genetic biomarkers and personalized data points, HaluGen's pre-screening platform can help individuals that are considering psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to gain key insights into safer and personalized psychedelic therapies. "We are thrilled at the progress made by HaluGen since the acquisition, as it prepares to launch its proprietary genetic testing service on a commercial scale," said Chief Executive Officer of Entheon, Timothy Ko. "The commercial readiness of HaluGen's technology platform and genetic testing kit is an important achievement in executing our mission to developing tools that increase safety and outcome measures by screening patients for underlying psychiatric disorders prior to the administration of psychedelic molecules. We feel the widespread availability of this technology represents an important step forward, providing an additional layer of safety and confidence, widening the scope of patients and individuals who can feel confident accessing psychedelic medicines." Lobo has fulfilled its performance milestone in accordance with a product development agreement dated November 13, 2020, as amended on January 14, 2021 (the "Product Development Agreement"), among the Company, HaluGen and Lobo, thus the Company has allotted and issued 900,000 common shares to Lobo, pursuant to the Product Development Agreement. The shares are subject to a hold period of four months and one day. About Entheon Biomedical Corp. Entheon is a biotechnology research and development company committed to developing and commercializing a portfolio of safe and effective Dimethyltryptamine based psychedelic therapeutic products ("DMT Products") for the purposes of treating addiction and substance use disorders. Subject to obtaining all requisite regulatory approvals and permits, Entheon intends to generate revenue through the sale of its DMT Products to physicians, clinics and licensed psychiatrists in the United States, certain countries in the European Union and throughout Canada. About HaluGen Life Sciences Inc. HaluGen has developed a DNA testing and personalized psychedelic pre-screening platform that provides genetic, personal and familial insights to better inform the psychedelic experience, with the goal of improving patient care and reducing side effects and risk. HaluGen's genetic-based psychedelic pre-screening platform helps evaluate an individual's overall sensitivity and risk profile when using hallucinogenic drugs. This platform is the first of its kind with test results within days. https://www.halugen.com For more information, please contact the Company at: Entheon Biomedical Corp. Joseph Cullen, Investor Relations Telephone: +1 (778) 919-8615 joe@entheonbiomedical.com https://www.entheonbiomedical.com For media inquiries, please contact Crystal Quast at: Bullseye Corporate Crystal Quast Telephone: +1 (647) 529-6364 Quast@BullseyeCorporate.com Cautionary Note on Forward Looking Information This news release includes certain forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, statements with respect to HaluGen's genetic testing kit, potential market, generation of revenue by the Company, the efficacy of the products, and the anticipated business plans and timing of future activities of the Company, are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Often, but not always, forward looking information can be identified by words such as "pro forma", "plans", "expects", "will", "may", "should", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", "believes", "potential" or variations of such words including negative variations thereof, and phrases that refer to certain actions, events or results that may, could, would, might or will occur or be taken or achieved. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such risks and other factors include, among others, the Company being able to follow through with anticipated business plans and timing of future activities of the Company, completion of the milestones in connection with the issuance of the Compensation Shares, the ability of the Company to obtain sufficient financing to fund its business activities and plans, delays in obtaining regulatory approvals (including of the Canadian Securities Exchange), changes in laws, regulations and policies affecting the Company's operations and the Company's limited operating history. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements in this presentation or incorporated by reference herein, except as otherwise required by law. The Canadian Securities Exchange has not approved nor disapproved the contents of this news release. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75297 After reviewing thousands of pages of financial documents, provisional liquidators have not identified a single genuine document that missing businesswoman Melissa Caddick provided to her investors. Bruce Gleeson and Daniel Soire from Jones Partners, the court-appointed provisional liquidators of Ms Caddicks company Maliver, have spent the past two months forensically reconstructing her financial affairs. Melissa Caddick has not been seen since November, the day after she was accused of financial misconduct. Credit: The 49-year-old vanished in mid-November, hours after the Federal Police raided her Dover Heights home on behalf of the corporate watchdog, ASIC. Court documents have since revealed Ms Caddick allegedly misappropriated millions of dollars from her clients. While the full amount is yet to be revealed, it is understood to be in excess of $25 million. Investors money ended up in her personal bank accounts and was used to acquire property, luxury goods, designer clothes and extravagant holidays abroad, the Federal Court has previously heard. [February 24, 2021] Semcasting and Stirista Partner to Further Advance Identity Resolution Offerings NORTH ANDOVER, Mass., Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Semcasting , creators of the patented IP, location and device-targeting Smart Zones technology, today announced a strategic new AudienceDesigner (ADS) platform partnership with Stirista , a data-driven digital marketing solutions provider known for its identity solutions and authoritative data assets. Semcasting and Stirista have formed a partnership to combine their strengths and to further expand access to future-proofed and privacy-compliant identity resolution and audience targeting. Using IP addresses, location, public demographic profiles, hashed emails, mobile and home device signals, Semcasting is incorporating Stiristas data into its audience tool ADS identity graph in full compliance with current and pending privacy requirements. Semcasting Smart Zones, which powers ADS, includes proprietary data for 254 million consumers and 22 million businesses and offers true one-to-one targeting capabilities to more than 300 million home and business networks and 400 million mobile devices. The partnership with Stirista adds their database of 90 million households and 670 million hashed email addresses (HEMs) to the ADS graph. This further advances transparent data onboarding, audience enrichment and attribution through ADS. The new partnership also makes available Stiristas revolutionary self-serve media buying platform, AdStir, available to ADS clients. AdStir empowers marketers to run media against their CRM data and o activate their custom audiences seamlessly through the ADS platform. AdStir provides advertisers with access to premium inventory across connected TV (CTV), over-the-top (OTT), mobile and display, in addition to allowing access to Stiristas deterministic data. By leveraging the simplicity of the AdStir media buying platform, Semcasting can offer its customers streamlined media solutions across all types of digital media, said Hamid Qayyum, Stiristas SVP Digital Solutions. Semcasting clients onboarding through the ADS platform will be able to further enrich their tailored audiences using Stiristas comprehensive data insights, available within AdStirs Customer Data Hub, and seamlessly activate advertising through the integration with AdStir. Semcasting first began securing patents for our cookie-less ID graph in 2012, so we were prepared for the cookie-less future and the decline of cookie and device-based targeting tactics, said Ray Kingman, CEO and founder of Semcasting. As an industry, we should look at identity resolution as a holistic process that respects the users choices through informed consent, but by default, protects them with differential privacy. Adding the Stirista HEMs to the ADS platforms federated identity graph empowers marketers to design segments, enhance them with deterministic offline data, and then protect the identity before, during and after activation. To learn more about Semcasting ADS, please visit: https://audiencedesigner.com/ . About Semcasting Semcasting, a data-as-a-service provider, created the next-generation end-to-end audience design solution, AudienceDesigner (ADS), which includes omnichannel onboarding, audience design and attribution in one self-serve platform. Our three-time patented Smart Zones IP Targeting platform onboards a wide array of consumer, business, mobile and internet site traffic to both online and offline locations. Smart Zones uniquely links all cross-device activity for targeted advertising and attribution with nearly 100% reach and unrivaled accuracy. Semcasting is headquartered in North Andover, Massachusetts. About Stirista Stirista is a data-driven marketing solutions provider that combines the power of authoritative identity data with the execution of omnichannel marketing. Through its data and customer-centric approach, Stirista is helping Fortune 500 and mid-market brands including Great Clips, Oracle and Verizon, among others, increase brand loyalty and acquire new customers. Stiristas privacy compliant data insights helps clients interact with customers and prospects via digital, email and social channels. For more information, please visit http://www.stirista.com . Media Contact Lacy Talton Blast PR for Semcasting lacy@blastpr.com 252-467-5220 Jennifer Qotb Young & Associates for Stirista jennifermq@yapr.com 513-281-2772 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) The rehabilitation of Ninoy Aquino International Airport has faced numerous setbacks throughout the years, with proposals to upgrade the gateway consistently failing to take off. Experts have painted bleak scenarios in light of the delays, ranging from dwindling confidence within the private sector on investing in public projects to foregone opportunities for a pandemic-hit economy. We take a look at how efforts to improve the countrys main international gateway have progressed in the past years, the hurdles encountered along the way, and what could be done moving forward. What happened in the last three years? In February 2018, a super consortium of seven tycoons submitted a 350-billion unsolicited proposal to operate and maintain the Philippines busiest airport and increase its capacity following years of overcrowding. The NAIA was intended to cater to 31 million passengers, but this has been breached even as early as 2012 according to data from the Manila International Airport Authority. The group, dubbed as NAIA Consortium, was composed of Aboitiz InfraCapital, Inc., AC Infrastructure Holdings Corporation, Alliance Global Group, Inc., Asias Emerging Dragon Corp., Filinvest Development Corporation, JG Summit Holdings, Inc., and Metro Pacific Investments Corp. The conglomerates also tapped Changi Airport International, the operator of Singapore's airport, for technical support. Just a month after, listed construction firm Megawide, partnering with Indian company GMR Infrastructure, sought to challenge the NAIA Consortium with a $3-billion unsolicited proposal to overhaul the air hub. The pair was also behind the improvement and operation of the Mactan-Cebu International Airport or MCIA and the model Clark International Airport or CIA. This influenced the Consortium to revise its bid, pulling the project cost down to 102 billion. The Department of Transportation decided in April to still prioritize the NAIA Consortiums offer as it followed the rules under the build-operate-transfer law, granting it the original proponent status for the project in September. The consortiums proposal, however, eventually hung in the balance as several negotiations and revisions got in the way. Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade demanded to standardize unsolicited proposals for airport developments, with authorities modelling NAIA rehabilitation plans after the CIA as both airports must still maintain everyday operations while repair works are ongoing. This forced the NAIA Consortium to submit a revised bid to retain its chance of leading the massive rehabilitation project. It eventually complied with Tugades order in July 2019. The National Economic and Development Authority Board gave the green light to NAIA Consortium's multi-billion peso proposal four months after, meaning the group could finally gear up for the Swiss challenge. In February 2020, Transportation Undersecretary Ruben Reinoso Jr. revealed during a briefing that the consortium has not yet ironed out issues on manpower absorption and provision of a people mover system at the gateway. This delayed the process again. MPIC likewise withdrew from the project a month after, with its chairman Manuel Pangilinan citing issues on the payment of real property taxes as a concern. It was during this time that the COVID-19 pandemic finally broke out across the globe. Countries left and right locking down borders and declaring travel restrictions, effectively crippling local and overseas trips worldwide. In July, NAIA Consortium released a statement saying it proposed changes to ensure the bankability of the project despite the pandemic. Negotiations, however, reached a dead end with the government rejecting the groups fresh proposal on the airports rehabilitation. In less than two weeks, the Megawide-GMR tandem bagged the preferential status for the NAIA upgrade. However, the duos proposal also experienced its fair share of turbulence, with the government doubting its financial muscle to execute the project despite their insistence they can sufficiently fund rehabilitation efforts. Authorities eventually stripped Megawide-GMR of its status as project contractor in mid-December. Around this time, MIAA general manager Ed Monreal revealed to lawmakers the two private companies who also submitted separate proposals to improve and run the countrys busiest gateway: San Miguel Corporation and Philippine Airport Ground Support Solutions, Inc. SMC President and COO Ramon Ang told CNN Philippines in July that they were the first to hand in an offer to rehabilitate NAIA. However, the diversified conglomerate was told the project should be kept "for somebody else to compete with us at the time. Tugade likewise told lawmakers Megawide can still convince the MIAA board to reinstate its original proponent status for the project, which the construction giant did in late December. Its efforts were futile, however, as the government still rejected its formal appeal a month after. What went wrong? With talks between authorities and private firms on the rehabilitation of NAIA repeatedly reaching a dead end through the years, transport economist Jedd Ugay points to the governments dependence on unsolicited proposals as the main reason behind the projects delays. Ugay said the project has been slow because the state did not proactively procure the necessary rehabilitation on its own. So normally if I'm in government, I would already request for expansion, I will create my own terms of reference and bidding documents to ask for these. And I will ask for bidders to do this work, the transport planner and economist further explained, citing how the Mactan-Cebu International Airport project was handled. In 2012, the then-Department of Transportation and Communication along with the MCIA Authority invited prospective bidders for the construction of a new airport terminal. Megawide-GMR eventually was awarded the concession two years after, and Terminal 2 was opened to the public in 2018. Had the state adopted a similar approach for NAIA, the airports rehabilitation would have been much faster, Ugay added. If it's a public tender, it normally follows the government timeline and if there are setbacks because there's a request for more time to draft the proposals, it wouldn't be like this, he said, wherein the entire project goes back to step one once negotiations with proponents fall apart. For airport planning expert Rommel Gavieta, however, this assumes that the state has unlimited resources to develop all projects, which he says isnt the case. My premise is the governments resources are finite, the former Transport Undersecretary for Planning told CNN Philippines. This means authorities should allow the private sector to develop projects driven by market demand, the NAIA being an example. The expert further argued that solutions to problems that can be solved by market forces must not come from the state, which is already in charge of development-driven initiatives. The job of the government when it comes to PPP (public-private partnership) projects, whether solicited or unsolicited, is the regulation of tariff rates" along with any adverse foreign exchange movements, he noted. Also under authorities regulation is the economic return such projects generate proponents, according to him. In railways, airport systems, toll roads, nire-regulate dapat yan ng government na di dapat excessive yung kita ng private sector. Dapat tama lang, Gavieta explained. [Translation: In railways, airport systems, toll roads, the government should regulate these in such a way that the private sectors financial returns arent excessive. They should just be the right amount.] Meanwhile, think tank Infrawatch convener Terry Ridon argued the Department of Transportation "threw the private proponent under the bus when confronted with issues on Megawide-GMR's financial clout. "As PPP partners, it was supposed to jointly work with the private proponent to ensure that all eligibility requirements were met prior to submission to the NEDA ICC, Ridon told CNN Philippines. He noted both sides should have continued working together in the re-submission of a proposal after the body returned the initial one due to incomplete requirements. "[The] government has compromised private sector confidence in future PPPs," Ridon added. The bottomline is, this could have been the opportune time to execute any repairs and upgrades to NAIA, while demand for air travel is still low given current restrictions on mobility, experts said. The Passenger Forum convener Primo Morillo noted the current administration in particular "failed to see the window of opportunity" to start the project during this period. "The response is too slow, and lacks urgency...The government needs to decide where NAIA rehabilitation is in their infrastructure priority list," he added. How do these setbacks affect the country? Airports link not only people but goods and services, and with efforts to upgrade the gateway failing to take flight for the past years, the economy is deprived of opportunities it badly needs to bounce back. For one, how an airport functions plays a role in strengthening economic activity and making the country more attractive to businesses in the international scene, said Gavieta. Foreign investors, he said, get a lot more confident if they see that when they come into a countrythe airport theyre getting into is efficient both in terms of arrival and departure. Foreign direct investments are a key source of employment for Filipinos, with more capital placements generating additional job opportunities for them. RELATED: CREATE-ing opportunities through better fiscal incentives, lower corp taxes Of course there are a lot of factors to that, said Ugay about winning investors confidence. But definitely one of the things is how good is our international airport particularly NAIA. The state of a countrys gateway also affects demand for its tourism sector, he added. The industry is one of most gravely hit by the health crisis, with current demand a far cry from pre-pandemic levels. Before the pandemic, NAIA catered to tens of millions of arriving and departing domestic and local passengers. MIAA's 2019 data revealed the number of flyers the airport had accommodated breached 47 million, over half from overseas. Inbound tourism generated receipts worth 482 billion during the year. Given travel restrictions, the number of passengers the gateway had accommodated plummeted to 10.7 million as of November last year. Less than half of this number are foreign nationals, reflective of tighter rules on entry into the country including the prohibition of tourists from overseas. The nearly 84% nosedive in foreign tourist arrivals this 2020 likewise resulted in a plunge of over 80% in expenditures of visitors from abroad, according to the Tourism Department. Even airlines werent spared from the wrath of COVID-19. PAL Holdings, parent company of Philippine Airlines, incurred a net loss of 28.85 billion as of end-September last year while Cebu Air saw losses deepen to 5.54 billion. What happens next? With the government counting on tourism as part of the key industries eyed to bounce back from the pandemic, all the more should officials include a better NAIA in their plans according to Morillo. "They should see this project as a possible pump priming for the economy hit hard by the pandemic," he said. One of the components of a comprehensive rehabilitation of NAIA is by also beefing up infrastructure used by people who travel to and from the gateway. Its not just developing the airport, said Gavieta. Its developing the linkages needed to make the airport accessible to the public and to businessmen. For instance, the transport system linked to airports in countries like Hong Kong, London and France, where one can easily take the train after landing to get to their target destination in time, he added. Ugay likewise underscored the need to make NAIA well-connected with the metropolis, and this can be achieved by better public transport in the form of buses and a railway linking the gateway to the metro. Ultimately, a multiple airport strategy will immensely help in addressing congestion problems in the countrys main gateway, according to experts. For instance, Gavieta suggested developing NAIA in conjunction with Sangley Airport, which will raise the formers operating capacity to about 75 million. This is cheaper than constructing a high-speed rail link between Manila and Clark, he added. The rail link corresponds to his other suggestion: the establishment of a system assigning NAIA as a check-in terminal and CIA as a take-off point for travelers, similar to a check-in airport in Hong Kong. Option #1 is consistent with most of the PPP proposals...yung isang [the other] option is a purely government option, explained Gavieta. At the end of the day, the government must decide which model it will employ, he said, adding they must view the initiative as not just an airport development, but as an airport and supporting infrastructure development kind of project. President Rodrigo Duterte in mid-2019 first floated the idea of using Sangley Point as an alternative airport for the greater Manila area as NAIA faces years of worsening congestion. Earlier this February, the Cavite government released its second invitation for bidders for the airport project after pulling the plug on its deal with the consortium of Lucio Tans MacroAsia Corp. and state-owned China Communications Construction Company Ltd. Morillo and Ridon both said that while they are supportive of the current administration's push for a multiple airport strategy, the government should not brush off the NAIA as the main gateway. "As the countrys main gateway to the world, we cannot allow NAIA to rot while waiting for the new airport in Bulacan to be built," Ridon said, this time referring to the New Manila International Airport. The gateway, which SMC will be constructing from scratch, also aims to decongest the countrys busiest gateway. While Morillo and his colleagues reserve the right to scrutinize future plans related to NAIAs rehabilitation, he said they hope an above board proposal to improve will be processed before its too late. Gavieta, meanwhile, emphasized the need for both the state and private firms to trust each other when linking up for PPP projects. The government should trust the projection of the private sector, and the private sector should be truthful also in making its projections sa [on] demand, he said, noting proponents must also be transparent on how much they stand to gain from the project theyre pitching for. It would also be helpful if authorities exercise a bit more of understanding given the pandemic and how infrastructure spending could drive private expenditures, added the airport planning expert. Household consumption fell by 7.2% year-on-year this 2020, which also saw the Philippine economy contract full-year by an all-time low of 9.5%. A little flexibility on the governments end as far as concession periods, foreign exchange support and possible cooperation with the private sector should there be any shortfall on passenger projection could also help move such projects forward, he further explained. "They should learn how to work together for the good of the public," Gavieta said, adding this is especially needed amid the pandemic. Indonesian foreign minister Retno Marsudi (left) talks with Myanmar foreign minister Wunna Maung Lwin as Thai foreign minister Don Pramudwinai listens, during a meeting at the Don Mueang International Airport in Bangkok, Feb. 24, 2021. Updated at 3 p.m. ET on 2021-02-24 Myanmar must listen to its people, Indonesias top diplomat told her counterpart from Naypyidaw in Bangkok on Wednesday, as they held the first known face-to-face meetings between a senior junta member and foreign governments since the Feb. 1 Myanmar coup. Foreign ministers Retno Marsudi of Indonesia, Don Pramudwinai of Thailand and Wunna Maung Lwin met briefly at Don Mueang International Airport after her planned trip to Myanmar had to be postponed, she told an online press conference after the gathering. Retno said she told Wunna Maung Lwin that the wishes of the Myanmar people must be heard, and called for an inclusive democratic transition process. [W]e need to create a conducive situation through dialogue, reconciliation, and trust-building, she said. The safety and welfare of the people of Myanmar is of paramount importance. She called on all parties to refrain from violence and urged the military rulers to allow humanitarian access and visits to detainees. Retno said she was also in intensive communication with the Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, or CRPH, a shadow parliament formed by Burmese lawmakers elected in the November 2020 vote, which the junta claims was marred by fraud. Myanmars envoy also met Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha in a closed-door session on Wednesday. We, as friends, have to listen to one another. However, [we] give them moral support, Prayuth told reporters after the meeting. As an ASEAN country, we have to encourage cooperation and offer good wishes that everything [in Myanmar] comes back to normalcy, he said. Myanmar trip postponed Indonesia, the largest country in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and a founding member of the bloc, has been on a diplomatic push to get neighboring countries more involved in addressing the coup in Myanmar. Last week, Retno visited Brunei, this years ASEAN chair, and Singapore. She had been due to make an hours-long trip to Naypyidaw on Thursday, in what would have been the first known visit by a foreign envoy since the coup, but it had to be delayed, she said. This postponement has not dampened the intention to establish communication with all parties in Myanmar, including with the Myanmar military and the CRPH, Retno said Wednesday. Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah said the time was not ideal for a visit. In Myanmar on Tuesday, the activist group Future Nation Alliance rejected the purported visit, calling it tantamount to recognizing the military junta by embarking on official communications with the coup regime. Yan Myo Thein, an independent political analyst in Yangon, said neighboring countries should use approaches in their diplomacy with Myanmar that reflect the will of its people. The international community including ASEAN should primarily find an approach as close as possible to the desires of the Myanmar population, he said. The results of the November 2020 elections have clearly shown the will of the people. It is irrefutable. A fine line On Feb. 1, Myanmars generals seized power from the elected government and arrested civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and others. The military declared a one-year state of emergency to deal with allegations of voting fraud tied to the Nov. 8 general election, which Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy handily won, according to polling authorities. The country has since been gripped by a civil disobedience movement and huge anti-coup protests that have continued to swell despite internet blackouts, curfews and the use of lethal force against demonstrations. Security forces have used live ammunition against protesters, killing at least four people and injuring dozens. A protester shot in the head in Naypyidaw on Feb. 9 died in hospital, while two others hit by gunfire in Mandalay on Feb. 21 also died. Police also shot dead a night watchman in Yangon. The Group of Seven industrial democracies on Tuesday deplored the Myanmar militarys use of violence against protesters. We condemn the intimidation and oppression of those opposing the coup, said the G7 and the EUs high representative, in a joint statement that also scorched a crackdown on free speech. Use of live ammunition against unarmed people is unacceptable, the statement said. Anyone responding to peaceful protests with violence must be held to account. Also on Tuesday, demonstrators gathered outside the Indonesian Embassy in Yangon to reject reports that Jakarta was urging countries in the region to send monitors to ensure that the generals hold fair and inclusive elections. Indonesias Ministry of Foreign Affairs later denied it. That is not Indonesias position, because our focus is on how to reach a peaceful settlement in Myanmar that is inclusive and involves all parties, said Faizasyah, the ministry spokesman. I categorically say that such a plan of action doesnt exist, because the fact is that currently the foreign minister is still trying to forge a common position with other ASEAN foreign ministers. Indonesia should be cautious in its Myanmar diplomacy and avoid offending the junta, said Mohammad Hasan Ansori, program and research director at the Habibie Center, a Jakarta think-tank. From experience, including on the issue of the Rohingya, talking with the Myanmar military is not easy. Retno has to tread a fine line giving encouragement the ASEAN way, Hasan told BenarNews. Myanmar has a lot of respect for Indonesia. Indonesia is acting in good faith, treating Myanmar as a friend. It wants to help, not intervene in its internal affairs, he said, referring to a core founding principle of ASEAN that members of the bloc do not interfere in the domestic matters of other states within the grouping. Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service. The Myanmar service of Radio Free Asia (RFA), a sister entity of BenarNews, contributed to this report. Diamond core drilling will test priority zinc-copper-gold targets as delineated by the recently completed maiden drilling program and moving loop electromagnetic survey at the project. Venture Minerals Limited ( ) ( ) has started the second phase of exploration drilling at the Golden Grove North Project in Western Australia with diamond core drilling underway. The drill program will test priority zinc-copper-gold targets and follow-up results from reconnaissance-style drilling at the Orcus prospect and maiden drill holes testing several newly identified strong EM conductors situated along the 5-kilometre-long VMS target zone. A maiden drill program of three holes for 1,311 metres has also been completed at Kulin and this tested multiple gold targets beneath the broad mineralised trenches that returned intervals of up to 31 metres at 1.0 g/t gold and 20 metres at 0.6 g/t. Exciting drill intersections at Orcus Venture managing director Andrew Radonjic said: With the maiden drill program at Kulin completed and now waiting for assays, Ventures exploration team will switch focus to following up some very exciting drill intersections at Orcus and several strong EM conductors within the Golden Grove North VMS target zone. The companys Western Australian assets continue to deliver exciting exploration opportunities whilst the Riley Iron Ore Mine development team gets on with building the wet screening plant. Golden Grove North Project geological setting with historic rock chip surface sample results, Vulcan geochemical copper anomaly, Gossan Hill historic geochemical copper anomaly and Ventures priority VMS targets. Orcus drilling ongoing Maiden drilling at Orcus prospect confirmed a Volcanic Massive Sulphide (VMS) System with assays of up to 7.6% zinc, 1.3% copper, 2.2 g/t gold and 22 g/t silver, and with all three holes returning strong zones of VMS-style mineralisation. The maiden drilling returned results of: 5 metres at 1.3% zinc, 0.54% copper, 1.1 g/t gold and 7 g/t silver from 59 metres, including 1-metre at 6.1% zinc, 1.3% copper, 0.80 g/t gold and 22 g/t silver from 59 metres; 2 metres at 4.4% zinc, 0.87% copper, 0.94 g/t gold and 17 g/t silver from 100 metres, including 1-metre at 7.6% zinc, 1.0% copper, 0.17 g/t gold and 20 g/t silver from 101 metres; and 2 metres at 2.4% zinc, 0.34% copper, 1.0 g/t gold and 4 g/t silver from 152 metres, including 1-metre at 4.2% zinc, 0.47% copper, 1.6 g/t gold and 8 g/t silver from 152 metres. Venture Minerals will also complete maiden drill holes at the strong EM conductors along the 5-kilometre-long VMS target zone akin to the Scuddles-Gossan Hill area at the Golden Grove Mine along strike to the south of the project. The upcoming National Assembly session, which will take place from March 24 to April 7, will elect a number of positions in the State apparatus for the 2016-2021 term. National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan. National Assembly Chair Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan said at the 53rd session of the 14th National Assembly Standing Committee which concluded on February 23 that the upcoming National Assembly session, which will take place from March 24 to April 7, will elect a number of positions in the State apparatus for the 2016-2021 term. During its 53rd session, the National Assembly Standing Committee gave comments on the preparation of the 11th session of the 14th National Assembly, the last session of the National Assemblys 14th term. National Assembly General Secretary Nguyen Hanh Phuc said that during the upcoming session, National Assembly deputies will spend 2.5 days to discuss the report on the National Assemblys 14th term and summary reports of the State President, Government, National Assembly Standing Committee, Ethnic Council, the National Assemblys Committees, Supreme People's Court, Supreme People's Procuracy, and State Audit of Vietnam. The rest of the time, the National Assembly will consider and decide on other important issues, including 6.5 days for personnel work. Vietnamese people will cast their ballots to elect deputies to the 15th National Assembly and local Peoples Councils in May this year. In the new year, the National Assembly Standing Committee will do its utmost to fulfil set targets, with the focus on thoroughly preparing for the organization of elections of deputies to the 15th National Assembly and Peoples Councils at all levels for the 2021-2026 tenure, said National Assembly Chair Ngan. The following legislature is expected to have 500 deputies, including 207 deputies working at central agencies. As many as 95 deputies are members of the Party Central Committee. Thu Hang Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 3 mesi fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. Food Service Equipment Market Growth & Trends The global food service equipment market size is estimated to reach USD 50.01 billion by 2028, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. It is projected to expand at an estimated CAGR of 5.5% from 2021 to 2028. The increasing trade activities in the food and beverage industry, upsurge in travel and tourism activities, changing food consumption habits, and rise in disposable incomes are some of the key factors driving the growth of this market. Equipment manufacturers are focusing on mergers and acquisitions to introduce state-of-the-art product offerings for attaining a competitive edge in the market. For instance, in 2019, SMEG S.p.A collaborated with Dolce & Gabbana S.r.l. for special styling of Fab28 SMEG refrigerator, which was encouraged by old Sicilian art. This collaboration was aimed at developing products in captivating designs consumers would like to incorporate in their modular, open commercial kitchen spaces. Furthermore, the pressing need to conserve energy has compelled manufacturers to focus on the development of energy-efficient appliances for commercial kitchens. Appliances are being integrated with bidirectional internet of things (IoT) connectivity. These connected appliances can automatically alert kitchen staff to increase the preparation uptime. Additionally, the increasing number of restaurants across the globe is also driving the market. As per the National Restaurant Association, the U.S region itself accounts for more than 1 million restaurants of different kinds and sizes. The COVID-19 breakout and the subsequent lockdowns imposed by governments worldwide to minimize its communal spread at the beginning of 2020 had a substantial negative impact on the market for food service equipment. Various industries such as food and beverage, travel and tourism, and hospitality have been severely impacted by the temporary shutdown of manufacturing units, transportation, and logistic operations. Relaxations announced by several governments in the mid of 2020 led to the gradual increase in the online delivery business and takeaway from restaurants and hotels, resulting in some recovery of the food and beverage industry. Request a free sample copy or view report summary: Food Service Equipment Market Report Food Service Equipment Market Report Highlights In terms of geography, Asia Pacific is estimated to emerge as the fastest-growing regional market with a CAGR of close to 7.0% from 2021 to 2028 In terms of product, the kitchen purpose equipment segment dominated the market with a revenue share of over 35.0% of the overall market in 2020 Expanding at a CAGR around 5.0% from 2021 to 2028, the Full Service Restaurant (FSR) end-user segment is estimated to dominate the market over the forecast period Food Service Equipment Market Segmentation Grand View Research has segmented the global food service equipment market on the basis of product, end-user, and region: Food Service Equipment Product Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2016 - 2028) Kitchen Purpose Equipment Cooking Equipment Food & Beverage Preparation Equipment Refrigeration Equipment Ware Washing Equipment Food Holding & Storing Equipment Others Food Service Equipment End-user Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2016 - 2028) Full Service Restaurant (FSR) Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) Institutional Others Food Service Equipment Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2016 - 2028) North America US. Canada Europe UK. Germany Asia Pacific China India Japan Latin America Brazil Mexico Middle East & Africa (MEA) List of Key Players of Food Service Equipment Market AB Electrolux Ali Group S.r.l. a Socio Unico Dover Corporation Duke Manufacturing Haier Group SMEG S.p.A. The Middleby Corporation About Grand View Research Grand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare. Britons could get their Covid vaccine in the form of a pill in the future, according to the lead scientist behind Oxford University's jab. Professor Sarah Gilbert told MPs today her team were focusing their efforts on new, injection-free ways to deliver the vaccine and stimulate a better immune response. The group are exploring delivering the jab using nasal sprays, in the same way the flu jab is given to children, or in tablet form, used in polio vaccination. Not only would it be great news for people who have a fear of needles, it could help alleviate supply issues that have hindered rollouts internationally. Professor Gilbert said using pills or nasal sprays may better target immune cells in the lungs, throat and nose, making them even more effective. She told the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee: 'As you know all the vaccines have been given at the moment as intramuscular injections. 'That is not necessarily the best way to provide protection against a respiratory virus infection, where we want the immune system to be active in the upper respiratory tract and then in the lower respiratory tract, which is where the virus is causing the infection. 'We have flu vaccines that are given by nasal spray and this could be a very good approach in the future to use vaccines against coronaviruses. 'It's also possible to consider oral vaccination where you take a tablet, that will give you that immunisation, and that would have a lot of benefits for vaccine rollout if you didn't have to use the needles and syringes.' The coronavirus vaccine could be taken as a pill in the future, according to the lead scientist behind Oxford University's jab Professor Sarah Gilbert told MPs today her team were focusing their efforts on new ways to deliver the vaccine and stimulate a better immune response The group are also exploring delivering the jab using a nasal spray, in the same way the flu jab is given to children She added: 'Both of those approaches which we are beginning to assess, they will take time to develop, they will have to be tested for safety and then for efficacy as well. 'The immune responses that will be generated by both of those approaches will be a little bit different to what we get from an intramuscular injection, but they have potentially large advantages. 'No scientific case' to prioritise teachers for Covid vaccine, says JCVI chief There isn't a strong scientific argument to prioritise teachers for a Covid jab, the UK's chief vaccine adviser said today. Professor Anthony Harnden, deputy chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), told MPs that data had shown school staff were not at an increased risk of catching or falling ill with the disease compared to their peers. Prof Harnden told the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee: 'In fact there are other occupational groups which are usually more at risk than teachers. 'So then it becomes a political decision, which is why the JCVI have decided that we'll be steering our advice based on science and it will be up to politicians to decide on what you do in terms of teachers. 'But I would say that one of the key reasons that this programme has been so successful is because it has been simple, it's been deliverable, and it has been rolled out very quickly and people understand it.' He added that picking out certain groups would make it more complicated, and risks slowing the programme down which would in turn mean exposing people to the virus when they otherwise might not have been. Professor Harden also told the committee the JCVI had decided the priority list for phase two of the vaccination programme and this is 'with ministers at the moment'. Advertisement 'And so that's where we're going to be focusing our attention on working out if we could use different delivery routes in the future for these vaccines.' Last month, trials run by a British biotech company found oral Covid vaccines given to monkeys were highly effective in immunising them. Sussex-based IoBio and California's ImmunityBio are applying for regulatory approval to run tests in Britain as clinical trials of the pill began on Americans in January. And a nasal spray Covid vaccine is currently being trialled on dozens of Brits. New York-based Codagenix launched human studies of its experimental vaccine, COVI-VAC, in London in the first week of January. The UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) green-lit the trials after positive safety data in animal studies. Meanwhile, Britain's vaccine minister earlier this month raised the prospect of Covid vaccines eventually being administered orally. Speaking to Times Radio, Nadhim Zahawi said: 'There are technologies with pills and others being developed around the world and we will continue to look at those. 'But we're making sure the UK will always have the capability and capacity to manufacture the variant vaccines that will deal with any variant virus.' Meanwhile, Professor Gilbert also told MPs today it's unlikely a new variant will completely undo the current Covid vaccines. Professor Gilbert said there were good signs that coronavirus variants will not suddenly start escaping from the effectiveness of vaccines. 'Certainly what we're seeing at the moment is a reduction in efficacy against variants rather than falling off a cliff edge,' she said. 'We have to remember that for the virus to mutate to evade the immune responses being induced by the vaccination, it may have to take a penalty. 'It may become a virus that doesn't function quite as well as the original virus did, and that will prevent new variants which may escape the immune response by the vaccine, they may actually not spread so well.' She said that anything could happen as 'viruses are infinitely able to mutate' but 'currently I think the signs are good that we won't see a sudden escape from the vaccine with a virus that is very well able to circulate'. UK 'WON'T HAVE TO LEARN TO LIVE WITH COVID' BECAUSE VACCINES ARE SO GOOD Britain might not have to live with coronavirus in the future because the current crop of vaccines are so effective, a top Government scientist expert has claimed. Most scientists agree that once the country jabs its way out of the pandemic, Covid will become a seasonal illness which puts pressure on the NHS every winter, like flu. They have told Brits they must 'learn to live with the virus' and predict new jabs will have to be made annually to tackle new variants. But Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh and an adviser to the Scottish government, said the current jabs are so successful they could stamp the disease out to measles-like levels. But Professor Sridhar added that vaccines on their own could not squash Covid infections to measles-like numbers, adding that social distancing and mass testing would still need to play a role. She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme there was 'no reason we have to live with this virus or even see it as a seasonal flu' because the vaccine is so effective. She said: 'A better analogy is probably measles, which is a virus that's endemic in parts of the world. But we don't accept living with measles here we vaccinate against it.' There were just 810 cases of measles in England and Wales in 2019, when the latest figures go up to, down from 989 the year before. Professor Sridhar added: 'The UK should be aiming to suppress and eliminate Covid-19 through vaccines, mass testing and supported isolation.' Advertisement Professor Gilbert said a decision on whether an autumn vaccination campaign would be needed would be made over the summer. Oxford is running clinical trials from the early summer with batches of a new vaccine aimed at tackling variants. She said: 'I think we need to make a decision over the summer, we will start to get data from the clinical trials on the immune responses to the variant vaccine, both against the virus variant and against the original virus, and we will then be able to monitor the situation and decide what should be happening in the autumn. 'Currently the plans are to be ready for an immunisation campaign in the autumn, so before going into the winter season we would have a new variant vaccine available if it turns out that is what's going to be required. 'If we see the emergence of a new strain very close to that date, it is going to be difficult to go through this whole process, because we do need to conduct a clinical study and get regulatory approval, in time to be vaccinated before the winter.' She said it was therefore important to keep case numbers as low as possible to 'prevent the risk of further variants arising'. Dr Philip Dormitzer, vice president and chief scientific officer of viral vaccines at Pfizer, said his firm believes its vaccine will protect against the variants seen to date but that could only really be tested as vaccines are rolled out. 'We think it is likely that the vaccine will protect against the variants that we have seen to date, but the way to be sure is of course the real world data because laboratory measures of immunity cannot be translated directly to known protection that requires actually observing protection in the field,' he said. Professor Wendy Barclay, from Imperial College London said that, going forward, the Covid vaccine is likely to be rolled into the annual flu jab. 'I think the most likely scenario is that a combination vaccine would be given going forward in the future, which would combine influenza, with an updated Sars-CoV-2, but that really is crystal ball gazing to an extent,' she said. 'I think the next year will really tell us much more about how the epidemiology of this new coronavirus will settle down and how quickly it might mutate and necessitate vaccine updates, and how long the immunity from the current vaccine that we're going to roll out to a large proportion of the UK population will last, and therefore how necessary it will be to give boosters.' Exercising its right of reply, India held a mirror to Pakistan in the 46th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). As old habits die hard, Pakistan once again used the UN body to rake up the issue of Kashmir in an attempt to get global attention. Not surprised by the move, India slammed Pakistan for misusing the UN platform for "baseless and malicious propaganda" and countered it with facts. Pakistani human rights minister Shireen Mazari in her address to the UN body in Geneva repeated Pakistan's propaganda surround Kashmir. In response, Seema Pujani, India's second secretary in the permanent mission to the UN asked Pakistan to take "credible and irreversible steps" to end state-sponsored terrorism and dismantle the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan. Not only did India reiterate the fact that the entire union territory of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh are an integral and inalienable part of India, but the Indian representative also highlighted the atrocities that are suffered by minorities in Pakistan and the hostile neighbour's use of state-sponsored terrorism against India. "As a country with one of the world's worst human rights records, Pakistan would do well to put its own house in order before venturing to point a finger at India," Indian representative said at UNHRC. READ | Paris Summons Pakistan Envoy Over Arif Alvi Calling Anti-radicalism Bill 'dangerous' READ | Pakistan's FDI Falls 27% In Seven Months Of FY2021 As FATF's Grey-listing Scares Investors India pointed out the persecution of the minorities in Pakistan while highlighting the frequent attacks on places of worship of minority communities. The Indian representative cited a recent report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and stated that nearly 1,000 women, mostly belonging to the age group of 16-25 years, from the minority communities are subject to abduction followed by forced conversion and forced marriage in Pakistan every year. Pakistan administration and Army's atrocities in Balochistan were also highlighted in the UN forum while making a mention of the enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions and torture of the Baloch activists. "Several Baloch human rights defenders have even met tragic death under mysterious circumstances, while in exile," India stated. Pakistan has been a safe haven for the largest internationally proscribed terrorist entities and individuals in the world. As many as 126 individuals and 24 entities sanctioned by the UN are associated with Pakistan, India highlighted at the UNHRC while adding that state-sponsored terrorism of Pakistan is not only a threat to India but also to other countries in the region and across the world. An al-Qaeda terrorist and murderer of American journalist Daniel Pearl was acquitted by the Pakistan Supreme Court. India at UNHRC called the acquittal "a clear example of Pakistani establishment's nexus with terror entities." Pakistan's all-weather ally, Turkey too raked up the issue of Kashmir. Giving it back, India advised Turkey to practise what it preached and asked it to implement UN resolutions on its own soil. "It is ironical for a country which trampled upon its own civil society to pass unjustified comments on other's internal matters," India remarked on Turkey's meddling into India's affairs. READ | BJP Accuses Overseas Congress Of Raising Pakistan Flag In Germany; IOC Mounts Explanation READ | India Allows Pakistan PM Imran Khan's Flight To Sri Lanka To Pass Through Indian Airspace Read India's response at UNHRC: In a controversial move, the Kerala government on Wednesday decided to withdraw cases against people related to the issue of women's entry in Sabarimala temple and those booked during anti-CAA protests 'that are not serious in nature'. The sudden decision is seen as a politically-calculated move by the ruling CPI(M) and LDF dispensation, in the run-up for the state assembly elections. It has been a long-standing demand of the Opposition parties, including the Congress and BJP, to take back the cases registered against protestors seeking to uphold the religious customs of the Sabarimala temple. The Pinarayi Vijayan-led government has either given in to the pressure by the Opposition or attempted to win over the Hindu vote by withdrawing cases against the devotees of Lord Ayyappa. READ | After Congress Promises To Protect Devotees Rights; LDF Says 'It Is Trying To Fool People' Controversy over Sabarimala temple custom On September 28, 2018, the SC had lifted the ban on entry of women belonging to all age groups in the Sabarimala temple, which sparked off huge protests across Kerala. The Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB) which manages the shrine, argued that the SC could not interfere with a century-old belief. The ban on entry of women has been justified on the grounds that Lord Ayyappa, the presiding deity is celibate. On the other hand, the government of Kerala had supported the SC verdict, maintaining that religious practices that clashed with fundamental rights could be set aside. The LDF government had then registered cases against thousands of people who participated in these protests, including Ayyappa devotees who protested against the Supreme Court order. READ | Congress Rakes Up Sabarimala Row Again; Vows To Pass Law To 'protect Devotees' Rights' Clean chit to protestors Changing its stance, however, the government has now withdrawn the charges pressed against the Sabarimala protestors. As the assembly polls are round the corner, the ruling party is looking to garner people's votes, as Sabarimala continues to hold the profit of winning the elections for the LDF. It is pertinent to note that in the last local body elections, BJP had swept the polls in all areas dominated by the devotees of Lord Ayyappa. Besides this, a total of 350 cases registered against CAA protests have also been withdrawn by the government, right before the release of election dates in the state. Kerala had witnessed massive anti-CAA protests in 2019 and early 2020, demanding that the controversial law be scrapped. Thousands of people had participated in state-wide protests when the BJP-led NDA government enacted the law in December 2019. READ | Rahul Gandhi Trains Guns On Left Ahead Of Kerala Polls; Claims 'BJP Going Slow On Cases' READ | Congress claims It 'spearheaded' Anti-CAA Movement; Terms Kerala CM's Decision Superfluous Pakistan: Water reserves must be enhanced to modernize agriculture, livestock: Governor Balochistan Amanullah Khan Yasinzai by Muhammad Irfan February 24,2021 | Source: Urdu Point Balochistan Governor Amanullah Khan Yasinzai on Tuesday said water reserves must be enhanced to modernize agriculture, fisheries and livestock sectors in Balochistan. "It is as if we can overcome malnutrition only by building new reservoirs", he said adding, apart from government initiatives on food and nutrition, there was an urgent need for cooperation and guidance from national and international organizations. He expressed these views while talking to Ms. Rebekah Bell, Country Representative of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) stationed in Pakistan who called on him at Governor House Quetta. On the occasion, Governor Yasinzai said agriculture and livestock in Balochistan were being adversely affected due to climate change and rains. "It is the tireless efforts of farmers and wealthy people that lead to an increase in national production," he said. The governor said, it was important to nurture their capabilities and teach them modern skills in agriculture and livestock. The governor further said there was an imperative need to launch a comprehensive public campaign on food and nutrition in remote areas of Balochistan, especially in the backward areas. He said in view of the special importance of workers and farmers, the incumbent government was taking steps for their welfare. Appreciating the performance of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Governor Yasinzai said the decision to hire experts from Balochistan to form a team of experts and researchers was commendable. 1997-2021, UrduPoint Network California Attorney General Xavier Becerra's nomination to serve as the Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary is the most controversial cabinet choice of President Joe Biden to date. Republicans wanted to deny Becerra's confirmation, and some of them voiced sharp criticism of him during the Senate's first of two hearings on Tuesday. A Fox News report noted that Becerra's trip to meet Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in 1997 had prompted the resignations of Republicans from the House Hispanic Caucus. The report said Xavier Becerra clashed with Cuban-Americans in the House Hispanic caucus after he traveled to Cuba to meet with Castro. He was then the chairman of the group. As then-congressman, Becerra allegedly refused to call for free elections following a meeting with Castro and voted 10 years later to end a trade embargo with the Cuban dictator. Sens. Susan Collins, Joe Manchin, and Mitt Romney have yet to decide how they will vote in Becerra's confirmation. Becerra faces criticism from conservatives who raised their concerns that he was too liberal or inexperienced as a health care leader. Reps. Illeana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart said in 1997 that they were personally insulted by Becerra's four-day trip to Cuba, prompting them to resign from the caucus, which then had no Republicans left. Los Angeles Times has reported that Diaz-Balart said he would not contribute membership dues to the caucus until Becerra demonstrates minimal respect for the Cuban rights to be free and calls for free elections "for that oppressed island." Xavier Becerra later said that he could not issue a call for free elections since the caucus "does not take positions" on the issue. Related story: Biden Selects California AG Xavier Becerra to Be First Latino Health Secretary Xavier Becerra's Nomination to Serve HHS If Xavier Becerra is confirmed, he will have the task of steering the administration's policy on the COVID-19 pandemic and helping in Biden's goal to get health care to more Americans. It would also make him the first Latino HHS secretary. According to an NBC News report, Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chair Patty Murray said Becerra has the experience and principles needed for the said role. Murray said that they have a lot of work to do and no time to waste. She then called on the Senate to quickly confirm him after the hearings. But Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican ranking member, voiced sharp criticism of Xavier Becerra during his opening remarks on Tuesday. Burr questioned Becerra's experience, citing his congressional service does not give him the necessary experience or skills "to do this job at this moment." On the other hand, Collins pressed Becerra on the lack of a provider relief fund in Biden's COVID-19 relief bill. Romney grilled him on his past vote against the partial-birth abortion ban, saying they wouldn't find common ground on that issue. In his opening statement, Becerra said he understands the huge challenge and the responsibility to faithfully served the said agency. He added that he's humbled by the task, and he's ready for it. Xavier Becerra's Career Becerra became one of the most influential people in the House, serving in several leadership positions as the first Latino in House history to sit on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, according to the History Archives site. He also became the second Hispanic American to chair the House Democratic Caucus. After he resigned from the House in 2017, Becerra accepted the job as attorney general of California. In his resignation letter to the House, Xavier Becerra said, "It has been a distinct honor to serve the people of Los Angeles and my country for more than 24 years." He added that he was grateful to his constituents "for their tremendous counsel and support over those two decades." Becerra is set to face the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday. Read also: Senators Call for Response Over Possible COVID-19 Outbreak in Juvenile Detention Facilities Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 19:35:14|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The following are the updates on the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. - - - - HONG KONG -- Hong Kong's Center for Health Protection reported 17 additional confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, taking its total tally to 10,913. The new cases included 16 local infections, of which six had an unknown origin. The only imported case was from Dubai. There were also more than 10 cases testing positive for COVID-19 preliminarily, according to a CHP press briefing. - - - - BANGKOK -- The first batch of COVID-19 vaccines that Thailand ordered from China's Sinovac Biotech arrived in the capital Bangkok Wednesday, putting the country on track to kickstart its national inoculation program. The 200,000 doses, the first shipment among 2 million doses Thailand ordered from the Chinese biopharmaceutical firm, were delivered by a Thai Airways International cargo flight from Beijing to Bangkok. - - - - MOSCOW -- Russia registered 11,749 COVID-19 cases over the past 24 hours, the lowest daily increase since Oct. 8, the country's COVID-19 response center said Wednesday. The national tally has thus increased to 4,200,902, with 84,430 deaths and 3,751,562 recoveries, the center said. - - - - VIENTIANE -- Local authorities across Laos continue to implement preventive measures and closely monitor people entering the country to prevent a second wave of COVID-19 outbreak. People entering Laos especially returning workers will be sent to quarantine centers for 14 days, and the temperature of each person entering the country must be checked, Deputy Director General of the Department of Communicable Disease Control under the Lao Ministry of Health Latsamy Vongkhamsao told a press conference in Lao capital Vientiane on Wednesday. - - - - WASHINGTON -- U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday held a virtual meeting to discuss joint efforts in addressing COVID-19 and climate change, vowing to renew bilateral relations. "For both our nations, getting COVID-19 under control at home and around the world is the immediate priority," said Biden after the meeting, noting "the United States has no closer friend than Canada." - - - - HONG KONG -- China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government has earmarked over 8.4 billion Hong Kong dollars (1.08 billion U.S. dollars) for the procurement and administration of COVID-19 vaccines, aiming to have the majority of the population vaccinated for free this year, a senior government official said Wednesday. "It is the government's top priority to contain the epidemic so that businesses and the public can be back to their daily routines," said Financial Secretary of the HKSAR government Paul Chan when delivering the annual budget. - - - - ADDIS ABABA -- The Ethiopian Ministry of Health on Tuesday evening reported 716 new COVID-19 cases over the last 24 hours, taking the national count to 154,257. Meanwhile, 12 new fatalities and 1,338 more recoveries were recorded over the same period, raising the COVID-19 death toll to 2,305 and the total recoveries to 133,051. - - - - SEOUL -- Sentiment among South Korean businesses over economic situations slightly worsened this month on the back of the continued COVID-19 pandemic, central bank data showed Wednesday. The business sentiment index (BSI) came in at 76 in February, down 1 point from the previous month, according to the Bank of Korea (BOK). - - - - BRASILIA -- Brazil has confirmed 204 cases of infection with variants of the coronavirus, including the variants first detected in Brazil and the United Kingdom, the Health Ministry's Health Surveillance Secretariat (SVS) reported on Tuesday. Of these cases, 184 correspond to the P.1 variant first detected in Brazil, and 20 to the variant first reported in the United Kingdom, the SVS said. - - - - PARIS -- French health authorities on Tuesday reported 20,064 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, up from 4,646 on Monday and from 19,590 last Tuesday. Since the outbreak, 3,629,891 people were diagnosed with COVID-19, the world's sixth highest tally after the United States, India, Brazil, Russia and Britain. Enditem Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 00:13:53|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Relations between China and Mongolia have entered into fast-track in recent years with fruitful results gained through practical cooperation, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Wednesday. Wang made the remarks in a telephone conversation with the newly-appointed Mongolian Foreign Minister Batmunkh Battsetseg. China attaches great importance to the friendly neighborship with Mongolia, and always puts this relation at a specially significant place in China's neighborhood diplomacy, he noted. This year is historically meaningful for both China and Mongolia as people of each country will respectively greet the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China and Mongolian People's Party, Wang said. Both sides should jointly implement the important consensus reached by the leaders of both countries, promoting greater development of the China-Mongolia comprehensive strategic partnership and bringing about more benefits to both peoples, he added. In the face of the unexpected COVID-19 pandemic, governments and peoples of China and Mongolia have shared the weal and woe, and reached out to each other with assistance and support, lifting the bilateral ties to a new level, Wang said. Noting that the touching story of Mongolia donating 30,000 sheep to China is widely known in both countries and the vaccines sent by China has arrived recently in Mongolia, Wang said he expects the two sides can further strengthen anti-pandemic cooperation until the pandemic is completely defeated. Economic and trade cooperation is an important support for China-Mongolia relations, Wang said, adding that the two sides need to speed up the synergy between China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Development Road Initiative of Mongolia, expand the areas and upgrade the level of cooperation so as to compensate for the losses caused by the pandemic as soon as possible. For her part, Battsetseg thanked China for its selfless help to her country in fighting the pandemic, saying that the two countries have maintained the development momentum of bilateral ties and continuously strengthened practical cooperation amid the pandemic, setting a good example of how countries support each other in response to adversities. The new Mongolian administration attaches great importance to developing the comprehensive strategic partnership with China, hoping to enhance political mutual trust, deepen BRI cooperation and push for sustained rapid development of their bilateral ties, she said. Enditem We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. (Photo : Screenshot From What Car? YouTube) Hyundai Beats Tesla? Ioniq 5 has Solar Panel Roof Capable of Charging Even Other EVs The new Hyundai Ioniq 5 has recently just been announced as a full EV, mid-size CUV or crossover SUV which should come with some pretty unique tech features and additional options which include solar panels on its actual roof. Originally seen at the previous 2019 Frankfurt Motor Show as somewhat of a 45 EV concept, the car has seen some tweaks in designs before becoming the current Hyundai Ioniq 5. While the Tesla solar roof for their EVs has been a discussion shared amongst enthusiasts for quite some time, the carmaker hasn't included this feature yet while Hyundai, on the other hand, has. Can solar panels be used to charge electric cars? According to an article by TechRadar, owners technically won't be able to use the sun in order to fully recharge the said 58 kWh standard range or the 72.6 kWh long-range battery lodged inside the Hyundai Ioniq 5, with it basically acting as just a complimentary charging source meant to extend the range. Hyundai notes that the solar panels are capable of adding up to 2,000kms per year which means around 5-6kms a day of additional range while driving through sunny environments. Another interesting feature that the Hyundai Ioniq 5 has is that it is capable of charging the other electric vehicles. This is if the battery level is notably above 15%. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 can easily be plugged into another EV in order to charge it. Hyundai Ioniq 5: How long does a Hyundai Ioniq battery last? Once the reported battery goes down to 15% it will then automatically stop charging the other EV in order to preserve range for itself. The charging speed is practically just 3.6kW so this might just be in order to top up another car instead of actually thoroughly charging it. The good thing is that it might be able to charge other electric devices aside from EVs like e-bikes, laptops, e-bicycles, and others. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 will reportedly be available along with two different battery sizes as well as two drivetrains namely the AWD and the RWD or the All Wheel Drive and the Rear Wheel Drive. There's also reportedly a standard 58kWh battery offering capable of about 200km or 125miles in range. Another 72.6kWh long-range battery is reportedly capable of a whopping 500km or 310 miles in just a single charge. Read Also: Rivian R1T Electric Pickup Debuts Test Drive Videos Ahead of June Launch-300-mile EV Coming Soon! How do you calculate EV charging? The new 800v battery reportedly supports fast charging as well, capable of claiming 100km of range in about just five minutes when reportedly plugged directly into a 350kW charger. This means that 10% to 80% would happen in only about 18 minutes. Unfortunately, however, the 350kW chargers aren't too popular as of the moment but the 50kW charger will reportedly allow users to go from 10% up to 80% in just an hour. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 reportedly wants to make sure that it is typically a welcoming place when it is being charged. The upcoming Hyundai Ioniq 5 will reportedly be available around March to May this 2021 with the EV landing in the UK somewhere mid-2021. The pricing for the mid-size CUV hasn't been revealed yet aside from the special edition "Project 45" Ioniq 5 noted to cost around $63,000. InsideEvs, however, puts the price at around $67,700. Related Article: Polydrops Launches Futuristic Travel Trailer P17A That Works With Electric Vehicles Like Tesla This article is owned by Tech Times Written by Urian Buenconsejo 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. A Romanian anesthesia and intensive care medical team is leaving for Bratislava on Wednesday for a 21-day mission to help the Slovakian doctors fight the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department for Emergency Situations (DSU) announced on Facebook, according to AGERPRES. The five doctors and eight nurses will be accompanied by two representatives of the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations tasked with providing support for the smooth unfolding of the mission, including liaison with the Slovakian authorities,. "In the context of support for efforts to combat the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and following the activation of the European Civil Protection Mechanism - as per the request received by the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations, in its capacity as national point of contact, from the European Commission's Emergency Response Coordination Center (ERCC) - the government of Romania has decided to provide assistance to the Slovak Republic by dispatching a medical team specializing in anesthesia and intensive care," DSU said. The action is funded by the European Union through the Emergency Support Instrument. A plane carrying the first batch of 117,600 doses of COVID-19 vaccine landed at HCM City-based Tan Son Nhat international airport at 10.40am this morning. Deputy Health Minister Truong Quoc Cuong at the delivery ceremony (Photo: VNA) The vaccine was jointly studied and produced by AstraZeneca pharmaceutical company and the UKs Oxford University. Deputy Health Minister Truong Quoc Cuong highlighted the significance of the vaccine delivery at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic is erupting in Hai Duong, Hai Phong and Quang Ninh. With the delivery, Vietnam has become one of the first countries in Asia to access a prestigious vaccine in the world. In order to achieve the dual goal of fighting the pandemic and developing the economy, it is necessary to increase vaccination to reach community immunity, he said. Apart from stepping up the trial and production of vaccines at home, the Health Ministry is working to import more vaccines from other producers as directed by the Government while preparing for vaccination in the priority list, he added. Vu Thu Ha, Director of the Vietnam Vaccine JSC (VNVC) importer of the vaccine, said the batch will be brought to the VNVCs super cold facilities for storage in line with the Government and Health Ministrys regulations. Result from clinical trials showed that 22 days after the first shot, AstraZeneca vaccine could fully protect people from serious illness, hospitalisation and death caused by the novel coronavirus. Within 90 days, the vaccines potency could reach 76 percent. Analyses showed that the vaccine could reduce infection risk by two thirds for cases without symptoms. First batch of COVID-19 vaccine arrives at Tan Son Nhat airport Health Ministry officials and the British Consul in HCM City welcome the first batch of vaccine at Tan Son Nhat airport. The vaccine will be preserved in cold storages of VNVC and AstraZeneca in HCM City. The vaccine will be kept in modern cold refrigerators. VietNamNet/VNA Photo: Thanh Tung The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company ROME, FEB 24 - Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio told the Lower House on Wednesday that Italy's Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Luca Attanasio, and Carabiniere police officer Vittorio Iacovacci were "victims of a cowardly attack" this week. Attanasio and Iacovacci and a Congolese driver, Mustapha Milambo, were killed on Monday while travelling from Goma to Rutshuru in the east of the African country where they were planning to visit a UN World Food Programme (WFP) school feeding programme. Di Maio said that the government has asked the United Nations and the WFP to open an investigation into the attack. "We have formally asked the UN and the WFP to open an investigation that clarifies what happened, the reasons behind the security provisions used and who was responsible for these decisions," Di Maio said as he reported to parliament on the attack. "We have also explained that we expect clear, exhaustive answers in the shortest period of time possible". The minister said that a team from the Carabinieri's ROS special operations group was in DR Congo to gather evidence for an investigation by Rome prosecutors into the case. Di Maio said other investigative missions would follow. The DR Congo government has blamed Rwandan rebel group FDLR for the attack. It said Attanasio and Iacovacci were killed by their assailants, ruling out the hypothesis that the friendly fire of Congolese security forces may have caused the deaths. "We owe our fallen the truth before everything," Di Maio said. "But the best way to honour the memory of Ambassador Luca Attanasio and Carabiniere Vittorio Iacovacci is to continue to strengthen our political attention for the African continent, something Luca strongly believed in with passion and dedication. "He had devoted most of his diplomatic career and his personal efforts to Africa and the support of the weakest, with the activities organized by the Mama Sofia NGO founded by his wife Zakia in Kinshasa". The bodies of Attanasio, 43, and Iacovacci, a-30-year-old who was part of the ambassador's security detail, arrived in Italy late on Tuesday. Autopsies are set to be performed on Wednesday. Di Maio said Attanasio and Iacovacci were "heroes" and would have a State funeral in Rome on Thursday. (ANSA). Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Actor Bryan Brown brought some star power to the corridors of Parliament House on Wednesday as the star of 1988s biggest film Cocktail (the actors finest performance, FACT) joined Screen Producers Association representatives to lobby for an extension to JobKeeper as the industry continues to be crushed by COVID social distancing rules. And for a catch-up with his former Two Hands cast mate Perin Davey, now better known as Nationals senator for NSW. Bryan Brown and Scott Morrison. Credit:Illustration: John Shakespeare But Browns presence wasnt the only event lifting spirits. Education Minister Alan Tudge hit a milestone on Wednesday, turning 50. A giant balloon arch mounted outside his office by some enthusiastic staffers inside the Liberal ministerial wing indicated he was in the mood to party. But if only that were the case. I am trying to pretend that my birthday is not happening, he told CBD. Perhaps he should follow the lead of first-term MP Katie Allen. The paediatric allergy specialist turned 55 and marked the occasion with a hefty looking lemon-meringue tart in her office with staff. Meanwhile, the National Press Clubs last-minute cancellation of Defence Minister Linda Reynolds appearance due to her sudden hospitalisation forced a quick pivot in the kitchens. The clubs chef offloaded to the public all the West Australian champagne-poached rock lobsters prepared for the event at the bargain basement price of $10 a pop. By 1.30pm they had sold out thats 220 crustaceans snapped up in 72 minutes. Silver linings. 32999 The Crevalle Group's team is excited to join forces with K2 as they both strive to offer the highest level of service along with the best Salesforce talent. FREMONT, CA: Tequity, an M&A advisory firm with an exclusive focus on global enterprise cloud, software, and digital transformation firms, acted as the exclusive financial advisor to The Crevalle Group, a Salesforce partner headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, in their acquisition by K2 Partnering Solutions, the pioneer in consultative technology offerings. This acquisition, which was completed on December 31, 2020, will widen K2's existing footprint within the Salesforce ecosystem in North America. This illustrates Tequity's 11th successful Salesforce cloud ecosystem transaction. Tequity as a leading supplier of Salesforce talent, selected Tequity to find an acquisition partner as Tequity knows the Salesforce ecosystem extremely well. The company has invested extensively into the SFDC consulting partner and AppExchange ecosystems. The present valuation and key metrics knowledge that we have are street smart, based on the experience gained on several transactions working firsthand with buyers and sellers. Tequity also understands the most in-demand cloud solutions. All of this means we know how to match SFDC sellers with the best-suited buyers. The Crevalle Group offers services in the United States and Canada, including salesforce staff augmentation, managed services, improvements, support, training, and contract & permanent staffing. K2 Partnering Solutions are headquartered in London, UK, with offices around the world. The firm's unmatched understanding of the technology landscape and industry verticals means they offer unique consultative solutions in the Enterprise Cloud and on Premise, Predictive Analytics & Big Data, Social & Enterprise Mobility, Cyber Security, Artificial Intelligence, and Robotics markets. K2 is thrilled that Will Drescher and the team are joining K2. They will play a significant role in the continued Cloud Market position and expansion. The combination of K2 and Crevalle offers a powerful solution to the valued consultants and clients. FILE - In this Dec. 11, 2020, file photo former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who the Biden administration chose to reprise that role, speaks during an event at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File) Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 3 mesi fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. Global Split Air Conditioning Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report by Application (Residential, Commercial, Industrial, and Others), by Refrigerant Type (HCFC, HFC, HFO, Natural Refrigerant) and Forecast 2019-2025 The global split air conditioning market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 4% during the forecast period. Split AC comprises of an indoor and an outdoor unit that is connected by a refrigerant piping. There are variations of split-type ACs available in the market. These are inverter split AC, no-inverter split conditioners, and multi-split AC. Major factors augmenting the market are increasing urbanization, increasing disposable income, cohesive government regulations related to refrigerants, adverse climate change and so on. The rise in the demand of inverter AC is providing a significant opportunity to the market. Significant changes will be witnessed during the forecast period. Request a free sample copy of Split Air Conditioning Market Report @ https://www.bharatbook.com/marketreports/sample/reports/2346904 The market is segmented on the basis of application and refrigerant type. By application, the market is segmented into residential, commercial, industrial, and others. The residential segment is expected to show a significant growth rate globally. By refrigerant type, the market is further divided into HCFC, HFC, HFO, and natural refrigerant. As per the Montreal Protocol, HCFC will be totally phased out from the developed countries in 2020 and by 2030 in developing countries. Phase-out of HFC will also start from 2019 in developed economies. Due to this HFO and natural refrigerants will find a significant growth rate during the forecast period. On the basis of geography, the global split air conditioning market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World (RoW). The US is expected to hold a significant market during the forecast period. Asia-Pacific is expected to have a major market share with a significant growth rate during the forecast period. It is due to the significant demand for AC from the residential segment in the emerging economies including China, India, ASEAN countries and so on. The companies which are contributing significantly in the market include United Technologies Corp., LG Electronics Inc., Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Daikin Industries Ltd., and others. The market players are considerably contributing to the market growth by the adoption of various strategies including new product launch, merger, and acquisition, collaborations with government, funding to the start-ups and technological advancements to stay competitive in the market. Research Methodology The market study is incorporated by extensive primary and secondary research conducted by the research team. Secondary research has been conducted to refine the available data to breakdown the market in various segments, derive total market size, market forecast, and growth rate. Different approaches have been worked on to derive the market value and market growth rate. In the report, the analysis of the country is provided by analyzing various regional players, regional tax laws and policies, consumer behavior and macro-economic factors. Numbers extracted from secondary research have been authenticated by conducting proper primary research. It includes tracking down key people from the industry and interviewing them to validate the data. This enables our analyst to derive the closest possible figures without any major deviations in the actual number. Our analysts try to contact as many executives, managers, key opinion leaders, and industry experts to brings authenticity to the reports. Secondary Sources Include Financial reports of companies involved in the market. Whitepapers, research-papers, and news blogs. Company websites and their product catalog. The report is intended for AC manufacturers, AC component manufacturers, automobile companies, chemical companies, government organizations, venture capitalists for the comprehensive market analysis. The report provides an in-depth analysis on market size, intended quality of the service preferred by consumers. The report will serve as a source for 360-degree analysis of the market thoroughly integrating different models. Market Segmentation 1. North American Air Conditioning Market Research and Analysis by Application 2. North American Air Conditioning Market Research and Analysis by Refrigerant Type The Report Covers Comprehensive research methodology of the North American Air Conditioning market. This report also includes a detailed and extensive market overview with key analyst insights. An exhaustive analysis of macro and micro factors influencing the market guided by key recommendations. Analysis of regional regulations and other government policies impacting the North American Air Conditioning market. Insights about market determinants which are stimulating the North American Air Conditioning market. Detailed and extensive market segments with regional distribution of forecasted revenues. Extensive profiles and recent developments of market players. Browse our full report with Table of Content: https://www.bharatbook.com/marketreports/global-split-air-conditioning-market-2019-2025/2346904 About Bharat Book Bureau: Bharat Book is Your One-Stop-Shop with an exhaustive coverage of 15,00,000 reports and insights that includes latest Industry Study, Industry Trends & Analysis, Forecasts Customized Intelligence, Newsletters and Online Databases. Overall a comprehensive coverage of major industries with a further segmentation of 100+ subsectors. Contact us at: Bharat Book Bureau Tel: +91 22 27810772/27810773 Email: poonam@bharatbook.com Website: www.bharatbook.com While you can use your existing PlayStation VR headset on the PS5 (if you have the adapter), Sony has revealed the first details of a brand new PSVR visor built for its new console. Some of the upgrades are predictable (and much needed), like "dramatic leaps" in performance, higher resolution displays, a wider field of view and better tracking. On the tracking front, expect a new VR controller, too, which will include elements of the DualSense controller and better ergonomics. Finally, you can retire your decades-old Move controllers. Sony Not just yet, mind. Sony warned you won't see a VR headset for PS5 in 2021, so its back to VR Beat Saber, Blood and Truth and Rez for now. Sony had a busy day. It also announced a revived Play At Home scheme, offering PlayStation freebies between March and June, which includes a free copy of Ratchet and Clank for PS4 to download from March 1st. No PlayStation Plus subscription needed. Before then, theres also a State of Play preview event coming Thursday February 25th thats tomorrow. Mat Smith USPS This is the next-generation USPS van, which will replace an aging fleet of vehicles powered by gas engines that can barely crack 10 MPG. The Postal Service announced that its 10-year, multi-billion-dollar modernization plan will revolve around these slightly cartoony vehicles, built by a company called Oshkosh Defense, which usually produces tactical vehicles for the military. The Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) doesnt have turrets or gun racks, but it does have air conditioning, blind-spot warning, automatic braking and a back-up camera. Most notably, however, is the option of an electric powertrain, which the USPS claims allows for upgrades in the future as technology improves. Continue reading. Fry's Fry's Electronics was a mostly West Coast-based shopping destination for gadget heads of all kinds, but now the retailer has called it quits. Yesterday was the last day stores were open, and the website has now gone offline, replaced with a farewell message. Founded in 1985, Fry's was known both for stocking whatever electronics parts you might need and often notoriously poor customer service. The retailer had previously closed a number of its stores, but that wasnt enough to ride out recent times, coupled with the online-heavy retail landscape in 2021. Continue reading. Sony Sony has announced the FX3, a cinematic A7S III, crammed into a body that looks like the A7C. The FX3 can shoot 4K footage with 10-bit 4:2:2 color sampling. Now, theres no 8K, but the FX3 can still capture 4K video at 120 fps and 1080p video at up to 240 fps. And thanks to an active cooling system inside, Sony says the FX3 can shoot video for up to 13 hours uninterrupted. Pre-orders start today. Continue reading. Sony The latest Gran Turismo has been delayed. Once again, Gran Turismo has been delayed. Development of a Gran Turismo title can only mean one thing: wait longer. Continue reading. Yeah, Im confused, too. OnLeaks and Voice have shared what they say are leaked design details of a Pixel 5a, and it appears to be the Pixel 4a 5G, with some minor changes. That phone was a blend of the Pixel 4a, which appeared a few months before it, and the Pixel 5, which launched at the same time. Nothing notable, yet, in these leaked images, just that the Pixel 5a may well exist and arrive sooner rather than later. Continue reading. But wait, theres more... Android update adds scheduled texts and improves accessibility Razer's $200 Kiyo Pro webcam adds adjustable FOV and 60 fps 1080p capture You are the frog in Peacock's upcoming 'Frogger' physical competition show Oppo demos true wireless charging on its rollable phone Epic Games is sending players V-Bucks to settle 'Fortnite' loot box class action lawsuit Analogue will crack down on scalpers when Pocket orders reopen Google had to fix a broken Stadia game after laying off its developer Firefox's Total Cookie Protection aims to stop tracking between multiple sites Governor Greg Abbott issued multiple waivers over the weekend to aid Texans response to the winter weather that gripped the state. The following are a few of the notable changes: Plumber apprentices who have met all other qualifications can temporarily perform plumbing repairs without direct supervision by a licensed plumber as long as the qualified individual is under general supervision of a master plumber. Abbott and the Texas Health and Human Services Commission waived regulations related to the intake and transfer of Texans in assisted living, nursing and other long-term care facilities. These waivers provide flexibility for long-term care facilities regarding capacity limits, intake and discharge paperwork and related processes and to reduce limitations on the transfer of Medicaid beds between facilities. Home and community-based services four-person residences are also allowed to temporarily increase capacity. The governor issued waivers to suspend certain regulations regarding food preparation and delivery. Under these waivers, unlicensed kitchens can prepare meals to donate to Texans as long as they follow Department of State Health Service food safety guidance. Waivers have also been issued to temporarily cover any overtime payments for Texas meat inspectors. The waivers will cover overtime costs through the rest of the week. These waivers will ensure meat inspectors are compensated for their time without burdening meat-processing and slaughterhouse establishments with extensive overtime costs throughout the next week, said Abbott in the news release. Another waiver enables trucks from the alcohol industry to deliver non-alcoholic grocery supplies to grocery stores. These waivers will provide more trucks, drivers, and logistical support to retailers who are working to replenish their stock in the aftermath of the winter storm, Abbott said. Abbott and the Texas Division of Emergency Management encourage Texans to self-report any damages experienced during the winter storm in an effort to help emergency management officials gauge the situation across the state. The data will also help FEMA highlight the need for federal disaster assistance for individuals. The survey, which is voluntary, is available in both English and in Spanish. Those interested can fill it out at www.TDEM.texas.gov/warm. Filling out the survey does not guarantee disaster relief assistance. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close Under the measure, police officers would be allowed to determine reasonable uses of force in certain situations. That means officers could disregard their departments use of force policy and use techniques including chokeholds, which are currently prohibited by Indianapolis police that are not currently permitted. The bill also prohibits officers from firing warning shots. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company New Delhi: When US space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), offered the job opening for a 'Planetary Protection Officer', liitle did they know that it would cross all the age barriers and receive a zealous letter from a 9-year-old. Jack Davis, a fourth-grader in New Jersey wrote a hand-written letter to NASA asking if he could apply for the position. Describing himself as a Guardian of the Galaxy, Jack asserted that despite his young age, he thinks he would be "fit for the job". Adding up to his abilities he stated that he has great video game skills and has seen many space movies, that would make him perfect for the position. Seeing a streak in this young space enthusiast, Dr. James L. Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, responded to Jack's letter, writing that the I hear you are a Guardian of the Galaxy and that youre interested in being a NASA Planetary Protection Officer. Thats great! Although the Planetary Protection Officer position may not be in real-life what the title conjures up, it does play an important role in promoting the responsible exploration of our solar system by preventing microbial contamination of other planets and our own, NASA writes in the press release. Jonathan Rall - NASA's planetary research director - also rang up Davis "to congratulate him on his interest in the position", the press release further added. The job opening for a 'Planetary Protection Officer' has created a lot of excitement among the public as it will pay whopping $187,000 (141,000) to the selected candidate for this role. However, the job is not easy and comes with a lot of complications which is why NASA is giving away a hefty salary for the post. Read more: Gigantic storm about the size of Earth observed on Neptune While the title of the job suggests that the 'Planetary Protection Officer' is supposed to prevent the destruction of the Earth, but the job requires a broader focus. The officer will actually be responsible for helping to prevent NASA from destroying other worlds just as much as they are protecting the Earth. When 4th grader and self-proclaimed Guardian of the Galaxy, Jack, wrote to us about applying for a job, we replied https://t.co/932pj3Q50B pic.twitter.com/RhcGdnzGAw NASA (@NASA) August 4, 2017 For all the Latest Science News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Sheep Baarack is seen before his thick wool was shorn in Lancefield, Victoria, Australia February 5, 2021. Photo: Edgar's Mission Inc A wild and ailing sheep found in a forest in Australia, named Baarack by rescuers, has yielded a fleece weighing more than 35kg - nearly half the weight of an adult kangaroo - after being shorn for the first time in many a year. The sheep was found by a member of the public who contacted the Edgars Mission Farm Sanctuary near Lancefield, Victoria, about 60km north of Melbourne, according to the Missions Kyle Behrend. Expand Close Sheep Baarack is seen before his thick wool was shorn in Lancefield, Victoria, Australia. Photo: Edgar's Mission / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Sheep Baarack is seen before his thick wool was shorn in Lancefield, Victoria, Australia. Photo: Edgar's Mission It would appear Baarack was once an owned sheep, said Behrend, he had at one time been ear-tagged, however these appear to have been torn out by the thick matted fleece around his face. Sheep need to be shorn at least annually otherwise the fleece continues to grow and grow, as happened here, said Behrend. After his much-needed shearing, Behrend said Baaracks fleece weighed in at 35.4kg. Whilst his hooves were in great condition from running over the rocks in the forest, he was in a bit of a bad way. He was underweight, and due to all of the wool around his face he could barely see. Baarack is now settling in with other rescued sheep at Edgars Mission, Behrend said, adding it all goes to show what incredibly resilient and brave animals sheep really are and we could not love them any more if we tried. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kyrgyz counterpart Sadyr Japarov have discussed bilateral ties in Moscow as Kyrgyzstan emerges from a political crisis. Japarov, who was elected president on January 10, arrived in the Russian capital on his first foreign trip as the Central Asian state's leader on February 24. "Undoubtedly, my first trip abroad to Russia as the president of the Kyrgyz Republic proves the high level of the bilateral ties between our nations. We intend to continue strengthening strategic partnership and allied ties," Japarov said at the meeting with Putin. Putin expressed hope that the political crisis in Kyrgyzstan would come to an end, calling ties between the two countries "close and privileged." During Japarov's two-day visit in Moscow he will also hold talks with other top Russian officials, including Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and the speakers of both chambers of parliament. Kyrgyzstan has been in political crisis since parliamentary elections in October led to protests that triggered the toppling of the government and the resignation of then-President Sooronbai Jeenbekov. Japarov was among several prominent politicians freed from prison by protesters during the unrest. He had been serving a 10-year prison sentence for hostage taking during a protest against a mining operation in northeastern Kyrgyzstan in October 2013. He has denied the charge. The 52-year-old's landslide victory came in an election that international observers said "generally respected" fundamental freedoms even though the vote was not "fully fair." Based on reporting by TASS and Interfax A thematic briefing on "Stories of CPC" is held in Urumqi in Xinjiang. Photo: Liu Xin/GT A briefing on stories of the Communist Party of China (CPC) was held in Urumqi, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on Monday, with major politicians from across the world hailing the strong leadership of the CPC and the country's efforts in poverty alleviation and ethnic solidarity in Xinjiang. The event was conducted via video link with over 300 international participants representing nearly 200 political parties, international institutions, civil society organizations, media outlets and think tanks from dozens of countries. It was held by the International Department of the CPC Central Committee and the CPC Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Committee. Xinjiang Party chief Chen Quanguo attended the briefing and outlined the real lives of people in Xinjiang with stories, data and facts, refuting the Western's claims of "forced labor" and "genocide" on Uygurs in Xinjiang. From 2010-2018, the Uygur population in Xinjiang grew by 2.5 million, or 25.04 percent, which is higher than Xinjiang's overall population growth rate (13.99 percent), ethnic minority population growth rate (22.14 percent) and Han population growth rate (2 percent), Chen said. What Xinjiang has done is just and transparent and aims to make a better life for residents. The claims of "forced labor," "genocide," or "camps" are total slander, and call white black, he added. This is the second time that the Xinjiang regional government has held a thematic briefing on the stories of the Communist Party of China. It was also the first of such briefing in the region to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CPC. The briefing was also held a week ahead of the country's important political events - the two sessions and at the start of the 46th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council. More than 100 political parties from Islamic countries sent their delegates to the online briefing, which shows their interest, understanding and support to China and their wish to use the platform to strengthen the exchange of governance experiences. Chinese officials said the briefing, held at the beginning of the year marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CPC and the first year for implementing the country's 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), demonstrates the openness and confidence of Xinjiang. Tonga's Speaker of Parliament Lord Fakafanua said at the briefing that the country should learn from China's efforts on combating COVID-19 that have ensured people to continue to enjoy security, prosperity and a better life. The briefing is an ideal platform for calling for global efforts against the pandemic. Tep Ngorn, Member of Central Standing Committee of Cambodian People's Party and 2nd Vice President of the Senate hailed the strong leadership of the CPC, China's efforts to protect religious beliefs, and assistance in Cambodia's fight against COVID-19 by providing anti-epidemic supplies and COVID-19 vaccines, noting that he firmly opposes any lies and attempts to smear the image of the CPC. Zulkifli Hasan, leader of Indonesia's PAN party, said that his party is helping the Indonesian government promote Sinovac Biotech's COVID-19 vaccine. "All vaccines used in Indonesia were manufactured by Sinovac and this is a major cooperation between the two countries. Indonesia is ready to promote the safety of this vaccine to the general public, and as a party greatly supported by Muslims, the country will educate them about the safety of the vaccine in terms of health standards," Zulkifli said. The 64-year-old sister of Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has died of COVID-19 complications as the city reached its grim milestone of 1,000 virus deaths Wednesday. Mercia Bowser, who was retired from a career working for Catholic Charities and the DC Office on Aging, died Wednesday morning after she contracted COVID-19 and then developed pneumonia. The mayor, 48, announced the death of her oldest sibling and only sister in a statement saying she 'joins the legion of angels who have gone home too soon due to the pandemic'. The heartbreaking announcement came just hours after Bowser confirmed 1,000 lives have now been lost to the virus in the capital city and declared February 24 a day of remembrance. Mercia Bowser (pictured) , the 64-year-old sister of Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has died of COVID-19 complications as the city reached its grim milestone of 1,000 virus deaths The mayor, 48, announced the death of her oldest sibling and only sister in a statement saying she 'joins the legion of angels who have gone home too soon due to the pandemic' 'My family and I are mourning the loss of my sister, Mercia Bowser, who passed away this morning due to complications related to COVID-19,' Bowser said in the statement Wednesday afternoon. 'Mercia was loved immensely and will be missed greatly, as she joins the legion of angels who have gone home too soon due to the pandemic.' Bowser urged Americans to keep 'in your thoughts and prayers' all those who have lost loved ones to the virus and asked that she be given 'time and space' to grieve for her sister. 'I ask that you continue to keep those who have been lost or impacted by the pandemic and those who are working so hard to protect us from it in your thoughts and prayers, and I respectfully request that my family and I are granted the time and space we need to mourn the loss of Mercia,' she said. The mayor paid tribute to her sister who she said was 'a loving daughter, sister, aunt, and friend' and who 'worked tirelessly for children, the elderly, and those with behavioral disorders until her retirement and beyond'. 'She counted many friends and fond memories of her service to Catholic Charities and the DC Office on Aging,' she said. Bowser thanked the medical staff at Washington Hospital Center who had cared for Mercia up until her death. The heartbreaking announcement came just hours after Bowser (pictured earlier this month) confirmed 1,000 lives have now been lost to the virus in the capital city 'We are grateful to the doctors and nurses at Washington Hospital Center, who heroically treated her for COVID-19 related pneumonia until her death,' she said. 'We thank you for your kindness and will share how our family will honor Mercia, my only sister and oldest sibling, and her beautiful spirit in the coming days.' Mercia is survived by her parents Joan and Joseph Bowser, four brothers, sister Muriel Bowser, nieces, nephews, and friends 'ranging from St. John's Elementary School, to Academy of Our Lady High School, to Fisk University, and Israel Metropolitan CME Church'. Mercia was the eldest of six siblings and was in high school when her younger sister, who she nicknamed JB Jr., was born. The Bowsers grew up in a politically active household, with their father Joe Bowser campaigning and being elected as an advisory neighborhood commissioner in DC more than four decades ago. Bowser declared February 24 a day of remembrance for lives lost to COVID-19 But, unlike her sister, Mercia chose not to follow in her father's footsteps. She attended Fisk University and instead chose a career working for charities. When her younger sister first ran for mayor in 2014, Mercia gently mocked her for going down the same route as their father, reported the Washington Post. Mercia would have turned 65 on March 7. Her death from COVID-19 comes just one day before DC officials will expand vaccine eligibility to a broader group including some residents aged 65-plus. From Thursday February 25, residents who live in priority zip codes and are 65 and older, have a qualifying medical condition, and/or are a member of an eligible workforce will be eligible to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Mercia's death makes her one of the more than 1,000 now killed by the virus in DC. Just hours before naming her sister as one of the victims, Bowser announced the devastating death toll. She declared February 24 'A day of remembrance for lives lost to COVID-19' and encouraged houses of worship to honor the 1,000 killed at 6 p.m. 'I hereby proclaim February 24, 2021 in Washington, DC as 'A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE FOR LIVES LOST TO COVID-19' and call on all Washingtonians to pause and remember more than 1,000 neighbors, family, and friends whose lives were lost to the virus,' she tweeted. In a statement, Bowser wrote: 'This tragic milestone is a reminder that this pandemic has forever changed families and communities. 'Even when the pandemic ends, for many, the pain and loss will still be there.' Nationwide, more than 500,000 Americans have died and 28.3 million have been infected with the virus. The Australian Federal Police has told politicians they must report allegations of sexual assault and other criminal matters without delay or risk prejudicing any investigations. The advice from AFP commissioner Reece Kershaw to Prime Minister Scott Morrison was circulated to members of parliament on Thursday after debate over the handling of allegations from former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins that she was raped in a ministerial office in March 2019 by a colleague. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has given his full support to Defence Minister Linda Reynolds. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen At the time, Ms Higgins boss Defence Minister Linda Reynolds encouraged her to go to police but the adviser ultimately decided not to pursue a formal complaint. Ms Higgins asked police on Wednesday to reopen the investigation. I cannot state strongly enough the importance of timely referrals of allegations of criminal conduct, Mr Kershaw wrote in the letter to Mr Morrison. Failure to report alleged criminal behaviour in this manner, or choosing to communicate or disseminate allegations via other means, such as through the media or third parties, risks prejudicing any subsequent police allegations. While Guntraders in Redmond sells mostly collectible guns, owner Jerry Koch said that isnt stopping customers from flocking to his shop in search of a firearm. Theyre coming out of fear, Koch said. Customers are fearful of the protests theyve seen on television, in Portland and across the country. I pray for America, Koch said. At the start of the pandemic, they came in and we were busy. They were scared then, too. But once the riots started, they started climbing again. The pandemic and protests have made 2020 a banner year for gun sales in Oregon, according to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which tracks criminal background checks of gun applicants. Gun sales are not tracked, but the background checks required for most gun sales are. Still, not every background check results in a gun sale, and some sales are made without going through background checks. For example, guns sold between family members do not require a background check, according to federal guidelines. In 2020, Oregon sold more than 516,000 guns and performed background checks for those sales. In the United States, 39.6 million gun background checks were done in 2020, compared to 23.1 million in 2015. With so many purchases, the state, which performs its own background checks, is backlogged. In 2019, there were 276,912 background check requests, compared to 2020 when there were 418,061 requests . That backlog is mostly due to near hits on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System because of incorrect information, missing information or invalid government-issued identification or missing information, Capt. Timothy Fox, an Oregon State Police government and media relations officer, said in an email. Jefferson County District Attorney Steven Leriche said he was not aware of increased crime being associated with increased firearm sales. But he did say there is a correlation between drug and alcohol use and gun ownership and serious crimes. Guns themselves are generally not my worry, Leriche said. The combination of drugs being plentiful and guns being plentiful, thats a worry. Weve had five murders so far and at least two involve a firearm. According to the FBI data, there was a 44% increase in firearm background checks in Oregon from 2019 to 2020 and an 86.9% increase from 2015 to 2020. Jefferson County Sheriff Jim Adkins said he preferred to have an armed citizenry, as it is difficult sometimes to get to someone in need and they can help themselves. Police cannot always be there at the moment they are needed most, Adkins said. I always encourage citizens to be more self-reliant. Everyone should be prepared with food, water, warmth and self-defense, so they can handle any emergency on their own until help arrives. Sometimes help can be pretty slow. Especially a life-threatening event. In Bend, at Hammer Down Firearms, not only are firearms selling rapidly, so is ammunition, said owner Scott Wyke. He agreed with Koch that customers are coming into the store looking for protection because of the recent civil unrest. For months, protests persisted in Portland that were mostly peaceful. A march drawing several hundred was held in May in downtown Bend to protest the killing of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck. The protest was held in conjunction with a nationwide movement that sparked violence in some cities, including Portland and Eugene. All the riots started it, Wyke said. Now its the Democrats saying theyre going to take our guns away and people are purchasing now. Ammunition is in short supply now. Combined with demand are ammunition plant shutdowns or slowdowns caused by efforts to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Sales have been higher than I expected and its mostly coming from first-time buyers, he said. She looked busy enjoying the outdoors with her three-year-old daughter, before running into a superhero of a friend. Irina Shayk was seen out for a stroll with her three-year-old daughter Lea de Seine on Tuesday in New York City. During their outing, the mother-daughter pair met up with none other than X-Men star Hugh Jackman on the street, along with his wife Deborra-Lee Furness. Sublime snowy pair: Irina Shayk was seen out for a stroll with her three-year-old daughter Lea de Seine on Tuesday in New York City Smiles all around: The mother-daughter pair looked to be enjoying the outdoors together Irina, who turned 36 last month, was chic in a black shearling full length coat. She also wore a burgundy leather buttoned down shirt, dark jeans and knee-high black leather boots with heels. On her head, the Russian runway star pulled a black beanie cap over her long brown hair, which spilled out from underneath. Shayk wore rectangular thick black sunglasses and stayed protected in a black face mask. During their outing: They also met up with none other than X-Men star Hugh Jackman on the street, along with his wife Deborra-Lee Furness Irina also held onto a tan leather saddlebag purse. She pushed the stroller a long containing Lea, whom she shares with ex Bradley Cooper. However the toddler also opted to get out and walk alongside her mother, hand-in-hand as they strolled both on the snow as well as sidewalk. Stylish with stroller: Irina, who turned 36 last month, was chic in a black shearling full length coat and beanie cap Hand in hand: She also wore a burgundy leather buttoned down shirt, dark jeans and knee-high black leather boots with heels Like her mother, the adorable little girl clutched a handbag, which appeared to be a small Louis Vuitton tote with yellow handles. She also wore a pink puffer coat, plaid pants and black Wellington-style boots. Lea stayed warm in a bright red scarf and pink and violet pom-pom hat. Like her mother: The adorable little girl clutched a handbag, which appeared to be a small Louis Vuitton tote with yellow handles Winter fashions: Lea wore a pink puffer coat, plaid pants and black Wellington-style boots At one point they stopped by the railing overlooking the river, with Lea seemingly feeding the gaggle of seagulls who perched there. Jackman, 52, look thrilled to see Irina along with his wife Deborra-Lee, 65. They both wore black winter coats and matching pants, with Hugh in sturdy-looking black Sorel snowboots. Fun: At one point they stopped by the railing overlooking the river, with Lea seemingly feeding the gaggle of seagulls who perched there Enjoying the sunshine: Irina and Lea took a moment to sit in the sun with there feet in the snow His wife bent down and lowered her face mask momentarily to greet a smiling Lea. Tuesdays run-in was not the first time Irina and Hugh have been seen out at the same time. Last November, they also briefly saw each other out on the streets of the city. Jackman also appears to be a friend of Coopers, as he was seen last June leaving Bradley's apartment. If you're interested in submitting a Letter to the Editor, click here. Submit (Newser) A repeat felon released early from prison in January has admitted to cutting out the heart of a neighbor before authorities say he killed the uncle and aunt he'd been staying with, along with that couple's 4-year-old granddaughter. Only the aunt survived. This comes from a request for a search warrant from an agent with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, per the Oklahoman. It claims Lawrence Paul Anderson was arrested at the Chickasha home of his aunt and uncle after a 911 call on Feb. 9, three weeks after his Jan. 18 release. Police found Leon Pye, 67, dead inside the home. Pye's granddaughter, Kaeos Yates, died in an ambulance at the scene. Delsie Pye, 64, survived, but with stab wounds to both eyes, the outlet reports. Anderson, 42, was found "throwing up in the living room into some pillows," the agent wrote. story continues below Police found the body of Andrea Lynn Blankenship, 41, in her home only after Anderson confessed to cutting out her heart on Feb. 12, per the Washington Post. He "cooked the heart with potatoes to feed to his family to release the demons," the agent wrote to a judge in the OSBI's request to collect pots and pans from the Pye home. Anderson cried during his arraignment Tuesday, adding he didn't want to be bailed out, per the Daily Beast. Held at the Grady County Jail, he's charged with first-degree murder, assault and battery with a deadly weapon, and maiming. He'd received a 20-year sentence for drugs and weapons crimes in 2017, following a lengthy criminal history. But Gov. Kevin Stitt commuted his sentence to nine years in June at the recommendation of the state parole board. The interim secretary for public safety has vowed to look into the case amid outrage, per the Oklahoman. (Read more murder stories.) Argentina's President Alberto Fernandez said Tuesday that no crime had been committed in a scandal over coronavirus vaccine queue-jumping that forced his health minister to resign. Fernandez, on an official visit to Mexico, called the incident "reprehensible" but said that the issue of vaccines was "very sensitive" and should not be politicized. "I've read that they've made a complaint ... Let's end the nonsense!" Fernandez said as he joined Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador at his daily news conference. "I ask the prosecutors and judges to do what they must," he said, adding that there was "no such crime" as vaccine queue-jumping under Argentinian law. Gines Gonzalez Garcia quit as health minister on Friday at the request of Fernandez after it emerged that his friends had been able to skip the line for coronavirus inoculation. Fernandez said he did not rule out further resignations. "Those who have to go are going to have to go because I never promoted or endorsed any of that," he said. Fernandez himself received Russia's Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine in January in what he said was an effort to encourage others to be inoculated. "I had to have the vaccine because the Argentine media said that the Russian vaccine could not be trusted," the 61-year-old said. The two leaders also issued a joint plea for greater efforts to tackle vaccine inequality. Fernandez said that he would seek Mexico's support for a proposal for the G20 to ask coronavirus vaccine makers to waive their intellectual property rights "so all countries can produce them freely." Lopez Obrador urged the United Nations to do more to ensure equal access to vaccines against a virus that has killed more than 180,000 people in Mexico -- one of the world's highest tolls. "There are more than 100 countries that do not have a single dose of the vaccine. This is totally unfair," he said. Mexico began mass vaccination on December 24, starting with health workers, but like many countries is constrained by limited supplies. The West Bengal CID on Wednesday detained a Bangladeshi national in connection with the blast in Murshidabad's Nimtita Railway Station in which state minister Jakir Hossain and over 20 others were injured. Hossain, Trinamool Congress MLA and the minister of state for labour, was waiting at platform number 2 to catch a train to Kolkata around 10 pm on February 17 when the blast occurred, seriously injuring him and the others. "We have detained one person and investigation is underway," news agency PTI quoted a senior CID official as saying. Hossain and the other injured persons are undergoing treatment at a state-run hospital in the city. Mamata Banerjee alleges conspiracy West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee had alleged the bomb attack on Jakir Hossain was part of a conspiracy as certain people were "pressuring" him to switch over to another party. Banerjee, who went to the SSKM hospital to inquire after his condition following the incident, hit out at the railways for its "lack lustre" way of functioning. "It was a preplanned attack on minister Jakir Hossain. Some people have claimed the blast was remote controlled. It is a conspiracy. Some people (party) were pressuring Jakir Hossian to join them for the last few months. I don't want to disclose anything more as the investigation is on," Banerjee told reporters. The attackers apparently knew about Hossain's movement and must have been tailing him, she said. Banerjee said not just the CID, but state STF and Counter Insurgency Force (CIF) will assist in the probe. READ | We'll bring 40 lakh tractors to Delhi, grow crops at India Gate, gherao Parliament: Tikait READ | Tiger Woods camp issues update after his accident; confirms multiple fractures, surgery "How can the railways deny their responsibility for security lapses when the attack happened at a railway station? There were no security personnel at the station at the time of the attack. There was no light, it was completely dark. What was the railway police doing?" she asked. The railways should cooperate in the investigation, she said. The BJP leadership, meanwhile, slammed Banerjee for trying to divert public attention from the failures of the state government. "The incident proves that law and order has ceased to exist. Does the railways run the state? Such theories won't help. She has failed both as state home minister and the Chief Minister," state BJP vice president Jaiprakash Majumdar said. Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar had also called for an NIA investigation into the blast. Attack on WB Minister Jakir Hossain at Nimtita railway station, Murshidabad, reprehensible. Concerned at increasing rise in violence that has no place in democracy. Time @WBPolice @HomeBengal administration @MamataOfficial to act fast as per law. Governor West Bengal Jagdeep Dhankhar (@jdhankhar1) February 17, 2021 READ | Ahmedabad's giant Motera named 'Narendra Modi Stadium' before 3rd India-England Test READ | Centre clarifies its Chinese FDI policy remains unchanged; dismisses Congress 'deal' claim The Nigerian Army has recovered the corpses of four soldiers allegedly killed by members of the pro-Biafra group, IPOB, in Orlu, Imo State. A senior military officer, who confirmed the development to PRNigeria, said the military vehicle damaged during the attack has also been recovered. PRNigeria reported how Nigerian troops on Monday arrested 20 members of IPOB after they attacked soldiers and civilians in Orlu. The troops, in a joint operation involving the army, air force and the police, sustained a raid operation in the axis, after the killing of the soldiers. The IPOB members were said to have ambushed and killed the soldiers who were on the escort of a top military officer. The officer, a brigadier-general, and his team were on inspection of the civil-military project at Nkwerre. The IPOB members were said to have also taken away weapons and a vehicle belonging to the troops. The PRNigeria report was not explicit on when the soldiers were killed. But it appeared the incident happened late January, from a report published, January 26, by the BBC Pidgin English. The BBC report, which was later pulled down, said the police spokesperson in Imo, Orlando Ikeogwu, confirmed the killing. Meanwhile, the spokesperson of the Nigerian Army, 82 Division, Aliyu Yusuf, has alerted the public of a fake video on an alleged plan by soldiers to attack women and children in Orlu Market. Mr Yusuf, a colonel, said the video was circulated on social media to hoodwink the public. He said: The video was recorded in an unknown market with a fake soldier claiming to be privy to a supposed order given by 302 Artillery Regiment, Onitsha to start killing everybody at Orlu Market and environs in Orlu Local Government Area in Imo State. Preliminary investigation revealed that it was a calculated attempt to maliciously fabricate sensational stories to cause resentment and smear campaign against Nigerian Army Internal Security Operations. The supposed individual in the video was not bold enough to reveal his true identity as claimed or present his so called military uniform and identity card which were deliberately obscured to deceive innocent target audience. Mr Yusuf added that the Nigerian Army recognises the right of citizens to hold and share opinions on social media, and not to spread divisive contents by unpatriotic individuals. I invited military to Orlu Governor Uzodinma Amidst the controversy over the military operation in Orlu, Governor Hope Uzodinma has said the military came to Imo State on his invitation. IPOB has claimed the Igbos are unfairly targeted by the Nigerian government. Mr Uzodinma, who spoke with reporters in Abuja after a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari, said the soldiers were brought in to quell violence perpetrated by militants in Orlu and its environs. ADVERTISEMENT Well, the issue of bringing the military to Imo state; you recall, during the EndSARS protests, a lot of properties were damaged in Imo State; police stations were burnt down, soldiers were killed, their rifles removed from them. And immediately after the EndSARS, we thought it was over then issues of kidnapping, where you know, a Catholic bishop was kidnapped, people were killed. And these militants come out and begin to shoot. Weve lost lives, market women were killed, old women were raped in Orlu area of Imo State and they visited this serious terror on the citizenry. And then I came here, pleaded with Mr President for his support and he sent additional support by sending in police and the military also came in. And that is where we are, the governor said. Mr Uzodinma did not mention IPOB by name, but it was apparent he was referring to the outlawed group. He said the military were not at Orlu to crush anybody. It is not about crushing anybody and those that came didnt do any crushing, the governor said. Those that came through their intelligence, identified where these people were and I can tell you, all the people arrested, all the rifles recovered are intact. IPOB, which enjoys great following in the South-east, has been canvassing an independent state of Biafra, and has frequently clashed with security agencies, including the Nigerian Army. The group recently set up its security arm called the Eastern Security Network. [February 24, 2021] Blueshift Raises $30M Series C To Scale SmartHub Customer Data Platform SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Blueshift , the leading AI-Powered Customer Data Platform, today announced a $30 million Series C financing round, bringing the total amount raised to $65 million. This latest funding round was led by Fort Ross Ventures, along with Avatar Growth Capital. Existing investors including Softbank Ventures Asia, Storm Ventures, Conductive Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the round. Ratan Singh of Fort Ross Ventures will join Blueshift's Board of Directors. Blueshift, the leading CDP, announces a $30 million Series C, bringing the total amount raised to $65 million . "Our mission is to back category-leading companies that are poised to dominate a market. Blueshift clearly stood out to us as the leader in the enterprise CDP space," said Ratan Singh of Fort Ross Ventures, Blueshift's newest board member. "We are thrilled to partner with the Blueshift team as they accelerate the adoption of their SmartHub CDP platform." Marketing and Customer Experience (CX) are increasingly intertwined in today's connected world, and marketers are being tasked with understanding customers through the lens of CX data to craft personalized experiences. However, traditional marketing platform focus only on marketing response data (like clicks), and are unable to leverage CX data from across the customer journey. The first generation of CDPs attempted to solve this challenge by focusing only on data integration, but lacked any intelligent decisioning, and were not built for marketers or CX professionals. Blueshift's SmartHub CDP platform combines the data fidelity of a CDP with the intelligence needed for marketers to make real-time decisions. This enables marketers to not only unify 360-degree CX data ("CDP"), but also to make AI-Powered decisions from large volumes of data ("Smart"), and distribute the decisioning to every touchpoint in the customer journey (the "Hub"). Blueshift's SmartHub CDP platform has been adopted by leading global brands including LendingTree, Discovery Inc., Udacity and BBC among others, and has been shown to deliver 781% ROI in a recent study conducted by Forrester Research. Blueshift was recently named among the fastest-growing companies on Deloitte's Fast 500 Technology Awards , which lists the fastest growing technology companies in North America. Blueshift will use the proceeds from this latest funding round to further accelerate its global growth, cementing its leadership position in the CDP space. "With the increased urgency towards digital transformation, we have seen an increased demand for a SmartHub CDP, that can not only unify silo-ed data, but also unify silo-ed experiences", said Vijay Chittoor, co-founder and CEO of Blueshift. "I am very pleased to welcome both Fort Ross Ventures and Avatar Growth Capital to the Blueshift family as they have tremendous experience with enterprise-focused scale-ups at our stage of rapidly accelerating growth." "One of the biggest challenges in 1:1 marketing is the need to activate large volumes of data when you scale to millions of customers across multiple touch points. Unlike other platforms that struggle with handling increasing amounts of data, Blueshift becomes more powerful the more data you have in it.", said Chris Kachel, Senior Director of Customer Experience at LendingTree. "This has allowed us to scale our personalization efforts and customer journeys across multiple apps on different channels, and the results have been tremendous" About Blueshift San Francisco based Blueshift helps brands deliver relevant, connected experiences across every customer interaction. The Blueshift SmartHub CDP platform uses patented AI technology to unify, inform, and activate the fullness of customer data across all channels and applications. Through unified data, omnichannel orchestration, intelligent decisioning, and unmatched scale, Blueshift gives brands all the tools they need to seamlessly deliver 1:1 experiences in real-time across the entire customer journey. The company is backed by leading venture capital investors, including Fort Ross Ventures, Avatar Growth Capital, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Storm Venture Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. For more information visit: blueshift.com . View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/blueshift-raises-30m-series-c-to-scale-smarthub-customer-data-platform-301234016.html SOURCE Blueshift [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Side or Stomach Position Adults already spend the majority of time sleeping on their side, and research has found that people spend more time sleeping on their side as they age. Still, there isnt evidence to suggest that a certain body position leads to better sleep, and the sleep doctors I spoke to said you cant really control your movement while youre asleep anyway. The average adult only spends about 7 percent of their sleep time on their stomach, but I already fall asleep on my stomach as a rule. I cant drift off unless Im in a very specific position with my arms pinned underneath me, my face turned to the right side, and my right leg in a figure four. Shush The adult equivalent of shushing a baby is white noise or a fan (which can be used on babies as well). A meta-review of 38 studies reviewing the efficacy of noise as a sleep aid published this year showed that the evidence for this is weak. There was a lack of consistency in the research many of the studies used a different kind of background noise and some studies found that if the noise was too loud, it actually interrupted sleep, and could be bad for your hearing. That said, Clinically, if someone tells me they sleep better with the fan on, thats perfectly fine, but its not something I would recommend to everyone, said Jennifer Mundt, an assistant professor of neurology specializing in sleep at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. I live adjacent to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, so I have been using a white noise app on my iPad and have conditioned myself to associate white noise with getting sleepy. That can be comforting, said Dr. Mundt. Swing Rocking an infant helps put them to sleep, and the SNOO, a bassinet that uses motion and sound to calm a baby an invention of the aforementioned Dr. Harvey Karp is a hot ticket registry item. Theres a passage in a famous essay by David Foster Wallace, written about his trip on a luxury cruise ship, where he claims that heavy seas are great for sleep, because you feel rocked to sleep, the windows spume a gentle shushing, engines throb a mothers pulse. Unfortunately, none of the experts I spoke to knew of any research that tested the efficacy of rocking a grown-up on land or on the high seas, though, There is probably a market for an adult SNOO, said Dr. Mundt. Sorry! This content is not available in your region Not wearing a mask in Mumbai will not cost you Rs 1,000 but Rs 200. To encourage mask-wearing in public places, Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh tweeted a few days ago that the police will issue challans to those not wearing a mask in public places. However, soon fake rumours started doing rounds that the fine for not wearing face masks is Rs 1,000. Singh took to Twitter again yesterday to clarify that the fine is Rs 200 and Rs 1,000. His tweet said, "Dear Mumbaikars! #FakeNews mongers are back again! This time claiming that No Mask can cost you a fine 1,000 rupees. While no money can compensate for safety being compromised, you can only be charged Rupees 200 for not wearing a mask. #MaskIsMust #FakeNewsAlert" Authorities in the city including the Mumbai Police and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), are encouraging COVID-19 appropriate behaviour among residents to curb the spread of the infection. Both the BMC and the Mumbai Police are actively encouraging people to wear their masks with interesting and catchy messages. Mumbai Police recently tweeted "Float like a butterfly with your mask on, Don't let the virus 'sting like a bee'."BMC also took to Twitter to raise awareness among people about the importance of mask wearing. It said in a tweet, "Quite a steep price to pay for a minute of comfort. Wear a mask properly to reduce risk of infection." Dear Mumbaikars! #FakeNews mongers are back again! This time claiming that No Mask can cost you a fine 1000 rupees. While no money can compensate for safety being compromised, you can only be charged Rupees 200 for not wearing a mask. #MaskIsMust#FakeNewsAlert CP Mumbai Police (@CPMumbaiPolice) February 23, 2021 Quite a steep price to pay for a minute of comfort. Wear a mask properly to reduce risk of infection.#NaToCorona#MissionZeropic.twitter.com/GL6xGIWeqz Mumbai, BMC (@mybmc) February 23, 2021 Maharashtra has reported an upsurge in COVID-19 cases in the past few days. The Union health ministry on Tuesday said two variants of COVID-19, N440K and E484K have been found in Maharashtra, Kerala and Telangana. However, the Centre said there is no scientific evidence to prove that these two strains are responsible for the rising cases in Maharashtra and Kerala. Also read: Elderly man rushed to hospital after getting Rs 80 crore electricity bill Japanese auto major (SMC) on Wednesday said its long-serving Chairman will retire and assume the role of senior advisor subject to shareholders' approval in the ordinary general meeting to be held in June this year. SMC also said its board has proposed the appointment of Toshihiro Suzuki -- current director and President, and son of -- as the Chairman of the Board of Directors. The company further said Kenichi Ayukawa, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of its Indian arm, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, has been proposed to be appointed as Executive Vice President. The Japanese auto major has also set a record consolidated net sales of 4.8 trillion yen in FY2025 on the back of expected recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and growth in the Indian market, having missed the previous mid-term management plan target "in its final year of FY2020 due to the slowdown of the Indian market, final inspection issue, and the COVID-19 pandemic". At the board of directors meeting held on February 24, 2021, made an internal decision regarding candidates for directors, and audit and supervisory board member to be elected at the 155th ordinary general meeting (OGM) of shareholders to be held in June 2021, SMC said in a statement. Accordingly, two directors on the board -- Osamu Suzuki, Representative Director and Chairman (Chairman of the Board of Directors) and Yasuhito Harayama, Representative Director and Vice Chairman, Supporting Chairman -- will retire. "Upon retirement, both will be appointed as senior advisors," SMC said. The 91-year-old Osamu Suzuki, who joined the then Suzuki Motor Company Ltd in 1958, gradually rose through the ranks to become one of the longest-serving CEOs and Chairmen in the automotive industry. In 1967, he became the Managing Director of and was elevated as President and CEO of the company in 1978. In 2000 he was appointed Chairman and CEO of the company. In June 2016, SMC had appointed Toshihiro Suzuki as its next CEO, with the senior Suzuki retaining the Chairmanship. From 2002 till date, has been a Director with Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, formerly Maruti Udyog Ltd -- a joint venture company between SMC and the government of India. A graduate from the faculty of Law, Chuo University, Osamu Suzuki had played a key role in setting up of Maruti Udyog Ltd and brought a revolution in personal mobility in India with the launch of the iconic M800 in 1983. Since then the company has been the market leader in the passenger vehicles segment in India, which also became SMC's most significant global market. Among the personnel changes in its managing officers, SMC said Kenichi Ayukawa, Managing Director and CEO, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, has been proposed as Executive Vice President. Ayukawa, who joined Suzuki Motor Corporation in 1980 and was appointed as Managing Director of Maruti Suzuki India in 2013 and was reappointed as Managing Director and CEO of the company for a period of three years with effect from April 1, 2019. Charting out the mid-term management plan from April 2021 to March 2026, SMC said, "As for management performance targets, we expect a recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and growth in the Indian market, and we aim for a record consolidated net sales of 4.8 trillion yen." The operating income target is set at 5.5 per cent, below the previous target of 7 per cent, due to aggressive investment in research and development, such as electrification, which amounts to 1 trillion yen over 5 years, it added. "In the previous mid-term management plan, we achieved a net sales target in FY2017 and FY2018, operating profit ratio target in FY2016 to FY2018, ahead of the scheduled plan. However, the target was not achieved in its final year of FY2020 due to the slowdown of the Indian market, final inspection issue, and the COVID-19 pandemic," SMC said. During the previous mid-term management plan period, there were cases of loss of customer trust, including quality problems, frequent recalls, and fraud in fuel efficiency tests and final inspection, the company 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.) Necessary protections for Indigenous heritage sites have been excluded from the Morrison governments proposed environmental reforms, prompting warnings from First Nations leaders it risks another devastating incident like Rio Tintos destruction of the Juukan Gorge. Former competition watchdog Graeme Samuels recent review of federal environment law said the government should bring in greater protections for Indigenous heritage immediately because of the legal culture of tokenism and symbolism. Before it was destroyed by Rio Tinto, the Juukan Gorge in WA held evidence of human habitation dating back 46,000 years. Credit:PKKP Aboriginal Corporation. The lack of legal protections for Indigenous heritage sites shot to public attention last year when mining giant Rio Tinto blew up two ancient Aboriginal rock shelters in Western Australias Juukan Gorge. The longer any substantial reforms take, there is every risk that a site is destroyed or impacted by land users who are not being held to any level of account by the government, said Anne Dennis, co-chair of the First Nations Heritage Protection Alliance representing 20 key Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island land councils nationwide. If you're interested in submitting a Letter to the Editor, click here. Submit Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. European Union Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager warned of potential antitrust action against Google or other US technology giants if they threaten to pull out of markets. Vestager told the European Parliaments economy committee on Tuesday that there could be scope for investigating if its actually legal for a dominant provider to stop supplying services, adding that the EU would have a number of tools to use. Also read: Valve declines Apple's request for data against Epic in antitrust lawsuit Her comments follow controversy in Australia, where Google and Facebook Inc. have been lobbying against a proposed law to require the search and social media companies to pay publishers for the value stories generate on their digital platforms Google initially threatened to shut its search engine in the country before striking a deal with News Corp. Facebook had restricted news sharing on its site but ended its blackout earlier Tuesday after the government agreed to amend the legislation. Google declined to comment on the latest warning by Vestager, who has fined it more than $9 billion for antitrust breaches. Meanwhile, it confirmed a report by Reuters that it had received antitrust objections from French regulators over its alleged non-compliance with an order to pay publishers for news snippets. Alphabet Inc.-owned Google said it would review the statement of objections and will work closely with the French competition authority. Read more: UK antitrust regulator suffered 150 data breaches in two years Our priority is to comply with the law, and to continue to negotiate with publishers in good faith, as evidenced by the agreements we have made with publishers in the past few months, the company said. The French competition authority didnt immediately respond to a request for comment outside of usual business hours. Burma China Says It Will Work With ASEAN to De-Escalate Situation in Myanmar Anti-coup protesters stage a sit-in protest in front of the Indonesian Embassy on Wednesday, demanding Jakarta stop backing the military regime's plan to hold a new election. / The Irrawaddy YANGONThe Chinese foreign minister said Beijing supports efforts by ASEAN to ease the situation in Myanmar during a phone conversation with his Indonesian counterpart, amid growing anger among Myanmar people toward ASEANs largest nation due to reports that it backs the coup leaders plan to hold a new election. Chinese state-owned media reported that China is ready to conduct close coordination with the bloc to de-escalate the situation in its southern neighbor. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said no countries were as concerned about the situation in Myanmar, and had a stronger desire to see the resumption and maintenance of peace and stability, than China and ASEAN, adding that ASEAN member Myanmar has friendly ties with China. The continuing turbulence in Myanmar is neither in the interests of Myanmar and its people, nor in the common interests of other regional countries, Wang said. He called on Myanmars military and political parties to take responsibility for the countrys stability and development, while expressing hope that all players would act in the countrys long-term interests. Wang said this would allow Myanmars problems to be solved peacefully and within constitutional and legal frameworks, and the let countrys democratic transition proceed in an orderly manner. Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said Jakarta and other ASEAN member countries proposed holding an informal meeting, and hoped that China would support it. She promised that ASEAN would help Myanmar find a way out of the current situation and advance inclusive democratic processes in Myanmar. Indonesia faced condemnation from Myanmar people after reports emerged that it had been pushing other ASEAN nations to agree to an action plan that included keeping the military to its promise to hold a fair and inclusive new election. Myanmar State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide victory in Myanmars general election on Nov. 8. On Feb. 1, the military staged a coup and detained national civilian leaders including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior NLD members, citing alleged electoral fraud. Following the reports, a large crowd gathered in front of the Indonesian Embassy in Yangon on Tuesday, demanding Jakarta not back the juntas plan to hold a new election, and that it recognize the results of the Nov. 8 vote. The anti-coup protesters held placards reading ASEAN Respect our Vote, We dont need another election, We want our elected government back and We dont accept Indonesias action plan. Later, Indonesias Foreign Ministry denied the report and announced that it respected the Myanmar peoples wishes. However, many in Myanmar remain skeptical of ASEANs stance and large numbers of protesters gathered outside the embassy for a second day on Wednesday. According to a letter from the Myanmar Ministry of Transport, Retno was expected to arrive in Myanmar on Thursday to discuss ASEANs stand on the military coup. On Wednesday, however, the Indonesian Foreign Ministry said it had canceled the trip. The cancellation comes amid concerns among the Myanmar public that such a visit would be tantamount to recognizing the military government. Myanmar military regime-appointed Foreign Minister U Wunna Maung Lwin flew to Bangkok on Wednesday to meet Retno following the cancellation of her trip. You may also like these stories: Myanmar Junta Leader Warns Media Against Using Junta or Regime After Embassy Protest, Indonesia Denies Backing Myanmar Regimes Election Plan Myanmar Police Fails to Probe Headquarters Raid: NLD After Texas won its independence from Mexico in 1836, it became its own independent country and was named the Republic of Texas. During the years 1836-1846 immigrants moved here from various countries in Europe hoping to find a better life in the Republic in Texas. These immigrants took a chance and left their homes and countries to start a new life in a beautiful place with lots of land, rivers and mild climate. In areas where they settled in the Republic, you can still see evidence of their culture, hear their different languages being spoken and see their influence on the area they chose to settle. Life was different back in those days. The capital was located in Houston. There was not much money in the Republic because so much money had been spent on the war. There were not many roads to get from one town to the next and there were still attacks from Indians and Mexican troops near the border. The Republic wanted new people to move here to build towns, schools and roads for our new country. Our new government wanted people to move here from Europe to start new lives here. To help attract European immigrants to Texas, the empresarial system was used to designate colonies and bring immigrants here. Three of the most famous empresarios were Henri Castro from France and two Germans named Henry Fisher and Burchard Miller. In 1842, Henri Castro persuaded 600 families and men to move from their homes in France and come live near San Antonio, Texas. They started a colony called Castroville named after Henri Castro. Castro hired 27 ships and brought over 2,000 farmers from France to start new lives in Texas. In return for the French people leaving their homes, friends and country, Mr. Castro gave them a ship ride over to Texas, 320 acres, a house and tools to start their first farm. All of this only cost $240.00. In return, Castro gave all his colonists approximately 300,000 acres of land. The ship ride was very difficult and would take months to get to Texas from France. They would land in Galveston, Texas and take horses and buggy rides from Galveston to their new community and the trip was long and hard and would take many weeks. Back then, a horse and buggy could only travel about 10 miles a day. Also in 1842, Henry Fisher and Burchard Miller were two empresarios who helped bring 6,000 German, Swiss, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish families to settle on 3 million acres between the Llano and San Saba Rivers. These immigrants moved away from their countries and chose to move to Texas where costs were cheap and taxes were not high. A small number of European immigrants moved to Texas from Switzerland, Sweden and Norway. The Swiss immigrants settled in the northern part of Texas. They helped to bring dairy farming to Texas. The first Swedish immigrants settled mainly in the towns of Galveston and Houston. The first Norwegian immigrants settled near the Dallas area and in East Texas. The largest groups of immigrants to move to Texas were from Germany. During 1836 and 1846 over 35,000 immigrants moved to Texas from Germany. They did not speak English and only spoke German. They had to learn a brand new language when they arrived in our country. They settled mostly in the areas of New Braunfels, Texas and Fredericksburg, Texas. Both of these towns have a strong German influence still seen today. You can still hear German accents spoken when you walk down the streets visiting these towns. You also still see some of the German influence in many of the buildings and homes were built with an architecture style from Germany. German foods like sausage, sauerkraut, German potato salad and German beer are very popular in these towns today. One of the largest water parks in the United States today is called the Schlitterbahn, which is a German word meaning slide. The Schlitterbahn water park is located in New Braunfels, Texas and was built with a German theme to remind us today of the strong German culture in this area. New Braunfels and other towns have yearly festivals called the Wurstfest and Oktoberfest that honor all the German people who immigrated here and to celebrate all the German traditions still seen today. The European immigrants sacrificed greatly by leaving their family and friends in their home countries of Germany, France, Norway, Sweden and many more and took a chance moving to Texas and starting a new way of life. Many died from the long trips over the ocean and malaria from mosquitos when they landed in Galveston. They slept in tents for months while waiting for their homes to be built, but coming to the new frontier of the Republic of Texas was worth it. Texans today owe gratitude for the sacrifices made by the European immigrants to settle Texas and start farms, build towns, hospitals and schools and they contributed to the creation of the Texas we have today. Tanner Hedrick is a seventh-grader at Midland Christian School. He is the son of Stephanie Hedrick and Larry Hedrick. Last Wednesday, as California Governor Gavin Newsom gave one of his regular Covid-19 updates, he expressed surprise at something not a lot of folks are paying attention to. That something is the growth of the so-called West Coast variant of Covid-19. Newsom and his surrogates have, to their credit, regularly given updates on the growth of the variant. Deadline reported that CA Health and Human Services Director Dr. Mark Ghaly reported in early February that the state had discovered 1,000 instances of the West Coast variant, which is actually two similar variants referred to as B.1.427/B.1.429 or CAL2.0C. More from Deadline The following week, Newsom reported the number of B.1.427/B.1.429 cases identified had risen 20% to 1,200. Last week, when he expressed surprise at the lack of coverage, the governor noted a further 50% jump to 1,834 cases. But those numbers were just a fraction of the actual numbers. Genomic testing is required to identify new variants from samples, and it is expensive. At the beginning of January, the state had administered over 30 million Covid-19 tests. Of those tens of millions, only about 7,000 had been analyzed genomically, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Los Angeles County, for its part, is only genomically analyzing a few dozen test specimens each day. According to Dr. Charles Chiu, a virologist and professor of laboratory medicine at UCSF, who authored a new study analyzed by the Los Angeles Times, CAL2.0C has surged to account for more than half the cases in the state and could be the source of 90% of the states cases by the end of March. Whats worse, Dr. Chiu told the New York Times on Tuesday infections from the variant produce a viral load double that of other variants. CAL2.0C also seems more wily at evading the immune system. As a result, said Chiu, cases caused by the variant are doubling each 18 days. Story continues While the more contagious UK variant of the virus is also spreading in the state, it seems to be doing so more slowly. But the two variants could merge. From LAT: The U.K. and California variants are each armed with enhanced capabilities, and the likelihood that they could circulate in the same population raises the specter of a return to spiking infections and deaths, Chiu said. It also opens the door to a nightmare scenario: That the two viruses will meet in a single person, swap their mutations, and create an even more dangerous strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Eric Vail, the director of molecular pathology at Cedars-Sinai, told The New York Times in early February that CAL.20C may have played a part in the surge in cases that overwhelmed Southern Californias hospitals earlier this month. Im decently confident that this is a more infectious strain of the virus, said Dr. Vail. At least 50% of our samples have shown the West Coast variant, said LA County Director of Public health Barbara Ferrer last week, before hedging that more research needs to be done. That research may confirm what one small sample seems to indicate: The West Coast variant may not only be more transmissible, but more virulent. Dr. Chiu studied the medical history of 324 people hospitalized at UCSF and found that those infected with CAL2.0C were more likely to have been admitted to the ICU and 11 times more likely to die. That is, again, a very small sample and requires more research. But if nothing else, the indications from Chius research call for vastly increased geonmic testing of Covid-19 sames and increased caution as the state proceeds to reopen. Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The Berkeley City Council in California unanimously voted to adopt sweeping police reforms that will include eliminating traffic stops for low-level violations and removing racist officers as it seeks to cut the department's $72million budget in half by this summer. The reform vote on Tuesday coincided with Berkeley's effort to reduce the police department's to $36million in the coming months. A task force leading the effort met for the first time last week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The changes come as some other cities around the US that cut police budgets in response to unrest following the death of George Floyd face growing challenges - including in Minneapolis, where officials recently moved to increase funding due to a shortage of officers. Berkeley's newest reforms will likely be difficult to execute on the dramatically reduced budget. They include implementing an 'Early Intervention System' to get biased officers off the street, requiring written consent for searches, blocking police from asking about parole or probation status in most circumstances, transitioning traffic enforcement to unarmed civil servants and looking into the legality of firing officers who post racist content on social media. The department will also overhaul its policy on traffic stops, ending them in situations that are not related to public safety, such as driving with expired license plate tags. The Berkeley Police Association (BPA) released a statement condemning the proposed reforms, saying they will create 'significant safety consequence for citizens and officers'. The union also claimed the council did not consult its members before holding the vote. The Berkeley City Council in California unanimously voted to adopt sweeping police reforms that will include eliminating traffic stops for low-level violations and removing racist officers on Tuesday as it seeks to cut the department's budget in half by this summer (file photo) 'At stake is the safety of Berkeley citizens and its police officers as the proposed reforms will turn officers into filing clerks, gutting their much-needed time on the streets within our community,' BPA President Sgt Darren Kacelek said. The reforms were recommended by a Fair and Impartial Policing Working Group appointed by Mayor Arreguin, which included Councilwoman Kate Harrison, Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenwood, Oakland police Capt Chris Bolton and civil rights attorney Jim Chanin. The group consulted with the NAACP, ACLU, the city's police review commission and other organizations in compiling its list of recommendations. Greenwood spoke at Tuesday's council meeting and said his department is ready to begin developing a strategy to implement the reforms, but cautioned that some of them will take time and 'heavy lifting'. The police chief said his department had already begun working to reduce racial disparities in policing, in part by prohibiting stops based solely on race and not hiring racist officers. 'We work within policies and the law to make sure we don't have racist officers,' Greenwood said. Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenwood (left) spoke at Tuesday's council meeting and said his department is ready to begin developing a strategy to implement the reforms, but cautioned that some of them will take time and 'heavy lifting' During the public comment section of the meeting, several speakers expressed frustration with Greenwood's remarks, accusing him of downplaying the issue of racism within his department, according to the Chronicle. Chanin, the civil rights attorney in the working group, emphasized the importance of Greenwood admitting there was a problem based on police stop data. 'It seems to me that acknowledging a problem, which police chiefs have done all across the country, is the first stage to solving it,' he said. 'If you don't acknowledge it, you're going to have a lot of trouble solving it.' The reforms were recommended by a Fair and Impartial Policing Working Group appointed by Mayor Jesse Arreguin (pictured) Arreguin indicated that the council's decision was motivated by calls for an end to discrimination in policing over the past year. 'It's important to acknowledge that last year there was a lot of conversations about reimagining public safety,' the mayor told the Chronicle. 'Millions of people took to the streets to demand change. We have not seen the kind of big transformative change that people called for. It's significant that we are still moving this forward.' The vote followed a report from the Center on Policing Equity which found that Berkeley Police were 6.5 times more likely to stop black motorists than white motorists. 'There are very clear disparities in terms of who is stopped and who is interacting with police in Berkeley,' Arreguin said. 'This erodes community trust. It impacts public safety.' The mayor said that eliminating stops for low-level offenses will allow officers to focus on more serious crimes. Arreguin indicated that the council's decision was motivated by calls for an end to discrimination in policing over the past year. Pictured: A squad car sits next to graffiti calling for the Berkeley Police Department to be defunded Many cities around the US have moved to implement reform similar to those in Berkeley in the months after George Floyd's death. Floyd died on May 25 in Minneapolis after police officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, pressed his knee against the handcuffed black man's neck even as he said he couldn't breathe. In the wake of Floyd's death some Minneapolis City Council members and activist groups have been advocating to replace the local police department altogether. But earlier this month the City Council voted unanimously to boost funding for the department by $6.4million to hire dozens more police officers. An unprecedented number of officers quit or went on extended medical leave after Floyd's death and the unrest that followed, which included the burning of a police precinct. According to the Minneapolis Police Department, there are now only 638 officers available to work - roughly 200 fewer than usual. The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control's latest data shows nearly 60 cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) reported in the Palmetto State. According to the data, the Midlands is leading the state in the number of MIS-C cases with 21. The Upstate has 20 cases, the Lowcountry counted 10 and eight are in the Pee Dee. The rare condition can cause swelling in organs including the heart, lungs, brain and intestines, DHEC said. Symptoms typically occur two to three weeks after COVID-19 infection. DHEC confirmed the state's first death of MIS-C associated with COVID-19 on Jan. 29. Statewide numbers New cases reported: 896 confirmed, 299 probable. Total cases in S.C.: 438,861 confirmed, 70,183 probable. Percent positive: 8.8 percent. New deaths reported: 25 confirmed, 20 probable. Total deaths in S.C.: 7,460 confirmed, 938 probable. Percent of ICU beds filled: 76.3 percent. How does S.C. rank in vaccines administered per 100,000 people? 42nd as of Feb. 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sign up for our new health newsletter The best of health, hospital and science coverage in South Carolina, delivered to your inbox weekly. Email Sign Up! Hardest-hit areas In the total number of newly confirmed cases, Greenville (157), Richland (82) and York (88) counties saw the highest totals. What about the tri-county? Charleston County had 49 new cases on Feb. 24, while Berkeley and Dorchester both saw 28. Deaths Nine of the new confirmed deaths reported were among people age 35 to 64, one was a person age 18 to 34, and the remainder were patients age 65 and older. Hospitalizations Of the 968 COVID-19 patients hospitalized as of Feb. 24, 231 were in the ICU and 129 were using ventilators. What do experts say? This week, South Carolina is receiving its largest allocation yet of COVID-19 vaccines from the government, according to federal data. In all, about 98,000 first doses are headed to the Palmetto State during the week beginning Feb. 22 from the two authorized manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna. Next week, the total number of first doses in shipments will surpass 100,000 for the first time this year, with an 8,000-dose increase expected from Pfizer. The state is sending out every dose it's able to, said Nick Davidson, DHEC's senior deputy for public health. "We are receiving our full allocation," Davidson said. "The full amount we're able to, we draw down every week." Davidson added that hospitals routinely request much more vaccine than DHEC is able to send. The former second-in-command of the Massachusetts chapter of the Almighty Latin Kings gang, whose duties included coordinating violent punishment against members who informed for law enforcement, has pleaded guilty to racketeering charges, federal prosecutors said Tuesday. Angel Roldan, 35, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to conduct enterprise affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity, more commonly referred to as RICO conspiracy, according to a statement from the U.S. attorneys office in Boston. Sentencing was scheduled for July 7. Roldan served as the Cacique, or second-in-command, of the Latin Kings in Massachusetts from at least 2018 through 2019, according to prosecutors. When an informant was confirmed, Roldan organized violence against them, even when they were in prison, prosecutors said. During the investigation, Roldan was also recorded selling a cooperating witness about 100 grams of fentanyl and a gun. A federal grand jury in December 2019 returned an indictment alleging racketeering conspiracy, drug conspiracy and firearms charges against 62 leaders, members and associates of the Latin Kings. Roldan is the 36th defendant to plead guilty in the case. Syrias minister of foreign affairs has demanded the UNs neutrality in discussions over the Syrian Constitutions, writes North Press. Syrian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, Faisal Mekdad, called on the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, to be neutral and not to set a timetable for the Constitutional Committees discussions. On Monday, Pedersen met with Mekdad, where they discussed the political and economic situation in the country. On his arrival in Damascus on Sunday, Pedersen said that his discussions would concentrate on UN Resolution 2254 and the living conditions in the country. The official news agency SANA reported that Pedersen and Mekdad discussed a number of issues related to the situation in Syria, including the political and economic situation. It added that Mekdad called on Pedersen to adhere to neutrality and not set a timetable for the Constitutional Committees discussions. They both stressed the non-interference of the external forces in the affairs of the Constitutional Committee and not setting any timetables for its work imposed by the outside. Mekdad condemned both the Turkish and American presence in Syria and asked the UN to stand against all these practices. Just before heading to Syria, Pedersen met with a number of Russian officials in Moscow to urge them to put more pressure on the Syrian government in order to set a date for the sixth round of the Constitutional Committee negotiations. On February 17, the 15th round of Astana talks started in the Russian city of Sochi in the presence of representatives of the guarantor countries of Turkey, Russia, and Iran. Other observers included Pederson and delegations from Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kazakhstan. At the end of the meeting, the delegations agreed on holding the 16th round of Astana talks in the middle of 2021 in the Kazakh capital, Nur-Sultan. Late in January, the fifth round of the Constitutional Committees meeting concluded without achieving any progress. 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. Welcome Guest! You Are Here: A Cleveland, Tn., resident appeared in Chattanooga Federal Court on Tuesday on charges that he took part in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. Joseph Lino "Jose" Padilla is facing charges in connection with the attack during a session of Congress. His attorney, Lee Davis of Chattanooga, said, "Our office represents Joseph Padilla. Mr. Padilla had his initial appearance in Federal Court in Chatanooga today. All further matters will be in Federal Court in Washington D.C." Federal agents said three days after the attack they were notified that Padilla had made statements on social media about being involved in the attack. Agents were able to capture Padilla on various videos taking part in the attack, authorities said. Here is the full criminal complaint against Padilla: On January 6, 2021, your affiant, Timothy J. Ervin, was on duty and performing my official duties as a Speical Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). As a Special Agent, I am authorized by law or by a Government agency to engage in or supervise the prevention, detention, investigation, or prosecution of violations of Federal criminal laws. The U.S. Capitol is secured 24 hours a day by U.S. Capitol Police. Restrictions around the U.S. Capitol include permanent and temporary security barriers and posts manned by U.S. Capitol Police. Only authorized people with appropriate identification were allowed access inside the U.S. Capitol. On January 6, 2021, the exterior plaza of the U.S. Capitol was also closed to members of the public. On January 6, 2021, a joint session of the United States Congress convened at the United States Capitol, which is located at First Street, SE, in Washington, D.C. During the joint session, elected members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate were meeting in separate chambers of the United States Capitol to certify the vote count of the Electoral College of the 2020 Presidential Election, which had taken place on November 3, 2020. The joint session began at approximately 1:00 p.m. Shortly thereafter, by approximately 1:30 p.m., the House and Senate adjourned to separate chambers to resolve a particular objection. Vice President Mike Pence was present and presiding, first in the joint session, and then in the Senate chamber. As the proceedings continued in both the House and the Senate, and with Vice President Mike Pence present and presiding over the Senate, a large crowd gathered outside the U.S. Capitol. As noted above, temporary and permanent barricades were in place around the exterior of the U.S. Capitol building, and U.S. Capitol Police were present and attempting to keep the crowd away from the Capitol building and the proceedings underway inside. At such time, the certification proceedings were still underway and the exterior doors and windows of the U.S. Capitol were locked or otherwise secured. Members of the U.S. Capitol Police attempted to maintain order and keep the crowd from entering the Capitol; however, shortly around 2:00 p.m., individuals in the crowd forced entry into the U.S. Capitol, including by breaking windows and by assaulting members of the U.S. Capitol Police, as others in the crowd encouraged and assisted those acts. Shortly thereafter, at approximately 2:20 p.m. members of the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate, including the President of the Senate, Vice President Mike Pence, were instructed toand didevacuate the chambers. Accordingly, the joint session of the United States Congress was effectively suspended until shortly after 8:00 p.m. Vice President Pence remained in the United States Capitol from the time he was evacuated from the Senate Chamber until the sessions resumed. During national news coverage of the aforementioned events, video footage which appeared to be captured on mobile devices of persons present on the scene depicted evidence of violations of local and federal law, including scores of individuals inside the U.S. Capitol building without authority to be there. On January 9, 2021, the FBI received an anonymous tip that JOSE PADILLA, later fully identified as JOSEPH LINO PADILLA (herein referred to as PADILLA), made posts on his Facebook page and a web-site known as thedonald.win under a specific username, in which he admitted to taking part in the riots at the U.S. Capitol. Subsequent investigation, described below, confirmed PADILLA was the user of both the Facebook page and the username on thedonald.win that were identified by the tipster. Your affiant reviewed a Tennessee drivers license photo issued to PADILLA and compared it to the Facebook page identified by the anonymous tipster and the two photographs appear to be the same individual. On January 11, 2021, another tipster, who will be referred to herein as W1, contacted the FBI to report that s/he knows PADILLA. W1 was able to recognize PADILLA in videos shown on television from the Capitol rioting. According to W1, another individual, herein referred to as W2, is also familiar with PADILLA and has had multiple in person interactions with PADILLA. W2 identified PADILLA through videos circulating online and prompted W1 to find videos online of PADILLA in an altercation with a police officer at a guard rail and another video in which PADILLA is seen throwing a pole. W1 stated that according to individuals who still remain in contact with PADILLA, PADILLA has recently been immersed in the alt-right and had a Q-Anon mentality. W1 provided the Based on information provided by W1, and subsequent FBI review, the following videos were located which capture evidence of PADILLA taking part in the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol: 1. The body worn camera (BWC) footage from January 6th of a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Officer. 2. An online posting of a video from Just Another Channel, which carries the title Watch: What Really Happened at the Capitol Door? 3. Another online posting of a video from jrobertson.nyc. The screen shots below are taken from the above listed videos. MPD BWC: At approximately 1:31 pm, PADILLA approaches the barricade line and is eventually pushed away by an MPD officer. In the below and later images, it is clear PADILLA is wearing the same dark blue jacket worn by him in his 2012 Facebook photo. In the below photograph, PADILLA is also wearing a scuba mask over his eyes and a black backpack on his back: photograph below, which was posted on PADILLAs Facebook page on March 4, 2012. W1 indicated PADILLA was wearing the same jacket at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The MPD BWC captured PADILLA pushing the barricade in front of him and shouting, Push! Push! F------ push! As depicted below, the Just Another Channel video shows PADILLA pushing the fence in front of officers: MPD BWC: At 1:38 pm, after PADILLA begins pushing the barricade, MPD officers remove his SCUBA mask and begin shoving him and deploying baton strikes to get him to stop: Just Another Channel: Subsequent to MPD Officers removing PADILAAs scuba mask and deploying baton strikes, PADILLA backs away from the barricade: Just Another Channel: Shortly after being pushed back from the barricade, PADILLA is observed assisting rioters as they begin to move a large sign on wheels with a metal frame towards the barricade. The back of PADILLAs head and blue jacket are visible in the bottom right: A few hours later on January 6, 2021, PADILLA and numerous other rioters began to mass in front of a law enforcement line inside the archway of the U.S. Capitol Lower West Terrace Doors. All six of the images below are shots from the jrobertson.nyc video. PADILLA is seen at the bottom of these pictures with a flagpole. He throws the flagpole at the officers who are simultaneously being attacked by rioters: On January 7, 2021, PADILLA posted the following message on his Facebook page: Theres a lot of memes and posts flying around saying that the people who were fighting last night were all Antifa provacateurs etc. I just want to say that as a first hand observer of every point of last night, that it was not Antifa. They were Patriots who were trying to Restore the Republic after being attacked by the cops, who struck first. Even those who broke the windows next to the doorway to the Capitol were Patriots trying to find a way to turn the Flanks of the cops. On January 8, 2021, PADILLA posted the following on his Facebook page, which included a link to an approximately 21 second video of rioters at the U.S. Capitol posted to the website streamable. On January 14, 2021, law enforcement attempted to interview PADILLA, who responded by stating, I do not answer questions. During the period January 7 to January 18, 2021, PADILLA employed a certain username in order to post numerous comments in chats on the web-site thedonald.win. Your affiant knows the username to belong to PADILLA for several reasons. The anonymous tipster indicated that PADILLA had an old Twitter account with the same username as the username on thedonald.win. Your affiant reviewed records from the username associated with the Twitter account and confirmed it belonged to PADILLA. Additionally, the username on thedonald.win describes Dalton as very close to where I live. Through a search of law enforcement databases, your affiant confirmed PADILLAs address as being in near proximity to Dalton, Georgia. Additionally, the same streamable video posted on PADILLAs Facebook page is also posted by the username on thedonald.win, with the comment Pardon my haorse voice, I had already been beaten and sprayed multiple times. Additionally, the username on thedonald.win posted additional biographical and location information which your affiant has confirmed is identical to PADILLA. Finally, on or about January 14, 2021, the username on thedonald.win posted that FBI visited him that morning and just told them I didnt answer questions. Below are several comments posted by the username on thedonald.win: 1. After I had my right hand knuckles and ring finger crushed for just talking to an officer I knew was a soldier and reminding him of his duty to refuse unlawful orders, I got pissed, and so did many others. Thats when we started pushing. 2. I was right there. I have the wounds to prove it. I pushed the rails, I pushed the stairs, and then pushed the doorway. I was beaten unconscious twice, sprayed more times than I care to count, received strikes from batons that should have been lethal (Multiple temple and carotid strikes) except that God was on my side. 3. They may have let the first group in for the fear mongering. The rest of us they smashed our hands, tased us, and sprayed us for the crime of standing at the railing yelling. Then we got pissed and started to push. Then they ran up the stairs and we followed, and I think God the guys on the left of the building were able to push up the stairs, allowing the capture the second tier and start knocking on the Capitol Building doors. 4. Honestly, the guy breaking the windows werent Antifa. They were Patriots trying to find a new way in so we could flank the cops who were holding the doorway. 5. If we could have occupied the Capitol, we could have invoked the right given to us in the 2nd paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.We would have been in the Seat of Power. All we would need to do is declare our grievances with the government and dissolve the legislature, and replace it with Patriots who were there. Then simply re-adopt the Constitution with amendments added to secure future Federal elections. Based on the foregoing, your affiant submits there is probable cause to believe that JOSEPH LINO PADILLA, also known as JOSE PADILLA, violated 18 U.S.C. 231(a)(3), which makes it unlawful to commit or attempt to commit any act to obstruct, impede, or interfere with any fireman or law enforcement officer lawfully engaged in the lawful performance of his official duties incident to and during the commission of a civil disorder which in any way or degree obstructs, delays, or adversely affects commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce or the conduct or performance of any federally protected function. For purposes of Section 231 of Title 18, a federally protected function means any function, operation, or action carried out, under the laws of the United States, by any department, agency, or instrumentality of the United States or by an officer or employee thereof. This includes the Joint Session of Congress where the Senate and House count Electoral College votes. Your affiant submits there is probable cause to believe that JOSEPH LINO PADILLA, also known as JOSE PADILLA violated 18 U.S.C. 111(a)(1), and (b) which makes it a crime to use a deadly or dangerous weapon, in this case a flagpole, to forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede or interfere with any person engaged in the performance of official duties. Your affiant submits that there is probable cause to believe that PADILLA violated 18 U.S.C. 1752(a)(1), (2), and (4), and (b)(1)(A), which makes it a crime to (1) knowingly enter or remain in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do; and 2) knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions, engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct in, or within such proximity to, any restricted building or grounds when, or so that, such conduct, in fact, impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions; and (4) knowingly engage in any act of physical violence against any person or property in any restricted building or grounds. For purposes of Section 1752 of Title 18, a restricted building includes a posted, cordoned off, or otherwise restricted area of a building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service, including the Vice President, is or will be temporarily visiting; or any building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance, while carrying or using a deadly or dangerous weapon or firearm, in this case a flagpole. Your affiant submits there is also probable cause to believe that PADILLA violated 40 U.S.C. 5104(e)(2)(D), and (F), which makes it a crime to willfully and knowingly utter loud, threatening, or abusive language, or engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct, at any place in the Grounds or in any of the Capitol Buildings with the intent to impede, disrupt, or disturb the orderly conduct of a session of Congress or either House of Congress, or the orderly conduct in that building of a hearing before, or any deliberations of, a committee of Congress or either House of Congress; and engage in an act of physical violence in the Grounds or any of the Capitol Buildings. Chancellor Rishi Sunak is considering hiking corporation tax at the Budget next week to repair the public finances and help pay for the coronavirus crisis, it was claimed today. Treasury officials are looking at increasing the tax on company profits from the current rate of 19 per cent to 25 per cent, according to The Times. Every percentage point added onto the levy would generate an estimated 3billion but such a move would inevitably spark a furious Tory and business backlash. Meanwhile, Mr Sunak is also planning to extend the Government's coronavirus grants scheme for the self-employed by another three months, using the same terms as previous rounds. The extension would cover the period between February and April and would allow those eligible to claim 80 per cent of average monthly profits, up to a maximum of 2,500 a month, according to The Telegraph. Chancellor Rishi Sunak is said to be considering hiking corporation tax at next week's Budget Office for National Statistics numbers published this month showed state debt was above 2.1trillion in January as ministers borrowed record amounts to keep the UK afloat Public sector net borrowing has surged since the start of the pandemic last year with records set almost every month Mr Sunak is expected to use next week's Budget to confirm the extension of furlough beyond the end of April as the Government tries to prop up workers and businesses while lockdown is lifted. But reports suggest the Chancellor could also use the Budget to set out the first steps in how the UK will pay for the crisis which has seen ministers borrow record amounts to keep firms afloat. It was previously claimed that the Treasury was looking at increasing corporation tax to 23 per cent. But officials are now said to be looking at going even further, with an increase to 25 per cent now on the cards. Critics are likely to blast the prospect of such a move, arguing that hitting businesses with higher taxes as they try to get back on their feet after the pandemic will stifle recovery. Corporation tax rates have been on a downward trend for decades and at the Budget back in 2016 the government set out plans for it to fall to 17 per cent. However, at the Budget last year it was announced that the main rate would remain at 19 per cent. The Government has run three rounds of its grants for the self-employed scheme during the coronavirus crisis. Official figures showed that in the three months to December the unemployment rate went up by 0.1 per cent compared to the equivalent period up to November The ONS figures underlined that younger people have been hardest by the pandemic. This chart shows cumulative change in the unemployment rate by age groups The third round closed at the end of January and it provided a taxable grant worth 80 per cent of average monthly trading profits, paid out in a single instalment covering 3 months worth of profits, and capped at 7,500 in total. Mr Sunak is expected to run a fourth round of the scheme but it was previously claimed that the cap could be set at 20 per cent, making it significantly less generous. But The Telegraph said the 80 per cent cap is in line to be retained, with the scheme either scrapped entirely or scaled back from May ahead of Boris Johnson's targeted 'back to normal' date of June 21. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Despite a wide generational gap Mr. Biden is nearly 30 years older than Mr. Trudeau, who is 49 the two leaders are natural partners with similar political agendas. Mr. Trudeau was the first foreign leader to call Mr. Biden in November with congratulations on his election victory, and the first one Mr. Biden called after his swearing-in last month. After their meeting, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trudeau delivered statements from the East Room of the White House, where by tradition they would have held a short news conference, taking two questions each. In this case, Mr. Biden spoke from a lectern alongside another video screen showing Mr. Trudeau, and the men did not take questions. In their statements, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trudeau said they would cooperate not only on climate change but also on the coronavirus, as well as on restoring their respective economies and combating racial discrimination. Mr. Biden also said that closer cooperation would allow the United States and Canada to more effectively compete with China. And he called on Beijing to release two Canadian men who have been detained in China for more than two years in what was widely perceived to be retribution for Canadas 2018 detention of a prominent Chinese technology executive at the request of American prosecutors. Human beings are not bartering chips, he said. In his remarks before their meeting, Mr. Biden also said that he saw Mr. Trudeau as an ally in his effort to resurrect the strength and image of democracy worldwide. As the leaders of the major democracies, we have a responsibility to prove that democracy can still deliver for our people, Mr. Biden said, in an implicit reference to countries like Russia and China. There are a lot of leaders around the world who are trying to make the argument autocracy works better. Torino, February 24, 2021 - The eukaryotic cell is the basic unit of animals and plants. At the microscope, it looks highly structured and subdivided in many membrane-bound compartments. Each compartment has a specific function, and its membrane is populated by specific molecules. How does the cell preserve this amazing internal order, and (in the absence of pathologies) does not degrade into a shapeless bunch of molecules? Such degradation is countered by a continuous process of molecule sorting by which similar molecules are collected and dispatched to the "right" destinations, similarly to what happens when a house is kept clean and tidy by daily chores. It's still mysterious, however, how a living cell may achieve this task without a supervisor directing it. In a recent Physical Review Letters paper, a collaboration of researchers from Politecnico di Torino, Universita di Torino, Italian Institute for Genomic Medicine - IIGM, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare - INFN, and Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics (Moscow), hypothesizes that this process of molecular sorting emerges from the combination of two spontaneous mechanisms. The first mechanism is the propensity of similar molecules to aggregate on membranes in the form of "patches", or "droplets", in the same way as water droplets form in a vapor cloud that is cooled down. The second mechanism is the tendency of such droplets to bend the membrane, leading to the formation and further detachment of small vesicles enriched in the molecular components of the original droplets. The various membrane compartments of the eukaryotic cell act thus similarly to the vessels and tubes of a natural distiller, or alembic, that continuously sorts and redirects molecular components toward the appropriate destinations. In the published work, this process of molecular sorting is studied with mathematical tools and computer simulations, showing that the propensity to aggregation is the main control parameter of the process. For each group of molecules there exists an optimal value of this parameter (neither too large, nor too small), such that the sorting process takes place with the maximum possible speed. Actually, some propensity to molecular aggregation is needed to drive the process, but when the propensity to aggregation is too large, the molecules "freeze" in a large number of small "droplets" that grow very slowly, and the overall sorting process slows down. Experimental observations of this distillation process in cells isolated from the blood vessels of human umbilical cords confirm this theoretical picture, and suggest that evolution may have led the cells to work in the optimal parameter region, where the sorting process achieves maximum efficiency. These findings are of particular interest, since the misregulation of molecular sorting is a hallmark of severe pathologies, such as cancer. The theoretical identification of the parameters that control the process is an important first step toward a better understanding of the origin of such disruptions and the development of therapies. ### The research was supported also by: Fondazione Collegio Carlo Alberto - Torino, Russian Academy of Sciences, National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE). Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Ukraines Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov and Ambassador of the Kingdom of Denmark Ole Egberg Mikkelsen have discussed areas for further cooperation in the field of e-governance. The meeting was held in online regime, the press service of the Ministry of Digital Transformation reports. "We are most interested in how we can increase the efficiency of public services online. Therefore, for us, the experience of Denmark, the number one country in the world in terms of digitalization, is the most important," Fedorov said. The Ambassador of Denmark shared the country's experience in the field of digitalization. He told about digital transformation projects, digital transformation of services in Denmark and about the state electronic identification system NemLog-In. In 2020, Denmark took the first place in the UN ranking for the development of e-government. It is one of the most digitized countries in the world. For example, last year 91% of the entire population of Denmark communicated with the government through online means - online services, e-mail etc. According to the Ambassador, one of the peculiarities of e-government introduction in Denmark is the system of digital education of citizens, which describes how to use online services. He said that the courses for different levels of users were developed jointly with the public sector. In particular, special attention is paid to the integration of older people into the process. In turn, Fedorov said that Ukraine is rapidly moving towards building a digital state. The Minister told about the unique organizational structure that the Ministry of Digital Transformation managed to build. Namely, about CDTOs - Chief Digital Transformation Officers who already work in each ministry and gradually appear in regional administrations and city councils. He stressed that now there is needed infrastructure to scale projects and implement the goals set by the Ministry of Digital Transformation. iy The UNs dream for political transition in Syria has turned into a nightmare, writes Burhan Ghalyoun for Al-Araby Al-Jadeed. From making peace to managing war After nearly 10 years [of war], Syrians feel, and we all feel, that we have been deceived. We also feel that we have failed ourselves when we thought that a political solution was a viable option, an option that has reached a dead end. Instead of the international initiative sparing us more casualties and material losses, as we had all hoped, the political peace process turned out to be a trap. The regime, with its Russian and Iranian allies, succeeded in tipping the power balance in their favor, before turning the tables when it comes to both the United Nations and the international community. While tens of thousands of young Syrians abandoned everything and took up arms to liberate their homeland from tyranny and wore out their nerves as they waited for weapons or ammunition that never came, the unlimited support (soldiers and weapons) flowed to the regime forces from Tehran and Moscow; support that was used to destroy hospitals, bakeries, popular markets, buildings, and empty cities of their residents. The regime gave the auxiliary forces of extremist movements Salafism, nationalism, and sectarianism, including the Islamic State (ISIS), to which the government of Nouri al-Maliki gave access to the coffers of Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq money and modern American weapons. Faced with the reluctance of friendly countries to provide arms to the Free Syrian Army factions and the widespread intervention of Iranian militias and the Russian army, it became increasingly difficult to preserve the land that was liberated over the first year. As a result, no political solutions were achieved, the war did not end, its disastrous effects were not eliminated, or the suffering of Syrians diminished. Assad remains determined to keep fighting, while the international community prides itself on his success in reducing the pace at which the fighting is taking place. The true meaning of this success is the deterioration of any possible political solution, the settlement of the military conflict with the spread of militias, the continuation of the intersecting wars of origin and proxy, and the fall into the same schism that led to the destruction of the state in Afghanistan and Somalia, in many other countries before that, and, today, in more than one country in the Middle East. The dream that the UN might achieve a political transition for Syrians has turned into a nightmare, and the opposition lost the last remains of independence and credibility it had left, in addition to its fighters whose morale and deep sense of responsibility were shattered by internal conflicts and lack of political leadership and who had to turn into soldiers ready to claim loyalty to anyone who would guarantee their livelihood and survival. When Annan refused to be a false witness Kofi Annan, six months before the end of his assignment, realized the impossibility of his mission. He did not hesitate to submit his resignation, stating, as the newspapers reported, I did not receive all the support that the mission required []. There are divisions within the international community, which has complicated my duties. Washington stated that Annans resignation was due to Russia and Chinas refusal to support the decisions targeting Bashar al-Assad, and the Assad regimes refusal to stop criminal attacks against its own people. Simply and clearly, Annan, the first-ever Special Envoy to Syria, submitted his resignation because he refused to be a false witness. Annans resignation, as well as the failure of his successor, Lakhdar Brahimi, did not bring about any noteworthy reaction from the Secretary-General, who expressed his concern, which became a subject of discontent among the Syrians back then. There has not been any review of the organizations modus operandi nor its approach to the issue of negotiations, deemed moot. The new Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, appointed Staffan de Mistura as a third envoy. Guterres was envoy for four years (2014-2018) and did not manage to obtain the slightest concession from the regime, despite his close ties to Moscow and his clear show of complicity with the Assad regime. Despite the failure of the three envoys to release as little as one detainee from Assads prisons, eight years after the start of the so-called political solution process, the Secretary-General appointed a fourth envoy, Geir Pedersen, without any review of the existing approach or the adopted path. It took Pedersen two years to form the parody that is the Constitutional Committee, to which the entire Syrian settlement file was referred, after the discussion of thorny issues was halted such as releasing detainees, stopping ongoing violations, forming a transitional governing body, transitional justice, reconstruction, and combating terrorism. A revolution is needed to manage international relations Some of the countries that have turned a blind eye to the Syrian issue may think that Syria, at the end of the day, is not a high-priority issue, for Syria is, after all, a small and poor country that has been marching to the beat of its own drum for decades, and that there is no point in saving it nor is there real danger in letting it drown in its own blood and ruin. This is what the former US Ambassador, Robert Ford, wrote in his latest articles, admitting that Syria has lost, and that it is game over. I am not one of those to ascribe to conspiracy theories, as many Syrians have come to do nowadays. I do, however, believe that keeping silent about mistakes, covering up crimes, and colluding with forces could potentially be more destructive to trust, international relations, and the world order than any local or global conspiracy. All the UN did in recent years in Syria with all due respect to Ban Ki-moon and Guterres was nothing more than helping the Syrian regime, its Iranian and Russian allies, and many other mercenaries to cover up the pursuit and sharing of interests and influence, at the detriment of the Syrian peoples. The challenge, in fact, is greater than we think, as the demand for the intervention of the UN to limit the increasing violation of the law in weak states that have lost their sovereignty, continues to grow. Also, there are those calling, in more than one Arab country, for an international trusteeship whereby the UN would appoint a sovereign to manage the country which is threatened with disintegration, devastation, and famine, due to the corruption of its power-hungry elites. Unfortunately, however, these requests for international humanitarian and political intervention are on the rise at a time when the UN has been, now more than ever, losing its influencing capacity and initiative-taking capabilities. 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. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Corp said on Wednesday that its 91-year old chairman, Osamu Suzuki, is retiring in June. Suzuki, who served as the Japanese carmakers chief executive for 22 years and then as chairman for another two decades, will step down from his current role following a shareholders meeting in June, the company said in a statement Wednesday. "The corporate management direction toward 2030 and 2050 was defined. Therefore, with the expiration of the current term of office, Suzuki will retire," the automaker said in a statement. The chairman will be appointed as senior adviser upon retirement, it said. Japan's fourth-biggest automaker earlier said it was announcing a management plan later in the day. With almost half a century at the helm, Suzuki is widely credited with turning the carmaker into what it is today: one of the largest small-vehicle manufacturers in the world. Instead of taking Japans biggest auto giants like Toyota Motor Corp. head on, Suzuki worked to grow the company by finding new markets around the world for its compact automobiles, building a dominant share in India during his first of two terms as president from 1978 to 2000. The nonagenarian also steered the company into alliances with two of the worlds biggest automakers, Volkswagen AG and General Motors Co., though those ultimately failed. His departure comes one week after Honda Motor Co.s chief executive Takahiro Hachigo said he would resign effective June, underscoring the churn the Japanese auto industry is currently undergoing. Japanese carmakers are beginning to recover from a tough pandemic-marred year, but even as demand revives, theyre struggling to meet sales targets amid a global chip shortage. Suzuki is targeting a profit of 160 billion yen ($1.5 billion) for the fiscal year through March, down by about a quarter from the previous years 215 billion yen. Suzuki had ceded his title of president to his son Toshihiro Suzuki in 2015, easing market uncertainty about management succession at the firm. The companys shares are up 4% this year. It really is annoying to read many of the opinions with regard to snowbirds. It seems that people are writing with emotions boiling over, ignoring most or all of the facts. You might have guessed already, I am one of those snowbirds. I am a big believer in science and practice social distance everywhere I can, wearing a mask even on empty streets when walking the dog and obey to government restrictions and orders so long they make at least some sense. But here is exactly what is missing with many of those orders, sense! And people seem to have lost the most important thing you NEED in life, common sense! Please think before you speak or write with hate or ignorance! We snowbirds, not to be mistaken with spring breakers, are between three and six months out of country. As soon as we hit the road with a big RV or we board a plane, we are no more risk to any other Canadian, full stop! We are not lining up twice a week at Costco, Canadian Tires, Superstore, Walmart or a gas station, restaurant, coffee shop or bakery. We are not walking our dog on Canadian streets or in the park, go to our family doctor, a walk in clinic or the emergency room or are by any other means a risk to any of you. So what the heck is your problem with us? The only time of risk is when we return to Canada and that risk is in the 0.003%, which is a well educated guess because 90% of us will come back home between March and May fully vaccinated, arrive with a negative PCR test and are willing to self isolate at our home for another 14 days. Again, what the heck is your problem with us? Now you please take your eyes off the snowbirds and look at other actions or non actions our government is taken without any sense. The land borders allow over 90% travellers in to Canada unchecked. Not even a negative Covid test required while sitting on millions of quick tests. Seriously? They asked Canadian airlines to stay out of business to sun destinations for at least 3 month and let American airlines instead serve that sector. They want to avoid that travellers bringing the virus mutations from other countries to us, I get that, but they still let planes from many high risk countries land on a daily basis strategically on all 4 airports of our country! Seriously? Our government want to avoid Spring Breakers from travelling, I get that. Their only shot to do so is to make it very difficult for them to return home. Fair enough and makes some sense, anything else unfortunately makes no sense! Matter of fact is, we are all very unfortunate to have a very bad leadership in Canada. We should be one of the leading countries when it comes to vaccine supplies and distributing it at light speed. This is no rocket science, it is a simple task for a competent government. But unfortunately we are now ranked somewhere 65 in the world because most decisions made zero to little sense or were simply made too late because the focus were on things like the snowbird. Ridiculous and shameful. Guido Gonschorek, Kelowna (ANSA) - ROME, FEB 24 - Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio told the Lower House on Wednesday that Italy's Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Luca Attanasio, and Carabiniere police officer Vittorio Iacovacci were "victims of a cowardly attack" this week. Attanasio and Iacovacci and a Congolese driver, Mustapha Milambo, were killed on Monday while travelling from Goma to Rutshuru in the east of the African country where they were planning to visit a UN World Food Programme (WFP) school feeding programme. Di Maio said that the government has asked the United Nations and the WFP to open an investigation into the attack. "We have formally asked the UN and the WFP to open an investigation that clarifies what happened, the reasons behind the security provisions used and who was responsible for these decisions," Di Maio said as he reported to parliament on the attack. "We have also explained that we expect clear, exhaustive answers in the shortest period of time possible". The minister said that a team from the Carabinieri's ROS special operations group was in DR Congo to gather evidence for an investigation by Rome prosecutors into the case. Di Maio said other investigative missions would follow. The DR Congo government has blamed Rwandan rebel group FDLR for the attack. It said Attanasio and Iacovacci were killed by their assailants, ruling out the hypothesis that the friendly fire of Congolese security forces may have caused the deaths. "We owe our fallen the truth before everything," Di Maio said. "But the best way to honour the memory of Ambassador Luca Attanasio and Carabiniere Vittorio Iacovacci is to continue to strengthen our political attention for the African continent, something Luca strongly believed in with passion and dedication. "He had devoted most of his diplomatic career and his personal efforts to Africa and the support of the weakest, with the activities organized by the Mama Sofia NGO founded by his wife Zakia in Kinshasa". The bodies of Attanasio, 43, and Iacovacci, a-30-year-old who was part of the ambassador's security detail, arrived in Italy late on Tuesday. Autopsies are set to be performed on Wednesday. Di Maio said Attanasio and Iacovacci were "heroes" and would have a State funeral in Rome on Thursday. (ANSA). New Delhi, Feb 24 : Global skills and talent development company NIIT on Wednesday announced that it is introducing Nokia's 5G certification programme to train industry professionals and youth aspiring for a career in telecom and IT to realise the full potential of 5G networks in India. The launch was announced over an industry webina, "Skilling Digital India for 5G: International Certification Programme", organised by the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) together with Nokia and NIIT Ltd. COAI Director General S.P. Kochhar said: "Building out an extensive 5G network is a mammoth undertaking, but finding the workforce to make it possible is a challenge. Even finding people to update and maintain existing infrastructure is a substantial issue for many companies." This programme covers the fundamental principles and the technical pillars of 5G along with the key business aspects that enable the learners to contribute towards the 5G strategy and planning initiatives, he said. "We are excited to partner with Nokia and COAI to deliver this innovative 5G certification programme - a first-of-its-kind opportunity for professionals and organisations across India," NIIT Ltd CEO Sapnesh Lalla said. Increased financial insecurity and even heavier domestic burdens are stressing out Vietnamese mothers as they struggle with the fallout of Covid-19. Le Thi Phuong, an hourly wage worker at a textile firm in Hanois Long Bien District, starts her 90-minute lunch break at noon by rushing home to feed her children, whose school and kindergarten have been closed due to the new Covid-19 wave. After lunch is done, she cleans the dishes, helps the children sleep, and returns to the factory, "sometimes after screaming and yelling at my babies." "Sometimes I wonder why I have to carry such a burden. I cannot lose the job or let my children stay at home all day without any care," said Phuong, whose husband works at the same factory, "but is next to helpless when it comes to housework." Given the widespread and deep impacts that the pandemic has had, 35-year-old Phuong is not the only mother bearing their brunt. Millions of Vietnamese mothers are waging a daily struggle with taking care of their children and trying to earn a stable income. Their children not going to school yet again has complicated their situations. A mother who has lost her job, takes her son, suffering from leukemia, to their hometown in central Thanh Hoa Province after the boy was discharged from the Hanoi-based National Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion, July 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Thanh Hue. Since early February, Nguyen Thanh Quynh has found it very difficult to work with her six-year-old son at home. The owner of an online clothing store has to spend hours responding to her patrons messages and orders, "but none of this can be done if my son is around." On a Monday morning in February, Quynh was sitting in the kitchen while her son was having an online lesson with his teacher on Zoom. "Mother Quynh, please help your son turn off the microphone when I am speaking," the teacher said as the boy interrupted her lessons by screaming and dancing on his chair. After a while, the rambunctious boy complained he could not see his teacher due to the weak Wi-Fi network and demanded to watch videos on YouTube. "I cannot do any work or talk to anyone, I just need silence to run the business and make some money, and it has become such a luxury," Quynh said, adding the three-month break from February to May last year had been a nightmare. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, she had to close her store last May and operate one online to contribute much needed income for the family. Her husband, an office worker, is away from home during the day, and she has to handle her business and her son by herself. "I know its my son, but staying at home all day with him makes me and my wallet shrink. Sometimes, I do not want to wake up in the morning anymore," said Quynh, adding that she had no time to have her hair cut and her nails done for the Lunar New Year holiday. Mental issues In Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyen Thi Hoa, 38, felt tired all the time, got angry at her children and cried in the middle of the night. When she visited Nguyen Tri Phuong hospital last September, she was told that she had depression. One of the reasons was that her working hours at a Binh Tan District company were cut, so she stayed at home and took care of her children even as she tried to find more jobs. She was stressed out. In a 27,000-member Facebook group of people with depression, many women have shared stories of their mental breakdown because of several factors related to the pandemic, including job loss, overwhelming housework and indolent husbands. Doctor Le Nguyen Thuy Phuong from the Geriatric and Psychiatric Department of the Nguyen Tri Phuong Hospital in Saigon warns that women are two times more likely to suffer from depression than men. The risk is exacerbated when Covid-19 forces people to stay at home and cuts off social connections, she added. The pandemic has set up a perfect storm for women, beginning with financial security and the feeling of worthlessness that it brings, compounded by increased dependency on husbands, worsening the pressures and blame that are foisted on them in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society. In 2020, Vietnam saw a 10-year record high unemployment rate of 2.48 percent, up 0.31 percentage points over the previous year, according to the General Statistics Office of Vietnam (GSO). The nations labor force shrank by 1.3 million workers to 53.4 million last year. Among the unemployed, 51.6 percent were women. "I came home and burst into tears when my company told me they would not hire me anymore. How useless and weak I was!" Le Thi Yen, a delivery woman, summed up her experience and feelings last June when her employers in Saigons District 9 sacked her. A mother takes her six-month-old daughter to the Hanoi Center for Employee Service in Cau Giay District to apply for unemployment benefits, June 2020. Data from the center shows that women account for 65 percent of people applying for unemployment benefits. Photo by VnExpress/Ngoc Thanh. Vietnams long-standing domestic inequality worsens the problem. While taking care of families and their children, a large number of women also take up positions in the labor market, work longer hours and earn more than ever before, instead of staying home and being completely dependent on their husbands who are highly unlikely to get involved in housework. A survey by the Institute of Labor Science and Social Affairs and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research revealed only 3 percent of surveyed husbands wash dishes at home, with only 0.5 percent offering to do so all the time. "I have one head and two arms, just like my husband, but he does not want to share the responsibilities equally," Yen said, adding theyve had several arguments on doing household chores. The impacts of domestic imbalance amid the pandemic hitting women the hardest is borne out by a recent research by the Vietnam National University of Agriculture and the National Economics University. "When your child is sick, they will blame the mother. I am unable to sleep when I think about how I can protect my family from the pandemic and keep my job at the same time," Hoa said. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), when the country began its social distancing campaign last April, reports of domestic abuse to the hotline of Vietnam Womens Union increased by 50 percent, and the number of people that needed protection at the Peace House, a shelter for survivors of violence against women that is managed by the union, increased 80 percent year-on-year. Some women stressed out by the Covid-19 pandemic have leaned on their larger families, especially in caring for the children. Yen sent her four-year-old son to her mother in the southern province of Tien Giang, and picked up her husbands mother from Long An, also in the south, to take care of her 10-year-old daughter in Saigon. "That is the best choice I can make, having the grandmothers take care of my children when I am busy working," she said, adding it was just a temporary option "until the grandmothers also get stressed out in taking care of the kids." Mothers like Yen know that they have to be strong to sail their family through the Covid-19 storm. "What if my children get sick? What if I lose my job? What if the schools remain closed and I must maintain this situation?" Phuong mused as she fed her three-year-old daughter against the sounds of a YouTube video for children, before returning to work at 1:30 p.m. "We will make it through this, the problem is when." New Delhi: The Patanjali Research Foundation Trust on Wednesday (February 24, 2021) said that the Coronil is in no way a secret medicine. In a fact check response to the Indian Medical Association (IMA) on Coronil, Acharya Balkrishna, the MD of Patanjali Ayurved Ltd, shared a press release on his social media platforms. It said, "Coronil is an evidence-based medicine with the integration of scientifically validated research evidence under pre-clinical and clinical expertise. The composition of this medicine has been disclosed to public-at-large, and has been thoroughly reviewed and scrutinized by the competent licensing authorities." "In fact, the contents of Coronil are clearly described on its packing, as per the regulatory requirements. Therefore, Coronil is in no-way a secret medicine, as portrayed by IMA officials; stating such vague and erroneous statements is absolutely incorrect and should be withdrawn forthwith," it added. #Coronil has been awarded the CoPP licence as per #WHO-GMP. Ayurveda has moved to the world-stage, for #COVID-19 pandemic. Opponents of Ayurveda are panicked. Find the truth.. Facts check response to #IMA on Coronil. https://t.co/yF5aSBLu7m pic.twitter.com/ESGDtHLhxj Acharya Balkrishna (@Ach_Balkrishna) February 24, 2021 The Patanjali Research Foundation Trust also said such statements are clearly an affront to the ancient practice of Ayurveda and the practitioners thereof. "Further such statements are contrary to the policy of the Government of India to facilitate the growth of nature-based medicines through its respective Ministries, as well as the regulatory bodies," the Patanjali Research Foundation Trust stated. The co-founder of Patanjali Yogpeeth Haridwar, Acharya Balkrishna, said that Coronil has been awarded the CoPP licence as per WHO-GMP. "Ayurveda has moved to the world stage, for COVID-19 pandemic. Opponents of Ayurveda are panicked," Acharya Balkrishna wrote. The Patanjali Research Foundation Trust's statement also read, "In the press conference held on February 19, 2021, honourable Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan jee communicated about the integration of Ayurveda with the national healthcare system, which was in-line with recent initiatives of WHO, as stated by Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus. Our honourable Health Minister never undermined modern medicine, rather his presence in the vent showed his sincere efforts as a health minister to provide acceptability to another form of medical systems. We cannot help but observe that remarks made by officials of IMA (Indian Medical Association) were uncalled for to the state the very least, rather than reflecting sincere concerns for the holding of certain medical beliefs." They added, "We have shared all of our research data with Ministry of Ayush, Government of India. The ministry has approved and categorically agreed for Coronil as medicine for COVID-19 management." This is to be noted that the Indian Medical Association (IMA) had demanded an explanation from the Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan for promoting Patanjali's Coronil Ayurvedic medicine. On Monday, the IMA released a statement and said, "Being a Health Minister of the country, how justified is it to release such falsely fabricated unscientific product to people of the whole country and how ethical is it to promote the product in unethical, wrong and false ways." "Let us not adulterate Ayurveda on the pretext of market gain to some monopoly corporate and create a disaster for humanity," the IMA added. The IMA also said that it will write to National Medical Commission for seeking Suo moto explanation for the blatant disrespect to the code of conduct of the Medical Council of India. "It was claimed by Baba Ramdev along with Health Minister that the said Coronil Ayurvedic medicine has got WHO certification. This has been clearly denied by WHO in an official tweet. The said false and fabricated projection of an unscientific medicine by the Health Minister to the entire country and being rejected by WHO is a slap and insult to the people of the country," the IMA added. This came after the World Health Organization (WHO) clarified that it has not reviewed or certified the effectiveness of any traditional medicine for the treatment of COVID-19. The WHO said, "WHO has not reviewed or certified the effectiveness of any traditional medicine for the treatment COVID-19." Patanjali had introduced THE Ayurveda-based Coronil in June 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic was at its peak. Live TV As if things weren't bad enough, some Texas workers are having to use their paid time off for the days they couldn't go work because of the winter storm. Steven Monacelli reports for the Daily Beast that "dozens" of employers in Texas told workers to use vacation, sick or personal time if they wished to be paid for days they were unable to work. AFTER THE FREEZE: Looking for an affordable generator for the next emergency? There's a sales tax holiday soon in Texas The icy weather made roads impassable and caused the state's main power grid to fail, knocking out power for more than 4 million Texans at one point. We are required to use vacation on the days of the storm when I had no heat or WiFi, or I can forfeit the money and not get paid, an anonymous Bell Helicopter employee told Monacelli. Even though Im salaried, Im entry-level, and any knock to my income will put me on the street and thats terrifying. Employees at United Ag & Turf, a John Deere equipment dealer, were allowed to "borrow" paid time off that would come out of future time off or pay. But employees were told they need to maintain a time-off balance to prepare for unexpected weather events like the winter storm. To be prepared for circumstances like this in the future, each employee is expected to manage their PTO and encouraged to always carry a balance for unexpected situations like health issues and bad weather. This type of assistance will not be offered in the future, read an email from the executive management of United Ag & Turf obtained by the Daily Beast. GIVING BACK: Trae tha Truth rented an entire gas station to help Houstonians Even employees for the City of Dallas received similar emails, according to Monacelli. The Dallas library department was told to use personal time off to make up for days they were unable to work. Austin Kaplan, an employment lawyer based in Austin, told the Daily Beast that a lack of expansive labor protections in the state allow employers to essentially decide how to handle unprecedented events that keep employees from working. Theres no requirement in Texas that people pay any vacation time at all. Theres just no safety net or anything like that, Kaplan said. "In my estimation, the state that turned the power grid off ought to be the one paying." At least 16 people died in Harris County as a result of the winter storm, the Houston Chronicle's Brooke A. Lewis reports. Funds will be used to expand drilling at Lynn Lake Nickel-Copper-Cobalt Sulphide Project in Canada and first drill testing of the recently identified copper porphyry target at Mt Gilmore Copper-Cobalt-Gold Project in NSW. The company will issue up to 40,385,738 fully paid ordinary shares at a price of 5 cents per share. ( ) (OTCMKTS:CRZNF) has received firm commitments for a placement to raise approximately A$2 million from sophisticated, professional and institutional investors. The placement involves the issue of up to 40,385,738 fully paid ordinary shares at A$0.05 per share. Capital raised will be used to advance Corazons drilling of priority targets at the Lynn Lake Nickel-Copper-Cobalt Sulphide Project in Canada. They will also assist in preparation for maiden drilling of a large copper-cobalt-silver-gold geochemical anomaly at the Mt Gilmore Project in New South Wales. Pleased with level of support Corazons chairman Terry Streeter said: Corazon has two very exciting projects that have the capacity to host large deposits. The targets on these projects are compelling and have the potential, via drilling, to deliver significant value for our shareholders. We are pleased with the level of market support for this placement, which will provide us with the opportunity to expand the current phase of drilling at Lynn Lake, and commit to the first drill testing of the recently identified copper porphyry target at Mt Gilmore. The company thanks all shareholders who participated in the placement for their support. Placement details Placement shares are anticipated to be issued on Tuesday, March 2, 2021, under the companys existing placement capacity under ASX Listing Rule 7.1 and ASX Listing Rule 7.1A. PAC Partners acted as lead manager to the placement which received strong investor demand. Lynn Lake project in Canada The company is drilling at the Lynn Lake Project testing newly identified high-priority geophysical conductor targets immediately west of the Fraser Lake Complex (FLC), where previous drilling by Corazon identified extensive low-grade disseminated nickel-copper-cobalt sulphide mineralisation. Six priority drill targets have been identified within a large area of conductance to the west of the main FLC intrusion. This phase of drilling will initially target the three highest priority targets and will comprise around 1,600 metres of core drilling, with subsequent drilling dependent on the results. Mt Gilmore project At the Mt Gilmore Project, Corazon is planning a maiden drill program to test a large, regional-scale copper-cobalt-silver-gold surface geochemical anomaly. This priority target is on a coincident geochemical/geophysical anomaly, adjacent to a recently identified mineralised (copper) porphyry. All permits for this drilling have been received and drilling will commence as soon as a drill rig becomes available. Would you like to receive breaking news notifications from The Post and Courier? Sign up to receive news and updates from this site directly to your desktop. Breaking News Columbia Breaking News Greenville Breaking News Myrtle Beach Breaking News Aiken Breaking News Click on the bell icon to manage your notifications at any time. Success! Please click the 'Allow' button in the 'Show Notifcations' alert in your browser if one is available. Thank you for signing up! Please enable notifications in your browser and reload the page. Yes, no matter what Yes, but it depends on variety No, for medical reasons, uncertainty No, principle Vote View Results The way I usually work is to dive into the history and trajectory of the organization and the physical history, he explained. In examining the King Labor Center he fell for the mural, with its bond to 1199s aspirations as well as to Refregiers embrace of the social justice mission in much of 20th-century art. Refregier was born in Russia in 1905 and immigrated to the United States, where he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and with the artist Hans Hofmann. He spent most of his career in Woodstock, N.Y., and found his artistic voice with the Roosevelt administrations Depression-era Federal Art Project. He gained notoriety for a set of 27 murals, titled The History of San Francisco, which he painted in the lobby of a post office. It drew ire from fear-mongering anti-communists for portraying some of the citys worst excesses, including an image of a white man beating a defenseless Chinese laborer during anti-Chinese riots. The work is now a protected landmark. On a visit to the S.E.I.U. mural, Adjaye found, It had a power, and was a relic of hope from the 1960s and 70s. He and Gresham agreed to relocate the mural to the new space. I wanted it to register as material memory in the new building, a kind of cultural sustainability. Stephen Miotto, a glass artisan based in Carmel, N.Y., was one of the experts consulted. He recognized the work immediately because he had taken over the studio of his godfather, Carlo Rett, who created the original work with his two partners. In high school Miotto had been invited to help with final cleaning of the work when it was being installed in 1970. He knew that it was cemented onto the concrete-block wall behind, and the entire wall would have to be removed intact and somehow installed in the new location. It was too hard, he said. He offered to replicate the mural for the new building, and the union hired him. His Miotto Mosaic Art Studios, working with partners in Spilimbergo, Italy, used similar techniques and much of the same glass tiles that Rett had used. New Zealand arrivals to Queensland will have to undergo quarantine from 6pm tonight due to increased transmission across the Tasman. The 'green flights' allowing for unrestricted travel will cease and New Zealand will be removed as a safe travel country, Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young announced. There were no new community cases in New Zealand on Wednesday, but the country has 11 active cases linked to a cluster in Auckland. QLD Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young (pictured) announced QLD is closing borders to NZ 'Unfortunately, over the past few days New Zealand has been recording some new positive cases, which is why we are closing the border from 6pm,' Ms Young said. 'Anyone who is permitted to travel to Queensland from New Zealand will be required to quarantine on arrival.' Authorities are asking all travellers who have been in New Zealand since February 21 to get tested and isolate until they get their results. This also applies to anyone who has entered from February 6 who has not already had a test after entering Queensland. 'New Zealand is working very hard to contain this community transmission, but they are still in a critical stage of their response so we need to keep watching closely,' Dr Young said. 'Things can change really quickly with this virus, we've seen that in other countries around the world, which is why I am asking Queenslanders to reconsider their need to travel to New Zealand.' NZ arrivals will have to quarantine. Pictured: NZ travellers arrive in Brisbane on Jan 7, 2021 Kelly Parker, was the first non-quarantine traveler from NZ in Brisbane, on Jan 7, 2021 Thousands of New Zealanders were forced into quarantine after two new cases of coronavirus were diagnosed on Tuesday night, all linked to a cluster based around Papatoetoe High School. The two new cases were siblings of a high school student who tested positive on Tuesday, with one a teenage worker at a Kmart n Auckland's east. The students have tested positive with the highly infectious 'mutant' UK strain of the virus. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern revealed the infected teenager had been handling clothes, among other small tasks, during her Kmart shifts last week. 'She was doing things like folding clothes, doing a bit of the click-and-collect work,' the prime minister said. 'She wasn't a cashier, but we are being very cautious.' NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (pictured) said a new case on Tuesday night worked at Kmart New Zealand passengers arrive at Brisbane and are quarantined on Dec 16, 2020 More than 600 people were tested at Papatoetoe High School on Tuesday. At the same time, New South Premier Gladys Berejiklian has called for Ms Ardern to open a trans-tasman bubble with Australia and let Aussies enter her country. 'I've always hoped Prime Minister Ardern would return the favour to NSW because we've certainly been accepting New Zealanders since October/November last year,' Ms Berejiklian said at a press conference on Tuesday. 'I've always been robust and confident about our ability to have a transtasman bubble. I hope that happens sooner rather than later. There's no reason why it can't.' A popular American etiquette expert has earned thousands of loyal followers for her etiquette classes, bestselling books, and Instagram page but she was shocked to learn that one of those followers was covertly stealing her content and reposting it as her own. Myka Meier, New York Plaza Hotel's etiquette instructor and the founder of Beaumont Etiquette, is known for posting fun videos where she demonstrates Do's and Don'ts of table manners and other polite behavior. But when she recently began fielding questions about her so-called 'understudy,' Myka learned that she had a copycat on the other side of the globe: a Middle Eastern woman with her own etiquette school who has been recreating all of Myka's videos and passing them off as her own. Exposed! Myka Meier (left) , the etiquette instructor for the Plaza Hotel in New York, frequently shares etiquette tips on Instagram but noticed that she now has a copycat (right) About six months ago, Myka (pictured) started receiving messages about her 'understudy' who was posting near-identical content She found that Farno Rezaei (pictured), who runs the Farsse (Fars School of Etiquette), was 'replicating my Instagram account and lessons from my book' Myka's etiquette tips have appeared on TV and in her books, 'Modern Etiquette Made Easy: A Five-Step Method to Mastering Etiquette' and 'Business Etiquette Made Easy: The Essential Guide to Professional Success'. Last year, she spoke to DailyMail.com about the signature positions that members of the royal family revert to when they're in the public eye, and previously detailed the most important manners to teach children. But it turns out, someone else may be making bank off of her success. Farno Rezaei also bills herself as an etiquette expert and runs Farrse, the Fars School of Etiquette, which she founded in New York in 2021. She promises to teach clients about social etiquette, including dining, style, and afternoon tea customs in English culture. But while she designs her own curriculum for the private courses she teaches, much of the content she has posted on social media in the past 11 months is strikingly similar to that of another etiquette expert. Some of Myka's most popular posts are her short instructional videos that teach the right and wrong way to do something in a matter of seconds. Myka (left) is known for her cute videos in which she silently shows the right and wrong way to do things, like stir a hot drink Myka (left) noticed that Farno (right) poses nearly identical videos after she does, sometimes within hours In past clips, Myka has demonstrated how women should exit a car (to avoid revealing anything they don't want to), what to do with a used napkin at the end of a meal (fold it next to the plate, don't crumple it on top), and how to eat shared dip on a table. And Farno, it seems, was quite inspired by these videos. Several of her videos offer the same exact tips presented in the same exact way. Farno appears to have studied Myka's movements gestures, and replicates each one including the way Myka smiles and wags her finger back after demonstrating the 'wrong' way to do something. Occasionally, Farno even appears to replicate Myka's outfits, like the time she wore a black and white checkered look to show how to bend down to pick up something that's been dropped just like the black and white checkered look Myka wore to demonstrate the same tip. In some cases, she's uploaded her own video within hours of Myka sharing the original content. Myka, who trained in Switzerland and in London under a former member of staff of Her Majesty the Queen, said that she finds Farno's behavior humorous but deceptive. How to: Occasionally, Farno even replicates Myka's outfits, like the time she wore a black and white checkered look like this one to show how to bend down to pick something up Style inspo: Farno (pictured) not only gave the same tip and demonstrated it with the same motions, she also wore a similar outfit Myka, who trained in Switzerland and in London under a former member of staff of Her Majesty the Queen, said that she finds Farno's behavior humorous but deceptive In one video, Farno replicates Myka's tip and gestures and also adds an animates a line under her teacup, like the arrow Myka animated on her video 'It is baffling and slightly funny when I post and only hours later it is reproduced without acknowledging where it came from. Good etiquette is about being kind and respectful, so its just ironic,' she told DailyMail.com. She explained that she first noticed she had a copycat about six months ago when others brought it to her attention. 'I started receiving an outpouring of messages saying I had an impersonator who was replicating my Instagram account and lessons from my book, only with subtitles in another language,' she explained. 'People started asking if she was my understudy. 'At first I was flattered, but then I realized she was monetizing off people thinking they were receiving an education from someone they thought was affiliated with me, when the truth is I have never met or spoken to this person.' Myka said she tried to contact Farno about stealing her content but got no reply. 'When I politely reached out to her directly via Instagram DM, she did not respond and blocked me,' she said. Her team also contacted Instagrams intellectual property and copyright department, but unfortunately, Instagram said there was nothing they could do since Farno is not literally posting Myka's posts. 'It is baffling and slightly funny when I post and only hours later it is reproduced without acknowledging where it came from,' Myka told DailyMail.com Myka is unhappy that Farno is 'monetizing off people thinking they were receiving an education from someone they thought was affiliated with me' 'It's surprising because they give public figures the verified badge so people can't pretend to be you, but then again, apparently they can,' she said. 'I just feel bad that so many people have been tricked. I love my students around the world and feel awful for those deceived.' Farno, however, has denied Myka's claims to DailyMail.com, insisting that it's Myka who is trying to capitalize on Farno's success even though all of Farno's videos have been published after Myka's. 'What is obvious [is that] Myka is trying to gain my audience's attention ... by making baseless claims, defamation, and creating controversy,' she said. 'This is nothing new, and every day on the Internet we see thousands of similar cases, accusing famous and popular people for gaining fame and credibility for themselves.' Farno insisted that etiquette rules are similar worldwide 'and no one can claim to have an exclusive right to them.' Farno, however, has denied Myka's claims to DailyMail.com, insisting that it's Myka who is trying to capitalize on Farno's success Farno insisted that etiquette rules are similar worldwide 'and no one can claim to have an exclusive right to them.' She also pointed to other examples of etiquette videos on Instagram and provided pictures to DailyMail.com 'Such a claim by Myka for etiquette is as childish as someone to claim an exclusive right to driving rules or language grammars!' she said And while Farno confirmed that she had, in fact, blocked Myka on Instagram, she claimed that it was bad etiquette to reach out on the social media platform 'Such a claim by Myka for etiquette is as childish as someone to claim an exclusive right to driving rules or language grammars!' she added, calling Myka's claims 'shocking.' She also pointed to other examples of etiquette videos on Instagram and provided pictures to DailyMail.com. And while Farno confirmed that she had, in fact, blocked Myka on Instagram, she claimed that it was bad etiquette to reach out on the social media platform. 'I wonder how a writer of a business etiquette book doesn't know must write a formal email to communicate with an important business person and instead she uses Instagrams direct message for a page with 280k followers with thousands of daily messages!' she said. Finally, Farno who graduated from from Canada AIP College and has taken etiquette courses at academies in the UK said she hopes Myka learns 'not to violate moral and human principles in order to achieve fame.' Kochi, Feb 24 : Actress Rashii Khanna has started shooting for last schedule of the untitled Malayalam remake of the Bollywood hit Andhadun. The film is currently on floors in Kochi. In the remake, Rashii will portray the character essayed by Radhika Apte in the Hindi original. Prithiviral plays the male protagonist, essayed by Ayushmann Khurrana. "I was in awe of the storyline of 'Andhadhun' when I saw it. I wondered what it might have been like to be part of such an edgy film. It is surreal to be shooting for its Malayalam remake helmed by the one and only Ravi K. Chandran. We have begun shooting for the final leg of the film and each moment at the location is exciting. Not to mention, I have one of the most beautiful coastal cities in India to myself after the shoot!" says Rashi. The actress will be stationed in Kochi for almost a week. Before this schedule Rashii finished the shoot of Raj and DK's untitled web series starring Shahid Kapoor. Rashi has enjoyed a string of successes with films such as Prati Roju Pandage, Venky Mama, Imaikkaa Nodigal, Tholi Prema and Jai Lava Kusa. India has recorded a steady rise in active cases of coronavirus disease over the past few days with a surge in daily infections in five states. The new Covid-19 strains detected in the country is highly transmissible, Director of Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh said, ANI reports. He further added that we should take all precautions to prevent the rise in cases. "New COVID19 strains detected in India & the UK strain is highly transmissible. We should take all possible precautions to prevent the rise in cases. Currently, we have 55 COVID19 cases at the hospital. The cases have gone up in the last 2 weeks," Director, PGIMER Chandigarh said. New COVID19 strains detected in India & the UK strain is highly transmissible. We should take all possible precautions to prevent the rise in cases. Currently, we have 55 COVID19 cases at the hospital. The cases have gone up in the last 2 weeks: Director, PGIMER Chandigarh pic.twitter.com/L2CElLeQS6 ANI (@ANI) February 24, 2021 Meanwhile, India has reported 13,742 new coronavirus cases, 14,037 discharges, and 104 deaths in the last 24 hours, as per the data released by the Union Health Ministry. With this, the total Covid-19 tally in the country jumps to 1,10,30,176. At present, there are 1,46,907 active Covid cases in the country. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers On Tuesday, the Health Ministry said that India has detected two new variants of the virus-- namely N440 K and E484Q in Maharashtra and Kerala. "Two new variants-- N440K and E484Q have been found in Maharashtra, Kerala and Telangana. However, it cannot be assured that these two new virus strains are responsible for the surge of fresh COVID-19 in these states," Dr VK Paul, Member (Health) of the NITI Aayog said during the weekly COVID-19 update. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Friends of murdered millionaire call girl Carole Waugh have revealed their shock after discovering the oil executive's double life, saying they thought she was just the 'ordinary girl next door' until she was brutally murdered by her conman gambling addict boyfriend. Carole Waugh was killed in 2012, aged 49, by Rakesh Bhayani, then 41, in a row over money at her central London home. After stabbing her in the neck Bhayani stole the 5,000 cash she kept in her home before taking her jewellery including a 4000 Cartier bracelet to sell as well as swiping money from her current account and, even trying to sell her 750,000 Marylebone flat. But a new documentary, set to air tomorrow on Channel 5, has shown how those closest had no idea about her wealth and work, and though she was a 'nice, ordinary, girl next door'. Friends of murdered millionaire call girl Carole Waugh (pictured) have revealed their shock after discovering the oil executive's double life, saying they thought she was just the 'ordinary girl next door' until she was brutally murdered by her conman gambling addict boyfriend Carole, who was born in County Durham, worked in the oil and gas industry and travelled around the world for her work. In the nineties, she travelled to Libya where she lived a 'glamorous expat lifestyle' working as an accountant an oil company, spending time with other western immigrants and drinking in embassy bars. But following a heartbreak in 2008 she left without telling her friends and moved back to her London home, which she is thought to have bought by saving up her salary, as the cost of living was low in Libya. After arriving back in the UK, she signed up to dating sites advertising herself as a sex worker, and called herself 'posh totty fun'. It was there she met Bhayani, who falsely described himself as a doctor at a top London hospital. While he may have dressed the part, his story was a lie. Carole, who was born in County Durham, worked in the oil and gas industry and travelled around the world for her work Bhayani was a career conman and gambling addict with more than 40 convictions for fraud, and was exploiting Carole's desire for love. Oblivious to Bhayanis lies, Carole soon fell victim to his romantic charms and was slowly drawn in by his evil schemes. Less than a year later, Bhayani would take not only her money, but also her life. After borrowing more than 50,000 from her for a series of gambling debts, the two came to blows in an argument about money in 2012, which resulted in him stabbing her. And it wasn't until her death that her friends and family discovered her double life A new documentary, set to air tomorrow on Channel 5, has shown how those closest to Carole had no idea about her wealth and work, and though she was a 'nice, ordinary, girl next door'. She is pictured 'I first met Carol Waugh in 2002 working for a Libyan oil company,' her friend Leigh said. 'She then joined us to do the accounts, basically she was the bookkeeper doing the day-to-day accounts. 'We were shocked an surprised that the press described her as an escort girl, that she was basically a high-class hooker, that she was a millionairess, that wasn't the girl we knew. 'She was just an ordinary girl, perhaps looking for love'. 'She had beautiful long reddish hair, but was just an ordinary girl next door'. Carole Waugh was killed in 2012, aged 49, by Rakesh Bhayani, then 41, in a row over money at her central London home. He is pictured Other friends described her as 'nice' and 'sociable but not an extrovert' and a 'naive country girl'. To this day, her friends and family don't know how Carole got her wealth, as she only earned 24,000 a year while working in Libya. Those who worked with her during the eight years she spent in the Libyan capital speak of a complex character who told extraordinary stories about her life in England tales which left many of her fellow workers baffled. Despite never having been married, she wore a huge diamond solitaire engagement ring and gold wedding band and told her colleagues of a wealthy Egyptian husband who had died and left her a fortune. She spoke of owning a flat behind Harrods in Knightsbridge, and having a top-of-the-range Harley Davidson motorbike. She claimed that back in London she rubbed shoulders with film stars at parties. Her friends and family were shocked to hear about her tragic end. 'We heard about Carole's death when we in a car dealership. My wife opened the newspaper and there was a pictured of Carole,' one friend Tim said. None of us could work out why she had come to Libya to work for just 24,000 a year if she was already so wealthy, one British secretary who worked and lived alongside her for six years told the Daily Mail in 2012. A lot of what she said simply didnt add up. We were quite baffled by her. We just didnt know what was truth and what was fiction. Others described her as a fantasist, with her brother telling the Old Bailey at the time of her trial she often spoke of being close to the Gadaffi family, which he didn't believe. 'The stories were embroidered and exaggerated to give an impression she was more successful than she was and happier than she was,' he said. But she was wealthy enough to keep 30,000 in her current account and was generous and trusting with friends, loaning her gambling addict boyfriend more than 50,000. But when she asked for the money back a row erupted, resulting in her death. Bhayani stabbed her in the neck and placed her body ina bag which was carried to a car. The vehicle was initially stored in a central London car park, behind John Lewis on Oxford Street, but it was then left in a rented garage in New Malden, south-west London. Together with his accomplice Nicholas Kutner, 48, Bhayani used female impersonators to try and strip every asset Carole had ever owned in the hopes of hitting a million pound jackpot. Her furniture and jewellery were sold and her bank accounts were emptied out by the pair. They also stole her identity and managed to defraud banks and other institutions of more then 250,000. The Old Bailey heard how the pair blew the money on posh hotels, prostitutes and gambling - with Bhayani losing 200,000 at the roulette tables in Londons West End within just a few weeks. It was only when the pair tried to sell Ms Waugh's flat for 750,000 with Kutner posing as Miss Waughs brother Chris that they were caught by police. He is now serving a 27 year sentence. Her friends and family were shocked to hear about her tragic end. 'We heard about Carole's death when we in a car dealership. My wife opened the newspaper and there was a pictured of Carole,' one friend Tim said. 'We were extremely shocked, she was just a nice person'. A woman who is accused of attempting to murder a man she allegedly met on Tinder will not stand trial for at least another two years due to the backlog of cases that has arisen during the pandemic. Inita Romanovska, 34, who has an address at Cahercalla, Kilrush Road, Ennis, County Clare, is charged with attempted murder during an incident at an apartment complex at Henry Street, Limerick on March 11 2020. Ms Romanovska, who is originally from Latvia, did not appear at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin this Wednesday where Mr Justice Michael White scheduled her trial to begin on March 6, 2023. It is expected to take two weeks and, Mr Justice White said, may be held in Limerick rather than Dublin. A previous district court hearing heard that Ms Romanovska met the alleged injured party on Tinder and while they had been on a number of dates they were not in a relationship. A backlog of cases has been created in the Central Criminal Court where measures to tackle the spread of Covid-19 have put jury trials on hold. The Central Criminal Court is prioritising cases where the accused person is in custody. Ms Romanovska was granted bail last March. The old Google Pay app, perhaps better known as GPay to some users due to the app icon, is going to be mostly useless in the next couple of months. This morning Google started sending out emails to users of the old app to let them know about some upcoming changes. Those changes consist of removing some of the features that make the app a useful tool to have on your device. Not just any features mind you, but the apps key features. Google is not looking to shut things down right away. But sooner or later, it will have no reason to keep the old app around, now that the new one is available for installation. Advertisement Having said that, the new Google Pay is still in early access. So it likely wont be the only option until early access is over. Whenever Google decides to make the shift. The old Google Pay app is losing its transactional features in April Right now, you can use the old app and the new app to send, receive, and request money from friends. Both will work for that same purpose. But come April, more specifically April 5, users will no longer be able to use the old app for any of those transactions. Furthermore, the pay.google.com website will also lose this capability. Users will also lose the ability to use the old app for viewing any recent payments or transaction history. And lastly you wont be able to access or transfer any balances within your Google Pay account. Advertisement For clarification though, this does not mean that you will lose any of that balance. You will just need to use the new Google Pay app to interact with it. Since the old app and the website will stop working for this purpose. Google will also be updating the Terms of Service for the app on this same date. Worth noting is that these changes are only listed as taking place in the U.S., but they will probably be rolled out elsewhere eventually. The new app offers more features If youve not used the new app yet, you might want to. It has more features than the older version and overall its a more useful experience. Advertisement For example, you should be able to see your entire transaction history from the time you started using the older app to your most recent transaction with the new app. The older app only showed you transactions for so far back. And from personal experience it didnt always show ever single transaction. Though, its not clear if this was intended or just malfunction. In any case, if you use the older app at all, start making the transition to the new app as soon as you can. The one thing to keep in mind is that the new app also has fees for transferring any money you may receive. Whereas the old app did not. ACMT 2021 Annual Scientific Meeting This dynamic virtual event will feature original, innovative research and provide numerous opportunities for networking and engagement. The American College of Medical Toxicology (ACMT) 2021 Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM) will be held virtually from Wednesday, April 14 through Friday, April 16. This event will be preceded by ACMTs 1-Day Virtual Symposium The 4th Wave: Methamphetamines and Stimulants on April 13. Access more information and registration links for both events here. These events provide an opportunity for specialists in the fields of medical toxicology, addiction medicine, emergency medicine, and more to learn from the cutting-edge research of their peers and connect with others in the field. Because this event is virtual, registrants may enjoy the flexibility of participating live or accessing presentations on-demand. Access to the virtual event portal and all its recordings will be available for one year after the event. Events and activities include: 20 plenaries, professional development sessions, and panels featuring national and international speakers 40 mainstage presentations of innovative, original research in the form of Platforms, Lightning Orals, and Moderated Posters 150+ Posters accessible in an interactive eGallery Moderated Q&As Poster Walks with ACMT Presidents and Board Members Virtual chat sessions on a wide range of topics including: Magic Mushrooms and Psychedelic Medicine, Poison Bottles, Poisonous Plants, The Future of Medical Toxicology Clinical Practice, Recent Grads Meet and Greet, Women In Toxicology, Legal and Consultative Section, International Committee and Section Presentation Highlights Include: A History of Pandemic Response: Are Those Who Forget the Past Condemned to Repeat It? | Dr. Gigi Kwik Gronvall, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security The Beirut Explosion: Emergency Response and Toxicological Implications | Dr. Ziad Kazzi, Emory University School of Medicine; Dr. Tharwat El Zahran, American University of Beirut Medical Center Amanitas of the Northwest | Dr. Zane Horowitz, Oregon Health and Science University Aluminum Adjuvants: Advocates and Advocants | Dr. Laurie Halmo, University of Colorado School of Medicine The Role and Promise of Artificial Intelligence in Medical Toxicology | Dr. Michael Chary, Weill Cornell Adverse Effects of COVID-19 Therapeutics | Dr. Jeffrey Brent, Principal Investigator/Director, Toxicology Investigators - Consortium (ToxIC); Dr. Paul M. Wax, American College of Medical Toxicology View full agenda here. Register for the 2021 Annual Scientific Meeting here. Register before March 4th to receive the early bird discount! About ACMT The American College of Medical Toxicology (ACMT) is a professional, nonprofit association of physicians with recognized expertise and board certification in medical toxicology. Our members specialize in the prevention, evaluation, treatment, and monitoring of injury and illness from exposures to drugs and chemicals, as well as biological and radiological agents. ACMT members work in clinical, academic, governmental, and public health settings, and provide poison control center leadership. Advertisement People flocked to parks and beaches across Britain this afternoon as the country enjoyed its warmest day of the year so far with temperatures soaring to nearly 64F (18C). Britons sat on park benches enjoying coffee and went for walks on the beach as the third coronavirus lockdown continues, but the North remained on high alert for flooding after three inches of rain fell in 24 hours. The UK recorded a new 2021 high of 17.6C (63.7F) in the Lincolnshire villages of Donna Nook and Coningsby by midday, while temperatures in London and the South East were expected to reach 61F (16C) this afternoon. It meant temperatures comfortably beat the previous record for this year of 60.6F (15.9F) set only on Sunday in Norfolk, although they were below the all-time monthly record of 70.2F (21.2C) set in London on February 26, 2019. People go for a walk in the warm and sunny weather at Hyde Park in London this afternoon as the third lockdown continues People gather at a park in Bristol to enjoy the milder weather as the third national coronavirus lockdown continues People take a breath of fresh air as they go for a walk along Bournemouth beach in Dorset this afternoon People enjoy walking in the warm and sunny weather at Hyde Park in Central London this afternoon Jodie, Eddie, three, and Cara Kingsley go for a paddle in the sea on Bournemouth beach in Dorset today People sit on benches in the warm and sunny weather at Hyde Park in Central London this afternoon Surfers take to the sea at Bournemouth beach in Dorset today as parts of the country enjoy fine conditions People walk through Hyde Park this afternoon as London and the South East of England enjoy mild temperatures Everly Fidler, five, runs among a stunning blanket of over 200,000 crocus bulbs at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey today Surfers take advantage of the waves on Bournemouth beach this afternoon Police on horseback as they patrol Hyde Park this afternoon while London enjoys warm and sunny weather People enjoy sitting on benches in the warm weather at Hyde Park in London this afternoon People take a breath of fresh air as they go for a walk along Bournemouth beach in Dorset this afternoon Today's maximums were significantly above the UK average daily high for February, which is 43.9F (6.6C), and come after the sky glowed a deep orange at sunrise again today thanks to Saharan dust blown north from Africa. The mercury at 8am today was already at 54F (12C) in Preston, 52F (11C) in Bristol and 50F (10C) in Inverness, County Armagh and North Wales - the sort of temperatures normally seen as maximums for the time of year. The high readings, which come ten days after Britain faced ice, snow and sub-zero temperatures, were even above the average maximum for May, which is 58.6F (14.8C) for the UK and 60.4F (15.8C) for England. But northern England and Scotland face more heavy rain, after Keswick in the Lake District had nearly three inches (75mm) in the 24 hours until sunrise this morning, with more expected today. Matt Horler and Sally Pike take a stroll along the shoreline as people enjoy the weather at Bournemouth beach today Cyclists speak to each other while having a rest at Hyde Park in London during the warm weather this afternoon Two women sit with a dog at Hyde Park in London today as parts of Britain enjoy the warmest day of the year so far People enjoy the sea air on a blustery and overcast afternoon at Hengistbury Head in Dorset today A couple take a photo amongst daffodils at St James's Park in London today amid the mild temperatures People go out for a walk in the warm and sunny weather at Hyde Park in Central London today People go kayaking along the River Cam in Cambridge this morning as the country enjoys mild conditions People talk to others while walking a dog at Hyde Park in London today as they enjoy being out in the warm weather Mother Marina and baby Vivienne among daffodils at St James's Park in London this afternoon A woman is taken for a run by her dog as people enjoy the fresh air at Bournemouth beach in Dorset today People sit on park benches in Bristol this morning as parts of the country enjoy warmer-than-average conditions for February People walk by crocuses in bloom in the grounds of Holy Trinity Church in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, this morning Two women enjoy a walk as they stroll through Hyde Park in Central London this morning during the warm weather Police officers speak to people in Hyde Park this morning as Londoners enjoy the warm and sunny weather Meanwhile there was flooding at Windermere in the Lake District this afternoon as the area was hit by heavy rain and winds Flooding at Windermere in Cumbria today after parts of the Lake District suffered three inches of rain in 24 hours The Met Office has issued two weather warnings for downpours in North Wales, running until 6pm today, and Cumbria, running until 8pm - as up to 3.5in (90mm) is expected to fall across those two areas. The South will enjoy mild weather while the North faces rain There were 137 flood alerts or warnings in place across Britain this morning, including 63 alerts and nine warnings in England; ten alerts and 38 warnings in Scotland; and 15 alerts and two warnings in Wales. The rain is forecast to move down across the UK from late today into tomorrow, but is likely to clear by Friday - and more fine weather is predicted for the end of the week, with sunshine and further mild temperatures. Met Office forecaster Oli Claydon said: 'A few days of milder temperatures are forecast. It will be a noticeable change from what we've had in recent weeks. It will feel more like spring, especially in the sunshine. 'Through the week we're into double figures [in Celsius] for many places, including parts of Scotland.' BBC weather presenter Carol Kirkwood said it was 'very mild for late February', adding that parts of the country 'could see 17C (63F), possibly even 18C (64F) in any prolonged sunshine, in some eastern areas' today. Many spring flowers are already blooming as much of Britain enjoys the warm sunshine, with stunning arrays of snowdrops, carpets and crocuses and golden daffodils in full bloom across the country. There are 63 alerts and nine warnings in place for England (left), and ten alerts and 38 warnings across Scotland (right) People speak to each other on benches at Hyde Park in Central London this morning People take photographs of crocus flowers as they bloom at the back of Trinity College in Cambridge this morning People kayak along the River Cam in Cambridge this morning on what is a beautiful day in much of eastern England People go for a walk in the warm weather at Hyde Park in Central London this morning as the third lockdown continues A spectacular sunrise this morning over Ely Cathedral in the Cambridgeshire Fens as a Saharan dust cloud affects the country The London Eye in silhouette against the early morning sky viewed from across the River Thames in London this morning The sky over South West London glows a deep orange at sunrise again today thanks to Saharan dust blown north from Africa In Scotland, strong winds have been causing problems, with many Caledonian MacBrayne ferry services cancelled due to adverse weather while the Tay Road Bridge was closed to double decker buses due to high winds. Gusts of 50mph to 60mph and up to 70mph for the Western Isles and the Moray coast were expected overnight, with Police Scotland urging people to plan ahead if they had to travel. Transport Secretary Michael Matheson said: 'The Met Office is telling us to expect another period of difficult weather, with heavy rain and strong winds forecast for much of Tuesday and Wednesday this week. 'The current Covid restrictions mean you should only be leaving your home for an essential purpose, so please consider if your journey is absolutely necessary before setting off.' Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 22:06:06|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BANGUI, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Central African Republic (CAR) government forces (FACA) and their allies on Wednesday retook the northwestern town of Bossangoa from rebels, CAR Prime minister Firmin Ngrebada said Wednesday. "Order will be restored in Bossangoa and the entire Ouham Prefecture," said Ngrebada in a Facebook post, adding that "it will be the same everywhere else!" Bossangoa is considered a stronghold of former CAR president Francois Bozize. At his instigation, rebel groups joined forces to launch an offensive against the government just before the presidential election on Dec. 27 last year. Recently, the FACA and their Russian and Rwandan allies have repelled the rebels and took over many major cities. On Tuesday, following a report of the defense ministry, the CAR government eased the curfew introduced in January because of the threat posed by the rebels. The curfew now starts from 8 pm until 5 am, according to the new government order. Enditem Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has instructed the quick vaccination for people as more than 100,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have arrived in Vietnam. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc chairs a Cabinets meeting with the National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control in Hanoi on February 24. Photo: VNA Chairing a Cabinets meeting with the National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control in Hanoi on February 24, the PM said Vietnam aims to provide COVID-19 vaccine shots to all people. However, as the supply of vaccine cannot meet demand at the same time, priority should be given to certain groups in line with the Government's resolution, he said, stressing the principle of high-risk groups and pandemic-affected areas coming first, followed by those with lower risks. More vaccine will be imported in the future to serve domestic demands, the PM said while reminding people and authorities at all levels to continue with strict epidemic prevention measures. He stressed the need to persist with the twin targets of controlling the pandemic and boosting economic development at the same time. PM Phuc lauded the efforts of localities in controlling the pandemic. Regarding the rescue of goods in Hai Phong, Quang Ninh and Hai Duong, the Government leader asked the Ministry of Industry and Trade to work with Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and Ministry of Health to design procedures to quickly sell agricultural products in pandemic-hit localities. He also requested media agencies to strengthen communications on preventive measures against COVID-19. VNA There are two key takeaways from the Governments new plan for managing rather than living with the coronavirus. The first is the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) has resumed control of the countrys Covid-19 strategy. The second is the Government no longer trusts the public to fully comply with coronavirus restrictions. Depending on your point of view, you will be either delighted or disillusioned to hear Nphet is back in control. But after months of trying to find a way of standing up to public-health chiefs without being really seen to be doing so, the Government has ceded authority for now. You wont be seeing any outbursts from Tanaiste Leo Varadkar about recommendations in the coming weeks and there will be no attempts to gazump the public health advice with more social - or economic-driven proposals. At the launch of the plan, Taoiseach Micheal Martin deferred questions on a noticeable number of occasions to deputy chief medical officer Ronan Glynn. So all decisions from now on will be based on public health advice from Nphet and there will be little or no deviation. We cant be seen to overrule Nphet after we did at Christmas and it led to 1,000 deaths, a Cabinet minister said. The Government feels burned by its decision to deviate from Nphets advice, even though the group did clear the way for the easing of some restriction and you could argue it would have resulted in a similar situation in January. Nphet also did not predict the devastation that was caused by the British variant. But it had been calling for quarantining of international passengers for more than six months and this would have caught some of the British strain. Read More Rightly or wrongly, the blame for the coronavirus carnage of the last two months rests squarely on the Governments shoulders so it will nod along to Nphet for the foreseeable. This might change if public tensions fray further as we head into April. The other aspect of the Covid-19 Resilience and Recovery 2021 The Path Ahead likely to infuriate the public is that it offers very little Path Ahead. All that is on offer beyond schools opening is the possibility that you might be able to meet someone outside in April. After that its anyones guess what will happen. The reason they didnt include an actual pathway is the belief that people are less compliant with Covid rules as dates for easing restrictions approach. The plan says research shows a complex balance between Covid-19 fatigue and resilience is emerging. High ongoing levels of pandemic fatigue, could adversely affect continued population acceptance of and compliance with the non-pharmaceutical interventions. There is a further risk that vaccinated cohorts will be less likely to adhere to public health measures, it adds. So, unlike our neighbours in Britain who have been given a clear idea of when restrictions will ease, we will have to be on our best behaviour or else we wont be told what the Governments plan is for returning the country back to some form of normality. Cannes Lions and its official representative in South Africa, Ster-Kinekor recently announced this year's jury. With only one month to go until two years' worth of Lion-winning work is awarded, we touched base with some of the local jury members for a preview of what to expect. Next up, Lufuno Mavhungu... HOUSTON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- 2021 has barely begun, and the largest teacher recruitment campaign to date for DIVERSITY in Ed is already underway. On Feb 1st, in honor of Black History month, DIVERSITY in Ed's publisher, Trina Edwards, launched an ambitious campaign with the goal of connecting 5,000 teachers from diverse backgrounds and cultures in communities of color nationwide. Says Edwards, "this goal is how we achieve the mission we share with our nationwide partners, that all students of color have access to a teacher who looks like them or shares their unique cultural background." To date, 179 school leaders and Human Resources personnel from across the country have joined the campaign to recruit and hire minority teachers. Some of the largest and most diverse districts in the country, which include NYC Department of Education, Duval County Public Schools, Clark County Public Schools, Fairfax County Public Schools, and Gwinnett County Public Schools have committed to recruiting and hiring at this spring's 7th annual Virtual Recruitment Fair to be held on April 14, 2021. Representation includes schools and districts from both northern and southern states, and over 20 charter schools are also registered, with Edwards sharing that there is already diversity in the range of recruiters who don't want to miss out at the opportunity to make their pitch to in-demand teacher talent. As LaMeika Robinson, Talent Acquisition Manager, Columbus City Schools described her experience at DIVERSITY in Ed's pop-up fair last fall, "I was blown away! I met teacher candidates locally, nationally, and INTERNATIONALLY. Without a doubt, I would recommend this fair to all school districts globally." While DIVERSITY in Ed's virtual event is the perfect fit for a pandemic landscape in which both teacher candidates and recruiters are looking to connect safely to fill critical roles in our nation's schools, the model predates these unprecedented times, and the experts in diversity hiring are hoping their 7th recruitment fair is the biggest and best yet. For recruiters ready to get a jump start on vetting candidates, Edwards and her team encourage schools and districts to register now at the DIVERSITY in Ed job board at https://www.diversityined.com. New teachers and teachers preparing for graduation and certification are welcome to browse jobs and sign up to hold their spot to become part of this historic effort to make a major impact in increasing diversity in the education workforce. For more information on DIVERSITY in Ed's next Virtual Teacher Recruitment Fair, or to register your school or district, please visit https://diversityined.careerfairexpo.com/. CONTACT: Trina Edwards 281-265-2473 [email protected] SOURCE DIVERSITY in Ed London, United Kingdom--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - China Food and Beverage Company (OTC Pink: CHIF), today announced that the Company will be entering the cryptocurrency, blockchain and digital asset technology arena. The management of CHIF believes that with the recent success of Bitcoin https://www.bitcoin.com and the impending IPO of Coinbase https://www.coinbase.com , the time is now for CHIF to make its entrance into this booming industry. The Company feels it has the expertise, industry contacts, affiliations and investing banking relationships to participate in one of the globes most dynamic and exciting sectors. James Tilton, president of CHIF stated, "With Bitcoin now at all time highs of over $50,000. and the upcoming IPO of Coinbase being projected in the range of $300. per share, we believe that this move will benefit all CHIF shareholders." CHIF's vision is the establishment of a fully integrated technology company that provides turnkey technological solutions to the cryptocurrency, blockchain and digital asset industries. Over time, the Company plans to provide a wide range of services such as software solutions, e-commerce, advisory services, financial services and information technology. For further information please contact CHIF at info@chiftech.com The CHIF Twitter account can be accessed at https://twitter.com/chif_tech This press release contains certain 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, which are intended to be covered by the safe harbors created thereby. Investors are cautioned that, all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including without limitation, the ability of China Food and Beverage Company to accomplish its stated plan of business. China Food and Beverage Company believes that the assumptions underlying the forward-looking statements contained herein are reasonable, any of the assumptions could be inaccurate, and therefore, there can be no assurance that the forward-looking statements included in this press release will prove to be accurate. In light of the significant uncertainties inherent in the forward- looking statements included herein, the inclusion of such information should not be regarded as a representation by China Food and Beverage Company or any other person. Contact China Food and Beverage Company info@chiftech.com To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75342 Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. When what is needed is vision and a pathway to a positive future, what we get in Northern Ireland is sniping, point-scoring, opportunism and the old translation of every single problem on earth into the language of Orange and Green. Even the question of when to bring children back to school has become a proxy for the constitutional question. The way funerals did, the way pubs did, the way closing entry points did. The DUP and TUV would appear to favour aligning NI with England, where all pupils return to school on March 8 - for once finding something to agree on with Boris Johnson. While Sinn Fein and the SDLP oppose this, wanting to stick with the phased return scheduled for that date, it may be that their keenness to take a stance against unionism has also set them at odds with revised policy in the Republic where schools begin a phased re-opening on March 1. For the rest of us who aren't involved in these heady discussions what we thought we knew on Sunday was turned on its head on Monday. And not for the first time. It's no wonder there is so much scepticism on the street at this new declaration of positivity. After the harrowing death toll, the shocking mismanagement of protective clothing for care-workers, the misguided attempts to "re-open" last July prior to the second wave, even after the misjudged decision to let separate directions be taken by the four nations, what will be remembered will be the appalling mood-swings in news management. In the lead up to the festive season, it was gung-ho for turkey dinners; then almost immediately it was Christmas Day in the Workhouse for everyone, as an extended lockdown was ushered in, with new "vaccine-dodging" variants frightening the life out of all of us. Last week, it was all social distancing until the autumn, booster injections in August, the Australian Open (where they seem to have no cases at all) having to play out in empty stadia, caution over the availability of the second jab. This week? Hey! Let's paaaarrr-ty! Blokeworld is back! Pubs open by mid-April, indoor leisure facilities, hairdressers and non-essential retail open by May 17, thousand-seat theatres open by mid-May, the Epsom Derby and Royal Ascot in early June, nightclubs open by June 21, 90,000 punters in Wembley for England v Czech Republic on June 22, Wimbledon by June 28 Once again, the UK has lurched from depression to eye-rolling euphoria, leaving more questions than answers. The downturn in infections and fatalities up until Monday had been ascribed to the efficiency of lockdown. If we understand the leaflets correctly, the vaccine can suppress serious symptoms but doesn't prevent infection or transmission, and right on cue, on Tuesday, news emerged that the South African variant had arrived in Northern Ireland. Response to Boris was muted here at first. The punishment meted out to our society by the virus for our Christmas recklessness - one thousand further deaths since December 1 (10 weeks to accomplish what it took 32 weeks to do in 2020) - seemed to have chastened those usually calling for rapid re-opening. But Boris clearly awakened those who saw the chance to steal a march on the Republic by matching Mother England stride for stride. The last time there was a real expectation of re-opening society was last September, just prior to the second wave, when the Kent variant was emerging. Perhaps it would help the confidence of the public if there were some consistent messaging now. Even within 24 hours of Boris's speech, Health Secretary Matt Hancock suggested the gaps between stages of re-opening would more likely than not be extended Maybe this is the hallelujah moment and the UK is leading the way into the Nirvana of the Old Normal. It's just depressing that, among the first bits of the Old Normal we find ourselves getting back, is a society in Northern Ireland that's as divided as before, and just as ready to fall back on bickering and back-biting as a substitute for taking care of our shared community. Geneva, February 23 (KMS): Turkey has raised the Kashmir dispute at the United Nations Human Rights Council, with a call for resolving the decades-old dispute on the basis of UN resolutions and the legitimate expectations of Kashmiri people who are struggling for their right of self-determination. We reiterate our call to the Government of India to ease current restrictions in Jammu and Kashmir, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the 47-member Council in Geneva. We wish for the resolution of the issue through peaceful means on the basis of the relevant United Nations resolutions and the legitimate expectations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, the Turkish foreign added. The Council on Monday began its month-long, 46th session, which is being held almost entirely remotely to prevent the spread of COVID-19. A staple of good food in Northeast Alabama is closing after more than four decades in business. Albertvilles Catfish Cabin has announced it is closing. Its final day of business will be Sunday, Feb. 28, according to a post on the restaurants Facebook page. We want to thank everyone for your loyalty and patronage over the years, the post read. The news was met with regret and memories. One of our favorite places and where we celebrated my husbands 70th birthday, Riki Limbaugh Rager wrote on Facebook. Just when Albertville seems to really be growing, we dont need to lose this local treasure. Nancy Carol Boren said even after she moved out of state, her family would plan a trip to the restaurant. June Spaulding said the news hurts my heart. I have fond memories of taking my grandmother and mother there for over 30 years, she wrote. We just took my mom there last January to celebrate her 86th birthday. And as soon as we are vaccinated had planned to return. Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press "Nancy Pelosi has invited all illegals to her mansion at 2724 Pacific Ave, San Francisco, CA. Free food and plenty of room," a Facebook post with 5.3K shares reads. It's one of many similar posts from social media users sharing and targeting the the Speaker of the House of Representatives' supposed San Francisco address. The posts are wholly untrue Pelosi never invited any "illegals" to her residence, and she does not live at that address. (Alliance News) - Openreach engineers have launched a two-day strike in a row over regrading, ending 21 years of industrial peace in the BT Group PLC. Around 170 members of the Communication Workers Union walked out on Wednesday, with further stoppages planned next week. The union said it is the first industrial action in the BT group since 1999. National Officer Davie Bowman said engineers are "incensed" at the imposition of fiercely disputed regrading of their role. "Whatever Openreach is trying to achieve has spectacularly misfired," he said. An Openreach spokesman said: "We're surprised and saddened by the news, having worked closely with the union for more than a year-and-a-half to try and resolve this specific issue. "None of the 170 repayments project engineers in question is at risk of losing their job or seeing any deterioration in their pay, terms and conditions. "In fact we've offered them the option to upgrade to the better-paid, higher technical professional grade, but we've also given a cast-iron guarantee that they can choose to stay on their existing terms and conditions a which includes an extremely competitive salary of around GBP45,000 a year. "We want to reassure customers that this action won't impact the quality of the services we provide, or affect our large ongoing investments in recruitment, training and a new full fibre broadband network for the UK." By Alan Jones source: PA Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved. The U.S.-Mexico border where the fence becomes a small barbed wire fence, west of Nogales, Ariz., on May 23, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) Judge Blocks Enforcement of Bidens Moratorium on Most Deportations President Joe Bidens administration cannot enforce a pause on most deportations until further notice, a federal judge ruled late on Feb. 23. U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee, agreed to issue a preliminary injunction that was requested by the state of Texas. Acting Homeland Security Secretary David Pekoske had directed in a memorandum on Jan. 20 an immediate pause on removals of any noncitizen with a final order of removal for 100 days. Texas officials sued, alleging the pause violated an agreement between the state and the federal government reached during the Trump administration, and that the Department of Homeland Security has a responsibility to promote the removal of illegal aliens. Tipton said on Feb. 23 that arguments by Texas officials that they would incur financial costs from having to detain immigrants who otherwise would have been deported and from an increase in unaccompanied children requiring public education were legitimate. The Court finds Texas has established by a preponderance of the evidence that it could reasonably expect a 100-day pause to lead to a significant number of criminal aliens and unaccompanied children moving freely within and into Texas who would otherwise be removed, he wrote in the 105-page decision. The 100-day pause will lead to a significant number of criminal aliens moving freely within and into Texas who otherwise would have been removed. Criminal aliens and state offenders have a demonstrable propensity to recidivate. Therefore, the 100-day pause will cause Texas unanticipated detention facility costs, he added. A preliminary injunction blocks an order temporarily, until the case at hand is resolved or until a superseding decision is issued. Tipton expressed general opposition to nationwide injunctions but cited precedent in other cases. He, therefore, issued a nationwide injunction of the deportation pause. The stay of the pause will remain in place pending a final resolution of the case or a further order from a federal court, such as an appeals court. Tipton had twice blocked the order for two weeks at a time before making the new decision. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton praised the court for its decision. The Courts decision to stop the Biden Administration from casting aside congressionally enacted immigration laws is a much-needed remedy for DHSs unlawful action. A near-complete suspension of deportations would only serve to endanger Texans and undermine federal law, Paxton, a Republican, said in a statement. Blatantly illegal security threats cannot be allowed to stand, and the rule of law must be upheld. I commend the Court for prioritizing the law and safety of our citizens, and I will continue to defend Texas against the unlawful and unconstitutional actions of President Biden and his Administration. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email that the department does not comment on pending litigation. The White House didnt respond to a request for comment and didnt address the issue at a briefing on Wednesday. White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in January that the order halting deportations will allow the administration to review and reset enforcement policies and ensure that resources are dedicated to the most pressing challenges, and that we have a fair and effective enforcement system rooted in responsibly managing the border and protecting our national security and public safety. Approximately 6,000 noncitizens subject to a final order of removal are currently detained nationwide, according to the government, which alleged only some of those would be released from custody during the pause. Many are detained by local authorities, who may or may not work with federal immigration officials. Defendants had asked the judge not to issue the injunction, writing in a filing in mid-February that Pekoskes memo didnt violate federal law and that Texas lacked standing. Texas has failed to show it will be harmed by the temporary removal pause at all, let alone irreparably, as is required for injunctive relief, government lawyers asserted. In addition, they said, multiple statutory provisions expressly preclude review in district court, and over the substantive and procedural issues raised here. Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin's Regular Press Conference on February 24, 2021 2021/02/24 Kyodo News: I have two questions. First, Japan's supreme court ruled today that it was unconstitutional for the city government of Naha, Okinawa Prefecture, to provide a site in a city-managed park free of charge to a group for a Confucian temple, because it violated the principle of separation of politics and religion under the Constitution. Can you comment on this? Second, according to reports, at a press briefing, the US Pentagon press secretary asked China to avoid actions using coast guard vessels near Diaoyu Dao. I wonder if you could comment on that? Wang Wenbin: On your first question, I'm not aware of what you said. On your second question, Diaoyu Dao and its affiliated islands are China's inherent territory. The Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, born out of the Cold War, shall not be used to undermine the interests of any third party, let alone regional peace and stability. Reuters: A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators are set to reintroduce a legislation they say will counter Chinese censorship within the United States and hold Beijing accountable for efforts to stifle criticism inside the US. They complained the Chinese government has sought to force U.S. companies including hotel chains, airlines and even Hollywood film producers to support pro-Beijing stances. What's the ministry's comment on this legislation? Wang Wenbin: What you said about China's "censorship in the US" has no factual basis. As we said repeatedly, the China-US trade relationship is in essence mutually beneficial. We hope those people in the US can heed the call from American business communities and people with vision all over the world, view China and China-US trade ties in an objective manner, work with China to strengthen dialogue, advance cooperation and properly manage difference on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit, and contribute to the sound development of China-US relations in trade and other areas. Beijing Youth Daily: At the high-level segment of the 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council, British Foreign Secretary Raab slashed China on issues related to Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet. He said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Bachelet or another independent expert should be given "urgent and unfettered access" to Xinjiang and said that there should be a resolution at the Council to this effect. Can you comment on this? Wang Wenbin: The UK has abused the platform of the UN Human Rights Council to spread disinformation, smear China and meddle in China's internal affairs. China firmly rejects such unacceptable accusations. We welcome people from all over the world traveling to Xinjiang to see the region's prosperity and the residents' happy life. Invited by the Chinese side, more than 1,200 foreign diplomats, international organization officials, journalists and religious personnel from over 100 countries visited Xinjiang in the past years, and they agreed that what they saw and experienced in the region was entirely different from Western media reports. At the high-level segment of the 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council, State Councilor Wang Yi reiterated that the door to Xinjiang is always open. We welcome the High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit Xinjiang. China already extended invitation to the High Commissioner for visiting Xinjiang and other places in China, and both sides have been in communication on that. I'd like to stress the purpose of the visit is to enhance bilateral exchange and cooperation rather than carry out "investigations" with the presumption of guilt. We firmly oppose any political maneuvers to press China on this matter. The UK's proposed so-called "resolution" is apparently out of the ill intention to muddy the water, slander China and sabotage China's cooperation with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which we firmly oppose. Its petty tricks cannot fool the international community. The UK is keen on lecturing and pressuring other countries, meddling in their internal affairs and practicing politicization and double standards on human rights issues. However, it turns a blind eye to the severe rights issues at home. One-third of British families with children aged under five live below the poverty line. Millions of children suffer from hunger. The British military committed murder of innocent civilians and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the perpetrators are still sheltered by the government and unpunished. In the UK there are a lot of such phenomena as racial discrimination, xenophobia, hate speeches, and severe rights abuses against refugees and immigrants. We urge the UK to take concrete measures to improve domestic human rights condition and contribute something tangible to the sound development of the international human rights cause. Reuters: Just a quick follow-up on what you said in case I misunderstood. Did you say that the Chinese side is in discussion with the High Commissioner about a trip to Xinjiang and do you have any more details on that? Or is that a hypothetical invitation? Wang Wenbin: China already extended invitation to the High Commissioner for visiting Xinjiang and other places in China, and both sides have been in communication on that. CNR: Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP, hailed China's ecological progress in a recent interview, noting China's stewardship in climate action and efforts to restore biodiversity including on the legal front. She also called on countries to take broad actions in order to build an inclusive and sustainable future. What's China's comment on this? Wang Wenbin: We noticed the UN official's statement. China has rolled out 10-plus laws and regulations on biodiversity for better ecological conservation and stronger legal and policy basis of biodiversity. In China, 90 percent of terrestrial ecosystem types and 85 percent of key wild fauna species are effectively protected. While strengthening ecological protection at home, China participates in international exchange and cooperation in an in-depth manner. We earnestly fulfill our obligations under environmental treaties, including on climate change and biodiversity, and have hit, ahead of schedule, the targets set for 2020 for tackling climate change and establishing nature reserves. China proposed the establishment of the BRI International Coalition for Green Development, and has had environmental exchange and cooperation with over 100 countries. Last year, President Xi Jinping announced China's goal to strive to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060, and put forth four new measures to enhance nationally determined contribution targets, demonstrating China's resolve as a responsible major country to actively respond to climate change and foster a community with a shared future for mankind, which has been lauded by the international community. Ecological conservation bears on the future of mankind, and a green planet is what humanity pursues. As the host of the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming this year, China will discuss with other parties global biodiversity protection, act on multilateralism, and contribute to the environment of our common home and the sustainable development of all mankind. South China Morning Post: The President of Sri Lanka is currently reviewing the Hambantota Port agreement between China and Sri Lanka. The Foreign Minister of Sri Lanka also said in a recent interview that, according to the agreement, the Hambantota Port lease can be renewed for another 99 years after the 99-year lease expires. He described this as a mistake of the previous government. May I ask how China responds to this? Also, have the two sides been renegotiating terms of the port agreement? Wang Wenbin: The Hambantota Port is a landmark project jointly undertaken by China and Sri Lanka under the Belt and Road Initiative. The concession agreement on the Hambantota Port is a mutually beneficial one reached through friendly consultations on an equal-footed and voluntary basis. This cooperative project, built on the strengths of the two sides, will make the Hambantota Port into a center for logistics, shipping and industrial activities in the Indian Ocean. The Port will become an important engine for Sri Lanka's future economic growth. With the joint efforts of China and Sri Lanka, the Hambantota Port project has been expanding its scale and operations, showing a good momentum for development despite the adverse effects of the pandemic. We believe that going forward, the project will play an even bigger role in growing local economy and improving people's livelihood in Sri Lanka. AFP: The rights group Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday that Chinese authorities have "increased prosecutions with long prison sentences for Muslim minorities in Xinjiang." What is the foreign ministry's comment on this report? Wang Wenbin: When it comes to China-related issues, the organization you mentioned is always biased and spreading false and denigrating statements on China. What they said cannot be trusted. I would like to share some facts about Xinjiang's development with you. Xinjiang has maintained security, social stability and economic development, and people there live and work in peace and contentment. In the past four years or so, there has not been a single violent terrorist incident in Xinjiang. This is a positive achievement of Xinjiang's anti-terrorism and de-radicalization measures. We know that from 1990 to the end of 2016, the terrorist, separatist and extremist forces at home and abroad carried out thousands of violent and terrorist attacks in Xinjiang and other places, causing great suffering to the people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang. Xinjiang's counter-terrorism and de-radicalization efforts, while ensuring security and stability for people in Xinjiang, have contributed to the development of Xinjiang's human rights cause. The government of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has held four press conferences at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I noticed people from Xinjiang's religious communities said at the press conferences that they had neither seen nor heard any Muslim locals in Xinjiang detained for their religious beliefs or legitimate activities. They believe that the religious freedom of Muslims in Xinjiang is fully protected in accordance with law. I believe that this is the real human rights situation in Xinjiang. We hope that clear-eyed people from all walks of life will stay clear of the unfounded lies and rumors on Xinjiang-related issues. Let's say no to those malign accusations against Xinjiang. Reuters: The Guardian on Monday released a report that cited internal documents from the World Health Organization dating back to August 2020. The documents reportedly said that Chinese officials did little in terms of epidemiological investigations into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan for the first 8 months of the pandemic. The report also said that Chinese officials did not provide necessary data and documents to earlier WHO missions. Is the ministry aware of this report by the WHO and does it disagree with the allegation that China has not conducted an appropriate investigation in the first stage of the pandemic? Wang Wenbin: Since the start of COVID-19, China has kept close communication and cooperation with the World Health Organization on global origin-tracing in an open and transparent spirit. From July 11 to August 2 last year, at China's invitation, WHO experts conducted preparatory consultations on COVID-19 origin-tracing cooperation in China, during which they together formulated the China part of a global scientific cooperation plan. Later, Chinese and foreign experts had multiple video conferences where Chinese experts shared China's findings in origin-tracing in a candid and science-based manner. The WHO and international experts highly recognized China's achievements in epidemic control and origin-tracing on multiple occasions. Global Times: The Wall Street Journal published an article signed by Mike Pompeo and Miles Yu, which again hypes up the conspiracy theory of "leakage of virus from Wuhan Institute of Virology," and claims the world must hold China accountable. However, we find many rumors cited in that article, and some of them have already been proven false. What's your comment? Wang Wenbin: Pompeo's claim of "Wuhan Institute of Virology's making or leakage of virus" has been publicly denied by almost all top-notch scientists and disease control experts worldwide. The WHO-led expert panel on origin-tracing said on multiple occasions that the virus was "highly unlikely" leaked from a lab. Pompeo, with his credibility hitting rock bottom, already became a byword for lying. After leaving office, Pompeo and his like are still seeking to get selfish gains and hijack China-U.S. relations by taking an anti-China stance. Their attempts are doomed to fail. Bloomberg: The US and Canada held bilateral meetings on Tuesday where President Biden said that the US would work together with Canada until the safe return of two detained Canadians. He said that Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig are not bartering chips. Does the foreign ministry have any comment? Wang Wenbin: China has repeatedly stated its position on the cases of these Canadian nationals. Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor are suspected of engaging in criminal activities endangering China's national security and charges have been filed. China's judicial sovereignty allows no interference. Reuters: The German interior ministry said on Tuesday that China has tried to intimidate Hong Kong residents living in Germany since pro-democracy protest began in the city. Has the Chinese side sought to pressure Hong Kong residents in Germany and what's the Chinese side's policy towards Hong Kong critics that are residing in other countries? Wang Wenbin: This is totally unfounded. It is an intentional effort to create a so-called hype-up. Hong Kong affairs are purely China's internal affairs. We hope the German side can hold an objective and just position on Hong Kong-related issues, be discreet with its words and deeds, stop making irresponsible remarks and do not meddle in Hong Kong affairs and China's other domestic affairs. Shenzhen TV: Iran said on February 23 it had started to restrict some site inspections by the IAEA. The foreign ministers of France, Germany, and Britain said in a joint statement that they "deeply regret" the move by Iran. Permanent Representative of Russia to the IAEA said that Moscow hopes Iran's suspension of the Additional Protocol of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) will not last for a long period of time. Do you have any comment on this? We noted that there have been frequent interactions on the issue of U.S. return to the JCPOA in recent days. What has China done with respect to that? Wang Wenbin: China attaches high importance to the Iranian nuclear issue, actively advances the political and diplomatic settlement process, and upholds the international non-proliferation regime as well as peace and stability in the Middle East. China has made great efforts and played a key role in order to bring the JCPOA back on track. At a video conference of foreign ministers on the Iranian nuclear issue last December, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi stressed that all parties should steadfastly preserve the JCPOA, fairly and objectively resolve differences on compliance issues, properly settle regional security issues and promote the unconditional U.S. return to the deal at an early date. He also proposed to hold an international meeting with the participation of JCPOA participants and the United States to start the process of U.S. return to the Iranian nuclear deal. The EU made specific proposals for the meeting recently. China supports that and stays in close communication with other parties including the United States and Iran. The Chinese side hopes the proposed meeting will focus on a possible roadmap for the synchronized and reciprocal return to full compliance with the JCPOA by the United States and Iran and produce early harvests. On February 10 and 22, 2021, Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu had phone conversations with U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley at the latter's invitation, and the two sides had an in-depth exchange of views on the Iranian nuclear issue. Vice Foreign Minister Ma stated China's position and concerns on the Iranian nuclear issue, stressing that the United States should return to the JCPOA and lift sanctions on Iran as soon as possible, which holds the key to breaking the current deadlock. It also needs to take concrete actions to address Iran's concerns and enhance mutual trust with Iran in order to pave the way for holding an informal meeting between JCPOA participants and the United States to discuss a possible roadmap for the synchronized and reciprocal return to full compliance with the JCPOA by the United States and Iran. Both sides said they will remain committed to political settlement and stand ready to step up dialogue with other parties to ensure the JCPOA will return to the right track at an early date. The two sides also agreed to stay in communication and coordination. On February 22, Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu also had a phone conversation with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Vice Foreign Minister Ma said the JCPOA participants should hold the meeting with the United States as soon as possible to consolidate the current good momentum. The two sides stressed that the United States should return to the JCPOA and lift sanctions on Iran as soon as possible, which holds the key to breaking the current deadlock. Relevant parties should seize the opportunity, promote the return of the Iranian nuclear deal to the right track and the political and diplomatic settlement of the Iranian nuclear issue to uphold peace and stability in the Middle East. Besides, the principal official of the MFA's Department of Arms Control stays in close communication with all parties of the Iranian nuclear deal. China will continue to preserve the JCPOA, work for the resumption of full and effective compliance at an early date so as to better safeguard peace and stability in the Middle East. The Iranian nuclear situation is at a critical juncture with both opportunities and challenges. China always holds that U.S. return to the JCPOA and lifting of sanctions on Iran holds the key to breaking the deadlock. China appreciates the reaching of a temporary bilateral technical understanding on the safeguards issue between Iran and the IAEA and noticed that both sides have spoken highly of this result. China hopes that the relevant understanding could be faithfully implemented and urges other parties to play a constructive role in this process. PTI: This is further to what you said about the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka. Can we presume that China is opposed to the review of the agreement to grant the 99-year lease to the Chinese company? Wang Wenbin: As I just said, the relevant report runs counter to facts. The concession agreement relating to Hambantota Port is a mutually beneficial one signed by China and Sri Lanka in an equal-footed and voluntary spirit through friendly consultations. This cooperation project will help Sri Lanka to build a new engine driving future economic growth. We believe this project will play an active role in facilitating Sri Lanka's economic growth and improving people's lives. Loading the player... Patanjali's Coronil not to be sold in Maharashtra without 'proper certifications' The sale of Patanjali's Coronil tablets will not be permitted without "proper certifications" in Maharashtra, said the state's Home Minister Anil Deshmukh on Tuesday. Deshmukh's statements come a day after the Indian Medical Association (IMA) expressed shock over Patanjali's claims of getting WHO certification for Coronil tablets, which it says is an evidence-based medicine to fight COVID-19. Uttarakhand flash floods: 136 missing persons to be declared dead for early compensation The Uttarakhand government on Monday issued a notification to declare dead 136 persons missing after the flash floods in Chamoli district to make it easier for the affected families to get early compensation. The missing persons will be presumed dead after the notification and the state government has begun the process to issue death certificates for them. Rescue teams have so far found 68 death bodies after the glacier burst and subsequent flooding of Alaknanda and Dhauliganga rivers on February 7 Adani Enterprises, EdgeConneX join forces to provide data centre solutions in India Adani Enterprises and global data centre operator EdgeConneX have formed a 50:50 joint venture (JV), AdaniConneX, to provide data centre solutions in India. Both the organisations are committed to investing significant capital into the JV over the next decade to build India's leading green data centre platform and address the rapidly growing need for high-quality and reliable IT infrastructure. Indian pharma goes local for APIs, strives to end dependence on China Indian drug companies are looking to local makers of so-called active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) or trying to make them in-house in a bid to end their reliance on China as ties between the two countries soured after a deadly border clash last June. Executives at India's CadilaHealthcare,Cipla, SunPharmaceutical , said on Tuesday they were aggressively working on reducing the dependence on the richer rival for raw materials. Indian economic recovery entered consolidation phase in January: ICRA After registering strong growth in December, the economic indicators suggest loss of momentum in January, with the recovery in Indian economy entering a consolidation phase, rating agency ICRA has said. However, ICRA does not see the fall in economic indicators as a sign of alarm regarding the sustainability of the recovery. Hotel industry revives in Goa; average occupancy rises to 55% from 15% Finally some good news for the hotel industry. Goa stood out as the most solid market in hospitality sector in September-to-December 2020 period. The market saw marked improvement in both occupancies and room rates, says the latest Hotel Momentum India report by consultancy JLL. In third quarter, hotels in Goa were running at an average occupancy of 15 per cent. This figure jumped to nearly 55 per cent in the fourth quarter. Similarly, the average room rates swelled from about Rs 4,500 to nearly Rs 7,000 per night. Gardai have issued a significant number of fines for alleged breaches of Covid-19 regulations relating to a funeral which took place in County Limerick this Wednesday. Video footage posted on social media shows a large number of people gathered in the centre Newcastle West as a horse-drawn hearse made its way through the town ahead of the funeral Mass and burial. The deceased passed away in the UK last week and it's believed a number of those who attended the funeral traveled from England in recent days. The Limerick Leader has learned that dozens of people gathered at a house in the town on Tuesday night and that members of the Armed Support Unit were deployed for a time. Gardai say there was "considerable prior engagement" with the parties and that a large operation, involving local and divisional resources, was put in place yesterday and today. Footage from the burial which took place at Calvary Cemetery in the town and which was live-streamed on social media has been viewed nearly 2,000 times and widely shared. It shows close to 200 people - including men, women and children - gathered around the graveside as mourners sing and chat with each other. They can also be seen shaking hands and embracing each other throughout the footage which is nearly 20 minutes long. Only a handful of people can be seen wearing masks and face coverings and those seen in the footage do not appear to be making any effort to adhere to social distancing guidelines. In reply to a query from the Limerick Leader, a spokesperson at the Garda Press Office stated: "Gardai are aware of a funeral that took place in Newcastle West, County Limerick on February 24, 2021. Gardai attended the scene and engaged with those present." The statement adds: "An Garda Siochana has and will continue to adopt, a graduated policing response based on its tradition of policing by consent. This has seen gardai engage, educate, encourage and, as a last resort, enforce. Personal social responsibility, wearing of face coverings in open spaces and social distancing are public health guidelines and are not penal regulations. In addition to the issuing of fines, gardai say files will be prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions in relation to what occurred. Issuing a threat to the Central Government, Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader, Rakesh Tikait on Tuesday said if the three laws are not repealed, the farmers will march to the Parliament on 40 lakh tractors. Speaking at a farmers' rally in Sikar in Rajasthan, Tikait said, "Our next call will be for a march to Parliament. We will tell them before marching. This time it won't be just 4 lakh tractors but 40 lakh tractors will go there if farm laws are not taken back." Tikait also demanded that a new law should be enacted ensuring minimum support price for farmers. On February 18 at a maha panchayat at Kharak Punia in Haryana, Tikait said the protesting farmers will take the agitation to the poll-bound West Bengal if the Centre does not concur with their demands against the new farm laws. He again reiterated the claim the next day and said "Talks are going on taking out a tractor rally to West Bengal." Farmers broke barricades to enter Delhi and indulged in vandalism across several parts of the capital during their Kisan tractor rally organised to protest against the Centre's three new farm laws on January 26. Several public and private properties were damaged in acts of vandalism by the protestors. A total of 22 FIRs have been filed by the Delhi Police with one of them mentioning the incident at ITO where a farmer died after his tractor overturned. Farmers have been protesting on the different borders of the capital since November 26 against the three newly enacted farm laws - Farmers' Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; the Farmers Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and farm Services Act 2020 and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 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.) Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Ihor Zhovkva and Ambassador of the Italian Republic to Ukraine Pier Francesco Zazo discussed the acceleration of Ukraine's access to certified vaccines against COVID-19. This was reported by the press service of the President's Office on February 23. Zhovkva congratulated the Italian ambassador on the beginning of his work in Ukraine, noting the high dynamics of bilateral contacts over the past year and the successful cooperation of the countries in overcoming the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the context of the recent appointment of the new Italian government headed by Prime Minister Mario Draghi, he expressed hope to continue effective cooperation between Ukraine and Italy on a wide range of issues on the bilateral and international agenda. The interlocutors noted that the visit of President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky to Italy on February 7, 2020 gave a significant impetus to the development of bilateral cooperation. An exchange of views took place on the measures of political dialogue for 2021 and further steps to intensify trade, economic and investment cooperation between Ukraine and Italy. Ihor Zhovkva and Pier Francesco Zazo also discussed the schedule of contacts at the highest level this year. The deputy head of the Presidents Office thanked the ambassador for Italys continued support for the restoration of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as for supporting our country's initiatives to deepen cooperation with the EU and NATO. Particular attention was paid to the current epidemic situation in Ukraine and Italy and the acceleration of Ukraine's access to certified vaccines against COVID-19. As Ukrinform reported, on February 19, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that the Ukrainian embassies are making every effort to ensure that the Health Ministry receives a vaccine against COVID-19. ish Dust from the asteroid impact was blown into the atmosphere where it blocked out the sun and led to the extinction of 75% of life, including all non-avian dinosaurs. Credit: Willgard Krause/ Pixabay Researchers believe they have closed the case of what killed the dinosaurs, definitively linking their extinction with an asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago by finding a key piece of evidence: asteroid dust inside the impact crater. Death by asteroid rather than by a series of volcanic eruptions or some other global calamity has been the leading hypothesis since the 1980s, when scientists found asteroid dust in the geologic layer that marks the extinction of the dinosaurs. This discovery painted an apocalyptic picture of dust from the vaporized asteroid and rocks from impact circling the planet, blocking out the sun and bringing about mass death through a dark, sustained global winterall before drifting back to Earth to form the layer enriched in asteroid material that's visible today. In the 1990s, the connection was strengthened with the discovery of a 125-mile-wide Chicxulub impact crater beneath the Gulf of Mexico that is the same age as the rock layer. The new study seals the deal, researchers said, by finding asteroid dust with a matching chemical fingerprint within that crater at the precise geological location that marks the time of the extinction. "The circle is now finally complete," said Steven Goderis, a geochemistry professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, who led the study published in Science Advances on Feb. 24. The crater left by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is located in the Yucatan Peninsula and is called Chicxulub after a nearby town. Part of the crater is offshore and part of it is on land. The crater is buried beneath many layers of rock and sediment. A 2016 mission led by the International Ocean Discovery Program extracted rock cores from the offshore portion of the crater. Credit: The University of Texas at Austin/Jackson School of Geosciences/ Google Maps The study is the latest to come from a 2016 International Ocean Discovery Program mission co-led by The University of Texas at Austin that collected nearly 3,000 feet of rock core from the crater buried under the seafloor. Research from this mission has helped fill in gaps about the impact, the aftermath and the recovery of life. The telltale sign of asteroid dust is the element iridiumwhich is rare in the Earth's crust, but present at elevated levels in certain types of asteroids. An iridium spike in the geologic layer found all over the world is how the asteroid hypothesis was born. In the new study, researchers found a similar spike in a section of rock pulled from the crater. In the crater, the sediment layer deposited in the days to years after the strike is so thick that scientists were able to precisely date the dust to a mere two decades after impact. "We are now at the level of coincidence that geologically doesn't happen without causation," said co-author Sean Gulick, a research professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences who co-led the 2016 expedition with Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London. "It puts to bed any doubts that the iridium anomaly [in the geologic layer] is not related to the Chicxulub crater." The dust is all that remains of the 7-mile-wide asteroid that slammed into the planet millions of years ago, triggering the extinction of 75% of life on Earth, including all nonavian dinosaurs. Sean Gulick, a research professor at The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences (right), and Joanna Morgan, a professor at Imperial College London, examining cores retrieved from the crater during the 2016 research mission led by the International Ocean Discovery Program. Credit: The University of Texas at Austin/ Jackson School of Geosciences Researchers estimate that the dust kicked up by the impact circulated in the atmosphere for no more than a couple of decadeswhich, Gulick points out, helps time how long extinction took. "If you're actually going to put a clock on extinction 66 million years ago, you could easily make an argument that it all happened within a couple of decades, which is basically how long it takes for everything to starve to death," he said. The highest concentrations of iridium were found within a 5-centimeter section of the rock core retrieved from the top of the crater's peak ringa high-elevation point in the crater that formed when rocks rebounded then collapsed from the force of impact. The iridium analysis was carried out by labs in Austria, Belgium, Japan and the United States. "We combined the results from four independent laboratories around the world to make sure we got this right," said Goderis. A section of rock core pulled from the crater left by the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. Researchers found high concentrations of theelement iridium a marker for asteroid material in the middle section of the core that contains a mixture of ash from the impact and ocean sediment deposited over decades. The iridium is measured in parts per billion. Credit: International Ocean Discovery Program In addition to iridium, the crater section showed elevated levels of other elements associated with asteroid material. The concentration and composition of these "asteroid elements" resembled measurements taken from the geologic layer at 52 sites around the world. The core section and geologic layer also have earthbound elements in common, including sulfurous compounds. A 2019 study found that sulfur-bearing rocks are missing from much of the rest of the core despite being present in large volumes in the surrounding limestone. This indicates that the impact blew the original sulfur into the atmosphere, where it may have made a bad situation worse by exacerbating global cooling and seeding acid rain. Gulick and colleagues at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and Bureau of Economic Geologyboth units of the UT Jackson Schoolplan to return to the crater this summer to begin surveying sites at its center, where they hope to plan a future drilling effort to recover more asteroid material. Explore further New evidence suggests it was matter ejected from the Chicxulub crater that led to impact winter More information: "Globally distributed iridium layer preserved within the Chicxulub impact structure" Science Advances (2021). Journal information: Science Advances "Globally distributed iridium layer preserved within the Chicxulub impact structure"(2021). advances.sciencemag.org/lookup .1126/sciadv.abe3647 A married father-of-three has been jailed for 20 months for sharing child and animal porn videos over a group chat. Asylum seeker Fartam Bassiri, 46, claimed he didn't have a sexual interest in children despite police finding around 30 indecent images on his laptop in December 2018 during a police raid on his home in Birchwood, Warrington. Bassiri told Judge David Swinnerton he didn't know sharing the images was a crime and that he did it out of disgust, not because he was sexually attracted to children. Learning he had been jailed Bassiri, with the help of an interpreter, said: 'I really really don't know this is a crime and I wouldn't know that by sending this to somebody else to show someone disgusting matter is going to cause me this problem.' Asylum seeker Fartam Bassiri (pictured), 46, claimed he didn't have a sexual interest in children despite police finding around 30 indecent images on his laptop in December 2018 after a police raid on his home in Birchwood, Warrington But Judge Swinnerton said: 'You have not yet been ready to face up to why you were looking at and distributing these images.' Mike Stephenson, prosecuting, said police found 11 category A images in Bassiri's home, of which eight were videos, and 27 category B images, of which two were videos, and one category C image. There were also two still images of extreme pornography involving animals and six videos. Mr Stephenson said: 'Some of the images were automatically loaded onto another piece of equipment, there was some element of duplication.' He explained one of the three videos of child rape involved a mature female and a boy aged between five and seven which was sent to an address in Georgia on October 16, 2018. A second video which involved two 12-year-old girls was sent to a doctor in Germany. Bassiri then sent another video to the same doctor on December 5, 2018, which involved two boys, aged eight and 12, and a donkey. Mike Stephenson, prosecuting, said police found 11 category A images in Bassiri's home, of which eight were videos, and 27 category B images, of which two were videos, and one category C image. Pictured, Liverpool Crown Court Mr Stephenson added: 'The crown's position is he does have a sexual interest in children.' Bassiri has no previous convictions. Jonathan Turner, defending, said: 'The images were received without request on a group chat from Iranian nationals.' Mr Turner explained that the duplication of the images was due to the way the devices synced with each other automatically. He said: 'He has worked consistently since arriving in the UK, most recently as a driver for a pharmaceutical company.' Mr Turner said Bassiri had been married for 15 years and has three sons, who he provides for as his wife does not work. He said Bassiri was an asylum seeker since his brother was incarcerated in Iran, adding: 'That was his first attempt to remain, he was in danger due to political association.' Referring to a pre-sentence report Mr Turner urged the judge to impose a community penalty and said: 'He expresses remorse and shame for offending in that report. There is a low likelihood of reoffending and low risk of sexual offending.' Bassiri admitted three counts of downloading indecent photographs of children, distributing three child rape videos, possessing an extreme pornographic image portraying serious injury to a person's private parts, possessing seven extreme pornographic images including animals and possessing 39 indecent images of children. Judge Swinnerton said: 'You not only downloaded that but you shared it. I don't think you have been entirely frank with your reasons for looking at this. You said you shared them to show disgust and comment at how terrible this is. 'You didn't just post it once. You distributed it on three separate occasions - that is in addition to the 30 images you had downloaded.' The judge, commenting on how Bassiri had claimed he didn't know it was an offence and shared it out of disgust, said: 'That was not what you were doing here. You know. 'You have expressed some remorse and shame. You know this material, looking at it and in particular sharing it is deeply wrong and that is why the starting point for sharing is three years.' Bassiri told Judge David Swinnerton (pictured) he didn't know sharing the images was a crime and that he did it out of disgust, not because he was sexually attracted to children Judge Swinnerton said he took into account Bassiri's good character and afforded him full credit for his guilty pleas. The judge added: 'You are someone with a wife and three children for whom you provide, although at the moment you are not living with them because of this offence. 'I note what is said about the further risk you pose being low but I also note you have not yet been ready to face up to why you were looking at and distributing these images. 'I also have to ask myself whether the only proper sentence for distributing class A images is one of immediate imprisonment and I take the view it is I am afraid.' Judge Swinnerton said: 'Those that distribute class A images of children can expect to go to prison.' Bassiri was jailed for one year and eight months. He was ordered to sign the Sex Offenders Register for 10 years and must adhere to a Sexual Harm Prevention Order for 10 years. Cheshire Police declined to release a photograph of Bassiri. A spokesman for Cheshire Police said: 'The officers involved in cases consider a range of criteria when it comes to mugshot requests. 'On this occasion it has been decided, after taking everything into account, not to issue a mugshot.' New Delhi: From pasting party posters to an epitome of political and ideological loyalty who rose to become one of BJPs most visible leaders and now Indias vice president-elect, Muppavarapu Venkaiah Naidu has come a long way. Born to a humble agricultural family in Andhra Pradeshs Nellore district, the 68-year-old has served as BJP president, the minister in various portfolios and a long-time Rajya Sabha member. This remarkable career in politics has been more than four decades in the making. It began in the 1970s when BJPs precursor Jana Sangh was a marginal player with little clout in the south and a young party worker kept himself busy putting up posters of stalwarts such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L K Advani. Naidu has come a long way since those days of political obscurity.Coming from an agricultural background, I never imagined I would be here. Agriculture has no proper voice in Indian polity, Indias vice president-elect told PTI. I am very humbled. I am also thankful to the Prime Minister and all party leaders for their support. I will seek to utilise the vice presidential institution to strengthen the hands of the president and uphold the dignity of the Upper House, he added. Naidu is known for his oratory. A two-term member of the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly, he was elected to the Rajya Sabha three times from Karnataka. He represented Rajasthan in the Upper House of Parliament before he was nominated to the vice presidents post by the NDA.Once an Advani protege, Naidu vigorously backed Modi for the prime ministers post before the 2014 elections. He was minister for Information and Broadcasting and Housing and Urban Affairs in the Modi government and earlier also held the Parliamentary Affairs portfolio. Suggested read: Venkaiah Naidu elected as next Vice President of India: 'Humbled by honour bestowed on me' In the previous NDA government led by Vajpayee, he had served as Rural Development Minister. The veteran party leader also served as the BJP national president from July 2002 to October 2004 for two consecutive terms. He quit the post after the partys defeat in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. Naidu was an ABVP activist during the Emergency and was arrested and jailed. As the first minister of Parliamentary Affairs in the Modi government, Naidu defended the prime minister and the government whenever the opposition targeted them in Parliament. He had also ensured high political outreach by meeting Congress chief Sonia Gandhi when there was a standoff between the government and the opposition in Parliament. Several major legislations were cleared by Parliament when he was Parliamentary Affairs Minister, including the historic Real Estate Act and fast forwarding of the GST Bill. Read | PM Modi hopes Naidu will serve as VP with dedication, diligence Known for coining acronyms, Naidu termed the mission of the Modi Government as MODI- Making of Developed India which had become the official line of the Centre in its public outreach campaign on the occasion of three years of being in office. As the minister for Information and Broadcasting, he was always quick to present issues in perspective with effective repartee as and when required. As Minister of Urban Development and Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, which was recently merged as Housing and Urban Affairs, Naidu pioneered the launch of several new urban missions, including the Smart City Mission, Atal Mission, Swachh Bharat Mission and Housing for All. As Rural Development Minister, Naidu was instrumental in launching the hugely popular Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana. When the Congress swept the polls in Andhra Pradesh in 1978, Naidu got elected as MLA from Udayagiri constituency as a Janata Party candidate.He was re-elected on a BJP ticket when N T Rama Rao swept the polls in the state. But all that has receded into the past. There is no my party or your party. Now I am a non-party man, Naidu told reporters this morning as the election for the vice president got underway. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Panaji, Feb 24 : The second dosage of the Covid-19 vaccine administered to healthcare and frontline workers will help in case Goa needs to deal with a second Covid-19 wave, Dr. Shivavand Bandodkar, the state's top medical official and dean of the Goa Medical College said on Wednesday. Speaking to reporters at the medical college -- the state government's apex healthcare facility -- Bandekar also said that the government standard operating procedures (SOPs) and basic norms like wearing of face masks and social distancing would go a long way in combating a possible increase of infections in the state linked to the new Covid-19 variant. "The second (vaccination) dose has started. No side effect has been reported. Everybody is doing well. They will get immunity in 14 days. If there is a second wave, our healthcare workers are now well equipped to tackle it. This is a big advantage," Bandekar said. "The mutant version is highly infectious. The infection rate is high, but there are less reports of fatalities. Its treatment, however, is not dissimilar. SOPs should be followed strictly. We should be following them, which we are not right now. We should wear masks and not crowd places," the official said. The Goa government is mulling over a new strategy to keep infections in Goa down, especially amid a fresh wave of Covid-19 cases in the neighbouring state of Karnataka. Goa reported 57 fresh cases on Tuesday, while the total number of Covid-19 infections reported in the state are 54,648. A total of 788 persons have died in the state after being infected with the deadly virus. Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19) -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text Landlords were some of the big winners on the stock market as offices and shopping centres gear up to reopen later this year. The commercial property market has been hammered since Britain first went into lockdown last March, with warehousing being the only sector that has really thrived. Since the Prime Ministers Covid roadmap was published on Monday, however, many of these hard-hit stocks have made chunky gains. On the charge: Shopping centre-landlords were in hot demand - with Birmingham Bullring (pictured) -owner Hammerson climbing almost to the top of the FTSE 250 last night Workspace Group closed 6.5 per cent higher, up 50p, to 818p, rallying 14 per cent so far this week. And British Land, owner of Broadgate Circle and other sites in the City of London, rose 3.8 per cent, or 18.8p, to 520p, with an 11 per cent gain since the lockdown plans were announced. One of the biggest discussions prompted by the pandemic has centred on the future of work: will Britons all work remotely or will we all flood back to offices? The answer is probably a mix of the two, with many companies pledging to roll out more flexible working policies permanently. Stock Watch - United Oil & Gas United Oil & Gas shares climbed for a second day after tests on a well in Egypt found more oil and gas reserves than it had expected. The rally came as stock market filings showed serial small-cap investors David Newlands and his wife Monique, who have cropped up on the shareholder roster of many tiddlers, increased their holding in the AIM-listed explorer. The stock-pickers raised their stake to 3.3 per cent from 2.8 per cent on Tuesday. Shares gained 19.2 per cent, or 0.7p, to 4.35p. British Lands rise shows hope that cities will revive, and there is clearly faith that Workspaces shared office business model could be taken up by companies that want to ditch their permanent headquarters. Shopping centre-landlords were also in hot demand, with Birmingham Bullring-owner Hammerson climbing almost to the top of the FTSE 250 last night (rising 12.7 per cent, or 2.89p, to 25.6p), while the wider index added 1.2 per cent, or 254.93 points, to close at 21,312.65. And on the FTSE 100, Bluewater-owner Land Securities rose 4.1 per cent, or 27.1p, to 682.6p. But it was oil stocks that added some of the heftiest gains to the Footsie, which rose 0.5 per cent, or 33.03 points, to 6658.97. BP was the top riser, advancing 5.4 per cent, or 15.3p, to 298.8p, while Shell added 3.3 per cent, or 47.8p, to 1481.6p, after crude prices hit another 13-month high. Brent crude rose 2.7 per cent to $67 a barrel, closing in on the 2020 high of $68.60 last January, as vaccine drives boosted hopes that petrol and jet fuel demand will recover. Housebuilders too were on the up on signs that the stamp duty holiday will be extended. It is credited as being one of the key drivers of a sales frenzy. Barratt Developments rose 1.6 per cent, or 10.8p, to 694.8p, Persimmon by 1.4 per cent, or 39p, to 2764p, and Taylor Wimpey by 1.6 per cent, or 2.65p, to 166.6p. Video game stock-watchers took note of brokers at Shore Capital, who upgraded their rating on Team17 and Frontier Developments. Team17 was upped to hold from sell and Frontier to buy from hold after lockdowns led to a surge in people playing games while stuck at home. Shore expects the industry to keep growing and more big takeover and mergers. Team17 rose 2.6 per cent, or 18p, to 714p while Frontier dipped 1 per cent, or 25p, to 2575p. Over on AIM, Angling Direct failed to make a splash with a trading update that showed it defied the retail gloom during lockdown. Revenue rose 27 per cent to 68million in the year to January 31, despite stores closing for months. The fishing tackle seller has benefited from hundreds of thousands of people taking up fishing or renewing their licence for one of the few socially distanced hobbies available during the pandemic. It fell 5.7 per cent, or 4.5p, to 74.5p. After a bruising couple of days, digital currency bitcoin reversed its slide, adding 5.3 per cent and taking the price to around $49,850. This lifted bitcoin miner Argo Blockchain, which uses algorithms to unlock bitcoins, by 10.3 per cent, or 22p, to 235p. Metro Bank said it booked more than 40 million in costs for speeding up its move out of its London headquarters (Tim Goode/PA) Metro Bank more than doubled its loss last year as it took a major hit from loans it expects to go bad largely because of Covid-19. Pre-tax loss hit 311.4 million in 2020, up from 130.8 million a year before, the bank revealed on Wednesday. The company said it expected the cost of lost credit to hit 100 million because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This was coupled with costs of more than 40 million associated with speeding up its exit from its central London headquarters. Metro took the decision to hasten the move out of the offices as remote working makes it unlikely staff will return to permanent desk working in the future. Our transformation strategy is firmly on track and we have accelerated initiatives to shift our asset mix, bringing higher yield and improving net interest margin, as evidenced in the second half Daniel Frumkin, Metro Bank chief executive Many other banks have said the shift to remote working, which has been made necessary by Covid-19, could stick around in some form when the pandemic ends. Lloyds separately on Wednesday said it would reduce its office space by around a fifth. Metro Bank chief executive Daniel Frumkin: The pandemic has clearly impacted performance, leading to significant expected credit losses, but our transformation strategy is firmly on track and we have accelerated initiatives to shift our asset mix, bringing higher yield and improving net interest margin, as evidenced in the second half. The businesss loan book shrank by 18% over 2020 to 12.1 billion, Metro said, driven by the second half of the year. It came even as Metro granted 36,000 Government-backed loans to businesses, at a total of 1.5 billion. The company also revealed it had taken a 5.4 million hit to pre-tax profit from the integration of peer-to-peer lender RateSetter, which it bought last year. Earlier this month, Metro also completed the sale of a mortgage portfolio to NatWest for 3 billion. Mr Frumkin said: The purchase of the RateSetter platform has allowed us to enter the unsecured lending market. In addition, we have made progress against each of our strategic pillars, including the sale of part of our residential mortgage portfolio to further optimise our balance sheet, the launch of higher yielding products including specialist mortgages, and we have grown customer accounts to 2.2 million. MANZINI In another twist of events, textile employers are running from pillar to post seeking to save their investments and the thousands of jobs they have created for emaSwati. This comes after the South African Government has passed a policy that could spell doom for the textile industry in the Kingdom of Eswatini. The policy is a result of the South African Retail - Clothing, Textile, Footwear and Leather (R-CTFL) Value Chain Master Plan, which is part of the neighbouring countrys COVID-19 Economic Recovery Strategy. According to well-placed sources within the industry, the said policy, which was published on February 5, 2021, would see textile companies from countries around southern Africa, including Eswatini, losing their main market (South Africa). As a result, a majority of them would be forced to shut down, something which will automatically affect the jobs of the about 22 000 workers in the textile sector. They said the South African policy, as per the master plan, was bold in ambition as it aimed at delivering significant new jobs along the value chain, behind a clear set of commitments from retailers to buy local. In a bid to ensure that retailers support local manufacturers, the sources said, through the policy, the South African Government had introduced some incentives. For example, they said currently, South African companies which were importing materials like fabric from overseas countries (Republic of China, Taiwan and Far East), were paying 22 per cent levy. However, they said under the new policy, they (South African companies) would import the material duty free, on condition that they did not export it to other countries like Eswatini, Lesotho, Botswana and Namibia. The insiders claimed that by so doing, the South African Government aimed to revive its economy by resuscitating the textile industry. They claimed the South African Government identified the textile and apparel sector as one of the key sectors to revive its economy post COVID-19, because there were no age and literacy restrictions. This sector employs young and old people, literate and those who are illiterate. So, it is one sector that can create jobs for a large number of people in SA, the sources said. Indeed, in its R-CTFL Value Chain Master Plan, the South African Government said the plan sustained approximately 212 000 formal jobs (1.33 per cent of total South African employment) with some 92 000 jobs estimated in CTFL manufacturing and 120 000 jobs estimated to be in the retail portion of the value chain. In addition, it said an estimated 165 000 foreign manufacturing jobs were sustained by South African CTFL retailing activities. In that regard, the South African Government said it was targeting that by 2030, the R-CTFL employment would have grown by at least 121 000 net new jobs to 333 000 workers. It said this would be done through focused action that would increase the share of local CTFL retail sales of locally manufactured clothing and footwear to 65 per cent of total retail sales. It said it also sought to grow procurement by local retailers of locally manufactured CTFL products to at least R69 billion (E69 billion) from the E31 billion that, was recorded in 2016. On top of that it said it would grow local CTFL manufacturing output per employee by at least R36 000 (E36 000) to R205 000 (E205 000). The plan will also seek to deliver upstream formal manufacturing employment growth of 70 000 net new formal jobs to a total of 160 000 and enhance the value chains cost, process and product competitiveness, reads part of the plan. In that regard, employers in the sector said the more retailers who supported this plan and apply to operate under the new policy, the more they would lose orders from the South African markets. Currently, according to the South African R-CTFL Value Chain Master Plan 2030, there are 19 parties that have expressed their support for the plan and committed to work towards achieving the outcome. The parties include retail shops, trade unions and the Government of South Africa. Therefore, the kingdoms employers said since more of them were relying on South African markets for orders, especially those of cut, make and trim (CMT), whereby the companies from the neighbouring country brought their own fabric and design to the local ones to produce the garments, they might not be getting jobs once the policy was implemented. This will automatically affect our operations and consequently the workforce in the factories, they said. As a result, they said, they might start with retrenchments, which would be determined by the size of the orders they would be getting and if nothing came through, they would be forced to close down. SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced that 47 new members and end user supporters have joined the Foundation to continue driving cloud native technology innovation. CNCF now has over 600 members and more than 80 projects with over 110,000 contributors from nearly 1,000 organizations representing 177 countries. This steady growth is powered by the diversity and resilience of our projects, ecosystems, and technologies. Together the cloud native ecosystem is stronger, faster, better, and more innovative than alone and apart. "As our community continues to thrive, we have seen first-hand the resilience of such a diverse ecosystem," said Priyanka Sharma, general manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. "We are very pleased to welcome so many new members to CNCF this quarter from across the globe and industries. The fact that there are so many new companies meaningfully contributing to the cloud native ecosystem, despite the pandemic, is incredible. We look forward to continuing to drive innovation together." These new members will also join CNCF at the upcoming 2021 KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events, including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU - Virtual from May 4 7, 2021, and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA in Los Angeles from October 12 15, 2020. About the newest Silver Members: 3K Technologies is a leading provider of Software Product Engineering, Cloud Migration, Cloud Native Technologies, DevOps, Data Engineering and Intelligent Automation solutions and services. is a leading provider of Software Product Engineering, Cloud Migration, Cloud Native Technologies, DevOps, Data Engineering and Intelligent Automation solutions and services. 3-Shake is a technology company that promotes data analysis, ad tech platforms, and cloud computing and automation in areas with high technical difficulty. is a technology company that promotes data analysis, ad tech platforms, and cloud computing and automation in areas with high technical difficulty. Agyla.Cloud is a company with expertise in cloud and DevOps. is a company with expertise in cloud and DevOps. Arima provides software design and development services intended to create unique, cloud-ready solutions that stand the test of time. provides software design and development services intended to create unique, cloud-ready solutions that stand the test of time. Axiata Digital is at an intersection of digital technology, creative innovations, and human interactions, providing agile and reliable solutions and services, whilst integrating ethics and professionalism in all that we do. is at an intersection of digital technology, creative innovations, and human interactions, providing agile and reliable solutions and services, whilst integrating ethics and professionalism in all that we do. Capitalonline Data Service is a public cloud provider listed on Shenzhen Stock Exchange, that focuses on cloud computing services, and provides professional cloud native technologies such as CCK (aka CDS Container service for Kubernetes). is a public cloud provider listed on Shenzhen Stock Exchange, that focuses on cloud computing services, and provides professional cloud native technologies such as CCK (aka CDS Container service for Kubernetes). CAST AI is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform that reduces cloud costs, optimizes is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform that reduces cloud costs, optimizes DevOps, and automates disaster prevention. Caylent is a leading Kubernetes and DevOps consulting and managed services provider that helps companies achieve Cloud Native transformation using best practices through our deep subject matter expertise. is a leading Kubernetes and DevOps consulting and managed services provider that helps companies achieve Cloud Native transformation using best practices through our deep subject matter expertise. CINQ ICT is a consultancy agency based in the Netherlands , working for enterprise level companies to design, build and manage container platforms, CI/CD pipelines, cloud platforms and software solutions in public cloud and multi/hybrid environments. is a consultancy agency based in , working for enterprise level companies to design, build and manage container platforms, CI/CD pipelines, cloud platforms and software solutions in public cloud and multi/hybrid environments. Cloud Control 's 'Kubernetes First' solution is a low-touch multi-cloud management platform (called "AppZ"), with end to end automation from source to live, with lower cloud migration costs and reduced TCO in the cloud to clients. 's 'Kubernetes First' solution is a low-touch multi-cloud management platform (called "AppZ"), with end to end automation from source to live, with lower cloud migration costs and reduced TCO in the cloud to clients. Dalian Hi-Think Computer Technology is a company that is a digital technologies enterprise providing application software products, information services and industry solutions to customers all over the world. is a company that is a digital technologies enterprise providing application software products, information services and industry solutions to customers all over the world. DevSamurai is an IT consulting company based in Tokyo providing cloud native application development, DevOps services to free customers from IT tasks. It also implements and sells development tools on the Atlassian marketplace. is an IT consulting company based in providing cloud native application development, DevOps services to free customers from IT tasks. It also implements and sells development tools on the Atlassian marketplace. DevsOperative guides large enterprises on their Cloud Native journey by driving digital transformation and migrating legacy systems to Kubernetes based digital platforms. guides large enterprises on their Cloud Native journey by driving digital transformation and migrating legacy systems to Kubernetes based digital platforms. Devsu is a technology agency that provides software development services, IT augmentation and staffing. is a technology agency that provides software development services, IT augmentation and staffing. Dosec is a cloud-native security solution provider with security protection capabilities for containers, Kubernetes, microservices, serverless, and DevOps. is a cloud-native security solution provider with security protection capabilities for containers, Kubernetes, microservices, serverless, and DevOps. EDB offers an enterprise-ready PostgreSQL database and tools. The company is a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider with Kubernetes Operators for PostgreSQL. offers an enterprise-ready PostgreSQL database and tools. The company is a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider with Kubernetes Operators for PostgreSQL. EXEM is the manufacturer of CloudMOA, an integrated cloud native architecture monitoring solution, and provides Kubernetes and application monitoring solutions and cloud IT environment construction and operation consulting service to quickly respond to performance issues and failures in a container-based multi-cloud environment. is the manufacturer of CloudMOA, an integrated cloud native architecture monitoring solution, and provides Kubernetes and application monitoring solutions and cloud IT environment construction and operation consulting service to quickly respond to performance issues and failures in a container-based multi-cloud environment. Huayun Data Group provides private cloud with innovative architecture, full-stack modular software-defined data center suite, hybrid cloud management solution, built-in general-purpose cloud operating system hyper-convergence suite and one-stop public cloud service. provides private cloud with innovative architecture, full-stack modular software-defined data center suite, hybrid cloud management solution, built-in general-purpose cloud operating system hyper-convergence suite and one-stop public cloud service. iauro partners with global enterprises to envision, handhold, and accelerate their digital transformation journey via their one-line ideas and transform them into scalable, high-performance, design-thinking led software products focusing on Cloud Native Development, Application Modernization, Micro front-end & Microservices implementations, and DevOps consulting and delivery. partners with global enterprises to envision, handhold, and accelerate their digital transformation journey via their one-line ideas and transform them into scalable, high-performance, design-thinking led software products focusing on Cloud Native Development, Application Modernization, Micro front-end & Microservices implementations, and DevOps consulting and delivery. Intelletive , based in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul , implements and develops enterprise grade, secure Kubernetes environments and software platforms. , based in of and , implements and develops enterprise grade, secure Kubernetes environments and software platforms. Isovalent 's Cilium is the leading Cloud Native Networking technology, leveraging eBPF to provide critical connectivity, observability and security for Kubernetes environments and beyond. 's Cilium is the leading Cloud Native Networking technology, leveraging eBPF to provide critical connectivity, observability and security for Kubernetes environments and beyond. Jiangxi Yumin Bank is the first private bank in Jiangxi Province and the 18th private bank in China . is the first private bank in and the 18th private bank in . KINX provides internet network infrastructure, data center, and cloud, including Kubernetes services in Korea for both domestic and global companies, organizations and businesses. provides internet network infrastructure, data center, and cloud, including Kubernetes services in Korea for both domestic and global companies, organizations and businesses. Liquid Reply is your partner to design, build and automate Container Orchestration on Multi-/Hybrid-Cloud environments, create your cloud native application delivery path and implement transparency into your platforms through FinOps best practices. is your partner to design, build and automate Container Orchestration on Multi-/Hybrid-Cloud environments, create your cloud native application delivery path and implement transparency into your platforms through FinOps best practices. MegazoneCloud is Asia's leading cloud managed service and platform provider empowering customers with cloud-optimized technology, people, and process. is leading cloud managed service and platform provider empowering customers with cloud-optimized technology, people, and process. Momenton is a Melbourne based consulting company leading some of Australia's largest digital transformations. Momenton's Kubernetes Consulting services enables businesses to access the readiness and maturity of your business process for running reliable, scalable, and secure Kubernetes cluster. is a based consulting company leading some of largest digital transformations. Momenton's Kubernetes Consulting services enables businesses to access the readiness and maturity of your business process for running reliable, scalable, and secure Kubernetes cluster. Novetta is an advanced analytics company delivering disruptive technologies in machine learning, cloud engineering, DevSecOps, full-spectrum cyber, and data, open source, and multi-INT analytics to Defense, Intelligence Community, and Federal Law Enforcement customers. is an advanced analytics company delivering disruptive technologies in machine learning, cloud engineering, DevSecOps, full-spectrum cyber, and data, open source, and multi-INT analytics to Defense, Intelligence Community, and Federal Law Enforcement customers. OBSS is a leading consultancy company providing software development services and enterprise-wide technology transformation solutions based on industry-standard tools and open technologies. is a leading consultancy company providing software development services and enterprise-wide technology transformation solutions based on industry-standard tools and open technologies. Occentus is a managed service provider specialized in Cloud engineering, 24/7 IT Operations and Cybersecurity. is a managed service provider specialized in Cloud engineering, 24/7 IT Operations and Cybersecurity. ReadySpace is an Open Source Cloud Service Provider that focuses on providing services to business of all sizes with applications that require performance, compliance and connectivity. is an Open Source Cloud Service Provider that focuses on providing services to business of all sizes with applications that require performance, compliance and connectivity. ManDao-Tech - with years of financial IT implementation experience and professional technical service team - helps financial companies upgrade their comprehensive technical capabilities and escort the realization of corporate strategic goals. - with years of financial IT implementation experience and professional technical service team - helps financial companies upgrade their comprehensive technical capabilities and escort the realization of corporate strategic goals. Shinesoft provides consulting and supports k8s solutions on your choice of infrastructure, adopt DevOps, build CI/CD, and migrate applications to Kubernetes. We also design and build your Kubernetes cluster in the public cloud, on-prem, or multi/hybrid cloud environments according to your needs. provides consulting and supports k8s solutions on your choice of infrastructure, adopt DevOps, build CI/CD, and migrate applications to Kubernetes. We also design and build your Kubernetes cluster in the public cloud, on-prem, or multi/hybrid cloud environments according to your needs. Starburst unlocks the value of data by making it fast and easy to access anywhere; resulting in lower total cost of infrastructure and analytics investments, preventing vendor lock-in, and using existing tools that already work for the business. unlocks the value of data by making it fast and easy to access anywhere; resulting in lower total cost of infrastructure and analytics investments, preventing vendor lock-in, and using existing tools that already work for the business. Swisscom cloud native services enable enterprise customers in Switzerland to deploy and manage container-based applications in the cloud environment of their choice (private, public or hybrid cloud) with Kubernetes, providing them with the necessary flexibility to respond quickly to end customers' needs and to drive innovation. cloud native services enable enterprise customers in to deploy and manage container-based applications in the cloud environment of their choice (private, public or hybrid cloud) with Kubernetes, providing them with the necessary flexibility to respond quickly to end customers' needs and to drive innovation. Vectorized offers Redpanda, a Kafka API compatible event streaming platform. No Zookeeper, no JVM, and no code changes required. Use all your favorite open source tooling. offers Redpanda, a Kafka API compatible event streaming platform. No Zookeeper, no JVM, and no code changes required. Use all your favorite open source tooling. Wanclouds Inc. is a Multi-cloud Migrations, DR, and Management as a Service company is a Multi-cloud Migrations, DR, and Management as a Service company WeScale : customized Cloud expertise : customized Cloud expertise WOQU Tech provides the research and development of database ecological products, combined with the development trend of cloud computing, x86 platform, and localization, to provide users with cloud platform solutions for the complete life cycle of relational databases provides the research and development of database ecological products, combined with the development trend of cloud computing, x86 platform, and localization, to provide users with cloud platform solutions for the complete life cycle of relational databases x-cellent is a Munich based IT-consultancy with focus on Kubernetes, Open Source development for metal-stack.io, DevOps, Business Analysis and Process Automation. About the newest End User Supporters: Airbnb is a community based on connection and belonginga community that was born in 2008 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to 4 million hosts who have welcomed over 800 million guest arrivals to about 100,000 cities in almost every country and region across the globe. is a community based on connection and belonginga community that was born in 2008 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their home, and has since grown to 4 million hosts who have welcomed over 800 million guest arrivals to about 100,000 cities in almost every country and region across the globe. HiTRUST have accrued rich experience and won the recognition and trust of our clients in the fields of secure payment, member rewards service, online banking service and more finTech related solutions by harnessing Microservices, artificially intelligence and machine learning technologies to turn big data into business outcomes and conduct their business plan from data-driven view. have accrued rich experience and won the recognition and trust of our clients in the fields of secure payment, member rewards service, online banking service and more finTech related solutions by harnessing Microservices, artificially intelligence and machine learning technologies to turn big data into business outcomes and conduct their business plan from data-driven view. MyFitnessPal is the leading app for tracking - and conquering - your nutrition and fitness goals with the support you need for your entire health and fitness journey. https://www.myfitnesspal.com/ is the leading app for tracking - and conquering - your nutrition and fitness goals with the support you need for your entire health and fitness journey. https://www.myfitnesspal.com/ PriceSpider is an advanced retail data technology company that provides insights about consumer purchasing behavior for the world's largest brand manufacturers. is an advanced retail data technology company that provides insights about consumer purchasing behavior for the world's largest brand manufacturers. ProSiebenSat.1 : As an integrated part of P7S1, we incorporate all subjects regarding Enterprise IT. We are responsible for operations and continuous development of our P7S1-internal business applications and broadcasting technology, for the provision of workplace products & services for our employees, as well as for central IT infrastructure including modern cloud solutions. : As an integrated part of P7S1, we incorporate all subjects regarding Enterprise IT. We are responsible for operations and continuous development of our P7S1-internal business applications and broadcasting technology, for the provision of workplace products & services for our employees, as well as for central IT infrastructure including modern cloud solutions. Qualtrics , the leader in customer experience and creator of the Experience Management (XM) category, is changing the way organizations manage and improve the four core experiences of businesscustomer, employee, product, and brand. About the newest Nonprofit Members: National Information Society Agency is hosting an Opensource Cloud Platform PaaS-Ta, providing various activities to grow a strong and vibrant ecosystem. is hosting an Opensource Cloud Platform PaaS-Ta, providing various activities to grow a strong and vibrant ecosystem. UPchieve is an edtech non-profit that provides free, 1-1, 24/7, on-demand tutoring for low-income high-schoolers via web and mobile apps With the addition of these new members, there are now over 140 organizations in the CNCF End User Community . This group regularly meets to share adoption best practices and feedback on project roadmaps and future projects for CNCF technical leaders to consider. Additional Resources About Cloud Native Computing Foundation Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry's top developers, end users, and vendors, and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 500 members, including the world's largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io . The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Media Contact Jessie Adams-Shore The Linux Foundation [email protected] SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Mangaluru, Feb 24 : Mangaluru on the west coast would be the next IT and IT services industry cluster in Karnataka after Bengaluru, said state Deputy Chief Minister C.N. Ashwath Narayan on Wednesday. "We have identified the port city of Mangaluru as the next IT and IT e-service industry cluster as per 'Beyond Bengaluru' policy in the state," said Narayan at the 'Mangaluru Innovation Conclave' here. Mangaluru is located about 360km west of state capital Bengaluru. "Mangaluru will also emerge as the next start-up hub in the state after Bengaluru as part of the IT cluster, which will include the adjacent districts of Udupi, Dakshina Kannada, Kodagu and Uttar Kannada along the coast," said Narayan, who holds the portfolio of IT, BT and Science and Technology. With Infosys software development park in the port city, Manipal Institute of Technology near Udupi and state-run National Institute of Technology (NIT) at Surathkal near Mangaluru in Dakshina Kannada district, the state plans to develop the region as the IT cluster for software and hardware development. "We are taking steps to set up an Electronic System and Design Management (ESDM) centre in this city along with Central Instrumentation Facility to attract investments and generate hundreds of jobs," said Narayan in his address at the day-long conclave here. The state government plans to set up three more IT industry clusters at Belagavi, Mysuru and Shivamogga to decongest Bengaluru and replicate its success in other regions across the state. "The state government has also set up the Karnataka Digital Economy Mission (KDEM) to promote digital growth, attract investments and innovation in science and technology in the state. The mission will work to increase the contribution of digital economy to the gross state domestic product (GSDP) by 30 per cent of and create 30-lakh jobs across the state over the next 5 years. "We are targetting $150 billion IT exports by the knowledge industry in the state in the next 5 years," asserted the Minister. Ruling BJP's state unit president and Lok Sabha member from Mangaluru Nalin Kumar Kateel, who presided over the conclave, said more jobs would be created when the IT industry flourishes and spurs the local economy. "At the same time, the culture and heritage of the region should be protected. Mangaluru should grow by keeping its natives intact," said Kateel in his address to the gathering. According to the state IT-BT and S&T department's estimate, the port city has the potential to transact Rs 7,500 crore annually in the IT sector by 2023. State-run Keonics chairman Harikrishna Bantwal, electronics and IT-BT department secretary E.V. Ramana Reddy, Centre for Contemporary Issues Steven David and Keonics managing director S.N. Siddaramappa participated in the panel discussion held as part of the event. M&A AeroVironment's latest acquisition centers on AI, autonomy tech AeroVironment just completed one large acquisition focused on the unmanned aerial platform and has quickly closed on a second deal to bring in more augmenting technologies like autonomy. In a release Wednesday, AeroVironment said it has purchased the Intelligent Systems Group of Progeny Systems Corp. that makes computer vision, machine learning and perceptive autonomy technologies and other systems enabled by artificial intelligence. The transaction has an initial cost of $30 million in cash to AeroVironment and potentially $6 million more in payments over three years if certain performance targets are met. ISG was founded in 2006 and makes software that performs automated analysis of still and video imagery from many sources that include satellites, unmanned aircraft and fixed cameras to detect objects or so-called pattern of life activity. "Delivering higher levels of intelligence and autonomy will improve the ability of our solutions to achieve customer mission objectives in permissive and anti-access/area-denied (A2/AD) environments through onboard processing, exploitation and dissemination (PED) without requiring radio communication," AeroVironment CEO Wahid Nawabi said in a release. Simi Valley, California-headquartered AeroVironment has had a busy past 12 months on the acquisition front through one deal for ground vehicle maker Telerob to enter that market, followed by the purchase of Arcturus UAV to add larger-sized aircraft. The Arcturus UAV deal was announced as done earlier this week, while work to complete the Telerob acquisition is ongoing. For the ISG division, AeroVironment plans to combine that team with its own advanced solutions division to pursue greater research-and-development revenue in the fields of AI and autonomy. ISGs facility in Manassas, Virginia will also be AeroVironments main hub for AI Innovation and work with teams across the corporation to integrate new technologies into the product portfolio. "Our employees have worked well together in the past and we are excited to see how the combined teams abilities will allow rapid support and deployment for current and emerging warfighter requirements," Progeny Systems CEO Walt Kitonis added. "Progeny Systems and AeroVironment will continue to support existing programs and together pursue new opportunities in the future. Shinsegae acquired the SK Wyverns baseball club from mobile carrier SK Telecom early this year and the name and uniform of the new club will be unveiled sometime next month. The retail giant announced Tuesday that Choo signed a massive deal with an annual salary of W2.7 billion, surpassing the previous record of W2.5 billion earned by Lee Dae-ho of the Lotte Giants. Choo said he is willing to donate W1 billion of his salary (US$1=W1,112). After an illustrious career in Major League Baseball, slugger Choo Shin-soo is returning home to play with a new club soon to be launched by Shinsegae. Choo's latest deal marks his return to Korea, nearly 20 years after he left the country to play in the U.S. On his Instagram account, Choo reflected on his time in the U.S. and expressed excitement about his return to Korea. "Some 20 years ago, I left the country with a lifelong dream to become a big league player. My dream eventually came true, spending 16 seasons in several clubs," he said. "I've always hoped to return to Korea someday, and now it's time for me to start a new chapter of my life." Choo set various records while playing for the Seattle Mariners, Cleveland Indians, Cincinnati Reds and Texas Rangers. He played in some 1,652 games with a career batting average of 0.275, posting 1,671 hits, 218 homers and 157 steals. Choo has chalked up more records than any Asian player in MLB history. In 2014, Choo signed a seven-year deal worth US$130 million with the Texas Rangers. As his deal with the club expired last year, he had been looking for his next move. He will arrive in Korea on Thursday, while his family -- his wife and three children -- will reportedly remain in the U.S. for some time. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. While the world grapples with the Covid-19 pandemic many new lessons are being learned every day by nations all over the globe. For example, Brazil and the US have learned that having a leader who does not believe that the virus is a serious threat to life certainly doesnt augur well for the population. Minister for Health Greg Hunt addresses a press conference in the Main Committee Room at Parliament House on April 8, 2020 in Canberra, Australia. (Sam Mooy/Getty Images) 2 Elderly Australians Given 4 Times the Correct Dose of Virus Vaccine Two elderly people in an aged care home in the state of Queensland have been given four times the correct dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine just days into Australias rollout of its CCP virus immunisation strategy. The 88-year-old man and 94-year-old woman, both residents at the Holy Spirit Nursing Home in Brisbane, the states capital, are being monitored but have not shown signs of an adverse reaction at this stage. The man was admitted to St. Andrews hospital in Brisbane while the woman was monitored at the nursing home. Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said early on Wednesday morning that the deputy chief medical officer would review the events and file a report. The rollout continues. There will be cases. There will be challenges. This has happened in other jurisdictions overseas, Hunt told reporters in Canberra on Wednesday. But Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the incident was very concerning and has written to Prime Minister Scott Morrison to request a national cabinet meeting to discuss the roll-out strategy. The Federal Government is responsible for the roll-out of the vaccine in aged care and theyre using private contractors to deliver it, she said in a statement. Palaszczuk revealed that the actions of a nurse prevented the privately contracted doctor from administering more incorrect doses. The doctor responsible for the overdoses has resigned. Although this happened yesterday morning, Queensland authorities were only advised late last night, Palaszczuk said. Discovering these details now is simply not good enough. The premier is demanding answers about the training provided to those administering vaccinations at aged care facilities and wants the government to release details about when they are vaccinating people, and the numbers. Because Queenslanders deserve to have full confidence in this vaccine, she said. Sky News reported that Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly told reporters that the incident was a case of maladministration. Kelly said that during early clinical trials researchers experimented with different doses of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, including at fours times what is now the prescribed dose. During those trials, the side effect data was not a higher problem, and so theres that element, he said. Second of all, as has been mentioned by the minister, we are aware of several cases like this happening early in the phased rollout through residential aged care facility equivalents in both Germany and the UK. Again, the side effect profile was minimal, particularly in older people, so that gives us hope, he said. The Therapeutic Goods Administration cleared the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for use in elderly Australians but noted that for frail patients over the age of 85, the TGA had limited research data on its effects, and it should be carefully assessed on a case-by-case basis. The TGAs statement on this came after 30 out of 40,000 elderly people in Norway died after receiving the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. The deaths were recorded among very frail patients, including some who were anticipated to only have weeks or months to live, TGA said on Feb. 2. A recent Department of Health survey of 4,000 people showed that 27 percent of Australians were hesitant about receiving the vaccine, preferring to wait to see if side effects emerge in others. CLIFTON PARK - The owners of Dolce and Biscotti on Route 9 are grateful that everyone who works at their bakery was unharmed on Tuesday afternoon when a driver crashed through their front window and into the cake case. Tom Fron, whose wife Mary Baldi-Fron owns the bakery, said at about 4:57 p.m. elderly woman apparently mixed up the brake pedal with the accelerator when she drove onto the bakery floor. Fron said the woman was so rattled that even after she was inside the bakery, she still had her foot on the gas. Fron said he ran over and turned off the ignition, taking out the keys. "It was a miracle," Fron said. "I was at the cash register and everyone else was in a separate corners of the bakery. It happened so fast. I heard a crash and she was in the middle of the bakery. ... We are blessed. Everything that was damaged can be repaired." State police identified the driver as Kathryn M. Ford, 82, Mechanicville. The police spokeswoman Trooper Kerra Burns said that Ford was driving a 2010 BMW 528i when she "went to apply the brakes and a accidentally hit the gas." Burns said a witness sustained a minor arm injury and was evaluated by EMS on scene. Ford was not injured. The bakery will be closed for an indefinite time. But Fron hopes it won't be for long. "We hope to reopen as soon as possible," he said. Meanwhile, he is calling his customers to tell them that he is still working to fulfill orders by teaming up with Zachary's Pastry Shop in Rensselaer. "We are so fortunate," Fron said. "It could have been a lot worse." At a time when digital currency Bitcoin has been soaring to new heights, ace investor and billionaire Rakesh Jhunjhunwala has called for a complete ban on cryptocurrencies in India. While bitcoin price has surged over 90 per cent in 2021 alone, the 60-year-old 'Warren Buffet' of India has said he "won't buy it for even $5". "I think it's speculation of the highest order. I don't want to join every party in town. I think the hangover is much worse," Jhujhunwala said during an interview on CNBC. Jhunjhunwala said something that fluctuates 5-10 per cent in a day can't be considered a currency. "Only the sovereign has the right to create currency in the world. Tomorrow people will produce 5 lakh Bitcoins, which currency will go? Something which fluctuates 5-10% a day, can it be considered as currency," he asked. He said the US dollar fluctuating 1-2 per cent makes big news but bitcoin fluctuates 5-10 per cent almost every other day. He said the regulators must intervene and ban cryptocurrencies in India. "I think regulators should step in and ban bitcoin and should focus on the digital rupee," said Jhunjhunwala. Also read: 'Don't want to join every party in town': Rakesh Jhunjhunwala backs Bitcoin ban Bitcoin has been the most volatile digital currency so far. After witnessing minor increases in early and mid-2020, the Bitcoin price took a sharp turn in December, jumping from $19,417.08 in December to $50,416.1 now. The market value of cryptocurrencies has also touched the $1-trillion mark on February 20. The unprecedented rally in bitcoin price has been fuelled by a series of investments by some of the world's biggest companies like Tesla, Mastercard and Bank of New York Mellon. Tesla CEO Elon Musk's tweet early last week, defending Tesla's investment in the digital currency, also saw Bitcoin scaling a new high of $58,000. However, it was his tweet later in the weekend, expressing concerns over the meteoric rise of the cryptocurrency, that resulted in about 16 per cent fall of the cryptocurrency to around $50,000. As per the latest data, bitcoin price has surged about 0.32 per cent to $50,411.05 today. Notably, Indian regulators are yet to decide on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies but there's widespread speculation that the government is planning to introduce its official digital currency, banning all private virtual currencies. Also read: Jeff Bezos back as richest man in the world as Elon Musk's net worth falls by $15 billion eNotes transaction signals transformative industry turn toward digitization Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions' newly acquired eOriginal technology platform is helping support a major U.S. government institution's efforts to adopt digital technologies as part of its broader modernization initiative. Ginnie Mae, an eOriginal client, recently announced a key milestone in its digital journey by guaranteeing securitization of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) for the first time exclusively through the use of eNotes technology, utilizing the eOriginal platform. The MBS were part of the January issuance cycle and backed by digital pools comprised exclusively of eNotes that closed in December 2020, totaling approximately $24 million in aggregate principal value. By accepting eNotes as valid collateral for loan products issued by the Federal Housing Administration, Veterans Administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture and other government entities, Ginnie Mae enables broader acceptance of digital mortgages across the residential lending ecosystem. "This transaction marks a turning point for Ginnie Mae and for the broader mortgage industry in facilitating the digital securitization of loans," said Angel R. Hernandez, Director of MBS Policy and Program Development, Office of the President for Ginnie Mae. "Our use of digital technologies such as eNotes speeds transactions and helps support consumer access to credit while reducing the risk of defects in loan instruments, and it sets the foundation for broader and more rapid adoption of digital mortgages." The eOriginal platform enables lenders and their partners to create, store and manage digital assets through a leading set of purpose-built electronic signature, closing and vaulting solutions including SmartSign, ClosingCenter and eAsset Management (with connectivity to the MERS eRegistry). The platform enables frictionless, secure and trusted transactions of digital loan assets and is used by all types of lenders including mortgage, auto, consumer, commercial and more. "Ginnie Mae's adoption of our eOriginal platform for its securitization process marks the continued progression-and acceleration of digital technologies that are helping speed and secure transactions in the mortgage ecosystem," said Steven Meirink, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions. "With eOriginal's purpose-built electronic signature, eClosing and eVaulting capabilities now part of our portfolio, we have an end-to-end digital capability and are well-positioned to assist lenders throughout all phases of the lending process, from origination through to the secondary market, with compliance certainty." Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions is a market leader and trusted provider of risk management and regulatory compliance solutions and services to U.S. banks and credit unions, insurers and securities firms. The business, which sits within Wolters Kluwer's Governance, Risk Compliance (GRC) division, helps these financial institutions efficiently manage risk and regulatory compliance obligations, and gain the insights needed to focus on better serving their customers and growing their business. Wolters Kluwer GRC provides an array of expert solutions for legal and banking professionals to help ensure compliance with ever-changing regulatory and legal obligations, manage risk, and increase efficiency. These solutions include customized offerings to address Covid-19 challenges. Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions' Paycheck Protection Program Supported by TSoftPlus, for example, helps U.S. lenders' small business customers access critical stimulus funding. Wolters Kluwer CT Corporation, meanwhile, has launched a Covid-19 resource center to provide businesses and law firms with international, federal and state legislative updates. Other expert solutions include Wolters Kluwer Lien Solutions' UCC Manage, which enables lenders to manage and address risks in their entire Uniform Commercial Code lien portfolio with analytics, visibility and automation. About Wolters Kluwer Governance, Risk Compliance Governance, Risk Compliance is a division of Wolters Kluwer, which provides legal and banking professionals with solutions to help ensure compliance with ever-changing regulatory and legal obligations, manage risk, increase efficiency, and produce better business outcomes. GRC offers a portfolio of technology-enabled expert services and solutions focused on legal entity compliance, legal operations management, banking product compliance, and banking regulatory compliance. Wolters Kluwer (AEX: WKL) is a global leader in information services and solutions for professionals in the health, tax and accounting, risk and compliance, finance and legal sectors. Wolters Kluwer reported 2019 annual revenues of 4.6 billion. The company, headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands, serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries and employs 19,000 people worldwide. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005077/en/ Contacts: Media Contacts Paul Lyon Global Corporate Communications Director Governance, Risk Compliance Division Wolters Kluwer Office +44 20 3197 6586 Paul.Lyon@wolterskluwer.com David Feider Corporate Communications Manager, Banking Regulatory Compliance Governance, Risk Compliance Division Wolters Kluwer Tel: +1 612-852-7966 David.Feider@wolterskluwer.com Lisa Haydon, who is pregnant for the third time is keeping her health in check. Giving some pregnancy fitness goals, Lisa took to her Instagram handle to flaunt the 'best gift' her husband gave new gym equipment, a spinning cycle. Lisa has placed the cycle right in the middle of her bathroom and thanked her husband. She wrote, "It's the spot least disruptive to the house, ok a girl's gotta get it done somewhere. Dino got me this bike for our 6 year anniversary ... It's the best gift ever cuz we live on a mountain, kids, other stuff always a priority, and getting anywhere for a workout was getting close to impossible. Having this in the house is so easy to squeeze in. I love cardio too and this is nice and low impact and still a super good burn thanks hub." [sic] On Wednesday, Lisa shared some mirror selfie videos flaunting her baby bump and revealed that she was going to attend a friends' Pilates baby shower. "Pregnant Pilates baby shower, not for my baby but for my friend's baby," she clarified. The actor recently announced that she and her husband, businessman Dino Lalvani are expecting their third child, a daughter, together. The couple is already parents to sons, Zack and Leo. Lisa Haydon's son Leo takes his 'first three steps', actor shares adorable picture The 34-year-old actor shared a video on Instagram to reveal her pregnancy. She captioned the post: "#3 Coming this June." In the video, Haydon said she wanted to share something with her fans when her three-year-old son Zack entered the frame. "What is inside mummy's tummy, Zack?" Haydon asked her son, to which he replied, "Baby sister." The Queen star and Lalvani, who is a son of Pakistan-born British entrepreneur Gullu Lalvani, tied the knot in October 2016 after one year of dating. Haydon's last big-screen outing was Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016) and she hosted the reality show Top Model India in 2018. Lisa Haydon flaunts her baby bump, receives gym equipment after 'dreaming for weeks' 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. ROME, FEB 22 - Italy's ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Luca Attanasio, and a Carabiniere were killed in an attack on their convoy at Goma in the African country on Monday, well-informed sources told ANSA. The nature of the attack is not yet clear. Attanasio died in hospital, sources said. The envoy's car was part of a MONUSCO UN peacekeeping mission convoy including the EU's delegation chief, sources said. The Italian foreign ministry confirmed the killings of Atanasio and the Carabiniere with "deep grief". The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or MONUSCO, an acronym based on its French name, is a United Nations peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) which was established by the United Nations Security Council to monitor the peace process of the Second Congo War, though much of its focus subsequently turned to the Ituri conflict, the Kivu conflict and the Dongo conflict. (ANSA). (Reuters) - Indonesia is holding intensive talks with both the Myanmar military and representatives of the ousted elected government in a bid to end a crisis over a Feb. 1 military coup, Indonesia's foreign minister said on Wednesday. Indonesia has taken the lead within the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in efforts to resolve Myanmar's turmoil. Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi met Myanmar's military-appointed foreign minister, Wunna Maung Lwin, for talks in the Thai capital earlier on Wednesday. The Myanmar army seized power after alleging fraud in a Nov. 8 election swept by Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), detaining her and much of the party leadership. Opponents of the coup have staged days of demonstrations in towns and cities across Myanmar and three protesters and one policeman have been killed in violence. The Indonesian effort to resolve the crisis has raised suspicion among Myanmar democracy activists who fear dealing with the junta would confer legitimacy on it and its bid to scrap the November election. They insist the election result should be respected. Retno, speaking to reporters in Bangkok, said the wellbeing of the people of Myanmar was the number one priority. "We ask for everybody to use restraint and not resort to violence ... to avoid casualties and bloodshed," Retno said after her talks with the Myanmar minister and her Thai counterpart, Don Pramudwinai. Retno said she had "intensive" communications with both sides, including ousted lawmakers from the parliament, known as Pyidaungsu Hluttaw. Members of the lawmakers' group, the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH), were not immediately available for comment. A Reuters report this week cited sources as saying Indonesia was proposing that ASEAN members send monitors to ensure the generals stick to their promise of fair new elections. That added to suspicion among some pro-democracy activists that Indonesia's intervention would undermine their demand that last year's election must stand. Story continues The military has not given a time frame for the new election it has promised, although it imposed a one-year state of emergency when it seized power. Dozens of protesters gathered outside the Thai embassy in the main city of Yangon with signs reading: "Respect our vote" and "We voted NLD". "Our foreign minister is Aung San Suu Kyi," the protesters chanted, referring to the post she held in the government she led after winning a 2015 election in a landslide. Retno did not mention the issue of the election but said Indonesia emphasised "the importance of an inclusive democratic transition process". "We need a conducive condition ... in the form of dialogue, reconciliation, trust building," she said. "Indonesia will be with the people of Myanmar." 'OFFER SUPPORT' Retno had been expected to fly to Myanmar earlier on Wednesday but the plan was dropped, her ministry said. Later, Thailand announced that Wunna Maung Lwin, making the first foreign trip by a member of Myanmar's new military government, had come to Thailand. A Thai source said the Myanmar minister also had a meeting scheduled with Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha. Prayuth, a former army chief who seized power in a 2014 coup, declined to confirm that he met the Myanmar minister. "Some things are not official," he told reporters. "We offer support as an ASEAN country that has to cooperate and offer well-wishes that everything works out smoothly." Earlier, the Myanmar-based Future Nation Alliance activist group said in a statement a visit to Myanmar by Retno would be tantamount to recognising the military junta. The group instead demanded foreign officials meet Htin Lin Aung, a member of the CRPH who was the sole responsible official for foreign relations. Protesters, some leading a procession of elephants, marched in Myanmar's second biggest city, Mandalay, in support of the ousted parliamentarians on Wednesday. Myanmar's security forces have shown more restraint compared with earlier crackdowns against people who pushed for democracy during almost half a century of direct military rule. Military chief General Min Aung Hlaing has said this week authorities were following a democratic path in dealing with the protests and police were using minimal force, such as rubber bullets, state media reported. The crisis has restored Myanmar's reputation as the problem member of the 10-country ASEAN and the diplomatic scramble by its neighbours comes as wider international concern is growing. The Group of Seven (G7) rich nations on Tuesday condemned intimidation and oppression of those opposing the coup. The United States, Britain and others have imposed limited sanctions, aimed at members of the junta and military businesses. China has traditionally taken a softer line on Myanmar as have ASEAN neighbours. (Reporting by Tom Allard and Stanely Widianto in JAKARTA, and Panarat Thepgumpanat, Panu Wongcha-um and Fanny Potkin in BANGKOK; Writing by Ed Davies and Robert Birsel; Editing by Lincoln Feast, Simon Cameron-Moore and Peter Graff) New Delhi: In a strong message to Turkey, India on Wednesday (February 24) reminded Turkey of United Nations Security Council or UNSC resolutions on Cyprus after the latter raked UNSC resolutions on Kashmir. India's Second Secretary, Permanent Mission of India to UN, Geneva, Seema Pujani said, "As far as the subject of UN Resolutions is concerned, we would advise Turkey to practise what it preaches by first implementing those UN Resolutions that apply to it." UNSC resolution on Cyprus has been a cause of embarrassment to Turkey even as it continues to occupy the northern part of the island nation in the Mediterranean Sea. Turkey in the past, especially after India removed special status for the erstwhile state for Jammu and Kashmir has been supporting Pakistani "cause" at various multilateral organizations especially the UN. Pujani hitting out at Turkey said "we find them completely unacceptable", pointing out, "it is ironical for a country which has trampled upon its own civil society to pass unjustified comments on others internal matters." Pakistan was the key focus of India's right of reply at the council, which out of habit raises Kashmir, irking New Delhi. For the first time, India raised the issue of acquittal of Omar Saeed, key accused in the killing of US Journalist Daniel Pearl and Islamabad's support to "state-sponsored terrorism". Pujani said, "The recent acquittal of Omar Saeed Sheikh, the al-Qaeda terrorist and murderer" of Daniel Pearl by the Pakistani Supreme Court is a "clear example of the Pakistani establishments nexus with such entities and, as the US Secretary of State said, it is "an affront to terrorism victims everywhere. The young Indian diplomat listed out the "institutionalized discrimination and persecution" faced by the minorities in the country, along with "instances of repression" of journalists and civil society activists giving the example of Pakistani human rights defender Gulalai Ismail, Idris Khattak. Gulalai Ismail is right now in the US and as retribution, her father Muhammad Ismail has been arrested under "terror" charges by Pakistan. Idris Khattak, who was doing a report on enforced disappearances in Pakistans Federally Administered Tribal Areas has been missing since November 2019. Live TV The company also provided a brief update on its finances following the recent fundraising (LON: UKW) said it had agreed to make acquisitions worth almost 100mln. It is buying the 50% of the Braes of Doune wind farm, in Stirlingshire, Scotland, which it doesnt already own for 48.1mln from Federated Hermes. And it has agreed with Banks Renewables to take 49.9% of the Kype Muir Extension wind farm for 51.4mln. It is also providing 47mln of financing for the Lanarkshire project, which is scheduled for completion in the final quarter of next year. In the same announcement, Greencoat said that, following the recent share placing, which raised a gross 198mln, it will pay off 160mln of its revolving credit facility (RCF). This will reduce borrowings under the RCF to 240mln from 400mln. Together with term debt of 700mln, total borrowings currently stand at 940mln, or 28% of the value of the business gross assets. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 00:10:32|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close Doctors are seen on their way to provide diagnosis and treatment services at the resettlement community for relocated residents of Rasekam Village in Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, July 7, 2019. (Xinhua/Wang Fei) BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- China strongly condemns and firmly opposes a Xinjiang-related motion of Canada's House of Commons, and has lodged stern representations with Canada, a foreign ministry spokesperson said on Tuesday. Spokesperson Wang Wenbin made the remarks at a press briefing when commenting on reports that Canada's House of Commons adopted a motion calling on the Trudeau government to declare that China has committed "genocide" in Xinjiang and calling for a countermeasure to the 2022 Winter Olympics. The relevant motion disregarded facts and common sense and deliberately denigrated and smeared China. It seriously violated international law and basic norms of international relations and grossly interfered in China's internal affairs, Wang told the press briefing. Pointing out that the essence of Xinjiang-related issues is counter-terrorism and de-radicalization, Wang said China's Xinjiang is faithfully implementing the UN Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism. It also draws lessons from similar practices in other countries to carry out de-radicalization in accordance with the law. It is in full compliance with the principles and the spirit of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. Thanks to the efforts of people of all ethnic groups, Xinjiang has reported no violent terrorist cases for more than four consecutive years, Wang said, adding that the region enjoys social stability and steady progress, and people enjoy their lives and work. According to Wang, the Uygur population in Xinjiang grew from 10.17 million in 2010 to 12.72 million in 2018, an increase of 25.04 percent, which is higher than that of Xinjiang's total population and that of all ethnic minority groups, as well as the growth of the Han population. "Facts have proved that there has never been any genocide in Xinjiang," Wang said, adding that it is a lie of the century, deliberately concocted by extreme anti-China forces, and a ridiculous farce to smear China. He said some Canadian politicians openly politicize sport, which runs counter to the spirit of the Olympic Charter and harms the interests of the international Olympic movement and athletes of various countries. Wang said some people in Canada should abandon anti-China paranoia and treat China objectively instead of indulging in the outdated thinking of ideological confrontation. They should not put domestic political battles or their party interests above the overall China-Canada relations. "Canada has always claimed to defend values, but one of the most important values is to respect facts," Wang said. "Relevant Canadian politicians who engage in political manipulation on Xinjiang-related issues under the guise of human rights and openly spread false information and lies have never been to Xinjiang or even China. It is precisely trampling on the values Canada has always touted," he added. Wang stressed that Xinjiang-related issues are purely China's internal affairs, and Canada has no rights to interfere in. China's determination to defend national sovereignty, security, and development interests is unwavering. "China will respond resolutely to any actions that harm China's interests," the spokesperson said. Lucenia Dunn spent the early days of the coronavirus pandemic encouraging people to wear masks and keep a safe distance from each other in Tuskegee a mostly Black city where the government once used unsuspecting African American men as guinea pigs in a study of a sexually transmitted disease. Now, the onetime mayor of the town immortalized as the home of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study is wary of getting inoculated against COVID-19. Among other things, she's suspicious of the government promoting a vaccine that was developed in record time when it can't seem to conduct adequate virus testing or consistently provide quality rural health care. Im not doing this vaccine right now. That doesnt mean Im never going to do it. But I know enough to withhold getting it until we see all that is involved, said Dunn, who is Black. The coronavirus immunization campaign is off to a shaky start in Tuskegee and other parts of Macon County. Area leaders point to a resistance among residents spurred by a distrust of government promises and decades of failed health programs. Many people in this city of 8,500 have relatives who were subjected to unethical government experimentation during the syphilis study. It does have an impact on decisions. Being in this community, growing up in this community, I would be very untruthful if I didnt say that, said Frank Lee, emergency management director in Macon County. Lee is Black. Health experts have stressed both the vaccines' safety and efficacy. They have noted that while the vaccines were developed with record-breaking speed, they were based on decades of prior research. Vaccines used in the U.S. have shown no signs of serious side effects in studies of tens of thousands of people. And with more than 26 million vaccinations administered in the U.S. alone so far, no red flags have been reported. Tuskegee is not a complete outlier. A recent survey conducted by the communications firm Edelman revealed that as of November, only 59% of people in the U.S. were willing to get vaccinated within a year with just 33% happy to do so as soon as possible. But skepticism seems to run deeper here. When Alabama and the rest of the South were still segregated by race, government medical workers starting in 1932 withheld treatment for unsuspecting men infected with syphilis in Tuskegee and surrounding Macon County so physicians could track the disease. The study, which involved about 600 men, ended in 1972 only after it was revealed by The Associated Press. A lawsuit filed on behalf of the men by Black Tuskegee attorney Fred Gray resulted in a $9 million settlement, and then-President Bill Clinton formally apologized on behalf of the U.S. government in 1997. But the damage left a legacy of distrust that extends far beyond Tuskegee: A December survey showed 40% of Black people nationwide said they wouldnt get the coronavirus vaccine. Such hesitancy is more entrenched than among white people, even though Black Americans have been hit disproportionately hard by the virus. The Chicago-based Black nationalist group Nation of Islam is warning away members nationwide with an online presentation titled Beyond Tuskegee: Why Black People Must Not Take The Experimental COVID-19 Vaccine. Gray, now 90 and still practicing law in Tuskegee, rejects such comparisons. The syphilis study and the COVID-19 vaccine are completely different, he said. He believes that enough that he himself has gotten the vaccine and is publicly encouraging others to do the same. Georgette Moon is on a similar mission. Hoping to both protect herself and encourage skittish friends, the former city council member recently bared an arm and let a public health nurse immunize her. Now, Moon said, if only more fellow Black residents could overcome their lingering fears and get the vaccine. The study is a huge factor, Moon said. Ive had very qualified, well-educated people tell me they are not going to take it right now. The Macon County health department, which is administering two-step Moderna vaccines in its modern building near downtown, could perform as many as 160 immunizations a day, officials said. But a maximum of 140 people received the vaccine on any single date during the first six days of appointments, with a total of 527 people immunized during the period. Health care workers, emergency responders and long-term care residents are currently eligible for shots in Alabama, along with people 75 and older. There are some signs of hope. State statistics show a slow uptick in the number of people coming in for vaccinations, and word seems to be filtering through the community that its OK to be vaccinated. Down the street from the county clinic, the Veterans Affairs hospital in Tuskegee is vaccinating veterans 65 and older. While only 40% of the VA workers in the area have been vaccinated, officials said, more people are agreeing to the shots than during the initial wave. They know people who have had the vaccine, they hear more about it, they become more comfortable with it, said Dr. April Truett, an infectious disease physician at the hospital. The Rev. John Curry Jr. said he and his wife took the shots after the health department said they could get appointments without a long wait. The pastor of the oldest Black church in town, Curry said he is encouraging congregants to get the vaccine. Yet he said he also understands the power of lingering distrust in a town that will forever be linked to the syphilis study, one of the most reviled episodes of U.S. public health history. Its a blemish on Tuskegee, he said. "It hangs on the minds of people. Hospitals across Massachusetts will soon again be able to schedule first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. State health officials have reached agreements with more than a dozen health care facilities to resume receiving more doses, the Boston Globe reports. The decision comes the same day scientists with the Food and Drug Administration confirmed that the Johnson & Johnsons single-dose vaccine does protect against COVID, estimating it at 66% effective against moderate to severe cases of the virus. State officials said earlier this month that hospitals will see a ramp up of shipments again once the J&J vaccine is approved. The largest hospital system in the state - Mass General Brigham - to more than a half dozen hospitals in Western Massachusetts - received word two weeks ago that they should to stop scheduling first-dose vaccination appointments as shipments of the vaccine scheduled to be received by the hospitals will be diverted to the states vaccination clinics. The commonwealth will distribute more vaccines to high throughput locations, like mass vaccination sites, retail pharmacy sites, and community health centers until more vaccines are made available by the federal government, Kate Reilly, COVID-19 Command Center spokeswoman, said of the plan on Feb. 11. Patients who already scheduled their appointments with hospitals for the first dose of the vaccine - as well as those scheduled to receive the second - were able to receive their doses, lawmakers and the Massachusetts COVID-19 Command Center confirmed to MassLive. The plan became public the same day state health officials released weekly vaccine data showing that only 68% of doses shipped to the Bay State have been injected. Now, Massachusetts is ranked the top state for total first doses administered per capita among states with at least 5 million residents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In weeks since, Gov. Charlie Baker has continued to push large-scale vaccination sites. He said Wednesday that residents have had overwhelmingly positive experiences at the large-scale vaccination sites. People are in and out in 30 minutes, and people think the experience is terrific, the Republican governor said, adding people like that all those sites do is vaccinate people. Massachusetts has several mass vaccination sites: Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Fenway Park in Boston, the Eastfield Mall in Springfield, the Natick Mall, the DoubleTree in Danvers and the former Circuit City in Dartmouth. Worcester also has a large-scale vaccination site run by St. Vincent Hospital, Commonwealth Medicine and Worcester State University. The site is located at the university. A similar vaccination site exists at the Reggie Lewis Center in Boston. Access to book appointments at these sites was limited when 80,000 appointments were scheduled to go online last Thursday. The day nearly a million residents became eligible to receive the vaccine, the website crashed. A message appeared on the website - vaxfinder.mass.gov - as seen by MassLive at 7:30 a.m., with an image of an octopus with a question mark and informing visitors that the online application crashed and asking visitors to try again later. The operator behind Massachusetts online appointment booking system issued an apology after the website crashed Thursday morning. As the states biggest online appointment vendor, we deeply regret what happened [Thursday] in Massachusetts and are committed to ensuring this does not happen again, Prep Mod said in a statement. As public health servants and your partner, we are sorry for not meeting expectations. We accept full responsibility for the problem. Residents 65 years and older, individuals with at least two comorbidities that make them high risk for COVID and/or residents and staff of low income and affordable senior housing can now receive the vaccine. They followed residents 75 years and older in eligibility, who were the first priority group in Phase 2. This is the 12th in a "Letter to President Biden" series aimed at conveying policy recommendations through open letters from politicians, scholars and experts to the new U.S. president following his Jan. 20 inauguration. ED. By Stephen Costello Dear Mr. President, As you consider how you want to approach the issues surrounding Korea, it would be useful to review where U.S. policy has been, and where it may go now. Of course, there are multiple challenges to U.S. interests, and those of your South Korean ally, in the current situation. But contrary to many published papers and analyses in the past three decades, there are also great opportunities. The short story is that you have a rare opportunity to pick up where your friends Bill Clinton and Kim Dae-jung left off 20 years ago. Twenty years is a long time, particularly in Washington. For that reason, few of the people now in government remember how masterfully Clinton and Kim had addressed the simmering Korean Peninsula issues between 1998 and 2001, or how strongly they had to confront the forces of Cold War thinking, bad analysis, insincere political opponents, and just bad luck. Clinton and Kim were pushing a large rock up a hill, one might say. But they had reasons to do so. Their shared goal was a more stable and prosperous Korean Peninsula, and an East Asia region where North Korean WMD and missiles did not drive a zero-sum hardening face-off between democracies and non-democracies, and a doomed arms race. China and Russia were very interested in what happened in their backyard, so lining up their conditional but grounded support was a crucial part of the effort. Of course, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, you were aware of these forces. In fact, you huddled with the South Korean president in Seoul in late August 2001, as the George W. Bush administration's reckless and self-defeating approaches to foreign relations were unfolding. You were both alarmed at the prospect that Bush would abandon the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and set off a race to the bottom with missile defenses provoking missile buildups. It was both illuminating and a source of pride for those of us who knew Kim that he voiced opposition to that ABM decision, thus becoming a true enemy of the Bush crew. But more important was the speech you were working on at the time. A few weeks after you talked with Kim, you spoke at the National Press Club (NPC) in Washington. It was Sept. 10, 2001. You laid out as no one yet had just what self-defeating "nonsense" the Bush group's approach to the world was. That speech is probably one of your best, because you were not only very specific about how their approach would fail. You were frankly pissed off, and this is clear in your voice. (https://www.c-span.org/video/165936-1/us-foreign-policy) As fate would have it, the events of the next morning in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania overshadowed the prescient and forceful call-to-arms you had offered us in the U.S. A lot has happened in Korea and the U.S. in the past 20 years. Koreans have worked hard to become one of the most open and democratic societies in the word. At the same time, they now stand as the sixth most effective military, with domestically-produced fighter jets, long-range radar and coast guard ships. As the U.S. struggles against all odds to censure its corrupt former president, two of Korea's corrupt former presidents sit behind bars. When over a million people from all walks of life peacefully demonstrated around the country during the winter of 2016-17, helping to impeach a president, they picked up their trash on the way home. Due to its respect for science-based policy and generally good governance, Korea is a world leader in confronting and mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic. During this same time, and accelerating just after your NPC speech, the U.S. squandered much of its hard and soft power, its ability to make and implement foreign policy, and its reputation for trustworthiness. Those were only partly recovered during the eight years you were vice president. And then came Trump. It should strike you as telling and even illuminating that the same group, including John Bolton, that destroyed the ABM Treaty and the working Agreed Framework with North Korea in the early 2000s then went on to walk away from America's promised commitments to the nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018. In both cases agreements that prevented nuclear weapons development were abandoned unilaterally, with dire regional consequences. President Moon Jae-in has 17 months left in his term. Along with all Korean democrats, he is trying to honor the work of Kim Dae-jung, and of Korean leaders and presidents going back to the Korean War who were trying to end those hostilities and rebuild the peninsula so that economic development, infrastructure and security would show what cooperating Koreans can do. Neither Kim nor Clinton had parliamentary majorities for long. But you and Moon Jae-in do. Together you have a rare opportunity to pick up where Kim and Clinton left off. You have been around a while, so you know how remarkable this time is, when you can capture, cap and roll back North Korea's nuclear programs and ICBMs to zero. To do so you must do what you have promised, by engaging in honest diplomacy, accepting Seoul's central role, and stitching together a deal and then a process that is fair, realistic and durable. It's time to put on the table those five U.N. sanctions from late 2016. They are probably illegal anyway, since they target the public, and not any specific activity. Listen to Dr. Hazel Smith, among others, on this point. To cite this article, you can refer to "Smith's 2020: The ethics of United Nations sanctions on North Korea: effectiveness, necessity and proportionality, Critical Asian Studies." (To link to this article, go to .) If you do this, you will unlock the most urgent and critical aspects of North Korea's programs. These are the ones that must be stopped first. In the view of the best analysts in Korea and the U.S., the Kim Jung-un regime is ready to deal. If you are wise and modern about this you will help unleash mutually-reinforcing economic development, security cooperation, and tension reduction in Northeast Asia. Contrary to what many people are telling you, this "Korea initiative" should be considered low-hanging fruit. You would be pushing at open doors with China and Russia, some of Japan's security concerns would be addressed, and South Korea would gladly shoulder much of the weight and long-term management. Who knows, if you pitch the long-planned Korea-Japan bridge/tunnel, you might even help get those two talking about productive things again. In a nutshell, you are the right person to do this at this critical time. President Moon has surrounded himself with some of the best and most experienced people, who know what happened in the 1990s and do not want it to go to waste. You should do the same. Give them authority and guidance, and help all of us build back better on Korea. Good luck to you, Stephen Costello Stephen Costello (scost55@gmail.com) managed the Kim Dae Jung Peace Foundation Washington office in the 1990s. He directed the Korea program at the Atlantic Council there from 1999 to 2004. He now directs AsiaEast.Org, a policy initiative focused on security, development and politics in Northeast Asia. He writes from Washington and Seoul. The European Commission proposed setting up 10 new European Partnerships between the European Union, Member States and/or the industry. The goal is to speed up the transition towards a green, climate neutral and digital Europe, and to make European industry more resilient and competitive. The EU will provide nearly 10 billion of funding that the partners will match with at least an equivalent amount of investment. This combined contribution is expected to mobilize additional investments in support of the transitions, and create long-term positive impacts on employment, the environment and society. The proposed partnerships aim to improve EU preparedness and response to infectious diseases, develop efficient low-carbon aircraft for clean aviation, support the use of renewable biological raw materials in energy production, ensure European leadership in digital technologies and infrastructures, and make rail transport more competitive. The partnerships include the Clean Hydrogen Partnership which will build on the success of the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH JU) with a proposed budget of 1 billion of public funding complemented by an equivalent private investment. This Partnership will be organized in three pillars: hydrogen production, hydrogen distribution and hydrogen usage in transport, industry, buildings. As a sign of the growing interest in hydrogen, six other sectoral partnerships will also support hydrogen technologiesroad transport, train, maritime, aviation, clean steel and clean process industries which now consider hydrogen as a key tool to achieve their climate objectives. The Partnership will include R&D but also large-scale demonstration and some early deployment in flagship projects. The other nine Partnerships, some of which are building on existing joint undertakings, are the following: Global Health EDCTP3: This partnership will deliver new solutions for reducing the burden of infectious diseases in sub-Saharan Africa, and strengthen research capacities to prepare and respond to re-emerging infectious diseases in sub-Saharan Africa and across the world. By 2030, it aims to develop and deploy at least two new technologies tackling infectious diseases, and support at least 100 research institutes in 30 countries to develop additional health technologies against re-emerging epidemics. Innovative Health Initiative: This initiative will help create an EU-wide health research and innovation ecosystem that facilitates the translation of scientific knowledge into tangible innovations. It will cover prevention, diagnostics, treatment and disease management. The initiative will contribute to reaching the objectives of Europe's Beating Cancer Plan, the new Industrial Strategy for Europe and the Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe. Key Digital Technologies: They encompass electronic components, their design, manufacture and integration in systems and the software that defines how they work. The overarching objective of this partnership is to support the digital transformation of all economic and societal sectors and the European Green Deal, as well as support research and innovation towards the next generation of microprocessors. Together with the Declaration on a European Initiative on processors and semiconductor technologies signed by 20 Member States, an upcoming Alliance on microelectronics, and a possible new Important Project of Common European Interest under discussion by Member States to foster breakthrough innovation, this new partnership will help boost competitiveness and Europes technological sovereignty. Circular Bio-based Europe: This partnership will contribute significantly to the 2030 climate targets, paving the way for climate neutrality by 2050, and will increase the sustainability and circularity of production and consumption systems, in line with the European Green Deal. It aims to develop and expand the sustainable sourcing and conversion of biomass into bio-based products as well as to support the deployment of bio-based innovation at regional level with the active involvement of local actors and with a view to reviving rural, coastal and peripheral regions. Clean Aviation: This partnership puts aviation en route to climate neutrality, by accelerating the development and deployment of disruptive research and innovation solutions. It aims to develop the next generation of ultra-efficient low-carbon aircraft, with novel power sources, engines, and systems, improving competitiveness and employment in the aviation sector that will be especially important for the recovery. Europes Rail: This partnership will speed up the development and deployment of innovative technologies, especially digital and automation ones, to achieve the radical transformation of the rail system and deliver on the European Green Deal objectives. By improving competitiveness, it will support European technological leadership in rail. Single European Sky ATM Research 3: The initiative aims to accelerate the technological transformation of air traffic management in Europe, aligning it to the digital age, to make the European airspace the most efficient and environmentally friendly sky to fly in the world and to support the competitiveness and recovery of Europes aviation sector following the coronavirus crisis. Smart Networks and Services: This partnership will support technological sovereignty for smart networks and services in line with the new industrial strategy for Europe, the new EU Cybersecurity Strategy and the 5G Toolbox. It aims to help resolve societal challenges and to enable the digital and green transition, as well as support technologies that will contribute to the economic recovery. It will also enable European players to develop the technology capacities for 6G systems as a basis for future digital services towards 2030. More information is available here. Metrology: This partnership aims to accelerate Europes global lead in metrology research, establishing self-sustaining European metrology networks aimed at supporting and stimulating new innovative products, responding to societal challenges and enabling effective design and implementation of regulation and standards underpinning public policies. The Commission proposal needs now to be adopted by the Council of the European Union, following consultation with the European Parliament. The European Partnerships are approaches provided by Horizon Europe, the new EU research and innovation program (2021-2027). They aim to improve and accelerate the development and uptake of new innovative solutions across different sectors, by mobilizing public and private resources. They will also contribute to the objectives of the European Green Deal and strengthen the European Research Area. Partnerships are open to a wide range of public and private partners, such as industry, universities, research organizations, bodies with a public service mission at local, regional, national or international level, and civil society organizations, including foundations and NGOs. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Brad Eliason shortly after the May 2019 attack that left him unable to work and led to the break-up of his marriage. Editors note: In relation to Saturdays log entry regarding a student with COVID-19, St. Helena High School Principal Ben Scinto sent the following email to parents Tuesday morning: Good morning Saints families. We are informing you that there was a student on the high school campus from 1/6 to 1/11/21 who we later found out had COVID-like symptoms and did not notify the school. The student was later tested for COVID-19 on 1/20/21 and found to be positive. After doing contact tracing, Napa County Public Health informed us yesterday afternoon that they determined the individual was infectious from 12/30/20- 1/11/21. Had we been alerted at the time of the infectious period, we would have immediately performed site-based contact tracing and informed everyone who had close contact with this person. We would also have informed the entire high school community as is our policy. The quarantine period for any close contact is over, and so there is nothing to do at this time. We are not aware of any COVID-19 cases linked to this individual. Please ring us at 967-2740 should you have any questions. Thank you. Hard water can significantly increase wear on home appliances, as untreated water includes hard water minerals that can create a dense coating on pipes and appliances. This coating can limit the efficiency of water heaters, ultimately leading to higher energy costs for homeowners. Rheem's water softeners can extend the life of many appliances, including water heaters, by breaking down these minerals. In addition, water softeners can mitigate the effects of hard water such as tough water stains on dishes/glassware, tubs that do not rinse clean, white crust on faucets and fixtures, and even dry and itchy skin and hair. Often, these hard water challenges can also increase costs of everyday products such as detergent and soaps, which can all impact a homeowners' budget. Rheem's goal is to simplify the process for homeowners to find a water softener solution with a free water test strip that helps determine a home's water hardness level and guides the homeowner to the ideal product for their specific water needs. In addition, Rheem created a water savings calculator at Rheemwatertreatment.com to help homeowners understand the potential savings of utilizing a water softener. "We are excited to launch this innovative series of Rheem water softeners at The Home Depot to enable consumers to solve their hard water challenges while helping them save money and prevent the harmful wear and tear of hard water on expensive appliances," noted Jim Connors, Director of Retail Business, Rheem U.S. Water Heating. "In addition, Rheem's water softeners utilize a new learning technology that uses dramatically less salt than other softeners and requires less maintenance from the homeowner," continued Connors. Rheem's Preferred Series Water Softeners offer models at 42,000 grain standard and Wi-Fi enabled models, as well as a 32,000-grain unit for smaller homes. Each model comes equipped with learning technology, a "recharge now" feature, high flow valves for maximum water pressure, a protective shroud and a low-salt indicator light. The 42,000-grain model also includes ultra-high flow valves, built-in sediment filter, adjustable hardness feature and water management features. The Wi-Fi unit includes a free app that allows consumers to remotely monitor home water usage, continuous water flow events (leaks), and handy alerts when it is time to add salt, without having to check the unit. An optional Wi-Fi Whole Home Water Shut-Off valve (available on Homedepot.com) can be added with the softener to enable remote shut-off of your home's water in the event of a leak event or prolonged stay away from home. Rheem's new Preferred Series Water Softeners also come with a protection guarantee that includes a one-year parts and labor, three year electronic and 10-year tank warranty, with the ability to extend the parts and labor coverage up to five years with the use of the Rheem Water Softener Cleaner. Visit Rheemwatertreatment.com for more information on the Rheem Preferred Series Water Softeners and to order your free test kit. About Rheem Founded in 1925, Rheem innovates new ways to deliver precise temperatures while saving energy, water and supporting a more sustainable future. Rheem is America's #1 water-heating brand with products available in more than 50 countries. Paloma Co., Ltd. of Nagoya, Japan, acquired the iconic Rheem brand in 1988, and today the company's portfolio of premium brands include Rheem, Raypak, Ruud, Eemax, Richmond, Splendid, Solahart and EverHot as well as commercial refrigeration brands Russell, Witt, ColdZone and Kramer, which are part of the Heat Transfer Products Group (HTPG) division. SOURCE Rheem Related Links https://www.rheemwatertreatment.com/ Gurugram, Feb 24 : A manager of a private firm was allegedly shot dead late on Tuesday night at the under-construction Delhi-Mumbai Expressway near Sancholi village in Sohna area in Gurugram. The police said on Wednesday that an accused, who has been identified as Bhim of Nuh district, has been nabbed. Bhim is involved in the smuggling of stolen iron rods. According to the police, the deceased was identified as a 37-year-old Rohit Sharma, who was a manager in a private firm located in Sancholi vallage in Sohna. The complainant, Ajay Vikram Singh, a senior manager of the firm in his complaint said on Tuesday night around 11.45 pm Sharma was about to leave his office. "When Rohit come out he asked the occupant of an I-20 car parked outside the company as to the reasons for being present on the spot. On this the accused fired a single shot into his chest and rode away from the spot. Later the victim was rushed to a private hospital in Gurugram by his colleagues where the doctor declared him brought dead," Singh told the police. Singh said that the victim didn't have any enimity with anyone. "The arrested accused was involved in the smuggling of stolen iron rods incidents. Initial probe suggest that the victim had asked about increasing iron stolen incidents in the area and later the accused killed the victim," said Subhash Boken, spokesperson of the Gurugram police. The body has been handed over to the victim's family after an autopsy. Further probe into the matter is underway," said Umesh Kumar, station house officer (SHO) of the Sohna Sadar police station in Gurugram. A case of murder including the Arms Act was registered against an unknown accused at Sohna Sadar police station. (Natural News) New research out of the University of Hamburg in Germany found that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) was, in fact, created in a Chinese lab. According to world-renowned researcher Roland Wiesendanger, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the true cause of the Chinese virus, not bats at a Wuhan wet market as the world was originally told. The paper challenges the two prevailing narratives that the WuFlu either escaped a wet market or is the product of a laboratory accident. In Wiesendangers view, neither narrative holds water. To date, there is no scientifically based rigorous evidence for either mentioned theories, Wiesendanger, a three-time recipient of the prestigious European Research Council, is quoted as saying. Wiesendangers 105-page report goes on to ask questions about whether the current global crisis really is just a coincidence, or if it was plotted years ago by the likes of billionaire eugenicist Bill Gates to usher the planet into a new world order. [I]s the current global crisis actually the result of a coincidence in nature a coincidental mutation of a coronavirus a bat with the assistance of an intermediate host or the result of a Scientist carelessness when carrying out the project is high-risk research with global pandemic potential? the paper reads. In response to his own question, Wiesendanger cited 600 incontrovertible facts to prove his claim that the number and the quality of evidence clearly indicate a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A summary outlining Wiesendangers key points highlights the fact that the host of COVID-19 still has not been identified, even though it couple[s] surprisingly well to human cell receptors. It also explains that the Wuhan lab: carried out genetic manipulations on coronaviruses for many years with the aim of making them more contagious, dangerous and deadly for humans. Theres no further denying that coronavirus originated at Wuhan Institute of Virology In contrast to earlier coronavirus-related epidemics such as SARS and MERS, the origin of COVID-19 simply cannot be explained any other way than a laboratory creation. The zoonosis theory as a possible explanation for the pandemic therefore has no sound scientific basis, the paper explains. Chinese germs also contain special cell receptor binding domains that are connected to the novel furin cleavage sites of their spike proteins. Both properties together were previously unknown in coronaviruses and indicate a non-natural origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen, the paper adds. People who read only mainstream news are probably also unaware of the fact that there is an entire research group in Wuhan that exists for the purpose of genetically modifying (GMO) coronaviruses to make them more contagious, dangerous and deadly for humans. This is proven by numerous publications in the scientific specialist literature, Wiesendanger reveals. There were also major safety problems at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the time when COVID-19 emerged out of nowhere. Putting two and two together, it becomes clear that this lab was, in fact, responsible for releasing the virus. Interestingly enough, a young scientist who worked at the facility is said to be the first person ever infected with the WuFlu. This further bolsters Wiesendangers claim that the virus originated at this facility, which is Chinas only level-4 biosafety lab. There is ample independent evidence that a young researcher from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the first to deal with the novel coronavirus and was thus at the beginning of the COVID-19 infection chain, Wiesendanger concludes. The entry on the website of the institute has been deleted and has been considered as disappeared. To keep up with the latest news about COVID-19, be sure to check out Pandemic.news. Sources for this article include: TheNationalPulse.com NaturalNews.com NaturalNews.com Bidens HHS nominee Xavier Becerra is worse-case scenario for people of faith, pro-life groups warn Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Republican senators and pro-life groups have raised concerns about President Joe Biden's pick for Health and Human Services secretary, Xavier Becerra, who they warn has a record of using his power to go after his enemies, including people of faith and pro-lifers. Over 60 pro-life advocates sent a letter to ranking members of the U.S. Senate HELP and Finance Committees urging them to reject Becerra, calling him an "enemy to every pro-life policy and law" who "has demonstrated complete disregard for the religious and moral convictions of those opposed to the brutal act of abortion." The letter was spearheaded by the pro-life lobbying group Susan B. Anthony List and signed by leaders such as Southern Baptist Convention Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission President Russell Moore, Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan Anderson and the heads of other pro-life organizations. On the issue of abortion, Xavier Becerra has a decades-old track record of siding with the abortion lobby whenever possible and using the power of whatever office he is in to try and force others to share his enthusiastic support of abortion up until the moment of birth, said Kristan Hawkins, president of the pro-life campus organization Students for Life of America. Hawkins, who signed the letter, moderated a panel last Wednesday that featured Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Steve Daines, R-Mont., and SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser. Hawkins maintained that the confirmation of Becerra to the position of secretary of HHS was something that every single pro-lifer should be concerned about. Becerra, who formerly served as a congressman in the U.S. House from California, currently serves as the state's attorney general and must be confirmed by the Senate before he can serve as Biden's HHS secretary. Hawkins said that as secretary of HHS, Becerra would oversee over $87 billion of our taxpayer funds and discretionary budget authority and over $1.2 trillion in mandatory funding. Dannenfelser added that when every other state that did something bold by passing pro-life measures, he would lead all the other AGs in trying to shut down every pro-life measure that every other state was doing. She also recalled how Becerra prosecuted David Daleiden, the pro-life activist journalist who exposed Planned Parenthoods selling of aborted baby body parts. When he was told just very recently by the Trump administration that well take $200 million away of Medicaid funding unless you comply with the Weldon Amendment that would require you to obey the consciences of Californians and not force health care workers and taxpayers to pay for abortion, he (Becerra) said Id rather give up that funding for California than to enforce the Weldon Amendment, she continued. He was the one who was spearheading all of the amicus briefs to the courts to make sure that during COVID, that there could continue to be mail-order abortions, chemical abortions, Dannenfelser added. Hawkins expressed disgust that Becerra was uniting 20 other attorney generals across the country to sue the FDA to dispense the abortion pills without a doctor ever seeing a woman, without a woman ever getting a blood test because that was his number one priority amidst the COVID pandemic. Cotton, who previously served in the House with Becerra, said he knew what a far-left radical he was, but only once he became Californias top law enforcement officer did he have the power to act unilaterally on those radical ideas. The common thread of Xavier Becerras tenure as attorney general of California is that he abuses the law to target his enemies, which curiously enough always seem to be people of faith and pro-lifers and other social conservatives. If hes done it with the power he has as attorney general of California, of course he will do it with the vastly greater power he would have as the Secretary for Health and Human Services, Cotton warned. While any nominee to HHS by this president is going to be bad, according to Dannenfelser, Becerra is the worst-case scenario. I do think its important to put a marker down and say there is some line that we must draw, that an advocate, an extreme abortion absolutist advocate as the head of HHS, is a bridge too far even for an administration like this. We choose this nominee to say no and send a message when the Senate is so close, the House is so close, that whoever is heading HHS needs to be closer to those margins than this person is, she said. Cotton agreed with Dannenfelser that were not going to get a great secretary of Health and Human Services out of Joe Biden. He predicted that if efforts to stop Becerras confirmation to the post are successful, Bidens subsequent nominee will have watched what happened to Xavier Becerra though and recognize that if he crosses these far-left radical lines, that he is apt to face political blowback as well. Much of the panel's conversation focused on outlining a strategy that pro-life Americans can use to persuade elected officials to oppose Becerras confirmation in light of the balance of power in Washington. Democrats hold a narrow 50-50 majority in the Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote. Any effort to block Becerras confirmation would require the support of all 50 Senate Republicans and at least one Senate Democrat. According to Cotton, Some Democrats may be troubled by some of the most extreme steps hes taken or the most extreme ideas of the far-left when it comes to advocating for abortion, but theres a whole host of reasons to oppose Xavier Becerra in addition to his extreme views on abortion. He cited Becerras lack of experience in the health care industry as well as his support for Medicare for All as reasons that might lead some of the more moderate Democrats in the Senate to oppose his confirmation. So there are ample grounds to oppose Xavier Becerras nomination. We dont need 51 senators to all agree on why they say no; we just need 51 senators to say no, Cotton said. Dannenfelser mentioned pro-life Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., as the most important senator that pro-lifers should contact and urge him to oppose Becerras confirmation. She also highlighted the importance of contacting Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, pro-abortion Republicans who might be more disposed to support Becerras confirmation than the rest of their Republican colleagues. She also listed Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Jon Tester, D-Mont., as lawmakers who pro-lifers should try to convince to vote against Becerras confirmation. Tester represents a state that routinely votes Republican in presidential elections, while Sinema represents a swing state that narrowly voted Democratic in the 2020 presidential election. Daines, the other senator on the panel, suggested that Sen. Bob Casey, R-Pa., could be receptive to arguments against Becerra because he has sided with us in the past on some critical pro-life votes. Casey serves on the Senate Finance Committee, which, owing to the close margin in the Senate, has an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. Should Casey vote with all Republicans to oppose Becerras confirmation, that would be enough to prevent his nomination from going to the full Senate. Becerra will appear before the Senate Committee on Health, Labor, Education and Pensions on Tuesday and an additional hearing will take place in the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday. While Casey also serves on the Senate Committee on Health, Labor, Education and Pensions, so do Murkowski and Collins, the two Republicans most likely to support his confirmation. During the Trump administration, a small number of former presidents cabinet nominees were opposed by all members of the opposing political party and at least one member of his own party. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was opposed by all 48 Senate Democrats as well as Collins and Murkowski. DeVos was confirmed to the position, but Vice President Mike Pence had to cast the tie-breaking vote. Trumps first nominee to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, was opposed by all 48 Democrats and Collins. So far, Bidens cabinet nominees have been confirmed with varying degrees of bipartisan support. With several confirmation votes pending, the cabinet member who received the slimmest margin of support was Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was supported by all 50 Senate Democrats and six Senate Republicans. With Becerras confirmation hearings expected to take place this week, Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan T. Anderson issued a statement warning about the consequences of Becerras confirmation: Xavier Becerra is simply unqualified to be Secretary of HHS. He has no relevant medical expertise, rendering him particularly unsuited to assume this position amid a pandemic. Indeed, his only health care qualifications seem to be his attacks on pro-life medicine, his persecution of the Little Sisters of the Poor, and his defense of an unlawful California abortion mandate. President Biden promised to heal and unify the country, but his nomination of an ideological culture warrior like Becerra will only drive us further apart, he added. EPPC Senior Fellow Roger Severino, who previously headed the HHS Office for Civil Rights during the Trump administration, recalled, When I was head of Civil Rights at HHS, I twice held Becerra in violation of laws protecting conscience in health care resulting in a $200 million disallowance of HHS funds to California. He called the idea of Becerra leading the HHS the very agency that investigated him and found he broke the law an astounding conflict of interest. Remember the photos of that 'golden tiger' from Assam's Kaziranga National Park that went viral on social media last year? After the dust settled, the sad reality behind the photo was revealed. KNP issued a statement, in which the photographed golden tiger has been identified as Golden Tiger of Kaziranga KAZI 106-F and added that there are a total of four golden tigers there. Parveen Kaswan But what lead to the colour change was more concerning. According to Rabindra Sharma, Research Officer, Kaziranga National Park, the skin of tigers is orange-yellow with black stripes and whitish abdominal region, a change that has been brought in genetically due to inbreeding. Now, a new study has shed light on the extent of inbreeding among Indian tigers and its potential consequences. Parveen Kaswan The research, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution found that fragmentation of habitat has already disrupted the natural evolutionary process in wild tigers and will continue to do so in future as anthropogenic pressures increase, leading to higher inbreeding and lower survival. The researchers from Stanford University, the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bengaluru, and various zoological parks and wildlife NGOs sequenced 65 genomes from four of the surviving tiger subspeciesAmur tigers, Bengal tigers, Sumatran tigers and Malayan tigersover a period of three years to gain insight into the genomic variation in tigers. While Indian tigers have the highest genetic variation compared to other subspecies of the feline across the world, their populations continue to be fragmented by loss of habitat, leading to inbreeding and potential loss of this diversity. Umred Paoni Karhandla Wildlife Sanctuary/ Representational Image "As human population started expanding, so also their signatures on the land. We know that some of these signatures would result in disrupting the ability of tigers to move," Uma Ramakrishnan, co-author of the research, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, told PTI. According to Ramakrishnan, molecular ecologist and assistant professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, this habitat loss from human activities leads to tigers being "hemmed into their own protected area." "Now, they can only mate with the other tigers in their own population. Over time, this will result in inbreeding, they will end up mating with their relatives," she explained. "Whether this inbreeding compromises their fitness, their ability to survive, we do not yet know," the molecular ecologist added. BCCL While genetic diversity across a population improves their chances of survival in the future, the study said population fragmentation of tigers can decrease this variation, and endanger them further. Although tigers have received significant conservation attention, the scientists said very little is known about their evolutionary history and genomic variation, especially for Indian tigers. With 70 per cent of the world's tigers living in India, the researchers said understanding the genetic diversity of tigers in the country is critical to the feline's conservation worldwide. The results of their three-year long study offer insights into genomic variation in tigers and the processes that have sculpted it. Based on the results, the scientists believe there have been relatively recent divergences between subspecies, and intense population bottlenecks that may have contributed to inbred individuals. According to the NCBS scientist, maintaining structural connectivity, enabling tigers to move between protected areas can help overcome these bottlenecks. AFP/ REPRESENTATIONAL IMAGE "This would require the right types of habitat between protected areas, for example having densely populated human settlements would not work. Further, there also needs to be functional connectivity, that tigers do actually move," Ramakrishnan added. In the study investigated the partitioning of genetic variation, possible impacts of inbreeding, and demographic history, and possible signatures of local adaptation. While the total genomic variation in Indian tigers was higher than in other subspecies, the study found that several individual tigers in the country had low variation, suggesting possible inbreeding. According to the research, tigers from northeast India were the most different from other populations in India "Given our results, it is important to understand why some Bengal tigers appear inbred and what the consequences of this are," said Anubhab Khan, co-first author of the research. The study showed recent divergences between tiger subspecies, within the last 20,000 years, which the scientists believe is concordant with increasing human impacts across Asia and a transition from glacial to interglacial climate change in the continent. BCCL However, the scientists believe this finding needs to be investigated further with expanded data and analyses of more tiger genomes. "Most studies focusing on species of conservation concern use limited numbers of specimens to try to gain understanding into how genomic variation is partitioned," said Ellie Armstrong, co-first and co-corresponding author of the study from Stanford University in the US. "It is clear from our work here, and a growing number of other studies, that it is crucial to increase our sampling efforts and use caution when interpreting results from limited sample sizes," Armstrong added. According to Ramakrishnan, the genomic variation of Indian tigers continues to be shaped by the ongoing loss of connectivity. "Population management and conservation action must incorporate information on genetic variation. I hope doing so will help India maintain the gains in tiger conservation achieved so far," Ramakrishnan added. Dr Kingsley Nyarko, Member of Parliament for Kwadaso, has expressed confidence in the ability of the Minister-designate for Fisheries and Aquaculture to deliver when given the opportunity. He pointed out that the capabilities of Madam Hawa Koomson, to solve pertinent issues was not in doubt since she had been able to demonstrate it in many areas of endeavour. Speaking to the Ghana News Agency in reaction to criticisms from a section of the public that Madam Koomson failed to impress the Parliaments Appointment Committee during her vetting, Dr Nyarko said such criticisms were unfounded. Many people have argued that Madam Koomson did not only sound fluent in the English language but also, she did not appear to know what was at stake at the Ministry she had been designated to head. However, Dr Nyarko was of the opinion that it was only in Ghana that proficiency in the English language was equated to intelligence. If for some reasons you arent able to express yourself in the English language fluently, or exhibit mastery over it, then youre considered a persona non grata. This is very sad because proficiency in any language is not necessarily a measure of intelligence. Intelligence transcends that, he pointed out to the Ghana News Agency. He stated that intelligence, in its basic meaning, refers to ones ability to apply acquired knowledge and skill in solving problems. If you are eloquent in any language, but cant solve life or societal problems, how useful is your eloquence? he asked. Dr Nyarko further explained that an intelligent person was not necessarily eloquent, neither was it the one who could write so very well. According to him, an intelligent person was one who had demonstrable ability in solving problems, making society better and improving the lot of others. The Kwadaso MP described Madam Koomson as an intelligent person, who had the ability to accept new challenges and deliver positive outcomes. According to him, when Madam Koomson was appointed by President Akufo-Addo as the Minister for Special Development Initiatives, she discharged her duties perfectly and acquitted herself creditably. He indicated that that was probably the reason why the President nominated her for this new position. Anytime I see Hon Hawa Koomson, I see intelligence in her; I see intelligence in her ability to produce results, he remarked. Dr Nyarko recalled how, when she was appointed Minister for Special Initiatives during President Akufo-Addos first term, she came to the University of Ghana and engaged some colleagues of his (Dr Nyarko) at the Business School who did survey (needs assessment) across the country and helped her to develop a framework that guided her to deliver. If this is not an act of intelligence, then tell me what it is? Look at the positive outcomes she produced at her ministry? The dams in the villages, ambulances for all constituencies and stadia, places of convenience, and the many other social interventions across the length and breadth of the country, he said. Dr Nyarko stressed the need for Ghanaians to judge people based on their past records. Let us look at peoples record in the past, their resolve to transform and their propensity to deliver on their mandate. The Appointments Committee should appreciate the fact that she came to the vetting without an academic or professional knowledge in fishing, yet she demonstrated interests and commitment to a charge, that when given the opportunity, she will deliver, he stated. 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 Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasted the Biden administration Tuesday for reopening a temporary influx center for unaccompanied minors in Carrizo Springs, Texas and a shelter in Miami, Florida, where now-Vice President Kamala Harris protested outside of in June 2019. 'This is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay - no matter the administration or party,' the New York Democrat tweeted. The Washington Post reported Monday that the emergency facility was being reactivated to hold up to 700 children ages 13 through 17. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed the Biden administration for reopening a temporary migrant facility in Texas that will house kids who crossed the border by themselves AOC shared a Washington Post article reporting the opening, which government officials explained was a temporary fix for dealing with overcrowding during the COVID-19 pandemic The Carrizo Springs, Texas facility will hold up to 700 children ages 13 through 17 to allow proper social distancing among the Health and Human Services accomodations for unaccompanied minors The government said it needed to expand its facilities because of the coronavirus pandemic. Officials told The Post that their capacity had been cut in half because of the space needed to adhere to proper social distancing protocols. Additionally, in January, the number of unaccompanied children coming over the border was higher than 5,700, a high watermark in recent years. AOC's voice joined a chorus of immigration lawyers and advocates who are questioning why the government would reopen controversial camps, which have been criticized for their conditions in the past. The Biden administration will also be reopening the Homestead shelter, which now Vice President Kamala Harris protested outside when the Democratic primary candidates were gathered in Miami for the first presidential debate in June 2019. Mark Weber, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs these facilities, told The Post that putting children in permanent facilities is preferred, but because of the pandemic some will have to stay in like influx shelters, like Carrizo and Homestead. He expects that Carrizo will close once the pandemic ends. He also explained that the facilities' reputations were tarnished during the Trump years because people associated them with the cramped detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Biden administration will also be reopening the Homestead shelter, which now Vice President Kamala Harris (pictured in 2019) protested outside when the Democratic primary candidates were gathered in Miami for the first presidential debate in June 2019 Harris is pictured alongside Sen Kirsten Gillibrand as they observed youths incarcerated at a dentition facility near Miami in Homestead, Florida, on June 28, 2019 The Homestead Branch held around 2,300 children from the ages of 13 to 17, who were placed in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services after being detained at the border Weber also argued that children in HHS' care were treated well in both the Trump and Biden administrations. However, he also explained that the Biden administration is moving away from the 'law-enforcement focused' approach of Trump, and will make child welfare central. AOC, who shared the Washington Post story on her Twitter feed, still objected to the Democratic administration's move. 'Our immigration system is built on a carceral framework. It's no accident that challenging how we approach both these issues are considered "controversial" stances. They require reimagining our relationship to each other and challenging common assumptions we take for granted,' the New York progressive said. 'It's only [two months] into this [administration and] our fraught, unjust immigration system will not transform in that time,' she continued. 'That's why bold reimagination is so [important.] DHS shouldn't exist, agencies should be reorganized, ICE gotta go, ban for-profit detention, create climate refugee status & more.' Biden has made some moves on immigration, including releasing a plan that includes a pathway to citizenship. He also signed an executive order ordering the Department of Justice to not renew for-profit prison contracts. He hasn't, yet, made a similar move in regards to immigration facilities. New Delhi: The Centre on Friday informed Rajya Sabha that Aadhaar number is not mandatory for booking rail tickets. In a written reply in the Upper House of Parliament, Union Minister of State for Railways Rajen Gohain asserted that as of now, the government has no plan to make the 12-digit unique identification number mandatory for train reservation. He further added, At present, there is no proposal to make the Aadhaar number compulsory for booking tickets for rail journey. However, with effect from January 1, 2017, the requirement of Aadhaar verification for getting concessional railway tickets for senior citizens has been introduced on a voluntary basis. Also Read | Issues related to Aadhaar to be decided by Constitution bench: SC The ministers statement comes on a day the home ministry made the Aadhaar number mandatory for registration of death with effect from October 1, 2017. Over the last few months, the Aadhaar number has been made mandatory for a range of services and schemesfor bank accounts, to file taxes, for tuberculosis patients to avail treatment under the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP), to avail the benefits under the Maternity Benefit Programme and Integrated Child Protection Scheme and other schemes for farmers, labourers, students etc. (With PTI Inputs) Also Read: Privacy protection is a losing battle in modern era, says Supreme Court For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Today will see a major step forward in plans for a 250m investment in the Derry City and Strabane District Council area. The City Deal proposal involves huge amounts of money being pumped into a wide range of local projects, including major expansion of the Magee campus and the transformation of Derry's riverfront area. The City Deal has been described as the largest ever government investment in the local area. This morning, all the agencies involved will hold a virtual meeting to sign a Heads of Terms Agreement. Such an agreement is seen as a commitment from all those involved to take the proposal forward. While the signing of the Heads of Terms Agreement is being described as a major milestone in the City Deal initiative, the proposed projects are still subject to the expenditure approval process. The proposed investment of 250m will be made up of 105m each from the British government and the Northern Ireland Executive. The remaining 40m will be provided by Derry City and Strabane District Council, Ulster University, North West Regional College, the Western Trust and the C-TRIC initiative which is based at Altnagelvin Hospital. In relation to the planned projects, 45m has been earmarked for the development of Derry's riverfront area from Queen's Quay to the Guildhall. A further 20m would be spent on the creation of a 'Walled City Experience' to boost Derry's tourism industry. An estimated 45m of the City Deal money is planned to be spent on creating a 'healthcare quarter' at Strand Road in partnership with Ulster University. This could see the university take over the current headquarters of the local council, with the council offices being relocated into the city centre. A total of 50m of the money has been earmarked for the regeneration of Strabane town centre. Stormont Finance Minister Conor Murphy, who will sign the Heads of Terms today on behalf of the Executive, said it was a 'key milestone' and a 'very timely' boost for the people of the North West in what has been an extremely tough year. This investment will play a key role as we begin to emerge from the pandemic and our focus turns to rebuilding and restoring our economy, said Mr Murphy. It will bring greater prosperity and social benefits to the whole community, addressing regional imbalance and delivering much needed jobs across the North. Mayor of Derry City and Strabane District Council Brian Tierney said: A funding package of this scale and magnitude will be felt not only in the Derry City and Strabane District Council area, but across the wider North West region and beyond, and will deliver a stronger, more resilient and regionally balanced economy. The City Deal projects have the potential to really change the future of this city and region, to bring life and people back into our city and town centres, attract additional investment that can bring life, culture and opportunity to peoples doorsteps. The signing of the Heads of Terms today sets in motion the work that needs to be done to maximise the opportunities that City Deal can bring in terms of employment opportunities, output growth and a boost in population, the local economy and society. "City Deal allows us to enhance our business offer in growth sectors such as health and life sciences, digital industries and SMART technology and support our digital capabilities to support economic investment and regeneration as well as boost tourism and culture. Key to this will be ensuring that these are underpinned by infrastructural developments and investment in skills to connect people with jobs and to services. We are hugely excited at todays milestone to move to the next stage towards the delivery of an aspiring, creative and forward thinking suite of long-term sustainable projects. An investigation into a ransomware attack on a North Carolina countys computer network showed personal information posted for sale on the dark web, the county said. The Chatham County network was hit on Oct. 28 with ransomware that originated in a phishing email with a malicious attachment, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported last week. It encrypted much of the countys network infrastructure and associated business systems, the county announced. County spokeswoman Kara Dudley said the hacker sent a ransom note asking for 50 bitcoins, or about $2.4 million. The county refused to pay. County staffers are working with the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services and the N.C. Attorney Generals Office to identify files affected by the breach and to notify people whose personally identifiable information or personal health information may be at risk, County Manager Dan LaMontagne told the board of commissioners Monday. The cyberattack shut down most county functions and temporarily cut off public access to services. Data also was stolen from county systems, but LaMontagne said its not known what specifically was taken. The Chatham News & Record reported last week that it found sensitive files, including county employee personnel records, eviction notices and Chatham County Sheriffs Office investigation documents, posted to the internet, including to the dark web. There were two releases, according to the News & Record. On Nov. 4, mostly innocuous files were uploaded, LaMontagne told the newspaper. In January, a second upload included more sensitive data. The newspaper was able to take screenshots of a counter on the site showing the files had been viewed over 30,000 times. Staff had to wipe and re-image the countys servers and over 550 staff computers, LaMontagne said. Staff computers, internet, office phones and voicemail are almost recovered, and they are adding security measures and reinforcing employee training, he said. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Cyber North Carolina If you'd like to leave a comment (or a tip or a question) about this story with the editors, please email us We also welcome letters to the editor for publication; you can do that by filling out our letters form and submitting it to the newsroom. IF you have absolutely no urgent or emergency need to be outdoors today, then remain at home. Should you take a chance and decide to tempt fate, then it may most likely result in you being stopped and questioned by police officers and members of the Defence Force, or even find yourself charged and taken before a court. Victoria has tightened restrictions on travellers from Auckland from Wednesday night after more cases emerged in the city this week. The Department of Health issued a statement late on Wednesday night saying all flights arriving from Auckland into Victoria would be regarded as red zone arrivals from 11.59pm on Wednesday. The updated advice comes after three more cases emerged in Auckland on Tuesday, believed linked to an outbreak on February 14 that plunged the city into a snap three-day lockdown. The statement said anyone arriving into the state from the New Zealand city would have to enter mandatory hotel quarantine for 14 days. New Delhi: In its bid to further increase employment opportunities for the youth in the state, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has targeted banks to give 80 thousand crore loans to Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) in the next financial year. About 20 lakh MSMEs will benefit from this amount. CM Yogi Adityanath also took major initiative during the Corona period, to provide employment to the youth in private sector as well. Loans of Rs 61977 crore (100.35) have been given to MSMEs till December against the allocated target of 61,759 crore in this financial year with special coordination of the state government. For the first time in the state, MSMEs have been given the highest ever loan under the Yogi government which has helped in providing employment opportunities to millions of youth in the state. Apart from this, CM Yogi has also proposed Rs 100 crore for the self-employment scheme in the budget of the next financial year. Economic expert Arvind Jaiswal has said that under the Yogi Adityanath government, MSMEs are not only getting convenience of loans from banks, but the economy of the state and the country is also being strengthened as a result of this. This is also directly and indirectly increasing employment opportunities in the private sector. MSME Additional Chief Secretary Navneet Sehgal said that MSME is proving to be a growth engine for providing employment in the private sector to the youth. In the last four years, 49 lakh MSMEs have invested in the state. He informed that CM Yogi has given a target of giving loan of Rs 80 crore to MSMEs in the next financial year. This will benefit 20 lakh MSMEs and provide employment opportunities to one crore youth. CM Yogi Adityanath has proposed Rs 250 crores for 'One district, one product' (ODOP) for the next financial year in the budget. In ODOP last year, on 14 May, 26 June, 7 August and 3 December, more than 10 lakh beneficiaries were given loans of about 30 thousand crores through four online fairs. The ODOP Virtual Fair was held from October 19 to 23 last year in the wake of the Corona pandemic. It was attended by 35 countries and around 1000 buyers from the country. Loans to the tune of Rs 46,594 crore in the financial year 2017-18, 57,808 crore in 2018-19, 71,080 crore in 2019-20 and 61,977 thousand crore in 2020-21 in the Yogi government. This is 100.35 percent of the target for this financial year. Total loans worth Rs 2,37,459 crore have been granted in the Yogi government till December. Live TV #mute As compared to the above, previous Samajwadi Party government led by CM Akhilesh Yadav had issued Rs 13,248 crore for MSMEs in the financial year 2012-13, Rs 19,249 crore during 2013-14, Rs 22,439 crore in 2014-15, Rs 22,996 crore in 2015-16, Rs 28,136 crore in 2016-17 taking the total loan to Rs one lakh six thousand 68 crore. A fresh internal dispute has erupted within one of Australias largest unions as the construction division of the CFMMEU makes a bid to claim members from the rival mining division. The dispute comes before a key vote next week on whether the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union will split under new federal government laws. For more than 18 months the union has been mired in dysfunction over the alleged misogynistic conduct of John Setka, secretary of the Victorian construction division, who was convicted in 2019 of harassing his wife via text message. John Setka is a key player in the battles within the CFMMEU Credit:Eddie Jim Now a notice sent to national executive members and obtained by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald reveals the construction division wants the right to represent workers who could also be members of the mining division. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Hotel and guesthouse owners in Louth are calling for an urgent review of business and employment supports for the hospitality sector following the announcement that it is unlikely to reopen before mid-summer. They are also asking the Government to intervene with the banks to ensure that appropriate supports and engagement processes are in place for business owners and their team members until Covid 19 has been suppressed. Niall Quinn, Louth representative of the Mourne Boyne Lakes branch of the Irish Hotels Federation warns that failure to act now will have long term implications that could take years to repair. Mr Quinn states: Public health must always be the number one priority and we recognise the difficult balance the Government has to achieve. "However, if the all-important summer period is being eroded, additional supports are required now to safeguard businesses and the livelihoods they support until society reopens and the sector and wider tourism industry can recover. The news at the weekend resulted in acute frustration and anxiety for many people. "Prior to this pandemic, some 2,600 livelihoods were supported by tourism and hospitality in Louth with the sector contributing 90 million to the local economy. "Hotels and guesthouses not only provide local employment opportunities, they buy local services, source locally produced food and provide a vital infrastructure in support of local business and communities. "In some parts, whole communities are built around tourism. "A severely devastated tourism and hospitality sector would be a major loss to the economy and society here for many years to come. "This can and must be avoided. It wasnt that long along ago that in the aftermath of the last financial crisis tourism was the number one sector in terms of job creation. Government must step up with engagement and the required supports to ensure that the sector and its 270,000 community nationwide can recover, he said. By Thyagaraju Adinarayan and David Randall LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - The largest outflow on record for Cathie Wood's ARK fund was not enough to stop the firm from increasing its bet on Tesla Inc after the electric carmaker's stock closed below $700 for the first time this year on Tuesday. Wood, whose $26.6 billion ARK Innovation exchange-traded fund (ETF) was the top-performing actively managed U.S. equity fund tracked by Morningstar last year, bought $171 million of Tesla shares, pushing its weight to about 10% of the fund. Shares of the carmaker jumped 4.7% in ... The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Critic, Femi Fani-Kayode has replied Nigerians who said he is broke and wanted to seek refuse in the All Progressives Congress, APC, sayin... Critic, Femi Fani-Kayode has replied Nigerians who said he is broke and wanted to seek refuse in the All Progressives Congress, APC, saying that he has 55 domestic staff in his house alone and pays them regularly. He said he is not broke as being championed by his haters. Fani-Kayode, in an article on his blog said: You insult me and say I am broke because I had talks with two APC Governors. Do you know that I spend more on my monthly salary bill in one month than some of these people that are claiming I am broke earn in 5 or 10 years? I have 55 domestic staff in my house alone. Not one of them gets below 70,000 naira per month which is higher than the national minimum wage. I do not owe salaries and I feed each of them three square meals every day. I do all this just to help them and to ensure they can look after and feed their families. Does that sound like a broke man to you? That is my little contribution to the welfare of our people because I certainly do not need so many staff. I employ them just to keep them off the unemployment line, he said. He asked further: Apart from that do you know how many people I give scholarships to and how many peoples children I feed and educate? Do you know how many other families I am responsible for in terms of day to day living? The Bible says be your brothers keeper and I do these things unto the Lord. I do them and I will never stop even when my good is repaid with evil. The Lord has always provided for me and given me the fat of the land. He has always caused me to be a blessing to others though I do not make noise about it. Fani-Kayode said for the last 60 years of his life, God has been good to him as He caused him to excel, prosper and flourish and that from beginning to end, He has always been with him. You say I make money through politics, meanwhile I left public office in 2007 which is 13 years ago! Does that make sense to you? In any case is politics my only source of income in the world? Am I your conventional politician who craves for elective office? Do I even attend their meetings? I have been in this game since 1990! Do you know that? I have been making my contributions to current affairs, political discourse and politics for the last 31 years which is long before most of todays Governors or Ministers even knew the meaning of the word. And it was always a struggle which involved sacrifice. Where were my detractors when I was in NADECO and fought against military rule? The records are there and so are the essays and some of the people I worked with. Where were they when we set up September Club in 1989 and some of the nations greatest leaders and elder statesmen and top politicians over the last 30 years, including Presidents, Governors, Ministers and legislators across party lines, were members. Where were they in the days of NRC, SDP and Choice 92 when politics was real, when the greats held sway and when men honored their word. Where were they when we risked all for MKO Abiolas stolen mandate and June 12th and even had to go into exile for years because of it? Where were they when we stood against the annulment of June 12th and fought against the Government of General Sani Abacha? He asked. MEDFORD A Roseburg man who shot at cars along Interstate 5 in southwest Oregon from his UPS vehicle has pleaded guilty to multiple charges, according to county officials. Kenneth Ayers, 49, pleaded guilty to three counts of attempted murder, five counts of unlawful use of a weapon, three counts of reckless endangerment and multiple counts of criminal mischief, the Jackson County District Attorneys Office said in a news release Tuesday. The incidents, investigated by the Oregon State Police and local law enforcement agencies, happened from May into August 2020. During the investigation, a number of the victims reported traveling near a semi-truck when the shootings happened, some identifying the truck being a UPS double or triple trailer, the District Attorneys Office said. On Aug. 19, a woman was shot in the shoulder while driving on I-5 between Gold Hill and Central Point and police arrested Ayers about 60 miles away. He was employed by UPS as a driver at the time. No motive for the shootings has been released. His sentencing has been set for March. --The Associated Press The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company First batch of mainland-manufactured COVID-19 vaccines arrived in Hong Kong, south China on Feb. 19, 2021. (Xinhua/Li Gang) HONG KONG, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government has earmarked over 8.4 billion Hong Kong dollars (1.08 billion U.S. dollars) for the procurement and administration of COVID-19 vaccines, aiming to have the majority of the population vaccinated for free this year, a senior government official said Wednesday. "It is the government's top priority to contain the epidemic so that businesses and the public can be back to their daily routines," said Financial Secretary of the HKSAR government Paul Chan when delivering the annual budget. With the first batch of mainland-manufactured COVID-19 vaccines arriving in Hong Kong last Friday, the vaccination program started on Tuesday. The HKSAR government will also propose 1 billion Hong Kong dollars by the end of February to establish a vaccination indemnity fund, said Chan. Besides funding support for vaccination, the government has allocated 4.7 billion Hong Kong dollars to support the anti-epidemic work, including better protection for frontline healthcare staff. Chan said the government also provides an extra 3 billion Hong Kong dollars mainly for Hong Kong's Hospital Authority to establish and operate a community treatment facility and an infection control center, with the former commencing services in phases since last August and the latter from the end of this month. (1 U.S. dollar equals 7.75 Hong Kong dollars) Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. A coalition of Malaysian and international media organisations and freedom of expression groups, including the Centre for Independent Journalism, Gerakan Media Merdeka and the National Union of Journalists Peninsula Malaysia, and global partners International Federation of Journalists, Article 19, Reporters Without Borders and the Centre for Law and Democracy are concerned that the Malaysian Federal Courts 19 February 2021 conviction of online news outlet Malaysiakini on contempt of court charges will have a serious chilling effect on media freedom and freedom of expression. Malaysia has experienced unprecedented political turmoil since the Perikatan National coalition of political parties took power in March 2020 and is currently under a State of Emergency which was proclaimed on 11 January 2021. Increasingly, we are seeing journalists and news portals being investigated by the police and charged with criminal offences because of their reporting. Media operations in Malaysia are more controlled and restricted than ever since the change of government last year. The decision of the apex court comes at a time when the government is silencing dissent and cracking down on those challenging or questioning the current regime. We call on the Malaysian government to end and refrain from the continued use of intimidating measures to threaten and punish the media and silence opinions. We note that any restrictions on freedom of expression should be clear and narrowly defined, and serve a legitimate interest as recognised under international law, while meeting the internationally established tests of necessity and proportionality. Punishing a news portal over comments left by their readers, which they removed upon being notified that the comments were problematic, is grossly disproportionate to any legitimate aim of protecting public order, and seriously undermines freedom of expression. Specifically, the Federal Court held that the online news portal Malaysiakini was guilty of contempt of court for comments posted by third party subscribers on their site and fined an exorbitant amount of Malaysian Ringgit 500,000 (USD125,000). Steven Gan, the editor-in-chief, was acquitted as the second respondent. Malaysiakini was first alerted by the police about five allegedly contemptuous comments left by their readers in the comments section of a news article on the judiciarys decision to reopen its courts. Following the police notification, the comments were immediately taken down by Malaysiakini. Notwithstanding that, the Attorney General initiated contempt of court proceedings against Malaysiakini and its editor-in-chief in June 2020 on the basis that these comments threaten public confidence in the judiciary and are clearly aimed at tarnishing the administration of justice by the judiciary. According to the Attorney General, Malaysiakini had facilitated the publication of the five comments, which were themselves unwarranted and demeaning attacks on the judiciary. The Federal Court on 19 February 2021 found Malaysiakini guilty as they were deemed to be publishers of the impugned comments under Section 114A of the Evidence (Amendment) (No.2) Act 2012. This Act is highly controversial and has been criticised for its overreach in making internet intermediaries liable for content that is published through their services. It further applies a presumption of guilt doctrine. This decision imposes an obligation on all online news portals to ensure that they moderate, and ultimately censor, comments before they are posted to avoid liability. This goes against even the internationally contested standard of flag and take down, while better practice is to protect intermediaries until an authoritative source, such as a court, orders them to take content down. To comply with this rule would require extensive resources to be mobilised to manage the flow of third party comments. Online media, already under tremendous financial pressures, are instead likely to completely remove the comment option to mitigate the risks and save funds. This, in turn, would seriously undermine the critical role of media in facilitating space for public participation, which allows ideas and opinions to be exchanged and dissent and protests on matters of public interests to be expressed freely as a fundamental and constitutional right. It is also discouraging to see the archaic approach to the legal doctrine of scandalising the court which was applied. While we recognise the key role played by an independent judiciary, at the same time the public should be able to express critical views about the judiciary, and have those views published by the media, without being threatened with legal proceedings. Public confidence in relation to all branches of the State, including the administration of justice, should be fostered through public criticism and debate, not suppression of democratic dissent. The State should be cautious of undermining its own stature and credibility through the repressive application of legal practices, which is likely to provoke discontent and suspicion rather than bolster the status of public institutions. An example of this was seen in the publics reaction to the decision against Malaysiakini and the outpouring of monetary support enabling Malaysiakini to reach its fundraising target of the 500,000 Malaysian Ringgit it was fined within less than 4 hours. Resistance can take many forms and the people have clearly demonstrated their protest against this injustice and attempt to silence the media. Malaysia must stop using its significant arsenal of repressive and archaic laws, such as the Evidence Act, Communications and Multimedia Act, Sedition Act, Official Secrets Act and the Printing Presses and Publications Act, amongst others, to defend its institutions. Instead, these laws should be reviewed and amended or repealed to ensure compliance with international standards. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 22:30:42|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close TOKYO, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Japanese Cabinet met on Wednesday to discuss the possibility of cutting short the COVID-19 emergency period of some regions to ealier than March 7. Japanese Prime Minster Yoshihide Suga held talks with Cabinet members including Health Minister Norihisa Tamura and Yasutoshi Nishimura, the minister in charge of the government's pandemic response, following a health ministry panel saying COVID-19 infections nationwide were declining. Under the state of emergency, infections had fallen although the pace of decline had slowed from mid-February, it said. The panel added that ongoing efforts were needed to bring the pandemic under control and medical facilities dealing with COVID-19 cases still remained strained, although the situation had improved too. Informed sources said that of the 10 prefectures under the state of emergency, Aichi, Gifu, Kyoto, Osaka, Hyogo and Fukuoka could be removed from the list as early as this weekend as their COVID-19 situation, including strains on their medical systems, have improved. The Greater Tokyo area, which comprises neighboring Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama prefectures are likely to remain under the state of emergency, the sources said, as necessary improvements have not been seen. The Tokyo metropolitan government on Wednesday reported 213 new daily COVID-19 cases, bringing the city's total tally to 110,400. The daily count in the capital of 14 million has remained under 500 for 18 straight days and under 300 for four days in a row. According to health officials, the number of people designated as being in a "serious condition" stood at 69, compared to 77 the previous day. The governors of Kyoto, Osaka and Hyogo made a joint request to Nishimura on Tuesday for their prefectures to be allowed to exit early from the emergency period. The governor of Aichi Prefecture has similarly asked for the state of emergency to be lifted early and the governor of Gifu has said he wants the emergency period lifted at the same time as Aichi. Fukuoka Prefecture has also asked for the emergency period to be lifted before the initial deadline of March 7. Suga declared Japan's second state of emergency on Jan. 7 for the Greater Tokyo area before expanding it to include 11 prefectures in total. It was later extended to March 7 for all prefectures with the exception of Tochigi. Under the state of emergency, restaurants and bars are asked to close by 8 p.m. and people are encouraged to work from home and not make unnecessary trips outdoors, especially in the evenings. Spectator capacity at large events has also been capped. Enditem Indonesia to see sharpest surge in wealthy people Fuelled by the vaccination-based recovery, Indonesia is set to see a 67 per cent growth surge in the number of people becoming high net worth individuals over the period of five years through 2025, according to a Knight-Frank report. Indonesia's surge comfortably beats China, which is seventh on the list with an expected 46 per cent rise in the wealthy. India takes the second spot with a projected annual growth rate of 63 per cent over the next five years. Poland, Sweden, France and New Zealand take up third through sixth spots. Victoria Garrett, head of residential for Asia-Pacific at Knight Frank says: "while Covid slowed the world's economic momentum, the Asia-Pacific overall has adapted well to new trends and opportunities, strengthening its foothold as a wealth hub." Read here Let's look at the global statistics Global infections: 112,116,627 Global deaths: 2,485,601 Nations with most cases: US (28,261,585), India (11,030,176), Brazil (10,257,875), United Kingdom (4,146,756), Russia (4,142,126). Source: John Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center Oil market bounces back from Covid depths On the back of vaccination hopes, oil market is fast emerging from the depths of the pandemic. After reaching negative levels last year on demand-related concerns, West Texas reached $60 per barrel this month at one point of time. That is an increase of over 60 per cent from october last year. On April 20, last year the WTI benchmark fell to as low as minus $37.63 a barrel on bets that the pandemic would decimate global oil demand. Experts say governments spending, including the $1.9 trillion stimulus of Joe Biden, output cuts from leading oil producers are sustaining current price levels. OPEC-plus has since January reduced oil production by 7.2 million barrels a day, around 7% of global demand. Read here Rivals make unsual alliances to produce vaccines Some of the hottest corporate battles across the world would take place, usually, in the pharma industry, with drugmakers competing for cancer and other drugs. However, that was before Covid. The pandemic has forced pharma giants to forge unsual alliances with rivals to produce more vaccine doses. Sanofi recently agreed to help make a vaccine from Pfizer and its partner BioNTech after Sanofis experimental Covid-19 shot suffered a five-month setback. Novartis also agreed to help Pfizer and BioNTech produce more doses, while Baxter and Endo have agreed to help Novavax produce its shot. These collaborations, however short-term and unsual, will boost the global vaccination output as governments seek more and more doses. Read here WHO reports 20 per cent drop in global deaths In a significant downturn, the world health organization said global deaths have declined by 20 per cent compared to the last week. This coincides with the decline in cases across the world. According to the WHO, nearly 66,000 coronavirus-related deaths were reported last week, marking the third straight week of drop. The number of new cases also dropped by 11 percent for the sixth consecutive week, the agency said, taking the total number of cases to more than 110 million since the start of the pandemic. Read here Willis Towers Watson and Liberty Specialty Markets have partnered to offer reputational crisis insurance that enables organizations to transfer the financial risk associated with certain types of reputational crises and provides access to non-insurance capabilities, including AI-powered data analysis. The new Reputational Crisis Insurance includes live, client-controlled reputational data and intelligence analysis provided by Polecat Intelligence Limited. The coverage is available globally and is initially available to clients in the leisure & hospitality, manufacturing, retail and transportation sectors. According to Lewis Edwards, head of Underwriting, Specialty Binders at Liberty Specialty Markets, clients increasing exposure to both traditional media and social media has led to a rise in reputational losses globally. The new product provides coverage for the loss of an organizations gross profit following a reputational crisis event and provides financial protection as well as tools to protect a companys reputation. The ability to act quickly and transparently can have a hugely positive impact on a crisis outcome, he said. Liberty Specialty Markets offers specialty and commercial insurance and reinsurance products across UK, European, Middle East, US, Bermuda, Asia Pacific & Latin America markets. Topics Excess Surplus New Markets Willis Towers Watson We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. Linda Thomas-Greenfield appears before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on her nomination to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Jan. 27, 2021. (Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images) Republicans Voted Against UN Ambassador Because of Her Stance on CCP Republicans on Tuesday cited Linda Thomas-Greenfields stance on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the reason why they voted against her confirmation to the position of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The Senate on Tuesday confirmed the President Joe Biden nominee to the position nearly a month after her confirmation hearing. The vote was 75-20, with all of the no votes coming from Republicans. Thomas-Greenfield, 68, is a 35-year veteran of the Foreign Service who has served on four continents, most notably in Africa. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in a statement cited his concerns over her alleged rush to embrace the CCP. In the first weeks of the new administration, I have been deeply troubled by President Bidens nominees dangerous rush to embrace the worst elements of the Chinese Communist Party. Ms. Thomas-Greenfields record shows a pattern of apologizing for China, praising their Belt and Road Initiative, failing to call out their human rights atrocities and political oppression, and downplaying the risk China poses to the security and safety of the American people, said Cruz, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) speaks at a Senate hearing on Capitol Hill, Washington, on Feb. 23, 2021. (Andrew Harnik, Pool/AP Photo) Additionally, I believe that Ms. Thomas-Greenfields decision to give remarks at an event sponsored by the Confucius Institute, a key propaganda platform for the CCP, should be disqualifying, he added. Cruz was referring to remarks that Thomas-Greenfield gave at a 2019 event sponsored by the communist-supported Confucius Institute network. There, at the Savannah State University Confucius Institute, she spoke positively about China and how the CCP has invested in Africa including in railway projects and other infrastructure development. The CCP has been working to gain greater global influence, often by providing loans to developing nations in Africa and elsewhere that tie them closer to Beijing. The United States desperately needs a U.N. ambassador who will stand up to China and their pervasive influence at the United Nations, Cruz said in his statement. Due to her extensive record, I do not believe Ms. Thomas-Greenfield is capable of doing so and therefore oppose her nomination. I remain dedicated to engaging vigorously with the Biden administration and State Department to combat Chinas malign influence throughout the world. A number of other senators also issued public statements on Tuesday, citing Thomas-Greenfields stance on the communist regime as the key reason why they opposed her confirmation to the role of U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee like Cruz, said in a statement prior to the confirmation vote that he opposed Thomas-Greenfield for the United Nations post because she has a record of repeatedly downplaying communist Chinas predatory actions. To back up his assertion, Hagerty cited the 2019 paid speech by Thomas-Greenfield at the Confucius Institute sponsored event, as well as her having waffled on acknowledging the genocide against Uyghurs taking place in China during her confirmation hearing. Then-Sen.-elect Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) meets with the media in Washington on Nov. 9, 2020. (Stefani Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images) Contrary to [her] previous claims, China does not have a firm commitment to good governance, gender equity, and the rule of law. For these reasons, I could not support her confirmation, he said. The United States needs a representative at the United Nations who fully comprehends the diplomatic, economic, technological, military, and moral dimensions of the most serious global challenge we facethe communist regime in China as well as one who is clear-eyed about other threats to our Republic and allies, he also wrote. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) also cited the 2019 speech as part of the reason why she opposed Thomas-Greenfield for the position. We need a U.N. ambassador who will stop Beijing in its tracks, not one who repeats the CCPs foreign policy concepts, Blackburn announced on Twitter. In 2019, Linda Thomas-Greenfield referred to pervasive communist influence as a win-win-win situation at a Confucius Institute anniversary event. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) meets with President Donald Trump and bipartisan members of Congress to discuss school and community safety in the Cabinet Room of the White House, on Feb. 28, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said on Twitter Thomas-Greenfields nomination represents another signal of weakness to Beijing. He also wrote that in the last month, there has been a gradual erosion of Americas resolve in confronting China. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) on Twitter alleged that Thomas-Greenfield believes the U.S. should accept a restrained, diminished, and wilting position on the global stage. We need diplomats who will be strong and stand up for American interests in the face of our adversaries like communist China, he wrote. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) speaks during a press conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on March 25, 2020. (Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images) The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times. At her confirmation hearing in late January, Greenfield expressed regret for having accepted the invitation to speak at the 2019 event when asked about the matter by multiple senators. She also said she was surprised that the institute was involved in activities in Georgia high schools and elementary schools. When Cruz asked Thomas-Greenfield as to how she could reconcile that she had spoken at a Confucius Institute and how the CCP has been using the Confucius Institutes for CCP-aligned propaganda, she replied that the CCP is undermining our values and undermining what we believe in. Theyre undermining our security and our people. We need to work against that, she said at the time, adding that she looks forward to addressing such issues and will be working aggressively against the Chinese efforts in New York, where the United Nations is headquartered. Frank Fang, Zachary Stieber, and Reuters contributed to this report. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 22:31:13|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close LUANSHYA, Zambia, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The labor movement in Zambia has implored Zambian workers to appreciate efforts by their Chinese employers for having kept their firms operational and maintained jobs amidst the COVID-19. Speaking in an interview with Xinhua Wednesday, Tresford Chikope, who is Luanshya district chairman for Zambia Congress of Trade Unions, said the Chinese entrepreneurs have managed to keep their business running while strictly adhering to COVID-19 preventive measures. "Most of our members engaged by Chinese firms are in employment, as the Chinese entrepreneurs are strictly adhering to COVID-19 preventive measures to ensure their business activities continue running safely," Chikope said. According to Chikope, families of workers engaged by the Chinese entrepreneurs were normally enjoying life under the COVID-19 pandemic by adhering to the laid down preventive measures. Also, the Chinese companies in the area have demonstrated that they are committed to high productivity, he said. Andrew Mwale, one of the workers employed by the Chinese, said he was happy that his company, Kusamangala Enterprises, which is a business selling stationery, was also giving them health tips on how to protect themselves against the pandemic. "Apart from that we are also given face masks to protect ourselves and our families against COVID-19," he said. Mwale expressed happiness that the Chinese entrepreneurs were committed to enhancing Zambia's national development amidst the deadly COVID-19. "The Chinese have proved that they are committed to enhancing Zambia's national development by ensuring that businesses continue to be operational during these difficult times," he said. He urged his fellow workers to remain committed to duty and be productive as an indication that will result in maintaining jobs for all stakeholders. Enditem GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- The Grand Rapids metropolitan area and West Michigan is estimated to return to pre-pandemic employment levels in 2022 or 2023, based on the latest research. The forecasts presented Tuesday morning, Feb. 23, to the Grand Rapids City Commission by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research also show lost employment in the Grand Rapids metro area bottomed out in 2020 and is beginning to come back. (The forecast line) is really showing by 2022, so really in the next 15 to 24 months, a recovery for employment in the Grand Rapids area, said Jim Robey, the institutes director of regional economic planning services. I think were seeing that now with tight labor markets. The forecast starts with roughly 900,000 people employed in the Grand Rapids metro area in 2019. The latest projection estimates the workforce was reduced by about 60,000 in 2020. The Grand Rapids metro area examined in the forecast is largely a group of West Michigan counties. It includes Allegan, Barry, Ionia, Kent, Montcalm, Muskegon and Ottawa counties. The total population is about 1.43 million people. While the forecast is dated to November, Robey said a more-recent employment prediction was released last week that shows an even stronger recovery. Employment change forecasts presented Tuesday by officials from the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. Other projections presented Tuesday were formulated in March, May and August 2020 and show a much slower return to pre-pandemic employment forecasts. Only one of them, the May forecast, shows employment remaining far below pre-pandemic forecasts over the next decade. Robey also presented the most recent data on unemployment in the metro area. As of December 2020, unemployment stood around 4.2%, or roughly 23,000 people looking for work. Just before the pandemic, unemployment was around 3.6% or 3.7%, Robey said. At its highest point in the pandemic, unemployment sharply spiked to around 21% in the Grand Rapids metro area, according to Robeys chart. You really are probably at full employment, he said, and as weve talked with some of the staffing agencies we know that wages are going up simply due to demand and lack of supply of workers -- increased demand, lack of supply. Data presented Tuesday also showed how Grand Rapids has exceeded the United States and Michigan in jobs recovered since the pandemic shutdown. Your recovery has far exceeded both Michigan and well above that of the U.S. You really are in a good position, Robey said. This is very similar to what we see looking back from the Great Recession, that you all were a shining point, particularly in manufacturing. Commissioners on Tuesday were also briefed on efforts over the past year by The Right Place economic development organization, COVID-19 business relief grants and economic recovery efforts by the city. Read more: New jobs, capital investment down in West Michigan amid global pandemic Police expected violence at U.S. Capitol but werent ready for coordinated attack. Michigan senator leads probe to learn why. Grand Rapids Symphony set for online concert Soul of the City Egyptian authorities Tuesday released a university professor and activist after he spent about a year and a half in pre-trail detention, his lawyer said. Hazem Hosny, a political science professor at Cairo University, arrived at his home in Cairo a day after a prosecutor ordered his conditional release. Hosny was set free pending an investigation into allegations he disseminated false news and joined an outlawed group, his lawyer, Khalid Ali, said. Hosny was a spokesman for the 2018 presidential campaign of Sami Annan, who served as chief of staff for former president Hosni Mubarak. Hosny was arrested in September 2019 following small but rare anti-government protests. Hundreds were arrested at the time, but many were released. Hosny is required to stay at home as part of his conditional release, Ali said. Egyptian authorities have in recent years launched a wide-ranging crackdown on dissent, jailing thousands of people, mainly Islamists, but also several well-known secular activists. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) AFL superstar Nic Naitanui admits he was so terrified he cried during a dangerous trip to the Middle East in the off-season. The West Coast Eagles ruckman was on holiday Israel in 2018 when he decided he wanted to venture to Palestine, the Gaza Strip, and the Syrian border. But Naitanui got far more than he bargained for and even had to hide in a car under a jacket and yell 'I'm from Fiji' potential violence. 'I was really scared... I'm happy to say I cried. I cried, I laid down and cried, but I'm happy I did it and I won't do it again,' he told the Ordineroli Speaking podcast. AFL superstar Nic Naitanui (left with his girlfriend Brittany) has lifted the lid on his wild trip to the Middle East The West Coast Eagles ruckman was on holiday Israel in 2018 when he decided he wanted to venture to the Gaza Strip and Syrian border. He is pictured in Old City Jerusalem The 30-year-old said he likes to travel somewhere 'different' - but his footy club were not necessarily happy with his unconventional travel style. 'When people think of a holiday they think of an amazing island... For me, I try to get the complete opposite,' he said. 'Sometimes I go to the extreme level and I go to places you probably shouldn't travel.' The Eagles star said he was 'safe' in Israel but found himself in some 'sticky situations' once crossing into Palestinian areas. 'I remember one time I had to lay down flat in the car and put a jacket over my head because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,' he said. 'Because I looked like an American and I was screaming 'I'm from Fiji!'.' Naitanui said the trip was a 'big eyeopener' and a 'different world' to his reality at home in Perth. 'Yeah it was different. When you're seeing missiles flying over your head at night time or people walking around with machine guns like AK-47s in the street, things like that,' he said. 'You see militant groups running wild on the back of their Toyota hiluxes.' Naitanui said the trip was a 'big eyeopener' and a 'different world' to his reality at home in Perth. He is pictured in the Dead Sea in Israel Naitanui is seen warming up before the AFL Marsh Community Series pre-season match between the West Coast Eagles and the Essendon Bombers at Mineral Resources Park in Perth, on February 27 2020 Naitanui said he wouldn't recommend visiting that part of the world, appearing to have learned his lesson. 'The club didn't really like me going there, but I'm a free man, I'm a free spirit and free to travel where I can, when I can,' he said. Naitanui aid he was only able to venture to far more dangerous areas by convincing Julie Bishop, who was the foreign affairs minister up until August 2018, to grease the wheels. 'She was the number one ticket holder for a while at West Coast, and she helped me get in contact with a few people and put me in the right places,' Naitanui said. 'Growing up here in the [notoriously rough] Perth suburb of Midland, a lot of people think they're gangsters. You're not gangsters. 'You go over there, those guys are gangsters, they are real thugs.' In terms of Jewish holidays, Purim is far down on the list of significance within the faith, and its certainly not one of those days well known by people not of the faith, according to a Portland rabbi. But she said the message, one cloaked in fun, is powerful and timely. Its not essential, not like the Day of Atonement, said Rabbi Eve Posen, associate rabbi at Congregation Neveh Shalom in Southwest Portland. But it is a holiday that reminds us of the good and gives us a reason to celebrate, even in times of hatred. There is no mention of God, no solemnity or silence, she said, but there is the chance, for one night, to disengage with the seriousness of the world. Purim, she said, is a time to have a party, the agenda all about celebrating, eating and having fun. This year, given the ongoing turmoil, uncertainty and virus that have been the backdrop to our isolated lives for too long, the message of Purim may be more meaningful. The holiday is always celebrated on the 14th day of a month based on the Hebrew calendar. This year, it begins Thursday evening. There are four specific calls to action, but they are rooted in joy, a chance to revel in fellowship and also to contemplate the lessons of perseverance and endurance. Purim, which began more than 2,500 years ago, celebrates the power of the Jewish people to save themselves at a moment in time when the ruling king planned to wipe them out. The holiday has its roots as do religious tenets in all faiths in a story that can, in the retelling without a map and flow chart, seem confusing. Posen understands that and created a humorous video in which she explains the essence of the holiday. (Its one of several in a series explaining What the Heck is That Holiday?) She said the story, set in a town in the Persian Empire, is about the fear of difference. The king had an adviser, Haman, who feared the Jews and their religious convictions, she said. He sought to have the king kill them rather than learning about them. One Jew heard about this and took advantage of the situation because the king needed a new queen. He sent in his niece Esther, who was Jewish, to become the queen. Esther convinced the king to allow the Jews to fight and kill their enemies on the very day they were to be killed. They did so, and that date became the day to celebrate Purim. The story portrays one character as pure evil and the other who is the hero, she said. Theres a little bit of both those characteristics in all of us. We must fight within ourselves to do what feels safe and what feels brave, to fight for ourselves and for others. Because of COVID-19, Jewish people have not been able to gather in groups or in synagogues for any Jewish holiday since celebrating Purim on March 9, 2020. We did not fully understand what was on the horizon, said Posen. We thought it would be 14 days of shutdown and then back to the world. We had very little fear of the disease. Then the world and everyones lives changed. This year Purim is a reminder of resilience, said Posen. That is the story of Purim. They tried to kill us, and we survived. Purim honors the past, keeps people rooted in the present and looks to the future, said Rabbi Chayim E. Mishulovin. He is with Chabad of Oregon, an organization not affiliated with a particular synagogue in the metropolitan area but one that serves as a spiritual home for those of the Jewish faith, or those interested in learning more. If not for the day we celebrate, he said, we would not be here. In any other year, Purim would be celebrated with a carnival for adults and children. People dress up in costumes and often wear masks, said Posen. Thats funny this year because we are celebrating on Zoom and no one will have a mask. Over the weekend, Congregation Neveh Shalom held a drive-thru carnival so kids could dress up and receive gifts, an important part of the day. It is a time for fun, she said. We can say that the year has been hard, but here we are again. Posen said the faithful are asked to do four things: Hear the story of Purim as written, give gifts to friends, give gifts to the poor and take care of others in the way God cares for the faithful. Mishulovin said Purim was instituted the meaning and lessons put down on paper so that for all time the Jewish people would never forget their history. We celebrate it every year in the exact way, he said. Millions of Jews around the world will celebrate in every corner and condition of this world. In the midst of the revelry, he said the story takes on more significance and relevance in 2021. With all the chaos we are experiencing it seems as if God is masked, and we are dealing with a series of events not being orchestrated, he said. Purim reminds us there is nothing in this world that is not part of a divine plan. Mishulovin said he personally knows of dozens of people across the United States who have died from COVID-19. The pandemic is bad, he said. Really bad. But we need to remember this is not the end of the world. Thursday night, he said, the faithful will focus on a powerful truth that this, too, will pass. We need to open our eyes for a moment, he said. We can look for the positivity, or we can go around on autopilot or dig deeper. If we dig deeper, we see there is much more there. Focus on the story and on the spirituality of the message. Focus on how you can help others. -- Tom Hallman Jr; thallman@oregonian.com; 503-221-8224; @thallmanjr I handled a caseload that covered counties all over the state and was able to take the very first case I was assigned to the Indiana Supreme Court, which was an unreal experience that I am forever grateful for, particularly as a young attorney at the time, Pol said. Emily Mieure covers criminal justice and emergency news. She also leads the News&Guides investigative efforts. She has reported for WDRB TV in Louisville, Ky., WFIE TV in Evansville, Ind., and WEIU TV in Charleston, Ill. Spains last statue honouring General Franco has been removed more than 40 years after it was erected in the North African enclave of Melilla. The removal of the monument to Spains former dictator, described as the only statue dedicated to a dictator still in the public sphere in Europe, follows a 2007 law calling for the removal of all symbols connected to Franco's regime. Only the far-right Vox Party opposed its removal, claiming the statue celebrated Franco's military role and not his dictatorship. On Tuesday, a day after the local assembly voted to take the statue down, workers used a mechanical digger and heavy drills to chip away at its brick platform before putting a chain around its neck and carrying it away in bubble wrap. The controversial monument, installed in Melilla in 1978, three years after the dictator's death, was moved from its former home elsewhere in Melilla in 2005 due to building works. Vox said earlier this month that it was strongly opposed to the removal of the statue, arguing it celebrated the fascist leader's earlier role as commander of the Spanish Legion in the Rif war of the 1920s, when Spain managed to keep control of Melilla after Moroccan tribes almost captured the town. Elena Fernandez Trevino, in charge of culture in Spanish autonomous city, which sits on the Mediterranean and shares a border with Morocco, called it a historic day. On Tuesday, workers used a mechanical digger and heavy drills to chip away at the statues brick platform (REUTERS) The statue to Franco was the last one remaining in Spain (REUTERS) Spains 2007 Historical Memory law has been used to erase Francos legacy, including taking over the former dictator's summer palace from his heirs last September. In 2019, Francos remains were moved from a vast mausoleum to a low-key grave ending what was effectively the last monument to a dictator in western Europe. A strict vegetarian who hasn't eaten meat for 30 years was 'sick for days' after biting into king prawns hidden in her Lidl spinach cannelloni. Charlotte Eddy, 40, was horrified to find seafood inside the spinach and ricotta cannelloni she purchased from the supermarket in Trowbridge, Wiltshire last week. She claims the incident has 'shattered her trust' in Lidl, saying she was left 'feeling sick for days' after eating meat for the first time in three decades. The banking consultant added she has binned all her other ready meals from the store, insisting she believes lives could be at risk if companies fail to list allergens processed in the same factory. Charlotte Eddy, 40, was horrified to find seafood inside the spinach and ricotta cannelloni she purchased from the supermarket in Trowbridge, Wiltshire last week She claims the incident has 'shattered her trust' in Lidl, saying she was left 'feeling sick for days' after eating meat for the first time in three decades. Pictured: The packaging Pictured: The prawns Ms Eddy claims she found in her spinach and ricotta cannelloni She said: 'On Saturday, I cooked [the meal] and thought there was a heck of a lot of sauce on it. I put it in my mouth and knew straight away the texture wasn't right. 'I bit into the prawn and I felt sick. I spat it out and delved into it a bit. I found three really large king prawns. I haven't eaten much all weekend. I've been living on bread. 'I just felt so physically sick and it's not nice. I knew the texture was not something I was used to having. 'I've got [other ready meals] now that I've thrown in the bin. I don't want to eat them or look at them. It's put me off. I don't normally have a ready meal and I thought they looked so nice. 'It's difficult. I'm the only veggie in the house and now I'm panicking about what food to eat. This item needs recalling now as it could kill someone with an allergy.' Ms Eddy says she always checks the packaging of products to see if they were made in a factory where seafood is processed. The mother-of-two claims the packaging of her cannelloni did not contain warnings for shellfish. The banking consultant added she has binned all her other ready meals from the store, insisting she believes lives could be at risk if companies fail to list allergens processed in the same factory The mother-of-two claims the packaging of her cannelloni did not contain warnings for shellfish She said: 'I always read the point where it says if it was made in a factory containing nuts or seafood. If I ever read it's been produced in a factory containing seafood, I don't buy it for the risk of cross contamination. 'I don't know how I didn't see [the prawns] but I wasn't expecting [them] to be there. 'Shellfish is a major allergy. All I can assume is the factory is used for seafood as well. 'Even if it's made in a factory, it should say it on the pack. I wouldn't dream of buying a meal that was made in a factory that used meat products.' Ms Eddy said she may now return to shop at Tesco. She added: 'Even my husband was really shocked because he knows how much I check everything and how careful I am. He wasn't too happy with it. Ms Eddy (seen with her husband Michael) says she always checks the packaging of products to see if they were made in a factory where seafood is processed A spokesperson for Lidl said: 'We were very sorry to hear of this matter as it is never our intention for a customer to be dissatisfied in any way'. Pictured: Ms Eddy 'I'd had a conversation with my dad that day about how I was shopping more at Lidl and really starting to like their food. 'I've ended up thinking "right, that's it. I'm back to Tesco". All the adverts say Lidl will save you money and it does. 'We're a family of six and our food bill is shocking. Lidl is really good to help with that, but now, I'm not rushing back there at all and my bills are going to be more.' A spokesperson for Lidl said: 'We were very sorry to hear of this matter as it is never our intention for a customer to be dissatisfied in any way. 'As soon as the customer raised their concerns with us an investigation was launched with our supplier. We are in direct contact with the customer and will keep them fully updated of our findings.' A spokesperson for Laila's Fine Foods, who are listed as the manufacturer of the cannelloni, said: 'Product safety and quality are of the utmost importance to us and we are working closely with Lidl to investigate these claims.' Worried that the carnival at the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo could become a COVID-19 hotbed, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said he worked out an agreement with rodeo organizers cancel the event and the county would make up a portion of the lost revenue. At their Jan. 12 meeting, Bexar County commissioners voted to contribute $741,600 to the rodeo organization for scholarships. Later that week, rodeo officials pulled the carnival from the lineup of events. During the commissioners meeting, however, no one mentioned the deal. The carnival would have been more dangerous than the rodeo shows, Wolff said in an interview. We helped them out, and they canceled the carnival. Revenue from the carnival and other events at the 18-day stock show and rodeo, which ends Sunday, goes to scholarships for high school and college students. Last years event generated $12 million for scholarships. The carnival had been one of the rodeos most popular events. This year, it would have featured as many as 45 rides and 40 carnival game vendors and food stands, said Frank Zaitshik, owner of Wade Shows, the carnivals operator for the past 17 years. The stock show and rodeo attracted 1.9 million visitors in 2020, though its unclear how many visited the carnival. On ExpressNews.com: 'Postpone the rodeo' says Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, concerned about spreading COVID-19 Two days after county commissioners approved the contribution, Cody Davenport, executive director and CEO of San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo, announced the carnivals cancellation. The health and safety of our community is of utmost importance, and we greatly appreciate the support and understanding of the community as we navigate these unprecedented times, he said in a statement at the time. In an email to the San Antonio Express-News, Davenport noted the county funding, but did not respond to questions about the carnivals cancellation. His organization has downsized this years event because of the coronavirus pandemic. It moved the rodeo events from the AT&T Center, with more than 18,000 seats, to the neighboring Freeman Coliseum, which seats 8,000. Organizers say they sold only 3,800 seats for each of the 14 rodeo competitions to maintain social-distancing between groups of spectators. Rodeo officials also canceled the fair, which in the past featured five stages for live music. Despite the precautions, Wolff asked Nancy Loeffler, chairwoman of the annual event, in a Feb. 2 letter to postpone it or prepare for the difficult job of implementing and enforcing strict rules to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Texas other major rodeos in Austin, Houston and Fort Worth have been canceled this year because of the pandemic. Davenport said his organization is conducting the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo safely, requiring all attendees to wear face coverings. If patrons do not comply with the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo safety guidelines upon being asked by our ushers, they will be warned by a supervisor, he said in an email. If needed, non-compliant patrons are escorted offsite by Rodeo police. At Sunday afternoons sparsely attended rodeo competition, ushers held signs directing fans to mask up. A giant electronic screen delivered the same message: Face coverings were mandatory. Yet, many of the spectators didnt wear masks during the two-hour-plus event. Bexar County sheriffs deputies have issued 123 verbal warnings to guests not wearing masks since the stock show and rodeo began Feb. 11, according to Sheriffs Office spokesman Johnny Garcia. However, deputies issued no citations because spectators who received warnings immediately put on their masks, he said. On ExpressNews.com: Expect a very reduced, watered-down 2021 San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo In addition to the Sheriffs Office, the Bexar County Office of Emergency Management is also monitoring mask compliance at the rodeo. Wolff said law enforcement and emergency management officials werent at the Freeman Coliseum in large numbers on Sunday because most remained on winter storm duty. But this week theyll be out in force, he said. They will be out there writing tickets, he said. Zero tolerance. Wolff said the problem is that citations, which carry fines of up to $250, are handed out only after people ignore warnings. I know how difficult it is to enforce mask-wearing, he said. randy.diamond@express-news.net State authorities receive reconstructed Bafut DO's office Teneng Lucas Atanga Nji Paul, Cameroons Minister of Territorial Administration officially received the reconstructed office of the Divisional Officer, DO, for Bafut Subdivision Tuesday, February 23, 2021. Armed separatists burnt down the office of the Divisional Officer for Bafut on August 16, 2018. The armed men grouped under the group 7-Kata set official documents ablaze, including furniture and the roof of the building. After the arson, local contractors did not bid on the contract to reconstruct the Bafut Divisional Office. Many are those who feared the unknown given that the terrain was uncertain. The Rapid Intervention Battalion (Bataillon d'Intervention Rapide, BIR), an elite unit of the Cameroonian army, dealt with the problem directly and reconstructed the burnt building. In a bid to beef up security around the reconstructed office of the Divisional Officer for Bafut, the military engineers erected two watchtowers to permit security officials to identify people as far as one kilometer away from the building. Speaking at the reception ceremony, Minister Atanga Nji Paul congratulated the professionalism of the military, commending their collaboration with civilians to ensure the security of people and their property. He said henceforth, watchtowers will be constructed in all administrative buildings to guarantee maximum security and surveillance. Watchtowers erected at the office of the Divisional Officer for Bafut to beef up security surveillance (c) Teneng Lucas The work was well done. We are here today to commission the building and I am so impressed. We have some innovations like the watchtowers. When you sit there, you can see kilometers away, Minister Atanga Nji said. This is a sign of a good partnership between the military and civilians. When you talk about the military, people think that they are only out to provide security. The military in Cameroon is professional because they are multidimensional. They have hospitals with professional doctors. We have gone to schools, where teachers are absent, and have found military personnel delivering lessons to schoolchildren. It is a good partnership between the civilians and the military authorities, the Minister furthered. He said the BIR has reconstructed about five other offices of administrative authorities torched and/vandalized by armed men in the North West and South West Regions. Before leaving Bafut, Minister Atanga Nji called on the Mayor of Bafut, Ngwakongoh Lawrence, and the Member of Parliament for Bafut-Tubah Constituency, Hon. Oliver Agho to collaborate with the population, the elite, and the administration for a return to peace in the hitherto bustling town of Bafut. The Divisional Officer for Bafut, Diobe Elumba Didacus Elumba told the Minister that life was gradually returning to normal in the subdivision. I have called on the Divisional Officer, MP, and Mayor to talk to the people. Like President Paul Biya said on February 10, Politics is over. People should go to work. The children should go to school and the population should return to their routine activities, said Minister Atanga Nji. Things are moving to normalcy. We encourage the local population to work with the military and civil authorities so we can provide peace and security. The main mission of the Government is to protect the people and their property. We cannot do that if we do not have assistance from the people. We have to work together. Those who are hiding in the bushes should come out and live a better life. New techniques aim to help Mediterranean wine makers and olive oil producers become resilient against climate change. Credit: Lukasz Czechowicz/Unsplash From the possible demise of Merlot grapes in Bordeaux to loss of olive trees in north Africa, the impacts of climate change will be felt by farmers across the Mediterranean region, say climatologists. To help the region's agricultural producers cope with shifting weather patterns, and make strategic decisions now for the future, scientists are researching new growing techniques, and creating climate forecasts. The Mediterranean Basincomprising countries bordering the Mediterranean Seais a climate hotspot. It is experiencing faster than average rises in temperature and may suffer major losses of rainfall in future decades. Wine makers are among those already feeling the effects. "Climate change is not only a thing of the future it is happening now. We see an increase of mean temperatures, and this already has an impact on grape growing," said Josep Maria Sole Tasias, coordinator of VISCA, a project developing forecasts and pruning techniques to help vineyards adapt to climate change. One impact is that higher temperatures make grapes ripen too early, before their aromas have had a chance to fully develop. "That is something the wineries are very worried about," said Sole Tasias who is a civil engineer at Meteosim SL, a Spanish company offering meteorological services. In southwestern France, the Bordeaux region's famous Merlot and Sauvignon blanc grapes are expected to be victims of climate change, so wine makers there are testing more resilient grape varieties from southern and eastern Europe. Another solution is to find plots of land in more northern or elevated cooler locations to plant for the future. But small wineries will find it difficult to make such large investments, says Sole Tasias. So VISCA has been testing some innovative farming techniques to see if they can minimise the damage. These include 'crop forcing," which involves pruning vines so the grapes mature later in the growing season once temperatures have dropped. But deciding when to prune is difficulttoo early or too late in the growing season would impact the harvest. Forecasts VISCA has developed seasonal forecasts which are helping farmers assess the best times to apply these techniques. They use detailed data about the vineyardincluding location, soil type, and grape varietyto estimate when vines will produce buds or grapes will ripen, as well as predicting temperatures and rainfall. But unlike short-term weather forecasts which can accurately predict whether there will be a frost or warm sunshine, seasonal forecasts of up to six months ahead are much less certain. Knowing how to use them for decision-making is complex, says Sole Tasias. "Farmers at the moment don't know exactly how to use themthey are used to making decisions in the short-term," said Sole Tasias. A seasonal forecast could for example say there is 60% probability there will be a particularly warm summer. If a farmer delay s the ripening of their grapes based on this assumption, they may lose money if the summer turns out to be normal. "Farmers have to understand that their decision can result in losses," said Sole Tasias. To help with this, VISCA has worked with some wineries to create a list of actions based on each short-term and seasonal forecastfor example, buy more chemicals to deal with a possible spike in pest numbers, or prune the vines to delay the grape harvestand spell out the financial risks associated with each option. The options and risks will be tailored to each vineyard or winery. And the more information the researchers have about the vineyard, the better they can forecast, they say. Unpredictability Long-term climate forecasting is particularly difficult in the Mediterranean region, says Dr. Alessandro Dell'Aquila, co-coordinator of the MED-GOLD project, which is developing climate services for pasta, olive oil and wine producers. "It has an intrinsic unpredictability because there is a lot of noise due to large-scale (atmospheric) movements and perturbations," said Dr. Dell'Aquila, who is a climatologist at the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA). The tropics, by contrast, are more stable, which means that seasonal forecasts for coffee, tea, maize and other crops in parts of Africa and South America could be more accurate. But seasonal forecasts will still be vital for Mediterranean farmers despite their uncertainty, says Dr. Dell'Aquila. The longer-term impacts of climate change on the Mediterranean are likely to be severe. "The Mediterranean could look very different in future decades. We may have completely different species of animals or insects that could arrive from the tropics, and we could experience loss of local biodiversity," said Dr. Dell'Aquila. We could also have less water available, including for agricultural purposes, he says. "And the region may experience a higher number of (severe) heatwaves." Some crops will need to be grown on higher ground or further north where the climate will be cooler and wetter. More field irrigation will be needed and, in the case of grapes, different varieties will have to be grown. Parts of Europe may open up for wine and olive oil production for the first time, while other areas may see a collapse. "There are some ideas of moving olive trees northward to new growing regions. And parts of the Mediterraneanfor example, north Africacould become too hot for olive groves." Similarly, while wine production has recently expanded in the UK and Denmark, certain southern Italian wines may become extremely rare within the next decade, Dr. Dell'Aquila says. Support EU policy needs to change to support producers adapting to climate change, he says. Rules that regulate the composition of wines, for example, could be changed to allow producers to use different varieties of grapeeven grapes from different regionswithout changing the name of the wine. "This could be very important for consumers because they want to go to the supermarket and find a (Chianti), and the name of this wine is clearly defined in some EU rules." In the meantime, producers need to act now. "Wine-makers should start thinking now where they can buy new plots of land and start planting grapes as an investment for the next 10 or 20 years," said Dr. Dell'Aquila. The issue As the climate changes, we need to prepare for its impacts and take action to minimise the damage to our environment, society and economy. This is known as climate adaptation. On 24 February the EU published its climate adaptation strategy which sets out how to make Europe more climate resilient and protect people from the impacts of climate change, such as heatwaves and flooding. Explore further Can water saving traits help wine survive climate change? 2020 was a year marked by hardships and challenges, but the Fauquier community has proven resilient. The Fauquier Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you for your continued support, wed like to offer all our subscribers -- new or returning -- 4 WEEKS FREE DIGITAL AND PRINT ACCESS. We understand the importance of working to keep our community strong and connected. As we move forward together into 2021, it will take commitment, communication, creativity, and a strong connection with those who are most affected by the stories we cover. We are dedicated to providing the reliable, local journalism you have come to expect. We are committed to serving you with renewed energy and growing resources. Let the Fauquier Times be your community companion throughout 2021, and for many years to come. Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) is an organization offers aid (and sometimes employment) to people who have been forced to flee their homes due to war and conflict. Some of the biggest roadblocks hindering NRCs ability to provide effective aid include: Legislation challenges Limited connectivity Large provisioning workload Read this case study to see how NRC addressed these concerns and expanded their reach with the help of Okta. Sure, Democrats might not actually have the votes to pass a $15 minimum wage as part of their big coronavirus relief packagebut theyre giving it a shot anyway. And this week, the effort is about to face one of its most important legislative tests, as lawmakers meet with the Senates parliamentarian to try to convince her that they should be allowed to tack the hike onto their bill. Whether they succeed will largely boil down to how the parliamentarian interprets a single word contained in a law governing congressional procedure: incidental. Beyond the fate of the minimum wage, her reading of this all-important adjective could also have serious implications for major Democratic priorities such as immigration reform. Advertisement Does this seem preposterous? It should. Vast swaths of the Biden administrations agenda currently hang on the subjective linguistic judgment of an unelected congressional functionary, whose job is to advise senators on matters of procedure. But thats the reality were currently stuck in, since moderate Democrats have refused to junk the Senate filibuster, preferring instead to force their party through joint-popping procedural contortions in order to pass laws. Advertisement Advertisement To be specific, the party is attempting to enact its COVID rescue through budget reconciliation, the baroque maneuver that bars filibusters on certain tax and spending bills, allowing them to pass with a bare majority. This process is governed by a statute known as the Byrd rule, named for the late Sen. Robert Byrd. Crucially, it states that in order to pass via reconciliation, each provision of a bill must have an impact on the federal governments finances that is not merely incidental to its nonbudgetary components. Advertisement What does incidental mean? Thats the $15 question at the moment. Nobody has ever formally defined the term. Theres no official rubric for what counts and what doesnt, no multipart test we can all check at a glance. Instead, the Senate has traditionally left it up to the parliamentarian to decide what passes muster, based on a loose series of precedents. Still, the conventional rule of thumb about reconciliation is that Congress can only use it to pass laws that are primarily concerned with how the government spends money or collects it, rather than regulatory matters. Just because a piece of a bill could affect the federal budget doesnt make it eligible. The current parliamentarian severely complicated Republican attempts to repeal Obamacare during the Trump administration by ruling that pieces of their proposals were Byrd rule violations, even though they had some nominal connection to spending. (She said that defunding Planned Parenthood was a no-go, for instance.) Most famously, she concluded that lawmakers could not eliminate the laws individual mandate requiring Americans to buy health insurance or pay a fine, despite the fact that the Congressional Budget Office believed doing so would have had a large impact on health expenditures. This led Republicans to rewrite their bill so it simply reduced the fine to zero, while technically leaving the mandate in place on paper. Advertisement Advertisement For those reasons, many have been skeptical that Democrats could pass a minimum wage increase through reconciliation. Increasing pay for workers would undoubtedly affect the federal budgetby decreasing spending on safety-net programs like food assistance, for instance. But in the eyes of many policymakers, those changes seem like incidental effects of a labor regulation that would have much larger consequences for the private sector than the government. Nevertheless, progressives, led by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, are giving it a shot. They will get to make their case to the parliamentarian directly on Wednesday during a ritual affectionately known as the Byrd bath. Members of both parties will gather to present their best arguments for why pieces of the COVID relief package should or shouldnt be considered eligible for reconciliation; the minimum wage will almost certainly be the hottest topic of discussion. Democrats plan to make two main points. First, hiking the pay floor would have a budget impactthe Congressional Budget Office has concluded that it would increase the deficit by $54 billion over a decade (rising tax revenues and falling safety-net spending would be canceled out by things like higher health care costs as labor becomes more expensive for providers). Second, they claim that the parliamentarian has already created a precedent for letting Congress use reconciliation to pass economic regulations with small budget impacts, such as when she allowed Republicans to open up Alaskas Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil development in their 2017 tax bill. Yes, it gave the federal government the opportunity to auction oil leases, but the point was mostly to end the regions drilling ban. Advertisement Advertisement The outcome of this argument wont just affect whether Democrats are able to pass a minimum wage increase. If the the parliamentarian adopts a broad reading of the Byrd rule, it could potentially open the door for other major pieces of legislation with significant budget consequences that arent traditionally thought of as tax and spending bills. One of the most consequential might be immigration reform, which the Congressional Budget Office has previously suggested would decrease the deficit by growing the countrys tax base. If the parliamentarian chooses a narrower reading, however, it could further limit the partys realistic agenda going forward. Technically, Democrats could choose to ignore the parliamentarian if she rules against them. Officially, she just offers advice. And under the rules of reconciliation, the presiding officer of the Senate (in this case, probably Vice President Kamala Harris) gets final say over whats kosher and what isnt. But in the past, Congress has almost always deferred to the parliamentarians judgment, and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has said hed oppose any attempt to override her. My only vote is to protect the Byrd Rule: hell or high water, Manchin told CNN recently. Everybody knows that. Im fighting to defend the Byrd rule. The president knows that. Advertisement Advertisement The idea that the Byrd rule itself is in any way sacrosanct is more than a bit silly. It was only enacted during the mid-80s to put a few guardrails on the reconciliation process, which itself was a historical accident, not unlike the modern filibuster. But in the end, what Manchin is really fighting against is the idea of pure majority rule, which he and a handful of other moderates have come to regard as anathema. The fact that it could stop Democrats from passing popular policies like a minimum wage hike? Maybe thats secretly their goal. Or maybe its merely incidental. NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Nobu Hospitality, the global lifestyle brand founded by Nobu Matsuhisa, Robert De Niro and Meir Teper, is delighted to announce its continuing global expansion into the "Gate to the World," Hamburg, Germany. "We are very happy to be working with SIGNA in developing the Nobu Hotel in the great city of Hamburg,"A stated Robert De Niro and Chef Nobu Matsuhisa, Founders of Nobu Hospitality. The Nobu Hotel and Restaurant will be located within the Elbtower, a project by SIGNA Real Estate, one of Europe's leading property companies. The Elbtower will be a mixed-use development destination encompassing premium office space and the Nobu Hotel and Restaurant set within the tallest high-rise in the city. Timo Herzberg, CEO SIGNA Real Estate Germany remarks, "The partnershipA with Nobu Hospitality in the launch of the Nobu Hotel and Restaurant Hamburg underscores the compelling Elbtower development as Northern Germany's tallest skyscraper. Hamburg as a destination fits seamlessly within the Nobu Hotel and Restaurant collection and will be embraced by our prestigious office tenants in the Elbtower as the most exclusive destination in Hamburg." Trevor Horwell, CEO Nobu Hospitality comments, "We are extremely honoured and excited to be working with SIGNA on this unique project.A This is the first project in this growing partnership, and we are exploring other destinations with SIGNA. Hamburg is an economic powerhouse in Germany and is an exciting destination for travellers whether for business or pleasure and perfectly fits with our global clientele.A A The Elbtower itself is a very special project planned as Hamburg's world class dynamic lifestyle destination with our Nobu Hotel and Restaurant sitting as its core." Rising 245m and 64 stories over the River Elbe, the Elbtower is designed by celebrated architectural firm, David Chipperfield Architects, and will complete the city's silhouette with its striking and curved faAade. Forming a designed counterpoint to the famed Elbphilharmonie concert hall and serving as an entrance marker to the prestigious HafenCity district. The Elbtower will house the Nobu Hotel and Restaurant, the tower itself will be comprised of flexibly designed office spaces with unparalleled views of the city and beyond. The ground floors, with their innovative layouts, will form the hub of the Elbtower community and play a significant role in positioning the Elbtower as the most attractive place to work, sleep, eat and drink, shop and socialise in Hamburg. The offering will comprise of a variety of retail shops, restaurants, and co-working spaces. The Elbtower will add to The SIGNA Group's portfolio ! of exclus ive real estate properties in prime city locations around Europe. The Nobu Hotel Elbtower Hamburg will offer 191 spaciously designed guest rooms and suites, a 200-seat Nobu restaurant, a stylish terrace bar and lounge with views of the River Elbe, and a state-of-the-art fitness and wellness facility.A In addition to the restaurant and private dining rooms, the hotel will offer sophisticated event space for corporate and social gatherings as well as an outdoor terrace. Another highlight will be a Nobu private members club for the local community where members will benefit from a private lounge with a food and beverage offering, access to the hotel's fitness and wellness facility as well as exclusive members only events. Nobu is one of the world's most celebrated luxury hospitality brands renowned for its award-winning "new style" Japanese cuisine and exceptional hotel offerings in the world's most desirable locales, with heartfelt service, energized public spaces and instinctive design. A A A Video - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1443422/NOBU_Hotel_Hamburg.mp4 Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1443418/No! bu_Hospit ality_Bathroom.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1443419/Nobu_Hospitality_Founders_Robert_De_Niro_Nobu_Matsuhisa_Meir_Teper.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1443420/Nobu_Hospitality_Elbtower.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1443421/Nobu_Hospitality_Guest_Room.jpg A Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Ateba Resources Inc. ("Ateba" or the "Company") announces that it has agreed to settle an aggregate of $175,000 of indebtedness owed to an arm's length creditor through the issuance of 8,750,000 common shares ("Common Shares") of the Company at a price of $0.02 per Common Share (the "Debt Settlement"). All Common Shares issued in connection with the Debt Settlement are subject to a statutory hold period of four months plus a day from the date of issuance in accordance with applicable securities legislation. For more information, please contact: Arvin Ramos Chief Financial Officer Tel: (416) 271-3877 Forward Looking Information 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. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75350 EDMONTON, Alberta, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Capital Power Corporation (Capital Power or the Company) (TSX: CPX) provided the following update for its operations following the recent extreme weather event through the central United States. From February 9th to February 20th, the extreme winter weather caused some disruptions to our wind facilities in Texas (Buckthorn Wind) and Kansas (Bloom Wind) with essentially no impact on the balance of Capital Powers U.S. operations. The two wind facilities experienced no significant physical damage, but some turbines were forced offline. As of February 22nd, the operations were back to normal. Capital Power continues to evaluate the financial impact under the offtake arrangements and is reviewing force majeure and other mitigating possibilities. During the peak days of the weather event, the Company was able to leverage its commodity management expertise to physically flow power around North America to help offset any potential financial impacts. Based on current information, Capital Power estimates the impact of the production loss to be approximately US$8 million partially offset by commodity gains of US$6 million for a net loss of approximately CAD$3 million to adjusted EBITDA and adjusted funds from operations (AFFO). Capital Power believes that the event will not have any material impact on the Companys 2021 financial guidance of $500 million to $550 million for AFFO and $975 million to $1,025 million for adjusted EBITDA. Non-GAAP Financial Measures The Company uses (i) earnings before net finance expense, income tax expense, depreciation and amortization, impairments, foreign exchange gains or losses, finance expense and depreciation expense from joint venture interests, gains or losses on disposals and unrealized changes in fair value of commodity derivatives and emission credits (adjusted EBITDA) and (ii) AFFO as financial performance measures. These terms are not defined financial measures according to GAAP and do not have standardized meanings prescribed by GAAP and, therefore, are unlikely to be comparable to similar measures used by other enterprises. These measures should not be considered alternatives to net income, net cash flows from operating activities or other measures of financial performance calculated in accordance with GAAP. Rather, these measures are provided to complement GAAP measures in the analysis of the Companys results of operations from managements perspective. Additional disclosure around the Companys non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to their nearest GAAP financial measures are disclosed in the Business Report section of the Companys Integrated Annual Report, prepared as of February 18, 2021 for the year ended December 31, 2020, which is available under the Companys profile on SEDAR at SEDAR.com and on the Companys website at capitalpower.com. Forward-looking Information Forward-looking information or statements included in this press release are provided to inform the Companys shareholders and potential investors about managements assessment of Capital Powers future plans and operations. This information may not be appropriate for other purposes. The forward-looking information in this press release is generally identified by words such as will, anticipate, believe, plan, intend, target, and expect or similar words that suggest future outcomes. Material forward-looking information in this press release includes disclosures regarding the expected adjusted EBITDA and AFFO impacts of the recent extreme weather event in central United States, including the expected non-material impact on the Companys 2021 financial guidance. These statements are based on certain assumptions and analyses made by the Company in light of its experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions and other factors it believes are appropriate. The material factors and assumptions used to develop these forward-looking statements relate largely to electricity pricing. Whether actual results will conform to the Companys expectations and predictions is subject to revisions to electricity pricing during the applicable periods of extreme weather as well as the success and impacts of potential mitigating actions, which could cause actual results to differ materially from the Companys expectations. See Risks and Risk Management in the Business Report section of the Companys Integrated Annual report for the year ended December 31, 2020, prepared as of February 18, 2021, for further discussion of these and other risks. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the specified approval date. The Company does not undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in the Companys expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except as required by law. About Capital Power Capital Power is a growth-oriented North American wholesale power producer with a strategic focus on sustainable energy headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta. We build, own and operate high-quality, utility-scale generation facilities that include renewables and thermal. We have also made significant investments in carbon capture and utilization to reduce carbon impacts and are committed to be off coal in 2023. Capital Power owns over 6,500 megawatts (MW) of power generation capacity at 28 facilities across North America with approximately 425 MW of owned renewable generation capacity and 560 MW of incremental natural gas combined cycle capacity, from the repowering of Genesee 1 and 2, in advanced development in Alberta and North Carolina. For more information, please contact : Foreign-invested capital on the rise. Source: plo.vn While not yet reaching the dizzy heights of the $4-billion Bac Lieu LNG-gas-to-power project welcomed into the country a year ago from the United States, Vietnam continues to see a wave of billion-dollar ventures converge within the early months of the year despite the ongoing pandemic complexities worldwide. Foxconn Singapore is considering three locations offered by Thanh Hoa Peoples Committee to develop a $1.3-billion project to produce electronic parts for Apple. The locations include Nghi Son Economic Zone, an industrial park in the west of the north-central province, and another one in Thieu Hoa district. Once complete, the plant will generate 100,000-150,000 jobs and generate $10 billion in export revenue per year. According to Do Minh Tuan, Chairman of Thanh Hoa Peoples Committee, the investor is waiting for the opinions of the parent companies overseas before issuing a final decision. Foxconn representatives in recent times have visited Thanh Hoa on several occasions in order to work with the provincial leadership to promote investment activities. The province has committed to creating favourable conditions to shorten the timeline for project approval. Once the group has made its final decision, the province will establish a steering committee headed by the chairman to accompany the investor to develop the project, Tuan said Along with Foxconn, numerous large-scale foreign-invested projects worth hundreds of millions of US dollars have already been licensed in the first two months of 2021. Haiphong Peoples Committee awarded an investment certificate for a LG Display Haiphong project to increase capital by $750 million. The project now has total capital of $3.25 billion, becoming the largest foreign-invested project in the northern port city so far. LG has plans to start implementation of the expanded project in March and take it into operation in May this year. The expanded factory will generate 5,000 labourers and arrange accommodation for 10,000 experts and other workers, simultaneously contributing $5 million to the state budget. Elsewhere, an investment registration certificate was presented to developers of the 1,050MW O Mon II thermal power plant project on February 8. The plant is a joint venture between Vietnam Trading Engineering Construction JSC (Vietracimex) and Marubeni Corporation from Japan, with initial capital of VND30.56 trillion ($1.33 billion). Bac Giang Peoples Committee has also granted investment registration certificates for four projects with the total registered capital of $570 million $270 million of which is Foxconn Singapores initiative to produce laptops and tablets. Do Nhat Hoang, director of the Foreign Investment Agency under the Ministry of Planning and Investment said, Nearly 300 enterprises from many nations are planning to expand their existing investment or explore opportunities in the country. Of this, over 60 groups have reaped initial results in new and expanded projects here. Initial information shows that the total registered capital of these projects will likely be over $60 billion, Hoang said. The achievements are stemming from efforts to reform policies and legal frameworks, especially through implementation of the Politburos Resolution No.50-NQ/TW issued in 2019 on orientations to perfect mechanisms, policies, raise quality and efficiency of foreign investment by 2030. Furthermore, three amended laws that came into effect at the same time are also strongly pushing the potential of attracting foreign-invested capital. After the governments Resolution No.02/NQ-CP on the continued implementation of major tasks and solutions for improving the business environment and national competitiveness in 2021 came into effect at the start of the year, the country immediately saw positive signs from foreign-invested capital inflow. In cities and provinces, leaders are also making efforts to reform administrative procedures and shorten the time for granting licenses, while ensuring they are available to deal with problems that arise during the investment process. For example, the leadership team at Foxconn was surprised when it took only four days to receive an investment certificate for the Fukang Technology factory in Bac Giang province. The provincial leaders also committed to support the investors to complete the remaining procedures as fast as possible. Besides that, they are willing to meet directly with investors to talk about their difficulties. The province in addition also organises periodic meetings with investors to listen to their proposals and problems, while looking for solutions. Meanwhile, Le Trung Kien, director of Haiphong Economic Zones Management Authority, said that the LG Display project is a large-scale foreign-invested project in which the managing board, departments, and relevant authorities focused their power to appraise the investment registration procedure and grant the license within only five days. The achievement showed the determination in reforming administrative procedures, improving the business environment, and turning Haiphong into an ideal destination for investors. Minister of Planning and Investment Nguyen Chi Dung said that in 2021, in order to improve the quality of foreign-invested capital inflow, the authority will review foreign-invested enterprises relating to their legal compliance, responsibility to the environment, and checking for signs of transfer pricing, among other issues. Rising temperatures began melting the snow and ice in Mississippi and Louisiana, but tens of thousands of people still had little or no water service Monday, some waiting a week for restoration since the outages began during an extended freeze. A City Council member in Jackson, Mississippi, said Monday that its time for the city to seek state and federal help. This is an institutional failure, said DeKeither Stamps, who is also a state representative. He said he spent about $5,000 to install a tank on his truck so could distribute water to homebound residents. Stamps told The Associated Press that he visited a 70-year-old woman last week without heat or water who hadnt left her bed in two days. This really broke the backs of a lot of communities, he said of the storm. We need door-to-door check-ins with our elderly. Jackson is under boil-water advisory, and city workers are delivering drinking water to older and homebound residents. Water for flushing toilets was available for pickup at two local schools, and people waited in long lines Monday to fill buckets and bowls. Mississippi Emergency Management Agency has supplied 131,000 bottles of water to people statewide and is working to determine if the state has met its $4.5 million damages threshold to request a federal disaster declaration. Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said he has had trouble reaching Gov. Tate Reeves. The Democratic mayor said he has tried calling the Republican governors personal number without getting a response. Lumumba said he usually communicates with Reeves chief of staff, who left the state for a family emergency. Reeves spokeswoman Bailey Martin said the governor has no unanswered calls from the mayor. This is false, Martin said. The governor has been leading the states response to this crisis, and he was the one who directed that water be delivered to Jackson residents via his agency, MEMA. We have been in consistent contact with the mayors office and other local leaders. On Monday, Jacksons Public Works Director Charles Williams said it could be the end of the week before water returns for all 161,000 residents as crews scramble to repair broken pipes. We are doing everything we can to get it hopefully quicker than that, Williams said. Williams said the water shortage occurred after frigid temperatures iced equipment and caused water lines to burst. Officials say the citys aging water system is not built for subfreezing temperatures. Jackson has struggled to find money for improvements. Mississippi has a 7% sales tax on many items. With permission of the Legislature, Jackson had a local election in January 2014 to add an extra 1% sales tax in the city to improve or replace aging infrastructure, including streets riddled with pot holes and pipes that are decades old and have a history of breaking after cold weather. Voters overwhelmingly approved the tax, which was projected to generate about $15 million a year. That is only a fraction of what is needed, though. Jackson officials said in 2014 that fixing all the citys infrastructure problems would cost about $2 billion. Sheila Lewis, a parent of a 19-year-old student at Jackson State University, said her son has been without water for six days on campus. The campus has been shut down during the crisis. We just didnt expect the university to be out for so long, said Lewis, who lives in a Houston suburb. Louisiana has faced similar challenges. About 82,000 people in Louisiana lacked access to water by Monday, according to the state health department, and hundreds of thousands of people around the state were advised to boil their water before using it. In Shreveport, Louisianas third-largest city, about 8,000 residential and business customers still waited for their water connection to return, according to Shreveport Mayor Adrian Perkins. He said Louisianas difficulties from the winter weather have been lost amid the problems in Texas. Everybodys eyes are on Texas, Perkins said in an interview Monday. Nobody even knows whats going on here. They dont even know the damage. He added: Louisiana has been treated very much like a stepchild in this crisis. Perkins estimated full water restoration would be complete in his northwestern Louisiana city by Tuesday, a full eight days after outages began. But even that wont end the water woes in Shreveport. Perkins said once water is completely restored, customers will remain under a boil advisory until Thursday or Friday, because testing will need to be completed ensuring water is safe to drink. Meanwhile, water has been trucked to hospitals and distributed to residents. Weve even had our fire trucks go out and pump water into the hospitals, Perkins said. Families running low on supplies have found Shreveport area grocery store shelves stripped of items, with delivery trucks unable to reach the region until roads cleared. Its still rough on a lot of families, Perkins said. Just about every grocery store in the city doesnt have milk, water, bread, any of those types of essentials. More than 15,000 customers remained without power Monday in Mississippi, according to PowerOutage.us, which trackers outages nationwide. Most of the outages were in the central and southwest parts of the state. In Louisiana, fewer than 4,000 customers remained without power. __ Deslatte reported from Baton Rouge, La. Associated Press reporters Emily Wagster Pettus in Jackson and Jeff Martin in Atlanta contributed to this report. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Mississippi New Delhi: Travellers from five states, including Maharashtra, Kerala and Punjab, will have to show negative Covid-19 test report before entering the national capital, officials said on Wednesday amid a spike in coronavirus infections in some states. They said an official order will be issued later in the day and it will be effective till March 15. Coronavirus The issue had also been discussed in a meeting of the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) on Monday. The requirement of the negative Covid-19 test report is likely to be implemented from Friday night, officials said. Coronavirus Maharashtra is showing a daily surge in COVID-19 cases, according to an official of the Union Health Ministry. Kerala is showing an incremental decline whereas Punjab, with its daily increase in cases, is also a cause of worry. Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh are also showing an increase in daily cases, the central official had said on Tuesday. Lord Alton speaks on the genocide amendment in the House of Lords, Westminster, London, on Feb. 23, 2021. (Parliamentlive.tv/Screenshot) UK Peers Pass Lord Altons Genocide Amendment for Third Time In a final attempt to give legal backing to the recognition of state genocide in relation to trade, the UKs House of Lords on Tuesday passed a genocide amendment for the third time. The amendment to the UKs post-Brexit Trade Bill, proposed by Lord Alton of Liverpool, seeks to establish an ad-hoc Parliamentary Judicial Committee (PJC) that could make a preliminary determination on whether a partner in a relevant bilateral trade agreement with the UK has committed genocide. If such a determination is made, the Secretary of State must give a satisfactory statement on the actions the government will take, or the committee will set out the wording of a motion for Parliament to debate and vote on. Lord Altons amendment was passed on Tuesday by 367 votes to 214. Its the only amendment to the Trade Bill that will go back in the House of Commons for a final votethe last step of a bills amendments consideration stage, known as ping pong. The Ping-Pong Process During the legislation process of the Trade Bill, which is to make provisions for Britains international trade agreements after Brexit, peers have insisted on inserting clauses that would prevent the UK from entering into trade deals with genocidal countries. Peers debate about the genocide amendment in the House of Lords chamber, in Westminster, London, on Feb. 23, 2021. (Parliamentlive.tv/Screenshot) Lord Altons amendment, which has gone back and forth between the two houses of Parliament twice, initially proposed an automatic revocation of trade deals once the high court in England had determined that a trade partner has committed genocide. This initial amendment was passed in the House of Lords on Dec. 7, 2020, but rejected by the House of Commons on Jan. 19 by only 11 votes, despite the fact that the governmentwhich objects to the amendmentenjoys an 80-seat majority in the Commons. An updated version of the amendment, which still requires the UKs high courts to make a determination on genocide, but leaves the power to determine subsequent actions regarding trade with Parliament, was passed in the House of Lords on Feb. 3 by a landslide victory. However, it was never put before the House of Commons. The government bundled Lord Altons amendment with another amendment by Lord Collins of Highbury, and proposed a compromise amendment in lieu of the Lords. The governments amendment was passed in the House of Commons by 15 votes on Feb. 9. Lord Alton told The Epoch Times that the support for his amendment was so overwhelming in the House of Commons that the government knew that it was going to pass if MPs were able to vote on it. Lord Collinss amendment, which had gone through the ping pong process the same way as Lord Altons, would require the government to conduct a risk assessment to consider if a trade agreement would comply with the UKs international treaties and obligations, including genocide and other human rights violations. The governments compromise amendment gives the power to determine genocide to a select committee of either house of Parliament, which Lord Alton and supporters of his amendment say already had that power. Putting Teeth Back The inception of Lord Altons genocide amendment was when the government refused to declare what happened to the Yazidis in Northern Iraq as a genocide, after Parliament voted to support the declaration. And the government said, no, only a court can decide [on genocide]; its not the government, not the House of Commons of Parliament, only a court, Lord Alton said. He said that the government made the amendment a toothless tiger by removing the judicial determination, and his new amendment was to put some teeth into the tiger. Lord Alton of Liverpool speaks to The Epoch Times during an online interview in England on Feb. 12, 2021. (The Epoch Times/Screenshot) An ad-hoc PJC comprising former judges makes use of the tremendous legal expertise of this house in providing a credible analysis, which no existing select committee could hope to emulate or achieve, he told Parliament during the debate ahead of the vote on Tuesday. Lord Alton said the governments amendment has two other serious defects. First, it applies only to prospective Free Trade Agreement [FTA] counter signatories, which excludes China. And therefore, as the government well knows, would do nothing to help Uyghurs, he said. The other defect is that it applies to both state and non-state actors. Conceivably, the select committee could hold accountable an FTA counter signatory state for the actions of a group or even a single individual within that territory. Thats a very serious defect, which our new amendment corrects, Lord Alton said. The government still opposes Lord Altons new amendment, insisting the governments version is a reasonable, proportionate, and substantive compromise on the part of government. Xinjiang Although Lord Altons amendment doesnt mention any particular country, the debates around it in Parliament have been centred around the Chinese regime, since there has been growing evidence that its treatment of the Uyghur people amounts to crimes against humanity and genocide. Buildings at the Artux City Vocational Skills Education Training Service Center, believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, north of Kashgar in Chinas northwestern Xinjiang region, on June 2, 2019. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images) The Canadian Parliament on Monday voted in favour of declaring Beijings oppression of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in China a genocide. On Jan. 19, the last day of the Trump administration, the United States government announced that the Chinese regime had committed genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur Muslims in the region of Xinjiang. On Feb. 18, two Belgian lawmakers submitted a resolution calling on the Belgian government to declare whats happening in Xinjiang as a genocide. Isaac Teo and Cathy He contributed to this report. FILE - Author Lawrence Ferlinghetti appears in Oct. 8, 1988. Ferlinghetti, a poet, publisher and bookseller has died in San Francisco at age 101. His son says Ferlinghetti died at home on Monday, Feb. 22, 2021. Ferlinghetti helped launch and perpetuate the Beat movement. He was known for his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, an essential meeting place for the Beats and other bohemians in the 1950s and beyond. (AP Photo/Frankie Ziths, File) ANN ARBOR, MI - A partnership between Ann Arbor Public Schools and Michigan Medicine to quickly vaccinate teachers and staff will factor into the districts recommendation to return students to the classroom, officials said. AAPS Superintendent Jeanice Swift and the districts school board announced the partnership with the health system on Tuesday, Feb. 23, a day before the school board is scheduled to meet to discuss plans to bring students back to in-person learning. District officials noted significant progress has been made in recent days in its efforts to achieve rapid COVID-19 testing and ensuring staff has access to vaccines, with major events taking place this weekend. The Washtenaw County Health Department is working with Michigan Medicine and IHA to vaccinate approximately 1,200 elementary school educators on Saturday, Feb 27. In addition to the vaccinations, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services has permitted AAPS to expand rapid testing for students and staff in school buildings, school officials said. Since the January announcement that K-12 educators would be eligible for vaccination, we have been disappointed that Washtenaw County has lagged behind other counties in achieving these critical goals, an AAPS statement reads. This promising turn of events is the result of the advocacy work of many. This news will inform the recommendation the school board will consider at its Wednesday, Feb. 24 meeting, now scheduled to begin at noon, according to the statement. The developments are a game-changer for a healthy and safe reentry to AAPS school buildings, school officials said. The health department is providing the vaccine out of its state allocation this week and is working directly with county schools and districts to connect their staff to the appropriate partner for vaccination registration. Both Michigan Medicine and IHA are continuing to vaccinate staff and have begun vaccinating patients 65 and older as vaccine supply has allowed. Their support will allow Washtenaw County Health Department to vaccinate area preK-2 school employees this coming Saturday. School employees 50 years and older have been offered vaccination appointments, but, moving forward, appointment requests are being opened up to all eligible school employees using an invitation process. Limited vaccine supplies continue to hamper our local efforts to reach everyone currently eligible for COVID-19 vaccination, said Jimena Loveluck, Washtenaw County Health Department health officer, said in a news release. This week, were grateful to have enough doses available to team up with Michigan Medicine and IHA to offer vaccination to our early elementary educators as efficiently as possible. Pressure has continued to build on AAPS in recent weeks regarding whether it would mostly remain in remote learning for the remainder of the year, or if it would establish a target date for students return to the classroom. Last week, the Ann Arbor School Board voted to direct Swift to present a plan for allowing instruction to remain virtual for the remainder of the 2020-21 year, with the exception of serving those with the greatest needs. The decision came nearly five-and-a-half hours into a meeting on a motion opposing trustees described as rushed, a surprise and radical. After the meeting, Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor and several city council members asked that the district confirm its previously-established hybrid learning format and establish a target date of return. The board has since clarified in a message to families that it has not decided to remain in fully virtual instruction for the remainder of the year and that it has not yet voted to change or alter its approved transition to a hybrid learning option. Instead, board members said their intent is to establish a date on which the most vulnerable students may safely return to the school buildings, assist students struggling the most under the current virtual model, help parents and caregivers who have requested assistance with their students learning, assist families in planning for the rest of the school year and focus efforts on an enhanced summer program and a strong and safe return to schools in the fall. The district in January targeted an early March return to in-person classes. Students have remained in remote learning since last March. The districts current plan proposes bringing students back in stages, with the first stage including students in pre-kindergarten, young fives and kindergarten who have chosen the hybrid in-person learning model, as well as students with high-level specialized learning needs. Also included were small groups of middle and high school students most in-need of in-person classes. Additional stages proposed bringing students back by grade level in one-week increments, with middle and high school students entering the hybrid format last. READ MORE: Ann Arbor School Board to vote on plan for most students to finish year virtually With mental health struggles looming, Ann Arbor Public Schools students organize rally for in-person learning Mayor, council members urge Ann Arbor schools to offer hybrid learning, target return date Page Content Virginia may be the first state to follow California's lead on consumer privacy legislation, but it certainly will not be the last. The International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) observed, "State-Level momentum for comprehensive privacy bills is at an all-time high." The IAPP maintains a map of state consumer privacy legislative activity, with in-depth analysis comparing key provisions. We discuss the Virginia legislation here, along with legislative activity in several other states that seem likely to pass. It was California that enacted the first data-breach notification law, which became effective in 2003. In about 15 years' time, all U.S. states have such a law, as well as many jurisdictions around the world. Whether it is the pending Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), or a similar framework, there are several features that should be considered when examining the effects of such laws on an organization. Does the law apply? Neither the CCPA nor the VCDPA apply to all organizations doing business in the state. But they may apply more broadly than initially assumed, including to organizations without locations in the particular state. Also, some entities that control or are controlled by covered businesses also could become subject to one of these laws even if such entities would not otherwise fall into the law's scope. Finally, data-privacy and security laws increasingly reach third-party service providers to covered organizations either directly or indirectly through contracts that covered organizations must put in place. Are we exempt? Perhaps just as important as whether an organization is covered by one of these laws is the question of whether an exemption applies. It is important to know that while an organization may not be exempt as a whole, certain classifications data it maintains may be. For example, under the CCPA, "protected health information" covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is generally exempt from the law. Of course, that information comes with its own compliance obligations! What is personal information? Assuming an organization is covered by the law, the next question it may want to ask is what data is covered. As we have discussed, there are various definitions and understandings of personal information. Similar to the CCPA and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the VCDPA would define personal data broadly to include "any information that is linked or reasonably linkable to an identified or identifiable natural person." Again, this broad definition should be read together with potential exemptions to obtain a firm understanding of the information within the scope of the law's protections. In some cases, such as under the GDPR, and the amendment to the CCPA, the California Privacy Rights Act, there is a subset of personal information that comes with even more protections. Often referred to as "sensitive personal information," this category can include personally identifiable information such as racial or ethnic origin, religious beliefs, mental or physical health diagnosis, sexual orientation, citizenship or immigration status, genetic or biometric data, and geolocation data. Of course, covered organizations with these categories of data would need to understand those additional requirements. Who is protected? It is not enough to know what kind of information is "personal information," covered organizations also need to know whose personal information is protected under the law. Several of these laws protect "consumers" defined generally as natural persons who reside in the jurisdiction. Basing the analysis solely on the word "consumer" and assuming that does not include employees, students, website visitors, etc., might be a mistake. Some frameworks have specific exclusions for these and other categories, others do not. What rights do protected persons have? Ostensibly, a key purpose for this kind of privacy legislation is to empower individuals with respect to their personal information. That is, to give them more access to and control over their data that is collected, used, disclosed, maintained, and sold. To effectively comply with these measures, covered organizations need to understand the kinds of rights granted. These rights can include: The right to know what personal information is collected and processed, why, and to access such personal information. To right to correct inaccuracies in the personal information. To right to delete personal information. The right to limit processing of personal information. The right to opt out of the processing or sale of personal information. Can my organization be sued for violations of the law? It is important to understand the consequences of failing to comply with any law. The flood of litigation under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) which permits substantial recovery for failing to comply with notice and other requirementseven without a showing of actual harmconfirms the importance of examining this issue. Several of these privacy frameworks, including the CCPA and legislation supported by Governor DeSantis in Florida, include a private right of action in connection with data breaches. How will the law be enforced? Related to the question of whether consumers can sue for violations is how the law will be enforced, what are the potential penalties, and how are they measured. In most cases, enforcement rests with the state's attorney general's office. Often, the law requires covered organizations be provided written notice of any violation and a period of time to cure the violation. Compliance can be challenging so covered organizations should be aware of a law's enforcement scheme so that in cases where their compliance efforts may not be perfect, they have a plan in place for quickly acting on such notices and curing any violations. Answering these questions is certainly not the end of the analysis. For example, if covered, there are a whole host of additional questions organizations need to ask in order to evaluate compliance needs, allocate resources, identify affected business units, weigh risk management objectives, manage vendor compliance, and implement new policies and procedures, as needed. However, these questions can help to sharpen the big picture on the effect one or more of these privacy laws may have on your organization. Joseph J. Lazzarotti is an attorney with Jackson Lewis in Berkeley Heights, N.J. 2021 Jackson Lewis. All rights reserved. Reposted with permission. A woman submits documents to quarantine officials at Incheon International Airport, Wednesday. Yonhap By Lee Hyo-jin All travelers entering Korea, including Korean nationals, are required to submit negative COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test results starting Wednesday in order to curb the influx of new variants, according to health authorities. The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) said all arrivals, regardless of their nationality, must submit negative PCR test results conducted within 72 hours prior to their departure for Korea. The document must be in hard copy form issued in English or Korean. If it cannot be issued in either language, a supplemental translated version certifying the translation should be submitted along with the original test result. Transfer passengers passing through Korea without entering are excluded from the rule. Foreign nationals who fail to hand in the test results will be barred from entering. Korean citizens who do not submit negative PCR test results will be tested at a temporary living facility and be required to self-isolate for 14 days at their own expense. In addition to taking the PCR test before entering the country, incoming travelers will be tested two more times in Korea once within a day after arrival, and another during the self-isolation period. The strengthened regulations are part of efforts to effectively control the influx of highly contagious new strains, which are possibly more lethal. Since Korea detected the first case of the mutated variant from Britain on Dec. 28, a total of 128 people have been confirmed with new variants, including 83 Korean nationals, as of Tuesday. Among them, 109 cases were the British variant, 13 from South Africa and six from Brazil. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the mutant virus from Britain has spread to 94 countries worldwide as of Feb. 15. The mutant strains from South Africa and Brazil have been detected in 46 and 21 countries, respectively. The first batch of COVID-19 vaccine doses arrived in Vietnam on a Korean Air flight that landed at Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City at 11:00 am on Wednesday. The vaccine shipment of 117,600 shots, part of an order of 204,000 doses approved by the Vietnamese Ministry of Health, was developed and produced by pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and Oxford University in the UK. According to Vietnam Vaccine JSC (VNVC), which is the importer, the AstraZeneca vaccine provides a high immune response from 62 percent to 90 percent. Study results showed that 100 percent of the vaccinated people had an immune response to COVID-19 without any serious complications. VNVC confirmed that it will carry out vaccinations in its whole system immediately after completing the necessary procedures as required. We expect the price of COVID-19 vaccine to be very favorable for many people to have a chance to get inoculated early during the pandemic, said Vu Thi Thu Ha, VNVC's supply chain director. Meanwhile, four companies in Vietnam are also developing locally-made COVID-19 vaccines. As of Wednesday morning, Vietnam has documented 2,403 COVID-19 cases, with 1,760 recoveries and 35 virus-related deaths, according to the Ministry of Health. A total of 811 domestic infections have been recorded in 13 provinces and cities across the country since January 27. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A federal judge in a late-night ruling Tuesday extended his nationwide block on the Biden administrations order halting certain deportations for 100 days, a major victory for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sued over the policy. In a 105-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton granted a preliminary injunction that blocks the Department of Homeland Security policy, which was issued on Bidens first day in office. It was part of a broader strategy meant to give the agency time to recalibrate and focus on the highest enforcement priorities of securing the southwest border and national security, administration officials have said. As long as the decision stands, it leaves the Biden administration with no choice but to continue to deport individuals and families prosecuted under Trump administration rules that critics have called xenophobic and overly punitive. The Trump administration broadened the agencys deportation targets to include immigrants without serious criminal records, while the new administration is poised to narrow them. The 100-day pause did not apply to people considered national security threats or those who crossed the border illegally after Nov. 1. Tiptons ruling extends a previous temporary restraining order he granted first for 14 days, then extended for two more weeks. The judge has faulted Homeland Security for failing to explain why a pause in deportations was necessary as the department reconsidered its priorities. Tipton has also found that the policy would unlawfully cause financial harm to Texas by forcing the state to pay to continue to detain people who would otherwise be deported, and to provide public education to unaccompanied migrant children. The core failure of DHS lies not in the brevity of the January 20 memorandum or the corresponding administrative record, but instead in its omission of a rational explanation grounded in the facts reviewed and the factors considered, Tipton wrote. This failure is fatal, as this defect essentially makes DHSs determination to institute a 100-day pause on deportations an arbitrary and capricious choice. BACKGROUND: Texas AG Ken Paxton's lawsuit temporarily blocks President Biden's order on deportation Department of Justice attorneys are likely to appeal the decision, but face an uphill battle as the case heads toward conservative-leaning court after conservative-leaning court. Tipton was a Trump appointee, and an appeal would be heard by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative in the nation, then the U.S. Supreme Court. For Paxton, who has faced public scrutiny since the revelation that he took a business trip to Utah while Texas endured a major disaster last week, the judges ruling was welcome news. HUGE WIN. The first of many against Bidens unlawful agenda, Paxton tweeted Wednesday. Later, Paxton released a more detailed statement: A freeze on deportations at this scale would undermine federal law, irreparably harm our great state, and directly endanger our citizens. Law and order must be upheld, he said. I will continue to defend Texas against those who unlawfully ignore United States law in favor of their own policy preferences. On HoustonChronicle.com: AG Ken Paxton and wife Sen. Angela Paxton went to Utah during Texas freeze Attorneys for the Department of Justice said they disagreed with the decision and were considering next steps. An attorney with American Civil Liberties Union, which represents two Texas groups that intervened in the case, similarly said they were reviewing their options. This ruling is legally wrong and will seriously harm families and communities around the country, ACLU attorney Cody Wofsy said. Texas suit is an attempt to deprive the Biden administration of a meaningful opportunity to review and assess immigration enforcement after years of living under lawless Trump policies. Tipton said in his order that he understood the agencys desire to reset priorities as well as address operational challenges posed by COVID-19; however, he disagreed that a 100-day halt on certain deportations was the way to do that. Why is a 100-day pause needed to alleviate the problems COVID-19 poses? What basis in the record is there that anything will be different in 100 days on this front? he asked. Why does DHS need a 100-day pause on removals to fairly and efficiently process immigration and asylum applications at the southwest border? Why is pausing removals essential to redirecting immigration resources? Tiptons order prevents mass stayings of deportation orders; however, DHS still retains the ability to make case-by-case decisions. Geoffrey Hoffman, director of the University of Houston Law Centers Immigration Clinic, said Biden administration lawyers still have a good chance of having the decision overturned by higher courts, despite their conservative majorities. First, the Supreme Court and other federal courts have expressed doubts recently about the legitimacy of nationwide injunctions, Hoffman said. Second, there is the substantive problem with the decision impinging on the wide discretion given to presidents in the context of immigration enforcement, which traditionally has been within the almost-exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government. Raed Gonzalez, a Houston immigration attorney, said the suit will eventually be moot once the administration sets a more permanent policy beyond these 100 days, which will be up in May. In the meantime, however, he said it will mean more torn families and immigrants being forced to face danger in their home countries. The Biden administration did not intend to stop all deportations, but some that were not on their priorities, Gonzalez said. I trust this will be able to be achieved once the priorities from DHS are formally followed, but in the meantime this is just another partisan lawsuit clearly following Paxtons xenophobic policies of the prior administration. taylor.goldenstein@chron.com Ex-Mari El head ordered to 13-year imprisonment in $3 mln corruption case Moskva city news agency 12:20 24/02/2021 MOSCOW, February 24 (RAPSI) A court in Nizhny Novgorod has sentenced ex-Governor of Mari El Republic Leonid Markelov to 13 years in high-security prison in a 235 million-ruble (over $3 million) bribery case, RAPSI has learnt in the press service of Russias Prosecutor Generals Office. Additionally, he has been fined 235.8 million rubles and banned from holding certain posts for 3 years, according to the statement. Moreover, the court has granted a 9 million-ruble civil lawsuit filed by the Mari El Republics Finance Ministry. In November, prosecutors urged to jail Markelov for 17 years, his attorney Igor Trunov told RAPSI. According to the lawyer, the prosecution demanded 10 and 4.5 years behind bars for two other defendants businessperson Natalia Kozhanova and Markelovs ex-deputy Iraida Dolgusheva respectively. Investigators believe that Markelov acting as the republics governor received through Kozhanova 235 million rubles from the founder of Akashevskaya factory Nikolay Krivash as a bribe for common protection and assistance in the property payment of funds provided by the state support for development of the agricultural complex. According to defense lawyer Sergey Sevruk, Markelov is also a defendant in another criminal case over illegal possession of ammunition. Media also reported that there is the third case against the former official over abuse of power. Markelov pled not guilty to all accusations. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Islamabad: Pakistan on Friday said that it is committed to peacefully resolving the Kashmir issue and will extend its political and diplomatic support to the people of the Valley. Pakistans Foreign Office, in a statement, accused the Indian security forces of using live ammunition and pellet guns against Kashmiris. It said the deteriorating human rights situation in the Valley has serious implications for the regional peace and security. Pakistan remains committed to peacefully resolving the Jammu and Kashmir dispute in accordance with the resolutions of the UN Security Council and will continue to extend its moral, political and diplomatic support to the people of Jammu and Kashmir, it said amid escalating tensions between India and Pakistan along the Line of Control (LoC). It called upon the international community to take notice of the grave human rights crisis in the Valley. Suggested read: Pakistan has increased attempts to push terrorists into Jammu and Kashmir, says Arun Jaitley For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. EAGLE POINT, Ore. Law enforcement officers from multiple agencies swarmed an area of Eagle Point near Church on the Hill for a "shots fired" investigation on Tuesday night. The Jackson County Sheriff's Office confirmed just after 10:45 p.m. that this was an officer-involved shooting. According to the agency, JCSO deputies and officers from Eagle Point Police responded to reports of a domestic disturbance in the 100-block of Idlewood Drive shortly before 7:30 p.m. Before officers arrived at the scene, a man left the location in an SUV, accompanied by another man. Police stopped the SUV on Stevens Road in the parking lot of Church on the Hill. A few minutes later, one of the deputies on the scene "advised shots were fired," JCSO said. One of the men in the SUV has died, the Sheriff's Office said, and another is being treated at a local hospital. One deputy was hit by a bullet fired from the SUV, but the injury is believed to be a minor one. The case has been handed over to the Major Assault Death Investigation Unit (MADIU), with Oregon State Police as the lead agency. Church on the Hill is located just south of Hillside Elementary School along E Main Street, which becomes Stevens Road. Officers had blocked off both roads for the investigation before 9:30 p.m. This is a developing story and will be updated with more details as they emerge. VANCOUVER, WA / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / Adaptive Ad Systems, Inc. (OTC PINK:AATV), announced today that it has commenced with installation of an additional network system in South Georgia. Adaptive and its subsidiary companies provide Dynamic Digital Ad Insertion (DDAI) via its streaming media hardware and proprietary processing software for all U.S. cable TV markets, and High Speed Fixed Wireless Internet Service (WISP) via a network of Hybrid Access Points and Micro POPs. J. Michael Heil, CEO, states "The Company has made it its absolute focus to continue the expansion of our network of ad insertion systems into markets that present the best possible opportunities for continuing and accelerated sales growth. Our particular emphasis is on markets that we expect to experience the greatest sales growth over the next five years. For a variety of reasons, Georgia and Florida have evolved as states with markets that are likely to provide extraordinary expansion and sales growth. The network system we are currently installing, covers southern Georgia and includes sections of the Jacksonville, Florida DMA. With this installation, we will increase our subscriber reach in Georgia by more than thirteen percent." THE ADAPTIVE SYSTEM Adaptive allows advertisers across the US to purchase ads that are inserted into a linked group of the Adaptive digital TV advertising system. Adaptive Ad Systems manages all ad-related activities, provides all technical support, ad-sales, traffic, and billing. Adaptive has established an innovative revenue share agreement with each individual cable television system. ABOUT ADAPTIVE Adaptive Ad Systems Inc. is a digital media and video communications company that together with its subsidiary manufactures, develops and deploys dynamic digital ad insertion (DDAI) and video streaming media hardware and proprietary processing software for the Cable TV, Satellite TV, and IPTV markets. Adaptive's primary focus is the 2nd and 3rd tier US markets. Adaptive exclusively sells all available advertising space in each market across multiple national cable television networks, while maintaining complete technology ownership. Adaptive has implemented a unique profit-sharing model with its cable TV partners. The Company serves over 200 designated marketing areas in approximately 39 states. Adaptive also provides broadband and cable TV services in some niche markets. For additional information, please visit: www.adaptiveadsystems.com. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS Any statements contained in this press release that do not describe historical facts constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements may include, without limitation, financial projections, statements regarding the plans and objectives of management for current and future operations, the development, regulatory approvals, and commercialization of the Company's products, or any of the Company's proposed services, systems, partnerships, or acquisitions. Such forward-looking statements are not meant to predict or guarantee actual results and performance and actual events or results may differ considerably. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from any projections may include, without limitation, the Company's delays in the development of its products, the inability to obtain additional financing, the impact of significant new or changing government regulation on the industry, existing or increased competition, results of arbitration and litigation, stock volatility and illiquidity, and the Company's general failure to implement the Company's business plans or strategies. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this release. DOWNLOAD SWI RESEARCH REPORT HERE. CONTACT: Adaptive Ad Systems, Inc. 4400 NE 77th Avenue, Suite 275 Vancouver, Washington 98662 310-321-4958 info@aatv.co www.aatv.co StockWatchIndex San Diego, California 442-287-8059 info@stockwatchindex.com www.stockwatchindex.com www.swiresearch.com SOURCE: Adaptive Ad Systems, Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631528/Adaptive-Ad-Systems-Announces-New-Network-System-Installations-in-Georgia-Florida-Markets A researcher caught a harrowing encounter in a Georgia salt marsh when a fish pulled a baby sparrow down to a watery grave. Seaside sparrows usually balance their nests in the marsh grass, but researchers believe climate change has caused tides in the area to rise precipitously. As a result one bird's nest was flooded, putting its hatchling right in the fish's path. In a video shared on Twitter, a mummichog can be seen breaching the nest and making a meal of the hours-old hatchling. Ornithologist Corina Newsome shared video of a hatchling MacGillivray's seaside sparrow attacked and eaten by a mummichog, a common East Coast fish Corina Newsome, an ornithologist at Georgia Southern University, saw the deadly attack while reviewing video she took in 2019 of dozens of sparrows nests in the marshes of Brunswick, Georgia, about 80 miles from Savannah. The birds face a variety of threats, from predators to habitat loss. One subspecies, the dusky seaside sparrow, went extinct in the late 1980s. Others, like the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, are endangered because of habitat destruction from flooding and adaptation to agricultural land. Nestled in a Georgia salt marsh, the sparrow's nest had flooded. That gave the opportunistic mummichog the chance to breach the nest and make a meal of the baby chick If seaside sparrows place their nests too high, their young are vulnerable to predators. Too low, and they can flood. Newsome's observations show predators can come from unexpected directions Newsome was watching a video of a baby MacGillivray's seaside sparrow, a subspecies typically preyed on by owls, raccoons, minks and even snakes. But this time the killer came from beneath the water. There had been record-breaking high tides across the Southeast in 2019 and more than a third of the nests Newsome videotaped were flooded, according to The Post and Courier. 'In the video, you can see the water rising incrementally in the nest, and the chick is floating on top of the water,' she told Live Science. These sparrows have to perform a delicate balanceif they place their nests too high it leaves their young open to birds of prey and other hunters. Too low, though, and the nest will flood and their chicks will drown. Climate change has caused record high tides and flooding in the Southeast, threatening the MacGillivray's nesting, breeding and feeding areas According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the sparrows 'will shift nests higher or lower in marshes to contend with these risks.' Miraculously, the hours-old hatchling in this nest managed to stay afloat for some time. But as the grainy footage revealed, it wasn't able to hold off a fish that hopped over the rim of the nest. It was a mummichog, an commonplace East Coast fish known to inhabit brackish coastal waters. According to Newsome's report this month in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology, the mummichog pulled the baby bird under the surface and 'thrashed the chick around in its mouth' until it drowned. Mummichogs, also known as mud minnows, are opportunistic feeders. They normally eat plants, insects, algae and even other fish, but perhaps the nestling proved too tempting a treat to ignore. Newsome screamed out loud when she saw the clip of the attack. 'I was sending videos to everybody,' she told the newspaper. 'I was like, 'You're not going to believe what I'm seeing.' ' Conservationists are concerned about the MacGillivray because it's threatened by the same factors as the endangered Cape Sable sparrow. But the Fish and Wildlife Service has refused to classify it as a protected species. The birds are also endangered by rising sea levels caused by global warming, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. 'Climate change is expected to raise sea levels by as much as 3 to 9 feet this century, which would destroy the sparrow's breeding and foraging habitats near the coast,' the center said. University of Georgia ornithologist Robert Cooper told the Post and Courier that Newsome's findings adds 'to a growing body of knowledge ... about the songbirds that have to run this gauntlet between all these different nest predators.' TROY, Mich., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Plex Systems , the leader in cloud-delivered smart manufacturing solutions, today announced it has acquired Kors Engineering, a leading provider of plant floor connectivity and manufacturing process automation software. The acquisition is effective immediately and all Kors employees have joined Plex. Plex is uniquely focused on delivering production and plant-level insights. By acquiring Kors and its product, Mach2, Plex extends its solutions to the plant edge. "As a long time Plex partner, Kors is a natural fit for our smart manufacturing strategy. With Mach2, Kors drives plant-floor connectivity, production dashboards and process automation for hundreds of Plex-powered plants today," said Bill Berutti, CEO of Plex. "The combined solution extends the power of the Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform, giving manufacturers what they are constantly striving for: greater control and continuous improvement to deliver on their customer promises faster and more efficiently." "Machine connectivity, process automation, and plant control are the new requirements for manufacturers as they look for more predictability, accuracy and speed in their business," said Kevin Prouty, Group Vice President, Energy and Manufacturing Insights at IDC. "By adding Kors Mach2 to the Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform, manufacturers now have the capabilities to connect MES and Industrial IoT to the plant edge, enabling them to gain the granular control they need to execute quickly, eliminate manual errors and produce accurate insights for customers." Helping Manufacturers Embrace Smart Manufacturing The Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform was built on the plant floor, offering ERP capabilities to run business operations, MES to manage production, supply chain planning to accurately forecast and plan, and Industrial IoT to analyze machine-level data. Through this acquisition, the Plex platform expands to seamlessly connect the full enterprise, driving bidirectional data communication that offers greater accuracy and lower costs to manufacturers. The combined solution provides a truly smart manufacturing environment that aligns to the promise of Industry 4.0. "Launching Mach2 on Thai Summit America's production floors revolutionized our operations," said Janice D'Amico, Executive Manager, IT at Thai Summit America. "Bringing the integration of the machine PLC and Mach2 to the plant floor, along with the Plex Control Panel, highlighted for everyone the real-time performance of our operations with clear visibility. Just one week post launch, we uncovered opportunities for improvement. And within our first year we had production efficiency improvements on our plant floor of over $9M." "As an award winning and proven Plex partner, we are excited to now be officially part of the company," said Tony Kaczmarek, Kors President and owner. "Kors Mach2 is a flexible, low-code plant connectivity solution that shares data between machines and Plex to streamline data entry, setups and processes, and provides real-time dashboards that give manufacturers total visibility. With hundreds of successful plant implementations, the acquisition is a win-win for manufacturers looking for a proven solution to deliver immediate value." About Plex Systems Plex Systems, Inc. is the leader in cloud-delivered smart manufacturing solutions, empowering the world's manufacturers to make awesome products. Our platform gives manufacturers the ability to connect, automate, track and analyze every aspect of their business to drive transformation. The Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform includes solutions for manufacturing execution (MES), ERP, quality, supply chain planning and management, Industrial IoT and analytics to connect people, systems, machines, and supply chains, enabling them to lead with precision, efficiency and agility. Contact Info: Lori Zoellner Director, Corporate Communications (248) 221-3076 [email protected] SOURCE Plex Systems [February 24, 2021] Evoque Data Center Solutions CEO: 2021 Evolving as "Year of Growth" DALLAS, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- After a year of aligning the companys capabilities with the rapidly changing data center market, the chief executive officer of Evoque Data Center Solutions (www.evoquedcs.com) says his company is primed for a year of growth in 2021. Andy Stewart noted last months introduction of the Evoque Connectivity Suite (ECS) as a prime mover in the companys transition from a traditional space and power colocation company toward a more encompassing and flexible hybrid data solution provider. In a report issued earlier this month, industry analysts 451 Research called the ECS a key step in that direction as interconnection and connectivity in general become more important to MTDC (Multi-Tenant Data Center) customers. Evoque will continue to expand its services portfolio and has indicated a willingness to further partner, acquire or develop technologies in-house to do so. Philbert Shih, managing director at Structure Research, concurred, saying, Data center providers must increasingly offer their clients an expanded range of flexible connectivity services to enable a consistent global reach. By delivering a full range of options (via the ECS), with the promise of more services on the way, Evoque is demonstrating that its prepared to work with companies of virtually any size and meet their evolving digital transformation requirements. Stewart cited increased demand for Evoques services from clients and prospects as companies continue to develop post-COVID strategies. He also said the company has begun an initiative to increase investments in its most strategic owned and operated data centers, with the goal of making significant capital expenditures at those facilities to improve their valu to Evoques clients. Evoque Data Center Solutions is in its third year as a standalone company, having purchased data centers from AT&T. The firm has made significant upgrades, implementing improvements to its infrastructure as well as instituting new streamlined procedures to be more responsive to its roster of Fortune 1000 clients around the world. A new article in Data Center Knowledge reflects that approach, saying that Evoque is taking what the article calls a Hybrid-First Approach to the Colocation Business. Stewart is also quoted in a new Data Center Frontier article as saying the company intends to grow aggressively in 2021. Since Ive joined Evoque, weve looked at over a dozen M&A opportunities, and well continue to work on both domestic and international opportunities, said Stewart. Our plan has always been to scale, through both organic and inorganic growth. Were working on expansions, but I think it will be a year of some inorganic growth for us as well. Stewart noted that the long-term backing of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, Evoques corporate owners, is a key element in the companys plans. I see a number of factors coming together in a positive manner, giving us optimism for significant growth in 2021 and beyond, Stewart said. Pursuing a focused strategy of build, buy and partner has given us momentum that I expect will continue with several major developments in the months ahead. About Evoque Data Center Solutions Evoque Data Center Solutions, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, is one of the worlds 20 largest data center firms. Evoque Data Center Solutions offers enterprises a full range of services, ranging from local, regional and global connectivity to secure space in highly available and redundant environments across four continents. The company supports a diversified base of Fortune 1000 customers across multiple segments, including utilities, transport, energy, communications, healthcare, and technologies. For more information, visit https://www.evoquedcs.com/. Evoque Data Center Solutions is a portfolio company of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, a leading global infrastructure asset manager that owns and operates high-quality, long-life assets in the utilities, transport, midstream and data sectors across North and South America, Asia Pacific and Europe. For more information: Steve Friedberg sfriedberg@evoquedcs.com 484.550.2900 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 24, 2021] Global Cards & Payments Market Report 2021: Critical information to Assess the Market as the World Emerges from the COVID-19 Shut Down - ResearchAndMarkets.com The "Cards & Payments Global Market Report 2021: COVID-19 Impact and Recovery to 2030" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. Cards & Payments Global Market Report 2021: COVID-19 Impact and Recovery to 2030 provides the strategists, marketers and senior management with the critical information they need to assess the global cards & payments market as it emerges from the COVID-19 shut down. Major companies in the cards and payments market include American Express Company; Visa; Bank of America; PayPal (News - Alert) and Mastercard. The global cards & payments market is expected to grow from $671.73 billion in 2020 to $729.9 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.7%. The growth is mainly due to the companies rearranging their operations and recovering from the COVID-19 impact, which had earlier led to restrictive containment measures involving social distancing, remote working, and the closure of commercial activities that resulted in operational challenges. The market is expected to reach $961.34 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 7%. The cards and payments market consists of sales of cards and payments services by entities (organizations, sole traders and partnerships) that are engaged in storing, processing and transmitting payment card data. The cards and payments market is segmented into cards; and payments. Asia Pacific was the largest region in the global cards & payments market, accounting for 33% of the market in 2020. Western Europe was the second largest region accounting for 23% of the global cards & payments market. South America was the smallest region in the global cards & payments market. Cards and payments companies are investing in technologies and formulating guidlines to prevent card and payment frauds. In this regard, payment service providers and merchants have implemented various solutions including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard ( PCI (News - Alert) DSS) compliance, EMV technology, 3-D Secure services, tokenization, biometrics and end-to-end encryption. To combat the constantly evolving card fraud methods, the National Retail Federation (NRF) also updates its security guidelines continuously. Key Topics Covered: 1. Executive Summary 2. Report Structure 3. Cards & Payments Market Characteristics 3.1. Market Definition 3.2. Key Segmentations 4. Cards & Payments Market Product Analysis 4.1. Leading Products/ Services 4.2. Key Features and Differentiators 4.3. Development Products 5. Cards & Payments Market Supply Chain 5.1. Supply Chain 5.2. Distribution 5.3. End Customers 6. Cards & Payments Market Customer Information 6.1. Customer Preferences 6.2. End Use Market Size and Growth 7. Cards & Payments Market Trends And Strategies 8. Impact Of COVID-19 On Cards & Payments 9. Cards & Payments Market Size And Growth 9.1. Market Size 9.2. Historic Market Growth, Value ($ Billion) 9.2.1. Drivers Of The Market 9.2.2. Restraints On The Market 9.3. Forecast Market Growth, Value ($ Billion) 9.3.1. Drivers Of The Market 9.3.2. Restraints On The Market 10. Cards & Payments Market Regional Analysis 10.1. Global Cards & Payments Market, 2020, By Region, Value ($ Billion) 10.2. Global Cards & Payments Market, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F, Historic And Forecast, By Region 10.3. Global Cards & Payments Market, Growth And Market Share Comparison, By Region 11. Cards & Payments Market Segmentation 11.1. Global Cards & Payments Market, Segmentation By Type, Historic and Forecast, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F, $ Billion Cards Payments 11.2. Global Cards & Payments Market, Segmentation By Institution Type, Historic and Forecast, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F, $ Billion Banking Institutions Non-Banking Institutions 12. Cards & Payments Market Segments 12.1. Global Cards Market, Segmentation By Type, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F, Value ($ Billion) - Credit Card; Debit Card; Charge Card; Prepaid Card 12.2. Global Payments Market, Segmentation By Type, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F, Value ($ Billion) - 13. Cards & Payments Market Metrics 13.1. Cards & Payments Market Size, Percentage Of GDP, 2015-2025, Global 13.2. Per Capita Average Cards & Payments Market Expenditure, 2015-2025, Global Companies Mentioned American Express (News - Alert) Company Visa Bank of America PayPal Mastercard For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/niqt5w View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005651/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] WA Labor Party Could Gain Both Houses Following Huge Lead in Election Polls The Western Australian (WA) Labor Party appears to be on track for an unprecedented win in the upcoming March election after February Newspoll results, conducted by The Australian, showed the WA Labor Party with an unassailable lead. The results released on Feb. 19 showed Labor had a 36 point lead over the WA Liberal Party in the two-party-preferred vote. In terms of primary votes, 59 percent of Western Australians also said they preferred the Labor state government. This is an increase from 42.2 percent in the 2017 elections. Meanwhile, the Liberals only received 23 percent of the primary votes, decreasing from 31.2 percent in 2017. The Nationals, Greens and One Nation parties secured 2 percent, 8 percent, and 3 percent respectively, all dropping from their 2017 primary votes. WA Premier Mark McGowan also received the tick of approval, with 88 percent of those polled satisfied with his performance. The premier, though has argued that the results should be taken with a grain of salt, explaining that there have been polls wildly inaccurate polls in other elections. We are not so arrogant as to just assume the election is won, McGowan said. We have a hard fight ahead of us. However, the WA Liberal Party leader, Zak Kirkup, appears to be worried that the polls are correct, which could almost wipe out the Liberal Party in the state. Kirkup, on Friday, warned West Australians about the dangers of having a Labor majority in both the upper and lower houses of parliament. The risk of total control of the West Australian government is real, Kirkup said. If the Labor Party got their wish for Western Australia, they would have total and absolute power over the parliament without any checks or balances. I think that is dangerous to our democracy. However, Martin Drum, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Notre Dame Australia in Fremantle, says the prospects of Labor winning both houses of the state Parliament is not as high as everyone is saying. Drum says that for Labor to win a majority, the Party would need to win either an extra seat in the metropolitan electorates or look to win seats in regional areas, but both tasks will prove difficult. Theres not too many options for picking up seats in the metropolitan areas, Drum said. That means that youre looking for seats in the regional areas, and Labor traditionally hasnt polled that well. The WA state elections are set for March. 13, among the Liberal Party policies, are plans to create 200,000 new jobs in WA and lower small businesses taxes until they are below the rest of the country. While the Labor Party has also promised to create new jobs and has committed to investing AU$100 million (US $79 million) into building a film studio in Fremantle if reelected. Post-stabilisation notice 24 February 2021 Not for distribution, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States or any jurisdiction in which such distribution would be unlawful. Hamburger Hochbahn AG EUR 500 million Green Senior Unsecured Eurobond due 2031 Post-Stabilisation Notice Commerzbank (contact: Daniela Olt-Farrelly; telephone: +4969136-20) hereby gives notice that no stabilisation (within the meaning of Article 3.2 (d) of the Market Abuse Regulation (EU Regulation 596/2014) was undertaken by the Stabilising Managers named below in relation to the offer of the following securities. Issuer: Hamburger Hochbahn AG Guarantor (if any): none ISIN: XS2233088132 Aggregate nominal amount: EUR 500,000,000 Description: 0.125% green, senior, unsecured due 24 February 2031 Stabilisation Coordinator: Stabilisation Managers: Commerzbank AG BNP Paribas Credit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank This announcement is for information purposes only and does not constitute an invitation or offer to underwrite, subscribe for or otherwise acquire or dispose of any securities of the Issuer in any jurisdiction. This announcement is not for distribution, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States or any other jurisdiction in which such distribution would be unlawful. Tina Desai is a force to reckon with. She kickstarted her career with modelling and is now a popular actor in Hollywood. The actress who graduated in Business Management with a specialization in finance got into the movie business after participating in the reality show contest Get Gorgeous. She then worked as a model for several years and featured in more than 100 advertisements at that time. She made her acting debut in 2011 with Yeh Faasley and went on to star in the action-comedy Sahi Dhandhe Galat Bande and Table No. 21. February 24 Celebrity Birthdays: Check List of Famous Personalities Born on Feb 24. Also Read | Maggie Smith Birthday: Downton Abbey, Gosford Park, It All Came True 5 Thought-Provoking Movie Dialogues by the Actress This was just the beginning of her career. Tina soon bagged a key role in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. She went to feature in the sequel of the film titled The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel as well. She gained prominence with her stint in The Wachowskis and J. Michael Straczynski's Netflix drama Sense8 where she plays Kala Dandekar. The actress will now be seen in Amazon Prime's web series Mumbai Diaries 26/11. Tine abides by the mantra of 'Work Hard, Play Hard'. She often is seen spending quality time with friends and family and balancing between her personal and professional life. She even ventures on to different adventures in different countries and her Instagram account is flooded with pictures of her travel extravaganzas. Today as the actress is celebrating her 34th birthday, we decided to take a look at some of her pictures from the different vacations she has been on. Check it out below: Also Read | Mumbai Diaries 26/11 Teaser: Amazon Prime's Medical Drama Featuring Mohit Raina Looks Bloodcurdling (Watch Video) Tina Desai in Malta: This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Tina is seen having a relaxing time at the Blue Lagoon beach in Malta. She is seen wearing a blue bikini in this picture while she strikes her brightest smile for the picture. Story continues Tina Desai in Amsterdam: This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This picture was taken by Tina in Amsterdam. She visited the flower market in the city and shared these lovely snaps with the perennials. The actress looked beautiful surrounded by the gorgeous flower arrangements. Mumbai Diaries 26/11 Teaser: Amazon Prime's Medical Drama Featuring Mohit Raina Looks Bloodcurdling. Tina Desai in New York City: This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Time Square in New York is one magical place and Tina shared a glimpse of it when she shared this picture with her fans. Taking a pretty selfie, the actress gave a nice view of the busy Times Square. Tina Desai in Paris: This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Tina visited Paris almost a year back and posted this beautiful picture of hers posing in front of the Arc de Triomphe. Donning a bomber jacket and black jeans, Tine looked gleeful holding the Sephora bag in her hand in this picturesque photo. Tina Desai in Las Vegas: This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Tina made sure she enjoys Las Vegas the right way. She can be seen in a very casual avatar in this picture where she is enjoying a drink in the famous Las Vegas Novelty drink glass. Tina Desai in Brazil: This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Tina visited Rio De Janerio in Brazil and shared this lovely picture from her stay in the city. She striked a goofy pose in front of the Christ the Redeemer and we are loving her energy in the picture. Tina Desai in Paris: This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Paris by the night become even more appealing and Tina gave us a glimpse of it with these pictures. She shared a selfie of hers in front of the glittering Eiffel Tower and added pictures of many famous tourist spots as well. These pictures of Tina's makes us wanna pack our bags right away and go on a vacation. We hope she gets to explore more and more of such beautiful places in the coming years. Join us in wishing the actress a very happy birthday. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. Citing a former cops fatal wrong-way crash on Staten Island, District Attorney Michael E. McMahon slammed a proposal that would make the city Department of Transportation the lead agency to probe deadly car accidents. The NYPD Highway District Collision Investigation Squad (CIS) currently heads probes of life-threatening crashes on Staten Island and throughout New York City. If approved, the Department of Transportation (DOT) would establish a crash investigation and analysis unit under a proposal sponsored by Councilman Ydanis A. Rodriguez (D-Manhattan), who represents neighborhoods that include Washington Heights, Inwood and Marble Hill. Mayor Bill de Blasio does not support the proposal and neither does the NYPD or the DOT. The mayor has said he believes the Department of Transportation and the police both have a role to play in investigations, which is already the case, according to a spokesman for de Blasio. This legislation is flawed for many reasons, but most significantly, if enacted, it would drastically hamper law enforcements ability to investigate and hold offenders accountable for serious vehicular crimes and would prevent my office and the citys other district attorneys from securing justice for the victims of these crimes, McMahon said on Wednesday during a meeting of the City Councils Committee on Transportation. Under the proposed legislation, the citys Department of Transportation would take over the primary responsibility for investigating crash scenes, effectively yanking these duties from the NYPDs Collision Investigation Squad. As I have already stated, this is a misguided and dangerous move that will have a serious impact on the prosecution of vehicular crimes and hurt innocent victims throughout the five boroughs. The transfer to the DOT would impact our ability to hold intoxicated or drugged drivers accountable, McMahon said. It is hard to believe that the City Council who claim to care deeply about making the streets safe for drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and cyclists would even consider handing off such immense responsibilities to a non-NYPD agency with no expertise in collision investigation or potential criminal prosecution, he said. The bill also remains ambiguous as to how DOT would work in conjunction with law enforcement to ensure evidence is preserved and proper procedures are followed to establish probable cause when an arrest must be made. ABAD CASE McMahon bolstered his position by referencing Pedro Abad, a former officer in Linden, N.J., who was sentenced to the maximum 8 1/3 to 25 years behind bars for the horrific crash on March 20, 2015, that killed 28-year-old passengers Joseph Rodriguez, a friend, and Frank Viggiano, a Linden police officer and injured Abad and Patrik Kudlac, 25, another Linden police officer. I shudder to think how this proposed unit would handle complicated and intricate cases such as the case involving defendant Pedro Abad, the New Jersey police officer who crashed in 2015 going the wrong way on the West Shore Expressway while driving drunk, killing his two passengers, and seriously injuring a third victim, McMahon said. Due in part to the excellent investigative work by CIS, my office was able to convict this defendant at trial and secure the maximum prison sentence. Together, we won justice for the victims. All four men who were in Abads car had been drinking at Curves, a Charleston strip club, shortly before the 4:50 a.m. wreck, according to authorities. A jury convicted Abad of all nine charges against him four counts of aggravated vehicular homicide, two counts of aggravated vehicular assault, and single counts of second-degree manslaughter, second-degree assault and reckless endangerment. A jury convicted former Linden cop Pedro Abad of aggravated vehicular homicide and all other charges after his trial before Judge Mario Mattei in Supreme Court, St. George. (Staten Island Advance/Bill Lyons) Under the proposed bill, the DOT would create a crash investigation and analysis unit tasked with investigating all vehicle crashes involving significant injury. The unit also would make recommendations for safety-improving changes to street design and infrastructure and post its reports on the Department of Transportation website. The district attorney praised the investigative skills of the NYPDs Collision Investigation Squad and expressed doubts that the DOT has the funds, experts and other resources needed to successfully probe fatal crashes. For members of a new unit within DOT to become equipped to handle these tasks will take substantial time and, as the city continues to experience an exceedingly difficult financial situation, significant funding, McMahon said. Further, if the sponsor and the Council have concerns regarding CIS historical response to incidents across the city, addressing those concerns while maintaining CIS current role and responsibilities is a far more appropriate, realistic, and cost-efficient option than what this legislation proposes. As written, this legislation is unpractical and unfeasible to implement on its current timeline given the training gap for the new positions at DOT. McMahon said that only police officers currently are empowered to execute search warrants and conduct breathalyzer testing. Cops are the experts at collecting and examining evidence from crash scenes. CHALLENGES ON S.I. The district attorney also spoke about the unique safety challenges faced by drivers on the least populated and most car-centric borough of New York City. We all want to reduce traffic injuries and fatalities while creating safer roads for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists especially on Staten Island, where a lack of public transportation and heavy reliance on cars makes this goal even more essential to our safety and the safety of our loved ones, McMahon said. Effectively eliminating the NYPDs squad and transferring the primary responsibility for investigating serious vehicular crashes to a new unit within the DOT, is, stated simply, a bad idea and a solution in search of a problem. The mayor previously said that he wants to see stronger penalties for people who hurt or kill other people with their automobile. I want to see more stringent investigations that lead to consequences, de Blasio said. I obviously also want to see that crash investigations lead to structural change where needed, design change or what else is needed. Those are two different elements. The mayor said both the NYPD and DOT have a role to play. The Northern Commercial Court of Appeal on February 23 upheld a complaint of PJSC A/T B.A.T. Pryluky Tobacco Company owned by British American Tobacco (BAT) related to the decision of the trial court and the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine on imposition of a fine UAH 450 million, the company's press service said on Wednesday. "The Court of Appeal has carefully examined the evidence and facts of the case and has found erroneous the legal position of the court of the first instance and groundless the qualifications of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine, on which we have been repeatedly emphasizing," the press service of BAT said. The company said that it welcomes the decision of the Court of Appeal. After more than a year of judicial debates, we have finally achieved justice in our cause and proved our rightness. The company believes that the court's decision guarantees the stable functioning of the constitutional state in Ukraine and serves as a strong positive signal to investors from around the world. The press service of the company told Interfax-Ukraine that B.A.T. Pryluky did not admit his guilt and did not pay the fine imposed by the committee in the amount of UAH 450 million. As reported, the Antimonopoly Committee in October 2019 imposed a fine of UAH 6.5 billion for anti-competitive concerted actions on cigarette manufacturers and distributors: UAH 3.4 billion on Tedis Ukraine, UAH 370 million on Philip Morris Sales and Distribution, UAH 810 million on Philip Morris Ukraine, UAH 430 million on PJSC JT International Ukraine, UAH 490 million on PJSC JT International Company Ukraine, UAH 170 million on Imperial Tobacco Production Ukraine, UAH 290 million on Imperial Tobacco Ukraine, UAH 80 million on British American Tobacco Sales and Marketing Ukraine LLC, UAH 450 million on PJSC A/T B.A.T. Pryluky Tobacco Company, and also ordered these companies to stop violations. According to the court decisions database, the Northern Commercial Court of Appeal heard the claim of B.A.T. Pryluky over the fine imposed by the committee behind closed doors at the request of the committee. On January 26, 2021, British American Tobacco Sales and Marketing Ukraine lost an appeal over the fine of UAH 80 million paid by the company with the Northern Commercial Court of Appeal. According to the company, the fine imposed by the committee was paid to avoid the accrual of penalties, although the manufacturer did not admit his guilt. At the same time, Tedis Ukraine on February 2 was the first to achieve the satisfaction of the appeal against the committee in the Supreme Court and the invalidation of the fine of UAH 3.4 billion, which the company has not yet paid. The Supreme Court said that it upheld the cassation due to the impossibility of bringing any person to justice on the basis of decisions of the committee in other cases (as adjudicated), without obligatory proof of guilt in each individual case and taking into account the erroneous legal qualification of actions of Tedis Ukraine LLC. Saab has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Abu Dhabi Ports for the development of technologies for port surveillance and vessel traffic management. The agreement was signed at the international defence exhibition Idex 2021 in Abu Dhabi, a WAM report said. Saab is a leading defence and security company in the UAE, partnering with the UAE government and institutions to support the building of a competitive defence and security industry and ecosystem. For Saab successful strategic partnerships are key to success and essential to generate innovative products and solutions for national needs as well as the global market. "We are excited to collaborate with one of the fastest growing and innovative port operators in the world. Their high requirements will be essential for us in our ambitions to develop market-leading technologies made in the UAE," says Anna-Karin Rosen, Managing Director, Saab Ltd in UAE. Headquartered in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi Ports is a company that owns, develops, manages and operates 11 ports and terminals in the UAE and Guinea. The company facilitates global maritime trade, industry and logistics by effectively managing integrated ports, logistics assets and services, industrial cities and a free zone. "Through our maritime trade proposition, Abu Dhabi Ports is enabling our emirates economy to soar to new heights, and compete globally as a key hub connecting east and west. Our partnership with Saab further solidifies our long-term strategic effort by creating new opportunities for both companies to work together to pioneer and develop solutions that place us at the forefront of technology," says Captain Maktoum Al Houqani, Chief Corporate Authority Officer, Abu Dhabi Ports. Saab is an early investor in the UAE having started its business in the 1980s and is using its unrivalled innovation, expertise and capabilities to create world-class Emirati defence and security solutions, for national needs as well as the global market. -- Tradearabia News Service * Username This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. Choose wisely! INDUSTRY INSIGHT Why system modernization must be given higher priority The maiden flight of Americas B-52 bomber took place, fittingly enough, in 1952. Today, nearly 70 years later, the plane remains a mainstay of the nations strategic strike force. I have nothing but respect for the B-52 and its storied history, but some casual observers may find it surprising that a plane of its vintage, largely unchanged, would still be on active duty. Technologies, like people, can get old and lose their edge. Its easy to understand the issues around IT system modernization. Although a systems age by itself is not necessarily a problem; it can become one if its neglected. That applies to more than just federal installations. When modernizing systems that are more than 50 years old, agencies cant simply update them to be web-friendly and more secure. The basic architectural paradigm in which legacy systems were developed prevents modernization to web technologies and the latest new data and information technologies. Such shortcomings cascade throughout the infrastructure, impacting everything from tax systems to budget applications, social services management and more. The onset of COVID-19 brought other public-sector IT obsolescence into sharp focus. For example, the state unemployment system in Florida was unable to handle the surge in demand, frustrating thousands of applicants because they couldnt apply for or receive their desperately needed unemployment benefits. And Florida was not alone; unemployment insurance system failures were happening everywhere. That was bad enough. Yet, it was the work-from-home phenomenon, which was amplified by COVID-19, and the corresponding need to support a remote, distributed workforce, that put legacy government infrastructure to the test. Agencies learned that meetings via Zoom or any other videoconference tool can be genuinely helpful. However, issues including poor resolution, bad audio, limited bandwidth, institutional firewalls and lax security all had to be resolved. Its not just a technical issue; its also a cultural one. Until the pandemic struck, many government agencies considered it unacceptable for employees to work offsite. Thats starting to change, and theres even some money being used to web-enable certain systems. However, there are plenty of DOD systems that require users to be on base before they can get their hands on a keyboard. Some of them are classified, which means theres no web-enablement permitted; users can only work on them in a classified room with physical security. A more significant cultural issue -- and one thats baked into the military funding and acquisition process -- is the inclination toward replacing entire systems rather than incrementally modernizing existing ones. DOD faces a dilemma: On the one hand, leaders really want to move ahead, but on the other, they are anchored to long-planned and budgeted system modernization projects, unable to incrementally improve existing systems. Each government system is assigned a lifecycle, and agencies tend to stick with that cycle to secure their projected return on investment. Because agencies are reluctant to integrate advances that deliver no functional gain, IT systems incur technical debt as they age. The nations focus on acquiring big new defense systems makes sustained innovation much more difficult than it ought to be. Agencies must bake active and deliberate innovation into all their programs. Every one should have an innovation plan and technology roadmap that drives it to prevent technical debt from accruing and ensures that IT systems evolve. The belief that unless there are billions of dollars to work with, nothing important can be accomplished is a dangerous habit of mind. Much smaller sums of money, when properly focused, can update technologies already in hand, leading to smarter, more effective uses. Embracing this mindset requires a process less like traditional defense planning and acquisition and more like the way an innovative agile warfighter adapts to changing conditions in the field. Sometimes I ask military clients what they would do to improve an application if they had an unlimited budget, because budget constraints clearly limit their thinking. However, an equally revealing question might be: What would they do if you had just a thousand dollars to work with? That was essentially the choice faced by a DOD when it wanted a system that could automatically translate text from Chinese to English. As the apocryphal story goes, a small group of university professors and grad students set to work on the challenge, as did a private research firm backed by a multi-million dollar DOD contract. In the end, the university team came up with an elegant solution and delivered it more quickly than the research institution for a small fraction of the cost. Im convinced that the root problem of obsolete government systems is not a failure of technology; its a failure of imagination. Instead of supporting continuous innovation and upgrades to existing systems, we have been seduced by the siren song of exotic new systems that come with equally exotic price tags. Of course, new systems can be a good thing. However, neglecting the systems weve already invested in is a false economy and a danger to national security. Youve been writing to me a lot lately, wondering about bitcoin. What is this technology? What is it used for? Should you get involved? As of this writing, a bitcoin costs roughly $50,000, up from $10,000 a year ago. Could it go to $200,000? Sure, why not? $200,000 sounds great. Thats not a prediction. What do I think is the right price for bitcoin? Id say, roughly, zero. But it could take a while to get there. Now, blockchain the innovative technology of which bitcoin is the best-known example may have real uses. Im open to that idea. Blockchain allows for anonymous transactions that can be verified between parties who neither know nor trust each other. Theoretically, blockchain obviates the need for government regulation or third-party verification. Applied to money, bitcoin, using blockchain technology, theoretically allows us to remove transactions from the purview or limitations of existing financial infrastructure. Dollars, the theory goes, involve pesky government issuers, unreliable central banks and the meddling institutions of the existing global finance system. To its proponents bitcoin is like money unshackled from politics, regulators and borders. To be clear: I totally disagree with the need for unshackling. I think dollars are awesome. I even buy products and services with them! Ive honestly never felt limited by dollars, except obviously by the amount of them that I control at any given time. By contrast, I believe bitcoins are at their essence useless. A useless fiction, and therefore a fraud. I prefer my fictions to be useful. What is the real-world use of bitcoin? Bitcoin is not a useful store of value in the way that dollars are. Anything that can soar 500 percent in the past year, as Bitcoin has, can also drop 80 percent the following year. Or the following month. That makes it entirely inappropriate for storing value. Can bitcoin be delightful as a pure gamble, like buying a lottery ticket? Sure. But no sensible person advocates lottery tickets as a store of value. (The South Sea Company was created by charter in 1711 with a mandate to engage in an implausible business, in a far off place, that none of its British investors had ever seen. It was just exotic and mysterious enough to capture the whiff and elan of possibly unlimited wealth. It enjoyed the imprimatur of the government of England, and for a time legitimately traded in English government bonds. Shares began at 100 pounds, reaching 1,000 pounds a decade later. Fortunes were destroyed shortly thereafter, when the laws of financial gravity returned. We return to this cautionary financial story over and over because, while no two bubbles are alike, history does rhyme.) Bitcoin has all the makings of collective financial madness. Magical thinking! A difficult-to-grasp technology! Breathless media coverage of its ever-increasing price! Celebrities might be buying it! Bitcoins only plausible real-world use cases as a medium of exchange rather than a speculation are tax evasion, drug dealing, prostitution, child pornography, assassinations, arms-dealing, illegal gambling and ransomware for computer hackers. As I have yet to engage in any of these activities, I have yet to find an actual use for bitcoin in my own life. Incidentally, bitcoin is probably not even anonymous. One of the features of the blockchain is that all transactions are traceable and reproducible. Thats the plausible key to blockchain technologys usefulness in the future that all transactions create a permanent record, visible to all counterparties. But that feature of permanence undermines anonymity. A blockchain-sophisticated FBI should be able to see exactly who sold you bitcoin, and who you in turn sold bitcoin to. Your drug deal or tax evasion with bitcoin was not as anonymous as you thought it was! Havent you ever watched movies? This is neither business nor legal advice, but do you know what is really anonymous? A suitcase full of unmarked, non-sequential dollar bills. Should you take my word for it on bitcoin? I can only warn you about my similarly strong feelings in the past and how that worked out. In the one and only market call I have ever made in this space in 7.5 years, I said Tesla was a terrible stock in 2015. It promptly quadrupled in value. So I reiterated my hatred for that stocks price in 2020. My bold call clearly triggered the value of that stock to septuple over this past year. Youre welcome. Im just saying dont look to me if youre itching to speculate. Bitcoin is far, far, stupider than Tesla shares will ever be. Naturally, Tesla announced last month that it had speculated with its corporate cash by acquiring $1.5 billion in bitcoin. Because LOLs. And YOLO. And FOMO. Tesla CEO Elon Musks explanation: Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money. The key word is almost. Ah, yes, such wisdom! What mysterious sagacity from 2021s newest richest man in the world! Take all my money, please, you carnival-barking promoter of fictions. Never underestimate the power of greed and magical thinking to keep things irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Welcome to the monkey house. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts like to point out that traditional fiat money like dollars, un-moored from a metallic base like silver or gold, is based on a collective fiction. In that sense, would-be sophisticates (and Musk) argue, the collective fiction of bitcoin is no worse than dollars. Gold is also a collective fiction, albeit one thats a few thousand years old. Shells have made for a collective fiction in the past. The rai stones of Micronesia were a collective fiction. What is money anyway? U.S. dollars are also a collective fiction, except for the fact that my government demands, and accepts, dollars for taxes. As far as I can tell, this is the basis for fundamental value in a currency what my government accepts in taxes. A convenient currency is more useful than barter. My local, state and federal governments do not currently accept extremely well-reasoned and delightfully funny finance writing as a means of discharging my tax obligations. I need to first convert finance columns to dollars, which my government then does accept. When President Elon Musk declares in 2028 that we can and must make tax payments in bitcoin, then and only then will I agree that bitcoin has any fundamental value. It may well go to $200,000 (and beyond!) in the meantime for all I know. Until Musk runs for president, I expect a zero value future for this particular collective fiction. Michael Taylor is a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and author of The Financial Rules for New College Graduates. michael@michaelthesmart money.com |twitter.com/michael_taylor Many wonder what the new U.S. administration wants in its China policy that used to be anti-China with Trump. One Aussie senator is asking Biden's real stance on Uyghur Genocide if he condemned it. In China, Uyghurs are getting oppressed by the CCP and are reported exploited by the communists. Beijing has been asked to admit what they have done but denied it. Biden is not Trump During a town hall on February 16, President Biden had said something about Uyghurs. He said what the CCP was doing to them saying that China has a different culture which came across as distinct, reported the Epoch Times. Senator Eric Abetz from Australia sent a letter to the U.S. embassy in Canberra to ask what the real sentiments of the new U.S. president are. He was bothered by how Joe Biden regarded what genocide was happening to Uyghurs. Another is that Joe Biden's opinion differs from the Trump administration. During the town hall hosted by CNN, the President talked about calling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping. He cited that, he spoke to Xi, who asked about the Uyghurs and his opinion about it. Trump's successor answered back that human rights are essential. Biden becomes a China apologist Observers saw the opposite of what Trump would have done, which is never to apologize to China. Many who heard president Biden alleged he was defending the actions of the communist regime. He cited that China has been a victim of other nations before, saying their actions as a unified nation now are justified. He was echoing other pro-China administrations like Obama's and previous. Also read: Failed Attempt to Impeach Trump Angers Pelosi, Says Censuring Is Not Enough Biden said in his own words that knowing China's history, they were victims of other countries when they were not as unified now. This is different from the former President, who valued America first, not the opposite. He added that Ji wants China to be united and tightly controlled for his intentions. Biden affirmed that totalitarian control of Xi is acceptable. The President stated that he told the Communist leader that the United States leader should embody the values of America. Furthermore, the nation must be behind the President, not be regarded otherwise. Biden stressed that he wouldn't butt heads with Xi's red lines in Hong Kong, enslaving Uygurs, trying to annex Taiwan by force, and upholding the CCP's one-China policy. He added that Xi got what was meant by the U.S. president. He said that everyone has different cultures, and leaders are expected to follow. Biden struck the wrong chord Many observers say that the new President is not committed in his policies that was not the cases before January 20. Many could not understand how he would take a weak position with such ambiguity. Genocide was no problem because communists were different, and it was acceptable what Uyghurs were going through. For the record, his stand did not get any popularity with others. With no clear statement from the U.S. president, the Tasmanian senator sent a letter and asked how Biden's real stance on Uyghur Genocide is. The embassy in Canberra has not issued a statement. Related article: Trump Doubts Biden Saying He Must Be Dishonest, or Forgot Vaccines Were Ready Before December @ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Delilah Hamlin and her boyfriend Eyal Booker gave an intimate look at their life together in a newly released shoot for Paper magazine. The steamy images of the couple, taken by Leo Baron, show them getting frisky in the bedroom as the 22-year-old model wore a semi-sheer white lace lingerie set and gold necklace. Looking every inch the loved-up couple while tenderly wrapped in each other's arms, Booker sported a beaming grin across his handsome face. Happy couple: Delilah Hamlin and her boyfriend Eyal Booker gave an intimate look at their life together in a newly released shoot for Paper magazine Meanwhile, the eldest daughter of Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin caressed her man's bulging biceps and displayed her incredible physique. In addition to posing with a digital camera next to Delilah's beloved French bulldog in bed, they posed for a sensual snap of them tongue wrestling. While exchanging a passionate open-mouth smooch with her hunky other half, the beauty's honey blonde tresses cascaded down her back. Locking lips: The steamy images of the couple, taken by Leo Baron, show them getting frisky in the bedroom as the 22-year-old model wore a semi-sheer white lace lingerie set and gold necklace Steamy display: Looking every inch the loved-up couple while tenderly wrapped in each other's arms, Booker sported a beaming grin across his handsome face Another series of images showed them in the shower, while Booker stood shirtless under a running shower head with Delilah leaning in for a kiss. As she bared her peachy posterior in her tiny thong, Delilah held a silver camera behind her back. A close-up of just Booker showed him looking off in the distance with his damp brown hair perfectly tousled. Bombshell: Meanwhile, the eldest daughter of Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin caressed her man's bulging biceps and displayed her incredible physique Cheeky: In addition to posing with a digital camera next to Delilah's beloved French bulldog in bed, they posed for a sensual snap of them tongue wrestling Handsome: A close-up of just Booker showed him looking off in the distance with his dap brown hair perfectly tousled While speaking to the New York City-based fashion magazine this week, the pair opened up about their deepest fears, desires and ambitions. 'COVID was going to either make or break mine and Delilah's relationship, and we weren't always sure if we would be able to see each other and spend time with each other but somehow we managed to get through it, make it work and come out even stronger,' the Love Island star admitted. He continued: 'COVID is not over yet, but we've made it this far and that's pretty special to me considering at the beginning we weren't sure how we would navigate through it.' New interview: While speaking to the New York City-based fashion magazine this week, the pair opened up about their deepest fears, desires and ambitions 'COVID was going to either make or break mine and Delilah's relationship, and we weren't always sure if we would be able to see each other and spend time with each other but somehow we managed to get through it, make it work and come out even stronger,' the Love Island star said Through the pandemic, Delilah said she confessed that she has recently spent too much time 'worrying about contracting COVID,' which has led her to 'feel crazy' for isolating so strictly, unlike many of her peers. She also noted that feeling judged by others causes her to suffer from 'massive social anxiety.' 'I constantly think people are judging,' she confessed, before speaking about working to better navigate her mental health. Making it work: He continued: 'COVID is not over yet, but we've made it this far and that's pretty special to me considering at the beginning we weren't sure how we would navigate through it' Anxious: Through the pandemic, Delilah said she confessed that she has recently gave 'too much of' her 'energy worrying about contracting COVID,' which has led her to 'feel crazy' for isolating so strictly, unlike many of her peers 'I'm happy and mentally stable and healthy. I'm still learning how to decompress and get control over my anxiety,' the reality star told the outlet. Speaking of the Black Lives Matter movement, Delilah said seeing the amount of people protest 'was a beautiful thing because it showed that we can and should unite, and change the narrative.' Like his girlfriend, Eyal also spoke of feeling misunderstood 'in the public eye.' 'I constantly think people are judging,' she confessed, before speaking about learning to better navigate her mental health Perfect match: Eyal appeared on the 2018 series of Love Island and started dating Delilah, in May 2019, after she slid into his DMs 'I judge myself too hard about not achieving everything I want instantly and making sure I'm working hard enough,' he reflected. 'A lot of the time I beat myself up if I don't feel like I'm doing enough.' He continued: 'I think I can show myself more empathy by being kinder to myself and realizing some days are great and other days not so great, but knowing I'm always trying my best.' Eyal appeared on the 2018 series of Love Island and started dating Delilah, in May 2019, after she slid into his DMs. The couple declared their love for one another after just six months of dating and juggled a long-distance relationship at first before becoming inseparable. Ghana has become the first country to receive doses of the Oxford-Astrazeneca COVID-19 vaccines through the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Assess Facility, COVAX. COVAX, a World Health Organization-backed programme, was set-up to divide about two billion doses of vaccines across 92 low-and middle-income countries. The facility promised access to vaccines for up to 20 per cent of participating countries population with an initial supply beginning in the first quarter of the year to immunise three per cent of their populations. On 23 February, COVAX shipped 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca/ Oxford vaccine, from the Serum Institute of India (SII) from Pune, India to Accra, Ghana, arriving on the morning of 24 February, WHO said in a statement published on its website on Wednesday. The arrival in Accra is the first batch shipped and delivered in Africa by the COVAX Facility as part of an unprecedented effort to deliver at least 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2021. The vaccine delivery comes after a year the COVID-19 virus was first reported in the African region. Ghana has recorded more than 81,000 infections and over 500 lives lost, data from worldometers shows. The WHO said the delivery is part of a first wave of arrivals that will continue in the coming days and weeks as other African countries are expected to start receiving the COVID-19 vaccines. Along with the initial shipment to Accra, more deliveries are expected to arrive in Abidjan, Cote dIvoire, this week, the WHO said. The WHO statement thus suggests Nigeria may not receive, this week, its expected four million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccines through COVAX. Nigerian officials had said the country expects the four million doses before the end of February. On Wednesday, Nigerias health minister admitted that the country may have to wait till March to receive its first doses of the vaccines. Now, the COVAX will start delivering to African countries before the end of February, thats what they told us. But they didnt tell us which country is first or which is second, which is third, health minister Osagie Ehanire said at the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting on Wednesday. Mr Ehanire said COVID-19 vaccines will not arrive in all African countries at the same time as that can only be determined by COVAX. We hope that before the end of this month it will be our turn or latest by the beginning of next month. Historic moment The international agency described the vaccines shipment as a historic moment. This is a historic step towards our goal to ensure equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines globally, in what will be the largest vaccine procurement and supply operation in history, it said; a fact reiterated in a joint statement by WHO Representative to Ghana, Francis Kasolo, and UNICEFs representative in Ghana, Anne-Claire Dufay. WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus noted that the pandemic will not end anywhere unless it ends everywhere. Today is a major first step towards realizing our shared vision of vaccine equity, but its just the beginning, he said. The Executive Director of the United Nation Childrens Fund (UNICEF), Henrietta Fore, said the next phase in the fight against this disease can begin with the ramping up of the largest immunisation campaign in history. ADVERTISEMENT Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. In her latest book, Mary Foltz examines the ways several postmodern authors produce scatological works to critique how humans treat each other and the natural world "There is no big secret about sh*t: most people do not like it," writes Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University, in one passage of her book, Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture: American Sh*t (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). In it, Foltz, whose expertise is in American literature of the post-1945 period, explores how authors in the postmodern era have employed excremental culture to engage with urgent issues such as institutional racism, environmental justice and militarism. Foltz will participate in a virtual book launch event in conversation with Rachele Dini, Lecturer in English and U.S. Literature at the University of Roehampton on Thursday, February 25, 2021 at 5:00 p.m. GMT (12:00 EST; 11:00 CST; 9:00 PST) hosted by the International Literary Waste Studies Network. "These representations of waste and bathroom humor that keep coming up in fiction are actually calling us as readers to a deep engagement with our fear of our status as bodies, and specifically as waste-producing bodies," says Foltz. "That fear really maps out onto a larger cultural problem in which we don't want to think about not only bodily waste, but the other kinds of waste our cities, our regions and our nation are producing." In the book, Foltz explores representations of waste in five post-1960 American novels: Ishmael Reed's The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001), Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills (1985), Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997) and Samuel R. Delany's The Mad Man (1994). In Reed's The Free-Lance Pallbearers, a character named Harry Sam, a stand-in for "Uncle Sam," rules a city from a toilet throne. While he sits on this throne he is leaking a range of waste materials: sewage, industrial waste, military waste, even dead bodies. In addition to its critique of environmental degradation, says Foltz, the book also addresses how, according to Reed, African American communities in the United States are treated like human waste. "You get this sort of nationalist figure that's just laying waste to the environmental world and just dumping on African American communities," says Foltz. "It speaks to the importance of thinking about environmental issues in relationship to which communities unequally bear the burden of our processes of disposal." The chapter exploring Naylor's Linden Hills is titled"Fleeing the Excremental Stain Through Acquisition: Getting to the Bottom of Black Suburban Splendor in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills." In the novel, one of the young Black male characters is nicknamed White and another is called Sh*t. "Naylor is really playing with constructions of race and fantasies about racial difference," says Foltz. "She also employs metaphors of waste to critique how we understand value through capitalism in the U.S." Part of Foltz's discussion of DeLillo's Underground focuses on the character of Nick and "...his employment as a waste broker in detailed accounts of his movement from the United States to Semipalatinsk Polygon, now known as National Nuclear Center of Kazakhstan, where his company and others seek to dispose of toxic waste," writes Foltz. DeLillo, says Foltz, is interested in the connection between weapons and waste. "He is linking communities like the Kazakh communities that were utilized for the testing of nuclear weapons to the fact that they then became places where nations wanted, and still want, to dispose of their waste." Foltz says these works are calling on readers to embrace themselves as waste-producing beings and to engage more strongly with waste disposal systems for the sake of life and the bioregions that sustain it. She expresses hope that themes of waste in postmodern literature offer a way to, she writes, "Resurrect the vulnerable excremental body as the fertile way back to the world and each other." ### If interested in attending the virtual book launch on Thursday, February 25, 2021, please contact Professor Foltz at: mcf209@lehigh.edu. Several mills increased contractual volumes for north American metallurgical coal at the end of 2020, an end user from south China said."We have also added about two vessels of hard premium coking coal for the yearly contact volume with a Canadian supplier, so spot liquidity for such coal will continue to fall in 2021, an end user from South China said.A trader source said the reduction in spot liquidity would also squeeze reselling margins, with a few traders having already left the market.The fallout from the growing tensions between the two nations over the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, along with Australia's call for a boycott of Chinese technology firm Huawei, has not been insignificant.And one effect has been the reshaping of metallurgical coal trade flows , which has reduced supplies for Chinese steelmakers and has resulted in a spike in seaborne coking coal prices.An increase in the the supply of Australia-origin coal cargoes to the spot market has been observed by market participants since Chinas unofficial ban on Australian coal in October and the improving weather conditions expected in Queensland, Australia in March are expected to further boost the availability of spot cargoes.Even though several vessels unloaded last week , there remains a need for end users to resell Australian coal cargoes, some of which are still anchored along China's coast, sources told Fastmarkets this week.Some cargoes are looking for new buyers... as most cargo owners do not expect the ban to be lifted in the first half of 2021, a trader source from Hebei province said.Buyers from Japan and South Korea have showed only limited demand for Australia-origin premium low-volatile coking coal (PLV) from Chinese sellers.We normally depend on contractual cargoes and have limited port or plant capacity to store spot cargoes, a mill source from South Korea said.But a major Australian miner has started selling PLV cargoes at bargain prices to term customers in Japan, a Tokyo-based trader told Fastmarkets.There is very little chance [of Japanese steelmakers] taking cargoes from China, he added. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. The Pentagon is launching an unprecedented campaign to root out extremists in the ranks after dozens of military veterans took part in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. But confronting white nationalism and other far-right ideologies is proving to be a political minefield for an institution that prides itself on staying out of the nations partisan wars. There's a growing sense of anxiety within the Pentagon that this push could feed the perception that it is policing political thought, favoring one political party over another or muzzling free speech. By the first week of April, all members of the military must take part in a highly unusual order from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in which unit leaders will conduct a day-long stand down to discuss the threat of extremism and gather feedback from troops on the extent that racism and other hateful ideologies or anti-government sentiment have taken root in recent years. The Pentagon has not yet disclosed all the training materials it is providing commanders, but that hasn't stopped lawmakers and right-wing commentators from accusing the Defense Department of initiating a witch hunt on behalf of the Biden administration to purge political opponents. While there is no evidence to support a politicization of this effort, there are concerns among the top brass and senior retired officers that it could backfire if the Pentagon doesn't clearly define exactly what "extremism" means. The day-long event is one in a series of steps the Pentagon has initiated in recent weeks to try to get a handle on the problem. The military, which has been accused of a "haphazard" approach to weeding out extremists, is also assessing the extent to which the problem has permeated the ranks, and has begun a series of reviews to determine if new training or regulations are needed to screen out extremist elements. But the order for all units to set aside a full day to address the threat of extremism and to hear from rank-and-file troops on what they are seeing or hearing is considered a major test case for how effectively the Pentagon can manage such a politically sensitive subject. Story continues It really matters how its done, said Doyle Hodges, a retired Navy commander and former professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and Naval War College. If its done correctly, its a way to educate the force about what the problem is and what it looks like. If it is done poorly, it is a way to make people feel persecuted on the basis of political views they hold. Some branches of the military have adopted their own initiatives. The Navy this week decided as part of the stand down that it will require all sailors to reaffirm the oath they took to the Constitution when they joined the service. The service also warned sailors in a separate video that just by posting, retweeting, or liking an offensive post on social media you could be participating in extremism." Austin also issued a new video message warning of the speed and pervasiveness with which extremist ideology can spread today, thanks to social media and the aggressive and organized and emboldened attitudes many of these hate groups and their sympathizers are now applying to their recruitment and to their operations. But as officials compile additional training materials to help guide these conversations and subsequent actions, senior military leaders acknowledge there is a risk of going too far, especially if the Pentagon is not specific about what constitutes extremism and prohibited behavior. How do you balance this? We dont have all the answers on this right now, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown told reporters on Friday. How do you define it? Thats been part of the conversation. Where does the line get drawn on the definition? We may all have different opinions about this. And this is part of the work we will do with the stand down and as we go forward. Others have pointed to previous crackdowns that went too far, such as when the Army was a primary target of a communist witch hunt by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s that ultimately became a symbol of the federal government trampling individual rights. You cant cross the line into political correctness, said Roger Rosewall, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and intelligence officer who has written about the risk of damaging the military if the crackdown is not carried out surgically. Then you are accusing them of thought crime. The risk is that current military leaders will be telling soldiers you may not believe this, that or the other thing." "If you are in the military and you participated in the events of Jan. 6, then you and anyone who was there committed violent acts that really amounted to an attempted insurrection against the United States government and you violated your oath, he added. Rosewall cites a number of views that commanders must ensure do not get lumped into extremist behavior, including religious convictions that hold that gay marriage, while legal, is immoral. "Some service members believe their race, ethnic group, tribe, organization, etc., is superior to others, while acknowledging this belief affords them no special rights or privileges," he said. "Are they extremists?" The Pentagon says it is still working on additional guidelines for commanders to rely on during the stand down, including the specific themes to be highlighted about the military's values and its adherence to the law and subservience to civilian authority. But officials also insist that the effort to address extremism will be very focused in order to avoid discussions that could alienate members of the military or be perceived by the public as advancing one political worldview over others. "We want our people to participate in the electoral process," said John Kirby, the Pentagon's chief spokesperson. "We want them to vote. It's absolutely OK for them to have political views. That's not what this is about. It is about ideology that is prejudicial to good order and discipline and contradictory to our values and could incite conduct and behavior in oneself or others that can actually do harm to the institution." Avoiding any discussion of the controversies and conspiracies surrounding the recent presidential election is crucial, Hodges believes, "especially since so much of the narrative of stolen election made its way into mainstream media. " "While you would ordinarily think of these as fringe beliefs," he said, "Fox News isnt fringe. When you tell someone a hallmark of the insurrectionist behaviors is not accepting legitimacy of the election, you not only are addressing the QAnon people. You are addressing a nontrivial portion of Fox News viewers. Theres a real challenge in how you present it in a way that is not equivocal but also doesn't make someone feel persecuted by virtue of their political alignments. Good luck with that." Others with experience combating extremists in the military also assert that the focus must be on behavior, not ideas or beliefs, and point to regulations already widespread in the military as a guide. For example, an Army regulation published last year defines extremist organizations and activities as advocating "the use of force or violence or unlawful means to deprive individuals of their rights," and advocating "the use of unlawful violence or force to achieve goals that are political, religious, discriminatory, or ideological in nature." That also includes "expressing a duty to engage in violence against [the Department of Defense] or the United States in support of a terrorist or extremist cause," the regulation states. "Focus on behavior," advises George Reed, a former investigator in the Army's Criminal Investigation Division who investigated racial murders committed by soldiers at Fort Bragg in 1995 that uncovered a large group of white supremacists in the ranks. "There is no litmus test for ideology and people can hold in their head and in their heart pretty much whatever they want to," added Reed, who is now the dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. "Its when they start impacting other people through their behavior that it becomes prejudicial to good order and discipline. However, he added: I understand the concern about overreacting, but the threat is less of overreaction and more of under reaction. Two women have been arrested in connection with a couple of thefts at Old Navy and Target, according to Laredo police. On Tuesday, Maria del Socorro Jimenez, 30, and Ana Gabriel Martinez, 22, were served with arrest warrants charging them with theft of property and engaging in organized criminal activity. Part of the reason why we doubled down on the community navigator approach with PPP was to make sure that we could continue to reach businesses where theyre at, and make these programs accessible in a way that in the past, they have not been for them, Bader said. When Imad Elabdala came to Sweden fleeing persecution in his home country, he expected to jump into a new life drawing on his training and experience as an engineer in Syria. But in the safety of his new country, the mental distress he had suffered during the war in Syria caught up with him and he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Suffering from PTSD was harder than experiencing the war itself, said the 36-year-old engineer, speaking of the conflict that began 10 years ago. I used to underestimate mental health issues. What Ive learned from dealing with PTSD is that your mental health is key to everything. People with PTSD can often relive traumatic experiences through nightmares and involuntary flashbacks that can significantly disrupt everyday life. Imad began studying psychology to aid his recovery. Soon thereafter, he began a quest to explore what he could do to help fellow young refugees, especially children, whose mental health also had suffered as a result of their experiences. The answer he came up with is the organization Hero2B. Set up in 2016, the non-profit organization works to make a positive impact on the mental health and wellbeing of societys most vulnerable children. Under the slogan, every child deserves to feel like a hero, not a victim, it brings together storytelling, psychology and technology into innovative tools that are specially developed to engage children in learning how to overcome their challenges and build a healthy outlook. This is where the power of stories comes in. Suddenly we are not advisers, we are friends.' A book, Sarahs Journey, ideveloped by Imad, together with children and psychologists, tells the story of a young refugee girl who overcomes challenges on her journey to safety. Prior to the pandemic, Imad and an educator from Hero2B would visit classes to run sessions exploring themes such as empathy and empowerment. This is where the power of stories comes in. Suddenly we are not advisers, we are friends, Imad says. The method transformed Yaras* life. The seven-year-old came to Sweden from Syria with her parents in 2015. Following their arrival by sea in Europe, Yara developed a fear of water and, once in Sweden, started to skip swimming lessons at school. In addition, Yara was ashamed of her background as a refugee, something that had an inhibiting effect on her development, Yaras mother, Amina*, explained. Children at a book signing in Stockholm for the Hero2B charity. Martin Stalberg Children at a book-reading event for Hero2B in Stockholm Martin Stalberg Child at a book-reading event for Hero2B in Stockholm. Martin Stalberg We were so happy to reach safety, said Amina. "But our experience changed when we started living with the uncertainty of what the future will hold, and the effects of our experiences in the war and journey began to surface. Hero2Bs storytelling methods helped Yara gradually come to terms with the traumatic experiences she had been exposed to and how to deal with them. She was struck by the strength of the main character in Sarahs Journey because she could communicate with natural elements. 'She had a role model who looked like her' Yara looks up to Sarah and started to tell friends at school that she had a role model who looked like her and was also a refugee, Amina said. The fictional Sarah helped Yara face her fear of water, and she started attending swimming lessons. The organizations books and films really helped Yara develop her self-esteem, Amina said. When the pandemic began, Imad was forced to adapt. Not being able to work in schools could have been a setback but he set up a pilot project that used social media, films and online learning tools to engage with children and families. Role models remain central but Imad said now families can discuss issues of inclusion in their new society at home. The focus on mental health and switch to online methods attracted the attention of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, which established an annual Innovation Award in 2018 to encourage innovation among NGOs working with refugees. In December, the organization gave the award to Hero2B, which comes with a US$15,000 prize. Imad will use the prize money to develop his organization further. Hero2Bs focus on mental health and psychosocial support is considered particularly important at a time when uncertainty, isolation, and anxiety is severely affecting refugee communities particularly children, according to the award citation. These days, Imad devotes himself to Hero2B full time and plans for it to become a global provider of digital psychosocial support tools. * Names changed for protection reasons. The governments COVID-recovery stimulus has encouraged urban sprawl to Perths fringes and caused building costs and timelines to blow out, a planning industry event heard on Tuesday. At the pre-election event, Planning Minister Rita Saffioti, opposition planning spokesman Tjorn Sibma and Greens South Metro MLC candidate Brad Pettitt responded to concerns voiced by event hosts the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, Australian Institute of Architects and the Planning Institute of Australia. We bulldoze our way up and down the coast through a biodiversity hotspot, Mr Pettitt told the audience. Credit:Allan Johnson AIA WA president Peter Hobbs said the housing stimulus favoured people signing up for house and land packages and had unintended consequences, including driving up construction costs. Brickies are charging $2 a brick, plumbers and sparkies are in huge demand and booked for months, he said. More than 22,000 Connecticut businesses have been approved for nearly $2 billion in forgivable loans since the federal government reopened the popular Paycheck Protection Program in January, and now the Small Business Administration will aim squarely at loans for the smallest businesses. On Wednesday, the SBA launched a two-week period where PPP loans are only available to businesses that have fewer than 20 employees. Starting next week, the SBA will also revise its funding formula to allow more sole proprietors, independent contractors and self-employed people to get the assistance. The SBA is also setting aside $1 billion to help these businesses in low and moderate-income communities. These small businesses not the ones with 500 employees, but these small businesses that, with a handful of folks, they are 90 percent of the businesses in America, President Joe Biden said as he announced the changes Monday. But when the Paycheck Protection Program was passed, a lot of these mom-and-pop business just got muscled out of the way by bigger companies who jumped in front of the line. Small businesses employ over 700,000 Connecticut residents, U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4, said as he praised the window for the smallest companies to apply. It's critically important that federal assistance programs, such as the Paycheck Protection Program, are readily available to mom-and-pop businesses, he said. Starting next week the PPP will be open to people with a non-fraud felony conviction, people who are delinquent on student debt payments and U.S. residents who are not citizens but are lawful residents, the Biden administration announced. The latest round of PPP reopened a month ago, allowing small businesses to get forgivable loans to cover payroll and other costs. Companies with 500 employees or fewer can still apply for their first PPP loan or some companies with fewer than 300 employees that can demonstrate a 25 percent reduction in gross receipts between comparable quarters in 2019 and 2020 can get a second loan, too. Catherine Marx, Connecticuts SBA District Director, said the agency is doubling its outreach to inform the smallest businesses in all neighborhoods will be able to tap the funds. The program closes March 31 or when funding runs out. Since PPP reopened on Jan. 11, the SBA has approved 1.8 million loans nationwide for a total of $134 billion. In Connecticut, 22,669 Connecticut small businesses and entities have been approved for PPP loans totaling $1.9 billion as of Feb. 21.This follows millions of PPP loans previously approved nationwide by the SBA in the spring and summer. The program was initially envisioned as a means to help businesses that had to temporarily shut their doors due to the pandemic keep employees on the payroll. As the pandemic has continued for a year, the program has become the primary way the government is trying to stave off a tsunami of small business closures. Initially, the Paycheck Protection Program was swamped with applications from larger companies and partnerships including regional law firms; retail and restaurant chains; and publicly-traded corporations that fit the size limits. Banks were criticized for helping wealthier business clients with their applications before smaller, less-connected shops and companies. Democrats and Republicans have made a concerted effort to curb loans to bigger companies that may not need the relief, by adding stricter eligibility criteria to the second round loans. Biden also promised more oversight of the program Monday. I invite any inspector general in this program, with jurisdiction over this program, to closely look at these loans and report publicly report on any issues they uncover inconsistent with what I'm saying today, Biden said. We will ensure every dollar is spent well. These changes will bring much-needed, long-overdue help to small businesses who really need help staying open, maintaining jobs and making ends meet. emilie.munson@hearstdc.com; Twitter; @emiliemunson State may delay city elections until 2022 RALEIGH With new U.S. Census data not expected until September, the State Board of Elections is recommending moving all of this years municipal elections to 2022. Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell also told the elections board Tuesday that she recommends delaying the 2022 primary elections from March until May. The changes would need to be passed by the General Assembly. Bell said she would present these recommendations to a House committee on Wednesday, Feb. 24. Sixty-two municipalities, including North Carolinas largest city of Charlotte, use districts or wards to elect council members. These districts are reapportioned every decade with data provided in the U.S. Census. In Henderson County, Mills River, Fletcher and Flat Rock all have districts while council members in Hendersonville and Laurel Park are elected at large. Henderson County commissioners are also elected from districts, although the next election for those seats is in 2022. Data local and state governments use to redraw boundaries traditionally is furnished by the end of March, and redistricting is completed by the summer. But the U.S. Census Bureau said results this year would be delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Numbers wont be delivered to the states until Sept. 30. This poses a problem for the 2021 municipal elections. Filing is currently set to begin in July. Holding elections under previous census data could pose constitutional and other legal issues for those 62 municipalities. The delayed census results could also create a tight turnaround for the 2022 primary elections, which are scheduled for March. North Carolina could be in line for an additional seat in Congress due to population growth. Once redistricting is complete, it takes about two months for the State Board of Elections to finish coding and preparing ballots for the new districts. Thus, Bell recommended moving the 2022 primary to May. That election will include several high-profile contests, most notably the party primaries for the U.S. Senate. U.S. Sen. Richard Burr has announced his retirement at the end of this term, creating an open seat. The recommendations were met with little comment by the State Board of Elections members. One member said he was hesitant to endorse the changes. It causes me some heartburn to talk about making such a sweeping change, board member Stacy Eggers said. Chairman Damon Circosta said he trusted the General Assembly would make the right decision. Off-year elections tend to have significantly lower turnout than even-year federal election cycles. Moving municipal elections to 2022 could pose problems for Republicans in urban areas, which have trended Democratic in recent years. Operation Smile Global Headquarters The ILC seeks to educate students, the community and visitors to Virginia Beach about culture, medicine, geography, and leadership. Through a gift of $1 million from late donor and local humanitarian, Anthony L. Burgess, Operation Smile has been provided with the means to create the Anthony L. and Hideko S. Burgess Interactive Learning Center (ILC) at its global headquarters in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Anthony Tony Burgess was a hard-working man who endeavored to give back to others and preserve the memory of his wife, Hideko, with a bequest at his passing. Tony researched charities in which education and childrens development were a priority. Upon meeting the team at Operation Smile and learning about the plans for their Interactive Learning Center, Tony decided to make Operation Smile his charitable beneficiary. "The bequest from Mr. Burgess is a full-circle love story," said Kathy Magee, Co-Founder and President of Operation Smile. "Mr. Burgess came into the organization as a monthly donor and, through our planned giving program, established a living legacy with the Interactive Learning Center. He made a generous decision to complete the project in honor of his wife and their 55-year marriage, knowing that the ILC will foster learning, education and cultural understanding for generations to come." The ILC will serve as a Window to the World, allowing visitors to take a journey through the medical mission process and learn about patients and families that Operation Smile serves. The ILC seeks to educate students, the community and visitors to Virginia Beach about culture, medicine, geography, and leadership. With empathy and compassion at the heart of the exhibit, participants will better understand the challenges that patients and their families overcome on their paths toward brighter futures through cleft surgery and comprehensive care. Mr. Burgess donation will help to build an immersive experience in which visitors will experience the realities of living in a country with limited access to food, water and medical care. As a military veteran with time spent abroad and a wife from Japan, Operation Smiles international medical missions resonated with Tony. I think in the big picture, he came to know he could trust us and have confidence in us, explained Fred Facka, the Director of Planned Giving for Operation Smile. His realization was, I believe, that he found the vehicle he was looking for. After returning home from his time in the military to Chesapeake, Virginia, Anthony spent the majority of his career working at the railroad, supporting his family, and saving his money where he could. I think we are all privileged to be a witness to a man who transcended himself to the highest level of human fulfillment, becoming a humanitarian, said Facka. And, in his case from living a humble life. The Interactive Learning Center at Operation Smiles Global Headquarters will offer interactive exhibits that tell compelling stories of the lives of children living with cleft conditions and the volunteers who provide medical care. Operation Smile aims to provide an experience that is optimistic and encourages both reflection and action through the center, which is expected to safely open to the public later in the year in accordance to local COVID-19 regulations. The ILC will honor Tony and his wife, Hideko, and hopes to inspire future volunteers and humanitarians. About Operation Smile Operation Smile revolutionized cleft surgery globally in 1982. With nearly four decades of experience as one of the largest surgical volunteer-based nonprofits, Operation Smile staff, its private-public partnerships and thousands of volunteers have improved the health and dignity of patients with cleft conditions, helping them to better breathe, eat, speak and live lives of greater quality and confidence. While one cleft surgery can bring immediate transformation to a childs life in as little as 45 minutes, Operation Smile is committed to providing patients with health that lastsbeing there to offer patients additional surgeries, dentistry, psychological services, speech therapy and other essential cleft treatments. Its training and education programs elevate local surgical standards and entire health systems to aid safe surgery and strengthen a global network to reach more people earlier in their lives. You can learn more about its transformative and healing work by visiting https://www.operationsmile.org or by following @operationsmile on social media. COLUMBUS, Ohio -- November 2022 ballots could include the partisan affiliations for candidates for the Ohio Supreme Court and other state judicial races, if a bill introduced this week by state lawmakers were to become law. Republican-sponsored bills introduced this week in the Ohio House of Representatives and Senate also would apply to races for the state courts of appeals, but not county and municipal court races. Similar legislation got preliminary approval from a House committee in December, but it was never voted on by the full House or Senate, and the bill expired at the end of the year, requiring it to be re-introduced. Under current law, judicial candidates run in partisan primaries, but their partisan affiliations arent listed in November. There also are extensive ethical rules in place that limit political campaigning by judges, including restrictions on attacking opponents and fundraising, meant to prevent the perception that judges are swayed by political influence. If approved, the bill could have major ramifications for state judicial races. While losing most other statewide races in recent years, Democrats have had recent success gaining seats on the state Supreme Court, with Republicans now holding a narrow 4-3 majority. Republican judges, meanwhile, routinely win appellate races in areas with heavy Democratic majorities, including in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties. If partisan affiliations were listed on the November ballot, it would be much less likely that either would happen. State Rep. Brian Stewart, a sponsor of the House version of the bill, downplayed the political ramifications for the bill, saying either party could see a benefit depending on the specific election year and the type of judicial office. I think the goal here is not to put any weights on the scales, but to just acknowledge the situation that we already have, said Stewart, a Pickaway County Republican and lawyer who took office in January. Which is that these judges already run in partisan primaries, they already appear on partisan slate cards and they seek partisan endorsements. The only people who are disadvantaged in this situation are the voters who would like to have this information, but are deprived of it. Some judges and the Ohio State Bar Association have pushed back against listing party affiliation for judicial candidates, saying it would increase the perception that the courts are partisans, and not independent interpreters of the law. A major critic is Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen OConnor, a Republican who is leaving her seat next year due to age limits for judges. In September, OConnor sharply criticized the Ohio Republican Party after the party used its social media accounts to attack a Democratic Franklin County judges ruling on elections-related lawsuits filed by the Ohio Democratic Party. The party deleted the posts and apologized. In a January interview, OConnor brought up a 2012 state Supreme Court case over legislative redistricting in which she joined a dissenting opinion. The majority opinion largely favored Republicans, and she said she got some criticism from members in her party for not joining the majority. I broke away from the mold in some peoples minds, OConnor said in January. And so again, party affiliation should not and people have to understand it should not have anything to do with how a judge does their job. But Stewart said the cat is out of the bag when it comes to partisan affiliation for judges. He said media accounts routinely list judges party affiliations in accounts of prominent judicial decisions. To the extent that there is a problem, it already exists, so we might as well let voters know who theyre voting for, he said. Unlike the bill that cleared a House committee last session, the new bills have no Democratic co-sponsors. Last years bill was introduced in December 2019, but didnt get its first committee hearing until November 2020, after Democrats won an additional seat on the state Supreme Court. In the December House committee vote, one of the bills primary sponsors, State Rep. Mike Skindell, a Lakewood Democrat, took the unusual step of joining other Democrats in voting against his own bill. He said at the time it was because the bill was brought up in the lame-duck session, when lawmakers quickly approve many leftover bills in the final days before their legislative term ends. All eight Republicans on the committee voted for the bill. Last years version of the bill also would have applied to local judicial races. The new one does not. Stewart said thats because local judges are better-known in their communities, and the issues they handle are more likely to be routine matters in which party differences matter less. The sponsors for this years judicial partisan affiliation bills are Stewart and state Rep. D.J. Swearingen, of Huron, and state Sens. Theresa Gavarone, of Bowling Green, and Jerry Cirino, of Kirtland. The House bill has 12 co-sponsors, all Republican. An earlier version of this story incorrectly said the bill would apply to local judicial races. It has been updated. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. 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Once the email address is confirmed please provide your Account Number to activate your Print Subscription Service. New Delhi: Shyamvar Rai, a former driver of Indrani Mukerjea, the prime accused in the Sheena Bora murder case, Friday said he did not know the content of his letter written to the court last year. The letter requested the court to make him an approver accused-turned-prosecution witnessin the sensational case. The court had granted the request. During his examination by the prosecution, Rai last week narrated how Sheena, Indranis daughter, was murdered. During the cross-examination by defence lawyers on Friday, when shown the letter, he said he can not read English, and hence did not know its content, though the signature was his. The letter was purportedly written on Rais behalf. Rai also told the court today that he was not aware of the legal provisions relating to approvers. He said he was also not aware that after becoming an approver he would be pardoned by the court. According to the CBI, Indrani and her former husband Sanjeev Khanna strangled Sheena, Indranis daughter from an earlier relationship, inside a car here in April 2012. Rai was driving the car. Also Read | Sheena Bora murder case: Indrani started looking for "good place" to dispose body, tells her ex-driver The murder came to light in August 2015 after Rai, arrested in another case, spilled the beans. Later, Indranis husband Peter Mukerjea, a former media baron, was also arrested for being party to the conspiracy. The CBI claimed that financial dispute was behind the killing. Also, Sheena was in a relationship with Peters son from earlier marriage, which Indrani did not approve of, it said. Also Read: Case of rioting against Indrani Mukherjea handed over to Mumbai crime branch For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Quaterra Resources Inc. (TSXV: QTA) (OTCQB: QTRRF) today announced its wholly-owned subsidiary Singatse Peak Services LLC ("SPS") has entered into a purchase and sale agreement to sell certain primary ground water rights associated with its copper property in Yerington, Nevada, to Desert Pearl Farms LLC ("Desert Pearl"), a Yerington-based company involved in agriculture in the district, for US$2.91 million. Desert Pearl has paid an initial $1 million on signing into escrow which will be released to Quaterra once the application for change is submitted to the State of Nevada Division of Water Resources (NDWR). These funds will be available to Quaterra for corporate use. The balance of funds of $1.91 million will be paid when the deal closes and the NDWR approves an application to change the manner of use of the water rights from mining to agriculture, their place of use and when title is transferred to Desert Pearl. Once the sale has closed, SPS will retain about 5,000 acre-feet per year of primary ground water permitted for mining on its 51-square-mile Yerington property. In addition to SPS's primary ground water rights, Quaterra also has decree, supplemental and storage water rights associated with options it holds on private land over the property's Bear deposit. Funds from the sale will be used to progress the Company's MacArthur copper project, assess exploration opportunities and for general corporate purposes. The sale of water rights is non-dilutive to shareholders. About Quaterra Resources Inc. Quaterra Resources Inc. (TSXV: QTA) (OTCQB: QTRRF) is a copper exploration company with the objective of advancing its U.S. subsidiary's copper projects in the Yerington District, Nevada. The Company also looks for opportunities to acquire copper projects on reasonable terms that have the potential to host large mineral deposits attractive to major mining companies. On behalf of the Board of Directors, Thomas Patton, Chairman Quaterra Resources Inc. For more information please contact: Karen Robertson, Corporate Communications, 778-898-0057 Thomas Patton, Chairman, Quaterra Resources Inc., 604-641-2758 email: info@quaterra.com website: www.quaterra.com Disclosure note: Some statements contained in this news release are forward-looking statements under Canadian securities laws and within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are identified in this news release by words such as "believes", "anticipates", "intends", "has the potential", "expects", and similar language, or convey estimates and statements that describe the Company's future plans, objectives, potential outcomes, expectations, or goals. Since forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. In particular, forward-looking statements in this news release include that the transaction described herein will complete. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. A summary of risk factors that apply to the Company's operations are included in our management discussion and analysis filings with securities regulatory authorities, and are publicly available on our website. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date thereof. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement that may be made from time to time except in accordance with applicable securities laws. 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. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75258 The Telegraph Benjamin Netanyahu, Israels longest-serving prime minister, was closer than ever on Sunday night to finally leaving office. A series of extraordinary political twists have produced a diverse coalition containing left-wing parties, right-wing parties that support the West Bank settlement movement, centrist parties, and the party that represents the Islamic Movement in Israel, whose voters are mostly Palestinian-Israelis. What they all have in common is their revulsion for Benjamin Netanyahu, who is standing trial on a string of corruption charges. The government has not yet been sworn in, and the Israeli political system is used to seeing Netanyahu wriggle out of every political crisis at the last minute. But this time, most of the players believe, his chances are slimmer than ever. The change coalition, as it is known, looked like a non-starter a week ago. Its designated leader, former defence minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of the Yamina right-wing party, announced that the renewed fighting with Gaza and the riots in Israel between Arabs and Jews had convinced him that this coalition stood no chance. A few days ago, it became clear once more that there was no chance of Netanyahu establishing a right-wing government, and Bennett resumed talks with the chief architect of the alternative government-in-waiting, the chairman of the centrist Yesh Atid Party, Yair Lapid. On Sunday night, Bennett appeared on live TV and said that he would form a positive-minded government that would appeal to all Israelis, and which would be more right-wing than the current government. He thanked the left for its generosity, but promised that the new government would not relinquish territory or pursue unilateral withdrawals. From these remarks, it is easy to understand the challenges facing the new government: it brings together progressive left-wing parties with a religious right-wing party, all headed by a prime minister who will control just six seats in the 120-seat Knesset. This government patently is making no pretence of pursuing a peace process with the Palestinians, and it is also clear that it cannot propose sweeping reforms in the domain of religion and state, a critical issue for so many Israelis. The fall of Benjamin Netanyahu cannot be chalked up to the strength of the Israeli centre-left, which remains a minority in Israeli society, but to the rise of the a conservative right which opposes his rule, and identifies his brand of leadership as Bibism: a cult of loyalty to the leader himself above all other ideological principles. Israel has been dragged through four election cycles in the last two years, and in none of them did the bloc of parties that support Netanyahu manage to obtain a majority in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. In the last election, a centrist party joined forces with Netanyahu to form a government that was supposed to include a rotating premiership between Netanyahu and his rival Benny Gantz; but Netanyahu violated the agreement the moment he signed it and pushed the country toward elections, because he refused to relinquish his seat not even in two years time. In the fourth elections, it turned out that again that Netanyahu had no majority, and two right-wing parties announced that they would not support him. They have just been joined by the party of the prime minister-in-waiting, Naftali Bennett. These right-wing parties decided to abandon Netanyahus bloc for a host of reasons, but the commonly cited reason is their leaders intense lack of trust in Netanyahu, their sense that the country has had enough of his long rule, and a consensus that his government is crippled by chronic decision-making difficulties and that it sows division and that preventing a 5th election in two years is of paramount importance. If a new government is indeed formed in the next week, it will turn out that Netanyahu was not replaced because of the left, but because of a growing agreement on the right flank of Israeli politics that its time for change. Nadav Eyal is a leading Israeli journalist and columnist for the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot A health worker collects a swab from a woman for a COVID-19 test in Samut Sakhon province, Thailand, on Dec. 22, 2020. (Xinhua/Rachen Sageamsak) BANGKOK, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Thailand has approved Sinovac Biotech's COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, paving the way for the country to receive its first vaccine shipment of 200,000 doses from the Chinese biopharmaceutical firm on Wednesday. The country's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared the Sinovac vaccine for emergency use, and the first batch, aboard a Thai Airways International plane, is scheduled to arrive at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi international airport Wednesday morning, Thai Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Public Health Anutin Charnvirakul said Tuesday. The authorization for the Sinovac vaccine will be valid for one year, according to the FAD approval letter that Anutin posted on his Facebook page. Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha will go to the airport to observe the delivery of the Chinese vaccine, said a government official, who requested anonymity due to lack of authority. Prayut said on Monday that he may be among the first people in the country to get vaccinated with the Sinovac vaccine. The first Sinovac shots will be administered to at-risk groups, including medical workers, those who may be dutifully bound to make close contact with infected patients and those with chronic illnesses, among others, the Center for the COVID-19 Situation Administration spokesman Taweesin Visanuyothin said Tuesday. The 200,000 doses, excluding 16,300 doses to be stored in reserve, will be sent to 13 provinces with high infection rates and economic significance. Samut Sakhon province, where the new wave of outbreak was first detected, will be assigned with 70,000 doses, the most among the regions, according to Taweesin. Samut Sakhon now remains the only province under the highest risk category with continued containment measures. The capital Bangkok will be given 66,000 doses, while four provinces, namely Chonburi, Phuket, Chiang Mai and Surat Thani (including Koh Samui), which are largely considered as the country's economic movers, will together share 14,700 doses, he said. The Southeast Asian country ordered 2 million doses from Sinovac, with the second batch of 800,000 doses scheduled for delivery next month, followed by the third batch of 1 million doses in April. On Tuesday, Thailand's total COVID-19 caseload rose to 25,599, with more than four-fifths of the infections being detected since the new wave of outbreak erupted in mid-December 2020. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Walgreens and CVS stories will offer more cororonavirus vaccines to eligible individuals in participating locations throughout the Bay Area after receiving tens of thousands of more doses from the federal government. Both companies received an additional 49,000 vaccines each for their California stores through the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program. Vaccinations at some Walgreens began Wednesday. Eligible groups can book an appointment for a vaccine at participating CVS pharmacies starting Wednesday, with vaccinations beginning Thursday. Health care workers, long-term residents, people over the age of 65, teachers, child care workers, emergency workers, food and agricultural workers are eligible to get vaccinated in California as of Wednesday. However, some teachers, grocery store employees and first responders may not get their first-dose shots for another two or three weeks in San Francisco because many public health departments and providers are prioritizing second-dose shots. Heres how you can book an appointment with Walgreens and CVS: Walgreens Eligible individuals are required to create an online Walgreens account to schedule an appointment. To schedule an appointment, visit Walgreens.com/ScheduleVaccine or call 1-800-Walgreens or 1-800-925-4733 to find a list of participating stores in the Bay Area. Walgreens will not accept walk-ins. If appointments are not available, individuals must create an account to sign up for alerts on appointment availability. Vaccine supplies are still very limited, but they will be ramping up. Please be patient while attempting to schedule appointments, as appointments will be limited as well, Walgreens said in a statement. CVS CVS will add an additional 40 locations across California, including several in the Bay Area, that will start to administer vaccines Thursday, according to spokeswoman Monica Prinzing. Individuals can book an appointment starting Wednesday on CVS.com, through the CVS Pharmacy app or by calling 1-800-746-7287. The list of specific pharmacies will be available on CVS.com as more vaccines and appointments become available. Active stores also change based on vaccine supply, Prinzing said. Customers should continue to check availability on CVS.com. Jessica Flores is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jessica.flores@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jesssmflores Were thrilled that Innovation Group is as passionate as we are about ensuring those who drive for work purposes return home safely every day Innovation Group delivers transformational expertise to the worlds leading insurers, brokers, fleet managers and automotive manufacturers. As a result of the new partnership, Innovation Group will provide fleet operators and owners with access to eDrivings award-winning driver risk management solution, Mentor by eDriving, that helps organizations around the world reduce collisions, injuries, incidents and license violations/infractions among those who drive for work purposes, and helps ensure that every driver returns home safely to their loved ones at the end of each day. Our main aim is to minimize the impact of on-road incidents and reduce vehicle down-time. But, more than that, we are committed to pre-empting collisions and reducing driver risk, said Drew Schnehage, Managing Director at Innovation Group Australia. The partnership will allow us to offer value-added solutions to the fleet industry that enable improved driver behavior and risk management. eDrivings Mentor app uses the telematic sensors in iOS and Android smartphones to collect and analyze data on the driving behaviors most predictive of risk. These include Acceleration, Braking, Cornering, Speeding, and Phone Distraction, one of the biggest threats to road safety today. Driver on-road performance is converted into an individual FICO Safe Driving Score, which has been validated to predict the likelihood of a driver being involved in a collision. Personalized insights are provided to drivers after each trip, showing both positive and negative driving events, and, for the drivers review only, exactly where they occurred. Additionally, engaging, interactive micro-training modules are delivered directly to the driver in-app to help promptly remediate identified risky behaviors and reduce risk. Crucially, drivers can designate trips as business, passenger or personal, ensuring that only business trips are analyzed by the program. Mentor will be offered to Innovation Group clients within eDrivings Crash-Free Culture program, a 5-stage comprehensive program that starts with embracing safety as a strategic imperative and building out a safety culture accordingly. We are excited to be partnering with Innovation Group to deliver Mentor to the Australasian market, said Ed Dubens, Founder/CEO of eDriving. Were thrilled that Innovation Group is as passionate as we are about ensuring those who drive for work purposes return home safely every day, with the knowledge that their safe driving program not only prioritizes their safety, but their privacy too, by adhering to global privacy best practice as well as local and national regulations. And, with recent analysis confirming Mentors ability to reduce driver risk, fleet operators can be confident of seeing an improvement in driving behaviors and a reduction in risk within just six months. *References to driver(s) or drives include drivers of cars, trucks and vans, and riders of motorcycles and two-wheelers. About eDriving eDriving helps organizations to reduce collisions, injuries, license violations/infractions and total cost of fleet ownership through a patented digital driver risk management program. Mentor by eDriving is a smartphone-based solution that collects and analyzes driver behaviors most predictive of crash risk and helps remediate risky behavior by providing engaging, interactive micro-training modules delivered directly to the driver in the smartphone app. As part of a broader risk management platform, Virtual Risk Manager, eDriving provides organizations with everything they need to establish safety as a strategic imperative, and support drivers and managers as they strive to create a crash-free culture. eDriving is the digital driver risk management partner of choice for many of the worlds largest organizations, supporting over 1,000,000 drivers in 96 countries. Over the past 25 years, eDrivings research-validated programs have been recognized with over 100 awards around the world. For more visit http://www.edriving.com Media Contact Julie Farmer julie.farmer@edriving.com About Innovation Group Innovation Group delivers transformational expertise to the worlds leading insurers, brokers, fleet managers and automotive manufacturers, helping them to open new growth frontiers with revolutionary solutions. With over 20 years experience, our clients trust us to transform their claim management processes, manage critical vehicle and property incidents and generate more revenue through value-added services. For more visit innovation.group Media Contact Malcolm Noyle malcolm.noyle@innovation.group Former Massachusetts Rep. David Nangle plans to plead guilty to bank fraud, wire fraud and other federal charges on Wednesday, according to court filings. A little more than a year has passed since the Lowell Democrat was accused of using campaign funds for gambling debts and other personal expenses. Nangle, who is scheduled to appear in Boston federal court Wednesday morning, plans to plead guilty to wire fraud, bank fraud, making false statements to a bank and filing false tax returns, according to a plea agreement filed Tuesday afternoon. In return, federal prosecutors will drop the obstruction of justice and extortion charges. That includes charges stemming from two payments a Billerica owner made to Nangle. Nangle was indicted on Feb. 18, 2020, on multiple charges of fraud and extortion. At the time, U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said Nangle stole more than $70,000 in campaign funds to cover mounting gambling debts and loans from the restaurant affiliates, among other personal expenses. He stepped down as House chair of the Ethics Committee after the indictment. A state representative since 1999, Nangle ran for re-election but lost to Vanna Howard, who served as an aide to former U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongass office. Nangle initially pleaded not guilty, but he requested a change of plea hearing earlier this month. Nangle and prosecutors did not reach an agreement on the sentencing guidelines he should face. Related Content: Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 19:15:38|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The leading group for Party history learning and education campaign issued a circular on Wednesday, urging Party members to study the speech on Party history learning by Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee. The speech is of major guiding significance to building the CPC into a stronger Marxist ruling party and securing the success of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era, said the circular. Calling on Party members to align their minds and actions with the guiding principles of Xi's speech, the circular demanded efforts to arm the Party with its innovative theories, draw experience from history to improve the ability to address risks and challenges, carry forward the revolutionary spirits, and strengthen the Party's unity. Enditem Anthony Warner blew himself up in an RV in Nashville on December 25. His best friend says he spent weeks prepping the voice he used to warn people around him of the imminent blast Weeks before Nashville bomber Anthony Warner blew himself and much of the city up, he prepared the creepy voice-over that was heard by terrified residents warning them that an explosion was coming. Warner, 63, had terminal cancer and was also a conspiracy theorist, which his best friend Crystal Deck believes may have driven him to carry out the suicide mission on December 25. Deck spoke to The New York Times for an article published on Wednesday where it was also claimed he dated his cousin in his 20s. No one had visited his home for 20 years and he was estranged from his family. His own mother sued him for trying to give away his dead brother's house after he died. Deck said she knew instantly that he was to blame when she heard about the blast because she had heard him preparing the warning announcement that was reported on weeks earlier. The announcement warned: 'Stay clear of this vehicle, evacuate now. Do not approach this vehicle!' Afterwards, the RV played the song 'Downtown.' Deck told the Times that he had wanted to 'go out in his own way' after being given a terminal cancer diagnosis. She did not specify what type of cancer he had. In the weeks before his death, he gave her his car. He also retired, emptied out his house and signed the deed for it over to the daughter of an ex-girlfriend. Warner is shown driving his RV near downtown Nashville in the early hours of December 25, before blowing it up In the weeks before his suicide, Warner gave away his property to friends and signed the deed of his house over to the daughter of an ex-girlfriend The explosion caused extraordinary damage to the downtown Nashville area but miraculously, no one else was killed 'He was trying to escape. He talked about going out on his own terms,' she said. She also revealed that he had become fixated on a conspiracy theory that earth is controlled by alien reptiles which live in tunnels beneath the earth and sometimes shape shift to become humans. Warner's friend Crystal Beck (shown) said he was preparing the warning announcement for weeks He was so convinced with the theory that he often camped at a park in Nashville where he felt the reptiles were highly active, and complained to friends that he couldn't find them with infared technology. 'If you try to hunt one, you will find that you are the one being hunted,' he wrote about the creatures. Deck grew up in Nashville then served in the Navy briefly in the 1970s. It's unclear what exactly he did. At one time, he worked for a security company. In recent years, he made money through freelance IT work. 'He was real proud of his computer skills. He loved how smart he was,' Deck said. Tom Lundborg, 57, worked with him in his 20s and said that he was a 'good looking' man who could have any woman he wanted but was dating his own cousin. 'He was a really nice-looking guy back then. He had long fluffy hair, a Magnum, P.I.-type mustache. 'Girls liked him,' he told the Times. The reptilian theory gained traction when British conspiracy theorist David Icke wrote about it. Warner's own mother sued him for $249,000 after he inherited his late brother's home then gave it away to a young woman in California. Miraculously, no one else was injured after Warner detonated the bomb on Christmas Day. The warning he played from the RV gave cops enough time to evacuate people. Under-fire Defence Minister Linda Reynolds has been admitted to hospital and will take medical leave, after a week of pressure over her handling of an alleged rape in her office. This follows advice from her cardiologist relating to a pre-existing medical condition, said a statement issued on Wednesday morning. Defence Minister Linda Reynolds during question time last week. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The statement said the minister would take a period of medical leave. Senator Reynolds has been under pressure after former staffer Brittany Higgins went public last week with allegations she was raped by a colleague in the ministers office in March 2019. The minister has faced repeated questions from political opponents and journalists over what she knew about the incident and when. Nepals embattled prime minister, K P Sharma Oli, will not resign but let parliament decide his fate instead, an aide said on Wednesday, a day after the Supreme Court rejected his decision to dissolve the legislature and call early elections. The Himalayan nation has been in political turmoil since December, when Oli suddenly dissolved parliament and announced the elections, citing a lack of cooperation on key policy issues by leaders of a rival faction of his ruling party. Oli, 69, has begun meeting allies in the Nepal Communist Party (NCP) to review the situation after the court ... Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 09:55:43|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close CANBERRA, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Two elderly Australians have been given a higher than recommended dose of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine, Australian Health Minister Greg Hunt confirmed on Wednesday. Hunt said the 88-year-old man and 94-year-old woman in Queensland were being monitored but have not shown signs of adverse reaction to the doses. It has been reported that they both received four times the recommended dose of the vaccine but Hunt could not confirm, saying an investigation was underway. "It hasn't been confirmed, because it's actually really hard to be able to tell what was in the needle," he told a press conference in Canberra. The doctor who administered the vaccines has been stood down from the rollout. "In relation to the individual doctor, we'll leave that to the investigation as to whether or not they either did not understand or did not complete it, but it was a serious breach in terms of following the protocol," Hunt said. "Both patients are being monitored and both patients are showing no signs at all of an adverse reaction. But it is a reminder of the importance of the safeguards." It occurred on only the second day of Australia's coronavirus vaccine rollout. Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said that training modules for administering vaccines may need to be reviewed. "This was a mistake, whether it was simple or not we leave that to the investigation." Enditem The requirement of the negative COVID-19 test report is likely to be implemented from Friday night, officials said. (PTI file photo) New Delhi: Amid a spike in coronavirus infections in some states, the Delhi government is likely to ask travellers from five states, including Maharashtra, Kerala and Punjab, to show negative COVID-19 test report before entering the national capital, officials said on Wednesday. They said an official order will be issued later in the day and it will be effective till March 15. People travelling in flights, trains and buses from these states will have to produce negative test report before entering Delhi, they said. The requirement of the negative COVID-19 test report is likely to be implemented from Friday night, officials said. The issue had also been discussed in a meeting of the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) on Monday. Maharashtra is showing a daily surge in COVID-19 cases, according to an official of the Union Health Ministry. Kerala is showing an incremental decline, but the daily cases in absolute numbers is still high over there. Punjab, with its daily increase in cases, is also a cause of worry. Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh are also showing an increase in daily cases, the central official had said on Tuesday. Delhi recorded 145 fresh COVID-19 cases and two new fatalities on Tuesday, while the positivity rate stood at 0.25 per cent, authorities said. With this, the toll from the coronavirus infection has gone up to 10,903 and the case tally rose to 6,38,173. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Glorifying terrorism should be outlawed to tackle extremists, a report backed by two ex-prime ministers warns today. It calls for a shake-up to thwart 'shocking and dangerous' behaviour by far-Right groups, Islamists and harmful conspiracy theorists who currently avoid prosecution. The Commission for Countering Extremism said new criminal offences should be introduced to silence them. It received support from Tony Blair and David Cameron, who said: 'The law needs changing.' The proposals could lead to the outlawing of groups such as Cage, which called Islamic State executioner Mohammed Emwazi nicknamed Jihadi John a 'beautiful young man'. Hate preacher: Choudary Extremists can currently operate 'lawfully, freely and with impunity' providing they stop short of directly encouraging violence or terrorism, the report found. The 'gaping chasm' in legislation means there is an 'ever-bigger pool' from which terror groups can recruit. A new law should ban 'praising and glorifying' terrorism, going further than the Terrorism Act 2006, the watchdog's 123-page report said. It highlighted the case of hate preacher Anjem Choudary who operated with impunity for years. He is thought to have motivated 70 to 100 people to turn to terrorism before finally being convicted in 2016. A classification system should be drawn up for extremist material in the same way police grade paedophile images by severity, the report said. This would allow tech firms to prioritise which material should be deleted online. The new system should cover 'extremist conspiracy theories and disinformation', based on criteria including the harm they cause to the public. Commission chief Sara Khan said: 'We have charted a path the Government can take which will ensure protection of freedom of expression while restricting the dangerous activity of hateful extremism.' She added: 'I would not be surprised if Cage would meet the threshold for a legal framework. I think the evidence speaks for itself.' Former Scotland Yard counter-terror chief Sir Mark Rowley, who helped draw up the report, said: 'I have been shocked and horrified by the ghastliness and volume of hateful extremist materials and behaviour which is lawful in Britain.' Mr Cameron said: 'The fact that someone like Anjem Choudary was able to radicalise and poison the minds of so many people with such tragic consequences for so long without apparently breaking the law demonstrates that the law needs changing.' Mr Blair said: 'The balance between protecting civil liberties while remaining robust in our measures to tackle extremism is essential, and yet the evidence from this review suggests that extremists are able to operate with impunity because of a void in our legislation.' The Home Office will consider the report's findings. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Hong Kong: Consumption vouchers set Financial Secretary Paul Chan in his Budget speech today announced the Government will issue electronic consumption vouchers in instalments with a total value of $5,000 to Hong Kong permanent residents and new arrivals aged 18 or above. Mr Chan said the Government should make good use of its fiscal reserves to energise the market, stimulate the economy and facilitate the speedy recovery of the consumption market and other economic segments in view of the current special situation. The vouchers, aiming to boost local consumption, will cost about $36 billion and benefit around 7.2 million people. He explained that the Government will identify suitable stored value facilities operators to help roll out the scheme. To help businesses explore markets, Mr Chan said $1.5 billion will be injected into the Dedicated Fund on Branding, Upgrading & Domestic Sales. The Government will substantially extend its geographical coverage from 20 to 37 economies. The funding cap for enterprises will be raised from $4 million to $6 million each to support them in exploring more diversified markets. Supporting tourism The finance chief noted that the epidemic has dealt a heavy blow to the local tourism industry. Apart from the nearly $2.6 billion that has already been provided for the tourism industry, the Government will further earmark $934 million to enhance tourism resources, of which $169 million will be used to continue taking forward local cultural heritage and creative tourism projects. Another $765 million will be set aside to support the Tourism Board. Upon gradual resumption of cross-boundary travel, the board will roll out promotional offers to attract visitors through the Open House Hong Kong platform. Additionally, Mr Chan said he will allocate a total of $375 million to the Trade Development Council in three years starting from 2021-22 so that it can develop virtual platforms to enhance its capability to organise online activities and proceed with digitalisation. The council will promote Hong Kongs strengths in the development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area as well as in healthcare products and services. A total of $1 billion will be injected into the CreateSmart Initiative in 2021-22 to drive the development of creative industries, he added. This story has been published on: 2021-02-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company FINEOS Corporation (ASX:FCL), the market-leading provider of group and individual core systems for life, accident and health insurance, today announced that Partners Life, following a comprehensive market evaluation of Claims Management System vendors, has selected the FINEOS Platform for life insurance and medical claims. The Partners Life and FINEOS partnership will bring about changes focused on replacing existing claims systems and processes with a differentiated value proposition. This will bring key operational benefits such as efficient, integrated and automated workflow processes and accurate claims covering life, TPD, trauma, income protection and medical products. Speaking about the selection, Tracey Lonergan, Partners Life Chief Claims Officer said, "Claims service is at the core of Partners Life's business and so when we looked for a credible provider it was important that the provider had the capability, experience and infrastructure to deliver and support a Claims Management System that would integrate into the Partners Life ecosystem. Also important to us was that the selected vendor come with a strong record of successful implementations and strong support of its Claims Management System within the New Zealand and Australian life and health insurance industry. FINEOS met these requirements. Our initial collaboration has been extremely positive, and we envisage that the project will deliver high quality results" Commenting on the deal, Michael Kelly, CEO, FINEOS added, "We're delighted that Partners Life has selected to partner with FINEOS and adopt the FINEOS Platform for life insurance and medical claims. The FINEOS Platform includes a market tested, pre-configured pack for the region known as LISA (Life Insurance Solutions Australasia). This is an exciting project for us in New Zealand and we look forward to a fast and smooth system implementation to enable the benefits of using FINEOS as early as possible thereby delivering a high-level service to its customers and independent financial advisers across New Zealand. The FINEOS Platform provides a comprehensive SaaS end to end core solution for the Global Life, Accident and Health market. Key to the solution is the rich functionality that underlies FINEOS AdminSuite, FINEOS Engage and FINEOS Insight, a common set of capabilities including workflow, rules engine, customer management, no-code/low-code configuration tools, a standardized API connection and the cloud environment powered by AWS." About FINEOS Corporation Limited FINEOS is a leading provider of core systems for life, accident and health insurers globally with 7 of the 10 largest group life and health carriers in the US as well as 6 of the largest life insurers in Australia. With employees and offices throughout the world, FINEOS continues to scale rapidly, working with innovative progressive insurers in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. The FINEOS Platform provides clients full end to end core insurance administration and includes the FINEOS AdminSuite core product suite as well as add-on products, FINEOS Engage to support digital engagement and FINEOS Insight for analytics and reporting. For more information, visit www.FINEOS.com About Partners Life Partners Life is proud to be a New Zealand operated company. Like many Kiwi companies, they began with humble beginnings as a small start-up in 2011. Since then, they've become a recognised industry leader in life and health insurance. Their rapid rise to the top has only been made possible because of the strong partnerships they've built over time with their customers and with independent financial advisers across the country. That's why they're called Partners Life. Their focus is on protecting Kiwi families and businesses. People need insurance when their lives are negatively affected by ill-health or death. This can be an incredibly stressful time for them and their families. By working with independent financial advisers, their customers can be confident that they have insurance tailored to fit them. This gives them the very best chance of getting their claims paid quickly and without any hassles. Their insurance products include life insurance, income protection, medical insurance, disability insurance, trauma cover and business risk protection. They're an industry leader that Kiwis trust. Find out about the Solvency and Financial Strength of Partners Life. For more information, visit https://www.partnerslife.co.nz/. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005877/en/ Contacts: Victoria Jamison Marketing Manager FINEOS Corporation + 353 1 639 9700 victoria.jamison@FINEOS.com She bought ammunition, camping gear, a water purifier and boxes of canned food. Then, Tyler's mother started wearing a holstered pistol around the house, convinced that 10 days of unrest and mass power outages were coming. The chaos would culminate, she assured her son, in former president Donald Trump's triumphant return to power on March 4, the original Inauguration Day before the passage of the 20th Amendment in 1932. Tyler, 24, had been living with his mother an hour north of Minneapolis since he graduated college in 2019. The paranoia and fear that had engulfed his home had become unbearable in the months since Trump began to falsely claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. "Any advice for dealing with a qanon parent who thinks ww3 will happen during the inauguration?" Tyler asked last month on r/QAnonCasualties, a fast-growing Reddit group for those whose loved ones have been consumed by the bizarre and byzantine universe of baseless conspiracy theories known as QAnon. "Do they have weapons?" one of the site's moderators asked. "Yep. A lot of them," Tyler replied. "I would leave, but I don't have anywhere to go." He said he couldn't imagine cutting ties to his mother. In Washington, rioters, inflamed by unfounded allegations of a stolen election, had stormed the Capitol leaving five dead and triggering the impeachment of a president. Far from Washington, the falsehoods that had whipped so many into a frenzy were wreaking a different sort of chaos; one that was tearing families apart. Family members spoke of their loved ones as if they were cult members or drug addicts, sucked in by social media companies and self-serving politicians who warped their views of reality. They begged and bargained with parents and partners to put down their phones for just a few days in the hope that the spell might be interrupted and they might return to their old selves. To some it seemed as if the United States was gripped by an epidemic of conspiracy theories. The anguish was playing out behind closed doors in therapists' offices, where overwhelmed family members were seeking advice. And it was painfully clear on QAnonCasualties, the Reddit group where Tyler had turned for support. The group offered a rough barometer of the growing turmoil. Since last summer it had grown from about 10,000 members to more than 130,000 in the days after Joe Biden's inauguration. Each day there was a flood of new posts: A woman in Chattanooga, Tenn., was just days away from moving out of the house she and her partner bought five years earlier. "I feel like I'm in a twisted black mirror episode that's lasting WAY too long," she wrote. "I feel hopeless that we will ever get back to the beautiful life we shared in our lovely home." A woman in Palm Beach, Fla., had gone two weeks without speaking to her mother and was starting to wonder if the rift was irreparable. "I grieve for her every day as if she is dead," she wrote. A teenager in Annapolis, Md., worried that she no longer "knew" her father. "I've come to the breaking point," she confessed. "My heart goes out to everyone else in this situation. It really sucks." Tyler, alone in his bedroom, read many of the new posts, hoping that they would help him make sense of his mother's beliefs. Sometimes it felt as if every conversation with his mom and her new husband circled back to Trump-related conspiracies. To protect his family's anonymity, The Washington Post is only using Tyler's first name. In an email, she blamed her son for the tension in the house, writing that he was disrespectful and refused to look for work after leaving his job earlier this year. She added that she "never even heard of Qanon until very recently" and doesn't "follow it," but declined to discuss why she had begun purchasing survival gear and whether she believed Trump would return to the White House in March. "My beliefs about Trump are actually none of your business," she wrote. Tyler said he and his mother discussed QAnon one time; a bizarre conversation in which his mother insisted that QAnon prophecies were the product of artificial intelligence. He described an atmosphere of growing conspiracy and fear that pervaded his home. "It started a month before the election," Tyler said in an interview, "and it kept growing until it felt like she was preaching the Bible to me." At first she insisted that Trump, not Biden, would be inaugurated on Jan. 20, and for a while Tyler held out hope that Biden's swearing-in would jolt his mother back into reality. She would put away her gun and life would return to normal. But, the ceremony in Washington seemed to make little difference at his house in Minnesota. "She's waiting for March 4th now," he wrote. "What's March 4th?" asked one of the QAnonCasualties group members. "Trump's inauguration as new world president," Tyler replied, referring to a common belief among some QAnon followers that it represented the true Inauguration Day as set out in the Constitution. Tyler worried that he might not be able to wait that long for his mother to snap out of the spell. The first QAnonCasualties post went up on July 4, 2019, some two years after the conspiracy's unidentified online originator, known as Q, baselessly claimed that Trump was secretly leading a war against an elite cabal of pedophiles who controlled Washington, Hollywood and the world. By that point, QAnon was no longer just an online phenomenon in which the group's most fanatical adherents called for hanging traitors and waited for the "Storm," an awakening that would reveal the true breadth of evil in America. Some followers had begun showing up at Trump rallies wearing T-shirts and holding signs advertising their cause. "My mom has been into QAnon since it got started," wrote the QAnonCasualties founder, who has since deactivated his Reddit account. "The ignorance, bigotry and refusal to question the 'plan' has only gotten worse over time. I'm always torn between stopping communication with her because it only seems to make me feel terrible, and feeling like it's my responsibility to lead her back to reality." The founder described his experience with his mother as "exhausting, sad, scary, demoralizing" and invited members to vent or share coping strategies. Other Reddit groups, such as r/Qult_Headquarters, were dedicated to discrediting and mocking the growing conspiracy. QAnonCasualties, the group's founder wrote, was intended to be a "comforting place." "Thank the fucking stars I found you guys," replied one of the first to join. "Today has been hard." "My mother is a hard-core believer," wrote another. "I found her Twitter account handle and I am horrified and embarrassed. Who is this person?" Like many conspiracy theories, QAnon supplied a good-versus-evil narrative into which complicated world events could be easily incorporated. "Especially during the pandemic, Q provided a structure to explain what was going on," said Mike Rothschild, author of "The Storm Is Upon Us," which documents QAnon's rise. And it offered believers a sense of meaning and purpose. "We want to believe that we matter enough [that someone wants] to crush us," Rothschild said. "It's comforting to think that the New World Order would single us out for destruction." A big part of what made it novel was that it was interactive, allowing its followers to take part in the hunt for clues as if they were playing a video game. Social media algorithms, built to capture and keep consumers' attention, helped expand the pool of hardcore believers by leading curious individuals to online groups of believers and feeding them fresh QAnon conspiracy theories. Unlike other online conspiracy theories, it also had the blessing of some top Republicans, such as Trump, who embraced the movement in the hope that he could channel believers' rabid, and sometimes violent, passions for political gain. "It's a bet that they can control this insurgency and use it to defeat their opposition and retain control," said Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies. "The bet is we can ride this tiger. And sometimes, as in Germany and Italy, you can get eaten by the tiger." The same news events that inflamed QAnon followers' passions often produced simultaneously big spikes in QAnonCasualties's membership rolls. On the day the news media declared Biden the winner of the 2020 election, the online support group added 2,500 new members, according to Reddit. More than 6,000 joined in the days after the Capitol riots, and another 7,300 people signed up in the hours after Biden was inaugurated. Some family members who flocked to the site wondered if they were partially to blame for their loved one's descent into madness. "I know that disengaging with [my sister] as our beliefs began to diverge is why she turned to Q in the first place," a 33-year-old woman from Maryland wrote on QAnonCasualties. "Still I will just never understand." - - - Others sought out advice and coping strategies. "How should I handle my relationship with my Dad after I leave home?" asked an 18-year-old from Tampa, whose father believed that Bill Gates and other globalists were going to use the coronavirus vaccine to implant microchips in unsuspecting Americans. "I still love the man and part of the reason this has me so torn up is that I feel I may lose him for good." The tens of thousands flocking to QAnonCasualties represented only a subset of the pain sweeping the country. A recent NPR/Ipsos poll found that 17 percent of adults believed that "a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media." Some psychologists likened the spread of QAnon and the increase in conspiratorial thinking to a global pandemic. "I've been practicing for 30 years and this feels very different," said Nancy Molitor, a clinical psychologist in Chicago and assistant professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. "There have always been cults, but this one is a doozy." In Nashville, a group of about 200 mental health therapists recently set aside time to discuss how to handle QAnon believers. One therapist said she was fighting the urge to tell a QAnon believer who had come with for marriage counseling that his views were wrong, said Lisa Henderson, a licensed professional counselor and expert with the American Counseling Association, who took part in the discussion. A better approach, the group determined, was to try to figure out why the QAnon spouse was drawn to the conspiracy theory. - - - On QAnonCasualties, family members worried that mental health counselors might dismiss their fears or conclude that they had lost touch with reality. "I am now going to my first therapy appointment to deal with this and I have no idea how to talk to my therapist without sounding like I'm completely crazy," a middle school teacher from Wichita wrote in early February after cutting off contact with her mother. "Has anyone else gone to therapy for this? I'm so broken hearted because I currently have no blood relatives that I can speak to. I'm so tired." The woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve her relationship with family, said in an interview that she met with the therapist the next day. She described her mother's predictions of mass arrests, fears of rampant pedophilia and worries about political violence. And she shared the pain that their estrangement had caused her. Fortunately, she said, the therapist was familiar with QAnon. "She nodded," the woman said in an interview, "and gave me the sign of the cross." In the days after the Capitol riots, Tyler began spending more and more time messaging with people he had met on QAnonCasualties. As a child, Tyler said he was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism. In 2019, he graduated from a local university with a degree in manufacturing engineering. In early January, he quit his job with a local manufacturer, hoping to find something that required a college degree. He was living at home. - - - "Without a way to vent, I would be truly alone on this and it would break me over time," he wrote in a QAnonCasualties discussion group. A few days after the Capitol riots, one of his mother's oldest friends stopped by to deliver a wedding present. Tyler's mother had recently remarried. "Do you plan on shooting someone today?" the friend said she joked when she noticed Tyler's mom was wearing a pistol. "You never know what's going to happen with the Democrats," Tyler's mother replied, according to the friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They stole the election." "We're not going to do anything," replied the friend, who voted for Biden. The argument continued to escalate and the friend said she left. She described Tyler's mother as normally a "wonderful" person, who accompanied her on kayaking trips and invited her over for tea. But she said in an interview that she was stunned by the response. "We're 50 miles north of Minneapolis," she said. "She was concerned for everybody, but in the Republican way. I don't know how to explain it." - - - Tyler held out hope that Biden's inauguration on Jan. 20 might help ease tensions in the house. "It seems like my mom is returning to her old self," he wrote on Jan. 21. "I mean, she's still political, but now it's not in my face 24/7. I'll take that any day." The respite, though, didn't last. Soon she was insisting that Trump would return to the White House in early March. Tyler said he decided to confront her. "I told my mom everything," he texted his biological father's wife, Heather, on the morning of Feb. 3. Tyler's father had lost contact with him when his son was a child, and they had only reconnected in recent years. "Told her what?" Heather asked. "That I don't believe in Trump or any of her theories," Tyler replied. He said his mother had threatened to have her new husband "hurt" him when he returned home from work. Tyler wasn't actually worried for his safety. "I've been dealing with this for years," he texted. "It's normal for me." "That's not love," Heather replied. Tyler wrote back asking if he could stay at his stepmother and biological father's house until his mother cooled off. When Heather pulled up to the house 30 minutes later, Tyler was standing in the front yard, holding an overnight bag. He climbed into the car, exhaled and closed his eyes. Heather, a registered nurse, said she put a hand on Tyler's shoulder and began to cry. These days Tyler is living in his 7-year-old half sister's bedroom, while she sleeps in her parents' room. Recently, his mother's new husband told him that he was no longer welcome at their home. "When your daddy gets sick of you living there (and he will) don't bother calling us," he wrote. Tyler said he still hopes that the rancor and conspiracy theories fueled by the Trump presidency will fade. Maybe then, he said, he'll be able to rebuild a relationship with his mother. About a week after he moved out, he drove by his mother's home to pick up his belongings. His mother was inside. His things had recently been placed on the front lawn and were covered in a light dusting of snow. "I just don't see the humanity in this," he said, "I wanted my family back, not this hatred." Two men walk into a temporary staffing agency near OHare International Airport to inquire about a job. They are both in their 50s, with similar work histories. One is Black, the other Latino. The Black man, who arrives first, is told the agency is not hiring at the moment. He leaves his contact information and never gets a call. The Latino man, who arrives 20 minutes later, is told about a warehouse job at an electronic assembly plant that pays $11 an hour. remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Sage member Professor Devi Sridhar has said Britain will not have to live with Covid like flu because its prominence in society will be more like measles Britain might not have to live with coronavirus in the future because the current crop of vaccines are so effective, a top Government scientist expert has claimed. Most scientists agree that once the country jabs its way out of the pandemic, Covid will become a seasonal illness which puts pressure on the NHS every winter, like flu. They have told Brits they must 'learn to live with the virus' and predict new jabs will have to be made annually to tackle new variants. But Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh and an adviser to the Scottish government, said the current jabs are so successful they could stamp the disease out to measles-like levels. But Professor Sridhar added that vaccines on their own could not squash Covid infections to measles-like numbers, adding that social distancing and mass testing would still need to play a role. She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme there was 'no reason we have to live with this virus or even see it as a seasonal flu' because the vaccine is so effective. She said: 'A better analogy is probably measles, which is a virus that's endemic in parts of the world. But we don't accept living with measles here we vaccinate against it.' There were just 810 cases of measles in England and Wales in 2019, when the latest figures go up to, down from 989 the year before. Professor Sridhar added: 'The UK should be aiming to suppress and eliminate Covid-19 through vaccines, mass testing and supported isolation.' There were just 810 cases of measles in the UK in 2019, when the latest figures go up to, down from 989 the year before Her comments come as England's deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van Tam said today he expected the virus to become 'a bit like flu', with yearly vaccinations required to prevent mass hospitalisations and deaths. Speaking on ITV's Good Morning Britain today, he said: 'I've always framed Covid-19 as a virus that is newly emergent in humans that over time will adapt to humans and that's what we're seeing with variants emerging. Covid could become 'a bit like flu', says Jonathan Van Tam Coronavirus could settle to become 'a bit like winter flu', England's deputy chief medical officer has said. Once Britain's vaccine drive has seen all adults receive the jab, Jonathan Van Tam predicts the virus will become less prevalent and easily treatable each year like influenza. Speaking on ITV's Good Morning Britain today, he said: 'I've always framed Covid-19 as a virus that is newly emergent in humans that over time will adapt to humans and that's what we're seeing with variants emerging. 'We fought back with the vaccines but I think it is going to settle in the end a bit like winter flu. 'In the end we'll learn to live with coronavirus alongside other winter respiratory viruses like flu and RSV.' Advertisement 'We fought back with the vaccines but I think it is going to settle in the end a bit like winter flu. 'In the end we'll learn to live with coronavirus alongside other winter respiratory viruses like flu and RSV.' Speaking at the Downing Street press conference on Monday when Boris Johnson announced his roadmap out of lockdown Englands chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty said he expects the virus to return every winter for the next few years. He said the country would need to get used to a certain number of Covid-19 deaths every year as the virus would not be eliminated. 'Every year in the UK, as in every other country, you get substantial numbers of people dying from respiratory infections,' he said. 'Flu kills around 9,000 a year, and bad years are significantly more, but there are also pneumonia and adenoviruses and other respiratory infections. 'I'm afraid, for the foreseeable future, coronavirus is going to be added to that list of things that those who are vulnerable even despite vaccination can be at risk of.' He said coronavirus was 'likely to be a problem, in particular, in the winter for the next few winters'. Health Secretary Matt Hancock suggest has previously suggested the government does not believe it can eradicate the virus completely, with it instead becoming a regular part of life. Speaking in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, he said: 'I hope that Covid-19 will become a treatable disease by the end of the year. 'If Covid-19 ends up like flu, so we live our normal lives and we mitigate through vaccines and treatments, then we can get on with everything again. 'I'm confident we can offer the vaccine to all adults by September.' Strides Pharma Science announced that its step-down wholly owned subsidiary, Strides Pharma Global, Singapore, has received approval for Ibuprofen Oral Suspension USP,100 mg/5 mL (OTC) from the United States Food & Drug Administration (USFDA). The product is bioequivalent and therapeutically equivalent to the Reference Listed Drug (RLD), Children's Motrin Oral Suspension, 100 mg/mL, of Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc. Strides is focusing on building a private label business in the US by leveraging its portfolio of products across soft gels, tablets, capsules, topicals, powders and oral solutions. Ibuprofen Oral Suspension USP,100 mg/5 mL (OTC) further strengthens company's private label portfolio for the US market. According to IRi data, the US market for Ibuprofen Oral Suspension USP,100 mg/5 mL (OTC) is approximately US$ 133 Mn. The product will be manufactured at the company's facility at Bengaluru. The company has 127 cumulative ANDA filings with USFDA of which 99 ANDAs have been approved and 28 are pending approval. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Born in Missouri, Lucy grew up in New Hampshire where she spent her days climbing trees and catching frogs. The little girl was rapidly attracted to artistic activities, but her admiration for her grandmother who was a writer encouraged her to follow the same path. She began a career in writing and taught literature at the faculty of Rhode Island for over twenty years. A faithful companion, her drawing accompanied her in every moment of the day (notebooks, margins of her students homework, shopping lists, envelopes, paper towels...). In 2006, Lucy decided to quit her job to return to her first vocation. She traded her pens for paintbrushes and began painting. She has exhibited in the United States since 2009. The artist works rapidly. She uses many mediums (pastels, watercolours, markers and coloured pencils...), with the exception of oils whose drying time prevent her from being spontaneous. She creates collages. Her technique is unusual; after spreading the paint with her hands, she engraves the background with all sorts of unusual tools, such as a vegetable peeler. She then incorporates ink, pencil and pastel with her fingers or a brush. Self-taught, she paints by instinct and with great generosity. Ideas and colours take shape in her head before they are brought life on the background. Creating is a way for her to interact with others, to touch them, and bring about emotions. Lucy appreciates the simplicity and sincerity o f c h i l d r e n ' s d r a w i n g s . H e r a r t i s t i c a p p r o a c h i s c l o s e r t o t h e c o n c e r n s o f a r t b r u t a n d p a i n t i n g s b y J e a n D u b u f f e t ( F r e n c h p a i n t e r , t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y ) . First Minister Arlene Foster said it marked an important milestone in the progress of the City Deal. (Liam McBurney/PA) The Stormont Executive will mark a major milestone today on the way to a 210m city deal for the north west region. Executive ministers will sign the heads of terms for a regeneration deal for Londonderry and Strabane. In addition to the Executive and UK Governments 210m investment in the region, a further 40m will be provided by Derry City and Strabane District Council and its delivery partners bringing the total funding package to 250m. It is hoped the investment package will see the delivery of 10 major projects, with a focus on innovation, digital and health projects alongside renewal and regeneration initiatives. The Northern Ireland Office said the proposed projects have the potential to deliver an additional 7,000 jobs, increase economic output by 210m per annum, drive growth in output and wages and provide a population boost as further people are attracted to come to the city region to work and study. First Minister Arlene Foster said it marked an important milestone in the progress of the City Deal. There is a real sense of vibrancy and ambition in the North West. The Executive is working with the UK Government, the council and a wide range of stakeholders to turn that potential into reality through collaboration and innovation, the DUP leader said. The deal was heralded by Deputy First Minister Michelle ONeill as a game-changer for the regional economy, driving growth and creating opportunities for people. There is an abundance of potential in the north west and this funding will help to harness it. I commend all the partners and local representatives who have worked tirelessly to secure this investment and I look forward to seeing the benefits it brings. Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis said the funding would support and encourage economic development across the region, creating jobs, boosting opportunity and encouraging further inward investment. Philippe Delpal, a French national and an associate of prominent U.S. investor Michael Calvey, has reiterated his innocence as a high-profile embezzlement trial involving the two men, along with five others, resumed in Moscow. Delpal told the court on February 24 that accusations against him, Calvey, and five other businessmen over the alleged illegal allocation of loans in 2015 were baseless, and that all financial operations in question had the goal of saving Vostochny Bank. Last week, Calvey, the founder of the private-equity group Baring Vostok, also proclaimed his innocence, saying he planned to continue investing in Russia after the trial is over, "but everything depends on the end of the process." The trial of Calvey, Delpal, and five associates -- Russian citizens Vagan Abgaryan, Ivan Zyuzin, Maksim Vladimirov, Aleksei Kordichev, and Aleksandr Tsakunov -- started on February 2, almost two years after their arrest. The defendants all deny any wrongdoing, saying the charges against them are being used to pressure them in a business dispute over control of Vostochny Bank. The trial was adjourned until March 3. Russia's Supreme Court in November 2020 eased the detention terms for the seven businessmen, ruling that they may not leave their homes between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., communicate with other suspects in places other than the courtroom, send or receive mail, or use telephones unless in an emergency. The case has rattled Russia's business community and prompted several prominent officials and businessmen to voice concerns about the treatment of the executives. Baring Vostok is one of the largest and oldest private-equity firms operating in Russia. It was founded in the early 1990s and manages more than $3.7 billion in assets. The company was an early major investor in Yandex, Russia's dominant search engine. Calvey is one of three Americans currently held in Russia on charges supporters say are groundless. Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, was sentenced in June 2020 to 16 years on espionage charges that he has vehemently rejected. Another former U.S. Marine, Trevor Reed, was sentenced to nine years in prison in late July 2020 after a Moscow court found him guilty of assaulting two police officers, a charge that he refused to admit. With reporting by Interfax and TASS One theory of aging invokes the Second Law of Thermodynamics and suggests that in the long-term, the heat energy generated by metabolic changes causes damage to living systems that accumulates as repair mechanisms cannot keep pace with the damage, entropy accumulates, and this is manifest in the signs of aging that are all too familiargraying hair, wrinkled skin, immune compromise, organ failure, cognitive decline. A team from Turkey, writing in the International Journal of Exergy, point out that as is ever the case with living systems, the picture is far more complicated. Indeed, an individual is not truly a single living thing given the presence of myriad microbes that live on the skin and within the alimentary canal, for instance. Indeed, the team from Yeditepe University in Istanbul explain that the human gut microbiota acts as an autonomous thermodynamic subsystem within what we ought to refer to as the human superorganism. These microbes generate and export their own entropy without causing age damage to their human host. The team's thermodynamic calculations show that between 12 and 59 percent of the metabolic entropy generated by each of us as a whole is produced by the microbial guests in our gut and exported in feces. This entropy is not associated with aging damage. The researchers explain how entropy removal via the waste stream from a chemical plant is well known and discussed at length in the pertinent scientific literature. Given that we know from the work of Schrodinger and Prigogine that living systems must import energy and export entropy to maintain their living state this new research into the entropy export by the gut microbiota could open up new avenues for research into aging that have not previously been considered in depth. More information: Cennet Yldz et al. Fraction of the metabolic ageing entropy damage to a host may be flushed out by gut microbiata, International Journal of Exergy (2021). Cennet Yldz et al. Fraction of the metabolic ageing entropy damage to a host may be flushed out by gut microbiata,(2021). DOI: 10.1504/IJEX.2021.113004 by Vladimir Rozanskij Amid excursions in the snow and hot saunas, the two "eternal leaders" reportedly spoke about economic aid, but also about the succession to Lukashenko. Belarus protests will resume on 25 March. Communist demonstrations in Moscow, Novokujbyshev, Ulan-Ude, followed by many arrests. Moscow (AsiaNews) - Yesterday, 23 February, the "Defenders of the Fatherland Day" was celebrated in Russia and Belarus, a military holiday that dates back to the establishment of the Revolutionary Red Army. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Lukashenko held a joint celebration together at a summit in Sochi, including excursions in the snow and hot saunas, while in Russia Communist Party activists tried to gather for unauthorized protest marches, in what they consider their national celebration. The meeting of the two disputed presidents was not followed by statements, and the terms of the agreements reached between them are not known. There is talk of a request for subsidies from Lukashenko, of about 3 billion dollars. The Belarusian media evaluate the negotiation as positive judging by its length, having lasted for over 6 hours. But according to all commentators, the real issue at stake would be the modality of Lukashenkos agreed exit, given that Putin himself cannot afford to control the protests of two bordering brother nationa. Just as the other faithful "brother-leader", the Kazakh Nursultan Nazarbaev, taught, it would be advisable for all "eternal presidents" to take a step to the side and prepare succession, maintaining structures of control. As the 2020 Russian constitutional reforms show, Putin himself would be ready to leave the scene leaving an iron bureaucracy in his place. But the same cannot be said of Lukashenko, who in no way intends to give in to the shame of being replaced by opponents. The Belarusian constitutional reforms are for now only a project on paper, and there are no guarantees of implementation. For this reason, the only words that Lukashenko leaked are those on the "integration at a high price" between Russians and Belarusians, to force Putin to take on his problems. The integration between Russia and Belarus was also discussed in the previous meeting, last September 14, when Minsk was still shaken by constant protests. At the time Putin granted a credit of 1.5 billion dollars. This time, the "high price" should double the stakes. Before the protests, Lukashenko himself was trying to curb the Russian desire to incorporate his country. There are many points under discussion about the integration agreement (over 30), starting with the common currency and supranational government structures, but the economic part now seems to be the most urgent. Scepticism prevails among Russian analysts, however, for fear of having to take on the "toxic debt" of current Belarus. Lukashenko assured that he had "definitively" stopped the protests. But his legitimacy and resistance remain strongly in doubt, nor can a truly loyal succession to Moscow be predicted. From her Lithuanian exile, the opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaja has called for renewed protests on "Freedom Day", next March 25, when the founding of the People's Republic of Belarus in 1918 is remembered. According to Tikhanovskaya "we see that attempts are being made to sell off Belarus in pieces, in exchange for credits and aid to stay in power for a few more months the only force capable of stopping the sale is the Belarusian people. In Russia, the protests of Navalny supporters are on hold, after the leaders conviction and the arrest of most of his lieutenants. His wife Julia Naval'naja has just returned home from Germany. Communists, nostalgic for the Red Army and Soviet grandeur, have tried to take to the streets. At least 600 people managed to parade in Moscow, next to Red Square, also chanting slogans against Putinian repressions. In Novokujbyshev, in the Samara region, 15 people were arrested for laying flowers under a monument to Lenin, on charges of "illegal agitation". Demonstrations by Communists, with hundreds of people, were organized in Buryatia, in the capital Ulan-Ude, where there were many arrests, including some local deputies. Funding has been approved to upgrade the wooden trackway at Killaun bog looped walk, just outside Birr under the Peatlands Community Engagement Scheme. 20,000 has been allocated to upgrade the existing wooden trackway, under the ownership of the Board of Management of St Brendan's Community School, Birr at Killaun bog, which is a popular spot with walkers and nature lovers. As part of the same funding allocation, it was announced that Schohabog bog/Cloughjordan Community Development group was allocated 7,260 to undertake a habitat survey at Schohaboy Bog Natural Heritage Area on habitats not covered to date and to carry out an Appropriate Assessment for a proposed route way for a new visitor and amenity broadwalk. The group was allocated 7,260 under the latest funding allocation, which was made by Malcolm Noonan T.D., Minister of State for Heritage and Electoral Reform on February 22. As part of the announcement, approval was given for grant funding of just under 230,000 to 25 local community groups and organisations for a variety of peatlands related projects across Ireland. Announcing the funding under the Peatlands Community Engagement Scheme, which has been operating for the last number of years, the Minister stated that he was delighted to see the diverse range of initiatives put forward by such active community and volunteer groups and environmental organisations. The Minister stated that the amount of high quality applications received for 2021 was impressive and he was delighted there was such a geographic spread with projects in 15 counties set to benefit. He said: The high volume and quality of applications to the Scheme shows just how much communities care about and value their local peatlands, and how much enthusiasm there is across the country for local people to work together to protect, explore and enjoy these precious habitats. These kinds of bottom-up initiatives are inspiring and Im proud to have the opportunity to support them. This funding allocation a two-fold increase on last years allocation to the scheme will support various projects in local peatland areas from boardwalks, maintenance of bog trails, peatland restoration plans, information signage and way finder markers, the surveying of bog habitats and birds, promotional material and publications, oral history projects, invasive species control and peatland education programmes to nature awareness, wellness and sensory experiences. The Minister went on to praise the important peatland work being done by communities and organisations; I know from my own experience that hands-on local action can have enormous positive impacts - not just for nature and biodiversity, but also for people in terms of physical and mental health and wellbeing. Investments in nature deliver enormous social value, which is especially important in these challenging times. Projects to benefit include five in Roscommon, four in Galway, two in Westmeath and Laois and one apiece in counties Kildare, Offaly, Kerry, Clare, Cavan, Monaghan, Dublin, Carlow, Wicklow, Tipperary and Louth. Minister Pippa Hackett welcomed the announcement this week for these projects. Our relationship with the bog is changing from one of extraction to one of protection and its wonderful to see local groups in the Midlands finding a new appreciation for this fundamental part of our heritage. Under the Peatlands Community Engagement Scheme, the Abbeyleix Bog Project volunteers are receiving 12, 605 towards equipment and software to map 3,000 peat dams, while St. Brendans Community School in Offaly is to get 20,000 to upgrade the Killaun Bog looped walk.: The Mountrath Scout Group are receiving 2,315 to run awareness and education days at Knockacoller Bog and toward wildlife cameras and drone surveys. I applaud the community groups who have applied for this funding and I look forward to seeing the results of their efforts. Elsewhere, Offaly TD Barry Cowen also welcomed the news from Minister Noonan, saying that the funding announced under the Peatlands Community Engagement Scheme, which has been operating for the last number of years and supports various projects in local peatland areas. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Since its management buyout from Aurora Cannabis in May 2020, ALPS has built a blue-chip roster of global customers and a growing pipeline of potential new deals Australis will pay between C$13.7 million and nearly C$26 million in total consideration, the company said ( ) ( ) (FRA:AC4) has reached a definitive agreement to acquire 51% of the issued and outstanding shares of cannabis facility design company ALPS, the company announced Wednesday. Australis will pay between C$13.7 million and nearly C$26 million in total consideration, the company said. Initially, the company will pay C$10 million in either common shares at a price of C$0.20, cash, or a mixture of both. An additional C$2 million will be paid once the deal closes, and a C$1.7 million indemnity holdback to follow after 18 months. The agreement also has an option for Australis to acquire the remaining 49% within three years. If sufficient milestone payments are made (the maximum milestone payment is $24 million in three installments if ALPS hits cumulative revenues of C$108.7 million and EBITDA of C$48.9 million), the payments will count in part toward that option. Since its management buyout from Aurora Cannabis in May 2020, ALPS has built a blue-chip roster of global customers and a growing pipeline of potential new deals, the company said. ALPS is currently executing on a number of contracts, including Aurora, Cann Group, Vertical Harvest and Aldershot Greenhouses. As part of the move, former Aurora CEO Terry Booth will step into the same role at ALPS. "The ALPS Transaction and the [Green Therapeutics Inc] acquisition are the first steps in combining forces to build a strong and very hard to imitate MSO in the US cannabis space, Booth said in a statement. The opportunity for the cannabis industry has never been greater. Political changes towards acceptance of cannabis in the US will, we believe, drive major regulatory changes in short order. We anticipate that this will result in an exponentially greater opportunity for all cannabis companies in the US, and especially for those that are well differentiated, such as AUSA. The concurrent GT deal adds a US cultivator to Australis arsenal. Three of the company's cultivars, sold under the GT Flowers brand, have tested for high potency with exceptional terpene profiles. We strongly believe that with our assets, team, experience and vision, we have what it takes to build the next generation of [multi-state operators], delivering substantial growth with a strong focus on high-quality, resulting in superior brands and an enhanced bottom line, Booth added. The ALPS standard in cultivation and compliance will continue to set the industry benchmark globally, and will be reflected across all of AUSA's operations." When Booth takes over as CEO, interim CEO Duke Fu will shift over to the COO role. "With the completion of the Definitive Agreement, we continue to execute at a rapid pace," Fu said. "We are focused on building significant shareholder value, which is reflected in the transaction terms that are EBITDA weighted and back-end loaded through the earn-out provisions." In addition to delivering profitable revenue growth, Australis expects the deals to enable its strategy to secure low-cost, high-quality biomass to fuel the scale-up of its brands. The moves strongly signal a shift from an investment company to a formidable, highly recognizable MSO, the company said. Because Australis doesnt rely on third-party cultivated inputs for the manufacturing of its products, the company expects to achieve a much-reduced cost of goods sold. The company believes its three decades of experience in optimized facility design results in high-quality, high-yield products at low operating expenses. With the ALPS Transaction comes the award-winning west coast brand Mr. Natural, while the GT Transaction brings more award-winning brands, including GT Flowers, Tsunami and Provisions. These transactions set up Australis to expand its footprint in the US and make these brands available to all consumers and patients, the company said. Specifically, the company has identified a number of significant growth catalysts for the ALPS business: Growing demand in the legal cannabis sector, including lifecycle-related demand for facility upgrades. Potential legalization of cannabis at the US federal level creating demand for centralized cultivation facilities Growing demand for high-tech facilities for more traditional crops such as soft berries and vegetables, as well as newly popular crops (such as algae, in which ALPS has unique expertise) A drive for operations to become more sustainable, including increased demand for self-sufficiency ALPS has built a rapidly expanding business development pipeline, the company said, and is in advanced negotiations on potential projects with total capital expenditure in excess of $2.5 billion. The company anticipates that ALPS will convert on multiple opportunities in the coming months. Additionally, ALPS' new compliance and data-driven service offering, APIS, is designed to create a high-margin, recurring revenue stream. APIS has been resonating strongly with operators, the company said, and interest in this new solution is strong with demand coming both from the regulated cannabis sector and more traditional horticulture market segments. The company recently signed its first APIS contract with Cann Group in Australia. Board member Avi Geller and Chairperson of AUSA's Compensation and Nominating committee, stated, The company is in the late-stage completion of two significant and accretive transactions that will set the stage for success in the US cannabis market, AUSA Compensation and Nominating Committee Chair Avi Geller said. [The] committee is focused on attracting the very best talent in every vertical that we intend entering into, be it cannabis or traditional crops, and we have made significant appointments. We are engaged in multiple negotiations that are progressing well. Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com Follow him on Twitter @andrew_kessel (Natural News) Children are no longer exempt from coronavirus vaccine trials. The Oxford Vaccine Group is looking for children aged 6 to 17 to take part in a coronavirus vaccine study. This marks the first time a coronavirus vaccine would be tested on anyone younger than 12 years old. We have a new COVID-19 study open for recruitment. If your child is aged 6-17 years and in good health they may be eligible to participate, the group tweeted on Feb. 13. The study seeks to assess the safety and effectiveness of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, also known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. It would enroll 300 participants up to 240 would be injected with the experimental coronavirus vaccine while the rest, as a control group, would be receiving a licensed vaccine for Meningitis B (MenB, Bexsero). The phase 2 trial funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and AstraZeneca would show if kids have a good immune response to the shot. Previous trials of the vaccine have shown that it is safe. Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson are expected to start trials for younger age groups in the spring. Niall McCrae, a British mental health ethicist and academic, condemned the encouragement of parents to enter their children in a coronavirus vaccine trial. Children should not be lab rats for the benefit of Big Pharma and the Great Reset. I would go as far as saying this is tantamount to child abuse, McCrae said. (Related: Medical child abuse now socially accepted across America as vaccine-damaged children are locked in scream rooms by teachers.) An established scientific and ethical standards related to experimentation on humans could be found in the Nuremberg Code of 1947. It came about as a result of the post-World War II trials and convictions of Nazi doctors who had conducted deadly experiments on prisoners of war without the consent of the subjects. The code recognized that the risk must be weighed against the expected benefit and that unnecessary pain and suffering must be avoided. The first principle of the code provided strict conditions for establishing voluntary consent. It stated that the subject should have legal capacity to give consent, along with sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved. Meaning, the parents or guardians would be responsible for the children in the coronavirus vaccine trial. McCrae also pointed out the sixth principle of the code, which stated that: The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that (of the one) determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment. Given the 99.997 survival rate of school-aged children to coronavirus infection, McCrae noted that subjecting them to any dangers from an experimental vaccine would be unjustifiable. Opinion varies about coronavirus trial on children People offered varied opinions about the coronavirus vaccine trial on children. Thats a tough question. I dont know. I guess I would have to read up on it, said Ana Batkovic of San Mateo, California when asked if she would enroll her 11-year-old in a coronavirus vaccine trial. But Batkovic said she would absolutely vaccinate her child once trials are completed and the vaccine is proven safe. Batkovics son, Jaya Dann, had mixed feelings about the vaccine. It would be great because wed get the vaccine, but then again, I hate shots, Dann said. Danns best friend, Dominik Darius, hoped the vaccine would get them one step closer to the classroom. I like playing sports, so itd be fun to go back, Darius said. Maria Gil of Brentwood, California, on the other hand, wasnt convinced at all that any coronavirus vaccine is safe. To me, I believe they came up with this method of a vaccine too soon, she said. We have to acknowledge everyones concerns and not dismiss them, said Stanford pediatric critical care physician, Dr. Alan Schroeder, adding that safety data from multiple trials in young children would be critical when it comes to convincing families to give their kids a coronavirus vaccine. When people are aware of the fact that the probability of their child getting extremely ill from the infection itself is really low, its a harder sell. Its an easy sell to a 75 year old. Its a little bit of a harder sell to a 25 or 30 year old, and it might even be harder for a younger child. According to Dr. Schroeder, immunizing children should not be a prerequisite for in-person learning. Once teachers are immunized, I think we do not need to wait for kids to get immunized to get them back to school, he said. Follow Immunization.news for more news and information related to vaccines. Sources include: LifeSiteNews.com 1 LifeSiteNews.com 2 CIRP.org ABC7News.com Med.Stanford.edu POSTtitle Without question the warmer Kansas City weather is spiking an uptick in local ALLEGED misdeeds and so we share this compilation of local news regarding police action, court cases and crime searches. Suspect Kansas City Tourist Police believe man wanted for murdering Iowa woman is in Kansas City by: Travis Meier, AP Wire Posted: / Updated: AMES, Iowa - A woman is dead and police have a warrant to arrest a man who they believe is in Kansas City for her murder. Police responded to a welfare check at an apartment in Ames at 7:02 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. Suburban Hero Dodges Bullets From Bandits Man shot at trying to stop thieves from burglarizing cars in Blue Springs neighborhood BLUE SPRINGS, Mo. - A good Samaritan tried to stop a car burglary in progress Monday morning in his neighborhood and ended up facing a barrage of bullets. It happened about 2:30 a.m. Monday near S. Powell Avenue and E. 52nd Street Court South. Westside Tragedy Aftermath Mo. Mom and Her Son Are Killed, Allegedly by Victim's Boyfriend Mother of five Khasheme Strother, 35, and her son, Raymon Hill, 20, are dead after an altercation with her boyfriend, police say A Missouri mother and one of her five sons are dead - and her boyfriend has been charged with killing them. On Feb. More Highway Gunfire Raymore police say woman shot several times Tuesday afternoon Raymore police said a woman was shot several times Tuesday afternoon during a domestic dispute.Authorities said the shooting was reported about 1:45 p.m. near Crest Drive and Highway 58.Police said the victim was standing outside a vehicle when she was shot. The woman was taken to a hospital with serious injuries.Investigators said a man was taken into custody. COVID Crime Hurts Workers KDOL says fraud claim payments have cost state unemployment insurance program $140M The Kansas Department of Labor said Tuesday about $140 million in fraudulent claim payments were made from the Kansas regular unemployment insurance program.The state Department of Labor released the data Tuesday following what it called "an in-depth analysis and IRS Form 1099-G reconciliation from Jan. 1, 2020, through Dec. Show-Me Tricky Suspect Mugshot Postscript Woman charged with stealing trooper's patrol car in St. Charles County ST. CHARLES COUNTY - A woman who sped off in a Missouri Highway Patrol car after being arrested on Saturday has been charged with three felonies. Heather Rene Nesler, 32, of St. Charles, was able to slip out of her handcuffs and steal the trooper's car when the trooper went to retrieve her purse for her, authorities said. Highway Gunfire Repeat Police investigating I-70 road rage shooting MANHATTAN, KS (AP/KCTV) - A woman is recovering in a hospital after being shot on Interstate 70 in a road rage incident near Manhattan. The man suspected of shooting her has not been caught. Youngster Suffers Shooting St. Joseph police investigating shooting of 8-year-old girl ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (AP) - Police in St. Joseph are investigating the shooting of an 8-year-old girl at an apartment complex there. The shooting happened Sunday morning at the Oak Ridge Apartments in St. Joseph, the News-Press reported. Police said the girl was taken to Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City with critical injuries. Tech Helps Cold Case Arizona's 'Valentine Sally' identified as Missouri woman FLAGSTAFF, AZ (3TV/CBS 5) -- Coconino County Sheriff's Office announced Monday that after 40 years they have been able to officially identify the Jane Doe from the Valentine Sally case. Valentine Sally was one of the oldest unsolved "Jane Doe" cases in Arizona. Street Justice Legislation Sparks Culture War Debate New legislation would protect drivers who hit protesters Video above: Video shows SUV colliding with protesters in Boston streetWhen massive demonstrations against racial injustice erupted across the nation last summer, protesters used an increasingly common tactic to draw attention to their cause: swarming out onto major roads to temporarily paralyze traffic.This method sometimes resulted in searing images of drivers plowing through crowds, causing serious injuries and in some cases, deaths.Now, Republican politicians across the country are moving to stop the road-blocking maneuver, proposing increased penalties for demonstrators who run onto highways and legal immunity for drivers who hit them. Waiting Game Ruling Missouri judge says public defender waitlist unfair COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) - A Missouri judge said the wait time for some poor defendants to get legal help is unconstitutional but is giving state lawmakers time to beef up the agency's budget in hopes that will help. Outcry For Justice After Tragic Duffel Bag Demise 'I hope they pay': Family of woman found dead in Buchanan County a year ago wants justice KANSAS CITY, Mo. - The family of the mom killed and left in a bag on the side of a rural road feels one step closer to justice. Two people were charged over the weekend in the death of Ariel Starcher. The announcements came nearly one year to the day after her body was found in February 2020. Developing . . . [February 24, 2021] HCL Technologies Named a Prestigious World's Best Employer by Forbes HCL Technologies, (HCL), a leading global technology company, has been named by Forbes as one of The World's Best Employers for 2020, honoring HCL among the top global employers in the world. In addition to being ranked number 30 on the list, HCL is recognized as the only multinational company that is headquartered in India to be featured in the top 50. Forbes' The World's Best Employers for 2020 list recognizes the most admired workplaces around the world as voted by the people who know them best - their employees. HCL is recognized for its outstanding work environment in every assessment category, including employee satisfaction with the company's COVID-19 response, as well as the company's image, economic footprint, talent development and career opportunities, gender equality and social responsibility. "We dedicate this prestigious recognition to our employees as all 159,000 ideapreneurs drive our brand with enthusiasm, passion and innovation. This distinction is reflective of our people-centric culture and commitment, deep rooted in our 44 years of business around the globe," said Apparao VV, Chief Human Resources Officer, HCL Technologies (News - Alert) . "We're very proud of what we have buit together and will continue to empower our people, clients and communities to help them achieve their professional goals in an environment filled with creativity, freedom, inclusiveness, ideapreneurship and innovation." Forbes partnered with market research firm Statista to compile the ranking by surveying 160,000 full-time and part-time workers from 58 countries that are working for businesses with operations in multiple nations or regions. Surveys were conducted on a rolling basis from June to July 2020 and participants were asked to rate their willingness to recommend their own employers to friends and family, while ranking their satisfaction with their employers in multiple categories that are important to today's modern and competitive work environment. The complete list features 750 global corporations headquartered in 45 countries. To see the full Forbes The World's Best Employer List visit here: https://www.forbes.com/lists/worlds-best-employers/#23688cab1e0c About HCL Technologies HCL Technologies (HCL) empowers global enterprises with technology for the next decade, today. HCL's Mode 1-2-3 strategy, based on its deep-domain industry expertise, customer-centricity and entrepreneurial culture of Ideapreneurship, enables businesses to transform into next-gen enterprises. HCL offers its services and products through three business units: IT and Business Services (ITBS), Engineering and R&D Services (ERS) and Products & Platforms (P&P). ITBS enables global enterprises to transform their businesses through offerings in the areas of applications, infrastructure, digital process operations and next generational digital transformation solutions. ERS offers engineering services and solutions in all aspects of product development and platform engineering. P&P provides modernized software products to global clients for their technology and industry specific requirements. Through its cutting-edge co-innovation labs, global delivery capabilities and broad global network, HCL delivers holistic services in various industry verticals, categorized as Financial Services, Manufacturing, Technology & Services, Telecom & Media, Retail & CPG, Life Sciences & Healthcare and Public Services. As a leading global technology company, HCL takes pride in its diversity, social responsibility, sustainability and education initiatives. For the 12 months ended December 31, 2020 HCL had consolidated revenue of US$ 10.02 billion. Its 159,682 ideapreneurs operate out of 50 countries. For more information, visit www.hcltech.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210223006272/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader Rakesh Tikait has said that the farmers would march to the Parliament if the three agricultural laws are not taken back. IANS spoke to Tikait and he said, "A call would be made for taking farm protests to the Parliament." Tikait claimed that farmers would do farming on the lawns located near Parliament and when the crop would mature, the government could analyse the financial yield of the crop. He further said that a Parliamentary Standing Committee should be formed and monitor this and then the government would get to know about the gains and losses related to it. While speaking to IANS, Tikait also said that the movement would spread to other states such as Telangana, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. Berkshires Gets Limited Vaccine Doses; Named 'High-Efficiency Collaborative' PITTSFIELD, Mass. COVID-19 vaccine shipments expected early last week were delayed because of inclement weather and were smaller than expected, leaving Berkshire County shorthanded. And a "very limited" amount of vaccines was available for appointment first-dose slots on Wednesday. "This week, Massachusetts received 139,000 doses," Mayor Linda Tyer said to the City Council on Tuesday. "That's it, we have a million potential new residents who are eligible, but for the week we received 139,000 doses." Public Health Program Manager Laura Kittross said there is limited access everywhere and doesn't expect this to be an ongoing issue. She hopes to see additional vaccine allocations later this week and is "certainly hopeful for next week." On Thursday, there were very limited first-dose clinic at Berkshire Community College from 2 to 5 with 300 appointments available to eligible individuals. The North Adams and Great Barrington vaccination sites will also hold first-dose clinics on Thursday, offering 250 doses each. All of those were gone by late afternoon on Wednesday. About 50,000 appointments will be available on Thursday morning through the state website, which Gov. Charlie Baker said should be working better. The updated site crashed last week. Baker on Wednesday offered some hope that doses will begin arriving in greater numbers for the mass and regional vaccination sites set up across the commonwealth. "The news out of Washington on some of this stuff right now is actually encouraging. I hesitate to draw too many conclusions about it because, honestly, we've been disappointed before by some of the things people told us were going to happen and then what ultimately happened with respect to vaccine production and distribution," he said at the newly opened mass vaccination site in Natick. "But on the same day to have Johnson and Johnson's vaccine deemed safe and effective by by the FDA and to have Moderna and Pfizer say they would double their vaccine production in March over the level of vaccine production they did in February is a really positive development in so many ways. "This could be a really big moment if in fact what folks are saying actually plays out over the course of the next 30 to 45 days." The state has been receiving about 130,000 or so first doses a week for the two-dose Moderna and Pfizer vaccine. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, while not as effective as the first two, is a single dose and offers greater portability. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized its emergency use on Wednesday. "As far as vaccine allocation this week to the public clinics, it's important to remember that the state is constantly juggling the needs of the entire commonwealth," Kittross wrote in an email. "Vaccine shipments were late last week due to the weather in the Midwest/South so that messed everything up. We got a very large allocation of Pfizer second doses this week for people who received their first doses three weeks ago, and it's possible that affected our ability to get an additional larger allocation this week for first doses. Or they simply needed the vaccine elsewhere this week, possibly in an area that was underserved to date." The Berkshire County Boards of Health Association, the umbrella group for vaccine distribution to the three regional Berkshire sites, was named on Wednesday as one of 11 "high-efficiency" collaboratives across the state in an effort to streamline vaccine distribution. Last week, the governor halted doses to smaller municipal areas saying 95 percent of Bay State residents now live within 45 minutes of a mass or regional vaccination site. The collaboratives have to have capacity for a minimum of 750 people a day, five days a week, subject to vaccine availability, among several other criteria. Tyer reported that the BCC clinic administrated 960 vaccines last Thursday and 1,150 last Saturday. She noted that Tuesday and Saturday clinics are for second doses. "Regarding the Massachusetts data, I know you're hearing this and I'm hearing it pretty frequently this sense of frustration that many are having about the Massachusetts vaccine rollout," she said. "It has certainly been difficult and confusing, and it's a constant work in progress. So state officials are continuing to work through these difficulties and the dominant obstacle to all of this is the constraint that we have on vaccine supply." At the clinic occurring earlier on Tuesday day, around 490-second doses were administered and on Saturday, the BCC clinic will administrate 2,100-second doses over a nine-hour period, Tyer said. Pittsfield's 14-day case rate is currently at 7.64 with a positivity rate of 1.02. The current positive case count is 248 with two new cases occurring on Tuesday. The city is averaging at 316 COVID-19 tests per day, which is a number that has been reportedly decreasing. According to Center for Disease Control data, Massachusetts is currently number one for total first doses administrated per capita. "The tests per day are high, but they are going down and have been going down since mid-January," Tyer said. "And this downward trend in tests and the low positivity rate means that our cases are going down dramatically since January." She was pleased to inform the council that Pittsfield hasn't seen any COVID-19 deaths in the last 25 days. Kittross explained that the only vaccination sites that Berkshire County controls are the three located in North, Central, and Southern Berkshire County. "Vaccinations at pharmacies and grocery stores are not under local control in any way," she wrote. "Nor are we aware of what vaccine they receive or how many they vaccinate. Anyone with issues related to the pharmacies will need to contact them directly. I have heard sporadic complaints, but nothing systemic; overall people seem positive. However, there is limited supply everywhere." So far, more than 1 million residents have received their first dose of the vaccine. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) best exemplifies the reason thousands of businesses are departing California. Her attitude toward one of the states most successful companies, Tesla, was made clear with a childish vulgarity she aimed at the companys CEO after learning that he was threatening to leave the Sunshine State. F*ck Elon Musk, she tweeted unapologetically in early 2020. This wasnt the first time Gonzalez dropped the f-bomb in a public forum. The assemblywoman wasnt too concerned about the innovative billionaire packing up his manufacturing plants because she believed the CEO needed the state more than taxpayers needed him. Tesla receives numerous green grants from Southland taxpayers. Apparently, she misjudged the balance in the relationship. Musks response to the assemblywoman signaled his next move at the time: Message received. Gov. Gavin Newsom reportedly held the same ill-advised view and wasnt too concerned about Musk moving his billions in revenue and more than 40,000 employees to a friendlier business environment. They have learned otherwise. Tesla joins a formidable list of high-tech companies fleeing bad government and relocating to Texas, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., Oracle Corp. McKesson Corp., and expansions of Apple, Google and Facebook. There is a new name for the trend: Techsodus. Musk will be the first to admit that insults are hardly the tipping point for a CEO deciding to relocate to another state. The best reason is summed up by a relocation specialist cashing in on the trend: Californias regulatory environment is the most costly, complex and uncertain in the nation, Joseph Vranich recently said. And its gotten worse. The laws have become so confusing and so complex that California has earned the dubious distinction as rated among the top judicial hellholes in the nation, according to CEOs polled by Chief Executive magazine. It has reached a point to where the lawmakers fail to understand whats in the laws -- all 10,000s of new pages. Assemblywoman Gonzalez has contributed to this bureaucratic quagmire with her job-killing AB5 bill, targeting independent contractors. Her aim was to dismantle the gig economy (labor market with short-term contracts), specifically hurting part-time workers for Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash. Now they will be taxed as employees, forced to absorb the myriad layers of additional taxes, while struggling to earn a living. The mandate ended up hurting not only adults, but children, too. Parents desperate to establish learning pods -- as an alternative to school closures -- were particularly upset dealing with the rigid standards of the mandate. Numerous conditions of the legislation must be met before hiring private tutors and teachers. Parents can wade through the legislation and take the laws prescribed ABC test, to determine whether they meet the onerous definition of being an established business, according to the mandates. Those most impacted by AB5 are the most upset. Lorena Gonzalez is hiding behind a carefully worded and deceptive statement when she knows the state of California has already issued guidelines that make parents and tutors subject to AB5s absurd requirements, says Carl DeMaio, chairman of Reform California, an organization fighting against the mandate. Even liberal attorneys are having to admit that the law is so fatally flawed as written that it traps everybody Perhaps Gonzalez could gain greater insight into her constituents lives by getting up out of her chair, leaving her office and speaking to struggling taxpayers overwhelmed by the fundamentally unfair conditions of her signature legislation, according to DeMaio. Regrettably, fiscal realities rarely come between Gonzalez and her like-minded progressive colleagues. One of the most poignant examples of Gonzalez economic illiteracy was to label Elon Musk a union buster, and to suggest he was feeding off the public coffers by accepting green grants. It appears to have escaped her notice that the United Auto Workers (UAW) was recently handed a crushing defeat by the employees at the Volkswagen manufacturing plant in Tennessee. Those hard-working folks voted to keep the union out of their paychecks. And the more than 10,000 employees at the Tesla plant in Alameda are most grateful for the allocation of green grants which have contributed to their employer offering lucrative salaries. The next time Gonzalez decides to drop the F*ck bomb on a CEO, she may wish to take into account those benefitting from her antagonistic actions. Corporate relocation experts are happy to help out CEOs desperate to leave behind poor governance and tempted by the open road. Many of them anticipate their best year ever in 2021. Departures are understandable when year after year CEOs nationwide have declared California the worst state in which to do business, adds Joseph Vranich, the much-quoted corporate relocation expert. Signs are that California politicians contempt for business will persist. Vranich admits he loves the climate in California, but knows the worst Arctic chill now blowing over Texas will not effectively stem the tide of corporations seeking a saner business climate. Image: Jimmy Emerson, DVM DeRay Mckesson 07 with student moderators Johari Joseph 21 and Ayana Opong-Nyantekyi 23. Joseph and Opong-Nyantekyi asked Mckesson a number of questions, starting off with an inquiry about his trajectory from Bowdoin to one of the Black Lives Matter leaders. Mckesson said his life changed when he joined the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. He originally planned to participate for a weekend, but ended up staying (with a Bowdoin friend) for three months. He vowed to dedicate himself to stopping police brutality, and went on to cofound Campaign Zero, a nonprofit dedicated to ending police and state violence. "We believe we can win in this lifetime," he said. "We believe that the only way the outcomes will change is if structures change. Symbolic change is cool; narrative shifts are important. But they don't change outcomes. And we're rooted in changing outcomes." To that end, Campaign Zero launched 8 Can't Wait last year to push police departments to adopt eight "common-sense" use-of-force policies. Hundreds of police departments have pledged to implement these strategies, which include banning choke holds, requiring officers to give a warning before shooting, and changing reporting systems for use-of-force incidents. (Natural News) Recently released court documents have shown that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) can intercept encrypted messages in the Signal app. Federal authorities possess certain tools to access these encrypted correspondences, the documents said. The messaging app recently gained popularity following moves by Big Tech companies to curb free speech. The documents filed by the Department of Justice were in relation to a recent gun-trafficking case in New York state. It contained screenshots of Signal messages between suspects discussing illegal weapons trading and attempted murder. Metadata accompanying the screenshots indicated that the correspondences were decrypted on their respective mobile phones. Encrypted messages sent from iPhones with the Signal app installed can indeed be intercepted by authorities. However, these messages can only be intercepted when the mobile phone are in partial AFU mode AFU meaning after first unlock. The documents revelation confirms that vulnerabilities of so-called encrypted messaging apps threaten to undermine privacy protections. iPhones on AFU mode are more susceptible to data extraction. This also facilitates access to Signal messages by federal authorities and other unscrupulous parties. But how vulnerable a phone is to hacking will ultimately depend on how up to date its operating system is. GrayKey and Cellebrite are two tools utilized by the FBI to bypass encryption, but it remains unclear which exact program did the federal agency use to access the messages. However, a Russian cyber-forensics expert has surmised that the FBI may have used GrayKey for the operation. ElcomSoft founder Vladimir Katalov said that GrayKey uses some very advanced [approaches] using hardware vulnerabilities. However, an investigative journalist claimed that the vulnerability in the Signal messaging app was not a software bug or flaw. Yasha Levine said the flaw the FBI is exploiting to decrypt the apps messages was a deliberate backdoor for law enforcement. The journalist warned that Signal is not your friend as it was created by a Central Intelligence Agency spinoff. Levine continued that Signal received at least $3 million worth of funding from federal sources during a four-year period despite the silence of the apps developer Open Whisper Systems and its founder Moxie Marlinspike. (Related: Signal is a government op.) Signals vulnerability comes amid the popularity of its competitor Telegram Signal is not the only messaging app gaining popularity amid Big Tech censorship. The Telegram app hailing from Russia is also gaining ground as more and more users eschew WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook. Both these apps have seen a steady increase in their download counts on both Google Play and the Apple App Store. Mobile app analytics firm Sensor Tower said in January 2021 that Signal saw 17.8 million app downloads during the week of Jan. 5 to Jan. 12. This constituted a more than 60 percent increase in its download count, having registered 285,000 downloads the previous week. Meanwhile, Telegram saw 15.7 million downloads during the week of Jan. 5 to Jan. 12 almost twice its 7.6 million download count it registered the week prior. The sudden spike in downloads for both encrypted messaging apps came amid the Jan. 6 Capitol riots two weeks before President Joe Biden officially served as U.S. president. The false flag attacks left five dead, including a Capitol police officer. The New York Times reported that 25 million new users joined Telegram in the aftermath of the Capitol riots. The move was triggered by a massive purge by Twitter and Facebook on users they deemed as part of the unrest by inciting violence or spreading misinformation. Telegram founder Pavel Durov dubbed it as the largest digital migration in history. Durov has previously said that the app he established has never yielded to pressure from officials who wanted [Telegram] to perform political censorship. (Related: CNN, NBC and New York Times want to destroy encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram.) Disinformation analyst Nina Jankowicz of the non-partisan research group Wilson Center remarked: Theres a real push and pull between the people that are using [encrypted messaging apps] for good, and the people who are using them to undermine democracy. We see the same openness and sense of connection that is used by democratic activists opportunistically exploited by extremists. Given Signals vulnerability to law enforcement interference, Telegram appears to be the better free speech platform for now. Visit Surveillance.news to read more about the flaws of Signal and other supposedly private messaging apps. Sources include: BigLeaguePolitics.com FoxBusiness.com Yasha.Substack.com NYTimes.com DANBURY As COVID-19 vaccinations lag among Black and Hispanic populations, a local group plans to debunk myths surrounding the vaccine. DanburyWORKS, a city-wide collaborative that supports residents in need, will host the virtual program at 7 p.m. Thursday. The citys health director, a Danbury physician and a nurse practitioner will discuss why Latinos and communities of color have concerns about the vaccine, according to a flyer. The latest data from the state health department shows 56.1 percent of first doses in Connecticut went to white people, compared to 3.4 percent to Black people, 5.2 percent to Hispanic and Latino people, 2.6 percent to Asians and about 24 percent to those identifying as being of another race or multiple races. Races for 8.8 percent of recipients were unknown. Registration is required online. Subscriber content preview PORTLAND (AP) A jury has ordered Alaska Airlines to pay $3.2 million to the family of a 75-year-old disabled woman who died four months after falling down a Portland International Airport escalator. KGW reports the family of Bernice Kekona, of Spokane filed a wrongful death suit against Alaska Airlines in December 2017, alleging neglect at the airport contributed to her injuries. . . . Power Minister on Wednesday brushed aside apprehensions that or dam projects, which also generate hydro electricity, harm environment, and urged experts to commission an authoritative and scientific study to find out the truth. Speaking at a symposium on sustainable development of dams and river basins, Singh said, "I have not seen science of environment being harmed. I see science of progress in this (water storage). Punjab and Haryana developed and they are where they are today because of Bhakra Nangal dam." He further said, "If you ask any person in Bihar, then his dearest wish is to construct large dams on the river Kosi in Nepal. Wherever we constructed large dams, we have improved the lives of people...generations. This is the message we need to convey." He brought attention toward pushback to or dam projects in the country by NGOs (non-government organisations) or civil societies which claim that these would harm environment. The minister said, "In our country, there is a decade or two of push back (to projects) by NGOs without any authoritative study that says that dams are harmful to environment." Currently, India is developing around 14,000 megawatts of generation capacity. He said, "In water resources, in the past decade also, we have faced headwinds in harnessing our water resources. There was concerted movement against harnessing the water, dams, against any project which sought to harness our water resources." He said the movement still persists. "That push back against dams still persists. That is something which we have to address." The minister urged all to first accept that humans have been harnessing water right from the time our civilisation began. "The earliest dam started on the Nile (in Egypt)...harnessing water was there before Christ (BC). It is not that it is happening now," he said. The minister stated that the proposition is that if some how you stop the natural flow of water, then it harms the environment. He added that the water storage projects do not stop the natural flow of the water and just the excess flow of water is harnessed through storage so that it can be used as and when needed. "Does that harm the environment? Is there any study? I think you need to commission a study and examine whether it actually harms the environment... I think we need to come out with an authoritative study on this," the minister said. The minister also said that in some areas, it is essential to set up water storage projects like Brahmaputra river. If India does not do it, its rival China would do it, he added. He said, "They (China) are planning construction of large dams. So, we have to start construction of large dams. If they construct large dams before us then they can squeeze our (water) supplies in Assam and North East." He also said every developed country has exploited 80-90 per cent of their hydro power generation potential. India needs balancing power for renewable energy, and the balancing power has to come from pumped hydro storage projects, he added. Currently, thermal power provides base load or balancing power because renewable energy like solar and wind energy does not generate power round the clock. Thus, there is a need for constant supply of power to the grid. The minister also said, "I believe that harnessing water resources and harnessing water resources are central to our lives and livelihoods.....since inception of civilisations." He said life flourishes beside the rivers valleys, as it was evident from any old civilisation like Indus Valley, and life started on earth because of water. The essential requirements for life are water and energy, he 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.) Childrens rights activist blasts judges decision allowing gay throuple to be named as legal parents of 2 kids Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A Children's rights activist decried a California judge's ruling allowing three men to be listed as the legal parents of two children born to surrogate mothers using donor eggs as being the consequence of laws that sacrifice the wellbeing of children to benefit the desires of adults. The homosexual male throuple includes Ian Jenkins, Alan Mayfield and Jeremy Allen Hodges. The three-way relationship happened after Jenkins and Mayfield, who met nine years ago, invited Hodges to join the couple eight years ago. The two children who belong to the trio of men are half-siblings. Jenkins wrote a memoir about the throuple's unorthodox relationship in the book, Three Dads and a Baby. Last week, the three men, who are now the legal parents of two children a 3-year-old and a 14-month old appeared on "The Morning Show" in Australia to speak about this unusual arrangement and how they received a favorable result in court. "We weren't sure that we could have all three of us on the birth certificate so it became a court process," Mayfield said during the interview. "It was a pretty interesting, tense courtroom scene where at first it seemed we were not going to be granted that and we asked to speak in court and plead our viewpoint and the judge ultimately changed her mind and granted us legal parentage for our child before she was born." For all three men to be placed on the birth records serves legal purposes. Hodges added: If our child, God forbid, was to end up in the hospital, one of the parents might not be able to go visit them. It was really important to be recognized as the family that we are, and thankfully we live in California, which is a state that, after some teeth pulling and fighting, actually did then allow us to do that, so that was amazing." Katy Faust, founder of children's rights organization Them Before Us, and the author of a recent book of the same name, noted in a Monday interview with The Christian Post that much of the media is framing their coverage of these adult men as being victims of a system that did not make it effortless to acquire someone else's children. "Of course the real victims are the two motherless children who were intentionally separated from the woman who provided half of their genetic identity, the woman to whom they bonded during their first 9 1/2 months of life, and who will be starved of the daily maternal love that all children crave," Faust said. But people should not be surprised by the newest manifestation of "modern family," she asserted, as it was "the inevitable result of centering all legal and cultural conversations about family around the desires of adults. "That slippery slope of 'if the adults are happy the children will be happy' which began with no-fault divorce, normalized single mothers by choice, insisted gender is irrelevant to parenting during the gay marriage debate, is now championing male throuples raising motherless children," she added. "Until we recognize that children have a natural and fundamental right to be known and loved by both their mother and father, you can expect more wild variations of the modern family, as children become the acceptable sacrifice on the pyre of adult desires." We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form * Username This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. Choose wisely! MBABANE The Swaziland Music Association (SWAMA) has urged local tech startups and emaSwati to tap into the soon to be launched Spotify platform in the country. This is because giant music streaming platform Spotify will soon be available in the country as the Swedish company is expanding its reach across the globe. The free and premium plans will be available across all the markets. The streaming service will also offer individual, family, duo and student plan options in select-markets, which Spotify doesnt specify. According to the Spotify website, in each of these new markets, Spotify will offer its full global catalogue. The company added that it will continuously work with local rights holders and partners to expand its catalogue to include more local offerings globally. streaming Also, full podcast catalogues of the global streaming giant will be launched in a majority of these markets. For the other markets, Spotify will work closely with local partners to introduce more podcasts from its catalogue, as well as Spotifys proprietary creator platform, Anchor. SWAMA Public Relations Officer DJ Tizalami said the organisation welcomed all digital platforms from outside and within Eswatini that would make the transition to the digital dispensation a reality, particularly to the arts sector, given how informal it has been over the years. Platforms like Spotify, among many others will certainly promote music and arts from Eswatini to a global audience resulting in the sector tapping into the vast international markets, and that gives our artists better leverage as we are generally a small market on our own, he said. He mentioned that while the organisation welcomed this great move, SWAMA implored local tech startups and emaSwati to also establish their own digital stores that will be made available to the world markets and use same to export local arts as well as to aggregate arts from all over the world and sell it to the world markets. It is imperative, therefore, that we embrace advanced platforms, while also building home grown ones that solve our immediate problems and provide realistic, profitable and sustainable solutions, he asserted. Other things which will be offered by the company will include a personalised experience to users through its home screen and further browse and search features. Once the streaming service is launched in the country, Spotify will be made available on mobile and desktop web players while the company works with local partners to introduce the service on more platforms including TV, speakers, wearables and cars in the coming months. Having more listeners on our platform creates more opportunities for artists and podcasters to make a living the their work. And more creators, the more audio content for our users to discover, said Alex Norstrom, Spotify Chief Premium Business Officer. This creates an essential flywheel between creators and listeners that is the foundation of our business and in the end; it is what will propel the audio industry forward, he said. markets The expansion includes markets across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean and when combined, these markets include more than one billion people. With these launches, it essentially means that local musicians songs and content creators stories which have for the longest time remained locally will now have access to a global audience of fans across nearly 180 markets. And as part of its ongoing commitment to building a truly borderless audio ecosystem connecting creators, listeners and content; this move represents the companys broadest market expansion to date. According to the company, it will be working closely with local creators and partners in each market to deliver a tailored experience that meets their unique needs, with scaled language translations and specialised payment formats. In addition, Spotifys expansion will likely accelerate the discovery of more genres like afrobeats, amapiano, k-pop and reggaeton that have earned a place in the global music scene. The existing rich music cultures in each of these markets will now be able to reach Spotifys global audience. All this untapped music energy and access to our innovative creator tools will help propel artists to new heights and empower them to turn their passion into a profession, reads an excerpt in the companys statement. The streaming platform currently has more than 340 million active users and 150 million subscribers using its ad-free premium product across 93 markets. This expansion will take the streaming giant to 178 markets globally. The new markets in Africa will include Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Chad, Comoros, Cote dIvoire, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe and lastly, Eswatini. Meanwhile, local content creators have expressed their excitement towards the news of the streaming platform. Phindokuhle Sithole, a local content creator who has a podcast called Jobe Flavoured which has over 870 subscribers on YouTube, said the advantage of Spotify coming to the kingdom was that their podcast content would be readily and evenly available to someone with a mobile device as long as they have data. asserted This means that our content will be more accessible to locals and even in other countries where they were not reachable before, he asserted. Another podcaster and deep house music producer, Phiwokuhle Gama aka Wolf De Dj said he was happy with the developments and said he believed more people would get to listen to his music as he also doubles as a music producer. This essentially means that our content will get much more exposure and more people will be aware of our content and music reaction wise. Im also excited because this means my music will get to be accessed in other countries as well, he said. Also echoing the aforementioned statements, was DJ Davas, who said this would definitely increase the reach for his music. He mentioned that prior to this since 2011, he had been all along using a digital distributor called Wax Tune which distributed his music to over 30 platforms. He went on to add that this was a definite opportunity for local musicians and content producers to promote their work as we were now living in a digitally driven era. It is a true testament to Greenspan Adjusters that the number of employees who have dedicated 25 years or more of their lives to this firm is in the double digits. As the Greenspan Co./Adjusters International celebrates 75 years of excellence in public adjusting, it honors those who have dedicated two and a half decades or more to the firm. Founded in 1946, over the years Greenspan Adjusters has helped tens of thousands of clients in California, Arizona and Nevada recover from devastating property losses by providing expert guidance on insurance claims. As a rule, insurance companies always aim to minimize payouts because payouts cut into profits. This can put them at odds with the customers they insure when disaster strikes. With intricate knowledge of the myriad regulations, standards and laws that govern the claims process, Greenspan Adjusters role is to ensure that insurance companies pay their clients the absolute maximum they are due under their policy contract, while simultaneously relieving the burden of dealing with an insurance company allowing the homeowner to care for his/her family and the business owner to focus on his/her employees and customers. In the Northern California, Northern Nevada and Arizona region, seven Greenspan Co. employees have served for over 25 years. Gordon Scott, President/CEO began working for Greenspan Adjusters in 1974, and has now been with the company for almost 50 years. Paul Migdal, Executive Vice President & In-House Counsel, joined The Greenspan Co./Adjusters International in 1995, and Steve Severaid, Senior Vice President & Treasurer has been with Greenspan Adjusters since 1992. Others being honored include Forensic Accountant & Board member Chris Glenister, CPA; Kenneth Crown, Senior Construction Cost Estimator; Jim Warren, Executive Vice President; and Mark Fratkin, who manages sales/marketing and business development. Covering Southern California and Southern Nevada, being honored for their decades of dedication are Robb Greenspan, Senior Partner, Sidney Greenspans son; Professional Public Insurance Adjuster Matt Goldstein; Inventory Specialist Orlando Villavicencio; and Professional Public Insurance Adjuster Susy Kim. Others who have passed the 25-year mark include Consultant Executives Bill Rake (former President/CEO), and retired principals Arnie Abramson and Richard Tanitsky, all of whom still work with Greenspan Adjusters even post-retirement. It is a true testament to Greenspan Adjusters that the number of employees who have dedicated 25 years or more of their lives to this firm is in the double digits, said Steve Severaid. Each one of these individuals is extraordinary, and Greenspan is the leading public adjusting firm on the West Coast today because of their commitment and hard work over the decades. About The Greenspan Co./Adjusters International Founded in 1946, The Greenspan Co./Adjusters International is the leading public adjusting firm on the West Coast, serving both commercial properties and homeowners. Greenspan Adjusters has the expertise and track record necessary to prepare, present and negotiate insurance claims to ensure you receive what you are entitled to. And as insurance professionals who represent the interests of our clients not the insurance company Greenspans public adjusters can save you time and lower your stress as we negotiate the settlement you deserve. http://www.greenspanai.com. Bodies dealing with human rights should realise, terror cant be justified: Jaishankar India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Feb 24: Describing terrorism as one of the gravest threats to humankind, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that the bodies dealing with human rights should realise that terrorism can never be justified, nor its perpetrators ever equated with its victims. Speaking at the high-level segment of 46th session of Human Rights Council, Jaishankar said terrorism is a crime against humanity and violates the most fundamental human right namely the right to life. "Terrorism continues to be one of the gravest threats to humankind," he said in a virtual address. "As a long-standing victim, India has been at forefront of global action against terrorism. It''s possible only when there''s a clear realisation, including in bodies dealing with human rights, that terrorism can never be justified nor its perpetrators ever equated with its victims," he said. He said India presented last month at the UN an eight-point action plan to deal with the scourge of terrorism. "We will continue to work together with members of the UNSC and other states to ensure implementation of our action plan," he added. He said that the human rights agenda continues to face severe challenges, most of all from terrorism. The perennial concerns remain equally strong, be it global inequities or armed conflicts, he said. "The ongoing pandemic has complicated the situation in many geographies. There is a need for us to come together to overcome these challenges. At the same time, multilateral institutions and mechanisms need to be reformed to deal with these challenges effectively," he added. He said that the violation of and gaps in implementation of human rights should be addressed in a fair and just manner with objectivity, non-selectivity, transparency and with due respect to the principles of non-interference in internal affairs and national sovereignty. Jaishankar said India''s approach to the UNHRC is guided by spirit of engagement, dialogue and consultation. "Equal emphasis should be placed on promotion and protection of human rights. They''re best pursued via dialogue, consultation and cooperation amongst states and technical assistance and capacity building," the minister said. "Our Constitution has enshrined basic human rights as fundamental rights, guaranteeing civil and political rights, stipulating provisions for progressive realisation of economic, social and cultural rights," he added. He said India ensured that basic needs were very effectively addressed even during the COVID-19 lockdown. "As we address the health front at home, we responded to the world in equal measure. We provided essential medicines and equipment to more than 150 countries to assist them in this fight," he said. "In the same spirit, India has pledged to use its vaccine manufacturing capacity to make vaccines accessible and affordable to all. From Bangladesh to Brazil, and from Morocco to Fiji, the pharmacy of the world is today supplying millions of vaccine doses to more than 70 countries," he added. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 8:26 [IST] Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty (AGCS) has named Katie Fioretti as regional head of portfolio steering for financial lines in North America, effective immediately. She assumes the role from Alessandro Carriglio, now head of claims reporting and analytics. Fioretti reports to Joe Caruso, regional head of financial lines, North America. Based in New York, Fioretti is an underwriter with nearly 20 years of experience in management liability. In her new role, she leads a team focused on portfolio management pertaining to regional product offerings. Specifically, this team will play a role in strategy and risk management across the commercial, financial institutions, professional indemnity and cyber lines of business and will be critical in driving results within AGCS as well as externally in relation to customers and trading partners. Having joined Allianz in 2015, Fioretti has held increasingly senior roles within the financial lines team in North America, including national practice leader/deputy regional head of commercial directors and officers, and most recently, regional head of commercial management liability. AGCS is a global corporate insurance carrier and a business unit of Allianz Group. It provides risk consultancy, property/casualty insurance solutions and alternative risk transfer for a spectrum of commercial, corporate and specialty risks across 10 dedicated lines of business. Source: Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty Topics New York Allianz A Brazilian woman who swallowed 88 pellets of cocaine before travelling to Ireland because she was desperate for money has been jailed for two years. Raynessa De Sousa (27) pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to having the drugs, worth an estimated 55,447, for sale or supply at Dublin Airport on September 20, 2020. Garda Patrick Duffy told Katherine McGillicuddy BL, prosecuting, that De Sousa had travelled from Sao Paulo to Lisbon to Dublin, along with two other men. Authorities in Portugal had contacted officers in Dublin and alerted them to the trio as it was suspected that they were transporting drugs. De Sousa had no visa and was refused entry to the State. She was taken to Kevin Street Garda Station during which she pointed to her stomach and said the word cocaine. She was taken to Beaumont Hospital where she was x-rayed and ultimately passed 88 pellets of cocaine over a few days. Gda Duffy agreed with Ms McGillicuddy that the drugs were analysed and confirmed to be 792 grammes of cocaine with an estimated street value of 55,447. De Sousa explained, with the assistance of an interpreter, that she had been promised 1,200 to bring the drugs into the country by swallowing the pellets. She said when it came to the point of actually ingesting the pellets, she changed her mind but she was threatened by others and forced to swallow them. She told gardai that she was a mother of a 12-year-old son and her own mother was caring for him. De Sousa described it as the worst mistake of my life. Gda Duffy agreed with Anne-Marie Lawlor SC, defending, that in his experience only the most desperate would traffic drugs in this way due to the high risk to their own health. He accepted De Sousa had no previous convictions and had never come to the attention of the authorities in Brazil. Ms Lawlor said her client had come to Ireland in a desperate state and she has struggled with her mental health for most of her life. She found herself unable to care for her son and was susceptible to earning money in the way she did because of her financial situation. She was prevailed upon to engage in this with the promise of money. She didnt want to do this when it came to the point she was being asked to ingest the drugs but there was no return from the enterprise at that point, Ms Lawlor submitted. Counsel said that her clients family and girlfriend are under real and proper bona fide threats in Brazil. Judge Martin Nolan said De Sousa was desperate for money and agreed to transport the drugs. He said she wanted to back out at the last minute but couldnt because of threats made to her. The court can accept that a person would want to be very desperate to transport drugs in this way, Judge Nolan said before he jailed De Sousa for two years, commenting that it was unlikely that she will re-offend. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Bethlehem Township police charged a 35-year-old resident with homicide in the fatal shooting of his neighbor Tuesday afternoon, according to court records. Joshua Anthony Leone, of the 3100 block of Clifton Avenue, is accused of fatally shooting Kenneth Pickell shortly after 2:30 p.m. in Leones driveway, authorities said. Northampton County Coroner Zachary Lysek pronounced the victim dead at the scene and ruled the death a homicide. County District Attorney Terry Houck told reporters earlier no one was else was sought in the investigation. Pickell was 31, Houck said Tuesday night. According to the affidavit of probable cause for charging Leone, police dispatched for a male victim shot with a shotgun at Leones home discovered the victim lying in a pool of blood in the driveway. A woman beside the body told police Josh had shot her husband, whom she identified as Pickell, police Investigator Edward Fox III wrote in the court records. The woman told police she and Pickell were going out for a walk around the residential neighborhood just west of Santee Road, and exited the house to find Leone breaking up furniture in front of his home, police said. The woman looked up from tending to her dog to see Pickell and Leone arguing in Leones driveway, according to court records. She reportedly told police she could see things were getting out of hand and that she walked over to the driveway of the home to plead with her husband to walk away, police wrote. Leone by that point was in the garage of his home, and the woman could hear him inviting Pickell inside, court records say. She also witnessed that Joshua Leone was now holding a shotgun and a revolver in his hands and that Pickell began to turn around and that is when she saw Joshua Leone shoot her husband in the back, police said. Pickell fell to the ground and began to bleed, having suffered a significant gunshot wound to the left upper back area, the police investigator wrote in court papers. Leone was arraigned Tuesday night before District Judge Jacqueline Taschner on a single count of criminal homicide, and was sent to Northampton County Prison without the possibility of bail, police said. A preliminary hearing will be scheduled to determine if there is sufficient evidence to send the case toward trial in Northampton County Court. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to lehighvalleylive.com. Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. The Hamilton County Health Department has added a total of 4,360 new first dose Pfizer appointment opportunities to the schedule. Feb. 26 & March 5 at Tennessee Riverpark March 2, 5 & 6 at CARTA Bus Barn People in the eligible phases (1a1, 1a2, 1b and adults 65+) are encouraged to visithttps://vaccine.hamiltontn. gov/ and make their appointment online. Those who do not have access to the internet can call the appointment call center for assistance: First dose appointments: 423-209-5398 Second dose appointments: 423-209-5399 A Spanish vaccine webpage and Spanish appointment call center are available for residents who speak Spanish. Spanish appointment line: 423-209-5384 Spanish vaccine webpage: http://health.hamiltontn.org/ en-us/allservices/coronavirus( covid-19)/vaccine/ vacunacioncontracovid19.aspx All three call center lines are open Monday-Friday from 8AM-4PM. Due to high call volume, callers may experience a busy signal and need to hang up and call back. General COVID-19 questions may be directed to the Health Departments hotline at 423-209-8383. Hours are Monday-Friday from 8AM-4PM and Saturday 10AM-3PM. Bilingual representatives are available. Current Phases/Eligibility The COVID-19 vaccine is currently available to Phases 1a1, 1a2, 1B and individuals 65+ according to the Tennessee Department of Healths Vaccination Plan. Age Group Bracket : 65 years or older, must be a Hamilton County resident No specific medical conditions are required Phase 1B includes: Childcare, pre-school, and kindergarten through twelfth grade teachers School staff School bus drivers Other first responders (including dispatch, administrative personnel and other emergency communications personnel not included in Phase 1a1) Airfield operations personnel employed by primary commercial and cargo service airports Phase 1a2 includes: Other Health Care Workers with Direct Patient Exposure Primary care providers and staff Outpatient specialty providers and staff working with acute patients Pharmacists and staff Patient transport Outpatient therapists Urgent visit center providers and staff Environmental services Oral health providers Behavioral health providers Outpatient laboratory staff working with COVID-19 specimens Funeral/mortuary workers with direct decedent contact Phase 1a1 includes: Hospital/Free-Standing Emergency Department Staff with Direct Patient Exposure and/or Exposure to Potentially-Infectious Materials Home health care staff COVID-19 mass testing site staff Student health providers Staff & Residents of Long Term Care Facilities (Skilled Nursing Facilities, Assisted Living Centers, Homes for the Aged, DIDD Residential Centers, Group Homes) First Responders with Direct Public Exposure including Jailers Individuals >18yrs who cannot live independently due to serious chronic medical condition or intellectual or developmental disabilities Important Information to Know Prior to Appointment Do not arrive more than 15 minutes prior to your scheduled appointment. Wear appropriate clothing to get a shot in upper arm Bring proof of Hamilton County residency (if applicable) Bring proof of Hamilton County employment (if applicable) Bring proof of age (if applicable) Bring COVID-19 Vaccine Encounter form (if possible; form available for download on registration page) Be prepared to wait 20 minutes after shot Be prepared for the entire process to take an hour or more Vaccination Record Card When patients receive their first dose with the Health Department, they will receive a Vaccination Record Card with the following important information. The vaccine manufacturer (either Moderna or Pfizer) The date the first dose of vaccine was given The date the second vaccine dose is due It is important to keep the Vaccination Record Card because when making the appointment for the second dose of vaccine, it helps ensure the correct product is received and in the correct timeframe. The current recommendation is that second dose vaccinations be received either on or after the recommended date on the Vaccination Record Card, not before. This card is a reminder of the date, so you must make a second dose appointment when appointment slots become available. Additional Resources Stay up-to-date on new vaccine appointment information. Follow the health department via their email newsletter and social media accounts, available at this link:http://health.hamiltontn.org/ AllServices/Coronavirus(COVID- 19)/ConnectWithUs.aspx . Transportation is available to the vaccination site. Call 423-209-8383 to schedule a ride. Clinical officers have obeyed a court order requiring them to resume work immediately following a 70-day strike. Justice Maureen Onyango of the Labour Court also ordered that all disciplinary measures against the clinical officers be stopped and that employers pay salaries for all workers. Kenya Union of Clinical Officers (KUCO) Chairman Peterson Wachira on Tuesday directed all members to report back to work. He, however, noted that their grievances remain unresolved. We will comply with the court orderwe direct our members to report to their work stationsEmployers have not addressed our grievances even as we resume duty. We urge employers to sign and implement the Return To Work Formula (RTWF) said the KUCO boss. We shall not voluntarily expose ourselves even as we report back to dutyWe left work because the working environment was not safe. As we go back we know we are going to suffer because nothing has changed. We urge members not to work in an environment where you know the environment is not safe, Wachira added. We were the ones who were spreading Covid-19 because of lack of proper personal protective equipment. Since we went on strike no healthcare worker has lost their lives due to Covid. The KUCO boss also said there has been a big crisis in the health sector because of lack of a health service commission. A $250,000 reward is being offered to help solve the case of a NSW mans body found in a sewage tank on Brisbanes bayside more than a year after the mans father made an emotional plea to the public. Detectives believe several people were involved in 45-year-old Jason Guises death. He was last seen on April 21, 2019, after he rode past the Waterloo Bay Hotel on Berrima Street, Wynnum about 7.20pm. His body was found in a sewage tank weeks later on May 8. A dancer from Canada who has gone viral told Lorraine practicing Bhangra has kept him positive. Gurdeep Pandher, from the Yukon, Canada, has gone viral after spreading joy through Bhangra, a traditional dance from India. Speaking to Lorraine this morning, the dancer, who has shares several videos of himself dancing in Canadian fields and even on snowy days, said the dance was responsible for his positive mental attitude. He said Bhangra helps him forget about his troubles and live in the present, and his joyful videos have caught the attentions of celebrities like Canadian-born actor Ryan Reynolds. Viewers said Gurdeep put a smile on their faces thanks to his positivity. Gurdeep Pandher, from the Yukon, Canada, has gone viral after spreading joy through Bhangra, a traditional dance from India. He told Lorraine Kelly how the dance kept him positive (dancing to the sound of a bagpipe in one of his videos) The dancer, speaking via video link from Canada, old Lorraine he started sharing video of his dancing to friends, but soon noticed other people were also interested. 'I noticed people nationally and around the world started watching them. I could see these notifications coming on my computer or phone. It started so naturally and so organically,' Gurdeep told Lorraine. Bhangra, which originates from Punjab, India, sees dancers execute kicks, jumps and leaps to the sound of a dhol, a double-headed drum. While his first videos only showed Gurdeep practicing the moves alone, since he's gone viral, other people have joined for group videos, and one clip even shows the dancer doing Bhangra to the sound of a bagpipe. Viewers loved Gurdeep's dancing and said the Yukon resident put a smile on their faces this morning Come rain or shine or even heavy snow, Gurdeep has recorded videos of himself dancing Bhangra all around the Yukon. 'I made a video with the Canadian Armed Forces, it was a collaboration together for happiness, for joy, for inclusion and diversity and people loved that video,' Gurdeep added. 'Happiness, joyfulness is very important,' he said. 'Bhangra is a dance of joy, or happiness, for people to express their happiness and their gratitude as well,' he added. He said Bhangra was a dance of positivity designed to make people feel that everything is alright. Gurdeep films himself dancing all around the Yukon, regardless of the weather. He felt in love with the landscape, pictured, and the wildlife of the Yukon after moving to Canada in 2011 Lorraine said Gurdeep was one of the most contened people she'd ever met and that he looked like he was living his best life Video courtesy: Gurdeep Pandher of Yukon Lorraine, who thoroughly enjoyed Gurdeep's videos, told him he looked like the most 'contented' perso she'd ever met. 'Generally you just have go that air about you that you've cracked it, that you got your best life,' she told him. The modest dancer said his good attitude was due to his dancing. 'I feel that Bhangra is behind that,' he said. 'I do have my own reflection, struggles of life like everybody, but when I'm doing Bhangra, I forget everything, I'm in the present, enjoying life and reflecting positivity and I love it,' he added. Gurdeep came to live in Canada in 2011 and did several road trips around it to learn about his new country. He said he travelled North, South, East and West of Canada to discover all its different region, which brought him to Yukon. He said he fell in love with the people, the open landscape and the wildlife of Yukon and decided to stay there. He's now been in the Yukon for ten years and still loves it. 'Lots of people dance to be joyful and happy, it's all about happiness,' he said. People said Gurdeep was 'absolutely brilliant' and had brightened their morning by appearing on Lorraine The positive dancer charmed ITV viewers, who said he put a smile on their faces. 'This wonderful man has certainly put a smile on my face. Keep going Gurdeep,' one said. 'What an awesome guy. That definitely cheered me up this morning,' said another. 'You've hit the big time. The dancing brings a smile to your face, what a wonderful man,' one wrote. 'Just watched you live on the Lorraine show Gurdeep, if only you had a regular slot every morning on TV! It made me want to dance & I could not stop smiling Thank you for transmitting your positivity and joy to us in the UK,' said another. Egypts ministries of international cooperation, local development, agriculture and land reclamation, and social solidarity discussed on Tuesday in a meeting with the Menghestab Haile, the Country Director and Representative of World Food Programme (WFP) in Egypt, the Decent Life initiative and future action plans for expanding WFP projects that aim to achieve agricultural and rural development in the country. The meeting comes on the heel of the success of the first phase implemented in 63 villages across five governorates in Upper Egypt. Minister of International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat reviewed during the meeting the successful partnership with the WFP in the countrys strategy from 2018 to 2023, which is based on enhancing food security, developing agricultural and rural communities, and supporting the most vulnerable groups in rural communities, such as girls, women and rural entrepreneurs, and small farmers. The second phase of the projects implemented through the WFP, in collaboration with the government of Egypt, complements the Decent Life presidential initiative, said Al-Mashat. This initiative aims to develop and reform the countrys most vulnerable villages by supporting investment in human capital through enhancing livelihoods, diversifying sources of income via livestock and poultry production projects, loans, handicrafts, improving the efficiency of using water resources, supporting the ability of farmers to adapt to climate change, achieving economic and social empowerment of women and girls, and encouraging creativity and innovation through collaborative digital knowledge platforms. She added that these projects help in achieving a wide range of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG 1: No Poverty, SDG 2: Zero Hunger, SDG 4: Quality Education, SDG 5: Gender Equality, SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation, SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, and SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities. She also noted that a specialised committee will be formed to pinpoint the appropriate villages and centres for the development project expansion, adding that the committee will include representatives from the relevant ministries and the WFP to discuss the precise details of the proposed plan and finalise its implementation framework. Minister of Local Development Mahmoud Shaarawi stressed during the meeting the importance of the projects in coordination with the WFP to support rural communities in Upper Egypt within the framework of the National Program for the Development of Rural Areas, which falls under the Decent Life presidential initiative. This includes ensuring the availability of important services to citizens, particularly in infrastructure and sanitation, drinking water, and job opportunities for residents, especially for youth and women. This is happening alongside other development projects implemented by other ministries: canal lining, and modernising irrigation systems and agricultural processes, said Shaarawi. Nevine El-Qabbaj, the minister of social solidarity, also applauded the strong partnership between the WFP and Egypt in several projects under the social protection framework, adding that the 1,000 days project is an essential collaboration between the ministry and the WFP, which focuses on supporting children, community schools, micro-enterprise training, the provision of loans for mothers of school children to develop their own projects, and employment support for the informal sector during the COVID-19 pandemic. El-Qabbaj explained that the Forsa program aims, as well, to widen agricultural, animal care, and crafts development to cover many villages across Upper Egypt, stressing that this is an opportunity for economic progress and empowerment, especially for women and youth, representing 32 million citizens according to the Ministry of Social Solidaritys database; adding that this is a chance to endorse the Decent Life initiative. Minister of Agriculture and Land Reclamation El-Sayed El-Quseir said that the ministry had successful experiences with the WFP in developing agricultural and rural communities, asserting the need to identify the villages that will most benefit from the project and a list of their requirements so that an appropriate program suited for the residents can be put into action to achieve the desired results. El-Quseir also stressed the need for projects to include digital agricultural development, as well as value chain development, and cooperative marketing of agricultural products, to ensure the sustainability of achievements in the selected villages. Meanwhile, Haile praised the governments coordination through the Ministry of International Cooperation in implementing the programs framework. He noted that the WFPs national agenda has been laid out in collaboration with the concerned ministries in Egypt, explaining the good outcome and smooth workflow of previous collaborative projects. The villages development expansion project that falls under the WFPs action plan is expected to support rural communities, achieve economic and social empowerment of women, enhance livelihoods, and improve water management in Egypt, according to Haile. Short link: Gonda : , Feb 24 (IANS) In yet another shocking crime in Uttar Pradesh, a high school girl student in Mankapur Kotwali area of Gonda district was gang-raped and then stabbed by four men. The girl was returning home from school on Tuesday evening when she was waylaid by four accused and dragged to a sugarcane field. The four men, one of whom belongs to her village, raped her by turns and then stabbed her on the hand, warning her not to report the incident. The girl returned to her home and informed her parents after which she lodged a complaint with the police. The police spokesman at Mankapur police station said that a case had been registered against the four accused for rape and under provisions of the POCSO Act. The girl has been sent for medical examination. The police said that there was a dispute between the families of the accused and the victim. No arrests have been made yet. New Delhi, Feb 24 : With just three days left for the bypolls to five municipal wards of Delhi Municipal Corporation (MCD) scheduled on February 28, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) supremo and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal hit the campaign trail on Wednesday to seek support for AAP candidates. Kejriwal on Wednesday participated in a roadshow in Shalimar Bhagh (under North MCD). During the roadshow, he slammed the BJP, which runs the MCD, for the financial crunch faced by the civic authorities in the past 15 years and asked people to vote for the AAP candidates in the bypolls. "We have elections on Sunday, and you all must go and vote for AAP. We have worked to improve Delhi in the last six years in several sectors like in schools, hospitals, availability of electricity and water etc. But the BJP has put the MCD in shambles. It is your responsibility to make AAP victorious in the coming bypolls in Delhi," Kejriwal said. In fact, the AAP had strategically started its preparations for the municipal bypolls from the beginning of 2021 by organising 'mohalla' meetings across the municipal wards in the city. Within a period of two weeks, the party had organised around 2,500 meetings in all the municipal wards in Delhi even before the dates for the bypolls were announced. Out of these five poll-bound municipal wards, four have been vacant since last year after the councillors had been elected to the Delhi Assembly. AAP had won in all the four municipal wards -- Rohini C, Trilokpuri, Kalyanpuri and Chauhan Bangar. The Shalimar Bagh ward has been vacant since the death of Renu Jaju, who had won the seat on a BJP ticket. The five AAP candidates for the bypolls are -- Bunty Gautam from Kalyanpuri, Vijay Kumar from Trilokpuri (both under East Delhi Municipal Corporation), Mohammad Isharaq Khan from Chauhan Bangar, Ram Chandra from Rohini C and Sunita Mishra from Shalimar Bagh (under North MCD). The results of the MCD bypolls are scheduled to be announced on March 3. PARIS (AP) The Paris prosecutors office said on Tuesday that French actor Gerard Depardieu was charged last December with rape and sexual assault after authorities revived a 2018 investigation that was initially dropped. The office told the Associated Press that the French actor was not detained when he was handed the preliminary charges on Dec. 16. The Paris prosecutors office addressed the charges after the case was leaked to French media. French media reports said the charges relate to allegations made by an actress in her 20s that date back to 2018. An initial inquiry against the star was dropped in 2019 because of lack of evidence, but was later revived. French newspaper Le Parisien and BFM TV said the actress and dancer alleged that Depardieu assaulted her on Aug. 7 and Aug. 13, 2018 at his home in Paris. The two met when Depardieu led a master class at her school, BFM TV reported. The actress, who has not been named, first filed a complaint with details of alleged rape and assault in August 2018 in the southern French city of Aix-en-Provence. The probe was take over by Paris investigators, but was soon dropped. Depardieus lawyer Herve Temime was not immediately available for comment, but he has previously said that the actor absolutely denies any rape, any sexual assault, any crime. Depardieu is among Frances most well-known and controversial stars. He has appeared in 200 films over six decades and is among a few French actors who have made a name for themselves in Hollywood. He won a Golden Globe for his performance in Green Card, a 1990 English-language romantic comedy co-starring Andie MacDowell. His first big hit in France was Les Valseuses, (Going Places), Bertrand Bliers classic farce about two wandering thugs. Before crossing the Atlantic to star in Green Card, Depardieu played an array of roles ranging from Jean Valjean, the thief-turned-saint in Les Miserables, to Christopher Columbus. In 2014, he played the leading role in Welcome to New York, the film inspired by the life of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former director of the International Monetary Fund who was accused in 2011 of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. ADVERTISEMENT The police in Lagos have arrested a 53-year-old man for allegedly stabbing his neighbour to death. The incident happened on Monday at Mafoluku, Oshodi, the police said. Muyiwa Adejobi, the spokesperson of Lagos police, said the suspect, Sunday Amaefula, fatally stabbed Chibuike Nwanne. Mr Adejobi, a Chief Suprintendent of Police, said the suspect was arrested by police officers attached to Makinde station. Investigation reveals that the deceased had an altercation with the suspects brother, one Ifeanyi Emmanuel, m, his neighbour, before the suspect stabbed the deceased to death with a bottle in their house. The deceased, who got married last year, is survived by his pregnant wife, the police said, adding that investigation is ongoing. The police also said two suspected armed robbers were arrested by the police on Monday at about 5.30 p.m., around Alakara area of Lagos State. The Divisional Police Officer of Alakara and his men on patrol intercepted two men on Okada. During the search, two brand new Beretta pistols with three magazines and twenty two live ammunition were recovered from them, the police said. Mr Adejobi said the suspects, Mojeed and Kudaisi Ajetumobi could not give satisfactory explanation on their means of livelihood, and were arrested by the police. Meanwhile, the Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Hakeem Odumosu, directed that the suspects and exhibits be transferred to State Criminal Investigation Department (SCID) for proper investigation. She loves flashing the flesh online. And Kylie Jenner fired up her Instagram page this Tuesday to post a sizzling album of herself flaunting her washboard abs in a revealing look. She went bra-less under an almost translucently thin peekaboo crop top and slipped into a high-waisted matching skirt. Sizzler: Kylie Jenner fired up her Instagram page this Tuesday to post a sizzling album of herself flaunting her washboard abs in a revealing look The cosmetics tycoon wore a collar-style necklace and accentuated her screen siren features with makeup for the photo-shoot which she captioned: 'less is more.' She was about to shoot a segment of her web series Cooking With Kylie which she first launched more than four years ago. Kylie was spotted playing up her sensational figure while stepping out in Los Angeles on Monday of this week. The 23-year-old lip kit mogul emphasized her hourglass frame in a tightly fitted bright orange cocktail dress during a trip to the gas station. What a look: She went bra-less under an almost translucently thin peekaboo crop top and slipped into a high-waisted matching skirt Glamour queen: The cosmetics tycoon wore a collar-style necklace and accentuated her screen siren features with makeup for the photo-shoot which she captioned: 'less is more' Her outing marked Kylie's first public sighting since her half-sister Kim Kardashian filed for divorce from Kanye West last Friday. Kylie balanced on a sky-high pair of nude stilettos while emerging from her cherry red Lamborghini to fill up her tank before setting off. Kim and Kanye, who married in Florence in 2014 and have four children, had been the subject of breakup rumors for over a month. Family matters: Kylie shares her daughter Stormi - who turned three at the beginning of this month - with her rapper ex-boyfriend Travis Scott. Making it work: Although she and Travis broke up in 2019 they have remained friendly co-parents and have even celebrated holidays together with their daughter Last month Kylie enjoyed a vacation to Turks And Caicos in the Caribbean with all of her sisters as well as her daughter Stormi. Kylie shares Stormi - who turned three just after returning from holiday - with her rapper ex-boyfriend Travis Scott. Although she and Travis broke up in 2019 they have remained friendly co-parents and have even celebrated holidays together with their daughter. New Delhi, Feb 24 : The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has reduced the syllabus for the social sciences exam by providing relief to the students of class 10 all over the country. CBSE has taken the decision of reducing the syllabus in view of providing leeway to students in the class 10 board examination. The CBSE would conduct the social sciences paper for class 10 on May 27. A total of five units from the social sciences theory topics have been removed for the students. The revised syllabus would be displayed on CBSE's official website. According to the Union Education Ministry, due to the coronavirus pandemic the working days of schools have been reduced significantly this year. Most of the students have been provided education through the online medium. In such a situation, now the students, parents and teachers themselves are also in favour of reducing the curriculum for the students. Earlier, Union Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank said, "In view of the extraordinary situation arising across the country due to Covid-19, CBSE has been advised to reschedule and reduce its syllabus." CBSE has reduced the syllabus by 30 per cent in various subjects after the Union Education Minister directed that the syllabus must be reduced. A specific syllabus would no longer be part of the board examinations and prescribed subjects scheduled for internal evaluation. School principals and teachers would also ensure that students are explained about the reduced subject contents to combine different topics. According to the Union Education Ministry, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, concrete suggestions were invited from academicians from all over the country on the subject of syllabus reductions. More than 150 academicians across the country have sent their suggestions on this subject. We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form GOVERNMENT received a total of $7.37 billion from oil, gas and quarrying/mining companies in fiscal 2018, with the largest payment of $2 billion coming from majority State-owned National Gas Company (NGC). However, for the period 2019 to 2020, unaudited figures indicate a declining trend in revenue. Expelled AIADMK leader VK Sasikala pays floral tribute to former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister late J Jayalalithaa on her birth anniversary, at her residence in Chennai, Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021. (PTI) Chennai: The ruling AIADMK put up a united front on party icon J Jayalalithaa's birth anniversary celebrations on Wednesday with leaders lighting lamps symbolising loyalty to the party, in an apparent bid to keep the flock together and wary of the V K Sasikala factor in a crucial election year. Led by Chief Minister K Palaniswami and Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam, Ministers, MLAs, MPs, office-bearers, and cadres lit traditional lamps in their respective residences in the evening and took a pledge to guard the people and party in 'Amma's path. Thousands of party cadres lit lamps across Tamil Nadu as they remembered their iconic leader. The symbolism assumes significance in the wake of expelled leader Sasikala's (confidante of Jayalalithaa) return to Tamil Nadu from Karnataka, and her nephew and AMMK leader T T V Dhinakaran's stand on retrieving the AIADMK. Palaniswami and Panneerselvam, in an apparent message of unity at the level of top leadership, exchanged 'cakes' after cutting a massive 73-kg cake at the party headquartes. Though there had been claims of discord among the top two leaders, such claims were dismissed as false by the party. The two leaders together presided over several events organised as part of the anniversary celebrations like an 'Annadhanam' (mass feeding) and medical camp here. Coinciding with the anniversary fete, the party began the exercise of receiving applications for party tickets from aspirants. Palaniswami submitted an application to contest from Edappadi segment, Panneerselvam from Bodinayakanur, party spokesperson R M Babumurugavel said. Electricity Minister P Thangamani filed papers seeking to fight from Komarapalayam and Local Administration Minister S P Velumani from Thondamuthur, the spokesperson said, adding he has sought an opportunity to contest from Aarani. Palaniswami, marking the commencement of observance of Jayalalithaa's birth anniversary as state event from this year, garlanded her statue along with his cabinet colleagues here and unveiled a museum and a knowledge park in the Phonenix themed memorial of Jayalalithaa at the Marina beach. Also, he launched an initiative to plant 73-lakh saplings across the state marking the 73rd anniversary celebrations. Sasikala, who recently returned here after completing her prison term in the assets case, today signalled the possibility of a truce with AIADMK ahead of Assembly elections likely in April. The ruling party leader D Jayakumar however ruled out scope for any patch-up. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 23:29:03|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa (C, front) visits the National Data Center with senior officials in Harare, Zimbabwe, on Feb. 24, 2021. Mnangagwa on Wednesday officially commissioned the National Data Center (NDC) in the capital Harare as his government aims to digitalize the public services sector and to modernize the economy. The data center was completed with assistance from the Chinese government. (Photo by Wanda/Xinhua) HARARE, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa on Wednesday officially commissioned the National Data Center (NDC) in the capital Harare as his government aims to digitalize the public services sector and to modernize the economy. The data center was completed with assistance from the Chinese government. Mnangagwa, his two deputies Constantino Chiwenga and Kembo Mohadi and other senior government officials toured the new facility, while Chinese Ambassador to Zimbabwe Guo Shaochun followed the procedures through a virtual platform. Speaking at the event, Mnangagwa said the opening of the NDC is a monumental step towards modernizing the country's ICT infrastructure. "This is indeed another great leap forward in the modernization of our public sector and economy in general," Mnangagwa said. He said the objectives of the NDC are to create a facility for the centralization of the government's ICT operations and equipment with a view of achieving cost savings and the coordinated modernization of government business. "The national data center of strategic national importance and its reach and impact will go a long way towards the attainment of an upper-middle-income economy by 2030," he said. Mnangagwa said the center will provide the facilities to optimize harmonized and standardize e-government data and information management processes thereby improving public sector administration and management. In addition to improving the security of government data, the center will also ensure that the country is not left behind in global ICT development. "The national data center will ensure that Zimbabwe is not left behind. This is in line with our quest to build a knowledge-based society riding on today's digit world, information highways, the internet of things, and the big data economy. To this end, we envisage the ICTs to become the backbone underpinning our national development competitiveness and adaptation to the post-COVID-19 world," he said. Furthermore, Mnangagwa said the government will continue to upscale the implementation of ICT projects to accelerate the modernization, industrialization and growth of the economy. He said a multifaceted reform program is on course and the new data center will anchor the revamped e-government system, adding that there was a need to continue adopting a system that eliminates bureaucratic red tape and reduce the cost of doing business. Speaking on the same occasion, Vice President Chiwenga expressed gratitude to the Chinese government for its assistance that enabled the successful and timely completion of the center. "The establishment of the national data center could not have been achieved without the well-meaning support of our comprehensive strategic partner -- the People's Republic of China. Indeed the government of the People's Republic of China assisted us in the process of appreciating the historic development of ICTs and their customization for use by government," said Chiwenga. Enditem Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Wednesday is "Twin Peaks" Day, celebrating the cult-classic show of the same name that captivated fans in the 1990s with its moody, surreal atmosphere and eerie mysteries. In the pilot episode of "Twin Peaks," Kyle MacLachlan's FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper arrives in the gloomy eponymous town on February 24, 1989 to investigate the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer. A straightforward premise for a show that was anything but straightforward. "Twin Peaks" was canceled in 1991 after its second season, but the show remained a fan favorite and grew in cult status in the years following its departure from the airwaves. In 2017, "Twin Peaks" was revived, returning Kyle MacLachlan's Special Agent Dale Cooper, and loyal fans worldwide, to the sleepy Pacific Northwest town where nothing is as it seems. "Twin Peaks" rooted in Upstate unsolved mystery The central mystery of the cult-classic show, the death of the seemingly innocent high schooler Laura Palmer, has its origins in the murder of another young woman, this one real, and this one who met a mysterious and tragic end not in the Pacific Northwest, but right here in the Capital Region. Hazel Drew was 20-years-old in 1908, with beautiful blonde hair and friends and family and a job working in the homes of some of Troy's most prominent families. Days before July 7, 1908, she quit her job and hopped a trolly to Sand Lake, where she had family living on a farm. That evening, two locals spotted her walking along Taborton Road and greeted her. It was the last time she was seen alive. Drew's body was found floating in Teal's Pond four days later. She'd been brutally killed by a blow to the back of the head. As police searched for her killer, the mysteries of Drew's death unspooled, captivating the community of Sand Lake where decades later, "Twin Peaks" creator Mark Frost would spend his childhood summers. Ghost stories told by Frost's grandmother about a ghostly young woman who haunted the nearby woods would eventually morph into the story of Laura Palmer and the FBI Special Agent tasked with investigating her death. Cold Cases of the Capital Region The cold case which inspired "Twin Peaks" is far from the only unsolved mystery in the Capital Region. Here is a look at just a few of the area's most famous unsolved cases. What happened to Jaliek Rainwalker? The mysterious disappearance of 12-year-old Jaliek Rainwalker from a Washington County home in 2007 has remained unsolved for more than a decade. The last tangible development came in 2012, when investigators upgraded the case from a missing child to a probable child homicide. Despite following more than 500 leads, authorities have neither recovered a body nor been able to name any suspects. The disappearance of Karen Walker When 22-year-old University at Albany student Karen Wilson went missing in the early spring of 1985, there were very few clues as to what may have happened to the young woman. More than three decades later, there are even fewer. Who murdered the Chen family? Guilderland residents Jin Chen, Hai Yan Li, and their two sons, Anthony and Eddy, were found brutally murdered in their home on Western Avenue on October 8, 2014. The murders set off an international investigation that led authorities across the United States, Canada and China. But the question of who is responsible for the killings, and why, has remained a mystery. UAlbany student Suzanne Lyall, gone without a trace When 19-year-old Suzanne Lyall went missing from the University at Albany campus one spring evening in 1998, there were very few solid leads to follow. More than 20 years later, there are even fewer. Her disappearance remains one of the most famous cold cases in upstate New York Troy detectives reopen 33-year-old homicide case The case of a 25-year-old woman found brutally murdered by the railroad tracks in South Troy in June of 1987 has remained unsolved for more than 30 years. In August 2020, Troy Detectives reopened the case, hoping that modern forensic techniques will help them finally discover who killed Deborah Koenig. Windhoek, Feb 24 : Namibian President Hage Geingob on Wednesday lauded China and other nations for Covid vaccine assistance to the country in fighting the pandemic. This comes after China recently announced a donation of 100,000 Covid-19 vaccines to Namibia. China is also helping other countries in the southern African region with the vaccine, Xinhua reported. He also made a plea to the developed countries to continue working closely with developing countries in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic which has left a trail of destruction on many economies worldwide. Speaking at the 25th Covid-19 public briefing on measures to contain the coronavirus, Geingob said the leading role taken by China in assisting poor countries is a symbol that the pandemic can only be defeated through working together as well as pulling resources together. The Namibian President also bemoaned the continued economic lockdowns and movement restrictions imposed by governments all over the world in a move to combat the spread of the pandemic, saying it has caused untold mental suffering as well as economic challenges for many Namibians. "We are very aware of the burden that many Namibians are facing from the continued lockdowns and restrictions imposed to avert the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and we all want life to get back to normal but sometimes these restrictions are necessary for the health of many," he said. During his address, Geingob said the status quo of the health regulations to combat the pandemic will be extended till March 31. Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19) An Iraqi T-55 main battle tank burns after an attack by the 1st British Armored Division during Operation Desert Storm, February 1991. CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images As the threat from the Soviet Union declined in the early 1990s, a new challenge for the US arose in the Middle East. The first Gulf War was a textbook conventional war, but it featured an array special-operations missions that helped secure victory. Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the US military shifted its focus from Russia to the Middle East. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait, starting an international crisis that would end with Iraq's defeat by a US-led coalition six months later. Although Operation Desert Storm is considered a textbook conventional war, it was full of special-operations missions. Let us into the fight! Delta Force personnel in civilian clothes guarding Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during the first Gulf War in 1991. Staff Sgt. Dean W. Wagner The first and biggest hurdle US special-operations units faced was getting into the battle. Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the four-star commander of US Central Command and the war's military leader, viewed unconventional-warfare units with skepticism. Initially, Schwarzkopf was adamantly against special-operations units having any significant role in the conflict - though he did accept some Delta Force operators as personal bodyguards. Conversely, his second-in-command, British Gen. Sir Peter de la Billiere, immediately called in the Special Air Service (SAS), which he had served in and commanded, and Special Boat Service (SBS). The SAS and SBS, the British equivalents of Delta Force and SEAL Team 6, respectively, offered unconventional-warfare options to the war effort. Meanwhile, after some persuasion from the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Schwarzkopf relaxed his no-commandos policy. Here is a brief breakdown of the notable operations they conducted. US Army Special Forces Members of US Army Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 525. Courtesy photo Army Special Forces operators set up observation posts on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border to monitor Iraqi moves. Special Forces teams also conducted prisoner-snatching operations to provide the Coalition with more human intelligence, perhaps the most valuable form of intel. Story continues One team, Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 525, was compromised when Iraqi boys spotted its members conducting a special reconnaissance operation 150 miles inside Iraq. Alpha 525 chose not to kill the boys and instead tried to escape and evade. Over the following hours, the Iraqi Army almost overwhelmed them numerous times. The Green Berets escaped only because of their disciplined marksmanship and the close-air-support they received. Special Forces teams also conducted Foreign Internal Defense (FID) by training allies and partner forces. Although not as shiny as raids and ambushes, FID was key to the victory because it brought Coalition units up to speed and was the glue that kept the multi-national force together. Green Berets embedded with coalition units also served as liaisons, primarily between coalition units and US aircraft, and called close-air-support. British Special Air Service and Special Boat Service British infantry during Operation Desert Storm. British Army/Crown Copyright British special-operations units played a vital role in the military buildup during Operation Desert Shield and during combat in Operation Desert Storm. Alongside their US counterparts, SAS and SBS operators hunted for SCUD missiles in the Iraqi desert and conducted special reconnaissance along the Saudi-Iraqi border and within Iraq. SBS operators also conducted a highly publicized assault on the British Embassy in Kuwait City, which the Iraqis had captured. They also participated in a lesser-known operation on the outskirts of Baghdad, in which nearly a full squadron of SBS operators, accompanied by some American commandos from a Tier 1 unit specializing in signals intelligence, went after the Iraqi Army's underground fiber-optics communications network. Saddam had used the network to communicate with his mobile SCUD launchers in the desert. Ferried in by two special-operations Chinook helicopters, the joint commando force spent close to two hours on the ground digging for the cables. With dawn approaching, the operators managed to locate the cables and rig them with explosives, destroying them and frustrating Saddam's communication with his most dangerous weapons. US Navy SEALs Members of Navy SEAL Team 8 and French commandoes hang on a special patrol insertion/extraction rope secured to a CH-46D helicopter as part of an exercise during during Operation Desert Storm, February 1991. CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images Navy SEALs conducted special reconnaissance operations along the Iraqi and Kuwaiti coasts to gather intelligence on Iraqi moves. In the first hours of the ground war, SEALs conducted diversionary raids on the coast to fool the Iraqis into thinking that a large-scale amphibious operation was coming. The diversion - bolstered by the presence of US battleships - worked, allowing Coalition ground troops to arrive from the desert in the opposite direction and overwhelm the Iraqis. SEALs conducted Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure (VBSS) operations in the Persian Gulf, often assaulting suspicious ships, and a SEAL element from SEAL Team Two went ashore to destroy a Tomahawk missile that had failed to detonate in order to prevent the Iraqis from getting the technology. A SEAL platoon was also one of the first US units to enter Kuwait City during its liberation. US Army Rangers A battalion of Rangers was sent to Saudi Arabia as a quick-reaction force for the Tier 1 units. The Rangers were also to assist Delta Force if it mounted a hostage-rescue operation in Iraq or Kuwait to free any of the hundreds of Westerners who Saddam captured in during the invasion and held as human shields. Rangers also conducted a raid against a telecommunications tower near the Jordanian-Iraqi border, destroying it and capturing several prisoners. US Air Force Commandos A Pararescueman meets a Navy F-14 pilot during the Gulf War's first successful combat search-and-rescue operation, January 21, 1991. Air Force Special Operations Command Air Commandos don't usually get as much publicity as their sister-service comrades because more often than not Pararescuemen, Combat Controllers, Special Operations Weather Technicians (now Special Reconnaissance operators), and Tactical Air Control Party airmen are attached to other special-operations units as individuals. During Desert Shield and Desert Storm, Air Commandos mainly saw action alongside Delta operators in the hunt for the SCUD missiles. But they also did some traditional Air Commando tasks. A Pararescue element conducted the first rescue operation of the war on January 21, 1991, after a Navy F-14 Tomcat was shot down in Iraq. A special-operations MH-53J Pave Low helicopter carried the team behind enemy lines to save the pilot, though the F-14's radar officer was captured. But not all missions went well. During the Battle of Khafji, in a Saudi city close to Kuwait's border, an AC-130H Spectre gunship was shot down by an Iraqi portable surface-to-air missile, killing its 14-man crew-the largest loss of life in a single incident in Air Force Special Operations Command's history. Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (National Service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate. Read the original article on Business Insider (Newser) President Biden's Cabinet is starting to fill out, with nominees for agriculture secretary and United Nations ambassador gaining Senate approval Tuesday. The Senate voted 78-20 to approve career diplomat Linda Thomas-Greenfield as UN ambassador, a Cabinet-level position. A 35-year foreign service veteran who resigned during the Trump administration, Thomas-Greenfield will be the third African American, and the second African American woman, to hold the job, the AP reports. Her confirmation was hailed by Democrats and advocates of the United Nations, who had lamented the Trump administration's unilateral approach to international affairs. During confirmation hearings, Thomas-Greenfield faced some criticism from Senate Republicans who labeled her soft on China. story continues below The Senate voted 92-7 to confirm Tom Vilsack for a return engagement as agriculture secretary. The former Iowa governor spent eight years leading the same department under Barack Obama. In his testimony, Vilsack heavily endorsed boosting climate-friendly agricultural industries such as the creation of biofuels. One of the few "no" votes came from Sen. Bernie Sanders, who said he would have liked "somebody a little bit more vigorous in terms of protecting family farms and taking on corporate agriculture." Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says he intends to wrap up the remaining nomination votes quickly, although one of Biden's nominees, Neera Tanden to lead the White House Office of Management and Budget, is clearly in trouble in the evenly divided Senate. (Read more Biden administration stories.) CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Moderna, which makes one of the two authorized COVID-19 vaccines, is set to launch a clinical trial of a new vaccine designed to combat a variant of the virus, the company announced Wednesday. The company says it has produced enough of its variant-specific candidate vaccine, called mRNA-1273.351 to begin testing it in people. Any change to address variants, which other vaccine makers also are working on, would need to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In a study published last week, Moderna showed that blood from people who received the current vaccine includes neutralizing antibodies against the major known variants. But only one-sixth of their antibodies were protective against the B.1.351 variant of the virus, which originated in South Africa, and which is the target of its new vaccine. It is not clear whether this reduced antibody level is sufficient to protect people against symptomatic or serious cases of COVID-19 from this new variant. That's why "out of an abundance of caution," the company said in a news release it has begun pursuing two possible strategies against the variant: giving people a booster dose of the original vaccine to increase antibody levels, and developing two variant-specific vaccines, which could be given instead of the original one. It will test several variations of a booster, the company said, including a single, low-dose shot of the variant-specific vaccine; a shot that includes both the original vaccine and the variant-specific one; and a third low-dose version of the original vaccine. According to FDA guidance, the company plans to evaluate the safety and immune effects of these approaches in people who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19, and in those who received the original vaccine, mRNA-1273. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease will help lead the clinical studies to see whether mRNA-1273.351 can boost immunity against the variant. In its announcement Wednesday, the company said it already has shipped sufficient doses of this variant-specific vaccine needed for testing. Story continues As we seek to defeat COVID-19, we must be vigilant and proactive as new variants of SARS-CoV-2 emerge," Stephane Bancel, Moderna's CEO, said in a prepared statement, referring to the virus that causes COVID-19. "We are moving quickly to test updates to the vaccines that address emerging variants of the virus in the clinic." As of Feb. 25, CVS will offer the COVID vaccine in 17 states by appointment. The lower doses hopefully will work for the booster, Bancel said, allowing the company to stretch its limited vaccine supply. Other leaders in the COVID-19 vaccine effort Pfizer-BioNTech, Novavax, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca-Oxford University also have said they are working on new versions of their vaccines or boosters to increase their protection. A third vaccine on the way: One-dose J&J COVID-19 vaccine meets criteria as safe and effective, FDA report finds It's not yet clear whether a booster shot, which amps up the immune system, will be enough to protect against a new variant, or if an entirely new vaccine is needed. Moderna is the first to release details about its effort. In a congressional subcommittee meeting Tuesday, Pfizer's chief business officer, John Young, said his company is "preparing to respond quickly to initiate a study to investigate the effectiveness of a third booster of our vaccine in trial participants who have already received two doses." He said Pfizer is discussing trial designs with the FDA. "We will fight every step of the way until a devastating pandemic is under control," he said. The Moderna vaccine, like the Pfizer-BioNTech one, is based on mRNA technology in which a simple change to the code will enable the recipient to make a slightly different protein. That's why they were both made so quickly last year, once it became clear which protein on the SARS-CoV-2 virus they should target. By getting the body to produce a protein from the virus, the vaccine trains the immune system to recognize that protein and immediately attack if the recipient is exposed to the virus. On Monday, the FDA laid out guidelines for companies that want to change their vaccines to adapt to new variants. They will not be required to start from scratch, running gigantic clinical trials over many months as they have to win FDA authorization. Instead, as with the flu vaccine, which is altered every year to cope with changing strains, COVID-19 vaccine versions will be tested in smaller groups to confirm safety and to examine immune responses for effectiveness. Lab studies and some real-world evidence suggests that current vaccines will remain effective against a variant called B.1.1.7, which originated in the United Kingdom. Lessons from the UK: COVID-19 variant found in UK spreads 'like wildfire.' British experts fear what will happen if US won't lock down But they may not all work against B.1.351. Studies of AstraZeneca-Oxford University's collaborative vaccine showed it was barely protective at all against B.1.351 in South Africa, and that country has passed on using doses of the vaccine. Johnson & Johnson's vaccine does seem to provide some protection there, and lab studies suggest that Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine, like Moderna's, would continue to provide some protection against that variant, though it's not clear how much. Even if it proves unnecessary to reconfigure vaccines to fight the B.1.351 variant, there may be another that comes along that will require a new vaccine, public health officials have said. New variants of the virus will continue to emerge as COVID-19 continues to infect people across the globe. The only way to stop these variants is to reduce the spread of the virus, public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, America's top infectious disease doctor, have said. "It really is the time to study effects of booster doses to new, emerging viral variants," Dr. Jesse Goodman, a professor of Medicine at Georgetown University and former chief scientist with the FDA, said in a Wednesday call with media. Studies are needed to show whether people respond as expected to booster doses, and whether they cause any concerning safety problems. And even if the virus doesn't escape protection from current vaccines, people might need boosters eventually, Goodman said. "We don't know," he said, "how long immunity will last from these vaccines." Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday. Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Moderna to begin trial of new COVID vaccine to address virus variant Last minute touches on a frilly white dress, a final coat of powder and it's showtime for the Black Lives Matter-inspired collective making history at Milan Fashion Week. After a years-long battle to improve diversity on the Italian catwalks, a group of five black designers made their on-schedule debut Wednesday by opening the women's Fall/Winter fashion shows. All of this season's shows are pre-recorded due to coronavirus, but AFP news agency was given exclusive access to their preparations last week at Milan's Circolo Filologico library, not far from the famous La Scala opera house. Michelle Ngonmo, who chose those to include in the show, described opening fashion week as 'a first step', rather than a victory. She is a co-founder of the collective dubbed Black Lives Matter in Italian Fashion, named after the anti-racism movement that swept the United States last year and reached Europe. After a years-long battle to improve diversity on the Italian catwalks, a group of five black designers made their on-schedule debut Wednesday by opening the women's Fall/Winter fashion shows. Pictured: A design by Mokudu Fall Michelle Ngonmo, who chose those to include in the Black Lives Matter in Italian Fashion show, described opening fashion week as 'a first step', rather than a victory. Pictured: A design by Claudia Gisele Ntsama Taking part in Milan Fashion Week is a dream come true for the individual designers, but their experiences in the industry have not always been positive. Pictured: A design by Joy Meribe Longer term, 'we have to make the society we live in understand that the 'Made in Italy' label is not a question of skin colour but of know-how', she told AFP. On an individual level, opening Milan Fashion Week is a dream come true for the designers, all of whom are Italian but were born in various African countries. Claudia Gisele Ntsama, a 29-year-old from Cameroon, admitted being 'a little nervous' as she fussed with the eco-friendly looks in pastel tones made entirely from hemp that made up her collection. Nearby, fellow designer Fabiola Manirakiza played with silk in floral prints for her brand, Frida Kiza. 'In general, we are ignored, we are invisible. But this is a rebirth,' exclaimed Manirakiza, whose parents were killed in 1972 in ethnic violence in Burundi. Claudia GIsele Ntsama (left) Fabiola Manirakiza (right) are two of the designers taking part in the Black Lives Matter in Italian Fashion collective Ngonmo co-founded the collective last year alongside designers Edward Buchanan and Stella Jean, who has been the only black member of the National Chamber for Italian Fashion since 2016. It participated in Milan's Fashion Week in September, with a video featuring the same five designers, but that 'was just a teaser,' explained Mokudu Fall, 45, from Senegal. 'Now we're on the official calendar, I've been dreaming about it since I've been in fashion,' Fall said. In a nod to his origins, his collection - 'works of art that I transpose on clothes' - featured satin lions and zebras in gold and red, his favourite colours. Previously, the presentation of the collections of black designers was confined to Afro Fashion Week, which launched in Milan with a show in 2016. Mokudu Fall said he had 'been dreaming about [being in the official fashion week calendar since I've been in fashion' Joy Meribe said she 'had to work twice as hard' as a woman and an immigrant in Italy Moroccan-born shoe designer Karim Daoudi said it was 'a dream come true,' to take part in the show 'For years we came up against a wall of silence when knocking on the door' of the fashion chamber, said Ngonmo, the founder of Afro Fashion Week. The catalyst for change was the death last year in US police custody of an African-American man, George Floyd, an event that triggered anti-racism protests across the US and the world. Carlo Capasa, head of the fashion chamber, acknowledged that the death of Floyd was 'an important moment of awareness for the whole world'. Thanks to the collective, 'we have become more aware of this theme' of racism, he said, adding: 'In fact, we could have done more.' The chamber now supports the collective through tutoring on design and business skills, and finances the five designers' fashions show and the collections of three of them. Milan Fashion Week has been slower to embrace diversity than its London, New York and Paris counterparts and several Italian luxury labels, including Dolce and Gabbana and Etro, have been accused of racism over a lack of diversity in shows and campaigns, cultural appropriation and employing racial stereotypes in their advertising. 'In general, we are ignored, we are invisible. But this is a rebirth,' designer Fabiola Manirakiza said. Pictured: A design by Manirakiza for her line Frida-Kiza Pictured: Shoes by Karim Daoudi that he hopes 'will go around the world' thanks to the platform offered by opening Milan Fashion Week Pictured: A design by Claudia Gisele Ntsama whose collection featured eco-friendly looks in pastel tones made entirely from hemp 'As a woman and an immigrant in Italy, I had to work twice as hard to prove that I have the same skills as the others,' said Joy Meribe, a 43-year-old born in Nigeria. Her collection - dresses and skirts in 100 percent organic silk, yellow, Atlantic blue and dark red - was made entirely in Italy, like all the others. Buchanan, an African-American who has been in Italy for 25 years and co-founded the collection, said he has experienced racism on a daily basis. He said people often assume that he makes T-shirts, or other garments for hip-hop fashion. 'They find it hard to imagine that I work in the luxury sector,' he said. But this first official show of the association gives hope to some. 'It's a dream come true,' says Karim Daoudi, 27, a designer born in Morocco. Of his shoes featured in the show, he said: 'I hope they will go around the world.' 5 things you need to know Monday News Guest Column Japans Values Diplomacy Runs Aground in Myanmar Myanmar military chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing (right) and Hideo Watanabe, chairman of the Japan-Myanmar Association (JMA), meet in Naypyitaw, the capital of Myanmar, on Jan. 19, 2020. / Military Information Team The Myanmar militarys unconstitutional coup detat to derail democracy, and subsequent killing of peaceful pro-democracy protesters, is awkward for Japans so-called values diplomacy. Aside from some mild diplomatic handwringing, Tokyo has confirmed that promoting values is not a priority in Myanmar and that it is not willing to sacrifice anything to protect or promote them. Across Asia, the Japanese government has no qualms in working with whoever is in power, raising questions about whether there is any substance to its values diplomacy or if its merely a branding strategy. Large protests in Tokyo by Myanmar residents seek to pressure Tokyo to side with their nations democratic aspirations, but the Japanese government is signaling that it will work with the junta. Tokyo managed to get then US President Donald Trump to back Prime Minister Shinzo Abes vision of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) and participate in the Quad security component involving Australia, India, the US and Japan. Ostensibly, FOIP is a values-driven strategic concept aimed at containing Chinas expanding regional influence. The conceit is that values matter and that by promoting democracy, freedom and human rights, FOIP stands in stark contrast to what China offers. Current Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and US President Joe Biden have reaffirmed their support for FOIP and the Quad. Does this matter? In the case of Myanmar, not if one narrowly focuses on democracy, freedom and human rights. On the eve of the coup, Hideo Watanabe, chairman of the Japan-Myanmar Association, visited State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the man who would become the coup leader, Myanmar military commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, to discuss boosting Japanese investment there. Watanabe has long been the chief fixer for economic relations and has a long track record of working closely with the military. He and many in Japan are more concerned about Chinas soaring influence in Myanmar and are eager to counter that through expanded economic relations. For the new junta and Tokyo, he is a key back channel for communications, but there are no signs that he promoted the democratic transition or supports efforts to reverse democratic backsliding in Myanmar. The Japanese business community sees Myanmar as the regions most promising frontier and are there to make money regardless of the political situation. Miyake Kuni, a foreign policy adviser to Suga, opposes sanctions and pressure, instead advocating persuasion. He argues that, a simple resumption of a big stick policy vis-a-vis Myanmar would only push the Tatmadaw [Myanmars military] back to the dark side. Back to the dark side?! Given the scale of protests against the military coup, its safe to say that for the people of Myanmar the military is the dark side and the greatest threat to democracy, the rule of law and public security. Miyake wrote in the Japan Times (Feb. 4, 2021), What is needed is a subtle and mature supervision of concerted efforts by the international community to resume talking to and eventually persuade the leaders of the Tatmadaw to change their mind. And how is that going to happen? The same way that Japan has maturely and subtly persuaded the Thai military to mend its ways? Or subtly used the little stick of dialogue to nudge Cambodias Hun Sen towards free and fair elections? According to Stanford Universitys Daniel Sneider, a veteran Asia-hand, the Biden administration rejects such vacuous sophistry. Writing in Tokyo Business Today (Feb. 18, 2021), Sneider describes early frustrations in the Biden administration with Japans opposition to sanctions and pressure on the military. Apparently, Tokyo has not been very persuasive in convincing the US to join it in abandoning democracy in Myanmar under the pretext of respecting Asian values. Tokyo downplays human rights and democratic values in favor of maintaining trade ties and securing geo-strategic advantage. It is thus a values-free diplomacy of pragmatism and expediency, dealing with regional governments as they are, not as one might wish them to be. Japan is certainly not unique in this regard, but Abe and Suga invite scrutiny of the governments record due to their sustained grandstanding on promoting values. The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) pursues a regime-compatible approach to development assistance and thus does not intervene to promote democracy, bypasses civil society and prioritizes smooth relations with recipient nations. From 2007-2016 Japan ranked 26 out of 29 donor nations in terms of its overall aid to democratization-related programs. JICA official Shiga Hiroaki explains that, JICA does not support democracy promotion due to an entrenched belief among officials that development aid should be apolitical. Japan emphasizes long-term capacity building of state institutions rather than strict adherence to the values and principles of democratic governance. He added, For the Japanese people, the most important value is harmony; i.e., to keep harmony among community members. Freedom is also an important value but probably after harmony. But harmony according to whom? One suspects that pro-democracy protesters in Myanmar also seek harmony, one that is based on the military respecting the National League for Democracys landslide victory and the Constitution. Aid without conditions is welcome by recipients, whether from China or Japan, but this means it is not being used to promote democratization or human rights. The nostrums of shared values are thus invoked by Japan like background music to establish an appealing identity and to provide useful political cover for expanding security ties with other regional governments. The main goal of brandishing democratic commonalities is not about spreading or supporting universal values but rather is to facilitate a shift in Japans security policies and shrug off constitutional constraints under the banner of Abes proactive pacifism. Japanese experts confide that the impact of Chinas foreign aid resembles that of Japan, as both emphasize noninterference and noninterventionist principles. Containing China is more important to Japans leaders than expanding or defending democracy in Asia, and thus it refrains from actions that would jeopardize relations with authoritarian or illiberal governments. Because China offers unconditional support, Tokyo fears that its relations with undemocratic nations will be undermined if it insists they embrace democratic values. This is the crux of the problem. Thus, Japans rivalry with China reinforces Tokyos inclination to avert its eyes from human rights abuses, electoral fraud, corruption and suppression of fundamental freedoms. Tokyo is not opposed to liberal democracy but also not prepared to risk anything to support it. Japanese politicians brandish values principally to align Japan with the US and other regional democracies. Tokyo has expanded security ties with the US, Australia and India, the so-called Quad, as part of its balance of power strategy to contain China, but positions this as part of a broader agenda of advancing shared values under the banner of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. The Japanese public has been wary of Abes agenda of boosting security alliances and easing constitutional constraints on Japans armed forces, so emphasizing the shared values of a concert of democracies has provided useful political cover. Even among the ruling elite, there is unhappiness with the governments hypocrisy. In mid-2020, Liberal Democratic Party conservatives condemned Abes weak-kneed response to Chinas curtailing of Hong Kongs autonomy and crackdown on pro-democracy activists. As in the cases of Tibet and the jailing of over 1 million Uighurs, Abe didnt champion the values he preached. In response to democratic backsliding across Asia, Abe and Suga have remained silent and cozied up to human rights suppressing strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte, Hun Sen and Narendra Modi. One wonders what values Japans ambassador to Myanmar was promoting as a leading apologist for the militarys expulsions of ethnic Rohingya? That effort should stand Japan in good stead with the new junta, but one has to be incredibly naive to imagine that Tokyo can persuade the Tatmadaw to change its mind. Like Tokyo, the junta is hoping to resume business as usual, but popular discontent and civil disobedience render this wishful thinking. The genie of democracy is out of the bottle. Jeff Kingston is director of Asian studies at Temple University Japan. He is author and editor of a dozen books, including Press Freedom in Japan (Routledge 2017), Japans Foreign Relations (2018), Japan (Polity 2019), Press Freedom in Asia (Routledge 2019) and The Politics of Religion, Nationalism and Identity in Asia (Rowman & Littlefield 2019). This article first was first published by FORSEA. You may also like these stories: Indias Muted Response to Myanmar Military Coup Seen as a Strategic Move In Myanmar, Its Back to the Future but Not Quite Whos Culpable for Myanmars Coup? New Delhi, Feb 24 : Nothing Technologies, the newly-launched venture of OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, on Wednesday announced Stockholm-based company Teenage Engineering as its founding partner. Teenage Engineering has been developing highly acclaimed products for people who love sound, music, and design. The company's emblematic first product, the portable wonder synthesizer OP-1, was launched in 2010. "I am really excited to welcome Teenage Engineering to the growing Nothing family. They consist of some of the best designers and creatives that I've had the pleasure of working with. Together, we have created a product roadmap that's unique and true to Nothing's vision," Carl Pei, CEO and co-founder of Nothing said in a statement. Jesper Kouthoofd, co-founder and CEO of Teenage Engineering is the Creative Lead and the visionary behind Nothing's design world, while Tom Howard has been appointed as Head of Design of Nothing. Nothing also announced that it will open up for its community to invest in the company through a community equity funding round. Nothing will allow its community to invest a total of $1.5 million at the same valuation as their Series A funding with GV (formerly Google Ventures). Earlier, the firm acquired smartphone brand Essential that shut shop last year. According to a report in 9to5Google, the Essential brand which was launched by Android co-founder Andy Rubin but did not succeed and the company was closed last year, is now officially owned by Pei's Nothing Technologies. London-based Nothing has so far raised over $22 million. In December, the company raised $7 million in seed financing December that included tech leaders and investors such as Tony Fadell, Casey Neistat, Kevin Lin, Steve Huffman and Josh Buckley. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company A man who calls himself Abu Walaa, alleged leader of the ISIS terrorist group in Germany, hides his face at the Higher Regional Court in Celle, Germany, on Feb. 24, 2021. (Julian Stratenschulte/DPA via AP, Pool) German Court Convicts Radical Imam of Membership in ISIS BERLINA former imam at a radical mosque in Germany was convicted Wednesday of being a member of the ISIS terrorist group and sentenced to 10-1/2 years in prison. The state court in Celle in northern Germany convicted Ahmad Abdulaziz Abdullah A., who goes by the alias Abu Walaa, of membership in a foreign terrorist organization as well as terror financing and being an accessory to preparing a serious act of violence, a court statement said. A man who calls himself Abu Walaa, alleged leader of the ISIS terrorist group in Germany, hides his face at the Higher Regional Court in Celle, Germany, on Feb. 24, 2021. The state court in Celle in northern Germany convicted the 37-year-old Iraqi citizen who goes by the alias Abu Walaa of membership in and support for a terrorist organization. (Julian Stratenschulte/DPA via AP, Pool) The court found that Abu Walaa and his network radicalized young people in northern and western Germany and sent them to areas controlled by ISIS, the dpa news agency reported. Three co-defendants were given prison sentences ranging from four years and two weeks to eight years for supporting ISIS, among other offenses. The verdict against Abu Walaa, a 37-year-old Iraqi citizen, ended a trial that began in September 2017. Abu Walaa was the imam at a prominent radical mosque in the northern city of Hildesheim and also organized Islam seminars at mosques elsewhere in Germany. German authorities banned the organization that ran the mosque in March 2017. The effort of inoculating all Americans with the COVID-19 vaccines flails the supply of the doses. With Pfizer and Moderna on the move to release more dosage, Johnson & Johnson will fail to live up to their commitment of 10 million vaccine doses by the end of February, as their supply falls short. With the Biden administration securing deals for 600 million COVID-19 vaccine doses for America's constituents, the crusade for COVID-19 vaccine injection continues until the nation achieves herd immunity. Read also: Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 Vaccine Applies for Emergency Use Authorization Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 Vaccine CBS News reported that the company expects to fall short on their COVID-19 vaccine as they disclose their company is falling behind their production goals. The company only has four million vaccine doses ready to be transported once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted its emergency use authorization (EUA). According to a U.S. News Chant report, Johnson & Johnson pledged to ship another 25 million vaccine doses by the end of March. Dr. Richard Nettles, Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen's vice chairman of medical affairs, said their company is confident in its plan to deliver 100 million doses by the end of June. CBS News reported that the single-dose vaccine from Johnson & Johnson can be stored in the standard refrigerator temperatures for about three months and has been heralded as a significant advance in the U.S. vaccine effort despite its slightly lower efficacy. Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said the vaccine from Johnson & Johnson is what he prefers since it is a single dose, very easy to ship and administer, and it does not have complicated requirements. CBS News also reported that the Biden administration anticipates allotting two million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine next week. But Both Johnson & Johnson and federal officials acknowledged for weeks that the firm confronted obstacles as it ramped up production in the U.S. This prompted the Biden administration to modify their vaccination goals. COVID-19 Vaccines and the United States According to Medical News Today, there are 11 vaccines authorized across several countries so far. The report noted that the vaccine by Johnson & Johnson called the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine is a single-dose viral vector inoculation and has 66 percent efficacy in preventing moderate to severe COVID-19. The company expects the EUA from the U.S. FDA soon. But they were concerns about the vaccine's availability once U.S. authorities add it to the national vaccination rollout. Meanwhile, vaccine advisers to the FDA will meet Friday to discuss whether to recommend the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for EUA. With fewer doses expected from Johnson & Johnson, the administration has not made any plans yet to distribute the vaccine if it wins authorization. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is the third under consideration for the U.S. market and only the first single-dose COVID-19 shot available so far. Related article: FACT CHECK: Did Pfizer Research Head Say COVID-19 Vaccine Could Cause Female Sterilization? WATCH: Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 Vaccine Could Soon Join Fight Against Pandemic From CBS News Marie-Pascale was born in Algeria to Andalusian parents, but her family left Africa for France when she was two. Nothing pointed her towards an artistic profession, and when it came time to choose a career, she decided to become a teacher, which she carried out for twenty-five years. From 1986 to 1995 taught throughout Africa (Gabon, Madagascar, Comoros....) and her memories are filled with the sounds, smells and colours. Introducing children to art only served to fuel her artistic curiosity, and at the age of forty, Marie-Pascale experienced a new beginning. She became a full-fledged artist and launched into her new life with passion. She has exhibited throughout the past ten years, and now lives and works in Strasbourg. The artist has developed an abstract universe in which figurative elements get lost. She combines acrylics with mixed media (ink, tar, walnut juice) on canvas or paper. Music accompanies her work, and she gives her works the titles of songs from groups heard in her workshop (Lou Reed, The Rolling Stones, The Doors...). Her artistic preferences lean towards contemporary art: the artists Antoni Tapies and Coignard (twentieth - twenty-first centuries) Miquel Barcelo (Spanish painter) or Alechinsky (Belgian painter and printmaker). With great generosity, Marie-Pascale creates sensations on the canvas (olfactory, visual, auditory) that she has collected during her various trips, inviting the viewer to escape through her art. She draws her inspiration from her Andalusian roots and her African life. She creates colours with pigments and confronts them with the rough surface of sand or cement. Marie-Pascale sees the use of small formats a personal challenge, a way to tell a story in a literary way, rich and concise at the same time. Made of perennial or ephemeral strokes, her art revolves around a reflection on the vagaries of time. The artist wishes to freeze the immediacy of a moment by using simple, raw materials. Matter, in all its fragility, is the heart of her work. Three years before Saturdays harrowing engine failure and aborted flight to Hawaii, another Boeing 777 headed for Honolulu faced a similar emergency with the same model engine. Both had fractured fan blades and left a trail of debris below, including flying hunks of engine coverings. Passengers on that February 2018 flight heard a loud bang before their United Airlines jet began to shake violently and pilots struggled to fly with one working engine. Investigators uncovered problems with the inspection process set up by the engines manufacturer, Pratt & Whitney, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2019 ordered airlines to regularly scour fan blades for tiny but potentially catastrophic cracks. The timing for required inspections was based on how many times engines have been used. The FAA said these thresholds provide an acceptable level of safety, according to the 2019 order. After independent investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said two more fan blades broke on Saturday large metal chunks from the plane were spread over a mile of the Denver suburb of Broomfield the FAA said it was reconsidering. We concluded that the inspection interval should be stepped up, FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said, noting that a forthcoming emergency order would provide more details. Aviation experts said investigators will try to determine, among other things, how the failures that preceded the 2018 incident line up with those that led to Saturdays incident, and whether actions by the FAA, Pratt & Whitney and Boeing to address them were sufficient. Theyre definitely going to look into this, but theyre not going to initially assume thats what it is, said Jeff Guzzetti, who was director of the FAAs Accident Investigation Division until 2019. Theyre going to have an open mind about other potential failure modes. The FAA said on Monday that it already had been evaluating whether to adjust blade inspections because of a December 4, 2020, fan blade incident on a Japan Airlines jet. That also was a Boeing 777 with a Pratt & Whitney engine, and led the pilot to return to Okinawa. A report last month on the Japan incident found that fan blades on the engine were damaged. The nations ministry of transport ordered domestic airlines to accelerate inspections on jets with similarly built engines by the end of March. These types of inspections are generally done every seven years in Japan. Japanese regulators announced on Sunday that they were grounding the jets. United pulled 24 planes from its fleet that same day, and Boeing recommended that air carriers ground 128 of the companys 777 jets with the same type of engine. The Denver incident marks the latest safety challenge for Boeing, which recently saw its 737 Max jets return to the skies after two crashes that killed 346 people. Boeing said it is actively monitoring recent events related to United Airlines Flight 328. Pratt & Whitney said it sent a team to assist the NTSB, which is investigating Saturdays incident, and coordinating with airlines and regulators on developing new inspection protocols for the engines. Read More Washington Post The top commander of US military forces in the Middle East issued a subtle but unmistakable warning to Iran today over recent projectile attacks on Iraqs Kurdistan region and Saudi Arabia. CENTCOM commander Gen. Kenneth Frank McKenzie said he considers it very dangerous for Iranian officials to assume that an uptick in such attacks in recent weeks can be non-attributable in some way back to Iranian policy. We believe that all of this ultimately emanates from Iran, McKenzie said during a virtual forum hosted by the Beirut Institute. The generals comments went a step beyond the Biden administrations cautious messaging to date on attributing blame for the recent strikes as Washington seeks to reengage with Tehran on a return to the 2015 nuclear deal. Last week, more than a dozen Iranian-made rockets rained down in and around Erbil International Airport in northern Iraqs Kurdistan region, killing a military contractor and wounding nine other people, including a member of the US military. A supposed group calling itself Saraya Awliyya al-Dam claimed responsibility for the attack. Some experts have suggested it is one of many front groups for influential Iran-backed militias in Iraq, though Irans government denied any involvement in the strike. While the names of these groups change, their methodologies and frequently even the weapons they use are similar if not exactly the same and ultimately traceable back to Tehran, said Simone Ledeen, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who formerly led the Pentagons Middle East office under the Trump administration. No major operation or one that would have second- or third-order political effects would be conducted in a vacuum, Ledeen said. The Biden administration has so far avoided publicly assigning blame, citing an ongoing investigation led by Iraqi authorities. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Monday that the United States would hold Iran responsible for the actions of its proxies that attack Americans. Rockets again fell on Baghdads Green Zone on Monday, though no one was injured. Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most powerful Iraqi Shia militias linked to Tehrans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), denied responsibility for both the Erbil and Baghdad attacks. Current US officials have promised a measured response to such incidents, contrasting with the Trump administrations penchant for quickly pointing the finger at Tehran for the activities of its regional proxies. What we will not do is lash out and risk escalation that plays into the hands of Iran, Price said Monday. A December 2019 rocket strike at a military base in Kirkuk killed a US contractor, launching a tit-for-tat that nearly brought the United States and Iran to the brink of conflict when Trump ordered IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani killed in a drone strike in Baghdad. A number of projectiles have also been launched into Saudi Arabia in recent weeks, in some cases coinciding with official visits from McKenzie and Bidens Yemen envoy, Timothy Lenderking. "The Saudis have had good success in intercepting those," McKenzie said Wednesday, noting that the cruise missiles and other projectiles typically fired from Yemen "have Iranian fingerprints all over them." The commander said he agreed with Saudi Arabias Prince Turki al-Faisal who also spoke during the event that recent Houthi strikes, such as drone attack on an airport in southwest Saudi Arabia, constituted terrorism. Still, the general praised the Biden administrations decision to rescind the Yemeni rebels official terror designation, saying it was a sign of goodwill on the part of the United States to help bring the Houthis to the negotiating table to end Yemens civil war. The Biden administration has put major weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on hold pending review, citing the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen. The US continues to provide defensive support to Saudi Arabia. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last week emphasized that the United States strategic relationship with Riyadh has not changed. The United States maintains a Sentinel radar system in Saudi Arabia to monitor potential strikes from Iran. CENTCOM also has a THAAD ballistic missile defense system and two Patriot missile batteries at Prince Sultan Air Base in central Saudi Arabia, where most of the roughly 3,000 US troops in the country are based alongside rotating fighter squadrons since 2019. McKenzie on Wednesday touted successes in integrating Saudi air defense systems, something CENTCOM sought for years. When we have imminent indication of attacks on Saudi Arabia, we share that with them," McKenzie said Wednesday. "That allows them to help defend themselves. The Egyptian Defense ministry has chosen the countrys Sovereign Fund (SFE) to sell between 80 and 90 per cent of Wataniya Petroleum, a subsidiary of the National Service Products Organization (NSPO), reports say. SFEs CEO Ayman Soliman told Reuters that the army is keen to deal with franchisers as it seeks to sell part of a portfolio of companies. The ministry is willing to retain between 10 and 20 per cent of the company and incoming new shareholders will hold the fueling stations on a long-term leasehold basis, paving the way to start the transaction. Few candidates including Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC), Saudi Aldrees Petroleum and Transport Services Co. and Qalaa Holdings TAQA Arabia expressed their interests for the operation. Soliman hopes the sale will be completed in June this year. Both the SFE and NSPO signed a cooperation agreement in February to offer some of NSPOs subsidiaries to private investors, Egypt Oil & Gas reports. Jessica Wright and son. Wright is project manager for a study led by Penn State Hershey family physician Aleksandra Zgierska that seeks to understand how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting pregnant and postpartum women in central Pennsylvania. Credit: Penn State Health When the first U.S. case of COVID-19 due to community spread was diagnosed in late February 2020, it set off a rapid series of events. As cases surged, many states issued stay-at-home orders, and schools and childcare centers shut down. With such rapid, widespread disruption, it's no wonder that many found themselves struggling with fear and anxiety. Unfortunately, these emotions may trigger adverse effects on the body and mind. Previous studies have linked fear with depressed immune system functioning, cardiovascular problems, and long-term mental health issues like post-traumatic stress disorder. And in a pandemic, these repercussions could be even more harmful than usual. James Dillard, distinguished professor of communication arts and sciences, said people use a variety of strategies to cope with their fear in situations like this. While he is not currently studying fear during the coronavirus pandemic, he did research on how pregnant women dealt with fear during the 2015 Zika epidemic, which posed an extra threat to babies in utero. One strategy Dillard and his team investigated was "avoidance," where people try to manage fear by avoiding a topic altogether, such as turning off the TV and not talking about it. This did not reduce fear for the participants in the study. A second strategy was called "contesting," which means denying the problem exists or that it was being blown out of proportion. This also was ultimately ineffective. "One of the most surprising things we found was in regard to the suppression of emotions," Dillard said. "There's this idea that you can say "I know I'm feeling this, but I'm going to push it down and ignore it," but people who do that actually experience more fear. It's very counterproductive and something to avoid." While media coverage can be overwhelming or frightening, Dillard said it is still important to stay up to date with the latest recommendations from public health officials and other experts. To stay informed while minimizing fear, he recommends creating a plan for how much and what kind of media you consume. "If you feel consistently uncomfortable or are unable to sleep, it may be best to back off the media," Dillard said. "It's also important to choose media sources carefully. There are some outlets that actively try to increase your fear, but fortunately, they're not that hard to avoid." Expecting during the pandemic Other researchers across the University are exploring how fear, uncertainty and other psychological stresses due to the COVID-19 pandemic are affecting individuals and families. In a project funded by a seed grant from the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, Aleksandra Zgierska, family medicine and addiction medicine physician at Penn State College of Medicine, is leading research to discover how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting pregnant and postpartum women in central Pennsylvania. "The pandemic could be affecting these women in a couple different ways," said Jessica Wright, project manager for the team. "It could be the risk from the COVID-19 infection itself, or it could be social distancing requirements and other restrictions that may lead to job and food insecurity or contribute to domestic abuse. And of course, heightened anxiety about the child's health due to COVID-19 exposure may also impact the women's well-being and mental health." Asking women themselves about their experiences can help better understand the pandemic's impact, the researchers said. Interestingly, experiences may be both positive and negative. "My husband has been working from home the majority of the past six months so that has been a huge blessing," reported one participant. "He's been able to help with my transition back to full time work. [At the same time,] I mourn the loss of the experiences I thought I would have during my maternity leave, not being able to spend time with friends and family and not being able to share the joys of the first months of my son's life with anyone else." The research team will use a survey and screening tool to identify pregnant women who are experiencing risk factors such as depression, substance misuse, or anxiety, that could lead to adverse outcomes such as premature birth or potential difficulties due to loss of income, isolation from support systems, and other stresses. These women will then be provided with a personalized list of resources or a link to a Penn State Health clinic where they can then schedule an online or in-person appointment with a clinician. As a pregnant woman herself, Wright knows firsthand how difficult it can be expecting a child during a pandemic. She said that while it's always important to make healthy choices during pregnancy, making those choices is more stressful now than ever. "Each decision I make is weighed against the potential impact of becoming COVID-positive on my older children and the baby, too," she said. "Pregnancy and child birth can bring joy but also add complexity and stress to our lives," said Zgierska. "The pandemic has heightened that stress among expectant mothers and families who now worry about impacts on pregnancy, mother and child health, and family well-being. We need to actively support pregnant women, new mothers, and their families so that families and children can thrive." Too much of a good thing? Another Huck seed grant focuses on how the pandemic might influence family dynamics. From stay-at-home orders that were issued in the early spring, to the recognition that their children will be educated at least partially through remote learning, many families have been spending an unprecedented amount of time with each other. While this has some benefits, it can also aggravate existing strains and create new ones. Mark Feinberg, research professor of health and human development at Penn State, said families may face a range of stressors during the pandemic. When lockdown orders went into effect across the country, many people were suddenly unemployed or on furlough, without a steady income in an already tumultuous time. Feinberg said it's hard to overestimate the stress this can bring to an individual, let alone a family. "There's a lot of research that shows financial stress translates into more family conflict and aggression, harsh parenting, and even child abuse," he said. "This stress affects how calm, patient and supportive a parent can be. Research from previous times of widespread economic stress shows how detrimental it can be for families, parenting and ultimately for kids' well-being." The parent-child relationship is not the only one within many households. There are also relationships between siblings. While sibling roughhousing and teasing are sometimes written off as harmless, Feinberg said these relationships can sometimes become high-conflict and even abusive, with effects lasting into adulthood. He added that sibling relations can have almost as much of an influence on children's lifelong well-being, mental health, social competence and quality of romantic relationships, as parenting. "There's a lot of jealousy, rivalry, physical aggression and other dimensions of conflict that go on in somebut not allsibling relationships," Feinberg said. "And while some researchers are working in the field of sibling relations, there's still not a lot of understanding about how to deal with the more violent aspects of sibling relationships." Feinberg said that while he and other researchers can use their previous work to predict how the pandemic is affecting families, there is still a lot they do not know. He recently received COVID-19 seed grant funding to study the effects of the pandemic on two groups of families that the researchers have been studying for several years. "We're hoping to survey these families several times during the pandemic and over the next few years to examine how lockdowns and other changes to daily life initially disrupted their lives and how they're adjusting over time," Feinberg said. One of the groups being studied is part of a randomized trial of Family Foundations, a program developed by Feinberg that helps expecting couples build a strong, supportive parenting team with a series of brief sessions both prior to and after the birth of their child. According to Feinberg, the program is based on the idea that a solid coparenting relationshipone that is built on teamwork and mutual supportis one of the fundamental bases of family well-being. So far, the study has found that parents who have gone through the program tend to be less stressed, less depressed and less anxious than parents who have not, and as a result are more patient and less harsh with their children. And, Feinberg said, they may be weathering the COVID-19 pandemic better. "Our initial results are suggesting that during the pandemic, those Family Foundations families are also doing better, relative to other families," he said. "This family support and prevention approach appears to have long-term benefits, even in this unexpected and acutely stressful situation." While the pandemic has put unprecedented stress on nearly everyone, Feinberg said it is still possible to find a silver lining in what is an incredibly tough situation. In normal times, many families are operating under busy schedules, and the pandemic may have given them an unexpected gifttime. "Despite the stress and hardships, I hope that families can also enjoy their time together," Feinberg said. "If families are finding themselves spending more time together, I'm hoping they can have less distractions and more opportunities to play games, enjoy each other, and do things together that they normally wouldn't." Explore further Study shows pandemic stress affects how parents feed their children London, Feb 24 : Another 8,489 people in Britain have tested positive for Covid-19, bringing the total number of coronavirus cases in the country to 4,134,639, according to official figures released Tuesday. The country also reported another 548 coronavirus-related deaths. The total number of coronavirus-related deaths in Britain now stands at 121,305. These figures only include the deaths of people who died within 28 days of their first positive test, the Xinhua news agency reported. The latest figures were revealed as nearly 18 million people in Britain have been given the first jab of the coronavirus vaccine. Following his announcement of the roadmap out of lockdown on Monday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Tuesday that he is "hopeful" that all coronavirus restrictions in England will be removed by June 21. "I'm hopeful but obviously nothing can be guaranteed and it all depends on the way we continue to be prudent and continue to follow the guidance in each stage," he said during a visit to a south London school. "That's why it's so important to proceed in the cautious way that we are," he said. England is currently under the third national lockdown since the outbreak of the pandemic in the country. Similar restriction measures are also in place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Also on Tuesday, Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced the roadmap out of the coronavirus lockdown with four people from two households being allowed to meet outdoors from March 15. The British government is only responsible for coronavirus restrictions in England. The devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are responsible for their own policies in relation to public health matters. To bring life back to normal, countries such as Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the United States have been racing against time to roll out coronavirus vaccines. Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19) Revellers at an illegal party held in a Croydon barber shop have been fined for breaching Covid-19 rules. Police busted the rave at the Kiss Kuts barber shop on London Road in South London at about midnight on 19th February. The alarm was raised when someone heard loud music coming from the business. Officers found 22 people at the party ignoring the Covid restrictions. Police cam footage shows officers entering the property and then heading to the back of the business where the party-goers were hidden. 22 people were found at the illegal party at a barber shop in Croydon last weekend They were all sent home and now face fines for breaching health regulations. The event's organiser is facing a fine of 10,000. Inspector Kathy Morteo said: 'Everyone knows that it is neither lawful nor safe for such events to take place while the country is dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. 'The Health Protection Regulations are in place for good and easily understood reasons, and it is our role to enforce them in London.' Police have broken up several Covid parties since the start of the third lockdown. Last month two officers were injured when they broke one up in Kensington, London, which had about 200 attendees. They became 'hostile and pushed' to avoid fines. In Sheffield, a student party attended by up to 150 revellers was shut down by police for breaching coronavirus rules. The broken up party comes after several similar illegal parties have been broken up across the UK The organiser of the illegal party held in Croydon, south London, has been fined 10,000 Footage showed dozens of students attempting to flee the Ranmoor Student Village as officers descended on the illicit party on Thursday. Police issued more than 34,000 worth of fines following the gathering, including a 10,000 penalty for the organiser of the party and more than 30 Fixed Penalty Notices of 800. And in Basingstoke, Hampshire Police were called to a home where a total of six people were gathered. The Lockdown-flouting revellers told police they had no idea there was a pandemic because 'we don't watch the news' when their party was busted. Under current lockdown laws, police can take action against Britons who meet in 15-person, including breaking up illegal gatherings and issuing fines - from 200 for the first offence, doubling to a maximum of 6,400. If people hold, or are involved in holding, an illegal gathering of over 30 people, the police can issue fines of 10,000. People attending illegal house parties face 800 fines as police tighten their clampdown on rule-breaking. Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. 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Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Russian opposition leader quotes Sermon on the Mount in court as prison appeal is rejected Former atheist Alexei Navalny says new faith helps him face challenges Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Russian opposition leader, lawyer and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny paraphrased Jesus Sermon the Mount and made pop culture references during his final argument before a Moscow City Court rejected the appeal of his prison sentence relating to an alleged probation violation on Saturday. Navalny, who was arrested on Jan. 17 upon returning to Russia after recovering at a Berlin hospital from a near-fatal nerve agent poisoning, told the judge he was not guilty of parole violations because he was unable to report to the Moscow prison service last year since he was recovering in Germany, according to reports. In his closing statement before the sentencing, Navalny reportedly quoted the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount and said he believes those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are blessed, reports The Associated Press. Navalny, who is known by some as the man Vladimir Putin fears most, reportedly told the court that he was once an atheist, but now his belief in God helps him face his challenges. Even though our country is built on injustice and we all constantly face injustice ... we also see that millions of people, tens of millions of people, want righteousness, Navalny was quoted as saying. They want the righteousness and sooner or later they will have it. He said Russia was built on injustice and that tens of millions of people want the truth. He said he did not regret returning to Russia after his hospital release though it brought his arrest. To live is to risk it all, he said, in reference to Rick and Morty, an animated sci-fi sitcom. Otherwise, you're just an inert chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you. Navalny, who leads the Russia of the Future Party, said the government scares people to persuade them that they are alone. He encouraged Russians to resist authoritarian pressure. Our Voldemort in his palace also wants me to feel cut off, he said in a Harry Potter reference, referring to Putin. The opposition leaders arrest ignited widespread protests across Russia, leading to thousands of arrests. He was sent to the Matrosskaya Tushina prison in Moscow on Jan. 18. On Saturday, the court decreased his prison sentence from two years and eight months to just over two years and six months, AP notes. He will likely be sent to a remote penal colony. Navalny mocked the ruling while standing in a glass cage in the courtroom. They've reduced the sentence by one-and-a-half months. Great! he was quoted as saying. Later in the day, Navalny returned to court and was fined for slandering a World War II veteran. Navalny said this is an effort to disparage him further and has rejected the slander charges. Last Wednesday, the European Court of Human Rights ordered Russia to temporarily release Navalny because it could not provide sufficient safeguards for his life and health. However, Russia called the courts ruling a blatant and gross interference in the judicial affairs of a sovereign state, The Guardian notes. Last August, Navalny became suddenly sick on a plane over Siberia and was rushed to receive treatment in Germany, where he lay in a coma for two weeks. Reports suggest that Navalny was poisoned by a chemical weapon called Novichok, a powder or liquid agent that can only be produced in specialized laboratories. Navalny blames the government for his nearly lethal poisoning. But the Kremlin denies this allegation. According to BBC, Navalny claims to have tracked down a weapons expert behind the poisoning who said the poison was mainly laced in his underwear, but this was also dismissed as false by the Russian government. Tens of thousands have called for his release. AP reported over 5,100 protesters were arrested, and some were beaten. Navalnys wife was among those detained. Navalnys Twitter account has over 2.5 million followers and appeals to a younger audience. His recent video, Putins palace. History of worlds largest bribe, has garnered over 113 million views and details the extravagance of the Black Sea estate allegedly built for Putin. Protestors chanted, Putin, resign! and Putin, thief,"the news agency reports, adding that it is the largest, most widespread wave of demonstrations in Russia for years. The demonstrators believe the truth is on their side, protestor Leonid Martynov said. Navalny has accused Putin of sucking the blood out of Russia through concentrating power in the Kremlin and contends the United Russia Party is full of crooks and thieves, according to BBC. U.S. Secretary of StateAnthony Blinken tweeted on Feb. 2 that the United States is "deeply concerned by Russias actions toward Navalny. We reiterate our call for his immediate and unconditional release as well as the release of all those wrongfully detained for exercising their rights, Blinken stated. Navalny founded the Anti-Corruption Foundation and is known for his investigations of the Russian state and officials, according to the Yale World Fellows program, where he was a world fellow in 2010. Navalny attempted to run for president of Russia in 2018 but was banned by Russias Central Electoral Commission and Supreme Court, according to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. I believe that one of the main problems in modern Russia is corruption, Navalny said in a statement on the Yale World Fellows website. I focus on combating it using all available methods: conducting investigations, publicizing facts about abuses of power, and organizing peaceful protests. The 44-year-old activist and his wife, Yulia, have two children: Daria and Zakhar. State-county discussions about the site began in early December, Cardenas said. But the actual build, which involved officials and staff from both jurisdictions, took about 10 days from the time contracts were signed in mid-January to Jan. 19, when the public-facing component was up and running; and to Jan. 21 and 22 when pilot sites for the two counties went live. We had a very, very aggressive timeline. Theres no shortage of interest in trying to get the vaccine, and so it was really kind of an all-hands effort, Cardenas said. Weve had so many situations where weve had to lean on each other and work together in a really strong collaborative way it really came out and showed itself during these moments, so were just really proud of the engagement and the way we have been able to partner up to this point. State CIO Amy Tong, director of the California Department of Technology (CDT), affirmed via email that the California Department of Public Health and CDT partnered with L.A. County to build and pilot myturn.ca.gov. Los Angeles County made crucial design decisions to make My Turn work in their jurisdiction during the pilot phase. The site streamlines the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines through county clinics and mega-vaccine events managed by local health departments, medical providers and CalOES/FEMA, Tong said, referring to the California Governors Office of Emergency Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Following the two counties, locations in San Francisco and Oakland that use the technology have come online, Tong said, indicating other counties will follow. More than 2 million Californians have used the site to register and learn their eligibility, she said, and more than 382,000 vaccinations have been completed as a result. We had a very, very aggressive timeline. Theres no shortage of interest in trying to get the vaccine, and so it was really kind of an all-hands effort, Cardenas said. Weve had so many situations where weve had to lean on each other and work together in a really strong collaborative way it really came out and showed itself during these moments, so were just really proud of the engagement and the way we have been able to partner up to this point. State CIO Amy Tong, director of the California Department of Technology (CDT), affirmed via email that the California Department of Public Health and CDT partnered with L.A. County to build and pilot myturn.ca.gov. Los Angeles County made crucial design decisions to make My Turn work in their jurisdiction during the pilot phase. The site streamlines the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines through county clinics and mega-vaccine events managed by local health departments, medical providers and CalOES/FEMA, Tong said, referring to the California Governors Office of Emergency Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Following the two counties, locations in San Francisco and Oakland that use the technology have come online, Tong said, indicating other counties will follow. More than 2 million Californians have used the site to register and learn their eligibility, she said, and more than 382,000 vaccinations have been completed as a result. For the county, the development need centered on a solution or solutions that could handle the tracking and scheduling of vaccine appointments as well as clinic site setup, appointment registration and vaccine administration details, Cardenas said. The project was initially called LAVax, and would use Accenture technology and would connect via interface to CalVax, the state vaccination signup website. After a discussion with state officials, however, Los Angeles County officials decided to join the initiative and become the lead county to pilot the solution. It comprises three main components, the CIO said: My Turn provider, powered by Salesforce, which providers will utilize around vaccine receipt; the My Turn public site, where residents can go to sign up, which relies on technology from Skedulo; and the My Turn clinic element, which officials use to access appointment records when residents receive their actual shots at a county drive-through; its powered by Salesforce. Cardenas estimated the new solutions have reduced the time residents require to receive the vaccine at a drive-through meeting a clinician to getting the shot from more than five minutes to less than half that. Throughput and training, he said, have been improved, and the interface has been accomplished in just four to five intuitively designed screens. Our expansion goal for the state is that they push out to all counties; our goal within the county is to push out to more providers so that we can get a much more consistent experience across all the major sites where people might be vaccinated, so that were not seeing a lot of people struggling, having to jump from appointment system to appointment system to get their vaccine, he said. Its unclear whether this initiative will yield other IT contracts, but Cardenas said connecting with residents who arent tech-savvy remains a huge focus, adding: I think if theres ever a place where were going to be focusing our attention from a technical standpoint, it would be trying to solve that problem . Our expansion goal for the state is that they push out to all counties; our goal within the county is to push out to more providers so that we can get a much more consistent experience across all the major sites where people might be vaccinated, so that were not seeing a lot of people struggling, having to jump from appointment system to appointment system to get their vaccine, he said. Its unclear whether this initiative will yield other IT contracts, but Cardenas said connecting with residents who arent tech-savvy remains a huge focus, adding: I think if theres ever a place where were going to be focusing our attention from a technical standpoint, it would be trying to solve that problem . For other governments contemplating a similar project or engagement, he recommended keeping the process streamlined and expectations minimal. In creating the system, Cardenas said, officials tried to not overcomplicate things and asked, what are the absolute requirements that we have. Doing so and avoiding making a My Turn visit a very significant data collection experience that would prolong the encounter, helped on throughput. An entitys infrastructure may be a limiting factor, the CIO said, noting that L.A. County currently runs five large megapod sites. He praised the countys infrastructure response team, which has helped set up local networks and Wi-Fi, as well as county IT support teams noting this support structure is going to be heavily leaned on as clinics are set up. Deployment of the My Turn COVID-19 vaccination eligibility website recently has already yielded millions of registrations, hundreds of thousands of shots in arms and some significant technology takeaways.The website, myturn.ca.gov , was deployed late last month as a collaboration among state officials; the technology companies Accenture Salesforce and Skedulo; and the counties of Los Angeles and San Diego , which were the first to pilot the site. The reach and impact of My Turn, which lets Californians learn when theyre eligible to be vaccinated and book their shots, are likely to continue to grow. The lessons learned are already considerable, David Cardenas , chief information officer for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health , told Techwire. Among the takeaways: Texas City resident Crystal Gutierrez recently put on her own shoes for the first time in nearly half a year to head to HCA Houston Healthcare Clear Lake. She now uses a wheelchair; her legs still dont work since spending months in a hospital bed 152 days to be exact battling COVID-19. Her pink hair is short, since her husband, Rafael, shaved her head to hide the bald spots resulting from the length of her treatment. Lets start fresh, she told Rafael. Even though her breath is still somewhat labored and movement remains a challenge, Crystal had a mission. This time, she wasnt going to HCA Clear Lake for a checkup. This time, she wanted to thank the nurses and doctors who saved her life. On Feb. 12, Crystal, 36, her husband and children, were greeted by chief nursing officer Puneet Freibott and Peyton Elliott, CEO at HCA Houston Healthcare Medical Center. Then she saw Dr. Keshava Rajagopal, the cardiac surgeon who performed the emergency procedures that kept her alive. I just told him thank you for not giving up on me, she said. It was the first time Rajagopal was able to hear her voice. Im a husband and father, and I understand what her family went through, to have a child who does not know if his mother is going to make it home, Rajagopal said. He remembers at the most dire moments telling other doctors and nurses, We cannot let this woman die. Still, in her critical condition, survival was a struggle. They gave me a 15 to 30 percent chance of making it, Crystal said. They told my family to call a priest twice. On HoustonChronicle.com: 'The true, staggering toll': U.S. surpasses 500,000 COVID-19 deaths The odds stacked against her, Crystal remembers telling her nurses that she couldnt make it. I was ready to give up, she said. But her health care team wouldnt let her. The doctors and nurses kept up the fight. They made sure they were doing everything they could. Seeing them again brought tears to her eyes and Rafaels. I tried not to show it, but there was a moment I had to turn my head the other way, he said. It really hit me. HCA has gone above and beyond for us. Crystal was 36 weeks pregnant in June when she noticed her breathing was labored. At first, she attributed it to her pregnancy. Rafael wanted her to be safe in the pandemic, so he preached caution. Crystal had avoided the grocery store and even refrained from descending the stairs of their second-floor apartment. Regardless, we did end up getting sick, Crystal said. We both got COVID at the same time, but we were in denial. We thought it was a summer cold. We got Sudafed and Mucinex. The symptoms worsened. Finally, Crystal called a doctor, who insisted she get tested right away. She headed to the emergency room at HCA Clear Lake. Nurses noted she had no fever, but they ordered X-rays, gave her a Tylenol and started an IV with fluids. Then her temperature began to rise, and the X-rays revealed fluid in her lungs. The symptoms were consistent with COVID, Crystal recalled. I broke down and cried, just hearing, You tested positive. I was worried about my husband, my family. My sister had just been over, too. At first, she was placed in a room for COVID patients but was soon moved to labor and delivery. Then she called Rafael, still sick himself, to report that she was getting an emergency C-section. The anesthesiologist offered to pray with me, Crystal recalled. And shes the one who took the first picture of my son. Once the baby Matthew was delivered, he went straight to a NICU incubator. They tested him daily for COVID-19, and when Rafael was better after a month, Matthew was finally able to go home. But his mother remained in the hospital, unable to see her son until October. Immediately after Matthew was born, Crystal was sent to the ICU. She remembers being told, This is life or death right now. You need to do breathe with this mask or youll be intubated, and theres no guarantee youll come out. It was like a prophecy. On July 6, Crystal was intubated and placed in a medically induced coma. While under, she was transported to different hospitals for treatments. Rajagopal was at HCA Clear Lake when he first learned about Crystal through Hannan Chaugle a physician on his team at Houston Heart, a cardiology department for HCA Houston. Chaugle served as her doctor in Clear Lake. Together, Chaugle and Rajagopal determined that an Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation, or ECMO treatment a temporary machine that functions as a patients heart and lungs was necessary. Then, the two surgeons realized that Clear Lake did not have a bed for Crystal. She was transported to HCA Houston Northwest, then a few days later to the HCA Houston Healthcare location in the Medical Center. After Crystals lung function improved, Rajagopal said their team was able to wean her off the ECMO and performed a tracheostomy. Then, she proceeded to deteriorate, Rajagopal said. Her lungs failed. Doctors attached her to more machines. She would have died if she wouldnt have gone on ECMO, Rajagopal said. This was absolutely life or death. Crystal doesnt remember any of it. Everything was relayed to her later. On HoustonChronicle.com: How will the deadly winter storm affect COVID vaccinations in Texas? An expert explains. When I woke up, I was in the Medical Center, Crystal said. The hardest part was the separation anxiety. The lights go out, and no visitors are allowed. Its lonely. Im used to being with my husband and kids. She had missed one of her older sons birthday and her wedding anniversary. And she wanted to see her new son. When visitors were again allowed, her father, Jimmy Martinez, came during the week. Rafael, who was acting as the sole parent to the children Mark, 7, Rafael Jr., 6, Angel Gutierrez, 4, and Matthew visited on weekends. During the week, he was a father and Zoom teacher, and could not return to his job. Instead, he relied on his savings for income until her release. I was able to save enough to float us through the months, he said. It was so stressful. I tried to do the best that I could. Sometimes, Rafael would load the boys up and drive to the beach. We would hold hands, walk in the water and just pray, he recalled. We would pretend to talk to her. I would do whatever it takes to just get her back home. At night, he said, the hospital often called for permission for another surgery or procedure. He waited until his children went to sleep so they would not see him cry. Then, I would just let the waterworks go, he said. Crystal struggled to come out of her coma. Sometimes, Rafael recalled, she would seem alert, then start tearing at tubes and have to be sedated. At one point, her eyes opened, and they didnt know if it was her body on its own or her, Rafael said. They didnt know if she was brain dead. Finally, on a video call, he told her that they were waiting for her to come home. Right as he was about to hang up, she cried out, I love you. I got on my knees and thanked God, Rafael recalled. Two days before Thanksgiving, Crystal was discharged and able to finally go home. Come Christmas, the hospital staff that had become like a second family ensured they were able to celebrate. Jennifer Milholland, critical care manager at HCA, explained that all of the nurses banded together to host a toy and diaper drive for the family. Her story broke our hearts, Milholland said. She had to walk away from her newborn, because she was so sick. She was at deaths door more than once. The staff sort of adopted her and made it our mission to help her out. Recovering from COVID-19 isnt easy, Crystal said, especially after intubation and months of bed rest. Recovery still means a lingering cough, she said. I lost muscles. I cant walk. My feet feel like theyre asleep. Im still on oxygen. Losing movement has been a challenge, especially as a mother of four. When a tornado hit Texas City in January, she could not get up to find safety. With the recent freezing weather, she again felt trapped. But she is making progress. Last week, she rolled into the kitchen, parked her wheelchair and used the countertop to prop herself up. I washed dishes, she said. I washed a few bottles, and I put some away. She called Rafael to show him that she was standing. I want you to see that Im trying, Crystal said. Being in the hospital for so long has made her appreciate being with her family and doing the little things even dishes. Its the simple things, so simple you take for granted, she said. The main thing is not to forget the simplest things. Lindsay Peyton is a Houston-based freelance writer. James Bonet's participation in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection was already documented on Facebook, where he was on video smoking marijuana inside the Capitol. On Wednesday, as the 29-year-old Glens Falls man was arraigned virtually in a Washington, D.C., court on his latest federal charges, he learned he faces evidence that could include footage taken by police body cameras and surveillance video from the Capitol. Evidence in the case was likely to be "voluminous," Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexis Loeb told U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan. "We're working through issues related to body-warn cameras, Capitol surveillance footage," the prosecutor said, adding that the government planned to move for a protective order to keep the evidence confidential. "We do have some discovery specific to Mr. Bonet to produce in the next couple of weeks that I would need some time to review." Bonet, who initially was charged with misdemeanors, pleaded not guilty at his virtual arraignment to charges of violent entry and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building; entering and remaining in a restricted building without authority; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building. In a court filing Wednesday, Bonet's attorney, federal public defender Jose Alejandro German, asked the U.S. attorney's office for the District of Columbia for timely disclosure of all information that could be favorable to the defense, as required by law. Bonet was one of hundreds of zealous supporters of former President Donald J. Trump who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 as members of Congress were certifying the results of now-President Joseph Bidens November victory. Bonet, who worked as a manager in a Saratoga Springs business, was arrested after his co-workers told the FBI they saw a photo Bonet shared on Facebook of him smoking pot in the Capitol, a criminal complaint said. "We made it in the building bitches! We're taking it back! We are taking it back, we made it in the building!" Bonet said in a video on Facebook, according to the complaint. The complaint said Bonet openly talks about government conspiracy theories at work" and tried to convince co-workers that Trump's re-election had been "stolen." Bonet, who remains free, cannot leave the 32-county Northern District of New York without court permission. The judge set Bonet's next appearance for April 22. A defiant Nine Entertainment Co chief executive Hugh Marks has criticised industry rivals for slashing jobs and pay during the coronavirus pandemic and for failing to diversify their businesses after signing off on a stronger than expected half-year profit. Nines share price surged 9.7 per cent to close at $2.93 on Wednesday after the diversified media company reported a half-year profit of $181.9 million, up 79 per cent on last year, and issued upbeat earnings forecasts for the full-year. Mr Marks, who is set to leave the media company in coming weeks, attributed the strong result to a $100 million cost-cutting program announced last February that he said is now almost complete, two years ahead of schedule. The results are the last for outgoing chief executive Hugh Marks. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen When we went into COVID what a lot of other businesses did is they paused pay or cut back peoples hours, Mr Marks told this masthead. We just said we are going to keep paying everyone and were going to keep everyone employed, but we will make the structural changes that we would have made over the next two or three years now. Once you do that, those structural changes when the market recovers are all ready for the upside. Nine owns The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age as well as television network Channel Nine, radio stations such as 2GB and 3AW and streaming service Stan. It also has a majority stake in real estate listings website Domain. This change reflects the analytical rigor of our MBA programs, which have long developed business leaders and today more than ever before need to be ready to apply their analytics skills to make data-driven strategic decisions, said Brad Staats. The four MBA programs at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School have received STEM designation. At UNC Kenan-Flagler students can earn their MBAs in the Full-Time MBA, Evening MBA, Weekend Executive MBA and online MBA@UNC programs. All MBA students in all four programs will now graduate with a STEM-designated degree. The four MBA programs received the STEM designation after the UNC System reviewed and approved UNC Kenan-Flaglers request to change the programs classification using the Instructional Program (CIP) code of the National Education Statistics. This change reflects the analytical rigor of our MBA programs, which have long developed business leaders and today more than ever before need to be ready to apply their analytics skills to make data-driven strategic decisions, said Brad Staats, associate dean of MBA Programs, professor of operations and faculty director of the Center for the Business of Health. In recent years, we have significantly enhanced our analytical offerings, from innovative new courses to weaving the related knowledge and skills throughout the curriculum. Our students graduate with the skills valued by employers and needed for long-term career success, said Staats. For international students, a STEM-designated MBA offers a two-year extension of the Optional Practical Training (OPT). In its Full-Time MBA program, UNC Kenan-Flagler offers concentrations in Business Analytics and Management Science as well as Technology and Innovation Management. It also offers concentrations in Capital Markets and Investments, Consulting, Corporate Finance, Marketing, Operations Management, Real Estate, Energy, Entrepreneurship, Healthcare and Sustainable Enterprise. About the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School Consistently ranked one of the world's best business schools, UNC Kenan-Flagler offers a broad range of programs Undergraduate, MBA, Master of Accounting, PhD and Executive Development and extraordinary, real-life learning experiences. Faculty demonstrate unparalleled dedication to students learning and a commitment to world-class research that addresses critical business challenges. Contributing to the Schools thought leadership is the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, which promotes innovative, market-based solutions to vital economic issues. UNC Kenan-Flaglers collaborative culture is rooted in core values that date back to its founding in 1919, and graduates are renowned as effective, principled leaders with the technical knowledge and leadership skills to deliver results in the global business environment. WORCESTER, Mass., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The 800 registered nurses at St. Vincent Hospital (SVH), who are negotiating a new contract with Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare, delivered the required 10-day notice to hospital management on Tuesday evening, notifying them of their intent to strike the hospital beginning at 6 a.m. on Monday, March 8 if Tenet continues to refuse to heed nurses' call to increase staffing levels to better protect their patients during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and beyond. The SVH nurses, who are represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), voted overwhelmingly on Feb. 10 to authorize the strike, which was followed by the 31st negotiation session with management on Feb. 11, where management for the 31st time refused to engage in any discussion of the nurses' proposals to improve conditions that the nurses claim place their patients' health and safety in jeopardy nearly every day. "Nurses have been pushed to the brink with unsafe staffing conditions by Tenet for more than two years. We refuse to be pushed any further and are now ready to do whatever it takes to ensure the safety of our patients," said Marlena Pellegrino, RN, a frontline nurse at the hospital and co-chair of the nurses local bargaining unit with the Massachusetts Nurses Association, "While it is an agonizing decision to decide to strike, we are committed to do so on March 8 unless Tenet comes to its senses and finally puts its concern for patients ahead of its desire to increase its profits at our patients' expense." The vote to authorize a strike was scheduled after Tenet issued what it called its "last, best and final" offer at negotiations on Jan. 28, an offer which once again, failed to include any proposal to address the hospital's longstanding staffing/patient safety crisis. The nurses were further outraged the day after the vote when the parties held contract negotiations on Feb. 11, where the nurses put forth a reasonable adjustment to their staffing proposal to help reach a settlement. Unfortunately, Tenet once again refused to engage in any discussion of improvements to patient care conditions, while the nurses report their patients in Worcester are experiencing an increase in patient falls, an increase in patients suffering from preventable bed sores, potentially dangerous delays in patients receiving needed medications and other treatments all due to lack of appropriate staffing, excessive patient assignments, and cuts to valuable support staff. Adding insult to injury, that same day, Tenet announced annual profits of more than $400 million. The nurses continue to hope that with ongoing public pressure, Tenet will come back to the table to negotiate in good faith to reach an agreement to avert the need for a strike. In the meantime, the nurses are actively engaged in preparing for the strike, including having secured a strike headquarters across the street from the hospital. The strike would be the second strike by nurses at St Vincent Hospital against Tenet, as the nurses waged a successful 49-day strike in 2000 to achieve their first union contract. That strike ended with a settlement reached in the DC offices of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, where the nurses achieved landmark provisions to limit the use of mandatory overtime as a staffing tool, one of the first settlements in the nation to provide such a protection. Background on Staffing Crisis For months, nurses have been struggling to care for patients without appropriate staffing levels, adequate personal protective equipment, and in the wake of furloughs and daily staff reductions that have left them unable to provide the care and attention patients, particularly desperately ill COVID-19 infected patients require. The nurses' concerns have been documented in real time as nurses have filed more than 500 reports to management citing staffing and patient care conditions that they believed threatened the safety of their patients. This includes 76 such reports in the month of January alone, more than two a day. Nurses also have sent personal emails to management and confronted the hospitals' recalcitrant CEO with their concerns on her visits to hospital units. Other efforts to move to Tenet to improve care include: Last February, more than 70 percent of nurses signed and delivered a petition to Tenet administration calling for safer staffing levels and an end to management's punitive treatment of nurses, and this was before the onset of the pandemic. In March, again, prior to the first surge in the pandemic, more than 200 nurses from every unit and every shift attended a negotiation session with management to provide alarming personal testimony about the impact current staffing levels were having on patient care, with numerous nurses describing conditions at the hospital as a "travestydisgraceful...and shameful." They described numerous patient falls, the onset of serious preventable complications, suicidal patients being left without one-on-one monitoring, and even preventable deaths directly attributable to inadequate staffing levels and unsafe nurse patient assignments. In May, after management implemented a furlough of staff, and daily staffing cuts (a process referred to as flexing staff) and other negative staffing practices, the nurses cast an overwhelming vote of "no confidence" in hospital CEO Carolyn Jackson and her management team. No action was taken to address the concerns. and her management team. No action was taken to address the concerns. During the last 10 months alone, as a result of these conditions, more than 100 nurses have left the facility for other hospitals, specifically UMass Memorial, with better staffing, pay and benefits. In December, more than 400 nurses participated in an informational picket to call for public support for safer staffing, particularly in light of the growing second surge of the pandemic. And starting in January, dozens of nurses have been participating in daily picketing in an effort to move Tenet to address our number one concern safe staffing. Still, management has done little or nothing to address nurses' concerns. In fact, as nurses prepared for the second surge, the hospital refused to put in place standards of care, such as the creation of COVID specific units with strict limits on nurses' patient assignments to no more than three patients that were in place during the first surge. Now, to the shock and dismay of the nurses, the hospital is insisting on comingling COVID and non COVID patients; and creating conditions that force nurses to take up to five patients at one time a reckless practice that endangers both patients and nurses. They have also laid off secretaries and other support staff, thus exacerbating an already dangerous practice environment. When the nurses finally convinced management to meet with them to hear their concerns and recommendations, the chief nursing officer abruptly ended the meeting, refusing to address any of the issues raised. "Our nurses have been sacrificing for our patients, family and communities throughout this pandemic," said Dominique Muldoon, a nurse who worked on the COVID floor during the first surge and co-chair of the nurses local bargaining unit. "Nurses have moved out of their homes or isolated from loved ones. Our members have been exposed or infected with this virus in our efforts to provide care to these very sick patients. Our members have witnessed unbearable suffering and been the only ones with patients, or been the conduit of all communication with families as they watched their loved ones die. For nurses, this is our duty and our obligation, and all that we ask is to be treated with respect and to be given the resources to perform this noble work." Staffing/Patient Care Improvements Sought by Nurses The nurses have spent more than a year in negotiations with management for a new contract that would include the staffing improvements nurses need to provide safe patient care, as well as improvements in pay and benefits to compete with other hospitals in the region, with the staffing improvements the key stumbling block to a settlement, and the issue Tenet refuses to address. Those improvements include: Improvements to the current staffing guidelines to ensure all nurses have safe patient assignments and support staff to ensure safe patient care. These improvements are consistent with the standard of care provided at UMass Memorial Medical Center and a number of other hospitals in the state. This is a key point for reporters to understand, as Tenet falsely claims that St. Vincent has some of the best staffing in the state. First, this is not true. Staffing is better at UMass Memorial Medical Center. Creation of a pool of nurses who are expert in caring for critically ill patients, which is essential to support nurses in the emergency department who in addition to taking care of five or six patients, are also expected to care for patients in need of ICU level care, who are waiting for a bed to open in the ICU. The addition of what are called "STAT and Rapid Response" nurses, which are nurses who would be available to be assigned to floors and units when census increases, and the needs of the patients are more complex. These nurses are especially important to support newly graduated nurses, who may lack the experience to care for more challenging patients, or patients who may be in crisis. Again, UMass Memorial Medical Center provides this level of support to its nurses. Tenet Can Afford Safe Patient Care While nurses call for improved staffing levels, adequate PPE and the pay and benefits they need to recruit and retain the staff they need to meet the challenges of the pandemic, Tenet Healthcare's focus has been on cutting corners and recouping revenue to boost their bottom line, expecting nurses and patients to pay the price for their decisions. Back in April of last year, Tenet's corporate leaders in Dallas touted their plan to use furloughs and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from the federal stimulus package "to ensure we were focused on maximizing our cash position" not to improve care for patients, according to the Dallas Morning News. Tenet has received more than $2.8 billion in loans and grants from the federal government as part of the CARES Act. During the first three quarters of 2020, the corporation generated more than $12 billion in revenue, and now has cash or cash equivalents of more than $3 billion, a 10-fold increase over 2019. In addition, while other hospitals have cut back on elective surgeries to free up additional staff to support care for COVID-19 patients, Tenet has pushed ahead with procedures, such as knee and hip replacements, colonoscopies and cosmetic surgeries to generate revenue at the expense of care for COVID patients. St. Vincent Hospital has been one of Tenet's most profitable hospitals, and St. Vincent is one of the most profitable hospitals in Massachusetts. In fact, St. Vincent Hospital generated more than $355 million between 2014 and 2019. In 2019, the hospital posted record profits of more than $73 million, a profit margin of 14 percent, four times the state average for hospitals and five times the profit margin for UMass Memorial Medical Center, a facility that provides the staffing levels the nurses at St. Vincent are seeking, while also paying their nurses significantly more and providing better health and pension benefits. Nurses believe that Tenet can easily afford to provide the improvements the nurses are seeking, but the nurses see the decisions being made on the local level being driven by corporate heads in Dallas. Nurses view St. Vincent CEO Carolyn Jackson, a chemical engineer by training with no prior experience in caring for patients, as a willing tool for Tenet corporate management in Texas. "Tenet is a for profit healthcare conglomerate, and we cannot stand by while they take advantage of a global pandemic to, in the words of their Dallas-based CEO. 'maintain a strong cash position.' The voices of our bedside nurses must be heard," explained Marie Ritacco, RN, a nurse in the Post Anesthesia Care Unit and Vice President of the Massachusetts Nurses Association. "We hold that patient care and the safety of the caregivers must be prioritized before profits going to Dallas and the shareholders. We will do everything in our power to shed sunlight on the decisions we believe fail to protect our patients, our community, and our families." MassNurses.org Facebook.com/MassNurses Twitter.com/MassNurses Instagram.com/MassNurses Founded in 1903, the Massachusetts Nurses Association is the largest union of registered nurses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Its 23,000 members advance the nursing profession by fostering high standards of nursing practice, promoting the economic and general welfare of nurses in the workplace, projecting a positive and realistic view of nursing, and by lobbying the Legislature and regulatory agencies on health care issues affecting nurses and the public. SOURCE Massachusetts Nurses Association Related Links http://www.massnurses.org It looks like mainstream media still favor terrorists, abortionists and socialists over conservatives even after they die. According to a report by News Busters, liberal figures which include terrorists and famed advocates of abortion and socialism have far nicer obituaries compared to conservatives. When Rush Limbaugh, a conservative radio star passed away this week, The New York Times made a sub-headline of his online obit saying that he pushed "talk radio to the right with misogynistic and racist language and conspiracy theories." Limbaugh's obituary on paper was even worse with words telling about his "grievances," "mistrust" and "hate." Another conservative who got the same treatment was Antonin Scalia. Justice Scalia was an icon in the Supreme Court for his acerbic dissents on laws and policies concerning gay rights, abortion and even religion. When it comes to his faith and his interpretation of the Constitution, Scalia was a bold fundamentalist in the face of opposition. But when he died in five years ago in 2016, the Washington Post published about him a headline that read: "Supreme Court conservative dismayed liberals." Despite the dour and negative headline by mainstream media, John Roberts who was Chief Justice during that time remembered Scalia as someone "extraordinary," "admired and treasured" not only by those he worked with but also by the country he served loyally. "On behalf of the Court and retired Justices, I am saddened to report that our colleague Justice Antonin Scalia has passed away," Roberts said. "He was an extraordinary individual and jurist, admired and treasured by his colleagues. His passing is a great loss to the Court and the country he so loyally served." Instead of a headline that should have focused on the legacy of Scalia or his impact to the country, the liberal media group used a big headline instead to say how the late Supreme Court justice was a dismay to his opponents in the liberal party. Scalia's obit headline was a far cry when Ruth Bader Ginsburg, another Supreme Court Justice and advocate of equal rights and gender equality including her strong stance in abortion, died last year. Her obit headline read from the Washington Post: "A pioneer devoted to equality." For the late Justice Ginsburg, "abortion rights are about equality" and her death put reproductive freedom more urgent than ever. Big stream media also called the cruel and famed terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi an "austere religious scholar" when he died in 2019. However, they seemed to forget that he was a cruel killer who executed prisoners of wars and killed masses using suicide bombers. For a cruel leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr's obit sounds a lot nicer in comparison to Scalia who actually spent almost 30 years of his life to protect the life of the American people. Fidel Castro was another example of the absolute bias by mainstream media. When he died, the New York Times seemed to cheer the late "revolutionary who defied the U.S." The Washington Post also recalled how he "remade Cuba." Both media outlets forgot to mention that as a Marxist-Leninist in Cuba, Castro was the first prime minister to establish a communist state in the West making him rule the country for almost five decades and stifled the country's political and economic freedoms. Former City Councilman Greg Brockhouse is trying to compel Mayor Ron Nirenberg to meet him on the debate stage. The former District 6 councilman issued a challenge to Nirenbergs campaign Tuesday seeking five debates with the mayor before the May election. Nirenbergs team has said the mayor wont debate one-on-one with Brockhouse, who nearly ousted him in a close, contentious runoff two years ago. Instead, the mayor plans to focus on the citys recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and implementing his workforce development plan, his team has said. On ExpressNews.com: In S.A. mayoral rematch, focus is on pandemic recovery, police reform Public debates are a responsibility that candidates for public office have to every voter, Brockhouse said. It is shameful, cowardly and undemocratic for Ron Nirenberg and his mouthpiece to arrogantly claim he is too busy to respect the voters enough to answer tough questions in a debate. So far, Nirenbergs camp is sticking to the no-debates plan. For one, the mayor is dealing with fallout from the recent winter freeze and ensuing damage wrought by power and water outages, campaign chairman Gilberto Ocanas said. The mayors advisers also dont see Brockhouse, who nearly won the mayors seat in 2019, as a credible challenger. If we were running against a former mayor, we should debate him or her, Ocanas said. But were running against a one-term councilman who says pretty outrageous things and not all of them are true. So you have to be wary of that Were not going to do mud-wrestling. Nirenberg will participate in candidate forums with Brockhouse, Ocanas said, pointing to a Feb. 13 forum sponsored by the Northeast Bexar County Democrats in which both men were present. On ExpressNews.com: Gameboard is set; bakers dozen challenging Mayor Nirenberg in May election Brockhouses team have pushed back on that, arguing that forums dont allow for true back-and-forth debate. Your strategy makes sense, Matt Mackowiak, Brockhouses chief campaign adviser, wrote to Ocanas on Tuesday. He cant run on his record. He doesnt want to answer questions. Brockhouse and four other mayoral candidates. not including Nirenberg were at an event billed as a debate Tuesday held at The Restoring Church. The event was scheduled for 6 p.m., around the same time the mayor holds his daily coronavirus briefings with Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff. Nirenbergs campaign hasnt completely shut the door on future debates, Ocanas said. Never say never, Ocanas said. Well evaluate it as we go along. jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFReports LONG BEACH TOWNSHIP, N.J. (AP) The federal government will recommend flood control measures including storm surge barriers, floodwalls, and elevating homes and other buildings in a report later this year on combating back bay flooding, a major problem in New Jersey that gets comparatively less attention than oceanfront storm surge. Since Nov. 2016, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been studying ways to reduce or prevent flooding along back bays in New Jersey and elsewhere. Governments in Massachusetts, California, Florida and Maine are among those that also have grappled with the issue. Such flooding caused major damage on the East Coast during Superstorm Sandy in 2012, even though more attention was paid to damage from oceanfront waves pounding on the beachfront. By contrast, back bay flooding is gradual and insidious, creeping up on areas fronting on bays or places with tributaries that swell with flood water and inundate homes and businesses. J. Bailey Smith, an Army Corps coastal expert overseeing the study, said on Monday that the agency will present its recommendations in July. During a webinar hosted by a special panel of the New Jersey state Assembly, Smith said the recommendations will include storm surge barriers, floodwalls, elevations, and other features. The Army Corps and state government have been building dunes and replenishing beaches for more than 30 years as a way to protect against deadly storms along the oceanfront. We often get asked why isnt there a similar solution already in place on the back bays, Smith said. Along the oceanfront, dunes and berms reduce damages and inundation associated with wave attack and storm surge. Along the back bays, the problem is tied to storm surge pouring through coastal inlets and raising the water surface elevation in the bay. In an interim report in March 2019, the Army Corps floated the possibility of storm surge gates across popular and widely used inlets up and down the Jersey Shore, including the Manasquan, Barnegat, Absecon and Great Egg Harbor inlets. Similar barriers have been proposed for waterways in New York like those already in place along the Mississippi River and in Venice, Holland and England. But other places, including Boston, considered the idea but decided the cost outweighs the benefits. Some environmental groups oppose such barriers, fearing the structures would restrict the tidal flow and sediment transport, and impede the migration of fish, including striped bass. The potential solutions to this problem are very different from on the oceanfront, Smith said. These potential solutions are much more complex and costly, but there is a clear need to consider and evaluate all options and thats what the New Jersey Back Bays Study aims to do. Natural solutions including so-called living shorelines, reefs, wetland restoration and submerged aquatic vegetation are also mentioned as possible solutions. Shawn LaTourette, New Jerseys acting environmental protection commissioner, said sea levels are rising at a faster rate in New Jersey than in many other places. He said pollutants such as heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are contributing to the higher water levels. It is coming, no matter what we do, he said. The study actually ran short of money and was halted in the fall of 2019. But Smith and other Army Corps officials said new funding should be in place shortly, and the study can resume once an Army assistant secretary approves it. It would be 2030 at the earliest before construction could begin on the project, which would still have to be approved and funded by Congress. The potential solutions are costly, Smith said. However, the cost of doing nothing is also staggering. About the photo: This March 14, 2017, photo shows Jim and Maryann ONeills home in a back bay neighborhood of Manahawkin N.J., surrounded by water after a moderate storm. Back bay flooding is a type of recurring nuisance flooding that affects millions of Americans and which experts agree has not been as widely addressed as oceanfront flooding, in part because potential solutions are much more difficult. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry) Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. The development of e-commerce and the accelerating urbanisation process is translating into a growing stock of urban warehouses in Poland which currently stands at approx. 1.6 million sqm, with the prospect of further growth. Over the last decade, industrial supply has more than tripled from 6.3 mill... [] Handout photo issued by Julien Behal Photography of Taoiseach Micheal Martin at Government Buildings in Dublin, where he addressed the nation and held a press conference afterwards. Tuesday February 23, 2021. PA Photo. The Government has conceded that the National Vaccination Programme is the only chance the country has of returning to normality a year into the pandemic. Taoiseach Micheal Martin pinned his hope on the vaccine roll-out as he published a new plan for managing the virus after ditching his original strategy of living with the virus. Launching the plan, called Covid-19 Resilience and Recovery 2021 The Path Ahead, Mr Martin said the end is truly in sight but added that the vaccine programme needed to be accelerated before the country could be reopened. The vaccination programme will completely change the landscape and transform the options available to us as a society for reopening and renewing our country, he said. Speaking at the same event, deputy chief medical officer Ronan Glynn said that the vaccine is our most powerful tool in battling the virus, and added: There are brighter days ahead. Reports that the EU would receive only half of its intended supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the second quarter of the year looked to overshadow the launch. However, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly insisted the shortage had been factored into the Governments target of having 60pc of the countrys adults fully vaccinated by the end of June. It is hoped 82pc of all adults will have received their first vaccine at the same date. The new plan was launched after the Cabinet agreed to extend Level 5 restrictions until April 5, while reopening schools and childcare on a phased basis. Around 320,000 students will return to school on March 1, including junior and senior infants, first and second class and Leaving Cert students. This will be reviewed by Nphet in two weeks and may then lead to the rest of primary school classes and fifth-year secondary students returning to school on March 15. Another review of schools will be carried out on April 12 and, if there are no concerns about the spread of the virus, all other classes may then return. Childcare will return on a phased basis on March 8, with the States Early Childhood Care and Education preschool scheme resuming first. By March 29, it is hoped all childcare services will return if transmission of the virus is under control. Business supports and the Pandemic Unemployment Payment will be extended until the end of June, under the new Covid plan. A review of overall coronavirus restrictions will be carried out in March ahead of plans to ease them on April 5. Read More However, the Government will only consider lifting the 5km travel ban and it will not permit inter-county movement in the next two months. It may also allow small groups of people meet outdoors, and some sporting activity. However, the Government did not provide details on what will be permitted. Another review will then be carried out in April ahead of restrictions possibly being eased further in May. It is expected construction will return in April, but the ban on building will remain in place next month despite Housing Minister Darragh OBrien saying he expected to return on March 5. The plan was described as damp squib and underwhelming by a number of senior Government sources yesterday. Tourism Minister Catherine Martin raised concern at Cabinet that the plan did not go far enough for sectors still shut down due to Government restrictions. Ms Martin told the Cabinet that sectors, especially those under her brief, expected a roadmap for exiting lockdown and may not believe the new plan contained one. Irish Hotels Federation president Elaina Fitzgerald Kane called for more support for her industry, saying a failure to do so will have ramifications for the future of Irelands tourism offering and for the economy that could take decades to remedy. Restaurants Association of Ireland CEO Adrian Cummins criticised the lack of details for when the hospitality industry could reopen. If we are all in this together why are we; the public, businesses and employees, not being informed of the plan for reopening sectors? Mr Cummins said. Labour Party leader Alan Kelly also said the plan lacked clear metrics and targets for easing restrictions and over-relies on vaccination roll-out. This is more of the same, with a reliance on continued lockdowns until vaccines reach enough of the population, Mr Kelly said. Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald criticised the Government for the delay in introducing a mandatory quarantine programme. People are told they cant travel 5km from their home and the Government still has a very reckless approach to international travel through our airports and ports, she said. Meanwhile, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly pulled out of an appearance on RTEs Prime Time. The move came after he faced criticism over comments he made about schools reopening on Monday night on RTE. His spokesperson said he had to focus on the vaccination programme. Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board to host health and wellbeing event This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Feb 24th, 2021 Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (BCUHB) is to host a virtual stall at its health and wellbeing event on 25 February. The virtual stall will focus on the COVID-19 vaccination and testing programme and is open at various times throughout the day for people to drop in via Microsoft Teams. It also features the COVID-19 Test, Trace and Protect programme as well as the latest info regarding the COVID-19 Vaccination Programme, with staff available to answer questions. The Bite Sized Health and Wellbeing event brings together various organisations and charities including BCUHB, Diabetes UK, Flint Library and Wellbeing Hub as well as many more. RCS Wales will be on hand to offer professional support for people to improve their wellbeing at work and experts from Groundwork North Wales Energy will also be holding talks to give people hints and tips on how people can reduce energy wastage and keep bills down. Wrexham and Flintshires Family Information Service will be providing information, advice and guidance to parents, carers and professionals for families and children from pre-birth to 19. For more information on these stalls, and many others, visit https://padlet.com/vicaragek/4iaf5e8sllik8l4m to find all the relevant links and times. Aspen, CO (81611) Today Partly cloudy with isolated thunderstorms possible. High 64F. Winds NNW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 30%.. Tonight Mainly clear skies. Low 39F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. The award has gone in this thirteenth edition to the two scientists who developed new nanomaterials with applications in solar energy and cutting-edge electronics The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category has gone in this thirteenth edition to Paul Alivisatos (University of California, Berkeley, United States) and Michael Gratzel (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland) for their fundamental contributions to the development of new nanomaterials already in use for the production of renewable energies and in latest-generation electronics. "Gratzel's groundbreaking work includes the invention of a dye-sensitized solar cell named after him," reads the committee's citation, while "Alivisatos has made pioneering contributions in using semiconductor nanocrystals for energy and display applications." Scientists have long been fascinated by the way in which light interacts with matter, and the quest to control this interaction in fine detail is at the basis of some of today's most powerful technologies. Alivisatos and Gratzel are leaders in controlling the play of light-matter through the use of nanomaterials that act upon the latter. The committee recognizes them as key figures in the fundamental science that led to "the development of nanostructured materials for energy-related applications." Gratzel - nominated by Jean S. Hesthaven, dean of the School of Basic Sciences at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) - was the first to combine molecular systems with nanoparticles to create a new kind of solar cell that mimics photosynthesis, bringing closer the goal of converting sunlight into a clean, efficient and cheap source of electricity on a major scale. Alivisatos created nanocrystals of barely a thousand atoms, known as "quantum dots," to emit light whose color can be minutely controlled. He has also used these nanocrystals to explore new renewable energy sources. At present, the most advanced application of his work is a new generation of screens that incorporate quantum dots to achieve high color quality, already on the market as QLED televisions, standing for Quantum Dot LED. Professor Alivisatos was nominated by Jennifer Doudna, Director of the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, winner of the Frontiers Award in Biomedicine in 2017 and Nobel Chemistry Laureate in 2020; Mike Witherell, Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Milan Mrksich, Vice President for Research at Northwestern University. In a sense, Alivisatos remarked in a video conference after hearing of the award, "Michael has looked more at how to get electricity from the light coming into the system, whereas I've probably done a bit more work where energy is extracted in terms of light coming back out of the system, and then making something that people can use." Emulating photosynthesis Photosynthesis, whereby the leaves of plants convert sunlight into organic matter - essentially just a means of storing energy - is the natural process that gave Gratzel his inspiration. Plants use chlorophyll and other pigments to absorb as much as they can of visible light; the chlorophyll molecule is so structured that it emits electrons when excited by the sun's protons, triggering chemical reactions to build organic matter with water and carbon dioxide. Gratzel's solar cells also use a pigment that takes the role of chlorophyll, harvesting the sun's light and generating electrons which are then collected and transported by a semiconductor material such as titanium dioxide. His masterstroke was to arrange the titanium dioxide in nanoparticles. Each titanium dioxide nanoparticle is coated in pigment, and the result is a liquid that holds the nanoparticles and serves to fabricate the solar cells. "That was the first use of nanoparticles to build photovoltaic cells, something no one had thought of before," said Gratzel in a video conference following news of the award. "The first time we tried it was so exciting, we were genuinely astonished because the response we got [of light conversion into energy] was thousands of times greater than we had expected." He and his team presented their new photovoltaic solar cell in a 1991 paper in Nature - "A low-cost, high-efficiency solar cell based on dye-sensitized colloidal TiO2 films" - since cited tens of thousands of times. This was the world's introduction to what would come to be the new DSSC or dye-sensitized solar cells, also known simply as Gratzel cells in honor of their inventor. The discovery would lead to "thousands of patents," he himself remarks, and open up "a whole new field of research." For the Gratzel cells offer multiple advantages: abundant raw materials, a cheap manufacturing process, transparency - meaning they can be mounted on windows, flexibility and the capacity to obtain electricity from even ambient light of the kind you find in any room. In 2013, they were used to create a colorful glass facade for the convention center on the EPFL campus. The cells' efficiency is approximately 15%, less than that of conventional silicon cells. But this drawback could soon be overcome with another type of cell following on from Gratzel's, known as perovskite cells. This material, which also starts from a liquid so is suitable for flexible surfaces, entered use in 2009 and in less than a decade had achieved efficiencies of 25%. Gratzel, who has also been a pivotal player in perovskite cell research, remarks that "the speed of perovskite cell efficiency gains is on a scale not seen in any other material." Indeed the figures coming in are already comparable to those of silicon. Whatever degree of reach Gratzel's cells eventually achieve, the committee highlights the power of his work to launch new lines of research on use of nanomaterials in the renewable energies domain. Nanocrystals for high-resolution screens Alivisatos' nanocrystals, also known as quantum dots, are likewise at the core of multiple applications, from the search for new clean energy sources to consumer electronics by way of biomedical imaging techniques. The U.S. scientist is himself a leader in the development of nanocrystals, a new kind of macromolecule that can be studied, controlled and widely used - in a liquid medium, like Gratzel's nanoparticles. Ultraprecise control of nanocrystal size brings with it control over the color of light it emits, as the new laureate explains: "An electron in a nanocrystal can emit light and the color of that light will depend on the nanocrystal's size. If it is a little bit smaller the energy of the light will be higher, so it will be bluer light. And in this way you can use nanocrystals to make materials that emit the full rainbow of colors; such a large rainbow that you can reconstruct with it every color you can see in nature." Among its most successful applications are the displays developed in the mid-1990s that are now a part of QLED television sets. Alivisatos showed that it was possible to manufacture them in a way that combined high resolution with energy saving efficiency. "In a color display," he elaborates, "there is always a red, a blue and a green color that can be excited. And those colors interact inside your eye - mixtures of them - to reproduce all the colors that we can see around us. When we put quantum dots into a television to produce the reds, greens and blues, the size of the particle can be used to precisely tune the color to match the best spot in energy, which matches the receptors in your eye. So that's an example which enables, for example, artists and photographers to achieve better color reproduction, but it also results in very, very high efficiency for those displays, which means that they consume less energy and they can be used in a variety of new applications." In the biomedicine field, Alivisatos and his group have developed nanocrystals for the staining of biological samples - by adjusting the size of the nanocrystal, the liquid will tag one or other cell type. In fact, hundreds of quantum dot-based products are now commercially available for bioimaging purposes. The environmental dividend of nanomaterials The two laureates are convinced that, given the serious threat of climate change and the need to ramp up production of renewable energies, the new lines of research enabled by their work in nanomaterials could provide forefront solutions from the realm of science and technology. "Climate change," says Gratzel, "is certainly a major challenge. We need to curtail our use of fossil fuels, while scaling up photovoltaic energy supply by a factor of 200 in the next few decades. That means new technologies, and, in this respect, the dye-sensitized cell has led onto the new perovskite cell, whose efficiency in pilot tests is already outperforming that of conventional silicon cells." Alivisatos, meantime, is convinced that nanomaterials have yet to reveal their full potential, and that they have a part to play in tackling the key environmental issue of our time: "Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, and part of that challenge is to learn how to make new materials that can harvest the energy of the sun and put it to beneficial use with as few losses as possible. But also, to do it on a vast scale. It turns out that nanomaterials can be made in extremely high quality but at relatively low cost. And they can be used to absorb light from the sun, and absorb it without losing it to thermal energy or heat, which allows more efficient conversion to electricity. Michael Gratzel has already shown some uses of nanomaterials in solar energy but there will be many more over the years to come." ### Laureate bio notes Paul Alivisatos (Chicago, Illinois, United States, 1959) earned a BA in Chemistry from the University of Chicago (1981), then went on to complete a PhD in the same subject at the University of California, Berkeley (1986). After two years researching at AT&T Bell Labs, in 1988 he joined the faculty at UC Berkeley, where he is currently Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, and Samsung Distinguished Professor of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. Also at Berkeley, he is the Founding Director of the Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute, and Director Emeritus of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), which he headed from 2009 to 2016 and where he remains a senior faculty scientist. He also holds professorships in the university's departments of chemistry and materials science. Among his previous positions at the Berkeley Lab, he was Founding Director of the Molecular Foundry, a U.S. Department of Energy's Nanoscale Science Research Center, and Director of the Materials Science Division. Author of more than 400 publications, he is co-holder of 38 patents and founder of two companies, Nanosys and Quantum Dot Corporation (now part of Thermo Fisher). Alivisatos is also founding editor of Nano Letters, a publication of the American Chemical Society, and formerly served on the senior editorial board of Science magazine. Michael Gratzel (Dorfchemnitz, Germany, 1944) completed a degree in chemistry at the Free University of Berlin (1968), then a doctorate in Physical Chemistry at TU Berlin (1971). He joined the faculty at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (Switzerland) as an associate professor in 1977, and four years later was appointed Professor of Physical Chemistry. That same year he founded the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces at EPFL, which he has headed ever since. He has held visiting or research positions at centers including UC Berkeley (United States), the National University of Singapore, Delft University of Technology (Netherlands), the Hahn Meitner Institute Berlin (Germany) and the Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan (Paris, France). An External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Germany), he chairs one of the panels of the ERC Advanced Grants program, and has served on the scientific advisory boards of the presidents of the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (South Korea), KTH Stockholm (Sweden), the University of Helsinki (Finland) and the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel). He is author of over 1,700 scientific papers and 2 books, holds more than 80 patents and has co-founded two start-ups. Basic Sciences committee and evaluation support panel The committee in this category was chaired by Theodor Hansch, Director of the Division of Laser Spectroscopy at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Germany), and the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Physics, with Ignacio Cirac, Director of the Theory Division at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Germany) acting as secretary. The evaluation support panel of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) was coordinated by M. Victoria Moreno, Deputy Vice President for Scientific and Technical Areas, and formed by: Jose Luis Fernandez Barbon, scientific researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (IFT); Carmen Garcia Garcia, Deputy Coordinator of the MATERIA Global Area and research professor at the Institute of Corpuscular Physics (IFIC); Berta Gomez-Lor Perez, scientific researcher at the Institute of Materials Science of Madrid (ICMM); Jose Luis de Miguel Anton, tenured scientist at the Daza de Valdes Institute of Optics (IO); and Carlos Prieto de Castro, Coordinator of the MATERIA Global Area and research professor at the Institute of Materials Science of Madrid (ICMM). About the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards The BBVA Foundation centers its activity on the promotion of world-class scientific research and cultural creation, and the encouragement of talent. The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, funded with 400,000 euros in each of their eight categories, recognize and reward contributions of singular impact in science, technology, social sciences and the humanities, privileging those that significantly expand the frontiers of the known world, open up new fields, or emerge from the interaction of various disciplinary areas. The goal of the awards, established in 2008, is to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a public good without frontiers, the best instrument at our command to take on the great global challenges of our time for the benefit of all humanity. Their eight categories are congruent with the knowledge map of the 21st century, ranging from basic science to key challenges for the natural environment by way of domains characterized by the overlap of disciplines - Biology and Medicine; Economics, Finance and Management - or the supremely creative realms of music and the opera. The BBVA Foundation has been aided in the evaluation of the 105 nominees for the Frontiers Award in Basic Sciences by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the country's premier public research organization. CSIC appoints evaluation support panels made up of leading experts in the corresponding knowledge area, who are charged with undertaking an initial assessment of the candidates proposed by numerous institutions across the world, and drawing up a reasoned shortlist for the consideration of the award committees. CSIC is also responsible for designating each committee's chair and participates in the selection of its members, thus helping to ensure objectivity in the recognition of innovation and scientific excellence. Victoria Police has been ordered to pay all legal costs in a failed prosecution of three Mongols bikie club members after the Office of Public Prosecutions dropped firearms charges connected to the alleged murder of Croydon fruiterer Paul Virgona. Josh Rider, 30, Andrew Heil, 31 and Phillip Main, 48, were due to face a day-long committal hearing in Melbourne Magistrates Court on Wednesday when crown prosecutor Aggy Kapitaniak revealed firearms charges against the trio would be dropped. Josh Rider Credit: The Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police has been ordered to pay the three mens legal costs which have been accumulating since their arrests on January 22, 2020. Mr Rider, Mr Heil and Mr Main had been charged with a string of firearms offences relating to a haul of guns seized as part of the police investigation into the execution-style killing of Mr Virgona as he drove along EastLink freeway in November 2019. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 03:50:51|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (R) and President of the 75th Session of the UN General Assembly Volkan Bozkir attend the UN General Assembly briefing on the Call to Action for Human Rights at the UN headquarters in New York on Feb. 24, 2021. Guterres said on Wednesday that human rights must not only be available to the privileged few and joint efforts must be made to deliver them. (Eskinder Debebe/UN Photo/Handout via Xinhua) UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday that human rights must not only be available to the privileged few and joint efforts must be made to deliver them. "Much like COVID-19 vaccines, human rights will not lead to a healthier world if they are only available to the privileged few," the UN chief told the UN General Assembly briefing on the Call to Action for Human Rights. Addressing the Human Rights Council, Guterres on Feb. 24 last year launched a Call to Action for Human Rights. He said these rights are powerful tools for preventing conflict, reducing human suffering and building a just and equitable world. "We need renewed, concerted, global determination to ensure the protection of human rights of all people, everywhere and in all situations," the UN chief briefed member states exactly one year after the release of the call. "We must all join forces to deliver," the top UN official added. "Only by working together can we forge a new social contract that reflects respect and protection for all people and is rooted in universal human rights," he noted. "As we enter the second year of the Call to Action, I look forward to working closely with all of you to fulfil the highest aspirations of the people of the world - human rights and dignity for all," said Guterres. Noting that with the support of member states over the last year, he said that the Call to Action "is making important progress." The UN family is working together to ensure that human rights are at the heart of COVID-19 socio-economic response plans, he said. After elaborating on some of the areas where progress has been made, the UN chief noted that the UN will launch a first-of-its-kind "One Stop Digital Shop," bringing together a wealth of resources on implementing human rights in the digital space. "Our enduring challenge is to transform the promise of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into real-world change on the ground. It is to look at our contemporary challenges with a human rights lens," said the UN chief, noting that "this is why my Call to Action extends beyond the UN family." It is also a call to all member states, to parliamentarians, to the business community, to civil society and to people everywhere, he said. "We shoulder a collective responsibility. The Novyny Media Holding, which operates the blacklisted television channels 112 Ukraine, ZIK and NewsOne, has established the eponymous limited liability company, Ukrainian Minister of Culture and Information Policy Oleksandr Tkachenko said. "The blacklisted 'Medvedchuk troika', which calls itself the Novyny Media Holding, has put on a new mask. It has established a same-name limited liability company. Perhaps, so that the NSDC [National Security and Defense Council] and SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] did not have to search for it for too long," Tkachenko said on Telegram on Tuesday evening. The limited liability company was registered on February 18, "just two weeks after the anti-Ukrainian propaganda channels were banned from broadcasting in Ukraine," he said, adding that the company had 100 founders and a charter capital of UAH 100. "It looks like Medvedchuk & Co (blacklisted by the Ukrainian NSDC) are looking for legal methods to resume the broadcast of Kremlin propaganda on our information space. No matter how many new LLCs they establish for UAH 100, the meaning does not change, and the state attention to their activity does not change, either," Tkachenko said. On February 2, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky enforced the NSDC order, which practically blocked the activity of the television channels 112 Ukraine, NewsOne and ZIK associated with Viktor Medvedchuk, a leader of the Opposition Platform - For Life. The NSDC imposed personal economic and other restrictive measures on Taras Kozak and the following legal entities: Ariadna TV, Novy Format TV, TV Vybor, Television and Radio Company 112 TV, Leader TV, Partner TV, Novyny 24 Hodyny (24 Hours News), and New Communications. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Wednesday that the United States would seek a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, where Washington would counter what he called the rights bodys unacceptable bias against Israel." Im here to reaffirm Americas commitment to respect and defend the human rights of all people, everywhere, Blinken told the 47-member body in a video. Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced it had rejoined the council as an observer, in keeping with the presidents pledge to put human rights at the forefront of his foreign policy. The US will run for a three-year, full-member seat on the council during elections held by the wider UN General Assembly in October. "Institutions are not perfect," Blinken said. "As the United States reengages, we urge the Human Rights Council to look at how it conducts its business. That includes its disproportionate focus on Israel." Americas top diplomat called on the Geneva-based body to abolish Agenda Item 7, which requires that Israeli violations in the Palestinian territories be discussed at every meeting. Israel, which is regularly condemned in resolutions put forward by the council, is the only member state whose rights record is a permanent agenda item. Blinken said membership should reflect high standards for upholding human rights, noting the council's history of granting rights-abusing countries a seat at the table. Current members include China, Cuba, Eritrea, Russia and Venezuela. The Trump administration withdrew from the rights council in 2018, in part over what Nikki Haley, then the US ambassador to the United Nations, described as the councils chronic bias against Israel. Blinkens comments come days after his phone call with Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi. The secretary on Monday emphasized the Biden administrations belief that the two-state solution is the best way to ensure Israels future as a Jewish and democratic state, living in peace alongside a viable and democratic Palestinian state, according to the US readout of the call. President Joe Biden waited nearly a month to reach out to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in what was seen as a sign of his tougher approach to Israel compared with his predecessor. Although Biden intends to build on the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries, his administration is expected to roll back a number of Trump-era policies that critics said undermined the changes of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Biden administration plans to resume relations with Ramallah and restore aid to the Palestinians, but the US Embassy which Trump controversially moved from Tel Aviv will remain in Jerusalem. [February 24, 2021] Yokogawa and ICQ Consultants Enter Into Partnership Agreement for Biopharmaceutical Business Yokogawa Electric Corporation (News - Alert) (TOKYO:6841) (Yokogawa) and Integrated Commissioning and Qualification Consultants, Corp. (ICQ Consultants) of Southborough announce that they have entered into a partnership agreement under which ICQ Consultants will provide consulting and engineering services for the installation, maintenance, qualification, and support of Yokogawa's bioreactor systems and related products in the United States. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210223005006/en/ Yokogawa's Advanced Control Bioreactor System BR1000 (Photo: Business Wire) As a result of the COVID pandemic, the global biopharmaceutical market has been growing at an unprecedented rate, with significant investments being made in diagnostics, vaccine development, and medical devices to test and treat the coronavirus. These investments have driven demand for infrastructure in developing and manufacturing monoclonal antibody drugs and products that require mammalian cell bioreactor technologies. Since 2007, ICQ Consultants has played an important role in the commissioning and qualification of manufacturing plants in the major life sciences hubs in the United States, including some of the world's largest biomanufacturing facilities. As part of this partnership agreement, Yokogawa will leverage ICQ Consultants' engineering and laboratory expertise in the biopharmaceutical segment to deploy its new bioprocess technologies in the United States. The first portfolio product, the Advanced Control Bioreactor System BR1000 was recently released on January 8, offering significant performance advantages over existing methods for biologics development. The automation of manual processes is a rapidly advancing trend in the biopharmaceutical industry. For complete automation of the fed-batch mammalian cell culture process, the control of glucose -- a key nutrient source -- is critical. Through in-line sensing and model predictive control software, and automated feeding, a stable concentration of glucose in bioreactors can be achieved. he BR1000 automates lab-scale mammalian cell culture with highly accurate real-time monitoring and advanced process control. Michael Bogan, president of ICQ Consultants, commented, "We are very excited to join Yokogawa in this strategic partnership agreement to help facilitate the support of their bioreactor systems and related products throughout the United States. As ICQ Consultants continues to expand operations across the country, we are poised to further develop lasting relationships, which has been a key factor in our ongoing success. I look forward to working with Yokogawa on this unique and collaborative opportunity." Hiroshi Nakao, a Yokogawa vice president and head of the company's Life Innovation Business Headquarters, added, "Driven by a clear business vision and recent successes in the life sciences, food, and pharmaceutical sectors, Yokogawa Corporation of America is also turning its attention to biologics development and manufacturing. Alliances with industry experts like ICQ Consultants are vital to gain expertise and penetration in the high growth biopharmaceutical market. ICQ Consultants' engineering and technical knowledge in drug manufacturing will support our innovative new bioreactor and bioprocess technologies and help position Yokogawa for rapid sales and market leadership in the emerging bio-industrial autonomy sector." For more information Advanced Control Bioreactor System BR1000 https://www.yokogawa.com/solutions/products-platforms/life-science/bioreactor/br1000/ About ICQ Consultants ICQ Consultants partners with leading and emerging biopharma and life sciences companies to help engineering and quality teams proactively anticipate and solve complex commissioning, qualification, and validation challenges. ICQ Consultants' ultimate goal is to facilitate safe and timely delivery of medications and therapies to patients in need. Applying a pragmatic approach that is anything but typical, the transparent, data-first communication and project management philosophy ensures strict adherence to continually evolving industry regulations, site-specific requirements, schedules, and budgets. ICQ Consultants gets critical CQV and quality activities done properly so client facilities can focus on saving and improving patient lives. Since 2007, ICQ Consultants has partnered with the world's largest biopharmaceutical manufacturers and emerging life sciences companies to provide comprehensive commissioning, qualification, and validation services that accelerate the delivery of medications and therapies to patients in need. ICQ Consultants has also built and maintained a growing database of 500+ skill-assessed CQV professionals, allowing clients to source the right blend of abilities and experience to complement in-house engineering and compliance teams. About Yokogawa Founded in 1915, Yokogawa engages in broad-ranging activities in the areas of measurement, control, and information. The industrial automation business provides vital products, services, and solutions to a diverse range of process industries including oil, chemicals, natural gas, power, iron and steel, and pulp and paper. With the life innovation business the company aims to radically improve productivity across the pharmaceutical and food industry value chains. The test & measurement, aviation, and other businesses continue to provide essential instruments and equipment with industry-leading precision and reliability. Yokogawa co-innovates with its customers through a global network of 114 companies spanning 62 countries, generating US$3.7 billion in sales in FY2019. For more information, please visit www.yokogawa.com. The names of corporations, organizations, products, services and logos herein are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Yokogawa Electric Corporation or their respective holders. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210223005006/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Israel on Wednesday described Iran's move to restrict some site inspections by the UN nuclear watchdog as a "threat" that required a response. Iran this week began limiting the International Atomic Energy Agency's access to sites and other information in response to the US refusal so far to lift sanctions imposed by former president Donald Trump. "Israel sees this step as a threat and it must not go by without response," Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi said in a statement. "We will never allow Iran to control the capability to acquire a nuclear weapon," he added. Israel's government, led by right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was vehemently opposed to the 2015 nuclear agreement negotiated between Tehran and world powers. Netanyahu applauded when Trump scrapped the deal almost three years ago. The Israeli leader has repeatedly urged US President Joe Biden not to restore the deal. But Biden, European powers and Iran are still trying to keep the nuclear accord alive. Tehran demands Washington take the first step by scrapping painful sanctions Trump had imposed since 2018, while Washington insists Iran first return to all its nuclear commitments, some of which it has backed away from. Iran's parliament had set Sunday as the deadline to limit to some IAEA inspections, a move that took effect on Tuesday. The IAEA and Iran agreed a temporary technical deal allowing the watchdog to "retain the necessary degree of monitoring and verification work", according to IAEA chief Rafael Grossi. With inspections now restricted, Ashkenazi said that "Iran is destroying what remains of the IAEA's oversight." Iran says its nuclear programme is civilian in nature. Netanyahu alleges the Islamic republic is pursuing a nuclear weapon and insists this marks one of the gravest threats to the Jewish people since the Nazi Holocaust. Short link: Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes News editor's pick centerpiece featured Awash in leaks, pipeless hold plumbing swap meets STUART VILLANUEVA/The Daily News Plumbing materials are stacked in a corner at Blues Bar & Grill in Santa Fe as Hunter Welch searches for materials to make plumbing repairs Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021. The bar is offering plumbing supplies for free to those who need them and also is accepting donations of plumbing material and supplies. jenniferreynolds / JENNIFER REYNOLDS/The Daily News A section of burst pipe sits in front of Cody Tobias, a plumber with Absolute P&M Services, as he pieces together the fittings hell need to make repairs at a house in Kemah on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021. STUART VILLANUEVA/The Daily News Hunter Welch searches through plumbing materials that Blues Bar & Grill in Santa Fe has made available for free to people who need them to make repairs to their homes in light of a long wait for plumbers to do the job and dwindling plumbing supplies at local hardware stores. jenniferreynolds / JENNIFER REYNOLDS/The Daily News Cody Tobias, a plumber with Absolute P&M Services, searches his bag for the chlorinated polyvinyl chloride, or CPVC, connectors hell need to repair a burst pipe at a house in Kemah on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021. jenniferreynolds / JENNIFER REYNOLDS/The Daily News Residents in the West End neighborhood of Sea Isle set up a plumbing exchange at the Milton Pines Park Pavilion on Monday, Feb. 22, 2021. jenniferreynolds / JENNIFER REYNOLDS/The Daily News Cody Tobias, a plumber with Absolute P&M Services, glues a pipe as he repairs a water line in the attic of a house in Kemah on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021. jenniferreynolds / JENNIFER REYNOLDS/The Daily News Cody Tobias, a plumber with Absolute P&M Services, searches his bag connectors hell need to repair three burst pipes at a house in Kemah on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021. jenniferreynolds / JENNIFER REYNOLDS/The Daily News Cody Tobias, a plumber with Absolute P&M Services, repairs one of three burst pipes at a house in Kemah on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021. STUART VILLANUEVA/The Daily News A sign at Blues Bar & Grill invites those needing plumbing supplies to take what they need Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021. Theyre still coming and borrowing. I even loaned out some of my tools and got them back, restaurant owner Natalie Taylor said. SANTA FE Last weeks subfreezing temperatures plunged much of Galveston County into days without power or heat. And when the big thaw came, things got really bad for some when burst pipes began leaking, flooding walls and floors at homes and businesses across the county. Now residents are struggling to find the labor and materials needed to repair the damage caused by long blackouts during freezing weather. Unprecedented calls for plumbers and statewide demand for hardware and other materials mean many homeowners might wait weeks without water for the help or equipment they need. Supplies are so tight residents across the county are turning to each other and community groups to exchange materials, meeting at local bars, restaurants or online. PLUMB BUSY Daryl Watley, owner of Absolute P&M Services, has been working nonstop since early last week, he said. The Santa Fe-based plumbing and HVAC company has a running list of about 700 customers in need of repairs, Watley said. The workload is crazy, Watley said. Ive never seen anything like this before. I have people calling my phone until 3 oclock in the morning. Part of the Watleys problem is call volume, but another part is finding materials, he said. Watley is ordering materials from contacts out of state because suppliers in Texas have so much demand, he said. Theres not enough material right now, Watley said. Were having to source out of state. Were a big state. We usually dont ever have to do that. Watley has been focusing on just patching up his customers pipes so they can have water and plans to fully fix them once more materials become available, he said. WATERLESS Residents like islander Tamara Grant are just waiting for more parts to become available. When Grant first called a plumber, she thought her pipes only had one leak, she said. Then, she discovered more. Now, her plumber is trying to find the materials needed to fix her home, Grant said. He just tells me hes looking high and low, Grant said. Grant and her 12-year-old grandson are drinking bottled water and showering at a friends house. It just handicaps every aspect of your life, Grant said. Grant lives in a 100-year-old home where all the pipes are under the house, so it doesnt have much structural damage. But shes frustrated that Galvestonians had to go so long without power during the freezing temperatures and werent part of rolling blackouts that would have given residents some electricity periodically as the grid failed, she said. This location was ill-equipped to handle this, Grant said. Residents will need to be patient, League City Mayor Pat Hallisey said. There are only so many plumbers, Hallisey said. TAPPED OUT Area hardware stores are having trouble keeping plumbing materials on the shelves. Galco Hardware Supply Co., 12920 FM 1764 in Santa Fe, is out of three-quarter- and 1-inch pipe and primer and is waiting on shipments, co-owner Cecilia Eckenrode said. Were hoping to get what we ordered, Eckenrode said. Every store also is low on supplies, though, so Galco might not receive its full order, she said. Were getting it as quick as we can, Eckenrode said. This is statewide. League City Ace Hardware, 1915 West League City Parkway, ran out of many supplies when it opened Tuesday and Wednesday, said Edie Trout, a sales associate. I know my shelves are going to be empty in possibly a week, maybe less, Trout said. Were hoping for those shipments to start coming. Trout hopes other states will send supplies. The Texas warehouses are overwhelmed, she said. League City Ace Hardware is out of or low on CVPC pipe, copper piping, galvanized fittings and pretty much anything related to plumbing, she said. BUCKETS OF SPARES Thats why many residents are turning to each other. About 200 to 300 residents flocked Sunday to Blues Bar & Grill, 11948 state Highway 6 in Santa Fe, for an exchange of plumbing parts, restaurant owner Natalie Taylor said. The exchange came together on the suggestion of some friends and grew over the course of a few days, she said. Taylor ordered some materials from a friend in south Texas to give out, she said. I wish Id ordered more, Taylor said. The idea was people could bring plumbing materials from home they didnt need and others could come and take the materials they couldnt find in hardware stores. Many people just needed one or two parts, Taylor said. Theyre still coming and borrowing, Taylor said. I even loaned out some of my tools and got them back. Residents in La Marque have started doing the same thing through a city-sponsored social media thread, Mayor Keith Bell said. Weve learned that sometimes, when people make repairs to their homes, they tend to buy two or three of the same thing, Bell said. A considerable number of our neighbors have buckets with extra parts. Like other areas of the county, older homes in La Marque had burst pipes, he said. At least some officials are blaming the extent of the damage on long blackouts. I personally feel that if we had of gone into a rolling blackout type of response, we would have had a lot less broken pipes, Galveston Mayor Craig Brown said. Theres no way of knowing that, but at least we could have kept some type of heat. In the latest escalation of its continuing crackdown on public discourse that detracted from the party line, China imposed its tightest restrictions to date on the publishing of original online content creators through short video and "self-media" accounts this week. China imposed stricter rules for independent content creators The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country's internet watchdog, has released new regulations requiring bloggers, influencers, and content creators on public social media sites, known as "self-media." The new rules urge independent content creators to have a government-issued certificate to post anything on a host of topics, which came into effect on Monday. According to Variety, other social media categories will also be affected, such as trending charts, hot search lists, push notifications and short video platforms. However, the CAC did not provide information about what sort of penalty for violators will be doled out. The latest regulations are the first adjustment since 2017 to the policies of the country on the issue. That year, China technically released legislation requiring official credentials of those writing about political and military matters, but enforcement was sketchy and weak. With this recent revision, that is likely to change; even the definition of what must be accepted has increased. This latest crackdown seems to have its roots in Chinese officials' concern about the role played by "self-media" accounts and online-only outlets in spreading information about the COVID-19 pandemic. The CAC specifically identified these sources to explain its new measures as having "maliciously created rumors" and "seriously impacted the stability and harmony of society" in the early days of the pandemic. In December, officials indicted citizen reporter Zhang Zhan, who live-streamed from the Wuhan Pandemic Epicenter in the earliest days of the outbreak, to four years in jail. In late January, these new rules paved away as officials stated the need to "strengthen order in online publishing." CAC should see the regulation of self-media as a "preeminently essential mission" and should give regulators the teeth and violators among memory," CAC head Zhuang Rongwen said. Read also: YouTube Removes Former President Trump's Interview After Repeating Election Fraud Claims China orders bloggers to have state-approved credentials After ordering bloggers and influencers to have a state-approved credential before publishing online content, China has tightened its grip on the country's heavily censored web. Starting next week, Chinese citizens must have their public online accounts verified with personal data, including IDs and phone numbers, a move that further restricts people from posting original content. The new regulations issued by CAC aimed to prevent users from 'creating online rumors and harming society's stability and harmony, authorities said. A central concept of his rule, under which authorities have set limits and increased control of the digital realm, the Chinese leader has made 'digital sovereignty.' Ma Xiaolin is a Chinese blogger on one of China's leading microblogging sites, where he has two million followers, frequently publishing about current affairs. The Weibo site recently called and asked him not to publish original content on topics ranging from politics to economic and military issues, he said in a post. Some fear that permission will only be received by state media and official propaganda accounts, as per Daily Mail. While permits have been needed to write about topics such as political and military affairs since at least 2017, enforcement has not been widespread. Read also: Facebook Steps Down from Australia News Ban After Law Compromise China leads the US to dominate the social commerce market Meanwhile, Social commerce is defined as a subset of e-commerce that includes social media and online media that promote social interaction, with user contributions to help the purchase and sell products and services online. According to research data analyzed and published by Finaria, China's total sales of social trade in 2020 amounted to US$242.41 billion, representing 11.7% of online sales, and will grow to US$363.26 billion in 2021 and account for a 13.1% share of the eCommerce market. Finaria foresees that in 2021, with $5.506 trillion against China's $5.13 trillion, the US will take the lead in retail sales. But e-commerce sales in China will outperform the US by a $2 trillion margin. Read also: China Bans BBC for Reporting News That Harms National Interests, but Move Is Seen as Retaliation @ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 23:18:49|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- China firmly rejects the unacceptable accusations made by the UK, which has abused the platform of the UN Human Rights Council to spread disinformation, smear China and meddle in China's internal affairs, a foreign ministry spokesperson said here Wednesday, urging the UK to take concrete measures to improve domestic human rights condition. At the high-level segment of the 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab attacked China on issues related to Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet. "We welcome people from all over the world traveling to Xinjiang to see the region's prosperity and the residents' happy life," spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a daily press briefing. He said more than 1,200 foreign diplomats, international organization officials, journalists and religious personnel from over 100 countries have visited Xinjiang in the past years under the invitation of the Chinese side, and they agreed that what they saw and experienced in the region was entirely different from Western media reports. "The door to Xinjiang is always open. We welcome the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit Xinjiang. China already extended invitation to the High Commissioner for visiting Xinjiang and other places in China, and both sides have been in communication on that," he added. Wang however stressed that the purpose of the visit is to enhance bilateral exchange and cooperation rather than carry out "investigations" with the presumption of guilt. "We firmly oppose any political maneuvers to press China on this matter." "The UK's proposed so-called 'resolution' is apparently out of the ill intention to muddy the water, slander China and sabotage China's cooperation with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which we firmly oppose," Wang said. "Its petty tricks cannot fool the international community." He noted that the UK is keen on lecturing and pressuring other countries, meddling in their internal affairs and practicing politicization and double standards on human rights issues. However, it turns a blind eye to the severe human rights issues at home. According to Wang, one-third of British families with children aged under five live below the poverty line, and millions of children suffer hunger. The British military committed murder of innocent civilians and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the perpetrators are still sheltered by the government and unpunished. In the UK, there are a lot of such phenomena as racial discrimination, xenophobia, hatred talks, and severe rights abuses against refugees and immigrants. "We urge the UK to take concrete measures to improve domestic human rights condition and contribute something tangible to the sound development of the international human rights cause," Wang said. Enditem Parallels between the tales of Sleeping Beauty and the COVID-induced decimation of Melbournes performance industry are obvious. Even when, finally, Victorian Opera thought it was to awaken from the nightmare, lockdown forced the cancellation of the companys 2021 season opening night. VOs revival of its 2017 production of The Sleeping Beauty opened at last on Tuesday. And though there are many reasons to forgive, it felt more weary than wondrous. In 1921, with Italy recovering from the First World War and Spanish Influenza, Ottorino Respighi composed La bella dormente nel bosco for a local puppet theatre company in Naples. VOs telling maintains pantomime-like charm but seems confused in who this production is for. The huge puppets, slapstick humour, dancing and running around feels entirely for children. There are also moments of darkness, grief and references intended for adults some work, some do not. (Please spare us the Donald Trump cameo. Its just not funny anymore). It was difficult to grasp the greater moral lesson amidst the madness. What will always save an opera is the magic of the human voice, and this ensemble is mesmerising across the board. As the princess, Georgia Wilkinson is utterly perfect. Her soprano shimmers and soars, completely even and alluring throughout her range. Tenor Carlos E. Barcenas is in the finest voice of his career, easy top notes ringing with strength and stunning tone. Their final duet is exquisite. In smaller roles, Kathryn Radcliffe, Raphael Wong and Liane Keegan are all vocally magnificent. Conductor Phoebe Briggs leads Orchestra Victoria in a skilful romp through Respighis score which calls for many musical styles and moods. After a period of such devastating dormancy, some opera-lovers will be overjoyed to see any opera at all. Indeed on Tuesday night, some laughed and some appeared deeply moved. But some may leave The Sleeping Beauty assuming perhaps it simply wasnt meant for you. Following the death of 45 chickens at a poultry farm, bird flu has been confirmed in Palghar, Maharashtra . The district administration has ordered to close all the poultry farms and shops selling chicken in the region, for the coming 21 days, according to a report. Meanwhile, Maharashtra reported deaths of 381 birds on Sunday amid the avian influenza scare, a state government official said on Monday. He said 380 of these were poultry birds, including 190 from Nandurbar and 115 from Amravati in Vidarbha. So far, 7,20,515 poultry birds, including 5,86,668 from Navapur in Nandurbar, have been culled, and 26,44,177 eggs as well as 73,004 kilograms of poultry feed destroyed in infected zones, and carcasses were being buried in lime lined pits to prevent the spread of infection, a state government release informed. The state government has paid compensation of 3.38 crore to affected poultry farmers in the infected zone, it added. Additionally, the culling operation of the birds, mopping and sanitisation of infected poultry farms were completed in Punjab's SAS Nagar earlier in February, the district Information and Public Relations Office said on Monday. "After three weeks of extensive curtailment measures, the threat of spread of avian flu in the district has been successfully countered'', informed Deputy Commissioner Girish Dayalan on Monday. The Deputy Commissioner also said that the administration has been on high alert ever since the bird flu confirmation was received on January 21. Twenty-five Rapid Response Teams (RRTs) comprising of five members each were deployed for swift action. The culling in the infected farms Alpha, Royal and Evergreen in village Behera commenced on January 22 and by January 29 nearly 84,505 birds from these farms were culled. "Subsequently, 2,760 eggs and 1,28,850 kg feed was destroyed. This was followed by a period of mopping which lasted for nearly ten days. Thereafter, large scale sanitization measures were initiated, and now the concerned farms have been finally issued the certificates of sanitization and all the aspects of culling operation are complete," he added. With inputs from ANI Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Appointment 24 February 2021 Kevin Carter, CHA has been appointed Managing Director of Lansdowne Resort and Spa located in Leesburg, Virginia. Carter takes the helm with close to 40 years of experience in the hospitality industry, most recently serving as the President of Guests, Inc., a full-service hotel management company headquartered in Strasburg, Virginia. Carter's vast experience includes positions such as Director, Corporate Director, Resident Manager, General Manager, Independent Consultant, and 16-year tenure as the Managing Director of Airlie Resort Hotel. He served on the management teams of some of the country's most notable properties including the U.S. Grant Hotel, Intercontinental Hotel San Diego, Club Corporation of America, Rancho Valencia Resort, Kiawah Island Resort, and Bald Head Island Resort. Carter is currently a member of the Town Council of Warrenton, Virginia, serves on the Board of Director for the Fauquier Bank and the Board of Southern Innkeepers Association where he previously served as President. Carter has been a member of the Board of Directors for the Fauquier Hospital and Health System and the PATH Foundation. In addition, he has served as the President of the Warrenton Rotary Club and Senior Warden and School Board Treasurer for the St. James Episcopal Church in Warrenton, Virginia. Carter currently resides in Warrenton, Virginia with his wife Carrie and children Madison, Emma and Jack. Whether you're a professional-level home cook or a take-out fanatic who uses the oven to store shoes, the design and function of your kitchen is very important. No matter its square footage or number of built-in features, the kitchen plays a big part in how you live at home. That's why time spent beautifying your kitchen is always time well-spentespecially if you plan on selling your home someday. And while "kitchen renovation" may set off alarm bells for a big-budget project, there are some simple DIY upgrades that can improve the functionality and appearance of your kitchenas long as you have the time. To find out what kind of kitchen refresh might be doable in the time you have, we reached out to a variety of design and home improvement experts. We found 10 projects that homeowners can execute themselves (or with the help of a professional) no matter how much free time they have. Have only 5 minutes to commit to cleaning up your kitchen? There's a project for you. Ready to get your DIY on for an entire weekend? Grab your tool belt and get to work! If you have 5 minutes Photo by All Things Home Organizing by Gayle Grace There are several low-cost projects that can be accomplished in a few minutes, tops. However, one that will make a world of difference quickly is removing dark scuff and dirt marks from surfaces, cabinets, and walls with a Magic Eraser, says Julie Bennett, the founder of Renovators Toolkit, a guide to making home renovations simple, in Seattle. Cost: Around $7 You can also take 5 minutes to organize a junk drawer or cooking utensil drawer. Remove all of the items from the drawer, and purge anything you don't use. Add in wooden or plastic dividers, group your items by type or use, and place them back in the drawers. Cost: Dividers range from $5 to $30. If you have 30 minutes Photo by Lisa Bell Design Group In well under an hour, you can transform the look and feel of your kitchen with simple cosmetic upgrades. Outdated pendant lights or fixtures should go, says Lanna Ali-Hassan, co-owner and principal designer of Beyond the Box Interiors in Washington, DC. If you're feeling confident in your DIY skills, you can easily replace a funky old ceiling light with a more tasteful one. The installation instructions are fairly straightforward, but if you have any reservations about dealing with electricity in your home, go the safe route and hire an electrician. Opt for a timeless, sleek brass and glass pendant ($79+, West Elm) or something geometric and modern ($219, Shades of Light). Cost: $50-plus for the light(s) and hardware; $150 to $300 for an electrician. Looking for a more low-key project? Ali-Hassan recommends swapping out cabinet hardware like drawer pulls and cabinet handles for an updated, clean look. Cost: Depends on the number of cabinets and/or drawers. Hardware starts around $5 per item. If you have 1 hour Photo by Inspired LED An investment of just an hour can lead to instantly noticeable, significant changes. Faucets are easy to swap if you follow directions, and can make a huge difference in the appearance of your kitchen. Faucets are like the garnish of the kitchen, says Jake Romano, who works for John the Plumber in Ottawa. A beautiful faucet can modernize the room, or make it look classic. Plus, new functions that are touch-activated keep the kitchen more sanitary. Cost: Supplies are $50 to $500. A professional will install it for about $150. An under-the-radar quick fix is adding LED lighting strips ($15.99, Amazon) under cabinets, which brighten up and modernize kitchens quickly, according to Anastasia Hartmann, an agent with Re/Max Professionals in Cottage Grove, MN. Cost: $15-plus for lighting that can be hard-wired, plugged in, or battery-operated. A professional will install it for $150 and up. If you have 3 hours Photo by NEAT Method Three hours gives you enough time to take on projects that will reap serious aesthetic rewards. One option that may not occur to many sellersbut will have broad universal appealis a reorganized pantry with matching storage containers, says Nick Drewe, a home improvement expert for Wethrift, headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. The bulk of your time will be spent pulling all items out of your pantry, throwing away expired or unused food, and decanting your dry goods into plastic or glass containers. Use woven rattan or metal baskets to hold chips, crackers, cookies, and other bagged snacks. Use a 10- to 20-piece set to organize dry foods, and modernize the overall look of the kitchen and pantry, Drewe says. Cost: $50 to $199 If you have some extra wall space, floating shelves will give the kitchen an open, airier feel and add room for storage, says Hartmann. Your local hardware store should have a number of prefab floating shelf options in a variety of finishes. Cost: $20-plus for a single shelf, depending on size and material If you have a weekend Photo by Mercury Mosaics and Tile Giving yourself a full weekend means you can tackle a larger project like installing a new tile backsplash. Of course, novice DIYers should proceed with cautionbut if your home improvement abilities are above average, you'll be more than capable of completing this in a couple of days. If you need some extra help, pull up a tutorial on YouTube, or you can hire a pro. Cost: Supplies will range from about $200 to $1,000, depending on the tiles and the size of your backsplash. You can also give your kitchen a face-lift with a few fresh coats of paint. Either repaint using your existing color or go for something bold and new. Cost: Supplies for a 150-square-foot kitchen will be about $150, and if you want a professional painter, the total project will run from $300 to $1,000. The post 10 Practical Kitchen Improvement Projects Based on How Much Time You Have appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com. An aerial view of the commercial harbor of the northeastern Italian city of Trieste along the Adriatic Sea on Oct. 8, 2017. (Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images) Italy the Beachhead for CCPs Invasion of Europe Commentary Churchill called Italy, the soft underbelly of Europe, meaning the invasion of the continent in World War II should be done there first by the Allied forces. Italy has also received other titles, such as the Sick Man of Europe. This title has been passed among several countries, but Italy has been a common recipient of this inglorious title due to its anemic economic growth. High taxes, low economic growth, high unemployment, have led to an economy perpetually in the doldrums since World War II. Italy has never quite re-established itself from the peak of its Roman magnificence. The Second World War axis with its northern ally ended miserably for the country and squelched its totalitarian leaders attempt to re-establish its once world-renowned aura. A grand self-image combined with empty pockets created a willing candidate to be the first European nation to sign up for the CCP Maritime Silk Road Project. Although a country showed up with investment funding in return for signature of a contract that may or may not have been translated properly, Italy jumped. And perhaps once again, Italy is acting as the first beachhead for the invasion of Europe, this time unfortunately by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Ports and Information Technology Networks The port arrangement model previously used in Kenya, Sri Lanka, and other places was a natural starting point for the CCPs influence operations in Italy. A major port such as Trieste in the top northeast portion of the country was an early entrant as a port partner program. It is ironic that Trieste was the same immediate region in which British and American military forces skirmished with Soviet and Yugoslavian Communists attempting to cede the territory away from Italy at the end of World War II. Smaller ports also are getting the attention of the Chinese. Vado Ligure, a more diminutive port on the top northeastern portion of the Italian peninsula has also received significant CCP attention with the port deal there. Vado Ligure is the largest fruit logistics hub in the Mediterranean is the best reason it appears on the surface for the CCP interest (China is a net food importer), but perhaps there are additional reasons. As usual, Huawei is part of the vanguard of CCP influence operations. Although making initial progress in entering the Italian market, things became rocky by fall of 2020. Huawei was blocked by Italy in October 2020 along with Bulgariamajor wins for then Secretary of State Pompeo and the Clean Network initiative, well-constructed programmatically as well as by moniker. With the change of Administrations in the United States, it remains to be seen if this State Department initiative becomes enduring or the seemingly hardening European stance begins to go wobbly. It is too early to tell on how long this rejection as a network provider will last, but likely Huawei will continue to seek soft spots and access points in Italy through lesser measures such as phone sales, routers, and other mobile devices. Although not as good as controlling the network, these network endpoints and components are important steps also for the ability to see the data traversing the networks. An Aviation Manufacturing Hub Venture A joint venture has been in operation for several years at Pomigliano dArco, just outside of Naples, Italy. This facility is Alenia Aermacchis biggest plant in southern Italy, part of the long standing, successful Boeing international supply chain. It participates in the production of the Boeing 787, producing about a 14% share of (the) 787s airframe, according to the firms website. Alenia is part of the larger Leonardo multi-national company which focuses on aerospace, defense, and related market sectors. Leonardo also owns Leonardo DRS in the United States led by former Deputy Secretary of Defense, William J. Lynne III. What is also curious about the Alenia facility outside of Naples is the relation of both Russian and Chinese interests, apparently in the same facility with Boeing. On Oct. 26, 2018, China, through the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, Ltd. (COMAC) signed with Leonardo (parent of Alenia) to develop the CR929, essentially the Chinese equivalent to the Boeing 737. Although the Leonardo listing mentions COMAC, COMAC has also created a joint venture with United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) of the Russian Federation and the CR929 is really the China-Russia Commercial Aircraft International Corporation Co., Ltd. (CRAIC) CR929. This can get quite confusing. A check of the Consolidated Screening List (CSL) of the Department of Commerce does display UAC as a listed company. This means that there are concerns of the U.S. Government toward UAC. COMAC did not come up directly in the CSL, but close variants did. The civil-military fusion efforts of the CCP are adept at constantly creating new or slightly differently named companies, so the coincidental nexus of COMAC/UAC with Leonardo/Alenia, which is simultaneously performing Boeing 787 should be considered one hop away or closer to Boeing intellectual property (IP). This means a listed Russian company and a questionable Chinese Company are working with a trusted Boeing partner, potentially in the same facility, potentially on the same network. The CSL list is good, but there is a lag time between variants of incorporation, done willfully to evade being memorialized on the CSL, and the CSL being updated to catch these willful evasions. There has been an ongoing attempt by COMAC (really CRAIC) to obtain Boeing IP to support the development of the CR929s immediate predecessor, the CR919, as identified by a cybersecurity firm named Crowdstrike, which identified this activity in approximately the 20102015 period. The 737 is essentially the crown jewel of American commercial airline exports. If CRAIC could destabilize the 737-market position, they would be able to enter the top tier of providers to the airline industry. The possible co-location of Boeing network endpoints so physically close to CRAIC personnel should be of great concern to any cybersecurity or export control risk analysis. Theres also another concerning angle: a possible insider threat situation, an expression in cybersecurity describing a trusted personality who has network access who may have played a role in all of this. The personalitys name: Arturo DElia. Arturo DElia, a former cybersecurity director within Leonardo, was imprisoned in December 2020 in regards to possible unlawful access and removal of data from the Leonardo networks. An analysis by Reaqta further established the exfiltrations to be significant, contrary to initial reporting by Leonardo. There are additional Italian investigations going on related to significant bribes involving multiple Leonardo personalities. In summary of all these events, once again Italy seems to be the entry point for a (soft) landing on the European continent, the CCP is relentlessly using its Italian beachhead as an influence operation, and President Bidens resolve to deter CCP adventurism is unclear, which is a green light to the CCP to push harder. Retired Col. John Mills is a national security professional with service in five eras: Cold War, Peace Dividend, War on Terror, World in Chaos, and now, Great Power Competition. He is the former director of cybersecurity policy, strategy, and international affairs at the Department of Defense. On Gab: @ColonelRETJohn. On Telegram: Daily Missive Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. Ten Vermont legislators have sponsored a bill (H.268) to create a "Sex Work Study Committee" concerning the legalization of prostitution in Vermont. This bill strives to rewrite Vermont history via an absurdly vacuous lie that Vermont prohibited prostitution because of "white supremacist" motives. In fact, the impetus for banning prostitution in Vermont and elsewhere was from feminists and suffragettes. How then could ten elected Vermont representatives draft and seek to establish as law something so patently false? House Bill 268, referenced to the Judiciary Committee on February 17, states: Sec. 1. FINDINGS AND INTENT 19 (a) The majority of Vermont's laws on prostitution were adopted more than 100 years ago and have remained largely unchanged since that time. ... Historically, these types of laws were used to prosecute men of color for having relationships with white women. It's bad enough the world must contend with actual racism without these partisan legislators fabricating nonexistent racist history to justify "developing a modern approach to State involvement in sexual activity for hire by consenting adults." Perhaps legalizing prostitution makes sense but how can the subject be legitimately addressed now that it has been tarnished with such a bald-faced lie as justification? Since this assertion or "finding" is the foundation of this bill, and since it is demonstrably false, why continue with the next section? This farce has no legitimacy it is a prostitution of legislative process to advance racist partisanship yet again. These legislators cannot point to a single case of such a thing ever happening in Vermont, the most BIPOC-friendly state of all America since its founding. If they could prove a single incident, would they impute a racist motive to Vermont's entire 1915 Legislature? If elected officials slander their own people, surely they must possess and procure evidence other than an unsubstantiated "historically, these types of laws were used..." After all, they have now made it an issue in a prostitution bill. In truth (and until these traitors re-write the Encyclopedia Britannica to accord with their toxic fictionalizations In the late 19th century ... [w]ith the rise of feminism, many came to regard male libertinism as a threat to women's status and physical health[.] ... Antiprostitution campaigns flourished from the 1860s, often in association with temperance and women's suffrage movements. International cooperation to end the traffic in women for the purpose of prostitution began in 1899. In 1921 the League of Nations established the Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, and in 1949 the United Nations General Assembly adopted a convention for the suppression of prostitution[.] ... By 1915 nearly all states had passed laws that banned brothels or regulated the profits of prostitution[.] ... Authorities also intervened to prevent girls from being coerced into prostitution ("white slavery"). Women initiated the prohibition of prostitution to prevent white slavery, and now a deluded clan of Progressive white Vermont legislators have introduced a law that claims that these old laws were passed not to protect white female victims, but to oppress black male ones. Perhaps the adroit Vermont media will inquire of these legislators for an example or two of Vermonters' forebears halting black men at the borders to Canada and Massachusetts from leaving the state with white Vermont gals in tow (in between smuggling slaves to Vermont via the Underground Railroad). Or perhaps, after electing the first BIPOC man to a state Legislature (in 1836!), Vermont decided by 1915 to reverse course and (silently, perhaps subconsciously) abandon its well established record of welcoming tolerance to persecute the 1,173 black men who lived here (per U.S. 1910 census, Table 2). Race activists assert (in the area of racial disparities in the criminal justice system) that "the matter of reducing racial disparities must not under any circumstances be seen as a partisan issue." How could anything be more obviously partisan than fabricating race-baiting lies to "liberate" Vermont from the criminalization of sex for hire? Vermont's factually deficient crew of virtue-signaling H.268 sponsors have pushed racist shaming to new pinnacles of Pinocchian proboscises and partisan ptooey. Is passing lies as laws, the new social justice pattern for America or just Vermont? Accountability is past due. Will Vermont's Progressive supermajority Legislature, bent on using any Alinskian means available, actually pass legislation this false in order to allow young women (of any color) to sell their bodies freely? Vermont will see, soon enough. Subscribe for John Klar's commentaries at vtliberty.net. William Burns is seated to testify before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on his nomination to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency on Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 24, 2021. (Reuters/Tom Brenner/Pool) Chinese Regime Is Authoritarian Adversary Posing Biggest Geopolitical Test: Biden CIA Director Nominee President Joe Bidens CIA director nominee William Burns told a Senate committee on Feb. 24 that the Chinese regimes adversarial, predatory leadership poses the greatest geopolitical test to the United States. Burns, 64, a former career diplomat who has worked in both Democratic and Republican administrations, said his four top priorities if he is confirmed to head the agency will be China, technology, people, and partnerships. Out-competing China will be key to our national security in the decades ahead, Burns said at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, repeating the position used by the Biden administration to describe its approach to the Chinese regime. He called the regime a formidable, authoritarian adversary that was methodically strengthening its capabilities to steal intellectual property, repress its own people, bully its neighbors, expand its global reach, and build influence in American society. However, Burns also noted areas in which the United States had mutual interests to work with the regime, such as climate change and nuclear non-proliferation. Biden has indicated he would focus on extreme competition with the Chinese regime, although the administration has shed little light on concrete plans pending a review of Trump-era China policies. The administration also faces pressure from Congress to continue a hardline stance toward the regime, an area that enjoys bipartisan support. The nominee also faced questions from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), vice chairman of the committee, about his time as president of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which recently came under scrutiny over the think tanks ties to ChinaUnited States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), a body affiliated with the Chinese Communist Partys influence operations. Burns said he inherited this relationship with CUSEF when he became president in 2015, but cut off ties not long after because we were increasingly worried about the expansion of Chinese influence operations. He also defended the think tanks partnership with Beijing-based Tsinghua University through the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center. Some of the Chinese scholars who worked for the center also have ties to the CCP, according to The National Pulse. Burns said that during his tenure, he was extraordinarily careful to ensure that the arrangements with Tsinghua University allowed the think tank to do independent work. Ive also made clear to my colleagues at Carnegie that the moment we were constrained and doing that independent work, we would cease operations, he said. Burns is expected to easily win confirmation to become director of the CIA. He has already been confirmed by the Senate five times for his positions as ambassador to Jordan and Russia and three senior positions at the State Department. Reuters contributed to this report. NASHVILLE, Tenn. Since late December, the Tennessee National Guard has been transitioning from primarily supporting COVID-19 testing to supporting vaccine administration throughout Tennessee. Helping citizens get vaccinated has been our primary focus since the vaccines have become available, said Maj. Gen. Jeff Holmes, Tennessees Adjutant General. Its the next step to helping Tennessee return to normal. Since vaccinations began, the Tennessee National Guard has helped administer over 223,000 vaccinations across Tennessee. They are also continuing to support COVID-19 testing which began on March 23 when Gov. Bill Lee initially requested 250 Soldiers and Airmen of the Tennessee National Guard to assist Tennessees response to the pandemic. Currently, 680 Guardsmen are activated and working alongside the Health Department and local agencies providing support during the ongoing pandemic. Over the last year, more than 1,600 Guardsmen have assisted with COVID-19 testing. We have over 12,000 Soldiers and Airmen across the state and they are all trained and ready to help their fellow Tennesseans whenever called upon, said Holmes. Right now, Guardsmen are supporting 126 individual locations in 72 counties. In the last 11 months, the Tennessee National Guard has supported testing of nearly 850,000 Tennesseans for COVID-19. Between testing and vaccinations, they have directly assisted more than 1 million Tennessee citizens across the state. Our Soldiers and Airmen have displayed an impressive level of mental fortitude and adaptability over the last year, said Holmes. From COVID-19 testing, vaccinations, tornado response, civil unrest, and winter weather relief, the men and women of the Tennessee National Guard have stepped up and overcome adversity time and time again. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, left, shakes hands with outgoing Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industries (KCCI) Chairman Park Yong-maan during a general meeting of the Seoul Chamber of Commerce and Industries in Seoul, Tuesday. Chey was appointed as the chairman of the Seoul chamber and will succeed Park as KCCI chairman in March. Yonhap By Nam Hyun-woo SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won is expected to be appointed as the new head of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) in March, and under his stewardship the business organization is expected to encourage its members to pursue environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) values. The head of the Seoul Chamber of Commerce and Industry typically serves as the head of the KCCI, and it appointed Chey, 61, as its new chairman Tuesday. Chey will be officially appointed as the KCCI chairman at a March 24 general meeting of member companies for the first of a possible two three-year terms. "I have been thinking about many things in taking up the responsibility of leading the Seoul chamber at a time when various difficulties linger across industries," Chey said. "I believe we can improve our business circumstances and build a good environment for future generations with help from various people." With Chey's concurrent chairmanship of the KCCI, its leadership is anticipated to become younger and represent the voices of a wider range of businesses, as the heads of info-tech firms, financial companies and startups are also joining the Seoul chamber as vice chairmen. Along with Chey, seven new vice chairmen were appointed to the Seoul chamber Korea Investment Holdings Chairman Kim Nam-goo, Kakao Chairman Kim Beom-soo, NCSoft CEO Kim Taek-jin, Doosan Group Vice Chairman Park Gee-won, Bespin Global CEO Lee Han-joo, SK Social Value Committee Chairman Lee Hyung-hee and Krafton Chairman Chang Byung-gyu. With SK's Lee now a vice chairman, the KCCI is also expected to follow SK Group and become more active in encouraging member companies to pursue ESG goals. Under Chey's leadership, SK Group has been highlighting ESG values as a priority in operating its businesses. In 2019, SK Group introduced an index to measure each affiliate's social contributions and has been making this public in financial statements or sustainability reports to compel its units to be more committed to social values. As part of these efforts, SK hynix issued $1 billion worth of green bonds last month to invest in environmentally friendly business projects. SK Innovation is planning to unload a 49 percent stake in its wholly-owned chemical subsidiary SK Global Chemical and set up a joint venture with a global partner company to lower its reliance on the conventional chemical business. Chey has been striving to share this business philosophy with fellow businessmen nationwide. SK Group began holding an annual Social Value Connect event in 2019 to share ideas on corporate social responsibility. Last year, Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Euisun and POSCO Chairman Choi Jeong-woo participated to share their thoughts on ESG values. PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 23, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kaskela Law LLC announces that it is investigating Decision Diagnostics Corp. (Decision Diagnostics) (OTC: DECN) on behalf of the companys stockholders. On December 17, 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a complaint against Decision Diagnostics and its Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Keith Berman, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleges that Decision Diagnostics and Berman seized upon the Covid-19 global pandemic through a series of press releases that falsely claimed Decision Diagnostics had developed a finger prick blood test that could detect Covid-19 in less than a minute. According to the complaint, from March 2020 to at least June 2020, Decision Diagnostics and Berman made false and misleading statements about the existence of Decision Diagnostics' Covid-19 device and progress towards FDA emergency use authorization. As alleged, at the time of these claims, Decision Diagnostics lacked a proven method for detecting the virus and had no physical testing device. Further, its advisors had warned that the testing kit they were trying to manufacture would not work as Decision Diagnostics had described. The complaint also alleges that the statements created the misleading impression that the test was soon to be introduced to the market and led to surges in the price and trading volume of Decision Diagnostics' stock. Decision Diagnostics investors are encouraged to contact Kaskela Law LLC at https://kaskelalaw.com/case/decision-diagnostics-corp/ for additional information about this investigation and their legal rights and options. Kaskela Law LLC represents investors in securities fraud, corporate governance, and merger & acquisition litigation. For additional information about Kaskela Law LLC please visit www.kaskelalaw.com. CONTACT: D. Seamus Kaskela, Esq. KASKELA LAW LLC 18 Campus Boulevard, Suite 100 Newtown Square, PA 19073 (484) 258 1585 (888) 715 1740 www.kaskelalaw.com skaskela@kaskelalaw.com This notice may constitute attorney advertising in certain jurisdictions. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 20:28:22|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close HONG KONG, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- More and more Asia-Pacific countries started COVID-19 vaccinations on Wednesday as Thailand received vaccines from China's Sinovac, while Malaysia launched its national immunization program, with Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin being the first to be vaccinated. The first batch of COVID-19 vaccines that Thailand ordered from China's Sinovac Biotech arrived in the capital Bangkok Wednesday, putting the country on track to kickstart its national inoculation program. The 200,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccines, the first shipment among 2 million doses Thailand ordered from the Chinese biopharmaceutical firm, will be distributed to 13 provinces, including Bangkok, and administered to at-risk groups, including medical workers, close contacts with COVID-19 patients and people with certain chronic illnesses. Thailand has so far confirmed 25,692 cases of infection, 22,956 of which were reported as domestic while 2,736 others referred to those who had returned from abroad. The national immunization program would be Malaysia's largest vaccination program ever, aiming to inoculate at least 80 percent of the country's total population to achieve protection against COVID-19, which has infected over 290,000 people and caused over 1,000 deaths in the country so far. Muhyiddin received the shot on live television in a bid to build confidence in the vaccine among the public. He was joined by Health Ministry Director-General Noor Hisham Abdullah and four frontliners, who also received their shots. Meanwhile, the health ministry reported another 3,545 new infections on Wednesday, bringing the national total to 291,774. Another 12 deaths have been reported, pushing the death toll to 1,088. India's total tally rose to 11,030,176 as 13,742 new cases were registered during the past 24 hours, said the latest data from the health ministry. The death toll mounted to 156,567 with 104 new deaths. There are still 146,907 active cases in the country, while 10,726,702 people have been discharged from hospitals after medical treatment. Malaysia launched its national immunization program, with Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin being the first to be vaccinated. This would be Malaysia's largest vaccination program ever, aiming to inoculate at least 80 percent of the country's total population to achieve protection against COVID-19, which has infected over 290,000 people and caused over 1,000 deaths in the country so far. Meanwhile, the health ministry reported another 3,545 new infections on Wednesday, bringing the national total to 291,774. Another 12 deaths have been reported, pushing the death toll to 1,088. The Department of Health (DOH) of the Philippines reported 1,557 new confirmed cases, bringing the Southeast Asian country's total tally to 566,420. The death toll rose to 12,129 after 22 more patients died from the coronavirus epidemic, the DOH said. It added that 392 more patients recovered, raising the total number of recoveries to 523,321. South Korea reported 440 more cases of COVID-19 as of midnight Tuesday compared to 24 hours ago, raising the total number of infections to 88,120. Of the new cases, 138 were Seoul residents and 137 were people residing in Gyeonggi province. Twenty-three cases were imported from overseas, lifting the combined figure to 6,963. Three more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 1,576. Enditem The pandemic drove an astounding decline in rental prices across the notoriously pricey Bay Area over the past year. But recent data shows that might be coming to an end. The most recent national rent report from apartment listings website Zumper shows rental price decreases have been slowing and even reversing in some parts of the region since the start of the new year. Prices could still decrease more in 2021, but the three largest Bay Area cities San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland have all had monthly price increases at least once so far into this year, said Zumper analyst Neil Gerstein. San Franciscos median one-bedroom rent for February was $2,650, declining 1.1% since January, according to Zumper. In Oakland, the median one-bedroom rent remained flat at $2,000. But in San Jose, where rental prices havent grown since before the pandemic, median one-bedroom rental prices increased 2.3% to $2,180 from January. The Zumper report contrasts with data released last week by Zillow, which showed continuing declines in Bay Area cities using a different methodology. According to Zumper, rent decreases have been slowing in recent months after prices plummeted across the Bay Area from the start of the pandemic, according to Zumper. The widespread pivot to remote work, particularly in the tech sector, has upended a rental market whose prices had been pushed sky-high by nearly a decade of record job growth and business expansion. The trend has been the most dramatic in San Francisco, which as of February had seen a jaw-dropping 24.3% decline year-over-year in rental prices for 1-bedroom apartments. Part of that can also be attributed to the normal winter season slowdown in the rental market, according to Zumper analysts. Despite the huge drop, San Francisco still remained the most expensive rental market in the nation in February, according to Zumper. It was followed by New York, with a one-bedroom median price nearly $200 lower, at $2,460, and San Jose in third place. Four other California cities were in the top 10 Oakland at No. 5, Los Angeles at No. 7 with a median price of $1,900, San Diego at No. 8 with a median price of $1,820, and Santa Ana tied with Fort Lauderdale, Fla., at No. 9 with a median price of $1,700. Zumper The pandemic sent many big city dwellers to cheaper neighboring areas, which caused prices to drop in the more expensive markets and spike in the less expensive ones, bringing the rental prices closer to each other. The trend was most obvious in San Francisco, which has seen the most dramatic year-over-year median one-bedroom rent decline of any major market. San Joses one-bedroom median price decreased 11.7%, and Oakland went down 15.6%. In contrast, in Sacramento which Zumpers analysis pairs as a neighboring city with the Bay Area metros the year-over-year median one-bedroom rent went up 10% to $1,430, while Fresnos increased 13.1% to $1,120. This trend has started to reverse as price decreases in expensive cities have slowed or stopped completely, and growth has slowed in cheaper places, meaning that the price gap between expensive and cheaper cities has started to widen again, which we havent seen happen since early 2020, Gerstein said. Zumper A separate report from Zumper looking specifically at Bay Area cities shows San Francisco still in the top spot for most expensive median one-bedroom rent in February, followed by Cupertino ($2,490), Palo Alto ($2,390) and Emeryville ($2,330). Vallejo had the least expensive one-bedroom median rent ($1,470), followed by East Palo Alto ($1,550) and Richmond ($1,720). Livermore had the fastest growing one-bedroom rent, according to Zumper, increasing 6% year-over-year, with Concord in second place at 3.5%. Three Silicon Valley cities had the largest year-over-year declines: Mountain View (-31.3%), Sunnyvale (-28.6%) and Santa Clara (-28.1%). In February, Union City saw the biggest one-bedroom month-over-month increase, up 5.2% since January, with East Palo Alto following (4.7%) and Dublin in third (3.2%). Richmond had the biggest month-over-month decline (-4.4%), followed by Walnut Creek (-4.2%), and South San Francisco (-4.1%) Nationally, Zumper found that February rent rose at the fastest monthly rate since the pandemic began in the U.S., increasing 1.1% for a median one-bedroom rent of $1,240 and going up 0.9% to $1,501 for a median two-bedroom unit. A year ago, median one-bedroom rent was up 1.8% and 2.6% for a two-bedroom. Zumpers reports analyze data from over 1 million active listings across the United States and include newer builds. Data is aggregated monthly to calculate median asking rents for the top 100 metro areas by population. Kellie Hwang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kellie.hwang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KellieHwang Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. HCL Technologies, (HCL), a leading global technology company, has been named by Forbes as one of The Worlds Best Employers for 2020, honoring HCL among the top global employers in the world. In addition to being ranked number 30 on the list, HCL is recognized as the only multinational company that is headquartered in India to be featured in the top 50. Forbes The Worlds Best Employers for 2020 list recognizes the most admired workplaces around the world as voted by the people who know them best their employees. HCL is recognized for its outstanding work environment in every assessment category, including employee satisfaction with the companys COVID-19 response, as well as the companys image, economic footprint, talent development and career opportunities, gender equality and social responsibility. We dedicate this prestigious recognition to our employees as all 159,000 ideapreneurs drive our brand with enthusiasm, passion and innovation. This distinction is reflective of our people-centric culture and commitment, deep rooted in our 44 years of business around the globe, said Apparao VV, Chief Human Resources Officer, HCL Technologies. Were very proud of what we have built together and will continue to empower our people, clients and communities to help them achieve their professional goals in an environment filled with creativity, freedom, inclusiveness, ideapreneurship and innovation. Forbes partnered with market research firm Statista to compile the ranking by surveying 160,000 full-time and part-time workers from 58 countries that are working for businesses with operations in multiple nations or regions. Surveys were conducted on a rolling basis from June to July 2020 and participants were asked to rate their willingness to recommend their own employers to friends and family, while ranking their satisfaction with their employers in multiple categories that are important to todays modern and competitive work environment. The complete list features 750 global corporations headquartered in 45 countries. To see the full Forbes The Worlds Best Employer List visit here: https://www.forbes.com/lists/worlds-best-employers/#23688cab1e0c About HCL Technologies HCL Technologies (HCL) empowers global enterprises with technology for the next decade, today. HCLs Mode 1-2-3 strategy, based on its deep-domain industry expertise, customer-centricity and entrepreneurial culture of Ideapreneurship, enables businesses to transform into next-gen enterprises. HCL offers its services and products through three business units: IT and Business Services (ITBS), Engineering and R&D Services (ERS) and Products & Platforms (P&P). ITBS enables global enterprises to transform their businesses through offerings in the areas of applications, infrastructure, digital process operations and next generational digital transformation solutions. ERS offers engineering services and solutions in all aspects of product development and platform engineering. P&P provides modernized software products to global clients for their technology and industry specific requirements. Through its cutting-edge co-innovation labs, global delivery capabilities and broad global network, HCL delivers holistic services in various industry verticals, categorized as Financial Services, Manufacturing, Technology & Services, Telecom & Media, Retail & CPG, Life Sciences & Healthcare and Public Services. As a leading global technology company, HCL takes pride in its diversity, social responsibility, sustainability and education initiatives. For the 12 months ended December 31, 2020 HCL had consolidated revenue of US$ 10.02 billion. Its 159,682 ideapreneurs operate out of 50 countries. For more information, visit www.hcltech.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210223006272/en/ MIAMI, FL, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NewMediaWire -- Amazonas Florestal, Ltd. (OTC : AZFL) ( azflamerica.com ), a natural resources company dedicated to innovative, sustainable forest management, the certification and sales of carbon credits, and processing Industrial Hemp, announced today that the Company has organized a new subsidiary in the State of Nevada named Green America Laboratories. The Company also announced that the new subsidiary brings together an important group of investors led by Mr. Raul Rocha Cantu, a Mexican businessman whose home group owns and operates the largest private gaming establishments in Mexico. GAL, as it has now been baptized, will be directed by AZFLs Company Chairman, Ricardo Cortez, in conjunction with Mr. Rocha Cantu and Mr. Alejandro Otero, also a Mexican businessman and land-owner who has also contributed with important guarantees to the GAL Project. As previously announced, Green America Laboratories has secured a facility in NW Miami-Dade County where the company will be building a top-of-the-line Hemp derived products lab. GAL has selected and ordered a new lab configuration with equipment manufactured by Precision Extraction Solutions of Troy, Michigan. Precision, widely considered the best USA manufacturer of solvent based cannabinoid extraction equipment, was founded by Mr. Nick Tennant, world renowned as the USAs Extraction Guru. Further, the Company announced that GAL has hired architects and engineers to design the lab layout under the technical direction of Mr. Grim Leadingham of WKU Consulting. Mr. Leadingham and his team are accredited with 100% effectiveness in the business, having helped built some of the largest bulk concentrates laboratories on the west coast and with a perfect 9 for 9 record in labs built and labs operating successfully. GAL is expected to be operational sometime during the second trimester of this fiscal year and will become the first of its kind this far south among major USA based cannabinoid extraction operators. GALs standardized operating procedures aim to produce bulk T-Free concentrates and premium T-Free distillates for the emerging Florida and Latin American Markets. AZFLs present board also announced that it has officially appointed Carlos Martinez as its new CFO. Mr. Martinez brings more than 25 years of banking and financial experience, having directed several large financial institutions. The Company also announced that it has hired Mr. Jose Giron as General Manager to direct the Green America Laboratories project. Mr. Giron, has a masters degree in Finance and will be initially directing all of new hires at the GAL facility and coordinating the Building Permits with Miami-Dade County and permits by FDACS. The Company stated further that several new appointments are in progress and will be announced as applicants are being considered to occupy several key management positions to oversee these new operations. Ricardo Cortez, Chairman of the Board of Amazonas Florestal Ltd., stated: These are new and exciting times for AZFL. After almost two and a half years in pursuit of the right business combination to bring our project to life, thanks to the backing of our Mexican investors without whom these new operations would not be possible, I can proudly state that the Company is well on its way to develop new and important operations this year and right here in our back yard, Miami-Dade County and the State of Florida. Cortez also stated, Under my direction, we are building the new management teams and I can assure our investors and shareholders that all of the elements are in place to make the GAL project a reality. I want to thank our followers and collaborators for their valuable support in helping to get this project on its way in an effective and positive manner. We will be following up with more important updates as the project further develops. About Amazonas Florestal Ltd. Amazonas Florestal Ltd. is a natural resources company dedicated to innovative, sustainable management of large tracts of land in the rainforests of Amazonas, Brazil, that include the certification and sale of carbon credits. In 2017, the Company shifted gears to focus on the growth, harvesting, research and development of Industrial Hemp and related products in the U.S.A. and for the U.S. and Latin Markets. In 2021, the Company will build an important Hemp Oil Extraction facility in South Florida dedicated to the production of premium bulk cannabinoid extractions derived from Hemp and products that use these extractions as an active ingredient to Health and Wellness products. Headquartered in Miami, FL, Amazonas' goal is to become a leader in field of Cannabinoid Extractions serving labs that use these chemicals as a raw material for human and animal health and beauty products. Disclaimer: Forward Looking Statements Forward-looking statements in this release regarding Amazonas Florestal Ltd. are made pursuant to the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including, without limitation, continued acceptance of the company's products, increased levels of competition, new products and technological changes, the company's dependence upon third-party suppliers, intellectual property rights, and other risks detailed from time to time in the company's periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Amazonas Florestal Ltd. Email: azflorestal@outlook.com Website: http://azflamerica.com Re: On the Liberal gun ban Just a note about the letter to editor concerning the Liberal gun ban. He states that Texas is the safest state in the U.S. because of their open carry gun policy. This could not be farther from the truth. In 2019 there were 1490 murders in Texas, they have a population of 29 million and most were all gun related. By comparison Canada had 675 murders and our population is 37 million. I've spent a fair amount of time in Texas, Florida, Arizona and many other states that have open carry and conceal policies. These States have many school and church shootings and are not safe. We were touring through El Paso not long before there was a mass shooting at a Wal Mart with a legally purchased AK47. Americans hide behind their second amendment which gives them the right to bear arms. We have no such constitutional right in Canada and in fact owning a gun in Canada is a privilege and not a right. I've noticed many letters to the editor recently amplify far right movements with little information based on fact. If we are to give a megaphone to to the far right fringe then we should at least fact check. It's one thing to read the anti Trudeau ranting from the same people over and over again but it's another to read misinformation that tries to radicalize a movement based on fiction. Howie Hewgill Sorry! This content is not available in your region When is daylight savings time 2021? When do we change our clocks this spring? Daylight Saving Time, also colloquially referred to as daylight savings, begins on the second Sunday in March. That means you need to move your clocks ahead one hour at 2 a.m. Sunday, March 14, 2021, and we lose an hour of sleep as we spring forward. Many digital clocks, such as on phones and computers, automatically change the time overnight, but other clocks should be moved ahead one hour before going to bed on Saturday, March 13. Daylight Saving Time will end on the first Sunday of November, which is Nov. 7 this year. Thats when we fall back, or turn the clocks back one hour and gain that hour of sleep back. Daylight Saving Time was first established during World War I to conserve fuel for war industries. The law was repealed after WWI ended, but was re-established by Congress during World War II due to energy consumption and became U.S. law in 1966 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Uniform Time Act, establishing uniform start and end times within standard time zones. The policy, regulated by the Department of Transportation, aims to save energy, reduce traffic fatalities, and reduce crime. Not all states observe DST. Arizona and Hawaii do not participate in Daylight Saving Time, and multiple bills have been introduced in the New York state legislature to end the changing of clocks in the Empire State. Its time to turn the page on changing our clocks twice a year and, given the similar interests of New York and contiguous states, it makes sense to do so regionally, NY Sen. Joseph Griffo (R-47) said in November. I am looking forward to working with my legislative colleagues in other states to make permanent daylight saving time a reality in the Northeastern United States. Some lawmakers have also proposed making Daylight Saving Time permanent nationwide. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) reintroduced legislation in 2019 and then-President Donald Trump said that hes in favor of it. Daylight Saving Time was kept after World War II because Americans were believed to use less energy by extending summer daylight into the evening. However, a 2008 Department of Energy study found that DST reduces annual energy use by just 0.03 percent, and another study by the University of California-Santa Barbara found DST might even increase energy consumption. The bodies of a mother and her 11-year-old son have been found in a New Jersey pond after her six-year-old boy was discovered screaming out for help nearby. Police were called to Grace Lord Park in Boonton on Tuesday evening to reports of an unattended child. After locating the boy, they discovered 'footprints going into the water', and found the bodies of Warda Syed, 35, and her son Uzair Ahmed in the pond. The woman's younger boy, who was unharmed, has not been named by officials. It is not clear why the mother and her son entered the water, or why the family was at the park. DailyMail.com has contacted the Morris County Prosecutor for comment. The bodies of a mother and her young son have been found in a New Jersey river with her six-year-old boy left screaming out for help nearby Police discovered the youngster alone in Grace Lord Park in Boonton on Tuesday evening. He was unharmed. They then found the bodies of his mom and brother in the pond 'with footprints, pictured, going into the water', acting Morris County Prosecutor Robert Carroll said One local, Lexi Finn, told NBC: 'Who wants to go in the water at this time of year anyway?You don't want to go in this water at all.' The bodies were discovered at the top of a waterfall, which flows into the Rockaway River. Police had been called after a passerby heard the six-year-old screaming out for his mom. The Morris County Prosecutor's office said in a statement: 'This is an active and ongoing joint investigation being conducted by the Morris County Prosecutors Office Major Crimes Unit, Morris County Sheriffs Office Crime Scene Investigation Unit, Boonton Police Department Detective Bureau and Boonton Fire Department Swiftwater Rescue Team.' It is not clear why the mother and her two sons were at the park and why two of them entered the water Morris County Sheriff James Gannon said: 'We're going to spend some time on this and do a thorough investigation to ensure that we find the facts out as to what happened here.' Police say the incident appears isolated. They were seen towing a Nissan SUV from the scene. Acting Morris County Prosecutor Carroll added: 'It's obviously a very sad day when children are involved in this type of situation, horrible situation, our deepest condolences go out to the family.' By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 02/24/2021 ADVERTISEMENT FOLLOW REALITY TV WORLD ON THE ALL-NEW GOOGLE NEWS! Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade. star Chris Williams has slammed Dr. Pepper Schwartz after the show expert recently posted and deleted a strong statement about how Chris' behavior in his marriage to Paige Banks has been "appalling" and casting him on Season 12 was "a bad call."Pepper, who serves as one of three experts and matchmakers with Pastor Calvin Roberson and Dr. Viviana Coles, took to Instagram on Thursday with a lengthy statement about the experts' unpopular decision to put Chris on the show.Pepper wrote how she empathizes with viewers who are "horrified" and "appalled" by Chris' "offensive" and "disappointing" actions, and she suggested Chris has "fooled A LOT of people" in the casting process.Shortly after Pepper deleted her post -- which was captured in a series of screenshots reposted by @mafsfan Instagram account -- Chris took to Facebook and unloaded on the expert."I told my people no more posts, but this is the last one. Yes I saw Dr. Pepper's post and delete comment! These are the things I took away from her post and delete (As I attempt to not mince my words too)! With all due respect!" Chris began."1. She referred to me as 'that man'! My name is not 'that man'! 2. I find it crazy that you are making it seem as if I f'd up your impeccable track record! When in reality, you have been an expert since Day 1 and your track record is 30% of the people you personally put together that are still together (From Day 1)."Chris continued, "3. The national average divorce rate is 50%. Yours is 70%! 4. If 12 people stay together out of 39, then that means that there are 27 'bad calls'. Not 1!""5. Maybe [it's] time to retire because a change is needed and everyone sees that but you!!!" Chris concluded. "CallForMeAndIWillAnswer #TheseAreAllFacts #LeaveMeAlone."In Pepper's Thursday Instagram post, she wrote in the caption, "As many of you know, this season of #MAFS included a match that has turned out to be both disappointing and, often, offensive to myself and the viewers. I wanted to make sure you all could have some of the context that I do for why this man was allowed to participate in our program." No excuses: it was a bad call ," she added."But please, if you are upset about this match, take a minute to read my words and see how seriously we vet these people before matching them and how much I empathize with all of those at home who are horrified by Chris's actions."Pepper went on to thank fans for their concern and insisted the show does "a lot of in-depth research on people" every season during the vetting process -- including filling out long questionnaires and conducting several interviews with the experts and producers."There is also an outside, independent psychological firm that gives tests to applicants at two different times. There is also a forensic researcher, looking for any legal infractions in the last ten years. And we also look a decade back for social media posts that might disqualify someone," Pepper shared."All this is to say that if someone gets past all this and turns out to be a bad fit for this process, they have fooled A LOT of people. One reason we think this can happen is that all of this is in-depth but not necessarily happening when a person is UNDER stress. People do change -- a lot -- when threatened or disappointed."Pepper also addressed backlash from people saying should have stopped documenting Paige and Chris' marriage once it clearly turned into a trainwreck "I also understand why people might want us not to continue filming this couple. This reason we keep on is that we have seen similar 'train wrecks' turn around," Pepper wrote before citing Season 6 couple Shawniece Jackson and Jephte Pierre as an example."It's miserable to watch in the beginning but [Jephte] turns around -- breaks down, changes the way he approaches his wife and his life, and the changes are both life changing and inspirational. They are happily married now with a beautiful child. Granted this is exceptional -- but it does happen, and so we watch things play out," Pepper explained."Even if the couple doesn't get together -- at least one person can grow and gain strength and know more about who she or he is and what they want in a partner. More time in the experiment also gives us experts more time to counsel, to try and help them work through tough experiences."Pepper continued in her since-deleted post, "Do I, or any of the experts, mince words with Chris? I don't think so. I am appalled at some of the things he has said and done. I don't know how many of our statements to him make the final cut (for me or anyone else) -- but no one is giving Chris a 'pass.' I can understand however, if you don't think it's enough."But Pepper said the experts' role is simply to give honest feedback and counsel the couples the best they can."But not everyone can listen and use our insights and critiques to be a better person. It's also true that we can tell Paige what we think is in her best interests (i.e. cut all interaction) but that doesn't mean that she agrees with us and wants to end the relationship," Pepper wrote, suggesting the experts had recommended that Paige end her marriage to Chris."She is an adult, a person determined to see this experiment through, and she considers what we say, but she does what she wants to do. But does a lot of it break my heart, as much of it has broken yours? Do I understand your disgust? Of course I do.""We must take responsibility for this match -- but I assure you the Chris we all see now, is not the Chris we met and married to Paige," Pepper wrote."I wish we knew how to get to the core of someone's intent and their ability to love all the time, but we cannot."Pepper, however, said the experts take great pride in the couples they have successfully matched over the years who are still married today."I wish it was a perfect record, that's what we try for, but that doesn't seem to be possible. We tell everyone that truth -- that this is a high-risk endeavor, even with three trained professionals matching the couples and giving them support all along the way," Pepper explained."But we are not relationship wizards; there will be some failures. However, we think the many life enhancing successes we have created justify the continuation of . Sincerely, Pepper."viewers have been lashing out at Chris and scolding the show's experts for casting him ever since Season 12, which was filmed late last summer in Atlanta, premiered in January on Lifetime.The season has shown Chris repeatedly boasting about himself and his accomplishments, making offensive and sexist remarks about wife Paige Banks , discussing his high expectations of a woman's physical looks, constantly talking about sex, and marrying a stranger only three months after ending his engagement to a woman he still continued hooking up with after their split.Chris also received backlash for having sex with Paige twice after their wedding despite telling production and her bridesmaids that he wasn't physically attracted to her.Chris then appeared to discover his ex-fiancee, Mercedes, was about six weeks pregnant with his child at the beginning of his Las Vegas honeymoon with Paige.In addition, Chris was shown screaming at co-stars Erik Lake and Virginia Coombs in the latest episode after he believed the couple had invaded his privacy and inappropriately butted into his personal affairs.Paige, however, decided to continue her relationship with Chris despite an extremely rocky first week of marriage, including a shocking revelation from Chris that he still loved his ex-fiancee and briefly considered getting back together with her.Interested in more news? Join our Married at First Sight Facebook Group or click here to view our newspage!And click here for more updates on former cast members and info on where they are now! 82 Shares Share As a Latina physician on the frontlines of COVID-19, it feels like a race against time to get as many vaccines as possible to the communities of color that are more likely to be infected, hospitalized, and die from the virus. A lot of effort right now is focused on the logistics of managing vaccines that need to be manufactured, stored, allocated, distributed, and administered by health care workers. But all these efforts will be in vain if the needs of communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 are ignored or neglected. According to the KFF Vaccine Monitor, Black and Brown communities do not feel they have enough information on the vaccine side effects or effectiveness, dont know when and where to get vaccinated, and are less confident that vaccine distribution is taking into account the needs of their respective communities. The low confidence levels are not unfounded. Centuries of trauma and systemic racism from the U.S. government and medical community through events like the Tuskegee experiments, sterilization without consent, and, still today, the undertreatment of pain because of racist assumptions have broken Black and Brown communities trust in these institutions. Now we are reaping the consequences of that history. Of those who received a COVID-19 vaccine in the first month of distribution, only 11.5 percent were Hispanic/Latino and just 2 percent were Black. So how does the medical community work to earn the trust that we broke? In one word, transparency. Heres what that transparency looks like in practice: 1. Acknowledge that the medical community broke the trust of Black and Brown communities. This can be as simple as stating, Yes, the medical community has made mistakes, but we are making a conscious effort to do better and be better by working to get the vaccines to communities that need it. This helps validate their experiences and works to earn back trust. 2. Dont assume you know the reasons behind someones hesitancy. There may be questions or concerns specific to a community or individual that you have not identified or addressed yet. Rush University Medical Centers Community Response Playbook shows how individuals from the community and health care institutions can come together to identify problems and develop solutions to a communitys unique needs. 3. Work with trusted messengers. A known partner, such as community and faith-based organizations, can help bridge communication and trust. A trusted messenger can also be a physician or health care worker from that community who understands the community and its culture. I am currently working with Enlace Chicago to train their Promotoras de Salud to respond to questions. This will be paired with Charlas, monthly virtual information sessions, so that the community can not only get information but also have questions answered by Promotoras and Spanish-speaking physicians like myself. 4. Information should be clear, consistent, linguistically appropriate, culturally appropriate, and in a channel of communication preferred by that community. For example, some individuals who are undocumented are hesitant to access any publicly-funded testing, care, vaccinations related to COVID-19 for fear of not being eligible to receive a green card due to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Public Charge Rule. When I speak to communities, I clearly and concisely state in Spanish that President Biden and Homeland Security want to ensure that everyone residing in the U.S. has access to the vaccine and that accessing care and vaccines related to COVID-19 will not negatively impact a persons Public Charge analysis. 5. Meet communities where they are. We know that difficulties physically accessing health care negatively impact health outcomes, including outcomes of COVID-19. Vaccination sites should be easily accessible to the communities hardest hit by the pandemic. 6. Respect the decisions of individuals even if you disagree. As medical and government institutions, our role is to provide people with the information they need to make the best decisions for themselves and their families. If they decline the vaccine, we must respect that decision. We can still build trust by encouraging the evidence-based public health behaviors that will protect them from the virus. There are still many obstacles to making earning the trust of Black and Brown communities. But by acknowledging that the trust is broken and being transparent in how we reach out to communities, we can work toward earning trust and doing better for these communities who have suffered so much from this virus already. Susan Lopez is an internal medicine physician. Image credit: Shutterstock.com The Open Library Foundation enables the development, accessibility and sustainability of open source software and communities for and by libraries. The Foundation also looks to increase awareness of open source initiatives and advocate for the benefits of open source in the library space The Open Library Foundation has named Elizabeth German to the role of Senior Program Officer. German is an associate professor and the service design librarian at Texas A&M University and will work with the Foundations Board to support Foundation operations and strategic initiatives. The Open Library Foundation enables the development, accessibility and sustainability of open source software and communities for and by libraries. The Foundation also looks to increase awareness of open source initiatives and advocate for the benefits of open source in the library space. Open Library Foundation Board President Tom Cramer, the Associate University Librarian and Director of Digital Library Systems and Services at Stanford University, says German will work closely with the Board. While the Foundation is looking to support more projects and communities, we are also looking for volunteers to take part in the Open Library Foundation. Beth will be providing both strategic and operational leadership as the Foundation builds programs, and a diverse group of volunteers who make up the Open Library Foundation. German says her taking this role at the Open Library Foundation is an outgrowth of her support for open source technology. Open source software can be transformative for industries and communities, being a part of the Open Library Foundation and working towards fulfilling its mission is a great way to support expansion of open source resources. Cramer says the Open Library Foundation should be a vehicle for thought leaders looking to expand the use of open source technology. The organizations and volunteers involved in the Open Library Foundation are a testament to the power open source has to galvanize people to solve problems, and for libraries to help build and shape their services in the 21st century. German says her experience building processes and systems at Texas A&M is a natural fit. The Open Library Foundation has entered a new phase in its development. Im excited to use my skills in project management, user experience, and association organization to expand the value the Foundation adds to the library open source community. In 2021, the Foundation will be focusing on strengthening a global network of library open source projects and communities that leverage and reinforce each other. This comes after two years of successful work to establish the Foundations operational basis, led by Ginny Boyer, OLF Managing Director from 2019-2020 and Scott Anderson, current OLF Treasurer. About the Open Library Foundation The Open Library Foundation is an independent not-for-profit organization designed to ensure the availability, accessibility and sustainability of open source projects for and by libraries. The Foundation provides an environment in which the library community can organize, contribute to, and benefit from open source. Find out more about the Open Library Foundation at http://www.openlibraryfoundation.org. ### For more information, please contact: Kathleen McEvoy, Media Relations, Open Library Foundation mediainquiries@openlibraryfoundation.org 978 223-0438 This item is available in full to subscribers. Attention subscribers We have recently launched a new and improved website. To continue reading, you will need to either log into your subscriber account, or purchase a new subscription. If you are a digital subscriber with an active subscription, then you already have an account here. Just reset your password if you've not yet logged in to your account on this new site. If you are a current print subscriber, you can set up a free website account by clicking here. Otherwise, click here to view your options for subscribing. A ex-Liberal advisor accused of raping Brittany Higgins was sacked for sneaking into a minister's parliamentary office on false pretenses and not behaving with 'integrity', government sources have claimed. Bombshell allegations about the security breach at Parliament House have emerged a week after Ms Higgins claimed she was assaulted by a male colleague inside their boss Defence Minister Linda Reynolds' office in March 2019. Government insiders have claimed the alleged breach wasn't the first security issue flagged in relation to the male staffer at the time. They claimed the advisor was already being closely monitored by the government after other serious offences occurred, The Australian reported. Brittany Higgins (pictured) alleges she was raped by the staffer in a ministerial office in 2019 Insiders told the publication the man had no official work purpose to be in the minister's office on the night of the alleged sexual assault, despite him claiming otherwise. They also claim his employment was terminated before Senator Reynolds was made aware of the rape allegations. The male staffer's access pass for Parliament House was cancelled four days after the alleged rape, Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed on Tuesday. He said the man's employment was terminated due to a security breach. 'That was the reason for it. As I understand it, it related to the entry into those premises,' Mr Morrison said. The Prime Minister's office has declined to reveal the nature of the male staffer's other alleged offences. The security breach occurred in the office of Senator Linda Reynolds (pictured on Tuesday) Senator Reynolds has come under heavy fire for her handling of the allegations and was admitted to a hospital in Canberra on Wednesday as a precaution for a 'pre-existing medical condition'. Another three women have since come forward to allege they were assaulted by the same man since Ms Higgins went public with her claims last Monday. Ms Higgins is expected to make a formal complaint to Australian Federal Police on Wednesday. The allegations have prompted former intern to share intimate details about her experiences with the man on a couch in the office of a Nationals senator at Parliament House in 2014. While she says their encounters were consensual, she claims she felt 'pressured' to have sex with him on other occasions. 'Nothing 'rapey' happened. But that makes me feel really ill. I feel like he wanted to [take me there] because he wanted to show off his power. He was obviously much more important than I was,' the woman told news.com.au. 'There was one time I kept saying, 'No, I am really tired, I don't want to do anything' and he kept being like, 'Oh, come on. Come on.' The former Liberal Party staffer accused of raping Brittany Higgins was sacked for a security breach at Parliament House (pictured) in 2019 She also shared Facebook messages which refer to the couch in the senator's office, which the man insists is 'comfortable' as he invited her there. 'The lounge in his office is really comfy, good for doing readings. haha,' he wrote. The woman replied: 'mmm, depends, do you tend to talk a lot whilst studying?' The man adds he's usually 'a good boy' and has an essay to write. She claims the encounter occurred five years before the staffer allegedly raped Ms Higgins. The woman was a university student at the time and interning for a Labor MP. The former intern shared an exchange of Facebook messages from 2014, where the man claims the couch in the senator's office is 'really comfy' The man, whom she described as 'ambitious' with dreams of becoming Prime Minister, was also an intern at the time for a Nationals MP. She first met him at drinks where she got 'very drunk' and went back to his house. 'We kissed that night. I was very drunk and he was totally sober,' the woman recalled. 'I never felt weird about that but there were other instances where he definitely pressured me. We never had proper sex.' The woman says she will come forward to police to make a statement if it helps with their inquiries. The latest allegations comes a day after Ms Higgins' boyfriend said he has 'no regrets' about quitting his job and standing by his partner amid allegations that she was raped in Parliament House. David Sharaz, who worked in Canberra dealing with federal government clients, said his bosses gave him time off to support her but realised he could not keep his job. Prisons with more green space have lower levels of violence and self-harm, according to new research at the University of Birmingham and Utrecht University. The study is the first to attempt large-scale mapping of green space within prison environments and link it to well-being in a robust, statistically significant way. The results are published in Annals of the American Association of Geographers. The researchers used GIS mapping to identify the percentages of green space (such as trees, lawns and shrubbery) within prisons in England and Wales. They compared this with available data about incidents of self-harm, prisoner assaults on staff and violence between prisoners. They also drew on information about the age and function of individual establishments - for example their capacity, what the security level was, whether they accommodated men, women or young offenders, and whether they were purpose-built prisons, or converted from other types of buildings such as military bases. Their findings showed that taking all of these factors into account, prisons with a higher presence of green space had lower levels of self-harm, and lower levels of prisoner-on-prisoner violence and assaults on prison staff. The study is significant since it demonstrates that the beneficial effects of nature contact, already recognised in other institutional contexts such as hospitals and schools, are also to be found in prisons. Self-harm and violence are currently at very high levels in prisons in England and Wales, with over 61,000 incidents of self-harm in the 12 months to September 2019. Over the same period, there were more than 33,000 incidents of violence between prisoners, and more than 10,000 assaults on staff. While it is not possible to calculate the personal and emotional costs of these incidents, the costs of hospital treatment from self-harm amount to some 2.7 million, while the costs of litigation arising from violent incidents are also significant. Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service has not disclosed the full costs of legal actions, but has paid out 85 million in litigation claims between 2016 and 2019. The team's findings, shared with the Ministry of Justice ahead of publication, therefore show that through improving wellbeing, increasing green spaces within prisons should also help in terms of managing costs and minimising staff absence. Lead researcher, Professor Dominique Moran, of the University of Birmingham's School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, says: "Our evidence shows clear and demonstrable benefits from the presence of green space for prisoners in all categories of prison. It's clear that inclusion of green space should be a key design element for new prisons, and existing prisons should convert existing outdoor areas to provide more green space wherever possible." ### The research team included Professor Dominique Moran, Dr Phil Jones, and Amy Porter at the University of Birmingham in the UK, and Dr Jacob Jordaan at the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands. ENDS President Joe Biden held first his first bilateral meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday, with the two leaders convening virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic. After the virtual meeting, Mr. Biden and Trudeau made a statement expressing the commitment between the two nations. The two world leaders unveiled a "U.S.-Canada Partnership roadmap" detailing that commitment on issues like combatting COVID-19, tackling the climate crisis, bolstering continental defense and strengthening global alliances. During their meeting, Trudeau told Mr. Biden that "U.S. leadership has been sorely missed over the past year" a not-so-cryptical nod to former President Trump's relationship with Canada and the western world. To boost alliances, the blueprint calls for a revival of the North American Leaders' Summit as a "recommitment of solidarity" between the U.S., Canada and Mexico, according to the White House. The roadmap aims to "advance our shared vision of prosperity, diversity, equity and justice for all our citizens," the White House said. Trudeau and Mr. Biden delivered televised statements on their partnership, but did not hold a traditional joint press conference. Mr. Biden has yet to hold a press conference as president. "We both recognize our responsibility as leading democracies to defend our shared values around the world, and to strengthen our own democracies at home," Mr. Biden said. "That means rooting out systemic racism and unconscious bias from our institutions and our laws as well as our hearts. Today, we agreed to reestablish the cross-border crime forum and work together to modernize our approach to community safety and to do the most we can do more to take on racism and discrimination in both our systems." The president also spoke to the United States' commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the two countries' shared commitment to a strong defense. Mr. Biden said the United States is committed to the release of two Canadians detained in China. Story continues "Human beings are not bartering chips," the president said. Trudeau delivered his statement in both English and French, starting off with stating Canada's commitment to Texans in need. The Canadian prime minister expressed Canada's commitment to tackling COVID-19 and other crises. Trudeau said Canada and the U.S. are "each others' allies, most important trading partners, and oldest friends." "The president and I discussed the ambitious new partnership roadmap based on shared values and priorities that will guide our countries' work together over the coming years. In the face of COVID-19, of climate change, of rising inequality, this is our moment to act. So we're not wasting any time in getting down to work," Trudeau said. Mr. Biden has vowed to rebuild America's alliances following four years of former President Donald Trump's "America First" foreign policy. The president participated Friday in a virtual meeting of the G7 and committed up to $4 billion to COVAX, an initiative backed by the World Health Organization that aims to ensure equitable access to vaccines worldwide. {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","thumbnailUrl":"https://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2021/02/23/7d20cdcd-7a76-438e-8ab7-db084d558345/gettyimages-1231326003.jpg","embedUrl":"https://www.cbsnews.com/live/","name":"Biden holds virtual bilateral meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau","description":"Mr. Biden and Trudeau are set to unveil a \"U.S.-Canada Partnership Roadmap\" detailing shared goals between the two nations.","contentRating":"MPAA PG-13","videoQuality":"720p","publication":{"@type":"BroadcastEvent","isLiveBroadcast":true,"startDate":"2021-02-23T21:40:00.000Z","endDate":"2021-02-24T01:00:00.000Z"},"uploadDate":"2021-02-23T21:40:00.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cbsn-us-cedexis.cbsnstream.cbsnews.com/out/v1/55a8648e8f134e82a470f83d562deeca/master.m3u8"} CBS Sports analyst on Tiger Woods car crash GOP questions Health Secretary nominee Xavier Becerra on his experience, abortion views at Senate confirmation hearing Texans struggle to find food and shelter after deadly winter storm Riyadh, Feb 24 : Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Secretary General, Nayef Al-Hajraf has called for the participation of GCC countries in any talks on Iran's nuclear deal, Al Arabiya News reported on Wednesday. Hajraf made the call during his meeting with the Ambassadors of the European Union in Riyadh on Tuesday, noting the Iranian nuclear negotiations are related to regional security and stability, Xinhua reported. The administration of the United States' President Joe Biden has signalled to Iran its willingness to return to talks to revive the nuclear deal former President Donald Trump abandoned in 2018. GCC countries were kept out of the talks that led to the 2016 international agreement on Iran's nuclear programme. New York, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Ankylosing Spondylitis Market Research Report by Drug, by Type of Molecule, by Mechanism Of Action, by Route Of Administration, by Dosage Forms, by End User - Global Forecast to 2025 - Cumulative Impact of COVID-19" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p06028001/?utm_source=GNW Market Statistics: The report provides market sizing and forecast across five major currencies - USD, EUR GBP, JPY, and AUD. This helps organization leaders make better decisions when currency exchange data is readily available. 1. The Global Ankylosing Spondylitis Market is expected to grow from USD 4,112.97 Million in 2020 to USD 5,846.91 Million by the end of 2025. 2. The Global Ankylosing Spondylitis Market is expected to grow from EUR 3,606.33 Million in 2020 to EUR 5,126.68 Million by the end of 2025. 3. The Global Ankylosing Spondylitis Market is expected to grow from GBP 3,206.03 Million in 2020 to GBP 4,557.63 Million by the end of 2025. 4. The Global Ankylosing Spondylitis Market is expected to grow from JPY 438,958.12 Million in 2020 to JPY 624,013.45 Million by the end of 2025. 5. The Global Ankylosing Spondylitis Market is expected to grow from AUD 5,972.57 Million in 2020 to AUD 8,490.49 Million by the end of 2025. Market Segmentation & Coverage: This research report categorizes the Ankylosing Spondylitis to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following sub-markets: Based on Drug , the Ankylosing Spondylitis Market studied across Cimzia, Cosentyx, Enbrel, Humira, Remicade, and Simponi. Based on Type of Molecule, the Ankylosing Spondylitis Market studied across Biologics and Small Molecules. Based on Mechanism Of Action, the Ankylosing Spondylitis Market studied across COX Inhibitors and TNF Inhibitors. Based on Route Of Administration, the Ankylosing Spondylitis Market studied across Oral and Parenteral. Based on Dosage Forms, the Ankylosing Spondylitis Market studied across Liquid and Solid. Based on End User , the Ankylosing Spondylitis Market studied across Clinics and Hospitals. Based on Geography, the Ankylosing Spondylitis Market studied across Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The Americas region surveyed across Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and United States. The Asia-Pacific region surveyed across Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. The Europe, Middle East & Africa region surveyed across France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom. Company Usability Profiles: The report deeply explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Ankylosing Spondylitis Market including Abbvie Inc., Amgen Inc., Biothera Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb, C.H. Boehringer Sohn AG & Ko. KG, Cadila Healthcare Limited, Celgene Corporation, Celltrion, Eisai Co., Ltd, Eli Lilly and Company, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Hetero Drugs Limited, Izana Bioscience, Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc., Merck & Co., Inc, Novartis AG, Pfizer Inc., Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc, Reliance Life Sciences, Samsung Bioepis Co., Ltd., Sandoz International GmbH, Sanofi SA, Shanghai Pharmaceuticals Holding Co., Ltd., Trinity Biotech Ireland, UCB Inc., and Xian Janssen Pharmaceutical Ltd. Cumulative Impact of COVID-19: COVID-19 is an incomparable global public health emergency that has affected almost every industry, so for and, the long-term effects projected to impact the industry growth during the forecast period. Our ongoing research amplifies our research framework to ensure the inclusion of underlaying COVID-19 issues and potential paths forward. The report is delivering insights on COVID-19 considering the changes in consumer behavior and demand, purchasing patterns, re-routing of the supply chain, dynamics of current market forces, and the significant interventions of governments. The updated study provides insights, analysis, estimations, and forecast, considering the COVID-19 impact on the market. FPNV Positioning Matrix: The FPNV Positioning Matrix evaluates and categorizes the vendors in the Ankylosing Spondylitis Market on the basis of Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) that aids businesses in better decision making and understanding the competitive landscape. Competitive Strategic Window: The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies. The Competitive Strategic Window helps the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. During a forecast period, it defines the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisition strategies, geography expansion, research & development, and new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth. The report provides insights on the following pointers: 1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on the market offered by the key players 2. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyzes the markets 3. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new product launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments 4. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players 5. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and new product developments The report answers questions such as: 1. What is the market size and forecast of the Global Ankylosing Spondylitis Market? 2. What are the inhibiting factors and impact of COVID-19 shaping the Global Ankylosing Spondylitis Market during the forecast period? 3. Which are the products/segments/applications/areas to invest in over the forecast period in the Global Ankylosing Spondylitis Market? 4. What is the competitive strategic window for opportunities in the Global Ankylosing Spondylitis Market? 5. What are the technology trends and regulatory frameworks in the Global Ankylosing Spondylitis Market? 6. What are the modes and strategic moves considered suitable for entering the Global Ankylosing Spondylitis Market? Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06028001/?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. __________________________ The Telangana state government took a serious view of the AP government launching works to construct a canal at Rajolibanda village in Kurnool district, in parallel to the existing Rajolibanda Diversion Scheme (RDS) to draw additional water without obtaining any approvals from various government agencies. (Representational Image/DC) Hyderabad: Yet another water row has erupted between Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The Telangana state government took a serious view of the AP government launching works to construct a canal at Rajolibanda village in Kurnool district, in parallel to the existing Rajolibanda Diversion Scheme (RDS) to draw additional water without obtaining any approvals from various government agencies. This will deny Telangana its rightful share and adversely affect the erstwhile Mahabubnagar district. Public representatives and farmers of Gadwal and Mahabubnagar districts complained to Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao that the AP government had started making markings to dig a canal on the right side of the RDS. Official sources in the irrigation department said that CM Chandrashekar Rao discussed the issue with officials on Tuesday and directed them to lodge a complaint with the Krishna River Management Board (KRMB), the Central Water Commission (CWC) and the Apex Council of the Union ministry of Jal Shakti against the AP government and ensure that Andhra Pradesh suspends these works. Though Telangana state is supposed to get 16 tmc ft of water through the RDS, it is getting less than five tmc currently due to leakages. Farmers complained that if AP builds a parallel canal, it would deprive Telangana of even the minimum five tmc of water. Irrigation project RDS is located on Tungabhadra river and spread in Gadwal district of Telangana, Kurnool district of AP and Raichur district of Karnataka. It is an inter-state barrage on Tungabhadra river, which supplies water to the three states. The RDS is crucial for Telangana, as it irrigates about 87,000 acres in the state and 4,000 acres in AP. Telangana has been allocated 15.9 tmc from the RDS but only gets an average of only five tmc. The RDS has only one canal, which emanates from the left side of RDS anicut on Tungabhadra river. The anicut is located at the border of Andhra Pradesh (Kurnool) and Karnataka (Raichur). The canal passes through Karnataka for 43 kms and flows into Telangana for the remaining 100 km. It is intended to serve an ayacut of 5,900 acres, utilising 1.2 tmc in Karnataka and 87,500 acres with 15.9 tmc in Telangana. The tailend reaches in Telangana have not been getting water for decades due to leakages. RDS was one of the main issues during the Telangana statehood agitation. However, it was not addressed in the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014. Due to this, farmers under the RDS canal in Gadwal district are still awaiting their rightful share of water to reach their fields even more than six years after Telangana state was formed. Sudbury, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Transition Metals Corp (TSXV: XTM) ("Transition", the "Company") is pleased to announce that its board of directors has declared a special dividend-in-kind (the "Dividend") of a portion of the common shares of SPC Nickel Corp. ("SPC Nickel") held by the Company to the Company's shareholders of record as at March 3, 2021 (the "Record Date"). Each holder of the Company's common shares on the Record Date will receive 0.1 of an SPC Nickel share (each whole SPC Nickel share, a "SPC Nickel Share") for each one Transition share held by the Transition shareholders. Shareholders will not receive fractional shares. It is anticipated that the Dividend will be paid on or about March 17, 2021. About Transition Metals Corp Transition Metals Corp (TSXV: XTM) is a Canadian-based, multi-commodity project generator that specializes in converting new exploration ideas into Canadian discoveries in Canada. The award-winning team of geoscientists has extensive exploration experience in established, emerging and historic mining camps and actively develops and tests new ideas for discovering mineralization in places that others have not looked, which often allows the company to acquire properties inexpensively. The team is rigorous in its fieldwork and combines traditional techniques with newer ones to help unearth compelling prospects and drill targets. Transition uses the project generator business model to acquire and advance multiple exploration projects simultaneously, thereby maximizing shareholder exposure to discovery and capital gain. Joint venture partners earn an interest in the projects by funding a portion of higher-risk drilling and exploration, allowing Transition to conserve capital and minimize shareholder's equity dilution. The Company has an expanding portfolio that currently includes more than 25 gold, copper, nickel and platinum projects across Canada. Cautionary Note on Forward-Looking Information Except for statements of historical fact contained herein, the information in this news release constitutes "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities law. Such forward-looking information may be identified by words such as "plans", "proposes", "estimates", "intends", "expects", "believes", "may", "will" and include without limitation, statements regarding estimated capital and operating costs, expected production timeline, benefits of updated development plans, foreign exchange assumptions and regulatory approvals. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate; actual results and future events could differ materially from such statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include, among others, metal prices, competition, risks inherent in the mining industry, and regulatory risks. Most of these factors are outside the control of the Company. Investors are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking information. Except as otherwise required by applicable securities statutes or regulation, the Company expressly disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Further information is available at www.transitionmetalscorp.com or by contacting: Scott McLean President and CEO Transition Metals Corp. Tel: (705) 669-1777 To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75304 PHILIPSBURG: --- An internal investigation is currently underway at the Ministry of Justice while a senior civil servant attached to the Ministry has been placed on desk duty. Information reaching SMN News alleges that the senior civil servant has impregnated three immigration officers who willingly and knowingly entered into a relationship with him. SMN News learned that the director of the immigration and border patrol services was made aware of the situation and immediately launched an investigation. SMN News sent an email to Minister of Justice Anna Richardson on Tuesday evening, which she acknowledged receipt of during the Council of Minister's press briefing on Wednesday. Minister Richardson said that if the women immigration officers felt they were taken advantage of then they should file a complaint with the Integrity Chamber, and she guaranteed that justice will be served. Minister Richardson further explained that she once met with the Integrity Chamber and has been showing her aim to develop a Ministry that aligns itself as law-abiding citizens. The Minister did not confirm or deny if the situation exists within her ministry, however, she has called on everyone not to put a spectacle on a situation where all the information is not provided or clear. The Minister said persons who feel that they have been taken advantage of should speak to internal affairs, integrity chamber, or the new platform she will soon launch to deal with allegations that are floating around. New Delhi: Discovery+, the subscription-based video streaming service owned by factual entertainment network Discovery, has introduced a genre devoted to kids content, with the launch of a show from the Little Singham franchise, modelled on the popular Bollywood film. With its children's programming, Discovery adds to a small but growing market for kids content on OTT in India. In 2019, Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd had announced the launch of VOOT Kids, an app that combines audio, video and text along with puzzles and quizzes. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers Priced at 99 per month and 799 per year, the app is distinct from Viacoms advertising-led video-on-demand platform VOOT and targets children aged between 2 and 8 years. Meanwhile, Netflix has been gung-ho about the success of Indian animation original Mighty Little Bheem that it says had the largest launch of any pre-school original and the second-largest launch of any kids original animated series on the service. Animated versions of Bollywood films have long been eyed by television broadcasters and streaming platforms as viable strategies to draw young viewers. Discovery Kids, a division of Discovery Networks Asia Pacific, had earlier announced Fukrey Boyzzz, an animated version of popular Hindi film Fukrey. The show was available in six languages - Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and English. Discovery has also produced Little Singham based on the popular Ajay Devgn-starrer for TV while Nickelodeon had brought out a version of Rohit Shettys comedy franchise Golmaal, titled Golmaal Jr, in May 2019. Among other offerings, Discovery + has a cookery show Chopped Junior, Mister Maker, centered on arts and crafts, with a mix of live action, graphics, and animation techniques and detective show Sally Bollywood. We are committed to being a platform that appeals to every person in the living room of an Indian household. With that in mind, we are premiering a wide canvas of kids focused shows on the app," Issac John, direct-to consumer head APAC-Discovery said in a statement. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Never miss a story! Stay connected and informed with Mint. Download our App Now!! Dozens of Filipino fishermen protested in the capital Manila on Wednesday to defy the passage of a recent law by China that authorises its coast guard to fire on foreign vessels and destroy other countries' structures on islands it claims in the South China Sea. Protest leader Fernando Hicap said life for local fishermen is already hard because of disputed waters, along with the pandemic. China's Coast Guard Law, passed on January 22, empowers the force to "take all necessary measures, including the use of weapons, when national sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction are being illegally infringed upon by foreign organizations or individuals at sea." The law also authorises the coast guard to demolish other countries' structures built on reefs and islands claimed by China and to seize or order foreign vessels illegally entering China's territorial waters to leave. The Chinese law raises the stakes and the possibility of clashes with regional maritime rivals. The Philippine protest is the latest public criticism by Manila of China's increasingly assertive actions in the disputed waters, despite cozier ties nurtured by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte with Beijing. China and the Philippines, along with Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei, have been locked in territorial rivalries in the South China Sea in tense decadeslong standoffs. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) Funeral Announcements A daily list of current funeral annoucements as heard on KXRA 1490 AM/100.3 FM News Updates The daily news, sports, and events delivered daily from Voice of Alexandria. Sports Update This current sports headlines delivered daily from Voice of Alexandria. Upcoming Events This email is the events of the area delivered daily from Voice of Alexandria. Breaking News The big news. Sent only as it happens. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Prices for the sale of apartments in the secondary market in Kyiv increased by 5% by the end of 2020, and the number of offers of one- and two-room apartments increased by an average of a third, according to the analysts of OLX Real Estate. "Since the beginning of the new normal era, square meters have become cheaper by 2-3%. Sellers have begun to raise prices since the summer. So, buying the home became 5% more expensive by the end of the year. The average price of a one-room apartment in Kyiv was $54,600, a two-room apartment - $77,800, and a three-room apartment - $110,100. The cheapest apartments are in Desniansky district," OLX told Interfax-Ukraine. At the same time, the offers of one-room apartments increased by 31%, two-room apartments by 36%, and three-room apartments by only 3%. According to OLX, the cheapest one-room apartments are offered in Desniansky and Sviatoshynsky districts (on average $36,200 and $36,900, respectively), while Desniansky district has the least offers. Slightly more expensive one-room apartments are in Solomiansky and Obolonsky districts ($44,000 and $46,400). In Pechersky district, there are the most expensive one-room apartments an average of $117,300. At the same time, most of the offers for sale are in Holosiyivsky and Shevchenkivsky districts ($61,800). In the secondary market of two-room apartments, housing in Desniansky district costs an average of $49,300, while in other districts prices start at $54,000. The most expensive two-room apartments are in Pechersky district an average of $152,900, followed by apartments in Holosiyivsky ($84,500), Shevchenkivsky ($82,900) and Darnytsky ($79,200) districts. Prices for three-room apartments in the secondary market start from $60,000 in Desniansky district, and $66,400 in Sviatoshynsky, while in other districts prices range from $80,000 to $100,000. More than $100,000, a three-room apartment costs in Holosiyivsky, Shevchenkivsky and Pechersky districts. According to OLX analysts, people were most often interested in offers for the sale of apartments in Darnytsky and Sviatoshynsky districts. In other large cities, prices in the secondary housing market are significantly lower than in the capital. So, the prices for one-room apartments in Kharkiv are on average $25,400, two-room apartments - $38,900, and three-room apartments - $52,900. Prices for one-room apartments in Dnipro are on average $26,600, two-room apartments - $35,500, and three-room apartments - $45,700; in Odesa, respectively, $32,700, $46,400 and $59,400. In Lviv, the average prices for one-, two-, and three-room apartments are $38,700, $51,800, and $63,300, respectively. Parents and students will be the targets of a new publicity campaign aimed at keeping Covid out of schools as more than 300,000 pupils return for the first time since Christmas. The reopening is being backed up with strong messaging to parents not to send children in if they are displaying Covid-like symptoms, and not to gather at the school gates. A video directed at Leaving Cert students will advise on issues such as the importance of wearing masks. The Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) is encouraging schools to adopt a strict approach to congregation zones outside schools Education Minister Norma Foley said reopening must be given the best possible chance to get all students back as quickly as possible. The return will be phased and cautious, with only one-third of the school population primary pupils from junior infants to second class and Leaving Cert students back next Monday. Advocacy organisations AsIAm, Down Syndrome Ireland, Family Carers Ireland and Inclusion Ireland said that up to 20,000 children with special needs in mainstream classes outside those returning next Monday had been left behind. Read More Children with more complex needs, in special schools and special classes, are already back. Ms Foley said primary schools were being asked to deploy as many resources as possible to facilitate engagement with pupils with special needs in third to sixth classes from Monday. Primary pupils from third to sixth class and fifth year post-primary students are pencilled in for a return on March 15 and the balance of post-primary pupils on April 12. The gap between each phase is to allow time to assess the impact of reopening on community transmission of Covid, and implementation of the later phases will depend on public health advice. The Department of Health and the HSE have advised that infection prevention and control measures in place in schools are adequate, once there is strict adherence. INTO, Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI), Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) and Forsa, which represents special-needs assistants (SNAs), are facilitating the phased return, although they did not achieve all their demands. INTO is pressing for air ventilation monitors, face masks for pupils in senior classes and regular antigen testing. TUI president Martin Marjoram said members would withdraw from engagement in situations where the measures and safeguards that protect them and their students are not being adhered to. ASTI said it would continue to work to ensure the necessary arrangements and supports were in place. Forsa said the only way to guarantee schools would stay open was to prioritise staff to receive the vaccine. ROMA - The Catalan self-exiled separatist and Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Carles Puigdemont on Wednesday vowed to "fight to the very end" to prevent the loss of parliamentary immunity. His comments came during a press conference in Brussels after on Tuesday the European Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee recommended revoking parliamentary immunity for him and two other Catalan MEPs, Antoni Comin and Clara Ponsati. He said that if the European Parliament decision was actually based strictly on fundamental, democratic rights, that "we will win this match" but that it is an entirely different matter if the decision had been subject to pressure from the Spanish state or any of its parties. Puigdemont then noted that Spanish authorities had asked the European Parliament to remove parliamentary immunity to "put us in prison without a judicial ruling" and that "this would be scandalous if we were talking abotu Russia". The Catalan added that "this is the dilemma that the EU will have to deal with on the day it decides on our immunity". His fellow MEP Comin used the term "political persecution" during the press conference, stressing that "all Democrats should listen and not ignore" the case. The former Catalan minister then noted that large Spanish parties had pushed on Monday for this decision to be taken by the committee, saying "today is a black day for the European Parliament". Following the vote on Monday, a March plenary session will decide on the issue. The UK, France and Germany have condemned Irans "dangerous" decision to restrict international inspections of its nuclear facilities. The three European signatories to Irans nuclear deal said it was "further violation" of the accord by Tehran. The joint statement from Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and his French and German counterparts said the three countries the E3 "deeply regret that Iran has started, as of today, to suspend the additional protocol and the transparency measures under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Irans actions are a further violation of its commitments under the JCPOA and significantly reduces safeguards oversight by the IAEA. The E3 are united in underlining the dangerous nature of this decision." It will "significantly constrain" the IAEAs access to sites and the watchdogs ability to monitor Irans activities, Yahoo cited the report as saying. The joint statement by the three European nations said: "We urge Iran to stop and reverse all measures that reduce transparency and to ensure full and timely cooperation with the IAEA. Our objective remains to preserve the JCPOA and to support ongoing diplomatic efforts for a negotiated solution allowing for the return of Iran and the US to full compliance with their JCPOA commitments." You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close Advertisement Royal Marines have braved bitter -30C temperatures in the Arctic during a brutal survival training exercise in one of the most of inhospitable places on Earth. Cold weather warfare specialists, the 45 Commando battalion, were deployed to northern Norway at the end of January, to undergo a gruelling training exercise. The operation teaches essential skills for surviving in the Arctic, including building shelters, living off the land and dealing with cold shock during the infamous ice breaking drills. The intense drill sees Royal Marines plunged into a hole in the ice, forcing them to climb out of the water unassisted using nothing but ski poles. Pictures from this year's exercise shows commandos, usually based at Arbroath in Scotland, facing freezing conditions, sitting in snow shelters and training in the dark. Cold weather warfare specialists 45 Commando battalion have spent recent weeks training in northern Norway as part of a training operation. Among the exercises to take place was a brutal ice breaking drill that sees Royal Marines plunge into freezing-cold water The exercise is designed to train commandos for the brutal terrain of the Arctic Circle. They are taught how to survive using the elements by building shelters out of wood in bitterly cold conditions Temperatures can reach as low as -30C in northern Norway at this time of year, making it possible for commandos to build shelters out of snow as part of the training exercise The exercise is held during the winter to prepare marines for the harshest conditions - which feature temperatures well below freezing and days spent mostly in the dark - with as little as four hours of daylight. Explaining the importance of the ice breaking drill, 45 Commandos' website states: 'This brutal part of the training is designed to help participants recognise and reduce the risks of cold shock: a physical response to being immersed in cold water that can rapidly incapacitate and even kill. 'Crossing a frozen lake or river can bring a tactical advantage but comes at significant risk, so ice breaking is about preparing for being suddenly dropped into bracing water. 'After rewarming from their dip through the ice, those on the survival course head into the wilderness to construct and inhabit survival shelters. 45 Commando is classed as the high-readiness Lead Commando Group, meaning it must always be ready to conduct operations anywhere in the world at a moments notice, in all extremes of environment, from Arctic to desert and jungle. After mastering survival skills, marines refresh their ability to move across the Arctic terrain on skis and snow shoes, before honing tactics and combat abilities on the final fight stage of the deployment. Marine Stuart Bryant, who is on his first Norway deployment, said: 'I learnt a lot this week and I am actually surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It takes a while to get used to the cold, but keeping busy and active takes your mind off it.' The infamous ice breaking drill sees Royal Marines plunged into a hole in the ice, forcing them to climb out of the water unassisted using nothing but ski poles Temperatures reach well below freezing at this time of year, but commandos are forced to take the exercise to prepare for the harsh reality of warfare in the Arctic Most of the training exercise is carried out in the dark, with northern Norway seeing as little as four hours of daylight during the winter months Commandos are wrapped in plastic to try and preserve their body temperature during the incredible ice water exercise, but they can only rely on themselves and a pair of ski poles to get themselves out of the water The intense experience represents the 'bare minimum skill set required to stay alive in a very aggressive environment,' according to Colour Sergeant Ian Freeman Commandos were trained on digging shelters in dark and freezing conditions in order to prepare them should they ever be called upon to serve in such a harsh environment Colour Sergeant Ian Freeman added: 'All personnel operating in this environment must complete the Cold Weather Survival Course. It represents the bare minimum skill set required to stay alive in a very aggressive environment. The course will form the foundation for everything we do in Norway.' 45 Commandos Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Innes Catton, said: 'As Cold Weather Warfare specialists held at very high readiness, this training is vital to retaining capability to deploy anywhere in the world in the event of crisis and to support our NATO allies in the region. 'Stringent control measures and quarantine procedures are in place to protect the local population and our people in Norway, as well as our families upon return to the UK.' Tents were pitched in blisteringly-cold conditions using wood from a nearby forest. The entire purpose of the exercise is to ensure marines can rely on nature to survive Commandos lined up to plunge into freezing cold waters, as senior officers looked on to see them escape from potentially deadly temperatures Deployed alongside 45 Commando are marines of 30 Commando Information Exploitation Group, Commando Logistic Regiment and Commando Helicopter Force, plus British Army troops from 24 Commando Royal Engineers and 29 Commando Royal Artillery Covid-19 had cancelled training exercises with other countries including Norway, Germany, the US and the Netherlands, but marines went through a rigorous quarantine period to ensure this was safe Marines were tasked with working together to chop down wood, before using to build a shelter to brave the elements 45 Commandos Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Innes Catton said: 'Half the battle is managing the climate and the terrain.' 'Snow storms can occur suddenly, so learning the basics of survival is key to operating in the Arctic,' Lt Col Catton added After rewarming from their ice dip, those on the survival course head into the wilderness to construct and inhabit shelters Marine Stuart Bryant, who is on his first Norway deployment, said: 'I learnt a lot this week and I am actually surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It takes a while to get used to the cold, but keeping busy and active takes your mind off it' In order to take part in the gruelling exercise, UK troops were instructed to conduct training in a bubble and in line with the Covid-19 guidelines of host nation, Norway With northern Norway plunged into darkness during the winter months, commandos were able to catch a glimpse of the stunning Northern Lights, but they were likely more busy building shelters in sub-zero temperatures Crossing a frozen lake or river can bring a tactical advantage but comes at significant risk, so ice breaking is about preparing for being suddenly dropped into bracing water 45 Commando is classed as the high-readiness Lead Commando Group, meaning it must always be ready to conduct operations anywhere in the world at a moments notice, in all extremes of environment, from Arctic to desert and jungle The training exercise in Norway has been taking place since the winter of 1971, 50 years later, commandos continue to brave the elements to ensure their combat-ready at a moment's notice Having built the shelters out of wood, they're covered in snow to offer insulation and also camouflage from their surroundings After mastering survival skills, marines refresh their ability to move across the Arctic terrain on skis and snow shoes, before honing tactics and combat abilities on the final fight stage of the deployment In the 1970s and 80s the 45 Commando battalion would spend winters protecting NATO's northern flank, while it was also deployed in Northern Ireland Ski poles are left outside of shelters as markers for others to see, should their be heavy snowfall or a collapse overnight Faced with freezing cold temperatures, use snow shelters as they can insulate their bodies when the cold drops overnight During the day, they are trained in building shelters and given essential survival skills. The training keeps their body moving, helping to warm them up from the persistent cold Commandos are tasked escaping a pool of ice-cold water with nothing but a pair of ski poles. Should anything go wrong, there are other members of the battalion to assist While they have to prepare for conflict in the Arctic, 45 Commando have more recently been deployed to conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kosovo The ice breaking drill has become synonymous with the tenacity and intense training that Royal Marine Commandos undergo Royal Marines have completed the first intensive phase of their Arctic deployment for this year, but it will return again in 2022 'Half the battle is managing the climate and the terrain. Snow storms can occur suddenly, so learning the basics of survival is key to operating in the Arctic conditions.' In the 1970s and 80s the 45 Commando battalion would spend winters protecting NATO's northern flank in Norway, while it was also deployed in Northern Ireland. Deployed alongside 45 Commando are marines of 30 Commando Information Exploitation Group, Commando Logistic Regiment and Commando Helicopter Force, plus British Army troops from 24 Commando Royal Engineers and 29 Commando Royal Artillery. The battalion's website states that vital training exercise with forces from Norway, United States, the Netherlands and Germany, have been cancelled due to Covid-19. However, crucial training has been able to resume in the short-term for those who have been through quarantine. UK troops were instructed to conduct training in a bubble and in line with the Covid-19 guidelines of host nation, Norway. Babies are able to quickly and seemingly effortlessly acquire a skill as complex as language. They already develop basic skills for this in the first six months of life. Credit: Marion Vogler/Universitat Wurzburg In the first few months of their lives, babies cry, babble, gurgle and make a variety of other peculiar sounds. It can be difficult to imagine that they are actually laying the foundations for later speech with these utterances. However, there is a determining element that proves that even their cries can be assigned to a particular language: the speech melodyor, more accurately: prosody. "Every language is characterized by specific musical elements, which we call prosody," says Kathleen Wermke. Prosody, in simple terms, is the combination of intonation (melody) and rhythm. Earlier studies have shown that even newborns are able to distinguish different languages, like German or French, using prosodic cues, particularly melody. With the help of these musical elements, infants recognize the respective language long before they are able to perceive its special features such as consonants, vowels or syllables. Study with more than 67,000 baby sounds Kathleen Wermke is a Professor at the Wurzburg University Hospital at the Department of Orthodontics and Head of the Center for Pre-speech Development and Developmental Disorders. Together with scientists from the USA and New Zealand, she has now examined the vocalizations of a total of 277 infants over the first six months of life in more detail. In total, the team analyzed more than 67,500 cry vocalizationsthe so-called hungry-crying, cooing and babbling sounds. "We have found a clear developmental pattern towards more complexity," Wermke summarizes the result of the study, which has now been published in the journal Scientific Reports. According to the study, this increasing degree of complexity is an important building block on the way to language development. According to the research team, these findings do not only significantly improves our understanding of the early preparatory processes for language acquisition, it also makes it possible to identify potential signs of a language development disorder. Complexity increases over the course of the first six months In their study, the team distinguished between two types of vocalizations in babies: cry and non-cry vocalizations in technical language. Or, to put it another way, the "communicative" crying uttered in the presence of the mother, which results from discomfort such as hunger and when there is a desire for contact. And, on the other hand, the sounds a baby makes when it feels comfortable and interacts vocally. "The aim of the study was to conduct an objective developmental analysis of prosodic antecedents in the form of melodies in healthy infants from birth to 6 months of age in all their vocalizations," says Wermke. Her hypothesis was: both types of vocalization show a characteristic developmental increase in complex melodies. In fact, the evaluation shows that the melodies of spontaneous cries become increasingly complex during the first 180 days of life; complex meaning that simple melodies (single-arc) are increasingly replaced by multiple-arc melodies, i.e. the foundation for the richness of variants of later intonation patterns in speech is already laid during crying. The development was comparable for phonetic utterances that fall under the category of "comfort vocalizations". The degree of complexity also increased in these, but with a temporary decline at around 140 days of age. Rapid brain growth is the foundation "Already at the end of the first month of life, the cry repertoire of the babies studied shows a complex melody in more than half of the cases," says Wermke. From single-arc to multiple-arc melodies in 30 days: this developmental program is based on an early maturity of the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying melody production. In fact, the brains of newborns also grow tremendously fast during this time, and newborns show amazing coordination between breathing and phonation. Furthermore, the scientists believe that the early occurrence of complex cry melodies indicates that infants have already undergone a kind of training, a 'preparatory' intrauterine development before birth, in order to start with the development of melodies immediately after or at the starting signal 'birth.' Wermke and her co-authors have an explanation for this slight decrease in complexity between the ages of four and five months: "During this time, infants expand their repertoire of vocalic utterances to include new components that interact with the overall melodic contour, namely vowel- and consonant-like elements," says Wermke. At the same time, the larynx and vocal tract are changing, which entails a series of adaptation processes in sound production. In addition to this, infants also begin to produce their first syllable combinations in babbling during this phase. "This new developmental period evidently causes a temporary 'regression' in melody development to establish vocal development on a higher hierarchical level. Thereafter, the infant begins to intentionally imitate intonation patterns of the surrounding language(s) in consonant-vowel syllable sequences in babbling. Prerequisite for innovative therapies According to those involved, the developmental model now presented can contribute to a better understanding of why the human infant acquires such a complex skill as language so quickly and seemingly effortlessly. What sounds like rather dry basic research in the field of spoken language acquisition nevertheless has a very practical relevance. "Knowledge of this developmental process will enable us to identify clinically robust risk markers for language development disorders," says Wermke. This, she says, is the crucial prerequisite for developing new and innovative therapies for young children at risk for language disorders. Explore further Maternal language shapes infants' cry melodies More information: Kathleen Wermke et al, Melody complexity of infants' cry and non-cry vocalisations increases across the first six months, Scientific Reports (2021). Journal information: Scientific Reports Kathleen Wermke et al, Melody complexity of infants' cry and non-cry vocalisations increases across the first six months,(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-83564-8 Impeachment manager Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) speaks on the second day of former President Donald Trump's second impeachment trial at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Feb. 10, 2021. (congress.gov via Getty Images) Republicans Seek FBI Briefing on Rep. Swalwells Past Ties to Alleged CCP Spy More than a dozen House Republicans sent a letter on Feb. 23 to FBI Director Christopher Wray, asking to be briefed on Rep. Eric Swalwells (D-Calif.) past ties to an alleged Chinese spy. As our nation faces a growing security threat from the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) attempts to infiltrate and undermine the United States Government, we write to request a full briefing regarding counterintelligence threats to Members of Congress, including information related to Rep. Eric Swalwells ties to a suspected Chinese intelligence operative, reads the letter from 14 House Republicans. The lawmakers referred to public reporting that Swalwell was among a group of politicians targeted by the alleged CCP spy, known as Fang Fang or Christine Fang. A report by Axios on Dec. 7 claimed that Fang built up an extensive network of contacts with up-and-coming politicians in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Swalwell. The report said Swalwell cut ties with her after investigators gave him a defensive briefing, and that he provided information about her to the FBI. Swalwell, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN that he didnt do anything wrong and accused Republicans of trying to weaponize the Axios report. I was told about this individual, and I offered to help, he told CNN. All I did was cooperate, and the FBI said that. But national security concerns have persisted, given Swalwells membership on the House Committee on Homeland Security, whose members have access to sensitive classified information. This breach of our national security is especially concerning, the lawmakers wrote in the letter, saying that unauthorized disclosure of top-secret information that committee members are privy to could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the countrys security. The Republicans pointed to the CCPs engagement in a highly sophisticated malign foreign influence campaign in the United States, which includes bribery and blackmail, along with the CCPs successful attempts to influence politicians, as reasons for a briefing. They called on Wray to brief the Homeland Security panel about Rep. Swalwells relationship with Fang and any potential exposure of classified information so that its members can consider whether to limit Swalwells future access to classified information. Earlier, top Republicans in the House called for Swalwells removal from the committee. Swalwells office didnt respond to a request for comment after the Axios report was published. Jack Phillips contributed to this report. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Dear readers, On the occasion of Labor Day, The Syrian Observer will not be publishing any articles Friday, May 1. We will be back in action Monday, May 4. Thank you for all your continued support. The Syrian Observer Dear readers, On the occasion of Labor Day, The Syrian Observer will not be publishing any articles Friday, May 1. We will be back in action Monday, May 4. Thank you for all your continued support. The Syrian Observer New Delhi [India], February 24 (ANI/SRV Media): A panel discussion on the topic of Judicial Ethics was organized by the Institute of Law, Nirma University as part of its International Teaching Month-2021. The institute hosted judges from India, the United States, Brazil and Nepal. The august speakers for the session included: Justice Abhilasha Kumari, Judicial Member of Lokpal & Former Chief Justice, Manipur High Court, Hon'ble Judge Andrea Galhardo Palma, Civil Law Judge, Sao Paulo State Court, Brazil, Hon'ble Judge Keith Barnes, Associate Presiding Judge, Fifth Judicial District, Utah, USA, and Hon'ble Justice Anil Kumar Sinha, Judge, Supreme Court of Nepal. Justice Abhilasha Kumari highlighted that in every society, primitive or evolved, democratic or subscribing to any other form of government, the need has always been felt for an independent and impartial judicial system. She further stated that there cannot be an airtight definition of Judicial Ethics. However, Justice Abhilasha implored that to maintain the independence and integrity of the judiciary, it is important that judges remain above reproach. She stated that judges undertake the Constitutional Oath at the beginning of their tenure. Adherence to rule of law, independence and impartiality in duty are ingrained in the Constitutional Oath. Judicial Ethics have much wider implications than just prescribing a code of conduct for professional purposes; it casts a solemn obligation on the judge to accordingly shape their persona in a holistic manner. Justice Abhilasha stated that Judicial Ethics can be considered to be a self-imposed code of conduct. She also emphasized that the judge must thoroughly know the laws of the land and apply them judiciously. Adding on, judicial integrity is at the heart of Judicial Ethics. She stressed that respect cannot be commanded, it has to be earned. She also referred to Restatement of Values of Judicial Life which reiterates universally norms, guidelines and conventions observed by Judges Uplifting the perception of the judiciary in the eyes of the common man should be one of the goals of the judicial officers. J. Keith Barnes emphasised that'Ethics simply starts with you'. It is important for one to be honest and ethical with themselves- that is the beginning of ethics. Judge Barnes shared his experience of cases that he dealt with as a Judicial Officer. He highlighted that the individuals involved in law enforcement should ensure that while dealing with the individuals, they must maintain their integrity. Moving on, he stated that honour belongs to those who never forsake the truth, even when things seem dark and grim. He then discussed the different cannons that judicial officers follow in the US. It is simply - integrity and independence. The esteemed judge further elaborated on the challenges that were faced in the US judiciary in light of the current pandemic. He discussed the challenges that come with being a judge, such as the idea that at some point the judge might have to sign a death warrant for some person. Special emphasis was placed on the need for judges to be compassionate and be respectful towards the parties involved. Justice Anil Kumar Sinha shared his experience of judicial ethics in Nepal. The vastly experienced judge highlighted that confidence in oneself and the confidence to uphold the Constitution of the country constitute two significant qualities in any judge. The code of conduct comes from within the judges, as they embark on their journey and realize their responsibilities of imparting justice. Judges should not be influenced by their past and must strive to live in the present. They should not be affected by their political and religious affiliations. This constitutes a significant part of judicial ethics too. He highlighted the challenges that the Nepal judiciary has faced over decades such as lack of funds, lack of efficient staff, backlogs, lack of facilities and how the officers are constantly striving to work for its development. Judge AndreaGalhardo Palma stated that being a judge is not only a job but a mission to ensure justice delivery across the country. She stated that judges can fail sometimes, however it is important that they continue to maintain the highest standards of judicial conduct. She emphasized that being prudent, diligent, transparent, and respecting client confidentiality are some important qualities that judges must always abide by. Earlier, Prof (Dr) PurviPokhariyal, Dean & Director, ILNU in her inaugural address stated that deliberation on ethical conduct in all aspects of professional dealings is very crucial and complex and thus it is imperative to discuss them. The session was ably moderated by Prof Neeraj Sharma, Asst. Professor (Law) Aadesh Shinde, a 4th-year student at the institute delivered the vote of thanks. This story is provided by SRV Media. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/SRV Media) DISCLAIMER (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Photo-Illustration: by Vulture; Photos by The Weinstein Company, HBO, Miramax Films When we say that the Golden Globe Awards are one of the most fun nights during awards season, its because they somehow cram just so many famous actors and actresses into one ballroom. The Hollywood Foreign Press hands out a lot of awards to actors every year 14 of the 25 categories at this Sundays Globes belong to them which is why so many actors have one. Almost all of the performers who are famous for their futility with Oscar? Theyve got Globes, at least. Glenn Close? Shes got three. Amy Adams? She won back-to-back Globes in 2014 and 2015. Peter OToole and Richard Burton? They have zero Oscars but seven Golden Globes between them. Thats why its always so surprising to come across a highly regarded actor whos never won a trophy from the HFPA. How exactly did that happen? What kind of dark stars had to align against them? These ten actors have never won a competitive Golden Globe (lifetime achievement awards dont count, we can all agree). For a couple of them, the HFPA might have a chance to rectify that this weekend. For the others, their legacies may never recover. Laurie Metcalf (3 nominations, 0 wins) Photo: Courtesy of Studio In pretty much every other context, Laurie Metcalf is an awards magnet. In the 90s, she won three Emmy Awards in a row for her role as Aunt Jackie on Roseanne, part of her 11 career Emmy nominations. Shes got two Tonys! And yet the Golden Globes just never got it. They only nominated her twice for Roseanne, where she lost to Joan Plowright and Miranda Richardson, respectively, and her third nomination came for Lady Bird just a few years ago, where she was bested by Allison Janney. Meg Ryan (3 nominations, 0 wins) Photo: Courtesy of Studio Famously, one of the things that sets the Golden Globes apart from the Oscars is that they recognize comedies far more readily. So youd think that would have added up to at least one win for Meg Ryan, the queen of 90s romantic comedies. But no: Ryan was nominated for all three of her Nora Ephron movies, 1989s When Harry Met Sally, 1993s Sleepless in Seattle, and 1998s Youve Got Mail, but she lost all three times. On all three occasions, she had the profound bad luck of running into awards-season juggernauts: Jessica Tandy in 89 (Oscar winner for Driving Miss Daisy); Angela Bassett in 93 (Oscar nominee for Whats Love Got to Do With It); and Gwyneth Paltrow in 98 (Oscar winner for Shakespeare in Love). Penelope Cruz (4 nominations, 0 wins) Photo: Courtesy of Studio The 2009 Golden Globes were a peculiar wrinkle in that years awards season. Kate Winslet was nominated as both a lead actress in Revolutionary Road and a supporting actress for The Reader. The HFPA were clearly so enamored of her that they voted her for the win in both categories, passing over Cruzs performance in Vicky Christina Barcelona in the supporting category. Cruz would go on to win the Oscar when Winslet was only nominated in Best Actress later that year, but the Globes have never made it up to Cruz, despite subsequent nominations for the Rob Marshall musical Nine and the Ryan Murphy limited series The Assassination of Gianni Versace. (She was also nominated for Best Actress for her performance in the 2007 drama Volver.) Harrison Ford (4 nominations, 0 wins) Photo: Courtesy of Studio/Getty Images Somewhat infamously, Harrison Ford has only ever received one Oscar nomination, for his performance in 1985s Witness. But the Golden Globes are usually far friendlier to big box-office stars, so youd think theyd have found a way to sneak a trophy into Fords pocket. But theyve only given him the lifetime achievement Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2002, despite nominations for The Mosquito Coast, The Fugitive, and Sabrina. Samuel L. Jackson (4 nominations, 0 wins) Photo: Courtesy of Studio I think we can all agree that we deserve to watch a Samuel L. Jackson acceptance speech at the Golden Globes. Weve been through so much. But historically, the Globes keep passing him over. Theyve nominated him four times, which is three better than the Oscars have done, but none of those four nominations have led to a win. He was nominated twice at the 1995 Globes, for Pulp Fiction (where he lost, as he did at the Oscars, to Ed Woods Martin Landau) and for the TV movie Against the Wall, where he lost to a posthumously nominated Raul Julia for The Burning Season. Will Smith (5 nominations, 0 wins) Photo: Courtesy of Studio Once again, the Golden Globes are supposed to be so celebrity obsessed, and yet Will Smith has zero trophies in his long career as one of the biggest movie stars in the business? Doesnt make sense. The HFPA did nominate Smith twice for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which was more than the Emmys ever did. But otherwise, the Globes have done no better than the Oscars when it came to passing him over for his performances in movies like Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness. Cynthia Nixon (6 nominations, 0 wins) Photo: Courtesy of Studio/Getty Images Nixon has been nominated four times for her role on Sex and the City and won zero times. At least she won an Emmy in 2004 for the first half of SATCs final season, a year when the Globes chaotic supporting actress category (for a series, miniseries, or television film!) forced her to compete with Mary-Louise Parkers unbeatable performance in Angels in America. If Nixon can pull out a win in Best Supporting Actress in a TV Series for Ratched, she can break her no-Globes streak. Anthony Hopkins (8 nominations, 0 wins) Photo: Courtesy of Studio Hopkinss legendary performance as Hannibal Lecter earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor, as part of a sweep of the top awards for The Silence of the Lambs. But the awards swell for Silence crested late, and at the Globes that year, Hopkins got beat by The Price of Tides star Nick Nolte. While the Welsh actor was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in 2006, hes never won a competitive Globe, despite a whopping eight nominations (including one just last year for his performance in The Two Popes). This is another streak that can end this year, with a Best Actor in a Drama nomination for The Father, though hell have to best a much-beloved performance from the late Chadwick Boseman in Ma Raineys Black Bottom to do it. Katharine Hepburn (8 nominations, 0 wins) Photo: Courtesy of Studio Perhaps the most stark depiction of the gulf between who the Hollywood Foreign Press loves and who the Oscars love is that Katharine Hepburn, the winningest actress in Oscar history, with four Best Actress trophies to her name, never won a single Golden Globe. It does make some sense, when you think about it. For one thing, the Golden Globes began in 1944, a whole decade after Hepburn won her first Oscar for Morning Glory. Theres also the fact that the Globes love celebrities who show up, and Hepburn never even showed up to the Oscars to collect her trophies. So instead of awarding Hepburns performances in Guess Whos Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, and On Golden Pond, like the Oscars did, the Globes instead went to Dame Edith Evans (The Whisperers), Joanne Woodward (Rachel, Rachel), and Meryl Streep (The French Lieutenants Woman). The Globes did, however, give Hepburn one final nomination, for the TV movie The Man Upstairs, in which she starred as an old woman who befriends the criminal (Ryan ONeal) hiding out in her attic. She lost to Laura Dern for Afterburn. Susan Sarandon (9 nominations, 0 wins) Photo: Courtesy of Studio Back in the early 90s, the drumbeat for Susan Sarandon to win her first Oscar was loud, especially after shed starred in films like Thelma & Louise, and Lorenzos Oil. Usually when a performer is famously futile at the Oscars, the Globes are usually there as a consolation prize. Not for Susan, though. While the Globes have thrown more nominations her way for Bull Durham, Stepmom, and Igby Goes Down theyve never given her a trophy. The year she won the Oscar for Dead Man Walking, she was upset at the Globes by a surprise Sharon Stone win for Casino. Most recently, Sarandon got a nod for Feud alongside her co-star Jessica Lange, though they were both bested by Nicole Kidman for Big Little Lies. ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- A court in Kazakhstan has rejected a request for early release filed by jailed activist Almat Zhumaghulov, whom rights organizations in the Central Asian country have recognized as a political prisoner. Zhumgahulov's relatives and colleagues told RFE/RL on February 24 that a court in Qapshaghai in the southern region of Almaty made the decision the previous day. The relatives said that Zhumaghulov took part in the hearing via video link from a penal colony in the town of Zarechny and that the ruling will be appealed. Zhumaghulov and another activist, Kenzhebek Abishev, were sentenced to eight years and seven years in prison, respectively, in December 2018 after they and a third defendant were found guilty of planning a "holy war" because they were spreading the ideas of the banned Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) opposition movement. The two pleaded not guilty, calling the case against them politically motivated. Last week, Abishev, who was previously granted an early release for good behavior in prison, was not released as expected after the Almaty regional prosecutor/s office appealed the ruling to free him at the very last moment. The DVK was founded by Mukhtar Ablyazov, an outspoken critic of the Kazakh government who has been residing in France for several years. Ablyazov has been organizing unsanctioned anti-government rallies in Kazakhstan via the Internet while in exile. It promises to be a busy day, Thursday's diary is packed with blue-chip names. PLC ( ) held its sales and cashflow guidance steady for 2020, according to its trading statement in November, when the aerospace group nudged up guidance for underlying earnings per share. In its finals on Thursday, there will be much more flesh to add the bare bones of its last update, including on managements indication that order intake expectations was ahead of pre-coronavirus pandemic planning for the year. Investors will be looking for updates on the companys order backlog, as well as whether the Eurofighter consortium member is expecting any specific benefit from the UKs planned 16.5bn increase to its military budget over the next four years. When is Primark reopening? Also on Thursday, ( ) will be dropping a trading update that may contain news on its shop reopenings after Boris Johnsons big announcement at the start of the week. The FTSE 100 group said last month it will lose 1.05bn if the Primark stores currently closed remain shuttered until the financial half-year end on February 27. As a result, the adjusted operating profit for the fast fashion retailer in the first half is forecast to be broadly break-even, compared to 441mln for the same period last year. Under the scenario that the entire estate is closed imminently, and remains closed until the end of March, the further loss of Primark sales would amount to 800mln, with a consequent hit on profits of 300mln. The budget clothier doesnt have an online presence so it cant offset the losses caused by store closures, though it has a loyal fan base that is willing to hold on their purchases until shops reopen. While Primarks struggles have made headlines, ABFs food business has enjoyed quiet success with bumper results in the third quarter, analysts at Hargreaves Lansdown said. The Grocery division benefited from increased sales over lockdown as consumers have eaten more at home and a cyclical upturn in sugar prices is good news for the sizeable Sugar business. Anglo American to post big second-half rebound ( ) will also be announcing final results on a busy Thursday, a week after big rivals BHP, Glencore and Rio Tinto. The diversified miners shares have risen 40% over the past year, despite a horrible set of interim results, which showed a sharp drop in profits, drops in production and a dividend cut. Numbers should be looking up now, with higher commodity prices as lockdowns also become less impactful in South Africa. The market expects underlying earnings (EBITDA) for the De Beers owner to come in at US$9.4bn, down from US$10bn a year ago though it still implies a second-half rebound after reporting US$3.4bn EBITDA in the first half. Bumper dividend pay-outs from BHP and Rio Tinto and a return to the dividend list from Glencore have set the mining sector on its way to be the largest individual paying sector within the FTSE 100 in 2021 (and possibly even 2020, depending upon what the banks declare) and Anglo-American will be the next big digger to set up to the plate, analysts at AJ Bell said. Based on Anglos policy of paying out 40% of net profits in dividends, a second-half distribution of around US$0.65 a share would be expected, taking the full-year total to US$0.93. Thursday February 25 Trading announcements: Associated British Foods PLC ( ) Finals: Anglo American PLC ( ), BAE Systems PLC ( ), ( ), ( ), ( ), ( ), St. Jamess Place PLC ( ), ( ), ( ), PLC ( ), PLC (LON:GFTU), PLC ( ), Impax Environmental Markets PLC (LON:IEM), PLC ( ), PLC ( ), ( ), ( ), Group PLC ( ), PLC ( ), ( ), ( ) Interims: ( ), ( ), Cap-XX Ltd ( ), ( ) FTSE 100 ex-dividends to knock 12.76 points off the index: ( ), Group PLC ( ), ( ), PLC ( ) Economic data: US GDP, US jobless claims, US durable goods orders Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 23) Two health experts on Tuesday voiced out support for President Rodrigo Dutertes decision to reject the further easing of restrictions nationwide pending the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in the country. In an interview with CNN Philippines, infectious diseases expert Dr. Rontgene Solante said the Presidents move lets healthcare workers breathe a sigh of relief for now as it would give them more time to prepare for the future shift to the more lenient modified general community quarantine measure. As frontline healthcare workers, thats quite a relief for us because we still do have a lot of time to really prepare, Solante, who heads the Infectious Diseases Department of the San Lazaro Hospital, told The Source. Since the President more or less prioritized the safety of the public over that of the economy, then we will still continue to abide by that and prepare ourselves for the cases to come, he added. Meanwhile, health reform advocate Dr. Tony Leachon said he was extremely happy with Dutertes decision, noting the current COVID-19 data being reported in the country do not look good at the moment. Im extremely happy with the Presidents decision Because the numbers are not really good, and its coming from the DOH [Department of Health], Leachon said in the same program. Citing data from the health agency, Leachon noted the Philippines daily coronavirus case average has been hovering at around 2,000, adding that the case fatality and positivity rates have also been higher. The country recorded 2,288 new cases of infections on Monday the biggest single-day increase since November 8. And you dont have a vaccine at this point in time really that would protect the population, the former task force special adviser pointed out. So to me, its clear cut that the modified GCQ should not be implemented knowing that you dont have the vaccine plus the other variables plus, the threat of the entry of the B117 [variant] in our country. Duterte on Monday announced that the Philippines would not be placed under MGCQ unless there is a rollout of vaccines. Malacanang in a statement said the chief executive gives higher premium to public health and safety. The proposal to place the whole country under the most relaxed lockdown measure was first floated by the National Economic and Development Authority, as it cited the need to bounce back from economic losses. However, health experts have continuously warned against the risky move, saying this may only contribute to a further spike in virus cases. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose said he would allow more than one ballot drop box per county, if the courts allowed that. Then he changed his mind. Were talking about LaRoses decision to limit drop boxes in the May primary election on This Week in the CLE. Listen online here. Editor Chris Quinn hosts our daily half-hour news podcast, with editors Jane Kahoun, Kris Wernowsky and me. Youve been sending Chris lots of thoughts and suggestions on our from-the-newsroom account, in which he shares what were thinking about at cleveland.com. You can sign up for free by sending a text to 216-868-4802. Here are the questions were answering today: Every judge who has considered the issue says Ohio Secretary of State Frank La Rose has the ability to provide more than one ballot drop box per county, so what does LaRose say? Cuyahoga Countys housing market has made a lot of strides in recent years, but not in every neighborhood. Where have prices lagged? What is the beef between Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish and the county council that held up the approval of a new sheriff Tuesday? Whats the latest proof that Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine had a winning strategy to use the very limited amount of vaccine Ohio received on the oldest people in the state? Beachwood police fired an officer over how he reacted to a shoplifter. What are the details? We keep talking about mass vaccination centers for the coronavirus. How hard would it be to set one up? What was Sen. Rob Portmans tack in questioning the people in charge of security at the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection? Where is Cuyahoga County getting $70,000 to help build a statue of beloved former Indians player Rocky Colavito? Want more? You can find all our past episodes here. 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. And on PlayerFM, we are here. One of Editor & Publishers 10 That Do It Right 2021 NDO - Prime Minsiter Nguyen Xuan Phuc cabled a congratulatory message to his Ethiopian counterpart Abiy Ahmed on February 23 on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries (February 23). The Subject Expert Committee (SEC) of the Indian drug regulator on Wednesday took up an application by pharma giant Dr Reddy's Laboratories seeking emergency approval for Sputnik V , the Russia-developed Covid-19 vaccine, in the country. The SEC didn't consider the request of Dr Reddy's application and has asked the firm to come back with immunogenicity data, news agency Reuters reported. Sputnik V vaccine has an efficacy of 91.6%. Earlier on 19 February, Dr Reddy's Laboratories had approached the Drug Controller General of India to get approval for the emergency use of the Russian vaccine. In September 2020, Dr Reddy's partnered with the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) to conduct the clinical trials of the Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine and for its distribution rights in India. The Russian vaccine is currently undergoing the phase 3 clinical trial in India. Here, the trials are being conducted on 1,600 people. At 91.6%, Sputnik V has a higher efficacy as compared to coronavirus vaccines that are currently being administered in India. The vaccine's less effective than those developed by Pfizer and Moderna, which have an efficacy of 95% and 94%, but significantly higher than that of the jab developed by the Oxford University and AstraZeneca. The Oxford Covid-19 vaccine is manufactured in India by the Serum Institute of India under the Covishield brand. Sputnik V maintained a consistent efficacy at 91.8% even among the group of 2,144 volunteers over 60 years old. Priced at less than $10 per dose in international markers, the Covid-19 vaccine has already been administered to over 20 lakh people worldwide. Sputnik V is being developed by Russia's Gamaleya National Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology to fight against coronavirus based on the human adenoviral vector platform. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. A runaway dog became a surprise guest on a Virginia news broadcast last week. Fox 5 reporter Bob Barnard was broadcasting live outside in Leesburg, Virginia on February 19 when his weather report was interrupted by one of the street's furrier residents. A dog from a nearby house ran out and into the shot, where Barnard picked him up and continued his report now with a special guest in his arms. Breaking news! Reporter Bob Barnard was broadcasting live outside in Leesburg, Virginia on February 19 when his weather report was interrupted by a dog He wants to be famous! Barnard was discussing icy conditions outside when the pup darted out from a nearby house Laughing, Barnard bent down to stop the pup, realizing that its owners probably didn't realize he'd run outside 'Forget the people we talked to earlier! I want to get to know this dog,' Barnard said as the pet squirmed in his arms and licked his face Barnard was discussing icy conditions outside and the cameraman panned down the street to show all the snow that had piled up. Suddenly, the camera jerked to the left to catch a small dog running out into the street toward Barnard. Laughing, Barnard bent down to stop the pup, realizing that its owners probably didn't realize he'd run outside. The energetic dog ran in a circle around the street before Barnard could catch it, but within seconds he'd picked the pup up and was back to talking live to the anchors int the studio. 'Forget the people we talked to earlier! I want to get to know this dog,' Barnard said as the pet squirmed in his arms and licked his face. Anchors back in the studio laughed as the dog joined their broadcast After about a minute, the dog's owner walked out of her house to fetch her pet on air She also revealed that the dog with so much on-camera presence is named Pierogi After about a minute, the dog's owner walked out of her house to fetch her pet on air. 'I'm so sorry!' she said. 'She just jumped over the gate!' She also revealed that the dog with so much on-camera presence is named Pierogi. The sweet segment has since been uploaded to YouTube, where commenters are cooing over the dog and praising Barnard's professionalism. 'This reporter knows how to roll with the punches,' wrote one, while another commented: 'This guy looked like he had so much fun with this segment.' 'Most wholesome neighborhood in America,' said one more. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 21:18:29|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close CAIRO, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian Health Minister Hala Zayed said the COVID-19 vaccination will cost citizens 200 Egyptian pounds (12.8 U.S. dollars) for a two-dose regimen of 21-day duration, state-run Ahram website reported Wednesday. "Needy families and individuals to be exempt from any vaccination expenses," Zayed told ON satellite channel on Tuesday. Starting Feb. 28, the minister said, a designated website will be opened for registration with priority to be given to the patients suffering chronic diseases and people above 40. The priority groups are expected to start receiving the first shot in the first week of March, Zayed added. Chinese Sinopharm and British-Swedish Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines are currently available in Egypt. The first batch of COVID-19 vaccines provided by China for Egypt and the General Secretariat of Arab League arrived in Cairo early Tuesday. Chinese Ambassador to Egypt Liao Liqiang and Egyptian Assistant Health Minister for Financial and Administrative Affairs Wael El Saaey held a handover ceremony at the Cairo International Airport upon the arrival of the vaccines developed by Sinopharm. Egypt began the nationwide vaccination of medical workers in January. Enditem All the folks waiting for that new library in southern North Charleston are getting a tad impatient. In the past couple of years, theyve watched as snazzy new branches opened in Mount Pleasant, Hollywood and West Ashley and on James Island. Existing libraries are now halfway through top-to-bottom renovations on Johns Island, in West Ashley and Otranto Road in northern North Charleston. Meanwhile, folks in the southern end of the city still have their 1940s-era Cooper River Memorial Library. Locals routinely grouse about this on social media, in letters to the editor and to public officials. When county voters approved a plan to issue $108 million in bonds to rebuild, renovate and open new branches of the Charleston County Public Library in 2014, Cooper River Memorial was slated to be among the first replaced. Now, its closer to last. Its hard to blame the community for suspecting a slight, because its happened so often. This time, however, their patience will be rewarded. Construction for the new library at Rivers Avenue and Dorchester Road will begin this summer. As a bonus, its going to be 33% larger than promised. Toni Lombardozzi, the project manager overseeing all this work for the Charleston County Public Library, says staff is reviewing final plans for the North Charleston branch and it will be 20,000 square feet, the same as the Baxter-Patrick branch on James Island and the new Bees Ferry Library in West Ashley. The plan voters approved called for North Charleston to get a 15,000-square-foot library. The larger-than-advertised facility is a fringe benefit of what otherwise has been a long, annoying delay. Which, make no mistake, is in not the fault of Charleston County Public Library staff. Originally, the plan was to build the new library behind the current one, which sits at the corner of Rivers and Dorchester. That would have allowed the old library to remain open until the new one was finished. Then the old site would have become a park. But when the countys plans for the Charleston Naval Hospital fell apart, officials shifted a planned social services hub and new CARTA bus terminal to the land slated for the new library. Sign up for our new opinion newsletter Get a weekly recap of South Carolina opinion and analysis from The Post and Courier in your inbox on Monday evenings. Email Sign Up! At one time, the library was set to share a roof with those places. The neighborhood opposed that, and a little behind-the-scenes shuffling eventually derailed the suggestion. Ultimately, CCPL decided to build its newest library on the site of the old one. But that forced staff to toss out the original architectural plans and come up with a new design to fit that land a delay that cost a year. Then the pandemic slowed everything else down. Now, the old Cooper River Memorial Library is scheduled to be demolished in the spring in order for construction on the new branch to begin in the summer. Lombardozzi says staff is looking for a nearby location to serve locals in the meantime. Were going to move, because we didnt want a break in services, she says. Which is exactly why residents were wary of building on the existing site. Its taken some time, but North Charleston folks can be assured theyre getting an upgrade. The four new branches that have opened so far are state-of-the-art facilities with great public space. And the libraries being renovated now (all of which are slated to reopen this summer) have been gutted. Their new interiors will be similar in design to the all-new branches. The work thats resulted from the 2014 library referendum is a credit to the Charleston County Public Library. It has modernized the county's library system, improved its services ... and even managed to open two new libraries in the middle of a pandemic. The only hitch throughout this long project has been the replacement for Cooper River Memorial, and its gotten enough grief to go around. Aside from the delays, some people protested County Council's decision not CCPL's to name the new branch after North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey. But the upshot is southern North Charleston will end up with the county's newest and most modern library. If the rest of the plans for that stretch of Rivers Avenue work out, and turn out as well as the library, the area could be on the brink of a long-overdue revitalization. Finally. The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes has retrieved back-up tapes of recordings of first-hand accounts of the institutions. Children's Minister Roderic O'Gorman told a Dail committee he was told by the commission the records had been destroyed. However, in a statement yesterday from the Department of Children, it was confirmed the tapes were recovered from off-site storage. The department said an IT expert had checked first to ensure they were retrievable by testing a random sample. The commission then agreed to deposit the recordings with the department. Read More This was in keeping with other actions it is taking to transfer the rest of the archive to the minister, who will become data controller next week. "The retrieval of audio recordings from the back-up tapes and their imminent transfer to my department now provides another avenue for the people who appeared before the committee to access their personal data," Mr O'Gorman said. Eighty people have asked for their interview with the confidential committee to be redacted. The minister said this will be "respected". "My department will liaise with the commission as current data controller in this regard," he said. "If any of the people who appeared before the committee consider their record is inaccurate or incomplete, they will be able to exercise their GDPR rights." The department said it will continue preparations to become data controller of the homes archive from February 28 and will continue to engage with the Data Protection Commission. It will shortly publish information on how people can access their data. Each interview was attended by two commission staff. The commission said the interviews were audio record- ed to ensure the account of the survivors' experience - which would later inform a report - were reflected accurately. The commission said the process ensured the experience of 550 people was "heard and documented in an accurate manner". Read More Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. [February 24, 2021] BIBA Marks Growing Captive Business in Barbados With a New Virtual Global Insurance & Risk Management Conference, BRIM 2021 BIBA, the Association for Global Business in Barbados, has launched its first virtual Barbados Risk & Insurance Management (BRIM) conference, which will be held March 24 & 25. Derrick Cummins, BIBA President and CEO of Amicorp Bank & Trust Ltd noted that, as Barbados is one of the top domiciles for captive insurers in the world, such a conference was long overdue. According to Cummins, reports showed that as businesses and individuals grapple with the fallout from the COVID-19 global pandemic, the insurance industry worldwide is experiencing a high demand for coverage. However, on the flip side, he said, insurers were facing high capital adequacy requirements, creating the type of hard market that leaves clients little room for negotiating on premiums, and insurers little appetite for writing new policies. Ricardo Knight, BIBA's Marketing and Communications Committee Chair and Senior Vice-President of Marsh Captive Solutions, highlighted that captive registrations into Barbados continued to increase despite one of the harshest pandemics that the world has ever seen. A captive insurer is generally defined as an insurance company that is wholly owned and controlled by its insureds, and its primary purpose is to insure the risks of its owners, while its insureds benefit from the captive insurer's underwriting profits. Barbados is a glbal business centre with over 30 years' experience in providing international insurance solutions. 2020 statistics from the Barbados Financial Services Commission (FSC) showed Barbados had 279 captives, the bulk of which are Canadian and American entities. Topics for discussion at BRIM 2021 include: Risk Management Post-Pandemic Emerging Markets - New Opportunities Investment opportunities in a low yield environment New Initiatives in Captives - Covering Cyber Risk and Pandemic Risk Managing Investment Portfolios for Captives Regulation in a Post-COVID World Disaster Risk Financing and Sustainable Development - A Look at Parametric Insurance at the Sovereign and Micro Levels IFRS 17 - It's time for a Straight Line to the Finish Speakers include: Michael Serricchio, Managing Director of Marsh Captive Solutions in the Americas Daryl Senick, Partner and National Insurance Leader with BDO Canada Elizabeth Emanuel, Technical Assistance Manager for the CCRIF SPC (formerly the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility) Professor Avinash Persaud, Chairman of the Barbados FSC Ben Arrindell, special advisor to the Prime Minister on international business matters and Deputy Chairman of Cidel Bank & Trust Conference Sponsors are: RBC Dominion Securities Global; the USA Risk Group; London & Capital; Strategic Risk Solutions; Invest Barbados; Sagicor Life Inc; and Summit Asset Management. To register visit www.brim.biba.bb About BIBA BIBA is a non-profit private sector organization comprising companies engaged in global business from, within and through Barbados, and companies which are otherwise strategically associated with this sector. It provides a network for meetings and exchange. BIBA serves as a voice for global business in Barbados and has over 140 member firms at this time. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210223006255/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Each morning before work at a Singapore construction site, Gunasekar Udayakumar, 41, gets his vital signs checked, without going to a clinic, or even seeing a nurse. All he needs is his smartphone, which in just 45 seconds can tell him his heart rate, oxygen levels and even his stress levels. It can also tell him if he should see a doctor. The application, developed by Singapore startup Nervotec, is what construction firm Kajima considers its first line of defence against another outbreak of the coronavirus in Singapore. The city-state has kept a tight lid on its infections and wants to avoid a repeat of last year, when a series of clusters emerged in migrant worker dormitories. Kajima staff at various sites have used the application since December as part of a government-initiated programme that provides companies with trial-stage technology to help them adjust to the new pandemic-era norms. It offers a diagnosis of the users health condition, relying solely on a smartphone camera that can measure heart rate by picking up changes in the reflectivity of light on the users skin between heart beats according to blood flow underneath. Nervotec founder Jonathan Lau said Singapores government was very interested in the technology. We see the most traction coming from healthcare providers, both private and public, he said. Nervotec founder Jonathan Lau shows the comparison in vital signs readings between his company's app and a pulse oxygen monitor, in Singapore, February 19, 2021. Photo: Reuters Laus initial inspiration came from his experiences as an air force pilot, when he underwent constant check-ups. He eventually founded a company that used wearable devices to monitor pilots. But when the pandemic hit, Lau broadened the focus. The app is still undergoing local review and Chwee Teck Lim, director of the National University of Singapores Institute of Health Innovation and Technology, said it could have a big impact if approved by regulators What Nervotec is proposing could potentially be a game-changer, Lim said. By the numbers Data is across Kern High, Bakersfield City and Panama-Buena Vista Union school districts, grades 6-12: Students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 16% Students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 30% Socioeconomically disadvantaged students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 16% Socioeconomically disadvantaged students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 33% English language learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 25% English language learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 44% Students with disabilities receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 21% Students with disabilities receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 37% Socioeconomically disadvantaged English learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 21% Socioeconomically disadvantaged English learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 43% KHSD Students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 19% Students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 33% Socioeconomically disadvantaged students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 21% Socioeconomically disadvantaged students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 38% English language learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 32% English language learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 51% Students with disabilities receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 19% Students with disabilities receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 33% Socioeconomically disadvantaged English learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 31% Socioeconomically disadvantaged English learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 52% BCSD (grades 6-8) Students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 12% Students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 29% Socioeconomically disadvantaged students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 13% Socioeconomically disadvantaged students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 29% English language learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 18% English language learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 38% Students with disabilities receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 15% Students with disabilities receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 29% Socioeconomically disadvantaged English learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 18% Socioeconomically disadvantaged English learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 38% PBVUSD (grades 6-8) Students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 8% Students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 21% Socioeconomically disadvantaged students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 9% Socioeconomically disadvantaged students receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 24% English language learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 11% English language learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 32% Students with disabilities receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 14% Students with disabilities receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 27% Socioeconomically disadvantaged English learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2019: 12% Socioeconomically disadvantaged English learners receiving Ds or Fs in fall semester 2020: 34% COVID-19 cases have been dropping, along with hospitalizations and deaths. Some states are ending shutdowns and mask mandates. Some major sporting venues are going to start letting fans attend in restricted numbers and March Madness will have fans in the stadiums.My question: Is it all a bit too soon? Declaring victory early is always an "unforced error" by politicians. There is good news today from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been approved for emergency use. The efficacy rate for this one-dose version of the vaccine in trials was 100 percent for keeping people out of hospitals if they did come down with the virus. In general it is over 70 percent, which when compared to the traditional flu vaccine is a high mark indeed.I still see the variants as being the wildcard in the mix of events and statistics we are seeing today. We may be done with the pandemic, but I don't think the pandemic is done with us.Note to self no uptick yet in cases following the Super Bowl parties in people's homes. But, the jury is still out on that. We have a few more days to wait and watch for a surge in cases and then hospitalizations.Here is aupdate:Epidemiologists have been warning for months that more contagious and deadly coronavirus variants have been bubbling just beneath the surface in the U.S. and could soon lead to another powerful surge of the virus just as many places are easing up on restrictions.And yet, there have been a number of signs in the U.S., and across the world, that the pandemic is in decline. During the last month, new cases globally have dropped to half their peak while hospitalizations in the U.S. have reached their lowest point since November. Recorded deaths around the world are also falling, declining roughly 50 percent since late January.So then, are the variants losing? My colleague Carl Zimmer, who writes about science for The Times, told me that assuming the positive trends will continue was presumptuous.The dynamics of viruses are weird, Carl said. And this is our third peak, so youd think wed have learned our lesson by now not to be too smug. Its not certain that variants like those discovered in South Africa or Brazil will spread rapidly when they arrive in new territory. They may have showed up too late to the party, when another variant was already dominant, Carl said. Or the new population could be healthier, or with high rates of previous infection and antibodies.But in the U.S., we just dont know exactly what the variants are doing. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has ramped up its sequencing of genomes, to about 9,000 cases per week, when it comes to our ability to watch the variants, Carl said, Our eyesight is not great.Denmark, however, has 20/20 virus vision, and its experience may act as a warning to the U.S. The country sequences the genome of the vast majority of its coronavirus cases, and has found that even as a national lockdown drove down cases over the last few months, the virus variant B.1.1.7., first discovered in Britain, has continued to gain steam.Camilla Holten Moller of the Statens Serum Institute, which models the epidemic for the Danish government, told me that they think the variant could make up as much as 80 percent of cases in the country, possibly by the end of this month. If that happens, she expects a sudden rise in infections and hospitalizations. And with B.1.1.7, its like speeding in a car, she said. Your reaction time is shorter.The California variant. Two new studies show that the variant first discovered in California in December is more contagious than earlier forms of the coronavirus, and may be better at evading vaccines. The findings added to concerns that emerging mutants could hamper a decline in cases. Lucknow, Feb 24 : The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Bill, 2021 was passed by the UP Assembly on Wednesday by a voice vote. The opposition demanded that the Bill should be sent to the select committee. The Congress' Aradhana Mishra said that marriage was a private matter of an adult individual and the new law was an infringement of one's fundamental rights. BSP's Lalji Varma said the new law was against the spirit of the Constitution and the government should take it back. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Suresh Khanna said that the new law was brought in because it had been found that young girls were being duped into conversion through marriage and people were forging their identities for this purpose. Amid the din, the Bill was passed by a voice vote. UP Governor Anandiben Patel had promulgated the legislation exactly three months ago in November. The UP Cabinet had cleared the ordinance on November 24 after the Allahabad High Court upheld people's right to freedom of choice of individuals, putting down its own previous order which stated that conversion for the sake of marriage was not acceptable. Under the 'Love Jihad' law, a person if convicted of forceful conversions for the sake of marriage, shall face imprisonment from one to five years, and the crime will be a non-bailable offence. UP is not the only state to take the legislation route to end forceful conversions. In January, the Madhya Pradesh government passed the Freedom of Religion Ordinance, 2020, and promulgated it into a law. (Newser) If anyone knows what it's like to struggle to pay for college, it's Calvin Tyler Jr. He enrolled at Baltimore's Morgan State College (now Morgan State University) in 1961 to pursue a degree in business administration. A lack of funds forced him to drop out two years later, and he became one of the city's first 10 UPS drivers instead. Nearly 60 years after that college dream was dashed, Tyler, 78, and his wife, Tina Tyler, are making others' dreams come true, courtesy of a $20 million pledge to the school made Tuesdaybelieved to be the largest private donation ever to a historically Black college or university by an alum, reports CNN. The money will be put into an already established scholarship fund set up in the couple's name that had initially offered scholarships to Baltimore students in need; now, students from anywhere will be eligible. story continues below "My wife and I have become keenly aware of the effect that the pandemic has had on a number of young people trying to get an education, [and] we have the resources to help a lot of young people," Tyler, who has previously donated millions to the school, said, per a release. "This is why we are increasing our commitment at Morgan." He adds, to the New York Times: "Going to college for four years and coming out ... $80,000 to $100,000 in debt puts the person behind. ... I want to provide scholarships for young bright people so that they can ... come out of college debt-free." The Tylers' generosity has already benefitted 222 Morgan State students. As for the source of his wealth, Tyler moved up to a management position just two years after joining UPS, eventually becoming senior VP of operations before he retired in 1998. (Read more uplifting news stories.) Five Thames Valley Police officers face manslaughter charges after a 24-year-old suspect who was arrested at a home in Milton Keynes died in hospital. Brian Ringrose was taken to Milton Keynes University Hospital by ambulance after officers had medical concerns during his arrest on January 27. The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said the 24-year-old had been restrained using handcuffs and limb restraints and then carried to a police van in a 'flexible lift and carry system' (Flacs). After being discharged from Milton Keynes University Hospital he was restrained by officers and taken to a police van to be transported to custody, before falling ill en route and being readmitted to hospital. Mr Ringrose was then placed in an induced coma before dying in hospital on February 2 - with a post-mortem examination giving the cause of death as 'inconclusive pending further investigation'. Five police officers have been told they are under investigation for alleged gross negligence manslaughter and unlawful act manslaughter. Five Thames Valley Police officers face manslaughter charges after a 24-year-old suspect who was arrested at a home in Milton Keynes died in hospital. Stock image used One of the officers is also being investigated for alleged common assault and all of them have been served with gross misconduct notices for potential breaches of professional behaviour related to use of force and duties and responsibilities. An IOPC spokesperson said: 'The decision to inform officers they are under criminal investigation means evidence indicates a criminal offence may have been committed. This does not necessarily mean criminal charges will follow.' IOPC regional director for the South East Graham Beesley said: 'Our thoughts are with Mr Ringrose's family and all of those affected by his tragic death. 'This is a significant development in our investigation and is based on evidence we have gathered to date. Brian Ringrose was taken to Milton Keynes University Hospital by ambulance after officers had medical concerns during his arrest on January 27. Stock image used 'We have updated Mr Ringrose's family and will now seek to interview the officers under criminal caution. 'It is our role to independently investigate all of the circumstances when someone dies in police custody.' Thames Valley Police has suspended its use of Flacs and the IOPC is looking at its use in other forces with the National Police Chiefs' Council. A spokesperson for Thames Valley Police said: 'Our thoughts remain with Mr Ringrose's family at this very difficult time. 'We have been fully cooperating with the IOPC from the outset and will continue to do so. Support is being given to the officers involved.' Cruiser, Backhoe, Bridge Top Clarksburg Capital Requests CLARKSBURG, Mass. Town officials will be considering department requests for vehicles and equipment in the fiscal 2022 budget. The Police Department, Highway Department and library presented their budgets and capital plans to the Finance Committee on Monday. Police Chief Michael Williams's budget includes a request for a new police cruiser and police clerk. Williams had asked for a new vehicle last year to replace the decade-old Chevrolet Tahoe but had been asked to put it off another year. "Last year we had put some money into it. This year hasn't been real bad, but we had a couple issues," the chief said. "We had to replace the radiator, and I think the alternator went on us. I mean it's up there in age." The sport utility vehicle has about 87,000 miles and has been running well, he said, "but you never know." It is expected to get new brakes, pads and rotors and tires in this year. If a new cruiser was purchased, the Tahoe would become the backup vehicle and replace the force's old Chevy Impala. "We do like to have it to be able to use as a secondary at some point, you know, so I hate to just drive it into the ground," Williams said. "It's still a decent vehicle." Finance Chairman James Stakenas said he had spoken with Select Board Chairman Ronald Boucher and Town Administrator Rebecca Stone about the possibility of a cruiser. "We're not making any decisions today," he said. "I needed to know the condition and I think you make a good point that ... should we be able to get a new cruiser, that would become a second vehicle, like you did with the Impala for 1,000 years." Stakenas asked Williams to look ahead at what the Tahoe might need in repairs in the coming fiscal year, assuming the pending repairs would come out of this year's budget, and get an estimate on the cost of a new cruiser. Williams received more push back on the need for a police clerk, with Finance Committee member Debra Lefave sharply questioning what the clerk would do for the allotted eight hours. "From what I understand, the only thing that they do is bill for detail," she said. "It says we have two policemen and if we don't have details all the week, I wonder what justifies eight hours?" She asked if someone in the Police Department could take on the billing since it didn't seem like it would take long. The billing for details had been done by the former administrative assistant but that duty was taken out when the position was slightly revamped to align more as support for the town administrator. Stakenas said the decision was made by the Select Board to have a consistent person rather than a part-timer who may not be available. Stone suggested there may be other tasks that the person can do. "I think the justification on our end has already been dealt with by the Select Board doing it this way," said Stakenas. "So our questioning isn't going to change it." "I think it's frivolous," said Lefave. The clerk's wages would come out of the existing salary line but Stakenas said he wanted to be sure Williams had the resources he needs. Highway Foreman Kyle Hurlbut's list included expenditures for salaries, new doors for the town garage and a much-needed backhoe. The department's salary line has someone retiring, a retiree buyout, a new hire that will overlap the retiree's departure for training, and a 2.5 percent cost of living wage. The position for the new hire has not yet been posted. The capital budget has two doors that were not replaced during the garage addition. Replacing the rotted doors will cost about $6,000 installed. "We need to start saving money to replace the 1986 backhoe, it's on its last leg," Hurlbut said. "It's losing power, its transmission is slipping. Those are pretty costly repairs. I mean, it took me a half an hour a month ago to get from a Houghton Street water break back to the garage a mile down the road. "It's tired, it's done, it's time. We've gotten our life expectancy out of that machine." Also in his top three needs is the Cross Road bridge, which has been one-lane for several years. Hurlbut said he'd asked Stone to see if there were any grants the town was eligible for. "It's going to be quite an expensive repair that we need to start saving money for," he said, estimating it would take 8-10 years of Chapter 90 highway funds to cover -- without doing any other work in town. Library Director Lynn DePaoli had no large capital needs but did require a raise in the dues and membership line to cover added services from CW MARS, the Central/Western Massachusetts Automated Resource Sharing library consortium. That added about $700 to the line item, which was carried over to next year's budget. DePaoli reported that the library's hours have been cut back because of the pandemic but it has been doing about 30 curbside pickups a week and also home deliveries. She did ask for an increase of $2,000 in the materials line for new books, saying she's been weeding out a lot of books dating back to the 1980s. Stakenas noted she'd only used about 14 percent of this year's materials budget and Lefave asked why she would need extra if she's not spending what she already has. DePaoli said a lot of things had been back-ordered. Stakenas said he agreed with Lefave and asked DePaoli to coordinate with Stone on what has been spent and what is encumbered. "There's no question you need to buy materials and if you're not able to get them, we should talk about where that money can be put," he said. "We don't want to deprive you of the resources, we just want to make sure we have the right amount of money there." No final decisions will be made until state numbers firm up but the town is in generally good fiscal condition. It has $340,748 in free cash, down from $514,892 last year, and $241,922 in the sewer enterprise fund. The town had also budgeted very conservatively this year but had been pleasantly surprised when state aid came in higher numbers than anticipated. Stone reported that the property tax receipts are about 62-65 percent and personal property 85. There is potential for a slight increase in unrestricted government aid, she said, but added "it's still way too early for the House and Senate to be giving out preliminary numbers." She had plugged in a 2.5 percent increase for McCann Technical School but the town's assessment will actually drop from $371,727 to $347,942. The assessment is largely based on enrollment. Lefave questioned the process of filling the town clerk's position at 20 hours and if it would have benefits. A special town meeting last August had approved making the elected position an appointed one; this will have to be ratified at the annual town election. Lefave argued that it was still an elected position that people run for until the town meeting vote was ratified; Stone countered that town counsel had said the appointment could made immediately after the vote despite it being in the middle of a term. The town clerk's office is not on the ballot this year despite a year being left on the three-year term. It is currently being filled by an interim appointment. Senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi meets with Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, Kuwait, February 23, 2021. /Kuwait News Agency KUWAIT CITY, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah on Tuesday held a meeting with visiting senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi, during which the two sides hailed the deep-rooted friendship and solid political mutual trust. Yang, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, conveyed Chinese President Xi Jinping's cordial greetings to the Kuwaiti emir, and warmly congratulated Kuwait on celebrating its 60th National Day and the 30th anniversary of liberation. Yang noted that the China-Kuwait relations have stood the test of time thanks to the unswerving strategic mutual trust and sincere friendship, which is a vivid manifestation of "a friend in need is a friend indeed." China's "dual circulation" development pattern, in which domestic and overseas markets reinforce each other, and Kuwait's "2035 National Vision" have great potential for synergy, providing a powerful driving force for pragmatic cooperation between the two countries, he said. On the occasion of celebrating the 50th anniversary of the establishment of China-Kuwait diplomatic ties, China is willing to work together with Kuwait to consolidate strategic mutual trust, promote high-quality joint construction of the Belt and Road Initiative, expand cooperation in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, enhance people-to-people exchanges, and deepen China-Kuwait strategic partnership in the new era, the senior Chinese diplomat said. China appreciates Kuwait's positive role in promoting stability in the Gulf region, and is willing to strengthen communication and coordination between the two countries in international and regional affairs, Yang said. China welcomes Kuwait to continue playing a positive role in pushing forward the negotiations on clinching a free trade agreement between China and the Gulf Cooperation Council, he added. For his part, the Kuwaiti emir asked Yang to convey his sincere regards to President Xi Jinping. He spoke highly of China's development achievements and the fruitful achievements in Kuwait-China cooperation in various fields, stressing that the two sides enjoy deep-rooted friendship, solid mutual trust and broad prospects for cooperation. The Kuwaiti leader also sincerely wished the Chinese people success in gaining more brilliant achievements in development under President Xi's leadership. On the same day, Yang also met with Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Ahmad Nasser Al-Mohammad Al-Sabah. After more than 20 years working in the industry, the 30-year-old star Emma Watson is officially stepping back from acting. Is Emma Watson signing off as an actress? Emma Watson became an instant household name as soon as she made her acting debut in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 2001. Since taking on Hermione Granger, Watson has starred in many popular films, including The Bling Ring, My Week with Marilyn, and Beauty and the Beast. Most lately, in Little Women, Watson played Meg. It appears, though, that Emma Watson may have decided to place her acting career on hold indefinitely and stay out of the public eye, as per Pop Buzz. According to the Daily Mail, Emma is leaving acting behind and will focus on her relationship with her alleged fiance, Leo Robinton. A source told them: "Watson has gone away, she is settling down with Leo. They're laying low. Maybe she wants a family." Emma is reported as "not taking on new commitments." Besides, Watson's Instagram account has been updated, confirming that she will no longer be active on social media: "Emma's official Instagram page is currently inactive and is not being updated." Since June 2020, Emma has not shared anything on the platform. Over the past five years, she's also only worked in three films, Beauty and the Beast, The Circle, and Little Women, so the news isn't that surprising. If Emma's intentions to leave acting are permanent or whether she may be convinced to return in the future is still uncertain. Read also: Peter Weber, Kelley Flanagan: Fans Strongly Predict They Will Get Back Together Is Emma Watson engaged? According to Republic World, Emma Watson's photos with a diamond on her ring finger are viral online. Netizens gushed on Twitter to get more information. Harry Potter star actress Emma Watson has long been tight-lipped of her personal life and romantic interests. These photos of Emma Watson have some fans wondering if she's engaged to her beau Leo Robinton, (though there has been no confirmation at this time.) Check out why fans are talking: https://t.co/QuN1bo1Pdd JustJared.com (@JustJared) February 8, 2021 @Twitter However, the actress was recently seen hanging out with Leo Robinton, her boyfriend. A ring that Watson wore on her ring finger was what caught the attention. After the photos have gone viral on the internet, "Is Emma Watson engaged" has started trending. Many netizens took to social media over the viral photos making the rounds on the internet to share their surprise and shock. On Twitter, some netizens wrote and asked if Emma Watson was engaged or not. Many others have said that, after all, she may as well be engaged to her fiance. On social media, a number of netizens even wrote that the two had been dating for months now, and it was sweet if the two were engaged. Meanwhile, some wrote they are heartbroken in the tweets. I wish you all the best & never lose your beautiful smile! I will always love you @EmmaWatson now Im gonna cry again byee haha joulina (@holyvalu) February 23, 2021 Read also: Larry King Omits His Widow from His Secret Will; Shawn King to Contest Who is Emma Watson dating? Emma Watson and her boyfriend were spotted together during their pre-day Valentine's trip to Mexico, as per a Daily Mail media portal report. Watson was seen sporting a white t-shirt, and she matched the quotation "Femme Liberte" with a white pair of pants and simple jewelry. She was also seen wearing a gold band on her ring finger as she and boyfriend Leo scooted their way. The media outlet reports that Leo is from Los Angeles, but it is not assumed that he and Emma live together. There is, still, no official statement issued by either Emma or her partner about the rumors. The two did not confess to being engaged, nor did they quash the speculation. Read also: Estranged Sister Sues Mariah Carey for 'Emotional Distress' Memoir Causes @ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. His email is dshribman@post-gazette.com. A division bench comprising Chief Justice Hima Kohli and Justice B. Vijaysen Reddy said that the road will be accessible only to the students and staff of the University of Hyderabad. (PTI) Hyderabad: The Telangana High Court on Wednesday issued an order restraining third parties, including the general public, from accessing the road laid recently by the GHMC in the land of the University of Hyderabad. A division bench comprising Chief Justice Hima Kohli and Justice B. Vijaysen Reddy said that the road will be accessible only to the students and staff of the University of Hyderabad. If any third parties or the public at large would be allowed to access the road, which passes through the University, then it may compromise the safety and security of those who reside in the University Campus, the Bench opined. The HC made it clear that these orders will continue till further orders. The Bench was dealing with an appeal filed by the University of Hyderabad, aggrievied with the order of a Single Judge, who had allowed the passage of general public through a road laid by the GHMC recently, while issuing status quo orders either to not extend the road, further and stopping the University to close the road. The Sankranti vacation court had issued a status quo in the petition filed by the University of Hyderabad (UoH), which had challenged the laying of an approach road through its campus in the stretch from the Indian School of Business (ISB) road to the government employees' colonies at Gachibowli. The university's contention was that without acquiring the land and without Union cabinet approval, Telangana government and GHMC had laid the road of 20 feets within two days, on request of the Government Employees Housing Board Association. This was contrary to the law. While hearing the appeal of University, the Division Bench on Wednesday pulled up the GHMC on how it could it lay a coal tar road in an arbitrary manner, where it has no rights over the said land. What is the hurry and scurry in laying the road by violating Article 300-A, the Bench questioned the GHMC. "When the University was established in 1975, A 2,324 acres of land was allotted to it. The state governments had taken more than 700 acres from the University to give to other parties. So far, no alternative lands were given. Right now, in the name of a master plan, the government is trying to take possession of another 18.30 acres to lay a 100 feet road. If you want that land, then you should follow the due procedure by acquiring the land. It is very high handedness in laying the road unilaterally, Justice Vijaysen Reddy observed. Chief Justice Kohli told the Advocate General to show minutes of the meeting held on January 6, 2021, where the revenue officials had asked the University registrar and other authorities to come for a discussion on the handover of land to lay the road. This meeting was arranged in the premises of Cyberabad police commissionerate. [February 24, 2021] CloudCommerce to Change Corporate Name to AiAdvertising SAN ANTONIO, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CloudCommerce, Inc. (OTC: CLWD ), a leading provider of digital advertising solutions, today announced that it has raised $10 million of equity capital and is changing its corporate name to AiAdvertising, Inc., to better reflect the Companys focus on using artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the cost of advertising. "With our increased focus on artificial intelligence, we believe that AiAdvertising is a more appropriate name for our public company, said Andrew Van Noy, CEO of CloudCommerce. Therefore, we plan to use the name of our recently launched artificial intelligence venture as our parent company name. Mr. Van Noy continued, Changing our corporate name also represents our commitment to developing SWARM, our flagship solution, into a cloud hosted software platform that will harness the power of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive algorithms to eliminate the inefficiencies, waste and guesswork that is inherent and accepted in todays data driven digital marketing campaigns. Closing an equity round of $10 million allows us to increase the pace of our AI development and decrease the time to market. One cannot overestimate the importance of having access to capital at this stage of our development, Mr. Van Noy oncluded. For more information about AiAdvertising, please visit the Companys new website at www.AiAdvertising.com. About CloudCommerce CloudCommerce is a leading provider of digital advertising solutions. Our flagship solution, SWARM, analyzes a robust mix of audience data to help businesses find who to talk to, what to say to them, and how to market to them. We do this by applying advanced data science, behavioral science, artificial intelligence, and market research techniques to discover, develop and create custom audiences for highly targeted digital marketing campaigns. For more information about the Company, please visit www.CloudCommerce.com. Forward-Looking Statements This press release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are neither historical facts nor assurances of future performance. Instead, they are based only on our current beliefs, expectations and assumptions regarding the future of our business, future plans and strategies, projections, anticipated events and trends, the economy and other future conditions. Because forward-looking statements relate to the future, they are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict and many of which are outside of our control. Our actual results and financial condition may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Therefore, you should not rely on any of these forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause our actual results and financial condition to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements are included in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019. Any forward-looking statement made by us in this release is based only on information currently available to us and speaks only as of the date on which it is made. We undertake no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise. Press Contact: CloudCommerce, Inc. Tel: (800) 673-0927 communications@cloudcommerce.com [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A new study suggests that, while atheists and theists share moral values related to protecting vulnerable individuals, atheists are less likely to endorse values that promote group cohesion and more inclined to judge the morality of actions based on their consequences. Tomas Stahl of the University of Illinois at Chicago presents these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on February 24, 2021. In many countries, including the U.S., widespread cultural beliefs hold that atheists lack a moral compass. However, no previous studies have systematically examined the differences between atheists' and theists' concepts of morality. To address this gap, Stahl conducted two surveys examining the moral values of 429 American atheists and theists via Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. He also conducted two larger surveys involving 4,193 atheists and theists from the U.S. (a predominantly religious country) and Sweden (a predominantly irreligious country). Analysis of the results suggests that theists are more inclined than atheists to endorse moral values that promote group cohesion. Meanwhile, atheists are more likely to judge the morality of an action based on its consequences. However, atheists and theists appear to align on moral values related to protecting vulnerable individuals, liberty versus oppression, and being epistemically rational, i.e.: believing in claims when they are evidence-based and being skeptical about claims not backed by evidence. The survey results also provided clues as to why atheists' and theists' moral compasses may be calibrated differently: the distinctions may stem in part from theists' increased exposure to community engagement in belief-based behaviors that would be costly if the beliefs were false (such as attending religious meetings). Differences in cognitive style and levels of perceived existential threat may also contribute. Future studies could further explore these potential causal relationships. These findings suggest that the widespread idea that atheists are immoral may arise in part from their weak endorsement of moral values that promote group cohesion and their consequence-based, case-by-case moral judgment of actions. Stahl adds: "The most general take-home message from these studies is that people who do not believe in God do have a moral compass. In fact, they share many of the same moral concerns that religious believers have, such as concerns about fairness, and about protecting vulnerable individuals from harm. However, disbelievers are less inclined than believers to endorse moral values that serve group cohesion, such as having respect for authorities, ingroup loyalty, and sanctity... It is possible that the negative stereotype of atheists as immoral may stem in part from the fact that they are less inclined than religious people to view respect for authority, ingroup loyalty, and sanctity as relevant for morality, and they are more likely to make moral judgments about harm on a consequentialist, case by case basis." Explore further Why atheists are not as rational as some like to think More information: Stahl T (2021) The amoral atheist? A cross-national examination of cultural, motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, and their implications for morality. PLoS ONE 16(2): e0246593. Journal information: PLoS ONE Stahl T (2021) The amoral atheist? A cross-national examination of cultural, motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, and their implications for morality.16(2): e0246593. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246593 Equine Guelph has announced the reboot of JobTrack, its free online equine employment matching service. Serving the Ontario horse community for nearly 20 years, JobTrack has been a popular job-matching service for thousands of employers and job seekers. After undergoing many updates and upgrades for user functionality, the free service is live and now available at this link. With its new facelift and upgraded user-ability, Equine JobTrack is poised to roll out across Canada to serve the equine industry nationally. New expanded search and sort functions include the ability to sort searches by: racing or non-racing, sector, job position and region. Advanced searches using a locator map will assist both job seekers and employers in finding each other. Equine JobTrack is a vitally important part of supporting the horse industry, both racing and non-racing and plays an essential role in job development in rural Ontario, says Sue Leslie, president of the Horsemens Benevolent Protective Association. Currently, the racing industry is experiencing major labour shortages in Ontario. The upgraded Equine JobTrack webpage will support both employers and those looking for employment. Career pathways can be investigated with many feature videos and infographics showcasing careers in the equine industry. Training opportunities can also be explored by reviewing testimonials from Equine Guelph students who have found their niche in the industry with the help of highly valued, evidence-based education. People often get into the horse business because they love horses and want to spend their lives in the business but without ever receiving proper training in business and horse health. The Resources section can help applicants find the tools they need to pave their pathway to a rewarding career in the equine industry. The goal of Equine JobTrack has always been to link jobs with training to support growth of the equine industry and rural development in Ontario. The introduction of self-service profiles and upgraded user-ability has allowed the program to expand exponentially. The redevelopment of Equine JobTrack will more effectively connect employers with job-seekers nationwide. As director of Equine Guelph, I am so pleased that we can now offer this updated and functional pathway to employment for the equine industry in Canada as a free service, says Gayle Ecker, director of Equine Guelph. I would like to thank HBPA and Ontario Racing for their strong support of this initiative. Thanks also goes out to Grand River Agricultural Society for additional funding received. This program is funded in part through the Canadian Agricultural Partnership Program (the Partnership), a provincial-territorial initiative. The Ontario Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Rural Affairs assists in the delivery of CAP the Partnership in Ontario. Originally developed with funding from the Horsemens Benevolent Protective Association of Ontario (HBPA), Equine Guelph is pleased to have financial support from HBPA once again. Additional collaborating partners include Grand River Agricultural Society, Ontario Racing, Ontario Equestrian and Standardbred Canada. Other industry partners include: AgCareers, Central Ontario Standardbred Association, Ontario Harness Horse Association and Quarter Racing Owners of Ontario Inc. (Equine Guelph) Multiple Defence sources aware of behind-the-scenes efforts to protect whistleblowers said at least two of the soldiers who were issued termination notices allegedly engaged in war crimes on the orders of more senior soldiers, and in both cases, these alleged crimes would never have been discovered without the disclosures, the sources said. Some soldiers suspected of repeatedly lying about their own involvement in war crimes have also been issued termination notices, but were given no support from the Inspector-General. The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have confirmed this by speaking to more than a dozen serving and former special forces insiders. In November, General Burr and Defence Force Chief Angus Campbell both publicly praised the role of special forces soldiers who disclosed alleged war crimes to Justice Brereton, who led the Inspector-Generals inquiry. Justice Brereton ultimately found that Australian special forces soldiers allegedly committed up to 39 murders and recommended that up to 19 current or former soldiers should face criminal investigation, possible prosecution and be stripped of their medals. Justice Brereton warned in his November report that too often ... have the careers of whistle-blowers been adversely affected. He urged the Defence Force to promote cleanskin whistleblowers those who had observed or disclosed alleged war crimes but not participated in any alleged summary executions. Chief of the Defence Force Angus Campbell is yet to act on that recommendation. Justice Brereton also urged General Campbell and General Burr to consider special treatment for those whose conduct is such that they cannot be rewarded by promotion, but who, having made disclosures to the Inquiry in protected circumstances when they reasonably believed they would not be used against them, and whose evidence was ultimately of considerable assistance to the Inquiry, ought not fairly be the subject of adverse administrative action. Again, it will be an important signal that they have not been disadvantaged for having ultimately assisted to uncover misconduct, even though implicating themselves. General Angus Campbell. Credit:Getty Images When he announced Justice Breretons findings in November, General Campbell described being deeply appreciative of people who came forward to speak with concern of what they had seen, in some cases of what they had participated in. It was a very brave thing for them to do, because in the climate and the culture I have described, they would have been very concerned for doing so, he said in comments which suggested General Campbell was aware that key whistleblowers had also disclosed their own wrongdoing. But since then, senior officers working under General Burrs ultimate command have, in at least three cases, disregarded the advice from the Inspector-General and issued termination notices that inform a soldier they will be sacked unless they provide mitigating circumstances. The question of how to deal with special forces veterans who have admitted to egregious acts is not simple. Even considering their assistance to the inquiry, their alleged conduct may be so serious that it warrants dismissal. However, that is the same workplace penalty suffered by SAS and commando soldiers who have been found to have repeatedly lied about their own role in war crimes only to have it disclosed by others. Loading The tension comes amid confusion about how the federal police and Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions will work with the new Office of the Special Investigator, which was announced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison in November to help prosecute those accused of war crimes. The Office of the Special Investigator (OSI), led by former Victorian judge Mark Weinberg, is analysing what information from the Brereton inquiry can be used in criminal prosecutions and what must be withheld because it was obtained under a special power that gives immunity to those who confess to wrongdoing. However, the OSI is at risk of replicating steps already taken by the Australian Federal Police, which was referred war crimes allegations by Justice Brereton in 2018. Federal police agents have spent almost three years investigating former special forces soldier and Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith, who is accused of multiple war crimes, and are also investigating serious allegations against another soldier known as Soldier C. After a North Korean defector was able to wander along South Korea's heavily guarded border with the North undetected, the South Korean military is currently facing tons of criticism. North Korean Defector Evades Capture Reports stated that the defector crossed over to the south by swimming early morning on February 16. However, despite being spotted by surveillance cameras on multiple occasions, the defector was able to evade being captured for over six hours. According to NPR, the man passed through the East Sea to defect to the South. Reports also stated that the man used a drainage tunnel in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and crawled through. Defector Evaded Capture for Hours Moreover, it was reported that the man was able to walk undetected for about 5kms after hiding his wetsuit and flippers. He was only captured after a guard saw him through the CCTV and then alerted the superiors. By the time that the search for the defector began, the man from North Korea has already been spotted by coastal surveillance cameras at least five times. Aside from that he also triggered at least two alarms, which the soldiers were not able to notice, resulting in inaction. The defector was then able to move on with his journey passing through three fence cameras that did not trigger any alarm. According to The Guardian, following the incident, the joint chiefs of staff (JCS) official told South Korea's Yonhap News that several service members who were in charge of the guard duty were not able to follow certain procedures. As a result of failing to follow the rules, the service members were not able to detect the North Korean defector. Read also: Kim Jong Un's Wife Seen on Public First Time After Being a No-Show for One Year Meanwhile, after the incident was investigated it was found out that the guard who was in charge of the coastal surveillance was fixing an issue with his computer. The guard reportedly thought the alarms were simply caused by a technical error. On the other hand, the guard at the military post was reportedly distracted by a phone call during the incident. On top of these, the military was also highly criticized after it came out that it had not known of the existence of the drainage tunnel that the North Korean man used when he defected from the North. In a report by BBC, the North Korean defector journeyed from the North amid the winter, which raised several questions on how he was able to survive swimming in the freezing water. However, the JCS answered the questions stating that the man wore a padded jacket inside his wet suit and that the tides could have worked in favor of the man. Officials refused to release the name of the North Korean defector and only stated that he was in his 20s and was a fisheries worker. Reports have claimed that the man intended to surrender himself to civilians fearing that the military would force him back to the North. Before the recent incident, South Korea's military has already faced criticism regarding breaches from the North after a civilian was able to cross the fences covered in barbed wire and was able to evade capture in November. Related article: North Korea Attempts to Steal Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Data, South Korean Lawmakers Say @ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. In the 1900s, Black children in North Alabama thought of Trinity School not as a place to be separate from whites, but as a second home for them. "You have to understand, you have to look at the atmosphere. What it was like in the '60s and '70s. Here was a place where Black folks could come and you felt like you were somebody. You were treated like you were somebody. And people cared for you. And they wanted you to be the best that you could be," said Trinity School Class of 1970 graduate Barbara Clemons. Della Dardy graduated from Trinity in 1964. She remembers going to a different window than the whites at Dairy Queen to get ice cream. Or only being allowed to sit in the balcony at the theater while the white kids sat close to the stage. But at school? "Here at Trinity...We were just like everybody else," Dardy said. Trinity School was first built to educate the children of freed slaves in the late 1800s. Having gone through two fires in two locations, Trinity made its home off Browns Ferry Street in Athens - the former location of Fort Henderson during the Civil War. As time went on and the school grew, so did its following. "The people in the community - if you were attending trinity, or if you had graduated from Trinity - they treated you as if you had been to college. That's how much Trinity meant to this community," said Trinity School Class of 1966 graduate David Malone. Today, David is the president of Athens-Limestone Community Association. They've salvaged parts of the school like the original stairs and fountain, but could only save so much of the building that fell apart after it was abandoned. Nowadays, he and other members of the association work to ensure the school and historic site are not forgotten. "The moat went all the way around the fort. In other words, if the enemy came on top of the hill, they had to come up the hill to attack," said Malone of the hill that still surrounds the school grounds today. That's exactly what happened in 1864. Confederate general and later grand wizard of the KKK Nathan B. Forrest took over the fort from the infantry that was there. Today, the association - both Black and white - works to keep stories like this alive. And to restore the school to what it once was while making the people of Athens aware of the history this site has. "We are lucky to be sitting right here. You should've seen it before we got started," said Athens-Limestone Community Association Vice President Richard Martin. The association pays for renovations to the school with donations from the public. To donate or find more information, visit their Facebook page. Armenias Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Tuesday questioned the operation of the Russian Iskander missile systems. He said that they "have not exploded, or exploded by only 10 percent." Pashinyan commented thusly on former President Serzh Sargsyan's statement that the Armenian army could have used the Iskander missile system on the fourth day of the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) war last fall. But in an interview with Govorit Moskva radio, Viktor Zavarzin, Deputy Chairman of the Defense Committee of the Russian State Duma, slammed the aforesaid statement by the Armenian PM. He noted that thus Pashinyan decided to emphasize his innocence in the result of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. "When a person wants to be innocent, he will blame the Iskanders, the Armenian people, and the military. That, of course, is not true. Iskander is a high-precision weapon, it has shown itself in various military exercises. It [i.e., Pashinyan's words] is an absolute lie and is not even subject to doubt. It is no coincidence that the West often talks about bringing these short-range missiles into the negotiation process. They have been used many times and very accurately in Syria. I do not agree, to put it mildly, with Mr. Pashinyan's opinion," Zavarzin said. Chandigarh: The Captain Amarinder Singh led Punjab Cabinet on Wednesday approved a new EWS Policy, paving the way for construction of more than 25000 houses for the economically weaker sections, with developers and authorities required to develop 5% of project area for EWS housing. These houses would be constructed in reasonably sized pockets, along with social infrastructure, such as schools, community centres and dispensaries, at convenient locations to ensure comfortable living for the beneficiaries. They will be provided access to basic civic amenities. Captain Amarinder Singh This decision was taken during a Cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh through video conferencing. The houses under the new policy would be constructed with the latest brick-less technology, using services of qualified Project Management Agencies (PMAs). They will be offered to eligible families, who will be financed by banks at affordable monthly instalment rates. The policy provides for eligible applicants to furnish proof of birth in Punjab or of 10 years stay in the state from the date of application, such as Aadhaar card, copy of ration card, extract of voter list, copy of driving license, passport etc. Family income should not be more than Rs3 lac per annum from all sources, as revised by GoI or Punjab from time to time. The applicant/his spouse/minor child must not already own freehold/leasehold residential plot/dwelling unit in Punjab or Chandigarh, and the applicant would be required to self-certify on these counts. Captain Amarinder Singh The applications will be received and verified by the authorised banks. Only an application for which a Bank provides loan, or applicant undertakes to make lump sum payment within 40 days of issue of letter of intent, would be considered for allotment through draw or otherwise. Applicant must be married and the application must be in the joint name of husband and wife. There will be bar on sale, gift, mortgage with possession, exchange, long lease of the so allotted EWS dwelling units for a period of 15 years except within the family case of death of allottee. The government would fix sale price for EWS keeping in view the cost of construction of unit, proportionate cost of site development and common infrastructure such as school, community centre etc. and administrative charges such as PMC, advertisement cost, which would not exceed 5% of the total project cost. Land cost will be taken as zero and there would be exemption from EDC on such EWS projects. Developers may consolidate their EWS areas in pockets which must be at least 1km apart, be it of 12 to 16 acre in size, in residential zones of SAS Nagar and New Chandigarh Master Plans, on already constructed master plan roads, 5 acre to 16 acre on existing roads with minimum 40 feet right of way in case of rest of Punjab, within 4km of their colonies. Apart from these, the value of area transferred to government and area reclaimed in the colony must be same as per collector rates of the two lands. Captain Amarinder Singh It is required that area being offered should not be less than the area being reclaimed, and all EWS land would be transferred to government free of cost. In case of group housing projects, land can be similarly offered such that EWS houses equal to 10% of the number of apartments, can be built on 80% area of land offered @80 units per acre. Remaining 20% area will be kept for essential amenities/social infrastructure. Developers who have transferred EWS area of their projects to government in compliance to notification dated December 31, 2013 can also take benefit of it by exchanging land given to government, with such new parcels of lands by way of mutation. Notably, in 2013, Cabinet approved a policy that made it mandatory for developers to transfer the EWS pockets free of cost to government and accordingly a notification was issued on December 31, 2013. Subsequently, in 2016, the said policy was amended by the Cabinet Committee vide notification dated May 24, 2016. Some developers handed over the possession of the EWS pockets to the respective authorities while few, who had obtained licenses/approvals prior to 2013-14, went to Punjab and Haryana High Court, against retrospective application of the policy of 2013 and subsequent amendment in the Act in 2014 that demanded free transfer of their EWS areas to concerned development authority, while their projects had been approved according to the original Act of 1995 under which they could sell the EWS plots at a sale price that was 15% less than what they would charge from others. Moreover, there has been general resistance to construct EWS houses within the colonies due to wide variance in life styles necessitated by economic status. It was also felt that provision of social infrastructure in large number of small sized EWS scattered pockets was extremely difficult. In view of these limitations and legal issues, virtually no EWS houses have come up in the state under the government policy. Finally, to address all these issues and to see that EWS houses are actually built in the state in requisite numbers, the new policy has been framed in accordance with relevant provisions of extant law. BJP leader Rakesh Singh sent to police custody by Alipore Court in Kolkata till March 1st India oi-Madhuri Adnal Kolkata, Feb 24: BJP leader Rakesh Singh has been sent to police custody by Alipore Court in Kolkata till 1st March, in connection with a narcotics case involving youth BJP leader Pamela Goswami. West Bengal police had arrested Rakesh Singh from Galsi in Purba Bardhaman district, about 130 km from Kolkata, on Tuesday night in connection with his alleged involvement in a drug seizure case, a senior officer said. His two sons were arrested by the narcotics section of the city police on charges of obstructing and stopping its personnel from entering the residence of the BJP state committee member in the port area of the city, he said. Singh was arrested at a nakapoint on the national highway at Galsi by the district police after being alerted by Kolkata Police. Singh was in a car in which he was travelling to an unknown destination along with CISF personnel provided as his security, the officer said. Kolkata: BJP leader Rakesh Singh, named by Pamela Goswami, arrested in drug seizure case Earlier, Singh had been summoned by Kolkata Police to appear before its narcotics department in connection with a drug case. He had then told the police that he had left the city for Delhi and will appear before them after returning. BJP state youth leader Pamela Goswami and two others had been arrested in connection with the case. "It seems he was trying to escape. He had switched to another vehicle probably sensing that we have already started looking for him. He was trying to evade arrest," a top police Kolkata Police officer said. Singh had reportedly left his home in the city''s Kidderpore area in a SUV and later got into to a car. Police said that the BJP leader had switched off his mobile phone but had used it once to make a call following which sleuths spotted him trying to escape taking the national highway to Bardhaman. "All the districts'' police were alerted and finally he was stopped at a naka point at Galsi in Purba Bardhaman at around 8 PM. Our teams have left to bring him to the city and hopefully by tonight we will be able to bring him here," he said. Singh had moved Calcutta High Court seeking a stay on and quashing of the notice by the police to appear before it on Tuesday as a witness in the case. The HC had dismissed Singh''s petition seeking the quashing of the notice by the police. Pamela Goswami, the state secretary of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), was arrested along with a friend and her personal security guard from New Alipore area of the city on February 19 after about 90 gm of cocaine was seized from her car. She had then alleged that it was a conspiracy by Singh. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 17:36 [IST] The owners of a renowned British beauty spot that was ravaged by litter and vandalism last summer have urged the government to educate 'culturally diverse' tourists how to behave in the countryside. The Lulworth Estate, which owns Durdle Door in Dorset, has complained that huge crowds that headed for Britain's coasts during the easing of the first lockdown left behind an unprecedented trail of destruction. They claim the huge spike in day trippers seen at Durdle Door in May led to 'environmental degradation that has never been experienced' before on the 12,000-acre site on Britain's south coast. Infamous photos also show thousands of beachgoers packed together as ambulance helicopters land to rescue three people who injured themselves jumping off cliffs. The estate blamed 'the younger and more geographically and culturally diverse cohort' from urban areas for huge piles of litter that took weeks to collect. Volunteers reported at the time finding human faeces in food boxes left behind on the sand. The Lulworth Estate, which owns Durdle Door in Dorset, has complained that huge crowds that headed for Britain's coasts during the easing of the first lockdown left behind an unprecedented trail of destruction The estate blamed 'the younger and more geographically and culturally diverse cohort' from urban areas for huge piles of litter that took weeks to collect A spokesman told MailOnline that many of the issues were caused by people from towns and cities and that they were 'younger than our usual visitor'. He added: '(They were) from many different countries and cultures, including a good proportion of Europeans in their 20s, possibly furloughed from the hospitality industry.' In a letter to the Government Petitions Committee, the estate has called for a 'countryside code' to be put in place ahead of the easing of the third national lockdown, starting in April. According to The Times, the letter claims the lifting of the first national lockdown led to a surge in visitors who usually go abroad and aren't used to the rules of 'leaving no trace' in the English countryside. 'The estate usually attracts families with children during the main summer season, but 2020 brought a much younger and more geographically and culturally diverse cohort to the nations' coast and countryside,' it added. 'These visitors were mainly on day visits from cities, not travelling a short distance but sometimes driving four or five hours for a day out at the beach. With no foreign holidays, whole cities decamped into rural Britain.' In a letter to the Government Petitions Committee, the estate has called for a 'countryside code' to be put in place ahead of the easing of the third national lockdown, starting in April The estate added that the 'hit-and-run' approach to holidays had a serious impact on the countryside with 'mass littering, flycamping, graffiti, fire and other environmental concerns'. 'We earnestly do not want a repeat of this for the upcoming spring and summer as delicate environments cannot sustain the level of degradation they received in 2020.' Durdle Door, Lulworth Cove and other parts of the Jurassic Coast are routinely voted among the most beautiful in the UK and attract a wide range of visitors throughout the year. Natural England, a watchdog body sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DeFRA) said it was updating its code for visitors to the countryside to make it more relevant to the new type of visitor. Ahead of the relaxation on travel restrictions at the end of March, a Dorset police chief said they county would welcome tourists, but their arrival must not be at the expense of other people's health. It comes as Dorset's police chief warned his force is preparing to stop the influx of tourists this spring after it was swamped last summer Assistant Chief Constable Sam de Reya, of Dorset Police, said: 'The Government has now announced their road map for how lockdown restrictions will be gradually lifted this summer and I know this news will be very much welcomed by both businesses and our communities. 'We fully expect the numbers of people travelling into Dorset this summer for a staycation to be higher than ever before. 'We are committed to leading policing operations to deal with the extra demand summer will bring and will continue to work proactively with our partners to coordinate and strengthen our plans. 'We want the county open and welcoming visitors so our businesses, that rely heavily on tourism, can thrive and we get the economy moving. 'However, encouraging people to visit Dorset must not be at the expense of peoples health. 'Our communities should feel reassured that the huge amount of planning already underway should allow people to travel into Dorset and enjoy what the county has to offer, while keeping both residents and visitors safe.' The Australian government is about to throw more than 1.5 million workers into potential unemployment by terminating its JobKeeper COVID-19 wage subsidy scheme. Simultaneously, on March 31, it will end the Coronavirus Supplement on JobSeeker dole payments, throwing another 1.6 million unemployed workers into dire poverty. Yesterday, the Liberal-National Coalition government announced a supposed $25 a week rise in the underlying JobSeeker rate. In reality, it is another cut in the benefits, which were temporarily supplemented last March to avoid a social explosion triggered by Great Depression levels of joblessness. A mass unemployment queue outside a Sydney Centrelink office last March (Credit: WSWS) The resulting pittance will leave unemployed workers and youth on the sub-poverty level of about $44 a day, designed to coerce them into low-paid and insecure employment. JobSeeker recipients also face being cut off benefits altogether if they fail onerous and usually pointless mutual obligation requirements, such as undertaking 20 job searches per month. Combined with the shutting down of moratoriums on rent and mortgage repayments and business insolvencies, the JobKeeper-JobSeeker fiscal cliff on March 31 will intensify the social crisis created by the ongoing global pandemic. In an op-ed published last week in the Australian, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg adamantly defended the scrapping of JobKeeper. He said the scheme had created adverse incentives that were hampering labour mobility and the reallocation of workers to more productive roles. In other words, the paltry JobKeeper payment, already reduced last month to $500 a week, is enough to prevent some workers from readily accepting a further assault on their pay and working conditions. Frydenberg claimed: JobKeeper has to come to an end as our economy strengthens, and businesses and their staff adjust to the new economic environment. In fact, official statistics showed that 1.54 million workers were still receiving the JobKeeper payment in January. If Frydenbergs further claimthat the scheme is keeping businesses afloat that would not be viable without ongoing supportis true, many small business operators are also set to join the unemployed. Around 1.3 million workers currently receive payments under JobSeeker, while close to 340,000 receive Youth Allowance, a similar payment for those under 24. That means more than 3.1 million workers will be affected by the March 31 JobKeeper and JobSeeker cutoffs. The official unemployment rate stood at 6.4 percent in January, 1.1 points higher than a year earlier, and underemploymentthose seeking more hourswas at 8.1 percent, which was down slightly over the year. But these figures understate the workforce crisis. Monthly hours worked fell by 86 million in January, and were down by 100 million over the yearthe equivalent of more than 600,000 full-time jobspointing to a massive further shift to casual, part-time and gig economy work. As measured by the Roy Morgan survey company, the actual situation is considerably worse. By its estimates, the unemployment rate was 11.7 in January, and the underemployment rate was 10 percent, also indicating that more than three million workers were either jobless or wanting more work. The abolition of the $75 per week JobSeeker Coronavirus Supplement will cause severe hardship and homelessness. According to Anglicare Australias Rental Affordability Snapshot, only 13 out of 77,000 rental listings surveyed were affordable for a single person receiving JobSeeker without the supplement. Despite the governments media-backed propaganda, the pandemic is far from over internationally or in Australia. This year, quarantine breaches have caused outbreaks in each of the mainland state capitals, triggering limited lockdowns. Even if the federal governments optimistic target of vaccinating the entire adult population by the end of October is achieved, and the inoculations prove effective in preventing transmission of the coronavirus in all its variant forms, workers and small businesses face at least another six months of uncertainty and disruption. In some industries, dependent on large crowds, open borders and long-term planning, a full recovery will not be possible this year. Australias $152 billion tourism industry, which directly employed more than 700,000 workers in 2018-19, has been devastated by the pandemic. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that 113,100 tourism jobs were lost between December 2019 and September 2020. Australian Tax Office figures obscure the number of tourism workers still on JobKeeper. But they show that 154,000 workers in Accommodation and Food Services, and 112,000 in Transport, Postal and Warehousing were receiving the wage subsidy at the end of 2020. The same applied to 77,000 workers in Arts and Recreation Servicesalmost one third of those employed in the sector before the pandemic. More than 3,000 music industry workers signed an open letter, published last week, calling for JobKeeper to be extended beyond the end of March. The live music sector is now operating at just 4 percent of pre-pandemic capacity, and 55 percent of respondents to a recent survey on the I Lost My Gig web site are considering leaving the industry. While the cessation of JobKeeper will worsen the unemployment crisis, the wellbeing of the working class was never the schemes objective. One sharp example of this is that 2.5 million vulnerable and exploited workers, temporary visa holders and casual employees, were excluded from the subsidy. The reality is that the scheme was a corporate bailout on a scale never seen before. At least 11 billionaires have reaped multi-million-dollar dividends from companies subsidised by JobKeeper, contributing to an average 59 percent increase in the personal wealth of Australias richest individuals. Retail group Premier Investments received $70 million in wage subsidies despite recording increased profits, paying a $2.5 million bonus to its chief executive and handing out $57 million in shareholder dividends. Company chairman and major shareholder Solomon Lew pocketed $20 million, a small fraction of his 31.6 percent year-over-year gain in personal wealth to $3.72 billion. Household goods retailer Harvey Norman received $10 million in JobKeeper payments while securing record profits and paying $74.7 million in dividends to shareholders, including $23.5 million to co-founder Gerry Harvey, helping to boost his worth to $2.57 billion. The JobKeeper legislation, which was backed by the Labor Party opposition and formulated in collaboration with Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus, also granted employers a range of powers to maximise profits at the expense of workers pay and conditions. This allowed big business to accelerate major restructurings, changing workers duties and cutting the hours of full-time staff to reduce their wages to the level of the JobKeeper payment. This flexibility has not prevented the destruction of thousands of jobs by major corporations, such as Qantas, Virgin and Telstra, over the past year. With the fortunes of the wealthy elites propped up by the bailouts, the meagre JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments now stand as an impediment to the corporate drive to force workers into increasingly super-exploited employment. This marks an escalation of the decades-long assault on working class jobs and conditions, policed by the trade unions. The Labor Partys basic support for this offensive has been demonstrated by its refusal to promise any JobSeeker rise above the governments proposed measly $25 a week. Globe Newswire AS Pro Kapital Grupp has not yet published audited annual report for 2020 (related notice: https://view.news.eu.nasdaq.com/view?id=b9a14c4af26fbcf29852a28f2d4144b75&lang=en). However, the Company is using unaudited financial statements as basis of preparation in this report. All details related to this issue can be find in Note 2 of the report. MANAGEMENT REPORT Chairmans summary Start of 2021 has been a dynamic working period. We have continued working on our developments, where we see remarkable results, but also had to face a setback as after reporting date the decision of the Supreme Court terminated reorganisation proceedings of our subsidiary AS Tallinna Moekombinaat which led to the permanent insolvency of the subsidiary. Real estate development We have continued construction of Ratsuri Houses and Kalaranna projects and preparing project documentation for the following development phases in Tallinn. In March we completed Ratsuri Houses in Kristiine City where we had booked or presold all 39 apartments already prior to the completion. All apartments were sold and handed over within March and April. Soon we start handing over apartments in two first buildings of Kalaranna project, where completion of eight buildings with the total of 240 apartments will be achieved step by step in four phases. Today we have reservations or presales concluded for 85% of premises. After reporting date, we concluded an agreement for sales of all business premises of Kalaranna project for 16.16 million euros (with VAT) including the option to sell also premises of the last phase, which we are preparing to launch in the near future. This year we have started with construction of the new project Kindrali Houses in Kristiine City, where two building complexes with 129 apartments will be raised by next summer. In this project we had booked or presold more than half of the apartments before signing the construction agreement. Today over 90% of the apartments have been booked or presold. In Riga we are selling our luxury product River Breeze Residence and prepare for the further development of Kliversala Residential Quarter. We have received a building permit for City Oasis residential quarter with 326 apartments a tranquil and green living environment in the city centre. We will be ready to proceed with construction activities as soon as the market situation becomes more favourable. Unfortunately, the Latvian real-estate market has not been as active as its neighbouring countries Estonia and Lithuania. However, we have observed some changes in the recent months and recovery of the market. In 2019 we completed five buildings in Saltiniu Namai Attico project in Vilnius with 115 apartments. Today we have only 5 apartments unsold. We are preparing for the following phase with city villas and commercial building and plan to start the construction this year. Our revenues from the sales of the real estate depend on the completion of the residential developments as the revenues are recorded at the moment notary deeds of sale are concluded. In 2021 we have already completed Ratsuri Houses project with 39 apartments and soon we start handing over exclusive homes in prime location of Kalaranna project. T1 Mall of Tallinn On 3 April 2020 Harju County Court initiated reorganization proceedings of the operator of T1 Mall of Tallinn - AS Tallinna Moekombinaat (TMK). Reorganization proceedings were terminated a year later by the decision of 26 April 2021 of the Supreme Court not to take TMKs appeal into proceedings. Without the reorganisation proceedings AS Tallinna Moekombinaat is not capable to fulfil its obligations and has become permanently insolvent. On 7 May 2021 Harju County Court appointed Kristo Teder as an interim bankruptcy trustee of TMK. Interim bankruptcy trustee presented to the court a written report and opinion on 27 May 2021. Based on the report the court will take a decision about the following proceedings. The management of TMK continues to operate T1 Mall of Tallinn in cooperation with the interim trustee in bankruptcy until appointment of bankruptcy trustee and declaration of insolvency. Supreme Courts decision as an adjusting event after balance sheet date requires writing-off investment into subsidiary. AS Pro Kapital Eesti has written off an investment into subsidiary in amount of 13.4 million euros due to negative equity of TMK and as a result of adjusting event also receivables in the total amount of 26 million euros as at 31 December 2020. When bankruptcy is declared and the Company loses control over subsidiary, TMK will not be consolidated into the group any more. Although discontinuing consolidation will influence consolidated results by 26 million negatively, it will have a positive effect to the Group financial results due to derecognition of negative equity of the subsidiary. Bankruptcy of TMK will not affect liquidity of the Group nor short-term cash flows. Long-term cash flows are influenced by uncollectable receivables to the Group. Adjusting event described above and writing off the debts of subsidiary on parent company level has triggered a non-compliance with financial covenants of secured bonds (Notes 9 and 19). Hotel operations Last year had a significant impact on PK Parkhotel Kurhaus in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, the hotel was closed from March until the end of June and due to new restrictions hotel is not operating since November 2020. The impact of COVID-19 has been 0.7 million euros in less hotel revenues in the first quarter of 2021 comparing to last year. However, due to governmental support, the net result was better by 30 thousand euros. We expect to reopen the hotel in the middle of June. In the following months we continue construction works of ongoing development projects and plan to start with the following phases. In spite of losing T1 Mall of Tallinn, our real estate development is doing well, the Company is a going concern and we have an optimistic view for the future. Paolo Michelozzi CEO Key financials The total revenue of the Company in the first quarter of 2021 was 6.6 million euros, which is an increase of 12% compared to the reference period (2020 3M: 5.9 million euros). The real estate sales revenues are recorded at the moment of handing over the premises to the buyer. Therefore, the revenues from sales of real estate depend on the completion of the residential developments. The real estate sales revenue was higher in 2021 due to completion of Ratsuri Houses project, where apartments were handed over to new owners during March-April. In 2021, the Company has continued with presales of current development projects: first phases of Kalaranna District and Kindrali Houses in Tallinn. The gross profit in the first quarter of 2021 decreased by 8% amounting to 2.0 million euros compared to 2.1 million euros during the same period in 2020. The operating profit in the first quarter of 2021 was 1.9 million euros compared to 0.3 million euros during the same period in 2020. The increase in operating result is mainly influenced by the sale of investment property. The net result in the first quarter of 2021 was -2.1 million euros compared to -4.0 million euros during the same period in 2020. The net result of the reporting period was influenced by the sale of the investment property, but as well in fewer administrative (decreased 27% compared to 2020 3M) and financial costs (decreased 6% compared to 2020 3M). Cash generated from operating activities in the first quarter of 2021 was -2.1 million euros compared to -4.0 million euros during the same period in 2020. The net result of the reporting period was influenced by the sale of the investment property, but as well in fewer administrative (decreased 27% compared to 2020 3M) and financial costs (decreased 6% compared to 2020 3M). Net assets per share on 31 March 2021 totalled to 0.20 euros compared to 1.19 euros on 31 March 2020. Key performance indicators 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited*) Revenue, th EUR 6 563 5 873 19 234 Gross profit, th EUR 1 974 2 137 6 775 Gross profit, % 30% 36% 35% Operating result, th EUR 1 897 346 -43 108 Operating result, % 29% 6% -224% Net result, th EUR -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Net result, % -32% -68% -309% Earnings per share, EUR -0.03 -0.07 -0.98 31.03.2021 31.03.2020 (Restated*) 31.12.2020 (Unaudited*) Total Assets, th EUR 185 287 207 361 179 048 Total Liabilities, th EUR 177 829 142 022 169 477 Total Equity, th EUR 7 458 65 339 9 571 Debt / Equity ** 18.44 2.10 14.15 Return on Assets, % *** Return on Equity, % **** -1.2% -1.9% -30.7% Net asset value per share, EUR ***** -24.8% -5.9% -141.2% * See Note 2 in the Consolidated Interim Report for I Quarter and 3 Months Of 2021 for details regarding the unaudited status of the report and restatement as a result of an error 2019 year end results **debt / equity = total debt / total equity***return on assets = net profit/loss / total average assets****return on equity = net profit/loss / total average equity*****net asset value per share = net equity / number of shares CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS Consolidated interim statement of financial position in thousands of euros 31.03.2021 31.03.2020 (Restated) 31.12.2020 (Unaudited) ASSETS Current assets Cash and cash equivalents 13 331 9 459 9 393 Current receivables 1 542 1 281 1 797 Inventories 61 481 40 329 58 352 Total current assets 76 354 51 069 69 542 Non-current assets Non-current receivables 3 715 2 942 3 517 Property, plant and equipment 6 717 7 100 6 745 Right-of-use assets 318 480 357 Investment property 97 814 145 406 98 512 Intangible assets 369 364 375 Total non-current assets 108 933 156 292 109 506 TOTAL ASSETS 185 287 207 361 179 048 LIABILITIES AND EQUITY Current liabilities Current debt 104 373 83 153 107 581 Customer advances 10 284 5 935 7 866 Current payables 24 011 10 837 22 211 Tax liabilities 1 280 849 458 Short-term provisions 471 329 459 Total current liabilities 140 419 101 103 138 575 Non-current liabilities Long-term debt 33 425 38 398 27 255 Other non-current payables 2 638 1 064 2 295 Deferred income tax liabilities 1 151 1 320 1 170 Long-term provisions 196 137 182 Total non-current liabilities 37 410 40 919 30 902 TOTAL LIABILITIES 177 829 142 022 169 477 Equity attributable to owners of the Company Share capital in nominal value 11 338 11 338 11 338 Share premium 5 661 5 661 5 661 Statutory reserve 1 134 1 134 1 134 Revaluation reserve 2 984 3 262 2 984 Retained earnings -8 031 47 647 47 647 Profit/ Loss for the period -1 951 -3 788 -55 678 Total equity attributable to owners of the Company 11 135 65 254 13 086 Non-controlling interest -3 677 85 -3 515 TOTAL EQUITY 7 458 65 339 9 571 TOTAL LIABILITIES AND EQUITY 185 287 207 361 179 048 Consolidated interim statements of profit and loss and other comprehensive income in thousands of euros 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited) CONTINUING OPERATIONS Operating income Revenue 6 563 5 873 19 234 Cost of goods sold -4 589 -3 736 -12 459 Gross profit 1 974 2 137 6 775 Marketing expenses -126 -161 -621 Administrative expenses -1 143 -1 562 -6 154 Other income 1 351 3 478 Other expenses -159 -71 -43 586 Operating profit 1 897 346 -43 108 Financial income 1 1 4 Financial expense -3 994 -4 244 -15 998 Profit / loss before income tax -2 096 -3 897 -59 102 Income tax -17 -69 -354 Profit / loss for the period -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Attributable to: Equity holders of the parent -1 951 -3 788 -55 678 Non-controlling interest -162 -178 -3 778 Items that will not be reclassified subsequently to profit or loss Net change in properties revaluation reserve 0 0 -278 Total comprehensive income / loss for the year -2 113 -3 966 -59 734 Attributable to: Equity holders of the parent -1 951 -3 788 -55 956 Non-controlling interest -162 -178 -3 778 Earnings per share for the period (EUR) -0.03 -0.07 -0.98 Consolidated interim statements of cash flows in thousands of euros 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited) Cash flows from operating activities Profit/loss for the period -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Adjustments for: Depreciation, amortisation of non-current assets 100 105 416 Gain from disposal of investment property -1 092 0 0 Loss from write-off PPE and intangible assets 0 0 8 Change in fair value of property, plant, equipment 0 0 -16 Change in fair value of investment property 0 0 43 128 Finance income and costs 3 993 4 243 15 994 Changes in deferred tax assets and liabilities -19 -27 -178 Other non-monetary changes (net amounts) 2 -1 -3 111 Changes in working capital: Trade receivables and prepayments 53 -409 -1 514 Inventories -3 129 703 -13 011 Liabilities and prepayments 3 506 1 336 10 025 Provisions 13 10 59 Net cash generated in operating activities 1 314 1 994 -7 656 Cash flows from investing activities Payments for property, plant and equipment -28 -10 -94 Payments for intangible assets -2 -2 -43 Payments for investment property -210 -302 -844 Proceeds from disposal of investment property 2 000 0 0 Interests received 0 1 1 Net cash generated in investing activities 1 760 -313 -980 Cash flows from financing activities Net proceeds from secured bonds 0 28 500 28 500 Redemption of convertible bonds -69 0 -33 Redemption of non-convertible bonds 0 -28 000 -28 000 Proceeds from borrowings 5 838 100 14 410 Repayment of borrowings -2 857 -648 -1 376 Repayment of lease liabilities -46 -48 -135 Interests paid -2 002 -2 742 -5 953 Net cash generated by financing activities 864 -2 838 7 413 Net change in cash and cash equivalents 3 938 -1 157 -1 223 Cash and cash equivalents at the beginning 9 393 10 616 10 616 Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the period 13 331 9 459 9 393 The full report can be found in the file attached. Allan RemmelkoorMember of the Board+372 614 4920prokapital@prokapital.ee Attachment PKG Q1 2021 ENG Members of an Armenian opposition alliance entered Yerevan State University and called on students to join their anti-government protest on February 24. Supporters of the Homeland Salvation Movement blame Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian for Armenias defeat in the autumn war with Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh and are demanding his resignation. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company High-profile regime defector Manaf Tlass will head the Syrian Military Council, according to Zaitun Agency. The head of the Free Officers Association, Brig. Gen. Talal Farzat, emphasized in an exclusive statement with Zaitun Media Agency that the idea behind the Military Council is both old and new, as it was first proposed in 2016 and brought back today with the aim of finding a solution to the Syrian situation. The proposed joint Syrian Military Council includes armed factions and defectors from the regime, will seek to remove foreign forces and militias from Syria, unify the country and its forces, and sponsor the political solution. According to Farzat, The council is an urgent necessity at this stage and it would be the most important achievement, for without the Military Council there can be no stability in the post-Assad era. He considered that the Military Council guarantees Resolution 2254, which provides for the political transition in Syria, adding that the most important tasks of the council are to confiscate uncontrolled and illegal weapons and make sure they become under the supervision of the state, all the while preventing sectarian fighting or retaliation among the Syrian people and preparing for the creation of a constitutional document. He pointed out that the council is considered a premise to a social contract based on the concept of citizenship and restructuring the army and security system based on national foundations in order to protect the people and civil peace. [The council] also ensures the dignified return of refugees and protects the states institutions. We have obtained the signature of 1,200 officers thus far, all of whom nominate Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass to head the Joint Military Council, Farzat said, adding that the timing of the councils formation is in the hands of the countries that call the shots regarding the Syrian issue. He stated that Tlass visited Russia and that the visit was secret with the aim of conducting discussions in order to resolve the Syrian issue. The discussions reached a dead end. Regarding the steps for forming the council, Farzat said, The process has not started yet because the decision is taken by international entities. Once the process begins, we will see Brig. Gen. Tlass explaining to the Syrian people his plan for a solution, through the media. A journalist close to Tlass comments Yasser Badawi, writer and journalist close to Brig. Gen. Tlass, said in an exclusive statement to Zaitun Media Agency that the Military Council was first proposed at the beginning of the Syrian revolution, similar to other countries such as Egypt, but the project has now been re-introduced, and with great momentum, especially since the revolution is in a pivotal stage, with the fake presidential election nearing. He explained that the Military Council is a necessity for the transitional period in Syria and should be among the international decisions and the political solution agreed upon by worldly countries. He added that the political solution cannot be implemented without the presence of a military arm and a military force that can enable the political solution and keep the right people on its radar, especially that the regime and other parties refuse such a solution. Syrian politician, Michel Kilo, weighs in Syrian writer and politician, Michel Kilo, said in an exclusive statement to Zaitun Media Agency that forming a transitional governing body in Syria is impossible, for it is rejected by the butcher of Damascus [Bashar al-Assad], the Russians, and the Iranians. Kilo pointed out the necessity to search for an alternative that would allow to achieve a transitional political solution from the Assad rule to an alternative regime, adding that the council is one of the proposals that can be worked on in this context. He added that as for the implementation of the idea, I believe that it needs concerted efforts, the involvement of a large number of stakeholders, and clear popular support, given the many obstacles that must be overcome locally, regionally, and internationally. [Bringing the council to life] is not aimed at overcoming Resolution 2254, but rather the goal is to implement it. Therefore, it is not permissible to talk about the failure of the resolution in the event that the council ended up being adopted as a tool for its implementation., he continued. He stressed the need to support the proposal in the way it was presented, despite his belief that its implementation will be an uphill battle that requires an uncharacteristic amount of unity and creative insight in the opposition arena. 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. TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) It is now illegal in Tucson, Arizona, to enforce dress code or grooming policies that discriminate against hair texture and hairstyles in the workplace and public schools, officials said. The Tucson City Council voted Tuesday to adopt the Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair, or CROWN Act, joining multiple cities across the country in passing the ordinance, the Arizona Daily Star reported. The ordinance has been part of a national campaign promoted by Dove, the National Urban League, Color Of Change and Western Center on Law and Poverty. It also prohibits workplace discrimination based on headdresses worn for cultural or religious reasons. We want to be sure there are no barriers for people in the workplace and in schools, said Annie Sykes, president of Tucsons Black Womens Task Force. These barriers are usually rooted in discrimination and prejudice. Sykes cited a study showing that Black women are 1.5 times more likely to be sent home from work because of their hair and 80% more likely to feel like they have to change their hair to fit in at work. Your hair is your crown and it connects us to our culture and to our ancestry, said Desiree Cook, a licensed hair stylist and founder of the local organization, I AM YOU 360. So we ask that those crowns are honored, whether it be in schools, in the community or the workplace. The Tucson ordinance will be enforced through the human relations section of the city code and will apply to any facility or business with public accommodations, officials said. Violations can bring civil penalties. If you'd like to leave a comment (or a tip or a question) about this story with the editors, please email us We also welcome letters to the editor for publication; you can do that by filling out our letters form and submitting it to the newsroom. Srinagar, Feb 24 : Two unidentified terrorists were killed in an encounter between terrorists and security forces at the Shalgul forest area in south Kashmir's Anantnag district on Wednesday, officials said. The police said that based on a specific input generated by Anantnag police regarding the presence of terrorists in the Shalgul forest area in Srigufwara, a joint cordon and search operation was launched by the police and the army. As the presence of terrorists was ascertained during the search operation, they were given an opportunity to surrender. However, they fired indiscriminately upon the joint search party, leading to an encounter. In the ensuing encounter, two unidentified terrorists were killed and their bodies were retrieved from the encounter site. The identification and affiliation of the slain terrorists are being ascertained. "In case any family claims the slain terrorists to be their kith or kin, they can come forward for their identification at PCR Kashmir," the police said. The police also said that arms and ammunition, including two AK rifles and other incriminating materials, were recovered from the site of the encounter. All the recovered materials have been taken into case records for further investigation and to probe their complicity in other terror crimes. The police have registered a case and investigations are underway. "People are requested to cooperate with the police till the area is completely sanitised and cleared of of all explosive materials, if any," the police said. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 TENOSIQUE, Mexico (AP) In the first Mexican shelter reached by migrants after trekking through the Guatemalan jungle, some 150 migrants are sleeping in its dormitories and another 150 lie on thin mattresses spread across the floor of its chapel. Only six weeks into the year, the shelter known as The 72 has hosted nearly 1,500 migrants, compared to 3,000 all of last year. It has halved its dormitory space due to the pandemic. That wasnt a problem last year because few migrants arrived, but this year its been overwhelmed. We have a tremendous flow and there isnt capacity, said Gabriel Romero, the priest who runs the shelter in Tenosique, a town in southern Tabasco state. The situation could get out of control. We need a dialogue with all of the authorities before this becomes chaos. In particular, he would like the government to assist with migrants who camp outside while they are full. Latin Americas migrants from the Caribbean, South America and Central America are on the move again. After a year of pandemic-induced paralysis, those in daily contact with migrants believe the flow north could return to the high levels seen in late 2018 and early 2019. The difference is that it would happen during a pandemic. The protective health measures imposed to slow the spread of COVID-19, including drastically reduced bedspace at shelters along the route, mean fewer safe spaces for migrants in transit. The flow is increasing and the problem is theres less capacity than before to meet their needs because of the pandemic, said Sergio Martin, head of the nongovernment aid group Doctors Without Borders in Mexico. Some shelters remain closed by local health authorities and almost all have had to reduce the number of migrants they can assist. Applications for visas, asylum or any other official paperwork are delayed by the governments reduced capacity due to the pandemic to process them. This is not a post-COVID migration; it is a migration in the middle of the pandemic, making it all the more vulnerable, said Ruben Figueroa, an activist with the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement. Story continues Some migrants have expressed hope of a friendlier reception from the new U.S. administration or started moving when some borders were reopened. Others are being driven by two major hurricanes that ravaged Central America in November and desperation deepened by the economic impact of the pandemic. Olga Rodriguez, 27, had been walking for a month since leaving Honduras with her husband and four children, aged 3 to 8, after Hurricane Eta flooded the street vendors house. They arrived in Mexico and applied for asylum, but told it would take six months. Forced to sleep in the street, they changed plans. The children suffered cold, we got wet and I told my husband if were going to be in the cold and rain, better we walk, she said from Coatzacoalcos. Now their goal is the United States. President Joe Bidens administration has taken steps toward rolling back some of the harshest policies of ex-President Donald Trump, but a policy remains allowing U.S. border officials to immediately send back almost anyone due to the pandemic. The U.S. government is concerned that the more hopeful message could set off a rush for the border and says it will take time to implement new policies. The number of people apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in January was more than double that of the same month last year and 20,000 above January 2019. This week families have been seen crossing from Ciudad Juarez and turning themselves over to Border Patrol in hopes to applying for asylum. Wait in your country, or if youre in Mexico, wait until you can be sure you can cross legally, Roberta Jacobson, the White Houses lead advisor on the border, said recently. Last week, the Biden administration announced that it would slowly start processing the approximately 25,000 asylum seekers who were forced to wait out their process in Mexico under Trump. That was scheduled to begin Friday at three border crossings. Mexico has so far said it will continue enforcing an orderly migration, which in practice has meant trying to contain migrants in the south since Trump threatened tariffs on all Mexican imports in 2019. On Tuesday, Mexicos National Immigration Institute said in a statement that authorities had made 50 raids on freight train lines since Jan. 25 in southern and central Mexico, detaining nearly 1,200 migrants. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador warned migrants recently to not be fooled by traffickers who promise that the U.S. will open its doors. Isabel Chavez, one of the nuns who work at the migrant shelter in Palenque, some 60 miles (100 kilometers) from Tenosique, said they had to reduce the number of days migrants could stay there to a maximum of two because of the avalanche of migrants who arrived in January. There would be as many as 220 migrants there compared to the 100 they would see before the pandemic began in March 2020, she said. In Tapachula, the largest Mexican city near its border with Guatemala and home to Mexicos biggest detention center, there are signs of the increase as well. There are more people applying for refuge and the increase in migrants is evident in the citys public spaces, said Enrique Vidal Olascoaga, lawyer for the nongovernmental organization Fray Matias de Cordova, which helps migrants with legal procedures. Cesar Augusto Canaveral, the director of the Belen shelter in Tapachula, lamented having to close the doors of the shelter after it filled in late January. Now we take food out to the street and some sleep outside, but that has concerned the shelters neighbors, who worry about the risk of COVID-19 infections. This is going to be more complicated than (the wave of migrants in) 2018, because the cherry on top is COVID-19, he said. Now, more than 1,300 miles to the southeast, some 1,500 migrants spread across various camps in Panama have their sights set on getting to Tapachula, either as a temporary stopover en route to the U.S. border or to begin the asylum process in Mexico. Panama reopened its border in late January and ever since, groups have been walking out of the dense Darien jungle that divides Panama and Colombia. The government has been shuttling them to other camps closer to the Costa Rica border to make space for new arrivals. Last week, Guatemalan immigration officials warned that a new migrant caravan could be forming in coming days in Honduras. In January, Guatemalan authorities blocked the years first caravan, sending nearly 5,000 Hondurans back to their country over a 10-day span. But while Guatemala was focused on the caravan, other migrants were moving north as always in small, discreet groups. It was during the caravan last month that shelters in southern Mexico began seeing their numbers increase with mostly Honduran migrants. Small groups of migrants are more vulnerable to criminals who kidnap and extort them, said the activist Figueroa. Most invisible are those paying smugglers who stuff them into trailers like the one that Mexican authorities stopped in Veracruz this week. Inside were 233 migrants, mostly from Guatemala. In late January, 19 bodies, shot and burned, were found inside a pickup truck near the Mexico-Texas border. Most were believed to be Guatemalan migrants. A dozen state police officers were arrested in connection with the case. We foresee an increase in violence, said Sergio Martin of Doctors Without Borders, noting that despite the pandemic migrants continue to be pushed into moving clandestinely. Just down the border from where the bodies were found, the Rev. Francisco Gallardo, director of the migrant shelter in Matamoros, said he had recently made arrangements for two pregnant women to deliver their babies in the Mexican city. Two families with two women eight months pregnant just crossed the river into the U.S., he said, referring to the Rio Grande that divides the two countries. They already had their smuggler and decided to risk it. Back in southern Mexico, migrant Edilberto Aguilar continued walking. This is a chain, said the 33-year-old Honduran. One day we arrive and tomorrow others arrive. This never ends. __ Verza reported from Mexico City. AP writers Juan Zamorano in Panama City and Sonia Perez D. in Guatemala City contributed. She's quickly becoming a fan favourite on this season of Married At First Sight. And Joanne Todd, 39, further endeared herself to audiences on Wednesday when she made an unintentionally racy comment shortly after marrying James Susler, 44. Learning her new husband had once owned a Turkish restaurant during her wedding reception, the barber exclaimed, 'Fill me with some dip!' Fan favourite: Joanne Todd, 39, further endeared herself to audiences on Wednesday when she made an unintentionally racy comment shortly after marrying James Susler Despite clearly just showing her enthusiasm for Turkish cuisine, several members of the wedding party giggled at the faux pas. And fans seemed to appreciate Joanne's bawdy slip of the tongue. 'Just checking she did say ....DIP,' wrote one fan. 'Jo just said 'fill me with some dip' and I just love her....' enthused another. Whoops! Learning her new husband had once owned a Turkish restaurant, the barber exclaimed, 'Fill me with some dip!' Appreciative: Fans seemed to appreciate Joanne's bawdy slip of the tongue Another fan acknowledged the mother-of-three's Frankston roots by quipping, [You] can take the girl out of Frankston but.......' ''Fill me with some dip' - slap that on a Hallmark card,' tweeted user @BrandonAtkins_. And @Signora_Borgia agreed with the sentiment, tweeting, 'Yes fill me with some Turkish Dip!' Cheeky: @Signora_Borgia agreed, tweeting, 'Yes fill me with some Turkish Dip!' Wednesday night's episode saw an insecure mother-of-three, marry a confident Lamborghini-driving, Rolex-wearing millionaire. But despite the odds being stacked against them, Joanne 'Jo' Todd and James Susler appeared to really hit it off. 'I'm sh**ting myself,' she told producers, after she arrived at her wedding ceremony. Opposites attract: Married At First Sight took a major risk by pairing insecure mother-of-three Joanne Todd (left) who shops at Kmart with confident Lamborghini-driving, Rolex-wearing millionaire James Susler on Wednesday night 'I'm nervous incase I stuff this up, incase he doesn't like me, incase I don't like him, because he is marrying a stranger and meeting them for the first time,' she said. Jo explained she was feeling self-conscious because her partner didn't know anything about her and would be judging her by her looks or sparks. 'Hopefully, i'm good enough for him,' she said. It's a match! The newlyweds with seemingly opposite personalities couldn't get enough of each other after they met for the first time at the altar Self-doubt: Jo explained she was feeling self-conscious because her partner didn't know anything about her and would be judging her by her looks or sparks The newlyweds with seemingly opposite personalities couldn't get enough of each other after they met for the first time at the altar. Walking over to her well dressed groom, Jo, introduced herself. 'Hello, I am James, nice to meet you,' he said as he planted a kiss on her cheek. 'Are you here for me?' she asked, to which the Melbourne based luxury car dealer replied: 'I think so,' before they both shared a laugh. Happy as Larry! After meeting her groom, Joanne said she was thrilled to see that the experts paired her up with someone who had great hair, had height and smelled great After meeting her groom, Joanne said she was thrilled to see that the experts paired her up with someone who had great hair, had height and smelled great. Speaking to producers, James said he was just as happy to be paired with Jo. 'When I first saw Jo, it was definitely a sign of relief. She's absolutely gorgeous. She's got a big bright smile,' he gushed. Before exchanging their vows, the couple exchanged compliments. Will they last? 'We're going to be a massive brady bunch,' she said after learning James has three children of his own And while Jo originally had doubts about not being able to find a partner, things began to quickly blossom for the pair. 'We're going to be a massive brady bunch,' she said after learning James has three children of his own. 'We're getting along like a house on fire, but I noticed that he has this Rolex watch, so I am worried that we are from completely different worlds.' 'I'm a Kmart shopper and he looks like a Rolex shopper, so this will be interesting.' Married At First Sight continues Thursday at 7.30pm on Channel Nine Faulty intelligence was to blame for the outmanned Capitol defenders' failure to anticipate the violent mob that invaded the iconic building and halted certification of the presidential election on January 6, the officials who were in charge of security declared in their first public testimony on the insurrection. The officials, including the former chief of the Capitol Police, on Tuesday pointed their fingers at various federal agencies and each other for their failure to defend the building as supporters of then-President Donald Trump overwhelmed security barriers, broke windows and doors and sent lawmakers fleeing from the House and Senate chambers. Five people died as a result of the riot, including a Capitol Police officer and a woman who was shot as she tried to enter the House chamber with lawmakers still inside. Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who resigned under pressure after the attack, and the other officials said they had expected the protests to be similar to two pro-Trump events in late 2020 that were far less violent. He said he hadn't seen an FBI field office report that warned of potential violence citing online posts about a war. And he and a House official disputed each other's versions of decisions that January day and in advance about calling for the National Guard. Sund described a scene as the mob arrived at the perimeter that was like nothing he had seen in his 30 years of policing and argued that the insurrection was not the result of poor planning by Capitol Police but of failures across the board. Trump had rallied the invaders to protest his election loss at the Capitol, and the House later impeached him on a charge of incitement of insurrection. But he noted that he had asked the crowd to protest "peacefully," and the Senate acquitted him. Sund insisted the invasion was not his or his agency's fault. No single civilian law enforcement agency and certainly not the USCP is trained and equipped to repel, without significant military or other law enforcement assistance, an insurrection of thousands of armed, violent, and coordinated individuals focused on breaching a building at all costs, he testified. The joint hearing, part of an investigation by two Senate committees, was the first time the officials testified publicly about the events of January 6. In addition to Sund, former Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger, former House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving and Robert Contee, the acting chief of police for the Metropolitan Police Department, testified. Like Sund, Irving and Stenger resigned under pressure after the deadly attack. They were Sund's supervisors and in charge of security for the House and Senate. We must have the facts, and the answers are in this room," Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar said at the beginning of the hearing. The Rules panel is conducting the joint probe with the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Much remains unknown about what happened before and during the assault. How much did law enforcement agencies know about plans for violence that day, many of which were public? How did the agencies share that information with each other? And how could the Capitol Police have been so ill-prepared for a violent insurrection that was organised online? Sund told the lawmakers that he learned only after the attack that his officers had received a report from the FBI's field office in Norfolk, Virginia, that forecast, in detail, the chances that extremists could bring war to Washington the following day. The head of the FBI's office in Washington has said that once he received the January 5 warning, the information was quickly shared with other law enforcement agencies through a joint terrorism task force. Sund said Tuesday that an officer on the task force had received that memo and forwarded it to a sergeant working on intelligence for the Capitol Police but that the information was not sent on to other supervisors. How could you not get that vital intelligence? asked Senate Homeland Chairman Gary Peters, who said the failure of the report to reach the chief was clearly a major problem. That information would have been helpful, Sund acknowledged. Sund said he did see an intelligence report created within his own department warning that Congress could be targeted on January 6. But he said that report assessed the probability of civil disobedience or arrests, based on the information they had, as remote to improbable for the groups expected to demonstrate. Contee, the acting city police chief, also suggested that no one had flagged the FBI information from Norfolk, Virginia, which he said came in the form of an email. He said he would have expected that kind of intelligence would warrant a phone call or something". Two officials disagreed on when the National Guard was called and on requests for the guard beforehand. Sund said he spoke to both Stenger and Irving about requesting the National Guard in the days before the riot, and that Irving said he was concerned about the optics of having them present. Irving denied that, saying Sund's account was categorically false. Safety, not optics, determined the security posture, he said, and the top question was whether intelligence supported the decision. Pentagon officials have said it took time to put the troops in position, and there was not enough contingency planning in advance. They said they offered the assistance beforehand but were turned down. (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 chemical DMSP is released when phytoplankton are consumed by zooplankton such as krill. Credit: Professor Kei Toda A joint research project between organizations in Japan and the US has demonstrated that zooplankton, a major food source for marine predators, can be located by following the concentration gradient of the chemical dimethyl sulfide (DMS) in ocean water and air. Currently, little is known about how marine predators search for and find enough food to maintain their body size. This study is expected to expand research into the chemical triggers of marine organisms while foraging. Zooplankton, such as krill and copepods are the main energy source for many large marine animals. The big predators must consume a large amount of these tiny creatures to provide enough energy to power their enormous bodies. How they find their food is still not clearly understood. Krill feed on phytoplankton which produce and retain water-soluble compounds in their bodies to cope with osmotic pressure. This is essential for survival in seawater. One of these compounds is dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP). DMSP contains sulfur elements and is zwitterionic, meaning that it has both a positive and a negative charge like an amino acid. It is broken down by bacteria into DMS, a component of the familiar aromas associated with ocean air or dried seaweed. DMSP stored in phytoplankton is released into seawater when zooplankton graze on the phytoplankton, which is hypothesized to result in higher DMS concentrations in dense zooplankton areas. It is thought that marine predators could use DMS concentration to locate food sources. While attraction to artificially released DMS has been shown in some predatory species, whether natural gradients of DMS are used by predators and serve as a useful foraging cue remains unknown. [Top] Distribution of DMS in seawater (left) and in air (right). Credit: Dr. Daniel P. Zitterbart To investigate the phenomenon, an international team of researchers from Kumamoto University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution developed a new instrument to continuously and automatically analyze seawater and atmospheric concentrations of DMS. Together with a researcher from Stony Brook University, they then used the device to conduct a survey in June 2019 off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a summer feeding grounds for many baleen whale species. Researchers took chemical measurements, recorded zooplankton and fish biomass, and whale locations over a series of transects across the ocean surface. Their work revealed that, as hypothesized, zooplankton grazing on phytoplankton seems to result in higher localized concentrations of DMS compared to surrounding areas. In contrast, no association was found between fish biomass and DMS concentration. Simulations based on their measurements show that if large marine predators, such as whales, are able to detect the DMS concentration gradient, following increasing concentrations of DMS would allow them to reach denser zooplankton feeding areas than if they swam randomly. "We plan to expand this research project in the future to investigate the relationship between DMS and predation by measuring the concentration of the chemical alongside marine predator movement trajectories," said Professor Kei Toda, who led the chemical measurements. "We also plan to explore other attractant chemicals and study their relationship with the behavior of marine predators like whales, seabirds and penguins. A pilot study tagging humpback whales to examine their movements in relation to DMS was conducted in Antarctica in February 2020, but there are still some issues that need to be addressed to pursue the relationship between chemical substances and predation. We believe that we will have some interesting findings in the near future." Explore further Copepod mortality rates have been linked to jellyfish abundance and warmer, windier conditions More information: Kylie Owen et al, Natural dimethyl sulfide gradients would lead marine predators to higher prey biomass, Communications Biology (2021). Journal information: Communications Biology Kylie Owen et al, Natural dimethyl sulfide gradients would lead marine predators to higher prey biomass,(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-021-01668-3 ULSTER Bank executives have been told the way the closure announcement of the bank was handled represented a decency failure and a respect failure. And it was not credible a decision was made overnight to close the bank. The banks chief executive Jane Howard told staff in a memo last Thursday no decision had be made to shut the operation here. But the next morning it was confirmed by Ulster and its parent NatWest that it was closing. This came after five-months of reports that it was likely to be wound up. Labours Ged Nash said it was hardly the case that a decision was taken overnight by bank bosses to cease operations here. A decision of this magnitude is not made overnight, he told Ulster Bank executives when they appeared before the Oireachtas Finance Committee. It comes after the bombshell confirmation from the British-owned bank last week that it is shutting down in this country. Sinn Feins Pearse Doherty echoed the sentiments of the Financial Services Union (FSU) that described the handling of the announcement of the closure as a case of a humanity failure, a decency failure and a respect failure. Fianna Fails Jim OCallaghan, Aontus Peadar Toibin and Sinn Feins Mairead Farrell told the committee the bank staff and customers were treated shabbily. The FSU accused the bank of failing customers and putting profit ahead of staff well-being. Committee chairman John McGuinness (Fianna Fail) heard the union accuse the bank of deplorable behaviour in the months leading up to its decision to exit the Irish banking market. The union said the banks actions should be addressed at the highest level of Government and by the Central Bank. FSU general secretary John OConnell said the bank owner NatWest deliberately decided not to engage with staff or their representative groups when they were carrying out a strategic review of their operations in Ireland. He claimed that commitments from Ulster Bank that there would be no compulsory redundancies was being contradicted with 40 staff already fighting for their jobs. The union called on the Central Bank to impose a moratorium on branch closes during the pandemic for all banks, including Ulster and Bank of Ireland. This was done by regulators in the UK. Ms Howard admitted that the failure of the bank, over a five-month period, to confirm it was closing added to distress for customers and staff. I accept that this situation, the ongoing media speculation and some of the communications issued to colleagues have added to the stress of the situation. Our colleagues were rightly frustrated and worried with the level of information that we could share with them. She claimed the bank was bound by confidentiality restrictions which meant it was not able to tell staff what was happening until a decision had been made. NatWests board made the final decision late on Thursday. She insisted that there will be no immediate changes for staff and no new compulsory departures this year. We do not intend to close any branches this year on the back of this announcement. Customers are also unaffected in the short term. She is set to say the bank is closing because it has been unable to generate sustainable returns over the long-term for its shareholders. Ms Howard said Ulster Bank is now entering into an extensive consultation process with the FSU and other employee representative bodies. We have also scheduled a series of listening sessions with all staff and in smaller groups so that all colleagues have ample opportunity to ask questions and look for answers to their queries. She insisted Ulster Bank and NatWest will work hard to minimise the impact on colleagues and customers. Following success in the domestic market, many Vietnamese businesspeople are seeking profits from outward investment projects. VinFast plans to penetrate the US market in 2021 Masan Group, the business of billionaire Nguyen Dang Quang, last year wrapped up a deal to take over H.C Starck Tungsten as part of its plan to become a leading high-tech industrial material manufacturer. The deal will help stabilize cash flow through business cycles and help expand market size by 3.5 times, from $1.3 billion to $4.6 billion, as well as turn Masan Resources into the leading midstream tungsten product manufacturer. Analysts say that Vietnamese businesses now tend to play big, trying to reach out to the world. To implement their plans, they take over existing production facilities in targeted foreign markets and use the facilities as a springboard to enter the markets. The nations leading dairy producer Vinamilk spent $10 million to acquire Driftwood, a milk production facility in the US nearly 10 years ago. After several years of restructuring, the facility helped Vinamilk make a profit of $100 million and bring Vietnams dairy products to the US market. The T&T Group of Do Quang Hien became well known in Africa after it succeeded in the biggest raw cashew nut deal in history. In 2020, the total import/export volume from T&G Group reached 400,000 tons, or 25 percent of the total import/export volume of Vietnam. The group plans to import 600,000 tons of raw cashew nuts this year. Vinamilk affirmed that outward investment deals have brought big benefits to the company. One of the gains is the acquisition of large land funds to set up organic milk cow farms overseas, which Vinamilk finds difficult to have in Vietnam. Producing materials in other countries and bringing them to Vietnam has proven to be a good choice. Vinamilk recently bought Miraka shares in New Zealand, an investment item which not only brings dividends but also helps it have a stable supply source of milk powder. VinFast, the auto manufacturer belonging to Vingroup, has taken over the 900-hectare Lang Lang car testing center in Australia, a daring move, analysts said, that will help VinFast set foot in the international market. To serve international projects, VinFast has recruited hundreds of engineers who once worked for well-known automobile manufacturers such as Ford and Toyota. In 2020, it set up an R&D center in Melbourne. Meanwhile, Nguyen Duc Tai has brought Dien May Xanh, a home appliance distribution brand of Mobile World (MW), to Cambodia. The brand now holds 50 percent of the Cambodian market share. The success in Cambodia will help MWG reach Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar. M. Ha Outward investment projects incur losses of over $1 billion Forty-seven outward investment projects have an accumulated loss of $1.048 billion, according to the governments report on the financial situation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and state-invested enterprises, submitted to the National Assembly. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 18:08:38|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close WINDHOEK, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Doses of COVID-19 vaccines allocated through the COVAX facility are expected in Namibia in March, Health Minister Kalumbi Shangula said on Wednesday. Shangula said the country has proposed a total budget of about 583 million Namibia dollars (40 million U.S. dollars) for COVID-19 vaccines under the Deployment and Vaccination Plan, of which 485 million Namibia dollars will be for the actual procurement of vaccines. "This will enable Namibia to procure vaccines for an additional 40 percent of the population to attain a 60 percent vaccination coverage," he said, adding that China has pledged to donate 100,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine and India has pledged to donate 30,000 doses of the vaccine from the Serum Institute of India. Shangula urged Namibians to "welcome and embrace our vaccination campaign like the rest of humanity." Namibia has so far reported 37,896 cumulative confirmed cases, 2,058 of which still active. Enditem Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) The Senate Committee on National Defense and Security, Peace, Unification, and Reconciliation said there is no need for a new law to penalize red-tagging, citing legal remedies under existing laws are already sufficient. "There is no need to pass a law that penalizes red-tagging because recourse is already provided under the Revised Penal Code, Civil Code, special law, and other judicial remedies," read the committee report. The panel said some of the existing remedies were already availed by the progressive groups. "Legal remedies, as exhaustively discussed in this Committee Report, are sufficient and available for personalities or groups that have been the subject of the so-called 'red-tagging', and which some of them have already availed as evidence by the cases filed in the Ombudsman," the report stated. The senate panel said the Revised Penal Code, the Anti-Terrorism Act, the Philippine Act on Crimes Against International Humanitarian Law, Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity are some of the laws that can be cited in complaints by individuals who are branded as communists or enemies of the state. The committee report also recommended to progressive groups that they address their alleged involvement with the communist group instead of issuing "general denials." "These groups should come clean and ensure their organizations are not being used by the CPP-NPA-NDF in the recruitment of armed combatants as alleged by the witnesses presented by the security sector," it read. But the panel advised the security sector to be responsible with any information it handles by strengthening its intelligence capabilities. "It is recommended that the security sector should give greater attention to the strengthening of its intelligence gathering and analysis capability to ensure that every information used is indeed verified and actionable," it said. The Armed Forces of the Philippines drew flak last month after it released online an unverified list of students allegedly recruited by communist rebels. "The security sector should exercise caution in making public pronouncements as these carry with it a semblance of authority from the State," the panel said. The report was signed by committee chairperson Senator Panfilo Lacson, as well as Senators Francis Tolentino, Ronald Dela Rosa, Manny Pacquiao, Lito Lapid, Sonny Angara, Bong Revilla, Cynthia Villar, Koko Pimentel, Risa Hontiveros, Sherwin Gatchalian, Ralph Recto, and Miguel Zubiri. Hontiveros said she signed with dissent. I dissent to the argument that red-tagging does not violate human rights just because there are existing laws that provide legal redress," she said. Hontiveros also agrees with the observation of the United Nations that red-tagging has "chilling effect on the legitimate work of human rights defenders" and has "muddled the space for debate, disagreement/ for challenging state institutions and policies." An Accra Circuit Court has ordered the prosecution to comply with its order of serving Lawrence Nana Asiamah Hanson, aka Bulldog, accused of threatening President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in a video recording, with disclosures. When the matter was called, Hanson informed the Court that he had not been served with any witness statements or any processes. The matter has been adjourned to March 12. At the last sitting, the Court ordered the prosecution to serve Bulldog with disclosures to facilitate a case management conference. Hanson, an artiste manager, is said to have said on a United Television (UTV) programme that, the President will not finish his tenure and that he will run away if he failed to pay customers of Menzgold their deposits. Charged with offensive conduct, conducive to breach of the peace, Hanson pleaded not guilty and is on GH70,000.00 bail. Prosecuting, Chief Inspector Simon Apiorsornu said on January 11, this year, the Police intercepted a video recording on United Television. He said in the said video, the accused was seen and heard saying, The President of the Republic of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo will not finish his term in office and that he will run away if he failed to pay the deposits of Menzgold customers. Prosecution said on January 12, this year, Hanson was handed over to the Police by the National Intelligence Bureau for further investigations. According to the prosecution, during interrogation, Hanson admitted to have made such comments in the said video when same was played to him. It said Hanson explained that during the show, an argument ensued among the guests on the programme and that he made the statement in jest and had no ill motive behind same. 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 An 11-year-old child wrote to Dublin City Council about its plans for a 25m white-water rafting facility, saying: What I wish for Christmas is for that money to be used for a better cause. Correspondence released to the Irish Independent shows how members of the public have been critical about the project. People sent handwritten letters and emails outlining their struggle to own a home in the capital as they questioned why the money was not being allocated to essential services or social housing. One young child also spoke about a trip to Dublin which opened their eyes to the homelessness crisis. They wrote: To Dublin City Council, my name is redacted and I am eleven years old. Yesterday I went to Dublin city and saw so many homless (sic) people out on the street in the cold and it just seemed so awful and not right. The one thing I keep thinking about is while Im writing this letter there are so many people and children that dont have a place to call home and the Dublin City Council are busy building a white water rafting place for twenty two million euro. So what I wish for this Christmas is for that money to be used for a better cause. It emerged in January that the cost of the project initially estimated to be 12m has now risen to 25m. The councils chief executive Owen Keegan outlined that the cost increased because the project was extended to include a swift water training facility as part of the white water course and the construction of a new docklands office and reception centre. The funding is not all taxpayers money, he wrote in an email dated January 25,2021, which responded to a letter published in the Irish Times criticising the project. Read More A substantial portion of the funding will come from development levies and from a loan, which will be remunerated by the surplus generated by the facility. Some grant funding may be sourced from the EU. Under the plans, Georges Dock will be converted into a mechanically-propelled rafting facility with a water polo pitch and an emergency service training centre. Another email released under a Freedom of Information request read: Dear councillor, this is not Dubai, this is Dublin. There is a housing crisis the likes of which hasnt been seen in decades. I am 33 years old and a primary school teacher. My partner, soon to be husband, is a health care assistant. Currently we live separately with our parents and will be living apart for the foreseeable future. We are a lot more fortunate than many, with steady jobs and income, yet our combined salary of 72,000 gets us laughed out of banks when we go looking for a mortgage to live where we work and grew up. Another email told the council to look at the Twitter reaction to the project. The email, sent on January 16, 2021 said: I dont care how much of a keen white water rafter Mr Keegan is (please ensure he sees this if the email is correct). Read the tweets under the announcement. People do not want this. While the white-water rafting facility has been met with opposition, others have welcomed the project. A 15-year-old kayaker wrote to the council: I am writing to express my pleasure and happiness over how you voted. Please, please keep supporting this project. My sport has never gotten anything in the past. The PSNI are being asked to investigate the erection of 'sinister loyalist posters' in the Waterside area of Derry. Sinn Fein Councillor Christopher Jackson said the posters were put up along Crescent Link over recent days. One of the posters that was erected there included what appears to be replicas of a historical poster of the 1912 period when thousands of guns were illegally landed in Ireland by the UVF," he said. The addition of the term Time to Decide and reference to 2021 is seen by many as a call to repeat the use of the gun in modern day Irish politics. There were also posters clearly directed at members of Sinn Fein which is very worrying, particularly given the recent bomb threats to the offices of elected representatives. The police need to investigate those responsible for these posters. "We need to see those in positions of leadership within unionism, particularly within the DUP coming out and condemning these sinister posters and the veiled threat they contain. "There can be no cover given to those who would make threats or use violence." A study co-authored by scientists at the New England Aquarium has found that known deaths of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales represent a fraction of the true death toll. This comes as the death of a calf and recent sightings of entangled right whales off the southeastern United States raise alarm. The study, published this month in Conservation Science and Practice, analyzed cryptic mortality of right whales. Cryptic mortality refers to deaths resulting from human activities that do not result in an observed carcass. The study's authors combined data on whale encounters, animal health, serious injuries, and necropsies from the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium Identification Database curated by the New England Aquarium with the serious injury and mortality database held by the National Marine Fisheries Service. The scientists concluded that known deaths of the critically endangered species accounted for only 36% of all estimated death from 1990 to 2017. "Our work has shown that 83% of identified right whales have been entangled one or more times in fishing gear, and an increasing number of these events result in severe injuries or complex entanglements that the whales initially survive. But we know their health becomes compromised and they eventually succumb and sink upon death," said Amy Knowlton, senior scientist with the Aquarium's Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life. The study--led by Richard Pace and Rob Williams and co-authored by Knowlton, New England Aquarium Associate Scientist Heather Pettis, and Aquarium Emeritus Scientist Scott Kraus--determined that several factors interact to cause undercounting of human-caused mortalities of marine mammals. First, in order for a human-caused mortality to be determined, a whale carcass must float or strand, be detected before decomposition or scavenging occurs, be evaluated to determine cause of death, and then have that result reported. In the absence of any of these steps, information about the cause of mortality can easily be lost. Additionally, a number of right whales have been observed entangled or injured from vessel strikes and never seen again. This suggests they died and their carcasses were not discovered. "We have long known that the number of detected right whale carcasses does not align with the number of whales that disappear from the sightings records," Pettis said. "Since 2013 alone, we have documented 40 individual right whales seen with severe injuries resulting from vessel strikes and entanglements that disappeared following their injury. This study allowed us to quantify just how underrepresented true right whale mortalities are when we rely on observed carcasses alone." The estimated population number for North Atlantic right whales stands at just over 350 whales. Right whales are one of the most endangered large whale species in the world, facing serious ongoing threats from vessels and fishing gear. Just in the past month, a right whale calf died in an apparent vessel strike and two right whales have been spotted entangled in fishing gear. A sport fishing boat hit and killed the calf in the calving grounds off the Florida coast on February 12. The calf was the first born to Infinity (Catalog #3230), who also suffered injuries consistent with a vessel strike. Catalog #1803, a 33-year-old male, was seen badly entangled off the coast of Georgia and Florida in mid-January, and on February 18, Cottontail (Catalog #3920) was sighted entangled and emaciated off the Florida coast. Cottontail, an 11-year-old male, was first seen entangled in southern New England last fall. In both cases, disentanglement efforts were not successful and these whales will likely die. "These serious entanglements are preventable with regulatory changes and a commitment from the fishing industry and the U.S. and Canadian governments to do more to address this threat," said Knowlton. For 40 years, the Aquarium's Right Whale Research Program has extensively studied this critically endangered species. Scientists focus on solutions-based work, collaborating with fishermen on new techniques to reduce deadly entanglements in fishing gear, facilitating communication across the maritime industry to reduce vessel strikes, and working with lawmakers locally, nationally, and internationally to develop science-based protections for the whales. ### New Delhi: In the sensational Palghar lynching case, the Supreme Court on Wednesday (February 24) directed Maharashtra Police to place before it the second chargesheet. The apex court adjourned by two weeks a batch of pleas seeking for a probe by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in the case. In the alleged lynching case of three people, including two seers, in Palghar district in April last year, the counsel for the Maharashtra government informed a bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan and R S Reddy. The bench said the fresh charge sheet shall be placed before it on record in two weeks and posted the matter for further hearing thereafter. On September 7 last year, Maharashtra Police had informed the top court that it has punished "delinquent" policemen for dereliction of duty in the case. On August 6, 2020, the top court had asked Maharashtra Police to apprise it of the inquiry and action taken against the errant police personnel in the case. Maharashtra Police had submitted before the apex court that as many as 18 delinquent police personnel have been awarded varying punishments and some of them have been dismissed from service and some of them have been compulsorily retired. Some delinquent cops have been punished with salary cuts also, it had said, adding that the state's criminal investigation department has so far filed two charge sheets in the alleged lynching case. On June 11 last year, the top court had sought a response from the state government on two petitions seeking a separate probe by the CBI and the NIA into the alleged lynching. The bench was hearing petitions including the one filed by sadhus of 'Shri Panch Dashban Juna Akhara' and relatives of the deceased seers. Their plea alleged the investigation by the state police was being conducted in a biased manner. The other plea, seeking an NIA probe into the incident, has been filed by advocate Ghanshyam Upadhyay. Live TV Besides the Maharashtra government, one of the petitions has arrayed the Centre, CBI, and the Director-General of Police of Maharashtra as respondents in the matter. The plea filed by 'sadhus' of 'Shri Panch Dashban Juna Akhara' has sought transfer of the probe to the CBI, claiming that there is "reasonable apprehension of bias" if Maharashtra Police proceeds with the investigation. "Several video clippings have emerged on social media and news reports which very clearly demonstrate the active involvement of the police present, who can be seen handing over the three persons to the unlawful assembly of persons gathered," the plea has claimed. The three victims from Kandivali in Mumbai were travelling in a car to attend a funeral in Surat in Gujarat amid the COVID-19-induced nationwide lockdown when their vehicle was stopped and they were attacked and killed by a mob in Gadchinchile village on the night of April 16 last year in the presence of police. The victims were identified as Chikne Maharaj Kalpavrukshagiri, 70, Sushil Giri Maharaj, 35, and Nilesh Telgade, 30, who was driving the vehicle. While hearing a separate plea seeking a CBI probe in the case, the top court had on May 1 directed the Maharashtra government to submit a status report on the investigation in the matter. (With Agency Inputs) The Ghana National Fishermen Council (GNFC) has backed the nomination of Minister-designate for Fisheries and Aquaculture Development, Hon. Mavis Hawa Koomson following the media uproar which greeted her recent vetting in Parliament. According to the association, the hullabaloo that was generated on traditional and social media following her appearance before Parliaments ministerial vetting committee was unnecessary and a distraction from pertinent issues that had arisen during the exercise. A media statement released on February 23, 2021 by the association, reads in part: As fishermen, our key concern and expectation is how the Minister-designate intends to tackle niggling issues like Seiko, light fishing, the influx of foreign fishing vessels and the need for a foreign vessel to conduct scientific research among others. The statement further reads: We share the sentiments of several well-meaning Ghanaians who have since the fallout of the vetting exercise, opined that the mastery of English language is not necessarily a sign of competence. The Honourable Minister-designate will definitely work with technocrats and industry players who equally have the progress of the sector at heart. Accordingly, we encourage the media to set the agenda for a liberal conversation on how promises elucidated in the manifesto of the current government will be executed vis-a-vis the content of the vetting exercise. It will be recalled that on 18th February, 2021, the Minister-designate for Fisheries and Aquaculture Development, Hon. Mavis Hawa Koomson took her turn at the parliamentary ministerial vetting committee. Following the exercise, the media space became awash with commentary on her perceived lack of proficiency in the use of the English language. 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. Featured Video Jaipur Literature Fest: Pavan K Varma highlight types of elements used in Indian Literature India oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P Jaipur, Feb 22: The Jaipur Literature Festival, that is known as the "greatest literary show on Earth", is a sumptuous feast of ideas. Each year, several world's greatest writers, humanitarians, politicians, business leaders and entertainers are welcomed on one stage to champion the freedom to express and engage in thoughtful dialogue. This year, Dailyhunt and OneIndia are the proud partners as live streaming partner and digital media partner respectively for the Jaipur Literary Fest 2021. Earlier, authors Annie Zaidi and Deepa Anappara were in conversation with Shahnaz Habib. This session was on two novels, that unblinkly examined the alienation across the Indian society. Jaipur Literature Fest: Annie Zaidi, Deepa Anappara share experiences of their novel-writing processes The fest also witnessed Harsh Mander, an Indian author, columnist, researcher and social activist who works with survivors of mass violence and hunger, as well as homeless persons and street children, having a discussion about his latest book "Locking Down the Poor: The Pandemic and India's Moral Centre." In today's session, Pavan K. Varma is a writer diplomat and now in politics where he still, till recently, was an MP in the Rajya Sabha. An author of over a dozen of books, he is been ambassador of several countries including Butan. Addressing the gathering, Pavan said, "There has been no tradition by which there is constrained on the expression of humour. We have as an essential part of Indian literature as a generic whole, the notion of "kataksh or vyang" satire of poking fun of asking through the understatement." Pavan was addressing a gathering with regard to his book "Being Indian: The Individual and the Civilisation" "For a long time, Sanskrit was a delight language. But, one of the great mythology is that the wisdoms that were incorporated in Sanskrit did not get translated and reach the large audience," he said. Click here to login "There are no Ten Commandments in Hinduism. There are enough texts which give out what could constitute ethical or beneficial conduct. In other words, Hinduism refrains from saying that this is absolutely right or absolutely wrong without the contextual background of that act," he added. Click here to watch full video: In its next session, on February 26, author-politician Shashi Tharoor will talk about his latest book, The Battle Of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism, And What It Means To Be Indian, scraping off the surface of the "idea of India." Along with journalist, Faye D'Souza, he will discuss the varied renditions of nationalism and patriotism. The 14th edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival 2021 (JLF) has also followed suit of virtual. The festival took place in a virtual avatar from February 19, and will end on 21. The fest will again resume from February 26 to 28. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 12:43 [IST] SANTA FE, N.M., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Thornburg Investment Management ("Thornburg"), a global investment firm that oversees $46 billion in assets1, today announced that Steven Klopukh, CFA, and Tim McCarthy, CFA, have joined the firm as portfolio managers and managing directors. Messrs. Klopukh and McCarthy oversee two small- and mid-cap ("SMID") equity mutual funds and plan to introduce SMID managed account and model delivery capabilities. Messrs. Klopukh and McCarthy each have nearly two decades of SMID investment experience and worked together at Allianz Global Investors since the mid-2000s. Prior to Thornburg, Mr. Klopukh spent 18 years at Allianz, most recently as director and lead portfolio manager on the U.S. Small- & Mid-Cap Growth team. Mr. McCarthy spent 17 years at Allianz, where he was senior portfolio manager and director, with research responsibilities for the U.S. Small- & Mid-Cap Growth team. He was also a portfolio manager and analyst on the Small-Cap team and a member of the Quantitative Analytics & Risk Strategy group. Together, they broaden Thornburg's fundamental, bottom-up equity research capabilities into the SMID asset class, providing significant opportunities to active investors. "We are excited to welcome Steven and Tim to Thornburg," said President and CEO Jason Brady. "We are continually investing in talent with proven expertise to expand our platform of strategies and deliver active solutions to our clients." Messrs. Klopukh and McCarthy share portfolio management responsibilities on the Thornburg Small/Mid Cap Growth Fund (Ticker: THIGX), which has $770 million in assets as of December 31, 2020. Mr. Klopukh also serves as portfolio manager on the Thornburg Small/Mid Cap Core Fund (Ticker: TVIFX), which has $822 million in assets as of December 31, 2020. Both Messrs. Klopukh and McCarthy report to Thornburg co-heads of investments Ben Kirby and Jeff Klingelhofer and are supported by the entire Thornburg investment team. "Tim and I are delighted to join an investment-led organization," said Mr. Klopukh. "Thornburg is well known for its thoughtful set of investment solutions that encompass active investing and a fundamental approach. We admire the rigorous and repeatable process that delivers positive outcomes to global investors." Steven Klopukh, CFA Steven Klopukh joined Thornburg Investment Management in 2020 as a portfolio manager to lead Thornburg's small- and mid-cap investment strategies. Prior to Thornburg, Steven worked at Allianz Global Investors, where he spent 18 years, most recently as a director and lead portfolio manager on the U.S. Small- & Mid-Cap Growth team. While at Allianz Global Investors, Steven managed the top-performing AllianzGI Mid-Cap Fund as lead portfolio manager since 2014. With over 20 years of investment industry experience, Steven was also vice president and fundamental equity analyst at CDC Investment Management Corp., where he collaborated on quantitatively enhanced, risk targeted large-cap core and market-neutral equity strategies. Before that, he was in the investment banking associate program at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, where he was involved in M&A, debt and equity capital raising, and consumer products corporate finance. Steven has a BS, magna cum laude, from Fairleigh Dickinson University and an MBA with honors from the University of Chicago. He is also a CFA charterholder. Tim McCarthy, CFA Tim McCarthy joined Thornburg Investment Management in 2020 as a portfolio manager to co-manage Thornburg's small- and mid-cap investment growth strategies. Prior to Thornburg, Tim spent 17 years at Allianz Global Investors, where he was senior portfolio manager and director, with research responsibilities for the U.S. Small- & Mid-Cap Growth team. He was also a portfolio manager and analyst on the Small-Cap team and a member of the Quantitative Analytics & Risk Strategy group. His extensive investment-industry experience includes serving as a portfolio product specialist at FactSet Research Systems, where he held responsibilities for portfolio construction, risk analysis, and performance. Tim holds a BS in business administration with a concentration in finance from the University of Vermont. He is a CFA charterholder and a member of the CFA Society of San Francisco. About Thornburg Founded in 1982, Thornburg Investment Management is a privately-owned global investment firm that offers a range of multi-strategy solutions for institutions and financial advisors. A recognized leader in fixed income, equity and alternatives investing, the firm oversees $46 billion1 as of January 31, 2021 across mutual funds, institutional accounts, separate accounts for high-net-worth investors and UCITS funds for non-U.S. investors. Thornburg is headquartered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with additional offices in London, Hong Kong and Shanghai. At Thornburg, we believe unconstrained investing leads to better outcomes for our clients. Our culture is collaborative, and our investment solutions are highly active, high conviction and benchmark agnostic. When it comes to finding value for our clients, it's more than what we do, it's how we do it: how we think, how we invest and how we're structured. For more information, visit www.thornburg.com or call (877) 215-1330. Media Inquiries Michael Corrao Director of Global Communications Thornburg Investment Management Tel: +1 (505) 467-5345 Email: [email protected] Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investments carry risks, including possible loss of principal. Additional risks may be associated with investments outside the United States, especially in emerging markets, including currency fluctuations, illiquidity, volatility, and political and economic risks. Investments in small- and mid-capitalization companies may increase the risk of greater price fluctuations. Investments in the Fund are not FDIC insured, nor are they bank deposits or guaranteed by a bank or any other entity. Before investing, carefully consider the Fund's investment goals, risks, charges, and expenses. For a prospectus or summary prospectus containing this and other information, contact your financial advisor or visit thornburg.com. Read them carefully before investing. Thornburg mutual funds are distributed by Thornburg Securities Corporation. 1 Includes $44 billion in assets under management and $1.8 billion in assets under advisement as of January 31, 2021 SOURCE Thornburg Investment Management Related Links www.thornburg.com Good morning. A tweet from Tiger Woods account last night said the golf star was awake and responsive after crashing his SUV in Los Angeles on Tuesday. Several homes were evacuated on Winchester Street in St. James last night because of high levels of natural gas in a sewer line. Manitoba Hydro said it was one of three gas leaks in Winnipeg on Tuesday. A search for a missing snowmobiler was called off late Tuesday afternoon. Dan Lemay, 50, is presumed to have drowned in a lake in Whiteshell Provincial Park. Adam Treusch, assignment editor Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. A state appeals court has reinstated a cleanup order and multimillion-dollar penalties against a developer who has deposited large amounts of landfill into Suisun Bay marsh waters to clear the way for a duck club and kite-surfing center on an island he owns. Environmental agencies restoration orders and $3.6 million in fines against John Sweeney had been overturned in December 2017 by Solano County Superior Court Judge Harry Kinnicutt, who said Sweeney had actually improved conditions on the 39-acre island and had been targeted by the agencies with an appearance of vindictiveness. More for you News California's water wars have created a dilemma in the... But the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco said Friday that there was no evidence to support Kinnicutts decision. The 8,500 cubic yards of fill Sweeney discharged into state and federal waters has harmed habitat for waterfowl, blocked access to habitat for fish and endangered species, interfered with tidal flows to the interior of the island, killed tidal marsh vegetation, and caused excessive salinity, turbidity and discoloration of the (islands) interior waterways, Justice Peter Siggins said in the 3-0 ruling. The law contains no mandatory duty directing state agencies to carry out activities in a manner favorable to duck-hunting clubs, Siggins said. In a separate suit by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller of Sacramento ruled in September that Sweeney had illegally deposited soils from the island into federal waters. Sweeney bought the island, Point Buckler, in 2011. The island, on the eastern edge of Grizzly Bay in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, had been a site for duck hunters until the 1990s, but regulatory agencies said levee breaches and neglect of the site had turned it into a tidal marsh. Sweeney rebuilt levees around the island, opened a kite-surfing center and announced plans to re-establish the club for duck hunters, whose prey swim in ponds maintained by the levees and tidal gates. But the Bay Conservation and Development Commission and the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board said in 2015 that Sweeney had acted without the required permits and damaged habitat for waterfowl and fish, including endangered species of salmon and the Delta smelt, by depositing dirt from trenches in marsh and tidal waters. In his 2017 ruling, Kinnicutt said the dirt that Sweeney used to repair the levees and left in the water was not waste but actually a valuable building material. But the appeals court said the soil, though not contaminated, was harmful as used and caused excess sedimentation that smothered the (water) habitat. Lawrence Bazel, a lawyer for Sweeney, said the ruling was disappointing and may be appealed to the state Supreme Court. Larry Goldzband, executive director of the BCDC, said the decision was a step toward undoing the damage to the island and surrounding waters. Mr. Sweeney operated illegally and harmed the environment, and now he needs to submit the plan to BCDC that will restore the environment and the habitat that he destroyed, Goldzband said. Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko A zero-Covid strategy is more likely to reduce the emergence of dangerous mutations in the coronavirus, MPs have been told, as questions were raised over the governments new roadmap out of lockdown. One day after the prime minister, Boris Johnson, insisted there was no credible route to eliminating Covid-19 in the UK, experts from New Zealand and Australia both of which have been heralded for their pandemic response gave evidence to a parliamentary group on their success in suppressing the virus. In the same meeting, Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that he could not understand why the government had decided against pursuing a zero-Covid approach, instead choosing to accept that it will become endemic in society. Prof McKee told the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus: "I'm puzzled by this, because it's not just Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan (adopting zero-Covid tactics), which are islands, but it's also Vietnam, and there are other parts of the world that have been very successful even if they do have challenges, like Uruguay or Rwanda or Finland or Norway. "So there are plenty of places that are trying to do this [achieve zero-Covid status]. "This sort of strange [idea] that 'they're different in some way', I find quite puzzling, particularly for New Zealand." Regarding a disease which "spreads exponentially", Prof McKee said he could not work with the "idea that you can sort of somewhat calibrate your policy responses to keep it at a level which is other than zero. To calibrate perfectly this level of infections at 1,000 or 10,000, whatever [number of] cases and just keep it absolutely right, without it either going up or down ... I just don't know how you do that. "And I think people need certainty. At the minute, we have a situation where we're yo-yoing up and down and that means that nobody can plan holidays, nobody can plan weddings, nobody can plan anything. We're just creating a massive dose of uncertainty by doing anything other than trying to drive it down. When asked about virus variants, Prof McKee added: "If we can suppress it, it's not going to mutate at anything like the same rate." Earlier on Tuesday, Dr Stephen Griffin, a virologist at the University of Leeds, said the notion of having to live with the virus was a defeatist attitude and a potentially dangerous strategy to adopt. Allowing continued circulation of this virus poses a very real risk that more serious variants might emerge that better-evade the responses elicited by our vaccines, he said. Dr Griffin pointed to the example of the highly infectious UK variant, which first emerged in Kent even when prevalence was comparatively low towards the end of summer. Whilst certainly not yet cause to panic, these changes serve as a warning that this virus is still adapting to its newfound host the human race, he added. We have yet to severely test Sars-CoV-2 by restricting its reservoir of hosts via vaccination, and this situation has never before been applied to a pathogenic human coronavirus. To allow the virus to maintain significant prevalence and diversity in this scenario therefore seems unwise at best, he said. Meanwhile, experts from the Southern Hemisphere told the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus that they have looked on as the crisis unfolded in the UK with "frustration". New Zealand has recorded 2,363 cases and 26 deaths since the start of the pandemic, having all-but eradicated community transmission via a series of strict lockdown measures and travel restrictions. Australia, which has reported 28,937 infections and 909 fatalities, is aiming to follow in its neighbours footsteps by adopting a similar approach to reducing the spread of the virus. Michael Moore, adjunct professor at the University of Canberra, told MPs: "All of us have people in the UK my niece has just had a baby in Birmingham and it has been challenging and frustrating for us to watch and [say] 'why don't the government just...' "It's easy for an outsider to say but in some ways it has been frustrating." MPs heard that vaccine programme is "not life or death" in countries opting for a zero-Covid approach. In New Zealand, the vaccine is not being given to the elderly and medically vulnerable, but border workers who are deemed to be at highest risk and capable of reintroducing the virus to the wider population. Michael Baker, professor of public health at the University of Otago in New Zealand, said: "The prioritisation is very different in countries pursuing elimination where you start with your border workers, then healthcare workers, and then start to work through vulnerable populations. "That's going to take us until the end of the year because the vaccine arrival is at much smaller levels because it is not a matter of life or death in New Zealand." World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 6 May 2021 Buddhist monks and believers attend a lantern parade in celebration of the upcoming birthday of Buddha at a temple in Seoul, South Korea Reuters World news in pictures 5 May 2021 Russian MiG-29 jet fighters of the Strizhi (Swifts) and Su-30SM jet fighters of the Russkiye Vityazi (Russian Knights) aerobatic teams fly in formation over the Cathedral Square of the Kremlin in Moscow during a flypast rehearsal for the WWII Victory Parade AFP via Getty Images World news in pictures 4 May 2021 An elevated metro line collapsed in the Mexican capital on Monday, leaving at least 23 people dead and dozens injured as a train came plunging down, authorities said AFP via Getty Images World news in pictures 3 May 2021 Lightning bolts strike buildings during a thunderstorm in Bangkok AFP/Getty World news in pictures 2 May 2021 Samaritan worshippers arrive to take part in a Passover ceremony on top of Mount Gerizim, near the northern West Bank city of Nablus AFP/Getty World news in pictures 1 May 2021 A Gilet Jaune, or yellow vest, protestor stands in front of a burning barricade holding his hand up with an inscription calling for President Macron to resign as May Day Protest turn violent near Place de la Republique in Paris, France Getty World news in pictures 30 April 2021 A demonstrator from the Rio de Paz human rights activist group digs a symbolic grave in front of rows of bags symbolising bodybags on Copacabana beach, during a protest against the Brazilian governments handling of the coronavirus pandemic, in Rio de Janeiro AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 April 2021 An aerial picture shows dead carp fish flushed to the shores of al-Qaraoun reservoir in Lebanons Western Beqaa District in the countrys east. Tonnes of fish have washed up dead on the shoreline of the highly polluted artificial reservoir in eastern Lebanon in recent days AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 April 2021 Health workers wearing PPE attends to coronavirus patients inside a banquet hall temporarily converted into a covid care centre in New Delhi AFP/Getty World news in pictures 27 April 2021 The full moon, known as the Super Pink Moon rises behind the Statue of Liberty in New York City, Reuters World news in pictures 26 April 2021 Balinese people lay wreaths with names of the crew on board the sunk Indonesian Navy submarine KRI Nanggala during a prayer at the sea near Labuhan Lalang, Bali, Indonesia EPA World news in pictures 25 April 2021 An Ethiopian Orthodox Christian worshipper walks around the Edicule, the place believed to be where Jesus Christ was buried, during Palm Sunday celebrations at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 April 2021 Fans of Wuhan Three Towns FC cheer for their team during the 1st round match Wuhan Three Towns FC and Beijing Institute of Technology FC during Chinese Football League One in Wuhan, China Getty World news in pictures 23 April 2021 A girl prays in front of the Dome of the Rock, in the compound known to Muslims as Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount, in Jerusalems Old City, on the second Friday of the holy month of Ramadan, as coronavirus restrictions ease around the country, in Jerusalem Reuters World news in pictures 22 April 2021 People walk through the art work 'THE SPIRITS OF THE PUMPKINS DESCENDED INTO THE HEAVENS' by Yayoi Kusama, during the press preview of a retrospective exhibition of the Japanese artist at the Martin Gropius Bau museum in Berlin, Germany AP World news in pictures 21 April 2021 Hungary's Sara Peter competes in the Women's floor qualifications during European Artistic Gymnastics Championships at the St Jakobshalle, in Basel AFP via Getty Images World news in pictures 20 April 2021 South Korea university students gets their heads shaved during a protest against Japan's decision to release contaminated water from its Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea, in front of the Japanese embassy, in Seoul Reuters World news in pictures 19 April 2021 A spectator wearing a football jersey of Argentina's forward Lionel Messi attends the ATP Barcelona Open tennis tournament singles match between Japan's Kei Nishikori and Argentina's Guido Pella at the Real Club de Tenis in Barcelona AFP via Getty Images World news in pictures 18 April 2021 People raise their fist during a demonstration near the George Floyd Memorial in Minneapolis, Minnesota AFP/Getty World news in pictures 17 April 2021 Security personnel stand guard outside a polling station during the 5th phase of West Bengal's state legislative assembly elections in Kolkata AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 April 2021 Palestinians take part in the first Friday prayers of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Islam's third holiest site, in Jerusalem's Old City AFP/Getty World news in pictures 15 April 2021 A firefighter inspects the site of a car bomb attack in Sadr City district of Baghdad, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 14 April 2021 This picture shows the 100 days countdown till the start of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games displayed on the illuminated Tokyo Skytree in Tokyo on April 14, 2021 AFP via Getty Images World news in pictures 13 April 2021 This photo taken and received courtesy of an anonymous source shows Buddhist monks gesturing while taking part in a demonstration with protesters against the military coup in Mandalay during the Myanmar New Year festival of Thingyan AFP/Getty World news in pictures 12 April 2021 An Indian holi man during the Kumbh Mela royal bath (Sacred Hindu Pilgrimage) in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, India. Thousands of pilgrims are gathering and taking holy dip in Kumbh Mela that is a mass Hindu pilgrimage which occurs after every twelve years and rotates among four locations EPA World news in pictures 11 April 2021 Nasa released images of of sand dunes on Mars captured using infrared reflections NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU) World news in pictures 10 April 2021 People watch devotees pulling a chariot in Biska Jatra Festival in Bhaktapur, Nepal AP World news in pictures 9 April 2021 Maintenance workers clean the monument of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in Moscow on April 9, 2021. - Sixty years ago Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, marking it a new chapter in the history of space exploration. AFP via Getty Images World news in pictures 8 April 2021 Protesters hold a banner and burning red flares during a demonstration of called by unions of healthcare and social workers in support of their sector and to demand a bonus in their pay in Paris AFP via Getty Images World news in pictures 7 April 2021 Protesters laying on the street near the Election Commission office in Kolkata during a demonstration demanding the halt of the ongoing state legislative election and campaign rallies amidst the rising number of Covid-19 cases AFP/Getty World news in pictures 6 April 2021 Voters stand in queue to cast their votes at a polling booth during third phase of West Bengal state elections in Baruipur, South 24 Pargana district, India AP World news in pictures 5 April 2021 The Statue of Christ appears behind clouds from the Sao Jorge Castle in Lisbon as the Portuguese government eased coronavirus restrictions AFP via Getty Images World news in pictures 4 April 2021 Christian worshippers light candles during an Easter service in Yerevan, the Armenian capital AFP/Getty World news in pictures 3 April 2021 Anti-coup protesters hold improvised weapons during a protest in Yangon, Myanmar. Myanmars military Junta continued a brutal crackdown on a nationwide civil disobedience movement in which thousands of people have turned out in continued defiance of live ammunition Getty World news in pictures 2 April 2021 A rescue works at the site after a train derailed in a tunnel north of Hualien, Taiwan Reuters World news in pictures 1 April 2021 Man flashes three-finger salute next to burning tires during a protest against the military c REUTERS World news in pictures 31 March 2021 Mannequins wrapped in barrier tape stand in front of Berlins landmark Brandenburg Gate as part of German artist Dennis Josef Mesegs Corona Memorial called It is Like it is AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 March 2021 A ship heads down the Suez Canal, in Ismalia, Egypt EPA World news in pictures 29 March 2021 Flocks of flamingos are pictured in a pond in Navi Mumbai AFP via Getty Images World news in pictures 28 March 2021 Anti-coup protesters use slingshots and pelt stones towards approaching security forces on March 28, 2021 in Yangon, Myanmar. Myanmar's military Junta continued a brutal crackdown on a nationwide civil disobedience movement in which thousands of people have turned out in continued defiance of live ammunition. Getty World news in pictures 27 March 2021 The mother of Aung Zay Min, 20, who was shot and killed in the night by security forces, mourns over his body at his funeral in Dala township in Yangon, Myanmar Getty World news in pictures 26 March 2021 Farmers play cricket on a deserted highway road during a 12-hour strike, as part of protests against farm laws, at the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border in Ghaziabad, India Reuters World news in pictures 25 March 2021 China Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2021 collection show in Beijing Reuters World news in pictures 24 March 2021 A man rows a boat against the setting sun at the Dal Lake after a downpour in Srinagar AFP/Getty World news in pictures 23 March 2021 Hindu devotees dance as colored powder is thrown at them at Ladali, or Radha temple, at the legendary hometown of Radha, consort of Hindu God Krishna, during Lathmar holi, in Barsana, India AP World news in pictures 22 March 2021 Campaign for Uyghurs Executive Director Rushan Abbas holds a photo of her sister, Gulshan Abbas who is currently imprisoned in a camp during a rally in New York AFP/Getty World news in pictures 21 March 2021 Damage at a hospital after a government bombing in the rebel-held town of Atareb in northwestern Syria Reuters World news in pictures 20 March 2021 A helicopter flies close to a volcanic eruption which has begun in Fagradalsfjall, Iceland Getty Images World news in pictures 19 March 2021 U.S. President Joe Biden stumbles on steps departs on travel to Atlanta, Georgia at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland REUTERS World news in pictures 18 March 2021 A sculpture by artist Jacques Tilly with the slogan '11 years of relentless investigation of the abuse cases!' is seen in front of the Cologne Cathedral in Cologne, western Germany, on March 18, 2021, as a long-awaited report was published on sexual violence allegedly committed by clergy and laymen in Germany's top diocese. - The independent study on the Cologne diocese commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church found 202 alleged perpetrators of sexual assault and 314 victims between 1975 and 2018 AFP/Getty Meanwhile, Catherine Bennett, of Deakin University in Victoria, said border closure had been one of Australia's "main tools" in keeping infection rates low and protecting its domestic economy. She said the country had tightened up its hotel quarantine system in response to the new variants, including adding extra testing. Prof Bennett remarked that the British system of hotel quarantine which has only just been introduced, is only 10 days long and allows people out for exercise demonstrates a difference in the way Australia and the UK perceive lockdowns. "If you're going to ... have too many holes in the sieve, then why bother with the sieve?" she said. The professor added that Australia was now testing hotel quarantine staff daily, including on their days off, and had imposed much stricter conditions on Australian air crews who had previously been allowed to return home between shifts. Additional reporting by PA Thursday, Feb. 18 Plainview police were called to the 800 block of Kokomo St. on Feb. 18 in reference to an assault. A 55-year-old woman was arrested for an outstanding warrant. An assault was reported at the 100 block of SE 7th St. on Feb. 18. A 19-year-old man was arrested for assault causing bodily injury, family violence. Forgery was reported at the 1500 block of N. Interstate 27 on Feb. 18. A theft was reported at the 1400 block of Houston St. on Feb. 18. Police responded to a theft at the 1300 block of Xenia St. on Feb. 18. A theft was reported at the 800 block of Lexington St. on Feb. 18. Police arrested Amanda Gale Long, 34, for theft of property valued at more than $500 but less than $1,500, which is a felony. Friday, Feb. 19 A crash was reported the 800 block of Itasca St. on Feb. 19. The crash resulted in vehicle damage. Shoplifting was reported at the 2400 block of N. Columbia St. on Feb. 19. A theft was reported at the 2600 block of Dimmitt Road on Feb. 19. Sara Lynn Gutierrez, 33, was arrested Feb. 19 at the 1200 block of Fresno St. when officers responded to the location in reference to an assault. Gutierrez was charged with criminal trespass, resisting arrest or transportation (felony), assault of a public servant (felony) and taking a prohibited substance in a correctional facility (felony). A crash resulting in vehicle damage was reported at the 2900 block of N. Interstate 27 west frontage road on Feb. 19. A crash resulting in an injury was reported at the 1300 block of N. Interstate 27 on the east frontage road on Feb. 19. An abandoned vehicle was reported at the 1000 block of Ash St. on Feb. 19. Police arrested Chris Villalon, 33, on Feb. 19 at the 3600 block of Quincy St. Villalon was charged with driving while intoxicated, unlawfully carrying a weapon, possession of marijuana and possession of a controlled substance, which is a felony. Saturday, Feb. 20 A burglary was reported at the 1000 block of W. 16th St. on Feb. 20. A stolen motorcycle was reported at the 100 block of E. 24th St. on Feb. 20. An assault was reported at the 2800 block of Houston St. on Feb. 20. Sunday, Feb. 21 A crash was reported at the 2400 block of Dimmitt Road on Feb. 21. Vehicle damage was reported. Criminal mischief was reported at the 600 block of N. Columbia St. on Feb. 21. Property damage was reported. A hit-and-run crash was reported at the 1000 block of Canyon St. Vehicle damage was reported. Corfo is Chiles state agency in charge of handling lithium contracts.Albemarle operates a lithium production facility in the lithium-rich Atacama salt flats in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.The other major lithium producer active in the Atacama salt flats is Chiles Sociedad Quimica y Minera (SQM).Lithium is a key ingredient in batteries that power electric vehicles (EVs), sales of which are expected to soar in Europe and other regions with the shift to greener mobility gathering momentum.Corfo has demanded that Albemarle pay $15 million in extra royalties for 2020.The lithium miner already paid $44 million in royalties for 2020. Corfo has argued that as of 2020, Albemarle stopped complying with the contract signed in 2016 with the state of Chile, which established quarterly payments on its sales of lithium and other minerals extracted in Chile.The company decided to arbitrarily and unilaterally change the method of calculating royalties, Corfo said.Lithium is a strategic resource for the future of the country, and it is totally unacceptable that Albemarle does not fulfill the contract when the agreement is less favorable, due to the fall in the price of lithium worldwide, Corfos executive vice-president Pablo Terrazas said in a statement.We reaffirm that we have fulfilled all our contractual obligations with the State of Chile, including the payment of the corresponding commissions. We regret that Corfo has insisted on this arbitration process, which will involve time and costs for the country, even though there is a clause in the same contract for the solution of these issues, an Albemarle spokesperson told Fastmarkets.We reaffirm our commitment to Chile and will continue to produce sustainable lithium for the world while we await the outcome of this litigation, the Albemarle spokesperson said.Prices for lithium surged over 2016 and 2017. But additional capacity expansions outstripped demand growth between 2018 and 2019, triggering a slump in prices.The Covid-19 pandemic added further bearish pressure to lithium prices over most of 2020.Yet in the key consuming market of China, the price of lithium carbonate started to increase in the last quarter of 2020, dragging up prices across the whole lithium complex thus far in 2021.Battery-grade and technical-grade lithium carbonate prices in China bottomed out at the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2020 amid a resurgence of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery demand in the country.Fastmarkets weekly price assessment for lithium carbonate, 99.5% Li2CO3 min, battery grade, spot price range exw domestic China was 68,000-73,000 yuan per tonne ($10,481-11,251) on Thursday February 18, up by 46.9% from 45,000-51,000 yuan per tonne on February 20, 2020. SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 23, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hagens Berman urges Leidos Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: LDOS) investors to submit their losses now. The firm is investigating a potential securities fraud. Visit: www.hbsslaw.com/investor-fraud/LDOS Contact An Attorney Now: LDOS@hbsslaw.com 844-916-0895 Leidos Holdings, Inc. (LDOS) Investigation: The firm is investigating whether Leidos misrepresented and concealed problems with its Security Detection and Automation (SD&A) business. In May 2020, Leidos acquired L3Harris SD&A business for $1 billion, claiming the deal would help Leidos achieve double-digit growth, 15% margins, and boost international sales. Leidos also represented that the cash acquired from the SD&A line was $30 million. Since this time, management has consistently stated that SD&As business was ahead of our milestones and on target. But on Feb. 16, 2021, analyst Spruce Point published a scathing report, concluding that Leidos had wasted $1b on the SD&A acquisition. Spruce Point states, We believe Leidos is potentially covering up at least $100m of fictitious sales, mischaracterizing $355 - $367m of international revenue. Spruce Point also alleges that the company is concealing numerous product defects from investors, notably faulty explosive detection systems at airports and borders. Spruce Point further avers that management may be intentionally inflating certain of Leidos financial metrics, including operating cash flow and organic sales growth, to obscure strains from investors. Most recently, on Feb. 23, 2021, Leidos released mixed Q4 2020 financial results and disappointing 2021 outlook, including guided revenue and EPS well below analyst consensus. Leidos also reported that the cash acquired in connection with SD&A Businesses purchase was $26 million. The same day, Spruce Point highlighted the poor 2021 outlook and picked up on the SD&A cash acquired discrepancy, tweeting [t]his asset is a total black box. On these disclosures, Leidos shares have declined sharply. Were focused on investor losses and whether Leidos has misled investors about its SD&A business, said Reed Kathrein, the Hagens Berman partner leading the investigation. If you are a Leidos investor, click here to discuss your legal rights with Hagens Berman. Whistleblowers: Persons with non-public information regarding Leidos should consider their options to help in the investigation or take advantage of the SEC Whistleblower program. Under the new program, whistleblowers who provide original information may receive rewards totaling up to 30 percent of any successful recovery made by the SEC. For more information, call Reed Kathrein at 844-916-0895 or email LDOS@hbsslaw.com. About Hagens Berman Hagens Berman is a national law firm with eight offices in eight cities around the country and over eighty attorneys. The firm represents investors, whistleblowers, workers and consumers in complex litigation. More about the firm and its successes is located at hbsslaw.com. For the latest news visit our newsroom or follow us on Twitter at @classactionlaw . The Work Zone A lot of folks will go to work this morning, and not be happy about it. I hope I can give you some ideas today that will help make sure youre Read more Nifty, Sensex to head higher Wednesday closing report To bookmark you need to sign in We had mentioned in Tuesdays closing report that Nifty, Sensex may fall further if overseas markets remain weak. On Wednesday, the indices rallied and closed with major gains. On the NSE, there were 1,227 advances, 600 declines and 411 unchanged. The trends of the major indices in the course of Wednesdays trading are given in the table below: Bank stocks rallied after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman tweeted that private banks can now participate in government businesses. Bharti Airtel said it has entered the advertising business with the launch of Airtel Ads. Bosch has decided to open a global smart campus in Bengaluru to showcase its R&D capabilities in both automotive and non-automotive products and services. The smart campus at Adugodi in the heart of Bengaluru will be built at an investment of Rs 800 crore. Coal India board may consider a second interim dividend for 2020-2021. Granules India received USFDA approval for its Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA) for Acetaminophen, Aspirin and Caffeine Tablets USP, 250 mg/250 mg/65 mg (OTC). Sanofi India net profit rose 26.4% YoY to Rs 123 crore. Net sales declined 12.8% YoY to Rs 720.3 crore. Tata Power raised Rs 9,000 crore through issuance of non-convertible debentures on a private placement basis. IIFL Finance raised Rs 100 crore through issuance of non-convertible debentures on private placement basis. IRB Infrastructure Developers has successfully completed concession period of Thane Ghodbunder BOT Project on 23rd February, 2021 and handed over the project to the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation. Godawari Power and Ispat has started booking export orders of high grade iron ore pellets to China and other countries. The top gainers and top losers of the major indices are given in the table below: The closing values of the major Asian indices are given in the table below: Press Release February 24, 2021 Drilon hits DOLE's 'nurses for vaccines' policy "Bakit tayo umabot sa ganito?" Senate Minority Leader Franklin M. Drilon asked this question as he hit the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) for its offer to the United Kingdom and Germany of deployment of more Filipino nurses in the two European nations with the highest number of cases and deaths related to COVID-19 in exchange for COVID-19 vaccines. "It's a sign of desperation. Ganito na ba tayo kadesperado? said Drilon, saying that policy is borne out of the growing exasperation over the lack of COVID-19 vaccines in the country. Drilon said DOLE's "palit bakuna" initiative "is a wrong policy and sets a bad precedent." "Our health care workers are not commodities they can trade off," he added. An official of the labor department, Alice Visperas, revealed that Secretary Silvestre Bello III has asked the UK and Germany to provide the Philippines with at least 600,000 vaccines in exchange for the deployment of more Filipino nurses and other health care workers. "For the government to go this far as trading off its Filipino health care workers in exchange for vaccines means something is not right in the government's coronavirus vaccination strategy," he added. The former labor secretary advised DOLE to abandon the policy. "Hindi po kasama sa mandato ng DOLE ang 'palit bakuna'. Our focus should be on protecting the rights and welfare of our overseas Filipino workers especially during these trying times," Drilon said. Drilon said it only highlights the need for the government to fast-track the procurement of COVID-19 vaccines. The Senate passed on Tuesday a measure that will help expedite the purchase and administration of the much-needed vaccines in the country as the Philippines lags behind in coronavirus vaccination among its Southeast Asian neighbors. With the passage of the measure, Drilon said there will be no more excuses for delays in COVID-19 vaccination plan. "There should be no more excuses. But I am holding my breath for the next excuse and finger pointing," he said. .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... CANBERRA, Australia Facebook announced Tuesday that it would lift a ban on Australians viewing and sharing news on its platform after it struck a deal with the government on proposed legislation that would make digital giants pay for journalism. The social media company caused alarm with its sudden decision last week to block news on its platform across Australia after the House of Representatives passed the draft law. Initially, the blackout also cut access at least temporarily to government pandemic, public health and emergency services, fueling outrage. Facebooks cooperation is a major victory in Australias efforts to make two major gateways to the internet, Google and Facebook, pay for the journalism that they use a faceoff that governments and tech companies the world over have watched closely. Google also had threatened to remove its search functions from Australia because of the proposed law, but that threat has faded. There is no doubt that Australia has been a proxy battle for the world, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said. ADVERTISEMENTSkip ................................................................ Facebook and Google have not hidden the fact that they know that the eyes of the world are on Australia, and that is why they have sought to get a code here that is workable, he added, referring to the bill, the News Media Bargaining Code. In fact, this week, Microsoft and four European publishing groups announced they would work together to push for Australian-style rules for news payments from tech platforms. The legislation was designed to curb the outsized bargaining power of Facebook and Google in their negotiations with Australian news providers. The digital giants would not be able to abuse their positions by making take-it-or-leave-it payment offers to news businesses for their journalism. Instead, in the case of a standoff, an arbitration panel would make a binding decision on a winning offer. Frydenberg and Facebook confirmed that the two sides agreed to amendments to the proposed legislation. The changes would give digital platforms one months notice before they are formally designated under the code. That would give those involved more time to broker agreements before they are forced to enter binding arbitration arrangements. A statement Tuesday by Campbell Brown, Facebooks vice president for news partnerships, added that the deal allows the company to choose which publishers it will support, including small and local ones. Were restoring news on Facebook in Australia in the coming days. Going forward, the government has clarified we will retain the ability to decide if news appears on Facebook so that we wont automatically be subject to a forced negotiation, Brown said. Frydenberg described the agreed upon amendments as clarifications of the governments intent. He said his negotiations with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg were difficult. A European publishers lobbying group that is among those teaming up with Microsoft said the deal shows such legislation is possible and not just in Australia. The latest twist proves that regulation works, said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council. Regulators from around the world will be reassured that they can continue to take inspiration from the Australian governments determination to withstand unacceptable threats from powerful commercial gatekeepers. Facebook said it would now negotiate deals with Australian publishers. We are satisfied that the Australian government has agreed to a number of changes and guarantees that address our core concerns about allowing commercial deals that recognize the value our platform provides to publishers relative to the value we receive from them, Facebook regional managing director William Easton said. As a result of these changes, we can now work to further our investment in public interest journalism and restore news on Facebook for Australians in the coming days, Easton added. Google, meanwhile, has been signing up Australias largest media companies in content-licensing deals through its News Showcase. The platform says it has deals with more than 50 Australian titles and more than 500 publishers globally using the model, which was launched in October. Peter Lewis, director of the Australia Institutes Center for Responsible Technology, a think tank, said in a statement that the amendments keep the integrity of the media code intact. However, others took a more skeptical stance. Jeff Jarvis, a journalism expert from the City University of New York, said media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who owns most of Australias major newspapers through his U.S-based News Corp., is the biggest winner while smaller titles and new media startups would suffer most. Jarvis said Murdochs media empire was the driving force behind the Australian legislation, which he noted includes a requirement for media companies to earn at least 150,000 Australian dollars ($119,000) in revenue to be eligible. So a startup which has no revenue has no real recourse, Jarvis said, adding that even if Facebook and Google open payment talks with smaller companies, clearly a smaller player has less clout than a bigger player, than a News Corp. ___ Associated Press writer Kelvin Chan contributed to this report from London. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 22:28:25|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close ATHENS, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The China-EU Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI), awaiting approval in writing, will be important for the global competitiveness and growth of EU industry and EU entrepreneurship in general, a Greek expert told Xinhua in a recent interview on the future prospects of bilateral cooperation. On Dec. 30 2020, China and the European Union (EU) announced the completion of the investment agreement negotiations as scheduled. The agreement will be one of the most ambitious deals China has ever concluded with a third party, said Dimitris Filippidis, head of Unit-Innovation Programs Management at PRAXI Network which provides a bridge between research and industry in Greece. PRAXI has been promoting cooperation with China over the past years. "This agreement will ensure that EU investors achieve better access to the fast-growing consumer market in China and they will be able to compete on a better level playing field in China," Filippidis said. "This of course is greatly important, vastly important for the global competitiveness and future of growth of EU industry and EU entrepreneurship in general." "From our experience over the years, we have realized that there is a number of common challenges that stakeholders from both sides face and it is important to handle these together and have meaningful communication with each other in order to solve them," Filippidis said. As regards investment opportunities, the CAI will open a new chapter, but in research and innovation cooperation between the two parties, there are established mechanisms in place for several years, he said. "Cooperation between Europe and China in research and innovation is a long-lasting one. It didn't start 3 or 4 years ago. It started in 1998 and it is moving on the right track," Filippidis said. In this bridge-building, PRAXI Network holds a significant role in Greece in the research, development and innovation (RDI) field. It has coordinated in the country a series of EU-funded projects aimed to enhance RDI cooperation between EU and China. Among them, as part of the Horizon 2020 (H2020) EU framework program for research and innovation, was the European Research Innovation Center of Excellence in China (ERICENA) project implemented between 2017 and 2020 which aimed to promote EU science and technology innovation in China, Filippidis explained. PRAXI Network has also been a leading partner in the ongoing ENRICH in China initiative (European Network of Research and Innovation Centers and Hubs in China), launched in 2017 in order to establish a research and innovation center in China. With an office in Beijing and a regional hub in Chengdu in southwest China's Sichuan province, ENRICH in China still facilitates the efforts of European research and innovation stakeholders who want to enter the Chinese market in creating synergies and cooperation opportunities with their Chinese counterparts, although it no longer receives funding by the European Commission under H2020, he added. "ENRICH (in China) aims to promote European research and innovation to a wide range of Chinese stakeholders by connecting and supporting European researchers, businesses and entrepreneurs in the Chinese market," according to an ENRICH in China video. About 60 Greek stakeholders -- including large companies, small- and medium-sized enterprises, startups, universities, research organizations and innovation agencies interested mainly in manufacturing and construction, maritime, health services and Information and Communication Technologies -- have benefited over the last three years from the services provided by ENRICH in China, such as webinars, training workshops and matchmaking tools, Filippidis said. One of the key results of both the ERICENA and ENRICH initiatives was the creation of a rich network of over 125 European and Chinese organizations, including universities, research organizations, funding agencies, research councils and private companies that communicate with one another, he said. Enditem In the six months to December 31, 2020, it produced a total of 137,386 ounces of gold, 2% more than in the corresponding six-month period in 2019. The steadily increasing earnings and cashflow is expected to continue, boosted by a material contribution from its third mine, Yaoure. ( ) ( ) ( ) (FRA:P4Q) has recorded a 61% increase in group net profit after tax to A$49.1 million in the first half of FY21 compared to the corresponding period in FY20, reflecting its successful transition to a multi-mine, multi-jurisdictional gold producer. In the six months to December 31, 2020, it produced a total of 137,386 ounces of gold, 2% more than in the corresponding six-month period in 2019. In the same period, the weighted average all-in site costs (AISC), including the costs of production, royalties and sustaining capital, increased by 6% relative to the December 2019 half-year, averaging US$1,000 per ounce of gold produced. Strong Sissingue performance The results reflected the strong operating performance at the low-cost Sissingue Gold Mine in Cote dIvoire, (55,909 ounces of gold at an AISC US$643 per ounce), combined with steady gold production at the Edikan Gold Mine (78,790 ounces of gold at US1,253 per ounce). Perseuss third gold mine, Yaoure, where first gold was poured in December 2020, contributed a total of 2,687 ounces to the groups total half-yearly gold production although with net costs being capitalised until the declaration of commercial production, the mines activities did not contribute to the half-year earnings result. Increasing earnings, cashflow to continue Perseus Mining chief executive officer and managing director Jeff Quartermaine said: The financial results released by Perseus today are further evidence of the continuing transition of our company from a junior gold producer to a multi-mine, multi-jurisdictional business. In coming periods, the trend of Perseuss steadily increasing earnings and cash flow is expected to continue, boosted by a material contribution from our third mine, the Yaoure Gold Mine. The construction of Yaoure was completed late in the December half-year and operations are steadily ramping up to optimum performance levels. "Heading into 2021, Perseus is in a strong financial position to continue the growth of our business through both organic means and by being positioned to take advantage of M&A opportunities that may present and offer attractive returns on our investment. The results that we have released today, and the strong financial position in which Perseus is now positioned, reflect the focused efforts of both our on-site and corporate office teams, all of whom have worked with dedication and commitment in a period of uncertainty and challenge brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. I thank them sincerely for their efforts in delivering the results published today. Results Perseuss net profit after tax of A$49.1 million or 3.0 cents per share attributable to the owners of the parent company, materially exceeded the net profit after tax of A$30.4 million or 2.6 cents per share earned in the previous corresponding half year. It attributed the improved performance to: A period-on-period decrease of A$32.5 million in the depreciation and amortisation expense relating to gold production; Administration and other corporate expenses decreasing to A$9.8 million from A$11.5 million in the December 2019 half-year; A decrease in income tax expense to A$8.4 million, which compared favourably to the A$12.9 million incurred in the corresponding period in 2019. A foreign exchange loss of A$13.2 million, A$20.2 million more in the prior year when a foreign exchange gain of $7.0 million was recorded. The loss occurred due to an appreciation in the value of the Australian dollar against the US dollar and revaluation of intercompany loans. As at December 31, 2020, the total value of cash (A$120.5 million) and bullion on hand (A$32.7 million) was A$153.2 million, or A$38.3 million more than at December 31, 2019. Operating cash flows increased by A$30.4 million in the half-year to A$103.6 million, or 8.6 cents per share, as revenue increased and payments to suppliers and employees decreased. A total of A$150.6 million of cash was invested during the period, including A$111.9 million on the development of the Yaoure Gold Mine and A$11 million on exploration. A net total of A$27.6 million of borrowings were repaid in cash during the period and a further A$7.6 million was paid in cash for borrowing costs. The companys net tangible assets on December 31, 2020, were A$853.5 million or A$0.70 per share, including cash and bullion on hand. Total interest-bearing liabilities stood at A$168.9 million, A$48.7 million less than on June 30, 2020. 2021 guidance Looking to the future, Perseuss financial performance is expected to remain strong with continuing solid gold production and an improving cost structure at its two operating gold mines. Development of Yaoure, Perseuss third operation, will be a major focus in the 2021 financial year. Production and cost guidance for the 2021 financial year is as follows: Before the not-so-subtle trips to the first voting states or the string of announcements from 2024 presidential hopefuls, a drawn-out clash is dividing the four early states down the middle. In Nevada, Democratic Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson introduced a bill last week to position the state at the front of the line. The maneuver could erode the decade-long detente between the privileged four, which wield outsize influence over the nominating contests, with Nevada and South Carolina angling for the top two positions occupied for nearly half a century by Iowa and New Hampshire. "I think that South Carolina and Nevada should be the first two," said former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democratic power broker who is the driving force behind the concerted push in Nevada. He would be "satisfied," he said, if either Nevada or South Carolina claimed the top spot, even if that means his home state landed in second -- a signal that along with House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, who shares Reid's interest in moving up South Carolina's primary, the two states could work in tandem to displace Iowa and New Hampshire. "Those states are not representative of what's going on in 90% of the rest of the country," Reid continued. "Just because you've done something in the past, doesn't mean you should do it in the future." PHOTO: Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid speaks about Nevada politics, the presidential race and baseball during an interview in his office at the Bellagio in Las Vegas on July 2, 2019. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images, FILE) For the two predominantly white states, who for years have successfully survived attempts from others to jump ahead, the legislation in Nevada marks an early, but not unforeseen, attack on their entrenched position of prominence on the primary calendar. MORE: Iowa caucuses fail to declare Democratic winner after major snafu with reporting results Although Iowa and New Hampshire are familiar with being on defense, they now find themselves in a far more beleaguered position after a turbulent 2020 Democratic primary. The bungled Iowa caucuses last year, the stunning revival of then-candidate Joe Biden's campaign in South Carolina and repeated calls from inside the party to reshuffle the calendar to reflect the diversity within the Democratic electorate are temping some Democrats away from tradition and leaving the early states preparing for war, whether intended or not. Story continues "Every four years, this process really kicks up again where states jockey for position," said Iowa state Rep. Ross Wilburn, the newly elected chair of the state Democratic Party. "We're committed to doing whatever it takes to keep Iowa first-in-the-nation." In New Hampshire, Bill Gardner, the longtime secretary of state who has sole authority to set the date of the primary, indicated that he is prepared to once again outmaneuver others to keep his state's prime position. He did not rule out waiting until the eleventh hour to schedule New Hampshire's contest ahead of all other states. "The law says it can be in the year of the presidential election or earlier," he said in an interview, referring to a state law mandating that the New Hampshire primary be held seven days before any other "similar election." Iowa, too, must hold its caucuses at least eight days before any other nominating contest, according to state law. Gardner said that the size of New Hampshire and the level playing field it offers, coupled with the historical traditions that cannot be recreated elsewhere reinforce the state's claim to leading off voting. "The primary here is really an opportunity for the little guy to have a chance to compete. You don't have to have the most fame or fortune to win here," he said. "It's natural that it's here like it's natural that a Kentucky Derby is in Kentucky." MORE: As Julian Castro exits the race, Democrats renew concerns over diversity in presidential field Democrats outside of Iowa and New Hampshire often criticize the current lineup of the calendar for giving too much power to homogeneous states, since their populations are roughly 90% white, particularly for a big-tent party that featured the most racially diverse field of candidates competing for the nomination last cycle. "A diverse state or states need to be first. The difference between going first and going third is really important," Tom Perez, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, told the New York Times earlier this month. "This is the Democratic Party of 2020. It's different from the Democratic Party in how we were in 1972. And we need to reflect that change." The bill in Nevada shifts the state's nominating contest from a caucus to a primary and moves the date of the primary to "the Tuesday immediately preceding the last Tuesday in January'' -- laying the foundation for the state party to make the case before the DNC that Nevada should be first. Before the bill was released, the state party chairs in the three other early states were given a courtesy heads up by William McCurdy II, the chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, a party spokesperson said. MORE: Sen. Bernie Sanders projected to win Nevada caucuses But between approvals from the statehouse and both party committees, the process for upending the shape of the nominating contest and the decades of tradition that define it is not an easy one. President Joe Biden, who holds significant sway over the next primary calendar as the leader of the party, has not weighed in on the debate, and White House press secretary Jen Psaki said earlier this month it was "too soon" and they don't have "any point of view to share" on the outline of the contests yet. PHOTO: Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden, accompanied by his wife Jill Biden, speaks at a primary night election rally in Columbia, S.C., Feb. 29, 2020. (Gerald Herbert/AP, FILE) Biden's own unusual path to the nomination bypassed Iowa and New Hampshire, where his disappointing finishes in the first two states left his campaign on the ropes. It wasn't until the fourth contest in South Carolina, where he earned Clyburn's endorsement and overwhelming support among Black voters in the state that his campaign proved resilient. DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, a former state party chair in South Carolina who was handpicked by Biden to helm the committee, also hasn't signaled which way he's leaning. "Jaime is not going to put his finger on the scale," said Clay Middleton, a Democrat from South Carolina who is close with Harrison and was named a senior adviser at the DNC after the interview. Reid said he thinks the party is open to restructuring the calendar. "Every four years, the DNC looks back at what worked and what didn't work, and the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee will continue to evaluate all areas of our nominating process and make recommendations for any changes," said David Bergstein, a spokesperson for the DNC. A meeting before the powerful Rules and Bylaws committee on the issue has not been scheduled yet, but two Democrats said one is expected later this year, in late summer or early fall. Wilburn, who mentioned he previously spoke with Harrison, said that he is confident Iowa will make a compelling case before the national party and "highlight changes that need to be made to our process." His assessment comes more than a year after Iowa's disastrous caucuses, when the state party was unable to report a winner on caucus night due to technological failures and reporting delays. Iowa has long resisted a major overhaul of its caucus system -- even shifting some blame for last year's breakdown on the DNC's interference -- and Wilburn is no different. He underlined what makes Iowa's caucuses so distinctive -- forcing candidates to rely on intimate one-on-one campaigning, often in living rooms, to reach voters directly -- and asserted that the first four early states taken together are representative of the country. He also pointed to his own history-making election as the first African American to lead an Iowa state party as a sign of the state's diversity. "Whether they win here in Iowa or not, they're better candidates once they've come through here," he told ABC News. For years, the four early states worked together, and across party lines, to maintain their status. The effort in Nevada, though, might strain that alliance and open "a can of worms," said Jeff Kaufmann, the chair of the Iowa Republican Party -- suggesting more states might try to make the leap too. "If you begin to disrupt the carve-out system that we have, and the trust," he said, "they may very well ... hurt the state that they are supposedly trying to stand up for by skipping over." But some Democrats in Iowa are conceding that it might be time for a change. "Being first in the nation is bad for Iowa. For the Democratic Party to reach Iowa voters, win Iowa elections, make Iowa policy and improve the lives of Iowans, it must give up its privileged place on the national nominating calendar," wrote Jason Noble, who was part of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren's campaign in Iowa. The focus, Noble argued, should be on party building inside the state to make gains down the ballot, instead of on "the presidential circus." Inside Nevada, the party's most influential highlight the state's contrasting diversity, with a population that is nearly 30% Latino, increasingly Asian, more urbanized and heavily unionized. They also believe the state represents a broader shift in the power structure towards the West and provides a stronger proving ground for national viability, particularly after the presidential election last fall when a slate of battlegrounds along and in between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada helped deliver the White House for Biden. "If you look at states like Ohio, we're not doing as well there as we used to. But we're doing better in states like Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada," said Alex Goff, a DNC member from Nevada. "I think we need to double down on the West." "Candidates who can win here in Nevada will show real viability around the country," said Reid, who clinched Nevada's No. 3 spot in 2008 and called for the state to jump ahead in the calendar after last year's caucuses. "You win in New Hampshire that doesn't show you're going to win anyplace else." Ray Buckley, the chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, dismissed the idea that his state can't be a test of national electability while also maintaining that regardless of the likely fight ahead, the relationship between the first four states is still "strong." "For years, we heard the argument that New Hampshire is trying to decide who the nominee is, so that's an interesting flip," he said. "We never wanted to be the decider." PHOTO: Attendees hold letters that read 'CAUCUS' during a campaign event for Democratic presidential candidate former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg at Northwest Junior High, in Coralville, Iowa, Feb. 2, 2020. (Matt Rourke/AP, FILE) In South Carolina, Democrats are also prepared to convince national party leaders that they should mark the start of the primary season, although some aren't anticipating a similar move from the state legislature as Nevada. Trav Robertson, Jr., the chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, declined an interview request. MORE: Commanding Biden win in South Carolina resets and recasts primary race: ANALYSIS The argument among some Democrats in the Palmetto State points to not only Biden's success but also the two victories in Georgia, which cemented a Democratic majority in the Senate. As the party looks to expand its political fortunes across the region, some Democrats view the debate over the primary calendar as part of the larger conversation about increasing investments in the South. "We put a lot of effort into history, particularly in Iowa, suggesting it will pick the nominee (Biden) started a new history," said Middleton, the Democrat in South Carolina. "Don't dilute the value that South Carolina has and don't dilute the value that the South has or the diversity of the Democratic Party." Changing the outset of a presidential primary that is still three years away -- and might not even be competitive for Democrats if Biden runs for re-election -- will also have to overcome the GOP's resistance, since they have an interest in keeping their own calendar aligned with Democrats. On the Republican side, Kaufmann said the first four states are in lock step: "without ambiguity ... it is four for all, all for four." Asked about the possibility of misaligned primary calendars between the two parties if Democrats move forward with changes, Kaufmann indicated he would do everything in his power, alongside his Democratic counterparts, to safeguard Iowa's standing -- a rare show of bipartisanship. "Whatever it takes for Iowa to be first-in-the-nation is on the table for me," he said. "But first and foremost of everything, I want to do this with the Democrats." The first 4 early states start scramble to lead 2024 primary calendar originally appeared on abcnews.go.com The National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity under the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) of Ukraine has warned of a cyberattack on the document management system of government bodies, the NSDC's press service has reported. "The National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity under the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine has recorded attempts to disseminate malicious documents through the System of Electronic Interaction of Executive Bodies (SEI EB). The purpose of the attack was the mass contamination of information resources of public authorities, as this system is used for the circulation of documents in most public authorities," the report reads. According to the report, the malicious documents contained a macro that, when opening files, secretly downloaded a program to remotely control a computer. The methods and means of carrying out this cyberattack allow connecting it with a hacker spy group from the Russian Federation. "According to the scenario, the attack belongs to so-called supply chain attacks. It is an attack in which attackers try to gain access to the target organization not directly, but through the vulnerabilities in the tools and services it uses," the NSDC said. According to the report, the most notorious and large-scale attacks of this type were NotPetya, aimed at damaging Ukrainian infrastructure in 2017, and Solorigate Russia's cyber-espionage operation in 2020-2021, which is currently being investigated in the United States. In these cases, the malicious code was spread through distributed software (MeDoc in Ukraine and Solarwinds products in the United States), which was compromised by the attackers. On February 22, the NSDC reported DDoS attacks on the websites of the Ukrainian security and defense sector, the source of which are IP addresses belonging to certain Russian traffic exchange networks. op The event is to begin at noon. Protesters in Kyiv have announced that a new, indefinite rally in support of imprisoned activist Serhiy Sternenko is to start at noon on February 27. They invited supporters to join the protest action over the court ruling and imprisonment of Sternenko, according to an UNIAN correspondent. Read alsoHundreds take to the streets in Kyiv to protest against Sternenko's imprisonment (Photos) Protesters also announced over the loudspeaker that updates regarding the event would be posted on social media. Despite the fact that the February 23 rally was over, some activists started throwing smoke bombs and firecrackers again, the correspondent said. Verdict Odesa's Prymorsky District Court on February 23, 2021, passed a guilty verdict in the case of activist Serhiy Sternenko, who has been convicted of abduction. The ruling provides for seven years and three months in prison and confiscation of half of the convict's property. Sternenko was found guilty of committing criminal offenses under Part 2 of Article 146 (Unlawful imprisonment or kidnapping), Part 2 of Article 187 (Robbery) and Part 1 of Article 263 (Illegal handling of weapons, ammunition or explosives) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The punishment was imposed under Article 187 and Article 263, as the term for criminal prosecution under Article 146 has already expired. Hundreds of people took to the streets in Kyiv in protest against Sternenko's imprisonment on February 23, which was followed by detentions amid clashes with police. The number of detainees grew to 24; they were later released after interrogation. Over 2,000 people took part in the protest event, police said. Sternenko case In 2015, Sternenko's house in the city of Odesa was searched. The activist voluntarily handed to law enforcers his air gun, a collectible knife, and a noise pistol. Investigative actions were carried out on citizen Serhiy Shcherbych's report of his alleged abduction. Shcherbych alleged Sternenko wanted to steal UAH 300 (about US$11 at the current forex rate). After the raid, Sternenko was served with charge papers and put in custody before being bailed out. Later, the activist was also accused of illegal possession of weapons. Several criminal cases have been brought up against Sternenko, including homicide charges over the death of Ivan Kuznetsov, a person identified as one of the attackers who assaulted Sternenko in 2018 in what Sternenko believes were attempts on his life. Reporting by UNIAN Manpower Minister Josephine Teo in Parliament on 5 January 2021. (SCREENCAP: MCI/YouTube) SINGAPORE Manpower Minister Josephine Teo said on Wednesday (24 February) that there is no place for abuse of foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Singapore and called for an end to it. Singapore has to do better to provide the community of support for FDWs, Teo added in a post on her Facebook page. Teo was reacting to the horrific abuse case involving Piang Ngaih Don, a 24-year-old maid from Myanmar, who died after she was killed by her employer Gaiyathiri Murugayan due to repeated choking. "The Government takes the protection of FDWs seriously and will let the law run its course. The suffering and death of Ms Piang should never have happened. Abuse is abhorrent, whoever the victims are. When it involves FDWs, all the more we have to act," Teo said. Gaiyathiri pleaded guilty on Tuesday to 28 charges involving culpable homicide, grievous hurt, hurt, wrongful restraint and criminal intimidation. The prosecution is pushing for a life jail sentence. Piang had 47 external injuries and 31 fresh scars all over her body through repeated abuse. She weighed just 24kg, having lost 38 per cent of her initial weight of 39kg at the time of her death. Gaiyathiris policeman-husband Kevin Chelvam and her mother Prema S Naraynasamy are facing multiple charges of abuse and others. Over the years, the authorities have implemented safeguards such as a settling-in programme for first-time FDWs, so they know who they can approach for help, Teo said. These include the MOM hotline or NGOs such as Centre for Domestic Employees - CDE or Foreign Domestic Worker Association for Social Support and Training - FAST . Employers also need to attend an orientation programme on their roles and responsibilities while the authorities also work with NGOs who engage and look out for the workers. Piang worked in Singapore for less than a year and had attended the settling-in-programme, according to Teo. She was later examined by doctors on at least two occasions, between six and 10 months of her employment. Her employment agency also spoke with her on two separate occasions. Story continues Sadly, on none of these occasions were signs of her distress picked up, said Teo. Even as the case is tried in court, Singapore Ministry of Manpowers (MOM) review to protect FDWs will continue, Teo said. These would include the threshold for blacklisting errant employers, as well as improving measures to detect abuse. We cant do it alone. We appeal to you for help too. If you are aware of any ill-treatment of foreign domestic workers, or foreign domestic workers facing employment or other issues to reach out to Centre for Domestic Employees or FAST for help. FDWs can also call the MOM helpline at 1800 339 5505 to speak to an MOM officer. MOM's statement In a separate statement on Wednesday, MOM said it expressed its deepest sympathies to Piang's next-of-kin. At the time of her death, MOM ensured that a full insurance payout was made to the next-of-kin, consisting of the full death benefit, repatriation cost and a special gratuity payment. CDE had also made a donation to Piang's family and facilitated her brothers visit to Singapore, MOM added. In the first six months of Piangs employment, Chelvam had provided feedback to the employment agent (EA) on communication problems and work performance, MOM said. The EA had offered to replace Piang multiple times, but Chelvam did not take up the offers, according to MOM. During this period, the EA had spoken to Piang on two different occasions but did not pick up on any issues. Chelvam and his family members had previously employed four other FDWs and MOM said it had not received any complaints or adverse feedback from them. "MOM will intensify our efforts to reach out to and interview all new FDWs about their well-being, and also engage with healthcare providers to see how we can support them to identify cases of possible abuse," the ministry said. Stay in the know on-the-go: Join Yahoo Singapore's Telegram channel at http://t.me/YahooSingapore Related story: Prosecutors seek life term for cop's wife who starved and abused maid who died Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. More Information Wear It Well will host two virtual events during the last week of February: I am Black History on Feb. 27 at 11 a.m., and The Heart of the Matter on Feb. 28 at 3 p.m. Both events are designed for the community at large. They can be attended via Zoom. For more information on these events or Wear It Well, visit the organizations website at www.wearitwell.org. Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The 84-member Libyan House of Representatives (Parliament) has called for a plenary session for the vote of confidence for the national unity government chaired by Prime Minister Abdelhamid Al-Dbaiba, an official source said here Wednesday She's been keeping her fans supplied with sun-soaked bikini snaps while working in the Caribbean hotspot over the past three months. And Montana Brown was at it again on Wednesday as she took to Instagram to share a sizzling swimwear snap from Barbados. Writing a heartfelt caption, the Love Island star, 25, admitted that she has never felt more 'grateful, confident and content' as she looks to be more 'open minded' in her life. Work it: Montana Brown was at it again on Wednesday as she took to Instagram to share a sizzling swimwear snap from Barbados as she continues to work in the Caribbean hotspot Montana looked sensational in the photo as she displayed her washboard abs in a tiny blue bikini from her Swim Society range. The reality star styled her brunette locks into a loose hairdo, she added a slick of radiant make-up and oversized black sunglasses. Montana knew how to work her best angles as she posed up a storm on a yacht during another idyllic day in Barbados. Reflective: Writing a heartfelt caption, the Love Island star, 25, admitted that she has never felt more 'grateful, confident and content' as she looks to be more 'open minded' in her life Stunning: She's been keeping her fans supplied with sun-soaked bikini snaps while working in Barbados over the past three months Reflecting on her life, she captioned the photo with: 'Manifesting my life and my future. 'Really looking into learning more about spirituality and being more open minded in my life. I've never felt more grateful, confident and content.' It comes after Montana sent temperatures soaring once again last week as she flaunted her toned figure in a baby blue bikini, highlighting her sizzling physique. The Love Island beauty appeared in good spirits as she beamed for the camera in the idyllic Instagram post, taken during her jaunt to the Carribean. Glowing: It comes after Montana sent temperatures soaring once again last week as she flaunted her toned figure in a baby blue bikini, highlighting her sizzling physique She showcased her taut midriff in the one-shouldered bikini top which featured a cut out section that drew attention to her pert cleavage. Montana sported a matching pair of bikini bottoms that showed off her slender pins as she posed against a palm tree. The TV personality, who was promoting her Swim Society range, covered her tresses with a beige hat and styled her locks in beachy waves. Her skin looked radiant and sun-kissed as she opted for a natural makeup look for the snap. 'Lovely': It comes after Montana thanked her followers for sending her 'lovely messages' and supporting her decision to travel in the midst of a global pandemic Sharing the snap with her 1.3million followers, Montana wrote: 'Oh she's happy' and added a bikini emoji. It comes after Montana thanked her followers for sending her 'lovely messages' and supporting her decision to travel in the midst of a global pandemic. Montana was seen leaning against a wall post as she sported a daisy embroidered one-piece from her swimwear brand, Swim Society. Wow: Montana was seen leaning against a wall post as she sported a daisy embroidered one-piece from her swimwear brand, Swim Society She wrote alongside her stunning snaps: 'Just wanted to say a thanks to everyone's lovely messages. It's hard to know where the line is with posting content and I really don't want to be upsetting anyone. 'I get the odd message with people being quite angry. I travelled well before lockdown, I've stayed out here because I can work from abroad and I started my business last year in lockdown and I'd like to give it a fighting chance to be honest. 'Sending love to you all, I am going to continue posting and again, it's not my intention to be insensitive to anybody as I know this is an awful time for a lot of people. Sending love.' (sic) The shocking moment a group of students went on a rampage at a school for at-risk teens and attacked two tradies has been captured on camera. About 10 students were seen in vision livestreamed to Instagram running wild at the SMYL community college in Rockingham, south-west Perth, on Tuesday after the workers arrived to fix a burst fire hydrant. The two men were subjected to verbal abuse after appearing on site, before the confrontation quickly escalated as students surrounded the two men and started throwing punches after trapping them in a corner. The rowdy students could be heard egging each other on with chants of 'bomb him, bomb that motherf**ker' and 'keep going' while the tradesmen desperately tried to fend for themselves. A group of about 10 students at the SMYL Community College in Rockingham went on a wild rampage on Tuesday after two tradies arrived to fix damage to the school. Pictured, a student captured in footage posted online kicking the front windscreen of the tradies' work car Another student was seen smashing the front windscreen of the tradesmen's work vehicle after jumping on the bonnet amid cries of 'let's smash his car'. Terrified students not involved in the ferocious attack ran for cover, locking themselves in classrooms and hiding under desks as the violence unfolded. Police were forced to intervene after being called to the school about 1:40pm, with officers investigating what exactly sparked the brutal brawl. SMYL Community College director Sam Gowegati said a number of students have since been suspended over the incident, with a probe into their actions underway. The tradesmen were backed into a corner and surrounded by the students who started throwing punches just after lunchtime on Tuesday Police are now investigating what sparked the incident, with a number of students at the school suspended 'It is an atypical event. We're just trying to figure out what happened and what triggered it,' Mr Gowegati told The West Australian. 'A number of students have been currently sent home to decide what their futures are going to be.' Mr Gorwegati said they were reviewing their procedures as under college policy tradesmen were not usually on site during school hours. The Premier said the state had to pull together and make some very difficult choices after the highly contagious UK variant of the virus spread in the Holiday Inn quarantine hotel at Melbourne Airport, infecting staff who then mingled in the community. But Victorians were equal to that challenge, he said. Thats what makes me so proud. No states been through as much as our state I think tomorrow will be a positive day for all ... I will try to get the settings back as close to not New Years Eve but Christmas, a COVID-safe summer setting. I wont commit to it today ... but it will be tomorrow morning. Lets hope tomorrow is the seventh day of zero cases ... and the test number is still strong. Im very confident tomorrow will be a day of good news. Under current restrictions, Victorians are allowed a maximum of five visitors to their homes and public gatherings are limited to 20 people outdoors. The cap on people returning to work currently set at 50 per cent may move to 75 per cent in the public and private sector if restrictions are eased. On a positive note, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is reopening at the Princess Theatre after COVID-19 shut down the show for 11 months. Audience numbers will be capped at 50 per cent on Thursday and Friday due to restrictions from the snap lockdown. If restrictions ease as expected on Friday, the cap will lift to 85 per cent from Saturday. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video The training and credentials of all Victorian doctors and nurses involved in Australias COVID-19 vaccine rollout are being urgently reviewed after two aged care residents in Queensland accidentally received overdoses of the vaccine. Vaccinations in aged care homes are behind schedule just days into the federal governments rollout as an untrained doctor was revealed to have delivered the wrong dose to patients in Brisbanes north. NSW appears to be leading the charge in vaccinating front-line workers. More than 3200 quarantine hotel staff and healthcare workers have received the first doses of the Pfizer vaccine in NSW. A total of 808 vaccine doses were administered in Victoria on Wednesday, up from 675 on Tuesday and 580 on Monday. In total, 2063 vaccine doses have been received in Victoria this week. Mr Andrews said the rollout was a massive, massive logistics task but was ultimately progressing well. Loading Its that sort of slow, steady, gradual work that has to be done so that we get the best outcomes for each of those [vaccine] cohorts and as the program expands, he said. Meanwhile, Victoria has tightened restrictions on travellers from Auckland after more cases emerged in the New Zealand city this week. The Department of Health issued a statement late on Wednesday night saying all flights arriving from Auckland into Victoria would be regarded as red zone arrivals from 11.59pm on Wednesday. The updated advice comes after three more cases emerged in Auckland on Tuesday, believed to be linked to an outbreak on February 14 that plunged the city into a snap three-day lockdown. The statement said anyone arriving into the state from the New Zealand city would have to enter mandatory hotel quarantine for 14 days. Any traveller from Auckland who arrived in Melbourne from Tuesday has been urged to get a COVID-19 test immediately and quarantine until they received a negative result. Mr Andrews said that one flight had arrived from New Zealand since the new advice came into effect. Ambassador of Belarus A.Metelitsa meets the Minister of National Food Security and Research of Pakistan On February 24th, 2021 Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Belarus to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan Andrei Metelitsa met with Federal Minister of National Food Security and Research of Pakistan Said Fakhar Imam. The main topic of discussion was the preparation for the fifth meeting of the Belarusian-Pakistani joint working group on agriculture in Minsk. During the meeting, the parties also exchanged views on the current state and prospects for the development of Belarusian-Pakistani cooperation in the field of agriculture. In particular, the issues of increasing mutual supplies of food products to the markets of the two countries, ensuring the mechanization of agriculture and conducting scientific research in this area were discussed. The interlocutors confirmed their readiness to work together and agreed to maintain contacts to resolve topical issues of cooperation between Belarus and Pakistan. print version Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) The Department of Labor and Employment on Wednesday clarified that it did not intend to treat nurses and other healthcare workers as commodities to be traded in exchange for COVID-19 vaccines from the United Kingdom and Germany. The agency stressed that it merely wants to ensure that the additional workers to be deployed would have already been vaccinated using doses from the requesting country. "Ang gusto lamang na tiyakin ay 'yung ipapadalang mga nurses ay nabakunahan na and the vaccine should come from the host country," DOLE public information head Rolly Francia told the media. "Hindi rin intensyon na ituring na commodity ang ating mga nurses para ibarter with whatever material gain that we may [get]." [Translation: We just want to make sure that the nurses who will be deployed have already been vaccinated and the vaccine should come from the host country. It was not our intention to treat our nurses as commodities that we can barter with whatever material gain we may get.] The labor official added that negotiations are still ongoing between Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III and British Ambassador to the Philippines Daniel Pruce. He said the DOLE might also ask the UK to send more vaccines that would cover overseas Filipino workers returning to the Philippines. "Considering na napakagallante or generous ng pamahalaan ng UK, baka sakali, request lang naman na 'yun, kung magbibigay, dagdagan na lang," said Francia. "Halimbawa kung 5,000 'yung request nilang nurses, alangan naman for 5,000 nurses 'yung vaccine na ibibigay nila, baka kaya magbigay na more than that to cover OFWs who have been repatriated to the Philippines." [Translation: Considering that the UK government is gallant and generous, it is only a request, but maybe they can add vaccines more than for the requested 5,000 nurses, to cover the OFWs who have been repatriated to the Philippines.] In an earlier Senate hearing, Bello said the UK and Germany have requested to remove the 5,000 deployment cap that the Philippine government imposed on its healthcare workers in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two days ago, International Labor Affairs Bureau Director Alice Visperas said Bello set two conditions for this to happen one of which is for their governments to send coronavirus vaccines to the Philippines. Bello's proposal was met with fierce criticism from an organization of nurses. "We are being traded by the government like export products?" the Filipino Nurses United said in a social media post on Tuesday. Visperas added that the other condition is for the UK to revisit and renew the 2002 and 2003 bilateral labor agreements. She said the decision may be finalized this week. The Duterte administration in April 2020 barred nurses, doctors, and other medical workers from leaving the Philippines to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic. The ban was lifted in November, but the government only allowed 5,000 health workers to leave annually. The Philippines has been a labor exporting country since the 1970s, with migrant workers often hailed as modern-day heroes. Remittances from workers overseas boost the local economy and are a big source of disposable income among Filipino families. For the seven banks that have maintained branches in Bethel over the years, the towns residents and businesses have boosted the deposit base by impressive margins, triggering loans that generate income for those banks. The one outlier? A branch in the heart of downtown, where M&T Bank has seen its Bethel deposits plummet more than $50 million since adding the branch five years ago. As it turns out, M&Ts experience in Bethel is no outlier for its half-decade run in Connecticut, which began when after it acquired Hudson City Savings Bank in 2015. M&T is now pursuing the $7.6 billion buy of Peoples United Financial, which has the largest branch office network in Connecticut and trails only Bank of America for deposits. In Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data posted last summer, M&T reported a precipitous drop off in own customer deposits across its nine Connecticut branches, from $888 million as of June 2015 to just under $300 million last year. By comparison, Connecticuts nearly 1,100 remaining bank branches statewide generated a 36 percent increase in deposits over that same five-year stretch. And since assimilating the Hudson City branches, M&Ts own deposits are up 21 percent across more than 750 locations from Virginia to Massachusetts. Whats up with M&T in Connecticut? Banks often make the decision to close branches, whether to phase out of a market or avoid geographic overlap Bank of America closed several in Connecticut over the years, including a branch in Bethel that had $50 million in deposits in 2017 on the eve of being shuttered. But M&T has kept the full slate it picked up in Fairfield County from Hudson City. In announcing the Hudson City acquisition, M&Ts CEO at the time emphasized the branch network as a major factor in the appeal of the deal. One thing weve never focused on is filling out our franchise from a geographical perspective adding pins on the map solely to fulfill someones idea of completeness, said former M&T CEO Bob Wilmers, speaking in 2012 while leading the company through the Hudson City acquisition which took three years to complete amid regulatory scrutiny. However, in this case, in addition [to] making full financial and strategic sense, the geographic fit also works quite well. ... Weve always believed that a strong branch presence is a key component of commercial banking. Deposit data can move significantly depending on how banks assign major commercial and municipal accounts to any single office. And customers otherwise have a say after an acquisition, whether seeking better service and rates or using it as an excuse to shop for a branch closer to home. With the Peoples United deal, M&T picks up 175 offices in Connecticut and close to 250 more in nearby states. While Peoples United plans to close dozens of bank counters in Stop & Shop supermarkets in the coming years, its branches remain familiar sights otherwise in Connecticuts retail corridors. During a Monday conference call, the chief financial officer of M&T highlighted Peoples Uniteds branches but in the context of their proximity to Stop & Shop supermarkets where limited-service branches will close, presumably on the assumption that M&T will be able to hang onto customer relationships through other nearby offices in those communities. In a separate web conference with his M&T workers, CEO Rene Jones emphasized the community relationships he hopes M&T will preserve and expand upon in Peoples United territories. Theres no way we would have the capability to keep all the customers that do business with Peoples today, unless we keep the majority if not all of the customer-facing employees, Jones said. Getting through that together is going to be a lot of work, but it actually also is a lot of fun because we get to introduce ourselves to new people and new communities and new customers. In a Monday interview, Jones counterpart at Peoples United expressed confidence the combined company will offer a stronger set of services for customers. One of the primary reasons that we agreed to pursue this with them was the similarities in culture and the commitment to communities, said Peoples United CEO Jack Barnes. Its one of the strong pieces of this [merger] that gives me a great deal of confidence. ... In many ways, I think because of their strength, theyll do more; theyll make a strong commitment to products, services, low-income housing they really have a great track record there. Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman A virtual event aimed at highlighting the development in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is held in Urumqi on Monday, with more than 300 foreign guests from 200 parties, international organizations, media outlets and think tanks from 80 countries and regions attending. Photo: Courtesy to Cui Zhijian The Party chief of Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region defended China's policy and debunked accusations of "forced labor" and "genocide" in the region at a virtual event on Monday, while representatives from foreign political parties at the event condemned some Western countries for using human rights as a cover to interfere in other countries' domestic affairs. Data, stories and facts they shared at the event were a strong rebuttal to some Western countries' blatant smears of China on Xinjiang-related affairs, especially at the ongoing session of the UN Human Rights Council during which Britain's foreign secretary attacked China on so-called human rights issues in Xinjiang, analysts said. The Monday event, themed "A Better Life for All," focused on how the Communist Party of China (CPC) regional committee of Xinjiang implements various policies to allow local residents to enjoy better lives. More than 300 foreign guests from 200 political parties, international organizations, media outlets and think tanks from 80 countries and regions attended the event. Representatives of Xinjiang residents also shared their stories with foreign guests. Chen Quanguo, secretary of the CPC Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Regional Committee, shared six stories to show Xinjiang's economic development, improvements in local residents' livelihood, ethnic unity, protection of religions and the battle against COVID-19 in the region. Chen said that a 91-year-old Uygur resident in Qiemo county in the Bayingolin Mongolian Autonomous Prefecture is enjoying life with seven sons and daughters, and more than 40 grandchildren. Chen also said that from 2010-2018, the Uygur population in Xinjiang grew by 2.5 million, or 25.04 percent, which is higher than Xinjiang's overall population growth rate (13.99 percent), ethnic minority population growth rate (22.14 percent) and Han population growth rate (2 percent). Chen's story as well as the data he gave refuted claims that "Xinjiang is committing genocide against ethnic groups." What Xinjiang has done is just and transparent and aims to improve the lives of its residents. The claims of "forced labor," "genocide," or "camps" are total slander and calling white black, said Chen. Song Tao, head of the International Department of the CPC Central Committee (IDCPC), said at the event that under the guidance of the CPC, China's Xinjiang has made great achievements in recent years and got rid of poverty at the end of 2020. "But some countries and a small group of people don't want to see the good situation in Xinjiang under the guise of human rights, they are attacking China's policies in Xinjiang and trying to sow discord between China and Islamic states," Song said, noting that no matter how the small fraction of people slandered, they would not stop Xinjiang's development. The event was jointly held by the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (IDCPC) and the CPC regional committee of Xinjiang. It was part of a series of activities held by the department on "Stories of CPC" to explain the CPC's practices and achievements across China to the international community. The Global Times has learned that the timing of the event has special meaning: it was the first thematic briefing held by the IDCPC in 2021 - the year that marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CPC. The 46th UN Human Rights Council also opened on Monday. At the 46th regular session of the Human Rights Council that opened on Monday, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, in a recorded speech, accused China of torture, forced labor and sterilizations that he said were taking place against Uygurs on an "industrial scale" in Xinjiang. Raab called for UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet or another independent expert to be given "urgent and unfettered access" to Xinjiang and said that there should be a resolution at the council to this effect. Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the UN Human Rights Council on Monday that Xinjiang-related issues are in essence about countering violent terrorism and separatism. Basic facts show there has never been a so-called "genocide" and "forced labor" in Xinjiang. Such inflammatory accusations are fabricated out of ignorance and prejudice. They are simply malicious and politically-driven hypes, and couldn't be further from the truth. The door to Xinjiang is always open. China also welcomes the High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit Xinjiang, Wang said at the UN HRC. Many party leaders who attended Xinjiangs event via video link also shared their views of Xinjiang's economic development and achievements in poverty alleviation, and refuted rumors of "forced labor" and "genocide" of ethnic groups. Representatives from more than 100 political parties from Islamic countries also attended the online briefing, showing their interest, understanding and support for China and using the platform to strengthen the exchange of experiences in governance. Chinese officials said the briefing, held at the beginning of the year marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CPC and the first year for implementing the country's 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), demonstrates the openness and confidence of Xinjiang. Tep Ngorn, a member of Central Standing Committee of Cambodian People's Party and 2nd Vice President of the Senate, said at the event that there is no one-fit-for-all way to deal with human rights issues, but human rights should not be used as an excuse to interfere with other countries' domestic affairs. Some countries with malicious purposes are defaming the CPC's image by hyping Xinjiang related topics, a move that is despicable and should be firmly opposed, Tep Ngorn said, noting that he spoke highly of China's efforts to help the development of ethnic groups as well as their cultures. The cultures and languages of ethnic groups have been preserved in the Xinjiang region and the Chinese government has set an example to the international community in protecting ethnic minorities, Turkish Patriotic Party chairman Dogu Perincek said in an interview on the sidelines of the event. In response to claims of genocide in the Xinjiang region, Perincek said that they are lies made by Western countries and are the opposite of the truth. The Turkish politician said that forced labor and genocide are conspiracies made by the US and the West for political purposes. We condemn the deeds of interfering with other countries domestic affairs and we Turkish people stand with the Chinese people, he said. [February 24, 2021] HilltopSecurities Welcomes Brian Connery to Fixed Income Capital Markets Hilltop Securities Inc. (HilltopSecurities) recently welcomed Brian Connery to its Fixed Income Capital Markets division in Dallas as director and municipal trader, reporting to Todd Bleakney, senior managing director, co-head of Debt Capital Markets. "HilltopSecurities is excited to have Brian as a new member of our team," said Bleakney. "He's an accomplished municipal finance professional, covering financial modeling and trading for high yield securities and other fixed income products. His years of experience will help us continue expanding our client base and the services we provide as a leading municipal investment bank." Connery brings 14 years of financial services experience to his role. He joins from Morgan Stanley where he served as vice president and high yield trader for their Municipal Fixed Income group. Prior to his time there, Connery worked with Citigroup as vice president of municipal fixed income, specializing in credit analytics and structured products. "My career has taken me to seeral large firms, which have helped enhance my capabilities and understanding of each municipal sector," said Connery. "I'm proud to join HilltopSecurities. Not only are they an established, respected, and growing company, their professionals share my appetite for developing creative structures and innovative financial solutions to benefit the communities our public finance clients serve." Connery received a bachelor's in finance with an emphasis on financial accounting from the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. About HilltopSecurities Hilltop Securities Inc. delivers forthright advice and tailored solutions for municipal issuers, institutions, broker-dealers, and individuals. The full-service municipal investment bank and registered investment adviser is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with offices across the United States. Areas of focus include public finance; municipal and taxable fixed income underwriting, sales, and trading; retail brokerage services; securities clearing; structured finance; and securities lending. A wholly owned subsidiary of Hilltop Holdings Inc. (NYSE: HTH), HilltopSecurities' affiliates include Momentum (News - Alert) Independent Network Inc., PlainsCapital Bank, and PrimeLending. Learn more at www.HilltopSecurities.com. Member: NYSE/FINRA/SIPC. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224006000/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] WASHINGTON - Lawmakers were awaiting a key ruling from Senate officials Wednesday on whether President Joe Biden's proposed $15-an-hour minimum wage can remain in his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill. Top Senate aides from both parties huddled with the Senate parliamentarian Wednesday morning to advance arguments about whether the minimum wage increase would be allowable under the complex Senate rules that will govern consideration of the legislation. A ruling from the parliamentarian was expected as soon as Wednesday evening or Thursday. Meanwhile House Democrats were preparing to advance the $1.9 trillion relief bill on Friday, and intend to include the minimum wage increase regardless of its ultimate fate in the Senate. The minimum wage increase has emerged as a flashpoint, but it's just one piece of a wide-ranging piece of legislation that also includes a new round of $1,400 stimulus checks to individuals, an extension of emergency unemployment benefits, $130 billion for schools, $350 billion for cities and states, and tens of billions of dollars for vaccines, testing and help for the health-care system. "I expect that the House Democratic Caucus is going to strongly support the American Rescue Plan. We remain hopeful that the $15 minimum wage increase, which takes place gradually over a period of four years, will be made in order," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries, N.Y. "The notion that we have people working for $7.25 an hour, which is the current federal minimum wage, is egregious in the context of all the wealth that exists in this country," Jeffries said. The relief bill, which is Biden's first major legislative initiative, is looking unlikely to receive any Republican support. House Republican leaders slammed it Wednesday as a "$1.9 trillion liberal wish-list filled with extraneous provisions such as the minimum wage increase and a "bailout" to blue states such as California. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated recently that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 would cost 1.4 million jobs and increase the deficit by $54 billion over 10 years, but it also would lift 900,000 people out of poverty. "Who said a $15 minimum wage - that estimates say would kill over $50 billion in economic activity and jobs in America - has anything to do with covid?" asked House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La. The $15 minimum wage increase faces two potential problems in the Senate. Democrats are pushing the relief bill forward under a "budget reconciliation" process that allows it to pass with a simple majority vote, instead of the 60 normally required. That means no GOP support is necessary if the 50 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus hang together. If they do, Vice President Harris could break a tie in favor of the bill. But under the rules of "budget reconciliation," provisions that increase deficits over the long term or don't have a significant budgetary impact, among other limitations, are not permitted. Many Democrats including Biden himself have suggested they don't think the minimum wage increase will meet certain of those criteria. That decision is up to the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough. Even if MacDonough were to determine the minimum wage hike could remain in the bill, two Senate Democrats - Joe Manchin III, W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) -- have indicated they oppose it, suggesting it won't have the votes to stay in the bill. Manchin has suggested he would like to amend the bill to bring the minimum wage increase down to $11 an hour. White House press secretary Jen Psaki declined to say Wednesday whether Biden would sign a bill with an $11 minimum wage instead of the $15 he initially opposed. Liberals including Senate Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., are pushing hard for the $15-an-hour figure. "The president proposed an increase in the minimum wage in his package, that's what he wants to be in the final package," said Psaki. "He also was in the Senate for 36 years and has great respect for the parliamentary process. We're gonna see that through. Once that's concluded we can all talk further about the next steps." Thank you for reading! 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Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / Core One Labs Inc. (CSE:COOL)(OTC PINK:CLABF)(Frankfurt:LD62)(WKN:A2P8K3) (the "Company" or "Core One") a research and technology company focused in life sciences and on bringing psychedelic medicines to market through novel delivery systems and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy is pleased to announce it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire (the "Transaction") Ketamine Infusion Centers of Texas Inc. (KICT), a US based health and wellness Ketamine Clinic. The Transaction is the first health and wellness operation for the Company in the United States. The acquisition of KICT allows the company to establish a roster of patients in Texas for psychedelic assisted psychotherapy utilizing our novel delivery system and API grade psilocybin, upon legalization. KICT was established to address the growing problem of depression and other mental health issues that plague society. KICT's goal is to be known as a center of excellence in the management of treatment-resistant depression. KICT strives to achieve this by providing unparalleled and individualized care based on the uniqueness of each of its patients. KICT offers Ketamine treatments to individuals suffering from depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. KICT combines their medical expertise with their passion to help patients reach optimal levels of health and vitality through intravenous therapy services and wellness programs. Ketamine clinics are on the cutting edge of mental health and addictions medicine and with over 100 Ketamine clinics operating in the US, its increasing use in the treatment of depression, anxiety, OCD, and PTSD, represents a significant paradigm shift. Ketamine, a Schedule III substance under the U.S. Controlled Substances Act, is garnering significant acceptance, and is supported by a growing body of research, for its affective use in the treatment of mood disorders and addictions. In addition to Ketamine, the psychotropic compound, psilocybin, is also witnessing increased support as an alternative medicine, and various cities in the United States, including Denver, Colorado, Oakland and Santa Cruz, California, Ann Arbor, Michigan as well as Somerville, Massachusetts have decriminalized its use. In the state of Oregon, legislators have gone so far as to legalize psilocybin outright. This rapid shift of regulations on psychedelics is very promising for the field of mental health and addictions, and the Company foresees many opportunities for growth and advancement. A new market study by Data Bridge Market Research indicates that the legal U.S. psychedelic drug market is projected to grow at 16.3% CAGR during the period of 2020 to 2027 noting that the market is expected to reach approximately $6.8 billion by 2027, up from $2 billion in 2019. In addition, the report highlights the growing acceptance of psychedelic drugs for treating depression, along with the increasing prevalence of depression and mental disorders as significant factors driving such growth. "I am very excited about establishing a footprint in the US through the acquisition of KICT. Their world-class team of physicians with years of experience in delivering psychedelic and wellness treatments at KICT will be a great addition to our Core One Team. We intend to collaborate with the KICT team as we move our IP and patentable psilocybin process forward with our team at Vocan. Our goal is to expand into several new locations in the US this year, where decreased regulations surrounding psychedelics have created a rapidly growing market." stated Joel Shacker CEO of the Company. Acquisition Details On February 18, 2021, the Company entered into a purchase agreement (the "Definitive Agreement") to acquire KICT. Pursuant to the Definitive Agreement, the Company will (i) issue 210,000 common shares of the Company (the "Consideration Shares") to the current interest holders of KICT in exchange for all of their interests in KICT (the "Transaction"). The Company also anticipates paying a finder's fee of 21,000 common shares to a third-party who introduced the Transaction to the Company (the "Finder's Shares"), as well as 2,100 common shares as an administration fee to each of two parties that provided administrative support in connection with the Transaction. The Consideration Shares are subject to a voluntary pooling arrangement, which will prevent the holders thereof from trading the shares until February 14, 2022. The Finder's Shares will be subject to a four-month hold from the date of issuance pursuant to the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange. Closing of the Transaction is subject to a number of conditions typical for a transaction of this nature, and readers are cautioned that completion of the Transaction cannot be completed unless such conditions are satisfied. The Company is at arms-length from KICT and its interest holders. The Transaction will not constitute a fundamental change for the Company, nor is it expected to result in a change of control of the Company, within the meaning of applicable securities laws and the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange. About Core One Labs Inc. Core One Labs Inc. is a research and technology company focused in life sciences and on bringing psychedelic medicines to market through novel delivery systems and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. The Company has developed a patent pending thin film oral strip (the "technology") which dissolves instantly when placed in the mouth and delivers organic molecules in precise quantities to the bloodstream, maintaining excellent bioavailability. With this technology, the Company intends to further develop its IP technology to focus on delivering psychedelic molecules with an initial focus on psilocybin. Core One also holds an interest in walk-in medical clinics which maintain a database of over 200,000 patients combined. Through research and development in these clinics, including the integration of its intellectual property related to psychedelic treatments and novel drug therapies, the Company intends to work towards regulatory approval for research that advances psychedelic-derived treatments for mental health disorders. Core One Labs Inc. Joel Shacker Chief Executive Officer FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT: info@core1labs.com 1-866-347-5058 Cautionary Disclaimer Statement: The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release. Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions, and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. The Company 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 the Company's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to the Company's limited operating history and the need to comply with strict regulatory regulations. 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, the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information. In addition, psilocybin is currently a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (Canada) and it is a criminal offence to possess substances under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (Canada) without a prescription or authorization. Health Canada has not approved psilocybin as a drug for any indication. Core One Labs does not have any direct or indirect involvement with illegal selling, production, or distribution of psychedelic substances in jurisdictions in which it operates. While Core One Labs believes psychedelic substances can be used to treat certain medical conditions, it does not advocate for the legalization of psychedelics substances for recreational use. Core One Labs does not deal with psychedelic substances, except within laboratory and clinical trial settings conducted within approved regulatory frameworks. SOURCE: Core One Labs Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631506/Core-One-Labs-Finalizes-Deal-to-Acquire-Ketamine-Infusions-Centers-of-Texas-Entering-the-US-Market-for-Psychedelic-Treatments Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., listens during the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hearing on her nomination to be Interior Secretary, Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Lawmakers in at least 23 states, often encouraged by vaccine skeptics, have proposed banning employers from requiring workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or other infectious diseases. Most bills are sponsored by Republicans, who say employees shouldnt have to choose between getting a shot and staying employed. I just kind of like the idea of personal freedom, and thats one of my biggest things as a legislator, said Republican state Sen. Dennis Kruse, who sponsored one such bill in Indiana. Although vaccines protect individuals and communities from disease outbreaks, online disinformation has turbocharged some peoples concerns about vaccine safety and potential mandates in recent years. Some anti-vaccine activists have spread false information about the science and public policy surrounding immunizations. Yet despite lobbying from anti-vaccine groups, often known as anti-vaxxers, the employer mandate bills are unlikely to pass, experts say. Thats because the proposals threaten employers legal obligation to maintain a safe workplace and could put the lives of workers, customers and patients at risk. Federal guidance issued in December allows employers to require that their workers get COVID-19 vaccines, although they must accommodate employees religious objections and also make sure vaccine requirements dont discriminate against employees with disabilities. Accommodating a religious objection could involve changing an unvaccinated workers job duties to maintain a safe workplace. For instance, employers could ask workers who refuse immunization to work remotely or wear protective gear. STATELINE STORY February 10, 2021: Vaccine Signups Cater to the Tech-Savvy, Leaving Out Many Kruses bill would have applied to all vaccines, not just COVID-19, which particularly alarmed public health experts. The main concern is that this applies to all vaccines in all contexts, Patrick Glew, a program manager for the Indiana Immunization Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for vaccinations, said when he testified against Kruses bill in January. If you do not have to get a vaccine for these [diseases] as a hospital worker, as a doctor, as a nurse, as somebody who works in health care, youre not only making a decision for yourself, Glew said. Youre making a decision for everyone else you treat, too. Youre putting them at risk. Nationwide, the bills could face opposition from both business and public health groups, said Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Thats exactly what happened in Indiana, where the state Chamber of Commerce, health care groups and public health experts all opposed Kruses bill. His legislation also would have allowed workers who had been punished by their employers for refusing a vaccine to sue for damages. Related from Insurance Journal: Insurance Implications of Required Vaccines Republican state Sen. Phil Boots, who co-sponsored the bill, killed it last week by declining to bring it up for a committee vote. There was simply not enough support for the bill to move forward in the legislative process, he said in an email to Stateline. Many of my colleagues felt that federal exemptions are adequate and that the bill went too far in the potential employer penalties. A similar bill in North Dakota has failed, and most of the other bills have yet to receive serious consideration. But vaccine skeptics say theyre not giving up. We are just getting started, said Ashley Grogg, founder of Hoosiers for Medical Liberty, a group that represents vaccine skeptics and worked with Kruse on his bill. Theres going to be more to come next year. Fear of Mandates Neither states nor the federal government require the general public be vaccinated against any disease, though states require children to be vaccinated against diseases such as polio and measles before they go to public school, daycare and often private institutions, too. Even then, states often allow families to opt out of vaccination requirements for medical reasons or because they have religious or philosophical objections. Some states also require vaccinations for college students and certain health care workers, also with exemptions. Before the pandemic, most businesses didnt require workers to get immunized. The exceptions included some hospitals and health care settings that serve people with weak immune systemssuch as newborns, cancer patients or older adultsfor whom an infection could be fatal. STATELINE STORY May 10, 2019: Amid Measles Outbreak, Little Effort to Kill Vaccine Exemptions So far only a smattering of employers, such as some nursing homes, are requiring workers to get the new COVID-19 vaccines. The vaccines arent yet widely available to the general population. Still, some vaccine skeptics worry about the small number of people whove suffered allergic reactions to COVID-19 vaccines and want more data on its long-term effects. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported rates of fewer than five cases of anaphylactic shock per million doses, and recipients are monitored for 15 minutes after receiving a shot. Anti-vaccine activists also point to examples of people refusing vaccines and getting firedsuch as a recent case where a Wisconsin nursing home laid off staff who declined immunizationsand say that workers should be able to refuse a vaccine for personal reasons, not just religious or medical reasons. In a January survey released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that researches national health issues, 53% of respondents who said they will definitely not get the vaccine either believed or were unsure about three common myths: that the vaccine contains the live COVID-19 virus, that the vaccine causes infertility or that people must pay for the vaccine. None of those is true. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given COVID-19 vaccines emergency, not permanent approval. That gives people reason to be cautious, said Grogg of Hoosiers for Medical Liberty. This is still an experimental treatment, or vaccine, and thats not something that should be required. Groggs group also wants to make it easier for workers to opt out of vaccines that have gone through the FDAs permanent approval process, such as flu vaccines. Public health experts note that millions of COVID-19 shots have been given with few ill effects. More than 43 million people have received at least one vaccine dose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Were seeing very few significant side effects, and the significant side effects that have arisenits like somewhere between three and five cases out of every million shots, said Ross Silverman, a professor at Indiana Universitys Fairbanks School of Public Health and McKinney School of Law. Republican voters are less likely to trust vaccines, polls show, which helps explain why GOP lawmakers are more likely to author bills that let people reject the immunizations. While nearly two-thirds of Democrats said theyve either already been vaccinated against COVID-19 or plan to get vaccinated as soon as possible, just a third of Republicans have been vaccinated or are eager to be vaccinated, according to the Kaiser survey. Nearly 1 in 10 Republicans said theyd only get vaccinated if required to, the survey found, and 25% said they would definitely not get the COVID-19 vaccine. STATELINE STORY January 13, 2021: Many States Resist Adapting Worker Safety Rules to Pandemic There is a wait and see attitude across demographics. Young adults ages 18-29 (43%) are more likely to want to wait and see how the vaccine works before getting it themselves; just 21% of adults ages 65 and older say the same. The same survey found that Black adults (43%) and Hispanic adults (37%) are more likely than White adults (26%) to say they will wait and see; all three groups have seen an increase in willingness to be vaccinated since a similar survey in December. The survey found that the increased enthusiasm is among Democrats and independents; Republicans have not shifted their views significantly. Wisconsin state Sen. Andre Jacque, the Republican sponsor of a bill that would block employers from requiring COVID-19 vaccinations, said that while he supports vaccines and gets his recommended shots, he thinks workers should have a choice. Their choice of whether or not to receive a COVID-19 vaccine should not put their ability to make a living and provide for their family at risk, he said. Jacque also has authored legislation that would ban state and local governments from requiring COVID-19 vaccinations. Some Democrats agree. Maryland state Del. Nick Charles, a Democrat, has sponsored a bill that would prohibit employers from firing workers for refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19. This is definitely not an anti-vaxxer bill. Its none of that, Charles said. He said he wants as many people as possible to get vaccinated and that hes already been vaccinated himself. But realistically, he said, some frontline workers in the mostly Black community he represents dont want to get vaccinated or are unsure about it, and he wants to protect them. STATELINE STORY December 8, 2020: Health Care Workers Can Decline a COVID-19 ShotFor Now Charles, who is Black, said its important that lawmakers discuss the bill now, in case Maryland employers start requiring vaccines later this year when the shots become widely available. While we have the power during session, I want to make sure we put something on the books, he said. Some unions, such as the Service Employees International Union, which represents hundreds of thousands of home care aides and frontline health workers, also argue employers shouldnt require vaccinations. Tough Opposition Jacques employer mandate bill was folded into the Wisconsin legislatures COVID-19 relief package, which Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed this month in part because it prevented businesses from requiring vaccinations. Bills in other states havent even made it to a committee vote, for a variety of reasons including opposition from business groups and public health experts. The Indiana Chamber of Commerce opposed Kruses bill because it could interfere with employers legal duty to provide a safe workplace and because it would let workers sue their employers if they faced consequences at work for refusing vaccines. Does the employees right supersede the employers right to provide that safe environment? asked Mike Ripley, the chambers vice president for health care policy and employment law, during the January hearing. Most U.S. employers arent likely to require COVID-19 vaccines anyway. Sixty percent of employers recently surveyed by the Society of Human Resource Managers, a Washington, D.C.-based association of human resources professionals, said they dont plan on requiring vaccinations. Even health care employers are hesitant to establish mandates. Nursing home and assisted living leaders in Indiana are encouraging, rather than requiring, employees to be vaccinated because they know some workers are wary, said Zach Cattell, president of the Indiana Health Care Association, a trade group that represents such facilities. At the same time, he said, long-term care employers know workers who refuse the vaccine put one another and their clients at risk. The balance of those issues is not easy to sort through, he said. About 41% of all people who have died from COVID-19 in Indiana lived or worked in long-term care facilities, according to The New York Times. The best way to keep workplaces safe from COVID-19 and other diseases is to encourage workers to get vaccinated and make it easy for them to do so, such as by hosting vaccine clinics, said Silverman of Indiana University. He said employers should also think holistically about safety, such as by providing protective equipment. Vaccination mandates, he said, risk a backlash. Thats really where I think most of the conversations should be leaning, is how can you make workplaces safe as a system, he said, rather than trying to create a requirement for vaccination. Employers are already thinking that way, said Tracy Billows, co-managing partner of the Chicago office of Seyfarth Shaw LLP, a law firm with posts in over 170 countries. Billows has been tracking vaccine mandate bills for her firms clients. I have to be honest with you, she said. Many employers think theyre going to get a much better participation rate from it being voluntary. Source: Republished with permission from Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts. When someone is involved in an accident, the sighting will only be known if there are authorities who search the person in the area. Through the use of several features, saving a life could be made easier than before. In line with this, Google Pixel's surprising feature called the Car Crash Detection will make the incidents more searchable like in the case of a man who was trapped when his automobile crashed into a pit. How Did Google Pixel Save This Man's Life? According to a report by 9to5 Google, the news erupted through the Reddit discussion forum when the man, identified as Chuck Walker, narrated how the Google Phone saved his life in a vehicular accident. Walker, who is also known in Reddit as @postnospam, said that the incident happened around late-November when he was cruising with his Bobcat loader en route to Missouri. However, the vehicle stumbled to a pit, and he continued to plunge towards it. He was trapped inside the skid loader and he could not find any means to get out of it. Walker also sustained seven broken ribs and four injuries in his center spine. At the moment, he was unconscious for eight minutes. Walker, however, had his Google Pixel 4 XL which acted as a life-saver through its feature called Car Crash Detection. Even though he was unconscious at the time, the device made its own way to activate the alarm by calling 911. After some moment, Walker came back to his senses and tried to call for help. From his earbud which was connected to the Bluetooth, he heard that a dispatcher was able to communicate with him. The said person forwarded a message to the rescuers where Walker was found. It only took a few minutes before the people from the Southern Platte Fire Protection District came to the rescue to pull him out of the vehicle. Read Also: Google Pixel 6: Price, Release Date, Features and MORE As former emergency personnel, Walker surmised that what he sustained may not be that serious, however, they still need a long time before they get back to their normal form, specifically in the case of his broken bones. Truly, the Pixel's feature was a big help for Walker because if it was not for it, he would be screaming for hours given that the accident happened on a private property, which is not an ideal place to trespass. The same report also said that Walker could have suffered hypothermia, where the body temperature steadily drops low. In addition, the threat of the leaking fuel could ignite a fire, so that will be another problem that he has to deal with. How to Turn On the Car Crash Detection in Your Google Pixel? If you have a Pixel smartphone and you want to enable the feature, follow these steps: Go to the Safety app Click the settings Click 'Car Crash Detection' to enable it. Previously, the feature is only available in Pixel 4 phones, but now it also supports Pixel 3, Pixel 4a, Pixel 4a 5G, and Pixel 5. According to the Reddit user named @gshirodkar, the feature is under the Safety App which both asks for details like availability of microphone and location. Walker is a type of person who does not want to give any personal information when using his phone, so what happened could be a blessing in disguise for him. The feature has really saved his life. Related Article: This Could Be What The Google Pixel 4 Looks Like This article is owned by Tech Times. Written by Joen Coronel 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. For nearly a year, the Washington Post has promoted the false claim that COVID-19 is a man-made virus released from Chinas Wuhan Institute of Virology. This campaign went into overdrive on February 5, when the Post published an editorial embracing the position of the Trump State Department that a laboratory accident or leak represents a plausible explanation for the pandemic. A view of the P4 lab inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology is seen after a visit by the World Health Organization team in Wuhan in China's Hubei province on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) That editorial was published under the headline, Were still missing the origin story of this pandemic. China is sitting on the answers. It called on the World Health Organization (WHO) team exploring the origins of the virus not to discount the Trump administrations claim that COVID-19 was a weaponized virus that originated in a Chinese lab. But the WHO team did exactly that, making clear that the Wuhan lab theory did not meet its evidentiary criteria for further investigationa polite way of saying that it is a lie. The WHOs statements have clearly thrown the Post into crisis. The newspaper, which regularly promotes internet censorship in the guise that only authoritative sources such as itself should be accessible to the public, found itself exposed and at odds with the entire authoritative scientific community. The Posts response to the WHOs findings took the form of a February 22 editorial titled, The US should reveal its intelligence about the Wuhan laboratory, which places the burden on the US government to back up the newspapers own assertions about the man-made origins of COVID-19. The Post writes: When a World Health Organization team recently wrapped up its initial investigative visit to Wuhan, the team leader said the laboratory leak scenario was highly unlikely. However, State Department spokesman Ned Price said Feb. 9 that the Biden administration would draw on information collected and analyzed by our own intelligence community to evaluate the report from the WHO. Mr. Price emphasized the need for full transparency. Full transparency is needed from China but also from the United States. The intelligence behind Mr. Pompeos statements should be declassified, with proper protection for sources and methods. The truth matters, and the United States should not hide any relevant evidence. This seemingly even-handed presentation conceals a damning admission. It is a tacit acknowledgment that the Post does not possess a shred of evidence to back up its previous claims that the release of the virus is a plausible scenario. In fact, this is as close as possible to a climb-down the newspaper could make, while still placing the universally accepted natural origins of the virus at the same level as Trumps conspiracy theory. The fact is that the Post has been caught in a lie. The newspaper insists on claiming the Wuhan lab theory is a viable explanation for the pandemic, even as it asks for proof from the US government to back up its own claims of a man-made origin of the virus. In early to mid-2020, when far-right conspiracy theorists first began circulating claims about the man-made origins of the disease, they were universally debunked. Asked in May, Do you believe or is there evidence that the virus was made in the lab in China?, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci declared, A number of very qualified evolutionary biologists have said that everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that it evolved in nature and then jumped species. In March, USA Today published a fact check of the claim that the coronavirus began in a Chinese laboratory. It concluded, We rate this claim FALSE, based on our research. Overwhelming scientific evidence suggests the coronavirus originated in nature, and there is no evidence to suggest otherwise. In the face of these categorical statements, the Post set out to rehabilitate the Wuhan lab narrative. On April 14, Post columnist Josh Rogin published an op-ed giving the newspapers imprimatur to the Trump administrations false claims that COVID-19 emerged from a laboratory. Under the headline, State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses, Rogin wrote, One senior administration official told me that the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan. He quoted the senior official as saying, Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and theres almost nothing on the other side. Tellingly, when the full diplomatic cable referenced by Rogin was released in July, the Post itself concluded, The full cable does not strengthen the claim that an accident at the lab caused the virus to escape. Any reading of the cable makes clear it says nothing like Rogins interpretation. Instead, it makes clear that a shortage of qualified staff had precluded the lab from operating at full capacity and importing highly contagious diseases. The release of the cable did nothing to discourage the Post, and it doubled down on its claims, culminating in the February 5 editorial. After its false assertions have been totally exposed before the public, the Post cannot make an honest accounting of its own claims, and it cannot admit that it was peddling lies. Instead, its demand is that the US government prove the newspapers own allegations! The promotion of the Wuhan lab conspiracy theory expresses the deep crisis of the entire US political establishment. Facing mounting social opposition at home, the US ruling elite desperately needs to manufacture an external enemy. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the breakdown of American imperialisms efforts to secure its global hegemony, raising the prospect of a military solution to Chinas rise. But however much the Wuhan lab conspiracy theory may be necessary for US imperialism, it faces one major problemit is an obvious lie from beginning to end, staining everyone who promotes it. In this swamp of lies, conspiracy theories and social breakdown, one thing is clear. The Washington Post stands exposed as a purveyor of false and discredited propaganda. Its claim to be an authoritative source, standing above what it calls fake newsa term that it helped coin to discredit left-wing political oppositionis in tatters. Following intense scrutiny of two fatal crashes and a spate of recent shootings, Mayor London Breed and San Franciscos law enforcement agencies said Wednesday theyll improve communication about repeat offenders and gun violence. The proposals include a commitment from the police to notify the district attorney when people have been arrested repeatedly for crimes like residential burglaries and car break-ins. The city will also receive a $1.5 million state grant to beef up a violence intervention program. To confront the public safety challenges we face in San Francisco, we all need to acknowledge where we are falling short and where we can work together to do more, Breed said in a joint statement, with Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, police Chief Bill Scott, District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Adult Probation Chief Karen Fletcher. These reforms come in the wake of several high-profile cases in which officials admitted that the police, the District Attorneys Office and the state parole system didnt work together well. Critics asked if tragedies could have been prevented with better communication. Business groups and neighborhood associations have also slammed the city over the recent events and asked for closer collaboration. The most scrutinized incident was a deadly New Years Eve hit-and-run in which the suspect, Troy McAlister, was on parole. That case ignited sharp criticism of Boudin, whose office had not filed charges against McAlister despite several arrests in the months prior to the crash that left two women dead. Boudin has said he referred the incidents to state parole. The announcement also comes after a driver suspected of causing a fatal eight-car collision in San Francisco while intoxicated and driving a stolen vehicle was on supervised release from prison and facing charges in another San Francisco DUI case from December. Police have already begun sharing with prosecutors lists of people they believe to be San Franciscos most prolific offenders, but theyve come infrequently and could contain better data, Boudin said. To date, the District Attorneys Office has received two such lists, the most recent on Feb. 1 with about 36 names. Going forward, we hope to receive lists on a more regular basis, and lists that include people who are under active investigation, Boudin said. In the past, the list largely included people who are already in custody, and/or already on high levels of pretrial supervision. Rudy Valintino, the founder and executive director of United Playaz, a San Francisco violence prevention organization, said the spike in crime lately has been overwhelming. While hes glad the agencies said they will work together more, hes skeptical at the difference it will make without more collaboration with those living and working on the ground. Well see when it happens, he said of the new initiatives. There is only so much that the police can do. They are overwhelmed with all of the incidents that are going down, and they cant be everywhere at all times. They just need to get the communitys support. Miyamoto said his office is beginning to share information with the District Attorneys Office when someone who is supervised with an electronic monitor either cuts off the device, allows it to run out of batteries or travels out of bounds. This gives prosecutors needed information before the defendant is brought before a judge again. Miyamoto said this type of information sharing is not new, but had fallen by the wayside as law enforcement officials tried to keep jail populations as low as possible due to the pandemic. He said its now something were reassessing. According to Wednesdays statement, the city will hire two additional prosecutors who will focus on communication and coordination between the departments. Other commitments outlined include stronger communication between the citys law enforcement agencies and the district attorney on specific suspects and whether they should be considered for detention. For example, the police could warn the district attorney if someone who has been arrested has a history of noncompliance with previous court orders or if they are trying to build a case against that suspect. This is the kind of collaboration that some community groups have been calling for. After a string of crimes in Hayes Valley, the neighborhood association sent a strongly worded letter to city leadership this month chiding them for finger-pointing from one agency to another, and from one elected official to another. District Attorney Boudin said he is pleased that the agencies will coordinate, rather than continue working in silos. Meanwhile, the city will also receive a $1.5 million California Violence Intervention and Prevention Grant over the next three years to help increase on-the-ground resources to help prevent and respond to gun violence. The funding comes after six people were recently shot in the Bayview and three in the Tenderloin in two incidents. Police are investigating whether the two shootings were related. The grant will help fund San Franciscos Street Violence Intervention Program, which provides those most at risk of gun violence with mentorship, guidance, and a path forward that does not involve violence, according to the statement. Valintino, of the United Playaz, said community efforts like the Street Violence Intervention Program are the true frontline soldiers. Instead of putting $1.5 million, they need to put $5.5 million into it, he said. They have saved so many lives and stopped so many shootings and killings that the police dont get to, and that people dont know about. Trisha Thadani and Megan Cassidy are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com, megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani, @meganrcassidy From abstract expressionist masterpieces to perfect portrayals of the real world, artificial intelligence (AI) can create artworks that are indistinguishable from pieces painted by humans, a new study reveals. In online surveys, around 200 humans were unable to suss the human-made artworks from the artificial art, the US author reports. AI art is created by machine learning algorithms that are trained with many thousands of images of real paintings. The more images of a particular style or aesthetic that the algorithm analyses, the more human-like the results can be, down to fine details like brushstrokes. Despite AI paintings already selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds, replicating artistic human emotion appears to be the final frontier for technology. Can you tell the difference between a human-made and an AI-made artwork? There are seven paintings included from the research paper, labelled A to G (E, F and G are below). Find out the answers at the bottom of this article However, the study author thinks it may not be long until computers can produce random and unpredictable pieces that move people emotionally. 'Creativity and the creative process is the last remaining frontier where humans still hold the edge,' study author Harsha Gangadharbatla, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, told the Times. 'If computers are producing something that humans implicitly think of as human, as the quintessence of what it is to be a human, then what does it mean to be us?' 'The big question is can we "algorithmise" emotion?' Data for the study, which is published in Empirical Studies of the Arts, was collected using an Amazon Turk sample from two survey experiments. Of the 211 participants in total, 52.6 per cent thought one of the AI-made artworks was created by a human. Pictured are attempts at representational art. But are they human-made or machine-made? Find out the answers at the bottom of this article (see below for G) Pictured, G, a piece of representational art. But was it created by an AI or a human? See below WHAT IS REPRESENTATIONAL ART? Representational art describes artworks particularly paintings and sculptures that are clearly derived from real object sources. They're representing something with strong visual references to the real world. For example, a painting of a cat looks very much like a cat and it's quite obvious what the artist is depicting. Source: Saylor.org Advertisement Results also showed that the volunteers were generally likely to associate representational art with humans and abstract art with machines. Representational art is clearly derived from real-life sources and therefore tends to portray something in the real world, like people, a field or a building. Abstract art, meanwhile, does not attempt to reflect reality, and so volunteers tended to associate it more with machines. This is despite the fact the best abstract art can stem from intense human emotions, in the case of artists such as Pablo Picasso and Mark Rothko. 'Artwork is increasingly being created by machines through algorithms with little or no input from humans.' said Professor Gangadharbatla. 'Yet, very little is known about peoples attitudes and evaluations of artwork generated by machines.' Professor Gangadharbatla also found volunteers' attribution knowledge knowing whether a human or AI created each piece had an influence on in their evaluation and reception of it. Unsurprisingly, paintings tend to be valued less if they were created by a computer but AI-made pieces are still going for impressive amounts. In a well-publicised instance in 2018, Christie's sold a portrait painted by an AI for an eye watering $432,500 (337,000). Entitled 'Portrait of Edmond Belamy', the AI artwork depicts a slightly blurry, chubby man in a dark frock-coat and white collar. Christie's said the winning bidder wanted to remain anonymous, but confirmed the price skyrocketed from its initial valuation of $10,000 after a five way bidding battle. Pierre Fautrel, a member of the French art collective Obvious, poses in front of 'Portrait d'Edmond Belamy,' an image created using artificial intelligence that sold for a whopping 337,000 in 2018 The fictional subject, Edmond de Belamy, is described by Christie's as a 'portly gentleman, possibly French and to judge by his dark frockcoat and plain white collar a man of the church.' The AI painting even carries the signature of the actual algorithm used to create it. It was created by a Paris-based trio who used a 'generative adversarial network' to store 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th and 15th centuries into their algorithm. Generative adversarial networks (or GANs) work by pitting two algorithms against each other, in an attempt to create convincing representations of the real world. Another algorithm called PaintBot, created by researchers at University of Maryland, the ByteDance AI Lab and Adobe Research, meticulously studies the work of virtuoso painters like Vermeer and Van Gogh and learns to reproduce their works. PaintBot uses deep learning techniques to master the way that each artist lays their brushstrokes on the canvas, mimicking stroke colour, density and size. Once adept at a given approach, the AI can then make new works of art in the learnt style based on photographs given to it. The algorithm, dubbed 'PaintBot', is the creation of a team of researchers from the University of Maryland, the ByteDance AI Lab and Adobe Research. PaintBot can not only reproduce the work of different artists, but also can create new works based on photographs in the chosen painter's characteristic style. Answers: A computer; B human; C human; D computer; E computer; F computer; G computer Only two of the artworks (B and C) were created by humans - the rest were the work of AI. Taking G as an example, of the 211 participants in total, 52.6 per cent mistakenly thought it was created by a human News reports have suggested that enterprise tech startup Chargebee is all set to raise $150 million funding at a valuation of $1.4 billion. The company is said to be raising the capital from a US-based investor along with existing backers Tiger Global, Steadview Capital and Insight Partners also participating in the round. Founded in 2010 by Rajaraman S, Thiyagarajan R, KP Sarvanan and Krish Subramanian, Chargebee is based in Chennai. The company offers an automated subscription billing management platform that integrates with payment gateways to seamlessly automate collections from customers, send invoices and notifications, real-time analytics and customer management. The startup has so far raised a total of $105 million across multiple rounds. The company had raised $55 million in Series F funding at a $500 million valuation led by Insight Partners, Tiger Global and Steadview Capital. In August 2019, Chagebee had raised $14 million in series D round led by Steadview Capital, Insight Venture Partners and Accel Partners. If the deal comes to fruition, Chargebee would become the third SaaS unicorn startup from Chennai, after Zoho and Freshworks. It would also become the fifth SaaS startup from India. Indias SaaS startups have caught investor attention in a big way in the past year. Horizontal SaaS alone accounts for $8.7 Bn opportunity, as reported, and the number of unicorn startups in this sector have grown by a magnitude in the past two years. So far over $2.8 Bn has been raised by enterprise tech startups since 2014. After Pune-based Icertis and Druva joined the unicorn club in 2019, Postman and Zenoti followed in 2020 amid the pandemic. BROOKLINE, Mass., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Advanced Aesthetic Technologies, Inc. (AAT), a leader in aesthetic gel implant technology, is proud to announce that AAT and our lead product Algeness were selected as one of the top two finalists in the recent Terra2 Solutions Skin Health Innovation Competition, finishing as the top aesthetic innovation and second overall in this prestigious, global event. As part of their commitment to investing in and supporting the growth of innovative skin health competitions, Gore Range Capital partnered with Terra2 Solutions, a global think tank, and DermX Media Group, a leader in dermatology education, to host the Terra2 Solutions Skin Health Innovation Competition. The finals of the competition were held during the recent 18th Annual Winter Clinical Dermatology Conference-Hawaii (WC21) that was held virtually this year and attracted 3,700 attendees. Doug Abel, CEO of AAT, commented, "We were very honored that Algeness was invited to participate in this prestigious competition, pleased to be initially selected as one of the top four semifinalists to present during WC21, and delighted to finish as one of the top two as selected by a group of industry leaders and highly respected physicians. This notable recognition from potential customers and investors underscores the unique advantages of the Algeness technology as a differentiator in the global dermal filler market." Participating companies were invited to present to a panel of expert judges and providers in the fields of clinical dermatology, aesthetic medicine, and other aspects of skin health, and executive leaders of pharmaceutical, medical device, diagnostic, and IT companies. Four semifinalists including AAT presented their pitch videos to the entire audience during the meeting, and the two finalists, AAT and Mindera Corporation were given the opportunity to present a live pitch to be followed by questions from the panel of judges. "The dermal filler market is one of the most attractive segments in healthcare. Advanced Aesthetic Technologies has the know-how, the assets, and the capabilities necessary to bring innovative and differentiated products to this market. The recent Terra2 Solutions Skin Health Competition recognized AAT's Algeness as a finalist among the most innovative technologies in medical skin health in the world," said Humberto Antunes, Founder of Terra2 Solutions, a Partner at Gore Range, and former global CEO of Galderma Laboratories. According to board certified dermatologist Valerie Callender, MD, FAAD, of Callender Dermatology and Cosmetic Center in Glenn Dale, MD, who served as one of the judges for the Terra2 Solutions competition, "The unique attributes of Algeness as presented will provide an important addition to the dermal filler market, filling a need for a product that offers a differentiated capability for achieving facial shape and contour definition and the potential for an outstanding safety profile." Algeness is a patented family of fully resorbable injectable gel implant dermal fillers that are 100% natural, providing advantages in terms of safety, skin rejuvenation, and natural looking results both at rest and during facial movement. Typical clinical advantages include minimal swelling upon injection and immediately visible results. Algeness holds a CE Mark and is currently distributed in over 30 countries worldwide. AAT has begun efforts to obtain US FDA approval. About Terra2 Solutions Skin Health Innovation Competition The Terra2 Solutions Skin Health Innovation Competition showcases companies developing new treatments, diagnostic capabilities, and technologies to improve the health of our skin. The Competition is an opportunity for Winter Clinical Dermatology Conference-Hawaii participants to learn about emerging solutions in clinical dermatology and aesthetic medicine. https://www.gorerangecapital.com/innovationcompetition About Advanced Aesthetic Technologies, Inc. AAT is a fast growing, global corporation developing new technologies for aesthetic medicine. Our lead products, the Algeness family of injectable implants, are the culmination of more than 10 years of scientific and clinical research and were developed with the goal of providing aesthetic injectors advances in the ability to achieve deep structural support, clean definition, and exceptional clinical outcomes where the result at the time of treatment is the final outcome. Algenessis a 100% natural and biodegradable filler based on purified agarose with a differentiated clinical and safety performance profile. AAT continuously invests in research and product development to expand the scientific knowledge on Algeness and agarose as well as in pursuit of new and innovative technologies to enhance aesthetic medicine and expand our product portfolio. Algeness is CE Marked, has multiple additional country level registrations, and is currently available in over 30 countries. AAT is in the process of pursuing registration in the US through the FDA and also in China through the partnership with Lanzhou Biotechnique Development Co., LTD (Lanzhou) and their parent company China National Biotec Group Co., LTD (CNBG). http://www.algeness.com About the Winter Clinical Dermatology Conference For the past 18 years, the Winter Clinical Dermatology Conference-Hawaii, a continuing medical education (CME) event, has provided practitioners, including dermatologists, dermatologic surgeons, residents, fellows, physician assistants and nurse practitioners, with a therapeutic update based on real-life experience of the faculty. https://fallclinical.health About Terra2 Solutions Terra2 Solutions is a global think tank focused on exploring and designing solutions that address the emerging healthcare issues arising from our progression towards Terra2. Traditional social, demographic, and institutional dynamics that have driven and defined society for the last 2,500 years is rapidly changing. This disruption is driven by shifts in age and economic demographics, globalization trends, and rapid digitalization. The Sars-2-Cov pandemic has accelerated these trends and created a growing need for forward-looking products, technologies, and business models. http://www.terra2solutions.com/ About Gore Range Capital Gore Range Capital is a venture capital firm investing in early-stage healthcare businesses with a focus on skin health. The firm blends the hands-on approach of operationally focused private equity with the early-stage guidance needed in venture capital. https://www.gorerangecapital.com/ Contact: filler@algeness.com Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1443163/Algeness_Logo.jpg Press Release 24 February 2021 Lausanne, With a first intake planned in September 2021, EHL has redesigned its EMBA with a clear focus: to learn, to design, and to deliver innovative services by putting customer experience at the core of business strategy. Advertisements The state recognized, internationally accredited program will be offered to seasoned professionals who wish to acquire an Executive MBA with strong notions of service excellence and customer-centric business strategies incorporated in the learning experience. As a global hub for Service Excellence, EHL draws on its extensive experience and unique industry access to explore the future of the customer journey and prepare the leaders of tomorrow to actively shape and create a service orientation within their business. "This new program is perfectly aligned with our teaching philosophy and commitment to provide the most impactful programs, always one step ahead. Going beyond a traditional EMBA program, everything around a product that adds value for the customer will be looked at", explained Dr Achim Schmitt, Dean of the Graduate School ad interim. The new EMBA by EHL will be offered each fall semester in Singapore, as of 2021, as well as at EHL Campus Lausanne every spring intake, as of 2022. The program includes study trips and visits from international professors, and innovative solutions will be developed to leverage both campus locations throughout the program, if students wish to further broaden their international exposure and the global sanitary conditions allow for it. Through this part-time program based on a blended approach that can be undertaken in parallel of their jobs, busy Executives will accelerate their careers, having integrated the world's most influential hospitality alumni network and armed with a fresh global perspective.. To find out more about the program, visit the dedicated page to download the flyer. A woman who was killed by her violent ex-partner in a suspected murder-suicide had reportedly called police on a 'daily' basis in the build-up to her death. Two bodies believed to be those of Doreen Langham, 49, and her ex-partner Gary Hely were found in a townhouse in Browns Plains in Brisbane's south in the early hours of Monday morning. Ms Langham had been granted a temporary protection order against Hely, also 49, on February 9 - two weeks before the deadly blaze. Her neighbours though said she had contacted police 'daily' to report breaches of the order within that time, including twice in the hours before her death. Queensland Police Deputy Commissioner Steve Gollschewski - who has called for a review into how police responded to her calls for help - said he did not know 'what more Doreen could have done'. Doreen Langham is understood to have lived in fear of her ex-partner Gary Hely (pictured together) before he is suspected of killing them both in a deliberately-lit house fire on Monday Pictured: Ms Langham. Her neighbours said she had contacted police six times - including twice in the hours before her death - to report breaches of a domestic violence order against Hely Her triple-zero call on Sunday night had been classed as 'non-urgent' due to the high volume of call-outs police in the area were receiving that night, The Courier-Mail reported. Mr Gollschewski said Logan likely had one of the highest rates of domestic violence-related incidents in the whole of Queensland. Police have admitted they were called to her high-security gated complex about 9pm on Sunday evening but did not arrive at the address until after midnight. She reportedly told officers Hely was outside of her home, whose car was later found a short distance away parked at a shopping precinct. Officers though are believed to have found no sign of either of them and by the time they returned about 4am the house had been set on fire. 'The coppers went around and knocked on the door, but when there was no answer they left. [Hely] came back and set fire to the unit three hours later,' a source said. Her partner Gary Hely, 49, was also recovered from the blaze on Monday night. He is suspected of killing her in a murder-suicide Queensland Police Deputy Commissioner Steve Gollschewski said he did not know 'what more Doreen could have done' The source said Hely was wanted at the time for breaching a previous DVO Ms Langham had taken out against him and raised concern over why it had taken police so long to attend the premises. 'I couldn't imagine anything being more urgent than an aggrieved calling up that night saying (the man), who is a respondent, is outside my house.' As investigators work to piece together their final moments, neighbours told Daily Mail Australia security is strict and visitors must be buzzed in via one of the two front gates leading into the community. Investigations are underway to determine exactly how the 49-year-old man managed to get inside the estate, where two bodies were found in the rubble Forensic police are seen sifting through remains of a townhouse that was destroyed by fire at Browns Plains Police have spent hours combing through the rubble searching for clues in the investigation 'There's one way in, and one way out,' a female staff member said. Investigators combed through dirt and rubble for any clues as to how the fire started - and paid close attention to a yellow canister with a flute sticking out of it that they found in the ground. A young neighbour said she and her best friend were horrified to learn of their neighbour's death. A burnt out car was parked across the street from the wreckage on Tuesday afternoon Detectives were joined by fire inspectors on Tuesday, who assessed the rubble Detectives spent hours sifting through the rubble on Tuesday morning. The investigation is expected to take days Police were pictured at the scene sifting through the rubble to attempt to piece together the events 'I couldn't even get my car out to get to work, I had to get a friend to pick me up and drop me home because there were so many cops and other cars blocking me in.' The young woman said she'd come across several 'interesting people with colourful backgrounds' living in the complex, but always felt safe given the strict security measures. A staff member in the complex agreed the community was 'extremely secure'. 'This is a super secure estate. One way in, and one way out,' the woman, who did not want to be named, insisted. Over the last few years, drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are emerging as a disruptive technology which slowly but steadily finds its way into several aspects of human life. Initially seen as a technology more suited for military use, drones have been proving their utilities in several areas, including disaster response, search and rescue, law enforcement, crop monitoring, oil and gas discovery, home delivery, and recently as air taxis. But what is critical for successful UAV services is a rock-solid network connectivity. The superior connectivity offered by 4G and 5G allows low-altitude aerial vehicles like drones to execute complex tasks like traveling for greater distances and uploading high-definition videos. These functionalities ensure more effective and reliable performance, making drones suitable for business and mission-critical use cases. Several innovative use-cases of drones are emerging, especially for smart cities and critical communications applications. Ubiquitous high-speed connectivity is a key critical element in unlocking the true potential of drones. Existing commercial cellular networks are designed for terrestrial and human use, says Shady Makhlouf, Nokias Government and Cities Leader in the Middle East and Africa. However, augmenting these networks with 5G critical communication solutions can and will provide the seamless connectivity required for drones, and Nokia has the required technology and expertise to make it happen. The technology, once handicapped by connectivity issues limiting the range, radius, and altitude at which UAVs can effectively carry out tasks, has largely surmounted these limitations with the advent of Broadband technology. Even so, the rapid adoption of 5G technology opens new horizons and unlocks immense use-case possibilities for drones in the future. With superior connectivity, drones are expected to execute complex missions autonomously, stream and upload large data and high-definition video to the cloud, and travel far greater distances, including Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS). While with 4G connectivity, drones can roam beyond a finite radius by handovers between cells, with 5G connectivity, drones can take advantage of increased bandwidth and lower latency, says Prasanth Ananth, Research Technical Leader in the Enterprise and Industrial Automation Lab at Nokia Bell Labs. This enables higher bandwidth drone applications such as live video and allows us to offload computations to the cloud due to the low latency, enabling the cloud to function as a central orchestrator for a fleet of drones. All this leads to an era of networked multi-drone fleets. 5G connectivity: Giving wings to UAVs 5G will enhance UAVs capabilities in collecting and transmitting data at a very high speed, real-time streaming of high-definition pictures and videos, real-time remote monitoring and control and the use of AI. It will also enable the adoption of smaller-sized drones which consume lower energy, thus increasing the flight time short flight times are a major shortcoming of the existing drones. 5G networks will also address the two most challenging issues facing UAVs: regulation of UAV traffic and security. There is an impending need for regulations and flight protocols for drones. With the advent of 5G network technology, authorities can better control and regulate drone movement in industrial, public or military areas. Governments and authorities can devise safety and privacy guidelines for manufacturers as well as users. They can then enforce these regulations with the better monitoring technology that 5G networks can provide. Several countries, including those in the Middle East, Europe and the US, are working on protocols to allow drones in their respective air spaces and developing systems to manage drone air traffic. As drone use cases multiply and become an integral part of human life, it is imperative to protect them from attacks and other threats. Thus, monitoring them and their movement becomes a crucial cog in the wheels of drone management. 5Gs slicing features are handy in this respect. Calin Miculescu, P.Eng., Director, Sales at Nokia Canada, explains: Its easy to eliminate attack vectors while on entirely private infrastructure. E2E 5G slicing enables this, because once youre on your own 5G slice, the attack vectors are very much contained. Nokias cloud solution platform has been working diligently towards addressing the safety, security, and privacy concerns surrounding drone movement. Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (Nokia DAC) is an end-to-end solution comprising private and secure mobile broadband, cloud connectivity, and a variety of add-on applications such as drones. A highly reliable, secure, and scalable platform, Nokia Digital Automation Cloud combines data collection applications with unmanned vehicles and other IoT devices. With security being synonymous with safety, Nokia DAC provides a solid foundation for UAV use cases, says Mika Jarvenpaa, a UAV Operations Specialist at Nokia. High-speed ultra-low-latency 5G-powered critical network connectivity is then crucial to maximizing the benefits of drones. As 5G networks continue to become pervasive, we will witness the evolution of more drone-powered use cases. Texas City resident Crystal Gutierrez recently put on her own shoes for the first time in nearly half a year to head to HCA Houston Healthcare Clear Lake. She now uses a wheelchair; her legs still dont work since spending months in a hospital bed 152 days to be exact battling COVID-19. Her pink hair is short, since her husband, Rafael, shaved her head to hide the bald spots resulting from the length of her treatment. Lets start fresh, she told Rafael. Even though her breath is still somewhat labored and movement remains a challenge, Crystal had a mission. This time, she wasnt going to HCA Clear Lake for a checkup. This time, she wanted to thank the nurses and doctors who saved her life. On Feb. 12, Crystal, 36, her husband and children, were greeted by chief nursing officer Puneet Freibott and Peyton Elliott, CEO at HCA Houston Healthcare Medical Center. Then she saw Dr. Keshava Rajagopal, the cardiac surgeon who performed the emergency procedures that kept her alive. I just told him thank you for not giving up on me, she said. It was the first time Rajagopal was able to hear her voice. Im a husband and father, and I understand what her family went through, to have a child who does not know if his mother is going to make it home, Rajagopal said. He remembers at the most dire moments telling other doctors and nurses, We cannot let this woman die. Still, in her critical condition, survival was a struggle. They gave me a 15 to 30 percent chance of making it, Crystal said. They told my family to call a priest twice. On HoustonChronicle.com: 'The true, staggering toll': U.S. surpasses 500,000 COVID-19 deaths The odds stacked against her, Crystal remembers telling her nurses that she couldnt make it. I was ready to give up, she said. But her health care team wouldnt let her. The doctors and nurses kept up the fight. They made sure they were doing everything they could. Seeing them again brought tears to her eyes and Rafaels. I tried not to show it, but there was a moment I had to turn my head the other way, he said. It really hit me. HCA has gone above and beyond for us. Crystal was 36 weeks pregnant in June when she noticed her breathing was labored. At first, she attributed it to her pregnancy. Rafael wanted her to be safe in the pandemic, so he preached caution. Crystal had avoided the grocery store and even refrained from descending the stairs of their second-floor apartment. Regardless, we did end up getting sick, Crystal said. We both got COVID at the same time, but we were in denial. We thought it was a summer cold. We got Sudafed and Mucinex. The symptoms worsened. Finally, Crystal called a doctor, who insisted she get tested right away. She headed to the emergency room at HCA Clear Lake. Nurses noted she had no fever, but they ordered X-rays, gave her a Tylenol and started an IV with fluids. Then her temperature began to rise, and the X-rays revealed fluid in her lungs. The symptoms were consistent with COVID, Crystal recalled. I broke down and cried, just hearing, You tested positive. I was worried about my husband, my family. My sister had just been over, too. At first, she was placed in a room for COVID patients but was soon moved to labor and delivery. Then she called Rafael, still sick himself, to report that she was getting an emergency C-section. The anesthesiologist offered to pray with me, Crystal recalled. And shes the one who took the first picture of my son. Once the baby Matthew was delivered, he went straight to a NICU incubator. They tested him daily for COVID-19, and when Rafael was better after a month, Matthew was finally able to go home. But his mother remained in the hospital, unable to see her son until October. Immediately after Matthew was born, Crystal was sent to the ICU. She remembers being told, This is life or death right now. You need to do breathe with this mask or youll be intubated, and theres no guarantee youll come out. It was like a prophecy. On July 6, Crystal was intubated and placed in a medically induced coma. While under, she was transported to different hospitals for treatments. Rajagopal was at HCA Clear Lake when he first learned about Crystal through Hannan Chaugle a physician on his team at Houston Heart, a cardiology department for HCA Houston. Chaugle served as her doctor in Clear Lake. Together, Chaugle and Rajagopal determined that an Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation, or ECMO treatment a temporary machine that functions as a patients heart and lungs was necessary. Then, the two surgeons realized that Clear Lake did not have a bed for Crystal. She was transported to HCA Houston Northwest, then a few days later to the HCA Houston Healthcare location in the Medical Center. After Crystals lung function improved, Rajagopal said their team was able to wean her off the ECMO and performed a tracheostomy. Then, she proceeded to deteriorate, Rajagopal said. Her lungs failed. Doctors attached her to more machines. She would have died if she wouldnt have gone on ECMO, Rajagopal said. This was absolutely life or death. Crystal doesnt remember any of it. Everything was relayed to her later. On HoustonChronicle.com: How will the deadly winter storm affect COVID vaccinations in Texas? An expert explains. When I woke up, I was in the Medical Center, Crystal said. The hardest part was the separation anxiety. The lights go out, and no visitors are allowed. Its lonely. Im used to being with my husband and kids. She had missed one of her older sons birthday and her wedding anniversary. And she wanted to see her new son. When visitors were again allowed, her father, Jimmy Martinez, came during the week. Rafael, who was acting as the sole parent to the children Mark, 7, Rafael Jr., 6, Angel Gutierrez, 4, and Matthew visited on weekends. During the week, he was a father and Zoom teacher, and could not return to his job. Instead, he relied on his savings for income until her release. I was able to save enough to float us through the months, he said. It was so stressful. I tried to do the best that I could. Sometimes, Rafael would load the boys up and drive to the beach. We would hold hands, walk in the water and just pray, he recalled. We would pretend to talk to her. I would do whatever it takes to just get her back home. At night, he said, the hospital often called for permission for another surgery or procedure. He waited until his children went to sleep so they would not see him cry. Then, I would just let the waterworks go, he said. Crystal struggled to come out of her coma. Sometimes, Rafael recalled, she would seem alert, then start tearing at tubes and have to be sedated. At one point, her eyes opened, and they didnt know if it was her body on its own or her, Rafael said. They didnt know if she was brain dead. Finally, on a video call, he told her that they were waiting for her to come home. Right as he was about to hang up, she cried out, I love you. I got on my knees and thanked God, Rafael recalled. Two days before Thanksgiving, Crystal was discharged and able to finally go home. Come Christmas, the hospital staff that had become like a second family ensured they were able to celebrate. Jennifer Milholland, critical care manager at HCA, explained that all of the nurses banded together to host a toy and diaper drive for the family. Her story broke our hearts, Milholland said. She had to walk away from her newborn, because she was so sick. She was at deaths door more than once. The staff sort of adopted her and made it our mission to help her out. Recovering from COVID-19 isnt easy, Crystal said, especially after intubation and months of bed rest. Recovery still means a lingering cough, she said. I lost muscles. I cant walk. My feet feel like theyre asleep. Im still on oxygen. Losing movement has been a challenge, especially as a mother of four. When a tornado hit Texas City in January, she could not get up to find safety. With the recent freezing weather, she again felt trapped. But she is making progress. Last week, she rolled into the kitchen, parked her wheelchair and used the countertop to prop herself up. I washed dishes, she said. I washed a few bottles, and I put some away. She called Rafael to show him that she was standing. I want you to see that Im trying, Crystal said. Being in the hospital for so long has made her appreciate being with her family and doing the little things even dishes. Its the simple things, so simple you take for granted, she said. The main thing is not to forget the simplest things. Lindsay Peyton is a Houston-based freelance writer. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. This Dec. 2, 2020 photo provided by Johnson & Johnson shows vials of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine in the United States. Johnson & Johnson's single-dose vaccine protects against COVID-19, according to an analysis by U.S. regulators Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021, that sets the stage for a final decision on a new and easier-to-use shot to help tame the pandemic. The Food and Drug Administration's scientists confirmed that overall, it's about 66% effective and also said J&J's shot, one that could help speed vaccinations by requiring just one dose instead of two, is safe to use. (Johnson & Johnson via AP) Johnson & Johnson's single-dose vaccine offers strong protection against severe COVID-19, according to an analysis released Wednesday by U.S. regulators that sets the stage for a final decision on a new and easier-to-use shot to help tame the pandemic. The long-anticipated shot could offer the nation a third vaccine option and help speed vaccinations by requiring just one dose instead of two. Food and Drug Administration scientists confirmed that overall the vaccine is about 66% effective at preventing moderate to severe COVID-19, and about 85% effective against the most serious illness. The agency also said J&J's shot is safe. The analysis is just one step in the FDA's evaluation. On Friday, the agency's independent advisers will debate if the evidence is strong enough to recommend the shot. With that advice, the FDA is expected to make a final decision within days. The COVID-19 death toll in the U.S. topped 500,000 this week, and the vaccination drive has been slower than hoped, hampered by logistical and weather delays. So far, about 44.5 million Americans have received at least one dose of vaccine made by Pfizer or Moderna, and nearly 20 million of them have received the second dose required for full protection. Tests showed the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were 95% effective at protection against symptomatic COVID-19. Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, is part of the FDA advisory panel that will scrutinize the J&J data on Friday and cautions that none of the vaccines have been directly compared. Still, he was encouraged that one dose of the J&J vaccine appears as good at preventing serious illness as its two-dose competitors. "This is a vaccine to prevent you from going to the hospital and dying at a level that's certainly comparable" to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, he said. J&J tested its single-dose option in 44,000 adults in the U.S., Latin America and South Africa. Different mutated versions of the virus are circulating in different countries, and the FDA analysis cautioned that it's not clear how well the vaccine works against each variant. But J&J previously announced that the vaccine worked better in the U.S.72% effective against moderate to severe COVID-19, compared with 66% in Latin America and 57% in South Africa. South Africa recently began giving the J&J vaccine to front-line health workers on a test basis after deciding that a vaccine from rival AstraZeneca had not shown strong enough study results against the particularly concerning variant spreading there. "I was reassured" that despite different variants, the J&J shot still protected against serious illness, said Dr. Jesse Goodman of Georgetown University, a former FDA vaccine chief. "That's pretty robust data." Across all countries, Wednesday's analysis showed protection began to emerge about 14 days after vaccination. But by 28 days after vaccination, there were no hospitalizations or deaths in the vaccinated group compared with 16 hospitalizations and seven deaths in study recipients who received a dummy shot. The FDA said effectiveness and safety were consistent across racial groups, including Black and Latino participants. All of the world's COVID-19 vaccines have been tested differently, making comparisons nearly impossible. It would not be surprising if one dose turned out to be a little weaker than two doses, and policymakers will decide if that's an acceptable trade-off to get more people vaccinated faster. J&J has another large study underway to see if a second dose of its vaccine works better, raising the prospect that countries could eventually add a booster if one turned out to be warranted. Like other COVID-19 vaccines, the main side effects of the J&J shot are pain at the injection site and flu-like fever, fatigue and headache. No study participant experienced the severe allergic reaction, called anaphylaxis, that is a rare risk of some other COVID-19 shots, although one experienced a less serious reaction. The FDA said there were no serious side effects linked to the vaccine so far, although it recommended further monitoring for blood clots. In the study, those were reported in about 15 vaccine recipients and 10 placebo recipients, not enough of a difference to tell if the vaccine played any role. J&J was on track to become the world's first one-dose option until earlier this month. Mexico announced it would use a one-dose version from China's CanSino, which is made with similar technology as J&J's shot but initially was developed as a two-dose option until beginning a one-dose test in the fall. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines now being used in the U.S. and numerous other countries must be kept frozen, while the J&J shot can last three months in a refrigerator, making it easier to handle. AstraZeneca's vaccinewidely used in Europe and Britainis made similarly and also requires refrigeration but takes two doses. If the FDA clears the J&J shot for U.S. use, it will not boost vaccine supplies significantly right away. Only a few million doses are expected to be ready for shipping in the first week. But J&J told Congress this week that it expected to provide 20 million doses by the end of March and 100 million by summer. European regulators and the World Health Organization also are considering J&J's vaccine. Worldwide, the company aims to produce around a billion doses by the end of the year. Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Ahmaud Arbery's mother, Wanda Cooper, has filed a multimillion-dollar civil lawsuit against several people involved in killing her son or the subsequent investigation on the case. Ahmaud Arbery was the 25-year-old Black man gunned down by a white men group while jogging in Glynn County, Georgia. Wanda Cooper filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, which comes exactly one year after her son's killing. The lawsuit named father-and-son Gregory and Travis McMichael and William "Roddie" Bryan, all of whom are white and facing felony murder charges in connection with Arbery's death, NPR reported. According to the lawsuit, the men willfully and maliciously conspired to follow, threaten, detain, and kill Arbery. The only reason that the McMichaels and Bryan started their pursuit of Arbery was that he was a Black man, as stated under the lawsuit. Some law enforcement officials and local prosecutors were also named in the lawsuit, claiming they were involved with an alleged cover-up in the probe. The suit also alleged that the elder McMichael's law enforcement connections extended well beyond the officers. The case noted that the defendants were motivated to deprive Arbery of equal protection of the law and his rights "by racial bias, animus, discrimination." The complaint listed 14 actions, including failure to prevent harm, excessive force, and willful and wanton misconduct. The federal civil lawsuit was filed the same day Arbery's family members hold a public memorial at the New Springfield Baptist Church, where he is buried. "They took a part of me they never going to be able to put back. I've got to get justice for my boy, and I've got to make sure those three men never walk the streets again," Marcus Arbery, Arbery's father, told station WABE. Arbery's father added that he wants justice for him, and "we're going to get justice." Related story: Lawmaker Says Ahmaud Arbery Was Murdered for Being Black Ahmaud Arbery's Death The incident triggered mass anti-racism protests across the U.S. as activists called for justice for George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and others, including Breonna Taylor. Taylor was a 26-year-old Black woman shot and killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky. Organizations and leaders in the U.S. supported calls for social and racial justice reforms one year after Arbery's killing. Ahmaud Arbery was out for a jog in the coastal city of Brunswick and, at one point, entered the Satilla Shores neighborhood, where he was killed. He was shot dead after two white men chased him, believing he was a burglar. Gregory McMichael said Arbery resembled the suspect in a series of local break-ins. But police said there were no reports filed regarding these alleged break-ins. Gregory McMichael and his son Travis armed themselves with a pistol and a shotgun and pursued Ahmaud Arbery in a pickup truck through the neighborhood. According to Gregory, he and his son told Arbery to stop as they wanted to talk to him, BBC reported. Gregory also claimed that Arbery attacked his son. On the other hand, Arbery's family said the 25-year-old man was unarmed. Three shots were fired, and Arbery fell down on the street. According to an autopsy report, Arbery had two gunshot wounds in his chest and a gunshot graze wound on the inside of one of his wrists. Ahmaud Arbery did not also have drugs or alcohol in his system. Read also: Three Georgia Men Indicted in Killing Ahmaud Arbery Man cited following 2-vehicle accident PINE GROVE State police at Schuylkill Haven investigated a two-vehicle crash that happened on Route 443 at the intersection of Route 645 in Pine Grove Township around 11:50 a.m. Feb. 7. Police said Marcus Tout, 24, of Lititz, was driving a 2019 Subaru Crosstrek on Route 443 when he ran into the back of a 2004 Honda Accord driven by Halie Smink, 23, of Lykens, who was slowing down with her turn signal on to enter Route 645. Both drivers and a passenger in the Smink vehicle Ian Nawn, 36, also of Lykens escaped injury, police said, adding that, as a result of the crash, Tout will be cited for driving at an unsafe speed. Woman reports theft used for gambling POTTSVILLE State police at Schuylkill Haven are investigating a theft by deception that happened on Brier City Road in Norwegian Township around 5 a.m. Feb. 16. Police said a Pottsville woman reported someone stole her identity and tried to open a gambling account at Borgata Casino. About $2,800 was taken from the womans bank account to fund the gambling account, police said. Man faces DUI, possession chargesTOWER CITY A Frackville man is facing charges of DUI and possession of drug paraphernalia after an incident at the Top Star gas station, 523 E. Grand Ave., around 5:25 p.m. Feb. 15. State police at Schuylkill Haven said they were called to the business for a report of a possible drug overdose after an employee found a man passed out inside a bathroom. Police said when they arrived they found the man Jonathan Emerich, 29 passed out behind the wheel of his Ford F-250 about two miles from the gas station. Emerich showed signs of being intoxicated and was taken into custody and transported to a Pottsville hospital for a blood alcohol test. Drug paraphernalia was also found inside the vehicle, police said. Propane tanks, gas, oven stolen KLINGERSTOWN State police at Schuylkill Haven are investigating a burglary that happened at Klingerstown Fire Company, Ridge and Carnival roads in Upper Mahantongo Township, between Feb. 1 and 9. Police said they determined someone stole two 100 pound propane tanks, gasoline and other items from outdoor sheds, including a pizza oven and an extension cord. The value of the items stolen is $487.79, police said. Anyone with information is asked to call Police at 570-754-4600 and refer to incident PA2021-183889. Burma Myanmar Foreign Minister in Bangkok to Meet Indonesian Counterpart Anti-coup protesters stage a sit-in protest in front of the Indonesian Embassy on Wednesday, demanding Jakarta stop backing the military's plan to hold a new election. / The Irrawaddy Myanmar military regime-appointed Foreign Minister U Wunna Maung Lwin flew to Bangkok to meet Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi on Wednesday, after the latter abruptly canceled her planned trip to Myanmar. Thai Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai was due to receive the Myanmar foreign minister. Retno planned to hold talks with Myanmars military leaders, who earlier this month staged a coup against the elected National League for Democracy-led government. Indonesia faced condemnation from Myanmar people after reports emerged that it had been pushing other ASEAN nations to agree to an action plan that included keeping the military to its promise to hold a fair and inclusive new election. After taking into account the current development and the input of other ASEAN countries, this is not the ideal time to conduct a visit to Myanmar, an Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman told a news briefing. Myanmar is a member of ASEAN; several of the blocs members including Indonesia have expressed concern over the coup. On Tuesday afternoon, U Wunna Maung Lwin and Don Pramudwinai held discussions via videoconference, according to Myanmar state media. They focused on further intensifying collaboration in regional and multilateral arenas, particularly within the ASEAN framework on the basis of ASEAN solidarity and unity, reported the Global New Light of Myanmar. You may also like these stories: Myanmar Police Fails to Probe Headquarters Raid: NLD After Embassy Protest, Indonesia Denies Backing Myanmar Regimes Election Plan Myanmar Junta Leader Warns Media Against Using Junta or Regime By Lee Hyo-jin A Korean online streamer has come under fire for his "thoughtless" livestreams in Brazil including his disrespectful behavior toward local residents. The 26-year-old man surnamed Baek, better known by his channel name "Sijosae" on Afreeca tv, a local streaming platform, streamed live videos from Brazil recently during his visit to the southern city of Sao Paulo for several days from Feb. 12. During his livestreams with thousands of viewers, he deliberately filmed random women in the street without their consent and made sexually explicit comments about their bodies. He also made disparaging remarks to residents at "favelas," a Brazilian type of shantytown, saying that he will visit them to "become the victim of robbery and other crimes which occur daily there." Baek's disrespectful behavior caught the attention of Korean nationals living there as well as local residents. Internet users from both countries denounced his behavior and engaged in an online movement demanding an apology using hashtags such as #RespectBrazil and #RespectFavelas, and some made reports to local diplomatic agencies. The Consulate General of Korea in Sao Paulo released a statement expressing regret and disappointment over the streamer's behavior. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Seoul, which was also informed about the incident shortly after, asked Baek to return to Korea immediately and delete the videos. Following mounting criticism, Baek, who is currently under self-quarantine in Korea, made an apology during a livestream on Wednesday. He did however, claim that there was no sexual offense, nor did he intend to make any malicious remarks against Brazilians. "I am sorry to have shamed my country, but I only wanted to make interesting content for my viewers," he said. Within weeks, Senate Democrats want to present a new $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. Still, one significant barrier lies between them and the bill's actual passage: whether it would include a $15 increase in the minimum wage. Minimum wage increase likely to spark conflicts The wage provision is likely to spark some conflicts between Democratic senators until the House passes the legislation and sends it to the Senate. In the Biden rescue package, the minimum wage increase will be phased in over five years, and tip wages will be eliminated. According to Business Insider, both Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin have said they are opposed to the stimulus bill. Even if it eliminates all the barriers needed by a compromise package, these two senators' opposition threatens the measure. A looming legislative ruling from the Senate would undoubtedly face obstacles. In an interview, Jim Manley, a former senior Democratic aide, said, "There might be a few other Democrats with pretty significant concerns about the minimum wage increase." "No matter how the parliamentarian rules, I'm not sure the votes are there in the Senate to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour." Read also: Before Assuming the $15 Minimum Wage Hike, Here's Everything to Understand With the Debate The Senate parliamentarian acts as an impartial reconciliation arbitrator. This process would allow Democrats to pass a bill in the upper chamber with a simple majority of 51 votes instead of the standard 60. Reconciliation requires the federal budget to be attached to a bill's clause, or else the parliamentarian will throw it out. If this mechanism does not survive by the minimum wage, it could hinder the fast acceptance timetable of the Democrats, planned for mid-March. Even if it persists, every Democrat must back the final package in an evenly divided chamber where Vice President Kamala Harris will break ties. Read also: Stimulus Bill May Be Delayed Over Fury That Undocumented Immigrants Will Receive $1400 Checks Republicans: Minimum wage increase could shed jobs As a neutral arbiter of reconciliation, the Senate parliamentarian has not increased the federal minimum wage from $7.25 since 2009. Labor advocates say a measure could increase salaries for essential workers and those at risk of the pandemic. "To say that we can support jobless workers, teachers, caregivers, and medical professionals without supporting workers earning $7.25 per hour isn't just bad policy, it's inhumane," Elizabeth Pancotti, Employ America's policy director, said on Twitter. "Economic relief must include raising the minimum wage," Pancotti added. However, Republicans claim that increasing the minimum wage amid the COVID-19 pandemic could push employers to shed jobs. Some Democratic lawmakers share the same concerns. Meanwhile, Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado told the Wall Street Journal, "I think small business has got to be kept in mind, and I think there are a number of different variations that are being proposed that help insulate the impact in terms of small business." The $15 minimum wage initiative will cause 1.4 million job cuts but bring 900,000 people out of poverty, a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office suggested. Any GOP funding is available to increase salaries. On Tuesday, Senators Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton proposed bills to increase the minimum wage to $10 over four years after the pandemic. They will also relate that to the mandatory use of the E-Verify service to keep track of their employees' immigration status. Read also: Biden Had His First Defeat as President After Cabinet Nominee Receives Backlash @ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The LNP has called for any emails between Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuks private account and those of other government ministers to be released as Ms Palaszczuk dodges questions about whether she misled Parliament in 2017. Ms Palaszczuk confirmed the existence of the stacia1@bigpond.com email account during a budget estimates hearing in December but would not say whether it had been used for official communication before she banned the practice in 2018. Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk confirmed the existence of the stacia1@bigpond.com account during a budget estimates hearing in December. Credit:Matt Dennien She told Parliament in 2017 she had not used her private account for official purposes. One email, tabled during the hearing, suggested Transport Minister Mark Bailey had written to the Premier before Paul Simshauser was hired as director-general of energy and water, asking if Mr Simshausers ideological stance was contra to ours and contra to our platform. Ahead of polls, Assam declared disturbed area for 6 months under AFSPA by Governor India oi-Madhuri Adnal Guwahati, Feb 24: The Assam government on Wednesday extended the existing ''disturbed area'' status of the state for another six months from February 27 under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA). "As per powers conferred under section 3 of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, the Governor of Assam has declared the entire state of Assam as ''disturbed area'' upto 6 (six) months beyond 27/02/2021, unless withdrawn earlier", according to an official release issued here. Amit Shah's 100 plus target in Assam is meant for us: Baghel The release did not cite any particular reason for the extension, but sources said that it was in view of the assembly elections due in April-May and recovery of arms and ammunitions from some parts of the state. The AFSPA was imposed in Assam in November 1990 and has been extended every six months since then after a review by the state government. In the North East, the AFSPA is in force in Assam, Nagaland, Manipur (excluding Imphal Municipal Council Area), Changlang, Longding and Tirap districts of Arunachal Pradesh, and areas falling within the jurisdiction of the eight police stations of districts in Arunachal Pradesh bordering Assam. Civil society groups and rights activists in the region have been demanding withdrawal of the alleged ''draconian'' law from the northeastern states where it has been imposed. 30 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine will be imported to Vietnam in the first half of 2021 After arriving at Tan Son Nhat International Airport, the batch will be stored in the dedicated cold storage system of Vietnam Vaccine JSC (VNVC) and AstraZeneca in Ho Chi Minh City. The batch arrived in Vietnam earlier than originally expected in February. Therefore, the implementation plan for COVID-19 vaccination was also completed for March 2021. The first batch of COVID-19 vaccine arrives in Vietnam The batch is among 30 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine VNVC ordered in 2021. Other doses will be delivered to Vietnam in batches. In addition, the COVAX global vaccine alliance will aid Vietnam with about 4.9 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccines in the first and second quarters, and 33 million more doses in the third quarter. VNVC is in charge of importing this vaccine. It is also the only company eligible to be licensed by the Ministry of Health (MoH) to import vaccines, under the emergency anti-epidemic mechanism. According to the plan of the MoH, the first batch of COVID-19 vaccine will be given to 11 priority groups, consisting of medical workers and staff participating in COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control. Human resources and facilities are readily prepared to serve up to 4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine per month, as well as ensure safe injections, Bui Kim Khanh, director of VNVC said. After the arrival of the first batch of vaccines, VNVC will bring to Vietnam 30 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine of AstraZeneca in the first half of 2021. Priority groups and people in the country will be officially vaccinated with high quality COVID-19 vaccine such as the ones used in Europe and many major countries in the world, contributing to controlling the panpidemic, and gradually restoring the economy. Commenting on the arrival of the vaccines, Nitin Kapoor, chairman cum general director of AstraZeneca Vietnam said, We are grateful for the Vietnamese government and the Ministry of Health (MoH) for their proactive vaccine approach strategy and trust in our vaccine that made this early delivery in Vietnam possible. Under their guidance, these first doses will undergo final quality control testing before they are transferred to the MoH/VNVC to begin the inoculation of priority groups. Having operated in Vietnam for 27 years, AstraZeneca is proud to support the countrys fight against COVID-19 and economic recovery in such a meaningful way with our vaccine supply. We will continue to work closely with the government, the MoH, and VNVC to deliver our vaccine to the people in the fastest and safest way possible. The United States will provide USD 1 million worth of oxygen stations to 15 Ukrainian hospitals in 13 regions to treat COVID-19 patients as part of USAIDs HealthLink project. The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine reported this on its Facebook page, Ukrinform reports. "With USAID assistance, 15 Ukrainian hospitals in 13 regions are receiving oxygen stations worth USD 1 million to support the treatment of severe cases of COVID-19. These stations are already being installed in hospitals across the country through USAIDs HealthLink activity," the statement reads. The embassy expects that the new oxygen stations will help better treat COVID-19 patients and ensure that hospitals are better equipped to provide quality healthcare after the pandemic. At the same time, the diplomats reminded that USAID had provided USD 29 million as part of a broader US Government assistance package to help Ukraine respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. As of February 24, Ukraine reported 1,317,694 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 5,850 new cases recorded over the past 24 hours. ish NAPA, Calif., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Doctors Company Foundation has announced that it is accepting grant proposals through March 22, 2021, for innovative patient safety projects. Each year, the Foundation supports patient safety education for healthcare professionals and patient safety research with clinically useful applications by funding projects aimed at reducing or eliminating risk of adverse events. "This year in particular, we welcome proposals for projects that focus on telehealth, diagnostic error, and COVID-19," said William C. Rupp, MD, Foundation chairman. "These grants reflect our mission to advance the practice of good medicine and support our commitment to serving those who provide healthcare." The first step in the application process is submission of a letter of intent. Then, the Foundation will ask selected applicants to submit a full proposal. Eligibility criteria and application guidelines can be found on the Foundation website . In its 13-year history, the Foundation has provided over $6 million in grants for patient safety research and educational training. Grant recipients include the National Patient Safety Foundation (now the Institute for Healthcare Improvement) for developing guidelines on root cause analysis, Northwestern University for The Effect of Clinical Reasoning Feedback on Hospital Medicine Physicians and Residents, and the University of California, San Francisco, for The Family Input for Quality and Safety Study. In addition, the Foundation approved the following grants in 2020: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and NYC Health + Hospitals: An Intuitive, Nonintrusive Approach to Reduce Patient Harm from Inappropriate Dosing of High-risk Drugs in Older Adult Patients Across an Urban Safety Net Hospital System. Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Michigan Medical School: Immersive Virtual Reality Environment for Training Acute Care Teams (iREACT). Medical School: Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation:Perioperative Deterioration: Early Recognition; Rapid Response; and the End of Failure-to-Rescue. About The Doctors Company Foundation The Foundation supports patient safety education for healthcare professionals in training and in practice, and patient safety research with clinically useful applications. With this in mind, we focus on projects/activities that develop knowledge, techniques, and tools whose application reduces or eliminates risk of adverse events that cause harm to patients while under care. Visit tdcfoundation.com . SOURCE The Doctors Company Foundation Related Links http://tdcfoundation.com China in Focus (Feb. 23): State Department Responds to Warning From Beijing Washington responds to Beijings top diplomat. Earlier, the Chinese official laid out red lines he says the United States cant cross when dealing with the communist regime. Canadian lawmakers pass resolution accusing Beijing of genocide against the Uyghur ethnic minority. But Trudeaus administration is not supporting the resolution. Hundreds of British schools could become outlets for Chinese propaganda, as Chinese companies linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) look to buy them. Calls to boycott the 2022 Beijing Olympics are growing because of Chinas poor human rights record. The United States, UK, Canada, and Australia are among those supporting the movement. The daughter of a top Communist Party leader recounts her familys suffering. Her father served as the secretary to communist leader Mao Zedong. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more first-hand news from China. For more news and videos, please visit our website and Twitter. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) slammed the Biden administration for reopening a Texas migrant camp for children, saying it never will be okay no matter which party controls the White House. The firebrand lawmaker was responding on Twitter to a Washington Post report that the administration was reactivating the Carrizo Springs, Tex. facility to hold up to 700 children from ages 13 to 17 who came to the U.S. alone. This is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay - no matter the administration, AOC tweeted. Many progressives consider the military-style camps like the one reopened in Texas as a symbol of many failed Trump policies that Biden should eradicate. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. But officials said the facility had to be reopened to house children who cross the border without parents, who would otherwise be left to fend for themselves. Ocasio-Cortez argued that the U.S. must dump the paradigm of immigration as a law-enforcement problem and switch to a more humanitarian approach. Its only 2 mos into this admin & our fraught, unjust immigration system will not transform in that time, she wrote. Thats why bold reimagination is so (important). In this Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, file photo, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., questions Postmaster General Louis DeJoy during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on the Postal Service on Capitol Hill, in Washington. In this Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, file photo, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., questions Postmaster General Louis DeJoy during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on the Postal Service on Capitol Hill, in Washington. (Tom Williams/) The fierce advocate for undocumented immigrants has called for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and a dramatic restructuring of the Department of Homeland Security. Biden has called on Congress to enact a wide-ranging reform plan that includes a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. Hes also halted construction of ex-President Trumps wall on the southern border and called for an end to Trumps policy of separating children from their parents. But Biden is not planning to abolish ICE or enact other far-reaching reforms that AOC and others demand, and he has not abolished major tenets of Trumps border policies. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Robinhood destroyed its reputation with almost impressive speed, almost as though it were trying to outdo the recent controversy surrounding CD Projekt Red. Terry Cane, COO of SEOHost.net (https://www.seohost.net), a leading domain registration, SSL service, and SEO hosting provider, weighed in on the WallStreetBets controversy specifically, on how democratized stock trading app Robinhood has conducted itself throughout. A community on content aggregator and discussion community Reddit, WallStreetBets provides a forum in which its subscribers can discuss stock trading strategies and ideas. Self-described as what would happen if "4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal," it maintains a generally irreverent, sarcastic atmosphere. Many of the community's members maintain an interest in technology and the gaming industry. As reported by The Verge, one year ago, a member of the community known as delaneydi argued that the stock price of video game retailer GameStop was underpriced. This sparked a conversation that eventually led to an event some have colloquially termed "The Stonkening." In an effort to punish short-sellers and take revenge on Wall Street for market manipulation, the community began buying massive amounts of stock in GameStop and several other organizations. This caused a massive surge in stock prices, with GameStop climbing from $19.41 on January 11 to a record high of $483 at closing on January 29. In response, Robinhood was one of the first stock trading apps to freeze trading on GameStop. The backlash was both immediate and severe. "I've heard on more than one occasion it's ironic how the company named itself after Robin Hood, as it behaved more like the Sheriff of Nottingham," said Cane. "Whether or not it's true, public perception now holds that the company abandoned its stated mission the moment Wall Street stood to lose money. That it opted to cater to hedge fund managers rather than its users." As a direct result of the controversy, multiple government agencies are now investigating the stock trading company amidst allegations of collusion. This investigation has received bipartisan support, and the company is also facing dozens of lawsuits. In addition, multiple high-profile influencers have publicly disavowed the company, including YouTuber Philip DeFranco. "Robinhood made every mistake it could have possibly made in this situation," Cane said. "It acted in a way completely counter to its established brand identity, and then made absolutely no effort to manage the aftermath. I believe it's safe to say that, whatever else comes of this controversy, Robinhood's reputation is permanently tarnished." According to Cane, there are two takeaways here. First, every business needs a crisis management plan for public relations disasters. Second, for every decision a business makes, it must consider how that will impact its image along with the trust placed in it by its customers. "Robinhood may still have suffered reputational damage regardless, but it would have been far less severe had it bothered to communicate," said Cane. "Robinhood destroyed its reputation with almost impressive speed, almost as though it were trying to outdo the recent controversy surrounding CD Projekt Red." Robinhood's CEO will testify before a House committee on Feb. 18. #### About SEOHost.net: Located in Orlando, Florida with locations all around the world, SEOHost.Net provides a wide range of services in both the U.S. and the E.U., including domain registration, SSL Hosting for SEO, as well as VPS, dedicated, and A Class IP hosting. The company offers exceptional service with a strong service level agreement, multiple geographic locations, and free migration. For more information, visit https://www.seohost.net. Research News Ancient bone fragment holds clues on how dogs got to the Americas By CHARLOTTE HSU Because dogs are a proxy for human occupation, our data help provide not only a timing but also a location for the entry of dogs and people into the Americas. The history of dogs has been intertwined, since ancient times, with that of the humans who domesticated them. But how far back does that history go in the Americas, and which route did dogs use to enter this part of the world? A new study led by UB researchers provides insight into these questions. The research reports that a bone fragment found in Southeast Alaska belongs to a dog that lived in the region about 10,150 years ago. Scientists say the remains a piece of a femur represent the oldest confirmed remains of a domestic dog in the Americas. DNA from the bone fragment holds clues about early canine history in this part of the world. Researchers analyzed the dogs mitochondrial genome and concluded that the animal belonged to a lineage of dogs whose evolutionary history diverged from that of Siberian dogs as early as 16,700 years ago. The timing of that split coincides with a period when humans may have been migrating into North America along a coastal route that included Southeast Alaska. The research was published yesterday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. UB evolutionary biologist Charlotte Lindqvist was senior author of the study, which included scientists from UB and the University of South Dakota. The findings add to a growing body of knowledge about the migration of dogs into the Americas. We now have genetic evidence from an ancient dog found along the Alaskan coast. Because dogs are a proxy for human occupation, our data help provide not only a timing but also a location for the entry of dogs and people into the Americas. Our study supports the theory that this migration occurred just as coastal glaciers retreated during the last Ice Age, says Lindqvist, associate professor of biological sciences, College of Arts and Sciences. There have been multiple waves of dogs migrating into the Americas, but one question has been, when did the first dogs arrive? And did they follow an interior ice-free corridor between the massive ice sheets that covered the North American continent, or was their first migration along the coast? The fossil record of ancient dogs in the Americas is incomplete, so any new remains that are found provide important clues, says Flavio Augusto da Silva Coelho, a UB PhD student in biological sciences and one of the papers first authors. Before our study, the earliest ancient American dog bones that had their DNA sequenced were found in the U.S. Midwest. A bill proposed by Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek would address the demographic chasm between the states diverse public K-12 students and the overwhelmingly white teachers who educate them when making layoffs. The agency that licenses Oregon educators estimates 40% of Oregon students are culturally or linguistically diverse while about 10% of the states teachers hail from such backgrounds. Koteks solution would rewrite state rules that dictate whos on the chopping block if and when school districts face layoffs. House Bill 2001 would amend Oregon statutes that prioritize seniority, Kotek and the bills backers say, in an effort to retain educators of color who tend to be newer to the profession than their white co-workers. The proposed legislation would allow districts to retain educators of color if doing so helps maintain the schools ratio of teacher diversity. It would also allow an administrator to retain educators who have more merit than those who qualify for seniority protections. We have tried over the years to recruit and retain educators of color as our students have become more diverse over the decades, Kotek told the House Education Committee Tuesday. What this bill is about is protecting the progress we have made in the event of layoffs. If enacted, the bill could prove moot most of the time, as layoffs of Oregon educators are rare. Amid the pandemic, Oregon turned to the sizeable savings account it had built up during good economic times to protect schools in a downturn. Even when positions are cut, the shrinkage is usually handled through retirements and other forms of attrition, not by showing employed educators the door. The last time that happened at scale in Oregon was in 2010, when Oregon cut school funding 9% in the wake of the 2008 recession. With a new tax on businesses kicking in this school year and next, layoffs are unlikely. Still, Koteks testimony kicked off a half hours worth of public comment on the proposed legislation during a committee meeting, much of it in support of the bill. Bekah Sabzalian, the equitable education program officer at Meyer Memorial Trust, said teachers of color shes invited to speak with the nonprofits leaders almost universally say they feel isolated when they work in schools with largely white workforces. They feel overburdened, alone, Sabzalian said. Lake Oswego High School sophomore Alexander Aghdaei told the committee that in all his years attending the citys public schools, hes never had a teacher of color. He told the panel that recruiting and retaining such educators would make students like him feel more comfortable at school. Aghdaei said students of color sometimes feel as though they cant be themselves when they dont identify with their peers or teachers. Seventy percent of Lake Oswego students are white, according to the Oregon Department of Education. Its easy to abandon personal identity in service of fitting in, Aghdaei said. Much of the testimony supporting the proposed legislation, both written pieces submitted to the record and in speeches by attendees of Tuesdays virtual hearing, focused on how important it is that a schools staff reflect the makeup of its student body. But some critics of the bill, including educators of color, say that although they agree with House Bill 2001s intent, the legislation goes about things the wrong way. Hyung Nam, a social studies teacher in Portlands Ida B. Wells High School, said hes felt targeted by previous administrations for his self-proclaimed rabble rousing. He was a longtime and vocal advocate for the schools rebranding when it bore the name of President Woodrow Wilson and before such an effort earned broader support. That effort came to fruition this year. Nam told the House Education Committee he fears alterations to the states first in, last out policy that directs how schools conduct layoffs will give administrators a tool to oust vocal critics. Its also part of a larger ploy by employers to get rid of older workers who are more costly in pay and health care benefits while replacing them with younger and precarious workers, he said. Alisha Chavez-Downing, a special education teacher at Atkinson Elementary in Southeast Portland, said the bills language as-is would make her vulnerable to potential layoffs. In its current form, House Bill 2001 puts a premium on retaining educators who are fluent in a language other than English. Chavez-Downing doesnt speak Spanish fluently but says Latino families come to her for support. Educators like myself are frequently advocating for a voice at the table when making decisions that will impact our schools, she said. Listen to us on what we need rather than making decisions that will cause harm. The Oregon Education Association, the union for the states teachers, also took issue to Koteks bill enshrining merit as a metric to decide whos protected from layoffs. Jared Mason-Gere, a lobbyist for the unions, argued the state should instead more aggressively push to hire more educators of color. There is some real concern that this bill misses the mark, he said. Rep. Courtney Neron, D-Wilsonville, argued that current rules mean teachers of color typically dont get the chance to attain seniority, thus the bills focus on that language. Kotek also signaled a willingness to amend the proposed legislations inclusion of the word merit. Parasa Chanramy, legislative director for the Coalition of Oregon School Administrators, said she hopes the education committee will remove merit for another term that covers linguistically and culturally responsive practices and approaches. Our members are supportive of the goals in this bill but would like to see improvements, she said. Rep. Teresa Alonso Leon, D-Woodburn, closed the hearing by announcing the education committee will meet again March 2 for a hearing on House Bill 2697. Tuesdays hearing ran long, which kept lawmakers from having the first hearing on the proposed legislation. The bill would require schools to ban hate symbols on their campuses and in learning materials. A previous version of this article misstated the topic for the House Committee on Educations March 2 public hearing. --Eder Campuzano | 503-221-4344 | @edercampuzano | Eder on Facebook Eder is The Oregonians education reporter. Do you have a tip about Portland Public Schools? Email ecampuzano@oregonian.com. The Huron County Board of Commissioners has voted to rescind a hiring freeze for county jobs that has been in place since last March. Former Commissioner Ron Wruble came up with the idea of a hiring freeze as one of many ways to cut the county budget should the need arise during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sheriffs department was the only county department exempt from the freeze. A pandemic question mark: The variants Epidemiologists have been warning for months that more contagious and deadly coronavirus variants have been bubbling just beneath the surface in the U.S. and could soon lead to another powerful surge of the virus just as many places are easing up on restrictions. And yet, there have been a number of signs in the U.S., and across the world, that the pandemic is in decline. During the last month, new cases globally have dropped to half their peak while hospitalizations in the U.S. have reached their lowest point since November. Recorded deaths around the world are also falling, declining roughly 50 percent since late January. So then, are the variants losing? My colleague Carl Zimmer, who writes about science for The Times, told me that assuming the positive trends will continue was presumptuous. The dynamics of viruses are weird, Carl said. And this is our third peak, so youd think wed have learned our lesson by now not to be too smug. MANZINI Government has supposedly spent E85 million meant to reimburse civil servants, following appeals raised in the 2016 salary review exercise, on COVID-19 related needs. The news, which left public sector associations (PSAs) seething with anger, was delivered by the government negotiation team (GNT) during the joint negotiation forum (JNF), which was held virtually yesterday. The GNT represents government at the round table, while civil servants interests are presented by the PSAs. A well-placed source within the unions, said following the number of appeals which were filed with government after the implementation of the 2016 salary review recommendations, the agreement between the two parties was that its review should be concluded during the 2017/18 financial year. Mainly, the appeals were about civil servants who were placed at lower paying scales by the salary review recommendations while some of the complaints were about different pay grades for the same jobs. Agreement However, the source said despite the aforementioned agreement, the matter dragged for three financial years (2017/18/19/20). The delay was said to have been caused by the fact that the pair was simultaneously having negotiations on the cost-of-living adjustment (CoLA). In these three consecutive years, government tabled zero per cent for CoLA; which resulted in the PSAs and GNT abandoning talks as the former did not budge on the latters demand. As this was happening, indirectly it affected the negotiations on the appeals as they ended up not being discussed. This was solely because after reaching a deadlock on CoLA, the roundtable was suspended as the PSAs led civil servants in preparing for industrial actions and the actual strike actions over salary adjustment, the impeccable source said. Therefore, he said when the PSAs crafted the JNF agenda for the 2020/21 financial year with the GNT; they listed the appeals issue among the first agenda items. In fact, he said it was the second one on the agenda, after CoLA. The source said this was meant to ensure that this time around, it was discussed, given that it was a thorn in the flesh for their members. Nevertheless, they said when it was time to address the appeals, government said it was facing cash liquidity challenges and requested not to engage the services of a consultant because it would be costly. Instead, he claimed that government sought that the appeals be dealt with in-house, by using the Management Service Department (MSD), which is a department within the Ministry of Public Service. The MSD is an organ that manages the civil service. Government claimed to have reserved a sum of E85 million to cater for the appeals and it promised to give the PSA leaders periodical feedback about developments on the matter, the source claimed. Despite this commitment, the source claimed that they did not get any feedback such that in yesterdays JNF, the unions demanded to establish progress by the MSD in terms of dealing with the appeals. This, he said, was when the GNT relayed to the PSA leaders, point blank, that the MSD could not continue with the appeals process as there was no money available to cater for it. When the unionists asked where the E85 million which was reserved for the exercise was, the GNT told them that it was used (in December 2020) towards the fight against COVID-19, the insider said. The PSAs, through the Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) President, Mbongwa Dlamini, confirmed the latest developments. He said the response they got from government was that the E85 million which was reserved for the salary review appeals of their members had been used in the fight against COVID-19, something which did not sit well with them. The leader of the teachers union said there was nothing they could do, besides calling for an end to the meeting. He said their next assignment was to update their members and it would be the general membership who would decide on the next step. Doomed Meanwhile, Swaziland National Association of Government Accounting Personnel (SNAGAP) President Eric Ndlovu said what he could say was that the country was doomed. Thereafter, he asked to be given time to report to the unions national executive committee (NEC) before giving a comment. On the same note, the Principal Secretary (PS) in the Ministry of Public Service, Sipho Tsabedze, who is also the chief negotiator, confirmed that government had challenges with finances. He said governments focus was on ensuring that the nation survived the COVID-19 pandemic. Government has to ensure that emaSwati survive this pandemic, the PS emphasised. He said this was a difficult situation because when a country was at war, it channelled all its resources towards winning the battle. Therefore, he said the available minimal resources which government had, were channelled towards the fight against COVID-19. When he was specifically asked if government had used the money that was reserved to cater for the appeals of civil servants, in the fight against COVD-19, the PS maintained that the administration took the available minimal resources it had and channelled them towards the fight against COVID-19. Some of the notable appeals included that of primary school head teachers who were paid lower than their counterparts in high school, yet they did the same job. The appeal was that the primary school head teachers salaries should be increased to match those of their equals in high school. On the same note, primary school teachers with a Diploma in Teaching were paid better than teachers in the same level who had Primary Teachers Certificates, yet they were doing the same job. Again, there are appeals that some civil servants were poorly graded and should be elevated to a pay grade they deserve. In fact, all the four members of PSAs, SNAT, National Public Service and Allied Workers Union (NAPSAWU), Swaziland Democratic Nurses Union (SWADNU) and SNAGAP, submitted different appeals. Speaking after last weeks placeholder event for the delayed Munich Security Conference, Frances President Emmanuel Macron confirmed the role of vaccines as a geopolitical weapon in a war of influencea war that the West was in danger of losing. Warning, You can see the Chinese strategy, and the Russian strategy, too, the French President openly expressed his bitter hostility to the circulation of their vaccines to countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America that are seeking vaccines at affordable prices. Macron stressed the importance of sending at least enough doses to vaccinate health care workers in Africa, because of the increasing role being played on the continent by cheaper Russian and Chinese vaccines. He warned that the Wests slow response would leave the strength of the West a concept, but not a reality. This is an unvarnished declaration of the political realities governing every national ruling class response to the pandemic. Their dominant concern is not the health of the worlds population, but the struggle for commercial and geostrategic advantage. The burning need for a global immunization programme has accelerated this ruthless struggle, in what is being euphemistically described in the corporate media as vaccine diplomacy. Palestinian workers unload a truck from 20,000 doses of Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine upon its arrival to Gaza Strip, at the Rafah crossing border with Egypt, Sunday, Feb. 21, 2021. The 20,000 doses of Russia's Sputnik V, donated by the United Arab Emirates and organized by Abbas rival Mohammed Dahlan, entered the Palestinian enclave through its border with Egypt. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra) Just 10 countries have carried out 75 percent of all vaccinations worldwide amid a pandemic that has officially infected more than 112 million people and killed nearly 2.5 million. Leading the world are Israel with 82 doses per 100 residents, the United Arab Emirates with 54, the UK with 25, and the US with 17, compared to a global average of only 1.7 per hundred. Wealthy countries have bought up far more vaccines than they need. The European Union (EU) has ordered 1.6 billion doses for its 375 million adult population, enough for just under 900 million people, the UK 219 million full vaccinations for its 54 million adults, and Canada 188 million full vaccinations for its 32 million adults. The US and European countries have reportedly considered or implemented bans on exporting vaccines until they finish their own programs. The worlds rival capitalist cliques are relying on mass vaccination as a means of reopening their economies, ensuring their corporations and banks profits and diverting popular opposition away from their bailouts of the rich and back-to-work and back-to-school drives. Government funding serves to underwrite the monopoly profits of Big Pharma, even though the vaccines are largely the product of publicly funded research. Last October, the US, the EU and the UK rejected India and South Africas request to the World Trade Organization to waive intellectual property protection for the vaccines and allow developing countries to manufacture or import generic versions. Control over vaccine distribution and local licensing also strengthen the national powers political and economic influencetheir soft powerover allies and enemies alike. If or when the richest countries share their excess doses, they will likely donate or sell them at low cost bilaterally to their allies and client states instead of distributing vaccines through multilateral public health initiatives such as Covaxa Public-Private Partnership comprising international health organizations including the World Health Organisation, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance. From a rational and global healthcare, economic and social perspective, such nationalism will harm everyone. With 130 countries yet to receive a single dose, most of the necessary vaccinations are not set to take place until 2022 and 2023. Not only is that far too late to halt the spread of the disease, but it may also be necessary to revaccinate those who have already received the jabs as new harmful mutations prove resistant to the vaccines developed. Unable to pay the exorbitant prices demanded by Big Pharma, some 94 poor and middle-income countries have signed agreements with Covax, which will supply vaccines free to the very poorest countries in proportion to their population. But with the Western-produced vaccines typically selling within the EU at between $9 (Sanofi/GSK) and $18 (Moderna)only the AstraZeneca vaccine is selling on a not-for-profit basis at $2Covax, which has struggled to get enough supplies, hopes to be able to deliver just 2.3 billion doses this year. Even this is dependent on receiving further funding and will at best cover just 20 percent of its target population of frontline heath workers, the old and the vulnerable. While the US pledged an immediate $2 billion donation to the Covax programme at Fridays G7 meeting, it said it would provide a second tranche of $2 billion later only but after other nations make donations up to at least $15 billionfar short of the total vaccination effort that is expected to cost $35 billion. While Canada, Norway and the UK have said they will donate some of their surplus vaccines, Covax has no power to compel others to do so. In the meantime, countries are sending their vaccine surpluses to near neighbours, or to achieve national security or foreign policy goals. Spain announced it will sell 30,000 excess doses to the tiny tax-haven of Andorra at cost. In these circumstances, the supply of Russian and Chinese vaccines is seen as a major threat by the imperialist powers. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is one of the first countries to approve the Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccines, donating them to countries where it has strategic or commercial interests, including 50,000 doses each to the Seychelles and Egypt. On Friday, it was revealed that Israel had agreed to buy Sputnik V vaccines from Russia as part of a prisoner-swap deal to secure the release of an Israeli woman who had apparently strayed into Syria. Israel has given at least one vaccine shot to nearly half its 9.2 million population while denying vaccines to the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Syria, now entering the 11th year of a proxy war funded by the US, the Gulf monarchs and Turkey to overthrow the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, has yet to begin its vaccine rollout. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in a recent trade mission to south east Asia promised Myanmar 300,000 doses, 500,000 doses each to Pakistan and the Philippines and an initial one million doses to Cambodia. Wang Yi secured a $45 million deal with Indonesia for three million Sinovac doses with a further 100,000 doses for CanSino. Beijing is also offering small quantities of its vaccines free of charge to Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, as a precursor to larger sales contracts. Egypt, which has a significant pharmaceutical industry, is anxious to become a production centre for the Chinese vaccine in Africa, even as Sinopharm has agreed to build a manufacturing plant in Morocco next year. Russia has signed deals with more than 50 countries from Latin America to Asia for 1.2 billion doses of its Sputnik V vaccine and started delivering doses to Hungary and Serbia ahead of EU approval. With limited productive capacity of its own, Moscow is looking overseas to expand production, signing agreements with 15 companies in 10 countries to produce 1.4 billion jabs, with Germany interested in joint production of Sputnik V, according to the Financial Times . Iran, whose efforts to obtain the vaccine have been hampered by US sanctions, has rejected US and UK-produced vaccines, although it will access them through Covax, approving Sputnik V while seeking to develop its own vaccine in collaboration with Cuba. India, which produces 60 percent of the worlds vaccines, is determined not to be outdone by its arch-rival in the region, China. It is giving away millions of AstraZeneca doses, made locally under licence, to its neighbours, including Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cambodia, Maldives, Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar, and the Seychelles, as a central plank of its trade and foreign policy. It has concluded deals to supply Brazil and Morocco with vaccines and plans to supply Mongolia and Pacific Island states. Indias foreign ministry said it had supplied 15.6 million doses of the vaccine to 17 countries either through donations or commercial contract. In an indication of the desperate scramble to obtain the vaccine, Pakistan has so far only been able to obtain the Sinopharm vaccine and is still waiting for its 17 million allocation under the Covax scheme. It is allowing private companies to import four coronavirus vaccines (Sputnik V, the AstraZeneca and two Sinopharm vaccines) and sell them without a price cap, ensuring that only the financial elite will have access to them. Washington has responded by seeking to discredit China and Russias vaccines, which are both effective and capable of being stored at the standard 2C-8C (35.6F to 46.4F), in contrast to other vaccines that require cold or ultra-cold storagea major factor in Egypt, Morocco, United Arab Emirates and Bahrains choice of Chinas Sinopharm vaccine as part of their national rollouts. The US has derided China and Russia for pushing what it calls their vaccine diplomacy offensive, arguing they have only vaccinated a small number of their own citizens. The disastrous response of all the major capitalist powers to the global pandemic even as they prepare for great power conflict and a new scramble to recolonize the world serves to confirm the urgency of putting an end to capitalism and the subjugation of human health to private profit. It poses the utmost necessity of the international working class intervening to expropriate the pharmaceutical and all the major industrial corporations and transform them into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities in the service of humanity. OTTAWA - Parliaments budget watchdog is predicting another multibillion-dollar increase in the cost of a new fleet of warships for the Royal Canadian Navy, pegging the price for what was already the largest military procurement in Canadas history at more than $77 billion. Shipbuilders and Irving employees attend an announcement at Irving Shipbuilding's Halifax shipyard on Friday, February 8, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese OTTAWA - Parliaments budget watchdog is predicting another multibillion-dollar increase in the cost of a new fleet of warships for the Royal Canadian Navy, pegging the price for what was already the largest military procurement in Canadas history at more than $77 billion. Parliamentary budget officer Yves Girouxs latest estimate is $17 billion more than the governments stated price for the 15 warships, which are to be built in Halifax over the next two decades and form the navys backbone for most of the century. Girouxs estimate is in a highly anticipated report released Wednesday that is likely to set the stage for some tough discussions and heavy industry lobbying on whether Canada should push ahead on the project or change tack. To that end, the budget officers report includes a number of potential scenarios designed to provide a clearer picture of what options are available to the government should it decide to go in a different direction and how much each would cost. That includes scrapping the existing plan to base the 15 warships on the British-designed model called the Type-26, which Canadian defence officials have repeatedly described as the right ship for Canada, and choosing a different design for the fleet. Giroux and his team also looked at the idea of a hybrid fleet, in which Canada builds three Type-26 ships and supplements them with 12 other vessels. That would mimic how the navy was previously built, with three Iroquois-class destroyers and 12 Halifax-class frigates. The Type-26 frigate is also being built by the United Kingdom and Australia, but Canadian officials have been making numerous changes to the design to meet Canadas unique military and industrial requirements. Those changes have been made more complicated by the governments attempts to pack all the capabilities from the navys now-retired destroyers and existing frigates into one type of ship. The destroyers provided air defence while the frigates specialize in hunting submarines. The PBO found that the government could save $40 billion if it built only three Type-26 frigates and supplemented them with 12 smaller, less capable Type-31s, which is similar to what Britain has decided to do. Canada could also save $50 billion if it scrapped plans to build any Type-26s and went with an entire fleet of Type-31s, according to the report, though the PBO notes that the Type-31 was designed to operate alongside the higher-end Type-26. Restarting the entire project could result in a four-year delay to the start of construction. Giroux acknowledged during a media briefing that building a hybrid fleet would incur added costs over the long term due to the need for more training and spare parts for different types of ships, among other things, which were not figured into his calculations. It also means that you don't put all your eggs in the same basket, he added. So if you find a major defect in one class of ship, you have a fallback option. You're not bound by 15 ships. The PBO also looked at the potential cost to switch to a type of warship called the FREMM that is currently being built for the United States and which Giroux described as on par with the Type-26 in its capabilities. The budget officer found a revised project would cost around $71 billion whether the government decided to build an entire fleet of FREMMs or three Type-26s and 12 FREMMs. The Defence Department stood by its $60-billion cost estimate on Wednesday, arguing Giroux put too much emphasis on the ship's weight in his calculations, and noting his figure included tax. It also called the Type-26 "the right ship" for the navy, suggesting the other designs would not meet Canada' needs. While it said selecting a new design "is not an option we will be pursuing," the department did not specifically address the idea of a hybrid fleet. As a taxpayer, I really hope they're right on the $60 billion and even lower if they can, Giroux said. But we're confident that our cost estimate is the most likely scenario: $77 billion. I'm confident we have an accurate cost estimate. The warship project was launched in earnest nearly a decade ago when Irving Shipbuilding in Halifax was selected in October 2011 to build the fleet, with the total cost estimated at around $26 billion and the first ship to be delivered in the mid-2020s. That vague schedule remained largely unchanged, at least on paper, even as the estimated price tag ballooned to $60 billion and Ottawa ordered several smaller ships so Irving would have work until the surface combatants were ready for construction. But defence officials revealed to The Canadian Press earlier this month while that construction on the first Type-26 is set to begin in 2023-24, the ship won't be delivered until 2030-31. Officials nonetheless insisted that the $60 billion budget would be sufficient despite the new delays. Giroux said his teams analysis found a one-year delay in the project would add $2.3 billion to the overall cost, while a two-year delay would result in the fleet costing $4.8 billion more. Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and chief of the defence staff Admiral Art McDonald also appeared in a promotional video this month for a new design facility for the Type-26 that was organized by BAE Systems, which designed the warship, suggesting the government is doubling down on the warship. Wednesdays report is the result of a request from a parliamentary committee for the PBO to look into the warship project, and had been highly anticipated given the amount of money involved and the relative lack of information about the project from the government. It also comes as the federal auditor general prepares to release her own report Thursday on the federal governments entire shipbuilding strategy, which includes not only the 15 new warships but dozens of other vessels for the Navy and Canadian Coast Guard. The Naval Association of Canada, which represents current and retired naval officers, sent a commentary to members of Parliament last month warning them to exercise caution when it came to Wednesdays PBO report. Giroux acknowledged that naval officials are in a better position to determine what the navy needs in its new fleet, and that each of the different designs provide pros and cons. However, he said MPs asked his office to look at the costs, and thats what we did. Ultimately, it's up to decision-makers to make these trade-offs as to what the navy needs and what Canada can afford, he said. And by providing them with these cost estimates, we're allowing them to have better information to make these important decisions. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 24, 2021. Bernie Sanders objected to Tom Vilsack's nomination to resume his Obama-era position as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. Sanders joined six Republicans in opposing Vilsack's nomination Six Republicans joined the Vermont senator and former Democratic presidential nominee in voting against Vilsack's nomination at the Capitol meeting, where he was finally sworn in with nearly unanimous support. For the second time, by a 92-7 vote, the Senate approved Vilsack as USDA chief. Sanders was the only Democratic Senator who did not cast a vote in favor of Vilsack's nomination. He joined Republican members of Congress Ted Cruz of Texas; Josh Hawley of Missouri; Rand Paul of Kentucky; Marco Rubio; Rick Scott of Florida; and Dan Sullivan of Alaska. His vote marked the first time that one of President Joe Biden's Cabinet nominees was rejected by a member of the Senate Democratic caucus. Sanders, a democratic and active environmental advocate, first took his senate seat in 2007, after sitting for the best part of two decades at the House of Representatives. He noted in a statement released by his office following Vilsack's confirmation hearing, which Newsweek received on Tuesday afternoon, that his opposing vote did not reflect personal feelings about the current member of the Cabinet but rather concerns about his policy approach. After eight years as Iowa Governor, Vilsack had previously led the USDA from 2009 to 2017, under the White House terms of former President Barack Obama. Although Vilsack's return to the job under Biden's administration was endorsed by some major labor unions, such as the National Farmers Union, others were skeptical of his ties to Big Agriculture. When news of Vilsack's appointment as agriculture secretary emerged in December, Mitch Jones, the policy director of the environmental organization Food and Water Watch, suggested that "Vilsack has made a career of catering to the whims of corporate agriculture giants- some of whom he has gone to work for-while failing to fight for struggling family farmers at every turn." Read also: $15 Minimum Wage Becomes a Barrier for Lawmakers to Immediately Pass the Stimulus Bill Sanders voted against Biden's USDA nominee Tom Vilsack Progressives pushed back on Vilsack's nomination because, during his previous tenure as USDA chief, they thought he was too associated with big agricultural corporations, as per The Hill via MSN. More recently, Vilsack was the head of the U.S. milk lobby group, Dairy Export Council. Vilsack's role as a lobbyist also sparked questions among leftists, many of whom wanted former lobbyists working in the Biden White House to be restricted. The U.S. Dairy Export Council is a significant advocacy agency representing the industry, and Vilsack formerly worked for the law firm Dorsey & Whitney as a registered lobbyist. Sanders said in a statement that he opposed Tom Vilsack's confirmation because, at a time when corporate agricultural restructuring is rampant and family farms are being decimated, they need a secretary who is willing to take on corporate influence in the sector aggressively. "I heard from many family farmers in Vermont and around the country who feel that is not what Tom did when he last served in this job," he added. In 2016, Sanders fought against a bill Vilsack was behind, which required genetically engineered foods labeling but was less strict than Vermont's similar state law. In July 2016, Obama signed the bill, essentially voiding Vermont's legislation. Biden passed on the USDA post to Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio). Several progressive groups supported Fudge, and he has been a critical supporter of food banks and food insecurity programs. Read also: Biden Had His First Defeat as President After Cabinet Nominee Receives Backlash Senate confirmed Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture According to Yahoo, Vilsack has been criticized by some progressive groups and minority farm supporters. They argue that he was not proactive enough under the Obama administration to support black farmers and is too close to agribusiness needs. Read also: What Life Awaits Anti-Trump Republicans Who Changed Their Registration Since the Capitol Riot @ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Facebook Inc.s brief but tempestuous standoff with the Australian government over a world-first pay-for-news law is only the start of a string of regulatory battles that the worlds biggest social network faces in 2021. Mark Zuckerberg started the year on the offensive, blocking news across Rupert Murdochs home turf of Australia to fend off demands that Facebook pay media companies for content shared on its platform. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers On Tuesday, Zuckerberg struck a compromise after 11th-hour talks with the government on the legislation thats also aimed at Google and is expected to pass Australias parliament this week. But a regulatory domino effect is already underway, with publishers pressuring the European Union to emulate Australias approach. With the prospect of more assertive regulation and even Apple Inc. questioning Facebooks longstanding model of using data to better target advertising, the social media platforms way of doing business faces being upended. U.S. legislators are voicing the loudest concerns about Facebook, with Rhode Island Congressman and Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline tweeting that the company is not compatible with democracy." Congress is holding hearings this week to consider tougher antitrust measures to rein in the powers of the company and other tech giants. Australias Prime Minister Scott Morrison, meanwhile, said hes discussed Facebook with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Canadian leader Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron and the U.K.s Boris Johnson, whose government plans to conduct antitrust probes into its operations. Facebooks Australia Face-Off Could Backfire Across the Globe Facebook has struggled to shake off deep-seated distrust since the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed failings in safeguarding personal data. It courted fresh controversy this January when WhatsApps privacy policy was updated to help it share more information with its parent, leading to several lawsuits and a flood of users joining rival messaging services Telegram and Signal. Facebooks abrupt move to cut off news sharing in Australia -- jeopardizing credible sources of information about the coronavirus during a crucial time in vaccine rollout -- was widely criticized. But the high stakes gambit did help it wring some concessions from the government, which announced key amendments to the planned law on Tuesday. Crucially, Facebook and Google can decide what commercial deals to cut with news publishers, and will only face forced arbitration as a last resort. The lesson for regulators and governments around the world is, Facebook is a formidable foe thats willing to pull out the big guns to get what it wants," former Facebook Australia and New Zealand Chief Executive Officer Stephen Scheeler said in a phone interview Wednesday. The Silicon Valley firm has the power to essentially undermine a government position on a topic." Among its other battles, the company has been hit with a lawsuit by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission alleging a multi-year course of illegal conduct" and anticompetitive behavior. An unfavorable ruling in that case could ultimately force Facebook to sell off Instagram. And Zuckerberg, along with the leaders of Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc., will be answering U.S. legislators questions in March about the spread of misinformation online and the responsibility of platforms to curtail it. Zuckerberg, Pichai, Dorsey Due Back for New Grilling in Congress In response to mounting criticism, Facebook last year set up an Oversight Board of academics, lawyers, journalists and human rights advocates to review its content decisions and try to tamp down concerns about its influence. The boards rulings are binding: its reversed a number of the companys decisions and next on its agenda will be to judge the validity of former President Donald Trumps indefinite suspension from Facebook and Instagram. Outside of elected officials, the social network is involved in another thorny dispute with a rule-setting body of sorts: Apple. The iPhone maker plans changes to privacy rules on its mobile devices that will require explicit permission before software makers can collect certain data and track user activity across apps and websites. Facebook, which relies on such information to fine-tune its ads, has been fighting the move in the public arena, taking out full-page advertisements in U.S. newspapers and presenting itself as an advocate for small businesses. Meanwhile, the Australian legislation could serve as a global benchmark for how to force tech titans to the negotiating table and pay the traditional media for their news content. Johan Lidberg, an associate professor at Melbournes Monash University who specializes in media and journalism, said hes been inundated with calls from overseas publishers who want to talk about what actually happened in Australia and how did it come about." The next two years are going to be fascinating to watch," he said. Facebook will have to make some fundamental choices, because it is not long-term sustainable to have such dominance by so few players in the marketplace." Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. The one-shot coronavirus vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson provides strong protection against severe disease and death from Covid-19, and may reduce the spread of the virus by vaccinated people, according to new analyses posted online by the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday. The vaccine had a 72 percent overall efficacy rate in the United States and 64 percent in South Africa, where a highly contagious variant emerged in the fall and is now driving most cases. The efficacy in South Africa was seven percentage points higher than earlier data released by the company. The vaccine also showed 86 percent efficacy against severe forms of Covid-19 in the United States, and 82 percent against severe disease in South Africa. That means that a vaccinated person has a far lower risk of being hospitalized or dying from Covid-19. The analyses confirmed that Americans are likely to benefit soon from a third effective coronavirus vaccine developed in under a year, as demand for inoculations greatly outstrips supply. The F.D.A. could authorize the vaccine as early as Saturday, depending on a vote by its vaccine advisory panel on Friday after it discusses the newly released documents. Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 3 mesi fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. According to a research report " Cloud Mobile Backend as a Service (BaaS) Market by Application (Cloud Storage and Backup, User Authentication, Database Management, Push Notification), Platform (Android, iOS) Enterprise Size, Vertical (BFSI, Retail), and Region - Global Forecast to 2025 " published by MarketsandMarkets, the Cloud mobile BaaS market size is expected to grow from USD 2.0 billion in 2020 to USD 5.9 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 23.9% during the forecast period. Growing mobile app-driven economies demand BaaS, Increasing the adoption of mobile devices, and BaaS helps developers concentrate on the frontend for faster development and deployment are driving factor for the Cloud mobile BaaS market. Browse and in-depth TOC on Cloud Mobile Backend as a Service (BaaS) Market 152 Tables 46 - Figures 173 Pages Download PDF@ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=813 The Database Management segment to hold a larger market size during the forecast period The Database management application segment is projected to contribute majorly to the Cloud mobile BaaS market among the applications. This growth these segments are supported by enterprises are transforming to the digital world and cloud adoptions by enterprises from verticals across the world. SMEs segment to grow with higher market size during the forecast period The Small and Medium size enterprises (SMEs) segment is expected to grow with a higher rate contributing to the market. This growth of SMEs is supported by the implementation of the Cloud mobile BaaS solution, along with services, is expected to result in better risk mitigation, reduced administrative overhead, reduced cost of compliance, favorable business outcomes, and improved business efficiency for SMEs. Request Bundle Report@ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/RequestBundleReport.asp?id=813 North America to hold the largest market size during the forecast period The North American Cloud mobile BaaS market is already mature for Cloud mobile BaaS systems, and a significant number of new installations of Cloud mobile BaaS and upgrade of the existing Cloud mobile BaaS solutions. Currently, the United States (US) holds the highest share in the Cloud mobile BaaS market as it is home to large telecom giants, well-established suppliers, as well as end-user industries that continuously adapt to newer technologies for improved business productivity and work efficiency. Market Players Cloud Mobile Backend as a Service (BaaS) Market players profiled in this report include Microsoft (US), IBM (US), Oracle (US), Temenos (Switzerland), AWS (US), Google (US), PROGRESS (US), Kii (US), ProgrammableWeb (US), Appcelerator (France), EXADEL (US), 8Base (US), Back4App (US), Built.io (US), Backendless (US), Couchbase (US), Kumulos (US), Kuzzle (France), BaaSBox (Italy), Loopback (US), and PubNub (US). These players offer various Cloud mobile BaaS solutions and services to cater to the demands and needs of the market. Major growth strategies are adopted by the players, including acquisitions, partnerships, collaborations and agreements, and new product launches/product enhancements. About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies revenues. Currently servicing 7500 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions. 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. Markets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "Knowledgestore" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. Contact: Mr. Aashish Mehra MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA: 1-888-600-6441 sales@marketsandmarkets.com Content Source: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/baas.asp Report: https: //www.marketsandmarkets .com / Market-Reports / mobile-backend-as-a-service-mbaas-market-813.html The views expressed by public comments are not those of this company or its affiliated companies. Please note by clicking on "Post" you acknowledge that you have read the TERMS OF USE and the comment you are posting is in compliance with such terms. Your comments may be used on air. Be polite. Inappropriate posts or posts containing offsite links, images, GIFs, inappropriate language, or memes may be removed by the moderator. Job listings and similar posts are likely automated SPAM messages from Facebook and are not placed by WFMZ-TV. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Armenian Defense Minister Vagharshak Harutiunian reported such assistance in an interview with the Russian RIA Novosti news agency published on Monday. He said concrete recommendations have already been made on how to rearm the Armenian army in the current circumstances but did not give any details. Very intensive contacts are now underway between the defense ministries of Russia and Armenia in various directions, Kopyrkin told reporters, commenting on Harutiunians remarks. Asked whether Moscow is indeed ready to provide such military aid to Yerevan, he said: Russia is already doing that. Kopyrkin did not go into details. Also, he did not deny or confirm Harutiunians assertion that the Russian military base in Armenia will be expanded in view of the post-war military-political realities in the region. The envoy said only that the two sides are now looking into ways of strengthening cooperation between our countries and armed forces. Yerevan announced plans to further deepen Russian-Armenian military ties shortly after the war with Azerbaijan stopped by a Russian-brokered ceasefire on November 10. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian stated on New Years Eve that his country now needs new security guarantees. Late last month, a delegation led by Colonel-General Sergei Istrakov, the deputy chief of the Russian militarys General Staff, visited Yerevan for nearly weeklong negotiations with the Armenian armys top brass. According to Harutiunian, the talks were aimed at assisting us in the reform and modernization of Armenias armed forces. Very often, especially after Indias recent refusal to join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP), we hear that the ASEAN-India FTA is not good for India". While Indias free trade agreement (FTA) with the 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) was finalized in 2009 and came into effect in 2010, the countrys trade association with the bloc was not an isolated event, but a phenomenon that has emerged naturally and grown over time. The geographical zone it covers has disparate countries, but is a contiguous region that offers a unique space for various economic and geo-strategic interests to move hand-in-hand. Take economics. The opportunities presented by the ASEAN-India free trade area for goods, services and investments, and its associated arrangements, are growing and so are the means and ways for their utilization. The gains have been clear and there is scope to scale up the partnership further. Since 2010, when the ASEAN-India FTA for goods was activated, trade between the two partners has almost doubled to reach over $87 billion in 2019-20. Bilateral trade between ASEAN and India presently accounts for almost 11% of Indias global trade, up marginally by 1% from 2010-11 to 2019-20. If we add numbers for China, Japan and Korea, then countries under the coverage of New Delhis Act East Policy (AEP) contribute about one-third of Indias global trade. Driven mostly by imports, Indias trade with ASEAN has grown faster than that with the world at large. View Full Image The ASEAN opportunity The gains are far from meagre. Lets look at some recent numbers. For every $100 of global exports by India, $10.56 came from ASEAN in 2019, a proportion that rose slightly over 2004 to 2010, a period that witnessed a relatively intense engagement between ASEAN and India; and imports worth $11.89 came from ASEAN for every $100 imported by India from overseas. This trend underlines Indias import dependency, but also reveals much room to enhance trade between the two partners. Indias per capita exports and imports vis-a-vis ASEAN have increased since 2010, except for the later years when trade growth slowed down amid persistent trade tensions and a moderation in global economic growth. Policy uncertainties and anti-globalization measures have also affected foreign direct investment (FDI) flows between the two. Indias widening current account deficit with ASEAN, but with a capital account surplus, signals the need of a shift in Indias economic policy towards ASEAN. As of 2019, the net effect of both current and capital accounts is not in favour of India. To convert the deficit into surplus, India must strive for bigger ASEAN markets, seeking greater capital and trade. Yes, the downside of the bilateral FTA is that both trade partners have failed to reduce their non-tariff barriers (or measures). India faces significant non-tariff measures in ASEAN that limit its exports to ASEAN, which faces the same on its exports to India. This is among the major hurdles in the expansion of value chains spanning ASEAN and India. The services sector is another area where progress has been rather slow. India faces discriminatory standards applied by ASEAN countries to Indian service providers, and vice versa. So, are deficiencies in the FTA holding back closer economic integration? There is no clear answer. The matter requires further investigation. However, to assess integrational benefits and costs, we should also consider some specifics, such as the stage of economic development, structure of the economy, production characteristics, demand preferences, trade regimes and policies, connectivity networks, trade monitoring systems, etc. If guided properly, todays deficit can be tomorrows surplus. A review of the ASEAN-India FTA in goods is thus a welcome step. What next? One of the key challenges to Indian exports in these uncertain times is to maintain competitiveness in global and regional markets by improving trade facilitation, not only at home, but also with trade partners. Along with it, upgrading the ASEAN-India FTA and its effective utilization may perhaps add the required momentum to trade flows. Besides, to strengthen trade relations, ASEAN and India should address matters related to sensitive lists, non-tariff measures, and customs cooperation, among others. Another great opportunity to scale up the ASEAN-India engagement is the development of value chains. The current value-chain linkages between ASEAN and India are not substantial; total trade in parts and components between them amounted to about $5.8 billion in 2018. Indias vibrant private sector must actively work out new deals to enhance ASEAN-India relations. . In the post-covid scenario, restoring the connectivity and resilience of supply chains will hold the key to economic integration, particularly the development of Indias northeast. The supply chain resilience initiative (SCRI) between India, Japan and Australia (with ASEAN likely to join) will aid the development of the ASEAN-India economic corridor. It may also facilitate investment and act as a spur for growth in the region. Finally, regional cooperation, be it economic or non-economic, helps promote economic stability, competitiveness, growth and integration within the region. Today, it is possible for countries to pick their route to a destination from a multiplicity of available options. Sustaining these initiatives is a matter of scale, quality and trade costs. Think of it like a metro system (the accompanying diagram is modelled on Tokyos). Like a rapid transit system, trade flows need to increase all across a geography for its compound benefits to look attractive. Prabir De is professor, ASEAN-India Centre, Research and Information System for Developing Countries, New Delhi These are the authors personal views. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! But Young Frankenstein (for which Brooks wrote music and lyrics, and co-wrote the book with Thomas Meehan) is also ripe with laughs, and director Alexander Berlage and his cast maximise most of them, add a few of their own, and try to ensure the silly bits still entertain. Brooks, among the great American creators of stage and screen comedy, always had an inner eight-year-old itching to lace his scripts with whiffs of toilet humour or spots of sexual innuendo. Virtually all his work traverses that same rickety bridge, and while I have a high silliness threshold (perhaps that of a nine- rather than an eight-year-old?), it was still tested. Young Frankenstein is like a rickety slatted bridge, with hilarity the destination and the bottomless abyss of inanity always lurking beneath. Time and again, a slat breaks, we plunge into silliness, and claw for a grip on the bridge of laughs. Anyone who enjoyed Mel Brooks 1976 film of the same name knows what to expect: Blazing Saddles with less wind, more songs and a Transylvanian monster. Berlage certainly had time to think about it. His creative team first assembled last March, and then you-know-what happened, and of course the production was buried if not quite dead. Now it springs back to life as the Hayes first post-pandemic production, and that in itself is marvellous: Sydney is poorer without this little musical theatre crucible, and returning with a show that wears its daftness as a badge of honour was probably apt. Loading Whether aided by the delay or not, Isabel Hudsons set design is a thing of wonder. Its fantasia of staircases are as busy going nowhere as those in an MC Escher lithograph. It even has upside-down staircases that echo the battlements of the castle once inhabited by Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, and now inherited like his love of animating corpses by his grandson (Matthew Backer). Needless to say, the experiment goes horribly wrong, but, this being a comedy, the monster (Nick Eynaud) is tamed by the joy of sex with Frankensteins fiancee (Shannon Dooley), and further curbed by receiving a quotient of Frankensteins intelligence. Thus the carnage is contained, even if the villagers are left hungry for a hanging. Backer catches something of that goofy Gene Wilder charm and sings his socks off when required as does Dooley, who works Elizabeth into such a lather of sexuality that she can make a climax out of just pulling on a thigh-high boot. Eynaud is a hulking monster who can still milk his brief, inevitable moment of pathos, and Ben Gerrard cross-dresses to charming effect as Inga, the super-blonde lab assistant who is up for more than one sort of experiment. Panthera Resources PLC's (LON:PAT) Mark Bolton speaks to Proactive's Andrew Scott soon after announcing they've engaged law firm Fasken to advise them on a potential dispute with the Republic of India. It concerns the Bhukia joint venture project and a decision by the government of Rajasthan to rejected Pantheras application for a prospecting licence for the project. EP Global Opportunities Trust plc (the "Company") Total Voting Rights As a result of the purchase of 60,000 Ordinary 1p shares placed into Treasury on 23 February 2021 and in conformity with Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rule 5.6.1A, the issued share capital and voting rights of the Company are as follows: Class of share Total number of shares in circulation Number of voting rights attached to each share Total number of voting rights of shares in circulation Number of shares held in treasury (carrying no voting rights attached until issued) Total number of shares in issue Ordinary 1p Shares 38,082,725 1 38,082,725 26,426,917 64,509,642 The above total voting rights figure may be used by shareholders as the denominator for the calculations by which they will determine whether they are required to notify their interest in EP Global Opportunities Trust plc under the FCA's Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules. 24 February 2021 LEI: 2138005T5CT5ITZ7ZX58 Enquiries: Kenneth Greig Edinburgh Partners AIFM Limited Tel: 0131 270 3800 The Company's registered office address is: 27-31 Melville Street Edinburgh EH3 7JF FLORENCE The state of Oregon has fined a Florence restaurant nearly $18,000 for willfully exposing workers to COVID-19 after an investigation in which officials say compliance officers were threatened. The Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Administration on Tuesday announced the fine for The New Blue Hen, The Register-Guard reported. The New Blue Hen, doing business as Little Brown Hen Cafe, had been allowing indoor dining since at least Dec. 26, a state investigation found. The business did so despite knowing it was violating a public health order limiting the capacity for indoor dining to zero in an extreme risk county, the state news release said. The restaurant did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Complaints about the restaurant led to an inspection during which, several people including one carrying a firearm blocked the business entrance and threatened compliance officers on Jan. 4, according to the state. The state assigned two compliance officers and both identified themselves during the inspection and asked to speak to the owner, the state said, at which point they were threatened. The people at the entrance followed them to their cars shouting at them as they left, officials said. Inspectors were able to give visual confirmation of indoor dining. Michael Wood, administrator for Oregon OSHA, imposed the $17,800 penalty, which is twice the minimum penalty for a willful violation to reflect the need to ensure a more appropriate deterrent effect where employers insist on disregarding public health measures. The restaurant has 30 days to appeal. --The Associated Press The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Becoming an Isa millionaire will be twice as easy for the next generation of investors, new research shows. Joining the 1 million club is an impossible dream for many, but investing in Isas might make it easier than you think. There are 579 investors with Isas worth more than 1 million with broker Hargreaves Lansdown. High life: Joining the 1 million club is an impossible dream for many, but investing in Isas might make it easier than you think Their average age is 71, with those in their late 60s and early 70s most likely to be Isa millionaires. Two thirds are men. But it's easier than ever to join them. Today's millionaires have built up their fortunes despite being limited to a maximum 7,000 annual contribution for the nine years following the launch of Isas in 1999. These investors had to achieve an average 14 per cent annual growth on maximum Isa contributions to hit the 1 million mark, according to AJ Bell. But now that investors have a maximum allowance of 20,000, they would need just 7 per cent growth to hit the 1 million jackpot over the same period of 21 years. Laith Khalaf, financial analyst at AJ Bell, says: 'That means the Isa millionaires of the future will be more plentiful, and younger.' How the Isa fat cats invest Shares AstraZeneca Aviva BP GlaxoSmithKline Legal & General Group Lloyds Banking Group National Grid Royal Dutch Shell B Shares Unilever Vodafone Group Funds Artemis Income Fidelity Global Special Situations Fidelity Special Situations Fundsmith Equity Jupiter European LF Lindsell Train UK Equity Lindsell Train Global Equity Marlborough UK Micro-Cap Growth Marlborough Multi Cap Income Stewart Inv Asia Pacific Leaders An Isa is a valuable tax shelter for savings and investments as you don't pay tax on interest for a cash Isa, or on the gains from any investments. Any unused Isa allowance doesn't roll over if you don't use it, you lose it. You have until April 5 to use this year's 20,000 allowance. Sarah Coles, personal finance analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, says Isa millionaires 'hold the secret' to making a fortune from diligent investment. She says: 'While some people get into investment in the hope of getting rich quick, the vast majority of Isa millionaires have built a fortune through the far more reliable approach of getting rich slow. 'They don't take enormous risks: they've just consistently invested as much as possible of their annual allowance in a diverse and balanced portfolio, every year, for decades.' The top ten shares held by this group are dominated by blue chip companies, including Lloyds, Shell and BP. Mr Khalaf says this could be because the FTSE's big names are popular with older investors as they are regular dividend payers, even if the pandemic saw payments cut back, or missed. And Ms Coles says other investors have shown an appetite for investing in firms 'laid low by the pandemic' in the hope that their share price will rebound. She adds: 'Isa millionaires aren't as interested in this, because they're less prepared to risk holding shares that don't make it through the crisis.' Adrian Lowcock, head of personal investing at Willis Owen, says the top ten shares don't necessarily represent the companies that have performed the best in recent years. He adds: 'It's when they bought the shares that matters most. 'Many of these stocks are cyclical investments that don't have an existential threat posed to them by the pandemic. 'Overall, the list of shares looks to be driven by valuations with a bias towards the less risky areas of the market.' AJ Bell's Isa millionaires have an average of 28 investments each, showing the importance of not putting all your eggs in one basket. Indeed, Mr Khalaf notes that some held the LF Woodford Equity Income when trading was suspended and are still waiting for the final payout. He says it shows one fund that performs poorly 'needn't derail a well-diversified portfolio'. Joining the 1m club is an impossible dream for many, but investing in Isas might make it easier than you think When it comes to funds and other collective investments, Isa millionaires have a broad international mix, which Ms Coles says 'spreads risk across world-class companies'. She adds that the appearance of technology and health funds shows that investors have confidence in these sectors to 'out-perform' the market. A total of 28 investment companies would have made investors millionaires if they had invested the full annual Isa allowance in the same firm each year, according to new data from the Association of Investment Companies. Investing the full Isa allowance annually from 1999 to 2020 - a total of 246,560 - and reinvesting the dividends into Scottish Mortgage would have generated a tax-free pot of 2,541,100 by January 31, 2021 - more than ten times the original investment. Investment trusts account for 54 per cent of the average portfolio of Interactive Investor's Isa millionaires. This could be because they tend to outperform funds over the long term. The most popular are Scottish Mortgage, Alliance Trust and Witan Investment trust. Deputy Head of the Ukrainian President's Office Ihor Zhovkva and Ambassador of the Republic of Korea to Ukraine Ki-Chang Kwon have discussed the issues of developing political dialogue and strengthening the investment component of bilateral cooperation, the presidential press service has reported. According to the report, Zhovkva thanked the Korean side for supporting Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity. In furtherance of the agreements reached last year during a phone call between President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky and President of South Korea Moon Jae-in, the sides discussed the exchange of visits at the highest level this year. In particular, the Korean side was invited to take part in events marking the 30th anniversary of Ukraine's independence in August this year. Zhovkva and Kwon also discussed the organization of the Ukrainian president's visit to the Republic of Korea as part of the planned Asian tour. The parties agreed to continue working out possible dates for the Ukrainian-Korean summit, taking into account the situation with the pandemic in the two countries. The sides paid special attention to the implementation of specific infrastructure projects involving the investment potential of the Republic of Korea. The Korean party was invited to intensify cooperation in the development of high-speed rail traffic in Ukraine, as well as to join the "Large Construction" program, which, among other things, provides for the reconstruction and construction of 6,500 kilometers of roads in 2021. The prospects for the Republic of Korea abolishing the visa regime for Ukrainian citizens were also discussed. Zhovkva noted that this would be a powerful impetus to the further development of contacts between the two nations. Zhovkva thanked the Republic of Korea for its assistance to Ukraine in combating the COVID-19 pandemic. The parties agreed on further cooperation in this area. Photo credit: President's Office The chief executive of the aged-care organisation that manages the Brisbane facility where two residents were given incorrect doses of the coronavirus vaccine says the group will report the GP involved to the medical regulator. Lincoln Hopper, the CEO of St Vincents Care Services, which operates the Holy Spirit Nursing Home at Carseldine in Brisbanes north, said the incident had been distressing and concerning for them. It has caused us to question whether some of the clinicians given the job of administering the vaccine have received the appropriate training, Mr Hopper said in Brisbane on Wednesday. Before vaccinations continue at any of our sites, Healthcare Australia or any other provider will need to confirm this training and expertise of the clinicians they have engaged so that an incident like this does not happen again. Type address separated by commas Your Email: A 31-year-old Mayor from the Philippines has been named by the administration of US President Joe Biden as one of the 12 global anti-corruption champions. US President Recognizes Philippine Mayor Vico Sotto, a former councilor and now the mayor of Pasig City, Philippines was described as a standard-bearer for the Philippines' new generation of politicians who puts anti-corruption and transparency first even in their campaign and election strategies. According to Yahoo News, Sotto defeated the long-time mayor of the city, Bobby Eusebio, in the 2019 mayoralty race, after the family of Eusebio rules Pasig City for nearly three decades. Before the recognition, the 31-year-old Mayor authored a city ordinance that resulted in the freedom of information. Said ordinance allows its residents to request documents without having to provide justification, which is the first time in Metro Manila. The efforts of Sotto for more transparent governance not only focuses on the avoidance of kickbacks in the awarding of city contracts, involvement in civil society organizations in the budgeting and policy-making of the city, the establishment of a 24/7 hotline intended to give public information and complaints but also mandated that the value of every city government contracts will be reduced by at least 10 percent. This aims to reduce bribery in the awarding of contracts. Meanwhile, the said award shows the commitment of the United States in tackling the scourge of corruption that is why US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken launched the International Anti-corruption Champions Award. Also, it was launched in order to recognize people around the world who have demonstrated courage, leadership, and impact in exposing, preventing, and battling corruption, Inquirer.net reported. Read also: Dubai's Missing Princess Latifa: A Short-Lived Journey To Freedom Blinken stated that the administration of US President Biden recognizes the fact the world will only be successful in battling these issues by working together with partners, which include individuals who act as anti-corruption champions through their efforts. Partners should also include countries working to fulfill their commitments to international anti-corruption standards. He also said that it is the reason why he made the announcement about the new International Anti-Corruption Champions Award. The award features individuals who have worked tirelessly, often amid adversity, defends transparency, fights corruption, and ensures accountability in their own countries. Corruption remains one of the international problems that require an international solution. Based on the 2018 study of the United Nations, an estimated $1 trillion is paid in bribes every year, while around $2.6 trillion are stolen on a yearly basis through corruption. The said amount equals more than five percent of the global GDP or Gross Domestic Product. In developing countries, funds lost to corruption are at around 10 times the amount of official development assistance. Aside from Sotto who was considered as a global anti-corruption champion, 11 other individuals around the world were recognized. Other awardees are Juan Francisco Sandoval Alfaro of Guatemala, Anjali Bharadwaj of India, Diana Salaza of Ecuador, Francis Ben Kaifala of Sierra Leone, Dhuha A Mohammed of Iraq, Ruslan Ryaboshapka of Ukraine, Ibrahima Kalil Gueye of Guinea, Bolot Temirov of Kyrgyz Republic, Mustafa Abdullah Sanalla of Libya, Ardian Dvorani of Albania, and Sophia Pretrick of Micronesia. Blinken also emphasized that the individuals inspired them and many of their counterparts in pursuing these ideals worldwide. The US enforces one of the most robust anti-corruption frameworks in the world. Related article: Biden Had His First Defeat as President After Cabinet Nominee Receives Backlash @ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Protests erupted in Rochester on Tuesday after a grand jury voted to not indict police officers involved in the death of Daniel Prude, an unarmed and naked Black man. New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Tuesday afternoon that the Rochester cops who put a hood over Prudes head and then pressed his body against the pavement until he stopped breathing will not face criminal charges. Prude, 41, died last March; police initially described his death as a drug overdose, but outrage ensued six months later when body camera video showed the full incident. James said her office presented the strongest case possible to the grand jury, but couldnt persuade it that the officers had committed a crime. She said Prudes family and the Rochester community are rightfully disappointed by the outcome and condemned a system that she said had frustrated efforts to hold law enforcement officers accountable for the unjustified killing of African Americans. The Democrat & Chronicle reports hundreds of protesters took to the streets near the scene of Prudes death Tuesday night. Some waved Black Lives Matter flags and chanted No justice, no peace. White supremacy protects white supremacists, Free the People organizer Stanley Martin told the crowd. (The system) is not meant to protect us. The system did exactly what it was meant to do. The group marched on I-490 despite police objections and made their way to the Public Safety Building in downtown Rochester. Some climbed over barricades but the protest ended just before midnight with no arrests and no apparent clashes with police, according to the D&C. Face to face on Cild St pic.twitter.com/DZwZSnFQtb Shawn Dowd (@sdowdphoto) February 24, 2021 Protesters climbing over barricades at Public Safety Building. RPD guarding entrance #DanielPrude protest pic.twitter.com/0SssHSfnZL Rob Bell (@byrobbell) February 24, 2021 The Community Justice Initiative and other groups, including BLM, have demanded police reform and called for the introduction of Daniels Law, which would create a mental health task force with medical personnel specialized in aiding the de-escalation of incidents similar to Prudes. Daniel Prude suffered from mental health issues and was under the influence of the hallucinogen phencyclidine, or PCP, when he took off his clothes March 23 and ran naked in the streets of Rochester as a light snow fell. Responding police officers handcuffed him and put a white spit hood over his head, designed to protect police from a detainees saliva; at the time New York was in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. In this image taken from police body camera video provided by Roth and Roth LLP, a Rochester police officer puts a hood over the head of Daniel Prude, on March 23, 2020, in Rochester, N.Y. Rochester Police via Roth and Roth LLP via AP Prude became agitated and accused the cops of trying to kill me. Officers slammed his head into the street, with one holding his face down against the pavement and another placing a knee on his back; two minutes later, he stopped moving and fell unconscious. Prude was taken off life support a week later. RPD officers Troy Taladay, Paul Ricotta, Francisco Santiago, Andrew Specksgoor, Josiah Harris and Mark Vaughn, along with Sgt. Michael Magri, were suspended after Prudes death became public in September. The officers remain on leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation, according to Rochester Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan. ROCHESTER ACTION: protests are underway in Rochester, NY, after New York Attorney General Letitia James announced on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2021, that a grand jury declined to indict officers involved in the death of Daniel Prude. pic.twitter.com/XcrNyKSYt4 Niagara Action (@NiagaraAction) February 24, 2021 Protesters up to the front doors of PSB. @DandC pic.twitter.com/oCV78AI7NS Shawn Dowd (@sdowdphoto) February 24, 2021 San Francisco school officials unanimously approved a health and safety agreement with labor unions allowing the reopening of schools before the end of the academic year. The deal, approved during Tuesdays school board meeting, is the first major hurdle in bringing the first students back into classrooms for in-person learning, although the unions and district are still at odds over what the school day will look like when classrooms reopen. Any return to in-person instruction which is not a certainty is likely at least two months off. The district and board have faced increased pressure from parents and city officials to reopen schools including a lawsuit and possible recall and continue to face several hurdles before returning students to the classroom. Theyre now struggling to reach an agreement with teachers union officials, who have expressed both concern over learning loss as well as possible outbreaks among staff and in the community when students return. A key component of the agreement approved Tuesday allows a return to classrooms once the city reaches the red tier, the second most restrictive level of Californias reopening blueprint, if coronavirus vaccinations are made available to on-site school staff. San Francisco is expected to reach the red tier within the next week. If the city progresses to the orange tier, a less restrictive category with moderate virus spread, teachers and other staff would return without demanding vaccinations. The question now is what the school day will look like when schools reopen. The daily schedule for students and teachers is still pending, requiring an agreement between the district and teachers union. While bargaining continues over those issues, labor leaders and district officials expressed frustration at the ongoing talks over disagreements on how often students would be in classrooms. District officials touted a proposal at a Tuesday news conference before the board meeting for the youngest students. Superintendent Vince Matthews detailed the districts reopening proposal for children in transitional kindergarten through second grade, including students with disabilities, highlighting that the district is fighting for longer hours and days than the teachers union. The district wants five hours a day, five days a week at schools with low demand for a return to in-person learning, and for pre-K and special education students. In those cases, children would be in school for 25 hours a week. The superintendent said the unions proposal would provide just 12 hours of in-person instruction at those schools, with three hours a day for four days each week, and one day of distance learning. Under the unions plan, students and families would also spend much of the day transitioning from home to school and back, Matthews said. We dont want to just offer half days, he added. We want to offer consistency. In response, the United Educators of San Francisco issued a statement that did not directly address the difference between the proposals but said that after five days at the bargaining table arguing about how to reopen the schools before June, the union wants to bring in outside help. At this point, we believe there needs to be a trusted mediator to intervene, as we have lost confidence in the Superintendent to manage this process, Susan Solomon, the unions president, said. Solomon said teachers believe the most equitable and workable schedule is for students to attend school at least four days a week, even if they are half days and that families who choose not to return wont be left out. The statement added that students should remain with the same teacher theyve had all year. Several teachers spoke during public comment Tuesday, saying its imperative students remain with their current teacher given the importance of relationships already built during a tumultuous time. Im urging the board to trust and value educators, said teacher Betty Estrada. The districts hard push for its plan was the latest in an escalating battle over reopening schools. City Attorney Dennis Herrera, with backing from Mayor London Breed, sued the district in early February, arguing it didnt have a concrete plan to bring students back. COVID Resources Coronavirus Map Tracking COVID-19 cases across the Bay Area and California. Both the districts and unions plans require students to sit 6 feet apart, meaning that only 14 students could be in a single classroom. Both plans divide elementary schools into two categories: those with more requests for in-person instruction and those with fewer requests. Matthews said that more than 80% of schools would likely be able to stick to the 14-person limit. Under the districts plan, children at schools with more requests for in-person instruction would attend class twice a week all day, and learn at home on the three other days. In all, there would be 16 hours of live instruction each week, Matthews said. By contrast, he said the unions proposal for the same schools would provide 14 hours of live instruction with four half-days in the classroom each week. Children would be at home doing distance learning once a week. District officials said during a reopening update before the school board that there is still no date set to bring students back given uncertainty about vaccines and when the city will enter the red or orange tier. In addition, all elementary schools must be cleared by the Public Health Department for reopening yet only six of 64 elementary schools have completed applications for in-person instruction. There are no plans to bring back middle and high school students. Matthews said the district has heard from many families that are eager for more information, and school officials are trying to provide that. I know many families are anxiously awaiting clarity, he said. Nanette Asimov and Jill Tucker are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @nanetteasimov @jilltucker Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Demi Rose sent temperatures soaring as she went topless during her extended stay in Ibiza. The Wolverhampton-born beauty, 25, posed up a storm in a snap shared with her 16million Instagram followers on Wednesday. She fixed the camera with a sultry gaze as she appeared to make the most of the Balearic party island's warm weather by peeling off her top. Stunning: Demi Rose, 25, sent temperatures soaring as she appeared to be topless in a picture she shared with her 16million Instagram followers on Wednesday Demi let her chestnut locks cascade over one shoulder and down her back as she styled them in loose curls. The model drew attention to her beautiful features with a lick of makeup as she smiled for the camera. She captioned the snap: 'Shes like the ocean, pretty enough on the surface but dive down into her depths, youll find beauty most people never see.' 'You'll find beauty': The Wolverhampton-born beauty said she was 'like the ocean' in the snap which she took while sunning herself in Ibiza Wow! Demi was up to her old tricks once more on Tuesday as she posed up a storm in a tiny bikini during her extended stay in Ibiza On Tuesday, Demi was up to her old tricks once more as she showcased her heaving cleavage in a plunging bikini on her Instagram stories. Demi sizzled in the sexy bikini top, which made the most of her famous curves. She wore her brunette locks in cascading lengths over her shoulders while focusing the camera largely on her eye-popping assets. Demi has been sharing a slew of snaps from her sunny travels in recent months including trips to the Maldives and Tanzania. The brunette recently opened up to MailOnline about how she shot to stardom at the age of 14 after being bullied in school. Demi recalled: 'I was bullied in school, I wanted to make friends outside of it so I ended up spending a lot of time online. 'I was even interested in virtual reality as a kid, I was always on the computer and then MySpace came around and I found my calling.' From the age of 18, the Birmingham native signed with a modelling agency and her career went from strength to strength. Former Deputy Health Minister, Dr. Bernard Okoe Boye has rolled out government's plan for the COVID-19 vaccination beginning next week. Ghana will from Monday, March 1 begin administering the COVID-19 vaccines. A total of 350,000 vaccines are expected to arrive to start the vaccination process. According to Program Manager for the Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI), Kwame Amponsa-Akyianu, the exercise will continue till October this year. Expounding on the vaccination exercise, Dr. Okoe Boye says the first batch of people to receive the vaccines are health workers at hotspots in the country. He disclosed the vaccination will be issued first in Greater Accra and Kumasi in Greater Accra and Ashanti Regions respectively followed by other Regions. "When you look at the rollout plan, the first people we're targeting are the health workers at the hotspots. Although the disease is prevalent in entire Ghana, there are three/four Regions whose numbers are always high; that's Greater Accra, Kumasi (Ashanti Region) and Western," he told sit-in host Nana Yaw Kesseh on Peace FM's "Kokrokoo". He added that over 49,000 vaccinators and volunteers have been targeted to assist in the vaccination exercise. ''We're targeting training over 12471 vaccinators and 37000 volunteers. These are all people who will be trained to assist in the vaccination'', he said. 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. Featured Video BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- China's tax and fee cuts aimed at facilitating poverty alleviation topped 102.2 billion yuan (about 15.84 billion U.S. dollars) last year, official data shows. The amount increased from 74.2 billion yuan in 2019, with average annual growth exceeding 30 percent since 2015, according to a statement released on the State Taxation Administration's official website on Monday. The total sales revenue of more than 4,500 companies selling poverty alleviation products nationwide grew 32.9 percent year on year in 2020, read the statement, citing value-added invoice data. The growth outpaced that seen in 2019 by 19.4 percentage points, indicating the success of China's solid efforts to reduce poverty through consumption, the statement read. China began a full-scale battle against poverty in 2012. After eight years of continuous efforts, the country has lifted all rural poor under the current income standard out of poverty and removed all impoverished counties from its poverty list. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) President Rodrigo Duterte remains undecided on what he will do with the Visiting Forces Agreement or VFA. The President emphasized he wants to hear the Filipino people's opinion first before taking any course of action. "I have not decided yet on what to do, meaning to say to abrogate or renew, because I want to hear the people," Duterte said. Duterte added citizens are free to call the government's 8888 hotline to express their sentiments on the VFA. The VFA is a 1998 agreement between Manila and Washington on the protocol for American military personnel in the country. It is seen to support the Mutual Defense Treaty, another agreement between the Philippines and the US which guarantees that the two countries will provide military aid to each other in case their metropolitan areas or territories in the Pacific are attacked by a foreign force. Among its controversial provisions are the lax visa and passport policies for American troops and the authority granted to the US government to retain jurisdiction over its soldiers if ever they commit crimes on Philippine soil. EXPLAINER: The Visiting Forces Agreement In his address to troops at Clark Air Base last February 12, Duterte demanded the US government "to pay" if it wants to keep the VFA. He then explained in his February 15 national address that the US owed the country, as he reacted to Vice President Leni Robredo's statement comparing his demand to "extortion." Last year, the Philippines sent the US a notice to terminate the VFA, a move that stemmed from the cancellation of Senator Ronald "Bato" dela Rosa's visa due to alleged extrajudicial killings during his term as Philippine National Police chief from 2016 to 2018. Duterte suspended the abrogation amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In a speech in December, however, he threatened to push through with its termination if the US fails to deliver at least 20 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to the Philippines. Shares of hit a record high of Rs 1,160 after surging 19 per cent on the BSE in the intra-day trade on Wednesday. The stock has zoomed 43 per cent in the past two trading days. The stock of the leading consumer internet company in India surpassed its previous high of Rs 1,025 touched on September 21, 2017, also its debut day on the bourses. It zoomed 362 per cent from its 52-week low of Rs 251 touched in March 2020. At 10:39 am, the stock was trading 17 per cent higher at Rs 1,137 on the BSE, against a 0.64 per cent rise in the S&P BSE Sensex. A combined 286,000 equity shares changed hands on the counter on the NSE and BSE. is a signature consumer internet conglomerate, managing marquee brands such as BharatMatrimony, CommunityMatrimony and EliteMatrimony. The company delivers matchmaking and marriage related services to users in India and the Indian diaspora. Asset Management, which holds shares in through CMDB, is offloading its stake in the company via open through bulk deal. Last week, on February 18, CMDB sold 250,000 equity shares of Matrimony.com at an average price of Rs 880 per share on the BSE and NSE via bulk deals, the exchanges data shows. The names of the buyers were not ascertained immediately. As per December 2020 shareholding pattern, CMDB holding in the company declined to 5.7 per cent from 14.49 per cent at the end of the September quarter and from 14.78 per cent in the June quarter. SBI Mutual Fund (MF) bought 1.21 million shares or 5.3 per cent stake in Matrimony.com through its various schemes during the December quarter, the shareholding pattern data shows. For the quarter ended December (Q3FY21), Matrimony.com reported a 96.5 per cent year-on-year (YoY) growth in its consolidated net profit at Rs 11 crore. Revenues grew 7.4 per cent YoY to Rs 96.7 crore. The company added 2.3 lakh paid subscriptions during the quarter, registering a growth of 31.2 per cent YoY. The company launched two new and exclusive services namely RajasthaniMatrimony and BihariMatrimony, in a move to expand and strengthen leadership in the North. It also launched DoctorsMatrimony exclusively for Doctors. The first batch of 200,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines from China arrived in Thailand on Wednesday. Vaccines sent from China's Sinovac pharmaceutical arrived at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi International Airport on a Thai Airways flight. Thai Prime Minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha attended a ceremony along with Yang Xin, Charge d'Affaires from the Chinese Embassy in Thailand. Thailand has ordered a total of 2 million doses from China. 117,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines will also arrive later on the same day. Many critics and opposition parties have said that the government's procurement plans were delayed and inadequate. Thailand is aiming to inject 10 million doses a month from June, and plan to cover at least half of the total population by the end of 2021. Thailand's Centre for COVID-19 Situation Administration reported 93 new cases on Wednesday, of which 71 cases were local transmission and 22 were from travellers in state quarantine. This raised a total confirmed case to 25,692 including 1,067 active cases and 83 deaths. More than 20,000 cases were reported in the second wave, starting from Dec. 15. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) China's arms industry has brought a broad selection of weapons and equipment to an ongoing major large-scale international arms expo in the Middle East, attracting wide interest, with analysts saying on Tuesday that Chinese arms have prospects in the defense market in the region despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple Chinese arms firms joined the 15th International Defense Exhibition and Conference (IDEX) in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, under the unified brand of "China Defense" on Sunday, China Central Television (CCTV) reported on Tuesday. The HJ-12 portable anti-tank missile, SR-5 multiple launch rocket system, CM-501GA multipurpose tactical strike missile system, WS-43 loitering munitions system, L-15 advanced training jet, CH series drones and Wing Loong II armed reconnaissance drone are among key Chinese items at IDEX 2021, the report said, noting that they garnered wide interest. These products are carefully selected to meet the demands of countries in the Middle East, Wei Dongxu, a Beijing-based military expert, told the Global Times on Tuesday. For instance, the HJ-12 can launch precision attacks on tanks, fortifications and buildings with multiple types of guidance modes and strong anti-jamming capability, making it very competitive in the Mideast defense market; the SR-5 can launch different types of rockets, is automatic, accurate and easy to use; the CM-501GA missile is very accurate on both stationary and moving targets, making it a good choice for antiterrorism missions; and anti-aircraft equipment and armed reconnaissance drones are also popular in the region, Wei said. Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the scale of this year's edition of the biennial expo was reduced by one fourth compared with the previous edition, and Chinese arms companies exhibited models for the most part rather than real products, supported with video and audio displays, CCTV reported. Despite the pandemic, Chinese arms products have prospects in the Mideast defense market, as many countries in the region still possess a sufficient defense budget and are willing to retire older weapons for new ones as soon as possible, Wei said. "Chinese arms will likely win more and more market share in the Middle East." For years, many countries have been favoring Chinese arms products due to their affordability, high quality, good after-sales service and the lack of additionally attached political conditions, analysts said. Another highlight of Chinese products is that they can integrate into systems and series, and many of them are designed with foresight, high adaptability to battlefield environments and good compatibility with users, to an extent they can lead the trend of the development of international military technologies, CCTV said. IDEX 2021 is scheduled to be held from Sunday to Thursday, according to the event's website. It is the first international defense exhibit since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 900 companies from 59 countries participating, and countries including China, the US, Russia, the UK and France are sending exhibition groups, China Aviation News reported on Tuesday. More than 70,000 visitors and 110 official delegations from 80 countries are expected at the event, China Aviation News reported. Fig. 1 Automatic detection of joint range of motion Fig. 2 HOPE ROMREC Screen Image TOKYO, Feb 24, 2021 - (JCN Newswire) - Fujitsu today announced the launch of a new AI-powered physical rehabilitation solution in Japan, the "FUJITSU Healthcare Solution HOPE ROMREC", offering medical institutions like hospitals and clinics a powerful new tool for rehabilitation and orthopedic therapies. The solution leverages a new AI technology to automatically measure the range of motion(1) of the shoulder and elbow joints from videos of patients' rehabilitation sessions."HOPE ROMREC" is a solution that automatically measures, records, and visualizes the angles of a patient's shoulder and elbow by estimating a three-dimensional skeleton from rehabilitation videos captured using a tablet device(2). The solution leverages an image analysis AI engine developed by Fujitsu consisting of multiple AI image recognition models.The technology offers the potential to greatly improve the efficiency of the visual measurement of a patient's joint curvature using a goniometer(3), a task conventionally performed by physical therapists and occupational therapists. Ultimately, the solution will help medical professionals evaluate the effectiveness of physical and occupational therapies and determine the degree of their patients' conditions.Going forward, Fujitsu plans to continue strengthening the HOPE ROMREC solution and increase the number of measurement sites for range of motion detection. Fujitsu additionally plans to incorporate functions including automatic measurement of range of motion by simply sending video taken by a patient at home to their hospital or clinic, contributing to the realization of remote rehabilitation.BackgroundIn rehabilitation therapy, measuring range of motion is necessary to determine factors inhibiting joint movement, evaluate the effects of physical and occupational therapy, and determine the extent of a patient's condition. Physical therapists and occupational therapists make these measurements visually using goniometers, etc., however, which contributes to variation in measurement values from person to person. Conventional automatic measurement of range of motion demands special equipment, such as an acceleration sensor, which have not yet been widely implemented in the field. In addition to the system input work of measurement values, therapists now must also carry out extensive disinfection in rehabilitation areas to prevent COVID-19 infections , increasing the burden on medical facilities.To address these challenges, Fujitsu has developed the HOPE ROMREC solution, which automatically measures the range of motion of the shoulder and elbow joints by analyzing videos of patients' rehabilitation with AI. Sales of the new solution will begin in Japan on February 24.Key Features of the New Solution1. Automatic measurement of patient's range of motion with image analysis AI engineUsing an image analysis AI engine, which combines multiple AI image recognition models with previously learned motion patterns of a person's shoulder and elbow joints, it's possible to replicate a three-dimensional skeleton from a patient's rehabilitation video and automatically measure angles in a total of 16 motion directions for the shoulder and elbow. Therapists take the rehabilitation videos with a tablet's camera and send them to a dedicated PC equipped with an image analysis AI engine.The measured values are recorded as data and can be displayed as a time-series line graph, making it easy to grasp the effect and transition of individual patients' rehabilitation.It eliminates the need for accelerometers and joint markers on patients, as well as multiple cameras and specialized equipment such as infrared laser radar, which are required for conventional automated measurements of range of motion.This greatly increases the efficiency of therapists' work, which uses goniometers to visually measure a patient's range of motion, and helps assess the effectiveness of physical and occupational therapy and determine the degree of the patient's condition.2. Voice input function of the measured valueIn order to reduce the workload of therapists in rehabilitation areas other than shoulders and elbows, for which measurements can be automatically taken for the range of joint motion from video, the system is equipped with a voice input function that enables the tablet to automatically record and recognize when the user speaks the body part, direction of movement, and measurement values measured by their goniometer.This eliminates the need for note-taking and system input of measurement values that therapists typically perform, and enables measurement results to be recorded efficiently and quickly.3. Easily link data with electronic medical records systemsSince the measurement data can be exported as CSV data, it can be easily incorporated into an electronic medical record system and a medical certificate preparation system, and it can be utilized for higher quality rehabilitation treatment based on the patient's treatment results and treatment plans.(1) range of joint movement:The maximum range of physical movement of each joint of the body, measured in degrees(2) tablet device:Presently available on iPad(3) goniometer:Measurement device used by physical therapists, occupational therapists, etc. to measure range of joint movement.About FujitsuFujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company offering a full range of technology products, solutions and services. Approximately 130,000 Fujitsu people support customers in more than 100 countries. We use our experience and the power of ICT to shape the future of society with our customers. Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) reported consolidated revenues of 3.9 trillion yen (US$35 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2020. For more information, please see www.fujitsu.com.Source: Fujitsu LtdCopyright 2021 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner today said she is 'extremely disappointed' that frontline officers have not been given priority for Covid-19 vaccinations. Dame Cressida Dick said 147 of her colleagues have been coughed at and another 51 spat at by people claiming to have coronavirus since the start of the pandemic. She said around 10,000 fines have now been handed out in London for breaches of regulations since restrictions came into force in March, with the rate of tickets issued up during the latest wave. Dame Cressida has now backed an open letter sent from the Police Federation of England and Wales to officials in Westminster and the Welsh Assembly, which said failing to vaccinate officers would be 'a deep betrayal'. Last month, Priti Patel agreed that officers should be bumped up the vaccine priority list after Dame Cressida said she was 'baffled' as to why they had not been already. Dame Cressida Dick (pictured) said 147 of her colleagues have been coughed at and another 51 spat at by people claiming to have coronavirus since the start of the pandemic The Home Secretary claimed she was 'working to absolutely try and make that happen' amid growing calls for frontline workers to get the jab after the first phase of vaccinating the most vulnerable people had been completed. Ms Patel said the issue of who will be given priority is an active discussion within the Government and 'it is being looked at'. Speaking today, Dame Cressida told the City Hall's police and crime committee: 'I would have to say I'm extremely disappointed, and I think I can speak for my people when I say they are disappointed. 'Their motivation, they're up for the job, their desire to protect the public and carry out their core roles hasn't changed an iota. 'It's been a long tough year for them, they've been out there. We have not flinched from providing the best possible service that we can. Last month, Priti Patel (pictured) agreed that officers should be bumped up the vaccine priority list after Dame Cressida said she was 'baffled' as to why they had not been already Camden PC John Fabrizi (left) died just under a week after the death of his colleague PC Michael Warren (right) from the territorial support group on January 19 'They are at a particular risk because of the way in which they are so often going from house to house, in people's personal space, dealing with people who are spitting... this is a many times a day occurrence for my people. 'And inevitably they are concerned that they may take that home, or that they may be spreading as well.' She said no officer wants to be 'barging their way ahead' of the elderly or vulnerable but said there is a 'strong' case in the current phase of the vaccination programme to prioritise those on the front line. Pictured: Detective Sergeant Darren Barker, who died after being diagnosed with Covid-19 'I would like to have seen that,' the commissioner said. 'It looks like that is not very likely to happen. But at the very minimum, I'm still asking that if we can't have that, then when we get into the priority two that police officers and perhaps other occupations should be considered as a priority. 'I am disappointed with where we now are.' In January, Dame Cressida had questioned why police officers were not at the front of the queue for the Covid-19 vaccine. Ms Patel responded on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, saying: 'Well, it is being looked at. 'I have been working on this for a number of weeks alongside Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock and he is supporting all our efforts across government on this. How at least nine Met Police officers have died from coronavirus Darren Barker , specialist financial investigator detective sergeant (February 12, 2021) Sukh Singh , forensic command police constable (January 25, 2021) , forensic command police constable (January 25, 2021) Met Detention custody sergeant, unnamed (January 25, 2021) John Fabrizi , Camden police constable (January 24, 2021) , Camden police constable (January 24, 2021) Michael Warren , Territorial Support Group police constable (January 19, 2021) , Territorial Support Group police constable (January 19, 2021) Chris Barkshire , traffic police community support officer (January 11, 2021) , traffic police community support officer (January 11, 2021) Ramesh Gunamal , Forest Gate public access officer (May 9, 2020) , Forest Gate public access officer (May 9, 2020) Charles Harding , police community support officer (2020) , police community support officer (2020) Sophie O'Neill , call operator (2020) Advertisement 'I have already been in touch with our policing partners, so the NPCC, National Police Chiefs Council, and in fact the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, I speak to her regularly, a couple of times a week in fact, about getting our police, frontline, our forces ready to take the vaccine when that comes.' At least nine Met Police officers have died during the coronavirus pandemic, including specialist financial investigator Detective Sergeant Darren Barker, 51, who passed away this month. Det Sgt Barker, who had worked at the Met since 1992, was classed as vulnerable and had tested positive for Covid-19, Scotland Yard said. He had been shielding during the pandemic, but had continued to work on investigations from home. In a tribute, Detective Chief Superintendent James Harman, from the Met's Specialist Operations Command, said even while working from home Det Sgt Barker's leadership was 'truly invaluable'. A further five Metropolitan Police officers died in just over a fortnight in January. Among them were Camden PC John Fabrizi, who passed away less than a week after the death of his colleague PC Michael Warren from the territorial support group on January 19. Traffic police community support officer Chris Barkshire died on January 11 while PC Sukh Singh from the Met's forensic command died on January 25. The Commissioner said the deaths showed 'policing is not immune', while London Mayor Sadiq Khan described the news as 'deeply upsetting'. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 23:16:12|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close CAIRO, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Egyptian Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that Egypt supports a quartet mediation for the talks on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) being built on the Blue Nile. "Egypt agrees to the Sudanese proposal that involves the United Nations, the African Union, the European Union, and the United States," said the ministry's spokesman Ahmed Hafez in a statement. Earlier in the day, Sudanese Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources Yasser Abbas urged the negotiating parties to consider GERD a means for regional cooperation rather than political tension between Khartoum, Addis Ababa, and Cairo. Egypt's statement came following a meeting between Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Soukry and the visiting Alphonse Ntumba Luaba, the coordinator of the unit in charge of the Democratic Republic of Congo's chairmanship of the African Union. The unilateral second filling of the Ethiopian dam is scheduled for July. Ethiopia started building the GERD in 2011, while Egypt is concerned that the dam might affect its 55.5-billion-cubic-meter annual share of Nile water. Sudan has recently been raising similar concerns over the 4-billion-U.S.-dollar dam as a "direct threat" to Sudan's national security. Over the past few years, tripartite talks on the rules of filling and operating the GERD, with a total capacity of 74 billion cubic meters, have been fruitless, including the early ones hosted by Washington and the recent ones by the African Union. Enditem Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 21:28:35|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- China has unveiled plans to build the country's strength in the transport sector over the next 15 years, setting long-term goals for the industry, with the aim of developing a modern, high-quality and comprehensive national transport network. By 2035, the country's transport network should be convenient, cost-effective, green, intelligent and safe, according to the guidelines jointly released by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council. The transport network should feature higher domestic and international connectivity, multi-channel access to major cities, and effective coverage of county-level nodes, the guidelines state. China should be at the global forefront in terms of the quality, intelligence and green levels of transport infrastructure, they say. By the middle of the century, a modern, high-quality and comprehensive national transport network will be built in an all-round way, with a world-class transport infrastructure system, according to the guidelines. Enditem The Centre has deputed multi-disciplinary teams to states witnessing a surge in COVID-19 cases, including Maharashtra, Kerala, Gujarat, Punjab, Karnataka and Jammu and Kashmir, to support them in effectively tackling the pandemic. The three-member multidisciplinary teams are headed by joint secretary level officers in the health ministry, the Union Health Ministry said. "These teams will work closely with the states and UT administration and ascertain reasons for the recent surge in the number of COVID-19 cases. "They will also coordinate with health authorities of the states and UT for requisite COVID-19 control measures to break the chain of transmission," the ministry said. The central teams have been deputed to Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Jammu and Kashmir. The states and UT have been advised for regular critical review of the emerging situation with district officials concerned to ensure that gains made so far in COVID-19 management are not lost, the ministry stated. The Centre has also written to Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir which have been witnessing a rise in daily COVID cases, along with decreasing proportion of RT-PCR tests and rise in positivity in some districts. In the letter, the Union Health Secretary has exhorted Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir to focus on undertaking aggressive measures to break the chain of transmission and to ensure that RT-PCR testing is amplified to flush out hitherto undetected cases from the population. These states and UTs have been advised to increase testing in a focussed manner in the affected districts with the appropriate split of RT-PCR and rapid antigen tests and to also ensure that all symptomatic negatives of antigen tests are compulsorily tested via RT-PCR tests, the ministry said. The positive persons must be promptly isolated/hospitalised, all their close contacts be traced and also tested without delay. The Centre has reminded the states and UTs that any laxity in implementing stringent measures to curb the spread, especially in view of new strain of virus observed in certain countries, could compound the situation. The Union Health Secretary has separately requested the chief secretaries of these 10 States and UTs to provide time to these high level Central teams to debrief the respective chief secretaries at the conclusion of their state visits. These measures are in line with the Government of India''s graded and proactive approach to contain COVID across the country. The health ministry has been regularly engaging with states and UTs that have been exhibiting either a sudden surge in COVID-19 cases, high caseload or reporting a higher mortality in some districts, the ministry said. The teams interact with field authorities to get a first hand understanding of the challenges and issues being faced by them, it said. Also read: India reports 13, 742 new COVID-19 cases, recovery rate 97.25% Belfast City Hall. Donegall Square. Under construction in 1903. The Earl of Glasgow unveiling the statue of Sir Edward J Harland in the grounds of the new City Hall. BELFAST TELEGRAPH ARCHIVE Stonemasons finish work on the outside of the Royal Courts of Justice, Oxford Street, Belfast. April 1933 BELFAST TELEGRAPH ARCHIVE Craftsmen finish work on the Royal Courts of Justice, Oxford Street, Belfast, under the watchful of Lord Craigavon. 14/4/1933 BELFAST TELEGRAPH ARCHIVE Sir Arnold McNair, Judge of the Court of International Justice at the Hague, with Lady McNair and Professor J. L. Montrose. 22/10/1947 Sir Malcolm Sargent, Conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, with his hosts, the P.M., Lord Brookeborough, and Lady Brooke, at Stormont. 24/6/1947 Hon. Edward Carson, son of late Lord Carson of Duncairn, and his wife arriving for the Unionist Council meeting. 19/2/1948 Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, visit to Northern Ireland 1945. Arriving in Belfast and being greeted at the City Hall by Sir Crawford McCullagh. 14/9/1945. James Magennis:Ulsterman awarded The Victoria Cross (VC). Belfastman decorated for his heroic actions onboard the X.E.11 Midget Submarine returning from the attack on a japanese cruiser. James Magennis with Lord Mayor Sir Crawford McCullagh at a civic reception in Belfast in 1945. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, visit to Northern Ireland 1945. Arriving in Belfast, being recieved by Lord Londonderry at Assembly Hall for degree ceremony at Queens. 14.9.1945 The Countess Granville, wife of the Ulster Governor and sister of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, cutting ribbon to open childrens play centre at Bessbrook. 15/9/1945 On a visit to the Gasworks an employee demonstrates the Coal Gripper (The feed system of a coal getting combine, which works with a face conveyor, comprises: a traction device located on the combine and having a cylinder-shaped sprocket on the side surface of which a circular spherical-shaped recess is provided, slots being made on both inner sides of the spherical recess, said slots having an involute-spherical surface) 20/1/1938 Albion limited Group. The visit of H.R.H. the Duke Of Gloucester to Albion Ltd Clothing maufacturers Belfast,29th May 1934 On a tour of the gasworks our photographer is shown the Interior Gaosmeter. 27/4/1934 Donegall Square East, with air raid shelters, from the roof of the Robinson & Cleaver building, Belfast. Top of photo cut of by the censor. 22/9/1943 BELFAST TELEGRAPH COLLECTION/NMNI Grand Opera House, The Hippodrome (Odeon), and The Ritz (ABC). In the foreground is a motorcycle and sidecar and a jeep. 5/10/1942 BELFAST TELEGRAPH COLLECTION/NMNI Outside St. Anne's Cathedral Mr. W.D. Hoskins, ARICS. and Mr. T.J. Rushton FRIBA a partner of Sir Charles Nicholson, cathedral architect with the Dean of Belfast, Very Reverend R.C.H.Elliot. 18/9/1947 BELFAST TELEGRAPH COLLECTION/NMNI St. Anne's Cathedral, with Miss Praeger working on the figure of Solomon on the Pillar of Wisdom. 18/6/1928 Belfast Telegraph Collection/NMNI Belfast city centre, looking towards the City Hall and the hills beyond. 25/4/1939 BELFAST TELEGRAPH COLLECTION/NMNI The demolition of the old Post Office, in Royal Avenue, to make way for a new shopping complex. 11/7/1985 The hysterical crowd of teenagers which greeted the Bay City Rollers when they performed in Belfast's New Vic Cinema 25/4/1975 A visitor's view perhaps of Belfast at night, as seen from a bedroom in the Royal Avenue Hotel. 9/11/1966 Brendan Bowyer does "The Fly" with two dancers who will be touring with the Rpyal Showband. 22/4/1966 " This is how you do it." Three Randalstown fans get some quick tuition on "The Hucklebuck" from members of the Royal Showband. From left: Alice O'hara, Ballygrooby; Brendan Bowyer, Margaret O'Hara, Ballygrooby; Ed Sullivan, Betty McKeown, Hook's Lane, and Tom Dunphy. 18/2/1965 Belfast City Hall. Donegall Square. Under construction in 1906. The statue of Queen Victoria already in place. BELFAST TELEGRAPH ARCHIVE Spectators gather to view the Albert Bridge after the collapse of the central arches in 1886 WORLD WAR II: BELFAST AIR RAIDS. ARTHUR STREET. April/May 1941. Arthur Street, as senn from Donegall Place. The gap has been created by the destruction of Messrs. Brand's (Ulster Arcade) Emporium.. AR 12 Riots : Belfast. August 1969. Army take over: a young lady leaves the sealed off area passing through the barricades in Divis Street. 16/8/69 James Callaghan: Former British PM, deep in thought as he stands in front of one of a row of burnt out houses in Bombay street, Belfast. On the right is Gerry Fitt, MP. 27/8/1969 Explosions. Attacks on Electricity Service. Castlereagh. The smouldering remains of a transformer at an electricity sub-station in the Cregagh Hills, near Belfast, where an explosion caused ?500,000 damage. 31/3/1969 Riots: Belfast. Refugees. Furniture is carried into the schools meals centre in Butler Street as Roman Catholic families move from their homes in the Protestant area of the Crumlin Road. 5/8/1969 Rioting in Falls road area of west Belfast in August, 1969 at start of The Troubles Riots : Belfast. August 1969. Children playing in the sentry box erected by vigilantes at Thames Street, Belfast. The box is used by the residents who guard the street during the hours of darkness. (23/8/69) A report commissioned by the Department for Employment and Learning on labour mobility in Northern Ireland found some unemployed people suffer from a chill factor of Troubles Riots : Belfast. August 1969. A sentry looks on as Labour M.P. Gerry Fitt conducting Labour M.P's from Westminster around the Falls Road area, Belfast. (24/8/69) Riots : Belfast. October 1969. Women and children form a human chain across the Newtownards Road, Belfast, at Templemore Avenue. The protest lasted about an hour. (18/10/69) WORLD WAR II: BELFAST AIR RAIDS. HARLAND & WOLFF. 4/5 May 1941. Harland and Wolff general view of part of the shipyard, damaged by air raids. AR 103. WORLD WAR II: BELFAST AIR RAIDS. TRANSPORT. 15/16 April 1941. The Municiple tram service carried on despite Hitler's bombs, which fell both inside and outside this depot in Salisbury Avenue (Antrim Road). AR 172. WORLD WAR II: BELFAST AIR RAIDS. SUGARHOUSE ENTRY. April/May 1941. Where the United Irishmen used to meet under the leadership of Henry Joy McCracken in the days of '98. AR 161. WORLD WAR II: BELFAST AIR RAIDS. CITY HALL. 4/5 May 1941. Belfast City Hall showing the roof above the Banqueting Hall, damged after an explosion. AR 43. Baby elephant, Sheila, who was moved out of Belfast zoo because of fears of a hit from bombers during the Belfast Blitz of 1941 A huge crater at Ravenscroft Avenue off the Newtownards Road after the Blitz of 1941 Sinn Fein and the DUP councillers have clashed over how to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Belfast Blitz. At Belfast City Councils recent Strategic Policy and Resources committee, DUP councillor Dale Pankhurst suggested an air raid siren and searchlights be turned on for the anniversary in front of city hall. Sinn Fein councillor Ciaran Beattie said this would be alarming for residents, and asked for something more positive despite a siren being used five years ago for the 75th anniversary. Councillors were asked by officers if they would agree to mark the 80th anniversary of the Belfast Blitz on April 15 and contribute 1,000 towards the Northern Ireland War Memorial Programme. The commemoration is part of the councils Decade of Centenaries which will end in March 2022. The council has suspended live events until August 2021 in light of ongoing restrictions due to the pandemic. Mr Beattie said: I appreciate Councillor Pankhursts suggestion, but might it not be better to have some sort of symbol of peace? Obviously war is a very traumatic time for many, and I think we should try and project a positive message rather than try to remind people of the past. He added: Im not saying we shouldnt do this, I am just saying we should look at other suggestions too. I just think an air raid siren going off is a bit alarming for people. If we can be creative around this, and see the city promoted in a positive light, rather than opening ourselves to a bit of criticism. Mr Pankhurst said: I dont see it as any kind of glorification of war. In fact, a symbol of light going through a dark sky at night is probably one of the best symbols of peace. The chair of the committee said the chief executive confirmed there would be further investigation into the options for the commemoration. The NI War Memorial has said that it will be undertaking the majority of commemoration through virtual means. It has said wreath laying at City and Milltown Cemeteries will take place only if restrictions permit, and with a small number of people in attendance to maintain social distancing. In 2016, Belfast Council supported events to mark the 75th anniversary of the Blitz, with the names of those who died scrolled on the big screen in City Hall grounds, along with an air siren sounding. Plaques marking significant sites impacted by the Blitz were also erected across the City. The council has also applied for a 87,700 National Lottery Heritage Fund for four projects on the centenaries project: a drama and animation programme in mid June 2021, the restoration of the chairs in the council chamber used by the King and Queen during the inauguration of the NI Parliament in 1921, a digitised artefacts and stories project related to 1921, and a time capsule project. HAMILTON, Bermuda, Feb. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Seadrill Limited ("Seadrill" or the "Company") (OSE:SDRL,OTCQX:SDRLF) announces that Seadrill New Finance Limited (the "Issuer"), a subsidiary of the Company, has agreed to extend the existing forbearance agreement announced on 11 February 2021 with respect to the 12.0% senior secured notes due 2025 (the "Notes") with certain holders of the Notes (the "Note Holders"). Pursuant to the forbearance agreement, as extended, the consenting Note Holders have agreed not to exercise any enforcement rights with respect to the Issuer and any subsidiary of the Issuer which is an obligor under the Notes to, or otherwise take actions in respect of, certain events of default that may arise under the Notes as a result of, amongst other things, the Issuer not making the semi-annual 4% cash interest payment due to the senior secured noteholders on 15 January 2021 in respect of their Notes and the filing of Chapter 11 cases in the Southern District of Texas by the Company and certain of its consolidated subsidiaries (excluding the Issuer and its consolidated subsidiaries) until and including the earlier of 10 March 2021 and any termination of the forbearance agreement. The purpose of the forbearance agreement is to allow the Issuer and its stakeholders more time to negotiate on the heads of terms of a comprehensive restructuring of its balance sheet. Such a restructuring may involve the use of a court-supervised process. FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS This news release includes forward looking statements. Such statements are generally not historical in nature, and specifically include statements about the Company's plans, strategies, business prospects, changes and trends in its business, the markets in which it operates and its restructuring efforts. These statements are made based upon management's current plans, expectations, assumptions and beliefs concerning future events impacting the Company and therefore involve a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this news release. Consequently, no forward-looking statement can be guaranteed. When considering these forward-looking statements, you should keep in mind the risks described from time to time in the Company's regulatory filings and periodical reporting. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which such statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for the Company to predict all of these factors. Further, the Company cannot assess the impact of each such factor on its business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to be materially different from those contained in any forward looking statement. This information is subject of the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act. For further information, please contact: Media questions should be directed to: Iain Cracknell Director of Communications +44 (0)7765 221 812 Analyst questions should be directed to: Hawthorn Advisors [email protected] +44 (0)203 7454960 CONTACT: [email protected] 020 3745 4960 This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com https://news.cision.com/seadrill-limited/r/sdrl---seadrill-new-finance-limited-announces-extension-of-forbearance-agreement,c3294511 SOURCE Seadrill Limited LANSING, MI Michigan Senate Republicans have advanced a resolution that urges wildlife officials to hold a gray wolf hunting and trapping season in the Upper Peninsula this year following the loss of endangered species protections. The non-binding resolution, S.R. 15, is sponsored by Sen. Ed McBroom, a lawmaker from the western U.P. who chaired a Wednesday, Feb. 24 hearing in which he criticized state officials for delaying the decision on another hunt until mid-2022. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) says itll take until at least next June to update the states 2015 wolf management plan and hold a public opinion survey. The DNR wants to finish those before deciding on another hunt. McBroom, who lined up pro-hunt testimony from several hunting groups in the U.P., repeatedly questioned why the states plan must be updated before a new hunt and he panned an opinion survey as foolish and unnecessary. We dont suspend deer hunting on the third year while we wait for the replacement of the three-year plan, he said, while arguing with one of several hunting opponents who called into the hearing via Zoom. I mean, thats just not how plans work. McBroom, chair of the Senate Natural Resources Committee, held the floor during most of Wednesdays hearing, which follows the introduction of his resolution last week. The resolution urges the DNR and Natural Resources Commission (NRC) to use a hunt to control the U.P. wolf population, which the DNR estimates to be holding stable in recent years at roughly 700 wolves spread among 143 packs. McBroom and hunting supporters argue that wolves, coupled with severe winters, are causing a decline in the U.P. deer herd and problems for farms raising livestock. They claim other states, notably Wisconsin, are holding hunts already and that U.P. residents ought to be able to legally hunt wolves because the animals are being illegally poached anyway. The hearing did not feature testimony from state officials or experts. Hunt supporters in the U.P. questioned official state population estimates and one even suggested that wolves ought to be considered invasive to Michigan. According to the DNR, wolves are native to Michigan and the current U.P. population outside of Isle Royale grew from natural emigration of wolves from Minnesota, Ontario and Wisconsin after hitting a six-animal low in the 1970s. The animals have to be considered exotics, said Dale McNamee, alleging that Canadian gray wolves were introduced by wildlife authorities and that helped drive out native eastern timber wolves. At the least, they are an invasive species. People who have little or no scientific background, as well as some scientists, find the wolf to be a romantic, lovable creature to be admired and protected. The assumption is patently untrue. The wolf is a predator, a carnivore. Hes a meat eater, McNamee said. Hunting is not a very efficient method of control, really. Trapping is much more efficient. Another hunt supporter, Gary Gorniak of the Upper Peninsula Sportsmen Alliance, claimed without presenting evidence that the real average number of wolves is probably north of 1,200 and argued the population has basically exceeded the biological carrying capacity of the U.P. I live on Brevort Lake and in the past few years weve had wolves chasing deer right through our backyards in the middle of the day, Gorniak said. We have pictures of wolves in the city limits of St. Ignace. Just last month, a young lady jogging through the state park ran into a wolf. The wolf was not aggressive in any way, but the girl was scared and climbed a tree to be safe. Rory Mattson, Delta County Conservation District director, urged the state to look to a hunt taking place over state wildlife agency objections in Wisconsin and ensure that trapping is a part of harvest regulations because wolves quickly learn to avoid people once the shooting starts. Mattson said an overall decline in hunting in the U.P is hurting the area economically and he suggested wolves were to blame for declines in the deer population. Our local economic revenue, which is basically a hunting season, has been falling tremendously with the deer population going down and the wolf population going up, he said. Wolf hunt supporters received few, if any, questions from the senators but that was not the case for opponents, who were challenged and questioned aggressively. McBroom sparred with several female Zoom callers who opposed the resolution, including a lengthy back-and-forth with Molly Tamulevich, Michigan director of the Humane Society of the United States, during which the two argued, among other things, about the merits of research on the impact of hunting on pack structure and stability, the cascading impact on ecosystems from apex predator loss and the necessity of a 2021 hunting season. With a stable population for 10 years and without threat to human life and with minimal livestock predations, what would be the incentive to have a hunt when it doesnt appear that there are any objective issues with the wolf population as it stands? Tamulevich said. McBroom suggested data isnt telling the whole story. Just because predation reports are down doesnt mean predations are actually down, he said. The DNR doesnt come now when you call about seeing dead wolves. Farmers dont get compensated for it, so theres no point in calling. Guys who do shoot wolves who were predating end up with nothing but trouble, so its difficult to believe the numbers because folks dont want to give guys a legitimate way to deal with it. At times, the hearing starkly illustrated a cultural divide between Upper and Lower Michigan thats long been a feature of the gray wolf debate. McBroom leaned into that on Wednesday, asking each person who testified (other than those with whom he was familiar or obviously calling in from the Upper Peninsula) whether they were from the U.P. Youre asking everybody that. No, Im not. I am a Michigan constituent and I do have a voice, Karol Miller of Rochester replied to the question. McBroom then asked if she would support transporting a significant amount of the population of wolves downstate? Miller, who argued that wolves were likely helping reduce the prevalence of chronic wasting disease (CWD) among the U.P. deer herd, said that if she were a hunter and wolves could help reduce the prevalence of CWD in the Lower Peninsula where the transmissible pathogen is a serious and growing problem among the deer population, then yes, I do. Thats great, McBroom said. Ive been saying that for years. Ill be more than happy to bring them down with me. Jeff Towner, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist from Negaunee, broke the chain of U.P. support versus downstate opposition by calling actions pushed in McBrooms resolution wholly unnecessary to the effective management of the gray wolf population. Towner said human conflicts with wolves are not a significant problem and language in McBrooms resolution suggesting the wolf population must be culled to limit potential conflicts is false and without any scientific merit. There is simply no data or scientific analysis supporting this premise, he said. It is simply an excuse to justify a wolf hunt. The director and wildlife professionals of the DNR should be allowed to carry out their jobs and revise the current Michigan wolf management plan in the manner and on the timeline that has been set by the director, he said. That is the legitimate approach that I, as a Michigan taxpayer and former official responsible for gray wolf management, expect. If Michigan were to hold another wolf hunt, it would be the states second ever. Michigan previously organized a hunt in 2013 while wolves were temporarily delisted. Wolves officially came off the endangered list for the lower 48 states on Jan. 4. However, that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decision was put under review by President Joe Biden last month and environmental groups have already filed several lawsuits to challenge the delisting. Wolves were wiped out across most of the U.S. by the 1930s under government-sponsored poisoning and trapping campaigns. A remnant population in the western Great Lakes region has expanded to about 4,400 animals across Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin since wolves were listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1973. The Michigan DNR moved last month to revive a wolf management advisory council, which will include members from conservation, hunting and fishing, agricultural and animal advocacy groups and tribal government. The DNR indicated that its in a holding pattern while federal protection status is being worked out. Before another Michigan hunt, the legal status of wolves should be more permanently settled, especially given the long history of legal challenges to delisting decisions and the resulting shifting status of wolves, said DNR spokesperson Ed Golder last week. In the meantime, state law allows the use of lethal force against wolves now to prevent them from killing dogs or livestock. While federally listed, wolves previously could only be legally killed in defense of human life in Michigan. Related stories: Republicans push to open season on wolves DNR calls first Michigan wolf hunt a success Michigan voters reject wolf hunting laws Endangered or not? Scientists, lawmakers debate wolves Biden administration issues sanctions against Burma in response to military coup 24 February 2021 On February 11, 2021 President Biden signed Executive Order (EO) 14014, Blocking Property with Respect to the Situation in Burma , in response to the recent military coup in Burma. The same day it issued the EO, the U.S. Treasury Department designated thirteen new individuals and entities under the EO and added them to the Office of Foreign Assets Controls (OFAC) list of Specially Designated Nationals (SDN list), and designated two more individuals on February 22, 2021. In a separate but coordinated move, the U.S. Commerce Department put in place new export controls against Burma while contemplating further action. The sanctions and export controls are limited in scope and target the Burmese military and actors deemed responsible for the coup. The EU, which is Burmas third largest trading partner, has condemned the violence but has been slower to impose sanctions. At the time of writing, no new EU sanctions have been imposed, and those expected are likely to be limited to visa-bans and asset-freezes on the new junta rather than any material trade controls. This is a step both Canada and the UK (whose sanctions policy is no longer driven by Brussels) have already taken unilaterally. Download PDF Limerick Chamber is calling for the commencement of the multimillion euro O'Connell Street revitalisation project as a matter of urgency. It says it's important that key elements of the work can be delivered in time to support businesses that hope to reopen in the coming months if public health restrictions are eased. Speaking following the Governments announcement that Level 5 restrictions are to remain in place until at least April 5, Chamber CEO Dee Ryan said: "The Government is plotting a cautious route to the easing of restrictions and, in time, a gradual reopening of customer facing businesses. It is essential that we use this prolonged time of supressed movement to make as much progress as we can on the Limerick Urban Centre Revitalisation of O'Connell Street project, which the Chamber believes is essential in support of Limerick business. Last month Limerick City and County Council confirmed the 9.1m project is not deemed essential under current guidelines and will not be proceeding until the Level 5 restrictions are eased. The funding is in place and, for good reason, the commencement of works was suspended in January due to infection levels across the country being out of control. However, with infection numbers significantly reduced, its time that this essential project is allowed to push on. As much progress must be made as possible while businesses are closed so that the impact on their trading when they reopen is at a minimum," said Ms Ryan who noted that works in other urban centres, elsewhere in the country, have been given the go ahead in recent weeks. "If any urban centre needs this to start now, its ours. We have seen the go ahead given by government on major public realm works in Clare. We need the same urgency in the delivery of the OConnell Street works which are critical to stakeholders efforts to make improvements in our city centre, she added. Limerick Chamber has welcomed the governments commitment to extend existing business supports to the end of June and confirmation that a National Economic Recovery Plan is at an advanced stage. "However, specifically for Limerick also, we must commence the urgently needed work on OConnell street as a support for city traders into the future, said Ms Ryan. Limerick Chamber has commissioned a report on Future Limerick City by Indecon which will be completed in Q2. The initiative is part of the Chambers commitment to be a driver for positive change in the city centre and to enable Limerick City to achieve its potential to be the economic engine for the wider Mid-West region. Regarding the recent discussions on regularising food trucks, Ms Ryan welcomed Limerick City and County Councils desire to reach a resolution. I have been in communication with Limerick City and County Council CEO Dr Pat Daly and some Metro Area Councillors on the matter. The local authority is open to looking at this but a motion to amend bye-laws will be needed and this is being explored. Regarding the recent controversy relating to food and coffee trucks, Ms Ryan welcomed Limerick City and County Councils desire to reach a resolution. I have been in communication with Limerick City and County Council CEO Dr Pat Daly and some Metro Area Councillors on the matter. The local authority is open to looking at this but a motion to amend bye-laws will be needed and this is being explored. I informed the CEO that Limerick Chamber is supportive of measures to facilitate food trucks as they add to the vibrancy of the city. But any accommodation should not negatively impact on operation of other businesses, not least given that their rates and rent are based on location and footfall," she said. A group of 24 World Food Prize laureates have written a letter to US President Joe Biden urging him to alleviate global hunger and malnutrition. In the missive, that was made public by the World Food Prize Foundation on February 23, the group had urged Biden to lead the way to elevate hunger from the world. Furthermore, they asked him to change the existing food systems and reduce the gap between the haves and have nots. Calling the US a the catalyst for action, they said that any action by the country would also inspire other nations to follow the same. American leadership on getting food systems right will inspire and embolden others to join forces to end hunger, counter climate change, generate jobs, and promote responsible stewardship of the environment, an excerpt from the letter read. They also asked Biden to reestablish American global leadership to end hunger. Additionally, they also urged Biden to refresh the countrys evidence-based policy and investment to end hunger and expand the USAID Feed the Future initiatives. Read: Rasika Dugal's Short Film 'Zero Hunger' Spreads Awareness About Food Conservation, Watch Read: Commercial Vehicle Operators Threaten To Go On Hunger Strike American leadership will be a beacon that helps to light the way and a catalyst for action that gets us to a world in 2030 where we live within our planetary boundaries, everyone is well-nourished, and no one goes to bed hungry, said Lawrence Haddad, 2018 World Food Prize laureate and executive director of Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. Acute hunger According to the Global Hunger Index, the global level of hunger is at a moderate level however situation in three countries Chad, Timor-Laste and Madagascar- suffer from alarming hunger while eight countriesBurundi, Central African Republic, Comoros, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemenhave also been provisionally are battling alarming levels of hunger. In addendum, hunger is at serious levels in 31 countries and moderate in 14 countries. While the world is already struggling with food scarcity, the COVID-19 crisis has led to failure in food systems across the globe. (With inputs from AP) Read: 'Hunger Cannot Wait': Sonu Sood Assures Help To Starving Boatmen Struck In Varanasi Read: Kerala Congress Holds Hunger Strike Against Petrol Price Hike STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. Students across New York State may not need to take Regents exams in order to graduate high school this year, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) suggested on Tuesday. Education officials plan to vote next month on a series of amendments regarding the Regents exams for students taking the tests this year such as removing Regents exams as a requirement to get a high school diploma, and canceling any non-mandatory Regents exams. The changes would likely look similar to last year, when Regents exams were canceled and graduation requirements were modified due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The states announcement comes shortly after the Biden administration announced Monday that states must administer standardized exams this year, as part of a plan to see the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on student success. Schools wont be held accountable for the results, and states could also give shorter, remote, or delayed versions of the tests. The announcement has stopped plans by New York State, which requested a waiver from the federal government, to forego state assessments at the elementary, middle and high school levels. USDE [U.S. Department of Education] informed states [Monday] night that it will not grant a blanket waiver for state assessments. While we are disappointed by this decision, we are examining all possible options, said Emily DeSantis, a spokesperson for NYSED. To receive a high school diploma, most students are required to take at least five Regents exams, which measure student achievement in high school-level choices. There are usually three times each year when students can take Regents exams January, June and August. Three of those Regents exams math, English language arts and science are required by the federal government, which means New York cant cancel those exams. But DeSantis said education officials will vote to propose that any Regents exam administered this year wouldnt be required to meet graduation requirements. And it will also propose canceling any other Regents exam this year that isnt required by the federal government. *** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK *** Last year, the state canceled its Regents exams and modified the requirements that students must meet in order to earn a high school diploma, credentials and endorsements. Those modifications applied to all students enrolled in grades 7-12 during the 2019-2020 school year who were intending to participate in one or more of the June Regents exams. Exempt from the tests completely, those students arent required to re-take the exams at a later date to receive credit for their high school diploma or to graduate. They only needed to pass the class they were currently enrolled in at the time that would have culminated with the June exam. The Board of Regents will vote on its proposals for this school year during a meeting next month. School Zone: A new newsletter with the updates you need as our schools try to get back to normal. Enter your email address here and hit "subscribe" to receive this weekly newsletter: FOLLOW ANNALISE KNUDSON ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER. The parents of two deceased children, including a 1-year-old girl whose body was found earlier this week in a Liberty County swimming pool, have been arrested amid ongoing investigations into the toddlers death by area law enforcement and Child Protective Services, officials said Wednesday. Londell Laviene, 28, and Bonnie Tarrant, 41, on Tuesday were booked into Liberty County Jail on two misdemeanor charges of interfering with public duties and resisting arrest. They have since posted bond, officials said, though the exact amount was not available in online records. Also Tuesday, the parents four surviving children, ranging in age from 1 month to 14 years old, were removed from the home by Child Protective Services and placed into foster care. The toddlers death comes six years after the parents 4-year-old boy drowned at a community swimming area near Dayton. The Department of Family and Protective Services confirmed that CPS is investigating the death of the 1-year-old, whose body was found Monday afternoon in a neighbors above-ground swimming pool on West Pine Street in the city of Daisetta. The childs autopsy results have not been released. The family has had contact with DFPS before, but specific details are confidential, said DFPS spokesperson Melissa Lanford. The Texas Rangers and the Daisetta Police Department are assisting the Liberty County Sheriffs Office with its investigation. LCSO Capt Ken Defoor said said the parents have been uncooperative in their probe. He said the child did not show obvious signs of trauma at the scene but noted that the autopsy will provide a more accurate picture. The family reported the child missing around 2:30 p.m. Monday and found the body while deputies were en route to the home, according to an earlier news release. Two Liberty County Sheriff's Office investigators interviewed the parents, who said the child had been put down for a nap earlier in the day. They said she was not in her bed when they checked on her two hours later. The parents initially filed the missing person report "thinking the child had just walked away," the sheriff's office said. The previous death, in July 2015, was determined to be accidental and did not lead to criminal charges. At the time, the parents said they called 911 after their 4-year-old boy had been missing for about 30 minutes from Nine Mile Lake Water Park in south Liberty County. They had been circling the lake calling for their son as well as using a public address system to get his attention, authorities said at the time. Searchers eventually discovered the boys body in the water. It was a weekend other people were out there and the child just wasnt supervised or kept under close watch, Defoor said. That case was sent to the DAs Office. They reviewed it and no charges were ever filed. rebecca.hennes@chron.com julian.gill@chron.com The Biden Administration is rolling out a plan to deliver 25 million cloth masks to Americans through health centers and food banks, amid health warnings of the need for people to use them even as cases drop. The masks will be procured by the government and distributed free, with plans to deliver them to cites that could get them into the hands of lower-income Americans where the pandemic has been taking a toll. 'One of the most impactful things we can do is wear a mask and this is so important during this critical period where cases are declining but variants that spread more easily are increasing throughout our country,' said Rochelle Walenksy, who heads the Centers for Disease Control, at a coronavirus briefing Wednesday. President Joe Biden walks with Albert Bourla, Pfizer CEO, right, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, second from right, and Jeff Zients, White House coronavirus response coordinator, as he tours of a Pfizer manufacturing site, Friday, Feb. 19, 2021, in Portage, Mich. Biden has asked Americans to wear masks for 100 days to combat the virus The masks will be provided to the public free of charge to the public. Wallensky said they would be 'comfortable, easy to wear and when worn will prevent infection and we believe these masks will do so.' According to the White House, masks will go to about 1,300 Federally Qualified Community Health Centers across the country. Two-thirds of those who are served by the centers are living in poverty, and 60 per cent are minorities, according to the White House. 'Recipients will be encouraged to take an individually wrapped package of two masks for each person in their household,' according to guidance. The cloth masks will be available at food pantries and community health centers Zients said that not all masks are 'created equal,' and the plan is for people to get 'well fitting' ones that slow transmission of COVID-19 The masks will be available beginning in March and through May, according to a White House fact sheet. It said the Defense Department and the Agriculture Department will deliver masks to 300 food banks around the country, which in turn reach 60,000 food pantries. 'These masks will be no cost, high-quality, washable, and consistent with the mask guidance from the CDC. All of these masks will be made in America, and will not impact availability of masks for health care workers,' according to the White House. Coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said Wednesday that the program would cost taxpayers $86 million. Coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients described the mask rollout at a briefing Wednesday He did not directly respond to a question about mask hesitancy and whether masks are now generally available. 'We really believe that this policy makes a lot of sense in that it allows people who are not able to in some situations find or afford a mask to get a mask,' he said. Zeints referenced a plan rejected during the Trump Administration to send masks directly to Americans, saying months ago it 'would have been a good idea.' 'Today masks are widely available,' he said. 'Yet still, not all Americans are wearing masks regularly and not all masks are equal.' He said the program 'focuses on people who may be particularly in need of the extra support to stay safe and to meet the presidents mask challenge' of masking up for 100 days. Said Zients: 'We will deliver more than 25 million masks across the country. These masks will be available at more than 1,300 community health centers and at 60,000 food pantries nationwide. Any American who needs a mask will be able to walk into these health centers or food pantries and pick up high-quality, American-made masks. These masks will be available at no cost. Theyll be well-fitting cloth masks available in childrens and adult sizes, and they can be washed for reuse all consistent with CDC guidance, and all made in the USA.' Priti Patel today warned British holidaymakers it is 'far too early' for them to book a summer break abroad this year. The Home Secretary urged Brits to wait for progress to be made under Boris Johnson's lockdown exit roadmap before booking a foreign trip. The publication of the PM's strategy on Monday sparked a wave of optimism that people could could now start planning a getaway, with Mr Johnson targeting a return to something close to normal life from June 21. But Ms Patel said everyone should remain focused on sticking to the current lockdown rules as the vaccination drive continues. Boris Johnson's roadmap states that the earliest international travel rules could be relaxed is May 17 International travel during lockdown is banned unless it is for essential purposes. Under the PM's roadmap a Global Travel Taskforce will report on April 12 with 'recommendations aimed at facilitating a return to international travel as soon as possible'. The Government will then examine the recommendations before determining when foreign holidays can resume. However, the document warns that this will be 'no earlier than 17 May'. Ms Patel was asked this morning during an appearance in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee what her advice would be to would-be holidaymakers who want to book a foreign trip. Yvette Cooper, the Labour chairman of the committee, asked the Home Secretary: What would your advice be to all of those people booking their holidays today? To book away or to wait? Ms Patel replied: Well, it is too early. You have already heard me say. It is far too early. 'It is too early and we have to look at the data at every single stage and the roadmap outlined by the Prime Minister makes that abundantly clear. Ms Cooper then asked: So people thinking about booking a summer holiday in Greece or Spain right now should wait until after the global task force report? They shouldnt be booking things now?' Ms Patel replied: Well, first of all it is too early, absolutely, and there is a roadmap and we would advise everybody to follow all the restrictions, the measures that have been put in place. Vaccine certificates could be a requirement for entry to some countries in the future, with the Greek government pushing for UK tourists to be allowed back in May. Tigaki beach in Kos, Greece, is pictured As I have said we have got to continue with the vaccine roll-out and the four tests that the Prime Minister has outlined as well that we will need to meet before restrictions change. Many countries are expected to require proof of vaccination as a condition of quarantine-free travel in the future. Ministers are currently working on proposals which would allow UK travellers to request a vaccine certificate should it be asked for by border officials. Greece is leading the way on the issue and is said to be in discussions with the British Government about how to get UK tourists back from May. Venezuela and Iran, both sanctioned by the United States, have found a way to help each other as shipping companies stay away from dealings with the two oil-producing countries for fear of running afoul of the U.S. Venezuela is shipping jet fuel to Iran in the same tankers in which Iran delivers gasoline and spare parts for the refineries in Venezuela, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the matter and documents of Venezuelas state oil firm PDVSA it had seen. Venezuela, which has an excess of jet fuel with flights grounded in the country over the past year due to the coronavirus, is sending aviation fuel to Iran, after having received gasoline from the Islamic Republic, according to Reuters sources. Despite holding the worlds largest crude oil reserves, Venezuela has been suffering from acute gasoline shortages in recent years, as a result of lower production of crude and years of mismanagement at refineries, as well as U.S. sanctions, which have cut off gasoline imports from the United States. Iran explained last year the tanker traffic between Venezuela and Iran with the shipment of a cargo of mangos and pineapples to Iran as part of win-win commercial relations, Reuters reports. Neither of the two countries has revealed details about the fuel swap that has been going on, but Iran has been caught red-handed shipping gasoline to Venezuela. In August last year, the U.S. Administration said it had seized the fuel cargo of four vessels, alleging that the fuel came from Iran and was going to Venezuela. The 1.116 million barrels of petroleum on the four tankers were seized and sent to U.S. custody. Earlier this year, U.S. Department of Justice said it had completed the sale of the 1.116 million barrels of gasoline that Iran tried to ship to Venezuela last year. The U.S. Administration is now looking to detain another tanker it believes is part of an Iranian scheme to covertly ship Iranian oil to a foreign customer. The Department of Justice alleges that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has created a scheme to covertly ship Iranian oil to a customer outside Iran. The supertanker, the Achilleas, is carrying 2 million barrels of what the United States believes is Iranian crude oil. By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: This year our dine and drink business locations throughout the Gorge have suffered with closures. You can help support your favorites by purchasing take out and gift cards. Many of these business will offer curb-side delivery and some will deliver to your home. Lets keep the Gorge going strong! Grant Shapps last night became the first Cabinet minister to receive the coronavirus vaccine. The Transport Secretary received a dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, his constituency. Cancer treatment in the late 1990s means the 52-year-old is more vulnerable to the disease and therefore eligible for inoculation. He also filmed a video thanking NHS staff and urged people to get vaccinated so 'together we can protect each other'. Grant Shapps last night became the first Cabinet minister to receive the coronavirus vaccine The Transport Secretary received a dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, his constituency Mr Shapps tweeted yesterday evening: 'Just received first #Covid jab after getting call from GP surgery to attend. 'Double-checked I was in line for vaccine & NHS confirmed it was due to cancer treatment I received over two-decades ago. 'Key message from NHS is - get yourself vaccinated the moment you're offered it.' In 1999, shortly after he was selected to fight the seat of Welwyn Hatfield, Mr Shapps was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, an uncommon cancer that affects a person's glands. The following year he received chemotherapy treatment and has since been in remission. Earlier this month Mr Shapps revealed his 89-year-old father had been struck down with Covid on a hospital ward 'for some time'. Photographs issued by Downing Street show the Tory minister receiving the injection in his left arm, having rolled up the sleeve on his navy blue polo Photographs issued by Downing Street show the Tory minister receiving the injection in his left arm, having rolled up the sleeve on his navy blue polo. A Government publicity blitz encouraging people to get vaccinated comes amid evidence of low take-up in parts of the BAME community. So far 18,242,873 people in Britain have received their first shot of either the Pfizer or Oxford/AstraZeneca jab - roughly 27 per cent of the population. A further 326,692 received the jab yesterday, and 26,317 received their second dose. Vaccination hubs are currently working their way down the JCVI's top nine priority groups of the most at-risk people. Many areas have now started calling over-60s for their jabs, as well as over-16s with underlying health conditions. Boris Johnson's Cabinet is strikingly young, with the oldest members Alister Jack and Simon Hart, Scottish and Welsh Secretary respectively, who are both 57. Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend a gathering in Beijing Thursday to mark the country's accomplishments in poverty eradication. Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, will present awards and certificates to national honorary title recipients for their contributions to the poverty alleviation cause. He will also deliver an important speech. Other role models in this regard will also be awarded. The event will be broadcast live by China Media Group and on xinhuanet.com. It will also be rebroadcast simultaneously on major news websites including people.com.cn, cctv.com and china.com.cn, as well as on news apps run by the People's Daily, Xinhua News Agency and China Central Television. Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. If you'd like to leave a comment (or a tip or a question) about this story with the editors, please email us We also welcome letters to the editor for publication; you can do that by filling out our letters form and submitting it to the newsroom. GlobeNewswire Jourdan E Martin Stock Traders and Investors these days are taking a long-time selling and buying stocks due to seasonal change in price NEW YORK, May 31, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Stock Traders and Investors these days are taking a long-time selling and buying stocks due to seasonal change in price. However, despite the difficulty, they continue to trade their stocks to grow even in a slow and time-consuming way. A graduate from The University of Southern Mississippi and an Experienced Account Executive Jourdan E Martin, establishes Profit Calendar as the new trading service that is easier and life-changing. During College times, Jourdan also obtained a Bloomberg Market Concepts certification. Jourdan began trading and investing in the stock market in 2012 after developing a passion for learning about how it works and how it can be used to create wealth and income. He pursued his passion to help other people learn how to use the stock market to generate supplemental income, passive income, and wealth for themselves. WHAT IS THE PROFIT CALENDAR? Profit Calendar is your guide to determining which stocks are likely to return a profit shortly. Health and fitness companies likely see more revenue and stock increases around New Years, when people make their resolutions. Apple, Walmart, and Nike, likely get a boost around Black Friday and Christmas. There are plenty of stocks that move in patterns like this year over year. It provides traders with access to a list of 50+ stocks that have seasonal patterns of success 90% of the time, the past 15 years. For example, if you had purchased Domino's Pizza stock at around December 18 and sold it on December 30, you could have made a profit every year from 2005 to 2019. New investors often inquire Can you please tell me what to invest in and when? Thanks to this benefit calendar, investors can know exactly which stocks to buy, when to sell them, and how much profit they can make. Nowadays current stock trading processes, Profit Calendar would be the best fit to in partnership with. This service is a big help for traders and investors to focus on their objective and identify trades that carry a higher chance for success. But not only that, in the Profit Calendar, Jourdan also provides videos and PowerPoint lessons on how he uses this information to have consistent success when trading in the market. Why SHOULD One Experience the Profit Calendar Service? The Profit Calendar has several benefits and features that help its members grow in trading the industry. Founder and CEO Jourdan Martin, who has been in this industry for several years, helps other people understand the process and systems in trading stocks. Which is why this program has been designed to provide custom learning routines that allows traders to improve their trading skills and knowledge. With an experienced instructor who shares a strong passion for helping other people, improving ones ability in trading has never been this much as before. The Profit Calendar provides several benefits, some of which are the following Helps in the consistency, convenience, and profitability of your plan. You can limit your attention to stocks that have traditionally moved up or down by using it to complement your current strategy, and you will have experience on your side when taking the trade. This service will assist you in increasing your trading profitability, success rate, and comfort level.The profit calendar helps traders to stay organized and guides a path for them to follow. It is also keeping their analyzing skills sharp before purchasing the market stocks.The service given does not require to go anywhere else. In Martin Investment Group, using Profit Calendar you can learn whether short- to medium-term gains in a stock. Such also gives you reminders and extras. Can Profit Calendar be used on options trading and regular shares? - Absolutely! Because this is historical data that you can apply to stock trading as well as options trading. What you see with the profit calendar is based on the price for the stock. Is there a certain time of day to buy the stocks? - Profit Calendar data is based on the open and close price for the stock. 9:30a.m EST and 4:00p.m. EST. ConclusionThe Profit Calendar as a trading service provides a variety of offers more than guiding traders in trading stocks. The service provides a valued quality learning to the investors and traders to become profitable, trading rate successor, and comfortable with trading. Profit Calendar gives traders access to a list of 50+ stocks that have seasonal patterns of success 90% of the time for the past 15 years. This includes buy dates, sell dates, and average profit realized for a variety of stocks based on historical data patterns. Check out Profit Calendar and Get a Full Version here - https://www.migcourses.com/courses/profit-calendar A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/7b6a423d-f4a4-4f64-8236-01f1fb1e7102 CONTACT: Media Details Contact: Jourdan E Martin Company: Martin Investment Group Email: jmartin@migcourses.com NOT FOR RELEASE, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AUSTRALIA, CANADA, JAPAN OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION WHERE TO DO SO WOULD BE UNLAWFUL Basel, Switzerland, February 24, 2021 Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. ("Basilea" or the "Company") announced today that it has successfully placed 1 million new shares in a private placement to institutional shareholders by way of an accelerated bookbuilding. The net proceeds will be used for i) the clinical development of Basilea's clinical oncology drug candidates derazantinib and lisavanbulin, ii) pre-clinical research and development activities, and iii) working capital and other general corporate purposes, including investments in or in-licensing of complementary businesses, products or assets. David Veitch, Chief Executive Officer of Basilea, said: "Through this transaction we have successfully expanded our institutional shareholder base, including leading healthcare funds, and increased our financial flexibility in order to create value through the progression and expansion of our R&D portfolio in our strategic focus areas. In particular, we have gained further flexibility for our most advanced clinical oncology assets, derazantinib and lisavanbulin, following the upcoming key data readouts." Basilea placed 1 million new registered shares of CHF 1.00 par value each at CHF 45.75 per new share. The new shares, corresponding to 8.4% of Basilea's currently issued share capital, will be issued from Basilea's authorized share capital, excluding subscription rights of existing shareholders. The new shares are expected to be listed and admitted to trading on SIX Swiss Exchange on February 26, 2021. Payment and settlement are expected to take place on or around February 26, 2021. The new shares will rank pari passu with the existing shares. In connection with the offering, Basilea has agreed to a 150-day lock-up period following the settlement, subject to customary exceptions. Members of the Board of Directors and Management of Basilea have agreed to a 150-day lock-up period following the settlement, subject to customary exceptions. As a result of the transaction, Basilea updates its financial guidance for 2021. It maintains its revenue and operating loss guidances and increases its guidance relating to cash and investments to approximately CHF 155 - 160 million at year-end 2021. Cantor Fitzgerald, Credit Suisse and Bryan Garnier acted as Joint Bookrunners in connection with the offering. About Basilea Basilea is a commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company founded in 2000 and headquartered in Switzerland. We are committed to discovering, developing and commercializing innovative drugs to meet the medical needs of patients with cancer and infectious diseases. We have successfully launched two hospital brands, Cresemba for the treatment of invasive fungal infections and Zevtera for the treatment of severe bacterial infections. We are conducting clinical studies with two targeted drug candidates for the treatment of a range of cancers and have a number of preclinical assets in both cancer and infectious diseases in our portfolio. Basilea is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange. Disclaimer This communication constitutes neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation to buy securities referred to in it ("Securities") and it does not constitute a prospectus or a similar notice within the meaning of articles 35 et seqq. or 69 of the Swiss Financial Services Act. The offer and listing of the Securities will be made without the publication of a prospectus in reliance on the exemptions provided in article 36 paragraph 1 letter a and article 38 paragraph 1 letter a of the Financial Services Act. These materials 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 prior to registration, exemption from registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. In particular, these materials are not an offer of securities for sale in the United States. Securities may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an exemption from registration under the US Securities Act of 1933. The Securities have not been and will not be registered. There will be no public offering of these Securities in the United States. This communication does not constitute an "offer of securities to the public" within the meaning of Regulation 2017/1129 of the European Union (the "EU ProspectusRegulation") or the EU Prospectus Regulation as it forms part of UK domestic law by virtue of the UK European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (the "UK ProspectusRegulation") of the Securities in any member state of the European Economic Area (the "EEA") or in the UK. Any offers of the Securities to persons in the EEA or in the UK will be made pursuant to exemptions under the EU Prospectus Regulation and the UK Prospectus Regulation from the requirement to produce a prospectus for offers of the Securities. In member states of the EEA, this communication is being distributed only to, and is directed only at "qualified investors" within the meaning of Article 2(e) of the EU Prospectus Regulation ("Qualified Investors"). In the United Kingdom, this communication is being distributed only to, and is directed only at "qualified investors" within the meaning of Article 2(e) of the UK Prospectus Regulation who are also (a) persons who have professional experience in matters relating to investments falling within Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005, as amended (the "Order"), or (b) high net worth entities, or (c) other persons to whom it may otherwise lawfully be communicated, falling within Article 49(2) of the Order (all such persons together being referred to as "relevantpersons"). Any investment or investment activity to which this communication relates is available only to Qualified Investors in the EEA and to relevant persons in the United Kingdom and will be engaged in only with Qualified Investors in the EEA and with relevant persons in the United Kingdom. Any person who is not a Qualified Investor or a relevant person, as appropriate, should not act or rely on this communication or any of its contents. This communication expressly or implicitly contains certain forward-looking statements, such as "believe", "assume", "expect", "forecast", "project", "may", "could", "might", "will" or similar expressions concerning Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. and its business, including with respect to the progress, timing and completion of research, development and clinical studies for product candidates. Such statements involve certain known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which could cause the actual results, financial condition, performance or achievements of Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. is providing this communication as of this date and does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements contained herein as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. For further information, please contact: Peer Nils Schroder, PhD Head of Corporate Communications & Investor Relations Phone +41 61 606 1102 E-mail media_relations@basilea.com (mailto:media_relations@basilea.com) investor_relations@basilea.com (mailto:investor_relations@basilea.com) This press release can be downloaded from www.basilea.com. Attachment ADVERTISEMENT The family of Country Officer and Head of Nigeria Office of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), Jude Ilo, on Tuesday, launched his latest book, Kasie. Kasie is a glowing tribute to the short, invaluable life of his late daughter, Natasha Ilo. Mr Ilo and his wife, Nkem also launched the Natasha Ilo Foundation a family initiative to immortalise the life and times of Natasha. The event which was held at the Shehu Musa YarAdua Foundation, Abuja, had friends and associates of the family pay tributes to the late Natasha, including former President Goodluck Jonathan and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. Mr Ilo explained that his motivation to write the book, Kasie, was a fulfilment of his promise to immortalise Natasha. Kasie was an escape from the grief of losing Natasha, and to also help others going through similar pain. It is also a fulfilment of the promise I made to my daughter, at her burial, that the world will never forget about you. I do not ever want the world to forget my little daughter. I celebrate my love for her and the joy she brought to my heart, he said. He hoped that Kasie, an Igbo expression for comfort would help those going through pain and help others to understand the pain of loss, especially the loss of a child. In his remarks, Mr Osinbajo, praised the contributions of Jude and Nkem Ilo to the development of Nigeria, especially on the heels of the grief arising from the tragic loss of their daughter, Natasha, five years ago. He thanked the author for focusing on the brighter side of life by converting terrible grief into a civic gift. While unveiling the official logo of the Natasha Ilo Foundation, Mr Jonathan, commended the noble initiative of the Ilo family to institute the foundation to help the less privileged access quality education and healthcare, as well as prevent sexual and gender-based violence in society. Review Chika Oduah, a journalist and filmmaker, in a review of the book, described it as a thoughtful and honest collection of poetry that gently captures the complexities of the human experiences of love and anguish in humble, elegant prose. Another author, Ayisha Osori, said, Kasie (comfort) could not be born at a better time as the world constricts in the shadow of mourning while looking bravely, yet, to the dawn and what promise of relief the sun will bring. The event tagged a Night of Poetry, featured a gripping rendition by spoken word artist and poet, Deji Ige, and a soulful musical performance from the sensational Efe Oraka. The Natasha Ilo Foundation, a non-profit organisation borne out of a strong conviction that every child deserves to live a full healthy life seeks to support childrens development by accelerating access to healthcare, education and help in the prevention of sexual and domestic violence. Kasie is available for purchase. To get a copy, a mail can be sent to natashailofound@gmail.com. INDIANAPOLIS (AP) Indiana senators advanced measures Tuesday that would allow police to determine what use of force is reasonable in some cases and would allow the state's attorney general to appoint special prosecutors to handle criminal cases local authorities decide not to pursue. Both bills are now headed to the House. Sen. Mike Young, who sponsored the measure on prosecutors, said it ensures local authorities cant create lists of crimes they wont prosecute, pointing to such decisions made by prosecutors in Boston, Chicago and St. Louis to stop pressing charges in cases like trespassing, disorderly conduct or prostitution. Our job ... is to pass what we think are prudent laws that are fair and effective for the citizens of our state to keep them safe, Young said. The only people this bill applies to is a prosecuting who wont follow the law themselves. The Republican state senator introduced a nearly identical bill last year after Democratic Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears announced that his office wouldnt pursue charges against adults for possessing about 1 ounce or less of marijuana. Young has maintained that the bills latest iteration has nothing to do with the Marion County prosecutor, however, and said it is aimed at any prosecutor in the state who adopts what he called a social justice prosecution policy not to pursue charges for certain crimes. Another bill, authored by Republican Sen. Scott Baldwin, would ban local governments or merit boards from disciplining officers who lawfully defend themselves when they believe their own lives are at risk. Under the measure, police officers would be allowed to determine reasonable uses of force in certain situations. That means officers could disregard their department's use of force policy and use techniques including chokeholds, which are currently prohibited by Indianapolis police that are not currently permitted. The bill also prohibits officers from firing warning shots. At the end of the day, officers have to act reasonably," Baldwin said. "Piling on more and more guidelines creates more stress and decreases reaction time and causes offers to second guess themselves in their actions, leading to danger for themselves and others. MIAMI, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Oceania Cruises, the world's leading culinary- and destination-focused cruise line, announced that its 2022-2023 Tropics and Exotics Collection of voyages is available for travelers and travel advisors to preview online at OceaniaCruises.com. Fresh on the heels of the line's record-setting single-day sellout of its 2023 Around the World in 180 Days voyage, Oceania Cruises is opening these 127 new late-2022 and early-2023 voyages for sale on March 3, 2021. "Both loyal past guests and first-time guests alike have shown an almost unquenchable thirst for worldwide travel with our 2022 itineraries and our recently launched 2023 world cruise and we are certain they will be delighted with this latest collection of memorable, exotic experiences," stated Bob Binder, President & CEO of Oceania Cruises. More Diverse Itineraries, More Overnights, and More Itinerary Lengths Ranging from 7 to 77 Days From week-long winter getaways to languid, months-long sojourns, the 2022-2023 Tropics and Exotics Collection of itineraries are breathtaking in their scope, range, and diversity. Travelers can indulge in a quick escape to the Caribbean from Miami, Aruba, Barbados, or even glittering Panama City. Tahiti and the islands of French Polynesia beckon with their sultry allure while the wilds of Africa, the myriad cultures of Asia, and the experiential kaleidoscope that is Australia and New Zealand offer innumerable epic adventures. South America takes center stage this season with the juxtaposition of pulsating metropolitan cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires against the majesty of pristine Chilean fjords and the fabled Amazon River basin. New for this season, four South America voyages offer the breathtaking grandeur and unforgettable experience of three days in Antarctica. These voyages are made all the richer with overnight and multi-day stays on many itineraries. 2022-2023 Tropics & Exotics Collection Highlights 127 itineraries to choose from ranging from 7 to 77 days 272 ports of call and 284 overnight or multi-day stays Total of 62 extended explorations of 15 to 77 days that are perfect for long-cruise connoisseurs Antarctica four voyages aboard Marina that include scenic cruising in Antarctica four voyages aboard that include scenic cruising in Caribbean a diverse calendar of offerings with a great array of voyage lengths (from 7 to 77 days), a wide array of longer voyages with 12 cruises that are 15 days or more in length, and new embarkation ports beyond Miami in Bridgetown, Barbados ; Panama City , Panama ; and Oranjestad , Aruba a diverse calendar of offerings with a great array of voyage lengths (from 7 to 77 days), a wide array of longer voyages with 12 cruises that are 15 days or more in length, and new embarkation ports beyond in ; , ; and , Aruba 22 voyages aboard Regatta and Nautica spanning the entirety of Asia and Africa ranging from 10 to 40 days and spanning the entirety of and ranging from 10 to 40 days Three trans-Tasman Australia/ New Zealand voyages aboard Regatta + six voyages that explore the South Pacific, Polynesia, and Hawaii voyages aboard + six voyages that explore the South Pacific, Polynesia, and Marina offers three forays into the mighty Amazon offers three forays into the mighty Amazon Nautica reprises her perennially popular voyages to Africa , India , and the Arabian Peninsula reprises her perennially popular voyages to , , and the Arabian Peninsula 35-day Christmas and New Year's circumnavigation of Australia Three springtime immersions into Japan , sailing roundtrip from Tokyo , sailing roundtrip from Tokyo The diversity of enriching destination experiences with our Go Local Tours, exclusive culinary-focused excursions, and overland-tours that offer access to some of the world's most fabled historical, cultural, and archaeological sites For additional information on Oceania Cruises' small-ship luxury product, exquisitely crafted cuisine, and expertly curated travel experiences, visit OceaniaCruises.com, call 855-OCEANIA, or speak with a professional travel advisor. About Oceania Cruises Oceania Cruises is the world's leading culinary- and destination-focused cruise line. The line's six small, luxurious ships carry only 684 or 1,250 guests featuring the finest cuisine at sea and destination-rich itineraries that span the globe. Expertly curated travel experiences aboard the designer-inspired, small ships call on more than 450 marquee and boutique ports across Europe, Alaska, Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, New England-Canada, Bermuda, the Caribbean, the Panama Canal, Tahiti and the South Pacific in addition to the epic 180-day Around the World Voyages. The brand has two 1,200-guest Allura class ships on order. With headquarters in Miami, Oceania Cruises is owned by Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd., a diversified cruise operator of leading global cruise brands which include Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania Cruises and Regent Seven Seas Cruises. About Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. (NYSE: NCLH) is a leading global cruise company which operates the Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania Cruises and Regent Seven Seas Cruises brands. With a combined fleet of 28 ships with approximately 59,150 berths, these brands offer itineraries to more than 490 destinations worldwide. The Company has nine additional ships scheduled for delivery through 2027. SOURCE Oceania Cruises Iraq is seeing revival of the activities of the Islamic State (banned in Russia) in the country's deserts, Iraqi President Barham Salih said on Wednesday WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 24th February, 2021) Iraq is seeing revival of the activities of the Islamic State (banned in Russia ) in the country's deserts, Iraqi President Barham Salih said on Wednesday. "There remain pockets of these terrorists across the middle East, particularly in Syria," Salih said. "We are already witnessing signs of the revival of some of the activities by ISIS in the Iraqi deserts - near Mosul, in Anbar, sometimes in Kirkuk and so on." Salih stressed that while Iraq has achieved major victories in the fight against the terrorist group, the mission is not yet fully accomplished. The president also noted that neither Iraq nor the Untied States want to have US forces in the Middle Eastern country, though both are committed to maintaining the fight against the IS to the end. Biden administration officials have said that the White House has not yet made a decision on US force posture in Iraq and other countries going forward. The Iraqi legislature moved in early January 2020 to end the foreign military presence in the country after a US strike killed an Iraqi militia leader and top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. Two women accused of running a prostitution ring with a man who allegedly kept sex slaves and 'branded' them with tattoos to mark them as his property will remain on bail despite facing serious federal charges. Hannah Christina Stead, 23, and Crystal Anne Sawyers, also 23, are accused of assisting 35-year-old Matthew James Markcrow run an illegal prostitution business. Police allege they helped Markcrow in recruiting and keeping sex slaves, forcing up to nine young women into prostitution and plying them with drugs. Markcrow was arrested on February 4 and remains in custody, but prosecutors have previously raised concerns his co-offenders could keep the alleged prostitution ring in operation in his absence, given they remain on bail. He was hit with 13 new state and federal charges on Tuesday which were addressed in Brisbane Magistrates Court on Wednesday. Among his new charges are five counts of committing acts intended to maim or disfigure his alleged victims. Matthew James Markcrow, 35, was hit with 13 new state and federal charges on Tuesday which were addressed in Brisbane Magistrates Court on Wednesday. Among his new charges are five counts of committing acts intended to maim or disfigure his alleged victims A third accused, 23-year-old Hannah Christina Stead, also appeared in court on Wednesday charged with conducting business involving servitude and providing unlawful prostitution At least eight women and one minor have accused Markcrow of pimping them out, while some claimed he tattooed his own name on their bodies to prove that he 'owned them'. Photographs show at least four examples of tattoos reading 'property of Matt. M' on the bodies of women claiming to be victims of Markcrow's prostitution ring. A magistrate explained Markcrow is facing charges both at a state and federal level and scheduled a committal callover. He is facing a total of 23 charges, including six counts of keeping women for sexual servitude, which carries a maximum sentence of 25 years' jail. Markcrow is also facing two counts of supplying dangerous drugs and running a business of unlawful prostitution. Police allege women aged between 17 and 24 were kept in conditions of servitude of unlawful prostitution, given stupefying drugs, and subjected to controlled living, financial and work conditions. Detectives believe Markcrow and Sawyer, his younger girlfriend, recruited the alleged victims via social media. Police allege women aged between 17 and 24 were kept in conditions of servitude of unlawful prostitution, given stupefying drugs, and subjected to controlled living, financial and work conditions as well as being tattooed Markcrow is also accused of filming victims while engaged in sexual acts or without their clothing on. Sawyer was arrested and charged with running the illegal prostitution business on the same day as Markcrow. But the 23-year-old was granted bail provided she not go within 100 metres of the house where the alleged prostitution took place. She must also report to police twice weekly, and not contact certain people including Markcrow. On Wednesday, a magistrate extended her bail, despite earlier concerns she would continue to run the alleged prostitution operation in Markcrow's absence. She will next appear in court on March 31. Stead also appeared in court on Wednesday charged with conducting business involving servitude and providing unlawful prostitution. Her bail was enlarged to reappear in court on March 15. Co-accused Crystal Sawyer is pictured leaving Brisbane watchhouse earlier this month St Bernadettes Resource Centre Reopens its Doors St Bernadettes Resource Centre resumed normal activity on Monday 22nd February 2021. This follows a robust inoculation programme arranged for service users who have now received their second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Under the Leadership of Sharon Ratcliffe, COVID-19 Coordinator for the Care Agency, the inoculation programme commenced on 16th January 2021 and has now been completed. In conjunction with Public Health guidelines, St Bernadettes Resource Centre will be promoting social distancing, adhering to social bubbles and the stringent use of PPE, ensuring that the Health and Safety of its service users and its staff remain at the core of day-to-day practice. During the first closure in March 2020, in order to support service users, allocated Care Workers attended their residences to support them and their families. They were provided with sensory, personal and social programmes. Staff only worked with their allocated service user and their family only and did not mix with any others to ensure overall health and safety was preserved. The centre reopened in June 2020 at a reduced capacity, in keeping with public health advice to minimise risk. Furthermore, service users' access to the community was also limited and health and safety measures were in constant review. It was a difficult period for staff and most importantly for service users who were unable to socialise with their friends and resume their routine therapies and activities in a therapeutic environment. As the COVID-19 cases increased in mid-December 2020, the difficult decision was taken to close doors for a second time. The Centre has remained closed until the end of January 2021. Now, after a period of careful planning, St Bernadettes Resource Centre commenced a phased reopening as from 1st February 2021 with the administration of the second dose of the vaccine as well as the continued social distancing and other control measures. Head of Disability Service, Majella McMullan, said: The COVID-19 worldwide pandemic has had a dramatic impact on society in general. St Bernadettes Resource Centre was no different and users and families alike were affected. We are very pleased to be resuming our activity. CEO of the Care Agency, Carlos Banderas, said: I would like to use this opportunity to recognise the team efforts within Disability Services for the careful planning and consideration given to the phased reopening. Minister for Health and Care and Justice, Samantha Sacramento MP, said that the reopening of St Bernadettes Resource Centre was positive news as the community strives to regain a semblance of normality. She added: I would like to welcome back all the service users of St Bernadettes Resource Centre so that they can get back to their routine after a difficult period for them and their relatives. As well as thanking the staff at the Care Agency for their dedication to service users during this difficult time, I would also like to thank the GHA and other frontline services for their hard work and for delivering an impressive vaccination programme to release us from the clutches of a deadly virus that has caused much suffering to the community. Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 3 mesi fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. The growing pandemic of community infections owing to the emergence of new pathogens is expected to increase the demand for nitrile gloves across the world. The need to quell community and hospital-acquired infections is expected to drive the growth of the global nitrile gloves market. Key product manufacturers operating in the market offer a wide range of products, such as disposable and reusable nitrile gloves. 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Switch Over To The Methodology Tab! https://www.persistencemarketresearch.co/methodology/31892 Persistence Market Research predicts that the global nitrile gloves market will exhibit an impressive CAGR of 24% during the forecast period (2020-2030), to be valued at US$ 26.7 Bn by 2030-end. Key Takeaways from Nitrile Gloves Market Study By product type, powder-free gloves are expected to gain traction in the global nitrile gloves market during the forecast period. Owing to the use of powder-free gloves for the prevention of primary infections and allergic side-effects, and to perform surgical procedures, the powder-free segment is the most dominating product type in North America and Europe nitrile gloves markets. In terms of usage, disposable gloves are expected to gain more than 1/3 share in the nitrile gloves market share by 2030 . . By sterility, sterile gloves are expected to hold more than 1/3 revenue share in the global nitrile gloves market by 2030 , owing to high standard regulatory compliance requirements for medical nitrile gloves. , owing to high standard regulatory compliance requirements for medical nitrile gloves. Under the end user segmentation, hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers segments are expected to collectively gain more than 2/3 market share in the nitrile gloves market by 2030 . . North America is the highest revenue generating market by region, due to the high rate of COVID-19 pathogenic infections and 10X increase in the average selling prices of nitrile gloves. Europe is expected to offer lucrative opportunities, owing to higher incidence of hospital-acquired infections and increasing volume of innovative surgical procedures. Keeping A Tab On Key Players In The Nitrile Gloves Market? Go To Purchase Now To Decipher The Competitive Analysis In Our Nitrile Gloves Market Report ! https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/checkout/31892 Disruptive unmet demand for medical gloves with 10X rise of average selling price, and WHO pushing for effective COVID-19 prevention, are expected to propel the growth of the global nitrile gloves market, says a PMR analyst. Accelerated Expansion & Acquisition by Leading Industry Players to Meet Unmet Demand in Nitrile Gloves Market Leading manufacturers in the global nitrile gloves market are extensively focusing on the expansion of their manufacturing capabilities due to current disruptive demand. Governments are actively encouraging local manufacturers to prioritize emergency demand, specifically for public hospitals and healthcare setups. What Does the Report Cover? Persistence Market Research offers a unique perspective and actionable insights on the nitrile gloves market, in its latest study, presenting historical demand assessment of 2015 - 2019 and projections for 2020 - 2030 , on the basis of product type (powder-free gloves and powdered gloves ), usage (disposable gloves and reusable gloves), sterility (sterile gloves and non-sterile gloves), and end user (hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, clinics, diagnostic centers, and others) across seven key regions. About Us: - ATLANTA, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Bonnie Mauldin, Atlanta business owner and digital marketing influencer, has been selected to serve on the National Small Business Association (NSBA) Leadership Council. NSBA is the nation's oldest small business advocacy organization and operates on a staunchly nonpartisan basis. Bonnie Mauldin, a recognized leader in the Metro-Atlanta small business community, joins the NSBA Leadership Council alongside other small business advocates from across the country as they work to promote the interests of small business to policymakers in Washington, D.C. "As a business owner, the last year has been especially challenging. Small businesses in my community, as well as the nation, have had to work harder than ever to survive. To address these challenges, it is more critical than ever to get involved, be active and make your voice heard when it comes to laws and regulation," stated Bonnie Mauldin. "Joining NSBA's Leadership Council will enable me to take a collective small business message to the people that need to hear it most: Congress." Bonnie Mauldin is the founder and owner of The Mauldin Group, one of Atlanta's leading marketing agencies and ranked in the top 10 SEO companies in the nation by MarTech Magazine. In addition, Bonnie works as a consultant and mentor for new business owners and young entrepreneurs, helping to groom the next generation of business owners. Bonnie Mauldin joined the NSBA Leadership Council to share her experience as the owner of multiple small businesses. Her passion is to actively raise awareness of the many critical issues facing small business, including tax reform, regulatory restraint and health care costs. The NSBA Leadership Council is focused on providing valuable networking between small business advocates from across the country while ensuring small business a seat at the table as Congress and regulators take up key small business proposals. "I am proud to have Bonnie Mauldin as part of our Leadership Council," stated NSBA President and CEO Todd McCracken. "She came to us highly recommended." To learn more about Bonnie Mauldin or The Mauldin Group, please visit: www.bonniemauldin.com or www.themauldingroup.com. For more on the NSBA Leadership Council, please visit www.nsba.biz Contact: Mark Hayes 404-510-6674 [email protected] SOURCE The Mauldin Group Related Links http://www.themauldingroup.com Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said Tuesday his office is investigating whether residents died last week as a result of power outages during the record-breaking, weeklong cold streak. A special team within the sheriffs office is looking into at least 21 deaths that could be related to the extreme cold or lack of heat. Its also pursuing information from CPS Energy, the city-owned utility that shut off power to large swaths of Bexar County, Salazar said. He noted that investigators could find that all of the deaths were due to natural causes and unpreventable. He described the number as unprecedented. The new team, which includes a detective and a crime scene investigator, plans to examine each incident and find out what happened to people who had been transported to hospitals. Salazar urged residents to check on the elderly and people experiencing homelessness. Im a firm believer that at this very moment there are people lying dead inside homes that we still havent discovered, he said. He cited several examples of deaths that are under investigation. One is a 69-year-old man found dead Feb. 18 at a residence on Green Lake Drive. The team is trying to determine whether the power was out at the time. A 52-year-old woman who had been reported missing was found dead Feb. 21 in her home. Her death was attributed to natural causes. However, we know from talking to the neighbors that her power was out for a long period of time. Is it anything that could have been hastened or aggravated by the fact that person did not have access to power? It bears investigating, Salazar said. The sheriffs office received about 150 calls for welfare checks and reports of sick or injured people last week. Asked who could be held responsible as a result of the investigation, Salazar referenced CPS Energy and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the entity that manages the statewide energy grid, though he cautioned that it was way too early to point fingers or say the investigation would result in criminal charges. Salazar said it is possible for an organization to face charges for the deeds or misdeeds of their actions. If I do find out that their negligence led to deaths in Bexar County, Im definitely going to hold someone accountable, he said. Like other utilities, CPS Energy, which is part of Texas energy grid, had to cut power after ERCOT warned that the entire grid was on the verge of shutting down early Feb. 15. That morning, temperatures dipped into the single-digits across much of the state, causing electricity demand to soar while power sources failed and supplies dwindled. At the same time, CPS said it had equipment failures and other problems when it tried to restore power. In some parts of the county, outages lasted for days except for brief moments. Five board members of ERCOT have submitted their resignations. Resignations do not absolve an individual of any wrongdoing while they had the job, Salazar said. According to the Sheriffs Office, the new team has obtained one subpoena, with the approval of the District Attorneys Office, to pursue records from CPS Energy related to the death of the 69-year-old man. Another subpoena is in the works to obtain records regarding the death of the 52-year-old woman, the Sheriffs Office said. Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales said he was not aware of anyone from his office approving a request for a subpoena, but that he was looking into the matter. CPS said it would not release information without a subpoena. In a statement Tuesday night, the utility said it extends heartfelt condolences to the friends and family of these individuals. It said it is cooperating with authorities as these incidents are investigated. We are committed to our customers and remain focused on helping our community recover. eeaton@express-news.net New Delhi, Feb 24 : The Supreme Court on Wednesday asked the Maharashtra police to submit the second supplementary charge sheet in the alleged lynching of two seers and another person in Palghar in April last year. The counsel for Maharashtra government submitted before a bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan and R S Reddy that a second supplementary charge sheet has been filed in the case. The bench directed the fresh charge sheet should be brought on record and scheduled the matter for further hearing after two weeks. In October last year, the Maharashtra government had informed the Supreme Court that it has taken action against the erring policemen in the case. The state government counsel had submitted that action taken by the state has been placed on record before the court, and cited the affidavit filed last month. In the affidavit, Maharashtra had told the top court that action, ranging from dismissal from service to salary cuts, has been taken against 18 personnel. The state government counsel informed the bench that a charge sheet has been filed in the case and action has also been taken against the policemen. In the affidavit, the Maharashtra police had said 18 policemen have been given varied punishments and some of them have also been dismissed from service. Also, some of them have been made to compulsory retire. "The police personnel have replied to the show cause notices. After considering their replies to the show cause notice and after hearing them, the Special Inspector General of Police, Konkan range has issued final orders on August 21 imposing punishment upon the delinquent police personnel...," the affidavit said. The victims identified as Chikne Maharaj Kalpavrukshagiri, 70, Sushil Giri Maharaj, 35, and Nilesh Telgade, 30, who was driving the vehicle, were travelling from Mumbai in a car to attend a funeral at Surat in Gujarat amid the lockdown. They were attacked and killed by a mob in Gadchinchile village on April 16 in the presence of police. A PIL was filed by advocate Shashank Shekhar Jha seeking CBI probe into the case. OCALA, Fla., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Governor Ron DeSantis announced today that Lockheed Martin and CareerSource Florida have partnered to develop and refine a registered apprenticeship program. Lockheed Martin, one of the nation's leading global security and aerospace companies, has led the development of a regional workforce and education ecosystem and will model the program across its major regional operations in Florida and nationwide. "Lockheed Martin's new apprenticeship program with CareerSource Florida exemplifies many of the reasons why Florida is the best state to do business: we are focused on job creation, partnerships, innovation and workforce education," said Governor Ron DeSantis. "The expansion of workforce education and training programs is an essential element of our mission to ensure Florida is No. 1 in the nation for workforce education." Lockheed Martin Corporation employs approximately 114,000 people worldwide. In Florida alone, the company employs more than 17,000 residents at 66 facilities across the state. "Lockheed Martin is committed to creating 8,000 new apprenticeship and workforce positions within the company through 2023 and this program is one way we'll do that," said Monet Nathaniel, vice president of human resources at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. "These students serve as a cornerstone of our future talent and the success of our workforce, and we're proud to partner with CareerSource Florida to help us create highly skilled and high-wage career opportunities for Floridians." The partnership with CareerSource Florida began in 2019 when Lockheed Martin launched an initiative to hire and train apprentices across its enterprise over the next five years. CareerSource Florida, the Governor's principal workforce policy board, provided support in building those apprenticeship programs, recruiting potential talent, and identifying grant opportunities to defray training costs. "The mission of the CareerSource Florida network is to connect employers with qualified, skilled talent," said CareerSource Florida President and CEO Michelle Dennard. "Providing customized solutions for companies like Lockheed Martin in targeted industry sectors is one of the most important contributions our team can make to help diversify Florida's economy and grow opportunities for Floridians to prosper." Lockheed Martin's Ocala facility is home to the pilot program, with strong support from CareerSource Citrus Levy Marion, the local workforce development board. The two-year apprenticeship program trains electronics associates who will solder circuit cards and wiring harnesses used in aerospace and defense systems. The Ocala program includes 265 new apprentices so far. "These apprentices are getting a foothold in a great company with growth potential for their careers," said Thomas E. "Rusty" Skinner, Jr., CareerSource Citrus Levy Marion CEO. "We are honored Lockheed Martin entrusted us to lay the groundwork for this unprecedented pilot program. And, to other businesses in our state, we encourage you to explore how we can create a custom talent solution for you as well." The apprentices begin their journey with 160 hours in the classroom at Lockheed Martin's Ocala facility. This month, the training expanded to a dedicated classroom at the College of Central Florida's Ocala campus, where the apprentices can earn between nine and 12 college credits for that paid training. Those credits also count toward an Associate in Science degree in Engineering Technology, which the employee can pursue if they choose to do so. "The college's unique partnership with Lockheed Martin will create an academic pathway for its employees to earn college credit while on the job," said Dr. James Henningsen, College of Central Florida president. "Our Engineering Technology program at the College of Central Florida is a very marketable degree in the workplace, and we appreciate this opportunity to support our students, our industry partners and our community." "Apprenticeship programs are a viable on-ramp toward higher educational attainment and workforce readiness that allows students the opportunity to learn while they earn. Through apprenticeship programs like this one, the Department of Education continues to strive to make Florida the number one state in the nation for workforce education by 2030," said Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran. "I want to thank Governor Ron DeSantis for continuing to deliver on his promises, and Lockheed Martin, the College of Central Florida, CareerSource Florida and CareerSource Citrus Levy Marion for working on this collaborative apprenticeship model - a pathway to success for Floridians." "Under Governor DeSantis' leadership, DEO remains committed to expanding apprenticeships throughout the state," said Department of Economic Opportunity Executive Director Dane Eagle. "Joining with our local and state partners, we can work collaboratively to help Floridians find gainful employment through apprenticeship programs." In addition to ongoing work to expand apprenticeship opportunities alongside the Florida Department of Education and Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, CareerSource Florida administers the Quick Response Training and Incumbent Worker Training grant programs to offset training costs for new or expanding businesses. These grants have facilitated additional growth for Lockheed Martin, which trained 884 new hires and 396 incumbent workers over this first year of the grant programs. Learn more about business services and available grants for companies of all sizes and in all industries at careersourceflorida.com/business-services/. SOURCE CareerSource Florida Related Links https://careersourceflorida.com From the very beginning, Jacob Arabo wanted to do things differently. He started making his own jewellery in 1986, when the brand was born, with bespoke pieces crafted for celebrities, musicians and actors. His first high-watchmaking timepiece, the Quenttin, had a 31-day power reserve, difficult to achieve even now and unheard of when it was introduced in 2006. The Quenttin put the entire vertical tourbillon on display, a move that has become a hallmark of Jacob & Co. and was a gamechanger at the time. What really put the brand on the watchmaking map was the Astronomia, introduced in 2014. This timepiece featured a triple-axis tourbillon along with other elements, all rotating around the dial. The animation on the dial was like nothing that anyone had ever seen before, and it paved the way for Arabo to be daring in other ways. The Astronomia collection grew to include an astronomical complication, art pieces, and models turning clockwise and counter-clockwise. The brand branched out to other complications, including double tourbillons, music boxes, Grand Complications, and more. Jacob Arabo Jacob & Co. What Jacob & Co. does is revolutionary and out of the box, but the reality is that every complication or combination of complications is rooted in Swiss watchmaking tradition. Though his brand has a relatively short history compared to more established Swiss brands, Arabo sees this as an advantage because there is no weight of history to contend with he has the absolute freedom to create whatever he wants. This freedom has resulted in some of the most ground-breaking watches the industry has ever seen. I want to be remembered as a trailblazer, says Arabo. I am not a watchmaker, Im not an engineer. I am a creator and I am willing to take a risk. Luckily, the risks I have taken have proven successful, and I promise I will continue to create extraordinary timepieces and jewellery. Without Jacob Arabo in the industry, watchmaking would not be as exciting, interesting or creative as it is today. *Written by Keith W. Strandberg *A loccasion du 20eme anniversaire de GMT Magazine et de WorldTempus, nous nous sommes lances dans le projet ambitieux de resumer les 20 dernieres annees en horlogerie dans The Millennium Watch Book, un grand et beau livre magnifiquement illustre. Cet article en est un extrait. The Millennium Watch Book est disponible sur www.the-watch-book.com, en francais et en anglais, avec une remise de 10% en utilisant le code WT2021. Commander maintenant Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Ashanti Regional Secretary of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Sam Pyne has urged Ghanaians not to be afraid of taking the COVID-19 vaccine dose that has arrived in the country. Sam Pyne, contributing to Peace FM's ''Kokrokoo'', was alarmed that some Ghanaians have settled in their hearts not to take the vaccine. He wondered why a Ghanaian would refuse the remedy for a disease as dangerous as Coronavirus. Sam Pyne however stated that it is the right of any person not to avail himself or herself for the vaccination but warned such a person against recommending same behavior to others. ''It's your right to choose not to take the vaccine but don't use that opportunity as an advocacy for other people not to be vaccinated.'' Ghana has taken delivery of 600,000 AstraZeneca doses today through the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility (COVAX) vaccine-sharing initiative. The country will begin vaccination on Tuesday, March 2. According to Information Minister-designate, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, the Covid-19 vaccination will be conducted in phases among segmented populations''. The first segment of the population that will receive from the 600,000 doses will be health workers, adults 60 years and over, people with underlying health conditions, frontline executive, legislature, judiciary and their related staff, frontline security personnel, some religious leaders, essential workers and teachers, Hon. Oppong Nkrumah stated. Sam Pyne pledged his family's readiness to be vaccinated against the deadly viral disease. "I, Sam Pyne, together with my family will take the dose," he said. 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. Featured Video Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Joe Prude, brother of Daniel Prude, right, and his son Armin, stand with a picture of Daniel Prude in Rochester, N.Y., on Thursday, Sept. 3, 2020. AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey The Rochester officers involved in Daniel Prude's death won't face criminal charges, NY AG said. Prude died a week after officers put a bag over his head and pressed his face to the ground. His brother said he was the one to call 911 to get help for his Daniel, who was in mental crisis. Visit Insider's homepage for more stories. New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Tuesday that none of the officers who were at the Rochester scene associated with Daniel Prude's death will face criminal charges for their actions. The case was presented to a Grand Jury, which chose not to indict the officers. "My office presented an extensive case and we sought a different outcome than the one the Grand Jury handed us today," she said from Aenon Missionary Baptist Church. Prude, of Chicago, died last March a week after his brother called 911 seeking help for him during a mental crisis. When officers responded to the call, they found Prude naked in the street and put a "spit hood" over his head due to concerns he might have COVID-19, according to police video made public in September. The officers pressed his head to the ground for two minutes until he stopped breathing. He was taken off life support seven days later and died. Prude's brother, Joe Prude, spoke out about the case in the fall. Joe Prude said that the day his brother arrived in Rochester on March 22, he immediately tried to get him psychiatric help after he was hallucinating at their home. An AG report released Tuesday says that Joe Prude's wife called 911 that day and four officers arrived at their home. Prude told police he had consumed PCP, marijuana, and alcohol. He was taken to the hospital for a medical evaluation, but he was released only hours later, according to the report. He arrived back at Joe Prude's home 11 p.m. and by 3 a.m. the next day, his continued concerning behavior resulted in the final 911 call that lead to his death. Story continues "I placed a phone call for my brother to get help. Not for my brother to get lynched," Joe Prude said at a press conference in September. "When I say 'got lynched,' that was a full-fledged on-going murder, cold-blooded." The news of Prude's death reignited outrage at a time when Americans were already calling for an end to police brutality. AG James launched an investigation into the incident in April. The seven officers on scene that day - Mark Vaughn, Troy Talladay, Paul Ricotta, Francisco Santiago, Andrew Specksgoor, Josiah Harris, and Sgt. Mark Magri - were suspended in September. Then the Rochester Police department's entire command staff, including its chief, resigned. James said Tuesday that she is "extremely disappointed" in the Grand Jury's decision and said that she will now continue her fight to reform the criminal justice system. Her office put together a package that outlines her calls for reform, which include changes to the police use of force standards, implementing coordinated mental health response, analyzing the use of spit hoods, and training officers in unconscious bias and deescalation "We need to take a systemic look at policing in Rochester, and not just Rochester, but all throughout the state of New York," she said. Tuesday's decision puts an end to the criminal investigation into the officers, but the Prude family can continue any efforts in civil court. It is up to the Rochester Police Department whether the officers involved can return to work, she said. A makeshift memorial is seen, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2020, in Rochester, N.Y., near the site where Daniel Prude was restrained by police officers. Prude, a Black man who had run naked through the streets of the western New York city, died of asphyxiation after a group of police officers put a hood over his head, then pressed his face into the pavement for two minutes, according to video and records released Wednesday by his family. Prude died March 30 after he was taken off life support, seven days after the encounter with police in Rochester. AP Photo/Adrian Kraus Killings during crisis James' office also released a 112 page report detailing the investigation into Prude's death. "What that report depicts is a man in the throes of a mental health crisis who was literally crying out for help the only way that he knew," James said. "And his brother, Joe, also placed a call for help," she added. "He didnt call for the police to come deal with a law enforcement crisis. He called for emergency medical professionals to deal with a mental health crisis." When police were called, Prude was experiencing "excited delirium," a state that can cause individuals to act irrationally and also put them at risk of death if they're put under increased stress, James said. "Yet the officers who ultimately restrained Mr. Prude were largely unfamiliar with how to handle this type of medical emergency," the AG said. "And this is not an isolated problem." Throughout the fall, Insider spoke to mothers around the US who called 911 when their sons were experiencing a mental health crisis, only to end up summoning officers who ended up killing their loved ones. In most cases, the families first tried to seek involuntary treatment for the men through the civil-commitment process - in which a person can argue that a loved one needs to be entered into treatment even if they oppose it. This system, though, usually involves the courts or law enforcement to be involved, which can lead to traumatizing or even fatal encounters. "The debris and wreckage that leaves behind for the family members who are essentially survivors, who may themselves feel like they had a hand in contributing to the death of a loved one - this survivorship is one of the most under-recognized sources of mental-health disparities in the country," Alexander Tsai, a psychiatrist and researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, previously told Insider. James said Tuesday that the manner in which police treated Prude - including by putting a spit hood over his head - added to his stress and agitation that day. "We know that Daniel Prude was experiencing a mental health crisis and the service that he received was devoid of compassion and trained professionals," James said. "My heart aches for the Prude family and for the countless others who have suffered just as they have." Read the original article on Insider In a veiled attack at Congress General Secretary Priyanka Vadra, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Thursday slammed the Congress leader for her remarks on the Sugarcane farmers. This comes after Priyanka Gandhi last week claimed that Sugarcane farmers from Uttar Pradesh haven't been given their dues of Rs 10,000 crores by the state government. Responding to the Congress attack, Yogi Adityanath while addressing the state assembly fired salvo by saying that the Congress leader doesn't even know if Sugarcane grows on trees or ground. Yogi Adityanath mentioned the Unnao incident and alleged that fake news was peddled over it from outside Uttar Pradesh and also from foreign places including Pakistan. Launching a scathing attack on the fake news campaign, he said, "We have to be cautious of the negative atmosphere which they spread. Recently, the Unnao incident, it's all out in the open as to who all were involved in it. But look at how the vested interests twisted the narrative. Will they be able to help the victim by merely twisting the narrative." "When we give a political narrative to such an incident, it is the safest ground for the perpetrators of the crime to escape punishment. Be it during Hathras or Unnao, we checked all the tweets. 85% of the tweets were from outside Uttar Pradesh and also from all those countries which do not hold India in good regard. Who are these people. Pakistan tweets on Uttar Pradesh! Tweets come from Bangladesh! They will decide from their countries and then Netas and people from other parties here follow them and twist the narrative! Why can't we show the truth the way it is." Yogi Adityanath said as he came down heavily on the vested interests. Speaking on incidents that need to be handled with sensitivity, such as Hathras and Unnao, Yogi Adityanath asked Congress and other opposition parties if politics should be done on such cases. "Why do we (opposition parties) portray our daughters and sisters in such poor light, should politics be done on every issue? There are many other issues to politicise. Should we gamble with the lives of our daughters and sisters. It is shameful. There is a political party, their people tweet from Delhi on every issue," he said while slamming Congress. READ | Unnao Double Murder: Police Register FIR On 8 Twitter Handles For Spreading Misinformation READ | Unnao Double Murder: Plaint Against Cong' Udit Raj For Spreading Fake News On Social Media Unnao case An FIR has been registered against eight Twitter users for allegedly spreading misinformation about the death of two Dalit minors in Uttar Pradesh's Unnao district. The FIR has been registered on the Twitter handles for spreading misinformation under the IT Act. Unnao Police had lodged a complaint against Congress MP Udit Raj for attempting to incite the public through his tweet and for spreading misinformation about the death of the two Dalit girls in Unnao. Moreover, two accused have been arrested and sent to 14 days of judicial custody over the Unnao crime. The accused - Deep Sagar a.k.a Vinay Lambu and Raju, a minor, - were produced before the Unnao court on Saturday and were remanded to judicial custody following which they were taken to an undisclosed location. During the course of the investigation, the accused Vinay and Raju (name changed)- who hail from Babruha village - have confessed to knowing the girls who hailed from Amroha. Vinay allegedly had made romantic advances to one of the victims, who had repeatedly turned him down. On being spurned, Vinay allegedly planned to kill her. Narrating the crime, Vinay confessed that he had visited the farm in Amroha where the girls worked and offered one of the victims, water mixed with pesticides used on wheat crops. The two other girls too drank the same water and all fell unconscious, confessed Vinay, after which the boys ran away. READ | Unnao Double Murder: UP Police Arrests Two Minor Boys; Accused Confesses To Poisoning READ | Priyanka Gandhi Accuses Centre Of Not Paying Dues To Sugarcane Farmers In UP A Syrian intelligence agent has today been convicted by a German court of crimes against humanity in a landmark ruling against torture by President Bashar Assad's government. Eyad Al-Gharib, a former member of Assad's secret police, was convicted of facilitating the torture of prisoners and sentenced by the Koblenz state court to four-and-a-half years in prison, the DPA news agency reported. It was the first time that a court outside Syria ruled in a case alleging Syrian government officials committed crimes against humanity - and human rights activists hope the ruling will set a precedent for other cases. Syrian intelligence agent Eyad Al-Gharib has today been convicted by a German court of crimes against humanity in a landmark ruling against torture by President Bashar Assad's government. Pictured: Eyad Al-Gharib arriving into the court room today in Koblenz to hear his verdict Eyad Al-Gharib (pictured during his trial in June 2014), a former member of Assad's secret police, was convicted of facilitating the torture of prisoners and sentenced by the Koblenz state court to four-and-a-half years in prison German prosecutors invoked the principle of universal jurisdiction for serious crimes to bring the case that involved victims and defendants who are in Germany. Details of the ruling were not immediately available, but Al-Gharib could have been sentenced to more than a decade behind bars. However judges were able to consider his defection and court testimony as mitigating factors. Al-Gharib was accused of being part of a unit that arrested people following anti-government protests in the Syrian city of Douma and took them to a detention center known as Al Khatib, or Branch 251, where they were tortured. The 44-year-old went on trial last year with Anwar Raslan, a more senior Syrian ex-official who is accused of overseeing the abuse of detainees at the same jail near Damascus. Raslan is accused of supervising the 'systematic and brutal torture' of more than 4,000 prisoners between April 2011 and September 2012, resulting in the deaths of at least 58 people. A verdict in his case is expected later this year. Al-Gharib (pictured today) was accused of being part of a unit that arrested people following anti-government protests in the Syrian city of Douma and took them to a detention center known as Al Khatib, or Branch 251, where they were tortured Anwar Raslan (pictured during his trial in April 2020) is accused of supervising the 'systematic and brutal torture' of more than 4,000 prisoners between April 2011 and September 2012 Balkees Jarrah, associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch, said the conviction of Al-Gharib 'gives Syrians some hope that this may be the beginning of a path to fuller justice.' 'Germany's trial of two former Syrian officials for atrocities shows that it's possible with drive and perseverance and determined prosecutors for victims to have their day in court,' she said. Evidence reviewed during the trial included photographs of thousands of alleged victims of torture by the Syrian government. The images were smuggled out of Syria by a police officer. Pictured: A visitor looks at photographs from 'Caesar's Photos: Inside Syria's Secret Prisons', a collection of photographs smuggled out of Syria documenting the atrocities committed by the Assad Regime against his people in Washington, USA on July 15, 2015. The store of over 55,000 photographs was used as evidence against Raslan and Al-Gharib Syrian government officials did not testify during the trial. 'Over the last ten months, courageous survivors have provided testimony about horrific abuses committed in Syria's ghastly archipelago of prisons,' Jarrah said. 'This case not only speaks to the role of the two suspects but also lays bare the Syrian government's systemic torture and killing of tens of thousands of people.' Al-Gharib was one of Raslan's subordinates. When he was a sergeant major, his unit was allegedly involved in chasing down and detaining at least 30 people following a demonstration in Douma, and then bringing them to the detention center where they were tortured. Al-Gharib left Syria in 2013 and came to Germany in 2018. Both men were arrested a year later. The chupacabra has been called the Bigfoot of Latino culture, an urban legend said to drain the blood of goats and other farm animals from South America to south Texas. Its name is Spanish for goat sucker. And like Bigfoot, the chupacabra also has eluded capture and provided no credible evidence that it exists. Still, at least one citizen scientist sees the chupacabra as both a cultural phenomenon and a modern spin on the worlds most storied bloodsucker. Its basically a vampire or a small, evil, fairy-type creature, which are popular archetypes in Latino culture, said Ken Gerhard, a docent at the San Antonio Zoo and a widely recognized cryptozoologist. Cryptozoology is the study and search for so-called cryptids, hidden animals whose existence defies scientific evidence or substantiation, such as Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster, bizarre beasts that live on in alleged sightings and indecipherable photos and videos. Gerhard has traveled the world in search of such X-Files fare, skeptical as Dana Scully yet still wanting to believe like Fox Mulder. Ive never found one yet, Gerhard said. But I still look. When it comes to chupacabras, Gerhard said they just arent the most credible cryptids. He noted theres neither physical evidence a chupacabra exists nor any sort of biological reality or animal group that a chupacabra would fit in to. Its almost a little bit too weird, Gerhard said. On ExpressNews.com: Meet the T. rex of Texas that prowled the San Antonio area more than 100 million years ago Yet more than 25 years since its first alleged sighting, Gerhard said the chupacabra remains a quirky cucuy or boogeyman that fits well into pop culture and especially Latin culture. So much so that the San Antonio Zoo the zoo opened the first-ever chupacabra exhibit at a zoological facility in September. Located by the zoos bat habitat, a replica of the fabled creature greets patrons with a face full of fangs and a back full of quills. Were excited to educate the public and our visitors about the elusive and legendary chupacabra, San Antonio Zoo President and CEO Tim Morrow said in a statement at the time. This new one-of-a-kind habitat is sure to spark both the imagination of what wildlife exists that we havent yet discovered and the desire to conserve species, both known and unknown. Just days after that zoo debut, an anonymous rancher on San Antonios South Side reportedly killed a strange creature that was stalking his livestock. His first guess: Chupacabra!Rob Coke, director of veterinary care at the San Antonio Zoo, reportedly looked at photos of the carcass and deemed it a coyote with mange. Which is it? chupa-fact or chupa-fiction? Or maybe its both? Heres what we know about the chupacabra. At least, what they want us to know. A Puerto Rican export. The chupacabra, or Venator nocturnus according to the San Antonio Zoo exhibit, stalks most of South and Central America as well as northern Mexico and the southern United States. That is, according to reports of livestock deaths attributed to the creature. The first chupacabra sightings date back to March 1995 in Puerto Rico, where reports circulated of several sheep found dead with puncture wounds in their chest and purportedly drained of their blood. A comedian came up with the name. Puerto Rican comedian Silverio Perez coined the term chupacabra in 1995 while discussing the creatures attacks. The Spanish word literally translates to goat-sucker, as in chupa (to suck) and cabra (goat). The name comes from the creatures purported habit of sucking the blood of goats and other livestock. An urban legend with different legs. The chupacabra often is described as a hairless reptilian creature around 3 feet tall with gray-green skin and spines or quills down its back. But how it walks depends on where its spotted. South and Central America sightings describe the chupacabra as a goblinlike humanoid that walks upright on two legs, while sightings in Mexico and the US describe the chupacabra as a canine or doglike creature that walks on all fours. Gerhard was not involved in the chupacabra exhibit at the San Antonio Zoo, but said its canine-leaning depiction of the cryptid is a wonderful synthesis of the varying chupacabra descriptions. On ExpressNews.com: Yep, San Antonio gets its share of wild alligators. On guard, Fluffy! H.R. Giger may have inspired the first description. The first eyewitness account of the chupacabra likens its appearance to Sil, a sinewy alien-human hybrid with spines down her back in the 1995 sci-fi horror film, Species. Sil was designed by H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist famous for the title terror of the Alien films. In August 1995, Madelyne Tolentino in Puerto Rico alleged she saw a chupacabra in the municipality of Canovanas. Researcher and skeptic Benjamin Radford interviewed Tolentino for his 2011 book, Tracking the Chupacabra. He concluded her description was based on the creature from Species, which Tolentino had seen just the week before her report. Gerhard believes the internet popularized Tolentinos description and variations spun from there. Then again, its likely a mangy coyote. As Coke with the San Antonio Zoo noted, most chupacabra sightings in Mexico and the United States are debunked as coyotes with severe mange. Likewise, stray Mexican hairless dogs get mistaken for chupacabras. Gerhard has examined half a dozen animal carcasses referred to as chupacabras. He said DNA testing and bone and skull analysis revealed all of them were dogs or coyotes with some sort of mange or genetic deformity. They dont really suck blood, either. Dead livestock attributed to chupacabra attacks may bear puncture wounds, but those holes tend to correspond to bites made by canine teeth. There also are no reported autopsies that confirm the dead animals were drained of their blood. So why do so many accounts mention bloodless victims? Gerhard noted when an animal dies, its body goes into rigor mortis and its blood drains to the lowest part of the body where it coagulates. This gives the carcass a gaunt, drained appearance. On ExpressNews.com: Ringtails, a catlike creature with the head of a fox, on the rise in San Antonios Stone Oak A ufologist put San Antonio on the map for chupacabra investigation. Horror writer and San Antonio native Whitley Strieber is perhaps best known for Communion, his 1987 account of alleged experiences with aliens. But Gerhard noted Strieber also was instrumental in a chupacabra investigation. In 2004, a rancher killed and buried the so-called Elmendorf Beast, an alleged chupacabra blamed for livestock attacks in South Bexar County. Strieber had the animal exhumed for analysis at the San Antonio Zoo. Later DNA analysis at the University of California, Davis concluded it was a coyote with mange. Barely a blip on TV series. Guess Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster get all the plumb roles. About the only major TV series time dedicated to the chupacabra is a 1997 monster-of-the-week episode of The X-Files and a 2014 episode of Grimm. But oh what a TV movie. Eat your heart out, Sharknado. In the 2013 TV movie Chupacabra vs. The Alamo, Erik Estrada plays Carlos Seguin, a tough DEA agent who discovers a that bunch of doglike chupacabras have been making mincemeat of drug cartel members. Seguin and his band of desperate heroes make a last stand against the mythical blood-hounds at, of course, the Alamo. rguzman@express-news.net | Twitter: @reneguz The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Pakistan asked the international forums, the UNHRC, and the United Nations to give up its double standards on Human Rights, whilst forgetting its own inhouse atrocities. Pakistan on Tuesday carried out a video statement while attending the 46th Human Rights Council Session wherein it accused the international community of having double standards in the matters of Human Rights. drawing the councils attention towards Kashmir, Dr. Shireen Mazari, Federal Minister for Human Rights asserted that the region was witnessing a a full-blown human right crisis. Ms. Shirren went on with her remarks, highlighting the aggravating situation in Kashmir and the atrocities carried out by India in the region despite having faced certain backlashes on these remarks. In the meeting, the minister asked High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to continue with the Kashmir reporting process in the exercise of her monitoring and prevention mandate. Appeasement or inaction are no options. Doing so will only embolden the abuser. Let us not repeat mistakes of the past but rather demonstrate the courage to stand firmly on the right side of the history, she asserted forgetting that every charges fall back on the nation itself. The Indian government on several occasions have reverted that there is no role of third party in the matter and sees the Kashmir issue as a bilateral matter between India and Pakistan. the onus of the matter lies with Pakistan to create an environment for engagement. Also Read: Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 19:50:32|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close Aerial photo taken on Feb. 5, 2021 shows a view of the snow-covered Tianshan Shengli Daban in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (Xinhua/Hu Huhu) BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- China on Wednesday expressed firm opposition to British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab's remarks on Xinjiang at the 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), saying those words are obviously driven by "ulterior motives." Raab has called for UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet or another independent expert to be given "urgent and unfettered access" to Xinjiang and said that there should be a resolution at the council to this effect. "Britain's so-called remarks on passing a resolution are obviously driven by ulterior motives aimed at misleading the public, smearing China and undermining the cooperation between China and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a regular press conference. "We are firmly opposed to that," he said. "Britain's little trick cannot cheat the international community." San Francisco, Feb 24 : Google Maps is now getting a full-fledged dark mode on Android, the feature has been in testing since September 2020. "These days, we are all experiencing a bit of screen fatigue. With the dark themes in Google Maps soon expanding to all Android users globally, you can give your eyes a much-needed break and save on battery life," the company said in a statement on Tuesday. Once your Google Maps has been updated, you can turn it on for your entire phone by heading to Settings > Theme and pick Always In Dark Theme. The company also introduced some updates to Android Auto. In addition to custom wallpapers, Android Auto is now going to feature games as well. For longer drives, you and your passengers can stay entertained with voice-activated games like trivia and "Jeopardy!". Just say, "Hey Google, play a game" to get started. Android Auto is also getting a split-screen feature that will put Maps side by side with media controls, Google is also rolling out Password Checkup to Android to help alert you about potential leaks or data breaches that may have exposed your existing passwords to hackers. Password Checkup will be rolling out to devices with Android 9 and above, and will automatically check passwords already saved in Android along with any new ones. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text A 4.4 million-year-old skeleton could show how early humans moved and began to walk upright, according to new research led by a Texas A&M anthropology professor Evolutionary expert Charles Darwin and others recognized a close evolutionary relationship between humans, chimps and gorillas based on their shared anatomies, raising some big questions: how are humans related to other primates, and exactly how did early humans move around? Research by a Texas A&M University professor may provide some answers. Thomas Cody Prang, assistant professor of anthropology, and colleagues examined the skeletal remains of Ardipithecus ramidus ("Ardi"), dated to 4.4 million years old and found in Ethiopia. One of Ardi's hands was exceptionally well-preserved. The researchers compared the shape of Ardi's hand to hundreds of other hand specimens representing recent humans, apes and monkeys (measured from bones in museum collections around the world) to make comparisons about the kind of locomotor behavior used by the earliest hominins (fossil human relatives). The results provide clues about how early humans began to walk upright and make similar movements that all humans perform today. This discovery is described in a study published in the current issue of Science Advances. "Bone shape reflects adaptation to particular habits or lifestyles - for example the movement of primates - and by drawing connections between bone shape and behavior among living forms, we can make inferences about the behavior of extinct species, such as Ardi, that we can't directly observe, Prang said. "Additionally, we found evidence for a big evolutionary 'jump' between the kind of hand represented by Ardi and all later hominin hands, including that of Lucy's species (a famous 3.2 million-year-old well-preserved skeleton found in the same area in the 1970s). This 'evolutionary jump' happens at a critical time when hominins are evolving adaptations to a more human-like form of upright walking, and the earliest evidence for hominin stone-tool manufacture and stone-tool use, such as cut-marks on animal fossils, are discovered." Prang said the fact that Ardi represents an earlier phase of human evolutionary history is important because it potentially shines light on the kind of ancestor from which humans and chimpanzees evolved. "Our study supports a classic idea first proposed by Charles Darwin in 1871, when he had no fossils or understanding of genetics, that the use of the hands and upper limbs for manipulation appeared in early human relatives in connection with upright walking," he said. "The evolution of human hands and feet probably happened in a correlated fashion." Since Ardi is such an ancient species, it might retain skeletal features that were present in the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. If this is true, it could help researchers place the origin of the human lineage - in addition to upright walking - into a clearer light. "It potentially brings us one step closer to an explanation for how and why humans evolved our form of upright walking," Prang said. He added that the big change in hand anatomy between Ardi and all later hominins occurs at a time, roughly between 4.4 and 3.3 million years ago, coinciding with the earliest evidence of the loss of a grasping big toe in human evolution. This also coincides with the earliest known stone tools and stone cut-marked animal fossils. He said it appears to mark a major change in the lifestyle and behavior of human relatives within this timeframe. "We propose that it involves the evolution of more advanced upright walking, which enabled human hands to be modified by the evolutionary process for enhanced manual manipulation, possibly involving stone tools," Prang said ### This research was funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation. [February 24, 2021] AB INTL GROUP Announces Appointment of Jimmy Chue as Chief Investment Officer NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AB International Group Corp. (OTCQB: ABQQ), an intellectual property (IP) and movie investment and licensing firm announces appoints Jimmy Chue as chief investment officer for the company effective February 22, 2021. Jimmy Chue, Wall Street career spans for more than three decades. Working with prestigious firms such as Merrill Lynch and Prudential Securities as a senior analysis of operations, etc. Founding Member and CIO of Healthier2gether, Senior Partner at Silver Bear Capital, and Cofounder of a new entity in formation named World Global Partners Inc. Jimmy heads the North America operation office located in New York City, that will launch on March 1, 2021. The office will be operating the companys global business: acquisitions in IP and film copyrights; Provide TV dramas and films to broadcast on video streaming websites worldwide. Jimmy is a high valued influencer and global networker and an amazing addition to our team. I expect that he will add tremendous value and a wealth of experience to our robust investment and treasury teams, said AB president and CEO Chiyuan Deng. At AB we are constantly reviewing our operations to ensure that we deliver superior client experience and shareholder value. Jimmys extensive work on an international level will be a tremendous benefit in that regard. About AB International Group Corp. AB International Group Corp. is an intellectual property (IP) and movie investment and licensing firm, focused on acquisitions and development of various intellectual property. We are engaged to acquisition and distribution of movies. The Company has a Patent License to a video synthesis and release system for mobile communications equipment, in which the technology is the subject of a utility model patent in the eople's Republic of China. The Company engages highly anticipated video streaming service targeting global multi-billion dollar and growing video streaming industry. The online service will be marketed and distributed in the world under the brand name ABQQ.tv. ABQQ.tv is expected to generate a new and profitable revenue stream immediately following its launch derived from its hybrid subscription and advertising business model. For additional information visit www.abqqs.com Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains "forward-looking statements" that are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements relating to changes to the Company's management team and statements relating to the Company's transformation, financial and operational performance including the acceleration of revenue and margins, and the Company's overall strategy. Because forward-looking statements inherently involve risks and uncertainties, actual future results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the possibility of business disruption, competitive uncertainties, and general economic and business conditions in AB International Groups markets as well as the other risks detailed in company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. AB International Group undertakes no obligation to update any statements in this press release for changes that happen after the date of this release. Investor Relations Contact: Jeff Deng (212) 918-4519 corp@abqqs.com [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 19:17:53|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- A spokesperson for the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislature, on Wednesday condemned the adoption of a motion concerning China's Xinjiang by Canada's House of Commons. Spokesperson You Wenze said the motion has seriously distorted facts and wantonly attacked China's policy on Xinjiang, constituting gross interference in China's internal affairs and a malicious provocation against the Chinese people. "We strongly condemn it and express our firm opposition to it," the spokesperson said. Enditem Following intense scrutiny of two fatal crashes and a spate of recent shootings, Mayor London Breed and San Franciscos law enforcement agencies said Wednesday theyll improve communication about repeat offenders and gun violence. The proposals include a commitment from the police to notify the district attorney when people have been arrested repeatedly for crimes like residential burglaries and car break-ins. The city will also receive a $1.5 million state grant to beef up a violence intervention program. To confront the public safety challenges we face in San Francisco, we all need to acknowledge where we are falling short and where we can work together to do more, Breed said in a joint statement, with Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, police Chief Bill Scott, District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Adult Probation Chief Karen Fletcher. These reforms come in the wake of several high-profile cases in which officials admitted that the police, the District Attorneys Office and the state parole system didnt work together well. Critics asked if tragedies could have been prevented with better communication. Business groups and neighborhood associations have also slammed the city over the recent events and asked for closer collaboration. The most scrutinized incident was a deadly New Years Eve hit-and-run in which the suspect, Troy McAlister, was on parole. That case ignited sharp criticism of Boudin, whose office had not filed charges against McAlister despite several arrests in the months prior to the crash that left two women dead. Boudin has said he referred the incidents to state parole. The announcement also comes after a driver suspected of causing a fatal eight-car collision in San Francisco while intoxicated and driving a stolen vehicle was on supervised release from prison and facing charges in another San Francisco DUI case from December. Police have already begun sharing with prosecutors lists of people they believe to be San Franciscos most prolific offenders, but theyve come infrequently and could contain better data, Boudin said. To date, the District Attorneys Office has received two such lists, the most recent on Feb. 1 with about 36 names. Going forward, we hope to receive lists on a more regular basis, and lists that include people who are under active investigation, Boudin said. In the past, the list largely included people who are already in custody, and/or already on high levels of pretrial supervision. Rudy Valintino, the founder and executive director of United Playaz, a San Francisco violence prevention organization, said the spike in crime lately has been overwhelming. While hes glad the agencies said they will work together more, hes skeptical at the difference it will make without more collaboration with those living and working on the ground. Well see when it happens, he said of the new initiatives. There is only so much that the police can do. They are overwhelmed with all of the incidents that are going down, and they cant be everywhere at all times. They just need to get the communitys support. Miyamoto said his office is beginning to share information with the District Attorneys Office when someone who is supervised with an electronic monitor either cuts off the device, allows it to run out of batteries or travels out of bounds. This gives prosecutors needed information before the defendant is brought before a judge again. Miyamoto said this type of information sharing is not new, but had fallen by the wayside as law enforcement officials tried to keep jail populations as low as possible due to the pandemic. He said its now something were reassessing. According to Wednesdays statement, the city will hire two additional prosecutors who will focus on communication and coordination between the departments. Other commitments outlined include stronger communication between the citys law enforcement agencies and the district attorney on specific suspects and whether they should be considered for detention. For example, the police could warn the district attorney if someone who has been arrested has a history of noncompliance with previous court orders or if they are trying to build a case against that suspect. This is the kind of collaboration that some community groups have been calling for. After a string of crimes in Hayes Valley, the neighborhood association sent a strongly worded letter to city leadership this month chiding them for finger-pointing from one agency to another, and from one elected official to another. District Attorney Boudin said he is pleased that the agencies will coordinate, rather than continue working in silos. Meanwhile, the city will also receive a $1.5 million California Violence Intervention and Prevention Grant over the next three years to help increase on-the-ground resources to help prevent and respond to gun violence. The funding comes after six people were recently shot in the Bayview and three in the Tenderloin in two incidents. Police are investigating whether the two shootings were related. The grant will help fund San Franciscos Street Violence Intervention Program, which provides those most at risk of gun violence with mentorship, guidance, and a path forward that does not involve violence, according to the statement. Valintino, of the United Playaz, said community efforts like the Street Violence Intervention Program are the true frontline soldiers. Instead of putting $1.5 million, they need to put $5.5 million into it, he said. They have saved so many lives and stopped so many shootings and killings that the police dont get to, and that people dont know about. Trisha Thadani and Megan Cassidy are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com, megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani, @meganrcassidy As President Joe Biden ticks off items on his lengthy to-do list, speculation continues to grow about who will be chosen as the next US ambassador to China. Among the names floated in Washington include Nicholas Burns, a former long-time diplomat and now a Harvard professor; Rahm Emanuel, the one-time White House chief of staff and former mayor of Chicago; Claire McCaskill, a former senator from Missouri; and a current ambassador, Daniel Kritenbrink, the US envoy to Vietnam. Analysts add that this administration is disciplined and keeps a tight lid on discussions about nominees, in sharp contrast to former president Donald Trump, who often turned the appointment process into a media spectacle. But they cite several attributes that would be helpful. Get the latest insights and analysis from our Global Impact newsletter on the big stories originating in China. Nicholas Burns, shown in 2006, is said to be a front runner for the position. Photo: AP The person will have a clear-eyed view of both the challenges China presents to the United States and what can realistically be expected from engagement with the Chinese leadership, said Fred Rocafort, a former diplomat once posted to Guangzhou who is now a trade and intellectual property lawyer with Harris Bricken. It could still be several weeks before a nominee is announced, analysts added. Hobbled by poor cooperation with the departing Trump administration during the transition, the Biden team is scrambling to get bodies into seats. Biden was unable to have a single cabinet member confirmed before his inauguration on January 20; for comparison, Trump had two by that time, Barack Obama had six, George W. Bush had seven and Bill Clinton had three. The Senate only voted to confirm Linda Thomas-Greenfield as US ambassador to the United Nations on Tuesday, a month after her nomination hearings. Former diplomats note that four years of increasingly strained relations have narrowed the scope of the job, opportunity for creativity and even chances to meet senior Chinese officials. Story continues The conduct of relations with China is a very scripted affair, with few opportunities for foreign diplomats to represent their country on their own terms, said Rocafort. For persons with experience in more open societies, this could be frustrating. Frequently, top ambassador spots in the US political system are handed out as gifts to major political donors or to prominent domestic politicians. This often makes a close relationship with the president at least as important as foreign policy expertise in the region. For example, Clark Randt, Bushs choice for China, had been a major contributor to Republican candidates and the presidents fraternity brother at Yale University in the late 1960s. President Joe Biden could break with recent practice by selecting a career professional for the position, analysts said. Photo: AP The Biden administration could signal a shift from past practice, however, by selecting a top-level career professional or military leader for the job, analysts said. Not only would this mark a sharp break with the policies of the Trump administration, it would also underscore the gravity of the China challenge. That kind of choice would signal that the relationship is about practical, interest-based policies and not political appearances, said Kevin Nealer, a former member of Obamas Intelligence Advisory Board. Analysts said that the next ambassador will carry out but probably not shape Washingtons response to Beijings more muscular policies as it squeezes Hong Kong and Xinjiang and pushes boundaries in the South China Sea and along the de facto border with India. US-China relations have been redefined not just by Trump, but more so by Xi Jinping the X factor in bilateral relations now, said Nealer, now with the Scowcroft Group. The Chinese leaders risk-indifference and willingness to break Chinese hide and bide conventions and roll back reforms makes Embassy Beijing a very different job than at any time in the recent past, Nealer added. Chinese President Xi Jinping has become the X factor in bilateral relations now, an analyst said. Photo: Xinhua No matter who Biden selects, China will interpret the appointment as a mark of respect, said Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican ambassador to China and now senior director with McLarty Associates. In terms of Mexican ambassadors, China is not even in the top 10, behind the United States, Spain, many others, he said. But I remember every time Id approach someone in China theyd say Oh you must be very powerful to be named ambassador to China. They always assume ambassador to China has to be the most important person named from that country, that President Biden is spending sleepless nights worrying about it. According to one China watcher in Washington who asked not to be identified given the sensitivity of personnel issues, the Biden administration hopes to limit naming political appointees as ambassadors to a quarter of the 170 or so heads of mission. That is less than the roughly 43 per cent that both Trump and Bush named and the 30 per cent under Obama. Burns is said to be a front runner. Born in New York and raised in Massachusetts, he speaks French, Arabic and Greek. And despite his heavy focus on the Middle East and Russia, the long-time diplomat is seen as a safe and steady pair of hands. Since retiring from the United States Foreign Service in 2008, he has taught international relations at Harvard and consulted with the Cohen Group. Burns seems like the most logical and likely choice, bringing diplomatic stature and an understanding of the complexity of the relationship but also of the limitations of the role, Michael Hirson, Asia head with the Eurasia Group and a former US financial attache to China, said in a report. The key decisions on China will be made in Washington, and an effective ambassadors most important task is likely to be informing that debate with on-the-ground observations. Another name receiving attention is Emanuel, who would likely bring a more confrontational approach to the job. Known as a sharp-tongued political street fighter, Emanuel has earned the nickname Rahmbo, a reputation amplified after he sent a dead fish to a political pollster who was late with his projections. The Chicago native started out doing public interest work before moving into campaign organising and fundraising, eventually joining the Clinton administration and the Obama team. Emanuels possible nomination has drawn criticism from progressive Democrats, who decry many of his actions while mayor of Chicago. In particular, they contend he ordered that footage of a police shooting of a 17-year-old African-American, Laquan McDonald, be suppressed for nearly a year. Emanuel has denied any cover-up. If named and confirmed, Claire McCaskill, a Missouri senator from 2007 to 2019, would be the first female US ambassador to China. Photo: Getty Images via AFP I would be a little surprised if Emanuel were chosen for China given his reputation for abrasiveness, but some in [Washington] may think that is exactly what we need at this time, said Russell Menyhart, a former diplomat and now a lawyer handling international issues. What is most interesting is that you arent hearing rumours of anyone with a deep China background for the position. It shows how hard it is to identify someone with that background and yet sufficient stature in DC to be seen as qualified. Supporters have also called on Biden to name a woman or person of colour to the job, in keeping with his pledge to make his administration more representative. If named and confirmed, McCaskill, a Missouri senator from 2007 to 2019, would be the first female US ambassador to China. Concerning the administrations priorities, the Washington China watcher noted, its impossible to exaggerate the instinct to diversity. More from South China Morning Post: This article China awaits a new US ambassador as names circulate in Washington first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2021. STOCKHOLM, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Adverty, the leading in-game platform for advertisers, agencies and game developers, will outline a unique opportunity to significantly boost monetisation with seamless in-game advertising on the Unity platform at a seminar taking place on 3rd March 1pm UK / 2pm CET. The upcoming seminar by Adverty will unveil how to integrate its Unity software development kit (SDK) into mobile games and will see the seamless in-game advertising specialist share tips, tricks and best practice with developers. Adverty is also running a competition to encourage developers to use its SDK - with the prize being a 12-month contract with a whopping $30,000 in guaranteed prize money - with ad revenue on top, and an additional $20,000 in prize money to developers who manage to surprise the jury with their creativity. Being considered will entail some requirements for developers - such as certain minimum daily active users (DAU) in specific geographies and a 12-month live commitment to its SDK. The tech seminar is entitled `Boost monetisation with in-game brand advertising on the Unity platform' and, in order to win Adverty's exciting competition, participants must submit their entries before April 16th. The winner will be chosen by gaming specialists within Adverty's supply-side team. Join Adverty for this fascinating webinar in which we showcase how to incorporate the seamless ad units In-Play and In-Menu into your game on the Unity platform, and share best practice tips and tricks of the trade as to how and where you can place effective ads and drive revenue. The webinar will outline how easy it is to integrate Adverty's offer into games, and enable audiences to test its BrainImpression technology, ImpViz and SmartBend features to maximise viewability and monetisation. Register for the free seminar here: https://live.remo.co/e/seminar-boost-your-monetisation-/register For further information, please contact: Anders Rossel, CFO Phone: +46 70 867 00 20 E-mail: [email protected] Corpura Fondkommission AB, phone +46 (0)722 52 34 51, act as certified advisor/mentor for the company at NGM Nordic SME. About Adverty Adverty, the leading in-game platform, delivers seamless advertising to connect brands and people through its revolutionary display advertising technology built for games. The platform offers true in-game ad inventory at scale and allows content creators to monetise the complete experience with unobtrusive, easy-to-integrate, immersive ads. Founded in 2016, Adverty has offices in Stockholm, London, New York, Madrid, Helsinki, St Petersburg and Lviv and works with advertisers, agencies and developers to unlock audiences and gaming revenue streams. More information at www.adverty.com. This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com The following files are available for download: SOURCE Adverty AB Pennsylvania movie theaters ditch mask mandate Three chain movie theaters have announced that masks are no longer mandatory for moviegoers who have been vaccinated against coronavirus. A tenure-track professor at a California community college is on leave and under investigation after video of him speaking critically to a hard-of-hearing student during an online class made the rounds on social media. Last Thursday, a two-minute video -- broken into three parts for TikTok -- surfaced showing a Zoom recording from a physiology class at Oxnard College that day taught by professor Michael Abram, who is identified in the video by name and by a student in his class. CNN has reached out to Abram multiple times via email and phone but has not heard back. When the posted video begins, it's not clear whether the professor is aware the student, who later self identifies in the video as hard of hearing, needs assistance with her hearing. CNN is not naming the student because she declined to speak to us. He asks the student, who says she can hear him a little bit, why she hasn't been answering. "You can hear me a little bit? Abram asks. "Why didn't you answer all the times I spoke to you then? The student attempts to respond, but Abram continues to talk over her. "I'm hard of hearing," she says in response to Abram. "Why don't we talk sometime? Why don't you email me? We'll set up a live Zoom and we're going to have some real communication at some point in time," he says. "Maybe you can have your counselor join us, OK? Do you hear me? OK, wonderful, do that," he says. After that interaction, another female student on the Zoom class says the student is hard of hearing and cannot respond right away. "She's not paying attention, she's not trying," Abram says. The other student says, "It's slower on her end because she needs to get it translated and then it goes to her hearing piece." Abram tells the student who is hard of hearing to "have your counselor speak with me because you've got too much distraction to even understand what is going on." "Yes, I do because my translator is next to me explaining me everything that you're saying," she replies. Abram suggests the student's translator teach her moving forward. "Just have them teach you, the whole class, that makes sense to me," he says. "I don't know, I don't understand it," adding he saw the student who is hard of hearing "laughing" and "giggling" with someone else and is not paying attention. She replies that she's in a good mood. Abram continues to repeatedly ask her to have her "counselor" talk to him, to which she agrees, but says she feels like he is "attacking" her. "I'm not attacking you, I'm not attacking you," he says. "I'm just significantly disappointed in you. That's all, that's all it is. I'm not attacking you." The professor is now on administrative leave, the college said in a statement. "I am saddened and outraged beyond words that any of our students should either be or feel disrespected by any of our employees," acting President Luiz Sanchez said in a statement posted to Twitter. The video was meant for administrators to review Sarah Rand, a student in Abram's class, took the original video that was then posted on TikTok by someone she described as a family friend. Rand told CNN she took the video with the intention of sending it to administrators to show the behavior and commentary she said she and other students have seen during Abram's classes this semester. When asked at a press briefing Monday whether any prior complaints were made against Abram, administrators said they couldn't comment because that is part of the investigation. Abram was hired as a full time tenured-track professor in fall 2004 as a biology teacher but he has taught anatomy and physiology classes at Oxnard College, according to Art Sandford, vice president of academic affairs and student learning. On Friday, the Ventura County Community College District, of which Oxnard College is a part, issued a statement. "The Ventura County Community College District is opposed to any language or behavior which is offensive or harmful to anyone based on gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age or disability," board Chair Joshua Chancer said in the statement. "Comments in the video do not reflect the District's values of integrity and honesty in action and word, respect and the constant pursuit of excellence." The National Association of the Deaf said deaf and hard-of-hearing students vary in what they need in class, including interpreters, captioning and devices to assist them. "The use of interpreters or captioning usually results in additional time for the deaf or hard of hearing student to receive all the information and then be able to respond," CEO Howard A. Rosenblum said in a statement. "Professors must therefore be patient and accommodate this additional time, instead of berating such students." Administrators say campuses can make learning accommodations The investigation could take up to 90 days to complete, Greg Gillespie, chancellor of the Ventura County Community College District, said at press briefing Monday. "The instructor is entitled to due process under the law so it's his constitutional right as a permanent public employee and so he will be on a paid leave until the investigation is complete and we're able to determine what the findings bring us," said Laura Lizaola Barroso, vice chancellor of human resources at Ventura County Community College District. CNN has reached out to the Oxnard College Academic Senate, which has a voice in student and faculty matters. Administrators said they have told students the district has the ability to make accommodations for any type of learning assistance that is needed. They said it's important for students to let faculty or the educational assistance center staff know their needs. The home college for the student who is hard-of-hearing is Moorpark, another one of Ventura's campuses, according to administrators at the briefing. It's not uncommon for a student to take classes at other campuses, especially now, when the majority of classes have shifted online because of the coronavirus pandemic. "We know that the student was connected with the EAC (educational assistance center) folks at Moorpark College. However, we're still looking into the status of the student with regards to whether or not accommodation had been requested for this Oxnard College class," Gillespie said. Administrators said they are in the process of meeting with and reaching out to the students involved. Rand said at first she was worried that sharing the video with administrators may risk her graduation and her grades, but says without it, they wouldn't know what's happening with a faculty member. "It's our hope that we've created an environment where people are comfortable in coming forward so that these can be addressed, Gillespie said. "This incident is an example of where unacceptable behavior is seen occurring in a video and we're going to investigate it and take that seriously." The administration said it also is proud of the other female student who spoke up on behalf of the student who is hard of hearing. Rand said she never thought the video would be received on social media in the way that it has. "No matter what this person did, I don't think his reputation should be buried, like millions of people are hating him. That wasn't my intention," she said. "I did this for other people to show that when you see something wrong, don't just stay quiet, because this is abuse that's happening that needs to stop," said Rand. "Don't be afraid. Speak up for the truth." Darrin Zammit Lupi via Reuters ROMEThe confession of a partially blind hitman in the heinous murder of Maltese muckraker journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia has kicked off a slew of new arrests in the complicated case. On Tuesday, a Maltese judge accepted the startling guilty plea of Vincent Muscat, 57, who had originally pleaded not guilty along with brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio, for setting off the car bomb that killed Galizia on a country road near her home in Malta in October 2017. The brothers, who were also in the courtroom, maintain their not guilty pleas in the case. Muscats lawyers say the change in tactics is part of a guilty plea that should see their client out of jail by 2027. Malta Arrests in Daphne Caruana Galizia Murder Still Dont Solve the Crime Muscat, who is blind in one eye after being shot at close range in April 2014 in an attempted vendetta murder, was sentenced on Tuesday to 15 years in prison of which he has already served three years. He admitted to all six charges against him: the wilful homicide of Daphne Caruana Galizia, causing an explosion that led to the death of a person, illegal possession of explosives, conspiracy to carry out a crime, promotion of a group intending to carry out criminal acts, and participation in such a group. He was separately awarded a presidential pardon in the 2015 murder of lawyer Carmel Circop, in which he supplied crucial information after confessing to his peripheral involvement in that crime. That pardon does not affect the Galizia sentencing. Just moments after Muscats change of heart was read in court by his lawyer, police swooped in on a secret hideout of brothers Adrian and Robert Agius and accomplice Jamie Vella, arresting the trio for allegedly supplying the bomb that killed Galizia. Police say more arrests are expected. On Wednesday, local media in Malta reported that three more arrests were imminent, including those with ties to organized crime in Italy and Malta. Galizias many investigative targets revealed on her blog Running Commentary, which still receives thousands of hits a day according to her sons, included the countrys then prime minister Joseph Muscat (no relation to Vincent). His wife was tied to the corrupt Pilatius bank exposed in the Panama Papers. Since her murder, journalists collaborating on Galizias original investigations under The Daphne Project have uncovered further connections between the Maltese prime ministers wife and the bank. Muscat resigned under pressure in 2019 over his associates alleged ties to the murder. Story continues The former prime ministers associate, energy tycoon Yorgen Fenech, who secretly owned 17 Black, a company that was a frequent target of Galizias journalistic investigations, was arrested on his yacht en route to Italy in December 2019. He is charged with masterminding the murder and denies involvement. Preliminary hearings in his trial are expected to resume on March 18. Fenechs arrest came after taxi driver Melvin Theuma confessed to being a middleman between Fenech and those accused of carrying out the killing. Vincent Muscats plea bargain reportedly includes testimony that corroborates the taxi drivers claims. Fenech has secured a presidential pardon and full protection in exchange for his testimony. The Daphne Project reporting consortium has learned that Galizia received a cache of thousands of emails and documents tied to a company owned by Fenech. Investigators believe that she may have been killed before she could expose the contents of the documents. The family of Galizia, who believe she was murdered for getting too close to the crimes of Maltas political elite, issued a cautious statement after Muscats plea. This development will begin the road for total justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia, they said, adding that her assassination destroyed her right to life and removed her right to enjoy her family and grandchildren who were born after her murder. The lawyer for the Galizia family read the statement in court. The macabre murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia was intentional and could have been avoided. The victim paid with her life and her family are paying for the loss of their loved one, he said. I said all this today because if Daphne's family had to respond to the plea bargain based on their emotions, their response would be obvious. Maltese blogger Manuel Delia, who has written a book on the case, warns that Vincent Muscats confession does not solve the case. Muscat is at the very bottom in the brutal pecking order of this mafia. He is not even a button man. He is a gofer that has seen things and remembered some of them and at a time when he came to face a possible life sentence he has used what he has seen and remembered to negotiate a reduced sentence for himself, he said Tuesday. Hearing his confession, his admission of guilt is a small step in the sad, long and so far otherwise fruitless search for justice. Read more at The Daily Beast. Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now! Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more. Congress-JD(S) join hands for Mysuru Mayoral polls, keep BJP out of power India pti-Madhuri Adnal Bengaluru, Feb 24: In a last minute twist, Congress and JD(S) joined hands to keep away BJP from taking control of the Mysuru City Corporation, during the Mayoral polls on Wednesday. JD(S)' Rukmini Made Gowda was elected as the new Mayor, while Anwar Baig of Congress was elected Deputy Mayor. Though the Mayoral polls saw the continuation of the Congress-JD(S) alliance, the turn of events came as a surprise, as JD(S) had ahead of polls ruled out allying with any party and fielded its candidates. No party has an absolute majority in the council, but all three had fielded candidates, making for an interesting contest. The Congress and JD(S) decided to join hands at the eleventh hour to keep the BJP out of power. Sources said JD(S) agreed to it after the grand old party decided to sacrifice the Mayor's post. "After several rounds of discussions we decided to give the Mayor post to JD(S). it's part of our strategy to keep BJP out of power," Congress MLA Tanveer Sait said. The coming together of both parties shattered the BJP's dream of having the partys first Mayor in Mysuru. Saffron party candidate Sunanda Palanetra polled 26 votes against Rukmini, who secured 43 votes with Congress' support. What made the turn of events interesting was JD(S) leader H D Kumaraswamy's statement earlier in the day, ruling out a tie up with Congress at any cost and that his party would remain equidistant from Congress and BJP in the polls. COVID-19: BJP says 2nd phase of vaccination drive to ensure no vulnerable person left out "We want to show our strength to Congress leaders, who had questioned JD(S) strength," he had said, as he targeted Congress leader Siddaramaiah for the end of alliance between both parties in Mysuru corporation. Kumaraswamy, however later in the day maintained that the local party leaders took the call on going with the Congress. Siddaramaiah, who had earlier indicated about not going with JD(S) if Congress does not get the Mayor's post in his home turf Mysuru, is said to be miffed by today's outcome. Sources said Congress state President D K Shivakumar, realising that BJP will be at advantage if the party does not join hands with JD(S), reportedly contacted Kumaraswamy, resulting in continuation of alliance in the corporation. This is also seen as part of a cold war that is on between Shivakumar and Siddaramaiah to gain control over party affairs in the state. For Kumaraswamy too it gave an opportunity to hit back at Siddaramaiah at his own home district, by getting the Mayor post with Congress' support against his wishes. ADSB, the regional leader in the new build, repair, maintenance, refit and conversion of naval and commercial vessels, has signed a reciprocal agreement with Novamarine, a global leader in the design and build of boats with unique features. The agreement mandates ADSB to design, manufacture and market co-branded Rigid-Hulled Inflatable Boats (RHIBs) in the UAE, while Novamarine handles the marketing of ADSB vessels in Europe. David Massey, CEO of ADSB, and Francesco Pirro, CEO of Novamarine, signed the strategic agreement on the sidelines of the ongoing Naval Defence and Maritime Security Exhibition (Navdex 2021), that is underway alongside the International Defence Exhibition and Conference (IDEX 2021) until February 25 at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (Adnec). Under the terms of the agreement, ADSB and Novamarine are to explore market opportunities for the RHIB in the GCC region as well as in Europe, and develop tailored designs and solutions based on various customer requirements. Purposed to build long-term synergies between the two entities, the agreement enables ADSB to locally manufacture RHIBs in dimensions ranging from 8-20 m significantly expanding its current product portfolio. Recognised for their performance and stability in various sea-state conditions, RHIBs are the favoured boat in multiple naval scenarios today due to their versatility and durability. The RHIBs build and the design of its foam-filled tubes makes the boat a best-in-class, high-buoyancy vessel that offers stability in all weather conditions and turbulence, even while conveying heavy payloads. Militaries and special ops around the world employ high performance RHIBs across a range of operations, from search and rescue to interception. The new agreement is expected to pave the way for new opportunities for ADSB while reinforcing the companys mission to deliver innovative and dependable solutions that add value for its clients and stakeholders both military and civilian. David Massey, CEO of ADSB, said: At ADSB, we remain focused on bringing to market innovative new products. Collaborating with industry leading companies, such as Novamarine, enables ADSB to anticipate and address evolving market demand. We look forward to a mutually beneficial and enduring partnership. Francesco Pirro, CEO of Novamarine, said: We are confident in our choice of partner for the GCC region. ADSB boasts a long track record of success in building cutting-edge vessels and boats to meet varying requirements. This synergy will set the tone in ensuring greater interoperability among our entities in the future. ADSB is part of the Platforms & Systems cluster of EDGE, an advanced technology group for defence and beyond, that ranks among the top 25 military suppliers in the world. - TradeArabia News Service Top managers voiced concerns about "an aggressive approach" toward NS2 contractors on the part of the U.S. Wintershall Dea, Europe's leading independent gas and oil company, has said it has no plans to further fund the construction of Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. That is according to the company's 2020 annual report. In particular, the company's top managers are concerned about "an aggressive approach toward the contractors of the project" on the part of the United States, which has tightened sanctions against Nord Stream 2. "The company's loan payments to Nord Stream 2 AG amount to EUR 730 million and were completed prior to the revision of the 'Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act 'CAATSA' Section 232 Public Guidance' of the US Department of State," the report said. Read alsoEighteen European companies withdraw from Nord Stream 2 project over U.S. sanctions: DWNord Stream 2: Background The Nord Stream 2 project envisages the construction and operation of two gas pipeline branches with a total throughput capacity of 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year from the coast of Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany. It should connect Russia's Ust-Lug and Germany's Greifswald. This new pipeline bypassing Ukraine is to be built next to the existing Nord Stream 1 pipeline. The construction was expected to be completed before the end of 2019. The pipeline will be 1,220 km long. The project is being implemented by Russia's Gazprom in alliance with European companies. Ukraine stands against the construction of Nord Stream 2 as it will most likely lose its status of a gas transit country, while its potential revenue losses are estimated at US$3 billion annually. The project is also highly criticized by the U.S., Poland, and the Baltic States. On November 4, 2020, the media reported that U.S. Congress wanted to expand sanctions against Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream. On December 6, 2020, United States Charge d'Affaires to Germany Robin Quinville called on the EU and Germany to declare a moratorium on the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. On December 9, 2020, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with expanded restrictions against the Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. On December 11, 2020, the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline resumed. On December 29, 2020, it became known that the House of Representatives overcame the then President Donald Trump's veto on the U.S. defense budget with sanctions on Nord Stream 2. The United States is urging European allies and private companies to halt works on Nord Stream 2, and is preparing broader sanctions against the Russian project in the coming weeks. The U.S. Senate approved the U.S. defense budget for the fiscal year 2021, which provides for new sanctions against Russia's Nord Stream 2. On January 7, 2021, a fund was established in Germany to support the completion of the Nord Stream 2 project. On January 13, 2021, the U.S. Department of State notified European companies involved in the construction of Nord Stream 2 of the risk of imposing new sanctions. On February 22, the United States made changes to the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) List of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) by including a Russian-flagged vessel Fortuna involved in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. As of February 23, 2021, at least 18 European companies had either terminated their participation in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline or had pledged to withdraw from the project over threats of U.S. sanctions, according to a U.S. State Department report for Congress. Reporting by UNIAN by Sumon Corraya 65-year-old Catholic sculptor Mondol says he has obtained immense blessings from God as a reward for this work. He testified: I was a simple security guard and not very educated, but after I started making religious statues, I obtained what I asked of Almighty God. I have gained prosperity, honour, peace and security in my life." Natore (AsiaNews) - The Catholic Dominic Mondol worked at the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Bangladesh, a humanitarian agency, as a security guard. After working there for 23 years, he decided to quit his job two years later. He wanted to learn something. Being devoted to Mother Mary, he wanted to start making a statue of Mary. His maternal uncle lives in Krishnanagar in the Indian state of West Bengal. He is a professional sculptor. In 1996, he visited Krishnanagar and brought his cousin so that he could learn how to make status. For two years, in addition to working at MCC, Mondol learned how to sculpt from his cousin. In 1998 he quit his job and started making statues of Mary, Jesus, Joseph, Saint Anthony of Padua, Mother Teresa etc. In 2008 he created the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, in the Bonpara parish of Natore. The realization of this statue was successful and the Catholics liked it. Later, he sculpted an entire biblical history. He makes hundreds of statues every year. In the past, Bangladeshi Catholics bought the religious statue from India and other countries, but now they get the statues from Mondal. He participates in at least 20 pilgrimages across the country and sells his religious statues. AsiaNews recently caught up with him. He said he is a great faithful to Mother Mary, who has responded to his prayer. He said: I was devoted to religious statues. Later I started making them. I like doing it. " A devout 65-year-old Catholic Mondol says he has obtained immense blessings from God as a reward for this religious work. He testified: I was a simple security guard and not very educated, but after I started making religious statues, I obtained what I asked of Almighty God: prosperity, honour, peace and security in my life. Bishops, priests and laity, he says, honour him because he is a creator of religious statues. Visiting his factory in his house in the village of Bonpara Sud in Natore, we see that he made a statue of the Italian Xaviren Fr. Mario Veronesi who was killed in the Shimulia parish of Jessore in 1971 during the war of independence of the Bangladesh from Pakistan. "From the parish of Shimulia - Mondol says - the priest sent me a photo of religious statues, seeing it I made these statues of Father Mario Veronesi". He received 40,000 BDT (about 400 euros) for the statue. And he reported that he received many other orders. The Christian Communication Center (CCC) once brought religious statues from India, because there were no Catholic sculptors in Bangladesh. CCC operates under the Episcopal Commission for Social Communications, publishes religious books, brings religious materials from India and sells them to Catholics in parish offices across the country, including their centres. Despite this, the CCC and the diocesan pastoral centers are the main wholesale buyers of the statues of Mondol. Mondol said he feels happy when he sees devoted people and prayers beside his statues of him. These are my best moments, when I see someone doing devotion to the statues I made. At that moment, it seems to me that the work is fruitful and I have the inspiration to make more beautiful religious statues ". He adds that he does not make religious statues just to earn money, but also to spread God's message. "I have observed that in Bangladesh no one makes religious statues in the Christian community, so I have learned this and it seems that I am preaching God's work. Religious statues help to increase devotion in prayer and holy mass. Many people pray and communicate with God through statues and obtain responses to their prayers. So I'm working as a bridge between people and their God. He would like those who buy his statues to pray close to the statues, instead of just keeping them for display. Finally, he said that his statues are in demand in the dioceses of Dinajpur and Rajshahi, where new believers are on the rise thanks to foreign and local missionaries. (Natural News) Left-wing New Yorkers lined the streets on Sunday to protest white supremacy as a rash of black-on-asian violence sweeps through the city. (Article by Shane Trejo republished from BigLeaguePolitics.com) Even though it is black individuals who are overwhelmingly perpetrating the rash of anti-Asian violence, these leftists still blame white supremacy because their cults dogma takes precedence over logic, reason, rationality and objective truth. Video of the protest can be seen here: Several hundred people from the Washington Square Park "Unite Against White Nationalism" rally are now marching through Chelsea. This protest is in response to anti-Asian/AAPI violence happening in New York and across the country. pic.twitter.com/Qy3kG3tRiK NYC Protest Updates (@protest_nyc) February 20, 2021 Now about 400 people headed north on 6th Ave at W34th. pic.twitter.com/2hktRHftNQ NYC Protest Updates (@protest_nyc) February 20, 2021 Many Twitter users pointed out the stupidity of these leftists who are facilitating the destruction of their own nation and civilization due to their levels of idiocy. Wait, who do they think is accosting Asians? Who? I got news for them. It aint who they think it is Wojak Meme Distributor (@DeezNutz676) February 20, 2021 As frictions in the coalition of the fringes get more intense the only strategy available is to double down on anti-white rhetoric. Fred Arnolfson (@arnolfson) February 20, 2021 Oh, look, it's another MENSA march. J: Q's less secretive brother (@Kvos77) February 21, 2021 Blood libel. NOBLE (@AGARTHA_NOBLE) February 21, 2021 The white attackers wore blackface. Dr. WSH (@WStanleyHudson) February 21, 2021 If 9/11 happened today instead of 20 years ago, they would have blamed whites for it too. Unbelievable. Jon Castleman (@jon_castleman) February 21, 2021 They are united against something that barely exists, in the far corners of knowhere, consisting of small groups of people, that are all but dead, and have no power, so they can justify their own bigotry. Teddy "%@#! twittter & %@#! Jack" Bear (@MisterToyBear) February 21, 2021 I went undercover as a White Nationalist and went to their meetings. Their ability to hypnotise Blacks to internalize White Supremacy, thus causing them to attack Asians, was truly incredible. Looks like these people are wise to them. Rigid Signifier (@Placemarker99) February 21, 2021 This is also how reports/studies work, that purport to show almost no left wing violence (even after a year of non-stop left wing riots and mayhem) but "white nationalism" on the rise. They simply re-label stuff, ignore what they want to ignore, fantasy results. Gaslighting. Saeger Ryman (@saegerart) February 21, 2021 Even though the Left complains about white people and demonizes them with a religious fervor, America is under the regime of multiculturalism, and the people are tasting the fruits of that system right now. Big League Politics has reported on the national surge in crime since the rise of the Black Lives Matter revolutionary marxist terror movement in summer 2020: While virtually every American knows the name of deceased serial felon George Floyd, dead drug ring suspect Breonna Taylor, and the crippled accused rapist Jacob Blake, very few know the name of Roman Sweeney, the innocent four-year-old child who was brutally murdered by a black thug this week. In Struthers, Oh. on Mon., Sept. 21, Sweeneys life was extinguished senselessly. The alleged shooter, 24-year-old Kimonie Devante Bryant, has been described as a young, light-skinned, black male. The black thug reportedly went into a home on the 100 block of Perry Street in Struthers. He shot two men, one received two slugs in the head while another was blasted two times in the back. Two women were also shot by the savage in their lower extremities. The adults all have survived the attack for the time being, but Sweeney was not so lucky. He died in his mothers arms as she cried incessantly for her poor son The Nationalist Review has noted that CNN, the Washington Post, HuffPo, and the New York Times have ignored the story because white lives simply dont matter to the fake news media. In their view, an innocent childs life is worth less than common street trash if the kid happens to be white. Big League Politics reported on the case of five-year old Cannon Hinnant last month, another white child whose life was snuffed out because of black terror. Sadly, with the public inclined to ignore the reality of the racially-charged attacks on Asians, its unlikely that the knockout game style thuggery will be put to an end. Read more at: BigLeaguePolitics.com and AntiWhite.news. The Work Zone A lot of folks will go to work this morning, and not be happy about it. I hope I can give you some ideas today that will help make sure youre Read more News at 4Cs Cape Cod Regional STEM Network at 4Cs Looks to Pair Pre-K-12 Educators with Teacher-in-Residence Opportunities The Cape Cod Regional STEM Network at Cape Cod Community College is seeking applications from local Pre-K through 12 STEM teachers across Massachusetts as part of their Teacher-in-Residence program. Offered via a grant from the Woods Hole Sea Grant, the Teacher-in-Residence program pairs a STEM teacher with a marine science or technology host institution in their region for a two week externship. In addition to a $1000 stipend for completing their externship, a transportation stipend is also available to alleviate the cost of travel. Each residency is built around the challenge of creating a project in collaboration with staff at their host institution. The goal is to develop approaches and STEM curricular materials that engage young people in STEM in the professional world and back in their classrooms. Through the grant we received from Woods Hole Sea Grant, we can support teachers and their students to connect with marine science institutions and bring high-quality, relevant, hands-on marine science curriculum into the classroom. said Bridget Burger, Director of the Cape Cod Regional STEM Network, And now more than ever, we need to dedicate resources and create spaces that support diversity in STEM. Upon completing the curriculum, participating teachers will receive a $500 transportation stipend that enables students to travel to the host institution for a field trip. This year, the STEM Network is working to better engage teachers from populations traditionally under-represented in STEM. Woods Hole Sea Grant recognizes the need for innovative solutions to address the gross lack of diversity in our field, said Matt Charette, Director of Woods Hole Sea Grant. These projects include concrete steps to meaningfully improve diversity, equity, and inclusion not only in the sciences, but across multiple walks of life. It is our hope that these projects will in turn inspire others and make a noticeable impact. Now in its seventh year, the Teacher-in-Residence program has placed teachers in settings such as Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, The Marine Biological Laboratory, National Marine Life Center, SencorpWhite, Teledyne Marine Systems, and Whydah Pirate Museum. Applications are open now for Pre-K-12 teachers in Massachusetts and will be open on a rolling basis at https://bit.ly/3byhMFl. The Cape Cod Regional STEM Network at Cape Cod Community College is the hub for the regions STEM Learning Ecosystem. Created in 2004, the states Regional STEM Networks connect educators, community leaders, and industry partners to further excite and energize students about opportunities in STEM. The Teachers-in-Residence program has been funded by National Science Foundation grant #1347610. For more information, contact Bridget Burger, Director, Cape Cod STEM Network at bburger@capecod.edu. Soleil Moon Frye was just a kid when she rose to fame as Punky Brewster. And now the actress/director is giving the world a fascinating look at life growing up in the limelight, curating her own home videos from her teen years into the new Hulu documentary Kid 90. In a brand new trailer for the project, out March 12th, Soleil explained how she documented her 'entire life' on video as a teen, but only returned to the 'Pandora's box' of footage two-decades later. Candid camera: The trailer for Soliel Moon Frye's Hulu documentary Kid 90 came out Thursday, revealing never-before-seen video of the Punky Brewster star and her famous friends as teens in the 90s 'As a teenager, I carried a video camera with me, everywhere I went I documented my entire life,' she says in the nearly three-minute promo. 'We did the things that teenagers did, we just happened to be in Hollywood.' 'I carried that video camera everywhere and then locked it away for 20 years and I had never really looked back at it,' she went on. . 'And a few years ago, I decided to unlock Pandora's box, and really it was meant to be about everyone but me, but it ended up becoming this really deeply personal coming-of-age story that really changed my life forever.' Kid 90 features interviews with fellow 90s stars David Arquette, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Brian Austin Green, Heather McComb, who also reflect on their strange upbringings. Pandora's box: In a brand new trailer for the project, out March 12th, Soleil explained how she documented her 'entire life' on video as a teen, but only returned to the 'Pandora's box' of footage two-decades later Good times: 'We did the things that teenagers did, we just happened to be in Hollywood' Cast of characters: Kid 90 features interviews with fellow 90s stars David Arquette, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Brian Austin Green, Heather McComb, who also reflect on their strange upbringings The It crowd: Green said that the group was tight-knit, telling Frye 'There were 12 kids in the business. We all knew everyone' And at the time, the group of famous teens were thick as thieves, according to Green, who rocketed to stardom at just 17 for his role on Beverly Hills, 90210. 'There were 12 kids in the business,' he said. 'We all knew everyone.' The group also looked back on the pressure of that time, with Gosselaar recalling: 'I remember it was a Saved By The Bell director saying "The minute you walk onto the stage you're no longer a child anymore, you're an adult."' 'The most awkward period in your life, that's when we were in front of the cameras,' he added later. Under pressure: Gosselaar said 'I remember it was a Saved By The Bell director saying "The minute you walk onto the stage you're no longer a child anymore, you're an adult"' Flashback: David Arquette is one of the stars looking back at his youth Still a kid: Frye also spoke about the trauma of being sexualized as a child, remembering the many times she was harassed or touched as an underage girl. 'Men treated me more like a woman and not a 13-year-old,' she said Frye also spoke about the trauma of being sexualized as a child, remembering the many times she was harassed or touched as an underage girl. 'Men treated me more like a woman and not a 13-year-old,' she said. While definitely not their easiest years, the director/actress said that looking back on that time helped her embrace her past. 'I didn't know what true self-love was until this process,' she went on. Rewind: 'I carried that video camera everywhere and then locked it away for 20 years and I had never really looked back at it,' Frye explained Insight: While definitely not their easiest years, the director/actress said that looking back on that time helped her embrace her past. 'I didn't know what true self-love was until this process,' she went on Soleil shared a bit about her creative process during an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live Tuesday, telling the host: 'I turned 40 and I really was wondering if my life had happened how I thought it had.' 'And what I realized is, I think on a subconscious level, there was so much joy and bliss and also a lot of pain, I had lost some people that were very close to me and so I don't think I wanted to deal with the pain or I wasn't ready to deal with it.' 'And in uncovering Pandora's box, I discovered true self-love and self-awareness in a way that I never really understood,' she added. Kid 90 will premiere March 21, 2021 on Hulu. Editor: The Pennsylvania Academy of Family Physicians, Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and Pennsylvania Chapter of the American College of Physicians, representing thousands of primary care physicians, were shocked by the Department of Healths action on Feb. 12 to cut out independent primary care providers from the states COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan. Our organizations have expressed willingness to help with the vaccine rollout and outreach to minority communities, with no response. Many of our member physicians are upset by the departments actions. We stand with them. The announcement should have been handled more transparently, out of respect for physicians who have followed the departments guidance and remain on the front lines in helping prevent a surge of the virus, and for high-risk patients they serve. Additionally, refusal to include the states physician organizations in developing the pandemic response is baffling. Many people turn to primary care physicians for vaccine guidance. Patients trust physicians, nurses and physician assistants who provide care in private practice settings. This is especially noteworthy when considering patients who may otherwise be reluctant to get the vaccine. A pharmacist or other provider unknown to the patient will not be able to provide that same level of confidence. Additionally, many older Pennsylvanians may believe they will receive the vaccine in their primary care physicians office. The new order, without any forewarning or outreach to our organizations, creates yet another hurdle for a demographic that struggles to navigate the vaccine distribution landscape. We urge the department and Gov. Tom Wolf to rescind this provision of the order, engage with our member organizations and recognize the critical value our members provide in preventing and mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Doing so will help avoid further problems in the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. The Pennsylvania Academy of Family Physicians The Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics The Pennsylvania Chapter of the American College of Physicians Editor: I ask the senators who voted to acquit former President Trump at his impeachment trial what evidence they had to decide his innocence. I understand that holding ones treasured seat in that revered body is important, but at what price? Your integrity? Your service to your constituents? The price is too high. All Republican senators know that Joe Biden won the election. Is it not at least embarrassing to pretend otherwise? Is it not disgraceful to hang on to the instigator of the murderous attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6? Kudos to Pennsylvania Sens. Bob Casey and Pat Toomey. Both voted for conviction. Elected officials need to be leaders, exemplary in their words and deeds, for the rest of us citizens. Our democracy can only endure if we can trust the people that we elect to care about the public good; that is their job. To witness the votes on Feb. 13 for or against impeachment was a painful experience. Dont Republican senators who voted to acquit know that the acquittal was a lie? For the sake of saving our democracy we cannot tolerate our highest officials lying to save their seats. They have an obligation to lead their constituents, not follow their worst impulses. On Jan. 6, their sacred building was ravaged by brutal destroyers who broke into offices and shouted Wheres Nancy? and Hang Pence. Fortunately, we saved ourselves from ourselves. The election was certified at 4 a.m. on Jan. 7. This is America meant to be the leader of the free world. In Biden, we have a president who knows who we are and who we aspire to be. We have a chance to move ahead from the perils of authoritarianism to the promise of aiming for liberty and justice for all. SONDRA MYERS SCRANTON Editor: So, people who have no children of school age would like to see students in the classroom, not being taught by virtual instruction. I agree. However, do the teachers have a choice? No. Do the teachers want to go back to classroom teaching? Yes. Do teachers teach as efficiently virtually as they would in the classroom? I dont think so. Have all teachers been offered the COVID-19 vaccine? No. Do teachers teach virtually even though their own child may have no school due to the weather? Yes. Is it fun to sit at home in front of a computer for seven hours? No. Do all parents want their children to go to the actual school despite the pandemic situation? No. Is it fun to drive to school to have five to 10 students in your classroom while the rest of your class, whose parents would rather them learn virtually, watch you teach on their computer at home? No. So, those who criticize teachers should get the facts straight. Perhaps critics should have chosen teaching as their own occupation. Otherwise, please get the facts straight, or keep the negative thoughts to yourself. Teachers are doing their best in this most difficult time. BARB PUNTAR JERMYN Editor: The Times-Tribune ran a small story last week regarding a Dickson City police officer who passed away. The story included reference to an incident that occurred a few years back when he was fired and later rehired through an arbitration process. Combining both of those stories into one after his death was done in poor taste. The man has a child and has a family that cares for him. The newspaper ran the story of his termination and reinstatement when it was relevant. Its not shocking to me that the newspaper would publish this while a family is grieving the tragic loss of their son, father and friend. MIKE FREDERICKS SCRANTON (Newser) A coronavirus variant detected in California appears dangerous enough to be considered a "variant of concern" along with the variants that have emerged from Brazil, Britain, and South Africa, researchers say. Researchers at UC San Francisco warn that like the other variants, the California one is more infectious than the older strain and it is now the dominant one in the state, the Los Angeles Times reports. "The devil is already here," says lead researcher Dr. Charles Chiu. "I wish it were different. But the science is the science." Chiu, an infectious diseases researcher, believes the strain will account for 90% of COVID-19 infections in California by the end of March. The new variant, first detected last summer, comes in two formsB1427 and B1429with slightly different mutations, researchers say. story continues below The variant has mutations in its spike protein that makes it easier to invade human cells, and lab tests showed that it is more resistant to antibodies from vaccines or prior infection, researchers say. The researchers say the variant, which has also been detected in other states, appears to also be deadlier. They found that patients infected with the variant were 11 times more likely to die, although that finding was based on a small sample of patients and the researchers say the higher death rate could have been because hospitals were overwhelmed at the time, the journal Science reports. Chiu and other experts say the new variant makes it more vital than ever to stop the spread of the virusespecially to avoid a "nightmare scenario" where the California strain meets another variant in the same patient, creating a highly dangerous new strain combining their mutations. (Read more coronavirus stories.) Gerard Depardieu's daughter says she has had five nose jobs to rid herself of his 'hoodlum' looks and claims he will be dead in five years Julie Depardieu said her father Gerard had little hope of living beyond 70 The 40-year-old actress also attack on her father's Gallic nose She said she looked too much like him and wanted to be anonymous Not so happy families: Julie Depardieu has launched a ferocious attack on her father The daughter of Hollywood star Gerard Depardieu has had plastic surgery on her nose five times because she could not bear to look like her hoodlum father, she admitted yesterday. In a ferocious attack on the French actor, who turns 65 this month, Julie Depardieu added that he had little hope of living beyond the age of 70. Miss Depardieu, 40, said she continually called in plastic surgeons because she had inherited her fathers trademark nose and wanted to be less recognisable. She told French newspaper Le Monde: I had five nose jobs because I couldnt stand myself. It was a question of identity. It was not even to be pretty. I didnt want to have that nose, because it resembled someone in my family. Miss Depardieu is an award-winning film actress in her own right, having starred in a number of films, including La Petite Lili, for which she won a Cesar the French equivalent of an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. She was also nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Cesar in 2005 for her performance in Podium. But her father became a household name in Britain and America after starring in hit films including Jean de Florette, Green Card and Cyrano de Bergerac. Miss Depardieu said: He wont grow much older 65 years its not old. And when you know what he does, he wont last. In five years time, he wont be around. Hes the next on the list, I know it. The actress, who has two sons Billy, two, and Alfred, one added: My father is a hoodlum. He says one thing, he does another. You have to be wary of him. French actor Gerard Depardieu (left) speaks next to his daughter Julie Depardieu after she was awarded as Best Female Newcomer actress of the year at the Chatelet theatre in Paris 21 February 2004 Ms Depardiu (right) continually called in the plastic surgeons because she looked too much like her father (left) The actor took Russian citizenship earlier this year to avoid paying increasing high taxes in Paris Hes not a traitor but you have to be wary anyway. Gerard Depardieus reputation in France took a severe dent earlier this year when he took Russian citizenship to avoid paying taxes in Paris. He was also fined the equivalent of 3,800 earlier this year for drink-driving on his scooter in the French capital. Depardieu had two children with Elisabeth Guignot, the French actress to whom he was married between 1970 and 2006. His daughter said her family had never been a very close one, saying that at Christmas everyone argues with each other. Often we dont even open the presents because everyone has already got up from the table, she said. Miss Depardieu added that it had been difficult for her and her late brother Guillaume to grow up in their fathers shadow. Hes a guy who is always going off somewhere else and who explains to you that he cant stay around. Hes got a handicap, in fact, because hes someone who cannot stay in the same place. Red carpet appearances: Ms Depardieu at the Franck Sobier fashion show in 2008 (left) and at the Tommy Hilfiger Champs Elysee flagship opening in 2010 Depardieu, who has made more than 150 films, wrote an open letter to France's prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault last year explaining why he was leaving his native country. WEST HARTFORD A catastrophic fire ripped through a Prospect Avenue home early Wednesday morning, taking firefighters more than an hour to get the blaze under control, officials said. Fire crews, police and medics were dispatched around 6:30 a.m. to a fire in a single-family home on Prospect Avenue, according to Fire Chief Greg H. Priest. He said the home is located in an area of town known for older, historic homes. When firefighters arrived, they saw flames coming from the second floor, the chief said. The first unit on scene, arriving two minutes after the dispatch, reported heavy fire on several sides of the house. As crews were getting ready for search-and-rescue efforts, neighbors told crews no one was living in the home due to renovations. Fire crews went to work on the flames with an aggressive interior attack, Priest said. Crews were faced with extensive fire conditions and determined that there were portions of the residence that were structurally unstable due to either fire conditions or renovations, he said. After conducting a primary search and determining there was no one in the residence in the areas where they were able to access, fire crews remained in heavy fire conditions for about 45 minutes attempting to stop the fire. Priest said the volume of the fire and structural issues drove firefighters out of the home for safety reasons, transitioning to a defensive attack from outside. Firefighters had the blaze under control shortly after 9 a.m. The residence suffered catastrophic damage due to fire, smoke and water damage, Priest said. Officials contacted property owners, who confirmed no one was home at the time, he said. There were no injuries reported to first responders, Priest said. The cause of the fire remains under investigation. ++ SERVICE NOTE - ANSA JOURNALISTS MEETING ++ (ANSAmed) - ROME, FEBRUARY 24 - We inform all users that the transmission of all ANSA newswires will be curtailed because of a journalists' meeting this afternoon.(ANSAmed). (ANSA). Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. President Donald Trump talks to reporters before departing with his family from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for the Thanksgiving holiday, in Washington on Nov. 21, 2017. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) Trump Is Back in the Political Arena, Says Sebastian Gorka Former President Donald Trump is back in the political arena after going silent following Jan. 20, said his former political adviser, Sebastian Gorka. In an interview with Sky News, Gorka remarked that following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, he believed Trump would disappear for months. This man has to disappear for a while before he can get back in politics, Gorka said. But that all changed when he was impeached in the House for allegedly inciting violence on Jan. 6, he added. The impeachment, Gorka asserted, allowed Trump to move back into the political arena sooner. He cited the establishment of Trumps Office of the 45th President, his first political endorsement of Sarah Sanders for Arkansas governor, held interviews with media outlets about the passing of radio host Rush Limbaugh last week, and the move to speak at Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) over the weekend. Trump is slated to deliver a speech on Sunday, Feb. 28. Donald Trump is back and is the de facto conservative kingmaker, he proclaimed, without elaborating on the former presidents next moves or whether he will run for office in 2024. None of the rising stars in the conservative movement can generate the same interest as Trump, he argued. Sebastian Gorka speaks at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit in Washington on July 25, 2019. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) According to a slew of recent polls, Republican voters view Trump quite favorably. Some polls have found that a significant number of GOP voters would be willing to join a Trump-backed political party if he breaks off from the Republican establishment. Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress who voted to impeach, convict, or took other actions against Trump in recent weeks have been censured or condemned by local Republican Party groups. About a week ago, the former president issued a statement that strongly criticized Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), calling on him to rescind his leadership position while saying that Republicans wont take majorities in the Senate under his leadership. It came after McConnell suggested in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal that Trump could face criminal prosecution for his Jan. 6 speech. Trump also issued a lengthy statement via email criticizing the Supreme Courts Monday decision not to block his taxes from being released to a grand jury convened by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. The new phenomenon of headhunting prosecutors and AGswho try to take down their political opponents using the law as a weaponis a threat to the very foundation of our liberty, he said. Thats what is done in third world countries. Even worse are those who run for prosecutorial or attorney general offices in far-left states and jurisdictions pledging to take out a political opponent. Thats fascism, not justiceand that is exactly what they are trying to do with respect to me, except that the people of our Country wont stand for it. [February 23, 2021] RockItCoin Responds to Texas Crisis with Feeding Texas Donation CHICAGO, Feb. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- RockItCoin, one of the nation's largest bitcoin kiosk operators, responded to Texas' unprecedented weather and energy crisis today with a $10,000 donation to Feeding Texas. "As a member of the Texas business community, RockItCoin wants to give back and help those in need during these difficult times," said Michael Dalesandro, CEO and founder of RockItCoin (www.rockitcoin.com). "Given the magnitude of what Texas is facing, it is critical we all pitch in however we can." One of the ever-growin concerns from the crisis is hunger. "The pandemic already pushed more Texans than ever to access food assistance from food banks. But the need is even higher as we strive to help Texas families recover from the impact of the recent winter storms," said Celia Cole, Chief Executive Officer at Feeding Texas. "We are grateful for RockItCoin's support in helping Texas food banks keep their communities nourished through this crisis." "Feeding Texas was a natural fit for us to address hunger with their existing statewide network that reaches communities both large and small," explained Ben Phillips, president of RockItCoin. "We wanted to help Texas across the board." Depleted food pantries across Texas will not only have difficulties meeting demand now, but also restocking supplies in the near future, according to Dalesandro. "We applaud and support the work Feeding Texas is doing. They will need all the help they can get in the coming weeks. In times of crisis, we are all in it together." About RockItCoin. Founded in 2015 by Dalesandro, RockItCoin is a crypto blockchain company based in Chicago, IL. RockItCoin has a nationwide network of crypto ATMs with 153 locations in Texas that provide consumers with a safe, efficient, and fast way to obtain or sell bitcoins. CONTACT: Ben Phillips, ben@rockitcoin.com, 312-878-4706 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rockitcoin-responds-to-texas-crisis-with-feeding-texas-donation-301234044.html SOURCE RockitCoin [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Facebook Inc on Wednesday pledged to invest at least $1 billion in the news industry over the next three years, days after a high-profile stand-off with the Australian government over paying news outlets for content. The social network's commitment to the news industry follows Google's $1 billion investment last year, as technology giants come under scrutiny over their business model as well as the proliferation of misinformation on their platform. Facebook on Tuesday restored Australian news pages, ending an unprecedented week-long blackout after wringing ... Mumbai-based quick service restaurant chain Jumboking is all set for a national rollout as an Indian burger brand. The company in the next few months would be expanding to 13 cities and the plan is to substantially scale up the Rs-100-crore brand in the next few years, says Dheeraj Gupta, Founder and MD of Jumboking. The company tried a national rollout as a vada pav QSR brand way back in 2008-09, but had to turn back after burning its fingers badly. When the company launched its vada pav quick service restaurant chain way back in 2001, the ambition clearly was to be a desi version of McDonald's or Burger King. The idea was to make the ubiquitous Mumbai vada pav a national phenomenon. Just as McDonald's has an array of burger variants, Jumboking also came up with varied offerings such as a Schezwan vada pav and Achari vada pav amongst many others. The Mumbaikars did lap up the QSR-style vada pav, which encouraged the brand to go national in 2008. It set up stores in Bangalore, Delhi and Hyderabad. However, after the initial excitement, the consumers in Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore didn't show sustained interest in vada pav. To make vada pav consumption a habit, the brand needed to spend crores on advertising. The India QSR start-up didn't have deep pockets and hence decided to withdraw from these markets in 2011. ALSO READ: Over 1 million kirana stores went digital during COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 Though vada pav is a staple in Mumbai, research was also telling Jumboking that the younger generation didn't find vada pav aspirational. They were not too interested in paying a premium for vada pav due to its street food credentials. "There is also a pricing power issue with vada pav. Consumers didn't want to pay beyond Rs 20 for it and we were not able to offer the product for less than Rs 25, as we were using the best available technology to manufacture our vada pav hygienically," explains Gupta. In 2015, the brand repositioned itself as an Indian burger brand. It launched a range of burgers which had an international appeal, such as corn and spinach, crispy veggie and mac and cheese. This move met with instant success. The aspirational Indian consumer, says, Gupta, clearly wanted a product which had an international appeal but at the same time was looking for Indian flavours. "Our burgers are designed to suit the Indian palette, they are spicy," explains Gupta. They consumers wanted burgers with an Indian touch, but they were clearly not in favour of desi burgers such as a vada pav. However, Gupta believes that just as too much Indianisation doesn't work in a product like burger, one can't meddle with the taste of street food like vada pav either. "We came up with products such as Achari vada pav and Schezwan vada pav and they didn't work." ALSO READ: French yogurt major Novandie launches operations in India through JV with Heritage Foods Today, the brand only has the Mumbai Burger, which is the classic Mumbai vada pav. Priced at Rs 25, it is Jumboking's entry level product which competes with McDonald's McAloo Tikki burger. An average Jumboking burger is priced at Rs 75, while McDonald's is priced at Rs 125. Gupta has ambitions of taking Jumboking beyond the current plan of 13 cities. He wants to set up stores in tier 2-3 towns. While he plans to have dine-in restaurants in the smaller towns, his model largely would be 'on the go'. "I want to be the ATM of QSR business, from where consumers can pick up burgers on-the-go." In fact, global coffee chains such as Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks have a similar on-the-go model world over. Gupta says that his stores will not be more than 200-300 square feet, as that is the only way he can make profits. Gupta says that he has built his business by observing the business models of global QSR giants such as Burger King and McDonald's. When it comes to its store strategy, he has adopted Subway's franchise model. "Subway has a 100 per cent franchise model, because of which it has 78,000 stores worldwide. A franchise network helps in churning profits," he says. The QSR chain currently has 100 stores across Mumbai and Pune. ALSO READ: How Frontier Markets all-woman salesforce enables last mile delivery in rural India The Perspective Atlanta, Georgia February 24, 2021 Turkish Dictator Erdogan Human rights abuses under Erdogan are beyond the pale of inhumanity and moral decadence. The list of Erdogans violations and cruelty is too long to numerate. The detention and horrifying torture of thousands of innocent people for months and at times for years, without being charged, is hard to fathom. Many prisoners are left languishing in dark cells, often in solitary confinement. The detention of tens of thousands of men and hundreds of women, many with their children, especially following the 2016 failed coup, has become common. It is calculated to inflict horrendous pain and suffering to bring the prisoners to the breaking point, so that they confess to crimes they have never committed. Nelson Mandela, who spent 26 years in prison, eloquently but painfully described the real purpose of unlawful detentions under a despotic regime: Prison is designed to break ones spirit and destroy ones resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individualityall with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are. Recently I was told a story about one prisoner who had been incarcerated for nearly three years. Regardless of the unspeakable torture that he was subjected to, he kept refusing to confess to crimes he never committed. Like many other prisoners, it is not difficult to picture the sleepless nights he spent thinking of his wife and son. We can only imagine the unbearable pain and anguish he felt over what they were enduring, uncontrollably weeping night and day over being deprived of seeing his family. In the hope of seeing their loved ones, many prisoners try initially to endure the torture but eventually succumb and confess. By that time, they have become nothing but a shell of themselves. This prisoner was determined not to confess. After months of torture, he was threatened with the imprisonment of his wife and son if he did not confess. For some weeks he was torn between confessing to a crime he did not commit, and the fear that his family would soon be apprehended and face a similar fate. One morning as a prison guard was making his daily inspection, he was stunned to see this prisoner, whom he befriended, hanging by his neck from the ceiling. Like others before him, the prisoner found more meaning in his death than in living as a broken man. From the letter he wrote to his wife, smuggled out by that same guard, we know that he decided to commit suicide to prevent the authorities from apprehending his family, preserve whats left of his dignity, and deny the authorities the satisfaction of him confessing. This case is not an aberration. The specially-trained interrogators first try without much intimidation to convince the prisoners to confess to crimes they are accused off by promising leniency and a lighter sentence. The longer they resist confessing, the more intense torture and excruciatingly daily abuse they face. Over a period of a few months, thousands of prisoners reach the point of hopelessness and despair, not knowing what to expect next, what day of the week it is or what hour of the day. Many of them are brought daily in shackles for interrogation, largely about their alleged affiliation with the Gulen movement and/or as conspirators behind the 2016 failed military coup. Initially, the vast majority refuse to confess, beseeching their interrogators to believe in their innocence. Sadly, their repeated pleas are simply dismissed as they were already deemed guiltyinnocent or not did not matter. Erdogan has incarcerated over 80,000 individuals, including judges, teachers, police officers, and 150 journalists. Many are suspected of being affiliated with the Gulen movement, including fathers who are persecuted because of their sons alleged association with the movement. Turkish prisons under Erdogan house torture chambers27,493 people were victims of torture and maltreatment; 86 more died from severe physical abuse. Incarcerating pregnant women and children in Turkey has become common. Over 700 children are in Turkish prisons with their mothers. Many women are sexually assaulted by police officers during their arrest. Political prisoners in Turkey are deliberately put in cells with suspected members of ISIS as part of an intimidation tactic to pressure them into signing false confessions. The Turkish people deserve a leader who is responsive to their needs and aspirations. Instead, they are cursed to be governed by a despot who robs them of their basic human rights. He makes a mockery of the rule of law, cynically proclaiming that Turkey is a democracy when in fact Erdogans despotism is the law of the land. It about time for the US and the EU to warn Erdogan that he must cease his gross human rights violations. They must threaten Erdogan with unspecified sanctions that will cripple his economy, while taking the unprecedented step of kicking Turkey out of NATO. He must begin by releasing the thousands of detainees, including journalists, who have been incarcerated on bogus charges or no charges at all. This may well be wishful thinking on my part. But if the West fails to insist that any NATO member state fully adhere to human rights and restore the basic pillars of democracy as enshrined in its own charter, NATO becomes shamefully complicit in Erdogans crimes against humanity, which he has been perpetrating against his own people with impunity. Hopefully, Biden will not allow undue political consideration to prevent him from warning Erdogan that his witch hunt and trail of torture must end. The world wont be destroyed by those who do evil, said Albert Einstein but by those who watch them without doing anything. About the Author: Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. [email protected] Web: www.alonben-meir.com AUSTIN, Texas (AP) All the groceries spoiled and the water was out for days. Then Melissa Rogers, a believer in the Texas gospel that government should know its place, woke up to a $6,000 energy bill before the snow and ice even melted. The roads were awful, but we were running around town trying to get money from every single bank we could possibly think of," said Rogers, 36, whose Fort Worth family of four was left with $80 after the charges drained her accounts and took her husband's paycheck. Now, the emerging response to a winter catastrophe that caused one of the worst power outages in U.S. history is not the usual one in Texas: demands for more regulation. On Thursday, managers of Texas' power grid are expected to receive a lashing in the first public hearings about the crisis at the state Capitol where the belief that less government is better is reflected in a part-time Legislature that meets just once every two years, and only for 140 days. The current session ends in May. That leaves Texas little time to make last week's plunge into freezing darkness that touched nearly all of the state's 30 million residents one way or another including grocery shelves left bare and miles of busted water pipes produce tougher regulations that the state's GOP majority has resisted for decades. At the same time, warnings ignored after a previous deep Texas freeze in 2011 have baked in skepticism. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott wants to force power plants to winterize after nearly half of the state's generation capacity was knocked offline by subfreezing temperatures. There's also new support for guardrails on Texas' deregulated electric market to prevent astronomical energy bills that financially devastated homeowners like Rogers, who frantically emptied her savings after wholesale prices, which are typically as low as a couple of cents per kilowatt-hour, spiked to $9 per kilowatt-hour. At $9 a kilowatt-hour, the average U.S. home would have a monthly electric bill of about $8,000. In a lot of respects, were victims of our own attempt to let free market forces work, said Republican state Rep. Drew Darby, who sits on the House Energy Resources Committee that is digging into the outages. His rural district includes two or three homes in the Texas oil patch that burned down as the power lurched off and on, and he heard of plants that couldn't burn piles of frozen coal outside. Even before the storm dropped six inches of snow as far south as San Antonio, generators in Texas were required to submit safeguard plans for cold weather. Darby suspects enforcement was scant. Typically, you know, the Texas Legislature pushes back on overregulation," Darby said. However, my view on something as basic to human survival and need is we need to have reliable power and water." At least six board members of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state's power grid, resigned this week ahead of likely calls for their ouster at the hearings. Officials in Houston have opened their own investigations into the outages, and prosecutors in Austin say they will investigate potential criminal wrongdoing. President Joe Biden is set to fly to Texas on Friday, a trip that marks his first visit to a disaster site since taking office. Just weeks before the outages, Abbott had ordered state agencies to look for ways to sue the new administration over energy regulations that he said would hamper the state's biggest industry. Abbott has put much of the fault on ERCOT, which he accuses of misleading Texas about the grid's readiness. But Abbott's hand-picked appointees govern the state's Public Utility Commission that oversees ERCOT. A federal report after the 2011 outages urged hardening electric generators against extreme cold, but neither the commission nor ERCOT required plant owners to do anything more than file the weatherization plans. There are no standards for what must be in those plans. ERCOT staffers conduct spot checks at a small portion of power plants every year to, among other things, check on their progress at protecting equipment. But, ERCOT president Bill Magness said, These are not inspections." There is no regulatory authority to issue fines or penalties. Democratic state Rep. Rafael Anchia said it often takes a crisis to push through transformational regulation. Regulation is a four-letter word in this building at times," said Anchia, who sits on the House energy committee. But four million people without power and 12 million people without drinkable water, right, that gets everybody's attention." In Houston, Mya James' diabetic grandmother was rushed to an emergency room as she struggled to breathe. The power had gone out two days earlier. Nurses at another hospital were collecting rain water in buckets to flush toilets. James, 38, is a beauty product entrepreneur with customers overseas. When the outages began, clients in other countries were baffled: How could Texas, the state built on energy, not have any? It was very hard for people to comprehend," James said. If we're known for one thing, let's be good at that one thing." ___ Associated Press writer David Koenig contributed to this report from Dallas. Ho Chi Minh City police have coordinated with the Ministry of Public Security to raid three major drug trafficking networks between Cambodia and Vietnam, seizing 217 kg of drugs of all kinds. The drugs seized by HCM City police. The drugs included 104 bricks of heroin, 142kg of meth, 5kg of ketamine, and 100,000 ecstasy tablets. The police arrested 10 people involved in these rings. All of these rings were raided in the early months of 2021. On January 30, the police arrested three suspects and 22 kilos of meth. The next day, the police seized an additional four suspects and 50 more kilos of meth. On February 2, they captured three other suspects and seized 14 bricks of heroin. After examining the residence of the suspects, the police seized an additional 90 bricks of heroin, about 100,000 ecstasy tablets, 70 kilos of meth, 5 kilos of ketamine, and 35 bullets. Further investigations are underway. Phuoc An Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A new study involving researchers from the University of Oxford and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) has examined the change in overall and cause-specific death rates during the three months of the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020. The results are published today in The BMJ. In China, the emergence of COVID-19 was first reported during mid-December 2019 in Wuhan city, Hubei province. Coinciding with the January 2020 festivities for the Chinese Lunar New Year, the virus spread rapidly across China. This led to a national lockdown on 23 January 2020, which continued until early April. The study analysed data from official Chinese death registries for the period 1 January-31 March 2020, and compared this with the same period over the previous five years. The researchers performed separate analyses for Wuhan city, the epicentre of the pandemic, and elsewhere in China. The main findings were: The overall death rate in Wuhan city was 56% higher than would be normally expected (1147 v 735 per 100,000). This was mainly due to an eightfold increase in deaths from pneumonia, most of which were COVID-19 related. Deaths from certain other diseases also increased modestly in Wuhan city, including cardiovascular disease (29% increase: 408 v 316 per 100,000) and diabetes (83% increase: 46 v 25 per 100,000). Overall, in Wuhan city, there were about 6000 additional deaths (4573 caused by pneumonia) in January-March 2020 compared with the expected rate based on the previous five years. Excess deaths were significantly greater in central districts (compared with suburban districts), in adults over 70 years old, and were higher in men than women. Outside of Wuhan city, the overall death rate did not increase, and was in fact slightly lower than that expected (675 v 715 per 100,000). This was due to fewer deaths from non-COVID-19 related pneumonia (47% reduction), chronic respiratory diseases (18% reduction), and road traffic incidents (23% reduction), all of which coincided closely with the lockdown. Dr. Jiangmei Liu, a study author at the China CDC, said 'This was the first nationwide study in China to systematically examine the excess mortality during the COVID-19 outbreak, not only from pneumonia but also from a range of other conditions across different regions of China.' The researchers used official records from China CDC's nationally-representative Disease Surveillance Point (DSP) system. It covers more than 300 million people from 605 urban districts and rural counties, representing more than 20% of the entire population in China. Professor Maigeng Zhou, senior author for the study at the China CDC, said 'The data showed that during these first three months of the COVID-19 outbreak, there were totally different situations in Wuhan city and in the rest of China. Within Wuhan city, there were also major differences in the severity of the outbreak between central and suburban districts.' In Wuhan city, apart from excess deaths from pneumonia (mostly COVID-19 related), there were about 1400 additional deaths from several chronic diseases. When examined by the location of these deaths, the data revealed that hospital deaths decreased significantly, whilst deaths that occurred outside hospital increased. This indicates that difficulty in accessing hospital services or a reluctance to seek medical care during the outbreak may have been a key factor causing the increased deaths from non-pneumonia related diseases. Outside of Wuhan city, the small increase in deaths from COVID-19 related pneumonia were more than offset by a reduction in deaths from other types of pneumonia, chronic respiratory diseases and traffic accidents. This reflected the success of the rapid control of the spread of SARS-CoV-2, besides the appropriate maintenance of healthcare systems during the nationwide lockdown. Zhengming Chen, Professor of Epidemiology at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford and senior author for the study, said 'It would appear that the lockdown and associated behavioural changessuch as wearing facemasks, increased hygiene, social distancing and restricted travelactually had unintended additional health benefits beyond those of reducing the spread of SARS-CoV-2.' Apart from cause-specific mortality, the study did not directly assess the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on hospital admissions, routine clinical examinations (e.g. for cancer diagnosis), and case fatality rates following infection with SARS-CoV-2. Nevertheless, this large study provides important evidence highlighting the need for rapid, drastic and coordinated actions during major outbreaks of infectious diseases to contain, suppress, and eradicate transmission and minimise detrimental effects on human health. Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-23 23:28:39|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close China continues its vaccine cooperation with African countries as the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging in the continent. Produced by Xinhua Global Service Although it was written back in October, the cry is still echoing throughout the mainstream media. It comes from Hamilton Nolan, formerly at Gawker Media and now the public editor for the Washington Post. He penned a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review titled "The Powerful have realized they don't need the Post." What triggered Nolan was that Elon Musk had eliminated Tesla's media relations department. Musk apparently felt he did not need a formal interface with the press to get his company's message out. He had Twitter and other social media platforms. Plus, Musk has been long vocal about his disdain for the media. He once tweeted: "The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them." To Nolan, this was, as he put it, "[o]ne more glaring data point showing that powerful people no longer think they need the mainstream press, especially critical and ethical outlets like the Washington Post." Should you think Nolan referring to the Washington Post as "ethical" shows signs of being totally self-unaware, there is more to come. Nolan went on: "As journalists, we all view this as a horrifying assault on the public's right to know, and our own status as brave defenders of the public good." Nolan and the media from which he gains employment are highly selective in what the public has a right to know. It never seems to include damaging information about high-level Democrats. Look at numerous Clintons scandals, such as Bill allegedly raping women or his reported numerous flights on Jeffery Epstein's Lolita Express. Where was the exposure? And Hillary's law-breaking while secretary of state was never fully investigated, and the Clinton Foundation was never touched. After being elected president, the press admitted it was too busy cheerleading for Barack Hussein Obama to vet him. As a result, the public was kept in the dark about Obama's radical nature, which was the media's objective all along. The media went on to quash news about the Hunter Biden corruption in Ukraine and China as it might damage Joe Biden's election chances. The current news blackout is preventing Americans from knowing the true level of the irregularities and illegalities in the 2020 election, which led to a senile old man who didn't campaign supposedly getting nearly 13 million more votes than the charismatic Barack Obama did in 2012. Now the media's focus is on branding anyone who questions the legitimacy of Biden's installment as president a danger to the republic. Another lie. When mainstream press aren't covering up information that is damaging to the progressives cause, they fabricate stories against conservatives like the Russian collusion hoax or reporting that the riot in the Capital on Jan. 6 was an insurrection led by Donald Trump. Both of these stories were lies from start to finish. But both lead to poisoning the minds of countless Americans against the president and two impeachments against him. Yet during the summer of 2020, the press presented the Antifa and BLM riots as mostly peaceful demonstrations. With a straight face, Nolan writes: "Because journalism, particularly at the highest level [by which he means the Washington Post, New York Times, etc.], is about raw power. It is about bringing important people to heel, on behalf of the public." He goes on: "A powerful press, for all its flaws, is good for democracy, and trends to promote equality by holding big shots in check." Nolan's premise is that the "big shots" subject themselves to scrutiny (a grilling) by the press in interviews only because they view it as a necessary evil. That is, if they want to get their story out to the public, they have to kowtow to the journalists. But that dynamic is fast changing. Nolan knows it but is delusional otherwise. He mouths what the press should be in a democracy without realizing that today's mainstream media are the antithesis of that ideal. The sad and frightening thing is that those in the mainstream press actually believe what Nolan wrote about their profession. Fortunately, the public isn't so easily hoodwinked. Gallup reports that trust in the media is at an all-time low. The mainstream press is in a panic. Its circulation and ad revenue may be falling, as is its trustworthiness among the American people. Plus, those readers the press still holds tend to be in an aging demographic. They are not the future. Younger people prefer internet alternatives for their news source. The growing alternative media are taking big bites out of the legacy media's influence and revenue stream. Give Elon Musk credit for seeing the obvious and refusing to deal with the press on the press's terms. But Donald Trump is the one who led the way starting with his 2015 campaign and throughout his presidency. It is hard to see the trend that Nolan fears from receding anytime soon. This is good news for the country. Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. House Bill 133 aims to extend Medicaid coverage to eligible new mothers. The House version of the bill calls for a one-year extension, whereas the Senate version calls for a six-month extension. Advocates say the bill could reduce the states maternal mortality rate. Currently, the state offers Medicaid for two months after giving birth. Should Texas extend Medicaid for eligible new mothers for six months or one year? You voted: .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... PHOENIX The Arizona Senate has revived a stalled bill that would purge about 200,000 people from a list of voters who automatically get mail ballots. The measure is among dozens of election bills that Republicans have introduced this year to put new limits on how ballots can be cast, many targeting the increasingly popular vote-by-mail system. The measures come in the wake of victories in Arizona by President Joe Biden and Sen. Mark Kelly, both Democrats. A Senate committee on Tuesday brought back to life the proposal to purge the permanent early voting list. The measure died on the Senate floor last week when Republican Sen. Paul Boyer joined all 14 Democrats in opposition, holding it short of a majority. ADVERTISEMENTSkip ................................................................ Boyer said Wednesday his concerns have been addressed. The measure has drawn harsh criticism from voting rights advocates, who describe it as a voter-suppression tactic by Republicans after Democratic President Joe Biden narrowly won Arizona last year. The measure would remove the word permanent from the popular permanent early voting list and require people to vote at least once in every two election cycles to stay on the list. Boyer was said he was concerned that people would be dropped from the list for missing just one primary or general election. But legislative lawyers assured him that voters would need to miss both the primary and the general for two consecutive cycles to be removed. State election officials have said about 200,000 voters currently meet that criteria. If the bill passes, they would get a letter asking them whether they want to remain on the permanent early voting list and would be removed if they dont respond. On Wednesday, the Senate Appropriations Committee advanced a bill that would prohibit election officials from counting mail ballots postmarked after the Thursday before an election. It also would change the date ballots are mailed from 27 days before an election to 22 days. Another bill would require voters casting mail ballots to include in the ballot envelopes an affidavit with their birthdate and proof of their identity. That measure was approved in a committee this month but has not yet received a vote in the full Senate. Proposals in both the House and the Senate to give lawmakers not voters the final say in selecting Arizonas representatives in the Electoral College have been introduced without receiving committee votes. The House and Senate approved several other election bills over steep opposition from voting rights advocates. The Senate voted to give certain lawmakers instead of the governor veto power over the election procedures manual, a state document that outlines in minute detail how elections should be carried out. The document is currently written by the secretary of state and approved by the governor and attorney general. Sen. Martin Quezada, a Glendale Democrat, said that would introduce unnecessary partisanship. The bills sponsor, Republican Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita of Scottsdale, said it would give the public more involvement. ___ Associated Press writer Bob Christie contributed. The U.S. urged Turkey not to go ahead with the delivery of Russian S-400 missiles and jettison the battery it already acquired, as Ankara engages in talks with Moscow over the delivery of a second system. "Again, we urge Turkey not to move ahead with the delivery of the S-400," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said. "We believe its incompatible with the F-35, and Turkey remains suspended from that program. Again, we urge them not to retain it," Bloomberg cited him as saying. Turkey and Russia have been negotiating over technology transfers and local production ahead of a potential purchase of a second system. Turkey acquired the first battery from Russia in 2019 after dropping talks over a comparable U.S. Patriot system because Washington refused to share technology. The U.S. recently imposed sanctions on Turkeys defense industry over the missile purchase, saying the Russian system could be used to gather intelligence on Lockheed Martin Corp.s F-35 stealth fighter. It previously suspended Turkish defense contractors from the international program to help build the F-35. Lots of good criminal justice reads from CCRC, Law360, and Reason | Main | "Viral Injustice" February 24, 2021 Potent call for new Attorney General to address how "mass detention creates mass incarceration" Alison Siegler and Kate M. Harris have this notable new New York Times op-ed under the headline "How Did the Worst of the Worst Become 3 Out of 4?: Merrick Garland can bring bail reform to the federal justice system." Here is how the efective piece gets started and concludes: Few see Judge Merrick Garland, President Bidens pick for attorney general, as a progressive who will reform the criminal legal system. But the Biden administration recently acknowledged that mass incarceration does not make us safer. And as the nations chief federal prosecutor, if confirmed, Judge Garland will have the power to prioritize federal bail reform and reduce sky-high rates of pretrial jailing. Doing so will decrease mass incarceration, advance racial justice and enable Mr. Garland to stake his claim as a progressive prosecutor. In fact, federal bail reform is an area where he may have already shown an appetite for change. In November, voters across the nation overwhelmingly chose reform-oriented progressive prosecutors over law and order challengers. Red and blue districts elected prosecutors who ran on a promise to use their office to enact change. Some of these prosecutors promised to stop pursuing low-level drug crimes. And at least one has since ended the use of cash bail for certain crimes. But while the progressive-prosecutor movement has gained momentum at the state and county levels, it hasnt gotten any traction in the federal system. Mr. Garland will be able to change this by disrupting the culture of detention that pervades the ranks of federal prosecutors and, to some degree, the federal judiciary. During his time as chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Mr. Garland was a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the main policymaking organization for the federal bench. Since 2017, the Judicial Conference has repeatedly called on Congress to reform the federal bail law by eliminating what is known as the presumption of detention for many drug cases. While the Supreme Court famously said that freedom should be the default for people awaiting trial, current law directs judges to assume that people charged with certain crimes including most drug crimes will flee and endanger the community if released. That exception has now swallowed the rule, becoming a built-in bias for incarceration that feeds the federal systems colossal detention rates and stark racial disparities.... As Judge James Carr of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio has observed, Mass detention creates mass incarceration. Instead of maintaining a default position that most people awaiting trial should be jailed, Mr. Garland should enact policy changes that limit pretrial jailing to cases where it is genuinely necessary, eliminate all financial considerations from the detention calculus and aim to reduce racial disparities in pretrial detention. These common-sense changes would mark the true beginning of a progressive-prosecutor movement at the federal level. Prosecutors fostered the culture of detention. Now they must help dismantle it. February 24, 2021 at 10:19 AM | Permalink Comments Here in Kentucky, the Coronavirus pandemic has generated some interesting new data on the need for financial bail to secure attendance at criminal court hearings and trial. Before March 2020, the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, financial bail was set in most misdemeanor and criminal cases. Historically, only 4.4% of people released on pre-trial bail have either failed to appear for a court hearing/trial, or committed new crimes while out on bail. With the onset of the CV-19 pandemic, and due to the high danger to jail and prison inmates of contracting the Coronavirus (in 1 year, 55% of Kentucky's state prison inmates have tested positive for the virus, although more than half are asymptomatic), Judges and prosecutors have worked together to dramatically reduce the head count in county jails by substantially eliminating or reducing cash bail. Many pre-trial defendants (especially drug possession and DUIs) are now released on their own recognizance or on a surety bond signed by a family member, with no cash put up. Even those from whom cash bail is being required, the amounts are dramatically reduced, except in the most serious and violent cases (murder, first degree assault and first degree robbery). The Administrative Office of the Courts, which keeps track of the stats, has recently said that the rate of defendants missing Court hearings or committing new crimes while out on bond has not changed since March 2020 -- it's still 4.4% -- which means that we really don't need to require cash bonds in most cases going forward, after the pandemic ends. Posted by: Jim Gormley | Feb 24, 2021 10:50:21 AM There shouldn't be any AG brought forward that isn't going to fix the Mass incarceration-with a promise. There are so many people in Prison (Federal) who are there for words from another person actually caught with drugs for a lighter sentence. No EVIDENCE but that. It has to stop and those people let go with an apology. How is this not a Constitutional and Civil violation? Why hasn't a smart , hero lawyer fought this and stop them from violating people's rights? It baffles me. It's disgusting that I could get pulled over with drugs and tell on someone else, make up drug amounts and they go to prison for 20 years.....don't you have a problem with that? I know first hand of people who have made up drug amounts to get a lighter sentence who actually conspired with friends in the cell with them to tell on someone innocent, this person is now serving 15 years. Why is this not an outrage? Because most people don't know our Federal Government does this... Posted by: Lisa Sciretta | Feb 24, 2021 5:54:45 PM Post a comment Tanaisate Leo Varadkar has said there are grounds for optimism despite the country remaining in Level 5 restrictions until at least April 5. Last night, Government revealed their revised plan for living with Covid-19 which involves a cautious and phased approach to reopening society, which will see businesses closed for another six weeks at least. Mr Varadkar acknowledged that people were depressed, anxious and fatigued due to the length of the current lockdown, but said there was cause for hope. There are grounds for optimism; this virus is in retreat. Its in retreat around the world, the number of new cases every day across the world has halved in the last month or so. The number of cases in Ireland every day is down considerably. The number of people in hospitals and ICU are all falling and that is due to what people have been doing, he told RTEs Morning Ireland. The Tanaiste said people need to stick with the plan for the next number of weeks to drive numbers down to much lower than they are now, and also to give hospitals a rest and the breathing space they need. Mr Varadkar admitted that the governments commitment to having 60pc of adults fully vaccinated by June was based on certain assumptions such as supply and also authorisation being granted for use of Johnson & Johnsons vaccine. A fifth vaccine, CureVac, may also become available later this year which isnt factored into the plan, giving Government possible headroom in their rollout projections. The Tanaiste said the Government is confident that Ireland will go from about 100,000 vaccines a week to 250,000 per week in April; That is a huge scale-up. Mr Varadkar said that if everyone over 60, and everyone under 60 with a chronic condition is vaccinated, that is actually 98pc of the job in terms of deaths and hospitalisations. Read More We may really see the vaccine making a difference in people getting sick and deaths as opposed to cases, in May or June. That could put us in a position to make decisions that we cant make now, the Tanaiste said. Government will reassess all the metrics of the disease in early April and then assess the situation every three or four weeks with regard to relaxing restrictions or not, the Tanaiste confirmed. Mr Varadkar said the PUP, CRSS and Employee Wage Subsidy schemes were extended until June 30 in an attempt to give people and businesses receiving them security rather than signalling no businesses would be opening before then. He said there were six elements to The Path Ahead document, with the return of schools, childcare and regular healthcare the first port of call. Next week we will see kids in their uniforms walking to school, that is going to lift my spirits. Its a strange thing to lift the spirits but it will be a great thing to see that kind of normality again. Read More The vaccine programme is being sped up, that is going to be really encouraging too, seeing 100,000 people a week getting their vaccine, the Tanaiste said. There are four tests we are going to apply, based on advice from our public health doctors and scientists. The first one is, are case numbers falling, and is the R number still at or below one? The second is what do our hospitals look like? Are the numbers in hospitals and in ICUs lower than they are now. Over the course of the next month we would like to see the number of people in hospital and in ICU fall to half of what it is now, but it isnt just about any one number, it is about the trends, Mr Varadkar said. The Tanaiste said it was also really important that the vaccination programme remains on track and were it to fall behind schedule, it would cause us to reassess. The final point of concern is new variants. He said it cant be exactly measured whether variants of concern are circulating in the community or the effect they were having on the overall profile of the virus. The Tanaiste admitted that the continued opening of schools is contingent upon case numbers, hospital numbers and vaccination progress being maintained in the coming weeks and months. The last time schools went back in September we didnt see a significant increase in the number of cases, so that gives us some reassurance. The difference this time is the B117 variant and that does seem to behave differently, among children as well as among adults. If it turns out that the return to schools causes a significant spike in infection, then we wont hesitate to make the right decision, which would be to defer that [reopening], Mr Varadkar said. The Tanaiste said there would be clear messaging to parents that this was about kids returning to school and not an opportunity to catch up with other parents. President Joe Biden's administration will name Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the man who approved the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi when it releases an intelligence report on the journalist's murder. Four U.S. officials told Reuters the forthcoming declassified U.S. intelligence report - to which the CIA was the main contributor - assesses that the crown prince approved and likely ordered the murder of Khashoggi. Biden plans to call the king of Saudi Arabia ahead of the public release of the report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence - which could come out as soon as Thursday. 'I'm going to be talking to him. I haven't spoken to him yet,' Biden told reporters at the White House Wednesday when asked if he's spoken to Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz. Biden also said he's read the report on Khashoggi's murder. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday that she did not have any information on the timing of the call. She said she 'expect that to happen soon.' 'We're still in the process of scheduling when that will happen,' Psaki said at her daily press briefing. She declined to provide any specifics about the upcoming conversation. 'I'm not going to preview his call with the king. Obviously, they'll cover a range of topics, and when we have concluded that call I'm sure we'll provide a by a readout,' Paski said. A forth coming declassified intelligence report from the Biden administration will name Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the man who approved the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi A classified version of the report on Khashoggi's death was given to Congress in late 2018. But the Trump administration declined to release a declassified version. Saudi King Salman, 85, is the head of government but the crown prince, his heir, is seen as the power behind the throne. Bin Salman has denied involvement in the October 2018 murder of Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident who wrote columns critical of MBS, as the crown prince as known. MBS did accept responsibility for the assassination as the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. And Riyadh eventually admitted that Khashoggi was killed in an 'rogue' extradition operation gone wrong. Five men were given the death penalty for the journalist's murder but had their sentences commuted to 20 years in prison after being forgiven by Khashoggi's family. Khashoggi fled Saudi Arabia in September 2017 to live in self-imposed exile. He was writing columns critical of the Saudi government - including of both King Salman and MBS - for The Washington Post when he was killed. In October 2018, Khashoggi visited the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, to pick up the paperwork required for his marriage to a Turkish citizen. He was never seen leaving. According to reports, while there he was drugged, killed and dismembered by a team of assassins sent in from Saudi Arabia. His remains have never been recovered. President Joe Biden plans to call Saudi King Salman ahead of expected release of intelligence report on the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi The Biden administration said last week it would recalibrate relations with Saudi Arabia and that Biden would speak with the 85-year-old King Salman bin Abdulaziz (above left) instead of his heir - a change in policy from the Trump administration Biden's call with the king comes after the White House last week announced a recalibration of American relations with Saudi Arabia. 'We've made clear from the beginning that we're going to recalibrate our relationship with Saudi Arabia,' Psaki said last week. She said part of that recalibration would include Biden speaking to the Saudi king, instead of MBS - a marked change in policy from the Trump administration. 'Part of that is going back to engagement counterpart to counterpart, the president's counterpart is King Salman and I expect that, at an appropriate time, he would have a conversation with him,' Psaki said. The Biden administration is shifting America's relationship with the Middle East country after Trump made the U.S.'s relationship with the Saudis a priority, making his first trip abroad in 2017 to Riyadh. Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner was close to MBS, who became next in line to the throne in June 2017 after a power struggle ousted a rival. Kushner's close relationship with him - the two were said to text and communicate via apps - raised eyebrows due to its taking place outside of diplomatic channels, Kushner's lack of foreign policy experience and MBS' reputation as a despot. The crown prince has been accused of the torture of human rights activists; the Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen which has exacerbated the humanitarian crisis and famine; and the arrest of members of the Saudi royal family in November 2017 where he imprisoned several of his royal cousins in a Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyad. President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner was close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman - the three men are seen together in Riyadh in May 2017 The brutal Khashoggi killing didn't change U.S.-Saudi relations under President Trump. In Bob Woodward's book 'Fear,' the veteran Washington Post journalist wrote that Trump had said, 'I saved his a**,' about MBS. 'I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop,' Trump said. Trump saw the relationship with Saudi Arabia in dollar figures, warning lawmakers that the Saudis could go into business with Russia instead. In May 2019, Trump also bypassed Congress allowing the Saudis to buy $8 billion in arms. Trump took MBS' denial at face value, the Woodward book indicated. 'He will always say that he didn't do it. He says that to everybody, and frankly I'm happy that he says that. But he will say that to you, he will say that to Congress, and he will say that to everybody. He's never said he did it,' Trump told Woodward. Woodward asked if Trump believed that he ordered Khashoggi's killing. 'No he says he didn't do it,' the then president replied. 'He says very strongly that he didn't do it.' Trump also ignored a law passed in early 2019 that instructed his administration to give Congress an unclassified intelligence report with 'a determination and evidence with respect to the advance knowledge and role of any current or former official of Saudi Arabia ... over the directing, ordering or tampering of evidence in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.' In February of last year the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told congressional leaders it was 'unable to provide additional information ... at an unclassified level,' instead sending them a copy of the classified CIA report. In July, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe reiterated to lawmakers that he would not be releasing an unclassified report because 'the disclosure of additional details surrounding Mr. Khashoggi's murder would undermine U.S. intelligence sources and methods.' He also said, 'I have determined that there is only a marginal 'public interest' argument for this declassification.' But the Biden administration vowed to release the document. During her confirmation, Biden's nominee to head the DNI, Avril Haines, said it would happen. 'Yes, senator. Actually, we'll follow the law,' she said when asked about the report's release. Kinshasa, DRC (PANA) - The World Food Programme (WFP) has provided further information on the deadly convoy attack in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Monday in which Italys Ambassador to the country, his bodyguard, and a WFP driver were killed VIRGINIA A Virginia man will be arraigned next month in connection with a Jan. 10 double homicide in this small Cass County city. Robert D. Harris, 71, is facing eight counts six counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted murder and one count of aggravated battery and discharge of a weapon, according to Cass County States Attorney Craig Miller. President of Georgia Salome Zurabishvili met with the ambassadors of France, Germany and the US. Information regarding the meeting was published by the Presidential Administration noting that the parties gathered to discuss the current political situation and a way out of it.U.S. Ambassador Kelly Degnan; The Ambassador of France, Diego Colas, and the Ambassador of Germany, Hubert Knirsch met the president to discuss the preceding events of the arrest of the new leader of the UNM opposition party Nika Melia. He was detained by the police forces in the office of the United National Movement today, February 23.The Tbilisi City Court ordered the Ministry of Internal Affairs to detain Nika Melia on February 17.Police arrived at the UNM office shortly after parliament approved the appointment of Irakli Gharibashvili as Prime Minister. Gharibashvili stated that the Law should be enforced and the constitutional order restored quickly.Khatia Dekanoidze, a member of the United National Movement, introduced the nearest plan of the opposition to the people gathered on Rustaveli Avenue. The procession is planned in Tbilisi on February 26, at 15:00, which will start from the Tbilisi Concert Hall building. It is dedicated to the Russian occupation, against Rodionovs and Gavrilovs.The march will take place for freedom. It is a symbolic year of the 100th anniversary of the occupation of our country. It is symbolic that the Bolsheviks have started governing our homeland again, Dekanoidze said.After Melias arrest, the opposition parties held a rally in front of the government chancellery and then moved to the parliament.The opposition and its supporters are going to spend the night in tents in front of the Parliament building.I want to call on all political forces, for whom the country is precious, to open a real and sincere dialogue, to talk not about what divides us, but about what should unite us today.I propose that all sane opposition forces enter parliament and use the country's legislature as the main platform for discussion. As I mentioned yesterday, we are ready for a real dialogue at any time and in any format. Together we will take care of strengthening our statehood and independence, further strengthening the democratic system, overcoming economic and social problems, Georgia's integration into the European Union and NATO. Our homeland has no time to lose. May God be our protector," the prime minister stated.On the first day of registration, February 15, at midnight, 35,121 citizens of Georgia filled out the application form Temporary Employment in Germany on the government website.Ekaterine Tikaradze, the Minister of IDPs from the Occupied Territories, Labor, Health and Social Affairs of Georgia, has repeatedly stated in her public speeches that all those who meet the requirements of the employer will be employed.The number of participants in the project was limited last year and we were talking about only 500 citizens, and this year it is clearly stated that the number is not limited; it is based on the markets demand, said the Minister of Health on February 11.On February 16, or 5 days after this announcement, the German Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food published a statement on the German government portal stating where, when and how many Georgians will be able to work in Germany.According to the information of the German agency of today's data, about 172 people are competing for one position on average. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 14:18:46|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close Peter Ben Embarek, a member of the WHO-China joint study team, answers questions at the WHO-China joint study press conference in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Feb. 9, 2021. (Xinhua/Cheng Min) The WHO experts, on multiple occasions since their arrival in Wuhan on Jan. 14, have shattered the lab-leak theory, called for science-based approaches, and commended China's openness and candor. BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- A team of experts led by the World Health Organization (WHO) finished their field study earlier this month in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, gaining new insights into the origins of the novel coronavirus. On multiple occasions since their arrival in Wuhan on Jan. 14, the experts, composed of 17 international and 17 Chinese scientists, have shattered the lab-leak theory, called for science-based approaches, and commended China's openness and candor. The mission was "successful in many ways," said Peter Ben Embarek, head of the WHO expert team in Wuhan, at a virtual press conference from Geneva on Feb. 12, soon after their trip. "We have made a lot of new knowledge about the start of the events," said the Danish scientist, noting that there were no widespread and no large clusters of COVID-19 infections in or around Wuhan in months prior to December 2019. With regard to the origin-tracing work, Wuhan's Huanan seafood market may have made it possible for the novel coronavirus to spread, but it does not mean the virus originated there, according to Vladimir Dedkov, a member of the WHO expert team. "There is no evidence that the virus originated there" but "hypothetically, there are all conditions for the spread of the virus there," the Russian expert was quoted by Sputnik as saying. Passengers wearing masks are seen at Hankou Railway Station in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Jan. 22, 2020. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu) The virus was most likely of animal origin but not necessarily at a wet market in Wuhan, wrote Professor Dominic Dwyer from University of Sydney in an article on The Conversation, a publisher of research-based news and analysis. "It probably crossed over to humans from bats, via an as-yet-unknown intermediary animal at an unknown location," the WHO expert team member said, adding that the experts "are still working to confirm the exact chain of events that led to the current pandemic." Scientists have also concluded that it was impossible the virus was man-made, according to Liang Wannian, another member of the WHO-China joint study team. "There was no novel coronavirus in the Wuhan lab at all, so how could the virus leak from the lab?" Liang said. Prof. Dwyer echoed that view, saying that "the most politically sensitive option we looked at was the virus escaping from a laboratory." The Wuhan Institute of Virology "is an impressive research facility, and looks to be run well, with due regard to staff health," he said. "We concluded this was extremely unlikely." British zoologist Peter Daszak, another member of the WHO team, said that during the visit to the institute, the experts were met with a level of openness even he had not anticipated, and that suspicion surrounding it had been "politicized on a global scale." The schematic science-based approach in the study with China's total openness was not only reflected in the experts' visit to the virology institute, but throughout their trip in Wuhan. "I can't stress enough how rewarding a process the trip has been. It went beyond all expectations in many ways. When we have had discussions in the expert team, it has only been based on data and documentation," said Thea Kolsen Fischer, also a WHO team member. A crew member of Train G598 measures body temperature for Gao Li on the train from Shanghai, east China, to Wuhan, central China's Hubei, Jan. 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Ding Ting) The Danish professor of virus epidemics and infections at the University of Copenhagen was also vocal in his criticism of a misguiding report published by the New York Times (NYT) on Feb. 12, which accused Chinese scientists of refusing to share important data about the COVID-19 pandemic, citing independent investigators for the WHO. "This was NOT my experience either on the Epi-side. We DID build up a good relationship in the Chinese/Int Epi-team! Allowing for heated arguments reflects a deep level of engagement in the room," she explained on Twitter, saying the report "intendedly twisted" the interviewees' remarks and cast "shadows over important scientific work." "We DID get access to critical new data throughout. We DID increase our understanding of likely spillover pathways," Daszak clarified on Twitter after he was quoted by the NYT. The Chinese side granted full access to all sites and personnel as requested -- a level of openness beyond expectation, the Associated Press quoted Daszak as saying. "We were asked where we wanted to go. We gave our hosts a list ... and you can see from where we've been, we've been to all the key places," he said. "So this is an in-depth, deep understanding of the sites and the people who were involved," Daszak said. "I think the outcome of the mission is a win for the international scientific community. We managed to find a way of getting studies done that would otherwise not have been done. The politicization of events has not helped over the past year," Ben Embarek told the Science journal on Feb. 13 in an interview. The SABC and Department of Communications and Digital Technologies plan to force DStv subscribers to pay TV Licences could be highly damaging to South Africas largest pay TV broadcaster, which is already getting hammered by streaming services. The proposals for TV Licence amendments have been detailed in the White Paper on Audio and Audiovisual Content Services Policy Framework, and more recently discussed during a Portfolio Committee on Communications meeting in Parliament. According to the proposed regulations, MultiChoice would either be required to have DStv decoder buyers present a TV Licence upon purchase or when they subscribe to its service. DStv currently carries the SABCs free-to-air channels on all of its packages, which are used by more than 8.7 million customers in South Africa alone. However, SABC CFO Yolande van Biljon has told Parliament that only around 2.5 million of the 9.5 million TV licence holders on its database settled their TV licences last year. That implies that the vast majority of DStv subscribers are not paying their TV licences, despite having an active service. On this basis, a move to make TV Licences compulsory for DStv subscribers could bolster collections significantly. Even assuming that all 2.5 million paying TV licence holders are DStv customers, 6.2 million others would not be paying their TV licences. In theory, having these customers pay would add more than R1.6 billion to the SABCs coffers, effectively turning it into a profit-making entity. Piggybacking off private companies However, TV broadcasting analyst and journalist Thinus Ferreira has slammed this plan as another example of the abject failure of South Africas public broadcaster to do its own job and to piggyback on private companies. The SABC has been lazy and incompetent and now wants to grab onto private companies who have kept up with the times to use their power to drag itself out of its financial quagmire, Ferreira said. The SABC imploded its own TV Licence base with mismanagement, corruption and bad decisions over decades and now wants to grab whatever information and other resources it can get in the form of private companies consumer data and information to leech off of that because it didnt keep its own information up to date, Ferreira said. According to Ferreira, the new regulations will have significant consequences for the sales of decoders in particular. Pay TV providers like StarTimes SA and MultiChoice will get shackled in terms of decoder sales and decoder upgrades if consumers must prove they have a valid SABC TV Licence or must take out one in store, Ferreira said. Doing things in reverse Ferreira stated that the SABC was approaching the entire process by which consumers become pay TV subscribers in reverse. The typical TV owner starts as a free-to-air viewer, he said, where it is the SABCs responsibility to capture them at the point of sale of a TV set. If you buy a dishwasher you are progressing because you already have a kitchen sink at home. Now when want to buy the dishwasher you are forced to show proof that you have access to running water. Ferreira said it will be extremely damaging to not only pay TV providers like MultiChoice or StarSat to be forced to add or verify SABC TV Licence requirements, but also to streaming services like Netflix, Showmax, VIU, and Amazon Prime Video. There will definitely be existing subscribers who wont want to prove they have a licence and will cancel their pay TV subscription, as well as potential people who might sign up for a pay TV or streaming service or want to buy a better decoder who wont because of the added hassle of having to show a SABC TV Licence. To what degree compulsory proof of a valid SABC TV Licence might dampen either new sales or new subscribers or increase churn existing subscribers who cancel and leave remains to be seen, Ferreira added. Learn from the BBC Ferreira maintained the SABC should follow the example of the UKs public broadcaster the BBC by rather launching its own streaming service, app, or platform to offer its content on demand. TV Licence holders can then use their licence number to sign up and log into the service. The SABC should behave like a public broadcaster like the BBC who has control of its licence fee division, gets money from viewers through its iPlayer and in annual fees and doesnt force private companies to tack on licence fees on its behalf, Ferreira stated. People who want the SABCs content will make sure they have a valid licence for it, Ferreira said. Now read: British streaming service will take on Netflix in South Africa The guests have been revealed for this week's Graham Norton Show on BBC One. Joining Graham on Friday night will be Kate Winslet, Orlando Bloom, Stanley Tucci and Kingsley Ben-Adir, with music from Silk City featuring Ellie Goulding. Hollywood star Kate Winslet joins Grahm to talk about her role in romantic Victorian drama Ammonite, and versatile actor, Stanley Tucci, speaks about portraying a writer with dementia in Supernova. Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean star Orlando Bloom joins to discuss his powerful revenge drama Retaliation, and rising British star Kingsley Ben-Adir talks about his new sci-fi anthology, Soulmates. Music on the night will be from Silk City ft Ellie Goulding, who perform New Love. Catch the programme this Friday night on BBC One at 10.45pm. DUP MP Ian Paisley has said that United Kingdom residents must come first when it comes to Covid-19 vaccinations. Mr Paisley said that any Northern Ireland or UK politician "must put their own community first". "That has got to happen," the North Antrim MP told BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback programme. Mr Paisley was discussing Northern Ireland being ahead of the Republic of Ireland in terms of vaccinations and the possibility of North- South cooperation on the issue. He blamed the EU for the slower rollout of the vaccination programme across its members states and also took aim at their attempt to trigger Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol during a row over vaccine distribution. As of Wednesday Northern Ireland has administered 509,580 vaccines, of which 478,235 were first doses and 31,345 were second doses. The UK Government has said it hopes to be able to offer a first dose to every adult by the end of July. As of Sunday the Republic of Ireland had administered a total of 353,971 vaccines, of which 222,073 were first doses and 131,898 were second doses. The Irish Government aims to have administered first doses to 40% of people over the age of 18 by the end of April, 64% by the end of May and up to 82% of adults by the end of June. Mr Paisley said there was a need for politicians to "take responsibility for the people who elect us". "We must put them first, I'm not trying to nationalise it, but I'm trying to be practical about how we can make it rollout," the North Antrim MP said. "I have to have responsibility for the people to who I'm accountable to and who I speak for, they have to come first in my mind." Mr Paisley said the blame for the Republic of Ireland being behind on their vaccine rollout lays squarely with the EU. "The fact of the matter is in the biggest question that the world has faced in the past 35 years the European community failed," the DUP MP said. Mr Paisley said the UK "took the right decision" in approving vaccines early, while "Europe is now playing catchup". Mr Paisley said the EU's actions in discussing triggering Article 16 had hurt any notion of a common approach on vaccines. "It's all well and good saying we want to have this lovely, beautiful common approach, but three weeks ago it was fairly clear where Europe's views were on this common approach," the North Antrim MP said. "If they could have stuffed Northern Ireland's share of the vaccine they would have and indeed they almost got away with it." However, he said he would be happy to share vaccines with the Republic of Ireland when the UK reaches a surplus. "Of course then you would look immediately to share with your nearest neighbour, hopefully your good nearest neighbour," Mr Paisley said. He said there was also an obligation for the UK to help poorer nations and those within the Commonwealth. (Newser) Saturday Night Live is getting an earful about a joke on last weekend's show. "Saturday's deeply offensive joke about Israel's COVID-19 vaccination process not only missed the mark, but crossed the linebasing the premise of the joke on factual inaccuracies and playing into an anti-Semitic trope in the process," Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, tweeted. The bit, delivered on the "Weekend Update" segment by Michael Che, was: "Israel is reporting that they vaccinated half of their population, and Im going to guess it's the Jewish half." Israel is vaccinating people at the fastest rate in the world, the Washington Post reports, but it's been criticized by human rights groups for not providing the 5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with full access to the vaccines. The government argues that's the responsibility of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, though it's taken a step to change that stance. Israel indeed has vaccinated nearly half its population, per USA Today. story continues below Israel's ambassador to the US also objected. "I'm a big fan of humor but, perpetuating anti-Semitism is just not funny," Gilad Erdan tweeted. "Your 'joke' is ignorantthe fact is that the success of our vaccination drive is exactly because every citizen of IsraelJewish, Muslim, Christianis entitled [to] it. Apologize!" A group of Jewish American organizations called the joke "especially painful" at a time when anti-Semitic incidents are increasing. But the Jerusalem Post said the "anti-Semitic" reaction to a TV bit was over the top. "If everything is anti-Semitic, [then] nothing is, so the appellation must be used sparingly," the editorial said. The JDL also complained that "Weekend Update" this year has stepped up jokes that "inappropriately use Jews as the punchline." Greenblatt said he's contacted SNL boss Lorne Michaels to ask him "to take action both to repair the damage thats been done and ensure that this does not happen again." The show hasn't commented on the issue. (Read more Saturday Night Live stories.) A cheating butcher rigged his scales to overcharge customers by around 30p on every sale, a court heard. Matthew Butler secretly stuck 1.7oz of coins to the scales with Blu Tack, allowing him to charge shoppers full price for less meat. He was caught after undercover trading standards officers visited Muddy Pig Butchers, in Willenhall, West Midlands. Butler, who owns the store, admitted to the 'fraudulent use of a scale' and of 'selling short weight meat' at Dudley Magistrates Court on Feb 18. He was fined and ordered to do 200 hours of unpaid work to 'give back to the community of customers he had cheated'. Matthew Butler secretly stuck coins to his butcher scales with Blu Tack (pictured) so that every weighing would be 1.7oz light, conning customers out of about 30p per sale The butcher was caught after undercover trading standards officers visited Muddy Pig Butchers, in Willenhall, West Midlands (pictured) and found they were repeatedly sold less produce than they requested The court heard Mr Butler had altered his scales deliberately to con customers out of additional cash by giving a false impression of the weight of produce they were buying. An investigation was launched after Walsall Council recieved a number of complaints about the 'sharp practice' in 2019 and dispatched undercover Trading Standards officers to the shop. They posed as customers asking for stewing steak in October and November that year, and discovered that they were sold 1.7oz short of the weight they had asked for. When they later seized the scales the court was told that they found coins had been stuck on to the mechanism meaning customers were being systematically overcharged. When officers removed the coins and tested the scales, they were accurate, adding they could see no reason for the presence of the coins other than to defraud customers. In mitigation, the judge heard Mr Butler's business was burgled in early September 2019, with the thieves ransacking the shop of stock and damaging the inside. Butlers' shop scales were knocked to the floor and and he claimed in court that he had added the ballast after 'experimenting' with the 'damaged scales' in order to get them to read satisfactorily. But the court rejected his explaination and he was ordered to pay costs totalling 1,798 and given an 18-month community order of 200 hours of unpaid work. An investigation was launched after Walsall Council (pictured, stock image) recieved a number of complaints about the 'sharp practice' in 2019 and dispatched undercover Trading Standards officers to visit the shop in October and November that year Councillor Garry Perry, deputy leader and portfolio holder for regulatory services at Walsall Council, said: 'It was without doubt deliberate fraud and cynically geared towards fleecing vulnerable, as well as low income and often, elderly shoppers. 'It is a sad truth that while loyal customers were supporting this butcher's business with their custom and in good faith, he was cheating them. 'Just by using this set of dodgy scales within the two-month period of our initial investigations, meant that many customers would have been overcharged by roughly 30p per item. 'Anyone buying three or more items in one go, would be losing 1 for every shopping trip made - and that's just one person. 'As the judge ordered, it is only right that those customers cheated in this way, are compensated by way of his community and compensation order. 'Mr Butler must therefore give back to the community from which he has taken.' by Nirmala Carvalho The 83-year-old Jesuit is set to make another appeal. Suffering from Parkinson's, he is in prison on terrorism charges. Two days ago, the Bombay High Court ordered the release of poet and activist Varavara Rao, 80, for health reasons, in prison since August 2018 for the same reasons. For Father Mascarenhas, a government that cannot tolerate democratic dissent can so easily abuse security laws. Mumbai (AsiaNews). The special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court will examine on 2 March a new appeal for the release on bail of Father Stan Swamy, a 83-year-old Indian Jesuit held in Taloja prison, near Mumbai, since 9 October. Father Stan is accused of terrorism for his long-term commitment to the rights of tribal communities. The hearing will come just a few days after the Mumbai High Court on 22 February ordered the release on a six-month bail of poet and activist Varavara Rao, who is in the same prison as Father Swamy,. Like the elderly Jesuit and 14 other people, Rao is also accused of instigating the violence that broke out in 2018 in Bhima Koregaon, Maharashtra, during the Elgar Parishad, the commemoration of a historic battle 200 years ago, seen as a milestone in the struggle to assert the rights of Dalits and tribal communities in India. In Varavara Raos case, after more than two years in custody pending trial, the High Court ruled that he should be released for six months because of poor health. This overturns a ruling by the NIA court, which had rejected a defence request on the same grounds. The poet, who contracted COVID-19 last July, worsening pre-existing health conditions, is expected to be released this afternoon from the prisons hospital. The Bombay High Court found that Rao needs specialised medical assistance that cannot be guaranteed in prison. However, it ruled that he cannot leave Mumbai, that he must remain available for questioning, and that he should not, alone or with others, take undue advantage of the situation, which would ultimately adversely affect the trial. On paper, the same applies to Father Stan Swamy, who was arrested in Ranchi four months ago. Suffering from Parkinson's disease, he struggles to eat and drink, and has lost his hearing and suffers from lumbar spondylosis. So far, the request for release on health grounds has been rejected. Now the new application filed by his lawyers is based on the argument that the prosecution has not yet demonstrated how Father Stan took part in illegal activities or incited others to carry them out. The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) is a law for emergency times of widespread violence. It was earlier meant only for organisations, said Father Frazer Mascarenhas, a Jesuit and a sociologist at St Xavier's College in Mumbai. Recently the NDA government amended the Act to include individuals. And it has been very liberally using it against human rights activists, journalists, lawyers, writers, poets and even students. The denial of bail to Fr Stan is not surprising as the UAPA itself makes this very difficult. Hence the need for all civil society [groups] to come together to demand a repeal of this law, [. . .]. A government that cannot tolerate democratic dissent can so easily abuse such a law. The accusation itself becomes the punishment for the persons concerned and their families. An insensitive and overburdened jail administration makes things worse. This is not the depth of degradation our country should have sunk to. But it's not too late to wake up. Our farmers are leading the way. Delta, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Desert Gold Ventures Inc. (TSXV: DAU) (FSE: QXR2) (OTC Pink: DAUGF) (the "Company") is pleased to provide an update on the Company's largest exploration program to date at its flagship Senegal Mali Shear Zone project in Western Mali (the "SMSZ Project"). The 410 km2 SMSZ Project is both named after and overlies a 38 km section of the prolific Senegal Mali Shear Zone (the "SMSZ"). The SMSZ is related to 5 large mines located both to the north and south, along strike of the Company's SMSZ Project, including B2 Gold's Fekola Mine, Barrick's Gounkoto and Loulo Mines and Allied Gold's Sadiola and Yatela Mines[1]. To the Company's knowledge, the SMSZ Project is the largest, contiguous, non-producer land package over this highly prospective structural feature (see Figure 1.). Field work recommenced at the SMSZ Project in early December, 2020. The goal of the exploration program is to develop/discover a stand-alone Tier 1 gold deposit(s). Exploration comprises drilling to advance known gold zones and soil, auger and IP surveys to identify new targets, with real-time follow-up of drill testing of newly developed targets. The SMSZ exploration program is fully underway with one multipurpose drill, three auger drills, a geological mapping team and a couple of soil sampling teams. Geophysical surveys have been completed. SMSZ Project Exploration Progress to Feb 21, 2021 Drilling - 6% complete Three core holes, totaling approximately 825 metres completed at Gourbassi East and West. RC drilling has commenced at Gourbassi West with 310 metres completed in three holes. Drilling will progress through property from West to East to North. All three core holes were extended by the drill geologists to cover potentially gold-bearing alteration zones. Drilling pace expected to materially increase with move from diamond to RC drilling. Auger Drilling - 49 % complete 9,248 metres drilling in 1,087 holes. Two rigs active. IP Geophysical Surveys - 100% complete 90.8 line kilometres completed. Historic and new IP data have been merged. Soil Sampling - 56% complete 3,962 samples taken. Mapping and prospecting ongoing Community Support Program Initiated Funding from Desert Gold and major contractors including SGS, Etasi Drilling and Sahara Natural Resources. Medical and school supplies to be donated to 9 communities in the SMSZ Project region. A summary of exploration progress to date is presented in Figure 2. Corporate Update The Company has launched its new corporate website at www.desertgold.ca which includes several new features: New projects page with enhanced technical detail regarding the Company's projects. An updated corporate presentation that can be found at https://www.desertgold.ca/images/presentation/2021/Desert_Gold_Presentation_Jan_2021_final-_V1.pdf. New photo gallery feature which showcases the Company's ongoing exploration, development and community work. Djimbala Project Update - Southern Mali The Company's joint venture partner, Indigo Exploration, has completed its previously announced auger drill program on the Company's Djimbala concession situated in Southern Mali's Yanfolila Gold Belt The 602 vertical auger holes drilled to an average depth of 7.8 metres and spaced 25 metres apart along 10 transect lines will provide a 2.0 kilometre strike length by 2.5 kilometre wide test of the Djelinfing and Forela gold targets with the aim to prioritize subsequent air core fence drilling later this year. All samples have been delivered to the lab for assays and results are pending. 2021 Exploration Program Fully Funded 20,000 metres of drilling- Drilling started January 2021 Follow-up on Gourbassi West, Gourbassi East and Barani East Zones Continue to trace gold mineralization from Barani East northeast to Soa and south to Keniegoulou Follow up drill testing at Gourbassi NE, Goubassi SE, Berola, Frikidi, KE, Komana and Manakoto zones Test gold-in-auger targets Contingency metres will follow-up drill success Approximately 19,000 metres of auger drilling Auger drilling will commence in mid-December to follow up on 2020 auger anomalies Testing for gold mineralization along thinly-covered laterite, and/or, not yet evaluated, regional scale structures 90-line km of induced polarization gradient geophysical surveys Five grid areas, with four covering structural targets related to the SMSZ and one covering a felsic intrusion that hosts gold mineralization Survey to start mid-December 7,000 soil samples Test 3 areas comprising ~100 km2, that have not been soil sampled, mapped or drilled Geological mapping and prospecting Approximately 55% of the property still requires mapping and prospecting Complete a 43-101 compliant report in Q4, 2021 Figure 1 - SMSZ Project Location and Major Deposits in Western Mali and Eastern Senegal To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4954/75296_092135af84e04b3e_001full.jpg Figure 2 - Overview of 2020-21 Exploration Planning to Date with historic drilling results** To view an enhanced version of Figure 2, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4954/75296_092135af84e04b3e_002full.jpg **All gold grades over width, with the exception of the Soa, Berola and Gourbassi prospects, represent drill holes with the true widths, for most holes, ranging from 65 to 95%. Estimated true widths for the Soa and Berola prospects are unknown. Estimated true widths at the Gourbassi Zones are estimated to range from 60% to 90%. Assays A total of 4,908 samples have been sent to the lab. This includes 814 core samples, 1,718 auger samples and 2,376 soil samples. All sample sets also include standards, duplicate and blank samples for QAQC. Some of the auger sample assays are expected this week with core, soil and additional auger assays expected in March. Assay results and additional updates will be released in due course. Metallurgical Update Samples from two, un-oxidized, gold-bearing intervals from the limestone-hosted Barani East Zone were combined to create two sample composites. The first sample corresponds with an interval that returned 4.76 g/t Au (un-cut) over 13.45 metres (true width estimated at 12.3 metres) from 171.3 to 184.75 metres (152 metres vertical depth) from 2020 hole BERCD0007 (see Desert Gold news release for August 31, 2020). The second sample corresponds with an interval that returned 2.49 g/t Au over 5.05 metres (true width estimated at 4.6 metres) from 191.7 to 196.75 metres (167 metres vertical depth) from 2020 hole BERCD0007. Both samples were pulverized to 85% passing 70 microns and subjected to 72 hours of bottle roll in a cyanide-saturated, ph-monitored fluid. Both samples were analyzed before and after the bottle roll test with samples of the CN-rich fluid taken every 12, 24, 36, 48 and 72 hours. The goal of this test was to indicate both how much and how quickly that of the gold could be recovered. A summary of the results is presented in the following table. UNITS COMMENTS 12 hr ppb Au 24 hr ppb Au 36 hr ppb Au 48 hr ppb Au 72 hr ppb Au Final ppb Au Composite 1 Initial assay 5,530 ppb Au 4,713 4,784 4,920 5,011 5,235 780 % recovery based on initial assay 85.2% 86.5% 89.0% 90.6% 94.7% % recovery based on 6,310 ppb Au 74.7% 75.8% 78.0% 79.4% 83.0% Composite 2 Initial assay 3,260 ppb Au 2,828 2,993 3,042 3,107 3,216 <0.01 % recovery based on initial assay 86.7% 91.8% 93.3% 95.3% 98.7% The initial assays, fairly reflect that average composited grade of each sample. Each sample, comprises 500 grams of material from 22 and 6 individual assay samples for Composites 1 and 2, respectively. The final estimated grade of Composite 1, is higher than expected, which may be due to coarse gold as a 0.4 metre interval in Composite 1, had initially returned 62.05 g/t Au. Overall gold recoveries, over 48 hours, averaged 87.3% with a range of 79.4% to 95.3%. At 72 hours, gold recoveries in Composite 1 were still increasing, while, essentially all of the gold was leached from Composite 2. If coarse gold was a factor in Composite 1's reduced recovery, this could be mitigated by the addition of a gravity circuit, which would recover coarse gold and is common at gold mills in the region. In management's opinion, these results suggest that the preliminary gold recovery results in unoxidized rock, at Barani East, are quite positive, are within acceptable limits and that ongoing exploration of this zone continues to be warranted. This press release contains certain scientific and technical information. The Company is solely responsible for the contents and accuracy of any scientific and technical information related to it. Don Dudek, P.Geo. a director of Desert Gold and a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information contained in this press release. On Behalf of the Board "Sonny Janda" ___________________________ Sonny Janda Chairman About Desert Gold Desert Gold Ventures Inc. is a gold exploration and development company which holds 2 gold exploration permits in Western Mali (SMSZ Project and Djimbala), its Anumso project in Ghana's Ashanti Belt and its Rutare gold project in central Rwanda. For further information please visit www.SEDAR.com under the company's profile. Website: www.desertgold.ca. Contact Jared Scharf, President and CEO Email: jared.scharf@desertgold.ca This news release contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements entail various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected in these forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on current expectations, are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks, and actual results may differ materially from those contained in such statements. These uncertainties and risks include, but are not limited to, the strength of the capital markets, the price of gold; operational, funding, liquidity risks, the degree to which mineral resource estimates are reflective of actual mineral resources, the degree to which factors which would make a mineral deposit commercially viable, and the risks and hazards associated with mining operations. Risks and uncertainties about the Company's business are more fully discussed in the company's disclosure materials filed with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada and available at www.sedar.com and readers are urged to read these materials. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from such statements unless required by law. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its regulation services provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy the securities described herein in the United States. The securities described herein have not been and will not be registered under the united states securities act of 1933, as amended, and may not be offered or sold in the United States or to the account or benefit of a U.S. person absent an exemption from the registration requirements of such act. 1 Mineralization hosted on adjacent and/or nearby properties is not necessarily representative of mineralization hosted on the Company's SMSZ Property. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75296 81 Shares Share An excerpt from Cured: A Doctors Journey from Panic to Peace. Dead bodies surrounded me. They lay on their backs, supine in medical terminology. I imagined some staring at the white plastic sheets that covered them completely, others glaring at their closed eyelids. Their smell, a mixture of formaldehyde and death, made me gag. Corpses horrified me. They represented the end of life, separation from loved ones, the possibility of a souls eternal damnation. Now as a first-year medical student in Gross Anatomy class, I would examine and touch a cadaver daily to learn the mysteries of the human body. I was thirty-two years old, but terrified that these corpses would drag me into their netherworld. I was no stranger to the deceased. Id met many of my relatives at their wakes and funerals, which were more family parties than bereavement rites. But never had I touched a dead person. Now Id have to touch and see and explore ones depths. My life before medical school was full, yet I felt empty. Id hoped that medicine would make me a powerful woman, would help me feel OK about myself. I hoped to join the exalted club of physicians, healers, and holders of the secrets to long and healthy lives. But, raised as a Boston Irish-American Catholic by a single mother, with no father in my life, I felt better prepared to be a maid than a doctor, more suited to be a nun than wife and mother. Becoming a physician was out of the question for Catholic girls growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. We were groomed to be mothers or nuns. If we couldnt manage either of these, we could be teachers, librarians, secretaries, or nurses. When I once told my mother that Id like to become a doctor, she immediately replied, Just marry a doctor. As if there was a line of doctors outside my door, each hoping Id choose him as my groom. That September morning of 1985, I gently extricated myself from my girls embraces and sped in my beige Volvo station wagon down the Taconic Parkway to the campus that New York Medical College shared with the county prison. I raced through halls to find my assigned anatomy lab section. I opened the door and entered hell. The anatomy professor raised one eyebrow at me as I slinked in, seemingly the last to arrive. On my way in, I had managed to get only one arm into my lab coat. I skirted the bodies, terrified of touching them. I wondered why the seats were one shortas if the professors were playing musical chairs and the one left standing would be out. I was the odd one out at this school, where two-thirds of the students were male, most had medical genes passed down from their doctor-fathers and nurse-mothers, the average age was twenty-two, and all spoke the mile-a-minute New York vernacular. It goes without saying that you will treat your bodies with respect, the professor was saying. I figured she wasnt talking about our own bodies like the nuns lectured us in high school. No, she meant these dead people. She had a slight European accent, not Austrian or Hungarian like my in-laws. I read the name on her lapelvan Dornand thought she must be Dutch. Her skin and hair were as white as her lab coat. I couldnt estimate her height, since she sat, but imagined her as Viking-sized, ruler of the anatomy lab, holder of my future status as doctor or failure. You must remember that the corpses in the anatomy lab were once human beings. They have given a precious gift to you, young doctors, in letting you learn from their bodies. You must appreciate that always. You will not give your bodies names; you will not joke about them or make fun of them. And you will only perform the prescribed dissections, no others. Do you understand? Bug-eyed, we all nodded. We will begin with learning every muscle of the body, she said, from the smallest to the largest. Can anyone tell me what is the smallest muscle in the body? Less than a split second elapsed before a male student spit out an answer: The arrector pili. Yes, excellent, replied our Viking. Where is this located? In the hair follicle, the same student replied, not bothering to hide his smugness. Very good. So, this was how it was going to be, I thought. While our professor talked on about the class structure, dissection, and written and practical exams, all I could think about was how I didnt even know there were muscles inside my hair follicles, much less their obscure name. I was a failure already. As I leaned against the pristine wall, my vision suddenly dimmed. Everything turned gray. I gulped for air. My arms and legs went numb. I felt that drowning sensation Id had in third grade when a nun pushed my head between my legs to keep me from fainting in church on a brutally hot June day. Or like the time when I was eight months pregnant, took a hot shower at the university gym, and almost belly-flopped onto the concrete floor. I prayed that I wouldnt pass out on my first day of medical school classes. I didnt want those MDs-to-be, all smarter and younger than I, to know I couldnt handle this, that I didnt belong. I pressed harder against the white wall, willing myself to remain upright with the living rather than supine with the corpses. Little did I know that the enormity of medical school would soon wash over me, causing these drowning-like symptoms to occur over and over again. I didnt realize then that I was suffering from a panic attack brought on by the stress of medical school. I didnt foresee the daily agonizing anxiety Id face as I tried to do too much with too little time and too few resources. Anne McTiernan is an internal medicine physician and epidemiologist. She is the author of Cured: A Doctors Journey from Panic to Peace. Image credit: Shutterstock.com The Florida Housing Coalition Center for Racial Equity will serve as a composite platform for the Coalition's efforts focused on race and equity in public and private investments, regulations, and legal and policy frameworks that shape Florida's neighborhoods, cities, and regions. "We know two things: Floridalike every other state in the nationhas a housing problem intricately linked with race; and Florida's cities often look to the Coalition to help them solve housing problems," Coalition's President and CEO Jaimie Ross said. "What is the right approach for local communities to take? There are no obvious benchmarks and little to no statewide policy guidance to indicate a single working approach. This is how the Coalition can help," she added. The idea for the Center came from discussions among Coalition staff in response to the protests for Black Lives Matter that occurred nationally throughout 2020. "Each of us felt a need to respond to the urgency of the moment in a way that was thoughtful and deliberate and that would move the dial long term," Coalition Chief Programs Officer Ashon Nesbitt said. Closing the Racial Disparity Gap in Homeownership Central to its early efforts is the seminal program Closing the Gap a matching grant program for municipalities. With funding in place from major underwriters Bank of America and Wells Fargo, the program provides a 3:1 match in technical assistance and resources to close the gap in the homeownership rate between Black and white households. "Bank of America is helping advance racial equality and economic opportunity, with a particular focus on helping create opportunity for people and communities of color," said Gene Schaefer, Miami market president for Bank of America. "We are committed to helping multicultural families and communities begin to build personal wealth and family legacy through the power of homeownership." The Florida Housing Coalition Center for Racial Equity is being launched with funding by the Wells Fargo Foundation, which is focused on advancing racial equity and creating pathways to safe, affordable homes. "Having a safe and affordable place to call home is essential to help lay the foundation for wellness, dignity, and economic opportunity," said Eileen Fitzgerald, head of housing affordability philanthropy with Wells Fargo. "With our support for the Coalition's Center for Racial Equity, we hope to inspire meaningful change to a long history of systemic inequality, injustice, loss of wealth, and housing instability experienced by people of color, particularly during times of economic distress. We aim to build a more inclusive, sustainable future where everyone can have a quality and affordable place to call home." Other Programs the Center is launching with include: Leading with Equity Online Course Funders Collaborative & Allies Glossary of Shared Language HBCU Internship Program SOURCE Florida Housing Coalition Related Links https://www.floridahousing.com Five mature Southwestern Snake-necked Turtles were found dead from illegal fish traps. They were found as part of a research project to remove Koi Carp introduced into waterways. Credit: Murdoch University Murdoch University researchers from the Harry Butler Institute recently made a heart-breaking discovery in a wetland in Perth's northern suburbs with five mature Southwestern Snake-necked Turtles found dead in illegal traps. Drs Stephen Beatty and David Morgan made the discovery during a control program of invasive damaging introduced fishes in wetlands that is being conducted for the City of Wanneroo. "This was a really disturbing find, but unfortunately we encounter these traps quite regularly in wetlands and rivers, particularly around Perth," Dr. Beatty said. "Whether it is kids or adults trying to catch a feed of fish or crayfish, they need to be aware that these traps are illegal, for very good reasons, and there are penalties for the use of such illegal traps." Recent research by Ph.D. candidate at the Harry Butler Institute, Anthony Santoro, is revealing that the turtle species is under immense pressure from predation, road trauma, and habitat destruction. "We have little understanding how many turtle deaths occur from illegal traps, but the impact could be quite severe, particularly in smaller wetlands." Mr Santoro added. Dr. Beatty said the use of box or opera-house style fish or crayfish traps is illegal in public waterways in Western Australia due to their risk to air-breathing animals. "Unfortunately, the baits used to attract the fish or crayfish also attract other animals that need to return to the surface to breathe, including turtles, mammals and birds," Dr. Beatty said. "The animals cannot escape from these traps and while they can usually remain submerged for a few hours, death is inevitable if they are trapped overnight," Dr. Beatty added. "Often the target is the Smooth Marron, but to ensure the sustainability of the fishery, the Fisheries Division of the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development has a range of restrictions on the type of gear that may be used during the four week marron fishing season that closed recently. Noting the impact these traps can have on native wildlife, in recent years the WA Government has been in discussions with the Commonwealth and other State jurisdictions in support of a national ban on the sale of opera-house style crayfish traps. Explore further Where to find WA's most fertile marron Chinese Vice Premier Hu Chunhua, also head of the State Council leading group on employment work, presides over a meeting in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 23, 2021. (Xinhua/Yao Dawei) BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Hu Chunhua has called for all-out efforts to strengthen the job-first strategy and ensure fuller and higher-quality employment. He made the remarks while presiding over a Tuesday meeting of the State Council leading group on employment work. Noting that this year's employment work is full of risks and challenges, Hu underlined more support for enterprises to stabilize employment, expand new jobs, and find ways to reduce the adverse effects of the epidemic. Hu called for enhancing support for key groups of job-seekers, expanding employment channels for college graduates, and ensuring stable employment for workers out of poverty. Localities and relevant government departments should improve the quality of vocational skills training, shore up the weak links in the rights and interests of flexible employment, and create a better employment environment, said Hu. WASHINGTON A conservative state representative and former member of the U.S. Navy will challenge Democrat U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney in 2022 in an uphill battle for his 2nd District seat. Republican Mike France of Gales Ferry, a four-term state legislator, who serves as ranking Republican on the state Houses budget committee, may be Courtneys most serious challenger in years. France, 58, said Tuesday he decided to launching his campaign after watching Congress fail to reach an agreement for more than six months to deliver more coronavirus relief. Campaigning as a fiscal conservative, France said Congress relief bills have contained unnecessary spending and one of his top priorities is to rein in the ballooning deficit he thinks is imperiling the country. France filed a lawsuit in September challenging Gov. Ned Lamonts emergency powers and arguing his public health executive orders hurt the states residents and businesses. That suit was dismissed by a Superior Court judge in December. Frances conservative record could be his biggest hindrance in a district where Democrats outnumbered Republicans by roughly 40,000 in 2020, according to data from the Secretary of the States Office. France introduced legislation to restore the death penalty, backs a religious exemption for vaccinations of public school children and was one of eight lawmakers to vote against banning gay conversion therapy. Unseating Courtney, 67, will be a Herculean task unless a major scandal shakes up the race dynamics. Courtney has received at least 58 percent of the vote in each of his past re-election campaigns. He leads the sea-power subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, giving him broad oversight of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard Academy which both have presences in his district and the influence to steer more business to submarine-builder General Dynamics Electric Boat, the most significant employer in his district. During his time in Congress, Courtney has secured contracts for Electric Boat to construct two submarines a year for the U.S. Navy, setting the manufacturer up to hire thousands more employees over the next few years. France served 20 years in the U.S. Navy including deployments to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, before he retired in 2005. For 15 years, he has worked at Progeny Systems Corporation, a Department of Defense contractor that produces electronic systems for submarines. France said he understands the Navy from a different perspective than Courtney, but does not advocate for dramatically different sea-power policies from him. I dont think there is a wedge to be driven there, he said. With his early campaign announcement and experience in elected office, France hopes he will succeed where others struggled. I think some of the challenges that were faced by the candidates of the past few cycles is they havent come early enough into the campaign and raised enough money to get a message out, he said. In 2020, the 2nd District Congressional race was marred by scandal after the Republican endorsed candidate Thomas Gilmer was arrested on the eve of the primary on two felony domestic violence charges. Police were tipped off to some evidence the other Republican challenger Justin Anderson who went on to narrowly win the primary but lose in the general election by over 75,000 votes. emilie.munson@hearstdc.com; Twitter: @emiliemunson New Delhi, Feb 24 : Former union minister Vijay Sampla on Wednesday assumed the charge of Chairman National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC). Talking to the media after assuming office, Sampla said he will work incessantly to safeguard the interests and the rights of the SC community. "The Commission will work not only to ensure justice to the SCs but will also remain proactive to prevent any form of injustice to the community," he said. He further stated that the Commission will participate and advise on the planning process of socio-economic development of the Scheduled Castes and to prevent atrocities against them. He assumed the office in presence of Union Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment, Krishan Pal Gurjar , Union Minister Som Prakash, former Chairman of NCSC and BJP MP Hans Raj Hans and other members of Commission. Sampla has been the former Union Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment from 2014-19. He was president of the BJP Punjab unit. He also served as Chairman, Khadi and Village Industries Board, Punjab from 2009-12 and subsequently his name was recommended for Rashtrapati Award. He won the 2014 general election from Hoshiarpur Lok Sabha constituency from Punjab and was the Union Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment in the first term of the Narendra Modi government. In a statement, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment said that Sampla was actively involved in the upliftment and welfare of deprived classes of the society, especially for the Scheduled Castes. "He assumed charge today after being appointed by the President as Chairman, National Commission for Scheduled Castes," it said. A chilling attack on free speech is happening as California Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney pressure cable providers for broadcasting right-wing media reports. The Blaze reported that the two California Representatives wrote letters to a dozen cable providers and demanded they explain the "misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies" the "right-wing media outlets" they carry, which are Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News Network. The said letters were sent to Alphabet, Altice, Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Charter, Comcast, Cox, Dish, Hulu, Roku, and Verizon. It contained, as per The Blaze, various accusations against the three news networks whose programming and content pushed the "radicalization of seditious individuals who committed acts of insurrection on January 6" at the U.S. Capitol, "all aired misinformation about the November 2020 elections," and promoted "misinformation related to the pandemic." "Some purported news outlets have long been misinformation rumor mills and conspiracy theory hotbeds that produce content that leads to real harm," the letters revealed. "Misinformation on TV has led to our current polluted information environment that radicalizes individuals to commit seditious acts and rejects public health best practices, among other issues in our public discourse." The Blaze pointed out that the two Democrats demanded from cable providers to explain "what moral or ethical principles (including those related to journalistic integrity, violence, medical information, and public health) do you apply in deciding which channels to carry or when to take adverse actions against a channel?" The cable providers were also asked to detail steps undertaken to "monitor, respond to, and reduce the spread of disinformation," to identify any punitive measures to correct them, as well as, to express plans to continue carrying the three media networks should their contracts expire, as per The Blaze. Eshoo and McNerney are part of the subcommittee under the House Energy and Commerce Committee of Congress that intends, The Blaze highlighted, to hold a hearing entitled "Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media" on Wednesday. Republicans and journalists among others, reacted negatively to Eshoo and McNerney's actions calling it a threat to the First Amendment. "By writing letters to the cable providers and other regulated entities that carry these news media outlets, the Democrats are sending a message that is as clear as it is troubling--these regulated entities will pay a price if the targeted newsrooms do not conform to Democrats' preferred political narratives" Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr denounced the two representatives in a statement posted in Twitter. "Debate on matters of public interest should be robust, uninhibited, and wide open. More speech is better than less. Yet the concerted effort by Democrats to drive political dissent from the public square represents a marked departure from these First Amendment norms," he highlighted. "A newsroom's decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official, not targeted by them." As per CBN News, media outlets Fox News and Newsmax responded to allegations against them by pointing out that their reporting has always been "in-depth" and "fair" coverage. "As the most-watched cable news channel throughout 2020, FOX News Media provided millions of Americans with in-depth reporting, breaking news coverage, and clear opinion. For individual members of Congress to highlight political speech they do not like and demand cable distributors engage in viewpoint discrimination sets a terrible precedent," Fox News said. To which Newsmax echoed, "Newsmax reported fairly and accurately on allegations and claims made by both sides during the recent election contest. We did not see that same balanced coverage when CNN and MSNBC pushed for years the Russian collusion hoax, airing numerous claims and interviews with Democrat leaders that turned out to be patently false." "The House Democrats' attack on free speech and basic First Amendment rights should send chills down the spines of all Americans," Newsmax added. If mail-in ballots do not change the results, the three winners might face three challengers, depending on a judicial ruling. Three independent candidates, Anna Mitera, Adam Chudzik and Andrew Charles Kopinski, had filed to run as trustee candidates, but were rejected by the Norridge Electoral Board on a technicality in January. The candidates have appealed the decision in the Circuit Court of Cook County. They have said if a judge does not allow their candidacies on the ballot, at least two of them will run as write-in candidates in the April 6 election. NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Cornell Capital LLC ("Cornell Capital") and Trilantic North America, two leading private investment firms, today announced that they have agreed to acquire Fastaff Travel Nursing ("Fastaff") and U.S. Nursing Corporation ("U.S. Nursing"). This acquisition is part of a broader effort by Cornell Capital and Trilantic North America to build a leading tech-enabled platform for healthcare staffing, following three other recently announced acquisitions in the space: trustaff Management, Inc. ("trustaff"), a leading provider of traditional travel nurse and allied healthcare staffing services; CardioSolution, a managed services offering providing cardiologists and support personnel to hospitals; and Stella.ai, Inc. ("Stella"), an AI-driven online marketplace for employers and job seekers that brings cutting-edge technology expertise to the staffing sector. With the addition of Fastaff and U.S. Nursing, the combined company will create an industry-first platform, leveraging data science and automation to meet client needs across traditional nurse staffing, rapid response, strike preparedness and job action services to accelerate growth. Founded in 1989, Fastaff and U.S. Nursing have provided hospitals with staffing solutions for more than three decades. Fastaff pioneered the practice of Rapid Response travel nurse staffing and has since grown to become the leading provider of temporary nurses to help hospitals provide continuous, high-quality patient care in urgent and crucial situations nationwide. U.S. Nursing is the largest provider of strike preparedness and job action staffing services for hospitals with unionized workforces. Together, Fastaff and U.S. Nursing partner with many of the nation's largest and most prestigious healthcare facilities, as well as small community hospitals, using a scalable, centralized infrastructure and shared technology. "We are excited to add Fastaff and U.S. Nursing to further diversify our innovative healthcare staffing platform, whose enhanced technology and AI will help drive future growth," said Stephen Trevor, Partner of Cornell Capital, and Jeremy Lynch, Partner of Trilantic North America. "We have been impressed by the performance of Fastaff and U.S. Nursing for their health system customers both prior to and during the global pandemic. With each company's track record of execution and deep hospital relationships, we look forward to partnering together as we continue to build an industry-leading organization and grow this platform organically, geographically and through additional acquisitions." Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P. ("THL"), current owners of Fastaff and U.S. Nursing, will remain investors in the combined company. "We invested in Fastaff and U.S. Nursing in 2015 with a thesis behind the increasingly mission-critical nature of their urgent and crucial staffing services to their hospital partners," said Megan Preiner, Managing Director at THL. "During the global pandemic, the importance of these services has only been amplified, and these two brands have been able to consistently deliver nurses to their customers during these times of unprecedented demand. We are excited to remain partnered with the Fastaff and U.S. Nursing teams in this next evolution as the combined new entity will allow for continued efficiency and automation of the nurse staffing experience for their customers." "For more than three decades, Fastaff has been a premier provider of Rapid Response travel nurse staffing, and U.S. Nursing has been the industry leader in comprehensive job action consulting and staffing solutions," said Bart Valdez, Fastaff and U.S. Nursing CEO. "Our team has the utmost confidence that partnering with Cornell Capital and Trilantic North America will help us build on our unique market position delivering experienced nurses for urgent hospital needs. Bringing the capabilities of our two brands to this larger platform will accelerate organic growth, allow for greater product and service innovation, and position the combined company to help meet the nation's expanding healthcare staffing needs." "Combining Fastaff and U.S. Nursing to our recent acquisitions of trustaff and CardioSolution on one platform will increase the scale and diversity of staffing opportunities we can deliver to both clients and healthcare professionals," said Adam Zoia, who has been named CEO of the combined company. "I look forward to applying superior technology to these best-in-class businesses and teams to strengthen their brands and accelerate growth at this critical moment for the industry across our country." Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close in March 2021, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP is acting as legal advisor to Cornell Capital. Kirkland & Ellis LLP is acting as legal advisor to Trilantic North America. Lincoln International is acting as financial advisor to Fastaff and U.S. Nursing, and Ropes & Gray LLP is acting as legal advisor. About Cornell Capital Cornell Capital LLC is a U.S.-based private investment firm with over $4.0 billion of AUM and offices in New York and Hong Kong. Partnering with strong, entrepreneurial management teams, the firm takes a value-oriented approach to investing across the consumer, financial and industrial sectors. Founder and Senior Partner Henry Cornell, who served as the Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs' Merchant Banking Division prior to founding Cornell Capital in 2013, leads a highly-seasoned senior leadership team with decades of shared investing experience. For more information, visit www.cornellcapllc.com. About Trilantic North America Trilantic Capital Management L.P. ("Trilantic North America") is a private equity firm focused on control and significant minority investments in North America. Trilantic North America's primary investment focus is in the business services, consumer and energy sectors. Trilantic North America has managed six private equity fund families with aggregate capital commitments of $9.7 billion. Trilantic North America has been recognized by Inc. Magazine's 2019 list of Top 50 Founder-Friendly Private Equity Firms. For more information, visit www.trilanticnorthamerica.com. About Fastaff Travel Nursing Over 30 years ago, Fastaff pioneered the practice of Rapid Response travel nurse staffing. Since then, the company has grown to become the leading crisis provider of experienced nurses to hospitals experiencing urgent and crucial situations nationwide. With a guaranteed delivery in ten days or less, and often in 24-48 hours, Fastaff is recognized as the most reliable partner to ensure uninterrupted high-quality patient care in hospitals, healthcare systems and communities facing turbulent times. Fastaff provides enriching employment opportunities to nurses while also providing the highest pay in the industry to meet acute staffing needs and provide unparalleled patient care. Visit www.fastaff.com for more information and connect with Fastaff on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. About U.S. Nursing Since 1989, U.S. Nursing has been working with healthcare facilities and nursing professionals to provide comprehensive staffing solutions during labor disputes. U.S. Nursing has staffed or helped avert many of the largest healthcare labor disputes nationwide, and is the pioneer and industry leader for comprehensive services throughout strike preparation and implementation. When facing an organized labor strike, U.S. Nursing helps facilities negotiate from a position of strength. In the event of a job action, U.S. Nursing will provide a core group of proven and experienced healthcare professionals who can hit the ground running to ensure continuous, quality patient care. Visit www.usnursing.com for more information. About Thomas H. Lee Partners Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P. ("THL") is a premier private equity firm investing in middle market growth companies, headquartered primarily in North America, exclusively in three sectors: Financial Services, Healthcare and Technology & Business Solutions. We couple our deep sector expertise with dedicated internal operating resources to transform and build great companies of lasting value in partnership with management. Our domain expertise and resources help to build great companies with an aim to accelerate growth, improve operations and drive long-term sustainable value. Since 1974, we have raised more than $25 billion of equity capital, invested in over 150 companies and completed more than 400 add-on acquisitions representing an aggregate enterprise value at acquisition of over $200 billion. For more information on THL, please visit THL.com. Media Contacts Cornell Capital Julie Hamilton / Tim Ragones / Kate Thompson Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher 212-355-4449 Trilantic North America Mariel Seidman-Gati 646-818-9013 [email protected] Thomas H. Lee Partners Natalie Short Edelman 310-425-9917 [email protected] SOURCE Cornell Capital LLC IF you have absolutely no urgent or emergency need to be outdoors today, then remain at home. Should you take a chance and decide to tempt fate, then it may most likely result in you being stopped and questioned by police officers and members of the Defence Force, or even find yourself charged and taken before a court. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 19:21:21|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close LUSAKA, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The decision by the Zambian government to introduce a cyber-security bill has received mixed reactions from a cross-section of society. Recently, the cabinet approved the introduction and publication of a bill to introduce the law on cybersecurity and cybercrimes. Chief Government Spokesperson Dora Siliya said the move follows the approval of the National Cyber Security policy by the cabinet last month. According to the government spokesperson, the introduction of the cybersecurity law is meant to promote the responsible use of social media platforms as well as ensure the provision of cybersecurity in the country. The bill has since been introduced in parliament for discussion by lawmakers. Currently, the Parliamentary Committee Joint Committee on Media, Information and Communication Technologies and National Security and Foreign Affairs is sitting to get submissions from various stakeholders before parliament starts deliberating on it. Among the contentious provisions in the bill include monitoring and interception of electronic communication as well as any other information using the internet. The bill has also provided for the establishment of a Central Monitoring and Coordination Center through which intercepted communication and call-related information will be forwarded. However, stakeholders believe that there is more to the law and that the draft bill, if passed, will stifle freedom of expression. Richard Mulonga, chief executive officer of Bloggers of Zambia, says there is no need for the government to rush into enacting the bill into law especially as the country heads towards the general elections. Instead of rushing to enact the law, he feels that the government should instead raise awareness and educate citizens on cybersecurity. Linda Kasonde, executive director of Chapter One Foundation and former president of the Law Association of Zambia (LAZ) urged citizens to take an interest in the bill because it has far-reaching implications. She said in an interview on private television, Diamond TV, that the bill has huge implications on freedom of expression, freedom of the media, and the right to privacy. A consortium of civil society organizations has since urged lawmakers to take into consideration the concerns from stakeholders. While acknowledging the need to ensure the safety of the public against cybersecurity threats, the organizations feel that this needs to be balanced with the right to freedom of expression and the need to maintain the right to privacy. "While the bill contains progressive provisions particularly with regard to the cybersecurity of children, we note several provisions that have the potential to facilitate and even enhance the wanton surveillance and censorship of members of the public through interception of communications," the organizations said in a release. The organizations are also concerned that there have been few consultations with all stakeholders in the drafting process of the bill, adding that consultations would have allowed for the resolving of issues being raised. But the government has defended the bill, saying it is meant to protect people's rights and not to take away any rights. Minister of Transport and Communication Mutotwe Kafwaya said people should be happy that the bill will provide protection for people against any infringement of their rights. He said the bill is targeting people who abuse others using social platforms, adding that innocent citizens should be happy that they will be a law to protect them. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Services Permanent Secretary Amos Malupenga described the bill as progressive and that the government's interest stems from its responsibility to ensure the safety of all citizens as they communicate using online platforms. Samuel Banda, executive director of the Advocates for National Development and Democracy says the bill is timely and necessary to ensure cybersecurity and the protection of internet users in the country. "It is blatantly evident that the cyberspace in Zambia and the world over have been plagued by sophisticated crime and abuse. Incidences of cybercrime such as fraud, intellectual property theft, identity theft, and cyberbullying have been on the rising and hence the need for regulation," he said in a release. According to him, responsible governments in the world are exploring ways of making cyberspace safe. Enditem We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form A racing driver who lost both his legs following a crash in 2017 has been forced to halt the second day of his 140-mile triathlon-inspired charity challenge due to dangerous weather conditions. Billy Monger, 21, from Charlwood, Surrey, still aims to tackle the huge distance to raise money for Red Nose Day. However, winds of 50mph and high waves made Tuesday's plan to kayak across a lake too dangerous for him to attempt. The double amputee, who was pictured standing by the shore of Ullswater in the Lake District, said: 'Obviously I'm absolutely gutted. I just want to keep going on this challenge and do my supporters proud, but safety has to come first. Racing driver Billy Monger, who lost both his legs following a crash in 2017, has been forced to halt the second day of his 140-mile triathlon-inspired charity challenge due to dangerous weather conditions Winds of 50mph and high waves made Tuesday's plan to kayak across a lake too dangerous for him to attempt. The double amputee (pictured standing by the shore of Ullswater in the Lake District) said: 'Obviously I'm absolutely gutted' Keen to practise every element of the upcoming triathlon, Monger was also seen testing the waters at the beginning of February. On Tuesday, Mark Agnew, kayak technical lead, said the weather was 'treacherous and too unpredictable'. He added: 'Even an experienced kayaker would struggle in these conditions let alone a beginner like Billy' 'It was so windy on the shore that I was finding it difficult to even stand up at one point. 'It's such a shame because this morning it was a bit rainy but I still thought it could go ahead. 'But just 20 minutes away, the waves were crashing into the road and boats were being tossed around on the lake.' He added: 'I've trained so hard for this and after yesterday I just wanted to keep the momentum going. But I'm determined to finish this challenge no matter what. There's no way I'm stopping now.' People at home will be able to see all the highs and lows of Monger's Red Nose Day challenge in an hour-long special documentary, filmed by a reduced crew, on BBC One in March Above, Monger trains for the triathlon. He began racing aged just six, but in April 2017 at a British F4 race he was left with life-changing injuries that resulted in the amputation of both his legs Mark Agnew, kayak technical lead said the weather was 'treacherous and too unpredictable'. He said: 'Even an experienced kayaker would struggle in these conditions let alone a beginner like Billy. 'I know he is massively disappointed, but it just wasn't safe for him to go out today.' Contingency plans are now being put into place in the hope that Monger can continue his challenge by kayak on Wednesday, which will again be weather dependent. His aim is to cover the 140 miles in four days, finishing at the world-famous race circuit Brands Hatch in Kent. Recent footage has shown just how gruelling Monger's training regime is as he prepares to take on the challenge. Above, he completes chest presses under the supervision of his trainer Monger began racing aged just six, but in April 2017 at a British F4 race he was left with life-changing injuries that resulted in the amputation of both his legs. However, he was back at the wheel within a year and has now been training for months to take on the mammoth challenge. He was due to walk, kayak and cycle the distance to raise money to help tackle issues including homelessness, hunger, domestic abuse and mental health problems. On Monday, he walked 18 miles from Newcastle to Durham, joined by comedian Chris Ramsey. People at home will be able to see all the highs and lows of Monger's challenge in an hour-long special documentary, filmed by a reduced crew, on BBC One in March. Insurance fraud seems like it might be an easy thing to do. Insurance companies are often so huge, one wonders how they might not even notic... Berlin: The European Unions chief said she would happily receive AstraZenecas coronavirus vaccine as officials rushed to find ways of ensuring doses refused by skittish Germans did not go to waste. President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen volunteered for the jab amid growing concerns that unfavourable comments by top European officials including French President Emmanuel Macron had slowed take-up of one of only three vaccines currently approved EU-wide. Earlier this month, Macron said Britain had taken a risk in authorising AstraZeneca so rapidly. A German official study also found evidence that, though effective, the vaccine has more severe side effects than its two main rivals. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says she would take the AstraZeneca dose. Credit:AFP I would take the AstraZeneca vaccine without a second thought, just like Modernas and BioNTech/Pfizers products, von der Leyen told the Augsburger Allgemeine. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton at the Collin County Courthouse in McKinney, Texas, on Dec. 1, 2015. (Jae S. Lee/The Dallas Morning News Via AP, Pool) Texas Attorney General and Wife Traveled out of State Amid Winter Storm Crisis Texass attorney general left the state amid the winter storms last week. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton visited Utah last week and met with Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes at various times Wednesday-Friday, a spokesman for Reyes told The Epoch Times via email. Paxton and Reyes met in Salt Lake City and discussed current investigations and litigation, including antitrust actions against Google. The Texas AG was also able to experience and evaluate Utahs law enforcement firearm de-escalation training system called VIRTRA at our Murray office, south of Salt Lake. The office does not have further information on the Texas Attorney Generals schedule, the spokesman added. Paxtons office and campaign didnt respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Republican told news outlets that Paxton did travel to Utah to meet with Reyes. A campaign spokesman told CNN that Paxton and his wife did not leave Texas until after power had returned to most of the state, including his own home. Attorney General Paxton attended a previously planned meeting with the attorney general of Utah to discuss several matters, Prior added. Texas was slammed with storms earlier this month, leading to power outages and deaths. An electrical substation is reflected in water in Houston, Texas on Feb. 21, 2021. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) Paxton is at least the third official to have left the state as residents were dealing with the crisis. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) flew to Cancun, Mexico, last week. After returning, he said the trip was obviously a mistake. In hindsight, I wouldnt have done it, Cruz said, Fox News reports. I was trying to be a dad and all of us have made decisions, when you have two girls who have been cold for two days and havent had heat or power and theyre saying, Hey look, we dont have school, lets get out of here.' State Rep. Gary Gates, a Republican, also left the state, but said he took his family to Florida because his home was flooded. Gates told the Houston Chronicle that his pipes burst, leaving his ill wife and daughter, who has special needs, at risk. Democrats decried Paxtons trip, similar to their reaction to Cruz traveling outside of Texas. Does @KenPaxtonTX not have a Zoom account? Chris Turner, the Texas House Democratic Caucus chair, said in a tweet. In a week when there were multiple reports of price gouging, the top official charged with consumer protection was out of state. And he wants his budget increased? Texans are getting $15,000 electric billsyou are the states consumer cop and you abandoned ship when Texans needed your support? added state Rep. Trey Martinez Discher, a Democrat. Youre looking at a distinction that from a clinical standpoint or from an epidemiological standpoint is very minor, she said. The most important thing is that when these vaccines come on the market, if you have an option for any of these three, get one of them. Goodbye Troop P, Wyoming. Welcome Troop P, Wilkes-Barre. The Pennsylvania State Police on Tuesday ended one era and started another by moving its longtime Troop P headquarters from Wyoming Borough to a state-of-the-art new facility in Hanover Twp. along the South Valley Parkway. After 100 years approximately, PSP Wyoming is going back to its original roots in Wilkes-Barre, Troop P spokeswoman Trooper Deanna Piekanski said. Theres a lot of memories. There were a lot of friendships forged here. Theres a lot of history. But this will better enable us to keep up with the times and better serve our community. While the new headquarters is technically in Hanover Twp., its mailing address is Wilkes-Barre. New Delhi: Faizuddin Laskar, a teacher of Model High School in Assam's Hailakandi district, took obscene pictures of himself with a minor student inside the classroom and posted them online. In the pictures, the teacher can be seen posing with the girl with a blackboard in the background. The pictures that have gone viral have raised serious concerns over the role of school authorities. Local news channel DY-365 described him as a "serial offender". According to the channel, this is not the first controversy reported against Lashkar earlier also teacher had punished by an angry mob for molesting a woman in Katlicherra. Despite the evidence, local police only interrogated the teacher but took no action against him. The police decision has created havoc in the Katlicherra area with the locals accusing the senior police officers of not taking appropriate action against such serious offender. As pictures went viral on internet, they also created chaos on social media platforms. Reacting to the news, the Universal Team For Social Action and Help ( UTSAH) - an NGO working for child rights - has lodged a complaint with the Assam State Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (ASCPCR). According to the reports published in the International Business Times, the NGO has asked for stringent action against the school teacher under sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act 2012 (POCSO). Also read: Khasi attire row: National Commission for Scheduled Tribes issues notice to Delhi Golf Club for discrimination Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) Jocelyn Solis-Reyes, the judge who convicted members of the Ampatuan clan in the Maguindanao massacre trial, has been nominated as Associate Justice of the Court of Appeals. In a list submitted to the President by the Judicial and Bar Council last week and released to the media on Wednesday, Solis-Reyes joined 35 other candidates for the six positions of CA Associate Justice. Four posts were vacated by CA Associate Justices Rodil Zalameda, Mario Lopez, Edgardo Delos Santos, and Samuel Gaerlan who were appointed to the Supreme Court, while the other two were left by Associate Justices Luisa Padilla and Jane Aurora Lantion who retired in January last year. According to JBC rules, qualified justices of the CA are members of the Philippine Bar of proven competence, integrity, probity and independence. To be eligible for a post, one must also be at least 40 years old and must have been, for 15 years or more, a judge of a lower court or engaged in the practice of law in the country. Solis-Reyes came into the public eye in December 2009 after she took on the high-profile Maguindanao massacre case, which was turned down by another judge for fear of his life and his familys safety. The November 2009 mass killing saw 58 people murdered, including more than 30 media personnel, in broad daylight in Ampatuan, Maguindanao. The case involved 197 accused individuals, several of whom were members of the province's powerful Ampatuan clan. READ: Everything you need to know about the Maguindanao massacre On December 19, 2019, Solis-Reyes rendered a guilty verdict to 28 accused in the multiple murder case, including eight members of the Ampatuan clan. A number of other individuals were also sentenced to imprisonment for being accessories to the crime. Meanwhile, 56 were acquitted. Aside from a law degree from the University of Santo Tomas, Solis-Reyes also holds a journalism undergraduate degree from the Lyceum of the Philippines. The JBC also submitted a list of 15 nominees for two vacant positions at the Court of Tax Appeals, as well as eight candidates for a vacancy at the Sandiganbayan. The Homeland Salvation Movement alliance had urged supporters to surround the building that houses several government ministers as part of its ongoing campaign of street protests aimed at forcing Pashinian to resign. The high-rise was cordoned off in the morning by scores of riot police that kept protesters at bay and enabled Pashinian to enter it and hold a meeting with senior officials from the Armenian Ministry of Environment. More than 50 protesters were detained on the spot. Gegham Manukian, a senior opposition figure, claimed that the police made more than 100 arrests. Manukian said security forces tried unsuccessfully to detain Ishkhan Saghatelian, who coordinates the opposition movements day-to-day activities. We didnt let them do that, he told reporters. According to eyewitnesses, Saghatelian was injured in an apparent scuffle with the riot police. Manukian insisted that the latest opposition protest was not a failure. He argued that Pashinian had to bring in several thousand police officers to be able to walk 200 meters in the city. The Homeland Salvation Movement, which comprises more than a dozen opposition parties, blames Pashinian for Armenias defeat in the autumn war in Nagorno-Karabakh and wants him to resign. The prime minister has rejected the opposition demands, leading the alliance to resume its anti-government protests on Saturday. Saghatelian and other opposition leaders have pledged to hold daily demonstrations this week in a bid to step up the pressure on Pashinian. They and their supporters were due to again march through the center of Yerevan later on Tuesday. Max Lucado recently apologized for a 2004 sermon where he spoke with regards to same-sex marriage. He added that LGBTQ individuals are God's children because like males and females, they are made in the "image of God." In a letter to Washington National Cathedral dated Feb. 11, Rev. Max Lucado apologized for his sermon on same-sex marriage. "I now see that, in that sermon, I was disrespectful. I was hurtful. I wounded people in ways that were devastating," Lucado's letter wrote. "It grieves me that my words have hurt or been used to hurt the LGBTQ community. I apologize to you and I ask forgiveness of Christ," he added, according to Christian Post. Rev. Max Lucado is a pastor of Oak Hills Church, a nondenominational Christian megachurch in San Antonio, Texas. He is also a bestselling author of self-help books. Lucado apologized after criticisms flooded the Washington National Cathedral for inviting him to preach in a cathedral worship service. Critics believed that the cathedral should have thought twice before having him speak in the pulpit. The Episcopal Church's Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Paul in the City and the Diocese of Washington, also known as the Washington National Cathedral invited Lucado on Feb. 7. The evangelist's message on the cathedral's live-streamed service focused on having the Holy Spirit to ease life's anxieties, Episcopal News Service reported. However, critics are looking at the harm caused by a statement he released back in 2004. In his message, Lucado compared same-sex marriage to legalized polygamy, bestiality, and incest. He also suggested that homosexuality can be changed through pastoral care. "Faithful people may disagree about what the Bible says about homosexuality, but we agree that God's Holy Word must never be used as a weapon to wound others," responded the reverend through his letter of apology. Meanwhile, the cathedral's management acknowledges the critics' concern. In an email, they let the people know that they are willing to listen to the community in order to improve. "Deep pain was caused to the LGBTQ community by our invitation to Max Lucado to preach at the Cathedral last Sunday," said Kevin Eckstrom, the cathedral's chief communications officer. "We appreciate him acknowledging the pain his past remarks have caused, and we hope that he will find a way to truly listen to those who have been hurt by his words," Eckstrom added. "For us, here as the Cathedral, we are now in the mode of listening to our community so we can do better going forward," the spokesperson concluded. The Episcopal Church is a denomination known to hold liberal views on marriage and sexuality issues. Among the critics are members of the church who filed a petition to Randy Hollerith, the cathedral's dean to rescind the reverend's invitation to preach. National Cathedral Dean Randy Hollerith and Washington Bishop Mariann Budde issued apologies for inviting Lucado and for not responding to the critics' call to cancel his invitation to preach. They also organized a listening session on Feb. 21 at 7 pm to give an ear to what the LGBTQ community has to say. The Andrews government is close to brokering a deal with a key upper house MP to extend Victorias state of emergency and break the political impasse. State of emergency powers would be extended for three months instead of the nine months sought by the government under a compromise being hammered out between Health Minister Martin Foley and Reason Party MP Fiona Patten. The proposal would also commit the government to a traffic light system that would allow parts of the state to remain open in a future lockdown, rather than imposing blanket restrictions on the entire state. Reason Party MP Fiona Patten says she is close to brokering a deal with Health Minister Martin Foley. Credit:Eddie Jim Victoria recorded no new local cases of coronavirus for the fifth consecutive day on Wednesday and none were detected in hotel quarantine. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 04:07:08|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close A woman wearing a face mask holds a cat along the Vistula river in Warsaw, Poland, Feb. 25, 2021. The Polish government has announced new restrictions in an effort to curb a recent rise in new COVID-19 infections officially dubbed the "third wave." Over the course of this month, the daily infection rate has steadily climbed after a period of stability. A total of 12,146 new cases were confirmed on Wednesday, taking the tally to 1,661,190 since the start of the pandemic. To date, 42,808 Poles have lost their lives due to the coronavirus. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/Xinhua) WARSAW, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Polish government announced new restrictions on Wednesday in an effort to curb a recent rise in new COVID-19 infections officially dubbed the "third wave." Over the course of this month, the daily infection rate has steadily climbed after a period of stability. A total of 12,146 new cases were confirmed on Wednesday, taking the tally to 1,661,190 since the start of the pandemic. To date, 42,808 Poles have lost their lives due to the coronavirus. Over 2.8 million Poles have already received at least one vaccine dose, which is currently administered to healthcare workers and people older than 65. At the start of the month, daily figures were stable at between 2,500 and 5,000 positive tests. "Today's results show the third wave is accelerating," Health Minister Adam Niedzielski said at a press conference, adding that the dynamics are starting to be a cause for concern and the numbers are increasing. Niedzielski said that the rules on face covering will be tightened, mandating the use of masks in public spaces starting on Saturday instead of the previously allowed alternatives, such as scarfs and visors. Also starting on Saturday, travelers from southern neighbours Slovakia and the Czech Republic will have to quarantine for ten days after arrival in Poland. One of Poland's 16 provinces, Warmia-Masuria in the northeast of the country, will introduce additional lockdown measures due to a particularly steep rise in the number of cases there, including the closure of malls and cinemas and a return to remote learning for schoolchildren aged six to eight. Older students in the province and the rest of the country have already been taking classes from home since Oct. 26, 2020. Earlier plans to reopen schools for these groups in March have been shelved for now. The most recent projections put this date closer to April. "We determined that it could be possible for high school students to return to school as early as the beginning of March," Niedzielski said in an interview with public broadcaster TVP on Monday. "But the situation has worsened over the last two weeks." "I would still not rule out a return to school in March or April, as we think the peak of this wave will be slightly lower than in November." As the world is struggling to contain the pandemic, vaccination is underway in some countries with the already-authorized coronavirus vaccines. Meanwhile, 255 candidate vaccines are still being developed worldwide -- 73 of them in clinical trials -- in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the United States, according to information released by the World Health Organization on Tuesday. Enditem Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 3 mesi fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. The demand for face mask has witnessed robust growth in the recent past and this trend is expected to continue till 2027. The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended to use face mask in home as well as in Production of face masks is an extremely complex process and has a lot of dynamics attached to it. In addition, to the masks, several auxiliary items such as ear loops, packaging, metal strips among others also need to be manufactured. The global Face Mask market size is expected to reach USD 31.83 billion by 2027 according to a new study by Polaris Market Research With the scale of the huge demand amidst the pandemic, the whole face mask manufacturing and its supply chain are under a lot of pressure. The pre-pandemic production capacities were not enough to meet the meteoric demand rise and hence, in major manufacturing hubs such as China, companies scrambled their operating systems to ramp up their production. Request a sample Copy : https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/face-mask-market/request-for-sample Companies in China are now operating at 110% of their capacity and even this production is not able to meet the global demand. The country has increased its manufacturing capacity by 20 times as compared to February of masks ranging from N-95 to cloth masks. Even factories producing mobile phones, shoes, automotive, diapers, sanitary pads among others have been modified to meet the rising demand of face masks. Such trends have put the supply chain of face masks under tremendous pressure. Government initiatives in helping companies in China to transition into face masks manufacturing hubs and granting subsidies has resulted in a rapid rise in new entrants. Provincial regulators are working in full-time to provide licenses to these new participants. However, adherence to globally accepted standards and quality norms remain a cause of concern. Italy has eased restrictions as of now and is in phase 2 widely termed as living with the virus phase. Wearing of masks has become mandatory due to the regulations prescribed by the government in order to curb the spread of the virus. According to Consumer associations in the country, only 25% of pharmacies had these capped masks for sale. Get Discount Offer : https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/face-mask-market/request-for-discount-pricing There were also difficulties in the overall supply chain management of these capped masks as many of the batches that were earmarked for supply to drugstores did not reach their destination. Authorities in the country also took concentrated efforts to boost the production of the masks and announced intentions to set up a consortium of companies. The intention of the Italian government to speed up the overall exit process of lockdown is expected to greatly benefit the demand for face masks in the country. Moreover, the key players involved in the global Face Mask Market include, Moldex, Shanghai Dasheng, Kimberly-Clark, BDS, Gerson, Halyard Healthcare, SAS Safety Corp., Honeywell, Irema, KOWA, 3M, McKesson, MolnlyckeHealth, CM, Sinotextiles, DACH,Te Yin, Hakugen, and Uvex among others are key players in the market.. Product launch, merger & acquisition, and partnerships encompass key players strategies to preserve and capture the most important share of the global market. Read More : https://www.medgadget.com/2020/05/face-mask-market-size-worth-7-22-billion-by-2026-cagr-22-14-exclusive-study-by-polaris-market-research.html https://www.medgadget.com/2020/08/face-mask-market-to-surpass-31-83-billion-by-2027-cagr-24-6-polaris-market-research.html The world of decaying capitalism is overcrowded. ... In an era of aviation, telegraph, telephone, radio, and television, travel from country to country is paralyzed by passports and visas. ... Amid the vast expanses of land and the marvels of technology, which has also conquered the skies for man as well as the earth, the bourgeoisie has managed to convert our planet into a foul prison. Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution adopted by its Emergency Conference of May 19-26, 1940 The Fourth Internationals emergency conference held in the midst of the Second World War delivered a comprehensive indictment of the wars chief causethe private ownership of the means of production, together with the capitalist nation-state system which rests upon this foundation. This indictment applies with even greater force today in Latin America, as one nation after another seeks to align itself ever more closely with US imperialism as Washington prepares its next military aggression against Venezuela in its attempt to quash Chinese and Russian influence in the hemisphere. As interimperialist antagonisms grow, the historically venal and reactionary bourgeoisie in Latin America is shutting its borders to millions of Venezuelans escaping economic, social and health disasters caused by decades of unending destabilization, coup attempts and plunder. Haitian refugees forcibly expelled from Peru at Brazil border (Credit: foto diffusion) The pro-imperialist, right-wing regimes in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are using an explosion in regional migration as a justification to militarize their borders, whipping up xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment in the process. Thousands of troops, backed by tanks and armored vehicles, have been deployed to reinforce security personnel at irregular border crossings. Earlier promises made to displaced Venezuelans have proven a cruel hoax. The truth is that the ultraright governments were only concerned with using the profound crisis facing destitute migrants for political advantage. Today, military forces monitor the crossings between Brazil and Venezuela, on one side, and Colombia on the other. Colombia has dispatched 600 national police and military personnel to monitor the border. The right-wing government of President Ivan Duque launched Operation Wall last year to control its border with Venezuela. More forces have been deployed to the Colombia-Ecuador border, the Ecuador-Peru border, as well as the Peru-Brazil and the Chile-Bolivia borders. As a result, more than 500 displaced people, mainly from Haiti, have remained stranded on the Amazonian border between Peru and Brazil for the last two weeks. The refugees, trying to leave Brazil through the International Friendship Bridge linking the two countries, are denied entry by Peruvian Armed Forces mobilized to bolster the police. Last Tuesday, security forces charged at the defenseless men, women and children with tear gas and repression. On Thursday, Brazil responded by sending military forces to take charge of border control for 60 days. This follows an incident at the end of January, when Peruvian troops opened fire on displaced Venezuelans entering from Ecuador through Tumbes. Some 500 mostly Venezuelan nationals were arrested at different points in the Tumbes region. In mid-January, the Peruvian government deployed 1,200 troops, tanks and armored vehicles, as well as national police, to control the more than 30 irregular crossing points between Ecuador and Peru. The Ecuadorian government reciprocated. On January 27, the Ecuadorian Armed Forces mobilized 200 soldiers and 20 Hummer tactical vehicles on the border with Peru in the El Oro department. A person who enters the country with an irregular pass is being put on the same level as someone who commits a crime. Crossing the border with an irregular pass is not contemplated as a type of crime in Perus migration law, said Marta Castro, a human rights research coordinator in Peru. But this is precisely the aim. This has been facilitated by the local big business media with inflated and salacious reports of supposed migrant crime waves that have fomented attacks and pogroms against Venezuelans and other refugees with increased frequency. They are cultivating the basest moods of national chauvinism and xenophobia, dehumanizing the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the working class and oppressed masses. Chilean Interior Minister Rodrigo Delgado explained the concept best when he revealed that the decree extending the use of the military also gives the authorities the tools in terms of immediate expulsion of refugees. He continued, Today crossing the border is not characterized as a crime, but with the new law it is characterized as a crime. This is not merely a national but rather a regional response. The death of 23-year-old Bolivian Jaime Veizaga Sanchez at the hands of the paramilitary Carabineros police on February 9 must be viewed in this context. The cops dumped the barely conscious man from a checkpoint vehicle outside the Medical Legal Service (legal mortuary) in the mining town of Calama. He had arrived in the country just seven days earlier. Last week, about 100 migrants were expelled from Iquique in the north of Chile. While a Court of Appeals annulled the expulsion order, arguing the refugees were denied due process, most are already in Venezuela. The expulsion order was issued while they were in the sanitary residence, they were notified at 2 in the morning and then the expulsion was carried out 24 hours later, but they never left this place where they had no possibility of organizing a defense, explained a lawyer representing the refugees. The Venezuelan exodus Some 4.6 million of the 5.4 million Venezuelans who have fled the ravages of both an unending imperialist onslaught and the abject failure of the bourgeois nationalist Bolivarian Revolution have sought refuge in the neighboring countries, only to suffer more hardship. In 2018, the ultra-right-wing billionaire president of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, and the fascistic Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro drafted bills limiting the intake of refugees by making it a requirement to present certified documentation. Every other regime has followed suit. The special rapporteur of the United Nations for migrants rights, Felipe Gonzalez, criticized the increasingly restrictive measures. Comparative experience, even in Latin America, shows that the use of the Armed Forces in migration matters produces serious violations of the human rights of people in mobility and in no way solves the problem, but rather increases it, Gonzalez tweeted. Faced with this radical change in migration policy measures, international organizations warned that there would be a significant increase in irregular entries and human trafficking, with the consequent risk for people in mobility, he added. A turning point in the mass migration of Venezuelans was reached in 2019 when Washington and Brussels began sharply escalating their attacks on the government of President Nicolas Maduro with sanctions and embargoes, backed by the so-called Lima Group (consisting of Canada and 13 Latin American countries that do the bidding of the US against Venezuela). Conditions for refugees residing in Latin American countries have only deteriorated during the pandemic as millions have been laid off, evicted and made homeless. A study released last week revealed that two out of five Venezuelans residing in Latin American countries have been evicted during the pandemic. The survey by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and UN agencies showed that 11 percent of all renter evictions led to homelessness, while three out of four Venezuelans had no place to call home once evicted. With much grandstanding, the Colombian government announced a Temporary Protection Status for Venezuelan migrants, which will identify, register and formally document 1.7 million refugees and migrants in Colombia, ostensibly to guarantee protections to foreigners. The measure will do nothing to protect them from exploitation, but it will replenish government coffers with increased foreign aid. In another report the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR warned last week that barely two percent of the 1.7 million Venezuelan migrants in Colombia can cover their basic needs. Eighty-four percent are unable to obtain food, lodging or clothing. Three-quarters of these are believed to be irregular, or undocumented refugees. While the governments of the Lima Group claim that the militarization of borders is designed to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, the reality is that the beefed-up security preceded 2020 and has more to do with demonstrating allegiance to US plans. This takes the form of the Armed Forces being allocated millions of dollars and employing tens of thousands of its troops in border control operations that ostensibly serve as an extension of the US war on drugs across the continent. Over the last two years, Latin American armed forces have deployed an increasingly sophisticated arsenal to intercept transnational organized crime in the border areas. The coronavirus pandemic has ravaged South American nations not because of migration, but precisely because every right-wing government has imposed criminally reckless herd immunity policies that prioritize profit above the health and lives of the masses. Non-essential export-oriented industries critical to profit interests remained operational throughout 2020. Now, each government is extending the use of its armed forces to control so-called illegal smuggling of migrants and human trafficking. Among the measures enacted is a plan allowing Colombian, Peruvian, Bolivian, Ecuadorian and Chilean police forces to coordinate transnational operations. The dangers of such measures are burnt into the history of 20th century Latin America, where the intelligence services of the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s united in hunting down and murdering their political opponents under the CIA-backed Operation Condor. The fate of the Venezuelan masses puts into sharp relief the anachronism and bankruptcy of the existing capitalist national state system in Latin America. In its 1940 conference, the Fourth International pointed the way out of this blind alley by advancing the slogan of the Soviet United States of South and Central America and calling on the proletariat to lead the struggle to free the masses from the yoke of world imperialism as part of the fight for world socialist revolution. It is not the belated South American bourgeoisie, a thoroughly venal agency of foreign imperialism, who will be called upon to solve this task, but the young South American proletariat, the chosen leader of the oppressed masses, it stated. This is truer today than ever before, after 80 years of the continents domination by a succession of bourgeois nationalist, fascist-military and pro-imperialist bourgeois comprador regimes. The Latin American working class must draw the necessary conclusions, unifying with workers throughout the continent, the US and around the world in a common struggle to put an end to capitalism. This is the perspective of permanent revolution, which is today fought for only by the International Committee of the Fourth International. Suzuki Motor Corp's 91-year old chairman, Osamu Suzuki, announced he will retire in June, stepping aside for a new leader to navigate the shift to electric cars and fight off competition from tech firms such as Tesla and Apple. The chairman, after heading the company for more than four decades that his wife's grandfather founded, is leaving his son Toshihiro Suzuki, already president and CEO, to hold the reins of the company. Osamu told reporters on Wednesday he decided to retire after the company welcomed its 100th anniversary last year and the approval of its new ... We couldnt find anything at this address. Please check the URL or go to the homepage [February 23, 2021] 4Q20 Results: Telefonica Brasil S.A. SAO PAULO, Feb. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Telefonica Brasil - (B3: VIVT3 [Common Shares]; NYSE: VIV), announces its results for 4Q20 and 2020. Leadership reaffirmed in mobile and fiber, combined with strong financial performance and shareholder remuneration R$ million 4Q20 % y-o-y 2020 % y-o-y Net Operating Revenues 11,193 (1.6) 43,126 (2.6) Net Mobile Revenues 7,569 1.6 28,421 (0.9) Net Fixed Revenues 3,623 (7.7) 14,705 (5.7) Operating Costs (6,316) (1.5) (25,318) (3.4) Recurring Operating Costs (6,316) (3.4) (25,394) (3.5) EBITDA 4,877 (1.8) 17,808 (1.8) EBITDA Margin 43.6% (0.1) p.p. 41.3% 0.3 p.p. Recurring EBITDA 4,877 0.8 17,733 (1.2) Recurring EBITDA Margin % 43.6% 1.0 p.p. 41.1% 0.6 p.p. Net Income 1,293 1.5 4,771 (4.6) Capex Ex- Licenses | Ex- IFRS 16 2,429 3.1 7,789 (11.9) Free Cash Flow after Lease Payments 708 (72.8) 9,610 12.6 Total Subscribers (thousand) 95,051 1.5 95,051 1.5 Mobile subscribers 78,532 5.3 78,532 5.3 Fixed subscribers 16,519 (13.3) 16,519 (13.3) Core Revenues 9,828 3.2 37,030 1.5 Core Revenues / Net Operating Revenues 87.8% 4.1 p.p. 85.9% 3.5 p.p. Non-core Revenues 1,365 (26.4) 6,096 (21.7) Non-core Revenues / Net Operating Revenues 12.2% (4.1) p.p. 14.1% (3.5) p.p. Mobile market share reached 33.6% in December 2020 and remains at historic highs. Postpaid accesses grew 3.9% y-o-y and accounted for 57% of total mobile accesses, with a market share of 37.7% in December 2020 and the lowest churn in 5 years. Fiber-to-the-home broadband customers totaled 3,378 thousand (+36% y-o-y), posting accelerated additions of high-quality customers in 4Q20. FTTH ARPU increased 13% versus 4Q19, reaching R$91.9. Core businesses represented 88% of total revenues with increasing relevance. FTTH revenues continue to grow significantly (+52.9% y-o-y) while mobile service revenues are showing solid recovery growing 2.1% y-o-y. Operating Costs decreased 3.4% y-o-y in 4Q20, driven by digitalization and automation initiatives. Recurring EBITDA totaled R$4,877 million (+0.8% y-o-y) in 4Q20, with a recurring EBITDA margin of 43.6%. Investments of R$7,789 million in 2020, focused on the expansion of the FTTH network and the capacity of the 4G and 4.5G networks. Net Income of R$1,293 million in 4Q20, up 1.5% y-o-y. In 2020, net income reached R$4,771 million, down 4.6% y-o-y. Proposed shareholder remuneration based on 2020 profit reaches R$5,418 million, representing a payout of 113.6%, with a dividend yield of 7.0%. Free Cash Flow after Leasing payments reached R$9,610 million in 2020 (+12.6% y-o-y), the highest ever cash generation as a result of Capex optimization and lower operating, financial and tax payments. TELEFONICA BRASIL Investor Relations Christian Gebara David Melcon Luis Plaster Joao Pedro Carneiro +55 11 3430-3687 / ir.br@telefonica.com To download the complete version of the Company's earnings release, please visit our website: http://www.telefonica.com.br/ir View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/4q20-results-telefonica-brasil-sa-301234072.html SOURCE Telefonica Brasil It was not clear how soon the high court might act on the matter after agreeing to allow the original objectors to Jones nominating papers to file an emergency motion for expedited consideration of their appeal, according to a Feb. 18 court order. The case will be submitted to the Supreme Court based on the briefs filed by both sides in the appellate case, according to the order. Florida pastor loses home in fire after church; neighbors save baby goat and cat Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A Florida pastor and his family lost their home to a fire that took most of their belongings Sunday but remained thankful as neighbors saved their pet cat and a goat from perishing. The Bellview Assembly of God in Pensacolaannounced in a statement on Facebook Monday that the churchs parsonage burned down Sunday afternoon. Youth minister Jacob White and his family, who were living in the home, lost nearly everything. Yesterday afternoon, the church parsonage burned down. Praise God no one was home and the pets were rescued, the statement said. Our Youth Director and his family lived in the house and they have lost everything. White, who has four children with his wife, Amanda, told WKRG that while they lost a lot in the fire, he is grateful that the fire happened at a convenient time. The family was reportedly out celebrating a birthday when they received a phone call about the fire at the home. If there is such a thing [as] a convenient time for something like this, then it happened at a convenient time. Because nobody was here to be harmed or hurt and we are all safe and are ok, White said. Escambia County Fire and Rescue said the fire, which occurred on Sunday afternoon, was started by a failed power strip in one of the homes bathrooms. White is now staying in a family mobile home on his fathers property. He acknowledged that the family will have to restart from scratch but expressed faith in Gods word to recover. We have a roof over our heads but as far as anything else goes, its just starting from scratch and just figuring it out. We just know that Romans 8:28 and what it tells us on Gods word and we are just going to stand on that, he said. Romans 8:28 states: And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Neighbors reportedly broke down the home's door when they saw the fire and found the goat and the cat inside. They were also able to save some of the pastors family photos. I am thankful that everything that means the most to us survived, Amanda White told the local news station. You know our pictures and our memories, our memory books of our kids and children, and they revived our animals. So we lost a lot, but we didnt lose the important stuff. The family also expressed thanks to the community for stepping in to help them when they needed it the most. We have never been one to have our hand out. We have always been the one giving out, and its just nice to know that people love us and care for us and [are] willing to give and help us out in a time of need, the pastor said. A GoFundMe campaign with a $10,000 fundraising goal to assist the family had raised more than $3,200 as of Wednesday morning. The outpouring of love, support and prayer is humbling. I cannot even begin to express how grateful our family is! God is so good, Amanda White wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday. Everyone wants to help. Honestly we don't really know where to start. Its overwhelming and we are frazzled. Nuclear:experts say no to Krsko 2, area of high seismic risk Geologist Decker, 'Italy should make its voice heard before 2023 (ANSA) - TRIESTE, 24 FEB - Geologists and seismologists all agree: the potential doubling of the Krsko nuclear power plant in Slovenia, 125 km from Trieste, should be ruled out, given that it stands in an area of medium-high seismicity, as many studies and monitoring confirmed. The plant's license will expire in 2023, and then a decision must be made whether to keep it running or not. It is, therefore, also the right time for the Italian government to make its voice heard against the plan of a plant's "revamping" to keep it running until 2043, as the Slovenian authorities seem to want to do. Viennese geologist Kurt Decker, consultant of the Austrian government, suggested yesterday at the Facebook meeting organized by the Pd Trieste, focusing on "The seismic risk of the Krsko nuclear power plant: 125 kilometers from Trieste, towards the Bora", during which seismologists and geologists presented "unequivocal" data on the seismic risk for the plant, designed in the late seventies and active since 1983. Decker underlined that the Italian government is fully entitled to "intervene with authority in the debate around the plant, upon an agreement signed by Austria, Italy, and Slovenia in 1997." Researcher Giovanni Costa, a member of a cross-border monitoring network which also includes Slovenia and Croatia, Livio Sirovich, a geologist-seismologist researcher at the Ogs of Trieste, Peter Suhadolc, a seismologist of the University of Trieste, the MP Debora Serracchiani (Democratic Party), former president of the Fvg Region, attended the meeting. Giovanni Costa stressed that "the continuous observation of phenomena shows that the area is seismically active," as confirmed by the events that involved Croatia last year, such as "the earthquake in Petrinja last December and several tremors in recent months in Zagreb, which is only 40 km away from the Krsko plant". Suhadolc pointed out that several earthquakes between magnitudes 5 and 5.5 have occurred in the area over 150 years. "Furthermore - he said - we know nothing of future ones, which could occur on new faults created near the plant." Sirovich said that so far, all the studies have not been listened to, beginning with the first investigations for the construction of Krsko 2, conducted by two French national institutes, which denounced "the presence of faults that have moved in recent times." Underlining the opposition already expressed by the previous regional administration to a doubling project of the Krsko plant, Debora Serracchiani took up Decker's suggestion. She guaranteed her commitment so that the Italian government takes over the issue in the competent offices. "Our country - she said - must take an active part ahead of the expiry of the plant's license in 2023." (ANSA). Copyright ANSA - All rights reserved Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. With a nomination for the 2020 China Philanthropy Award under his belt, Jicheng Lyu is on a mission to continue alleviation services to the most disadvantaged. NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / February 23, 2021 / Leading a team of 300 staff members and volunteers, Jicheng Lyu knows philanthropy better than anyone. Through assistance and alleviation, he is on the front lines of supporting communities and service organizations. The recent China Philanthropy Award nominee knows that to enact true change in the world, it takes many different organizations and selfless drive. Most importantly, those wishing to alter their communities need to do so because of the good that will come rather than existing ulterior motives. Lyu comments: "Donation amounts are many times used as a testimony to prove a donor's warm hearts to the poor. People are willing to donate money for the privilege of becoming a lifesaver in the eyes of the world." This is why Jicheng Lyu started the Sinic Venture Philanthropy. He believes in local grassroots organizations being the stimulant to change. In fact, his initiative funds over 400 civil societies with more than 1.49 million dollars. Lyu and his team carry out poverty alleviation projects in 516 villages and for 74,334 (and counting!) impoverished households. As a result, their work has exponentially been recognized and financially continued. Their outstanding corporate social responsibility has been authentically acknowledged by more than just the public. Jicheng Lyu and his team have been honored with a China Philanthropy Award nomination. This is one of the most prestigious awards that they can receive. Upon receiving this recognition, Lyu responded: "I am glad that my work has helped nonprofits become a recognized force who could make meaningful contributions to China's development." The road towards philanthropic success always begins and ends with those whose lives have been changed for the better. Jicheng Lyu considers his work with Save the Children to be among his most impactful. On the first day of the program, standing in front of the doorway to an auditorium, Lyu realized that this forum was different. This was the first time that Save the Children had developed a program geared towards empowering disadvantaged youths. It had the possibility to impact individual lives and entire generations. This Save the Children event was considered Vocational Education and donated by Accenture. Forums were held to promote and establish soft skills in young adults aged 16 through 25. It also encouraged companies to place a greater number of people from different backgrounds in their open positions. In his own words, Jicheng Lyu describes this event: "In these workshops, migrant youth commented on policies and expressed what they needed in employment procedure. This became the input of topics discussed in the forum." This beneficially impacted both marginalized people and the companies who attended the workshops. After much research, it was discovered that migrant youths were facing two main difficulties in the professional sphere. One was pressure from companies to have a wide variety of experiences that were not available to them. Another was social pressure. Their social network included mostly those in their families and others who share the same place of birth. People from other backgrounds and with other networks were not as connected to them. When Jicheng Lyu and his team spoke to the young adults, he not only gave them professional advice, but he also broadened their horizons and expanded their network. Over 10,000 young people were taught how to explore their strengths, build positive attitudes, effectively find jobs, make impactful decisions, be efficient, manage money, and understand health practices. With this knowledge under their belts, 91% of 10,360 migrant youths had expressed increased confidence in finding jobs. Seven schools have since integrated soft skill courses into their daily lessons. 307 teachers have a deeper understanding of how to express these lessons to their future students. More than 8 corporations and 30 stakeholders have retained what they learned with Save the Children. They recruit migrant youths into their workplace and have remained focused on the cause. Building workplace confidence is taught through a process of lectures, participatory classes, and training sessions. With career conversations led by professionals and organized classes set to systemically elaborate upon lessons, the young adults discussed and brainstormed as a group. They problem-solved together and experienced success on both an individual and collaborative level. In working with disadvantaged youths, Lyu was able to experience their transformations firsthand. With knowledge and confidence in hand, the futures of these students are bright and well-connected. This was not the only instance where Jicheng Lyu brought brightness in a formerly dark place. April 2020 marked a time when grief was always imminent. Covid-19 destroyed everything in its path. Wreckage remained and the world needed help. Seeing this, Jicheng Lyu jumped into action. He knew to use everything in his wheelhouse to help the people who are on the front lines, saving lives. He launched the "Promotion Plan for Good Doers" as soon as the outbreak occurred. This decision saved thousands of people in destitute areas where even basic necessities were impossible to come by. Lyu spearheaded this project, delivering meals and supplies to doctors and nurses in Wuhan. Between January 30, 2020 and April 30, 2020, over 137,000 supplies were delivered to 6 different hospitals. Those receiving the supplies that Jicheng Lyu and his team brought were appreciative. Even the most basic necessities were unavailable until then. When asked about his service, he stated: "The medical team lacked daily necessities, so we provided them with basic daily necessities such as paper, soap, hangers, and washbasins". This was not all, though. While handing out supplies, Jicheng Lyu saw the conditions that the hospital workers and visitors had to endure. Then, it wasn't just about the basics. The team referenced a list of medical professionals' birthdays. They prepared cakes and brought them during supply runs because even when the world is in turmoil, it is important to mark the celebrations. In his own words: "The delivery of the cake was a trivial matter, but the medical team's feedback was very strong, and they were very moved. Think about it and understand that medical staff face a lot of pressure and struggle every day on the front line closest to the death of illness. When they return to the hotel and see the birthday cake, they will feel that they are cherished and remembered. They are not alone. The cake symbolizes sympathy and comfort." Through service and compassion, Jicheng Lyu leads with his heart. Upon seeing openings in his community, he fills them to the brim. His China Philanthropy Award is well earned. The aid he has brought to thousands is unmatched. His only wish is to inspire others to perform acts of kindness where they see their communities need it most. About NU Media NU Media was founded in 2007 with a mission to support and serve small and mid-sized business partners with integrity and to aid their growth by providing the highest level of service and expertise. Their professional team includes a diverse group of web developers, online marketing experts, and digital strategists working from all corners of the world to deliver unbeatable results for their partners. Media Contact Name: Nicole Gnafakis Phone: (713) 865-1552 Email: nicole@nxtfactor.com SOURCE: NU Media View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631575/COVID-Relief-From-a-Philanthropy-Chief-in-the-Middle-of-Global-Grief Burma Australia Demands Immediate Release of Detained Myanmar Government Adviser Anti-regime protesters in Mandalay hold placards calling for the release of Professor Sean Turnell on Feb. 22, during the nationwide '22222' general strike. / Ko Ko Phyo The Australian government continues to call for the immediate release of Professor Sean Turnell, the only foreigner detained following the Feb. 1 coup, as he is an economic adviser to detained State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. His family called for his release two weeks ago, saying his whereabouts are unknown. The Australian Embassy in Yangon had a Zoom call with Turnell on Feb. 11. But his family said since Feb.11, we havent heard anything, his whereabouts are still a mystery. Nonetheless, the fact that he was treated well, and I hope that he is even now treated well, gives me comfort to get through each day in the best possible way I can, said Ha Vu, his wife. The family hired lawyer U Than Zaw Aung to represent the detained adviser but the lawyer said he has no information about Turnells location nor about any charges he might face. Australias Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said Canberra continues to press the Myanmar authorities for regular consular access to Professor Sean Turnell, and remains in close touch with his family [and] for his rights and welfare to be upheld. During a video-conference with Myanmars military deputy, Vice-Senior General Soe Win, on Monday the Australian Defence Forces Vice-Admiral David Johnston repeated calls for Turnells release. Johnston also expressed Australias deep concern at the situation in Myanmar, according to a Canberra representative, adding that Johnston stated that the use of lethal force or violence against peaceful protesters is unacceptable. He urged Myanmars authorities to refrain from violence against civilians, restore democracy and release all civilian leaders. The National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in the November election, which observers judged to be free and fair. Millions of citizens have taken to the streets for three weeks, opposing the military regime, despite a crackdown by the security forces which has killed at least four people. You may also like these stories: US Citizen Among the Advisers to Myanmar Military Regime Despite Sanctions Imposed by US Myanmar Medics in Hiding as Regime Targets Hospital-Led Disobedience Movement Myanmar Military Targets Striking Civil Servants Italian artist Roberto Rizzo turns bland river stones into incredibly detailed artworks inspired by the animal kingdom. From mammals like cats and dogs, to birds and fish, there is almost no creature that Rizzo cant turn a stone into. Roberto Rizzo has always believed that stones have a soul, and using his minds eye and his talent as a painter, he has been able to turn stones into living artworks of sorts, by turning them into photo-realistic animals. He has been creating his beautiful painted stones since 1996, and is an expert at hunting for special stones that can be used as canvases for his art. Photo: Roberto Rizzo Mammals are the most suitable inspiration for the talented Italian artist, as their physical characteristics are well suited for bland river stones as well as for strangely-shaped ones. Birds, with the exception of nocturnal birds of prey such as owls, are generally more difficult, and require a lot of imagination. View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) Fish are the most challenging for Rizzo, as they require very specific characteristics that are rarely found in stones. Still, whenever he finds one of these rare stones, the results are quite impressive. View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) The mammals are the ideal subjects to be painted on the stones. Most of them have thick fur and have a habit of gathering in a crouched position, the artist writes on his website. Working with the imagination I can adapt them to even the strangest stones and thus obtain unique works. View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) Painting birds and reptiles on stone is a real challenge. With the exception of nocturnal birds of prey such as owls and owls which have a compact body and which are easier to insert into the stone, for all other species, imagination and experience play a key role, Rizzo adds. Stones suitable for fish are quite rare, but when I am lucky enough to find one I cant wait to get to work! View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) Roberto Rizzo uses high quality acrylic pigments and paints that are very resistant over time, but he recommends that collectors keep his artworks away from direct contact with the elements, as no painted work can resist heavy rains or direct sunlight for too long. View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) With an experience of over 25 years, Rizzo is one of the worlds leading stone painters. Each one of his creations is hand-painted and therefore unique, and even though he can try to reproduce some of his popular past works, no two will be identical. View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) You can learn more about Roberto Rizzos art, and even order painted stones, from his official website. View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@robertorizzoart) President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill is getting a boost from big business. CNN reported Wednesday that more than 160 senior executives across seven major industries have written a letter to Congressional leaders backing the package. 'Previous federal relief measures have been essential, but more msut be done to put the country on a trajectory for a strong, durable recovery,' the letter said. 'Congress should act swiftly and on a bipartisan basis to authorize a stimulus and relief package along the lines of the Biden-Harris administration's proposed American Rescue Plan.' President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package got the backing of more than 150 business leaders in the form of a letter sent Wednesday to Congressional leaders Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon (left) and Google CEO Sundar Pichai (right) were among the business leaders who signed the letter At Wednesday's White House press briefing, press secretary Jen Psaki said the letter proves that there's 'growing concensus' that this package needs to pass. Psaki said the letter was put together by outside groups and wasn't organized by the White House. 'We did not play an organizational role here,' she said. Biden rolled out $1.9 trillion package even before he was sworn-in, and the House is expected to vote on it this week, with the Senate following suit shortly thereafter. He's justified the cost by saying he needs to 'go big' to deal with the economic crisis caused by the nearly year-long COVID-19 pandemic. While the president had originally hoped that he would pick up some GOP support, especially from moderates in the Senate, so far no Republicans have bitten. The White House has since defined 'bipartisan' as Republican voters approving of the package in polling. The White House's Rapid Response Director Michael Gwin tweeted out figures Wednesday morning that included that 60 per cent of Republicans backed Biden's bill. The biggest complaint from GOP lawmakers is the plan is simply too expensive. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has also complained that the package is 'totally partisan.' Progressive Democrats want a $15 minimum wage to be included in the final bill, but that decision will have to be made by the Senate parliamentarian as reconciliation - meaning just a majority of votes in the Senate will be needed for passage - will likely be used to pass the bill. Among the business bosses to sign the letter: Google CEO Sundar Pichai, AT&T CEO John Stankey, Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts, Lyft's co-founder and president John Zimmer, Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO David Solomon and Blackstone's chairman and CEO Stephen Schwartzman, CNN reported. 'Strengthening the public health response to coronavirus is the first step toward economic restoration,' the letter said. 'The American Rescue Plan mobilizes a national vaccination program, delivers economic relief to struggling families, and supports communities that were most damaged by the pandemic.' The American Rescue Plan includes money for vaccination efforts, for reopening schools, for small business relief and for expanded federal unemployment benefits. And it adds $1,400 to the previously passed $600 stimulus checks, for the $2,000 amount wanted by both former President Donald Trump, before he left office, and Biden. CALGARY, AB, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Crescent Point Energy Corp. ("Crescent Point" or the "Company") (TSX: CPG) (NYSE: CPG) confirms the filing of its Annual Information Form ("AIF") for the year ended December 31, 2020, with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities on the System for Electronic Analysis and Retrieval ("SEDAR"). In addition, Crescent Point has filed its Form 40-F for the year ended December 31, 2020, which includes the AIF, with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval ("EDGAR") system. The AIF contains the Company's reserves data and other oil and natural gas information, as required under National Instrument 51-101. An electronic copy of the AIF may be obtained on Crescent Point's website at www.crescentpointenergy.com, on the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com and on the Company's EDGAR profile at www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml. FOR MORE INFORMATION ON CRESCENT POINT ENERGY, PLEASE CONTACT: Brad Borggard, Senior Vice President, Corporate Planning and Capital Markets, or Shant Madian, Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Communications Telephone: (403) 693-0020 Toll-free (US and Canada): 888-693-0020 Fax: (403) 693-0070 Address: Crescent Point Energy Corp. Suite 2000, 585 - 8th Avenue S.W. Calgary AB T2P 1G1 www.crescentpointenergy.com Crescent Point shares are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CPG. SOURCE Crescent Point Energy Corp. Related Links http://www.crescentpointenergy.com AG Nessel Joins Bipartisan Coalition in Urging FCC to Provide E-Rate Funds for Remote Learning During Pandemic AG Nessel Joins Bipartisan Coalition in Urging FCC to Provide E-Rate Funds for Remote Learning During Pandemic Ryan Jarvi 517-599-2746 Attorney General February 24, 2021 LANSING Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently joined 29 other attorneys general in urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to fund internet connectivity and internet-enabled devices to K-12 students whose schools are closed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and who are learning online at home or other locations. This month, the FCC asked for comment on petitions urging the commission to temporarily waive some restrictions on its E-Rate program to allow schools to extend their broadband internet networks to students homes and to allow E-Rate funds to support Wi-Fi hotspots or other broadband connections for students who lack adequate internet connectivity to participate in remote schooling. In their comment letter to the FCC, the attorneys general urge the commission to promptly take action to unlock the doors of the virtual classroom while physical schools remain closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has underscored the critical need for adequate internet connectivity for millions of Americansincluding students, Nessel said. Remote learning has quickly become a way of life across the state of Michigan and this nation but it comes with a cost. My colleagues and I are urging the FCC to use its power to reduce some of that cost by using funds that sit unused and unallocated to support remote learning. The E-Rate program provides funding to better connect schools and libraries in all parts of the nationurban, suburban and rural. Now, all parts of the nation are struggling with the best means to educating K-12 students during the pandemic. At least 55 million K-12 students in the U.S. have, at one time or another, been forced to rely on online learning when their classrooms were closed. When schools are closed, the living room, bedroom or basement becomes the classroom and deserves the same E-Rate support. School districts stand ready to use E-Rate funded services to rapidly connect their students to high-speed internet. In a recent survey of more than 2,000 E-Rate program participants, 93% reported that they would use E-Rate funds to connect students at home for virtual schooling, if allowed by the FCC. The attorneys general also state in their letter that, given the special circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, the FCC is authorized to amend or waive E-Rate program rules as necessary to provide broadband connectivity for remote schooling. Joining Attorney General Nessel in this effort are the attorneys general of Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. On Friday, February 26, at 12.00, the press center of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency will host a roundtable conference entitled "Political Disposition on Eve of Spring Ice Drift or Freeze-Up?" Participants include expert at the Hardarika Strategic Consulting Corporation Kostiantyn Matviyenko; Director of the Institute of Global Strategies Vadym Karasiov; Director of the Ukrainian Barometer sociological service Viktor Nebozhenko; political scientist, Director of the Politics analytical center, candidate of political sciences Mykola Davydiuk (8/5a Reitarska Street). The press conference will be available on the YouTube channel of Interfax-Ukraine. Admission of journalists requires registration on the spot. National & World News, Arts & Culture By Ls Cohen Published: February 24 2021 Over 7 tons of steel from the Twin Towers was forged into the hull of this warship. Soon after 9/11, New York State Governor George Pataki asked the Navy to name a warship operating in the global war on terror after New York in honor of the victims of the attack. State names were traditionally reserved for submarines, but the Navy made an exception in this case. In August 2002, that request was approved. Now, the USS New York (LPD-21) is one of the most state-of-the-art amphibious warships in the Navys fleet. It is manned by a crew of 360 sailors and three permanently assigned Marines. Her motto is Strength Forged Through Sacrifice Never Forget." A Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey takes off from the amphibious transport dock ship USS New York in the Atlantic Ocean, May 21, 2019. The USS New York participated in Fleet Week New York. Photo By: Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Roland John. It also happens to be forged with 7.5 tons of steel salvaged from the World Trade Center wreckage that was incorporated into the construction process. According to the GlobalSecurity.org website, the steel was melted and formed to make the bow stem of the ship. Use of this steel symbolizes the spirit and resiliency of the people of New York. The mission of this warship is to carry Marines and equipment anywhere in the world. Sailors and Marines salute from the flight deck of the USS New York while transiting the Hudson River en route to a pier in Manhattan during Fleet Week New York, May 22, 2019. Photo By: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Ryan Seelbach. It can remain under the radar and place many Marines on the beach very quickly to build combat power ashore before the enemy is even aware, the Department of Defense (DoD) website says of the ship. There is a steel plate recovered from the World Trade Center rubble that is displayed above one of the most-used passageways on the ship and a firefighter's helmet reminds sailors of the first responders who sprung to action. "You can't help when you walk around the ship to notice all the things meant to remind you of why you serve, says Command Master Chief Petty Officer Ben Hodges on the DoD website. The amphibious transport dock ship USS New York fires a rolling airframe missile, or RAM, during training in the Atlantic Ocean, Aug. 3, 2019. Photo By: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Lyle Wilkie. She's the glamorous new sexologist on Married At First Sight, who hasn't been afraid to ask intimate questions about the couples' sex lives. But Alessandra Rampolla cut a much more casual figure as she ran errands near her apartment in Sydney's Bondi Beach, in photos taken ahead of filming in October. The 46-year-old ditched her sassy on-screen attire in favour of a more comfortable look, as she dressed her frame in a striped jumper, jeans and a pair of sandals. Casual chic: Married At First Sight sexologist Alessandra Rampolla cut a casual figure as she ran errands near her apartment in Bondi Beach, in photos taken ahead of filming in October The smiling therapist appeared to go makeup free for the occasion, and whisked her hair into a simple bun. Alessandra is currently single, after her seven-year marriage to businessman John Hernandez ended in 2011. And on Thursday, the Puerto Rican beauty told Who magazine she was open to dating Australian men in the future. Stunner: The 46-year-old ditched her sassy on-screen attire in favour of a more comfortable look, as she dressed her frame in a striped jumper, jeans and a pair of sandals Delightful: The smiling therapist appeared to go makeup free for the occasion, and whisked her hair into a simple bun 'I'm officially single this year!' she said. 'It's a very odd, strange year and I had to face this adventure completely on my own. 'So I'm actually glad I'm not in a relationship because I think it would be really, really hard to be away from them for so long.' She then laughed: 'But, I'm open to Australians making a pass at me!' Looking for love? Alessandra is currently single, after her seven-year marriage to businessman John Hernandez ended in 2011 Alessandra joined Mel Schilling and John Aiken on Married At First Sight's panel of experts this year. As part of her role, Alessandra asks participants about their sex lives during group therapy sessions in an attempt to liven up the intimacy between couples. She replaced former expert Dr Trisha Stratford, who announced last year she was leaving the franchise after seven seasons. Married At First Sight continues Thursday at 7:30pm on Channel Nine After Congress justified party leader Rahul Gandhi's 'North-South Politics', Union Minister Smirti Irani on Wednesday said that she completely agrees with Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar's statement that "insulting India and its citizens is the favourite pastime of Rahul Gandhi." While speaking exclusively to Republic Media Network, Smriti Irani said that this is not the first time that the Wayanad leader has said something against the country and its people. The Union Minister said, "A neta's job is to keep the whole country united and think for the interest of the country and its people, despite his/her own political indifferences." READ | Smriti Irani Calls Out Rahul Gandhi's 'divisive Politics'; Slams Cong's 'hateful' Agenda Smriti Irani speaks to Republic TV While stating that it is absolutely okay to work in the interest of one's own constitutency, the Union Minister however added, "One should never disrespect other states and people of the country for their own interest." Alleging that Rahul Gandhi often insults India and its citizens, Smriti Irani said that a few weeks ago, when the Congress leader had visited Assam, he had insulted Gujarat and its people. Taking a fresh jibe at the Wayanad leader whom she had memorably beaten in the 2019 Amethi Lok Sabha election, Smriti Irani said, "Rahul Gandhi is the same person who on Republic Day had voiced his opinion in favour of country's division during tractor rally violence." She also mentioned that earlier, Rahul Gandhi had also questioned the Indian Army on how it had attacked its enemy-nation Pakistan. Speaking further, the Minister said, "My only question is that is Rahul Gandhi has so much hatred for India and its people then why is he engaging in country's politics and pretending that he is always wishing for India's best interests?" READ | Smriti Irani Slams Rahul Gandhi For Not Debating Budget In LS, Cites Amethi disinterest Rahul Gandhi's 'divisive politics' While addressing a public meeting in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday, Rahul Gandhi stirred controversy by speaking against the North Indian population, in an attempt to woo the audience in Kerala which is a part of Southern India. Rahul Gandhi said, "My experience now since I have been an MP, I have also got to understand the wisdom of people of Kerala. For the first 15 years, I was an MP in the north. I had got used to a different type of politics. For me, coming to Kerala was very refreshing because suddenly I found that people are interested in issues and not just superficially but going into detail in the issues." READ | Smriti Irani Delivers On Poll Promise; Buys Land In UP's Amethi After Shaming Rahul Gandhi "I was talking to some students in the US & I said that I really enjoy going to Kerala. It's not just affection but the way you do your politics. If I might say so, the intelligence with which you do your politics. So, for me, it's been a learning experience & pleasure," he added. Soon after the Congress leader engaged in the "North vs South politics", BJP leaders hit back at Rahul Gandhi. BJP national President JP Nadda said the "divide and rule politics won't work" while reminding him of the Gujarat Civic body elections results which saw BJP's landslide victory. Recently, the Congress leader was ridiculed for his demand for a Ministry of fisheries at the Centre when there existed one already. Rahul Gandhi is the former MP from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, which was said to be a stronghold of Congress. During the 2019 General elections, however, he was compelled to contest from Wayanad as well which is another stronghold of Congress, for the fear of losing from Amethi where BJP's Smriti Irani contested against him again and won this time. READ | Amid Farmers' Stir, Smriti Irani Reminds Rahul Gandhi Of His Loan Waiver Promise U.S. Attorney John Durham speaks to reporters on the steps of U.S. District Court in New Haven, Conn., on April 25, 2006. (Bob Child/AP Photo) Why a Durham Report Is Becoming Highly Unlikely Commentary Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee say they want to know if President Joe Bidens nominee for attorney general, Merrick Garland, will allow special counsel John Durhams investigation into the origins of the FBIs Crossfire Hurricane probe to continue. I have no reason to think he should not remain in place, Garland told Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on Feb. 22. In reality, if confirmed, Garland wont allow Durham to stay in place, never mind issue a report. The prospect that Bidens attorney general might allow Durham to indict former Obama administration officials is ludicrous. Remember that documents released over the past year gave evidence that as vice president, Biden was not only aware of the spying operation against Trump administration officials but participated in it. Biden not only knew that the FBI was framing incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn but suggested that the Department of Justice might charge Flynn for violating the Logan Act. In other words, the FBI officials that Durham is reportedly investigating are Bidens co-conspirators. To allow them to be indicted would not only point to Bidens guilt but also show that the most powerful man in the world is unable or unwilling to protect allies who have helped advance the cause of the party he now leads. That would show Biden to be weak. Garland understands that his primary duty as Bidens chief law enforcement officer isnt to oversee the fair and equal treatment of all Americans under the law but to protect the president and the party he serves. The Biden administration has already shown its a very different animal than Trumps. During his four years in office, Trumps allies complained that his biggest problem was staffing. Its true that key spots in his administration were filled with officials who opposed his America First agenda. There were problems with the personnel office, insiders explain. Further, sometimes Trump family members pressed for friends without the experience or commitment to implement Trumps vision. But even those least experienced or most opposed to Trumps vision would have fallen in line if hed given them cause to fear him. In The Prince, Machiavelli writes that in deciding between earning the love and respect of his subjects, the successful prince must choose the public mood that he can control. Instead, the 45th president of the United States sought love. Perhaps the clearest record of that is to be found in former FBI Director James Comeys memos of his meetings and conversations with Trump. They are unintentionally moving documents, showing that Trump solicited the help and even friendship of experienced bureaucrats such as Comey. But to him, Trumps entreaties signaled weakness. Soon, Comey saw that the new president had become frustrated when the director failed to publicly clear him of any ties to Russia. And Trump only asked him again to clear him. Instead of firing Comey in disgrace, he cut Flynn loose and then petitioned Comey to go easy on the retired general, the one man who was most loyal to the president. As a result, Trump got the Mueller investigation, which consumed two years of his presidency. But even then, there was still time for Trump to elicit the respect that is engendered by fear. William Barr may be a decent man, but hes a Washington man and thus subject to the winds of power that course through the capital. What makes a Washington man honorable is not any abstract sense of duty but the fear that if he doesnt serve his boss, he will be destroyed. In the spring of 2020, Barr counseled the president against firing FBI Director Christopher Wray, warning it would be taken as evidence that the White House was in chaos in the middle of an election year. Barr could have fired Wray himself, and had reason to do so, for withholding documents from DOJ prosecutors. But the attorney general was probing the president. By agreeing to Barrs wishes, Trump indicated there would be no price to be paid for crossing him. Barr hedged his bets with the potential victory of a candidate who had shown that by spying on the Trump team, there was no question he would, if victorious in November, retaliate against Trumps attorney general for chasing him. With no pressure on him from Trump, Barr didnt pressure his prosecutor to choose between issuing indictments by late summer, as had previously been promised, or being replaced by someone who would. For all practical purposes, the Durham investigation was over by last April. Bidens attorney general would have an additional incentive to shut down Durham for good. Lets say the special counsel had the evidence to indict the senior FBI officials he had been investigating. That would confirm what Republicans have been saying about Crossfire Hurricane since 2017the FBI wasnt investigating Russian interference, it was spying on a presidential candidate and then the commander-in-chief. To show that Bidens party was lying about that would suggest that maybe the Democrats were lying about other things, too, maybe lying about everything. They lied about the phone call that got Trump impeached; they lied about the mostly peaceful George Floyd riots; they lied about the Jan. 6 protests by calling them an armed insurrection; and most importantly, they lied about the transparency and legitimacy of the 2020 election. Republicans could try to fight Garlands nomination or at least use the hearings to advance a case about Democratic Party corruption, but they wont, because they fear the new administration. Lee Smith is the author of the recently published book The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. For the third year in a row, the Ethisphere Institute, an organisation focused on defining and advancing the standards of ethical business practices worldwide, has named UPMC one of the worlds most ethical companies. UPMC, which has provided healthcare in Ireland since 2006, is one of 135 organizations on Ethispheres 2021 list, which spans 22 countries and 47 different industries. Four companies headquartered in Ireland also made the list this year. Ethisphere evaluated UPMC as an integrated healthcare delivery and finance system, and it is one of only two organisations recognized in that category. To quantitatively assess a companys performance in an objective and standardised manner, Ethisphere examined a wide range of factors, including how applicants are adapting and responding to the pandemic, inclusion and social justice, environmental, social and governance factors, safety and equity. At UPMC, we strive to uphold the highest level of ethical standards as we provide patient- and member-centred healthcare to the communities we serve, said Diane Holder, executive vice president at UPMC and president and chief executive officer of UPMC Health Plan. We are honoured to be recognised by Ethisphere for a third consecutive time for our ethical foundation, commitment to integrity and leading by example while pursuing our organisational mission. UPMC and UPMC Health Plan have consistently scored above the honoree average in the Compliance and Ethics Program section of the evaluation, which is the most heavily weighted category. Other categories include culture of ethics, corporate citizenship and responsibility, governance and leadership and reputation. Visit the Ethisphere website for a full list of the 2021 World's Most Ethical Companies. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. PITTSBURGH, Feb. 24, 2021 - Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have discovered a blood biomarker that predicts kidney transplant rejection with a lead time of about eight months, which could give doctors an opportunity to intervene and prevent permanent damage. These results, published today in Science Translational Medicine, not only identify a warning signal that something is going wrong, but also suggest an existing medication that could be given to these patients to right the course of their long-term recovery. "We can't tell a priori if a patient is on too much or too little immune suppression--we don't know until after rejection or an infection has already started," said senior author David Rothstein, M.D., the Pittsburgh Steelers Chair in Transplantation and professor of surgery, medicine and immunology at Pitt. "We wanted to find something that would tell us this patient is at risk of rejecting later so that we could change their immunosuppressants up front before the immune system revs up, before scarring and chronic damage is done." About a third of patients lose their transplanted kidney within 10 years, and at that point, a new transplant isn't easy. The patient's immune system is already sensitized to the foreign organ, and it's harder to find a match. Rothstein and his colleagues at the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute at Pitt analyzed blood samples taken from 244 patients who received kidney transplants at UPMC between 2013-2015, as well as another 95 kidney transplant patients who were treated at Royal Free Hospital, London, and found a highly predictive biomarker. Of the patients who were identified as high-risk for rejection based on this new biomarker, 91% rejected the organ within the first year, compared to 10% in the low-risk group. And the high-risk group was significantly more likely to lose their transplanted kidneys five years after the surgery. The biomarker Rothstein and colleagues discovered is a proxy for functioning of regulatory B cells--a type of immune cell that tunes up or down the immune response--which have recently been implicated in organ rejection and proved challenging to measure. B cells can secrete both IL-10 and tumor necrosis factor (TNF) and, according to this new study, it's the ratio of these two molecules that best measures regulatory B cell activity and predicts whether a patient is at high risk of rejection. "Being a functional biomarker, ours gives us an idea of what goes wrong in these high-risk patients," Rothstein said. "The balance between IL-10 and TNF seems to indicate your immune setpoint--is your immune system going to be quiescent or is it going to be revved up and try to reject the transplant? We hope we can restore that balance with anti-TNF drugs." Anti-TNF drugs haven't been used much for transplant patients, but they're a mainstay for treating rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and other conditions marked by inflammation, so the side effect profile is well-known. To mitigate that risk, the idea is to treat patients with anti-TNF drugs for just a few months, which might be enough to "reset" the immune system to prevent rejection before it starts. A human clinical trial is needed, but to show proof of principle, Rothstein and colleagues applied anti-TNF to B cells taken from high-risk patients and saw not only changes in the biomarker, but also a host of other changes indicative of restored regulatory B cell activity. ### Additional authors on the study include Aravind Cherukuri, Ph.D., Rajil Mehta, M.D., Amit Tevar, M.D., Douglas Landsittel, Ph.D., Fadi Lakkis, M.D., and Sundaram Hariharan, M.D., of Pitt and UPMC; Alan Salama, Ph.D., Ciara Magee, Mark Harber, Ph.D., and Hans Stauss, M.D., Ph.D., of the University College of London; Richard Baker, Ph.D., of St. James's University Hospital in Leeds; and Kanishka Mohib, Ph.D., and Leting Zheng, M.D., of Pitt. This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (R34 AI136782), Roche Organ Transplant Research Fund, American Society of Transplantation and the National Institute for Health Research, UK (RCF2013/14-058). To read this release online or share it, visit https:/ / www. upmc. com/ media/ news/ 022421-kidney-tx-biomarker [when embargo lifts]. About the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine As one of the nation's leading academic centers for biomedical research, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine integrates advanced technology with basic science across a broad range of disciplines in a continuous quest to harness the power of new knowledge and improve the human condition. Driven mainly by the School of Medicine and its affiliates, Pitt has ranked among the top 10 recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1998. In rankings recently released by the National Science Foundation, Pitt ranked fifth among all American universities in total federal science and engineering research and development support. Likewise, the School of Medicine is equally committed to advancing the quality and strength of its medical and graduate education programs, for which it is recognized as an innovative leader, and to training highly skilled, compassionate clinicians and creative scientists well-equipped to engage in world-class research. The School of Medicine is the academic partner of UPMC, which has collaborated with the University to raise the standard of medical excellence in Pittsburgh and to position health care as a driving force behind the region's economy. For more information about the School of Medicine, see http://www. medschool. pitt. edu . About UPMC A $21 billion health care provider and insurer, Pittsburgh-based UPMC is inventing new models of patient-centered, cost-effective, accountable care. The largest nongovernmental employer in Pennsylvania, UPMC integrates 89,000 employees, 40 hospitals, 700 doctors' offices and outpatient sites, and a more than 3.7 million-member Insurance Services Division, the largest medical insurer in western Pennsylvania. In the most recent fiscal year, UPMC contributed $1.2 billion in benefits to its communities, including more care to the region's most vulnerable citizens than any other health care institution, and paid $587 million in federal, state and local taxes. Working in close collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences, UPMC shares its clinical, managerial and technological skills worldwide through its innovation and commercialization arm, UPMC Enterprises, and through UPMC International. U.S. News & World Report consistently ranks UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside on its annual Honor Roll of America's Best Hospitals and ranks UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh on its Honor Roll of America's Best Children's Hospitals. For more information, go to UPMC.com. http://www. upmc. com/ media Contact: Erin Hare Mobile: 412-738-1097 E-mail: HareE@upmc.edu Contact: Andrea Kunicky Mobile: 412-552-7448 E-mail: KunickyA@upmc.edu Gov. Charlie Baker on Tuesday said the biggest impediment to more people getting vaccinated or being able to book an appointment is supply. "Every first dose we get ends up in somebody's arm and it ends up in somebody's arm in a big hurry," he said. "The problem is we get 130,000 first doses per week and we have a much bigger universe of people who are eligible to be vaccinated." WASHINGTON (AP) President Joe Bidens nominee to head the Interior Department faced sharp questions from Republicans Tuesday over what several called her radical ideas that include opposition to fracking and the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Deb Haaland, a New Mexico congresswoman named to lead the Interior Department, tried to reassure GOP lawmakers, saying she is committed to strike the right balance as Interior manages oil drilling and other energy development while seeking to conserve public lands and address climate change. If confirmed, Haaland, 60, would be the first Native American to lead a Cabinet agency. Native Americans see her nomination as the best chance to move from consultation on tribal issues to consent and to put more land into the hands of tribal nations either outright or through stewardship agreements. The Interior Department has broad oversight over nearly 600 federally recognized tribes as well as energy development and other uses for the nations sprawling federal lands. The historic nature of my confirmation is not lost on me, but I will say that it is not about me, Haaland testified. Rather, I hope this nomination would be an inspiration for Americans moving forward together as one nation and creating opportunities for all of us. Haaland's hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee was adjourned after nearly 2 1/2 hours and will resume Wednesday. Under questioning from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., the panel's chairman, Haaland said the U.S. will continue to rely on fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas even as it moves toward Bidens goal of net zero carbon emissions by mid-century. The transition to clean energy is not going to happen overnight, she said. Manchin, who is publicly undecided on Haalands nomination, appeared relieved, saying he supports innovation, not elimination of fossil fuels. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., was less impressed. He displayed a large chart featuring a quote from last November, before Haaland was selected to lead Interior, in which she said: If I had my way, it'd be great to stop all gas and oil leasing on federal and public lands." If confirmed as Interior secretary, "you will get to have it your way,'' Daines told Haaland. She replied that Biden's vision not hers will set the course for Interior. "It is President Biden's agenda, not my own agenda, that I will be moving forward,'' Haaland said, an answer she repeated several times. While Biden imposed a moratorium on oil and gas drilling on federal lands which doesnt apply to tribal lands he has repeatedly said he does not oppose fracking. Biden rejected the long-pIanned Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office. Haaland also faced questions over her appearance at protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota before she was elected to Congress in 2018. Haaland said she went there in solidarity with Native American tribes and other water protectors who felt they were not consulted in the best way'' before the multi-state oil pipeline was approved. Asked by Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., if she would oppose a renewal of the pipeline permit, Haaland said she would first ensure that tribes are properly consulted. She told Hoeven she also would "listen to you and consult with you.'' Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said the GOP questions over oil drilling and pipelines revealed a partisan divide in the committee. I almost feel like your nomination is this proxy fight about the future of fossil fuels," Cantwell said, adding that Haaland had made clear her intention to carry out Bidens clean-energy agenda. She and other Democrats very much appreciate the fact that youre doing that, and thats what I think a president deserves with his nominee,'' Cantwell said. In her opening statement, Haaland told lawmakers that as the daughter of a Pueblo woman, she learned early to value hard work. Her mother is a Navy veteran and worked for a quarter-century at the Bureau of Indian Education, an Interior Department agency. Her father was a Marine who served in Vietnam. He received the Silver Star and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. As a military family, we moved every few years ... but no matter where we lived, my dad taught me and my siblings to appreciate nature, whether on a mountain trail or walking along the beach,'' Haaland said. The future congresswoman spent summers with her grandparents in a Laguna Pueblo village. It was in the cornfields with my grandfather where I learned the importance of water and protecting our resources and where I gained a deep respect for the Earth,'' she said. Haaland pledged to lead the Interior Department with honor and integrity and said she will be a fierce advocate for our public lands. She promised to listen to and work with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle and ensure that decisions are based on science. She also vowed to honor the sovereignty of tribal nations and recognize their part in Americas story.'' Some Democrats and Native American advocates called the frequent description of Haaland as radical a loaded reference to her tribal status. That kind of language is sort of a dog whistle for certain folks that see somebody who is an Indigenous woman potentially being in a position of power, said Tajin Perez with the group Western Native Voice. In an op-ed in USA Today, former Sens. Mark and Tom Udall said Haaland's record "is in line with mainstream conservation priorities. Thus, the exceptional criticism of Rep. Haaland and the threatened holds on her nomination must be motivated by something other than her record.'' Mark Udall is an ex-Colorado senator, while cousin Tom Udall just retired as a New Mexico senator. Tom Udall's father, Stewart, was Interior secretary in the 1960s. Daines called the notion of racial overtones in his remarks outrageous. I would love to see a Native American serve in the Cabinet. That would be a proud moment for all of us in this country. But this is about her record and her views, he said in an interview. National civil rights groups have joined forces with tribal leaders and environmental groups in supporting Haaland. A letter signed by nearly 500 national and regional organizations calls her a proven leader and the right person to lead the charge against the existential threats of our time,'' including climate change and racial justice issues on federal lands. ___ Associated Press writer Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana, contributed to this report. GlobeNewswire AS Pro Kapital Grupp has not yet published audited annual report for 2020 (related notice: https://view.news.eu.nasdaq.com/view?id=b9a14c4af26fbcf29852a28f2d4144b75&lang=en). However, the Company is using unaudited financial statements as basis of preparation in this report. All details related to this issue can be find in Note 2 of the report. MANAGEMENT REPORT Chairmans summary Start of 2021 has been a dynamic working period. We have continued working on our developments, where we see remarkable results, but also had to face a setback as after reporting date the decision of the Supreme Court terminated reorganisation proceedings of our subsidiary AS Tallinna Moekombinaat which led to the permanent insolvency of the subsidiary. Real estate development We have continued construction of Ratsuri Houses and Kalaranna projects and preparing project documentation for the following development phases in Tallinn. In March we completed Ratsuri Houses in Kristiine City where we had booked or presold all 39 apartments already prior to the completion. All apartments were sold and handed over within March and April. Soon we start handing over apartments in two first buildings of Kalaranna project, where completion of eight buildings with the total of 240 apartments will be achieved step by step in four phases. Today we have reservations or presales concluded for 85% of premises. After reporting date, we concluded an agreement for sales of all business premises of Kalaranna project for 16.16 million euros (with VAT) including the option to sell also premises of the last phase, which we are preparing to launch in the near future. This year we have started with construction of the new project Kindrali Houses in Kristiine City, where two building complexes with 129 apartments will be raised by next summer. In this project we had booked or presold more than half of the apartments before signing the construction agreement. Today over 90% of the apartments have been booked or presold. In Riga we are selling our luxury product River Breeze Residence and prepare for the further development of Kliversala Residential Quarter. We have received a building permit for City Oasis residential quarter with 326 apartments a tranquil and green living environment in the city centre. We will be ready to proceed with construction activities as soon as the market situation becomes more favourable. Unfortunately, the Latvian real-estate market has not been as active as its neighbouring countries Estonia and Lithuania. However, we have observed some changes in the recent months and recovery of the market. In 2019 we completed five buildings in Saltiniu Namai Attico project in Vilnius with 115 apartments. Today we have only 5 apartments unsold. We are preparing for the following phase with city villas and commercial building and plan to start the construction this year. Our revenues from the sales of the real estate depend on the completion of the residential developments as the revenues are recorded at the moment notary deeds of sale are concluded. In 2021 we have already completed Ratsuri Houses project with 39 apartments and soon we start handing over exclusive homes in prime location of Kalaranna project. T1 Mall of Tallinn On 3 April 2020 Harju County Court initiated reorganization proceedings of the operator of T1 Mall of Tallinn - AS Tallinna Moekombinaat (TMK). Reorganization proceedings were terminated a year later by the decision of 26 April 2021 of the Supreme Court not to take TMKs appeal into proceedings. Without the reorganisation proceedings AS Tallinna Moekombinaat is not capable to fulfil its obligations and has become permanently insolvent. On 7 May 2021 Harju County Court appointed Kristo Teder as an interim bankruptcy trustee of TMK. Interim bankruptcy trustee presented to the court a written report and opinion on 27 May 2021. Based on the report the court will take a decision about the following proceedings. The management of TMK continues to operate T1 Mall of Tallinn in cooperation with the interim trustee in bankruptcy until appointment of bankruptcy trustee and declaration of insolvency. Supreme Courts decision as an adjusting event after balance sheet date requires writing-off investment into subsidiary. AS Pro Kapital Eesti has written off an investment into subsidiary in amount of 13.4 million euros due to negative equity of TMK and as a result of adjusting event also receivables in the total amount of 26 million euros as at 31 December 2020. When bankruptcy is declared and the Company loses control over subsidiary, TMK will not be consolidated into the group any more. Although discontinuing consolidation will influence consolidated results by 26 million negatively, it will have a positive effect to the Group financial results due to derecognition of negative equity of the subsidiary. Bankruptcy of TMK will not affect liquidity of the Group nor short-term cash flows. Long-term cash flows are influenced by uncollectable receivables to the Group. Adjusting event described above and writing off the debts of subsidiary on parent company level has triggered a non-compliance with financial covenants of secured bonds (Notes 9 and 19). Hotel operations Last year had a significant impact on PK Parkhotel Kurhaus in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, the hotel was closed from March until the end of June and due to new restrictions hotel is not operating since November 2020. The impact of COVID-19 has been 0.7 million euros in less hotel revenues in the first quarter of 2021 comparing to last year. However, due to governmental support, the net result was better by 30 thousand euros. We expect to reopen the hotel in the middle of June. In the following months we continue construction works of ongoing development projects and plan to start with the following phases. In spite of losing T1 Mall of Tallinn, our real estate development is doing well, the Company is a going concern and we have an optimistic view for the future. Paolo Michelozzi CEO Key financials The total revenue of the Company in the first quarter of 2021 was 6.6 million euros, which is an increase of 12% compared to the reference period (2020 3M: 5.9 million euros). The real estate sales revenues are recorded at the moment of handing over the premises to the buyer. Therefore, the revenues from sales of real estate depend on the completion of the residential developments. The real estate sales revenue was higher in 2021 due to completion of Ratsuri Houses project, where apartments were handed over to new owners during March-April. In 2021, the Company has continued with presales of current development projects: first phases of Kalaranna District and Kindrali Houses in Tallinn. The gross profit in the first quarter of 2021 decreased by 8% amounting to 2.0 million euros compared to 2.1 million euros during the same period in 2020. The operating profit in the first quarter of 2021 was 1.9 million euros compared to 0.3 million euros during the same period in 2020. The increase in operating result is mainly influenced by the sale of investment property. The net result in the first quarter of 2021 was -2.1 million euros compared to -4.0 million euros during the same period in 2020. The net result of the reporting period was influenced by the sale of the investment property, but as well in fewer administrative (decreased 27% compared to 2020 3M) and financial costs (decreased 6% compared to 2020 3M). Cash generated from operating activities in the first quarter of 2021 was -2.1 million euros compared to -4.0 million euros during the same period in 2020. The net result of the reporting period was influenced by the sale of the investment property, but as well in fewer administrative (decreased 27% compared to 2020 3M) and financial costs (decreased 6% compared to 2020 3M). Net assets per share on 31 March 2021 totalled to 0.20 euros compared to 1.19 euros on 31 March 2020. Key performance indicators 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited*) Revenue, th EUR 6 563 5 873 19 234 Gross profit, th EUR 1 974 2 137 6 775 Gross profit, % 30% 36% 35% Operating result, th EUR 1 897 346 -43 108 Operating result, % 29% 6% -224% Net result, th EUR -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Net result, % -32% -68% -309% Earnings per share, EUR -0.03 -0.07 -0.98 31.03.2021 31.03.2020 (Restated*) 31.12.2020 (Unaudited*) Total Assets, th EUR 185 287 207 361 179 048 Total Liabilities, th EUR 177 829 142 022 169 477 Total Equity, th EUR 7 458 65 339 9 571 Debt / Equity ** 18.44 2.10 14.15 Return on Assets, % *** Return on Equity, % **** -1.2% -1.9% -30.7% Net asset value per share, EUR ***** -24.8% -5.9% -141.2% * See Note 2 in the Consolidated Interim Report for I Quarter and 3 Months Of 2021 for details regarding the unaudited status of the report and restatement as a result of an error 2019 year end results **debt / equity = total debt / total equity***return on assets = net profit/loss / total average assets****return on equity = net profit/loss / total average equity*****net asset value per share = net equity / number of shares CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS Consolidated interim statement of financial position in thousands of euros 31.03.2021 31.03.2020 (Restated) 31.12.2020 (Unaudited) ASSETS Current assets Cash and cash equivalents 13 331 9 459 9 393 Current receivables 1 542 1 281 1 797 Inventories 61 481 40 329 58 352 Total current assets 76 354 51 069 69 542 Non-current assets Non-current receivables 3 715 2 942 3 517 Property, plant and equipment 6 717 7 100 6 745 Right-of-use assets 318 480 357 Investment property 97 814 145 406 98 512 Intangible assets 369 364 375 Total non-current assets 108 933 156 292 109 506 TOTAL ASSETS 185 287 207 361 179 048 LIABILITIES AND EQUITY Current liabilities Current debt 104 373 83 153 107 581 Customer advances 10 284 5 935 7 866 Current payables 24 011 10 837 22 211 Tax liabilities 1 280 849 458 Short-term provisions 471 329 459 Total current liabilities 140 419 101 103 138 575 Non-current liabilities Long-term debt 33 425 38 398 27 255 Other non-current payables 2 638 1 064 2 295 Deferred income tax liabilities 1 151 1 320 1 170 Long-term provisions 196 137 182 Total non-current liabilities 37 410 40 919 30 902 TOTAL LIABILITIES 177 829 142 022 169 477 Equity attributable to owners of the Company Share capital in nominal value 11 338 11 338 11 338 Share premium 5 661 5 661 5 661 Statutory reserve 1 134 1 134 1 134 Revaluation reserve 2 984 3 262 2 984 Retained earnings -8 031 47 647 47 647 Profit/ Loss for the period -1 951 -3 788 -55 678 Total equity attributable to owners of the Company 11 135 65 254 13 086 Non-controlling interest -3 677 85 -3 515 TOTAL EQUITY 7 458 65 339 9 571 TOTAL LIABILITIES AND EQUITY 185 287 207 361 179 048 Consolidated interim statements of profit and loss and other comprehensive income in thousands of euros 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited) CONTINUING OPERATIONS Operating income Revenue 6 563 5 873 19 234 Cost of goods sold -4 589 -3 736 -12 459 Gross profit 1 974 2 137 6 775 Marketing expenses -126 -161 -621 Administrative expenses -1 143 -1 562 -6 154 Other income 1 351 3 478 Other expenses -159 -71 -43 586 Operating profit 1 897 346 -43 108 Financial income 1 1 4 Financial expense -3 994 -4 244 -15 998 Profit / loss before income tax -2 096 -3 897 -59 102 Income tax -17 -69 -354 Profit / loss for the period -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Attributable to: Equity holders of the parent -1 951 -3 788 -55 678 Non-controlling interest -162 -178 -3 778 Items that will not be reclassified subsequently to profit or loss Net change in properties revaluation reserve 0 0 -278 Total comprehensive income / loss for the year -2 113 -3 966 -59 734 Attributable to: Equity holders of the parent -1 951 -3 788 -55 956 Non-controlling interest -162 -178 -3 778 Earnings per share for the period (EUR) -0.03 -0.07 -0.98 Consolidated interim statements of cash flows in thousands of euros 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited) Cash flows from operating activities Profit/loss for the period -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Adjustments for: Depreciation, amortisation of non-current assets 100 105 416 Gain from disposal of investment property -1 092 0 0 Loss from write-off PPE and intangible assets 0 0 8 Change in fair value of property, plant, equipment 0 0 -16 Change in fair value of investment property 0 0 43 128 Finance income and costs 3 993 4 243 15 994 Changes in deferred tax assets and liabilities -19 -27 -178 Other non-monetary changes (net amounts) 2 -1 -3 111 Changes in working capital: Trade receivables and prepayments 53 -409 -1 514 Inventories -3 129 703 -13 011 Liabilities and prepayments 3 506 1 336 10 025 Provisions 13 10 59 Net cash generated in operating activities 1 314 1 994 -7 656 Cash flows from investing activities Payments for property, plant and equipment -28 -10 -94 Payments for intangible assets -2 -2 -43 Payments for investment property -210 -302 -844 Proceeds from disposal of investment property 2 000 0 0 Interests received 0 1 1 Net cash generated in investing activities 1 760 -313 -980 Cash flows from financing activities Net proceeds from secured bonds 0 28 500 28 500 Redemption of convertible bonds -69 0 -33 Redemption of non-convertible bonds 0 -28 000 -28 000 Proceeds from borrowings 5 838 100 14 410 Repayment of borrowings -2 857 -648 -1 376 Repayment of lease liabilities -46 -48 -135 Interests paid -2 002 -2 742 -5 953 Net cash generated by financing activities 864 -2 838 7 413 Net change in cash and cash equivalents 3 938 -1 157 -1 223 Cash and cash equivalents at the beginning 9 393 10 616 10 616 Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the period 13 331 9 459 9 393 The full report can be found in the file attached. Allan RemmelkoorMember of the Board+372 614 4920prokapital@prokapital.ee Attachment PKG Q1 2021 ENG McDonald's has brought a new McFlurry to Australia for a limited time only - and it's sure to delight New Zealanders living across the ditch. Packed with triple chocolate chunk cookie crumb and hot fudge sauce, the flavour is a collaboration between Macca's and cult Kiwi biscuit brand Cookie Time, which has become a national treasure since it was founded in Christchurch in 1983. Australian customers can order a Cookie Time McFlurry in restaurants across the country from Wednesday, March 3. But eager fans too excited to wait for the in-store launch can order the new flavour for $5.10 (AUD) on Uber Eats right now. Australian customers can now order this limited-edition Cookie Time McFlurry for $5.10 on Uber Eats Packed with triple chocolate chunk cookie crumb and hot fudge sauce, the flavour is a collaboration between Macca's and cult Kiwi biscuit brand Cookie Time (biscuits pictured) If the chocolate and fudge mix doesn't do enough to sate your taste buds, McDonald's recommends adding Cadbury Flake, mini M&Ms and extra caramel topping to your ice cream for 55c each. The Cookie Time swirl will only be available in Australian Macca's until the end of April, so you'd better move fast. The news comes after the fast food giant yesterday teased fans with a social media post about the latest release, promising 'something big is coming.' 'Before you say bubblegum, this is a McFlurry collaboration Australia's never seen before one for all our Kiwi friends!' a post on the McDonald's Australia Facebook page read. Fans shared ideas about what the new flavour might be, with many guessing pavlova, Milo, Violet Crumble and Caramello Koala. But the Cookie Time creation did not disappoint. Cookie Time has become a national treasure since it was founded in Christchurch in 1983 The announcement prompted customers to flood the comments section with responses such as 'oh my god sis, catch me at Macca's daily'. 'Guess I'm getting fat again, if it's Cookie Time cookies,' another person said. McDonald's New Zealand stores first sold the Cookie Time McFlurry in 2018, mixing its signature soft serve and caramel sauce with chunks of chocolate chip cookie. Crude oil exports from Canada to the United States are increasingly being shipped by rail due to the now chronic shortage of pipeline capacity that is only going to become more severe as Canadian oil output rises while pipeline capacity stagnates. Bloombergs Robert Tuttle reports that Cenovus Energy and Imperial Oil are among the companies increasingly using oil trains to carry their heavy crude south of the border. The companies combined oil exports by train have tripled since last July, the report said, adding that a railway company now expects other producers to follow in their footsteps. President Joe Biden canceled the federal permit for Keystone XL on his first day in office despite warnings from analysts, as well as Albertas Premier Jason Kenney, who said that killing Keystone XL would not diminish demand for heavy crude oil at U.S. refineries in the future. It could, however, raise Americas dependence on crude oil imports from OPEC, instead of imports from Canada, for the U.S. Gulf Coast. This is a gut punch for the Canadian and Alberta economies. Sadly, it is an insult directed at the United States most important ally and trading partner on day one of a new administration, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said after the decision to ax the pipeline was announced. The provinces government is currently considering forcing Washington to pay it for the money poured so far into the project, which amounts to about $1.2 billion. According to an official from Premier Kenneys office, Alberta may invoke terms in the North American Free Trade Agreement to recoup at least some of its expenses. Meanwhile, research has suggested that transporting oil by rail rather than pipeline is riskier in terms of spills. At the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, this was highlighted by two major oil train derailments that occurred within two months of each other in Saskatchewan. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam is supporting a call made by a key Chinese official for electoral reforms that would ensure the city's legislature is filled with pro-Beijing loyalists. Xia Baolong, the director of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council, said Monday that the city could only be ruled by "patriots" which he said excludes people he described as "troublemakers." Lam told reporters Tuesday that she understands why officials in the central government are concerned, as "they do not want the situation to deteriorate further in such a way that 'one country, two systems' cannot be implemented." Lucknow, Feb 24 : Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday mounted a blistering attack on the opposition. Replying to the debate on the Governor's address, the Chief Minister slammed the opposition for raising objections over the Governor's delay of a few minutes in coming to the Assembly for her address on February 18. "There should be respect for those occupying constitutional positions. They do not belong to one party but are above political lines. The tendency to attack such persons is a matter of concern," he said. In an obvious reference to the Samajwadi Party without taking its name, Yogi Adityanath said, "There is a new culture of wearing caps of different colours." Recalling an incident, he said at a function he once saw a two-year-old boy point towards a leader who was wearing a cap of a particular colour and saying, "Mummy, dekho wo goonda (look he is criminal)." "Caps of different colours make the Vidhan Sabha look like a drama company," he said. The Chief Minister, without taking names, also criticized the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) over its allegations of a scam in the purchase of oximeters and PPE kits. "When we probed the matter, we found that these items were purchased at a much higher rate in Delhi. When we told them (AAP), they have been quiet after that," he said. The Chief Minister then said that those who reached Parliament from Uttar Pradesh, are now ridiculing the state in Kerala. "Who is insulting UP and Amethi? Who has the time to visit Italy but not Amethi? Who is now visiting temples in UP?" he asked, even as Congress members made feeble attempts to protest. Yogi Adityanath said the Congress had turned the pandemic into a joke when it said it wanted to send 1,000 buses for migrant workers. "We checked and found that they had given registration numbers of scooters and three-wheelers. Is this not a joke on the people? If they had the buses, why did they not use them to send children from Kota?" he said. In his speech, the Chief Minister listed in detail the steps taken by his government to deal with the pandemic and also efforts made to improve the condition of farmers. Former Deputy Health Minister, Dr. Bernard Okoe Boye has asked Ghanaians not to be afraid of taking the COVID-19 vaccines. According to him, all the negative rumors and conspiracy theories about the vaccines are untrue. He called on the citizenry to ignore the misconceptions. Speaking to host Nana Yaw Kesseh on Peace FM's "Kokrokoo" programme, Dr. Okoe Boye outlined the objectives for the vaccines stressing it is to reduce the chances of people contracting the disease and minimize the mortality rate. "We want to curtail the spread of the disease . . . another thing that the vaccines help to do is to reduce morbidity. One thing that the vaccine helps to achieve is if you don't get protection or it doesn't prevent you from contracting the disease and you get infected, your risk of severe morbidity is low. We're not just afraid of you contracting the disease but the end result which is death. That's the most important thing that we want to deal with. The last one is mortality. When you give the vaccine, it reduces the mortality rate drastically," he highlighted. He assured the government will not endanger the lives of Ghanaians. 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. Featured Video With all-party support, Canadas House of Commons overwhelmingly approved a provocative motion Monday that condemns China for perpetrating a genocide against the countrys Uyghur Muslim minority and other Turkic peoples. Introduced by the hard-right Conservatives, the motion equates Beijings state surveillance and repression of the Uyghurs with the Nazi holocaust and other horrific crimes. It is the latest salvo in a propaganda campaign aimed at providing a bogus human rights cover for Canadian imperialisms ever expanding role in Washingtons all-sided diplomatic, economic and military-strategic offensive against Chinaand under conditions where US President Joe Biden has vowed to wage extreme competition with China. President Joe Biden speaks after holding a virtual meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in the East Room of the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) MPs from all parties, including the governing Liberals and the nominally left New Democrats and Greens, backed the genocide motion, and a Bloc Quebecois (BQ) amendment that urged Ottawa to press for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be withdrawn from China. With the exception of Foreign Minister Marc Garneau, all members of the Liberal cabinet, including Trudeau, absented themselves from the House of Commons during Mondays vote. Garneau abstained. In the face of opposition charges of inaction and appeasement, Trudeau and Garneau have been at pains to stress that their government would be willing to embrace the genocide charge, if done in coordination with Washington and the other G-7 imperialist powers. The incendiary charge of genocide levelled against the Stalinist Communist Party regime in Beijing is politically motivated. While there is no doubt that Chinas government, which represents the interests of a corrupt capitalist oligarchy, is carrying out widespread repression against the Uyghurs of Xinjiang province and the working class throughout the country, the lurid claims that it is committing a genocide have no basis in fact. They are being promoted in the United States, Canada and other Western imperialist countries with the aim of demonizing China, labelling those who oppose the US strategic offensive against China as apologists for crimes against humanity and creating a base of popular support for aggression and war with Beijing. It is a classic case of human rights imperialism, which has been used by Washington, Ottawa and the other imperialist powers to justify one war of aggression after another over the past 25 years. The claim that Beijing is conducting genocide against the Uyghurs goes hand-in-hand with the promotion of totally discredited claims, originating from far-right groups and now embraced by the Biden administration, that the coronavirus was released from a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan. (See Washingtons Wuhan laboratory lie) The passage of the China genocide motion came on the eve of yesterdays virtual summit between Trudeau and President Biden. Picking up from where the far-right Trump administration left off, Biden and his secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, have vowed to continue and intensify Washingtons bullying of Beijing. Unlike Trump, however, whose policy was characterized by unilateralism, Biden has indicated that he will work to cobble together an alliance of Western democracies to more effectively confront China and use human rights issues to try to give this offensive a progressive hue. In a recent speech to an online meeting of the Munich Security Conference, Biden invoked Europe and Americas shared democratic values to appeal for transatlantic unity to push back against the Chinese governments economic abuses and coercion that undercut the foundations of the international economic system. Canadas ruling elite views its three-quarter-century-old military-security partnership with Washington as pivotal to its global imperialist interests and ambitions, and shares the US Republican-Democratic bipartisan consensus that the rise of China constitutes an unacceptable threat to North American imperialist hegemony. That is why it is hitching its wagon to Washingtons anti-China offensive. Mondays unanimous parliamentary vote comes after a crescendo of anti-Chinese propaganda from the media and the political establishment. Last month, a letter sponsored by the BQ demanding that the 2022 Winter Olympics be stripped from China due to its genocide against the Uyghurs was supported by representatives of all parties in the House of Commons and the Quebec legislature, including the two pro-Quebec independence parties in the Quebec legislature, the Parti Quebecois and the pseudo-left Quebec Solidaire. (See Canadas left parties promote bogus claims China is committing genocide against Uyghurs) The Conservatives and New Democrats, the left and right flanks of this all-party coalition for strategic conflict and war preparations against China, are demanding that the Trudeau government go even further in integrating Canada with the US offensive against Beijing. NDP international development spokesperson Heather McPherson chastised the Trudeau cabinet for failing to endorse Mondays genocide motion. Cabinet hid, she complained. It seems to me to be very along the same lines of their China policy to date, where there is such a lack of action. The action demanded by these pro-imperialist warmongers includes the formal exclusion of Chinese tech giant Huawei from Canadas 5G telecommunications network on the basis of national security concerns. It also includes the call for Canada to withdraw from the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which is seen by Beijing as an important pillar of its Belt and Road initiative aimed at expanding Chinese trade and economic activity across Central Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Last year, even as it provided the big business minority Liberal government with the votes needed to retain power, the NDP joined forces with the Conservatives and BQ to create a special parliamentary committee, over the governments objections, charged with reviewing and pressing for the reset of Canadas policy towards China. The opposition parties denunciation of the Liberal government for allegedly failing to adopt a sufficiently hardline approach to Beijing must serve as a warning to the working class as to the extent the entire establishment is gripped by imperialist anxiety and militarism. Trudeau and his Liberals long ago abandoned their plans to seek an Australia-style free trade agreement with China. Instead, with the full support of their trade union allies, they worked with Trump to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement to make it a more explicit trade war and geopolitical bloc, so as to strengthen North Americas twin imperialist powers against their rivals, above all China and Russia. The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement specifically prohibits free trade deals with non-market economies, a euphemism for China. In December 2018, the Trudeau government ordered the seizure of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou on bogus charges of violating illegal US sanctions on Iran, and the Canadian military has dramatically expanded its presence in the Asia Pacific in recent years, including with freedom of navigation-type operations in the Taiwan Strait. In his first discussion with Biden after his assumption of the presidency, Trudeau reiterated his governments commitment to expand bilateral military-strategic cooperation, above all by upgrading the North American Aerospace Defence command (NORAD) so that this Cold War-era military alliance is ready for a nuclear conflagration with Moscow or Beijing Following Mondays vote, Garneau made clear in a statement that the Liberal cabinets tactical decision to abstain on the non-binding vote did not represent a weakening of its hardline stance towards China. Garneau welcomed parliamentarians working together and debating this critical issue, reiterated the governments call for an international investigation of the allegations of genocide and said Canada will continue to work with international partnersthat is, the US, Britain, France, Germany and Japanto defend vulnerable minorities. For the Conservatives, NDP and their backers in the ruling class, this does not go far enough. The opposition parties have repeatedly assailed the government from the right on military spending, with the NDP complaining that the Liberals, who have announced a more than 70 percent hike in military spending, are guilty of underspending on defence and leaving Canadas armed forces ill-equipped to fulfill their imperialist operations around the world. Well aware that this mad program of military rearmament and great power confrontation enjoys no popular support, the ruling class is working through their political parties and media mouthpieces to whip up a bogus narrative of Canada standing up for democracy and human rights. Tory leader Erin OToole gave voice to this drive following Mondays vote, declaring, There is real suffering going on in China, theres a genocide happening, and Canadians, while were free traders and Im very proud to be a free market party, our values are not for sale. Just who does OToole think he is kidding? Canadas values and its denunciations of reputed violations of international law invariably correspond to its imperialist ambitions and those of its closest ally, the United States. In 2003, when the Bush administration launched its illegal war of aggression against Iraq on bogus claims of weapons of mass destruction, then Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien dismissed all talk of the war being a violation of international law, quipping cynically that this would be a question for historians to decide decades hence. In 2011, the Canadian military joined NATOs war on Libya, claiming they were upholding human rights and the responsibility to protect, as they bombarded the country and used Islamists as shock troops to overthrow the Gaddafi regime. After NATOs bombs caused the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians and plunged the country into civil war, a Canadian Armed Forces commander acknowledged that Ottawa had functioned as Al Qaedas air force. However, the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the human rights imperialists does not make their pro-war campaign any less dangerous. On the contrary, they hope that the incessant repetition of the lie of Chinese genocide will poison the political climate, creating the conditions for them to pursue a campaign of aggression against China in alliance with Washington, whose logic is a catastrophic military conflict, unopposed. As the banner headline on the front-page of yesterdays Globe and Mails gleefully declared, Yea: 266 Nay 0China committing genocide, parliament declares. The former superintendents of the Athens City and Limestone County school systems, Trey Holladay and Tom Sisk, were indicted by a federal grand jury along with four other people. All six are charged with conspiracy. Other charges include wire fraud and identity theft. Those charges stem from alleged misappropriation of school funds. "What we are seeing is a breaking of that trust," State Superintendent Eric Mackey said. The U.S. Attorney's Office, the FBI, U.S. Department of Education and Alabama State Department of Education all were involved in a more than two year investigation into an alleged scheme, ultimately stealing money from taxpayers. The 'scheme' took place from 2016 to 2018. Investigators interviewed more than 200 people to gather evidence. Trey Holladay was indicted on more than 100 counts of fraud, including wire fraud and falsifying private student information. The indictment alleges he received cash payments from those involved. His wife is also facing charges. Investigators said Limestone County Superintendent Tom Sisk was brought into the scheme in July of 2016. According to federal officials, both districts were improperly paid around $7 million in state education funds during those two school years. Prosecutors claim the defendants pretended to enroll full-time private school students into their online learning systems. "Many of these students had never heard of Athens City Schools or had ever been into Limestone County," U.S. Attorney Louis Franklin said. These private schools involved are scattered across the state. While the indictment claims private school officials involved did not profit from the scheme, their schools and students did receive access to educational tools and equipment. "To keep this fraud from being brought to light, the defendants went as far as to create fake report cards, transcripts and even home addresses and report those to the state department of education," Franklin said. The indictment claims the state did question enrollment several times, but Holladay always denied accusations. He claimed students were taking a full class load through the district. An attorney for the Holladays released a statement Tuesday, denying these accusations. Limestone County Schools also released a statement. It emphasized that no one currently working for the district is involved in the investigation. They added they are working to be more transparent. Athens City Schools declined to comment. Trey Holladay was fired from Athens City Schools in October. He was placed on administrative leave in June of 2020 after the FBI raided his home as part of this investigation. Sisk left Limestone County Schools in September 2019 for a job in Bristol, Tennessee. He has since left that job. Bomb scare at Mantralaya in Mumbai turns out to be hoax Covid-19: Non-essential shops in Mumbai can now operate 7 am to 2 pm on alternate days, says BMC Mask-less Mumbaikars coughed up Rs 30.05 crore in fine since March 2020 India oi-Vicky Nanjappa Mumbai, Feb 24: nearly 23,000 people have been fined in Mumbai for not wearing masks. On day one of imposing the fine, the authorities collected Rs 45 lakh. The police, BMC, Western Railway and Central Railway collected the fine from 22,976 people. On Sunday 14,100 people were fined a total of Rs 28 lakh and on Saturday it was Rs 32 lakh after 16,154 people were fined. Now Mumbaikars to be challaned for not wearing masks Since March 2020, the BMC fined over 15 lakh mask-less people and a fine of Rs 30.05 crore was collected. In case the people have not been able to pay, they were made to do community work like sweeping the road. The BMC once again intensified the drive after people started lowering their guard and the number of COVID-19 cases started to surge. The BMC has been imposing a fine of Rs 200 for those not wearing masks. From Monday onwards even the police began issuing challans for those not wearing masks. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 11:10 [IST] Alex Petro sits outside his bar, Ale House, with his latest sign in the background, in London, Ont., on Feb. 22, 2021. (Jason Ransom) Being Branded a Racist Is Hurtful: London Bar Owner Explains Message on His Sign Aim of sign was to call out 'the oppressive government of China,' not the Chinese people, says Alex Petro In the early hours of Feb. 18, Alex Petro was in the office of Ale House, the bar he owns in London, Ont., when his bar manager told him, We got trouble. There were stories making the rounds on the internet claiming that the establishment had told one, or in some versions of the story, two Chinese students that Chinese people are not allowed in the bar. The stories claimed the students were told to leave after asking that a sign outside the bar be changed. The sign, which Petro says had been in place for around 10 days before Feb. 18, read, Mr. Ford History will show lockdowns caused more damage 2 the public then [sic] the China virus. Petro said in an interview that the stories about Chinese people not being allowed in the bar are fabricated, and he has invited people to look at the footage from the bars surveillance cameras to see for themselves. The social media posts claiming the incident with the students took place have since been removed, but remain accessible using internet archive sites. The claims still remain in place on some Chinese sites as well as in a petition on change.org, which Petro says has so far refused to remove despite his requests. He says he has hired legal representation to pursue the issue further. Since the Feb. 18 posts, the sign with the reference to China viruswhose wording Petro has since changedhas been denounced as racist, with some local politicians issuing statements condemning the sign, as well as a barrage of media reports on the racism claims. Being branded a racist is hurtful, says Petro. I really love the Chinese people. His intention in calling the virus the China virus, he explains, was to draw attention to the fact that the Chinese communist regime is responsible for the spread of the virus, since it tried to hide the outbreak and even punished the whistleblower doctors who leaked the news about the outbreak. Its 110 percent against the oppressive government of China, he says. Petro has since changed the sign a few times. One iteration read, We love Chinese People we hate the genocide and China virus your commie govt has inflicted on us. He says after this change he again attracted criticism for saying your government instead of the government. I acknowledge that. Was that malicious on my part? Absolutely not. I could have used the, but I wasnt thinking that deeply about it. I thought that my message was pretty clear that it was geared towards the government of China, he says. In another iteration he changed the sign to, Calling out an oppressive govt is not racist period! We have (heart) respect 4 all people. His latest sign as of Feb. 22 asks for freedom of speech, which he notes is not allowed in China. Petro says he finds it puzzling that there seems to be no issue with referring to the origin of the new virus variants as the UK, South African, and Brazilian variants, but there was a huge uproar about his reference to China. I felt somethings not right. We are terrified to call out this [Chinese] government, he said. As reported previously by The Epoch Times, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has launched multiple campaigns to claim that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in other countries. This has included large-scale use of social media advertisements viewed by millions linking statements by the U.S. administration about the origins of the virus in China to racism. There have also been efforts by Chinese officials to pin the blame for the virus on specific countries. This included a claim by Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian that the virus originated in the United States and was brought to Wuhan by the U.S. Army. The U.S. State Department summoned the U.S. ambassador over the incident. Chinese state-owned media have also published reports claiming that the virus appeared in Italy before the outbreak in China. Chinese Foreign Ministry new spokesman Zhao Lijian gestures as he speaks during a daily briefing at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs office in Beijing on Feb. 24, 2020. (Andy Wong/AP Photo) In hindsight, Petro says if hed known his choice of words would be taken out of context he would have been more careful, as his criticism is toward the Chinese regime, who he says is suppressing the people of China. But he says hes quite concerned that some local politicians have made negative statements about him, and fears what the consequences will be. Petro says his phone has been ringing non-stop with calls denouncing him or placing prank orders, but he has also received lots of support, including from members of the Hong Kong community who appreciate his stance against the Chinese regime. The way I see it, my own kids, and many others in general, are oblivious to whats going on, he says, referring to the CCPs global threats, citing recent remarks by the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service that China is posing a threat to Canada on all fronts. To me, China is the biggest threat to the world. And it disturbs me that [among the younger people] theres more sympathy towards this whole socialist slash communist movement, and it just breaks my heart, he says. I wish these people would channel some of their energy towards our own government to end the genocide of the Chinese communist government, to see if we can do anything about the two Michaels [Kovrig and Spavor] that are imprisoned in China. The Vagina Museum today schooled Health Secretary Matt Hancock on female anatomy after accusing him of confusing smear tests with self-sampling swabs in an 'incorrect and misleading' tweet. Mr Hancock said more than 31,000 women will be offered kits to 'carry out smear tests in the privacy & convenience of their own homes' in parts of London where screening appointment attendance is low. Tweeting a link to the NHS England announcement, the Health Secretary added: 'Cervical screening is life-saving, so this is a great step forward.' It is hoped the pilot will encourage women who are too embarrassed to have the test conducted by a health professional at a GP surgery or health centre. However, his post this morning was seized upon just hours later by the Camden-based Vagina Museum, which is currently closed due to the coronavirus lockdown, as 'incorrect and misleading'. The Museum account accused Mr Hancock of 'conflating' self-sampled vaginal swabs checking for Human Papillomavirus (HPV), a virus which causes cervical cancer, with a cervical smear test. In a lengthy thread on Twitter, it pointed out that it is 'impossible' for women 'to perform a smear test on yourself unless you are incredibly flexible and have absolutely perfect aim to hit your cervix'. The Vagina Museum today schooled Matt Hancock on female anatomy after accusing him of confusing smear tests with self-sampling swabs in an 'incorrect and misleading' tweet Health Secretary Matt Hancock said more than 31,000 women will be offered kits to 'carry out smear tests in the privacy & convenience of their own homes' However, his post was seized upon just hours later by the Camden-based Vagina Museum, which is currently closed due to the coronavirus lockdown, as 'incorrect and misleading' The post went on: 'The self sampling pilot isn't cervical screening. 'Those who receive the kits are taking a swab from their vagina to check for Human Papillomavirus (HPV), a virus which can cause cervical cancer. People whose sample contains HPV will then be asked to go for a standard smear test. 'The study is targeting people who haven't responded to invitations from their GPs to come for a smear test. It's not a replacement for cervical screening, it's a way of reaching those who are not having their smears.' The Vagina Museum added: 'This isn't just us being contrary. Terminology matters. A self-sampled vaginal swab checking for HPV is entirely different to a cervical smear test, and we mustn't conflate them'. A spokesperson for the Department of Health told MailOnline that Mr Hancock had 'followed the wording' of NHS England's press release. When approached for comment, an NHS England spokesperson said 'this is part of the cervical screening process, and women are being invited to carry out 'smear tests' in their own home'. A spokeswoman for the Vagina Museum told MailOnline: 'We're glad to see the NHS trying to connect with people who don't go for smear tests, but it's crucial to get the details right. The HPV self-sampling kits are not a smear test. 'They don't sample cells from the cervix, which need to be examined when HPV is found. Getting the terminology wrong can lead to confusing messages about vital cancer screening programmes.' NHS England had announced that more than 31,000 women will be offered kits to carry out 'smear tests' in the privacy of their own homes in a trial. The swab tests will be posted to women or given out by a GP to increase take-up of screening for HPV as a 'simple way for women to do the test themselves, rather than have one done for them by a general practice nurse'. The Museum account accused Mr Hancock of 'conflating' self-sampled vaginal swabs checking for HPV with a cervical smear test. It also pointed out that it is 'impossible' for women 'to perform a smear test on yourself unless you are incredibly flexible' HPV VACCINE 'COULD ERADICATE CERVICAL CANCER' Public Health England said last year that the HPV vaccine could all but wipe out cervical cancer among young women. Real-world data, it said, shows HPV infections have gone from affecting 15 per cent of women to fewer than two per cent in just 10 years since the vaccine was brought into use. HPV causes almost all cases of cervical cancer and many experts believe that by stopping it spreading they will be able to wipe out the disease in England. 'Our analysis finds that the near perfect efficacy of HPV vaccination in trials is realised in real-world settings,' said Professor Peter Sasieni, who conducted a study on the vaccine's effects. 'These results imply that the impact of HPV vaccination on preventing cervical cancer could be even greater than estimated previously.' The vaccine was developed to prevent HPV types 6, 11, 16 and 18 from spreading. Types 16 and 18 cause more than 70 per cent of cervical cancer cases in the UK, while types 6 and 11 cause 90 per cent of of genital warts cases the jab protects against both. Professor Sasieni's research used data from a review which combined 65 other studies from 14 countries. It found the jab was 92 per cent effective within four years of it being given; 99.8 per cent effective after five years; and 97.6 per cent effective overall. Cancers in both male and female genitals and reproductive systems, as well as of the rectum and the mouth and throat, may all be linked to the HPV viruses. A report published in February 2019 predicted that the cancer cases would be cut in half by 2050 and eradicated completely by 2100. Professor Sasieni's letter was published in the Lancet medical journal. Advertisement The kits will go to women aged 25-64 who are 15 months overdue for a check and live in Barnet, Camden, Islington, Newham and Tower Hamlets where screening appointment attendance is low. Although the HPV vaccine, brought into use in 2008, is expected to all but eliminate the virus from Britain in the coming generations, women who turned 12 before then may still be at risk from the virus. HPV viruses are spread through sex and mostly do not cause any symptoms or serious harm, but may raise the risk of cancer in later life. Cervical cancer can develop at a young age, often affecting women in their 30s and 40s, and around half of women who develop it die within 10 years of their diagnosis. Dr Anita Lim, from King's College London, who is leading the study, said self-sampling is a 'game-changer for cervical screening.' She said: 'We know many women aren't coming forward for screening and almost half of women in some parts of London aren't up to date with their cervical screening. 'It's an intimate procedure and a variety of barriers can stop people from attending, even though it can be a life-saving test. 'This simple and convenient swab means it can be done in the privacy and comfort of your own home. 'Women who don't come for regular screening are at the highest risk of developing cervical cancer, so it is crucial that we find ways like this to make screening easier and protect women from what is a largely preventable cancer.' Screening for the disease in Britain has fallen to an all-time low with around five million women currently overdue for testing. Nearly a third of British women ignored their latest invitation and are at risk because they have gone several years without a smear test. Experts believe offering them the chance to test themselves in the privacy and comfort of their own home would appeal to the many women who are too embarrassed or busy to attend a clinic. Studies have shown the DIY kits can increase screening among these hard-to-reach groups by up to 50 per cent. The trial will target people living in the London Boroughs of Barnet, Camden, Islington, Newham and Tower Hamlets, where screening appointment attendance is low. Women who are six months overdue for their test and attend GPs surgeries involved with the trial will also be offered an at-home kit. 'This is an important new way to make screening easier for thousands of women,' said Professor Peter Johnson, national clinical director for cancer for the NHS in England. 'We know there are lots of reasons why women might not attend a screening appointment, including worries about Covid. 'GPs have taken extra precautions to make surgeries safe, and these home kits give thousands of women another option to keep up to date with their screening. 'We would urge every woman to make sure they have their smear test - the earlier HPV is detected the better. It could save your life.' Women taking part in the YouScreen trial, which is being jointly run by NHS England, Public Health England and Kings College London, will follow the instructions on the test and then post their swabs back for analysis. They will receive their result in the post, and if HPV is detected they will be contacted for a follow-up appointment. Ruth Stubbs, National Cervical Screening Programme manager at PHE, said it is the first step in getting closer to HPV self-sampling at home for women across England. She said: 'PHE is also working on a clinical validation study to inform a larger national evaluation of HPV self-sampling at home. 'This work together with the findings from the YouScreen London study, will provide data from England to inform the UK National Screening Committee on the potential impact of offering HPV self-sampling on the prevention and early detection of cervical cancer.' Kate Sanger, from Jo's Cervical Cancer Trust, said: 'Self-sampling removes so many of the challenges to cervical screening and through our research we know it is very much wanted by women. 'It has been fantastic to be part of this study and we hope it leads to change that will save lives and the trauma a cervical cancer diagnosis can bring.' EDITORS NOTE: NJ Cannabis Insider is hosting a two-day business and networking conference March 9-10, featuring some of the states most prominent industry leaders. Tickets are limited. Part of the comedown after Gov. Phil Murphy at long last legalized marijuana in New Jersey this week was the realization for many supporters that it will likely still be months before they can legally buy weed in the state. Recreational growers and dispensaries will have to get approval from the state, and even existing medical marijuana providers will have to prove they have enough supply to serve patients something thats long been a struggle before they can sell to the wider public. But even once those businesses are in place, there will still be dozens of towns across the state where you wont be able to buy marijuana. In the three years since Murphy swept into office, partially on a promise to make weed legal, more than 70 towns have taken some sort of action to either ban marijuana businesses from within their borders or indicate that they opposed such businesses. A provision in the legalization law actually voids any bans enacted before it took effect, so if those towns are steadfast in their opposition to growers and dispensaries, theyll have to pass the ban again within 180 days, as would any other municipality that doesnt want cannabis businesses. If they fail to do so within that six-month window, theyll have to wait five years to try again. So while we dont know exactly which towns will enact a ban, below are the towns that had previously done so. Allendale, Bergen County Barnegat Township, Ocean County Berkeley Township, Ocean County Brick Township, Ocean County Bridgeton, Cumberland County Bridgewater Township, Somerset County Brigantine, Atlantic County Carlstadt, Bergen County Chatham Township, Morris County Chester Township, Morris County Clifton, Passaic County Colts Neck, Monmouth County East Rutherford, Bergen County Elmwood Park, Bergen County Emerson, Bergen County Fair Haven, Monmouth County Franklin Lakes, Bergen County Freehold Borough, Monmouth County Garfield, Bergen County Harding Township, Morris County Hasbrouck Heights, Bergen County Hawthorne, Passaic County Hazlet, Monmouth County Highlands, Monmouth County Ho-Ho-Kus, Bergen County Jamesburg, Monmouth County Lacey Township, Ocean County Lavallette, Ocean County Lodi, Bergen Lumberton, Burlington County Mahwah, Bergen County Mannington Township, Salem County Manville, Somerset County Middletown Township, Monmouth County Midland Park, Bergen County Montvale, Bergen County New Milford, Bergen County North Caldwell, Essex County North Haledon, Passaic County Oakland, Bergen County Oceanport, Monmouth County Old Bridge, Middlesex County Old Tappan, Bergen County Palisades Park, Bergen County Parsippany-Troy Hills, Morris County Pleasantville, Atlantic County Point Pleasant Beach, Ocean County Ramsey, Bergen County Ridgewood, Bergen County Rumson, Monmouth County Saddle Brook, Bergen County Saddle River, Bergen County Sea Girt, Monmouth County Seaside Heights, Ocean County Shrewsbury, Monmouth County Somers Point, Atlantic County Spotswood, Middlesex County Surf City, Ocean County Union City, Hudson County Upper Freehold, Monmouth County Upper Pittsgrove Township, Salem County Upper Saddle River, Bergen County Waldwick, Bergen County Wall Township, Monmouth County Wayne, Passaic County Weehawken, Hudson County West Caldwell, Essex County West Long Branch, Monmouth County Westwood, Bergen County Woodcliff Lake, Bergen County Wyckoff, Bergen County Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Payton Guion may be reached at pguion@njadvancemedia.com. Irans President Hassan Rouhani has defended his administrations deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency after conservatives in parliament called for the judiciary to open a legal case against the president. Rouhani said that the deal with the IAEA was artful in that it fully implemented parliaments bill restricting IAEA access without opening Iran to accusations of not cooperating with the nuclear watchdog. He accused anyone distorting Irans accomplishment in this deal of aiding Irans enemies. On Feb. 23 Iran technically suspended its voluntary implementation of the Additional Protocol, which gave the IAEA greater access to Irans nuclear program. However, two days prior, Iranian diplomats and IAEA chief Rafael Grossi reached a deal in which Iran would retain certain data for up to three months. If sanctions on Iran are removed, Iran will hand the data over to the IAEA. If the sanctions are not removed, Iran will delete it. The United States reapplied sanctions on Iran in 2018 when it exited the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. While the Biden administration campaigned on reentering the deal, it has asked Iran to return to full compliance with the JCPOA before removing sanctions. Tehran has incrementally increased enrichment and taken other measures once the United States exited the deal, but claims that it as permitted to take the steps as part of the text of the JCPOA. Conservatives in parliament passed a bill in December 2020 that called on Iran to suspend implementation of the Additional Protocol. After the deal with the IAEA was announced, those behind the bill, especially Mojtaba Zolnour, the head of the powerful National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, called for the judiciary to open a case against the president and others involved in the deal with the IAEA. On Feb. 22, Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned members of the Assembly of Experts about divisions. While he publicly backed the legislation, referring to it as a good bill, he said of the parliaments disagreements with the administration, "These differences are solvable and the two sides must cooperation to resolve them. The differences must not widen, which would show division" Today, Feb. 24, parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf vowed to heed Khameneis warning. He said that the Khameneis call for unity and understanding is our responsibility. Even Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor of Kayhan newspaper who opposed the JCPOA and many of Rouhanis policies, criticized the parliament for the harsh criticism of the administration. In an editorial, he implicitly defended the deal with the IAEA and wrote that objection to it did not require this volume of protest. More than half a million people have received a Covid-19 vaccine in Northern Ireland (Nick Potts/PA) More than half a million people have received a Covid-19 vaccine in Northern Ireland. Those aged over 65 and the clinically vulnerable are among those being booked in for jabs. Health minister Robin Swann said it was a landmark moment. Expand Close Health Minister Robin Swann said it was a landmark moment (Kelvin Boyes/Press Eye/PA). PA / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Health Minister Robin Swann said it was a landmark moment (Kelvin Boyes/Press Eye/PA). As of yesterday evening we had administered more than 509,000 vaccines, he said. There are countries many times larger in population terms than Northern Ireland that are nowhere administering half a million jabs. Thats a huge achievement and I again I want to thank all our vaccinators, our organisers and our volunteers across trusts and primary care for reaching this milestone. A total of 478,825 first doses and 31,345 second doses have now been administered. The health system has opened vaccination bookings to all carers aged 18 and over in Northern Ireland. Feedback from the carer organisations indicates that a significant number of their members have taken up the offer and have already had the vaccine or have booked in the coming days. Mr Swann added: I am pleased to report that the regional vaccination centres are heavily booked for the next few weeks. I can also announce today that further vaccination appointments are being made available in the centres. These slots will be for those who are in the 65-plus age group and those who received a shielding letter because they are clinically extremely vulnerable to Covid-19. I would strongly encourage people in these two groups to book their appointments as soon as possible and to do so online if possible, to ease the pressure on the very busy telephone booking system. In line with the latest medical advice, those with a learning disability will be called forward by GPs for vaccination, if they havent received it through the health trust. From April, the SSE Arena will be opened as a mass vaccination centre for Northern Irelands adult population aged 60 and under who have not yet received a vaccine via a trust or their GP. In the coming months every adult will be offered a vaccine. The Department of Health said: Please remember to only book a vaccine slot if you are eligible. Do not make multiple bookings, you will automatically be booked for your second dose when your first appointment is confirmed. Vaccination teams have now completed their first visit to every care home in Northern Ireland. Mr Swann announced on Tuesday the first confirmed cases of the South African variant of Covid-19 in the region. He said three cases of the variant had been confirmed. A criminal case was opened over the Tuesday demonstration near the Ukrainian presidential administration's building on Kyiv's Bankova Street, which developed into clashes, and 17 demonstrators were taken to police stations for violating law and order, the Kyiv police department's press service told Interfax-Ukraine. "Seventeen people have been taken to police stations," the National Police said. According to the press service, a number of police officers sustained eye burns. "The police instantly respond to all attempted provocations and clashes. Demonstrators used aerosol cans and threw flares at officers in the course of the clash," the press service said. The demonstrators gathered near the presidential administration's building in Kyiv to protest against the sentencing of Odesa activist Serhiy Sternenko and clashed with the police. Tear gas was sprayed. The demonstration supporting Odesa activist Sternenko gathered over 1,000 protesters, an Interfax-Ukraine correspondent said in a report. The protesters were trying to break through the police cordons around the Ukrainian presidential administration's building in Kyiv. The protest against the ruling of the Prymorsky District Court in Odesa, which sentenced Sternenko to seven years in custody on charges of abducting Lyman village council deputy Serhiy Scherbych, was scheduled to begin near the Ukrainian presidential administration at 8 a.m. on February 23. Would you like to receive breaking news notifications from The Post and Courier? Sign up to receive news and updates from this site directly to your desktop. Breaking News Columbia Breaking News Greenville Breaking News Myrtle Beach Breaking News Aiken Breaking News Click on the bell icon to manage your notifications at any time. Success! Please click the 'Allow' button in the 'Show Notifcations' alert in your browser if one is available. Thank you for signing up! Please enable notifications in your browser and reload the page. Amazon Web Services claims to have the broadest and most complete set of machine learning capabilities. I honestly dont know how the company can claim those superlatives with a straight face: Yes, the AWS machine learning offerings are broad and fairly complete and rather impressive, but so are those of Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Amazon SageMaker Clarify is the new add-on to the Amazon SageMaker machine learning ecosystem for Responsible AI. SageMaker Clarify integrates with SageMaker at three points: in the new Data Wrangler to detect data biases at import time, such as imbalanced classes in the training set, in the Experiments tab of SageMaker Studio to detect biases in the model after training and to explain the importance of features, and in the SageMaker Model Monitor, to detect bias shifts in a deployed model over time. Historically, AWS has presented its services as cloud-only. That is starting to change, at least for big enterprises that can afford to buy racks of proprietary appliances such as AWS Outposts. Its also changing in AWSs industrial offerings, such as Amazon Monitron and AWS Panorama, which include some edge devices. IDG This diagram summarizes the AWS Machine Learning stack as of December 2020. It appeared often during talks at AWS re:Invent. AWS Machine Learning Services When I reviewed Amazon SageMaker in 2018, I thought it was quite good and that it had significantly improved the utility of AWS for data scientists. Little did I know then how much traction it would get and how much it would expand in scope. When I looked at SageMaker again in April 2020, it was in a preview phase with seven major improvements and expansions, and I said that it was good enough to use for end-to-end machine learning and deep learning: data preparation, model training, model deployment, and model monitoring. I also said that the user experience still needed a little work. There are now twelve parts in Amazon SageMaker: Studio, Autopilot, Ground Truth, JumpStart, Data Wrangler, Feature Store, Clarify, Debugger, Model Monitor, Distributed Training, Pipelines, and Edge Manager. Several of the new SageMaker features, such as Data Wrangler, are major improvements. Amazon SageMaker Studio Amazon SageMaker Studio is an integrated machine learning environment where you can build, train, deploy, and analyze your models all in the same application. The IDE is based on JupiterLab, and now supports both Python and R natively in notebook kernels. It has specific support for seven frameworks: Apache MXNet, Apache Spark, Chainer, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, SparkML Serving, and TensorFlow. SageMaker Studio seems to be a wrapper around SageMaker Notebooks with a few additional features, including SageMaker JumpStart and a different launcher. Both take you to JupyterLab notebooks for actual calculations. I showed lots of notebook examples in my April 2020 review, but only for Python notebooks. Since then, there are more samples in the repository. Plus, the sample repository is easier to reach from a notebook, and there is now support for R kernels in the notebooks, as shown in the screenshot below. Unlike Microsoft Azure Machine Learning notebooks, SageMaker does not support RStudio. IDG Amazon SageMaker now supports R kernels as well as Python kernels in its notebooks. This example is a simple Hello, World that does some pre-analysis of an abalone measurement dataset. I also tried an end-to-end R sample. IDG Amazon SageMaker Notebook samples and launcher. IDG Amazon SageMaker Studio with JumpStart launched assets and Get Started. Amazon SageMaker Autopilot In the April review I showed a SageMaker Autopilot sample, which took four hours to run. Looking at another Autopilot sample in the repository, for customer churn prediction, I see that it has been improved by adding a model explainability section. This is a welcome addition, as explainability is one facet of Responsible AI, although not the whole story. (See Amazon SageMaker Clarify, below.) According to the notes in the sample, the enabling improvement for this in the SageMaker Python SDK, introduced in June 2020, was to allow Autopilot-generated models to be configured to return probabilities of each inference. Unfortunately, that means you need to retrain any Autopilot models produced on previous versions of the SDK if you want to add explainability to them. Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth As I discussed in April 2020, SageMaker Ground Truth is a semi-supervised learning process for data labeling that combines human annotations with automatic annotations. I dont see any notable changes in the service since then. Amazon SageMaker JumpStart SageMaker JumpStart is a new Getting Started feature of SageMaker Studio, which should help newcomers to SageMaker. As you can see in the screenshot below, there are two new colored icons at the bottom of the left sidebar: the upper one brings up a list of solutions, model endpoints, or training jobs created with SageMaker JumpStart, and the lower one, SageMaker Components and Registries, brings up a list of projects, data wrangler flows, pipelines, experiments, trials, models, or endpoints, or access to the feature store. The Browse JumpStart button in the SageMaker JumpStart Launched Assets panel brings up the browser tab at the right. The browser lets you look through end-to-end solutions tied to other AWS services, text models, vision models, built-in SageMaker algorithms, example notebooks, blogs, and video tutorials. When you click on a solution square in the browser, you bring up a documentation screen for the solution, which includes a button to launch the actual solution. When you click on a model square that has a fine-tuning option, you should see both Deploy and Train buttons on the documentation screen for the model, when I brought up the BERT Large Cased text model the Train button was disabled, and had a note that said Unfortunately, fine-tuning is not yet available for this model. IDG Amazon SageMaker Studio with the SageMaker JumpStart browser. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler Amazon claims that the new SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning from weeks to minutes. It essentially gives you an interactive workspace where you can import data and try data transformations; on export you can generate a processing notebook. Supported data transformations include joining and concatenating datasets; custom transforms and formulas; encoding categorical variables; featurizing text and date/time variables; formatting strings; handling outliers and missing values; managing rows, columns, and vectors; processing numeric variables; search and edit; parse value as type; and validate strings. Custom transformations support PySpark, Pandas, and PySpark (SQL) directly, and other Python libraries with import statements. Im not sure I buy the weeks to minutes claim, unless you already know what youre doing and could write the code snippets yourself off the top of your head. Id believe that most people could handle data preparation with SageMaker Data Wrangler in a few hours, given some knowledge of Pandas, PySpark, and machine learning data basics, as well as a feel for statistics. I went through a demo of SageMaker Data Wrangler using a Titanic passenger survival dataset. It took me most of an afternoon, but cost under $2 despite using some sizable VMs for processing. IDG You can import data into SageMaker Data Wrangler from Amazon S3 buckets, either directly or using Athena (an implementation of Presto SQL). The interface says it supports data uploads directly, but I couldnt get that to work. IDG Here Im using a custom transformation with Pandas code to drop unnecessary columns. Each transformation creates a new DataFrame. IDG Data imports and preparation steps appear on a data flow diagram. When you export the data flow, you can create a data wrangler job as a Jupyter Notebook, a notebook that creates a Pipeline, a Python code file, or a notebook that creates a Feature Store feature group. IDG This SageMaker Data Wrangler Job Notebook is the result of an export of a Data Wrangler flow. You can see how the export created a lot of Python code for you that would have been time-consuming to write from scratch. IDG At the end of the Data Wrangler Job Notebook theres an optional SageMaker training step using XGBoost. I ran it and saw reasonably good results. Note the instances, apps, and sessions listed at the left. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store Metadata and data sharing are two of the missing links in most machine learning data. SageMaker Feature Store allows you to fix that: It is a fully managed, purpose-built repository to store, update, retrieve, and share machine learning features. As mentioned in the previous section, one way to generate a feature group in Feature Store is to save the output from a SageMaker Data Wrangler flow. Another way is to use a streaming data source such as Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Feature Store allows you to standardize your features (for example by converting them all to the same units of measure) and to use them consistently (for example by using the same data for training and inference). IDG Amazon SageMaker Feature Store makes it easy to find and reuse features for machine learning. Amazon SageMaker Clarify SageMaker Clarify is Amazons Responsible AI offering. It integrates with SageMaker at three points: in SageMaker Data Wrangler to detect data biases, such as imbalanced classes in the training set; in the Experiments tab of SageMaker Studio to detect biases in the model and to explain the importance of features; and in the SageMaker Model Monitor, to detect bias shifts over time. IDG The Analyze step of SageMaker Data Wrangler includes a data bias report, which includes four standard tests: class imbalance (an issue in this dataset); difference in positive proportions in labels; Jensen-Shannon divergence; and conditional demographic disparity in labels, which isnt checked for this particular report. There are four more tests, classified as additional. IDG The Bias report is one of the tabs in the Experiments pane. It lists metrics that might indicate biases for the chosen feature, in this case ForeignWorker. The class Imbalance of -0.92 is the same as it was in the original data; in other words, foreign workers are under-represented both in the data and in the model. IDG The SageMaker Model Monitor can detect biases in inferences in real time. Bias metrics above the orange threshold line indicate possible drifts in the population and may require you to retrain the model. Amazon SageMaker Debugger The SageMaker Debugger is a misnomer, but its a useful facility for monitoring and profiling training metrics and system resources during machine learning and deep learning training. It allows you to detect common training errors such as inadequate RAM or GPU memory, gradient values exploding or going to zero, over-utilized CPU or GPU, and error metrics starting to rise during training. When it detects specific conditions, it can stop the training or notify you, depending on how you have set up your rules. COLUMBIA A powerful state lawmaker supported his ex-wife's successful bid to unseat a longstanding Richland County coroner, and now she's hired the legislator's brother. Newly seated Coroner Naida Rutherford said she violated no ethical rules in hiring Harry "Torr" Rutherford, brother of House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford, as a deputy coroner. She called her former brother-in-law "highly qualified." Harry Rutherford previously operated the Grilled Teriyaki restaurant in Five Points until it closed in 2020. Todd Rutherford, a Columbia attorney, said his past relationship with the coroner or as a legislator has no bearing on his brother being hired and that the move was only being questioned because he is Black. Naida Rutherford said her ex-husband's campaign support had nothing to do with bringing abroad Harry Rutherford. She said she is committed to transparency and will soon include a list of employees on its website, but the coroner's office declined to provide Harry Rutherford's resume, a summary of his qualifications or his salary without a formal open-records request to the county, a process that can take weeks. When initially asked about Harry Rutherford's qualifications, Naida Rutherford said he has leadership experience from working for a police department in the Washington, D.C., area and held a doctorate degree in science. But she did not specify his position with the police agency or the subject of the degree or where it was obtained. Her office referred further questions about his work history to the pending records request. Hours after Post and Courier Columbia first posted its article online, Naida Rutherford directed a reporter to a video posted to her offices Facebook page on Feb. 15 in which she interviews Harry Rutherford and he says he attended Howard University and while he was in school was a police reservist in Washington, D.C. He also notes he then earned a doctor of chiropractic degree from Life University in Marietta, Ga., and later returned to South Carolina to care for his mother. Harry Rutherford investigates death scenes while being on call at all times, Naida Rutherford said. His title of deputy coroner is the same one held by much of the staff of 32 in the coroner's office. A candidate for deputy coroner requires only an associate's degree, Naida Rutherford said. While state law outlines education and training requirements for coroners, there are so such guidelines for deputy coroners. "I needed people who could do the job and do it well," Naida Rutherford said. "To be a deputy coroner is a difficult task and not everybody can stomach that. We had several people that submitted applications and wanted to work here in the office, and we were able to bring on an amazingly diverse staff." Harry Rutherford was sued on Feb. 1 by the landlord for Grilled Teriyaki, seeking $57,622 in unpaid rent dating back to June 2019, penalties and legal fees, according to court filings. Harry Rutherford has not filed a response to the complaint. A coroner's office spokesman declined a request to speak to Harry Rutherford. In saying his ex-wife is being targeted unfairly, Todd Rutherford said there are multiple coroners in the state who don't meet updated education requirements for the position as laid out by state law and examples of officials' family members in favorable positions throughout state and local governments who aren't scrutinized because they are White. "The fact that I've been in legislative office 23 years should not stop my family members from wanting to give back nor get in public service for doing whatever it is they want to do," Todd Rutherford said. Naida Rutherford, a nurse practitioner, unseated five-term incumbent Gary Watts in the Democratic primary election in June 2020. She's the first African American and first woman to hold the Richland County coroner's office. Her election bid was endorsed by Todd Rutherford, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, on his campaign website and in posts on his social media. Naida Rutherford also endorsed her ex-husband's campaign. Todd Rutherford, who has represented his North Columbia district more than 20 years, was elected to another two-year term in November 2020. Todd Rutherford in 2017 proposed a bill that would have only required a coroner be a high school graduate and complete a 40-hour training course, rolling back requirements that have been beefed up during the past decade. He said at the time the requirements are too limiting for an elected office and more restrictive than qualifications for president and U.S. Senate, The Post and Courier reported at the time. Update: This story has been updated to include more information about Harry Rutherford's qualifications provided by Naida Rutherford and details of a pending legal case involving Harry Rutherford. The President of the Hotels and Restaurants Employers' Organization in Romania (HORA), Daniel Mischie, asked Bucharest's Prefect Traian Berbeceanu for the restaurants to operate until a complete lockdown. "There is no justification for which restaurants should be closed. To do this, we have requested that the restaurants be detached from the coefficient of 3 per thousand and to operate at 30% capacity inside and with known restrictions on the terrace until a full lockdown, if case may be. The second thing we requested from the prefect was to send the Government that the industry needs unblocking the payments for the 20% measure. I brought to mind that today, at the Bucharest Municipal Court, HORA has filed an action challenging the decisions of the Municipal Committee for Emergency Situations, respectively at the Bucharest Court of Appeals. HORA against has an action challenging the Government's decisions imposing restrictions on HoReCa industry, Daniel Mischie said after Wednesday's meeting between representatives of HoReCa with Bucharest's prefect. Regarding the penalization of those who violate the restrictions, Mischie said that there is a proposal made by Bucharest's Prefecture, which will be sent to them in the next period. You can listen to the latest episode of Today in Pa at this link, or on any of your favorite app including Alexa, Apple, Google, Spotify and Stitcher. Episodes are available every weekday on PennLive. Feel free to subscribe, follow or rate Today in Pa. as you see fit! Today in Pa. Daily Podcast | Feb. 24, 2021 Several hospitals in western Pennsylvania are being fined for high rates of potentially avoidable medical complications in patients such as infections and injuries. An attorney in Chester County admitted to stealing his ex-wifes and former mother-in-laws identities to financially support his mistress, buy pornography, and fund strip club visits. After all this snow, Pennsylvania will at last be treated to some spring-like weather. Plus, passengers at Philadelphia International Airport now have the chance to have their food brought to them by robots. Those are the stories we cover in the latest episode of Today in Pa, a daily weekday podcast from PennLive.com and hosted by Claudia Dimuro. Today in Pa is dedicated to sharing the most important and interesting stories pertaining to Pennsylvania that lets you know, indeed, whats happening today in Pa. Todays episode refers to the following articles: If you enjoy Today in Pa, consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or on Amazon. Reviews help others find the show and, besides, wed like to know what you think about the program, too. Alabama native Laverne Cox and comedian George Wallace are set to star in Clean Slate, a comedy series in development at IMDb TV. In the half-hour series, Cox plays a trans woman who returns to her Alabama hometown after 17 years and reunites with her estranged father, Henry (played by Wallace). Hes the old-school owner of a car wash, and according to a description of the show, Henry has a lot of soul searching to do when the child he thought was a son returns as the determined, proud, trans woman, Desiree. The series comes from Norman Lears Act III Productions. Lear is one of the executive producers, along with Cox, Brent Miller and Dan Ewen, according to a report by Variety. Cox wrote the storyline with Wallace and Ewen, the series showrunner. Theres no word yet on when Clean Slate will make its debut. The series previously was under development at Peacock, a streaming service owned by NBCUniversal. Its now at IMBb TV, a free, ad-supported streaming service owned by Amazon. Cox -- an actress, producer and LGBTQ advocate who was born in Mobile -- is best known for her Emmy-nominated work on Netflixs Orange Is the New Black. She earned four Emmy nods, 2014-2020, for her portrayal of Sophia Burset, a transgender hairdresser and inmate at a New York prison. In 2015, Cox won a Daytime Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Special Class Special as executive producer of Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word. She is the first openly transgender woman to win the award, the Emmys website says. Coxs TV career includes roles in ABCs Doubt, HBOs Curb Your Enthusiasm, Netflixs Dear White People, Foxs The Mindy Project, a 2016 TV remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and more. In 2018, she was the host of Glam Masters, a reality series on Lifetime. Cox, a veteran of reality TV, earned public attention in 2008 when she competed on the VH1 series I Want to Work for Diddy. She also produced and starred in 2010s TRANSform Me, giving makeovers to women across the country with two transgender pals. In 2019, Cox was confirmed for the cast of Inventing Anna, a Netfix miniseries from producer Shonda Rhimes (of Grays Anatomy, Scandal and Bridgerton fame). Production of Inventing Anna was underway in 2020, but halted because of the coronavirus pandemic. Fan sites report that filming restarted in fall 2020, but Netflix hasnt announced a premiere date. Cox also hosts a new podcast, The Laverne Cox Show, produced by Rhimes Shondaland Audio and iHeart Media. The first episode aired Feb. 4. On the weekly podcast, Cox conducts interviews with guests who provoke thought and potentially new outlooks, a press release says. The show was created in hopes that it may foster perspectives that might inspire new behavior in each of us, to in turn get us closer to becoming the very best versions of ourselves, all the while inviting Laverne, guests, and listeners to undergo a spiritual makeover together. Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden shakes hands with former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack during a campaign event in Newton, Iowa, U.S. on Jan. 30, 2020. (Mike Segar/Reuters) US Senate Confirms Tom Vilsack as Bidens Agriculture Secretary The U.S. Senate on Tuesday confirmed Tom Vilsack to head the Department of Agriculture, returning the former Iowa governor to the job he held under ex-President Barack Obama. The 100-member Senate approved Vilsack 92-7. He needed a simple majority in the Democratic-controlled chamber to be confirmed. As secretary of the sprawling department, Vilsack will oversee about 100,000 employees responsible for food stamps, crop insurance, land conservation and other missions at a time U.S. farmers are benefiting from high soybean and corn prices but hunger is on the rise throughout America. Vilsack has said the White House wants to tap a pool of funds from the agencys Commodity Credit Corporation to support on-the-farm efforts to fight climate change, a policy priority for President Joe Biden. The Depression-era program of up to $30 billion in annual funding was tapped by the Trump administration to distribute billions of dollars in aid to cover farmers lost sales due to trade wars, primarily with China. Vilsack must also confront the coronavirus pandemic, which has reduced restaurant demand for farm products and led to long lines at food banks. We have a lot of work to do as we overcome obstacles created by the COVID-19 pandemic, American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said in a statement after the vote. Some slaughterhouses shut temporarily in spring 2020 due to outbreaks of the coronavirus among workers, pushing up meat prices and leading to shortages of certain products. We found that when one or two processing facilities shut down during COVID, it created havoc in the market, Vilsack said during a Senate committee hearing on Feb. 2. We cant have that. Groups like the National Black Farmers Association raised concerns about Vilsacks nomination, saying alleged discriminatory practices continued at USDA under his previous leadership. Vilsack, who was Iowa governor from 1999 to 2007, said at the Feb. 2 hearing that there can be no tolerance for discrimination. By Tom Polansek IF you have absolutely no urgent or emergency need to be outdoors today, then remain at home. Should you take a chance and decide to tempt fate, then it may most likely result in you being stopped and questioned by police officers and members of the Defence Force, or even find yourself charged and taken before a court. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it was chandeliers, a Tiffany bracelet and a vintage velvet chair with silver-colored rams heads. In Jackson Heights in Queens, it was a Korean wedding chest, and in Park Slope in Brooklyn, a giant stiletto chair with a purple zebra pattern. All of these, remarkably, were free. They were just a few of the items that have been found discarded on the stoops or streets of New York City over the past year, a byproduct of the pandemic that has amounted to such an abundance of valuable trash that some are calling it The Golden Age of Free Stuff. The bonanza of freebies has prompted New Yorkers to prowl the city every day, combing through trash as if they were panning for gold, even at the risk of carrying bedbugs home. Look at this! exclaimed Sonia Izak, after spotting a chair with a missing leg as she walked around her block on the Upper East Side on a recent frigid evening. She lifted the bottom to look for a label. The Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL) has called for applications in a prescribed format from officers of the Indian Railways for filling vacancies to the post of Chief Engineer, Chief Electrical Engineer, General Manager and Deputy General Manager in BMRLC on deputation to posted at Bengaluru in Karnataka, India on a fulltime basis. The offline application process towards the same started on February 23, 2021 and closes on March 22, 2021 by 5:30 pm. CRITERIA DETAILS Name Of The Posts Chief Engineer, Chief Electrical Engineer, General Manager and Deputy General Manager posts in BMRLC Organisation Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL) Educational Qualification Degree in Electrical, Electrical and Electronics, Electronics and Communication, Electrical and Power, Mechanical Engineering disciplines Experience Three to five years in concerned area Job Responsibilities null Skills Required null Job Location Bengaluru Salary Scale In the range of Rs. 29,100 up to Rs. 73,000 per month as per the post Industry Metro Rail Corporation Limited Application Start Date February 23, 2021 Application End Date March 22, 2021 BMRCL Recruitment 2021: Age Criteria And Fees Candidates interested in applying for BMRCL Engineer Jobs 2021 through BMRCL Recruitment 2021 must not have exceeded 45 years of age (DGM posts) and 55 years of age as on February 23, 2021 with relaxation (upper age limit) for reserved categories as specified in the BMRCL Notification 2021. For details regarding application fee for BMRCL Engineer Jobs 2021 through BMRCL Recruitment 2021, refer to the official BMRCL Notification 2021 given at the end of the article. Also Read: RBI Recruitment 2021 For 841 Office Attendants Posts, Check RBI Notification For Eligibility And Other Details BMRCL Recruitment 2021: Education, Experience Desirous candidates applying for BMRCL Jobs 2021 through BMRCL Recruitment 2021 must possess a Degree in Electrical, Electrical and Electronics, Electronics and Communication, Electrical and Power, Mechanical Engineering disciplines from a recognised University/Institute with three to five years of work experience in concerned area as detailed in the BMRCL Notification 2021. BMRCL Recruitment 2021: Selection And Pay Scale The selection of candidates to BMRCL Manager Jobs 2021 through BMRCL Recruitment 2021 will be done on deputation as notified in the BMRCL Notification 2021. Candidates selected to BMRCL Manager Jobs 2021 through BMRCL Recruitment 2021 will be paid emolument in the range of Rs. 29,100 up to Rs. 73,000 per month as per the post. Also Read: BMRCL Recruitment 2021 For Chief Engineer Posts, Apply Offline Before February 28 BMRCL Recruitment 2021: How To Apply Candidates applying for BMRCL Jobs 2021 through BMRCL Recruitment 2021 must fill the application form in a prescribed format attached with the BMRCL Notification 2021 and send the same to the "General Manager (HR) Corporation Limited, III Floor, BMTC Complex, Shanthinagar, K.H. Road, Bangalore - 560027" on or before March 22, 2021 by 5:30 pm Download BMRCL Recruitment 2021 Notification PDF for DGM, Chief Engineer, CEE and Gen Manager posts Education Commissioner Jeff Riley said Tuesday he plans a push to return more students to physical school buildings, beginning with elementary schools. Priti Patel today said 'outstanding questions' remain over the Met's bungled Operation Midland investigation into fabricated claims of a VIP paedophile ring - as MPs demanded to know why senior officers are still in position. Former High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques heavily criticised the inquiry into false claims of a VIP sex abuse ring in Westminster in a 2016 report, which identified 43 police failings. The force was also met with criticism for waiting three years before acting on his recommendations, with Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir Tom Winsor finding bosses were more concerned with 'restricting access' to the report. Among Sir Richard's revelations were claims that officers misled district judge Howard Riddle into signing search warrants for help the probe by failing to reveal evidence undermining the credibility of their witness 'Nick'. Priti Patel appeared in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee today to discuss Operation Midland Asked by Home Affairs Select Committee member Tim Loughton if she 'will not rest' until further investigations have taken place to see if there really was 'corruption at the highest level' and 'whether people should still be in positions of authority that some of them are', Ms Patel replied: 'There are outstanding questions. 'I think I do definitely need to ask some further questions in terms of what has happened.' Mr Loughton went on: No heads have rolled and many of the senior officers involved in that whole operation still hold senior positions - why havent any heads rolled and what do you propose to do about it? The Home Secretary said: There is more that clearly needs to be done here. I will absolutely follow the inquiry that the committee is holding I would be very happy to come back to the committee at some stage to talk further about it. My priority right now, obviously with all respect and sympathy to the victims, broadly to follow up with Sir Richard Henriques, not just to respond to him but hearing from him as well. Former home secretary Leon Brittan was one of the men falsely accused by fantasist Carl Beech - then known as 'Nick' - who died in January 2015 without knowing there was insufficient evidence to prosecute him. His home was raided, along with those of D-Day veteran Lord Bramall and former Tory MP Harvey Proctor, before it emerged that all the claims were based on lies by Beech, who was jailed for 18 years in 2019 for perverting the course of justice. The calls for an inquiry have now been backed by senior district judge Howard Riddle, who granted the contentious search warrants for the probe. Steve Rodhouse was 'gold commander' of Operation Midland. He is now deputy head of the National Crime Agency, Britain's version of the FBI, on a salary package of around 300,000 The Met insisted there was 'no cover-up' in the investigation after confidence in Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick was called into question. Deputy Commissioner Sir Stephen House apologised again for failings made by the force after political aides maintained that the Prime Minister and Home Secretary had 'absolute confidence' in the UK's most senior police officer. It came after Ms Patel declined to express her confidence in Dame Cressida when questioned over Operation Midland during a live radio interview. Asked about this at the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee on Wednesday, Dame Cressida said: 'The Home Secretary, through the Home Office, immediately after the interview, gave her full confidence in me and ... so did the Prime Minister, and so did the mayor. 'I have nothing else to say, except I am focused on my job, I'm getting on with it, and I will continue, amongst other things, I know, to have very productive working relationships with all the aforementioned people.' She added that she loves her job and, while the Met faces challenges, it is 'doing brilliantly'. Judge's 'VIP paedophile ring' case sensation: Former chief magistrate who issued Brittan and Bramall search warrants now says Met officers must face criminal probe By Stephen Wright for the Daily Mail A former judge today demands a criminal inquiry into detectives who asked him to sign search warrants in the disastrous VIP child sex abuse inquiry. In a dramatic intervention, Howard Riddle says there are 'reasonable grounds to suspect a criminal offence' has been committed. He says that if police failed to reveal evidence undermining the credibility of their witness 'Nick' then the applications for warrants would appear to amount to perverting the course of justice. Scotland Yard detectives used the warrants revealed in the Mail to raid the homes of Lord Brittan's widow and former Army chief Lord Bramall. Mr Riddle said: 'Perverting the course of justice is a serious criminal offence that almost always carries a prison sentence.' He adds: 'Judges and magistrates issuing search warrants must be able to rely on the accuracy and the integrity of the information sworn on oath before them. 'They must know that in the rare and exceptional case of being deliberately misled, then action will be taken for perverting the course of justice.' Former judge Howard Riddle (left) is demanding a criminal inquiry into detectives who asked him to sign search warrants in the disastrous VIP child sex abuse inquiry. The false allegations from Nick real name Carl Beech (right) led to the paedophile being jailed for 18 years for perverting the course of justice and other offences Mr Riddle, who was senior district judge (chief magistrate) for England and Wales from 2010 to 2016, says an independent force should also investigate the work of the police watchdog that cleared the Operation Midland officers. He insists it did not carry out a 'rigorous' inquiry. The false allegations from Nick real name Carl Beech led to the paedophile being jailed for 18 years for perverting the course of justice and other offences. Mr Riddle is speaking out after a retired High Court judge urged the Home Secretary to order a probe into both the watchdog and the detectives. In an open letter to Priti Patel, published in the Daily Mail earlier this month, Sir Richard Henriques said confidence in the criminal justice system had been 'gravely damaged'. The Home Secretary insisted police 'were not above the law' and said she would consider his letter carefully. Writing in this newspaper today, Mr Riddle piles further pressure on Miss Patel by saying he 'wholeheartedly' supports Sir Richard's call for action. He says his judicial colleague has made a 'clear and compelling case' that an independent force should investigate the detectives and the Independent Office for Police Conduct. Mr Riddle agrees with Sir Richard's conclusion that he was misled by police when they applied to him in 2015 for permission to raid the homes of Field Marshal Lord Bramall, Lady Brittan and ex-Tory MP Harvey Proctor. Pointedly, he says the applications stated they had been 'considered at Deputy Assistant Commissioner (DAC) level' a reference to the 'gold commander' of Operation Midland, Steve Rodhouse. He is now deputy head of the National Crime Agency, Britain's version of the FBI, on a salary package of around 300,000. Mr Riddle's intervention raises serious questions as to how Mr Rodhouse can continue in his job under NCA director general Dame Lynne Owens, his old boss from Scotland Yard and Surrey Police. Former Home Secretary, the late Lord Brittan, with his wife Lady Brittan. Two homes of Lady Brittan were raided by police six weeks after her husband's death He was cleared of misconduct in Operation Midland and over another bungled inquiry into Lord Brittan just four months after a watchdog inquiry was launched. Mr Rodhouse was not even interviewed. Mr Riddle's statement today is also a damning indictment of the IOPC, led by ex-council chief Michael Lockwood whose work is currently being scrutinised by MPs. Sir Richard has been scathing of how the watchdog investigated Operation Midland, branding it 'lamentable' and a 'whitewash'. Mr Riddle decided to comment in detail on the shambolic VIP abuse inquiry after the Mail published the police warrant application to raid two homes of Lady Brittan six weeks after the death of her former home secretary husband. Former head of the British Army, the late Lord Bramall, who was one of the high-profile figures targeted by Nick It is understood that the widow's interview with this newspaper earlier this month in which she spoke of a 'culture of cover-up' at the Metropolitan Police demonstrated to the former chief magistrate that officers had not acted with the sensitivity he had expected. Sir Richard said officers on Operation Midland, which investigated the far-fetched lies of Beech, obtained the search warrants unlawfully. He wrote a highly-critical 2016 review that identified 43 major blunders and called for five officers, including Mr Rodhouse and Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald, to be investigated for alleged misconduct. In his letter to Miss Patel, Sir Richard said the 'apparent condoning of police criminality by its notional watchdog, will inevitably give rise to allegations of political manipulation of the police ... an orchestrated cover-up ... and corruption at the highest level'. Mr Riddle's statement will place more pressure on the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, who sanctioned the creation of Operation Midland in November 2014. She has refused to call in an outside force to investigate the officers at the centre of the investigation into entirely innocent high-profile figures. Her force was lambasted last year in an inspectorate report into how it had responded to recommendations in the Henriques report. In the wake of Sir Richard's open letter to the Home Secretary, Dame Cressida's future at Scotland Yard was plunged into doubt after Miss Patel refused to publicly back her on three occasions during a live radio interview with LBC's Nick Ferrari. Her deputy and chief troubleshooter, Sir Stephen House, has denied Lady Brittan's cover-up allegations. EX-CHIEF MAGISTRATE HOWARD RIDDLE: Why I now believe Met Officers may have perverted the course of justice Earlier this month the Daily Mail published an open letter to the Home Secretary from the former High Court judge, Sir Richard Henriques. In the course of his investigation into Operation Midland, Sir Richard had detailed a series of damaging errors made by the Metropolitan Police. Some of those involved the applications for search warrants for premises connected to distinguished and entirely innocent men: Lord Bramall, Lord Brittan and Mr Harvey Proctor. Sir Richard said: 'A district judge was knowingly misled into issuing search warrants.' The search warrants were issued by me. Now that the applications have been published and are in the public domain, it is no longer inappropriate for me to comment on them. The police were investigating allegations of murder and serious sexual assault on boys. They asked for my authority to search a number of properties for evidence in connection with those offences. Earlier this month the Daily Mail published an open letter to the Home Secretary from the former High Court judge, Sir Richard Henriques (pictured) Authorising a search of a person's property is a serious invasion of privacy, and can be justified only if there are reasonable grounds to believe that an indictable offence has been committed and that relevant evidence will be found during the search. The judge or magistrate issuing the warrant is wholly dependent on the police to provide accurate information. As is nearly always the case, I had no knowledge of the facts gathered in the investigation apart from those contained in the application form. The information is sworn by the officer on oath, a solemn process designed to emphasise the importance of telling the truth (including setting out any undermining factors) and the consequences of perjury. In this case the allegations were made by a man identified as Nick but whose real identity was known to police. I was provided with a summary of the claims he had made. Nick alleged, falsely as it later became clear, that he had witnessed murders and been a victim of assault himself. He named a number of people, including those mentioned above, as being involved, along with others whose identity he did not know. Nick had said that some of the offences had been filmed, so police were looking for films as well as diaries and indecent material relating to children. Presumably to allay any fears I might have that the informant was malicious, the application stated the following: 1: The victim has been interviewed at length by experienced officers from the child abuse team. 2: His account has remained consistent. 3: He is felt to be a credible witness who is telling the truth. 4: There is nothing to suggest any links to those he accuses suggesting the allegations are malicious. 5: An independent counsellor instructed by Nick supports his account as credible. 6: A [named] qualified consultant instructed by police was of the opinion that the counsellor was able to make an accurate assessment of his credibility. 7: Nick is in a managerial position. 8: He is of good character. 9: I was also told, and endorsed this on the application, that the application had been considered at Deputy Assistant Commissioner level. On the information provided on oath, the statutory test was made out. I was also persuaded that the police understood the need for sensitive handling of the search, including not alerting the press, which would inevitably have increased the distress of people presumed innocent. However, the Henriques Report established and set out a number of ways in which that information provided by the police was false and misleading. In his recent letter to the Home Secretary (Priti Patel pictured), Sir Richard Henriques says that former judge Howard Riddle was knowingly misled and that there are reasonable grounds to believe a criminal offence was committed Eight things police 'failed to tell judge' The damning report into Operation Midland by former High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques spelt out how he believed police had 'misled' Howard Riddle to obtain warrants to search the homes of VIPs. Detectives said in court documents there was no reason to doubt the claims made by 'Nick', aka Carl Beech, who was 'credible' and believed to be 'telling the truth'. However Sir Richard said that when the warrant applications were made, officers were aware of at least eight factors that undermined his outlandish claims. These included: Despite extensive inquiries into Beech's background, they had found no evidence of physical abuse, injury or proof that he been absent from school as he had alleged. No witnesses had come forward despite extensive media coverage. There was no record of the supposed hit and run murder of a school friend called Scott in south-west London in 1979, as Beech had claimed. Officers on Operation Midland had traced boys from his school named Scott and none had been killed. Police had concluded that a supposed witness to the abuse called 'Fred' was either unwilling to engage or was an invention of Beech. It later turned out that 'Fred' was a bogus witness created by the serial liar. There was no identity for 'boy 3', who was supposedly strangled to death by ex-Tory MP Harvey Proctor. Officers on Operation Midland had access to an interview Beech had conducted with Wiltshire Police in 2012, where he made no mention of VIP child sex abuse, torture and murder. In blogs on the internet, before he went to the Metropolitan Police in 2014, Beech did not mention murders by high-profile figures. Advertisement Sir Richard concluded that had the correct information been provided then the warrants would not have been issued. In his recent letter to the Home Secretary, he says that I was knowingly misled and that there are reasonable grounds to believe a criminal offence was committed. I have never met Sir Richard Henriques, but I know his reputation. He is one of the foremost criminal lawyers of his generation, as a barrister and then as a judge. The Metropolitan Police asked him to report on the failings of Operation Midland, the police operation that pursued untrue allegations made by Nick, now identified as Carl Beech, who is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for perverting the course of justice, as well as other offences. The Henriques Report is thorough and detailed. There is no reason to doubt Sir Richard's conclusions. I am not aware of any dispute as to the facts he found. It is a matter of astonishment and grave concern that the 2016 report and its recommendations have not been acted upon. If those responsible for the application knew facts that undermined the credibility of the witness, and did not disclose them, then the applications for search warrants would appear to amount to perverting the course of justice. Perverting the course of justice is a serious criminal offence that almost always carries a prison sentence. It is the offence, along with some others, for which Carl Beech is serving 18 years' imprisonment. It is also not clear to me why the investigation by the police watchdog, now known as the Independent Office for Police Conduct, did not take as its starting point the detailed factual findings of Sir Richard in his report. Of course, the officers responsible for providing the information in the search warrant applications are presumed innocent of any crime. All that is being said is that there are reasonable grounds to suspect a criminal offence. Those grounds seem to me to be stronger than the grounds police had for suspecting Lord Brittan and others of murder. Of course, the officers should have the opportunity to explain their position, under caution where appropriate. Of course, the investigation needed to be fair, but it also needed to be rigorous. This didn't happen. The failure to act appropriately in the light of the findings of the Henriques Report has caused obvious and understandable grief to those wrongly accused by Carl Beech, and their families. That is bad enough. It is made far worse by the damage caused to the administration of justice. Judges and magistrates issuing search warrants must be able to rely on the accuracy and the integrity of the information sworn on oath before them. They must know that in the rare and exceptional case of being deliberately misled, then action will be taken for perverting the course of justice. Sir Richard Henriques' letter to the Home Secretary makes a clear and compelling case that an independent police force investigate the conduct of Operation Midland by both the Metropolitan Police and the IOPC. Each of the questions he asks must be answered. I wholeheartedly support his call for action. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the coronavirus pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Southwest stopped blocking seats in December, and flights can now be filled to capacity. The trade-off is strict mask enforcement in addition to existing health and safety protocols. But inconsistencies remain across the airline's network, especially at outstation airports. Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories. Southwest Airlines was a standout for most of the coronavirus pandemic as it was one of the few airlines blocking seats to promote social distancing. Only 67% of seats were sold on its flights, allowing all rows to have at least the middle seat open. That policy was abandoned in December, however, after the airline announced a $1.2 billion third-quarter loss. CEO Gary Kelly said the policy cost the airline $20 million in lost revenue over the summer. Southwest cited studies from the Department of Defense and the Harvard School of Public Health that showed the effectiveness of high-efficiency particulate air filters, or HEPA filters, and mask-wearing in limiting the onboard spread of COVID-19. But leaving middle seats open was what truly set the airline apart from the rest of the four biggest US airlines, alongside the fellow seat-blocker Delta Air Lines, as Insider found when reviewing new health and safety practices of the country's largest airlines in mid-2020. With open seats no longer a factor, I sought to see whether flying Southwest had the same appeal by taking two flights on the airline during a recent trip. Here's what it was like flying America's largest low-cost carrier in 2021. My journey started at Miami International Airport, from which I flew to Houston and then to Denver. Southwest just began Miami flights in November as part of a new push to serve larger airports in major cities. Flying Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Read more: Southwest Airlines is adding 9 new leisure routes and expanding to major airports in Chicago and Houston here's the full list The airline was off to a good start, as the check-in area had been overhauled to include plexiglass partitions and hand-sanitizer dispensers. Story continues Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider I opted for the kiosk, where one of the first screens was a COVID-19 declaration. I acknowledged the airline's mask mandate and confirmed that I didn't have and had not been exposed to COVID-19 and that I checked my temperature. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Then it was off to the gate, where the airline had installed more of the same plexiglass partitions at the counter. Gate signage, however, was standard with no digital messaging outlining new health and safety, as some other airlines are doing. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Miami International is a new airport for Southwest, so I wasn't expecting anything over the top, but the airline hadn't added any placards or signage here to implement the new boarding procedure. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Before the pandemic, Southwest flyers would line up on each side of these posts according to their boarding position, and about 30 passengers would board at a time. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider The process has been changed to have only 10 flyers board at a time, with the rest remaining seated until their 10-person group is called. Since Miami service launched during the pandemic, it would stand to reason that the airport would have the most updated signage. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Boarding then proceeded in groups of 30 instead of 10. This is a common problem at Southwest's outstation, as I found when I first flew it during the pandemic from New York to Nashville, Tennessee. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Read more: I flew on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic and came away impressed by how well the largest low-cost US airline handled social distancing The key to boarding early, by the way, is to check in exactly 24 hours before the flight. I snagged an A37 position so I'd be in one of the first groups to board. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider On the jetway, there were reminders about social distancing - but they hadn't been placed by Southwest. Out of the big four, only Delta and United have these placards, and these appeared to be placed by Delta. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider These placards are seldom adhered to, but it's a nice gesture by the airlines that place them. Our flight to Houston was operated by the airline's smallest plane, the Boeing 737-700. There were so few passengers that the aircraft's size didn't matter. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Boarding was routine, and the airline did not give out sanitary wipes or hand sanitizer as some others do. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider The one downside to Southwest's unique boarding procedure is that it doesn't allow for back-to-front boarding, a policy being adopted by many airlines during the pandemic. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider The aircraft was impressively clean at first glance. Southwest's planes are cleaned each night with a disinfectant by "fogging" with an electrostatic sprayer and are touched up in between flights by the crew. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider And it truly showed. This aircraft looked brand new despite it having an older interior. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider The only issue I found was that leftover bits of plastic were left in my seat-back pocket. It wasn't a huge issue, but, as I've said in other reviews, even the smallest item could make a customer question what other spots were missed. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Other than that, my immediate area and tray tables were impeccably clean. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider With Southwest's seat-blocking policy no longer in place, I had to hope that nobody would sit next to me for the two-hour flight to Houston. I lucked out and had the row to myself. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Flight attendants were strict with the face-covering requirement, specifically outlining that it's now federal law that passengers cover their face and nose at all times except when eating and drinking. They even warned they'd wake up any sleeping passengers who weren't complying. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider The appeal was genuine, as wearing masks helps prevent onboard transmission, which helps airlines show that flying is safe. "Believe me it's not because we want to nag you," one flight attendant said. "It's because it's what we have to do because we want to keep flying and taking you places you want to go." Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider The in-flight offering is basic: a cup of ice water and a snack mix. It isn't much, but Southwest has been offering this since the beginning of the pandemic - even on shorter routes. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider The only downside to the service was that flight attendants weren't wearing gloves while handing out the items. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider After the service, it was time for a quick walk around the plane. The harsh mask warning appeared to have worked, as passengers were wearing their coverings correctly when I walked around the cabin. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Soon enough, we were landing in Houston. Flight attendants came on to remind passengers to keep their distance while deplaning. The flight was luckily empty enough where that could be somewhat accomplished. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider My next flight was at the next gate over, so I didn't have to walk too far through the airport. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Houston is a Southwest stronghold, and the airline has retrofitted its gate counters with plexiglass partitions and hand-sanitizer dispensers. The gate signage still remained blank instead of highlighting the airline's new health and safety policies and practices, which seemed like a wasted opportunity. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider The gate area for this flight was markedly more crowded, so it would be a better opportunity to see how the airline handled social distancing on a full plane. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Our aircraft type was the same, the smaller Boeing 737-700, so it would very likely be a full flight. And unlike some of its competitors, the airline did not notify me ahead of time of the full flight nor offer a complimentary change to a less crowded flight. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider The gesture, however, is often meaningless as airlines cannot control how full their flights are, and a moderately full flight can quickly become a sold-out flight. The gate area had been overhauled with social-distancing reminders in a dramatically different scene from that in Miami. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider The same boarding posts were in place but were now outfitted with new messaging on the boarding procedure and reminders for passengers to keep their distance. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Even floor placards were installed. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Come time to board, the screens showed the new boarding process and told those not in the group to remain seated. The gate agent also reviewed the airline's mask policy and reminded passengers that it had become federal law to wear a mask. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Only 10 passengers boarded at a time, compared with the 30 in Miami. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider The walk down to the plane revealed no social-distancing placards in the jetway. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Once more, no hand sanitizer or sanitary wipe was offered by flight attendants, but the aircraft looked impressively clean. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider And there were no bits of plastic in the seat-back pocket this time. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider I was one of the first to board, again, but knew these rows wouldn't stay open too long since the boarding area was packed. It wasn't long before the aisle seat was taken - and the middle seat didn't survive much longer after that. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider This wasn't my first time having a seat neighbor when flying during the pandemic, but having the middle seat open is always preferable. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Flight attendants once more outlined the strict mask policies, and then it was off to Denver. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider The flight was routine, with the same in-flight service consisting of ice water and a snack. Overall, there were no issues with mask enforcement, as most people followed the rules. When we got to Denver, there was the same reminder about distancing for deplaning. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider But most people stood up as soon as the seatbelt sign came off. Flying on Southwest Airlines during the pandemic. Thomas Pallini/Insider Southwest lost a lot of its appeal for me during the pandemic when it stopped blocking seats, and not much differentiates it from other carriers now. The airline is still a good choice when flying, but it certainly is no longer a clear standout as it was when seats were blocked. I applaud the airline's commitment to strict mask enforcement and was impressed by how clean the aircraft were. Consistency is still a major issue the airline faces at its airports, however, as it was when I flew the airline in June. In Miami, for example, the airline hasn't installed social-distancing reminders or implemented the new boarding procedure. It could be a consequence of the airport being new to Southwest, but I've experienced the issue on other Southwest flights. The airline without a doubt is going above and beyond what some other US airlines are doing during the pandemic, but there is still work to be done. Read the original article on Business Insider Posted Tuesday, February 23, 2021 5:18 pm A DEA undercover investigation led to the arrest and indictment of three Whatcom County men Tuesday, Feb. 23, and the seizure of more than 5,000 fentanyl pills, according to a U.S. Department of Justice news release. Jamie Hernandez Hernandez, 21 of Ferndale; Gorge Ortiz, 23 of Lynden; and Stanley Stubbs, 51 of Bellingham, were each arrested and indicted on charges of conspiracy to distribute fentanyl, according to the release. Hernandez and Ortiz were each charged with three additional counts of fentanyl distribution, while Stubbs is charged with possession of fentanyl with intent to distribute and unlawful possession of a firearm. All three were scheduled to make their first appearance Tuesday or Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Seattle. "This undercover investigation revealed these defendants were responsible for the distribution of thousands of pills tainted with potentially deadly fentanyl," U.S. Attorney Brian T. Moran said in the release. "A recent analysis by the King County Medical Examiner's Office showed a significant drop in overdose deaths following large law enforcement seizures in federal drug cases. "I am pleased our federal partners worked closely with Whatcom County law enforcement and other local authorities to reduce the flow of dangerous pills into our communities." Last week, the Washington State Department of Health released data showing that Whatcom County saw eight overdose deaths related to fentanyl during the first half of 2020 after the county had three in all of 2019. "Saving lives is a priority of the Drug Enforcement Administration," DEA Special Agent in Charge Frank Tarentino said in the release. "Today's enforcement action illustrates the commitment and sense of urgency the men and women of DEA routinely demonstrate as they carry out their mission of enforcing the federal narcotic laws of the United States. "We must continue to focus our valuable resources and leverage our much needed and well established partnerships with the United States Attorney's Office and local, state, county and federal law enforcement agencies to stem the tide of the systemic and widespread abuse of opioids in our communities." Law enforcement executed eight search warrants on Tuesday, according to the release, which led to the seizure of more than 5,000 fentanyl pills. Over the course of the investigation, law enforcement seized "thousands" of fentanyl pills and "pound quantities" of heroin and methamphetamine, the release stated. Due to the amount of fentanyl, Hernandez, Ortiz and Stubbs all face a mandatory minimum 10-year sentence if convicted, according to the release. The investigation was part of an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces operation, according to the release, and was conducted by the DEA High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Bellingham Resident Office, which is comprised of DEA, the Whatcom County Sheriff's Office, Washington State Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations, and U.S Customs and Border Protection. Whatcom County SWAT, Washington State Patrol SWAT, Homeland Security Special Response Team, Skagit County Interlocal Drug Enforcement Unit, Ferndale and Lynden Police Departments assisted with arrests and the execution of the search warrants Tuesday. ___ (c)2021 The Bellingham Herald (Bellingham, Wash.) Visit The Bellingham Herald (Bellingham, Wash.) at www.bellinghamherald.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. Police Release Pilot's Name in Fatal Plane Crash By West Kentucky Star Staff GRAVES COUNTY - Authorities have released the name of the pilot who was killed Monday afternoon in a plane crash near the Mayfield-Graves County Airport.Graves County Sheriff Jon Hayden said the pilot was identified as 60-year-old Dr. Henry D. Babenco of Paducah.Babenco's plane crashed in a field near the intersection of Twin Hill Road and Spence Chapel Road, just north of I-69. That intersection is less than a mile from the north end of the airport runway, and about three miles northeast of Mayfield.On the Net: Former President Donald Trump has filed a statement of appeal to the oversight board funded by Facebook in an appeal to rejoin the social media platform. The decision is slated to take an estimated two and a half months. Trump Appeals to Rejoin Facebook Instagram The decision on whether to let the former president back on the social media giants is slated for April. The board garnered nearly 10,000 comments from the public, which is by far the most it has received regarding a decision. Trump has appealed directly to the "supreme court" of Facebook or the Oversight Board in an appeal to rejoin the social network. Former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who is a co-head of the Oversight Board, which comprises 20 members, stated the panel was currently evaluating his case, reported Diaz Hub. Facebook's content oversight board stated on Tuesday that it received a "user statement" in a highly watched case that involves its choice to indefinitely prohibit the former president from posting on his account due to concerns that he could incite violence again, similarly with the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill. According to a spokesperson for the oversight board, "We can confirm that a user statement has been received in the case before the Oversight Board concerning President Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts. We will have no further comment concerning that statement until the Board has issued its decision," reported CNET. Trump had uploaded a video to Facebook during the siege that appeared sympathetic to demonstrators and disseminated allegations of election fraud. He was suspended following the insurrection at the US Capitol. Also Read: Donald Trump Condemns Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in Deepening Republican Rift Schmidt told presenter Jon Snow they would be assessing the appeal. According to Schmidt, "It's a very high profile case but that is exactly why the Oversight Board was created in the first place," reported Independent. Trump was indefinitely suspended from Facebook and Instagram on January 7. He asserted in this speech that the presidential election was stolen from him. In January, the social media giant stated it was deferring the decision to permanently bar the former president from the platform to its seemingly-independent Oversight Board. Trump was also suspended from YouTube. For Twitter, Trump was permanently banned and said it has no plans to review or rescind the prohibition, even if Trump runs in a bid for the presidency again. Trump's appeal was first reported by Channel 4 News in the UK. It is the most consequential case yet for the Oversight Board, having far-reaching political repercussions for the United States. The Facebook Oversight board was launched in 2020 and has ruled on five cases so far. It declared on January 21 that it would review the company's decision to suspend the former president. The board has a total of 90 days to deliberate whether Trump could remain on the platform. Decisions made by the Board cannot be reversed. The former president's office did not immediately respond to a request for their side of the story. The board is also reviewing public comments on their appeal. Related Article: Trump Ready to Move on After Acquittal Says Sen. Graham @ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. -- VersaBank Partners with Stablecorp to Complete Development of Digital Currency Offering Will Create Significant New Low Cost Deposit Source for VersaBank as it Experiences Record Loan Growth LONDON, ON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - VersaBank (TSX: VB) ("VersaBank" or the "Bank"), a North American leader in business-to-business digital banking and technology solutions for cybersecurity, today announced it plans to launch a strong encryption based digital currency (cryptocurrency) represented one-to-one by a Canadian dollar bank deposit with the Bank, to be known as VCAD. VCAD is expected to be the first digital currency to represent a fiat currency, as well as the first in the world digital currency issued by and backed by deposits with a North American bank. As such, VCAD will offer the highest level of stability and security amongst all digital currencies in the market today. VersaBank has entered into a strategic partnership with Stablecorp, a joint venture between Canada's leading crypto asset manager, 3iQ, and Mavennet, a Canadian leader in blockchain development, to commercially launch VCAD. VCAD is based on VersaBank's proprietary banking software and the digital currency issuance processes for VCAD will be securely managed via VersaVault, VersaBank subsidiary, DRT Cyber Inc.'s ("DRT Cyber"), world leading digital bank vault designed to secure digital assets. The Bank is targeting public availability of VCAD in the coming months. Consistent with VersaBank's highly efficient, business-to-business model, VCAD will be issued by VersaBank to financial intermediary partners in exchange for Canadian dollar deposits with the Bank utilizing "smart contracts", a more highly encrypted iteration of the Bank's existing digital deposit contracts. VersaBank's partners will then offer VCAD directly to individuals and businesses, who can use them for commerce and redeem them for Canadian dollars at any time. VCAD creates a significant new low-cost deposit source for VersaBank as it experiences record loan growth. "As North America's first bank-issued "stablecoin", VCAD offers consumers and businesses the ability to adopt and leverage the benefits of digital currency and blockchain-based assets without the volatility of traditional currencies, alongside the security of a value-backed asset that the cryptocurrency world has long demanded," said David Taylor, President of both VersaBank and its cyber security subsidiary, DRT Cyber. "Consumers and businesses purchasing products and services with VCAD will finally know the precise value of their digital currency when executing these transactions." Mr. Taylor added, "VersaBank was the very first digital bank nearly 30 years ago and has continuously been a pioneer in digital banking in the decades since. Digital currencies are the natural evolution of the world's payment systems, and the launch of VCAD is a natural extension of our digital banking operations as we once again leverage our in-house technology to lead the banking industry. We are proud to work with our partner, Stablecorp, on this industry first." "We are thrilled to partner with VersaBank, a Schedule I Canadian bank, to offer a digital currency that addresses the two major shortcomings of the traditional cryptocurrency market volatility and security," said Jean Desgagne, CEO, Stablecorp. "VCAD provides consumers with not only the security afforded by an underlying deposit with a Canadian chartered bank but also the comfort of knowing that each VCAD issued or redeemed will always have one-to-one value with the Canadian dollar. With such clear benefits, we are highly confident in the demand for VCAD as digital currencies increasingly become part of mainstream financial transactions." In addition to VCAD, under their partnership, VersaBank and Stablecorp plan to work together towards the development and launch of "VUS" and "VEuro", deposit-based, US dollar and Euro versions of the VersaBank digital currency. ABOUT VERSABANK VersaBank is a Canadian Schedule I chartered bank with a difference. VersaBank became the world's first fully digital financial institution when it adopted its highly efficient business-to-business model using its proprietary state-of-the art financial technology to profitably address underserved segments of the Canadian banking market in the pursuit of superior net interest margins while mitigating risk. VersaBank obtains all of its deposits and provides the majority of its loans and leases electronically, with innovative deposit and lending solutions for financial intermediaries that allow them to excel in their core businesses. In addition, leveraging its internally developed IT security software and capabilities, VersaBank established wholly owned, Washington, DC-based subsidiary, DRT Cyber to pursue significant large-market opportunities in cyber security and develop innovative solutions to address the rapidly growing volume of cyber threats challenging financial institutions, multi-national corporations and government entities on a daily basis. VersaBank's Common Shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol VB and its Series 1 Preferred Shares and Series 3 Preferred Shares trade under the symbols VB.PR.A and VB.PR.B respectively. About Canada Stablecorp Canada Stablecorp is a joint venture between 3iQ, Canada's largest cryptoasset manager and Mavennet, a leader in blockchain development. QCAD was Stablecorp's first product release and is a digital asset with the stability of the Canadian dollar and backed by Canadian dollars. Launched in February 2020, QCAD was the first ever major Canadian-dollar Stablecoin designed for the mass market. For more information visit our website at: https://www.stablecorp.ca. SOURCE VersaBank Related Links https://www.versabank.com/ Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 23) From the 33 barangays and one establishment placed on lockdown on Saturday, Pasay City now has a total of 55 areas under localized enhanced community quarantine as it grapples with rising COVID-19 infections. As of this afternoon, we have 55 barangays under localized enhanced community quarantine...because nagkaroon po kami ng 21 additional barangays na nagkaroon ng [we have 21 additional barangays which registered] three or more cases, Pasay City Epidemiology and Surveillance Unit nurse Mico Llorca told CNN Philippines News.PH on Tuesday. In its report released on Sunday, the OCTA Research Group said Pasay City logged an alarming 203% increase in daily new cases over the Feb. 18 to 20 period, as compared to the daily average from the week prior. READ: Metro Manila sees rise in new COVID-19 cases; Pasay logs over 200% increase OCTA Llorca said a number of factors could be behind the surge. He said it could be linked to the new and more transmissible variant first found in the United Kingdom, which was detected last week in a Pasay City resident. He said this development prompted intensified testing as well as enhanced contact tracing efforts, which cover up to third-generation contacts. The local government has also requested the Department of Health to have samples from their city undergo genome sequencing to help determine if more of their residents contracted the variant. Another likely factor, he said, is the location of the city itself. Nasa amin po yung airport, so 'yung mga palabas at papasok ng bansa at ibang probinsya, sa amin po dumadaan, he said. Yung iba, nag-iistay pa nang ilang araw sa amin, sa mga dormitories or bedspace, habang naghihintay ng flights. [Translation: The airport is located in Pasay, so those entering and leaving the country or travelling to and from other provinces pass through our area. Others stay for a few days in our city, in dormitories or bedspace, while waiting for their flights.] Data also showed high viral transmissions among family members, with some 66% of their active cases belonging to the same households, he added. According to its public information office, the city has 395 active cases as of Feb. 22. The total number of infected is now at 7,650, but 7,059 have already recovered while 196 have died due to the illness. Pasay City Mayor Emi Calixto-Rubiano, who tested positive for COVID-19, is also still recovering, Llorca said. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The US Department has released a statement on the anniversary of Resolution 2254, regarding President Assad and the US sanctions. Press Statement Michael R. Pompeo, Secretary of State December 22, 2020 Five years ago last Friday, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2254, firmly laying out the only path for an enduring resolution to the Syrian conflict. The United States and the vast majority of the international community remain committed to this dignified plan for ending the suffering of the Syrian people. The Assad regime, supported by its enablers and allies, however, refuses to end its needless, brutal war against the Syrian people, stalling efforts to reach a political resolution. The Department of State today is imposing sanctions on Asma al-Assad, the wife of Bashar al-Assad, for impeding efforts to promote a political resolution of the Syrian conflict pursuant to Section 2(a)(i)(D) of Executive Order 13894. Asma al-Assad has spearheaded efforts on behalf of the regime to consolidate economic and political power, including by using her so-called charities and civil society organizations. In addition, we are sanctioning several members of Asma al-Assads immediate family, including Fawaz Akhras, Sahar Otri Akhras, Firas al Akhras, and Eyad Akhras as per Section 2(a)(ii) of EO 13894. The Assad and Akhras families have accumulated their ill-gotten riches at the expense of the Syrian people through their control over an extensive, illicit network with links in Europe, the Gulf, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Syrian people continue to wait in long lines for bread, fuel, and medicine as the Assad regime chooses to cut subsidies for these basic essentials that Syrians need. As we mark the one-year anniversary of the President signing the bipartisan Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 into law, the United States will also continue to pressure the Assad regime and its enablers to prevent them from amassing the resources to perpetuate their atrocities. As part of that effort, the Department of State today is taking action against Syrias Military Intelligence (SMI) organization by designating the SMI commander, General Kifah Moulhem, for his role as one of the architects of the Syrian peoples suffering. Moulhem is now sanctioned pursuant to Executive Order 13894 Section 2(a)(i)(A) for his actions in preventing a ceasefire in Syria. The Department of the Treasury is additionally imposing sanctions on the Central Bank of Syria, as well as on Lina al-Kinayeh, one of Assads key advisers, her husband, Syrian parliamentarian Mohammed Masouti, and several regime affiliated businesses. The United States will continue to seek accountability for those prolonging this conflict. The Syrian people will decide the future of Syria. To support them, the United States has provided over $12.2 billion in humanitarian assistance since the start of the conflict and will continue applying pressure on the Assad regime until there is irreversible progress toward a political transition as called for in UNSCR 2254. Also as called for in UNSCR 2254 and the Geneva Communique, there must be a nationwide ceasefire, accountability for acts committed during the conflict, free and fair elections pursuant to a new constitution, as well as the release of all arbitrarily detained persons. This is the only path toward a peaceful future for the Syrian people. 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. MURFREESBORO, Tenn. - The Special Investigations Section of the Tennessee Department of Revenue conducted the investigation that led to the indictment and arrest of Carlos Ramirez, president of Carmens Taqueria in Murfreesboro. Revenue special agents arrested Ramirez, age 54, on Tuesday. His bond was set at $50,000. On February 9, 2021, the Rutherford County Grand Jury indicted Ramirez on one count of theft over $250,000, 50 counts of false sales tax returns, and five counts of money laundering. The Department of Revenue has always been committed to making sure Tennessees tax laws and procedures are applied uniformly to ensure fairness, Commissioner David Gerregano said. We can never allow individuals engaged in fraudulent tax activity to have a competitive advantage over honest Tennesseans. If convicted, Ramirez could be sentenced to a maximum of 25 years in the state penitentiary and fined up to $50,000 for theft of property. He could also be sentenced for up to 12 years and fined up to $25,000 for money laundering. Also, he could face up to two years in the state penitentiary and fined up to $3,000 for each count of filing false sales tax returns. The department is pursuing the criminal case in cooperation with District Attorney Jennings Jones office. Citizens who suspect violations of Tennessee's revenue laws should call the toll-free tax fraud hot line at (800) FRAUDTX (372-8389). The Department of Revenue is responsible for the administration of state tax laws and motor vehicle title and registration laws, and the collection of taxes and fees associated with those laws. The department collects around 87 percent of total state revenue. During the 2020 fiscal year, it collected $15.1 billion in state taxes and fees and more than $3.2 billion in taxes and fees for local governments. To learn more about the department, visit www.tn.gov/revenue. ### We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Missing Dover Heights woman Melissa Caddick left behind a trail of emotional and financial devastation, according to Bruce Gleeson who has been appointed by the court to unravel her complex financial affairs. After reviewing thousands of pages of financial documents, Mr Gleeson, a principal of insolvency firm Jones Partners, said he could not identify a single genuine document Ms Caddick provided to her investors. Melissa Caddick has not been seen since November, the day after she was accused of financial misconduct. Credit: The 49-year-old vanished in mid-November, hours after the Federal Police raided her eastern suburbs home on behalf of the corporate watchdog, ASIC. Court documents have since revealed that Ms Caddick allegedly misappropriated millions of dollars from her clients. Investors, most of whom knew and trusted Ms Caddick, were suffering emotional and financial devastation with many of them losing their life savings, said Mr Gleeson. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Madam Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration-designate, has appealed to Serbian investors to come and invest in Ghana. The Foreign Minister-designate, made the appeal on Tuesday, when Mr Djura Likar, Ambassador of Serbia to Ghana, paid a courtesy call on her in Accra. She noted that though bilateral trade between the two countries was modest, it was her expectation that it would improve with the coming into force of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), which would create a huge market of 1.2 billion people, an opportunity for Serbian investors to explore new opportunities on the African continent, with Ghana as the entry point. She urged Serbian investors to take advantage of the development, identify their areas of interest and use the conducive business environment in Ghana as a springboard to access the continental market. She mentioned the need for countries such as Serbia to act as advocates for developing countries such as Ghana to have access to affordable vaccines in the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic that had badly hit the global economy and stated that it behoves on countries to utilise traditional friendships to jointly battle the pandemic. Madam Ayorkor Botchwey further commended the Government of Serbia for their continued collaboration with Ghana and extending vital support for Africa on the very important matter of the reform of the UN Security Council. She recalled that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was instrumental in the processes leading to the Ezulwini Consensus and Expressed the hope that Ghana would continue to count on the support of Serbia for consensus and work closely together to move the negotiations forward, but in the right direction. She stated that Ghana was looking forward to working closely with Serbia on the issue of the Revitalization of the Work of the General assembly during negotiations at the upcoming 75th session. Madam Ayorkor Botchwey acknowledged the excellent tradition of cooperation and support for each others candidates for positions at various multilateral institutions and express the hope that both countries would continue to cooperate and support each other in that regard. She said in the spirit of the aforementioned tradition, requested support for Ghanas bid for a non-permanent seat at the UN Security Council for the period 2022 to 2023 and the Ghanaian candidature for membership of the United Nations Board on Narcotic Drugs for the period 2022 to 2025 as well as for membership of the International Narcotics Control Board for the period 2022 to 2027. The Foreign Minister-designate reaffirmed Ghanas commitment to enhancing the warm relations between Ghana and Serbia for mutual benefit. She noted that the friendship and cooperation between Ghana and Serbia, particularly in recent times, have been marked by the exchange of notable high-level visits such as the visit to Belgrade by the former Speaker of Parliament, Professor Aaron Mike Oquaye in 2018 and the visit to Belgrade in 2019 by herself as Minister for Foreign Affairs, testify to the growing exchanges between the two countries. She expressed the hope that high-level visits would increase in the coming years to facilitate closer cooperation and give further impetus for the common efforts to deepen and broaden relations and cooperation in diverse spheres for the mutual benefit of the Ghanaian and Serbian peoples. Madam Ayorkor Botchwey expressed appreciation to the Government of Serbia for their continued support to the human resource development of Ghana through the offer of Serbian Government scholarships to Ghanaian students to pursue various degree and post-graduate programmes in Serbian Universities. She applauded the Serbian Government for the 12 scholarship slots offered to Ghanaian students for the 2021 academic year, for deciding to extend the deadline for submission of applications for Ghana and stated that the Scholarship Secretariat of Ghana is working assiduously to submit names of the selected beneficiary students for submission to the Serbian Authorities. She commended Mr Likar for taking time to come to Accra to commiserate with the family of the late Mr Steve Mawuenyega, who until his death on January 12th, was the Honorary Consul of Serbia to Ghana. She stated that the late Mr Mawuenyega, during his tenure, worked assiduously to strengthen the relations between the two countries, which have been longstanding, warm, and cordial since the establishment of diplomatic relations in the 1950s. Mr Likar suggested the creation of a Parliamentary friendly group between the two nations as part of strengthening their relationship. He noted that his Government would continue the scholarship scheme to enable more Ghanaian students to study in Serbia. 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 New Delhi, Feb 24 : BJP chief J.P. Nadda will visit poll-bound West Bengal to attend several programmes of the party. Nadda will reach Kolkata late on Wednesday evening and participate in various programmes on Thursday. On Thursday, Nadda will launch the 'Lokkho Sonar Bangla' manifesto crowd sourcing campaign to seek suggestions from common people at BJP office in the state capital. Nadda will also visit Rishi Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's residence and museum in Naihati. He will have lunch at a jute mill worker's house in Gouripur and visit Anandpuri Kalibari Temple, Barrackpore. He will also address a rally on the culmination of 'Poriborton Yatra' of the party's Nabadwip zone in Anandapuri Khelar Math. Later in the day, Nadda will visit Bibhutibhusan Bhandhopadhyay's house and Mangal Pandey memorial. In the evening, the BJP chief will attend an intellectuals' meet at Science City. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text Four girls, including three minors, who allegedly went missing on their way to school still remain untraceable. The girls were reported missing on Tuesday. The police came across CCTV footage in which the four girls are seen coming out of a building after changing their school uniforms and then boarding a bus to Sitapur. Lakhimpur Kheri Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Vijay Dhull, said on Wednesday that he had immediately alerted all police outposts and circulated the girls' photographs in the public as well as on various social media platforms. Suspecting that the girls had eloped on their own and they were not abducted, police said they had deployed five teams to track them. According to reports, the families became worried after the girls did not return from their school on time. Their families searched for them and then, fearing for the lives of their daughters, the parents lodged a complaint with police. All the four girls are close friends and students of the same school in Lakhimpur city. Police, meanwhile, said one of the girls, 20, a student of Class 12, had left home with Rs 25,000 cash. She, along with three minor girls aged between 15 to 16 years, were seen boarding the bus. Police teams have been rushed to Lucknow and Sitapur. The SSP said, "The bus conductor, who identified the girls, said he had dropped them at Sitapur bus stand. It appears from the CCTV clips and the conductor's account, that the girls left home on their own. We do not see anyone accompanying them." The girls have all turned off their mobile phones and their last location was traced to Sitapur. The police have been scanning CCTV footage of the bus stand ' title=' bus stand '>bus stand and railway station and are coordinating with their counterparts in Sitapur and Lucknow in the search operations. U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) asks questions during testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in Washington, on Nov. 13, 2019. (Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty Images) Stefanik Proposal Would Block Federal Funding for Colleges, Universities With CCP Links Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) proposed a measure on Feb. 23 that would block federal funding for U.S. colleges and universities that have links with the Chinese regime, a move she says will combat efforts by the regime in Beijing to undermine the United States. The legislation, named the End College Chinese Communist Partnerships Act, would halt taxpayer funds from going to institutions that have partnerships with Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes (CI) and the Peoples Republic of China. The CCP is partaking in genocide, censoring speech, & influencing our academia. Taxpayer $$ should NOT fund their partnerships with U.S. schools! Period, Stefanik said in a statement on Twitter. Under the bill, all U.S. colleges and universities that have a contractual partnership in effect with an entity that is owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by the Government of the Peoples Republic of China, or organized under the laws of the Peoples Republic of China, will have federal funding blocked, Fox News reported. The legislation exempts funds from the Department of Education that are provided directly to students. CIs bill themselves as places to learn Mandarin, study Chinese culture, and land a scholarship. Theyre funded and largely staffed by Hanban, a nonprofit that claims to be non-governmental, but is directly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to a report by the Senate Homeland Security committees investigations subcommittee (pdf). The institutes came under intense scrutiny from U.S. officials under the Trump administration over concern that they spread Chinese propaganda, restrict academic freedom, and facilitate espionage in U.S. classrooms. On Dec. 31, 2020, the Trump administration submitted a proposal, named Establishing Requirement for Student and Exchange Visitor Program Certified Schools to Disclose Agreements with Confucius Institutes and Classrooms, that sought to ensure colleges and K12 schools that are certified to host foreign exchange programs disclose their financial ties to CIs and the affiliated Confucius Classrooms. However, that proposal was quietly scrapped by the Biden administration on Jan. 26, according to the U.S. Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which is a division of the White Houses budget office. Stefanik on Feb. 23 accused House Democrats of being weak on China, adding on Twitter that she will always be STRONG for America! The Chinese regime has been engaged in a sustained effort to undermine all facets of American power through influence campaigns within the United States, and has engaged in the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of intellectual property and academic and scientific research on college campuses, within national labs, and within the private sector, the legislation states, according to Fox News. The legislation notes the CCPs attempts to recruit Chinese Americans and ethnic Chinese on U.S. soil for intelligence collection and coercion to advance the CCP ideology and agenda. Separately on Feb. 23, Stefanik co-sponsored a bill, named the Opposing Business with Chinese Military Companies Act, which would ensure that any and all companies affiliated with, or operated on behalf of the Chinese military, are made public and sanctioned. As we know, the Chinese military is engaged in hostile actions against the United States and a genocide of ethnic minorities, a release states, referring to the human rights abuses being committed against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Chinas northwestern Xinjiang region. Despite President Biden and the Democrats soft approach towards China, I will continue to propose and support legislation that strongly combats their malign, anti-American behavior, and advances the interests of the United States at home and abroad, Stefanik added in a statement. Frank Fang contributed to this report. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. The president confirmed his readiness to get vaccinated together with the military as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says a nationwide COVID-19 vaccination campaign should begin as soon as the regions receive the first batches of a vaccine. He announced this at a meeting with Ukrainian Deputy Health Minister, Chief Medical Officer Viktor Liashko, according to the press service of the President's Office. "Vaccination should begin as soon as possible, as soon as the regions receive the first batches. But it must be voluntary no one needs to be forced, it is better to inform people in detail about the proper quality of the drug," he said. The vaccine supply logistics to all regions of Ukraine has already been worked out, and there should be no delays, he said. Deliveries to hospitals will be handled by mobile teams. First of all, doctors of hospitals with COVID-19 patients will be vaccinated, they will be followed by employees of medical wards, cardiovascular and gastrology care units, emergency medical care, family doctors, etc. The second stage provides for the vaccination of the military. Zelensky confirmed his readiness to get vaccinated together with the servicemen as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. Liashko, in turn, informed the president that on February 22 two COVID-19 vaccines Pfizer/BioNTech and Covishield were registered in Ukraine. According to him, the first batch of 500,000 doses of the Covishield vaccine has already arrived in Ukraine. It will be delivered from Boryspil International Airport to the Ukrprompostach warehouse, and the delivery of the vaccine to the regions will begin on February 24. Covishield was produced at an Indian plant under the AstraZeneca license. Vaccination with the drug is carried out in two stages. Read alsoLithuania to share excess stocks of COVID-19 vaccine with Ukraine Kuleba Coronavirus vaccine On the morning of February 23, Ukraine received the first batch of coronavirus vaccines. Some 500,000 doses of an Indian-produced vaccine from AstraZeneca are being dispatched from Boryspil Airport. On February 22, the Ukrainian Health Ministry registered the Oxford / AstraZeneca (Covishield) COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use. The vaccine was developed by the University of Oxford in partnership with the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca. The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine for emergency use has been approved by the World Health Organization (WHO) and authorized by the UK, the European Union, and India. The vaccination campaign in Ukraine was originally expected to start with the use of a vaccine produced by Pfizer/ BioNTech, which Ukraine was supposed to receive during the first wave of distribution under the global COVAX Facility. The supply of 117,000 doses of that vaccine to Ukraine has been confirmed. During the first half of the year, Ukraine could receive from 2.2 million to 3.7 million doses of the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine within as part of COVAX. In addition, the vaccine will be purchased for public funds directly from producers. It is expected that at least 500,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine will arrive in Ukraine in February. Reporting by UNIAN We are living in interesting times - so many changes happening. When I think of the persecuted people in our world, I think we dont take the threat of persecution very seriously I mean, that happens in other countries, not here in Australia! In this article I want to show you one persecuted Christians take on being persecuted. After all, Jesus never promised that we would not have any trouble see John chapter 16 verse 33. And then, while I dont want to pre-empt anything, I wonder if we shouldnt brace ourselves for potential persecution here at home as we go about our daily business of prayer, worship and fellowship. An Indian perspective Ajay Pillai is the leader of the Indian Inland Mission, having taken it over after Dr Paul Pillai, the missions founder and Ajays father, passed away last year. The Mission reaches across India and the world at great personal cost to the members. As a result of dealing with the pandemic, Ajay has noted the following observations or lessons learnt about a life of faith (used with permission): 1) There is a vast difference between going to Church and being the Church. Romans chapter 12 verse 5. 2) The scattered Church is sometimes more effective than the gathered Church. Acts chapter 8 verse 4. 3) God is exposing our idols. Psalm chapter16 verse 4. 4) No matter how hard we try, we are still not in control. Psalm chapter 115 verse 3. 5) Death is a reality because sin is a reality. Romans chapter 6 verse 23. 6) Only Gods plans prevail; we cannot control the future. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 1. 7) The ripple effects of sin are far-reaching. Romans chapter 5 verse 12. 8) We cannot put our trust in man. Psalm chapter 118 verse 8. 9) The suffering and hopeless abound around us. All the time. Matthew chapter 11 verse 28. 10) Jesus is the ONLY answer. John chapter 14 verse 6. If you read these points, including the references, and ponder on them rather than just skimming them, I hope you will realise how significant, uncomfortable and challenging these can be. The more so because they are coming from a person in the front line of persecution. An Australian perspective Last week, on 4 February 2021, VictoriasChange or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Bill 2020 passed the upper house of Victorias parliament. This will now become law. It will be illegal to try to change or suppress a persons sexual orientation or gender identity. While no-one supports aversion therapies, where pain or nausea are used to deal with unwanted sexual attraction, the law makes it a criminal offence for doctors, psychiatrists, churches or even parents to engage in practices or 'therapies' - be they formal (e.g. counselling) or informal (e.g. prayer) with an LGBTIQ+ person - even if they have been specifically requested. The Bill empowers the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission to investigate reports of conversion and suppression practices. Criminal penalties of up to 10-years in prison will apply. Contrary to Daniel Andrews claims, no faith leaders were allowed to see the Bill before it was introduced to Parliament, and the Attorney-General, Jill Hennessy, has declined to meet church representatives herself. In commentary for The Australian (26 January), columnist Nick Cater notes that the Bill is a Trojan horse for activism of the most insidious kind. It is an attack on freedom of religion and parental rights by activists who regard the very existence of categories of sex and sexuality to be oppressive. To call upon the laws of biology when counselling a gender-confused teenager or to suggest they might want to think again before declaring war on their bodies will become a criminal act. The role of doctors, psychiatrists, priests and parents will be reduced to applying a rubber stamp. Many people fear there is a broader agenda at work by a state government more hostile to Christianity than its predecessors. . . They fear the bill may hide an agenda to silence people of faith. The broadest threat to religious freedom in Australia comes from those hostile to traditional religious views (such as on sexual relations). While those who are hostile are often motivated by a desire to protect and include minority groups such as gay and lesbian Australians, their methods can intimidate and exclude religious people and associations. The Institute for Civil Society concludes that Freedom of religion and belief are much better protected in international law than in Australian law. Improved legal protections are urgently needed in Australia. But legal protections are only part of the answer. The promotion of true tolerance the acceptance that we all have a responsibility to give each other the right to be wrong in our eyes while holding to our own truths without trying to drive others out of the public square is a cultural commitment. It needs to be taught and modelled by all of us in family, community and public life, not just in the law. If we can do that we may escape polarisation and tribal warfare and find ways to live together with our differences in pluralist Australia. We must pray Praise God for the wisdom and faithfulness exhibited by persecuted Christians such as Ajay Pillai. May God bless us with wisdom to know how to respond when we need to. Remember what happened to the apostles when they were brought before the Sanhedrin, who had given them strict instructions not to teach about Jesus? Peter replied We must obey God rather than men. Sadly, they were flogged but their lives were spared, and they continued teaching. Do we have the courage to continue praying, teaching, counselling in love, despite the law? The sentencing of a man for sexually assaulting two women in Dublin city centre four years ago has been adjourned because the prison he is on remand in is currently in lockdown. Philip Murphy (40) was not produced from the Midlands Prison on Wednesday and Judge Melanie Greally adjourned the case to April 16 next for sentence. She said it is likely that she will be imposing a custodial sentence so the adjournment should not impact Murphy. The Midlands Prison is currently in lockdown after a number of prisoners and staff have tested positive for Covid-19. The case had been adjourned last November after evidence was heard at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court that Murphy had just been released from serving a 10-year prison sentence for falsely imprisoning a woman, when he sexually assaulted the two women in February 2016. He was extradited from the UK in early 2020 following lengthy legal argument. Murphy, of no fixed abode in the Dublin 8 area, pleaded guilty to two counts of sexually assaulting the two women at Jervis Lane and O'Rahilly Parade in Dublin on February 25, 2016. During both incidents, Murphy grabbed the women from behind as they were walking on their own through the city in the early hours of the morning, told them he wanted to have sex with them and said he was going to kill them. You're going to die tonight, he repeatedly told one victim. Detective Garda Emma Ryan told Philipp Rahn BL, prosecuting, at the sentence hearing last November, that Murphy's first victim was walking home from her work in a restaurant shortly after midnight on the night in question when Murphy grabbed her from behind by the mouth. He told the woman: Don't scream or I'm going to kill you. I just want to fuck. I can pay you for it. The woman was terrified, but tried to lead Murphy along the road towards help before screaming loudly, the court heard. People in nearby apartments looked out their windows at the sound of the screaming, causing Murphy to flee. The woman also ran home before contacting gardai. Twenty minutes later, another woman was walking along Moore Street, on her way to work when Murphy came up behind her, put his hand over her mouth and pushed her into O'Rahilly Parade. He stroked her shoulder and touched her chest area, repeatedly telling her: You're going to die tonight, the court heard. He was looking at me like I was naked, like I was a piece of meat, the woman told gardai. He kept telling me I was going to die, that he was going to cut my throat. A man walked past and the woman tried to scream, as Murphy squeezed her throat. The passer-by looked their way and a passing bin truck driver also noticed her calling for help. Murphy again fled the scene and the men came to the woman's aid. Gardai at Store Street launched an investigation and sourced CCTV footage of both areas. In footage of the first incident, Murphy could be seen putting on a pair of gloves before jogging after the first victim. In footage of the second incident, he could also be seen walking closely behind the woman. Murphy's probation officers and former prison officers identified him from the footage. He had been released from prison just two days prior to the incident after serving the bulk of a 10-year sentence for false imprisonment. He has 10 previous convictions in total, including public order offences and production of a Stanley knife. Murphy was arrested, questioned and released without charge while a file was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions. During the garda interview, Murphy denied carrying out the offences. He said he had received psychological treatment in prison and didn't treat women like that anymore. He also claimed he was gay and no longer attracted to women. A decision was made to charge him in October 2017, but by then he could not be located, Det Gda Ryan said. Murphy was eventually arrested in July 2019 in the UK on foot of a European arrest warrant. He remained in custody in the UK for nearly a year due to legal issues before being extradited to Ireland in June this year. He has been in custody ever since. Judge Melanie Greally noted that any sentence handed down to Murphy would require a lengthy probation period. She had adjourned the case to Wednesday to allow for the preparation of a probation report. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The Australian government has been accused of backing down to Mark Zuckerberg by weakening new laws to regulate big tech in response to Facebook's news ban. Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young roasted Treasurer Josh Fryderberg, telling Parliament: 'The government has buckled here. 'You've blinked, you weakened the power the minister has because Facebook bullied you. This is a face-saving exercise by the Treasurer'. Facebook shocked the world last week when it blocked Australian news websites in response to a new law forcing it to pay media companies for news content. The tech giant on Tuesday said it would end the ban after the government made changes to the bill, including a clause exempting a platform if it makes a 'significant contribution' to news in Australia. The Greens and independent senator Rex Patrick said this amendment could allow the Treasurer to let big tech off the hook after just a few deals with large companies like News Corp, leaving smaller publishers unable to get any cash. Senator Patrick said the phrase 'significant contribution' was not defined and caused 'great ambiguity' for smaller companies. 'We will still in effect have a huge imbalance in power between Facebook, Google and the small players. It undermines the whole bill,' he said. Senator Hanson-Young moved an amendment to require the Treasurer to consider whether deals have been done with smaller publishers when deciding which platforms must abide by the code. But the government rejected the idea, saying it was not necessary and the motion was defeated with the support of Labor senators who feared that Facebook may ban news again if it passed. Senator Hanson-Young blasted the Coalition government and Labor, saying: 'Small and regional players will get left out in the cold. 'We are going to be keeping a very watchful eye on this. If the government wants to make sure the power is in the Treasurer's hands, it will be on the Treasurer's head if anybody misses out. Facebook has agreed to restore news pages in Australia 'in the coming days' after CEO Mark Zuckerberg (left) forced MPs to water down new laws that will make the site pay for content 'We will expect answers in this place as to who has been screwed over by Facebook and Google until you understand that it is your job to look after all players, not just the Murdoch press, not just the Nine News Empire.' She added: 'If deals are done with those in the media who are their mates and not with the smaller publishers, it will be quite clear that this government has been duped. 'Expect a fight in the months to come.' Senator Patrick said Labor had been 'played' by the government after the changes were made at the last minute, leaving senators little time to consider them. The union for Australia's journalists, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, also said the changes could hurt smaller publishers. 'For small publishers who fail to make side deals with the tech giants, they could be locked out, further entrenching the narrow ownership base of the Australian media market,' a statement said. 'It shouldn't be up to Facebook and Google to cherry pick and groom publishers it deems acceptable for side deals. Any code should be mandatory, uniform, predictable, and fair; not at the whim of technology executives.' The Treasurer has insisted that he will take into account deals with smaller publishers when deciding which platforms must obey the code. On Tuesday Campbell Brown, Facebook's vice president of news partnerships, said Australian ministers assured him the site will be free 'to support the publishers we choose to' after new bargaining laws are voted into force. The rule could allow Facebook to ban companies demanding higher prices for their news while using cheaper rivals - a significant loophole in legislation that was designed to 'level the playing field' between tech firms and publishers. It could also allow Facebook to block news outlets who are critical of the site, though the final deal has yet to be published. Mr Brown spoke out as CEO Mark Zuckerberg agreed to end a week-long blockade of news in Australia after ministers significantly watered down laws designed to force the site to pay for news content it hosts. The concessions will have global ramifications. The UK, EU and US are all considering whether to pass similar rules, but will now find it much harder to go beyond the precedent set in Australia. Nevertheless, Mr Frydenberg painted the move as a victory, saying Facebook will now negotiate deals to pay for content - albeit with a stronger negotiating hand than it had last week. Key changes agreed by Australia are that the law will not apply if Facebook can show a 'significant contribution' to Australian journalism by striking its own deals with news publishers. If the law is going to be applied, then Facebook will be given one month's notice - allowing the company more time to strike deals and wiggle out of regulation. Even after the law is applied, Facebook will have a further two months to negotiate deals on its terms and will only be forced into arbitration - which would set a fixed price for news content - 'as a last resort'. In effect, it means arbitration is unlikely to ever be used and encourages deals to be struck ahead of time - with Mr Frydenberg telling media companies to 'get out there and talk to Facebook' as he announced the changes on Tuesday. The new rules also state that Facebook is free to offer different fees to different news organisations as a result of its negotiations, and will not have to reveal the inner workings of their closely-guarded algorithms or disclose data. Mr Brown also claimed the site will retain control over which news organisations get to appear. 'Going forward, the government has clarified we will retain the ability to decide if news appears on Facebook so that we won't automatically be subject to forced negotiation,' he said. 'We have come to an agreement that will allow us to support the publishers we choose to, including small and local publishers.' While the final details of the deal have yet to be seen, giving Facebook the option of blocking certain news sites would hand it significant bargaining power while weakening the hand of publishers in negotiations. What legal changes has Australia agreed to - and what do they actually mean? The government says: 'A decision to designate a platform under the Code must take into account whether a digital platform has made a significant contribution to the sustainability of the Australian news industry through reaching commercial agreements with news media businesses' What it means: Tech companies will not be affected by the new rules if they strike deals with media publishers and pay enough money The government says: 'A digital platform will be notified of the Government's intention to designate prior to any final decision noting that a final decision on whether or not to designate a digital platform would be made no sooner than one month from the date of notification' What it means: If the law is going to be applied, then tech companies will be given a month's notice in order to strike more deals The government says: 'Non-differentiation provisions will not be triggered because commercial agreements resulted in different remuneration amounts or commercial outcomes that arose in the course of usual business practices' What it means: The government will not force tech companies to offer the same fees to all news publishers, will not force them to share information on their algorithms, and will not force them to sign data-sharing deals The government says: 'Final offer arbitration is a last resort where commercial deals cannot be reached by requiring mediation, in good faith, to occur prior to arbitration for no longer than two months' What it means: Even after the rules are applied, tech firms will have two months to negotiate before being forced into arbitration - which will be used only 'as a last resort' The government says: 'These amendments add further impetus for parties to engage in commercial negotiations outside the Code' What it means: Publishers should do deals with Facebook now, because arbitration is unlikely to be used in practice Advertisement Facebook's Australian managing director, Will Easton, welcomed the changes on Tuesday, saying: 'We're pleased that we've been able to reach an agreement with the Australian government and appreciate the constructive discussions we've had.' Australia's new law was designed to tackle the huge power imbalance between big tech companies which dominate their markets and soak up the lion's share of advertising revenue by forcing them to pay for the news content they host and reveal some of their closely-guarded algorithms and data. Google and Facebook had led opposition to the changes, fearing it would create international precedent that would threaten their business models. Initially, Google threatened to pull its search engine from Australia altogether - but backed down last week and began doing deals with media outlets. Facebook went further, blocking all news content in a hastily-organised ban that also brought down charity pages, emergency services providing Covid information, domestic violence shelters and missing persons groups. The ban even brought down the site's own page for a short time. Facebook has now agreed to restore news and negotiate deals similar to the ones Google has struck, but will do so with increased bargaining power after the changes were agreed. Google has been told about the changes and has described them as 'sensible.' Facebook and Google still face the prospect of having to agree deals with media around the world, as the European Union, Canada and other jurisdictions move to regulate the sector. Since their emergence around the turn of the century, Google and Facebook have been largely unregulated and have grown into two of the world's largest and most profitable companies. But a string of scandals about misinformation, privacy violations, data harvesting and their virtual monopoly on online advertising has triggered the attention of watchdogs. For every $100 spent by Australian advertisers online today, $49 goes to Google and $24 to Facebook, according to the country's competition watchdog. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (right) hailed the news as a victory and said Facebook will negotiate with Australian publishers over their content Facebook last week blocked all news content in Australia in protest at the new laws, sparking international outcry and calls for tougher regulations Critics of the law have said it is punishing successful companies and amounts to a money grab by struggling but politically connected traditional media. They also lament that there is no requirement in the law that money gained by the media companies from Facebook and Google be spent on expanding public interest journalism rather than just boost profits. Thousands of journalism jobs and scores of news outlets have been lost in Australia alone over the past decade as the sector watched advertising revenue flow to the digital players. 'We will negotiate': Facebook's statement on the deal 'We're pleased that we've been able to reach an agreement with the Australian government and appreciate the constructive discussions we've had with Treasurer Frydenberg and Minister Fletcher over the past week. 'We have consistently supported a framework that would encourage innovation and collaboration between online platforms and publishers. 'After further discussions, we are satisfied that the Australian government has agreed to a number of changes and guarantees that address our core concerns about allowing commercial deals that recognize the value our platform provides to publishers relative to the value we receive from them. 'As a result of these changes, we can now work to further our investment in public interest journalism and restore news on Facebook for Australians in the coming days.' By William Easton, Managing Director, Facebook Australia & New Zealand Advertisement Facebook's news ban last week sent shockwaves around the world and sparked campaigns to delete the app. 'Delete Facebook', 'Boycott Zuckerberg' and 'Facebook We Need To Talk' began trending on rival site Twitter. David Cicilline, a Democrat politician from Rhode Island in the US, even went so far as to say 'Facebook is not compatible with democracy' as users were also urged to give up Instagram and WhatsApp because Facebook owns them. British MP Julian Knight said Facebook appeared to be using Australia as a 'test case' for how democracies would react to having news banned, and called for legislators around the world to bring the tech giant 'to heel'. Among those urging users to delete the app was Stephen Scheeler, former Facebook Australia CEO, who slammed the 'alarming' move and accused Mark Zuckerberg of being motivated by 'money, power, and not [by the] good.' Critics also said Facebook's ban would lead to the proliferation of conspiracy theories and misinformation - which the platform claims to be tackling. The ban appeared rushed and spectacularly botched - as it brought health services providing Covid information, charities, food banks, and even Facebook's own homepage. Instead of seeing posts from the social media giant, users clicking on its own Facebook page were instead met with a message saying 'no posts yet'. In a spectacular case of buck-passing, Facebook then attempted to blame the errors on the Australian government, saying it mirrors the 'broad and vague' definition of 'news' in its new law. Facebook and Google still face the prospect of having to agree deals with media around the world, as the European Union, Canada and other jurisdictions move to regulate the sector. Since their emergence around the turn of the century, the tech platforms have been largely unregulated and have grown into two of the world's largest and most profitable companies. Australian ministers (Prime Minister Scott Morrison, right, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, left, and Communication Minister Paul Fletcher, rear) have agreed to make four concessions to the law which will make it more beneficial to Facebook But a string of scandals about misinformation, privacy violations, data harvesting and their virtual monopoly on online advertising has triggered the attention of watchdogs. Mr Frydenberg and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher drew up Australia's law after a three-year inquiry by Australia's competition regulator, the ACCC, which found Google and Facebook have 'an imbalance in bargaining power' when dealing with news companies. The code was intended to apply to Facebook NewsFeed and Google Search - but other services such as Instagram and YouTube can be added if a bargaining power imbalance arises. In addition to payment for content, the measures would also force transparency around the closely guarded algorithms that tech firms use to rank content. The code will require Google and Facebook to give publishers 14 days notice of any algorithm changes that are likely to have a significant impact on their traffic. Under a two-way value model, the payment for content would take into account the value that Google and Facebook provide to news organisations by driving traffic to their sites. A snake catcher has captured the astonishing moment a blue tree snake was found lurking on a family's veranda for some cool reprieve on a scorching hot afternoon. Luke Huntley, owner of Snake Catcher Noosa, was called to relocate a blue phase common tree snake from a home at Peregian Springs on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland on Tuesday. 'I scooped the beauty up into my hands, it was the easiest catch I've ever made,' Mr Huntley told the Daily Mail Australia. Luke Huntley, owner of Snake Catcher Noosa, was called to relocate a blue phase common tree snake (pictured) from a home at Peregian Springs on the Sunshine Coast Mr Huntley said he considers himself lucky to rescue his second blue phase tree snake this week. 'I couldn't believe how vibrant blue he was, absolutely beautiful,' he said. While the common tree snake is regularly found in the Sunshine Coast, Mr Huntley said a blue phase is a rare but exciting find. 'They can come in yellow, varying green shades and even jet black, but a turquoise aqua colour is really rare,' he said. While the common tree snake is regularly found in the Sunshine Coast, Mr Huntley said a blue phase (pictured) is a rare but exciting find The blue phase commmon tree snake (pictured) is considered a 'rare and exciting find' for Noosa Sanke Catcher Luke Huntley 'I have to reassure people the snake isn't Photoshopped, people don't believe it.' Snake Catcher Luke later released the snake into nearby bushland. Viewers were left astonished at the rare sighting of the blue phase snake on Facebook. 'I haven't seen one of these, very pretty,' one said. 'I've never seen one of these!' Another commented. 'Beautiful colour, that's the best coloured snake I've ever seen,' a woman said. Paxton, IL (60957) Today Cloudy. Slight chance of a rain shower. High 69F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Cloudy. Low around 55F. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph. The United States, under the administration of President Joe Biden, maintains unchanged its position on the Moroccan Sahara issue and continues to support the UN process to implement a just and lasting solution to this longstanding dispute in Morocco. The remarks were made by the US State Departments spokesman, Ned Price, during the daily press briefing Monday. To a question on whether there is an update on the Sahara issue, Mr. Price said: No. No update at the moment. I think what we have said broadly still applies. Nothing has changed with regard to the examination by the new Administration of the policies and decisions of the previous Administration, insisted Ned Price, who also welcomed the new steps Morocco is taking to improve relations with Israel, added the spokesperson for the State Department. The Morocco-Israel relationship will have long-term benefits for both countries, he said. He stated further that the United States will continue to support the work of MINURSO to monitor the ceasefire and prevent violence in the region. The spokesman for the US State Department has thus put an end to the gesticulations of the Algerian and polisario media which have multiplied calls on the new US Administration to cancel the decree of the former President Donal Trump, officially recognizing Moroccos sovereignty over the entire territory of its Sahara. It is to be recalled that the US State Department is posting on its website Moroccos undivided map, including the Sahara provinces. New Delhi, Feb 24 : A Delhi Court will be hearing on Thursday the arguments on the anticipatory bail petition filed by Shantanu Muluk in the 'Toolkit' case. The matter was slated to be heard Wednesday but, Additional Sessions Judge Dharmendra Rana of the Patiala House Court adjourned it on the request of Additional Public Prosecutor (APP) Irfan Ahmed. "I am seeking adjournment for physical date. I want to argue in the presence of the investigating officer,": APP Ahmed told the court, following which the matter was adjourned and kept for tomorrow. Muluk had moved the Patiala House Court in Delhi on Tuesday, days before the end of ten-day transit remand granted to him by the Bombay High Court on February 16. The Additional Sessions Judge was apprised that the accused has the interim protection till February 26. Muluk, along with climate activist Disha Ravi and Nikita Jacob are facing charges of conspiracy and sedition in the case related to the farmers' protest. Muluk and Jacob had joined the investigation at Delhi Police's Cyber Cell office in Dwarka on February 22. They were later confronted with Disha Ravi for three hours, according to the police. The Delhi Police have contended that the google document tweeted by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg to back the farmers' protest and then deleted, was created by Ravi and two other activists -- Jacob and Muluk. The police said that the 'Toolkit' was a sinister design to defame India and cause violence. Climate activist Disha Ravi was granted bail by the court on Tuesday. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text Killeen, TX (76540) Today Mostly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 82F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph.. Tonight Thunderstorms likely this evening. Then a chance of scattered thunderstorms overnight. Low 66F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%. Locally heavier rainfall possible. THIS NEWS RELEASE IS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES Release Highlights: Completion of Concurrent Financing of $3,718,900 Completion of Qualifying Transaction with Kalo Gold Corp. The Vatu Aurum Gold Project in Fiji, comprised of a 367 square km land package, containing a drill-stage target and a number of epithermal gold prospects VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / KALO GOLD HOLDINGS CORP. (formerly E36 Capital Corp.) (TSXV:KALO) ("Kalo Holdings" or the "Company"), a discovery-driven company with high-grade opportunities in Fiji, is pleased to announce it has completed its Qualifying Transaction (as defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange (the "TSXV")) (the "Transaction"), pursuant to which it has acquired all of the outstanding securities of Kalo Gold Corp. ("Kalo"). The Company expects to resume trading as a Tier 2 Mining Issuer on the TSXV under the symbol "KALO" at market open on or about Monday, March 1, 2021. In connection with the closing of the Transaction (the "Closing"), the Company: changed its name from E36 Capital Corp. to Kalo Gold Holdings Corp.; completed a private placement of common shares of the Company (each, a " Share ") for aggregate gross proceeds of $3,718,900; ") for aggregate gross proceeds of $3,718,900; appointed Fred Tejada, Kevin Ma, Michael Nesbitt, David Whittle and Cam Grundstrom as directors, and Fred Tejada, Kevin Ma, and Alex Tong as officers of the Company; and created an Advisory Committee and appointed David Medilek, Alastair Still, and Russell Fountain as Special Advisors of the Company. all as further described in this news release and in the Company's filing statement dated February 9, 2021 (the "Filing Statement") with respect to the Transaction. Vatu Aurum Gold Project, Fiji The Vatu Aurum Gold Project is located in Fiji, along the mineral-rich Pacific Ring of Fire. Kalo is working towards a district-scale high-grade gold discovery. With the $3.7 million concurrent financing, Kalo is well funded to carry out an initial drilling program strategically targeted to: confirm high-grade mineralization that contains an inferred historical resource; conduct an expanded soil sampling program and a geophysical survey (IP) over a 2.5 km zone to define the extensions of the known mineralization; and confirm the presence of other drill targets along the 2.5 km long mineralized potential zone. The Kalo exploration team has been on the ground since last December conducting soil sampling, geological mapping, core review and mapping, in addition to completing two drill holes in the main target area in anticipation of an intensive exploration program within the next month. The results of the recent work is pending and it is expected that assay results will be available by the end of March. Closing of Qualifying Transaction In connection with the Closing, the Company's wholly-owned subsidiary amalgamated with Kalo under the provisions of the Business Corporations Act (British Columbia), with the amalgamated company being named "Kalo Gold Corp." and now being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Company. The Company issued one Share to each former shareholder of Kalo, on a one for one basis. After giving effect to the completion of the Transaction there are 53,758,075 Shares issued and outstanding (on an undiluted basis), with approximately 26% of the Shares (on an undiluted basis) held by insiders. Certain Shares issued in connection with the Transaction are subject to escrow requirements, seed share resale restrictions or contractual lock-up restrictions, as applicable, as more particularly detailed in the Filing Statement in the section entitled "Information Concerning the Resulting Issuer - Escrowed Securities". New Board of Directors, Management Team and Special Advisors In connection with the Closing, the Company welcomes a new board of directors and management team. The Company will be led by Fred Tejada, who has been appointed Chief Executive Officer, and Kevin Ma, who has been appointed as President. In addition, Fred Tejada, Kevin Ma, Michael Nesbitt, David Whittle and Cam Grundstrom have been appointed as new directors of the Company. Alex Tong has been appointed Chief Financial Officer and Corporate Secretary. The Company has also established an advisory committee and has appointed David Medilek, Alastair Still and Russell Fountain as Special Advisors of the Company. Brief descriptions of the experience of new directors, officers and special advisors of the Company are provided below. Fred Tejada, P. Geo Chief Executive Officer and Director Mr. Tejada is a seasoned executive and professional geologist, registered in British Columbia, with over 35 years of international mineral industry experience and a proven record of working with both major/junior mining and exploration-focused organizations. He has significant experience in porphyry copper and epithermal gold exploration. Mr. Tejada was country manager of Phelps Dodge Exploration Corp. in the Philippines and previously served as vice-president of exploration at Panoro Minerals Ltd., where he directed the resource definition drilling of two major copper projects in Peru. He was also previously involved in the exploration of the Trend and Belcourt Saxon coal projects in northeastern British Columbia. He was vice-president of operations and exploration at Tirex Resources Ltd. (now European Electric Metals Inc.), before transitioning to chief executive officer of the company. Mr. Tejada is a director of several junior mining companies, including MegumaGold Corp., Westminster Resources Ltd., and Major Precious Metals Corp., all of which are based in Vancouver, B.C. Kevin Ma, CPA, CA, President and Director Mr. Ma was a Director and the Chief Executive Officer of E36 Capital. He is also a partner at Calibre Capital Corp., a private merchant bank and advisory firm that provides corporate finance, strategic go-public and management advisory services to public and private companies. Most recently, Mr. Ma advised and executed First Cobalt Corp.'s $103-million three-way merger with Cobalt One Ltd. and Cobaltech Inc., and a $93-million acquisition of U.S. Cobalt Inc. He has been involved in over $200-million in corporate financing transactions. Mr. Ma was the director of finance at Alexco Resource Corp. and was integral in the new development and operations of the Bellekeno silver mine in the Yukon. Mr. Ma has over 15 years of experience in: corporate finance; mergers and acquisitions; senior executive advisory; and working with Toronto Stock Exchange-listed and New York Stock Exchange-listed companies. Mr. Ma is currently serving several public and private companies as an executive officer and director. He is a chartered accountant certified by the Institute of Chartered Professional Accountants of British Columbia. Mr. Ma will be responsible for matters related to corporate finance, capital markets and corporate development for Kalo Gold. Michael Nesbitt Senior In-Country Manager and Director Michael Nesbitt, a co-founder of Kalo, has been conducting mineral exploration for over 10 years at projects in Vanuatu, Fiji, Palau, Tonga and Guinea (Conakry). He has been active on the ground in Fiji since the beginning of the exploration of the Vatu Aurum gold project and has established key relationships with landowners and government in the area. Mr. Nesbitt holds a BSc in economics (with a minor in Spanish) from the University of Victoria. Mr. Nesbitt will continue to act as the in-country senior manager of Kalo in Fiji. Alex Tong, CPA, CA Chief Financial Officer and Corporate Secretary Mr. Tong has over 15 years of experience in financial roles for mining companies operating in both North America and Africa. He was most recently the director of finance for diamond producer Lucara Diamond Corp. Prior to Lucara, Mr. Tong held senior finance roles at public resource development companies, including Energy Metals and NovaGold, where he was responsible for achieving operational performance and leading mergers and acquisitions, while also being involved with various financing initiatives. Mr. Tong is a chartered professional accountant and holds a bachelor of business administration degree from Simon Fraser University. He is a co-founder of Calibre Capital, a full-service merchant bank providing financial services, leading stock exchange listings and managing all aspects of businesses for its clients to achieve commercial success. David Whittle, CPA, CA Director Mr. Whittle is a chartered professional accountant with over 25 years of senior executive experience in the mining industry, where he has been responsible for: strategic planning initiatives; operations; and all aspects of corporate and financial management and administration. He was formerly the chief financial officer at Alexco Resource, where the team developed and operated a high-grade silver mine in the Keno Hill silver district in the Yukon. More recently, Mr. Whittle served as an independent director of Alio Gold Inc., which was acquired by Argonaut Gold Inc., where he also served as chair of its audit committee. He also served as an independent director of Mountain Province Diamonds Inc., including acting as audit committee chair and lead outside director for much of his tenure. Mr. Whittle additionally served as chief executive officer of Mountain Province, leading the company through a chief executive officer transition and the $330-million (U.S.) refinancing of its senior debt facility, then resuming his role as an independent director. He is currently a director of Viva Gold Corp. and Treasury Metals Inc. Mr. Whittle holds a BComm (finance) degree from the University of British Columbia Cam Grundstrom Director Cam Grundstrom, a co-founder of Kalo, started his career in mining by working underground in small lead/zinc/silver mines. He went on to earn his mining engineering degree from the Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology. Mr. Grundstrom has since worked at Placer Dome (Papua New Guinea), BHP, Ekati, Island Copper, OK Tedi and Suncor. In 2000, he and his Kalo co-founders identified Fiji as a solid jurisdiction for mineral exploration and conducted reviews of the top 10 prospective areas of Fiji, securing the current Kalo licences in 2009. David Medilek, P. Eng., CFA Special Adviser Mr. Medilek is a mining professional with over 13 years of mining, capital market, corporate strategy and technical experience. In addition to serving as vice-president, business development and investor relations, of gold producer K92 Mining Inc., Mr. Medilek is a director of Minaurum Gold Inc. and Northern Superior Resources Inc. Prior to joining K92, he was an equity research analyst at Macquarie Group Ltd., covering precious-metal-mining companies. Mr. Medilek was previously a mining investment banker with Cormark Securities Inc. for over four years, gaining extensive capital-raising and M&A experience. He began his career as a mining engineer, with a focus on underground mining, spending over four years at Barrick Gold Corp. in Western Australia. Mr. Medilek holds a bachelor of applied science degree in mine engineering (with distinction) from the University of British Columbia and a professional engineer designation in the province of British Columbia. He is also a CFA charter holder. Alastair Still, MSc Special Adviser Alastair Still, Executive Vice-President and Chief Development Officer of GoldMining Inc., is an experienced mining industry professional with over 25 years of experience working for major gold miners such as Newmont, Goldcorp, Placer Dome, Agnico Eagle and Kinross Gold. He has worked within Canada and internationally in a variety of leadership roles including corporate and project development, and mine operations. Mr. Still spent ten years in corporate development and most recently served as Director, Corporate Development with Newmont Corporation (formerly Goldcorp). Mr. Still graduated with a Bachelor of Science (First Class, Honours) from the University of New Brunswick and a Master of Science (structural geology) from Queen's University. Dr. Russell Fountain, PhD Special Adviser Dr. Fountain is the principal and founder of Exsolutions Pty. Ltd., a mineral exploration consultancy firm based in Sydney, Australia, specializing in gold and base metals, which he founded 20 years ago. He has served on the boards of several publicly listed mineral resource companies. He was formerly the president of Phelps Dodge Exploration Corp., which is based in Phoenix, Ariz., United States. Most recently, Dr. Fountain was the chairman and a director of Geopacific Resources Ltd., an Australian Securities Exchange-listed public company that, at one stage, held the largest mining concessions in Fiji, holding five copper/gold projects, including the Raki-Raki and Faddy projects. Dr. Fountain holds a doctor of philosophy degree in economic geology from the University of Sydney. Manny Padda has resigned as a director of the Company and the Company thanks him for his service in bringing the Company to completion of its Qualifying Transaction. Closing of Concurrent Financing Immediately prior to the Closing, the Company completed a non-brokered private placement pursuant to which it sold an aggregate of 18,594,500 Shares at a deemed price of $0.20 (the "Issue Price") for gross proceeds of $3,718,900 (the "Concurrent Financing"). The Concurrent Financing as previously announced was to consist of the issuance of Shares at the Issue Price for gross proceeds of $3,220,000. Due to overwhelming demand, the Company was able to sell additional shares for increased gross proceeds of $3,718,900. In connection with the Concurrent Financing, the Company paid a cash commission of an aggregate of $114,134 to PI Financial Corp., Leede Jones Gable, Echelon Wealth Partners, Haywood Securities Inc., and Canaccord Genuity Corp. for introducing certain placees in connection with the Concurrent Financing The proceeds of the Concurrent Financings will primarily be used for expenditures relating to the Company's proposed Phase 1 exploration program which commenced on December 7, 2020, and general working capital purposes. All securities issued in connection with the Concurrent Financings (including, for greater certainty, the Shares), are subject to a statutory hold period of four months and one day expiring on June 24, 2021, and such other hold periods as required under applicable securities laws. Finders' Shares In connection with the Closing, the Company issued an aggregate of 1,535,000 Shares at a deemed price of $0.20 per share to Lambeth Consulting Inc., an arms'-length third party, pursuant to a finder's fee agreement dated November 4, 2020, as amended on January 22, 2021. Grant of Stock Options In connection with the Closing, the Company also granted an aggregate of 3,620,000 stock options as further described in the Filing Statement. Early Warning Through Delta Mining Ltd. ("Delta"), Michael Nesbitt ("Nesbitt"), a director of the Company, has acquired control or direction over 10,625,000 Shares of the Company, representing approximately 19.8% of the Shares of the Company on a non-diluted basis, at a deemed price of $0.20 per Share, for total deemed consideration of $2,125,000, pursuant to the exchange of Kalo shares for Shares of the Company. Immediately prior to the Closing, Nesbitt did not have control or direction or ownership of any securities of the Company. Nesbitt also acquired ownership of 500,000 stock options exercisable into 500,000 Shares. Upon the exercise of the stock options in full, Nesbitt would have control or direction and ownership of a total of 11,125,000 Shares of the Company, or approximately 20.7% of the Issuer's issued and outstanding share capital. Nesbitt or Delta, may acquire additional securities or dispose of existing securities on the basis of Nesbitt's assessment of market conditions and in compliance with applicable securities regulatory requirements. A copy of the early warning report filed by Nesbitt in connection with the above is available on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com or by contacting the Company at the information provided below. About Kalo Gold Holdings Corp. Kalo Gold Holdings Corp. is a mineral exploration company focused on the Vatu Aurum gold project on Fiji's north island -- Vanua Levu. Kalo holds two mineral exploration licenses covering over 36,700 hectares of land and on trend with many of the largest gold deposits in the world within the Southwest Pacific Ring of Fire. Qualified Person The technical information in this news release was reviewed by Fred Tejada, P. Geo, a qualified person as defined by NI 43-101, and a director and officer of Kalo Holdings. On behalf of Kalo Gold Holdings Corp. Fred Tejada Chief Executive Officer and Director For more information contact, please contact Kevin Ma, CPA, CA, President and Director, at info@kalogoldcorp.com or +1 (604) 363-0411. Investors are cautioned that, except as disclosed in the management information circular or filing statement to be prepared in connection with the transaction, any information released or received with respect to the transaction may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon. Trading in the securities of a capital pool company should be considered highly speculative. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release. Forward Looking Statements Disclaimer Certain statements in this release are forward-looking statements, which are statements that are not purely historical, including any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Forward looking statements in this news release include statements relating to the Concurrent Financing, the funds available to the Company on completion of the Transaction and the proposed use of such funds, and the intention of Kalo to continue its Phase 1 exploration program as proposed. Forward-looking statements are often identified by terms such as "will", "may", "should", "anticipate", "expects" and similar expressions. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included in this release, including statements regarding the Proposed Transaction and the future plans and objectives of the Company, are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results, and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations include the failure to satisfy the conditions to completion of the Proposed Transaction set forth above and other risks detailed from time to time in the filings made by the Company pursuant to applicable Canadian securities laws. The reader is cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of any forward-looking statements herein may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, as a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. As a result, the Company cannot guarantee that the Proposed Transaction will be completed on the terms and within the time disclosed herein or at all. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking information. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect, and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release and the Company will update or revise publicly any of the included forward-looking statements as expressly required by Canadian securities law. SOURCE: Kalo Gold Holdings Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631555/Kalo-Gold-Holdings-Corp-to-Commence-Trading-on-the-TSX-Venture-Exchange The UN General Assembly held the debate titled: "Situation in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine" on February 23. Ukraine's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Serhiy Kyslytsya has called on the United Nations to deprive Russia of its veto right at UN Security Council meetings, as it is an aggressor country that continues waging a war against Ukraine. "As a party to the conflict, non-elected member of the UN Security Council that is not even mentioned in Article 23 of the UN Charter on the composition of the Council, Russia should not be allowed to use veto power," he said at the UN General Assembly debate "Situation in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine" on February 23. Read alsoU.S. can do more to end Donbas war, Russian occupation of Crimea, Ukraine's top diplomat says He says it is extremely important to constantly remind Moscow of its obligations as a party to the conflict in Donbas. "It is crucial to constantly remind Moscow of its obligations as a party to the conflict," he said. "Until Russia denies its role in the conflict, the prospects of peaceful resolution will remain elusive. Repetitive statements by Russian officials about Russia's alleged 'mediation' role in the Donbas peace process are outrageous," he said. "Russia has not been and cannot, in principle, be a mediator in the conflict it has started and continues to take part in since the first day of aggression," he added. Reporting by UNIAN Vallarta Living Puerto Vallarta & Riviera Nayarit Vehicle Registration It is important to keep your vehicle registration up to date for insurance purposes, legal purposes, and because unpaid fees will accrue and must be paid in full before you can sell your vehicle. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico - Now that you have hopefully paid your Puerto Vallarta property taxes online using the instructions in our recent There are two ways to pay your vehicle registration (often called "placas" in Spanish), either in person or online. Of course, as we attempt to stay at home as much as possible, the online function is appealing, but to avoid frustration, be aware that the website can be tricky, so log-on with some patience and be ready to spend a little time. PAYING ONLINE Jalisco: Nayarit: Both websites function in Spanish and you will need to enter your license plate number and the last 5 digits of the N.R.P.V (serial number) found on your Tarjeta de CirculaciAn (registration card). The website will then generate what you owe a generally somewhere between 600 and 700 MXN a and direct you to a payment screen. The payment screen is where things can get a little frustrating. You will need a Mexican bank or credit card (foreign cards are not accepted) and there seem to be some bugs with payment screens processing through without an error message. However, you can also print a bill and take it to one of many convenience stores or your bank and pay there. Once you've paid, hang on to your receipt. This will be your legal proof that your license plate is in good standing until after March, at which time you will need to pay a visit in person to UNVIRSE to pick up your new Tarjeta de CirculaciAn. PAYING IN PERSON The other way is to pay in person at the UNVIRSE building on Av. Grandes Lagos 236 in Fluvial which is open Monday to Friday from 8:30 am to 2:30 pm. In our experience, the best time to go is around 11:00 am, not right at 8:30 am during the morning rush, and be prepared to wait a bit. However, once you have paid (again, cash or Mexican bank/credit card) you will be issued your new Tarjeta de CirculaciAn on the spot and you will not require another visit. Similarly, on the North Shore, you can visit the tax collection office at JosA MarAa Morelos 2 in BucerAas to pay your Riviera Nayarit licence plate registration. It is important to keep your vehicle registration up to date for insurance purposes, legal purposes, and because unpaid fees will accrue and must be paid in full before you can sell your vehicle or transfer it out of your name. But, with a little patience, vehicle registration is easily paid and affordable. Click HERE for more Puerto Vallarta real estate and lifestyle tips from Tropicasa Realty. Since 1997, Wayne Franklin and his team at Tropicasa Realty have been a trusted name in Puerto Vallarta real estate. Tropicasa Realty is the region's representative for "The Leading Agents of the World" and with over 100 years of combined experience in real estate, all agents of the company are affiliated with AMPI. Wayne Franklin or any member of his knowledgeable team can be contacted in-person at their Romantic Zone Office - Pulpito 145-A at Olas Altas. While in PV they can be reached at (322) 222-6505 or by calling 866-978-5539 (Toll-Free) from the U.S. - Now that you have hopefully paid your Puerto Vallarta property taxes online using the instructions in our recent real estate blog post, if you have a vehicle and you haven't yet registered it for 2021, you will want to do this now, to save 5% for early payment before the end of March.There are two ways to pay your vehicle registration (often called "placas" in Spanish), either in person or online. Of course, as we attempt to stay at home as much as possible, the online function is appealing, but to avoid frustration, be aware that the website can be tricky, so log-on with some patience and be ready to spend a little time.Jalisco: gobiernoenlinea1.jalisco.gob.mx Nayarit: hacienda-nayarit.gob.mx Both websites function in Spanish and you will need to enter your license plate number and the last 5 digits of the N.R.P.V (serial number) found on your(registration card). The website will then generate what you owe a generally somewhere between 600 and 700 MXN a and direct you to a payment screen.The payment screen is where things can get a little frustrating. You will need a Mexican bank or credit card (foreign cards are not accepted) and there seem to be some bugs with payment screens processing through without an error message. However, you can also print a bill and take it to one of many convenience stores or your bank and pay there.Once you've paid, hang on to your receipt. This will be your legal proof that your license plate is in good standing until after March, at which time you will need to pay a visit in person to UNVIRSE to pick up your new Tarjeta de CirculaciAn.The other way is to pay in person at the UNVIRSE building on Av. Grandes Lagos 236 in Fluvial which is open Monday to Friday from 8:30 am to 2:30 pm. In our experience, the best time to go is around 11:00 am, not right at 8:30 am during the morning rush, and be prepared to wait a bit. However, once you have paid (again, cash or Mexican bank/credit card) you will be issued your new Tarjeta de CirculaciAn on the spot and you will not require another visit.Similarly, on the North Shore, you can visit the tax collection office at JosA MarAa Morelos 2 in BucerAas to pay your Riviera Nayarit licence plate registration.It is important to keep your vehicle registration up to date for insurance purposes, legal purposes, and because unpaid fees will accrue and must be paid in full before you can sell your vehicle or transfer it out of your name. But, with a little patience, vehicle registration is easily paid and affordable.Since 1997, Wayne Franklin and his team at Tropicasa Realty have been a trusted name in Puerto Vallarta real estate. Tropicasa Realty is the region's representative for "The Leading Agents of the World" and with over 100 years of combined experience in real estate, all agents of the company are affiliated with AMPI. Wayne Franklin or any member of his knowledgeable team can be contacted in-person at their Romantic Zone Office - Pulpito 145-A at Olas Altas. While in PV they can be reached at (322) 222-6505 or by calling 866-978-5539 (Toll-Free) from the U.S. Click HERE to learn more about Tropicasa Realty , or visit tropicasa.com. Site Map Print this Page Email Us Top Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) The Health Department was not consulted nor informed of the proposal to lift the deployment cap on healthcare workers on the condition that countries asking to hire Filipino personnel send a supply of COVID-19 vaccines to the country, an official said on Wednesday. "We were not consulted. We are not even aware of this kind of exchange between our govt and the other governments," Health Department spokesperson Maria Rosario Vergeire said in a media briefing. She stressed the country's COVID-19 task force should be informed of these types of plans, saying decisions involving healthcare workers and vaccines should fall under the jurisdiction of the Inter-Agency Task Force. Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III said that United Kingdom and Germany are asking the Philippines to lift the cap on deployment of 5,000 healthcare workers. Labor official Alice Visperas said Bello set two conditions for this to happen one of which is for their governments to send coronavirus vaccines to the Philippines. DOLE on Wednesday clarified they are not asking for vaccines in exchange for workers, saying the doses that will be sent will be used to inoculate the healthcare workers before they are deployed. DOLE head of public information Rolly Francia said this will ensure that the Filipino medical frontliners are protected against COVID-19 before they work overseas. 'Yung mga ipapadalang mga nurses ay nabakunahan na and the vaccine should come from the host country," he said in a briefing. [Translation: The nurses who will be sent overseas should be vaccinated first and the vaccines should come from the host country.] "We are being traded by the government like export products?" the Filipino Nurses United said in a social media post on Tuesday. The Duterte administration in April 2020 barred nurses, doctors, and other medical workers from leaving the Philippines to help respond to the COVID-19 crisis in the country. The ban was lifted in November, but the government only allowed 5,000 health workers to leave annually. The Philippines has been a labor exporting country since the 1970s, with migrant workers often hailed as modern-day heroes. Remittances from workers overseas boost the local economy and are a big source of disposable income among Filipino families. Building Mongolia's premier precious metals company Flagship mine already generating strong cash flow Advancing Phase 2 expansion plans What Steppe Gold does: Mining is nothing new in Mongolia but it was not until the 1990s, and the transition of the country to a free-market democracy, that the industry was opened up to foreign investment. The famous Oyu Tolgoi property in the country, operated by London-listed major Rio Tinto ( ), is one of the largest copper and gold mines in the world, in which the Mongolian government also owns a 34% stake. The Mongolian economy is growing rapidly and the government knows that mining is a key to sustaining growth. The country's mineral riches are valued at between US$1 trillion and US$3 trillion across coal, copper and gold. Against this backdrop, Steppe Gold Ltd ( ) ( ) (FRA:2J9) began producing gold at its flagship Altan Tsaagan Ovoo (ATO) mine in the country in March 2020. The ATO mine was built in just 14 months with less than US$20 million of capex and is now ramping up output. Steppe also has the Uudam Khundii (UK) gold project, which is an 80:20 joint venture between Steppe and the Bayankhongor provincial government. At ATO, Steppe is targeting annual production in 2021 and 2022 of between 50,000 and 60,000 ounces. It is also now bidding to expand production via a Phase 2 sulphide project, which will see it mine fresh rock ores to generate 150,000 ounces equivalent a year from 2023. How is it doing: Steppe hit a key milestone at its ATO operation in February 2021, with the release of an updated resource estimate that nearly doubled the ounces in the deposit. According to the report, measured and indicated (M&I) resources increased to 41.6 million tons, or 2.2 million ounces, at an average grade of 1.7 grams per tonne (g/t) gold equivalent ounces 1.4 million gold ounces and 20.5 million silver ounces. That doubled the amount of resources represented at the ATO Gold Mine to 2.45 million ounces of gold equivalent, up from 1.2 million ounces in the previous resource statement. According to the company, the increase in the M&I resource was due primarily to significant expansion through drilling at the ATO 4 Deposit and incorporation of a maiden resource at the Mungu deposit. The ATO 4 Deposit, where mining recently started, shows an M&I resource of 15.7 million tons at 1.6 g/t for a total of 819,000 gold equivalent ounces, while the maiden resource at the Mungu discovery shows an M&I resource of 7.6 million tons at 1.7 g/t for 424,000 gold equivalent ounces. Then on March 24, the group said it had begun procuring major long lead items and was continuing talks on a multi-tranche project debt facility for its Phase 2 expansion project into fresh rock. The aim is to lift output from the ATO mine to 150,000 ounces of gold equivalent a year in 2023. The company said it bought a new crushing plant from a leading international supplier for US$5 million, including its installation and construction, which has a capacity of 1,000 tonnes per hour (t/hr), more than three times' the current capacity. Construction of the foundation of the new plant is set to begin in early April this year, and it is scheduled to be operational by July. Alongside the procurement of capital items, the company said it was continuing discussions with Mongolian and international lenders on a multi-tranche project debt facility to finance this Phase 2 expansion, which is expected to include a grinding circuit, a leach/CIP plant, and a flotation circuit. On the financial front, for the first quarter of 2021, the miner said COVID-19 challenges and the cold weather had impacted output in the three months but that the feasibility study into expanding the project remains on track to be finalized this summer. In the three months to March 31, the company mined 179,130 tonnes versus 291,455 tonnes in the previous quarter to December 31, 2020. Revenue for the three months was US$1.634 million (Q4: US$13.2 million) on sales of 945 gold ounces and 861 silver ounces, with average realized prices per ounce of US$1,938 and US$26 respectively. Steppe also noted that it had filed a prospectus to list its shares on the Mongolian Stock Exchange. The miner is targeting at ATO annual production in 2021 and 2022 of 50,000 ounces and then to transition to the fresh rock ores in 2023. Inflection points: New crusher in place Completion of bankable feasibility and project financing for expansion at ATO Uplift in output from ATO What the broker says: Following the first-quarter results, Stifel GMP repeated a 'Buy' rating and put a C$4 price target on the stock. "As expected, ATO did not have any production through Q1. However, stacking activities continued with grades stacked from the low strip ratio open pit remaining strong (1.91 g/t Au + 10.1 g/t Ag) and the company finishing the quarter in a durable liquidity position," the analysts said in a note. "Leaching resumed in early April, and we expect Q2 and Q3 production to benefit from the tonnes stacked through Q1. Steppe Gold put a $1m deposit down on a new crusher that will quadruple capacity and is the first step in the construction of the Phase 2 Sulphide expansion. The Bankable Feasibility Study for the expansion remains on track to be delivered this summer." What the boss says: In its statement with the 1Q results, Steppe CEO Bataa Tumur-Ochir told investors: "There has been a slow start to production in 2021 and the achievement of full year production forecasts are dependent on no further delays on procurement due to COVID 19. Reagent supplies are currently unpredictable and any further delays will reduce production forecasts for 2021. We have now mined over 1.8 million tonnes of ore with 1.4 million tonnes stacked on the leach pad." He added; "With a new fixed crusher in place this summer, we are planning a record year for stacking in 2021. We paused production in the first quarter with prevailing cold weather conditions and we resumed leaching in early April with a successful gold pour in late April." Contact the author at giles@proactiveinvestors.com Google developed its own COVID-19 database that can efficiently track new variants of the novel coronavirus and tell if a person's immunity will last long. Google's innovation is expected to help medical experts, especially epidemiologists. According to Nature's latest report, the new Google-funded is very different from the global COVID-19 dashboard, managed and maintained by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Why? Because the new database called "Global.health" collects an unprecedented amount of anonymized information about individual cases in one location. "Global.health is the first of its kind, easy-to-use global data repository and visualization platform that enables open access to real-time epidemiological anonymized line-list data," said Google via Global Health's official website. How the new Google COVID-19 platform works The new Google-funded database includes around 40 associated variables of each individual in the platform. The database contains information such as travel history, the date they received a positive coronavirus report, and the date when their first COVID-19 symptoms appeared. Also Read: Nipah Virus Cases Increasing: Scientists Warn of the Next Pandemic, 75% Deadlier Than COVID-19 These data points allow epidemiologists and other medical experts to know how the new COVID-19 variants spread across locations. "By the time we understand the gravity of an outbreak, it's often too late. Data can close that loop and make the process faster," said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins who is also involved in the development of the new Google-funded COVID-19 databases. How Google's innovation will help epidemiologists Epidemiologists collect and organize bits of information provided by newspaper articles or health agencies when an outbreak happens. The published data include the virus's contagiousness, mortality rate, patient's age, person's symptoms, and more. However, recording the required data might be hard if they'll base it on newspaper articles. With the new Google-funded COVID-19 database, all they need to do is create an account and search for the location they want to study. For more news updates about Google's new platform and other COVID-19 innovations, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes. Related Article: Organ Transplant Patient Dies Two Months After Receiving COVID-Infected Lungs This article is owned by TechTimes. Written by: Giuliano de Leon. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Senator Mitt Romney (UT-R) said that he could see former President Donald Trump securing the nomination in 2024 if he decided to run, a clear indication of his grip on the GOP. Romney was speaking with the New York Times's DealBook DC Policy Project on Tuesday when he made the assertion. 'I don't know if he'll run in 2024 or not, but if he does, I'm pretty sure he will win the nomination,' the senator stated. The longtime Trump critic added that 'a lot can happen between now and 2024.' Mitt Romney was speaking with the New York Times's DealBook DC Policy Project on Tuesday when he made the assertion about Trump's chances of securing the GOP nomination He continued: 'I look at the polls, and the polls show that among the names being floated as potential contenders in 2024, if you put President Trump in there among Republicans, he wins in a landslide.' When asked if he would campaign against Trump, Romney indicated that he would throw his support behind someone else. 'I would not be voting for President Trump again. I haven't voted for him in the past. And I would probably be getting behind somebody who I thought more represented the tiny wing of the Republican Party that I represent.' Trump, who told his supporters following his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial that 'our historic, patriotic and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun,' continues to hold majority support nearly a month after leaving office. 'He wins in a landslide,' Romney added when asked about Trump competing against other Republicans during the 2024 election cycle He is backed by 53 per cent of respondents in a Politico / Morning Consult survey. A distant second in the poll is Vice President Mike Pence, who became a chief focus of the impeachment trial, as Democratic managers highlighted Trump's tweet that Pence lacked 'courage' after he began counting votes for Joe Biden in his ceremonial role at a joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes. Pence gets 12 per cent support in the poll. Romney was the sole Republican to vote for Trump's impeachment twice. Three of the seven Republican senators who voted for impeachment have already been formally condemned by their state party When asked if he would campaign against Trump, Romney indicated that he would throw his support behind someone else Some Republicans in Romney's state of Utah accused him of having 'embarrassed' them, claiming he is not representing their interests but is instead an 'agent of the deep state' and have started an online petition for a censure motion. The leaders of Utah's Republican party, however, put out a statement saying they're not behind the effort and that they support a 'diversity of thought.' 'The differences between our own Utah Republicans showcase a diversity of thought, in contrast to the danger of a party fixated on 'unanimity of thought,'' they wrote last week. 'There is power in our differences as a political party, and we look forward to each senator explaining their votes to the people of Utah.' Paytm Payments Bank Ltd (PPBL) on Wednesday announced that it has facilitated refunds for 2.6 lakh FASTag users who were charged incorrectly by toll plazas in the year 2020. Paytm Payments has set up a fast redressal mechanism, which identifies incorrect deductions and immediately raises claims to reverse the extra charges. While FASTags ensure automatic payment of toll charges, sometimes issues with systems & processes present at the toll plaza result in deduction of more than the applicable charges. "To expeditiously resolve all such customer complaints, PPBL has put in place a meticulous dispute management process that thoroughly audits all customer complaints, associated toll transactions, and issues raised by the toll plazas," the company said in a statement. Paytm Payments says that it has won 82% of cases on behalf of its FASTag users. Satish Gupta, MD & CEO - Paytm Payments Bank Ltd said, "It has been our endeavour to empower our users with seamless & hassle-free travel on road. In this quest, we support our users in every possible way, including fast redressal of any grievance they face with toll plazas. We continuously strive to ensure that customers are always charged the correct toll amount and our teams remain vigilant against the unjustified charging at every step. The innovations that we have made in technology and the deep trust in our bank has helped us become the leading issuer of FASTags in the country. We aim to expand our services across the length & breadth of the country and contribute towards building fully digital journeys on highways." Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. For decades, climate change researchers and activists have used dramatic forecasts to attempt to influence public perception of the problem and as a call to action on climate change. These forecasts have frequently been for events that might be called "apocalyptic," because they predict cataclysmic events resulting from climate change. In a new paper published in the International Journal of Global Warming, Carnegie Mellon University's David Rode and Paul Fischbeck argue that making such forecasts can be counterproductive. "Truly apocalyptic forecasts can only ever be observed in their failure--that is the world did not end as predicted," says Rode, adjunct research faculty with the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, "and observing a string of repeated apocalyptic forecast failures can undermine the public's trust in the underlying science." Rode and Fischbeck, professor of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy, collected 79 predictions of climate-caused apocalypse going back to the first Earth Day in 1970. With the passage of time, many of these forecasts have since expired; the dates have come and gone uneventfully. In fact, 48 (61%) of the predictions have already expired as of the end of 2020. Fischbeck noted, "from a forecasting perspective, the 'problem' is not only that all of the expired forecasts were wrong, but also that so many of them never admitted to any uncertainty about the date. About 43% of the forecasts in our dataset made no mention of uncertainty." In some cases, the forecasters were both explicit and certain. For example, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich and British environmental activist Prince Charles are serial failed forecasters, repeatedly expressing high degrees of certainty about apocalyptic climate events. Rode commented "Ehrlich has made predictions of environmental collapse going back to 1970 that he has described as having 'near certainty'. Prince Charles has similarly warned repeatedly of 'irretrievable ecosystem collapse' if actions were not taken, and when expired, repeated the prediction with a new definitive end date. Their predictions have repeatedly been apocalyptic and highly certain...and so far, they've also been wrong." The researchers noted that the average time horizon before a climate apocalypse for the 11 predictions made prior to 2000 was 22 years, while for the 68 predictions made after 2000, the average time horizon was 21 years. Despite the passage of time, little has changed--across a half a century of forecasts; the apocalypse is always about 20 years out. Fischbeck continued, "It's like the boy who repeatedly cried wolf. If I observe many successive forecast failures, I may be unwilling to take future forecasts seriously. That's a problem for climate science, say Rode and Fischbeck. "The underlying science of climate change has many solid results," says Fischbeck, "the problem is often the leap in connecting the prediction of climate events to the prediction of the consequences of those events." Human efforts at adaptation and mitigation, together with the complexity of socio-physical systems, means that the prediction of sea level rise, for example, may not necessarily lead to apocalyptic flooding. "By linking the climate event and the potential consequence for dramatic effect," noted Rode, "a failure to observe the consequence may unfairly call into question the legitimacy of the science behind the climate event." With the new Biden administration making climate change policy a top priority, trust in scientific predictions about climate change is more crucial than ever, however scientists will have to be wary in qualifying their predictions. In measuring the proliferation the forecasts through search results, the authors found that forecasts that did not mention uncertainty in their apocalyptic date tended to be more visible (i.e., have more search results available). Making sensational predictions of the doom of humanity, while scientifically dubious, has still proven tempting for those wishing to grab headlines. The trouble with this is that scientists, due to their training, tend to make more cautious statements and more often include references to uncertainty. Rode and Fischbeck found that while 81% of the forecasts made by scientists referenced uncertainty, less than half of the forecasts made by non-scientists did. "This is not surprising," said Rode, "but it is troubling when you consider that forecasts that reference uncertainty are less visible on the web. This results in the most visible voices often being the least qualified." Rode and Fischbeck argue that scientists must take extraordinary caution in communicating events of great consequence. When it comes to climate change, the authors advise "thinking small." That is, focusing on making predictions that are less grandiose and shorter in term. "If you want people to believe big predictions, you first need to convince them that you can make little predictions," says Rode. Fischbeck added, "We need forecasts of a greater variety of climate variables, we need them made on a regular basis, and we need expert assessments of their uncertainties so people can better calibrate themselves to the accuracy of the forecaster." ### PORTLAND Members of the Russell Library Veterans Writing Group lost one of their own recently with the death of Eugene Sullivan, a retired Marine known as a gentleman with a twinkle of mischief, and a ready wit. He was 86. Sullivan, a Korean War veteran who had lung and thyroid cancer, according to his wife Shirley, traveled the world while in the service, and, afterward, the country, while researching entries for Grolier Encyclopedia. He joined the writing group 10 years ago. He is among the soldiers whose etchings are featured on the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C. The couple visited the memorial a few times, although she cant recall exactly how he became involved. He was very proud of it. His fellow writers traveled to the site, taking photographs of themselves beside Eugene Sullivans image, she said. So, too, did his grandchildren, who both visited the memorial in the eighth grade to take a photo next to their grandfathers image, his wife said. He was always smiling, Shirley Sullivan said. He loved people and loved doing things, being in different organizations, volunteering and boating especially sailing. He loved being on the water. For years, members have been working on a book of their stories, titled En Route, publication of which has been delayed by the pandemic, according to Christy Billings, who works in Information Services and Adult Learning at the library. Sullivans writing was very visual, said Billings, who called him a gentleman with a twinkle of mischief, and a ready wit. He put you in the place hed be writing about with a minimum of words. He was very good at taking a description and making it come alive. He would make it very interesting. He would pull you right into a scene. Youd get the feeling of what was happening immediately, Billings said. His contribution to the book was The Most Violent Image, the story of a horrific incident the veteran witnessed during wartime. Billings and co-leader Liz Petry offered a prompt for the writing that eventually made it into the book. Members were tasked with relaying a memorable image using their five senses, Billings said. Eugene Sullivan wrote wrote of an accident during which three men, while raising a 30-foot-tall antennae, brushed briefly against a high-power overhead line which came in contact with a pool across the street and were fatally electrocuted. He wrote that even today he could still recall the horrific moment. Sullivans piece was so strong that Petry asked members to begin reading their works aloud. It was just so visceral, she said. The writers group first met in March 2012 with the goal of providing an outlet for their wartime and other recollections. After two years, Eugene Sullivan warmed up to the group, Billings said. He was so happy to be a part of it its such a great group of guys and women. The guys were so wonderful helping him out of the car into the wheelchair, his wife said. He always came away with a good feeling. Her husband loved to joke. He was a talker. Thats just how he was, very outgoing. He got along with everyone. He loved life, Shirley Sullivan said. We had a very good life together. He was one special man, Petry said. He sometimes told outrageous stories, but he was the perfect gentleman, she wrote in a tribute last week. Our veterans get along well with frequent detours into heavy doses of heckling each other. Gene was the recipient of his share. The worst of it came when he suggested a writing prompt, which I had been encouraging everyone to do from the beginning, Petry wrote. Gene asked the veterans to write a letter of apology. His gave everyone a laugh as he asked forgiveness of a hostess for spilling red wine on an expensive white tablecloth, she wrote. One of her favorite moments with Gene Sullivan was a holiday meal with members, Petry said. Gene arrived with a bright red sweater. I said, Oh, how festive its got reindeer and snowflakes. I took a closer look, and, oh my God, hand grenades and crossed swords! Silly me. It said Marine Corps on the bottom in huge letters. Gene was delighted at my reaction, she said. He was a really wonderful addition to our writing group and a really good writer. I learned something pretty much every time he wrote something, Petry said, herself a published author. Eugene Sullivan had an endless curiosity about things, and would often check out books she recommended. We are old, and older, but seem to act as one, member Vance Fisher, a helicopter pilot who served in Vietnam, said about his fellow writers. What I feel is the most valuable about this group is we have become a unit, a squad, a platoon, and act as a unit should. We strive to reach the objective to complete the mission. All for one. We miss him so much, said fellow writer Jerry Augustine of Middletown, a Vietnam War veteran. It was always interesting to hear his experiences. He was very laid-back and very, very nice. Over the years, group members became very close, almost like a brotherhood, said Augustine, who is working on his own book he expects to publish within the next two months sharing his recollections of his time in the military and growing up in Middletown. Sullivan would be tickled at his story being told, his wife said. He would have cut [the article] out and put it on the refrigerator. I know hes looking down up there and laughing. Thats more than he would have expected. The writing group meets Thursdays at 2:30 p.m. on Zoom. For information, visit russelllibrary.libcal.com. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Egypts Economic Court sentenced on Tuesday two people to two years in prison for uploading videos defying public morality. The court sentenced Mazen Ibrahim and Shaimaa Shaker to two years in prison with labour for spreading videos involving the rape of the underage Egyptian TikToker Aya, who is commonly known by the alias Menna Abdel-Aziz, on social media in May. The two were fined EGP 200,000 in a civil lawsuit filed by lawyer Ashraf Farahat for spreading immorality last year. In July 2020, Egypts public prosecution referred six people to the criminal court on charges including kidnapping and sexually assaulting the 17-year-old TikToker. The story of Abdel-Aziz was made public when she revealed in a live Instagram video in May that one of her friends had raped, beaten, and injured her, and pleaded for help from the government. Ibrahim and Shaker appeared online in live videos on Facebook and Instagram defending themselves and trash-talking the victim and sharing videos of her being sexually assaulted online. Besides looking into economic and commercial disputes, the Economic Courts jurisdiction involves cybercrimes, which include publishing non-authorised material on social media. Short link: Chicken is pictured in New York on March 11, 2015. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters) Pilgrims Pride Pleads Guilty to Chicken Price-Fixing Charge, to Pay $107.9 Million Fine Pilgrims Pride Corp, one of the largest U.S. poultry producers, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to pay a $107.9 million fine on Tuesday to settle federal charges it conspired to fix chicken prices and passed on the costs to consumers and other purchasers. Chief Executive Fabio Sandri entered the guilty plea on the companys behalf at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Raymond Moore in Denver. A plea agreement had been reached in October. The plea followed the indictments last year of 10 poultry industry executives, including former Pilgrims Pride Chief Executives Jayson Penn and Bill Lovette, on price-fixing charges. All 10 have pleaded not guilty. Pilgrims Pride is based in Greeley, Colorado, and owned mainly by Brazilian meatpacker JBS SA. It was the first U.S. poultry company to settle charges that companies conspired from 2012 to at least 2019 to reduce production in order to boost prices of broiler chickens, which account for most chicken meat consumed in the United States. Prosecutors estimated that Pilgrim Prides illegal activity affected at least $361 million in sales of its broiler chicken products. The fine was less than federal guidelines recommended because of the companys substantial assistance, Moore said. Tyson Foods Inc, another poultry producer, has said it was cooperating with the Justice Department probe under a corporate leniency program. Pilgrims Pride, Tyson, Perdue Farms Inc and Sanderson Farms Inc are also facing federal lawsuits in Chicago by consumers, restaurants, supermarket chains and food distributors over alleged price rigging dating back to 2008. The producers were accused there of using data from an outside service to review rivals production and pricing activities, which should have remained confidential. Chick-fil-A, Kroger Co, Walmart Inc and Sysco Corp are among the plaintiffs in Chicago. In January, Pilgrims Pride and Tyson agreed to pay a respective $75 million and $221.5 million to settle other claims there. By Jonathan Stempel The number of civil cases filed in federal court in Colorado rose by 39% between 2000 and 2019, and the administrative body for the judiciary has called for two additional judges to handle the workload in the state. However, the rate of cases that make it to trial has slowly dropped over the past two decades, now comprising less than 1% of civil cases annually. One thing for certain about Otisco Lake. The tiger muskie population there has taken hold in this easternmost Finger Lake and it has gained a well-deserved reputation as one of the best if not the best -- tiger muskie fishery in the state. This winters ice fishing season has seen at least three, tigers measuring more than 45 inches caught through the ice. The biggest was 47 inches, There have also reports in recent years of anglers landing fish in the 50-inch range during the open water fishing months. The stories of the three big fish caught this winter through the ice, though, have resulted in more anglers than usual flocking to the lake and raised the level of discussion about fishing practices specifically, whether big tigers should be kept to eat or for trophy mounts, or released in ways to ensure their survival to fight another day. Among those individuals that favor the latter approach are the members of Muskies Inc., Central New York Chapter 70. Trevor Thieme, of Eaton, the groups president, readily concedes that as long as its legal, the decision to keep or release a tiger muskie is an individual anglers business. His 60-member group, though, favors catch and release and is intent on educating anglers on ways to land, handle and release the lunker tigers so theyll grow even bigger, creating a memorable experience for another angler down the line. In addition, volunteers from the group have asked, gotten permission and were trained by state Department of Environmental Conservation DEC to tag moer than 50 fish on the lake last year with the intent of assisting the DEC in monitoring the tigers growth rates and locations where theyre found on the lake. Signs have been put up at various locations around Otisco Lake alerting anglers to the fact that more than 50 tiger muskies have been tagged by the Muskie Inc, Central NY Chapter 70 group. The first stocking of tiger muskie (also spelled musky) in Otisco Lake by the DEC dates back to 1977. Tiger muskies (also called norlunges) are a sterile cross between a muskellunge and a northern pike. Otisco Lake was likely chosen as a stocking site because there was an abundance of alewives and white perch in the lake that the fish can feed on, DEC said. Today tiger muskie are stocked in waters all over the state and appear to be doing the best in Otisco Lake, DEC said. In Region 7 alone they are stocked in Lake Como, Jamesville Reservoir, Cross Lake, Seneca River, Lake Moraine, Leland Pond, Oakly Corners Pond, and Long Pond. Thiemes group has chapters throughout the country dedicated purely to purebred muskellunge. The Central New York chapter, though, has also adopted Otiscos tigers as a muskie species worth protecting. We advocate for both, he said. Otisco is the main tiger fishery in the area, in the state. Its been our home lake since the inception of our group in 2017. Thieme recommended the following when it comes to catch and releasing big tigers through the ice. Some of the same principals also apply in open water fishing situations, he added. *Use a heavy rod and reel when fishing in open water. And in both open water and ice fishing with tip ups, use heavy test line. And I personally use a a wire leader. A lot of people use a fluorocarbon leaders. But after being bit off by a huge, purebread muskie that (appeared to be) nearly 50 inches on another Upstate NY waterway a few years ago, I stopped doing that, Thieme said. *Get the fish to come in quickly. Theyre surprisingly fragile. Dont play them for too long. *When ice fishing, once you get their head to the hole, be careful how you grab them to pull them out. Dont use a gaff because youre likely to inflect an injury that will kill the fish. Grab it with your hand(s) underneath the gill plate and not on the gills. Be careful, the gill rakers (the sharp edges of the gills) can cut you. Also, the filaments in the gills are very fragile and you can fatally injure the fish by sticking your fingers inside the gills. Walter Kemblowski, of Marietta, N.Y., with a 47- inch tiger muskie he caught recently through the ice fishing on Otisco Lake. The fish was pulled through the hole in the ice by a gaff. Kemblowski kept the fish to eat. *In open water situations, Thiemes group recommends removing the lure or the hook while the fish is in the net in the water. As for ice fishing, once the fish is out of the hole, keep it horizontal on the ice while removing the hook (hooks) and while youre measuring it. If the fish swallows the hook(s), Thieme said theres a device called a hook cutter (a small hand-held version of a bolt cutter) one can use to either cut the wire leader or the hook itelf, rather than injuring the fish more by trying to pull it out. *Do not hold the tiger vertically for pictures or for other reasons. The advice is the same for purebred muskies and northern pike. When you do that, you put a lot of stress on the fishs internal organs. Everything is connected to the gills in the head. Holding the fish that way will cause internal bleeding and movement of its organs, Thieme said. A big problem with releasing these fish is delayed mortality. For pictures, Thieme recommended holding the fish near its gill plates and by its lower belly or tail. Once again, do not stick your hand/fingers inside the fishs gills. *The quicker the release, the less time the fish is out of the water will improve the fishs chances for survival. On a boat, Thieme recommended having a bump board readily accessible that you can lay the fish on and quickly measure it. As for ice fishing, have a bump board or tape measure readily accessible as well, he said. *Finally, be aware of the effect of the air temperature while the tiger is out of the water. The same goes for any fish one decides to release, Thieme said. When its really cold outside, if a fish is out of the water for an extended period its thin gill filaments can freeze and be damaged. The same goes for its eyes. The tagging program As for the tagging program, Thieme said DEC staff trained members of his group to put the spaghetti-looking, gray tag on the dorsal fin of the fish. The group tagged 51 fish last year. The tags, include a phone number to call to report the catch, and ask for the fishs length and where on the lake it was caught. So far weve had eight fish reported. Two have been recaptured three times, he said. The tagging system will assist the DEC in tracking the growth rates of tigers in the lake and whether they move around or stay put in certain areas, Thieme said. His group also supports the DECs angler diary program, which asks anglers to log similar information of fish they catch. As pointed out above, not all anglers share the catch-and-release position of Thiemes group concerning legal-sized tigers on the lake that are 36 inches or bigger. Its our position, not the DECs, he said. According to the DEC, in 2010 it was proposed that the length limit (on Otisco) be raised (to 40 inches) with the intent to increase the trophy potential of tiger muskellunge in a lake that has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to produce 40-inch and greater fish. The regular statewide legal length is 30 inches. Only one fish can be kept per day. Public input received on this proposal was mixed with some anglers strongly in favor of the higher size limit and others strongly opposed, resulting in a modification of a 36-inch minimum length, DEC said. A 36-inch minimum length (which took effect in 2013) provides a compromise that will allow tiger muskie to reach trophy size but allows harvest-oriented anglers to take a fish smaller than originally proposed. The overall state freshwater fishing record for a tiger muskie is 35 pounds, 8 ounces. That fish measured 50 inches and was caught in 1990 by Brent Gofgosky on the Tioughnioga River. The word ice fishing record for a tiger caught on a tip-up, according to the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame in Wisconsin, is held by Tom Boise in 2009 on Otisco Lake. That fish measured 45 1/2 inches and weighed 27 pounds, 5 ounces. Demetrio Ascioti, of Fairmount, N.Y. with his 50-inch tiger muskie he caught and released Oct. 12, 2019 while fishing on Otisco Lake. It could have been a state record, but he didn't keep and weigh it. It appears only a matter of time before both records are broken on Otisco Lake. In October 2019., Demetrio Ascioti, of Fairmount, N.Y. landed a 50-inch tiger muskie he caught and released while fishing from a boat on Otisco Lake. Thieme said he was among those who supported the 40-inch minimum length restriction. These fish cant get any bigger if you dont put them back, he said. For more on Muskie Inc. Central NY Chapter 70, see the groups website. More Upstate NY Outdoors Upstate NY ice fishing bonanza: Anglers share photos of their catches Upstate New York coyote hunter talks about his passion: This is the best time of year to be doing it Get outdoors: Bear Swamp State Forest in Cayuga County is a magical place DEC announces Holiday Deer Hunt for bow, muzzleloaders during Christmas break in Southern Zone Need to take a NYS boating safety course? What you need to know. Ice fishing 101 in Upstate NY: The basics for having a safe, fun outing and catching fish What you need to know to go camping at a public or private campground in Upstate NY this year UPGRADE YOUR OUTDOOR GEAR Fishing Gear | Camo Face Masks | Hunting Gear | Camping Supplies OSAGE, Iowa Stealing from a Mitchell County garage means probation for a Riceville man. Lonnie John Dozark, 44, was sentenced Tuesday to three years of supervised probation. Authorities say he burglarized the same garage in the 700 block of Walnut Street in Riceville on September 13, 2019, and January 7, 2020. Court documents state a desk was broken into and over $700 was stolen. The garage owner said he set up a video camera and recorded Dozark illegally entering the garage. Dozark pleaded guilty to one count of 3rd degree burglary and a second count was dismissed. ADVERTISEMENT Oando PLC joined the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) top gainers with a 10 per cent increase in share price from N3.18 on Tuesday, to N3.41 on Wednesday. The share price appreciation can be attributed to the recent announcement of the nullification of the Securities and Exchange Commissions (SEC) suspension of Oandos Annual General Meeting (AGM), in a ruling presided over by Justice O A Musa, at the High Court of the FCT. The court ruling, deemed a big win for Oando shareholders, was filed by Patrick Ajudua, an Oando shareholder. According to Olowola Kehinde, an Oando shareholder and Coordinator, Sage Shareholders and Inc, This news is evidence that if given the opportunity, our shares could be doing considerably better on the capital market. Overnight, this positive ruling by the court has seen our share price go up by 10%, imagine how much more it could have appreciated by if given a favourable operating environment since 2017. The SEC issue has evidently, harmed our share price and we hope the regulator can see this and will look for a resolution that benefits shareholders. Following the news, investors poured into the stock helping it top the gainers chart. Recall that in 2019, after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dismissed Oandos board over allegations of poor corporate governance and management infractions, the companys share price dropped by 20% from N4.65 per share on May 31, 2019, the day of the announcement to N3.80 per share on June 3, 2019. Nearly 2 years on and as a result of the suspension of the companys AGM, there has been no insight into the companys corporate initiatives and financials leaving little room for growth in share price. Speaking on the jump in share price, an Oando shareholder in Lagos said, For four years, Oando and SEC have been in a tussle and we the shareholders have been the ones on the receiving end. We bought these shares as investments and its painful not being able to reap any benefits from this investment especially for an issue that can be resolved in a boardroom. Weve pleaded with SEC to allow the management team to focus on running the business rather than fighting in court but there has been no movement until the court ruling yesterday. For two years we have had no oversight of our investment or what the company is doing, we value the role of the regulator and want them to do their jobs properly but at the same time we are hopeful that SEC will see this as an opening for a resolution that will benefit all starting with us shareholders whose interests they are to protect. Nigeria was in a recession for the second time in four years, brought on by an unexpected and still ongoing pandemic. It saw the Nigerian Government in 2020 looking for ingenious ways to support individuals and businesses to ensure their survival; globally it has seen the collapse of well-known brands and substantial losses by leading companies. It is against this backdrop that Oando shareholders are clamouring for a resolution so the companys management team can focus on ensuring the future of the business and their investments. Market players will be watching the impact of the signalling effect of the courts ruling and SEC action on Oandos share price in subsequent days as well as the implications of finally being allowed to hold an AGM. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. A new COVID-19 cluster, which was detected over the weekend, has spread beyond Phnom Penh, with the World Health Organization warning that a larger scale outbreak could overrun Cambodias health care infrastructure. The outbreak, dubbed February 20 Community Event, was first detected on Saturday in a cluster of Chinese nationals who had visited a Phnom Penh nightclub and was linked to travelers who bribed security guards at Sokha Hotel to evade the quarantine. On Wednesday morning, the Health Ministry reported new 40 cases, bringing the current outbreak tally to 139. Among the 40 new cases, 36 are from Phnom Penh, two are from Kandal, and two are from Preah Sihanouk province the first cases to be reported outside the capital and Kandal. The Health Ministry initially categorized the two infections in Preah Sihanouk province as imported cases, but ministry spokesperson Or Vandine confirmed later that the two infected foreign nationals were linked to the February 20 community transmission. Preah Sihanouk provincial spokesperson Kheang Phearom said the authorities were placing lockdown measures at three hotels and casino facilities, and a staff dormitory owned by Jin Bei Group. Similar measures were being taken at Huang Guan Jiajue Hotel, which was close to the provincial office. It is a situation under control because we have collected and managed comprehensive information about the contacts and we acted quickly, Kheang Phearom said. At the exposed locations, we close off the facilities, keep people who had direct and indirect contacts in one place, leaving no chance of them moving around freely. Two people a Chinese and a Vietnamese national -- tested positive in Kandal provinces Koh Thom district, according to Wednesdays statistics. Kuoy Bunthoeun, chief of Kandals Department of Health, said the two individuals had been hospitalized and a contact tracing team was working in Koh Thom district to search for any other contacts. In Prey Vengs Kamchay Mear district, local media reported that at least 41 people were tested and placed under quarantine after they attended a wedding party last week where one of the attendees, who was from Phnom Penh, had tested positive for the virus. Or Vandine could not be reached for comment on Wednesday, but on Tuesday she said health officials had detected at least three cases of the UK variant of COVID-19, which is highly contagious. We had been suspecting that this would be the case because the current situation is different from the November 3 and the November 28 outbreak events, Or Vandine said during a Tuesday press conference. The situation now is that it is spreading faster. Schools in Phnom Penh and Kandal were closed for two weeks to contain the virus, according to the Education Ministry. The Culture Ministry also ordered a two-week closure of museums, theatres and cinemas in the capital, Kandal, and Preah Sihanouk. Li Ailan, who heads the World Health Organizations Cambodia office, said the organization was seriously concerned about the new cluster, which had the potential to spread rapidly. I want to be very clear here [that] we are facing the risks of large scale outbreak, Li said at a press conference at the Health Ministry. Li warned that Cambodian healthcare facilities and hospitals could be overwhelmed if the worst-case scenario was to be realized. Our goal is to act quickly to suppress the transmission, she said. Otherwise, the virus is running very fast and we have to be ahead of curve. The Chinese Embassy in Phnom Penh also issued a notice to its citizens in Cambodia to strictly observe epidemic control rules as some Chinese arrivals have left the quarantine hotel or escaped treatment centers after testing positive, according to the Chinese state-owned Global Times. Bailey McCann, Opalesque New York for New Managers: Arion Investment Management, a London based commodity specialist, has launched a new multi-strategy commodity fund platform. Arion Alpha Strategies SPC includes five strategies representing the full complement of Arion's commodities capabilities within a Cayman domiciled platform. The funds include Arion's Multi-Commodity; Copper Arbitrage; Fundamental Systematic Energy; Commodity Spread Trading Program, and Oil Products Trading Program. The platform also includes an expanded Arion team. Last year, Brent Belote, Portfolio Manager at Cayler Capital and Arion announced a tie up. Belote is now trading as part of Arion's Systematic Energy Strategy and Cayler Capital is getting infrastructure support from Arion's platform. James Purdie, Head of Investor Relations at Arion tells Opalesque New Managers that the firm will likely continue to build out the platform with additional traders over time. "We've reached a large enough size that we feel like the platform was the best way to provide our capabilities to an institutional audience," Purdie says. "And, it will allow us to do more in terms of the strategies. We're in a part of the cycle now where we expect commodities to run hard for a little while and so if we can bring on people like Brent who have the skill to take advantage of the opportunities, that's what ...................... To view our full article Click here Treasury Metals Raising C$17.5M, Advancing Goliath-Goldlund to PFS Posted by Publisher Internet After acquiring the neighbouring Goldlund open pit project from First Mining Gold, Treasury Metals (TML.TO, TSRMF.US) has been busy ever since to integrate both projects into a single open pit-underground project with synergies whenever possible. After hiring Ausenco, a reputable engineering firm, and appointing a new President and CEO, Jeremy Wyeth, who has lots of experience in building mines, the company worked diligently for 6 months on an integrated Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) for both projects. From his bio, Wyeth seems the right man in the right place, considering his background. The highlight of his career is undoubtedly the development, construction, commissioning and ramp up of the Victor Diamond Mine in Northern Ontario, owned by De Beers. He took the Victor project from Preliminary Feasibility Study (PFS) to nameplate capacity. The Victor Project had a capital budget of $1 billion and under Mr. Wyeth?s leadership, it was completed 9 months ahead of schedule and under budget. Before this, he worked on mines around the world in Canada, Russia, Brazil and South Africa, and after the completion of the Victor Diamond Mine he was operations director at a large engineering firm. Before I delve into the PEA results, I would also like to briefly mention the recently completed Phase I infill and expansion drill program at Goldlund, which accounted for a 10,000m diamond drill program. The goal of management was to convert Goldlund Inferred resources into Indicated resources, improve continuity, and establish a small maiden resource for the Miller target, all this to be used in the aforementioned combined PEA. The drilling focused on filling in under-drilled Zones 2 and 3 of Goldlund. Initial reported results of this program were decent, including hole GL-20-037 which includes 2.23?g/t gold over?10.0m from 82m depth, including 2.99?g/t gold over?6.0m, and GL-20-035 which includes 1.41?g/t gold over?17.6m from 167m depth at Goldlund. The news release mentioned the holes which weren?t included in the PEA, but most of the pending results for Zones 1, 4, 7 and 8 at the time of the release were included, although these weren?t disclosed yet, so my guess is they will be available for the general public when the PEA is filed. ?Another set of 12 results was announced for Zones 2,3 and 6 on February 11, 2020. Stand out holes were GL-20-043 returning 15m @ 7.15g/t Au including 1m @83.7g/t Au from 74m depth, GL-20-046 returning 37.7m @ 1.18g/t Au from 1.3m depth, GL-20-49 returning 9.5m @ 5.15g/t Au including 1m @ 19.90g/t Au and 0.6m @ 33.90g/t Au from 56m. These results were excellent, as they were all well within open pit depth, and targeted the northeast section of the combined PEA open pit at Goldlund in order to delineate additional resources as well as convert Inferred resources into Indicated resources. Management has identified over 40,000m of drilling at Goldlund, for infill and expansion purposes. As a consequence, a follow up program will start in March, and management is designing a resource expansion program for their nearby Goliath project as well. As the deposits/targets are all in different stages of development, Treasury Metals aims at a 4 stage development of their deposits, comparable to the hub and spoke strategy of Atlantic Gold and their MRC project, which has been taken over in 2019 by St. Barbara for C$802M. Please note that this table might show a bit of underrated view of the Atlantic Gold story compared to the one of Treasury Metals, as the total production from MRC is planned to be 1.46Moz Au with peak production of 254koz Au. Treasury?s combined project, despite the larger resources and higher gold price, has a smaller production profile and is much less profitable. For a quick idea of MRC, here is an overview of the expansion PFS, based on the original FS. These are pretty good numbers, and although I published some critical work on Atlantic done by fellow analyst Dekker regarding the achievability of these numbers, fact is that Atlantic has been taken out during ramp-up for a hefty price tag. On the other hand the AISC reported by current owner St Barbara Ltd keeps hovering around C$950/oz which is significantly above Atlantic?s PFS/FS calculations (C$692/oz), so looking in hindsight, Kees might have been on to something substantial after all. Notwithstanding this, at the current gold prices, St. Barbara is doing just fine with these results, but proving up economic studies by commercial production has been a problematic subject lately, with several projects having failed completely the last years (Baja, RB Energy, Midway, Red Eagle, Rubicon, Nemaska), or others having substantial ramp up issues lasting over one or more years (Detour, Orocobre, Pretium). As the new Treasury Metals CEO Wyeth with all his impressive operational expertise probably is aware of these cases and many more, let?s have a look what the impact is of his stance ?towards the recently published combined PEA, but also the 2017 PEA.? All presented tables are my own material, unless stated otherwise. All pictures are company material, unless stated otherwise. All currencies are in US Dollars, unless stated otherwise. When Treasury Metals published the results of the combined PEA on February 2, 2021, I was immediately puzzled by the NPV and the used price of gold. The NPV figures weren?t notably higher compared to the 2017 Goliath PEA (C$328M now vs C$306M in 2017), which used a much lower base case gold price of US$1225/oz Au vs the combined base case gold price of US$1600/oz Au. This is remarkable, as the resource base of both projects is two times larger than Goliath alone, and a much higher base case gold price usually results in a much higher NPV. This begs for some scrutiny as you will understand. When I put the basic metrics of both PEA?s together in one table, normalized for a US$1225/oz gold price, we get the following comparison, with the most important changes marked in green. As can be seen, the size of the mining operation has doubled, whereas the average head grade has dropped from 3,81g/t to 1.47g/t Au. This was caused by integrating part of the Goldlund open pit resources, which had lower grades, into the project. What really surprised me was the drop in average annual production, as I definitely expected the combined project to produce over the magic threshold of 100,000oz Au annually. As a result, with almost the same life of mine (LOM), total gold production didn?t grow but actually decreased from 1.14Moz to 1.06Moz Au. Keep in mind the Goliath resource base stood at 1.4Moz Au, and the combined Goliath/Goldlund resource at 3.1Moz Au, but management adapted a more conservative approach. This was the old resource estimate for Goliath. And the old Goldlund estimate, compared with the former 2017 estimate. This is the current resource estimate for both Goliath and Goldlund (a satellite deposit of Goldlund called Miller is included but very small). The Goliath open pit component was adjusted from 569koz @1.40g/t Au M&I to 847koz @ 0.99g/t Au, as management used a much lower cut-off but also a different methodology. ?For Goliath, this differs from the previous mineral resource estimate approach that used discrete wireframes created from both geological contacts and drill assay results for the underground model and wider wireframes for the open pit model. With the new methodology, the entire mineralized corridor for the Main Zone and C-Zone were wireframed conventionally and then, internally sub-divided in a low grade, medium grade and high grade components using a probabilistic approach.? The resulting single model respects the known geological information while ensuring that the grade distribution is more representative of the field condition. This has resulted in having a more conservative approach to continuity of the mineralization in both the low grade (Open Pit) and high grade (Underground) zones.? For the underground component of Goliath, this meant a change from 623koz Au @ 5.39g/t Au M&I to 368koz Au @ 3.25g/t Au M&I, also at a lower cut-off (1.9g/t vs 1.6g/t). This is remarkable as a lower cut-off usually includes more ounces. It also effectively means that the underground component is almost rendered uneconomic at more conservative gold prices (US$1200-1300/oz), so this is quite an adjustment. Management was forthcoming in why they felt the need to adjust it like this, and VP Projects Wheeler stated: ??As the project moves to a construction decision we have to be absolutely certain that we are confident in the material we are able to mine to make a critical mass. This conservative approach with a very high portion of M+I ounces allows us to present a realistic PEA that we have significant opportunities to add upon and mitigating risks of downgrade as we move towards greater detail in future studies.? For Goldlund, the changes were also substantial using lower cut-offs (these were 0.40g/t Au, now 0.26g/t Au OP and 1.6g/t Au UG), as the M&I component went from 809koz @ 1.96g/t Au to 840koz @ 1.07g/t Au, so at almost half the grade. Such a decrease in grade affects the profitability a great deal so management definititely wasn?t happy. The Inferred component was adjusted from 877koz @ 1.49g/t Au to 260koz @ 0.56g/t Au open pit, and 51koz @ 6.8g/t underground, almost neutralizing the original Inferred open pit part, and introducing a very small underground high grade component. This isn?t the first robust correction Goldlund has seen in its history, as it was already downsized from the 3.3Moz resource bought at the time of the acquisition in 2016, to 2.3Moz in 2017, to 1.6Moz in 2019, to 1.2Moz now, so it keeps getting smaller. It made me wonder a couple of things. First of all it made me curious if this conservative stance was coming from CEO Wyeth as he is the only new factor in the story, and what triggered him to overhaul the resource estimates. Was this his usual MO, or did he notice certain things? He had this to say: ?My belief is that we want to use this as a base to build from. The last thing we want is to be coming to the market in nine months with apologies and reasoning as to why we haven?t hit our targets.? Past successes have taught me that we want to under promise and over deliver.? The new resources also made me contemplate if Treasury currently thinks they did enough due diligence on the asset when it was bought from First Mining, if they still think the price was right, and what their expectations are for resources. Management had this to say: ?The purchase of the Goldlund process has always been about the potential for the two properties to gain a critical mass and grow using the significant strike length for exploration. We remain confident in the Goldlund asset as can be shown in the M+I resources that remain contained within the resource estimate. Much of the drop has come from the indicated category and we see opportunities to both gain back those resources through the drilling we are currently doing, further revisions to the geological knowledge and modelling of high grade zones and very importantly the development of the trend as a whole. We currently have more the 62km of strike length that needs to be explored for growth like has happened with the newly developed Miller deposit.? The second intriguing aspect of this combined PEA was the huge increase in All-In Sustaining Costs (AISC). To see these costs rise with 61% is unheard of, for me in 10 years of doing junior mining research at least, for economic studies that are both NI43-101 compliant. I have seen JORC-compliant (Australia) economic studies being adjusted or rather corrected dramatically when projects owned by Australian listed companies were taken over by Canadian listed companies, I have seen JORC estimates adjusted by 50% to NI43-101 resource estimates, also strongly revised NI43-101 resource estimates, but this is a first. A comparison of both PEAs for cash costs/AISC looks like this: As we can see, the costs per tonne don?t differ too much, but the issue here is the average grade is much lower, so the costs per ounce increase. As more production comes from a relatively cheaper open pit operation at Goldlund, cash costs remain at acceptable levels. Things go wrong at the AISC side of things, with sustaining capital exploding. In the 2017 PEA sustaining capital was extremely low at a total of just C$12M, but underground development and equipment (C$96M) was for some reason quoted separately. When I calculated sustaining capital per ounce in order to reconstruct AISC, I noticed things didn?t add up, as cash cost plus sustaining capital would generate an AISC way over US$620/oz instead of US$566/oz. It almost seemed like underground development, which usually is labeled as sustaining capital, was left out. Management had no comment on this subject. Sustaining capital was not separately addressed and specified in the 2017 PEA unfortunately. In the 2021 PEA, sustaining capital was more adequately calculated in my view. Of note are the increase in underground mine development and mining equipment, but especially the significant items Mining infrastructure and Tailings storage facility (TSF). I wondered if these items were taken from the initial capex, in order to increase the IRR, as most of the infra and a TSF usually is constructed before production, as you simply need both from the start. According to VP Projects Mark Wheeler: ?We have used leased equipment to attempt to minimize the needed upfront capital and as such this does have a positive effect on the IRR of the project. We have taken a much more conservative view on the cost of tailings construction and have planned as such for a phases approach.? Additional detailed optimization work will be completed in the PFS to ensure capital is spent in the most efficient manner possible.? Another item that caught my attention was the mining schedule. As management told me last year they are aiming at getting Goldlund into production about 3 years after Goliath, which made sense due to permitting and funding construction at Goldlund by internal cash flow, I noticed something different in the schedule: In this schedule, Goldlund is planned to go into production in year 1, together with Goliath. As I don?t expect Goliath to be shelved during the full permitting procedure of Goldlund, management had the following explanation for this: ?We have assumed that Goldlund is approximately 1 year delayed on permitting of Goliath. As such, with an 18 month Goliath construction period, and a resource that comes to surface at Goldlund with minimal pre-stripping needed we are afforded the opportunity to start Goldlund with minimal delay to the production start of mining.? It seems that incoming CEO Wyeth definitely had some cleaning up to do regarding resources of both Goliath and Goldlund, and the 2017 PEA on Goliath. If both the resources and grades would have hold up better, there is no doubt in my mind that the combined NPV of both projects would have superseded values of C$700M @US$1600/oz Au instead of the current C$328M. Investors in Treasury Metals weren?t too happy as the stock sold off when the PEA results were announced. As gold went down further the last few weeks, so did gold equities, providing additional pressure for the Treasury share price. Notwithstanding this, I believe it is better for everybody to paint a clear picture as early as possible, and I am sure Wyeth, as a high level executive with lots of high quality experience will do whatever he can to restore future potential for investors. He had this to say when asked: ?We are very happy with the overall result. The mining plan and economic results are reasonable and achievable and with the drilling plan in place and drills turning on site we see significant opportunity to add to the resources and in turn significantly de-risk the project with that growth.? At this point, the company has sufficient funds, and currently has about C$11M in the treasury. Notwithstanding this, on February 17, 2021 the company announced a C$15M financing, consisting of a C$10M non-flow through bought deal based on C$0.95 NFT special warrants, and a C$5M flow through private placement at a combination of C$1.10 and C$1.33 (Charity) FT special warrants. The NFT warrants will be exercisable into common shares, and the FT warrants into flow-through common shares. The holding period is a standard 4 months and one day. The financing is lead by Haywood, Cormark Securities and Sprott Capital Partners, and the underwriters have the option to buy another C$1.5M NFT special warrants. Per the news release: ?The net proceeds of the NFT Special Warrants will be used to fund exploration and trade-off optimization studies as part of the pre-feasibility study work and development of the company\-\-s Goliath Gold Complex projects, as well as for general working capital purposes. The gross proceeds from the sale of the FT Special Warrants and Charity FT Special Warrants will be used by the company to incur eligible \Canadian exploration expenses\ that qualify as \flow-through mining expenditures\ (within the meaning of the?Income Tax Act?(Canada)), related to the Company\-\-s Goliath Gold Complex projects in?Ontario.? The financing was just upsized from C$15M to C$17.5M, and is expected to close in early March. The underwriters also have an over-allotment options which could see the financing upsized further. After closing the company is expected to have at least about C$28M in cash. This is enough to get them through PFS exploration and optimization, and completion of the PFS itself, which is expected at Q2, 2022. As a reminder, Treasury holds a convertible debt of C$4.5M, carrying an 8% interest. The debenture is held by two of the largest equity holders in the company, Extract Capital and DSC, which are supportive. After this quick financial update, let?s have a look at valuations. As I always like to see where the analyzed company stands among its competitors, I updated the peer comparison: ? As can be seen, Treasury Metals still has lots of upside potential, as profitable projects at PFS/FS/Construction level usually approach EV/oz values of US$80-100 or even higher, and P/NAV values going to 1 when going into production. Realistically, a gold price of US$1500/oz is very conservative in a US$1800/oz environment, so evidently when calculated NAV on the then current gold price will be much higher, P/NAV will have more room to run as well when commercial production is about to start. For now, and with gold remaining above an assumed US$1600/oz for the next few years, a double from today?s share price isn?t unrealistic at all for Treasury Metals when going into production, including the inevitable dilution that comes with capex funding. This is based on no resource growth, a gold price of US$1600/oz, and no improved economics, so pretty conservative. This will take time of course, and I?m looking forward to the next steps in the new course of CEO Wyeth, who seems extremely professional about his business. Conclusion The combined PEA of Goliath and Goldlund surprised a lot of investors, and unfortunately not in a positive way. As the new CEO Jeremy Wyeth has intimate knowledge of everything that can go wrong with mining projects from resource to production, he set out to heavily scrutinize everything that Treasury brought to his table. Both the resources of Goliath and Goldlund decreased as a consequence, and the 2017 PEA on Goliath could basically be thrown into the shredder. Although the current potential is significantly lower, there is still upside, and now it is conservative and realistic. As Wyeth is a mine builder who has proven he can work in time and under budget at projects much larger than at his current job, there is no doubt in my mind he will waste no time advancing the Goliath Gold Complex in the best possible way. He already rounded up the support of influential parties like Sprott Capital Partners, who don?t take due diligence lightly, and will probably soon have at least an additional C$17.5M at his disposal. Let?s see where he can take Treasury Metals in this gold bull market. I hope you will find this article interesting and useful, and will have further interest in my upcoming articles on mining. To never miss a thing, please subscribe to my free newsletter on my website www.criticalinvestor.eu, in order to get an email notice of my new articles soon after they are published. Disclaimer: The author is not a registered investment advisor. Treasury Metals is a sponsoring company. All facts are to be checked by the reader. For more information go to www.treasurymetals.com and read the company?s profile and?official documents on?www.sedar.com, also?for important risk disclosures. This article is provided for information purposes only, and is not intended to be investment advice of any kind, and all readers are encouraged to do their own due diligence, and talk to their own licensed investment advisors prior to making any investment decisions. Gurugram, Feb 24 : The Gurugram Police has arrested a pregnant woman's lover who had killed her in Jal Vihar Colony, Sector-46 in Gurugram. According to the police, the accused Subhash told them that he killed Preeti by strangulation due to a mutual conflict. Preeti had a fight with her husband after which she stayed with Subhash for a few days. Preeti's husband and Subhash were both staying in Jal Vihar Colony, the police said. "The accused was nabbed by Crime Branch unit Sector-40 from Ghata-Faridabad Road. The accused has confessed to his involvement in the murder. The accused was produced before a local court on Wednesday which sent him to jail," said Preet Pal Sangwan, ACP (crime). On February 19, the police had received information that a woman was murdered in the Jal Vihar Colony. The woman originally had a love marriage with Satish Kumar, a resident of Hathras in Uttar Pradesh around four years ago. The couple was residing in Sheetla Colony area in Gurugram for the last one year. Meanwhile, Preeti met Subhash, a resident of Hathras. After two to three days, Preeti went to Faridabad with her alleged lover Subhash. Later Satish also travelled to Faridabad to fetch her back but there the trio planned to stay together in Gurugram again after mutual consent. Thereafter, Preeti her husband and Subhash started living in a room in Jal Vihar Colony. On February 19, there was an argument between Preeti and Subhash and later he killed her and fled the spot. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company A Texas prosecutor is opening a criminal investigation into whether any person or entity should face criminal charges for last week's deadly power outages. Jose Garza, the District Attorney for Travis County - which includes Austin, told KVUE that the investigation will be handled by his office's public integrity unit. 'Lives were lost, homes were lost, and it will take weeks, months and in some cases years for some people to be made whole again,' Garza told KVUE. 'We will not forget the horror our community experienced.' Garza did not indicate if the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state's power grid, would be targeted by the investigation. Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza is launching a criminal investigation into the power outages in Texas After a snowstorm hits the state of Texas, millions were left without power after ERCOT chose to use rolling blackout to save energy in the state 'We will do everything we can to hold powerful actors accountable whose actions or inactions may have led to the suffering,' he said. He added: 'The events of last week were horrifying, and in the midst of that horror the spirit of our community was evident to EMS workers, hospitals works, firefighters, law enforcement and everyone who worked hard to make sure our neighbors were safe you made us proud and thank you.' Top ERCOT board leaders said on Tuesday they will resign after more than 4 million customers lost electricity during the winter storm last week - marking one of the worst power outages in United States history. All of the four board directors who are stepping down, including Chairwoman Sally Talberg, live outside of Texas, which only intensified criticism of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. The resignations are effective Wednesday a day before Texas lawmakers are expected to sharply question grid managers and energy officials about the failures during hearings at the state Capitol. All of the board directors stepping down, including Chairwoman Sally Talberg, live outside of Texas, which only intensified criticism of ERCOT. The other board members are vice chairman Peter Cramton, Terry Bulger and Raymond Hepper. There are a total of 16 members on ERCOT's board, which appoints officers who manage the grid manager's day-to-day operations. A spokesman for the Public Utility Commission (PUC) of Texas declined immediate comment on the resignations or when the regulator would seek to appoint new members. The PUC appoints the 15-member ERCOT board. Cases of water are stacked at a distribution site after winter weather caused electricity blackouts and water service disruption in Dallas on February 23 Collin Camp unloads groceries to be distributed to West Texans in the Permian Basin at Odessa Christmas In Action on February 23, 2021, in Odessa Christina Beverly and John Shearon light candles in their home after winter weather caused electricity blackouts and 'boil water' notices in Fort Worth on February 20 Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has largely blamed the outages on ERCOT and called for investigations. But the problems were wider than ERCOT, including power plants that were knocked offline by the extreme cold and natural gas producers didn't protect wellheads from freezing. 'The lack of preparedness and transparency at ERCOT is unacceptable, and I welcome these resignations,' Abbott said in a statement. 'The State of Texas will continue to investigate ERCOT and uncover the full picture of what went wrong, and we will ensure that the disastrous events of last week are never repeated.' This week, the State Legislature is set to begin hearings amid calls for reform of its deregulated electricity market after the power outages. 'I encourage Texas residents to use the House's public comment portal to formally share their experiences & thoughts about the electric blackouts as the House State Affairs and Energy Resources committees prepare for next week's 2/25 hearings,' House Speaker Dade Phelan tweeted. Last week, Senator Ted Cruz faced criticism for traveling with his family to Cancun as dozens of people died during the power outages in his state. 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. Utah senator Mitt Romney has predicted that Donald Trump will win the Republican presidential nomination if he decides to run in 2024. Mr Romney, the Republican nominee for president in 2012, made the comments during a discussion with The New York Timess Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook DC Policy Project on Tuesday evening. Mr Trump failed to be re-elected in 3 Novembers presidential election and was subsequently impeached by the House after a mob of his supporters breached the US Capitol after attending a rally where he told them to show strength and be strong. Five people died and several more were injured during the siege, but a few weeks after leaving office Mr Trump was acquitted of the charge of incitement of insurrection by the Senate even though a bipartisan majority 57 to 43 voted to convict him. A total of 67 senators was required for conviction. Despite Mr Trumps loss in the election and his second House impeachment, Mr Romney told the Times on Tuesday that he is sure that the former president will continue being influential in the Republican Party. He has by far the largest voice and a big impact in my party, the Utah senator said about Mr Trump, adding: I dont know about his family members, whether they intend to do that, but I expect he will continue playing a role. Mr Romney, who voted to convict Mr Trump in his Senate trial and has been critical of his false claims of widespread fraud in last years election, then claimed that the former president would secure the GOP nomination if he decides to run in 2024. Im pretty sure he will win the nomination, the senator said, adding: I look at the polls and the polls show that, among the names being floated as potential contenders in 2024, if you put President Trump in there among Republicans he wins in a landslide. However, Mr Romney was quick to note that a lot can happen between now and 2024. When asked if he would run for the nomination again and campaign against Mr Trump, the senator said he would prefer to support another candidate. I would not be voting for President Trump again. I havent voted for him in the past and I would probably be getting behind somebody who I thought more represented the tiny wing of the Republican Party that I represent, he said on Tuesday. Since leaving the White House on 20 January, Mr Trump has refused to confirm whether he will run for the nomination in 2024, with rumours floating around that he will form his own party to campaign for president. However, he has boasted about the tremendous support, for him, adding: Im the only guy who gets impeached and my numbers go up. Mr Trump was likely referring to a Politico-Morning Consult poll released last week that showed 59 per cent of Republican respondents want the former president to continue playing a prominent role in the party and 54 per cent would back him in the primaries in 2024. Although Mr Trumps popularity among Republicans dipped following the Capitol insurrection, it shot back up in the wake of his impeachment acquittal. Former vice-president Mike Pence was second in the poll, with 12 per cent saying they would back him in the primaries, while Donald Trump Jr and former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley were tied for third place with 6 per cent each. They are all rumoured to be planning on running for the nomination in 2024, but none of them have yet confirmed whether they will campaign to be the next US president. One side benefit of the defeat of Neera Tandens nomination (if thats what ends up happening) is the enjoyment of watching identity politics bean-counters explode in anger, making fools of themselves in the process. Rep. Judy Chu, head of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, and her colleague Rep. Grace Meng claim to detect a double standard in the opposition to Tanden (who is Asian, but not Asian Pacific, for those of you keeping score at home). Chu states: Theres a double standard going on. [Tandens] nomination is very significant for us Asian American and Pacific Islanders. I do believe that this double standard has to do with the fact that she would be a pioneer in that position. I doubt that many Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders know who Neera Tanden is, or care. Nonetheless, she shouldnt be the victim of a double standard. But whats the evidence of a double standard? According to Politico: Inside the White House, it did not go unnoticed that many of the lawmakers objecting to Tandens social media missivesincluding Manchinvoted to confirm Richard Grenell, the acid-tongued Trump booster, to the post of U.S. ambassador to Germany. Grenell may be acid tongued, but did he ever call U.S. Senators names, as Tanden did? Not that I know of, and not according to anything in Politicos silly report. Whatever ones race, ethnicity, or gender, its bad practice to call Senators names if you hope to be confirmed for any position by the Senate. Politico continues: [Democrats] point not just to [former president Trumps] own acerbic social media presence and repeated attacks on lawmakers of color, but to Justice Brett Kavanaughs conduct during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing and the confirmation of former Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general decades after he lost a bid for a federal judgeship over accusations of racism. These comparisons are ridiculous. The Senate never confirmed Trump to any position; nor is it clear that the Senate would have done so. Kavanaugh lashed out at Senators who, in effect, accused him of rape. Tanden, by contrast, attacked Senators for no reason other than that they disagree with her policy positions. In any case, Kavanaugh did not resort to the kind of schoolyard name calling Tanden indulged in. Sessions, an old-fashioned gentleman, certainly never insulted his fellow Senators. And the accusations of racism were baseless. Sessions Senate colleagues knew he wasnt a racist. But Tandens past viciousness is undisputed. She even had to apologize for it. Politico assures us that its not just Tandens nomination that is surfacing complaints of sexism and racial prejudice. Of course it isnt. When one identity politics group starts whining, can others be far behind? Thus, opposition to Xavier Becerra, a Latino, is deemed suspect, if not outright racist. Democrats complain that Becerra is being called underqualified because he is not a doctor, yet Trumps Health Secretary, Alex Azar, wasnt a physician, either. (Azar, by the way, is of Middle Eastern descent.) This is beyond stupid. The objection to Becerra isnt thats hes not a doctor. The objection, as I phrased it yesterday, is that Becerra has no experience working at HHS, no medical background, and has never been chief executive of a state or any entity other than an attorney generals shop. Compare this to Azar. Before becoming Secretary of HHS, he had been both the general counsel and the deputy Secretary of that very agency. He had also been president of the U.S. division of Eli Lilly, a huge drug company. Clearly, Azar had loads of experience directly relevant to the position for which Trump nominated him. Clearly, Becerra does not. And clearly, opposition to Tanden and Becerra has nothing to do with their race or ethnicity. Claims to the contrary cannot be made with a straight face. Unfortunately, when it comes to spouting Democrat talking points, Politico does not apply a straight-face test. UPDATE: Sen. Manchin has doubts about voting to confirm Rep. Deb Haaland, Bidens nominee to be Secretary of Interior. Haaland is an American Indian (dont confuse her with the great Norwegian footballer). Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggests that Manchins opposition is racist. Has it not occurred to her that the West Virginia Senators reservations might have something to do with Haalands past positions on fossil fuels? Of course it has. Ocasio-Cortez isnt bright, but shes not stupid. Playing the race card against Manchin over the Haaland nomination is an act of pure cynicism. Fortunately, its unlikely to move the Senator. Yes, no matter what Yes, but it depends on variety No, for medical reasons, uncertainty No, principle Vote View Results Kentucky Republican State Senate President Robert Stivers stands on the floor of the Senate Chamber at the Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Wednesday, March 2, 2020. (AP Photo/Bryan Woolston) PHOTO:AP Photo/Bryan Woolston Stivers Files No-knock Warrant Bill By The Associated Press FRANKFORT - One of Kentuckys top GOP lawmakers has filed legislation to ban some no-knock warrants nearly a year after the death of Breonna Taylor.Under the bill, no-knock warrants would only be issued if there was clear and convincing evidence that that crime alleged is a crime that would qualify a person, if convicted, as a violent offender.Senate President Robert Stivers says that that would prevent similar situations from occurring again.Taylor was shot multiple times by police during a botched drug raid in March 2020.Police had a no-knock warrant but said they knocked and announced their presence before entering Taylors apartment, a claim some witnesses have disputed. Burlington, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Evertz Technologies Limited (TSX: ET) will release its third quarter 2021 financial results on March 3, 2021 at approximately 4:00 p.m. (EDT). The Company will hold a conference call with financial analysts to discuss the results on March 3, 2021 at 5:00 p.m. (EDT). Media and other interested parties are invited to join the conference call in listen-only mode. The conference call may be accessed by dialing 647-792-1240 or Toll-Free (North America) 1-800-437-2398. For those unable to listen to the live call, a rebroadcast will also be available until April 2, 2021. The rebroadcast can be accessed at 647-436-0148 or Toll-Free 1-888-203-1112. The pass code for the conference call and rebroadcast is 1237007. About Evertz Evertz Technologies Limited (TSX: ET) designs, manufactures and markets video and audio infrastructure solutions for the television, telecommunications and new-media industries. The Company's solutions are purchased by content creators, broadcasters, specialty channels and television service providers to support their increasingly complex multi-channel digital, high & ultra-high definition television ("HDTV" & "UHD") and next generation high bandwidth low latency IP network environments and by telecommunications and new-media companies. The Company's products allow its customers to generate additional revenue while reducing costs through efficient signal routing, distribution, monitoring and management of content as well as the automation and orchestration of more streamlined and agile workflow processes on-premise and in the "Cloud". Contact Information Evertz Technologies Limited Doug Moore, CPA, CA (905) 335-7580 ir@evertz.com To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75360 Nothing on Wednesday announced teenage engineering as a founding partner of the company. Nothing is a London-based consumer electronics start-up founded by Carl Pei, the Swedish technology entrepreneur and co-founder of Chinese smartphone company OnePlus. teenage engineering is a Stockholm-based consumer electronics company known for uniquely design electronic products for all people who love sound and music. When Carl first told me about Nothings vision I remember being super excited thinking about how this would be translated into the design identity of the products. After months of research and development, we are now in a place where I believe we will have something exciting to show to the world, said Jesper Kouthoofd, Founding Partner & Creative Lead of Nothing. Im really excited to welcome teenage engineering to the growing Nothing family. They consist of some of the best designers and creatives that Ive had the pleasure of working with. Together, weve created a product roadmap thats unique and true to Nothings vision, said Carl Pei, CEO & co-founder of Nothing. Nothing will be releasing its first products, touted to be a pair of true wireless earbuds, in the coming months. Nothing recently announced that it is opening up for its community to invest as part of its Series A. Nothing says, over 20,000 people have signed up for early access with a registered interest close to $30 million in total. This community funding round will be carried out through a crowdfund campaign starting on March 2nd. Nothing is a privately held company and has raised $22 million from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and other private investors including; Tony Fadell (Principal at Future Shape & Inventor of the iPod), Casey Neistat (YouTube personality and Co-founder of Beme), Kevin Lin (Co-founder of Twitch) and Steve Huffman (Co-founder and CEO of Reddit). Indian serial entrepreneur Kunal Shah has also backed the venture. Two San Francisco supervisors called for an investigation Tuesday into a San Francisco nonprofit, focused on an agreement to run the controversial Golden Gate Park Ferris wheel. Supervisors Connie Chan and Aaron Peskin say they want the controllers office to dig deeper into the nonprofit San Francisco Parks Alliance, which would reap some Ferris wheel revenue, in light of the citys public corruption investigation. The potential investigation comes after neighborhood groups and naturalists clashed with city departments, residents and business leaders over whether the city should extend the contract for the Ferris wheel for four years. The San Francisco Parks Alliance was subpoenaed by the City Attorneys Office last year as part of the citys corruption probe. Under the terms of its contract with Ferris wheel operator SkyView Partners, the city gets $1 from every $18 ticket sold. The nonprofit San Francisco Parks Alliance will receive up to $200,000 of this revenue to help fund the nonprofits $1.9 million yearlong celebration in collaboration with the city and other organizations. Beyond that amount, city revenue will go to the Recreation and Park Department to fund commemorative signage for Golden Gate Parks 150th anniversary, transportation access to the park and general needs, the department said. Our agreements with the nonprofit Parks Alliance, including those involving the SkyStar Wheel, went through a transparent public process and, like any other civic celebration, are open for anyone to examine, a department spokesperson said. The organization said in a statement Tuesday evening that it voluntarily undergoes city and independent financial audits and has cooperated with federal and local investigations. The nonprofit wholeheartedly supports any effort by the City to increase transparency and accountability, the statement read. We embrace this scrutiny and the increased transparency that will result from it, because SFPA does not have, and never has had, anything to hide, the statement continued. The Recreation and Park Commission voted last week to approve the four-year extension on the Ferris wheel, though the Historic Preservation Commission has not voted yet on the deal. The giant wheel was originally scheduled to stay in the park for a little more than a year in honor of the parks 150th anniversary. But as soon as it was unloaded last winter, the pandemic surged, freezing the wheel in place. In a September 2020 presentation to the boards government, audit, and oversight committee, the controllers office explained ties between the nonprofit and former San Francisco Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru, who was charged with fraud, Chan said. Nuru allegedly solicited donations from private companies or individuals and directed funds to a nonprofit account to influence procurement decisions, Chan said. Chan and Peskin now want to investigate this relationship in light of the recent Ferris wheel agreement. This really raises the question of whether this is a good government practice or whether such practices contribute to the pay-to-play culture among city agencies, Chan said. While we all can agree Ferris wheels are fun, anti-corruption and good government policies are of utmost importance. San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Steve Rubenstein and Dominic Fracassa contributed to this report. Mallory Moench is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mallory.moench@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@mallorymoench Vancouver, British Columbia and Boulder, Colorado--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Intellabridge Technology Corporation (CSE: INTL) (OTC Pink: CRBTF) (FSE: 98AA), a blockchain technology company, is pleased to announce that the Company has partnered with Transak to power its fiat gateway to DeFi markets. With the Transak partnership, Intellabridge customers will be able to onboard more customers from fiat to crypto and expand the Intellabridge DeFi footprint in more than 60 countries worldwide. Customers will be able to buy dozens of different DeFi tokens using a bank transfer or bank card with payment methods including Visa, Mastercard, SEPA and more. The partnership improves the accessibility to decentralised finance for mainstream users. Intellabridge CEO, John Eagleton, explains that "one of the biggest user pain points in DeFi is buying crypto currencies with fiat, and Transak helps reduce the barriers to DeFi markets. Fiat on-ramps will play an important role in the scaling and adoption of DeFi, and the partnership with Transak will help us to generate broader access to the Kash platform." Transak CEO, Sami Start explains that "Transak is on a mission to make it easier to connect money and data to your blockchain wallet. We believe that the blockchain wallet will become a single sign-on for finance. Kind of like sign in with Google or Facebook, but with way more features. We are very pleased to partner with Intellabridge to help grow the adoption of the Kash DeFi platform." About Transak Transak is a single integration for applications to accept fiat-to-crypto deposits and withdrawals from a global user base. It does this by aggregating fiat on-ramps from around the world and abstracting away the complexity of local compliance, payment methods, and operations. Transak is backed by Consensys. For more information, please visit https://transak.com. About Intellabridge Technology Corporation Intellabridge Technology Corporation (CSE: INTL) (OTC Pink: CRBTF) (FSE: 98AA) is a venture builder investing in blockchain technologies with a focus on fintech and decentralized financial ("DeFi") solutions. For more information, visit www.intellabridge.com. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD of DIRECTORS INTELLABRIDGE TECHNOLOGY CORPORATION "John Eagleton" John Eagleton, CEO To contact Intellabridge: Website: intellabridge.com Phone: +1-303-800-5333 Email: maria@intellabridge.com The CSE does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation (collectively "forward-looking statements"). The use of any of the word "will" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated in such forward looking statements. Such forward-looking statements should not be unduly relied upon. Actual results achieved may vary from the information provided herein as a result of numerous known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors. The Company believes the expectations reflected in those forward-looking statements are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct. The Company does not undertake to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. ### To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75242 The response raised more questions about when the government knew of the case, given statements that Mr Morrisons office took media queries about it on February 12. In a television interview on Thursday morning, the Home Affairs Minister said he decided not to tell Mr Morrison about the case on the day he found out about it, even though he passed on information as a courtesy the next day. I deemed it not to be appropriate to provide information to the Prime Minister on the 11th, Mr Dutton told the Nine Network. There were media inquiries that came in to the government on the 12th of February, the following day, and as a courtesy we provided information to the Prime Ministesrs office at that point. I dont disclose the information provided to me by the Australian Federal Police, particularly where there are operational matters, and that was a decision, I think quite appropriately, that I took on the 11th of February. Mr Dutton said he asked his chief of staff to pass the information to the Prime Ministers office on February 12 but this was at a high level rather than about the details of the allegation. Mr Morrison has told Parliament several times that he found out about the alleged rape when it was reported in the media on Monday, February 15. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Labor leader Anthony Albanese has expressed disbelief in some of the government claims amid speculation about how Mr Dutton came to be told before the Prime Minister. A source aware of the steps taken by police, but who was not authorised to speak publicly about the matter, said Mr Dutton was told of the case by AFP commissioner Reece Kershaw on February 11 under guidelines that require the minister to be told of sensitive cases. The commissioner contacted the minister after a meeting of the Sensitive Investigations Oversight Board, a group within the AFP that meets to decide whether cases require an alert to senior authorities such as the minister. Loading The AFP guidelines for ministerial briefings on investigations state that ministers must be told of any matters when media attention is reasonably likely. Mr McCartney, the deputy commissioner in charge of investigations, chaired the SIOB meeting with other senior AFP officers and the group decided the minister needed to be told. The AFP commissioner, who is not on the board, acted on the decision the same day. The SIOB meeting came after Ms Higgins contacted ACT Policing, a part of the AFP, on February 6 to say she wanted to re-engage on a complaint she had made soon after the alleged rape. The alleged rape took place on Saturday, March 23, 2019 in the office of Senator Reynolds, where Ms Higgins and the alleged perpetrator both worked. The man was fired on the subsequent Tuesday. Ms Higgins has said she told others in Parliament House of her rape within days, including in a meeting with a police unit in the building on the Wednesday. But there is uncertainty over the timing of some of these steps, with the initial complaint to ACT Policing made on April 1. On that day Ms Higgins also had a meeting with Senator Reynolds and the ministers chief of staff to tell of the alleged rape. ACT Policing confirmed the initial complaint was made on April 1, 2019. It said on Wednesday night it was now investigating the alleged assault after a report was made. Loading The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age asked Mr Duttons three press secretaries why he did not tell Mr Morrison of the case on February 11, but they did not respond before the deadline for this report. Labor sought to link the questions over what the Prime Ministers office knew about Ms Higgins allegations with other reports of inappropriate behaviour by a staff member of newly-independent MP Craig Kelly, who quit the Liberal Party on Tuesday. This Prime Minister is running a dont ask, dont tell government of cover-ups, shadow minister for women Tanya Plibersek said after Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese moved a motion to condemn Mr Morrison. The vote was also intended as a test of the new finely balanced parliamentary numbers after Mr Kellys defection. However, the government won the vote 65-56. Mr Kelly and independent Bob Katter backed the government and Labor was down a vote after backbencher Josh Burns was ejected for interjecting. Crossbench MPs Andrew Wilkie, Zali Steggall, Rebekha Sharkie and Helen Haines opposed the government gagging debate on the matter but abstained from the final vote, walking out of the chamber as a group. The quartet has a general rule of not playing political games or supporting motions that use the word condemn. Ms Steggall saw merit behind the issues Labor was raising and said the governments response had been insufficient. Leonard Forte, shown in this 1987 booking photo, is facing three felony charges of sexual assault out of Bennington County. Forte, 79, has claimed for decades that he is too sick to be retried, after a judge reversed his 1988 trial conviction. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Vote Percentage of Parties in Puducherry2021: How did the parties fare It is through 'conspiracy' by BJP and its allies that my govt was toppled: Narayanasamy India pti-Deepika S Puducherry, Feb 24: Former Chief Minister of Puducherry V Narayanasamy on Wednesday cautioned the voters against supporting the alliance comprising BJP, AINRC and AIADMK in the coming assembly polls here as these parties would have no qualms to merge the Union Territory with Tamil Nadu. Addressing party workers during a demonstration here to condemn the 'toppling' of the Congress led government in Puducherry, Narayanasamy said, 'my government was toppled through undemocratic and scrupulous designs and conspiracy hatched by the BJP in coordination with the AINRC and AIADMK.' He launched an emotional tirade against the BJP and its allies for 'committing murder of democracy' by adopting 'unprincipled practices to lure turncoats' to topple the democratically elected government here. 'Even before my government was formed in June 2016 the Centre had posted the former IPS officer Kiran Bedi as Lt Governor of Puducherry in May that year. This was a clear proof of the plan of the NDA to rock the boat and disturb democratically elected government.' Narayanasamy, who led the Congress government, resigned on Monday ahead of the confidence vote after his ministry was reduced to a minority following a spate of resignations of his party MLAs and a DMK legislator in recent days. What is President's rule? Why it is being imposed in Puducherry He called on Lt Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan, who had earlier directed a floor test to prove his majority, and submitted the resignation of his four-member cabinet. President Ram Nath Kovind has accepted the resignation. The Congress leader claimed that the BJP led alliance would bite the dust in the forthcoming polls and all the contestants of the saffron party and its alliance partners would lose deposit. 'If by any chance the alliance comprising BJP and its allies comes to power, the separate identity of Puducherry as a union territory would be dismantled and its merger with neighbouring Tamil Nadu would happen,' he alleged. Asserting that the SDA headed by Congress would get elected in the ensuing polls, Narayanasamy said, 'we will form the next government to serve the people.' VCK leader Tirumavalan in his address said the BJP led government at the Centre had shown its political machinations by dislodging the Congress led governments in Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Karnataka and a few other States. 'On the same line the Narayanasamy led Congress DMK coalition ministry was ousted in Puducherry. The toppling of the government elected by the people of Puducherry was a shameless act on the part of the BJP,' he said. Tirumavalavan listed several unique and progressive measures the Narayanasamy headed government had implemented for housing facilities andeducational advancement of the students belonging to SC and ST and Other Backward classes. He said the VCK would extend its cooperation to the secular democratic alliance here. He asked the people to ensure that those who had 'fallen a prey to allurements and shifted their allegiance' were taught a lesson in the Assembly polls due in the next few months.' In an interview with 1in.am, Armenias Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan referred to the statement of third President Serzh Sargsyan, according to which he was surprised why the Iskander ballistic missile in Armenias arsenal was not fired on the third or fourth day of the recent Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) war. The journalist conducting the interview inquired from the PM whether that insinuation was addressed to him, and Pashinyan responded: "That insinuation may be addressed to me as well. But I believe the one who is rejected [i.e., Sargsyan] should know the answers to many questions and not ask questions to which he knows the answers. And maybe they will answer: Why did the Iskander that was fired not explode, or it exploded, for example, by 10 percent? Then the journalist asked if that was the case, and the premier responded: "I do not know." (Natural News) China has refused to provide the World Health Organization (WHO) with raw data on early Wuhan coronavirus cases. The global health body said Chinese authorities have turned down requests to provide data on 174 COVID-19 cases dating back to December 2019. Chinas information is of huge help to WHO investigators examining how and when the coronavirus first began to spread in the country. Investigators finished their month-long scrutiny on the matter during the week of Feb. 12. WHO experts said Chinese officials and scientists provided their own extensive summaries and analyses of COVID-19 case data. They also supplied aggregate data and analysis on retrospective searches through medical records in the months leading to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. Ultimately, Chinese health authorities claimed that they found no evidence of the virus. But the WHO team was prohibited from viewing the raw data behind those retrospective studies. Member states of the global health body typically provide such data in a disaggregated yet anonymized form. This is to permit investigators to see all other relevant details on each case part of standard WHO procedure. Access to the data would allow WHO team members to conduct their own examination on how early and how extensively the Wuhan coronavirus began to spread across China. Australian microbiologist and WHO team member Dominic Dwyer said: They [Chinese authorities] showed us a couple of examples, but thats not the same thing as doing all of them which is standard epidemiological investigation. He continued: The interpretation of data becomes more limited from our point of view, although the other side might see it as being quite good. Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, another WHO team member, said the teams Chinese counterparts had performed extensive work involving hundreds of investigators from several institutes. She added that the WHO investigatory team could attempt to obtain information later given their limited time in China. Meanwhile, both Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Health Commission did not answer The Wall Street Journals request for comment. (Related: China blocks WHO investigation team probing coronavirus origins from entering the country.) Chinas refusal to provide key information muddles ongoing investigation into coronavirus origins Dwyer said the lack of transparency on Chinas part when it came to the raw, personalized data on the 174 early Wuhan coronavirus infections and other potential cases prior to December 2019 led to heated discussions. By the time the WHO team left Wuhan, no agreement to provide raw data had been reached with China. Danish epidemiologist Thea Fischer said Feb. 9 that she found no inconsistencies in the available data from Wuhan. But she noted that a deeper analysis would be impossible without the raw data, adding that other countries would provide it right away. Sometimes, emotions have really run high. I am a scientist and I trust data. I trust documented evidence based on data, [and] I dont just trust what anyone tells me, the WHO team member remarked. The WHO delegation to Wuhan aimed to probe if COVID-19 was already spreading in China before early December 2019. Chinese authorities reported the first patient in the country who experienced COVID-19 symptoms that month. If the Wuhan coronavirus was detected earlier, necessary actions would have been done to curtail its spread before it became a pandemic that has claimed more than 2.3 million lives as of writing. Meanwhile, team leader Peter Ben Embarek said Feb. 9 that the virus most likely jumped to a human from an animal, and may have entered China by means of imported frozen food. He said the virus coming from a laboratory and being released via accident was extremely unlikely. (Related: No surprise: WHO kowtows to communist China, announces the virus didnt come from the Wuhan lab.) The Chinese government welcomed the WHO delegations findings and urged other countries such as the U.S. to invite the global health body for similar probes. However, the U.S. called for greater transparency and said it wanted to see data obtained from the WHO investigation. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration plans to scrutinize data from the probe in an independent review. The press secretary told reporters during a Feb. 9 briefing that the administration had no hand in the WHOs planning and implementation of the Wuhan problem. Psaki added that even though the U.S. had rejoined the WHO, it is still imperative that [the U.S. has its] own team of experts on the ground in China. Embarek said the WHOs findings in Wuhan are expected to be summarized after a week, with a full report to follow. Visit Pandemic.news to read more about Chinas concealment of key data on the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus. Sources include: WSJ.com BBC.com USNews.com The state-owned Uzbek company at the center of an RFE/RL investigation into a secret luxury mountain resort allegedly built for President Shavkat Mirziyoev has dismissed the report as "unfounded and untrue." The investigation led by RFE/RL's Uzbek Service, published on February 23, lifted the curtain on a luxurious mansion allegedly built for Mirziyoev in the protected Ugam-Chatkal National Park about 100 kilometers northeast of Tashkent. Uzbekistan Railways, a sprawling state-owned company that spearheaded construction of the mountain resort, said in a statement posted on its website on February 24 that the Shovvozsoy River area was transferred to the company in 2010 to "preserve the existing ecosystem." It added that over the past 10 years, the company used extra-budgetary funds amounting to 495 billion soms ($43 million) to develop infrastructure and recreation facilities in the park. In addition to the Shovvozsoy complex, other resorts in the area employ 90,000 people, the company said. "In these resorts and sanatoriums on the basis of contracts and referrals with JSC 'Uzbekistan Railways,' along with the railwaymen, the Administration of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan, the Cabinet of Ministers, various ministries, departments and government agencies, as well as local investors, ecotourism and extreme tourism, health promotion and rehabilitation services are provided to partners and tourists," it said. The statement, however, did not address several outstanding questions over the project, leaving it shrouded in secrecy. Construction of the compound, which features helicopter landing pads and is subject to a no-fly zone, began in 2017 and was largely completed by the end of 2018. Locals say a new reservoir built next to the compound has disrupted their water supply, displaced families, and caused environmental damage. Construction of the adjacent reservoir was carried out by the politically connected company involved in the building of the Sardoba Dam in eastern Uzbekistan, which burst in 2020, leaving six people dead and forcing thousands from their homes, the RFE/RL investigation revealed. Officials have never publicly explained the reservoir and resort, nor have they provided information about the costs, which multiple RFE/RL sources estimated at several hundred million dollars to build. Construction workers said they were forced to hand over their phones while working on site, and roadblocks and security guards prevent the public from approaching the area. Since coming to power in 2017, Mirziyoev has portrayed himself as committed to improving transparency, human rights protections, and anti-corruption efforts in the Central Asian nation of 30 million, striking a contrast to his autocratic predecessor, Islam Karimov. Incheon International Airport Corp. (IIAC) President and CEO Kim Kyung-wook speaks during a media conference held at the IIAC headquarters in Incheon, Wednesday. Courtesy of Incheon International Airport Corp. IIAC expects net loss of more than W800 billion this year By Jun Ji-hye Incheon International Airport Corp. (IIAC), the operator of the country's main gateway, is striving to help duty free shopping at the airport stay alive amid the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, IIAC President and CEO Kim Kyung-wook said Wednesday. The comment came amid growing concerns over more empty space in the duty free area at the airport as the nation's two major duty free operators Lotte Duty Free and Shilla Duty Free are scheduled to close their stores in Terminal 1, Feb. 28. Their leases had originally expired last August but they extended them for another six months after the IIAC failed to attract new duty free operators amid the industrywide slump caused by the pandemic. Kim said during a media conference that the IIAC will allow the three existing duty free operators at Terminal 1 Shinsegae Duty Free, Hyundai Department Store Duty Free and Kyung Bok Kung Duty Free to expand their stores temporarily to spaces that will be vacant following the exit of Lotte and Shilla. "The IIAC is making every effort to fill up empty space in the duty free area and help maintain employment stability," Kim said. "We have been cooperating with government organizations and duty free operators to ensure new operators employ workers from the exiting operators." Lotte and Shilla have used the DF2, DF3, DF4 and DF6 sections in the duty free area at Terminal 1. Shinsegae, Hyundai Department Store and Kyung Bok Kung will be able to expand their operations to DF3, DF4 and DF6 after talks with the Korea Customs Service. But the operation of the DF2 section that sells perfumes and cosmetics will be terminated, IIAC noted, adding that it could not keep operations going there as duty free operators have been suffering deepening financial difficulties amid the pandemic. "It is regrettable that the rehiring of every employee will not be possible despite our utmost efforts," Kim said. "We will continue to work hard to stabilize employment and improve duty free services by coming up with follow-up measures, including the review of bidding rules to attract new duty free operators." Kim noted the IIAC will continue to mull ways of filling the empty space, which will account for about 25 percent of the entire duty free area, adding that duty free services are directly related to the airport's global competitiveness. The airport operator's attempts to auction duty free licenses three times last year in February, September and October were unsuccessful due to a lack of participants. Duty free operators have been suffering amid a sharp fall in the number of people flying due to air travel restrictions. Incheon International Airport suffered a net loss of 426.8 billion won ($384 million) last year, its first in 17 years, with the number of international passengers using the airport falling 83 percent from a year earlier. The airport operator said it expects a net loss of 860.9 billion won this year, noting that it expects air travel demand to recover in the latter half of the year at the earliest, after more people around the world get vaccinated for the coronavirus. "I think air travel demand will increase suddenly at some point as many people stuck at home amid the pandemic are longing for overseas travel," Kim said. "We will make thorough preparations for that." A record 5.6 percent of Americans now identify as LGBTQ, the majority of whom say they are bisexual, according to a new survey. Gallup on Tuesday published its latest update on LGBTQ identification, showing a 1.1 percent increase since the poll was last conducted in 2017. It marks the largest increase since the survey began in 2012, with an estimated 18 million adults in America identifying as LGBTQ last year. The results, based on more than 15,000 interviews conducted throughout 2020 with Americans aged 18 and older, found that younger generations were more likely to say they are LGBTQ with one in six Generation Z adults aged between 18 and 23 - or 15.9 percent - identifying as such. This dropped to less than two percent in respondents who were born before 1965. An estimated that a record 5.6 percent of all Americans now identify as LGBTQ A record 15.9% of Generation Z Americans now identify as LGBTQ, according to a new poll from Gallup published Wednesday. Less than 2% of those born before 1965 do 'One of the main reasons LGBT identification has been increasing over time is that younger generations are far more likely to consider themselves to be something other than heterosexual,' wrote Gallup senior editor Jeff Jones. 'It reflects what we are seeing in society and the way society is changing.' 'The pronounced generational differences raise questions about whether higher LGBT identification in younger than older Americans reflects a true shift in sexual orientation, or if it merely reflects a greater willingness of younger people to identify as LGBT,' Jones added. 'To the extent it reflects older Americans not wanting to acknowledge an LGBT orientation, the Gallup estimates may underestimate the actual population prevalence of it.' Prior to this year, the most the percentage of Americans who identify as LGBTQ had increased was by .4 points between 2016 and 2017. It has climbed from 3.5 percent in 2012, just over a two percent increase in 18 years. In last year's survey, Gallup reported that 86.7 percent of Americans say they are heterosexual or straight, while 7.6 percent do not answer the question about their sexual orientation. This response had grown from an average of 5 percent in previous surveys. In prior years, Gallup had not asked respondents to identify their exact sexual orientation, only asking for yes or no answers in response to whether or not they were LGBTQ. With the inclusion of the question in 2020, it found that 54.6 percent identify as bisexual while almost a quarter say they are gay. Another 11.7 percent identified as lesbian and 11.3 percent as transgender. And a further 3.3 percent volunteered another non-heterosexual preference such as queer or same-gender-loving. The results found that an estimated 11.5% of Gen Z Americans identify as bisexual. This drops to below 2% for Americans born before 1980, as pictured above The Gallup poll found that most LGBTQ Americans identify as bisexual, as pictured The Gallup poll in 2020 had marked the biggest increase in Americans identifying as LGBTQ A record 15.9% of Generation Z Americans now identify as LGBTQ, according to a new poll from Gallup published Wednesday. Less than 2% of those born before 1965 do Gallup estimates from these results that within the entire US adult population, 3.1 percent of Americans identify as bisexual, 1.4 percent as gay, 0.7 percent as lesbian and 0.6 percent as transgender. The number of Americans identifying as bisexual is far higher among younger generations. The Gallup poll found 72 percent of Generation Z adults who identify as LGBT say they are bisexual compared to half of millennials. It falls significantly lower in older generations. The survey estimated as a result that 11.5 percent of American Gen Z adults identify as bisexual. This falls to 5.1 percent among Millennials, 1.8 percent in Generation X and 0.3 percent in Baby Boomers and Traditionalists. As well as the divide by generations, the poll also found significant gender difference among the respondents. According to the Gallup report, women are more likely than men to identify as LGBT - 6.4 percent vs. 4.9 percent, respectively - and women are also more likely to identify as bisexual. Political differences also showed up with 13 percent of liberals identifying as LGBT, 4.4 percent of moderates and 2.3 percent of conservatives. The divide was not as significant among party lines. The survey estimated that 8.8 percent of Democrats identify as LGBTQ, 6.5 percent of independents and 1.7 percent of Republicans. However, the survey also found that there appears to be no meaningful divide in terms of education. College graduates identify as LGBTQ at 5.6 percent compared to 5.7 percent of college nongraduates. Following the release of the survey on Wednesday, LGBTQ advocates said they were not surprised to see 'generational shifts in awareness and acceptance' from the results Following the release of the survey on Wednesday, LGBTQ advocates said they were not surprised to see 'generational shifts in awareness and acceptance' from the results. 'I have had conversations with many older LGBTQ people who break down in tears when they share their coming-out stories of decades ago heart-wrenching stories of family rejection, losing parents, losing siblings, losing jobs,' Ineke Mushovic, executive director of the Movement Advancement Project, told USA Today. 'Older generations grew up during those times when being LGBTQ could land you in jail, or alone or jobless. 'The younger generations haven't experienced this level of fear where often being in the closet felt less like a choice and more like a survival mechanism,' she added, stating that parents have created environments where young people feel safe coming out. Cathy Renna, communications director for the National LGBTQ Task Force, claimed that it also came from increased representation in the media in recent years. 'Children are taught prejudice, and when LGBTQ people are part of their lives from the beginning, they understand that they can be themselves and are not alone,' she said to USA Today. 'Young people do not want to check off a box; they want to be able to express themselves authentically and acknowledge all their identities'. Tracking the number of LGBTQ Americans has been debated in recent years, according to Gallup. 'Exactly who makes up the LGBT community and how this group should be measured is a subject of some debate,' the organization wrote in its first survey in 2012. 'There are a number of ways to measure lesbian, gay, and bisexual orientation, and transgender status. Sexual orientation can be assessed by measuring identity as well as sexual behaviors and attractions.' It comes after early attempts to place a figure on the section of the population have now been called into question. A prominent study by Alfred Kinsey of sexuality in men from the 1950s claimed that 10 percent of the U.S. population is gay or lesbian but his methods of collecting the data including tracking down respondents in prisons have been criticized. In 2011, Gary J. Gates from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law published 'The Gay and Lesbian Atlas' which claimed that the figure was closer to 3.8 percent, which was in line with the Gallup results from the following year. 'The largest reason is that we don't ask,' Gates told NPR of the uncertainty. 'We just don't ask these on the major federal surveys that are used typically to count Americans or to kind of gauge the health and wellbeing of Americans. These surveys, just for the most part, don't include questions about sexual orientation or gender identity.' The U.S. Census Bureau does not ask respondents to mark their sexual orientation but has asked about living in same-sex households. The American Community Survey has also not historically included questions on sexual orientation. Gallup had previously found in 2015 that Americans greatly overestimate the percentage of the population who are gay or lesbian. A survey they conducted that years found that Americans believed 23 percent of the population to be gay or lesbian when they found only 3.8 percent of the adult population identified as LGBTQ that year. Dingle nurse Joan Lucey was 'brave and courageous to the last', her son Sean told mourners in a deeply moving eulogy at the outset of her Funeral Mass in the parish church of her beloved home town of Dingle on Monday. Just her immediate family - including daughters Sinead and Eileen, son Sean, grandchildren Isobel, Jane and Fiadh, sister Eileen, brother Sean and son-in-law Jonathan - attended the Covid-restricted Requiem Mass. But thousands watched as it was streamed live on the internet, many of them strangers from across the nation who had been deeply moved by her plight since her legal battle to secure mediation with the HSE came to public attention. The retired nurse died on Friday, shortly after the HSE had finally agreed to mediate in a case in which she sued the HSE and two laboratories for the alleged misreading, misinterpretation or misreporting of cervical smears taken between February and August of 2011. Ms Lucey had waived anonymity in the case to secure what her family described as 'justice', and to encourage other women to come forward. In doing so she was to become the latest woman linked to the CervicalCheck scandal - in a heartrending chapter of the saga made ever more painful by the dual nature of her valiant battle with advanced illness and a seemingly intractable bureaucracy. The circumstances of her final weeks would appear utterly at odds with the real traits of which her personality was formed, as her son Sean gave a remarkable account of a woman who lived life fully and with great joy. Joan Lucey's character was defined by love of family, gregariousness and an unstinting sense of fun. "I suppose there has been much sadness surrounding my mother's passing but I think today we are going to take this opportunity to reflect on her really wonderful life, and how she has brought so much joy and love and fun to her family and also to the lives of many others," Mr Lucey began. Dingle was her refuge, the hometown she moved back to after the earlier tragedy endured by the family on the death of her husband Robbie in 1994. "Mom was very much a Dingle woman who came from a fishing family and was born in 1948 in 6 Strand St, to John and Ina Brosnan. She often spoke very fondly of her childhood in 1950s Dingle when the town was a very different place than it is today. "She often alluded to the antics that she and her childhood friends got up to, such as jumping off the head of the pier...Mom went to secondary school in Colaiste Idea where she developed her lifelong love of the Irish language, and then went to train as a nurse in the old North Infirmary Hospital in Cork City. "It was at this time during one of her regular trips to the Brosnans in Youghal, her cousins, where through a chance encounter she met Robbie Lucey and her life was changed forever. "They had a whirlwind romance, were engaged within six weeks and married within a year. Not much hanging around in those years. "They got married in this beautiful church and in her wedding photos she looks absolutely stunning in her dress...Soon after getting married our parents, demonstrating their sense of adventure, moved to Zambia in Africa, of all places, where they wortked for several years. During this time they led a very exciting life and made many happy memories which she always cherished." The couple moved to Tralee after their return in 1976, where the family enjoyed a 'great life'. "They were very much a gregarious and fun-loving couple and the stories and memories that we have from that time are really very very funny, of many hilarious moments. "Then, of course, our father very sadly got sick and was taken far too young from us. During his illness our mother cared for him, and treated him, in a truly amazing manner. After our father's passing, mom, with three children, aged 19, 16 and eight, faced the challenge of her life. She met this with determination, energy and intelligence and in the space of a few years had moved back to Dingle, built our lovely family home, retrained in UCC as a nurse and started her career as a district nurse in West Kerry. "This brought a new chapter to her life and to our lives. She really loved living in Dingle and everything this wonderful place has to offer. Her ethos was one of care and giving: "As a nurse in the community she touched the lives of many in west Kerry. "She also actively participated in charities such as the Irish Cancer Society and one of her proudest moments was when she was involved in the welcoming committee for the South African Special Olympics team during their stay in Dingle in 2003." Family was everything for Joan Lucey: "The centre of mom's world was her family. Mom loved nothing more than having her family around her at the kitchen table, holding court, eating well, sharing stories and laughter...Her brother and sister Eileen and Sean were a constant source of companionship, comfort and support...She adored her grandchildren, Isobel, Jane and Fia, who often stayed with her on trips to Dingle from Dublin and with whom she shared a love of cakes, chocolate and a bit of divilment. "She was a truly doting and loving wife to our father Robbie and mom, we now know that you are finally back with dad. And as a mother to Sinead, Eileen and me there are not enough words to describe how loving, caring, supporting and inspiring you have been to us. From the bottom of our hearts mom, thank you. After thanking friends, relatives and medics who had been of massive support through her illess, Mr Lucey touched on the pain suffered by the family: "Finally, this has been an extremely difficult time for us and we would like to thank the support we have received from the people of Dingle, west Kerry and beyond. "Mom, we love you very much and you were a brave and courageous woman to the last. "You will be missed beyond belief and long remembered." Dingle Parish Priest Fr Michael Moynihan said everyone touched by her presence found themselves 'in the better of her company', describing Joan Lucey as a 'fighter in the face of injustice'. PIERRE, S.D. (AP) South Dakota lawmakers are considering impeaching the state's attorney general as he faces misdemeanor charges for striking and killing a man with his car, Republican legislative leaders said Monday. Jason Ravnsborg, the state's top law enforcement officer, indicated he will not step down while he waits for the case against him to proceed. Prosecutors have charged him with three misdemeanors but no felonies in the September death of 55-year-old Joseph Boever. Rep. Tim Goodwin, a Republican whip whose job is to gain support from his fellow lawmakers, said Ravnsborg should resign and that lawmakers are considering impeachment if he doesn't. I think what's best for everybody is that he just does the honorable thing and steps down, Goodwin said, adding that the crash was tragic for both Boever's family and Ravnsborg. South Dakota law allows officials like the attorney general to be impeached for conduct that includes a "misdemeanor in office. Republican House Speaker Spencer Gosch acknowledged that impeachment was being weighed by lawmakers, but said that the legislative resolution that would start such proceedings has not been filed. If the House initiates Ravnsborg's impeachment, it would require a vote from at least half of House lawmakers to advance the impeachment resolution to the Senate. There, it would require two-thirds of senators to convict and remove him from office. Gov. Kristi Noem would get to appoint a replacement if Ravnsborg was removed from office or resigned. The investigators have presented their findings and recommended misdemeanor infractions in a wholistic process they described as going above and beyond, and we look forward to the continued due process of law," said Mike Deaver, a spokesperson for Ravnsborg. He added that Ravnsborg is focused on his present duties as attorney general, especially during the legislative session. The Republican attorney general, who was elected to his first term in 2018, initially told authorities that he thought he had struck a deer or another large animal as he was driving home to Pierre from a Republican fundraiser late on Sept. 12. He said he searched the unlit area with a cellphone flashlight and didnt realize he had killed a man until the next day when he returned to the accident scene on U.S. 14 near Highmore. Story continues After an investigation that stretched over five months, prosecutors said they still had questions about the crash but were unable to file more serious criminal charges against Ravnsborg. They charged him with careless driving, driving out of his lane and operating a motor vehicle while on his phone. Though prosecutors said he was not using his phone at the time of the crash, he had been using it while driving about one minute before. The attorney general could face up to 30 days in jail and up to a $500 fine on each charge, if convicted. Michael Moore, the Beadle County State's Attorney who is assisting in the case, said Monday that when Ravnsborg was interviewed by law enforcement after the crash, he gave varying examples of possibly what could have happened" to cause him to swerve on to the highway shoulder where he hit Boever. But Moore said he expected more details to emerge with Noem promising to release more information this week and Boever's widow planning to file a civil lawsuit against Ravnsborg. Moore said of the crash investigators' interview, We have to live with what information they give us." Viral Infection Hits 15 Childcare Centres in Far North Queensland An Australian city in the far north of the state of Queensland is dealing with a significant spike in cases of hand, foot, and mouth disease, affecting 15 childcare centres, with tests being carried out urgently to determine the cause. Cairns and the nearby Tablelands region have been hit hard, with 60 infected people presenting at Cairns Hospitals emergency department since the start of the year. Nine were so sick they were admitted. Hand, foot, and mouth is not a notifiable disease so theres no long-term data on typical case numbers, but the hospital presentations are evidence of a significant spike. Viruses of the enterovirus family cause the illness, and tests are being conducted in Brisbane to identify which one is behind the outbreak. We always see it in the summer months why we are having more of it in Cairns this particular year, were not sure yet, public health medical officer Dr. Annie Preston-Thomas told reporters. We know that in the Asia-Pacific region theyve been having increasing outbreaks of hand, foot and mouth disease in the last 10 to 15 years. Preston-Thomas said she should know the specific virus involved within a week and it might tell us more about why weve got so much of it. The highly infectious disease most commonly affects preschool-age children, but can also affect older children and adults. Symptoms include a runny nose, fever, and tell-tale blisters or rash-like legions on the hands, feet and in and around the mouth. It spreads via contact with fluid from inside the blisters, or via droplets from sneezing and coughing. Preston-Thomas said parents must not send their kids to daycare or school if they have any symptoms. By Tracey Ferrier Map and photo India is the world's second-largest producer of wheat and rice and is home to more than 600 million farmers. The country has achieved impressive food-production gains since the 1960s, due in part to an increased reliance on irrigation wells, which allowed Indian farmers to expand production into the mostly dry winter and summer seasons. But those gains have come at a cost: The country that produces 10% of the world's crops is now the world's largest consumer of groundwater, and aquifers are rapidly becoming depleted across much of India. Indian government officials have suggested that switching from groundwater-depleting wells to irrigation canals, which divert surface water from lakes and rivers, is one way to overcome projected shortfalls. But in a study scheduled for publication Feb. 24 in the journal Science Advances, a University of Michigan researcher and her colleagues conclude that a switch to canal irrigation will not fully compensate for the expected loss of groundwater in Indian agriculture. The authors estimate that if Indian farmers lose all access to groundwater in overexploited regions, and if that irrigation water is not replaced with water from other sources, then winter cropped acreage could be reduced by up to 20% nationwide. However, that scenario seems highly unlikely and was included in the study only as an upper-bound estimate. It seems more likely that any future groundwater shortfalls would be at least partially offset by increases in canal irrigation. But even if all Indian regions currently using depleted groundwater switch to canal irrigation, winter cropped acreage could still decline by 7% nationwide and by 24% in the most severely affected locations, according to the researchers. "Our results highlight the critical importance of groundwater for Indian agriculture and rural livelihoods, and we were able to show that simply providing canal irrigation as a substitute irrigation source will likely not be enough to maintain current production levels in the face of groundwater depletion," said study lead author Meha Jain of the University of Michigan. The study analyzed high-resolution satellite imagery and village-level census data and focused on winter cropped acreage. While nearly all Indian farmers plant crops during the monsoon to take advantage of seasonal rains, winter agriculture is mainly reliant on groundwater irrigation and now accounts for 44% of the country's annual cropped acreage for food grains. "These findings suggest that other adaptation strategies, in addition to canal expansion, are needed to cope with ongoing groundwater losses," said Jain, an assistant professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability. The possibilities include switching from winter rice to less water-intensive cereals, increased adoption of sprinklers and drip irrigation to conserve water in the fields, and policies to increase the efficiency of irrigation canals. While groundwater depletion is becoming a global threat to food security, and the extent of current and projected groundwater depletion are well documented, the potential impacts on food production remain poorly quantified. The study by Jain and colleagues is the first to use high-resolution empirical data, including census data about the irrigation methods used in more than 500,000 Indian villages, to estimate the crop production losses that may occur when overexploited groundwater is lost. The proliferation of deep (>100 feet) irrigation wells called tube wells since the 1960s has enabled Indian farmers to increase the number of seasons when crops are planted in a given year. This increase in "cropping intensity" is credited for much of the country's food-production gains. The researchers used satellite data to measure Indian winter cropped area, a key determinant of cropping intensity. They then linked the satellite data to census information about the three main types of irrigation infrastructure in India: shallow "dug wells," deeper tube wells and canals that divert surface water. Linking the two datasets allowed them to determine the relative efficacy of each irrigation method. That, in turn, enabled them to estimate potential future acreage losses and the ability of canal expansion to fill the gap. The study's worst-case scenario found that winter cropped area could decrease by up to 20% nationwide and by 68% in the most severely affected regions, if farmers lose all access to groundwater and if that irrigation water is not replaced from another source. The expected losses would largely occur in northwest and central India, according to the study. The researchers also found that increased distance from existing irrigation canals is strongly associated with decreased acreage planted with winter crops. In the future, a greater reliance on canals could increase inequities related to irrigation access, according to the authors. "This suggests that while canals may be a viable form of irrigation for those who live near canals, they may lead to more unequal access to irrigation across villages compared to wells, with negative impacts for those who live farther from canals," the authors wrote. In addition, the lakes and rivers that feed irrigation canals rise and fall in response to rainfall variability, unlike deep groundwater wells. So, a greater reliance on canal irrigation in the future would result in increased sensitivity to year-to-year precipitation fluctuations, as well as any long-term trends due to human-caused climate change. "Understanding the complex relationship between food security and water availability is crucial as we prepare for future rainfall variability due to global climate change," said co-author Gillian Galford of the University of Vermont. ### The authors of the Science Advances study, in addition to Jain and Galford, are Ram Fishman of Tel Aviv University; Pinki Mondal of the University of Delaware; Nishan Bhattarai of the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability; Shahid Naeem, Upmanu Lall and Ruth DeFries of Columbia University; and Balwinder-Singh of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in New Delhi. The work was funded by a NASA New Investigator Award to Jain and two NASA Land Cover and Land Use Change grants, one awarded to R.S. DeFries and one to Jain. Study: Groundwater depletion will reduce cropping intensity in India Meha Jain Overview of the session of the Human Rights Council during the speech of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet at the United Nations in Geneva, on Feb. 27, 2020. (Denis Balibouse/File Photo/Reuters) US to Seek Seat at UN Human Rights Council, Undoing Trump Pullout The Biden administration will vie for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on Feb. 24, unwinding the Trump administrations decision to withdraw from the body in 2018. Blinken, in a video message to the council, said the United States would seek election to the U.N.s top human rights body for the 2022-24 term. He acknowledged that the Geneva-based body was in need of reforms, including its disproportionate focus on Israelthe only country whose rights record comes up for scrutiny at every one of its thrice-yearly meetingsas well as its membership. Countries with the worst human rights records should not be members of this Council, Blinken said. The Trump administration pulled out from the council in mid-2018 over its excessive focus on Israel, which has received the largest number of critical council resolutions against any country by far. It also denounced the membership of the council, which includes some of the worlds worst human rights abusers. The 47-nation council currently includes China, Cuba, Eritrea, Russia, and Venezuelaall of which are perpetrators of rights violations. Then-U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley at the time called the body a protector of human rights abuses, and a cesspool of political bias. Last year, the body drew harsh criticism for appointing China to a panel that helps select the councils rights investigators, a move described at the time by an advocate as akin to making a pyromaniac into the town fire chief. Blinken, in a separate statement, acknowledged challenges with the body, but noted that improving the Council and advancing its critical work is best done with a seat at the table. The statement, released after the secretary of states speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council, didnt explicitly mention China or its human rights abuses. In response to a query from The Epoch Times about whether the United States would raise the subject of the Chinese regimes abuses at the council, a State Department spokesperson said the administration will focus on advancing resolutions and supporting joint statements that promote accountability for human rights violations and abuses globally, especially those highlighting the deteriorating human rights conditions in China. Elections for three-year membership on the 47-member council are due at the U.N. General Assembly in October. Blinken said in the speech that the United States would call out abuses in places like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Iran. He also reiterated the U.S. call on Russia to release opposition figure Alexei Navalny as well as hundreds of others detained during protests. We will speak out for universal values when atrocities are committed in Xinjiang or when fundamental freedoms are undermined in Hong Kong, he said, referring to the Chinese regimes detention of more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims in the far-western Xinjiang region, and Beijings growing suppression of Hong Kong. On Feb. 22, the regimes Foreign Minister Wang Yi addressed the council via video message denying it was committing genocide or repressing Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. He also said the regime has a people-centered approach to human rights. The Trump administration in January designated the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) atrocities in Xinjiang as a genocide, a declaration followed by the Canadian parliament, which passed a unanimous motion on Feb. 22. The Biden administrations decision to reengage the Human Rights Council drew criticism from Republicans. Haley, in a tweet on Feb. 24, said: The U.S. should not give credibility to the sham U.N. Human Rights Council. A group that covers for the worlds worst human rights violators and spends most of its time attacking Israel. Earlier this month, a group of 45 Republican House lawmakers sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking him not to rejoin the body that has adopted zero resolutions condemning countries such as China, Russia, Cuba, and Pakistan between 2006 and 2019. We believe President Trump was right to withdraw the United States from the Human Rights Council. The United States participation in this body has not led to any meaningful reforms, they wrote. Frank Fang and Reuters contributed to this report. This article was updated to include a statement from a State Department spokesperson. A family's legal battle over the 350,000 will of a cancer patient who died after an ambulance taking him to hospital crashed has been branded 'shameful' by a High Court judge. Keith Fuller, 66, had incurable bladder and prostate cancer, but died from pneumonia caused by the crash in Ramsgate, Kent. His final will split his 350,000 estate equally between his son, Benjamin Ward-Fuller, 48, and his younger brother Tony Fuller, 67. But the death has sparked a bitter falling out in the family, with Mr Ward-Fuller suing his uncle and claiming all of his father's money, with solicitors arguing his father was 'not of sound mind,' when he signed the final will. High Court judge Master Jonathan Arkush said Mr Fuller 'would be horrified,' if he knew that his family were fighting over his estate. He said the row was 'shameful' and could cost as much in lawyers's fees as the amount at stake. 'It is utterly disproportionate. It is shameful that this family should be split by this litigation and I think the deceased would be horrified by it.' Keith Fuller died in 2018 after an ambulance he was travelling in crashed into a roundabout in Ramsgate, Kent. His brother and son are now caught in a legal battle over his 350,000 estate Mr Fuller, a father-of-one, was in hospital when his last will was made in January 2018, splitting his estate between his son and brother. The shotgun collector died only three weeks later after the ambulance in which he was travelling struck a roundabout near Ramsgate. The vehicle overturned and ended up on its side and Mr Fuller, who suffered chest injuries, died of pneumonia in hospital two days later. Following an inquest last year, a coroner said the accident had contributed to his death. Suing his uncle to overturn the 2018 will, Mr Ward-Fuller, of St Albans, Herts, claims that his father did not fully understand what he was doing when he signed it. He believes instead that it should be torn up and he should receive his father's entire estate - except for his shotgun collection - under the terms of an earlier will made in 2005. Solicitors representing Benjamin Ward-Fuller claim his father, who had incurable cancer at the time of his death, was 'not of sound mind,' when the final will was signed in January 2018 In claim documents, he says that after starting a new relationship in 2001, his father had told him that everything he had, including his home in Island Road, Canterbury, would be his when he died. Then, in February 2017, his father told him that when he died he should take one of the guns from his shotgun collection, but to give the rest to his uncle, who had a shotgun licence. Mr Ward-Fuller claims that the meeting at the hospital for the signing of the 2018 will was arranged by his uncle and that a pre-drafted will had been brought along. Despite repeatedly expressing difficulty in deciding what to do with his estate, his father signed it, says Mr Ward-Fuller's lawyer Olivia Murphy in his particulars of claim. 'The deceased at the time when the pretended will purports to have been executed was not of sound mind, memory or understanding,' she continues. 'At the time the deceased purportedly executed the pretended will, he was 66, he was hospitalised with cancer and suffering from acute confusion. 'He had been admitted to hospital on the 28th December 2017 after his neighbours found him wandering and confused.' Two days after the will was signed, Mr Fuller was seen by an occupational therapist, who found him unable to make a cup of tea or follow the instructions on a ready meal. Tony Fuller was set to receive an equal share of his brother's 350,000 estate - but Mr Ward-Fuller claims he only expected his uncle to be given a shotgun collection Despite his confusion, Tony Fuller had not arranged for a doctor to assess Mr Fuller's 'testamentary capacity' or to attest to the execution of the will, it is claimed. However, in his defence to the claim, Tony Fuller, of Canterbury, denies organising the meeting to sign the will or that his brother was unable to understand what he was doing. 'It is admitted that on occasions whilst the deceased was in hospital, he displayed periods of confusion particularly whilst under the influence of the substantial medication administered to him,' his defence documents state. In his defence to the claim, Tony Fuller, of Canterbury, denies organising the meeting to sign the will or that his brother was unable to understand what he was doing 'However, the instructions he imparted to his solicitor...were entirely clear, demonstrating that he understood fully the obligations that he had and had a reasonable appreciation as to the value of his estate. 'Both the lawyer who drafted the will and her supervising partner were entirely satisfied that he had mental capacity both at the time he gave instructions and when the will itself was executed.' The case reached court this week for a preparatory hearing ahead of a four-day High Court trial of Benjamin Ward-Fuller's claim in London next month. Master Arkush told the parties that fighting over such a small sum of money - potentially to be wiped out by the lawyers' bills - would result in them facing a judge 'with a very sore head.' In claim documents, mr Ward-Fuller says that after starting a new relationship in 2001, his father had told him that everything he had, including his home in Island Road, Canterbury, (pictured) would be his when he died He added that proceedings were 'utterly disproportionate,' and 'shameful'. The family should have done more to settle their differences outside court, where the costs will wipe out much of Mr Fuller's estate, he said. 'The estate was left between the parties 50-50, so each party is fighting over about 150,000,' he said. 'This is very unfortunate family litigation. 'One can immediately see there have been all sorts of troubled history with this family and this litigation is going to make this worse. 'Where 150,000 is at stake, the costs on each side are either going to outweigh that or be disproportionate to it.' According to court papers, shotgun collector Mr Fuller was first diagnosed with cancer in 1989, but recovered only to fall ill again in 2010. Opposition parties have called for mandatory hotel quarantine to be introduced for all arrivals into the countrys ports and airports. Mandatory hotel quarantine legislation, which would see passengers from 20 countries stay in facilities for two weeks upon arrival into the country, was brought before the Dail today by Health Minister Stephen Donnelly. While Opposition parties were in favour of legislation on mandatory hotel quarantine being finally brought before the house, Labour, Sinn Fein and the Social Democrats will propose amendments that all non-essential arrivals be put into mandatory hotel quarantine. Passengers may leave quarantine if they arrive into the country with a negative test and a further negative test again on day 10. Read More They may also end the quarantine for medical treatment or other humanitarian reasons. Mr Donnelly called The Health (Amendment) Bill 2021 a radical piece of legislation and said he spoke to a New Zealand minister who oversees a similar measure in their country. We will, undoubtedly, face operational challenges just as they did. We may not get everything exactly right from the very start, so where we need to learn and to adapt the arrangements, Mr Donnelly said. He said between 1,000 and 3,500 people are arriving into the country every day. Last week, 10,500 people arrived into Dublin Airport alone. Mr Donnelly said some people might describe the proposals as harsh and by others as insufficient but he believes it strikes a fair and proportionate balance between the protection of public health and the common good. However, members of the Opposition did not agree, with Sinn Fein health spokesperson David Cullinane saying limiting the measure to just 20 countries is wholly inadequate. People are making the sacrifices they are making and are being told that they cannot stray outside 5km from their own homes yet we are still not putting in place mandatory hotel quarantine for all international travel. How can that be the case? he said. Labour leader Alan Kelly said the Bill does not go anywhere near enough with its lax measures, saying that Nphet recommended mandatory quarantine for arrivals in May 2020. He said the new Covid-19 variants are on tour and Mr Donnelly has been treated unfairly by his Cabinet colleagues, arguing that the mandatory quarantine legislation should not fall under his remit. This has been dumped on you, said Mr Kelly. Solidarity People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett called the mandatory hotel quarantine proposals the latest installment of totally defective and failed policy from the Government. He also asked why politicians and diplomats are exempt from these measures. Do they not carry the virus same as everyone else? he asked. A historian related to Noel Coward is leading a research project to find gay, lesbian and transgender Britons who may have helped in the Industrial Revolution more than 200 years ago. Sacha Coward, the great-nephew of the famous playwright, is leading the 'Hidden Histories' project run by the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, which is based in the Shropshire Valley region known for its famous 18th century cast iron bridge. A virtual cabaret night, named 'Steam Punq' and featuring cocktails and drag acts, will kick off the project looking for 'queer stories' in the area. But Tory MP Andrew Bridgden blasted what he called the 'PC brigade' for trying to turn Britain's Industrial Revolution into the 'sexual revolution'. The Trust last year received more than 2million in emergency public money after it was hammered by plummeting visitor numbers caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Historian and researcher Mr Coward, told The Telegraph that while Ironbridge is 'traditionally a masculine place', 'you're still going to get queer people there'. The area's bridge, which spans what was formerly the Severn Gorge, was built in 1779 to link the industrial town of Broseley with the smaller mining town of Madeley. It was the first structure of its kind in the world and the process by which it was made is considered the catalyst for the boom in industry which saw Britain become the industrial centre of the world. A historian related to Noel Coward is leading a research project to find gay, lesbian and transgender Britons who may have helped in the Industrial Revolution more than 200 years ago. Left: Historian and researcher Sacha Coward is leading the project run by the Ironbridge Gorge Museums Trust. Right: Drag act 'Miss Sundi' will perform in the cabaret event The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust runs sites in the Shropshire Valley region known for its 18th century cast iron bridge and for being the birthplace of British manufacturing innovation The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, will receive money from public body Arts Council England for its new research. Mr Coward said: 'Even if the town is industrial, about steel and coal, and traditionally a very masculine place, you're still going to get queer people there. Referencing the gay 19th century author Oscar Wilde, Mr Coward added: 'Rather than say queer people are these bizarre, outlandish lords - wealthy, strange, with these kind of slightly perverse lifetstyles - well, they're also the person down the pub. 'We want to show that we are also salt of the earth and we've always been there. Mr Coward is the great-nephew of the playwright, writer and director Noel Coward. Pictured: The star in 1966 'We've existed in every strata of society. I could be a gay coalminer, or engineer or landlord.' Mr Coward admitted that Ironbridge was not a 'traditional' area to look for 'queer' stories in but said 'that doesn't mean it's not there, we have to look a little harder.' However, MP Mr Bridgden said he thought Ironbridge was part of the Industrial Revolution, 'not the sexual revolution'. He added that there appeared to be 'no limit for the PC brigade'. The Trust's project will launch on Saturday with the virtual cabaret event, tickets for which cost 3.50. A virtual cabaret night, named 'Steam Punq', will kick off the Trust's 'Hidden Histories' project to try to look for 'queer stories' in the area Viewers are told to expect 'performances, drag, history and fascinating stories'. They added: 'We guarantee there's no better way to spend a Saturday evening indoors!' Non-binary entertainer 'Miss Sundi' will perform at the cabaret event. The Trust's attractions in the Severn valley, which include its museums and a re-created Victorian town, are normally popular with millions of visitors each year. However, the charity last year needed a 500,000 grant from the Art's Council's Emergency Response Fund and a further 1.86million from the Government's separate Culture Recovery Fund. Both were set up to help deal with the fallout of both the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdowns imposed as a result. Noel Coward, who was himself gay, is best known for plays including Hay Fever, Blithe Spirit and Private Lives, and the 1969 film In Which We Serve. He also composed hundreds of songs and several musical theatre works, screenplays and short stories. During the Second World War, he acted as an unofficial spy in Paris for the Foreign Office. The area's iron bridge, which spans what was formerly the Severn Gorge, was built in 1779 to link the industrial town of Broseley with the smaller mining town of Madeley. Pictured: A contemporary painting of the bridge being constructed, by artist Elias Martin Many materials in the modern world--from the plastics that dominate it to the electronic chips that drive it--are constructed of polymers. Given their ubiquity and the evolving requirements of our world, finding better and more efficient methods of making them is an ongoing research concern. In addition, current environmental issues necessitate the use of methods and input materials that are environment friendly. Recent research by scientists from Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan, has been in this vein, adding a new twist to a polymerization technique that has been around and successful since the 1980s: living cationic polymerization, where the polymer chain growth does not have the ability to terminate until the monomer is consumed. The scientists have, for the first time, demonstrated metal free organocatalysis for this reaction at room temperature for vinyl and styrene polymers, two of the most common polymers used in plastics. Their method is not only more efficient than current metal-based methods, but also environment friendly. Their findings are published in the Royal Society of Chemistry's Polymer Chemistry. In their study, they first tested the applicability of non-ionic and multidentate (or several electron-pair accepting) halogen bonding organocatalysts, specifically two iodine-carrying polyfluoro-substituted oligoarenes, to the living cationic polymerization of isobutyl vinyl ether. Mentioning one of their reasons for choosing this, Dr. Koji Takagi, lead scientist in the study, explains in an aside: "The non-ionic characteristic is advantageous because the catalyst is soluble in less polar solvents like toluene which is more suitable for such polymerization of vinyl monomers." They found that with the tridentate variant, the reaction smoothly progressed even at room temperature, producing good yield--though less than the theoretical limit--in a reasonable amount of time, without the catalyst decomposing or appearing as an impurity in the product. As Dr. Takagi explains, this could be a good advantage over existing metallic catalysts used in industry: "While metal-based catalysts have significantly contributed to the materials sciences over the past century, the contamination of remaining metallic impurities often brings about a decrease in the produced materials' lifetime and performance. We believe that the present finding will lead to the production of highly pure and reliable polymeric materials." In saying this, he is, of course, referring to the other major finding in the study as well. The second part of their study involved evaluating the applicability of ionic iodoimidazolium catalysts with various counter anions (the negative ions accompanying the positively charged group) to the polymerization of p-methoxystyrene (pMOS) and unsubstituted styrene, the latter of which is more difficult to polymerize than the former. pMOS easily polymerized at room temperature within two hours and with no catalyst decomposition of a bidentate 2-iodoimidazolium salt that had a triflate counter anion. Unsubstituted styrene gave maximum polymer yield via a reaction at -10C for 24 hours with an anion-stabilizing and bulky counter ion-containing catalyst. Speaking of the products yielded, Dr. Takagi says: "Although the obtained polymers are not intended for any specific purpose, our methodology is expected to be applied to the synthesis of conductive polymers and degradable polymers, which should not include metallic impurities if they're to be constructed for practical use." Indeed, the findings are invaluable for moving forward with the more efficient production of polymeric materials for a variety of applications. However, the successful use of organocatalysts at room temperature also offers several other advantages. For one, organocatalysts lack sensitivity to moisture and oxygen, taking care of the sometimes serious problem that the relatively hygroscopic nature of ionic catalysts poses to such controlled polymerization reactions. Further, they are readily available and therefore, low cost. They are also not toxic to the environment. And when reactions are conducted at room temperature, the energy requirements are low. This study is, thus, paving the way for low cost electronics in the future that are made of environment friendly materials in sustainable ways. ### *This study was made available online in October 2020 ahead of final publication in issue on November 14, 2020 About Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan Nagoya Institute of Technology (NITech) is a respected engineering institute located in Nagoya, Japan. Established in 1949, the university aims to create a better society by providing global education and conducting cutting-edge research in various fields of science and technology. To this end, NITech provides a nurturing environment for students, teachers, and academicians to help them convert scientific skills into practical applications. Having recently established new departments and the "Creative Engineering Program," a 6-year integrated undergraduate and graduate course, NITech strives to continually grow as a university. With a mission to "conduct education and research with pride and sincerity, in order to contribute to society," NITech actively undertakes a wide range of research from basic to applied science. Website: https:/ / www. nitech. ac. jp/ eng/ index. html About Associate Professor Koji Takagi from Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan Dr. Koji Takagi is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Life Science and Applied Chemistry at Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan. Between completing his doctoral degree in Engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1998 and joining this post, he has been part of several academic societies including the American Chemical Society. His research interests lie in polymer chemistry, synthetic chemistry, functional solid-state chemistry, device-related chemistry, and organic and hybrid materials. To date, he has contributed to 93 papers and 5 books, and taken part in several prominent projects and presentations. By John J. Metzler "I'm sending a clear message to the world: America is back. The transatlantic alliance is back," President Joe Biden affirmed to a high-level assembly of European leaders. I didn't realize we had left. "The transatlantic alliance is a strong foundation, the strong foundation, on which our collective security and our shared prosperity are built," the president intoned on video link to the Munich Security Conference (MSC) last Friday. I could not agree more. This clearly represents the collective security policy which defended Western Europe in the postwar era from Soviet aggression and allowed the continent to regain its prosperity in freedom and liberty. Despite all the rhetoric and occasional rancor across the Atlantic during the earlier years of the Trump administration, the U.S. did not reduce its troop commitments in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nor did it renege on the critical Article 5, the mutual security guarantee that an attack on one is an attack on all. But in the sphere of transatlantic policy, it's the old style-over-substance argument. The Europeans clearly didn't like the Trump style; the U.S. president, ever the bottom-line businessman, pushed for fulfilling financial commitments and demanding results. Biden, on the other hand, told the gathered Euroland leaders what they wished to hear, but without making clear commitments. European leaders appreciate the change in tone. Regarding substance, the Trump administration, despite its initial bluster, did not reduce the American military footprint in Europe. Between 2006 and 2018, (largely before Trump) the number of American forces stationed in Germany more than halved, from 72,400 to 33,250, reflecting a changing global security situation. President Trump wanted to rotate a contingent of 12,000 troops from Germany to Belgium, but this was fortunately scrapped. President Biden stated, "I know the past few years have strained and tested our transatlantic relationship, but the United States is determined determined to re-engage with Europe, to consult with you, to earn back our position of trusted leadership." The prestigious Munich Security Conference held in the Bavarian capital has emerged as the epicenter of global diplomacy, setting the gold standard for transatlantic relations. Just last year, at this very same conference, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scoffed at the idea that the U.S. was disinterested or disengaged from Europe; he stated, "I am happy to report that the death of the transatlantic alliance is grossly over-exaggerated." He exclaimed, "The West is winning. We are collectively winning. We are doing it together." On China, President Biden warned, "We must prepare together for a long-term strategic competition with China Competition with China is going to be stiff." Just last year Secretary Pompeo stated, "China encroaches on the exclusive economic zones of Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia China has had a border or maritime dispute with nearly every nation bordering it." To President Biden's chagrin, the European Union entered into a major trade deal with China. Viewing the threat from Russia, Biden stated, "The Kremlin attacks our democracies and weaponizes corruption to try to undermine our system of governance." He added, "Putin seeks to weaken the European project and our NATO alliance. He wants to undermine the transatlantic unity and our resolve." That's certainly true but not the first time. Former Secretary Pompeo underscored similar Russian security challenges; "Let's talk about territorial integrity, or rather, those nations that have contempt for it. Russia has seized Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine and Georgia." The point is that on substance, the transatlantic weathervane has not shifted dramatically with the Biden administration as the adoring mainstream media suggests, but rather still reflects the postwar bipartisan consensus which helped win the Cold War. Yet a very disconcerting poll taken among 15,000 Europeans in 10 EU member states reflects their view of the American commitment. The European Council on Foreign Relations poll states, "Very few Europeans believe the United States will intervene on their behalf in the event of a military crisis." Just 10 percent of those polled held the view that the U.S. was a "reliable" security partner that will always protect Europe, while at least 60 percent of respondents in every country polled felt their country could not depend on U.S. support in the event of a major crisis. There is deep unease toward the U.S. in the event of conflict with China or Russia, with many Europeans keen to be neutral in such a scenario. In no country did a majority want to take Washington's side against Russia. This is seriously troubling. Is this the cherished transatlantic solidarity? John J. Metzler (jjmcolumn@earthlink.net) is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of "Divided Dynamism The Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China." In 2017, the French publisher Don Quichotte editions published Veronique Tadjo's In the Company of Men (En compagnie des hommes), a slim powerhouse of a novel telling the story of West Africa's Ebola crisis from the perspectives of a wide variety of its survivors and victims: doctors and nurses and patients and family members, but also government officials and undertakers, bats and trees, and even the virus itself. This week, a little more than a year after the first case of Covid-19 in the U.S. was confirmed, Other Press published an English-language edition of Tadjo's novel. PW spoke with Tadjo about putting out this novel during a global pandemic, the storytelling traditions behind its structure, and more. This book was originally published only a year after the Ebola outbreak ended. Now, its English-language edition is coming out in the midst of another pandemic. Has your perspective on this book changed since its original publication? How? When I first wrote the book in French in 2017, Covid-19 was not in anybodys mind. The two situations are not comparable. However, while doing research at the time of the Ebola crisis, I came to realize that many aspects of our lives were connected: the degradation of the environment, climate change, and our health. Reading medical experts reports, it was easy to see that the threat of more epidemics to come was real unless structural changes were carried out in Africa and in the world in general. I am struck by how close to the bone some of the themes I develop in the book are to the situation we are in at the moment: the isolation and the loneliness; the tearing apart of family ties; the issue of trust in government; the violence and resistance at times; the heavy burden on the medical profession; the economic crisis; and so on. The big issue today is vaccine equity. Because we are in a pandemic, a global solution needs to be found. Therefore a campaign for vaccines against Covid-19 needs to be put in place and recognized as a global public good. After a period during which vaccine nationalism took over and many governments from rich countries pre-ordered or ordered far too many vaccines for their populations, a system is gradually taking shape. The Covax international system aims to get coronavirus vaccines to low- and middle-income countries that have been cut out of the vaccine race. Lets hope that it will be a successful attempt at redressing an imbalance that puts the whole world at risk. The novel is told from a multitude of voices. How did you come to realize that the novel required so many perspectives? Why did you choose this method of storytelling? In a way, I have always written in this style. Right from my first novel As The Crow Flies (Heinemann, 2001), first published in French, I have adopted a non-linear approach. I find that it is closer to the way we live. We always have multiple stories in our minds. A soldier can be aiming at an enemy but at the same time wondering when he will ever go back home or if he will ever see his wife and children again. I also believe that we are what we are because of others. So you are never alone when you tell a story. Many voices interact. The novel, at times, almost reads as if it is made up of first-person, nonfiction accounts of experiencing the Ebola pandemic. What sort of research did you conduct in order to flesh out the details of each character's experiences? I read a lot in French and in English. I also looked for testimonies of Ebola survivors and medical staff involved in the fight against the disease. I watched television documentaries. I also discussed with doctors as much as I could and went to conferences. I became more and more interested in the social dimension of the epidemic. People had been affected in many different ways and each time I researched one aspect, it led me to another one. It was important for me to get as close as possible to what had happened on the ground. But I had one restriction: it had to be done through the medium of literature. Some of your characters are not humanthe Baobab tree most prominently, but also a bat and even the virus itself. Why did you choose to include these chapters? How did you need to think differently as an author when writing those sections? Were they challenging to get right? I have been raised in the oral African tradition in which the storyteller can call on many different genres, from poetry, historical narratives, songs, myths to political language. Animals and nature connect with human characters on an equal basis. In many folktales nature speaks. So you could say that it wasnt that much out of the ordinary for me to make non humans speak. It also suited my purpose very well because I wanted to show human beings as part of nature and not above nature. This way of looking at the world has also appeared in the works of a number of Western authors who influenced me. Jean de La Fontaine, one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century comes to my mind. I read his book of fables when I was young and I remember one in particular entitled The Animals Stricken by the Plague (les animaux frappes par la lepre). I admit that in the case of the virus, it was a bit tricky because I did not want it to be the villain of the story. On the other hand, I wanted him to tell a few truths so I had to get the balance right. The bat attracted me because of its dual nature, mammal and bird. For me she is the symbol of complexity and the diversity of nature. This novel is very attentive to the intersections of human development and the natural world, and the way human encroachment on nature leads to viral outbreaks. What's an example or two of something you learned while researching what humans can do to avoid, and be prepared for, pandemics that were particularly interesting or surprising for you? Through my research I learnt how important communication was. Science alone cannot work. People have to feel empowered to fight against diseases. They hold a big part of the solution in their hands. But for this to happen they need to have confidence in their leaders. They need to trust the system. If they feel marginalized or if they do not have a good grasp of what is happening, they may retreat in false beliefs. Without adequate communication there can be resistance and protest. I was also surprised by the importance that traditional medicine still holds. In fact, the majority of the Africans in rural areas and in many popular areas in big cities still consult a healer. This is because conventional medicine has failed. Big dilapidated hospitals are considered as places where people die. Added to this, medicine is expensive so most of the time people cant afford the prescriptions they are given. Once scientists observed habits, they were able to seek the collaboration of healers. They trained them so they could influence their patients. They became active actors in the fight to eradicate the disease. Which was the most difficult chapter for you to write from a technique perspective? From an emotional perspective? From a technical point of view, the difficulty was to condense information that spanned the three affected countries: Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. I wanted to create a spaceless and timeless territory because viruses know no borders. Emotionally, it was the chapter on the dying mother because it was about religious faith in the face of death. Where was God? The other difficult chapter was the one about the lovers because I had the choice of saving the fiancee or not. After reflection I decided that a happy ending would not be appropriate. At times love cannot make miracles. But it certainly makes us more human. Science and anthropology both inform this book significantly, but so does myth and folklore and music. What do you hope readers take away from the inclusion of oral storytelling and songs in a novel about a contemporary crisis? Oral storytelling is ancestral and common to all the cultures of the world. This form of narration has the added advantage of touching several generations. For example, most folktales can be understood at different levels of complexity. A young person may grasp only one aspect of a tale whereas a more experienced person will be able to decipher the symbolism behind the story. It is very comforting for a writer to work from the premise of a universal genre. Tales are timeless therefore it is left to the storyteller to adapt them for a new audience. Also human beings survival on Earth remains a contemporary theme for literature. Did any of your own lived experience influence this book? Can you share how? I was born in Paris and raised in Abidjan. I am familiar with the West African region. It was a miracle that Ebola did not spread to Cote dIvoire as the country shares borders with Guinea and Liberia where I have travelled to many times. All the health restrictions were in place and everybody was on high alert. I have friends who are doctors and they were following events closely. We had long discussions. The health systems are more or less in the same dire state in the region. On one of my visits to Abidjan (I was based in Johannesburg at the time), I went to one of the Ebola centers that had been quickly built in the eventuality of an epidemic. It was located within the perimeter of a hospital in a popular area. There was a huge tree casting its shade over the building. I thought to myself, if Ebola had come to this city, what would the tree have witnessed? This is how the idea of Baobab was conceived. A Winnipeg company, one of only a handful of Canadian firms that make drones, is disappointed it is effectively being shut out of a City of Winnipeg tender to acquire two new drones. A Winnipeg company, one of only a handful of Canadian firms that make drones, is disappointed it is effectively being shut out of a City of Winnipeg tender to acquire two new drones. The city wants to buy two more unmanned aerial vehicles, one each for the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service and the Winnipeg Police Service. The WFPS was at the vanguard of first responders across the country to test the use of drones in large structure fires, wild fires, water rescues, and hazardous material calls. Alan Tay, the CEO of Aurora Aerial Inc. said the fact the tender specifies a platform made by SZ DJI Technology Co Ltd., a Chinese company recognized as the world leader in civilian drones, almost automatically shuts it out of the competition. DJI was recently blacklisted in the U.S. which bans U.S. companies from exporting to DJI. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has warned U.S. firms of the risks to company data from Chinese-made drones but it has not banned the purchase of Chinese drones by U.S. agencies. A spokesperson for the city said, "The City of Winnipeg follows all Transport Canada rules and regulations for safe drone operation." She said the DJI Matrice 300 RTK is on Transport Canadas list of drones eligible for advanced operations, meaning they are able to fly in controlled air spaces, near people or over people. As well, the tender does include a clause that allows for bidders to request approval for substitutions. "Any bidder can apply for this substitution and if approved, the city will issue an addendum to identify a new approved product," the spokesperson said. But that might not be enough to qualify Aurora for the tender. Its equipment is certified to safely fly over people but its drones are larger and heavier than the DJI models. DJI is the leader in the market that would generally be characterized as consumer. They are smaller, lighter and much less expensive than Auroras which sell for more than $50,000 each. But Tay said it is disappointing when a young company it started two years ago thats trying to break into the market is not able to bid on work for its home town. Aurora has only made 10 drones, but it employs 14 people in the city, including four University of Manitoba co-op students. Tay said that while the commercial market for drones is growing, "it would be a great boost for the company to have our home town be one of our customers." Aurora also partners with another local company, MicroPilot, which makes control systems and other technology for drones. Howard Loewen, the CEO of MicroPilot, said the market for drones has been steadily on the rise. "There has been some progress but it is still painfully slow," he said. "If you want to fly a drone outside the line of sight of the operator that can be quite challenging." He said they are certainly being used more by fire and police departments, but he said, "They are still very experimental and mostly low-capability drones and many are still being driven around in the trunk of a car" to the site that needs observation even though the technology makes them perfectly able to actually fly to the site. Tay said Aurora is working on certification to allow them to be used outside the line of sight. The companys market strategy is to concentrate on last-mile delivery for logistics companies. It has at least one customer that is using Auroras drones for medical deliveries. The company is talking to logistics companies about potential partnerships. martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. WALTHAM, Mass., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Fresenius Medical Care North America's (FMCNA) Renal Therapies Group, the nation's leading provider of kidney care products, announced today that its customer support team has been named a J.D. Power Certified Customer Service Program recipient for 2020. This certification is the first of its kind for a dialysis company and recognizes an "outstanding customer service experience." "This incredible recognition reflects the determination and commitment of our team to always be there for our customers who depend on our life-sustaining products," said Mark Costanzo, President of FMCNA's Renal Therapies Group. "It is especially rewarding to earn this certification after our customer service team delivered such essential service to providers on the frontlines of the pandemic." The Renal Therapies Group Customer Service team assists home patients and dialysis facilities throughout the United States in ordering dialysis supplies. The team focuses on providing an effortless experience for patients and healthcare providers through active listening, positive language, and forward resolution. The professional and courteous staff strive to exceed the needs of each customer on every call, providing a strong commitment to teamwork and quality that results in efficient service and satisfied customers. "We are working hard to create a best-in-class customer support team that helps fulfill our mission to improve the lives of every patient, every day," said Veronica Stephens, Vice President of Customer and Technical Services at FMCNA's Renal Therapies Group. "After a lengthy and detailed review process, including input directly from our customers, we are proud to receive certification from this trusted program." The J.D. Power Certified Customer Service Program recognition is based on successfully completing an evaluation and exceeding a customer satisfaction benchmark through a survey of recent servicing interactions. For more information, visit www.jdpower.com/ccc. To learn more about FMCNA's range of products for treating acute and chronic disease, visit https://fmcna.com/products/. About Fresenius Medical Care North America Fresenius Medical Care North America (FMCNA) is the premier healthcare company focused on providing the highest quality care to people with renal and other chronic conditions. Through its industry-leading network of dialysis facilities and outpatient cardiac and vascular labs, Fresenius Medical Care North America provides coordinated healthcare services at pivotal care points for hundreds of thousands of chronically ill customers throughout the continent. As the world's largest fully integrated renal company, it offers specialty pharmacy and laboratory services, and manufactures and distributes the most comprehensive line of dialysis equipment, disposable products, and renal pharmaceuticals. For more information, visit the FMCNA website at https://fmcna.com/. About J.D. Power J.D. Power is a global leader in consumer insights, advisory services and data and analytics. A pioneer in the use of big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic modeling capabilities to understand consumer behavior, J.D. Power has been delivering incisive industry intelligence on customer interactions with brands and products for more than 50 years. The world's leading businesses across major industries rely on J.D. Power to guide their customer-facing strategies. J.D. Power is headquartered in Troy, Mich., and has offices in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. To learn more about the company's business offerings, visit JDPower.com/business. The J.D. Power auto shopping tool can be found at JDPower.com. Disclaimer This release contains forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those described in these forward-looking statements due to certain factors, including changes in business, economic and competitive conditions, regulatory reforms, foreign exchange rate fluctuations, uncertainties in litigation or investigative proceedings, and the availability of financing. These and other risks and uncertainties are detailed in Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA's reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA does not undertake any responsibility to update the forward-looking statements in this release. Media Contact: Fresenius Medical Care North America Brad Puffer Corporate Communications [email protected] (781) 699-3331 SOURCE Fresenius Medical Care Holdings, Inc. Related Links https://fmcna.com/ Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Nine has pledged to return Nines $2m JobKeeper allowance for its wholly-owned businesses, to the Federal Government as it reports a net profit of $182m for the six months to December 2020. Nine reported a 42% increase on last year in EBITDA of $355 million and a total revenue of $1.16 billion for the December half year. CEO Hugh Marks delivered his final results today ahead of his departure, expected by mid year. Our business has performed incredibly well through this period of heightened volatility, and has come out the other side in a very strong operating position, he said. We acted swiftly when circumstances changed, whilst continuing to embrace opportunity and remain true to our vision of building Australias leading cross-platform media business. In these latest six months, the combined contribution from Stan and 9Now, and the digital components of Domain and Publishing grew by 53% to more than $140m, and, notwithstanding the strong recovery in earnings from our traditional markets, equated to 41% of our total EBITDA. From an advertising perspective, this latest half year was a tale of two quarters. The advertising market clearly turned in late September, earlier and more sharply than we had anticipated, and this was led by Television, both Free To Air and BVOD. The brand-building strength of these segments underpinned clear growth in market share overall for the Television industry, that has continued into the first quarter of 2021. Nines consistently strong audience performance, across all of our platforms, means we are well positioned to benefit from this improvement in the ad cycle. The lessons we have learned from COVID are clear. Our focus on strict cost efficiency at our traditional media assets delivered the profitability we were targeting. And continued investment in our digital businesses is delivering strong digital profit growth. Together, enabling us to continue to migrate the business to a more flexible, digital-base. Moreover, the accelerated growth in businesses like Stan and 9Now, as well as our digital publishing mastheads, has enabled us to bring forward our longer term plans. And importantly has enhanced our competitive position across all segments. This will enable us to continue to invest in our audiences to ensure continued growth into the future. Ive had a great five years at Nine, and am confident that I am handing over the reins at the perfect time of a business which is clearly firing on all cylinders, but that has plenty of scope to accelerate its profitability in the coming few years. Broadcast Nines Broadcast division comprises Nine Network (FTA), 9Now as well as Nine Radio. Together, Broadcast reported EBITDA of $207m on revenues of $622m for the half. Nine Network reported a revenue decline of 2%, or $8m for the half. After a September quarter decline of 14.3%1 , the Metro Free To Air ad market grew by 16.6%1 in the December quarter, combining for growth of 0.6% across the half. Nines Metro FTA revenue share of 38.6%1was broadly flat on pcp. For Ratings Season 2020, Nine was the #1 Network and Primary Channel in all key demographics. Nine attracted a commercial network share of 37.5%2 of the 25-54 demographic, 4.7 points ahead of its nearest competitor. On a primary channel basis, Nines share of the 25-54s was 38.3%2 , and 6.1 share points ahead of its nearest competitor. In the December half, Nine also won all of the key demographics. FTA costs declined by 16%, or ~$70m. There were both cyclical and structural elements to the cost decline, which was partially offset by a close to $10m increase in revenue-related costs, given the stronger market. For the half, FTA EBITDA increased by 55%, to $171m, with the associated margin of almost 33% being the highest achieved since Nine listed in 2013. The BVOD market grew by 44% for the half to $123m3, with both quarters showing clear growth (+41% in Q1 and 48% in Q2). 9Now recorded revenue growth of 30%, equating to share of ~45%. Nines investment in incremental content helped to broaden usage, with Daily Active Users up 8% across the period, notwithstanding the absence of Love Island (which contributed as much as half the VOD minutes in the months it played). Live and VOD minutes streamed increased by 24% across the half on pcp. Overall, 9Now increased its EBITDA contribution by 22% to $33m. Stan During the half, Stan consolidated on the subscriber gains of FY20, with the strong summer period resulting in current active subscribers of 2.3m. Across the half, Stan sourced content from 18 different distributors. Particularly popular were Sky Original Gangs of London, the Bryan Cranston series Your Honour (CBS Showtime), the reboot of Saved By The Bell (NBC Universal), the hit new UK drama series Its a Sin (All3 Media), Clarice (MGM) and Stan Originals A Sunburnt Christmas and more recently Bump, which was released on January 1 and has quickly become Stans most successful show of all time. Across the half, total streams increased by almost 20%. The higher subscriber base going into this half, coupled with the September price increase (premium plan subscribers from $17 to $19) underpinned the reported 28% growth in revenues. Costs increased by 10% (split fairly equally by content and marketing), resulting in an EBITDA more than doubling to $37m. The strong subscriber growth of the past 12 months has enabled Stan to expedite previous growth ambitions. During the half, Stan announced a long-term content deal with NBCU, the launch of Stan Sports as well as an increased commitment to Stan Originals. Already, Stan has a strong market position and significant EBITDA and cash profitability. There remains substantial upside in both subscribers and profitability for Stan on a longer-term basis. Related YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 24, ARMENPRESS. Georgia will re-open the air traffic with Armenia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, Azerbaijan and Belarus starting March 1, 2021, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili said at a press briefing, Sputnik Georgia reports. The nationals of these counties can arrive in Georgia if they have a negative COVID-19 PCR test result. Previously, the citizens of these countries could visit Georgia in case of having a document on vaccination. Georgia still keeps its land borders closed for foreign citizens due to COVID-19. Only the cargo transportation through the land borders is allowed. Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan Flash Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry received on Tuesday a phone call from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during which they discussed means to advance bilateral relations and exchanged views on issues of mutual concern, said the Egyptian Foreign Ministry in a statement. "Shoukry affirmed the strategic ties binding Egypt and the United States, looking forward to enhancing their prospects in a manner that would serve the two countries' interests," said the statement. The two diplomats also discussed the latest developments in Libya as well as the Palestinian cause, asserting the need to continue joint work to combat terrorism and address other challenges and threats facing the region. The phone talks came a day after Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi met with head of the U.S. Central Command Kenneth McKenzie in Cairo, where they discussed ways to strengthen military and security cooperation. Cairo has been a key regional ally of Washington for decades. Egypt has been receiving military and economic aid from the United States, amounting to 1.5 billion U.S. dollars annually, since it signed the U.S.-sponsored peace treaty with Israel in 1979. A rezoning of Cortana Mall into a warehouse center for a developer that works closely with Amazon was deferred by the East Baton Rouge Metro Council until March 10 to allow time for the project to get under single ownership. Donnie Miller, director of business development for the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, told the Metro Council the project is still alive and moving in the right direction. What might come next for Sears space at Mall of Louisiana? Here are a few ideas With Sears set to close its Mall of Louisiana store this spring, there are a number of possibilities real estate experts see for the space tha There were delays on the transaction of closing, he said. Miller said the project needs to be under the ownership of one entity that requests the rezoning. Right now, Cortana has several owners, including former anchor tenants of the retail center, and Moonbeam Capital Investments, which owns the interior of the mall and the former Mervyns space. Seefried, which has close ties to Amazon, wants to demolish Cortana and replace it with a five-level warehouse and office, which would have 2.9 million square feet of space. Documents filed with the Planning Commission call for 1,251 parking spots at the site, an indication of how many employees might work at the facility. Belk files for bankruptcy, pledges no layoffs or store closings Belk filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Houston late Tuesday, the first step in a reorganization plan that will see its owner, Sycamore Partne Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up In April, the Atlanta-based company handled the purchase of a 34.3-acre site on Bethany Churchs Industriplex campus. That property is now home for Amazons South Baton Rouge Distribution Center, a 111,918-square-foot facility. In November, the company bought a 63.3-acre site off La. 415 in Port Allen and filed documents with the West Baton Rouge Parish Clerk of Courts office outlining a lease agreement with Amazon. Amazon is currently building a 1 million-square-foot fulfillment center near Carencro, at the former Evangeline Downs site. That fulfillment center is designed to pick, pack and ship bulky items, such as rugs, patio furniture and outdoor equipment. Last Sears store in Louisiana is hiring temp workers and will close soon After 24 years, Sears is closing its Baton Rouge location at the Mall of Louisiana, the last location in the state. Based on the size of the proposed Cortana facility, Marc Wulfraat, a logistics expert who tracks Amazon, has said it will handle small, sortable products, less than 18 inches in size. Amazon typically pairs fulfillment centers that carry sortable products with those that handle larger items, he said. On Monday, the East Baton Rouge Planning Commission easily approved the site plan that Seefried has submitted for Cortana. That will go before the Metro Council in March. CHANTILLY, Va., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Perspecta Inc. (NYSE: PRSP), a leading U.S. government services provider, announced today that it has received an award to continue supporting the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) with a mission-critical program for contractor management. The award spans five years, including four option years, with a ceiling value of $38 million. Under the agreement, Perspecta will modernize the Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker - Enterprise Suite (SPOT-ES). This will enable the DMDC to monitor threats in environments with deployed contractors, as well as inform U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) decision-makers about the status of personnel, training and security related to humanitarian and peacekeeping missions. Specifically, Perspecta will provide cloud migration, software development, quality assurance, 24/7 help desk support and training. "DMDC will benefit from Perspecta's ingenuity and drive to optimize digital environments while ensuring cyber resiliency," said Jeff Bohling, senior vice president of Perspecta's defense group. "The SPOT-ES award is reflective of Perspecta's growing impact on mission-critical programs within the DOD." Perspecta, which received "excellent" ratings from DMDC in the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting (CPAR) system for the last two years, was awarded the agreement over the bids of five other contractors. About Perspecta Inc. At Perspecta (NYSE: PRSP), we question, we seek and we solve. Perspecta brings a diverse set of capabilities to our U.S. government customers in defense, intelligence, civilian, health care and state and local markets. Our 280+ issued, licensed and pending patents are more than just pieces of paper, they tell the story of our innovation. With offerings in mission services, digital transformation and enterprise operations, our team of nearly 14,000 engineers, analysts, investigators and architects work tirelessly to not only execute the mission, but build and support the backbone that enables it. Perspecta was formed to take on big challenges. We are an engine for growth and success and we enable our customers to build a better nation. For more information about Perspecta, visit perspecta.com. This press release may contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made on the basis of the current beliefs, expectations and assumptions of the management of Perspecta and are subject to significant risks and uncertainty. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements. All such forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made, and Perspecta undertakes no obligation to update or revise these statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Although Perspecta believes that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, these statements involve a variety of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from what may be expressed or implied in these forward-looking statements. SOURCE Perspecta Inc. Related Links perspecta.com WASHINGTON, D.C.As both Republicans and Democrats prepare to legislate new rollbacks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Actthe 1996 law that protects freedom of expression on the interneta congressional rep from Silicon Valley, Ro Khanna, says he plans to bring a new constituency into the debate: sex workers. Theres no politician who gains political currency for standing up for the voices of sex workers. Theyre not a voting bloc. Theyre not a donor bloc. Lobbyists dont represent them on Capitol Hill, Khanna told the political site Roll Call. And they were just totally shut out. They were simply invisible. Khanna was one of only 25 House members to vote against the 2018 FOSTA/SESTA bill, which supposedly was designed to curb online sex trafficking, but instead created new hazards for sex workers. According to one recent study, one of every three sex workers reported facing increased violence in the course of their work since passage of the law. The study also found an increase in economic instability for sex workerseven prior to the COVID-19 pandemicdue to FOSTA/SESTA restrictions. At the core of FOSTA/SESTA was a significant weakening of Section 230. The 25-year-old law shields online platforms from legal liability for user-generated content, allowing an almost unlimited range of online expression. But FOSTA/SESTA stripped that protection in cases of sex trafficking, a term that the law defined so broadly that almost any sexually frank or explicit content could be deemed to promote sex trafficking. Khanna has authored a bill to fund a congressional study of FOSTA/SESTAs effects on sex workers, which if passed is seen as the first step to repeal of the law. In the Senate, Khannas bill has won the backing of Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren, and Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders. The opinion has shifted, Khanna told Roll Call. People have now heard stories of sex workers being abused and having to go on the streets and harassed. Theres a recognition of the harm that has been caused, but there was not that awareness when this was rushed to a vote. The latest attempt to roll back Section 230 comes from Senate Democrats in the form of the Safe TECH Act, which would effectively remove the laws protection from any site that takes in money in order to post content. Khanna says that he wants sex workers to have a voice in the debate over that bill, or any other potential partial or full repeal of Section 230. Could you craft reforms to Section 230 that I could get behind? Yes, he told Roll Call. But we have to be thoughtful and understand that we may not be able to anticipate all the consequences. Kate DAdamo, a sex worker rights advocate with the group Reframe Health and Justice, told the site that sex workers are simply outgunned by the forces both inside and outside of Congress that are aiming to criminalize the sex industry out of existence. If we dont understand the impact of regulating digital space, then we really cant make good policy, DAdamo told Roll Call. And we cant just silo out the sex industry as the canary in the coal mine, because at the end of the day, were going to end up disproportionately harming other marginalized people. Photo By Web Summit / Wikimedia Commons Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Senior Queen's officials expressed concerns at the impact of Covid-19 on recruitment income, with the value of just eight international students shown in a report to have an economic impact of 1 million. Internal documentation seen by The Detail highlights how university officials acknowledged just before Christmas the "important role" played by the university in chartering international flights in September and October as these helped to retain fee income from international students. But QUB declined to say whether its perception of international students as having a high economic value played any role in its chartering of three flights from China during the Covid-19 pandemic. Documents revealed concerns GB-based universities could poach students from QUB due to the lack of face-to-face teaching. The latest QUB chartered flight from Beijing took place on January 10, 2021 and carried around 150 students to Northern Ireland during the lockdown. Students, however, were legally allowed to travel to the UK. Tickets cost the students 839 each but QUB did not reveal how much this flight cost the university citing commercial sensitivity. The documentation showed that QUB officials were also considering chartering a further January flight, from New Delhi, India. QUB told The Detail the safety and wellbeing of staff and students was its "first priority". A spokesperson said: "The university chose to charter flights for international students in recognition of the difficulty of travelling and limited availability of flights." This allowed students to travel directly to Belfast rather than transiting through another hub before going directly to campus to self-isolate, they explained. QUB said it "liaised with all relevant authorities and complied with all Civil Aviation Authority regulations, as well as applying more stringent safety measures than were required by the regulations in place at the time". A spokesperson for the Department for the Economy (DfE) said: "QUB arranged to use charter flights to bring students from China direct to Belfast International Airport to avoid transit through London. "All students were legally entitled to enter the UK and were advised of all the relevant health guidance and measures before arriving in Northern Ireland." A spokesperson for the university added: "Relevant government departments have been kept informed of the universitys approach throughout." In January, it was reported that Stormonts Economy Committee sought guidance from the Department of Health (DoH) on whether the most recent Chinese flight breached any Covid-19 regulations. The DoH told The Detail it is not aware of any correspondence from the Economy Committee on the matter. QUB said it could not make a comparison between the economic impact of its Northern Irish students and its international ones. However, in terms of fees to the university, a Northern Irish undergraduate student pays 4,530 per year while an international undergraduate student pays between 17,400 and 32,200, though QUB said it had to be acknowledged that Northern Irish students also attract government grants. A QUB spokesperson added: "The bulk of tuition fees are used to cover the costs of delivering a world-class education in a research intensive environment. Any surplus is reinvested to further augment the student experience." QUB documentation dated April 2020 stated that Northern Irelands universities operate with a cap on student numbers, resulting in around 60 university places per 100 applicants, while English universities are not capped in terms of enrolment. The documentation highlights QUB viewed universities in Great Britain as being in a competitive position to offer Northern Irish students places to "mitigate losses from international students" due to Covid-19. This would "impact negatively on the economy and the universities in Northern Ireland for years to come". Later documentation from December 2020 shows, however, that there were over 3,900 new first-year undergraduate students from either Northern Ireland or the EU at the university at the end of October 2020 - almost 650 students ahead of the university's initial target. The number from the European Union, mostly consisting of students from the Republic of Ireland, grew by 33% (to 334). The number of new first-year undergraduates from Great Britain also rose by 36.5% (to 179) from the previous year. They are charged 9,250 per year, while students from the European Union pay 4,530 the same as Northern Ireland students. Documentation on how many new first-year QUB undergraduate students came from Asia this academic year has not been released. The documentation references concerns about QUBs capacity to attract international students. It attributes this as being, in part, due to the university not being able to guarantee face-to-face teaching because of Covid-19 restrictions. The university has said it "remains committed" to face-to-face teaching "when it is able to do so safely and within the context of existing public health restrictions". "The university has taken decisions throughout the pandemic in the best interests of students including, for example, the decision to pause accommodation contracts when public health restrictions meant that many students were asked to study from home," said a spokesperson. "The university remains confident in the safety measures that it has in place across the campus to ensure that it is a safe place to live, work and study for all members of the QUB community." The Belfast Telegraph has approached Queen's for comment. Presidential honeymoons have remarkably different lengths. President Barack Obamas honeymoon, at least with the press, began the day he announced his candidacy, Feb. 10, 2007, and the blissful union continues today. On the complete opposite end of the honeymoon spectrum is President Donald Trump, an impeachment target from before his inauguration in 2017 until a month after he left office. Surprisingly, the polls show that President Joe Biden is, after only four weeks in the White House, having a rough go of it with the very Democrats that helped elect him. The Morning Consult poll, a partnership with the left-leaning journalism company Politico, found that several of Bidens executive orders especially those immigration-related are among the most unpopular with voters. Of the voters polled, only 45% support including illegal immigrants in the census, and only 46% approve halting the Trump administrations Remain in Mexico policy, which the Biden administration has undone. On Feb. 19, the first of an eventual 25,000 migrants began entry into the United States. Others entered earlier and illegally were, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, caught and released with orders to appear in immigration court at a later date. Bidens lenient immigration policies have encouraged large migrant caravans to come north. As one of thousands of border-bound Hondurans told CNN, Biden is going to help all of us to become legal residents. When asked how the administration could refute the widely held perception that the 100% surge increases meant that migrants interpreted that the borders were open, an opinion Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador shares, White House press secretary Jen Psaki avoided giving a straightforward answer. The least popular among Bidens executive orders is his goal to expand refugee admission to 125,000 from President Trumps 15,000, a greater than 800% increase. Among those polled, 48% of voters somewhat or strongly oppose the presidents plan to increase refugee resettlement in the upcoming fiscal year, while 39% support it. Summing up the Feb. 5-7 survey among 1,986 registered voters, and accounting for a 2% error margin, Morning Consult senior editor Cameron Easley wrote that, Orders pertaining to immigration and immigrant rights constitute five of his seven least popular actions among voters, and are particularly animating for Republicans. As a result, Easley concluded, immigration will be tricky political territory for the president. The nationwide apprehension about Bidens expansive immigration executive orders is easily understandable. At the border, COVID-untested migrants, their total as yet unknown, have been released into Texas, a development that Democratic state Sen. Juan Hinojosa called very alarming. From Texas, many migrants enter other states general populations, and could put those residents at risk. An anonymous Customs and Border Protection official told local reporters that as per a longstanding practice, when long-term holding solutions become impossible, some migrants will be processed for removal, provided a Notice to Appear, and released into the U.S. to await a future immigration hearing. Without identifying catch and release, the anonymous officer identified the process to a tee. Bidens proposed refugee intake increase has generated similar concerns about Americans health and safety. Weaker screening and less vetting of international refugees could unnecessarily add to the domestic COVID crisis. Americans are puzzled at what the thought process may be behind Bidens urgency to liberalize immigration laws when theres no link to how his actions help the millions of economically distressed, employment-anxious citizens and lawfully present residents. Bidens immigration actions will expand the labor pool the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment population ratio that measures the number of people employed against the total working-age population is a dismal 57.5%. Biden is urging Congress to pass amnesty that would legalize and provide lifelong valid work permission to millions of aliens, a big gamble for the new president. With only a five-seat margin in the House of Representatives, the Senate tied at 50-50, and with history showing that the mid-term elections cost the majority party about 25 seats, Biden could be, as the Morning Consult poll editor warned, plunging into cold and murky water. Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro presenting his annual report to the National Assembly in January 2020 -- the body has voted to expel the EU ambassador after the European Union slapped sanctions on more top Venezuelan officials Venezuela's National Assembly called Tuesday for the government to expel the European Union's ambassador to Caracas, in response to new EU sanctions against 19 Venezuelan officials. The Assembly, which is controlled by President Nicolas Maduro's party, approved a "rejection agreement" of the sanctions and plans to "urge" the head of state to "declare persona non grata the head of the diplomatic delegation" from the EU, Isabel Brilhante Pedrosa, in order to proceed with her "expulsion." The text, unanimously approved by the deputies, also calls for a revision of the agreement on the EU's presence in Caracas. "I vote with both hands for the European Union representative to be declared persona non grata," Assembly Speaker Jorge Rodriguez said before calling for the vote. The Venezuelan government said Tuesday that Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza will meet with Brilhante Pedrosa on Wednesday, along with ambassadors and diplomatic representatives from France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. EU foreign ministers agreed Monday to sanction 19 Venezuelan officials for "undermining democracy" and human rights abuses. The move brings to 55 the total number of members of Maduro's regime to be slapped with asset freezes and travel bans by the bloc. The EU expanded the list after rejecting a December legislative election that saw Maduro win total control of parliament after an opposition boycott. The election results were not recognized by the EU, the United States nor several Latin American countries. Among the newly sanctioned officials are two members of the National Assembly, the governor of Zulia state, the commander of the armed forces and three members of the Electoral Council, including its president. On July 29, after a previous round of European sanctions, Maduro declared Brilhante Pedrosa persona non grata and gave her 72 hours to leave the country. When the deadline passed, however, the government backed down. erc/jt/dga/jb/plh/to/caw/jh Earlier, the billboard spoke praise for counterintelligence operatives. The SBU Security Service of Ukraine says it has installed a billboard saying "Crimea is Ukraine!" in front of the Russian embassy in the capital city of Kyiv. The relevant photo was published by the SBU press service on Telegram on February 24. "Just a photo, just the Russian embassy in Kyiv, and a statement of the fact that Crimea is Ukraine," the press service said. The banner placed outside the embassy building, which is located on the capital's Povitroflotskyi Avenue, also portrays the SBU emblem. Read alsoSBU nabs Russian GRU's asset in Kharkiv (Video)Earlier, a billboard designed to honor SBU counterintelligence officers was also installed by the aggressor country's embassy. However, it was dismantled a month ago. Russian occupation of Crimea Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea in March 2014 after its troops had occupied the peninsula. An illegal referendum was held for Crimeans to decide on accession to Russia. De-facto Crimean authorities reported that allegedly 96.77% of the Crimean population had voted for joining Russia. On March 18, 2014, the so-called agreement on the accession of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol to Russia was signed in the Kremlin. The West did not recognize the annexation in response to which sanctions against Russia were introduced. Ukraine's parliament voted to designate February 20, 2014, as the official date when the temporary occupation of Crimea began. Reporting by UNIAN Because of the pandemic we really valued the connection and social support we were able to give each other and continued to dance together virtually every week through the entire summer, and we actually collaborated with other artists and were able to put video projects out on the internet. Three inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary began a hunger strike this week after being held in solitary confinement past the end of their disciplinary sentences, but officials at the Angola prison say there is no space available for the men in the regular cell blocks. The inmates have been on strike since Monday, according to Ken Pastorick, spokesperson for the Department of Public Safety and Corrections. Pastorick said inmates in trouble are placed in separate cell blocks for a length of time set by a "disciplinary sanctions matrix." Once inmates have completed their time in segregation, they are transitioned into an appropriate housing unit. In this case, an appropriate unit would be the "working cell blocks," where inmates are housed in individual cells but are not in solitary confinement, receiving more time outside and doing work assignments. Pastorick said when bed space is not immediately available, inmates are sometimes kept in the disciplinary segregation unit until space opens up. He said DOC staff will to monitor the inmates in disciplinary segregation and have medical staff visit the inmates to ensure they are receiving proper attention. Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Prisoner rights advocates with the Louisiana Stop Solitary Coalition are slamming the department for failing to treat inmates humanely. "Having served 44 plus years in solitary confinement, I am fully aware of the brutality of solitary. Hunger strikes are brutal, so I know from personal experience how desperate these men must be to resort to this," said Albert Woodfox, who was released from Angola in 2016 after spending decades in solitary. DOC leaders have themselves acknowledged that solitary confinement has been overused in the past and pledged their commitment to reducing the practice. A 2019 report found that the use of disciplinary segregation in Louisiana prisons was well above the national average. Officials promised to change some practices based on those findings. The authors defined solitary confinement as any solo housing units where inmates were confined for an average of 22 hours per day. "We call on DOC to transfer people out of solitary immediately and follow the disciplinary matrix. It's 2021, how can our people still suffer from these inhuman conditions?" said Kiana Calloway with the New Orleans advocacy group VOTE. "They're sacrificing their life to be heard. Lets make sure DOC listens." Travellers arriving in Australia from New Zealand face tighter restrictions in NSW, Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania in response to a growing COVID-19 outbreak in Auckland. At least eight cases have been linked to a cluster at a high school in Auckland that was discovered on February 14 and triggered a snap three-day lockdown in New Zealands largest city. The cluster emerged days after quarantine-free travel between Australia and New Zealand resumed. Credit:Getty Images The cluster was discovered days after quarantine-free green flights from New Zealand to Australia resumed. NSW Health is contacting travellers who have arrived on quarantine-free flights from New Zealand since Saturday, February 20, to check if they had been to any venues of concern visited by an infectious person. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Archbishop Miguel Cabrejos blesses an oxygen-bottling machine as part of "Breathe, Peru" Donors have come out in strength to support a Church-supported campaign to help guarantee oxygen supplies for hospitals treating Covid-19 patients. By Devin Watkins The Respira Peru, or Breathe, Peru, campaign has had rousing success, raising almost 8 million Euros for Covid-19 sufferers. The initiative began last July as a fundraiser to support hospitals across Peru as they treat coronavirus cases. Organizers say the funds are used to guarantee much-needed oxygen supplies and other medical equipment in the fight against Covid-19. Telethon of tenderness Breathe, Peru held its second, 4-hour telethon last Saturday on Pan-American Television. Pope Francis even got in on the action by sending his support for the initiative and inviting donors to give generously. He said they are helping make Gods tenderness reach everyone through care, building a more humane and fraternal society, in which we ensure that no one is left alone, or feels excluded or abandoned. Saving lives The campaign is spurred on by Perus Catholic Bishops Conference, in conjunction with the University of St. Ignatius of Loyola and a host of national businesses. At the telethon event, Archbishop Miguel Cabrejos, President of the Bishops Conference, expressed his gratitude to donors. He underlined the profoundly human and spiritual value of efforts to save lives. The University president, Raul Diez Canseco Terry, recalled the many people who have toiled in silence to help others throughout the pandemic. He also urged the government and private sectors to shift resources temporarily to promote the creation of oxygen supplies. Critical shortage The campaign is responding to a critical situation in Peru. Hospitals throughout the country have been crippled by a shortage of oxygen supplies. Long lines have formed in the capital, Lima, as relatives and friends of Covid-19 patients seek out the last remaining bottled oxygen available. Reuters reports that prices have tripled in some regions. As of Wednesday, Peru had recorded nearly 1.3 million cases and over 45,000 deaths. As a growing number of Americans get vaccinated against COVID-19, many are likely to start traveling again but even once herd immunity is achieved, the pandemic may have some people approaching the risks of travel with new caution. Certainly, face masks and hand sanitizer aren't going anywhere, but one company is offering travelers additional peace of mind with their Safe Travels Kit. The kit, which retails for $39.95, includes several items that help prevent the transmission of germs, including an antimicrobial seat cover to provide extra protection against other passengers. Ready to travel? The $39.95 Safe Travels Kit comes with a washable airplane seat cover and pillowcase made from antimicrobial and hypoallergenic fabric Necessities: The kit also has a face mask and 85% alcohol sanitizing wipes for wiping down surfaces like armrests, tray tables, buckles, screens, and air vents The kit comes with four pieces, including a patent-pending airplane seat cover and pillowcase made from antimicrobial and hypoallergenic fabric. The pillowcase can also be used as a tray table cover, while the seat cover works just well in trains and cars. The pieces are bed-bug proof and reusable, good for up to 40 washes and both can be monogramed. Also in the kit are a surgical mask and 85 per cent alcohol sanitizing wipes for wiping down surfaces like armrests, tray tables, buckles, screens, and air vents. Everything comes packed together in a washable travel pouch. Extra safe: As a growing number of Americans get vaccinated against COVID-19, many are likely to start traveling again For now, the CDC is still warning against all non-essential travel, urging Americans to delay travel and stay home. For those who must travel, the CDC recommends getting vaccinated if possible, getting tested between one and three days of a trip, wearing a mask in public settings, and washing hands, and avoiding touching one's eyes, nose, and mouth. 'Air travel requires spending time in security lines and airport terminals, which can bring you in close contact with other people and frequently touched surfaces,' the agency warns. 'Most viruses and other germs do not spread easily on flights because of how air is circulated and filtered on airplanes. 'However, social distancing is difficult on crowded flights and sitting within 6 feet of others, sometimes for hours, may increase your risk of getting COVID-19. 'How you get to and from the airport, such as with public transportation and ridesharing, can also increase your chances of being exposed to the virus.' Caution: The CDC is still warning against all non-essential travel; however, experts say it will be safer once people have been immunized While people who are vaccinated are unlikely to get sick COVID-19, scientists are still learning whether those who are vaccinated can still spread the virus to others. Early data out of Israel paints a hopeful picture that the vaccine stops transmission but until there are more concrete numbers, experts are urging those who do decide to travel, even if they have been inoculated, to follow safety precautions. 'These two vaccines have 94 and 95% protection against serious COVID disease,' Dr. Chris Beyrer, a professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, told Today. 'It is certainly going to be safer to travel once you're immunized, but on the other hand, we also do not know the answer to the question of "Are people who have been immunized still infectious for others?" ... That's a very important distinction.' Hong Kong's government on Wednesday earmarked more than U.S.$1 billion to pay for "national security" operations, amid an ongoing crackdown on peaceful dissent and political opposition under a draconian national security law. The city's financial secretary Paul Chan said the government would set up a special fund for "safeguarding national security in the coming years," but gave no details of what they would be spent on. Government broadcaster RTHK cited an appendix to the budget as saying that the fund was "aimed at meeting the expenditure for safeguarding national security and approving the establishment of relevant posts, which are not restricted by Hong Kong laws." It quoted Chan as saying that he had arrived at the figure after discussing the manner with the "relevant national security authorities." Chan also announced a 7.7 percent rise in the policing budget for the coming year, setting total police spending at U.S.$3.2 billion. The move comes amid growing fears that the city's seven million residents are rapidly losing freedoms promised to them under the terms of the 1997 handover to Chinese rule. A February poll by the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute (PORI) found that public perception of several different measures of freedom in Hong Kong were at their lowest level since the handover. Academic freedom, freedom of association, and freedom of movement all dropped to their lowest ebb in the survey, while press freedom and freedom of speech also returned low scores. HKPORI deputy chief executive Chung Kim-wah has said the freedom of movement figure reflects people's concerns over growing entry and exit controls at Hong Kong's borders, particularly after China said it would no longer recognize the British National Overseas (BNO) passport. He said rumors continue to circulate that people may not be allowed to leave under planned changes to immigration laws. Hong Kong's government is seeking to amend the city's immigration laws to enable security chiefs to ban passengers from taking any form of transport in or out of the city, sparking concern that the authorities may be getting ready to stop people from leaving. Airport under surveillance The move comes amid growing fears that the city's airport is already under routine surveillance by national security police, after a Hong Kong-based Youtuber filmed a group of unidentified people with no luggage lingering in the departure hall and watching passengers board their flights. The planned amendment to the Immigration Ordinance has been billed by the government as a crackdown on asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants, making easier for the authorities to deport them. But it also includes a clause enabling border guards to prevent a person from boarding a flight or any other form of transportation out of the city, paving the way for exit bans on any of Hong Kong's seven million residents or visiting foreign nationals. On Feb. 13, a spokesman for the Security Bureau said the right of Hongkongers to enter or leave the city was "guaranteed." He said an advance passenger information (API) system would only apply to people traveling to the city, rather than those leaving it. "The right of Hong Kong residents to enter or leave Hong Kong is not affected," the spokesman said. Concerns were also raised by recent changes to the Hong Kong Airport Authority's privacy policy regarding self-service checkpoints that process passengers using facial recognition technology. The policy, which once pledged not to share passenger data with third parties without the person's express consent, now warns that the data could be released in many more circumstances than before. "We may engage third party service providers who are acting for, on behalf of or jointly with us ... and in this connection we will provide your personal data to such service providers provided that they shall use and handle your personal data in accordance with this Privacy Policy," the new policy states. It also warns that passenger data may be turned over to the authorities if required "as and when necessary for the purpose of safeguarding aviation and airport security." The earlier version had required the authorities to implement equivalent privacy protections before data could be handed over. A clause in the earlier policy promising to anonymize passenger data, and to delete all personal data within seven days of the passenger's flight, has also been dropped. The Airport Authority refused to disclose the identity of its third-party partners when contacted by RFA on Wednesday, but said it operates a very strict data security policy, using encrypted local servers rather than cloud-based storage. It said that all identifiable passenger information would still be automatically deleted from the system seven days after the departure of the passenger, adding that third-party service providers are also required to follow the same policy. The Airport Authority uses established procedures to tender and appoint contractors, it said. "Passengers are free to decide whether to use traditional checkpoints or the self-service facilities," it said. Hong Kong data scientist and democracy activist Wong Ho-wa said he was concerned about the changes, however. "Actually this is very scary," Wong said. "Anonymization is there to protect people's personal data, and its purposes are clear and understandable, for example to compile statistics or optimize business operations." "But while the previous version emphasized anonymization and the use of data for statistical analysis, that part is no longer there," he said. "Could that mean [people's] data is less secure? It's possible." Wong said facial recognition scans could also enable the authorities to track a person's whereabouts once they landed. Last year, state security police in mainland China used nationwide camera-linked facial recognition technology to track down dissident Xu Zhiyong, who is facing charges of subversion for writing essays critical of ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping. Gathering more information Former Democratic Party lawmaker Andrew Wan said the changes to the privacy policy were a "sneaky" way to get hold of more information about people's movements. "It's pretty sneaky not to disclose who the third parties are," Wan said. "It's very different from the transparency that previously surrounded the disclosure of departing passengers to commercial partners." "It's a bit of a black box, so it's hard to know if they are hiding something," he said. "Maybe these facial recognition checkpoints can also be used as a form of surveillance technology." Financial secretary Paul Chan reported a record fiscal deficit in Wednesday budget, blaming "ups and downs" faced by the city in the past two years, including the Sino-U.S. trade war, the 2019 protest movement, and the coronavirus pandemic. Hong Kong economist Law Ka-chung said the city's resilience had once been linked to its status as a free-wheeling, international port. "Now, it is gradually being cut off from the rest of the world and becoming more like mainland China," he said, adding that the city has lost its former status as a financial center attractive to foreign investors. "The common travel area with the Greater Bay Area [cities in southern China] wasn't something that Hong Kong asked for ... and it's all about turning Hong Kong into a city like Shenzhen for political reasons," he said. Reported by Man Hoi Yan, Gigi Lee, Lu Xi and Chan Chun-ho for RFA's Cantonese and Mandarin Services. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. LONDON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- PrimeStone Capital LLP, a shareholder with a c.12.3% holding in Mears Group plc, has sent a public letter to the Board of Directors of the Company asking it to organize a competitive sale process to take the Company private. You can find the letter here: http://www.primestonecapital.com/MER For more information on PrimeStone Capital LLP: http://www.primestonecapital.com/ For media enquiries, please contact Greenbrook: [email protected], 02079522000 SOURCE PrimeStone Capital LLP Aljazeera, February 21, 2021 Separate bomb explosions in Afghanistan killed at least three people including a child and wounded 20 others on Sunday, Afghan officials said. Kabul police spokesman Ferdaws Faramarz said a roadside bomb targeted a police car, killing the driver and a nearby child. Five other civilians including children were wounded.The second blast was caused by a bomb placed in a crowded market in southern Helmand province, killing one civilian and wounding 15 others including two police, said provincial police spokesman, Mohammad Zaman Hamdard. No group immediately claimed responsibility for any of the attacks. Afghan police officials said that an investigation was under way. Bombings and assassinations have occurred on a near-daily basis in the capital, Kabul, in recent months, targeting Afghan security forces, civilian government employees, journalists, religious scholars and civil society activists. Many of the attacks have used sticky bombs explosive devices with magnets that are attached to vehicles and detonated by remote control or timer. On Saturday, at least five people were killed after three back-to-back explosions rocked various parts of the city. The ISIL (ISIS) groups local affiliate has claimed responsibility for some of the attacks, but many go unclaimed, with the government blaming the Taliban.The Taliban has denied responsibility for most of the attacks. In the Doha agreement signed in February 2020, the Taliban committed to peace talks with the Afghan government and to significantly reduce violence. As part of the deal, the United States pledged to withdraw all international troops by April this year. However, violent conflict has continued in Afghanistan, making it difficult to implement the agreement. The new US administration under President Joe Biden is reviewing the withdrawal plan.There are about 2,500 US troops and 10,000 NATO soldiers in Afghanistan now. (Natural News) Weather modification and manipulation dont exist. Weather modification is a crazy conspiracy theory. Weather modification is not scientifically possible. (Article by Robert Wheeler republished from TheOrganicPrepper.com) All of these are phrases that have been repeated ad nauseam by mainstream media for years. Suddenly, however, now mainstream media outlets can (and do) openly discuss ongoing weather modification programs from both corporations and foreign governments. It looks like weather modification is one of those crazy conspiracy theories that isnt so crazy after all. Lets talk about Chinas weather modification program. Chinas program sounds suspiciously like the conspiracy theories the MSM told us were false. A recent story from Business Insider regarding Chinas weather modification projects revealed that China is massively expanding its publicly admitted weather control projects. China aims to be able to cover half of the country in artificial rain and snow by 2025. The project is a rudimentary and now arcane method of cloud seeding, which General Electric claimed the discovery of in the United States in 1946. China launched its program in the 1960s. Dozens of other countries have similar programs. However, China now has the worlds largest, and it employs around 35,000 people. Keep in mind this is the publicly acknowledged wing of the program, not secret research or facilities. In a statement, the Chinese State Council said that the countrys cloud seeding project would expand five times over to cover an area of 2.1 million square miles. China is 3.7 million square miles, which means that the project would cover 56% of its land surface area. Chinas weather manipulation is set to be worldwide by 2034 The State Council said that the project would be at a worldwide advanced level by 2034 and that it will help alleviate disasters such as drought and hail, and that it will facilitate emergency responses to forest or grassland fires. Chinas current publicly admitted program uses artificial cloud seeding, spraying chemicals like silver iodide or liquid nitrogen into clouds which can make water droplets condense, then fall as rain or snow. In 2008, China launched a cloud seeding project in Beijing right before the Olympics that caused rain to fall before the event started. In 2016, China devoted $30 million to cloud seeding and began firing bullets filled with salt and minerals into the sky. In 2017, it spent $168 million on a massive supply of equipment to facilitate the project, including four aircraft and 897 rocket launchers. Business Insider previously reported that Chinas Ministry of Finance wanted to use cloud seeding to create at least 60 billion cubic meters of additional rain every year by 2020. Chinese media reported in 2019 that cloud seeding tactics in Xinjiang prevented 70% of crops from anticipated hail damage. One must wonder if a government has the scientific ability to manipulate the weather on such a grand scale, have they considered weaponizing it as well as using it for benevolent purposes? Some people might ask if the engineering is such that a once-in-a-century storm could be created, or some other ecological anomaly. No, thats just crazy talk. For more information on the weaponization of weather, check out Steve Quayles book, Weather Wars. Read more at: TheOrganicPrepper.com and WeatherTerrorism.com Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) The first batch of Sinovac COVID-19 vaccines is being prepared for delivery to the Philippines, a top official of the Chinese company said Wednesday, adding they are doing their best to ship the doses to the country within the week. In an interview with CNN Philippines, Sinovac Biotech General Manager Helen Yang said the firm is in close coordination with the Chinese Embassy with regards to the shipment of the 600,000 vaccine doses that will be donated by China's government to the country. I think its still possible We will do our best, Yang told The Source when asked if the vaccines may arrive this week. Currently, the product is being prepared, is ready. If we finish all the procedures, I think we will be soon ready to supply the product to Philippines, she added. The doses from the Chinese firm were initially set to arrive on February 23, Malacanang announced earlier this month. However, at the time, Sinovac had yet to receive an emergency use authorization from the local Food and Drug Administration which only gave the green light for the vaccines use on Monday. With the EUA issuance on the table, Yang said the company will now only need to complete the delivery schedule, as well as finalize Customs procedures, which she said will normally take a few days. The FDA announced this week it was granting the EUA for the Sinovac vaccine following a long review of its application, which was previously hampered by the incomplete submission of Phase 3 clinical trial data. Netizens and even lawmakers questioned the approval, given that it came with a warning from the regulatory agency that the product was not the most ideal for frontliners due to its lower efficacy rate. Aside from the Chinese government donation, the country has likewise secured 25 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine. Senator Sonny Angara, citing information from task force officials, earlier said an initial batch of 1.5 million doses is set to be delivered "before the end of March." Samsung is gearing up for the launch of another handset under its M-series. Called the Galaxy M62, the smartphone will arrive in Malaysia on March 3. The Galaxy M62 is said to be the rebranded version of the Galaxy F62 that launched in India recently. Ahead of the official launch, the handset has made an appearance on a local e-commerce website. The listing shows the renders of the upcoming Galaxy M62, which is identical to the Galaxy F62. As of now, there is no word on whether the global version will have a different set of specifications or any other changes. That said, Samsung Galaxy F62 has launched in India for a starting price of 23,999. The top-end model of the phone costs 25,999. According to reports, the Galaxy M62 will be available in the same price vicinity. As far as specifications go, Samsung Galaxy F62 features a 6.7-inch full HD+ Super AMOLED Plus display. It runs on a 7nm Exynos 9825 processor. The phone comes with up to 1TB of expandable storage via a microSD card. On the software front, Galaxy F62 runs Android 11-based One UI 3.1 out-of-the-box. In the camera department, Samsung Galaxy F62 has a 64-megapixel primary sensor. The other three cameras on the back are a 12-megapixel ultra-wide-angle lens, 5-megapixel macro sensor, and a 5-megapixel depth sensor. On the front, the handset houses a 32-megapixel punch-hole camera for selfies. Another highlight of the phone is the 7,000mAh battery. The phone also ships with a 25W fast charger. It also supports reverse charging. Other key features of the phone are the side-mounted fingerprint sensor and Samsung Pay (NFC). It comes in Laser Blue, Laser Green and Laser Grey colour options. In case you are planning to buy the phone, you should definitely check out our detailed Samsung Galaxy F62 review. Aankhen 2 is one of the highly anticipated film sequels in the coming times, as it aims to take over from its previous instalment, which was released way back in 2002. The news of the arrival of this sequel was announced last year, which had created a lot of excitement and speculations among fans. After a long wait, a new update of the upcoming film seems to have finally arrived. It has been revealed that the film is likely to enter the production stage in the coming month of May. Aankhen 2 to start rolling in May While the buzz for the sequel of the 2002 hit had been going on for the past few years, it has only recently been confirmed that the film is in works. Fans have been waiting ever since to hear the news about when its production would actually start. The news has now been revealed in Mid Day that the film will begin its shoot in May, which is only a couple of months away. It has been reported that Akshaye Khanna and Sidharth Malhotra will be seen alongside Amitabh Bachchan in the star cast of this film. ALSO READ: Sidharth Malhotra Sets Major Fitness Goals With His New Outdoor Workout Video; Watch In addition to this, actor and comedian Sunil Grover has also reportedly joined the films cast. A source has revealed to the portal that the heist will be seen in a grander scale in the plot of the sequel. The character of Amitabh Bachchan will be seen leading a new team this time, which has visually impaired people, who will be played by Akshaye, Sidharth and Sunil. The location of the film is being set abroad and the makers have been scoping places such as the UK and Bulgaria. The shooting of the film is likely to begin in May if the schedule pans out accordingly, the source revealed. ALSO READ: Sidharth Malhotra Announces Release Date Of Kargil-based War Film 'Shershaah' It has further been revealed that Sidharth Malhotra is currently busy shooting for his upcoming film, Mission Majnu and will begin preparations for Aankhen 2 around mid-April. Sidharth, Akshaye and Sunil are expected to begin the shoot early, while Amitabh Bachchan will be joining them later. While it is confirmed that Akshaye, Sidharth and Amitabh Bachchan will be part of the film, the finalising of Sunil Grover in the plot is yet to take place. ALSO READ: Kiara Advani Snapped Outside Rumoured Boyfriend Sidharth Malhotra's House ALSO READ: Sidharth Malhotra Marks 3 Years Of 'Aiyaary', Extends Thanks To The Film's Entire Team 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. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. In move many expect to signal U.S. reengagement in the world body, the U.S. Senate Tuesday confirmed Baker-native Linda Thomas-Greenfield to the cabinet-level position of Ambassador to the United Nations. She was confirmed on a 78-21 vote, with one senator not voting. Both U.S. Sen. John N. Kennedy, R-Madisonville, and U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, voted in favor of confirming Thomas-Greenfield. Im proud shes from Louisiana, but Im more proud of her service to our country, Cassidy said in a statement after the vote. The 68-year-old LSU graduate is expected to be sworn in Wednesday by Vice President Kamala Harris. Then, shes expected to travel to New York City, where the UN headquarters are located, to present her credentials to U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Thursday. Thomas-Greenfield also will assume leadership of the global policy-making U.N. Security Council on Monday. Almost immediately Thomas-Greenfield will be thrust into dealing with climate change and COVID-19 along with wars in Syria and Afghanistan and several humanitarian crises. "This confirmation sends a message that the United States is back and that our foreign service is back," U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., told the Associated Press. Bass chairs a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, global health, and global human rights. "We as a country and as a world are safer with Linda Thomas-Greenfield serving as the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Bass added. +3 Political Horizons: Historically Black colleges come into prominence with Joe Biden Grambling State University President Rick Gallot recalled a stab of fear that shot through him when he saw Lee Hall on the campus of the schoo Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have voiced concerns that United States world leadership had slipped during President Donald Trumps tenure because he focused more on U.S. concerns at home. In the breach, China stepped forward, pressuring diplomats to accept its wording on directives and hire its citizens to work in the body. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has claimed that Thomas-Greenfield could be soft on China and pointed to a speech she gave in October 2019 during which she did not scold the communist leadership on its human rights record. During her confirmation hearings, Thomas-Greenfield said she regretted the speech, which she said was mostly aimed at getting more students of color interested in the foreign service. Thomas-Greenfield, who because of protocol couldn't comment after the vote until she is sworn in Wednesday, told The Advocate and The Times-Picayune on Saturday how growing up in Louisiana informed her world views and helped her engage in constructive talks with leaders in other countries. The scoop on state politics in your inbox Get the Louisiana politics insider details once a week from us. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up I am truly excited about the opportunity to serve my country again and I am ready to get to work, she added. U.N. Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told Politico that Thomas-Greenfield and UN Secretary General Secretary Guterres had worked together in 2005. Thomas-Greenfield then led the state Departments refugee and migration division. Guterres was then UN High Commissioner for Refugees. U.S. Senate set to vote on confirmation of Baker native, LSU grad Linda Thomas-Greenfield The U.S. Senate is ready to begin Monday the voting process expected to install LSU alumna and Baker native Linda Thomas-Greenfield in one of He has witnessed her effectiveness and dedication in action, Dujarric told Politico news magazine. Having served for 35 years in the Foreign Service, Thomas-Greenfield comes to the job with considerably more experience than most UN ambassadors. Thomas-Greenfield grew up in segregated Baker, graduating in 1970 from an all-Black high school in Zachery because nearby Baker High School was all White. One of the first African Americans to attend LSU, she was there at the same time as David Duke, who later became a leader in the Ku Klux Klan for a while. She went to the University of Wisconsin for graduate school and in 1982 was one of first Black women to join the U.S. Foreign Service. In 1994, while serving in Rwanda during that countrys genocidal civil war, she had to talk her way out being killed by a solider. President George W. Bush, a Republican, named her ambassador to Liberia from 2008 to 2012. President Barack Obama, a Democrat, moved Thomas-Greenfield to head the State Departments office for African Affairs. In 2017, she retired and worked for an international relations think tank. Thomas-Greenfields husband, Lafayette Greenfield, also worked at the State Department before his retirement, as does their daughter Lindsay Jamila Greenfield. Her son, Lafayette Greenfield II, who the family calls Deuce, is a partner in the Washington, D.C. branch of the Seattle-based law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP. Maharashtra on Wednesday reported 8,807 new cases in the last 24 hours, taking the total infection count to 2,121,119, according to the state health department. The increase in cases was sharp, considering that on Tuesday, the state had reported 6,218 new Covid-19 cases. Mumbai recorded 1,167 new Covid-19 cases, the highest daily spike in about four months, on Wednesday, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) said. The tally of cases in the country's financial capital thus rose to 321,698, while the death toll reached 11,453 with four new fatalities. On Tuesday, the city had reported 643 new cases and three fatalities. On October 28, Mumbai had witnessed 1,345 new cases, after which the numbers had gradually fallen. The state also reported 80 deaths on Wednesday and the total toll from the pandemic stands at 51,937. With 2,772 discharges or recoveries seen during the same period, the active case count is at 59,358. The Centre has deputed multi-disciplinary teams to states witnessing a surge in Covid-19 cases, including Maharashtra to support them in effectively tackling the pandemic. Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray on Sunday announced that, all political, religious and social gatherings will be prohibited in the state. In his televised address, he also said that political agitations will not be allowed for the next few days as they attract crowd. Thackeray warned that if the situation in the state deteriorates, Maharashtra will be put under a lockdown. A 10-year-old boy, who was one of the survivors of the recent attack on Ebute Igbooro by suspected herdsmen have been paralyzed as a resul... A 10-year-old boy, who was one of the survivors of the recent attack on Ebute Igbooro by suspected herdsmen have been paralyzed as a result of the bullets fired into his head. Recall that Ebute Igbooro, a community in Yewa North Local Government Area, was attacked at night by men suspected to be herdsmen. While four persons were reportedly killed, many others, including children sustained injuries, even as houses were set on fire. Speaking about the 10-year-old survivor, a social media influencer, Bimbo Cash, narrated how the boy has been bedridden since the incident. It was said that the boys stepmother and siblings were hacked to death by the attackers. According to her, the boy needs to undergo surgery, adding that about eight bullets are yet to be removed from his head. She said: I was at a hospital in Ogun State when the matron dragged me to see a 10-year-old boy shot in the head by Fulani herdsmen. He needs to undergo surgery. 8 pellets (are) still logged in his head and he was in pain. They hacked his step mom to death, killed his siblings, 8 months baby and shot his father and several others. His father was taken to another hospital. These guys invaded the Igbooro community at night, moved from one house to another, shooting and macheting people. They killed an 80-year-old. He needs to be operated on as soon as the deposit is made. Government is supposed to take responsibility for this care. Im angry that the boy is laying there without hope. The boys right arm and right leg are paralyzed already, which means the bullets in the brain are affecting other parts of his body, she explained. Meanwhile, it was gathered the Ogun state government is now on top of the situation. Video: The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company ADVERTISEMENT The Senate has commenced the screening of the newly appointed chairman-designate of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Abdulrahseed Bawa. The screening exercise commenced a few minutes past noon and is currently being done in plenary with the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, presiding over the exercise. Mr Bawa arrived at the Red Chamber at 11:56 a.m. for the exercise which will have lawmakers ask him questions ranging from his past experiences to his plans for the new position he has been appointed for. He was accompanied by the Special Adviser to the President on National Assembly Matters, Babajide Omoworare, and some of his family members. The screening comes one week after President Muhammadu Buhari conveyed a letter to the Senate seeking Mr Bawas confirmation as the EFCC boss. The president, in the letter, communicated his decision to appoint the 40-year-old. The appointment, he said, is in accordance with Paragraph 2(3) of Part1, CAP E1 of EFCC Act 2004. The presidents media aide, Femi Adesina, who made the first announcement on February 16, said the nominee is a trained EFCC investigator with vast experience in the investigation and prosecution of Advance Fee Fraud cases, official corruption, bank fraud, money laundering, and other economic crimes. He has undergone several specialised training in different parts of the world, and was one of the pioneer EFCC Cadet Officers in 2005. He holds a B.Sc degree in Economics, and Masters in International Affairs and Diplomacy. If confirmed, Mr Bawa will be the youngest ever EFCC chairman and take over from Mohammed Umar who has been in an acting capacity since June 2020. Mr Umar assumed the position after the embattled former EFCC boss, Ibrahim Magu was suspended. He was arrested dramatically in July 2020 in front of the EFCC Wuse II office, driven to the Presidential Villa and was also detained for more than four days on the directive of the panel. His arrest and detention was based on allegations levelled against him by the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami. He was thereafter suspended in July after five years as acting EFCC chairperson. A Judicial Commission of Enquiry under the Tribunals of Inquiry Act (Cap T21, LFN, 2004), was set up to investigate the activities of the EFCC under Mr Magu, from May 2015 to May 2020. Although the report has been presented to the president, it has yet to be released to the public. Senate Confirmation not automatic Although Mr Bawa is expected to be confirmed by the Senate, the lawmakers can also choose to reject his nomination. Mr Magu was the last EFCC chairman-nominee to be screened by the Senate. He was screened twice by the Bukola Saraki-led Senate and his nomination was rejected on both occasions on the grounds that he lacked the integrity to lead the countrys anti-graft agency. This was due to two contradicting reports submitted by the SSS one supporting his confirmation and another, rejecting it. He, however, went on to serve as acting chairman for five years. Nobody else in the school building knows this, but my mom died last year. I got in trouble because I didnt feel like being at school on the one-year anniversary of her death, but I didnt feel like telling anyone why. Is it not normal to be different? Everyone tells me I am crazy. Do you think I am? I have been depressed since the pandemic, and that makes it feel impossible to do my schoolwork. I am failing several classes now. I know I need to come back to school, but I dont have any clothes like the other kids have. Now you know what it is like to be a Mental Health Service Coordinator in an Alabama school. I heard those cries for help from students this year. How can students learn when they struggle with those issues? Mental Health Service Coordinators are a huge step forward for Alabama education. Through approval from the Alabama Legislature in 2020, the Alabama State Department of Education and Alabama Department of Mental Health partnered to create a new initiative for Alabama school districts. Now, student mental health needs are being addressed in rural, urban, and suburban schools across Alabama. It is estimated that 20 percent of people have a diagnosable mental health condition. One in five. Think about all of the places in your life. One in five students in your daughters third grade class. One in five coworkers in your office. One in five people in your gym, your church, your favorite restaurant. These numbers are only rising in the midst of the pandemic. Worries about job instability, stress of food insecurity, concern about upcoming mortgage or rent payments, loneliness, isolation, grief, and fear of the future compile. We have seen the toll this takes on the people around us, but our students are often forgotten. Access to mental healthcare is critical. According to the CDC, while children with mental health disorders clearly benefit from early diagnosis and treatment, it is estimated that 80 percent of children with a mental health disorder do not receive care from a specialized mental health provider. A lack of providers in rural areas, long waitlists, cost of care, insurance coverage, and scheduling difficulty all add to the list of barriers preventing children from receiving the services they need. The Mental Health Service Coordinator positions were created to address these disparities. With the 2020 legislative approval, this position was placed in 102 school districts across the state of Alabama. Mental Health Service Coordinators statewide are able to identify mental health needs in the school district, identify mental health resources in the community, and link the resources to the needs. This looks different in every district. This could include assessing and referring students for counseling, providing report card conferencing, providing services and professional development to teachers and administrators, facilitating relationships with community partners and resources, developing a community resource guide for students and their families, providing crisis intervention, helping with truancy issues, implementing restorative justice in disciplinary procedures, and more. The Mental Health Service Coordinator positions are part of a pilot program currently funded by a one-year grant through the Alabama State Department of Education. During the 2021 Alabama legislative session, the legislature will take another look at the funding to see whether they believe this program is worth continuing. 102 Alabama school districts are able to participate in the grant funding for this position in the current school year, but all students deserve to have a Mental Health Services Coordinator in their school district. We must show the legislature that prioritizing mental health for our children is critical to their success. As we choose to prioritize mental health services for our children statewide, we can expect to see the impact for years to come. Impact in our schools, our universities, our workplaces, and our communities. Lets not wait until it is too late. Lets continue to invest in the future of our students. For our children. For our families. For the great state of Alabama. Emily Herring is a mental health service professional Infrastructure Minister Nichola Mallon has announced plans for the new Park and Ride facility at Dungiven. The new scheme will provide around 150 spaces will be adjacent to the junction of the new A6 Dungiven to Drumahoe dual carriageway with the Feeny Road and will be a welcome boost for local commuters. I am delighted to announce this plan for the new Dungiven Park and Ride scheme which will bring greener and cleaner transport for local people while delivering active travel infrastructure for the local community," said Minister Mallon. "The Park and Ride will provide around 150 spaces close to the new A6 dual carriageway, helping to deliver cleaner, greener sustainable transport for the local community. "Park and Rides give people the chance to use the public transport network as an alternative to the private car, helping to drive down congestion and emissions and I am committed to developing them across Northern Ireland." The site is immediately adjacent to the new A6 dual carriageway, a strategically important route connecting the North West to Belfast and beyond. It is hoped the development will help increase accessibility, decrease journey times and attract commuters from Foreglen, Dungiven and the surrounding area. East Derry MLA Cara Hunter welcomed the announcement, saying it was 'long-awaited'. "It is fantastic news for local people in Dungiven that the SDLP Minister Nichola Mallon has announced that her department will now progress the Dungiven Park and Ride," she said. "This is a huge boost for local people helping transform how we travel and commute, while helping tackling the climate crisis by greener and cleaner travel. The Infrastructure Minister has also announced that Dungiven will have new cycle and walking infrastructure linking directly to the Park and Ride. This is a long awaited project for Dungiven and its very welcome news that now an SDLP Minister is in office, shes putting the needs of local people on the agenda. As the next stage in the development of the scheme, the Department will now begin the Pre-Application Discussions with Causeway Coast & Glens Borough Council as a pre-cursor to applying for planning permission later this year. The Department will be working closely with Translink to consider operational requirements for public transport through Dungiven when the Park and Ride is completed. Researchers in the United States have suggested a new approach to treating infection with coronaviruses such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) the agent that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The study showed that inhibiting phosphorylation of a key structural protein expressed on coronaviruses impaired SARS-CoV-2 infection in human lung epithelial cells. The team used inhibitors of the host cell protein glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK-3) to block phosphorylation of the SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein that is essential for coronavirus replication. The researchers also demonstrated that the GSK-3 inhibitor lithium was associated with a significantly reduced risk for COVID-19 Targeting GSK-3 may therefore provide an antiviral therapy for COVID-19 and for coronavirus infections that may arise in the future, says Peter Klein from the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues. A pre-print version of the research paper is available on the medRxiv* server, while the article undergoes peer review. Coronavirus outbreaks are likely to occur in the future Klein and colleagues warn that given the major coronavirus outbreaks that have occurred over the last two decades, it is likely that further outbreaks will occur in the future. In addition to the development of effective vaccines, antiviral strategies that target conserved mechanisms in coronavirus replication and transmission may be needed for COVID-19 and potential future coronavirus outbreaks, they say. What is already known about the nucleocapsid protein? The nucleocapsid (N) protein is essential for coronavirus replication, transcription and assembly. However, N protein expressed by the SARS-CoV-1 virus (that caused the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak) requires phosphorylation by host cell GSK-3 at the arginine-serine (RS) domain. Furthermore, the GSK-3 inhibitor lithium, which is already a common therapy for bipolar disorder, impairs the replication of various coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-1, porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, and transmissible gastroenteritis virus. Interfering with the conserved dependence of the N protein on the host protein GSK-3 may be a viable approach to treat COVID-19 and potential future coronavirus outbreaks, writes Klein and the team. Studies have already shown that despite the N protein of SARS-CoV-1 only sharing 2030% sequence identity with the N proteins of many other coronaviruses, all of the viruses have an RS domain that lies between N-terminal and C-terminal conserved domains. The RS domain of the SARS-CoV-1 N protein includes repeated motifs (SXXXS) that are frequently associated with GSK-3 phosphorylation. Furthermore, one study recently found that SARS-CoV-2 N protein is highly phosphorylated within the RS domain. However, no studies to date have tested whether GSK-3 phosphorylates SARS-CoV-2 N protein or whether lithium exerts any antiviral effect against SARS-CoV-2. What did the researchers do? Now, Klein and colleagues have shown that the RS domain of the SARS-CoV-2 N protein is 90% similar to that of the SARS-CoV-1 N protein and that they each contain two sets of three SXXXS motifs. Although the N protein sequences of other coronaviruses diverge, the team also showed that they still retain SXXXS motifs. As we find GSK-3 consensus sites in the N proteins of diverse coronaviruses, GSK-3 inhibitors may also be effective antiviral therapy in other coronavirus infections, including those that may arise in the future, say the researchers. Next, Klein and colleagues tested the effects of various GSK-3 inhibitors on SARS-CoV-2 N protein expressed in human embryonic kidney 293T cells. They found that lithium chloride and multiple other small-molecule GSK-3 inhibitors, including CHIR99021, AR-A014418, and Enzastaurin, all inhibited N phosphorylation, strongly supporting that GSK-3 is essential for N protein phosphorylation. Furthermore, the team found that the GSK-3 inhibitor CHIR99021 also impaired replication of SARS-CoV-2 in the human lung epithelium-derived cell line Calu-3. ddd GSK-3 inhibitor blocks replication in SARS-CoV2 infected cells: A. Dose-response analysis of Calu-3 cells treated with GSK-3 inhibitors CHIR99021 or Enzastaurin (UPenn). Cells were treated with the drug at the indicated concentrations and then inoculated with SARS-CoV-2. Cells were fixed at 48hpi and total cell count (green) and percent viral infection (blue) detected by immunofluorescence for dsRNA were assessed. B. Calu-3 cells were treated with vehicle or the indicated concentrations of CHIR99021, innoculated with SARS-CoV-2, fixed at 48 hpi, and Spike protein was detected by immunofluorescence (UCLA). Enzastaurin had no effect on viral infection in Calu-3 cells. Testing whether lithium reduces the risk of COVID-19 Since lithium is already widely used to treat bipolar disorder, the researchers investigated whether patients taking lithium are at a reduced risk of developing COVID-19, compared with the general population. They conducted a retrospective analysis of data from three major health systems in the United States. The researchers included data for 121,589 individuals from the University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS), 115,073 from Mount Sinai Medical Center (MSMC), and 102,420 from the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC). All of the patients had been tested for SARS-CoV-2 by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) as of February 2021. Among these individuals, 8,856 (7.2%) patients from UPHS, 10,597 (9.2%) patients from MSMC, and 16,170 (15.8%) patients from UIHC were confirmed SARS-CoV-2 positive. Across all three health systems, 7% of patients who were taking lithium developed COVID-19, compared with 15% among the general population. Furthermore, a meta-analysis of the data using a random-effects model showed that patients taking lithium were 49% less likely to develop COVID-19 than patients who were not taking lithium. What did the authors conclude? The team proposes that inhibition of N protein phosphorylation underlies the antiviral activity of lithium and other GSK-3 inhibitors against SARS-CoV-2. Developing GSK-3 inhibitors that safely and effectively inhibit N phosphorylation is a promising potential approach to controlling SARS-CoV-2 and other coronavirus infections that may arise in the future, says Klein and colleagues. The researchers also point out that the approach is based on a clear mechanism and utilizes clinically-tested, well-tolerated drugs that could be rapidly repurposed for COVID-19. *Important Notice medRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information. The Syrian Observer sat down for an interview with opposition figure Jamal Suleiman to discuss Syria's future in light of impending presidential elections. Fifteen months ago, I spoke with Jamal Suleiman. He had detonated a bomb when he announced that he would run for President in the coming elections, based on the new constitution. During these fifteen months, a lot has changed. The Constitutional Committee is in stalemate; the opposition is getting weaker and more fragmented; there is a new administration in the White House; and the Assad regime is running the presidential elections in pure defiance of the UN Security Council Resolution 2254. I spoke to Suleiman last week over the phone. It is always a pleasure to speak with an old friend, but it is equally rewarding to speak to a well-informed man who is willing to share his knowledge with us. Below is the Q&A. The Syrian government announced that the presidential elections will be held on time and in accordance with the current constitution, approved in 2012. Do you think that the elections will be legitimate while half of Syrias population is displaced across the world? The regimes decision to hold presidential elections amid these tragic conditions that Syria and the Syrian people are going through, regardless of their penchants and positions, is yet another blatant move to recognize UN Security Council Resolution 2254 of 2015. This is a policy of denial that ignores the exorbitant price Syria pays on a daily basis. Therefore, any elections of this kind and under these circumstances will not enjoy any national legitimacy. Do you think that the major powers will agree to holding the elections and acknowledge its outcome? Nine years of ambiguity and complexity in international policies towards Syria, in addition to the ambiguous roles of the active states, have made us lose any certainty with regards to the optics. I do not think that the international community will recognize the elections. It may consider it a fait accompli, but it will not recognize it, and it will not contribute to the establishment of a comprehensive and sustainable peace solution, nor will it participate in any reconstruction, which means Syria will plunge into further suffering and its unity will remain compromised. The Syrian National Coalition (SNC) announced a while ago that it would form a High Elections Commission, to later go back on its word. What do you think about that? It was a shocking move and the motives behind it are still unclear. SNC did well to retract the decision. More than a year ago, you announced your intention to run for president. I had an interview with you at the time, in which you explained your opinion on the matter. Has your opinion changed? Do you not plan on running anymore? No, I did not go back on my word. Most importantly, my invitation to all Syrians (both male and female) who find themselves competent to come forward and express their desire and willingness to become president still stands. However, I would like to re-emphasize what I said in my interview with you and in others, too, that there is no place or legitimacy for any elections except under the safe and neutral conditions mentioned in the Geneva Document and United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254. Safe and neutral conditions mean a transitional phase in which the candidate and the voter can also express their opinions. In a phase where freedom and equality reign supreme, neither the state nor its institutions should be biased towards any party, and the process is carried out under the supervision of the United Nations in order to ensure standards the level of credibility are met. Lets talk about another pressing issue. Many Syrians were suspicious about the position swap that Anas al-Abdah and Naser al-Hariri did last year. What are your thoughts on that? I do not think that this swap of positions strengthens the image of the Syrian opposition as a national force seeking effective democratic change in Syria. Perhaps the reaction of the people outside the political circle, activists, and others following the matter was a clear rejection of the move. It is clear that some opposition figures have become addicted to sitting in the front row and it has become difficult for them to do otherwise. In any case, I think that the opposition should be open to enter into talks with a wider spectrum of Syrians who believe in the Syrian national democratic project and have much to offer in this regard. It is imperative that the opposition does not turn into a monopoly and we should be able to consider ourselves as part of the diverse and rich factions of Syria. You were not present in the last round of negotiations in Geneva or the previous one, for that matter. Why is that? Will you be taking part in future rounds? The main reasons were my professional engagements, which I had to neglect a lot in the past, but I find myself unable to do that now, especially since no substantial progress is being made at the level of the Constitutional Committee, which could have been a gateway to the political transition in Syria, without which there is no viable solution. Who do you think is responsible? The reason for this is the regimes procrastination and its policy of buying time in order to consecrate the current reality and make the presidential elections happen according to the 2012 constitution, with the control it possesses over state institutions. A few days ago, you were in Moscow with Qadri Jamil and Khaled al-Mahamid, and you met Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Is the fact that the meeting coincides with the start of the Constitutional Committees work of any significance? It might carry significance for the Russian Foreign Ministry, but not for us. Did you attend the meeting, representing the Cairo conference? Not at all. I attended as Jamal Suleiman. You were heavily criticized because of your visit to Moscow. That is true, and I got in touch with some of those who criticized me. On the other hand, there are those who support such activity and consider it important, and they are concerned with its results more than they are concerned with sharp polarization to the right or the left. For me personally, and to be clear, when I got became a proponent of the patriotic agenda, it was my duty to understand that I was not just a social media activist (noting that I appreciate and respect the role of activists and their views), I started expressing my genuine views as without any political bias. When I entered the field of national political work, which has been the same since then, it was to make sure that the voice of every Syrian who rejects war, destruction and killing, rejects extremism and terrorism, and also rejects the survival of this tyrannical regime that brought Syria to where it is today, is heard. I wanted to make sure the voice of every Syrian who dreams of a strong and democratic country, in every sense of the word, is heard. I am one of the Syrians who seek to fight the image that has been established over the past nine years, an image that what is happening in Syria is only a war between an authoritarian regime and extremist groups that are more tyrannical than it. Making sure that the voice of the Syrians is heard is our bridge to the United Nations and the international community. We will meet with Russian, American, European, and Arab diplomats and anyone whom we feel would be useful to meet and talk with about the Syrian issue. Tell us a bit about what happened in Moscow. In our meeting with the Russian Foreign Ministry, we emphasized three points: that the upcoming presidential elections cannot have any national legitimacy, as it is not in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 2254 and it will increase the risks that Syria faces; the regimes handling of the Constitutional Committee will lead to its demise; there must be a transitional phase in Syria that opens up future prospects. How did the Russian side receive those points of view ? The Russian Federation is a very influential country in Syria and can influence its future. Russia should support the position of the moderate opposition, as they call us. Personally, I see that as part of the national duty, regardless of any criticism. London, Feb 24 : Politicians in the UK gave the go-ahead to plans by Premier League club Everton for a riverside stadium costing $712 million despite a call by UNESCO to reject the plan because of the impact it will have on Liverpool's maritime World Heritage Site. The city's planning committee unanimously gave the go-ahead. Everton's search for a new home to replace its outdated Goodison Park stadium started 25 years ago. Club officials said the widely supported plan would see a 52,888 stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock that would become a showcase around the world, Xinhua news agency reported. The plans aim to create the most sustainable stadium in the Premier League, the club said in its submission to decision-makers. The plans make provision to add a further 10,000 seats later if the club wants to expand its capacity. Everton predicts that the stadium development will deliver $1.83 billion to the city's economy and help create more than 15,000 jobs. Due to its size, the project will now be referred to the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government Robert Jenrick. City Hall planning managers told the planning committee that UNESCO indicated approval of development within the WHS would lead to further consideration of the loss of Liverpool's WHS status. It would mean Liverpool becoming one of only a few sites in the world to be stripped of the title. Liverpool's WHS, granted by UNESCO in 2004, has been on its "in danger" register since 2012 because of proposed developments within the city. UNESCO has objected strongly to the application on the grounds that the stadium would have an unacceptable major adverse impact on the authenticity, integrity and Outstanding Universal Value of the WHS. But Everton officials said there were no suitable alternative sites, and the Bramley-Moore Dock, opened in the 19th century when Liverpool was one of the world's leading seaports, has stood derelict for many years. Everton also won the go-ahead for major community development around Goodison Park once the new stadium is built in a separate application. Business leaders have welcomed the stadium plan. Henri Murison, director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, described the project as a no-brainer. Murison said: "Giving the green light to major shovel-ready infrastructure projects such as this will be key to spearheading a recovery here in the North of England. Bramley Moore Dock will create thousands of jobs, unlock billions in economic growth for local communities and open up the city further to the rest of the world. "This project will help put the city of Liverpool in the economic Premier League it deserves to be in post-crisis." WEST MIDLANDS, United Kingdom, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Inventor Rob Stephenson is lucky to be alive after the stress of launching his latest product nearly killed him. With the launch complete and steady sales now established, Stephenson has cut back on his workload. He does promise to continue developing new products though. Inventor Launches Adult Toy Despite It Almost Killing Him Stephenson's most successful invention to date is an adult toy called Humpus. Getting it to market required a tremendous amount of time and effort. Between actual development and the ancillary tasks of lining up investors and finding manufacturing partners, Stephenson put in countless hours over several years. The work and stress eventually took a toll on his health. After an intense meeting with manufacturing partners in China, Stephenson felt a crushing pain in his chest. He also experienced difficulty breathing, a matter made worse by a persistent 60-a-day smoking habit. His partner, who is also a nurse, realised he was in trouble and called paramedics. Stephenson was rushed to the hospital for testing and treatment. Though doctors could not confirm he had experienced a heart attack, Stephenson was told he had emphysema. The combination of this diagnosis and his chest pain convinced him to quit smoking. He has also cut back on his work hours in hopes of reducing the stress that comes with his line of work. As for the Humpus, Stephenson managed to get it to market despite his health scare. "Since the incident with my heart, I have decided to take better care of myself," Stephenson said. "I still get angina attacks from time-to-time. I treat these as a signal to slow down and take a break." In addition to continuing his work as an inventor, Stephenson has started a YouTube channel based on his love of fishing. The channel features videos that show anglers simple but effective ways to modify their tackle. Stephenson says that he would be spending more of his time fishing on the beach if it were not for the ongoing COVID-19 lockdowns. Meanwhile, his business continues to grow with the support of partners in the United States. About Rob Stephenson Rob Stephenson, from the UK's West Midlands region, is a serial inventor with plenty of successful products under his belt. One of his inventions, the Claspaway, is a simple device that helps stop necklace and bracelet clasps from slipping away and out of reach. Stephenson has also invented a magnetic tool to pick up sharp objects, like pins and needles, without injury. As an avid angler, his list of inventions even includes a number of products that make fishing more enjoyable and productive. CONTACT: Rob Stephenson Phone: +44 (0)7487 446 163 E-mail: [email protected] Website: humpus.com SOURCE Humpus Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 21:12:14|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close ABUJA, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Ten people were killed and 47 others injured late Tuesday in a rocket propelled grenade attack by Boko Haram militants on two communities in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state in northeast Nigeria, local authorities said on Wednesday. Enditem OTTAWA (dpa-AFX) - U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justine Trudeau jointly unveiled a new U.S.-Canada Partnership Road map. A White House communique explained that the Road map is a blueprint for relationship between the two neighboring governments, and commitment to work in partnership on areas of mutual concern, such as the recovery from COVID-19 and global health security, efforts to combat climate change and shared priorities in defense and security. Biden's meeting with Trudeau, which marked his first bilateral meeting with a foreign leader since assuming office, was virtual through video conference in the wake of COVID-19. The two leaders asserted that their top priority is to end the pandemic. They committed to work together to help prevent future biological threats by strengthening the World Health Organization, and cooperate on the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons [and Materials] of Mass Destruction. They also agreed to work in close cooperation to strengthen the supply chain security and resilience, and to ensure that Canada and the United States are driving a robust economic recovery. The United States and Canada announced joint initiatives to accelerate economic recovery of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with a focus on supporting women-owned and minority/Indigenous-owned SMEs, by leveraging the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) SME chapter and the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) model. Biden affirmed the goal for the United States to achieve a net-zero carbon pollution free power sector by 2035 while Trudeau reaffirmed the goal for Canada to achieve 90 percent non-emitting electricity by 2030. Biden said that now that the United States is back in the Paris Climate Agreement, 'we intend to demonstrate our leadership in order to spur other countries to raise their own ambitions'. Canada and the United States are launching a high-level Climate Ambition Ministerial to align the two countries' policies and goals, and to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. With the aim to root out racism and discrimination in both the countries' systems, both sides agreed to re-establish the Cross-Border Crime Forum. Biden and Trudeau, who are leaders of key NATO member nations, discussed their work with European allies to bolster transatlantic security. The North American Aerospace Defense Command will be modernized, and an expanded U.S-Canadian Arctic dialogue to cover issues related to continental security, economic and social development, and Arctic governance will be launched. Biden vowed to work together with Trudeau for the safe return of two Canadians detained in China. 'Human beings are not bartering chips,' Biden said. 'In the face of COVID-19, of climate change, of rising inequality, this is our moment to act, said Trudeau. The meeting is seen as an effort by Biden to set the records straight after former President Donald Trump's rocky relationship with his Liberal neighbor. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de Amsterdam, 24 February 2021 - Heineken N.V. ('HEINEKEN'), The Coca-Cola Company and the Coca-Cola System in Brazil have reached an agreement (the "Agreement") to redesign their longstanding distribution partnership in Brazil. The Agreement marks a new milestone in the relationship among the companies; it re-aligns the interests of all parties for the future and builds on a solid historical foundation. As per the Agreement, expected to become effective mid-2021, the parties will begin a smooth transition of the Heineken and Amstel brands to HEINEKEN Brazil's distribution network. The Coca-Cola System in Brazil will continue to offer Kaiser, Bavaria and Sol, and will complement this portfolio with premium brand Eisenbahn and other international brands. The Agreement allows the parties to better serve consumers and customers in the Brazilian market with a solid portfolio, building on the positive momentum developed over many years of successful collaboration. Additionally, as part of the redesign of the distribution partnership, the parties will have more flexibility. Subject to certain mutually-agreed upon terms established in the Agreement, the Coca-Cola System in Brazil will be able to produce and distribute alcoholic beverages and other beers in a certain proportion to HEINEKEN's portfolio and HEINEKEN will be able to explore further opportunities in the non-alcoholic segment. This will allow Brazilian consumers to benefit from a wider array of options. Mauricio Giamellaro, Managing Director HEINEKEN Brazil commented: "I am very pleased to redefine our distribution partnership with the Coca-Cola System in Brazil. Through a dual route to market, we will be able to reach and better serve our consumers and customers with our broad portfolio, leveraging two strong distribution systems." Luis Felipe Avellar, President Coca-Cola Brazil & South Cone Operations commented: "Our companies have a long partnership history in Brazil, and we are pleased to reach a new agreement that will serve consumers for many years to come." Ricardo Mello, President of the Association of Coca-Cola Bottlers in Brazil commented: "This new agreement is positive news not only for the parties involved but for our Brazilian clients and consumers as well." The parties have agreed to an initial term until December 31, 2026 with automatic renewal for another 5-year term subject to the terms of the Agreement. The Agreement is subject to customary regulatory approvals. As part of the Agreement, the parties have agreed to end the existing litigation between them relating to the previous distribution agreements. ENDS Press enquiries Sarah Backhouse / Michael Fuchs E-mail: pressoffice@heineken.com Tel: +31-20-5239-355 Investor and analyst enquiries Federico Castillo Martinez / Janine Ackermann / Robin Achten E-mail: investors@heineken.com Tel: +31-20-5239-590 Editorial information About HEINEKEN HEINEKEN is the world's most international brewer. It is the leading developer and marketer of premium beer and cider brands. Led by the Heineken brand, the Group has a portfolio of more than 300 international, regional, local and specialty beers and ciders. HEINEKEN is committed to innovation, long-term brand investment, disciplined sales execution and focused cost management. Through "Brewing a Better World", sustainability is embedded in the business. HEINEKEN has a well-balanced geographic footprint with leadership positions in both developed and developing markets. It employs over 84,000 employees and operates breweries, malteries, cider plants and other production facilities in more than 70 countries. Heineken N.V. and Heineken Holding N.V. shares trade on the Euronext in Amsterdam. Prices for the ordinary shares may be accessed on Bloomberg under the symbols HEIA NA and HEIO NA and on Reuters under HEIN.AS and HEIO.AS. HEINEKEN has two sponsored level 1 American Depositary Receiptand follow us on LinkedIn , Twitter and Instagram . Attachment Professor Kofi Agyekum, Dean of the School of Performing Arts at the University of Ghana, has urged Ghanaians not to cause chaos after Supreme Court's ruling on the election petition filed by former President John Dramani Mahama. A nine-member Supreme Court (SC) panel on Monday unanimously dismissed a review application by Mr. John Mahama. Mr Mahama filed an application for review of the Supreme Courts ruling that prevented him from reopening his case. According to his motion, the SC made fundamental errors of law including the ruling being per incuriam of constitutional provisions, statutes and previous decisions of the Supreme Court. I am advised by counsel and verily believe the court made fundamental errors of law including the ruling being per incuriam of constitutional provisions, statutes and previous decisions of the Supreme Court...Among these errors, I am advised by counsel and verily believe is an error whereby the courts subordinates a provision in the Evidence Act to a rule in subsidiary legislation by the Rules of Court Committee, portions of the application read. However, a ruling read by Chief Justice Anin Yeboah said the application was not based on law and so dismissed it. "We dismiss the instant application as being wholly without merit," the Chief Justice said. The Supreme Court has set 4th March 2021 to determine the final outcome of election petition. Speaking on Tuesday's edition of Peace FM's "Kokrokoo", Prof. Kofi Agyekum, popularly called Opanyin Agyekum advised the citizerny to let peace prevail after the ruling. "Let's be patient and wait. Whatever direction the verdict goes, we should ensure peace in the nation," he said. 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. Featured Video Accretive Transaction Delivers Revenues and Positive Contribution to AUSA EBITDA ALPS Business Accelerating - Contracts Signed in Past 5 Weeks for Total North of $5 Million ALPS Core Element in AUSA's Unique Capital-Light Expansion Strategy Terry Booth to Take the Helm as CEO upon Closing LAS VEGAS, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Australis Capital Inc. (CSE: AUSA) (OTC: AUSAF) ("AUSA" or the "Company") announced today that, further to its press release dated January 5, 2021, the Company has entered into a definitive agreement (the "Definitive Agreement") with the principals of ALPS for the acquisition of 51% of the issued and outstanding shares in ALPS (the "ALPS Transaction"). The Definitive Agreement has an option permitting the Company to acquire the remaining 49%. Furthermore, the ALPS Transaction also includes the appointment of Terry Booth as AUSA's CEO upon completion. Accretive Transaction to Deliver Rapid Growth Since its management buyout from Aurora Cannabis in May 2020, ALPS has rapidly built a blue-chip roster of global customers and a growing pipeline of potential new deals. ALPS currently is executing on a number of contracts, including four that were signed and announced in the past month: Aurora Cannabis - Annual ongoing services contract, multiple locations globally Cann Group - Cannabis facility contract + APIS extended services contract in Australia Multiple undisclosed cannabis related contracts in the U.S. Bluehouse Greenhouse 62 acre vegetable facility contract in California , U.S. , U.S. Vertical Harvest 200,000 sqft multi-level urban facility contract in Wyoming , U.S. , U.S. Aldershot Greenhouses 200,000 sqft facility expansion contract in Ontario, Canada 200,000 sqft small plant production facility in Finland 20,000 sqft crop research facility in northern U.S. Tropica facility for the cultivation of aquarium plants in Germany McMaster University , life Science Centre, Ontario, Canada , life Science Centre, Queen, Denmark ornamental plants ornamental plants Middle East large fruit & vegetable facility The ALPS Transaction, upon closing, will be immediately accretive to AUSA results, with further material growth anticipated in the coming months. Enabling Capital-Light Strategy Execution In addition to delivering profitable revenue growth to AUSA, the ALPS Transaction is a key enabler of the Company's strategy to secure access to low-cost, hi-quality biomass to fuel the scale up of its brands. The ALPS Transaction, and the pending acquisition of Green Therapeutics LLC ("GT") by the Company (the "GT Transaction"), which is progressing well towards completion, signals a pivot for AUSA from investment company to becoming a formidable, highly recognizable MSO. The U.S. cannabis space continues to grow at a high rate and is anticipated to reach in excess of $40 billion by 20251. Executing on this opportunity requires strong brands, agility, and a tight Capex and OpEx operating model that the AUSA strategy accounts for. With the change in the Senate and the White House, regulatory changes in the U.S. cannabis industry are considered by many to be inevitable. This will bode well for all participants in the industry. While other companies use third-party cultivated inputs for the manufacturing of their products, the AUSA model, through leveraging ALPS IP with its partners, is expected to result in a strongly reduced cost of goods sold. Furthermore, ALPS' three decades of experience in optimized facility design results in high-quality, high yield products at low operating expenses, further strengthening the AUSA brand proposition. Consequently, through its ownership of ALPS, AUSA with its strong network will look to set the standard of cannabis cultivation, processing and manufacturing globally. With the ALPS Transaction comes the iconic, award winning west coast brand Mr. Natural, while the GT Transaction will bring further high-end award-winning brands: GT Flowers, Tsunami and Provisions. These transactions set up AUSA to expand its footprint across the U.S. and make these brands available to all consumers and patients. _______________ 1 Source: Cowen & Company, Vivien Azer and team Rapid Growth More to Come ALPS has built a rapidly expanding business development pipeline and is in advanced negotiations on potential projects with a total CapEx in excess of $2.5 billion. The Company anticipates that ALPS will convert on multiple opportunities in the coming months, and management anticipates delivering accelerated, profitable growth through the ALPS Transaction. The Company has identified a number of significant growth catalysts for the ALPS business: Growing demand in the legal cannabis sector, including lifecycle-related demand for facility upgrades. Longer term, the potential legalization of cannabis at the U.S. federal level is likely to create demand for massive-scale, centralized cultivation facilities, in which ALPS is the global leader. Growing demand for high-tech facilities for more traditional crops such as soft berries and vegetables, as well as facilities for newly popular crops (e.g. algae, in which ALPS has unique expertise), creates further growth momentum and de-risks the value proposition. Additional momentum is created by the drive for operations to become more sustainable, which includes increased demand for self-sufficiency by cities, regions and countries ('grown by locals for locals.' The Company is working on three such projects). ALPS' new compliance and data-driven service offering, APIS, is designed to create a high-margin, recurring revenue stream. Developed using over three decades of design and operational experience, APIS has been resonating strongly with operators, and interest in this new solution is strong with demand coming both from the regulated cannabis sector and more traditional horticulture market segments. The Company recently signed its first APIS contract with Cann Group in Australia , and management anticipates consistent conversion on opportunities currently in its business development pipeline. Management Changes As announced on January 5, 2021, upon completion of the ALPS Transaction, Terry Booth, former CEO of Aurora Cannabis, will become CEO of the Company. Dr. Duke Fu, currently Interim CEO, will take on the role of COO of the Company. Management Commentary "With the completion of the Definitive Agreement, we continue to execute at a rapid pace," stated Dr. Duke Fu, Interim CEO of AUSA. "We are focused on building significant shareholder value, which is reflected in the transaction terms that are EBITDA weighted and back-end loaded through the earn-out provisions." Terry Booth, who will become CEO of AUSA upon completion of the ALPS Transaction, added, "The ALPS Transaction and the GT acquisition are the first steps in combining forces to build a strong and very hard to imitate MSO in the U.S. cannabis space. The opportunity for the cannabis industry has never been greater. Political changes towards acceptance of cannabis in the U.S. will, we believe, drive major regulatory changes in short order. We anticipate that this will result in an exponentially greater opportunity for all cannabis companies in the U.S., and especially for those that are well differentiated, such as AUSA. We strongly believe that with our assets, team, experience and vision, we have what it takes to build the next generation of MSO, delivering substantial growth with a strong focus on high-quality, resulting in superior brands and an enhanced bottom line. The ALPS standard in cultivation and compliance will continue to set the industry benchmark globally, and will be reflected across all of AUSA's operations." Board member Avi Geller and Chairperson of AUSA's Compensation and Nominating committee, stated, "We are very pleased with the rapid progress made at AUSA with the new leadership team taking over. The Company is in the late-stage completion of two significant and accretive transactions that will set the stage for success in the U.S. cannabis market. Our Compensation and Nominating committee is focused on attracting the very best talent in every vertical that we intend entering into, be it cannabis or traditional crops, and we have made significant appointments. We are engaged in multiple negotiations that are progressing well, and have significantly stepped up our efforts to engage with shareholders and other stakeholders. We are proud of the progress made and look forward to reporting on our rapid development as management continues to execute." Completion timeline Management anticipates completion of the ALPS Transaction within the next 7 days, subject to satisfaction of customary closing conditions, with the ALPS results to be consolidated in the AUSA accounts from the closing date going forward. ALPS Transaction details Under the terms of the Definitive Agreement, AUSA will pay to the ALPS principals between $13.7 million to a maximum of $25.94 million in total consideration for a 51% interest in ALPS and the option, exercisable by the Company at any time for three years after closing of the ALPS Transaction ("Closing"), to acquire the additional 49% interest in ALPS for additional consideration. The consideration will be paid based on various milestones and adjustments as set out below. Initial Consideration (i) $10,000,000 paid through either the issuance of common shares of AUSA ("AUSA Shares") valued at a deemed price of $0.20 per AUSA Share, or in cash, or a mixture of both at the election of AUSA on Closing; (ii) $2,000,000 paid in cash on Closing; and (iii) a $1,700,000 indemnity holdback (the "Indemnity Holdback"), payable eighteen 18 months after Closing, adjusted for any indemnity claim made by AUSA pursuant to the terms of the Definitive Agreement. The Indemnity Holdback payment, if any, may be paid, at the election of AUSA in cash or AUSA Shares at a deemed price per AUSA Share equal to the greater of (i) the 10-day volume weighted average price calculated from the payment date and (ii) $0.14625. Milestone Consideration Pursuant to the Definitive Agreement, AUSA is also responsible to pay to the ALPS principals the following milestone-based payments: The maximum milestone payments (the "Milestone Payments") that will payable, assuming full satisfaction of all milestones and the exercise of the option will be $24 million , payable in six installments, commencing no earlier than September 30, 2022 ; Each Milestone Payment will be calculated against revenue (3 payments) and EBITDA (3 payments) targets, related to 12 consecutive month periods between July 1, 2021 and as late as December 31, 2025 . The actual Milestone Payments are capped at $8 million per 12-month period (up to $24 million in total), contingent on actual performance. The maximum Milestone Payments of $24 million are payable upon ALPS achieving cumulative revenues of $108.7 million with cumulative EBITDA of $48.9 million . The first calculation period commences on July 1, 2021 and such period will end, at the option of the ALPS principals subject to ALPS achieving certain revenue and EBITDA milestones, on June 30, 2022 or September 30, 2022 and in any event no later than December 31 , 2022. The second calculation period commences on the day following the last day of the first calculation period and may end, at the option of the ALPS principals subject to ALPS achieving certain revenue and EBITDA milestones, on the 12 month or 15 month, and in any event no later than the 18 month anniversary, of the commencement of the second calculation period. The third calculation period commences on the day following the last day of the second calculation period and will end, at the option of the ALPS principals subject to ALPS achieving certain revenue and EBITDA milestones, on the 12 month or 15 month, and in any event no later than the 18 month anniversary, of the commencement of the third calculation period. If a Milestone Payment becomes payable by AUSA prior to AUSA's exercise of the option (the "ALPS Purchase Option") to acquire the remaining 49% interest in ALPS, such payment will be 51% of the applicable Milestone Payment. The number of AUSA Shares to be issued by AUSA in connection with the payment of the Milestone Payment or the payment for the exercise of the ALPS Purchase Option will be calculated by dividing the amount payable by an amount equal to the greater of (a) the volume-weighted average trading price of the AUSA Shares on the Canadian Securities Exchange (the "CSE") for the ten trading days immediately prior to the applicable payment date and (b) $0.14625. The Definitive Agreement contains a provision that if an any transaction (or one or more related transactions) pursuant to which any person (other than the ALPS principals or those acting jointly and in concert with them) is or becomes the beneficial owner, directly or indirectly, of securities AUSA representing fifty percent or more of the total voting power represented by AUSA's outstanding voting securities, without the approval of the board of directors of AUSA, then AUSA shall exercise the option to acquire the remaining 49% of the shares of ALPS (if not already exercised) and pay the remaining Milestone Payments for periods not then expired and the Indemnity Holdback (if not already repaid). Additional details with respect to the ALPS Purchase Option are as set forth in the January 5, 2021 press release. A copy of the Definitive Agreement will be filed under the Company's profile on SEDAR. About ALPS ALPS, formerly Aurora Larssen Projects, is a global leader in facility design, construction management and (post) commissioning services to the horticultural sector across a wide variety of commercial crops. Going back over 30 years, ALPS has built a stellar reputation as the leading innovator for greenhouse, indoor and outdoor facility design, with over 100 million square feet of projects under its belt. The Company's approach centers on vendor agnostic designs geared towards optimizing economic returns under all possible market and environmental conditions. In the past seven years, ALPS has established itself as a leader in the cannabis space, having been involved in over 50 projects globally, including the highly automated, low-cost, high-quality, 800,000+ sq. ft, flagship facility Aurora Sky. 'Designed by ALPS' has become a badge synonymous with quality and a high return on investment. ALPS' leadership in the industry is due to a number of strongly differentiating factors: Technology choice: Most of ALPS' competitors are builders providing their own products. ALPS, on the other hand, is vendor agnostic and will always design what is the optimal solution for its clients. This ensures ALPS is able, if needed, to always incorporate the newest innovations into its designs without having the overhang of legacy systems. This approach resonates strongly with growers who fully understand the intrinsic value of technology choice. Optimized localized solutions: ALPS pre-project services identify the optimal solutions based on local climate, power availability, utility, costs, labor availability, desired output and quality. These findings support the long-term value of the facility, ensuring costs align with expected margins. Economic optimization based on real life experience: Having been involved post commissioning in the operation of many facilities, ALPS understands the challenges growers will face once facilities are up and running, and adapts its solutions accordingly. Enhanced economic returns through post-commissioning service offering: ALPS' deep operational experience has resulted in the development of a unique suite of post commissioning service offerings. These offerings enable growers to reduce operating costs, maintenance and related CapEx, while extending a facility's economic lifespan. This further reduces economic and operational risks, setting ALPS apart from its 'design and construction only' peers. Intellectual Property: ALPS is a master of Controlled Environment Agriculture, an ability enhanced by its deep experience in developing high-quality, high throughput facilities, including those that must adhere to GACP/GMP regulations, as well as proprietary product offerings. For instance, ALPS has developed unique IP around climate delivery, which results in cost savings as well as higher product quality and yields with reduced disease risk. Scale: the scale of the ALPS organization provides competitive advantages through the accumulation of in-house talent across a wide range of specializations which is difficult to emulate. Partnerships: ALPS is the partner of choice for many vendors who are willing to co-develop proprietary solutions available only to ALPS customers. Furthermore, the assurance ALPS provides to vendors as a representative of both client and vendor ensures both parties align from the start of a project, reducing surprises and cost overruns during the life of the project. As a consequence, ALPS can negotiate cost-savings for the client that would otherwise be unavailable if the client went to a vendor directly. Brand: The quality of design, project management, commissioning, project handover, and post-commissioning services mean that ALPS' customer satisfaction is exceptionally high, delivering significant brand equity, as well as strengthening vendors' willingness to partner with ALPS. The "ALPS Standard" also provides considerable brand equity towards consumers of the end products, strengthening a client's market position. Compliance: APIS, the Company's new compliance and data driven service offering, enables growers to de-risk compliance and regulatory based concerns. APIS is a powerful tool designed to integrate multiple systems into a single source of data and information. It provides secure dashboards, track-and-trace functionality, as well as quick access to retrievable data useful for production personnel, facility owners, auditors, and data analysis. However, APIS is not just for regulated markets like cannabis; it also provides operational insight and controls for traditional vegetable and non-vegetable crops. This is called Industrialized Greenhouse Management. Quality of design, execution and innovation have enabled ALPS to grow rapidly, and the company currently serves customers across the globe. About AUSA AUSA is implementing a growth strategy towards establishing a highly competitive and profitable MSO in the U.S. and global cannabis markets. AUSA is closing a transaction for 51% ownership of ALPS, the world's premier design, construction management, commissioning and post commissioning consultancy for horticultural crops, such as cannabis, fruits, vegetables, mushrooms and algae. The Company also holds an option for the acquisition of the remaining 49% of ALPS. AUSA is currently working towards the closing of a transaction whereby it will acquire 100% of the membership interest in Green Therapeutics LLC, an award-winning MSO with operations in Nevada, Missouri and Oklahoma. Through GT and ALPS, the Company believes it will be able to secure low-cost access to cannabis biomass to fuel the scale up of its award-winning brands across the U.S. and global cannabis markets. AUSA's other business and assets include investments in ALPS, Cocoon, Body and Mind Inc., Quality Green, Folium Biosciences, and land assets in Washington and Michigan. The Company's common shares trade on the CSE under the symbol "AUSA" and on the OTCQB under the symbol "AUSAF". For further information about AUSA, please contact: Marc Lakmaaker [email protected] T: +1.647.289.6640 Forward-Looking Statement This press release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein is forward-looking information. Generally, forward-looking information may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "proposed", "is expected", "budgets", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases, or by the use of words or phrases which state that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, or might occur or be achieved. In particular, this press release contains forward-looking information in relation to: the timing and ability to close the proposed transactions with GT and ALPS; the anticipated development of the GT and ALPS businesses; the ability of the Company to execute on its strategy to establish a low capex model MSO; the impact of the changes to U.S. federal and state developments with respect to the cannabis industry and the opportunities this may present for the Company. This forward-looking information reflects the Company's current beliefs and is based on information currently available to the Company and on assumptions the Company believes are reasonable. These assumptions include, but are not limited to: the ability of the Company to successfully satisfy the conditions to closing the ALPS and GT transactions; the ability of management of ALPS, GT and the Company to successfully execute on their respective business plans; legal changes relating to the cannabis industry proceeding as anticipated; and the Company's continued response and ability to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic being consistent with, or better than, its ability and response to date. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Such risks and other factors may include, but are not limited to: general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; general capital market conditions and market prices for securities; the actual results of the Company's future operations; competition; changes in legislation affecting the Company; the timing and availability of external financing on acceptable terms; lack of qualified, skilled labour or loss of key individuals; risks related to the COVID-19 pandemic. EBITDA is a Non-IFRS measure. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization ("EBITDA") should not be construed as alternatives to net income/loss determined in accordance with IFRS. EBITDA does not have any standardized meaning under IFRS and therefore may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other issuers. The Company believes that EBITDA is a meaningful financial metric as it measures cash generated from operations, which the Company can use to fund working capital requirements and fund future growth initiatives. A description of additional risk factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking information can be found in the Company's disclosure documents on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. Readers are further cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information as there can be no assurance that the plans, intentions or expectations upon which they are placed will occur. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Forward-looking information contained in this press release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking information contained in this press release represents the expectations of the Company as of the date of this press release and, accordingly, are subject to change after such date. However, the Company expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable securities law. The CSE has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this news release. Neither the CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. SOURCE Australis Capital Inc. Related Links www.ausa-corp.com Ryan Jarvi 517-599-2746 Attorney General February 23, 2021 LANSING The owner of a Southeast Michigan asbestos abatement company that did subcontracted work for the Detroit Land Bank Authority is facing multiple felony charges for misrepresenting project costs to avoid paying more money to the state, bribing a contractor to secure work for his company and violating state laws that require post-abatement air monitoring to be done by an independent entity. Kevin Woods, owner of BBEK Environmental, will be arraigned in the 37th District Court in Warren on the following charges: Four counts of false pretenses over $100,000, a 20-year felony; One count of false pretenses between $1,000 and $20,000, a five-year felony; One count of money laundering, a 10-year felony; and One count of bribery of an agent or employee, a one-year misdemeanor. The charges against Woods, 50, of Harrison Township, Michigan, stem from an investigation by the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Eastern District of Michigan into the use of Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds for demolitions by the Detroit Land Bank. During that investigation, it became known that Woods had inappropriately paid Aradondo Haskins to obtain contracts with Haskins former employer, Adamo Group, a large demolition contractor in Southeast Michigan. Adamo Group performed demolition work for the Detroit Land Bank Authority and hired BBEK as subcontractor for asbestos abatement. Its alleged that BBEK was frequently selected for abatement work by Adamo Group due to several bribes from Woods to Haskins. Haskins was charged federally for receiving bribes and rigging bids for another contractor and pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bribery and honest services fraud and has since served a prison sentence. It also became apparent that Woods, between at least 2015 and 2019, was violating Michigan statutes requiring abatement contractors to be independent from air monitoring companies used by the abatement contractor. As the violations were of state laws, the Michigan Department of Attorney General became involved. Woods was suspended in July 2019 from being involved in any Detroit Land Bank Authority contracts and performing any work for the City of Detroit. While the complexities of this alleged financial crime cannot go unnoticed, I am grateful for the thorough work performed by my prosecutors and those at the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Nessel said. Our laws on the checks and balances in asbestos removal provide safeguards for the publics health and anyone who violates those regulations puts our residents in harms way. Michigan statutes require a post-abatement air monitoring check to be performed by a qualified neutral party that is completely independent of the asbestos abatement contractor. Two companies frequently used by BBEK to perform this task, HC Consulting Services and Green Way Environmental, were both operated by Woods, the Attorney Generals office alleges. There is no room for corruption in federally funded demolitions, as alleged in the charges today, said Christy Goldsmith Romero, Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The law requiring that air quality monitors must be independent from those who remove asbestos and other hazardous materials is critical to protecting the health and safety of Michigan communities. SIGTARP commends Michigan Attorney General Nessel for standing with us to charge this alleged violation of this law combined with bribery. Much of the air monitoring work done by HC Consulting and Green Way was completed by BBEK employees, and an investigation into the companies financials indicate Woods profited directly from the operations, by as much as $400,000 since 2015. Woods also reportedly violated the Asbestos Abatement Contractors Licensing Act by falsifying project costs to lower the amount of funds owed to the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. Woods was required under law to submit 1 percent of the project costs to the asbestos abatement fund, but would routinely devalue the project by as much as 50 percent to avoid contributing to the fund. A forensic review of Woods submissions over the course of three years, 2015 through 2019, indicate he cheated the state of Michigan out of roughly $26,600 in fees. Woods turned himself in to authorities today at the Michigan State Police Metro South Post in Taylor. He is scheduled to be arraigned on the charges at 10 a.m. Wednesday in 37th District Court in Warren before Judge John Chmura. ### NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Khaled Salem, looking to unseat Chuck Schumer in the U.S. Senate race in 2022, today appealed to the United Nations to eliminate immunity for the Arab monarchies. Khaled calls on the revered body of international law to rescind immunity to prosecution and allow a person or organization the right to sue ruling Arab princes and kings for crimes against citizens, groups and even their own family members. Khaled Salem, U.S. Senate Candidate Khaled Salem, U.S. Senate Candidate "I put Arab Gulf states on notice," said Khaled. "Rulers and those under their command must end brutal and overt racism against immigrant workers. There has long been a pattern of treating workers from all parts of Asia and Africa as less-than-human. That is to say, ruling families look upon non-Arab workers as human garbage whom they treat like slaves. This has to end. The United Nations must intervene and address the plight of people who come to the Middle East for an opportunity to make a living." As Khaled noted, immigrants in the Middle East just want to work and send money home to their families without being starved, beaten, molested or killed. As he put it, "All of these horrors have been allowed to go on for too long and the United Nations must stop these rulers from committing heinous crimes as though they were stepping on insects." Khaled also stressed, "The Gulf States in particular have a free hand in their countries where, except for the ruling class and those given respect and the latitude to come and go in the business community, the working class have no rights and live like animals. The human rights issues are a very serious matter." In addition, Khaled calls on the Gulf States to normalize relations with Israel for the sake of peace. He added, "An alliance must be maintained against the barbaric Iranian influence in the Middle East." Khaled is asking the United States Department of State to start, as soon as possible, to make the place of birth optional on U.S. passports to protect dual citizens abroad from discrimination in most international Airports around the world. Khaled reiterated his other key policy positions, including: Tourist visas to the US must require travel medical insurance for entry. Laws and procedures to reduce domestic violence nationwide. A reduction in U.S. military activity and presence in the Middle East . . A policy that requires these regions pay for American military services. The establishment of a home loan program for middle class single parents. Free university education for American students. Khaled is running in the next general election, scheduled for November 8, 2022. Thirty-four of the Senate's 100 seats are being contested in these elections. For more information, visit https://www.khaled2022forcongress.com/ https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEO_-_American_Human_Rights_Organization.jpg Media Contact: Khaled Salem 1.518.348.6868 [email protected] SOURCE Khaled Salem, U.S. Senate Candidate Related Links https://www.khaled2022forcongress.com/ GOP Civil War Is Now Cancelled, Sen. Rick Scott Says Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), urged the GOP in a Feb. 23 memo to end an escalating intra-party dispute and focus on defeating the Democrats in future elections. At the very same time these far-left radicals are trying to remake America in their image, and lead us into a disastrous, dystopian, socialist future, we have a parade of pundits and even Republican voices suggesting we should have a GOP civil war. NO, Scott wrote in a memo being sent to elected officials, activists, donors, and voters. This does not need to be true, should not be true, and will not be true. Those fanning these flames, in both the media and our own ranks, desire a GOP civil war. The Republican Civil War is now cancelled, he wrote. Scott sent the memo one week after former President Donald Trump issued a statement lambasting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and hinting that he will oppose primary candidates who arent fully behind the Make America Great Again agenda. McConnell opened the rift by laying some of the blame for the Jan. 6 Capitol breach on Trump and going on a media spree to criticize the former president. Scott noted that hes in favor of debate and disagreements within the party, but warned that the Democrats control of Washington is posing an imminent threat to the rights and freedoms secured by the Constitution. Perhaps in more genteel times, a bunch of infighting and arguing wouldnt do much damage. Truthfully, I enjoy bantering back and forth, and I have no interest in trying to quell intraparty policy dialogue and debates, the memo states. But now is not the time for division and heres why: For the first time in any of our lives, socialism has become the unabashed, governing policy of the Democrat Party. The Democrats are fast abandoning any pretense of allegiance to the First and Second Amendments to our Constitution, theyll give up on the rest of it in due time. Inklings of the civil war have already played out in the aftermath of the impeachment trial. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) traveled to Wyoming to host a rally against Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. The former presidents son, Donald Trump Jr., called in to the rally to rev up support for an eventual primary challenger. Scott warned that engaging in internal squabbles is no way to confront the Democrats. This is real life folks. If they can cancel the President of the United States, they will have no problem cancelling you and me. Todays Democrats do not want to simply cancel us, they want to destroy anyone who disagrees with them, Scott wrote. To beat this threatthe threat of socialism, crushing debt, loss of freedomwe must focus on addition, not subtraction; on looking forward, not backward. Damage caused to school playground Police are appealing for information after damaged was caused to a school playground. The incident happened during the half-term break. Damaged was caused to the playground area at Cronk Y Berry School whereby a significant amount of blue paint has been used. Anyone with information is asked to contact Police Headquarters. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Lifelong Staten Islander Mark Murphy has thrown his hat into the ring for borough president, joining a growing list of candidates vying for a place on the ballot this fall in the contest to replace outgoing Borough President James Oddo. I know what Staten Island was and I know what Staten Island can be, Murphy told the Advance/SILive.com about his candidacy. Im committed to this. The West Brighton resident, husband, and father of three, said his main reason for jumping into the race is because of the running joke that Staten Island is the forgotten borough. Its true, Murphy said. We are the forgotten borough. We dont get our fair share; we dont get a seat at the table and thats gotta stop. If elected, Murphy would be the first Democrat to hold the office of Staten Island borough president since Ralph Lamberti lost a reelection bid to Guy Molinari in 1989. Murphy says hes not a politician, despite a personal and family history in politics -- Murphy ran for congress in 2012 and lost to former-Rep. Michael Grimm, and the candidates father, John Murphy, held the boroughs congressional seat from 1963 to 1981. Instead, Murphy, who works as a real estate developer, describes himself as a businessman, and says that his profession makes him uniquely qualified for the job. I cant be lumped in with other politicians because Im not a politician. Im a businessman, and it is very important for me to get results for my clients, he said. Aside from being a businessman, he said the success of the Democratic party over the last few years Assemblyman Michael Cusicks win in a very tough race, his own congressional run where he secured 47% of the vote, Matt Titones borough-wide race for Surrogate Court and former Rep. Max Roses first congressional run shows how committed borough Democrats are to selecting serious candidates and putting them on the ballot. The Staten Island Democratic party endorsed Murphy for borough president ahead of the June 22 primary. Other Democrats listed for the primary with the New York City Campaign Finance Board are Lorie Honor, Radhakrishna Mohan, and Brandon Stradford. City Councilman Steven Matteo and local businesswoman Leticia Remauro are facing off in the Republican primary. Although Novembers general election saw overwhelming Republican success on Staten Island, Murphy said hes not worried about this November. He says the upcoming reset in many sectors of city government from mayor, to comptroller, to city council and agency heads is whats needed for the five boroughs and a new borough president will also be a new start for Staten Island. Right now, were at a pivot point and we need this fresh start. Its time we have a reset here, where we get leadership thats going to work with the city of New York, that is going to make sure we get what we deserve, he said. For 32 years theres been a transfer of a baton in a relay race, and we keep losing. Murphy says the coronavirus pandemic highlighted many issues on Staten Island, like healthcare inequities and the need for a public hospital, which he said will be a priority of his if elected. Hes also focused on getting illegal guns off the streets and making sure East Shore residents see lower flood insurance rates. We cant allow the city of New York to punish Staten Island any longer. We need to polish Staten Island because it is truly the gem of New York City. Im running to rebrand Staten Island -- were the borough of parks, and we need to make it cleaner, greener, safer, and stronger, he said. FOLLOW KRISTIN F. DALTON ON TWITTER. James Bond's latest entry No Time To Die has reportedly changed its UK release date yet again. The much anticipated blockbuster has seen its planned premiere pushed back multiple times due to the Covid pandemic, after originally being slated to come out in April 2020. But following Prime Minister Boris Johnson's announcement that the government hope to end all lockdown restrictions on June 21, it's been reported that No Time To Die's release has been brought forward to 30 September. It's coming sooner! James Bond's latest entry No Time To Die has reportedly changed its UK release date yet again Reports surfaced about the release date change after Tom Linay, who is marketing company Digital Cinema Medias Content Business Director, tweeted the news. The final entry in the franchise to star Daniel Craig will still be released in the United States on October 8 as planned. MailOnline has contacted representatives for Eon for comment. Exciting: The blockbuster has seen its planned premiere pushed back multiple times due to the Covid pandemic, and is now slated for release on September 30 (Rami Malek pictured) Since the Covid pandemic began, No Time To Die has opted to push back its release date rather than be released at a time when cinemas are either closed, or forced to open with limited capacity. On Monday Boris confirmed that cinemas in England will re-open on May 17 with social distancing measures in place, adding it's hoped that all legal restrictions will be lifted on June 21 if the vaccination programme continues. It comes just a month after No Time To Die changed its release date to early October from April 2, after already being hit by several delays due to the coronavirus pandemic. The film, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, was originally scheduled for release in April 2020, but was pushed back to November before the release was changed once again to April 2021 in light of the coronavirus pandemic. At last! No Time To Die was set to come out on April 2 after originally being slated for April 2020, but has faced multiple delays due to the Covid pandemic (Ana de Armas pictured) No Time To Die is the 25th film in the franchise, and finds Bond after he has left active service and is enjoying a tranquil life in Jamaica when his old friend Felix Leiter, played by Jeffrey Wright, from the CIA turns up asking for help. Leaving his seemingly happy life with Madeleine (Lea Seydoux), Bond returns to the field to face Safin (Rami Malek) who is armed with a new dangerous technology that could impact the world. Producer Barbara Broccoli has already teased what fans can expect and said that the movie will deliver a satisfying ending for Daniel's Bond. Speaking on the official James Bond podcast, she said: 'It's a culmination of everything that his portrayal of the character has been through and it ties up all the storylines. It's a pretty epic film, I have to say.' Ending: The new release will be Daniel Craig's final outing as the spy after landing the role for 2006's Casino Royale. He has also starred in Quantum of Solace, Skyfall and Spectre After pushing the film's release back to April 2021 in October, MGM quashed rumours about whether it was thinking of offering the film to streaming services for a $600 million one-year licensing deal. 'We do not comment on rumours. The film is not for sale. The film's release has been postponed until April 2021 in order to preserve the theatrical experience for moviegoers,' an MGM spokesperson told Variety. Bloomberg had reported that Netflix, Amazon and Apple had all been approached about the possibility of the movie being offered up for Premium VOD. Denial: After pushing the film back to April 2021 in October, MGM quashed rumours that it was thinking of offering the film to streaming services for a $600 million one-year licensing deal However, according to Deadline.com, none of the streaming services were willing to put up more than half the amount the studio was seeking. Lead actor Craig did defend James Bond producers' decision to delay the premiere of the new film in October last year. Speaking on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Craig said: 'This thing is just bigger than all of us. We want to release the movie at the same time all around the world and this isn't the right time. So fingers cross April 2 is going to be our date.' The new release will be Craig's final outing as the spy after landing the role for 2006's Casino Royale. He has also starred in Quantum of Solace, Skyfall and Spectre. YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 24, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan has sent a congratulatory letter to new Prime Minister of Georgia Irakli Garibashvili on assuming office, the Armenian PMs Office told Armenpress. The message reads: Your Excellency, I congratulate you on assuming the office of the Prime Minister of Georgia, wishing you success in that important and responsible position for the benefit of Georgia and the Georgian people. The current firm friendship between Armenia and Georgia is based on mutual contacts, deep respect and trust between our peoples, which has a history of decades. I am sure that our governments will continue closely cooperating for the implementation of joint projects, aimed at maximally utilizing the entire cooperation potential between Armenia and Georgia. Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan -- When Xi Jinping became China's top leader in 2012, he inherited a mission China had striven to achieve for generations, which is eradicating absolute poverty. -- The entire system was mobilized to help the rural indigent population, with more than 250,000 teams dispatched to offer on-the-ground support and over 3 million people sent to countryside as special commissioners for poverty relief. -- "Through eight years, under the current standard, China has eradicated extreme poverty for the nearly 100 million rural people affected," Xi said in the New Year speech that rang in 2021. BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Poverty plagued China for thousands of years. Through generations of struggle after the founding of New China in 1949, the country had lifted 700 million out of penury by the end of 2012. By then, China still had nearly 100 million people living under the poverty line, one ninth of the world's total. About 100,000 villages were yet to be connected by paved roads; some 4,000 villages had no access to electricity; and 8.3 percent of the country's rural households eked out a living in ramshackle, grass-thatched mud huts. In November 2012, Xi Jinping became China's top leader, and he inherited a mission China had striven to achieve for generations, which is eradicating absolute poverty. The Communist Party of China (CPC) aimed to reach the goal by the end of 2020. "To achieve this goal, China has to lift 10 million people out of poverty every year," said Eduardo Regalado, senior researcher at Cuba's International Policy Research Center. "That is, 20 people every minute." Xi Jinping (R), general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the CPC Central Military Commission, visits the family of Tang Rongbin, an impoverished villager in the Luotuowan Village of Longquanguan Township, Fuping County, north China's Hebei Province. Xi made a tour to impoverished villages in Fuping County from Dec. 29 to 30, 2012. (Xinhua/Lan Hongguang) TARGETED POVERTY ALLEVIATION At the end of 2012, Xi braved the ghastly winter temperatures to visit the villages of Luotuowan and Gujiatai, impoverished places set deep in the Taihang Mountains of Hebei Province. It was the first of a myriad of inspection tours dipping into the country's underdeveloped regions for Xi as the top Chinese leader. Chatting with villagers, Xi was particularly concerned with difficulties they faced in their daily lives, such as problems concerning their income, food, education and medical care. The austere living conditions were astounding. With similar hardship still haunting tens of millions of impoverished people in rural areas, Xi knew there was no time to spare. While the entire nation held its breath waiting for his answer, Xi's commitment to this seemingly insurmountable task was never in question. He knew what it was like to be hungry. "Meat would not grace our tables for months at a time," Xi once said, referring to the days when he was sent to Liangjiahe Village in northwest China's Shaanxi Province as a farmer some five decades ago. "How I wished to treat my fellow villagers to meat at least once." From a junior local official to China's top leader, Xi always held dear the wish he had made. Ensuring the rural poor improve their lot has been his motivation all along. Reviewing the whole situation, Xi determined that China had entered the most difficult stage of relieving poverty, and the root cause of every household's destitution needed to be identified before any targeted approaches could be formulated. It was during a visit to Shibadong Village in Hunan Province that he proposed a targeted approach to address poverty. "We should seek facts from truth; guidance and development must reflect the local conditions," Xi said. "This is what I mean by targeted poverty alleviation." Chinese President Xi Jinping (C), also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of Central Military Commission, talks with local villagers and cadres at Shibadong Village in Paibi Township of Huayuan County in the Tujia-Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Xiangxi, central China's Hunan Province, Nov. 3, 2013. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) In an effort to meticulously tackle impoverishment in various locations, the authorities need to have a full grasp of the conditions on the ground. Therefore, China launched an unprecedented project to compile a database of every single underprivileged citizen. In 18 months, the country had a complete nationwide register of its poor population. It was the first time in history that an all-encompassing poverty database had been compiled. "Precision poverty targeting is supporting the government in targeting the remaining poor in the last mile," said Jim Yong Kim, former president of the World Bank. "A SOLDIER'S PLEDGE" In November 2015, Xi led a conference on poverty alleviation and development, the largest of its kind ever held. The heads of 22 provincial-level regions in the central and western parts of China signed liability pledges to eradicate poverty in their purview on time, said Liu Yongfu, former director of the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development. "Xi Jinping took a liability pledge at the meeting, and said it is just like a 'soldier's pledge' and we must keep our word," Liu recalled in an interview. "Should tasks not be finished on time, the signatory would be held accountable," Xi was quoted as saying. Xi, too, had nothing to fall back on. The entire system was mobilized to help the rural indigent population, with more than 250,000 teams dispatched to offer on-the-ground support and over 3 million people sent to countryside as special commissioners for poverty relief. While they have brought about transcendental changes for those in dire need of help, 1,800 of them lost their lives in the line of duty. To uncover the root causes of underdevelopment and advise on solutions, Xi pushed on unabated with inspection tours, visiting some of the poorest places in China. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, listens to the poverty-alleviation work about relocation of residents from poor areas as he visits Huopu Village of Jiefang Township in Zhaojue County of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China's Sichuan Province, Feb. 11, 2018. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi) Ahead of the Chinese Lunar New Year in 2018, Xi traveled 2,200 km from Beijing to Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province to review plans for the relocation of communities. Eleven out of the 17 counties in the prefecture were flagged as key locations in the state's poverty alleviation work. "Not a single ethnic group, family or person should be left behind," Xi said. Locked in rough, unforgiving mountain terrain, Atulie'er Village in Liangshan, known as the "cliff village," was emblematic of how difficult it would be for the country to fulfill its poverty-free pledge. Due to the village's isolated location, precariously perched with near-vertical cliffs both above and below, villagers had to use a series of handmade ladders to scale the 800-meter-high cliff. "I saw that children had to climb the unsteady vine ladders on the cliff with no safety measures whatsoever. It made me feel heavyhearted and concerned," Xi said. Two years later, all 344 of the cliff village's former residents left the village in the clouds and moved down to safer ground. Bidding farewell to their former houses, the villagers moved to brand-new apartments. Children resumed their study in bright classrooms, without the need to scale daunting cliffs on the way to class. The village has since seen over 100,000 visitors every year, generating substantial income for the locals. As tourism becomes a pillar industry of the local economy, penury is resigned to history. At the end of 2019, China's rural underprivileged population had fallen to 5.51 million. An end to poverty was within reach. "It is difficult to recall or identify any parallel achievement," said Guy Ryder, director-general of the International Labour Organization. SPRINTING THE LAST MILE In early 2020, the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic dealt a heavy blow to the economy of China and the world. "For the first time in thirty years, poverty is rising," said Antonio Guterres, UN secretary-general. While most people assumed China's goal to lift all its people out of poverty by 2020 would take a back seat, Xi took a tougher path. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, delivers an important speech at a symposium on securing a decisive victory in poverty alleviation in Beijing, capital of China, March 6, 2020. (Xinhua/Ju Peng) In March 2020, Xi presided over an unusual symposium attended by officials ranging from country leaders to local officials. Xi stressed that lifting all rural residents living below the current poverty line out of poverty by 2020 was a solemn promise made by the CPC Central Committee, and it must be fulfilled on time. "There were only 300 days left, and Xi said this meeting had to be held as soon as possible for another round of deployment and mobilization," said Chen Songbai, deputy Party chief of Zhaojue County, Sichuan Province. "He had a very grave look on his face when he said it." Although fiscal revenue was at a low ebb in 2020, Xi pointed out that funding was key to achieving poverty alleviation. Instead of reducing investment, the central government's special fund for poverty reduction reached 146.1 billion yuan (about 22.4 billion U.S. dollars). There was also a one-off supplementary injection of 30 billion yuan. Xi's decision recharged the campaign and the whole society played its part. Once again, the have-nots knew that they would not be left behind under any circumstance. Over the past eight years, the rural landscape has been completely reshaped. More than 9.6 million people suffering from intractable destitution have been relocated from uninhabitable areas. All villages in the country are connected to the network of paved roads. Every rural household is connected to the power grid. More than 100,000 countryside schools have been renovated or rebuilt, providing tens of thousands of rural children with a chance to carve an alternative future. Aerial photo taken on Nov. 11, 2020 shows photovoltaic power generators in Hongni Village in Pingshun County, north China's Shanxi Province. (Xinhua/Cao Yang) Along the path to zero poverty, Xi made plans and decisions that have changed the fate of millions of Chinese families for the better. The path has been littered with bumps and holes, yet he held on to his original motivation. "Through eight years, under the current standard, China has eradicated extreme poverty for the nearly 100 million rural people affected," Xi said in the New Year speech that rang in 2021. China has ended the poverty that plagued the country for thousands of years, but it merely marks another beginning -- the beginning of more miracles yet to be worked, and a path toward an even brighter future. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) -- Four senators filed on Wednesday a resolution seeking to allow detained Senator Leila de Lima, who marks her fourth year in jail on the same day, to attend the chambers plenary sessions and committee hearings virtually. In Resolution No. 658, Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto, Minority Leader Franklin Drilon, and Senators Risa Hontiveros and Kiko Pangilinan said De Lima should be extended the privilege of taking part in meetings as a duly elected member of the 18th Congress. It is established jurisprudence that there is nothing that prohibits detained legislators from performing their duties as long as they are done within the confines of their detention centers, the document read. The lawmakers noted there are already existing telecommunications facilities within Camp Crame to allow her remote participation. In 2019, Drilon and Senator Panfilo Lacson filed a similar resolution. However, a Muntinlupa court denied last year De Lima's request to virtually take part in sessions, ruling that allowing her to do so is no different from allowing her to attend there physically. The senator, who has maintained her innocence of the charges against her, has been detained at Camp Crame since February 2017 for her alleged involvement in the illegal drug trade while she was Justice Secretary from 2010 to 2015. Last week, the Muntinlupa Regional Trial Court Branch 205 dismissed one of the three drug charges filed against her. With this acquittal, her legal team is hopeful for a positive outcome in her two other cases. Judge Catherine Staines told Portlaoise court on Thursday she would, in the future, be no longer prepared to strike out cases for possession of drugs in cases of first time offenders. She stated she would no longer apply Section 1(1) of the Probation Act in these circumstances. She made her comments in the case of Robert Manzanilla (21) of 69 Marina Village, Malahide who faced a number of drugs charges relating to August 29, 2019. He came before the court charged with possession of cannabis, MDMA, cocaine and ketamine, and possession for sale or supply of ketamine, cannabis, MDMA, and cocaine. He pleaded guilty to the charges. Garda Murphy told the court that the charges related to the Electric Picnic in 2019. The total amount of the drugs was 1,700. Defending Solicitor Barry Fitzgerald said that his client was bringing in the drugs for his friends and was distributing to them. There was no gain to him financially. He lives with his mother. When his father died it had triggered a sea change in him. He had 500 in court. Judge Staines asked Mr Manzanilla did he know where cocaine originated from. Societies are destroyed by these drug cartels. They are being sold by organised crime gangs in Ireland. By buying these drugs you become part of that, she said. She noted that he had no previous convictions and she also noted a letter from his mother. She told solicitors and counsel to take note that she was no longer prepared in the future to automatically strike out cases for possession and apply Section 1(1) of the Probation Act in these type of cases. It has got too serious, she stated. She applied the Section 1 (1) of the Probation Act in this case telling Mr Manzanilla that it was not a recorded conviction but if he did come before the courts again it would register. She also afforded Russell Hickey of Deerpark, Shillelagh, Wicklow a chance when he appeared charged with possession of cocaine on September 1, 2019 at the Electric Picnic. The quantity involved was 70. People have to take it more seriously now, she reiterated to Counsel, Suzanne Dooner. Dr. Ernan Norman, a minister of the gospel with the Seventh-day Adventist Church for more than thirty-eight years and actively involved in pastoring the churches, evangelism, disciplining, and nurturing those under his care, has completed his new book Gods Magnificent Eight: 8 Essential Non-negotiable Pillars of the Faith Centered in Christ: a gripping and potent exploration of fundamental Seventh-day Adventist principles and the fight to maintain them. As a Seventh-day Adventist minister and fellow member of the Seventh-day Adventist biblical community, I know that we are not immune from the ever-growing skepticism concerning the certainty of the pillars of the Christian faith. This ever-growing skepticism is happening and has been happening for some time, among evangelical Christians at an alarming rate. Liberal theologians, liberal schools of theology, seminaries, and Bible schools, established for the training of clergy are denying a literal six days of creation, the virgin birth, the reality of the resurrection, to name but a few, writes author Dr. Ernan Norman. Many spiritual thought leaders are teaching things that undermine the historical evangelical understanding of the inspiration of the Scripture and the fall of man into sin. While in general, we, as a Bible-believing, Seventh-day Adventism community of faith, have not succumbed to these liberal theological positions, we do have, and have had in our relatively short history, some supposedly learned minds and a steady growing number of grassroots believers that question and challenge the foundational pillars of our faith. They have called into question, for example, the spirit of prophecy in the life and work of Elen G. White, our position on the 2,300 days, the year 1844, the heavenly sanctuary, and the investigative judgment, and more recently, the Holy Spirit as a member of the godhead. We are not immune. Published by Page Publishing, Dr. Ernan Normans insightful book is a fascinating look at the eight major tenets of Seventh-day Adventism, as intensively studied by Dr. Norman throughout his career as a minister. The seven traditional pillars of the religion are previously laid out by Mark Finley in his writings. Dr. Norman, in this book, adds the church itself as an eighth pillar. Taken together, the eight pillars are completely fundamental and essential for a complete and total understanding of the Seventh-day Adventist religion. These pillars are rooted in Christ and define Seventh-day Adventists as members of a biblical community of faith. Tragically, however, great uncertainty concerning the pillars abound. These non-negotiable aspects of the religion are under direct assault, which will intensify into a mighty sifting siege over time. Dr. Normans book seeks to correct and inspire confidence in the traditional understanding of Seventh-day Adventism, creates a resolve to add guidance to the pillars. Readers who wish to experience this inspiring work can purchase Gods Magnificent Eight: 8 Essential Non-negotiable Pillars of the Faith Centered in Christ at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes Store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble. For additional information or media inquiries, contact Page Publishing at 866-315-2708. About Page Publishing: Page Publishing is a traditional, full-service publishing house that handles all the intricacies involved in publishing its authors books, including distribution in the worlds largest retail outlets and royalty generation. Page Publishing knows that authors need to be free to create, not mired in logistics like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes, and so on. Pages accomplished writers and publishing professionals allow authors to leave behind these complex and time-consuming issues and focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. Please note The Sun Chronicle is providing this story and all of our local coronavirus coverage for free so that all readers have access to this important information about the pandemic. Please visit our dedicated coronavirus coverage page for more stories. If you'd like to support our mission, please subscribe. Since Nepal's prime minister dissolved parliament in December, chaos has engulfed the Himalayan nation, with huge protests and the ruling party split into two warring factions. But for printing shop owner Umesh Babu Shrestha the crisis has brought a welcome boom in orders, after he was unable to pay his rent for nine months because the pandemic dried up business. Now the flags of Nepal's different parties -- and factions within them -- from across the complex and fractious political spectrum dangle drying in every nook and cranny of his Kathmandu shop. "Business has really improved. This has given a hope that we can pay off our dues now, otherwise there isn't a lot of other work," Shrestha told AFP. The smell of paint fills the air as red stars are stamped on one newly-cut cloth after another, before they are hung up in long rows wherever there is space. The country's demonstrations, which at times have descended into ugly clashes with riot police firing water cannon, are a sea of colourful flags and banners. The items are must-have accessories whether the demonstrators back or oppose Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli, 69, a wily former political prisoner who rose to power in 2018 promising an end to years of instability. Flags, said Hem Bahadur Shrestha, a local political leader, are "a signal of my identity and indicator of my ideology". "Followers of other political parties might carry a different flag. We are with the Nepal Communist Party and this is our flag," he said at one recent demo. Another printing shop owner, Kailash Shah, had no work for a whole year but has now hired four new workers after receiving flag orders from all across the country of 29 million. Major shops are now selling up to 3,000 flags a day, and demand is expected to stay strong even after the Supreme Court on Tuesday reinstated parliament. Oli's dissolution of the legislature came after months of wrangling with former Maoist rebel leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who helped the prime minister come to power when their parties merged in 2018 into the Nepal Communist Party. Story continues An unofficial split in the party has now left Oli without a majority in parliament, and he is likely to face a no-confidence vote soon, potentially meaning elections in two years. "The protests have provided some relief to us... if the election is held, we might be able to earn a bit more," Shah said. str/pm/stu/axn ADVERTISEMENT An Akure Magistrate Court has remanded 15 persons suspected to have been involved in illegal mining of gold in Ondo State. They are to remain at the Nigeria Correctional facility pending an advice from the director of public prosecution in the state ministry of justice, Damilola Shekoni, the magistrate, ruled. Mr Shekoni gave the ruling on Monday after the defendants were arraigned on a three count charge of illegal mining contrary to relevant laws of Ondo State. The court also remanded three suspects arrested by the Ondo State Security Network(Amotekun) for illegal possession of firearms and cattle rearing in a government forest reserve without permission. The 15 suspects were earlier arrested in the forest in Owo by Amotekun operatives. The Amotekun made the arrest while enforcing the quit order given to herdsmen to register or vacate the states forest reserves. The order given by the state government followed the increased cases of kidnapping and other criminality traceable to some herdsmen within the forest. They were charged for trespassing on government reserves and illegal mining punishable under section 517 of the criminal laws of Ondo State and 134 of the Minerals and Mining Act of 2007. The prosecuting counsel, Olusegun Akeredolu, said the court had no jurisdiction to hear a case of illegal mining and prayed for the remand of the defendants pending the advice of the director of public prosecution. Counsel to the defendants, Yemi Salau, who agreed with the prosecution on the lack of jurisdiction by the court, however, sought their bail citing Section 269 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Law in Ondo State. Mr Shekoni, after listening to arguments by the counsels, especially on the jurisdiction of the court, invoked Section 272 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Law and remanded the defendants in Owo and Ondo facilities of the Nigeria Correctional Services. He also directed the prosecution to forward the case file of the defendants to the office of Director of Public Prosecutions for legal advice and adjourned the case till march 26 2021. He also said COVID-19 tests should be conducted on the defendants before their transfer to the correctional facilities. Mr Salau and the state commander of Amotekun, Adetunji Adeleye, expressed satisfaction with the proceedings. The case of the three defendants remanded for illegal possession of fire arms, was also adjourned to March 26 for further hearing. An extinct and previously-unknown species of goose has been identified within a 4,600-year-old painting that has been dubbed the 'Mona Lisa of Ancient Egypt'. The painting, now held in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, once adorned part of the north wall of a chapel in the Mastaba (or tomb) of Nefermaat and Itet at Meidum. University of Queensland expert Anthony Romilio's fresh analysis of the artwork determined that the bird with its distinct bold colours and patterns was unique. The extinct species had red, black and white markings on its face, grey wings with white marks and a speckled red breast distinct from modern red-breasted geese. Two other species of the waterfowl are shown in the painting those of greater white-fronted- and either bean- or greylag- geese. The birds are portrayed in two trios, representing many of the birds. Patterns of threes in ancient Egyptian iconography represented the plural. An extinct and previously-unknown species of goose (pictured) has been identified within a 4,600-year-old painting that has been dubbed the 'Mona Lisa of Ancient Egypt' The painting, now held in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, once adorned part of the north wall of a chapel in the Mastaba (or tomb) of Nefermaat and Itet at Meidum. Pictured: the 'Meidum Geese' shown within a reconstruction of the surrounding art that would have once adorned the north wall of the Chapel of Itet within the tomb The eldest son of pharaoh Sneferu of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty, Nefermaat was a vizier, royal seal bearer and a prophet of Bastet, feline-headed goddess of protection. His wife was named Itet. Both are buried in the mudbrick tomb designated 'Mastaba 16' at the Meidum archaeological site 62 miles (100 km) south of modern-day Cairo. Pictured, the outside of Mastaba 16 PAINTING THE GEESE Considered by many experts to be a masterpiece, the 'Meidum Geese' also exhibits an unusual painting technique. It was produced by the carving of deeply incised patterns into plaster, which were then filled in with coloured paste to create the vivid scenes. Unfortunately, in many places, the plaster cracked and the paste was lost. It is thought that this drawback caused Ancient Egyptian craftsmen to abandon the technique certainly, the Mastaba of Nefermaat and Itet is the only known tomb to date that features it. Advertisement 'The painting, "Meidum Geese", has been admired since its discovery in the 1800s and described as "Egypts Mona Lisa",' said Dr Romilio. 'Apparently no-one realised it depicted an unknown species,' he added. 'Artistic licence could account for the differences with modern geese, but artworks from this site have extremely realistic depictions of other birds and mammals.' Bones of modern red-breasted geese, or 'Branta ruficollis', have never been recorded from any Egyptian archaeological site. 'Curiously, bones of a similar but not identical bird have been found on Crete,' Dr Romilio noted. 'From a zoological perspective, the Egyptian artwork is the only documentation of this distinctively patterned goose, which appears now to be globally extinct.' According to Dr Romilio, a number of extinct animals have previously been identified in ancient art although not all of the species have been scientifically confirmed. 'I applied the Tobias criteria to the goose, along with other types of geese in the fresco,' he explained. 'This is a highly effective method in identifying species using quantitative measurements of key bird features and greatly strengthens the value of the information to zoological and ecological science,' Dr Romilio added. Egypt was not always predominantly desert, he explained, but instead has 'a biodiverse history, rich with extinct species.' 'Its ancient culture emerged when the Sahara was green and covered with grasslands, lakes and woodlands, teeming with diverse animals, many of which were depicted in tombs and temples.' 'So far, science has confirmed the identity of relatively few of these species.' University of Queensland expert Anthony Romilio's fresh analysis of the artwork determined that the bird (left) with its distinct bold colours and patterns was unique. Pictured, right, one of the other birds in the painting, though to be a Bean or Greylag goose 'The painting, "Meidum Geese", has been admired since its discovery in the 1800s and described as "Egypts Mona Lisa",' said Dr Romilio. Pictured, three of the other geese from the painting. Left is thought to be a Bean or Greylag goose and those right are believed to be greater white-fronted geese The extinct species (left and middle) had red, black and white markings on its face, grey wings with white marks and a speckled red breast distinct from modern red-breasted geese (right) 'Art provides cultural insight, but also a valuable, graphical record of animals unknown today,' Dr Romilio said. 'These include the predecessor of modern cattle the auroch (Bos primigenius) and previously unknown forms of gazelle, oryx, antelope and donkey.' 'These ancient animal representations help us recognise the biodiversity thousands of years ago that co-existed with humans.' 'I see it also as a reminder of humans influence over the survival of species that are with us today,' he concluded. The full findings of the study were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Dr Romilio has also recently published a book on other species with colour marking that do not match those of their modern counterparts, titled 'A Guide to Extinct Animals of Ancient Egypt'. Dr Romilio has also recently published a book on other species with colour marking that do not match those of their modern counterparts, titled ' A Guide to Extinct Animals of Ancient Egypt', some illustrations from which are pictured, including the new goose, bottom right, and the auroch, centre back The painting, now held in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, once adorned part of the north wall of a chapel in the Mastaba (or tomb) of Nefermaat and Itet at Meidum Nefermaat and Itet are buried in the mudbrick tomb designated 'Mastaba 16' at the Meidum archaeological site 62 miles (100 km) south of modern-day Cairo. Pictured: right, a satellite image of Meidum and, left, a simplified illustration of the tomb of the painting's location ADA Compliance at City Hall Revoking or Suspending Liquor Licenses New Playground Equipment for 2 Parks 24th Street Mill/Overlay Contract Approved New Cheyenne Police Chief Appointed (TNS) With an eye toward the future of technology and entrepreneurship, the Cheyenne, Wyo., City Council approved two resolutions Monday that will create a Technology Advisory Council and an Innovation and Entrepreneur Advisory Council.Councilwoman Michelle Aldrich, the sponsor of the resolutions, said the move was partially inspired by the venture capital firm that's coming to Cheyenne, which was announced toward the end of last year. The goal of these advisory councils is to help the city be better prepared to accommodate such businesses, which bring well-paying jobs and expanded offerings to Cheyenne."We have a lot of opportunities, but we have to be ready for those when they come; we have to know what we're doing in order to encourage that," Aldrich said. "I think these two advisory councils will help us move in that direction."For the Technology Advisory Council, the main focus will be forwarding worthwhile projects, researching issues and collecting public input; promoting affordable access to information and communications technology; and advising effective electronic civic engagement and e-government services. With a venture capital firm coming to town, and with new programs like the gBETA startup pre-accelerator, Mayor Patrick Collins said these industries are an important part of what Cheyenne could become. Tech jobs tend to be high-paying and attract younger employees, both of which, Collins said, are beneficial for Cheyenne residents."We have a tech environment that's starting to happen here in Cheyenne," Collins said. "So what I wanted to do as the new mayor was to get together a group of people in this arena who can talk to me about what should the city be doing; what are some best practices that are happening in other communities; what can we do to help facilitate building that tech ecosystem here in in Cheyenne?"As for the Innovation and Entrepreneur Advisory Council, the stakeholders will take a comprehensive approach to looking at the things that improve the quality of life in Cheyenne and encourage workforce development in the community.Aldrich said that council will include representatives in technology, performing arts, visual arts, music and culinary arts, as well as five mentees between the ages of 18 and 24 to help deepen their knowledge of fast-evolving technologies.They'll focus on keeping an ongoing dialogue with the entrepreneurship and workforce development officials in the community, and will aim to empower the community so that entrepreneurs can launch companies, scale technology and create the jobs of tomorrow, according to the resolution passed Monday."Unless we start providing development for our young people, our 18- to 24-year-olds, to really develop their leadership abilities, their passions and their interests in some of these topics, we're really doing ourselves a disservice," Aldrich said. "In order to attract young people, we need to know what young people are interested in and what is drawing them in. I feel like this is a way to really incorporate some of our younger stakeholders in our community and plan toward the future."The council unanimously approved both resolutions. Both advisory councils will likely start accepting applications at the beginning of March.At city hall, a number of issues exist related to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. But the council approved a resolution Monday sponsored by Councilman Pete Laybourn that will put the city on a path toward compliance.Going forward, an evaluation of ADA compliance at the Municipal Building will be completed at a cost of $10,000, which will likely come from the Facilities Capital Improvement Program fund. That evaluation will then be used to create a plan of action for bringing the building up to date in terms of accessibility."We need to do it because it's the right thing to do. Our staff, people who come to this building really need to have that full accessibility," Laybourn said. "That is federally mandated, but it's also our responsibility."A few years back, the first-floor bathroom was redone to be accessible for people with disabilities, whether they have an electric wheelchair or a service animal. Previously, the building had no accessible bathrooms.While the improvement plan will likely result in more accessibility than just bathrooms for people with disabilities, it also covers the city for any liabilities related to the ADA. With no plan or timeline for improvements, a complaint to the Department of Justice would then require all those improvements to be made at once, instead of over a period of time."The city of Cheyenne Municipal Building is not currently in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. ... The risk that we face is that if the Department of Justice were to investigate our building, they could immediately order that all remediation occur," City Attorney Mike O'Donnell said.By carrying out an evaluation and coming up with a transition plan, the city will meet the ADA requirements and mitigate that risk. The resolution was approved on the consent agenda.An ordinance was introduced Monday that would allow the council to suspend or revoke a business's liquor license if it does not comply with state laws or city code.Right now, the city cannot take action on noncomplying bars, restaurants or other entities with liquor licenses until it's time for the license to be renewed, which happens each year. It can only consider those violations of law or code at the time of renewal."If there's a problem with liquor dealers not obeying the state laws or city ordinances, we really get one shot at them, and that is at the renewal time at the end of the year," Collins said. "I think that's frustrating for members of the council and the staff. And so this change would allow for those kinds of enforcement actions to happen."He referenced issues such as serving minors alcohol, though he noted the city would target enforcement at repeat offenders. Right now, a violation of the state health orders would also be considered a violation of state statute.Under the ordinance, the power would lie in the city clerk's office to suspend an entity's liquor license. After that happens, that business could file an appeal with the city, which Collins said would be heard by an unbiased arbitrator. Then, it would be possible to take the matter to court, if the business owner so desired."We're taking the politics out of it. So if we see a violation, the city clerk would do their investigation, and they can then start the proceedings," Collins said.The ordinance still has two more readings and two committee meetings to go through before a final vote.Thanks to some grant funding, both Pioneer and Lions parks will see new playground equipment this summer, with construction slated for completion by the end of June.The playground at Pioneer Park will be completely replaced, and a new safety system will take the place of wood fiber on the playground. The project is made possible by a Community Development Block Grant at a cost of $216,996.With a Land and Water Conservation grant, the playground equipment in the south portion of Lions Park will also be replaced. That project comes in at just under $250,000, and it is much needed for what Community Recreation and Events Director Jason Sanchez said is the oldest playground in the city."We no longer can get replacement parts for that playground, so this was a pretty important project for us," Sanchez said.With funding from previous years' fifth-penny sales tax, the council approved $1.16 million for the 24th Street Mill and Overlay project, which will stretch from Missile Drive to Warren Avenue. Simon Contractors, with the lower of the two bids received, will carry out the project.Two inches of existing asphalt will be removed from the road and replaced with new material. Curbs, gutters, sidewalks and other concrete in disrepair will be fixed up as part of the project, and Cheyenne Construction Manager Doug Klahn said 6,360 square feet of sidewalk will be replaced."We've reviewed this project, and we're confident in the scope and the bid of this project, and we recommend moving forward with the contract process," Klahn said.The council appointed Mark Francisco as Cheyenne Police Chief, after Mayor Patrick Collins announced his decision last Wednesday. Francisco will bring two decades of experience from Kansas City, Missouri."I love Wyoming, and I'm beyond excited to get to come out there and be part of the police team and part of the community," Francisco previo- usly told the For full access, please log in, register your subscription or subscribe. Try for 99 a month for two months, cancel or pause anytime. Samsung is enacting a new way to entice customers to try one of the companys foldable smartphones. Samsung will let anyone who purchases a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2 5G or Galaxy Z Flip 5G to Buy and try either of the phones, extending the return period to 100 days. If you purchase a Galaxy Z Flip 5G for $1,200 or a Galaxy Z Fold2 5G for $2,000, Samsung will offer you a 100-day return window to decide if youre not happy living with a Samsung foldable. For reference, Best Buys return window for smartphones is 14 days (with a restocking fee if opened) and Samsungs online store allows a 15-day window. Customers will be eligible for up to $550 in trade-in credit with eligible trade-ins. In addition, buyers will receive a $200 credit towards Samsung accessories. To clarify, the 100-day return window will only be available for purchases directly from Samsungs online store and only when purchasing a phone through April 1. Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2 and Galaxy Z Flip 5G I contacted Samsung Support to find out what happens to a trade-in if you decide you dont want the foldable anymore. Since the trade-in value is instant, youll buy the foldable at a discounted price. If you decide to return the phone, youll receive a refund for the phones full price. But what happens if you use Samsungs $200 promotional credit towards accessories after you return the phone? It turns out that youll have to either return the items or get charged for the credit amount. Source NEW DELHI : Despite harbouring the worlds second biggest burden of coronavirus infections, India has contributed less than 7% to scientific research on the virus, showed an analysis published in Scientometrics journal. Scientists across the world came out with an astonishing" over-87,000 scientific papers, according to the analysis that focused on China and the 10 most-affected countriesUS, India, France, Brazil, UK, Italy, Spain, Russia, Belgium, and Polandfor studies recorded by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. The authors defined four periods in terms of research articles produced: pre-covid-19 (between 2018 and 2019); Period I (1 January8 April 2020); Period II (9 April12 July 2020); and Period III (13 July5 October 2020). The number of coronavirus studies saw a boom in 2020, rising at a spectacular rate from a total of 4,875 articles produced on the topic (preprint and peer reviewed) between January and mid-April to 44,013 by mid-July, and 87,515 by the start of October. Indias contribution to the pre-covid-19 time frame was merely 3.7%. This declined to 2.9% in Period I, increased to 6.7% in Period II and 6.8% in Period III to make up an average of 6.7%. The US topped the table as Chinese contributions dropped off significantly after infection rates in the country fell. Following the decline in the global share of covid-19 cases and the rise in articles from a larger set of countries, the study found that articles from China represented a smaller share of world articles than in the early months of the pandemic. In contrast, the USA and European nations turned out increasing numbers of covid-19 articles, a finding particularly true of Italy which rapidly increased its output during covid-19," the study said. In general, and somewhat surprisingly, the trend of publication shares of each country mirrors the trend of newly confirmed cases of covid-19 in the selected countries." It may be that government funding for research on the issue dropped dramatically in countries such as China when the pandemic no longer posed as big a threat," said Caroline Wagner, co-author of the study and associate professor in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. In recent months, she's often been spotted doting on her one-year-old son Bruce as she makes the most of her downtime amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. And Krysten Ritter was seen enjoying some solo time on Tuesday, as she went shopping for toys and a new dress following a workout session in Los Angeles. The Veronica Mars star, 39, displayed her toned physique in a black tank top emblazoned with an image of rock band The Clash and purple leggings. Me time: Krysten Ritter was seen enjoying some solo time on Tuesday, as she went shopping for toys and a new dress following a workout session in Los Angeles Teaming her sporty ensemble with a pair of black running shoes, the raven-haired beauty tied a black sweatshirt around her waist as she emerged into the sunshine. Rounding out her casual look with stylish sunglasses, she adhered to coronavirus safety guidance by sporting a patterned protective face mask. Toting a reusable shopping bag, the Pennsylvania native was seen briefly lowering her face mask as she took a phone call outside a store. The Don't Trust the B**** In Apartment 23 star raises her one-year-old son Bruce with her partner Adam Granduciel, which whom she's often seen enjoying strolls. Phone chat: Toting a reusable shopping bag, the Pennsylvania native was seen briefly lowering her face mask as she took a phone call outside a store She opened up about motherhood back in September telling HollywoodLife: 'I had no idea that I would get to be a kid again myself. 'Getting to see the world through his eyes and find joy in playing with toys and things like dancing to Baby Shark, getting dressed up for Halloween is the best! I am so grateful for this gift.' The Gilmore Girls actress also talked about getting back to work amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, saying: 'I'm just trying to be present and do my best and not waste time worrying about balance. 'I definitely try and get as much done during that nap time as possible and then I just focus on soaking up the baby every day.' Family: In recent months, she's often been spotted doting on her one-year-old son Bruce as she makes the most of her downtime amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Pictured in 2019 The star has since been cast in the Netflix family movie Nightbooks, based on the 2018 horror/fantasy children's book by JA White. She plays an evil young witch who imprisons children in her contemporary New York City apartment, forcing them to tell a new scary story every night to stay alive. Krysten is also rumoured to be returning to the Marvel role of Jessica Jones in the upcoming Disney+ series She-Hulk, starring Tatiana Maslany in the titular role. The former model played the troubled super strong heroine in the self-titled Netflix series, which ran for three seasons from 2015 to 2019, as well as the spinoff The Defenders. Krysten didn't seem up for returning to the role, when she told TVLine in 2019: 'Do I think I'll play her again? I don't think so. I feel like I've played her, you know? I feel really good about it. I feel good about closing the door.' The Food and Drug Administration and the Health department are investigating a government official. That's after he admitted to using an unregistered vaccine. President Duterte's special envoy to China Ramon Tulfo revealed he received a Sinopharm shot in October last year. Tulfo adds, he was inoculated alongside some government officials and members of the presidential security group. He claims, President Duterte even knew about this. But Malacanang says, it is leaving that to the Ombudsman. Tulfo explains, he wanted to know the effects of the vaccine, after he applied to be one of its distributors. We now go above and beyond the headlines with Ramon Tulfo. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. A general hospital in the north-central Vietnamese province of Thanh Hoa has been temporarily locked down after a man with serious lung problems died at the facility, the Vietnam News Agency reported. The Bim Son General Hospital, located in the namesake town in Thanh Hoa, was put under temporary lockdown starting 5:30 pm on Tuesday. The decision came after L.Q.M., 37, who hailed from the south-central province of Ninh Thuan, passed away at the infirmary earlier the same day, said Trinh Xuan Hiep, director of the health office in Bim Son Town. A epidemiological investigation showed that M. had been to a virus-hit area in Binh Hung Hoa B Ward, Binh Tan District, Ho Chi Minh City before traveling to his wifes hometown in Ha Trung District, Thanh Hoa on February 5. M. began having symptoms such as coughing and difficulty breathing and headed to a commune-level medical center for treatment. The man was admitted to Bim Son General Hospital on February 21 as his condition worsened. His lung scan showed signs of bronchitis. Prior to his hospital admission, M. had a history of type 2 diabetes and complications from liver and kidney failure. He was treated and quarantined at the infirmary, as well as had his samples collected for COVID-19 testing. The result came back negative for the novel coronavirus on February 22. On February 23, M. had high fever and underwent a lung X-ray, whose result showed signs of pneumonia. His condition quickly deteriorated as he repeatedly suffered apnea and a cardiac arrest. M. passed away at 3:00 pm the same day. His samples have been collected for a second COVID-19 test and the result will be announced by the Thanh Hoa Center for Disease Control later. Multiple areas inside Bim Son General Hospital have been disinfected. Local authorities are tracking all people who had contact with the man over the past days. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! The Union Cabinet is likely to approve a Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for laptops and tablets in its meeting today. PLI for the medical devices and pharmaceutical sector is also likely to be taken up in the meeting. Sources revealed that the PLI scheme for electronic gadgets could entail an investment of over Rs 7,000 crore. "Companies setting up manufacturing units in India are likely to be offered a upto 4 per cent PLI. PLI in medical devices is likely to attract investment worth about Rs 10,000 crore," said a source close to the development. In its meeting held last week, the Union Cabinet approved the PLI scheme for telecom and networking products with an outlay of Rs 12,195 crore. The scheme approved last week aims at manufacturing telecom and networking products in India and proposes a financial incentive to boost domestic manufacturing and attract investments in the target segments of telecom and networking products in order to encourage Make in India. The scheme will also encourage exports of telecom and networking products 'Made in India'. "It is expected that the scheme will bring more than Rs 3,000 crore investment and generate huge direct and indirect employment," the government said in a release after the announcement of the scheme. Also read: Govt approves over Rs 12,000-crore PLI scheme for telecom sector Following Indias noble gesture of donating COVID-19 vaccines to several nations amid pandemic, Seychelles and Afghanistan expressed gratitude towards New Delhi. On receiving the India-made vaccines, Seychelles President Wavel Ramkalawan thanked the Prime Minister and the Indian government for choosing the country as the first African nation to deliver Covishield. He said, I thank Prime Minister Modi & the Government of India for making us the first African country to which India has donated the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. We can gove this vaccine to all our population including those who are above 60 years so once again thank you very much for helping us in our mass vaccination programme. Read - Russian Vaccines Delivered To San Marino Read - First Batch Of COVID Vaccines Arrives In Thailand Afghan President thanks India Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani noted Indias exceptional act of solidarity and generosity while kickstarting the nations vaccination programme with made in India vaccines. Ghani on Tuesday thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Indian government for sending vaccines. India had gifted 500,000 doses of Covishield vaccines earlier this month to Afganistan. Ashraf Ghani said, India, the worlds largest democracy and the largest producer of vaccines, not only provided the house of Parliament of Afghanistan and the dams that are the pride of this country but also partners with us in terms of securing our lives and livelihood. Elaborating, the solidarity that India has demonstrated is an indication of both our deep historical relationship and the promise of two democracies working in this region together. Let me thank PM Modi, the government of India for this expectational act of solidarity and generosity. Meanwhile, External Affairs Minister Dr. S Jaishankar on Monday delivered the second consignment of made in India COVID-19 vaccines, Covishield to Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth during the first day of the two-day visit to the African nation. Taking the foreground amid the COVID-19 pandemic, India has delivered domestically manufactured coronavirus vaccines to a number of nations with the most recent shipments arriving in Mongolia, Maldives, Serbia. Read - First Shipment Of AstraZeneca Vaccines Arrive In South Korea Read - First Shipment Of COVID-19 Vaccines Arrive In Thailand The Russian war in eastern Ukraine quietly but expensively, continues. Ukraine revealed that in 2020 its forces had lost fifty troops killed and 339 wounded in Donbas. That means about 3,200 Ukrainian troops have died fighting the Russians there since 2014. Nearly all these deaths occurred in eastern Ukraine (Donbas) where Russian forces have been stalled in their efforts to seize all the territory of the two provinces that comprise the Donbas region. Earlier in 2014 the Russians were successful in grabbing all of Crimea and that area is considered by most of the world as illegally under occupation by Russian forces. Crimea has also proved to be a financ8ial burden and the latest complication is Ukraine cutting fresh water supplies to Crimea. Despite all this Russia recently reaffirmed its decision to remain in Donbas. The details of Russian Donbas policy have shifted. At the end of 2020 Russia said it was not seeking to annex the portion of Donbas it has controlled since 2014. The two Ukrainian provinces (Donetsk and Luhansk) which comprise the Donbas contained about nine percent of Ukrainian territory, 13 percent of the population and 15 percent of the GDP in 2014. At the time Donbas was about 38 percent ethnic Russian. For Ukraine, the Donbas is worth fighting for while Crimea was not. The two provinces comprising the Donets Basin (or Donbas) were, for a long time, an economic powerhouse for Soviet Russia. But that began to decline in the 1980s and accelerated when the Soviet Union dissolved and Ukraine became independent in 1991. At this point Donbas is mainly about national pride and Russian politicians who face severe consequences if they cannot come out of this looking like a winner. Russia is also trying to use economic warfare to defeat Ukraine but that is not working out either. China continues to improve its economic relations with Ukraine, as do many other countries, like India, that have long imported a lot of Russian weapons and industrial goods. Russia does not disclose casualties in Ukraine but the losses do occur and evidence can usually be found on the Internet, where its something that Russians will discuss despite government efforts to censor such revealing discussions. The Donbas operation costs Russia several billion dollars a year in pay for Russian and ethnic-Russian Ukrainians who serve as mercenaries portraying the armed separatists as well as economic aid for the civilians still living in the area. The 2014 population in Russian controlled areas has shrunk as many civilians moved to Ukraine or Russia. That resulted in a collapse of the economy there. It does not help that the standard of living is higher on the Ukrainian side of the front line and there is more economic activity. Syria Syria has become the most expensive foreign effort Russia has undertaken since 2014. Part of the problem in Syria is that Russia has had to deal with some ancient enemies (Turkey and Iran) who are now needed allies. Turkey, Iran and Russia entered Syria for different reasons and generally supported the Iran backed Assad governments. The Americans supported the Kurds as part of a campaign to destroy ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant). Israel opposed the Iranian presence, whose stated objective was to attack Israel. Most of the remaining Sunni Islamic terror groups are trapped in the northwest (Idlib province) while ISIL battles on in eastern Syria. The Kurds, with American support, hang on to the northwest. Russia, Turkey and America cooperate to try and maintain ceasefires. Currently joint Russia/American patrols try to prevent more fighting between Turks and Kurds. A similar and less successful effort sought to keep Iranians from going after Israel and Idlib Islamic terror groups from going anywhere. The Russians and Americans both provide lots (hundreds a week if needed) air strikes to the people on the ground they support. The Americans take care to avoid injuring civilians while the Russians find collateral damage (civilian casualties) a feature not a flaw. The Assads want to drive pro-rebel civilians, especially Sunnis, out of the country. Americans are sensitive to international criticism; the Russians are not. Both countries find all those airstrikes expensive to carry out. Your average airstrike costs the American at least $100,000 and 20-30 percent less for the Russians. The Americans are doing all this as a public service while Russia sees it as a way to perfect its latest warplanes as well as the weapons and equipment carried. The cost of fighting in Syria is also a burden for Turkey but has been something that Iran couldn't sustain and Iran has sharply cut its expenses in Syria. This hurt the Assad government which likewise had to cut costs. In early 20201 the Assad government ordered its military to reduce costs by having most military units return to lower peacetime (pre-2011) levels of readiness. Syria is not at peace but the Assads cannot afford to keep most of the military combat ready. The cutbacks were dictated by the sharp reduction in financial support from Iran. American economic sanctions have, in the last three years, greatly reduced the amount of money Iran could spend on its foreign wars. Iran-backed groups in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen are all feeling the impact. Iran is hoping the new American government will relax the sanctions. While the Americans are now saying nice things about Iran, the sanctions are still in place and enforced. In Syria that means the troops have less ammo and fuel for patrols and combat. As was the case in peacetime, more soldiers and officers were given leave, to spend a few weeks visiting families or even taking a vacation. February 19, 2021: Diplomats from Russia, Turkey and Iran met and agreed to back Syrian claims that continued Israeli air strikes violate the 1974 UN brokered ceasefire that halted the Israeli advance on Damascus after defeating the Syrian surprise attack to retake the Golan Heights during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. In 1973 the Arabs believed their simultaneous attacks against Israeli forces in the north and south would push the Israelis out of the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan heights and possibly other Israeli territory as well. After some initial success the Israeli defenses held and counterattacks forced the Egyptians and Syrians to retreat in an effort to defend their capitals. The ceasefire agreements that halted the fighting on both fronts included Egyptian and Syrian pledges to not back covert terror attacks on Israel. As far as Israel is concerned the Iranian military buildup in Syria is a violation of the 1974 agreement and justifies the continued airstrikes against the Iranians. Syria protests that the airstrikes endanger commercial air traffic and Syrian civilians living near Iranian military facilities. Russia and Turkey are unlikely to do anything to block Israeli airstrikes because Israel, Turkey and Russia all want Iran to get out of Syria but only Israel can admit it openly. February 18, 2021: Russia quietly brokered a prisoner exchange between Syria and Israel. The exchange did not involve terrorists, spies or soldiers but rather civilians who had crossed the border by accident or derangement. Israel got back a young woman who crossed over in early February for unspecified reasons. Israel released two shepherds who accidently crossed in to Israel. The deal also involved Israel the reduction of a prison sentence for a pro-Syrian Arab. February 17, 2021: China and Russia have agreed, after more than a year of negotiations, to develop a joint BMEW (Ballistic Missile Early Warning) system. This involves Russia providing the tech needed to bring Chinese BMEW equipment up to Russian standards. As an incentive for Russia to cooperate, and provide the needed tech, Chinese Internet censors were ordered to allow open discussion about Chinese claims on a quarter of the Russian Far East and most of the prime coastal areas. China never cancelled these claims, even in the 1940s and 50s when China was very dependent on Russia. These claims amount to about nine percent of Russian territory. The Russian Far East contains part of Siberia as well as the large Pacific Ocean coastline and the port of Vladivostok. The coastal areas are the most densely populated. The Russian Far East is huge, at 6.9 million square kilometers. That is nearly the size (eight million square kilometers) of the continental United States. While these 48 states have 310 million people, the Russian Far East only has a population of 8.3 million. The Far East region contains 40 percent of Russian territory and less than six percent of Russias population. The region contains many naval and ballistic missile bases as well as ports that provide the cheapest way to get goods from the rest of Russia to the Far East. The Trans-Siberian Railroad alone cannot support the population and economy of the Far East region. February 16, 2021: Russia confirmed that one of the two Kirov class battlecruisers (completed in 1988 and 1998) was being scrapped because these is no money for maintenance and needed refurbishment on the older ship. The second retired Kirov is expected to be sent to the breakers eventually for the same reason. Its quite expensive to scrap a Kirov class cruiser because these ships are nuclear powered. The two younger Kirovs were refurbished and are expected to serve into the 2030s before they are also scrapped. The two surviving Kirovs are used mainly for ceremonial show the flag cruises to distant ports. February 15, 2021: In late January Ukrainian casualties in eastern Ukraine (Donbas) unexpectedly increased. Nearly all the additional losses were because troops were hit by rifle fire. Normally most casualties are inflicted by mortar and artillery shells as well as rockets. But this recent spike, involving 13 soldiers killed and at least twenty wounded, led to an investigation about the cause and it was discovered the Russian Army Sniper School has decided to use Donbas as part of the advanced curriculum. Sniper school students get to try out their new skills on real people. As an added feature, most of the targets are armed and can fire back. Ukrainian troops have killed or wounded some of the Russian sniper trainees but the exact numbers are not available. February 13, 2021: The Ukrainian Federal Security Service arrested another two Ukrainians recruited by the Russians to collect information on the Ukrainian military. The two were caught with classified documents and had been under observation for some time. Russia pays well for Ukrainians willing to collect information for Russia as this is seen as less harmful to Ukraine than engaging in sabotage, kidnapping or assassination. For those tasks Russia often has to send in highly trained agents who can pass as Ukrainian and are skilled at avoiding detection. February 10, 2021: Russian news agency TASS claims that mid-June 2020 fighting in southwest China (Tibet border with India) were more damaging to the Chinese than to the Indians. TASS reports 45 Chinese troops dead versus twenty Indian. The fighting took place on the shores of Pangong Lake. A 1996 agreement stipulates that troops from both sides entering disputed areas without firearms or explosives. The Chinese have taken to sending in their troops armed with wooden clubs and iron bars. This led to a battle on a ridge overlooking the Galvan River that was initially believed to have left at least twenty dead on both sides. Total casualties (dead, wounded, prisoners) were reported as at least fifty on each side. Currently both Indian and Chinese troops are moving back from the border Ladakh (India) area where they have been confronting, and occasionally fighting each other since May, 2020. China is still in close contact with Indian forces in other parts of their long mutual border. Russia fears that eventually China will be using these tactics against Russia. February 9, 2021: The Russian FSB secret police reported that it had found and shut down seven illegal gun manufacturing operations in 2020. Over the last few years 28 of these black-market weapons manufacturers have been eliminated. These operations dont actually manufacture as much as they assemble weapons from components obtained from foreign or local sources. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia was unable to control gun ownership as tightly as the Soviets did. Russia responded by liberalizing gun ownership laws so that there are now 25 million rifles, shotgun and pistols legally owned by civilians. These weapons are for hunting, sport (shooting is an Olympic event) and protection in areas acknowledged as dangerous. Despite the looser gun ownership rules there is still a lot of demand for illegal weapons. Not just from criminals, including Islamic terrorists and historically well-armed groups like Cossacks, but by a lot of civilians who believe the government overestimates the degree of state supplied security in many parts of the country. As a result, it is believed that there are more than fifty million weapons in circulation and that many weapons need a lot of replacement weapons each year for those lost, damaged or simply worn out. Some of the illegal manufacturers also do legal, and illegal repairs. February 8, 2021: Russia reported that another of their Syrian Arab mercenaries had died in Libya, bringing the total dead to eight, with over 30 wounded or injured. In Libya, Russian Syrian Arab mercenaries are not seeing much actions even though they have been in Libya since mid-2020, shortly after Russia began hiring Syrian mercenaries for service in Syria. So far at least 3,000 of these Syrian mercenaries have been sent to Libya while an equal number serve in Syria. Russia had an edge in recruiting the best and most reliable Syrian Arabs. This was because the Turks, who had been using Syrian Arab mercenaries since 2016, were detested by most Syrians as an old nemesis once more invading Arab territory. The Russians were seen as true allies because the Russians did not want to control any territory, but did rent a few bases and sell military equipment to Arabs. The Russians had been doing this in Syria for over half a century. In contrast the Turks had occupied and ruled most Arab territory for centuries, and were often quite brutal about it. That imperial rule only a century ago and is still remembered. The Russian offer the same pay as the Turks, but not the incentive of a residency permit in Turkey. The Iranians are also hiring again, but they, like the Turks, are seen as foreign invaders and dont get the most reliable recruits. February 7, 2021: In Syria Turkish Arab mercenaries are regularly skirmishing with Russian and SDF forces, and winning. The stakes are not large, usually the possession of a checkpoint that both sides claim. Turkey does not want to escalate when that might involve Russian or American airpower being called in. Turkey can get away with using the Predator-like UAVs for recon and surveillance as long as Russian and American warplanes do not use those UAVs for target practice. February 1, 2021: In Southeast Asia Myanmar (Burma) is again controlled by a military government. China promptly used their veto powers in the UN to block UN actions against the new military rulers of Burma. Within two weeks Russia also proclaimed support for the military government. The Burmese coup was a reaction to recent parliamentary elections that put into power a political party that pledged to reorganize the military to prevent another military takeover. The response of the military was not unexpected, because the civilian government knew that the Burmese generals maintained their connections in China and was the main reason China has sold $1.4 billion worth of military equipment to Burma since 2010. Russia sold $800 million worth. Together China and Russia accounted for over 90 percent Burmese spending on imports of military gear. January 30, 2021: Iran has purchased large quantities of the Russian Sputnik covid19 vaccine. How many doses and how fast it can be available in Iran wont be known until mid-February. The religious dictatorship had recently banned the use of Western covid19 vaccines, fearing that these might be sabotaged by the Americans in order to hurt Iran. This sort of thinking is not new, but most Iranians have learned to expect it from their dysfunctional rulers. There are millions of Iranians living outside the country who quietly report that there is no Western conspiracy against Iran. January 27, 2021: Corruption remains a major problem for Russia and years of well-publicized efforts to deal with it have failed and Russia is stuck near the bottom of the list when it comes to clean government. For 2020 China ranked 129th out of 180 nations in international rankings compared with 137th in 2019. These ratings and ranking are updated each year for the annual Transparency International Corruption Perception Index. Corruption is measured on a 1 (most corrupt) to 100 (not corrupt) scale. The most corrupt nations (usually Yemen/15, Syria/14, South Sudan/12 and Somalia/12) have a rating of under 15 while of the least corrupt (New Zealand and Denmark) are both 88. The Russian current score is 30 (versus 28 in 2019) compared to 33 (30) for Ukraine, 47 (45) for Belarus, 56 (58) for Poland, 80 (80) Germany, 65 (65) for Taiwan, 40 (39) for Turkey, 40 (41) for India, 30 (28) for Russia, 61 (57) for South Korea, 42 (41) for China, 18 (14) for North Korea, 36 (37) for Vietnam, 85 (85) for Singapore, 74 (73) for Japan, 37 (40) for Indonesia, 38 (38) for Sri Lanka, 34 (34) for the Philippines, 31 (32) for Pakistan, 26 (26) for Bangladesh, 25 (26) for Iran, 19 (16) for Afghanistan, 28 (29) for Burma, 71 (71) for the UAE, 61 (61) for Israel, 15 (15) for Yemen, 67 (69) for the United States, 33 (35) for Egypt, 25 (26) for Nigeria, 44 (44) for South Africa, 21 (20) for Iraq, 40 (39) for Turkey, 53 (53) for Saudi Arabia, and 25 (28) for Lebanon. The Russian corruption score has not changed much since 2012 when it was 28. January 26, 2021: Several Israeli F-35s flew over Lebanon in daylight. The F-35s were not carrying out an attack but there were demonstrating to Lebanese and Iran-backed Hezbollah that Israel still rules the skies. The F-35 usually fly at night where neither eyes nor radar can spot them, much less stop them. Operations over Lebanon and Syria are common for the F-35, which regularly carried out missile attacks on Iranian targets throughout Syria. Most of the missiles are launched from Israeli aircraft inside Lebanon, Israel or Jordan and, rarely, from inside Syria. Syrian and Russian air defense system keep trying to bring down an Israeli aircraft and keep failing. Russia has its latest S400 air defense systems guarding its bases in northwest Syria. The S400 radar can see almost all of Syria and into adjacent nations. The Russians have had a hard time detecting Israeli bombers, especially the F-35s. Syria is armed with the older S300 systems and they regularly fire lots of missiles at the Israelis and have yet to bring down an aircraft. The Syrians have shot down some Russian aircraft by accident. Syria urges Russia to at least try but the Russians know that if they try and fail it will a lot more difficult to get export orders for the S400. Russia watches and continues seeking a way to defeat Israeli aircraft, January 23, 2021: In Libya, today is the UN brokered deadline, agreed to in October 2020 by all parties fighting in Libya, for foreign troops to leave the country. None of them have. Its estimated that there are over 20,000 armed foreigners in Libya. Over a third are Islamic terrorists. About half the armed men in the country are Syrian Arab mercenaries working for Turkey and the rest are Syrian Arab mercenaries hired by Russia to assist the LNA (Libyan National Army). There are also about a thousand Russian military contractors, special operations troops, technicians, pilots and advisors. Matching that are nearly as many troops from Arab allies of the LNA. Lastly there are another hundred or so special operations troops from various nations who mainly act as observers for their governments. January 22, 2021: In January 2021 satellite photos revealed that all three of the Iranian Russian built Kilo class submarines were still out of the water, apparently undergoing repairs or refurbishment. Previous photos indicated the three subs had been out of the water since late 2020. It is not normal practice to have all of a warship class out of action at the same time. These three subs are not only out of action in a shipyard, but they are out of the water in a drydock. That means some serious work is being done, work that cannot wait. This usually means a common flaw with all the ships. Since no other Kilo users report or indicate a similar problem than this situation is unique. The major difference between Iranian Kilos and those of other export customers is that Iran refuses to send their Kilos back to Russia for major maintenance and insisted on doing it themselves. This is risky if you have no experience building similar subs or maintaining them with local parts rather original parts from Russia. Iran is not commenting on their Kilo crisis. Another problem is that Iran has been refurbishing its Kilos in Iran and refurbishment is required ever decade or so to keep the subs seaworthy. This angered Russia, which insists refurbishment of its subs take place in Russia. Iran thought the cost was too high and that Russia might bow to Western pressure and not return the sub. Russia did not provide any technical assistance or components to the Iranians for those local refurbishments but may have changed the policy since 2014 when Russia joined Iran in declaring the West a military threat to them. January 20, 2021: Russia now has an armed Predator-type UAV called Orion. This is a one-ton remotely controlled aircraft with a 200 kg payload and 24-hour endurance. Orion was revealed in 2017 but did not officially enter service until late 2019 and did not actually combat zones until early 2020. The main reason for the delays was unreliable engines. That delayed availability for several years and apparently that engine problem is not entirely solved yet. In 2018 an armed version (Orion-E) was revealed but it did not actually fire a Hellfire-type missile until the end of 2020. The Russian missile is the S-5Kor, which is similar to the American APKWS, a smaller laser guided missile that replaces of supplements Hellfire on many helicopters and fighter-bombers. APKWS is a 70mm laser guided missile that entered service in 2012. APKWS weighs 13.6 kg (30 pounds) with a 2.7 kg (six pound) warhead and a range of about six kilometers. Helicopters carry APKWS 70mm rockets in seven rocket pods already used for unguided rockets. That pod can be rewired to fire the APKWS, which are preferable to the larger (45 kg) Hellfire because the smaller warhead allows the APKWS to be fired against targets that are very close to civilians or friendly troops. Since APKWS are smaller and lighter, more can be carried. Hellfire has been around since 1984 with over 130,000 produced so far and most of them used in combat or training. The Russian version of APKWS is a guided version of their 5 kg (11 pound) S-5 unguided rocket. The guided version, S-5Kor, first appeared in 2000 but was not very reliable and it took more than a decade to fix that. The range of the laser guided S-5Kor is up to 7 kilometers. January 19, 2021: Japan decided to proceed with a two-decade old plan to design and build its own stealth fighter. Since the 1990s Japan has been concerned with the growing belligerence of China and North Korea, plus a simmering territorial dispute with Russia. More warplanes, and the modern ones at that were needed, just in case. The rapid Chinese development of its new stealth fighter, the J-20, also alarmed the Japanese. The delays in the F-35 program proved to be minor compared to the problems the Chinese and Russians encountered with their first stealth fighters. South Korea had the same idea, having also obtained nearly as many F-35s as Japan and also planning to develop their own stealth fighters. All this is bad news for China, Russia and North Korea because if you do the math it is clear that the modern warplanes available and planned for the local anti-China coalition (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia and a growing number of South-East Asian nations) matches what China has and once you add American forces deployed in the Western Pacific, China is at a disadvantage. This coalition developed because China has been making territorial claims on many of the coalition members or otherwise threatening them. Absent that aggression there would be no coalition or arms race. Russia may eventually join this coalition if China revives it territorial claims against Russia. Field survey. Hainan 2018. Credit: Guanghui Lin. Mangrove forests with greater species diversity can store more carbon, according to new research published in the British Ecological Society journal Functional Ecology. Researchers studying mangrove forests in Hainan Island, China, have found that species diversity in mangrove forests enhances both biomass production (the quantity of organic matter) and soil carbon storage. The findings highlight the impotence of conserving mangrove biodiversity as a nature-based solution to mitigate climate change. The East side of the island was found to have the highest mangrove biomass, diversity and carbon storage, with a mean of 537 tonnes of carbon per hectare (Mg C ha-1). This compared to a mean of 328 Mg C ha-1 across the entire island, and the world mangrove forest mean of 386Mg C ha-1. This is the first study based on an intensive field study to verify the positive effect of biodiversity on mangrove biomass and carbon storage. Mangroves grow in tropical regions and are one of the most carbon rich ecosystems on the planet. There are over 70 different species worldwide with 27 of these in China and 26 in the areas studied by the researchers. Because of the large representation of mangrove species in the study area, the researchers believe the results can be applied to other regions of China and the rest of the world, especially other Asian countries which have similar mangrove species diversity. The researchers also found that areas with high soil nitrogen content and annual rainfall had higher mangrove biomass and carbon storage potential, indicating that both soil fertility and climate factors determine areas of high mangrove diversity and carbon storage. Dr. Guanghui Lin of Tsinghua University and one of the authors of the study, said: "Our findings suggest that mangrove forests with greater diversity also have higher carbon storage capacities and conservation potential. Thus, mangrove biodiversity conservation is crucial for ensuring mangrove forests are able to mitigate climate change. We can increase mangrove diversity through restoration and conservation projects, especially those that promote local native species." Professor Xiaoshan Zhu, also of Tsinghua University and another author of the study, said: "Worldwide, particularly in developing countries such as China, mangroves have been lost or degraded over the last several decades. Restoration of mangrove forests and their habitats are urgently needed not only for preservation of biodiversity but also to increase carbon storage potentials." Another benefit of increasing mangrove species diversity is that it will help to maintain the stability of mangrove ecosystems against disturbances like climate change and extreme weather. This in turn ensures mangrove forests continue to provide a habitat for the hundreds of species that rely on them. Mangrove forests consist of trees, shrubs and other woody plants growing in the tidal zones of tropical and sub-tropical coastlines. They provide numerous ecological services including water purification, coastal protection, habitat provision and carbon storage. The 26 mangrove species found on Hainan Island, where the researchers conducted the study, ranged from 30m tall trees such as Sonneratia and Bruguerria species, to shrubs of only a few meters such as Avicennia marina. A higher diversity of mangrove species leads to a more complex ecological community that can access more of the resources available. This is why species diversity leads to a faster accumulation of mangrove biomass. In the study the researchers conducted an intensive field survey of mangrove biodiversity and carbon storage along the entire coastline of Hainan Island, which has nearly 20% of China's mangrove forest area. Between 2017 and 2018 they collected data from 234 10 m2 field plots along 30 transects distributed across the four main mangrove sites on the island. In each plot they collected data on the size, density and number of mangrove species, as well water and soil salinity and pH. They then calculated the carbon storage of the plant biomass using known carbon concentrations for each species and soil carbon and nitrogen content using soil samples from each of the 30 transects. A limitation of the study was that it was restricted to an isolated island. The authors are now compiling data for the rest of China and other countries with mangrove forests around the world. "This will allow us to test the relationship between plant species diversity and mangrove carbon storage found in this study." said Dr. Guanghui Lin. Explore further Study shows efforts in mangrove conservation and restoration paying off The pendulum swings both ways, Brown said, and I analogize this bill to the Biden Crime Bill in the 1990s, pushed by President Biden when he was in the Senate. In that bill, the political pendulum swung the other way. It was about locking everyone up. Discretion was taken from judges. Someone who never committed a crime in their life was found with 4 kilos in their car, and they were given what amounts to a life sentence. Thats unfair. And who suffered the most? Black and brown people. Srinagar: Violence along the de-facto border in Kashmir is likely to continue to increase and India and Pakistan are unlikely in the near future to make efforts to resolve the conflict bilaterally, according to a report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Project. The grim prediction is based on ACLEDs analysis of the events of 2020, which it called the most violent since 2016 when Kashmir witnessed months-long protests against India triggered by the killing of iconic rebel commander Burhan Wani. Both countries accused each other of violating the 2003 border cease-fire agreement. Indias Home Ministry said Pakistan violated it 5,133 times in 2020, while Pakistan accused Indian troops of violating the agreement more than 1,600 times. Dozens of soldiers and civilians were killed and scores wounded on the two sides in these firing incidents, which experts say were the highest since the signing of the border agreement in 2003. While the borders are likely to stay hot, the explosive situation inside Kashmir could deteriorate further, said the ACLED report, which lists Kashmir as one of the 10 conflicts to watch for in 2021 alongside others such as Yemen, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan. The report said there could be a surge in the activity of domestic and foreign militants in Kashmir because of policy shifts after Aug. 5, 2019, when India stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomous status and divided it into two centrally ruled territories. Though the rise in militancy is attributed to Pakistan-based jihadi groups, disillusionment and anger caused by [Indias move on] Aug. 5 has enabled both domestic and foreign [militant] groups to recruit Kashmiris, the report said. Marginalization of Muslims could in turn spur militant activity It said another source of a possible spur in militant activity is new citizenship and land laws that allow outsiders to purchase land in Jammu and Kashmir besides claiming residency. Before Aug. 5, only Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist residents of the Muslim-majority region had these rights. An ongoing exercise aimed at redrawing the local legislative assembly segments will shift the power to the Hindu-majority Jammu region, the report said. The resulting marginalization of Muslims could in turn spur militant activity in the region, it said. A Hindu jeweler who had acquired domicile residency rights was shot dead by militants on Dec. 31 last year, and the son of a Hindu owner of an eatery was shot three times by suspected militants Wednesday in a high-security zone. He survived the attack. In the past 30 years of insurgency, the eatery and several other businesses run by Hindus had never been targeted. Militant groups have declared any outsider planning to settle in Kashmir as their target. In fact, immediately after the abrogation of autonomy, suspected militants killed as many as 11 outsiders, the majority of them are Indian Muslims. India government has virtually destroyed any chances of peace Besides, last years data on the violence in the region only confirms ACLEDs prognosis. Jammu and Kashmir police chief Dilbag Singh told reporters on the last day of 2020 that 225 militants, 38 civilians and 16 police officers besides 44 army and paramilitary soldiers were killed in various incidents in 2020. The casualties do not include those killed in cross-border firing. Experts in Kashmir echo these concerns. Noor Ahmad Baba, former head of the department of political science at Kashmir University, told Anadolu Agency that Indias Hindu supremacist government has virtually destroyed any chances of peace with the Aug. 5, 2019 decision. On the one hand, Kashmiris have been thrown into an impossible situation. On the other, India tried to sideline Pakistan by the unilateral decision of Aug. 5, though Pakistans role in any Kashmir resolution is recognized internationally, Baba said. What is going to be most dangerous is the situation of fear in which common Kashmiris find themselves right now. There are extraordinary restrictions in place and the situation can explode, he added. lawless law in Kashmir The Aug. 5 decision has also disturbed regional stability, Baba said, referring to analyses that attribute last years India-China border clashes to the change of Kashmirs political status. China had said the decision was unlawful and void and challenged its sovereignty. Sociologist Farukh Fahim, who has studied the history of nationalistic movements in Kashmir, said India had claimed Aug. 5 as a solution, but that is not happening. Soon after Aug. 5, there was talk of Kashmir as another Palestine in the making. Muslims living in the neighborhood could be radicalized because of the worrying situation in Kashmir, he told Anadolu Agency. Contrary to Indias claims that the dismantling of autonomy would bring peace and end separatism, young Kashmiri men continue to join militant outfits. Last year alone, the Kashmir police chief said that 635 over ground workers, a term used by police to describe alleged supporters of militants, were arrested and 56 of them jailed under a preventive detention law called the Public Safety Act, which was termed a lawless law by Amnesty International. A person can be detained up to six months without trial and detention could be repeated perpetually. A top police officer told Anadolu Agency on condition of anonymity that the arrest of the 635 over ground workers was the highest in any year since the eruption of militancy in 1990. The ACLED report said that in 2020, India focused on deflecting opportunities for negotiation and tightening control of Kashmir while promoting pro-Indian politics in the region. At the same time, its forces reportedly used the coronavirus lockdown to strengthen intelligence gathering and to intensify counter-militancy operations. Pakistan responded by continuously casting doubt on the bilateral cease-fire agreement with India by highlighting Indian violations and human rights abuses in Kashmir at international diplomatic forums as well as inciting violence near the Line of Control, it said. With both countries adopting non-cooperative militarized strategies, the report said, bilateral attempts at resolving the Kashmir conflict remain unlikely in the near future. Disputed region Kashmir is held by India and Pakistan in parts and claimed by both in full. A small sliver of Kashmir is also held by China. Since they were partitioned in 1947, the two countries have fought three wars in 1948, 1965 and 1971 with two of them over Kashmir. Some Kashmiri groups in Jammu and Kashmir have been fighting against Indian rule for independence or unification with neighboring Pakistan. According to several human rights organizations, thousands of people have reportedly been killed in the conflict in the region since 1989. (Anadolu Agency) Two senior United States Army commanders will arrive in Tunisia on Wednesday to meet with local officials ahead of a planned multinational military exercise in North Africa. Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the commander of all US Army forces in Europe and Africa, and Maj. Gen. Andrew Rohling, head of the Southern Europe Task Force, will meet with senior officials in Tunis. Their visit will be the first official US delegation to North Africa since President Joe Biden took office last month. The trip comes a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced official travel to foreign policy priorities. While there, the commanders will meet with the head of the Tunisian armys land forces, Gen. Mohamed El Ghoul. Were very excited. Tunisia is an extremely important partner of the United States, Cavoli told reporters by phone Tuesday, adding, Were going to become acquainted with his operations [and] his modernization investment programs. The Tunisia visit will be a first for Cavoli, who late last year was named head of the US Armys forces in both Europe and Africa as the Pentagon moved to merge control over its troops on the two continents amid a shift toward strategic competition with Russia and China. Relations with Tunisia and its neighbors appear to have taken on renewed importance for Washington officials since the Kremlin introduced sophisticated military hardware into Libyas civil war last year, including fighter jets, mobile air defenses and radar systems. That move spurred public concern from US Africa Command that the Kremlin could potentially establish permanent basing in Libya, potentially limiting NATOs easy access to its southern flank. Russias steady support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his countrys brutal civil war has already ensured Moscow one permanent foothold on the Mediterranean, US officials have said. Tunisias democratic revolution in 2011 and subsequent Islamist insurgency provided Washington with an opportunity to reinvigorate military cooperation in western North Africa. The Pentagon sent a specialized military training unit to North Africa last year. Elements of that unit, known as a security force assistance brigade, will for the first time be coordinating this years multinational African Lion exercise. The exercise currently aims to bring together roughly 10,000 troops from some 20 countries for joint exercises in Senegal, Morocco and Tunisia this summer, but may be scaled back due to the coronavirus pandemic, Rohling noted. Last years exercise was canceled due to the pandemic. The two generals will also visit Tunisias special operations command and military institutions, which Washington has supported since the 2011 revolution. The US has provided hundreds of millions of dollars of military training and hardware sales to Tunisias armed forces in recent years. The two countries have also shared intelligence on Tunisian jihadi fighters traveling abroad to join the Islamic State. New Delhi/Jaipur, Feb 24 : Ahead of bypolls in four Assembly segments, the Congress in Rajasthan is trying to work out a truce between Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and former Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot. Pilot has been organising farmers' conventions in the state and the party is trying to put up a united face as winning the bypolls is crucial for the survival of the government and would be a morale booster for the Congress. Sources say the withdrawal of cases in the Supreme Court is one of the steps as party chief whip in the Assembly Mahesh Joshi had met Ajay Maken, General Secretary in-charge in New Delhi. The Special Leave Petition was filed last year after Pilot had rebelled against Gehlot, along with 19 MLAs, but later returned after a shaky truce. In Rajasthan four seats will see for bypolls - Sujangarh, Vallabhnagar, Sahada and Rajsamand. The Congress won three of these in 2018 elections and BJP won Rajsamand. The Congress direly needs support of the Gurjar community to retain the seats. Pilot also wants rehabilitation of his supporters in the government which has been delayed due to lack of a consensus. The fissures in the party are evident since Pilot has been organising farmers' conventions separately and during Rahul Gandhi's rally in the state, Pilot was not given a place on the dias as only the Chief Minister and state party chief were seated which has upset Pilot's supporters. Congress leader Acharya Pramod Krishnam had criticised such a move and said "How can the farmers benefit when the farmer leader is brought down from the dais during the farmers' convention? This is not the question of Sachin Pilot's insult and neglect, but this is the question of Congress' future." Sources close to him say that crowds in the Kisan Panchayat are a show of strength by the former Deputy Chief Minister. However, Pilot has denied any such rift and had said, "I am strongly attached to the farmer community. In fact, my father and I have received full blessings from the farmer community across castes. Farmers are the backbone of our country's economy." "This agrarian community plays a strong role in our country's development and hence the Congress is fully committed to their cause. As a Congress worker, I feel that it is my duty to remain committed to the farmers' issue and hence I am here addressing this rally," he had said. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text Presentation Castleisland students and Webwise Youth Panelists, Fiona Brosnan (left) and Joanna Moynihan were involved in the organisation of the day at their school Safer Internet Day 2021 took place on Tuesday, February 9, at Presentation Secondary School Castleisland, and never has it been more crucial that everyone is educated about online safety. It is a globally celebrated day to promote the safe and positive use of digital technology amongst young people. The campaign was run this year in Presentation Secondary School by Safer Internet Day ambassadors Danielle Moriarty and Katelyn Curtin, ably supported by the school's representatives on the Webwise Youth Panel, Joanna Moynihan and Fiona Brosnan, and staff ICT coordinator Ms Annette Leen. The four Transition Year students, who received training from Webwise throughout the year, organised a week-long series of events. Due to the current circumstances, all plans were adapted and presented remotely through the school's Microsoft Teams system. Parents and students received a daily 'top tip' via the school app and the school's social-media accounts to advise on best practice and encourage open communication about online safety. Danielle, Katelyn, Joanna and Fiona created a workshop which they delivered remotely to first-year and second-year students on the day. The workshops provided students with advice and information as well as an opportunity to discuss the issues which they face on social media in groups, using 'breakout rooms' in Microsoft Teams. Students were encouraged to take part in a poster competition emphasising the best behaviours online and what to do if issues arise. Sergeant Tim O'Keeffe from Tralee Garda Station presented very enlightening talks to students and to parents. "Sergeant O'Keeffe gave us an insight into how people can protect themselves online and how online criminals prey on vulnerable people and gain their trust," said Ms Leen. "It was a frank, hard-hitting and essential presentation for the whole school community. "Safer Internet Day in Presentation is going from strength to strength each year due to the dedication, organisational and leadership skills of our students," said Ms Leen in conclusion. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Research from Queen's University Belfast suggests that largescale antibody testing could lower social activity and thus contagion of COVID-19 (Coronavirus). Throughout the pandemic, most individuals act without knowing their health state, which naturally affects their willingness to social distance. Recent research suggests that this uncertainty can be quite adverse, by increasing contagion and raising COVID-19 related deaths. However, part of the uncertainty can be reduced by antibody testing. By revealing that susceptible and asymptomatic individuals are not immune, antibody testing reduces their social activity lowering the scale of the pandemic. The research was carried out by Dr Luis Guimaraes, Lecturer in Economics from Queen's Management School, and recently published in the Journal of Mathematical Economics. Dr Guimaraes built an economic model of epidemics extending the standard SIR epidemiological model, widely used to guide policy during the pandemic, to include individuals' choice of social distancing. In the model, individuals react to the information about infections. When infections rise, they realize the increased risk of infection and lower their social contacts, which reduces the effective reproduction number, Rt. However, if susceptible individuals are unsure of their health state and erroneously believe to be immune, they constrain their social activity by less than otherwise. In this regard, by informing individuals, antibody tests reduce average social activity and permanently lower COVID-19 related deaths. When the model is calibrated to capture the costs of social-distancing and of infection as well as the basic reproduction number, R0, Dr Guimaraes found that antibody testing could prevent approximately 12 per cent of COVID-19 related deaths within 12 months. Speaking about the findings Dr Guimaraes explained: "This research suggests that there can be sizeable gains in terms of lives saved from conducting largescale antibody testing. The benefits of these tests are particularly large for those that cannot work from home in areas in which many are estimated to have been infected like London." The Covid-19 pandemic has virtually halted the UK economy and resulted in over 120,000 people in the UK and over 2.4 million people worldwide losing their lives due to the virus (February 2021). The UK Government and countries around the world restricted movement, imposed lockdowns and quarantines, forced the closure of businesses, and increased the scale of viral testing and contact-tracing in order to contain the virus. Antibody testing can have major benefits. Firstly, in understanding the extent of the pandemic, the infection-fatality rate, the duration of immunity, and the proportion of the population who are asymptomatic. They have been and are currently being conducted in several countries, including the UK, and have helped to guide policy. Secondly, by identifying immune individuals, large-scale antibody testing may facilitate reopening the economy after a lockdown. There is also another, not as evident, reason to support largescale antibody testing. By revealing that susceptible individuals are not immune, antibody testing increases their social-distancing, lowering the scale of the pandemic." Dr Luis Guimaraes, Lecturer in Economics, Queen's Management School Most individuals infected with COVID-19 do not develop symptoms or only develop mild ones, most of those that were infected are unaware of the infection, which makes it very difficult to identify infected individuals and prevent contagion. The Office for National Statistics (ONS)(June 2020) estimated approximately 5.4 per cent of the English population had been infected, but less than 15 per cent of those had been diagnosed by June 2020. "Put differently, this means during the first wave of infections, 85 per cent of infected individuals were not diagnosed. Past infection is associated with, as least, temporary immunity, and so many would have recovered and became immune (and likely still are), unaware of their immunity. Therefore, there is uncertainty about the susceptibility to the virus," added Dr Guimaraes. "This uncertainty unlikely prevails for those that worked at home and effectively socially distanced however there is much uncertainty for those that could not stay at home (e.g., for work-related reasons), especially in cities or regions with high infection rates. Faced with such uncertainty, these individuals naturally wonder whether they were infected but asymptomatic in the past and, thus, whether enduring the costs of social distancing is warranted. This shadow of a doubt might lead susceptible individuals to be less cautious, reducing social-distancing and increasing SARS-COV-2 contagion." Largescale antibody testing would help to identify immune individuals, allowing them to enjoy the benefits of social activity. But, critical for contagion, negative antibody testing would identify those that are not immune, compelling susceptible or vulnerable individuals to be more cautious and, thus, increase social distancing. Leading technology companies have said that a months-long breach of corporate and government networks was so sophisticated, focused and labour-intensive that a nation had to be behind it, with all the evidence pointing to In the first congressional hearing on the breach on Tuesday, representatives of technology companies involved in the response described a hack of almost breathtaking precision, ambition and scope. The perpetrators stealthily scooped up specific emails and documents on a target list from the US and other countries. We haven't seen this kind of sophistication matched with this kind of scale, Microsoft President Brad Smith told the Senate Intelligence Committee. Forensic investigators have estimated that at least 1,000 highly skilled engineers would have been required to develop the code that hijacked widely used network software from Texas-based SolarWinds to deploy malware around the world through a security update. We've seen substantial evidence that points to the Russian foreign intelligence agency and we have found no evidence that leads us anywhere else," Smith said. US national security officials have also said was likely responsible for the breach, and President Joe Biden's administration is weighing punitive measures against for the hack as well as other activities. Moscow has denied responsibility for the breach. Officials have said the motive for the hack, which was discovered by private security company FireEye in December, appeared to be to gather intelligence. On what, they haven't said. At least nine government agencies and 100 private companies were breached, but what was taken has not been revealed. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday it would be weeks not months before the US responds to Russia. We have asked the intelligence community to do further work to sharpen the attribution that the previous administration made about precisely how the hack occurred, what the extent of the damage is, and what the scope and scale of the intrusion is, Psaki said. And we're still in the process of working that through now. FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia told the Senate that his company has had nearly 100 people working to study and contain the breach since they detected it, almost by accident, in December and alerted the US government. The hackers first quietly installed malicious code in October 2019 on targeted networks, but didn't activate it to see if they could remain undetected. They returned in March and immediately began to steal the log-in credentials of people who were authorized to be on the network so they could have a secret key to move around at will, Mandia said. Once detected they vanished like ghosts," he said. There's no doubt in my mind that this was planned," the security executive said. The question really is where's the next one, and when are we going to find it? Government agencies breached include the Treasury, Justice and Commerce departments, but the full list has not been publicly released. The president of Microsoft, which is working with FireEye on the response, said there are victims around the world, including in Canada, Mexico, Spain and the United Arab Emirates. The panel, which also included Sudhakar Ramakrishna, the CEO of SolarWinds who took over the company after the hack occurred, and George Kurtz, the president and CEO of CrowdStrike, another leading security company, faced questions not just about how the breach occurred but also whether victims need to be legally compelled to be forthcoming when they have been breached. Even now, three months after the breach was disclosed, the identity of most victims remains unknown. Congress has considered in the past whether to require companies to report that they have been the victim of a hack, but it has triggered legal concerns, including whether they could be held liable by clients for the loss of data. US authorities are also considering whether to give additional resources and authority to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency or other agencies to be able to take a more forceful role in working to prevent future breaches. Another measure that has been considered is to create a new agency, like the National Transportation Safety Board, that could quickly come in and evaluate a breach and determine whether there are problems that need to be fixed. Senator Ron Wyden, one of the most prominent voices on cyber issues in the Senate, warned that the US must first make sure that government agencies breached in this incident have taken the required security measures. The impression that the American people might get from this hearing is that the hackers are such formidable adversaries that there was nothing that the American government or our biggest tech companies could have done to protect themselves, said Wyden, an Oregon Democrat. My view is that message leads to privacy-violating laws and billions of more taxpayer funds for cybersecurity. (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.) Schiller Park Fire Department/FacebookBy JON HAWORTH, ABC News (CHICAGO) -- A woman is lucky to be alive after being trapped for more than 10 hours under an awning in her own backyard when it collapsed on top of her after being weighed down by heavy ice and snow. The incident happened at approximately 12 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 22 in Schiller Park, Illinois, a suburban community in northwest Chicago, when an unnamed woman in her 50s had gone outside to shovel snow in her backyard and the awning of her home suddenly gave way and came down on top of her, according to the Schiller Park Fire Department. "She was trying to call for help, but being her head was inside of the awning, nobody was able to hear her," Chief Michael Cesaretti of the Schiller Park Fire Department told ABC News Chicago station WLS-TV in an interview about the accident. The woman spent more than 10 hours trapped by the awning and under several feet of ice and snow in temperatures hovering around the mid-40s, far warmer than a week previous when the temperatures were between 4 and 19 degrees Fahrenheit in the region. Firefighters told WLS following the accident that if this had happened last week, the outcome could have been much more serious and that the warmer temperatures most likely saved the victim from injuries related to being out in the cold for an extended period of time. The woman was finally discovered when a relative arrived at approximately 10:30 p.m. and found her, according to WLS. [The] Schiller Park Police and Fire Department quickly started rescue efforts to remove as much snow and ice from the awning to take some of the weight off her legs, the Schiller Park Fire Department said in a statement. [The] Fire Department then placed struts for stability, utilized cribbing and the multi-force air bag system to lift the awning and free the patient. "Most of the snow was on top of the awning, and it did create a bit of a void space under the awning so she was able to still communicate," Cesaretti said. The woman remained conscious the entire time and was subsequently transported to Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois, in stable condition. Firefighters told WLS that they hope this incident will be a reminder to people to be aware of their surroundings. "There may be no warning signs, Cesaretti told WLS. So we're just asking people to be aware, what's over your head." Copyright 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved. Reporter Mary Schenk is a reporter covering police, courts and breaking news at The News-Gazette. Her email is mschenk@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@schenk). The Fauquier Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you, we are excited to offer 4 weeks FREE Digital & Print access to all subscribers new and returning alike. We are dedicated to continuing providing reliable, high quality journalism. This is possible with the trust and support of our subscribers in the community we are proud to serve. Brilliant! Al-Ahram Weekly - Ahram Online (Excerpt; read on: The power of neighbourhood lobbying) Social media is increasingly being used to communicate complaints about developments taking place in residential neighbourhood in Cairo, reports Nesmahar Sayed First, there was a campaign against setting up the Cairo Eye, a Zamalek-based project that would have seen Cairos first Ferris wheel at a height of 120m and providing a panoramic view of the city set up on the island of Zamalek in Cairo. Zamalek residents were anything but welcoming of the project, saying it would add to the congested traffic in the neighbourhood as well as jeopardise the safety of buildings. The island is already suffering from the effects of digging work for the new Cairo metro line. A couple of weeks later came news of plans to build a bridge above the Basilica of the Holy Virgin, the iconic Roman Catholic Church located in Al-Ahram Square in Heliopolis. The Basilica, where Baron Empain, the Belgian industrialist who founded Heliopolis, is buried, is a 100-year-old listed heritage site, and it is prohibited by law to build anything obstructing views around it. News of the project stirred an outcry among Heliopolis residents, and Facebook groups were formed to reject the project. Members of the social media groups met with officials as well as their representatives in parliament. Although there has been no official statement so far saying the two projects have been annulled, the campaigns have succeeded in suspending the developments until thorough studies of their effects on the neighbourhoods are done. Thanks to the authorities for listening to our voices and accepting our demands to save Heliopolis and its heritage, Rafic Sabet, administrator of the Facebook group No to building the Basilica bridge, said. Sabet said that he had formed the group just days after discovering that a bridge would be built in front of the Basilica. He told Al-Ahram Weekly that 320 members joined the group within two hours, and in 10 days the number was almost 200,000. The group includes members of the Heliopolis Heritage Initiative, a heritage group, officials, and MPs. Tarek Shoukri, the MP for Heliopolis and Nasr City, visited the area and made a quick poll of residents about the new bridge. The result was their 100 per cent rejection. This result was delivered to the authorities, and we hope a final decision is taken to stop the bridge, Shoukri said, Heliopolis, built in the early 20th century on the eastern outskirts of Cairo as an escape for the well-off and long known for its green areas, has seen a lot of developments over the last year, with almost six new flyovers built in different streets. While helping to deal with congested traffic, these have come at the expense of thousands of trees being cut down in the streets where the bridges were built. We welcome the developments, but not ones that change the identity of Heliopolis, Shoukri said, pointing out that this was one of the reasons the campaign against the Basilica bridge had gained such momentum. Sohaila Al-Sawi, chair of the Egyptian Association for the Environment and Community Services (EAECS), an NGO, told the Weekly that stopping the cutting down of trees was another cause social media campaigns were adopting. Pictures of truckloads of logs being carried away had terrified Al-Sawi. I sent the pictures and the video by WhatsApp to the Ministry of Environment, she said. I did this because I care, and knowing that many others do as well is what community participation is all about. A reply came almost immediately from the ministry notifying Al-Sawy that environmental inspection would be carried out on site. At least someone cared to reply, which is more promising than no reply, she said. In normal circumstances, localities would be responsible for such problems, but as long as local elections are postponed then communication between people and government is the task of NGOs and civil society initiatives, said Amr Al-Chobaky, an expert at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. All municipal councils were dissolved after the 2011 Revolution, and since then Egypt has had no elected municipal councils, especially as parliament is still discussing the new local administration law. This has opened the door for more participation by residents in deciding what happens in their neighbourhoods, Al-Chobaky said. The government should communicate with civil society and social media groups to assess peoples reactions to such projects, he added. He said that since there were at present no elected municipal councils, people miss mechanisms for solving daily life issues. Such issues need mediators between the people and the government in the absence of localities, he said. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. As Grace Cottage Hospital, in Townshend, Vt., starts a vaccination clinic for people 75 and older, Crystal Durocher, a registered nurse, gives Newfane, Vt., Select Board Chairwoman Marion Dowling the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. A man has been charged for a deadly crash in Jackson County in 2018. It happened on Nov. 17, 2018. Alabama State Troopers say Marty Alan Outlaw, 57, of Section was driving a Toyota Camry that left the roadway and hit a tree. His passenger, 45-year-old Tina Marsee Gifford, was not wearing a seat belt and died at the scene on Jackson County 19, about five miles east of Section. Outlaw was injured and taken by helicopter to a nearby hospital. Troopers say speed was a contributing factor to the crash. On Sunday, Feb. 21, Outlaw was arrested on a grand jury indictment for criminally negligent homicide. He was booked in the Jackson County Jail and is awaiting trial. STRATFORD School administrators are meeting this week to come up with a plan for more in-person learning at the towns two high schools, the superintendent told the Board of Education. Students in kindergarten through eighth grade have had the option to be in school for four days a week since Feb. 1. At the school boards monthly meeting Monday, board member Andrea Corcoran asked Superintendent Janet Robinson about students at Bunnell and Stratford high schools. Both schools are currently on a hybrid model where separate groups attend school in person two days a week, with three days of remote learning. Can we detail a little what the plan is for high schools and their scheduling? Corcoran asked. Robinson said plans are in the works, but that details havent yet been ironed out. The superintendent said shed be meeting with principals from both high schools this week. Both schools went fully remote at times last year because of positive COVID-19 cases and resulting staff shortages from the number of people in quarantine. About 65 percent of middle school students have been attending in person four days a week, officials said during the meeting. The middle schools, as you know, theyre coming in, theyre enthusiastic, theyve got things going, so now we need to focus on the high schools, Robinson said. The issue that we have to deal with is the quantity of students in one school, the superintendent said. Those are the things well be discussing and how we can work that through. Ill have something to you as soon as we meet and discuss that. While updating board members earlier in the meeting, Robinson said officials will continue to be careful. Weve had one or two or maybe three (positive COVID-19 cases) throughout the last few weeks, she said. None of them have had any close contacts. What thats telling you is that those are coming from home. As of Wednesday, a COVID dashboard maintained on the school districts website indicated that across the school district, 17 students and six staff members were in isolation because of positive cases. Of those, four positive students were at Stratford High School and one was at Bunnell. Neither high school reported staff with positive cases. Another 109 students and 25 staff members were in quarantine, according to the school districts numbers. Robinson said in an email Wednesday she hoped to have more information to share later this week. Board member Vincent Faggella referenced a newspaper story he had read about neighboring Milford schools pulling back plans for more in-person learning until the end of March. From what you were saying, it sounds like things here are a lot more positive, Faggella said. And we want to keep them that way, Vinny, thats really important, Robinson responded. She credited school nurses and teachers with being diligent and said positive cases in schools are less prevalent than in the community at large. Were pleased with that, Robinson said. The positive cases are not coming out of school. Theyre coming out of students on remote. YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 24, ARMENPRESS. A stable operational situation with no incidents has been maintained along the Armenian-Azerbaijani line of contact of the Armenian state border overnight February 23-24, the Defense Ministry of Armenia told Armenpress. According to the information provided by the Armenian National Security Service, no border incidents were registered in Vorotan-Davit Bek section of the Goris-Kapan inter-state road which is under the responsibility of the NSS border troops. The Armed Forces of Armenia and the NSS border troops confidently control the border situation along the entire length of the border zone. Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan Vietnamese people will have access to COVID-19 vaccination free of charge in the long term like other types of vaccine included in the countrys Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI), according to the National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control. Vietnam has made urgent efforts to obtain COVID-19 vaccines as soon as possible, but the number of vaccine shots distributed to the country in the coming time is still limited, the committee said during a meeting on Tuesday. The Ministry of Health has listed 11 groups of individuals who will be the first to receive COVID-19 vaccination next month. When supply is enough, all Vietnamese people will have access to free COVID-19 inoculation in the long run like other types of vaccine included in the EPI. A small number of vaccine doses will be sold to people who can afford them. The EPI started in Vietnam in 1981, initiated by the Ministry of Health with the support of the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). The initial goal of the program was to provide free immunization to children under one year old to protect them from six common and highly fatal infectious diseases. By 2010, the program had included 11 types of vaccine which protect people against tuberculosis, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, hepatitis B, measles, Japanese encephalitis, cholera, typhoid, and pneumonia/meningitis caused by Hib. According to Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long, Vietnam will need approximately 150 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine for all citizens. The Southeast Asian country will receive 30 million free doses supplied by COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) in 2021. Vietnam has also purchased 30 million more doses from AstraZeneca, which will be delivered this year. The first batch containing 117,600 AstraZeneca vaccine shots arrived at Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday morning. On February 26, the second phase of the human trial of made-in-Vietnam COVID-19 vaccine Nanocovax will begin in Hanoi and the Mekong Delta province of Long An. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! The White House plans to hold a meeting with lawmakers Wednesday to discuss supply-chain issues, including a global chip shortage that is hurting U.S. auto makers, according to people familiar with the plans. President Biden has made supply-chain problems a priority and the White House has said an executive order is imminent. The administration has been holding meetings with auto companies and suppliers. The White House didnt comment Tuesday. White House press secretary Jen Psaki previously said Mr. Biden would sign an executive order that would involve a comprehensive review of supply chains for critical goods, actions to improve production in the U.S., and working with allies to address bottlenecks. A White House official previously said the administration had asked embassies to identify ways foreign countries and companies could help address the chip shortage. Among those involved are Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and Brian Deese, Mr. Bidens top economic adviser. The official said a broad review is under way to look at critical supply chains to identify vulnerabilities and take steps, such as spurring increased U.S. domestic production, to address gaps over the long term and support good paying jobs." A run on chips in recent months has strained global supplies of critical components in a range of electronic devices that have been in demand as people work from home during the coronavirus pandemic. Auto makers have been especially hard hit by shortages of chips that go into numerous systems, from modules that manage engines to automatic braking and assisted driving technologies. The shortages have forced auto plants across the world to slow down or stop assembly lines entirely as auto makers try to funnel scarce chips to their most profitable models. Volkswagen AG said in December that it was reducing output at many of its factories around the world. Shutdowns in Japan and the U.S. soon followed. The Biden administration is facing industry pressure to act. Last week, a group of associations representing technology companies, the automotive industry and other business interests sent a letter to Mr. Biden calling it a national priority. To be competitive and strengthen the resilience of critical supply chains, we believe the U.S. needs to incentivize the construction of new and modernized semiconductor manufacturing facilities and invest in research capabilities," the letter read. We believe the need is urgent and now is the time to act." Bipartisan legislation is also pending on Capitol Hill. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said Tuesday that work had begun on a package to address competition with China, noting that semiconductor production is a priority. Youve all seen that auto plants throughout America are closed because they cant get the chips," Mr. Schumer said. We cannot rely on foreign processors for the chips. We cannot let China get ahead of us into production." This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. AWD WLTP Take a minute to work your mind around that figure. For reference, Hyundai posted a net profit of 2.12 trillion won last year, a figure that works out to $1.9 billion at the current exchange rates. In other words, nearly half of last years revenue will be spent on fixing the Kona Electric subcompact crossover.LG Chem, which is the supplier of the faulty batteries, and Hyundai Motor have both agreed that a software update isnt enough to prevent a fiery incident. Alas, all the vehicles built from November 2017 through March 2020 will have their battery packs fully replaced at no cost to the customer.According to the Financial Times , the cells produced by LG Chem in Nanjing, China, appear to have a flaw in the cathode tabs. This condition leads to an electrical short even when the Kona Electric is turned off, which explains why so many have caught fire so far. No fewer than 14 incidents were reported since 2018, of which four took place overseas and 10 in South Korea.Over in South Korea, the safety recall campaign will start on March 29th, according to a regulatory filing. The document also mentions that $900 million is merely an approximation. The final amount will be decided later after Hyundai settles on how to share the recalls expenses with LG Chem.Despite this costly hiccup, Hyundai still believes that EVs are the way forward. In addition to the Kona Electric, Ioniq family, and Nexo fuel-cell crossover, the South Korean company has recently revealed the Ioniq 5 compact crossover.A brand-new vehicle from the roofline to the floor, the Ioniq 5 is longer than the Tucson, even though it doesnt look like it. At launch, customers will be treated to a couple of battery options, RWD or, and a-rated range of 480 kilometers (300 miles) for the most efficient variant of the lot. President Alberto Fernandez on Tuesday asked Mexico to join the proposal that Argentina and France want to raise at the G-20 for the COVID-19 vaccine to be considered a "global good" and to cede its rights so that any country can produce it. Both leaders said they were against countries stockpiling vaccines and their intentions to ask the UN to intervene. Fernandez made the proposal in a state visit to Mexico, in a time when 70 people in Argentina are under scrutiny for taking the COVID-19 vaccine ahead of the immunization plan. He charged against the judicial investigation underway, saying there are no specific laws against taking the vaccine ahead of the immunization plan. Still, Fernandez said it is a "reprehensible act." Argentina and Mexico were allies in reaching an agreement with Russia to purchase the Sputnik V vaccine, whose first 200,000 doses arrived in Mexico City almost at midnight on Monday. Both countries signed a contract with the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to produce its drug in Argentina and to package and distribute it from Mexico throughout Latin America. Both Mexico and Argentina have surpassed two million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and immunized close to 1% of their population. (Image Credit: AP) (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) A protester in Yangon, Myanmar, as crowds turned out despite military presence. Photo: Hkun Lat/Getty Images Protestors against the militarys seizure of power in Myanmar were back on the streets of cities and towns yesterday, a day after a general strike shuttered shops and brought huge numbers out to demonstrate. In Mandalay, the countrys second-biggest city, a funeral was held for 37-year-old Thet Naing Win, one of two protesters shot dead by security forces on Saturday. He and a teenage boy were killed when police and soldiers opened fire on a crowd that had gathered to support dock workers who the authorities were trying to force to work. They have been on strike, as have many civil servants and state enterprise workers, as part of a nationwide civil obedience movement against the February 1 military takeover. Numbers were down from Mondays massive crowds, but groups of demonstrators in Yangon, the countrys biggest city, assembled again at various venues yesterday for peaceful protests. Protesters trained their ire on a new target, gathering outside the Indonesian Embassy in response to a news report that Jakarta was proposing to its regional neighbours that they offer qualified support for the juntas plan for a new election next year. The demonstrators demand that the results of last years election won in a landslide by Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy party be honoured. Meanwhile, Malaysian immigration authorities said they have deported 1,086 Myanmar migrants, breaking a court order to halt their repatriation following an appeal by two human rights groups. Just hours earlier, a high court granted a one-day stay order for the deportation of 1,200 Myanmar migrants to hear an appeal by Amnesty International Malaysia and Asylum Access Malaysia, which said refugees, asylum-seekers and minors were among those being sent back. Read More Immigration chief Khairul Dzaimee Daud said the 1,086 had agreed to return home voluntarily on three Myanmar naval ships. He stressed they were all Myanmar nationals who were detained last year and didnt include any Muslim ethnic Rohingya refugees or asylum-seekers. All of them have agreed to return voluntarily without being forced by any parties, he said. The statement didnt mention the court order or explain why only 1,086 were deported instead of 1,200. Amnesty International called the decision inhumane and devastating. It appears the authorities railroaded this shockingly cruel deportation before any proper scrutiny of the decision, it said in a statement. This life-threatening decision has affected the lives of more than a thousand people and their families, and leaves an indelible stain on Malaysias human rights record, already in steep decline over the past year. Amnesty said the court would hear its appeal today and urged the government to reconsider its plans to send the migrants back home, where human rights violations are high following the coup. It urged the government to give the UN High Commissioner for Refugees access to the 1,200 migrants and all immigration detention centres in general, which Malaysias government has denied since August 2019. Amnesty International and Asylum Access said the repatriation is tantamount to legitimising human rights violations by Myanmars military and would put the migrants at risk of further persecution, violence and death. Malaysia doesnt recognise asylum seekers or refugees, but has allowed a large population to stay on humanitarian grounds. It is home to some 180,000 UN refugees and asylum seekers including more than 100,000 Rohingya and other members of Myanmar ethnic groups. More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled from Myanmar since August 2017, when the military cracked down over attacks by a rebel group. Sorry, no valid subscriptions were found for this Publication. Please select from an option below to start a subscription. SUBSCRIBE TODAY! 24 Hour Access The URL has been copied to your clipboard The code has been copied to your clipboard. U.S. President Joe Biden pledged $4 billion to the World Health Organizations COVAX plan designed to help provide COVID-19 vaccines for 92 low- and middle-income economies around the world. He said this during Fridays virtual G-7 and the Munich Security Conference. Lockheed Martin offers F-21 for India exclusively, but the USAF will get another option. The upgraded F-16 is a good option, but the U.S. wants a new design from the ground up. The Air Force did not procure the offered updated F-16, so it was provided to India with options. Instead, the U.S. wants a 4.5 or 5th generation fighter without the expense of an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Why the Updated F-21 jet will be a good option The updated fighting falcon said the manufacturer is tweaked to the Indian Air Force's needs (IAF), even options to have the technology to make it 'Made in India.' This is a rare opportunity for India to have a foot in modern aircraft manufacturing reported Eurasian Times. Sources say that Lockheed Martin and Tata will make it in a joint production deal in India. Lockheed Martin has offered its F-21 fighter jet under a 'Make in India' propositionhttps://t.co/I0PisZYeLm Swarajya (@SwarajyaMag) February 7, 2021 Designed and developed by General Dynamics, the single-engine, supersonic, all-weather F-16 has been in service with the U.S. since 1974. Since then, has been flying with many air forces around the world too. The F-16s were made well and served longer than expected but getting old when new planes like the F-35 and F-22 are needed and upkeep. Plans for newer and better planes mean the Fighting Falcon needs a better 4.5 or 5th generation fighter in a slimmed-down version of either F-35 or F-22. The F-21 for India is an option for the IAF. Also read: Upgraded American F-16s to Deter Aggression in the Taiwan Strait Legacy F-16 will get a real successor Concern for the Fighting Falcon's future prompts a study of what plane will succeed the legacy fighter, said Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Q. Brown Jr. on the project. The design will be a clean-sheet design that will be the new 'F-16'. But, it affects the planned shift to F-35A that is slated for 1,763 units. Brown introduced a four-and-a-half-gen or fifth-gen-minus that will replace the F-16 Viper, the most modern version of F-16. He used to fly F-16s as an instructor and said the project for an advanced F-16 that will be cheaper without the stealth. The TacAir study will summarize what the U.S. Air Force will need to get the best mix for the chosen planes. One aspect is the cost and how fast the designs can get from paper to actual flight. One of the expenses controlling programs will be Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) which decides who gets the contract said, Brown. CAPE program will be part of a process that will determine how to develop projects from scratch. If the project is good and won't cost much, it will get the signal from the higher-ups, and the USAF decides where it goes. Plans for 2023 Brown said decisions are needed before the fiscal year 2023 to line up what projects will get funded. Will Roper (Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics) said the F-16 (Block 70/72 version) would be an option to add for the USAF tactical fleet. But Brown thinks it is better for a 4.5 or 5th generation fighter will be better for the long term. Not extending the life of an aging airframe like the F-16V. He added the lack of upgradable options makes them less capable. So, the F-21 for India makes sense in exporting it. Related article: Taiwan Getting More Accurate Missiles to Arm F-16s and Sink the PLAN @ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Photo: The Canadian Press Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is seen with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland and Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau as they meet virtually with United States President Joe Biden from his office on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Tuesday February 23, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld Joe Biden granted Justin Trudeau at least one of the items atop his wish list Tuesday as they met for the first time as president and prime minister: a pledge to help get two Canadians out of a Chinese prison. Strenuous expressions of presidential dismay were nowhere to be seen during the final two years of Donald Trump's tenure as Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor languished behind bars. That all changed Tuesday as Biden and Trudeau one in D.C., the other in Ottawa wrapped up a warm and comprehensive, if virtual, summit meeting, Biden's first since taking office. "Human beings are not bartering chips," the president said of Kovrig and Spavor during closing remarks from the East Room of the White House. "You know we're going to work together until we get their safe return." The two were detained in China in an apparent act of retaliation after Canada arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in December 2018 on U.S. charges of violating sanctions on Iran. They have remained in custody ever since, held on what the federal government and international observers alike have described as bogus charges aimed at putting relentless pressure on Canada. Biden, however, offered no hints about how the White House might help secure their release, such as by abandoning Justice Department efforts to extradite her to stand trial on U.S. soil. The public portions of Tuesday's meeting were cordial from the start. Biden made much of the fact that both his first phone call and his first foreign meeting were with Trudeau evidence, he said, of the deep friendship and lasting ties between the two countries. "The United States has no closer friend than Canada," Biden said from the Roosevelt Room, where he was flanked by cabinet members including Vice-President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. In Ottawa, Trudeau was joined by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau, with Biden, Harris and members of his cabinet projected on a big-screen TV. After four years of dealing with Trump, who famously ignored calls to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Trudeau's enthusiasm for Biden's aggressive climate-change strategy was hard to miss. "Thank you again for stepping up in such a big way on tackling climate change U.S. leadership has been sorely missed over the past years," he said. "As we are preparing the joint rollout and communique from this (summit), it's nice when the Americans are not pulling out all references to climate change and instead adding them in." Freeland, who addressed Harris directly, was no less effusive in her praise for the first woman and person of colour to be elected U.S. vice-president. "Your election has been such an inspiration for women and girls across Canada, especially for black women and girls, and for South Asian women and girls," Freeland said. "I couldn't agree more with what the president said, that we have a real responsibility now, all of us, to show that democracy can deliver for people for Canadians, for Americans and for the whole world." After the obligatory jokes about the challenges of learning French "Every time I tried to speak it, I made such a fool out of myself," Biden was heard to say the group got down to business. A White House "road map'" for the bilateral partnership issued earlier Tuesday highlighted six priority areas for the meeting, including battling the pandemic, rebuilding the economy "on both sides of the border," and a "high-level climate ministerial" meeting to align efforts to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. It also mentioned social diversity and inclusion, expanded co-operation on continental defence and a modernized Norad, plans for a cross-border dialogue on the Arctic and restoring a collective commitment to global institutions like NATO and the World Trade Organization. There was no direct mention of Canada's hope for an exemption to Buy American, Biden's protectionist guardrails for infrastructure and procurement projects, nor of COVID-19 vaccine doses. Canada has been squeezed by vaccine production problems in Europe, prompting calls for U.S. help especially since a key Pfizer manufacturing facility in Michigan is just two hours from the border. Only a diplomatically crafted readout from the Prime Minister's Office offered clues to how those discussions went. Biden and Trudeau "agreed that the pandemic will not end until everyone, everywhere has access to a vaccine," it said. They also discussed "the importance of avoiding measures that may constrain the critical trade and supply-chain security between our countries." Job 1 for the president is getting the vaccine to every American who wants it as soon as possible, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said earlier Tuesday. "Our focus right now is getting shots in arms at home," she said. "All options are on the table down the road, but we remain committed to getting Americans vaccinated." Nor did either leader mention Keystone XL, the on-again, off-again cross-border oil pipeline expansion Biden cancelled with the stroke of his presidential pen on his first day in office. The president has long believed the project was not in the best interests of the U.S. and was simply making good on his promise during the election campaign to cancel it, Psaki said. "We want to try to address our climate crisis while also creating good-paying union jobs. He believes you can do both." That approach is precisely why Ken Neumann, national director of the United Steelworkers union, had hoped Trudeau would be able to secure an agreement to allow Canadians to bid on U.S. contracts. "If the president can be convinced to include Canada as a partner in his plans on these priorities, it would mean more jobs and opportunity in both countries," Neumann said in a statement. "If the prime minister lets Canada get left out of the new president's plans to grow the American economy, Canadian workers will be left on the outside looking in." Mark Agnew, vice-president, policy and international with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, urged Canada to keep up the effort to secure a "carve-out" on Buy American. "Strengthening the relationship is important for Canada at the best of times, but even more critical now as a means to support a business-led recovery on both sides of the border," Agnew said. The two leaders intend to resurrect the North American Leaders' Summit a trilateral meeting of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, more commonly known as the "Three Amigos" summit, which hasn't been convened since 2016. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) Chinese company Sinovac Biotech on Wednesday said it respects the Philippine Food and Drug Administrations recommendations on the general use of its coronavirus vaccine in the country, noting there is no disappointment on the side of the firm. No I do not feel any disappointment, Sinovac general manager Helen Yang said in an interview with CNN Philippines The Source. As a manufacturer, we study the product, we supply the doses to government, and we respect any government who decide how they want to use the vaccine based on the data they collected, she explained. Sinovacs vaccine received its much-awaited emergency use authorization from the FDA earlier this week, but the regulatory agency warned that the product which logged an efficacy rate of 50.4% in late-stage vaccine trials in Brazil is not the most ideal to use for pandemic frontliners. Yang stressed that these trials covered healthcare workers who were more exposed to the virus. Despite this, the Sinovac official maintained their vaccine would prove to be effective in protecting and easing the burden of the healthcare system. Meanwhile, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said in his briefing the same day that President Rodrigo Duterte was perplexed with the special requirements of the EUA. Naiparating ni Presidente yung kanyang pagtataka kung bakit may ganitong colatilla," Roque said. "Nirerespeto po ng Presidente ang opinyon ng mga experts. Kaya let the colatilla remain. [Translation: The President relayed his confusion why there is a colatilla like this. The President respects the opinion of experts. So let the colatilla remain.] [February 24, 2021] Blue Canyon Technologies to Develop Six Additional DARPA Blackjack Satellites Leading small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider Blue Canyon Technologies LLC ("BCT" or "Blue Canyon"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Raytheon (News - Alert) Technologies (NYSE: RTX), today announced it will develop an additional six satellites for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Blackjack program under a Phase 3 contract. "We're demonstrating an economy of scale previously unheard of for national security space assets, and we're proving it can be done on a rapid schedule," said George Stafford, co-founder and CEO of Blue Canyon Technologies. "Blackjack will deliver persistent coverage in low Earth orbit that's resilient by numbers." By incorporating commercial sector advances, including designs used for LEO broadband internet service, Blackjack will demonstrate that a constellation of LEO satellites can meet Department of Defense performance and payload requirements at a significantly lower cost, with shorter design cycles and with easier and more frequent technology upgrades. Designed specifically for LEO missions, BCT will use the final design of its multi-mission X-SAT bus to begin procurement for the additional six satellites. The customized bus includes state-of-the-art electric propulsion, a robust power system, command and data handling, radio frequency communications and dedicated payload interfaces capable of hosting different DoD payloads. In late 2020, BCT and DARPA completed the bus's Critical Design Review at BCT's Satellite Constellation Factory in Lafayette, Colorado. BCT is currently building the first four satellites to be delivered by the close of 2021. To support DARPA's demonstration schedule, the company will deliver the additional six satellites by the close of 2022. About Blue Canyon Technologies Blue Canyon Technologies, a wholly-owned subsidiary o Raytheon Technologies, offers a diverse portfolio of innovative, reliable and affordable spacecraft that enable a broad range of missions and technological advancements for the new space economy, reducing the barriers of space entry. BCT is currently supporting nearly 50 unique missions with over 90 spacecraft, all in production at their newly developed 80,000-square-foot facility in Lafayette, Colorado. BCT has supported missions for the U.S. Air Force, NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and provided the Attitude Control Systems for the first interplanetary CubeSats, which successfully traveled to Mars. The company has been recognized with awards from Inc. Magazine's 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies, the 2020 Best in Biz Award and the 2020 Tibbetts Award. For the latest news on Blue Canyon Technologies and for other company information, please visit www.bluecanyontech.com. You can follow the company on Instagram here or Twitter (News - Alert) here. Distribution Statement "A" (Approved for Public Release, Distribution Unlimited). View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005660/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue has met with Ulster Bank CEO Jane Howard following the banks decision to start exiting the Irish market. The engagement follows warnings from farming organisations that Ulster Banks loan book must not be sold to a vulture fund. In a statement this afternoon, Minister McConalogue said: I am pleased to have had the opportunity to engage with the CEO and her colleagues on the banks decision to exit the Irish market. This is a difficult situation for many customers and I stressed the need for continued engagement and communication between Ulster Bank, its customers and its staff in the coming weeks and months. "It is crucial that the immediate servicing of customers continues which Ms Howard confirmed would happen and she assured me that the bank has capacity to continue to lend to their customers. I also stressed the need to protect, where at all possible, the branch network footprint, the minister said. Access to finance In terms of the agriculture sector, the minister said he impressed upon the bank the need to continue to support their family farm customers. "The strength and resilience of our agriculture sector is based on very low debt levels but continued access to finance is key in delivering on our ambitions for the sector. "I was pleased to hear the bank is continuing its participation in state-backed schemes and, in particular, that it intends to proceed with investment loans under the Future Growth Loan Scheme, for which there has been great demand from their agri-food customers. Its critical to note that the terms of loans and mortgages cannot be changed if the customer continued to meet the conditions of the loan regardless of the outcome of the Ulster Bank process. I will continue to keep in communication with Ulster Bank to ensure that issues important to farmers and the agri-food sector are fully represented in the time ahead, the minister concluded. After Ulster Banks exit announcement last week, the IFA urged the financial institution to make a commitment not to sell its loan book to a vulture fund. With an estimated 10,000 farmers with borrowings from Ulster Bank, and a further 10,000 availing of current account facilities, IFA president Tim Cullinan called on the Government to take action. * Username This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. Choose wisely! They are everywhere. Just a simple Google search throws up over a dozen choices of mobile signal boosters, including on popular e-commerce websites. Despite regular raids by DoT (Department of Telecommunications) across the country, and strict laws against the use, selling and possession of mobile signal repeaters, the proliferation of such illegal equipment is rampant. Early this week, Wireless Monitoring Organization, which is part of DoT, and International Monitoring Station along with a joint team of local administration and mobile operators, raided several locations in New Delhi, and took down illegal mobile signal repeaters installed in homes, shops, and other commercial establishments. As part of the recent crackdown, some 70 illegal repeaters were removed and 18 notices were given to remove the identified ones immediately. "In 2020, we had removed approximately 400 illegal mobile signal boosters. We have started an awareness campaign through which we are making people aware not to use illegal mobile signal boosters. This campaign is against illegal mobile signal boosters which lead to call drops and lowering of mobile network connectivity," said Devendra Kumar Rai, IRRS, Engineering-in-Charge, Wireless Monitoring Organization, DoT, in a statement. But why do people use such equipment in huge numbers? As per Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act, 1933 and Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, DoT can impose heavy penalties on owners of such illegal repeaters. Experts say that reasons for their widespread use are four-fold: easy availability, effortless installation, lack of awareness among consumers, and the deteriorating quality of mobile services (both voice and data) in several locations across India. "The problem with unauthorised boosters is that they deteriorate the quality of service for others which in turn, forces others to put up these boosters as well, and this harms the signal quality in the entire area," says a telecom consultant who didn't wish to be quoted. The claims of illegal equipment sellers are startling too. Not just do these equipment claim to ensure faster data speeds (uploads and downloads) and less call drops, but also reduce radiation levels and increase battery life. The equipment claims to support multiple users of 2G, 3G, and 4G technologies at the same time, and across devices (smartphones, feature phones) and networks (Airtel, Jio, Vodafone Idea, BSNL) of different kinds. Despite huge investments by telecom operators in networks and spectrum, the quality of services (QoS) have taken a hit, especially in dense areas. Although the regular audits by TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) show that QoS are satisfactory; users frequently complain about the increasing instances of call drops and poor data speeds. Also Read: Govt approves over Rs 12,000-crore PLI scheme for telecom sector Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 3 mesi fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. Market Definition: Monochloroacetic Acid (MCAA) Market is having a prolific run at present and can expect a safe passage growth-wise is owing to its popularity in the agricultural sector. Monochloroacetic acid is a specialty organochlorine compound that is colorless, crystalline structured mass, and highly soluble in water. The product is becoming widely popular in all the major agricultural countries where the cultivability and infertility of land are perturbing issues. The component is also required in the production of carboxyl methyl cellulose (CMC), a necessary water retention agent and viscosity modifier for oil drilling activities. The global monochloroacetic acid market is expecting robust growth with which it can exceed the expected market valuation during the forecast period (2020-2023), explains Market Research Future (MRFR). This extensively studied report encompasses segmental analysis depending on various parameters, drivers that can impact the global market significantly in the coming years, and the latest updates of different market players. Get a Free Sample of This Reports @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/5991 Market Scenario and Growth Factors: Monochloroacetic Acid Market Analysis is becoming popular among pharmaceutical manufacturers where its use as a component in the production of maleates, ibuprofen, diclofenac sodium, n-glycine, and others. Personal care and cosmetics industry is also having significant use of the component as a thickener. In the production of PVC resins, the component is gaining traction as well. As a by-product of monochloroacetic acid, sodium chloroacetate is garnering accolades as herbicide which can propel the Monochloroacetic Acid Market Analysis. In the textile industry, monochloroacetic acid finds use as an intermediate in the production of indigo dyes. The demand is burgeoning as the fashion industry is finding it challenging to maintain the pace with the constantly changing trends of fashion. But the monochloroacetic acid market can find it difficult to stay apace as the price of the raw materials fluctuates quite often. Competitive Analysis: Notable players of the Monochloroacetic Acid Market as profiled in the report of MRFR are: Akzo Nobel N.V. (Netherlands) The Dow Chemical Company (U.S.) CABB GmbH (Germany), Denak Co., Ltd (Japan) Daicel Corporation (Japan) PCC SE (Germany) Niacet (U.S.) Xuchang Dongfang Chemical Co. Ltd. (China) Shiv Chem Industries (India) Abhishek Impex (India) Shandong Minji Chemical Co., Ltd. (China) Jubilant Life Sciences Ltd. (India) Merck KGaA (Germany) Alfa Aesar, Thermo Fisher Scientific (U.S.) Anugrah IN-ORG (P) LIMITED (India). In 2020, PCC SE declared their plan to expand their monochloroacetic acid plant in Poland to keep up with the demand generated by various end-user industries. The production capacity would increase from 42,000 metric tons to 100,000 metric tons. AkzoNobel and Atul agreed on setting up a production unit in Gujarat in 2020. AkzoNobel plans to expand their incremental investments through this tie-up. Both the companies would benefit from their plans. Atuls growing popularity would be substantiated by the production. Segmentation: MRFR segments the Monochloroacetic Acid Market Size by form, application, and end-use industry for a better understanding of the market prospect in the coming years. Based on the form, the monochloroacetic acid market can be segmented into crystalline, liquid, powdered, and flakes. Based on the application, the monochloroacetic acid market includes carboxyl methyl cellulose, thioglycolic acid, thickening agent, surfactants, intermediates, and others. As a thickening agent, its utility in food & beverage industry is quite substantial. The end-user segment of the monochloroacetic acid market comprises agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, cosmetic & Personal care, textiles, plastics, oil & gas, and others. The component is witnessing significant traction from the agrochemicals sector and having a great run in the pharmaceuticals. Browse Complete Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/monochloroacetic-acid-market-5991 Regional Analysis: MRFR report region-specifically segments the monochloroacetic acid market into North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific (APAC), and the Middle East & Africa (MEA). Growing demand from agriculture, textile, and pharmaceuticals are boosting the APAC market, riding on which the region is fetching the maximum market share. Furthermore, a lot of major companies are based out of India, China, and Japan which is substantially assisting the market in having unprecedented growth. North America has the second largest market. The regional market is getting driven by the pharmaceutical industry and the personal care & cosmetic industry. Europe and Latin America are also going to register a significant hike in terms of revenue. Note: Our Team of Researchers are Studying Covid19 and Its Impact on Various Industry Verticals and Wherever required we will be considering Covid19 Footprints for a Better Analysis of Market and industries. Cordially get in touch for more details. The Canadian Press As COVID-19 vaccine supplies ramp up across the country, most provinces and territories have begun planning to give second doses in the coming weeks. More than 23 million people across Canada have now had at least one dose of a vaccine. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says by the summer, Canada will have enough vaccines so that every eligible resident will have gotten their first dose, and by September, it will have enough doses for everyone to be fully vaccinated. The National Advisory Committee on Immunization has recommended that Canada turn toward the ultimate goal of fully immunizing the population, now that supplies of COVID-19 shots are increasing. The advisory panel said those at highest risk of dying or becoming severely ill should be prioritized for second shots, either after or alongside first doses for anyone else who is eligible for a vaccine. Since the novel coronavirus is still circulating in Canada, NACI is still recommending that the second dose be received up to four months after the first dose, in order to maximize the number of people who get at least one shot. Here's a list of the inoculation plans throughout Canada: Newfoundland and Labrador All people in the province aged 12 and older can now book an appointment for a first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. So far 2.19 per cent (11,446) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- Nova Scotia Appointments for an initial COVID-19 vaccine shot are now open to people 12 years of age and older. Currently, the Pfizer vaccine is the only one approved for use in children aged 12 and up. The Moderna vaccine is only available for those 18 and older. Under the province's accelerated vaccine plan, someone who received their first dose of vaccine on March 22 and is due for a second dose on July 5 will now be able to reschedule their second appointment for as early as the week of June 20. The province has stopped the use of AstraZeneca's vaccine as a first dose. The Health Department says the decision was based on "an abundance of caution'' due to an observed increase in the rare blood-clotting condition linked to this vaccine. The department also says it will reschedule anyone who was to receive AstraZeneca to instead be inoculated with Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna "in a timely manner." --- Prince Edward Island In Prince Edward Island, residents as young as 16 can book a COVID-19 vaccine. People 16 years and older who have certain underlying medical conditions, pregnant woman and eligible members of their household can also get a vaccine. So far 8.11 per cent (12,868) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- New Brunswick Residents in New Brunswick aged 12 to 17 are now eligible to book an appointment for a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Officials also say residents 55 and older who received an Astra-Zenaca vaccine for the first dose at least eight weeks ago can now get a second dose of the vaccine with informed consent. So far 5.08 per cent (39,633) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- Quebec In Quebec, all residents 12 and older can book a COVID-19 vaccination appointment. The province's health minister says Quebecers 12 to 17 years old will be fully vaccinated by the time they return to school in September. Quebec also says it will shorten the delay between first and second doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to eight weeks from 16 weeks. The province says more than 5.8 million doses of vaccine have now been administered, with more than 58.1 per cent of the population having received at least one dose. --- Ontario All adults in Ontario can now book COVID-19 vaccine appointments. People turning 18 in 2021 can book Pfizer-BioNTech shots. Youth aged 12 and older can also book appointments across Ontario. They can book through the provincial online portal, call centre and through pharmacies offering the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the only shot authorized by Health Canada for use in youth aged 12 and older. Ontarians, meanwhile, are getting the option to shorten the interval between COVID-19 vaccine doses. Most people are being scheduled for doses four months apart, but officials say the new interval could be as short as 28 days. The plan will start with seniors aged 80 and older this week and the province will later offer second shots based on when people received their first. People will keep their original appointments if they dont re-book. The province aims to see all eligible Ontarians fully vaccinated by the end of September. Ontario is also resuming use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine but only as a second dose. Those who received the first dose of AstraZeneca between March 10 and March 19 during a pilot project at pharmacies and some doctor's offices in several Ontario communities will be first in line to receive their second dose. Ontario says more than 10 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have now been administered across the province. So far 4.68 per cent (687,894) of the population has been fully vaccinated --- Manitoba Manitoba is using the Pfizer vaccine for everyone aged 12 and up, and the Moderna vaccines for people aged 18 and up. These are available through a few channels including so-called supersites in larger communities. The province is also allowing anyone 40 and over to get an Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine through pharmacies and medical clinics, subject to availability. People 30-39 can get a shot if they have certain underlying health conditions such as chronic liver failure or severe obesity. The province has opened up second-dose appointments to all Indigenous people aged 12 and up, to people with certain medical conditions such as severe heart failure and Down syndrome, and anyone who received their first dose on or before March 29. Provincial health officials say they now expect 70 per cent of Manitobans aged 12 and older to get a dose by the end of June. So far 7.75 per cent (106,678) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- Saskatchewan Saskatchewan says it reached the step two threshold of its reopening roadmap released last week, with over 70 per cent of residents age 30 and older having received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. That means restrictions will begin to be relaxed June 20, which includes easing capacity limits on retail, personal care services, restaurants and bars, although they must still maintain physical distancing among occupants or have barriers in place. The rules also raise caps on private indoor gatherings to 15, while capacity limits jump to 150 for both public indoor gatherings and all outdoor assemblies, whether public or private. Premier Scott Moe says once 70 per cent of the entire adult population is vaccinated, Saskatchewan can move to the third step of its plan and remove almost all of the remaining public health orders. Saskatchewan residents aged 12 and older are now eligible to book their first COVID-19 vaccine appointment. A school immunization program for those aged 12 to 18 will be introduced in June, but eligible residents of that age can also be immunized at clinics offering the Pfizer vaccine. Anyone 85 and older or anyone who received their first vaccine dose before February 15 can now book their second dose. Anyone diagnosed with cancer and solid organ transplant recipients will be receiving a letter of eligibility in the mail which will allow them priority access to a second dose. There are drive-thru and walk-in vaccination clinics in communities across the province. The province says 6.60 per cent (77,767) of the population has now been fully vaccinated. --- Alberta Every Albertan aged 12 and older is now eligible for a vaccine. As of May 27, 60.3 per cent of Albertans over the age of 12 had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The milestone means the province's second stage of easing restrictions can begin on June 10. It is subject to hospitalizations being below 500 and trending downwards. Some of the restrictions that would be lifted include allowing outdoor gatherings including weddings and funerals with up to 20 people. Restaurants would be allowed to seat tables with up to six people, indoors or outdoors. Retail capacity would also increase, and gyms could open for solo or drop-in activities with three metres of distancing. Dr. Deena Hinshaw, the province's chief medical officer of health, has said people who are immunocompromised can book a second dose three or four weeks after their first shot. All other Albertans are eligible to get their second dose three to four months after the first. For the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, the province lowered the minimum age to 30. They are, however, reserving the remaining supply for second doses when people are eligible. More than 250 pharmacies are offering immunizations. So far 8.82 per cent (388,200) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- British Columbia British Columbia is setting an end-of-summer target for everyone in the province to receive their second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has also announced a decrease in the time between the first and second dose of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, cutting the interval to eight weeks from 16 weeks. But the interval for people who received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as a first dose and are waiting for their second AstraZeneca shot may take longer. Henry said the province is waiting for results from international data on AstraZeneca, including the effectiveness of mixing vaccine shots and ongoing concerns about rare blood clots. Henry said the rollout of second doses will be similar to the first dose, with those at the greatest risk at the top of the list. Seniors, Indigenous people and those who are clinically extremely vulnerable were to start getting their invitations to book a second shot by the end of May. The province will try to ensure that everyone gets the same vaccine they were first administered, but a shortage of the Moderna vaccine may mean people will have to substitute it for a Pfizer shot. Henry said the National Advisory Committee on Immunization has reviewed the evidence on using different vaccines and has updated the guidance, confirming that while it is preferable to have the same product, it's not always possible. Pfizer and Moderna are the same type of vaccines. Families can get vaccinated together in B.C. as the government allows youth between the ages of 12 and 17 to get their COVID-19 shot. The shots will be administered at community clinics instead of in schools based on feedback from families, with 310,000 children in B.C. eligible to get the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which has been approved for that age group. As of Friday, about 3.1 million doses of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines had been administered in B.C., which means about 63 per cent of those eligible have got their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. So far 3.14 per cent (160,885) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- Nunavut Chief public health officer Dr. Michael Patterson says Nunavut has placed an order for doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine with the federal government to vaccinate people ages 12 to 17 in the territory. The Moderna vaccine is currently the only one available in Nunavut. Nunavut has opened vaccinations to anyone 18 and older. It is also offering shots to rotational workers coming from Southern Canada. In the territory, 36.44 per cent (14,113) of the population has now been fully vaccinated. --- Northwest Territories The Northwest Territories is now offering vaccinations against COVID-19 to young people between 12 and 17. The territory, which has only been using the Moderna vaccine, recently exchanged some of that for doses of the Pfizer product, which Health Canada has now approved for anyone as young as 12. So far 51.74 per cent (23,344) of the territory's population has been fully vaccinated. --- Yukon The territory is now vaccinating children aged 12 to 17. The government says clinics in most communities will be held in schools, while those in Whitehorse can get their shot at the Coast High Country Inn Convention Centre. The children will be getting the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The territory says because of limited supply and stricter handling requirements, the vaccine will only be available for a short time. It says second doses for those 12 to 17 will start on June 23 and medical travel will be supported for youth who aren't able to make the clinic date in their community. The Moderna vaccine is available to adults 18 years of age and older. The government says 59.34 per cent (24,763) of the population has now been fully vaccinated. --- This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 31, 2021. The Canadian Press NASA's Parker Solar Probe captured stunning views of Venus during its close flyby of the planet in July 2020. Though Parker Solar Probe's focus is the Sun, Venus plays a critical role in the mission: The spacecraft whips by Venus a total of seven times over the course of its seven-year mission, using the planet's gravity to bend the spacecraft's orbit. These Venus gravity assists allow Parker Solar Probe to fly closer and closer to the Sun on its mission to study the dynamics of the solar wind close to its source. But -- along with the orbital dynamics -- these passes can also yield some unique and even unexpected views of the inner solar system. During the mission's third Venus gravity assist on July 11, 2020, the onboard Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, or WISPR, captured a striking image of the planet's nightside from 7,693 miles away. WISPR is designed to take images of the solar corona and inner heliosphere in visible light, as well as images of the solar wind and its structures as they approach and fly by the spacecraft. At Venus, the camera detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet that may be nightglow -- light emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules in the nightside. The prominent dark feature in the center of the image is Aphrodite Terra, the largest highland region on the Venusian surface. The feature appears dark because of its lower temperature, about 85 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) cooler than its surroundings. That aspect of the image took the team by surprise, said Angelos Vourlidas, the WISPR project scientist from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, who coordinated a WISPR imaging campaign with Japan's Venus-orbiting Akatsuki mission. "WISPR is tailored and tested for visible light observations. We expected to see clouds, but the camera peered right through to the surface." "WISPR effectively captured the thermal emission of the Venusian surface," said Brian Wood, an astrophysicist and WISPR team member from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. "It's very similar to images acquired by the Akatsuki spacecraft at near-infrared wavelengths." This surprising observation sent the WISPR team back to the lab to measure the instrument's sensitivity to infrared light. If WISPR can indeed pick up near-infrared wavelengths of light, the unforeseen capability would provide new opportunities to study dust around the Sun and in the inner solar system. If it can't pick up extra infrared wavelengths, then these images -- showing signatures of features on Venus' surface -- may have revealed a previously unknown "window" through the Venusian atmosphere. "Either way," Vourlidas said, "some exciting science opportunities await us." For more insight into the July 2020 images, the WISPR team planned a set of similar observations of the Venusian nightside during Parker Solar Probe's latest Venus flyby on Feb. 20, 2021. Mission team scientists expect to receive and process that data for analysis by the end of April. "We are really looking forward to these new images," said Javier Peralta, a planetary scientist from the Akatsuki team, who first suggested a Parker Solar Probe campaign with Akatsuki, which has been in orbiting Venus since 2015. "If WISPR can sense the thermal emission from the surface of Venus and nightglow -- most likely from oxygen -- at the limb of the planet, it can make valuable contributions to studies of the Venusian surface." ### Parker Solar Probe is part of NASA's Living with a Star program to explore aspects of the Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society. The Living with a Star program is managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Johns Hopkins APL designed, built and operates the spacecraft. Houlihan Lokey (NYSE:HLI), the global investment bank, announced today that Dr. Andreas Dombret has been appointed Independent Chairman of the firm's activities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (DACH). Dr. Dombret was appointed as a Senior Advisor to the firm last year and will now devote more time to Houlihan Lokey in his expanded role. As Independent Chairman, he will provide senior leadership and strategic counsel to the heads of our Corporate Finance and Financial Restructuring businesses in DACH and spearhead our further expansion in the region. "As we continue to expand our businesses across Europe, we are delighted to have Andreas guiding our growth in the DACH region. His experience and expertise in both policy and investment banking provide him a unique perspective that will give our clients unparalleled insights," commented Scott Adelson, Co-President of Houlihan Lokey. "Having made an immediate impact after joining the firm last year as a Senior Advisor, it became clear to us that Andreas was the ideal person for this new role, to play a critical part in driving our businesses forward in DACH," added Matteo Manfredi, Head of Corporate Finance in Continental Europe for Houlihan Lokey. "Andreas is an eminent figure in the German financial community, and having him on board in a leadership capacity will have a meaningful impact on our business in the region," said Joseph Swanson, Co-Head of Houlihan Lokey's EMEA Restructuring Group. Andreas Dombret commented, "Houlihan Lokey is already the leading U.S. mid-cap corporate finance advisory firm, and has shown its clear intention to match that position in Europe with the continued expansion of the business here. Within DACH, I can see many growth opportunities for both Corporate Finance and Financial Restructuring, and I look forward to helping the firm achieve its strategic goals in the region." The appointment comes as the firm's two businesses in Germany prepare to move into a new office in Frankfurt in April. In DACH, Houlihan Lokey's Corporate Finance team is headed by Managing Directors Tobias Rieg, Martin Bastian, Christian Keller, and Nicolas Zintl. The German Financial Restructuring team is led by Managing Directors Niklas Lerche and Malte Wulfetange. Between 2010 and 2018, Andreas Dombret served as a member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, the German central bank; from 2014 to 2018 he was a member of the Supervisory Board of the European Central Bank (ECB); and from 2012 to 2018, he was a Board Director at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Prior to joining the Bundesbank in 2010, he was Vice Chairman of European Investment Banking at Bank of America. From 2002 to 2005, he served as a Partner at Rothschild Co. in Frankfurt and London. He joined Rothschild after 10 years with J.P. Morgan, where he was a Managing Director covering the financial institutions sector in Germany and Austria. He began his career at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt in 1987. Since leaving the Bundesbank in 2018, Andreas Dombret has taken on a number of international advisory positions, which are unaffected by this appointment. About Houlihan Lokey Houlihan Lokey (NYSE:HLI) is a global investment bank with expertise in mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, financial restructuring, and valuation. The firm serves corporations, institutions, and governments worldwide with offices in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region. Independent advice and intellectual rigor are hallmarks of the firm's commitment to client success across its advisory services. Houlihan Lokey is the No. 1 M&A advisor for the past six consecutive years in the U.S., the No. 1 global restructuring advisor for the past seven consecutive years, and the No. 1 global M&A fairness opinion advisor over the past 20 years, all based on number of transactions and according to data provided by Refinitiv (formerly Thomson Reuters). View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005392/en/ Contacts: Investor Relations 212.331.8225 IR@HL.com Media Relations Richard Creswell +44 (0) 20 7747 1480 PR@HL.com (@ChaudhryMAli88) London, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 24th Feb, 2021 ) :Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca said Tuesday its EU supply chains would only be able to deliver half of an expected supply of Covid-19 vaccines to the bloc in the second quarter -- but that it would look to make up the shortfall from elsewhere. A spokesman for the British drugs group told AFP AstraZeneca was "working to increase productivity in its EU supply chain" and would use its "global capability in order to achieve delivery of 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter". "Approximately half of the expected volume is due to come from the EU supply chain" while the remainder would come from its international supply network, he added. The announcement follows controversy over deliveries of the AstraZeneca-Oxford University jab to the European Union in the first quarter, which has caused tension between the bloc and the pharmaceutical company. Ahead of the EU's approval of the vaccine at the end of January, the British-Swedish company sparked fury among European leaders by announcing that it would miss its target of supplying the EU with 400 million doses, due to a shortfall at the firm's European plants. The disagreement also caused diplomatic tensions with Britain, which definitively left the EU after 40 years of membership following a transmission period at the end of 2020 -- with Brussels implicitly accusing AstraZeneca of giving preferential treatment to Britain at the expense of the EU. The UK government has vaccinated millions of Britons with the AstraZeneca jab since late last year. But the company only began shipping it to the EU in early February, after the bloc's drug regulator took its time over recommending its use. The AstraZeneca vaccine has suffered a number of other setbacks -- it was temporarily excluded from South Africa's immunisation campaign because of concern it was less effective towards new virus variants there; and Germany's vaccine commission recommended it only for people aged 18 to 64 years old. But more recently, World Health Organization experts recommended it for use on people aged over 65 and in settings where new strains of the virus are circulating. The shot forms the bulk of doses being rolled out around the world -- especially in poorer countries -- under the Covax programme. It has attracted praise for its low cost relative to rivals and its ease of storage -- a regular refrigerator can be used. AstraZeneca announced on February 11 it had seen its profits double in 2020. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) - A measure paving the way for former Moro rebels to gain employment in the autonomous region cleared the Bangsamoro Transition Authority. The body unanimously approved on Wednesday Cabinet Bill 59 or the Bangsamoro Civil Service Code of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. The authority said in a statement, the Civil Service Code is a priority legislation as it will provide a favorable policy environment that would give chance to our qualified mujahideen (fighters) to be considered for employment by the Bangsamoro government during the transition period. The BARMM parliament passed the Bangsamoro Administrative Code in October 2020. READ: Displacement and untold histories: The Bangsamoro in transition The Education Code, Local Government Code, and Electoral Code are still pending at the committees in parliament. An analysis of U.S. county-level data found a strong association between jail incarceration and death rates from infectious diseases, chronic lower respiratory disease, drug use, and suicide, in a new study by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The researchers found this was the case to a lesser extent for heart disease and cancer. The study is the first to examine the link between the expansion of the jail population and multiple specific causes of death at the county level, and adds to the growing body of evidence suggesting that decarceration strategies would improve public health. Findings are published online in the journal Lancet Public Health. "Our findings underscore public health benefits of reducing jail incarceration and the importance of interventions to mitigate the harmful effects of mass imprisonment on community health including community-based treatment for substance use disorder and greater investment in social services," said Sandhya Kajeepeta, Ph.D. candidate in Columbia Mailman School of Public Health's Department of Epidemiology, who led the research. Using county jail incarceration rates and county-level mortality data in the U.S. across 1,094 counties between 1987 and 2017 the researchers estimated that every 1 per 1,000 population increase in the local jail incarceration rate was associated with a 6.5 percent and 5 percent increase in death rates from infectious diseases and chronic lower respiratory disease respectively, and around a 2.5 percent rise in mortality from drug use and suicide, in the county population (aged 75 years or younger) during the following yearafter accounting for the effects of county-level factors such as crime, poverty, racial demographics, and unemployment. Increases in county-level incarceration were also associated with smaller increases in county death rates from heart disease (2.1 percent increase), unintentional injury (1.5 percent, cancer (1.4 percent), diabetes (1.3 percent), and cerebrovascular disease (1 percent) over the subsequent year. "As we anticipate the Biden administration's plans to address persistent mass criminalization and incarceration, our findings underscore the role of local jail incarceration as an important independent contributor to all major causes of premature death in the counties in which they are located," said Kajeepeta. "Our findings provide further evidence of the population-level public health harms of mass incarceration. With U.S. correctional facilities reporting some of the highest COVID-19 infection rates in the nation, the pandemic highlights the immediate need for decarceral strategies to massively reduce the number of people held in our nation's jails and prisons to protect the lives of incarcerated people and control infectious disease spread in the community." The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. At any given time, county jails across the nation house more than 730,000 inmates that are typically serving less than a year or awaiting trial. However, many more people (over 11 million) enter jail every year (most awaiting trial)with generally 200,000 people passing in and out every week. Evidence indicates that Black Americans are incarcerated in local jails at four times the rate of white Americans. In the study, the authors used data from the U.S. National Vital Statistics System together with jail incarceration data for 1,094 counties (36 percent) of all U.S. counties) from the Vera Institute of Justice between 1987 and 2017, to model associations between jail incarceration and nine common causes of deathcerebrovascular disease, chronic lower respiratory disease (e.g., emphysema, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), diabetes, heart disease, infectious disease, cancer, drug use, suicide, and unintentional injuryfor county residents aged younger than 75 years. The median increase in county jail incarceration rate over the study period was 1.9 per 1,000 population, with some counties experiencing an increase of more than 20 per 1,000 population. The researchers hypothesized that the impact on a community from causes of death with longer latency periods, such as heart disease and cancer, are felt over time, so they assessed the medium- (5-year) and long-term (10-year) effects of jail incarceration as well as the short-term (1-year) impact. They adjusted for county-level characteristics and changes over time that might affect the relationship between incarceration and mortality, including local poverty and crime rates, unemployment levels, percentage of county residents who were Black, and state political party control. While increases in the county jail incarceration rate were linked with increases in mortality rates for all causes of death during the subsequent year, these associations weakened over time, particularly for infectious disease and suicidewith a 5 percent and 2.5 percent decline in county mortality respectively after 10 years. The decline was less pronounced for causes of death with generally longer latency periods including cancer. "Not only do county jails operate as revolving doors facilitating the spread of infectious disease in the community, but they are often dangerously overcrowded, with poor ventilation and substandard healthcare," said co-author Dr. Abdul El-Sayed from Detroit's Wayne State University, who is also the city's former health director. "Incarceration takes working-age people out of their local communities, separates families, and disrupts social ties and support networks. When combining that economic hardship with the money government spends on incarcerating people instead of investing in social services to support them, jail systems ultimately hurt the people the system thinks it's 'correcting'." The authors say that racial disparities in the nation's criminal justice system compound existing socioeconomic and racial health disparities. "Responses to the most pressing public health challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic and opioid epidemic, require public health to reckon with mass criminalization and mass incarceration," noted Seth J. Prins, Ph.D., assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School, the study's senior author. "We need to disinvest from the carceral systems that have displaced public health and social infrastructures. Decarceration policies, like investments in community-based substance use treatment, housing, education, and jobs, can produce broad mortality benefits and potentially save thousands of lives." Explore further Social and structural factors influence racial disparities in COVID-19 mortality More information: Sandhya Kajeepeta et al, Association between county jail incarceration and cause-specific county mortality in the USA, 19872017: a retrospective, longitudinal study, Lancet Public Health, DOI: 10.1016/S2468-2667(20)30283-8 Journal information: The Lancet Public Health Sandhya Kajeepeta et al, Association between county jail incarceration and cause-specific county mortality in the USA, 19872017: a retrospective, longitudinal study, Meaghan Loy, MS, ALAT, Director of In Vivo Services at Scientist.com [Loy's] considerable research marketplace experience will help us spread our message that while animals are still an essential part of scientific research, there are an increasing number of ways to reduce, refine and replace animal use.Ben Cappiello, current NA3RsC President and AxoSim executive. Scientist.com, the healthcare industrys leading marketplace for life science research, announced today that Meaghan Loy, MS, ALAT, has joined the Board of Directors of the North American 3Rs Collaborative (NA3RsC), an organization committed to advancing the Replacement, Reduction and Refinement (3Rs) of animal use in research. As a board member, Loy will help the NA3RsC fulfill its goal of facilitating communication, sharing and collaboration to bring transformational solutions to advance science and animal welfare. The NA3RsC is excited to welcome Meaghan to its Board, said Ben Cappiello, current NA3RsC President and AxoSim executive. Her considerable research marketplace experience will help us spread our message that while animals are still an essential part of scientific research, there are an increasing number of ways to reduce, refine and replace animal use. Loy is currently the Director of In Vivo Services at Scientist.com, a research marketplace that enables researchers to access pre-assessed animal model suppliers as well as hundreds of suppliers that provide in vitro models that can potentially replace or reduce the use of in vivo models. She joined Scientist.com in 2018 and is an expert in the use of COMPLi, Scientist.coms award-winning platform that introduces a common, comprehensive process and supply agreement supporting access to pre-assessed suppliers of in vivo and in vitro research models. Prior to Scientist.com, Loy worked at Science Exchange and Covance Laboratories. She has a bachelors degree in Agricultural Sciences and a masters degree in Biotechnology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. NA3RsC is creating powerful new approaches to the 3Rs, including translational digital biomarkers, microphysiological systems and rodent health monitoring, in addition to its outstanding education efforts. said Meaghan Loy, MS, ALAT, Director of In Vivo Services at Scientist.com. I am honored to work with such an essential organization on collaborative opportunities to refine, reduce and replace animals in research. About Scientist.com Scientist.com is the pharmaceutical industrys leading AI-powered marketplace for outsourced R&D. The marketplace simplifies R&D sourcing, saves time and money, reduces risk and provides access to the latest innovative tools and technologies. Scientist.com operates private enterprise marketplaces for most of the worlds major pharmaceutical companies, over 80 biotechnology companies, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Visit scientist.com to learn more. Join Scientist.com on social media: LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram Media Contact: Sean Preci Director of Communications +1 858 455-1300 ext. 401 The Virginia-based sailor who died Monday of the illness caused by the new coronavirus was Chief Hull Technician Justin Huf. Huf, 39, began quarantining Feb. 16 after developing symptoms of COVID-19, according to a Navy news release issued Wednesday. He tested positive for the virus three days later and was admitted to Sentara Leigh Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, on Feb. 20. He was in the hospital's intensive care unit when he died. Read Next: Congressional Pressure Adds 'Urgency' to Agent Orange Claims, VA Secretary Says "Our deepest condolences are with the family, friends and shipmates of Chief Petty Officer Huf during this extremely difficult time, and we ask that their privacy be respected," the release states. Huf, originally from California, was assigned to Assault Craft Unit 4 out of Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek. Sailors who'd been in contact with him have been notified and are taking precautions in case they were also exposed to the virus. Members of Huf's crew also have access to chaplains, embedded mental health specialists and counselors after their shipmate's loss, officials said. Huf is the seventh sailor to die of COVID-19 since the start of the global pandemic. He's also one of two Virginia-based sailors who died from the virus this month. Two more sailors also died this month -- one in Illinois and the other in Florida. Rep. Elaine Luria, a retired Navy commander and Democrat representing much of Hampton Roads and Virginia Beach, said Wednesday that Huf's death serves as "yet another painful reminder of the severity of this deadly virus." "I urge the Navy to investigate this trend and determine what improved mitigation measures may be necessary to better protect Navy sailors and civilians," Luria said. More than 50 Navy civilians have died of COVID-19. Rear Adm. Bruce Gillingham, the Navy's surgeon general, said last week that sailors who have died of COVID-19 this month were likely exposed to the illness in their communities since they weren't deployed when they became infected. "I think it just reflects the overall endemicity of the virus in the community," he said. ".... They were exposed, more than likely, within the community." Huf enlisted in the Navy in 2003, according to his service records. He became a chief petty officer in March 2020 and served on the destroyer Mahan before joining Assault Craft Unit 4. He was also assigned to the Naval Academy for three years and served with a different assault craft unit at a California Marine Corps base for four years. Huf's personal awards included three Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal and three Good Conduct Medals. -- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins. Related: Navy Loses 4th Sailor in 20 Days to COVID-19 NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Keeps is celebrating its three-year anniversary, announcing it is now the largest direct-to-consumer (DTC) hair loss brand in the U.S. and has distributed its one-millionth shipment. In support of a milestone-filled year, the brand will also launch the "Keeps Collective," a group comprised of some of their first customers who remain loyal to the brand and act as ambassadors. Launched in early 2018, Keeps entered the market as an entirely digital company focused on preventing hair loss and offering men simple and affordable ways to keep and regrow hair with FDA-approved products. After a steady following thanks to the success of its product line and being named a " promising start-up to watch " by CNBC Keeps' revenue tripled from 2019 to 2020. "For the last three years, we've helped hundreds-of-thousands of guys keep their hair. We're proud to have built a strong following over the years which has propelled our growth to become the largest direct-to-consumer men's hair loss brand. Our treatment plans feature clinically-proven medications along with convenient delivery and ongoing support from doctors specializing in hair loss. This full-service approach helps drive proven results for Keeps' customers against hair loss, greatly improving their confidence and overall lifestyle," said Matt O'Connor, General Manager at Keeps. "In reaching this three-year milestone, we've also been able to celebrate our one-millionth shipment in 2020 and ended the year with over 260,000 subscribing customers, a 125% increase versus the start of 2019." In support of the anniversary and tremendous growth, the brand will also launch the "Keeps Collective," engaging some of its most loyal customers who have trusted their products since inception. It will consist of a group of men who will share their success stories, creating a community in the space and acting as brand ambassadors. Revealing how they've improved their lives and found a new sense of confidence with Keeps treatment, collective members will also receive complimentary products and other perks. Keeps' strong success is also rooted in the fact that its patients report positive health outcomes--cessation of hair loss or regrowth--in as little as six months. Over 60% of patients report greater self-confidence after starting Keeps treatment. In addition, nearly a third of Keeps' patients report that they had not considered treating hair loss prior to learning of the brand, demonstrating that the direct-to-consumer brand is bringing new patients into the treatment category. Keeps is part of Thirty Madison , a leading digital health company reinventing the patient experience for the estimated 133 million Americans living with chronic conditions. For more information, please visit keeps.com or reach out to [email protected] . About Keeps Keeps is the largest direct-to-consumer men's hair loss brand in the U.S. With clinically-proven treatment plans and FDA-approved products, Keeps offers men a simple, effective, and affordable way to stop hair loss and ensure their hair is as healthy as possible. Since launching in 2018, Keeps has helped hundreds of thousands of men manage hair loss while improving and expanding access to treatments, leading to positive health outcomes and greater self-confidence for patients. Visit Keeps.com and follow us on Twitter , Facebook , Instagram , and LinkedIn . About Thirty Madison Thirty Madison makes specialized care and clinically-proven treatments accessible and affordable for everyone by bringing the specialist experience directly into people's homes with online doctor consultations, treatment delivery, and ongoing support. The company prioritizes and enables the cultivation of meaningful doctor-patient relationships to provide the best care for the successful management of lifelong conditions. Keeps launched in January 2018 and is now the largest direct-to-consumer men's hair loss brand in the U.S. Cove launched in January 2019 to serve migraine sufferers and is growing rapidly; and Evens , the first brand for acid reflux, launched in September 2019. SOURCE Thirty Madison Related Links https://thirtymadison.com MASON CITY, Iowa - Mental health experts are seeing a troubling trend. Suicide attempts by teenagers could be on the rise. The Iowa Poison Control Center has some alarming statistics regarding teen suicide attempts. They report they are seeing an increase. At the end of January, in just one week, the Iowa Poison Control Center reported 20 cases of girls aged 11-14 who tried to overdose on medication. That's over 2 times the average. KIMT News 3 spoke with Jen Hansen at Francis Lauer in Mason City. She says they have seen more teens coming in for counseling since the pandemic begain, but not necessarily for suicidal thoughts. Hansen says there are some signs parents should watch out for. "You want to be checking to see if their mood is changing. So, all of the sudden they're really happy or really sad. Just because all of the sudden they're really happy, isn't always a good sign either. If they are isolating more or spending more time alone," said Hansen. She also says if you notice those changes over a prolonged period of time, you might want to seek out professional help for your child. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranks suicide as the 10th leading cause of death, according to their numbers from 1999 to 2019. Dairy commodity prices are continuing to harden as strong global demand for powders and butter fuels a steady recovery in the trade. Spot prices for butter have increased by 350/t since Christmas to hit 3,600/t on the Dutch market. A 10pc price hike has also been recorded on the Dutch market for skim milk powder (SMP) and whole milk powder (WMP), which have moved to 2,390/t and 2,910/t respectively. The recovery in EU dairy commodity prices has been helped by milk supply expansion failing to keep pace with demand growth, particularly since early January, said Rabobank dairy analyst, Richard Scheper. European milk supplies are expected to be weaker through the first quarter, with production back in France, Germany and the Netherlands in January and likely to be in February. Although Kiwi milk supplies have improved over the last two months when compared to 2020, Mr Scheper pointed out that this was from a very low base due to the drought in New Zealand this time last year. Food-service trade Mr Scheper said strong retail sales of dairy produce in Europe were helping to underpin the market, as was increased demand for milk powders in China and other Asian markets. The million-dollar question is what impact will the food-service trade have on the market when it finally re-opens across Europe this year? he added. Overall the market outlook has improved since the Christmas period. This also provides the potential for an improvement in base milk prices in the next couple of months. Nonetheless, there are obviously still uncertainties around, for example with regards to demand and economic developments, Mr Scheper said. Stronger dairy commodity demand is being reflected in milk returns, with Friesland Campina increasing its guaranteed price for March to 35.25c/kg (VAT exclusive) this is up from 34.25c/kg for January. Commenting on the latest market developments and price announcements, ICMSAs, Ger Quain, said that dairy market fundamentals had moved to an extent that warranted the price increases announced by some milk purchasers for January milk. However, he insisted that price increases should continue into the peak supply months of April, May and June. ICMSA had expressed our view that a price increase was due for January milk and it was delivered by some milk purchasers - but we are now stating bluntly and on the record that all co-ops will have to increase milk price for supplies received in February, Mr Quain said. The ICMSA representative said the buoyant Dutch quotes and eight consecutive increases in the GDT had to be reflected in returns to farmers. The market-justified milk price increases had better be forthcoming, Mr Quain maintained, given the higher input costs milk suppliers are facing this year. Cian English died on May 23, 2020, when falling four storeys while trying to flee an alleged armed robbery. Five people have been remanded in custody charged with the murder of 19-year-old Carlow native Cian English on May 23 last year. The three men and two teen girls will be held in custody until a date for their trial is set, in connection with the incident that took place south of Brisbane in Surfers Paradise Beach. Cian fell four stories to his death from an apartment balcony after attempting to flee from the accused who allegedly tried to rob him at knifepoint. Cians ashes were buried in his native Carlow last June. His family had relocated to Brisbane ten years ago. The five people accused are Jason Ryan Knowles (22), Hayden Paul Kratzmann (20) and Lachlan Paul Soper-Lagas (18) along with two girls that have not been named due to being under the age of 18. The accused are charged with murder, robbery, torture and deprivation of liberty. Detective Inspector Brendan Smith of Queensland Police last year told 9 News in Australia that video obtained from the phones of some of the accused showed there was no remorse. Cian and a friend of his joined the accused in the belief they were joining a house party and were viciously assaulted according to police. "We've got a 19-year-old male who has died tragically and we've got people that don't seem to care, Det. Inspector Smith said. When police arrived at the apartment, they found four people all in varying degrees of consciousness due to overdosing on prescription medication. The three males will appear before the courts once again on March 23 in connection with the incident. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes The Central Texas Food Bank in Austin, Texas, must be thrilled with the recent donation it received. Actress Sandra Bullock, who previously lived in Austin, donated $250,000 to the food bank on behalf of the women of the movie Oceans 8, reports KXAN NBC. Its incredible to see our community come together to help Central Texans recover after the snowstorm. Were grateful to receive a $250K gift from Sandra Bullock on behalf of the Women of Ocean's 8. Their generosity will help provide 1 million meals for our community. Thank you! pic.twitter.com/88UYhLBrYo CentralTexasFoodBank (@CTXFoodBank) February 23, 2021 The food bank tweeted that the donation will help provide 1 million meals for people facing food insecurity in central Texas, a mission made more complicated due to the catastrophic and unusual winter storm that the state experienced a little over a week ago. NPR reported last week that not only did the extreme, cold weather shut down power and water in Texas, it depleted food supplies. Grocery stores had empty shelves due to long lines of people stocking up on supplies and replacing foods that spoiled due to power loss. The power and water outages impacted operations of stores, warehouses and manufacturing plants. Travel was hindered as well due to icy roads, making food deliveries impossible. Anyone following the career and life of Bullock knows this is not the first time she has been generous to causes and charities. This includes backing The Kindred Life Foundation, and the clean-up of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In addition, she has donated $1 million to the American Red Cross at least five times two of those being in the United States. One was to the Liberty Disaster Relief Fund after 9/11, and the other was in Texas for Hurricane Harvey relief. Others helping Texas recover include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. She donated nearly $300,000 to the food bank Monday. And according to an Associated Press story on PennLive, the lawmaker also raised $4 million in donations, and did some hands-on volunteer work at a Houston food bank on Saturday. KXAN also reported that Austin-based Titos Handmade Vodka and sparkling water brand Rambler each donated to the winter storm cause. Titos helped provide meals for 2,250 homes and Rambler provided water for a food distribution event that was held Saturday. Read more: The sentencing of a man for sexually assaulting two women in Dublin city centre four years ago has been adjourned because the prison he is on remand in is currently in lockdown. Philip Murphy (40) was not produced from the Midlands Prison today and Judge Melanie Greally adjourned the case to April 16 next for sentence. She said it is likely that she will be imposing a custodial sentence so the adjournment should not impact Murphy. The Midlands Prison is currently in lockdown after a number of prisoners and staff have tested positive for Covid-19. The case had been adjourned last November after evidence was heard at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court that Murphy had just been released from serving a 10-year prison sentence for falsely imprisoning a woman, when he sexually assaulted the two women in February 2016. He was extradited from the UK in early 2020 following lengthy legal argument. Murphy, of no fixed abode in the Dublin 8 area, pleaded guilty to two counts of sexually assaulting the two women at Jervis Lane and O'Rahilly Parade in Dublin on February 25, 2016. During both incidents, Murphy grabbed the women from behind as they were walking on their own through the city in the early hours of the morning, told them he wanted to have sex with them and said he was going to kill them. You're going to die tonight, he repeatedly told one victim. Detective Garda Emma Ryan told Philipp Rahn BL, prosecuting, at the sentence hearing last November, that Murphy's first victim was walking home from her work in a restaurant shortly after midnight on the night in question when Murphy grabbed her from behind by the mouth. He told the woman: Don't scream or I'm going to kill you. I just want to fuck. I can pay you for it. The woman was terrified, but tried to lead Murphy along the road towards help before screaming loudly, the court heard. People in nearby apartments looked out their windows at the sound of the screaming, causing Murphy to flee. The woman also ran home before contacting gardai. Twenty minutes later, another woman was walking along Moore Street, on her way to work when Murphy came up behind her, put his hand over her mouth and pushed her into O'Rahilly Parade. He stroked her shoulder and touched her chest area, repeatedly telling her: You're going to die tonight, the court heard. He was looking at me like I was naked, like I was a piece of meat, the woman told gardai. He kept telling me I was going to die, that he was going to cut my throat. A man walked past and the woman tried to scream, as Murphy squeezed her throat. The passer-by looked their way and a passing bin truck driver also noticed her calling for help. Murphy again fled the scene and the men came to the woman's aid. Gardai at Store Street launched an investigation and sourced CCTV footage of both areas. In footage of the first incident, Murphy could be seen putting on a pair of gloves before jogging after the first victim. In footage of the second incident, he could also be seen walking closely behind the woman. Murphy's probation officers and former prison officers identified him from the footage. He had been released from prison just two days prior to the incident after serving the bulk of a 10-year sentence for false imprisonment. He has 10 previous convictions in total, including public order offences and production of a Stanley knife. Murphy was arrested, questioned and released without charge while a file was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions. During the garda interview, Murphy denied carrying out the offences. He said he had received psychological treatment in prison and didn't treat women like that anymore. He also claimed he was gay and no longer attracted to women. A decision was made to charge him in October 2017, but by then he could not be located, Det Gda Ryan said. Murphy was eventually arrested in July 2019 in the UK on foot of a European arrest warrant. He remained in custody in the UK for nearly a year due to legal issues before being extradited to Ireland in June this year. He has been in custody ever since. Judge Melanie Greally noted that any sentence handed down to Murphy would require a lengthy probation period. She had adjourned the case today to allow for the preparation of a probation report. In victim impact statements read out by counsel, the first woman said she started losing hair in the wake of the assault. She said she was depressed and sad and ended up leaving Ireland to return to her home in Mexico. She said she had hoped to study for a Masters degree in Ireland, but Murphy stole my dreams from me. I don't wish him harm, just justice, she said. The second woman said she became a different person after the attack. She said she can no longer walk alone at night or do shift work and suffers from depression and anxiety. This man has taken my confidence and filled me with fear, she said. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Municipal leaders in Morden and Winkler are on standby, as provincial officials have yet to pick the site for a new COVID-19 vaccination clinic set to open in just 10 days. Municipal leaders in Morden and Winkler are on standby, as provincial officials have yet to pick the site for a new COVID-19 vaccination clinic set to open in just 10 days. Two new high-volume clinics are scheduled to open March 5, the provincial government announced last week: one in Selkirk and one in the Winkler-Morden area, though the exact locations had yet to be determined. As of Tuesday afternoon, Morden Mayor Brandon Burley said he had not heard from the province if his municipality would play host to a vaccination centre. "We would welcome them with open arms," Burley told the Free Press. "This is, hopefully, the biggest challenge of our lifetime, and we need to get needles in arms and get this behind us. "We will certainly do everything we can to facilitate them if they choose our city." MYMORDEN.CA PHOTO Morden Access Event Centre Burley said conversations between the municipality and province are ongoing and, on Feb. 19, provincial and regional health officials made the trip out to Morden to tour the citys Access Event Centre. The facility is fully accessible and has 8,500 square feet of available space, Burley noted. It also serves as the emergency response site for the region and is equipped with the backup power generators required to keep vaccine-loaded freezers running in case of a power outage. However, the province would require the facility for an extended period of time, the mayor said, meaning some rec activities at the centre would be relocated. Burley said the citys two indoor rinks would not be affected. "We know there is some sacrifice that would be involved in hosting a major clinic like this, but its a part wed be more than happy to play, and we would work to make them as comfortable and make the space as suitable as can be for their purpose." Thirteen kilometres to the east, Winkler Mayor Martin Harder said the province and the municipality have ruled out using any of its civic buildings to host a large-scale vaccination clinic. FACEBOOK Meridian Exhibition Centre Harder said the province and Winklers city manager have had extensive calls about potential sites, including the brand-new Meridian Exhibition Centre. Construction of the 84,000-square-foot facility wrapped up in late October. However, Harder said the facility only just opened to residents with the latest rollback of COVID-19 restrictions to allow access to its walking track. Should such a clinic be staged at the Meridian, the province would require a 14-month commitment and the facility would not be able to offer programming, Harder said. "We said no," the mayor said. "Its been so many years waiting for it to be completed that finally now that it is, we certainly dont want to sit back and not make it available to our community as the restrictions lift." Provincial officials also toured the Southland Mall in Winkler as a possible location, as the retail outlet has a number of vacancies ahead of an upcoming renovation. "We dont have any buildings sitting empty that could be usable for (a clinic) and, fortunately, our manufacturing industry is very active and so therefore its even difficult to find private owners that have facilities that size," Harder said. "Certainly, between Morden and Winkler, its a challenge to find something that is available for the length of time and the size that theyre looking for." SOUTLANDMALL.MB.CA Southland Mall Meanwhile, in Selkirk, chief administrative officer Duane Nicol said the province also struck out when it came to using one of the citys municipal buildings for the mass vaccination clinic. Nicol said formal conversations with the municipality began in early February and, ultimately, the province and the city determined none of its facilities met the mark. The province required between 15,000 and 20,000 square feet for the clinic, among other considerations including backup generators, security and connectivity, and accessibility, Nicol said. The Free Press requested Tuesday an interview with Johnau Botha, co-lead of the COVID-19 vaccine task force, but he was not made available. A provincial spokesman said information about new clinics would be provided today. In a statement, the province said the exact clinic locations in Selkirk and the Winkler-Morden area will be made public in "coming days," but did not say whether the March 5 opening would be delayed. "Before a location can be formally announced, discussions must be held with respective municipal leaders. This process can take time in order to finalize all pertinent details," the statement read. "Super sites will be ready to open when we have enough vaccine supply to do so." danielle.dasilva@freepress.mb.ca Azerbaijan sent last week a delegation from the country's Ministry of Defense Industry to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for IDEX-2021 where it is showcasing locally-made arms at the annual international defense exhibition. A total of 106 Azerbaijani-made arms are on display in Abu Dhabi, including various types of small arms and short-range combat vehicles, mortars, rifles, grenades, unmanned aerial vehicles, ammunition of various calibers and purposes over the next four days, Caspian News writes. In addition to arms demonstration, top officials from the ministry are holding meetings with state and government officials of the UAE and heads of official delegations of the participating countries. On February 21, Minister Madat Guliyev met with Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Presidential Affairs of UAE. The meeting focused on discussions on the ways to enhance relations between the UAE and Azerbaijan in multiple fields and sectors for improving the friendly ties between the two countries and peoples. This years International Defense Exhibition, more widely known as IDEX-2021, runs from February 21 until February 25. Around 900 defense companies from 59 countries, including Azerbaijan, the USA, Russia, China, Turkey, France, Poland, Brazil, Switzerland, the UAE, Pakistan, Switzerland, are attending the arms fair. IDEX is the only international defense exhibition and conference in the Middle East and North Africa region showcasing the latest defense technology in land, sea, and air sectors. The event also highlights new opportunities for the participating countries to establish and strengthen relationships with government departments, businesses, and armed forces throughout the region. Azerbaijans Ministry of Defense Industry owns a robust production network that includes 23 different manufacturing units stationed across Azerbaijan, including IGLIM, ARAZ, AZON, DALGA, and ALOV. Domestic production portfolio includes 1,200 arms of various segments, such as Istiglal and Mubariz-12.7 anti-materiel rifles, YIRTIJI-7.62, Yalguzag, and Shimshak sniper rifles, UP-7.62 and HP-7.6v submachine guns all of which are in line with NATO standards. Arms displayed by Azerbaijan included Yalguzag sniper rifles of 7.62-mm caliber, a special-purpose machine gun of 7.62-mm caliber, an automatic grenade launcher of 30-mm caliber, a manual grenade launcher of 40-mm caliber, as well as the hand grenade of F-1 type and mines of both M-6 and M-12 types. Azerbaijan manufactures also the Gurza armored patrol car and Tufan mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle, the TR-107 and TRB-107 ground-to-ground missiles, new-generation Zarba, and Iti Govan attack UAVs known as the kamikaze drone of Azerbaijan, all of which are considered to be state-of-the-art systems. At the IDEF-2019 fair, the ministry showcased an all-new domestically made aircraft bomb QFAB-250 LG created on the basis of a project that was jointly developed by its Scientific Research Institute and the Turkish company ASELSAN. Domestically manufactured weapons have been widely deployed by the Azerbaijani forces during the last years 44-day-long war from September 27 through November 10 with Armenia in the Karabakh region, an internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan. The Zarba and Iti Govan drones destroyed dozens of military equipment of the Armenian army throughout the war. The Azerbaijani army used the Istiglal and Mubariz anti-materiel rifles, as well, to counter the attacks and breach the defense of the Armenian forces. Azerbaijans drones owned the battlefield in Nagorno-Karabakh and showed future of warfare, the Washington Post wrote shortly after the end of the Armenia-Azerbaijan war in November. The 44-day war in the Karabakh region ended in Azerbaijans victory after the countrys forces liberated over 300 settlements, including five major cities in the region from Armenia's nearly 30-year-long illegal occupation. Armenia returned three more districts to Azerbaijan in non-combat conditions by December 1 last year as part of the tripartite ceasefire statement signed between these two countries and Russia on November 9. In 2019, Azerbaijans domestic arms-industry manufactured defense products worth more than $154 million or nearly $10 million more than in 2018. In the 2021 military strength rankings compiled by Global Firepower, Azerbaijan ranks 64 among 139 countries, being the strongest military in the South Caucasus region. The regions Georgia and Armenia rank 92 and 100, respectively. Alex Bonilla, 51, from Florida, is expected to plead guilty to cutting of his romantic rival's penis with a pair of scissors and disposing of it after catching the victim in the act with his wife A Florida man claims he 'blacked out' when he barged into the mobile home of his wife's lover, tied him up in the bedroom and then used a pair of scissors to cut off his penis, while assuring the bleeding victim that 'this is normal.' Alex Bonilla, 51, is expected to appear in Gilcrest County Court on Thursday and plead guilty to charges of kidnapping to inflict bodily harm or to terrorize; burglary while armed with explosives or a dangerous weapon; aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Bonilla, a married father-of-five dairy worker, has been jailed since July 2019, when he was arrested for allegedly mutilating his wife's 32-year-old lover and next-door neighbor at his home in the Gainesville suburb of Bell. Doctors have been unable to re-attach the victim's sex organ, leaving the married father-of-two unable to urinate normally, or have intercourse with his wife, according to court documents. Prosecutors plan to ask a judge to sentence Bonilla to 30 years in state prison, which is the maximum sentence that is allowed under law, reported The Smoking Gun. According to a graphic pre-sentence report that was filed in January by the Florida Department of Corrections, the violent incident began unfolding on July 14, 2019, two months after Bonilla caught his wife having sex with their married neighbor and family friend while babysitting the man's two children. On the day of the confrontation, Bonilla said he observed his neighbor looking at his house and decided to go talk to him. Bonilla said as they spoke in the victim's bedroom, he told his rival: 'you need to stay away from my wife and leave her alone,' which allegedly angered the other man and prompted him to physically tackle Bonilla. 'The defendant stated he then blacked out and doesn't remember anything from that point until he was at work and was arrested,' according to the document. But the victim's statement to the authorities tells a very different story. The incident took place in July 2019 at the victim's home in Bell, Florida (pictured), which is located just 50 yards away from Bonilla's trailer According to the mutilated man, on the day of the attack Bonilla entered his home without permission while the victim was making breakfast for his two daughters. Standing in the doorway with a gun tucked under his arm, Bonilla declared to him, 'I came here to fix something,' and then led him to a bedroom and closed the door behind them. Bonilla allegedly made the victim sit on the bed and put a gun to his head, then pulled a two-foot metal pipe from inside his pants and said he was going to break every bone 'for every lie the [victim] told.' The victim fell to his knees and begged Bonilla to spare him and leave, at which point the suspect restrained his arms behind his back and told him: 'You are not going to die, but you are going to have something to remember this for your whole life.' According to the document, Bonilla then forced the bound man to stand up and pulled down his underwear, exposing his penis. 'The victim stated that he asks what he was doing but the defendant told him "this is normal you will not die today,"' stated the report. Bonilla then allegedly took out a pair of gloves and tied a rubber band around the base of the victim's penis several times to cut off the circulation. Having completed these preparations, Bonilla produced a pair of scissors from his pocket and told the victim: 'this is for all the women you have been having relationships with,' at which point he proceeded to cut off his wife's lover's manhood. 'The victim stated that he tried to move to get way and to not scream because of his children in the house,' but Bonilla threw him to the floor and pressed his knee into his chest so he could not move. According to the victim's statement, Bonilla was unable to cut through the penis quickly and 'was getting frustrated because blood was going everywhere.' Bonilla would stop at times and place the gun back to the victim's head. He carried on with the mutilation until most of his romantic rival's penis 'was finally cut off,' according to the statement. The victim said he was lying on the floor bleeding, shaking due to shock and trying to not vomit. Bonilla told him: 'Don't act this way, this is normal, and if you try to call the police, I will be out in two months and I will come back and finish this.' When Bonilla opened the bedroom door to leave, grasping three quarters of the victim' member in his hands, he found the victim's oldest daughter lying on the floor and watching through the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door. Deputies found and arrested Bonilla at around 3pm at the Alliance Dairies where he worked. Bonilla, a married father-of-five dairy worker, allegedly tied the victim up in the bedroom, removed his shorts, put a rubber band at the base of the man's penis and proceeded to cut off his penis as payback for having sex with his wife The victim's penis was never recovered. The married dad said that 'urinating and the ability to have sex with his wife has been messed up for the rest of his life.' The man's doctors have told him that he will never have any sensation in whatever remains of his sex organ. Bonilla emigrated from El Salvador to the US in 1990 and had worked at a dairy for 20 years. He has two children from his first marriage in his native country and three children with his second wife. Corrections officials recommended that Bonilla be incarcerated instead of being placed under community supervision, noting that the man would most likely return to his home in Bell, which is located less than 50 yards away from the victim's. 'The chances of retaliation by the defendant would be high,' they warned. The company has increased dividends for 29 consecutive years American Banker named Chesapeake one of the Top 200 Community Banks' in the US It processed $77 million dollars in the first wave of the Paycheck Protection Program loans What Chesapeake Bank does: Chesapeake Financial Shares Inc ( ) operates as the bank holding company for Chesapeake Bank, and is also the parent company for Chesapeake Wealth Management Inc. Founded in 1900, Chesapeake Bank is a lender to small businesses. Headquartered in Kilmarnock, Virginia, it operates 16 community banks in the Northern Neck, Middle Peninsula, Williamsburg and Richmond region. Chesapeake Bank offers checking, savings, mortgages, lines of credit, commercial loans, mobile and online banking, business cash management, brokerage, wealth management, trust, and estate management services. Meanwhile, Chesapeake Wealth Management is an independent wealth management firm offering brokerage, trust, and estate management services. It has an in-house team of professionals, portfolio managers, and trust officers under one roof. It provides premium trust and estate services, including a thorough, no-obligation review of an individuals current estate plan. Jeffrey M. Szyperski is the chairman of the board and CEO of Chesapeake Financial Shares and Chesapeake Bank. Szyperski, a banker for three decades, is also the chairman of Chesapeake Wealth Management. A thoughtful risk-taker who is bullish on the banking industry, Szyperski has served as a former chairman of the American Bankers Association and the Virginia Bankers Association. How is it doing: As 2021 kicked off, Chesapeake Bank was on a growth fast track. Despite the challenges of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the company has just reported stellar earnings for the first quarter of 2021 of $5,262,879, a 56.3% increase over the first quarter of 2020. The reported earnings per share were $1.085 fully diluted, compared to $0.679 fully diluted for the first quarter of 2020. Total assets ended the quarter at $1,238,292,086, a 30.2% increase over March 31, 2020. The company said the large increases in both net income and total assets over the prior year were largely driven by governmental programs both the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and other Federal stimulus payments. The lions share of the first wave of PPP loans, around 60%, went through US community banks. The PPP program, the US governments small-business coronavirus bailout, brought community banks like Chesapeake new customers and kept current ones in business. Stimulus and unemployment checks also boosted deposits and kept borrowers from falling behind on their loans. Non-performing assets also decreased to 1.026% on March 31, 2021, compared to 1.034% on December 31, 2020. Chesapeake CEO Jeffrey M. Szyperski said that asset quality remains extremely good especially as we slowly come out of the pandemic and related shutdowns. He added that mortgage operations continue at close to full capacity and have provided strong fee income." At a meeting on April 16, 2021, Chesapeake Financial's board declared a quarterly dividend of $0.130 per share effective June 1, 2021, payable on or before June 15, 2021. Currently the stock has a 2.14% dividend yield. With a $0.005 increase last quarter, the company has continued a 29-year tradition of increasing dividends annually. In January, Szyperski told Proactive in an interview that the bank embraced a new workflow tool, along with flexibility, resiliency and teamwork to process $77 million dollars in the first wave of the PPP loans last year, producing $3 million in fees. Of that three million, the bank said it recognized $777,000 into 2020 income with the rest being deferred into 2021 awaiting forgiveness applications from the borrowers. American Banker earlier named Chesapeake one of the Top 200 Community Banks' in the United States for the thirteenth consecutive year and one of the Best Banks to Work For' for the eighth consecutive year. Chesapeake Bank has recently implemented Texas-based Q2 Holdings Incs (NYSE:QTWO) best-in-class commercial banking technology to improve the banking experiences for its business customers. The bank is presiding over a digital transformation, and said it treated its digital evaluation as an opportunity to hone its go-to-market strategy, focusing their digital investment dollars in the areas that are most important to the companys growth. As a result, the bank is focused on providing a complete, mobile-friendly, easy-to-use digital banking experience to its customers. Meanwhile, Chesapeake Bank has revealed that it had joined the Real-Time Payments (RTP) network developed by The Clearing House. With the RTP network, Chesapeake Bank customers can now receive payments directly into their accounts with real-time receipt confirmation and instant availability, while also providing for advanced messaging capabilities. Inflection points: Participating in the next round of the Paycheck Protection Program Gaining traction from the banks comprehensive digital strategy Continued boost from strong mortgage market as well as asset growth What the boss says: A lot of the growth can be attributed to Federal funds coming into our community through stimulus payments as well as PPP loans. Some lesser amount we attribute to an overall increase in savings by our customers, Chesapeake Bank CEO Jeffrey M. Szyperski said in a recent interview with Proactive. Through our specialty lines of business as well as our strong retail market share in each of our markets, we are well poised for the future even in a low-rate environment. We are earnest in our support of our communities, and we feel a certain amount of reciprocity there. Ultimately, our customers and we are striving for the same thing - the betterment of our communities over the long run. With that as guidepost, we feel confident in our long-term success and thus as a good investment. Contact the author Uttara Choudhury at uttara@proactiveinvestors.com Follow her on Twitter: @UttaraProactive The Series C round, co-led by IDC Ventures and Fuel Venture Capital, included the participation of ATW, LUN Partners, and Experian. The $70 million capital injection will expand its financial services offerings to small businesses and consumers, including further development of its popular subscription program Prime+. RecargaPay has over 300 full-time employees in Miami, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. The capital injection will enable additional recruiting of top talent from around the world. Founded in Brazil in 2010, RecargaPay set out to provide a comprehensive and user-friendly financial services ecosystem that would be accessible even to people who do not have bank accounts. The RecargaPay mobile app allows users to apply for and get micro-loans; replenish their cell phone payment plans, city bus and metro accounts; pay bills; send and receive money; buy gift cards, and more. Users can also add money to their RecargaPay wallet through cash deposits in stores, or by bank or card transfers. Since its inception, RecargaPay's digital wallet solutions have served Brazilians of all income levels, evidence that traditional payment systems have not comprehensively addressed broad consumer needs and wants. The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted demand for RecargaPay's platform, with the microloan segment in Brazil growing more than 500% in 2020 alone. "We're proud to be helping so many people with their essential payments during a moment of crises and challenges, but we know the utility of our platform is long-term as even people with bank accounts continue to flock to RecargaPay for more seamless and convenient transactions," said RecargaPay founder and CEO Rodrigo Teijeiro. "We look forward to further expanding our platform and bringing RecargaPay to a broader market with the support of our investors and our growing international team." "Access to loans, credit cards, and other forms of debt remains elusive for many in Brazil and other countries in Latin America, and the region's digital payments infrastructure has historically been deeply fragmented RecargaPay is a silver bullet that enables instant, cost effective payments rails and access to credit for all Brazilians," said Bobby Aitkenhead, IDC Ventures Managing Partner and former PayPal executive. "I look forward to further scaling RecargaPay in 2021 to bring its robust ecosystem to many more people and small businesses." "RecargaPay is a pioneer in the payments sector as one of the first all-in-one platforms to serve such a wide array of everyday needs of Brazilians," said Maggie Vo, Fuel Venture Capital Managing General Partner and Chief Investment Officer. "We are thrilled to back a company that is actively improving the lives of so many people by giving them more control over their finances, all the while challenging the status quo of banking systems." About RecargaPay RecargaPay is Brazil's leading all-in-one payments platform, dedicated to providing secure and easy access to mobile payments and financial services for all. Founded in 2010, RecargaPay empowers customers and merchants to complete essential transactions with convenience, without the need to wait in lines. With RecargaPay, it's easy to pay bills in installments; cash in using boleto, with credit cards, debit cards, loans, QR codes, mPOS and Pix; and cash out, with multiple efficient alternatives. The RecargaPay app is available for free via Android and iOS. To learn more about RecargaPay, visit our website: recargapay.com.br. About Fuel Venture Capital Fuel Venture Capital is committed to propelling groundbreaking ideas into world-changing companies and democratizing access to the creative economy to shape the future of society. The firm's "founder focused, investor driven" approach is led by a core team with more than 60 years of combined experience in investment banking, wealth management, executive leadership and entrepreneurship. The fund boasts a portfolio of more than 20 companies based around the globe across numerous sectors, bringing positive impact to virtually all corners of our modern economy. To learn more about Fuel VC, visit fuelventurecapital.com. Follow Fuel VC on social media via Twitter @FuelVC and Instagram @FuelVentureCapital. About IDC Ventures By entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs, IDC Ventures seeks to identify, invest in, support, and propel disruptive companies at the forefront of digital innovation. Companies led by visionary entrepreneurs, with agile organizations, committed to execution, and an unwavering commitment to their teams, their investors, and most of all, the realization of their vision. IDCV backs industry defining founders from Series A to growth stages in Europe, the US, and Latin America, and primarily in the verticals of fintech, marketplaces, and platforms. IDC Ventures is the venture capital arm of Grupo IDC, a Latin American investment bank and asset management firm founded in 1995. MEDIA CONTACT Debora Lima, Director of Public Relations [email protected] SOURCE RecargaPay Related Links https://recargapay.com.br The global sharing program designed to make vaccine access more equal delivered its first major shipment of doses on Wednesday to the West African nation of Ghana, ramping up the largest mass immunization campaign in history. Today marks the historic moment for which we have been planning and working so hard, said Henrietta Fore, the executive director of UNICEF. In the days ahead, frontline workers will begin to receive vaccines, and the next phase in the fight against this disease can begin. The first shipment of 600,000 doses was packed up and labeled in India, then flown to Accra, the Ghanaian capital. Ghana and other West African countries are to begin vaccinations in coming days, according to officials, the first of 92 low and middle-income countries that will receive free vaccines through Covax, a vaccine-sharing initiative. Sorry! This content is not available in your region Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) in southern Ba Ria Vung Tau Province has discovered five cases positive for COVID-19 aboard a Singaporean cargo ship passing Vietnams waters after a sailor died for an unknown reason. Ocean Amazing, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship, departed from Shanghai, China from February 13 to transport goods to a port in Ho Chi Minh City, according to Ba Ria Vung Tau port authorities. According to the Ba Ria Vung Tau CDC, as a sailor on the vessel suddenly died on February 20, the captain had to dock it at the port of the southern Vietnamese province with the intention of bringing the deceased crew member ashore and carrying out procedures to return his body home. As Ba Ria Vung Taus health authorities conducted COVID-19 prevention and control measures, they tested 20 crew members, excluding the deceased sailor. The results of the first test showed that five out of the 20 were positive for the novel coronavirus, while their second tests conducted by the Pasteur Institute in Ho Chi Minh City are still pending results. In case of positive second test results, the ship owner will send it to Indonesia to replace all crew members. Currently, the crew members are still staying on the ship anchored in Ba Ria Vung Tau and have yet to complete immigration procedures to Vietnam. The body of the dead crew member has not been taken to shore. The incident was already reported to the Ministry of Health. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 New Delhi: India will get its new Vice President by the end of Saturday as the elected representatives will vote to choose between ruling NDAs candidate M Venkaiah Naidu and Oppositions Gopal Krishna Gandhi. The name of the next vice president of India will be known on same evening after members of Parliament cast their ballot during the day in Parliament House. Members of Parliament will use special pens for marking their choice in the election to be held between 10 am and 5 pm. The counting of votes will commence after polling and the results will be declared by 7.00 pm, Election Commission officials said quoting precedents.No whip can be issued by political parties as the election is through a secret ballot. Suggested read | Powers and responsibilities of Vice President of India Naidu vs Gandhi The ruling NDA, which has a majority in the Lok Sabha, will find it easy to place its candidate as the next vice president. The BJD and the JD(U) which had supported NDA nominee Ramnath Kovind for the post of president, have decided to back opposition nominee Gandhi. Though the JD(U) has broken ties with mahagathbandhan and joined hands with the BJP to form a new government in Bihar, it has decided to vote for Gandhi, a former governor of West Bengal. Suggested read | Gopalkrishna Devdas Gandhi: The man who outgrew shadow of the Mahatma Electoral college The electoral college which elects the vice president, who is also the ex-officio Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, consists of elected and nominated members of Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha. The total strength of the two Houses is 790, but there are two vacancies in the Lok Sabha and one in the Rajya Sabha. BJP MP in Lok Sabha Chhedi Paswan is barred from casting vote following a judicial pronouncement. In the 545-member Lok Sabha, the BJP has 281 members. The NDA led by BJP, has 338 members. In the 243-member Rajya Sabha, the BJP as of now has 56 members, while the Congress with 59 is the single largest party. With its recent wins in the recent assembly polls, the BJP is set to emerge as the single largest party in the Rajya Sabha too next year and the NDAs tally would be close to 100. It would, however, still be short of a majority in the upper house. The one who bags 50 per cent plus one vote of the total valid votes cast will win the poll. The term of the present incumbent Hamid Ansari, who has held the post for two consecutive terms, is coming to an end on August 10. Suggested read | M Venkaiah Naidu is NDA's nominee for the coveted post; Know all about BJP leader For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Ukraine plans to disconnect from the electricity grid with Belarus and the Russian Federation by the end of 2023, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said. "Since Soviet times, the Ukrainian power grid has been a part of a single network that includes Belarus and Russia. But we want to cut off from this network and make the Ukrainian power grid an integrated part of the European network. We plan to do this by the end of 2023. After that, any power flows from Belarus will become physically impossible," he said at a press conference after talks with Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielus Landsbergis in Kyiv on Tuesday. Kuleba pointed out that this step will contribute to the energy security of Ukraine, Europe in general, including Lithuania. In turn, Landsbergis expressed Lithuania's concern over the fact that Belarusian electricity has access to the Ukrainian market and that this could help develop an unsafe nuclear power plant in Ostrovets in Belarus. TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - Area law enforcement agencies are conducting a full-court press to combat impaired and dangerous driving during St. Patricks Day and the NCAA Tournament. From February 26 through March 21, police will be conducting high-visibility patrols showing zero tolerance for those driving aggressively, over the speed limit, or under the influence. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration through an Indiana Criminal Justice Institute grant will fund overtime patrols. On average, the NHTSA says drunk-driving crashes claim more than 10,000 lives per year in the U.S. Dangerous and impaired driving continues to be a problem especially around high-risk events like St. Patricks Day and the NCAA Tournament, said Lieutenant Dan Jones, District Commander of the Putnamville State Police Post. However you celebrate this year, do so responsibly. Slow down, buckle up, and if you drink, dont drive. Its that simple. Preliminary data for 2020 from the federal safety agency shows miles traveled had decreased by about 14.5 percent in the first nine months, but overall traffic fatalities increased by 4.6 percent nationwide. Were seeing an uptick in dangerous driving during the pandemic, and its very concerning, said Devon McDonald, ICJI Executive Director. Thats why were pulling out all the stops this March to reverse that trend and encourage safe driving behavior. Preventing loss of life is our top priority. Sen. Del Marsh, R-Anniston, said he will spend the next two weeks hashing out details on his plan for a lottery and casinos in Alabama before asking for a vote in the Senate. Marsh introduced his bill for a lottery and five new casinos on Feb. 11 and said at that time he expected the Senate to debate it and possibly vote today. The Legislature did not meet last week. Marsh said talks with lawmakers during the off week helped him decide to do more work on the legislation before seeking a vote. Im positive about the whole process, Marsh said this afternoon. Everybody has been great participating in this process. Im as confident as Ive been that well get a piece of legislation out to the people to make a decision. Voters would have to approve an amendment to the state constitution to allow the gambling expansion. Along with the amendment, Marsh is drafting enabling legislation that would include details about the lottery, casinos, and use of the money they would raise. Marsh said he wants to use the extra time to get both the amendment and the enabling legislation ready for consideration in two weeks. The enabling legislation will include, for example, details such as specifics on who would be eligible for college scholarships funded by the lottery, Marsh said. This is an issue that is going to be a significant change for the state, Marsh said. And so it does not need to be rushed. And some of the questions Ive been getting have been the fine print questions. Constitutional amendments require approval by three-fifths of senators and representatives in order to go on the ballot for voters. That means 21 yes votes are required in the 34-member Senate. So, I think that even though I have 21 votes today, I would rather have 25 votes in two weeks and show a strong bipartisan consensus of the Senate, Marsh said. I think that would play well as it goes to the House because I want a stronger showing in the House, and this is about getting something to the people of Alabama that addresses gaming once and for all and how those revenues are going to be spent to the best of ability of the state to better the lives of the people of Alabama. Marsh said one change he might make to the bill would be to allow two more casinos, with one in each of the states seven congressional districts. For now, the bill calls for casinos at the states four greyhound tracks in Birmingham, Mobile, Macon County, and Greene County, plus a fifth in Jackson County or DeKalb County in northeast Alabama to be operated by the Poarch Band of Creek Indians. That leaves out the 2nd Congressional District, which stretches from the Montgomery area across southeast Alabama, and either the 4th or 5th district, depending on whether the Poarch Creeks casino was in Jackson County (5th District) or DeKalb County (4th District). Marsh said he would talk to other senators to gauge the support for adding the other two casinos. Those two slots would be open to competitive proposals. A gaming commission that the legislation would set up would hear those proposals and decide who gets the licenses for the additional two locations. Marsh said polling indicates public support for some competition for the casino sites. But the senator also said he believes people would oppose an unlimited number of sites. Sixteen Alabama counties allow bingo through local constitutional amendments. Marshs legislation would allow electronic bingo only at the casinos. We cant guarantee everybody a slot because people dont want an overabundance of these facilities statewide, Marsh said. They just dont. The plan also calls for Gov. Kay Ivey to enter an agreement with the Poarch Creeks to allow the tribe to offer the full range of casino games at their electronic bingo resorts in Atmore, Wetumpka, and Montgomery. That means the state would have a total of eight casinos, or 10 if two more are added to the plan. The Legislative Services Agency estimated the lottery, casinos, and sports betting would raise net revenue of about $450 million to $670 million. The lottery money would fund college scholarships in high-demand career fields. Money from license fees and a 20% tax on the casinos would support the expansion of broadband internet access, the state General Fund, rural health care, mental health, and other programs. Read the summary. Marsh said polling indicates the public is eager to have its say on expanding gambling. There is an overwhelming appetite for the people of Alabama to address this issue and to vote on it, Marsh said. Ecommerce saw its biggest boom in 2020 with more new businesses and consumers online than ever before and AdRoll's platform was designed to meet the needs of marketers within D2C brands. Last April, AdRoll unveiled its new platform which included email and advertising capabilities, and with Saxena, a seasoned SaaS executive now at the helm, that momentum is set to continue. The company saw more than 100 percent monthly growth in its platform subscriptions in the last six months of 2020, with more marketers depending on the technology to acquire and retain customers. "AdRoll is uniquely positioned to lead the next wave of D2C marketing automation, which is what made me so excited about this opportunity," said Roli Saxena, President of AdRoll. "NextRoll is a profitable and scalable business, thanks to its legacy media and new SaaS model across its businesses. With the launch of the AdRoll Ecommerce Marketing Platform last year, we now have a business model delivering marketing software and digital advertising to D2C brands combining ads and email in one powerful platform. I'm excited to accelerate AdRoll's growth by delivering a platform that D2C marketers truly rely on to grow their businesses." Saxena, who most recently served as Chief Customer Officer at Brex, has deep experience in AdRoll's current stage of moving from a single product to a multi-product SaaS company. During her time at Brex, Saxena was responsible for customer revenue and launching Brex banking products, during the company's rapid growth. She was a pivotal leader at LinkedIn, holding a variety of leadership roles, through IPO and growth to three billion dollars in revenue. In addition to leading companies into new areas of SaaS growth, Saxena has played an active role in growing their culture and diversity efforts. She was the co-founder of the LinkedIn Women's Network program that increased women's representation in senior leadership roles. She has been recognized as one of San Francisco Business Times' Most Influential Women in the Bay Area. She is an angel investor with Operator Collective, an organization leveling the investing landscape for women and people of color. Saxena also sits on the board of Culture Amp and understands how building a strong culture can be a force multiplier for business outcomes. "Outside of the market opportunity, what really swayed my decision to join was the people I met during the interview process and the overall culture of inclusion across the entire NextRoll organization," said Saxena. "As an introvert and woman of color, I have experienced environments where I did not fit in or felt I didn't belong, so it was refreshing to see the focus of NextRoll on culture and inclusion. There are many companies who talk about D&I and I was impressed to see that NextRoll did more than talk about it but operationalized D&I in the fabric of the culture." "Beyond Roli's impressive SaaS track record in multiple growth businesses, she's an excellent fit for our values and culture here at NextRoll," said Robin Bordoli, CEO of NextRoll. "Roli stands with us in our mission to create a more supportive and diverse workplace. She has consistently invested time and energy in elevating the voices of her peers and women in the industry. We're thrilled to have her on board and look forward to learning from her and growing with her in 2021 and beyond." About AdRoll AdRoll is an ecommerce marketing platform that gives growing direct-to-consumer brands the power to connect with people everywhere they go online. Today's shopping journey includes up to 56 touchpoints across ads, email, and your online store. Make them all work together with AdRoll to keep customers coming back and buying more. The AdRoll platform is fueled by our pioneering use of machine learning to analyze real-time performance advertising data. That early work is why more than 120,000 brands have relied on us since 2007. Start for free today at www.adroll.com . AdRoll is a division of NextRoll, Inc., and is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Dublin, New York City, Salt Lake City, and Sydney. About NextRoll NextRoll is a marketing technology company delivering products ambitious marketers use and rely on to grow their businesses. Powered by machine learning and integrated data platforms, NextRoll's technology serves tens of thousands of businesses globally through its two business units: RollWorks, an account-based platform for business-to-business marketing and sales teams, AdRoll, an e-commerce marketing platform for direct-to-consumer brands. NextRoll is a privately-held company headquartered in San Francisco, CA. To learn more visit nextroll.com. Contact: Meredith Klee [email protected] SOURCE NextRoll Related Links http://www.nextroll.com JERSEYVILLE Ameren Illinois announced Wednesday it is preparing to start Phase 2 of a two-year project designed to enhance energy service reliability, flexibility and load capacity of the companys local electric grid for customers in Jersey and Macoupin counties. In March electricians will begin making equipment upgrades to Anerens Jerseyville, Piasa Junction and Brighton substations. The firm is adding high-voltage switching components to each substation to potentially reduce the duration of an outage allowing the company to re-route power between the three substations. The company is also expanding the Brighton and Piasa Junction substations. The investment is estimated at $7.9 million. At the Piasa Junction Substation, crews will build a new substation just north of the existing one. The fence around the site will be expanded to accommodate the new substation. A new 14MVA transformer will be installed along with other equipment such as smart switches to modernize the structure. The existing substation will be decommissioned and removed. At the Jerseyville Substation, crews will be installing new 69-kilovolt breakers and switches to help re-route power between the local substations. At the Brighton Substation, crews will expand the site to the north and east. Two H-frame steel structures will be constructed as the location is converted into a 69-34-12 kilovolt substation with supporting equipment. A new transformer and control house structure will also be added to the site. Last year Ameren crews replaced power lines and about 300 power poles covering 13.5 miles between Jerseyville and Brighton. More than 50 composite fiberglass poles were erected at strategic points along the 13.5-mile route to storm harden the lines to able to better withstand high winds during storms. A new three-mile circuit tie was also constructed between the Piasa and Brighton substations, making the grid more resilient and enabling Ameren to re-route power between the substations during an outage. This phase of the project was a $10.5 million investment. The upgrades are part of our overall statewide plan to build a cleaner, greener, more resilient grid, said Kim Voypick, Director of Western Region Electric Operations, Ameren Illinois. With these enhancements, Ameren Illinois is taking proactive steps to prepare for the future needs of our electric customers. Since 2012, Ameren has implemented hundreds of projects, added new technology and strengthened poles, wires and distribution equipment. Company officials said that, as a result, reliability has improved by an average of 22 percent and the time of an outage has been reduced by 16 percent. Ameren Illinois delivers energy to 1.2 million electric and 816,000 natural gas customers throughout central and southern Illinois. (Alliance News) - The UK government is focused on making Brexit's Northern Ireland Protocol work, not ditching it, a Cabinet minister has insisted. Secretary of State Brandon Lewis was commenting ahead of a government meeting with the European Commission to discuss disruption and political tensions associated with the new Irish Sea trading arrangements. Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove and Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic will jointly chair a meeting on Wednesday afternoon of the UK/EU committee that has responsibility for implementing the protocol. Unionist politicians in Northern Ireland are demanding the end of the protocol, claiming it has driven an economic wedge between the region and the rest of the UK, undermining the Union as a consequence. The protocol was designed by the EU and UK to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland. It achieves this by moving regulatory and customs checks to the Irish Sea, with goods imported into Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK subject to a range of new processes. This has caused some disruption to trade since it came into effect on December 31 a disruption that could intensify significantly on April 1 when a grace period currently limiting the bureaucracy applied to imported supermarket goods ends. The government has asked the European Commission for extensions to that grace period a and a series of other exemptions now in operation a until January 2023 to provide space to find long-term solutions to the issues. Ahead of the joint committee meeting, Lewis made clear that the government is not of the view that the protocol a which was a key plank of the Withdrawal Agreement a should be scrapped. Asked whether it should be ditched, Lewis told BBC Radio Ulster: "No, the protocol is a legal agreement that's there, that's in place, and we've got to make sure that we make it work in a positive way for people in Northern Ireland." He stressed that Stormont Assembly members will have the opportunity to vote to keep or remove the protocol in 2024. The minister acknowledged it has caused some disruption in its early weeks of operation. "I do understand that the lived experience of some people in Northern Ireland is not what it should be under the protocol, we've got to get that put right," he said. While there are new checks on trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, the protocol also offers Northern Ireland-based traders unfettered access to sell into the GB market, as well as into the EU single market. Advocates of the arrangements believe this dual market access offers a significant economic opportunity for Northern Ireland. Lewis also highlighted that aspect of the protocol ahead of the committee meeting. "Businesses do recognise this, it offers a huge competitive advantage and opportunity to Northern Ireland for businesses to invest in Northern Ireland to grow and base and develop in Northern Ireland," he said. Northern Ireland First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster said any extension to the grace periods will only be "sticking plasters". She reiterated her demand for the protocol to be axed. Foster and Sinn Fein deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill will participate in Wednesday's meeting. "I will again be pointing out that the protocol is doing untold damage to the trading relationship of the internal market of the UK," Foster told Radio Ulster. "It is having a hugely disproportionate impact on Northern Ireland as part of the UK." While all the main unionist parties are campaigning for the end of the protocol, the main pro-Remain parties in Northern Ireland a Sinn Fein, the SDLP and Alliance a insist the protocol is needed to mitigate the impact of Brexit. By David Young source: PA Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 19:44:15|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Six fighters including four militants and two pro-government militiamen were killed in a clash in Aqtash district in the northern Kunduz province on Wednesday, district head Mohammad Aqtash said. The clash, according to the official, flared up after a group of Taliban militants stormed a checkpoint in the district's Janat Bagh area at 11:00 a.m. local time on Wednesday, triggering a gun battle lasting for couple of hours, with the militants fleeing away after leaving four bodies behind. Two pro-government militiamen were also killed in the gun battle, the official said. The Taliban outfit has yet to make comment on the incident. Enditem In summer 2015, Maisam thought that she would soon be starting her second year at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus. But then her sister Souad, whom she hadnt seen in a year, called with surprising news: She was no longer in Turkey but in Amsterdam, seeking asylum. She encouraged their mother, Suhair, to follow with Maisam, her older sister Naela, and their brother, Yousef. With the war in Syria only escalating, they hurriedly prepared to leave Syria forever, making every step of the journey from Damascus to the Greek island of Kos together. But once there, they would have to split up. Unlike most Syrians who that summer traveled via ferry from the islands to the Greek mainland and then over land through the Balkans to northern Europe, Maisams family traded on their looks they can pass for Europeans. While on Kos, they secured fake IDs from a smuggler who assigned them Czech nationality and told them to travel separately, as he hadnt made them relatives. They booked the earliest flights they could to anywhere within Schengen Area borders. Maisam and Naela found tickets to Zurich. Their mother and Yousef would leave the next day after them for Brussels. It would be the first time Maisam would spend even a day away from her mother, and she took it for granted that within 48 hours, the entire family would be together again in Amsterdam. Sitting in a pension in Kos the night before their departure, Maisam painted her nails. The next morning, she and Naela separated as soon as the taxi dropped them off at the airport. They pretended not to know each other and never made eye contact. Should one get caught, the other would keep going. Maisam was nervous about the deception she had never been to an airport by herself but imitated the behavior of others. Though both sisters were able to board, they only acknowledged each other in the bathroom in the Zurich airport, where they hugged and changed into warmer clothes. The hardest part, they thought, was now behind them. Instead, 15 hours after bidding their mother and brother goodbye and about eight hours until they were to reunite with Souad, the plan fell apart. They were on the train that would carry them across Germany to the Netherlands, when the same fake IDs that had worked so well in Greece were detected at the Swiss-German border checkpoint. German police now had them under arrest. Sitting in the police station, Maisam realized it was over, especially when she saw her sister Naela who had kept it together all their lives, from bearing the brunt of their fathers rage, to planning their mothers escape from the marriage, to getting them this far fall to pieces. As the youngest daughter, Maisam rarely had to bear the full weight of the familys burdens, even as, in the years before their departure from Syria, both her country and her parents marriage unraveled. Both disasters had led to multiple displacements, first to Jordan, then to smaller and smaller apartments in Damascus as her father withdrew any financial support and her mothers savings and sisters earnings dwindled. Through it all the different schools, cities and houses Maisams bond with her siblings and especially her mother was steadfast. I was just happy to have everyone, she says. I never felt lonely. A German court sentenced a former member of Syrian President Bashar al-Assads security services to four and half years in prison after finding him guilty of facilitating the torture of 30 prisoners, a Syrian lawyer said on Wednesday. Eyad A., was found guilty of arresting at least 30 opposition activists after an anti-Assad demonstration in 2011 and sending them to an intelligence facility knowing they would be tortured. Short link: The findings suggest that physicians should spend more time explaining medication side effects to ensure their older patients are fully informed. Credit: University of California, Los Angeles Older people correctly ascertained basic information such as dosage and duration of use for more than 70% of the medications they were prescribed, regardless of whether their physician explained it during an office visit. But when physicians failed to verbally provide information about potential side effects, people incorrectly assumed that about 55% of their prescribed medications had none. And even when physicians did discuss possible side effects, their patients incorrectly assumed there were no side effects for 22% of the medications. There is a shortage of data about how well people understand basic information about the medications they are prescribed. This information is important for ensuring that people take their medications safely and properly and adhere to medication regimens. The researchers examined data from 2009 and 2010 for 81 people age 50 and older who were subjects in a previous study aimed at improving how physicians communicate about newly prescribed medications. The researchers note that more than half of the people in the study had high levels of health literacy and at least some college education. Also, people were allowed to refer to information that had been provided to them about the medications when they were responding to the survey. These factors may limit the applicability of the findings to the general population. The findings suggest that although physicians might not need to spend much time conveying information on dosage, the number of pills in a prescription or how frequently medications must be taken, they should spend more time explaining side effects to ensure their older patients are fully informed. Gaps in knowledge about side effects may put people, particularly older people, at risk for medication nonadherence. Patients may be less likely to take or continue taking medications if they discover the existence of potential adverse effects without having the opportunity to discuss those side effects with their physicians in a timely manner. More information: Timothy Ho et al. Post-Visit Patient Understanding About Newly Prescribed Medications, Journal of General Internal Medicine (2021). Journal information: Journal of General Internal Medicine Timothy Ho et al. Post-Visit Patient Understanding About Newly Prescribed Medications,(2021). DOI: 10.1007/s11606-020-06540-4 Editors note: During Black History Month, the Times Union is sharing stories from its archive highlighting significant people, places and events that are part of the Capital Regions Black cultural heritage. This story was first published June 5, 2017. ALBANY One hundred years after Henry Johnson enlisted to fight in World War I, the city honored a man who fought on behalf of the army sergeant's honor for nearly 50 years. "It's been a long, long, long time coming," James Dandles said, standing beneath Johnson's Washington Park memorial, which is newly adorned with a replica Medal of Honor. "It means we brought justice to Henry Johnson." Johnson, an African-American man from Albany, received the military's highest honor for his battlefield bravery in 2015 after almost a century-long delay caused by racial discrimination and political wrangling. Now his statue in Albany reflects the long-awaited award. "We wanted to right a wrong," Dandles said. "This guy went through a lot of discrimination and that shouldn't happen today in America." Mayor Kathy Sheehan presented Dandles with the first Henry Johnson Award for Distinguished Community Service on Monday. The 10:30 a.m.ceremony also marked the city's inaugural Henry Johnson Day. "To honor Henry Johnson, his strength, his character and his devotion to his country, we've established an annual award in his name," Sheehan said. "It was created for an Albany resident who has given their time and talent to build a better Albany but, like Henry Johnson, who has not been fully recognized for their contributions." Dandles the district president of the 369th Veterans Association, which represents service members from Johnson's infantry regiment started lobbying Congress to award Johnson the Medal of Honor in the early 1970s. Over the years, he enlisted local, state and federal officials in the fight. In 2014, U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer became an integral part of his alliance. A turning point in the decades-old campaign was the discovery by a Schumer staffer in 2011 of a May 20, 1918, memo from Gen. John J. Pershing, commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. Pershing described battlefield reports of Johnson's heroism and documented his "notable instance of bravery and devotion." Johnson fought under French command because the U.S. Army was racially segregated and blacks were relegated primarily to manual labor. Johnson was working as a porter at Albany's Union Station when he enlisted at age 20 with the all-black 15th New York National Guard Regiment. It was renamed the 369th Infantry Regiment and shipped out to France, where its soldiers dug latrines and unloaded ships. The regiment later reinforced the French Fourth Army and the black soldiers, nicknamed the "Harlem Hellfighters," were sent to an outpost on the western edge of the Argonne Forest. On the night of May 15, 1918, Johnson, then a private, was on sentry duty with Needham Roberts, an African-American army private from Trenton, N.J. The two were attacked and overrun by a German raiding party and Roberts was severely wounded by grenade fragments. Johnson lobbed grenades at the enemy until he ran out and kept up a steady volume of rifle fire even after being struck in the head and lip by German bullets. Despite suffering 21 wounds, he kept fighting. When his rifle jammed, he swung it like a club until the wooden stock splintered. Knocked down by a blow to his head, Johnson fought with the only weapon he had left, a bolo knife, and managed to pull Roberts to safety. The sound of advancing French and American forces caused the Germans to retreat. Johnson was taken to a field hospital. Johnson killed four Germans, wounded an estimated 10 to 20, and prevented the enemy from breaking through the French line. Johnson, who stood just 5 feet 4 and weighed 130 pounds, was nicknamed "Black Death" for his ferocity. For their actions, Johnson and Roberts become the first American privates to receive the Croix du Guerre, France's highest military honor. Johnson's medal included the Gold Palm for extraordinary valor. "When Henry came home, he was famous," Sheehan said. In February 1919, the Harlem Hellfighters were cheered by thousands in a parade up Fifth Avenue in New York City. Johnson stood in the lead car. The celebrations for Johnson continued in Albany, with ceremonies at the armory and state Capitol. His image was used to recruit new soldiers and to sell Victory War Stamps. Theodore Roosevelt called Johnson one of the "five bravest Americans" to serve in World War I. But in a speech in St. Louis in March 1919, Johnson launched into an angry tirade against the racial prejudice he had encountered from white American soldiers and officers. The crowd of 5,000 reacted angrily, and the St. Louis black community tried to distance itself from Johnson's outburst. The St. Louis Argus, a black newspaper, called his speech "irresponsible." That controversial St. Louis speech which underscored a racial divide that continues to plague the country may have helped shelve Johnson's Medal of Honor chances. "He spoke the truth and he paid a horrible price," Sheehan said. "White America turned its back on our hero." The Military Intelligence Division investigated whether Johnson could be charged with inciting a riot and the chief of a "Negro Subversion" unit recommended that Johnson be stripped of his right to wear the Army uniform. Albany historian Akum Norder dug into the St. Louis controversy in "The Battle of Henry Johnson" in the December 2013 issue of 518 Life magazine, a Times Union publication. "It was a very bitter speech, and some of it was really ugly. I think it was a factor in his not getting the honor," Norder said. "I didn't discover this chapter in Johnson's life, but I wanted to make it part of Albany's understanding." After St. Louis, Johnson's life fell apart. He was no longer invited to give speeches, his body was too broken to work as a train porter, he fell into chronic alcoholism and became estranged from his family. He died destitute in 1929, but was given a burial with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, although his family and published reports believed Johnson was buried in a pauper's grave. His son, Herman Johnson, laid a memorial wreath at his father's grave in 2002 in a ceremony led by Gov. George Pataki. Jack McEneny, a historian and retired state assemblyman, attended the Arlington ceremony and worked with former Albany mayors for more than 40 years to gain the Medal of Honor for Johnson. "This has been a very long struggle and many worked very hard, none more so than Chuck Schumer," McEneny said. "Justice delayed is justice denied." Only two other Albany County residents are known to have received the Medal of Honor: Parker F. Dunn of Albany, who was killed in action in World War I, and Peter Dallesandro of Watervliet, a World War II hero. CINCINNATI, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Union Institute & University has announced the launch of "Channel U" a new podcast channel that will cover a wide variety of topics designed to engage, enlighten and empower listeners. The podcast is hosted by Union's President, Dr. Karen Schuster Webb, as well as various guest hosts. Dr. Webb said, "We are so proud of Channel U and the opportunity it represents to extend the positive influence of Union not only to our students and alumni, but to the world at large. The topics we cover will be wide-ranging and include mental health, social justice and changes in our world due to the pandemic. But they will all be designed to help listeners stay well, live better and keep learning in today's challenging world." Channel U's first episode will feature Dr. Rosalyn Brown-Beatty, Director of Union's Master of Arts in Clinical Mental Health Counseling program. During the discussion, Dr. Brown-Beatty will provide tips on maintaining mental health during the current pandemic and other stressful times. Upcoming episodes will feature advice from subject matter experts on job skills, nutrition, higher education and more. Channel U is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, the Podbean Podcast App and more. To access Channel U, now, visit https://channelu.podbean.com. About Union Institute & University Union Institute & University offers educational programs for busy adults who want to achieve their professional goals and pursue a lifetime of learning, service and social responsibility. Since its founding in 1964, Union has been a leader in the development and delivery of outstanding distance education undergraduate, master's and doctoral degree programs, in addition to a variety of new certificate programs. Students can choose to complete their studies online, through low residency, or site-based, depending on the program and location. A private nonprofit university, with international outreach, Union Institute & University is regionally accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, and has satellite centers located in Ohio, Florida and California. To learn more about Union Institute & University, visit www.myunion.edu or call 1-800-861-6400. SOURCE Union Institute & University Related Links https://myunion.edu Pleas in Supreme Court seek Rs 4 lakh ex-gratia to kin of those who died of COVID-19 Your honour? This is not the Supreme Court of the United States says CJI Bobde India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Feb 24: The Supreme Court Tuesday cautioned a law student not to address the judges as "Your honour" as it was not the "US Supreme Court". "When you call us 'Your Honour' it appears that you have the US Supreme Court in mind," a bench of Chief Justice S A Bobde and Justices A S Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian told the law student. He immediately apologised to the bench and said that he would address the court as "Your Lordship". To this, CJI Bobde said: "Whatever, but don't use inappropriate terms". Administrating own territories, not infringed upon Odisha's area: Andhra tells SC The bench told him that in the US Supreme Court and in magisterial court here, the court can be addressed as "Your honour" but not in Indian Supreme Court. The bench then asked him what his case was, to which the student, who appeared in-person, said that his plea seeks that infrastructure of the judiciary on the criminal jurisdiction side be strengthened. The bench told him that does he know that there is already a matter pending in the Supreme Court in which directions have been passed to strengthen the infrastructure of judiciary right up to subordinate judiciary level in a phased wise manner. The law student feigned ignorance after which the bench said that it appears that he has not done his homework before approaching the court. It told the petitioner that there is a pending case titled as Malik Mazhar Sultan versus UPSC in which directions have been issued to the Centre, different state governments and High Courts for strengthening of infrastructure right up to subordinate judiciary level. The bench adjourned the matter for four weeks and asked the student to come prepared on the next date of hearing. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 8:52 [IST] 'Simplicity is a great idea' Changes in CT vaccine eligibility phases make more sense, massage therapist says Franci Knight, owner of A Healing Trail Wellness Center in Harwinton, is glad that the state has changed the direction of the vaccine schedule to age groups and teachers. By Emily M. Olson When Franci Knight heard the state was changing the COVID-19 vaccine eligibility phases to age groups and teachers, she was thrilled. Simplicity is a great idea, she said. Having groups like this has got to be much more efficient, instead of spending time for people trying to figure out which category everyone is in. This plan opens vaccines to everyone within 60 days. ... This plan takes a huge logistics burden off the health care system. Now there are just four groups left and 60 days to include everyone. Knight, who owns A Healing Trail Wellness Center on Route 4 in Harwinton, already has signed up her staff of more than 20 people to get their vaccines. I dont know if we can get our vaccines or not, she said. But Ive made the appointments. She recommended people use mychartplus, a website and app used by Hartford HealthCare for scheduling. I used it and it was so easy, she said. I went on the website and got an appointment right away. Knight is 56. I qualified in the age group and under (Phase) 1b, as a massage therapist, and Im going to find out if my staff is able to (go), too, she said. They all want to get it, and I would like them all to be vaccinated. Right now the rules say 1b includes people who have hands-on contact with their clients all the time, and thats a massage therapist, she said. Knight wants to see everyone in the state get the vaccine. Whatevers best for the system, she said. If getting the schools open is a priority, then of course, get the teachers vaccinated, she said. Authored by Ievgen Kushnir, Regional Business Development, Director of MGID Global If there is anything positive that came out of the pandemic last year and the ensuing lockdown, it is that the potential of digital was revealed. With everyone stuck at home, digital media was the only way advertisers could connect with their customers most efficiently and it led to a new revolution in the use of programmatic and native advertising. Over the years many different approaches and formats have been used to get the best results and ROIs from digital campaigns. Starting from standard banners to video advertisements, brands have made use of a mix of approaches to reach their target audience. Today, advertisers do not look at only the reach of the campaign but also relevance of the audience and brand safety. As more and more stress is laid on ensuring that digital marketing campaigns reach the right audience and keep the brand name safe, native ads have emerged as the preferred choice. The appeal of native ads Traditional methods of advertising like OOH, TV ads etc largely adopt a one-to-many approach which is completely linear in nature. Digital advertising forms such as standard banner ads are similarly linear in nature, which is one of the reasons advertisers choose these when their target is to communicate a message to the masses. With such an approach, however, the scope to measure the feedback from the user or accurately calculate ROI to see if the marketing strategy worked is rather limited, unless one is looking at CTR as a measure of success of the campaign. With native advertising, advertisers can adopt a one-to-one session based bilateral conversation with users. Brands can get appropriate feedback on their messaging and accurately measure the ROI of the campaign to see if their KPIs have been met, and even optimise the on-going campaign in real-time. Attract genuine interest from the audience. One of the first reasons why brands choose native ads is because they do not stand out as an ad and can combat ad fatigue. They are non-intrusive, do not interrupt the experience of the user and thus have higher engagement than banner ads and many impact properties. They are marked as sponsored and so cannot be categorised as a deceptive form of advertising. Result in an overall lower CPC. Native ads allow advertisers a much better control over the audience they target as compared to other types of digital advertising options which cost wise makes them more efficient. Relevant audience means more clicks on the ad and higher response rate. Today native ads have emerged as the third most used publishing strategy, along with video ads, as per a poll conducted by Salesforce where they took responses from over 4000 marketers[1]. Apart from advertisers, publishers find native ads attractive as well since they can monetise their sites without compromising on the quality of user experience. Way forward with native ads for optimum monetisation Clear Labelling Native advertising is often confused with advertorials since they are similar in terms of style, design, and functionality. Clear labelling of the ad or content is the first step to ensure its success and to make sure that users do not feel betrayed. It also creates trust and positive recall in the minds of the users for the brand. Distribution and targeting When working with native ads, distribution is as important as the selection of the target audience. Distribution refers to the network of publisher websites and apps where AdTech companies such as MGID would be placing the ad. Choosing the right publisher is important because this would determine the quality of the users that are targeted and whether the ad has been shown to a contextually relevant audience. Data collection and privacy Over the past few months, new laws and regulations have passed to ensure that user data remains secure and there is no threat to privacy of internet users. AdTech companies have responded to these changes by leaning towards the use of first party data to run the brand campaigns which includes native ads. Accurate data from publishers and AdTech companies go a long way for the success of the native ad campaign. The data from publishers can also reveal the mindset of the user which helps in customizing the native ad for the audience[2]. Native Ad Led Solutions by AdTech Companies In the face of the ongoing pandemic the digital advertising universe realised a dire need for new ad products. Publishers saw a huge dip in network revenues and to compensate that they needed to employ these new ad products. AdTech platform MGID responded to this change with a new dedicated approach called Native Yield Optimisation. Within its yield optimization system, it combines different types of demand in one ad placement, which enables publishers to efficiently monetize their inventory, providing their audiences with an enhanced user experience. Native Yield Optimisation helps publishers in three ways real time selection of ad type for placement on the website, get better value of their inventory and better user experience. The AI-based tool incorporates both direct and programmatic demand. At MGID the yield optimisation ecosystem sees different types of demands native ad campaigns, direct and programmatic video ads, native programmatic demand from premium exchanges and PMP deals with advertisers and agencies, and programmatic display demand from direct partnerships with top local and global DSPs. Native ads work well for publishers and advertisers alike. Publishers can unlock the full potential of the inventory on their website through this approach while also ensuring good user experience. For advertisers, native ads are a great way to reach out to relevant audience and engage more efficiently with them. Native advertising is exploding in popularity and it will be interesting to see how it evolves in future to meet the demands of all concerned parties. [1] The Future of Native Advertising for Brands and Publishers, Enterpreneur.com [2] 6 reasons why you need to take data seriously when doing native ads, Native Advertising Institute DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and Adgully.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. BSCO Amid the calls the Bexar County Sheriff's Office responded to last week during the winter storm, one was for a young tiger in distress. This Tuesday, BCSO shared a video of the animal, named "Elsa" (as in the Frozen princess) who was found in frozen temperatures, being prepared for a roadtrip to Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch, which is about five hours north of San Antonio. A Private Legal Practitioner, Faisal Ibrahim has channeled his anger on the foreign diplomats advocating the rights of the Lesbians, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI) group in Ghana. The lawyer, speaking on ''Kokrokoo'' on Peace FM, blasted the diplomats for assisting the opening of LGBTQI office in the Greater Accra Region. A five bedroom apartment housing the group was reportedly opened on Sunday, January 31, at Ashongman Estate. The ceremony was attended by the Australian High Commissioner to Ghana, the Dannish Ambassador to Ghana and some officials of the European Union (EU) in Ghana. Lawyer Faisal Ibrahim issued a stern warning to the diplomats asking "why don't they introduce the same thing in Saudi Arabia? Why don't they try? Because they know their values and religious principles don't support it but why is that when they come to Africa, they feel they come and tell us anything they want?'' He continued; ''You have the right to be whatever you want to do in your country but when you leave your country to another country, at least show respect that you're going to deal with people there; so, don't come and impose your ideas and values.'' He stated emphatically that it is an insult for the diplomats to seek to legalize homosexuality in Ghana. "I feel it is an act of arrogance and disrespect to us, Africans," he fumed. 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. Featured Video Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. An almost life-size image of a kangaroo with practical genitalia included - is the most ancient known rock paintings in Australia. Researchers lately assume it age to 17,300 years ago using a technique that has never been employed on Australian old art before, assessing radioactive carbon in wasp nest from rocks close to the artwork. Mysterious Kangaroo Painting The kangaroo art stretches across the cover of a rock harbor and ranges almost 2 meters (7 feet), which is about the height of a modern kangaroo. This and other artwork in northwestern Australia's Kimberley area have certain stylistic traits with the earlier cave art from Asia and Europe, the scientists revealed. Paintings of an ancient animal such as these are regularly life-size or close to it, they likewise represent anatomy and their sketches are only partly covered with outlines. Because of these traits, the artwork was thought to be among Australia's most ancient. Till date such art used by researchers sometimes turn to radiocarbon dating, which examines the ratio of different isotopes, or versions of the carbon in an object. But it needs organic material, which is scarce in rock artwork. ALSO READ: Video of Kangaroo on a Leash Sparks Debate: Should Wild Animals Be Treated Like Pets? Chauvet Cave Ancient Paintings The researchers wrote that in areas in France such as the Chauvet Cave, very old drawings are carved in charcoal and covered deep inside limestone caverns, conserving the organic matter in the charcoal pigments and making radiocarbon dating feasible. Chauvet art has been promptly dated between 29,000 years and 34,000 years ago. But such conservation is extremely unusual, and the paintings imagined to be Australia's oldest are regularly exposed to the elements, University of Melbourne doctoral candidate in the School of Earth Sciences lead the research, author Damien Finch explained that additional open rock havens in sandstone country. Here, the paint used is consistently an iron oxide that can't be dated promptly, if charcoal was utilized as a rock artwork painting in ancient Aboriginal rock artwork, then we haven't yet discovered any living example in Australia So the researchers whirled to mud wasps nest built heart artwork, above and under. For more than five years, they compiled and evaluated 27 nests related to 16 several rock artwork in Drysdale River National Park, dyed in the locales oldest style. Scientific Proof Damien revealed that he then use the structure of all the minimum and maximum dates that relate to the paintings of the exact style, to measure the time when they were created. They discovered that most of the paintings were possibly created between 17,000 years and 13,000 years ago. Six closely nests gave both maximum and minimum dates, helping the researchers to calculate their ages. For thousands of years, individuals have used art to communicate their opinion on the world before them, the most ancient known animal portrait - an extremely hairy pig, discovered in an Indonesian cave, dates back around 45,000 years ago. While it's difficult to be certain of what impelled the first human artists to make imitational paintings, their work creates an image of the extinct ecosystem they occupied, completing scientific proof sea levels and climate as well as animals and the plants available at that time. RELATED ARTICLE: Kangaroos Ask Help From Humans Once They Do This! For more news, update about kangaroo and related topics don't forget to follow Nature World News! Shares is the leading weekly publication for retail investors. It is packed with investment ideas, news and educational material to help build and run portfolios and get more from your money. Shares puts on free Investor Events throughout the year across the country. They provide an opportunity for investors to learn more about companies on the stock market and hear from a range of investment experts including fund managers and Shares journalists. OTTAWA Manitoba needs to keep boosting its food-manufacturing industry or it will remain one of the least productive in Canada, according to a Tuesday analysis. OTTAWA Manitoba needs to keep boosting its food-manufacturing industry or it will remain one of the least productive in Canada, according to a Tuesday analysis. "It seems like Manitoba still has to pick up, in terms of productivity growth, to be at the same level as other provinces," said Julie Ades, a senior economist with the Conference Board of Canada. Ades and her colleagues analyzed Manitobas agri-food sector, and found signs of some positive trends. However, Manitoba has had a steady decline in the productivity of its food-manufacturing sector since 2000, meaning workers have had declining output. For example, Manitobas meat-processing sector jumped from roughly 6,000 to 10,000 jobs between 2010 and 2019, but that sectors economic output halved in that time frame. "Further investments will be needed to reverse the declining trend in productivity that we have seen over the past decade," Ades said. The bulk of Manitobas agri-food exports are still commodities, but those are volatile to issues like Chinas canola restrictions and strict European food regulations, as well as shifts in foreign demand. In 2016, a federal advisory panel highlighted value-added food as a key economic driver for Canada in the coming decade, because Canada exports many raw commodities but has room to grow in processing food products for export. The report notes that Manitoba projects are helping with this shift, like the new Roquette pea-processing facility and upgrades to the Simplot Foods potato-chip plant, both in Portage la Prairie. This can help respond to needs from various markets, such as a boom in demand for plant protein in North America. And while Manitobas meat sector already raises hogs that are cut to specifications demanded by Japanese consumers, economists say Canada could respond to a growing taste for meat in developing Asian markets. "Were hoping that this paper will help to increase awareness of the factors that can impact global demand for agri-food products," Ades said. The think tank argues that federal investments since 2017 have helped develop more valuable exports. "Manitoba has particularly benefited from the federally funded initiatives," the report reads. "Technological innovation and adoption will be central in supporting food manufacturing exports." Industry groups have previously said that will require more favourable labour policies, such as more nominated immigrants who have experience in agricultural technologies. dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca A TUV councillor has admitted the Northern Ireland Protocol played a part in his decision to vote to remove staff conducting Brexit checks from Larne Port. Timothy Gaston said that while his primary concern was the safety of staff, he also took the opportunity to do the right thing for "the bigger picture of unionism". A row has erupted over the Mid and East Antrim Borough Council's unanimous vote to remove staff working at the port earlier this month. On February 1 staff were withdrawn from inspection duties over "concerns for their safety and welfare" following "an upsurge in sinister and menacing behaviour". Graffiti threatening port officials carrying out checks under the protocol, intended to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland after Brexit, has appeared across Northern Ireland. The protocol has angered unionists who believe that by keeping Northern Ireland aligned with EU trade rules, it has cut it off from the rest of the UK. Police later said they had found no evidence of "credible threats" against port staff and they returned to their posts. On Monday, councillors debated an Alliance Party motion around "discrepancies" in the information provided to the council and called for an investigation. The proposal was defeated by 26 votes to 11, with one abstention. Sinn Fein MLA Phillip McGuigan accused the DUP and the TUV of using the issue of staff safety "as a pawn in the bigger political game". "There's something very, very fishy about the timing of this decision and the nature of this decision," the North Antrim MLA told the BBC. Mr McGuigan said there were "very serious questions" around "whether this was a political decision made in the interests of a bigger political agenda by unionism as opposed to the safety of Mid and East Antrim council staff". TUV representative Mr Gaston said he had asked a local Policing and Community Safety Partnership meeting about threats to staff ahead of the vote. He said there was "nothing that caused me any concern" in a senior officer's response and that he raised this in the council chamber before the vote was taken to remove staff. "First and foremost the safety of the staff is paramount and the main focus," he told the Belfast Telegraph. "But even though I had concerns about the legitimacy of the information we were given, I certainly took the opportunity to show that the staff could be removed. The element of that I want the staff out anyway certainly rested my decision. "If the shoe was on the other foot in a different scenario I would have still voted to remove the staff, because if there was still safety concerns they needed to be addressed." The TUV councillor said he would be in favour of the permanent removal of staff to bring the issues around the protocol "to a head politically". "I would have far rather we took that decision on the political will of the chamber because of the protocol to withdraw the staff," Mr Gaston said. "I feel unionist councillors on any of the councils that have a port and have staff implementing the protocol should be looking to take that action and it's something we are exploring." New Delhi/Puducherry, Feb 24 (UNI) The Union Cabinet on Wednesday recommended imposition of President's Rule in Union Territory of Puducherry after Chief Minister V Narayanasamy-led Congress government collapsed, and BJP and its allies did not stake claim to form the government. Briefing the media after Cabinet meeting, Information and Broadcasting Minister Parkash Javadekar said no other political party staked claim to form a Government there, hence, the Union Cabinet has recommended President's Rule in Puducherry. Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan who is officiating as Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry has also recommended to dissolve the UT Assembly and the recommendation will be sent to President Ram Nath Kovind. President Kovind will soon take a call on this issue and a communique will be issued by the President's Secretariat, Mr Javadekar added. Puducherry Assembly has the strength of 33 MLAs, including 30 elected MLAs, and three lawmakers nominated by the central government. Mr Narayanasamy lost the Trust Vote on February 22 when he and his ministers walked out of Puducherry Assembly pinning the blame for the political crisis on former LG Kiran Bedi and the BJP-led central government. Puducherry goes to polls in April-May along with Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal and Assam. The Congress-DMK alliance, led by V Narayanaswamy fell into a crisis after a spate of resignations that led to a controversy ending with the removal of Kiran Bedi as Lt Governor. Telangana Governor Soundarajan was subsequently given the additional charge of Puducherry. Six MLAs from the ruling alliance have resigned since mid-January, bringing down the Assembly strength to 26. UNI AKS SV 1602 Nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital delivered a 10-day notice to management on Tuesday of their intention to strike beginning at 6 a.m. on March 8 if their requests for increased staffing levels continue to be ignored, according to the union. The nurses, represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association, voted on Feb. 10 to authorize the negotiating committee to strike if necessary. The vote came a day before the 31st negotiation session with Tenet Healthcare, the Dallas-based parent company of Saint Vincent Hospital, the union said. Nurses have been pushed to the brink with unsafe staffing conditions by Tenet for more than two years, said Marlena Pellegrino, a frontline registered nurse at the hospital and co-chair of the nurses local bargaining unit with the Massachusetts Nurses Association. We refuse to be pushed any further and are now ready to do whatever it takes to ensure the safety of our patients. For about a year, the union, which represents about 800 nurses at the hospital, has lobbied complaints at Tenet Healthcare regarding staffing restrictions that nurses claim is affecting patient care. As we care for our community and battle the pandemic, we are disappointed that the MNA has walked away from the negotiating table and plans to hold a strike beginning March 8, Saint Vincent Hospital said in a statement. Our hospital will remain fully operational and our patients will be cared for by qualified replacement nurses and other caregivers. Complaints from nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital date back to last February when more than 70% signed a petition calling for safer staffing levels. A month later, more than 200 nurses attended a negotiation session with management to provide information about the staffing levels. Last May, after furloughs were implemented, nurses filed a vote of no confidence in CEO Carolyn Jackson and her management team. Last month, nurses picketed outside the hospital. In December, more than 400 nurses participated in an information picket to protest the same conditions. Earlier this month, Jackson told MassLive that a strike amid a global pandemic was irresponsible. If a strike occurs, Jackson said the hospital is prepared to continue to provide care to patients by working through an agency to bring on replacement nurses. We certainly are hopeful that we can reach an amicable resolution to the contract, and that there is no strike Jackson said. I feel that its irresponsible to even talk about a strike during a global pandemic and we feel we have an excellent offer on the table. On Feb. 10, Jackson said the latest offer to the nurses union is a way to boost staffing. New staff, Jackson said, could be lured to Saint Vincent Hospital through the offer, which includes wage increases between 5% and 22% by the end of 2022, retroactive pay, lump-sum payments, enhanced benefits for part-time nurses and hiring of critical care nurses. We do believe we have an excellent offer on the table that will help us recruit and retain nurses and help us ensure we are able to maintain the ratios in the current contract, which is more generous than most if not all of the hospitals in the commonwealth, Jackson said. The nurses have secured a strike headquarters across the street from the hospital, the union said. The strike would be the second strike by the nurses against Tenet Healthcare. Nurses waged a successful 49-day strike in 2000 to achieve their first union contract, the union said. The strike ended with a settlement reached in the Washington D.C. offices of former Sen. Edward Kennedy. Related Content: Mourners today gathered to pay tribute to a young girl who lost her battle with cancer after coronavirus lockdown stopped her from flying to the US for treatment. Eva Williams, 10, passed away on January 8, around 12 months after she was diagnosed with a rare high-grade diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma brain tumour. The girl, from Wrexham in north Wales, had complained of dizziness and blurred vision in December 2019 before being referred to Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool. Here, a CT scan revealed a mass on her brain that was later confirmed to be cancer. Her family raised more than 300,000 so Eva could undergo experimental treatment in New York, but she became unable to fly when travel restrictions were introduced amid the pandemic in April. Eva's father Paul Slapa, 35, last month confirmed his daughter had died. Eva Williams (pictured), 10, passed away on January 8, around 12 months after she was diagnosed with a rare high-grade diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma brain tumour Hundreds of wellwishers today gathered to release more than 400 balloons as Eva's funeral carriage passed through Wrexham Hundreds of wellwishers today gathered to release more than 400 balloons as Eva's funeral carriage passed through Wrexham. Lockdown restrictions meant only immediate family could attend the service, but the ceremony at Pentrebychan Crematorium was live streamed over the internet. Speaking after his daughter's death, Mr Slapa said: 'Eva is an inspiration to many, certainly to me, and I cannot begin to imagine how we will go forward from here. 'How do we wake up each day and go on? How do we face the world without our baby girl with us? Why did this happen to the most caring and loving of little girls? 'Every single part of us is in pain and I can't see how that can change. We love you Eva - more than you'll have ever known - and we will keep you with us every day for the rest of our lives.' The girl, from Wrexham in north Wales, had complained of dizziness and blurred vision in December 2019 before being referred to Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool. Pictured: Eva with mother Carran Williams and father Paul Slapa Eva's father Paul Slapa, 35, last month confirmed his daughter had died. Pictured: Mr Slapa and Eva Eva's cancer battle was previously brought to public attention by Wrexham MP Sarah Atherton during Prime Minister's Questions in July. Boris Johnson had said the Government would endeavour to 'look at everything we can do to support her travel arrangements.' However, her mother Carran Williams confirmed during the summer that Eva's cancer had progressed too far for her to be accepted onto the trial. Speaking previously, Mr Slapa said: 'Any of the trials we chose are all experimental treatment, so we will never know whether or not they would have been successful or not. 'But the fact is the chance and opportunity to try was taken away by Covid. 'That's the thing that really makes you feel like you have been wronged.' Reported NPAT $3.5M vs. ( $13M ) in PCP vs. ( ) in PCP Reported EBITDA* $10.6M vs. ( $8.8M ) in PCP, an improvement of $19.4M vs. ( ) in PCP, an improvement of Reported revenue $98.9M , +5.5% vs. PCP , +5.5% vs. PCP Double-digit top and bottom-line growth in focus growth markets Net debt reduction** $1.6M , Inventory reduction** $14M , Operating cash inflow $9.4M , Inventory reduction** , Operating cash inflow Gross Profit +1080 bps, +28.3% vs. PCP Marketing Investment +$2.1M or +25% $15M business transformation plan on track: business transformation plan on track: Additional $10M transformation phase two launched 37% reduction in total recordable injury frequency rate (TRIFR) Full year guidance maintained; dividends expected to resume at full year Financial results for the six months ended $M 31 December 2020 Unaudited 31 December 2019 Unaudited Revenue 98.9 93.9 Gross Profit 48.5 35.8 EBITDA* 10.6 (8.8) Net Profit/(Loss) after tax 3.5 (13.0) Net debt 13.9 93.2 Inventory 98.5 116.1 *EBITDA: Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation ** Performance vs. 30 June 2020 Comvita (NZX:CVT) today announced that for the six-month period ending 31 December 2020, it returned to profitability with net profit after tax (NPAT) reported as $3.5M versus a $12.97M loss in the prior corresponding period (PCP). Reported EBITDA was $10.6M versus a loss of $8.8M in the PCP. Revenue increased to $98.9M, +$5.5% versus PCP, or 6.7% in constant currency, with strong growth seen in focus growth markets and its core Manuka category. Marketing investment designed to support Comvita's long-term growth ambition increased by 25% on the PCP as Comvita activated plans to drive brand affinity and tell its founding story to discerning consumers around the world. Commenting on the performance, Comvita Chairman, Brett Hewlett, said "We're pleased with the progress the team has delivered over the last year. The Board and management have continued to transform the business at pace looking to ensure we deliver the performance that all Comvita stakeholders should expect. The result shared today shows that the ongoing transformation is multi-dimensional with revenue, margin, and earnings improvements, along with good financial and capital disciplines evidenced in net debt reduction, inventory reduction and cash generation. In line with our previous disclosure, and subject to delivering full year guidance, the Board reconfirms its commitment to resume dividend payments at the end of this financial year." Group CEO, David Banfield, says "The team and I are encouraged by the results that we share today. We remain totally focused on delivering our new long-term sustainable business model that will enable us to simplify and streamline the business further, invest in telling our unique brand story to discerning consumers around the world, and connect with our fantastic in-market teams to deliver the most compelling consumer proposition in market. We look forward to sharing further progress over the course of the second half of the year." Focus growth markets performing strongly Comvita's focus growth markets, China and North America, showed strong performance in this period with both markets delivering double-digit top and bottom-line growth. China is the world's biggest honey market valued at $1.8Bn, Comvita's long-term goal is to target market growth (growing the total addressable market) and market share growth. Revenue in China grew by 20% and net contribution by 28% versus the PCP, as Comvita invested in long-term brand building activity. Comvita also significantly strengthened leadership capability at its in-China subsidiary funded by efficiencies across the Group with a focus on delivering strong foundations for long-term profitable growth. Comvita North America posted another strong result with revenue increased by 38% and net contribution by 222% (though there was a delay in timing of some marketing activities to H2). Retail distribution increased by 170% over the PCP, which is hugely encouraging, and digital sales increased by 87%, now representing 41% of H1 sales. Comvita is the fastest growing Manuka honey brand in North America. Unique business model shows encouraging signs Comvita has a unique 'End to End' business model with around 350 people employed in markets outside of New Zealand to ensure that Comvita is better connected to customers and consumers in market, and is able to adapt at speed to meet local market changes and needs. A particular strength of this model has been evidenced in Mainland China and Asia where Comvita has been able to offset the impact of the challenges in the Daigou market in Australia and New Zealand. This model also enables the business to continue to perform strongly even with travel and tourism being so restricted. Headwinds in Australia and New Zealand The business in Australia and New Zealand has traditionally been focused on tourism, travel, Daigou, cross-border, and retail serving Asian consumers. This has meant a narrow distribution focus and lack of digital activity and has limited reach outside this core consumer group. This has resulted in a lack of distribution and brand awareness of our compelling story across the broader target demographic in Australia and New Zealand and has meant that COVID disruptions have had a material impact on revenue and earnings (particularly in Australia). Revenue in Australia fell by $5.5M versus the PCP due to the challenges in these channels. As previously advised Comvita sees success in its home markets as a prerequisite for long-term success. Comvita has launched a review of the optimum structure for its Asian health Daigou business to ensure consumer communication, experience and brand proposition is enhanced. The new Immersive Comvita Wellness Lab experience in Auckland will open in March 2021 as Comvita shares its amazing founding story and the story of the hive with New Zealand consumers. $15M Transformation on track Comvita has made good progress on its $15M business transformation programme announced last year, with the benefits being reflected in these Interim results. Overall Comvita has delivered a strong improvement in gross profit of 1080 bps or +28.3% vs. PCP, radically flattened the organisation structure and simplified the business significantly (legal entities and JV's). Its previously reported goal to reduce the total SKU count by 30% is on track to be delivered, freeing up cash and bringing more focus in the process. It is also on track to deliver underlying cost reductions of $5M. New additional $10M transformation phase two announced Comvita aims to be the highest quality, lowest cost producer of Manuka honey while also having a relentless focus on flattening the organisational structure and putting the consumer, and consumer experience, at the heart of their thinking. In order to ensure that the business model enables it to invest in telling its long-term story, to connect with consumers and deliver returns to shareholders in-line with expectation, Comvita has today launched an additional three-year $10M transformation phase two. This programme is designed to deliver an additional 400-450 bps improvement in margin by June 2024 and enable it to accelerate brand investment and deliver on its mid-single digit revenue growth expectations. Comvita will invest an additional $1.5M p.a. to deliver this phase two transformation. Good progress on digital transformation Comvita has set out its aim to grow digital sales to 50% of total group sales by 2025. Good progress has been made with total digital sales accounting for 32% of Group sales in this period. Comvita under index digital sales in all markets that have been slow to embrace the digital channel opportunity (NZ, AU, UK and HK). It is notable that all these markets share the same narrow distribution model and have underperformed during this period. Action is already underway to address this with the recent announcement of the partnership with The Hut Group. Net debt, inventory, and cash improvements Comvita continued its strategy to streamline the business and deliver on its low debt, lower Inventory, and cash generative plan. During this period net debt decreased by $1.6M, inventory by $14M, and $9.4M in operating cash was generated. Full year guidance maintained Comvita maintained full year guidance of an EBITDA range of NZD $20-$23M in the period ending 30 June 2021. Comvita also reaffirmed its intention to resume dividend payments following delivery of its full year guidance. Looking forward - Building a better business Good progress has been made on stabilising and transforming the business in line with Comvita's three-part plan to: Stabilise performance Transform the organisation Build long term resilience and growth Comvita is focused on putting in place long-term scalable foundations and processes that enable the business to excel in coming years. "We're pleased with progress so far but equally recognise the additional work ahead as we 'Stride" into this next phase." added Banfield. Comvita remains committed to delivering mid-single-digit revenue growth in constant currency, a 20% EBITDA margin by 2025, and a double-digit five-year EPS CAGR. In addition, Comvita reiterated its aim to be carbon neutral by 2025 and carbon positive by 2030. Banfield, concludes "This is a special chapter in Comvita's rich history as we turn 50 years of age in 2024/5. The team and I are totally committed to delivering long-term profitable growth and ensuring that we put in place the foundations at Comvita to thrive for another 50 years. We continue our transformation of Comvita and remain committed to pay back the support shown by the Board, the extended Comvita whanau and all our stakeholders." David Banfield Brett Hewlett CEO Chair Background information About Comvita (www.comvita.co.nz) Comvita (NZX:CVT) was founded in 1974 and is the pioneer and global market leader of the Manuka honey category. Comvita is committed to the long-term development of Manuka and Bee products backed by unrivalled scientific knowhow. Comvita recently announced its sponsorship of the NZ pavilion at the World Expo in Dubai focusing on Kaitiakitanga (guardianship and protection of the planet). SOURCE Comvita Thousands of women will be given DIY smear tests to do at home in a bid to boost screening uptake. The NHS will dish out more than 31,000 home kits in London, which will allow women to perform the potentially life-saving check at home for the first time. It is hoped the pilot will encourage women who are too embarrassed to have the test conducted by a health professional at a GP surgery or health centre. If successful, health professionals say it could soon be rolled out nationally. The tests which look for strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) responsible for 99 per cent of cases of cervical cancer will be posted to women aged 25-64 who are 15 months overdue for a check. The NHS's screening programme invites all women over the age of 25 for regular swabs, starting at one appointment every three years and then decreasing to once every five years for over-50s. Although the HPV vaccine, brought into use in 2008, is expected to all but eliminate the virus from Britain in the coming generations, women who turned 12 before then may still be at risk from the virus. HPV viruses are spread through sex and mostly do not cause any symptoms or serious harm, but may raise the risk of cancer in later life. Cervical cancer can develop at a young age, often affecting women in their 30s and 40s, and around half of women who develop it die within 10 years of their diagnosis. Smear tests are swabs done inside the vagina that can detect HPV, a sexually-transmitted virus that causes almost all cases of cervical cancer (stock image) Dr Anita Lim, from King's College London, who is leading the study, said self-sampling is a 'game-changer for cervical screening.' She said: 'We know many women aren't coming forward for screening and almost half of women in some parts of London aren't up to date with their cervical screening. 'It's an intimate procedure and a variety of barriers can stop people from attending, even though it can be a life-saving test. 'This simple and convenient swab means it can be done in the privacy and comfort of your own home. HPV VACCINE 'COULD ERADICATE CERVICAL CANCER' Public Health England said last year that the HPV vaccine could all but wipe out cervical cancer among young women. Real-world data, it said, shows HPV infections have gone from affecting 15 per cent of women to fewer than two per cent in just 10 years since the vaccine was brought into use. HPV causes almost all cases of cervical cancer and many experts believe that by stopping it spreading they will be able to wipe out the disease in England. 'Our analysis finds that the near perfect efficacy of HPV vaccination in trials is realised in real-world settings,' said Professor Peter Sasieni, who conducted a study on the vaccine's effects. 'These results imply that the impact of HPV vaccination on preventing cervical cancer could be even greater than estimated previously.' The vaccine was developed to prevent HPV types 6, 11, 16 and 18 from spreading. Types 16 and 18 cause more than 70 per cent of cervical cancer cases in the UK, while types 6 and 11 cause 90 per cent of of genital warts cases the jab protects against both. Professor Sasieni's research used data from a review which combined 65 other studies from 14 countries. It found the jab was 92 per cent effective within four years of it being given; 99.8 per cent effective after five years; and 97.6 per cent effective overall. Cancers in both male and female genitals and reproductive systems, as well as of the rectum and the mouth and throat, may all be linked to the HPV viruses. A report published in February 2019 predicted that the cancer cases would be cut in half by 2050 and eradicated completely by 2100. Professor Sasieni's letter was published in medical journal The Lancet. Advertisement 'Women who don't come for regular screening are at the highest risk of developing cervical cancer, so it is crucial that we find ways like this to make screening easier and protect women from what is a largely preventable cancer.' Screening for the disease in Britain has fallen to an all-time low with around five million women currently overdue for testing. Nearly a third of British women ignored their latest invitation and are at risk because they have gone several years without a smear test. Experts believe offering them the chance to test themselves in the privacy and comfort of their own home would appeal to the many women who are too embarrassed or busy to attend a clinic. Studies have shown the DIY kits can increase screening among these hard-to-reach groups by up to 50 per cent. The trial will target people living in the London Boroughs of Barnet, Camden, Islington, Newham and Tower Hamlets, where screening appointment attendance is low. Women who are six months overdue for their test and attend GPs surgeries involved with the trial will also be offered an at-home kit. 'This is an important new way to make screening easier for thousands of women,' said Professor Peter Johnson, national clinical director for cancer for the NHS in England. 'We know there are lots of reasons why women might not attend a screening appointment, including worries about Covid. 'GPs have taken extra precautions to make surgeries safe, and these home kits give thousands of women another option to keep up to date with their screening. 'We would urge every woman to make sure they have their smear test - the earlier HPV is detected the better. It could save your life.' Women taking part in the YouScreen trial, which is being jointly run by NHS England, Public Health England and Kings College London, will follow the instructions on the test and then post their swabs back for analysis. They will receive their result in the post, and if HPV is detected they will be contacted for a follow-up appointment. Ruth Stubbs, National Cervical Screening Programme manager at PHE, said it is the first step in getting closer to HPV self-sampling at home for women across England. She said: 'PHE is also working on a clinical validation study to inform a larger national evaluation of HPV self-sampling at home. 'This work together with the findings from the YouScreen London study, will provide data from England to inform the UK National Screening Committee on the potential impact of offering HPV self-sampling on the prevention and early detection of cervical cancer.' Kate Sanger, from Jo's Cervical Cancer Trust, said: 'Self-sampling removes so many of the challenges to cervical screening and through our research we know it is very much wanted by women. 'It has been fantastic to be part of this study and we hope it leads to change that will save lives and the trauma a cervical cancer diagnosis can bring.' London: The team behind the Oxford jab have launched research on whether the vaccine could be taken as a pill - a medical breakthrough that could make annual coronavirus inoculation programs faster, cheaper and more widespread. Professor Sarah Gilbert, the lead developer behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine being rolled out around the world including in Australia, said a product delivered via nasal spray could also be a game changer in the race for second generation vaccine products. As you know all the vaccines have been given at the moment as intramuscular injections, Gilbert said on Wednesday local-time. That is not necessarily the best way to provide protection against a respiratory virus infection, where we want the immune system to be active in the upper respiratory tract and then in the lower respiratory tract, which is where the virus is causing the infection. New Hyundai crossovers highlight deals and incentives at Hyundai of Mankato Mankato-area shoppers looking for a new vehicle will find that the deals and incentives at Hyundai of Mankato fit the bill. The Hyundai of Mankato dealership is currently offering specials on a variety of Hyundai vehicles, including new Hyundai crossovers. Hyundai Kona and Hyundai Venue models are currently highlighted in the available incentives at the dealership. Select 2021 Hyundai Venue SEL models are available at Hyundai of Mankato with a 0% Annual Percentage Rate (APR) for 60 months for well-qualified buyers. Shoppers looking to lease a new Venue may be eligible to enter a 39-month lease contract for $185 per month with $3,499 down. Attractive lease and finance options are also available on select 2021 Hyundai Kona models at Hyundai of Mankato. Qualifying buyers may be eligible to take advantage of a 0.9% APR for 60 months on select 2021 Kona models. Prospective lessees may be eligible to enter 39-month lease contracts with payments as low as $220 per month with $3,499 down. Eligibility for Hyundai lease and finance deals is subject to approval by Hyundai Motor Finance. Anyone can view the available Hyundai Kona, Venue and other Hyundai models at Hyundai of Mankato by visiting the dealership online at hyundaiofmankato.com. Hyundai of Mankato is located at 1281 Raintree Road in Mankato, MN, and is open Monday through Saturday. The dealerships showroom is open from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Fridays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays. Individuals looking to speak with a member of the dealership staff directly prior to visiting can do so by calling 507-550-1175. MONTREAL and PARIS, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Zelros , the industry's first AI-driven platform dedicated to advancing insurance distribution, today announced the successful close of an $11 Million Series A financing round, bringing the company's total funding to date to $16.5M. Silicon Valley-based BGV led the round with new participation from ISAI Cap Venture and Plug and Play . Historical investors HI INOV, 42CAP and astorya.vc also participated in the round. The Zelros AI business platform offers insurers, bancassurers, and policyholders a more efficient, fluid, and personalized way to distribute and receive products and services. The platform continuously learns, adapts, and improves its capabilities in real-time, offering insurance advisors and agents a streamlined and semi-automated experience from product/service needs discovery and sales to underwriting. It also allows insurance providers to offer policyholders fully automated, advisor-free subscription options. This enables incumbent industry leaders to compete with both fast-growth, technology-first insurance startups and tech behemoths heavily investing in insurtech. The company will use the funding to scale operations across Europe and expand into North America, strengthening its leadership position in the insurtech space. "Digital transformation is fundamentally changing how businesses operate, and with insurtech funding reaching an all-time high of $7.1 billion in 2020, the insurance industry is no exception," said Christophe Bourguignat, co-founder and CEO, Zelros. "At Zelros, we focus one hundred percent of our attention on developing AI-driven technology to improve and advance the insurance industry. We're passionate about helping insurance players transform into technology-first companies, and the support of BGV, Capgemini, and all of our investors will empower us to accomplish our mission." Following a $5.5 Million seed round of fundraising in 2018, Zelros has experienced two consecutive years of triple-digit revenue growth, expanded its operations across three countries, and grown its team by over 350 percent to 50 employees. In 2020 alone, Zelros software reviewed over 20 million policyholder-specific situations and issued over two million personalized recommendations. The company currently works with 15 of the leading insurance providers in Europe, including BPCE, AXA, Credit Agricole, MAIF, La Banque Postale, AssurOne, +Simple, across property and casualty (P&C) and life insurance business lines. Zelros also works closely with insurance regulators to promote usage of fair and transparent AI, and has published its own open standard for ethical, enterprise-grade AI to pave the way in this field. Zelros' co-founder and COO, Damien Philippon, will relocate and launch the company's Montreal-based North American headquarters in Q3 2021. The company plans to hire five full-time employees at its North American location by the end of the year. "Zelros is using AI to improve traditional insurance-industry standards and deliver immediate business value and ROI improvements for its customers. Their solution is helping insurance professionals to be more efficient and integrates smoothly into existing workflows while providing transparency on the final recommendation. This is exactly what we look for in the Enterprise 4.0 startups we invest in," said Eric Buatois, general partner, BGV. "At BGV, our expertise lies in sourcing the best startups in hubs outside of the valley and helping them scale up globally. We're thrilled to work together with Zelros to build their business in Europe, North America, and beyond." "The COVID pandemic and the digital revolution have forced insurers across the globe to rethink how they sell; even those who rely on agents and brokers to make the sale recognize the power of technology to enhance the productivity and effectiveness of the people who represent their brand. Zelros brings a powerful AI-based capability to the insurance sales process. Its machine learning engine identifies upsell and cross-sell opportunities at the point of customer interaction empowering agents to recommend the right insurance product to the right customer at the right time," said Seth Rachlin, global head of property and casualty insurance for Capgemini. In 2020, Zelros landed on the INSURTECH 100 annual list of 100 of the world's most innovative insurtech companies, was named one of 20 French startups to watch by Sifted , and was named to FirstMark Capital's 2020 Data & AI Landscape annual report. For more information on Zelros visit: https://www.zelros.com/ . About Zelros Zelros develops the first AI software dedicated to the insurance distribution of tomorrow. It enables insurance players to offer a fluid and personalized experience from intelligent lead management through need analysis and advice to automated underwriting. Zelros solutions are used daily by advisors, agents and managers of insurers such as BPCE, AXA, Credit Agricole, MAIF, La Banque Postale, AssurOne and +Simple. SOURCE Zelros / BAM Communications Related Links http://www.zelros.com/ Ahmedabad: One person was on Saturday arrested for allegedly throwing a stone at the car of Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi in Banaskantha districts Dhanera town when he was on a visit to the flood-hit areas of Gujarat. Banaskantha Superintendent of Police Niraj Badgujar identified the accused as Jayesh Darji alias Anil Rathod. Congress leaders claimed that he was a local office bearer of the BJPs youth outfit. We have arrested one person named Jayesh Darji alias Anil Rathod for allegedly throwing a stone at the vehicle in which Gandhi was travelling, Badgujar told PTI. Read | Congress workers hold protests over attack on Rahul Gandhis convoy in Gujarat We arrested Darji after his name was given by Congress members during the course of an investigation, Badgujar said. The Congress claimed that Darji was a BJP worker and was behind the incident on Friday. Jayesh Darji is the secretary of Banaskantha district BJP Yuva Morcha. He is the man who threw the stone at Rahul Gandhi. We have also submitted names of three more persons who conspired along with Darji to throw the stone at Gandhis vehicle, said district Congress general secretary, Prithviraj Kathwadia. Gandhi escaped unhurt after some unidentified persons threw a stone at the car in which he was travelling, breaking the glass pane of the rear window of the vehicle. Read | Rahul Gandhi alleges BJP-RSS people attacked his car, says this is PM Modis way of politics For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Researchers from University of British Columbia published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines whether and how the use of 'ugly' labeling for unattractive produce increases sales and profit margins. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "From Waste to Taste: How "Ugly" Labels Can Increase Purchase of Unattractive Produce" and is authored by Siddhanth (Sid) Mookerjee, Yann Cornil, and JoAndrea Hoegg. According to a recent report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (2020), each year in the U.S. farmers throw away up to 30% of their crops, equal to 66.5 million tons of edible produce, due to cosmetic imperfections. Such food waste has detrimental consequences for the environment: 96% of wasted food is left to decompose in landfills, releasing methane and contributing to climate change. Additionally, 1.4 billion hectares of land and 25% of the world's fresh water are used to grow produce that will be later thrown away. These researchers seek to answer two important questions: 1) Why do consumers reject unattractive produce? 2) Does 'ugly' labeling increase the purchase of unattractive produce and, if so, why does it work? They discover that consumers expect unattractive produce to be less tasty and, to a smaller extent, less healthy than attractive produce, which leads to its rejection. They also find that emphasizing aesthetic flaws via 'ugly' labeling (e.g., "Ugly Cucumbers") can increase the purchase of unattractive produce. This is because 'ugly' labeling points out the aesthetic flaw in the produce, making it clear to consumers that there are no other deficiencies in the produce other than attractiveness. Consumers may also reevaluate their reliance on visual appearance as a basis for judging the tastiness and healthiness of produce; 'ugly' labeling makes them aware of the limited nature of their spontaneous objection to unattractive produce. The research studies the efficacy of 'ugly' labeling in various contexts. First, a field study shows the effectiveness of 'ugly' labeling. Mookerjee explains that "We sold both unattractive and attractive produce at a farmer's market and find that consumers were more likely to purchase unattractive produce over attractive produce when the unattractive produce was labeled 'ugly' compared to when unattractive produce was not labeled in any specific way. 'Ugly' labeling also generated greater profit margins relative to when unattractive produce was not labeled in any specific waya great solution for sellers to make a profit while reducing food waste." In the second study, participants were told that they could win a lottery worth $30, and could keep all the cash or allocate some of the lottery earnings to purchase either a box of attractive produce or unattractive produce. 'Ugly' labeling increased the likelihood that consumers would use their lottery earnings to purchase a box of unattractive rather than attractive produce. In Studies 3 and 4, 'ugly' labeling positively impacts taste and health expectations, which led to higher choice likelihood of unattractive produce over attractive produce. Study 5 considers how 'ugly' labeling might alter the effectiveness of price discounts. Typically, when retailers sell unattractive produce, they offer a discount of 20%-50%. Cornil says that "We show that 'ugly' labeling works best for moderate price discounts (i.e., 20%) rather than steep price discounts (i.e., 60%) because a large discount signals low quality, which nullifies the positive effect of the 'ugly' label." This suggests that by simply adding the 'ugly' label, retailers selling unattractive produce can reduce those discounts and increase profitability. The last two studies demonstrate that 'ugly' labeling is more effective than another popular label, 'imperfect.' Although 'imperfect' is used by major brick-and-mortar and online retailers and was preferred by 50+ grocery store managers interviewed, the researchers find that 'ugly' labeling was more effective than 'imperfect' labeling at generating click-throughs in online ads. Importantly, these findings largely contrast with managers' beliefs. "While grocery store managers believed in either not labeling unattractive produce in any specific way or using 'imperfect' labeling, we show that 'ugly' labeling is far more effective," says Hoegg. Given retailers' participation in the U.S. Food and Waste 2030 Champions Initiativewith an objective of cutting food waste in half by 2030 (Redman 2018)this research urges retailers and sellers to use 'ugly' labeling to sell unattractive produce. Explore further Study unveils both pretty and ugly faces win at social selling More information: Sid Mookerjee et al, EXPRESS: From Waste to Taste: How "Ugly" Labels Can Increase Purchase of Unattractive Produce, Journal of Marketing (2021). Journal information: Journal of Marketing Sid Mookerjee et al, EXPRESS: From Waste to Taste: How "Ugly" Labels Can Increase Purchase of Unattractive Produce,(2021). DOI: 10.1177/0022242920988656 A 27-year-old man was indicted on multiple charges related to a 2016 stranger-on-stranger attack and kidnapping in downtown Portland, prosecutors announced Tuesday. Timothy Harris was indicted on charges of sodomy, attempted rape, kidnapping, unlawful use of a weapon and two counts of assault, according to Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt. The district attorneys office said the attack occurred July 5, 2016, in downtown Portland near Southwest 12th Avenue nd Southwest Main Street, though officials did not say exactly when Harris allegedly targeted the victim, who was not identified. It is alleged that Harris unlawfully and without consent took the victim from one place to another for the purpose of committing the crime of sodomy, officials said in a statement. Harris is also accused of striking the victim in the head and cutting the victims throat. Investigators responded to the scene of the crime and attempted to locate the assailant soon after the attack, prosecutors said, but were unable to do so. In January of this year, Harris was identified as the suspect by DNA analysis. He is currently in custody in King County, Washington, but prosecutors said they would be seeking his extradition to Oregon and he would be arraigned once he returned to the state. -- Kale Williams; kwilliams@oregonian.com; 503-294-4048; @sfkale KANSAS CITY, Mo., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- As the celebration of Black History Month continues, the Greater Kansas City chapter of the Public Relations Society of America celebrates the start of its 60th anniversary year with a celebration of its own, an extraordinary member of the chapter, Dr. Inez Y. Kaiser . Inez Y Kaiser, 1950s. Credit: The Museum of Public Relations Greater Kansas City Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America GKC/PRSA logo The words that guided the career of Kaiser, a national public relations pioneer from Kansas City, Kansas, are now guiding the chapter. The chapter is honoring Dr. Kaiser this year by establishing a $25,000 endowment fund, the Inez Y Kaiser GKC-PRSA Memorial Scholarship Fund, at the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation for undergraduate college scholarships. The fund, which the chapter hopes to increase in size by raising additional funds via a capital campaign, is to help identify future Inez Kaisers. Scholarships will be awarded starting in 2022. Inez Kaiser was born in Kansas City, Kansas in 1918. She was an educator first, but became a business woman and public relations professional of many other firsts. In 1957, she founded Inez Kaiser & Associates. In 1963, she was the first Black woman to establish a national public relations firm in downtown Kansas City unheard of at the time. She soon had an impressive roster of national clients. Yet it was her passionate commitment to volunteerism that defined her. Kaiser was the first Black woman to join the Public Relations Society of America in 1966. Rick Kaiser, son of Dr. Kaiser and Scholarship Advisory Committee Chair: "I am elated and humbled that my mother's accomplishments will be memorialized," said Kaiser. "It's quite wonderful and I thank the GKC/PRSA Inez Kaiser Scholarship Committee for everything they've done and especially for including me along the way. Growing up, I knew she was doing great things, but to me she was just 'Mama' and working on this has given me a clearer picture of her extraordinary contributions to the community." Lea-Ann Germinder, APR Fellow PRSA, GKC/PRSA Scholarship Co-Chair: "I thank Cheryl Procter-Rogers for telling Inez Kaiser's story, the Museum of Public Relations for all their kind assistance and for continuing to provide a platform for telling the history of public relations and in particular the stories of Black leaders in our profession. The GKC-PRSA chapter, its board and members are to be commended for recognizing Inez Kaiser on its 60th anniversary and in perpetuity with the endowment. History matters, and storytelling does indeed matter." Alex Miller, GKC/PRSA Chapter President: "The establishment of this endowment is an important first step in the chapter's D&I Strategic Plan. I'd like to thank the scholarship committee members for their efforts and the chapter board for recognizing Inez Kaiser and assisting future leaders. By ensuring a lasting legacy for the scholarship, the chapter will always be able to make a difference in the lives of talented Black individuals destined for the public relations industry in the Kansas City community." BACKGROUND: The journey to establish the fund began in February 2020 when former chapter president Lea-Ann Germinder attended a presentation by Cheryl Procter-Rogers, APR, Fellow PRSA at the Museum of Public Relations in New York, entitled "Why History Matters: Making the Case for Storytelling," that included the powerful story of Kaiser. Germinder became determined to find a way to honor Kaiser in her hometown chapter. She was thrilled her son Rick Kaiser and the chapter were amenable. A committee was formed led by her and vice president of diversity and co-chair Carrie Stapleton. Committee chapter members include chapter past president Norita Taylor, APR; PRSA past national chair Debra Peterson, APR; Anita Parran; Darius Lane; Sheba Clarke; Michael Grimaldi and current president Alex Miller. Chapter members have written tributes to Kaiser which can be found on the main website . The Greater Kansas City PRSA chapter is a community of public relations and communications professionals across the Kansas City area, from recent college graduates to leaders of some of the largest firms, agencies and non-profits. Our members represent nearly every practice area and professional and academic setting within the public relations field. In addition, we support students from across the Midwest who are members of their campus Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) chapters. We hold regular professional development events to enhance our professional growth. Our chapter also boasts signature events, such as our annual PRISM Awards gala honoring the year's best in communications excellence. At GKC-PRSA our mission is to be the professional resource and advocate for Kansas City's Communications community. https://kansascity-prsa.org/ Bio & Archival Photos Available Here Credit: The Museum of Public Relations Media Contacts: Norita Taylor, APR [email protected] Lea-Ann Germinder, APR Fellow PRSA 917-334-8682 [email protected] Alex Miller [email protected] SOURCE Greater Kansas City Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America GKC/PRSA Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman wrote in prepared testimony for a House hearing Thursday that intelligence did warn that armed, white supremacists would be targeting the U.S. Capitol on January 6. But the Capitol Police were not prepared, she wrote, 'for the massive groups of violent insurrectionists,' describing the number as being in the 'tens of thousands.' 'While the Department was prepared to neutralize and remove individuals or groups engaging in civil disobedience or violence among the demonstrators, it was quickly overwhelmed by the thousands of insurrectionists (many armed) who immediately and without provocation began attacking officers, bypassing physical barriers, and refusing to comply with lawful orders,' she said. Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman will testify about the insurrection during a House hearing Thursday. In pre-released testimony she wrote that police were warned of armed white supremacists being present, but not 'tens of thousands of insurrectionists' Pittman said the Capitol Police were 'quickly overwhelmed by the thousands of insurrectionists (many armed) who immediately and without provocation began attacking officers, bypassing physical barriers, and refusing to comply with lawful orders' Pittman will appear before the House Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on the Legislative Branch for a 10 a.m. hearing Thursday morning. Pittman's pre-released opening statement articulated the intelligence the Capitol Police force had prior to the attack and then explained what happened that day. She also wrote about what training Capitol Police officers will receive going forward. While President Donald Trump was acquitted on impeachment charges of inciting the January 6 insurrection, both House and Senate committees have started holding hearings on the Capitol attack this week. Pittman said that the Capitol Police's Intelligence and Interagency Coordination Division warned officers in advance of January 6 that 'militia members, white supremacists, and other extremist groups would be participating in the January 6th event.' Officers were warned that 'these groups planned to be armed.' Capitol Police officers were also told that unlike the two Million MAGA marches that happened in November and December, this group would be focused on Congress and the Electoral College vote certification process. 'Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of demonstrator would not be other branches of government or counter-protesters,' Pittman noted. 'This event was different because all judicial remedies for opposing election results had been exhausted and the only way for their candidate to win was for Congress to reject the Electoral College results.' Officers were also warned, 'due to the tense political environment following the 2020 election, the threat of disruptive actions or violence cannot be ruled out.' 'Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election. This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent,' Pittman wrote in her testimony. That being said, Pittman noted that 'although the Department's January 3rd Special Assessment foretold of a significant likelihood for violence on Capitol grounds by extremists groups, it did not identify a specific credible threat indicating that thousands of American citizens would descend upon the U.S. Capitol attacking police officers with the goal of breaking into the U.S. Capitol Building to harm Members and prevent the certification of Electoral College votes.' She said the Capitol Police's preparations for January 6 were based on information gathered from its law enforcement partners including the FBI. 'None of which indicated that a mass insurrection of this scale would occur at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th,' she said. On the day of the insurrection, Capitol Police gave Congressional leadership larger police details and had agents protecting evacuation vehicles for them. The police force also sent agents to the Ellipse in case members of Congress, participating in Trump's rally, encountered a security threat. There were 1,200 officers working on Capitol grounds at the time of the attack. Pittman wrote that while officers were trying to keep insurrectionists out of the Capitol Building, the Capitol Police also had to respond to the pipe bomb threats at the Democratic National and Republican National Committee headquarters, which are located on opposite sides of Capitol Hill. Officers had to evacuate House office buildings and also have businesses vacate premises and residents leave the area. Another problem that occurred is when a 'lockdown' was ordered, when the Capitol Building was initially breached, that process did not go smoothly. Officers were supposed to seal all entrances and exits of the Capitol, however 'some of the physical infrastructure of the building, however, gave way to protesters using shields, flag poles, and other objects to break through glass windows and doors.' Going forward, Pittman said officers would be receiving training on lockdown procedures. They would also be learning when to use lethal force. A Capitol Police officer fatally shot Ashli Babbitt during the January 6 insurrection. About that, Pittman just confirmed it was under investigation by outside law enforcement. The department will also be looking at how less lethal munitions were deployed, as they were 'not as successful in dispersing insurrectionists in the attack,' Pittman said. 'Additionally, the Department recognized that its training largely focuses on keeping unauthorized persons out of buildings on the Capitol Complex and not scenarios in which a building has been breached,' she wrote. 'The Department will also be developing and pushing out additional training scenarios for our officers.' At the top of her remarks, Pittman, who moved up the ranks on the heels of Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund's resignation in the aftermath of the insurrection, said that the police force 'succeeded in its mission' that day. 'It protected Congressional Leadership. It protected Members. And it protected the Democratic Process.' she pointed out. 'At the end of a battle that lasted for hours, democracy prevailed.' The bridge in New York state on the Greenwich border that has been hit more times than any other bridge in the state added another strike to its tally Tuesday morning, according to police. The truck hit the King Street bridge where the Hutchinson River Parkway becomes the Merritt Parkway at the Greenwich border around 11 a.m. Tuesday, according to the Westchester County Police Department. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, publisher, painter and pivotal figure to the Beats and about every other counterculture literary movement in San Francisco, has died at 101. Ferlinghetti died Monday evening in his second-floor walk-up apartment in North Beach, where he lived for 40 years under rent control. Cause of death was a degenerative lung condition, said Nancy Peters, co-owner and retired executive director of City Lights Booksellers and Publishers. "It was my good fortune to have worked closely with him for more than 50 years," Peters told The Chronicle on Tuesday. "We've lost a great poet and visionary. Lawrence was a legend in his time and a great San Franciscan." In his memory, City Lights on Columbus Avenue in North Beach was closed until 2 p.m. Tuesday, then open until its usual 8 p.m. closing time. Supervisor Aaron Peskin concluded Tuesday's regular meeting of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors with a memorial sermon for Ferlinghetti. He left behind dozens of books of verse, most prominently "A Coney Island of the Mind," which was published in 1958 and has never gone out of print, with a million copies released in a dozen languages. His final book, a novel titled "Little Boy," was published a week before the author's 100th birthday. Ferlinghetti was a veteran both of D-Day, in World War II, and of the left-wing intelligentsia that arose after the war. But his greatest contribution to the world of letters was as co-founder of City Lights, a paperback bookstore in North Beach and propeller of the San Francisco Renaissance in poetry. "I'm there in spirit all the time," Ferlinghetti said of the world-renowned bookstore, in a 2018 interview with The Chronicle. As for how often he was at the shop late in life, in reality, the ever-lighthearted bookseller replied, "As a poet, I don't deal in reality." Ferlinghetti arrived in San Francisco in 1951 and asked a stranger to point him in the direction of the bohemian quarter in the city. He moved in and was struggling to make it as a painter when he chanced upon an opportunity that was to change his life and the life of North Beach. "I was coming up from my painting studio and I drove up Columbus Avenue," he said in a 2012 interview. "It was a route I wouldn't normally take, and I saw a guy putting up a sign where City Lights is now." The man with the idea was Peter Martin, a student at San Francisco State. "I said, 'What are you doing?' and he said, 'I'm starting a paperback bookstore, but I don't have any money. I've got $500.' I said, 'I have $500.' The whole thing took about five minutes," Ferlinghetti noted. "We shook hands, and the store opened in June 1953 as City Lights Pocket Bookshop." Two years later, City Lights became a publishing house. The first release under its Pocket Poets Series imprint was his own "Pictures of the Gone World." It was followed by "Howl," the incendiary work by Allen Ginsberg, introduced at the famed Six Gallery reading on Fillmore Street in October 1955. Ferlinghetti himself did not read at Six Gallery, but the next day he sent Ginsberg a telegram offering to publish Ginsberg's graphic poem. "Howl & Other Poems" was released by City Lights in 1956, and Ferlinghetti stood by it during an obscenity trial that gained North Beach national exposure as the home of the Beats. "When the trial began, I was young and stupid and thought a few months in jail would be OK. I'd have a lot of time to read," Ferlinghetti told The Chronicle in 2012. Ferlinghetti never got that reading time, but he did get the publicity. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem couldn't be deemed obscene because it had "redeeming social significance." The case was covered by a photo spread in Life magazine. City Lights, on a triangular lot at Columbus Avenue and Broadway, was the first independent bookstore in the country to deal exclusively in the inexpensive paperback form. Although it eventually came to deal in hardcover books as well, it still focuses on paperbacks in its poetry room, which is up a creaky set of stairs that predates current building codes. Anyone interested in bohemian San Francisco came to City Lights to look for Ferlinghetti, who was invariably dressed in a button-down professorial manner, compared with the Beats and musicians who hung out there. The front sidewalk under the awning and the alley alongside were the locations of two of the most famous group photos in San Francisco lore, both taken in 1965. One is Larry Keenan's "The Last Gathering of Beats, Poets, and Artists," the entire bohemian tribe, including Richard Brautigan in a stovepipe cowboy hat. The other is of ultra-cool Bob Dylan with Robbie Robertson, McClure and Ginsberg. The storefront is known for its row of clerestory windows showcasing radical political messages, all hand-painted by Ferlinghetti on butcher paper. "His particular brand of highly reasoned, highly intelligent but witty political activism ... he has carried that in his life and in his poetry effectively but lightly through his whole career career up until now," poet Gary Snyder said in the 2009 documentary film "Ferlinghetti," directed by Christopher Felver. Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was born March 24, 1919, in Yonkers, N.Y. His father, Carlo Ferling, had shortened the family name when emigrating from Italy, but Lawrence later returned to the original. His father died before he was born, and because his mother, Clemence, had a nervous breakdown, he was sent to live with his aunt in France. When the aunt could not handle him, he was put in an orphanage. (Only later did Ferlinghetti learn that he had four older brothers.) "It was right out of Dickens," Ferlinghetti said in recalling that he reached out to his beloved aunt by mailing her a letter when he was 12. "That was when I first discovered I could really write," he said in the documentary. His aunt never responded to the letter and he never saw her or heard from her again. He was then raised by a family in Bronxville, N.Y., with a great library, and went through Bronxville public schools, where he made Eagle Scout the same year he got caught stealing pencils. From the library shelves, he pulled down Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel," which inspired him to both become a writer and do it at Wolfe's alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned his bachelor's degree in journalism at the university and served in the U.S. Navy as a ship commander in World War II. He was in the armada at the D-Day invasion in Normandy, serving as skipper on a submarine chaser. He later sailed to Japan and saw Nagasaki after the blast, and "it made me into a lifelong pacifist," he said. "No doubt about it." On the G.I. Bill, he earned his master's at Columbia University in 1947, with a thesis on critic John Ruskin and painter J.M.W. Turner. From there he went overseas for the second time to earn his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950, where he studied comparative literature and delivered his thesis (in French) on "The City as Symbol in Modern Poetry." While on a ship headed to France, Ferlinghetti met his future wife, Selden Kirby-Smith, who went by Kirby. She was the granddaughter of a Confederate general and had earned her master's degree from Columbia. In the early 1950s, Ferlinghetti wrote many reviews of poetry books in The Chronicle, using the name Ferling; his first byline in the paper was on July 22, 1951. He reclaimed his original family name in 1954. As the first poet laureate of San Francisco a position he held from 1998 to 2000 he called for the city to replace the "ugly" Central Freeway, damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, with a boulevard. The freeway is now long gone. "The norm is that when people get older, they get more politically conservative," Ferlinghetti said, "but it's been the opposite for me." This was reflected in the bookstore and in the work he chose to publish. "City Lights isn't stuck in the past. It isn't just a '50s or '60s institution," author Dave Eggers said in the 2009 documentary. "It's always looking for the next voice. It's as alive as anything." In 1994, an alley in North Beach was renamed Via Ferlinghetti in his honor. At the dedication ceremony, Ferlinghetti mentioned that the dead-end alley was once used by bootleggers and undertakers, and that a poet could hang with that crowd. "I was 30 before I saw San Francisco for the first time, and I've spent most of the last 40 years walking up and down the streets of little old wooden North Beach," he told the audience at the dedication. One of his last poems, "Trump's Trojan Horse," was published in the Nation magazine in 2017. It began: "Homer didn't live long enough/ To tell of Trump's White House/ Which is his Trojan horse/ From which all the President's men/ Burst out to destroy democracy." Though he no longer went into City Lights regularly, Ferlinghetti remained its co-owner with Peters, and "his political and cultural viewpoints still set the agenda for City Lights," said Stacey Lewis, publicity director for City Lights. Ferlinghetti will be buried in the family plot in the Druid section of the Bolinas Cemetery, beside his late ex-wife, Selden Kirby-Smith. Survivors include a daughter, Julie Ferlinghetti Sasser of Thompson's Station, Tenn.; a son Lorenzo Ferlinghetti of Bolinas; and three grandchildren. No memorial will be scheduled until after the coronavirus pandemic has passed. "For now, we're asking folks to remember the huge 100th birthday celebration, which was a fantastic tribute to his life and work," said City Lights publisher Elaine Katzenberger. Former Chronicle book editor John McMurtrie contributed to this report. This article is written by Sam Whiting from San Francisco Chronicle and was legally licensed via the Tribune Content Agency through the Industry Dive publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 16:18:11|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close SUVA, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Fiji's Health Minister Ifereimi Waqainabete said Wednesday that the first COVID-19 vaccines are expected to arrive in the Pacific island country as early as March this year. Local media quoted the minister as saying that it is the Fijian government's target to get the vaccines in the first quarter, and that preparations are being made for the vaccine rollout. Fiji has so far reported a total of 57 confirmed cases of COVID-19 including one active case, 54 recoveries and 2 deaths. The last 39 cases were international travel associated cases detected in border quarantine. Fiji still maintains a strict travel restriction for foreign visitors alongside a nationwide curfew effective from March 30 last year in efforts to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Fiji reported its first confirmed case of COVID-19 in March 2020. Enditem From 3,000 miles away and more than a year into a pandemic, two brothers are providing opportunities and empowering young people in the place they call home with a new nonprofit organization. The Arts Project Syracuse is aimed at providing fully-funded, transformative virtual arts programming to the under-resourced youth in the Syracuse area by connecting them with fine arts teachers from across the country. Brothers and co-founders of TAPS Hughie and Avery Stone Fish have had a passion for music and arts education since they were young, but theyve established their careers farther from home. The brothers graduated from Jamesville-DeWitt and Cazenovia High School and have since moved to Los Angeles to pursue careers in music production, comedy, songwriting and innovation. Hughie Stone Fish won a Daytime Emmy Award last June for Outstanding Original Song, and hes appeared as a finalist on NBCs Bring the Funny with comedy boyband Lewberger in 2019. Avery Stone Fish also has experience writing and producing music with Hughie but has led diversity and inclusion efforts for the last five years at Chicago Innovation as an innovation consultant and nonprofit manager. He recently moved to L.A. to be closer to his brother and start getting projects like TAPS off the ground. Avery really is a genius in so many regards, and we have such complimentary skills, Hughie Stone Fish said. He has such a great mind for collaboration and empowering people to take tasks upon themselves. Weve been working together for so long on everything Ive been doing, but now weve been able to do so much more than ever before. But TAPS isnt about Hughie or Averys success. The brothers came together with other co-founder Keely Scarlata to achieve a goal theyve had in mind for years inspiring future generations in their hometown of Syracuse. Growing up in the suburbs, Hughie and Avery had easier access to arts programs that helped better their lives, but not every student in the city has the same opportunities to learn the skills they did. We know that having a life enriched with art doesnt mean (youre) going to become a comedian or study music in college or become a professional painter, Hughie Stone Fish said. Sometimes, a life enriched by art means (youre) going to do a job that isnt directly in the arts, but the camaraderie, leadership and self-expression that (you) get from the arts are skills that enhance peoples lives. In 2019, Hughie Stone Fish wrote and produced a city-wide project called Welcome to Syracuse. It showcased Syracuse businesses, organizations, choirs, citizens and even Mayor Ben Walsh to draw positive attention to the city and bring everyone together in song. One of Hughies goals was to make tangible changes in Syracuse, so in order to formalize some of the work they had already done, the idea for TAPS was born soon after that. While living in L.A., the brothers stay connected to the work theyre doing in Syracuse by collaborating with existing institutions. Two months ago, they partnered with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Syracuse and Community Folk Art Center at Syracuse University for a two-week virtual arts fair. Students could sign up to learn about sketch comedy, acting and portrait collages with influential people in the music and art industry. TAPS is now providing all of the performing arts education for the Boys and Girls Clubs, working with the YWCA of Syracuse to provide summer arts programming and fundraising to expand education offerings with both organizations. Were excited about continuing to grow this and bring some of the same access that we had when we were living in the suburbs to these students in the city, Avery Stone Fish said. TAPS hopes to create a pipeline between L.A. and Syracuse using the resources the brothers have made in both cities over the years. Since my time in L.A., Ive met some of the most amazing educators that exist, and the people that have become my friends and family out here share my passion for Syracuse. They know how much it means to me, Hughie Stone Fish said. Our dream and our goal is not only to bring people from L.A. to Syracuse but to bring people from Syracuse to L.A. as well, but thats way down the road. The Covid-19 pandemic put some activities on hold for TAPS. Their virtual two-week arts fair was originally supposed to be in-person, and it was an adjustment to move the fair online after having all the teachers and students lined up to participate. But the brothers are fortunate to still work with organizations like the Boys and Girls Clubs who are continuing to provide services safely despite the pandemic. The increase in virtual learning allowed them to connect with people in ways they could never imagine before Covid-19. In a fully in-person world, bringing L.A.-based arts educators to Syracuse 3,000 miles away would be near impossible, Avery Stone Fish said. Were lucky now that people are used to doing their education online and being in front of a computer, so weve actually seen people being a little more open to engaging virtually because of the Covid situation. The brothers arent only focusing on arts education with TAPS. Over the next week, theyre partnering with Refugee and Immigrant Self-Empowerment, or RISE, for an upcoming food drive in various locations on SU campus through March 5. The brothers learned about RISE after working with them on the Welcome to Syracuse project. Two SU students reached out to TAPS asking for extra help collecting non-perishable food items for Syracuses refugee and immigrant communities. We want to help, Hughie Stone Fish said. We want to be a force for good, and there are so many amazing institutions and organizations in Syracuse that are doing this good work, and our goal is just to come in and help them. To learn more about TAPS, visit their website, follow their Facebook page or Instagram for updates, or reach out to Hughie Stone Fish at his website for Hughie Stone Fish Productions. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Stories of Kurdish Christian women who fought ISIS told in 'The Daughters of Kobani' Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Syrian women, many of them Christian, were a crucial part of defeating the Islamic State terrorist group. Yet, their stories of heroism, bravery, and resilience have largely remained untold until now. The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice, a new book from Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Ashley's War, documents how an all-female Kurdish militia known as the Kurdish Women's Protection Units fought alongside their male counterparts in northeastern Syria, defeating one of historys most violent terrorist groups and risking their lives for women's equality and political rights. The Daughters of Kobani is about how the world's most far-reaching experiment on women's equality is taking place right on the ashes of the ISIS fight, created by women who fought room by room and house by house and town by town so that the men of the Islamic State would not be allowed to bring their values to anyone else's communities, Lemmon told The Christian Post. I love to see stories that really challenge us, to see the resilience and the strength and courage of the women all around us, she continued. So many of us have daughters or mothers or sisters whose courage isn't always recognized. Seeing women who rewrote the rules governing their lives and created a whole different reality for girls coming after them is just so inspiring. To bring her book to life, Lemmon spent hours on the ground in Syria, interviewing young women fighting on the front lines. She was struck, she said, not only by their courage in the face of incredible odds, but how deeply respected they were by U.S. forces. These women were instrumental to the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces that defeated ISIS, she said. They had true respect for the will that these women brought to the fight. Lemmon revealed that many of the women she interviewed grew up in situations where they had very few rights let alone permission to fight against men. These women truly rewrote the rules governing their lives, revealing that women can do anything when they put their minds to it, she said. These women were fighting for the ability to name their babies what they wanted, to celebrate holidays, and to celebrate faith, safe and unhindered. Faith, and being part of a cause greater than yourself, can produce a fearlessness that changes the world. For ISIS, the buying and selling of women is at the center of its ideology, Lemmon stressed. Yet, they were defeated by these largely underestimated women who had emancipation and a desire for equality at the center of their ideology. Its a story, she said, of David and Goliath only, David was a woman. The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity. CP: Tell us about The Daughters of Kobani. How did you first hear about them? And what made you want to tell their story? Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: One of the soldiers from a book I've written called Ashley's War called me and said, You have to come see this. At the time, she was a soldier with a special operations unit that was working with these women who were fighting ISIS on the front lines and commanding men and women in battle. She said, It's just extraordinary. Their will to win and the faith they have that what they're doing matters is something you have to see for yourself. In this book, you will meet four women whose lives were changed and who changed the lives of the Americans they worked with while fighting to stop the Islamic State. CP:You share some incredible and compelling stories in this book. As you conducted your research, were there any stories that especially stuck out to you? Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: Ill never forget my interview with one young woman who comes from the Christian community. We spent an afternoon unannounced with her, and she told me the story about how ISIS had kidnapped Christians from the Khabur River Valley. She was so motivated to stop what she was doing and defend her neighborhood, so she joined the Christian Women's Protection Force. The reaction from her family was not thrilled, but then her parents went to church and people would come up to them and say how proud they were of their daughter who was protecting their neighborhood. I think her parents really came around by seeing how important it was for people in their community that a young woman from their community was defending them. CP: The idea of an all-women fighting force in Syria is extremely counter-cultural because this is not a region where women have many rights or much visibility. Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: Exactly. I come from a cultural tradition myself where the notion of women's equality is a bit confounding. So when I heard that there were women who were both fighting against ISIS and for women's equality, emancipation and political rights, I thought, This is a story we have to know. CP: It seems that in the West, theres sometimes a bit of apathy surrounding these kinds of stories. Why should we care? Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: I would say there are two reasons. First of all, these are women who are living on the frontlines of the fight against extremism and ISIS so that the United States is safe. The Islamic State doesn't have any kind of physical territory from which it can plan attacks. These are women who are keeping not just their community safe, but the world safe, including the United States, by fighting the men of the Islamic State from the front and keeping the pressure on them. The second reason is, I think we're in this moment when so many women really want to hear stories of women's persistence, resilience, courage and strength. These women truly believe that their work was to show the value of women's lives, not just in their community, but in their region and well beyond. This book is about women rising to the moment in support of their communities, their nations, and people all around the world who are fighting for a safer future in which everyone has the right to exercise their God-given talent. Investors are still getting to grips with the net-zero and green shift strategies of the major oil companies, BPs chief executive Bernard Looney said during a virtual conference on Wednesday, at which the top executives of the biggest European oil firms discussed the future of energy. Im fully confident that over time that will be acknowledged. But I understand that investors have questions whether we can do it or not, Looney said at the IP Week conference run by the Energy Institute, as carried by Bloomberg. Speaking about BPs foray into renewable energy solutions, Looney said that the company he leads wants to give the society the renewables it wants, but noted that oil and gasalbeit in smaller volumeswill continue to be central to BPs business because it would be the cash engine to help it transform into a lower-carbon company. You can't defy gravity, you can't go against the will of society... I want to be the one in the room working out how to give people the renewables they want, Looney said. But he also said that People don't always want our product, but they need it... Oil and gas will be here for decades to come, and is central to our business - fuelling our transition into a lower carbon company. BP, as well as Norways Equinor and Frances Total, said at the IP Week conference this week they are excited about hydrogen. Equinors CEO Anders Opedal said that the Norwegian giant would focus in the next two-three years on accelerated growth in renewables, particularly in offshore wind. We are also excited about hydrogen and CCUS. Italys Eni, for its part, is ruling out future double-digit-billion investments in new oil projects as it would be sanctioning projects in the range of $5-6 billion with a time-to-market which is shorter, Guido Brusco, Director Upstream, said at the conference. Last year, Eni was one of the first oil majors to announce a plan to cut emissions, in which it said its oil production would start declining after 2025 under the new long-term strategy to rely on natural gas, renewables, and new technologies. By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Remember when Kamala Harris said it was a "human rights abuse" for the United States (under President Trump) to detain children crossing the border? But with President Biden in office, and illegal border crossings skyrocketing thanks to a welcome mat being put out for illegal border-crossers, it's become necessary to reactivate a detention facility where kids can be safely held, separated from adults who may or may not be family members. Given the hysteria under Trump over children purportedly being ripped from their families' loving arms (never mind the predatory coyotes who often accompany them), this is a bit awkward. Even AOC notices: New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed the Biden administration on Tuesday for reopening a Texas facility to hold migrant children. The Bronx Democrat was reacting to a report that the emergency facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas was being reopened to hold up to 700 children ages 13 to 17. "This is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay no matter the administration or party," she tweeted. Questioned by Peter Doocy yesterday, Jen Psaki did a lot of verbal tap dancing: White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has recast the reopening of one of ex-president Trump's infamous migrant detention centers as a temporary fix for the pandemic, arguing that not locking kids up would be "inhumane." Psaki was skewered by reporters on Tuesday after the Biden administration reopened a migrant detention facility that had been closed in 2019 under former president Donald Trump. The press secretary floundered as she attempted to defend Biden's stated policy "not to expel unaccompanied children who arrive at the border" by putting those children back in the "cages" actually shipping containers he had so vociferously denounced when they were used by his predecessor. "This is not kids being kept in cages," Psaki insisted, arguing "this is a facility that was reopened that is going to follow the same standards as other [Department of Health and Human Services] facilities." It is not a replication. Certainly not. Psaki then emphasized that "That's never our intention of replicating immigration policies of the past administration. But we are in a circumstance where we are not going to expel unaccompanied minors at the border. That would be inhumane." Peter Doocy, one of the few remaining real journalists out there puts Jen Psaki in a tough spot by repeating back to her Kamala Harris's own words. Psaki: This is not kids being kept in cages." These people have no shame. pic.twitter.com/1yppZdTGTA Rising serpent (@rising_serpent) February 23, 2021 The Bezos propaganda organ seems to have been leading the way in redefining "cages," as Joseph Curl discovered: Throughout former President Donald Trump's four years in the White House, the mainstream media, like the Post, repeatedly cited "kids in cages," claiming foreigners entering the U.S. illegally had their children ruthlessly snatched from them and shoved into cages (it was actually former President Barack Obama who started the practice). But all that's changed now. "First migrant facility for children opens under Biden," said the Post headline on Monday. But in another twist, the facility was actually opened by the Trump administration. (snip) Out with "kids in cages," in with "migrant facility for children." Forget the Post's 2018 headlines, "The American tradition of caging children," and "The real reason we're locking children in cages." And don't even think about the 2019 piece headline, "Viewing US border cells derided as 'cages,' Central American officials pledge more immigration cooperation." In 2020, the Post's editorial board wrote, "The tableaux of caged migrant children, torn from their parents' arms, should be among the most enduring images produced by the president's policies" in a piece warning about what Trump's immigration agenda in a second term would look like. People on Twitter also noticed: Under Trump it was kids in cages...under Biden its a migrant facility for children Cant imagine why trust in the media is at historic lows. https://t.co/vW0rAJn7Mu Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) February 23, 2021 Bruh Joe Biden is keeping children in caged shipping containers. pic.twitter.com/BI0VjOiRvW mitrebox (@mitrebox) February 23, 2021 Bruh Joe Biden is keeping children in caged shipping containers. pic.twitter.com/BI0VjOiRvW mitrebox (@mitrebox) February 23, 2021 Compassionate Biden Moves Migrant Children From Cages Into Humane High-Security Metal Containment Cubes https://t.co/J3AfOx8mud The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 23, 2021 Hat tip: Ace. Graphic credit: Twitter. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority is targeting to start the construction of elevated bus ramps along EDSA four months from now. MMDA Chairman Benhur Abalos said the Department of Public Works and Highways is in charge of designing the elevated bus ramps, and the agency promised to submit the final design next week. Once they have the design, the bidding process can commence, Abalos added. "Give us four months matatapos na po ito (bidding process). Gagawin namin ito sa corner ng QC and Caloocan," Abalos said in Kapihan sa Manila Bay forum. [Translation: Give us four months to finish this. Then we will build this at the corner of Quezon City and Caloocan.] He said this would ease traffic congestion caused by several U-turn slots that were closed to pave the way for the EDSA Busway, a system which uses the innermost lanes for commuter buses. "Pagkaupong pagkaupo ko ay itong mga U-turn slots ay sinarado at grabe ang traffic sa EDSA," Abalos said. [Translation: When I assumed my post, these U-turn slots were closed resulting in heavy traffic along EDSA.] "There is only one way to beat this. It is what we call the elevated bus ramp. What does it mean? When you come to a corner, iyong mga bus ay aangat siya para makapag U-turn (buses can go up the ramp so other vehicles can make a U-turn)," he added. Abalos said they are now looking for more funding sources for the project. He shared they have so far secured P200 million P100 million from the Department of Transportation and another P100 million from the Quezon City local government. He added they may realign the MMDAs budget for the construction of the ramp. He did not say the exact amount needed for the project, only noting that it is quite expensive. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company ADVERTISEMENT The federal government on Wednesday requested citizens to submit suggestions on the best path to solving the the nations electricity metering problem. The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, said it has commenced a review of its dual plans for mass metering, and was considering three options for an optimal outcome. The agency said it was considering how to manage its National Mass Metering Programme (NMMP), approved in 2020, and the Meter Assets Provider (MAP) launched in 2018. Both seek the provision of meters for customers and an end to estimated billing that allows electricity companies exploit customers. Under NMMP, funding for at least 1 million meters is to come from the Central Bank of Nigeria and the World Bank. In a consultation paper released Wednesday, NERC asked the public to suggest between running MAP and NMMP concurrently, or integrating MAP into the latter. The third option envisages bringing MAP to an end for NMMP to kickstart. Options For the first plan, customers would be expected to pay their bills without being charged separately meters, as the cost will be part of energy charge. Where meters have already been deployed electricity firms are to reimburse such customers, NERC said. For the second plan, NERC will continue with the current MAP framework and allow meters procured under the NMMP be supplied only through MAPs (as off-takers from the local manufacturers/ assemblers). This option recognises the existing MAP framework and may also result in faster deployment of meters on account of current traction in the MAP programme. The final option would see the government wind down the MAP framework and allow the DisCos to procure their meters directly from local manufacturers/assemblers, and enter into new contracts for the installation and maintenance of such meters. This option proposes the winding down of the MAP due to its incompatibility with the NMMP. The sector regulator urged Nigerians to suggest an option and give reasons to defend their choices. Lindsey Janies, stf / Washington Post Cheniere Energy Inc. has become the latest big supplier of liquefied natural gas to say it will provide customers with emissions data as concern grows over the fuels contributions to climate change. The data will quantify the estimated greenhouse gas emissions from wellhead to delivery point for LNG cargoes produced at Chenieres Sabine Pass export terminal in Louisiana and its Corpus Christi terminal in Texas, the company said Wednesday in a statement. The citys jails have taken on a primary role in providing mental health services over the last few decades as incarceration rose and the number of hospital psychiatric beds shrank. Last year, about half the daily inmate population in the citys jails required mental health services, according to a spokeswoman for the city hospitals correctional services. Social service experts said well over half of single adults in shelters have some kind of undiagnosed mental health problem, and that estimate rises among people staying on streets and subways. To address their needs, the city deploys licensed clinicians and psychiatrists, but they can intervene only if homeless people agree or are in a life-threatening situation. Even then, the care they receive often focuses on the immediate crisis and ignores the underlying mental health issues that led to the emergency or can cause another incident. A lot of people in our shelter facilities, especially people who are resistant to services, dont receive the appropriate care and then can become a risk to themselves or others, said Scott Auwarter, assistant executive director at BronxWorks, a social services agency. People like this fall through the cracks all the time, every day. Shortly after the stabbings, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Mr. Lopez showed no troubling mental health issues after he entered the shelter system in 2019 up until the day of the attacks. But Mr. Lopez skipped his court dates and had missed more than a dozen mandatory check-ins since October. CASES, a nonprofit that was responsible for supervising him, reported his noncompliance to the court three times. The judge handling the case could not set bail or send him back to jail because the offense did not qualify under the states year-old bail reform law, said Lucian Chalfen, a spokesman for the Office of Court Administration. The law eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and some nonviolent felony offenses. The contractor tunnelling beneath thousands of inner Sydney homes to make way for the WestConnex motorway has ruled out using explosives to blast through hard rock on the final stretch of the $16.8 billion mega-tollroad. Joint venture contractor Acciona Samsung Bouygues previously sought planning permission to allow the use of controlled blasting to break rock for excavation on sections of the underground M4-M5 Link from Haberfield to St Peters. Construction is underway on the Rozelle Interchange, which will connect the new M4-M5 Link tunnels with Anzac Bridge and Iron Cove Bridge. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer The Berejiklian government is forging ahead with construction of the tunnels as part of its ambitious motorways agenda, the vast bulk of which is being built beneath thousands of Sydney homes. Residents had expressed alarm that the contractor was considering explosives to tunnel between Norton and MacKenzie streets in Leichhardt, months after testing showed the same method was unviable in Annandale. Aspen, CO (81611) Today Partly cloudy with isolated thunderstorms possible. High 64F. Winds NNW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 30%.. Tonight Mainly clear skies. Low 39F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Manitoba Hydro is rejecting allegations by the provincial NDP it is contemplating changes to electricity rates that could lead to sky-high bills similar to those suffered by Texans during the state's recent cold snap. Manitoba Hydro is rejecting allegations by the provincial NDP it is contemplating changes to electricity rates that could lead to sky-high bills similar to those suffered by Texans during the state's recent cold snap. NDP Leader Wab Kinew warned Tuesday a bill before the Manitoba legislature and elements of Hydro's yet-to-be-released 20-year strategic plan could spell bad news for the province's consumers. "We cannot let what happened in Texas happen here in Manitoba with our electricity bills," Kinew told a news conference at the legislature. The NDP released a portion of an internal Hydro power point presentation, which it claimed highlights the possible end of the Crown utility's flat-rate structure for electrical prices. Kinew said the document appears to open the door to "surge pricing," which would see electrical rates get more expensive as usage rises. The party also noted the proposed Public Utilities Ratepayer Protection and Regulatory Reform Act (Bill 35) would remove at least temporarily the Public Utilities Board's ability to set electricity rates. Bill 35 would see that responsibility rest with the provincial cabinet until April 2024, after which the PUB would approve rates at five-year intervals. MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES NDP leader Wab Kinew: "We cannot let what happened in Texas happen here in Manitoba with our electricity bills." Crown Services Minister Jeff Wharton said the NDP is "completely misrepresenting" Hydro's long-term planning documents. "This is another ridiculous fabrication by the NDP, and demonstrates why Manitobans dont trust them when it comes to Manitoba Hydro," he said in a statement. "They are making an absurd comparison between Manitobas power grid and Texas(s) grids which are generated differently, priced differently, and built for different climates." Hydro spokesman Bruce Owen said the portion of the planning document cited by the NDP refers to how the Crown corporation could potentially manage consumer-owned power generation capacity for instance, rooftop solar panels in the future. "This would allow us to more effectively manage the grid of the future and possibly defer the need for new (power) generation options, for example, by encouraging customers to send more energy to our grid when we need it," he said in an email. "This will help keep rates low for our customers." Hydro said, unlike Texas, Manitoba belongs to a power grid involving 15 U.S. states that allows it to import power as well as export it, when needed. As well, in order to be able to charge higher rates for electricity at high-use times of the day, Hydro says it would have to install new "smart meters" in every home and business in the province. larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca A total of 151 ECOWAS nationals have been intercepted for illegally making entry into Ghanas jurisdiction while its borders with neighbouring countries are still closed. They comprise 119 Nigerians, 22 Nigeriens, seven Beninoises, and three Ivorians, who gained entry through the unapproved border routes with the assistance of some cross-border syndicates. This is barely two weeks after erecting a barrier initiated by the Ketu North Municipal Security Council (MUSEC) in collaboration with the Akanu Sector Command of the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS), at Akanu, on the Dzodze-Aflao road network to track influx of illegal immigrants. Mr Felix Klu-Adjei, Public Relations Officer, Volta Regional Ghana Immigration Service, who told the Ghana News Agency said the foreign nationals had since been returned to neighbouring Togo after the necessary arrangements with the security authorities. He said the proposal for the checkpoint was tabled in a Municipal Security Council (MUSEC) meeting by Assistant Commissioner of Immigration (ACI), Felix Agyeman-Bosompem, the Akanu Sector Commander of the GIS. He said the new roadblock was to manage the border as well as coordinate and counter the illegal points of entry and exit strategically and effectively at the Ketu North border side. The Ghana Immigration Service is, therefore, cautioning all foreigners who are aiming to enter the country illegally to desist from such illegal practice since the land borders are not yet operational for human passage, she said. The Ghana Immigration Service would like to express its profound gratitude to the good people of the Region for cooperating with the Command operations at the various checkpoints, borders.. 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 CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The trade that brought enslaved Africans to the New World was not just a story of slave ship captains and their human cargo. Many other people were part of the machinery, drawn by money or opportunity, some from surprising places. One of them was a young German barber-surgeon who kept a journal. Johann Peter Oettinger inspected African captives prior to their branding and sale into slavery, tried to keep them healthy on the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean, and made note of their resistance and their deaths. His account also recorded many other experiences and observations from travels within and between Europe, coastal West Africa and the Caribbean in the late 1600s. Three hundred years later, two historians, working separately, discovered Oettinger's journal in a Berlin archive, joined forces to translate it into English and wrote a book that sets it in the context of its time. Through Oettinger's account, "we can reflect on daily life in the slave trade, its quotidian brutality and the willingness of ordinary men to enact it," wrote co-authors Craig Koslofsky and Roberto Zaugg. "It bears straightforward witness to the commodification of human life and to the banality of evil." Koslofsky is a history professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Zaugg is a history professor at the University of Zurich. Their book is "A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade." Oettinger's journal, Koslofsky said, "puts a human face on the slave trade and puts it in a vivid light," though often through plain and terse daily entries. "Oettinger describes things very naively," Koslofsky said, "and because he's going to places that nobody in Germany has even heard of, he describes things in a little more detail than other accounts of Atlantic slavery from this period. He's also probably the lowest ranking in social hierarchy of any author writing about West Africa at this time. He identifies more with ordinary people." That's the case because the barber-surgeon was regarded as more of a craftsman, on the level of a butcher or tailor, rather than a university-educated physician. His job was hands-on care of the human body: dressing wounds, stitching up cuts, treating fractures, ulcers and burns, as well as often bloodletting, teeth pulling, shaving and cutting hair. None of this means Oettinger had any moral qualms about slavery, Koslofsky said. Few at the time did, except for those enslaved. Oettinger described the trade in humans without questioning it. It was simply part of the world he found. He is, however, able to provide "a glimpse at real African people" and has "an eye for African agency," Koslofsky said. "He's pretty good at recording resistance among the enslaved, resistance of all kinds," in the form of suicides, escapes and an attempted mutiny aboard ship, which resulted in the brutal execution of the ringleader. Oettinger also writes extensively about the coastal Africans who are supplying slaves from farther inland, in particular in present-day Benin. His account of African life and culture in West Africa, at sites from Mauritania to Sao Tome, is one of the few among Europeans of this period, Koslofsky said. His story also reads, in places, as an adventure tale. His ship, operated by a German-based trading company, was threatened numerous times from a distance by ships of other countries or by pirates. On a return trip from the Caribbean, his ship was fired on, captured and burned by a French fleet. Slave-produced sugar, tobacco and cotton that Oettinger had purchased and hoped to profit from were destroyed. Death from disease and other causes was a constant on board the ship, for both crew and captives, and his journal routinely records the dumping of bodies into the sea. He describes several deadly shark attacks off the African coast. He also makes note of when food has gone bad or is running out. His journal also records years of trudging across Europe, seeking employment as part of his training, before and after his slave-trade voyages. "So we have a weird experience where we get to know this guy," Koslofsky said, "and can't help but kind of take his side because he's a poor young journeyman, trying to make his way in the world. And then he becomes complicit in the slave trade. So there's kind of an interesting moral challenge. "His complicity is something that we should all contemplate as we're thinking about our ancestors who benefited from the slave trade, and how that trade functioned. Because Oettinger is an ordinary guy from central Germany, miles from the ocean, and yet he gets thrown into it." ### People whose medical conditions put them at very high Covid risk will now get the vaccine sooner but some healthcare workers and healthier 65- to 69-year-olds will wait longer. An overhaul of the priority list announced last night will see certain healthcare workers, thousands of people aged 65-69 and key workers pushed down the queue. The new priority list for vaccines will also see people aged 16 to 69 with conditions like cancer, chronic kidney disease, diabetes and obesity moved up to be next in line to receive the vaccine next, after the over-70s. They will replace those healthcare workers who are not in direct patient contact, who were previously due to be next in the queue. There is also a change in cohort five, which will now be those people aged 65 to 69 whose underlying condition puts them at higher risk of the virus. Healthier people aged 65-69 have moved down to cohort six, with the remaining healthcare workers. The new list was approved by the National Immunisation Advisory Committee which has also said that the Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna vaccines will only be given to the 16- to 69-year-olds who are at very high or high risk due to pre-existing conditions. This could lead to delay in vaccinations, but it should not be longer than three weeks. Commenting on the changes, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly said that those who are moving up the list would suffer the worst outcomes if they were to get the disease. Meanwhile, it emerged that the chance of a staycation is Ireland this summer hinges on the roll-out of vaccines in the crucial months of April, May and June. Read More Although the Government has not made any promises about internal summer travel, Taoiseach Micheal Martin said yesterday he expects 82pc of the population will have got a first dose of vaccine by the end of June. He said he anticipated 44pc to 60pc of the country will be fully vaccinated at that point. If that happens, it would mean the Government would have more options about allowing holidays in Ireland, although there was no sign Mr Martin was looking that far ahead yesterday. The Governments new plan includes 602,082 doses of the yet-to-be licensed Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine in its projections for available jabs for the three months from April to June. Under the vaccine plan, it expects to have a total of 3.8 million doses of four different vaccines over these three months a major ramp up on vaccine availability in the first quarter. It includes just 818,000 Oxford-AstraZeneca doses half the amount originally expected. The single jab Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been described a game changer because of the way it will speed up vaccination, with the others needing two doses. It was submitted for approval to the European Medicines Agency in the middle of this month and could get the green light in March or April. It comes as a top Irish European Commission official yesterday dampened prospects of holiday travel to Europe this summer. John Ryan, director of public health in the European Commissions Directorate General for Health and Food Safety, speaking at an online event on the EU vaccines strategy organised by the European Commission Representation in Ireland, said: I am not sure if the summer will involve travelling to the beaches in Greece or Torremolinos, or Turkish resorts. I am not sure how we can re-establish leisure travel. What we are trying to do is to agree together on the importance of keeping essential travel open. We have seen in the past few days one of our biggest members closing certain frontiers. We do not think closing frontiers is the solution, he told an online event on the EU vaccines strategy. We hope to get back to normal as quickly as possible working with all states to make it as quickly and safe as possible. The European Commission will publish a tourism plan in the post-Covid period in the coming weeks, Mr Ryan added. Earlier, he said that parts of competition law are being suspended to allow for drug companies with spare capacity to offer it to vaccine manufacturers to boost supply. It comes as 45 more Covid-19 related deaths were reported among people aged 55 to 104 yesterday. The number of daily cases fell to 575, the highest of which were reported in Dublin with 218 newly diagnosed people and 38 in Galway. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes A male babysitter allegedly killed a 21-month-old girl by shaking and battering her in an attack which caused a catastrophic brain injury, a court has heard. Lilly Hanrahan, from Birmingham, was left with bruises where she had allegedly been gripped by Sean Sadler and six broken ribs following the incident in November 2017. Birmingham Crown Court heard Lilly was born in good health on February 21, 2016, although her mother was a heroin addict. She was soon discharged into the care of her grandmother before another woman was appointed as her special guardian, and she moved into her home on July 7. It was said Lilly's guardian then began a 'relationship' with Sadler, 32, and the woman soon became concerned about bruises which had appeared on the child's body. Later, on November 19, 2017, Lilly was rushed to Birmingham Children's Hospital after she was found unresponsive at her home. She died three days later. The child was found with bruises on the top of her scalp, grip marks on both of her thighs and 'extensive bleeding into the back of her eyes'. Sadler, from Northfield, has denied murder and wounding with intent. Lilly Hanrahan, from Birmingham, was left with bruises where she had allegedly been gripped by Sean Sadler and six broken ribs following the incident in November 2017. Pictured: Birmingham Children's Hospital Jonas Hankin QC, prosecuting, said Lilly's special guardian began a relationship with Sadler 'in the spring of 2017', adding that the woman soon started to leave the child in his care. He said: 'The special guardian began a relationship with the defendant. It began in the spring of 2017 and he became a regular visitor and often stayed the night. 'She began to leave Lilly in his care.' The woman soon became concerned about bruises on Lilly's body and took her to hospital but there had been no concerns of abusive handling. She had also raised her concerns with a nursery Lilly attended and she was monitored but nothing exceptional was noted, the court heard. But, said Mr Hankin, a 999 call was made on November 19, 2017 and when paramedics arrived at Lilly's home they found her unresponsive. She was taken to hospital a state of deep coma which continued to worsen. 'When her hair was shaved, several bruises were found on the top of her scalp and further grip marks on both of her thighs,' Mr Hankin said. 'Medical investigations revealed extensive bleeding into the back of her eyes ` 'Lilly died three days after she was admitted to the Children's Hospital. 'There followed post-mortem investigations which showed she had sustained a catastrophic brain injury. She also sustained six broken ribs.' Sadler, from Northfield, has denied murder and wounding with intent at Birmingham Crown Court Birmingham Crown Court heard Lilly was born in good health on February 21, 2016, although her mother was a heroin addict. Pictured: Birmingham Children's Hospital Lilly also had three fractured vertebrae in her spine, jurors were told. The period of three days she spent at the Children's Hospital allowed for extensive medical investigation. 'There was no evidence of natural disease. She was a normal healthy girl,' Mr Hankin said. 'She had no recent significant illness or accident. The head injury that caused her death was between the times she was last seen to be well and when she lost consciousness. 'It occurred when she was in the care of Sean Sadler. The prosecution contends that Sean Sadler caused the death of Lilly by assaulting her and he is responsible for her murder. 'The likely mechanism was forceful shaking, possibly involving an impact on a yielding surface such as the armrest of a sofa. 'Sadler also caused her older injuries, the fractures to the vertebrae and bleeding in the lungs.' He said these were also caused by forceful shaking. When quizzed about what had happened, Sadler said on the day of her collapse Lilly had been 'perfectly fine' and, after watching TV, had taken a nap. He said he had then been unable to rouse her. The trial continues. Ty Pennington knows that nearly all homeowners wish they had more square footagebut in the latest Ty Breaker, he shows that even a small house can feel spacious if you design it right. In the episode "A Boxed-In Box of Boxes," Pennington meets Janki and Sean, a couple with two kids who live in a small cottage in Atlanta. This house is tiny and the layout is cramped and closed off, but the couple want to stay and try to make their place work. With a $130,000 budget and the help of Windy City Rehab star Alison Victoria, Pennington needs to find clever solutions to this little houses big problems. Here are their clever space-saving solutions, which might inspire some upgrades around your own abode so you can stretch your legs. Stain can help make different floors look the same It can be tricky to match old and new flooring, but Alison Victoria and Ty Pennington pulled it off! HGTV Pennington and Victoria know they'll need to take down some walls in order to give this home the sense of openness that Janki and Sean want. However, with the walls removed, they realize that they have a different problem: the floors. The flooring in these different rooms wasn't uniform, so while Pennington and Victoria can keep the maple floor in some parts of the house, they need to add some engineered hardwood in others. This means Pennington will need to find a stain that makes the old and new floors look the same. He finds that the only stain that will do that is a whitewashed gray. Luckily, Victoria likes the look a lot. "I love all the gray tones, and I think they tie in, Victoria says. The gray floors look light, modern, and, best of all, uniform. Plus, the pale tones make the small house look larger. Two-tone cabinets are great, but the hardware should match This kitchen needed a lot of work. HGTV Pennington knows, right away, that the kitchen will need to be opened up. But thats not the only change that needs to be done in this space. They'll need to replace the appliances, counters, and cabinets. Would you be open to doing, like, two-tone, where those are the base and then we do the uppers and keep it light on top? Victoria asks when it comes time to choose cabinets. Pennington loves the idea of using white and gray cabinets, but initially he says that if theyre going to use two different-colored cabinets, theyll need two different styles of hardware as well. With two-tone cabinets unified by a single hardware design, this kitchen looks great. HGTV But in the end, Pennington and Victoria decide that different-colored cabinets were enough mix-and-match for this kitchen, and they go with pole handles throughout. Use bold artwork to add some color Pennington and Victoria end up adding color with decor. HGTV When it comes to the bedroom, Pennington wants to do something wild: add stripes. Im thinking, just on one side, we do, like, these thick stripes and thin stripes," Pennington says. "These different-colored stripes will make it feel like youre really in a room thats full of life." But Victoria hates the idea, saying that a striped feature wall will be too much. So instead they go with clean, white walls all around, plus a blue area rug with yellow accents. This painting brings in the colors Pennington thinks this room needs. HGTV Still, Pennington wants to bring in some stripes, so he paints some colors on a canvas to hang in this room. When the painting, and the room, is finished, Victoria is impressed with the extra color. While these stripes would be too much all over the wall, a smaller dose of these colors is perfect for this space. It brings the eye up, it brings the colors in that you love, and its a win-win, Victoria says. Patterned tile doesn't need to be loud This bathroom tile has a lot of pattern, but it's still subtle. HGTV In the bathroom, Pennington and Victoria want to get away from the typical white subway tile lookbut they don't want to go too bold, either. They end up choosing a shower tile that's filled with patterns but is still mostly white, making it seem like a typical tileuntil you get up close. "What I love about this is that it's subtle but it brings in, like, all these fun shapes, and it gives it that sort of faded worldly vibe, Victoria says. A sliding mirror may help you keep a window This mirror, with a black frame, looks simple and chic. HGTV While windows are usually seen as an asset, the window in the master bathroom creates some issues for Pennington and Victoria. The window is right above the vanity, so these two renovators will need to either get rid of the window or sacrifice a vanity mirror. "My snap judgment mind would go: Get rid of the window, Victoria says. However, Pennington gets a brilliant idea. He suggests installing a sliding mirror, which could go back and forth like a barn door. This way, Janki and Sean could use both the mirror and the window whenever they needed them. "Leaving the window, you get natural light," Pennington says. "You also get fresh air." This secret window is a big hit with Janki and Sean. They love the ability to keep the function of the window while still getting a big vanity mirror. Pennington and Victoria didn't want to choose between a window and a mirror. HGTV The post Ty Pennington's Top Secrets To Make a Small Space Feel Huge and 'Full of Life' appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com. Istanbul, Feb 24 : Turkey on Wednesday started vaccinating teachers against Covid-19 as part of the ongoing inoculation drive, with China's Sinovac Biotech. Turkish Education Minister Ziya Selcuk got the first jab in the Black Sea province of Corum during a live broadcast, Xinhua reported. Selcuk said that a list of 1.26 million school personnel was earlier submitted to the Health ministry and their names are now in the vaccination appointment system. Last week, the second semester started with in-person classes in village primary schools across the country. All other primary schools and 8th and 12th grades are expected to begin face-to-face education on March 1. Turkey launched the nationwide immunisation drive on January 14 with the vaccination of healthcare professionals and the elderly. So far, over 7.5 million doses of vaccines have been given across the country, according to the latest health ministry data. More than 6.3 million people got their first doses, while over 1.2 million others received their second doses, showed the data. (Natural News) The U.K. government reported that more than 240 people have died shortly after getting the Wuhan coronavirus vaccines. British citizens who died after vaccination reportedly obtained either the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine or the AstraZeneca jab. These vaccine candidates were approved by the British regulator and subsequently used in mass vaccination efforts. Despite this, the U.K. government said it does not believe that the inoculations are to blame for the deaths. In an extensive report released on Feb. 11, the U.K. government detailed all the adverse reactions reported by both medical personnel and COVID-19 vaccine recipients themselves. The reports scope included all cases between early December 2020 and the end of January 2021. According to the release, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) received 143 adverse reaction reports attributed to the Pfizer/BioNTech jab. The AstraZeneca vaccine made in partnership with the University of Oxford reported 90 adverse reactions. There were three reactions where the vaccine brand was not mentioned. Furthermore, a total of eight miscarriages were reported following COVID-19 vaccination five for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and three for the AstraZeneca candidate. To further monitor vaccine safety alongside mass immunization efforts, the MHRA introduced a Yellow Card Scheme to collect reports of any suspected side effects. More than 20,000 Yellow Card reports were linked to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. On the other hand, the AstraZeneca jab rolled out last Jan. 4 had 11,748 Yellow Card repots. Seventy-two Yellow Card reports did not specify the brand of vaccine. Elderly people or those with underlying conditions made up the majority of the reports. However, the government said either of the vaccines did not play a role in the fatalities based on a review of individual reports and reporting patterns. The report mentioned that for both vaccines, an overwhelming majority reported reactions at the injection site such as sore arms and generalized symptoms. These generalized symptoms included headache, chills, fatigue, fever, dizziness and muscle aches. These happen shortly following vaccination and are not associated with more serious illnesses. However, spontaneous adverse reactions associated with anaphylaxis or anaphylactoid reactions were also reported 130 for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and 30 for the AstraZeneca jab. Pfizer/BioNTech jab linked to vaccination deaths in other countries According to the report, more than 9.2 million first doses of the COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in the U.K.s four constituent countries. Meanwhile, 494,209 second doses have been administered in the four areas. (Related: UK to deploy resuscitation facilities in coronavirus vaccination centers to treat wave of allergic reactions caused by vaccines.) The U.K. is not the only country that has reported fatalities following COVID-19 vaccination. A number of medical personnel also died after getting vaccinated against the Wuhan coronavirus most notably with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. Florida obstetrician Dr. Gregory Michael died in January after getting inoculated with the first Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine dose. The 56-year-old received his first dose Dec. 18, but small spots appeared on his hands and feet three days after immunization. He then visited the emergency room of his workplace, Mount Sinai Medical Center, where he was confined. Doctors then found out that the obstetrician had zero blood platelets. Despite undergoing transfusions to restore his platelet count, it did little for Michael. He eventually suffered a stroke and died as he was set to undergo a last-minute surgical procedure. Michaels wife Heidi Neckelmann said: In my mind, his death was 100 percent linked to the vaccine. There is no other explanation. Meanwhile in Portugal, health worker Sonia Acevedo died just a mere two days after getting the COVID-19 jab. The 41-year-old mother of two who worked at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology (IPO) in Porto did not report any adverse effects after immunization. Acevedo was among more than 500 Porto IPO staff who were vaccinated against COVID-19 using the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. Sonias father Abilio Acevedo said his daughter was okay and had no health problems. She had the COVID-19 vaccine, but she didnt have any symptoms, he remarked. Abilio continued that he and his daughter even ate together on New Years Eve, not knowing that it would be the last time he would see her alive. He subsequently received a call informing him that Sonia was found dead the morning of Jan. 1. My daughter left home and I never saw her alive again, he lamented. Sonias daughter Vania Figueredo meanwhile said that her mother had only complained about the normal discomfort in the injection site. Figueredo added that aside from this complaint, her mother felt fine. (Related: Nurse aide dies after receiving work-mandated coronavirus vaccine shot.) Visit VaccineDeaths.com to find out more news about fatalities caused by the Wuhan coronavirus jabs. Sources include: LifeSiteNews.com Gov.uk DailyMail.co.uk 1 DailyMail.co.uk 2 WESTPORT Innovative residential construction techniques may one day make the use of wood obsolete. The gray European-influenced, modern-style house at 319 Bayberry Lane in Westport is an example of construction for strength without sacrificing aesthetics. Paul Gudas, a construction innovation specialist at the Norwalk-based Skyview Builders, built it over two years using insulating concrete form construction, or ICF. Under the process, hollow foam blocks are stacked, reinforced with steel rebar and filled with concrete. The method is more environmentally friendly, energy efficient, safer, and longer lasting than many other construction techniques. ICF construction can withstand strong storms and hurricane-force winds, according to some industry experts. That is believable when one considers this house was built with 23 tons of steel and 80 tons of concrete, according to Mikhail Faifman, the homes listing agent. This home is packed with cutting edge technology, automation and materials, he said. Contributed photo / Faifman Group It was built using commercial construction techniques and materials to create a maintenance-free structure without compromising the comfort for residential use, he said. Construction was completed in 2020 on this 10,132-square-foot concrete, steel, stone and stucco house. It was built in the Coleytown neighborhood on a two-acre level lot, enjoying a wealth of privacy yet conveniently close to the center of town and public schools. The private setting is enhanced by the homes adjacency to the 39-acre Newman-Poses Preserve. Here you will find well-established trails through woodland, wetland, open fields, stands of old white pine, and a trail beside the Aspetuck River, according to the website for the Aspetuck Land Trust, which manages the protected open space. Stone pillars mark the entrance to the long private lane that leads to the 13-room house. According to Faifman, the owner of this house will have the privilege of naming this lane. The driveway concludes at the forecourt in front of the house, which has an attached three-car garage. Across the courtyard there is a detached four-car garage that can be converted into a guest house or home office with its own separate heating and cooling systems. Contributed photo / Faifman Group Inside, there are special design features throughout. Faifman said this home boasts Klar Studio triple glazed windows that are floor to ceiling in every room. The windows are uncompromising in quality and energy efficiency, he said. There are radiant heated floors throughout the house, including in the attached garage and the finished lower level. The house is fully automated. Everything can be controlled from a single application on the owners cell phone, including the designer-grade lighting, the sauna and the temperature setting in the house and the in-ground swimming pool. Contributed photo / Faifman Group In the dining room there is a large built-in display shelving unit with smoked glass doors. Like every element in the house it was custom made. Sliding glass doors in the dining room open to the outdoor kitchen, pool, outdoor fireplace, and porcelain patio. Porcelain does not get hot in the summer the way slate or bluestone does. The gourmet kitchen is outfitted with hand-made cabinetry, a center island with a waterfall countertop, a touchless faucet and Miele appliances. This house has six bedrooms, five of them on the second floor. The master suite is in a private wing and has a large, luxurious bath and custom walk-in closet. The finished third level is the coolest kids room ever with (four) built-in bunks and areas for crafting, Faifman said. If thats true then the finished lower level is the coolest adults space. It features a wine cellar, a large full-service bar, a sitting room, and a spacious home gym. While the house is in a private setting it is only about a mile from the Merritt Parkway and convenient to the Post Road (Route 1) and downtown Westport. For more information or to set up an appointment to see the house contact Mikhail Faifman of Faifman Group and William Raveis Real Estate at 646-455-7997 or mikhail@faifmangroup.com. Shrill may be coming to an end, but theres another new Portland-filmed comedy series featuring a Saturday Night Live veteran coming to TV screens. Chad, created by and starring Nasim Pedrad, will premiere April 6 on TBS. Pedrad, who is also a writer, executive producer and showrunner for Chad, stars as a 14-year-old boy of Persian descent whos trying to fit in now that hes attending high school. When Pedrad talked about the show during the 2020 Television Critics Association winter press tour, it was expected to premiere later that year. But the pandemic changed that plan. As Tim Williams, executive director of Oregon Film, says, Chad shot the whole first season here. They were the only project that was physically shooting when the pandemic hit and had to shut down mid-stream. They came back in late summer to finish up. Chadis the latest project featuring past and current Saturday Night Live cast members to film in and around Portland. Fred Armisen co-created and starred in Portlandia; Aidy Bryant is an executive producer and star of Shrill, which will return for its third and final season on Hulu this spring; and Documentary Now!, whose executive producers included Rhys Thomas, who worked on SNL and is an executive producer on Chad, also filmed in the Portland area during its third season. Other Portland-related projects coming soon include Moxie, a movie that Amy Poehler (yet another former SNL star) directs and appears in, about a teenager who, following in the footsteps of her mothers own rebellious youth, strikes back against her high schools sexism and hypocrisy by starting her own zine. The movie is apparently set in a community in Oregon, though the majority of filming happened in California. Moxie will stream beginning Wednesday, March 3 on Netflix. From left, Richard Blais, Portland's own Gregory Gourdet, Dale Talde, Melissa King, Padma Lakshmi, Gail Simmons, Kwame Onwuachi, Amar Santana and Tom Colicchio will be on hand for the new "Top Chef" season, based in Portland. (Photo: David Moir/Bravo)David Moir/Bravo On April 1, the Portland-based season of Top Chef will premiere on Bravo. Season 18 of the culinary competition series also filmed during the pandemic, and brought together fan favorites and new contestants (including two Portlanders) for challenges and tributes to Oregons food scene, including visits to the Hood River Fruit Loop and Tillamook Creamery. More of our coverage: Top Chef will return April 1 for Portland-based Season 18 (watch the first-look trailer) Subscribe to our free weekly What to Watch newsletter. Email: -- Kristi Turnquist kturnquist@oregonian.com 503-221-8227 @Kristiturnquist The construction of Cau Dat Wind Farm is in full swing with completion expected by the third quarter The project will be powered by 15 of GEs 4MW-137 onshore wind turbines, with a hub height of 111.5m, ideally suited to exploit the wind conditions in the mountainous range of Lam Dong province in the Central Highlands region of Vietnam. This is the first partnership with Ocean Renewable Energy JSC. Both companies have been working closely for a year on wind farm design, layout, transportation, and engineering. The construction of Cau Dat Wind Farm is in full swing and completion is expected by the third quarter this year. The contract also provides a 10-year full service operation and management agreement for the wind farm. The construction of the wind farm will provide immense benefits for the provinces economy, creating jobs during the construction process and employment opportunities in operation, maintenance, and project support services throughout the agreement period. GE is a long-term partner in supporting Vietnams energy transition by bringing its innovative technology to support Vietnam in its efforts to power households with sustainable energy. Gilan Sabatier, regional leader for GE Renewable Energys Onshore Wind Business in South Asia and ASEAN, said, "We thank Ocean Renewable Energy JSC and their leadership team for selecting GE for this project. The award of the Cau Dat wind farm further validates the great work and commitment we have done in Vietnam and reaffirms our important contribution to the countrys energy transition. We are delighted to sign this important deal with GE Renewable Energy for our first wind farm project, said Do Van Binh, general director of Ocean Renewable Energy JSC. This project helps Lam Dong province contribute to the renewable energy goal of the country as well as lays the foundation for expansion of the project in the coming years. GE is a long-term partner in supporting Vietnams energy transition by bringing its innovative technology to support Vietnam in its efforts to power households with sustainable energy. Vietnam has seen an increase in the demand for energy and this wind project further expands GEs contribution in providing technological support for a variety of power generation projects throughout the country. GE Vietnam has more than 1,600 employees in Vietnam and is the only wind turbine original equipment manufacturer with a manufacturing footprint in the country. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 01:55:46|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close HARARE, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwe will soon receive 1.152 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine under the COVAX scheme, the European Union announced Wednesday. "Fabulous to see that the #COVAX rollout has begun in Africa! #Zimbabwe will also very soon get 1.152 million doses under the COVAX scheme, to which #TeamEurope is the biggest contributor," the EU said on its Twitter handle. COVAX is a global initiative led by the World Health Organization for better COVID-19 vaccine distribution. The facility plans to secure and distribute millions of doses of vaccines to developing countries. As Zimbabwe awaits additional vaccines under COVAX, China on Wednesday announced that it will donate a second batch of 200,000 Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccines to Zimbabwe. This will increase China's donation of the vaccines to Zimbabwe to 400,000. On its part, the Zimbabwean government has purchased 600,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses from China, which are expected to arrive in the country in March. The country is also in advanced negotiations to acquire the Sputnik V vaccine from Russia, while India has announced that it will donate 75,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses to Zimbabwe. Last Thursday, the Zimbabwean government launched its COVID-19 vaccination program, three days after taking delivery of the first batch of the 200,000 vaccine doses from China. Vice President Constantino Chiwenga, who is also Health and Child Care Minister, became the first citizen to receive the Sinopharm jab. Frontline workers, including journalists, are being prioritized for inoculation under the first phase of the vaccination program. Vaccination is being done on a voluntary basis and in three phases. The government aims to inoculate at least 10 million out of the country's population of 16 million people to achieve herd immunity. As of Tuesday, Zimbabwe had recorded 35,910 COVID-19 cases, with 32,288 recoveries and 1,448 deaths. Enditem Sorry! This content is not available in your region New Delhi, Feb 24 : In the run-up to the West Bengal assembly polls, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is trying to reach out to every section of society in the state. During his one-day visit to the state on February 25, BJP President J.P. Nadda will not just meet intellectuals and the cream of society, he will also ensure to have lunch with a working class jute mill worker. Traditionally West Bengal has been a hub of intellectual discourse and innovation. On his last visit, Nadda had said what Bengal thinks today, the rest of the country thinks tomorrow. On the evening of Feb 25, Nadda will address representatives of the city's intellectual classes at Science City and discuss the state's current affairs with them. Before that in the afternoon, at about 1.30 pm, he is likely to visit Ward No 14, Gauripur and have lunch at the residence of a jute mill worker. Nadda's lunch programme has enormous symbolism because the mismanagement of jute mills in the state and the poor living conditions of jute mill workers have turned into big poll issues. More than 3 lakh people are employed in the state's jute mills. They have already approached chief minister Mamata Banerjee about better remuneration and other demands. In this scenario, by having lunch at the residence of a jute mill worker, Nadda will send out a message to the working class that the party is serious about addressing the issues that they face. According to a BJP statement, Nadda will reach Kolkata on Wednesday night. The next morning, he will launch the party's Lokhho Sonar Bangla crowd-sourcing programme. His programme includes visiting the residence and museum of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, and offering his tributes to him. The Sydney-based family of prominent Iraqi politician Ahmed Al Asadi was allegedly attacked and threatened as part of a global extortion plot uncovered by police in Sydney and Canada. NSW Police have charged two men from Blacktown and Seven Hills and Canadian authorities have arrested a man and a woman in Edmonton over a campaign of intimidation they believe was a targeted attempt to extort Mr Al Asadi, spokesman for the Fatah alliance in Iraqs parliament. Ahmed Al Asadi, a dual Australian-Iraqi citizen and politician in Baghdad who has been targeted in an alleged extortion plot. Credit:Getty Police allege the Canadian man masterminded the plot that involved attacks on the familys home in Chester Hill and online threats, demanding payment of up to $10 million. Mr Al Asadi, a dual citizen, came to Australia as a refugee fleeing the regime of Saddam Hussein and worked as a taxi driver in Sydney but has since returned to Iraq to pursue his political career. His wife and five children remain in Sydney. Are We Ready for Globalized, Socialized, Sexualized Education? Commentary United Nations agencies and their partners are working to dominate the education systems of the world, which will enable them to deliver childrens sexual rights ideology in tandem with socialist and anti-family philosophies to youth around the globe. This is problematic for those who value sexual fidelity, free enterprise, and family. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is a key player in facilitating the global education movement that seeks to displace parents as the primary influencers of their children. The OECD was originally established to help countries recover from World War II, but today it has other goals. The group is a member of the U.N. Global Compact and partners with U.N. entities including UNESCO, which champions sexual rights for children worldwide. The OECD also collaborates with the International Planned Parenthood Federation (the largest promoter of childrens sexual rights in the world) and the Open Society Foundation, led by billionaire political activist George Soros. It has also received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The OECD has traditionally claimed to support democracy and free markets. However, as it deepens ties with the United Nations and other partners, its aims appear to be evolving. Fostering Socialistic Global Skills and Attitudes What positions does the OECD promote? The OECDs The Future of Education and Skills, Education 2030 document (pdf), published in 2018, says, Children entering school in 2018 will need to value common prosperity, sustainability, and well-being above other concerns and that curricula should continue to evolve, perhaps in radical ways that reflect evolving societal requirements. The entity says global education efforts are designed to focus on: Environmentalism focusing on climate change and the depletion of natural resources [which] require urgent action and adaptation. Economic change requiring new economic, social and institutional models. Social evolution arising from cultural diversity. Encapsulated in these three points are the seeds of the global takeover of energy resources, a transition from capitalism to more equitable economic models (i.e., socialism), and the intentional rise of diverse family structures and sexually diverse culture. In its Global Competency for an Inclusive World document (pdf), the OECD reveals its decidedly anti-family position. It says, The skills, attitudes, and values that shape human behavior should be rethought, to counter the discriminatory behaviors picked up at school and in the family in order to teach young people to challenge cultural and gender stereotypes and to help create tolerant, integrated societies. By its own admission, the OECD intends to foster widespread rethinking of the values that children learn in their families. The OECD uses testing tools such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Study on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) to advance this agenda. The OECD says of the SSES assessment: Apart from examining the level of childrens socio-emotional skills, the study will gather information on their family, school, and community learning contexts, thus aiming to provide information about the conditions and practices that foster or hinder the development of these critical skills. The OECD intends to question children to uncover information about their private family life. This data can then be used to help global education monitors dissect how elements of a childs family life foster or hinder the development of the socialistic global skills and attitudes the U.N. and the OECD wish to foster in children. This tactic of asking students probing questions to assess their family life is a classic socialist-communist technique often used to pit children against their families, fracture cultural alliances, and expose religious loyalties. To Measure Attitudes or to Change Them? In 2012, OECD Director of Education and Skills Andreas Schleicher offered an example of how the OECD not only seeks to measure attitudes but to change them through data collection: Data transformed some of the beliefs and paradigms underlying German education. For example, traditionally, the education of the very young children was seen as the business of families, and you would have cases where women were seen as neglecting their family responsibilities when they sent their children to [preschool]. PISA has transformed that debate and pushed early childhood education right at the center of public policy in Germany, he said in a 2012 TED talk. Consider that carefully. Schleicher gives PISA and the OECD credit for changing Germanys attitudes and policies regarding the education of very young children. Education of young children was previously seen as the purview of families, especially mothers. Now, thanks largely to PISA, the education of the very young in Germany is seen as a state responsibility. The OECD holds this up as a shining example of the fundamental change their assessments can bring to pass. And theyre right. This is a perilous course. If we wish to protect our nations, our children, and our families from the global ideological onslaught, we must swiftly adjust our trajectory. We must: Disengage from federal and global educational funding; Re-localize control of school curricula; Expose the destructive and deadly legacy of socialist principles; Reassert nations rights to drive their own economic and environmental policies; Teach sexual fidelity and responsibility in the context of family formation; Promote family-based solutions to world problems. If we dont take these actionsand the current U.S. administration seems determined not to take themwe will increasingly see the social, emotional, moral, and economic vitality of the world reduced to wreckage. Therefore, what we cant accomplish in public policy, we must undertake to accomplish in our homes and communities. In doing so, over time we will raise up a generation of patriots who understand history, value individual rights, prize economic autonomy, and embrace the family as the core of civilization. These rising patriots will be prepared to defend the pillars of prosperous living and rebuild our society on truly sustainable grounds. Kimberly Ells is a policy adviser for Family Watch International and the author of The Invincible Family: Why the Global Campaign to Crush Motherhood and Fatherhood Cant Win, which exposes U.N. agencies widespread promotion of sexual rights for children and frames the family as the most powerful organization in the world. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company It was a Barbie-themed birthday party most kids could only dream about, with carnival rides, hundreds of pink balloons and a theater-worthy set featuring gold chandeliers and a rose-colored throne. The guests of honor were the 7-year-old twin daughters of the worlds most notorious drug lord, Joaquin El Chapo Guzman. Photographs and videos of the decadent bash showed up on Instagram this week, giving Mexicans a glimpse into the lives of some of the countrys most controversial 0.1-percenters. Guzman, the longtime leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, was captured in Mexico in 2014 and three years later extradited to New York, where he is preparing to go on trial this fall on drug trafficking and murder charges. The federal indictment against Guzman also seeks the forfeiture of more than $14 billion in drug proceeds and other illicit profits. Advertisement Efforts by U.S. Treasury Department and Mexican law enforcement to find and seize Guzmans assets have largely failed. That seemed evident from the Instagram posts, in which his family looked quite comfortable. RELATED: The saga of El Chapo, one of the worlds biggest drug kingpins The party was thrown by Guzmans wife, Emma Coronel, who was photographed in 4-inch-high heels in front of a fake pink mansion and a long table covered with flowers, desserts and a towering birthday cake. Images from the extravaganza, which took place at what appeared to be a real mansion in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, were uploaded by the event photographer. Celebrating #MaximumElegance, photographer Antonio Tizoc wrote in one caption. In another, he praised the twins, Emali and Maria Joaquina, as princesses. Reactions to the images ranged from amused to incensed. Spectacular! one person commented on Instagram. Beautiful! said another. Pure elegance!! wrote a third. Pity where the money came from. Advertisement In an interview, Tizoc said Coronel authorized him to publish images of the party, but he said he was prohibited from sharing other details, including who attended. Tizoc, who is frequently hired to photograph the elaborate quinceaneras and weddings of Sinaloas wealthiest families, said he was distressed that some had criticized his birthday pictures. They have attacked me, he said. But in Culiacan its really normal to have parties like this. Rich and poor, we like big parties. Guzmans rise from rural poverty to leadership of Mexicos most powerful drug gang earned him folk hero status in his home state and beyond. He helmed the Sinaloa cartel for decades, even during long stints in Mexican prisons from which he famously escaped twice, once through a mile-long tunnel. Advertisement But now that he is in solitary confinement in a high-security federal jail in Manhattan, Guzman, 61, is finally believed to have handed over the reins of his organization to his adult sons. Alejandro Hope, a Mexican security analyst, said it is common for cartels to financially support the wives and children of leaders who have been killed or jailed. Coronel, a 29-year-old former beauty queen who caught Guzmans eye at a pageant a decade ago, may also have her own family money. She is a niece of Ignacio Nacho Coronel, a onetime partner of Guzman who was killed in a July 2010 shootout with the Mexican army. Emma Coronel, who was born in Los Angeles, gave birth to the twins in 2011 at a hospital in Lancaster. Advertisement The failure to seize Guzmans assets has not been for lack of trying by officials on both sides of the border, Hope said. Soldiers escort Joaquin Guzman, alias El Chapo, upon his arrival to the hangar of the attorney generals office in Mexico City on Jan. 8, 2016. (Pedro Mera / TNS) Drug kingpins are expert at laundering and concealing money hiding it in real estate, small businesses and sometimes even holes dug in the ground. At the same time, Mexicos legal framework for seizing drug money is still under development and is less advanced than those of other nations, such as Colombia. Chikinarcos, or narco juniors, as the children of Mexicos drug lords are called, have never been known for their modesty. Advertisement Damaso Lopez-Serrano, who is the son of another onetime Sinaloa cartel leader and believed to be Guzmans godson, famously posted photos on social media of his million-dollar jewelry, gold-plated guns and pet cheetah. Lopez-Serrano turned himself in to U.S. authorities last year and may testify against Guzman. Curiously, expressions of wealth by Mexicos narco juniors are generally less reviled than those of mirreyes, or my kings, a derisive term Mexicans use to refer to the children of the nations political and business elite who show off their decadent habits without shame. This year, the son of a general deleted his blog, titled Golden life, after he came under fierce public criticism for his posts showing off designer shopping sprees and trips on private jets. The daughters of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto were similarly mocked after they posted photos of themselves at the presidential palace with a celebrity tattoo artist from New York whom they appeared to have flown in for a personal appointment. Hope chalked it up to the same populist wave that helped anti-corruption and anti-poverty candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador win the presidency in July. Advertisement People get angry when its a politician or a politicians family, Hope said. When a narco flaunts his wealth, they get angry at the government. Some people simply laughed when they heard about the party for Guzmans twins. In a segment about the celebration, Telemundo newscaster Enrique Usales wondered what kind of precedent it set and how the girls would observe their 15th birthday, which in Mexico is generally marked with a blowout party. If they celebrated the seventh birthday this way, he said, can you imagine the quinceanera? Advertisement kate.linthicum@latimes.com Twitter: @katelinthicum Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Pranksters had been ringing doorbells and running away in his neighborhood for a while, Dean Taylor told police, and he was "fed up." When it allegedly happened again, police said, the 63-year-old's reaction - chasing the boys and telling a child he'd "put a bullet in his head" - got him arrested. Taylor, a former San Francisco police officer, faces felony charges of kidnapping and making death threats after police say he lashed out at an 11-year-old who participated in group shenanigans. Taylor said the pranks had happened at least four times in his San Rafael, Calif., neighborhood before the incident that led to his arrest Feb. 12. He had been waiting for his next chance to confront the youths, police said. That night, Taylor allegedly ran out of his home and chased the group of boys before getting in a dark sedan to pursue them further. Taylor reportedly blocked the running 11-year-old's path with his vehicle. When he got out, he yelled at the boy, grabbed him by the neck and forced him to the ground before pushing the boy into his vehicle to take him to his parents' house, according to police. According to police, Taylor then told the boy that if he ever caught him participating in the prank again, he would "put a bullet in his head," the boy said. The boy was dropped off near an intersection before running home to tell his parents what had happened. He had redness around his neck that did not require medical attention, the police report said. The San Rafael Police Department said it had received calls and alerts about the incident. Police said a witness called to report an older man yelling at a child and grabbing him aggressively. The witness told police that the man and the child got into a dark sedan and left the area. Police said a parent of another child who was allegedly part of the prank told responding officers that an older man had chased her child's friend. Police said they also received a call from the 11-year-old boy's parents. Taylor denied grabbing the boy by the neck or making a threat about the bullet. He was arrested and booked into Marin County jail. The former officer, who is now a licensed real estate agent, was released Feb. 13 on $100,000 bail, according to the Marin County Sheriff's Office. His next court date is set for March 29, a records clerk confirmed. No one responded to a call to a number registered to Taylor. Anthony Brass, his attorney, told The Washington Post that the group of youths had been doorbell-ditching the neighborhood for some time, that the boy has thrown oranges at homes before, and that no one had stopped him. Taylor was resting after surgery on one of his feet the night his actions escalated, Brass said. "It's incredible he has to now face that kind of punishment in a case where no one is hurt and everyone is fine," Brass said of the law enforcement veteran with more than three decades of service. Brass is working to get the charges against Taylor dropped. "There has been an outpouring of support since the story came out, from kids he coached [for junior varsity basketball] and their parents," Brass said. "This is a man known to keep a level head." A grandmother who bit off her friend's fingertip during a drunken fight has been spared prison. Mansis Bandi, 50, had been drinking wine and whisky at a function in southeast Melbourne in October 2017 when her longtime friend confronted her. The pair fell to the ground, wrestling, punching and scratching each other when Bandi, a mother of four, bit down on her friend's left ring finger and severed the tip. The victim had to have more of her finger amputated in hospital. Mansis Bandi (pictured above) has avoided a jail term after biting the tip off her friend's finger in 2017 Bandi, a mother of four, (pictured above) later told police she 'was sorry' the incident happened Bandi, now aged 50, on Wednesday was handed an adjourned undertaking in Victoria's County Court and ordered to be of good behaviour for three years. She must also make a $300 donation to a charity. She previously pleaded guilty to recklessly causing serious injury after other charges were dropped following an aborted trial and a second one that had to be scrapped because of Covid-19. Judge George Georgiou said Bandi did not provoke the incident and was acting in what she thought was self-defence, but overstepped the mark. After biting off the tip of the other woman's finger, Bandi left the Cranbourne South function and went to police. She said she had been pulled out of her car by her hair, been bitten herself and had a piece of wood swung at her. Bandi wasn't charged until July 2018. She told investigators she was immobilised and trapped underneath her friend when she bit her finger. 'Look I don't feel good, I feel bad I caused that much injury,' Bandi said. 'I'm sorry it happened.' Judge Georgiou found the circumstances of the case to be exceptional and said it did not warrant jail time. Both Bandi and her friend are from Papua New Guinea and have known each other for most of their lives. Judge George Georgiou said Bandi (pictured above) did not provoke the incident and was acting in what she thought was self-defence In 2015, Bandi (pictured above) was spared a conviction for assault and using a carriage service to harass after punching another woman in the face and sending her a threatening text message Their relationship began to sour in 2016 because the friend did not approve of Bandi's relationship. One of Bandi's son's described her as a 'brave, strong woman' who brought up four children on her own. In 2009, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. The previous year she developed pleural tuberculosis but was later cleared of the disease. Judge Georgiou said Bandi had strong family support, was working as a farm packer and caring for her grandchild and had contributed significantly to the PNG community in Victoria since coming here in 2003. In 2015, she was spared a conviction for assault and using a carriage service to harass after punching another woman in the face and sending her a threatening text message. "Hyundai Motor Company brought Tucson production to the U.S. because we have proven our ability to build world class automobiles," said Ernie Kim, President and CEO Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama. "Today, the Hyundai brand has positive momentum in the marketplace, thanks to the expanding lineup of sport utility vehicles. The new Tucson will continue that momentum in 2021." HMMA recently completed a plant expansion project to support adding the Tucson to HMMA's product mix. The addition of the Tucson will further enhance HMMA's ability to adjust its vehicle production with market demand and stay competitive in the ever-changing automotive market. "Adding this fourth Hyundai vehicle to HMMA's production lineup will help the Hyundai brand meet the growing demand for SUVs in the North American market," said Jose Munoz, President and CEO Hyundai Motor North America. "It will also better position HMMA to fully utilize its vehicle assembly capacity." The addition of the Tucson will continue to sustain high-quality jobs at HMMA and throughout its supplier base. Tucson is Hyundai's best-selling model globally and represents its vision for progressive design, eco-focused powertrains and segment-leading technologies. HMMA will supply internal combustion versions of the Tucson to the North American market, including Canada and Mexico. The 2022 Hyundai Tucson will begin arriving in U.S. dealerships this spring. For features and technical specifications please visit HyundaiNews.com https://www.hyundainews.com/en-us/models/hyundai-tucson-2022-tucson Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama, headquartered in Montgomery, Ala., is an independent manufacturing operation of Hyundai Motor Company, based in Seoul, Korea. HMMA currently produces the Hyundai Sonata, Elantra, Santa Fe, and Tucson. Hyundai cars and sport utility vehicles are distributed throughout the United States by Hyundai Motor America and are sold and serviced by more than 900 Hyundai dealerships across North America. SOURCE Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama, LLC Putin sets fines for distribution of information on foreign agents without marking 11:10 24/02/2021 MOSCOW, February 16 (RAPSI) President Vladimir Putin has signed a bill on fines for distribution of information on individual foreign agents without appropriate marking into law, according to the official website of legal information. The document is to amend Russias Code on Administrative Offences. Under the law, dissemination of information about individuals declared foreign agents without corresponding labeling in media or on the Internet will result in fines ranginh from 2,000 to 2,500 rubles for individuals, from 4,000 to 5,000 rubles ($54 - 67) for officials and from 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($540 - 670) for legal entities. Also, confiscation of the administrative infringement matter is possible, the document reads. Similar fines are envisaged for distributing information on NGOs or public associations added to the foreign agents register or about materials produced by these organizations without appropriate marking, excluding information published in single state registers and state information systems. Thus, producing or distribution of information via media or Internet by NGOs labeled as foreign agents would result in fines from 100,000 to 300,000 rubles ($1,300 4,000) for officials and from 300,000 to 500,000 rubles ($4,000 7,000) for companies, according to the law. Ahmedabad, Feb 24 : For a moment in the third session of the first day of the third Test here, the crowd followed the fate of a young man who was caught for breaching the security and running up to India skipper Virat Kohli. Kohli gestured to the young man to stay away and as he turned back to run back to the stands, he was caught by the security and whisked away through a passage that divided the Ambani end stand with another. The fans at the base of both stands rushed to the end to follow the treatment that the security would deal to them. A top police official posted at the venue said that the fan won't be easily let off. "We will register a case against him at the police station at Chandkheda (which is just about five kilometres) from the stadium," said the official without revealing the offence the fan will be tried for, as that was under discussion. Although the stands have been barricaded by fence, the man found an inlet from where the Man of the Series car is parked. Fans coming onto the field is nothing new. In Australia, there have been instances of streakers running onto the field. In India too, there have been instances in the past. However, with security tightened nowadays, such incidents have become infrequent. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. Instances of the coronavirus (COVID-19) variant first discovered in the United Kingdom are now showing up in a higher percentage of tested samples in New York City compared to last month, newly-released city Health Department data revealed Tuesday. A sample of 724 specimens roughly 3% of New York Citys recent weekly average of laboratory-confirmed cases sequenced during the week of Feb. 8 to Feb. 14 found 45 occurrences of the U.K. variant, known as B.1.1.7, the data showed. That total accounted for 6.4% of the number of specimens sequenced, according to the data, which represented a slight dip compared to the prior week when 7.4% were identified as the U.K. variant, but a significant rise from 2.7% tallied in January. Since the city began sequencing for B.1.1.7 a few weeks ago, the city Health Department discovered 59 cases of the variant in total have been found. There are caveats to the data, which the city Health Department said could not be representative of all NYC COVID-19 infections. Specifically, not all specimens have enough virological information to be sequenced. We estimate that 6.2% of #COVID19 cases in NYC are now B117 ("UK variant"). @NYCHealthSystem @nycHealthy have been rapidly scaling up capacity for sequencing, so we'll be updating this data weekly. Important caveats about sampling methods here: https://t.co/GOEMenr8Fk pic.twitter.com/sJLVDYkOra Jay Varma (@DrJayVarma) February 23, 2021 Mayor Bill de Blasios public health advisor, Dr. Jay Varma, said the city Health Department has been rapidly scaling up capacity for sequencing, adding that the data will be updated weekly. The U.K. variant is likely more transmissible, health officials say, and the British government previously said B.1.1.7 is likely to carry an increased risk of hospitalization and death. This variant is likely more transmissible than others and may cause more severe illness, the city Health Department wrote in a tweet. To prevent its spread, we must recommit to taking precautions. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) speaks during a news conference following a virtual Senate Democratic policy luncheon, in the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Feb. 23, 2021. (Al Drago/Getty Images) Schumer Calls for Democratic Unity Amid Wage Hike Debate Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Feb. 23 called for unity within the Democratic Party amid clashes over whether an hourly minimum wage hike should be included as part of a COVID-19 relief bill. He emphasized in a conference call the importance of Democrats sticking together on President Joe Bidens $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, despite ongoing debates on including a provision to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025. I made a pitch today to our entire caucus and I said that we need to pass this bill. The American people, the American public demands it and everyone is going to have things that they want to see in the bill and well work hard to see if we can get those things in the bill, Schumer told reporters after speaking with the Senate Democratic caucus. Job No. 1 is to pass the bill. Pass the bill we must. And I have confidence we will do it. The Democrat push for the hourly minimum wage hike included in the presidents relief bill has been met with opposition from within the Democratic Party itself. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has indicated that he opposes the provision, and his vote is needed for the bill to pass via budget reconciliation, a process that would allow it to clear the Senate without Republican votes. It also remains unclear if a federal minimum wage hike could be approved as part of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus stimulus package via the budget reconciliation process. Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough is expected to rule on the matter before the bill is put to a vote. Manchin said he would propose an alternative $11 amendment if the parliamentarian rules that the hike could be legislated via reconciliation. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) has also expressed an objection to the provision. Meanwhile, Republican leadership in the House is recommending a no vote on the nearly $2 trillion relief bill. Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Tuesday announced their own bill, the Higher Wages for American Workers Act (pdf), that proposes to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour by 2025. So far weve had great unity. On impeachment, we had great unity. On the two votes that have come before us on reconciliation, we have had great unity, Schumer said Tuesday. So weve had a lot of unity and we need to keep it. With 50 votes, we need our unity. And were fighting to get it. And so far so good. Hes [Schumer] begging all of us, despite any differences with any one section of the bill, that we hang together, added Majority Whip Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) during the press briefing. This is the signature provision of the Biden administration in terms of dealing with the pandemic and the economy. And we need to stick together. Thats it. Schumer and Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders are expected to meet on Feb. 24 with the parliamentarian to discuss whether the federally-imposed wage hike would violate the special budget reconciliation rules that would allow the bill to pass with 51 votes, as opposed to 60. Bernie Sanders and I are arguing very strongly for $15 and for it to be reconcilable, Schumer said. Were going to await [MacDonoughs] judgment before we go any further. Tom Ozimek contributed to this report. The next generation of supercomputers - including quantum computers - is at a crucial point: Tomorrow's high-performance computers are at their physical limit in terms of miniaturization of their components; at the same time, they must be more energy-efficient and increase in performance. In this context, the international research network SuperGate coordinated by the University of Konstanz is creating a new basis: The researchers are developing a bridging technology that combines superconductor technology with semiconductor technology, using an approach that was considered physically impossible until just a few years ago. "We are opening a completely new scientific field here", says Prof. Angelo Di Bernardo, a physics professor in Konstanz, who jointly with Prof. Wolfgang Belzig and Prof. Elke Scheer forms the Konstanz team of the international research network. The research project is funded with around 3 million euros through an FET Open Grant (FET: Future and Emerging Technologies) of the European Union. "Superconductor technology and semiconductor technology rely on completely different concepts", explains Elke Scheer: Semiconductors are controlled by voltage and operate at room temperature. Superconductors, on the other hand, are based on current and operate at temperatures of around -270 degree centigrade, near absolute zero. It is of great interest in high-performance computer development to combine the more powerful and more energy-efficient superconductor technology with existing semiconductor technology. Until a few years ago, however, both systems were considered incompatible. A path-breaking discovery In 2018 researchers made a path-breaking discovery: Physicists at the Istituto Nanoscienze CNR at NEST - Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (Italy) demonstrated that it was also possible to use voltage to control the current in superconductors. "The basic proof was provided, but how exactly and why this works is still not entirely clear", says Angelo Di Bernardo. "Now we need to detect the underlying physical mechanism. If we understand that mechanism and the principles behind it, we can control it and use it for technical applications." This fundamental discovery paves the way for hybrid computing platforms that combine superconductor with semiconductor technology. "Our aim is to design high-performance superconducting circuits that can be operated as if they were based on semiconductor technologies - and thus combine the advantages of both systems", underlines Elke Scheer. Four steps to achieve the goal The international project cooperation includes four steps: "Firstly, we will shed light onto the physical mechanism that makes it possible to control the state of a superconducting material via the application of a voltage", specifies Angelo Di Bernardo. "Secondly, we will research which are the best materials for technical applications. The third step will be to implement our concepts in a prototype device, and our fourth and final goal is to integrate this new superconductor technology in an electric circuit which interacts with conventional semiconductor technology." ### FET Open Grant The collaborative research project, which is coordinated by Elke Scheer and which is jointly performed with Angelo Di Bernardo and Wolfgang Belzig, is funded through an FET Open Grant. With this highly competitive funding programme, the EU supports the early stages of new ideas towards the development of radically new future technologies. Alongside the University of Konstanz and the CNR laboratories at Pisa and Salerno, also the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, the Delft University of Technology and the Chalmers University of Technology at Gothenburg as well as partners from industry (SeeQC) in Italy are involved in the project. Key facts: - The international research network "Gate Tuneable Superconducting Quantum Electronics" (SuperGate) is funded through an FET Open Grant of the European Union. - Funding sum: around 3 million euros - Funding period: March 2021 to August 2024 - Project coordination: Professor Elke Scheer, University of Konstanz - Topic: Researching the physical mechanism of how voltage can be used to control superconductors, with the goal of developing an interfacing technology between superconductor and semiconductor technology for future supercomputers. - Project partners: University of Konstanz, CNR laboratories at Pisa and Salerno, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Delft University of Technology, Chalmers University of Technology at Gothenburg, SeeQC-EU (Italy) Note to editors: You can download a photo here: https:/ / cms. uni-konstanz. de/ fileadmin/ pi/ fileserver/ 2021/ die_bruecke. jpg Caption: Insight view of a dilution refrigerator in which measurements at very low temperature (around -273 degree centigrade) take place. Copyright: University of Konstanz Contact: University of KonstanzCommunications and MarketingPhone: + 49 7531 88-3603Email: kum@uni-konstanz.de uni.kn/en Increased Adoption of Spirit Semiconductor's 5G Technology Fuels Expansion and Hiring Binge Spirit Semiconductor, an innovator in high-performance radio frequency solutions, today announced it will be moving to a new headquarters in Theale, U.K. and will be opening a new satellite office in Leeds, U.K. to tap into the strong radio frequency (RF) monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) and filter engineering talent in Northern England. The expansion comes on the heels of swift customer adoption and deployment of Spirit Semiconductor's technology for 5G massive multiple-input and multiple-output (mMIMO) and small cell base stations. Since the company's inception in 2020, it has experienced rapid growth, developing a core team of 15 people in less than one year. Located in one of the U.K.'s technology hotbeds, the new office is five times larger than current Spirit headquarters, boasting 9,000 square feet of office space. The new Leeds office will support the company's plans to expand its product portfolio and enter into other high growth markets. "When Spirit Semiconductor was founded last year, we were solely focused on creating cutting edge radio frequency products for 5G mMIMO. Currently, our products are being evaluated by customers but the feedback we have received so far has been hugely positive and really provides us with the encouragement we need to branch out into other markets," said Mark Moffat, managing director of Spirit Semiconductor. "At this rate, we are targeting 65% growth in 2021. This is only the beginning for our company, and I could not be more excited to see what the next year brings by way of innovation and expansion." "Massive MIMO architectures change the fundamental building blocks of the RF chain dramatically," commented Joe Madden, chief analyst at Mobile Experts. "We are experiencing very rapid market growth for some RF components as the base station design adapts to 32T and 64T variations of massive MIMO, with tight performance requirements for RFICs to support a wide range of applications." Spirit Semiconductor is looking for the semiconductor industry's top talent. The company is currently hiring for several positions: principal filter design engineer, principal MMIC design engineer, senior MMIC design engineer and senior analog IC design engineer. For additional information, contact Luke Ord at IC Resources, luke.ord@ic-resources.com, +44 118 907 3070. "IC Resources is excited to be helping Spirit Semiconductor to identify the right talent to fuel its impressive growth," commented Kathy Campling, client services director at IC Resources. "Spirit's strong business plan, exciting product roadmap and generous benefits package are an attractive proposition to potential employees." About Spirit Semiconductor Ltd. Spirit Semiconductor Ltd. is a United Kingdom based company, founded by experts in the radio frequency (RF) semiconductor industry. We are focused on developing high-performance RF products to support the rapid roll out of 5G massive MIMO (mMIMO), small cell base stations and other markets requiring high performance solutions. At Spirit Semiconductor our approach is intelligent innovation, fast implementation and strong team collaboration. We are an aggressive, fast-moving group that is focused on developing compelling products that meet our customers' needs and timescales, while maintaining a strong team ethic and collaborative spirit. We believe in developing a balanced team that has all levels of experience and fostering an environment where everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow. To learn more, visit www.spiritsemiconductor.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005291/en/ Contacts: Olivia Metcalfe Townsend Team olivia@townsendteam.com The councillor who brought a motion to recognise American founding father Hercules Mulligan has issued an apology after research showing he had been a slave owner came to light. Alliance councillor, Yvonne Boyle, had presented the motion to Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council's Leisure and Development Committee last week, where the Committee agreed to look at the establishment of a heritage trail in his reported town of birth, Coleraine. Lilian Seeoni-Barr from the North West Migrants' Forum. On Monday, the North West Migrants' Forum sent a letter to the Council calling on them to rescind their decision in light of the information on Mulligan's role as a slave owner. Lilian Seeoni-Barr from the North West Migrants' Forum, published the responses to their letter on her Twitter account this afternoon. "I am sorry for my error of judgement regarding the motion on Hercules Mulligan," wrote Cllr Boyle. "Any proposed acknowledgement of an historical figure should include their links to slavery. "I did not highlight this in my motion and I apologise for the distress and anger caused to people of African descent, ethnic minorities and all those working to combat racism in Northern Ireland." Cllr Boyle also indicated a further public statement would be issued, and invited Lilian Seeoni-Barr to a Zoom meeting with her and party colleague on the council, Cllr Chris McCaw. Ms Seeoni-Barr also received correspondence from Alan McClarty, the local historian who brought Mulligan to the attention of Cllr Boyle, in which he apologised for any offence caused. "Slavery was a shameful part of our history and in no way should be celebrated," he wrote. Chair of the Leisure and Development Committee, Sinn Fein's Cllr Dermot Nicholl, replied to Ms Seeoni-Barr's correspondence to make clear the party opposed 'all forms of racism and slavery, both historic and modern'. "We have asked council officials to investigate these claims about Hercules Mulligan and are in the process of trying to reverse the decision." Council Chief Executive, David Jackson, said the matter was due to be discussed at the next full council meeting on March 2. "The matter was introduced by way of a notice of motion by two elected members and debated at the recent Leisure and Development Committee, but any decision can only be made at the full Council meeting which is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, March 2," he wrote. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the new majority leader, has proposed a $435 billion community investment bill that includes $10 billion for a pilot program aimed at tearing down inner-city highways. Twenty-five Democrats have signed on as co-sponsors. Labor leaders have asked President Joe Biden to approve as much as $4 trillion in new infrastructure spending, citing estimates of need produced by the American Society of Civil Engineers, according to news reports. Suddenly, the razing of 787 no longer seems like a pipe dream, Times Union columnist Chris Churchill writes. What Capital Region project could be more worthy of federal infrastructure money? What could have a bigger impact on Albany and its region? Real momentum for the change is evident. Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester are in varying stages of removing downtown or waterfront highways, part of a worldwide trend. The lakefront in Burlington, Vermont, once was a privately owned wasteland riddled by rail tracks and used largely for petroleum storage. But in the 1980s, the city began the long process of reclaiming the waterfront, resulting in the jewel it is today. Providence moved a tangle of railroad tracks to uncover its river and also tore down a waterfront highway. Chicago built its now-iconic Millennium Park atop a massive rail yard. Boston's Seaport district has opened up the area to concert venues and walkways. Check out photos from the Times Union archives, and witness the possibilities for downtown Albany based on what has been done in other cities. The death has occurred of Rita Curran (nee McNamara) Eadestown, Naas, Kildare Curran Rita (nee McNamara), Athgarrett, Eadestown, Naas, Co. Kildare. 22nd February 2021. (Peacefully).Sadly missed by her loving husband Adrian, her children Michael, Catherine, Andrew, Maria and Isaac, her mother Ann, brother Pat, sisters-in-law, brother-in-law, mother and father-in-law, niece Auriel, nephews Reuben, Aidan and Matthew, relatives and friends. Recently predeceased by her loving father Patrick. May Rita Rest in Peace. Funeral to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Eadestown on Thursday arriving for 11.00oc Funeral Mass followed by burial in Eadestown Cemetery. Given the exceptional climate and to protect everyone who knew Rita, the funeral will be private for immediate family only (10 persons). hose who would have liked to attend Ritas funeral, but due to these restrictions cannot, may leave a personal message for the family on the condolence page below. The family thank you for your c-operation, understanding and support during this sensitive time. HOUSE PRIVATE, PLEASE Live Stream www.eadestownparish.com The death has occurred of Colette Bailey Leixlip, Kildare / Harold's Cross, Dublin BAILEY, Colette (Leixlip, Co. Kildare and formerly of Harolds Cross, Dublin 6) February 21st, 2021 (peacefully following a short illness) in the loving care of the staff at The Mater Hospital. Beloved wife of the late Gerard F. Curran and much loved mother of Amber Catherine and Aidan. Sadly missed by her loving son, daughter, sister Irene, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, nieces Deborah, Victoria and Siofra, nephew Steven, grandnieces, grandnephews, relatives and friends. May She Rest in Peace A private funeral will take place due to government advice regarding public gatherings. Those who would have liked to attend the funeral; but due to current restrictions cannot, may join the online private Funeral Mass on Thursday February 25th at 11am by following this LINK. Family flowers only, donations, if desired, to St. Francis Hospice, Blanchardstown. The death has occurred of John Buggy Chambers Park, Kilcock, Kildare / Leixlip, Kildare / Chapelizod, Dublin Formerly of Chapelizod and Leixlip. Peacefully after a short illness at home. John, predeceased by his loving wife Maire, dear father of Jennifer, John (Jnr) and David. Sadly missed by his family, grandchildren Shannon, Abbie, Megan, Stephen and Sophie, Jennifers husband Derek and Davids partner Susan, sister Eva, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews, friends and neighbours. May He Rest In Peace. Funeral Arrangements Later The death has occurred of Rosanna (Rose) Byrne (nee Anderson) Derrymullen, Allenwood, Kildare Unexpectedly at home surrounded by her loving family. Sadly missed by her loving husband Andy, sons John, Andrew, Jerome, Declan and Peter, daughter Martina, son in law, daughters in law, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, brothers, sister, brothers and sisters in law, nieces, nephews, relatives, neighbours and friends. May Rose rest in peace. In line with Government advice regarding public gatherings, a private family 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 page below. Mass will be live-streamed on the Allen Parish Facebook page. Removal on Thursday morning to arrive at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Allenwood for Requiem Mass at 11 o'clock. Burial afterwards in Allen Cemetery. The death has occurred of Olive C. Cobbe (nee Boyd) Clonsast, Rathangan, Kildare / Rathangan, Offaly Olive C. Cobbe (formerly Nurse Cobbe) Clonsast, Rathangan, County Kildare. Peacefully at her residence surrounded by her loving and devoted family in her 99th year. Predeceased by her husband Willie. Beloved mother of Irene, Harry, Elizabeth and Eva. Sadly missed by her 10 grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren, sons-in-law, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, extended family, neighbours and friends. "SAFE IN THE ARMS OF JESUS" Funeral cortege will leave her residence on Thursday at 1:20pm travelling via Bracknagh. Funeral Service in St Kevin's Church, Clonbullogue at 2pm followed by burial in the adjoining churchyard for family only please. You can leave your condolences on the online Condolence Book below. The family would like to thank you for your help and understanding at this sad and difficult time. Family flowers only please. Donations if desired to Portarlington Meals On Wheels. https://gofund.me/5f14897a House Strictly Private Please. Olive's Funeral Service to be streamed live on https://laoisfuneralslive.com/johnmaherfuneraldirector The death has occurred of Rosanna (Rose) Byrne (nee Anderson) Derrymullen, Allenwood, Kildare Unexpectedly at home surrounded by her loving family. Sadly missed by her loving husband Andy, sons John, Andrew, Jerome, Declan and Peter, daughter Martina, son in law, daughters in law, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, brothers, sister, brothers and sisters in law, nieces, nephews, relatives, neighbours and friends. May Rose rest in peace. In line with Government advice regarding public gatherings, a private family 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 page below. Mass will be live-streamed on the Allen Parish Facebook page. Removal on Thursday morning to arrive at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Allenwood for Requiem Mass at 11 o'clock. Burial afterwards in Allen Cemetery. To continue, please log in, or sign up for a new account. We offer one free story view per month. If you register for an account, you will get two additional story views. After those three total views, we ask that you support us with a subscription. A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much! Google Cloud has achieved a full Cloud Service Provider (CSP) empanelment after completing an audit from the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), a top company official said on Tuesday. This empanelment will enable the Indian public sector to deploy on Google Cloud, including government agencies at the Central and state level, and PSUs across sectors like power, transportation, oil & gas, public finance, etc, said Bikram Singh Bedi, Managing Director, Google Cloud India. He said that Google Cloud is designed, built, and operated with security at its core. "Government and enterprises want to work with us because we're focused on the best service and technology?not because they don't have choice or agility," Bedi said. "As we continue to invest in further evolving our infrastructure and expanding our reach into regulated industries; public sector organisations in India can now leverage the power of the cloud to accelerate digital services and to drive innovation." The company is gearing up to launch its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region in Delhi this year, which will be its second cloud region in India since its technical infrastructure in Mumbai was launched in 2017. "Today, many of the largest organisations in India trust Google Cloud, including Wipro, Sharechat,, TVS ASL, ICICI Prudential, Nobroker.com, Cleartrip and many others," Bedi said. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes This article is sponsored by SmileDirectClub. Everything to Know About SmileDirectClub Now Is the Time to Stop Hiding Your Smile 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. After what seems like endless months stuck at home, you're probably feeling more than ready to get back to normal life and in-person social gatherings. There's a lot of hope for the future and lots of stuff to be happy about, so no one would blame you if you couldn't stop yourself from smiling! But what if your smile is actually what's been holding you back? Whether it's crowded teeth, gaps, or a misaligned bite, SmileDirectClub provides invisible aligners that can help you feel more confident and comfortable showing off your gorgeous grin. RELATED: Upgrade Your Oral Hygiene Game With These Top Electrical Toothbrushes From all those close-up shots on Zoom calls and extra time spent primping in front of the mirror (even though you've got no place to go), you might have become more aware of imperfections in your smile. But the thought of sinking a ton of money and time on uncomfortable braces just doesnt seem like a viable option. Fortunately, SmileDirectClubs awesome invisible aligners are not like traditional braces, and they don't require tedious monthly office visits either. Thanks to their advanced teledentistry methods, you can get a straighter, more comfortable smile without ever leaving your home, and for just a few dollars per day. How Does SmileDirectClub Work? Whether you've got a big, long-awaited event coming up later this year, or you just want to look and feel more confident when the world gets back to normal again, it's clear that now is the perfect time to make a positive impact on your pearly whites. And when we say "clear," we really mean it because SmileDirectClub utilizes a series of invisible aligners custom-made for you that slide smoothly over your teeth to help nudge them into proper formation over time. That means no brackets or wires, no metallic taste in your mouth, and no difficulty cleaning your teeth like you would if you had traditional braces. SmileDirectClub / nickgx15 To get started from the comfort of your own home, you can simply request a remote impression kit ($59) that makes taking your own dental impression super quick and easy. Or, you could just pop into your nearest SmileShop for a free 3D scan. All SmileShops take special precautions to keep everything sanitized for your health and safety (especially these days), and they should be able to get you in and out in about 30 minutes or less. Plus, you'll get to see a really cool 3D image of your teeth and what your smile will look like at the end of the process! After theyve got a good look at the inner workings of your mouth, one of SmileDirectClubs state-licensed dentists or orthodontists will review and approve your custom treatment plan. You can opt for invisible aligners that you'll wear 22 hours per day for a straight smile in four to six months. Or, if you prefer to just wear your aligners overnight, you can opt for Nighttime Aligners that you'll wear for 10 continuous hours per day, though your results may take a little longer. Either way, it'll cost you thousands less than traditional braces (which are also way less comfortable and definitely not the biggest fashion statement, either). Once you've received your invisible aligners, you'll be guided along the way with periodic virtual Smile Check-Ins. You'll also have 24/7/365 access to a dental care team if you have any questions or concerns, and you can track your progress online and on your smartphone, too. How Can SmileDirectClub Help Your Smile? SmileDirectClub's aligners can help fix crowding and spacing issues, as well a variety of misaligned bites. These issues can be cosmetic, of course. But some might also cause discomfort in your jaw and lead to headaches, while others can make eating and talking uncomfortable. Knowing this, it's clear that wanting to fix your smile doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with vanity. In the end, it's really all about the health of your teeth, gums, and jaw, and improving your overall quality of life. Teeth Crowding: When theres just not enough space along the jawbone for all of your teeth, things can get crowded and result in teeth that twist and overlap. Its a super common issue, however, and can be fixed fairly easily with an invisible aligner. Teeth Spacing: Gaps between teeth can be hereditary, or they can be caused by habits such as tongue thrusting. Either way, SmileDirectClub has a ton of experience with this common issue and can devise a plan to fix your spacing problems with their custom clear aligners. SmileDirectClub / Jonathan Pena Overbite: When the upper front teeth almost completely cover the lower teeth when the mouth is closed, the teeth, gums, and jaw joints can become damaged over time, especially if you grind your teeth. Similarly, an overjet is when the upper front teeth protrude further forward horizontally, such as in the case of buck teeth. Fortunately, mild to moderate forms of both can be fixed with SmileDirectClub's clear aligners. Underbite: This common misalignment involves the lower teeth extending out past the upper teeth when the mouth is closed, which can make it difficult to chew properly, and can even lead to headaches, sleep apnea, and speech issues. Its definitely not something to play around with, so its a good thing that invisible aligners from SmileDirectClub can correct an underbite involving single pairs of upper and lower teeth. Crossbite: As the name implies, this misalignment can cause teeth to appear "crossed," with some upper teeth sitting behind the lower teeth while others sit in front. This can cause teeth to chip or wear unevenly over time, and could even lead to receding gums or bone loss, so it's definitely something you'd want to get fixed. Fortunately, SmileDirectClub has experience with this issue, too, and can correct a localized crossbite with invisible aligners. How Much Does SmileDirectClub Cost? SmileDirectClub is committed to helping people obtain a smile they'll love without dropping a fortune. That's why you can make a one-time payment of $1950, or opt for a $250 deposit followed by monthly payments of $89 over the course of two years. However, if you've got a dental plan that provides orthodontic benefits, your invisible aligners may even be covered by insurance. In that case, SmileDirectClub's people will connect with your insurance company's people to make sure you only need to pay a minimized balance after discounts and coverage costs are taken out of the equation. SmileDirectClub / ShelbyLynn Cribb Overall, it's estimated that SmileDirectClubs clear aligners are about 60-percent cheaper than traditional braces, and theyre cheaper than their competitors in the field of invisible aligners, too. What Are People Saying About SmileDirectClub? To date, SmileDirectClub has helped more than a million people feel more comfortable showing off their smiles. Among tens tens of thousands of positive reviews online, users rave about their fantastic results and how much they appreciated the ease and convenience of the entire process. "I had a lot of questions about whether this product works ... They patiently answered each question, and I felt comfortable moving forward. Let me tell you, if they can fix my teeth, they can fix anybody's teeth." Craig G. "The impression kit came in one day and was so easy. Everything was in there, including all the stuff to ship it back. It was very easy to follow the instructions and do the impressions." Makayla R. "I was pretty nervous to straighten my teeth without traditional braces at first, but Im so happy I decided to try! My experience was overall very positive, and things went smoothly ... Both of my SmileShop visits were pleasant and helpful, and everytime Ive had to call customer service I reached someone right away and had all of my questions answered. I would recommend this company to anyone who wants to straighten their teeth without a hassle." Fawn C. With so many positive reviews, its clear to see thats no longer any good reason to hide your smile. Thanks to SmileDirectClubs premium experience at an affordable cost, you too can tap into the ultimate convenience of a confident and comfortable smile. You Might Also Dig: AskMen may get paid if you click a link in this article and buy a product or service. To find out more, please read our complete terms of use. A consortium, which won the bid to acquire India-based Jet Airways, expects to restart operations of the defunct airline in four to six months, a report said. The operations will start once approval is reeived for its revival plan from India's National Company Law Tribunal, the country's top bankruptcy court, the report in Khaleej Times said. The consortium, comprising Murari Lal Jalan, a low-profile UAE businessman, and Kalrock Capital, London-based investment fund, submitted an Rs10 billion plan to re-launch the debt-ridden airline in November 2020, the report said. Abu Dhabis Etihad Aviation Group holds 24 per cent of Jet Airways which reportedly owes more than $3 billion to lenders, lessors, staff and other suppliers, it said. On the required funding to restart the airline, Jalan said it was not a concern during the first stage or for maybe a year or two. Everything is planned properly and we are going with the plan. In the beginning, the consortium plans to start operations with 25 aircraft. Of this, 18-20 would be narrow body aircraft and 5-7 would be wide body aircraft, it said. California workers could get two more weeks of paid sick leave to care for themselves or their loved ones affected by COVID-19, under a proposal introduced by Democratic legislators this week. Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help We're offering our best deal ever with this Editor's Special. Support local news coverage by subscribing to the Napa Valley Register. If passed, the package would restore a temporary benefit that expired at the end of last year and let more workers stay home to prevent the coronavirus from being spread at workplaces, legislators and labor advocates said. "Really, it's a recognition of the hard work that essential workers have had to do while the rest of the society has been able to safely stay at home," said Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, D-Los Angeles. The proposal would also cover those driving for ridehailing companies such as Uber and Lyft, which would make California one of the first states to offer a paid sick leave benefit for those gig workers. But it remains uncertain whether a recently passed initiative that exempts those companies from a state labor law, Proposition 22, would negate the attempt to extend a benefit to gig workers. A Lyft spokesman referred to Geoff Vetter, a spokesman for the Protect App-Based Drivers and Services Coalition supporting Prop. 22, who said in a statement that they are analyzing the proposal and can't comment on the specifics. Malaysian King Al-Sultan Abdullah Riayatuddin Al-Mustafa Billah Shah wears a face mask as he offers prayers during an opening ceremony for parliament, in Kuala Lumpur, May 18, 2020. Malaysias parliament can sit during an emergency, the king said Wednesday, adding he would consult with Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin on a date for a session, in a move that analysts described as a setback for the unelected PM. A parliamentary sitting could precipitate a no-confidence vote against Muhyiddin, analysts said about the longtime veteran of Malaysian politics who came to power in early March 2020 but who has since lost majority support, according to many lawmakers. Muhyiddin had suspended the legislature when the king declared the emergency on Jan. 12, a move widely criticized by the opposition. But on Wednesday, the monarch said the assumption that parliament could not sit during an emergency was inaccurate based on provisions of the emergency ordinance. King Al-Sultan Abdullah Riayatuddin Al-Mustafa Billah Shah stated his view that Parliament can convene during the emergency and will take effect on a date that His Majesty deems suitable, on the advice of the prime minister, palace spokesman Ahmad Fadil Shamsuddin said in a statement that was issued after the king met on Wednesday with the heads of the lower and upper houses of parliament. This is enshrined under paragraph 14(1)(b) of the Emergency (Essential Powers) Ordinance 2021, which states that parliament may be called, prorogued and dissolved on a date deemed suitable by the king, on the advice of the prime minister, the statement said. Therefore, the perception of some people that the emergency declaration would stop parliament from convening is inaccurate. The provisions in the emergency ordinance have been interpreted differently across the political spectrum, particularly on the issue of whether parliament could be suspended during an emergency. In addition, when Muhyiddin advised the king to declare an emergency until Aug. 1, it was unclear whether he had discussed the decision to suspend parliament with the monarch. As of Wednesday night, that question remained unresolved. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy with the king as head of state. But his position is largely ceremonial, and he has to act in accordance with the wishes of the government. On Wednesday, the king said he had approved the emergency declaration only as a proactive step to curb the spread of COVID-19, Fadil said. The monarch also stressed that Malaysias democracy was based on the Federal Constitution, and the executive, the judiciary and the legislature had to abide by its principles, the palace spokesman said. Muhyiddins advice to the king to declare an emergency occurred at the same time the PM lost the support of two lawmakers, which nominally left him without majority support in parliament. Opposition members and members of a party in the ruling coalition said the PMs advice to the king to declare an emergency was a move to prevent general elections being called in a situation where he had lost majority support and was an attempt to cling to power. The PM had denied the allegation, saying it wasnt his intention to avoid elections, and that polls would be held as soon as the pandemic was under control. Opposition leader Anwar and leaders of parties within his Pakatan Harapan coalition said that they supported the kings wish to convene parliament, and urged Muhyiddin to do so in March. This is also the stance of Pakatan and a majority of the MPs that the executive and judiciary can work during the Emergency, they said in a joint statement on Wednesday. Therefore we fully support his majestys wishes to restore parliaments position in playing a crucial role within the Federal Constitution, by highlighting issues and problems faced by the rakyat [people] in containing the COVID-19 pandemic as well as mapping the steps to revitalize the national economy. There will surely be calls for a no-confidence vote If parliament resumes sessions, there will be attempts to file no-confidence motions against Muhyiddin, said Tunku Mohar Mokhtar of the International Islamic University of Malaysia If the parliament is re-convened, there will surely be calls for a no-confidence vote, Mokhtar told BenarNews. James Chin, an Asian politics expert at the University of Tasmania, agreed, saying there would be attempts to topple Muhyiddin if a parliamentary session was held. This current move is a setback for Muhyiddin, he told the Agence France-Presse news agency. Bridget Welsh, a political scientist with Nottingham University based in Malaysia, said she could not speak to the kings motivation in issuing the statement about parliament convening more than a month after it was suspended. We do know that Pakatan Harapan members in the kings committee and many in the public have called for parliament to sit, to be a check on the government and to contribute to a needed wider discussion on the problems facing the country, Welsh told BenarNews. She was referring to Anwars coalition, and to an emergency committee to advise the king during the emergency, which comprises ruling and opposition lawmakers. Muhyiddin, however, has some time before parliament will have to be called, as vaccine administration has not fully started. The earliest any election can be called will depend on COVID-19, Welsh said. Muhyiddin may have a chance to boost his popularity with the inoculation campaign, Welsh said, but that depends on how well it is run. On Wednesday, Muhyiddin received the nations first COVID-19 vaccine shot, as health authorities began the first phase of the drive that aims to inoculate 500,000 health care and frontline workers. A day earlier, Khairy Jamaluddin, minister overseeing the vaccination program, told Channel News Asia that Malaysia may be ready for a general election once half of its 32 million population is inoculated. That could be as soon as September, he said. BEIRUT, Lebanon A court in Germany convicted a former Syrian secret police officer on Wednesday of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity for his role in arresting and transporting protesters to an interrogation center known for torture nearly a decade ago. The defendant, Eyad al-Gharib, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. He is the first former Syrian official to be convicted of crimes against humanity, in a case that rights groups have hailed as a landmark in the effort to ensure justice for violations committed during Syrias civil war. The conviction is a message to all criminals who still commit the most horrific crimes in Syria that the time of impunity is over, and you will not find a safe place to go, Anwar al-Bunni, a Syrian lawyer and activist, said in a statement. As the Syrian war nears its 10th anniversary, the country is marred by destruction and sinking into a profound economic crisis, with poverty and hunger spreading. But President Bashar al-Assad remains in power, after his governments widespread use of violence and torture to stamp out an uprising that sought to push him from power. Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. Transcript Request Policy As of February 23, 2021, MCLA has authorized Parchment to fulfill all official electronic and paper transcript requests. To contact Parchment for questions on how to order, or for updates on current orders, please call 833-781-7236 between the hours of 8am 4pm PST MCLA has authorized Parchment to provide official transcripts in electronic or paper format. Ordering your official transcripts through Parchment provides you with the most efficient and convenient method of ordering transcripts online. All official transcript orders will need to be placed online through the Parchment portal. Transcripts are not available for pick-up at this time. MCLA policy prohibits faxing transcripts. 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A Belfast DJ who died in hospital hours after an incident involving the PSNI was suffering from acute behavioural disturbance (ABD), a condition that should have been treated as a medical emergency, an inquest has heard. Instead, the hearing into the death of Gerard McMahon was told police arriving at the scene believed he was under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs. Mr McMahon (36), from Short Strand, became unresponsive while being restrained by officers called to a disturbance in Great Victoria Street on September 8, 2016. Two of the officers, identified as A and C, gave evidence that while they were aware of the signs of ABD, which include unexplained bouts of anger, bizarre behaviour and unnatural strength, they concluded that because Mr McMahon was "compliant and quite cooperative", he was under the influence of drink and/or drugs. Both officers said that while ABD was covered in their training, it was not at the forefront of their minds when they were dealing with Mr McMahon. The court heard how Mr McMahon was discovered in Great Victoria Street wearing only a pair of boxer shorts and behaving erratically. Officers placed him in handcuffs as "he was a danger to himself" before moving him to the steps of the Grand Opera House. The two officers had also responded to a report at 3am of a disturbance caused by a man in a state of undress acting erratically, where witnesses said they believed the man was "just under the influence". They suspected it was Mr McMahon. Officer A said that initially Mr McMahon was "compliant" and "cooperative" and had been joking with them while they waited on a cell van to arrive to take him to the police station, but he became very aggressive, both verbally and physically, and tried to get up from where he had been placed. Officer A told the inquest in Belfast, heard by Coroner Joe McCrisken: "As I and another officer tried to prevent Mr McMahon from escaping, we were being thrown about like wet rags." The officer described how they struggled against Mr McMahon's strength and he warned the prisoner that if he didn't comply CS spray would be used. Officer A said the CS spray appeared to have no effect at all on Mr McMahon, which the court later was told was also in accordance with symptoms of ABD, and that placing someone with ABD in a prone position, especially after a violent outburst, could be fatal. The court heard how two of the officers restrained Mr McMahon by holding him by the shoulders while a third held him by the legs and applied limb restraints to his ankles and knees. Officer C said that even with the restraints applied, Mr McMahon was able to lift him "nearly off the ground". The court heard that in the midst of the struggle Mr McMahon became "very quiet" and one officer said "I think he has stopped breathing", and "had turned a funny colour". Officer A said Mr McMahon was placed on his back and restraints removed while he radioed for an ambulance and back-up; CPR was also administered. Despite the efforts of officers at the scene and paramedics, Mr McMahon passed away in the Royal Victoria Hospital. The inquest continues. Armed civilian groups that rose to prominence by rejecting Gov. Gretchen Whitmers authority last year view themselves as heirs to a long tradition of well regulated militias defending the country in times of crisis. There are just two problems with that: Michigan law explicitly states militias must follow the governors orders, and private civilian militias have no right to exist under Michigan law or the U.S. Constitution. The First and Second amendments guarantee the right to speak freely, carry firearms and peaceably assemble, covering many of the activities enjoyed by members of paramilitary groups that rallied against Whitmer. But that doesnt mean militia is the correct term to describe them. The Michigan Military Act defines an organized militia comprised of the National Guard and the state defense force and an unorganized militia made up of able-bodied citizens between the ages of 17 and 60. Both serve under the authority of the governor and can be activated in response to terrorism, insurrections, invasions, disasters and other emergencies. Neither term applies to the Wolverine Watchmen, a group of men accused of spending months training with firearms and planning an operation to kidnap Whitmer. Members of the group called themselves militiamen, according to federal court documents, but they were charged as terrorists. An excerpt of an Oct. 13, 2020 hearing in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan shows how law enforcement officials discussed how "militia" was used to describe a group of men accused of planning to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. (Screenshot) The same law that allowed Whitmer to declare a state of emergency after the pandemic also allows her to activate Michigans militia to apprehend terrorists. The Legislature updated the Emergency Management Act in 2002 after the 9/11 attacks. JoEllen Vinyard, a retired professor of history and researcher of right-wing social movements, said Michigans militia groups of the 1990s were formed to campaign against perceived government overreach. Operating under state control was antithetical to their reason for existing. They saw themselves as protecting the people from a government which could be dangerous to the population; a government that had been duped and was being fooled about a number of issues and would eventually march on the people, Vinyard said. An online handbook for the Michigan Militia Corps argues militia should refer to a concept of universally armed people instead of any particular organized unit like the National Guard. The MMCW, Michigans oldest known existing paramilitary group, declined to comment for this story. Michael McDaniel, a law professor and retired brigadier general with the Michigan National Guard, said that interpretation of militia isnt supported by law. The connotation of a citizen militia is that they have some legal standing on their own, and they do not, McDaniel said. Regardless, modern paramilitary groups surfaced last year to oppose coronavirus restrictions and act as a civilian defense force. Related: The ties that bind the men behind the plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer McDaniel said its not illegal to join a group that calls itself a militia, but paramilitary organizations fall on the wrong side of the law when they take on roles reserved for police and military. Michigan law also prohibits people from training with firearms or explosives if they have reason to believe what is being taught could be used to cause civil disorder, defined as a public disturbance that causes danger to property or people. The Michigan Attorney Generals Office declined to comment on its interpretation of the law surrounding paramilitary activity and training. Armed vigilantes appeared across the country to protect cities from rioters. Some groups saw themselves as supporting law enforcement efforts to deter riots by guarding businesses and public buildings. Kyle Rittenhouse, an 18-year-old Illinois man, faces five felony charges after traveling to Kenosha, Wisconsin to protect businesses from protests against police brutality that at times turned violent last summer. Rittenhouse is accused of shooting three men, including two who died, with a rifle he borrowed from a friend. Videos posted on social media show Rittenhouse and militia members having friendly interactions with police that day. We appreciate you guys, says one officer in a widely circulated video. We really do. Angela Austin, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Michigan, said coordination between law enforcement and militia groups carries on a historic tradition of white supremacists using extra-judicial force to abuse people of color. The idea that you actually had a president who on national television and on social media deputized random people to dominate and cause harm to people like me -- like there were people in my community who were on Facebook posting and encouraging people to get on the rooftops and shoot Black Lives Matter protesters, said Austin, a Lansing resident. Steven Liedel, an attorney who specializes in constitutional law and served as chief counsel to former Gov. Jennifer Granholm, said the law doesnt support independent citizens using violence to protect private business owners. We generally disabuse the notion of vigilante justice, Liedel said Arguably, they can be interfering with law enforcement when theyre engaging in those sort of activities. Theyre deciding for themselves whos violating the law and who is not. Theres no due process and theres no training, and thats just vigilante justice, which is not permitted. Lowell Police Chief Steve Bukala was forced to resign last year after siding with armed vigilantes who patrolled the city. Bukala told the story during a September 2020 conference held by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Police Officers Association, an organization that asserts county sheriffs have the ultimate authority to interpret laws within their jurisdictions. Bukala told the audience that snowflakes in the Grand Rapids City Council allowed rioters to go unchallenged and the city was nearly destroyed by Black Lives Matter protesters. A day of peaceful protest was followed by destructive riots when night fell on May 30, though the city was far from being nearly destroyed. Rioters caused an estimated $2.1 million in damage by breaking downtown windows as well as looting some stores and setting fire to police vehicles. Related: Looking back at Grand Rapids riot, the damage and charges in unprecedented melee Bukala said neighboring cities like Lowell were on high alert after the incident, so he put together a plan to strengthen his ranks with armed civilians. I didnt realize at the time I was activating our militia, and I didnt even know what a militia was at the time, Bukala said during the conference. In a matter of 30 minutes, we would have had 100 armed citizens, business owners, firefighters and our small police force massing for a riot that would have been in the downtown Lowell area. I told this plan to the city manager -- and hes from the east side, near the Detroit area, so hes a left-winger -- and you would have thought he would have had diarrhea through a screen door with the look on his face. Bukala said he received a phone call the next day from four private citizens who were preparing to arm themselves and defend the city. I talked to these gentlemen, and I said, I understand what youre doing and I would appreciate if you see something, I would like you to call. I do not want you to engage. You do not have the authority to engage. But if you call us we will show up in mass and you can support us, Bukala said. Bukala posted a message on the police departments Facebook page notifying residents about the armed posse and saying they had the departments support. The post was met with backlash from residents who felt the group meant to intimidate people of color in the community. No further rioting transpired. Militias also appeared in Sterling Heights during a Black Lives Matter march last year. Detroit Will Breathe organizer Sammie Lewis said demonstrators were wary of civilians who brought dogs and weapons to intimidate them. Organized paramilitary groups also engaged in other security operations last year. The Michigan Home Guard stood watch outside an Owosso barbershop with the intent of preventing state police from issuing the owner a ticket for staying open in defiance of emergency coronavirus orders. Michael Wacyk, commander of the Michigan Home Guard, declined to speak with MLive for this story, citing a disastrous leftist/socialist-based untruthful media interview with 60 Minutes that was published last October. Members of the Home Guard were recorded saying Rittenhouse did nothing wrong in Kenosha. When asked about the kidnapping plot, second-in-command Adam Peisker told 60 Minutes that Whitmer brought it on herself by imposing COVID-19 restrictions. The Michigan Liberty Militia provided security at anti-Whitmer protests organized by the American Patriot Council, including an April 30 rally where protesters entered the Capitol and demanded admission to the House floor. Some protesters armed with rifles loomed over lawmakers from the Senate gallery, including two brothers who were charged in the Whitmer kidnapping plot. American Patriot Council co-founder Ryan Kelley organized the rally to coincide with a vote of the Legislature on extending Whitmers coronavirus emergency declaration. Kelley was photographed outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, when a mob tried to prevent Congress from certifying the presidential election. McDaniel, the retired National Guard general, said paramilitary groups that operate outside the states authority still considered former President Donald Trump their commander-in-chief. Trumps April 17 call via Twitter to liberate Michigan was seen as an order, similar to his remark that the Proud Boys should stand back and stand by, he said. Once you open that can of political violence, you cant screw the lid back on, McDaniel said. State law doesnt specifically regulate paramilitary activity. As long as members arent planning violence or break other laws, these groups are often left alone. Theres a very strong streak of this right of seclusion in Michigan, he said. Secondly, we have a culture of guns in this country and in the state. Thirdly, some of these groups dont seek to overthrow the government. Its easy to disparage them and say theyre just running through the woods, carrying weapons and playing army, but some of them truly believe that theyre part of the unorganized militia and have been helpful on occasion with doing public service. The fourth reason, perhaps the strongest, is if youre a prosecutor, youre not going to go looking for trouble. You dont want to rile up part of your base and you especially dont want to martyr them. The FBI began surveilling the Wolverine Watchmen in early 2020 after learning members of the group were discussing acts of violence against government officials and police, according to federal court documents. Court proceedings against the terror suspects are ongoing. Greek island holidays could be on the cards as soon as May as the country examines opening its borders early. Greece is looking into whether it can give an early green light to British tourists who have received the vaccine. The move would break from the rest of the European Union, which is pushing for a united and cautious approach to reopening non-essential travel from outside the bloc. Greek island holidays could be on the cards as soon as May as the country examines opening its borders early It comes as Greece has recorded a total of 182,783 Covid-19 cases and 6,343 deaths. Over the previous 24 hours, the country recorded 2,111 new cases and 22 new deaths. Athens is seeking to boost the country's vital holiday industry, which has taken a hit due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The government is considering plans to allow in British visitors who can prove that they have been vaccinated Covid-19 in time for the summer months, according to a report in The Times. It comes as Greece has recorded a total of 182,783 Covid-19 cases and 6,343 deaths. Over the previous 24 hours, the country recorded 2,111 new cases and 22 new deaths Athens is also putting in plans to ensure that airport staff and hotel employees will receive a vaccine. The reopening of the country would be in contrast with EU leaders who are expected to say that it is too soon to start lifting restrictions on non-essential travel. A video call in which EU leaders will gather to warn that infections are still too high to remove travel restrictions is expected to state that the 'epidemiological situation remains serious, and the new variants pose additional challenges.' On Monday, Boris Johnson revealed that foreign travel for leisure and holidays will be banned until at least May 17. Mr Johnson's roadmap out of lockdown said foreign holidays will not be allowed for at least another 12 weeks with scant detail on how the final decision to open up air travel will be made. Athens is seeking to boost the country's vital holiday industry, which has taken a hit due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Above, Oia on the island of Santorini Greece is looking into whether it can give an early green light to British tourists who have received the vaccine. Elafonisi beach on the island of Crete is pictured above Critics have called the decision to wait until May 17 to open up flights a 'hammer blow' to the aviation industry, which directly and indirectly supports up to 4million jobs and around 100,000 businesses in the UK. Gloria Guevara, President & CEO of the World Travel & Tourism Council, based in London, told MailOnline: 'Delaying the return of international travel until mid-May will come as yet another hammer blow to the already struggling Travel & Tourism sector, which has been battling to survive for the best part of a year. 'The sector was banking its hopes on a quicker return to international travel, so there will be widespread dismay at this news. Its return is crucial if the UK economy is to recover from the ravages of the pandemic, given the sector generates 200billion to the UK's GDP'. Boris Johnson says that international travel will begin at May 17th the earliest - but only after a review is completed on April 12 There are also growing calls in the industry for vaccine passports - but there is no mention of them in relation to foreign travel in Mr Johnson's roadmap. But there will be a review of 'potential uses to enable access to settings' with 'Covid status certification' - with the conclusions published before June 21. The Government has said a final decision on when international travel can restart will be made before a review is completed by the Department for Transport after Easter, causing yet more uncertainty for those dreaming of going abroad. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that vaccine requirements for international travel would be in violation of legally binding international health rules. The organisation stressed that there are still some uncertainties regarding the effectiveness of vaccination and called on governments not to introduce vaccination or immunity requirements as a condition of entry for international travel. 'There are still too many fundamental unknowns in terms of the effectiveness of the vaccines in reducing virus transmission and vaccines are still only available in limited quantities,' the committee said. Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release SubCategory Select Sub-Category US President Joe Biden would not be okay if the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, the White House has said, underlining that there is an ongoing process of considering the next steps to ensure peace in the war-torn country. The US and the Taliban reached an agreement in February 2020 that called for a permanent ceasefire, peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government, and a withdrawal of all foreign forces by May 1. There are about 2,500 US troops currently in the country. The Taliban had their ouster at the hands of US-led troops in 2001. I don't think he would say he'd be okay with that, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Tuesday when asked if Biden is okay with the Taliban ruling Afghanistan. But again, there's an ongoing process of considering the next steps in Afghanistan. That's an ongoing discussion, and I'm not going to get ahead of where that sits at this point in time, Psaki said. Separately, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said that Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has been in constant communication with Afghan partners about the ongoing review process and how they are working their way through that. We are mindful of looming deadlines here and everybody shares the sense of alacrity when it comes to working our way through this review but we want to do it in a thoughtful, deliberate way, to make sure that whatever decisions are made, they're the best ones, that are in our best national security interests and certainly the security interests of our allies and partners, and that includes the Afghan people, he said. Meanwhile, during a Congressional hearing General (retd) Joseph F. Dunford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told lawmakers that Taliban gets its financial support from the drug trade. We know that the Taliban have had sanctuary in Pakistan. We know that they have an active diplomatic effort travelling to Moscow, travelling to Beijing, travelling to other countries. We know they travel in the Gulf. We know Iran has provided some material support, he said. The Taliban, he said is a Sunni terrorist organisation. There's no question that the Taliban originates from the madrassas in Pakistan, he said in response to a question. Dunford told lawmakers that the terrorist threat has been reduced because of the US-trained Afghan forces and continued US military presence. We believe that the threat can reconstitute itself in a period of about 18 to 36 months and present a threat to the homeland and to our allies, he said adding that the Afghan forces are highly dependent on US funding, as well as operational support. They will remain so for some time. The probability of civil war is high in the wake of a precipitous US withdrawal, he said, adding that Afghanistan meets the definition of a fragile state. Despite very real challenges, with support, the Afghan government can deliver minimally effective governance. Dunford, who chairs the Afghan Study Group of the US Institute of Peace, told lawmakers that the Taliban were not meeting the conditionality of the February 2020 agreement. That was as a result of not seeing a broad reduction in violence and as a result of not seeing the Taliban demonstrate the will or capacity to prevent Al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a platform. We are not advocating for a unilateral declaration that we remain behind after the first of May. We're recommending that the Taliban actually hear that same message from other regional stakeholders, not the least of which is China, Russia and Pakistan, he said. We do think that continued negotiations with the Taliban to highlight the fact that we remain committed to the February 2020 Agreement. We have demonstrated that, by drawing down to 2,500, we remain committed, he said. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) Married At First Sight has already showed an impressive array of weddings since its launch show on Monday. But Wednesday's wedding between self-proclaimed 'hot teacher' Alana Lister and larrikin Jason Engler looks by far to be the most opulent to date. In a trailer for the new episode, the gorgeous bride is seen waltzing down the aisle at Sydney's iconic State Theatre located in the heart of the city's CBD. Scroll down for video Exquisite: Wednesday's wedding between self-proclaimed 'hot teacher' Alana Lister and larrikin Jason Engler looks by far to be the most opulent to date Surrounded by flowers, candles and an elegant white carpet, the mesmerising setting looks like something out of a fairytale as the duo say their 'I do's' in front of friends and family. While so many of the other MAFS weddings were set outdoors, Alana and Jason enjoyed a beautifully romantic indoor setting at the historic site. On the theatre's website, it claims guests are able to enjoy pre-dinner drinks on the Juliet Balcony, before hosting guests for a sit down banquet at the Grand Assembly. Beautiful: On the theatre's website, it claims guests are able to enjoy a pre-dinner drinks on the Juliet Balcony, before hosting guests for a sit down banquet at the Grand Assembly Iconic: Acts which have graced the stage at the iconic venue - built in the 1930s - include Shirley Bassey, Prince, John Legend and Whoopi Goldberg Picturesque: While so many of the other MAFS weddings were set outdoors, Alana and Jason enjoyed a beautifully romantic indoor setting at the historic site Epic: The State Theatre is located on Market Street in the heart of Sydney's shopping district Acts which have graced the stage at the iconic venue - built in the 1930s - include Shirley Bassey, Prince, John Legend and Whoopi Goldberg. While little is known about Alana's private life, the soon-to-be reality star has been teaching both primary and college students since at least 2014. In the trailer, Alana is seen saying: 'Coming up to 30 with no kids and a husband is not somewhere I want to be in my life.' Stunning: Alana will tie the knot with Jason Engler, who was surrounded by a sea of beautiful white flowers at the end of the aisle But it appears there could already be trouble in paradise for the pair, as Alana is later seen speaking to the camera on her wedding day - with some negative comments about her experience. 'I feel like... that's not what I'm looking for,' she says. Married At First Sight continues Wednesday at 7:30pm on Channel Nine Ireland's Prime Minister Micheal Martin on Tuesday confirmed an extension to certain lockdown restrictions until April to prevent another surge in Covid-19 cases. Earlier in the day, the government opted to extend the maximum level 5 restrictions until April 5. This means non-essential retail, bars, cafes, construction, gyms and other sectors will remain closed. A 5km travel limit will stay in place, as well as a ban on household mixing. However, schools will begin reopening in a phased system from next week. Under this plan, junior and senior infants will return from the start of next month as will first and second class in primary school. Leaving Certificate classes in secondary school will also return at the same time. Childcare will also resume in phases starting with the State's Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) preschool scheme a week later (March 8). Meanwhile, on March 15, the rest of primary school classes will resume. Fifth year students in secondary schools will also return on the same day. After the Easter Holidays, in mid-April, all remaining secondary school students below fifth year will resume with a complete return to education expected. Martin had been under some pressure after his UK counterpart Boris Johnson on Monday unveiled a plan to end COVID-19 restrictions in England by June 21, as long as strict conditions are met. In addition to the restrictions, the government agreed to extend COVID-19 pandemic welfare supports until the end of June. Business representatives in the hospitality industry and other sectors had complained that this third lockdown was killing businesses. (CGTN) Our survey makes it clear that were only at the very beginning of the SASE evolution, and that many organizations dont yet fully appreciate the benefits of going all in on this approach. NetMotion, a provider of security solutions for the worlds growing mobile and remote workforce, today announced the findings of its inaugural Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) global survey, revealing that although many public and private sector organizations have elements of SASE in their IT stack, only 12% worldwide currently have a comprehensive SASE architecture. As the unexpected growth of remote working greatly accelerated conversations around secure remote access solutions, NetMotion surveyed 750 IT leaders, including CIOs, CTOs, IT and network directors, as well as security analysts across legal, finance, public safety, transportation, healthcare and government sectors in Australia, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. The goal was to quantify and qualify the hype around SASE while ascertaining the popularity of various network and security solutions deployed by organizations around the world. The survey also found that two-thirds (67%) of respondents report confidence in their understanding of the comprehensive SASE framework. However, one quarter of organizations (26%) do not embrace the SASE philosophy at all (nor do they have immediate plans to), while just over one-third (35%) currently embrace it in less than half of their technology stack. Other key survey findings include: Only 67% of respondents in the United States can confidently explain the principles of SASE, compared to 81% in the United Kingdom and 78% in Australia The utilities and energy sectors reported the highest share of complete SASE adoption (17%), with legal (14%), finance (12%) and healthcare (11%) following closely behind IT teams are taking the lead in SASE implementation (52%), while security teams (21%) and network teams (18%) are also responsible at some organizations VPN is the most widely deployed SASE solution (54%), followed by WAN optimization (49%), cloud secure web gateways (46%), firewall-as-a-service (39%) and SD-WAN (29%) Despite their hype over the last two years, ZTNA/SDP and edge content filtering are the least widely deployed SASE solutions (15%), although filtering content at the edge is most prevalent in the US (23%), perhaps driven by the need to ensure compliance and security amidst the growth in remote working Only 56% of organizations have begun to adopt a zero-trust posture while 24% do not plan to, suggesting that IT leaders either dont understand zero trust as well as they claim to, or that they are overestimating their own capabilities While SASE is likely to represent the future of network availability, optimization and cybersecurity, our survey revealed that the perception of accelerated adoption is much greater than the current reality, which is that the vast majority of enterprises are not yet close to fully embracing this framework, said Christopher Kenessey, CEO of NetMotion. Our survey makes it clear that were only at the very beginning of the SASE evolution, and that many organizations dont yet fully appreciate the benefits of going all in on this approach. SASE awareness and adoption amidst remote work Coined by Gartner in 2019, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) represents a security framework or philosophy that combines the capabilities of SD-WAN and VPN technologies with cloud-native security functions such as zero-trust network access, CASB, firewalls and other technology. At its heart, SASE is an amalgamation of many existing tools coming together to help businesses reduce network complexity, deliver better security and reduce costs all things that todays distributed organizations desperately need. One of the main factors inhibiting greater SASE adoption is that only 4% of organizations have migrated fully to the cloud, with just over half (51%) having the majority of their apps and services in the cloud, according to our findings. In addition, over 15% of organizations still have at least three quarters of their resources hosted on-premise, a proportion that grows to 39% for government entities and 16% of public safety agencies. By contrast, financial and legal firms are the most likely to have pushed at least three quarters of their resources to the cloud. With organizations slow to adopt a comprehensive SASE stack, it is no surprise that the data also revealed a continued reliance on enterprise VPNs. In fact, over 50% of respondents reported that their organization relied most heavily on VPN for secure remote access during the pandemic. VPNs proved most popular among law firms (56%) and financial service organizations (49%), while 56% of private-sector organizations reported having utilized VPNs for their employees. Public sector leaders, on the other hand, reported only 29% VPN adoption, instead prioritizing cloud secure web gateways (37%) and firewall-as-a-service (42%). These results suggest that modernizing legacy technologies, such as VPNs, firewalls, and secure web gateways (SWG), was a more attractive initiative to IT leaders than the adoption and implementation of new solutions, such as control access security brokers (CASB), ZTNA and edge content filtering, especially since most organizations had goals of scaling existing tools rather than attempting a forklift upgrade. Click here to access the NetMotion SASE report. To learn more about NetMotions SASE platform, visit netmotionsoftware.com and follow the brand on social media @NetMotion. ### About NetMotion Software NetMotion provides security solutions for millions of devices deployed around the world, including 7 of the 10 largest airlines, 85% of US public safety agencies, and a variety of other major organizations ranging from utilities and healthcare to logistics and legal sectors. Customers choose the NetMotion platform for its powerful software-defined perimeter (SDP / ZTNA), experience monitoring and mobile-first enterprise VPN functionality. These solutions stand out for their ability to actively improve the employee experience, validated by a satisfaction rating of 97% and an NPS of 91. NetMotion is headquartered in Seattle, with offices in Victoria, Chicago, London, Tokyo, Sydney and Frankfurt. Deans of Presiding Members from all the 16 regions of the country have called for reforms in the decentralisation system in the country. They named some of the reforms as the improvement in the Funding Sources for Assemblies, payment of improved sitting and ex-gratia allowances as a charge on the consolidated fund and Election of Presiding Members should be by first past the post system or by a simple majority. There should also be contests between the winner and the first runner-up should no candidate attain more than fifty percent of the votes in an election involving more than two contestants. Mr Joseph Korto, National Dean of Presiding Members, who led his colleagues requested that the tenure of Presiding Members for instance, be streamlined with the countrys four- year election cycle just like every other elected office holder. As it is now, the President is elected and made to hold office for four years, so are the Speaker of Parliament, MPs and Unit Committee members, however, for some reason, Presiding Members are only elected to a tenure of two years, Mr Korto lamented. He appealed to Speaker Bagbin to provoke reforms in Parliament so that, the unfair and disruptive situation, where Presiding Members are made to face an Electoral College every two years will stop. The group also asked for a consideration of improvement in the conditions of service of Assembly Members. Mr Korto who doubles as the Dean of Presiding Members in Greater Accra, prayed the Speaker to, institute amendments in the Local Governance Act to engender fairness at all levels of government. The group,who included; the Volta regional Dean of Presiding Members, Mr. Johnny Akpali, the North East regional Dean, Pastor Ibrahim Sebiyam and the Northern Regional Dean, Mr. Abdulai Mohammed, handed over their petition to Speaker Bagbin, on the sidelines of the programme. The Ashanti Regional Dean of Presiding Members, Mr. Isaac Ohene Prempeh said ASK Bagbin is intelligent legally and politically, he is a humble leader respected by the intellectual class and the ordinary masses, those of us in the Akan speaking regions hold Mr. Bagbin in high esteem because of his mega record. Ghana as a nation must honour him at all cost. The Deans praised the Speaker and used the opportunity to officially congratulate him on his elevation to the position of the third highest office of the land. They said Bagbin was the father of the Presiding Members and therefore were hopeful that the necessary reforms would be catalyzed. Speaker Bagbin, after receiving their petition, thanked them and acknowledged their indispensability to Local Government. He said the District Assembly concept was a good system, which was not supposed to be partisan, but was unfortunately politicised. He appealed to them to develop themselves to become conversant with the law. He said it was relevant to call for reforms in decentralization as that had the potential to enhance democracy and grassroot participation and there was the need to embrace ideas from traditional rulers and opinion leaders to express their opinions for the enhancement of decentralisation as sideling them could have negative ramifications for democracy. He said it was unfortunate that 25 Assemblies were still without Presiding Members adding that most of the past Assemblies performed better than the current system because of the supporting staff they had and called for financial empowerment for Assemblies to develop. He promised to assess and have the viable parts of the reforms they were looking for initiated for posterity. Meanwhile they presented a citation to the Speaker as their show of honour to his elevation. 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 South Africa has approved clinical trials of a COVID-19 vaccine candidate designed to protect against variants of the coronavirus. Last week, the country's Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) granted authorization to two biotechnology companies based in California, ImmunityBio and NantKwest, to begin Phase I clinical trials. Their candidate, called the hAd5 T-cell vaccine, targets two parts of the virus: the spike (S) protein and the nucleocapsid (N) protein, The S protein is on the outside of the virus and is more prone to mutations while the N protein is more stable and less likely to mutate. Researchers hope the inoculation will help protect against variants like the ones that emerged in the UK, South Africa and Brazil, which have been shown to lower the efficacy of vaccines compared to the original strains. South Africa is beginning clinical trials of a vaccine developed by two biotechnology companies based in California. Their vaccine targets two parts of the virus: the spike protein, more prone to mutations and the nucleocapsid protein, which is less prone. Pictured: The University of Capetown, which will be conducting clinical trials Researchers hope this will help protect against variants of the coronavirus like those that arose in the UK, South Africa and Brazil and have spread across the U.S. (above) 'The nucleocapsid protein appears to be much more stable and therefore has a lower risk of developing mutations that could risk vaccine failure,' co-investigator Dr Graeme Meintjes, a professor of medicine at the University of Cape Town. told Quartz Africa. The trial's first phase, which is also being tested in the U.S., will look at whether vaccine is safe and effective and whether or not it elicits an immune response. Volunteers will be given two injections administered 21 days apart and eventually compared to those who received a placebo. Like the Johnson & Johnson's vaccine, the ImmunityBio shot combines genetic material from the new virus with the genes of the adenovirus - which causes the common cold - to induce an immune response. ImmunityBio says its vaccine can be stored at standard refrigerators temperatures, which are different than those produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Scientists are also testing versions of the jab that could be stored at room temperature or taken orally, which would make the vaccine easier to distribute, reported Quartz Africa. The trial will also examine whether the vaccine stimulates the production of T-cells and B-cells, types of white blood cells that attack against invaders and are key to immunity. In a statement chairman and CEO of ImmunityBio Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong - a billionaire biotech entrepreneur who is also owner of the Los Angeles Times - said he is very excited about the trials. 'We are excited about the potential of our COVID-19 vaccine candidate and the issues it could solve globally,' he said in a statement. 'Unlike antibody-based vaccines, T-cell-based vaccines kill the infected cell, preventing virus replication, and could provide long-term immune memory to recipients. 'Pursuing a vaccine that does not rely solely on targeting the S protein where the mutations are occurring is of critical importance as multiple variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have appeared globally, with concentrated outbreaks beginning in South Africa.' The daily average of vaccinations has fallen to 1.2 million per day, but it still appears President Joe Biden will reach his goal of 100 million shots in arms in the first 100 days of his term Currently, 44.5 million people - 13.4% of the U.S. population - have received at least dose and 19.8 million - 6% of the population - have received two doses. Also participating in the trial is Dr Tulio de Oliveira, a geneticist at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine in Durban, who identified the mutation known as B1.351. 'Our scientists...have discovered that patients who recovered from the first wave of COVID-19 may no longer be protected from the new local SARS-CoV-2 variants,' he said. 'We are hopeful that by teaming up with ImmunityBio, the now rampant 501Y.V2 variant in our country can soon be eliminated and protected against for good.' Currently, 44.5 million people - 13.4 percent of the U.S. population - have received at least dose and 19.8 million - six percent - have received two doses. Regulatory News: Korian (Paris:KORI) the leading European care and support services group for the elderly and fragile, announces its Q4 revenue and its 2020 results. Sophie Boissard, CEO of Korian Group: "As we take stock of the year, our thoughts are primarily with all of those residents and families who have suffered in this pandemic. I am extremely grateful for the outstanding commitment, resilience and solidarity that Korian teams across the network have shown to maintain service continuity and ensure high level of care quality. I also express my thanks to our stakeholders for their continuous support. We come out of 2020 united around our purpose and our values of Trust, Responsibility and Initiative and with a renewed commitment to build on our care and medical expertise to provide to elderly and fragile people solutions that offer them freedom of choice. We will continue on these foundations to innovate and invest in our people and in our capabilities to tackle the longevity challenge and fit to the needs of patients and residents." Strong commitment and collective mobilisation to affront the pandemic Full Covid processes in place: hospital level hygiene standards audited by Bureau Veritas, adapted and secured supply chain, 100,000 tests per week 76% of residents1 and 43% of staff2 vaccinated Korian delivering on its ESG roadmap taken in 2020, with tangible results Strong progression of net client satisfaction score 3 by 400 bps and a gross satisfaction score of 94% by 400 bps and a gross satisfaction score of 94% Doubling of the number of staff engaged in qualifying training programs (from 4% to 8% of staff) Launch of low-carbon action plan in line with -40% roadmap (between 2018 and 2030) Revenue up 7.2% ( 3 874m) fuelled by resilient organic growth and active buy and build strategy 2% organic growth supported by the geographical and activity mix New platforms in Spain and Netherlands bringing 20% of reported growth Additional healthcare capacities (post-acute, outpatient, mental health) represent 40% of reported growth Home care services confirm growth potential (+25% in 2020) EBITDA Margin above guidance at 13.6% excluding one-off costs (12.9% with Covid-19 one-off costs) Network of 1,000 facilities, 6,000 additional beds (+32% vs. 2019), of which 1,500 greenfield beds and 15 clinics with new outpatient places Acceleration of diversification strategy 2/3 of investments in high demand healthcare segment; including leading positions in mental health and specialised post-acute care in France and digital innovation for e-care pathways Geographical expansion with exclusive negotiations to acquire high end platform in the UK in 2021 Strengthened balance sheet: financial leverage of 3.0x, real estate LTV of 55% on value of 2.7bn Proposed dividend of 0.30 per share Guidance confirmed for 2022: >4.5 billion revenue with 15.5% of EBITDA margin Adapted to a long term Covid-19 environment and vaccination programme well advanced Korian has been constantly mobilised throughout 2020 to protect its staff and residents from the Covid-19 virus pandemic. From March 2020, the Group has taken numerous initiatives to be able to operate on the long run in the Covid-19 environment, such as: Deploying hospital level hygiene standards across the Group, audited by Bureau Veritas (98% outstanding or very good level of compliance) adapted therapeutical protocols, in clinics as well as in nursing homes access to dedicated teleconsultation platforms (operated by Omedys in France) on-site testing capabilities for teams and external visitors permanent rolling stocks of PPE covering 2 months' utilisation connexion tools to maintain links between patients and residents with families. The network is presently focused on finalising the first vaccination campaign in close coordination with the local authorities. To date, 76% of residents4 have received their first dose and 43% of staff5, this first campaign should be finalize by end of March 2021. Korian would like to thank its staff members, its patients and residents and all its local stakeholders for the resilience and the sense of solidarity they have demonstrated over the past months to contain and mitigate the virus threat. The positive feedback provided locally by internal and external stakeholders is a strong encouragement to all staff members to remain mobilized. As is the high level of the overall satisfaction score of patients and residents: according to the yearly survey performed in November across Europe in all Korian facilities, gross satisfaction scores at 94%, with a significant increase of 400 bps of the net satisfaction score6 Sustained ESG commitments: Korian ahead of its roadmap Over 2020, the Group has been focusing more than ever on its contribution to its different stakeholders, namely, patients and residents, their relatives, its staff members, local communities and partners, the medical community, academics and associations and the Group's investors and shareholders. In a context where strong solidarity is required to fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, Korian has dedicated part of its network taking care of Covid-19 patients and sharing the burden with public hospitals (5,620 patients cared for across Europe). It has also been actively contributing to 3 promising medical research programmes, through the Korian Foundation and the French Foundation for medical Research (FRM), conducted by the Institut Pasteur, INSERM and Paris University Hospital (AP-HP). All these actions have been financed through the Korian Covid-19 solidarity fund created in April 2020 and funded by the donations from Korian executives and directors. Korian has continued to invest in the quality of the care provided, notably the ISO 9001 certification has progressed this year with 11% of facilities now certified (versus 8% in 2019), the roll-out of Positive Care will be a priority in 2021 after being suspended during the pandemic. The Group has increased its investment into its people over the period, notably in terms of training and skill development. Korian has opened two new learning hubs in Europe (Lyon, Munich) to support internal qualifying training and promotion programs. It has also created in France the first integrated care apprenticeship school, that will train up to 500 nurse apprentices by 2022. Thanks to these actions, the Group has already reached by the end of 2020 its target to have 8% of its permanent staff (~4,320 people) engaged in qualifying training programmes, well ahead of its 2023 target. It has therefore decided to set a new target of 10% of its permanent staff by 2023. The Group has been driving numerous initiatives to improve the attractivity and the quality of work: reducing the portion of temporary staff members by increasing the recruitment of permanent staff members (11,000 recruitments done in 2020), promoting health and safety at work through adapted training, psychological support and qualitative work environment, aligning and increasing compensation and benefit policies, along with the financial support provided by the public payers, especially in France and Germany, teaming up with selected partner such as FACE to provide adapted support to staff members in their private life (legal support, education programme, medical support). Thanks to all these actions, Korian has been awarded as a Top Employer in Germany in 2020, being the first care company to earn this distinction. Korian, as an innovative move in the care industry, set out in early 2020 a comprehensive mid-term ESG roadmap, encompassing 15 objectives, based on its main stakeholders expectations and fully embedded in its corporate project "In Caring Hands". At the end of the year the Group is ahead on its ESG roadmap. Over the year the following milestones have been achieved: Staff on qualifying training programmes doubling from 4% to 8% of permanent employees Staff average tenure increasing from 6.7 to 6.9 years thanks to a reduced turnover ISO 9001 qualification of our sites from 8% to 11% First milestones delivered to reduce carbon footprint by 40% by 2030 (vs 2018), with a first reduction of 6.4% in 2020 of energy consumption, 80% of purchases done locally. Digital investments bringing value The pandemic has shown the value of each Korian facility being entirely integrated into its local ecosystem with the families and local healthcare professionals in particular. The Group's digital strategy has enabled an efficient integration in each local ecosystem, especially during the peak of the pandemic. The deployment of Omedys telemedicine system has been strongly contributing to care continuity in nursing homes and clinics during the pandemic with over 10,000 teleconsultations. MoveInMed, a Korian tech subsidiary was able to design and deploy e-rehabilitation platforms to ensure continuous supervision at home despite lockdown, while the Medicalib solution, as a market place for paramedical staff, supported the work of our local home care agencies. Last but not least, Korian Generation, a dedicated social network whose development is now supported by Technosens, another Korian digital company, has been used extensively to connect residents and families and is now used by over 8,500 families. All these initiatives pave the way for a further acceleration of the digitization of the service offering both in inpatient and outpatient fields. The consolidated audited financial statements for 2020 were approved by the Board of Directors at its meeting of 24th February 2021. The Statutory Auditors are in the process of issuing a report with an unqualified opinion. The consolidated financial statements were prepared in accordance with the IFRS 16 standard. For purposes of comparability, the financial information below is presented excluding the application of IFRS 16. Q4 revenue and Full year revenue and results 2020 Strong growth from recent acquisitions with resilient organic performance Revenue in Q4 2020 increased by 10.9%, topping 1 billion euros of revenue with 1,036.4 million. The organic growth was 4.7% driven notably by Germany and continued development in diversified solutions. This reflects the resilience of the Group and a strong contribution from bolt-on acquisitions. In 2020, revenue totalled 3,874 million, up 7.2%. The recent acquisitions of the Group have contributed and shown their pertinence, the Spanish and Dutch platforms contributing to 20% of the overall growth. The healthcare activities of the Group remain a key driver representing 40% of the Group's growth, reflecting the acquisitions in France and Italy and the ongoing transformation of the network and the increase in ambulatory care. The increase in chronic diseases and the need for innovative, ambulatory solutions will continue to drive demand. In 2020, Korian increased outpatient capacities by 25% in France and increased patients consultations by 70% in Italy. Organic growth of 2% reflects the solidity of the diversified geographic footprint, with notably a contribution of 4.2% organic growth of Germany and the diversified business model reflected in the 18% organic growth in Home Care (representing 0.4% of Group organic growth). The Group has added c.6,000 beds to its portfolio in 2020 and 107 additional facilities, reaching 88,651 beds and 1,000 facilities in operation at the end of the year. Korian's multi-local strategy aims to provide a diversified care pathway, at a local level. The Group has delivered c. 1,500 greenfield beds in 2020 and has a strong pipeline of greenfield projects, notably in the Netherlands, France and Germany with a focus on small sized structures, as well as in healthcare. The Group aims to deliver c. 3,000 greenfield beds per year in the coming years. In 2020, the Group has completed 19 acquisitions, representing 1.2Bn of investment. The acquisitions had a focus on the medical capability of the Group. Investment in this area represents 68% of the investments. Overall, the 39 acquisitions of 2019 and 2020 should generate c. 600m of revenue at run rate. The Group has significantly increased its medical footprint in 2020 with notably 2 acquisitions in France: 5 Sante specialised in respiratory care and Inicea an innovative player in the growing mental health segment in France, making Korian the third largest player in mental health in France. The acquisition of Inicea provides Korian with a strong platform of mental health capabilities, with innovative and outpatient capacities. The mental health segment has proved exceptionnaly resilient to the Covid-19 crisis and there continues to be a growing demand. The pipeline of projects within Inicea and the ramp-up of the capabilities allows the Group to aim at 6% of organic growth in this segement in the coming years. Both of these acquisitions reflect the focus of the Group on specialised medical care and the development of ambulatory and outpatient care capacity. The Group has continued its step by step build up in Spain and Netherlands, two footholds taken by the Group in 2019. The Spanish platform has doubled the number facilities to 16 since the first acquisition and has proved its resilience during the pandemic with revenue up 30% to 33m in 2020. In the Netherlands, the Group has continued to acquire regional networks of small sized homes with a strong pipeline. It now has the 37 homes and the revenue has multiplied almost five times since 2019 to c. 60 million. Korian is now replicating this strategy in the large UK market, where there is a strong demand for high end care home solutions for an affluent population. In February 2021, the Group has entered into exclusive negotiation to acquire Berkley Care Group in the UK, a group with 6 high end care homes in the South of England, providing outstanding quality care with a high level of client satisfaction, in a very large market with a rising need for premium care. Korian will also acquire the real estate for 5 of the homes. The Group is expected to deliver c.25 million of revenue in 2021. The Group's EBITDAR in 2020 is 975m, excluding Covid-19 one-off costs, and the EBITDAR margin is 25.2% reduced by 100 basis points on 2019 reflecting the reduction of revenue due to the lockdown and the various restrictions associated with the pandemic situation. (Including Covid-19 one-off costs, EBITDAR amounts 948.3m, and the margin is 24.5%) The investment of Korian in its staff has been sustained with staff costs increasing by 10.3% in 2020 and representing 57% of revenue (up 2% on 2019 reflecting a maintained staff structure in a context of reduced occupancy). By country7 In France8, revenue growth of +6.6% (versus +7.1% in 2019) including Spain, was fuelled by recent acquisitions, particularly in healthcare both post-acute and mental health and supported by organic growth of 2.4% despite impacts of the lockdown and pandemic. The EBITDAR margin reflects the higher ratio of staff costs at 25.5% (versus 27.1% in 2019). In Germany, revenue growth increased significantly by +6.3% versus +5.3% in 2019, reflecting the dynamic growth strategy and the limited effect of the first wave of the pandemic. This increase was driven essentially by organic growth of 4.2% (versus +4.5% in 2019), following in particular an increased care mix. The EBITDAR margin increased to 26.7% up 50 basis points since 2019 (and 100 basis points since 2018). In the Benelux9region the reported growth remained high at 11% (versus 18.2% in 2019) driven by the expansion in the Netherlands. Organic growth dropped from last year to 3.5% (versus 5.7%) following the Covid impacts but remains strong with the greenfield developments and a contribution of home care activities (10% growth in 2020). The EBITDAR margin decreased to 23.2% (versus 25.2% in 2019) following the pressure on occupancy rates and the ramp up in the Netherlands. In Italy, revenue was up by +7.3 (versus +9.3% in 2019) driven by a dynamic acquisition strategy with a focus on healthcare services and a local cluster approach in key regions. Organic revenue however has declined by 8.2% in the context of the pandemic hitting Italy particularly hard. The EBITDAR margin of 22.4% (versus 23.7% in 2019) reflects a partial offset of the impacts with careful cost management. Korian's EBITDA totalled 525.2 million excluding Covid-19 one-off costs (498.2 million with Covid-19 one-off costs), down 1.9% on 2019 as a reflection of the fixed rental costs. The margin stands at 13.6% (compared to 14.8% in 2019), or 12.9% with Covid-19 one-off costs.The Group's asset smart policy will bring an increased impact to EBITDA in the months to come since real estate investment were particularly focused on greenfield capex that will deliver beds in the years to come and acquisition of mature real estate was concentrated on the second part of the year. Korian now owns 219 facilities representing c.2.7 billion in value. These facilities are in all of the Group's geographies and represent 24% of the value of the real estate assets operated by the Group. In 2020, the Group invested 560m in real estate. Earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) amounted to 298.3 million, i.e. 7.7% of revenue (versus 9.3% in 2019). Net profit (Group share) totalled 64.9 million (versus 136 million in 2019) after income tax expense of 25.8 million and a lowered tax rate of 27.4%. Strengthened financial structure The Group has generated 223m of operating free cash flow in 2020 representing a conversion rate of 42.5% of EBITDA with careful working capital management. Maintenance or operating capex, included here, represent 2.2% of revenue in 2020. Korian's balance sheet improved following two operations to reinforce its equity, a capital increase and a participation in its real estate. This has led to an adjusted leverage of 3x in a context of high investment and a lower EBITDA as a consequence of the pandemic. The reinforced balance sheet will allow the group to play an active role in growing and consolidating care markets. The Group finalised at the end of 2020 a 15-year partnership with BNP Cardif and EDF Invest who invested in part of the Group's real estate for 336 million, with a guaranteed return for the investors and a possibility for Korian to buy back the shares with a capped price. This partnership, in line with the Group asset smart strategy launched in 2016, enables Korian to limit the equity allocated to its real estate portfolio without increasing the related debt, while keeping the control of its assets. It is a key component of Korian's sustainable growth strategy. The Group's net financial liabilities increased to 3,515 million from 3,157 million at 31 December 2019, almost all of this increase coming from an increase in real estate debt. The real estate debt represents 1,471 million compared to a real estate portfolio value of 2,668 million and therefore a stable Loan-to-value ratio of 55%. Outlook The Group is committed to continue to grow and diversify its service offering to provide adapted care to chronic patients and ageing populations at a local level and to meet the increasing needs in all its geographies The Group is confident in the achievement of its 2022 targets of over 4.5 billion of revenue and an EBITDA margin excluding IFRS 16 of 15.5%. The Group is also focused on the delivery of its extra financial commitments and in particular its 15 ESG commitments for 2023. ESG targets, covering client satisfaction and care quality, quality of work, promotion of gender diversity in the top management and energy savings are now integrated in the incentive system of Korian management. The Group will hold a Capital Markets Day on 16th June 2021(details to follow). Dividend Proposition Annual Shareholder Meeting The Board of Directors will submit to the next Annual Shareholders' Meeting to be held on May 27th, 2021, the proposition to distribute a dividend of 0.30 euros per share with an option for payment in new shares. The Board, acting on the recommendation of the Compensation and Appointment Committee, will also propose the following renewals and appointments in the Board's membership to the shareholders at Annual Meeting: Predica Prevoyance Dialogue (renewal), Holding Malakoff Humanis (renewal), Mrs. Catherine SOUBIE (renewal), and Mr. Guillaume BOUHOURS (ratification of an appointment by cooptation decided by the Board on January 11th 2021 following Mr. Christian CHAUTARD's resignation on October 1st 2020). Given the ongoing sanitary situation and the extension by the French government of the state of medical emergency until at least June 1st 2021, the Annual shareholder's meeting may be held at the Company's headquarters on a restricted attendance basis, under special rules applicable to behind closed doors" shareholder meetings (a huis clos). Therefore and in accordance with applicable rules (including under Ordinance No. 2020-321 of March 25th 2020 as amended by Ordinance No. 2020-1497 of December 2nd 2020), the Board of Directors in its meeting on 24th February 2021 gave full powers to the CEO to hold the Annual Shareholder's meeting on such a basis should the circumstances so require, at her discretion, pursuant to the specific regulations in force at that time. Presentation FY 2020 results Investor meeting (Virtual) Thursday 25 February 2021 at 10:00 am CET Details to access the live video webcast as well as dial-in numbers (voice only) are available below. The presentation document will be available online Access to join the live video webcast and submit written questions FR: https://channel.royalcast.com/landingpage/korianfr/20210225_1/ EN : https://channel.royalcast.com/landingpage/korianen/20210225_1/ Dial-in details to access the live audio webcast and ask questions verbally FR: +33 (0) 1 7037 7166 UK-Wide: +44 (0) 33 0551 0200 US: +1 202 204 1514 Please tell the operator if you want to join the conference in French or in English About Korian Korian, the leading European care services group for elderly and fragile people. www.korian.com Korian has been listed on Euronext Paris Section A since November 2006 and is included in the following indices: SBF 120, CAC Health Care, CAC Mid 60, CAC Mid Small and MSCI Global Small Cap Euronext ticker: KORI ISIN: FR0010386334 Reuters: KORI.PA Bloomberg: KORI.FP APPENDICES EBITDA En M FY 2020 FY 2019 Excl. IFRS 16 Excl. IFRS 16 Revenue 3 874,0 3 612,5 7,2% Staff costs (2 212,8) (2 005,3) 10,3% % of revenue 57,1% 55,5% +160 pb Other costs (686,0) (659,1) EBITDAR 975,2 948,1 2,9% % of revenue 25,2% 26,2% -100 pb External rents (450,0) (413,0) % of revenue 11,6% 11,4% EBITDA 525,2 535,1 (1,9%) % of revenue 13,6% 14,8% -120 pb One-off Covid costs (26,9) EBITDA incl. One-off Covid costs 498,2 535,1 % revenue 12,9% 14,8% GROUP INCOME STATEMENT m FY 2020 IFRS 16 adjustments FY 2020 FY 2019 Incl. IFRS 16 Excl. IFRS 16 Excl. IFRS 16 Revenue 3 874,01 3 874,0 3 612,5 7,2% Staff costs (2 228,5) (2 228,5) (2 005,3) 11,1% % of revenue (57,5%) (57,5%) 55,5% Other costs (707,9) 10,6 (697,2) (659,1) 5,8% % of revenue (18,3%) (18,0%) 18,2% EBITDAR 937,6 10,6 948,3 948,1 0,0% % of revenue 24,2% 24,5% 26,2% External rents (76,4) (373,5) (450,0) (413,0) 9,0% % of revenue (2,0%) (11,6%) 11,4% EBITDA 861,1 (362,9) 498,2 535,1 (6,9%) % of revenue 22,2% 12,9% 14,8% Amortisation Depreciations (531,4) 329,8 (201,6) (178,3) 13,1% Provisions (25,3) (25,3) (19,1) 32,2% EBIT 304,4 (33,1) 271,3 337,7 (19,7%) % of revenue 7,9% 7,0% 9,3% Non current expenses (38,5) (38,5) (15,7) 145,7% Operating income 265,9 (33,1) 232,8 322,1 (27,7%) % of revenue 6,9% 6,0% 8,9% Financial result (205,8) 67,2 (138,7) (119,9) 15,6% Net income before tax 60,0 34,1 94,1 202,2 (53,4%) Income tax (17,2) (8,6) (25,8) (64,7) (60,2%) Tax rate 28,6% 27,4% 32,0% Income from companies accounted for by the equity method (0,8) (0,8) Minority Interests (2,7) (2,7) (1,5) 75,7% Net profit Group share 39,4 25,5 64,9 136,0 (52,3%) % of revenue 1,0% 1,7% 3,8% GROUP CASH FLOW STATEMENT M FY 2020 IFRS 16 impact FY 2020 FY 2019 Incl. IFRS 16 Excl. IFRS 16 Excl. IFRS 16 EBITDA 861,1 362,9 498,2 535,1 (6,9%) Non cash others (2,2) 20,6 (22,8) (38,8) Change in WCR 13,1 1,4 11,7 6,5 Operating Capex (86,9) (86,9) (99,0) Operating cash flow 785,1 384,9 400,2 403,8 (0,9%) Income taxes paid (62,8) (62,8) (58,9) Financial expenses paid/received (181,6) (67,2) (114,4) (114,3) Operating free cash flow 540,7 317,7 223,0 230,6 (3,3%) Development Capex (111,7) (111,7) (99,4) Financial investments (bolt-on acquisitions) (530,0) (530,0) (254,3) Net free cash flow (101,0) 317,7 (418,7) (123,2) Dividends paid (10,2) (10,2) (33,4) Real estate investments divestments (560,1) (560,1) (278,8) Increase in equity 390,9 390,9 Non-cash adjustments to net debt other (108,0) (348,6) 240,6 2,2 Change in total net debt (388,6) (30,9) (357,7) (433,2) 1 Rates calculated on February 23, 2021 in the medico-social network 2 In France, only employees over 50 and/or with co-morbidities are eligible for this 1st vaccination campaign 3 Korian Satisfaktion survey: 39,347 respondents: 5 geographies, once a year in Oct-Nov in Nursing Homes/Assisted Living, and continuously for discharged patients in clinics. 4 Rates calculated on the eligible population for vaccination on February 23, 2021 in the medico-social network 5 In France, only employees over 50 and/or with co-morbidities are eligible for this 1st vaccination campaign 6 Korian Satisfaktion survey: 39,347 respondents: 5 geographies, once a year in Oct-Nov in Nursing Homes/Assisted Living, and continuously for discharged patients in clinics 7 EBITDA per country excluding Covid-19 one-off costs 8 Included Spain ( 33.4m) 9 Included Netherlands ( 57.6m) View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005871/en/ Contacts: INVESTOR RELATIONS Sarah Mingham VP Investor Relations & Financing sarah.mingham@korian.com Tel: +33 (0)1 55 37 53 55 Carole Alexandre Deputy Head of Investor Relations carole.alexandre@korian.com Tel: +33 (0)7 64 65 22 44 MEDIA CONTACTS Jean-Marc Plantade Head of Press Relations jean-marc.plantade@korian.fr Tel: +33 (0)7 62 90 32 58 Cyrille Lachevre Deputy Head of Press Relations cyrille.lachevre@korian.fr Tel: +33 (0)7 61 53 54 86 Marjorie Castoriadis Head of Media Relations marjorie.castoriadis@korian.fr Tel: +33 (0)7 63 59 88 81 Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 00:03:21|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close HARARE, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- China will donate another batch of 200,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines to Zimbabwe, Chinese ambassador Guo Shaochun said Wednesday. This will be China's second donation to Zimbabwe after the Asian country recently donated 200,000 Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccines to help the southern African country fight the pandemic. "Just now I had an online meeting with H.E. @edmnangagwa, announcing that China has decided to donate another 200,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine to Zimbabwe. Facing this global pandemic, what we need is solidarity and action. China is committed to standing with the Zimbabwean people," the Chinese ambassador said on his Twitter. The second donation will bring to 400,000 the total number of COVID-19 vaccines that China has donated to Zimbabwe so far. On its part, the Zimbabwean government has purchased 600,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses from China, which are expected to arrive in the country in March. The country is also in advanced negotiations to acquire the Sputnik V vaccine from Russia, while India has announced that it will also donate 75,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses to Zimbabwe. Last Thursday, the Zimbabwean government launched its COVID-19 vaccination program, three days after taking delivery of the first batch of 200,000 vaccines from China. Vice President Constantino Chiwenga, who is also health and child care minister, became the first citizen to receive the Sinopharm jab. Frontline workers, including journalists, are being prioritized for inoculation under the first phase of the vaccination program. Vaccination is being done on a voluntary basis and in three phases. The government aims to inoculate at least 10 million people out of the country's population to achieve herd immunity. As of Tuesday, Zimbabwe had recorded 35,910 COVID-19 cases, 32,288 recoveries and 1,448 deaths. Enditem The insurer is planning to focus on its strongest activities in the UK, Ireland and Canada Aviva PLC ( ) announced it has agreed to sell its entire 40% shareholding in its joint venture in Turkey, AvivaSA Emeklilik ve Hayat. The buyer is Belgian insurer Ageas Insurance International, which is paying 122mln in cash. Aviva's joint venture partner, Sabanc Holding, will retain its 40% shareholding. The British insurer said the deal is expected to increase its net asset value and solvency surplus by 100mln. The news comes a day after Aviva sold its French arm to Aema Groupe for 3.2bn (2.7bn) in cash as it looks to focus on its strongest activities in the UK, Ireland and Canada. Last year, the FTSE 100 firm agreed disposals of its businesses in Italy, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia and Hong Kong, which allowed it to design a new dividend policy based on a leaner portfolio. Asteroid dust found beneath an impact crater confirms a leading theory that it was a space rock that killed the dinosaurs and 75% of life on Earth 66 million years ago. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin studied 900 metres of rock core samples from below the seafloor under the Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico. They found evidence of asteroid dust within the samples, a discovery the team say is the 'final proof' dinosaurs were wiped out by a city sized space rock. This brings to an end counter arguments by other researchers who claim a catastrophe of that type would have also wiped out frogs, Texas researchers said. Study leader Professor Steven Goderis, of Vrije University in Belgium, also involved in the new discovery, said: 'The circle is now finally complete.' This brings to an end counter arguments by other researchers who claim a catastrophe of that type would have also wiped out frogs, Texas researchers said IRIDIUM: RARE IN THE EARTH'S CRUST BUT PLENTIFUL IN SOME ASTEROIDS Finding proof that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs saw a team of researchers dig deep beneath a crater in the Gulf of Mexico. They found asteroid dust - ad the telltale sign it was from space, rather than Earth is the element iridium. This element is rare in the Earth's crust, but present at elevated levels in certain types of asteroids. An iridium spike in the geologic layer found all over the world is how the asteroid hypothesis was born. In the new study, researchers found a similar spike in a section of rock pulled from the crater. In the crater, the sediment layer deposited in the days to years after the strike is so thick that scientists were able to precisely date the dust to a mere two decades after impact. Advertisement In 2016 an international team mounted an exhibition to gather samples from the 150km diameter crater, which is underneath the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. After analysing the chemical makeup of the rock sample, they realised there was a large amount of the element iridium - rare in the planet crust but present in elevated levels in some asteroids - there was a spike in sediments from the time of the impact. The layer deposited in the days to years after the strike is so thick the researchers were able to precisely date the dust to a mere two decades afterwards. Co-author Prof Sean Gulick, University of Texas, said: 'We are now at the level of coincidence that geologically doesn't happen without causation.' Levels of iridium that are 30 times greater than average have been found in the 'Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) boundary, the authors of the study explained. This is the layer of sedimentary rock laid down at the time of the dinosaur extinction - this is how the asteroid theory first came about, as iridium was also found int he geologic layer around the world. Prof Gulick said: 'It puts to bed any doubts the iridium anomaly in the geologic layer is not related to the Chicxulub crater.' The dust is all that remains of the 11km wide asteroid that slammed into the planet wiping out 75% of life - including all non-avian dinosaurs, plants and animals. It's estimated the dust kicked up by the impact circulated in the atmosphere for no more than a couple of decades - which helps time how long the extinction took. Prof Gulick said: 'If you're actually going to put a clock on extinction 66 million years ago, you could easily make an argument it all happened within a couple of decades - which is basically how long it takes for everything to starve to death.' The highest concentrations of iridium were found within a 5cm section of the rock core retrieved from the top of the crater's 'peak ring' - the mountains left behind from the impact that formed when rocks rebounded and collapsed from force. Prof Goderis said: 'We combined the results from four independent laboratories around the world to make sure we got this right.' In addition to iridium, the crater section showed elevated levels of other elements associated with asteroid material, the study authors said. The crater left by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is located in the Yucatan Peninsula and is called Chicxulub after a nearby town Their concentration and composition resembled measurements taken from the geologic layer at 52 sites across the globe, further adding to proof that the layer was created by the 11km wide asteroid 66 million years ago. The core section and geologic layer also have earthbound elements in common - including sulfurous compounds. Two years ago a study found sulfur-bearing rocks are missing from much of the rest of the core - despite being present in large volumes in the surrounding limestone. This indicates the impact blew the original sulfur into the atmosphere - making a bad situation worse by exacerbating global cooling and seeding acid rain. Sean Gulick, a research professor at The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences (right), and Joanna Morgan, a professor at Imperial College London, examining cores retrieved from the crater during the 2016 research mission The 'age of the dinosaurs' being ended by an asteroid rather than a series of volcanic eruptions or some other calamity has been the leading idea since the 1980s. SPACE ROCKS: FROM ASTEROIDS AND COMETS TO METEORS An asteroid is a large chunk of rock left over from collisions or the early solar system. Most are located between Mars and Jupiter in the Main Belt. A comet is a rock covered in ice, methane and other compounds. Their orbits take them much further out of the solar system. A meteor is what astronomers call a flash of light in the atmosphere when debris burns up. This debris itself is known as a meteoroid. Most are so small they are vapourised in the atmosphere. If any of this meteoroid makes it to Earth, it is called a meteorite. Meteors, meteoroids and meteorites normally originate from asteroids and comets. For example, if Earth passes through the tail of a comet, much of the debris burns up in the atmosphere, forming a meteor shower. Advertisement It painted an apocalyptic picture of dust from the vaporised asteroid and rocks it hit circling the planet - this would have blocked the sun, bringing mass death. It then drifted back to Earth to form the layer enriched in asteroid material that's visible today in the geologic layer from the time period - worldwide. In the 1990s, the idea was strengthened with the discovery of the Chicxulub crater. Stretching 150km wide and 20km deep, it's the same age as the rock layer. The latest study identifies asteroid dust with a matching chemical fingerprint at the precise geological location that marks the time of the extinction. Dinosaurs were the most successful animals to have roamed the planet. For over 170 million years they dominated the land. They ranged from small creatures just a few feet long to the largest animals that ever walked Earth. Another recent study found that the earliest primate ancestors lived alongside dinosaurs for a short time, but thrived when they left by adapting to feast on insects and fruit under the tree layer. The researchers, whose findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports, say the discovery 'seals the deal' for the asteroid hypothesis. Their International Ocean Discovery Programme mission has helped fill in gaps about the impact, the aftermath - and the recovery of life. We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form The statement by Armenias Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan about the allegedly unexploded missiles of the Iskander operative-tactical complex attestat the very leastto his lack of knowledge, Russian State Duma MP Dmitry Sablin told RIA Novosti. He noted this commenting on Pashinyans statement that the Iskanders missiles had not exploded, or "exploded by 10 percent," during the recent war in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). "People who have a better understanding of the matters of war and peace know that this [the Iskander] is the best universal operational-tactical complex; the weapon of the 21st century. Iskander has established its high profile in the war against terror in Syria," Sablin added in particular. In his opinion, however, the matter is not only the lack of knowledge of the Armenian PM. "The Soros methods betrayed Pashinyan... This is another testimony of how the street brings to powerwith loud beautiful slogans, a foreign, hostile scenarioa man who destroys his country; not only the citizens of Armenia were able to become convinced of this," the Russian MP added. Zachery Ty Bryan has pleaded guilty in his domestic violence case as part of a plea deal with prosecutors. The 39-year-old actor was arrested last October in Oregon after a physical altercation with his girlfriend. The Home Improvement star pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of menacing and assault in the fourth degree, according to an article Tuesday by TMZ. Plea deal: Zachery Ty Bryan, shown in an October 2020 mugshot, has pleaded guilty in his domestic violence case as part of a plea deal with prosecutors Two felony charges of strangulation and coercion were dismissed along with several misdemeanor charges as part of the plea deal. Bryan as part of the plea agreement will be put on probation for three years and must complete a domestic abuse intervention program within that period. Bryan was arrested in October following an argument at his apartment in Eugene, Oregon. An arrest warrant charged that Bryan dragged his girlfriend out of bed by her hair, beat her repeatedly and choked her after flying into a rage over a missing cellphone charger. Domestic violence: The 39-year-old actor, shown in November 2016 in Santa Monica, California, was arrested last October in Oregon after a physical altercation with his girlfriend Bryan was arrested just two weeks after splitting from his wife of 14 years. The Colorado native is best known for his portrayal of Brad Taylor in the 1990s sitcom Home Improvement. Bryan married his high school sweetheart Carly Matros in 2007 and they have six-year-old twin girls Taylor and Gemma, four-year-old daughter Jordana and 23-month-old son Pierce. Popular show: The Colorado native is best known for his portrayal of Brad Taylor in the 1990s sitcom Home Improvement and is shown with Tim Allen in a 1992 still from the show The victim in the October incident told police that she had been in a relationship with Bryan for two years. Bryan took to Instagram on October 1, 2020 to announce that he and Matros intended to separate. He later removed the post announcing their split after it emerged he had copied the text word-for-word from actor Armie Hammer's post, when he split from his wife last July. Myanmars neighbors are stepping up efforts to resolve the political crisis triggered by the militarys overthrow of the countrys elected civilian government. Wunna Maung Lwin, the juntas foreign minister, traveled to Bangkok Wednesday for talks with Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha and Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai, according to a Thai government source. Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi is also in the Thai capital for talks on the situation in Myanmar.Reuters news agency reported Retno and Wunna Maung Lwin met Wednesday, quoting a source from Thailands Foreign Ministry. Protest in front of Indonesian embassy News that Jakarta is seeking support from other member countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for a plan that would hold the junta to its promise of new elections within a year triggered angry protests in Yangon Tuesday in front of the Indonesian Embassy. The demonstrators demanded that Indonesia respect the results of last Novembers elections, won in a landslide by deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy. Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Teuku Faizasyah denied the reports, telling reporters Tuesday that it is not Indonesias position at all to support a new election in Myanmar. Popular protests have been staged across Myanmar on a daily basis since the military detained Suu Kyi and other members of the civilian government on February 1, claiming widespread election fraud. Three people have been killed as a result of the daily protests, including two who died Saturday in Mandalay one of them a teenage boy when police and security forces used live rounds and rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannon and slingshots against demonstrators. Massive demonstrations on Monday, combined with a general strike, took place in defiance of the juntas ominous warning issued the day before that protesters were heading down a confrontation path where they will suffer the loss of life. The United States and other Western nations have demanded the release of Suu Kyi and her lieutenants, and called on the junta to restore power to the civilian government. Losses by global airlines due to coronavirus-related travel restrictions continue to rise, with $95 billion "cash burn" expected this year under the worst case scenario, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said in a report on Wednesday WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 24th February, 2021) Losses by global airlines due to coronavirus-related travel restrictions continue to rise, with $95 billion "cash burn" expected this year under the worst case scenario, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said in a report on Wednesday. "Estimates for cash burn in 2021 have ballooned to the $75 billion to $95 billion range from a previously anticipated $48 billion," an IATA press release explaining the report said. "With governments having tightening border restrictions, 2021 is shaping up to be a much tougher year than previously expected." Tighter travel restrictions by many nations have severely curtailed international flights and forward looking bookings for the summer travel peak in July and August are currently 78 percent below levels in February 2019, the IATA said. An optimistic scenario puts 2021 passenger demand at 38 percent of pre-pandemic levels in 2019, with airlines burning through $75 billion in cash over the year, IATA said. The pessimistic scenario predicts a $95 billion in losses. The IATA recommended additional aid from governments to keep carriers flying and creating a system of health documents that would include travelers' coronavirus vaccination history. The IATA noted that a growing number of airlines - including Air New Zealand, Copa Airlines, Etihad Airways, Emirates, Qatar Airways, Malaysia Airlines, RwandAir, and Singapore Airlines - have done or are committed to doing trials with an IATA Travel Pass. New Delhi, Feb 24 : Gaurav Jain (name changed upon request) recovered from a mild Covid-19 attack around Divali and began a normal life after a short bout of weakness. Nearly three months later, Jain experienced some unusual symptoms like blurry vision, constant thirst and lethargy. He checked his blood sugar at home and to his horror, the reading came above 400 mg/dL. Before Covid, his blood sugar levels were in the normal range. Jain rushed to the nearby hospital and was given medications along with a warning to completely transform his lifestyle. According to leading health experts, Jain is not alone as they are witnessing more Covid-recovered patients being diagnosed with diabetes and related complications. "Corona infection can mess up with sugar levels of otherwise healthy and non-diabetic people. Those who recovered from the disease must get their glucose levels checked to avoid long-term complications," Dheeraj Kapoor, head of department of Endocrinology at Artemis Hospital in Gurugram, told IANS. "We are yet to ascertain why this is happening, but since this has now been observed, it is better to get the sugar test done fast," he advised. In the Covid-19 special session at the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in September last year, Juliana Chan from the Chinese University of Hong Kong said that SARS-CoV-2 may damage pancreatic beta-cells, the only insulin-secreting cells. "As such, Covid-19 may precipitate diabetes in people with risk factors such as those with obesity, low socioeconomic status and psychosocial stress," Chan warned. Diabetes and Covid-19 are silent epidemics with devastating consequences, if not diagnosed or controlled. Rajesh Khadgawat, professor of endocrinology at AIIMS, said that Covid infection has resulted in the worsening of glycemic control in diabetic patients. "At the same time, there is new onset of diabetes in people who were not diabetic before Covid infection," Khadgawat told IANS. There are many mechanisms proposed for the new onset of diabetes, "but a direct role of the virus in causing diabetes has not been proven yet". In diabetic patients who had Covid infection, worsening of diabetic control was very much shown in many studies and many of them required insulin therapy for control. "Diabetes was one of the important risk factors for getting the infection but those who have recovered and had no history of diabetes are advised to go for sugar tests," Khadgawat said. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 77 million people in India suffer from diabetes. "The Covid-diabetes story highlights the huge burden of diabetes which affects 460 million people worldwide, mainly coming from developing countries with unprepared healthcare systems," Chan said. Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19) TPC Group has officially started using its Port Neches site as a terminal after months of demolition work clearing the wreckage from the 2019 industrial blast and fire that rocked parts of Mid-County. The Houston-based company announced Tuesday that it had successfully started terminal operations, delivering shipments of butadiene to major customers in the area and using rail and waterway access to move crude C4. We are pleased with the progress we continue to make on reestablishing butadiene, crude C4 and raffinate terminaling capabilities at the Port Neches site, Ed Dineen, TPC Group president and CEO, said in a statement. Our ability to provide a safe, environmentally sound terminal with logistics capability to transport product is important to the industry. We are committed to ensuring the needs of our customers and suppliers are met. Related: Layoffs to hit blast-damaged TPC Group plant The company announced last February that it would be laying off about 100 workers from the plant during its transition to a terminal and that the positions could be gone as long as five years while TPC determined whether it would rebuild manufacturing capabilities. The companys Port Neches site had 183 employees at the time, 133 of whom were represented by five different unions. Crews started the demolition process last December to remove damaged equipment and make way for terminal operations. The start of terminal activity is part of a three-phased plan to redirect its business after the fire and explosion tore through parts of its butadiene processing units and caused massive damage across the site. The company has reportedly invested significant manpower and capital while mitigating the site, and says it is positioning it for future C4 capacity growth. Related: Port Neches residents still living through TPC explosion one year later Crude C4 is used in the process of extracting butadiene, an essential monomer used to create synthetic rubber. Before the explosion, the Port Neches site produced about 20% of butadiene in the United States. Investigators from the Chemical Safety Board believe the explosion is likely connected to one of the plants butadiene processing units. Related: Investigators zero in on cause of TPC blast TPC Group has a manufacturing facility on the Houston Ship Channel and now operates product terminals in Port Neches and Lake Charles, Louisiana. The company announced at the beginning of the month that it has successfully entered into an agreement to issue and sell $153 million in notes, which would help it terminate a $70 million loan. Moodys assigned TPC Group a B2 rating on the notes and gave the company a negative outlook. The negative outlook reflects uncertainty over the pace of cash outflows related to the remaining third party claims from the Port Neches explosion and fire, John Rogers, senior vice president at Moody's and lead analyst on TPC, said in the firms rating disclosure. jacob.dick@beaumontenterprise.com twitter.com/jd_journalism Currently, the strike groups of the Russian armed forces deployed along the state border and in the occupied territories are not on full alert, but Russia can increase its forces in a short time and, therefore, the risk of Russias open aggression against Ukraine always exists. "According to the General Staff and intelligence data, the Russian armed forces deployed along the state border and in the occupied territories are not on full alert now. However, the Russian Federation can increase its forces and resources with units and subdivisions of airborne troops, missile forces, and so on in a short time. Therefore, the risk of Russias open aggression against Ukraine always exists. As the military, we must be prepared for any scenario," Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Lieutenant General Serhiy Korniychuk said in an interview with Ukrinform. The aggressive foreign policy of the Russian Federation does not change, the Chief of the General Staff pointed out. "This is evidenced by the military conflicts in Abkhazia, Georgia, the occupation and subsequent militarization of Crimea, some areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where the passportization of the population continues. Intelligence records the supply of new weapons and military equipment to the occupied territories. There are constant rotations of units and curators of the first and the second army corps of the Southern Military District of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation which operate in the occupied part of Donbas. The sniper groups and other units of Russian occupation forces continue to violate the stable ceasefire," he said. In such a situation, Korniychuk stressed, the Armed Forces of Ukraine must "without delay replace the old armament and military equipment with more modern models, develop missile troops and artillery, aviation, navy, electronic warfare, air defense, acquire defense capabilities in information and cybernetics, etc." In addition, the Chief of the General Staff noted that the Joint Forces Command, established last year, "increased the readiness of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to repel large-scale aggression." ol The doctor who administered incorrect doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to two aged care residents in Queensland had not completed the compulsory vaccination training. Health Minister Greg Hunt has asked the Department of Health to take action against the doctor and Healthcare Australia, the company tasked with providing vaccinations within aged care facilities. Health Minister Greg Hunt said new information revealed the doctor had not completed the compulsory online training. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The aged care provider that runs the Brisbane facility where the incident occurred said they will also report the doctor to the medical regulator. Mr Hunt on Wednesday morning said the doctor had trained in Australia, was registered with the medical regulator and had undertaken the necessary COVID vaccination training. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 12:15:56|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BANGKOK, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The first batch of COVID-19 vaccines that Thailand ordered from China's Sinovac Biotech arrived in the capital Bangkok Wednesday, putting the country on track to kickstart its national inoculation program. The 200,000 doses, the first shipment among 2 million doses Thailand ordered from the Chinese biopharmaceutical firm, were delivered by a Thai Airways International cargo flight from Beijing to Bangkok. Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, Deputy Prime Minister and Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, as well as Chinese Embassy official Yang Xin were at the airport for the handover of the vaccines. Thailand approved the Sinovac vaccine for emergency use on Monday, and the authorization will be valid for one year, according to Anutin. Upon the vaccines' arrival, three days would be required for the final inspection before the national vaccination campaign begins, Prayut has said. The first batch of the Sinovac vaccines will be distributed to 13 provinces and administered to at-risk groups, including medical workers, close contacts with COVID-19 patients and people with certain chronic illnesses. A second batch of 800,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccines is scheduled to arrive in Thailand next month, followed by a third batch of the remaining 1 million doses. Enditem The Simpsons creator Matt Groening has spoken out about the show's decision to recast its non-white roles, following allegations of racial stereotyping in recent years. On Tuesday it was announced the character of Dr. Hibbert, voiced by white actor Harry Shearer, has been replaced by black actor Kevin Michael Richardson. Cartoonist Matt, 67, said while he didn't have a problem with white actors playing non-white characters in The Simpsons, he accepts that time has changed since the show launched in 1989. Speaking out: The Simpsons creator Matt Groening has spoken out about the show's decision to recast its non-white roles, following allegations of racial stereotyping (pictured 2014) In a rare interview with BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat, Matt said: 'I think it's great, times change, but I actually didn't have a problem with the way we were doing it. All of our actors play dozens of characters each, it was never designed to exclude anyone.' Asked whether he believes the controversy raised awareness of the need for more diversity in writers rooms, he said: 'I absolutely agree with that. And we're trying to make it better. 'Bigotry and racism are still an incredible problem and it's good to finally go for more equality and representation.' Casting change: On Tuesday it was announced the character of Dr. Hibbert, voiced by white actor Harry Shearer, has been replaced by black actor Kevin Michael Richardson The show's response in 2018 was subject to a lot of criticism, when, within an episode, Lisa Simpson appeared to look into the camera and say: 'Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. 'What can you do?' After the backlash, The Simpsons announced it would be re-casting its non-white roles. From the old to the new: The role was previously voiced by Harry (left), and will now be voiced by Kevin (right) Asked whether he regrets how they handled it, Matt said: 'At a certain point it doesn't matter what you say. You're going to be attacked by whoever, you know? Honestly, that doesn't affect me at all. 'We're not going out of our way to comfort bigots. On the other hand, if you do any kind of gesture and people perceive a weakness, you'll be criticised.' It comes after it was reported that the longest-running animated series in television history is joining the list of titles making more racially sensitive casting decisions. Moves forward: Veteran actor Harry has provided his voice to the character of Hibbert since The Simpsons' second season way back in 1990 The Wrap state Hibbert will now be voiced by black actor Kevin, 56, who has provided vocals for several roles in the show before, along with Family Guy, American Dad! and countless other titles. Harry, 77, meanwhile will continue to voice his many other characters on The Simpsons, including Mr Burns and Smithers, Ned Flanders and Kent Brockman. A statement from 20th Century Fox read: 'Last night's episode DiaryQueen featured Harry Shearer as the voice of Dr. Hibbert for the last time... 'Next Sunday's episode Wad Goals will have Kevin Michael Richardson voicing Dr. Hibbert and from there on out he will voice the character.' Veteran actor Harry has provided his voice to the character of Hibbert since The Simpsons' second season way back in 1990, while Kevin has been voicing various roles on the show since 2009. In 2013, Kevin was asked if he ever feels that he is typecast because of his voice, to which he said: 'Sometimes, from what I've done, people want similar sounds relative to those characters. What I admire are people who cast me for range... Changing role: Hank Azaria made the decision to stop voicing the Indian-American character of Apu on The Simpsons, last playing the role in 2017 'Knowing that I can do highs and lows and stuff like that, like when I was Cleveland Jr. and Barney Rubble, that's pretty cool. To not be set in one specific area is nice. It's nice to know that people are aware of what I can do.' The move to replace Harry mirrors several other similar decisions in the past year, especially in light of renewed attention paid to racial biases and white privilege thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement. Last July, Kristen Bell stepped down from playing the role of Molly on the Apple TV+ animated series Central Park, also stemming from concerns over representation. Bell announced via social media that she was stepping down from voicing the character, with a frank and candid statement on her Instagram. 'Casting a mixed race character with a white actress undermines the specificity of the mixed race and Black American experience,' she wrote at the time. 'This is a time to acknowledge our acts of complicity. Here is one of mine. Playing the character of Molly on Central Park shows a lack of awareness of my pervasive privilege,' she also said. Starring role: Harry, 77, meanwhile will continue to voice his many other characters on The Simpsons, including Mr Burns and Smithers, Ned Flanders and Kent Brockman Also last summer, Family Guy's Mike Henry announced he was stepping away from voicing the black character Cleveland Brown. Elsewhere, Hank Azaria made the decision to stop voicing the Indian-American character of Apu on The Simpsons, last playing the role in 2017. The casting move comes after Fox made a brief statement on the matter last June: 'Moving forward, The Simpsons will no longer have white actors voice nonwhite characters.' Colorado Springs, CO (80903) Today Considerable cloudiness with occasional rain showers. High 56F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.. Tonight Partly cloudy. Slight chance of a rain shower. Low 42F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. The felt the leads the way to create more global-scale pharma companies in India. The industry expects more guidelines to come out on minimum criterion to qualify for the scheme. If the Centre only links the incentive to incremental sales value, the industry is happy, said an industry insider. Ramesh Swaminathan, chief financial officer and head of corporate affairs at Lupin, said, they are eagerly awaiting the finer details of the scheme. Meanwhile, B R Sikri, chairman of the Federation of Pharma Entrepreneurs, said, higher incentives would have meant more production of cancer drugs, thereby, bringing down their prices. The large pharma firms are keen to take part in the scheme, says Sudarshan Jain, secretary general of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance, that represents the countrys largest 24 pharma firms. Former prime minister Kevin Rudd has avoided getting caught up in Queensland political donation laws by securing an official ruling that he is not a property developer. The Palaszczuk Labor government passed laws in 2018, backdated until before the 2017 Queensland election, banning property developers from donating money to state and council politicians, candidates and parties. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is not banned from making political donations, after seeking a ruling from the Electoral Commission of Queensland. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Mr Rudd sought a determination from the Electoral Commission to put the issue completely beyond doubt, with the body ruling in mid-October that he was not a prohibited donor. The decision remains in effect for 12 months. UN Cameroon chief, Naab (left) & Minister Atanga Nji Teneng Lucas Matthias Z. Naab, United Nations Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator for Cameroon says he is impressed with the communal coexistence between refugees and host communities in the country. He was speaking in Yaounde Wednesday, February 24, 2021, at the end of an audience granted him by Cameroons Minister of Territorial Administration, Atanga Nji Paul. Being his second audience with the Minister since September 2020, Naab said it was a follow-up meeting to discuss the humanitarian response plan. We wanted to get his guidance and his advice on how we agree on the various components of the humanitarian response plan. It was a follow-up meeting intended to get guidance from His Excellency on how we move forward, the UN Cameroon chief said. We intend to launch this humanitarian response plan in the next 14 days. We agreed with the Minister on some key numbers and dates that we are going to agree on in the next two weeks to launch the humanitarian response plan. In all, Naab described as excellent the meeting with Minister Atanga Nji. Although he fell short of detailing the extent of their discussion, the UN Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator for Cameroon said he thanked the Minister and briefed him on his recent visit to the East region. His words: I also took the opportunity to thank the Minister and to brief him on my visit to the East Region. I went two and a half weeks ago on my first official visit to the East to see the refugee situation in the East. The refugees coming from the Central African Republic. There, I was also impressed and I took the opportunity today to also brief the Minister about my impressions of the situation in the East, Naab said. I was particularly touched by the generosity and the hospitality of the government and the people of Cameroon to our fellow brothers and sisters from the Central African Republic. I was impressed with the communal coexistence between refugees and host communities, he furthered. But at the same time, I was also touched by the needs that were expressed by not only the refugees but also by the host communities. He told the press that, the UN Humanitarian country team is working very closely with the government in all the sectors to see how we can respond briskly and quickly to the needs of the region as a whole but also the needs of the vulnerable populations in the refugee camps but also in the host communities. The stakes According to ACAPS, a non-profit project of a consortium of three NGOs - the Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children, and Mercy Corps, Cameroon hosts the largest refugee population from the Central African Republic, CAR. ACAPS reports that no fewer than 290,000 CAR refugees are in Cameroon, mainly located in the East and Adamaoua regions. Many have been displaced for several years, including 45,000 people who have been in Cameroon for more than 10 years. Over 70% of CAR refugees are staying with host communities, putting significant pressure on already limited resources and service, the nonprofit consortium states. The CAR refugees are dependent on humanitarian assistance, with education, health, food, WASH, protection, shelter and livelihood opportunities reported as priority needs. With refugees and the host community sharing access to drinking water, fields, and social services such as education and health, there is a need for more support. The situation is even dire given that nearly 5,000 people have recently arrived in Garouda-Boulai (East Region) from CAR due to violence related to the elections held on December 27, 2020. They need shelter, WASH, and health assistance. Cameroon was already hosting over 300,000 refugees from CAR, mostly in the East, Adamawa, and North regions, where natural resources and essential services are limited, ACAPS reports. Katy-area churches and nonprofits are helping residents in the region recover after the winter storm left pipes burst and many refrigerators largely empty. On HoustonChronicle.com: Consider giving blood to help boost area blood supply Lay and staff members from Kingsland Baptist Church have been assisting widows and widowers whose homes sustained water damages as pipes burst. Many of them cleaned out caved in ceilings and wet carpet, and a few who have the necessary skills repaired plumbing components. KBC Senior Pastor Ryan Rush said as multiple crises impacted the Houston area over the last few years, the church has learned and grown more equipped to serve people during the next event. What Harvey allowed us to do is really understand how we can organize our community, Rush said. So when COVID happened and this happened, theres a pretty strong sense of community and communication about the nonprofit partners in this city and the churches, such that we dont have to start from square one. On HoustonChronicle.com: Katy 17-year-old works to provide more equitable education across Texas KBC Missions Pastor Omar Garcia said the work is just a part of who Kingsland is. Last year, teams traveled from the church to help after storms hit Louisiana. The church has a team of about 200 people that are trained to serve in different areas like a chainsaw team or in flood mitigation. Garcia said the only real difference with the winter storm from hurricane season was the temperature. Rush added that since so many church members were facing power outages and plumbing problems in their own homes, some were having to take stopgap measures there so that they could serve others. He said the storm was insult to injury amid the pandemics weighty effects. In recent weeks, Kingsland has been rebuilding the Brookshire home of a senior citizen, who Garcia said had been living there without running water for 11 years. Rush takes comfort in that the man was ready to weather the storm because of the churchs work. On HoustonChronicle.com: McMeans Junior High recognized as Texas School to Watch As families grapple with repairing their homes, materials have been in short supply. The church had plumbing supplies coming in from a church in Tennessee to help. A.L. Curry, 92, worked in the ministry for 60 years and served as pastor of different congregations for 50 years before he retired around 2010. He greeted Rush with a smile and gratitude as a crew gutted some of his partially flooded home in Brookshire. Curry said it was really encouraging to have the help. His children work together to care for their father. As conditions worsened in the home during the storm, they were able to move him to a drier spot within the house. Curry said he was, so grateful. Thank God, praise God. Thank you all so much. This is a blessing. He added that he trusted in God throughout the ordeal. Not far away, The Hangar Unity Center worked to distribute 1,500 hot meals to Brookshire residents, who had been affected. Volunteers formed assembly lines to fill to-go containers with the food. On HoustonChronicle.com: Heres what you need to know about the FDA-backed, one-shot COVID vaccine from Johnson & Johnson We dont want people to have to get out right now because theyre dealing with all kinds of issues at their house, so were knocking on doors, taking meals to them, said Dennis Turnipseed, executive director of Eyes on Me, The Hangars parent organization. Were just sharing the love of Christ. Feed the Hunger was also there. The nonprofit brings together volunteers to pack dry rice, beans, vegetables and vitamins for local, national and international distribution where they are needed. Regina Alexander, Packathon coordinator for Texas, said people had been very thankful to receive the hot food during a challenging time. Meanwhile, Katy Christian Ministries worked to restore services such as its food pantry and social services department. Executive Director Deysi Crespo asked community members to have patience because many of the staff members had experienced some of the same winter storm difficulties. On HoustonChronicle.com: Wharton County Junior College Fine Arts Department presents dark drama based on real-life murders Since plumbing issues had caused a flood at the KCM Kingsland Resale Shop at 23232 Kingsland Blvd. in Katy, Crespo was trying to get the store up and running. She said 40 percent of the KCMs budget comes from sales of donated items. Crespo explained that as people are replacing damaged furniture, they can get those items for free if they qualify as KCM clients. To me, it is important to get this place back up and running as fast as possible, Crespo said. During the storm, KCMs crisis center continued to answer calls from domestic violence and sexual abuse victims. Although counseling services resumed on Monday, Feb. 22, counselors worked remotely to help victims when they had power and were able. Crespo said going forward, KCM will be evaluating needs in the community and reaching out for support to continue its work. As in any disaster, people will be recovering over the long haul, she explained. So KCMs food pantry, social services and crisis center will continue to serve. On HoustonChronicle.com: Missouri City church provides warm shelter, electricity during unprecedented Texas ice storm She encouraged community members to volunteer by working at the food pantry or resale shops or in other capacities. They can also make monetary donations and even specify which ministry they want to specifically support. Nonperishable food and bottled water and in-kind donations of cleaning products are valuable right now, along with clothing, housewares and furniture for the resale shops. Most importantly, we want to be able to provide the food that our families need, at least the essentials. We just dont want (anyone) to go hungry, Crespo said. tracy.maness@hcnonline.com A $250,000 reward has been offered in a desperate big to solve the murder of a an Olympic champion's boyfriend whose body was found in a sewage tank. Jason Barry Guise, 45, was last seen on Charlotte Street in Wynnum, Brisbane, on April 21, 2019. Mr Guise was dating disgraced Olympic gold medal diver Chantelle Newbery when he vanished and detectives have run out of leads. Police have released CCTV footage of Jason's last known movements, when he was riding a bicycle past the Waterloo Hotel on Berrima street April 21 Jason's father, Barry Guise still holds hope he will find out what happened to his son, and still contacts the police regularly. In 2020, Barry Guise told reporters his son 'unfortunately' got involved with drugs but 'was still a good person'. Police are appealing for information that may lead to the conviction of those responsible for Jason's disappearance. Police released CCTV footage of Jason's last known movements of him riding a bicycle past the Waterloo Hotel on Berrima street on the night of April 21. Footage from an earlier date shows Jason walking through a car park and putting petrol in a red vehicle, wearing a bum bag, a cap and a white t-shirt. The last confirmed sighting of Jason was about 7.20pm on April 21, when he visited a food truck before returning to his home on Bride street sometime after 8pm Jason's disappearance was out of character, he was in regular contact with his family and had upcoming life plans that he was looking forward to, police said Jason was reported missing by his roommate nearly two weeks later on May 2. Due to evidence from medical examinations, police believe Jason died shortly after he disappeared and suspect there are people in the community who are withholding information. Maintenance workers located Jason's body in a pit within a sewage treatment plant at Wynnum on May 8. Police divers spent hours working to recover his body as four truckloads of liquid were pumped from the tank. It is believed Jason was killed in a separate location before his body was transported to the sewerage tank. Police have offered a $250,000 reward for information regarding Jason's suspicious death Earlier footage depicts Jason filling a red vehicle with petrol and walking through a car park Due to his weight and size it is believed multiple people were enlisted to move Jason's body to the six-meter deep tank and place his body there. Acting Detective Inspector Mark Mooney of the Bayside Criminal Investigation Branch called on the community to help bring justice to Jason's family. Mr Mooney said he wanted to make it clear that the first person that came forward with information, who was involved in the crime, but did not commit the crime would be eligible to be exempt from prosecution. 'Anyone involved before or after the death or during transportation, that's who we're looking at granting indemnity for', he said. Jason's disappearance was out of character, he was in regular contact with his family and had upcoming life plans that he was looking forward to, Mr Mooney said. He said police had investigated several leads, but all had 'dried up'. 'The community expects these cowardly acts to be fully investigated and those offenders responsible to be brought to justice, no matter how long it takes', he said. Disgraced gold medalist and ex-partner Chantelle Newbery posted an emotional tribute to Jason just hours after his body was recovered from a sewerage tank Newbery, posted an emotional tribute to Jason, just hours after his body was recovered from the sewerage tank in May 2019. 'Nooo please don't be dead!' the post read. 'I DON'T BELIEVE YOU ARE DEAD JASON! F**KIN CALL ME NOW.. TELL EVERYONE THEY ARE WRONG! LOVE YA MATE.. PLEASE BE OK..' Ms Newbery, OAM, is a well-known diving identity who won a gold medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics but has since spiraled due to her crippling depression. She appeared in court with drug and stealing charges in July last year. Slovakian cellcos 4ka and Orange Slovakia have both revealed that they expect to launch commercial 5G services by April. The news comes hot on the heels of O2 Slovakia selecting Ericsson as its 5G partner, although the operator declined to specify a proposed launch date. Slovak Telekom gained the first mover advantage, launching 5G in eight districts of Bratislava in December 2020. Both Orange and 4ka will spearhead their offerings in the capital, according to TeleGeography. Local outlet Zive.sk adds that both operators will use their 3.5GHz spectrum for the networks, with 4ka also using the 1800MHz spectrum that was utilized in its 5G trial. Advertisement Ministers are facing mounting calls for the parts of England with the smallest Covid outbreaks to be released from lockdown earlier, with official data showing cases in the worst-hit areas are seven times higher than in others. Department of Health data showed Devon, Cornwall and the Isle of Wight recorded fewer than 50 infections per 100,000 people in the week ending February 18. For comparison, the figure was 286.6 in Middlesbrough the nation's current hotspot. But under Boris Johnson's four-stage 'roadmap' back to freedom, everyone in England will be forced to move out of lockdown at the same pace and to wait at least five weeks between each change. Ministers have refused to follow Scotland's path, which will see some areas released sooner than others. The MP for Exeter, Ben Bradshaw today urged the Prime Minister to ease restrictions faster for areas with the lowest infection rates. 'The vaccination programme is showing stunning results in preventing serious illness and death,' he told MailOnline. 'If this is sustained, it would be perverse to keep local businesses closed for Easter because rates remain high in some other far-flung part of the country.' He added: 'Exeter and Devon have among the lowest Covid rates in the country. Our vital hospitality businesses are on their knees. Scotland is adopting regional variations, as it emerges from lockdown, and we haven't heard a satisfactory explanation from the Government as to why that can't happen here.' Selaine Saxby, the MP for North Devon, added her voice to the calls, telling MailOnline the roadmap was going 'too slowly' for her area. 'I think our cases are low and we could have started local unlocking sooner,' she said, 'but I also think, for tourism, moving at a national pace is important'. Dr Gabriel Scally, a member of Independent Sage and former regional director for health for the South West, said the Government should work 'local flexibility' into its plans and enact 'green zones' allowing life to return to normal in areas where case rates had fallen to single figures. Instead of easing restrictions on a case-by-case basis in different regions, the Prime Minister's 'one-way' ticket out of lockdown will see schools reopen to all pupils on March 8. The Stay at Home edict could finally be dropped on March 29 and shops, hairdressers and pubs may be allowed to reopen by April 12. The earliest all legal limits on social contact could go is June 21. Mr Johnson has not ruled out 'local action' in reverse, however, which could see tighter curbs brought back in to areas where there are Covid spikes in the future. The now defunct Tier system which twice failed to keep England out of lockdown saw certain areas enjoy months of lighter curbs, with friends and families allowed to meet in restaurants, pubs and cafes. Slide me LEFT: Infection rates in week ending February 4. RIGHT: Infection rates in week ending February 18. Public Health England data show that rates of infection are considerably lower in some rural areas such as Devon and Cornwall (dark green indicates the lowest rate), compared to higher numbers of infections in the Midlands Department of Health data on the weekly coronavirus infection rate up to February 18, the latest available, showed the smallest outbreaks were in the South West and London. The smallest outbreak was in Islington, London, where the infection rate was just 38.8 cases per 100,000 residents. Officials have previously advised councils in the capital, however, that they should not have different restrictions because they are so closely connected. WHICH AREAS HAVE THE LOWEST COVID INFECTION RATES? Council Islington Devon Cornwall Plymouth Isle of Wight Tower Hamlets Bath,N. Somerset Gloucestershire Camden East Sussex Brighton, Hove Infection rate 38.8 39.3 39.7 48.5 49.4 50.2 50.7 52.1 53.3 54 54 % weekly change -56% -26% -44% +1% -54% -42% -42% -36% -30% -39% -29% Source: Department of Health data on infection rates by local authority up to February 18, the latest available. It takes a week to establish the infection rate today because of delays with the testing system and the lag between becoming infected and suffering symptoms. Advertisement Devon had the second smallest outbreak in the country after recording 39.3 per 100,000, followed by Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (39.7) and the Isle of Wight (49.4). For comparison, the highest infection rate was in Middlesbrough (286.6), followed by Peterborough (270) and Sandwell in the West Midlands (263.1). Ms Saxby told MailOnline it would be good to see some curbs in Devon dropped earlier. 'This would be partly so we could get used to seeing each other again,' she said. 'It will be a big shock for people.' Asked how she would react if surging cases elsewhere in the country prevented Devon from moving down the stages, she added: 'We'll have to see what happens when we get there, but it is clear this is national to avoid a full lockdown.' Professor Scally, from the University of Bristol, said there should be 'local flexibility' with the restrictions because it was clear the second wave was unequally spread across the country. 'There should be local flexibility about what is needed to deal with the virus as we do know it isn't equally distributed and it's only right local areas should take action if there are outbreaks in their area', he said. 'That is going to be more and more necessary as vaccination takes a lot of cases down. 'I do think there should be flexibility but it is really dependent on the Government building up public health teams on the ground and really improving the Test and Trace system.' The head of Visit Cornwall, Malcolm Bell, told MailOnline hotels and bed and breakfasts in the county had been hoping they would be allowed to open two to three weeks before the earmarked May 17. 'I think the challenge we've got is unless it is at least a third of the country I don't want to go back to those silly tiers,' he said. 'There is no point in opening up if people cannot come here from their home. 'We were in Tier One, then Tier Two. When the Tiers were North of Birmingham that wasn't a problem, but when they came down that was just killing our market. 'There is no point being open for staying visitors if people can't actually come.' He said they were encouraging tourists to make contact with the hotels and B&Bs they wanted to stay in directly to ask about refunds and booking policies. He said some were taking pencil-bookings where they would reserve rooms for certain dates and offer a full refund if restrictions meant the trip couldn't go ahead. Summer lessons will be offered to children leaving primary school and all secondary pupils as part of a 700million catch-up package designed to reverse the impact of Covid on education. Pictured: Boris Johnson takes part in an online lesson during a visit to Sedgehill School in Lewisham, south east London, on February 23 Figures show just 150,000 Covid vaccines jabs were dished out in the UK on Sunday, the worst daily output since the scheme began to pick up pace last month Gavin Williamson today hinted that the school day could be extended alongside summer catch-up classes to recuperate thousands of hours of lost learning inflicted by the pandemic Announcing the roadmap out of restrictions on Monday in the Commons, Mr Johnson admitted there could be 'local action' in areas where cases spike. He said: 'Next month we will publish an updated plan for responding to local outbreaks, with a range of measures to address variants of concern, including surge PCR testing and enhanced contact tracing. 'We can't, I'm afraid, rule out re-imposing restrictions at local or regional level if [the] evidence suggests they are necessary to contain or suppress a new variant which escapes the vaccines.' Health Secretary Matt Hancock and Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick have both previously suggested that extra local restrictions may be brought back in some areas should infections spike. Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi has, however, warned England will be moving down restrictions at the same pace because infections were at 'similar' levels. 'So the view is very much that this is about a gradual reopening of the whole of England, not regional,' he said. WHEN? Dr Mike Tildesley, a statistician on Sage, also hinted yesterday that some further restrictions could be imposed on areas where infections begin to spike. 'If we do see a spike in cases or if we see things not going down as fast as we hoped I think there needs to remain the possibility to hold off for a couple of weeks so we get things in control,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. '[This is] particularly if the government wants to have this one-way route to freedom which I think in itself is potentially a little bit uncertain. 'It may well be that we have to have some measures introduced for a little bit of time in order to prevent these surges in infection occurring so that ultimately we can take virtually a one-way route back to normality.' It comes as Gavin Williamson today hinted that the school day could be extended alongside summer catch-up classes as part of a 700million package to recover lost learning time after the pandemic. The Education Secretary confirmed the government is looking at a 'broad range of options' when asked if school hours could be increased to make up for lost time during lockdowns. Under plans announced today, secondaries will offer face-to-face teaching over the holidays, with ministers keen to see summer classes for incoming Year 7 pupils. The summer schools will be funded with 200million from the package, while a 302million Recovery Premium will also see every primary school handed 6,000 and secondaries 22,000 each to fund further support for pupils most in need. The Department for Education said this will come on top of another 200million in funding for the National Tutoring Programme and other tuition schemes and could be spent on extra clubs, activities or teaching for those who have fallen behind. However, other radical measures like permanently trimming the summer holidays or lengthening the school day do not figure in the plans yet. Experts warned that the package is only a 'start' and it could take a decade to heal the 'educational scarring' suffered by children during the crisis. A suspect in the placement of two pipe bombs in Washington is seen on Jan. 5, 2021. On right is a closeup photograph of one of the bombs. (FBI) Pipe Bomb Discovery, Not Capitol Breach, Triggered Congressional Evacuations: Ex-Police Chief Members of Congress were evacuated on Jan. 6 because of the pipe bomb that was found outside the Republican National Committee headquarters, a former police official said Tuesday. U.S. Capitol Police found the bomb at 12:45 p.m., before violence started at the Capitol. Soon after, authorities found another device the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The discoveries resulted in the evacuation of two congressional buildings, the Cannon House Office Building, as well as one of the Library of Congress buildings, Steven Sund, former U.S. Capitol Police chief, told senators on Tuesday during a joint hearing. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) asked whether it was correct to say the discovery of the pipe bombs triggered the evacuations. That is correct, sir, Sund replied. Capitol Police headed the response to the bomb found at the Republican committee headquarters, while the Metropolitan Police Department led the response to the other bomb, the ex-chief, who resigned last month, added. It took extensive resources, he said. Former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund testifies in a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Senate Rules and Administration committees joint hearing on Capitol Hill, Washington on Feb. 23, 2021. (Erin Scott/Pool/AFP via Getty Images) Shortly after the bombs were found, a mob breached the Capitol, making it all the way to the entry of the House chamber and inside the Senate chamber. Members of Congress had been in a joint session to count electoral votes but went to their respective chambers after an objection to some of the votes was lodged, prior to the evacuation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is still looking for the person or persons responsible for the pipe bombs. A reward of up to $100,000 is being offered for information leading to the location, arrest, and conviction of the person or persons responsible. The bombs were placed on the evening of Jan. 5, authorities said. Surveillance footage showed an individual wearing a face mask, a grey hooded sweatshirt, and Nike shows in yellow, black, and gray walking and carrying a backpack in their hand. The bombs were real devices with explosive igniters and timers, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, told reporters last month. Officials were investigating to see why they didnt explode. That is obviously being vetted and investigated. What was the purpose of those devices being planted? Was it a diversionary type of a tactic used by some of these rioters? Or did it have some other type of nefarious purpose? So that is what the [investigators] are looking at as we speak right now, and looking for those persons that planted those devices, he said. The Schuylkill County NAACP chapter has been approved as an official branch of the national organization. A group of county residents began working toward establishing an NAACP chapter in the fall. Discussions about forming a local NAACP came up during conversations over the summer in response to national news about racism in the country after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Don Snowell, one of the founding members, said the group now has close to 200 members, with more people reaching out continuously. The goal to create a chapter is 100 members, Snowell said. We reached that goal very quickly, and it continues to grow. Snowell said once the chapter is assigned a unit number, they will be able to hold elections for leadership and start running official programs. One program the chapter has begun working on is offering assistance with the local COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Were going to be helping people who dont have internet access to help them set up appointments, Snowell said. Were trying to set up a system where were going to provide transportation. Snowell said they have a meeting this week with Rite Aid to discuss a partnership in which the NAACP will work with Rite Aid to choose vaccination sites in impoverished areas of the county once more doses become available. Another initiative the NAACP is working toward is diversifying local boards to promote representation, such as the chamber of commerce board. We want to get diversity on the boards so African Americans and minorities have a voice in whats going on in town, Snowell said. I think thats very important to have a voice in the room and see things from a different perspective than what theyre used to. The chapter also plans to establish a reentry program to help individuals transition back into society from the prison system. Snowell said he has been pleasantly surprised by the response from the community supporting the formation of the NAACP, especially considering the diversity within those who have joined. Its about 80% Caucasian or white, Snowell said. I think thats wonderful that we have that kind of diversity and that theres white people out there that recognize the need and want to give support and lend their expertise. Snowell said the group aims to educate the community on Black history and create proactive programs that will prevent discrimination from happening. At the same time, Snowell said the NAACP is an organization that works to help anyone who faces discrimination, especially those struggling with poverty. Anybody can come to us that has a civil rights issue, Snowell said. We will help anyone regardless of the color of their skin. Snowell said he faced discrimination growing up in Schuylkill County, so he is excited to be part of a positive force in the community. Now I know better, want to do better and have some tools that would be helpful, and I grew up here, so I know everybody in the community, Snowell said. I just want to be part of the solution to bring people together. Three bills currently working their way through the Florida Legislature are designed to tackle the rising costs of homeowner roof claims, the costs of attorney fees in homeowners claims and issues surrounding notice to insurance carriers. The proposed legislations come less than two years after Florida enacted an assignment of benefits law for homeowners property claims. But these latest efforts are meant to address the increasing costs of homeowners insurance due to market forces that were not addressed by the 2019 AOB bill. While these bills are preliminary and not law yet, it shows a shift in the legislature to reel in the liberal rules of lawsuits relating to property insurance claims. Among the bills currently being considered is Senate Bill 76, which amends Florida statute (627.428) to award attorneys fees for claims arising under the lodestar fee. Deviation from this method would be reserved for only rare and exceptional circumstances that competent counsel could not be retained in a reasonable manner. The lodestar method determines what a reasonable fee for an attorney would be and requires the following determinations: The number of hours reasonably worked on the case; A reasonable hourly rate to apply to the related hours. The reasonable amount of hours would be multiplied by the reasonable hourly rate creating the lodestar number. Further, SB 76 would allow insurance carriers to limit coverage on roof claims. Under the provision, a carrier can include a roof surface reimbursement schedule endorsement to the insurance policy, which allows for reimbursement for repairs, replacement and installation based on the annual age of a roof surface type, unless the roof is less than 10 years old. The schedule also would provide reimbursement amounts of no less than 70% for metal roofs, 40% for concrete, clay tile, wood shaker, and shingle roofs, and 25% for any remaining roof types. SB 76 also extends certain statutes to cover all property insurance claims instead of just a windstorm or hurricane claim, which would bar property claims if the insurer is not provided notice of claim or supplemental claim within two years of the date of the loss. The bill, if passed, would add a statute (627.70152), which would affect all property insurance policy lawsuits. Specifically, the statute would require any claimant(s) to provide at least 60 days notice of their intention of initiating litigation against their insurance carrier prior to filing the lawsuit. The notice must include: The alleged acts or omissions of the insurer; The insureds demand; Reasonable and necessary attorneys fees incurred by claimants via calculation of the lodestar fee. The new provision would give carriers the ability to inspect and evaluate the demand and allow the carrier to abate any lawsuit if said notice was not provided in compliance with the proposed statute. Attorneys fees under this statute would provide a similar sliding scale structure as the assignee of an assignment of benefits related to property insurance claims and would be based on a demand to judgment quotient. SB 76 was approved by the Senate Banking and Insurance Committee and is awaiting a hearing by the Judiciary Committee. The Florida House of Representatives companion bill to SB76 House Bill 305 would amend the same statutes as SB 76, except it does not involve adding the claimants requirement to provide notice of intent to initiate litigation proposed in SB76. This bill is currently awaiting a hearing by the House Banking and Insurance Subcommittee. The Florida Senate also introduced Senate Bill 212 as a standalone bill addressing just the attorneys fees issue of reasonableness and multipliers. SB 212 would only entail adopting the lodestar fee for property insurance policy lawsuits. SB 212 is currently awaiting a hearing by the Florida Senate Banking and Insurance Subcommittee. These bills would provide insurers the ability to address the growing number of roof claims that were either not damaged by wind or hail or could be repaired yet facing litigation due to insureds, or their representatives, demand full replacement. Further, SB 76 would force claimants to provide notice to a carrier of their intent to file their lawsuit, giving the carrier an opportunity to re-evaluate the claim. All three of these bills would go into effect on July 1, 2021 if passed and signed by Governor Ron DeSantis. Topics Trends Florida Homeowners Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico, President Bidens pick to head the Interior Department, sought Tuesday to find the line between her past remarks as an activist opposing the fossil fuel industry, and her prospective role at the helm of an agency that oversees drilling and conservation on the nations more than 500 million acres of public land. In the first day of a two-part confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy Committee, Ms. Haalands most important audience was the panels chairman, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat who has often sided with Republicans on environmental policy as he seeks to protect his home states coal industry. Privately, however, Democrats have warned Mr. Manchin against being seen as derailing the candidacy of Ms. Haaland, who, if confirmed, would make history as the first Native American cabinet secretary. Mr. Manchin asked Ms. Haaland if she supports the idea of American energy independence, to which she said, We want to move forward with innovation, but added, Thats not going to happen overnight. We will still rely on fossil fuel energy. Sorry! This content is not available in your region George Chaffee [Left] "...by all accounts, George Chaffee was a tireless public servant and Vermonters will continue to benefit from his contributions to our state for decades to come." said Governor Phil Scott The Agency of Commerce and Community Development (ACCD) and the Department of Financial Regulation (DFR) today recognized George Chaffee after his passing on February 6, 2021. George became Deputy Commissioner of the then Banking and Insurance Department in 1977 and was appointed by Governor Richard Snelling as Commissioner of the department on March 21, 1980. While Commissioner, George introduced landmark legislation in 1981 that allowed for the creation of the captive insurance industry in Vermont by making the state a domicile option for companies around the world. While I didnt have the privilege of knowing him personally, by all accounts, George Chaffee was a tireless public servant and Vermonters will continue to benefit from his contributions to our state for decades to come. I join ACCD, DFR and many Vermonters honoring his service and memory. said Governor Phil Scott. Since the passing of the captive insurance legislation 40 years ago, Vermont has become a prominent leader in the industry, ranked first nationally and third globally with over 1200 licensed captive insurance companies to date. The captive industry has directly created approximately 400 jobs in Vermont and contributed about $96 million to the States Gross Domestic Product. Vermont is considered by the captive industry to be the Gold Standard due to the expert regulatory staff, the vast infrastructure of service providers in Vermont, and the strong support of the legislature, all of which can be attributed to the work and vision of George Chaffee, said Deputy Commissioner of Captive Insurance, David Provost. George Chaffees dedication to the captive industry went beyond his time in public service. George was also the former president and founding board member of the Vermont Insurance Institute at Champlain College, established to train accountants to work in the specialized field of insurance accounting. It is now known as the International Center for Captive Insurance Education at the University of Vermont and is the first educational initiative in the nation designed for captive insurance professionals. Additionally, George was the founding director of the Vermont Captive Insurance Association, today the worlds largest captive insurance association with 426 members. Jeff Johnson, former Commissioner of Banking, Insurance and Securities, today working in the captive industry as a lawyer and shareholder at Primmer Piper Eggleston & Cramer PC, worked with George often throughout his career. He said when reflecting on the formation of the industry, George was dedicated to recruiting companies to Vermont to form a captive. He would take the time to show them around Montpelier and introduce them to the Governor. Prospective companies were impressed beyond words at the time and attention given to them. It set a tone that has distinguished Vermont apart from other domiciles from the very beginning. Georges family has asked that donations be made in his name to the Rokeby Museum in Ferrisburgh, Vermont. About Vermont Captive Insurance Captive insurance is a regulated form of self-insurance that has existed since the 1960s and has been a part of the Vermont insurance industry since 1981, when Vermont passed the Special Insurer Act. Captive insurance companies are formed by companies or groups of companies as a form of alternative insurance to better manage their own risk. Captives are commonly used for corporate lines of insurance such as property, general liability, products liability, or professional liability. Connect with the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation on Twitter, Facebook, and on our website. A hospitality boss has said the suspension of alcohol deliveries to Northern Ireland by online retail giant Amazon has presented it with an opportunity. Amazon stopped delivering wines, beers and spirits here at the end of December in anticipation of new custom rules following the end of the Brexit transition period and the beginning of the NI Protocol. A spokesman for Amazon yesterday could not confirm when deliveries would be resumed. But Andrew Maxwell of Belfast Pub Co, a business led by former Drinks Inc boss Paul Camplisson, said the situation presented an opportunity for the company. It has opened an off-licence and wine shop, The Crafty Vintner, at The Bowery on Lisburn Road, formerly The Albany. He said the company had invested 0.75m on e-commerce, as well as on renovating the site - including adding a Korean-style chicken restaurant Seoul Jack to the first floor. The off-licence is now delivering to customers who order online, as well as a click and collect and normal retail services. Mr Maxwell, who is a board member and former owner of Mexican fast food chain Boojum, said: "NI has always seemed to be a small fish to many companies who think it's inconvenient to get product here, but I see it as an opportunity for local companies to step up and fill those gaps. "We've been innovative with technology and how we use it to reach customers. I do see it as an opportunity, and we want to make sure we're at the front of it." The Crafty Vintner is divided into an off-licence and wine-sampling section, which also serves food. Mr Maxwell said it is stocked from local wine merchants such as James Nicholson Wine, Direct Wine Shipments and Robb Brothers. The Bowery opened for a short time in December before the latest lockdown. Mr Maxwell predicted a quick return for the hospitality trade. "We all crave human interaction and bars and restaurants are the hub for that. Outside bars and venues will be in big demand and Belfast has some of the best. Yes, there will be a bit of nervousness but the way things are going with the vaccine roll-out, I think that once we get open and rebuild confidence, we will come out very buoyantly." He said the business had availed of government support including grants and the furlough scheme. But he said lockdown had given him the space to consider a new restaurant concept, leading him to Seoul Jack. "It's will be a multi-concept venue and the first to bring Korean fried chicken to Belfast. With my experience in Boojum, this is something I think is going to be popular." He summed up the coating on Korean fried chicken as "sweet, spicy and crispy". And the restaurant would be "omnichannel", with click and collect, delivery and the option to sit-in. No matter where Dancehall takes hold there will always be a fight for who is the best at the genre. The most recent beef, among Ghanaian performers Shatta Wale and Samini, has taken the spotlight on social media in the West African country, so much so that the Unruly Boss Popcaan weighed in from Jamaica. Wale and Samini have never really seen eye to eye and the two reignited their beef on Twitter yesterday. YEN reports that Samini ignited the match when he described Shatta Wale as a living fool because he measures a mans worth by the value of his assets, in a 2 AM Tweet. The living fool measures the success of a man by the size of a swimming pool. living proof of the fact that depths of minds differ. A beneficiary always feels wisest until the benefactor becomes woke. Remember I did it all by myself without a Nam1 and no one is my Don, he posted. The living fool measures the success of a man by the size of a swimming pool .living proof of the fact that depths of minds differ.A beneficiary always feels wisest until the benefactor becomes woke. Remember I did it all by myself without a Nam1 and no one is my Don SAMINI (@samini_dagaati) February 23, 2021 Shatta Wale responded, You do song about girls and i do song about money ,nooorr you bore deh dis somebodys fada NAM1 .. I start buying houses before I met NAM1 ,you start buying credit as mtn sign you ..That was your f@#ken property ma#f@ka. You do song about girls and i do song about money ,nooorr you bore deh dis somebodys fada NAM1 .. I start buying houses before I met NAM1 ,you start buying credit as mtn sign you ..That was your fucken property maaafaka SHATTA WALE (@shattawalegh) February 23, 2021 Samini, who collaborated with Popcaan on Violate in 2014, continued to throw shots at Wale including letting him know that he was a self-made artiste and did not have the help of any big producers or record label like Wale. He made those comments because of the fact that Wale benefitted from a deal with NAM1, who is the CEO of Zylofon Media, a major company in Ghana. Wale was signed in 2018. Lol e vex .We Dey here wey you get everyting free cus of your kissass attitude and fanfool style. I Dey #wa Dey chill for now but I promise you a track on Friday 3 days of sleeplessness wont hurt .I never insulted your benefactor FYI .de jot high you read well he said in another tweet at 9AM. The beef continued back and forth with the duo trading insults until Samini declared that he would be dropping a special song for Wale on Friday, February 26. Minutes later, Popcaan awoke to the chubble and was clearly entertained by the rivalry. He tweeted, My entertainment is from ghana this morning SM VS HIGHGRADE?? Chubble. My entertainment is from ghana this morning SM VS HIGHGRADE?? Chubble Popcaan (@PopcaanMusic) February 23, 2021 Wale commented under that post letting Popcaan know that he intends to head to the studio to deal with Samini in song as well. He posted: Jamaica is even awake with these disturbances, sorry Unruly Boss for disturbing you this morning.. We apologize for disturbing your sleep my king we are entering the studio now mi boss. Looks like well have to wait until Friday to see what these two have in store. Kyrgyzstan has registered Russias Sputnik V vaccine for use against COVID-19, Russias RDIF sovereign wealth fund said. "Kyrgyzstan is the fourth nation in Central Asia to register Sputnik V. The vaccine will make an important contribution in promoting health safety for the people and preventing the spread of coronavirus," CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund Kirill Dmitriev said. Kyrgyzstan has become the 32nd country in the world to register Sputnik V, which is now one of the world's top three coronavirus vaccines in terms of the number of approvals issued by government regulators. The Southern Baptist Conventions executive committee voted on Tuesday to expel four of its member churches, ousting two for policies that affirm homosexual behavior and the others for employing pastors who are convicted sex offenders. The last year has revealed areas of weakness in our beloved convention of churches, J.D. Greear, the S.B.C. president, said in a fiery opening address to the committee on Monday night in Nashville. Fissures and failures and fleshly idolatries. Covid didnt produce these crises. It only exposed them. The next day, the committee disfellowshipped Towne View Baptist Church in Kennesaw, Ga., and St. Matthews Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., for church policies deemed accepting of homosexuality, in violation of the denominations statement of faith. Towne Views conversations about becoming an affirming congregation, and its decision to accept two gay couples as members in 2019, cost the church at least 30 percent of its membership, Jim Conrad, the pastor, said on Tuesday evening. He stands by the decision, and said he welcomes the opportunity to freely welcome L.G.B.T.Q. people to his church. Ive been S.B.C. all my life and have seen the convention for the last 30 years move further and further to the right, he said. This is just closing a chapter. Advertisement More than 160 Confederate symbols were removed from public spaces last year after Black Lives Matter activists threatened to tear them down following the death of George Floyd. The count was released Tuesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose 'Which Heritage?' database keeps track of nearly 2,100 statues, symbols, placards, buildings and public parks dedicated to the Confederacy around the US. The Montgomery, Alabama-based law center has been tracking a movement to take down the monuments since 2015, when a white supremacist entered a South Carolina church and killed several black parishioners. Of the 168 symbols changed or removed from public spaces last year, all but one went down after Floyd was killed in Minneapolis on May 25. At least one was stolen and several were vandalized by protesters before being removed. '2020 was a transformative year for the Confederate symbols movement,' SPLC Chief of Staff Lecia Brooks said in a statement. 'Over the course of seven months, more symbols of hate were removed from public property than in the preceding four years combined.' More than 160 Confederate symbols were removed from public spaces last year after the death of George Floyd sparked a nationwide reckoning on race, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Pictured: Workers dismantle a statue of Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, on July 7 Of the 168 symbols changed or removed from public spaces last year, all but one went down after Floyd was killed in Minneapolis on May 25. Pictured: An image of George Floyd is projected on a vandalized statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee in Richmond, Virginia, on January 20 Protesters cheer as workers remove the statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson from it's pedestal during a driving rainstorm on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, on July 1 Many of the statues had been vandalized before being removed. Pictured: A statue from the Richmond Howitzers Monument, erected in 1892 to commemorate a Confederate artillery unit, lies after being toppled by protesters on June 17 'These racist symbols only serve to uphold revisionist history and the belief that white supremacy remains morally acceptable,' Brooks continued. 'This is why we believe that all symbols of white supremacy should be removed from public spaces.' Virginia led the US in removals, taking down 71 Confederate symbols in total. The state was followed far behind by North Carolina with 24 and Alabama and Texas with 12 each. Thirty states didn't take down any symbols at all, according to SPLC's count. Among the most frequent names on the list of removals were Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson. The men are seen as top figures of the Lost Cause, a term referring to a belief that fighting on the side of slaveholders in the Civil War was just and heroic. Davis, who served as president of the Confederate States of America before becoming a US senator from Mississippi, had his name and likeness removed 11 times. Jackson, a top confederate general, was on the list eight times, with his name removed from five different schools. But by far the most frequent was General Robert E. Lee, who showed up more than 15 times. His removals included a statue which represented the state of Virginia as part of the National Statuary Hall Collection in the US Capitol for 111 years. Workers remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee from the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, DC, on December 21, 2020 State workers prepare to remove a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from the rotunda of the Capitol Building in Frankfort, Kentucky, on June 12 The statue of a Confederate soldier and plinth sit on a flatbed truck at the Old Capitol in Raleigh, North Carolina on June 21 Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrate in front of a statue of Robert E Lee in Richmond, Virginia, on June 25 Police stand guard as workers remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee in Dallas, Texas, on September 14 Crews remove the seated statue on the Matthew Fontaine Maury Monument in Richmond, Virginia, on July 12 Now Virginia is preparing to replace that statute with another one saluting Barbara Johns, a 16-year-old Black girl who staged a strike in 1951 over unequal conditions at her segregated high school in Farmville. Her actions led to court-ordered integration of public schools across the US, via the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown v Board of Education. Each state legislature can choose up to two representatives to honor in the Capitol's collection. In December, a state commission recommended replacing Lee's statue with a statue of Johns. Supporters told the AP that Virginia's legislature has nearly finalized her elevation alongside George Washington. Joan Johns Cobbs, Barbara Johns' younger sister, is ecstatic about the coming honor. She's also happy it hadn't happened before January 6, when the Capitol was breached. 'You can't imagine how sad I was seeing what was happening in the Capitol building,' Cobbs said. 'I was saying to myself: "Oh, my God. I'm kind of glad her statue wasn't there already." I wondered what would have happened.' Joan Cobbs (left), sister of civil rights legend Barbara Johns, shakes hands with Virginia Gov Bob McDonnell (right) after a portrait of Barbara Johns (center) was unveiled in the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond on September 17, 2010 The SPLC says there are 704 Confederate monuments still standing across the US. And taking some of them down may be difficult, particularly in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee - states where lawmakers have enacted policies protecting these monuments. The movement to remove these symbols from public spaces became part of the national reckoning on racial injustice following the killing Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into Floyd's neck for several minutes. Although activists have called for lowering Confederate flags and taking down monuments for decades, a broader push was sparked after a white supremacist gunned down nine Black parishioners during a June 2015 Bible study meeting at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. 'Exposing children to anything that falsely promotes the idea of white superiority and Black inferiority is dehumanizing,' Brooks of the SPLC said in her statement. Demonstrators secure a rope around the centerpiece of a solid stone obelisk before tearing it down in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on October 12, 2020 A statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee in Richmond, Virginia is seen covered in graffiti on January 17 A work crew removes the Columbus statue in Grant Park in Chicago on July 24 That's why the honor for Johns couldn't come at a better time, said Cameron Patterson, executive director of the Robert Russa Moton Museum, a caretaker of Johns' legacy. Johns moved from New York City to live with her grandmother in Virginia's Prince Edward County during World War II. She attended Moton High School in Farmville where, according to her memoir, the segregated school had poor facilities, lacked science laboratories and had no gymnasium. On April 23, 1951, at age 16, Johns led her classmates in a strike against the substandard conditions at Moton High, drawing the attention of civil rights lawyers at the NAACP. Attorneys filed a federal case that became one of five the US Supreme Court reviewed in the Brown decision. In 1954, the high court declared segregation unconstitutional. This year will mark the 70th anniversary since Johns' protest. She died in 1991, at age 56. 'There's real recognition that her inclusion in the Statuary Hall Collection really will be a great opportunity for folks to more fully come to understand the Moton story in full,' Patterson said. 'So not only are they learning about Barbara and who she was, they're learning about her classmates. They're learning about those that continue to labor in this community, as it relates to the fight for educational equality.' Cobbs, Johns' sister, agreed. 'I hope that young people will see it as something that they could emulate,' she said. 'Being that young, seeing an injustice, and deciding to do something about it is pretty remarkable.' Read the full list of removed symbols below: WKCTC Plan Approved For Use of $15 Million Grant By Bill Hughes PADUCAH - The board of trustees that oversees West Kentucky Community and Technical College approved a resolution last week that sets the framework for how a recent $15 million gift will be used.The resolution by the Paducah Junior College Board of Trustees created a special committee that will work with President Dr. Anton Reece and the WKCTC cabinet to review the details of the plan, called the "WKCTC Guarantee."The "WKCTC Guarantee" emphasizes seven areas: Education; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; Rural Access; Workforce Training; Student Success Academic Support, Student Non-Academic Needs; and Enrollment/Employee Morale.Reece said they will place 87 percent of the $15 million in an endowment, and the rest will be used for short-term and immediate impact.Increased diversity and equity were part of the catalyst for philanthropist MacKenzie Scott's $4.2 billion in donations to 384 "organizations driving change" in the U.S. and Puerto Rico late last year. She was also motivated by the side effects of the pandemic. Recipients were chosen based on data that included previous work to improve diversity and equity.WKCTC is a five-time finalist for the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, and Reece believes their efforts to propel students of diverse backgrounds and socio-economic classes to graduation and careers played a part in receiving this grant. WKCTC should learn if they are in the Aspen top three colleges in the country on May 18.Reece said it's not possible to apply for the MacKenzie Scott grants, and most of the 6,400 organizations being considered were not schools, so their record of providing access to education - and getting students educated or trained - clearly separated them from the pack.Reece said more announcements could be made by mid-to-late March as community partners are brought in. These businesses and organizations will learn of their involvement along with everyone else, and will receive some of the funding to help establish the seven sectors of the plan with the college.On the Net: A 31-year-old man evicted from his apartment faces charges he choked the woman who allowed him to stay at her home, Carbondale police said. Alex Pontosky, who is listed as homeless, was in the Lackawanna County Prison in lieu of $50,000 bail on charges of simple assault, false imprisonment, strangulation, terroristic threats and harassment. Shortly before 6 p.m. Monday, police responded to Krystal Olivers apartment on the 100 block of Fallbrook Street after a report of a fight, according to a criminal complaint. Oliver told police she allowed Pontosky to stay with her Sunday night but he was supposed to leave Monday. Pontosky did not want to go. He also threatened to kill Oliver if she left the apartment. While arguing, Pontosky hit her with his elbow and choked her hard enough that she felt she was about to pass out, according to the criminal complaint. Then, he grabbed her face and covered her nose and mouth to stop her from breathing, police said. The police arrived. Patrolman William Wolfe knocked on the door, but no one answered. Capt. Patrick Lawler went around to the back and saw Pontosky through a window. Lawler yelled at him, giving Oliver the chance to get away and open the front door for Wolfe and Patrolman Jeffrey Arthur, who took Pontosky into custody. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for 10:45 a.m. Tuesday. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close (Natural News) Immediately upon entering the White House, China Joe got to work protecting his rapist buddies from south of the border by issuing an executive order halting all deportations of illegal alien sex offenders for at least 100 days. Starting on Jan. 22, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is prohibited from deporting illegal immigrants who committed sex crimes against Americans, which is music to the ears of Gropin Joe. Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary David Pekoske issued a new directive in response to Beijing Bidens executive order that revokes President Donald Trumps Executive Order 13768, signed in 2017. EO 13768 ordered DHS, which oversees ICE, to prioritize the removal of illegal aliens who have been convicted of any criminal offense or charged with any criminal offense, where the charge has not been resolved. Sniffin Joe, a known sexual predator, had to undo this EO immediately because it threatened his brethren with potential deportation. ICE had been planning a nationwide operation in partnership with the U.S. Marshals targeting at-large sex offenders, but it was scuttled by the new directive, wrote Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), in an article about Chairman Xidens EO protecting illegal alien sexual predators. The U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) in conjunction with ICE is now working to reevaluate its enforcement operation in response to Bidens order. In an emailed statement, the USMS told The Epoch Times: According to our Sex Offender Investigations Branch chief, the USMS is working with ICE to reevaluate upcoming enforcement operations to ensure compliance with recent Executive Orders issued by the POTUS. Biden is destroying America, one executive order at a time After Bidens EO was issued, Texas sued the regime and was victorious, at least for 14 days. A federal judge temporarily blocked the order for two weeks starting on Jan. 26. That victory has since expired, however, and now it is back to protecting illegal aliens against deportation with Bidens blessing. In accordance with Bidens demand, DHS announced that it will now be prioritizing the release of individuals: incarcerated within federal, state, and local prisons and jails released on or after the issuance of this memorandum who have been convicted of an aggravated felony, as that term is defined in section 101(a) (43) of the Immigration and Nationality Act at the time of conviction, and are determined to pose a threat to public safety. Only in a very narrow set of cases, says Vaughan, will any illegal alien be deported under Bidens new rules. These include cases of aggravated felons and other serious criminals who are still in the custody of local law enforcement. Most prior convictions do not qualify and will be categorically excused if they happened 10 or more years ago, Vaughan contends. Bidens goal is to not only flood the United States with dangerous sexual predator illegal aliens, but also to pad the voting rolls with new Democrat voters so he and other treasonous criminals can remain in office presumably forever. The streets of America will now become even more dangerous than they already are with illegal aliens roving around in hot pursuit of their next victims. Should you or someone you know become one of them, you will have only Biden to thank. Federalism is why the founders signed the death warrants on the Declaration of Independence from the King of England, wrote one commenter at The Epoch Times. I am praying God bring his wrath on these criminals, wrote another. Pour out his mighty hosts to condemn, shame and punish them for their deeds of darkness. More related news about the collapse of America under Biden can be found at Treason.news. Sources for this article include: Air.tv TheEpochTimes.com NaturalNews.com The pioneer is a medic from Cherkasy region. At about 12:00 on February 24, Cherkasy region received 16,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine provided for the first stage of vaccination. A medic from Cherkasy region has become the first person in Ukraine who has undergone inoculation for COVID-19. "We already have the first vaccinated doctor this is Yevhen Vasyliovych Horenko, an emergency room doctor who works at the COVID unit. There are several generations of doctors in his family. His father has also been a doctor since the 1990s, and this is actually such a family dynasty," Chairman of Cherkasy Regional State Administration Oleksandr Skichko said at a briefing on Wednesday, an UNIAN correspondent reported. The official said, at about 12:00 on February 24, the region received 16,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine provided for the first stage of vaccination. Read alsoZelensky asks Chief Medical Officer to launch COVID-19 vaccination as soon as possibleCoronavirus vaccine On the morning of February 23, Ukraine received the first batch of coronavirus vaccines. Some 500,000 doses of an Indian-produced vaccine from AstraZeneca are being dispatched from Boryspil Airport. On February 22, the Ukrainian Health Ministry registered the Oxford / AstraZeneca (Covishield) COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use. The vaccine was developed by the University of Oxford in partnership with the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca. The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine for emergency use has been approved by the World Health Organization (WHO) and authorized by the UK, the European Union, and India. The vaccination campaign in Ukraine was originally expected to start with the use of a vaccine produced by Pfizer/ BioNTech, which Ukraine was supposed to receive during the first wave of distribution under the global COVAX Facility. The supply of 117,000 doses of that vaccine to Ukraine has been confirmed. During the first half of the year, Ukraine could receive from 2.2 million to 3.7 million doses of the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine as part of COVAX. In addition, the vaccine will be purchased for public funds directly from producers. It is expected that at least 500,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine will arrive in Ukraine in February. Reporting by UNIAN British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and veteran naturalist David Attenborough made direct pleas Tuesday to the UN Security Council to take urgent action on the climate crisis or face worsening global instability. The meeting represents a departure from the traditional focus of the Security Council of averting conflicts or establishing peacekeeping operations.after having But Johnson, who was chairing a virtual session of the council on climate and security, said: "It is absolutely clear that climate change is a threat to our collective security and the security of our nations." He added: "I know that there are people around the world who will say that this is...green stuff from a bunch of tree-hugging tofu munchers, and not suited to international diplomacy and international politics. "I couldn't disagree more profoundly." Johnson stressed that helping vulnerable countries adapt to climate change and cutting global emissions to net zero will aid the protection of biodiversity as well as prosperity and security. He evoked the examples of farmers becoming susceptible to radicalization when their crops dry up, or girls whose daily search for water takes them further and further from home and they fall prey to human trafficking. "When are we going to do something if we don't act now?" he asked, concluding: "Whether you like it or not, it is a matter of when, not if, your country, and your people will have to deal with the security impacts of climate change." Attenborough meanwhile likened the threat to civilization to that posed by World War II, which took place in his youth. But the new threats "do not divide us," he said. "They are threats which should unite us, no matter from which part of the world we come, for they face us all." He continued: "The change needed in itself sounds immense, and of course it is, but we already have many of the technologies needed, at least for the initial changes. "And perhaps crucially, we also have a level of public support and demand for action that I have myself never seen before. " Britain has committed into law a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and will host the COP26 climate summit in November in the Scottish city of Glasgow. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres meanwhile cited a study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which found that eight of the ten countries hosting the largest multilateral peace operations in 2018 were in areas highly exposed to climate change. "In Afghanistan, for example, where 40 percent of the workforce is engaged in farming, reduced harvests push people into poverty and food insecurity, leaving them susceptible to recruitment by criminal gangs and armed groups," he said. - Eyes on China, Russia - US climate czar John Kerry, French President Emmanuel Macron, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi were also set to address the forum. The meeting will serve as a test for US-China relations, one UN ambassador said on condition of anonymity, alluding to one of the few issues where the two big powers might agree. But this is not a given. "We should watch how the Chinese position themselves with the Americans," the ambassador said in the runup for the event. Traditionally, the ambassador said, "you know that the Russians and the Chinese will immediately say (climate change has) 'nothing to do' with the council's issues." Today, however, "the Chinese are more liable to be slightly open to that discussion," which "leaves the Russians pretty much on their own." Russia does not see climate change as a broad issue for the Security Council to address. Moscow prefers dealing with climate questions on a case-by-case basis, diplomats told AFP. BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- China's centrally-administered state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are making growth plans for the 14th Five-Year period (2021-2025), with a focus on high-quality development to underpin broader economic and social development. The growth targets of China's central SOEs will be specified once the country's 14th five-year plan for economic and social development is approved by the top legislature, said Hao Peng, chief of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), at a press conference on Tuesday. In the coming five years, the high-quality development of the central SOEs will be further enhanced, with progress seen in their business scale and profitability, according to Hao. The central SOEs are also expected to double their efforts in research and development to make new breakthroughs in core technologies and key industries. Hao said industrial layout for the central SOEs will be further optimized, and their presence in strategic emerging industries would be consolidated from 2021 to 2025. Central SOEs have long played a pillar role in China's economic development. The total assets of these enterprises reached 69.1 trillion yuan (about 10.71 trillion U.S. dollars) by the end of last year, representing an annual growth rate of 7.7 percent during the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020). In the meantime, their total profits and net profits showed average annual growth rates of 8.8 percent and 9.3 percent, respectively. In the overseas market, the operating revenue of the central SOEs surpassed 24 trillion yuan and total profits reached nearly 600 billion yuan over the same period. Currently, the overseas assets of China's central SOEs stand at 8 trillion yuan, with presence in more than 180 countries and regions. At the press conference, SASAC spokesperson Peng Huagang said the debt risks of the central SOEs are generally controllable. Peng noted that the commission will implement an early-warning mechanism of financial risks for SOE corporate bonds and formulate guidelines to strengthen risk controls of local SOE corporate debts. Centrally-administered SOEs have focused on preventing corporate default risks in recent years and their average debt-to-asset ratio declined to 64.5 percent by the end of 2020, Peng added. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Paulina Porizkova has opened up about how she unknowingly gave up the last years of her childhood to her pursue her modeling career, saying she was lured by the promise of money after growing up without any. The 55-year-old fashion star took to Instagram on Tuesday to share side-by-side shots of herself as a fresh-faced teen model and now while recalling how she enlisted other people to manage her money for her, a choice she now regrets. 'What was supposed to be just a summer job in Paris the year I turned fifteen, became my lifes career,' she wrote at the start of her candid post. Looking back: Paulina Porizkova, 55, took to Instagram on Tuesday to share side-by-side shots of herself as a fresh-faced teen model (left) and now (right) Strike a pose: In the caption, Paulina (pictured in 1986) recalled how she had worked as a model in Paris the summer after she had turned 15 and it ended up becoming her life's career 'When I was due to return back to school in September, I took stock and...realized I had made more money in one summer than all the babysitting and newspaper selling and grocery store clerking I had ever done, combined. So I stayed.' Paulina said she was 'in the right spot at the right time' and started making more money than she could have ever imagined, but she had no idea how to manage her own finances because she 'grew up with a single parent in a household with no money.' 'I handed it all off to other people to manage, trusting others would do the right thing for me. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they didnt,' she recalled. 'I didnt know then that I sold my childhood and my teenage years. 'I am not one for regrets. I like myself,' she added. 'It took all my mistakes to get me to be the person that I am. But I sure as hell wish I had learned to take charge of my money instead of handing over the responsibility of MYSELF to others.' Paulina shared the post as part of her new partnership with UBS bank. Earlier this month, she opened up about her financial mistakes during a two-part conversation with Paula Polito, vice chairwoman of UBS Global Wealth Management. Candid: The model admitted that she unknowingly gave up her childhood and teenage years to work, and while she doesn't regret her choice, she does regret not handling her own money When asked if she had regretted not signing prenup when she got married in her early 20s, she let out a maniacal laugh and made a face, saying: 'Uh, yeah.' 'Now if I had a daughter, any of my goddaughters or granddaughters or any of the young women I knowif there's one good thing I could do for them is to let them hear my story of how romance eclipsed any financial thinking and what a bad idea that is,' she added. Paulina explained that her family never talked about money when she was growing up because they didn't really have any. She started modeling when she was 15, and her agency had her hire a business manager to take care of her finances. She was only 19 when she met her late husband on the set of the music video for The Cars' hit 'Drive' in 1984. He was considerably older, and she felt he was wiser because of his age. 'I had this sort of idea that he knew everything about the world and his word was the word of God, and I should just sort of listen to what he said because, obviously, he had the wisdom of living that I hadn't had,' she said. 'And he reminded of that every of often, that he knows better because he's older.' Candid: Paulina opened up about her financial mistakes during a recent conversation with UBS as part of her paid partnership with the bank, saying she wished she had signed a prenup Paulina was pulling in about $6 million a year at the time, but she was never considered the breadwinner. 'From the very beginning, it always seemed like it didn't matter how much money I made. It was "hobby" money and his money was the "real" money,' she recalled. She felt it would be 'unromantic' to bring up finances in any way, saying she thought it put their relationship 'into a sort of a calculated romance rather than just love and passion.' Paulina and Ric wed five years later after they met, when she was 24 and he was 45. She said that before they got married, Ric had told her that he thought signing a prenup was a 'bad omen' and meant that they thought their marriage wouldn't last. Memories: The supermodel met her late husband Ric Ocasek on the set of the music video for The Cars' hit 'Drive' in 1984 (pictured) when she was only 19 Honest: Paulina (pictured with her husband in 1990) said Ric thought a prenup was a 'bad omen' and 'romance eclipsed any financial thinking' on her part 'I was stupid,' she said with a laugh. 'It was incredibly naive of me.' Their finances were merged throughout their 28-year marriage, and they had two sons together Jonathan, 27, and Oliver, 22. She noted that she still had access to money after they announced their separation in 2018. However, that all changed when Ric died in their Manhattan townhouse in September 2019 at age 75. She learned he had cut her out of his will, claiming she had 'abandoned' him, leaving her without any money to live off of, including her previous earnings. 'I got two mortgaged houses and the pension, but no way to pay for anything,' she said of her financial struggles the year after his death. 'So obviously things had to be sold, but until they got sold, I had nothing to live on. I literally went through a year of asking my friends to buy us groceries. It was not a good position to be in.' In September, Paulina sold the Gramercy Park townhouse where they had lived for more than 30 years for $10 million. She still has her home in upstate New York, and she recently moved into a rental apartment in Manhattan. Family: Their finances were merged throughout their 28-year marriage, and they had two sons together, Jonathan, 27, and Oliver, 22 (pictured in 2016) Loss: After Ric's death in September 2019, Paulina learned he had cut her out of his will, claiming she had 'abandoned' him, leaving her without any money to live off of Moving on: Paulina sold the townhouse where she lived with her late husband for three decades for $10 million in September More than a year later, Paulina said she still isn't sure if he did this to her intentionally or he was preoccupied with his health and wasn't paying attention when someone slipped him the paper to sign. 'That's my seesaw between grief and rage.' she said. 'And you know what? I'll never get an answer to that. That is something I will never know, and I have to come to terms with it. That's what I'm sort of doing now, forgiving him.' Paulina, as Ric's widow, may be entitled under New York law to an 'elective share' of his estate because they were not legally divorced when he died. Ric specifically addressed the rule in his will, stating: 'Even if I should die before our divorce is finalPaulina is not entitled to any elective sharebecause she has abandoned me.' However, unless it can be proven in court that she did abandon him, she will likely be entitled to a one-third share of the musician's assets, which are listed as $5 million in 'copyrights,' $100,000 in 'tangible personal property,' and $15,000 in cash. Nightmare: The model also has a home in upstate New York that she still owns. She noted that Ric left with her two mortgages but not any money to pay for them Racy: Paulina recently shared a nude photo of herself that was taken in her new apartment Paulina explained that while she has been angry with her late husband, she takes full responsibility for her financial woes. 'What happened to me, it seemed like it was so easily preventable,' she said. 'And it was based on not misfortune, it was based on my own stupidity. 'It wasn't that I had an evil husband. It wasn't that things conspired against me, this is literally, I have nobody to blame for this except for myself.' Paulina shared a touching Instagram tribute to Ric on Valentine's Day, posting a sweet throwback snap of them together at the start of their relationship. In the caption, she reflected on her relationship with the musician, from whom she separated in 2018, explaining that she still has 'love' for him and remains 'grateful' for their time together. Thoughtful words: Earlier this month, Paulina opened up about her complicated grieving process in a touching Valentine's Day tribute to her late husband Looking back: Last week, Paulina shared a cheeky throwback photo of herself that was taken in Costa Rica on February 19, 2020 'When someone you love dies, youre suddenly plunged into knowledge of the finite,' she wrote. 'At least it did for me. Yes, we were separated, yes, we were getting divorced, but I knew love didnt die with a divorce. 'We were not just husband and wife, we were family. I thought we would go on loving each other for the rest of our lives having no idea how short of a time that would be. But it turns out love doesnt go away with death either. 'Im deeply grateful for the time we spent together and soon, even the lessons I now have to learn the hard way.' She concluded the post by sharing one of the most valuable lessons she has learned in the wake of Ric's death. 'Most of all Time is precious,' she added. 'Lets use it well by loving and accepting love to the brim of the containers and dispensers of love that we are. Happy Valentines to you.' The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. As internet penetration and smartphone usage increases across Africa, digital spaces have become increasingly important for organising political uprisings and opposition movements. In response, several of the continents regimes have shut down the internet or blocked social media apps. To sidestep the economic costs and global criticism that these online shutdowns incur, governments have turned to digital surveillance technology as a shrewder way to crush all opposition. In a recently-released report titled Running in Circles: Uncovering the Clients of Cyberespionage Firm, Circles, the University of Torontos Citizen Lab which investigates digital espionage against civil society details how government agencies in Botswana, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe are using the surveillance technology developed by Israeli telecom company Circles to snoop on the personal communications of opposition politicians, human rights activists and journalists. These seven African countries are among 25 around the world using Circles, which is affiliated with the notorious NSO Group whose invasive Pegasus spyware has been used to target human rights defenders and journalists around the world. How does it work? Circles technology is sold to nation states only, and intercepts data from 3G networks, allowing the infiltrator to read messages and emails, and listen to phone calls in real time. Using only the telephone number, a Circles platform can identify the location of a phone anywhere in the world within seconds. Circles exploits flaws in Signalling System No.7 (SS7), the set of protocols that allows networks to exchange calls and text messages between each other. This allows government agencies to track individuals across borders without a warrant, bypassing international conventions. In 2019, 3G became the leading mobile technology in Sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for over 45 per cent of all connections. With the faster and possibly more secure 4G networks being at least five years away from becoming the standard for mobile connectivity on the continent, Circles 3G-manipulating technology is ideal for power-hungry African leaders looking to cling to power by spying on critics. The spying revelations came as African governments including some named in the Citizen Lab report are cracking down brutally on protestors and opposition groups. Nigeria Recent #EndSARS protests triggered a deadly response from Nigerias state security apparatus, with the government able to infiltrate the movements organisational structures successfully. Citizen Lab identified two Circles systems in Nigeria that both began operating in June 2015. One of them was being used by the Nigerian Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). In 2016, the governors of Delta and Bayelsa states also purchased Circles systems to spy on political opponents and critics. The presence of Circles products in Nigeria goes back more than a decade, when former Rivers state governor, Rotimi Amaechi, became the first Nigerian politician to use the surveillance technology in 2010. Circles government clients in Nigeria have a long history of abusing surveillance technologies to conduct mass surveillance of citizens telecommunications. Femi Adeyeye, a Lagos-based political activist who has been detained several times for criticising the Nigerian government, is not surprised that Muhammadu Buharis regime is using the invasive spying technology. Adeyeye cited several cases where Nigerians were swiftly traced, arrested and detained after criticising the government. These include journalists Omoyele Sowore, Abubakar Idris Dadiyata and Stephen Kefas. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has also reported numerous cases of the Nigerian authorities abusing phone surveillance by targeting journalists phones to reveal and track sources for stories investigating government corruption. We are already in the worst stage of dictatorship, warns Adeyeye. Freedom of expression, media, and political association have been further weakened by this spying technology. He says that Nigerian political analysts now self-censor when commenting on national political issues, after witnessing the governments infiltration of #EndSARS. They have seen how people have been traced, their passports seized and bank accounts frozen, and how they have been forced to go into exile. Zimbabwe In Zimbabwe which has witnessed intense anti-government protests recently Citizen Lab detected three Circles platforms, with one dating back to 2013. A second platform was activated in March 2018 and is still operating. As in Nigeria, there has been a government crackdown on anyone exposing corruption. Investigative journalist Hopewell Chinono, and Jacob Ngarivhume, the leader of the opposition group Transform Zimbabwe, were detained ahead of anti-government protests last year. Circles technology is facilitating this suppression. Equatorial Guinea A Circles surveillance system was also found in Equatorial Guinea, where dictator Tedoro Obiang has ruled for 40 years in a climate of torture, extra-judicial executions, arbitrary arrests and the persecution of political activists and human rights defenders. Obiang has crushed protests violently and ignored demands for electoral reforms and limits on terms of office. Morocco Moroccos Ministry of the Interior has been a Circles client since 2018. Rabat has a history of leveraging digital technology to unlawfully target Moroccan human rights activists. Eroding democracy in Botswana Its not just countries such as these facing protests, or those with a dismal record of human rights abuses, that are spying on their citizens. Even supposed democracies are involved. Botswana is hailed widely as one of Africas most stable democracies. Yet, the countrys Directorate of Intelligence and Security Services (DISS) was linked to two Circles surveillance systems dating back to 2015. The targets were journalists investigating corruption by politicians. According to Moeti Mohwasa, spokesperson for the opposition Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), Israeli companies have been selling spyware to the Botswana government for years. Mohwasa says that some of this equipment has been used to eavesdrop on opposition politicians and union leaders in the country. Enabling authoritarianism in Kenya Citizen Lab also reported a Circles system in Kenya. While the East African nation is often lauded as a strong democracy, critics accuse the Uhuru Kenyatta administration of being an authoritarian regime. In Kenya, freedom of expression and media freedoms are under constant threat, says Suhayl Omar, a policing, surveillance and militarism researcher from Nairobi. The Kenyatta regime has waged a war against constitutionalism and any form of opposition in Kenya. Omar believes that the Kenyan government relies heavily on surveillance of its citizens to crack down on any form of opposition. For this, they look to undemocratic and violent states like Israel to fund, equip and train their agents and armies for these unconstitutional missions. Zambia Zambia is also a Circles client. In 2019, the Zambian authorities reportedly used a cyber-surveillance unit in the offices of Zambias telecommunications regulator to pinpoint the location of a group of bloggers who ran an opposition news site. They were duly arrested, with the authorities in constant contact with the police units on the ground throughout the operation. Given its capabilities, it is likely that a Circles system was used to do this. Should the Israeli government be held accountable? African governments will justify spying by claiming that it is a matter of national security. The Israeli government, meanwhile, has distanced itself from these anti-democracy purges. Israeli Minister Zeev Elkin denied any government involvement, telling Israeli radio, Everyone understands that this is not about the state of Israel. But it is. The Israeli government, through its Ministry of Defence, implicitly sanctions such activities by providing tech firms with export licences. In January 2020, Amnesty International filed a lawsuit in Israel calling for the ministry to ban the export of invasive spying software, as it was being used to attack human rights activists by the governments purchasing them. Last July, an Israeli court denied Amnestys request. The Israeli regime has actively enabled the authoritarianism of Uhuru Kenyatta, explains Suhayl Omar, commenting on the situation in Kenya. Moeti Mohwasa in Botswana agrees about official Israeli involvement. In recent years, the Botswana government has increasingly been eroding civil rights, and becoming intolerant of political dissent. Israel is aiding these dangerous trends. Friends with benefits Although developed by private companies, the spying equipment is also a key part of the Israeli governments diplomatic charm offensive in Africa. By helping African governments cling to power through arming them with the weapons to wage cyber-warfare on their citizens, Tel Aviv is hoping to make more African friends. The aim is to dissolve African solidarity with Palestine, and capture African votes at the UN and so defeat resolutions that are critical of Israels brutal military occupation. Israel is also trying to find partners to lobby the African Union to grant the occupation state observer status. In his book War Against the People, Jeff Halper writes that Israel is exporting its expertise in population control gained through its occupation of Palestine, and leading the global pacification industry, assisting state security agencies around the world. The danger, Halper warns, is that gradually we will all become like Palestinians, fearful of being tracked and detained for organising a protest, defending human rights or trying to hold the powerful to account. As repressive African governments continue looking to Israel to help them shrink the safe space for human rights defenders even further, the danger is that Abuja, Nairobi, Gaborone and other capitals across the continent may end up under digital occupation just like Ramallah, East Jerusalem and Gaza City. Princess Diana would have been 'furious' with 'confused' Prince Harry over Megxit, a close friend of the late royal has claimed. The Duke, 36, and Duchess of Sussex, 39, who are currently living in their $14 million mansion in California, were stripped of their royal patronages by the Queen, 94, days ago, and shocked many by issuing a barbed statement in response to the palace. Sources said Prince William has been left 'really sad and genuinely shocked' by his brother's behaviour towards the Queen, branding it 'highly disrespectful'. Fashion designer Roberto Devorik, who remained a friend of Diana all her adult life, has now claimed the late royal would have been angered over the recent fall-out because she wanted him to help shape a 'modern monarchy.' He said Meghan and Diana wouldn't have got along 'in any way', telling Hola! magazine: 'I think Meghan is the boss... Harry is a boy who suffered a lot and believes that Meghan has the legacy of Diana. But he is very confused.' Princess Diana would have been 'furious' with 'confused' Prince Harry over Megxit, fashion designer Roberto Devorik, who was a close friend of Princess Diana, has claimed Fashion impresario Roberto said Princess Diana had told him 'many times' that she 'wanted her children to be princes of a 'modern Crown' and said the royal would have been 'furious' with Prince Harry over Megxit. Meanwhile he called the Queen's decision to strip the couple of their patronages 'logical'. Declaring Prince Harry 'the Queen's favourite grandson', Roberto said Her Majesty had been forced to put 'Crown first', adding: 'For the Crown, what Harry has done is unforgivable.' He explained: 'You cannot exile yourself and collect money from Netflix or Disney and also want to continue collecting from the State for your performances for the Crown. Roberto claimed the late royal had told him she wanted her children to be 'princes of the modern Crown' and would have been angered by the Sussexes' behaviour (pictured together in 1987) 'You cannot live in a mansion in Montecito, California, and sign millionaire commercial contracts , and also want to receive money from the public coffers or continue to represent the Crown.' On Friday it was announced that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had been stripped of their remaining roles after their 12-month trial separation from royal life and move to the US. The couple then issued a sharp rebuke, declaring they would offer 'continued support to the organisations they have represented regardless of official role'. They signed off: 'We can all live a life of service. Service is universal.' Princess Diana and Roberto Devorik pictured while lunching at a private house in Holland Park in 1995 The fashion designer claimed the Queen's decision to strip Prince Harry and Meghan of their royal patronages 'logical' and branded the couple's sharp statement in response to the decision 'shameful' Devorik branded the statement from the couple 'shameful', adding that nobody is 'forbidding' Harry from helping people, but he shouldn't 'receive the privileges from The Crown.' He said the Duke will now have 'a normal life' which is 'what he wanted.' Tensions have heightened since the Duke and Duchess issued their sharp statement on Friday, with sources close to the monarch told The Sunday Times that the riposte was 'petulant and insulting to the Queen'. A source told the Mail: 'Their statement in response to the Queen's heartfelt sentiment that the couple are still much-loved members of her family was considered highly disrespectful.' According to Roberto, Prince Harry is 'very confused' and 'believes Meghan has the legacy' of his late mother (pictured, with Prince William in 1995) Royal sources said it was 'horribly disrespectful' and ''you can't line your pockets while undertaking official duties'. It has been revealed that a 'battle royale' over their royal titles had raged behind the scenes, with the Queen telling the couple their commercial careers were completely incompatible with the impartiality required of those in public service. According to one official, she made it 'abundantly clear' to her grandson that when it comes to being a working royal you are either in, or you are out, telling him: 'You work for the monarchy, the monarchy doesn't work for you.' Meanwhile the Duke of Cambridge is said to be 'very upset by what has happened' and feels Harry has been 'insulting and disrespectful' to their grandmother. With negotiations already tense, the revelation that the couple have conducted a tell-all interview with Oprah sent matters into free fall and was deemed to be the final straw. The couple are said to have 'poured their hearts out' to Ms Winfrey during a two-day shoot in their 11million LA mansion last week. The tell-all interview is due to air on Sunday March 7 with no topics off-limits with one source warning Harry's family the show would be a good 'time to hide behind the sofa at the palace'. Yesterday it was announced the Queen will steal a march on Prince Harry and Meghan and beat them to the airwaves by addressing the nation on TV supported by Prince Charles and Prince William just hours before the Sussexes' interview. The highly transmissible Covid-19 virus variant that first emerged in the U.K. can partially evade a commonly used coronavirus test. Some health authorities are using that fact to their advantage. As more-transmissible variants emerge as a concern in the fight against the virus, the vast majority of Covid-19 diagnostic tests havent been affected. But for a handful, including one from diagnostics giant Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., a section of the test cant pick up on variants including the U.K. variant that have a specific mutation, the company, laboratories and health officials who have processed its tests said. Yet the other parts of the tests still work. So if a test comes up positive for Covid-19 but that portion of the test fails, that could indicate that the samples contain the U.K. variant. Some laboratories are exploiting the bug to more quickly find cases that might be caused by the fast-spreading variant. Its actually been a benefit for public health to be able to monitor," Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said at an online event last week. There was a silver lining there." The tests in question are PCR tests: molecular tests that search for specific portions of the viruss genetic code and amplify them. They are often performed in a lab. The large majority of Covid-19 diagnostic tests, including both molecular and rapid-antigen tests, are able to flag known Covid-19 virus variants as a positive test result. When laboratories flag the mixed test results from those few PCR tests, researchers can use a technique called genome sequencing to determine which variant has been found. Public-health authorities say more-widespread viral sequencing and better genomic surveillance are necessary to track variants circulating around the globe. Viruses mutate constantly as they replicate and spread. Most changes dont alter their core characteristics, but some can impact their ability to spread or the severity of disease they cause. Recent variants from the U.K., South Africa and Brazil have raised concerns among scientists because they appear to be more transmissible; vaccines and treatments might be less effective against the variant from South Africa, early research suggests. Scientists say the U.S. doesnt have a clear picture of how widespread Covid-19 variants are in the country. The countrys genomic surveillance system is improving but still trails behind that of the U.K. More than 1,600 cases caused by the U.K. variant, called B.1.1.7, have been identified across 44 states. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates the fast-moving variant could become the dominant one in the country in March. Just as the viruss mutations threaten to blunt the effectiveness of vaccines and therapies, they also have the potential to diminish the accuracy of Covid-19 tests. The variant discovered in the U.K., for example, has several mutations on what is known as the spike protein, which can affect the efficacy of tests that search for that part of the virus or viral genome, health authorities say. Federal officials have said the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration and manufacturers are evaluating how authorized tests hold up against the new variants. The FDA intends to notify healthcare providers and the public if any new information becomes available, an agency spokeswoman said. The impact on diagnostic testing so far appears to be minimal, in part because most available Covid-19 tests dont search for that part of the virus. Of 246 FDA-authorized tests that search for the viruss genetic material, 85% dont target the spike gene, according to an analysis by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Most rapid-antigen tests, which search for pieces of viral protein, hunt for the nucleocapsid protein, not the spike protein. Most diagnostic tests will still be fine because theyre not looking for the place that mutations have been found," said Gigi Kwik Gronvall, an immunologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Among tests that do search for the spike gene, many look for other parts of the viruss genome as well, making them more robust. Manufacturers design many molecular tests to look for more than one part of a viruss genome in part to withstand such mutations. One of the tests, Thermo Fishers TaqPath Combo Kit, looks for three targets including the spike gene. The part of the test that searches for the spike gene fails to pick up some coronavirus samples, including the B.1.1.7 variant, a phenomenon dubbed the S-gene dropout" by some health authorities. The other two targets are able to detect the variants. You only need two of the three to call it a positive test," Kimberly Hanson, chief of clinical microbiology at ARUP Laboratories in Salt Lake City, said at a media briefing last month. Molecular tests that fail to identify the spike gene but pick up the other pieces of the viruss genetic code might be flagging cases caused by the B.1.1.7 variant, she said. As of Feb. 8, ARUP Laboratories, a national laboratory affiliated with the University of Utah, has screened more than 77,000 Thermo Fisher test results and found roughly 400 instances of the S-gene dropout. The company had performed whole-genome sequencing on 150 of them and found four cases of the B.1.1.7 variant from states including Utah. An S-gene dropout isnt always due to the U.K. variant; it could result from another variant with related mutations, infectious disease experts say. Whole-genome sequencing is required to make the distinction. Still, laboratories and health officials have found cases caused by the variant through the S-gene dropout in states including Colorado, Minnesota and Washington. Researchers in the U.K. also started following S-gene dropout rates to track the spread of B.1.1.7 when it was first detected there last fall. Thermo Fisher first received reports of such cases from customers in the U.K. about the failure in September and October and started receiving reports from the U.S. in December, said Mark Stevenson, the companys chief operating officer and executive vice president. Thermo Fisher has developed a software update that can help laboratories flag dropouts more easily, he said, as well as a new test that can identify specific mutations related to key variants. Helix OpCo LLC, a genomic-sequencing company, makes a Covid-19 test that also exhibits S-gene dropout. That enabled the company to have an earlier detection [of the B.1.1.7 variant] than if we were randomly sampling throughout the country," said James Lu, co-founder and president at Helix. The S-gene dropout can also sometimes be a good proxy for where and how quickly the variant is spreading, Dr. Lu said. Helix, which recently partnered with the CDC to scale-up Covid-19 surveillance in the U.S., is following the rate at which tests produce the dropout to help track the variant in California and Florida, along with genomic sequencing. Dr. Lu and other health authorities say exploiting the S-gene dropout isnt enough to track all of the viral variants circulating in the U.S., and they are pushing for a broader genomic-surveillance system. The Biden administration on Wednesday said the CDC will invest nearly $200 million to scale up genetic sequencing of the virus to track emerging variants. The focus needs to be larger than the U.K. variant," said Frederick Nolte, Covid-19 response steering committee chairman at the Association for Molecular Pathology. This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The official version of the incident pursued by Iran provides no answer to the question why it was precisely the Ukrainian plane that got shot among all other aircraft that took off that night. Iran committed multiple human rights violations in shooting down Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 and in the aftermath of the deadly attack, two UN experts said February 23. "The inconsistencies in the official explanations seem designed to create a maximum of confusion and a minimum of clarity. They seem contrived to mislead and bewilder," Agnes Callamard, the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a 45-page official letter to Iran. Read alsoPS752 downing: Iran may not reveal truth, secret recording suggests"As for the mistakes that have been admitted, they suggest at minimum a reckless disregard for standard procedures and for the principles of precaution, which should have been implemented to the fullest given the circumstances and the location of the missile unit in the proximity of a civilian airfield," the letter reads. Finally, the official version of the incident pursued by Iran provides no answer to the question why it was precisely the Ukrainian plane that got shot among all other aircraft that took off that night. "Absent an impartial, independent and comprehensive investigation, the families of the victims are left without the answers they deserve; left churning over and over in their minds how could this have happened; why was it that this particular flight was targeted while other flights on the same route in the same period escaped attack. Some may even wonder if that particular flight was targeted deliberately," experts say. It is noted that, despite being initially aware of the fact that it was a military missile that brought down the plane, the government has failed to publicly acknowledge it for three days. Read alsoPS752 downing: Iran refusing to name suspectsMoreover, the report adds, the Iranian Government has failed to meet its obligations of respect for the remains of the deceased, including by its disrespectful handling of the crash site, its efforts to obstruct family wishes to repatriate remains; by its interference with private burials. "All this is compounded by entirely unacceptable harassment and threats against some family members," the report reads. PS752 downing in Iran: Background On January 8, 2020, Kyiv-bound Boeing 737 passenger jet flight PS752, operated by Ukraine International Airlines, crashed in Iran shortly after takeoff from Tehran Airport. All 176 people on board, including 11 Ukrainian nationals nine crew and two passengers were killed. Among victims are also citizens of Iran, Canada, Sweden, Afghanistan, Germany, and the UK. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani admitted that the Ukrainian liner had been shot down as a result of an unintentional "human error," and promised to bring those responsible to justice. On June 9, media reports said Iran had accused six persons in the PS752 downing case. On July 20, the flight recorders were delivered to Paris and decrypted on July 21. On July 24, it was reported that data from the black boxes had confirmed external interference with the aircraft's operation. On October 23, Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Yevhen Yenin said Iran would pay compensation to the relatives of victims of the UIA flight PS752 crash, but the process might last up to two years. On December 9, however, Yenin said that Iran had withdrawn the offer to handle the payments to the families of those killed in the UIA plane crash. In the middle of December, Canada expressed its position on the Iranian investigation into the downing of the Ukrainian plane, saying it is not credible. On December 22, the Iranian news agency Tasnim reported that Iranian investigators, during a video conference, had provided representatives of other countries whose citizens were victims of the crash with a technical report on the UIA downing. On December 23, Yenin said Ukraine had not received the report. On December 24, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba expressed concern that Iran was delaying the negotiation process on the case of the downed Ukraine International Airlines plane. He noted that Ukraine had not received a technical report from Iran on the plane downed almost a year ago. On December 30, Iranian cabinet members reportedly agreed at a session to allocate US$150,000 or its equivalent in euros to each family of the victims of the Ukrainian plane crash in January 2020. On January 7, 2021, Rouhani said all those responsible for the downing of the plane would be brought to justice. The Canadian government and security agencies are reviewing an audio recording in which a man identified by sources as Iran's foreign affairs minister discusses the possibility that the destruction of Flight PS752 was an intentional act. On Iranian Military Prosecutor's Office has completed a pre-trial investigation into the incident, Iranian media reported February 21. Reporting by UNIAN Samsung is giving you the chance to figure out if its foldable phones are right for you by extending their return period to over three months. The tech giant has launched a "Buy and Try" program for the Galaxy Z Flip 5G and Galaxy Z Fold 2 5G, which gives you 100 days instead of just 15 to decide whether you want to keep or return the devices. You'll have to purchase the phones first to get your hands on them, of course, but their prices are at least slightly lower now compared to where they were at launch. The book-type Z Fold 2 will set you back at least $1,450, whereas the clamshell-type Z Flip 5G recently got a price cut and now has a starting price of $1,200 before trade-in. Both phones sold quite well last year despite the pandemic. In the company's earnings report for the third quarter of 2020, it revealed that its mobile sales were up by 51 percent over the same period in 2019 due to the launch of flagship devices that include the Z Fold 2. Still, the fact that it's the first time Samsung is offering a program of this kind for mobile devices means it's making an effort to sell more people on its foldables. After all, they're not the cheapest phones to purchase, and the company's teething problems with the first Z Fold may still be discouraging potential customers from making the investment. You can avail of Samsung's Buy and Try program through its official website only until April 1st. UPDATE 1.05PM: There are no new community cases being reported in New Zealand today. The Minister for Covid-19 Response Chris Hipkins says this is good news. "Testing has been going well. Around half of Papatotoe High School have been tested and all have returned a negative result. "There are still some further results pending." Hipkins says overall, the school community has responded well." Second batch of Pfizer/BioNTech doses arrives safely A second batch of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines arrived safely yesterday at Auckland International Airport, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins says. This shipment contained about 76,000 doses, and follows our first shipment of 60,000 doses that arrived last week. We expect further shipments of vaccine over the coming weeks. As with the first shipment, quality assurance and checks by Medsafe are underway. By the end of March, were due to receive a total of about 450,000 doses enough to vaccinate 225,000 people with a two-dose course. The Ministry of Health is working with Pfizer/BioNTech to develop a delivery schedule for the vaccines that ensures a smooth rollout and scaling up of our immunisation programme as we rollout to the general public in mid-year. We started our immunisation programme to around 12,000 border and managed isolation and quarantine workers last Saturday, and once completed, well begin vaccinating their household contacts.". Meanwhile, around 40 border workers from Christchurch Airport were vaccinated this morning, the first to do so in the South Island. This passes a milestone of the first 1000 border workers and vaccinators in New Zealand to receive their first dose. Thats a great start and we appreciate the effort of the vaccinators and border workers,says Hipkins. They included aviation security workers, cleaners, police, customs workers and health protection officers who screen passengers arriving on international flights. Its pleasing to see the gradual scale up of vaccines being administered among this tier one group, as planned, as processes at each site are fine tuned. Numbers will start to pick up from here. Hipkins says a shipment of 490,000 special-purpose needles also arrived yesterday to New Zealand, which will help vaccination teams maximise safe usage of the vaccine. Making the most of every vial of the vaccine and avoiding waste will help to ensure the successful rollout of our immunisation programme." EARLIER: The Minister for Covid-19 Response Chris Hipkins and Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield, will provide an update on the Covid situation in New Zealand at 1pm. Last night, the Ministry of Health announced two additional community cases. They are siblings from the positive case from Papatoetoe High School. The siblings are a teenager and an infant. Earlier in the day, the Ministry of Health reported five new cases of Covid at the border and one new community case. No previously reported cases have recovered. The total number of active cases in New Zealand is 60. The total number of confirmed cases is 2007. The total number of tests processed by laboratories to date is 1,666,446. On Monday, 4123 tests were processed. The seven-day rolling average up to yesterday is 10,096 tests processed. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- RTA suspended a police officer without pay in an investigation into an incident where he shoved a man and slammed him to the ground at a rapid station. Officer Mark Sloboda is on unpaid crisis suspension for the incident that happened on Jan. 14 at the West Boulevard-Cudell rapid station in Cleveland, according to RTA records. RTA scheduled him to appear at a pre-termination hearing for Thursday. Otto Holm, a senior staff representative for the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio union representing transit authority officers, said he did not want to argue the case in public or make a public statement before the hearing. A written statement from RTA spokeswoman Linda Scardilli Krecic included in the records request said RTA placed Sloboda on unpaid suspension on Feb. 2 pending the internal investigation. Her statement said an update on Slobodas employment status is expected within the next few weeks. RTA did not release any reports about the incident. Scardilli Krecic said Slobodas report about the incident remains unfinished. Scardilli Krecic initially said the man slammed to the ground was cited for trespassing, failing to comply with a police order and disorderly conduct, but later said formal charges were never filed. Scardilli Krecic declined to provide the mans name. The video of the Jan. 14 incident shows Sloboda walk out of his office at the West Boulevard-Cudell rapid station. He approached a man wearing a facemask under his chin who appears to be talking to another man. Sloboda walked out of an office, confront the man and pointed toward the exit. He shoved the man, who pointed at his bag that he left on a bench. Sloboda pushed the man with one hand several times, then shoved him with both hands. Sloboda walked back to retrieve the mans bag, and the man followed. The mans chest bumped Sloboda, who shoved the man two times. The man stopped, and Sloboda pointed at the door and tossed the mans bag outside the station. He pushed the man again, and after a few seconds. The man fought back, and Sloboda shoved the man against the wall, and the two scuffled. Sloboda grabbed him, pushed him outside and slammed him onto the pavement. Sloboda held him on the ground for several minutes. The video ends without showing the resolution of their fight. It is unknown if the man suffered any injuries. Cleveland.com/The Plain Dealer requested surveillance video and reports of the incident the day after it happened. RTA officials initially denied the records release, citing an on-going investigation. Scardilli Krecic said the agency reconsidered the request after the news outlet pushed back on the organizations interpretation of Ohio public records laws. Slobodas personnel file shows several disciplinary actions that primarily resulted in verbal counseling by supervisors. The file includes a May 2017 incident where a woman said Sloboda used excessive force against him on West 25th Street. The report does not say if the incident happened at the West 25th rapid station or a bus route on that street. Another officer asked a woman for her fare card, then didnt hear her response and asked again. The woman got frustrated with the officer, and Sloboda yelled at her and put his hands near her face. According to the report, he jabbed her in the chest, and she put up her hands to protect her face. Sloboda grabbed the woman, spun her around, put his forearm in her back, pushed her 10 feet and slammed her down on a bench. Sloboda, in his report, said the woman shoved him, but supervisors wrote that surveillance video showed that never happened. Sloboda filed a grievance, and his discipline was dropped from a written warning to a verbal warning, according to the records. Slobodas personnel file shows several other instances of misconduct, which all resulted in verbal counseling. The first happened soon after he was hired in September 2015 when he asked a Chipotle employee to give him a police discount on the lunch he ordered. His file contains three citations for incidents in 2016. The first, Sloboda failed to search an arrestee, later found to have a toy gun hidden in his pants. The second noted his failure to open the Cleveland Hopkins International Airports rapid station on time. The third noted that he fell asleep while he was supposed to be conducting fare enforcement. In March 2018, he issued a traffic ticket to someone, then didnt file it with the clerk of courts until two weeks after the person was scheduled to appear in court. In July, he sent a department-wide email instead of going to a supervisor questioning RTAs new policy on marijuana enforcement. His personnel file also showed he received several commendations from supervisors for his work. He arrested a man suspected of robbing two people at knifepoint in 2018, arrested a man suspected of carrying drugs in 2017, and arrested a man in connection with a purse-snatching in 2016. Sloboda previously worked part-time for Linndale police, for the Cleveland Clinic as a patient care assistant, and as a sales rep for PartsSource, a medical replacement parts company. He left that job in 2012 after three incidents in which a supervisor wrote that his worst enemy is himself and that he responds emotionally to situations. In one incident, someone overheard him make a fake phone call to make it appear he was working. He used foul language on the phone with a customer, and in another incident, he shouted at a co-worker and used vulgar language during an argument. He denied using vulgar language and was suspended one day for the argument with the co-worker, the records say. Read more from cleveland.com: Solon High School principal placed on paid administrative leave due to investigation into a concern, superintendent says Federal monitor outlines Cleveland police failings in response to May 30 George Floyd protests Man fatally stabbed girlfriend at least 17 times in Clevelands Mount Pleasant neighborhood, police say Ukraine on Wednesday launched a nationwide campaign to inoculate its population against the coronavirus, following delays that sparked anger against the government in one of Europe's poorest countries Kiev, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 24th Feb, 2021 ) :Ukraine on Wednesday launched a nationwide campaign to inoculate its population against the coronavirus, following delays that sparked anger against the government in one of Europe's poorest countries. The ex-Soviet republic of 40 million people has struggled to keep up with other European countries in sourcing vaccines to begin inoculating its population. Oleksandr Skichko, governor of the central Cherkasy region, announced that Ukraine's vaccine rollout had officially begun Wednesday after a medical professional in his region was given the jab. "We have vaccinated the first doctor," Skichko said. Ukraine received 500,000 doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine on Tuesday, marketed under the name Covishield and produced at the Serum Institute in India. Health Minister Maksym Stepanov told reporters earlier Wednesday that the first of those doses had been dispatched to regions outside the capital. His ministry has set out a five-stage jab rollout beginning with 367,000 people in priority groups who will be administered the vaccine by mobile teams. The first group includes healthcare workers treating Covid-19 patients and the elderly with chronic illnesses. The ministry said vaccinations will be voluntary. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had faced criticism for failing to obtain vaccines for his country whose ageing public health system has been under strain during the pandemic. Health officials have so far recorded over 1.3 million cases and more than 25,000 deaths from the virus. - No 'aggressor' vaccine - Zelensky blamed the delay on wealthy Western countries which he said had reserved the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in bulk. He has urged the EU to help eastern European countries. His government originally announced it would begin its vaccination campaign in mid-February, but that date was pushed back after the arrival of vaccines was delayed. Stepanov insisted Wednesday that the vaccination campaign was launched "in accordance with the government's plan," and instead focused on a speedy nationwide rollout. "It is important for us that the maximum number of Ukrainians are inoculated," he said in a statement. Ukraine earlier this week greenlighted the use of the Pfizer vaccine and is awaiting the delivery of 100,000 doses that are part of eight million due under the global Covax programme. But doctors raised concerns Wednesday that fewer Ukrainians -- including medial professionals -- were likely to volunteer to be vaccinated with the Indian-produced jab. "When we talked about Pfizer, we were more confident. But there are more fears with this Indian vaccine," said Valentyn Bagnyuk, director of a hospital in the town of Brovary outside Kiev where vaccinations began Wednesday. According to a Gallup poll published this month, 65 percent of Ukrainians want to inoculated against coronavirus. Ukraine has said it also secured a total 17 million doses of vaccines developed by Novavax and AstraZeneca, including the 500,000 that arrived Tuesday. And it has signed a contract to receive 1.9 million doses of the Chinese Sinovac vaccine. The government earlier this month banned the use of one of the most popular vaccines in former Soviet republics, the Russian-developed Sputnik V jab, describing the vaccine as having been produced by an "aggressor". Ukraine's army has been fighting Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine since pro-Russian militias launched a bid for independence in the wake of Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea. Separatist authorities said earlier they had begun inoculating residents of the two breakaway regions using Sputnik V. Human Rights Council on the Right to Privacy OISTE.ORG to Address Virtually the 46th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council on the Right to Privacy March 3rd 2021 at 3 PM CET Privacy is as a basic, fundamental human right Geneva, February 24, 2021 - The OISTE Foundation, a non-governmental organization, in special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC), will lead a virtual panel on the human right to privacy during the 46th Session of the Human Rights Council. Zoom Registration at: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_HXWDJD60SnWsYKdPaFHTJg Privacy is as a basic, fundamental human right. It is also an endangered right. New digital technologies track and scrutinize us all at this age of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2018). The digital economy considers every click, search or like as an asset to be monetized. Our lives, reflected in cyberspace, are plundered for behavioral data for the sake of a system that converts our freedom into profit. We are quietly being domesticated into accepting as normal that decision rights vanish before we even know that there is a decision to make. A new awareness infused by a human-rights based approach that consider each individual "netizen" as a dignified moral being, worth of respect, is required. Otherwise, our connectivity will continue to offer a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment. Date & Time Mar 3rd 03:00 pm CET Title OISTE Foundation Webinar; The Human Right to Privacy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism Special Keynote by - Pierre Maudet, Conseiller d'Etat, State of Geneva, Moderated by: - Carlos Creus Moreira, Secretary General of OISTE Speakers - Navi Pillay, Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, OHCHR - Hans-Christian Boos, CEO, Arago - Sebastien Fanti, Swiss lawyer, Notary, and Data Protection Commissioner of the Swiss Canton of Valais - Estelle Masse, Senior Policy Analyst and Global Data Protection Lead - Access Now - Alana Tart, Senior digital, technology and privacy lawyer - PMI - Steve Crown, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Human Rights - Microsoft For these reasons, the Foundation OISTE, - building upon the various resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Council touching on the protection and promotion of the right to privacy in the digital age - has set up a panel to address, inter alia, the following issues: Identifying and clarifying principles, standards and best practices regarding the promotion and protection of the human right to privacy Reinforcing the principles of non-arbitrariness, lawfulness, legality, necessity and proportionality in communications surveillance by the State. Ensuring that profiling, automated decision-making and machine-learning technologies do proceed in accordance to agreed safeguards and do not affect the enjoyment of human rights Introducing a gender perspective and ensuring that there exists effective domestic oversight and remedies for the violation of the human right to privacy Addressing the issue of personal data management: often individuals do not provide their free, explicit and informed consent to the re-use, sale or multiple re-sales of their personal data Addressing the issue of human rights impacts of artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on examples of discrimination and bias The OISTE Foundation signed The International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance right after they were launched at the 24th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in 2013. OISTE invites other organizations to join: https://necessaryandproportionate.org/ About OISTE FOUNDATION Founded in Switzerland in 1998, OISTE was created with the objectives of promoting the use and adoption of international standards to secure electronic transactions, expand the use of digital certification and ensure the interoperability of certification authorities' e-transaction systems. The OISTE Foundation is a not for profit organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, regulated by article 80 et seq. of the Swiss Civil Code. OISTE is an organization in special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC) and belongs to the Not-for-Profit constituency (NPOC) of the ICANN. Contact OISTE FOUNDATION Nicolas Ducor nducor@oiste.org Urban Outfitters has recalled its Margo tapered candle holders because if they come in contact with the flame, they may catch on fire. According to an announcement with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, about 2,700 of the candle holders were sold at Urban Outfitters stores and online nationwide from August to November 2020 for between $18 and $30. Product details are: Margo Taper Candle Holders, made of pine or acacia, in small, medium and large sizes. SKU numbers are: small 0058346800, medium 0058346818 and large 0058346826. The candle holders can be returned for a refund. Urban Outfitters will provide a prepaid return label to return them by mail. For more information, contact Urban Outfitters at 800-282-2200, 24 hours a day; send an email to recall@urbn.com or go the website and click on product recalls. Urban Outfitters has recalled its Margo tapered candle holders because if they come in contact with the flame, they may catch on fire. Shown is the small size. READ MORE AMSTERDAM, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- MICROPLASTICS from textiles may inhibit the lung's ability to repair damage caused by COVID-19, scientists will warn today. Speaking on Plastic Soup Foundation's Plastic Health Channel researchers will unveil new findings which reveal microfibres from textiles may be harming lung growth, development, and repair. The research was carried out by scientists at Groningen University, The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research and Plymouth Marine Laboratory. Finding both nylon and polyester negatively affected the growth and repair of airway tissue, researchers said the microfibres could make it more difficult for those with COVID-19 to mend their lungs. With humans exposed to microplastic fibres on a daily basis, scientists also warned of the potential health risks for those with developing lungs, such as children. Professor Barbro Melgert, Principal Investigator of the Research, said: "A virus damages the lungs so you need repair, and if your lungs are filled with fibres that are inhibiting this repair then you are in for another problem in addition to COVID-19." Researchers exposed airway and air sac organoids (miniature lungs) to nylon and polyester microfibres across 14 days to determine their impact, using fibres small enough to be inhaled. Researchers focused on polyester and nylon as they are the most abundant material in indoor settings, where humans spend the majority of their time. The findings build upon research from Dr Fransien van Dijk and colleagues on the impact of microplastics on lungs, which was unveiled at the Plastic Health Summit in 2019. Once breathed in, where do these fibres go? A second study also set to be revealed on The Plastic Health Channel found airborne nanoplastics are travelling from the lungs of pregnant rats to their foetus. The study saw pregnant rats exposed to nanoplastics via inhalation before scientists measured the amount of plastic in both the maternal and foetal tissues. Nanoplastics were found in the pregnant rat's lungs and heart, while they were also recorded in the foetus' liver, lungs, heart, kidney and brain. Dr Phoebe Stapleton of Rutgers University, said: "We need to get a better handle on human exposure overall initially. We need to identify the chemicals in these nanoplastics." Both studies have raised serious concerns about the impact of microplastics entering the body, with experts on The Plastic Health Channel concerned about how they affect those suffering with COVID-19. During meet with Antony Blinken, Jaishankar thanks US for strong support India recognised by US as important part of conversation on Afghanistan: Jaishankar EAM inaugurates new chancery building of Indian High Commission in Mauritius India oi-Vicky Nanjappa Port Louis, Feb 24: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday inaugurated a new and environment-friendly chancery building of the Indian High Commission in Mauritius and reviewed over 950 housing units built with Indian support in the country. Jaishankar arrived here on Sunday night from the Maldives on the last leg of his two-nation tour. "Inaugurated the new High Commission building in Mauritius. This green & efficient project reflects New India," Jaishankar tweeted. India's time-tested relationship with Maldives poised to take quantum jump: Jaishankar He expressed confidence that the new building will inspire the work of the Indian mission even more. Jaishankar inaugurated the new Chancery-cum-Residence building of the High Commission of India in Ebene in the presence of Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth and Foreign Minister Alan Ganoo, the Indian High Commission in Mauritius said. Jaishankar thanked Prime Minister Jugnauth and foreign minister Ganoo for joining him at the ceremony. He also reviewed over 950 housing units built with Indian support. "An exemplary cooperation. Reviewed the Dagotiere Social Housing Project, accompanied by Deputy Prime Minister & Housing Minister Louis Steven Obeegadoo. Delighted that the 956 Housing Units, built with Indian support, will be occupied soon. Thank our workers who have done India proud," Jaishankar said in a tweet. Jaishankar also travelled on Metro Express, the metro train service in the country supported by India. "Pleasure to be taken for this ride!" Jaishankar tweeted along with a photograph of himself and Foriegn Minister & Transport Minister Ganoo. The India-supported Metro Express has emerged as a symbol New Mauritius, Jaishankar wrote. Mauritius is one of India's key maritime neighbours in the Indian Ocean Region and occupies a special place in the Prime Minister's vision of 'SAGAR' (Security and Growth for All in the Region). Indian-origin people constitute nearly 70 per cent of the population of Mauritius. Their ancestors were sent there as indentured labourers during British rule. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 9:56 [IST] Eighty percent of those vaccines have been sent overseas on par with the number of full-time State Department employees who work abroad, if not their family members or contractors. But diplomats noted higher risks of infection and lower quality of health care in many countries that were not at all comparable to conditions in the United States. One official based in the Middle East said that the medical staff in some American embassies had been sent back to Washington to administer vaccines to officials there, leaving the impression that overseas personnel were not a priority. Just as across the United States, officials at the departments headquarters have struggled with delivering a vaccine that requires subzero temperature controls to more than 270 diplomatic posts worldwide. In recent weeks, the State Department obtained more than 200 freezers for embassies and consulates to use for storing the vaccines, 80 percent of which had been delivered, Ms. Perez said. She also acknowledged missteps, such as in December, when an unspecified number of doses that were stored at the wrong temperature in Washington needed to be used immediately or go to waste. They were given to department employees who were put on a priority list by their managers and able to come to the medical unit at State Department headquarters on short notice during the holidays. Much of the first tranche of doses went to the departments frontline workers: medical, maintenance and diplomatic security personnel, and officials who work in round-the-clock operations centers that monitor diplomatic and security developments around the world. Vaccines were also given to employees at the State Departments missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. What was left over, for the most part, went to Washington-area employees who worked from government offices at least eight hours each week. In January, diplomats in Mexico City, across West Africa and in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, received the vaccine as did employees at passport offices in Arkansas, New Hampshire and New Orleans. Additional Washington-area employees were also given doses. [February 24, 2021] Plusgrade Partners with Amtrak to Deliver Ancillary Revenue Through Incredible Customer Experiences Plusgrade, a recognized leader in revenue generating solutions for the global travel industry, today announced its entry into the rail market with its newest partner, Amtrak, the largest and main passenger rail service in the United States of America. Together, the two organizations will bring incredible travel experiences to millions of rail passengers while driving meaningful revenue benefits to Amtrak. "Plusgrade is incredibly honored to be partnering with Amtrak to bring our solutions to travelers. We're thrilled to empower passengers to upgrade their travel experiences across the Amtrak network," said Chris Engle, Chief Commercial Officer of Plusgrade. "Whether a passenger wants to upgrade to first class on Amtrak's high speed Acela trains, or experience Amtrak's premium offerings on journeys across the USA-we're here to help them do it. Plusgrade and Amtrak have teamed up to give customers amazing experiences, while driving upsell revenue." Amtrak will be the first passenger rail service to bring Plusgrade's upgrade solution, which currently powers more than 70 airlines and cruise lines, into the industry. Beginning today, passengers will be able to easily bid for upgrades and experience Business Class or First Class on journeys across the USA. Beginning with Amtrak, Plusgrade is making a commitment to become a key partner to rail companies globally. McKinsey research shows that "passenger kilometers have grown by more than 10 percent in the past five years, and rail has been winning passengers from air travel on major intercity routes." As rail travel grows, Plusgrade will bring its reputation and success as one of the largest sources of ancillary revenue to this industry with the same innovative spirit as it does the other great travel industries it currently serves. In addition to a new, modernized upgrade experience for travelers, Plusgrade's proprietary SaaS (News - Alert) solution offers a number of unique features and benefits: Maximize offer targeting: Driven by over a decade of aggregated traveler insights, Plusgrade enables robust targeted messaging capabilities and easy-to-implement touchpoints. This ensures that the right passengers are shown the right offers at the right time, maximizing message reach, increasing conversion rates and delivering higher quality upgrade offers while respecting complex business environments. Driven by over a decade of aggregated traveler insights, Plusgrade enables robust targeted messaging capabilities and easy-to-implement touchpoints. This ensures that the right passengers are shown the right offers at the right time, maximizing message reach, increasing conversion rates and delivering higher quality upgrade offers while respecting complex business environments. Complete program automation : Automated processes allow our partners to reach the right audience, fulfill desirable upgrade offers, and process payment all without the need for manual program oversight or interruption to operations. This lowers the cost and effort necessary to generate high margin revenue from ancillaries. : Automated processes allow our partners to reach the right audience, fulfill desirable upgrade offers, and process payment all without the need for manual program oversight or interruption to operations. This lowers the cost and effort necessary to generate high margin revenue from ancillaries. White-labelled solution: Travelers engage with a platform that expands upon instead of replacing our rail partners' brand experience, helping to drive positive brand impressions and greater loyalty. "The future of all travel, including rail, will have a high focus on the experience," said Chris Engle. "Consumers want to travel comfortably, no matter the mode of transport. They want flexibility. Plusgrade gives rail corporations the tools to easily and inexpensively offer their passengers the shopping experience they want so they can enjoy the journey as much as the destination." About Plusgrade Plusgrade provides innovative revenue-generating solutions for the global travel industry. As the recognized leader in a key segment of the ancillary revenue and merchandising space, Plusgrade helps travel providers worldwide manage, optimize, and capture high-margin revenue generated from upgrades, unsold inventory, and other premium services. Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, with offices in New York and Singapore, Plusgrade has created billions of dollars of new revenue opportunities for the more than 70 premier airlines, cruise lines and railway companies it serves across 50 countries. For more information, please visit: plusgrade.com On social media: LinkedIn View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005243/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Greg Sukiennik has worked at all three Vermont News & Media newspapers and was their managing editor from 2017-19. He previously worked for ESPN.com, for the AP in Boston, and at The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass. LANSING, Mich., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Accident Fund Insurance Company of America is proud to recognize its President's Club Award honorees, representing an exceptional group of high-performing agent partners across the nation. President's Club qualifications for 2020 included written premium exceeding $2 million, a five-year cumulative loss ratio of 50 percent or less and premium retention of 80 percent or higher. "During a difficult year, these agencies displayed tremendous commitment and dedication to delivering our products and promoting our value to their customers," said Steve Cooper, president of AF Group's Workers' Compensation Division. "We deeply appreciate their continued support, ongoing feedback and valued insight into the individual needs of our shared customers. We look forward to continuing these critical relationships that lead to our joint success." Accident Fund is proud to honor these 2020 President's Club Award recipients: Allied Insurance Services Allied Insurance Managers, Inc. Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services Assured Partners Central States Assured Partners Great Plains BHS Insurance Brown & Brown of Detroit, Inc. Buiten & Associates, a division of Brown & Brown of Michigan, Inc. C & M Insurance Services Cambridge P&C, A Marsh & McLennan Agency LLC Company Capital Insurance Group Consolidated Ins & Risk Management Correll Insurance Agency, LLC Creative Planning Property & Casualty LLC Diebold Insurance Agency Doeren Mayhew Insurance Group Doyle & Ogden, Inc. Fisher Brown Bottrell GLAS Gompers, Cornish & Barr Gregory & Appel HUB International Grand Rapids HUB International Midwest Limited HUB International Midwest Ieuter Insurance Group InPro Insurance Group Inspro, Inc. Insurance & Risk Managers Insurance Marketing Group of WI J.A. Price, Inc. Johnson Insurance Services Kapnick & Co., Inc. Legacy Risk Solutions Lighthouse Insurance Group Marsh & McLennan Agency LLC Minnesota McGriff Insurance Services Inc. MidAtlantic Insurance Group, LLC North Risk Partners, LLC Oakland Companies Palmetto Insurance Associates LLC of Anderson Peabody Insurance Agency, Inc. Pelnik Insurance Presidio Insurance R&R Insurance Services Ralph C Wilson Agency Relation Insurance Services Rich & Cartmill, Inc R-T Specialty LLC Saginaw Bay Underwriters The Campbell Group The Christensen Group, Inc. The Hilb Operating Company The Huttenlocher Agency The Sterling Group The Unland Companies UNICO Group, Inc. USI Atlanta USI Insurance Services Charlotte Van Wyk Risk Solutions VAST Vtc Insurance Group Yates Insurance Inc Accident Fund Insurance Company of America Accident Fund Insurance Company of America is a member of AF Group. Insurance policies may be issued by any of the following companies within the AF Group: Accident Fund Insurance Company of America, Accident Fund National Insurance Company, Accident Fund General Insurance Company, United Wisconsin Insurance Company, Third Coast Insurance Company or CompWest Insurance Company. Contact: Bob Lapinski (517) 331-4890 [email protected] AFGroup.com SOURCE Accident Fund; AF Group Related Links https://www.afgroup.com A state trooper examines a vehicle involved in a fatal crash with a Berkeley County Sheriff Deputys K9 vehicle on Main Street in Bonneau on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. The driver of the vehicle was killed in the crash. Lauren Petracca/Staff Amtrak passenger service along the Gulf Coast is on target to return in 2022 and could come in the early part of next year, an official with the railroad company confirmed Tuesday. Marc Magliari, spokesman for Amtrak, said the nations passenger rail service reached out to CSX and Norfolk Southern in January to inform them that we intend to begin service in 2022 that will connect New Orleans to Mobile with four stops in Mississippi Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Pascagoula. It will be the first time that passenger trains have rolled along the Gulf Coast in more than 16 years. Magliari said the disclosure to the freight operators came at the conclusion of one year of negotiations involving Amtrak and CSX Corp. and Norfolk Southern. The parties were part of an ongoing study into how passenger train service would affect the freight operators. He said the study should have lasted only seven months but appeared to have no conclusion date. Weve spent a year to get through this process and it did not appear there was any end in sight, Magliari said. Instead of postponing the publicly sought and desired new Amtrak service for an indefinite period, we have notified the railroads that we believe we can start the service. There is money set aside for the capital improvements. There is money granted for the operating costs. Amtrak plans to provide more details about the project during the Southern Rail Commissions March 5 meeting. Weve said publicly we want to begin this service as soon as possible, said Magliari, confirming that the Amtrak has proposed beginning the Gulf Coast service as early as January 2022, or in less than 10 months. He added, We also have asked the freight railroads to give us feedback on how practical that is for them. We remain open to talking to the freight railroads about their concerns. The completion of an analysis over how Amtraks operations would impact freight trains had been anticipated by Mobile city officials. The studys completion was one of the contingencies for the councils approval of spending up to $3 million over three years for the operations of the Gulf Coast route. Up to this point, the citys commitment represents the only Alabama financial dedication into the three-state project. An additional $2.2 million had been requested from an Alabama source to support the improvements along the rail line. The project has secured millions of federal funding to move forward, that includes the state matches except from Alabama. In 2019, the project received $33 million in a federal grant for improvements along the rail line. Mississippi has dedicated $15 million, Louisiana $10 million and Amtrak $6 million toward capital improvements. But as Magliari has pointed out, studies have already occurred into the rail line and the costs associated with returning passenger rail. The Gulf Coast Working Group, created by Congress in 2015, provided a deep dive analysis into the project. Their report was completed in 2017. In good faith, and because of our desire to serve our customer the (Southern Rail Commission) directly, and the three states indirectly, we proceeded along this path, said Magliari, referring to the latest rail study. As it turned out, it was leading to no end in sight for yet another study. Representatives with the freight rail operators hope the studies continue, though federal law gives Amtrak has preference to operate along the freight line. Historically, the company exercised those rights by operating the transcontinental Sunset Limited for years before the service was disrupted after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the region in 2005. Related content: Rail advocates contend new Gulf Coast Amtrak service isnt the Sunset Limited There is an established process of introducing new passenger rail service on freight rail lines recognized by both the freight and passenger railroad industries, said Jeff DeGraff, a spokesman with Norfolk Southern. It involves identifying, through a data-driven study, what infrastructure is necessary to ensure that the new passenger service is transparent to freight operations and doesnt negatively impact the freight rail customers. The public entities sponsoring the service finance the infrastructure construction prior to passenger service being introduced. It is a well-instituted process, one that history has shown to work. Cindy Schild, spokeswoman with CSX, said the study took longer than expected due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors. She said that once modeling results are available, a subsequent engineering study is supposed to take place that she said would last another two to four months that would assign costs to any infrastructure identified in the modeling needed to avoid degradation of service to freight customers. She added, CSX has requested Amtrak resume and complete the study. The project has been long opposed by the Alabama State Port Authority, which also wants Amtrak to continue with the study. The ports interest in the project has garnered the attention from Republican U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, who has pushed for more federal investments into the facility include a massive dredging project. Blair Taylor, a spokeswoman for Shelby, said the senator has been participating in discussions. The Port Authority and many of its customers have voiced concern regarding the return of this service in Mobile and the potential congestion on the rail line, Taylor said. Amtrak, the Port Authority, and freight lines have been discussing efforts to minimize these concerns, particularly with the increase in intermodal rail traffic since passenger rail service stopped on the Gulf Coast in 2005. Prior to restoration of the Gulf Coast line, Senator Shelby believes that all parties involved should have access to the data and information needed to best determine the impact passenger rail service would have on economic growth and commerce in and around the Port of Mobile. The return of Amtrak to the Gulf Coast comes as Mobile considers what it should do with a future train station. The council, on Tuesday, tabled an $80,000 expenditure for an alternative train station analysis to study a possible location at the Brookley Aeroplex that would locate near a future commercial airport. Amtrak is likely to utilize a location near Cooper Riverside Park as its immediate stop in downtown Mobile. It would be in a site where the citys train station once stood before it was destroyed by Katrinas floodwaters. Its possible there could be a downtown stop and a Brookley stop, said Magliari. The reconfiguration of the Brookley area is a discussion weve had with the public bodies in Mobile for quite a while. One does not preclude the other. Wiley Blankenship, chairman of the Southern Rail Commission, said the council can request, at a later date, resources from the SRC to fund an analysis of a train station at Brookley. The momentum toward getting the service restarted coincides with efforts to bring U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to the Alabama Gulf Coast to learn more about the project that is a one-of-its-kind service Amtrak has not previously offered along the Gulf Coast. Described as a regional service, the train would provide daily trips between Mobile and New Orleans and would also cater to localized interests such as providing services during festivals and other events. Amtraks only connection in Alabama is the Crescent, which runs between New Orleans and New York, with stops in Birmingham, Tuscaloosa and Anniston. Mississippi U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, who invited Buttigieg to the Gulf Coast and who is a longtime advocate for the project, said the efforts to restore passenger rail to the Gulf Coast remains a top priority. This story was updated at 8:37 p.m. on Tuesday, February 23, 2021, to include a statement from Senator Richard Shelbys spokeswoman Blair Taylor. This undated electron microscope image made available by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in February 2020 shows the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, yellow, emerging from the surface of cells, pink, cultured in the lab. Also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus causes COVID-19. The sample was isolated from a patient in the U.S. On Thursday, March 5, 2020, Tennessee's Department of Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey confirmed the state's first case of the new coronavirus. (NIAID-RML via AP) The National Museum of China on Tuesday announced that it would exhibit the lunar samples brought back by China's Chang'e-5 probe. The samples arrived at the museum on Monday and the exhibition is under preparation, according to the museum. They are preserved in a delicate container made of artificial crystal. Designed in the shape of a Zun, a traditional Chinese bronze ware, the container is 38.44 cm high and 22.89 cm wide. The size refers to the average distance between the Earth and the moon of 384,400 km and the 22.89-day-long lunar probe task, respectively. The return capsule of the Chang'e-5 probe landed on Dec. 17, retrieving about 1,731 grams of lunar samples. Kyoto, Japan -- In the face of threats from other groups, humans become more cohesive and cooperative with their own, an association that Charles Darwin suggested could be an evolved capacity. Now a research group at Kyoto University has demonstrated experimentally for the first time that this propensity is shared with chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. "Despite the importance of understanding how humans can be cooperative with their in-group and still carry out acts of extreme out-group aggression, there has so far been little study on whether the association between these behaviors holds in non-human primates," says first author James Brooks. Building on field research that suggested chimpanzees were more cohesive in days and months when they had out-group encounters, the team tested the direct relation between out-group threat and in-group cohesion by simulating an out-group encounter and observing the subjects' behavior. Five groups of chimpanzees listened to vocalizations of unfamiliar individuals, along with a control of crow vocalizations. The team found that subjects who heard the out-groups became more vigilant and stressed, but instead of translating this into in-group tension, the chimpanzees drew closer to one another, engaged in more affiliative behaviors, and were less aggressive when given limited food compared to the control group. This suggests that in chimpanzees, as well as in humans, competition between groups fosters cohesion, and further that intergroup competition in human evolution may have led to our ability to maintain cooperation and tolerant relations in large groups in the presence of a common enemy. "This is the first experimental evidence that humans share this propensity with chimpanzees," explains study supervisor Shinya Yamamoto, "but it remains to be tested whether this is due to both species' strong evolutionary history of intergroup competition or a more common trait shared with other great apes." The team is currently studying whether the same pattern is observed in bonobos -- humans' other closest relatives -- that are known for not committing lethal out-group aggression. ### The paper "Uniting against a common enemy: Outgroup threat promotes ingroup cohesion in chimpanzees" will appear 24 February 2021 in the journal PLOS ONE, with doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0246869 Author contacts: James Brooks (jamesgerardbrooks@gmail.com, +81 80 8495 3884), graduate student, Wildlife Research Center, Kyoto University; Shinya Yamamoto (shinyayamamoto1981@gmail.com, +81 90 9275 7515), Associate Professor, Institute for Advanced Study, Kyoto University About Kyoto University Da Nang has so far lured 496 projects worth nearly 2.9 billion USD in the High-Tech Park and industrial parks (Photo: VNA) Da Nang The central city of Da Nang on February 23 granted investment licences to six investment projects in local Hi-Tech Park and industrial parks, including three foreign-invested projects. The three FDI projects are funded by Japanese and US investors. They are a 110-million-USD semiconductor factory, a 35-million-USD Fujikin Da Nang research-development-production centre, and a 300,000-USD packaging factory. The three domestically-invested projects have a total capital of 73.4 billion VND. Besides, the city also gave in-principle approval to a 135-million USD project on 3D printing services of Arevo Inc. from the US at the Da Nang Hi-Tech Park. According to Pham Truong Son, head of the Da Nang Hi-Tech Park and Industrial Zones Authority, of the projects, three are located in the Da Nang Hi-Tech Park with total investment of over 280 million USD, using high technology and creating high added value. These projects are expected to make Da Nang more attractive for high tech investors, he said. So far, the Da Nang Hi-Tech Park has attracted 24 projects, including 12 domestically-invested projects worth 6.29 trillion VND (273 million USD) and 12 FDI projects worth 545.1 million USD. Meanwhile, Da Nang has lured 496 projects worth nearly 2.9 billion USD in the High-Tech Park and industrial parks. This year's four-day landmark conferenceleverages innovative virtual meeting technologies to foster state-of-the-art strategies for the full breast cancer treatment team. As the leading go-to resource for continuing medical education (CME), Physicians' Education Resource, LLC, (PER), has been committed to improving the care for patients with breast cancer by educating the treatment team for nearly four decades. This commitment is more than professional, but also deeply personal. This annual marquee CME conference has been family-led since the beginning and continues to incorporate that family spirit into 2021 in the virtual setting. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005893/en/ Traditionally hosted as a live marquee meeting, this year's 38th Annual Miami Breast Cancer Conference has transformed into a live-broadcast virtual and interactive experience leveraging new online meeting technologies. This year the conference is more than Miami, and will bring the educational experience directly to health care professionals online. For 37 years, the historic multidisciplinary Miami Breast Cancer Conference has been a family-led annual meeting. By combining the conference's legacy with the Hennessy family spirit and commitment infused into the DNA of MJH Life Sciences,the parent company of PER, this year's meeting will continue to focus on improving the care of patients with breast cancer. The annual conference has become a landmark meeting that serves as the go-to resource for health care professionals to learn about the most important advancements in breast cancer treatment and how to translate these into clinical care. "In its 38th year, whether this is your first time or your 31st time attending, PER welcomes you as part of the Miami Breast Cancer Conference family," said Phil Talamo, CHCP, president of PER. "Our community is full of dedicated oncologists, surgeons, pathologists, nurses, and more who are committed to elevating patient care. We know that it takes more than a team to treat breast cancer it takes a family. During this year's conference, we will virtually come together with a shared purpose of driving contemporary patient care using strategies that you hear on Friday and use on Monday." This year's 38th Annual Miami Breast Cancer Conference will continue this tradition increase the use innovative virtual technology to deliver the robust educational programming and top-notch presentations for which this conference is known for. New in 2021, PER has expanded its afternoon programming to the full healthcare team with additional tracks on pathology, radiation oncology, and oncology nursing. To accommodate its international learners in European time zones, an international track will also be offered. This will broaden the Conference's impact and bring vital members of the treatment team into the Miami Breast Cancer Conference family, united in the approach to improve the care of patients with breast cancer. Additionally, this year's expanded virtual program will feature world-class tumor board panels, multidisciplinary meet-the-expert sessions, case discussions, poster sessions, a video surgical library, lively Medical Crossfire exchanges, and more. Included among the many important clinical and practical topics on the agenda are novel therapeutic targets, contemporary management issues, oncology care in the COVID-19 era, practical application of genomics, precision medicine, and more. For more information and to register, click here. About Physicians' Education Resource (PER) Since 1995, PER has been dedicated to advancing cancer care through professional education and now advances patient care and treatment strategies on a wide variety of chronic illnesses and diseases. In 2016, PER initiated continuing medical education (CME) programming in the cardiovascular and endocrinology areas. Although it is expanding into topics outside of oncology, PER stands as the leading provider of live, online and print CME activities related to oncology and hematology. The high-quality, evidence-based activities feature leading distinguished experts who focus on the application of practice-changing advances. PER is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education and the California Board of Registered Nursing. PER is a brand of MJH Life Sciences, the largest privately held, independent, full-service medical media company in North America dedicated to delivering trusted health care news across multiple channels. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005893/en/ Contacts: PER Media Contact Alexandra Ventura, 609-716-7777 aventura@mjhlifesciences.com Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Aerial photo shows citizens waiting in line to receive the COVID-19 vaccines developed by Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac at a vaccination site in Ecatepec, Mexico, Feb. 22, 2021. (Photo by Francisco Canedo/Xinhua) More than 100 countries around the world have yet to receive a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, Lopez Obrador said during his daily press conference, accompanied by his Argentine counterpart Alberto Fernandez. MEXICO CITY, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Tuesday urged the United Nations (UN) to intervene to ensure equitable access to vaccines against the COVID-19 pandemic, especially on behalf of poorer nations. More than 100 countries around the world have yet to receive a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, Lopez Obrador said during his daily press conference, accompanied by his Argentine counterpart Alberto Fernandez. "That is totally unfair. Where is the universal brotherhood?" Lopez Obrador said, after welcoming Fernandez. "So the UN has to intervene because it looks like a decorative vase (otherwise). And it is an agreement by all governments that must be enforced," he added. Taking the podium, Fernandez said both Argentina and Mexico have a duty to be united towards "a common future" that helps all of Latin America. "From the northernmost country in Latin America to the southernmost country in Latin America, we have to be able to draw an axis that unites the entire continent," said Fernandez, who arrived in Mexico Monday morning on a three-day visit. Mexico launched a nationwide vaccination campaign in December, initially targeting healthcare workers and older adults in poorer areas. Mexico has reported 2,043,632 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 180,536 deaths from the disease as of Monday night, according to the Ministry of Health. Defra Secretary George Eustice has invited farmers across England to take part in the next stage of the governments flagship green farming policy. In his speech to the NFU Conference on Tuesday (23 February), Mr Eustice said that hundreds of farmers will soon pilot the Sustainable Farming Incentive. The new scheme will reward farmers for taking actions that benefit the environment, such as creating greener landscapes and promoting cleaner air and water. The pilot will allow them to choose from standards based on specific features of the natural environment such as grassland, hedgerows, water bodies or woodland. Each standard brings environmental benefits and contains several actions which farmers can apply to their own farms in order to receive payment. Farmers will be able to shape the design of the scheme by taking part in the pilot, which will welcome expressions of interest from March before it begins in the autumn. An early version of the Sustainable Farming Incentive will be launched in mid-2022 and expanded over time, Mr Eustice explained. It will start with a core set of sustainable farming actions, which will build incrementally as more funding becomes available. In his speech at the virtual NFU Conference, the Environment Secretary said the 'era of top down EU rules is over'. "Now that we have left the EU, new payments and incentives will reward farmers for farming more sustainably. "Our future policy is about supporting the choices farmers make for their own holdings," Mr Eustice said. He said while there were challenges in some areas, many farming sectors had seen a boost to profitability, despite a challenging year due to the pandemic. Lamb and beef prices have been running at ten-year highs and profits in many sectors have increased. He signalled plans to use powers in the Agriculture Act to strengthen the position of farmers in the supply chain and to bring transparency and fairness. Mr Eustice also said he wanted to support new entrepreneurs seeking to get access to land and set up their own farming business. We want the transplant community to be aware that this can happen, and also that there may be things we can do to improve our success in screening patients for Covid, said the surgeon, Dr. Jules Lin, an author of the report and the surgical director of the lung transplant program at Michigan Medicine, the health system of the University of Michigan. The report said that medical professionals should consider testing lung donors for the coronavirus using a sample from their lower respiratory tract, which extends into the lungs beyond the reach of a nasal swab. That kind of testing, which is invasive and not recommended for the general public, is not always available; currently, only about one-third of donated lungs are tested this way. Dr. David Klassen, the chief medical officer at the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit organization that manages the nations organ transplant system, said the case in Michigan was very significant despite its rarity. We want to minimize any chances of this reoccurring, he said. Every organ donor in the United States is tested for the coronavirus in some way, Dr. Klassen said. The tests are not conducted by transplant surgeons; instead, they are typically overseen by nonprofit groups known as organ procurement organizations, which operate across the United States. The Association of Organ Procurement Organizations referred questions to Gift of Life Michigan, which was not involved in this case. Its chief clinical officer, Bruce Nicely, said that many labs had refused to run samples from the lower lungs early in the pandemic, fearing that the procedure could contribute to the spread of the coronavirus. The High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, Jabi, Abuja, on Wednesday, discharged and acquitted two defendants charged with forgery and document falsification in respect of a N170million contract fraud. The defendants, Princess Kama, and Onny Igbokwe, were arraigned by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) before Danlami Senchi, the trial judge, on October 24, 2018. The charges followed the petition by an Ibadan, Oyo State-based, Information Technology retail firm, Citadel Oracle Concept Limited, and its Managing Director, Benjamin Joseph, accusing the defendants and their allies of hijacking the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) contract from him in 2012. Mr Joseph alleged that the defendants and other members of a syndicate forged his companys board resolution with which they, without his knowledge, opened an Access Bank account into which FIRS paid the N70.3million proceeds of the contract. Ms Kama and Mr Igbokwe were charged with four counts of conspiracy, making a false board resolution of Citadel Oracle Concept Ltd dated December 14, 2012, fraudulently or dishonestly using the board resolution as genuine, forgery of a document and using a forged document as genuine. The prosecution led by Jude Obozua called four witnesses to prove their case while the defence called Ms Kama and another witness. Judgment Delivering judgment in the suit on Wednesday, Mr Senchi held that the prosecution failed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. The judge, in dismissing the case, noted that he observed that the allegations leading to the charges arose from the dispute between Mr Joseph and the defendants over the sharing formula of the proceeds of the contract. He noted that Mr Joseph, with various petitions he wrote to various authorities, was only bent on punishing the defendants by his false allegations. Citing section 323 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA), 2015, the judge ordered Mr Joseph to pay N20million compensation to the defendants for allegedly causing their being charged with the alleged offences without justification. Mr Joseph refused to testify According to the judge, one major reason the charge of falsification of the bank resolution failed was that Mr Joseph, whose testimony as the person his signature was allegedly forged on the document, blatantly refused to appear to testify in court. The position of the law on the allegation of forgery is that the person whose signature is alleged to have been forged is an indispensable, vital and material witness and the prosecutions case is fatal without his evidence, he said. The judge also disregarded Mr Josephs EFCC statement which was admitted as Exhibit 2 on the grounds of his failure to testify in court. Curiously, the court did not reference the February 2, 2020 proceedings, when Mr Joseph wept in open court, informing the judge how the prosecution had tried to shut him out and pleaded that he be given an opportunity to state his case. But despite the gaps left in the case by the prosecution, the judge did not censure the prosecuting counsel, Mr Obozua, but rather sympathised with him over the frustration he passed through especially with the non-cooperation of the nominal complainant towards the prosecution of this case. Prosecutions gaps For instance, Mr Senchi noted that aside Mr Josephs failure to testify in the case, the prosecuting counsel led evidence that was at variance with the allegation contained in the charge. The judge said, As I have said earlier, the charge against the defendant in Count 2 is that they made a false board resolution of Citadel Oracle Concept Limited December 14, 2012. Exhibit 12, the board resolution of Citadel Oracle Concept Limited which was admitted in the prosecutions evidence through PW4 and which he (the prosecutor) led extensive evidence purporting to be forged is dated December 18, 2012. He noted that such evidence led by the prosecution will naturally be at variance with the charges and could not amount to the proof of the falsification of the document referred to in the charge. ADVERTISEMENT The judge added, Even if the evidence before this court shows that the defendants did indeed forge Exhibit 12, dated December 18 2012, they nevertheless cannot be convicted for forging the document dated December 14, 2012 for which allegation they have been charged. On this plank alone, the first and second defendant ought not to be found guilty and be discharged and acquitted of the offence of forgery, using false document as genuine and criminal conspiracy, Mr Senchi ruled. Prosecution skipped to mention forged document in two counts In addition, the judge observed that while in counts 2 and 4, the charges specifically alleged that the defendants made false board resolution of Citadel Oracle, the prosecution failed to mention any specific document but only alleged that certain document was forged in counts 1 and 3. While the account opening package used for the opening of the disputed Access Bank account was alleged not to be forensically genuine by EFCCs forensic expert who testified as prosecution witness 4 (PW4), the judge said the allegation was not contained in any of the charges. The judge said, Although an account opening package was tendered through PW4, as Exhibit 13 to 13D, there is now where in Count 2 of the charge where the defendants were accused of opening account opening documents. There is a specific document the defendants were accused of forging in Count 2, and this is the board resolution of Citadel Oracle Concept Limited dated December 14, 2012. He added that in the absence of a specific document in counts 1 and 3 alleged to be forged, the defendants could not have been found guilty of the counts. Gaps in testimony of EFCCs forensic expert The judge added that there was also no sufficient proof, either by direct or circumstantial evidence, that the defendants made false board resolution of Citadel Oracle or forged the account opening document of the disputed Access Bank account. He noted that the expert opinion of EFCCs PW4 on both the alleged falsification of the board resolution of Citadel Oracle admitted as Exhibit 12 or the forgery of the account opening documents admitted as Exhibits 13 to 13D were not reliable. The judge said PW4s testimony was not only contradicted by the testimony of another forensic expert who testified as the second defence witness, the prosecution witness also failed to tell the court the source of the samples used for his comparison to arrive at his conclusions. He also said the prosecution witness failed to name the person who forwarded the samples he used for his forensic analysis, and the prosecuting counsel also failed to call the persons as witnesses. The judge said, In the instant case, I have looked at the facts and the evidence before this court, there are two conflicting expert opinions, on the same issue of forgery of Exhibit 12. I have also considered the first defendants evidence, that it was the nominal complainant himself that handed over the allegedly forged document to her. She also explained the circumstances in which he gave her the document. Two of EFCCs witnesses not relevant to prosecutions case Mr Senchi also noted that only two of the prosecution witnesses (PW1 EFCC investigator and PW4 EFCC forensic expert) were relevant to the case of the prosecution. The judge rather cited the evidence of the two other prosecution witnesses in support of the case of the defendants. Discharged and acquitted The judge subsequently discharged and acquitted the defendants after resolving the only issue formulated for determination against the prosecution and in favour of the defendants. He said, I hold the view that the prosecution failed to establish the offence of criminal conspiracy punishable under section 97 of the Penal Code, forgery punishable under section 364 of the Penal Code, using as genuine forged document punishable under section 97 of Penal Code and fraudulently or dishonestly using as genuine the forged document punishable under 364 of the same act against the first and second defendant and I so hold. The sole issue of determination is resolved against the prosecution and in favour of the defendants. Accordingly the first and second defendants are hereby discharged and acquitted of the four-count charge filed against them by the prosecution. Nominal complainants lawyer reacts Reacting to the judgment, Mr Josephs lawyer, Bob James, described the order awarding N20million against his client as strange. Mr James said, It is strange that an award could be awarded against a person without hearing the person. To the best of my knowledge, it has never happened before in our country that such an excessive amount of N20million is awarded against a nominal complainant because he reported a case to the authorities. We are taking steps to get the order set aside. Backstory Ms Kama and Mr Igbokwe, who is the chief executive of two Port Harcourt-based IT companies, Admas Digital Technologies Limited and Pirovics Engineering Services Limited, were arraigned by the EFCC on October 24, 2018. Mr Joseph had alleged that they connived with some top officials of Zinox Group, including the Company Secretary/Legal Adviser, Zinox Group and TD, Chris Ozims, to hijack the contract awarded to Mr Josephs company. Another director of TD, Folashade Oyebode, and two staff members of Access Bank Plc, Obilo Onuoha and Deborah Ijeabu, were also accused of aiding the alleged crime. The petitioner alleged that the trio facilitated the release to them confidential bank documents belonging to his company, which they allegedly used in opening a bank account at Access Bank for the transfer of the proceeds of the crime. The names of the accountant at TD then, Chares Adigwe, who was said to have filled in the account opening forms at Access Bank, and the Managing Director of Zinox Group, who is also Leo Stand Ekehs wife, Chioma, featured in Mr Josephs petition as playing roles in the alleged scheme. But only Ms Kama and Mr Igbokwe were charged by the EFCC. Ms Kama, had, however, told the court in her defence that she deployed her personal finances, experience and contacts to help Mr Joseph to secure and execute the contract but later betrayed her trust. [February 24, 2021] Jessie Guerrero Joins Alliant Insurance Services Jessie Guerrero has joined Alliant Insurance Services as Senior Vice President, Energy & Marine. Located in the Houston office, Guerrero strengthens the depth of experience of the Alliant Energy (News - Alert) & Marine team. His vast knowledge of all segments of the energy sector will be drawn upon to deliver enhanced consulting solutions for Alliant power and downstream clients. Guerrero will manage the placement of operational and construction coverages and provide strategic advice to power, LNG, downstream, and energy clients. Guerrero's extensive experience in both the private and public energy sectors is a notable expansion of knowledge to Alliant. "Jessie's power generation competence, operations knowledge, and procurement management proficiencies add significant potency to our E&M Power team," said John Ludwig, Co-COO, Alliant Specialty. "Jessie has cultivated longstanding relationships at the highest levels of customers and markets. His presence on the team places Alliant at the forefront of this sector." Prior to joining Alliant, Guerrero was a Managing Director in the energy practice for a global insurance brokerage firm. His expertise reaches across the entire spectrum of energy and heavy chemical. Hispassion is to provide strategic advice beyond the renewal, ensuring his clients have the best available information to make decisions. Guerrero's energy career includes construction project management of power plants, six sigma designations, energy asset trading, and he was the Director of Strategic Procurement for a large energy company with responsibility for the contractual relationship with EPCs and vendors to build simple cycle, combined cycle and renewable power plants, as well as environmental control projects for fossil plants. Guerrero's 30-plus year career began with hands-on operation and supervision of nuclear power plants on board U.S. Naval Submarines. He achieved the rank of Lieutenant Commander and has been designated as a Chief Nuclear Engineering Officer by the Department of Naval Reactors. Guerrero can be reached at (832) 317-4878 or Jessie.Guerrero@alliant.com. About Alliant Insurance Services Alliant Insurance Services is one of the nation's leading distributors of diversified insurance products and services. We operate through a network of specialized national platforms and local offices to offer our clients a comprehensive portfolio of solutions built on innovative thinking and personal service. The business of managing risk is getting more complex, and Alliant is meeting this complexity head-on, not with more layers of management, but with more creativity and agility. Alliant is changing the way our clients approach risk management and benefits, so they can capitalize on new opportunities to grow and protect their organizations. Visit us at alliant.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224006120/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Secretary General of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Nayef Al-Hajraf has called for the participation of GCC countries in any talks on Iran's nuclear deal, Al Arabiya News reported Wednesday. Hajraf made the call during his meeting with the ambassadors of the European Union in Riyadh on Tuesday, noting the Iranian nuclear negotiations are related to regional security and stability. The administration of US President Joe Biden has signalled to Iran its willingness to return to talks to revive the nuclear deal former President Donald Trump abandoned in 2018. GCC countries did not take part in the talks that led to the 2015 international agreement on Iran's nuclear program. Search Keywords: Short link: HOLLAND, MI The state of Michigan is supporting Brownfield incentives for an upscale condo project in downtown Holland that city leaders hope leads to further development. The Michigan Strategic Fund approved about $2.2 million in state tax capture for Towers on River at 159 S. River Ave. Additionally, the city of Holland is contributing $2.99 million in local Brownfield tax financing for the project, according to the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. The funding will go toward removing contaminated soil from the former industrial site, making infrastructure improvements and demolishing a building from 1883. City leaders hope the five-story development revitalizes the 6th Street corridor, an area tucked between downtown Holland and the waterfront on Lake Macatawa. A building from 1883 was demolished at 159 S. River Ave. to clear the way for a $26.9 million development. City leaders hope the Towers on River project kickstarts further developments on the 6th Street corridor. (Photo by Rose White | MLive) The mixed use development will include a first-floor parking garage, retail and office space and about 27 condominiums. Developer Dennis Jacobs said its going to be an iconic building for downtown Holland. Holland City Council unanimously approved the Brownfield plan in November, and City Manager Keith Van Beek said the state approval gets the proposed project over the finish line. Related: $22M workforce housing development planned for Holland The residential units at Towers on River will be priced between $500,000 and $1 million. Van Beek said the city has been looking to add more housing at both affordable and market rates. We think theres a place for all of it in Holland, he said. Were not sacrificing one for the other. Towers on River is being built on South River Avenue between 6th and 7th streets. We think that this is on a very important corner in downtown, but its also on one of those edge areas that weve been looking to for years, said Van Beek. The 6th Street corridor is home to former industrial sites, commercial areas, a city park, residential space and Freedom Village, a senior living community. The project is a crucial first investment to kickstart momentum for further development on the north side of downtown Holland, Van Beek said. The Window on the Waterfront Park on 6th Street in downtown Holland attracts visitors during the annual Tulip Time festival. But city manager Keith Van Beek said it's an underutilized park and a "hidden gem." (Cory Morse | MLive.com) MLive/The Grand Rapids PressMLive/The Grand Rapids Press Van Beek said the city has plans to make public investment in 6th Street to set the stage for and encourage private investment. Some ideas include reconstruction of the road, extending the snowmelt and adding amenities to the Window on the Waterfront park. Towers on River will join other recent additions to downtown Holland, including the west 8th Street redevelopment and the $16.5 million renovation of the Civic Center. Jacobs said the developments create a domino effect for further revitalization. This is going to create a need for more all in that area, he said. I think its going to transform that part of town within the next five- to 10-year period. It probably wont even look the same at all. Demolition has already started, and construction is expected to begin as soon as possible. Jacobs anticipates the building to be up within a year and completed in two years. More on MLive: Public bus system threatened with defunding likely to be cut loose from Muskegon County They call themselves militias, but actual militias report to the governor in Michigan See which businesses in your county got help from Michigans $55 million COVID-19 aid program This year our dine and drink business locations throughout the Gorge have suffered with closures. You can help support your favorites by purchasing take out and gift cards. Many of these business will offer curb-side delivery and some will deliver to your home. Lets keep the Gorge going strong! To boost Make in India, govt approves procurement of 26 defence items from local suppliers Aero India 2021: Here is how to register and watch the show for free Rs 17,000 crore worth procurement proposals, 118 improved Arjun tanks cleared by MoD India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Feb 24: The Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) on Tuesday approved buying of defence equipment worth Rs 13,700 crore for the three armed forces, including 118 Arjun Mk-1A tanks for the Army. The DAC also accorded three Acceptance of Necessities (AoNs) for an overall cost of Rs 13,700 crore, the Defence Ministry said in a statement. All these AoNs are in the highest priority category of defence acquisition --- ''Buy [Indian-IDDM (Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured)]. PM Modi hands over 'Made-In-India' Arjun battle tank to Army in Chennai The DAC, headed by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, is the highest decision-making body for defence procurement. "The Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), under the chairmanship of Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, has approved capital acquisition proposals of various weapons/ platforms/ equipment/ systems required by the Indian Army, Indian Navy and Indian Air Force, in New Delhi on February 23, 2021," the statement added. Sources said of the 13,700 crore, Rs 8,300 crore will be for procuring 118 Arjun (Mk-1A). Earlier this month Prime Minister Narendra Modi handed over to the Army the home-made Arjun Main Battle Tank (MK-1A) in Chennai. The state-of-the-art tank, has been indigenously designed, developed, and manufactured by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO)''s Combat Vehicles Research and Development Establishment The tank is infused with 71 new features and would ensure effortless mobility in all terrains, besides precise target engagement during day and night. All these acquisition proposals approved by the DAC will be indigenously designed, developed and manufactured, the statement added. These will include inter-alia platforms and systems designed and developed by DRDO. The DAC also approved that all capital acquisition contracts (delegated and non-delegated) other than D&D (design and development) cases shall be concluded in two years. The ministry, in consultation with the services and all stakeholders, will come up with a detailed plan of action for achieving the same, it added. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 9:06 [IST] Patna, Feb 24 : Following Bihar's Social Empowerment Minister Madan Sahani's statement in the Assembly, opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leaders shouted slogans demanding Sahani's removal as Cabinet Minister. The ruling Janata Dal United and the RJD on Wednesday indulged in a war of words on Day 4 of the Budget session. The massive spat was triggered after JD(U) leader Madan Sahani was replying on the elderly pension programme of the state government during the Question Hour in the House. At the same time, opposition RJD leaders started shouting the slogan "Mantri Chor Hai". Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leaders Bhai Virendra and Lalit Yadav spearheaded the political attack and a large number of party legislators headed by them gathered in the well of the Assembly. Bhai Virendra alleged, "We know Madan Sahani for a long time. When he was the Food and Civil Supplies Minister during the previous tenure of the Nitish Kumar-led government, he would not do any work without taking bribes. He is directly involved in corruption." Reacting to the corruption allegations levelled by the RJD, Sahani said the opposition leaders used to earn money by misusing the state government programmes. Now people of Bihar are getting benefited due to our strict implementation which is troubling them. Following Sahani's statement, the RJD leaders protested in the House and demanded an apology from the Minister. They have threatened to disrupt the proceedings of the House until Madan Sahani apologises in the House. Due to the protests, Speaker Vijay Kumar Sinha postponed the House proceedings. Madan Sahani while interacting with the media said,"I have touched the sore point of RJD leaders which is troubling them. They used to take commissions in various government projects which have been halted now. Asked for his reaction to the comment "Mantri Chor Hai", Sahani said,"The Opposition is free to say anything to me but I will do my work with honesty and sincerity." Texas man charged $16,752 for electric bill as Gov. Abbott seeks solutions after snow storm Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced Sunday that he is working with members of the state legislature to address skyrocketing energy bills that have hit customers like a tsunami in the wake of a wild winter storm that left millions of residents without power last week. Like 63-year-old Army veteran Scott Willoughby, who got hit with a $16,752 electric bill, many Texas residents are now contractually obligated to pay high charges due in part to the states uniquely unregulated energy market. Customers in Texas are allowed to choose their electricity providers among about 220 retailers in a market-driven system. Willoughby, who lives on Social Security payments in a Dallas suburb, told The New York Times that his $16,752 electric bill that his energy provider charged to his credit card has wiped out his savings and left him broken. But theres nothing he can do about it. My savings is gone, he said. Theres nothing I can do about it, but its broken me. Willoughby, whose energy provider is a company called Griddy, has since launched a GoFundMe campaign to help him cover his bill. For 7 days of the Texas freeze, I got a utility bill of $16,752.68 and my brother's is over $9,000. We are both retired veterans on fixed incomes and this has wiped us out, Willoughby detailed in his online campaign. Mine went on my credit card and once paid, will almost wipe out my savings and my brothers came straight out of his bank account causing an overdraft. Any and all help is appreciated. Blessings on all! As of Tuesday morning, Willoughbys campaign raised well over $12,000. On Saturday, after public outcry and a meeting convened with state lawmakers to discuss the situation, Gov. Abbott stated that the state has a responsibility to protect residents from exorbitant energy costs. We have a responsibility to protect Texans from spikes in their energy bills that are a result of the severe winter weather and power outages," Abbott said. "Todays meeting was productive, and I applaud Republican and Democrat members of the Legislature for putting aside partisan politics to work together on this challenge. We are moving quickly to alleviate this problem and will continue to work collaboratively throughout this week on solutions to help Texas families and ensure they do not get stuck with skyrocketing energy bills. On Sunday, Abbott announced that the states Public Utility Commission had issued a moratorium on customer disconnections for non-payment and would temporarily restrict providers from issuing invoices. This pause will ensure that the state has time to address these bills and develop a solution for Texans, a statement from the governors office said. In its announcement Sunday, the PUC said the moratorium orders were only applicable to customers of investor-owned utilities across the state that fall under the PUCs jurisdiction, which are: Oncor, American Electric Power, CenterPoint and Texas-New Mexico Power. The PUC order does not apply to municipally-owned utilities or electric cooperatives that are not within the PUCs jurisdiction. Our absolute top priority as a commission and a state is protecting electricity customers from the devastating effects of a storm that already affected their delivery of power, PUC Chairman DeAnn Walker said in a statement. The order and directives are intended to be temporary, likely through the end of this week, to address the potential financial impacts that are especially challenging during this extremely difficult time. Griddy, which charged Willoughby $16,752.68 for seven days, appeared to blame the PUC for the high energy costs in the states energy market because it has complete authority over the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. On Monday evening the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) cited its complete authority over ERCOT to direct that ERCOT set pricing at $9/kWh until the grid could manage the outage situation after being ravaged by the freezing winter storm, Griddy said in a statement Thursday. Under ERCOT's market rules, such a pricing scenario is only enforced when available generation is about to run out (they usually leave a cushion of around 1,000 MW). This is the energy market that Griddy was designed for one that allows consumers the ability to plan their usage based on the highs and lows of wholesale energy and shift their usage to the cheapest time periods. The power company added that as of Thursday, 99% of homes had their power restored, and available generation was well above the 1,000 MW cushion. Yet, the PUCT left the directive in place and continued to force prices to $9/kWh, approximately 300x higher than the normal wholesale price, the Griddy statement explained. For a home that uses 2,000 kWh per month, prices at $9/kWh work out to over $640 per day in energy charges. By comparison, that same household would typically pay $2 per day. Some providers not covered by the PUC orders, like CPS Energy, said they are looking at solutions like payment plans that would allow customers to pay for their unexpected bills over multiple years. CPS Energy is the nations largest municipally-owned energy utility providing both natural gas and electric service. The utility provider serves more than 840,750 electric customers and 352,585 natural gas customers in and around San Antonio. Paula Gold-Williams, president and CEO of CPS Energy, said during a press conference Monday that because of how the energy market is set up in Texas, the company had to pay a high price for the energy they provided during the storm. We, like every other operator, every other community, bought fuel, particularly natural gas for the needs. We did not buy the natural gas that was needed to fuel the natural gas system. If we didnt buy it, we wouldnt have had enough fuel to operate the plants, she said. And we wouldnt have been able to provide any energy at all. We saw immediately that the price of natural gas in particular, which also sets the price of power in the market, shot up. She explained that the increases the company saw were initially 6,000% to 7,000%. Then they kept climbing to as high as 16,000%. That is something that the whole state and industry is currently reconciling with, she said. Gold-Williams noted that she foresaw a tsunami in terms of customer affordability and said the company would try to do everything it could to help reduce costs for San Antonio customers, including possibly spreading the charges over multiple years in a payment plan. The utility provider had shared a similar statement on Twitter early Monday about the charges that has since disappeared from its account but is now being circulated widely on the social network. We understand that it would be unacceptable to have customers bear the costs on their monthly bill, so we are working diligently to spread those costs to 10 years or longer to make it more affordable, CPS Energy said. The company has also suspended autopay for customers as they work to resolve the situation. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. The chief suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has been ruled out of an investigation into a missing five-year-old German girl. Inga Gehricke - dubbed Germany's Madeleine McCann - vanished near a factory that Christian Brueckner, a convicted paedophile and rapist, was working on. But in a blow to the Madeleine's parents and investigators, Germany prosecutors have said that 44-year-old had nothing to do with Gehricke's disappearance. The German girl vanished in 2015 during a family picnic close to the derelict factory being renovated by Brueckner. Despite five years of police appeals and a reward of 25,000 euros (21,500) offered for information leading to her whereabouts, Inga has never been found - as is the case with Madeleine McCann. Inga Gehricke (left) - dubbed Germany's Madeleine McCann - vanished near a factory Christian Brueckner (right), a convicted paedophile and rapist, was working on 'The public prosecutor's office has thoroughly examined connections to the Inga case and determined there isn't even an initial suspicion against my client,' Brueckner's lawyer told The Sun. Investigators searched the factory and found 8,000 images of children buried in a plastic bag under Brueckner's dead dog Charlie. Lawyers representing the Gehricke family said that they stayed at a nearby house in May 2015, and the day before Inga disappeared, police records placed Brueckner at a nearby motorway service station where he had a parking-related accident. Brueckner - who is currently imprisoned for a separate crime - is thought to have commuted between the factory on Neuwegersleben and to Braunschweig, around 35 miles away. But despite the link, Thomas Kramer, a spokesperson for the prosecutor's office in Stendal, told the newspaper: 'The investigation of Christian B regarding Inga's disappearance is currently closed. 'Police investigations have been conducted but they have not produced any facts to suggest that Christian B. could have abducted, abused or killed Inga. 'Therefore, even after this additional research, there was no initial suspicion against Chrisitan B., so that the preliminary proceedings were discontinued.' Pictured: British girl Madeleine McCann, who went missing in 2007 Prosecutors in Madeleine's case have said they have 'concrete evidence' she was dead, and have also linked Brueckner with a string of child kidnappings that date back several years. But despite this, Brueckner has not been questioned by any police service about Madeleine's disappearance in 2007. Madeleine was nearly four when she went missing from her family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, on Portugal's Algarve, on May 3, 2007. Brueckner was told last November that he will remain behind bars until 2026, after losing a bid to overturn a rape conviction. He was last year found guilty of the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old American woman in the same Portuguese resort and sentenced to seven years in a Hanover jail, at a court in Brunswick, Lower Saxony. The 43-year-old German national - referred to as Christian B in Germany due to the country's strict privacy laws - was identified as a suspect in the Madeleine investigation last June. Madeleine was nearly four when she went missing from her family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, on Portugal's Algarve, on May 3, 2007. In December, Scotland Yard confirmed it has no plans to end its missing person investigation, despite the belief of German prosecutors that Madeleine was murdered. Christian Brueckner is the prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007. Pictured: A timeline showing his movements up until 2020 where he remain in a Kiel prison Brueckner was previously remanded at the prison in Kiel ahead of 2019's trial for raping the elderly American woman. She was attacked just two years before Madeleine disappeared from the same Algarve resort. In November, a court in Karslruhe rejected Brueckner's appeal against the 2005 rape conviction and confirmed his seven-year sentence. The move should make it easier for detectives in Braunschweig, around 15 minutes' drive away, to question Brueckner about the Madeleine case, as well as two others. Keeping prisoners is expensive and under Germany's federal system the states are obliged to deal with their own prisoners rather than it being handled by a central judiciary. Brueckner was seen in public for the first time in November since he was named as the prime suspect in Madeleine's disappearance by German police being loaded into an ambulance German media says Brueckner received at least two criminal convictions from a Hanover court, one for forging documents in 2010 and another for theft in 2013. He split his time between Germany and Portugal from 2013 to 2015, prosecutors in Hanover have said. Brueckner lived in the Algarve for much of the period from 1995 to 2007, and German prosecutors say he received a phone call from a Portuguese number around the time of Madeleine's disappearance in May 2007. He made a living doing odd jobs in the area where Madeleine disappeared, and was also known to have burgled hotel rooms and holiday flats. Madeleine was just three years old when she disappeared while on holiday in Praia da Luz in Portugal's Algarve region with her parents Kate and Gerry McCann (pictured together) Weeks after an allotment search, authorities indicated they had been looking for digital storage devices, but Brueckner's lawyer accused them of 'desperation'. Since taking the lead in the case earlier this year, German police have struggled to explain what evidence they have about Madeleine's disappearance. In November, a leaked memo revealed that Portuguese investigators were 'shocked' by the lack of concrete evidence after being briefed on the case against Brueckner. Before that, there was confusion about whether German authorities had specific evidence that Madeleine was dead, as they initially implied they did. In the UK, the case remains a missing persons inquiry, as there's no 'definitive evidence whether Madeleine is alive or dead' Ukraine is keen to secure doses of Covaxin for their country from Bharat Biotech, the Hyderabad based major said. A three-member high power delegation led by the country's health minister visited the Bharat Biotech's facility on Wednesday. The Central Asian nation with a population of 41 million people is keen to secure doses of Covaxin, the indigenously developed Covid-19 vaccine which is yet to come out with phase 3 efficacy data, from Bharat Biotech, the firm said. "Igor Ivashchenko, Deputy Minister of Health, Ukraine, and Ivan Konovalov, Head of Trade and Economic Department, Embassy of Ukraine in India, had a discussion with Bharat Biotechs leadership to secure the supplies of Covaxin to Ukraine," said here. The delegation was led by the country's health minister Maksym Stepanov. Krishna Ella, Chairman & Managing Director, International Limited, said, We discussed potential timelines for the supply of Covaxin to Ukraine on a priority and the prospects of a partnership for our BBV 154 intranasal vaccine. Stepanov said that they will soon firm up the Covaxin delivery plan for mass vaccination of Ukrainian citizens and also further strengthen their partnership on the intra-nasal vaccine supplies after the initial results from its phase 1 trials. Ella has said that they will soon have capacities to produce 40 mn doses per month. They have commissioned two facilities and the third one is in line. Iraq sees new daily record in COVID-19 infections; Oman to ban entry of travelers from 10 countries CAIRO, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Iraq sets a yearly new record in daily COVID-19 infections on Tuesday with 4,181 new confirmed cases. Meanwhile, Oman decided to ban travelers from 10 countries to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Iraqi Ministry of Health reported 4,181 new coronavirus cases, the highest daily record in 2021, bringing the total nationwide infections to 675,982. It also reported 16 new deaths, raising the death toll from the infectious virus to 13,311, while the total recoveries in Iraq climbed by 2,592 to 623,337. In Oman, the supreme committee tasked with fighting the COVID-19 pandemic decided to impose a two-week ban on travelers from Sudan, Lebanon, South Africa, Brazil, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia, starting on Thursday, to curb the pandemic's spread, local media reported on Tuesday. The Omani Health Ministry confirmed 297 new COVID-19 infections, raising the total confirmed cases in the Sultanate to 139,989. Oman's tally of recoveries from the virus rose by 295 to 131,143, while its coronavirus death toll increased by two to 1,557. Turkey reported 9,107 new COVID-19 cases and 75 more deaths on Tuesday, pushing its tally of infections to 2,655,633 and its death toll to 28,213. The total recoveries in Turkey, the hardest-hit country in the Middle East, surged by 5,546 to 2,534,996. So far, there are 6.23 million people in Turkey have received the Chinese Sinovac vaccine, among whom 1.21 million having received two shots, since the country started the nationwide vaccination campaign on Jan. 14. Iran reported 8,330 new COVID-19 cases and 91 more deaths from the infectious disease on Tuesday, raising its tally of infections to 1,590,605 and its death toll to 59,663. The tally of recoveries in Iran surged by 7,151 to 1,358,541. Israel reported 4,329 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, raising the total confirmed tally in the country to 758,810. The death toll from the COVID-19 in Israel reached 5,631 after 38 new fatalities were added, while the total recoveries rose to 712,002, with 2,806 newly recovered cases. The number of people vaccinated against COVID-19 in Israel has surpassed 4.5 million, or 48.4 percent of the total population, since the vaccination campaign began on Dec. 20, 2020. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that a COVID-19 night curfew will be imposed for three days, starting on Thursday, to prevent gathering during the Jewish holiday of Purim. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) reported 3,005 new COVID-19 cases and five more fatalities, taking its tally of infections to 375,535 and its death toll to 1,145. The total recoveries in the UAE soared by 3,515 to 366,567. Jordan recorded 4,139 new coronavirus infections and 19 more deaths, pushing its tally on confirmed COVID-19 cases to 372,417 and its death toll to 4,589. The total recoveries in Jordan climbed by 1,855 to 339,214. Morocco announced 446 new COVID-19 cases and 15 more deaths, bringing its tally of infections to 481,709 and its death toll to 8,574. The total number of recoveries in Morocco climbed to 466,105 with the addition of 808 newly recovered cases. Morocco's revenues from tourism decreased by 4.9 billion U.S. dollars, or 53.8 percent, in 2020 due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic that led to the loss of more than 8 million tourists, the Moroccan Ministry of Finance said Tuesday. Lebanon registered on Tuesday 2,723 new COVID-19 cases, raising the total number of infections to 359,320. The Lebanese Health Ministry reported that the number of deaths from the virus in Lebanon went up by 59 to 4,446. Kuwait confirmed 1,015 new COVID-19 cases and eight more deaths, taking its total confirmed infections to 186,004 and death toll to 1,057. The total recoveries in Kuwait rose by 906 to 174,088. The Qatari Health Ministry on Tuesday announced 455 new COVID-19 infections, raising the total confirmed cases in the Gulf state to 161,344. Qatar's tally of recoveries from the virus climbed by 510 to 151,225, while the total fatalities remained unchanged at 257 for the second day running, according to a ministry statement. First Minister Arlene Foster said it marked an important milestone in the progress of the City Deal. (Liam McBurney/PA) The Stormont Executive will mark a major milestone today on the way to a 210m city deal for the north west region. Executive ministers will sign the heads of terms for a regeneration deal for Londonderry and Strabane. In addition to the Executive and UK Governments 210m investment in the region, a further 40m will be provided by Derry City and Strabane District Council and its delivery partners bringing the total funding package to 250m. It is hoped the investment package will see the delivery of 10 major projects, with a focus on innovation, digital and health projects alongside renewal and regeneration initiatives. The Northern Ireland Office said the proposed projects have the potential to deliver an additional 7,000 jobs, increase economic output by 210m per annum, drive growth in output and wages and provide a population boost as further people are attracted to come to the city region to work and study. First Minister Arlene Foster said it marked an important milestone in the progress of the City Deal. There is a real sense of vibrancy and ambition in the North West. The Executive is working with the UK Government, the council and a wide range of stakeholders to turn that potential into reality through collaboration and innovation, the DUP leader said. The deal was heralded by Deputy First Minister Michelle ONeill as a game-changer for the regional economy, driving growth and creating opportunities for people. There is an abundance of potential in the north west and this funding will help to harness it. I commend all the partners and local representatives who have worked tirelessly to secure this investment and I look forward to seeing the benefits it brings. Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis said the funding would support and encourage economic development across the region, creating jobs, boosting opportunity and encouraging further inward investment. Sharekhan, one of Indias leading broking houses, has appointed Mirum, a full-service digital solutions agency from the WPP Group, as the social listening partner. As part of the mandate, Mirum will provide end-to-end ORM services to Sharekhan. The account will be serviced from Mirums Mumbai office. Mihir Karkare, EVP, Mirum India, said, It is our pleasure to partner with Sharekhan. With over a decade of experience, Mirum understands the immense opportunities social listening presents and the role it plays in customer care and brand building. We have 24x7 Social Listening Command Centre which ensures every brand conversation gets tracked, tagged and responded with a shortest TAT. We look forward to bringing our expertise to the Sharekhan business. Mirum India is a leading digital solutions agency with a pan-India footprint, offering 360-degree solutions in digital media for over 50 brands, with an in-house strength of 250+ professionals. Mirum India offers a bouquet of digital services across Social Listening & ORM, Digital Strategy, Media Planning, Creative Services, Tech Builds and Marketing Automation solutions. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close The historic cold and recent power grid failures gave us all some powerful perspective on the things we sometimes take for granted. Food on the shelves, lights, heat, running water and the ability to communicate with friends and family have become so routine we forget how fortunate we are to have them. The recent turmoil also highlights the community safety nets we come to rely upon in our darkest hours. We depend on our community leadership and partner organizations to step up in times of crisis, and this disaster was no different. Coordinated efforts between private organizations, churches, the city, the county and the hospital district, along with many other individuals, helped avert more catastrophic outcomes for our citizens. Community leaders stood up emergency shelters and warming stations in churches and office buildings. Despite the weather, power issues and supply disruptions, COVID vaccines continued to be administered. Police, Fire, and EMS, along with all the other first responders and frontline health care workers, stayed resolute in providing support to our community through grueling long hours and uncertain circumstances yet again. As I rounded throughout the organization, many staff had no power, water or heat at home, including myself. We mobilized our incident command in preparation for the weather. For the first time, to my knowledge, we activated a disaster operations plan while still in another disaster operational plan because of COVID. Staff was sheltered here at the hospital to continue to provide care for their patients through the weather. During this time, we also saw a large influx in the number of admitted patients and a backup of patients unable to be discharged home. Maintenance crews and staff with 4-wheel drive vehicles shuttled staff to the hospital, with one employee providing more than 60 rides over two days. The hospital remains a refuge for the vulnerable in our community. When things get tough and people are unsure or unable to go anywhere else, they come to the hospital. Through this disaster, we provided not only oxygen, medications and medical equipment but also shelter, food and caring empathy to all those who sought help. No matter what crisis comes along, the hospital continues to operate and serve as the last safety net for our city. The staff who continue to show up to work, despite massive obstacles, are what make this community and this organization so great. I want to take this opportunity to once again thank our health care heroes and those who sacrifice their time, comforts and security to care for those in need. A special heartfelt message of gratitude goes to the unsung heroes of health care who work behind the scenes to provide vital support to our patients and healthcare providers. To our facilities, engineering, environmental services, food services, and all the other critical support services departments, we thank you. Your dedication and commitment to your work are the foundation that allows us to continue to serve the most vulnerable of our community. -- Kit Bredimus is the vice president of Nursing and chief nursing officer for Midland Health. Flash Two people were killed and two others injured after a private helicopter crashed near the southern Polish town of Pszczyna early Tuesday morning, local media reported. The two deceased were identified as 80-year-old businessman Karol Kania and his pilot. Local media reported that Kania was returning home during the night from the Masuria lakes area when the aircraft, a Bell 429, was caught by fog and crashed into a wooded area. The exact cause of the accident is still unknown. Two other passengers, a 54-year-old man and a 47-year-old woman, traveling in the back of the helicopter, were brought to hospital with broken bones. Their lives are not in danger, doctors said. Further investigation is underway. A revised contract would make Portnoff Law Associates the next collector of delinquent Scranton trash fees. City council introduced a resolution Tuesday authorizing the contract with the King of Prussia firm, with the initial term running through 2022. The proposed Portnoff pact is similar to one council considered late last year, but includes several revisions members requested. Council tabled and ultimately did not adopt legislation authorizing the original agreement. Portnoff would collect delinquent trash fees under Pennsylvanias Municipal Claims and Tax Liens Act, which permits Scranton to shift collection costs to delinquent property owners. Like the original, the revised contract includes a schedule of legal and collection fees that could be added to delinquent refuse accounts during the collection process. As of the end of 2020, Scranton was owed about $9 million in face values and penalties and about $2.9 million in interest on delinquent trash fee accounts associated with approximately 5,000 properties between tax years 2002 and 2019, Treasurer Mary Jo Sheridan said last month. Except under certain conditions spelled out in the contract, Portnoff would attempt to collect any fees and costs it incurs in pursuit of the delinquencies, including outside attorney fees, directly from delinquent property owners. Scranton would be immediately responsible for unrecouped collection costs Portnoff incurs up to $50,000 if the contract is terminated and the city instructs the firm to cease collections, among other circumstances. Council requested in December revisions to the original contract limiting the citys liability in that or similar cases. Members hoped to avoid a potential future situation where Scranton switches vendors and is left with a large bill for unrecouped collection costs. Under the revised contract, Scranton would pay Portnoff for any unrecouped costs owed in excess of $50,000 not immediately, but upon future collection of those delinquent accounts by the city or another third-party vendor. Council President Bill Gaughan called the $50,000 liability limit a main sticking point, arguing the revised contract is a much better deal for the city. Council members Tom Schuster, Jessica Rothchild and others echoed that sentiment. Gaughan also credited Mayor Paige Gebhardt Cognettis administration for continuing to negotiate with Portnoff in light of councils requested revisions. In December, Portnoff attorney Kevin Buraks outlined a stepwise collection process beginning with the firm sending notices advising property owners of their delinquencies and the citys intent to shift collection costs to the delinquent accounts. Portnoff would charge Scranton $40 plus applicable postage per notice, but wont invoice the city for that one-time charge until it has cumulatively collected past-due trash fees in excess of the total amount of the invoice, per the proposed pact. The $50,000 liability limit would not apply to that one-time charge. The firm, which would offer payment plans and a hardship program, could file liens on properties, secure judgements in favor of the city against properties and ultimately list properties for sheriffs sale during later steps of the collection process. The proposed contract does not include a one-time grace period allowing property owners to resolve delinquencies by paying just the face value of their past-due bills, free of interest or penalties. Gaughan and other council members endorsed such a grace period late last year, arguing it would incentivize payments and prompt an influx of much-needed revenue. Noting his disappointment, Gaughan argued the city is leaving potentially millions of dollars on the table by not offering that grace period. To provide relief for pandemic-impacted fee payers, the Cognetti administration submitted and council adopted earlier this month legislation extending the deadline to pay 2020 city trash bills without penalty to March 31. Assuming council authorizes the contract at a future meeting, Portnoff will fill a void created when Scranton cut ties with the firm formerly known as Northeast Revenue Service at the end of 2020. That company came under intense scrutiny after federal prosecutors revealed its former president, John Rodgers, paid bribes to former Mayor Bill Courtright to maintain his companys contract with the city. Rodgers left the firm, which now does business as Elite Revenue Solutions, in 2019. Sentenced to seven years in prison on federal corruption charges, Courtright has been incarcerated at a West Virginia facility since Oct. 30. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 03:26:11|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Joe Biden will travel to Houston, Texas on Friday to discuss with local officials relief efforts in the wake of extreme winter weather that caused water shortages and power outages in the state, the White House announced Tuesday. "The president will meet with local leaders to discuss the winter storm, relief efforts, progress toward recovery and the incredible resilience shown by the people of Houston and Texas," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters at a White House press briefing. "While in Texas, the president will also visit a COVID health center where vaccines are being distributed," she added. Psaki said additional details of the trip are still in the making and will be released when they are finalized. Biden has approved an emergency declaration for the state. The severe storms battering Texas have claimed at least 29 lives, according to a count by the CNN. More than 12,000 electric customers in the state remain without power as of Tuesday, according to poweroutage.us. Some 7.9 million Texans are currently given boil water notices as they are impacted by public water system disruptions. Enditem The Monday ruling gives hope to dozens of restaurants, bars and other businesses including many in Chicago and its suburbs whose claims for business interruption insurance were denied by the company after COVID-19 and government-mandated shutdowns forced them to close or severely curtail operations. Their cases can now move forward in court. A gypsy mother who was shunned by her family for marrying outside of the community has revealed her determination for her 10-year-old daughter to become a bride as soon as possible so she doesn't suffer the same fate. In seson six of Gypsy Brides US, Lee Ann from Philadelphia explained the importance of her daughter, Mary, 10, marrying another Romanichal gypsy, and even organized a 10th birthday party for the youngster where future potential husbands and their families could 'get a look at her'. 'What difference does it make if shes 14 or 40, she has to carry on the tradition,' she asked her husband Joe, who said he didn't want to see their daughter 'wasting her life' by marrying young. Lee Ann added that she wasn't against Mary having a child at 14, claiming that if she waited until she's any older than 18 to get married, then she would not be 'wanted anymore' by any 'good gypsy boy'. The series is causing a stir after being released for the first time on streaming services including Amazon Prime. Traveller Lee Ann and her gorger husband Joe, are torn about their daughter Mary's (pictured) future in Season six, episode six of Gypsy Brides US Lee Ann, who had been married to Joe for 15 years when the show was filmed, explained that she 'loves' being a gypsy because of its traditions including marriage without the potential for divorce. She said: 'When I went to marry my husband, my father stopped speaking to me. I had to make a choice between Joe and my family. 'It was either marry the man that I love or have my family's approval. Marrying outside of the community has affected my life in a big way. 'I'm trash, i'm no good because of who I am. That's what a lot of people think. 'I want Mary to be a hundred per cent gypsy. It's very important that Mary marries a Romanichal to keep the blood line and the traditions going.' Joe described the gypsy culture as 'strange' and admitted that he didn't want their daughter to embrace the traditions, but said it was 'hard to win an argument with Lee Ann'. Lee Ann (pictured) tells Joe that Mary's 10th birthday party is an opportunity for her to meet future husbands who will help her to continue the Romanichal gypsy bloodline For her part, Mary said that she enjoyed the fashion associated with being a gypsy, but was torn about her future. 'They argue a lot about it. My mom wants me to clean and have children, take care of them. My dad really wants me to become a writer because I love to write,' Mary said. 'I just want to have both, I don't want to just have one,' she explained. Over a family dinner, Lee Ann took the opportunity to explain her plans for Mary's birthday party, despite opposition from Joe. 'I think it needs to be for her to meet future husbands, for their families to get a look at her,' Lee Ann said. 'Of course she's not ready yet, but you know' Joe turned to Mary saying that he would spend the next six years trying to talk her out of getting married young. Lee Ann is left devastated when none of her family attends Mary's (pictured) 10th birthday party and threatens to cut contact if they don't come Lee Ann added that the traditional birthday party was also important for her to get her family back. While Mary was out of the room, Lee Ann confronted Joe about not taking her arrangement seriously. 'If you had it your way, by the time you think she's ready. She's never going to find a good gypsy boy,' she said. 'If she waits any longer than 18, she's not going to be wanted anymore. That's the way it's done. 'Who's to say that she can't still live her life, get married, have kids and be a Romanichal and still go to school?' But Joe argued against Mary having to 'stay at home scrubbing the house all day, wasting her life'. Joe comforts Lee Ann (pictured) as she vows to no longer associate with being a gypsy because her family didn't come to Mary's party Lee Ann added that she'd be fine with Mary having a child at 14, if that's what she wanted to do. However Joe dubbed the idea 'crazy', saying: 'She's not a piece of meat. I'm not doing it, you're not pawning her off to somebody. 'It's a party for a little girl, I'll be damned if she's going to be surrounded and hounded by guys all night. Gypsy or gorger I don't care who they are. A guy is a guy and she's a 10-year-old girl.' On the day of the party Mary gushed about feeling like a princess after choosing a ballroom dress complete with lights. However, Lee Ann was left devastated when none of her family attended the occasion and Mary walked into a hall with very few people. Visibly emotional she said: 'Nobody comes. I'm done. They can all kiss my fat a**. I don't want nothing to do with none of them. Not a single one and I'm no longer a gypsy.' SOLON, Ohio -- The Solon school district placed Solon High School Principal Erin Short on paid administrative leave while it investigates a decade-old claim against her. In a letter sent to staff and students families Tuesday, Solon City Schools Superintendent Fred Bolden said Short is on leave due to a concern received last week. We take this matter seriously, Bolden says in the letter. Although we have not been able to confirm the source of the information, and the claim involves conduct alleged to have occurred more than a decade ago, we immediately initiated an investigation and shared this information with the Solon Police Department. The police are investigating the matter as well as the identity of the individual who expressed the concern. Bolden placed Short on leave Feb. 15, pending the outcome of the investigation. Assistant Principal Erica Kosiorek will serve as acting principal, the letter says. Bolden declined to give details on the claim, and Solon police Lt. Jamey Hofmann, who is the lead police investigator, also declined to elaborate. Short released a statement about the investigation Monday: From the onset of the investigation, I have been completely forthcoming and cooperative with both the Solon Board of Education and law enforcement, Short wrote. I unequivocally and categorically deny the false and defamatory allegation that has been made against me. Going forward, I will continue to be forthcoming and cooperative with both the Board of Education and law enforcement until this investigation is resolved. Moreover, I will zealously pursue all damages as a result of the false and defamatory allegation that has been made against me. Read more crime stories on cleveland.com: Stow mans car stolen at gunpoint in apartment parking lot Man fatally stabbed girlfriend at least 17 times in Clevelands Mount Pleasant neighborhood, police say Beachwood fires police officer who opened fire on shoplifter during 2019 incident at Beachwood Place shopping mall Woman charged in crash that killed two Lakewood men was speeding, under the influence, report says Cleveland Councilman Kenneth Johnson indicted on federal conspiracy charges involving reimbursements from city DARIEN Teachers could start getting the vaccine as early as next week, according to the towns Department of Health and the districts superintendent. The timing coincides with the last phase of Dariens secondary students returning to in-person learning on Monday. Despite the change, the leaders of the town and schools, both up for the vaccine in the next phase, say they will take a back seat on the list for those who need it first. Though he will be eligible as an educator and by age for the next round, Schools Superintendent Alan Addley said he will wait as those who work directly with children on a daily basis get vaccinated first. First Selectman Jayme Stevenson, also eligible beginning next week, said Tuesday that as long as there are others who need the vaccine and supplies are limited, she will wait. Im putting myself at the end of the line, she said. Gov. Ned Lamont announced Monday the state will expand COVID-19 vaccination eligibility next month through defined age groups and to teachers, shifting priority away from essential workers and those with underlying medical conditions. While state officials touted the new plan as a more efficient way to ramp up vaccinations, the approach deviates from guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the CT Food Association and several labor unions, criticized the governor for leaving behind frontline essential workers and those with medical conditions that make them more susceptible to COVID complications. Under the new plan, people age 55 to 64 will next be eligible to receive the vaccine as of March 1. The state plans to make an exception for teachers, school workers and child care professionals, who will also be eligible to receive the vaccine next month at separate clinics, in schools wherever possible. Darien is running vaccine clinics at the Mather Community Center at Town Hall. Addley said a clinic will be set up there for teachers. He said several school employees have already been vaccinated, either due to their age or because they are medical workers. From what I have gathered, teachers are very excited that we will be eligible for the vaccine next week, said Joslyn DeLancey, who is head of Dariens teachers union and is a teacher at Tokeneke School. I wont speak for everyone as I havent surveyed, but I will say that I personally will feel more comfortable in the classroom after having both doses of the vaccine, she said. DeLancey said the district has recently had more staff cases. Although we cant always directly link the cases to school exposure, we do think it to be true in some cases, she said. DeLancey said a vaccine for teachers and school staff is a huge step forward in getting back to some sort of normalcy and consistent in person learning for all. We are hoping the town can get a clinic in place for teachers and other school employees in order to get us vaccinated as soon as possible, she said. Addley said he is working with town health director David Knauf to begin teachers clinics next week through March. He said it will be held in the Mather gymnasium where the rest of the clinic is being held. It is exciting for our teachers. They will get a bit of understandable security and comfort. Its also good for kids in the rest of the state who are currently not in school, Addley said. Im so glad the state has now seen teachers as a priority, he said. Addley said he intends to be last on the list though he will be eligible. I assure you I will not be in the front of everyone who works in the schools or goes to visit the schools, he said. Addley said hes glad to see the state has made educators a priority. They deserve it, he said. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Sophie Wessex has given royal fans a glimpse inside previously unseen rooms in the Bagshot Park home she shares with Prince Edward. The Countess, 56, took part in a special virtual engagement with the British Fashion Council yesterday, during which she presented the 2021 Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design to London-born Priya Ahluwalia. Wearing a stylish navy and white printed Victoria Beckham dress, the mother-of-two took part in the Zoom webinar hosted by Caroline Rush, the British Fashion Council's Chief Executive. During the discussion she revealed her style 'icon' is actress Angelina Jolie, adding: 'I always think she looks amazing - and also Queen Rania of Jordan always looks stunning.' Sophie also shared a new photo via the Palace to mark the occasion, taken in a different room of the Surrey residence to the one she held the Zoom call in. Royal fans were quick to spot a number of sweet shots of their children Lady Louise Windsor, 17, and James, Viscount Severn, 13, and intimate portraits of their proud parents among their possessions. Here, we take look at what we can learn about the Wessexes from their sitting rooms. Sophie Wessex has given royal fans a glimpse inside previously unseen rooms in the Bagshot Park home she shares with Prince Edward in a new photo released yesterday 1. Baby photos of their children Sitting proudly on a round white side table with duck egg legs, situated beneath an oil painting, are a selection of photos, one of which shows a blonde-haired toddler, which looks like their son James. A further frame containing several photos appears to show Lady Louise riding a horse. The teenager is a keen equestrian and is often spotted out riding with her father, the Earl of Wessex. She also takes after her grandfather Prince Philip, having inherited his love of carriage driving and proved herself a talented driver from a young age. Sitting proudly on a round white side table with duck egg legs, situated beneath an oil painting, are a selection of photos, one of which shows a blonde-haired toddler, which looks like their son James 2. A black and white photo from William and Kate's wedding day Sitting on the shelf of a wooden display cabinet is a candid black and white photograph which looks to have been taken on the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's wedding day. It shows Prince Edward, dressed in military uniform, and a young Lady Louise who was a bridesmaid at the nuptials. On the big day in April 2011, the adorable eight-year-old was seen walking alongside Pippa Middleton and riding in a carriage with Prince Harry, donning a crown of flowers in her hair. Only half of the photograph is visible, but it's likely that Sophie also features in the sweet shot. Sitting on the shelf of a wooden display cabinet is a candid black and white photograph which looks to have been taken on the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's wedding day Lady Louise Windsor, pictured back left, was a flower girl at the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's wedding day 3. A model ship Also seen on the wooden dresser is the front of a model ship which appears to be a military vessel, complete with figurine sailors stood on deck. The boat is possibly a nod to Prince Edward's brief stint in the Royal Marines. He bowed out in January 1987, after just four months of training, with the Palace announcing at the time that his decision came after 'much consideration' and he was leaving with great regret. His commandant, Colonel Ian Moore, said the decision was made 'for very honourable reasons', adding that he was 'doing well in training [and] respected by his instructors, who had all had a lot of time for him'. Edward is the Queen's only son to not serve in the military; both Prince Charles and Prince Andrew served in the Royal Navy, as did their father Prince Philip. Prince William and Prince Harry served in the RAF and Army respectively. Also seen on the wooden dresser is the front of a model ship which appears to be a military vessel, complete with figurine sailors stood on deck 4. Wooden display cabinet featuring ornate crockery A statement feature in the room, the wooden cabinet with glass doors features three shelves, all of which bear three porcelain plates with a floral design. The nature of their prominent display suggests the crockery is significant to the royal couple and was possibly a wedding gift. 5. Intimate black and white couple portrait The intimate black and white shot in the background shows the Countess resting her head on her husband's shoulder as the pair smile for the camera During Sophie's Zoom call, a romantic photo of her and Prince Edward can be seen in the background. The intimate black and white shot shows the Countess resting her head on her husband's shoulder as the pair smile for the camera. The photograph looks like it was taken during a formal shoot, possibly taken to mark an anniversary. The couple married in June 1999. Further photos are also visible on the table, which appear to continue the black and white theme. Wearing a stylish navy and white printed Victoria Beckham dress, the mother-of-two took part in the Zoom webinar hosted by Caroline Rush, the British Fashion Council's Chief Executive. Further photos are also visible on the table, which appear to continue the black and white theme Sophie previously shared a glimpse inside her kitchen as she took part in the Act Your Age challenge in November last year. In a video shared by the Royal Family on its Twitter page, Sophie baked a hearty batch of cheese and bacon scones. Sporting a white apron over a blue and white floral dress with her hair scooped into a low ponytail, the Queen's daughter-in-law revealed she was taking part in the challenge for Girlguiding UK, of which she is president. Sporting a white apron over a blue and white floral dress with her hair scooped into a low ponytail, the Queen's daughter-in-law revealed she was taking part in the challenge for Girlguiding UK, of which she is president Sophie's scones were delivered to The Hope Hub Camberley, a charity supporting homeless people in Surrey Orange Countys Vaccination Efforts Rebound with Renewed Supply, New Hub Orange Countys inoculation efforts appeared to be back on track this week with the arrival of additional vaccines, the opening of its third large-scale vaccination site, and confirmation that its Disney site would reopen. The regions third super point of distribution (POD) opened on Feb. 23 at the Anaheim Convention Center and will distribute the Moderna vaccine. Its the second hub for Anaheim, which in January launched its first mass-scale immunization center at Disneyland. Orange Countys immunization plans suffered a setback last week after a winter storm delayed an incoming shipment of vaccines to California. Without it, health officials were forced to close some vaccination centers, including Disneyland. The countys top doctor told the Orange County Board of Supervisors on Feb. 23 that the backlogged shipment had arrived, allowing for the reopening of the Disneyland site on Feb. 24. Were expecting [another] allocation for this week to come in sometime Thursday, Orange County Health Officer Dr. Clayton Chau said. Orange County is expecting an additional 30,000 Moderna doses and 19,000 Pfizer doses this week. South Orange County At Soka Universitya second super POD that serves much of South Orange Countysupplies continue to be limited. We are still very low on vaccine due to East Coast storms that disrupted the supply chain, Mission Viejo Mayor Trish Kelley told The Epoch Times via email. Hopefully we can get back to large-scale distribution by the end of the week. Mission Viejo emergency services manager Paul Catsimanes said about 1,500 doses of vaccine were distributed on Feb. 22, compared to more than 3,000 daily doses given during peak activity. They are still open, but its a much smaller amount, Catsimanes told The Epoch Times. Mission Viejo is mostly supporting the Soka University Super POD in Aliso Viejo via staffing and planning, because thats the quickest way to get the vaccine out to the masses, he said. Super PODs provide approximately 30 percent of the vaccines, with the others coming from hospitals, Walgreens, pharmacies, doctors offices, [and more]. The City of Mission Viejo is considering its own super POD with vaccines allocated from Orange County. The city has a standing offer to partner with Saddleback College and assists in managing a super POD site at the Norman P. Murray Center. Mission Viejos mayor said the city has reached out to Supervisor Lisa Bartlett to extend the offer to the county. Our city staff provides flu shot clinics each year at the Murray Center, so the staff is experienced and trained, and our facility has ample parking and space for providing such clinics, Kelley said. In addition, Mission Viejo is home to two senior communities, Casta del Sol and Palmia. Both of these communities have expressed interest in hosting a clinic. This would be especially convenient to residents in those communities. If created, the Casta del Sol and Palmia PODs would be temporary, lasting sometimes for a single day, and on a smaller scale than the existing Super POD sites. A local POD would be very effective because it would bring the vaccine to the people, which would be especially helpful to our seniors and those who may have trouble getting to one of the Super POD sites, Kelley said. At this point, the issues lie with the shortage of vaccines, not availability of POD sites. It would be possible to add more POD sites and set up mobile POD sites if more vaccines were available. To continue, please log in, or sign up for a new account. We offer one free story view per month. If you register for an account, you will get two additional story views. After those three total views, we ask that you support us with a subscription. A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much! The Canadian Press As COVID-19 vaccine supplies ramp up across the country, most provinces and territories have begun planning to give second doses in the coming weeks. More than 23 million people across Canada have now had at least one dose of a vaccine. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says by the summer, Canada will have enough vaccines so that every eligible resident will have gotten their first dose, and by September, it will have enough doses for everyone to be fully vaccinated. The National Advisory Committee on Immunization has recommended that Canada turn toward the ultimate goal of fully immunizing the population, now that supplies of COVID-19 shots are increasing. The advisory panel said those at highest risk of dying or becoming severely ill should be prioritized for second shots, either after or alongside first doses for anyone else who is eligible for a vaccine. Since the novel coronavirus is still circulating in Canada, NACI is still recommending that the second dose be received up to four months after the first dose, in order to maximize the number of people who get at least one shot. Here's a list of the inoculation plans throughout Canada: Newfoundland and Labrador All people in the province aged 12 and older can now book an appointment for a first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. So far 2.19 per cent (11,446) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- Nova Scotia Appointments for an initial COVID-19 vaccine shot are now open to people 12 years of age and older. Currently, the Pfizer vaccine is the only one approved for use in children aged 12 and up. The Moderna vaccine is only available for those 18 and older. Under the province's accelerated vaccine plan, someone who received their first dose of vaccine on March 22 and is due for a second dose on July 5 will now be able to reschedule their second appointment for as early as the week of June 20. The province has stopped the use of AstraZeneca's vaccine as a first dose. The Health Department says the decision was based on "an abundance of caution'' due to an observed increase in the rare blood-clotting condition linked to this vaccine. The department also says it will reschedule anyone who was to receive AstraZeneca to instead be inoculated with Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna "in a timely manner." --- Prince Edward Island In Prince Edward Island, residents as young as 16 can book a COVID-19 vaccine. People 16 years and older who have certain underlying medical conditions, pregnant woman and eligible members of their household can also get a vaccine. So far 8.11 per cent (12,868) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- New Brunswick Residents in New Brunswick aged 12 to 17 are now eligible to book an appointment for a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Officials also say residents 55 and older who received an Astra-Zenaca vaccine for the first dose at least eight weeks ago can now get a second dose of the vaccine with informed consent. So far 5.08 per cent (39,633) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- Quebec In Quebec, all residents 12 and older can book a COVID-19 vaccination appointment. The province's health minister says Quebecers 12 to 17 years old will be fully vaccinated by the time they return to school in September. Quebec also says it will shorten the delay between first and second doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to eight weeks from 16 weeks. The province says more than 5.8 million doses of vaccine have now been administered, with more than 58.1 per cent of the population having received at least one dose. --- Ontario All adults in Ontario can now book COVID-19 vaccine appointments. People turning 18 in 2021 can book Pfizer-BioNTech shots. Youth aged 12 and older can also book appointments across Ontario. They can book through the provincial online portal, call centre and through pharmacies offering the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the only shot authorized by Health Canada for use in youth aged 12 and older. Ontarians, meanwhile, are getting the option to shorten the interval between COVID-19 vaccine doses. Most people are being scheduled for doses four months apart, but officials say the new interval could be as short as 28 days. The plan will start with seniors aged 80 and older this week and the province will later offer second shots based on when people received their first. People will keep their original appointments if they dont re-book. The province aims to see all eligible Ontarians fully vaccinated by the end of September. Ontario is also resuming use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine but only as a second dose. Those who received the first dose of AstraZeneca between March 10 and March 19 during a pilot project at pharmacies and some doctor's offices in several Ontario communities will be first in line to receive their second dose. Ontario says more than 10 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have now been administered across the province. So far 4.68 per cent (687,894) of the population has been fully vaccinated --- Manitoba Manitoba is using the Pfizer vaccine for everyone aged 12 and up, and the Moderna vaccines for people aged 18 and up. These are available through a few channels including so-called supersites in larger communities. The province is also allowing anyone 40 and over to get an Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine through pharmacies and medical clinics, subject to availability. People 30-39 can get a shot if they have certain underlying health conditions such as chronic liver failure or severe obesity. The province has opened up second-dose appointments to all Indigenous people aged 12 and up, to people with certain medical conditions such as severe heart failure and Down syndrome, and anyone who received their first dose on or before March 29. Provincial health officials say they now expect 70 per cent of Manitobans aged 12 and older to get a dose by the end of June. So far 7.75 per cent (106,678) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- Saskatchewan Saskatchewan says it reached the step two threshold of its reopening roadmap released last week, with over 70 per cent of residents age 30 and older having received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. That means restrictions will begin to be relaxed June 20, which includes easing capacity limits on retail, personal care services, restaurants and bars, although they must still maintain physical distancing among occupants or have barriers in place. The rules also raise caps on private indoor gatherings to 15, while capacity limits jump to 150 for both public indoor gatherings and all outdoor assemblies, whether public or private. Premier Scott Moe says once 70 per cent of the entire adult population is vaccinated, Saskatchewan can move to the third step of its plan and remove almost all of the remaining public health orders. Saskatchewan residents aged 12 and older are now eligible to book their first COVID-19 vaccine appointment. A school immunization program for those aged 12 to 18 will be introduced in June, but eligible residents of that age can also be immunized at clinics offering the Pfizer vaccine. Anyone 85 and older or anyone who received their first vaccine dose before February 15 can now book their second dose. Anyone diagnosed with cancer and solid organ transplant recipients will be receiving a letter of eligibility in the mail which will allow them priority access to a second dose. There are drive-thru and walk-in vaccination clinics in communities across the province. The province says 6.60 per cent (77,767) of the population has now been fully vaccinated. --- Alberta Every Albertan aged 12 and older is now eligible for a vaccine. As of May 27, 60.3 per cent of Albertans over the age of 12 had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The milestone means the province's second stage of easing restrictions can begin on June 10. It is subject to hospitalizations being below 500 and trending downwards. Some of the restrictions that would be lifted include allowing outdoor gatherings including weddings and funerals with up to 20 people. Restaurants would be allowed to seat tables with up to six people, indoors or outdoors. Retail capacity would also increase, and gyms could open for solo or drop-in activities with three metres of distancing. Dr. Deena Hinshaw, the province's chief medical officer of health, has said people who are immunocompromised can book a second dose three or four weeks after their first shot. All other Albertans are eligible to get their second dose three to four months after the first. For the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, the province lowered the minimum age to 30. They are, however, reserving the remaining supply for second doses when people are eligible. More than 250 pharmacies are offering immunizations. So far 8.82 per cent (388,200) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- British Columbia British Columbia is setting an end-of-summer target for everyone in the province to receive their second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has also announced a decrease in the time between the first and second dose of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, cutting the interval to eight weeks from 16 weeks. But the interval for people who received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as a first dose and are waiting for their second AstraZeneca shot may take longer. Henry said the province is waiting for results from international data on AstraZeneca, including the effectiveness of mixing vaccine shots and ongoing concerns about rare blood clots. Henry said the rollout of second doses will be similar to the first dose, with those at the greatest risk at the top of the list. Seniors, Indigenous people and those who are clinically extremely vulnerable were to start getting their invitations to book a second shot by the end of May. The province will try to ensure that everyone gets the same vaccine they were first administered, but a shortage of the Moderna vaccine may mean people will have to substitute it for a Pfizer shot. Henry said the National Advisory Committee on Immunization has reviewed the evidence on using different vaccines and has updated the guidance, confirming that while it is preferable to have the same product, it's not always possible. Pfizer and Moderna are the same type of vaccines. Families can get vaccinated together in B.C. as the government allows youth between the ages of 12 and 17 to get their COVID-19 shot. The shots will be administered at community clinics instead of in schools based on feedback from families, with 310,000 children in B.C. eligible to get the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which has been approved for that age group. As of Friday, about 3.1 million doses of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines had been administered in B.C., which means about 63 per cent of those eligible have got their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. So far 3.14 per cent (160,885) of the population has been fully vaccinated. --- Nunavut Chief public health officer Dr. Michael Patterson says Nunavut has placed an order for doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine with the federal government to vaccinate people ages 12 to 17 in the territory. The Moderna vaccine is currently the only one available in Nunavut. Nunavut has opened vaccinations to anyone 18 and older. It is also offering shots to rotational workers coming from Southern Canada. In the territory, 36.44 per cent (14,113) of the population has now been fully vaccinated. --- Northwest Territories The Northwest Territories is now offering vaccinations against COVID-19 to young people between 12 and 17. The territory, which has only been using the Moderna vaccine, recently exchanged some of that for doses of the Pfizer product, which Health Canada has now approved for anyone as young as 12. So far 51.74 per cent (23,344) of the territory's population has been fully vaccinated. --- Yukon The territory is now vaccinating children aged 12 to 17. The government says clinics in most communities will be held in schools, while those in Whitehorse can get their shot at the Coast High Country Inn Convention Centre. The children will be getting the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The territory says because of limited supply and stricter handling requirements, the vaccine will only be available for a short time. It says second doses for those 12 to 17 will start on June 23 and medical travel will be supported for youth who aren't able to make the clinic date in their community. The Moderna vaccine is available to adults 18 years of age and older. The government says 59.34 per cent (24,763) of the population has now been fully vaccinated. --- This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 31, 2021. The Canadian Press CHARLOTTE, N.C., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Belk today announced that it has successfully completed its financial restructuring, finalizing an expedited pre-packaged, one-day reorganization, and emerged well-positioned for long-term growth. Belk's plan of reorganization received nearly unanimous support from its existing lenders and provides for suppliers and landlords to be paid in full as normal operations continue at all store locations and on Belk's e-commerce platform. "We are pleased to have received nearly unanimous support from all of our stakeholders to complete this restructuring in just one day, positioning us to pursue our growth initiatives and move the company forward from a strengthened financial foundation," said Lisa Harper, Belk CEO. "We're immensely grateful for our loyal customers, dedicated associates, and supportive vendor partners who enabled us to complete this restructuring efficiently, without delay or disruption. We have a bright future ahead, and I'm looking forward to growing our more than 130-year legacy as a trusted retailer for many years to come." As a result of the restructuring, Belk has received $225 million of new capital, significantly reduced its debt by approximately $450 million and extended maturities on all term loans to July 2025. "I want to congratulate the team at Belk for its impressive transformation from a traditional department store business into a full omni retailer," adds Stefan Kaluzny, Managing Director of Sycamore Partners. "The company has tripled its web business and currently fulfills over 70% of its web orders from its stores, providing a nimble and scalable platform for expansion. It has been a remarkable undertaking in a very challenging macro environment." The infusion of cash and reduction in debt provides Belk with increased liquidity to focus on its key initiatives for growth, including further enhancements to its omnichannel capabilities and the expansion of merchandise offerings into new, relevant product categories. Belk is growing its merchandise assortments in popular areas like home, wellness and outdoor, and plans to continue diversifying its inventory to fit the evolving lifestyle of its customers, all while strengthening its $1 billion+ and growing e-commerce segment. Kirkland & Ellis LLP has served as legal adviser, Lazard has served as financial adviser, and Alvarez & Marsal North America, LLC has served as restructuring adviser to Belk. Latham & Watkins LLP has served as legal adviser to Sycamore Partners. Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP has served as legal adviser and PJT Partners LP has served as financial adviser to the Ad Hoc Crossover Lender Group and O'Melveny & Myers LLP has served as legal adviser and Evercore has served as financial adviser to the Ad Hoc First Lien Lender Group comprised of certain of Belk's existing first lien term lenders. About Belk Charlotte-based Belk, Inc., a privately-owned department store, opened its first store in 1888, beginning a legacy of selling great products at great prices, treating customers like family and giving back to the community. Today, Belk serves customers at nearly 300 Belk stores in 16 Southeastern states, at belk.com and through the mobile app. For over 130 years, Belk has proudly put customers and community at the center of what they do, supporting local charities, organizations and families when they need it most. For more information visit https://newsroom.belk.com/ To shop, find your local store at www.belk.com/stores, visit belk.com or download the Belk app in Google Play or Apple Store. About Sycamore Partners Sycamore Partners is a private equity firm based in New York. The firm specializes in consumer, distribution and retail-related investments and partners with management teams to improve the operating profitability and strategic value of their business. With approximately $10 billion in aggregate committed capital raised since its inception in 2011, Sycamore Partners' investors include leading endowments, financial institutions, family offices, pension plans and sovereign wealth funds. For more information on Sycamore Partners, visit www.sycamorepartners.com. SOURCE Belk, Inc. Related Links www.belk.com Plans for the completely revamped New Canaan Library campus have taken a significant next step in becoming a reality, as the Board of Selectman agreed on a private-public Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the library earlier this week, outlining provisions for the historic 1913 library and proposed parking. First Selectman Kevin Moynihan and other town officials reviewed proposals earlier this week, which outline parking plans for the Center School parking lot. The selectmens MOU stipulates the new 40,000 square-foot library will be built without removing the 1913 Library. Moynihan wants the new library, proposed at 151 Main Street next to the old library, to be able to break ground in June, which has been the librarys proposed hard start date. He also wanted the selectmen to sign the 23-page document so it can be approved by the Board of Finance and Town Council. This will allow the project to be approved by the Planning and Zoning Commission, he told the selectmen on Tuesday, Feb. 23. The Section 1.08. of the MOU is getting the most attention since it says until completion of the new library building, the library will not take action that will preclude preservation of the 1913 building. If by the time of completion of the new library building, a viable and funded plan for preservation of the 1913 building has been presented to the commission for approval, then the library will incorporate the preservation of the 1913 building into the building project, it said. Moynihan opened up to the public comment in the Zoom meeting, though during previous online meetings he invited comments through emails. Four proponents of saving the old building expressed their gratefulness for the new clause. I was surprised and pleased to see 1.08. in the MOU, Rose Rothbart, of New Canaan said. I do hope this may be the first step in the town governments recognition of the importance of such an integral visual and cultural feature in our community. The item 1.08 gives us a chance to come up with a plan, said Kimberly Norton, a proponent of the 1913 library preservation. It is not a private house. It is a public building that the public has been using for years. Norton also said there has been a outpouring of support for saving the old library. Thank you again for including that in the MOU, Norton said. It is not for this board to decide what happens to the 1913 building, that process will unfold in the next few months, Moynihan said. The purpose of section 1.08 is to leave this issue open for resolution by those bodies. You may be reading too much into it to say this board is advocating that solution. We are leaving the door open for that solution. Selectman Nick Williams questioned if the terms viable and funded are understood. I dont think it is clear that funding would not include a town component. The town will hopefully be providing $10 million for the new library. I would not be in favor of providing additional funding. The towns proposed capital 2021-22 budget has $10 million to give to the library, which, unlike many other towns libraries, is an not a fully public library but an independent entity. Preserving the facade Though many residents have spoken out in favor of preserving the iconic pillared stone structure of the 1913 New Canaan Library, much of the original structure has already been destroyed, leaving just the front wall and portions of the side walls. Proponents of saving the 1913 library had said that perhaps there were external walls of the original structure still intact inside the internal wall. On the day before the selectmens meeting, the Executive Director of the New Canaan Library Lisa Oldham told Hearst Connecticut Media that engineers had poked through the interior walls. Hazardous material engineers from Langan Engineering were drilling holes in all the walls and in all the floors and in everywhere in the whole building, Oldham said. Langan was contracted by Centerbrook, the building architects for the project. We confirmed that there is no external wall behind there, Oldham said. As a result, she thinks preserving what is left of the old building will be a significant challenge, since walls will need to be built, even if a wall from the 1933 renovation is retained. Changes to the library plans Oldham also mentioned when speaking with Hearst the size of the new library has been reduced from 48,000 square feet to 40,000 during value engineering, which she called a euphemism for saving money. The main changes are a reduced area in the basement and we went from having two 35-person conference rooms to one, Oldham said. We still have nine other meeting rooms. We also have the community room which is the back end of the auditorium that can be separated off for 100-person meeting room, she said Parking The original preliminary plans had assumed there would be parking under the building. Instead, the town will reserve 76 parking spaces, with six handicaps spots, in the Center School parking lot. For the past four or five months we had been waiting to resolve the parking issue. The library had originally proposed to do underground parking as part of the project, which turned out to be a problem, Moynihan said. Moynihan said the town looked at various solutions and after a discussion with the Chairman of the Planning and Zoning Commision John Goodwin, traffic engineer Mike Galante of Hardesty & Hanover surveyed the traffic in the Maple Street area. We also had the library analyze every conceivable way of getting in or out of the library underground parking and all of them turned out to be grossly expensive, over $100,000 per space. Moynihan explained that the new plan would have to be reviewed by the Parking Commission and Planning and Zoning. We have developed a proposal. Using the Center (School) lot because that is a very inefficient lot and always has been and will enable the library to move forward with their plan, the first selectman said. The lot, as was pointed out in the Parking Commission meeting on Feb. 22, brings in little revenue from parking permits as is for the town. Pedestrian safety Selectman Kathleen Corbet raised concerns about pedestrian safety, since visitors to the library will need to cross Maple Street to enter and leave the library. Director of Department of Public Works Tiger Mann said his department was considering possibly a raised pedestrian walkway, a speed table, and/or rapid rectangular flashing beacons such as at Saxe Middle School and near Irwin Park. A speed table is used to provide pedestrian access across a roadway and slow traffic. It is much more user-friendly than a speed hump or bump, Mann told Hearst. Moynihan said the town would reserve spots at the north edge of the lot and he would want to lower the speed limit on Maple Street. Delhi has made it mandatory for travellers from five states, where Covid-19 cases are on a rise, to carry a negative coronavirus test report upon arrival to the national capital from Friday, February 26. Travellers from Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab will require a negative Covid-19 test report in order to enter Delhi from February 26. The order shall stay in place till March 15, reported ANI. An official order from the Delhi government is expected later on Wednesday, February 24. Several states have made it mandatory for travellers to bring a Covid-19 test upon their arrival from states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh where there has been a recent surge in the number of coronavirus cases. Fresh restrictions have been imposed on inter-state travel, too. Besides Delhi, state including Maharashtra, Karnataka, Chattisgarh and Uttarakhand now require a negative RT-PCR tests from visitors, especially those arriving by air. Here is a round-up of all the states that need a negative Covid-19 test report from passengers on or before their arrival: Maharashtra Travellers to Maharashtra from Gujarat, Delhi-NCR, Goa, Rajasthan and Kerala require to produce a negative RT-PCR test report upon their arrival to the state. This is applicable to all passengers irrespective of whether they are travelling by flight or train. For those travelling by air, the test report should be within 72 hours prior to the flight and for rail passengers, the report should be within 96 hours before departure of their train. Those travelling to Maharashtra without a negative Covid-19 test report will be asked to undergo screening at the airport and if they display symptoms, an antigen test will be conducted on the passengers. Karnataka Travellers to Karnataka coming from Maharashtra or Kerala will need to mandatorily carry a negative Covid-19 test certificate to enter the state. It is applicable to all passengers irrespective of the mode of travel, including private vehicles. For air travellers, the test report has to be within 72 hours prior to the flight and for rail passengers, the report should be within 96 hours before their train. At airports, the Covid-19 negative reports will be verified by airline staff at the time of boarding and for buses and trains, conductors and ticket-checkers will be responsible to check the reports. Story continues Uttarakhand Travellers to Uttarakhand from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh will also need to produce a negative Covid-19 report in order to enter the state. Passengers will get tested at airports, railway stations and also at state borders. A Covid-19 test will be also be conducted (free of cost) for passengers arriving from Delhi. All passengers with a positive Covid-19 result will be sent to a quarantine centre. Himachal Pradesh All districts in the state do not need a negative RT-PCR test report from passengers but only the district of Lahaul and Spiti requires travellers to carry a negative Covid-19 report. Those travelling by cabs and private transport will have to provide an RT-PCR test conducted 72 hours to 96 hours before entering the district. Jammu and Kashmir Travellers from all states arriving in Srinagar will not be allowed to leave the airport unless they provide a negative RT-PCR test. Those with positive tests will be sent to isolation. Manipur The northeastern state has made it mandatory for all passengers travelling from Maharashtra and Kerala to undergo a Covid-19 test. This is applicable to all passengers coming by air and will be in place from February 24. Assam All passengers travelling to Assam, irrespective of their mode of travel, will need to undergo a swab or antigen test upon their arrival to the state. Meghalaya Travellers to the state will either need to present a negative RT-PCR test (not earlier than 72 hours prior to arrival) or will have to undergo a test at the airport. Mizoram Travellers to Mizoram also need to produce a negative Covid-19 report, failing which will result in the passengers undergoing screening at the entry point with a rapid antigen test. Odisha All passengers above the age of 55 years need to present a rapid antigen test on arrival in the state. Tripura All travellers to Tripura need to undergo a Covid-19 test (free of cost) on arrival in the state. Ladakh A negative Covid-19 report on arrival (not earlier than 72 hours prior to arrival) is required for all passengers arriving in Ladakh. The Pennsylvania Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee is holding a meeting at 7:30p.m. EST Thursday night, February 25, to discuss the developments in Philadelphia and mobilize opposition to the deadly reopening of schools. Register now and share this link with your coworkers to build the committee! All teachers, support staff and supporters should join the network of Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committees. As the March 1 start date nears for the first phase of reopening for the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), the eighteenth largest in the country, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) is continuing to provide political cover for the school districts reopening plans, worked out with the union behind closed doors. The PFT, while posing as concerned about certain elements of the reopening plans, claims falsely that schools can be made safe through updates to decrepit school buildings, in particular, improved ventilation systems. In comments before the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Education Committee, PFT Legislative Representative Hillary Linardopoulos said, Lets be clear: our goal at [the PFT] has been, and will continue to be, to reopen buildings, because we know that inside of a classroom is where the true magic of education takes place. The PFT is endorsing politically-motivated pseudo-science to justify the reopening of schools, which will inevitably lead to new outbreaks and deaths. In fact, studies have consistently shown that school closures are among the most effective mitigation strategies for combating the virus. The real purpose of school reopenings is not concern for the emotional and educational well-being of children, but to get their parents back to work so that they can continue producing profits for the major corporations. In the face of overwhelming opposition from teachers, the PFT was compelled to call for teachers not to return to in-person instruction on February 8, the original set by the district for reopening. However, this was only a maneuver aimed at buying time to work out a deal with the district to get teachers back into buildings. The role the PFT is playing follows the nationwide pattern for school reopenings, which was established with the betrayal of the Chicago Teachers Union. The Democratic Party is using the sham of negotiations with teachers unions that have signed off on school closures and layoffs for decades in order to beat back the opposition of wide majorities of teachers and parents, particularly working class parents, to a return to in-person learning. In the city of Philadelphia, the framework for these negotiations is governed by a Memorandum of Agreement signed last fall between the PFT and the school district. All disputes over particular elements of the reopening plan are to be settled by an independent mediator, Chicago-based Dr. Peter Orris, behind the backs of teachers, who are not even given the right to vote on his decisions. The mediator is due to render a decision in the next several days on which school buildings can be safely reopened, and which require additional work. In opposition to this, the Pennsylvania Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee, an independent organization of teachers formed with the assistance of the World Socialist Web Site and Socialist Equality Party, released a statement last week that demanded instead that all decisions on school openings and closures be made by rank-and-file teachers and parents, in consultation with experts of their choosing. A scientific approach to the pandemic is impossible as long as the profit motive holds sway! the committee statement reads. Last Friday, the PFT sponsored state Democratic politicians on the unions social media accounts, who falsely claimed that significant resources were now being spent to upgrade buildings after decades of neglect, particularly since the Great Recession when $1 billion was cut from school budgets statewide. Philadelphia closed 31 schools permanently. Seeking to give the reopening plan a scientific shoeshine, state Senator Vincent Hughes (D-Philadelphia/Montgomery) and state Representative Elizabeth Fiedler (D-Philadelphia) expressed their determination to pass school reform and fix the nightmarish conditions in Philadelphia. However, the two proposals which they cited, the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (RACP) and the Public School Building Emergency Repair and Renovation Grant program, have not even been passed and will take years to fully tackle the innumerable problems afflicting Pennsylvania schools. The politicians dont care about education, theyve been cutting education for years, one Philadelphia teacher told the World Socialist Web Site. The classrooms are overcrowded and dont have supplies. The PFT is a joke. They are pushing to get us back in the classroom. They are too tied up with the Democratic party. They dont fight for the teachers. What they are pretending is that you can reopen schools safely. Just not true. COVID is transmitted [through the air]. The ventilation systems in our schools will not stop this. We have some buildings that are a hundred years old. Some windows do not open all the way. Philly teachers have gotten cancer from exposure to asbestos. Buildings that are open are not following the existing rules. Staff ran out of PPE and there is little mask wearing occurring. Philadelphia school buildings have a long, sordid history of gross underfunding. A majority of them were constructed before World War II, and the districts buildings contain more than 11 million square feet of the carcinogenic substance asbestos. One veteran Philadelphia teacher, Lea DiRusso, is dying of mesothelioma due to asbestos exposure. Schools are also riddled with lead and mold, broken boilers in the winter, no air conditioning during the summer, and tainted drinking water. In spite of this, 9,000 children from pre-K to second grade are expected to enter these same death traps on March 1. A recent photograph, widely shared on social media, exposes the bargain-bin methods through which the school district is upgrading buildings ventilation systems: cheap electric fans in windows, fastened with tape containing lead. Cheap electric fans fastened to the window with lead tape at Philadelphia's Patterson Elementary (source: PFT) However, the danger of infections in school buildings is not only a function of a lack of resources. The experience in private schools and wealthier suburban districts demonstrates that a truly safe reopening is simply not possible. According to a report last month by the citys department of health, 6 to 7 percent of private and parochial schools that reopened in the fall experienced outbreaks, defined in arbitrarily restrictive terms as six or more cases occurring within 14 days in a school which cannot be traced to a close contact outside of the school setting. The Philadelphia School, Saints John Neumann and Maria Goretti High School all had to be shut down from outbreaks. A teacher from the nearby Lower Merion School District in Phillys suburbs explained that, even though her school district is very wealthy and possesses more resources and proper HVAC systems than the citys school district, it has still experienced many outbreaks, which have been covered up by the union and district. Air filter in Philadelphia school (source: Facebook) She continued, I spent all last summer fighting both my Human Resources office and my union [the Lower Merion Education Association] for the right to work from home. I have an auto-immune disorder, but they made it very difficult for me. She stated bluntly that her union had no plans to fight reopening and that it is in the pocket of the Democratic Party. I havent heard from my union since December 3, she explained, noting that her district has since moved to hybrid teaching from remote without hearing any updates from her union. According to Dr. Benjamin Mateus, a science writer for the World Socialist Web Site, The repair or replacement of ventilation systems is critical, but it is only one part of a constellation of measures that must be met before schools are reopened. This includes reducing regional cases of COVID-19 to exceptionally low levels, a vast acceleration of the production and distribution of vaccines to inoculate the population, the establishment of a rigorous, well equipped and trained contact tracing infrastructure that can do rapid testing of individuals and their contacts and, if necessary, close schools and communities to bring the pandemic under control. Until then, schools should remain closed and students taught remotely. The Missourians Opinion section is a public forum for the discussion of ideas. The views presented in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missourian or the University of Missouri. If you would like to contribute to the Opinion page with a response or an original topic of your own, visit our submission form The UK Government has been urged to act unilaterally over the Northern Ireland Protocol. Speaking after a meeting of the UK/EU committee for implementing the mechanism, Stormont First Minister Arlene Foster said government must step up and protect the internal market. In a joint statement after the virtual meeting on Wednesday, co-chairmen Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove and European Commission vice president Maros Sefcovic said both sides committed to the proper implementation of the protocol. European Commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic (Stefan Rousseau/PA) The parties acknowledged the importance of joint action to make the protocol work for the benefit of everyone in Northern Ireland. In that spirit, the EU and UK reiterated their full commitment to the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement in all its dimensions, and to the proper implementation of the protocol, they said. The UK and the EU underlined their shared commitment to giving effect to those solutions agreed through the Joint Committee on December 17 2020, without delay. The UK noted that it would provide a new operational plan with respect to supermarkets and their suppliers, alongside additional investment in digital solutions for traders in accordance with the protocol. A further meeting of the joint committee is set to take place to provide further steers and where appropriate approvals. Graffiti reading No Irish Sea border Stroud Street in Belfast (Brian Lawless/PA) Unionist politicians in Northern Ireland are demanding the end of the protocol, claiming it has driven an economic wedge between the region and the rest of the UK, undermining the Union as a consequence. The protocol was designed by the EU and UK to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland. It achieves this by moving regulatory and customs checks to the Irish Sea, with goods imported into Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK subject to a range of new processes. This has caused some disruption to trade since it came into effect on December 31, disruption that could intensify significantly on April 1 when a grace period currently limiting the bureaucracy applied to imported supermarket goods ends. Mrs Foster described the meeting as hugely disappointing and blasted European officials as tone deaf. However deputy First Minister Michelle ONeill described the meeting as very constructive and welcomed that both sides committed to try and define practical solutions. Mrs Foster later demanded action from the UK. It is time for the United Kingdom Government to act unilaterally, she said. The grace period ends next month, yet the European Union refused to recognise the problems or offer any sensible solutions. From January 29 until February 24 the European Union has prevaricated, dragged its feet and closed its eyes to the serious crisis within our supply chain. The Prime Minister told the House of Commons that there would be unfettered trade within the United Kingdom, yet the Northern Ireland protocol has completely ruptured the flow of goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. Whether from a constitutional or economic point of view, Northern Ireland cannot be cut off from our main trading partner by a protocol which not a single unionist party in Northern Ireland supports. With a stubborn and inflexible response from Brussels it is now a matter for the Government to step up and protect the United Kingdom internal market. Such a disruption of trade within the UK internal market should not be tolerated by the Government. It is offensive to the very core principles of the United Kingdom. Scots have blasted new Netflix drama Behind Her Eyes for making them out to be 'miserable, bad-tempered and stingy'. Viewers blasted the psychological thriller's script - based on a book adaptation - as 'anti-Scot' and claimed some of the lines were 'racist'. They were also angry that neither of the two main characters were played by Scots, with Oxford-born Tom Bateman's Scottish accent described as 'scary'. Eddi Reader, of rock band Fairground Attraction, fumed on Twitter: 'Did anyone else catch the anti-Scot script? Apparently all Scots are either miserable or mean. I don't accept it and never ever will.' They were also angry that neither of the two main characters were played by Scots Oxford-born Tom Bateman's (pictured) Scottish accent described as 'scary'. He plays the role of psychiatrist David Eddi Reader, of rock band Fairground Attraction, fumed about the show on social media Meanwhile, SNP MP Stewart Hosie told The Mirror: 'These daft, tasteless, inaccurate and outdated stereotypes should be consigned to history.' The six-episode series is adapted from the bestselling novel by Sarah Pinborough. It tells the story of David (Tom Bateman), a psychiatrist caught in a seemingly toxic marriage with his wife, Adele, (Eve Hewson) and an affair with his secretary, Louise (Simona Brown). In one scene, a character called Sue - who speaks with an English accent but is played by Scottish actress Georgie Glen - describes David as 'miserable', adding: 'They say that about the Scots, don't they?' Louise responds: 'Stingy, isn't it?' Later, after a heated conversation between Louise and David, Sue says: 'Told you Scottish. Bad tempered, aren't they?' The series includes Robert Aramayo, a Yorkshireman, playing a Scottish junkie, which some claimed also perpetuated stereotypes. Reader tweeted: 'I think it's the duty of all Scots to raise this bigotry... to question every time it raises its talentless, passionless, damaged head.' Meanwhile, SNP MP Steven Bonnar, said: 'We Scots are extremely generous people. Scottish hospitality is truly world renowned.' In one scene, a character called Sue (left) - who speaks with an English accent but is played by Scottish actress Georgie Glen - describes David as 'miserable', adding: 'They say that about the Scots, don't they?' Some viewers were also angry that neither of the two main characters were played by Scots, with Oxford-born Tom Bateman's Scottish accent described as 'scary' Reader said he spoke online with author Sarah Pinborough, who insisted no derogatory remarks about Scots were included in her novel, and that she had no role in the adaptation process. Behind Her Eyes follows single mother Louise as she enters world of mind games when she begins an affair David, while also secretly befriending his mysterious wife Adele. Louise becomes embroiled in an unconventional love triangle with David and Adele, one that takes a dark and unexpected turn. While the love triangle unfolds, viewers witness flashbacks to Eve's time in the mental health facility aged 17, where she is in a relationship with David. In present day the couple have been married for 10 years and have recently moved to London under suspicious circumstances. Netflix has been contacted for comment. Behind Her Eyes follows single mother Louise (right) as she enters world of mind games when she begins an affair David, while also secretly befriending his mysterious wife Adele PUNE, India, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Global demand for Single-Use Bioreactor Market Size, in terms of revenue, was worth of USD 1.10 Billion in 2017 and is expected to reach USD 4.50 Billion in 2027, growing at a CAGR of 15.13% from 2021 to 2027. The global Single-Use Bioreactor is expected to grow at a significant rate due to the number of driving factors. Single-Use Bioreactor Market: Global Size, Trends, Competitive, Historical & Forecast Analysis, 2021-2027. Demand in Efficient Vaccines is a key driving factor for the growth of Single-Use Bioreactor Market. Single-Use Bioreactor top Manufacturers: Sartorius, Xcellerex, Eppendorf, Applikon, Danaher Corporation, Merck Millipore, Thermo Scientific HyClone, PBS Biotech and others. Get Sample Copy of this report@ https://brandessenceresearch.com/requestSample/PostId/1463 A bioreactor is generally used for growing organisms like animal cell, bacteria, yeast and others in controlled atmosphere and helps in the production of vaccines, antibodies, pharmaceuticals and others. The disposable bioreactor has a disposable bag instead of culture vessel which is known as Single-Use Bioreactor. This disposable bag has three layers of plastic foil made from Polyethylene terephthalate or LPDE, PVA or PVC and contact layer from PVA or PP. The single use bioreactors are better in performance and scalable compared to stainless steel bioreactors. The traditional bioreactors have a validation issues due to its complexity and cleaning process which is avoided by new single-use bioreactors. This system also holds other advantages like less turn around time, lowers risk of contamination, cost-effectiveness, and easy to install & movement. During this COVID-19 pandemic, some industries severely affected, and some industries have flourished. Healthcare industry and Bioprocessing manufacturing industries are affected positively in terms of revenue and funding. Due to the rise in demand of COVID-19 Vaccines and Medications, various governments and organizations are funding and prioritizing Biomanufacturing companies for key technologies like perfusion reactors, single-use equipments, and chromatography resins. Hence, drug and vaccine manufacturers are significantly opting for disposable components like single-use bioreactors to avoid contamination issues. Single-Use Bioreactor Market Segmentation Analysis: Global Single-Use Bioreactor Market report is segmented on the basis of construction, mode, sizes, applications and region & country level. On the basis of construction, it is classified as Stirred Bioreactor and Rocking Bioreactor. Based upon mode, global Single-Use Bioreactor market is classified into Batch, Continuous, and Fed-Batch. Based upon the size, global Single-Use Bioreactor market is classified into 500L, 1000L, 2000L and 6000L. The market is classified on Application as Academic, Pharmaceutical, Environment and Life sciences. By Construction: Stirred Bioreactor, Rocking Bioreactor By Mode: Batch, Continuous, Fed-Batch By Size: 500L, 1000L, 2000L, 6000L By Application: Academic, Pharmaceutical, Environment, Life sciences News: Cytiva's New Manufacturing in Shrewsbury, USA January 15, 2021; Cytiva opened new manufacturing facility for Xcellerex XDR bioreactors in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, US in December, 2020in collaboration with Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). This facility has been developed as a company's 5 year plan for expanding global manufacturing with total investment $500 million. Thermo Scientific HyPerforma Bioreactors got Application Specific Enhancements October 09, 2020; To shift the process specific solutions, Thermo Fisher Scientific introduced the application specific enhancements to HyPerforma Single-Use Bioreactors. It is in creation with the requirements of cell cultures, intensified fed-batch and perfusion. This enables the developers to focus on solutions for diverse bioproduction processes. Get Methodology @ https://brandessenceresearch.com/requestMethodology/PostId/1463 Demand for Effective Vaccines is a key driving factor for the growth of Single-Use Bioreactor Market The major factors driving the growth of global Single-Use Bioreactor market is rising in demand of effective vaccines and medications. They have also been widely accepted for the applications like development of pharmaceutical materials, personalized medicines, upstreaming process, and production of cell cultures. The market has seen significant growth after adaptation of automation and control for Biomanufacturing processes. As per Richard Mirro, Business Manager, Eppendorf there has been exceptional growth in research and development for vaccine along with significant demand in small size and single-use bioreactors has benefited Eppendorf Single-Use Bioreactors portfolio, as they have working volumes up to 50L. Still performance wise technology has not completely proven for single-use bioreactors and application based scalability issues needs to be taken care are some of the restraining factors for Single-Use Bioreactors Market. Product enhancements and developing new features with better performance is expected to create new opportunities in Single-use Bioreactors market. North America is dominating the Global Single-Use Bioreactor Market North America is expected to dominate the global Single-Use Bioreactor market over the forecast period attributed to significant Research and Development along with investment in advanced Bioprocessing technologies. Furthermore, meeting the demands of vaccine development, medications and scalability issues has always been the top priority for Biomanufacturing industry. In 2019, ABEC, a biopharmaceutical manufacturer in Pennsylvania, US launched the 6000L of Custom Single Run (CSR) Bioreactors to meet the scalability demands. Europe and Asia-Pacific also expected to substantial growth, as Sartorius, a German based company is leading in R&D processes for vaccine development and helping CanSino Biologics in China to develop vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 by using Sartorius' Biostat STR single-use Bioreactor system. Full Access of This Report@ https://brandessenceresearch.com/medical-device/single-use-bioreactor-market Related Report Thoracic Surgery Devices Industry Size: By Product (CRM& Cardiac Assist, Heart Valve Repair & Replacement, Heart Defect Closure, Cardiopulmonary Devices), By End-User (Hospitals, Clinics, Ambulatory Surgery Centers) Forecast 2021 To 2027 Bone Densitometers Device Market Size By Technology (Axial Bone Densitometry, Peripheral Bone Densitometry), By End User ( Hospitals, Clinics, Others) Forecast Report 2021 To 2027 Medical Device Outsourcing Market Size, By Type( Class I Devices, Class II Devices, Class III Devices), By Applications (General Medical Devices, Cardiovascular, Orthopedics And Spine, Radiology ), By Product: ( Electronics, Raw Materials, Finished Goods) Forecast 2021 To 2027 Refurbished Medical Equipment Market 2020 By Product Type: (Medical Imaging Equipment, Operating Room And Surgical Equipment, Defibrillators, Cardiovascular And Cardiology Equipment, IV Therapy Systems, Neurology Equipment, Endoscopy Equipment, Others), By Application Type: (Diagnostic, Therapeutic) Forecast To 2025 Global Neonatal Intensive Care Size By Product Type (Thermoregulation Devices, Phototherapy Devices, Monitoring Systems, Neonatal Hearing Screening, Neonatal Infant Resuscitator Devices, Vision Screening, Others), By End-Use (Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Pediatric& Neonatal Clinics) Forecast Report 2020 To 2026 Telemedicine Market Size 2021: Growing Demand for Telemedicine Statistics Outlook Trends, Growth, Latest Technology with Top Company Profiles, CAGR Values Medical Tourism Market Size Worth $274.37 Billion | Industry Statistics, Growth, Share, Current Trends and Research Development Report to 2027 About Brandessence Market Research & Consulting Pvt ltd. 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Website: https://brandessenceresearch.com Article: https://businessstatsnews.com Media Contact: Mr. Aniket Patil aniket@brandessenceresearch.com Email: sales@brandessenceresearch.com Corporate Sales: +44-2038074155 Asia Office: +917447409162 Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1392316/BEMR_Logo.jpg The United States' patience with Iran on returning to discussions over the 2015 nuclear deal is "not unlimited," State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Wednesday. "Our patience is not unlimited, but we do believe, and the president has been clear on this, ... that the most effective way to ensure Iran could never acquire a nuclear weapon was through diplomacy," Price said. Short link: Kerrville, TX (78028) Today Sunshine and clouds mixed. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 83F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.. Tonight Scattered thunderstorms early, then mainly cloudy overnight with thunderstorms likely. Low near 65F. Winds ESE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Locally heavier rainfall possible. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Borsa Italiana non ha responsabilita per il contenuto del sito a cui sta per accedere e non ha responsabilita per le informazioni contenute. Accedendo a questo link, Borsa Italiana non intende sollecitare acquisti o offerte in alcun paese da parte di nessuno. Sarai automaticamente diretto al link in cinque secondi. Ecuador's prison system chief knew it was just a matter of time before a leadership void would provoke gangs to seek control of four jails as a wave of riots left 79 inmates dead and more than 20 inmates injured Tuesday. Edmundo Moncayo told reporters that the series of rebellions were provoked by two rival criminal groups due to a leadership void following the December 28, 2020, murder of Jorge Luis 'Rasquina' Zambrano at a cafeteria in the port city of Manta. Zambrano, who oversaw a drug-dealing gang known as Los Choneros, had been out of prison for six months before he was assassinated. 'We expected an immediate reaction, but the reaction had been delayed and it is what has occurred today between two groups trying to find a criminal leadership,' Moncayo said. Ecuadorean online portal Primicias said police intelligence learned that four gangs known as Los Pipos, Los Tiguerones, Los Chone Killers and Los Lobos all came together to attack members of Los Choneros. WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT Ecuadorean security forces appear in a video attempting to regain control of one of the four prisons where on Tuesday four gangs united to attack a gang that maintained a tight grip on illicit dealings. The riots left at last 79 inmates dead and some 20 others injured A prisoner at a prison in Ecuador surrenders and lies on the ground as a security forces agent sought to regain control of one of the four jails where rival gangs clashed Tuesday. The rebellion left 79 inmates dead and at least 20 injured Officials gather mobile phones, guns and dozens of knives that were seized from one of the four prisons in Ecuador At least 34 inmates were discovered dead after the military and the police were able to regain control following an uprising in the B wing of the Turi Social Rehabilitation Center in the southern city of Cuenca. Fighting between four different gangs housed in four cellblocks at the Guayas Male Deprivation of Liberty Center No. 8 in Guayaquil left an additional 31 detainees dead. Moncayo, who is in charge of the Andean nation's 53 prisons, confirmed eight prisoners were found dead at the Cotopaxi Rehabilitation Center in the north central city of Latacunga. A clash between prisoners at the Litoral Penitentiary in Guayaquil left six inmates dead. The body of an inmate who was killed during rebellions at four prisons Tuesday morning, lies in the middle of a penitentiary courtyard in Guayaquil, Ecuador Edmundo Moncayo told reporters that Tuesday morning's prison rebellions were provoked by two rival criminal groups due to a leadership void following the December 28, 2020, murder of Jorge Luis 'Rasquina' Zambrano (pictured) at a cafeteria in the port city of Manta. Rasquina oversaw a drug-dealing gang known as Los Choleros, which had a strong influence at the four prisons where the riots broke out Tuesday Ecuadorean security forces prepare to raid one of the four prisons where rivals gangs sparked a riot on Tuesday. The death toll rose to 79 as of Wednesday morning The violence erupted in prisons in Guayas, Azuay and Cotopaxi provinces, which hold about 70 per cent of Ecuador's total prison population, according to official statistics. Deadly prison riots have happened relatively frequently in recent years in Ecuador, whose prisons were designed for some 27,000 inmates but house about 38,000. An Ecuadorean security forces agent inspects a prison after inmates were finally placed under control following a series of riots that broke out across four different jails where a total of 79 prisoners were killed Tuesday The body camera of an Ecuadorean security forces agent captures the moment a rifle is aimed at three inmates inside a prison on Tuesday after military soldiers and police officers stormed inside and regained control of the facility With the help of an additional 800 police officers, Moncayo said, authorities have been able 'to control and restore order within the detention centers.' The government said there were wounded police officers, without giving further details. Prison officials managed to evacuate during the riots. President Lenin Moreno, who has sought to control prison violence in the Andean country, declared the prison system in a temporary state of emergency, because of the frequent confrontations between criminal gangs. A police officer's body camera captures the moment a group of inmates at a jail in Guayaquil, Ecuador, were caught escaping in the midst of a riot that left 31 prisoners dead The body of one of the 31 inmates killed Tuesday during riots involving rival gangs at the Guayas Male Deprivation of Liberty Center No. 4 in Guayaquil, Ecuador Moreno called the deadly disturbance a 'synchronized activity from organized mafias' that 'advantageously occurs infrequently, but always causes social unrest and the concern of the executive [branch] and the police.' A video recorded by a security forces agent captured the moment one of the prisons was raided by the military and local law enforcement, with inmates being forced to lie on the ground. At least three others had a rifle aimed at them. A police body camera video captured the moment about two dozen inmates were intercepted after they had walked out of the Guayas Male Deprivation of Liberty Center No. 8. Images seen from the bloody carnage that were posted on social media showed several prisoners posing with the severed heads of their rivals while several bodies of dead inmates were lying on top of each other. Inmates at a jail in Ecuador lie on the ground as security forces storm a section of the prison during a riot on Tuesday. A video recorded by a detainee also captured the gruesome moment a prisoner repeatedly stabbed another inmate with a butcher's knife. A woman who was visiting an inmate before the Turi Social Rehabilitation Center was overtaken by the prisoners told Ecuadorean newspaper El Universo the riot started around 10am local time and that she saw an image of a dead prisoner on a mobile phone. The woman said visitors were prohibited from leaving the visiting area, and that some of the prisoners were removed from the room over fears that they were going to be killed. The visitors eventually were allowed to exit after emergency alarms sounded off. The body of an inmate lies inside a cell at one of the four prisons in Ecuador where 79 detainees were killed Tuesday Aged cheeses pack a punch of nutty, sharp flavor. Before they're fully mature, aged cheeses are either waxed or placed in brine for weeks to create a natural rind. However, the high salt content in brined cheeses deters some consumers. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Food Science & Technology present a shortened brining time for Parmigiano Reggiano that results in a less salty product, while still potentially maintaining the cheese's distinctive texture and flavor compounds. Parmigiano Reggiano is a lactose-free, crumbly and hard cheese. Manufactured in select provinces in Italy, its protected designation of origin status requires that certain production processes, such as a minimum 12-month ripening period, be performed. Ripening or maturing imparts the cheese's recognizable taste as milk solids are converted to flavor compounds. But before that, cheese wheels are placed in a saturated brine solution for weeks. The added salt plays a key role in the ripening process by modulating microbial growth, enzyme activity and the separation of solids from liquids, hardening the final product. One enzyme-mediated reaction is lipolysis, in which triglyceride fats in milk break down into their key components -- free fatty acids and diacylglycerides. Free fatty acids not only contribute to the taste of the cheese but are also precursors to other flavor molecules. So, Silvia Marzocchi and colleagues wanted to test the impact of brining time on the lipolysis reactions responsible for the free fatty acids involved in Parmigiano Reggiano's flavor profile and distinctive characteristics. The researchers had five Parmigiano Reggiano dairies brine several cheese wheels by immersing them in a saturated salt solution for either 18 days or a shorter 12-day period. Then the wheels were ripened for 15 months under conditions typical for this type of cheese. Salt content in fully ripened cheese was 9% lower in the samples brined for a shorter time than the group with the longer procedure. Unexpectedly, the researchers found no difference in the moisture level, cholesterol and total fat in the two sets of cheeses. The team also observed no major variations in compounds involved in the flavor profile, as most of the 32 free fatty acids had overlapping concentration ranges between the two groups. Yet in the cheeses with the shorter salting time, overall, the total free fatty acids and the total diacylglycerides concentration ranges were 260% and 100% higher, respectively, than the traditionally brined version, suggesting the lower salt to moisture ratio resulted in more water available to lipolysis reactions and more rapid enzymatic activity breaking down triglycerides. The researchers say a reduced brining time for Parmigiano Reggiano could result in a product appealing to salt-conscious consumers, but sensory tests are still needed to indicate if they can detect differences to the overall taste and texture. ### The authors acknowledge funding from the PARENT Project, the European Regional Development Fund to the Emilia-Romagna Region and the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientifi cas y Tecnicas. The paper is freely available as an ACS AuthorChoice article here. For more of the latest research news, register for our upcoming meeting, ACS Spring 2021. Journalists and public information officers are encouraged to apply for complimentary press registration by emailing us at newsroom@acs.org. The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS' mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and its people. The Society is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a specialist in scientific information solutions (including SciFinder and STN), its CAS division powers global research, discovery and innovation. ACS' main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio. To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org. Follow us: Twitter | Facebook February 24, 2021DAYS BEFORE THE inauguration of President Joe Biden, at a time when some Americans were animated by the false conviction that former President Donald J. Trump had actually won the November election, a man in Colorado began texting warnings to his family. The coming days, he wrote, would be the most important since World War II. Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, the man believed, and he was arresting enemies in the Vatican and other countries. Predicting turbulence ahead, the man urged his wife and two adult children to begin stockpiling essential goods.Watch how the world and the United States are saved! he wrote.The man had shown an affinity for conspiracy theories in the past, according to one of his sons, who shared the text messages with Undark, requesting that his name and other identifying characteristics of his family be withheld because he feared exposing his father to public ridicule. Recently, however, his fathers preoccupations had taken a more hard-edged and political turn often following the twisting storylines of QAnon, a collection of right-wing conspiracy theories that describe Trump and his allies battling an international cabal of liberal pedophiles.His fathers texts about preparing for national upheaval worried the man, and he says he began checking corners and closets in the house to see if his father was indeed stockpiling supplies. He also ordered a book by Steven Hassan, a mental health counselor in Massachusetts who calls himself Americas leading cult expert. And he began looking mostly, he said, just out of curiosity for resources on deprogramming a loved one whom he worried had been brainwashed.He is far from alone in trying anew to make sense of conspiracist thinking. Since Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, many carrying signs and wearing clothing emblazoned with references to Q, deradicalization experts who cut their teeth on studies of militant Islamic ideologies have turned their attention to Trump-aligned right-wing extremists. Social psychologists who study conspiracy theorists and misinformation have also seen a sudden spike in interest in their work.But some Americans have also begun using the language of cults and turning to specialists in cultic studies to make sense of the surge of online disinformation and conspiratorial thinking that have accompanied Trumps rise.It is not hyperbole labeling MAGA as a cult, the progressive activist Travis Akers wrote on Twitter in late January, referring to Trumps Make America Great Again slogan, and adding that hard-line Trump supporters are sick and need help. Television journalist Katie Couric asked how are we going to really almost deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump? Democratic U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager during Trumps second trial, recently compared the Republican Party to a cult. And in a Reddit group where anguished relatives of QAnon adherents gather for support, or to swap various anti-cult strategies, there are many references to Hassans and other experts work.Im inundated, daily, with families freaking out, said Pat Ryan, a cult mediation expert in Philadelphia. Daniel Shaw, a psychoanalyst in the New York City area who often works with ex-group members, also described an uptick in interest. Ive been receiving many, many inquiries from terrified family members about a loved one who is completely lost mentally, emotionally in the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, Shaw said.Hassan, Ryan, and Shaw are part of the small field of cult experts who focus on the experiences of people who join intense ideological movements. Some are trained psychologists and social workers; others are independent scholars and uncredentialed professionals. Many identify as former cult members themselves. But for families hoping to deprogram a QAnon-obsessed loved one, its unclear how much evidence there is behind the methods of these practitioners.Ive been receiving many, many inquiries from terrified family members about a loved one who is completely lost mentally, emotionally in the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.Theres broad agreement that some groups harm some people sometimes, said Michael Langone, a counseling psychologist and the director of the International Cultic Studies Association. But members of the field have sometimes clashed with academic experts, and even among themselves, especially over the notion that otherwise healthy people who subscribe to unorthodox belief systems are victims of a mental hijacking. Such thinking has received scant scientific reinforcement since sociologists, psychologists, and religious studies scholars first started pushing back on anti-cult hysteria in the U.S. decades ago. And while few cult specialists today claim to do the sort of deprogramming that gained popularity in the 1970s, some anti-cult practitioners and licensed psychiatrists do still embrace the idea that brainwashing and mind control pose real threats, and that they apply to online conspiracies.Despite this, many other researchers today say that these notions simply discount human agency. For the most part, they say, people gravitate to ideas and assertions theyre already inclined to believe, and those disposed to get enthusiastic or obsessive about things will do just that, of their own volition. Still, for families divided over political conspiracy theories and even over belief systems involving left-wing, Satan-worshipping child sex rings many cult experts ultimately settle on advice that makes restoring and cultivating relationships the primary focus.Number one: Do not confront. It absolutely does not work, said Steve Eichel, a clinical psychologist in Delaware and specialist in cult recovery. And number two: Maintain your relationship with that person no matter what.THE ANTI-CULT MOVEMENT emerged in the 1970s, as a wave of new religious groups attracted young followers in the U.S. These included the Rajneeshees, whose rise in Oregon was the subject of a viral 2018 Netflix documentary; the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, better known as the Hare Krishnas; and the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. These were joined by radical political organizations like the Symbionese Liberation Army, which gained national attention for the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, an actor and heir who went on to participate in an armed bank robbery with the group.In some cases, adherents made dramatic changes to their lives, espousing beliefs that many of their friends and relatives found to be bizarre. Some groups took extreme paths: In particular, more than 900 followers of the Peoples Temple, a group based in San Francisco, died in 1978 at Jonestown, the compound their leader had built in Guyana, most from drinking a cyanide-laced punch.Some alarmed parents and commentators labeled many of these movements cults. They described what happened to their children as brainwashing, and even as a new kind of pathology. Destructive cultism is a sociopathic illness which is rapidly spreading throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world in the form of a pandemic, Eli Shapiro, a doctor whose son had joined the Hare Krishnas, wrote in the journal American Family Physician in 1977. Symptoms of the pathology, Shapiro wrote, included behavioral changes, loss of personal identity, cessation of scholastic activities, estrangement from family, disinterest in society, and pronounced mental control and enslavement by cult leaders.News reports throughout the 1970s and 80s offered a steady drumbeat of concern over cults and related concepts like mind control. But over time, researchers raised questions over the efficacy of deprogramming interventions, as well as the idea that members of new religious movements were being brainwashed. Visual: UndarkIn response, people began to organize. The American Family Foundation, launched in 1979, offered resources to families in distress. More hard-line groups, like the Cult Awareness Network, helped arrange deprogrammings of group members. In some cases, deprogrammers would kidnap a group member, detain them for hours or days, and use arguments and videos to try to undo the brainwashing.The anti-cult movement soon ran into opposition from many sociologists and historians of religion, who argued that the anti-cultists often targeted religious movements that, while exotic to most Americans, were doing nothing wrong. They also questioned the very idea that brainwashing and deprogramming were real phenomena. In one landmark study, Eileen Barker, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, spent close to seven years studying members of the Unification Church, whose members are sometime called Moonies, after their leader. Barker followed people who entered church recruitment seminars, and she gave them numerous personality tests to measure things like suggestibility.Barker argued that, far from experiencing brainwashing, the large majority of people who attended recruitment seminars opted not to join the Unification Church. Those who joined and stayed, she found, actually appeared to be more strong-willed and resistant to suggestion than those who had walked away. People who joined such groups, Barker told Undark, did so because they found something that, for whatever reason, fitted with what they were looking for and lacked in normal society. In other words, they were members because they wanted to be members.Today, scholars like Barker tend to eschew the term cult because of its pejorative connotations, instead sometimes referring to groups like the Unification Church as new religious movements, or NRMs. In response, some cult experts have accused sociologists and scholars of religions of whitewashing the behavior of abusive groups. But the brainwashing model also failed to gain the endorsement of many psychologists. In 1983, the American Psychological Association convened a task force to investigate the issue. The groups members mostly clinical psychologists and psychiatrists involved in anti-cult work argued that groups did indeed draw members in through deceptive and indirect techniques of persuasion and control. But the APAs expert reviewers were skeptical. One complained that sections of the draft report the group produced in 1986 read like an article in The National Enquirer, rather than an academic study.In general, the members of the APAs ethics board wrote in a letter rejecting the task forces findings, the report lacks the scientific rigor and evenhanded critical approach necessary for APA imprimatur. (Clinical psychiatrists have been warmer toward the idea of brainwashing than research psychologists; since 1987, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an authoritative source for the field, has warned of identity disturbance due to prolonged and intense coercive persuasion that can result from brainwashing, thought reform, indoctrination while captive, and other traumas.)The cultic studies field evolved. The hard-line Cult Awareness Network was bankrupted by legal actions, including a lawsuit stemming from a botched intervention in which deprogrammers seized an 18-year-old Christian fundamentalist, restrained him with handcuffs and duct tape, and held him captive in a beach house at the behest of the mans mother. Today, Eichel said, deprogrammings are no longer done by anyone ethical.The American Family Foundation began to make peace with the sociologists. The organization also renamed itself the International Cultic Studies Association. And while differences remain among people who study cults and NRMs, Langone, who has run the organization since 1981, said he is now friends with Barker and other scholars who once clashed with his organization.Michael Kropveld, who runs the Center for Assistance and for the Study of Cultic Phenomena, or Info-Cult, in Montreal, got his start in the field in 1978, when he helped organize the deprogramming of a friend who had joined the Unification Church. Since then, his approach has mellowed the organization long ago abandoned deprogramming, and Kropveld said that he now finds the concept of brainwashing to be lacking.Using terms like brainwashing or mind control tend to imply some magical kind of process that goes on that happens to people that are unaware of whats happening to them, he said. Kropveld believes that techniques of influence exist, but he thinks the reasons people gravitate to groups tend to be more complicated and individualized.Still, he acknowledged, ideas like brainwashing have an appeal. Simplistic messages with vivid labels, he said, are the ones that get the most attention.SOME CULT EXPERTS continue to find ideas like brainwashing to be useful. One of the most prominent is Steven Hassan, a former member of the Unification Church and the author of Combating Mind Control. In the past, Hassan has described the internet as a vehicle for mind control and subliminal programming, and he recently alleged that transgender hypno porn is being used as a form of weaponized mind control to recruit young people into gender transitions.Watching Trump run for office in 2016 led to a bizarre kind of deja vu, Hassan wrote in his most recent book, The Cult of Trump. It struck me that Trump was exhibiting many of the same behaviors that I had seen in the late Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon, whom I had worshipped as the messiah in the mid-70s.To jump from not liking Trump to Trump as cult leader, I think, is a bit of a leap, Langone said.In the days since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Hassan has offered expert analysis for CNN, The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, and other outlets, and he has fielded questions from a popular Reddit group for people whose loved ones are QAnon adherents. (Through an assistant, Hassan declined requests for an interview with Undark, citing a busy schedule.)Some people outside the cultic studies world have also made similar arguments, including Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and consultant for the World Health Organization who, until recently, taught at Yale. In an email to Undark, Lee, who has helped promote Hassans work, wrote that a segment of Trumps followers resembles cult members and suggested that the former president had cultivated a kind of mass psychosis.She applies that analysis to a wide range of right-wing positions. Asked in a phone interview whether someone who believes that climate change is overblown and that progressive tax policy is a bad idea could be said to have an individual pathology, Lee demurred. No, she said, I describe them as being victims of abuse. Specifically, she explained, they suffered from the abuse of systems that politics and industry have employed to psychologically manipulate the population into accepting policies that undermine their health, wellbeing, and even livelihood and lives.Not all experts in the cultic studies world buy this. Langone, the ICSA leader, specifically praised Hassans contributions to the field, but acknowledged that hes skeptical of describing Trump followers as cultists. I can understand why people dont like Trump, Langone said. But to jump from not liking Trump to Trump as cult leader, I think, is a bit of a leap. He also fears the cultic element of QAnon is overplayed by some of my colleagues in this field and that the influence of QAnon itself may be overstated by media coverage.Allegations of brainwashing are also out of step with some recent psychology research on misinformation and conspiracy theories. How much of someone going down that rabbit hole is due to that persons need, in a way or this misinformation or this activity, this community rather than these methods being pushed by whatever person is in charge? asked Hugo Mercier, a cognitive psychologist at Institut Jean Nicod in Paris and author of the 2020 book Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe.Mercier argues that the brainwashing model often gets the process backward: Rather than tricking people into harmful thinking, effective propaganda or even pure misinformation gives them permission to openly express ideas they already found appealing.Gordon Pennycook, a social psychologist at the University of Regina in Canada, also argues that, while it may seem to relatives that someone has changed suddenly as they fall down a rabbit hole, such accounts typically misapprehend the sequence of events. Its not that their minds are being taken over, he said. Their minds were susceptible to it in the first place. Whats been taken over is their interests, and their focus, and so on. People who gravitate to conspiracies, Pennycook says, have consistent personality traits that make those ideas appealing. Its not the conspiracies that are causing them to be overly aggressive and resistant to alternative narratives, Pennycook said. Instead, those traits are the reason they are so strongly believing in the conspiracies.Many scholars of new religious movements are also skeptical of the idea that disinformation and conspiracy theories should be understood as somehow hijacking peoples minds. Megan Goodwin, a scholar of American minority religions at Northeastern University, said she has heard people describe outlets like Fox News as brainwashing. People who are watching it are adults who are making choices to consume that media, said Goodwin. Similarly, she said, the people who mounted an armed insurrection to take over the Capitol are adults that made choices. An idea like deprogramming, she added, makes it sound like, okay, well theyve had their agency and their faculties taken from them.She sees no evidence thats the case, even if, she said, that narrative can be comforting. They make shitty choices, she said. People you love are going to make shitty choices.SOME FAMILIES HAVE gravitated toward cult specialists in the hopes that they can, indeed, help rescue a loved one from the tangled communities that grow around online conspiracy theories and there are such specialists who say they can offer useful guidance, even if they cant stage a full extraction. One of those is Ryan, the cult mediation specialist in Philadelphia. Raised in Florida, Ryan joined the Transcendental Meditation movement in his late teens and spent more than a decade as an avid practitioner of the popular global meditation movement, which was founded in the 1950s. Eventually, he came to believe he was part of a cult and left.Whether its to field worries about a conspiratorial loved one or to mediate disagreement over membership in a religious movement, families who work with him fill out long questionnaires and may eventually participate in sessions that involve Ryan, his business partner, and a licensed psychiatrist. (Ryan, who has a degree in Eastern philosophy and business from Maharishi International University in Iowa, is not a licensed mental health counselor. That lets him intervene in a way that it would be difficult for me to do given my professional license, said Eichel, the Delaware psychologist, who sometimes refers families to Ryan.)Ryan stressed that interventions are rare; usually, the extent of their work is helping families develop strategies to maintain a relationship. When Ryan and the family do decide on an intervention, it involves months of preparation. They sometimes employ elaborate ruses to coax the person into the room for a conversation with their relatives and Ryan.They make shitty choices, Goodwin said. People you love are going to make shitty choices.Whether such methods are reliably effective is difficult to ascertain, and, practitioners acknowledge, there is little research on outcomes. You can be simplistic, and lucky, and get the person out, said Langone, the ICSA head, stressing that peoples reasons for joining and leaving groups are often highly individualized. There are not good statistics on the effectiveness of exit counseling, Langone said.During a conversation in late January, Ryan estimated that, within the past year, he had consulted for roughly 20 families dealing with loved ones who had gone deep into QAnon or a similar community. He has not recommended formal interventions to any of them. The basis of what we would recommend is to stay connected, and how to do that, said Ryan. Because to influence someone, you have to have a relationship with them.For now, the son of the Colorado conspiracy theorist said hes gotten adept at finding ways to exit uncomfortable conversations, and he does what he can to lay low and avoid confrontation. He thinks anything else is likely to be ineffective. I think its just going to ride itself out, he said earlier this month.Hes now less confident that will happen especially since after the inauguration his father moved on to sharing anti-vaccination theories with his family and hes unsure of what the future will hold. I just I dont know where any of this is going to go, he said, with the way that theres just so much crazy going on right now in the United States.Michael Schulson is a contributing editor for Undark. His work has also been published by Aeon, NPR, Pacific Standard, Scientific American, Slate, and Wired, among other publications. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 23) The Department of National Defense said Tuesday it is ready to begin its COVID-19 inoculation program for DND personnel once China's donation of 100,000 doses doses of the Sinovac vaccine arrives. The vaccines will be given to all civilian employees and military personnel assigned to the DND and its civilian bureaus: the Office of Civil Defense, Government Arsenal, National Defense College of the Philippines, and the Philippine Veterans Affairs Office, with two doses each. The DND said there are about 25,000 civilian employees and military personnel in the department and its civilian bureaus nationwide, but their family members will also be eligible to get the shots. Uniformed personnel of the Armed Forces of the Philippines will be under a different vaccination program and are not part of the count. "The intent is to vaccinate everyone who is in the same working environment and those living in the same households as our employees," DND spokesperson Arsenio Andolong said in a statement. Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana initially said that he was willing to take the Sinovac vaccine CoronaVac, but the 72-year-old official later clarified that he will wait for other vaccines to arrive since the Food and Drug Administration recommended younger individuals (ages 18 to 59) to receive the drug. China donated 600,000 Sinovac vaccines to the Philippines, which were supposed to arrive on Feb. 23. There has been a delay, but Health Secretary Francisco Duque said the shipment is ready. On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration granted Emergency Use Authorization to CoronaVac, but there is a caveat. Due to its lower 50.4% efficacy rate on medical frontliners during a trial in Brazil, the vaccine is not recommended for healthcare workers exposed to COVID-19 patients, elderlies, and people with comorbidities. It should only be used on healthy people aged 18-59 with an interval of four weeks between doses, given that the efficacy rate for that demographic is higher at 65.3% to 91.2%, FDA chief Eric Domingo maintained. Sinovac is the third manufacturer whose vaccine received regulatory approval in the country, following UK-made AstraZeneca and US' Pfizer BioNtech. Apart from the donation, the country is finalizing a deal with Sinovac for the purchase of 25 million doses. The agreement is expected to get inked in two weeks, Senator Sonny Angara said, citing information from the National Task Force Against COVID-19. Of this number, an initial batch of 1.5 million doses is set to arrive before the end of March, the senator added. Nippon Steel's plan to suspend blast furnace operations at its Ibaraki Prefecture plant, near Tokyo, is the latest example of the group's efforts to deal with overcapacity in Japan. With an earlier decision to halt three other blast furnaces, the steelmaker will cut its domestic capacity by 20%. London: UK, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Nippon Steel's announcement is the latest example of the challenges faced by the steel industry in developed economies: overcapacity and environmental regulations. The Japanese steel industry has a total capacity of 130Mtpy. In 2019, Japan's crude steel production was 99Mt falling to 83Mt in 2020, implying a 64% capacity utilisation. Nippon Steel is Japan's largest producer accounting for more than 50% of the country's crude steel output. Like its peers in Europe, the Japanese steel industry is facing overcapacity with dire prospects. Domestic demand is on a downward trend, in line with a falling demography, making the Japanese steel industry highly dependent on exports. Roskill's new Steel Alloys 1st Edition report discusses key aspects impacting the Steel Alloys industry together with a 10-year forecast for steel and its alloys. The EU and the US are net steel importers, but Japan is the world's second largest steel exporter after China. Japan is even more reliant on exports than China with a net export ratio of 25% versus 5% for China. And the outlook for Japanese steel exports does not look good. China is increasingly gaining market share in Southeast Asia, the region's battleground. The steel quality gap between Japanese and Chinese material has narrowed, and one should not forget Korea, another strong regional player. Moreover, additional steel capacity is being built in Southeast Asia, implying a fiercer competitive environment in the years ahead. As is the case in the EU, the Japanese government aims at cutting carbon emissions and targets net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The Japanese steel industry will increasingly have to rely on technology (hydrogen/DRI) to comply with future regulations. A task even more difficult for Japan as 75% of its steel production comes from the BOF route. Roskill's upcoming Steel Alloys in the 2020s webinar will discuss the latest trends and insights on steel and its alloys, as well as share novel analysis on sustainability in the steel supply chain. With these headwinds in mind, there is no doubt that the Japanese steel industry is poised for a major downsizing in the years to come. What we are seeing now is just the beginning. California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara has proposed new rules to give homeowners and businesses open access to their properties wildfire risk scores. The new rules would require insurance companies to provide a consumer with their propertys wildfire risk score, which must recognize a consumers mitigation actions that could improve their rating, such as creating defensible space and fire-hardening, and allow time for the consumer to reduce their score. The new regulations will incentivize mitigation and help consumers make better-informed decisions when they buy, sell, or build a home, according to Lara. In community meetings and town halls that Lara held across California in person and virtually, he heard from consumers who said they took action to protect their homes but still saw their insurance dropped or their premiums increased based on wildfire risk scores. I have consistently heard from consumers that many insurance companies keep them in the dark about their propertys risk profile, leading people to spend thousands of dollars cutting down trees or hardening their homes without truly knowing how it will affect their insurance, Lara said in a statement. Giving consumers their wildfire risk scores and the ability to lower them will incentivize the home-hardening and community mitigation efforts already underway to better prepare us for future wildfires. Laras action builds on his Feb. 8 announcement of a wildfire resilience partnership with Gov. Gavin Newsoms Administration to establish fire-hardening measures for insurance companies. The partnership and this proposed regulation will lead to more incentives for homeowners and communities to bring down wildfire risk. In addition to the wildfire risk score regulations, Lara announced rules to strengthen his ability to protect consumers through review of insurance company rate filings. These proposed regulation changes make clear that insurers are required to submit the complete information they use to determine which properties to underwrite or renew. Additionally, these changes will provide insurance companies with more upfront certainty regarding what materials and information that Lara requires in filed rate applications with the California Department of Insurance, eliminating delays caused by incomplete initial rate filings from insurance companies, he said. Lara plans to hold public prenotice workshops on March 30 on the wildfire risk score regulations, and on April 6 on the complete rate filing regulations. Following input from the public, he will begin a formal regulatory process leading to adoption of new rules. Topics California Catastrophe Natural Disasters Wildfire United Oil & Gas (AIM:UOG): Transformational test rate confirmed at ASH-3, Egypt Share Price: 4.7p, Market Cap: 27.8m Yesterday afternoon, UOG announced a much-anticipated update on the testing of the ASH-3 development well in the Abu Sennan concession, onshore Egypt. The Company holds a 22% non-operating interest in Abu Sennan, which is operated by Kuwait Energy Egypt. Oil & Gas Daily Flow Non-Independent Research; Marketing & Sales Commentary - MiFID II exempt information see disclaimer below Market Update: Wednesday 24 February 2021 PetroTal (AIM:PTAL): Material uplift in YE20 reserves confirmed - Bretana oil field, Peru United Oil & Gas (AIM:UOG): Transformational test rate confirmed at ASH-3, Egypt Lekoil* (AIM:LEK): Company remains in discussions with Optimum re OPL310, Nigeria Energy Prices Brent Oil US$65.8/bbl vs US$65.7/bbl yesterday WTI Oil US$62.0/bbl vs US$62.1/bbl yesterday Natural Gas US$2.85/mmbtu vs US$2.93/mmbtu yesterday Oil Price News The much-publicised oil price rally has had a moment on pause on a surprise US inventory build The American Petroleum Institute (API) reported yesterday a build in crude oil inventories of 1.026MMbbls for the week ending 19 February Analysts had predicted an inventory draw of 5.2MMbbls for the week In the previous week, the API reported a draw in oil inventories of 5.8MMbbls after analysts had predicted a draw of 2.4MMbbls Oil prices were trading up on Tuesday ahead of the data release as oil supplies tighten from oil and gas shutdowns in the US courtesy of the Texas Freeze. US oil production fell 200,000bopd to 10.8MMbopd, according to the Energy Information Administration The API reported a small build in gasoline inventories of 66,000bbls barrels for the week ending 19 February, after the previous week's 3.9MMbbl build. The last couple of weeks have seen gasoline stocks rise but so has production While demand in the worlds top consumer of oil recovers, production is stalling According to the EIA, US output will remain below 12MMbopd next year This imbalance will turn the US into a net exporter this year and next, the EIA estimated in its latest Short-Term Energy Outlook But more importantly for OPEC+, this would push oil prices higher still, tempting barely compliant members to become even less compliant Elsewhere, according to an industry consensus, global crude demand will increase by 5.5-6MMbopd, implying that a full return to pre-COVID demand levels will require several years to take place The underlying question whether crude output levels can actually follow this demand growth this year has been growing in importance, steep backwardation on the Brent curve might suggest has serious qualms about it With divergent trends abounding, Middle Eastern national oil companies have opted for nuance after the January-February price increases As usual, Saudi Arabia has led the way, rolling over all of its February 2021 OSPs into March completely unchanged Overall, the reports pointed to a still-fragile energy market that is highly susceptible to the course of Covid-19 The robustness of Asian demand remains a key gauge for Middle Eastern NOCs China and India have been leading the continent with fuel consumption almost returning to pre-COVID levels in both On the other hand, insular economies such as the Philippines, Indonesia or Taiwan have been running their refineries below maximum capacity or temporarily halting several units amidst poor margins At the same time, turnaround season is just around the corner and Japans month-on-month import drop in February is the first of many to come Albeit smaller in terms of overall output, refinery maintenance in Thailand, Taiwan and Sri Lanka will also tighten the markets a bit February turnaround will blaze the path for next months large-scale works, China alone will have at least 0.9MMbopd of refinery capacity going offline in March 2021 Gas Price News Natural gas futures are edging lower as warmer weather in Texas is helping production to recover faster than previously expected from last weeks Arctic freeze that rattled the energy markets last week Falling spot gas prices are also weighing on the futures markets as well as forecasts calling for improving weather conditions Nonetheless, traders shouldnt become complacent with volatility expected to return with the March contract roll-off on Wednesday Company News PetroTal (AIM:PTAL): Material uplift in YE20 reserves confirmed - Bretana oil field, Peru Share Price: 18.4p, Market Cap: 145m PTAL has announced its 2020 year-end reserve evaluation undertaken by NSAI for the Bretana oil field (PTAL 100% WI). 1P reserves increased by 4% to 22.3MMbbl from 21.5MMbbl, 2P reserves increased by 7% to 51.0MMbbl from 47.7MMbbl and 3P reserves increased by 25% to 106.1MMbbl from 84.8MMbbl. Relative to 2020 oil production of 2.1MMbbl, reserve replacement was 38% in 1P reserves and 157% in 2P reserves; Bretanas reserve life index for 1P and 2P reserves is now an impressive 6.4 years and 14.6 years respectively. Original oil in place estimates for 1P, 2P, and 3P reserve categories were unchanged from 2019 at 235, 364, and 579MMbbls respectively. NSAI attributes a corresponding 2P recovery factor of 15.0%, increased from 13.6% at year-end 2019 due to performance of the existing wells. A 19% decrease in total 2P operating costs resulting in an undiscounted saving of US$232m was driven by further calibration and optimization to the Companys actual cost structure. Net Present Value (before tax, discounted at 10%) (NPV-10) is calculated at US$317m (US$14.21/bbl) for 1P reserves, US$830m (US$16.27/bbl) for 2P reserves. The 2021 development program combined with all future development and abandonment costs, represent total finding and development costs of US$11.52/bbl for 1P reserves, US$4.96/bbl for 2P reserves and US$3.16/bbl for 3P reserves. On a 2P basis, this represents a recycle ratio of 4.7x, based on the total US$4.96/bbl finding and development cost relative to a netback of US$23.40/bbl (assumed at US$50.00/bbl Brent oil price). Our take: Another positive development for PTAL today, undewrlining the considerable value of the Bretana oil field ahead of an active drilling campaign this year. The recovery factor improvements in PTALs 2P and 3P categories support the Companys approach to continued reservoir performance over time matching that of nearby analogous fields with higher recovery factors. In addition, the decrease in 2P operating costs by 19%, equating to US$232m in undiscounted savings over the remaining reserve life represents the compelling project economics of the field. PTALs recently replenished balance sheet will immediately lead to a return to development activity at the Bretana oil field, with the next well expected to commence drilling by the end of Q1 2021. The recent reopening of the Bretana oil field operations will invariably lead to a step change in the Companys cash flow position notwithstanding a much stronger oil price globally. Indeed, FY21 EBITDA of US$90m is likely to be the bearish case given the current spot and futures market for Brent crude, and we therefore see compelling value in the Companys share price at current levels. United Oil & Gas (AIM:UOG): Transformational test rate confirmed at ASH-3, Egypt Share Price: 4.7p, Market Cap: 27.8m Yesterday afternoon, UOG announced a much-anticipated update on the testing of the ASH-3 development well in the Abu Sennan concession, onshore Egypt. The Company holds a 22% non-operating interest in Abu Sennan, which is operated by Kuwait Energy Egypt. The ASH-3 development well, a step-out development well in the ASH Field, spudded on 4 January, and reached a total depth (TD) of 4,087m MD (3,918m TVDSS) on 8 February, ahead of schedule and under budget. Logging indicates a gross hydrocarbon column of 59m in the primary AEB reservoir target, 27.5m of which is estimated to be net pay. ASH-3 was successfully tested from the targeted AEB Formation, and preliminary results indicate maximum flow rates of 6,379bopd and 6.7MMscf/d (c. 7,720boepd gross; 1,700boepd net working interest) on a 64/64" choke. Rates of 3,561bopd and 2.9MMscf/d (c. 4,140boepd gross; 910boepd net working interest) were achieved on a reduced 30/64" choke, and in line with prudent reservoir management, these rates are expected to be more representative of the sustainable flow levels that will be achieved when the well is brought onstream through the existing ASH facilities. The ED-50 rig will now move to the north of the Licence, close to the producing Al Jahraa field to commence the drilling of the ASD-1X exploration well. This well is targeting the Abu Roash reservoirs in the Prospect D structure and, if successful, can quickly be brought into production. Our take: Another transformational result for UOG, and management deserve all the credit they are receiving from the market following a string of successful wells and continuing to exceed production targets. The first well of 2021, following the deferral of the majority of the 2020 drilling programme, has come in well ahead of expectations. This year will be a strong year of operational activity in the country in our view, with the drilling of further wells as part of UOGs 2021 campaign, including the ASD-1X exploration well, that will follow after completion of ASH-3. Lekoil* (AIM:LEK): Company remains in discussions with Optimum re OPL310 Share Price: 1.75p, Market Cap: 9.3m Lekoil has confirmed that its subsidiary Mayfair in which the Company has a 90% economic interest, has received a letter from Optimum, the Operator of the OPL 310 Licence, Nigeria, proposing to terminate the Cost and Revenue Sharing Agreement (CRSA) executed for OPL 310. As announced in December 2020, Optimum conveyed its enforcement of the default clause within the CRSA. Pursuant to the CRSA, the default clause stipulates that, following a cure period, if a default has occurred, Optimum and Mayfair shall jointly seek and agree on a buyer to whom Mayfair's 17.14% Participating Interest as well as the financial obligation within OPL 310 will be transferred. Mayfair will also be entitled to a full reimbursement of all amounts due to it, as a result of past costs spent on the asset, from future production proceeds from OPL 310. The Company believes that this further letter proposing to terminate the CRSA is not valid as the relevant provisions of the CRSA have not been adhered to by Optimum. The Company will engage with Optimum to ensure that the appropriate steps outlined in the Agreement are followed and is also seeking legal advice on the matter. Our take: Lekoil will understandably look to defend its position with regards to OPL310 which represents a significant potential hydrocarbon development. Elsewhere, despite the macro-challenges across the sector last year, Lekoil successfully navigated the period with steady production and cashflow generation from Otakikpo while implementing a range of significant cost reduction initiatives across its operations ensuring a timely repayment of its facility with Shell Trading. *SP Angel acts as Nominated Advisor and Broker to Lekoil Research Oil & Gas Sam Wahab - 0203 470 0473 / 0784 385 5037 sam.wahab@spangel.co.uk Sales Richard Parlons 020 3470 0472 Abigail Wayne 020 3470 0534 Rob Rees 020 3470 0535 Grant Barker 020 3470 0471 SP Angel Prince Frederick House 35-39 Maddox Street London W1S 2PP +SP Angel employees may have previously held, or currently hold, shares in the companies mentioned in this note. 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These include (i) physical, virtual and procedural information barriers (ii) a prohibition on personal account dealing by analysts and (iii) measures to ensure that recipients and persons wishing to access the research receive/are able to access the research at the same time. SP Angel Corporate Finance LLP is a company registered in England and Wales with company number OC317049 and whose registered office address is Prince Frederick House, 35-39 Maddox Street, London W1S 2PP. SP Angel Corporate Finance LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority whose address is 12 Endeavour Square, London E20 1JN. Recommendations are based on a 12-month time horizon as follows: Buy - Expected return >15% Hold - Expected return range -15% to +15% Sell - Expected return < 15% Expelled leader on Wednesday appealed to 'true followers' of late party supremo J Jayalalithaa to join hands and post a spectacular victory in the coming assembly elections. Her appeal, days after returning to after serving a four year prison sentence in an assets case, appeared to be a signal for truce with the ruling ahead of the polls, likely in April. After paying floral tributes to a portrait of Jayalalithaa here on her 73rd birth anniversary, Sasikala recalled the late leader's famous quote that even after her lifetime, the would continue to work for the people for centuries to come. 'True followers' of Jayalalithaa should come together and remember that the goal is winning it big in the assembly elections, she said without naming anyone and while addressing Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam cadres who gathered for the anniversary event. Expressing confidence that her pitch for unity would be reciprocated by the late leader's loyal followers, Sasikala said she would throw her weight behind them. She appealed to them to 'work like a bee' unitedly for poll victory. Sasikala's nephew and AMMK leader TTV Dhinakaran, when asked on Sasikala's assertion, said she only underscored unity. If her reference was to the AIADMK or the AMMK, Dhinakaran, who is the party general secretary said, "you have to ask her." In 2017, Sasikala and Dhinakaran were ousted from the AIADMK after the factions led by chief minister K Palaniswami, earlier chosen by her for the top post before proceeding to serve her jail term, and Panneerselvam merged burying the hatchet. Senior AIADMK leader and Fisheries Minister toeing the party stand of not accommodating Sasikala and relatives said her invite would not apply to his party and it meant only the AMMK. Asked about Sasikala's unity line, political analyst Sumanth Raman said the AMMK leadership appeared to work out some kind of an interim arrangement with the ruling party for the elections so that there is no split of votes. "I see this as a temporary kind of truce," he told PTI adding based on the poll outcome, the AMMK may rethink its strategy. Notably, Dhinakaran told reporters that preventing the DMK from coming to power was his party's goal. Appearing to be accommodative towards the AIADMK, in the same breath he said, "we need not even talk about others." He, however, hit out at the AIADMK government for the rising debt and poor financial health. The AMMK leader asserted that the front to be led by his party would be the primary force in the upcoming polls. He said, after sharing seats with 'allies,' his party would contest in the rest of the constituencies. The AMMK's general council and executive council meets are scheduled to be held tomorrow through video conferencing. Dhinakaran had till recent times maintained that the AMMK's goal was 'retrieving' the AIADMK (bringing the party back to the leadership of him and his aunt). Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam is the AIADMK coordinator, the numero uno position in the party and Chief Minister K Palaniswami is the co-coordinator, next in its hierarchy. Wary of the Sasikala factor, the AIADMK has already asked its party workers to light a lamp this evening in their respective houses and take a vow to be loyal to the party and protect it. Widow Ann Connors has laid down the gauntlet to the Criminal Assets Bureau and claimed she will "pay no more" than 300,000 of a 2.5 million revenue bill. The wife of murdered Fat Andy Connors has claimed that her own accountant has estimated her bill and says she will "pay no more". In a Facebook rant, Connors who has a vast property portfolio and has turned her own home into an unofficial halting site in recent months claims she has signed a book deal with a US publishing firm and is writing a book about her life. Ive been going since Im 14 years of age. I travelled as far as China with my husband for a living.Im wriging (sic) a book about my life storyThe Americans is after accepting to publish my life story and the name of my book will be he died in my arms. Read More "The world know what theyve done and are trying to do to my family.They pulled a 2.5 million bill out of the sky. My accountant reckons I owe euro 150,000 to euro 300,000 and thats the bill that will be paid. I will pay no more My husband was areal businessman a proper one, they killed him. In a special Sunday World investigation we have detailed the extraordinary birds-eye view of lands around the home of Connors at The Ranch in Saggart. Expand Close An aerial view of The Ranch, home of Ann Connors / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp An aerial view of The Ranch, home of Ann Connors CAB have judgement mortgages on nine of Connors properties including the site and large bungalow where the widow has expanded her compound outwards creating a massive expansive site where chalets are on offer for euro 1500 euro per month and yards are for rent. The developments have involved the concreting of a large neighbouring site of land which documents show is owned by Boherboy, a Mansfield family company. Neighbours in the Saggart area which include the expensive Coldwater Lakes estates, have been making a string of complaints to South Dublin County Council in relation to dumping, planning, sewerage and animal welfare issues in surrounding fields. On the border with Coldwater, where houses can fetch up to 1 million, mounds of rubbish and human faeces are strewn. One source said: This is a total disgrace. It is another Dunsink waiting to happen and it seems as if the authorities are standing back and letting it. Fat Andy led a burglary gang that terrorised the country for years robbing elderly people of their savings and using violence against them. He was murdered at The Ranch in 2014 when a masked gunman burst in and shot him dead in front of his wife and children. CAB have twice targeted Connors and he previously paid a 150,000 tax bill to them. After his death the Bureau got judgement mortgages on properties in his wife Anns name. They include a five-bedroom mansion with an indoor swimming pool known as The Villa and currently up for sale with a price tag of over 700,000. SAN DIEGO, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Battle Brothers Foundation has received approval to launch an observational study on the use of medical cannabis to help combat PTSD in veterans. In concert with NiaMedic , a medical data and research company, the study will determine if cannabis treatment will be beneficial in reducing symptoms in patients with treatment-resistant PTSD. The two groups received approval to proceed with the study from the national Independent Review Board (IRB), the independent committee that reviews the methods proposed for research to ensure that they are ethical. "This news could not come at a better time. Every day, 22 veterans are dying due to effects of post-traumatic stress from opioid addiction to depression. Through anecdotal experiences, we know that cannabis can alleviate symptoms and provide relief. We appreciate that the IRB recognizes the validity of and the need for this study," said Bryan Buckley, Founder and President of the Board for Battle Brothers Foundation. Study General Overview The study will enroll 60 California veterans, with moderate or severe PTSD over the next year. Participants will dose and titrate individually purchased products under their own discretion. Participants will be followed for 90 days to evaluate the safety and efficiency of cannabis on their symptoms. Results of the study will be documented and monitored at that time. PTSD in Veterans According to the National Institutes of Health , the rate of PTSD among returning service members varies widely across wars and eras. In one major study of 60,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, 13.5% of deployed and non-deployed veterans screened positive for PTSD, while other studies show the rate to be as high as 20% to 30%. As many as 500,000 U.S. troops who served in these wars over the past 13 years have been diagnosed with PTSD. The Partners The Battle Brothers Foundation is the nonprofit arm of Helmand Valley Growers Company (HVGC), a cannabis company founded by disabled United States Special Operations veterans that donates 100% of its profits to fund research on the medical use of cannabis for veterans. In 2016, HVGC founders spoke to members of Congress about the viability of medical cannabis as an alternative to the opioids military veterans were prescribed. They were advised to research data working alongside American medical doctors to build a strong case to present to Veteran's Affairs (VA). Using its innovative medical & research protocols, data collection & analysis process, NiaMedic generates high quality clinical data of medical cannabis and provides: (1) Healthcare Services research-based medical protocols integrating conventional medicine with propriety medical cannabis treatments; (2) Clinical Research Services; (3) Consultation Services. For more information, visit https://battlebrothersfoundation.org/veteran-treatment-research/. Contact: Beth Graham Kip Morrison Associates [email protected] SOURCE Battle Brothers Foundation by Francis Khoo Thwe A multi-ethnic rally was held today to show the international community that Myanmars many ethnic groups can live together without harsh military rule Indonesia's foreign minister, Ratno Marsudi, scarps a visit to Myanmar. Protesters gathered in front of the Italian Embassy. Yangon (AsiaNews) Protests continue in Myanmar against the military coup, despite a ban imposed by the military on gatherings of more than five people. The military warned youth that they risk dying if they take part in demonstrations "dragged" by older people. Yet more protests are expected today in Yangon, above all a multi-ethnic rally planned for Mayangone, in the northern part of the city, to show the international community that Myanmar's ethnic groups can live together without harsh military rule. Another multi-ethnic rally was held six days ago with people from 27 different ethnic groups. The military has used the countrys ethnic diversity as a pretext to impose its rule, claiming that it was the guarantor of national unity, when in fact it has governed by divide and rule, arming one group against another so that it could intervene to pacify conflict-torn areas. Multi-ethnic protests are a novelty in Myanmar, as most ethnic groups united against the coup and the junta. The international community especially the members of the Association of South-East Asian nations (ASEAN) is concerned about the stability of the country and therefore dares not take an open stance against the junta. Instability could negatively impact trade with Myanmar and drive tens of thousands of people to flee seeking asylum on nearby shores. That is why, Myanmars largest trading partner, Singapore, and Indonesia (ruled once by military dictatorship like Myanmar) have been fudging the issue, describing the coup d'etat as a domestic issue while calling for a solution to the impasse. A few days ago, some media reported that Indonesia's Foreign Minister, Retno Marsudi, set out to rally ASEAN around the idea of new fair and inclusive elections, after the junta claimed that the November election was rigged and promised to hold fresh elections within a year. In Myanmar, many people were displeased. For three days, young protesters held sit-ins in front of the Indonesian Embassy, to show their rejection of the Indonesian proposal (pictures 1 and 2). For one protester, accepting Indonesias proposal would be like admitting that the November election was tainted. This is Absolutely not true. We have already selected our leader and our government. Demonstrators have also visited other embassies calling for international action against the military junta and the release of imprisoned democratic leaders. In front of the Italian embassy, a large group held a placard saying How many dead bodies are needed to take action (picture 3). Some point out that Indonesia's proposal violates ASEANs own charter, which promises to support 'democracy' and 'human rights'. Reacting to the fallout, Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah yesterday said that Indonesia did not have any plan for Myanmar, but he did confirm that his government is working with other ASEAN members to reach a democratic transition. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi cancelled a visit to Myanmar planned for today. For protesters, this is good news since her visit, the first by a foreign leader since the coup d'etat, would be tantamount to recognising the military junta. The trust responsible for paying settlements to tens of thousands of Northern California wildfire victims is suing 22 former Pacific Gas and Electric Co. executives and board members of its parent company. Its an effort to secure more money for people affected by two of Californias worst disasters: the historically deadly 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County and the 2017 fires that burned in the North Bays Wine Country. Both blazes were caused by PG&E power lines, and they killed more than 100 people and incinerated thousands of homes. PG&E settled with fire victims as part of its exit from bankruptcy last year. But the trust established to pay victims an estimated $13.5 billion retained the right to pursue litigation against former directors and top executives. Trustee John Trotter, a retired state appeals court judge who oversees the victims fund, has taken advantage of that and filed suit Wednesday in San Francisco Superior Court against 22 PG&E ex-leaders. Trotters suit alleges that the defendants breached fiduciary duties, namely by failing to implement a fire safety power shut-off program early enough to prevent the 2017 fires and neglecting to properly maintain the high-voltage equipment that started the Camp Fire. Two very different things went wrong here, and it starts at the top, said attorney Frank Pitre, whose firm is leading Trotters lawsuit. Pitre has sued PG&E on behalf of fire victims in the past, and he was heavily involved in the companys bankruptcy proceedings. Defendants in the suit include former chief executives Tony Earley and Geisha Williams, former board chairman Richard Kelly and former chief financial officer Jason Wells, among others. Attorneys for the defendants could not be reached for comment. Though PG&E is not a defendant, company spokeswoman Lynsey Paulo said in a statement that the company was aware of the lawsuit. Paulo reiterated PG&Es intent to honor victims of the Camp Fire and previous fires by reducing fire risk, and she said the company has contributed the vast majority of the $13.5 billion victims settlement already. We remain focused on reducing wildfire risk across our service area and making our electric system more resilient to the climate-driven challenges we all face in California, she said. PG&E funded its $13.5 billion settlement with victims through a mix of cash and stock that the trust can sell off over time. But Trotter acknowledged in a recent letter to victims that the trust was more than $1 billion short of its intended value because of the stocks subpar performance. He also said the trust had a careful sell-down plan, so it could sell shares when theyre worth more. Pitre estimated that the suit against former company leaders could secure $200 million to $400 million or more to boost the funds available for victims. This is not motivated because of any fear or any anxiety over the value of the trust being $13.5 billion, he said. It is being done to try to enhance that value. Apart from its bankruptcy and related settlement with fire victims, PG&E also pleaded guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter over its role in the Camp Fire. The company was already on probation because of earlier convictions arising from the 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion. PG&E is still under investigation for possibly causing the 2020 Zogg Fire, which killed four and destroyed more than 200 buildings west of Redding. J.D. Morris is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorris Paramedics have started wearing body-worn cameras for the first time after 529 violent assaults were reported in London during the coronavirus pandemic. London Ambulance Service rolled out the trial on Monday in areas where emergency workers are considered to be most at risk. Crews from two stations in north London and two stations in south London will initially wear the gadgets with the intention of expanding the trial if the first phase proves successful. Figures show London Ambulance Service staff were victims of 529 violent attacks between April last year and the end of January. They include kicking, punching, head-butting, biting and spitting with 31 assaults with weapons also reported. It comes after ministers said they planned to bring forward legislation to double the maximum sentence for those convicted of assaults on police, prison staff, custody officers, fire service personnel, search and rescue workers and frontline health workers. London Ambulance Service rolled out the trial on Monday in areas where emergency workers are considered to be most at risk. Pictured, Emergency Ambulance Crew member Gary Watson, 33, will be among the first to wear one There were 834 incidents of verbal abuse and threats between April last year and January. The cameras are attached to paramedics' uniforms so they can hit a button to start recording when patients or members of the public become aggressive or abusive. Emergency Ambulance Crew member Gary Watson, 33, will be among the first to wear one. It comes two years after he suffered a torn ligament and serious injuries to his face, throat and neck when he was attacked by a drunk patient in January 2018. Two other medics were also injured and a fourth was badly shaken but the man, who was found guilty, only received a suspended sentence. The cameras are attached to paramedics' uniforms who can then hit a button to start recording when patients or members of the public become aggressive or abusive Physical assaults on paramedics (01/04/2020 to 31/01/2021) Physical assault by blow (Kick, punch, head-butt, push, scratch) 327 Physical assault by grab/touch (Including sexual) 95 Physical assault by spitting (Sputum landing on person/clothing) 56 Assaulted with a blunt weapon 21 Physical assault by biting 20 Assaulted with a edged weapon 9 Assaulted with a firearm 1 Total 529 'I had strangulation marks around my neck' Emergency Ambulance Crew member Gary Watson, 33, was attacked by a drunk patient in January 2018. He told the BBC: 'I had strangulation marks around my neck, a torn ligament on my shoulder which I'm still suffering from now, and a back injury which resulted in me being off for about three months. 'Going through court was horrible. I was worried about it leading up to it but at the time when you're in court, I was being accused - the ambulance service was being accused - of attacking the patient. 'So I had to stand there and be accused and be told that actually it was me that started this. This went on for hours and it was a two-day trial. It was a horrible place to be, horrible.' The attacker was handed a 12-month suspended sentence on the condition that he attended a drug and rehabilitation course. Advertisement Mr Watson, based at Croydon Ambulance Station, said: 'We need these cameras. We get up every day to help people, not to be severely beaten. 'Wearing these cameras should act as a deterrent and if it doesn't then at least there will be evidence which will hopefully mean tougher sentences for criminals.' Due to concerns many more go unreported, two violence reduction officers have been recruited in the Capital to help protect staff. There was a 33 per cent increase in violent incidents between 2018 and 2020 - with 468 attacks rising to 625 last year. During the same period the number of prosecutions tripled from 28 in the year 2018/19 to 82 in 2019/20. Between April 2020 and January 2021 the attacks rose yet again, despite lockdown forcing more people to stay indoors to take pressure off the NHS. In 2020, the most attacks were in July - the same month pubs were opened following weeks of lockdown - when 71 assaults were reported. Louise Murray, one of the violence reduction officers, said: 'We are working closely with the police to help support staff and volunteers when they have been assaulted or abused. 'Any video footage recorded on our cameras can be used as evidence and in turn we hope it will help to secure more prosecutions.' So far this financial year, 27 people have been successfully prosecuted for attacks on ambulance staff - 18 of those were jailed. Criminals who assault emergency workers will face up to two years in prison as ministers DOUBLE maximum sentences Criminals who assault emergency workers will face up to two years in jail under a new law announced by the Government. Ministers plan to bring forward legislation to double the maximum sentence for those convicted of assaults on police, prison staff, custody officers, fire service personnel, search and rescue workers and frontline health workers. More than 11,000 people were prosecuted for assaulting an emergency worker in 2019, the Ministry of Justice said. The Conservatives pledged in their 2019 election manifesto to consult on doubling the maximum sentence for assaulting emergency service workers. Assaults cover acts including being pushed, shoved or spat at, but prosecutions can take place under more serious offences when an emergency worker is seriously injured. The new law will apply to police, prison staff, custody officers, fire service personnel, search and rescue workers and frontline health workers. It will be the second change in two years after the 2018 Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act increased the maximum sentence from six months to a year. The law change also meant that when a person is convicted of offences including sexual assault or manslaughter, the judge must consider whether the offence was committed against an emergency worker as an aggravating factor meriting an increase in the sentence. The Home Secretary Priti Patel said: 'Our police officers, firefighters and other emergency workers are our frontline heroes who put their lives on the line every single day to keep us safe, yet some despicable individuals still think it's acceptable to attack, cough or spit at these courageous public servants. 'This new law sends a clear and simple message to these vile thugs - you will not get away with such appalling behaviour and you will be subject to the force of the law.' Advertisement New legislation means anyone found guilty of attacking emergency services staff and volunteers can be jailed for 12 months and more serious cases of assault could result in two years in prison. London Ambulance Service chief executive Garrett Emmerson said: 'Nobody should feel unsafe or threatened at work - particularly our crews and call handlers who continue to make huge sacrifices to care for patients and have never worked harder. 'Looking after our people, keeping them safe and supporting their wellbeing is our top priority. 'It is shameful that our staff and volunteers can be abused while caring for others and we will always push for the prosecution of anyone who attacks them.' It comes after a paramedic shared an emotional video explaining how a patient she was treating spat on her in a lockdown assault that left her feeling 'contaminated, broken and defeated'. Tracy Higginbottom was spat on while taking a young woman to hospital in an ambulance during a night shift in North Cornwall. Ms Higginbottom, who has been a health worker for more than 20 years, took a month off work to recover after the attack, but decided not to press charges against the offender. In a powerful six-minute clip, in which Tracy can be seen holding back tears, she speaks of the impact it had on her as well as her fear of returning to work and potentially passing on coronavirus to a colleague or patient. She said: 'Violence and aggression appear to be escalating, and is something we have to deal with as a part of our job. But I've never experienced anything quite like this. 'The patient had taken drugs and consumed alcohol in the community. She was out of control and vulnerable. We have a duty of care, and I was genuinely concerned for her welfare. So I decided she needed to go to hospital, even though it was an hour and a quarter away. 'It really kicked-off in the ambulance. She was swearing, kicking and spitting everywhere. It took two of us to hold the patient down to prevent her coming to harm and to prevent her damaging the ambulance. 'Afterwards I felt very distressed and traumatised. So I took some time out, because you need to be in the right frame of mind in my role. 'Now I'm back at work with support. I was so determined not to allow this horrible experience stop me doing the job I love and from being a part of my wonderful green family.' The South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWASFT) said it has seen more than 100 staff members physically assaulted while on duty by members of the public since lockdown was imposed. Tracy Higginbottom (pictured) was spat on while taking a young woman to hospital in an ambulance during a night shift in North Cornwall Executive Director of Quality and Clinical Care, Jenny Winslade, said: 'We praise Tracy for her bravery and courage in speaking out about this dreadful experience. 'Nobody should have to face that kind of unacceptable behaviour, especially not a healthcare professional caring for a patient. 'Sadly our people face violence and aggression every day while they are trying to protect and save our patients' lives, which can have serious consequences on them, their families and colleagues. 'They put themselves at risk for the sake of others, and we support whatever action is necessary to protect them from harm. Please respect our people, and help them to help you.' Ambulance staff in the region reported 106 physical assaults by patients and other members of the public between March 23 and August 23 last year. This figure compared with 77 during the same time period in 2019. They also reported 212 incidents of verbal abuse during the five months, compared with 183 last year. More than one in four (56) of the verbal incidents were by callers to 999 Control Room staff. The reported incidents included a separate spitting assault against a staff member in Bristol, which prompted a public appeal by SWASFT and Avon and Somerset Police. Ms Higginbottom, who has been a health worker for more than 20 years, took a month off work to recover after the attack, but decided not to press charges against the offender Additionally Emergency Care Assistant Mark Walker and a police officer were spat at by a patient Mark was trying to treat in Dawlish, South Devon. The offender was sentenced to 22 weeks in prison for assaulting two emergency workers and being drunk and disorderly in a public place. A man was also jailed for 20 weeks after coughing in a paramedic's face. The #Unacceptable campaign, which was launched in 2018, aims to highlight the abuse and assaults faced by emergency services workers while on the job. It reminds people that assaults of this nature are unacceptable, and are a crime under the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018. SWASFT is encouraging people to share social media posts in support of the campaign to spread the message as far as possible. The Odisha government on Tuesday took a tough approach towards those healthcare and frontline workers who have registered for vaccination but are now refusing to get the anti-Covid jabs without a genuine ground. The healthcare workers and frontline workers backtracking from getting the vaccine without any genuine reasons will cease to enjoy privileges granted by the state government in case of Covid-19 infection, said additional chief secretary to the health and family welfare department P K Mohapatra in a letter to the district collectors and commissioners of five municipal corporations. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers The government has decided to disallow such health care workers and front line workers to avail free treatment, period of isolation/treatment being counted as duty, financial and other benefits in case of death, the letter said. As the state has inoculated over 85% of health care workers, Mohapatra said that Odisha is in the third position among states and union territories in terms of the number of HCWs and FLWs vaccinated so far. "The state has procured valuable vaccines for them after they got registered and but now some of them are backtracking," he said. State Health and Family Welfare Minister N K Das had told the Assembly that the state government has spent nearly 389.59 crore for the treatment of Covid-19 patients since the outbreak of the disease in the state in March 2020. Special Relief Commissioner P K Jena asked all district collectors and commissioners of municipal corporations to focus on the strict implementation of health safety guidelines in public places to contain the spread of the disease amidst reports of a fresh outbreak of contagion in some states. Special attention should be given to schools where physical classes have resumed, he added. Cases in Odisha Meanwhile, Odisha's Covid-19 caseload mounted to 3,36,767 on Tuesday as 62 more people tested positive for the infection. The state, during the day, registered the recovery of 77 patients, taking the total number of cured persons to 3,34,243 which is 99.25% of the caseload. The states fatality ratio stands at 0.56% while the positivity rate is 4.1%. Of the fresh cases, 37 were reported from quarantine centres and 25 detected during contact tracing. Sambalpur district recorded the highest number of new cases at 12, followed by Khurda and Cuttack at seven each. Dhenkanal, Kandhamal and Nabarangpur districts have turned coronavirus free as there is no active case there, a health department official said. The state's Covid-19 toll remained unchanged at 1,914 as no fresh fatality was reported since Friday last week. Fifty-three other coronavirus patients have died in the state due to comorbidities. Odisha now has 557 active cases, which is 0.16% of the caseload. The state has so far conducted over 82 lakh sample tests for Covid-19, including 17,392 on Monday. With inputs from agencies. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. ADVERTISEMENT The Senate has betrayed Nigerians by rushing to confirm the immediate past service chiefs as non-career ambassadors, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has said. The party, which stated this in a statement on Tuesday by its spokesperson, Kola Ologbondiyan, said the confirmation was meant to make the former service chiefs evade prosecution for crimes committed under their watch. The Senate, on Tuesday, ignored petitions and complaints from Nigerians to confirm the four immediate past service chiefs as non-career ambassadors at the recommendation of President Muhammadu Buhari. The ex-service chiefs, namely the former Chief of Defence Staff, Gabriel Olonisakin; former Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai; former Chief of Air Staff, Ibok Ibas; and former Chief of Naval Staff, Abubakar Sadique, controversially retired in January after months of complaints by Nigerians, who called for their dismissal due to their inability to subdue the countrys security challenges. Their nominations again stirred criticisms from different quarters, with concerns being raised about the sincerity of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) administration to fight crimes. Foul play In reaction to the Senates decision, the PDP raised suspicion of foul play and alleged that it was conniving to suppress the will of the people. It is indeed horrendous that the APC leadership in the Senate could choose to betray Nigerians by rushing to clear the accused ex-service chiefs in a desperate attempt to grant them diplomatic immunity and shield them from investigation and prosecution for the atrocities committed against Nigerians under their command, the party said. Though it is public knowledge that the current APC Senate leadership is a mere rubber stamp and contrivance being used to endorse atrocious policies and suppress the will of the people, descending to the level of aiding and abetting crime against humanity by attempting to confer diplomatic immunity on the accused ex-commanders is, to say the least, despicable. It is indeed shameful that the APC leadership in the Senate could clear the ex-service chiefs, who the National Assembly had earlier indicted and requested for their sack over security failures and alleged compromises. Such a reward of failure amounts to stabbing our nation in the back. The PDP insisted that the haste to confirm the former service chiefs will not stop the investigation and possible prosecution of the accused commanders by the ICC. Interestingly, some members of the PDP were among the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs who screened the four ex-service chiefs before their appointments were ratified at the plenary session. The plant-based milk alternative producer is backed by Blackstone, Oprah Winfrey and Jay-Z Swedish oat milk brand Oatly has confirmed plans to list on the US market though it has not confirmed the price or how many shares will be issued. It is estimated it could be valued as much as US$10bn (7.1bn), according to media reports. Owned by Havre Global AB, Oatly has enjoyed a boom in trading as consumers worldwide seek more sustainable alternatives to cow milk, which are also perceived to be healthier. Headquartered in Malmo, Sweden, its oat-based milk and related products, such as yogurt and ice cream, are sold in more than 20 countries globally. It was founded in 1994 as a university spin-off,but it became popular internationally after 2012 when Toni Petersson joined as chief executive, stressing the positive environmental impact to drive up sales. However, climate activists turned sour last year after a US$200mln (157mln) cash call that involved Blackstone, a private equity firm headed by Trump donor Stephen Schwartzman, previously accused of having links to deforestation in the Amazon, The Guardian reported. The sale of the US$200mln minority stake, which valued the firm at US$2bn, also involved celebrity investors such as Oprah Winfrey and Jay-Z. Oatly is also backed by Belgian investor Verlinvest, state-owned China Resources and Nordics venture capital firm Industrifonden. NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- DLA Piper represented Truvian Sciences in its recent oversubscribed US$105 million Series C financing. The round was led by TYH Ventures, Glen Tullman of 7wireVentures and Wittington Ventures and was joined by General Catalyst, GreatPoint Ventures, DNS Capital and Wasson Enterprise. A healthcare company at the intersection of diagnostics and consumer technology, Truvian has developed an automated benchtop system that aims to produce lab-accurate results for a full suite of health tests using a small sample of blood. Powered by patented technologies and intelligent integration, Truvian's system delivers a convenient and affordable alternative to off-site labs, providing immediate insights to inform healthcare decisions. The funds will advance development of Truvian's automated benchtop blood testing system, paving the way to submit the device for US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance and enabling the company to scale its team in preparation for broad commercialization. "We are thrilled for the Truvian team and investors, and congratulate them on this significant milestone funding round, which will enable the company to accelerate its efforts to make regular blood testing more accessible to the population and provide consumers with valuable, personal and more immediate medical insights," said Randy Socol, the DLA Piper partner who led the firm's deal team. "This is a strong and innovative leadership team with deep healthcare experience, and Truvian is well positioned to bring its testing system to market to assist in the delivery of healthcare to patients, and we look forward to our continued partnership and helping the company achieve its goals." "DLA Piper has been a strong partner to Truvian over the last three years during a period of rapid growth, the development of our intellectual property portfolio and now our second successful financing round together," said Jeff Hawkins, president and chief executive officer of Truvian. "DLA Piper's experience and guidance was critical to successfully navigating the process with multiple lead investors in an oversubscribed round." In addition to Socol (San Diego), the DLA Piper team representing Truvian included associate Anthony Taranto (San Diego) and of counsel Nicholas Klein (Washington, DC). DLA Piper's Emerging Growth and Venture Capital practice includes more than 200 lawyers in the US who provide strategic counsel to emerging companies in high-growth industries, including healthcare, insurance, biotech, manufacturing, communications, software and semiconductors. Over the last three years, DLA Piper has completed more than 2,100 financings totaling over US$31 billion. DLA Piper's global Healthcare sector consists of a multidisciplinary legal team with niche experience in health-related business and legal issues. The team regularly works with corporations and financial institutions, private investors, private equity groups, venture capital funds, institutional investors and portfolio companies in all types of healthcare transactions. About DLA Piper DLA Piper is a global law firm with lawyers located in more than 40 countries throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, positioning us to help clients with their legal needs around the world. In certain jurisdictions, this information may be considered attorney advertising. dlapiper.com SOURCE DLA Piper Related Links http://www.dlapiper.com Born in 1952 in Ferryville, a small industrial town in northern Tunisia, Michele moved to France at the age of 8. Already drawing in a notebook that she took to school, she brought a little character to life, much like a cartoon. Endowed with a vivid imagination, she decided to attend drawing, painting and sculpture classes at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon and then began her training as a stylist at the Duperre School of Applied Arts in Paris. Her diplomas opened the doors of studios along Rue Royale in Lyon where she worked as a graphic designer in textile design, silk painting and hand painting. She then spent two years in Morocco to learn carpet making. Upon her return to France, she moved to Lyon where she worked for more than 20 years in children's publishing. Her passion for painting never left her and to her delight, Michele would work only on her painting from then on. Her paintings are small pieces of life in which the body, the nude, and the portrait still occupy a central place. ""Life! This is the largest collection of ideas on the planet!"" she says. Faces and silhouettes in motion fascinate the artist. She loves to capture the energy, and translate the emotions into poetry. Preferring colours to words, Michele tells us tales full of life, depicting her happiness, her conflicts, her exiled childhood or her joy in being a woman. Women are the artists favourite subject: she likes to stand up for them, representing and reflecting the ambivalence of their femininity, between strength and fragility. Joyful, angry, nasty, fierce and proud, Michele paints women in all her forms, in a lush and bold way, both full of wisdom and humour. She seeks above all to cause a reaction in the viewer. Her painting touches and moves us, sometimes shocking and pushing us to change our outlook and broaden our horizons. Behind the freshness and lightness of her works lies painstaking work. The artist creates a sketch with spontaneous strokes in front of a live model and then organizes and balances her composition in acrylic when back in her studio. Thus the canvas enters into movement: the charcoal lines give life to the characters and colour animates them, giving us a magical cure for sadness. Chikkaballapur, Feb 24 : A day after an 'accidental explosion' in a quarry killed six persons in Karnataka's Chikkaballapur, police arrested five persons including three partners of the quarry, and suspended two police officers on Wednesday. According to the police, the arrested are Raghavendra Reddy, Venkatashiva Reddy and Madhusudhan Reddy, who are partners of Sri Bhramaravasini Sanders while Praveen is a manager of this company and Mohammed Riyaz Ansari is the driver of the vehicle who drove the victims along with explosive materials. Superintendent of Police Mithun Kumar G.K. told IANS that two police officers - Gudibande police station inspector Manjunath M.N. and sub-inspector G.R. Gopal Reddy have been suspended. He said these officers had failed to act "in time" against the owners of Bhramaravasini Sanders for illegal blasting and storage of explosives. "Since the police officials failed to arrest the accused despite complaints, they were suspended," he said. Following the incident on Tuesday, Karnataka Home Minister Basavaraj Bommai who had inspected the spot had directed Inspector General of Police (Central Range) M. Chandra Shekar to form three special teams to nab the culprits. Accordingly, the IGP had formed the teams under the supervision of Chikkaballapur SP Mithun Kumar. The SP said the police have registered a criminal case under Explosives Act and named 14 people in the FIR. The blast occurred at a quarry in Hirenagavalli near Gudibande in Karnataka's Chikkaballapur district during a bid to dispose off explosives after authorities had raided the mine on February 7 and 21. Hirenagavalli is a small hamlet in Chikkaballapur district of Karnataka. It is 86 kms from Bengaluru. Six people, including a Nepalese citizen, lost their lives while attempting to dispose off explosives hidden around the crusher. RICHLAND, Wash. - No one went to Oktoberfest in 2020, but chances are those who attended in the past are still thinking about it. In a case study of the famous German beer festival, researchers tested the theory that events which create memorable experiences can increase life-satisfaction. This deep connection with customers has big benefits for associated businesses, according to Robert Harrington, lead author of the study recently published online in the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management. "If you can do something that transforms people even a little bit, it can have a huge impact on the success of your company and your brand," said Harrington, professor and director of the School of Hospitality Management at Washington State University Carson College of Business. "The more customers are delighted, the more likely they are to be return customers. They are also more likely to give positive recommendations to friends and relatives, and particularly on social media. In today's environment, people trust those reviews more than paid advertising." For the study, the researchers surveyed more than 820 people attending a festival beer tent over several days of the 2018 Oktoberfest. The majority of the respondents were male (56.8%) and largely German, though roughly 12% were from outside the country, including from Italy and the United States. The respondents answered questions related to food and beverage quality, connectedness, experience uniqueness, memorability and life satisfaction. When the researchers analyzed the relationship among those answers, they found that connectedness to Oktoberfest, such as feeling a close association with a particular beer tent or to Oktoberfest traditions, influenced impressions of food and beverage quality and the uniqueness of the experience. These in turn influenced how highly the participants felt that attending the event increased their overall satisfaction with life. The researchers purposely chose to study the annual beer festival in Munich because it is so well-known and brings together a mix of tourism and hospitality services. "Oktoberfest has a very strong brand. It's almost like a bucket-list event," said Harrington. "As a significant event in visitors' lives, there's a greater likelihood that there's a quantifiable measure of life satisfaction or sense of well-being from those experiences, as opposed to people going out to a neighborhood bar or restaurant." Emulating Oktoberfest, which attracts more than 7 million visitors a year, may be a tall order, but the researchers suggest that other businesses can learn from its success. Breweries or wineries can create regional or local events on a smaller scale. Like Oktoberfest, these events could bundle goods and services, such as a tasting that pairs beer or wine with food or adding an experience like a music performance or art show. The idea is to invite customers to participate in creating a memorable experience that lasts, Harrington said. "Once people go back home, they will want to bring up that memory again," said Harrington. "They will go buy that beer because they went to a festival where they had a great time." ### This study was conducted in collaboration with researchers from the Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences and the Munich University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. The report said that at the time of the outbreak, businesses in Chicago were encouraged but not mandated to report COVID-19 cases. Under a revised order, city-licensed businesses are now required to report any COVID-19related suspension of operations and awareness of five or more confirmed COVD-19 cases among employees or patrons, the report said. Subscriber content preview Photo from Martin Selig Real Estate [enlarge] The Seattle studio of Perkins and Will designed the renovation of the Federal Reserve Bank building, which is shown here in fall of last year prior to the completion of finishing touches. The Young Architect's Forum of AIA Seattle will hold a free virtual construction tour of the Federal Reserve Bank building modernization at 1015 Second Ave. in Seattle from noon to 1 p.m. today. . . . Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Minister-designate for Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Abu Jinapor on Wednesday faced Parliament's Appointments Committee for his vetting. Before his appointment as Minister-designate, Mr. Abu Jinapor was the Deputy Chief of Staff. He acquired a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in 2006 and proceeded to the University of Ghana in 2008 where he earned a Bachelor of Laws in 2010. Samuel Jinapor furthered to read LLB at Ghana School of Law in Accra. He also holds a Master of Laws in Alternative Dispute Resolution from the Faculty of Law, University Of Ghana and was called to the Ghana Bar in 2012 as a Solicitor and Barrister of the Supreme Court of Ghana. Based on this rich law experience, a member of the Appointments Committe asked Mr. Jinapor to narrate his motivation for being a lawyer instead of pursuing Physics. Delivering a response, lawyer Jinapor revealed the President of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo inspired him. He said he developed a strong liking for law through his association with the President. ''I suspect strongly that my association with the President at the time, Nana Akufo-Addo, who was then the Minister for Foreign Affairs and whom I had met as a very young man and Mr. Chairman, you can imagine that when you associate with President Akufo-Addo; law becomes very attractive'', he eulogized President Nana Addo. 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. Featured Video The Senate Intelligence Committee hearing was far more of a coronation than a confrontational question-and-answer session, with more of the discussion focusing on foreign policy than intelligence matters, perhaps unsurprising given Mr. Burnss experience as ambassador to Jordan and Russia, as well as the senior State Department positions he has held. That deep experience and ability to clearly explain complex foreign policy challenges appealed to President Biden, according to current and former officials. Jake Sullivan, now the national security adviser, remembered that when he met Mr. Burns in December 2008, the veteran ambassador pulled out a small notecard and gave a round-the-world briefing on every major issue. It was one of the single most impressive displays of breadth and depth on substance that I have ever witnessed, Mr. Sullivan said in an interview. Mr. Sullivan, who worked with Mr. Burns on a variety of back-channel diplomatic efforts, said China was a significant challenge for intelligence agencies. Mr. Burns, he said, has guidance to put his best minds on the problem. My basic marching orders to Bill will be: Give it to us straight, Mr. Sullivan said. Give us your best judgment on Beijings intentions, its capabilities. At the hearing, Mr. Burns described the Chinese government as adversarial and predatory. We have to buckle up for the long haul, I think, in competition with China, he said. This is not like the competition with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, which was primarily in security and ideological terms. This is an adversary that is extraordinarily ambitious with technology and capable in economic terms as well. On a Thursday night in early March, a Malawian man named Gilbert Daire was woken by the sound of people trying to drill through his wall. He was convinced that hunters had come to kill him for his body parts. When his wife screamed, neighbors came to help and fended off the attackers. But Daire no longer feels safe in the streets or at home. He worries that the hunters will return. Daire has albinism, a condition that makes him a valuable commodity in parts of eastern and southern Africa. Like elephants and rhino, they are hunted and killed for their body parts, which can fetch thousands of dollars and are often trafficked across borders. Slayings of people with albinism are common in Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique, where body parts are used in witchcraft rituals because of superstitions that they can bring riches, success, power or sexual conquest. Children are especially vulnerable. Advertisement A Malawian boy with albinism, a genetic condition that leads to a lack of pigmentation. In Malawi and some other countries in east and southern Africa, children like him are hunted for their body parts. (Lawilink / Amnesty International) At least 20 Malawians with albinism have been killed for their body parts since November 2014, according to Amnesty International. But the number could be higher, with many other people with albinism having disappeared. In Tanzania, at least 75 have been killed since 2000. The danger has become so significant that the United Nations refugee organization has recently begun relocating families of people with albinism in Malawi to Canada and other countries. The recessive genetic condition, which limits the bodys production of melanin and results in lack of pigmentation in skin, hair and eyes often leading to skin cancer or eye damage affects as many as 1 in every 1,400 people in Africa. Because people with the condition there are so visible in their communities, they are often forced to hide in their houses to avoid attack, abduction and slaughter. But even there they are not safe. The attacks are often brazen: Homes are invaded or people are seized in broad daylight. Toddlers and children are snatched from impoverished single mothers or while walking to school. Family members such as uncles, fathers or boyfriends are often implicated. Their mutilated bodies are often found later without hands, feet, breasts, genitals, skin, eyes or hair depending on the spells to be cast. The latest apparent victim was a 9-year-old Malawian boy named Mayeso Isaac, who was traveling to visit relatives late last month when he was attacked and abducted by a gang of 10 men. He has not been seen since and it is feared he was killed for his body parts. It was part of a familiar pattern. Advertisement Other recent young victims in Malawi: 2-year-old Whitney Chilumpha, whose teeth and clothes were found dumped in a neighboring village; 9-year-old Harry Mokoshini, whose head was recovered by police; and teenager David Fletcher, whose body was found without hands or feet. Edna Cedric lost one son to body part hunters. When they later returned for his twin brother, she was ready and managed to fight them off. Deprose Muchena, a spokesman for Amnesty International, said deep-seated cultural traditions persist, including a belief in mythical powers of people with albinism and a conviction that their body parts could change lives, bringing fabulous wealth, power or good fortune. Some believe that albinos are not human, that their only value is monetary and that they have gold in their bones. Its a readiness to believe in mythical expectations about how you create wealth, Muchena said. These are false, deep-seated beliefs that need to be eliminated in society. These beliefs feed on ignorance from the lack of education that afflicts a number of people in Malawi, particularly in rural areas. Advertisement Many people with albinism in Malawi live in remote, impoverished communities where education levels are low, superstitions are common, unemployment is high, and information about albinism is not available. Women who give birth to children with albinism are sometimes shunned. Killings of people with albinism also occur in South Africa, although these are less common. In February, a 67-year-old traditional healer there was convicted of murdering a 20-year-old woman with albinism and sentenced to life in prison. The healer, Bhekukufa Gumede, and four young accomplices removed the genitals, limbs and skin of the victim, Thandazile Mpunzi, and tossed her body into a shallow grave. Two of the accomplices told the court that Gumede convinced them that they would get rich if they ingested traditional medicine with the body parts. The victims boyfriend, who helped lure her to her death, was sentenced to 18 years while three others were given 20-year terms. Advertisement Muchena said poor policing and an inept criminal justice system in Malawi contributed to the attacks on people with albinism there, with nobody convicted in any of the 20 known slayings there in the last three years. Even suspects found with bones or other body parts were released because of errors by prosecutors or acquitted by poorly trained magistrates. Muchena said a government task force to tackle the problem had also failed to deliver. After a series of attacks this year, Malawian police chief Lextern Kachama told local media that the president had ordered police to protect schools from the hunters and called on communities to do more. Advertisement People in the communities play very crucial roles in the protection of people with albinism because they stay with them all the time, he said. To read the article in Spanish, click here A Malawian woman and her two children, who have albinism, in a country where those with the condition are hunted down for body parts, used in traditional medicine. (Lawilink / Amnesty International) robyn.dixon@latimes.com Advertisement Twitter: @RobynDixon_LAT ALSO He lost a leg to a shark. Now hes trying to save the species The day road rage led to a treason charge in Zambia, as democracy falters in Africa Advertisement One of South Africas top tourist destinations is almost out of water ROME, FEB 24 - Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio told the Lower House on Wednesday that the government has asked the United Nations and the UN World Food Programme to open an investigation into the attack in which Italy's Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Luca Attanasio, and Carabiniere police officer Vittorio Iacovacci were killed this week. Attanasio and Iacovacci and a Congolese driver, Mustapha Milambo, were killed on Monday while travelling from Goma to Rutshuru in the east of the African country where they were planning to visit a WFP school feeding programme. "We have formally asked the UN and the WFP to open an investigation that clarifies what happened, the reasons behind the security provisions used and who was responsible for these decisions," Di Maio said as he reported to parliament on the attack. "We have also explained that we expect clear, exhaustive answers in the shortest period of time possible". The minister said that a team from the Carabinieri's ROS special operations group was in DR Congo to gather evidence for an investigation by Rome prosecutors into the case. Di Maio said other investigative missions would follow. The DR Congo government has blamed Rwandan rebel group FDLR for the attack. It said Attanasio and Iacovacci were killed by their assailants, ruling out the hypothesis that the friendly fire of Congolese security forces may have caused the deaths. "We owe our fallen the truth before everything," Di Maio said. "But the best way to honour the memory of Ambassador Luca Attanasio and Carabiniere Vittorio Iacovacci is to continue to strengthen our political attention for the African continent, something Luca strongly believed in with passion and dedication. "He had devoted most of his diplomatic career and his personal efforts to Africa and the support of the weakest, with the activities organized by the Mama Sofia NGO founded by his wife Zakia in Kinshasa". The bodies of Attanasio, 43, and Iacovacci, a-30-year-old who was part of the ambassador's security detail, arrived in Italy late on Tuesday. Autopsies are set to be performed on Wednesday. Di Maio said Attanasio and Iacovacci were "heroes" and would have a State funeral. (ANSA). remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. Two of Jamaicas most capable talents, Lila Ike and Skillibeng, confront social chaos in the new visuals for Thy Will (Remix). The three and a half minute track is a hard-hitting testament to crushing social ills, a very crucial song in these times, according to Ike. The pairs passionate words are brought to life through the storyline of a set up, as well as protest-inspired scenes directed by creative mastermind Nickii Kane and shot in Kingston, Jamaica. Produced by Protoje, Iotosh and J.L.L, the original song which samples Sly & Robbies iconic Baltimore Riddim is loaded with strong messages and social commentary. It appeared on Lilas debut 7-track The ExPerience EP. Negative thoughts and impure heart a plague wi like a sickness/ Now di youth dem have a hit list pon every stall and most business/ Helicopters a circle round di area like a frisbee/ Unsolved mystery, Mada cyaah find pickney, Ike sings in her haunting tone. Mr. Universe put away his gunplay for subversive bars tackling corruption, crime and tribalism alongside Ike. Di system is fi business/ Trick wi, kill wi, diss wi/ Build wi wen dem wan wi vote fi winnings/ Den dem end up missing/ Si how people slipping?/ Yuh nuh si wi need a fixing, tell mi are you even listening?/ Di truth is hidden/ Di truth is how yuh wash wi brain and turn wi inna victim, they spit on the remixs shared verse. The intense visuals highlight the chilling headlines that have rocked the nation in recent months, including a woman gunned down in church while worshipping weeks ago. Ike and Skillibeng also take to the streets to voice their frustrations in a vivid black and white protest sequence. Complete with riled-up demonstrators, placards bearing Freedom and Break The System, and Ike spreading the word on a megaphone, the jarring images reinforce the songs unmistakable concept, when we are one, this is when well overcome. The collab is yet another of Ikes lamentations on the current state of affairs, following the 2019 hit Not Another Word with labelmate Protoje and Agent Sasco. The I Spy crooner channels immense star power on this affecting remix, as Skilli continues to prove the weight of his Mr. Universe moniker with each new venture. 2020 may have been filled with postponed realities, but both Lila Ike and Skillibeng celebrated their most successful years on the scene, each being signed to international publishing deals and receiving industry-wide nods from the likes of BBC 1Xtra. Their fans have responded favorably to the Thy Will Remix, sending the just-released clip to Top 10 on Youtube Trending in Jamaica. Many were impressed with the artists use of their platform to highlight social plights while others were impressed by Skillibengs versatility. Billboard settings Skillibeng and Lila this one is a hit! Baltimore Rhythm still sound good one user quipped while another said, Loving the vibes in this and really want to see more like this from Skillibeng. Lila outdoing herself as usual; big chune! Check out the new visuals above. The number of foreign nationals overstaying their visas in Britain has nearly doubled in five years, a report said yesterday. In 2016, 49,420 people arrived with visas but there was no record of them leaving. In the year to last March the total had risen to 91,863. Migration Watch UK, the think-tank that compiled the report, says another 250,000 per year from 55 countries whose citizens do not need a visa to enter the UK could also be remaining here unlawfully, taking the total to 340,000. The report accused ministers of failing to come clean with the public over what happened to them. The number of foreign nationals overstaying their visas in Britain has nearly doubled in five years, a report said yesterday. In 2016, 49,420 people arrived with visas but there was no record of them leaving. In the year to last March the total had risen to 91,863 (stock image) The figure matches the officially-accepted level of legal net migration - the number of people who arrive to live in Britain minus the number who emigrate. The net migration figure, which shows the impact of migration on the population of the country, was last counted before the pandemic in the 12 months to March 2020, and showed a level of 313,000 for the year. Migration Watch UK chief Alp Mehmet said: Overstaying is very likely getting worse while the Government seem to have ignored a large portion of data which could clarify the picture. So much for promises to take back border control. Our research points to a major problem and it is about time the government told us how they are going to tackle it. The missing visitors made up 4.8 per cent of the numbers of people who arrived in Britain whose visas ran out in the year to the end of last March. But yesterdays report said: These figures do not cover the largest tranche of non-EU visitors - so-called non-visa nationals who are citizens of 55 countries around the world who do not need a visitor visa in order to come here for a six-month stay. The most recent investigation by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration found that the number of non-visa national visitors who were not recorded as leaving on time between 2015 and 2017 amounted to 500,000 in two years, or just over 250,000 per year. The Government has declined to release recent figures on this, despite repeated parliamentary questions earlier this year. Migration Watch UK, the think-tank that compiled the report, says another 250,000 per year from 55 countries whose citizens do not need a visa to enter the UK could also be remaining here unlawfully, taking the total to 340,000 (stock image) The report accused ministers of failure to keep up with data on visa overstaying or to publish any figures that would help the public understand the real scale of the problem. It said: The failure to record departure may not always indicate overstaying but may be due to data matching issues or other anomalies or gaps. The Government also says that there is more confidence in data on visa nationals than non-visa nationals because more information is held on them through their visa. However, if the most recent figure of 92,000 people here on visas who were not recorded as departing in time were taken alongside the most recent equivalent published annualised figure for non-visa national visitors not recorded as departing on time during 2015-17, the total would be 340,000 per year. Migration Watch said that since the completion of the Brexit process last month 27 EU countries have joined the 55 from which visitors do need visas to enter Britain. Boris Johnson today unveiled a DIY haircut carefully crafted by Carrie Symonds - but his fiancee appears have gone carefully after previous unkind claims she must have used a ruler and shears to trim his unruly fringe. The Prime Minister's shaggy shock of blonde hair has been branded a 'national crisis' and with six weeks until hairdressers open again his partner is claimed to have had a go herself inside No 10. Mr Johnson had his hair styled to one side as he left Downing Street for Prime Minister's Questions this afternoon, with experts claiming Carrie has given him the lightest of trims, dragged a brush through it and tamed it with some hair products. But the smarter look didn't last, with his thatch of hair messed up again by the time he appeared in the Commons around ten minutes later. Previously critics have said that his more severe 'pudding bowl' trims during three lockdowns have been a fashion 'crime' and pondered if Carrie modelled his look on the couple's rescue dog Dilyn. Others have joked that it has been sticking up so much recently it looks like Mr Johnson had 'brushed his hair with a balloon'. It was Piers Morgan who revealed that Ms Symonds had given Prime Minister Boris Johnson a much-needed haircut. Boris Johnson emerges from Downing Street (left) today with his hair swept to the side after Carrie reportedly gave him a very light trim. His hair was very slightly longer when he appeared at a school in London yesterday (right) Normal service resumed only ten minutes later this afternoon when his brushed hair was already messy again at PMQs Critics have pondered if Carrie modelled his look on the couple's rescue dog Dilyn Boris' new hairdo: Experts weigh in and give it a 7/10 Celebrity hairstylist James Johnson said he was impressed with Carrie's efforts and gave her a '7/10' for the Prime Minister's new look. He said: 'Carrie kept his style long. The length gives Boris a more textured look, which I think breaks the stereotypical 'neat' hair we'd expect from a professional leader. 'But I think it's right to say his hairstyle needs some perfecting. 'Overall though Carrie has done a good job considering she's not a professional stylist!' Ricky Walters, director of London's SALON64, said: 'Every hairdresser loves an Insta-worthy before and after and although it may be lacking in the balayage and beach waves, I appreciate the effort Boris Johnson has gone through to tidy himself up. 'Rumour has it Carrie has attempted to cut Mr Johnsons hair and has adopted the 'less is more philosophy'. 'I imagine it was a very visual haircut removing areas that are causing the public offence. I do wonder if Boris is self conscious of his ears? As nearly all his haircuts are always covering them? 'We are seeing a huge rise in 70's hair trends and its amazing to see Boris supporting the Lulu inspired haircut which must certainly make him want to 'stand up and shout'. 'Getting a little nervous towards the front of Boris's hair, Carrie has decided to leave this as a heavy swept fringe. Slightly Farrah Fawcett. 'I would love the opportunity to cut the PM's hair. Taking the hair much shorter and more square will do Boris wonders. I guess after this haircut we can all agree hair salons probably are 'essential' business.' Advertisement The ITV star compared Mr Johnson to scarecrow Worzel Gummidge after the Prime Minister unveiled his ultra-cautious roadmap out of England's third lockdown to MPs and the public. Under No10's plans to ease the national shutdown, hairdressers, salons and nail bars will remain shut until April 12 'at the earliest' - provided coronavirus cases, hospitalisations and deaths continue to fall. Mr Morgan had claimed that Mr Johnson's fiancee Ms Symonds had acquired scissors to cut his hair following yesterday's statement to the Commons and Downing Street press conference to the nation. But the Good Morning Britain host announced on Twitter that the Prime Minister had had his shaggy blonde locks cut by his partner 'for the first time'. 'EXCLUSIVE: I can reveal to the world that Prime Minister @BorisJohnson has today had his hair cut by his partner @carriesymonds for the first time,' he tweeted. Downing Street declined to comment. Earlier, Mr Morgan's co-host Susanna Reid had said: 'The Sun this morning does a countdown to when, for instance, we might get a haircut because Boris' hair was looking a little...' Mr Morgan then interjected: 'He literally has become Wurzel Gummidge. Can we beam in on Wurzel?' Ms Reid added: 'It's 48 days until you can get a haircut Boris.' Mr Morgan then revealed: 'Now I am told on good authority - I don't want to want to be breaching any trade secrets here - but I'm told by sources close to the Prime Minister that some scissors may have already made their way to Downing Street, to the private quarters of the Prime Minister. 'And his other half, Carrie Symonds, may be contemplating using them on the Prime Ministerial bonce. 'I have just suggested it is a national crisis. Because where does his hair go in the next six or seven weeks. 'There are spouses all over the country getting the scissors out and having a go. 'My question for Carrie Symonds is: could it honestly get any worse? Could that hair look any more ridiculous? 'What I'm saying Carrie, is do it for your country. Do it for your country.' Piers Morgan tweeted: 'EXCLUSIVE: I can reveal to the world that Prime Minister @BorisJohnson has today had his hair cut by his partner @carriesymonds for the first time' Mr Morgan compared Mr Johnson to scarecrow Worzel Gummidge after the Prime Minister unveiled his ultra-cautious roadmap out of England's third lockdown Mr Johnson, wearing a face covering, leaves No10 on February 10, 2021 Mr Morgan had claimed that Mr Johnson's fiancee Ms Symonds had acquired scissors to cut his hair following yesterday's statement to the Commons. Pictured, December 16, 2020 Boris may have the longest hair of any PM in history (including Theresa May and Margaret Thatcher) Boris Johnson's lockdown locks meant he has had the longest hair of any British Prime Minister in modern history, experts say. The PM's blond barnet during the pandemic because barbers are shut has left him with a more flowing do than even his two female predecessor's Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. But before Boris got the chop, barbers were in agreement his barnet was the longest to disgrace Number 10 since the bygone era of 18th century Tory Whig leaders in, er, wigs! Speaking before the PM's home haircut, Tony Copeland - co-founder of The British Master Barbers Alliance - said he was on course to have the longest mop in recent political memory. He said: 'By the time barbers are allowed to see clients, all being well, April 12, the PM's locks may well have achieved the title of longest hair in the cabinet, and that's taking into consideration our two female PMs. 'Give it another six weeks and he could be sporting the Boris Bob length, as he will have added an inch and half. 'Harking back to previous centuries, longer locks were in vogue for many prime ministers, after the rejection of the revolution wig wearer, men and women allowed their hair to grow longer and sit more naturally. 'Boris may well be following in his forefather's footsteps, but for different reasons.' Advertisement Mr Johnson's last short haircut was on November 2 - after he modelled a half-way house trim branded 'mind-boggling bad'. His fringe was so straight when he visited Brussels for crunch Brexit talks with Ursula von der Leyen some pondered whether he had become so desperate for a trim that Carrie Symonds may have done it herself in their Downing Street flat. A No 10 source branded the claims 'b******s'. The PM looked so scruffy unkind watchers of PMQs suggested he resembled his Jack Russell-cross Dilyn, who features on the front of his official Christmas card this year, with one wag saying: 'Even the dog has a Boris haircut'. Under the Prime Minister's four-point roadmap, schools in England will reopen from March 8 - though the next stage of loosening will not be until March 29, when the formal Stay at Home edict is finally dropped in favour of 'Stay Local', and the Rule of Six makes a comeback. It will be extended to allow two households to gather, enabling relatives to meet properly for the first time in months. But shops, hairdressers and pubs must remain closed until April 12 at the earliest - the same time gyms can get back up and running - regardless of mounting fears about the economic meltdown. Campsites and holiday lets can reopen for single households from April 12 - but international travel is completely off the cards until at least May 17. Social distancing and masks could still be used for months more and vaccine passports may be required for a full return to normality. Sports can start to return from May 17, although venues will need to work on reduced capacities. Up to 30 people can go to weddings from the same date, but are stuck at that number until the next phase of the roadmap. Only at June 21 will all legal limits on social contact go, and the remaining elements of the hospitality sector be allowed to open. Mr Johnson has stressed that he is being driven by 'data not dates' and the timeline is not guaranteed. Advertisement Unions have reacted with anger after Gavin Williamson today hinted that the school day will be extended alongside summer classes as part of a 700million package to help pupils catch-up post-lockdown. The Education Secretary confirmed the government is looking at a 'broad range of options' when asked if school hours could be increased to make up for lost time during lockdowns. All pupils are due to come back to the classroom on March 8 - though Mr Williamson admitted some might return a few days later so that schools can meet testing requirements. Under plans announced today, it was revealed that secondaries will offer face-to-face teaching over the holidays, with ministers keen to see summer classes for incoming Year 7 pupils. The summer schools will be funded with 200million from the package, while a 302million Recovery Premium will also see every primary school handed 6,000 and secondaries 22,000 each to fund further support for pupils most in need. The Department for Education said this will come on top of another 200million in funding for the National Tutoring Programme and other tuition schemes and could be spent on extra clubs, activities or teaching for those who have fallen behind. However, other radical measures like permanently trimming the summer holidays or lengthening the school day do not figure in the plans yet. Despite this, the proposals have been blasted by teaching unions, who said that extra hours or extra classes would not be 'effective' and would not help 'tired' pupils. Geoff Barton, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: 'The government has not discussed with us the idea of extending the school day, and the only mention we have seen of this idea is in media reports. 'We would not support a mandatory extension to the school day. Schools may want to put on some tailored after-school provision for groups of children who would benefit from this support. 'But the notion of forcing all children to sit through extra classes at the end of the day is not necessary and making tired pupils do more work is not effective. We need to focus on quality not quantity.' In other coronavirus developments: A total of 5,691 deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending February 12 mentioned Covid-19 on the death certificate, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) - the lowest figure since the week ending January 1; Unemployment has risen to 5.1 per cent with younger people bearing the brunt as Rishi Sunak prepares to extend the furlough scheme in his Budget next week; Matt Hancock has defended rushing through PPE procurement after a wave of criticism about lack of transparency and cronyism; Scientists have suggested masks will still be used in 2026 after Sir Patrick Vallance said they could reappear next winter; Millions of secondary school pupils will have to wear masks in the classroom when they return to school on March 8; Scientists unveiled 'spectacular' data suggesting one dose of the Covid vaccine is cutting the hospitalisation risk among the over-80s by three-quarters; 178 virus deaths were announced yesterday - the fewest since mid-November. The seven-day average for cases was 11,186, compared with a peak of 68,053 on January 8; Downing Street confirmed ministers will examine the case for so-called 'vaccine passports', having rejected the idea two months ago. Summer lessons will be offered to children leaving primary school and all secondary pupils as part of a 700million catch-up package designed to reverse the impact of Covid on education. Pictured: Boris Johnson takes part in an online lesson during a visit to Sedgehill School in Lewisham, south east London, on February 23 Under plans to be announced today, secondaries will offer face-to-face teaching over the holidays, with ministers keen to see summer classes for incoming Year 7 pupils (file image) Experts earlier warned that the package is only a 'start' and it could take a decade to heal the 'educational scarring' suffered by children during the crisis. Social mobility professor Lee Elliott Major told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'I think we need a hugely ambitious drive over the next decade to equalise, level the playing field in education. Our research shows a whole generation could be educationally scarred by this pandemic. 'There was already huge inequality before the pandemic hit. This really is a fight for our future.' Pressed on whether lengthening the school day was on the table, Mr Williamson told Sky News: 'We'll be looking at how we can boost and support children in a whole range of different manners. 'But it's not just about time in school, it's about supporting teachers in terms of the quality of teaching and how we can help them.' Some secondary school students have lost more than TWO MONTHS of learning during lockdown Some secondary school children have lost more than two months' worth of learning, according to a Government report which states that the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers may have widened in the pandemic. Researchers said the findings show that pupil catch-up interventions need to be 'heavily targeted at the poorest pupils'. The research commissioned by the Department for Education to understand the progress pupils make in the 2020 to 2021 academic year found that all year groups in England have experienced a learning loss in reading, ranging from 1.6 months to two months. The learning losses in mathematics were greater, with primary school learning losses averaging just over three months, but due to small sample sizes it was not possible to provide an estimate for secondary schools. The research, carried out by Education Policy Institute (EPI) and Renaissance Learning, found all regions have, on average, experienced learning losses in reading, though the differences between regions are relatively small. Researchers found schools with high levels of disadvantage have experienced higher levels of loss than other schools particularly in secondary - 2.2 months in schools with high free school meal eligibility and 1.5 months in schools with low free school meal eligibility. The analysis is based on the results achieved by pupils in the first half of the 2020/21 autumn term, up to and including October 25 2020 in comparison to pupils in previous years. The interim findings are based on more than 400,000 reading and maths assessments. Star Assessments are frequently used by schools as their baseline assessment for reading and maths. The report said that at this stage it is not possible to break down results by pupil characteristics, or to model the progress typically made in Star Assessments by different pupil groups, but this will be possible when the data is matched with information held in the National Pupil Database and will be included in a second report. The report said: 'We will develop our models to account for these different rates of progress made by different pupil groups. 'That data will also enable us to assess the impact of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic on the gap in attainment between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. 'Consistent with other studies, the initial analysis presented in this report suggests that that gap may have widened as a result of the pandemic.' Advertisement The announcement comes ahead of details expected to be released tomorrow on the replacement scheme for this year's cancelled GCSEs and A-levels. Reacting to the news, headteacher Carl Ward warned: 'its going to take a lot longer than one year, it could take the next decade to catch up but may I add that we do not know the depth of the problem yet. Once we've got children back in and schools back to normal, it will take some time, it'll come out of the system and then we'll know in more detail in the coming three to four months perhaps the scale of the problem.' Boris Johnson said: 'Teachers and parents have done an heroic job with home schooling, but we know the classroom is the best place for our children to be. 'When schools reopen and face-to-face education resumes on March 8 our next priority will be ensuring no child is left behind as a result of the learning they have lost over the past year. 'This extensive programme of catch-up funding will equip teachers with the tools and resources they need to support their pupils and give children the opportunities they deserve to learn and fulfil their potential.' It follows new official figures showing infections falling by 20 per cent on last Tuesday as Britain recorded just 8,489 Covid cases in the lowest daily rise since October 2, while deaths tumble with another 548 victims. The promising figures will be pounced upon by anti-lockdown Tory MPs who are calling for Mr Johnson to ease lockdown quicker. Even top scientists have hinted that economically-crippling measures could be relaxed sooner. This week, the Prime Minister unveiled No10's ultra-cautious blueprint back to normality, which could see all virus-controlling restrictions eased by June 21, if things go well. Schools will return on March 8, but there will be almost no further loosening of the draconian curbs before Easter. Nicola Sturgeon yesterday unveiled an even more cautious lockdown exit roadmap for Scotland, which will see the stay at home rule lifted and the return of some non-essential shops on April 5. The Scottish First Minister said the coronavirus situation in Scotland is 'still quite precarious'. But hopes of lockdown being drastically eased in the next few months could be dashed if Britain's vaccine roll-out fails to pick up pace. It has slowed down over the past month, with just 210,000 doses dished out on Monday in the UK - down a quarter on last Tuesday. It means around 335,000 Britons are getting inoculated for the first time each week, piling pressure on No10 to urgently ramp up the drive so that the path to freedom isn't threatened. An extra 18million is being directed to support language development in the early years sector to try to stop the very youngest children being permanently disadvantaged. Mr Williamson said: 'Our package of measures will deliver vital support to the children and young people who need it most, making sure everyone has the same opportunity to fulfil their potential no matter their background. 'I know that longer-term support over the length of this Parliament will be vital to ensure children make up for lost learning. Our Education Recovery Commissioner Sir Kevan Collins will be engaging with teachers, school and college leaders and families over the coming weeks and months to develop our longer term plans.' The Times Educational Supplement reported that one aspect of the plan, which was to issue grades significantly earlier than normal - in early or mid-July - is now in doubt. Exams regulator Ofqual will also need to clarify the potentially important role of 'mini-exams'. Meanwhile, teaching unions yesterday appeared to back down in their opposition to Mr Johnson's 'big bang' plan for all schools to return from March 8. Last week the main unions signed an open letter demanding the PM 'go no further than a phased return', but their call was disregarded by the Government. Why lockdowns DON'T always stop thousands dying of Covid: Britain has had some of the toughest rules but ranks in the top five WORST death tolls... while Cuba's draconian measures helped it escape lightly Britain has endured some of the toughest lockdown restrictions in the world but has still suffered the fourth highest death toll of the pandemic, data showed. Oxford University researchers ranked the UK's curbs on daily life the sixth harshest out of 180 countries, after taking into account school and office closures, bans on social gatherings, international travel restrictions and orders to not leave the home. Only the Republic of Ireland was found to have tougher restrictions in Europe. Although its curbs are broadly similar to England's, the country has also stopped construction work and click-and-collect shopping. Germany, the US and France all had less stringent curbs on daily life. But when countries were ranked by Covid deaths per million people, the UK had suffered the fourth highest death toll, according to separate figures from OurWorldInData, despite having stricter measures than Belgium, Slovenia and the Czech Republic the only countries where more people died of the virus. It had also suffered the highest fatality rate from the virus out of the top 10 countries with the harshest restrictions, although this may be because the lockdown became stricter only after cases had surged. The UK may have suffered more fatalities than other countries because of the rapid spread of the more infectious Kent variant, and after tens of thousands died in the darkest days of the first wave when potentially infected patients were discharged to care homes. Delays in taking action and differences in how the data was compiled between countries could may also explain the differences. The data does not show that lockdowns do not work because a lack of any restrictions, scientists estimate, would have killed tens of thousands more people. In Cuba, which had a lockdown ranked the toughest in the Oxford study, the death rate was 2.4 per 100,000 people, compared to 178 per 100,000 in the UK. Advertisement The National Education Union yesterday said its priority was ensuring schools had 'robust safety measures' instead of trying to block the reopenings. Geoff Barton, of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that while a slower return would have been more logical, there was a 'whole range of different views' among headteachers. He added that, although mass testing presented a 'huge logistical issue' for larger schools, most teachers were 'looking for ways of solving those problems'. Scientists have warned that school reopenings could increase Covid's reproduction rate by up to 50 per cent. Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty on Monday insisted the risk posed by coronavirus to children at school is 'incredibly low' as he 'categorically denied' a claim he opposed a full return to classrooms on March 8. The Government's top medical advisor said there are 'huge advantages' to reopening schools across England in terms of the mental and physical health benefits for children as well as for their education. He said falling infection rates meant that 'there is some headroom' to resume face-to-face lessons next month and that 'everything is strongly in favour of children, whether primary or secondary, of going to school'. Professor Whitty's comments came after the Prime Minister revealed that secondary pupils will undergo a 'testing blitz' and be required to wear face masks in classrooms 'for several weeks' in his lockdown roadmap. Secondary pupils will be tested three times at school and once at home during the first fortnight before being asked to continue testing themselves twice a week at home, according to the Government's exit strategy. They will be allowed to return to class as soon as they have received a negative test result, while all teachers at primary and secondary level - as well as early years - will be entitled to twice-weekly testing at home. However, the Prime Minister's plans were immediately criticised by teaching unions who wanted a phased return to classes and accused Mr Johnson of 'failing to learn the lessons of his previous mistakes'. Reports at the weekend suggested Prof Whitty was opposing the 'big bang' return but he told a Downing Street press conference tonight that he had 'categorically denied' the claim. Setting out why he supports the return to classrooms next month, he said: 'First thing is, it is absolutely universally accepted that there are huge advantages for children to be at school from a health point of view, mental and physical, as well as from educational and from a life course point of view. 'Those are overwhelming, they are not in any dispute, everyone accepts that and if you keep children out of school, every single one of the children you keep out of school is disadvantaged.' He continued: 'The second point we made at that time which is still the case is the risk to children is incredibly low from going to school and indeed from catching Covid. 'Covid, one of the few good things about Covid is the risk to children, whilst not zero, nothing in Covid the risks are zero, the risks are so much smaller than they are for adults and others. 'Therefore we are confident that schools, given the huge benefits of schools, the very small residual risk is strongly in favour, from the child's point of view, everything is strongly in favour of children, whether primary or secondary, of going to school and the data on that I think are unambiguous.' However, radical measures previously discussed, like permanently trimming the summer holidays or lengthening the school day, do not figure in the plans The announcement comes ahead of details expected to be released tomorrow on the replacement scheme for this year's cancelled GCSEs and A-levels (file image) The summer schools will be funded with 200million from the package. A 302million Recovery Premium will also see every primary school handed 6,000 and secondaries 22,000 each to fund further support for pupils most in need (file image) An extra 18million is being directed to support language development in the early years sector to try to stop the very youngest children being permanently disadvantaged. Pictured: Prime Minister Boris Johnson visits Sedgehill School in south east London on February 23 Prof Whitty said that falling case numbers and the R rate of infection meant the Government had some 'headroom' to reopen schools. 'The third question is, and this is the one that led to having to close schools this time around, as it did indeed on the first wave, is the impact this can have on R,' he said. 'And the view is that as things are falling down rapidly at the moment there is some headroom to go ahead and the first priority as the Prime Minister has repeatedly said is for schooling and I think everyone would agree with that.' The reopening of schools is the first step to freedom in Mr Johnson's lockdown exit roadmap. Nicola Sturgeon reveals rival roadmap out of lockdown: Scotland will begin 'significant return to normality' with shops, gyms and hairdressers starting to open from April 26 - as First Minister hints pubs and restaurants could fully reopen BEFORE England Nicola Sturgeon unveiled a lockdown exit roadmap for Scotland which will see the stay at home rule lifted and the return of some non-essential shops on April 5 - a week earlier than in England. She said her 'deliberately cautious' plan will start with more pupils heading back to classrooms on March 15 and with the limit on outdoor mixing being increased on the same date to allow four people from a maximum of two households to meet. April 5 will then see all remaining pupils return to school as well as communal worship being allowed to restart. The definition of 'essential' retail will also be changed at this point to allow more shops to reopen - one week before the return of all retail in England which is earmarked to take place from April 12. However, Scotland will have to wait until April 26 for a 'phased but significant reopening of the economy' when the nation will return to a tier system of restrictions. Advertisement The PM said the strategy will 'guide us cautiously but irreversibly towards reclaiming our freedoms'. Outlining the wearing of masks in schools the Government's Spring 2021 Covid-19 response document states: 'The Government also recommends that the use of face coverings in Higher Education, Further Education and secondary schools is extended for a limited period to all indoor environments - including classrooms - unless 2m social distancing can be maintained. 'Face coverings are now also recommended in early years and primary schools for staff and adult visitors in situations where social distancing between adults is not possible, for example, when moving around in corridors and communal areas. 'All children will once again be expected to attend school, as they were in the autumn term.' The Prime Minister told the Commons: 'I can tell the house that two weeks from today pupils and students in all schools and further education settings can safely return to face to face teaching'. Mr Johnson also said the return of students will be supported by twice weekly testing of secondary school and college pupils. He told MPs: 'All the evidence shows that classrooms are the best places for our young people to be and that's why I've always said that schools would be the last to close and the first to reopen. 'And based on our assessment of the current data against the four tests, I can tell the House that two weeks from today, pupils and students in all schools and further education settings can safely return to face-to-face teaching, supported by twice weekly testing of secondary school and college pupils. 'Families and childcare bubbles will also be encouraged to get tested regularly.' However, the plans were immediately attacked by teaching unions who claimed the testing process may take at least two weeks, meaning some children could still be learning from home on March 22. Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the mass return, instead of a phased reopening, was 'hugely problematic'. It 'may prove counterproductive and lead to more disruption', he said, adding: 'Nevertheless, we will, of course, now work with the Government to try to make this plan work as safely and sustainably as possible.' Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said Mr Johnson had 'failed to learn the lessons of his previous mistakes'. 'A 'big bang' school reopening brings 10million people back into crowded buildings with no social distancing and inadequate ventilation,' she said. 'Headteachers should have been given the flexibility offered in the other nations to plan for a phased school return.' Yesterday the Prime Minister hit back at Tories and scientists suggesting lockdown could be eased faster - as Wales and Scotland warned his roadmap might be too quick. Ireland's Level 5 coronavirus lockdown is extended for ANOTHER six weeks as PM Micheal Martin begs 'completely fed up' nation not to drop its guard Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin last night extended the country's coronavirus lockdown for another six weeks until at least April 5 as he appealed to a 'completely fed up' nation not to drop its guard against Covid. In a live TV address to the nation from Government buildings, the Taoiseach confirmed Level 5 measures inflicting huge damage to the economy will remain in place until after Easter amid fears of the UK variant. Refusing to give specific timelines for the wider reopening of society, Mr Martin said: 'I know that people are physically and emotionally exhausted by this pandemic. It has placed enormous pressure on each of us. 'Businesses and workers are deeply worried about the future. We are all completely fed up with the impositions on our lives.' But he went on to call the more infectious B117 variant that has spread from England since Christmas 'equivalent to a new virus almost, and it is a major problem'. 'It is critically important that we do not let our guard down. When we open things, we want them to stay open,' the Taoiseach added. Mr Martin spoke after his Cabinet published a new lockdown plan following weeks of haggling after many businesses have spent nearly a year closed. The Irish Government, which has imposed one of the toughest lockdowns in the world, has spent more than 10billion keeping shuttered firms on life support and wages flowing to more than 600,000 workers made redundant. Outlining his revised Living With Covid plan, most existing lockdown measures imposed in late December will be extended until after Easter. People will be instructed not to leave their homes except only for essential reasons and should not travel more than 5 kilometres from their households. Schools and childcare will be reopened gradually, with junior and senior infants among the first to return to the classroom on March 1. Advertisement The PM said he was being 'sensible and prudent' with his four-stage plan after attacks on the approach from both sides. 'Some people will say we're going to be going too fast, some people will say we're going too slow,' he said on a visit to a school in South London. Mr Johnson refused to guarantee that all restrictions will definitely be lifted by June 21 as scheduled, but insisted he was 'hopeful' it can happen. The intervention came after Matt Hancock slapped down Professor Neil Ferguson for suggesting the government's blueprint for England could be speeded up if things go well. However, Commons Leader Jacob Rees-Mogg risked setting more hares running by suggesting that there could be 'flexibility' if the government keeps 'smashing' vaccine targets. Tories and business have been voicing disquiet about the ultra-cautious approach being taken by ministers, even though the vaccination drive has been surging ahead. Schools will return on March 8, but there will be almost no further loosening of the draconian curbs before Easter. There will be a five week gap between each of the four main stages of the plan, with scientists having won the argument in government that time is needed to assess the impact. The PM has been boosted by snap polls showing the public largely backs his stance, with 46 per cent telling YouGov it is about right - and around a fifth suggesting it is too fast. Nicola Sturgeon unveiled her own far more cautious exit strategy this afternoon, with non-essential retail not set to start opening until the last week in April. Welsh government experts have also warned that Mr Johnson's timeline is 'risky' and the outbreak could spiral out of control again. Professor Neil Ferguson - whose grim modelling triggered the initial lockdown last year - sounded a bright note on Times Radio last night. 'Hopefully what we'll see when each step happens is a very limited resurgence of infections. In which case, there's a chance we can accelerate the schedule,' he said. However, Mr Hancock dismissed the idea of speeding the schedule up in a round of interviews this morning. 'No. We need to see the effects of each step, and that takes five weeks,' he said. A row also erupted over vaccine supply as Pfizer slapped down the Health Secretary's claim that a lack of doses was to blame for their slowest ever jabbing day on Sunday. Matt Hancock claimed a delay in the supply schedule will result in fewer jabs being dished out. But he also said there would be some 'bumper weeks in March' to make up for the lag. Both Pfizer and AstraZeneca - manufacturers of the jabs currently deployed in the UK - say there is no issue with deliveries. Pfizer sources told MailOnline there were 'no supply challenges' and deliveries were arriving as planned. AstraZeneca admitted there were 'fluctuations' in supply at plants but that it was still 'on track' with orders. Official figures showed Britain only administered 150,000 vaccines on Sunday, in the worst daily performance since the NHS roll-out began to gather speed last month. The number of first doses dished out has dropped by 40 per cent week-on-week. With a rapid inoculation drive crucial to Britain's hopes of lockdown being eased in the next few months, critics say there is 'no excuse' for the rollout slowing down. Think-tank bosses believe it is unlikely supply is solely behind the downturn because there would be reports of centres across the country running out of stock - which hasn't been the case. Mr Johnson put a successful vaccine roll-out at the heart of his lockdown-easing plan. So long as the operation continues successfully, all restrictions could be dropped in England by June 21. Any hiccups could threaten that target. Britain is racing to give as many first doses to over-50s as possible before the end of March, when millions of second jabs must be rolled out - which will inevitably slow the operation. The PM has pledged to jab all 32million in the top nine groups by April 15 and every adult by the end of July. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- The U.S. Army awarded grants to seven academic teams across scientific disciplines to advance basic science research and enable the development of technologies critical to national defense. The teams will research topics in human agent-teaming, artificial intelligence, novel materials and quantum physics, among others. The awards are a part of the Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, known as MURI. Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory, represents the Army's portion of the MURI program. The awards are typically funded at $1.25 million per year for three years with an option for two additional years and supports research teams whose efforts intersect more than one traditional scientific and engineering discipline. Since its inception in 1985, the tri-service MURI program has successfully convened teams of investigators to combine insights from multiple disciplines to both facilitate the growth of newly emerging technologies and address DOD's unique problem sets. "The multidisciplinary teams are key to accelerating research progress in areas critical to future technological superiority of the Army," said Dr. Barton H. Halpern, Army Research Office director. "MURIs also serve the important purpose of helping to train students in science and engineering areas of importance to DOD." The highly competitive MURI program complements the department's single-investigator basic research grants and has made immense contributions to both defense and society at large. Recently, a MURI led to the development of a new machine learning algorithm that can isolate patterns in brain signals that relate to a specific behavior and then decode it, potentially providing Soldiers with behavioral-based feedback. Doing so, is the first step in developing brain-machine interfaces that help restore lost function for people with neurological and mental disorders. This year, the seven MURI projects funded through the Army Research Office include: Emergent Topological and Hierarchical Ordered Structures, Dr. Ramesh Ramamoorthy, University of California, Berkley, in collaboration with researchers at Cornell University, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Arkansas Cohesive and Robust Human-Bot Cybersecurity Teams, Dr. Somesh Jha, University of Wisconsin in collaboration with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, University of California San Diego, Pennsylvania State University, University of Melbourne, Macquarie University, and University of Newcastle Understanding and Engineering Transient Mechanical Responses in Nanoparticle-Reinforced Heterogeneous Particulate Systems, Dr. Jennifer Lewis, Harvard University in collaboration with researchers at University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, and the University of Chicago Rethinking Reinforcement Learning with Astrocyte-Neuron Computations, Dr. Mriganka Sur, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in collaboration with researchers at University of Minnesota, and California Institute of Technology Theory and Engineering of Large-Scale Distributed Entanglement, Dr. Saikat Guha, University of Arizona in collaboration with University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yale University Multi-functional devices in precisely engineered van der Waals homojunctions, Dr. Philip Kim, Harvard University, in collaboration with researchers at Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Princeton University Tunable III-Nitride Nanostructures for N=N and C-H Bond Activation, Dr. Zetian Mi, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor in collaboration with researchers at Yale University, University of California, Santa Barbara, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign For the fiscal 2021 competition, ARO, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Office of Naval Research solicited proposals in 25 areas important to DOD and the military services. The winning teams, which represent 57 academic institutions nationwide, will receive five-year grants, contingent upon satisfactory research progress and the availability of funds, to pursue basic research that spans multiple scientific disciplines. A complete list of MURI awards is online.. ### Visit the laboratory's Media Center to discover more Army science and technology stories DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory is an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command. As the Army's corporate research laboratory, ARL is operationalizing science to achieve transformational overmatch. Through collaboration across the command's core technical competencies, DEVCOM leads in the discovery, development and delivery of the technology-based capabilities required to make Soldiers more successful at winning the nation's wars and come home safely. DEVCOM is a major subordinate command of the Army Futures Command. A young endangered loggerhead turtle is recovering after it was found, stunned by cold ocean waters, on the Oregon coast earlier this month. A beach-goer found the turtle, a sub-adult female, on Nelscott Beach near Lincoln City on Feb. 7, according to the Oregon Coast Aquarium. Officials with the Marine Mammal Stranding Network sent a volunteer to keep watch over the creature so it could be picked up and brought to the aquarium in Newport. Loggerheads are rare but not unheard of in Oregons ocean waters. The population inhabiting the waters of the northern Pacific is protected under the Endangered Species Act and has declined by 50% to 90% over the last 60 years, according to federal data, though the population has stabilized somewhat more recently. The large turtles are generally unsuited for the frigid winter waves off the Oregon coast, however, and can lose the ability to eat and swim when stunned by cold water. Experts at the aquarium learned the turtles temperature was dangerously low a typical temp is around 75 degrees, this one was down near 50. Rehabilitating a cold-stunned turtle is not a quick endeavor. The aquariums veterinarian staff began a series of increasingly warm baths for the turtle, with the goal of raising its temperature by about 5 degrees per day. The turtle soon began showing signs of stability, according to the aquarium, swimming, diving and foraging for food. About a week after it was discovered on the beach, the turtle had its first meal: a salmon filet. The aquarium wasnt equipped to care for the animal long-term and, with the animal showing good signs of progress, the vet staff made arrangements with a nonprofit called Turtles Fly Too to have the creature flown to the San Diego Zoo on Saturday. I just received a video from SeaWorld San Diego, the aquariums curator of fish and invertebrates, Evonne Mochon-Collura, said soon after the turtles arrival in California. The loggerhead is swimming in their large outdoor pool a successful triage and transport! Vets at the zoo will monitor the animals recovery with the goal of eventually returning the turtle to the wild. Officials from the aquarium asked anyone who finds a turtle stranded on the beach to contact Oregon State Police at 800-452-7888 or the Marine Mammal Stranding Network in Oregon, Washington, and California at 1-866-767-6114. -- Kale Williams; kwilliams@oregonian.com; 503-294-4048; @sfkale ROME, FEB 24 - The government has decided to keep existing COVID measures in place, resisting pressure from the centre right to reopen gyms, swimming pools and other urban spaces and let restaurants work in the evening, Health Minister Roberto Speranza told the Senate Wednesday. "There are not the conditions to lower our guard," he said, stressing the need for national unity against the health emergency. He said the key RT transmission number was close to passing the crucial 1 threshold, and therefore "great prudence is still needed". Speranza said "rows may disorient" people but there was "light at the end of the tunnel with the vaccine rollout. He said the government had agreed to a proposal to have a single spokesman foe the CTS government committee of experts, rather than several sometimes discordant voices. Italy is currently in a three-tier COVID risk system and a travel ban between regions was recently extended till March 27 as the government looks to slow the spread of highly contagious coronavirus variants. Speranza said there a panel would be set up with the Higher Health Institute (ISS) to draw up a more accurate and thorough picture of the various COVID variants circulating in the country, starting with the highly contagious British strain. (ANSA). Judge Merrick Garland testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on his nomination to be attorney general, on Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 22, 2021. (Demetrius Freeman/Pool/AFP via Getty Images) Bidens Attorney General Pick Says Portland Riots May Not Have Been Domestic Terrorism Attorney general nominee Merrick Garland said this week that the riots in Portland last year may not have qualified as domestic terrorism. My own definition, which is about the same as the statutory definition, is the use of violence or threats of violence in an attempt to disrupt democratic processes. So an attack on a courthouse, while in operation, trying to prevent judges from actually deciding cases, that plainly is domestic extremism, domestic terrorism, Garland told the Senate during a confirmation hearing on Monday. An attack simply on a government property at night, or any other kind of circumstances, is a clear crime and a serious one, and should be punished. I dont know enough about the facts of the example youre talking about. But thats where I draw the line. One isboth are criminal, but one is a core attack on our democratic institutions, he added. Portlands U.S. Courthouse in the summer of 2020 was repeatedly attacked by rioters, some affiliated with the Antifa network and Black Lives Matter, prompting the federal government to send officers to defend it. Federal code defines domestic terrorism as: activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. Federal officials have not said what happened in Portland was domestic terrorism, but spoke out strongly about what happened. For more than 60 days, violent criminals, opportunists, and anarchists have attacked the federal seat of justice in Portland, Oregon: the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse. For more than 60 days, criminals violently attacked federal law enforcement officers who carried out their statutory mission, then-acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told Congress in August 2020. Our law enforcement officers were assaulted with, among other weapons, mortar-style commercial grade fireworks, accelerants, IEDs, sledgehammers, concrete, and slingshots. Officers have suffered chemical burns, bloody wounds, and attacks with blinding lasers, leaving some of our colleagues with eye injuries. The security fence we installed to protect the Courthouse and our officers has been repeatedly attacked with power tools in a dangerous attempt to topple the barrier, he added. Former Attorney General William Barr said that same month that highly organized violent operators have carried out direct attacks on federal personnel and property, particularly the federal courthouse in Portland. In another portion of the hearing, Garland vowed that anybody who attacks a federal building will be prosecuted. All three injured people were taken to area hospitals, officials said. The 44-year-old was pronounced dead on arrival to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn. The man was identified as Michael Burrage of Hazel Crest, according to the Cook County medical examiners office, which has not yet determined his cause of death. Kolkata: Amid rise in coronavirus cases, the West Bengal government on Wednesday made RT-PCR COVID-19 tests mandatory for passengers travelling by air from these four states - Maharashtra, Telangana, Kerala and Karnataka. Passengers will need to carry a negative COVID-19 negative RT-PCR report conducted within 72 hours of flight departure, with effect from 12 noon February 27 onwards. People travelling by by trains or buses have been exempted from this. Meanwhile, in West Bengal two people succumbed to coronavirus in a span of 24 hours, taking the death toll to 10,253, the health department said in a bulletin. The total tally mounted to 5,74,099 after 189 new COVID-19 cases were recorded. Earlier, the Union Health Ministry informed that it has deputed high-level multi-disciplinary teams to as many as 10 states to work closely with the states and UT administration and determine the cause for the recent surge in the number of coronavirus cases. The three-member multidisciplinary teams will be sent to Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Jammu and Kashmir for requisite COVID-19 control measures to break the chain of transmission, as per an official release. NEW YORK A former New York City police officer has surrendered to the FBI and is facing multiple charges after being accused of attacking police officer with a metal flagpole during the U.S. Capitol assault on Jan. 6. Thomas Webster, 54, has been charged with assaulting police officers with a deadly weapon, obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder, knowingly entering a restricted area, disorderly conduct in a restricted area, engaging in physical violence in a restricted area and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, CNN reports. According to the New York Times, Webster served on the unit that provided security for the citys mayor before retiring in 2011. Webster, a former Marine, appeared in court Monday, nbcnewyork.com reports. Prosecutors say Webster is seen in video attacking a Capitol police officer with a flagpole during the assault by supporters of Donald Trump who were trying to disrupt Congress confirmation of the results of the presidential election. NBC News reports that prosecutors say Webster is accused of calling the officer a commie motherf----- who went after him like a junkyard dog. A charging document says images show Webster appearing to pin the officer to the ground and trying to forcibly remove his gas mask and face shield. Webster is accused of hitting the officer several times with the flagpole, which had a Marine Corps flag attached. A lawyer for Webster says his client was acting in self-defense after the unidentified officer punched him, the Times reports. He went there as an American citizen to protest, an event that was urged on by our former president to protest an issue that Tom felt very strongly about, said the lawyer, James Monroe, according to the Times. Thats protecting the Constitution. Prosecutors say there is no evidence on video that Webster was punched by the officer, CNN reports. A judge has ordered that Webster be detained as he awaits trial. As with all community hospitals across the country, Community First Medical Center has felt the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic firsthand, the hospital said in a statement Wednesday. All loss of life associated with this pandemic is met with great sorrow, particularly by those who are professionally engaged in treating the ill and injured on a daily basis. Our colleagues have become ill and some have made the ultimate sacrifice for their profession. Experts revealed that the absentee vote results during the 2020 presidential election may have been manipulated, in accordance with their findings. A team headed by John Droz, a physicist and founder of Alliance for Wise Energy Decision in North Carolina, told LifeSite News that they have discovered a suspicious pattern on the graphical representation of the absentee vote results. Dr. William Briggs and Thomas Davis, team members of Droz, said that their analysis of Michigan 2020 election results over absentee votes in some counties appear to "track one another," indicating fraud. Briggs and Davis' analysis, "Irrational MI Absentee Ballots Findings," presented graphs of vote totals of presidential opposing parties based on state data. They said that high level of absentee voting among the Democrats may have not raised suspicions but they found suspicious patterns of correlations on the vote percentages cast by absentee or mail-in ballots. They showed a graph of Ingham County's 2016 absentee vote data which they said exhibits a normal result, not showing a "discernable pattern." "Note the irregularities that occur: some precincts are higher for [Republicans] some are higher for [Democrats]. More importantly, the difference between the two [Republican minus Democrat] varies widely - from plus to minus. In other words: neither the red line nor the blue line has a discernable pattern," they said. But when they compared it to a graph displaying the Michigan's 2020 results, they said that the latter presented a "dramatic" pattern. "Not surprisingly, the percentage of Democratic absentee voters exceeds the percentage of Republican absentee voters in every precinct. What is remarkable (and unbelievable) is that these two independent variables appear to track one another," they explained. "There is no apparent legitimate explanation for the two absentee lines to be tracking each other like that - other than it being due to a computer algorithm," they further said. They added that data from Macomb and Oakland counties in Michigan have shown this suspicious pattern. Eight other counties in the state have been found to be having the same problem. Davis further revealed that similar issues have been encountered in various counties across 20 states. "From a statistical perspective these are independent variables - which have no relationship with one another. Yet, the graphical representation of these values in many cases reveals a clear pattern, even to a casual observer," Davis said. "That the same type of pattern is seen across such a wide variety of locations is truly remarkable. Algorithmic manipulation of absentee votes remains a plausible explanation," he continued. Though the graphs clearly showed statistical anomaly, Davis said that findings were not presented in court, stating that the suspicious statistical correlation was overlooked. Briggs and Davis have called for hand recount or forensic audit on the affected counties in Michigan but the state, as well as other states reported to have complained of election fraud, has yet to have a full recount or audit. Droz's team also identified Allegheny County in Pennsylvania as facing a similar issue, particularly the city of Pittsburgh. The statisticians presented an affidavit to LifeSite in December, pointing out an anomaly wherein the Democrats gained 40-50% advantage "almost uniformly above the Republican absentee vote percentage." In addition to suspicions on vote totals, the experts also flagged Allegheny with its correlated time data of absentee vote tabulation. "While there are many timestamps, any selection of those timestamps - whether using many or a few - show perfect lockstep updates. This holds perfectly true for all three candidates, with no timestamp breaking the mold. The results of the Allegheny time-series incremental absentee votes defy reality in a perfectly synchronous fashion - with all 1,300 precincts and candidates marching perfectly in time toward their eventual total of 340,000 absentee votes," the report explained. Given the evidences, Droz told LifeSite that there was apparent fraud in the recent presidential election. "At this point we're all tired of the dishonest assertion that there was no 2020 Presidential vote fraud, malfeasance or other irregularities/illegalities, supposedly because 'the courts dismissed those claims as unfounded, wildly exaggerated, etc. [T]hat is simply not true," he said. ISTANBUL As the Turkish government attempts to recalibrate relations with the new US administration under President Joe Biden, its acquisition of Russian-made S-400 missile defense systems remains a central point of contention between the longtime NATO allies. Speaking in a press briefing Tuesday, Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby urged Ankara to take action and remove the missiles from Turkish territory, reiterating a stance widely held by Washington officials that the S-400s pose a security threat to NATO defense systems in the country. Shortly after acquiring the S-400s in July 2019, Turkey was removed from the blocs F-35 fighter jet program over concerns the missiles radars could collect data on the aircraft. Asked whether there were developments on the issue following a hint at a possible compromise by a Turkish official earlier this month, Kirby said theres been no change in the Biden administrations policy as Ankara reportedly pursues talks with Moscow over the purchase of a second batch of S-400 systems. We urge Turkey not to move ahead with the delivery of the S-400, Kirby told reporters in Washington Tuesday. We believe it's incompatible with the F-35, and Turkey remains suspended from that program. Again, we urge them not to retain it. The comments come after Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said in a Feb. 9 interview that Ankara might be willing to find a solution for its S-400 purchase if the United States considers ending its support to a Kurdish militia in Syria that Turkish officials view as a security threat and an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. In response, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Feb. 10 Washington would not lift sanctions on Turkey over the S-400s until Ankara ends its possession of the systems. Kirby doubled down on the stance Tuesday, noting the United States had offered Ankara NATO-compatible Patriot missile defense systems, which Turkish officials declined over disagreements concerning an additional technology transfer with the purchase. I would remind that they had multiple opportunities over the last decade to purchase the Patriot defense system from the United States and instead chose this S-400, which provides Russia revenue, access and influence, Kirby told reporters Tuesday. The latest statements come after a spat between the NATO allies sparked by Washingtons failure to immediately condemn the PKK over the deaths of 13 Turkish hostages in Iraq during a failed Turkish rescue operation launched on Feb. 10. Following a backlash from Ankara, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken walked back initial comments, affirming the PKK was responsible for the deaths in a Feb. 15 phone call with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu. Amid heightened tensions, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan struck a conciliatory tone in a video message Saturday, saying US-Turkey ties had been seriously tested recently but that the partnership has overcome all kinds of difficulties. As Turkey, we believe our common interests with the United States far outweigh our differences in opinion, Erdogan said Saturday, adding Ankara sought to strengthen cooperation through a long-term perspective on a win-win basis. Erdogan went on, Turkey will continue to do its part in a manner worthy of the allied and strategic partnership ties between the two countries. The apparent attempt to improve fraught relations comes after news broke Friday that the Turkish government hired a Washington law firm to lobby the Biden administration to remain in the F-35 jet fighter program. What will come of such efforts remains to be seen, though Sinan Ulgen, chairman of the Istanbul-based Center for Economic and Foreign Policy Studies, said Akars recent comments on a possible compromise could offer an off ramp from current tensions. It is the first time that Turkey signaled that it would contemplate such an option, Ulgen told Al-Monitor. Ulgen said US and Turkish officials could collaborate on an agreement laying out the conditions under which the S-400 missiles would be made operational, recalling a similar arrangement for Russian S-300 missiles stationed in the Greek island of Crete. Such a formula, Ulgen said, would also require a verification mechanism to ensure the agreement is followed. But for that to happen, there needs to be direct face-to-face negotiations between Turkey and the US, and we are not there yet, Ulgen told Al-Monitor. Thousands of Australians are still awaiting refunds for ill-fated holidays that never went ahead, with the consumer watchdog receiving almost 28,000 travel-related complaints since the pandemic began. Its estimated that about 30 per cent of grounded travellers are still seeking refunds, prompting calls for new laws to better protect consumers. Self-funded retirees Fiona and Greg Mills are chasing an almost $29,000 refund for an overseas tour that never went ahead because of the pandemic. Credit:Chris Hopkins Fiona and Greg Mills have spent almost a year trying to claw back the $28,965 they paid for a doomed tour of Alaska and parts of Canada that was set to go ahead last April but was suspended because of the pandemic. Their tour company, Scenic, has told the couple they wont be able to receive a refund until 2023 and has given them a travel credit instead. Supreme Court declines $100M Episcopal Church property case, lets breakaway diocese's victory stand Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal from The Episcopal Church over a dispute with a breakaway Texas diocese leadership over an estimated $100 million in church property. In orders released Monday, the high court denied certiorari in the combined cases of All Saints Episcopal Church v. Diocese of Fort Worth and The Episcopal Church et al. v. Diocese of Fort Worth. As a result, an earlier ruling awarding the 60 church properties to the breakaway diocese that voted to leave the denomination over theological differences on issues like same-sex marriage and the ordination of women will stand. The breakaway diocese's Bishop Ryan Reed said the court's decision marked "a turning point" for the diocese. "After directing so many resources to this dispute, we can now put our entire focus on Gospel ministry and Kingdom work," Reed said in a statement. "We are nearing completion on a strategic plan that will keep us focused on sharing the transforming love of Jesus Christ and our mission to equip the saints for the work of ministry." The Christian Post reached out to The Episcopal Church for comments on the decision. A response is pending. In 2008, a majority of the Fort Worth Diocese voted to leave The Episcopal Church over the overall liberal theological direction of the mainline Protestant denomination. A prominent example was the ordination of The Episcopal Churchs first openly gay bishop, the Rev. Gene Robinson, which resulted in other churches and dioceses leaving the denomination. The Fort Worth diocesan leadership then decided to join the Anglican Church in North America, a more theologically conservative denomination. Years of litigation followed over who rightfully owned the approximately $100 million in church property the mainline denomination or the departing Texas-based diocese. The Episcopal Church argued that it controlled the property via the Dennis Canon, which labeled all church properties as being held in trust for the denomination's benefit. In 2018, the Fort Worth Court of Appeals ruled in favor of The Episcopal Church. The court noted that the parties agreed that the corporation held legal title to all property in dispute. Individual members of a parish may decide to worship elsewhere; a majority of individual members of a parish or diocese may decide to do so, stated the ruling, in part. But when they leave, they are no longer Episcopalians as identified by TEC; they become something else. And that something else is not entitled to retain property if that property, under the terms of the deed, is held in trust for a TEC-affiliated diocese or congregation. In May 2020, Texas Supreme Court partially reversed the earlier ruling against the breakaway group, citing changes made to the dioceses constitution and canons in 1989. While it is true, as TEC says, that the dioceses organizational documents prohibited the adoption of canons inconsistent with the national churchs constitution and canons, revocation is not inconsistent with a revocable trust, wrote Justice Eva Guzman for the state supreme court. Moreover, in the twenty years between revocation and eruption of a dispute over the property, TEC lodged no objection to the amended canon and does not now contend the 1989 amendment is invalid for any other reason than purported inconsistency. EDWARDSVILLE In the Metro East, reactions to the Safe-T Act the day after it was signed into law ranged from outrage to grateful. Gov. J. B. Pritzker signed the legislation, which was House Bill 3653, and referred to as the Safe-T Act, during an event Monday at Chicago State University alongside members of his administration and lawmakers from the Black Caucus. This legislation marks a substantial step toward dismantling the systemic racism that plagues our communities, our state and our nation, and brings us closer to true safety, true fairness and true justice, Pritzker said. More Information Four key points of the Saf-T Act can be seen as: Beginning Jan. 1, 2023, the law eliminates all bail bonds and conditions of cash bail, the first state to eliminate it by statute. Washington, D.C does not use it and New Jersey eliminated cash bail in 2017. Instead, a pre-trial release will be used. By 2022, use-of-force standards must be established statewide but it bans chokeholds and any actions that restrict breathing used above the chest unless deadly force is authorized. The state will have more power over certification and law enforcement hiring under the new law, via the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board (ILETSB). The state's largest police departments must have body cameras in place by 2022. All police agencies, regardless of size must have them by 2025, however, the law does not include statutory funding for departments to comply with the law. See More Collapse Read the legislation here: https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/101/HB/PDF/10100HB3653lv.pdf State Sen. Jason Plummer (R-Edwardsville), a vocal opponent to the legislation, issued the following statement Monday: The actions taken by the governor today have effectively made our communities less safe, defunded local law enforcement and endangered the safety of our families, Plummer said. Tuesday, Edwardsville Police Chief Jay Keeven attended a virtual NAACP Edwardsville Branch meeting. He explained some of what he likes and does not like about the new law then got peppered with questions in the chat from some of the approximately 50 attendees. I have vocally not been supporting this bill from early on, Keeven told the group. My strongest language occurred when it was still being considered. He outlined some of the bills history as it trekked through the state legislature. One part of the bill he likes deals with police officer certification and decertification, which is handled locally by a civilian board, not Keeven. That had been worked on with the Illinois Chiefs Association and Attorney General Raoul, so our organization was great with that language, he said. He said a lot of required training is in the law, including crisis intervention training (CIT). His officers take 40 hours of CIT training as a foundation and are offered refresher courses. Keeven said when he took over as chief in 2013, one patrol officer had CIT training; today, all but three of his 48 patrol officers are so trained. Those three are headed to CIT class in April. Another aspect Keeven likes is body cameras. In 2013, he said none of the departments squad cars had video capabilities; they all do today. Ninety percent of my officers want body cameras. My opinion is, if everybody knows they are recorded, I think everybody behaves better. The concern that we have with body cameras is the expense of data storage. For a department like mine with just under 50 officers, body cameras are about $1,000 apiece, so the $48,000 for our budget would be manageable. But the expense of the storage and the redaction of the video and audio, thats what would get you, he said. He added there is a possible plan to have the Illinois State Police (ISP) host the data and Edwardsville Police would pay a fee to the ISP but its still in the conceptual stage. He said under Illinois Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), they have 10 days to provide video from a citizens request. Redaction software has improved, which comes in handy for blurring juveniles or bystanders faces but any personally-identifiable information dates of birth, social security numbers, etc. must also be redacted, audibly and visually, and that means hiring someone to do work that could be time-consuming, depending on the FOIA request. A part of the body camera legislation that he disagrees with is that officers are not allowed to review their videos before writing their reports, relying on their memories of the days events instead. Its not about the complaint, its about accuracy. In the heat of the moment, an officer may say, I saw this or I gave a field sobriety test and the person stepped off the line two times and the video may show the person stepping off the line three or four times. Keeven said the police chiefs associations are in conversation with local legislators to draft clean-up legislation. Proponents say the law will make Illinois safer by making the justice system more equitable for Black, Latino, low-income and minority communities that have been disproportionately harmed by disparate policies in sentencing, incarceration and policing. While today is a significant step forward, lasting reform is a constant work in progress, and I am committed to continuing to work alongside our partners in law enforcement to improve policing in communities across Illinois, said Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul. One of Pritzkers future opponents disagreed. By signing HB 3653 into law today, JB Pritzker failed the people of Illinois in terms of both policy and leadership, said Paul Schimpf, a Republican who is running to unseat Pritzker in 2022. Adamantly opposed by nearly all Illinois law enforcement leaders, HB 3653 makes Illinois communities and families less safe. Even more troubling, the legislations passage during an overnight, lame-duck session vote lacked meaningful scrutiny and review. As governor, I will veto all legislation that fails to comply with minimum levels of transparency. The states law enforcement coalition agreed. In signing this bill into law, Governor Pritzker chose to listen to a few strident political voices rather than the 120,000 petition signing citizens who plainly saw the bill for what it is, states a release from the Illinois Law Enforcement Coalition. This new law is a blatant move to punish an entire, honorable profession that will end up hurting law-abiding citizens the most. Because we are sworn to protect and serve the public, we sincerely hope that we will not be proven right about this new law, that it wont cause police officers to leave the profession in droves and handcuff those who remain so they cant stop crimes against people and property. Reach reporter Charles Bolinger 618-659-5735 Appointment 24 February 2021 Named Chief Development Officer, Max Cergneux joins the Executive Committee of the Louvre Hotels Group under the direction of CEO Pierre-Frederic Roulot. Louvre Hotel Group has announced the appointment of Max Cergneux as Chief Development Officer. Max brings with him solid experience with over 15 years in corporate and hotel development across the globe. He is a seasoned leader with extensive international background in achieving growth through brand expansions, portfolio transactions, strategic partnerships and acquisitions. Most recently, Max served as Head of International Corporate Development for Choice Hotels based out of London where he was tasked with setting up focus on international expansion, acquisitions and investment strategy. He has also previously held senior positions at Marriott International responsible for Corporate and Development Finance across all markets in Europe, Middle East and Africa. During that time, he contributed to growth strategies throughout the region and worked on numerous projects, such as the development of new brands, joint ventures and acquisitions in some of the most important cities in the world. A Swiss national, Max Cergneux has lived in some of the biggest cities in Europe, Asia and the Americas. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and an MBA from Columbia University in New York. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 00:58:20|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close GABORONE, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Thapelo Matsheka, Botswana's finance minister, has emphasized that the country should mobile more domestic revenue, as external sources of government plunge. Matsheka told parliament on Wednesday that the proposed tax broadening for the 2021-2022 financial year are meant to plug the fall in external revenue. "This trend is unsustainable, and necessitates enhanced efforts towards domestic revenue mobilization, including increases in taxes," said Matsheka, adding that the country cannot continue to rely on external sources of government revenue to finance operations and continued provision of public services. Botswana's major revenue sources for government are mineral revenue, customs and excise revenue from the Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU), non-mineral income tax value added tax, Bank of Botswana revenue and various fees and charges. The taxes proposed to be increased for the 2021-2022 financial year include value added tax, fuel levy and withholding tax on dividends. In addition, new taxes or levies will be introduced which include a levy on sugar content of sweetened beverages, a levy on plastic bags, and a levy on second-hand vehicles. Botswana intends to hike its value added tax to 12 percent and remain the lowest among her peers on the Southern Africa bloc. Enditem Researchers have used radiocarbon dating to determine that the painting is 17,000 years old. (Supplied by University of Western Australia) Archeologists Find 17,000-Year-Old Kangaroo Painting An Australian rock painting has been dated at approximately 17,300 years oldthe oldest known artwork still on the wall of a rock shelter in the countryin a finding that unlocks a greater understanding of humanitys ancient past. Researchers from the University of Melbourne (UM) and the University of Western Australia (UWA) found the kangaroo painted by ancestors of the Balanggarra people from the northeast Kimberley region of Western Australia. The results were published on Feb. 22 in Nature Human Behaviour and form part of Australias largest rock art dating project. To calculate its age, the archaeologists worked with traditional owners using radiocarbon dating based on the age of wasp nests over the paint. Painting of a kangaroo which has been dated back 17,100 to 17,500 years ago based on wasp nests. (Supplied by University of Western Australia) UWA archaeologist Sven Ouzman said the painting would be invaluable to understanding the history of Aboriginal culture. This iconic kangaroo image is visually similar to rock paintings from islands in South East Asia dated to more than 40,000 years ago, suggesting a cultural linkand hinting at still older rock art in Australia, Ouzman told the AAP. Dating rock art more accurately means we can better understand how Aboriginal people lived from their beginning right up to the present, where rock art is still being made, and country managed. Indeed, this rock painting makes us reconsider what it means to be Australian, combining everyones personal history with the deep time stewardship of the country by Aboriginal people. Researchers estimate that the first humans arrived in Australia at least 65,000 years ago. Known Aboriginal rock art has been dated to around 30,000 years ago, although unknown art is possibly much older. We dont have the [dated] art, but weve found the tools that were used to make the art close to 50,000 years ago, Anthropological archaeologist Bruno David said. The finding comes as archaeologists in Indonesia have found the worlds oldest rock art painting believed to date back to 45, 500 years ago, reports the BBC. The image, which depicts a wild pig still indigenous to the region today, was found at the Leang Tedongnge cave in a remote valley on the island of Sulawesi. Maxime Aubert, the co-author of the report on the painting, said that the painting was created by humans who were much like us today. The people who made it were fully modern; they were just like us. They had all of the capacity and the tools to do any painting that they liked, Aubert said. Like the Australian archaeologists, Aubert also utilised a deposit on the painting to extrapolate its creation date. He explained that he had used Uranium-series isotope dating on a calcite deposit on top of the painting to close in on the date and concluded that the deposit was at least 45,500 years old. But it could be much older because the dating that were using only dates the calcite on top of it, he added. Both the Kimberly region and the Indonesia province of Sulawesi are renowned for having some of the most prolific and oldest collections of rock art in the world, dating back tens of thousands of years. Weve had a cloud in Illinois and that has slowed the process of the discussion, Crane said. As some look at ComEd and the nuclear plants being one and working to separate that. But also explaining not only the environmental benefits, but the community and the economic benefits that they serve, along with the reliability. In all of our jurisdictions that we have nuclear plants, I think that recognition is strong or becoming stronger. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton remained completely silent as he landed back in Austin after it was revealed that he had been in Utah as his home state suffered under a disastrous winter snow storm. The Republican lawmaker buzzed through Austin-Bergstrom International Airport on Tuesday, weaving through local reporters who asked him about his trip and meetings with Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes last Wednesday and Friday. Paxton didn't answer a single question as he made his way to his vehicle, video obtained KXAN shows. The Republican lawmaker buzzed through Austin-Bergstrom International Airport on Tuesday NEW: @TXAG Paxton landed in Austin this afternoon after a trip to Utah last week. Its the first time we have seen the attorney general in-person since the energy crisis across the state last week. I tried asking some questions, he didn't answer any. #txlege @KXAN_News pic.twitter.com/kguCb29vFC Maggie Glynn (@maggie_glynn1) February 24, 2021 Paxton's trip was not previously known publicly, and he made no mention of being out of state while lashing out at Texas' grid operators on Twitter and urging residents to report price gouging. Paxton was in Salt Lake City with his wife, state Senator Angela Paxton, for meetings with Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes last Wednesday and Friday, but it was not clear when he left or whether he had returned, according to the Dallas Morning News. Spokesman Ian Prior said in a statement that the attorney general 'did not leave Texas until after power had returned to most of the state, including his own home.' Ken Paxton didn't answer a single question as he made his way to his vehicle from the terminal Texas AG Ken Paxton and his wife Angela are seen at Trump's infamous January 6 rally in Washington DC. The couple were in Utah last week during part of the historic blackout Paxton sent this tweet on Wednesday, the same day he had a meeting in Salt Lake City Ric Cantrell, a spokesman for Reyes, said Paxton was in Utah last Wednesday - when by nightfall nearly 2 million people were still without power in Texas, and millions more either had no water or were under boil-water notices. It is the second time that one of Texas' top elected leaders was found to be out of state during the crisis, after Senator Ted Cruz took a family vacation to Mexico during the deadly winter storm. Cruz faced heavy criticism for seeming to abandon his state during the crisis, and apologized after initially blaming his young daughters for insisting on the trip. Prior said Paxton and Reyes met to discuss an antitrust lawsuit against Google and attend a demonstration of a law enforcement simulation. Paxton met with Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes (above) last Wednesday and Friday, but it was not clear when he left or whether he had returned Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife Angela Paxton are seen in 2017 Ted Cruz says wife is 'p***ed' her group texts about their Cancun trip were leaked Senator Ted Cruz has said his wife Heidi is 'p*ssed' that her group texts about their Cancun trip were leaked, telling his neighbors 'don't be a**holes'. Text messages obtained by The New York Times show how Heidi, 48, encouraged other mothers on their street to join them on the heavily criticized jaunt in a group chat called 'Lovelies'. Speaking on conservative podcast Ruthless, Republican Cruz told host Josh Holmes: 'I will say, Heidi is pretty p*ssed at that. She was over at the neighbors house yesterday, sort of walking through.' 'Heres a suggestion: Just dont be a**holes. Yeah, like, just, you know, treat each other as human being, have some degree, some modicum of respect.' Advertisement Prior is a spokesman for Paxton's campaign; the Texas attorney generals office did not respond to questions about the trip. It's unclear whether the attorney general has returned to Texas. Word of the trip gave Paxton's critics another line of attack after months of scrutiny over his former aides reporting him to the FBI over accusations of bribery. He is also still awaiting trial over a 2015 indictment on felony securities fraud charges. 'He continues in a long line of Texas Republicans that have utterly failed Texans when we need it the most,' Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said. Meanwhile, Cruz faced heavy backlash for his pleasure jaunt to Cancun during the crisis. On Sunday, a mariachi band descended on Cruz 's house to troll him and his family over their ill-fated trip to Cancun during the Texas energy crisis. The band joined protesters outside the Cruz's home in Houston and played cheerfully on the sidewalk. It's unclear who hired them. The Senator was not home at the time. He returned to Texas on Thursday, a day after leaving, after being lambasted for abandoning the state. The Texas Senator flew to Mexico last Wednesday afternoon with his wife Heidi and their two daughters, aged 10 and 12, while millions in their home state struggled without power, heat and water. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. There's speculation that Married At First Sight star Booka Nile has already split with her on-screen 'husband' Brett Helling. And the musician did little to dispel rumours a few weeks ago when she was seen putting on what appeared to be a flirty display with a male friend at a cafe in Perth following filming for the show. During the outing, the 31-year-old rocker was joined by co-stars Alana Lister and Beth Moore and a bunch of friends. Where's Brett? Married At First Sight star Booka Nile put on a flirty display with a male friend in Perth in December after filming the reality TV show, fueling rumours she and her 'husband' Brett Helling have already split Booka turned heads in a skintight red mini dress, which showcased her numerous tattoos. She wore her darker locks tied up and off her face and rock chic makeup, including a red lip and a winged eye. New man? Booka was seen walking alongside her mystery man just weeks after filming the Channel Nine experiment Newlyweds: Booka tied the knot with co-star and on-screen 'husband' Brett Helling on Tuesday's episode of MAFS, which was filmed last year Red hot! Booka turned heads in her skintight red mini dress, which showcased her numerous tattoos Chilling out: At one point, she could be seen puffing on an unhealthy cigarette while sitting at a table with her friends High-fives all round: Booka and her mystery male pal put on a flirty display on the day At one point, she puffed on an unhealthy cigarette while sitting at a table with her friends. She later met up with co-star Beth, who was dressed in a stylish flowing floral dress. Booka tied the knot with her on-screen 'husband' Brett Helling on Tuesday's episode of MAFS, which was filmed prior to her outing in December. Rock chick: She wore her darker locks tied up and off her face and chic makeup, including a red lip and a winged eye Accessories: Booka completed her look with white sneakers, hoop earring, and a black backpack Fancy seeing you here: The 31-year-old rocker also met up with co-stars Alana Lister (pictured) and Beth Moore Booka and Brett hinted that they had split this week during an interview on Today Extra - when they did a live cross from two different cities. Booka appeared on the show from Perth, while Brett was in Melbourne. Hosts David Campbell and Belinda Russell immediately noticed that the two weren't in the same city together. Night out: Later in the evening the pair were joined by fellow MAFS castmate Beth Moore Three is not a crowd: The three ladies looked thrilled to be spending time together Looking good! Beth looked stylish in a flowing floral dress 'You're both in different cities, oh oh,' David said at the start of the interview. Belinda added: 'Come on, guys, what is going on? Is there trouble in paradise?' Electrician Brett, 31, insisted that the pair just live in two separate cities and that moving interstate is a big thing. Big hugs: The trio embraced one another as they chatted on the sidewalk Meanwhile, musician Booka said that the coronavirus pandemic is keeping them apart. 'Well it's not exactly, pack up the car and move down the road sort of territory, is it, it's halfway across the country, so,' Brett started, when Booka added: 'Have you guys heard of a guy called Mark McGowan [the WA premier]... but we've got a pretty closed border to Victoria right now,' she said. Those boots were made for walking: Alana rocked a pair of nude crocodile skin boots during the trio's night out However, interstate travelers from Victoria are allowed to enter Western Australia so long as they register and are approved for a 'G2G Pass' and have a place to quarantine in. Booka was also asked if Brett was the 'man of her dreams,' when she didn't outright answer the question with a yes or no. She played coy, saying: 'That jawline and mustache combination, I was pretty excited by it, by him.' There are rumours the pair have already split. Firm friends: The girls wrapped their arms around each other's neck as they walked down the street This week, an Instagram video uploaded by one of Booka's family members showed the tattooed blonde looking less than thrilled as she prepared to watch her nuptials on TV. Another telling sign that things may have soured is the fact that Booka isn't following her 'husband' on Instagram, even though he is still following her. If Booka and Brett have secretly parted ways, it will leave many fans hoping for a Jules-and-Cam-style love story disappointed. Daily Mail Australia has contacted Booka for comment, in relation to this article. Something to tell us? Meanwhile, Booka and her TV husband Brett hinted that they had split this week during an interview on Today Extra - when they did a live cross from two different cities. "Rick will be integral to leading the operations at our first-of-its-kind facility as we ramp up production," said Keith Brazzell, Genera's COO. "His operational expertise will be key to leading the exceptional operations team we've built. Genera is providing the sustainable solutions that the paper and packaging industries need in partnership with East Tennessee farmers." Presley most recently served as operations manager/assistant plant manager for Oil-Dri Corporation of America, Blue Mountain, Mississippi. He has more than 25 years of experience in manufacturing operations, risk management, and logistics, including 20 years managing pulp and paper mills. "Genera is a site of innovation, from ag fiber pulping to thermoforming, and it's exciting to help lead such a huge win for the region and the whole industry," Presley said. "I strongly believe in our mission to support small farmers while creating a sustainable, domestic supply chain for ag-based fiber." The fully operational facility processes agricultural crops, such as switchgrass, grown by regional farmers into ag-based fiber and the Earthable line of sustainable food-grade, compostable packaging. The facility, which is the largest fully integrated domestic solution for ag-based fiber and food packaging in North America, will host 120 employees at full production. For more information about Genera, visit https://generainc.com. About Genera Genera, a Tennessee-based ag fiber manufacturer, works to simplify supply chains with domestically sourced and produced ag-based pulp and molded fiber products. Partnering with local farmers, Genera provides a sustainable farm-to-finished product solution for a wide array of applications including compostable food service tableware, to-go containers, packaging, paper, tissue and more. To learn more about Genera, please visit https://generainc.com. MEDIA CONTACT: Heather Ripley Ripley PR (865) 977-1973 [email protected] SOURCE Genera Related Links https://generainc.com/ Nation fighting COVID-19 with all its strength: PM Narendra Modi at Mann ki Baat PM to address convocation ceremony of Tamil Nadu Dr MGR Medical University on Friday India pti-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Feb 24: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the 33rd convocation ceremony of the Tamil Nadu Dr MGR Medical University via video-conferencing on Friday, his office said. A total of 17,591 candidates will be conferred with degrees and diplomas at the convocation ceremony. The governor of Tamil Nadu will also be present on the occasion. Union Cabinet approves dissolution of Puducherry assembly "Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the 33rd convocation of the Tamil Nadu Dr MGR Medical University on February 26, 2021 at 11 am via video-conferencing," the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) said. The university is named after former Tamil Nadu chief minister MG Ramachandran. It has a total of 686 affiliated institutions under its umbrella, encompassing the disciplines of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, AYUSH, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and allied health sciences. These institutions, including 41 medical colleges, 19 dental colleges, 48 AYUSH colleges, 199 nursing colleges, 81 pharmacy colleges and the rest being speciality post-doctoral medical and allied health institutions, are spread across the length and breadth of Tamil Nadu. In 2021, Vietnam is expected to have 110 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine from many sources and some groups of people will be given priority. Vietnam will have at least 60 million doses of vaccine from AstraZeneka. This year, Vietnam will have 60 million doses of vaccine from AstraZeneka, including 30 million doses ordered by Vietnam and 30 million doses supplied by the international COVAX program. In addition, the Ministry of Health is negotiating with the US, Russia and other providers to buy more vaccines. It is expected that this year the country will have about 110 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines. According to Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long, Vietnam needs 150 million doses of the vaccine this year. By the end of this month, the first batch of AstraZeneka vaccine will arrive in Vietnam, but perhaps the number will be less than the initial plan of 204,000 doses. The Ministry of Health has certified three cold storages of up to -86 degrees Celsius of a private firm to keep the vaccines. 11 priority groups Deputy Health Minister Tran Van Thuan said that the Ministry of Health is joining Vietnamese representative agencies overseas in vaccine-producing countries to negotiate purchasing more vaccines to have enough for the entire population as soon as possible. The people given priority for vaccination will be based on the Law on Infections of Vietnam and recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO). We will prioritize vaccination of health workers, military forces, police officers, people working in quarantine zones, those working in the anti-epidemic front lines, people in epidemic zones, the elderly, and those with underlying medical conditions, said Deputy Minister Thuan. With a limited initial supply, priority will be given to frontline health workers, who are at highest risk of exposure to contracting Covid-19. As the supply of vaccines increases, vaccination will be expanded and provided on demand to enable access to vaccines fairly and transparently. For the vaccine provided by COVAX, the Ministry of Health has approved z plan to receive, preserve, distribute and use Covid-19 vaccines for the 2021-2022 period. This year, COVAX plans to supply Vietnam with more than 4.8 million doses. In the first quarter, Vietnam will receive 1.2-1.7 million doses and the remaining doses will be available in the second quarter. COVAX is co-led by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Gavi and the World Health Organization (WHO), alongside key delivery partner UNICEF. Its aim is to accelerate the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines, and to guarantee fair and equitable access for every country in the world. In the first quarter, the Ministry of Health will give priority to vaccinating 600,000 people, including 500,000 medical workers, and 116,000 people participating in epidemic prevention. In the second quarter, the Ministry of Health will vaccinate about 1.8 million people from five groups, in the following order: - Customs officers - Diplomats - Military forces - Public security forces - Teachers In the second half of the year, COVAX has committed to support vaccines for lower income countries to vaccinate up to 20% of the population. Then, Vietnam will have an additional of about 33 million doses, enough for 16 million people, in the following order: - Teachers - People aged above 65 - Those who work in essential service sectors like aviation, transport, tourism, and others - Those with chronic illnesses Earlier, at a meeting on February 19, the Minister of Health said that the Ministry encouraged domestic units to actively seek sources of vaccine supply. Regard the funding for vaccine purchase, Deputy Minister Tran Van Thuan said that the fund for buying COVAX vaccine will mainly come from the state budget. There are also other legitimate sources, including the support of benefactors and businesses. Provinces that want to buy vaccines for their people have to follow the plans approved by the Government. For the 30 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine, a local organization VNVC will cover it as it was chosen by AstraZeneka as the distributor of AstraZeneka vaccine in Vietnam. However, VNVCs vaccine distribution must comply with the plan of the Ministry of Health. Thuy Hanh Born in 1949 in the Hauts-de-Seine region, Paul Raynal has always been attracted by the graphic arts. He began studying art and earned an arts degree at the University of Aix -Marseille. He finished his university studies with training in screen-printing at the School of Decorative Arts in Paris. On completing his studies, Paul left to teach visual arts in Morocco, obtained a post graduate degree and began to exhibit. Six years later, he returned to France and settled in Paris. Originally inspired by the work of French Cubist painter Fernand Leger (nineteenth - twentieth centuries), he then turned to the New Figuration (art movement of the 50s) and the Pop Art culture of the 60s, which strongly influence his artistic approach. Paul isolates an image that is produced in series, pulls it out of its original media context and combines it with other images for a purely narrative purpose. Inspired by consumer society and the urban world, the artist borrows from advertising, cinema, news or iconic cartoon figures. He likes his paintings and collages to be rooted in a certain cultural reality. According to him, this allows the canvas to reach the viewer, to awaken his thinking and mark his memory. Paul uses both sensually unassailable models such as Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, and the contemporary glamorous icons or worshiped images, symbols of modern consumerism. He revisits them using graphics and brings them together in a ""chaotic and jubilant"" composition. The artist then paints on canvas or paper using silkscreen techniques and acrylic paints. With a wide and spontaneous gesture, he begins arranging areas of colour, which then guide the works organization. Paul sprinkles his works with fragmented texts, magazine titles or famous slogans with vintage accents, giving his collages the appearance of a ""poetic newspaper front page"". His objective is to succeed in establishing a dialogue between the figurative elements and text so that "" from this colourful chaos is born a free and open narrative path which everyone can find a singular pleasure in reading."" The first time we meet the character of William Shakespeare in Neil Gaimans The Sandman series, he is striking a deal with Morpheus, the eponymous sandman, master of dreams and prince of stories. Morpheus agrees to give the young Shakespeare the power to write tales that will persist long after hes gone, but there is a price. There is an undeniable diabolic undertone to the whole arrangement; Kit Marlowe even happens to be in the pub with Shakespeare at the time, and Shakespeare not coincidentally invokes his Dr. Faustus before going to make his own Faustian bargain with Morpheus. This diabolical tone will set the backdrop for the rest of the Shakespeare episodes as the series uses him to interrogate the cost of telling great stories. Im more interested in exploring the relationship not between Shakespeare and the Sandman, but between Gaiman and Shakespeare. Gaiman fits into a long, long tradition of artists who have adapted or been inspired by the Shakespearean canon. These artistic relationships have proven just as necessary for Shakespeares survival as they are for his adapters. As Rita Felski has written, Artworks can only survive and thrive by making friends, creating allies, attracting disciples, inciting attachments, latching on to receptive hosts (584). I admire Felskis thinking here: the sheer variety of relationships she imagines between artistic works and their posterity. Thinking along Felskis lines, I wonder what kind of relationship do Gaiman and Shakespeare have. Are they friends or allies? Is one a parasite on the other? Or perhaps we can understand Gaimans relationship with Shakespeare as his very own kind of deal with the devil? Lets examine four works: Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream and The Tempest, and Gaimans Sandman homages to these plays (Dream Country: A Midsummer Nights Dream, Vol. 2 #19 and The Tempest, Vol. 2 #75, but hereafter referred to by their Sandman seriation numbers19 and 75to differentiate them from Shakespeares originals). I consider the ways Gaiman interacts with Shakespeare, and trace how that interaction has changed over time. #19 was written in 1991 towards the beginning of The Sandmans run while #75 was written in 1996 at the very end of it, corresponding roughly with how Midsummer and Tempest come from the beginning and end of Shakespeares career. In that gap of time, there was a significant shift in both how pop culture generally engaged with Shakespeare and how comics were received as an artistic medium. Gaiman fell neatly at the crossroads of all these changes, and he had matured as a writer during those five years . His relationship with Shakespeare also shifted over time; it may be more accurate to speak of Gaimans deals with the devil. Critics tend to treat The Sandmans two major engagements with Shakespeare as being of a piece, and not without reason. Both #19 and #75 come from a collaboration between Gaiman and the comic artist, Charles Vess, both pay tribute to and recreate Shakespeares plays, and both are chiefly interested in using metafictional resettings of those plays as a way to comment on storytelling and storytellers. Despite their similarities, #19 and #75 employ two fundamentally different formal approaches, leading to their having two distinct takes on their common themes. Whereas #19 inhabits A Midsummer Nights Dream and expands its characters and themes beyond Shakespeares original, #75 is more interested in exploring the life of (a largely fictionalized) Shakespeare and references to The Tempest are primarily used as a way to shed light on that life. In #19, the person of William Shakespeare exists only as a secondary character in the expanding drama of his A Midsummer Nights Dream. In contrast, in #75, The Tempest mainly functions to adorn the hagiography of William Shakespeare as written by Neil Gaiman. In brief, #19s emphasis is in recreating A Midsummer Nights Dream while #75s is in recreating Shakespeare. Photo by ASTERISK on Unsplash A Brief History of Shakespeare Adaptations To understand Gaimans use of Shakespeare in The Sandman, its helpful to look at Shakespeares larger history in comics. Gaiman is, of course, far from the first comics author to engage with Shakespeare. In his essay, Michael P. Jensen, Shakespeare and the Comic situates Gaiman inside a long history of comics adapting, referencing, and otherwise appropriating Shakespeare. Jensen notes that different authors have found themselves using Shakespeare for many different reasons over the course of the mediums history. Starting in the 1940s, comics were seen as a useful pedagogical tool for young students. So many early publishers produced comic adaptations of Shakespeares plays in the interest of helping introduce these iconic texts to young readers who might not yet be sophisticated enough to handle Shakespeares originals (388-390). Beyond these pedagogical exercises, there have also been some notable manga adaptations, which put Shakespeare into meaningful (and sometimes hilarious) dialogue with Japanese culture (396-499). After the 50s, there were increasingly more references to Shakespeare in comics, which sought to use his cultural capital to gain legitimacy for the medium (400-403). If theres anything like a constant in comics adaptations of Shakespeare, its the intrinsic tension between the visual nature of comics as a medium and the pressure to remain faithful to Shakespeares original, complicated language. Comics tend to work best when the verbal element is paired down enough to complement and support the pictures rather than dominating them, like partners in a dance to use Scott McClouds idiom (156). This requires significant curtailment of Shakespeares highly wrought dialogue, which leads to a conflict with our cultural enshrinement of Shakespeare and his language. Historically, comic artists who wanted to adapt Shakespeare needed to navigate some compromise between the Charybdis of the comic medium and the six-headed Scylla of critical demand shrieking for faithfulness to the original text (incidentally, this latter figure is how I tend to picture Harold Bloom). Sometimes this compromise is successful, and sometimes it is not. Jensen notes how comics producers CI suffered when they tried to respond to the critical backlash against comics in the 50s by including more of Shakespeares dialogue in their adaptations: In an effort to please educators, CI used Shakespeares dialogue instead of paraphrasing it This requires a wordiness that uses more panels to show the same incident, and word balloons often cover a third to half of those panels (390). In his study of cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare, Douglas Lanier notes that this extreme emphasis on textual fidelity was largely eroded in the 90s. Visuality became the primary overriding value of cinema at that time, and Lanier notes that in adaptations like Kenneth Branaghs Hamlet and Henry V, Romeo + Juliet, Prosperos Books, and other Shakespeare films of the day, the range and density of pictorial allusiveness, the visual literacy they assume of their target audiences, firmly resituate Shakespeare in the regime of the (moving) image, not that of the word (106). Lanier also argues that this freeing Shakespeare from the word into images led to an explosion of Shakespeare comics adaptations (109-110). It is as if, once freed from the burden of Shakespeares language, comics artists were finally free to explore some of the expressive visual possibilities in combining their medium with Shakespeares stories. Gaimans two Shakespeare adaptations span neatly over this period of transition from word to image. #75, despite including about as many direct quotations from Shakespeare as #19, does indeed embody this new emphasis on visuality. The Sandman fits into this history in many other ways. Still, probably the most notable is that it was the first comic adaptation of Shakespeare to be recognized as a form of serious and prestigious art. #19 became the first comic to win the World Fantasy Award for best short story, netting Gaiman a huge amount of critical acclaim and dramatically increasing his audiences size (Castaldo 104). DC Comics would capitalize on this prestige and use The Sandman as the flagship property for its new imprint, Vertigo Comics, intended to publish more highbrow, literary work. Its fitting that Gaiman would choose to revisit Shakespeare in #75, the finale to this trailblazing series. The difference between #19 and #75 is the difference between Gaiman as a new writer cutting his teeth and making his name by experimenting with the medium, and Gaiman as an established writer looking back at the legacy hes accrued for himself over the years. These perspectives can be read into #19 and #75, and they both explore two related but distinct modes of adapting Shakespeare. A Midsummer Nights Dream The Sandman #19 consists primarily of a fictional restaging of A Midsummer Nights Dream. In the story, Shakespeare has agreed to write two plays for Morpheus as part of their bargain, and the first of these is Midsummer. #19 begins with Shakespeare and his acting company travelling through the countryside to show the new play. Morpheus appears and opens a portal between dimensions and invites the fairy realms denizens to see the new play, which he has commissioned from Shakespeare for them. To the companys surprise, they must premiere Midsummer for Titania, Oberon, Puck, and many other characters on whom the play is based in attendance. The peculiar thing about Gaimans treatment of Midsummer here is that he does not merely create an adaptation of it, but nor can #19 really be described as only a reference, a critique, or even a commentary on Midsummer. Rather, what #19 does is emulate and reproduce Midsummer in a way that extends the logic of the original play, disseminating its meaning, and projecting it into new contexts. Joe Sanders observes that Gaiman, while working on the script for #19, fretted a lot about separating the various layers of the comic. The comics action shows whats happening backstage of the play, the play itself, the play within the play, and the characters in the audience watching and commenting on their doppelgangers on the stage. Gaiman was worried it would be difficult to keep all of these pieces separate (238). Vesss interpretation of Gaimans script does an excellent job of maintaining enough demarcation between these layers so that they remain legible to readers. Still, hes not completely successful, and this is no mere accident. Sanders writes, As these attempts to separate levels in the story show, the levels resist separation. They want to blur into each other, smearing together roles, personalities, and motives, so that we see the same human concerns from different angles, in different shapes (238). The crowning moment of this metafictional slippage comes at the point in the comic when the real Puck knocks out the actor playing him, steals his Puck mask, and starts to play the role of himself (Gaiman, Midsummer 15). As Julia Round notes, this kind of layering not only sustains the plays traditional interpretations and performance legacies but also incorporates them into a broad discussion of the nature of literary creation. In this sense The Sandman transforms Shakespeares works into a metafiction that comments both on his life and on the nature of literary creation and storytelling (97). The one area where I disagree with Round is the implication that Gaiman introduces these metafictional elements when what he really does is extend them. Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream was already deeply metafictional, already composed of layers threatening to slip into each other. Midsummer consists of multiple levels of action: the lovers in the woods, the two rival camps of fairies, the rude mechanicals staging their play, and the Athenian body politic represented by Theseus and Hippolyta. Whereas these layers are ostensibly separate, the plays entire action is predicated on their tendency to slip into each other. Of course, sometimes those levels threaten to slip out and engulf the audience as well; let us not forget that the entire fifth act is dedicated to staging the schlocky play within a play (complete with Mystery Science Theater 3000-style commentary from our players turned audience). We see this as Theseus delivers the metafictional line par excellence, The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst / are no worse if imagination amend them (5.1.208-209). In #19 Gaiman extends this logic of narrative nesting and its metafictional commentary on the nature of dreams and fiction, to include new contexts. Namely, Gaiman extends it to include both the old folkloric origins that inspired Shakespeares Midsummer and include his new comic universe. Even Gaimans choice to have Puck as the boundary-bending trickster most prone to slip between the levels of the story reflects his original role in Midsummer ,where he tied together the disparate action of the fairy realm, the four lovers, and the rude mechanicals staging the play within a play together by way of his interfering mischief. A Midsummers Nights Dream was always layered; Gaiman merely added a couple layers more. Returning to the question of textual fidelity in Shakespeare adaptations, note that #19 uses a huge number of lines from Midsummer copied verbatim. Shakespeare is even named as a collaborator on #19s credits page. Tom Peyer, the assistant editor for Sandman, once made a joke about how Gaiman was assisted with #19 by a hot new comics talent, Will, and that Will might have gone on to one day write the definitive Batman comic had he not been dead for 300 years (qtd. in Round 95). Preserving huge swathes of text from Midsummer is in keeping with the puritanical demand to preserve Shakespeares language. Still, whats so delightful about Gaiman and Vasss work in #19 the text does not slow down the flow of the comic and Gaiman always finds ways to bring new life to the old lines. A great example is towards the end where Gaiman has his Puck repeat the epilogue by his counterpart in the play verbatim. However, whereas in the original Pucks lines was a warm and charming farewell, Gaiman and Vass combine their Pucks sinister nature with a disturbing art style to bring out an altogether more menacing overtone from the words. Now Pucks pleasant goodbye is transformed into a threat by Puck to use the blending of fiction and real as a means for him to escape into the real world (Gaiman, Midsummer 23); if Shakespeares original theme in Midsummer was about how easy it is for dreams to come into reality, then Gaimans addition seems to be that nightmares take the same road. All of this is to say that #19 sustains a very deep, formal engagement with A Midsummer Nights Dream. It extends the plays nesting logic, its metafictional qualities, its use of folklore, and it squeezes new meaning from Shakespeares language by putting it into new contexts. #75 functions in a similar way, but its formal engagement with The Tempest is more limited than #19s relationship with Midsummer, and towards different ends. #75 does not so much extend Tempests formal structures as it uses references to it and its themes to retroactively anoint it as the last great play of the prototypical artist, William Shakespeare. The Tempest The best way to describe the relationship between #19 and #75 is as thematic inversions of each other. Both are interested in using Shakespeares work to explore the relationship between fiction and reality, and both use the plays to comment on Shakespeares life and vice versa. However, in #19 the emphasis is placed on the play while in #75 its squarely on Shakespeares biography. Whereas #19 is dedicated to restaging a theatrical version of Midsummer, #75 rather follows Shakespeare through his daily life as he goes about writing The Tempest. We see Shakespeare interacting with his daughter, his wife, and his friend, Ben Johnson. We watch him go to his favorite pub where some sailors charge the locals money to see the mummified body of an Indian from the new world. Finally, we watch Shakespeare finish writing The Tempest, the second play in his bargain with Morpheus, and we watch him go with Morpheus into the dream world to take a cup of wine and discuss with him what hes been doing all his life. In #19, Shakespeares character is a small role that gets absorbed into the larger action of the play (quite literally: in #19, Shakespeare acts the role of Theseus). In #75, however, his biography dominates the story. Some of The Tempests settings, themes, and language are appropriated as a way to comment on Shakespeares life, but this pales in comparison to the deep level of formal engagement that #19 has with Midsummer. Rather, #75 just sprinkles its pages liberally with quotations from The Tempest, and these are barely legible most of the time as the majority come straight from Shakespeares manuscripts. Perhaps the most telling of the differences between how #19 and #75 use Shakespeare is the way in which they engage with Shakespeares language. As Ive said, #19 includes a significant amount of Midsummers dialogue and engages with it in a non-trivial way wherein Gaimans characters meaningfully interact with Shakespeares language and actively recontextualize it. #75 also includes a huge amount of text from Tempest, but its functioning in a very different way. Whereas #19 presents Shakespeares dialogue through the actors word bubbles, the majority of #75s quotations from Tempest are delivered through handwritten manuscript pages. This, of course, corresponds with #75s setting as the story of Shakespeares writing The Tempest. This stylistic choice leads to a number of interesting consequences for the way #75 engages with Shakespeares language. First, rather paradoxically, this emphasis on writing qua writing is in keeping with Laniers chronology of Shakespeare adaptations becoming increasingly visual during the 90s. By rendering Shakespeares language into ornately scribbled handwriting, Vess and Gaiman effectively transform Shakespeares writing from readable text into visual decoration. Ive always found the manuscript panels very difficult to decipher in my readthroughs of #75 because of the semi-illegibility of the handwriting, the general density of Shakespeares language, and because the quotations have been abstracted out of the plays larger narrative. I still think the manuscript bits look cool and work well as pictures, but I usually just skip over them in order to get on with the story. Even on occasions where The Tempests dialogue is rendered clearly, its not working in the same way as it does in #19. We can still understand #19s use of Midsummers dialogue even if weve never read the play, because #19 does much to preserve and recreate Midsummers original narrative context. By contrast, #75 only provides a very brief summary of The Tempest and sprinkles references to it haphazardly throughout in a way that is unconnected to The Tempests larger structure. Theres even a point where the comic seems to poke a little fun at this: Shakespeare bursts in on his wife to recite some of Prosperos lines following the masque from Act 4 Scene 1one of the few moments in #75 where The Tempests lines are rendered in easily legible word bubbles. Shakespeare gives an impassioned performance of the lines, even seeming to transform into Prospero for one panel. After he finishes his wife responds by telling him to go chop wood so she can finish cooking the goose (Gaiman, The Tempest, 26-27). Anne Hathaways non-sequitur here might seem a bit callous, but its not such an unreasonable response when your husband bursts in on your chores all of a sudden to randomly recite lines from the middle of a play that no one has read. Much like Hathaway here, we find ourselves having these lines flung at us largely out of the plays narrative context. Also like Hathaway, we are encouraged to read them not so much as parts of The Tempest, but as verbal indexes of their authors character; We dont care about these lines have to tell us about Prospero, but only what they have to say about Shakespeare, the great playwright wrestling with his last play. This brings me to my second point: not only is Shakespeares language in #75 more visual than textual, but its also more emblematic than functional. While Shakespeares dialogue in #75 is difficult to read and fails to lock into The Tempests larger context, it still gives us the sense of Shakespeares presence, effectively studding #75 with many little magic packets of Shakespeareness. The Tempest is popularly accepted as the last play Shakespeare wrote by himself, and this reputation made it the ideal subject for Gaimans closing meditation on artistic greatness and grappling with ones legacy. We may have trouble reading the manuscript fragments and we have little chance of making sense of it if we havent already read The Tempest, but that hardly matters when we are not intended to take the text for itself, but rather as the last great lines of the master descending into the veil of his twilight years. This is underlined by the aesthetic of the manuscript paper, we get to see The Tempest as imprinted by the masters own hand (or Vesss facsimile of it, anyway). #75s use of quotations from Tempest functions almost like a signature, or even like magical charms used to summon Shakespeares presence throughout the comic. The ultimate irony is that the Shakespeare we see in the comic is more or less a fiction created by Gaiman out of a collection of personal myths, half-substantiated biographical details, and pure invention. The Tempest was not the last play that Shakespeare had a hand in writing, he likely never saw a mummified Indian in a pub, and what the actual man thought about his life and his lifes work writing is ultimately unknown. Why did Gaiman choose not to recreate The Tempest as he did with Midsummer, and instead use it merely as a fulcrum to open up the details of a fictionalized Shakespeares life? It is probably because at the end of his wildly successful run with The Sandman, Gaiman was simply looking for an avenue to tell the story of what it felt like to be a creator swallowed up by his own success. Annalisa Castaldo observes that by writing the last comic in the series about the end of Shakespeares career, Gaiman effectively invites the reader to compare Gaimans own work with that of Shakespeares (106-107). Castaldo further argues that Gaiman, Shakespeare, and Morpheus ought all to be read as analogous for each other and that The Sandman is largely a commentary on the personal alienation that the great artists and storytellers must suffer in order to deliver their shadow-truths to the world (109). John Pendergast tries to push back significantly against this reading of Gaiman as promoting these myths of Shakespeare as the lonely, suffering genius. While I agree with Pendergasts general resistance to that myth, I think his desire to save Gaiman from it leads him into a bad reading. He cites as evidence of Gaimans resistance to bardolatry the fact that, in #19, Gaiman chose not to present the popular myth that A Midsummers Nights Dream was premiered at an aristocratic wedding (189). This is a weak argument, however, and can be easily countered by simply acknowledging that Gaiman was happy to repeat other Shakespeare myths, such as he had a hand in writing the psalms in the King James Bible (Gaiman, The Tempest 24) or that The Tempest was his last play. Gaiman was clearly willing to either adapt or abandon common myths about Shakespeares life dependent purely on whether they fit the message he was trying to promote; in #75, Gaiman made use of the myth of Shakespeare as the lonely, alienated genius as a way to describe his feelings he had upon finishing The Sandman. In order to help describe the nature of Gaimans two different relationships with Shakespeare, lets return to Lanier. In his article, Lanier observed that after the 90s weakened the association between Shakespeare and text, there was an explosion of international, non-English language adaptations of Shakespeare. He explains that this was because: The shift of gravity from text to image paves the way for Shakespeare to go fully global. Once Shakespearean narrative could be disembedded from Shakespeares words, it became far more readily available for translation into all manner of languages and cultural contexts Shakespeare can be relocalized in new cultural contexts without filmmakers needing to address the politics of adapting the master texts of a former master. (108) This new ability of creators to take on the former master without having to address the politics of adapting the master texts is the primary difference between #19 and #75. When #19 was written, comics were still working to prove their worth as a medium and there was a general cultural imperative to remain faithful to the text of Shakespeare. Hence, Gaiman wrote a comic that engaged very closely with Midsummers language, its themes, its characters, and its formal structures in a bid to demonstrate the competence of comics as an artform. Because Shakespeare at this time was still so closely identified with his text, the only way for Gaiman to access Shakespeare and his cultural capital was to engage very closely with that text. By the time #75 came around, Gaiman had already won himself and his comics real cultural acclaim and Shakespeares association with the exact letter of his plays was significantly weakened. It was now possible for Gaiman to appropriate the aura of Shakespeare without having to hew so closely to the plays themselves, and thus #75 plays rather fast and loose in its engagement with Tempest while still comfortably claiming for itself the person and the legend of Shakespeare. The Shakespeare that #19 deals with is textual while the Shakespeare of #75 is an altogether more amorphous iconic / biographical subject. Throughout this essay, I have shown the different ways that Gaiman has made use of Shakespeare in his work, but I reiterate that this kind of use of one artist by another is never simply a one-way street. While Gaiman benefitted tremendously from using Shakespeare, Shakespeare was also largely revitalized and even changed by the engagement. In #19, Midsummers themes, settings, characters, and language are thrust into new contexts that extend its formal structure and proliferate the plays meanings. In #75, the biography of Shakespeare is retold so as to reaffirm him as no mere man, but the archetypical creative genius struggling under the weight of his own alienation. In both engagements, Shakespeare comes away with more exposure to an audience that likely wouldnt have encountered him outside of high school English class, and his work is translated into some powerful new idioms. To close, lets return to the subject of deals with the devil: did either of Gaimans engagements with Shakespeare have a diabolical aspect? To answer that question, Id like to share an amusing comment I recently saw on an Eric Johnson video on YouTube: I heard Eric Johnson made a deal with the devil. No one knows what Johnson got, but the devil got guitar lessons (Jochem). Much the same is it with Gaiman and Shakespeare. Gaiman was dependent on Shakespeare for material and for a node to engage with the literary canon, but Shakespeare, despite all his genius, is still dependent on Gaiman (along with his many, many other adapters) to help realize and perpetuate his reputation and his work. Shakespeare is recognized as one of historys great writers, but it is only by the work of Gaiman and the many millions like him reading, reacting, reciting, rewriting, referencing, recasting, and recreating Shakespeare that the man that was can be transformed into the Bard. * * * Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd were in mourning, or at least their characters were, on the set of their new Apple TV Plus series The Shrink Next Door. Ferrell, 53, and Rudd, 51, were spotted filming a Jewish funeral scene in Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon. The new series marks the first time Ferrell and Rudd have worked together since their 2013 sequel Anchorman: The Legend Continues. Mourning: Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd were in mourning, or at least their characters were, on the set of their new Apple TV Plus series The Shrink Next Door Ferrell was wearing a classic black suit with a black jacket, white dress shirt, black tie with white polka dots, black pants and black shoes. He also stayed safe amid the COVID-19 pandemic by wearing a black face mask over his mouth and nose. The comedic actor completed his look with a black yarmulke covering his head during the funeral scene. Will's look: Ferrell was wearing a classic black suit with a black jacket, white dress shirt, black tie with white polka dots, black pants and black shoes Rudd was spotted in a similar black suit on the set, with a black suit coat, white shirt, black tie, black pants and black shoes. The Ant-Man star was wearing a white face mask to protect himself from COVID-19 as production continues in Los Angeles. There is no indication how long production is expected to last, or when the show will debut on Apple TV Plus. Paul'l look: Rudd was spotted in a similar black suit on the set, with a black suit coat, white shirt, black tie, black pants and black shoes The Shrink Next Door was first announced back in April, based on the hit Wondery podcast of the same name. The series is described as a dark comedy inspired by true events that detail the bizarre relationship between psychiatrist to the stars Dr. Isaac "Ike" Herschkopf (Paul Rudd), and his longtime patient Martin "Marty" Markowitz (Will Ferrell). Over the course of their relationship, the all-too-charming Ike slowly takes over Marty's life, even moving into Marty's Hamptons home and taking over his family business. Co-stars: The series is described as a dark comedy inspired by true events that detail the bizarre relationship between psychiatrist to the stars Dr. Isaac "Ike" Herschkopf (Paul Rudd), and his longtime patient Martin "Marty" Markowitz (Will Ferrell) The series explores how a seemingly normal doctor-patient dynamic morphs into an unprecedentedly exploitative relationship filled with manipulation, power grabs and dysfunction at its finest. Ferrell and Rudd both starred in the hit 2004 comedy Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and the 2013 sequel Anchorman: The Legend Continues. Ferrell most recently starred in a General Motors commercial that aired during the Super Bowl, promoting GM's new line of electric vehicles (EVs). Comedy: Ferrell and Rudd both starred in the hit 2004 comedy Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and the 2013 sequel Anchorman: The Legend Continues Current Print Subscribers will be prompted to either login to their current site user account or to create a new one. A confirmation email will be sent when a new user account is created, which must be confirmed within three days in order to provide uninterrupted online access through your Print Subscription. Once the email address is confirmed please provide your Account Number to activate your Print Subscription Service. Parents of students attending Boissevain School are questioning the legitimacy of a recent school policy, which involves bolting open select bathroom and change room doors to cut down on vaping and other unwanted behaviour. Advertisement Advertise With Us Parents of students attending Boissevain School are questioning the legitimacy of a recent school policy, which involves bolting open select bathroom and change room doors to cut down on vaping and other unwanted behaviour. Leanne Wiebe is perturbed about the bathroom door policy, especially since Boissevain School administration did not immediately inform her and other parents about the change when it first happened over a year ago, forcing many of them to find out through their children. "I was very upset about it," Wiebe said on Feb. 10. "There was no contact to the parents that this might be happening. There was no warning to the students that this might be happening. It just happened one day, and to me this is a complete violation of a students right to privacy in the school." "Emily," a mother of two who asked that her name be changed to maintain her anonymity, said this policy is especially hard on her pre-teen daughter, whose desire for privacy is very important at this point in her life. "I remember being a young girl and hated changing in front of my friends, never mind knowing that I cant close the door," she said on Feb. 3. "The last thing you need when youre trying to open a tampon or a pad, when youre already mortified that you have your period, is being unable to close the main door." Because of the ensuing backlash from parents, the Boissevain School administration composed a special version of its newsletter, titled "The Bathroom Crisis Edition," to address the issue directly. Within this document which was sent out to parents on Feb. 25, 2020 and recently obtained by the Sun a school official explains that several of the schools washrooms have had their doors latched open for years, "so it never seemed that it would be the kind of an issue that we would need to pre-communicate." The official goes on to write that this decision was made to cut down on the increased instances of vaping and vandalism within these spaces, with bullying also being a growing worry. In response to the concerns about privacy, the document goes on to explain that all the bathrooms or change rooms that were impacted either have a pre-existing "walk-around" wall or an opaque curtain that was hung after this new policy went into effect. However, Wiebe told the Sun that she has seen these "shower curtains" in person and said they dont alleviate her anxiety surrounding this set-up. "Those shower curtains werent staying up and it was not an acceptable solution to the issue," she said. Of course, shortly after this newsletter was sent out, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Manitoba schools to close their doors in March 2020, which put this whole controversy on the back burner temporarily. But when students returned to in-person classes this past fall, Emily revealed that this policy was still in place, with the administration digging in its heels even further by allegedly saying that keeping bathroom doors open is now a major health issue. "It just kind of pisses me off that youre going to use something like COVID to your advantage to make this choice," she said. Throughout this whole process, both parents said that the Boissevain School principal, Stephanie Emberly, has not been receptive to their complaints or the concerns of students. In fact, Emily revealed that she reached out to the Sun in the first place because she hasnt gotten anywhere talking to members of the school administration. While Emberly wouldnt provide an official comment on these matters, she directed the Sun to chat with Turtle Mountain School Division Supt. Tim De Ruyck, who maintains that "that there is no breach of privacy in any circumstance" when it comes to this issue. De Ruyck went on to say that the policy of bolting open select bathroom doors to deter bad behaviour is a "fairly common practice" in other school divisions, and that the TMSD is simply following suit. In Boissevain Schools newsletter to parents in February last year, the notice claims that their sister K-12 school in Killarney had already removed select bathroom doors as well. Similar cases have also popped up in the news across North America these past few years, with St. Joseph High School in Ottawa removing their bathroom doors in January 2019 to curb student vaping. South of the border, schools in both Maryland (Broadneck High School) and Alabama (Wilson High School) instituted similar measures around that same time, sparking concern from parents and students in the process. As for Boissevain School, Emberly indicates that she is going to keep this bathroom door policy in place for the time being, claiming that it has been effective in deterring student vaping. However, Wiebe still thinks this is the wrong approach and believes that there are alternate solutions to this vaping problem like installing speciality smoke detectors that doesnt punish students en masse. "For those few kids who were vaping in the bathrooms, you have sacrificed privacy to every other student then," she said. "To me, thats not fair." The Sun also reached out to the Boissevain School Parent Advisory Council for comment, but didnt not receive a reply by press time. kdarbyson@brandonsun.com Twitter: @KyleDarbyson VIENNA, Va., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Quzara LLC, a leader in cloud security & cybersecurity compliance announced today that they have been selected to join the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA), an ecosystem of independent software vendors and managed security service providers that have integrated their solutions to help customers better defend themselves against cyber threats. Quzara was nominated for their managed security services offerings for Azure Security Center, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Cloud App Security, and Microsoft Azure Sentinel. Quzara LLC Quzara Cybertorch Managed Detection & Response (MDR) Platform has deep integrations for the Microsoft Commercial and Government Clouds. Quzara Cybertorch provides threat protection, investigation, and incident response capabilities for Microsoft 365 Defender & Azure Defender. Using the power of the Microsoft security graph and leveraging Microsoft Azure Sentinel to ingest, investigate, and respond to alerts, Quzara Cybertorch enables customers to meet security and compliance requirements such as FedRAMP and CMMC. "We are honored to be part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association, a community of cybersecurity experts across the industry with a shared goal of improving customer security with valuable and effective solutions." Saif Rahman, Managing Director, Quzara LLC Additionally, Cybertorch uses Azure Sentinel's built-in artificial intelligence along with custom alerts and actions to quickly and accurately identify security threats strengthening the customers security operations. "I am pleased to welcome Quzara LLC to the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association. By including our strategic Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs) in MISA, we hope to further enable collaboration between leading security technology companies, so together, we can better secure and protect our joint customers. MISA members are the cybersecurity industry leaders, unified by the common goal of helping secure our customers by offering their own valuable expertise and making the association more effective as it expands. Mandana Javaheri, Global Director, SCI Partner Development at Microsoft. About Quzara: Quzara LLC is a WOSB, SBA 8(a) certified, and GSA HAC SINS approved Cybersecurity firm based in the Washington D.C Metropolitan area. Quzara provides compliance advisory, security engineering, and managed security services. Quzara also runs US Citizen only/24x7x365 Managed Detection & Response (MDR) Platform on a FedRAMP Authorized service environment on Microsoft Azure Government. Learn more about Quzara LLC at https://www.quzara.com or Quzara Cybertorch at https://www.cybertorch.com . Please send inquiries to [email protected] or call 1-800-218-8528 for a service overview. Media Contact: Heather Zapf 757-358-2403 [email protected]mail4pr.com SOURCE Quzara LLC Related Links http://www.quzara.com MIDDLETOWN Wesleyan University ended its start-of-semester quarantine over the weekend, and university officials said they would consider allowing students to venture into the community in the next two weeks. Students began a 14-day arrival quarantine earlier in the month that concluded on Sunday. In a message to the school community, Dean of Students Rick Culliton thanked students for abiding by the COVID-19 protocols. I know they are challenging, but your participation has been critical in starting off our spring as safely as possible, he wrote. Going forward, students will by allowed to attend in-person classes and can visit others in their same residence hall or program house provided their wear masks and maintain social distance. Dining remains pickup only, and students are only allowed to go off campus for groceries, or to go to pharmacies or medical appointments. The school relaxed some restrictions as students entered the second week of quarantine last week due to low positivity rates. Like some other colleges and universities, Wesleyan has taken a tough approach to student testing. Students are required to schedule their own tests, and those who miss more than three tests will be required to leave campus and take remote classes for the rest of the semester. Culliton said university officials will look at the COVID-19 metrics in Middletown by March 8 to decide whether students will be able to venture out into the city including stores and restaurants. That comes as COVID-19 metrics have been trending downwards in Connecticut for the past several weeks. As of Sunday, Wesleyan reported eight new cases in the past week, with four active cases among students and two among employees. As most colleges and universities are now several weeks into the spring semester, several have reported new cases as well. Western Connecticut State University in Danbury reported 15 new cases last week, with nine isolation beds in use. Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven reported 25 cases last week, with 11 students in isolation on campus. Quinnipiac University in Hamden reported six new cases last Thursday, with 25 active cases. The University of Bridgeport reported five active cases as of Sunday. The University of New Haven in West Haven reported 17 new cases within the last seven days as of Tuesday, with 24 active cases, all involving students. The University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford reported one new case last Friday, a commuter student. Sacred Heart University in Fairfield reported six new cases as of Tuesday, bringing the active caseload to 28 most of them among off-campus students. Central Connecticut State University in New Britain reported two new cases Monday, both commuter students. Connecticut College in New London reported two new cases last week, both involving students. Four cases are active there, evenly split between students and employees. Yale University in New Haven reported 21 new cases in the last seven days as of Sunday, with 233 cases reported since Jan. 1. Eastern Connecticut State University reported three new cases last week, with 22 students in quarantine or isolation. The University of Connecticut in Storrs reported three new cases Tuesday two are among on-campus students, one involving an off-campus student. With a stunning 10-day box-office haul surpassing 4 billion yuan ($619.2 million), the long-awaited Detective Chinatown 3, directed by former actor Chen Sicheng, has become a hot topic among moviegoers since Spring Festival. The franchise follows the adventures of a detective duo comprising an uncle and his nephew, played by actors Wang Baoqiang and Liu Haoran, respectively, as they travel the world looking to solve a series of mysteries, from Bangkok in the first film to New York in the second installment and now Tokyo. The newly released third chapter sees the pair being invited to try and solve a tricky case, in which murder is committed in a locked room, despite several witnesses supposedly watching the door of the room from the outside. The suspect and the victim are both heads of separate Japanese gangs. As the detectives probe more into the case to figure out who the culprit actually is, an unexpected tale about the tragic lives of war orphans and their offspring unfolds. "The movie features anti-war sentiment," Chen, the director, says in a promotional video for the film. He notes that although it's been a long time since the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45), what it left behind still affects the lives of many people. "I just want to show the long-term, harmful impact of wars on us as people," he says. A symposium was held recently to gather scholars, film experts and critics to comment on this latest installment in the series. Wu Yajun, director of the department of film and TV art at the Central Academy of Drama, said at the event that the movie tries to cater to the mass-market, as a variety of age groups will see in it cultural elements with which they are familiar. For instance, the plot revolves around the investigation and solving of a locked-room mystery, a genre which is popular among young fans of crime fiction. The movie also presents a cosplay show where the audience can see characters from Calabash Brothers, Saint Seiya, Chibi Maruko-chan and other Chinese or Japanese animations that are ingrained in the childhood memories of the post-1990s generation, he says. Older audience members, such as those born after 1970, can also discern an air of nostalgia from seeing some iconic Japanese stars in the latest Chinese detective movie, including Tomokazu Miura and Honami Suzuki, known to Chinese fans for their roles in the runaway hit Akai Giwaku, and the 1991 TV series Tokyo Love Story, respectively. "These icons of yesteryear help to recall the beautiful memories of many middle-aged audience members," says Wu, adding that the movie's producers have a clear understanding of the demands of moviegoers. Yin Hong, vice-chairman of China Film Association, pointed out that franchises like The Fast and the Furious, James Bond, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other renowned films have laid the foundation of the thriving Hollywood business and fueled its sustainable development. "Their continuity somehow meets the emotional needs of the audience," he says. As more characters and clues emerge in Detective Chinatown 3, two opposing camps, the good and the evil, have been gradually forming to shape a "cinematic detective universe" in a Chinese style. A larger picture of stories that fits in with people's common values will unfold, he adds. "China's film industry is also exploring the creation of its own film IP as it matures, and the Detective Chinatown franchise is an important step in that exploration," he says, adding that the popularity of the franchise has also been enhanced by a 12-episode online series of the same title, which has gained 7.5 points out of 10 on the review site Douban, considered a barometer of domestic popularity. "I hope the franchise will give a well-rounded portrayal of Chinese detectives, grow into a carrier of the wisdom, lifestyles and values of Chinese people and become a successful IP for Chinese-style detective films." Justice Minister David Lametti rises during question period in the House of Commons on Nov. 19, 2020. (The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld) Victims Rights Advocates Weigh In on Ottawas Plan to Axe Minimum Sentences New legislation introduced by the Liberals would eliminate many minimum sentences for drug offences and some gun-related crimes, a move that has drawn a mixed response from victims rights advocates. Introduced Feb. 18, Bill C-22 seeks to repeal mandatory minimum penalties (MMPs) for 14 Criminal Code offences, including 11 involving firearms. All six minimum penalties in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act would be repealed. The reforms aim to eliminate minimum sentences that are associated with the overrepresentation of indigenous, black, and marginalized Canadians in the criminal justice system, the government says. Aline Vlasceanu, executive director of the Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime, says victims she works with want minimum penalties for serious crimes, but the MMPs that would be eliminated by Bill C-22 arent in that category. These are minor, simple possession offences and not really what we deal with. We deal with victims of serious violent crime, homicide, she said in an interview. Were talking about sexual assault, things like that, that are just extremely serious. And most folks want those kinds of people off the street anyway, so it lines up with public safety regardless. Lozanne Wamback, co-founder of the Canadian Crime Victim Foundation, tells The Epoch Times that the justice system seems to show more sympathy toward criminals than victims. If the sentence is light, then whats going to happen with rehabilitation? So they get a slap on the wrist and theyre let out into the community and then theyre going to probably do it again. So what does that say to the community as well? asked Womback. Wombacks son, Jonathan, sustained permanent brain damage at age 15 over 20 years ago, when he was assaulted by a juvenile with 56 previous charges, along with other young offenders. She believes race has little to do with proper jail sentencing. They often play that card, but I dont think it matters. If youre a criminal, it doesnt matter what the colour of your skin is. Some of the MMPs targeted by Bill C-22 were in accordance with Supreme Court of Canada decisions that removed them on constitutional grounds. This includes the three-year MMP for the first-time offence of unlawfully possessing a loaded or easily loaded prohibited or restricted firearm, and the five-year minimum sentence for repeat offenders. The Supreme Court also struck down the one-year minimum penalty for a repeat offender for possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking. As of Feb. 8, 262 Charter challenges to MMPs were being tracked by Justice Canada. Of all Charter challenges to MMPs tracked by the department in the last decade, 69 percent of challenges to MMPs for drug offences were successful, while 49 percent of those for firearms offences were successful. Bruce Pardy, law professor at Queens University, says Section 718 of the Criminal Code lists many purposes of sentencing, but rehabilitation gets most of the attention. The progressive left is increasingly rejecting the idea that one of the legitimate purposes of sentencing is punishment, he says. When someone says jail doesnt work, they likely mean that it does not work in terms of rehabilitation, rather than that it does not provide punishment for criminal conduct. Section 718.2 (e) mentions that alternatives to jail should be considered with particular attention to the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders. There are tensions in other sections of the Code relevant to sentencing that reflect an ideological conflict, Pardy said. These notions provide cover for adjusting sentencing based upon the background of the accused, including their race and ethnicity, which conflicts with the old idea that the same rules and punishments apply to everyone without regard to identity. By getting rid of minimum sentences, Pardy adds, the Liberals may be seeking to allow identity to become a key factor in sentencing. The government says the proposed legislation would ensure courts can continue to impose tough sentences on violent and serious crimes, but without unfairly impacting black and indigenous offenders. The reforms we are introducing are critical to addressing systemic racism and discrimination in the justice system while keeping Canadians safe, Justice Minister David Lametti said in a press release on Feb. 18. According to Department of Justice statistics, indigenous offenders accounted for 30 percent of federal inmates in 2020. In 20182019, blacks represented 7.2 percent of those in federal jail, but only 3 percent of the Canadian population. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the New York-based Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, said in an interview that higher rates of incarceration are not reflective of systemic racism, but are proportional to the crimes committed. Everything going on in criminal justice reform now is driven by race, said Mac Donald, an outspoken opponent of the claim that the U.S. criminal justice system is pervaded by racial bias. On the day the Liberals introduced Bill C-22, Alberta Justice Minister Kaycee Madu issued a press release noting his concerns with the legislation. While Ottawas new justice bill contains some reasonable measures, I am deeply concerned about the decision to gut tough sentencing provisions for gun crimes, Madu said. Removing tough, mandatory penalties for actual gun crimes undermines the very minority communities that are so often victimized by brazen gun violence. MASON CITY, Iowa - A Mason City man is facing burglary charges after he was observed stealing items from a garage. Joshua Collings, 22, is being held in the Cerro Gordo County Jail on charges of third-degree burglary and attempted burglary. A witness observed Collings entering a garage in the 800 block of N. Jefferson Ave. and was observed leaving the structure. Collings was in possession of a power tool when stopped by officers. The COVID-19 vaccine is rolling out across the country, but medical experts said this is not the time to let our guards down. As of January, there have been more than 25 million cases and 433,000 deaths in the U.S. Now, scientists have uncovered some of the factors that may make one person more likely to spread the virus than another. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. A video of a Myanmar military soldier surfaced online in which he is heard threatening civilians. He showcases his gun in the video and says that if anyone shows any kind of protest, he will shoot them in the head. The Myanmar military is in charge of the government and has declared a one-year-long state of emergency after it seized control of the State on February 1, following a general election. "This is not a toy but a real gun and it's name is MA14. After 8 pm, I am in charge, I will go around and 'shoot' if I see one person outside. I will tear your faces with this shotgun as you can see these are real bullets. If we hit the cans at 8 pm, I will shoot right to the head. Who wants to be the freedom fighter? Who wants to do CDM (Clean Development Mechanism)? You all should meet me", he said in the video. READ | Myanmar Military Continues Internet Blackout Ahead Of Planned Protests Protests continue against military rule On Sunday, large numbers of people protested against the February 1 military coup. According to reports, two protestors were killed on Saturday after security forces opened fire on them. The killing of protestors did not stop people from coming out on the streets on Saturday. Anti-coup protestors in Myanmar's two largest cities paid tribute on Saturday to a young woman who died a day earlier after being shot by police in a rally. READ | Myanmar Coup Protests Grow In Strength As Army Crackdowns On Civil Disobedience Movement What's happening in Myanmar? The Myanmar military overthrew the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi on February 1. The military accused Suu Kyi's government of rigging the November elections. Aung San Suu Kyi's party National League for Democracy (NLD) managed to win 396 of the 476 parliamentary seats of the ones that are not reserved for the military. The military, for reasons they claim concern 'national security' and voter fraud allegations in the recently concluded election in November 2020 have arrested State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi along with other civilian leaders from its National League for Democracy (NLD) party that won with a thumping majority last year. READ | 'No Place For Coups': UN Chief Asks Myanmar Military To Release Civilian Leaders READ | Myanmar Coup: CRPH Appoints A Special Representative And A Special Envoy To UN Technology firm on Wednesday announced setting up of a new segment under brand name Impact which will sell low-cost solutions to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in small towns and cities. India President Akshay Bellare said the new brand is expected to contribute over 10 per cent of overall revenue of India in the next two years. "We have an aspiration of this business going to be a very significant part of our overall Honeywell India business. In the next couple of years I am looking at 10 per cent or higher revenues coming from this business initiative. "I see it even going beyond this. I expect it to be substantially higher than that (10 per cent) in the next five years," Bellare said while unveiling the new brand. Honeywell has been selling products to medium and large business organisations, including automation and other industrial technology solutions. Under the brand Impact, Honeywell will initially sell products like surveillance cameras, fire safety alarms and air conditioner controllers. "The mid-segment business is growing very fast. We need to focus on mid-segment. It was a realisation that unless we focus on it with a completely different approach, we will not be able to design and deliver products for this segment and we will always remain in the upper, mid or premium segment. There is a conscious effort for us to approach small and mid segments with Impact," Bellare said. Honeywell will design, develop and manufacture products for Impact in India and also look at exporting to Middle East and other regions. "We need to first create demand in the local market and then start exporting it to other countries. We will start serving some markets in a very limited way,"Honeywell India Director for Strategy and Marketing Piyush Arora said. He added the company will start selling products from April-June quarter both online and offline and also develop new solutions to meet the requirement of target customers of Impact. The government on Wednesday extended the existing 'disturbed area' status of the state for another six months from February 27 under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA). "As per powers conferred under section 3 of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, the Governor of has declared the entire state of as 'disturbed area' upto 6 (six) months beyond 27/02/2021, unless withdrawn earlier", according to an official release issued here. The release did not cite any particular reason for the extension, but sources said that it was in view of the assembly due in April-May and recovery of arms and ammunitions from some parts of the state. The was imposed in Assam in November 1990 and has been extended every six months since then after a review by the state government. In the North East, the is in force in Assam, Nagaland, Manipur (excluding Imphal Municipal Council Area), Changlang, Longding and Tirap districts of Arunachal Pradesh, and areas falling within the jurisdiction of the eight police stations of districts in Arunachal Pradesh bordering Assam. Civil society groups and rights activists in the region have been demanding withdrawal of the alleged 'draconian' law from the northeastern states where it has been imposed. (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.) Not everyone in West New York has a yard, but for those who do, the town doesnt want to hear about feuds over bamboo. Regulations on how and where bamboo can be grown may soon become law in the North Hudson town, an effort to preempt a problem popping up in other New Jersey municipalities, a spokesman for the town said. The fast-growing invasive plant has given homeowners and their neighbors headaches after spreading rapidly through New Jersey yards. Its a problem West New York hasnt yet dealt with but hopes to avoid by requiring residents to secure new bamboo in above-ground planters. This was purely preemptive as West New York currently doesnt have a bamboo problem, said spokesman J.P. Escobar. The town just wants to avoid the perils of the invasive plant on the infrastructure and residents properties. An ordinance establishing the new regulations was introduced by the Board of Commissioners on Feb. 3. It is scheduled for a final vote on March 3. Not all bamboo varieties grow the same, but the most aggressive can spread more than 10 feet in a year, said Bruce Crawford, state program leader in home and public horticulture at the Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station. Bamboo has always been perceived as evil so thats nothing new, Crawford said. West New Yorks ordinance would require any bamboo to be planted in above-ground vessels. They would also have to be 10 feet from any property lines or rights-of-way. It would not apply to existing bamboo growth unless the plant intrudes onto neighboring public or private property. Violators will face fines of up to $1,000, plus an extra $25 to $100 penalty for each day after the deadline the town sets for the property owner to remedy the issue. The proposed law is similar to other ordinances that have been passed throughout the state, including Hoboken in 2018. In Mahwah, which adopted a bamboo ordinance in late December, Council President David May said the law should have been done years ago, according to NorthJersey.com. The township had begun receiving complaints from residents about their neighbors, May said. Bamboo is considered an invasive species because of its ability to eliminate native plants and alter ecosystems. Unlike many invasive species, though, it cannot spread throughout an entire region without the help of humans, Crawford said. It would need to flower to spread naturally, but that only happens every give or take 100 years, the horticulturalist said. Installing barriers to prevent further growth of existing bamboo requires some equipment to get the barrier about 30 inches underground, he said. Natural barriers like streams or existing manmade partitions like well-built roads curb the plants growth as well, Crawford said. But if its a poorly built driveway, a patio, thats got a base of 4 inches, thats nothing, Crawford said. It will come up through that. Worst comes to worst, chemical herbicides can get rid of bamboo, since its a grass, he added. Its about being neighborly, Crawford said, Thats all. Former Ugandan Lords Resistance Army, or LRA, commander Dominic Ongwen has been convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. Ongwen, the first member of the LRA to appear before the court, was convicted on 61 of the 70 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes he faced. The charges relate to attacks on four camps for internally displaced people in Uganda in 2003 and 2004. He was convicted of several war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, torture, enslavement, conscripting children under fifteen, persecution, forced marriage, rape, and forced pregnancy. This is the first conviction for forced pregnancy by any international criminal tribunal. Ongwen, whose sentence is to be handed down at a later date, could face life imprisonment. The United States welcomes the conviction of Ongwen for war crimes and crimes against humanity . This is a significant step for justice and accountability for atrocities committed by the LRA, said State Department spokesperson Ned Price in a statement. We hope that this verdict brings some measure of peace to the many victims. The United States helped facilitate the voluntary surrender and transfer of Ongwen to the ICC in 2015. While we continue to believe the ICC is in need of significant reform, said Spokesperson Price, we are pleased to see Ongwen brought to justice. We hope Ongwens conviction demonstrates to the people of Uganda that the perpetrators of the crimes committed against them will be held accountable, there will be justice, and the horrible legacy of the LRAs tactics to perpetuate and prolong violence and abuse will be addressed, Spokesperson Price added. The United States continues to offer a reward of up to $5 million for information that leads to the arrest, transfer, or conviction of Joseph Kony, leader of the Lords Resistance Army. Anyone with information about him or his whereabouts can email wcrp@state.gov or send a WhatsApp text message to +1-202-975-5468. State lawmakers across the country, most of them Republicans, are moving aggressively to strip the powers of governors, often Democrats, who have taken on extraordinary authority to limit the spread of the coronavirus for nearly a year. In a kind of rear-guard action, legislatures in more than 30 states are trying to restrict the power of governors to act unilaterally under extended emergencies that have traditionally been declared in brief bursts after floods, tornadoes or similar disasters. Republicans are seeking to harness the widespread fatigue of many Americans toward closed schools, limits on gatherings and mask mandates as a political cudgel to wield against Democrats. Lawmakers frame the issue as one of checks and balances, arguing that governors gained too much authority over too many aspects of peoples lives. These legislators are demanding a say in how long an emergency can last, and insisting that they be consulted on far-reaching orders like closing schools and businesses. But governors respond that a pandemic cannot be fought by committee. They say that the same Republicans who politicized the science of the pandemic last year, following former President Donald J. Trump in waging a new battle in the culture wars, should not be trusted with public health. Vietnam has ramped up its defense capabilities around the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea over the last two years to counter Chinas militarisation and belligerence in the territory that has heightened tensions with rival island nations Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei. Hanois recent installations of the air and coastal defense systems in the Pacific waters is aimed at combatting Chinas intimidation for its expansionist maritime claims and its military aggression off the Paracel and storm Island. A report released by Washington based Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) revealed that the Southeastern Asian nation has advanced defense outposts across its bases in West Reef and Sin Cowe Island to tackle People's Liberation Armys (PLA) superiority in the archipelago, and its disputed claims on 45 islands in its entirety, which provide rich oil and gas deposits. "The work began in 2019 and is concentrated on the roughly 26 acres of reclaimed land built between 2013 and 2016. The reclaimed area on the north side of Sin Cowe, vegetated in images from 2018, was cleared for the construction of new tunnels and coastal fortifications," the AMTI report stated. It added, that to combat China's military superiority, Vietnam initiated the construction of small radar systems across all of its 10 largest islets, including Pearson Reef and Namyit, that are "easy to deploy and conceal", additionally installing radome, housing unknown sensing or communications systems, as well as several administrative buildings. "The coastal defence installations - concrete emplacements often connected to a bunker - are ubiquitous at Vietnam's larger outposts," the report said. [PLA vessel sailing across the South China Sea. Credit: AP] [Vietnam's Spratly Island in the South China Sea. Credit: Twitter/@duandang] Read: 'Destabilising And Aggressive': US Slams China Over Activities In South China Sea Read: France Sends Warships To South China Sea To Participate In Combined Military Exercise "In the past two years, West Reef has seen significant new construction, including several coastal defense installations, administrative buildings, concrete pads and bunkers, and a large tower structure presumably for communications or signals intelligence. The northern and southern tips of the island also saw the construction of a tunnel network similar to those on other Vietnamese features, as well as the planting of vegetation," the report stated, as cited by ANI. Interpreted 'right' to military activities China, over the recent years, has hardened its military bases and enhanced military capabilities to exercise de facto control across the South China Sea, Spratly, and Parcel islands under its evolving maritime strategy. Additionally, the PLA has exclusively enhanced the kinetic weaponry for long-range precision-strike capabilities on island-reef bases, strengthened its tactical, operational, and strategic presence to combat the foreign forces from maneuvering across the nine-dash line, a 12 nautical mile (nm) territorial sea from the Paracel baseline to command an all-domain naval power. While according to the United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Vietnamese vessels could legally navigate the contiguous zone around the Spratlys, recognized as international territorial waters, China claims 200 nm from the end of this territorial sea as its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and interprets to have rights to the military activities in the region. In its recent efforts, in order to make the archipelago more resilient against China, Hanoi has numbered up its military emplacements to ensure it can strike Chinese facilities, according to an AMTI report. The coastal defense installations concrete emplacements often connected to a bunker are ubiquitous at Vietnams larger outposts, the report stated. Stretching across 28.3 hectares (70 acres) of land at West Reef, the island country also erected signal towers and administrative buildings to come at par with Beijing's informationized warfare operational strategies. Read: Japan PM Yoshihide Suga Expresses Concern Over China's Dominance In East, South China Sea Read: India-Vietnam Sign Implementation Agreement On Hydrography During Virtual Meet Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. 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SOURCE Line of Credit.ai About Line of Credit.ai Line of Credit.ai is a Private Equity firm headquartered in Toronto Canada. Line of Credit.ai provides funding in form of non-recourse loans, commercial loans as well as debt/equity funding opportunities. For further information: please visit https://lineofcredit.ai , Email: taimour@lineofcredit.ai, Tel: +1 (416)6297924 The government has approved an emergency ordinance by which Romania grants 20,000 doses of anti-COVID vaccine to the Republic of Moldova, Prime Minister Florin Citu announced. "At today's gov't meeting we have adopted several decisions and ordinances with the most important being the emergency ordinance by which we regulated the help that we are going to give to the Republic of Moldova, immediately, consisting of 20,000 anti-COVID vaccine doses. This is a donation that we are making, the first tranche from a total of 200,000 vaccines that we are going to supply to Moldova. Today we have approved the emergency ordinance and as soon as it's published in the Official Journal we will need a government decision that we are going to approve, online maybe, if needed, in order to make sure that these doses reach Moldova as soon as possible," PM Citu told a press conference at the Victoria Governmental Palace. On Wednesday, Feb. 24, the FDA said that Johnson and Johnson one-dose vaccine works well against severe COVID-19 cases. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also stated that it could reduce the death risks of some patients. Also Read: Organ Transplant Patient Dies Two Months After Receiving COVID-Infected Lungs According to The New York Times' latest report, the FDA posted its analyses online to show their Johnson and Johnson COVID-19 vaccine findings. The health agency stated that it had 72% overall efficacy against the U.S. COVID-19 variant. On the other hand, FDA confirmed that it had 64% overall efficacy against the South African COVID-19 variant. What FDA says regarding the vaccine's efficiency NPR reported that FDA said that Johnson and Johnson COVID-19 vaccine has a favorable safety profile. The agency added that it will likely receive its emergency-use-authorization (EUA) approval since they see no specific safety concerns regarding the vaccine's efficiency. Although Johnson and Johnson one-dose COVID-19 vaccine offered promising results, it is still not that effective compared to other vaccines such as Pfizer, with 95% efficacy, Moderna with 94%, and other coronavirus medicines. Since this is the case, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine developer said that they will further improve their product's performance. "With a J&J vaccine, we'll be able to accelerate the vaccine rollout for our country and for the world," said Dan Barouch, one of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's virologists. For more news updates about Johnson and Johnson, as well as other coronavirus vaccines, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes. Related Article: Google's New COVID-19 Database Offers More Than 160 Million Data Points & Capable of Tracking New Variants and Immunity This article is owned by TechTimes. Written by: Giuliano de Leon. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. NASA said that it will soon develop electric planes to make Earth flights more eco-friendly. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration confirmed that it has partnered with the aviation industry to make its plan a reality. According to Yahoo Finance's latest report, NASA wants to focus on enhancing the modeling tools for future planes that use an EPA system or Electrified Aircraft Propulsion system. The space agency also said that it will soon advance future EAP aircraft design. "The release of this request for proposals represents an important next step as NASA partners with industry to further mature critical EAP technologies through demonstrating integrated megawatt-class powertrain systems in flight," said NASA's Integrated Aviation System Program Director Lee Noble via NASA Gov's previous report. NASA to introduce EAP fleets by 2035 NASA stated that it will introduce its EAP tech into global plane fleets when it is done with its innovation, which will showcase the systems in flight by 2035. As of the moment, the space agency said that it wants to use EAP in smaller airplanes. Also Read: Elon Musk Teases SpaceX SN10 Test Flight After New AFT Flap Installed-Talks About Hypernominalization of Space! These include single-aisle aircraft, turboprops, and regional jets. NASA said that the deadline for proposals of other companies is Apr. 20. On the other hand, the space agency said that its studies revealed that electric planes can greatly reduce the energy use of different aircraft. NASA added that electrification of aircraft propulsion could also decrease nitrogen oxide and carbon emissions. If NASA's new plan becomes successful, it will also have the same technology that most EV manufacturers are currently offering since their cars also produce fewer emissions that contribute to climate change. Why NASA decided to build electric planes The non-profit Air Transport Action Group explained that normal commercial airplanes produced around 900 million tonnes of carbon emissions way back in 2019. This contributed to 2% of all human-induced C02 emissions. NASA's new plan came since more sustainable air travel has become a hot topic for aircraft regulators and manufacturers. The space agency is not the only one that wants to help reduce carbon emissions. Boeing also promised to fly all its aircraft on 100% sustainable fuels by 2030. The company said that it will use animal fats, agricultural waste, and vegetable oil. For more news updates about NASA and its upcoming eco-friendly innovations, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes. Related Article: NASA Perseverance Rover Sends Landing Video, Plus Audio From Mars Finally Released This article is owned by TechTimes. Written by: Giuliano de Leon. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. DETROIT, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Wayne County Community College District will host a conversation between leading national thought leaders Eddie Glaude, Jr. and Isabel Wilkerson discussing the concept of a multiracial democracy on Tuesday, March 30th, 2021 from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. The theme of the conversation between Glaude and Wilkerson is, "Towards New Dialogues of American Multiracial Democracy," and the inaugural virtual event kicks off the Detroit Urban Summit Series, sponsored by the Institute of Social Progress (ISP) and School for Continuing Education at WCCCD. "We are committed to addressing issues of equity and inequality as we continuously work toward progress and change," said WCCCD Chancellor Dr. Curtis L. Ivery. "The Detroit Urban Summit Series provides a platform for the necessary conversations that will enable us to move toward achieving those goals." The Detroit Urban Summit Series will feature national thought leaders and speakers discussing issues such as urban studies, educational equity, public policy and the future of American democracy. Leading scholars and thought leaders in these fields have previously participated in three national Urban Summits, hosted by WCCCD's Institute for Social Progress. This new series of speakers brings the nation's top minds together to seek ways to advance the project that is American Democracy. The event is open to the public at no cost, but registration is required. For more on the virtual event, including registration, please visit www.wcccd.edu . About WCCCD: WCCCD, the largest urban community college in Michigan, is a multi-campus district with six campus locations and specialty campuses, including the Mary Ellen Stempfle University Center, the Heinz C. Prechter Educational and Performing Arts Center, the Michigan Institute for Public Safety Education (MIPSE), the Curtis L. Ivery Health and Wellness Education Center, and the Outdoor Careers Training Center. The District serves nearly 70,000 students annually across 36 cities and townships, and more than 500 square miles. WCCCD is committed to the continued development of new programs, workforce transformation, hosting community-based training sessions, and improving student facilities and services. www.wcccd.edu . SOURCE Wayne County Community College District Related Links http://www.wcccd.edu FOREST CITY, Iowa A Lake Milles man accused of being involved in a truck theft and a kidnapping entered his final guilty plea. Andrew John Aukes, 33, has entered an Alford plea to child endangerment, accessory after the fact, and possession of marijuana in connection with the November 7, 2018, abduction of a woman. Law enforcement said Aukes hid the kidnapper and the woman in an upstairs closet and when officers returned to his home the next day, they found drugs and six minor children there. Kristofer Voigt Kristofer Voigt Aukes sentencing is set for March 17. He previously pleaded guilty to 3rd degree theft for stealing a truck belonging to Advanced Concrete from a rural location east of Thompson on January 27, 2019. Aukes was fined $625 for that and ordered to pay restitution. The accused kidnapper, Kristofer Voigt, pleaded guilty to 3rd degree kidnapping and was given 10 years in prison. STAMFORD A judge upheld a $300,000 bond on a Stamford man accused of trying 59 times to contact a woman with a protective order against him, and then enlisting his fathers help to get her to recant her story to police. Attorney Robert A. Skovgaard downplayed the severity of the accusations faced by his client, Peter Didonato Jr., at Stamford Superior Court on Monday. He argued that there is no indication that Didonato is a threat and that his bond was excessive. Mr. Didonato has the same affliction that many young men have: He thinks his girlfriend should still love him, Skovgaard argued. Judge Gary White denied Skovgaards request to reduce the bond to $50,000, citing safety concerns to the victim in the case and Didonato Jr.s failure to follow court orders in the past. Why should I believe that, if I lower his bond, the protected person wouldnt be in danger, or that this gentleman will start following the courts orders? White said. Didonato Jr. and his father were both arrested in January 2020 on accusations they tampered with a witness who was willing to offer testimony in an ongoing domestic violence case. Didonato Jr. also faced 59 counts of violating a protective order. The arrests came amid an investigation into a complaint of a domestic violence incident that led to Didonato Jr. being charged with second-degree strangulation and first-degree unlawful restraint back in May 2019, according to police. As a result, a Stamford judge issued a protective order barring Didonato Jr. from calling or harassing or stalking the victim of the domestic incident. Despite the protective order, however, Didonato Jr. continued to contact the victim over a four-month period of time, police said. Officer Robert Daly later determined that while in jail, Didonato Jr. called the victim over 59 times and wrote several letters in an attempt to get the victim to recant her statements and drop her case against him, police said. Both Didonantos threatened and harassed the victim on numerous occasions, according to police. The 28-year-old is still being held on $300,000 bond, while his father is free after posting bond. Didonato Jr.s next court date is scheduled for March 5. If you are currently a print subscriber but don't have an online account, select this option. You will need to use your 7 digit subscriber account number (with leading zeros) and your last name (in UPPERCASE). More vaccines are headed to Californias vast Central Valley, an agricultural region whose workers and residents have been hard hit by coronavirus, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday. The multi-county region, which includes the cities of Fresno and Bakersfield, will get significantly more vaccines this week dedicated to farmworkers. The shifting allocation comes as California moves to inoculate others beyond health care employees in other essential jobs, including food and farm workers and teachers. California had been distributing doses based on the estimated number of health care workers and seniors in each county, but is revising its formula as it moves through its planned vaccination tiers. The state also will take 34,000 doses from a pharmacy that wasnt using them quickly enough and distributing them to food and agricultural workers through 11 new mobile clinics in the Central Valley, Newsom said. The clinics will be set up to ensure vaccines get to people who dont have transportation to a mass vaccination site or cant navigate the sign-up portal, including in the small city of Arvin, southeast of Bakersfield, where Newsom spoke. These are the folks that never took a day off, these are the folks that never complained, these are the folks that wake up every single day and (are) there for the rest of us so we can go about our lives, Newsom said. Its not just Californians who benefit, its the folks all across this country and around the world. The governor has made equitable access to the coronavirus a priority, saying the state hasnt done a good enough job reaching low-income people in neighborhoods, largely Black and Latino, hit hard by the pandemic. To better reach those populations, California on Sunday began transitioning to a distribution system run by insurance giant Blue Shield, starting in the Central Valley. All vaccine providers will now have to use a state website called My Turn to schedule vaccination appointments. Newsom acknowledged that invariably there will be bumps along the road. Arvin Mayor Olivia Trujillo appeared to get emotional as she talked about what it will mean for farmworkers to get vaccines in their home community. The fear is going to be taken away (for) them, she said. Statewide, about 70% of all vaccine doses are now going to people age 65 and older, while the remaining 30% are split among educators, emergency service workers and farm and food processing workers, Newsom said. Its not clear which pharmacy the 34,000 extra doses are coming from. Newsom had previously re-allocated more than 170,000 doses from CVS Pharmacy to Kaiser Permanente. Half of the doses went to mass vaccination sites at Cal Poly Pomona and to the Moscone convention center in San Francisco, which paused vaccinations last week after running out of supply. Newsom, a Democrat who is facing the threat of a recall election, spoke forcefully about his commitment to ensuring people in the region get resources needed to fight the virus. Kern and Fresno counties, which have a combined population of nearly 2 million, have higher positivity test rates than that of the state, at 10.5% and nearly 9% respectively, compared with 3.3% in the state overall. Local officials had called on Newsom to visit, including Bakersfield Mayor Karen Goh, a Republican who joined him in Arvin. Newsom described himself as not some guy from San Francisco who doesnt give a damn about the Valley. We dont have to agree on everything but damnit, I care about your kids, your family, your community. Goh thanked Newsom for visiting and noted that residents there have higher rates of health problems that can exacerbate coronavirus treatment, such as asthma and diabetes. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics California Agribusiness Kolkata, Feb 24 : UN agencies, western governments, including the US, and global human rights groups have strongly opposed Malaysia's sudden repatriation of 1,084 Rohingya refugees to Myanmar. This comes at a time when 90 Rohingyas, illegally heading for Malaysia from their camps in Bangladesh, have been stuck in a boat with engine failure off India's Andaman islands. Officials in Andamans say efforts by technicians of the Indian Navy to repair the engines of the Rohingya-laden boat failed on Tuesday. They said on conditions of anonymity that the local administration has to take a call as to whether it would allow the navy to bring the boat to the shore to allow for refit or repair and to feed and provide medical treatment to the famished stranded Rohingyas, most of whom are suffering from acute dehydration and diarohhea. It was so far not clear whether India will just push the boat back into Bangladesh territorial waters or allow it to proceed to their South-east Asian destination. Some officials said the pushback to Bangladesh appeared to be the 'most likely option', for which some diplomatic follow-up in Delhi may be needed. "Allowing the boat to sail towards Southeast Asia does not seem like a good idea, because no country in that region, not even Muslim majority Malaysia or Indonesia, seem willing to take any more Rohingyas," said a senior Indian official, but on condition of anonymity. Meanwhile, the US embassy in Kuala Lumpur said in a statement that it has voiced "serious concern" over the repatriation because the Rohingyas send back to Myanmar could be at "grave risk on return". Other western embassies, like those of the UK and Canada, tried to stop the repatriation as well, citing similar concerns of 'risk on return' to Myanmar which has witnessed a military takeover this month. The UNHCR in a statement said six of the deportees were registered as refugees with the agency and it was "downright unfair" to deport them. The US-based Human Rights Watch has urged the Malaysian government to "urgently investigate" the Immigration Department's return of 1,086 Myanmar nationals to Myanmar in defiance of a court order. On February 23, the Malaysian High Court granted a temporary stay on the proposed deportation of 1,200 Myanmar nationals in custody to allow judicial review. Despite the court order, immigration authorities handed over 1,086 of them to three ships of the Myanmar navy ships on Tuesday. The Human Rights Watch, in a statement, said that Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin should order the Immigration Department to grant the United Nations refugee office, UNHCR, immediate access to everyone in immigration detention to assess and determine whether they are recognized refugees, qualify as refugees, or have grounds to seek asylum. "Malaysia's immigration authorities have shown a blatant disregard both for the basic rights of Myanmar nationals and an order by the Malaysian High Court," said Linda Lakhdhir, Asia legal advisor at Human Rights Watch. "The immigration director-general has put lives at risk by sending people back to a country now ruled again by a military that has a long track record of punishing people for political dissent or their ethnicity." In a letter dated February 11, 2021 "regarding the repatriation for 1,200 undocumented Myanmar nationals," the Myanmar embassy in Kuala Lumpur asked Malaysia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs for "permission" for three navy ships to dock at the Lumut Naval Base in Perak State on February 21 and depart on February 23. Malaysia's director-general of immigration, Khairul Dzaimee Daud, publicly confirmed the arrangement on February 11. On February 15, Daud said that the Myanmar nationals to be returned would not include UNHCR "cardholders" or Rohingya refugees. Human Rights Watch, Fortify Rights and others called for Malaysia to allow UNHCR, which has been denied access to Malaysian immigration detention centers since August 2019, to have access to the detainees to determine whether any were recognized refugees or had grounds to qualify as refugees. That access was never granted. Despite lack of access, Asylum Access and another organisation in their application for judicial review filed on February 22, said they received information indicating that at least three UNHCR cardholders were among those scheduled for return. The groups also received information indicating that at least 17 children with one or more parent in Malaysia were among those scheduled for return. On February 23, the High Court granted review and ordered a halt to the deportations until after a hearing to be held at 10 a.m. on February 24. Malaysia's Immigration Department has provided no information regarding the approximately 114 Myanmar nationals who were not transferred to the custody of the Myanmar navy, but again insisted that it did not send back any Rohingya refugees or asylum seekers. "Given Malaysia's prior claims that no refugee cardholders were among those scheduled for return, the Immigration Department's assurances carry little weight," Lakhdhir said. "Without a full and transparent investigation into these returns and an order permitting UNHCR access to all detainees, refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia are at risk of prolonged detention and return to persecution." As of December 2020, more than 178,000 refugees were registered with UNHCR in Malaysia. More than 86 percent are from Myanmar, including more than 100,000 Rohingya, 22,000 Chin, and 29,000 from other ethnic communities. The total number of refugees in Malaysia, including those from Myanmar, is likely much higher. More than one million ethnic and religious minorities from Myanmar have fled persecution, protracted human rights violations, and mass atrocity crimes by the Myanmar military in the past decade. On February 1, the Myanmar military overthrew the democratically elected government. Since the coup, Myanmar security forces have used "excessive and unnecessary lethal force against peaceful protestors", conducted hundreds of arbitrary arrests, amended laws to strip away rights, and blocked internet access nationwide. The international legal principle of nonrefoulement prohibits countries from returning any person on its territory or under its jurisdiction to a country where they may face persecution, torture, or other serious harm, the rights groups argue. They say although Malaysia is not a party to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, nonrefoulement is recognized as part of customary international law and is binding on all states. Given the Myanmar military's repression of critics of the coup or the junta, as well as the military's record of abuses against ethnic minorities, Malaysia's failure to provide fair asylum procedures or allow UNHCR to make refugee determinations violates the government's international legal obligations, Human Rights Watch said. Director-General Daud did not specify whether the 17 children identified by Asylum Access and one more body, or any other children with a parent in Malaysia, were among those returned to Myanmar. Separating children from their parents would violate Malaysia's obligations under the Convention on Rights of the Child, to which Malaysia is a party. Under that convention, children should not be separated from their parents unless doing so is in the best interests of the child. Human Rights Watch said in their statement that the Malaysian government should thoroughly investigate the actions of the Immigration Department in this case, take appropriate disciplinary or legal action against anyone acting in violation of the court order, and put in place rules and regulations to ensure that any future returns are in full compliance with international law. "Malaysia's Immigration Department should recognize that it cannot operate above the law," Lakhdhir said. "With Myanmar's brutal military back in power, the risks of returning Myanmar nationals fearing return are higher than ever." -- Except for the title, this story has not been edited by Prokerala team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed Romain Grosjean ended his 2020 Formula One season with a terrible crash in Bahrain. After spending time in hospital and a total of 86 days without touching a steering wheel, he drove his first laps in an IndyCar test last Tuesday. Preparing for his debut in the IndyCar series in the United States made him feel right at home, but it takes some getting used to for the Frenchman. Grosjean drove his first laps in an IndyCar last Tuesday at Barber Motorsports Park. In an interview with Motorsport.com, the former Formula One driver talks about his first laps after miraculously escaping death during the Formula One race in Bahrain. Grosjean drove 83 laps in his new car, from the Dale Coyne Racing, and remarked afterwards that he is not yet the old one. "It's not ideal. On my left hand there's still a big blister and taking the gloves off isn't really pleasant, so especially on the left, I'm keeping my glove on a bit more often. This morning in my last run I also had quite a moment of oversteer and that wasn't very pleasant, but I expected that. My hands have not completely recovered and it is still a bit sensitive, but otherwise, it does not bother me. It doesn't hurt during it." Read more Great news: Grosjean to drive first IndyCar test today Grosjean not only has to get used to the physical part of the car Grosjean is not only suffering from discomfort due to his injuries after the crash in Bahrain. The new car also caused some challenges during the test day. Grosjean realises that an IndyCar drives very differently from a Formula One car and that races in this category are very different from those in his old career. "This car has no power steering and that takes some getting used to. After my first run, I already felt my biceps and thought 'Okay, now we're talking!' In Formula 1 you get your speed mainly from aerodynamics, but here it's all about mechanical grip. So I can see why the races are so good here. You really have a good feeling with the car. You can use your driving style a little bit more here, for example, by playing with your brakes and your steering. You can drive several lines in a corner, wherein Formula 1 you are often found to one ideal line. So it's a bit of an adjustment, this drives very different from Formula 1. I still have to work on that." Read more Grosjean on the pain he still feels after his accident Grosjean makes a promising start during IndyCar test days Grosjean will start next season's IndyCar in a relatively small team under the Dale Coyne Racing banner, where he received a warm welcome. Ahead of the upcoming races, the Frenchman is now driving test races so he will be away from home for a while. The helmet his children designed for his last race in F1, he now wears during his IndyCar adventure. His first test laps clocked him less than a second behind the fastest driver Rinus 'Veekay' van Kalmthout, who managed to complete a total of 105 laps. Next week, Grosjean will drive another test at the Laguna Seca circuit. Read more Investigation into Grosjean crash nearing completion; multiple F1 recommendations Asylum-seekers at an informal camp in Matamoros, Mexico. IOM/Alberto Cabezas MATAMOROS, Mexico UN agencies today will begin to prepare individuals and families in the informal camp in Matamoros, Mexico for entry to the United States in line with the U.S. plan to terminate a policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) that forced asylum-seekers to wait for their U.S. immigration hearings in Mexico. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, on Wednesday begins in-person registration of an estimated 750 people who have been living in the informal camp at Matamoros. A first group could be permitted to enter the United States later this week, pending authorization from U.S. authorities, who decide who will enter and when. In addition to registration by UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) is conducting COVID-19 tests to ensure protection of public health while the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) is ensuring humane treatment of children and their families. This action from UN agencies comes at the request of the U.S. and Mexican governments to assist with the re-entry into the United States of an estimated 25,000 people who have active immigration proceedings in the U.S. but were returned to wait in Mexico under the MPP program. Both governments have prioritized the Matamoros camp due to the difficult humanitarian conditions there. Other individuals with active MPP cases residing outside the Matamoros camp will also be processed. Following termination of the MPP program, a first group with active MPP cases entered the United States on February 19 at the San Ysidro port of entry between Tijuana and San Diego. UNHCR, IOM and UNICEF support the termination of the MPP program and the addressing of the grave humanitarian situation of the thousands of people who have been waiting at the United States-Mexico border since as early as 2019. In coordination with U.S. authorities, UNHCR established a website www.conecta.acnur.org through which people with active MPP cases are registering for processing. The website was launched February 19 and registered around 12,000 people in its first three days of operation. The website has been supplemented by alternative registration channels including email, social media and telephone channels. In addition to COVID-19 testing, IOM is also responsible for coordinating the transportation of persons to designated ports of entry. So far, no cases of COVID-19 have been detected. UNICEF offers support for the most vulnerable child protection cases, defending family unity and offering information to families and children. The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Mexican Red Cross together offer free telephone calls to allow asylum-seekers to maintain contact with their families before crossing into the United States. UNHCR, IOM and UNICEF reiterate that, according to the new U.S. government policy, all persons with active cases under the MPP program will be able to enter the country to continue their immigration proceedings and lodge asylum claims. The dates and points of entry to the United States for persons who have already completed registration are determined by the U.S. government. All individuals who qualify will be processed based upon the order determined by the U.S. and not based on the date when they pre-register with UNHCR using the website or the hotline. For more information, please contact: AS the white pirogue drifted in the waters just off Belle Garden in Tobago early yesterday morning, fishermen working nearby knew something was wrong. What they saw in the small vessel stunned them. Fourteen bodies, all of them male, along with a skull and other skeletal remains, were piled inside the vessel as it floated four miles off Belle Garden, police confirmed. The bodies were all clad in tracksuits and green rain jackets and were severely decomposed, police investigators said. While it is lamentable that we are not necessarily represented by our best across board, the leaders who thought they were building bridges by selling their people as cheap commodities now have a chance for soul searching. Is Nigeria actually one; with things tilting in the same direction? There is no doubt that it has been an interesting time in Nigeria. The instability that we can no longer deny is bringing out all shades of people from their closets, and they are now showing the colours that many of us had known them with for a long time. Many seemingly watertight alliances are giving way to the realities of disappointments, self-interests, and divisions. Before delving too deep into the discourse here, let me elucidate upon the operative concept at play. In the wisdom of our elders, no one is completely insane, in so far as they breathe and eat, no matter the kind of food and the circumstances of their abode. Therefore, it is postulated that no one is entirely foolish to the extent that if presented an opportunity, s/he will know what to do with it. Furthermore, the foregoing aphorism explains the intractably selfish disposition of humans, no matter the circumstances in life. Therefore, the depiction of a mad man is premised on the fallacy that he has lost his senses completely. This argument may or may not contradict the current mental health imperatives that are often lumped together with madness in our clime. So, a madman, so to name, will most likely still till the ground towards himself if given a hoe. This is a simple but profound statement about self-preservation as a natural law. Given the above, various narratives across the many divides in our supposedly beloved country need to be properly interrogated. Also, I may not be completely unbiased in interpreting these narratives given this title. Although we all know, presumably, that he who feels it knows it, nevertheless the inherent human tendency is to find justifications for all actions and inactions. Let us start with the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) agitations and the promptness of the groups labelling as a terrorist organisation The swiftness of this labelling should not rob us of the underlying hegemonistic imperatives of the powers that be. While we may all agree that some of the methodologies of operation of IPOB may not pass the test of decency, again, depending on which lenses through which we look at it, we should not be lost, in the least, by the centrality of its messages. In a non-complicated narrative, the agitation responds to real marginalisation that has unwittingly been deployed against a section of Nigeria, the Igbos, second-class citizenship. Many attempts at drawing attention to the blatant injustices in the lack of opportunity, more demanding conditions for gaining admission into schools, and so many other known discriminatory treatments that this group of people have had to suffer since the conclusion of the civil war, have always been dismissed as mere rants. Notwithstanding the abusive and uncouth language usually deployed by the organisations spokesperson, it is unfair to throw this baby of circumstance away with its bathwater. Their grievances are as genuine as they can ever be. Next is the echo from the Middle Belt, ably represented by General T.Y. Danjuma and the irrepressible governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom, who saw beyond the philosophy of the Rural Grazing Area (RUGA) settlements, as more than the preservation of economics, but more as a strategy of occupation. His governments resistance, which attracted both admiration and condemnation, depending on which side of the divide you are, shows that certain things are fundamentally wrong. Why should the promosition of a particular economic interest become a jeopardy to another economic interest, and we pretend that all is well? How does open grazing, which leaves in its trail the destruction of other peoples economic well-being, the loss of lives, and dehumanising rape, become beneficial or promotional of the fraud called national cohesion? Why should the tolerance of others amount to the loss of lives of the nice folks? Benues response has shown that all is not well. The Sunday Igboho phenomenon drew and is still drawing attention to the response that is not dissimilar to what was expressed by the governor of Benue State, as stated above. How can the life of an investor, employing over 200 to work on his farm, be cheaply terminated just because he sought to find out the reason behind the flagrant encroachment of his farmland? The child of circumstance that Igboho has become may not have been necessary if the instruments of justice and fairness had been demonstrated at the very least. This is besides the fact that many of the perpetrators of these heinous atrocities may not be indigenes of Nigeria. Supposing many of the people committing crimes against humanity and reason are illegal aliens, whose only strength is their ethnic affinity with the people in power, that they are overtly supported should be seen beyond the convenience of dismissive conspiracy theories. The case of a governor claiming that all bandits are not criminal came to the fore recently. For the sake of this argument, let us agree with him for a moment. So, in the same logic, how do all members of IPOB become terrorists for asking for their legitimate rights within the space they call their own? Yet, traveling up North of Nigeria has become a nightmare of untold proportion recently. Many lives have been cut short in their prime, and many sources of livelihood completely wiped out. The recurrent dehumanisation of people through kidnap, rape, and other forms of psychological trauma is also beyond comprehension. The so-called bandits, who by definition are considered as criminals, are being courted and negotiated with by some governments in the country, without consideration for the many victims of their nefarious activities. Now, farmers who dare go to their farms, do so in trepidation. They pay these criminals due to allow them sow on their farms and even pay more to harvest the produce. Farmers up North now consider it a great luxury to enjoy the fruits of their labour. Some effects of these untoward activities are that people are left in hunger, agony, and the loss of their dignity, which should not be in normal circumstances. Despite what could be considered a simple situation for even the blind to see, there have been some defences that are not only lame but can be charitably regarded as the products of infertile minds. However, this is unfortunate, given the stature of the people involved in these counter-narratives, as these are seemingly cerebral people in the corridors of power whose opinion we cannot easily dismiss. The case of a governor claiming that all bandits are not criminal came to the fore recently. For the sake of this argument, let us agree with him for a moment. So, in the same logic, how do all members of IPOB become terrorists for asking for their legitimate rights within the space they call their own? How do peaceful protesters become labeled as hoodlums, while AK47 wielding kidnappers and/or herders are our people who we should learn to accommodate? If bandits abduct school children at will, threatening to humiliate as many soldiers as are sent to them, and are still graciously negotiated with by a soldier-cleric, why then are shots fired at a group of youngsters who are peacefully expressing their grievances? The latest incredible statement was by the President of the Senateof Nigeria , who threw tantrums at the entire South-West Governors as being masterminds of the ethnic crisis that has been engulfing the region. Could we then say that governors in North-West are equally behind the unfettered activities of bandits in that zone of the country? Perhaps, since the North-West governors are better negotiators and have better access to the national treasury, their activities at compensating perpetrators of crime are more justified. I am yet to find any altruistic validation of that assertion, however. How do we proceed from here, especially if no one wants to shift base? How soon can we prevent the chicken from coming home to roost in Nigeria? The bottom line is that the North is good at defending its own, no matter how atrocious their activities are. For a balancing of perspectives, El-Rufai, the governor of Kaduna State, though not with the enviable record of not negotiating with terrorists in the past, however still lent a voice of reason that negotiations and payments of ransom to criminals can only be counter-productive and will not work. Nigeria has been long at the cliff, and there is no more assurance that the precipice will not give way sooner than later. While it is lamentable that we are not necessarily represented by our best across board, the leaders who thought they were building bridges by selling their people as cheap commodities now have a chance for soul searching. Is Nigeria actually one; with things tilting in the same direction? Are the South-Western governors complicit in the situation in the region, as indicated by the Senate President, or are they suffering double jeopardy because of their perceived compromises? The answer is not that simple, but in between those lines lies the truth. We have collectively and mistakenly over-empowered the North, and it should not be surprising if they now rub it openly in our face. It may not matter if you consider this a product of ethnic chauvinism; the fact remains that it is unacceptable to continue to perpetuate inequality in the union, while welcoming illegal aliens with royalty. The madman we have given the hoe has decided, and reasonably too, to tilt the ground towards himself. How do we proceed from here, especially if no one wants to shift base? How soon can we prevent the chicken from coming home to roost in Nigeria? Oluwadele Bolutife, a chartered accountant and a public policy and administration scholar, writes from Canada. He can be reached through: bolutife.oluwadele@gmail.com ADVERTISEMENT The chief executive of the aged-care organisation that manages the Brisbane facility where two residents were given incorrect doses of the coronavirus vaccine says the group will report the GP involved to the medical regulator. Lincoln Hopper, the CEO of St Vincents Care Services, which operates the Holy Spirit Nursing Home at Carseldine in Brisbanes north, said the incident had been distressing and concerning for them. It has caused us to question whether some of the clinicians given the job of administering the vaccine have received the appropriate training, Mr Hopper said in Brisbane on Wednesday. Before vaccinations continue at any of our sites, Healthcare Australia or any other provider will need to confirm this training and expertise of the clinicians they have engaged so that an incident like this does not happen again. PARLAMENTUL REPUBLICII MOLDOVA 2010 The Moldovan Parliaments website design was supported by the Democracy Support Programme in Moldova" an initiative financed by the European Union and implemented by the Council of Europe * Username This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. Choose wisely! Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Facebook Inc.s battle with publishers and regulators around the world over how the social-media giant handles news is far from finished after striking an agreement this week with the Australian government to pay for content. The agreement Facebook reached Tuesday with Australias government to restore news content to its platform comes as political leaders elsewhere have pledged to increase scrutiny on tech giants, and as news outlets also plan to amp up pressure on the company to cut deals. The matter also raises questions about which publishers should get paid for news content and how much. Facebooks deal with Australia gives it a path to avoid required payments to publishers for news content, so long as the company works toward reaching agreements with publishers on its own accord. We appreciate the government has created flexibility to move forward making deals with publishers, while giving us 30 days notice before a designation," said Campbell Brown, Facebooks vice president of global news partnerships. If Facebooks negotiations with individual Australian publishers fail to satisfy the government, the company could reimpose its news ban rather than be forced to comply with the new laws terms for setting payments. I am hopeful there will not be a need for that step," Ms. Brown said. The compromise as envisioned would be an alternative to the voluntary payments that Facebook has made to partner" news outlets for its News Tab product for mobile users in the U.S. and other countries. The payments Facebook has made to date arent overly costly for the company, whose ad business drove it to a record $86 billion in revenue last year. News content accounts for only 4% of what people see in their main newsfeed, Facebook said when it announced that it would remove news from the platform in Australia last week. News publishers rely on the audience that Facebook and Alphabet Inc.s Google deliver. In the hours after Facebooks decision to shut off news sharing in Australia, news publishers in the country saw traffic from readers outside Australia decrease by about 20%, data from analytics firm Chartbeat showed. Roughly 36% of Americans get their news from Facebook, according to a fall 2020 study from Pew Research, compared with 23% who get it from Alphabets YouTube and 15% from Twitter. If Facebook were to have to pay for news content on a global basis, the cost would be significant, said Cascend Securities analyst Eric Ross. Margins disappear when you have to all of a sudden pay for things that were free," he said. The brouhaha between Facebook and Australias news providers comes as it and Google face antitrust lawsuits in the U.S. and regulatory scrutiny elsewhere. Australia and other countries seeking payment for news content on behalf of publishers argue that Facebook is abusing its market power by trying to minimize or avoid such expenses. A 2019 Australian report deemed the large platforms threatened upstart social-media companies as well as advertisers and the news industry at large. Both Facebook and Google say that their platforms help journalism. As Facebook itself has noted, publishers world-wide already seek to maximize the attention their work receives on social media without any promise of compensation. One U.S. news publisher said the Facebook dispute in Australia suggested the social-media company has renewed interest in paying publishers after being previously reluctant to do so. Were at a tipping point," said Maribel Perez Wadsworth, publisher of USA Today, the flagship title of Gannett Co., the largest newspaper chain in the U.S. There is finally a much greater appreciation of the value of credible journalism." USA Today participates in the Facebook news tab offering in the U.S. via a licensing agreement. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Facebook. Last week the company reached a three-year deal with Google to license content from its publication and produce new products for Google platforms. Australias efforts could prompt nontraditional media, such as independent journalists who publish articles on writing platforms like Medium, to demand payments, said Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik. The concern is, what if we no longer draw a line at media conglomerates? Thats a pathway Facebook doesnt want to go down," he said. Earlier this month Australian officials talked with their counterparts from Canada, Germany, France and Finland about those countries making similar rules on tech platforms paying news publishers, said Steven Guilbeault, Canadas minister in charge of cultural policy, adding that the coalition of countries could expand over time. Mr. Guilbeault said hes encouraged by developments in Australia, and intends to introduce measures this spring that have the support of its global allies and relevant stakeholders. On Monday Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke with his Australian counterpart, Scott Morrison, about potential cooperation in pursuing regulation of online platforms, according to a summary of the conversation released by Mr. Trudeaus office. "We need to find a solution that is sustainable for news publishers, small and large, digital platforms, and for the health of our democracy," Mr. Guilbeault said. The battle over payments to news outlets has simmeredand at times boiled overin Europe for more than a decade. A new European Union copyright law passed in 2019 and the involvement of antitrust regulators have given news media fresh leverage by, among other things, creating new copyright control for press outlets over the use of their publications on the internet by tech companies, except in the case of very short extracts and hyperlinks. In France, the only country that so far has so far implemented the EU law, Google last November signed licensing agreements for its News Showcase product with several publications, including Le Monde. The agreements came after a French court reaffirmed an order from the countrys antitrust regulator that Google must negotiate. Google said it has signed News Showcase deals with more than 500 publications in a dozen countries, including Germany, the U.K. and Australia. Google last October pledged $1 billion over three years to such licensing deals, but declined to say Tuesday how much of that amount has been spent. We have hundreds of partnerships with news publishers large and small, making us one of the biggest funders of journalism," a Google spokeswoman said. Facebook said that publications posting of their articles to its platform constitutes a license under the French law, and remains unchanged. The company currently only shows links, rather than rich previews, when users post news articles from French publications themselves, unless the publication has given Facebook explicit permission. A Facebook spokesman said the company is in talks in France and Germany to launch its Facebook News product, which pays to license articles from news outlets. The product launched last month in the U.K. with articles from publications including the Guardian. Facebook has previously said it provided hundreds of millions of dollars to publications through its various tools for advertising and subscriptions. This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Pupils wearing facemasks as a precaution against the transmission of the CCP virus arrive to attend Moor End Academy in Huddersfield, northern England on Sept. 11, 2020. (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images) Summer Catch-Up Lessons Planned for Schools in England The British government has announced a 700 million ($989 million) package to help pupils in England catch up on lost learning during the CCP virus pandemic, including provisions for secondary schools to offer students face-to-face lessons during the summer holidays. Schools in England were closed for four months last year during the first CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus lockdown, and have been closed again from the beginning of this year. Pupils will not return to school until March 8 under the governments COVID-19 lockdown exit plan. When schools re-open on 8 March, I want to make sure no child is left behind as a result of the learning they have lost over the past year. A new 700m package of catch-up funding will help teachers support their pupils as they return to the classroom.https://t.co/SX37ryPipF Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) February 24, 2021 Teachers and parents have done a heroic job with home schooling, but we know the classroom is the best place for our children to be, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Wednesday when announcing the new catch-up package. When schools reopen and face-to-face education resumes on March 8, our next priority will be ensuring no child is left behind as a result of the learning they have lost over the past year. This extensive programme of catch-up funding will equip teachers with the tools and resources they need to support their pupils, and give children the opportunities they deserve to learn and fulfil their potential, he said in a statement. The new package is aimed at expanding one-to-one and small group tutoring programmes, supporting disadvantaged children, and offering summer provision for those pupils who need it the most. The government will also offer 200 million ($283 million) to secondary schools to help them deliver face-to-face summer schools. The main opposition Labour party said the government package is inadequate. This is not adequate and will not make up for the learning and time with friends that children have lost, said Kate Green, Labours shadow education secretary. She said the package amounts to just 43p ($0.61) per day for each child and is less than what the government spent on last summers Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which was intended to support pubs and restaurants after the first national lockdown. Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), called the governments package a welcome provision of funding and resources. But he said while summer schools are of value for some pupils, it will be important not to overwhelm students, as recovery cannot happen in a single summer. Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, also welcomed the package. But he expressed frustration that the funding had been salami-sliced to such an extent that it may reduce its effectiveness. He said the total sum of the money should go directly to schools to maximise the amount of money available to providers to spend on the approaches that work best for their pupils. Pakistan on Wednesday announced a $50 million Line of Credit (LoC) for Sri Lanka to help it step up its defence capabilities just days after India offered similar concessional loan facilities for two other Indian Ocean nations, Mauritius and Maldives. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan announced the new defence Line of Credit of $50 million for Sri Lanka, as he concluded his two-day visit to the island nation. A joint statement issued after Khans meetings with Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa noted that both sides had agreed to expand cooperation in the security sector. Pakistans move to step up defence cooperation with Sri Lanka comes at a time when India is trying to counter Chinas bid to spread its geopolitical tentacles in its maritime neighbourhood. New Delhi has been closely monitoring Islamabads bid to reach out to Colombo, as Khan apparently embarked on the visit at the behest of Pakistans iron-brother China. The 10-month-long military stand-off between the Indian Army and the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh prompted India to renew its focus on projecting itself as a net security provider for the Indian Ocean region. With External Affairs Minister S Jaishankars visit to Male and Port Louis from Saturday to Wednesday, India announced new credit lines of $50 million and $100 million for Maldives and Mauritius respectively to help them boost defence capabilities. New Delhi also signed an agreement with the Maldivian Government to develop, support and maintain a harbour at Uthuru Thila Falhu naval base in the island nation. India is also pursuing similar projects in Agalega Island of Mauritius and in Assumption Island in Seychelles, notwithstanding the Chinese Governments bid to scuttle them. Khan on Wednesday also called upon Sri Lanka to take advantage of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) for trade connectivity to Central Asia. Beijing has pledged over $70 billion to invest in the CPEC, which is proposed to link China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region and the port city of Gwadar in southern Pakistan. It is one of the flagship projects of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the cross-continental connectivity project launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping a few years back. New Delhi has been opposing the CPEC, because it passes through Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) areas, which India claims to be a part of its own territory and accuses Pakistan of illegal occupying. India itself was preparing to offer Sri Lanka a $50 million defence Line of Credit last year. But the talks between the two nations over the proposed soft concessional loan came under a shadow after the Sri Lankan Government of late scrapped a tripartite deal it had inked with New Delhi and Tokyo in 2019 to let India and Japan develop and run the East Container Terminal of the Colombo Port. New Delhi suspects that Beijing nudged the government led by Gotabaya and Mahinda Rajapaksa to scrap the deal. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. The Deputy Prime Minister Kelemen Hunor declared on Tuesday night for the private TV broadcaster Realitatea Plus, that he supports a "rational debate" regarding special pensions, but that he cannot agree with retirement at 48-50 years and with pensions larger than the salary, accordng to AGERPRES. "Apart from the populism, we should carry a discussion with rational arguments. What the Romanian state wishes to do with certain professional categories, which are in the public service, have some restrictions, very serious incompatibilities, such as the magistrates, judges and prosecutors, just like the military, regardless of whether we are talking about the army or other structures, such as politicians, MPs, mayors, who during their term are not allowed to do certain things and it is good they aren't. Thusly, we need to have a very serious talk and leave populism aside. We either go with contribution for everyone, including magistrates, or, if the Romanian state decides that there are some areas where after the public service, taking into account all restrictions, you stumble upon a certain capped contribution, then we can talk about that. In the majority of the civilized states this is what is happening," Kelemen Hunor said. In his opinion, there needs to be a threshold for pensions, so that they will not be larger than the salary of the one who is retiring and that neither retirement at 48-50 years old, nor the cumulation of pension with the state salary, are not acceptable. "What happened? We, in 30 years, built an absolutely abnormal society. And here we are all guilty, we who entered politics later, those who were in politics since the beginning," the deputy PM highlighted. He gave an example of a former Securitate (political police in Ceausescu era, ed. n.) officer who had him investigated prior to 1989 and who currently has a pension of 25,000-30,000 RON and also works for a city hall, where he is receiving a salary of 9,000 - 10,000 RON. "I stand for a rational debate. I am trying to be in this coalition, and not only, in Parliament, the voice of reason and to say let us treat all citizens equally," Kelemen Hunor added. The deputy PM reiterated that in 2021 there is a need for a pension reform and a recalculation, so that no pension will be larger than the allowance of the president of Romania. Campaigners have called on the chancellor Rishi Sunak to use the upcoming Budget to stop banks from funding the use of fossil fuels. The call comes as a petition signed by nearly 65,000 members of the public urges the Bank of England to cut off the money pipeline for fossil fuel projects. Mr Sunak is expected to make updates to the Bank of Englands mandate to include a greater focus on measures to tackle the climate crisis as part of announcements due next week. However, campaign groups including 350.org, Positive Money and SumOfUs have said that any update should ensure that the Bank gets its own house in order by ending financial support for fossil fuels. Anna Vickerstaff, from the climate campaign group 350.org, said: British banks are the worst in Europe for funding fossil fuels, with Barclays and HSBC alone pouring more than 145bn into dirty energy projects since the UK signed the Paris Agreement in 2015. Banks operating in the UK are fuelling the climate crisis by financing fossil fuel projects from Argentina to Mozambique, projects that trample on indigenous rights, destroy livelihoods and irreparably damage communities. The Bank of England must cut the flow of finance to fossil fuels and channel funds towards rebuilding an economy that works for people, not polluters. Sign up to The Independent Climate Newsletter for weekly updates on the environmental emergency The campaign groups urged the bank to stop supporting fossil fuels through programmes such as its 20bn corporate bond purchase scheme, which involves the bank buying debt issued by oil majors such as BP and Shell. Campaigners also called on the Bank of England to do more to stop the banks it regulates from pouring money into fossil fuel projects. Hannah Dewhirst, a campaigner at Positive Money, a group advocating for a more fair and sustainable banking system, said: [Mr] Sunak has a huge opportunity in this Budget to make the Bank of England get its act together. By stopping billions flowing to dirty fossil fuels and investing in green job-creating projects instead, we can ensure Britain is leading by example ahead of the critical Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow this November. Jonathan Bartley, co-leader of the Green Party, said the government could show true global leadership by including climate action in the Bank of Englands mandate. If the government wants to be taken seriously as chair of Cop26 then it is vital the chancellor uses next weeks Budget to enable the Bank of England to use the power of finance to make a dramatic step change in our national climate progress, he said. An end to subsidies for fossil fuels is long overdue and the UK will not be taken seriously in its talk of a green recovery unless the Bank is instructed to immediately cease the inclusion of fossil fuel companies in its asset purchase programme. The call comes after a cross-party group of MPs last week said that the Banks remit should be updated to include climate and nature objectives. The Environmental Audit Committee also recommended a range of measures that the government could take to put climate action at the heart of Covid-19 economic recovery plans. These included VAT cuts on green home upgrade schemes and new incentives to encourage faster uptake of electric cars. The MPs also said the government should begin scoping work on a carbon tax as part of its drive to pursue a green recovery from the pandemic. A spokesperson for the treasury said: The UK has some of the most ambitious climate commitments in the world and we recently announced proposals to extend the UKs global leadership in green finance. The governments 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution also sets out 12bn in green investment, including for hydrogen and carbon capture technology, greener homes, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, walking and cycling infrastructure, flood defences and backing offshore wind to power every UK home by 2030. The Independent also approached the Bank of England for comment. French Crepes, Finished With Fire In flambeed crepes Suzette, a boozy orange-butter sauce turns the delicate pancakes into a decadent dessert Crepes Suzette, classically thin French crepes drenched in an orange-butter sauce and flambeed tableside, is one of the most memorable French desserts. The recipe can vary from one cook to another, but in essence consists of delicate crepes in a beurre Suzette, a sauce of sugar, butter, and orange juice and zest. For the finishing touch, the sauce is flambeed with Grand Marnier, or sometimes triple sec or orange Curacao liqueur, into a thick, caramelized syrup. The good news is this elegant dessert is far easier to make than it may sound. In restaurants, the sauce is usually preparedincluding the final flambe performancein front of the guests, but it can just as well be done ahead of time in the comfort of your kitchen. A Happy Accident? As with many popular French dishes, crepes Suzette have a much-disputed origin, with different chefs claiming the invention of the recipe. One of the most popular stories credits it to famed French chef Henri Charpentier in 1895, when he was a 14-year-old assistant waiter working in the kitchens of Monte Carlos Cafe de Paris. According to the story, the invention was a happy accident: He inadvertently flambeed a dessert of cognac-infused crepes to be served to the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII of England. I thought I was ruined, the chef wrote in his memoir, Life a La Henri. The Prince and his friends were waiting. How could I begin all over? I tasted it. It was, I thought, the most delicious melody of sweet flavors I had ever tasted. I still think so. That accident of the flame was precisely what was needed to bring all those various instruments into one harmony of taste. The prince loved the dessert so much (he ate the pancakes with a fork; but he used a spoon to capture the remaining syrup, according to Charpentier) that he encouraged Charpentier to keep the recipe, and named it after his dining guest, a French girl named Suzette. Others claim this dessert was made in honor of actress Suzanne Reichenberg of the Comedie-Francaise, the French national theater, who was known by the nickname of Suzette. In 1897, Suzette appeared on stage as a maid serving flambeed crepes, prepared by Monsieur Joseph, the owner of Paris Le Marivaux restaurant. In 1903, crepes Suzette officially appeared in the first edition of chef Auguste Escoffiers Le Guide Culinaire, a cookbook he developed while working at the Savoy, Ritz, and Carlton hotels starting from the late 1880s. While the origin is still unclear, crepes Suzette is today one of the most classic and beloved French desserts. Tips for Making French Crepes French crepes have a reputation of being intimidating or finicky, as they are slightly trickier to make than American-style pancakes. But with practiceand some guidanceyou will soon realize they are completely achievable. The trick is to master the quick swirling motion necessary to cover the surface of the hot pan with a thin, even layer of batter. Dont fret if this takes several triesa French saying goes, The first crepe is for the dogs. Because no matter how experienced you are in making crepes, the first one almost never comes out right. With that settled, here are a few more tips to master these delicate French wonders. Dont Skimp on the Milk Fat Use whole or 2 percent milk. Avoid low-fat, skim, or lactose-free milk, or you will get flimsy, paper-like crepes that will likely break when you try to fold them. Add the Milk Slowly A common beginners mistake is to add the milk to the batter too quickly, or all at once. Even when using a whisk, you will likely have a hard time blending the milk in and end up with a lumpy batter. Instead, pour the milk in small additions, whisking well between each one until the batter is homogeneous. Use a Strainer Dont worry if your batter still ends up lumpy. Simply pass it through a fine-mesh strainer, and it will come out smooth. Its crucial to have a lump-free batter before starting to cook the crepes. Mix the Butter Into the Batter Whisking some melted butter into your batter will ensure it is blended evenly into the crepes, and you wont need as much butter to grease your pan for cooking. With the butter being incorporated into the crepes themselves, rather than simply forming a film on their surface, your crepes will have a less-greasy feel. Let the Batter Rest Refrigerate the batter for at least an hour, or ideally overnight. The flour in the batter needs time to fully absorb the liquids, which creates tender crepes. Preheat the Pan Make sure your pan is hot enough. Another French saying goes, there are no crepes without smoke, meaning that your pan needs to be hot before pouring your batter on. Perfect the Swirl To make each crepe, pour the batter into the middle of the pan while rolling your wrist in a circular motion, so the batter spreads evenly across the bottom. If your batter is too thick to swirl in an even layer, simply whisk in a few more tablespoons of milk to thin it out. Dont stress too much if there are little holes; you can patch them up with dots of additional batter. To Prepare in Advance If youre making your crepes in advance, prepare a plate covered with a clean dishcloth. Each time you finish cooking a crepe, place it on the plate and cover it with the cloth. Pile your crepes on the plate, and make sure the cloth is always wrapped around the plate, nice and tight, so the steam is trapped inside. This technique will make sure your crepes are evenly cooked and stay very tender until ready to use. Crepes Suzette This recipe will give you 12 to 14 crepes, and enough beurre Suzette to make 4 crepes Suzette. If you wish to serve 8 or 12 crepes Suzette, do not double or triple the beurre Suzette recipe to make all at the same time, or you will end up with too big of a flame when flambeing the crepes. Instead, prepare the beurre Suzette for the first 4 crepes, flambe them right before serving, and repeat the recipe for the next 4 crepes, and so on. You can make the crepes up to 3 days ahead and keep them well-wrapped at room temperature before using. Makes 12 to 14 crepes For the Crepes 2 cups all-purpose flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sugar 4 large eggs, at room temperature 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted 2 cups whole milk (or 2 percent) 1 tablespoon rum (dark or light) 1 tablespoon butter, for greasing the pan For the Beurre Suzette 1/4 cup sugar 1 tablespoon finely grated orange zest 6 tablespoons unsalted butter 1/3 cup fresh orange juice 1/4 cup Grand Marnier To Serve 1 orange Vanilla ice cream (optional) Prepare the batter: Sift together the flour, salt, and sugar into a large mixing bowl and dig a well in the middle. Break the eggs into the well, all at once, and mix with a wooden spoon until incorporated. The batter will have the consistency of a thick paste. Mix the flour, salt, and sugar with the eggs into a thick, paste-like batter. (Audrey Le Goff) In a separate bowl, mix together the melted butter, milk, and rum. Slowly pour the milk mixture into the batter in small additions, mixing well between each addition; start by mixing with the wooden spoon, and switch to a whisk once the batter becomes loose enough. At the end, the batter should become a velvety smooth, lump-free liquid, with the consistency of heavy cream. If the batter is lumpy, pass it through a fine-mesh sieve. Add the milk in small additions, stirring well with a wooden spoon. (Audrey Le Goff) Continue adding the milk, switching to a whisk, until the batter has the consistency of heavy cream. (Audrey Le Goff) Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour or, ideally, overnight. Cook the crepes: Heat a 12-inch nonstick pan over medium heat. Add about 1/2 tablespoon butter and swirl to coat the pan. When the pan is smoking hot and the butter is sizzling, add 1/3 cup of batter and swirl your pan quickly to completely cover the bottom. Cook until micro-bubbles form on top, and the underside of the crepe is golden brownthis should take 2 to 3 minutes (if it takes longer, your pan is not hot enough). Carefully loosen the edge of the crepe with a rubber spatula, and then with your fingertips, carefully peel off the crepe and quickly flip it. Cook for an additional minute on the other side. Slide the crepe out of the pan onto a plate and cover tightly with a clean dishcloth. Repeat with the remaining batter, piling each finished crepe onto the plate and covering with the dishcloth. You can re-grease your pan with another 1/2 tablespoon of butter halfway through, before making the 6th crepe. Make the orange supremes: Use a very sharp knife to slice off the top and bottom of the orange. Stand the orange upright on a cutting board. Starting from the top of the orange to the bottom, carve out a strip of the peel and white pith of the orange, curving the knife to follow the shape of the fruit. Repeat all the way around the orange. Once all the peel and pith is removed, delicately slice along the inside of the membranes and lift out the orange supremes. Reserve the supremes on a plate. Melt the sugar with the orange zest. (Audrey Le Goff) Make the beurre Suzette: Heat a 12-inch nonstick pan over medium heat. Add the sugar and orange zest, and let it cook without touching until the sugar melts and turns to a clear syrup; do not let it caramelize. Carefully add the orange juice and butter; the liquid will bubble and the sugar will crystalize. Stir continuously until the butter melts and the sugar turns liquid again. Carefully add the orange juice and butter. (Audrey Le Goff) Place one crepe in the pan and let it soak up some of the sauce. Fold it in half and then in half again, so it forms a triangle. Repeat with three additional crepes. Arrange the crepes in the sauce. (Audrey Le Goff) To flambe the crepes: Right before serving, pour 1/3 cup of Grand Marnier onto the crepes and turn the heat to medium-high. Bring the liquid to a light boil, 1 to 2 minutes. Remove the pan from the burner and set it on a heat-proof surface. Immediately, using a long match or barbecue lighter and carefully approaching from the edge of the pannot the middlehold a flame within 1 inch of the liquid, until it lights on fire. The flame will last 5 to 10 seconds and die when all the alcohol has burned off. Serve immediately with orange supremesand vanilla ice cream, if desired. (Audrey Le Goff) Serve the crepes immediately, topped with orange supremes and (optional) a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Audrey Le Goff is a French food writer, photographer, and creator of the food blog, Pardon Your French, where she shares recipes and stories from her beloved home country, France. She is the author of the cookbook Rustic French Cooking Made Easy (2019). She currently lives in Niagara, Canada. Follow her on Instagram @pardonyourfrench VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / Silver Elephant Mining Corp. ("Silver Elephant" or "the Company") (TSX:ELEF)(OTCQX:SILEF)(Frankfurt:1P2N) announces that the first ever drill hole at its Sunawayo project has intercepted 137 meters of mineralization grading 36 g/t silver, starting from 0 meters-depth. The Company acquired the Sunawayo project in central Bolivia in September 2020. The second drill hole intercepted 31 meters of mineralization grading 44 g/t silver, 0.39% lead, and 0.48% zinc from 1 meter-depth. Both SWD001 and SWD002 (240 meters to the southeast of the former) feature near-uniform silver assays throughout the reported intervals, indicating that silver mineralization is highly likely to continue deeper. The composited results for SWD001 and SWD002 are tabulated below: Hole ID From To Length (m) Ag (g/t) Pb % Zn % AgEq* (g/t) SWD001 0.0 137.0 137.0 36 0.12 0.02 39 SWD002 1.0 32.0 31.0 44 0.39 0.48 67 incl 21.0 30.0 9.0 48 0.73 1.57 112 Reported widths are intercepted core lengths and not true widths, as relationships with intercepted structures and contacts vary. Based on core-angle measurements, true widths range from 80% to 85% of reported core length. (*)Silver equivalent calculation uses a silver price of $25.00/oz, a zinc price of $1.10/lb., and a lead price of $0.80/lb. (all USD) and assumes a 100% metallurgical recovery. Silver equivalent values can be calculated using the following formula: AgEq = Ag g/t + (Zn % x 30.1644 ) + (Pb % x 21.9377). Silver Elephant's maiden 2,300 meter, 15-hole program at the southeastern half of Sunawayo started in December 2020 and is due for completion in March 2021. Three holes (SWD001, SWD002, SWD003) tested the Pujiuni target (500 meters x 250 meters), with the remaining 12 holes testing the Caballo Uma target which is over 8 times larger in size than Pujiuni. Of the 950 surface samples taken in late 2020 along an 8 km stretch concentrating on aforementioned targets, 87% returned silver assays of 1 g/t to 458 g/t silver. All 11 of the high-grade silver samples (over 100g/t silver) were taken from Caballo Uma. So far, 50% of Sunawayo (17 km span totaling 59.5 km2) has been mapped and sampled while geophysical surveys are scheduled to commence in Q2 2021. Joaquin Merino, Company's VP South American Operation states: "Sunawayo is receiving the lion's share of attention from Silver Elephant's 9 full-time geologists aiming to maximize the Company's silver resources. Positive assay results from the remaining drill holes (SWD003 to SWD015) would confirm a major silver discovery in the making at Sunawayo." The Company is financed by leading Canadian investment banks and offers elephant-sized silver exposure via its Sunawayo, Pulacayo, and Triunfo projects. Visit www.silverelef.com for detailed Sunawayo maps. Qualified Person The technical contents of this news release have been prepared under the supervision of Danniel Oosterman, VP Exploration. Mr. Oosterman is not independent of the Company in that he is employed by it. Mr. Oosterman is a qualified person ("QP") as defined by the guidelines in NI 43-101. Quality Assurance and Quality Control Silver Elephant adopts industry-recognized best practices in its implementation of QA/QC methods. A geochemical standard control sample and a blank sample are inserted into the sample stream at every 20th sample. Duplicates are taken at every 40th sample. Standards and duplicates, including lab duplicates and standards, are analyzed using scatterplots. Samples are shipped to ALS Global Laboratories in Ururo, Bolivia for preparation. They are then shipped for analysis to ALS Global laboratories in Lima, Peru. Samples are analyzed using Intermediate Level Four Acid Digestion. Silver overlimits ("ore grade") are analyzed using fire assay with a gravimetric finish. ALS Laboratories sample management system meets all the requirements of the International Standards ISO/IEC 17025:2017 and ISO 9001:2015. All ALS geochemical hub laboratories are accredited to ISO/IEC 17025:2017 for specific analytical procedures. All samples are taken from HQ-diameter core were split in half by a diamond-blade masonry saw. One half of the core is submitted for laboratory analysis and the other half is preserved for reference at the Company's secured core facility. All the core is geotechnically analyzed and photographed and then logged by geologists prior to sampling. About Silver Elephant Silver Elephant Mining Corp. is a premier mining and exploration company of energy metals. Further information on Silver Elephant can be found at www.silverelef.com. SILVER ELEPHANT MINING CORP. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD "John Lee" Executive Chairman For more information about Silver Elephant, please contact Investor Relations: +1.604.569.3661 ext. 101 ir@silverelef.com www.silverelef.com Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Toronto Stock Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this news release, including statements which may contain words such as "expects", "anticipates", "intends", "plans", "believes", "estimates", or similar expressions, and statements related to matters which are not historical facts are forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Such forward-looking statements, which reflect management's expectations regarding Company's future growth, results of operations, performance, and business prospects and opportunities, are based on certain factors and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors should be considered carefully, and readers should not place undue reliance on the Company's forward-looking statements. The Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements contained in this news release and the documents incorporated by reference herein are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct. In addition, although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events, or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events, or results not to be as anticipated, estimated, or intended. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly release any future revisions to forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this news or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as expressly required by law. SOURCE: Silver Elephant Mining Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631511/Silver-Elephants-Greenfield-Silver-Discovery-Sunawayos-SWD001-Drills-137-meters-of-36-gt-Silver-Starting-from-0-meters-Depth-SWD002-Drills-31m-of-67-gt-AgEq Former Vice President Mike Pence is keeping lines open with Donald Trump even after the Jan. 6th MAGA riot, and is talking up the former president in conversations with conservative lawmakers. Trump and Pence spoke by phone last week, as a series of top Republicans make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the former president. It is believed to be their second call since Trump left office Jan. 20th, two weeks after a Capitol riot where MAGA supporters swarmed the Capitol, with some captured on video chanting 'Hang Mike Pence!' as he prepared to preside over the counting of the Electoral College votes that made Joe Biden president. Former Vice President Mike Pence speaks after arriving back in his hometown of Columbus, Ind., Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021. He has been speaking to former President Donald Trump by phone Pence spoke this week to members of the Republican Study Committee, a group of House GOP lawmakers he once chaired when he served in the House. Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, who now chairs the group, said the Jan. 6 riot didn't come up. 'He spoke very favorably about his relationship with President Trump,' Banks told CNN. He added: 'I got the sense they speak often and maintain the same personal friendship and relationship now that they have for four years.' Trump plans to return to the political stage Sunday for an appearance at the CPAC conservative political conference. He twice called in to Fox News this week, to discuss the death of Rush Limbaugh and to talk about Tiger Woods following Woods' car crash in Los Angeles. President Donald Trump has spoken with his former vice president, while meeting with two GOP congressional leaders at Mar-a-Lago Demonstrators drag and capture a Metropolitan Police officer, while attempting to enter the U.S. Capitol building, during a protest in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021 Donald Trump's speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference next Sunday will be used to cement his place as the GOP's 'presumptive 2024 nominee', a Monday report revealed Trump had demanded Pence send electoral votes back to states that certified Joe Biden's win when Pence presided over the electoral count Pence, too, called in to CNN to discuss Limbaugh. Pence himself is a former conservative radio host. Pence is not set to address CPAC, although a source said he informed the group weeks ago that Pence and his family 'decided to keep a low profile in the first half of the year.' He looks forward to attending future conferences. Trump spokesman Jason Miller denied a Washington Examiner report Monday that Trump told friends he would skip the event if Pence were speaking. 'This story is patently false, and these 'anonymously sourced' attacks designed to create division are why people distrust the media,' Miller tweeted. 'No such demand or request was ever made by President Trump, and in fact, President Trump and Vice President Pence had a great call last week!' CNN previously reported the two men have spoken twice. Trump on Monday issued a 'Statement on the Continuing Political Persecution of President Donald J. Trump' following a Supreme Court ruling on his tax returns being sought by the district attorney in Manhattan. In it, he once again asserted that he won the election despite trailing Biden by 7 million votes. 'I will fight on, just as I have, for the last five years (even before I was successfully elected), despite all of the election crimes that were committed against me. We will win!' GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah told the New York Times's DealBook DC Policy Project on Tuesday Trump would win 'in a landslide' if he sought his party's nomination in 2024. 'I don't know if he'll run in 2024 or not, but if he does, I'm pretty sure he will win the nomination,' Romney said. 'I look at the polls, and the polls show that among the names being floated as potential contenders in 2024, if you put President Trump in there among Republicans, he wins in a landslide,' he said. The timing of Trump's Jan. 6th tweet about Pence became a subject of Trump's Senate impeachment trial. Trump tweeted at 2:26 pm: 'Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!' Security footage revealed that just two minutes earlier, security had ushered Pence out of the Senate chamber for his protection amid the riot. But a call to a senator who told Trump about Pence came afterward. This is the moment an 11-month-old girl showed off her advanced climbing skills - and her mother coolly stood back and let her get on with it. Mother Sara Ferreira, 35, was at home in Caldas Novas, Goias, Brazil, when she caught her baby daughter Laura propping a stepladder against wall and making her way to the top. Sara filmed the infant, wearing only a nappy, slowly placing her feet on each step before hoisting her body up and looking out of the window. Sara Ferreira, 35, watches her 11-month-old daughter Laura make her way up the stepladder at her home in Caldas Novas in Goias, Brazil After reaching the top, Laura swings her legs over to the other side and looks out of the window before looking behind her and giving her mother a smile. Sara said some people viewing the video had criticised her for being so laid back. However, she said this was not the first time her daughter had scaled the stepladder. She told local media: 'That was the third time she did the same thing. She did it twice under my supervision and I saw she was capable of doing it so I said I'd film it to show her dad.' Laura's mother went on to say that her daughter started crawling at just four months old and could stand at five months. She added: 'Many people criticised my calm. At no point did I want to put my daughter at risk. Babies are capable. I let them explore with responsibility.' Laura positions the stepladder against the wall and then begins to climb up each step The 11-month-old swings her legs over to the other side and looks out of the window Ms Ferreira (pictured with her husband Tiago and Laura) said the little girl began crawling when she was just four months old Paediatrician Watson Bizarro told local media: 'Her motor capacity is impressive. For the child's development, it's a positive sign. However, it's still necessary to be very careful because of her age.' He added: 'Unlike parents who stimulate their children with mobile phones, doing activities such as walking and climbing helps the child a lot.' Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Chinas Potential Rare-Earths Restrictions a Menace for Canada Canadas miners look for significant federal assistance in creating supply chain News Analysis What emerged as a potential weapon the Chinese regime could employ during the heights of the trade tensions with the Trump administration appears to have more teeth now as reports of looking into restricting exports of rare-earth elements and their refining technology have surfaced. China accounts for over 60 percent of global production and Canada could suffer if it also became a target for any cutbacks on exports. We are, in many respects, beholden to China for a number of these rare-earths products, and the impacts of not being able to access them could be both direct and indirect, Brendan Marshall, vice president for economic and northern affairs with the Mining Association of Canada (MAC), told The Epoch Times. Rare earths are 17 metals that arent actually rare, but typically occur in ore deposits in concentrations too low to be mined efficiently. Many modern products depend on them as key inputs, like cellphones, computers, medical devices, and electric vehicles. Rare earths are also used in F-35 fighter jets. China is the hub for the technology used in refining and purifying the raw materials, and Chinese officials view that as a more powerful weapon for protecting Beijings interests than the actual minerals, according to Bloomberg. Canada has been identified as part of the solution to unlock the sticky situation allied democracies face with China. Canada has 4050 percent of the worlds known rare-earth reserves, but it is not currently mining any. Marshall, an expert in critical minerals, said progress is ongoing between Canada and the United States following the memorandum of understanding signed in December 2019 on a joint action plan to develop a North American supply chain and break up Chinas stranglehold on rare earths. He says Canada has a significant opportunity to be a reliable supplier of these minerals both in raw form and in value-added manufacturing for its allies. Theres a recognition of our own domestic vulnerability and the benefits of being able to support supply in greater volume of these minerals within our own borders, Marshall said. As things currently stand, Marshall says its not viable in Canada to develop rare-earth deposits without the appropriate supports and outlets in place. Government support is needed at all points on the value chain until it can operate independently. We need tools that will allow these projects to move forward, Marshall said. You have to prove you can produce what the customer wants, said Donald S. Bubar, president and CEO of Avalon Advanced Minerals Inc., in his testimony at the parliamentary Standing Committee on Natural Resources on Feb. 22. On the rare-earth side, I think theres still a role the federal government could play here, creating some more of these demonstration-scale pilot facilities for aspiring new producers to get access to be able to prove their processes, he said. The lack of refining capacity in Canada relates to the culture of the mining industry in that it has typically focused on making the concentrates and shipping them elsewhere for value added, Bubar said. Its never been a part of the culture, [within] the industry in Canada, to create the value added. Its still a learning curve for everyone to climb on, he added. Pegging China Back China plays by a different set of rulesenvironmental, labour, and safetyand Jamie Deith, CEO of Eagle Graphite Corp., hopes Canadas allies could ensure greater accountability for those factors. Basically levelling the playing field to China that lacks regulatory structure [while turning it] into a cost advantage at the expense of our own industry, he told parliamentarians. Bubar suggested that the feds create a stockpile of critical minerals similar to what the United States has done. This way, Canada could attract some manufacturing businesses and help develop downstream capabilities, and that China used this strategy to justify investment in mining and processing facilities, he noted. Chinas been way ahead of us on this all along recognizing that they have to build out the downstream to justify the development of the upstream side, Bubar said. Janice Zinck, director of Green Mining Innovation Processing at Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), said on an Ask NRCan podcast that theres a lack of supply of rare earths and that some countries have already started stockpiling them. Many jurisdictions such as the U.S., the European Union, and Japan have declared the rare earths as a critical elementones that require protection and in need of more of a strategic approach in terms of securing that supply, she said. NRCan and Saskatchewan released a joint statement on Feb. 22 announcing the establishment of a task team that is developing a critical minerals inventory to build an integrated, all-Canadian critical minerals and battery value chain. A federal judge has ruled that California can enact its net neutrality law, paving the way for the enforcement of rules banning internet service providers from blocking, speeding up or slowing down select websites or services. The decision heralds the latest victory for the state after the Department of Justice dropped its legal challenge against the legislation, which has been in limbo since 2018. Several telecoms trade groups had filed their own lawsuit to block the net neutrality law. But in the latest hearing held on Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge John Mendez expressed concern over the lack of industry regulation in the wake of the FCC's repeal of net neutrality rules that applied nationwide, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The Judge rejected a push for an injunction from the trade groups and ruled that the law would be allowed to take effect. The four trade groups behind the lawsuit the American Cable Association, CTIA, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and USTelecom said they would review the court's opinion before deciding how to proceed. "A state-by-state approach to Internet regulation will confuse consumers and deter innovation, just as the importance of broadband for all has never been more apparent," they said in a joint statement. "We agree with the Court that a piecemeal approach is untenable and that Congress should codify rules for an open Internet." California State Senator Scott Weiner, who authored the bill, described the decision as "a major win for net neutrality." Meanwhile, a Biden-led FCC is expected to take up net neutrality protections on the federal level. The acting chair of the FCC, Jessica Rosenworcel, recently re-emphasized her support for the principles, but added that the agency (currently split 2-2 along party lines) is "conscious of the composition of the commission" as it mulls the best way forward. Biden is expected to nominate a third Democratic member to the Commission soon. Xind-media.nl scored 40 Social Media Impact. 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Twitter account link TWITTER PAGE LINK NOT FOUND Armenian News - NEWS.am presents the daily digest of Armenia-related top news as of 24.02.2021: Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan made a statement that arouses disputes in both Armenian and Russian media and political circles. He comments on the statement of third President Serzh Sargsyan, as the latter was surprised why the Russia-made Iskander ballistic missile in Armenias arsenal was not fired on the third or fourth day of the recent war. Thus, Pashinyan noted that Iskander missiles "did not explode" or "exploded by 10%." According to Russian and Armenian experts, Pashinyan questioned the efficiency of Russia-made weapons. In turn, Russian State Duma MP Dmitry Sablin told RIA Novosti that Nikol Pashinyan's statement about the allegedly unexploded missiles attests to his lack of knowledge. Meanwhile, popular Russian military journalist Yuri Kotenok, who also was reporting during the Noagno-Karabakh war, noted that this Pashinyan's statement is dictated by his US partners since the United States has also been seeking to discredit Russian weapons and push them away off the international weapons' market. Daily protests for the resignation of PM Nikol Pashinyan still continue in Yerevan. A group of young people held a protest near Yerevan State University (YSU) on Wednesday. They marched to the university building and entered it chanting, "Nikol, the traitor" and "Armenia without Nikol". They urge the students and faculty to join their fight. The protesters also entered the Armenian State University of Economics (ASUE). By the way, during the 2018 velvet revolution led by Pashinyan - and which resulted in the resignation of ex-president Serzh Sargsyan and Pashinyan's reign in power - the protesters also entered the university as well as public radio buildings. Nowadays, people are protesting in Yerevan - but now for the current government's resignation - even amid the violence that police are using towards the protesters. On Tuesday, police forcibly apprehended 57 citizens standing near the government's building doing no provocations. Some opposition representatives have been injured. Snipers have been spotted on the rooftop of the building. Twitter has blocked 373 accounts associated with Russia, Armenia, and Iran for violating platform manipulation policies, Reuters reported. The company said it has blocked 35 accounts linked to Armenia as they were reportedly created with the aim of targeting Azerbaijan. The company has also blocked 238 accounts linked to Iran due to various violations of its policies and 100 accounts linked to Russia - for reinforcing narratives that undermine faith in NATO and target the US and the EU. The notorious trial of the criminal case on the armed group ended in Yerevan on Wednesday after lasting for nearly 3.5 years. In protest of the then authorities, the armed group who called themselves Sasna Tsrer took over a police patrol regiment building in Yerevan in 2016 and held hostages, but later surrendered in July. Three police officers, however, were killed during the two-week standoff. Criminal charges were brought against 32 people in connection with this incident and related developments. Thus, verdicts in the criminal case on ten members of the armed group were announced Wednesday in Yerevan. Accordingly, defendant Armen Bilyan was acquitted of the murder of a police officer. However, he was found guilty of several other acts and sentenced to four years and eleven months in prison. Other defendants Pavlik Manukyan, Varuzhan Avetisyan, and Smbat Barseghyan were sentenced to 10, 9.6, and 25 years in prison, respectively. Georgia has facilitated Russian, Armenian, and Ukrainian citizens entry into the country, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili said. "Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus have been added to the list of countries whose citizens will be able to enter Georgia as of March 1with a PCR test," Garibashvili noted. Until now, tourists could enter Georgia only if they have a certificate of full vaccination. 273 COVID-19 new cases were reported in Armenia, and the total number of these cases has reached 170,945 in the country. Also, four more deaths from COVID-19 were reported, making the respective total 3,175 cases. The number of people who have recovered is 162,517, and the number of people currently being treated is 4,445. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company AP/Shutterstock Kenneth Rasmuson A convicted sex offender pleaded no contest to the murders of two California boys who were killed in the 1980s. Kenneth Rasmuson, 59, is expected to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the sexual assault and killings of Jeffrey Vargo, 6, and six-year-old Miguel Antero. "This was a heinous offense and this individual will not share the sidewalk with the rest of us," Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon said in a statement. Vargo had left his home in Anaheim Hills to check out a fireworks stand when he kidnapped while riding his bicycle July 2, 1981. His body was found the following day by construction workers at a Pomona construction site. Antero was abducted on April 8, 1986, and his remains were found the same day in a canyon in Agoura Hills. He had been stabbed multiple times, according to the Orange County Register. Rasmuson became a suspect in the slayings after his DNA connected him to the crimes. He was arrested in Idaho. At a news conference outside the Pomona courthouse, Jeffrey's mother Connie Vargo said she was glad that Rasmuson will spend the rest of his life behind bars. "We are finally putting an end to this," she said, according to the Register. "I just wanted it to be over." Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up forPEOPLE's free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases. Miguel's cousin Iris Land said she was "thankful to get some closure," the Register reports. "It's been nearly six years since they arrested the son of a b----." According to KCAL9, Rasmuson previously served time behind bars for sexually assaulting two other boys, 11 and 3. Gaborone (Botswana) 23 February 2021 (SPS)- The President of the Republic of Botswana, Dr. Mokgweetsi E.K. Masisi, addressed a letter Tuesday to the President of the Saharawi Republic, Mr. Brahim Ghali, congratulating him and the Saharawi people on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the proclamation of the Saharawi Republic. I wish to extend you, and through you, to the government and people of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, our warm congratulations on your countrys 45th Anniversary of Independence, President Masisi wrote. He further commended the Saharawi President and government for the resilience and relentless efforts towards addressing the question of the Saharawi Republic, considering that he remains convinced that through your visionary leadership and the solidarity of like-minded nations such as Botswana, a sustainable solution will be forged. President Masisi also seized the opportunity to reaffirm my personal commitment, and that of my government, to continue working with you and your government to further strengthen the bonds of friendship and fruitful cooperation that subsist between our two countries, the letter reads. He reiterated the commitment and continued support of my government to the people of the Saharawi Republic in the pursuit for their inalienable right to self-determination, wishing the people of the Saharawi Republic health and safety during this challenging time of the COVID-19 Pandemic. (SPS) 090/500/60 (SPS) DALLAS, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Pieces, a healthcare AI company, recently convened a virtual roundtable to discuss how rising rates of mental health and substance misuse issues in the wake of COVID-19 are impacting individuals and communities. The group of leaders from community organizations not only shared their perspectives about how COVID-19 has exacerbated these problems, which already had a devastating impact on millions of Americans, but also on how to strengthen community connections to develop a more comprehensive support network for those who are suffering. The virtual roundtable participants included: Joe Powell , President and CEO of Association of Persons Affected by Addiction (APAA), Dallas, TX , President and CEO of Association of Persons Affected by Addiction (APAA), Stephen Williams , Director, Houston Health Department (HHD) , Director, Houston Health Department (HHD) Jeremy Lampier , Director at Pathways to Hope Reentry Program, Tarrant County, TX , Director at Pathways to Hope Reentry Program, Ruben Amarasingham , MD, Founder and CEO, Pieces According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll , 53 percent of U.S. adults reported that their mental health had been negatively impacted by the virus. Census Bureau data in December also showed that U.S. mental health problems have reached all-time highs, with almost half of Americans now showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression. Substance misuse data is also alarming with federal statistics confirming long-standing worries that overdose deaths would rise sharply during the pandemic and that more people are now dying of drug overdoses than at any other point in U.S. history. "While our attention has been focused on COVID-19, we've had major public health problems raging in other critical areas in the background," said Amarasingham. "We must take these worsening trends as a call-to-action to refocus and double-down on our efforts to support these community organizations and most importantly to connect these stakeholders to strategize, innovate and unite to combat this crisis together." Key takeaways from the roundtable included: The public must be properly educated about these illnesses to reduce the stigma and prompt much-needed societal change: "The public should know that they likely have family members or friends who have experienced addiction or mental illnesses and may have suffered in silence," said Powell. "They should also know that there are millions of people in long-term recovery from these challenges, and that recovery is possible for anyone." Williams agrees and emphasizes the need to eliminate misconceptions. "People should understand that mental illness and substance use are diseases and have a disease process akin to physical illnesses. This acknowledgement would help to eliminate the idea that persons with mental or substance use challenges should help themselves whereas individuals with physical illnesses warrant professional treatment and support," he said. Lampier cites how this stigma can cause individuals to be hesitant to accept help. "Most people don't want to think they have mental health concerns. They're afraid of what they might lose once society labels them someone with mental health issues. For example, the right to own a gun, jobs, possibly their children if they seem as unfit, etc. They feel a lot of their freedoms will be lost when they are documented as someone with these issues. Nobody wants to be labeled." Partnerships and learning are key to both short-term change and longer-term systematic transformation: "We must learn how to build a recovery-oriented system of care that is culturally congruent to the population and community they are in," said Powell. "We must learn about the community, the stakeholders and all of the businesses that support health, wellness, and recovery." Lampier agrees. "It really does take a village. There are different experts in each field for a reason. Community organizations have to be willing to collaborate to meet just the basic needs of clients. Some organizations try to be a 'one-stop-shop' and when they do that they spread their organization too thin and cannot give the best care to the clients," he said. Williams shared that Houston has established collaborations and networks around substance misuse service delivery. "The HHD partners with its local mental health authority, mental health and recovery providers, and advocacy groups to increase help-seeking behaviors and reduce the stigma. Our partners work together around referrals and services, shared staff trainings and joint funding opportunities. We collaborate with public, private and non-profit sectors to increase the provision of services for individuals in need," he said. Embracing technology can help organizations to further their missions: According to Amarasingham, community organizations may not be aware of the full array of services available for clients in their areas because they don't have an easily accessible directory. He stresses that having a centralized platform to serve as a resource for referrals and managing clients can lead to more impactful, sustainable, and effective care. Williams cites that technology has empowered the HHD to better communicate with those they serve to promote important health messages and reminders. "We also use technology to capture data on key performance indicators to demonstrate the effectiveness of our programming and measure metrics that matter to those they serve," he said. Lastly, Amarasingham stresses that communities need more resources to support this important work. "I'm excited by new federal efforts to fund initiatives that address these critical issues. With better public policy, purpose-built technology, and more funding we can get a hold of this crisis and create a lasting impact for this generation and generations to come," he said. To learn more, please download the executive briefing here or register for the upcoming webinar with the panel. About Pieces Pieces, Inc. is a healthcare artificial intelligence and technology company that connects health systems and the community to address clinical and social determinants of health through community networks and intelligent software and services. Our solution interprets patient information in real-time and connects health systems and community-based organizations to support healthier outcomes, both inside and outside of hospital walls. Using cloud-based artificial intelligence with clinically-based natural language processing (NLP) and physician-supervised machine learning, our tools help streamline clinician workflows and improve patient outcomes. Combined, our solutions, Pieces Predict and Pieces Connect, create a comprehensive and unique solution for connected community health. Media Contact: Todd Stein 510-417-0612 [email protected] SOURCE Pieces, Inc. AstraZeneca vaccine arrives in Vietnam The first batch of Covid-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca arrived in Vietnam on February 24, several days sooner than expected. The first batches of Covid-19 vaccine arrive in Vietnam on February 24 Deputy Minister of Health, Truong Quoc Cuong said that 117,600 doses of Covid-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca arrived at the Tan Son Nhat International Airport in HCM City on Wednesday morning. "This vaccine has been used in over 50 countries and has high degrees of efficacy of over 80%," he said. The vaccine was given permission to be imported into Vietnam on February 1 based on the trial results as of January 28. AstraZeneca Vietnam was asked to work with the Department of Science and Training to carry out a clinical trial in Vietnam, and follow import and distribution regulations. Le Viet Dung, deputy head of Drug Administration of Vietnam signed the official document to import the first 204,000 doses into Vietnam. AstraZeneca Vietnam must take all responsibility about the origin and quality of the vaccine. VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / LeanLife Health Inc. (CSE:LLP)(FSE:LL1)(OTC PINK:LHLNF) (the "Company") is pleased to announce it has ordered a further ten containers of Mike Tyson branded energy drink from FoodCare Group in anticipation of strong sales in the United States. The Company intends to have a starting inventory of approximately one million cans of product that will be put into retail and online channels. LeanLife has increased its outlook and is priming for an aggressive sales rollout in the next few months. Stan Lis, CEO and Director of LeanLife, states "Given the positive response from major American retailers, the Company felt compelled to order these additional ten containers. We have projected ordering a minimum of 140 containers for the American market in 2021. We aim to also enter additional markets as the year progresses." Further, prior to selling through major retailers, suppliers are now required to ERP software with EDI ('Electronic Data Interchange') connections, allowing purchase orders and invoices to seamlessly be exchanged. The Company has just purchased Microsoft Dynamics GP, and will be commissioning this software and for it to go live this quarter in order to meet the requirements of major US national retailers. Microsoft Dynamics GP is a mid-market business ERP software package that has localizations for additional countries in South America, UK and Ireland, the Middle East, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Gavin Mah, Chief Operating Officer of the Company, states, "The major benefits of EDI are speed, accuracy, and demand. EDI can speed up transaction processing over 50%, while reducing the chance of human error. Large retailers insist on EDI to make product purchases" About LeanLife Health and its Brand Positioning in the Marketplace FoodCare Group, the supplier and manufacturer of Iron Energy, by Mike Tyson, is a market leader in Poland's energy drink market and is a leading brand in the Middle East. We believe, Iron Energy will also appeal to North American consumers and will quickly gain retail and consumer acceptance and trial. The annual market value of the combined U.S. and Canadian energy drink markets is estimated at over $14 billion (USD). Red Bull is the market leader, followed by Monster and Bang. While Red Bull pursues a premium price strategy; LeanLife will be aggressively priced and shelf positioned, appealing to a broad consumer base. According to Allied Market Research, the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of the global energy drink market is 7.2% while the US market is positioned to grow to over $86 billion (USD) by 2026. Consumer preference and the increased occasions for energy drink consumption are growing the category. Iron Energy will participate in this phenomenon through category and organic growth. The broad base of young adult consumers will be attracted to this unique product alternative. Iron Energy is enjoying great success in the European market. We believe Iron Energy will offer a similar success story in North America due to its compelling brand attributes, product taste and energy benefits. For more information, please contact: Stan Lis, CEO 604-764-0518 SLis@LeanLifeHealth.com Forward Looking Information Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. The Company 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 the Company's control including, the Company's ability to compete with large food companies; sales of any potential products developed will be profitable; the ability to complete sales under the sales agreement. 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, the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information. THE CSE HAS NEITHER APPROVED NOR DISAPPROVED THE INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE. SOURCE: LeanLIfe Health Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631601/LeanLife-Orders-Ten-Additional-Containers-of-Mike-Tyson-Branded-Iron-Energy-Drink New Delhi, Feb 24 : The Kisan Congress on Wednesday announced that it will lay siege to the Union Agriculture Ministry here on February 26 on the completion of three months of the farmers protest over the three farm bills in the national capital region. Addressing the media, Kisan Congress Vice Chairman Surendra Solanki said: "On the completion of the three months of the farmers protest at several borders of the national capital over three farm laws, the Kisan Congress will 'gherao' (surround) Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar." He also said that the Kisan Congress activists will also protest at the Union Agriculture Ministry as part of "efforts will be made to awaken the BJP government which has been ignoring the issues of farmers for last three months". Solanki said that the Kisan Congress has been standing with the farmers since day 1 at Delhi-Haryana Tikri border. "We have been standing with farmers since day one. Wer have also held many rallies against anti-farmer laws," he said. Solanki said that till date more than 200 farmers have lost their lives while protesting against the three farm laws. He said that the farmer movement is being supported not only in the country but also abroad. "The youth of the country are also understanding the problems being faced by the farmers. And the Kisan Congress will continue to fight for the rights and demands of farmers," he said. He also said that till the time Narendra Modi government does not withdraw these three laws, the Kisan Congress will stand in solidarity with farmers atthe borders of the national capital. Earlier, 11 round of talks of farmers with the government have remained inconclusive. Trov Mobility's context-based insurance program ensures that vehicles on Zoom EV's car sharing platform are fully covered, cost-effectively reducing risk for owners and renters. LONDON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Trov ( www.trov.com ), a global leader in embedded insurance technology, today announces the continuation of the company's expansion in the United Kingdom through a new partnership with Zoom EV ( www.zoom-ev.com ), a British e-mobility brand with an innovative approach to car sharing. Zoom EV's new car share service will allow auto-dealer networks across the U.K. to showcase the benefits of EV ownership while also facilitating the monetisation of idle vehicles. Their technology enables dealerships to offer their inventory to interested, vetted individuals on a variable-term basis. With the help of Trov's Mobility Insurance Platform powering a bespoke context-based commercial insurance program, managed by UK Insurance Business Solutions under the NIG brand within the Direct Line Group, vehicles on the Zoom EV car share platform are fully covered while in use - reducing the risk for both the dealership and the renter while also providing cost-efficient coverage. "The team at Zoom EV are experienced, innovative and truly inspiring and we're delighted to match those qualities by developing a unique insurance programme that links the Trov technology with the ZoomEV operational platform. At the same time, it has been a pleasure to support them as they do their part to fight climate change by encouraging EV use and adoption across the nation" comments Ed Axon, Global Head of BD at Trov. "We're excited to work with Trov to offer insurance to our EV sharing community. By reducing the risk for our users, we're eliminating yet another barrier to entry for EV adoption and taking a step towards a more sustainable future for travel in the UK," said Greg Fairbotham, CEO & Founder of Zoom EV. ABOUT TROV: Trov is a global leader in embedded insurance for digital brands and new mobility services. Its Mobility Insurance Platform combines powerful software with flexible insurance products to solve the complex risk management challenges facing companies in emerging mobility and gig work. In addition to ZoomEV, Trov's customers include global enterprises such as Waymo (an Alphabet Company), PSA NA Car Sharing Solutions, Hyundai, Lloyds Banking Group, Sompo, and Suncorp, amongst many others. Founded in 2012 by serial tech entrepreneur Scott Walchek, Trov is backed by leading VC's and strategic partners. The company is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and maintains offices in New York and London. For more information, please visit our website . ABOUT ZOOM EV: Zoom EV are a leading electric mobility-as-a-service provider in the UK with services that enable customers to get access to the essential services they need to run EVs and save money and enabling the flexible use of electric vehicles via their platform. Zoom EV's customers include Jardine Motors Group, Hendy Group, Lloyds Banking Group, and Cinch amongst others. Zoom EV was founded by Greg Fairbotham in 2018 to play a leading role in the drive towards electric vehicles and the flexible use of such vehicles. The company also contributes 10% of its profits towards initiatives that remove plastics from our oceans. For media inquiries please contact Deliberate PR James Lloyd james@deliberate-pr.com Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1122445/Trov_Logo_Logo.jpg In his maiden speech to Federal Parliament in 2010, Craig Kelly said: Over the years I have packed my head into many a rugby scrum, although no doubt some could say maybe one scrum too many. Nice try, perhaps, but those scrums could never explain the many embarrassments that Kelly would go on to cause the Liberal Party. Craig Kelly during a doorstop interview at Parliament House on Wednesday. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen Yet Kelly, who resigned from the party this week to sit on the crossbench for the remainder of this term, is largely a creation of Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison. Both Liberal leaders stepped in to ensure his preselection when he had lost the support of his electorate conference, and both let him speak out. Kelly is the member for Hughes, named after Billy Hughes, who served as prime minister but is perhaps better known as Kelly noted in his maiden speech for changing parties no fewer than five times during his 58-year parliamentary career. I doubt Kelly will rise to be prime minister and, as recent polling in Hughes would suggest, I suspect his defection will bring about the end of his parliamentary career. Russia has made territorial gains against the SDF, recapturing areas near Ayn Issa in northeastern Syria, writes Asharq Al-Awsat. On Monday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that it documented the killing of three members of the Suleiman Shah faction, loyal to Turkey, in addition to the wounding of about seven others. It stated that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) targeted a group with a thermal missile on the axis of the village of al-Mushairfa in the Ayn Issa region in the northern countryside of the Raqqa Governorate. According to the Observatory, the incident took place after a bombing by the Turkish forces, targeting the villages of Hoshan and Abu Surra close to the Hassakeh-Aleppo road, in addition to targeting an SDF truck, which was working on fortifying some sites in the vicinity of the silos located east of Ayn Issa. This took place as part of mounting pressure from the Russian field forces on the SDF to withdraw from areas near Ayn Issa in northeastern Syria, in conjunction with talks about opening a humanitarian crossing between areas controlled by fighting factions in Idleb and the regime areas in northwestern Syria. Ayn Issa The Observatory said that the Russian forces that withdrew from the Ayn Issa base yesterday, returned to it on Monday at dawn, as eight armored vehicles with Russian forces re-entered the base and raised the Russian flag. According to the Observatory, no information has been released as of yet about the gains Russia must have achieved so it was able to return to the base so quickly. Usually, the Russians follow a plan to subvert the SDF and threaten to withdraw every time, especially from Ayn Issa, which has aroused the resentment of the people of the regions, who feared a possible Turkish military operation. Alsharq Al-Awsat spoke with opposition sources in Idleb, who said that civilians in the governorate have no intention of going to the areas under the control of the regime, which are witnessing a state of lawlessness and the domination of local and foreign Iranian militias over civilians, as well as the deterioration of livelihoods and the economy, in addition to the lack of many means and components of a decent life such as bread, fuel, gas, food, and medicine. The sources explained that these reasons have pushed large numbers of civilians to leave the regime-held areas towards opposition areas in northern and western Syria, through smuggling along demarcation lines between the opposition and the regime, to escape hunger, poverty, and high prices. 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. Panaji, Feb 24 : The Congress in Goa on Wednesday protested the notification of dates for the upcoming Budget Session from March 24 to April 12, saying the dates clashed with the Holy Week observed by the state's Catholic community, which coincides with the period of fasting known as Lent. "Shocking to note @BJP4Goa Govt has scheduled 12 Days Goa Assembly Session coinciding with Holy Week of Christians commencing on Sunday 28th March to Sunday 4th April with one of the working day on Maundy Thursday. Goa is known for Communal Harmony & Respecting all Religions," Digambar Kamat tweeted soon after the state dates were notified by the state Legislature secretariat. Kamat, who is Leader of Opposition in the Goa Legislative Assembly and former chief minister of the state also said that he would raise the issue at the business advisory committee meeting of the state legislative assembly, which finalises business scheduled to be held in an assembly session. The 46-day-long holy period of Lent starts with the Carnival and ends a day before Easter Sunday and is marked by fasting by Catholics, who account for nearly 26 per cent of the state's population. IRISH Water should be asked to fund works to solve the historic problem of surface water on Church St in Clara. This will be a big project and it should not come out of our funding, pointed out Cllr Frank Moran when he highlighted the issue at last week's meeting of Tullamore Municipal District. He claimed that Irish Water were reverting the issue to Offaly County Council as the former's remit in the area had changed. Senior Engineer Mary Hussey said more information was needed on the surface water issue. But she stressed that her argument would be that the council should be reimbursed if they dealt with the issue. Cllr Moran also thanked the council for dealing with problems with blocked drains in Clara. The work has been completed and it has made a huge difference, he outlined. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Ghislaine Maxwell attends day 1 of the 4th Annual WIE Symposium at Center 548 in New York City, on Sept. 20, 2013. (Laura Cavanaugh/Getty Images) Ghislaine Maxwell Makes Third Attempt at Bail on Sex Charges NEW YORKGhislaine Maxwell, a British socialite awaiting trial on charges that she recruited teenage girls for Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse, says shell renounce her UK and French citizenships if she can be freed on bail, according to a court filing Tuesday. Maxwells attorneys made the offer in a third try at getting Maxwell out of jail before a trial scheduled for July in Manhattan federal court. A judge has previously rejected two bail attempts, including a $28.5 million bail release proposal in December. As part of the latest bail proposal, defense attorneys wrote that they will put the bulk of the $22.5 million estate belonging to Maxwell and her still-unidentified husband into a special account to be overseen by an asset managera former federal judge and U.S. attorney from Georgia. The deal would set aside about a half-million dollars for living expenses and over $7 million for legal fees. The 59-year-old was arrested seven months ago on charges alleging she recruited three girls for Epstein to abuse in the mid-1990s. She has pleaded not guilty. Epstein, her one-time boyfriend, killed himself in a Manhattan federal lockup in August 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. Audrey Strauss, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, speaks during a news conference to announce charges against Ghislaine Maxwell for her alleged role in the sexual exploitation and abuse of multiple minor girls by Jeffrey Epstein, in New York, on July 2, 2020. (John Minchillo/AP Photo) Maxwells lawyers say the new proposed bail package would resolve some of the concerns that previously got proposals rejected, including a failure to show Maxwell would not be able to access her assets to flee or rely on her citizenship of France, which would not extradite her to the United States. Maxwell also holds U.S. citizenship. The lawyers also wrote that they hoped a dozen separate arguments recently made to get the criminal charges against their client thrown out or reduced would also affect any bail decision. The challenges included claims that Maxwell should benefit from a non-prosecution agreement Epstein signed with federal prosecutors a dozen years ago and claims that coronavirus crackdowns forced a suburban grand jury to return her indictment, depriving her of the diversity of a Manhattan-based panel. These motions significantly call into question the strength of the governments case against Ms. Maxwell and the underlying justification for continued detention, the lawyers wrote. The lawyers also wrote that Maxwell has been the victim of vicious slurs, persistent lies, and blatant inaccuracies and has been depicted as a cartoon-character villain in an attempt to turn her into a substitute replacement for Jeffrey Epstein. They added: Yet, Ms. Maxwell is determinedand welcomes the opportunityto face her accusers at trial and clear her name. Prosecutors declined to comment through a spokesperson. By Larry Neumeister Islamabad, Feb 24 : Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has said that defence and security cooperation to end the menace of terrorism are of equal importance to both Pakistan and Sri Lanka. He said that Pakistan has offered Sri Lanka a credit line of $15 million in this regard, Geotv reported. The Foreign Minister along with the Prime Minister Imran Khan are on a two-day official visit to Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunwardena has said that Imran Khan's visit will help strengthen bilateral ties and cooperation. Later, Qureshi addressed the media over Imran Khan's visit to the Sri Lanka. Qureshi said Pakistan is standing side by side with Sri Lanka as a partner for the development of human resources, security cooperation, fighting terrorism, development and prosperity. Qureshi said Pakistan has transformed its geo-political priorities into geo-economic priorities. He said views were exchanged on enhancement of bilateral trade and investment with Sri Lanka. We have decided to give 100 scholarships to Sri Lankan students in top medical institutes of Pakistan, Qureshi said. During his two-day visit to Sri Lanka, Imran Khan has said that the country could strengthen its connectivity up to the Central Asian States by benefiting from the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project. Addressing a joint press conference with his Sri Lankan counterpart Mahinda Rajapaksa here after holding one-on-one and delegation-level talks, he said: "My visit is aimed at strengthening the bilateral relationship with Sri Lanka, especially trade and economic ties through enhanced connectivity." The Prime Ministers of both the countries also reaffirmed their resolve to work together across a broad range of areas during extensive consultations held at the Temple Trees. The one-on-one meeting between the two prime ministers was followed by delegation-level talks between the two sides. South Africa: Condolences for Prof Ndulu President Cyril Ramaphosa has expressed sadness at the passing of esteemed Tanzanian economist Professor Benno Ndulu. The professor who served as a member of South Africas Presidential Economic Advisory Council, passed away in a hospital in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam on Monday. He was 71 years old. President Ramaphosa offers his sincere condolences to Prof Ndulus family, the people of Tanzania and Prof Ndulus extensive, global and continental network of associates and partners, said the Presidency in a statement on Tuesday. The President also offered his condolences equally to the members of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council. During his multifaceted career, Prof Ndulu worked in the World Bank Group and served as a Governor of the central bank of the United Republic of Tanzania. He was also respected as an academic economist at the University of Dar es Salaam. We share this great loss with the people of Tanzania, who, in their generosity, shared Prof Ndulus wisdom and vision with our nation through our Presidential Economic Advisory Council, said President Ramaphosa. In his tribute, the President described Ndulu as an outstanding economic intellectual with an extraordinary and vibrant passion for African development and for the reconstruction and recovery of South Africas own economy. He made an invaluable contribution to the Presidential Economic Advisory Council. It is sad that Africa has lost a great thinker and visionary in the infancy of continental free trade. The President appointed members of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council with effect from 1 October 2019. The Council was announced by the President to ensure greater coherence and consistency in the implementation of economic policy and ensure that government and society in general is better equipped to respond to changing economic circumstances. We shall miss this special counsellor but we will be guided by the spirit and content of his lifetime of devotion to building a better Africa, said President Ramaphosa. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2021-02-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Black cab rapist John Worboys will challenge his sentence at the Court of Appeal. The 63-year-old predator, who now goes by the name John Radford, was jailed for life with a minimum term of six years at the Old Bailey in December 2019 after he admitted spiking the drinks of four women. He was already behind bars at the time, having been locked up indefinitely for public protection with a minimum term of eight years in 2009, after he was found guilty of 19 sex offences against 12 women between 2006 and 2008. Police believe the former male stripper committed offences against more than 100 women before he was caught. A Parole Board decision to release him was overturned by the High Court in March 2018 after two of his victims challenged the decision. The Royal Courts of Justice in central London (Nick Ansell/PA) A different Parole Board panel concluded in November of that year that he should remain in prison, citing his sense of sexual entitlement. As a result of the publicity, more victims came forward to report attacks dating back to 2000, meaning Worboys had been committing crimes up to six years longer than previously thought. He was charged with further offences in May 2019 and admitted two counts of administering a drug with intent to commit rape or indecent assault, and two counts of administering a substance with intent to commit a sexual offence. Three senior judges, including the Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett, will consider an application by Worboys for permission to bring an appeal against his most recent sentence at a hearing on Wednesday. If the court grants his application, it may go on to consider his appeal in full. Worboys, from Enfield, north London, became known as the black cab rapist after attacking victims in his hackney carriage. In several of the incidents, he pretended to be celebrating a win on the horses, or the lottery, as a pretext to give his victims alcohol which he had laced with drugs. During his sentencing at the Old Bailey, the court heard he had admitted to a psychologist that he plied a total of 90 women with alcohol, and drugged a quarter of them, after being inspired by pornography. Worboys told psychiatrists he had been fantasising about his crimes since 1986, and was motivated by hostility towards women. A probation report in August 2019 found: He is potentially just as dangerous now as the point of the first sentence. Sentencing him, Mrs Justice McGowan said: I am satisfied to the required standard, on the evidence I have heard, that you are a continuing risk. I find you are currently dangerous. Your offending spans five years more than previously known. I do not know when, if ever, you will cease to be a risk. It will be for the Parole Board to decide in the future. The judge added that she was concerned about Worboys ability to manipulate others and his failure to admit the risk he posed. In all, Worboys received two life sentences with minimum terms of six years for drugging women with intent plus six years in jail for two charges of administering a substance with intent. All the sentences are to run concurrently. Following his sentence, Tina Dempster, of the CPS, said: John Worboys is a dangerous predator who still poses a clear threat to women. The CPS concluded it was clearly in the public interest to prosecute him again, when more victims came forward last year and revealed he had been assaulting women much earlier than he appeared prepared to accept, or to admit to the Parole Board. Worboys claims to show remorse and believes he deserves credit for these guilty pleas. But the fact is he did not accept responsibility for his first set of convictions until recently and, in a clear effort to minimise the extent of his crimes, continued to dispute victims accounts of the latest offences. I would like to pay tribute to the bravery of all women who came forward and today helped keep a prolific sex offender behind bars. The Court of Appeal hearing is due to start at 10.30am. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. "At Replica, we believe better insights should not come at the cost of personal privacy. We were not willing to compromise on our privacy principles, which frustrated our Portland Metro client and ultimately led to an early end to the project." NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, reminds purchasers of the securities of Jianpu Technology Inc. (NYSE: JT) between May 29, 2018 and February 16, 2021, inclusive (the "Class Period"), of the important April 19, 2021 lead plaintiff deadline. SO WHAT: If you purchased Jianpu securities during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement. WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the Jianpu class action, go to http://www.rosenlegal.com/cases-register-2033.html or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] or [email protected] for information on the class action. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than April 19, 2021. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience or resources. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm has achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 3 each year since 2013 and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020 founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs' Bar. Many of the firm's attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers. DETAILS OF THE CASE: According to the lawsuit, defendants throughout the Class Period made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) certain of Jianpu's transactions carried out by the Credit Card Recommendation Business Unit involved undisclosed relationships or lacked business substance; (2) as a result, Jianpu's revenue and costs and expenses for fiscal 2018 and 2019 were overstated; (3) there were material weaknesses in Jianpu's internal control over financial reporting; (4) as a result of the foregoing, Jianpu's fiscal 2018 Form 20-F was reasonably likely to be restated; and (5) as a result, Jianpu's public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages. To join the Jianpu class action, go to http://www.rosenlegal.com/cases-register-2033.html or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] or [email protected] for information on the class action. No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investor's ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/. Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Contact Information: Laurence Rosen, Esq. Phillip Kim, Esq. The Rosen Law Firm, P.A. 275 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor New York, NY 10016 Tel: (212) 686-1060 Toll Free: (866) 767-3653 Fax: (212) 202-3827 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] www.rosenlegal.com SOURCE Rosen Law Firm, P.A. Related Links www.rosenlegal.com Stronger than the pandemic, IDEX 2021 is taking place between 21 to 25 February. Some 70,000 visitors and 900 exhibitors are expected. The UAE has signed deals worth US .36 billion. Military spending in the Mideast has dropped by 10 per cent because of the pandemic and the decline in oil prices. Abu Dhabi (AsiaNews/Agencies) The arms trade is stronger than the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, despite the ongoing worldwide health emergency, the Mideasts first annual arms fair is currently underway in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Opening with pomp, IDEX 2021 is the most important event dedicated to military technology in the region, which is running in parallel with Naval Defence and Maritime Security Exhibition (NAVDEX) 2021. Tens of thousands of people are expected, socially distanced with masks and personal sanitisers. To make easier for people to attend the event, organisers have boosted security measures and are strictly enforcing health restrictions, except for international visitors who were not required to submit to mandatory quarantine. The 2021 International Defence Exhibition and Conference (IDEX), which is being held from 21 to 25 February at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (ADNEC), represents the most important exhibit of the defence and security industry in the Middle East and Africa region. Even during the current pandemic, the event has attracted about 900 exhibitors and is expected to bring in 70,000 local and international visitors from all over the world. On the side-lines, the UAE signed arms agreements with local and international companies worth US$ 1.36 billion for state-of-the-art weapons destined to its Armed Forces. However, arms sales in the Mideast have declined due to the global health emergency and the collapse in oil prices. The drop in arms spending by Gulf nations is expected to be around 10 per cent with sales not expected to rebound to pre-pandemic levels before 2024. UAE officials, including Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, attended the fair. The United States, the world's largest exporter of weapons, is not present, except for a few US companies who are keeping a low profile. China and Saudi Arabia are instead present big times. The latter is promoting its own economic and energy programme called Vision 2030. By Benjamin Jumbe Foreign affairs minister Sam Kutesa has lauded the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) for its interventions in Uganda and the region This was during a meeting with the IGAD executive secretary Dr Workneh Gebeyehy at the ministrys headquarters in Kampala where the minister highlighted key initiatives in areas of social-economic development, peace, and security, migration, environment as well as regional integration and development in the region. The minister re-affirmed Ugandas commitment to promoting regional peace and security, regional integration, sustainable development, and cooperation with IGAD member states. Meanwhile, Dr Workneh reiterated IGADs commitment to delivering on its mandate to promote regional cooperation and integration for the benefit of the IGAD citizenrys development. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has sent a congratulatory letter to Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili. "Dear Mr. Prime Minister, I offer my sincere congratulations to you on the commencement of your tenure as the Prime Minister of Georgia," he noted. "Azerbaijan and Georgia are bound with traditional friendly and good neighborly relations with deep historical roots," the president said. "I believe that productive cooperation and strategic partnership relations between our countries will continue to develop dynamically and expand based on the will of our peoples that are closely connected to each other. "I wish you strong health, happiness and success in your responsible endeavors for the sake of prosperity of the friendly people of Georgia," the head of state concluded. Remember when patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrels? At Joe Biden's White House, it's now 'racism,' with a side of 'sexism,' being used as a means to garner Senate support for problematic cabinet picks. It's definitely the latest party line on why some extremely nasty cabinet picks of his are going down in flames in obtaining confirmation at the Senate. It's not anything to do with them, it's just all that racism and sexism in that Democrat-controlled Senate that's to blame for the first big fail to come for team Biden. According to Politico (Hat tip: Power Line) Womens rights activists and allied Democrats are growing increasingly vocal about what they call the unfair targeting of women and people of color nominated by Joe Biden to top posts in his administration. Their fears had been bubbling for weeks, as Bidens nominees of color came under sharp attack from conservative groups or saw their nominations delayed or opposed in greater numbers. But the worries burst out into the open over the weekend as Neera Tandens nomination to lead the Office of Management and Budget neared defeat at the hands of a Democrat. There's a double standard going on, said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), head of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Her nomination is very significant for us Asian American and Pacific Islanders. I do believe that this double standard has to do with the fact that she would be a pioneer in that position. Oh, really? File under 'preposterous.' The reason that Neera Tanden's nomination for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and two other cabinet nominees, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra for the Department of Health and Human Services post, and Deb Haaland for the Department of the Interior, are being opposed is their positions on issues, and that's in all cases. Leftwingery does not sell in most Republican circles, not even with Mitt Romney, in this instance. He doesn't like this bunch either. In the case of Becerra and Tanden, it's also their actions in past positionas and in the case of Tanden, it's her amazingly hateful politicized personal behavior both public and private. Haaland, for one, was being sold to the public as a Native American, but position-wise, she's opposed to drilling as all good leftwingers are, something that will cost millions of American jobs and drive gas prices skyward if she gets her way in that post. Benefit to the country? Zero. Benefit to the greenie lobby and petrotyrants like Vlad Putin? Big. Reason enough to vote her down and it has nothing to do with race. Perhaps the Ute tribe of the Four Corners region can enlighten her about the importance of drilling. Becerra not only has far left positions but a record as vindictive prosecutor, going after the Little Sisters of the Poor to force them to support abortions against their consciences, to take just one example, and there are many more. He's also got the odor of corruption: His 2008 nomination for U.S. Trade Representative fell apart after news emerged that he lobbied for leniency for a drug trafficker after the latter's rich dad made big donations to the Democratic Party. Pay for play, Xav? He's also an extremely unpleasant person: I've personally seen him scold poor young Latino students at a Cal State college for not being political enough despite the fact that they took their Friday off to come see him, not being convinced that signing up for overpriced Obamacare was a good thing, and asking whether Social Security will be available for them by the time they retire. He's textbook nasty and the Latino kids noticed and told me about it. So to claim that opposition to his nomination to manage health and human services is about race is completely false. Tanden, though is the grand poobah of leftwing awfulness -- in thought, word, and deed. She's a consumate political operative whose every thought is abou how to gain advantage for her HIllary branch of the Democratic Party, according to this negative 2016 New Republic account of her. She certainly moved in the John Podesta/Democratic National Committee circles that rigged the Democratic Party nomination for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016, as Donna Brazile described in her book, too. She's a Hillary Clinton right-hand woman who garnered a prized position at the Center for American Progress at a base salary of $368,000 a year, after Podesta, the man whose emails got hacked and leaked to WikiLeaks based on his use of a password called 'password' departed. Her bilious private emails got exposed, too, and while the New Republic argues that private emails maybe shouldn't be something to fairly judge someone about, she had a mountain of public statements, too, via Twitter, revealing her unending spirit of hate. Apparently the big-salary CAP gig was a do-nothing job, because she spent a lot of time tweeting and has since has made political enemies across the board. This isn't about being of South Asian heritage or female. This is about publicly stated hate for pretty much all of humanity, other than Hillary Clinton, to whom she was ferociously devoted. She may have been one of the embittered Democrat operatives who cooked up the Russian collusion hoax because they were so convinced that Hillary Clinton had won the election. But the press is reporting that the opposition to her was all about her long record of bile on Twitter alone, with some calling it hypocritical, given President Trump's tweets. Unlike Trump, though, Tanden scrubbed her Twitter site of its thousands and thousands of hate-tweets directed at Republicans, including Republican moderates such as Susan Collins, regular Republicans such as Ted Cruz ("Vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz," she tweeted), as well as Bernie Sanders and even his staff, She's also been accused of dispatching trolls. Collins was all set to support her ... until she looked closely: According to Politico: Tanden has tried to remedy perceived shortcomings in recent days. Twenty four hours after the White House said shed had those 35 meetings, Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Tanden had talked with 44 senators. Tanden had asked the staff of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) for a meeting, though Collins dug in further the more she sifted through Tandens record. By Tuesday Collins said that the installation of Topher Spiro, a former Center for American Progress staffer and a Collins critic on Twitter, at the OMB raises questions of whether shes even capable of leaving behind her extremely partisan approach. Collins called Spiro a troll of mine. Why would you put someone who is a troll against a United States senator in a key position in OMB? she asked. Tanden at her hearings conditionally apologized "to the extent" anyone's feelings were hurt, and promised in Senate hearings that she would from hereon out be a nice Office of Management and Budget director in the $239,000 a year position. But temperamentally, she looks like a pretty bad match for the position. It's not just her tweets, it's how she behaves: Start with far left publication The Nation, whose soft spot is for Bernie Sanders. They consider Tanden the Democrat "establishment" and therefore don't like her. They have an impressive list of reasons from their perspective to find her despicable: Ask any number of leftist writers who spend a lot of time on Twitter about Tanden, and theyll tell you the same stories: how she announced plans to fire the unionized employees of CAPs affiliated website, ThinkProgress, and to replace them with scabs (ultimately she just shuttered the site following public backlash); how she allegedly hit a colleague, future Bernie Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir, for daring to ask Hillary Clinton about her support for the Iraq War; how she named a victim of workplace sexual harassment in a staff meeting; how she pressured critics of Israel at ThinkProgress, bowing to the demands of pro-Israel lobbyists; how she accepted tens of millions in donations to her ostensibly progressive think tank from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, insurance companies, and the autocratic regime of the United Arab Emirates; how she once suggested compelling Libya to use its oil wealth to pay the United States for its 2011 regime change operation. And thats to say nothing of the many times Tanden has tried to bully or intimidate journalists (such as The Weeks Ryan Cooper, or me) for writing accurate sentences about her, or complained to managers or editors about comments that she didnt appreciatenot to mention her open contempt for Sanders and his millions of supporters. For a record of bad behavior this long, her nomination prospects are looking bad. Not even Mitt Romney supports her. Bernie Sanders will be a sellout if he does -- he hasn't stated what he will do. Sen. Joe Manchin has come out and said no. The nomination is clearly in trouble, and Politico says the Biden White House "botched' it. Now we have the yell of racism, directed at anyone who doesn't want someone like that managing the U.S. budget, including which government agencies get funds, subject to OMB pre-conditions. According to National Law Review: While OMB is known for its central role in drafting the Presidents annual budget submission to Congress and coordinating agency funding proposals, it has other significant responsibilities within the executive budget process. Federal statute requires OMB to release, or apportion, Congressionally appropriated funding to agencies in specified increments to prevent shortfalls and ensure sustained financial resources throughout the fiscal year. OMB may include conditions for apportionment, such as requiring agencies to take certain actions before funding becomes available. It therefore employs substantial authority over when and how an agency may receive and expend its funding. OMB additionally is tasked with coordinating the administrations legislative actions. Divisions within OMB clear agencies testimony before Congress, advise the President on Statements of Administration Policy, and review significant proposed and final rules prior to their publication. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is scheduled to hold Neera Tandens confirmation hearing on February 9 and the Senate Budget Committee will hold its hearing on February 10. It's likely significant that Rep. Judy Chu, who sits on the House Ways and Means committee, which determines taxation and works very closely with OMB, is her big champion, leading the charge of racism on her fellow Democrats? It sounds like the pair have some big plans to stick it to the American public and Tanden's failing nomination has put a spanner in the works. With nothing out there to defend Tanden, Chu and her pals are crying racism, sexism, any ad hominem claim they can on this nomination whose oversized baggage is just to costly for anyone with a brain to vote for. It's a thin charge. Tanden's flameout is based on her own actions. Same with Becerra and Haaland. The racism charge is cheap but it's apparently all they've got left. Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License THE National Vaccination Programme is the only chance the country has of returning to normality a year into the pandemic, the Government has conceded. Micheal Martin pinned his hope on the vaccine roll-out as he published a new plan for "managing the virus" after ditching his original strategy of living with the virus. Launching the plan, called 'Covid-19 Resilience and Recovery 2021 - The Path Ahead', the Taoiseach said the "end is truly in sight" but he said the vaccine programme had to be accelerated before the country could be reopened. "The vaccination programme will completely change the landscape and transform the options available to us as a society for reopening and renewing our country," he said. At the same event, deputy chief medical officer Ronan Glynn said the vaccine was "our most powerful tool" in battling the virus. "There are brighter days ahead," he said. Reports that the EU would receive only half of its intended supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the second quarter of the year appeared to overshadow the launch. However, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly insisted the shortage had been factored into the Government's target of having 60pc of the country's adults fully vaccinated by the end of June. Read More It is hoped 82pc of all adults will have received their first vaccine at the same date. The new plan was launched after the Cabinet agreed to extend Level 5 restrictions until April 5, while reopening schools and childcare on a phased basis. Around 320,000 students will return to school on March 1, including junior and senior infants, first and second class and Leaving Cert students. This will be reviewed by Nphet in two weeks and may then lead to the rest of primary school classes and fifth-year secondary students returning to school on March 15. A review of schools will be carried out on April 12 and, if there are no concerns about the spread of the virus, all other classes may then return. Childcare will return on a phased basis on March 8, with the State's Early Childhood Care and Education preschool scheme resuming first. By March 29, it is hoped all childcare services will return if transmission of the virus is under control. Business supports and the Pandemic Unemployment Payment will be extended until the end of June under the new Covid plan. A review of overall coronavirus restrictions will be carried out next month ahead of plans to ease these on April 5. However the Government will only consider lifting the 5km travel ban and it will not permit inter-county movement in the next two months. It may also allow small groups of people meet outdoors, and some sporting activity. However, the Government did not provide details on what will be permitted. Another review will then be carried out in April ahead of restrictions possibly being eased further in May. It is expected construction will return in April, but the ban on building will remain in place next month despite Housing Minister Darragh O'Brien saying he expected to return on March 5. The plan was described as "damp squib" and "underwhelming" by a number of senior Government sources yesterday. Tourism Minister Catherine Martin raised concern at Cabinet that the plan did not go far enough for sectors still shut down due to Government restrictions. Ms Martin told the Cabinet that sectors, especially those under her brief, expected a roadmap for exiting lockdown and may not believe the new plan contained one. Irish Hotels Federation president Elaina Fitzgerald Kane called for more support for her industry, saying a failure to do so will have "ramifications for the future of Ireland's tourism offering and for the economy that could take decades to remedy". The Restaurants Association of Ireland criticised the lack of details for when the hospitality industry could reopen. "If we are all in this together why are we, the public, businesses and employees, not being informed of the plan for reopening sectors?" CEO Adrian Cummins said. Labour leader Alan Kelly also said the plan lacked "clear metrics and targets" for easing restrictions and "over-relies on vaccination roll-out". "This is more of the same, with a reliance on continued lockdowns until vaccines reach enough of the population," he said. Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald criticised the delay in introducing a mandatory quarantine programme. "People are told they can't travel 5km from their home and the Government still has a very reckless approach to international travel through our airports and ports," she said. It came as Health Minister Stephen Donnelly pulled out of an appearance on RTE's Prime Time. He faced criticism over comments he made on Monday night on RTE about schools reopening. A spokesperson said he had to focus on the vaccination programme. Read More Insulted firefighter union blasts bosses over promotions after report says not enough quality staff This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Feb 24th, 2021 A firefighters union says members feel insulted by a report which claims there arent enough staff of the right quality in North Wales to promote permanently. The comment came after firefighters contacted the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) to voice anger over the study into the firefighter Future Leader apprentices scheme. It was presented to North Wales Fire and Rescue Authoritys executive panel meeting this week and said not enough of its staff are putting themselves forward for higher roles. The report also said that a a reduction in the quality of candidates applying for promotion has led to an inability to permanently appoint, with a number of staff members currently occupying temporary positions. The study said the three-year scheme would give apprentices an increased potential to progress beyond the firefighter role and into supervisory, middle and senior manager positions. The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) said it fully supports initiatives like the future leader apprenticeship scheme but was committed to supporting members, who objected to the accusations in the report. The union claimed more than 50% of managers in North Wales Fire and Rescue Service (NWFRS) were still in temporary positions, some for up to four years and up to three grades higher than their original permanent roles despite passing nationally agreed competencies for their temporary positions. The report said NWFRS had tried to prepare staff and held masterclasses for those engaging with promotional processes in areas such as written communications, media relations, finance, having difficult conversations, the requirements of a corporate officer and political awareness. In a statement, union leaders said it rejected claims made by chief fire officer Simon Smith and the reports author, assistant chief fire officer Stuart Millington regarding the quality and number of existing staff within the service who are suitable for promotion. The statement added: The view presented is unfounded and supported by no evidence whatsoever. Staff in North Wales Fire and Rescue Service continue to show exemplary standards of excellence, commitment and dedication. Union bosses said those filling temporary promotions satisfied all national standards and in many cases far exceeded them. It went on: The quality of our staff is unquestionable. This situation is not sustainable, and as local FBU officials we must urge our principal officers to address the issue without delay. Members do not understand the logic nor reason for the content of the report. They feel it is insulting, counter-productive and completely unnecessary. The union cannot stress enough the shock and disappointment staff across the service feel with the public accusations directed at them. FBU leaders added: Maintaining good industrial relations is key to this, with a joint approach to meeting local service needs a primary focus for us. Sadly, on this occasion, some senior managers clearly do not share this view. The time for change is now and it cannot be ignored. The union said it will present proposals for urgent action to continue positive progress experienced in recent months with the services bosses. Chief fire officer Simon Smith said: We first became aware that the FBU had concerns about particular issues last Friday, less than a week ago. We then met with their representatives the following morning and will not be commenting publicly as a service until we have had time to look into the issues raised. By Jez Hemming BBC Local Democracy Reporter The Security Forces on Tuesday killed Hassan alias Sajna involved in killing of four women during an intelligence based operation (IBO) in Mir Ali area of North Waziristan RAWALPINDI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2021 ) :The Security Forces on Tuesday killed Hassan alias Sajna involved in killing of four women during an intelligence based operation (IBO) in Mir Ali area of North Waziristan. The Security Forces conducted the IBO in the area on confirmation of presence of terrorists, said an Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) statement. During exchange of fire terrorist commander Hassan alias Sajna of banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) Hafiz Gul Bahadur group was killed. Hassan alias Sajna was involved in killing of four women worker yesterday (Monday) in Mir Ali. The killed terrorist remained involved in terrorists activities against Security Forces and peaceful civilians including improvised explosive device (IED) attacks, kidnapping for ransom, target killing , extortion and also involved in recruiting terrorists. A cache of arms and weapons was also recovered during the IBO. The Security Forces also conducted area sensitization. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. ADVERTISEMENT The House of Representatives, on Wednesday, asked the Minister of Defence, Bashir Magashi, and the Chief of Defence Staff, Lucky Irabor, to reinstate 15 cadets recently dismissed from the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA). The request by the House followed the consideration and adoption of the report of the House Committee on Public Petition during its plenary session. Presenting the report, the Chairman of the Committee, Jerry Alagbaso, explained that the petition was filed by Mohammed Ibrahim and 53 others against the Nigerian Defence Academy. The committee recommended that the 15 cadets, comprising five naval, three air force and seven army cadets should be reinstated. They are DJ Mohammed, Y.Y Bello, D.O Adebayo, D.C Obioha and U. Zakariyya, all naval cadets. The air force cadets are A.H Timson, H.O Mohammed and I. Salisu while in the army cadets are: A. Yusuf, A.O Akiri, E.Y El Nathan, E.A Emmanuel, U.S Zango, U.S Kashim and A.A Oyebanjo. The committee described their dismissal as unlawful and illegal. That the 15 Cadet Officers in question had completed their courses of study, passed the prescribed examinations and were graduated and convocated prior to the dossier review that indicted them. Against this backdrop, it is judiciously expedient that they should be given their academy Certificates and posted to their various Commands for onward redeployment. The committee further suggested that after their reinstatement, the 15 cadets should be accorded all the requisite courtesies and privileges due to them as officers of the Nigerian Army without any discrimination. However, those with academic challenges were exempted from reinstatement. The committees report was adopted by the House. [February 24, 2021] EnTrust Global's Julian Proctor to Present at Economist's World Ocean Summit Julian Proctor, Portfolio Manager of EnTrust Global's Blue Ocean 4Impact Fund ("BO 4Impact"), will join Elisabeth Munck af Rosenschold, Head of Supply Chain and Sustainability at IKEA, Sadan Kaptanoglu, President of BIMCO, Jeremy Nixon, Chief Executive of Ocean Network Express Co., and Craig Jasienski, Group Chief Executive at Wallenius Wilhelmsen at The Economist' World Ocean Summit panel entitled "Shipping: Collaborating across industry and supply chains to reduce emissions." Blue Ocean 4Impact is part of EnTrust Global's $2+ billion maritime investment platform and is launching one of the first companies that will own and lease environmentally-advanced vessels and other marine infrastructure assets to large corporate operators and end-users, in order to help reduce carbon emissions and other pollution generated by the ocean economy. The Summit is the pre-eminent global event bringing together the widst cross-section of ocean stakeholders each year, from business to government to civil society. Its goal is to change the way business is done in the ocean and accelerate collaboration between stakeholders to fashion the blue economy. To register for the Summit and access EnTrust Global's virtual booth, please visit https://www.woi.economist.com/events/. About EnTrust Global EnTrust Global is a leading alternative asset management firm with more than $18 billion in total assets under management. Co-founded in 1997 by Chairman and CEO Gregg S. Hymowitz following his investment career at Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., the firm manages assets for over 500 institutional investors representing 47 countries and has approximately $10 billion in customized strategic partnerships. EnTrust Global offers a diverse range of alternative investment opportunities across strategies, including private debt and real assets as well as core hedge funds and co-investments. EnTrust Global has 11 offices worldwide and is headquartered in New York and London. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005745/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] New Delhi: Cases of Dalit atrocities has taken a steep hike in Kerala said National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC) vice-chairman on Thursday after meeting family members of RSS worker Rajesh Kumar, who was murdered by allegedly history-sheeter in Thiruvananthapuram last month. According to NCSC vice-Chairman L Murugan around 1,000 cases of atrocities against the Dalits 155 rape and 12 murder have been reported in the state since June last 2016. He added that the crime records of the Kerala government says nearly 1,000 cases of Dalit atrocities were registered between June, 2016 and April, 2017. As many as 155 rape cases, 12 murder cases and cases of custodial death, in which the victims were Dalits, have been reported," added Murugan. Murugan also informed the media that the commission plans to carry out a statewide review to be headed by NCSC Chairman Ram Shankar Katheria September. Murugan also added that the NCSC has directed Kerala home secretary, state police chief and principal secretary of the SC/ST development department to file a case under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in connection with the killing of Rajesh. The NCSC vice-chairman added that the state government should grant a compensation of Rs 15 lakhs to the kin of Rajesh other than the addition to financial assistance provided by the Victims Welfare Fund. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. "Field Marshal", self-imposed King of Lebialem Twitter A commercial motorbike rider co-opted by armed separatist fighters in an operation that led to the killing of three traditional rulers on February 13, 2021, in Lebialem Division has shed light on the tragic incident. In an interview aired on CRTV's flagship newsmagazine program Cameroon Calling, the native of Essoh-Attah village said gunmen killed the three traditional rulers at the behest of notorious separatist strongman Oliver Lekeaka alias Field Marshal. Below are excerpts of the interview transcribed by Cameroon-Info.Net:- Welcome to Yaounde and welcome to the CRTV. You are coming after an unfortunate incident which led to the death of three traditional rulers in Lebialem Division. What happened? What did you see, what did you hear? Actually, what I want to say here is not what I heard. I am saying what I saw. I am speaking the truth and I will stand for that truth. That was on Saturday [February 1, 2021]. I had just returned from Dschang with my bike. I had just finished taking my bath when one guy [Titus] from our village, Essoh-Attah, came with a friend and asked me to come out of the house. When I got out and asked them what was going on, he said I will know when I get to the village square. I asked them to allow me to put on proper clothes given that I only had my underwear on. They refused and I had to oblige. As we went, we met a lady named Mary. She said they lost two of their fighters in an attack at Mbinadou. She said Field Marshal was on his way and that we should stay at the village square and wait for him. After some few minutes, Titus said we should go and bring out Chief Benedict Fomin, who is his Godfather. They went to that Chief's palace. I heard a lot of noise there. Chief Fomin was beaten and dragged out. They brought him to the junction where we were waiting. A few minutes later, the Field Marshal came. Where is that Chief? Field Marshall asked. When we showed him the chief, he said the chiefs are the ones betraying the struggle for Ambazonia independence. He said chiefs are the ones who voted in Menji during the December 6 Regional elections. Today is judgment day. I am going to kill all of you, Field Marshal said. That guy who came and took me told Field Marshal that I have a bike. He ordered that the bike be brought to him. When his fighters brought the bike to him, he said we are here feeling free and playing music when they are suffering in the bush. He said we cannot be enjoying life as though nothing is going on. He said we will see what he is going to do to us. He asked me to transport him on my bike. He warned that if he falls down, then I am a dead man. He ordered that his boys should take all the youths in the area into captivity. He kidnapped all the youths, took them to a place called Foreke Down where he tied them up. All these started unfolded around 5 pm on that fateful Saturday, February 13, 2021. Due to the delays caused by Field Marshal who was kidnapping people, the night fell on us. When we arrived Foreke Down, it was already around 7 o'clock. He insisted that today is judgment day. At the home of Pa Nkemchap who owns a provision store, Field Marshal made a stop. He looted the provision store. After he had emptied the shop, he told the owner that he would not pay. When we got to Foreke Down, he tied all the youths. The reason he did not tie me is that I was his rider at that moment. He asked Chief Benedict Fomin and Chief Simon Forzizong if they voted in the December 6 regional elections. They said they did not vote. They told him that they did not even go to Menji where the elections took place. When they caught Chief Fonchenallah and found a voter's card in his pocket, he had no choice but to accept that he voted. When they brought Chief Fonchenallah to Foreke Down, I met him. Field Marshal asked him if he voted. He said yes. Field Marshal said he was not going to kill Chief Fonchenallah since he had told the truth. He asked Chief Fonchenallah if Chief Forzizong and Fomin also voted. Chief Fonchenallah said yes. Field Marshal then ordered his fighters to kill Chief Forzizong and Chief Fomin. Field Marshal's second in command by the name Foncho [Ambrose Fontem], the one who got drunk and was captured by the military, said the chiefs should be beheaded and slaughtered. Field Marshal ordered that they should be shot and killed instead. They then asked who influenced them to go and vote in Menji. Chief Forzizong said it was the Fon. Asked who the Fon is, he said Chief Foreke. Field Marshal ordered one of his soldiers named Thunder to go ahead and kill Chief Forzizong. He asked that he should be shot directly in the chest. Thunder hesitated, stating that the chiefs should be allowed to make further confessions. Field Marshal objected, saying that there is no confession in the grave. The young man from our village named Titus, the one who was taking Field Marshal around and showing him where all the chiefs and youths are, said they should give him the gun so he can kill the chiefs. Field Marshal rejected his offer and rather ordered one of his fighters named 'Killer' to kill the chiefs. In my presence, Field Marshal asked Killer to shoot Chief Forzizong in the chest. I heard the sound of the gun and that was all. When they killed Chief Forzizong, they jumped to their feet in celebration. They ordered us to clap. They were shouting: Asawana wana. Then they sang: Amba no go tire, holy water dey. After a while, Field Marshal shouted, Ceasefire! and silence prevailed. He turned to Chief Fomin and told him that he will be the next to die. I don't know how it happened that Chief Fomin was trying to escape. That boy from our village dragged him back and tied him. He blindfolded him. Field Marshal ordered that chief Fomin should be killed. Chief Fualeasuoh was brought to the scene moments after the killing of Chief Fomin. Asked if he voted, Chief Fualeasuoh was still to talk when Field Marshal turned to Chief Fonchenallah to ask if Chief Fualeasuoh voted. Fonchenallah answered in the affirmative. Field Marshal ordered his fighters to immediately kill Chief Fualeasuoh. Chief Fualeasuoh was shot and killed. An eyewitness account of February 13, 2021 killing of three chiefs in Lebialem (c) CRTV Field Marshal then sought to know from Chief Fonchenallah if there was another chief who voted on December 6, 2020, and who can be got that night. Chief Fonchenallah called the name of Chief Fuambeh. Field Marshal ordered me to take Thunder to chief Fuambeh's palace. He said if they try to run, they should be shot. I rode Thunder on my bike to Chief Fuambeh's palace. We met the Chief in his palace. I called him out. I told him to forgive me for bringing a separatist fighter to his house. I told him to join me and convince Field Marshal's fighter to allow him to escape. I told him that Field Marshal had killed Chief Fomin, Forzizong, and Fualeasuoh and that he was next to die. I pleaded on behalf of Chief Fuambeh. I said that we had lost three chiefs already in the same village and in the same area. I told Thunder that Chief Fuambeh's life was in his hands. I said if he left the chief, the chief will live to testify. Thunder had a pistol and an AK47 with him. When he tried to shoot with the pistol, the gun did not respond. After a lot of pleading, Thunder said that Chief should give him two million FCFA. The Chief said he did not have money. After a while, Thunder asked Chief Fuambeh to take a few of his belongings and leave the village. He said Chief Fuambeh should never mention that he saved him, lest his palace will be burnt. Chief Fuambeh took some of his belongings and ran away. I then thanked the armed fighter. Thunder went ahead to destroy the door to the Chief's house. He later told Field Marshal that before we got to the palace, Chief Fuambeh had escaped. Field Marshal ordered that the corpses of the murdered chiefs be dumped in a nearby river. He warned that no one should touch the bodies. When they were carrying the bodies, I escaped. Field Marshal had warned that anyone trying to escape should be shot. I do not know how God made my escape from that place. I thank God that I was not tied like the others since I was riding Field Marshal. He was using me to run errands for him. I escaped into the forest and trekked to where I could be connected to network. There is only one place in that forest where one can make a phone call. When I got to where I could make a phone call, I called those whose parents had been killed. I said Field Marshal was in Foreke Down killing people and had a mission to continue with the killings the next day. He had planned to kill his targets and burn their property. Therefore, I informed that even if it means the military should come by helicopter to Foreke Down, let them come and rescue the people who were to be killed the next morning. Field Marshal did not kill Fonchenallah because Fonchenallah was saying the truth and he wanted Fonchenallah to help him confirm all the chiefs that voted in Menji. I know Field Marshal's aim was to kill Fonchenallah at the end of the day. When did the military get there? These chiefs were being killed at 8 o'clock and the military arrived at 4 am the next day. I was not there when the military arrived because I was in that forest making a call. I do not know how the military found their way to the place. However, I informed them that they should come and rescue those people, especially the youths who had been kidnapped and tied. When the military got to Foreke Down at 4 am on Sunday, February 14, 2021, they rescued those who had been tied up. The person who killed those Chiefs is Field Marshal and not the military. If he is refusing, they captured two of his fighters with guns. In addition, Field Marshal's second in command is in military custody. The military also interviewed the villagers who told them the same thing that I am saying here. Therefore, Field Marshal is the one who killed those chiefs. How do you feel now? Since this incident happened, I have not been able to sleep. I trekked for four days, three days in the forest before I could arrive at a point where I could be saved. They did everything to kill me because they know that I know the truth. Fortunately, God guided me for a day like this, that I will testify to people. I am out for the truth. Watertown, NY (13601) Today Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. Low 52F. Winds SW at 10 to 15 mph.. Tonight Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. Low 52F. Winds SW at 10 to 15 mph. Local councils will be stripped of the power to investigate wind farm noise complaints under a major shake-up of regulations governing renewable energy generators. The state government hopes the new laws, to be introduced in July, will provide a clearer process and prevent protracted and expensive legal disputes that have plagued some projects. A new system will govern complaints about wind farm noise in Victoria. Credit:Joe Armao Under the changes, the Environment Protection Authority will become the primary regulator of wind farms in Victoria. The government said the new laws would deliver a strengthened regulatory framework for turbine noise and require all Victorians to minimise the risk to human health and the environment from pollution, including noise. PHILADELPHIA (AP) Police on Wednesday apprehended a man who is suspected of hiding in a department store bathroom and raping a woman. The arrest occured at his home and officials expected to file charges later in the day, police said. His name was not released. The attack happened Sunday morning in the third floor restroom at the Macys on Market Street, police said. The man waited for about 20 minutes before the 55-year-old entered and he attacked her, police said. When she went inside the bathroom he was in the stall, Police Capt. Mark Burgmann said. He jumped over the stall into her stall. The womans husband was on a different floor. The suspect fled the store and entered the subway stop at 13th and Market Streets, police said. He exited the train at the 52nd Street Station. More: Philadelphia man wanted for assaulting Spooky Nook Sports official: police Pa. man shoots neighbor to death after argument: police PHILIPSBURG:--- Independent Member of Parliament Christophe Emmanuel on Tuesday said Princess Juliana International Airport should follow the same route as the major international airports that service St. Maarten scales back the project to protect the airport in uncertain times then re-commit when projected revenue can be counted on. If not, he warned, PJIA could run out of money in mere months. Emmanuel pointed out that all of the major ports that feed directly to St. Maarten have either canceled their extensive project plans or put them on hold until 2023 at the earliest when it is projected that travel will return to pre-2019 levels. Miami International, JFK New York, Charles de Gaulle Paris, Charlotte North Carolina, Dallas Fort Worth (American Airlines) and Atlanta (Delta) have all within the past few weeks made announcements to forgo large investments in upgrades or new terminal projects. He stressed that this does not mean that PJIA should stop its re-construction, but scale down the project which is already over budget by some US $25 million. Even more worrisome, he said, at the rate of spending at PJIA with ridiculously high consultant fees and poor financial and overall management, the airport could be out of money by the end of this year if not before. The MP suggest scaling the project back to focus on the necessities of the terminal, establish the first level/phase of US pre-clearance, take care of employees, replace the CEO, CFO, and Supervisory board and put all other related projects at PJIA on hold. The ongoing airport expansions and overhauls have all had to scale down as a result of the pandemic and a drastic drop in business. Dallas dropped its US $3 billion terminal expansion project, Miami International paused its the US $5 billion improvement plan to ensure it can maintain operations and make payroll, JFKs US $15 billion makeover has been put on hold with only the smallest project (American Airlines terminal 8) is moving ahead. And you see the same trend all over the world, Emmanuel said. Here we are, with a grossly mismanaged airport, hiring expensive consultants and trying to fix a facility that isnt even brand new but cost millions more than what it was built for, with a pandemic still affecting travel. We have to be real with what the numbers are. PJIA is losing money at an unsustainable rate. Two years from now, the airport is still projecting to have a cash shortage of approximately Naf 25 million. Current revenues are just not covering operating expenditures. And that means you simply have to scale back until you can count on dependable revenue, the MP said. A YouTuber has been cleared of harassing Tommy Robinson after it emerged the former English Defence League leader lied to police. Muhammad Abdul Basir, 24, had faced an Old Bailey trial next month on two charges relating to videos he uploaded to YouTube in September 2019. In the homemade clips, unemployed Mr Basir appeared rambling and near-catatonic as he referred to wanting to 'cut [Robinson's] neck off', the court heard. Pointing to his biceps, the defendant said: 'I'm a contract killer. I have got guns. How much will you offer me to kill Tommy Robinson?' Robinson, 38, claimed the videos posted on the popular platform by Basir left him terrified and fearful about his children attending school. But prosecutor Peter Clement said it had recently emerged Robinson had told not been honest with officers investigating the allegations. Mr Basir had denied harassing the far-right activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, and that the videos led to a fear of violence. During a hearing at the Old Bailey earlier today, the Crown offered no evidence and Mr Basir, of Mitcham, south London, was formally acquitted. Muhammad Abdul Basir, 24, (left) has been cleared of harassing Tommy Robinson (right) after it emerged the former English Defence League leader lied to police Prosecutor Peter Clement said there was no dispute he had uploaded the videos to YouTube in September 2019. They followed a video 20 months before which led to a confrontation with Mr Yaxley-Lennon outside Mr Basir's house. But the case, reviewed at a high level, had been undermined by inaccurate information Mr Yaxley-Lennon gave to police. Mr Clement said: 'An essential element to both counts on the indictment is that the defendant's actions in uploading as he did self-made videos to YouTube caused the complainant to fear on at least two occasions that violence would be used against him.' New evidence led to the conclusion that no reasonable jury properly instructed could be sure there was such a fear, he said. Mr Yaxley-Lennon had initially told police that his fears prompted him to take his children out of school for 48 hours, yet inquiries revealed that was not true, the court heard. When quizzed about his first statement being 'not entirely accurate' he did not expand on why he had said it, Mr Clement said. The prosecutor went on: 'He explained that the videos that the defendant had uploaded came at a time when he, the complainant, received numerous warnings from the authorities as to threats to life and/or threats of serious violence to himself. Mr Basir had faced an Old Bailey (pictured) trial next month on two charges relating to videos he uploaded to YouTube in September 2019 but all charges have now been dropped 'The police understandably and rightly inquired as to that and again that was found not to be accurate in that there had been no such warnings over the relevant period.' Mr Yaxley-Lennon had referred to the incident 20 months before when Mr Basir had uploaded another 'threatening and abusive' video to YouTube. Mr Clement said: 'In January 2018, the complainant managed to obtain the defendant's home address and said he had paid a reward to someone to find it. 'He, the complainant, travelled to London to confront the defendant. 'He said just that in his witness statement and that the confrontation was such that reinforced his, the complainant's, fears.' But Mr Yaxley-Lennon failed to tell police about a video made of the meeting with Mr Basir in 2018 which ended in a 'friendly arm wrestle'. The prosecutor said the 'quasi documentary' produced in a makeshift studio and uploaded on YouTube featured footage of him confronting Mr Basir outside his home. Mr Clement said: 'The contents of the video could be said to be at odds with what the complainant described. 'In the video, the complainant is seen to pat the defendant on the back and say 'I know you are no threat to me or my family' and to which the defendant replied 'I will protect you'. 'The two patted each other on the back and the confrontation ended in a friendly arm wrestle on the bonnet of the car.' The court heard Mr Basir was arrested in 2018 but no charges were brought as he was suffering from mental health issues and was sectioned. Within hours of the defendant's fresh videos being uploaded on YouTube, Mr Yaxley-Lennon and others drove to Mr Basir's home and knocked on the door, but he was not in. Police contacted the defendant who was 'scooped up', the court heard. Samantha Wright, defending, opposed an application by the prosecution for a restraining order. Ms Wright said: 'It is clear he has not caused distress at all.' She said Mr Yaxley-Lennon used his confrontation with Mr Basir as an 'an opportunity' for funding and publicity. She argued also that Mr Yaxley-Lennon had 'lied' in his evidence and 'cannot be trusted'. 'He says he took his children out of school. He did not. He said he received warning from the police where someone made threats to his life. He had not,' she said. 'He also lied about how he fared in the confrontation in 2018.' She said Mr Basir was a vulnerable young man of good character, while Mr Yaxley-Lennon had convictions for violence and contempt of court. Mr Basir had previously denied a charge of racially aggravated harassment involving fear of violence motivated by Mr Robinson's 'white English' racial identity. He had also pleaded not guilty to a charge of putting in fear of violence, which stated that he posted threatening videos and that he 'knew or ought to have known' that it would cause Mr Robinson fear of violence. Mrs Justice Whipple formally cleared the defendant of stalking Robinson between September 13 and 19 and causing serious alarm or distress by posting YouTube videos on September 13 and 16, 2019. He was also charged with racially aggravated stalking of Robinson between the same dates by causing fear that violence would be used against him. But these charges were also dropped. The judge said that evidence post-charge showed that Mr Yaxley-Lennon 'lied' to police and that he had 'not been put in fear at an earlier event in January 2018'. She refused to impose a restraining order saying whether Mr Yaxley-Lennon was harassed was a 'matter strongly in contention'. Basir, who was described by his lawyer as a man of good character with vulnerabilities and mental health issues, was present on video link. Nifty futures on the Singapore Exchange traded 70 points higher at 14,784, indicating a firm start for benchmark indices on Wednesday. Here are the top stocks to track in today's session: Tata Consumer, GAIL: The Tata Group firm will replace in Nifty50 Index from March 31, 2021. NTPC: State-owned said it has signed a share purchase agreement to buy GAIL's 25.51 per cent stake in Ratnagiri Gas and Power Pvt Ltd (RGPPL), which is commonly known as Dabhol project. In other news, the company raised Rs 900 crore through issuance of unsecured, redeemable, taxable, listed, rated non-convertible debentures. SPARC: Sun Pharma Advanced Research Company (SPARC) said the USFDA has ruled against its appeal related to Taclantis, its under development product for treatment of breast cancer. Aurobindo Pharma: The company has inked a pact to acquire 26 per cent stake each in two Hyderabad-based solar power generating companies. United Spirits: The company said it is initiating a strategic review of select popular brands as part of its strategy to continue "long-term profitable growth" through premiumising its portfolio. Coal India: CIL's board will meet on March 5 to consider the second interim dividend. Jet Airways: The NCLT, on Tuesday, rejected applications filed by various parties seeking a copy of the resolution plan submitted by winning bidder Kalrock-Jalan Consortium for grounded Jet Airways. SBI Card: SBI Cards and Payment Services had raised Rs 550 crore by issuing bonds on a private placement basis. Sanofi India: The company board, on Tuesday, approved a final dividend of Rs 125 per share and a special dividend of Rs 240 per share for the year ended December, 2020.The final dividend and the special dividend will be paid on or after May 4, 2021. REC: State-run has raised $500 million through issuance of notes (bonds) under its $7 billion Global Medium Term Note Programme which would be used to finance the power sector. Punjab & Sind Bank: The lender will allot preferential shares to the government next month in lieu of Rs 5,500 crore capital infusion into the bank. UPL: Two workers died and 26 were injured after a fire broke out at the company's Jhagadia Plant in Bharuch district in Gujarat. Mazagon Dock: The company has signed an MoU with Mumbai Port Trust in Maritime India Sumit 2021. February 24 : Levi's has roped in Deepika Padukone as its new global brand ambassador. Announcing the collaboration today, the denim brand said the popular actress association with the brand will help attract the new generation of women as the brand is in for an expansion of its women's wear category. Deepika becomes the first female celebrity to be the face of the denim brand in India. The Chhapaak actress will soon spearhead the new campaign that will highlight a new range of denim wear for women. Talking about her collaboration with Levis, an elated Deepika said in a statement, Authenticity, originality and honesty are values that the brand has been built on and are values I identify with the most! For those unaware, I have always been a jeans and t-shirt kind of a girl. The right pair of jeans not only makes me feel comfortable but also confident. Sanjeev Mohanty, managing director, South Asia and MENA, Levis, said, Deepika Padukone is not only a style icon but also an inspiration to the youth and women globally. With her on-board, we are confident of strengthening the brand further especially when we are strongly focusing on leading the womens category. The American denim brand had entered India 25 years ago. The company suffered immense loss during the COVID-19 pandemic. The brands recent financial report stated that its impact was the most in India. The decision to rope in the globally popular actress as their brand ambassador was taken strategically to recover the loss with her association. Moreover, the brand has been struggling to increase its sales for the last two years, and now with Padukone in, it has found a perfect fit as the actress is in sync with the core brand values of the denim brandbold, authentic, true and uncompromising. It would be interesting to see how the actress helps the brand widen its appeal among young women. New Delhi: Taking the secessionist campaign a step further, pro-Khalistan group Sikhs For Justice (SFJ) after sending letters to Chief Ministers of West Bengal and Maharashtra, launched an email campaign asking people to support their cause. SFJ launched a web portal for the people of West Bengal and Maharashtra to send emails to Mamata Banerjee, Uddhav Thackeray demanding to declare the independence of West Bengal and Maharashtra from the Union of India. The portal allows users to send a pre-drafted email to the Chief Ministers and their Cabinet. The email reads: "We the people of West Bengal & Maharashtra have been suffering under Indian control for the last 73 years. As your constituent, I am writing to demand you to declare the independence and secession of West Bengal & Maharashtra from the Union of India to safeguard the prosperity, ethnicity, identity, language, and culture of the Bengali & Marathi peoples from the cruel hegemony of India." SFJ General Counsel Gurpatwant Singh Pannun stated that we are also going to reach out to the Village Heads urging them to push Chief Ministers to declare the independence and secession of West Bengal and Maharashtra. The email also contains a disclaimer at the end which says that SFJ believes in the right to self-determination for all peoples as guaranteed in Article 1 of the UN Charter and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and believes in the realization of that right through non-violent and peaceful means of a referendum. Earlier, SFJ had written to the chief ministers of West Bengal and Maharashtra seeking independence for the states. SFJ "counseled" All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) chief Mamata Banerjee and Shiv Sena's Uddhav Thackeray to "unilaterally declare the independence of the territories of West Bengal and Maharashtra from Union of India." Live TV Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. What to do if someone tests positive for COVID-19 at your business If a confirmed or probable case of COVID-19 (a patron/client or an employee) is detected at a business or entity, the business or entity may be asked to close for a period of time to conduct any necessary environmental cleaning of the space, and to allow contact tracing and the public health investigation to be completed. You will need to completely clean and disinfect your business/location. Information on best practices for disinfecting your space can be found in general relaunch guidance. To support public health contact tracing efforts, you should collect the name and contact information of attendees (i.e., staff and patrons). Through the contact tracing process conducted by public health officials, the investigator would determine if the case had prolonged contact with other individuals in the business/entity, staff, or anyone else at the facility. The decision to close a business/entity or a building would be made by the Zone Medical Officer of Health in consultation with the business operator. If the case has had no prolonged contact with other areas or staff in the building, it is unlikely that a full closure would be required. Business operators, staff members, as well as others potentially exposed to the confirmed or probable COVID-19 case should complete the COVID-19 self-assessment. Close contacts (i.e. those that provide care, live with or have close physical contact without appropriate use of personal protective equipment, or come into direct contact with infectious body fluids) of a person who tested positive for COVID-19 are legally required to isolate for 14 days and monitor for symptoms. If the close contact of a confirmed case becomes symptomatic (cough, fever, shortness of breath, runny nose or sore throat) during this time they must isolate for an additional 10 days from the beginning of symptom onset, or until they are feeling well, whichever takes longer. Learn more about isolation requirements. Married At First Sight groom Jake Edwards has confirmed reports that he cheated on his ex-fiancee Paige McCuskey just weeks before their wedding. Speaking to Who magazine on Thursday, the former AFL star, 32, said he feels terrible about his infidelity, calling the affair 'one of the biggest regrets of his life'. Describing his behaviour as 'poor', Jake confessed: 'I was with someone I thought I wanted to spend my life with but there was something missing. Stupidly, I cheated on her with another woman.' 'I'm not proud of it': Married At First Sight's Jake Edwards, 32, told Who magazine on Thursday that he regrets cheating on his ex-fiancee Paige McCuskey (right) weeks before their wedding Jake said he was forced to take a good look at his life choices after cheating on Paige and ending their engagement. 'I lost a lot of things because of it: my house, mutual friends and her family. Im not proud of it,' he added. His admission comes after Paige slammed Jake for acting deceitfully and cheating on her in a series of brutal Instagram posts. Regret: Describing his behaviour as 'poor', Jake confessed: 'I was with someone I thought I wanted to spend my life with but there was something missing. Stupidly, I cheated on her with another woman' 'I lost a lot of things because of it': Jake said he was forced to take a good look at his life choices after cheating on Paige and ending their engagement Paige and Jake dated for about three years before getting engaged during a romantic trip to Fiji in December 2018. They had planned to wed in December 2019, but broke up weeks before walking down the aisle. While Jake's official bio states he simply 'fell out of love' with Paige, she claimed he was actually deceitful and cheated on her during their four-year romance. 'Deceit': Paige recently edited the captions of several photos of the couple in happier times, adding unflattering remarks about Jake and his alleged behaviour during their relationship Paige recently edited the captions of several photos of the couple in happier times, adding unflattering remarks about Jake and his alleged behaviour during their relationship. A post from August 2017 showed Paige and Jake sharing a tender kiss. The original caption read 'LOVE', but Paige has since updated it to 'Edit: deceit.' Taking a swipe: She updated the caption beneath this photo of the former couple kissing at a friend's wedding in November 2017. It was originally captioned 'my rock' but now states 'Edit: ehhkkkk also other people's rocks' She also edited the caption beneath a photo of the former couple kissing at a friend's wedding in November 2017. It was originally captioned 'my rock' but now states 'Edit: ehhkkkk also other people's rocks'. Elsewhere, the blonde recently tweaked the caption beneath a photo of herself and Jake posing in a car. 'Who knows what you were doing when you were away': Elsewhere, Paige recently tweaked the caption beneath this photo of herself and Jake posing in a car 'Amazing night with my boy doing footy the fancy way. So good to have you home,' the original post read. Paige has since added: 'Edit: Who knows what you were doing when you were away?' Perhaps the most brutal comment, however, was left beneath a photo of the pair snorkelling. Ouch! Paige also edited the captions of these Instagram posts to include unflattering comments about charity CEO Jake 'Should [have] held him under the water,' she wrote. Paige and Jake dated for about three years before getting engaged during a romantic trip to Fiji in December 2018. They had planned to wed in December 2019, but broke up weeks before walking down the aisle. 'Should of held him under the water': Perhaps the most brutal comment, however, was left beneath a photo of the pair snorkelling. 'Should [have] held him under the water,' Paige wrote Although Jake didn't specifically acknowledge his-ex's Instagram captions, speaking on Nova 96.9's Fitzy & Wippa show on Monday, he said: 'We split 12 months before the show.' 'We haven't been in contact at all and I don't think they'll be any need for me to reach out. The reason [I didn't tell her I was doing MAFS] was because I know the relationship we had at the time.' 'I was convinced she'd make me feel really terrible for doing something like this. So I probably would have pulled out.' Over: They had planned to wed in December 2019, but broke up weeks before walking down the aisle It comes after a friend of Paige's told the So Dramatic! podcast she was 'devastated' to learn her ex-fiance would be appearing on Married At First Sight just months after he was supposed to marry her. 'Who could possibly get ready for a wedding when he was supposed to be marrying the love of his life nine months prior? It's just selfish. Paige is devastated,' they said. 'I can't believe he would go on a show so quickly after what he did to her.' 'I can't believe he would go on a show so quickly': It comes after a friend of Paige's told the So Dramatic! podcast she was 'devastated' to learn her ex-fiance would be appearing on Married At First Sight just months after he was supposed to marry her Jake married business manager and former WAG Beck Zemek on Monday night's season premiere of Married At First Sight. Beck, 27, has since been dubbed the 'bride from hell' because of her demanding and hostile attitude towards her husband. Married At First Sight continues Wednesday 7.30pm on Channel Nine Credit: CC0 Public Domain A new analysis of education debates on both social media and in traditional media outlets suggests that the education sector is being increasingly influenced by populism and the wider social media 'culture wars'. The study also suggests that the type of populism in question is not quite the same as that used to explain large-scale political events, such as the UK's 'Brexit' from the European Union, or Donald Trump's recent presidency in the United States. Instead, the researchersfrom the University of Cambridge, UK, and Queensland University of Technology, Australiaidentify a phenomenon called "micropopulism": a localized populism which spotlights an aspect of public services, such as the education sector. Micropopulism is populist, they argue, in the sense that it expresses a fervent division between a disregarded "people" and an unjust elite. The paper, by Dr. Steve Watson and Dr. Naomi Barnes, sketches out how think tanks, among other organizations, propagate such controversies using both new media and old. They highlight how 'wedge' issues are being used to prompt bitter disputes on social media between those with traditional views of education, and those who are more progressive. 'Traditional' teachers, in this context, argue that their authority in the classroom has been undermined by a largely university-based and ideologically-progressive 'elite' which, they claim, has used its institutional power to force them to use student-centered teaching methods which are not supported by scientific evidence. The polarized debate that ensues disguises the complexity of real classrooms, which in practice can be neither purely traditional, nor purely progressive. The authors argue that "the claim that educational micropopulism is abroad in England and Australia is almost self-evident" and offer a theoretical analysis of how and why it is happening. As potential examples, they cite increasingly vitriolic and adversarial online standoffs over issues such as teaching methods, discipline, or free speech on university campuses. Many of these appear to be linked to, or directly involve, think thanks or other groups with an interest in shaping policy. The paper calls for more evidence-gathering to understand the conditions which precipitate increasingly bitter debates within the education community, and warns that some vested interests may be using micropopulist tactics to influence policy. Dr. Steve Watson, a lecturer at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, said: "We've reached the stage where there is enough evidence to indicate this issue requires more analysis and attention than it has received to date. There is clearly a relationship between education, policy-making, think tanks, media, and micropopulismbut its extent and consequences have yet to be fully determined." Dr. Naomi Barnes, from the Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology, said: "One concern is that at present, teachers and educators who are actively involved in these online discussions may not be aware of how controversy is being perpetuated and how bitter discussions go viral to help achieve policy-making objectives. There is a need to understand this more." The authors argue that controversies in the media and on social channels enable would-be reformers to position progressives in education (often abbreviated to "progs") as an out-of-touch elite. Most obviously, this idea seems to match Michael Gove's infamous demonisation of progressive "bureaucrats, academics and teachers" unions' as 'The Blob'." One reformist government advisor has similarly praised social media 'trads' for instigating "a reformation of the church of education." They also suggest that this reductive version of the debate now defines many of the most toxic arguments about education online. Watson, in particular, identifies Twitterespecially the popular #EduTwitteras the site of unpleasant confrontations about matters such as the #BanTheBooth debate on discipline in schools, or the use of phonics in primary education. In higher education, the researchers document a similar pattern in which university leaders are demonized as lazy, careless, distant and heavy-handed. In Australia, this seems to parallel a recent upswing in efforts by the right-wing Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) and Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) to actively publicize their policy arguments as research "findings." The paper highlights 10 recent examples of this activity, which prompted national media headlines such as: "Our universities have caved in to lazy groupthink"; and "Don't bail out bloated unis". Similarly provocative articles are increasingly appearing in the UK media, concerning issues such as free speech on campus, or claims about infiltration by foreign governments. Watson's own experiences suggest that some of the online confrontations, if not deliberately instigated, certainly involve strange forms of behavior. Last year, he published a paper highlighting possible evidence of micropopulist strategies on #EduTwitter. Within hours, this had provoked multiple angry responses on Twitter accusing him of fabricating a conspiracy theoryalthough many teachers and academics also posted messages of agreement. As a result, the paper scored unusually well on Altmetric.com: a tool that tracks engagement with scholarly content online. Once this became apparent, the Twitter attacks not only ceased, but disappeared, with several critics deleting their posts as if attempting to stifle its popularity. "Extraordinarily, the paper may have gone some way to proving its own theory through the backlash it created," Watson said. The authors believe that, at the very least, further research is needed to understand how today's education debates have become so schismatic. They warn that reasoned discussion about the future of education is being compromised. "We would recommend considering a digital citizenship initiative for education professionals to counter this," Barnes added. Explore further How teachers can use social media to improve learning this fall More information: Steven Watson et al, Online educational populism and New Right 2.0 in Australia and England, Globalisation, Societies and Education (2021). Steven Watson et al, Online educational populism and New Right 2.0 in Australia and England,(2021). DOI: 10.1080/14767724.2021.1882292 The coronavirus pandemic has crippled economies, shut down travel and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, transforming the world in ways that would have been unthinkable a year ago. The Biden administrations first days were inevitably dominated by discussion of how his team would tackle the crisis, as the U.S. death toll continued its inexorable climb to a staggering milestone: 500,000 deaths. Heres a look at the key figures on President Bidens Covid-19 response team, and some of their plans to try to stop the spread of the virus and regain some semblance of normalcy. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci Chief medical adviser. The longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Fauci said he accepted the presidents offer to be his chief medical adviser right on the spot. Considered the nations leading infectious disease expert, he has been an adviser to every president since Ronald Reagan, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush for his work fighting H.I.V./AIDS. But he became a household name only after the start of the pandemic, when he emerged as a trusted authority in countless news briefings, interviews and public appearances. Described by the United States officials as the first diplomatic initiative, the U.S. and Canada will host a high-level summit tackling climate change. ABC News reports that the United States' movement seeks to put the issue back at the top of the American Foreign Policy Agenda. Yahoo! News shares that the United States' movement was recognized and welcomed by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Trudeau virtually met with President Joe Biden in the first bilateral meeting. Based on a Fact Sheet released by the White House, it is indicated that President Biden will take executive action in tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad, alongside creating union jobs and an equitable clean energy future. Read also: New Study Shows Climate Change Intensifies Tropical Storms, Depletes Oxygen Canada on Climate Change ABC News reports that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that the United States' leadership had been sorely missed over the past years when it comes to climate change. He furthers that it is nice when the people of the U.S. are not pulling out all their references when it comes to the issue; instead, they add more. They add that Canada is expected to announce a commitment to enhancing their target in reducing carbon emissions. At the same time, the current administration of the U.S. plans to release the United States' target during Biden's Earth Day Summit 2021. Yahoo! News shares that an adviser from the special envoy for climate, John Kerry, said that Canada is working in partnership with them in establishing and creating the ambition in this decade. This is not only bilaterally, but also with other major economies in the rest of the world. ABC News notes that Kerry sounded the alarm regarding the need for action surpassing the Paris Climate Accord, which was negotiated during the Obama administration. They point out that Former President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the non-binding deal, but President Biden re-entered the agreement during his first day in office. President Biden's Actions on the Climate Crisis President Biden is starting its efforts to counter the climate crisis faced by countries from all around the world. Along with the rejoining of the United States in the Paris Agreement, the White House fact sheet notes that the current president of the U.S. will also have the immediate review of the rollbacks of standards when it comes to protecting the American air, water, and communities. The fact sheet added that President Biden will also sign an important Presidential Memorandum regarding the scientific integrity in sending a clear message that the current administration. The administration will also safeguard the scientists from political curiosity and ensure that they can think, research, and speak freely to provide valuable information catered to the American populace, as stated in the fact sheet. With the same goal of Canada and the U.S. during the climate talks, in answering and countering the climate crisis, climate change will be addressed better. This will be done while Americans await the commitment of the United States' current administration to the climate crisis to be announced on the Earth Say Summit 2021. Related article: Latinos Urged to Support Conservation and Combat Climate Change WATCH: Trudeau: 'This Is Our Moment to Act' on Climate Change, Inequality from Bloomberg Quicktake: Now Community News Editor / Librarian Jeannie Maschino is community news editor and librarian for The Berkshire Eagle. She has worked for the newspaper in various capacities since 1982 and joined the newsroom in 1989. She can be reached at jmaschino@berkshireeagle.com. A Chambers County, Texas, resident has filed a class-action lawsuit against electricity retailer Griddy, accusing the provider of price gouging customers during last weeks freeze. She is seeking $1 billion in relief for affected customers. Attorneys for Lisa Khoury said in the lawsuit that her bill spiked to $9,340 the week of the storm, compared to her average monthly bills that range from $200 to $250. Griddy drafted payments from Khourys bank account several times, according to the lawsuit, pulling $1,200 before she blocked further charges from her bank. She still owes thousands. Griddy passes wholesale electricity rates directly to customers, who in turn pay the company $10 a month. This differs from fixed-rate electricity plans which offer a consistent rate regardless of market conditions. But because of a price hike fueled by a shortage of supply and skyrocketing demand, some customers were faced with bills charging tens of thousands of dollars. While electricity bills are likely to rise across the board, Texans on variable rate plans faced immediate and alarmingly high prices. Texas Public Utility Commission, appointed by Abbott, raised the wholesale market price of electricity to $9 per kilo-watt hour a 7,400% increase over the average 12 cents per kilo-watt hour in response to rising demand. The hope was power generators would be enticed to produce more electricity. Energy prices should reflect scarcity of the supply, the order stated. Representatives for Griddy could not immediately be reached for comment. The electricity retailer addressed concerns of price gouging on its website and firmly placed the blame on the Public Utility Commission. The company states that it did not profit from raised prices. You effectively pay the same price as a retail energy provider or utility. No markups. No hidden fees. No contracts. Thats it, the company stated. Griddy warned its 29,000 customers last week of impending price hikes and encouraged them to seek out other electric providers. The company is offering customers a deferred payment plan to pay off balances over five months. At Griddy, transparency has always been our goal, the company said in a blog post explaining the price hike. We know you are angry and so are we. Pissed, in fact. Griddy has vowed to fight the raised prices, saying, The market is supposed to set the prices, not political appointees. Gov. Greg Abbott has said scaling back the bills will be a top priority, and the states utility commission on Sunday took action to temporarily prevent electric companies from cutting power to customers who dont pay and from sending out bills and cost estimates. This suit is part of the latest in a flurry of suits filed related to damages from the winter storm. On Tuesday, Morgan & Morgan a national plaintiffs firm with more than 700 lawyers announced a class action lawsuit against the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, alleging that the operator failed to plan for the cold weather, despite multiple clear warnings. Attorneys write that ERCOT refused to winterize equipment despite recommendations of both the Public Utilities Commission of Texas and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission after other storms in 1989 and 2011. The lawsuit was filed in the 133rd District Court of Harris County on behalf of all retail customers within the ERCOT Region who lost electric services or potable water services during the week of February 14, 2021 as a result of ERCOTs failure to ensure adequate generating capacity. This was not the first time ERCOT has failed to plan and prepare for cold weather. But instead of learning the lessons of its past failures, ERCOT yet again disregarded its duties to its customers, attorneys Mike Morgan and Rene Rocha said in a statement. It appears to be the first class-action lawsuit filed against the operator. Over the weekend, Houston attorney Tony Buzbee filed a lawsuit suing the ERCOT and energy provider Entergy for a total of $100 million on behalf of a family whose son died during forced outages last week. Buzbee said he plans on filing several more lawsuits against ERCOT and electric providers. Litigation against ERCOT might face hurdles as the Texas Supreme Court is expected to weigh in this year on whether ERCOT has sovereign immunity which would shield it from some lawsuits. Disclosure: Entergy has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribunes journalism. Find a complete list of them here. Texas woman who received $9,300 electricity bill files class-action lawsuit against wholesale electricity provider Griddy was first published at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/23/texas-electric-bill-griddy/ by The Texas Tribune. Related: Topics Lawsuits Texas The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company For a single performance of his wild, audience-baiting humour he was pocketing $10,000. Reverse back to 1984. Austen Tayshus was Australias most successful comic. His record Australiana had clocked up sales of 230,000 to become the all-time best-selling Australian single. Seven years later and Austen Tayshus real name Sandy Gutman is in the newspapers again. But this time it is courtesy of a notice of bankruptcy. His last record sold next to nothing. For his performance last night at Sydneys Cauldron nightclub he expected $100. A few nights earlier The Comedy Store paid him $150. A few things I speculated on didnt come off last year thats all, says Gutman of his slide into bankruptcy. Im sure its the same everywhere in Australia - you get a credit card and you use it and things get out of hand. Hes staying at a pleasant Kings Cross Hotel - on discounted rates, he adds but the Herald suggests a photograph across the road where the disciples of Krishna serve free food to the needy. Maybe Tayshus is right and weve become a nation of bankrupts. He chats to his neighbour in the queue Mark Metson, a 33-year-old from Adelaide. Hyderabad: Telangana Congress chief N. Uttam Kumar Reddy said on Wednesday that the Congress campaign for the MLC elections for the two graduate constituencies was receiving tremendous response. Addressing two different election meetings, the Nalgonda MP Uttam Kumar Reddy said that Congress candidates Ramulu Naik and G. Chinna Reddy have been enjoying the backing of organizational strength in all six districts. Besides PCC and DCC office bearers, he said, leaders of all frontal, departments and various cells were actively working for the victory of Congress. He claimed that neither the TRS nor the BJP has so much reach or strength to face Congress, although both were trying to lure voters with money and other sops. Alleging that the TRS government had disappointed all sections of society, Mr Reddy said that employees, teachers, jobless youth and students were repeatedly cheated by Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao. KCR, who is lavishly living in an `1,000 crore worth palatial bungalow, Pragathi Bhavan, has turned so insensitive that he never held a meeting to review problems being faced by common people. Employees have been waiting endlessly for the new Pay Revision Commission. Teachers have completely lost relevance. Lakhs of students are facing difficulties due to lack of funds and facilities. Jobless youth are frustrated without opportunities. But the Chief Minister has no time for any of them. He blamed the BJP government at the Centre and the TRS in Telangana as equally responsible for bringing the situation to level. Under these circumstances, he said, people are looking towards Congress for a solution. Mr Reddy ridiculed the ongoing membership drive of the TRS party. He said instead of enrolling people on an ideological basis, TRS leaders were offering membership by selling insurance policies and medi-claims. He said every political party takes care of its members. But TRS leaders are offering incentives and cash to achieve membership targets. He also ridiculed BJPs Operation Aakarshan, an attempt to lure Congress leaders into its fold. Telangana BJP leaders are searching for some disgruntled elements within the Congress. Earlier, the TRS had served as a trash can for Congress party, where non-important and irrelevant leaders got dumped. Since TRS trash can is almost full, BJP is proving to be a fresh dustbin, he said. He further said that defection of a few leaders to the TRS or BJP would never impact Congress. We are a cadre-based party. Leaders come and go. But cadre remains firm at ground level and never switches loyalties for money. Each Congress worker is capable. Congress has a capacity to produce leaders while TRS and BJP could only survive by behaving like vultures, he said. Mr Reddy exhorted Congress cadre to work hard to ensure the victory of Ramulu Naik and Chinna Reddy in the MLC elections. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Gov. John Hickenlooper had two points he wanted to get across as he questioned New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland on her nomination for interior secretary Tuesday: Protect public lands and keep the Bureau of Land Management headquarters in Colorado. "Like New Mexico, Colorado has a very strong conservation community, a vigorous outdoor recreation community," the former governor told President Biden's nominee at her confirmation hearing. Denver-based charity for Indigenous students advocates for Biden's Interior nominee The Denver-based American Indian College Fund is among the groups advocating for the confirmation of U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., to the job of secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, pushing back on accusations that her views are "extreme." She could replace another Westerner, David Bernhardt, who grew up in Rifle and practiced law in Denver. Hickenlooper is cosponsoring a bill that his Colorado colleague, Michael Bennet, has pushed for years: The Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy Act to protect 400,000 acres of public lands in Colorado for wilderness and recreation, known as the CORE Act. "Communities across our state have been working 10 years on this bill as a historic effort to protect public lands," Hickenlooper told Haaland. "And the CORE Act is key to ensuring Coloradans can inherit both a thriving outdoor recreation economy and pristine outdoor spaces, as you already have been discussing this morning. He debunked claims that the bill would close areas to roads and off-road trails, then Hickenlooper asked for an agency review of the bill, which he said was mischaracterized by the Trump administration. Haaland told Hickenlooper she was disappointed that the CORE Act did not pass last year. She said Biden, too, supports a strong outdoor economy. "I understand the administration also endorses the bill," she replied. On keeping BLM in Grand Junction, where it was moved from Washington, D.C. during the Trump administration, Haaland seemed less certain. Ill absolutely keep an open dialogue, she said. And if youre inviting me to Colorado, I gracefully accept. Hickenlooper sits on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which held Haaland's confirmation hearing. Haaland took 2 hours of questions Tuesday and the hearing is expected to conclude Wednesday. Rep. Diana DeGette reintroduces Colorado Wilderness Act to preserve 660,000 acres Its up to us, like those before us, to protect these precious lands for future generations to enjoy just as weve been able to do. U.S. Rep. Ken Buck of Windsor, who doubles as the state Republican Party chairman, released a statement skeptical of the restrictions that might accompany the Democrats' public lands legislation. Coloradans should have more control over our lands, not less, Buck said in a statement. The federal government already owns 35.9% of Colorado. This public lands package gives more power to bureaucrats in Washington to enforce onerous restrictions and kill energy jobs." The Interior Department oversees about 500 million acres of public lands across the country, but predominantly in the West. Haaland could play a key role in Bidens climate-focused agenda, deciding what activities must be limited to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Those public lands, however, sit on major fossil fuel reserves. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., noted Biden said last year he might stop all gas and oil leasing on federal and public lands. "It is President Biden's agenda, not my own agenda, that I will be moving forward,'' Haaland replied. If confirmed, she would become the nation's first interior secretary and presidential Cabinet member of American Indian descent. The historic nature of my confirmation is not lost on me, but I will say that it is not about me, Haaland testified Monday. Rather, I hope this nomination would be an inspiration for Americans moving forward together as one nation and creating opportunities for all of us. SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Feb. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- MC Residential moved quickly to assist their residents without heat, water and electricity by sending much needed aid as Texas suffers from a rare winter storm that has crippled power grids in almost every major city. With real estate holdings in three major Texas cities, MC Residential knew that acting fast was critical. MC Residential houses 3,000 residents in Texas along with 50 Texas based employees. Company leadership quickly allocated financial backing for this critical aid and sent four large RV's to provide shelter to those most vulnerable and in need of heat and comfort. Many have no potable water or have experienced water damage in their homes as pipes burst from the cold, displacing many residents. In addition, MC Residential sent over 6,500 pounds of much needed water, diapers, non-perishable food, blankets and medical supplies. Several residents of The Place at Oak Hills located in San Antonio, TX took to the internet to thank MC Residential for the aid and support. "After going through this extreme weather The Place at Oak Hills provided care packages for their residents!!!! To me, this is priceless. I've lived here for 6 months and management is very engaged in their property. They've been communicative, friendly and definitely understanding. I haven't had an issue whatsoever. If I could give them 10 stars I would!" Another resident said, "Thank you Oak Hills for providing tenants with care packages full of food, water and toiletries during this snow storm! The office employees, manager and maintenance team are the best! Anytime I need something they do all they can to make it happen as soon as they can! You've made my experience here so welcoming and safe." MC Residential is the Property Management division of MC Companies, an Investment Firm based in Scottsdale Arizona. The act of giving is woven deeply in the company culture and one of our most sacred values being "Giving" says Lesley Brice the President of MC Residential. "We found drivers willing to deliver these much-needed supplies and sent them on the path to our residents and their families", Lesley Brice continues. "As a company we band together and do whatever it takes to make the communities where we operate better than we found them and of course we never shy away in the face of crisis. Our experience with helping others during a natural disaster is not new. During the crisis brought on by Hurricane Harvey we had hundreds of employees donating time and money to help so many in need," says Ken McElroy Partner and CEO of MC Companies. About MC Residential: MC Residential https://www.mccompanies.com is a property management company specializing in multifamily properties and commercial markets and is a subsidiary of MC Companies. Photos: https://www.prlog.org/12859367 Press release distributed by PRLog SOURCE MC Companies New Delhi: Britain has been found in 187 people affected by the coronavirus in the country, South Africa in 6 people and Brazil strain in one. NITI Aayog member Dr. VK Paul said on Tuesday that genome sequencing is being done in 10 labs in the country. Under this, sequencing of 3500 samples has been done so far, in which this information has been revealed. Along with these, new strains of N-440K and E484-K virus have been reported in Maharashtra, Kerala, and Telangana. In fact, new strains of the virus are also appearing in the states of the country where the corona epidemic is increasing. In some districts of these states, the same type of forms is increasingly seen in corona-infected people. Dr. VK Paul said that new strains of the virus have emerged in Maharashtra, Kerala, and Telangana. But it has not been proved yet that due to these, cases of infection are increasing. On the new appearance of Corona, Dr. Paul said that the new strain of Corona is still surprising us. It is still necessary to understand more. Around 75 percent of the cases are coming from Kerala and Maharashtra. At the same time, Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray has also called a meeting in this regard. About 6 thousand cases were reported from Maharashtra on Tuesday. Here again, night lockdown has been implemented in many places. Also Read: Modi-Shah 'Thanks' public after very special win across Gujarat Corona cases spike in Punjab, 13 teachers out of 4000 caught infection Corona cases increased in Maharashtra and Kerala While kids of any age look forward to December all year long, anticipating 8 fun-filled nights of gifts, dreidel spinning, latkes and chocolate gelt on Hanukkah, Judaism also features another grand and celebratory holiday, replete with costumes, parades, treats and plenty of noise-making frivolity! Purim ranks as one of the most fun and entertaining of all the Jewish holidays. Celebrated this year on Feb. 26, Purim commemorates the day that Queen Esther of Persia saved the Jewish people from execution by Haman, the duplicitous and evil advisor to the Persian King. Esther bravely exposed her hidden Jewish heritage to her husband the King, successfully convincing him to denounce Haman and save her people. Part of the revelry during Purim services involves the retelling of the story (reading the Magillah); those assembled in the synagogue boo, hiss, and rattle noisemakers (graggers) at the mention of Haman. This custom serves the purpose of blotting out any utterance of the villains name. Other traditions include carnivals, with children dressing up as their favorite characters from the Purim story. Such festivals feature treats, themed games and crafts for the little ones. ADVERTISEMENT Each year, Jews the world over enjoy making and eating hamantaschen: sweet triangular-shaped stuffed pastries said to resemble Hamans three-cornered hat. Sweet hamantaschen are the most popular, plump with poppy seed, chocolate, date, apricot or apple filling. Given that the Purim story took place in Persia, many Purim recipes feature chickpeas, a staple in Persian cuisine. One tradition tells of how Queen Esther, in order to keep kosher, ate only seeds and legumes while living in the Kings castle; this in turn led to a custom of eating chickpeas as well as other foods containing seeds or nuts during the holiday. Try preparing Queen Esthers Salad (recipe below) as a a healthy way of including these traditional foods. This season, embrace the celebration of Purim with your friends and family. Most of us could use some uplifting, especially after the rough ride of the COVID-19 pandemic deflated much of our usual enthusiasm over the last 11 months. What better way to springboard from the recent celebration of Tu BShevat than to engage in some delicious and ironically planet-healthy green vegetarian foods while watching a costume parade during the Purim carnival! Dont forget your noisemakersdrown out that Haman character one and for all! Queen Esthers Salad Rinse and thoroughly dry 6 cups of mixed baby lettuce greens. Transfer to a bowl; add 2 teaspoons of white or red wine vinegar, 2 tablespoons oil, and salt /pepper to taste. Add in 2-3 tablespoons of toasted shelled sunflower seeds, and 3 cups of either roasted chickpeas or toasted walnuts. Toss thoroughly. Serve sprinkled with sesame and/or poppy seeds. Cathleen Kronemer, NSCA-CPT, Certified Health Coach, is a longtime fitness instructor at the Jewish Community Center of St. Louis. Papillon is a true story about Henri Charriere, a Frenchman framed for a murder in 1931 and then wrongly charged with a life sentence and hard labour. After watching a captivating movie based on the book, I was haunted by the suffering of Charriere and over 80,000 men like him who were condemned to penal colonies controlled by France by almost a century. Dry Guillotine The penal colonies consisted of three islands. By far, the most depraved form of punishment was on St Joseph Island. Not only were prisoners placed permanently in solitary confinement (sometimes in complete darkness), but they were forbidden to make even a sound. Thousands would spend years there under a piercing silence that eerily hovered over the entire island. St. Joseph was nicknamed the Dry Guillotine. A guillotine (and anyone in its vicinity) is extremely wet after being operated, drenched in the sprayed blood of the decapitated. But at St. Joseph, there was no blade, and therefore no blood; just the slow, maddening, excruciating death of mens spirits. Inmates were banned from screaming in frustration, venting to other prisoners in adjacent cells, singing a comforting tune, or even praying aloud for deliverance. That prohibition was more torturous than the hard and dangerous labour prisoners on the other penal islands were forced to do. Cries from the Cross Christs unjust trial and crucifixion paralleled the conditions at St. Joseph Island in several respects. The cross was solitary. Although multiple people were crucified at the same time, a cross (like a prison cell) would only hold one person at a time. The cross was the ultimate confinement. Unlike prisoners in St. Joseph, Christ could not even move His hands and feet. The cross was engulfed in physical darkness for some time (Mark chapter 15 verse 33), which paled in comparison to the spiritual darkness of demonic forces taunting Christ as he hung, bled and died. Breaking the Silence Likewise, Christ was silent throughout His suffering (Isaiah chapter 53 verse 7), refusing to answer Herod (John chapter 19 verse 9) or to complain or protest while being flogged, mocked and falsely accused. But near the end of his torment, even Jesus broke His silence. In the moment of His greatest anguish, he screamed My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Matthew chapter 27 verse 46 specifically notes that He let out a loud cry. If even Jesus eventually needed to cry out, how much more do we need to when we are in unbearable pain? St. Joseph Island today The French government eventually shut down the penal colonies in the 1950s. But, regrettably, the torment of silencing people amid suffering is a legacy that lingers far beyond the shores of former island prison camps. We have all, to a certain extent, lived the legacy of St. Joseph today, i.e. forcing people to be silent during painful trials. Whether deliberately or unknowingly, the core reason for doing this is to serve our own interests. The French government developed physical infrastructure (e.g. roads, railways and cleared land) in its Caribbean colonies at the cost of its prisoners dignity, justice and even lives. Likewise, people protect themselves from the guilt of seeing a colleague suffer, or the awkwardness of being helpless to change or eliminate a problem at the cost of others emotional dignity and justice. Same Root, Different Fruits While the root of selfishness remains the same, the fruit born from it can take a myriad of forms: imposing our presumptions and expectations about our feelings on others based on our (limited) understanding of their situation. (You just got a promotion, you MUST be happy!) ignoring the situation so we dont have to be saddened by it (e.g. a mother turning a blind eye to how her boyfriend abuses her child because of how badly she wants to keep the romance) trivialising the situation, by insisting the pain is not that bad, or invalidating the victims pain by comparing it to that of others guilting others through by wrongly dividing the word of truth (II Timothy chapter 2 verse 15) (If you had the joy of the Lord, you would never be sad.) pressuring others to accept abusive circumstances (Men will always push for sex) blaming others unfairly for inciting their own suffering (What were you wearing when he groped you?) pushing others to hurry up and get over it by unfairly accusing them of being unforgiving, resentful or bitter if they dont heal as quickly as we want them to telling victims outright that they dont have the right to express themselves (Men dont cry) by disingenuously masking our self-centredness behind a mirage of compassion for others (Dont bring that topic up, itll make others feel uncomfortable) Setting the Captives Free Jesus proclaims that the Spirit of the Lord is on me, because He has anointed me to set the captives free (Luke chapter 4 verse 18). That anointing is not only limited to physical captivity, but emotional captivity as well. If we invite him to examine our hearts and test our motives (Psalm chapter 26:62), He will give us the grace to repent, to renew our minds and to set our loved ones free by responding to their pain with His compassion. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili says he is not surprised by the current political turmoil engulfing the South Caucasus nation. In an interview with Current Time, he argued that it's the result of an ongoing crackdown on opponents of the government, including himself. Police stormed the party offices of opposition leader Nika Melia and detained him on February 23, ratcheting up a crisis that gathered momentum when the prime minister resigned last week. Melia's supporters had barricaded themselves in the offices, using furniture to block the doors. Scores of police surged into the building during the early morning raid in Tbilisi. Seventeen people were reported to have been hurt in the scuffles between police and activists. Some activists were coughing and suffered eye irritation after police sprayed gas toward them from hand-held canisters. Melia, the United National Movement (ENM) party's chairman, has been accused of inciting violence at street protests in June 2019, a charge he dismisses as politically motivated. Saakashvili, who founded the ENM party and served as Georgia's president from 2004 to 2013 after helping lead the massive, peaceful protests in 2003 known as the Rose Revolution, said Melia's arrest was the latest attempt by the current rulers to sideline the opposition. "At first they blocked my entry into the country under the pretext of far-fetched criminal cases," Saakashvili, who left Georgia shortly after leaving office and has not been back, told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. "Now, when I wasn't able to lead the party, the party chose Nika Melia as its leader by electronic voting. And they have arrested him also on a far-fetched pretext: for allegedly fighting with the police at a rally two years ago," he said. Melia was charged in connection with protests that erupted in 2019 after Russian lawmaker Sergei Gavrilov occupied the Georgian speaker's seat in parliament, a symbolic reminder of Russia's unwanted influence over its smaller southern neighbor. Saakashvili, 53, told Current Time that he and Melia weren't the only members of the ENM party to have been targeted by the government under the ruling Georgian Dream party. "I'd just like to say that other members of our party have been imprisoned. A criminal probe was launched, and several hundred people, leaders and activists of our party, were forced to flee the country abroad," Saakashvili said. In Georgia, Saakashvili has been prosecuted by the government that came to power after his party's defeat in 2012 parliamentary elections. In 2018, he was sentenced in absentia to a total of nine years in prison after being convicted of abuse of power in two separate cases. Prosecutors also said that he was wanted in his native country for allegedly authorizing a plot to kill an opposition politician who died in Britain in 2008. Saakashvili, who has rejected all charges as politically motivated, started a new political career in Ukraine in 2015. In the interview with Current Time, Saakashvili again repeated claims that parliamentary elections won by Georgia Dream last autumn were rigged. International observers said the October 31 vote, which triggered protests, was broadly free and fair. Two months after the controversial poll, the Georgian Dream party leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili, announced he was quitting politics. He served as prime minister in 2012-13, but opponents accused him of running the country of 3.7 million from behind the scenes after he stepped down from that position. Ivanishvili, who made much of the $4.8 billion Forbes estimates he is worth in Russia in metals and banking in the 1990s, has also been accused by opponents of being close to the Kremlin, something he denies. "I think what has happened over the past 24 hours has been taking place over the past few years. And what happened over the past day is just the culmination of what has taken place in recent years. The Russian model -- 'Belarusization' -- has been introduced into Georgia. But what can you expect when an oligarch takes power," said Saakashvili in a thinly veiled reference to Ivanishvili. Saakashvili also likened the current situation in Georgia to Belarus and Russia, where state authorities have cracked down hard on street protests, and accused the West of failing to rebuke Tbilisi, in contrast to its criticism of the actions of Minsk and Moscow. Thousands of people have been arrested and beaten in Belarus since long-time leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka claimed a landslide victory in an August 2020 presidential election that his opponents and the West say was rigged. Russia was the scene of unprecedented nationwide protests in January after opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was arrested and jailed after returning to Moscow from Germany, where he had recovered from a poisoning that he accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering. "Why has the West been silent until now? Yes, now they have begun to talk about what is happening in Georgia, but why have they been silent until now? It's just immoral. How is Georgia different from Belarus? There's no difference. The economic situation in Belarus is slightly better. How is Georgia different from Russia? There's no difference. It's just that the economic situation in Russia is slightly better," Saakashvili argued. "Everything else: arrests, intimidation, blackmailing the opposition, rhetoric of the authorities -- everything is absolutely one and the same." Saakashvili, a fierce critic of Putin, said he believes the Russian president "is extremely pleased by what is happening in Georgia." Russian forces pushed deep into Georgia in a five-day war in 2008 that erupted in the Russian-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia. After the war, Russia recognized South Ossetia and another breakaway region, Abkhazia, as independent -- a move condemned by the West, which has backed Georgia's territorial integrity. Written by Tony Wesolowsky based on reporting by Aleksandr Kasatkin of Current Time Commentary ASEANs Responsibility Is to the People of Myanmar, Not the Generals Anti-military regime protesters stage a sit-in protest in front of the Indonesian Embassy in Yangon on Wednesday. / The Irrawaddy History shows that when a Myanmar military regime holds an election, it will likely be neither free nor fair. It also tells us that when the vote is free, the result may well be disregarded. Its a fact of which Myanmars neighbors and the rest of the international community must be mindful. The previous military regime held two general elections, in 1990 and 2010. It ignored the results of the former, and rigged the latter. The 1990 election organized by the junta, known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council, was free and fair. For that very reason, the National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide victory. The junta, which had itself organized the election, simply ignored the result because it had not envisioned an NLD win. The regime didnt stop at annulling the election result, however. It went further, arresting hundreds of elected members of Parliament and throwing them behind bars for lengthy terms of imprisonment. Two decades later, the same military regime held another election. But not only was the 2010 vote not inclusivewith most of the main political parties, including the NLD and other ethnic parties sitting it out, condemning the electoral process as undemocraticit was also widely dismissed as rigged. The election took place on Nov. 7, 2010, just a week before Daw Aung San Suu Kyi herself was released from house arrest. Having gone as expectedwith the militarys electoral proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), claiming victorythe rigged result was honored. The elections held in 2015 under the semi-civilian government led by President U Thein Sein, a former general, met international standards. Fortunately, the result was honored, allowing the winning party, the NLD, to form Myanmars first civilian government since 1962, ending 53 years of absolute and semi-military dictatorship. The integrity of the most recent election, held in November 2020, was not questioned by international or domestic election observers, or by the majority of the many political parties that contested the election. (The exceptions, unsurprisingly, being the USDP and its allied parties.) The NLD again emerged as the resounding winner, and again confounded the militarys expectations. The result was the military coup of Feb. 1. Of the four general elections held in Myanmar in the past three decades, three were either rigged or overturned by force of arms. Hence, there is simply no reason to believe any promise of a free and fair election made by the latest coup leaders, led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. Somehow, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) appears willing to swallow this hollow promise. Perhaps we shouldnt be surprised; protecting ruthless generals in Myanmar is an ASEAN tradition. On Tuesday, Indonesia took the first step down that traditional path of knowingly ignoring the facts in order to help the coup leaders in Myanmar. According to reports, Indonesia initiated a push to have ASEAN back an action plan that would seek to hold the military to its promise to organize a fair and inclusive new election. Such a move can only be described as outrageous. Right after the report emerged, a large group of protestersmost of them youngmobilized and held a demonstration on Tuesday outside the Indonesian Embassy in Yangon. On Wednesday, even larger crowds continued to protest, not only at the Indonesian Embassy, but also at those of other ASEAN countries, including Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore. Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi planned to travel to Naypyitaw to meet the coup leaders but later canceled, perhaps fearing she would be met by crowds of protesters. Instead, the foreign minister of Myanmars military regime, U Wunna Maung Lwin, flew to Bangkok to meet Retno. It was the first in-person meeting between the minister of the military regime and his counterparts from Indonesia and Thailand. ASEANs reputation has for years been tarnished by its willingness to protect Myanmars generals as they oppress their own people. In the past, the regional grouping shielded the military regime from any criticism from the West and the UN over the generals political persecution and human rights violations. And as they have in the past, Western countries led by the US have once again shown strong solidarity with the Myanmar people, demanding the military regime release the countrys detained leaders, respect the election result and restore democracy US President Joe Biden has already imposed sanctions on the coup leaders, including Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing, who is the main culprit in this power seizure, heading the military regimes ruling organ, the State Administrative Council. For ASEAN, however, its a case of history repeating itself. ASEAN is unlikely to stand together with the people of Myanmar as they courageously and rightly protest against the military dictatorship. Instead, ASEAN leaders are likely to support the plans of the new military regime, which has no interest whatsoever in adhering to democratic norms. It is, after all, their undemocratic and immoral tradition. It is also further proof that ASEAN is politically and morally immaturejust like the generals in Myanmar. These birds of the same feather will always flock together. Myanmars peopleincluding, significantly, its millions of young peopledeserve the full support of the world and their regional neighbors. The duty of the international community is clear: to stand with the people of Myanmar and to refuse to help the military dictatorship. In other words, to be compassionate, righteous and democratic. You may also like these stories: Myanmar Medics in Hiding as Regime Targets Hospital-Led Disobedience Movement Myanmar Military Targets Striking Civil Servants UK and Canada Sanction Myanmars Coup Leader and His Subordinates Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 19:20:50|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close A farmer displays newly-harvested pumpkins in Xujiaba Township, Sinan County of southwest China's Guizhou Province, Aug. 12, 2020.(Xinhua/Yang Wenbin) BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- China's massive anti-poverty campaign has transformed nearly 100 million lives in just eight years. It was a miracle that helped the world's most populous country achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goal on poverty eradication 10 years ahead of the schedule. Xi Jinping (C), general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the CPC Central Military Commission, visits the family of Tang Zongxiu, an impoverished villager in the Luotuowan Village of Longquanguan Township, Fuping County, north China's Hebei Province. Xi made a tour to impoverished villages in Fuping County from Dec. 29 to 30, 2012. (Xinhua/Lan Hongguang) A LEADER'S PROMISE On a crisp winter day in December 2012, Xi Jinping, who was not long ago elected general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, visited the mud-brick house of Tang Zongxiu located in the Taihang Mountains, northern China's Hebei Province. The dilapidated house was engulfed in darkness and had leakages. For two days, Xi visited multiple houses in two villages and saw similar sights of destitution. Knowing what it was like to be in penury, Xi, as the top leader, was determined to end it for all Chinese. He sounded a clarion call to end poverty nationwide, which he deemed an essential requirement of socialism. At the time, China still had 98.99 million people living below the national poverty line. Xi pledged that all rural poor will shake off poverty to usher in a prosperous society in all respects when the Party celebrates its centenary in 2021. It was a tall order to achieve this goal. To deliver on that promise, Xi took charge, drew plans, convened conference after conference, and personally visited all 14 contiguous impoverished areas across the country. "We must have the determination like the fool old man who moved the mountains," Xi once said at a high-level meeting on poverty relief. "We must resolutely fight to win the war against poverty." Even the pandemic did not stop him. In March 2020, when China was fighting the critical battle against coronavirus, Xi convened the largest teleconference on poverty eradication in years, as he called for resolutely accomplishing this great cause of momentous significance for the Chinese nation and all humanity. Zhang Guimei weeps during a lecture at the Huaping Senior High School for Girls in Lijiang, southwest China's Yunnan Province, Sept. 5, 2020. Zhang is the principal of the Huaping Senior High School for Girls, the country's first public high school that provides free education for female students, in the city of Lijiang. Zhang has been educating and aiding students in need, most living in isolated and poor areas. The school, led by Zhang, has created a miracle for the girls: 1,804 graduates have been admitted to colleges. (Xinhua/Chen Xinbo) MIRACLE IN RETROSPECT Precision was a key to China's success. The strategy of targeted poverty alleviation was put forward by Xi who compared adopting indiscriminate approaches as "killing fleas with a hand-grenade." From household to household, the questions of who exactly needs help, who should provide help, how help should be rendered, and what standards and procedures should be adopted for exiting poverty were answered. The entire society was mobilized. Since 2015, 3 million cadres from governments, state-owned enterprises and public institutions in cities and towns were sent to the countryside to work out tailored poverty relief packages for each poor family. As part of the efforts, some received training to find urban jobs, some got loans or seed money to start their own businesses and some were relocated out of rugged mountains. The cadres also helped raise cattle, grow cash crops, build roads, drafted in books and teachers, and in many cases imparted e-commerce know-how to better market rural products. In these eight years, more than 1,500 cadres have died of car accidents, heart attacks and overwork-related ailments during the poverty-eradication battle. The war against poverty was a people's war, assisted by people across the country, notably urban returnees, entrepreneurs and professionals. Zhang Guimei, 63, is one among them who chose to work in rural schools at the country's southwestern border for 40 years. She runs a senior high school for girls from underprivileged families. The school, which offers free education, has sent 1,800 graduates to universities and colleges -- forging a path out of poverty for the poor rural children. The steady rise from poverty was exhibited in figures: the per capita net income of the rural underprivileged rose from 2,982 yuan (about 461 U.S. dollars) in 2015 to 10,740 yuan in 2020, posting an average annual growth of 29.2 percent. But the transformation was not just numeric. Rural people have better living conditions, medical care, education and job opportunities near home. Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, receives an exclusive interview with Xinhua in Seattle, the United States, on Nov. 13, 2019. (Xinhua/Qin Lang) GLOBAL IMPACT UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres acknowledged China's anti-poverty campaign over the past few years, calling it "the most important contribution" to the global poverty reduction cause. Combined with past achievements, China has contributed to over 70 percent of the global reduction in poverty, showed World Bank statistics. In 2020, the French newspaper "Le Monde," for example, wrote about China's "pair-up" practice, which pairs poor western regions with their wealthier eastern counterparts to receive dedicated support on capital, technology, personnel and other resources to fight poverty. The "pair-up" model has long been in practice. As an official in east China's Fujian Province in 1997, Xi was in charge of Fujian's pairing assistance to northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. He had pushed for a relocation project during the tenure. The relocated town is home to 60,000 people today and thrives on mushroom farming and wine manufacturing. Journalists are not the only foreign visitors to China's transformed rural villages. Inspired by China's experience in poverty eradication, Lao leader Bounnhang Vorachith had traveled to Shibadong Village -- where the idea of targeted poverty alleviation had been put forward. He also visited Ningde, a poor region where Xi had worked during his tenure in Fujian. Laos also set goals on poverty eradication by 2020, resembling that of China's. After lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, China can share what it has learned with the rest of the world, said U.S. billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, whose foundation works with Chinese partners in this regard. Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a New Year speech on Dec. 31, 2020 in Beijing to ring in 2021. (Xinhua/Ju Peng) THE WAY FORWARD Ending poverty is not the destination, but is the beginning of a new journey. To prevent people from slipping back into poverty, China has been keeping an eye on vulnerable groups so as to spot their difficulties at the earliest stage possible and offer timely help. For counties that newly emerged from poverty, China set a five-year transition period during which previous targeted anti-poverty policies will continue. The measure aims to ensure these counties can smoothly shift to the rural vitalization strategy. The strategy is an equally challenging task that aims to build rural areas into thriving businesses, with a pleasant living environment, social etiquette and civility, effective governance, and prosperity. "We still need to stay tenacious like a bamboo deeply rooted in the rocks, keep our feet on the ground, and work hard to paint a magnificent picture of rural vitalization, and steadily march ahead towards the goal of common prosperity," Xi said in 2021 New Year speech. India was the second most targeted country when it comes to cyberattacks in Asia according to a report by IBM. Last year, a report by Niti Aayog suggested that phishing and social engineering account for 57% of the attacks followed by malware attacks, DoS and ransomware. It was also reported that the majority of the attacks came from China and other countries such as Russia, Pakistan, Ukraine, Vietnam and North Korea. pexels-saksham-choudhary However, now according to Sudeep Das, Security Software Technical Sales Leader, IBM Technology Sales, India and South Asia, ransomware was the top attack type in the country where it rose to an astounding 40% share. Ransomware usually involves stealing, encrypting and using threats to leak personal data unless the ransom isnt paid. The most common form of ransomware used is called Sodinokibi where it exploits an Oracle WebLogic vulnerability to gain access to the victims hardware. The ransomware then tries to execute itself by elevating user rights so that it can access all files and resources on the system. The ransomware also has the ability to wipe out all files in the backup folder as well. So far, it is estimated that Sodinokibi has stolen around 21TB of data and leaked about 43% of the data. The group has managed to successfully earn $123 million in the past year according to IBM's 2021 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index. Unsplash According to IBMs report, Indias finance and insurance sector were the most attacked industries consisting of 60 per cent of the attacks. While the attacks took place throughout 2020, most of the attacks were detected in the months of May and July. Cybercriminals also used public health information to lure victims and carry out attacks on the vaccine supply chain. The 2020 threat landscape in India was largely shaped by the pandemic. As the pandemics timeline of events and progress unfolded, so did attack trends shift," Sudeep Das, security software technical sales leader, IBM Technology Sales, India/South Asia said in a statement. Unsplash Having said that, top technology companies such as Google, Dropbox and Microsoft were also targeted during the pandemic. E-Commerce websites like Amazon and Paypal werent spared either as the companies made the top 10 list of targeted websites. Source: IBM 20 members of the Tarn family have been arrested by the SDF in Raqqa for unknown reasons, reports Al-Souria Net. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) arrested 20 people from the same family in the city of Raqqa, which is under its control, in a raid operation carried out at dawn on Monday. Local networks from eastern Syria reported that the arrests affected members of the Tarn family, which is part of the Walda clan, including women. The networks documented the names of the detainees including Red Crescent relief activist Majid Ismail al-Tarn, and medical doctor Fawaz al-Tarn. Media sources from Raqqa confirmed in statements to Alsouria Net that people have been arrested from the city of Raqqa and its surroundings. The sources said that SDF members raided the homes of the family members, at dawn today, and arrested them immediately. Their fate remains unknown. SDF has already carried out arrest operations in the city of Raqqa during the past months, which led to an exchange of accusations. According to the sources, the charges against the members of the Tarn family are not clear yet. There was no comment from SDF explaining the reasons for the arrests. The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) announced last January that the SDF had detained 107 people, including women and children, over the span of a month. In a report, SNHR indicated that SDF has carried out more arrests than the other parties to the Syrian conflict, and has targeted civilians who have close ties with individuals in the armed opposition. SDF launched mass raids and arrests of many civilians under the pretext of fighting the cells of the Islamic State (ISIS). The report indicated that some of these campaigns were carried out with the support of helicopters of the international coalition forces. 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. New Delhi, Feb 24 : Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader Rakesh Tikait has said that the farmers would march to the Parliament if the three agricultural laws are not taken back. IANS spoke to Tikait and he said, "A call would be made for taking farm protests to the Parliament." Tikait claimed that farmers would do farming on the lawns located near Parliament and when the crop would mature, the government could analyse the financial yield of the crop. He further said that a Parliamentary Standing Committee should be formed and monitor this and then the government would get to know about the gains and losses related to it. While speaking to IANS, Tikait also said that the movement would spread to other states such as Telangana, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. A suspected serial thief was on Tuesday morning caught in the act after he fell from the ceiling of a building in Gwanda town centre. The suspect was apprehended at a place commonly known as Emabhizeni along 4th Avenue. Emabhizeni is part of partitioned shops that share one roof. A Chronicle news crew arrived at the crime scene shortly before 9AM, and the suspect was with police in a car as members of the public bayed for his blood. The daring thief is suspected to have entered one of the shops in the wee hours and broken through the ceiling to access other shops before stealing property. He was spotted by a worker in the next building who raised alarm. The thief panicked and fell from the ceiling. As he tried to flee using the front door, he was apprehended and was lucky police were nearby before the public meted instant justice on him. I was just arriving for work when I heard sounds at the back. I made a follow up as it was still quiet with most people not having reported to work yet. I saw the thief trying to jump from the ceiling. I managed to climb into the ceiling and chased after him and he fell into a shop next door to us commonly known as China Shop. Security details managed to catch him before he fled from the scene, said a supermarket employee. A man of the cloth, Reverend Fred Kamanga of Zimbabwe Christians Empowerment Fellowship, said the thief broke a window at his shop to gain access to other shops. The thief broke a top corner window and managed to lift the window handle before he gained access. He ransacked the place and only found a knife in a drawer. He then broke the ceiling before he went to other shops, said Reverend Kamanga. A cellphone dealer who spoke on condition of anonymity said they were trying to establish some of the things he might have stolen as a bag full of their belongings was recovered. We are still trying to ascertain what else this person might have stolen as we recovered a satchel which had belongings from a number of us in this shop, said the cell phones dealer. Matabeleland South provincial police spokesperson Inspector Loveness Mangena confirmed the arrest. She could not release his identity as he is assisting police with investigations on other cases he is allegedly linked to around the town. I can confirm that we arrested a man in Gwanda who had broken into shops around the CBD, said Insp Mangena. A police source said the accused person spent the day assisting police working on other cases he is suspected to be linked with in the mining town. As of now, the suspect is still under the CID department as he is linked with other crimes thus, he is not available at the station, said the source. Chronicle Lawton, OK (73501) Today Showers early, then cloudy overnight. Low near 60F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.. Tonight Showers early, then cloudy overnight. Low near 60F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%. The controversy surrounding the award of contract to Frontiers Healthcare Services, a company undertaken COVID-19 testing at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA), has been put to rest by the Minister-designate for the Ministry of Transport, Hon. Kweku Ofori Asiamah. Opening up on the matter when he appeared before the Appointments Committee of Parliament on Tuesday, February 23, 2021, for public hearing on issues relating to the portfolio he has been designated to by the President of the land after receiving briefing from the Ghana Airports Company Limited (GACL, Hon. Asiamah, said the Ghana Airport Company Limited (GACL), which operates the KIA, only rented its space to Frontiers Healthcare Services. This, he noted, was done after receiving confirmation from the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) about the certification of equipment to be used by Frontiers Healthcare Services. Sometime in July/August, 2020, the President announced the Governments inclination to reopen the borders of the nation to commercial air traffic, subject to the availability of an effective system for COVID-19 testing. Following this, Frontiers Healthcare Services Limited expressed the preparedness to provide such service to the public, whilst indicating that its equipment had been tested by the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA). The Ghana Airport Company Limited did not rely on the bare word of Frontiers Healthcare. It sought to verify and confirm the due certification of the equipment of Frontiers Healthcare. On 20th August, 2020, the MD of GACL wrote to FDA to confirm the certification of Frontiers Healthcare, he noted. Three ministerial nominees who had so far appeared before the Appointments Committee have failed to give a convincing account on the procurement processes that led to the award of a contract to Frontiers Healthcare Service to conduct COVID-19 testing at the KIA at a fee of US$150.00 per head. The Health Minister-designate, Hon. Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, told the Committee when he was confronted with the issue by Hon. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, a member of the Committee, that it was the Presidential Taskforce and Ghana Health Service (GHS) that were involved in the award of the said contract and therefore, could not give further details about the deal. The then Chief Procurement Advisor to the President and now Minister-designate for the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, on her part referred the Committee to the Minister of Finance who has oversight responsibility over the Public Procurement Authority (PPA). The Information Minister-designate, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, also referred the Committee to the Ghana Airports Company Limited when he was questioned about the deal. Explaining further, Hon. Asiamah, said by a letter dated 25th August, 2020, the FDA wrote to GACL indicating that it had approved of the equipment of Frontiers Healthcare for use in the detection of SARS-COV-2 in Ghana. The on-site audit report carried on the equipment was attached to the letter, he noted. He said following receipt of this information, GACL, intending to enter into an agreement with Frontiers Healthcare by which GACL would rent part of its space to the laboratory service provider to render the service in question to the public, wrote to the Public Procurement Authority (PPA) to seek its approval before executing any agreement with Frontiers Healthcare. By a letter dated 26th August, 2020, the PPA replied to the GACL advising that the rental of office space by GACL to another company falls outside the scope of the PPA Act as amended. GACL was therefore advised by PPA to use its administrative procedures to execute the transaction. Consequently, on 1st September, 2020, GACL entered into an agreement with Frontiers Healthcare to rent its office space to the company for consideration. The agreement was essentially for rental of office space. Paragraphs 4.4, 4.6, 4.7, 5.1 and 5.2 bear this out. The consideration payable by Frontiers was simply the payment of rent and service or utility charges, Hon. Asiamah explained. In the said rent agreement the GACL entered into with Frontiers Healthcare Services, the Transport Minister-designate revealed that the laboratory service provider was also required to make a payment of royalties of US$10.00 per each test done to the GACL. The payment of royalties to GACL did not imply that the agreement had to receive PPA approval, he stressed. He added Indeed, a precondition for an application of the PPA Act, and for that matter, obtaining PPA approval, is the use of public funds in the procurement of goods, works and services. GACL did not procure the services of Frontiers with public funds. The company offered to provide laboratory services to the public with their own equipment. No public funds was expended in getting them to provide the services to the public, apart from the provision of office space. Thus, the basic condition for an application of the PPA Act did not exist. In any case, GACL endeavoured to obtain PPA approval in respect of the contract for the rental of its space to the company. As stated already, the PPA indicated that the rental of office space falls outside the scope of the Procurement Act. 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. Featured Video This year our dine and drink business locations throughout the Gorge have suffered with closures. You can help support your favorites by purchasing take out and gift cards. Many of these business will offer curb-side delivery and some will deliver to your home. Lets keep the Gorge going strong! Advertisement An architect has created a one-of-a-kind home just metres from Melbourne's Brighton Beach, complete with a Bali-inspired swimming pool that creates the illusion of an underwater living room and marble finishes at every turn. Designed by Rodney Eggleston of March Studio, the house - which has been hailed a 'masterpiece' - has won a slew of sought-after accolades including the coveted 2017 Best of the Best Award and the 2018 Victorian Architecture Winner of the Harold Desbrowe-Annear Award. Known as 'The Compound' for its fortress-like facade, the house is kitted out with luxuries more likely to be found in a Kardashian mansion than a suburban Melbourne property. Behind this fortress-like facade is one of Melbourne's coolest mansions Known as 'The Compound', the house has a Bali-inspired swimming pool (pictured) that runs along the wall of the living room Standout features include a gym, steam room, balconied bedrooms with walk-in wardrobes, a cinema with a cocktail bar and a Batman-inspired fireman's pole that connects the study to a vast basement garage which is fitted with a two-car lift. No expense has been spared in the kitchen, which features an enormous 10-metre marble island with marble-faced drawers, a butler's pantry, a laundry and powder room. A solar-heated swimming pool runs along one wall of the living room, where a floor-to-ceiling window allows a complete view of the water at eye-level. No expense has been spared in the kitchen, which features an enormous 10-metre marble island (pictured) Other standout features include a gym, steam room and futuristic cinema (pictured) None of the four bathrooms would look out of place in a five-star hotel, with Japanese finger tiles (right), freestanding bathtubs and 'his and hers' sinks creating a sense of true opulence (left) Premium materials have been used throughout, from polished concrete floors to soft leather trims The luxury house is on the market with a guide price of $8.5million to $9million Premium materials have been used throughout, from polished concrete floors and timber panelled hallways to soft leather trims and natural stone benches. None of the four bathrooms would look out of place in a five-star hotel, with Japanese finger tiles, freestanding bathtubs and 'his and hers' sinks creating a sense of opulence. Described as a 'rare opportunity offering the best of Brighton', the house also has a full CCTV security system, air conditioning and hydronic heating for ultimate comfort all year round. Timber panels run across the ceilings of the bedrooms (one pictured), which have ensuites, balconies and walk-in wardrobes Sprawled across 895 square metres, the house dwarfs the average size of a Victorian home which was 244.8sqm in 2018 Private viewings can be arranged through Kay and Burton real estate agent, Alex Schiavo The upstairs is shrouded in steel trusses and angled copper screens that provide privacy from passersby on the street. Sprawled across 895 square metres, the house dwarfs the average size of a Victorian home which was 244.8sqm in 2018, according to figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Private viewings can be arranged through Kay and Burton real estate agent Alex Schiavo, who has set the guide price between $8.5m and $9million (AUD) - over three times the average sale price for the Brighton area. Guwahati, Feb 24 : Months before the Assembly polls, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in Assam on Wednesday extended the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 (AFSPA), in the state for six more months beyond February 27, an official said. An Assam Home Department official said that the AFSPA has been extended considering the ground situation in Assam and adjoining northeastern states. Various political parties, organisations and civil society groups and activists have been demanding the removal of the "draconian law" from the northeastern states. The AFSPA, which allows the Army and other paramilitary forces to conduct raids, and arrest anyone anywhere without prior notice or arrest warrant, has been in force in Assam since November 1990. Security agencies and senior officials review the situation every six months to decide on its extension. "The unified command structure comprising the Army, various central paramilitary and intelligence agencies and Assam Police always closely monitor the situations and terror activities in Assam," the official said. The AFSPA is also in force in entire Nagaland, certain districts of Arunachal Pradesh and most parts of Manipur barring the Imphal municipal areas. Terming the AFSPA as a "draconian law", renowned human rights activist Irom Chanu Sharmila of Manipur had fought for 16 long years till mid 2016, demanding its repeal. Tripura is the only state in the northeast region where the AFSPA was withdrawn by the then Left Front government led by Communist Party of India-Marxist veteran and Chief Minister Manik Sarkar in 1998 after terror activities were tamed. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced an end to embargo preventing private banks from taking on goverment businesses. RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das express grave concerns on cryptocurrencies. Read for more top news from the world of business and economy 1. Govt lifts embargo on grant of govt businesses to private banks The billionaires club in India is expected to increase significantly by 43 per cent to 162 by 2025. The growth will outpace the global average growth of 24 per cent and Asia average of 38 per cent during the period. 2. India to see 63% more ultra-high net worth individuals by 2025 With the lifting of the said embargo, private sector banks can now carry out government-related banking transactions such as taxes and other revenue payment facilities, the Department of Financial Services stated. 3. RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das raises 'major concerns' about cryptocurrency The central government is in process of bringing legislation that would create the ground for the introduction of an official digital currency and prohibit private cryptocurrencies. 4. Sensex surges 1,030 points, Nifty ends near 15,000 in extended trading session Following resumption of trading at 3:45 pm on NSE, benchmark indices rose as FM Nirmala Sitharaman announced that the government has lifted the embargo on grant of government businesses to private banks. 5. Air India, BPCL disinvestment to be completed by July-August While DIPAM targets to complete the stake sale by June, the government may have to relax the time period for bidders to complete due diligence. A 'massive' black cat 'the size of a sheep' has been spotted prowling the Welsh hills just weeks after a puma was reported in the area. Jonathan Terry, 30, filmed the beast from his kitchen window as it stalked the countryside in Trelogan, Flintshire, on Sunday afternoon. Footage showed the large animal just yards away from a field of grazing sheep. It was the third sighting of a big cat in the area in the last two months. Mr Terry said: 'I saw it out of the corner of my eye through the kitchen window overlooking the fields behind the house. 'I have been reading about these big cat sightings and it looked far too big to be a regular cat and was more like the size of a sheep or possibly bigger. Jonathan Terry, 30, filmed the beast from his kitchen window as it stalked the countryside in Trelogan, Flintshire, on Sunday afternoon 'I must have been more than 300ft away but the cat was massive. It looked like it was stalking something.' There have been a number of big cat sighting in the north Wales countryside in recent weeks. In January, witnesses described seeing 'a large cat roughly the size of a Labrador' walking along a busy road near Talacre, Flintshire. It followed other sightings of a black cat the size of a large dog just 20 miles away in Pontybodkin. Puma Watch founder Tony Jones said there was increasing evidence to support the theory of a small population of big cats thriving in North Wales Frank Tunbridge (pictured), 73, believes two pumas are to blame for the death of sheep after examination of the corpses revealed they were 'clinically' killed - unlike a random dog attack Last November a farmer claimed a big cat savaged ten of his sheep to death in Beddgelert in Gwynedd. Puma Watch founder Tony Jones said there was increasing evidence to support the theory of a small population of big cats thriving in North Wales. He said: 'Big cats such as pumas are solitary with a hunting range of dozens of miles. 'They're mostly spotted in Snowdonia and the Clwydian hills but reports of sightings in urban locations some distance from these areas are becoming more frequent. There have been a series of reports made to the Puma Watch North Wales group since November - with apparent sightings across the area. Pictured: Paw prints found in Rhiwlas, Bangor last year 'As seen with Llandundo's now-famous goats, who have taken to roaming the town's deserted streets during the coronavirus lockdowns, it's likely that the reduced levels of human activity over the last year is encouraging big cats to roam further from the hills into more populated areas.' Frank Tunbridge, 73, has been investigating big cat sightings for 40 years. He told MailOnline there has been a hybrid population of pumas living in the UK since the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976 made it illegal to own the animals. He said: 'People were releasing big cats in the countryside. I think theyve been breeding and an animal has been produced. 'Of all the reports, 80 per cent are uniform in description. They are not massive, they are the size of a Labrador or German Shepherd and they are black.' A 'labrador-sized' cat dubbed the 'Puma of Pontybodkin' was reported walking along a road on New Year's Eve just days after a similar animal dashed across a field He said lockdown in Wales has encouraged big cats to roam closer to civilisation but they are not a threat to humans. 'During lockdown weve had more reports of big cats across the country. I havent had a great deal of sightings in Wales but for whatever reason weve been getting more sightings. 'There are no deer in wales, hardly any, so the big cats have to turn to the next best thing and there are so many sheep in wales. 'They are not a threat to humans. They avoid mankind. Its not their natural prey. If you had it cornered or it was stuck in a shed there might be a problem. But they observe at a distance.' Due to the flurry of sightings in his constituency, MP for Delyn Rob Roberts wrote to the Welsh Government's Environment Minister Lesley Griffiths. She replied that reports received by the Welsh Government are treated seriously and investigated. She said: 'The Welsh Government's policy is to investigate any reports received by the Department for Economy, Skills and Natural Resources of alleged sightings and attacks by big cats on livestock in Wales.' Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Cocaine worth an estimated 1.6 million has been seized in Northern Ireland, as part of a National Crime Agency investigation into drug supply. Cocaine worth 1.6 million has been seized in Northern Ireland after arriving in Belfast on Monday. The seizure was part of a National Crime Agency investigation into drugs supply. The 20-kilo haul was discovered hidden inside an empty fuel tank being transported in a van which had just arrived into Belfast port on a ferry from Birkenhead on Monday 22 February. The vehicles driver, a 39-year-old man from Wolverhampton, has been arrested on suspicion of conspiring to supply controlled drugs and is now being questioned by NCA investigators. Officers using special equipment had to be brought in to recover the drugs, in an operation which took several hours and also involved Belfast Harbour Police, Border Force and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). Following the seizure a second man, aged 46, was arrested on suspicion of the same offences in Wolverhampton as part of the same investigation. In a statement, the PSNI welcomed the success of the operation. Detective Chief Superintendent John McVea said: We are delighted with the success of our Law Enforcement colleagues. More importantly we are pleased with the positive impact this will have for individuals and communities within Northern Ireland in terms of disrupting the distribution and supply of Class A drugs and bringing those harmful offenders to justice. Anything we can do to support a collective effort across a range of partners, as was seen in yesterdays operation, is always welcomed, as well as the fact that cocaine with an estimated street value of over 1.6 million has been taken out of the control of criminals. Mark Mulligan, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Exxon Mobil plans to sell holdings in the oil fields of the United Kingdom and the northern North Sea for more than $1 billion, as it focuses its portfolio on projects delivering the highest returns. The Irving oil major, the nation's largest oil company, on Wednesday said it signed an agreement to sell to NEO Energy its interests in 14 oil fields operated primarily by Royal Dutch Shell, oil fields operated by French oil major Total and interests in the associated infrastructure. Exxon said the oil fields produced about 38,000 barrels of oil and natural gas per day in 2019. Survey also shows that half of the responding countries have agreed to include dentists in their priority vaccination groups GENEVA, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- FDI World Dental Federation today called for more countries to enable dentists to administer COVID-19 vaccines after a survey of its members revealed the small number of countries currently permitted to do so. The survey was facilitated by FDI's COVID-19 Task Team. Fifty-seven member national dental associations, from across the globe, revealed that nearly two-thirds of countries had not granted permission to dentists to administer COVID-19 vaccines as part of national rollouts. In Europe, countries where dentists are not permitted to administer the vaccine include Switzerland, Portugal, Austria, Denmark, Slovakia, and Russia (see Table 1). In France, the National Order of Dental Surgeons has called on the government to grant permission to the profession, but no authorization has been given to date. Discussions are also ongoing in Spain, Sweden, Ireland, Australia, Kenya, Hong Kong, and Germany. "Oral health is a fundamental component of overall health and well-being and oral healthcare is an essential public service," said Dr Gerhard Konrad Seeberger, president of FDI World Dental Federation. "Efforts should be made to enable dentists to administer COVID-19 vaccines when possible within national legislation and regulations, and with minimal disruption to oral healthcare services." Countries permitting dentists to administer COVID-19 vaccines Of the 57 survey responses, the countries who have granted authorization to the profession to administer vaccines include: Cambodia, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Nigeria, Serbia, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom (17 per cent) (see Table 2). Significantly, some of these countries include those where dentists have not previously been allowed to administer vaccines, or at least the influenza vaccine. In the United States around 20 states are currently permitting dentists to administer COVID-19 vaccines. Inclusion of dentists in priority vaccination groups The survey also examined the prioritization of dentists in COVID-19 vaccine roll-out programmes. A total 53 per cent of responding countries said that dentists would be included in priority vaccination groups (see Table 2),12 per cent said that they would not be, and 18 per cent responded that the vaccination programme and priority groups were still being planned. Those countries NOT including dentists as a priority group include Cambodia, Colombia, Kazakhstan, Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Thailand (See Table 1). Ahead of World Oral Health Day on March 20, FDI will release a new set of data around the caseload of COVID-19 infection amongst dentists around the world. Further information: Michael Kessler FDI Media Relations Mob: +34 655 792 699 Email: michael.kessler@intoon-media.com Twitter: @mickessler About FDI World Dental Federation: FDI is the main representative body for more than one million dentists worldwide, with a vision of leading the world to optimal oral health. Its membership comprises some 200 national member associations and specialist groups in over 130 countries. www.fdiworlddental.org Notes to Editors: Table 1 Countries where dentists will not be permitted to administer COVID-19 vaccines Countries where dentists will not be included in priority vaccination groups Andorra Cambodia Austria Colombia Burkina Faso Kazakhstan Denmark Romania Guam Saudi Arabia Honduras South Korea Israel Thailand Japan Myanmar Netherlands Portugal Romania Russia Saudi Arabia Seychelles Slovakia Switzerland Thailand Turkey Table 2 Countries where dentists are permitted to administer vaccine Countries where dentists are confirmed to be included in priority vaccination groups Cambodia Australia Colombia Austria Egypt Canada India Chile Indonesia Denmark Lebanon Egypt Nigeria Georgia Serbia Germany Slovenia Greece United Kingdom Guam United States Honduras India Indonesia Israel Japan Lebanon Myanmar Netherlands Panama Portugal Russia Serbia Seychelles Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sri Lanka Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom Source: FDI World Federation Member Survey November 2020-January 2021. The survey was sent to 113 countries. Related Links www.fdiworldental.org SOURCE FDI World Dental Federation Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 3 mesi fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. Market Research Future Has Published a Cooked Research Report on the Global Master Alloys Market. Market Analysis: Various factors are propelling the master alloys market growth. These factors, as stated by the MRFR report, include burgeoning demand for master alloys from the titanium industry, and growing demand in the automotive sector. Additional factors pushing market growth include growing demand for superalloys that can withstand extreme temperatures and collaboration between consumers and manufacturers. Master Alloys Market Size is predicted to touch USD 441.2 million at a 6.51% CAGR over the forecast period (2018-2024), as per the latest Market Research Future (MRFR) report. A master alloy, simply put, is a base metal including nickel, copper or aluminium with a comparatively percentage of one or two other elements. These alloys are made in various shapes such as rod in coils, waffle plate, and ingot. They are mostly found in plants where metals are melted, alloyed with different elements as well as cast into shapes. It can be steel, iron, aluminium or precious metals such as gold. Master alloys are also known as a modifier, grain refiner, and hardener resting on its application. On the contrary, declining profit margins, coupled with the dull growth of the steel industry are factors that may impede the master alloys market growth over the forecast period. Key Players: Leading players profiled in the Master Alloys Industry include KBM Affilips (Netherlands), Advanced Metallurgical Group N.V. (Netherlands), Asturiana de Aleaciones SA (Spain), Reading Alloys (AMETEK Inc.) (US), and Milward Alloys Inc. (US), among others. July 2019: UK-based LCM (Less Common Metals), the sole rare earth alloy producer based outside Japan and China has begun the production of metal. LCM produces samarium cobalt alloys and neodymium-iron-boron, and high purity earth metals for the permanent magnet industry in Southern England. Besides, they also make other rare earth alloys such as master alloys (lanthanum nickel and yttrium aluminum) and hydrogen storage. Market Segmentation The Market Research Future report provides a wide segmental analysis of the Master Alloys Market Size based on application and type. Based on type, the master alloys market is segmented into copper-based master alloys, chromium alloys, vanadium alloys, molybdenum alloys, aluminium-based master alloys, and others. Of these, the aluminium-based master alloys segment will have the largest share in the market over the forecast period. This is owing to the fact that aluminium is lightweight, highly compatible with other base materials, and works as a hardening agent. By application, the master alloys market is segmented into the aluminium industry, metal anhydride alloys, iron, titanium production, powder metallurgical, stainless steel, superalloys, and others. Of these, the titanium production segment will dominate the market over the forecast period. This is owing to its wide use in aircraft engines as well as components. The titanium production segment will be followed by the superalloys segment. Regional Analysis Based on the region, the Master Alloys Industry covers growth opportunities and the latest trends across North America, Asia Pacific (APAC), Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa (MEA). Of these, the APAC region will remain the frontrunner in the market over the forecast period. It is predicted to grow at an 8.3% CAGR. This is owing to the burgeoning demand from various end industries such as aluminum, consumer goods, automotive, and aircraft components. The presence of automotive giants such as Mitsubishi and Toyota are investing largely in production facilities, especially in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia are also boosting the market growth in this region. The master alloys market in North America is predicted to have the second-largest share in the market during the forecast period and is predicted to touch USD 91.4 million. This is owing to the growth in the aerospace industry and the presence of leading aircraft manufacturers in the region. The master alloys market in Europe is predicted to have moderate growth over the forecast period. Germany is the key contributor in this region owing to the growing demand for titanium alloys in the automotive as well as aerospace industries. Access Report Details @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/master-alloys-market-6229 New Delhi [India], February 24 (ANI): In the ongoing nationwide drive against fake Good and Services Tax (GST) invoice frauds since mid-November 2020, the Directorate General of Intelligence (DGGI) and CGST Commissionerates have arrested 12 persons in a single day including a Chartered Accountant and a woman. The Chartered Accountant arrested is Abhishek Singhal who was involved in running fake firms to issue fraudulent invoices. He is the 10th Chartered Accountant arrested so far who has been involved in bogus firms and/or issuance of fake invoices to fraudulently avail and pass on ITC without actual supplies of goods/services. Department of Revenue sources told ANI that out of the 329 persons arrested so far, at least four persons have been booked under the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act (COFEPOSA) while the intelligence and CGST authorities have booked more than 3,200 cases against 9,600 fake GSTIN entities as of now. Also, the authorities have recovered more than Rs 1,000 crore from these fraudsters. According to sources, the authorities have been using deep data analytics, integrated data-sharing and AI and ML tools along with BIFA to unearth the input tax credit (ITC) utilisation frauds via fake invoicing and bogus firms. The technology has enabled the GST ecosystem and intelligence authorities to identify layer-by-layer activities of these fake entities and their networking without any overreach and able to pinpoint the fraudsters with specific inputs to take targeted actions and further investigations against them. It may be noted that the nationwide drive against fake GST invoice frauds has yielded record GST collections for over the last three months and has fetched record collections of Rs 1.15 lakh crore in December 2020 and Rs 1.20 lakh crore in January 2021. Sources expect a similar higher collection trend to continue in February 2021 as well. Sources said that the CGST Jaipur Zone noticed that CA Abhishek Singhal was involved in three fake firms which were generating goods-less invoices of miscellaneous commodities. He did not co-operate with authorities during investigations, following which a charge sheet was filed against him in the Economic Offences Court where he surrendered later and was sent to judicial custody. According to the sources, out of the 329 arrests so far there are 131 masterminds, 113 proprietors, 46 directors/managing directors, 17 partners, 5 CEOs/CFOs/CMDs, 10 chartered accountants, four accountants and one each of company secretary, broker, and GST practitioner. Arrested persons include fake entities operators and the end beneficiaries who connive with these fraudsters running businesses of fake invoices. (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.) Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. A science tour has just been launched in the southern province of Binh Dinh. ExploraScience Quy Nhon was officially launched after two years of piloting. Located some five kilometres south of Quy Nhon City, the Science Complex, which covers some 5,000 square metres in Quy Hoa Education and Science Urban Area in Ghenh Rang Ward, is expected to become a science-themed experience for visitors, especially children who want to learn about science. At present, ExploraScience Quy Nhon features seven rooms with different subjects including Mars Exploration, Astronomy Exhibition Zone, Earth and Natural Resources, Space Exploration, and Solar System. At the Solar System area, visitors can learn about various topics relating to Earth and the Solar System including climate change, as well as features of planets in Solar System through impressive visuals. At the Earth and Natural Resources space, an interactive sand table is set up with an aim to simulate renewable forms of energy attached to successful projects in Vietnam and the rest of the globe. ExploraScience Quy Nhon also has areas for cafeterias, libraries or shops. Director of the Binh Dinh Provincial Department of Science and Technologies, Le Cong Nhuong, said that ExploraScience Quy Nhon was put into trial operation in 2019 and had been open for free for some time. "ExploraScience Quy Nhon had provided free-of-charge tour programs to exhibition rooms, scientific shows and outdoor activities," he said. "We are building a plan to collect tickets at the site." Director of Binh Dinh Provincial Department of Tourism, Nguyen Van Dung said that ExploraScience is the first model of its kind in Vietnam and is expected to become a new, attractive destination of the province. "We hope to receive not only children, young people but also people of all ages to come and learn about scientific issues," he said. ExploraScience Quy Nhon is open all the weekdays (from 8:00 to 12:00 and from 14:00 to 17:00). Dtinews Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 19:57:30|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close Photo taken on April 9, 2020 shows the Dar es Salaam Port undergoing upgrading of port berths 1 to 7 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. (Xinhua) "There is no evidence China aims to deliberately push poor countries into debt as a way of seizing their assets or gaining a greater say in their internal affairs, researchers and analysts said -- countering Washington's narrative that China was engaging in 'debt-trap diplomacy,'" an article published Sunday by South China Morning Post said. HONG KONG, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- There is no evidence to support Washington's narrative of China's engagement in "debt-trap diplomacy," said an article published Sunday by South China Morning Post. "There is no evidence China aims to deliberately push poor countries into debt as a way of seizing their assets or gaining a greater say in their internal affairs, researchers and analysts said -- countering Washington's narrative that China was engaging in 'debt-trap diplomacy,'" the article said. Deborah Brautigam, a professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University and founding director of the China Africa Research Initiative (Cari), considers the "debt-trap" narrative a myth, it said. Photo taken on Oct. 21, 2019 shows an interior view of a warehouse at Kigali Logistics Platform in Kigali, Rwanda. (Photo by Cyril Ndegeya/Xinhua) After scrutinizing thousands of Chinese loan documents, mostly for projects in Africa, Cari reported that it has not found any evidence that China seizes the assets of other countries if they fail to pay loans, the article said. The revelation comes at a time when dozens of African countries are either in or at a high risk of debt distress. Most of the countries -- including Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia, which are among the top borrowers from China -- have sought debt relief. Beijing has since provided some debt relief to more than 20 countries and, for some countries, has canceled interest-free loans that were maturing in 2020, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce. Aerial photo taken on April 6, 2020 shows the Marshall Islands-based Mt. Melody bunkering ship in operation at Hambantota International Port, Sri Lanka. (Photo by Liu Hongru/Xinhua) For instance, noting some reports that China seized the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota when the South Asian country fell behind in servicing its debts, the article said that instead of the port being seized by China, Sri Lanka privatised 70 percent of the Chinese-financed port to a Chinese firm, citing Cari researchers. "The U.S. narrative on debt-trap diplomacy was flawed because of its lack of nuance," David Shinn, a professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, was quoted by the article as saying. "The real issue is China's holding of 20 percent of Africa's debt, not debt-trap diplomacy," Shinn said. LANSING, MI - A bipartisan group of state House representatives on Wednesday introduced health care reforms that aim to cap costs on medications and improve transparency in the price-setting process. House Speaker Jason Wentworth, R-Clare, joined state lawmakers from both parties to discuss the new plan during a Feb. 24 press conference in the Michigan State Capitol. Co-sponsors who joined him included Reps. Julie Calley, R-Portland; Abdullah Hammoud, D-Dearborn; Bronna Kahle, R-Adrian; and Sarah Cambensy, D-Marquette. The 15-bill package would attempt to control prescription drug pricing through various methods, including capping co-pays on medications such as insulin, regulating the middlemen between health insurers and drug manufacturers and requiring more reporting on how hospitals, pharmacies and insurers set prices. These reforms are especially important now, amid ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wentworth said. People in Michigan are hurting. Theyve lost jobs and businesses. Theyve lost loved ones to COVID. Some of them have even fought COVID themselves, he said in the Speakers Library of the state Capitol. In every case, the existing problems with our rigged health care system are magnified. A full list of the proposed reforms can be viewed here. Michigan House Speaker Jason Wentworth during a press conference on Thursday, Jan. 28, 2021 in Lansing. Nicole Hester/Mlive.com Hammoud, who holds a masters degree in public health, said the bills will help fight bullies in the health care industry. We have a solution to the seniors who call asking how they can afford their prescription drug prices, he said. We have a solution to those who are struggling with their insulin doses, whether they should buy the next dose... or try to put food on their table. We have an answer to the independent pharmacists who are oftentimes the first, critical point of access to health care professionals in rural and underserved communities, who have been struggling to push back against the bullies in the health care industry, (including) the PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers). One of the major initiatives in the package seeks to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, which are companies that manage prescription drug benefits for health insurers and other payers. The House plan refers to them as middlemen and would do the following: Prohibit them from imposing fees on local pharmacies for past prescription sales Ban the practice of spread pricing, or when PBMs receive a higher reimbursement from health plans and payers for generic drugs than what the PBMs actually paid pharmacies for the same drugs. Require transparency reports both quarterly and annually, with the annual report detailing information on how the cost of drugs was determined throughout the price-setting process. Ban PBMs from prohibiting pharmacies from disclosing the current price of a prescription medication. Calley said the role of PBMs made sense when they were first established in the 1960s, when the diversity of prescriptions were less broad and there was only an administrative fee charged. Now were seeing a number of complicated finance mechanisms which really benefit that middleman, she said. The bottom-line is its costing money for our Michiganders. Messages were left with spokespeople requesting comment from the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, an advocacy group for PBMs. The Michigan Association of Health Plans is concerned that the House package may inhibit competition among health plans in the state, said executive director Dominick Pallone. Michigan health insurance premiums are already growing at an annual rate of 4.61%, reflective of health care cost increases and a lack of competition for commercial health insurance, he said in a statement. We will work with the Legislature to address concerns, particularly in the area of growing pharmaceutical costs, as part of our mission to create affordable, accessible and quality health care for all Michigan citizens. Other price-setting measures in the House plan include a $50 cap on insulin co-pays for a 30-day supply, a requirement that drug manufacturers inform state regulators whenever they raise prices and a prohibition against insurers making patients pay a higher co-pay than the cost of the medication. Additionally, the plan calls for more drug rebates to go to insured patients by sharing a larger percentage of the commission a PBM makes on a negotiation with a pharmacy. Kahle further criticized PBMs for making life-saving medications worthless by pushing skyrocketing prices. This middlemen has found a variety of ways to make money shrouded in secrecy and silence, she said. They have the ability to prioritize medications not by efficacy or affordability, but by how much profit they get for their recommendations. A December 2020 study from the Michigan Prescription Drug Task Force concluded that prescription drug prices have been rising at unsustainable rates. The reform legislation would also attempt to address affordability concerns by requiring hospitals to publicly post information on how costs and charges are determined. Another proposed measure would allow patients to purchase covered prescriptions from out-of-network providers if the cost is lower. Two other sections of the package aim to increase access to telehealth care and curb favoritism toward certain drug manufacturers. The access reforms allow insured people to use out-of-state providers for telehealth, use oral chemotherapy medications without a higher co-pay than other anti-cancer treatments and renew contact lens prescriptions online. Additionally, there would be an expansion of certified and registered nurse anesthetists to improve access to anesthesia services. The favoritism reforms include limiting drug manufacturers from swaying physicians with gifts to use their products, and stopping insurance companies from removing prescriptions from coverage during a plan year unless its for a safety reason. House members crafted the plan, Wentworth said, with some preliminary input from health providers. He expects pushback from private insurers. I think there will be some opposition, he said. Private insurers, PBMs are the main two ones that will probably be in opposition. I think health plans will weigh in... these groups have weighed in in the past. Were experienced (and) were probably expecting the same type of debate and conversation thats happened previously. An early supporter is the Michigan State Medical Society, as president Bobby Mukkamala said in a statement that hes looking forward to working with the Legislature on these reforms. Michigan physicians believe our focus must also include increasing access to quality care through needed prior authorization reforms, the expansion of telemedicine options, reductions in health disparities among historically marginalized groups and continued support of Michigans physician-led model of patient care, he said in a news release. Wentworth praised the early bipartisan nature of the plan, listing co-sponsors that include 10 Republicans, including Calley and Kahle, and five Democrats, including Hammoud and Cambensy. Michigan is home to some of the finest health systems and healthcare providers in the nation, if not the world. But too often, Michiganders cant access or afford the healthcare they need because of where they live, what they do, or how much they earn, he said in a statement. Given the bipartisan support for these issues, Im confident we will get real reform done for the people of the state. Read more from MLive: Michigan Democratic Party embraces single-payer health care after DNC rejection Health care inequities focus of Michigan State University, Henry Ford Health System partnership We have a broken system. Amid pandemic, Ann Arbor calls for Medicare for All Irvine Republicans Form Splinter Group to Further Partys Aims More than two dozen conservatives in Irvine, California, have joined ranks to form a new local faction of the Republican Party. About 30 charter members met virtually on Feb. 22 to set up the new activist groupcalled the Irvine Republican Assembly (IRA)after becoming disenchanted with some stances taken by their former group, the Greater Irvine Republicans (GIR). Its just time to restructure, to make sure the local Republican group is aligned with the state party, former Irvine Mayor Christina Shea told The Epoch Times. I think its really good that were starting this new group. A lot of people are very excited about it. The IRA hopes to create a positive atmosphere with accountability, transparency, and really just basic Republican principles, she said, comparing the group to a wide-open tent that welcomes new members and fresh ideas, while avoiding closed-mindedness and political infighting. The new group split away from the GIR following disagreements over access to the groups social media accounts and its support of local candidatesincluding the Republican Party of Orange Countys (OCGOP) endorsement of Irvine City Councilman Mike Carroll last November, when he was embroiled in a controversy over spending on campaign mailers. Shea, who was elected president of the IRA, said she hopes the group will help local Republicans find their way back to more optimistic Reagan values. I want to be very open to all ideas, she said. So I think that is going to make people feel a little bit more comfortablethat theyre going to be able to see a participatory organization really focused on Irvine. According to its bylaws, the IRAs objectives include campaigning for the election of Republican candidates for public offices and striving for the appointment of Republicans to positions in Irvine. They also include participating in the development of party platforms while advancing the conservative principles of the California Republican Assembly (CRA). Shea said she reached out last week to Fred Whitaker, the chairman of the Republican Party of Orange County, to let him know the new group would be formed. Whitaker welcomed the new group to the GOPs ranks. We always appreciate Republicans wanting to form local clubs to combat job killing and crime increasing policies of CA Democrats, Whitaker told The Epoch Times via email. We would encourage them to play a contributing role in electing Republicanslocally, State, and at the Federal level. We also encourage them to work hand in hand with locally elected Republicans and other established clubs in the area such as the Greater Irvine Republicans and the Irvine Republicans Women Federated. Shea said the group simply wants to offer an alternative for Republicans who may see things differently than the status quo, while fostering a spirit of unity with the other conservative groups in Irvine, including the GIR. Theyve done a good job bringing Republicans together in Irvine, she said. Born of Frustration Mike Gasca, a co-founder of the IRA, told The Epoch Times he approached Shea with the idea of starting the splinter group after a rift widened within the GIR and the OCGOP over transparency and the way candidates are endorsed. We were born of frustration, said Gasca. He said the divide became problematic last fall, when the OCGOP endorsed Carroll after he had been accused of misusing more than $70,000 in public funds to send out campaign mailers. Carroll denied the allegations, and presented a letter from the Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) stating it had rejected to investigate the complaint. Nevertheless, Shea rescinded her endorsement of Carroll, and has since accused him of siding too often with Democrats on council votes. The OCGOP stood by its endorsement of Carroll, who went on to win an elected seat on the council. Gasca said some former GIR members were blocked from posting comments in the organizations private Facebook group that challenged the partys endorsements. I was removed entirely from the group, so I couldnt even view or access the information on their website, he said. Because the GIR lists one of the benefits of membership as the ability to participate in the social media groups, he demanded a refund. They did refund me my $100 so that they could, I guess, justify their ability to remove me from not only commenting, but just any preview whatsoever of what was going on, he said. Gasca said many people have been treated the same way when they dont support the groups preferred candidatesand that county Republicans have taken former President Ronald Reagans famous saying, Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican, too literally. The former president used the principleknown as his 11th Commandmentto limit damaging comments and character assassination during his re-election campaign, Gasca said. But when were talking policy and a record of votes, we have a responsibility to ensure that our Republicans are voting consistent with the principles of the partyotherwise, we shouldnt be endorsing them. He noted that county Republicans broke the commandment in a recent press release when they openly bashed Kevin Muldoon and Michael Vo, two candidates in next months special election for a seat on the Orange County Board of Supervisors, in an attempt to support their preferred candidate, former State Sen. John Moorlach. I think that the overarching issue is they dont like you to challenge their candidates, and they shield that behind the 11th Commandment as a way of saying why they block and censor certain people from being able to speak about those things, he said. Carroll and John Park, GIRs founder and chairman, did not respond to requests for comment by The Epoch Times prior to publication. Once the paperwork has been filed, the IRA will be established as a local arm of the CRA. Shea said all board members must be residents of Irvine to be recognized by the parent group, unlike the GIR. Anyone can join the IRA, but to serve on the board one must be from Irvine, according to CRA bylaws, Shea said. The IRA elected Shea as president, Richard Denzer as vice president, Steve Greenberg as treasurer, Deepak Shearman as secretary, and Scott Peotter as Parliamentarian. Park, the GIR chairman, responded to The Epoch Times on Feb. 24. Were always encouraged by any Republican activism. If this new group helps us keep Republican seats and win-back Republican seats, I want to support them anyway I can, Park said via email. Theyre all good people I know personally, and we sincerely wish them the best and much success. She's a bona fide A-lister. And Anne Hathaway looked like she meant business while heading to a meeting in Los Angeles on Wednesday. The Lockdown actress, 38, went for a subtly chic ensemble for the outing, donning a smart black jacket with dark cigarette pants. Business casual: Anne Hathaway looked chic while stepping out for a Wednesday business meeting wearing all black She went for classic accessories as she slipped into a pair of flat velvet mules and carried a quilted Chanel purse over one arm. A pastel pink mask helped perk things up with just a touch of color. Academy Award-winner Anne wore her shiny brunette tresses loosely and kept her naturally photogenic face at a makeup-minimal glow. The mother-of-two's trip around town came after she revealed she was nowhere near the first choice to play the lead in The Devil Wears Prada. Hathaway admitted she was actually the production's 9th choice while giving the contestants of RuPaul's Drag Race a pep talk last Friday. Classic: She teamed a smart jacket with slim pants and a quilted Chanel purse Natural: Anne wore her shiny brunette tresses loosely and kept her naturally photogenic face at a makeup-minimal glow The 38-year-old offered up the shocking fun fact when drag queen Rose (real name Ross McCorkell) asked what role she had to 'fight tooth and nail for.' She said: 'I will give you some tea: I was the ninth choice for Devil Wears Prada. But I got it! Hang in there, never give up.' Hathaway gave a memorable performance as the mousy assistant to the editor-in-chief of a prestigious fashion magazine, who finds her personal life unraveling as her career takes off. She starred alongside Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci in the film based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Lauren Weisberger. Near miss: Hathaway recently revealed that she was the ninth choice for the lead character in Devil Wears Prada while she gave a pep talk to the contestants of RuPaul's Drag Race on last week's episode Tooth and nail: The 38-year-old offered up the shocking fun fact when drag queen Rose (real name Ross McCorkell) asked what role she had to 'fight tooth and nail for' Spilling the tea: She said: 'I will give you some tea: I was the ninth choice for Devil Wears Prada. But I got it! Hang in there, never give up' Groundbreaking: Hathaway gave a memorable performance as the mousy assistant to the editor-in-chief of a prestigious fashion magazine, who finds her personal life unraveling as her career takes off That's all: She starred alongside Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci in the film based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Lauren Weisberger It was previously revealed that Rachel McAdams turned down the role, for which Juliette Lewis and Claire Danes were also considered. The Les Miserables actress also gave RPDR contestant Tina Burner (real name Kristian Seeber) some advice on nailing the perfect death scene: 'Just, like, don't sneeze. I don't know make as much noise as you can before you go.' She took to Instagram before the episode aired, sharing a funny text exchange with her mom, who is apparently a huge fan of iconic host RuPaul Charles. Hathaway captioned the screenshot: 'A text exchange with my Mom (who has "enormous respect" @rupaulofficial). 'I couldn't be more excited to be zooming into the work room on @rupaulsdragrace tonight! Huge love and thanks to the the crew that made it happen! Love, Annie Hathaslay' Biggest fan: She took to Instagram before the episode aired, sharing a funny text exchange with her mom, who is apparently a huge fan of iconic host RuPaul Charles Performance jitters: And although she made the appearance via Zoom, the Princess Diaries star revealed that she was just as excited to be there, showing off the hives on her neck Talk show hives: Hathaway has broken out in 'talk show hives' before, revealing them after appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in May of 2016, and most recently on Late Night With Seth Meyers last month And although she made the appearance via Zoom, the Princess Diaries star revealed that she was just as excited to be there. She told the cast, while revealing redness down her neck: 'I have to let you guys know, I don't care who I am I still break out in hives. So I'm just going to arrange my hair [and] cover up the fact that I get very nervous talking in public.' Hathaway has broken out in 'talk show hives' before, revealing them after appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in May of 2016, and most recently on Late Night With Seth Meyers last month. She appeared on the show to promote her HBO Max movie Locked Down, which also stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mindy Kaling, Ben Stiller and Lucy Boynton. The native New Yorker has recently been cast alongside Jared Leto in the Apple TV+ limited series WeCrashed, based on the podcast of the same name, which explores 'the greed-filled rise and inevitable fall of WeWork.' A $4,000 technical assistance grant from the Preservation League of New York State will support an engineering study on the Hudson-Athens Lighthouse. The lighthouse stands in the Hudson River between the city of Hudson and town of Athens. According to the announcement from the Hudson-Athens Lighthouse Preservation Society, most people assume that its foundation is stone down to the riverbed, but actually nearly 200 wooden pilings were driven into the riverbed and surrounded by a slope of stones in 1982. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company SC rejects another chance for UPSC aspirants whose attempts had exhausted in Oct India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Feb 24: The Supreme Court has rejected another chance for the UPSC aspirants whose attempts had exhausted in October 2020. The aspirants had claimed that their studies had been rudely hampered by the pandemic. Earlier this month, the Centre told the Supreme Court that it is against granting one-time relaxation on age limit to UPSC civil service aspirants, including those who had exhausted their last attempt in 2020 exam amid the COVID-19 pandemic and would get one more chance this year provided they are not age barred, as it would be discriminatory to other candidates. UPSC Civil Service Exam: Latest news on age relaxation for candidates The Centre told this to a bench headed by Justice A M Khanwilkar which reserved its verdict on a plea which had sought one more chance in the UPSC''s civil services exam to those aspirants who could not appear in their last attempt in 2020 due to the pandemic. Additional Solicitor General S V Raju, appearing for the Centre, said that initially the government was not willing to concede the extra chance and it was later done at the suggestion of the bench. "This is not the exam where you prepare at the last minutes. People prepare for years together," Raju told the bench, adding, "My first offer remains". The Centre had on February 5 told the court that it was agreeable to give an extra chance as a one-time relaxation to those civil service aspirants, who had appeared in their last attempt in the 2020 exam and are otherwise not age-barred. It, however, had said that no relaxation shall be granted for 2021 exam to those candidates who have not exhausted their permissible number of attempts or to those who are otherwise age-barred from appearing in 2021 exam as per the prescribed age limits of different categories, or to any other candidate for any other reason whatsoever. The counsel appearing for the petitioners had Monday argued that there should be one-time relaxation on age limit for the aspirants. On February 5, the Centre had filed a note in the SC which said, "Relaxation, only to the extent of providing one extra attempt for Civil Service Examination (CSE), specifically limited to CSE-2021, may be granted to only those candidates who appeared for CSE-2020 as their last permissible attempt and are otherwise not age-barred from appearing in CSE-2021." "This relaxation for the candidates and to the extent as prescribed above, shall be a one-time relaxation only and shall apply only for appearing in CSE-2021 and shall not be treated as a precedent," it had said. "As per the suggestion of this court, the Union of India is agreeable for the following ex-gratia, one-time, restricted relaxation to be granted to the prospective candidates, subject to the same being part of a consent order, disposing off the petition," the note had said. On February 1, the Centre had told the top court that it cannot grant an extra chance to civil services aspirants who could not appear or prepare well for their last attempt in the UPSC civil service exam in 2020 due to the pandemic, while reiterating that it would amount to extending "differential treatment" to similarly placed candidates. The Centre had earlier furnished a chart in the apex court giving details of relaxation given by Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) in civil services exams since its inception and had said that in 1979, 1992 and 2015 relaxations were given to the candidates due to change in patterns of examination. The top court on September 30 last year had refused to postpone the UPSC civil services preliminary exam because of the COVID-19 pandemic and floods in several parts of the country. However, it had directed the central government and the UPSC to consider granting an extra chance to candidates who have their last attempt in 2020, with corresponding extension of the upper age-limit. This aerial view taken with a drone shows pollution being emitted from steel factories in Hancheng, Shaanxi Province, China on Feb. 17, 2018. (Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images) China Will Exploit Paris Climate Accord to Undermine US: Expert After the Biden administration rejoined the Paris Climate Accord on Feb. 19, reversing the policies of the previous administration, experts warned that it will benefit China and the latter will take advantage of this move to undermine the United States. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will gain in four fronts through the Paris agreement, Sen Nieh, professor and former chairman of Mechanical Engineering at the Catholic University of America, told the Hong Kong edition of The Epoch Times. According to the Paris agreement, developed countries will provide developing countries with about $100 billion in aid each year to help them develop and improve their energy structure and technology development and transfer before 2025. China pledged to increase its carbon emissions and reach a peak in 2030. Nieh believes that for the CCP, signing the Paris agreement is like killing four birds with one stone. The agreement enables the CCP to obtain financial assistance; to increase its carbon emissions for as long as ten years; to establish an environmentally friendly image of a leading country in the world; and to defeat the United States. He believes the CCP is able to achieve the four goals because the climate agreement was built upon the different responsibilities of developed countries and developing countries. Through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the CCP managed to take a leading position in the Group of 77 and China became a key player in the negotiations with the developed countries, according to a report by Gang Chen, assistant director and senior research fellow of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore. The UNFCCC acknowledged the cooperation on the basis of common but differentiated responsibilities of participating countries. The UNFCCC noted that the largest share of historical and current global emissions of greenhouse gases has originated in developed countries, that per capita emissions in developing countries are still relatively low and that the share of global emissions originating in developing countries will grow to meet their social and development needs. Under this framework, the CCP has enjoyed many benefits in the climate agreement as a developing country. Nieh said that actions must be taken immediately to correct the previous mistakes and tackle the climate problem. The CCP will hit the carbon emission peak in 2030 before reducing emissions. This logic is like a claim made by a thief: After I have continued to steal for another ten years, I will reduce the stealing year by year until 2060. He also indicated that the agreement is not equivalent to problem-solving. In fact, the CCPs promise is worth nothing. Environmental protection and climate governance are issues in different fields. Although they are related, they are not the same, at least the terms are different. Carbon reduction does not completely represent environmental protection, Nieh explained. The CCP promised to reach carbon neutrality by 2060, which seems to contribute to environmental protection. This conceptual confusion allows the CCP, the political party that turned China into the worlds most polluting place, to gain global recognition for environmental protection, Nieh said. Chinese tourists wear masks on Tiananmen Square during severe pollution in Beijing, China, on Feb. 25, 2014. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images) The CCP Pollutes the World but Earns the Praise In September 2020, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced at the Climate Ambition Summit via video link, China will scale up its nationally determined contributions and strive to peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. The CCP has been actively participating in global climate talks, whether it was signing the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 or the Paris Agreement in 2015. Beijings mouthpiece Peoples Daily touted: China has made historic contributions to the Paris Agreement, demonstrating its responsibility as a great power. The CCPs commitment to the climate issue is supported by the international community, according to Chinese state-run media. Erik Solheim, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, said in 2018, China is taking the global lead in environmental protection and setting a very positive example for the rest of the world, China Daily reported. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore hailed Chinas leadership in tackling climate change, saying that China is one of the few countries on track to meet its Paris commitment, Xinhua reported in 2018. In fact, the CCPs carbon dioxide emissions have grown rapidly in the past two decades, and it has become the worlds largest carbon dioxide emitter, with nearly one-third of the worlds carbon dioxide emissions. According to a document, titled Chinas Environmental Abuses Fact Sheet, published on the website of the U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Brazil in 2020, China has been the worlds largest annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter since 2006 and its total emissions are twice that of the United States. Beijings energy-related emissions increased more than 80 percent between 2005-2019, while U.S. energy-related emissions have decreased by more than 15 percent. In 2019 alone, Chinas energy-related CO2 emissions increased more than 3 percent, while the United States decreased by 2 percent. The CCP talks well but lacks real action. On the contrary, although the United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement in 2017, it has done a very good job in reducing carbon emissions, Nieh said. In 2017, former President Donald Trump first announced his intention to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. He said the agreement disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries and that it was too lenient toward communist China and its greenhouse gas emissions. The Trump administration officially announced its withdrawal from the agreement in 2019. SOUTHERN OREGON -- Southern Oregon University is partnering with Medford and Ashland School Districts and the Black Southern Oregon Alliance to host to the third annual Black Youth Leadership Summit. During the program, Black youth can explore their identities, network and participate in interactive workshops and listen to guest speakers. Topics include leadership and financial literacy, which tie into this years theme Against All Odds, Black Success Continues. There are many ways to express blackness, but to also see that we have a shared history of shared culture that ties us together, that gives us a perspective that others that might not have, said Marvin Woodard, equity coordinator for racial justice at Southern Oregon University. So, this really is an opportunity for those students to get together and see those spaces and see those pieces in one space. The program isnt just for African American or Black students. Any student can participate, but it is focused primarily on the Black and African-American experience. Building leadership capacity and empowerment is a huge thing, said Becca Laroi, assistant principal at Ashland High School. And then community like connecting with people, knowing that there is a community and that they do have a network of support here. Last year, more than 150 students attended from seven Southern Oregon school districts. This year will be the first time elementary students can attend the program. The Black Youth Leadership Summit takes place on February 25th and will be held online due to COVID-19. Sixty seven inmates have died in riots at prisons in three cities in Ecuador as a result of fights between rival gangs and an escape attempt, authorities said Tuesday. Hundreds of officers from tactical units had been deployed since the clashes broke out late Monday. Edmundo Moncayo Juaneda, the SNAI General Director, said that two groups were trying to gain "criminal leadership within the detention centers" and that the clashes were precipitated by a search for weapons carried out Monday by police officers. Deadly prison riots have happened relatively frequently in recent years in Ecuador, whose prisons were designed for some 27,000 inmates but house about 38,000. Moncayo said that close to 70% of the country's prison population lives in the centers where the unrest occurred. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) The Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Ltd. (RVUNL), a Government of Rajasthan undertaking, has called for online applications from eligible and experienced candidates for filling One Thousand Seventy-Five (1,075) vacancies to the post of Junior Engineers I, Assistant Engineers, Accounts Officers, Personnel Officers, Junior Chemists and Informatics Assistants in RVUNL through direct recruitment to be posted in Rajasthan, India on a fulltime basis. The application-cum-registration process towards the same starts on February 24, 2021 onwards and closes on March 16, 2021. CRITERIA DETAILS Name Of The Posts Junior Engineers I, Assistant Engineers, Accounts Officers, Personnel Officers, Junior Chemists and Informatics Assistants posts in RVUNL Organisation Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Ltd. (RVUNL) Educational Qualification B.E/B.Tech in Electrical, Mechanical, Civil, Control & Instrumentation/Communication, Information Technology and Fire & Safety Engineering disciplines; qualified CA/ICWA (CMA) or MBA; Graduation Degree with Master Degree in Social Works or MBA/Post Graduate Degree in Personnel Management/Human Resource Management/Industrial Relations Experience Desirable years of experience in the concerned area Job Responsibilities null Skills Required null Job Location Rajasthan Salary Scale In the range of Rs. 18,500 up to Rs. 39,300 per month during PT period Industry Government of Rajasthan undertaking Application Start Date February 24, 2021 Application End Date March 16, 2021 RVUNL Recruitment 2021: Age Criteria And Fees Candidates interested in applying for RVUNL Jobs 2021 through RVUNL Recruitment 2021 must have attained 21 years of age and not have exceeded 40 years, with relaxation (upper age limit) for reserved categories as specified in the RVUNL Notification 2021. Candidates must pay a prescribed amount Rs. 1,600 (UR/Gen/EWS) and 1,400 (UR/Gen/EWS if annual income of family is less than Rs.2.50 lakh/SC/ST/BC/MBC/ PWBD(PH) respectively as application fee for RVUNL Jobs 2021 under RVUNL Recruitment 2021 either through online mode as mentioned in the official RVUNL Notification 2021 given at the end of the article. Also Read: ONGC Recruitment 2021 For 76 Junior Consultant/Associate Consultant Posts, E-mail Applications Before March 4 RVUNL Recruitment 2021: RVUNL Vacancy 2021 Junior Engineer I - 946 Informatics Assistant - 46 Assistant Engineer - 39 Junior Chemist - 27 Accounts Officer - 11 Personnel Officer - 06 Total 1,075 RVUNL Recruitment 2021: Educational Criteria And Eligibility Candidates applying for RVUNL Jobs 2021 through RVUNL Recruitment 2021 must possess a B.E/B.Tech in Electrical, Mechanical, Civil, Control & Instrumentation, Communication, Information Technology and Fire & Safety Engineering disciplines; qualified CA/ICWA (CMA) or MBA; Graduation Degree with Master Degree in Social Works or MBA/Post Graduate Degree in Personnel Management/Human Resource Management/Industrial Relations from a recognised University/Institution with desirable years of work experience in the concerned field as specified in the RVUNL Notification 2021. RVUNL Recruitment 2021: Selection And Pay Scale The selection of candidates to RVUNL Jobs 2021 through RVUNL Recruitment 2021 will be done through a Computer-based "common written competitive exam" through Online mode as notified in the RVUNL Notification 2021. Candidates selected to RVUNL Jobs 2021 through RVUNL Recruitment 2021 will be paid emolument in the range of Rs. 18,500 up to Rs. 39,300 per month during PT period. Also Read: Karnataka: Thousands Of School Teachers, Staff Protest Against 30 Per Cent Fee Reduction RVUNL Recruitment 2021: How To Apply Candidates applying for RVUNL Jobs 2021 through RVUNL Recruitment 2021 must register online on the RVUNL portal from February 24 onwards and submit their applications on or before March 16, 2021. Download RVUNL Recruitment 2021 Notification PDF for Junior Engineers I, Assistant Engineers, Accounts Officers, Personnel Officers, Junior Chemists and Informatics Assistants posts WASHINGTON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation (Farmer Mac;NYSE: AGM and AGM.A), the nation's secondary market provider that increases the availability and affordability of credit for the benefit of rural America, announced today that Eric T. McKissack of Chicago, Illinois has been appointed the newest member of the company's board of directors. His appointment fills the seat of former board member W. David Hemingway after his unexpected passing in November 2020. Mr. McKissack brings significant financial and investment expertise from his many years as a portfolio management executive. He is the founder and former CEO of Channing Capital Management, LLC, a Chicago-based institutional investment advisory firm. Mr. McKissack retired from the firm in December 2019 after 16 years and currently serves as CEO Emeritus. He was formerly vice chairman and co-chief investment officer of Ariel Capital Management (now known as Ariel Investments). Mr. McKissack is also an experienced board member of other financial institutions. Since 2011, he has served as chair of the board of FlexShares, a family of publicly-traded ETF funds managed by Northern Trust. Mr. McKissack also serves as an independent trustee on the board of Morgan Stanley Pathway Funds and holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation. Commenting on the appointment, Board Chair LaJuana S. Wilcher said, "While we continue to mourn the loss of David, we know that Eric's financial and business acumen will be a significant asset to the board and to the company. His deep investment experience and service on other boards make him an excellent complement to our board's strong collective base of knowledge and diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. His knowledge about mission-driven investing dovetails perfectly with Farmer Mac's critical mission of supporting agriculture and a strong and vital rural America. We welcome Eric to the board." "It is my honor and privilege to be able to serve on the board of an organization with such an important mission," said Mr. McKissack. "I have a strong personal connection to agriculture as one of the grandchildren of a farming family in rural Alabama whose legacy is reflected in the land that remains in family hands. Farmer Mac is a critical part of the nation's financial infrastructure, and I look forward to working collaboratively with the other board members to serve the company in its efforts to deliver the capital and commitment rural America deserves." Mr. McKissack joins four other board members elected each year by holders of Class A voting common stock (NYSE: AGM.A). Five other members are elected each year by holders of Class B Voting Common Stock (not listed on any exchange), and five are appointed by the president of the United States with the advice and consent of the United States Senate. About Farmer Mac Farmer Mac is a vital part of the agricultural credit markets and was created to increase access to and reduce the cost of credit for the benefit of American agricultural and rural communities. As the nation's secondary market for agricultural credit, we provide financial solutions to a broad spectrum of the agricultural community, including agricultural lenders, agribusinesses, and other institutions that can benefit from access to flexible, low-cost financing and risk management tools. Farmer Mac's customers benefit from our low cost of funds, low overhead costs, and high operational efficiency. More information about Farmer Mac is available on Farmer Mac's website at www.farmermac.com. SOURCE Farmer Mac Related Links www.farmermac.com Regulatory News: Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. (LN:PSH) (LN:PSHD) (NA:PSH) today released its regular weekly Net Asset Value ("NAV") and performance returns on its website, https://www.pershingsquareholdings.com/company-reports/weekly-navs/. The NAV and returns were computed as of the close of business on Tuesday, 23 February 2021. PSH NAV per share as of close of business on 23 February 2021 was 47.69 USD 33.79 GBP and year-to-date performance was 4.9%. Weekly net asset value ("NAV") is calculated as of the close of business on each Tuesday and posted on the following business day. In the event that Tuesday is not a business day, the Company will calculate the close-of-business NAV as of the business day immediately preceding that Tuesday. The end-of-month NAV is calculated as of the close of business on the last day of the month and posted on the following business day. For weeks that include a month-end NAV report, PSH will provide only the month-end NAV and not report the Tuesday NAV. Monthly NAVs are published in accordance with the Decree on Conduct of Business Supervision of Financial Undertakings under the Wft (Besluit Gedragstoezicht financiele ondernemingen Wft). Performance is presented on a net-of-fees basis and reflects the deduction of, among other expenses: management fees, brokerage commissions, administrative fees and accrued performance fees, if any. The performance figure includes the reinvestment of all dividends, interest and capital gains. Depending on the timing of a specific investment, net performance for an individual investor may vary from the net performance as stated herein. Net performance is a geometrically linked time weighted calculation. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. All investments involve risk including the loss of principal. About Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. (LN:PSH) (LN:PSHD) (NA:PSH) is an investment holding company structured as a closed-ended fund that makes concentrated investments principally in North American domiciled companies. Category: (PSH:WeeklyNAV) View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224006108/en/ Contacts: Camarco Ed Gascoigne-Pees Hazel Stevenson +44 020 3757 4989, media-pershingsquareholdings@camarco.co.uk It's suspected 19 residents of a Winnipeg care home, who have contracted COVID-19 during an outbreak, have not become seriously ill because they were given their first dose of the vaccine in January. It's suspected 19 residents of a Winnipeg care home, who have contracted COVID-19 during an outbreak, have not become seriously ill because they were given their first dose of the vaccine in January. "It looks like this might be helping in mitigating or minimizing effects and they will recover," said Charles Gagne, chief executive officer of Actionmarguerite, which runs three Winnipeg homes, including one at 185 Despins St. in St. Boniface, which reported a COVID-19 outbreak on Feb. 8. Health officials in Canada are looking into reports that there's a good level of protection from just one dose of the Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Manitoba has set out to vaccinate all personal care home residents with the two prescribed doses by early March. Charles Gagne, CEO of Actionmarguerite, which has had a COVID-19 outbreak despite residents receiving their vaccinations. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press) At Actionmarguerite St. Boniface, the first-dose vaccine clinic took place on Jan. 27. On Feb. 8, an outbreak was declared. Since then, 20 residents have tested positive for COVID-19. Sadly, a woman in her 90s, who was frail, died on Saturday, Gagne said. Before testing positive she had begun the end-of-life process, Gagne said. The other 19 residents who tested positive are all doing OK. "All of our residents appear to be stable," he said Tuesday. "I have to think that the contributing factor is the vaccine," said Gagne. Nurses and doctors familiar with outbreaks at other care homes prior to the vaccine rollout have said the symptoms of the vaccinated residents at Actionmarguerite don't seem as aggressive, Gagne said. A virologist with the University of Manitoba's department of medical microbiology said Actionmarguerite's one-dose experience, so far, is encouraging. "All of our residents appear to be stable. I have to think that the contributing factor is the vaccine." Charles Gagne, chief executive officer of Actionmarguerite "When we think about the issues we've had with longer-term care facilities, not only in Winnipeg but Canada and worldwide, we've seen a devastating toll on residents within those facilities," said Jason Kindrachuk. "Every piece of information we've seen about Pfizer or Moderna's vaccine has been unbelievably positive. As we get more data, we're seeing all the things that we thought looked good actually are really, really good." It's too soon to say if the experience at Actionmarguerite is proof that one dose is adequate, Kindrachuk said. "We can't look at this and say for certain this is the result of the vaccine. There could have been other factors," he said. "But it falls in line with what we've seen before. It's a very good sign and indicator." Recent data in peer-reviewed journals show the high efficacy of the vaccine after people got a first dose. (Supplied) It supports the movement toward vaccinating as many vulnerable people as soon as possible with their first dose of vaccine rather than holding some back to ensure there's enough for a second dose on time, Kindrachuk said. "Worldwide, there's a stronger impetus more towards vaccinating more broadly rather than conserving for potential second doses." Recent data in peer-reviewed journals show the high efficacy of the vaccine after people got a first dose. "Getting more people vaccinated immediately helps reduce severe disease," the virologist said. "We're also seeing data that (a first dose) may reduce transmission within those people most vulnerable to the disease," he said. As variants of concern threaten to drive up the number of cases and hospitalizations, getting as many at-risk people one dose of the vaccine as possible could prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed. "The data seem to indicate this is the way to go," Kindrachuk said. "Every piece of information we've seen about Pfizer or Moderna's vaccine has been unbelievably positive. As we get more data, we're seeing all the things that we thought looked good actually are really, really good." Jason Kindrachuk, virologist with the University of Manitoba's department of medical microbiology The St. Boniface home's second-dose vaccination clinic was scheduled for earlier this month but was postponed by distribution delays, Gagne said. It's scheduled to go ahead on Wednesday. So far, the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine appears to be keeping residents from getting sick, he said. "It's early, so we can't tell for sure," said Gagne. "Days 8, 9 and 10 are critical where they get better or crash." He said the care home staff are following all the protocols, and nurses are checking vital signs twice daily. They're testing symptomatic residents on other units for COVID-19. "They all came back negative, and that's reassuring," said Gagne. Actionmarguerite St. Boniface set up an area, which has extra equipment and better air circulation, to cohort residents who've tested positive for COVID-19. "We have prepared for this," he said. "We're not at the point where we can say we safely contained it," said Gagne. A virtual townhall meeting was held with 50 families of residents on Monday who haven't been allowed to visit their loved ones since the outbreak began. "There's a lot of anxiety and fear," he said. "We're working to reassure them we're doing everything right." carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca American lawmaker Cori Bush is seeking permanent residency for a Honduran immigrant who has lived for three years in a church, a Christian religious building. Bush is a new member of the United States House of Representatives. This week, she proposed a private bill that would permit Alex Garcia to safely leave the Christ Church United Church of Christ in Missouri. In 2017, the church gave Garcia refuge so the government could not enforce his expulsion for illegally entering the U.S. Garcia sneaked into the country in 2004 and has remained since then, finding work and building a family. He is hopeful that the bill will be a pathway for freedom, he said. I miss spending time with my family outside of the church walls, he said. It has been hard for me watching my babies grow and learn without me. Garcia is among many immigrants in the United States who took refuge from expulsion during Donald Trumps term as president. Many have said they are hopeful they can gain citizenship under new President Joe Biden. In his first weeks in office, Biden signed several orders that undo some Trump administration policies on immigration. Several Republican Party lawmakers are seeking to block the new orders. Garcia fled extreme poverty and violence in Honduras, his supporters say. He and his wife Carly Garcia, a U.S. citizen, have lived in the small Missouri town of Poplar Bluff for more than 10 years. In 2015, immigration officials ordered Garcias expulsion. He received two one-year suspensions of the order under former president Barack Obama. But after Trump took office in 2017, Garcia was again ordered to be expelled. He then found refuge at the church in Maplewood. Pastor Becky Turner said Garcia quickly became a valued part of the church membership. I have watched as he set up beds for the unhoused on cold winter nights, Turner said. I have watched as he would take care of our church members who needed something fixed or built or found. Alex the guest quickly became Alex the host. She added, The country needs more people like Alex. A private bill is one that targets a single individual. These bills are rare and usually sought as a last effort. Immigration is a common issue of private bills. Cori Bush said only four private bills have been signed into law since 2007. This will not be an easy fight, but thats never stopped us before and it wont stop us today, Bush said. We stand with Alex and we will not rest until he is free and protected from the most inhumane element of our countrys immigration system. The lawmaker that Bush replaced in January also sought passage of a private bill for Garcia. But that bill failed to pass. Im Jonathan Evans. Jim Salter reported on this story for the Associated Press. Jonathan Evans adapted this story for Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor. ________________________________________________________________ Words in This Story host n. a person who receives or entertains guests residency n. legal permission to live in a place GEORGETOWN Taneya Chandler knows what tragedy can do to someone. Having gone through her own hardship in 2019 of losing her pregnancy at 8 months, she knows that people can feel lost, scared and alone when devastation hits. As the new victims advocate for the Georgetown Police Department, Chandler wants to use her own experience with loss as well as her passion for community outreach to ensure no victims of a crime in the city ever feel the way she did. Chandler took the position in January after working as a probate court clerk for the county for about a year, a job which she said changed her life and offered her a way to pick herself back up after her miscarriage. It was more than just doing the paperwork for me, I would connect with these people in ways that when I initially saw them come into the probate office, in grief and distraught, I would see them leave differently after working with them for periods of time, Chandler said. To know that I was able to show them grace, love and support, that meant so much to them. Georgetown Police Captain Nelson Brown said when the department was looking for its new victims advocate, Chandler stuck out immediately as the best pick because of her drive and passion for the community and those in need. You could tell that she has a genuine passion for helping people, and of course the victim advocate, that's what they're doing is helping victims to navigate the process when they've been involved in an incident, Brown said. She just hit it out of the park, and when I took the results in there to the chief, I told him and everybody else on the panel, We got to get this girl quick because someone's going to scoop her up. Sign up for our Myrtle Beach weekly update newsletter. Sign up for weekly roundups of our top stories, news and culture from the Myrtle Beach area. This newsletter is hand-curated by a member of our Myrtle Beach news staff. Email Sign Up! Growing up in Georgetown, Chandler said her mother always noticed that she had to have the last word in every conversation. This expressive and opinionated nature manifested itself in Chandler wanting to go to law school, but she was quickly discouraged by those around her who told her law school would take a lot of time and effort. Though she said she wishes she hadnt taken these comments to heart, Chandler said her argumentative demeanor has helped her express her thoughts in effective ways and stand up for those who need extra support. Chandler returned to her hometown after graduating from Savannah State University in 2018 because she wanted to honor those who paved the path before her by giving back and continuing the progress in both the city and county. She hopes to do this as victims advocate by investing in the youth of the community, inspiring growth among citizens and groups alike, and fostering a safe space for those who have faced trauma and adversity. Sometimes there's a lot of background issues that go on at home, and I want to be able to use my position to get to the root of these things and in any way that we can help (the youth), Chandler said. At the end of the day, younger children are so easily influenced, and I would hate for them to see the bads and the lows of life .. and take that and think that that's what life is all about. Chandler said she hopes to host workshops with young people in the community to get them more familiar and comfortable with the police department, but also to work with the elderly in the city to ensure their needs are met and that they feel supported and cared for. Encouraging transparency and grace among citizens, victims, the department and the community as a whole is her ultimate goal, and she said she loves that she gets to offer those qualities to her home community. There's a lot of people within this community that I love, love, love, love, and I want to make it a better place for them, Chandler said. I want to take my job seriously, anything that I do I take seriously, but I have always tried to bring positive energy or just a lightness to things, because not everything that's heavy has to feel heavy. Foyle MP Colum Eastwood has welcomed today's City Deal progress for Derry but said 'more must be done' to help the local economy. Today will see a major step forward in plans for a 250m investment in the Derry City and Strabane District Council area. The City Deal proposal involves huge amounts of money being pumped into a wide range of local projects, including major expansion of the Magee campus and the transformation of Derry's riverfront area. The City Deal has been described as the largest ever government investment in the local area. This morning, all the agencies involved will hold a virtual meeting to sign a Heads of Terms Agreement. Such an agreement is seen as a commitment from all those involved to take the proposal forward. Read more details here - http://bit.ly/3pPojQY Mr Eastwood welcomed the Heads of Terms Agreement but added that delivery from the British government and the Northern Ireland Executive, as well as further investment, is needed to transform the north wests economy for the future. The City Deal is a significant step forward in building this citys economy and will no doubt benefit the entire northwest region, he said. The SDLP has been arguing for a City Deal for Derry in Westminster, the Northern Ireland Assembly and at local government level for years, starting with Mark Durkan when he was Member of Parliament for Foyle. It is clear that there are exciting projects involved in this City Deal that will begin the transformation of Derrys economy, with the hope that this help will create new jobs for our people and allow them to build a life here. The City Deal is a great start and should be seen as the beginning of the transformation of the northwests economy- not the end. The Foyle MP said work needed to continue to attract high quality jobs to Derry and to make the north west region an attractive place to work remotely in a fast-changing global economy. We need to see an expanded, full-scale university in Derry with over 10,000 students and the right kind of courses to attract and maintain students to our city and region. Only with this further investment can we put an end to the exodus of our young people having to go elsewhere for education and career opportunities. It is our hope that the City Deal, coupled with the all-island infrastructure approach spearheaded by Minister Nichola Mallon, can be the beginning of a real economic and societal change for the northwest of Ireland." More than $3.4million worth of fines were issued to New South Wales motorists in January alone after mobile speed camera warning signs were removed. By comparison, just $382,000 in fines were issued to drivers over the same period last year. The NSW government in November announced it would be removing warning signs which are stationed 250m and 50m in front of mobile speed cameras. As a result, Mona Vale Road in St Ives, in Sydney's Upper North Shore, saw 301 fines being issued in January - up from just eight in the same period in 2021. It was revealed in November last year that the NSW Government would be removing warning signs which are stationed 250m and 50m in front of mobile speed cameras Divers who were caught speeding on Anzac Parade in Maroubra were slapped with $24,403 in tickets, up from just $1127 in the same period last year Fines by area Mona Vale Road in St Ives January 2021 - 301 fines totaling $89,765 January 2020 - 8 fines totaling $1487 Anzac Parade in Maroubra January 2021 - 42 fines totaling $24,403 January 2020 - 8 fines totaling $1127 King Street in Mascot January 2021 - 72 fines totaling $14,088 January 2020 - 13 fines totaling $2368 Penthurst Road in Chatswood January 2021 - 390 fines totaling $70,868 January 2020 - 72 fines totaling $12,982 Advertisement Penshurst Road in Chatswood saw a 441 per cent jump to 390 infringement notices, while there was $16,344 fines issued along Barrenjoey Road in Mona Vale - up from $1044 last January. Drivers who were caught speeding on Anzac Parade in Maroubra were slapped with $24,403 in tickets, up from just $1127 in the same period last year. Labor's Roads spokesman John Graham said NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance has created a 'cash grab on a grand scale'. 'We knew that the state budget predicted that fine revenue would increase by a third this year to $864million. Now we know why. Based on these figures that could be an underestimate,' he said. A spokesman for Mr Constance told The Daily Telegraph that he had received advice that removing warning signs could save up to 43 lives a year. 'The minister couldn't ignore that advice. This is about saving lives not revenue raising,' she said. The signs will continue to be removed over the next 12 months, leaving thousands of motorists at risk of copping fines of up to $2,530. The decision was made after unmarked mobile phone detection cameras decreased the number of drivers caught using their phones behind the wheel. But Mr Constance last year argued the decision was about saving lives, not revenue raising. 'No warnings signs mean you can be caught anywhere, any time and we want that same culture around mobile speed cameras,' he said. 'This is about changing culture and changing behaviour.' The state Department of Corrections recently got around to vaccinating more than 1,000 inmates and staff at state prisons in Somerset and Lycoming counties, and plans to continue this week at the state prison in Waymart, Wayne County. Those prisons are high on the departments list because they include large numbers of older inmates, who are eligible under federal guidelines for order of vaccination based on risk. Some lawmakers complained that the inmates received vaccinations before many older people in the general population, which would be valid if the issue were one of supply. But the issue is efficient distribution of an abundant supply, which is orchestrated by the state government itself. As a practical matter, all prisons should be high on the vaccination list because their institutionalized populations do not have the opportunity for isolating at home, and the staff with whom the inmates come into contact can carry the infections into the general community. The state also is responsible for the welfare of people that it holds in custody, none of whom have been sentenced to being exposed to a deadly infectious disease. When the state government conducts a review of its response to the crisis, when the pandemic finally is under control, it should recognize that prisons are a primary incubator of infectious diseases. And as it makes plans to deal with the next pandemic, it should ensure that corrections officers, at least, are included in the first wave of vaccinations. Australias second most senior defence officer has personally urged the top member of Myanmars military to respect democracy and release an Australian professor from detention. In the first conversation between senior officials of either nation since the military coup earlier this month, Vice Chief of the Australian Defence Force, David Johnston, and Deputy Commander-in Chief of the Myanmar military, Soe Win, spoke over the phone on Monday. Myanmars coup leader Aung Hlaing, left, with Vice Senior General Soe Win. Credit:AP The move shows that Australia is prepared to maintain top levels of dialogue with the Mynmar junta despite the military coup, particularly through its own military. Myanmars military declared a year-long state of emergency on February 1 after it detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi in a coup that has ended a fraught 10-year journey to democracy. [February 24, 2021] DRIVE Software Solutions Announces New Board Member Stephen Doran, a fleet and technology industry expert, joins the DRIVE board Appointment follows successful first year for DRIVE under new management team DRIVE revenues up over 30% and vehicles on ODO more than treble year-on-year LONDON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- DRIVE Software Solutions ("DRIVE"), a leading provider of fleet management technology, is pleased to announce that Stephen Doran has joined its board as non-executive director. This appointment comes after a very successful first year for the business under new management, during which time DRIVE has generated revenue growth of over 30% year on year. In the same period, vehicle numbers on the ODO Fleet Management platform have more than trebled as the business accelerates traction amongst brokers, dealers, lease and rental companies. Stephen has a career spanning some 35 years, mainly in senior and executive positions in technology companies innovating and disrupting business models and services. Stephen has been involved in vehicle management and telematics since creating the programme for Norwich Union/ Aviva that led to the development of pay-as-you-drive insurance for young drivers. He went on to lead and grow Tracker limited, the vehicle security Company owned at the time by Direct Line Group and oversaw the sale of the business in2014. In 2015, he built Ecofleet, a fleet management Company based in Estonia, to around 100,000 vehicles under management before selling the business in 2018. He has lived and worked throughout the Nordics, Baltics, France, Germany, the US and the UK: managing global teams for both large and start up organisations. These include Apple, Aviva, Direct Line, Arqiva, Tracker, BrightGen and Ecofleet. Stephen's appointment follows last year's establishment of the new management team: Richard Parris as Chairman and CEO, Robert Gorby as Chief Commercial Officer and DRIVE veteran, Simon West-Oliver, moving into the new role of Strategic Partnerships Director. Commenting on his new role with DSSL, Stephen said: "This is an exciting time for the business. I am looking forward to working with the team to accelerate growth even further as we broaden our routes to market and deliver innovative solutions in areas such as EV transition management and Mobility as a Service." Richard Parris, Chairman and CEO of DSSL, said: "Stephen brings a wealth of innovative technology and fleet experience with him to the DRIVE team. His skillset and knowledge, coupled with the strong backing of Viva Investment Partners and the phenomenal momentum the new management team has already generated, gives us great belief in our ability to shape the future of the dynamic and evolving mobility sector." For more information, please visit www.ododrive.com About DRIVE Software Solutions Drive Software Solutions' developed technologies are responsible for the management of 1.5 million vehicles in 55 countries around the world. From bespoke software platforms and consultancy for individual corporates to ODO, our cloud delivered solution for fleet management, DRIVE is at the forefront of the automotive mobility sector. DRIVE gives businesses a bespoke platform to manage their fleet and their drivers on the go at anytime, anywhere, using all devices. Time to optimise your fleet. www.ododrive.com For more information contact Robert Gorby on +44 (0)7861 234984 / robert@ododrive.com or Scott Fulton at scott@fulton-associates.com / +44 (0)7788 144993 Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1443903/DRIVE_Stephen_Doran.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1336877/DRIVE_Software_Solutions_Ltd_Logo.jpg [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Patna, Feb 24 : A Sub-Inspector in Bihar's Sitamarhi district was killed in an encounter with a liquor mafia gang while a guard sustained injuries on Wednesday afternoon. Sources said that a smuggler was also killed. The encounter took place in Kunwari village around 12.15 pm. P.N. Sahu, Deputy Superintendent of Police Sitamarhi confirmed the incident. Sahu said that there was information about Sub Inspector Dinesh Ram posted in Majorganj police station who sustained gunshot injuries and later succumbed in Sadar hospital. There strict liquor prohibition laws in Bihar. WASHINGTON, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Yesterday, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) held a nomination hearing for Xavier Becerra, President Joe Biden's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). Today, the Senate Finance Committee will hold its nomination hearing. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins made the following comments: "The Department of Health and Human Services has the largest budget of any federal agencies, overseeing twenty-seven different National Institutes and Centers of Health. Xavier Becerra, President Biden's nominee to head the mammoth health-focused agency has zero health care experience. Mr. Becerra is an attorney that has amassed an extensive record of hostility toward religious freedom and appears to be fixated on promoting extreme pro-abortion policies. This was evident in his testimony yesterday before the Senate committee, in which he refused to explain his past support for the barbaric practice of partial birth abortion. "As Attorney General of California, he specialized in singling out private individuals and faith-based organizations for special harassment, aggressively prosecuting them without cause, and miring them in lawsuits even after he was rebuked by the Supreme Court. "Becerra would be a disaster for HHS and a menace to every American who cares about protecting human life and freedom. A leftwing culture warrior is the wrong person to lead the country's public health response out of the pandemic. The great power and reach of HHS will be placed in the hands of the most extreme pro-abortion zealot ever to lead it, should Xavier Becerra be confirmed by the Senate. The Senate must reject Becerra's nomination," concluded Perkins. Connor Semelsberger, Director of Federal Affairs for Life and Human Dignity at Family Research Council, added: "Xavier Becerra's abortion record is clear. When Senators on the Senate HELP Committee pressed him on his vote to oppose a federal ban on the barbaric practice of partial birth abortions, a pro-life policy President Biden supported in the Senate, he simply dodged the question. "After committing to following the law when asked about whether he would direct federal funds to pay for abortions, he later admitted to using his role as the Attorney General of California to join forces with other states and press federal courts to upend existing laws regulating chemical abortion. The message that Becerra will work across the aisle to build an appropriate response to the coronavirus pandemic is simply a smokescreen for his endgame of radically expanding abortion through one of the federal government's largest agencies," concluded Semelsberger. SOURCE Family Research Council Related Links http://www.frc.org New Delhi: Two days after the state government's order, primary schools in Haryana reopened on Wednesday (February 24) for classes 3 to 5 students. The Department of School Education, Haryana, on Monday issued an order stating all government and private primary schools should be reopened in the state. The school timings would be from 10 am to 1:30 pm, the order said. Students who attend classes are required to submit written consent from their parents allowing them to take offline classes. The students have been asked to bring a certificate from a health centre or doctor certifying they do not have any Covid-like symptoms. However, those students who wish to continue online classes like before will have the option to do so. The education department in the letter said that all necessary Covid-19 guidelines such as physical distancing, wearing of masks, and checking of the temperature of students will have to be ensured by the school administration. Earlier, the schools were reopened for Classes 6 to 8 students from February 1. Before that classes 9 to 12 were started in mid-September but were forced to close in November amid a rise in COVID-19 cases. Live TV Sunny Rajopadhyaya thinks he has lived through American rapper will.i.ams famous quote: Waste is not waste until we waste it. Following these words, Rajopadhyaya has been converting elephant dung, which is waste in general, into usable paper products. His startup Ecoorb Ventures has been an example of sustainable waste management and entrepreneurship. Conception Rajopadhyaya, 29, who currently works as the CEO of this company today, shares it all began in 2015 during his frequent visits to Chitwan. During one of my visits to Sauraha, we went to the Elephant Breeding Centre in Chitwan National Park to see the baby elephants. There, I happened to see heaps of elephant dung lying around, he says. Heaps of elephant dung. Photo: Wikimedia Commons That scene made him curious and he asked the staff what they would do with these dungs. In response, the staff told him that the centre would produce around 20 tons of dung every day, and most of the dung would be burned. But still, managing elephant dung was a huge problem there, shares Rajopadhyaya. In the meantime, Rajopadhyaya came across a video produced by Nas Daily, in which elephant dung is used to make papers and paper products in Sri Lanka. Then, he vowed to do a similar business in Nepal also. Establishment Rajopadhyaya was working in an IT firm at that time. I felt like why I am doing this (9-5 job) and wanted to do something on my own that would give me inner satisfaction, he says, But, I did not have money for that. On the other hand, he was unwilling to beg for money from his parents, but he did not have any option either. Hence, he just waited for possible investors while further concretising his idea. In 2018, he landed a grant of Rs 50,000 from Nepal Communitere, an innovation supporting organisation supporting Nepali startups. It proved crucial for executing his plan. Hence, Rajopadhyaya thought to give it a try and started developing some prototypes. He experimented with different models of converting waste into paper. Papers made of elephant dung are drying in the Sun. Photo: Ecoorb Ventures It was when he thought of the current name for his enterprise. I coined this name, combining two words: eco that stands for ecological and orb meaning objects having a spherical structure, which also stands for the earth. In the meantime, his friend Jonej Shakya also expressed his interest in the work and invested Rs 50,000 in the business, which Rajpapadhyaya says solidified his thought. After prototyping, the Nepal Communitere took us under their umbrella around 2018. They supported us with incubation plans for nine months in the following year, Rajopadhyaya informs, It was only in 2020 that we registered our startup as a company. Rajopadhyaya then went to Sauraha again and began studying as well as working. Operation While researching deeper, he came to know about Green Society Nepal, which was producing similar papers from elephant dungs. He then contacted the society and went there. He says, The papers they were producing were not up to the mark, meaning the usability of the paper was very less. This inspired him to focus on quality production. At that time, I thought only the lokta paper, the handmade Nepali paper, would have quality and it is a quality paper. But later, I realised we could improve the quality if we worked together to make our products worthy for the market. Then, Green Society also became a part of the Ecoorb Ventures. The enterprise, since its early days, focused on producing paper boxes and paper bags for packaging purposes from the early days. Later, it added other items to its production list such as visiting cards, photo frames, and notebooks, among others. According to Rajopadhyaya, it takes around five to seven days to convert elephant dung into pulp or usable fibre. This is done in Sauraha by a team of four local women and the pulp is brought to Kathmandu and processed further to make the paper and, therefore, the final products. Photo: Ecoorb Ventures We started with bringing 10-15 kg of pulp every month, but last month we used about 800 kgs, says Rajopadhyaya, And, in the last fiscal year before the Covid-19 pandemic, we recorded transactions of around 3 million rupees. Future plans Major clients of this startup are other startups like Nuga, and Naturo Earth. Meanwhile, the company has been exporting its products to countries like Costa Rica, France, and China. Rajopadhyaya adds, Word of mouth has helped attract the clients to Ecoorb Ventures. This experience has given him a lot of hopes for the further growth of the business. But, sometimes, I feel we are in a death zone now. We are in a stage of scaling up, for which we need a lot of money, he says, But, that is the most challenging part. Because most of the startups fail in this stage, he says investors are not easily convinced. But, he claims he is working on attracting funds. Meanwhile, Ecoorb Ventures is planning to launch two new types of eco-friendly products from hemp and banana stems within the next two to three months. Rajopadhyaya hopes his startup will be able to produce such newer items using different alternatives and produce varieties that could meet the need for different purposes. ADVERTISEMENT The Registrar of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Oladejo Azeez, has apologised for the role he played in locking out members of the Senate from the emergency meeting of the body on August 24, 2020. He made this known in a letter addressed to all Senate members released on Monday. I hereby tender my unreserved apology to the esteemed members of the Senate of the University of Lagos on the role I played in the unintended locking out of members of the senate during the Emergency meeting held on Monday, August 24, 2020, he said. He said he has respect for the Senate as an institution as well as the individual members in their respective capacities. Having come to the realisation that my action must have offended Senate members, I hereby apologise to all Senate members, he said. Mr Azeez assured the Senate that he remained loyal and committed to the Senate and management of the university. Background PREMIUM TIMES reported when the emergency meeting was scheduled for Monday, August 24, 2020. More than 140 professors signed for the convocation of the meeting, which was already more than half of the Senates roughly 230 members and four times more than the required 25 to convene such meetings. The Senate meeting was one of the decisions contained in the federal governments recommendations aimed at addressing the crisis which was rocking the university at the time. The meeting, however, was almost stalled by a directive from the registrar that no auditorium should be made available for the members to use for their meeting. According to the Vanguard, the memo was dated August 24, 2020, and directed to the Head, Auditoria Management Unit, J. F Ade-Ajayi Auditorium. The memo, titled Re: Notice to Senate Meetings directed the Auditoria Management Unit not to make any auditorium available for the members of the Senate. This is to inform all Senate members that no meeting of the 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, he said. However, despite the memo, members of the Senate were allowed in when workers in charge of the auditorium later opened the place. When what is needed is vision and a pathway to a positive future, what we get in Northern Ireland is sniping, point-scoring, opportunism and the old translation of every single problem on earth into the language of Orange and Green. Even the question of when to bring children back to school has become a proxy for the constitutional question. The way funerals did, the way pubs did, the way closing entry points did. The DUP and TUV would appear to favour aligning NI with England, where all pupils return to school on March 8 - for once finding something to agree on with Boris Johnson. While Sinn Fein and the SDLP oppose this, wanting to stick with the phased return scheduled for that date, it may be that their keenness to take a stance against unionism has also set them at odds with revised policy in the Republic where schools begin a phased re-opening on March 1. For the rest of us who aren't involved in these heady discussions what we thought we knew on Sunday was turned on its head on Monday. And not for the first time. It's no wonder there is so much scepticism on the street at this new declaration of positivity. After the harrowing death toll, the shocking mismanagement of protective clothing for care-workers, the misguided attempts to "re-open" last July prior to the second wave, even after the misjudged decision to let separate directions be taken by the four nations, what will be remembered will be the appalling mood-swings in news management. In the lead up to the festive season, it was gung-ho for turkey dinners; then almost immediately it was Christmas Day in the Workhouse for everyone, as an extended lockdown was ushered in, with new "vaccine-dodging" variants frightening the life out of all of us. Last week, it was all social distancing until the autumn, booster injections in August, the Australian Open (where they seem to have no cases at all) having to play out in empty stadia, caution over the availability of the second jab. This week? Hey! Let's paaaarrr-ty! Blokeworld is back! Pubs open by mid-April, indoor leisure facilities, hairdressers and non-essential retail open by May 17, thousand-seat theatres open by mid-May, the Epsom Derby and Royal Ascot in early June, nightclubs open by June 21, 90,000 punters in Wembley for England v Czech Republic on June 22, Wimbledon by June 28 Once again, the UK has lurched from depression to eye-rolling euphoria, leaving more questions than answers. The downturn in infections and fatalities up until Monday had been ascribed to the efficiency of lockdown. If we understand the leaflets correctly, the vaccine can suppress serious symptoms but doesn't prevent infection or transmission, and right on cue, on Tuesday, news emerged that the South African variant had arrived in Northern Ireland. Response to Boris was muted here at first. The punishment meted out to our society by the virus for our Christmas recklessness - one thousand further deaths since December 1 (10 weeks to accomplish what it took 32 weeks to do in 2020) - seemed to have chastened those usually calling for rapid re-opening. But Boris clearly awakened those who saw the chance to steal a march on the Republic by matching Mother England stride for stride. The last time there was a real expectation of re-opening society was last September, just prior to the second wave, when the Kent variant was emerging. Perhaps it would help the confidence of the public if there were some consistent messaging now. Even within 24 hours of Boris's speech, Health Secretary Matt Hancock suggested the gaps between stages of re-opening would more likely than not be extended Maybe this is the hallelujah moment and the UK is leading the way into the Nirvana of the Old Normal. It's just depressing that, among the first bits of the Old Normal we find ourselves getting back, is a society in Northern Ireland that's as divided as before, and just as ready to fall back on bickering and back-biting as a substitute for taking care of our shared community. CHICAGO, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dresner Partners, a leading FINRA-registered, middle-market investment bank and Mergers Alliance member firm, is pleased to announce that it advised Group Management Services, Inc. (GMS), a growing national Professional Employer Organization (PEO) headquartered in Richfield, Ohio, in its acquisition of Synergy, a leading provider of PEO and Human Capital Management services. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. GMS is a PEO and a Benefits Administrator with eight offices in the United States. GMS serves companies of all sizes nationwide. The company was founded by Mike Kahoe in 1996 and has helped thousands of organizations take control of their HR functions. Chicago-based Synergy was founded by Jon Skulborstad and has been in the human resources management business since 1989. Synergy, with the significant contributions of Jons brother Dennis Skulberstad, has been delivering high quality PEO services to the Chicago and Midwest SMB market for over 30 years. Last fall we engaged Cliff Sladnick of Dresner Partners to assist with GMSs strategy to grow nationally. In Synergy, the Dresner team identified the ideal PEO for GMS to enter the Chicago market, said Mike Kahoe, President and Founder of GMS. Both organizations are excited to continue upon the success and growth each has experienced over the past 30 years, while providing the same level of exceptional service to all our clients. Jon Skulborstad, Founder of Synergy, said, I have worked with Cliff Sladnick for over 10 years and appreciate his perseverance in finding the right partner for Synergy in GMS. I look forward to seeing what both companies can accomplish together. The GMS and Synergy teams did an outstanding job getting this transaction closed in a relatively short period of time. I am very happy to have found GMS to be the right home for Synergy and its people, said Clifford M. Sladnick, Managing Director, Dresner Partners. Steven M. Dresner, President of Dresner Partners, said, We brought Cliff Sladnick back to Dresner last fall to continue his success in the PEO and payroll spaces. This transaction is the first of many we expect Cliff to close at Dresner and the first of many Dresner PEO and payroll deals. More information on Group Management Services, Inc. can be found at www.groupmgmt.com. More information on Synergy can be found at www.mysynergy.com. About Dresner Partners Dresner Partners is a FINRA-registered, middle-market investment bank headquartered in Chicago, with offices in New York City, Boston, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Palo Alto, Calif. For nearly 30 years, Dresner Partners has provided financial advisory services to middle-market companies throughout the world including merger and acquisitions advisory, institutional private placements of debt and equity, financial restructuring, valuations and strategic consulting services. Dresner Partners has extensive international and cross-border transaction experience and is a member of Mergers Alliance, one of the worlds leading global mergers and acquisitions partnerships focused on the middle market. An affiliated company, Dresner Corporate Services, is a strategic communications firm specializing in public relations, investor relations and corporate development. More information is available at www.dresnerpartners.com. You can also follow Dresner Partners on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DresnerPartners. For Media Inquiries David Gutierrez, Head of PR, IR and Corporate Development, (312)780-7204, dgutierrez@dresnerco.com For Transaction Related Inquiries Steven M. Dresner, President, (312)780-7206, sdresner@dresnerco.com Clifford M. Sladnick, Managing Director, (847) 840-3460, csladnick@dresnerco.com Health Minister Stephen Donnelly has said he is fully supportive of Dr Gabriel Scally remaining involved in the CervicalCheck review, just hours after the Dail heard he was no longer involved. A spokesperson for Minister Stephen Donnelly told the Irish Examiner in reply to comments from Labour Leader Alan Kelly who said Dr Scally had been dumped. In his review report, Dr Scally said that substantial progress had been made and that he was satisfied with the approach and structure in place for implementation. He suggested that he conduct one more final progress review. In his last report, he said this should be held at a suitable point, sometime after the Coronavirus has abated. "Minister Donnelly is fully supportive of this. "He will raise this with the CervicalCheck Steering Committee at the appropriate time, a statement said. Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins Photos Dublin Government urged to explain why Dr Gabriel Scally is no longer involved in CervicalCheck process The Government was earlier called on to explain why it has dumped Dr Gabriel Scally from the process of fixing the CervicalCheck screening process despite it not being completed. The Irish Examiner has confirmed that Dr Scally is no longer involved in providing progress updates to the Department of Health, as he had been previously, despite 22 of his 170 recommendations remaining outstanding in terms of implementation. Following his devastating report in 2018 into the CervicalCheck scandal, Dr Scally was called on by then Health Minister Simon Harris to perform a number of reports and reviews as to how changes are being made, and he filed his last one in 2020. The Department of Health has said: Dr Scally has fulfilled his commitments to the process, including his two independent review reports which have been published. Speaking to the Irish Examiner, Dr Scally said he is ready and willing to continue his work if asked to do so, but it is up to the department to decide the matter. He said while great progress has been made, he would like to see all the recommendations aimed at improving services for women implemented and reviewed. He did say that while he recommended that the progress of implementation should be subject to several reviews, he accepts that Covid-19 has had a significant impact on the screening services but also on the review process. The news comes after reports of difficulties between patient advocates and the Department of Health and the resignations of some leading cancer patient advocates who strongly criticised the behaviour of officials towards them. Labour Leader Alan Kelly, who raise the issue in the Dail this afternoon, said he is both shocked and disappointed to find out that Dr Scally is no longer involved in the process. Speaking to the Irish Examiner, he said: I find it absolutely shocking that the Government which hinged its credibility on fixing the CervicalCheck issue has effectively dumped Dr Scally when so many recommendations remain to be implemented. The Minister for Health must now explain why he and his department have gotten rid of him. Why has this happened? It needs an urgent explanation also as to why there has been a change to the pathway to screening from 2 years to 3 years. This is very serious. In response, Taoiseach Micheal Martin has said he knew nothing of the removal of Dr Scally. "I'll have to check into that deputy, it hasn't come before the government in terms of a formal decision, so the government has not dumped anybody," Mr Martin said. "I will check it out and see what the process there was and what happened." Following the publication of his damning report in September 2018, then Minister for Health Simon Harris requested Dr Scally to undertake an independent review of the Implementation Plan. The Implementation Plan was revised to take account of further formal observations submitted by Dr Scally. A further revision of the Implementation Plan took place to encompass two further recommendations identified by Dr Scally in the Supplementary Report, which was approved in June 2019. Dr Scally was requested to undertake a further implementation review, and this took place in late 2019. The report of this Review of the Implementation of the Recommendations of the Scoping Inquiry into CervicalCheck was received by the Department in April 2020 and published on the Department's website in December 2020. In a statement to the Irish Examiner, the Department of Health said the Government accepted all 50 recommendations made in Dr Scally's Scoping Inquiry into the CervicalCheck Programme, which was published on 12 September 2018. It said that as of the end of 2020, there were 148 of 170 actions, arising from the 58 recommendations, completed. The Department of Health engages on an ongoing basis with the HSE and the National Cancer Registry of Ireland as part of the oversight of the implementation of the remaining recommendations and actions. The CervicalCheck Steering Committee, chaired by Professor Anne Scott, will also have a role in oversight of the implementation of the remaining recommendations, the department added. Dr Scallys 2018 report provided analysis of and recommendations on the crisis after it emerged that dozens of women had not been informed of an audit into cervical cancer results. Dr Scally said the screening system was doomed to fail at some point and that "the problems uncovered are redolent of a whole-system failure". He said the current policy and practice on open disclosure "is deeply contradictory and unsatisfactory" and that "there is no compelling requirement on clinicians to disclose". He said: I know, very well, from very many of the women themselves and the families, that the issue of non-disclosure is felt very intensely. "They have expressed very clearly their anger at not being told at the time when the information from the audit became available, and they are equally as angry about how they were eventually told. "In my view, the manner in which they were eventually told of their situation in many cases varied from unsatisfactory and inappropriate, to damaging, hurtful and offensive." Have You Seen This? Baby calmed by Imperial March UWs Mason to Lead International Webinar on Fracking March 15 Chuck Mason, the H.A. Dave True Jr. Chair in Petroleum and Natural Gas Economics and associate dean of the University of Wyomings College of Business, will moderate and serve as one of the speakers for a webinar hosted by the International Association for Energy Economists (IAEE). Titled Its a Fracking New World, the webinar is set for 9-10 a.m. MST Monday, March 15. Mason is an expert on the economics of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in oil and gas development. He and colleague Timothy Fitzgerald, an associate professor in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, will discuss important trends in fracking over the past 15-20 years. This includes how and who disseminates information about fracking; changes in fracking services; and implications, particularly for the developing world. More information and registration information may be found here. Mason holds a bachelors degree in economics and mathematics, and a Ph.D. in economics, both from the University of California-Berkeley. A member of UWs faculty since 1982, his research is mainly focused on energy and resource economics. He was a visiting academic at Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom; the Venice International University in Italy; and the Toulouse School of Economics in France. He testified in the case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against BP related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Saudi Arabias surprise January 2021 one million barrel per day production cut has sparked a sense of bullishness over the outlook for crude oil. The international Brent benchmark price has soared 25% since the start of 2021, sparking considerable bullishness over the outlook for crude oil and energy companies. Substantially higher oil prices, coupled with a renewed sense of optimism in the wake of the devastating fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, have seen oil companies across the globe bolster investment for 2021. One jurisdiction attracting considerable attention from global oil companies in Suriname. The deeply impoverished South American country, which emerged from a brewing political crisis in July 2020 only to be confronted by the severe economic fallout from the OCIVD-19 pandemic, is readying itself to benefit from a major offshore oil boom. Like neighboring Guyana, where the former British colonys burgeoning oil boom is delivering a tremendous economic windfall responsible for 2020 GDP expanding by 26% despite the pandemic, Suriname is anticipating a similar dividend. The former Dutch colony of only 600,000 people has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic. The International Monetary Fund predicted 2020 GDP contracted by 13%, the second-largest decline in South America when excluding Venezuela. This, along with the Fund estimating that 2021 GDP will only grow by a paltry 1.5%, highlights the urgent need for the government of President Chan Santokhi to identify ways of restarting Surinames fragile economy. A swag of major petroleum discoveries was made since the start of 2020, the latest being Apache and partner Totals Keskesi East-1 in offshore Block 58, their fourth offshore Suriname discovery. Energy supermajor Exxon along with partner Malaysian national oil company Petronas discovered hydrocarbons at the Sloanea-1 well in Block 52 which is adjacent to Block 58. Related Video: Goldman Calls $70 Oil in Q2, But Jet Fuel Is The Joker Oil Blocks in the Guyana-Suriname Basin Source: Staatsolie. Drilling activity in offshore Suriname is gaining pace, particularly after Exxons phenomenal results in the Stabroek Block in offshore Guyana, where the integrated oil supermajor estimates it has over eight billion barrels of recoverable oil resources. The latest Baker Hughes rig count shows there is one active drill rig in Suriname. After earlier disappointing drilling results in offshore Suriname, independent oil explorer and producer Tullow Oil recently spudded the Goliathberg Voltzberg North-1 exploration well in block 47. Tullow is the operator and owner of a 50% interest in the block with 30% and 20% held by Pluspetrol and Ratio Petroleum, respectively. Citing an estimate from industry consultants Netherland, Sewell & Associates, Ratio Petroleum believes there is the potential for the discovery of resources totaling 235 million barrels of crude oil with a 34% chance of success. This is a particularly important well for Tullow because its 2017 Block 54 Araku-1 exploration well came up dry. Block 47 is northwest and adjacent to Block 54 with both being distant from Exxons Stabroek Block where the most significant crude oil discoveries have been made to-date in the offshore Guyana-Suriname Basin. Related: U.S. Shales Struggles Will Be Help OPEC Stabilize Oil Prices In mid-November 2020 Surinames national oil company and hydrocarbon regulator Staatsolie announced its shallow offshore bid round. Eight blocks, totaling 13,524 square kilometers, in western offshore Suriname to the south of Apache and Totals Block 58 were made available to energy companies with bids closing 30 April 2021. While many energy companies are experiencing success in deep-water offshore oil exploration in Suriname, the history of shallow-water drilling is nowhere near as impressive. Earlier offshore shallow-water drilling campaigns yielded very few results. Paramaribo and Staatsolies hopes, nonetheless, have been buoyed by the volume of recent deep-water oil discoveries and the US Geological Surveys plans to reassess its estimated petroleum resources for the Guyana-Suriname Basin considering those finds. Incoming Chief Executive Officer of Staatsolie, Annand Jagesar, who has had a lengthy career with Staatsolie, in a January 2021 Argus article stated that Suriname will start offshore crude oil production during 2025. That will land a considerable windfall for the countrys beaten-down economy and fiscally challenged national government. As further oil discoveries are made and offshore blocks developed the appeal of operating in Suriname for international oil companies will grow rapidly. Like neighboring Guyana, it is anticipated that Suriname will have low breakeven prices making it an attractive jurisdiction in an operating environment weighed down by weak highly volatile oil prices where the threat of peak oil demand is moving ever closer. A robust regulatory framework and oil producer-friendly regime underpinned by favorable long-term production sharing agreements and low royalty rates compared to other jurisdictions bolsters Surinames attractiveness for oil companies. These developments make it highly likely that Suriname will successfully tap its considerable petroleum wealth, becoming the next major offshore drilling location after neighboring Guyana. By Matthew Smith for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: The threat of worsening delays adds to the pressure on Boeing as executives try to forge a turnaround after one of the toughest years in the companys centurylong history. The Chicago-based planemakers path to generating cash over the next two years, after burning through $20 billion last year, depends on its ability to unwind more than 500 jets mainly Dreamliners and 737 Max that have stacked up in inventory. Researchers from University of British Columbia published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines whether and how the use of 'ugly' labeling for unattractive produce increases sales and profit margins. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "From Waste to Taste: How "Ugly" Labels Can Increase Purchase of Unattractive Produce" and is authored by Siddhanth (Sid) Mookerjee, Yann Cornil, and JoAndrea Hoegg. According to a recent report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (2020), each year in the U.S. farmers throw away up to 30% of their crops, equal to 66.5 million tons of edible produce, due to cosmetic imperfections. Such food waste has detrimental consequences for the environment: 96% of wasted food is left to decompose in landfills, releasing methane and contributing to climate change. Additionally, 1.4 billion hectares of land and 25% of the world's fresh water are used to grow produce that will be later thrown away. These researchers seek to answer two important questions: 1) Why do consumers reject unattractive produce? 2) Does 'ugly' labeling increase the purchase of unattractive produce and, if so, why does it work? They discover that consumers expect unattractive produce to be less tasty and, to a smaller extent, less healthy than attractive produce, which leads to its rejection. They also find that emphasizing aesthetic flaws via 'ugly' labeling (e.g., "Ugly Cucumbers") can increase the purchase of unattractive produce. This is because 'ugly' labeling points out the aesthetic flaw in the produce, making it clear to consumers that there are no other deficiencies in the produce other than attractiveness. Consumers may also reevaluate their reliance on visual appearance as a basis for judging the tastiness and healthiness of produce; 'ugly' labeling makes them aware of the limited nature of their spontaneous objection to unattractive produce. The research studies the efficacy of 'ugly' labeling in various contexts. First, a field study shows the effectiveness of 'ugly' labeling. Mookerjee explains that "We sold both unattractive and attractive produce at a farmer's market and find that consumers were more likely to purchase unattractive produce over attractive produce when the unattractive produce was labeled 'ugly' compared to when unattractive produce was not labeled in any specific way. 'Ugly' labeling also generated greater profit margins relative to when unattractive produce was not labeled in any specific way--a great solution for sellers to make a profit while reducing food waste." In the second study, participants were told that they could win a lottery worth $30, and could keep all the cash or allocate some of the lottery earnings to purchase either a box of attractive produce or unattractive produce. 'Ugly' labeling increased the likelihood that consumers would use their lottery earnings to purchase a box of unattractive rather than attractive produce. In Studies 3 and 4, 'ugly' labeling positively impacts taste and health expectations, which led to higher choice likelihood of unattractive produce over attractive produce. Study 5 considers how 'ugly' labeling might alter the effectiveness of price discounts. Typically, when retailers sell unattractive produce, they offer a discount of 20%-50%. Cornil says that "We show that 'ugly' labeling works best for moderate price discounts (i.e., 20%) rather than steep price discounts (i.e., 60%) because a large discount signals low quality, which nullifies the positive effect of the 'ugly' label." This suggests that by simply adding the 'ugly' label, retailers selling unattractive produce can reduce those discounts and increase profitability. The last two studies demonstrate that 'ugly' labeling is more effective than another popular label, 'imperfect.' Although 'imperfect' is used by major brick-and-mortar and online retailers and was preferred by 50+ grocery store managers interviewed, the researchers find that 'ugly' labeling was more effective than 'imperfect' labeling at generating click-throughs in online ads. Importantly, these findings largely contrast with managers' beliefs. "While grocery store managers believed in either not labeling unattractive produce in any specific way or using 'imperfect' labeling, we show that 'ugly' labeling is far more effective," says Hoegg. Given retailers' participation in the U.S. Food and Waste 2030 Champions Initiative--with an objective of cutting food waste in half by 2030 (Redman 2018)--this research urges retailers and sellers to use 'ugly' labeling to sell unattractive produce. ### Full article and author contact information available at: https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1177/ 0022242920988656 About the Journal of Marketing The Journal of Marketing develops and disseminates knowledge about real-world marketing questions useful to scholars, educators, managers, policy makers, consumers, and other societal stakeholders around the world. Published by the American Marketing Association since its founding in 1936, JM has played a significant role in shaping the content and boundaries of the marketing discipline. Christine Moorman (T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University) serves as the current Editor in Chief. https:/ / www. ama. org/ jm About the American Marketing Association (AMA) As the largest chapter-based marketing association in the world, the AMA is trusted by marketing and sales professionals to help them discover what is coming next in the industry. The AMA has a community of local chapters in more than 70 cities and 350 college campuses throughout North America. The AMA is home to award-winning content, PCM professional certification, premiere academic journals, and industry-leading training events and conferences. MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 24th February, 2021) Two Malian soldiers were killed and seven others wounded in an ambush attack in central Mali, where jihadists are particularly active, the national military said early on Wednesday. "The act took place on the RN6 [main road between the capital of Bamako and the Sevare town in central Mali] about 32 km north-east of Sevare. The provisional assessment of FAMa [Armed Malian Forces] side is 02 dead and 07 wounded. The injured were evacuated to the Somino Dolo regional hospital in Sevare," the armed forces tweeted. Military reinforcements have been deployed to the scene of the attack, it added in a separate tweet. Mali has been mired in a security crisis since the 2012 Islamist insurgency in the country's north. The Malian army, supported by the French military and the G5 Sahel bloc, of which Mali is a member, are regularly targeted by terrorists, as are humanitarian workers in the country. Image via Getty Four board members of Texas widely criticized power grid operator announced their decision to resign on Tuesday. These resignations follow outrage against the Electric Reliability Council of Texas for its handling of last weeks deadly winter storms that resulted in more than 4 million Texans losing power. According to the Associated Press, chairwoman Sally Talberg, vice chairman Peter Cramton, Terry Bulger, and Raymond Hepper are the first to resign in the wake of a weather disaster that resulted in an unknown number of deaths, in part due to ERCOTs mismanagement of the states electrical grid. Our hearts go out to all Texans who have had to go without electricity, heat, and water during frigid temperatures and continue to face the tragic consequences of this emergency, their resignation letter reads. These four board members all live outside of Texas, and acknowledged concerns about out-of-state board leadership in their decision to resign. State lawmakers are set to question ERCOT on Thursday about the operators mishandling of the crisis. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Calls for additional resignations remain. There are 16 ERCOT board members who are able to appoint officers that manage the power grids day-to-day operations. During the outages, the board members contact information was removed from the ERCOTs website, despite being public information, because members were reportedly receiving threats. It was a security, safety idea, president Bill Magness told reporters. Some Texas families were left in their homes for days last week without power in subfreezing temperatures. Children froze to death, elderly people lost their lives in fires trying to stay warm, and others died from carbon monoxide poisoning. ERCOT is a part, though not the entirety of why Texans suffered such a devastating emergency and are struggling in its wake. In addition to ERCOT, power plants went offline, and local officials failed to prepare residents for the weather. Story continues Other officials, including Ted Cruz, are also being asked to resign for their failures during the Texas Freeze. Related Articles More Complex Sign up for the Complex Newsletter for breaking news, events, and unique stories. Follow Complex on: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok Tech darling Appen has moved to reassure investors that the slump in its full-year 2020 numbers is a temporary blip, citing its strong order book as a sign that it still has the goodwill of its major customers. Appen , valued at $2.2 billion, makes money by crowdsourcing labour for artificial intelligence/machine learning services for tech giants such as Google and Facebook. Its one of the five heavyweight technology stocks in the market but has run into turbulence as the pandemic forced its customers to press pause on projects. Appen chief executive Mark Brayan said its strong order book shows the slump in its AI business triggered by COVID is a temporary issue. Credit:Steven Siewert The pressure has led to Appen offering a weaker than expected outlook on Wednesday as its 2020 full year result missed earnings targets. The company reported an 11 per cent rise in revenue to $600 million, a 23 per cent rise in net profit to $50.5 million and a 5.5c per share dividend that will be paid March 19. But sales were below expectations across the business, according to RBC Capital. Appen shares closed 12 per cent lower at $17.81 compared to a high of $25.50 last week. SANTA ROSA, Calif., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- As efforts to vaccinate essential agricultural and production workers struggle to proceed throughout California and the nation, Sonoma County's farmers, vintners and health communities have been successfully partnering to get thousands of COVID-19 vaccination doses to these essential workers throughout the region. Now entering its 5th week of operation, the program has already vaccinated and scheduled vaccination appointments for more than 8,300 essential workers from Sonoma County's agriculture, vineyard, food, and winery sectors. The target for essential ag and production workers receiving vaccination in Sonoma County is 12,500. The vaccination program and collaboration will continue for the foreseeable future. "This effort in Sonoma County should be the model for the nation in how to organize and vaccinate essential ag and production workers," said Dr. Jason Cunningham, Chief Executive Officer at West County Health Centers. He added, "We have succeeded because of the tremendous collaboration throughout the community from people and organizations who share one focus to quickly and efficiently immunize our essential food and agricultural workers to reduce their risk of becoming ill." The program is a cooperative effort involving the Sonoma County Winegrowers, the Sonoma County Vintners, the Sonoma County Farm Bureau, local community health centers including the West County Health Center, the Sonoma Valley Health Center, the Alliance Medical Center, the Alexander Valley Health Care, and the Sonoma County Medical Association. Each agricultural group has a specific responsibility: the Winegrowers work with the local winegrape farmers; the Vintners work with local wineries; and the Sonoma County Farm Bureau works with non-wine related farmers and ag processors. Farmers, vintners, and processors have been receiving regular updates from their representative organization to provide the number of people they employ, where they reside or work in the county and their transportation needs. Each week, Community Health Centers throughout Sonoma County commit a certain number of vaccines to vaccinate essential ag and production workers against the Coronavirus pandemic. Every day, it is up to the industry partners to coordinate with the ag and production employers to organize and schedule appointments for the workers and ensure that all the vaccines are being utilized. Each of the ag partner organizations is contributing staff, providing translators, and donating additional resources to make this effort successful. In addition, the Sonoma County Medical Association and its vast network of local volunteers dedicated two full days to vaccinating vineyard workers and wine production workers at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, successfully administering the first doses of the COVID-19 Moderna vaccine to over 1,200 people. Multiple vaccination sites are utilized through this collaboration in the county. The agricultural organizations coordinate weekly and, sometimes, daily with the community health centers to determine how many vaccines will be available that week and at what location. With that information, the agricultural organizations work with their ag and production partners to schedule appointments to ensure the greatest number of essential workers are vaccinated each day. However, for any vaccination program to succeed, there is one essential element: a person's trust in the vaccine and the institutions that administer it. This model specifically relies on the partnerships among the ag and production associations and the healthcare community and the trust that employees have with their agricultural employers. In addition, agricultural organizations have conducted outreach and education to essential workers. All communication and education are offered in both Spanish and English so everyone can make informed decisions about getting vaccinated. "We are succeeding in reaching our vaccination goal because of the outstanding coordination and trust that exist amongst all parties involved. There is a unique relationship the county trade associations have with each other, local businesses and farms and, in turn, the trust that exists between the ag employer and their employees," said Karissa Kruse, President of the Sonoma County Winegrowers. She added, "While there has been a lot of news about problems throughout the country in vaccinating essential workers, here in Sonoma County, we created a broad coalition to develop a plan that would work to ensure that our ag and production workers get vaccinated as soon as possible. This model of bringing healthcare providers together with local businesses and farms should not be used just here for this pandemic, but as a model for supporting the health of our local communities moving forward. " As witnessed throughout the United States, the logistical challenges to distributing the vaccines are enormous and complex. Adding to that in California are the continued revisions to the state's rollout plan, confusing messaging to millions of workers regarding priority vaccination groups and an undersupply of doses statewide. The result has been a mixed effort to inoculate high-risk workers employed at farms, restaurants, and grocery stores. "From the beginning, our focus has been on creating accessible clinics at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds to support the vaccination efforts of the current eligible tier of community members and mobilizing our volunteer network of local doctors and nurses," said Wendy Young, Executive Director, Sonoma County Medical Association. She added, "The Sonoma County Medical Association is pleased to have been able to have an active role in vaccinating our community and partnering with the local agricultural and wine communities to vaccinate Sonoma County's essential ag and production workers in this phase. This level of collaboration is special, and we look forward to continuing this innovative partnership until all who want the vaccine have it and our community can open its doors again!" A new study out of the University of California, San Francisco found that Latinx Californians experienced a 36% increase in mortality during the pandemic as compared to historical periods, with a 59% increase among Latinx food/agriculture workers. The state's current vaccination Phase 1B includes people 65 and older and essential workers in education, emergency services, food, and agriculture workers as eligible for shots. In Los Angeles County and other counties in California, essential ag workers will not be eligible to get vaccinated until March 1. "As an employer, it is my responsibility to do everything I can to protect the health and safety of my employees. I was really worried after reading and hearing the news from throughout the country of the many delays and problems in vaccinating essential workers," said Bret Munselle, of Munselle Vineyards. He added, "But, witnessing how efficient the local collaboration has made securing appointments and providing on-site education for our employees was really impressive and a great relief to me. Everyone in Sonoma County should be proud of this partnership and its success." In addition to organizing the vaccine rollout for essential ag workers, the Sonoma County Vintners Foundation donated iPads and funding to each of the participating Community Health Centers to provide much needed technology for coordinating the logistics of vaccine program. The Sonoma County Grape Growers Foundation also donated funding to each of the healthcare community organizations involved to help cover day-to-day expenses related to the program. The collaboration will continue and is accessible for all ag and production workers who live in Sonoma County. To learn more about the vaccine program, contact your respective partner at: Sonoma County Winegrowers: https://sonomawinegrape.org/ Sonoma County Vintners: https://sonomawine.com/ Sonoma County Farm Bureau: https://sonomafb.org/ West County Health Centers: https://www.wchealth.org/ Alliance Medical Center: https://alliancemed.org/ Sonoma Valley Community Health Center: https://svchc.org/ Alexander Valley Healthcare: https://alexandervalleyhealthcare.org/ Sonoma County Medical Association: http://www.nbcms.org/home.aspx SOURCE Sonoma County Winegrape Growers Lara Worthington (nee Bingle) has been repeatedly spotted around Sydney in a stylish pair of dark wash jeans - and Australian shoppers can copy her look for a cool $295. The 'Genuine Jeans', from US brand The Feel Studio Inc., sit just below the waist and hang straight over the legs in a style that flatters every body shape. Designed and made in California from 100 percent cotton, the trousers boast dozens of rave reviews from customers who say they fit like a glove and rival the quality of premium vintage denim. Lara, 33, has worn the style on multiple occasions since returning to Sydney with her husband of seven years Sam Worthington and their sons, Rocket, five, Racer, four, and a third boy whose name has not yet been revealed, in January. Scroll down for video Lara Worthington (pictured in Sydney's Bellevue Hill on February 23) has been spotted in the same dark wash jeans on multiple occasions since returning to Australia earlier this year The $295 'Genuine Jeans' from California denim brand The Feel Studio Inc. (pictured) sit just below the waist and hang straight over the legs in a style that flatters every body shape The model - who is the founder of beauty brand The Base and holds ambassador roles with luxury brands including Louis Vuitton - has also been promoting the brand on her Instagram stories, sharing photos of the jeans with her 750,000 followers. Satisfied shoppers have gushed about them online, with one woman calling them 'the best jeans' she has ever owned. The jeans - which come in black, white and blue denim - are designed to last, with care instructions on the brand's website advising minimal washing to preserve their 'authentic character'. Australians can order a pair online, with tracked shipping available from $61 to major cities including Sydney and Melbourne. Lara last wore the jeans on Tuesday, February 23, for lunch with a friend in Bellevue Hill, looking every inch the supermodel in a black bodysuit, black heeled boots and an ankle-grazing trench coat. The beauty brand founder is pictured left and right in the $295 'Genuine Jeans' from The Feel Studio Inc. at Sydney's Parsley Bay on Sunday, February 21 Lara has been promoting the brand on her Instagram stories (pictured) The businesswoman was previously seen in the jeans two days earlier when she enjoyed a beach day at Parsley Bay in Sydney's affluent east with her young family. Lara cut a casual figure, pairing the jeans with a black T-shirt and black sunglasses as she strolled along the sand. Lara's husband Sam is in Australia to star in the Sydney Theatre Company production of the Wesley Enoch directed comedy, Appropriate. Last year it was reported that the couple were planning to relocate Down Under, having been based in the US for five years. Good News for Latter-Day Saints (Mormons): an enthralling presentation that closely examines the claims and implications of Mormonism, not only for todays Latter-day Saints but also for all those outside the church. Good News for Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) is the creation of published author Robert James, a teacher and a lover of knowledge and truth. Robert writes, It is no exaggeration to say that the Mormons (the Latter-day Saints) are a fascinating people. Since 1830, they have been a part of the great mosaic of America. Persecuted by mobs, driven from place to place, their incredible courage in the face of unrelenting hostility has wielded them into a formidable presence, especially in the State of Utah. Founded in New York State by the charismatic Joseph Smith Jr., who said he was personally commissioned by God to restore pure Christianity to the world. The Book of Mormon, this most perfect book was his initial written, binding revelation to his church. Joseph Smith was a controversial figure in his dayaccused of being a fraud, a racist, a womanizer, a disrupter of good morals, and a dictator. One thing he did do well was to gather people into his church, make them believe in themselves, and strengthen them into being a formidable force for Mormonism. Smith led them through armed conflict against hostile neighbors, even against government militias. Gun battles and extreme violence were commonplace. Eventually, Joseph Smith was captured and assassinated, all this by age forty. Nobody was convicted of his murder. Smith is perhaps the most understudied, under-estimated, and misunderstood character in American history. He was no ordinary man. When his successor Brigham Young led the Latter-day Saints to a place of sanctuary (todays Salt Lake City, Utah), it was one of the most epic, unifying journeys in American history. In the past, some of their unusual practices were total obedience to the leadership, blood atonement, and polygamy. Some of these were discarded (1890), so today most Mormons are good neighbors. However, there are Mormon outlaws who still practice such unsavory things, hoping to resume them all, especially polygamy. One goal of the early saints was to conquer Missouri, next the entire country, then the world. Today, the Mormon Church is one of the wealthiest and most powerful organizations on the planet. Its influence and missionary outreach are worldwide. As possibly the fastest-growing faith in the world, maybe someday they will succeed. Then what will follow? Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Robert Jamess new book welcomes the readers to the world of Mormons so they may be able to see their strong faith and what their relationship is with their God. It is not what you expect. View a synopsis of Good News for Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) on YouTube. Consumers can purchase Good News for Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble. It is also available as an e-book (Kindle) from Amazon.com at a much lower price. For additional information or inquiries about Good News for Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919. A report on an independent investigation of Elijah McClains death released Monday morning found the Aurora Police Department officers who stopped McClain did not have reasonable suspicion of criminal activity to do so and characterized McClains behavior in ways that conflicted with video and audio evidence of the encounter. ROCHESTER, Minn. - Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is announcing a new campaign with General Mills to help families in need secure access to healthy foods. The campaign will focus on sharing information and resources related to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. It will use digital marketing to direct Minnesotans interested in the program to a website connecting them with a SNAP specialist who can provide personalized assistance as they navigate the application process. Lisa Bayley, Acting Assistant Commissioner of Children and Family Services with the Minnesota Department of Human Services, says having access to high-quality food makes a significant impact on those who receive it. "We know that when people have more food, have enough food, and they can buy nutritious food, that they're healthier, kids learn better in school, seniors are better, people are more productive at work. There are just all kinds of benefits to it," Bayley told KIMT. Bayley adds many people in need may not realize they can receive assistance from SNAP. "Many people don't think of themselves as someone who would be eligible for a program like this, but the fact is that with the changes in employment and other needs, lots and lots of people do need those extra dollars to be able to fill their grocery bags and get food on the table during the month," Bayley said. Officials say more Minnesotans than ever before have experienced food insecurity since the beginning of the pandemic. Last month, more than 452,000 people across the state received assistance through SNAP. You can learn more about the SNAP program in Minnesota by following this link. A violent boyfriend who hurled a whiskey glass at his girlfriend refused to call an ambulance and instead tried to wash the blood off her face in the shower. Delia Fernandez was left with permanent scars following the domestic violence attack inside the Parramatta apartment she shared with her then-boyfriend, Julian Sebastiao, in Sydney's western suburbs on May 26. Sebastiao escaped jail time when he was convicted last week, to the disappointment of Ms Fernandez's online supporters. Missy Tysoe, the ex-girlfriend of Salim Mehajer, shared Instagram stories of Ms Fernandez's case as she pleaded for the Australian legal system to 'do better' for victims of domestic violence. Ms Fernandez she suffered a 5cm laceration to her left cheek, a 1.5cm cut to her left eyebrow and numerous superficial wounds after Sebastiao threw the glass that shattered on her face, Parramatta Advertiser reported. The injuries caused Ms Fernandez to bleed profusely - but in the wake of the attack, her boyfriend seemingly tried to cover his tracks. Delia Fernandez (pictured) was left with permanent scars following the domestic violence attack in May last year Ms Fernandez shared a picture of the glass her former partner threw at her during the domestic violence incident He refused to call an ambulance for his injured partner and, according to police facts, he instead took Ms Fernandez's clothes off and put her in the shower to try and clean off the blood. 'I lost everything in one night. He was my only family. Within one night I had no face, no boyfriend, no family, no home. My home was a crime scene,' Ms Fernandez said. Sebastiao later called his mum about what had happened and she advised her son to phone for an ambulance. But the couple then stayed at the apartment until Sebastiao's mum arrived and tried to clean Ms Fernandez's wounds. Sebastiao's mother 'possibly removed glass from the victim's eye' and then took Ms Fernandez to Westmead Hospital, while he was picked up by a friend. Medics flushed Ms Fernandez's cheek five times in an attempt to remove glass splinters and she underwent surgery two days after the attack. She later posted an Instagram story showing her stitches following the surgery. 'I never wanted to have to show the extent of what happened to me but trust me this is nothing compared to what my face looked like before emergency facial surgery,' she wrote. Pictured: Ms Fernandez is seen with stitches in her face after her ex-boyfriend threw a whiskey glass at her head 'The coward didn't take me to the hospital at all for hours after. 'His mother had to come and take me.' Ms Tysoe said Ms Fernandez's story was an example of 'love-bombing'. 'People think abusers are obvious and always treat you like trash,' she wrote. 'They think the victim is an idiot for not seeing it. 'But the truth is, no one knows these monsters hide in plain sight.' She referred to a card Ms Fernandez shared on Instagram. Missy Tysoe, the ex-girlfriend of Salim Mehajer, shared Instagram stories of Ms Fernandez's case as she pleaded for the Australian legal system to 'do better' for victims of domestic violence Ms Tysoe said Ms Fernandez's story was an example of 'love-bombing'. She shared a series of Instagram stories about the case Ms Fernandez received the love letter from her boyfriend just ten days before he attacked her. Ms Tysoe urged her Instagram followers to 'take note' of the language, which she claims are 'very typical manipulation techniques'. 'And yet no jail time,' Ms Tysoe continued. 'Free to cover his tracks, roam the streets and do this to the next woman. 'Australian legal system - do better for our victims.' Mehajer is subject to a restraining order after Ms Tysoe alleged the disgraced property developer and former western Sydney deputy mayor assaulted and threatened her. Ms Fernandez is pictured with Julian Sebastiao before the attack. The couple had been dating for just over a year The horrific domestic violence attack occurred after Ms Fernandez made a joke about one of her boyfriend's friends. The couple, who had been dating for just over a year, were lying in bed together on May 26 when Ms Fernandez made a comment that angered Sebastiao. 'He was saying of the whole male population, (not) one wanted to be my friend or family member, and said they saw me as a piece of meat and I laughed and said ''That's how your brain works''?' Ms Fernandez said. Ms Fernandez (right) is seen out with a friend following the attack in May last year Ms Fernandez made a joke about one of her boyfriend's friends and Sebastiao became so enraged he grabbed her shirt and pushed himself on to her. He then threw the glass at her The couple then began to discuss whether Ms Fernandez's friends would find Sebastiao attractive. 'He was getting frustrated that I wasn't getting jealous,' Ms Fernandez said, adding that she is not an insecure person. Ms Fernandez then made a joke about one of her boyfriend's friends and Sebastiao became so enraged he grabbed her shirt and pushed himself on to her. Ms Fernandez struggled to breathe as he leaned his weight on her chest. Sebastiao eventually let go and began to pace around the couple's dining area. Ms Fernandez threw a TV remote control in his direction and Sebastiao hurled the whiskey glass at her head. Magistrate Rodney Brender said the level of domestic violence was 'completely unacceptable'. Sebastiao (left) was convicted and sentenced to a 15-month intensive correction, to be served in the community Sebastiao was sentenced in Parramatta Local Court on Wednesday after he pleaded guilty to common assault and grievous bodily harm. Magistrate Rodney Brender said the level of domestic violence was 'completely unacceptable'. Sebastiao was convicted and sentenced to a 15-month intensive correction, to be served in the community. Magistrate Brender also ordered him to pay a $700 fine and complete 200 hours community service. Ms Fernandez has used her Instagram to document her recovery and speak out against domestic violence following the attack. Ms Fernandez (pictured) has used her Instagram to document her recovery and speak out against domestic violence following the attack 'Thank you to everyone for your constant love and support, you are all the reason I rebuilt my life from scratch in such a short amount of time,' she wrote on an Instagram post in December. 'I've accepted these scars and they are a constant reminder everyday of what we all came back from with strength. 'There's hope for all the ladies out there suffering in silence, we have so much life to live.' Ms Fernandez also shared Instagram stories after her ex-partner was convicted. 'This was confronting but I'm glad this nightmare is finally over,' she wrote. For domestic violence support, call 1800 RESPECT Advertisement Britain and the US may be on the cusp of herd immunity by the end of 2021 thanks to their speedy Covid vaccine roll-outs, data suggested today. But forecasters analysing the current pace of the global inoculation drive have warned Germany, France and Italy must rapidly speed up to reach the same threshold. Herd immunity is when an infectious disease stops naturally spreading in a population because enough people are protected against the disease. Experts disagree over the level needed to stamp out Covid but the overwhelming consensus is that at least two thirds of people must have immunity. Statista, a German statistics company which compiled the figures, used a 70 per cent threshold. Despite having slowed down over the past month, the UK is still dishing out 335,000 coronavirus vaccines every day. But Statista's projections say Britain only needs to inoculate 245,000 people each day to hit the theoretical figure for herd immunity by December 31. The US, which is giving jabs to around 1.9million people each day, would only need to reach 1.2million to hit the same target. It is likely to be the first Western nation to hit the target, the report said. There are suggestions Israel reached the state last week, as more than two thirds of its population has received a first dose. France and Germany, however, must more than double their efforts if they are to hit 70 per cent by the end of the year. Both nations are administering between 110,000 and 130,000 doses each day. And Italy, which is going even slower and jabbing 75,000 people a day, will need to triple the pace. Almost 18million Britons have already received a Covid vaccine and Boris Johnson has put a successful jab roll-out at the heart of his lockdown-easing plan. As long as the operation continues successfully, all restrictions could be dropped in England by June 21, but any hiccups along the way could threaten that target. But No10 has been urged to pick up the pace, with data showing the drive deemed crucial to Britain's hopes of being released from lockdown in the next few months has plunged to the lowest levels in a month. Ministers have pledged to offer first doses to all over-50s by April 15, with the remaining adults set to be reached by the end of July. Ministers have blamed supply problems for delays, but Pfizer and AstraZeneca have both claimed deliveries are on schedule. On the other hand, the EU's roll-out has been dogged by mounting delivery delays. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has issued a grovelling apology for the bloc's jab shambles, but many members are now securing separate deals with suppliers to ensure they have enough shots for their residents. The UK is administering 358,340 doses of Covid vaccines a day on average, according to the Statista report, which is 46 per cent more than it needs to achieve herd immunity by the end of this year. The US is also administering more doses Above the UK's vaccine rollout is laid out. About a third of adults in Britain have received one dose of the vaccine Above is the UK's progress towards herd immunity as the country steams towards a swift exit from lockdown. Boris Johnson has been urged to speed up the drive, however, after it slowed by 30 per cent this week The US is on course to become the first country in the world to achieve herd immunity against Covid, the report said. This is when the virus stops spreading because enough people are immune to the disease France has suffered from an anaemic vaccines rollout after problems with securing supplies of doses in Brussels Germany has also suffered from a slow rollout, with less than six per cent of its citizens inoculated against the disease so far. The authorities here have started securing deals outside the EU to increase their supply Italy has also faced a slow rollout of the vaccine. The report says the pace must be tripled to achieve herd immunity this year VACCINES POSTCODE LOTTERY MEANS PEOPLE IN 20S ARE GETTING JABS IN SOME AREAS Some regional NHS sites have started dishing out Covid jabs to healthy people in their twenties, it emerged today in another example of the UK's vaccine postcode lottery. Despite national guidance stating only the top six priority groups should currently be invited for the jab, there have been growing reports of younger Brits who are not frontline NHS or social care staff receiving their first dose. Examples have been most common in London, which is seeing the poorest uptake of anywhere in Britain, but there have also been anecdotal evidence of it happening in parts of Manchester, Scotland and Wales. GPs in the capital are believed to be moving down through the priority groups to use up doses that would otherwise go to waste. But it's not clear why others are ignoring Government guidance or if admin errors are contributing to the problem. Ellie, 28, who is registered at a GP practice in Balham, south London, and has no comorbidities, got her first injection in mid-February. When she asked why she was being selected ahead of more vulnerable people, she was told it was 'her lucky day'. Rhiannon Williams, 32, a journalist at The i newspaper, revealed today she was given her first vaccine in Tower Hamlets, East London, after a 'very surprising' appointment invitation, despite having no health woes. She told the paper: 'At first I assumed I might have something in my health history I wasn't aware of that bumped me up the list, but when I called up to ask the surgery said it was merely working its way through its patients. 'Either way, I'm grateful to have received my first jab and would urge anyone else to follow NHS advice and to accept an invitation for a vaccine when offered.' Currently only people over the age of 60, anyone over 16 with a serious health condition, frontline NHS and care home workers and carers of disabled people are eligible to receive the vaccine. Advertisement The report published on February 23 assessed how likely each of the five countries considered was to gain 'herd immunity' this year, using publicly available data on the number of doses administered. Statista says it compiled the figures using official numbers released up to February 22 and used a figure of 358,000 for Britain. But the Department of Health data shows that the UK is averaging just 335,000 people jabbed per day. The analysis also included estimates of the proportion of people who would get the jab but not become immune to the disease. No jabs are 100 per cent effective. The study could not consider changes in supply, the key limiting factor in the rollout. The UK will need to dish out 245,000 doses a day to achieve herd immunity by December 31, they wrote, while the US would need to give out 1.2million. France, however, needs to administer 280,000 daily, more than double the number being delivered, while Germany needs to give out 360,000, 61 per cent more than the current drive. Italy would need to administer 260,000 doses, meaning it needs to more than triple the pace. The report said the UK has raced ahead in the rollout because it got a 'head start' when its regulator approved the Pfizer/BioNTech jab three months before the cumbersome European body. 'This gave the country a head start with its vaccination campaign, resulting in around 20 vaccinations per 100 inhabitants as of the beginning of February,' they wrote. The likelihood the UK would also be the pioneer in approving additional vaccines such as Johnson & Johnson's dose and Novavax put the country in good stead for a speedy delivery, they said. 'In perspective, the UK is most likely to be the first large European country to reach herd immunity,' the report noted. 'In addition, the UK was reportedly less affected by the shortages in the delivery of Covid vaccines than EU countries. Overall, as of February 2021, herd immunity against Covid within 2021 appears achievable for the UK.' The US has seen its vaccination programme 'rapidly increase overtime', the report said, putting the country in a good position to achieve herd immunity this year. 'The goal of President Biden to reach 100million administered vaccines by his 100th day in office is likely to be exceeded,' they added. 'By continuously increasing its current average of almost 1.9million administered vaccines per day, the country will be able to reach herd immunity already in 2021. The US is on a promising way to be the first country of the G20 countries to reach herd immunity in 2021.' Mr Johnson is under mounting pressure to ensure the vaccine rollout does not run out of steam, after the number of first doses given dropped for the fifth day in a row week-on-week yesterday. The UK's inoculation list was expanded out of the top four priority groups care home residents and staff, over-70s, clinically severely ill adults and NHS frontline staff to cover all those over 65 last week. But there have been reports of people in their twenties and thirties being offered the jab in some areas, revealing the country's postcode lottery. Rhiannon Williams, 32, a journalist at The i newspaper, revealed today she was given her first vaccine in Tower Hamlets, East London, after a 'very surprising' appointment invitation, despite having no health woes. Israel has vaccinated the highest proportion of its population against the virus in the world. The authorities there are hoping this will enable them to get back to business as usual quicker It comes after Gavin Williamson claimed coronavirus vaccine supply issues are not to blame for Britains roll-out suffering its worst slump in a month. The Education Secretary insisted today there was 'no problem' with deliveries of doses and said 'there will always be some days' when uptake dips lower. Despite the trend, Mr Williamson claimed he had 'every confidence' the mammoth NHS operation would be 'rebounding back very shortly'. The comments contradicted Matt Hancock who revealed yesterday a European-wide vaccine supply shortage could lead to 'quieter' weeks ahead for Britain's jab drive. One of the main problems is thought to be lower than expected output at manufacturing sites in AstraZeneca's supply chain on the continent. The British drugmaker, which manufactures Oxford University's Covid jab, has told the European Union it will only be able to deliver less than half of its contracted supplies before summer, raising fears the UK's orders could also be affected. Egypt's Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly has ordered the formation of a ministerial committee to facilitate the procedures required for registering real estate, a cabinet statement said on Wednesday. Madbouly's directive came during the cabinet's weekly meeting that was held via video conference on Wednesday, during which a host of issues was discussed. The PM said the committee will include the ministries of justice, finance and local development, said the statement. "The state works to encourage citizens to register their real estate with the aim of securing their properties, and therefore the registration procedures should be facilitated," Madbouly said, charging the concerned ministers to quickly convening a meeting for the committee and present the outcomes of its work to the cabinet. Madbouly has also ordered that the procedures and the objective of registration be explained to citizens so as not to allow the spread of rumours and false information regarding this issue, the statement noted. According to amendments to the real estate registry law that were approved last August, new fees will be required to register properties at real estate registry offices starting 6 March. On Monday, Minister of Justice Omar Marawan said in TV statements that citizens "are not obliged" to register their housing units at real estate registry offices, with the exception of two cases. The first case is when a property owner wants a government agency to install facilities such as water, gas, or electricity meters, and the second is if they wish to transfer ownership of the property, Marawan said. The justice minister said that registration fees range from EGP 500 to EGP 2,000, which is the maximum fee for properties exceeding 300 metres, as well as 2.5 percent of the propertys value under the real estate disposal tax. In a statement on Wednesday, Finance Minister Mohamed Maait dismissed reports that a new tax would be imposed on the sale of real estate, explaining that the real estate disposal tax has been in place since 1939 and was reduced in 1996 from 5 to 2.5 percent. The finance ministry's statement added that real estate registry offices, electricity and water companies, or local administration offices would not register properties unless the owner provides evidence that they have paid the real estate disposal tax. Short link: The first shipments of COVID-19 vaccines arrived in Thailand on Wednesday. A plane carrying hundreds of thousands of doses of vaccines landed at Suvarnabhumi airport where it was greeted on the runway by Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha Thailand was expected to recieve 200,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccine and 117,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) New Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, who was confirmed prime minister yesterday, said in his recent video address that amid the important challenges Georgia is facing nowadays, including the pandemic, we must all unite regardless the political beliefs and views. "Today, now that the law has been enforced and the state has taken its due place, I would like to call on all political forces who hold the country dear to open a real and earnest dialogue and to talk not about what divides us, but about what must unite us," Garibashvili said. He noted as well that against the backdrop of the challenges facing the country, it is time for dialogue, not confrontation, Agenda.ge reported. Calling on all reasonable opposition forces to enter parliament, Garibashvili said they would use the countrys legislature as the main platform for discussion. "We are ready for real dialogue at any time and in any format. Together, we must ensure the consolidation of our statehood and independence, the further strengthening of the democratic system, the overcoming of social and economic problems, and Georgias integration into the European Union and NATO," the new PM has concluded. There was a huge outpouring of grief and sadness this week following the death of 17-year old Sarah Lynch, the beloved daughter of Joanne O'Connor and Shane Lynch from South Kerry. Sarah tragically lost her life in a single-vehicle crash in New York last week, and on Monday her Funeral Mass took place in St Barnabas Church in New York, where her devastated parents and two brothers, Colin and Sean, along with family and friends and class-mates, gathered to say goodbye to the talented teenager who, despite her young age, the congregation heard, lived life to the full. "Sarah Ellen Lynch never wanted to miss a party...She had the gift of the gab, could talk to anyone with her outgoing personality.. She pushed life to the limit and never let an obstacle get in her way." Gavin Williamson said ministers were putting their trust in teachers to mark pupils' GCSEs and A-Levels today as he confirmed that no computer algorithms would be used to work our fair grades. The Education Secretary fronted a Government press conference tonight ahead of an announcement tomorrow on how grades will be awarded this summer. Last year's exam results were marred by the use of a controversial computer programme which downgraded students from deprived areas more than those from posh schools. As children prepare to start back at school from March 8 he said longer school days were not part of the plan to help pupils catch up on lost learning after the pandemic. But he said he hoped extra funding announced on Wednesday would allow schools to put on classes and wellbeing sessions during the summer holidays. Under plans announced today, it was revealed that secondaries will offer face-to-face teaching over the holidays, with ministers keen to see summer classes for incoming Year 7 pupils. The summer schools will be funded with 200million from the package, while a 302million Recovery Premium will also see every primary school handed 6,000 and secondaries 22,000 each to fund further support for pupils most in need. The Department for Education said this will come on top of another 200million in funding for the National Tutoring Programme and other tuition schemes and could be spent on extra clubs, activities or teaching for those who have fallen behind. However, other radical measures like permanently trimming the summer holidays or lengthening the school day do not figure in the plans yet. It came as it was revealed some secondary school children have lost more than two months' worth of learning, according to a Government report which states that the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers may have widened in the pandemic. Gavin Williamson said, however, that he hoped extra funding announced on Wednesday would allow schools to put on classes and wellbeing sessions during the summer holidays. Asked at a Downing Street press conference whether summer holidays could be cut short, Mr Williamson said: 'On the summer holidays, what we have done in terms of a 200 million programme is we want schools to be putting on great activities, whether it is education-led or even wellbeing-led, so we'd be hoping that schools can be offering that, draw down that funding in order to be offering that to children. 'Yes, we'd hope that schools are offering time in schools for children and that's why we've put the funding there. 'You ask about lengthening the school day - it is not part of the plan.' In other coronavirus developments: A total of 5,691 deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending February 12 mentioned Covid-19 on the death certificate, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) - the lowest figure since the week ending January 1; Unemployment has risen to 5.1 per cent with younger people bearing the brunt as Rishi Sunak prepares to extend the furlough scheme in his Budget next week; Matt Hancock has defended rushing through PPE procurement after a wave of criticism about lack of transparency and cronyism; Scientists have suggested masks will still be used in 2026 after Sir Patrick Vallance said they could reappear next winter; Millions of secondary school pupils will have to wear masks in the classroom when they return to school on March 8; Scientists unveiled 'spectacular' data suggesting one dose of the Covid vaccine is cutting the hospitalisation risk among the over-80s by three-quarters; 178 virus deaths were announced yesterday - the fewest since mid-November. The seven-day average for cases was 11,186, compared with a peak of 68,053 on January 8; Downing Street confirmed ministers will examine the case for so-called 'vaccine passports', having rejected the idea two months ago. The Education Secretary fronted a Government press conference tonight ahead of an announcement tomorrow on how grades will be awarded this summer. Last year's exam results were marred by the use of a controversial computer programme which downgraded students from deprived areas more than those from posh schools. Gavin Williamson said there would be 'no algorithms whatsoever' used in determining exam grades in the summer. But he said he could not reveal what the appeal mechanism would look like before addressing MPs. He told a press briefing: 'As I said many times before, we are putting trust in teachers. 'That's where the trust is going - there is going to be no algorithms whatsoever but there will be a very clear and robust appeals mechanism. 'But I'm afraid you're going to have to forgive me - it is right that this is announced in the House of Commons and not to yourself, so sorry about that. 'But that will be happening tomorrow, so just a few more hours to wait.' Unions had reacted with anger after the Education Secretary earlier hinted that the school day will be extended as part of a 'broad range of options' . Geoff Barton, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: 'The government has not discussed with us the idea of extending the school day, and the only mention we have seen of this idea is in media reports. 'We would not support a mandatory extension to the school day. Schools may want to put on some tailored after-school provision for groups of children who would benefit from this support. 'But the notion of forcing all children to sit through extra classes at the end of the day is not necessary and making tired pupils do more work is not effective. We need to focus on quality not quantity.' Summer lessons will be offered to children leaving primary school and all secondary pupils as part of a 700million catch-up package designed to reverse the impact of Covid on education. Pictured: Boris Johnson takes part in an online lesson during a visit to Sedgehill School in Lewisham, south east London, on February 23 Under plans to be announced today, secondaries will offer face-to-face teaching over the holidays, with ministers keen to see summer classes for incoming Year 7 pupils (file image) Experts earlier warned that the package is only a 'start' and it could take a decade to heal the 'educational scarring' suffered by children during the crisis. Social mobility professor Lee Elliott Major told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'I think we need a hugely ambitious drive over the next decade to equalise, level the playing field in education. Our research shows a whole generation could be educationally scarred by this pandemic. 'There was already huge inequality before the pandemic hit. This really is a fight for our future.' Pressed on whether lengthening the school day was on the table, Mr Williamson told Sky News: 'We'll be looking at how we can boost and support children in a whole range of different manners. 'But it's not just about time in school, it's about supporting teachers in terms of the quality of teaching and how we can help them.' Some secondary school students have lost more than TWO MONTHS of learning during lockdown Some secondary school children have lost more than two months' worth of learning, according to a Government report which states that the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers may have widened in the pandemic. Researchers said the findings show that pupil catch-up interventions need to be 'heavily targeted at the poorest pupils'. The research commissioned by the Department for Education to understand the progress pupils make in the 2020 to 2021 academic year found that all year groups in England have experienced a learning loss in reading, ranging from 1.6 months to two months. The learning losses in mathematics were greater, with primary school learning losses averaging just over three months, but due to small sample sizes it was not possible to provide an estimate for secondary schools. The research, carried out by Education Policy Institute (EPI) and Renaissance Learning, found all regions have, on average, experienced learning losses in reading, though the differences between regions are relatively small. Researchers found schools with high levels of disadvantage have experienced higher levels of loss than other schools particularly in secondary - 2.2 months in schools with high free school meal eligibility and 1.5 months in schools with low free school meal eligibility. The analysis is based on the results achieved by pupils in the first half of the 2020/21 autumn term, up to and including October 25 2020 in comparison to pupils in previous years. The interim findings are based on more than 400,000 reading and maths assessments. Star Assessments are frequently used by schools as their baseline assessment for reading and maths. The report said that at this stage it is not possible to break down results by pupil characteristics, or to model the progress typically made in Star Assessments by different pupil groups, but this will be possible when the data is matched with information held in the National Pupil Database and will be included in a second report. The report said: 'We will develop our models to account for these different rates of progress made by different pupil groups. 'That data will also enable us to assess the impact of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic on the gap in attainment between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. 'Consistent with other studies, the initial analysis presented in this report suggests that that gap may have widened as a result of the pandemic.' Advertisement The announcement comes ahead of details expected to be released tomorrow on the replacement scheme for this year's cancelled GCSEs and A-levels. Reacting to the news, headteacher Carl Ward warned: 'its going to take a lot longer than one year, it could take the next decade to catch up but may I add that we do not know the depth of the problem yet. Once we've got children back in and schools back to normal, it will take some time, it'll come out of the system and then we'll know in more detail in the coming three to four months perhaps the scale of the problem.' Boris Johnson said: 'Teachers and parents have done an heroic job with home schooling, but we know the classroom is the best place for our children to be. 'When schools reopen and face-to-face education resumes on March 8 our next priority will be ensuring no child is left behind as a result of the learning they have lost over the past year. 'This extensive programme of catch-up funding will equip teachers with the tools and resources they need to support their pupils and give children the opportunities they deserve to learn and fulfil their potential.' It follows new official figures showing infections falling by 20 per cent on last Tuesday as Britain recorded just 8,489 Covid cases in the lowest daily rise since October 2, while deaths tumble with another 548 victims. The promising figures will be pounced upon by anti-lockdown Tory MPs who are calling for Mr Johnson to ease lockdown quicker. Even top scientists have hinted that economically-crippling measures could be relaxed sooner. This week, the Prime Minister unveiled No10's ultra-cautious blueprint back to normality, which could see all virus-controlling restrictions eased by June 21, if things go well. Schools will return on March 8, but there will be almost no further loosening of the draconian curbs before Easter. Nicola Sturgeon yesterday unveiled an even more cautious lockdown exit roadmap for Scotland, which will see the stay at home rule lifted and the return of some non-essential shops on April 5. The Scottish First Minister said the coronavirus situation in Scotland is 'still quite precarious'. But hopes of lockdown being drastically eased in the next few months could be dashed if Britain's vaccine roll-out fails to pick up pace. It has slowed down over the past month, with just 210,000 doses dished out on Monday in the UK - down a quarter on last Tuesday. It means around 335,000 Britons are getting inoculated for the first time each week, piling pressure on No10 to urgently ramp up the drive so that the path to freedom isn't threatened. An extra 18million is being directed to support language development in the early years sector to try to stop the very youngest children being permanently disadvantaged. Mr Williamson said: 'Our package of measures will deliver vital support to the children and young people who need it most, making sure everyone has the same opportunity to fulfil their potential no matter their background. 'I know that longer-term support over the length of this Parliament will be vital to ensure children make up for lost learning. Our Education Recovery Commissioner Sir Kevan Collins will be engaging with teachers, school and college leaders and families over the coming weeks and months to develop our longer term plans.' The Times Educational Supplement reported that one aspect of the plan, which was to issue grades significantly earlier than normal - in early or mid-July - is now in doubt. Exams regulator Ofqual will also need to clarify the potentially important role of 'mini-exams'. Meanwhile, teaching unions yesterday appeared to back down in their opposition to Mr Johnson's 'big bang' plan for all schools to return from March 8. Last week the main unions signed an open letter demanding the PM 'go no further than a phased return', but their call was disregarded by the Government. Why lockdowns DON'T always stop thousands dying of Covid: Britain has had some of the toughest rules but ranks in the top five WORST death tolls... while Cuba's draconian measures helped it escape lightly Britain has endured some of the toughest lockdown restrictions in the world but has still suffered the fourth highest death toll of the pandemic, data showed. Oxford University researchers ranked the UK's curbs on daily life the sixth harshest out of 180 countries, after taking into account school and office closures, bans on social gatherings, international travel restrictions and orders to not leave the home. Only the Republic of Ireland was found to have tougher restrictions in Europe. Although its curbs are broadly similar to England's, the country has also stopped construction work and click-and-collect shopping. Germany, the US and France all had less stringent curbs on daily life. But when countries were ranked by Covid deaths per million people, the UK had suffered the fourth highest death toll, according to separate figures from OurWorldInData, despite having stricter measures than Belgium, Slovenia and the Czech Republic the only countries where more people died of the virus. It had also suffered the highest fatality rate from the virus out of the top 10 countries with the harshest restrictions, although this may be because the lockdown became stricter only after cases had surged. The UK may have suffered more fatalities than other countries because of the rapid spread of the more infectious Kent variant, and after tens of thousands died in the darkest days of the first wave when potentially infected patients were discharged to care homes. Delays in taking action and differences in how the data was compiled between countries could may also explain the differences. The data does not show that lockdowns do not work because a lack of any restrictions, scientists estimate, would have killed tens of thousands more people. In Cuba, which had a lockdown ranked the toughest in the Oxford study, the death rate was 2.4 per 100,000 people, compared to 178 per 100,000 in the UK. Advertisement The National Education Union yesterday said its priority was ensuring schools had 'robust safety measures' instead of trying to block the reopenings. Geoff Barton, of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that while a slower return would have been more logical, there was a 'whole range of different views' among headteachers. He added that, although mass testing presented a 'huge logistical issue' for larger schools, most teachers were 'looking for ways of solving those problems'. Scientists have warned that school reopenings could increase Covid's reproduction rate by up to 50 per cent. Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty on Monday insisted the risk posed by coronavirus to children at school is 'incredibly low' as he 'categorically denied' a claim he opposed a full return to classrooms on March 8. The Government's top medical advisor said there are 'huge advantages' to reopening schools across England in terms of the mental and physical health benefits for children as well as for their education. He said falling infection rates meant that 'there is some headroom' to resume face-to-face lessons next month and that 'everything is strongly in favour of children, whether primary or secondary, of going to school'. Professor Whitty's comments came after the Prime Minister revealed that secondary pupils will undergo a 'testing blitz' and be required to wear face masks in classrooms 'for several weeks' in his lockdown roadmap. Secondary pupils will be tested three times at school and once at home during the first fortnight before being asked to continue testing themselves twice a week at home, according to the Government's exit strategy. They will be allowed to return to class as soon as they have received a negative test result, while all teachers at primary and secondary level - as well as early years - will be entitled to twice-weekly testing at home. However, the Prime Minister's plans were immediately criticised by teaching unions who wanted a phased return to classes and accused Mr Johnson of 'failing to learn the lessons of his previous mistakes'. Reports at the weekend suggested Prof Whitty was opposing the 'big bang' return but he told a Downing Street press conference tonight that he had 'categorically denied' the claim. Setting out why he supports the return to classrooms next month, he said: 'First thing is, it is absolutely universally accepted that there are huge advantages for children to be at school from a health point of view, mental and physical, as well as from educational and from a life course point of view. 'Those are overwhelming, they are not in any dispute, everyone accepts that and if you keep children out of school, every single one of the children you keep out of school is disadvantaged.' He continued: 'The second point we made at that time which is still the case is the risk to children is incredibly low from going to school and indeed from catching Covid. 'Covid, one of the few good things about Covid is the risk to children, whilst not zero, nothing in Covid the risks are zero, the risks are so much smaller than they are for adults and others. 'Therefore we are confident that schools, given the huge benefits of schools, the very small residual risk is strongly in favour, from the child's point of view, everything is strongly in favour of children, whether primary or secondary, of going to school and the data on that I think are unambiguous.' However, radical measures previously discussed, like permanently trimming the summer holidays or lengthening the school day, do not figure in the plans The announcement comes ahead of details expected to be released tomorrow on the replacement scheme for this year's cancelled GCSEs and A-levels (file image) The summer schools will be funded with 200million from the package. A 302million Recovery Premium will also see every primary school handed 6,000 and secondaries 22,000 each to fund further support for pupils most in need (file image) An extra 18million is being directed to support language development in the early years sector to try to stop the very youngest children being permanently disadvantaged. Pictured: Prime Minister Boris Johnson visits Sedgehill School in south east London on February 23 Prof Whitty said that falling case numbers and the R rate of infection meant the Government had some 'headroom' to reopen schools. 'The third question is, and this is the one that led to having to close schools this time around, as it did indeed on the first wave, is the impact this can have on R,' he said. 'And the view is that as things are falling down rapidly at the moment there is some headroom to go ahead and the first priority as the Prime Minister has repeatedly said is for schooling and I think everyone would agree with that.' The reopening of schools is the first step to freedom in Mr Johnson's lockdown exit roadmap. Nicola Sturgeon reveals rival roadmap out of lockdown: Scotland will begin 'significant return to normality' with shops, gyms and hairdressers starting to open from April 26 - as First Minister hints pubs and restaurants could fully reopen BEFORE England Nicola Sturgeon unveiled a lockdown exit roadmap for Scotland which will see the stay at home rule lifted and the return of some non-essential shops on April 5 - a week earlier than in England. She said her 'deliberately cautious' plan will start with more pupils heading back to classrooms on March 15 and with the limit on outdoor mixing being increased on the same date to allow four people from a maximum of two households to meet. April 5 will then see all remaining pupils return to school as well as communal worship being allowed to restart. The definition of 'essential' retail will also be changed at this point to allow more shops to reopen - one week before the return of all retail in England which is earmarked to take place from April 12. However, Scotland will have to wait until April 26 for a 'phased but significant reopening of the economy' when the nation will return to a tier system of restrictions. Advertisement The PM said the strategy will 'guide us cautiously but irreversibly towards reclaiming our freedoms'. Outlining the wearing of masks in schools the Government's Spring 2021 Covid-19 response document states: 'The Government also recommends that the use of face coverings in Higher Education, Further Education and secondary schools is extended for a limited period to all indoor environments - including classrooms - unless 2m social distancing can be maintained. 'Face coverings are now also recommended in early years and primary schools for staff and adult visitors in situations where social distancing between adults is not possible, for example, when moving around in corridors and communal areas. 'All children will once again be expected to attend school, as they were in the autumn term.' The Prime Minister told the Commons: 'I can tell the house that two weeks from today pupils and students in all schools and further education settings can safely return to face to face teaching'. Mr Johnson also said the return of students will be supported by twice weekly testing of secondary school and college pupils. He told MPs: 'All the evidence shows that classrooms are the best places for our young people to be and that's why I've always said that schools would be the last to close and the first to reopen. 'And based on our assessment of the current data against the four tests, I can tell the House that two weeks from today, pupils and students in all schools and further education settings can safely return to face-to-face teaching, supported by twice weekly testing of secondary school and college pupils. 'Families and childcare bubbles will also be encouraged to get tested regularly.' However, the plans were immediately attacked by teaching unions who claimed the testing process may take at least two weeks, meaning some children could still be learning from home on March 22. Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the mass return, instead of a phased reopening, was 'hugely problematic'. It 'may prove counterproductive and lead to more disruption', he said, adding: 'Nevertheless, we will, of course, now work with the Government to try to make this plan work as safely and sustainably as possible.' Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said Mr Johnson had 'failed to learn the lessons of his previous mistakes'. 'A 'big bang' school reopening brings 10million people back into crowded buildings with no social distancing and inadequate ventilation,' she said. 'Headteachers should have been given the flexibility offered in the other nations to plan for a phased school return.' Yesterday the Prime Minister hit back at Tories and scientists suggesting lockdown could be eased faster - as Wales and Scotland warned his roadmap might be too quick. Ireland's Level 5 coronavirus lockdown is extended for ANOTHER six weeks as PM Micheal Martin begs 'completely fed up' nation not to drop its guard Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin last night extended the country's coronavirus lockdown for another six weeks until at least April 5 as he appealed to a 'completely fed up' nation not to drop its guard against Covid. In a live TV address to the nation from Government buildings, the Taoiseach confirmed Level 5 measures inflicting huge damage to the economy will remain in place until after Easter amid fears of the UK variant. Refusing to give specific timelines for the wider reopening of society, Mr Martin said: 'I know that people are physically and emotionally exhausted by this pandemic. It has placed enormous pressure on each of us. 'Businesses and workers are deeply worried about the future. We are all completely fed up with the impositions on our lives.' But he went on to call the more infectious B117 variant that has spread from England since Christmas 'equivalent to a new virus almost, and it is a major problem'. 'It is critically important that we do not let our guard down. When we open things, we want them to stay open,' the Taoiseach added. Mr Martin spoke after his Cabinet published a new lockdown plan following weeks of haggling after many businesses have spent nearly a year closed. The Irish Government, which has imposed one of the toughest lockdowns in the world, has spent more than 10billion keeping shuttered firms on life support and wages flowing to more than 600,000 workers made redundant. Outlining his revised Living With Covid plan, most existing lockdown measures imposed in late December will be extended until after Easter. People will be instructed not to leave their homes except only for essential reasons and should not travel more than 5 kilometres from their households. Schools and childcare will be reopened gradually, with junior and senior infants among the first to return to the classroom on March 1. Advertisement The PM said he was being 'sensible and prudent' with his four-stage plan after attacks on the approach from both sides. 'Some people will say we're going to be going too fast, some people will say we're going too slow,' he said on a visit to a school in South London. Mr Johnson refused to guarantee that all restrictions will definitely be lifted by June 21 as scheduled, but insisted he was 'hopeful' it can happen. The intervention came after Matt Hancock slapped down Professor Neil Ferguson for suggesting the government's blueprint for England could be speeded up if things go well. However, Commons Leader Jacob Rees-Mogg risked setting more hares running by suggesting that there could be 'flexibility' if the government keeps 'smashing' vaccine targets. Tories and business have been voicing disquiet about the ultra-cautious approach being taken by ministers, even though the vaccination drive has been surging ahead. Schools will return on March 8, but there will be almost no further loosening of the draconian curbs before Easter. There will be a five week gap between each of the four main stages of the plan, with scientists having won the argument in government that time is needed to assess the impact. The PM has been boosted by snap polls showing the public largely backs his stance, with 46 per cent telling YouGov it is about right - and around a fifth suggesting it is too fast. Nicola Sturgeon unveiled her own far more cautious exit strategy this afternoon, with non-essential retail not set to start opening until the last week in April. Welsh government experts have also warned that Mr Johnson's timeline is 'risky' and the outbreak could spiral out of control again. Professor Neil Ferguson - whose grim modelling triggered the initial lockdown last year - sounded a bright note on Times Radio last night. 'Hopefully what we'll see when each step happens is a very limited resurgence of infections. In which case, there's a chance we can accelerate the schedule,' he said. However, Mr Hancock dismissed the idea of speeding the schedule up in a round of interviews this morning. 'No. We need to see the effects of each step, and that takes five weeks,' he said. A row also erupted over vaccine supply as Pfizer slapped down the Health Secretary's claim that a lack of doses was to blame for their slowest ever jabbing day on Sunday. Matt Hancock claimed a delay in the supply schedule will result in fewer jabs being dished out. But he also said there would be some 'bumper weeks in March' to make up for the lag. Both Pfizer and AstraZeneca - manufacturers of the jabs currently deployed in the UK - say there is no issue with deliveries. Pfizer sources told MailOnline there were 'no supply challenges' and deliveries were arriving as planned. AstraZeneca admitted there were 'fluctuations' in supply at plants but that it was still 'on track' with orders. Official figures showed Britain only administered 150,000 vaccines on Sunday, in the worst daily performance since the NHS roll-out began to gather speed last month. The number of first doses dished out has dropped by 40 per cent week-on-week. With a rapid inoculation drive crucial to Britain's hopes of lockdown being eased in the next few months, critics say there is 'no excuse' for the rollout slowing down. Think-tank bosses believe it is unlikely supply is solely behind the downturn because there would be reports of centres across the country running out of stock - which hasn't been the case. Mr Johnson put a successful vaccine roll-out at the heart of his lockdown-easing plan. So long as the operation continues successfully, all restrictions could be dropped in England by June 21. Any hiccups could threaten that target. Britain is racing to give as many first doses to over-50s as possible before the end of March, when millions of second jabs must be rolled out - which will inevitably slow the operation. The PM has pledged to jab all 32million in the top nine groups by April 15 and every adult by the end of July. New Delhi: The Uttar Pradesh Higher Education Service Commission (UPHESC) has announced three major openings in academics. These recruitments range from Teacher and Headmaster in Junior High School to Assistant Professor in Degree College. UPHESC Recruitment 2021: Assistant Professor vacancy 2002 vacancies for the post of Assistant Professor for various subjects have been notified. Candidates can register online to apply for UPHESC 2021 exams. The registration window will open on Thursday (February 25). Interested candidates can visit the official website of HESC on uphesconline.org to apply for the positions in their respective subjects. Important Dates: Start date of online registration and payment of application fee - February 25, 2021 Last date for online registration and payment of application fee - March 26, 2021 Last date to submit application - March 27, 2021 UPHESC Recruitment 2021: Teacher vacancy 15508 vacancies for TGT and PGT have been notified by the UP government. Uttar Pradesh Secondary Education Services Selection Board has prepared a separate portal for the application. UPHESC 2021: Headmaster vacancy UP government will release a notification for 1894 vacant posts of Principal in privately-aided Junior High Schools on February 25. Online registration will be done from March 3 to 17. The exam will be held on April 18. Live TV Britons are snapping up summer flights which are only a fifth of the average price in 2019 as travel firms report a foreign holidays booking bonanza this week. Demand has surged after Boris Johnson said there was 'every chance' breaks abroad can go ahead this summer, with the current plan to allow them again from May 17. Skyscanner, the flight booking website, said some prices were significantly lower than two years ago with many travellers still concerned about travelling overseas. It found the price of flights to southern Europe was down 82 per cent, with flights to Italy in August at 24 per adult on average compared with 131 this time in 2019. The average cost of a flight to Greece has been reduced from 216 to 75, while Spain is down from 151 to 52 and Portugal has dropped from 148 to 54. But Britons could face losing out on good deals for summer holidays as experts expect prices to rise in the coming weeks as planes fill up which normally happens. And a stampede for staycations in the UK has seen holiday cottage companies accused of hiking prices pushing up some short breaks to more than 1,000. Huge price rises have been spotted in the past few days by customers of websites marketing thousands of cottages in the UK on behalf of owners around the country. One MailOnline reader found a luxury lodge for four people at Retallack Resort and Spa in Cornwall was up by more than 500 per cent compared to last summer. In 2020 it cost 2,092 when he booked it for 14 nights from September 19, 2020, but the equivalent period from September 18 this year is now priced at a whopping 12,880. Aria Resorts, the owner, has been contacted for comment by MailOnline. Another MailOnline reader revealed a luxury cottage stay at the five-star Headland Hotel in Newquay, Cornwall, in May had gone up by nearly 300 per cent this year. She booked a cottage for six people for three nights for 1,100 for May 1 to 4, 2020 - but this year it is 4,065 for April 30 to May 3. The hotel has been asked to comment. It comes as health experts said they won't book a holiday abroad until at least 2023 because other nations are lagging behind Britain with their Covid-19 vaccine rollout. The price of a Ryanair return flight from Stansted to Corfu (file picture) for a family of four is down 25 per cent to 615 for a week this August, compared to the same period in 2019 Those heading to Antalya (above) in Turkey can get a return with easyJet from London Gatwick for a family of four for 1,062 this August, which is down 30 per cent on August 2019 A Ryanair return flight from Stansted to Ibiza (pictured) in Spain for a family of four is down 29 per cent to 313 for a week this August, compared to the same period in 2019 A British Airways return flight from London Heathrow to Paris (pictured last October) will cost 292 for a family of four this August, which is down 32 per cent on the figure in August 2019 RETURN FLIGHTS FOR A FAMILY OF FOUR - SUMMER 2019 AND 2021 AIRLINE FROM TO 2019 2021 CHANGE Ryanair London Stansted Corfu, Greece 822 615 -207 Ryanair London Stansted Ibiza, Spain 439 313 -126 Ryanair Manchester Bordeaux, France 278 226 -50 easyJet London Gatwick Rome, Italy 299 431 +132 easyJet London Gatwick Antalya, Turkey 1,514 1,062 -452 easyJet Bristol Crete, Greece 1,157 1,320 +163 British Airways London Heathrow Athens, Greece 898 869 -29 British Airways London Heathrow Paris, France 431 292 -139 Flight prices checked for a return for a week from August 7/8 in February 2019, and in February 2021 Professor Graham Medley, who sits on the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, told LBC Radio yesterday: 'I didn't last year and I won't next year. 'I think it's a time of caution and we need to see that. We're doing very well with the vaccine in this country; other countries are not doing so well. The whole situation is going to be uncertain for a long time.' Europe deals you can still book for summer BACK TO BULGARIA Enjoy a week all-inclusive at Riu Astoria in Golden Sands on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast from 446 per person, including flights. Book for June 11 with First Choice. CROATIAN CAPER Seven nights' all-inclusive at Tui Blue Kalamota Island in Kolocep, an island off the coast of Dubrovnik, from 685 per person, including flights. Book for May 20 with Tui. CLASSIC CANARIES Marylanza Suites & Spa Resort in Playa de las Americas, Tenerife, has a week all-inclusive from 508 per person, including flights. Book for May 23 with Tui. DUBAI DREAM A week half-board at Atlantis, The Palm in Dubai costs from 1,311 per person, including flights. Book for June 2 with Away Holidays Advertisement Tui, the UK's largest tour operator, saw a six-fold increase in bookings following the publication of the Prime Minister's roadmap for lifting lockdown on Monday. Greece, Spain and Turkey were the most popular destinations, with bookings for those countries up 500 per cent. It was Tui's busiest day for more than a month. Rival package holiday giant Jet2.com also reported a surge in bookings, up 600 per cent - with Spain, Greece and Cyprus among the most-booked countries. Steve Heapy, the chief executive of Jet2.com, said: 'We have seen enormous pent-up demand from British holidaymakers for some time, with people wanting nothing more than to get away to the sunshine and enjoy their well-deserved holidays. 'The Government's announcement is the news they have been longing for, and the surge in bookings shows how ready our customers are to get away to the sunshine on a real package holiday.' However, both firms confirmed they have cancelled all holidays up until May 16, with the day after the first possible date international travel can resume again under Mr Johnson's blueprint. As he announced the lifting of lockdown in the Commons on Monday, he said there was 'every chance of an aviation recovery later on this year'. A new travel taskforce will report to ministers on April 12 on when international travel can re-start. But whatever its findings, curbs cannot begin being lifted earlier than May 17. Despite this, easyJet also reported soaring bookings. Yesterday it said flight bookings had increased 337 per cent, while package deals were up 630 per cent week on week. Spanish beach resorts were among the most popular, including Malaga, Alicante and Palma, while bookings also poured in for Faro in Portugal and the Greek Island of Crete. The firm also launched sales for 19million seats on more 110,000 flights for spring 2022, more flights and holidays than the airline has ever put on a year early before. EasyJet chief executive Johan Lundgren said: 'We have consistently seen that there is pent-up demand for travel and this surge in bookings shows that this signal from the Government that it plans to reopen travel has been what UK consumers have been waiting for.' Europe's biggest budget airline, Ryanair, said it had seen 'a large surge in bookings from the UK to holiday destinations in Spain, Greece and Italy'. A spokesman added: 'Ryanair welcomes the UK's roadmap for the reopening of EU air travel this summer, on the back of the UK's very successful vaccine rollout to date.' One MailOnline reader found a luxury lodge for four people at Retallack Resort and Spa in Cornwall was up by more than 500 per cent compared to last summer. In 2020 it cost 2,092 when he booked it for 14 nights from September 19, 2020 (left), but the equivalent period from September 18 this year (right) is now priced at a whopping 12,880 Prices have soared at the Retallack Resort and Spa in Cornwall, which is owned by Aria Resorts Another MailOnline reader revealed a cottage stay at the five-star Headland Hotel in Newquay, Cornwall, in May had gone up by nearly 300 per cent. She booked a seaview cottage for six people for three nights for 1,100 for May 1 to 4, 2020 (left) - but this year the price for a village view is 4,065 for April 30 to May 3 (right) An example of a seaview cottage at the five-star Headland Hotel in Newquay, Cornwall One woman looking for a place in Dorset posted: 'Watch out 'Sykes Price Hikes'! The cottage we booked for last April 2020 was 580 per week. This year 2021 same week 1,010' A woman in Wales, who has rented her property to holidaymakers through Sykes, said on Facebook: 'I'm an owner, have just checked my prices and they've gone from 459 to 1,145!' Meanwhile, online travel firm Thomas Cook said traffic to its website was up 60 per cent following the PM's announcement. Phone app for tourists 'within weeks' to prove negative test or jab Holidaymakers could be offered a phone app 'within weeks' that would enable them to prove they have tested negative for Covid or been vaccinated. The International Air Transport Association, which is in talks with the UK Government, yesterday revealed plans to go live with its digital Travel Pass next month. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has asked a new taskforce to look into how holidays can safely be resumed, with 'vaccine passports' seen as one potential long-term measure. Popular holiday destinations such as Greece, Cyprus, Spain and the Canary Islands have already expressed interest in the idea. IATA's app will be capable of verifying if a passenger has had the Covid-19 tests or vaccines required to enter a country. It would also prove they were administered by an approved authority and store the information on individual phones rather than in a centralised database to better protect privacy. IATA stressed the app would not be live for use next month as a 'vaccine passport', partly because Britain does not currently issue proof of vaccination in digital format. But it is understood this is one of the issues being worked through by the new Department for Transport-led travel taskforce raising the prospect of British holidaymakers using such an app this summer. The UK's vaccine credentials, which are currently given in paper format, would need to be 'digitalised', IATA said. One way this could be done is if health authorities began issuing QR codes which could be scanned and uploaded into apps as proof that both doses of the vaccine had been given, along with information about where it was given, which jab was received and who it was administered by. The industry sees digital passes as an essential part of reopening air travel, as many countries still have strict restrictions or quarantines, which could be lifted for those who can prove they have been inoculated. Singapore Airlines was the first airline to start trials of the IATA Travel Pass in December. Etihad, Emirates, Qatar Airways and Air New Zealand are among the others conducting trials. Other airlines are also trialling different apps which could end up being used for 'vaccine passports'. British Airways is trialling one called VeriFLY and expanded the trial last week to cover all inbound flights to the UK, in addition to all outbound flights to the US. It is currently only used to verify a negative Covid test result. Advertisement Its chief executive, Alan French, said the roadmap was 'good news' and that bookings were 'flooding in' for countries like Greece, Cyprus, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. He said: 'While we await more details, it's clear that the government's ambition is to open up international travel in the coming months and hopefully in time for the summer holidays.' Paul Charles, chief executive of travel consultancy The PC Agency and co-founder of the Save Our Summer campaign, which called for a May travel re-start, said: 'Sales have started to soar again as some consumers start spending their wall of money stored up for overseas travel.' Amanda Matthews, managing director and owner of luxury travel agency network Designer Travel, said her firm saw double the usual number of enquiries on Monday. Meanwhile private jet firms said enquiries about chartering flights was also up. UK-based private jet broker, PrivateFly, said enquiries were up 184 per cent up on the same day last year, while bookings were up 150 per cent. Adam Twiddell, PrivateFly chief executive, said: 'We are certainly seeing increasing confidence. Yesterday was our busiest day of the month so far, with enquiry levels well over double the same day last year and a rise in bookings for July and August last night and this morning. 'Many UK clients who were uncertain and sitting on decisions have now booked.' He said charters to Ibiza and Malaga in Spain, Santorini in Greece and Split in Croatia were among the most popular. However, some in the industry urged caution given the tough travel restrictions currently in place and the difficulty officials will face in unpicking them completely in the coming months. For instance, some countries may remain closed to British tourists if they have not vaccinated enough of their own populations. Popular destinations are also currently subject at any moment to being added to the 'red list' of countries where worrying new variants have been discovered that could undermine the vaccination programme. Those returning from these places are currently subject to 11 nights quarantine in a hotel and, even if this is lifted, could remain subject to stricter measures. Testing will almost certainly remain a requirement for many destinations too and for those who have not been vaccinated, potentially adding hundreds of pounds to the cost of getaways. Rory Boland, Editor of Which? Travel, said: 'Holidaymakers who have been waiting for the green light to book some long-awaited travel plans will be very happy with the prospect of international travel resuming this summer. 'But it's vital that travellers are advised when booking of the additional costs and risks still involved in planning foreign holidays. 'Our advice remains that anyone considering booking a holiday abroad in the near future should proceed with caution. 'If you do book, only use providers that offer flexible booking policies, and where appropriate, book a package holiday as these come with stronger consumer protections.' Huge crowds enjoy the hot weather on Bournemouth beach in Dorset on August 8 last year In the UK, Sykes Cottages, one of the biggest providers with over 15,000 properties, has been accused of trying to take advantage of families desperate to escape lockdown. UK's chief pandemic modeller won't take a summer holiday abroad before 2023 The surge in booking foreign holidays came despite Britain's chief pandemic modeller revealing he would not travel abroad for a summer break before 2023. Professor Graham Medley, who sits on the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, said this was partly because other nations are lagging behind Britain with their Covid-19 vaccine rollout. He told LBC Radio yesterday: 'I didn't last year and I won't next year. 'I think it's a time of caution and we need to see that. We're doing very well with the vaccine in this country; other countries are not doing so well. The whole situation is going to be uncertain for a long time.' Advertisement Concerns were raised yesterday by the chairman of the South West Tourism Alliance, Alistair Handyside, who operates three holiday cottages in Devon. At the same time, critics of Sykes used Facebook to allege huge price increases. The company denied the allegations. One woman looking for accommodation close to the Dorset coast posted: 'Watch out 'Sykes Price Hikes'! The cottage we booked for last April 2020 was 580 per week. This year 2021 same week 1,010.' A woman in Wales, who has rented her property to holidaymakers through Sykes and is in the process of leaving, said she had no control over the prices. She wrote: 'I'm an owner, have just checked my prices and they've gone from 459 to 1,145! I've questioned this and they have said it's due to demand. Quite frankly I'm embarrassed and have told them to sort themselves out.' Mr Handyside said: 'Capacity is down. Lots of people have left the sector because they can't cope with dealing with the Covid preparations or they have gone bust. 'When there is less capacity and greater demand, you get price hiking. It was inevitable but not at these levels.' Sykes Holiday Cottages said it would be wrong to accuse it of changing its prices because of the pandemic. The company said its prices are set automatically according to availability and demand. It said it was unable to comment on the examples posted on Facebook because of a lack of detail. One MailOnline reader said she booked on August 3, 2020 to go to the Haven site at Hopton in Norfolk on March 27 this year for a week in a two-bedroom caravan for 580, which is during the school Easter holidays. She has now looked to rebook for the next school holidays from May 29 for seven days and the price is 1,418 a cost she described as 'disgusting'. Haven has also been contacted for comment. Confused about the roadmap? Unsure whether to book a break? Here's a Q&A with answers on how holidays for Britons will take off By HARRIET SIME FOR THE DAILY MAIL Will I really be able to go on holiday abroad from May 17 as the Government announced this week? International travel is due to resume from May 17 but this depends on a Department for Transport review to be published on April 12 that will examine the prevalence of mutant strains of coronavirus as well as vaccine programmes in other countries. What about travel corridors? Will these be back when the ban on travel abroad is lifted? The quarantine-free 'travel corridor' system of last year may be reintroduced as the Government restarts holidays on a country-by-country basis. However, Paul Charles, of travel consultancy PC Agency, says: 'Testing and digital health apps, which prove whether someone's been vaccinated, are likely to take prominence over travel corridors.' I can't afford to pay the 1,750 to quarantine at a hotel. Will the 'red list' remain in place this summer? The roadmap published by the Government on Monday suggested restrictions, including the requirement for arrivals from 33 high-risk countries to quarantine in hotels, could be scrapped in May and replaced by testing. I was hoping to go on a European cruise this summer. Will that be possible? 'You may well be able to go on a cruise this summer but there are two main hurdles,' says the Mail's cruising expert Lesley Bellew. 'First, the cruise industry has been treated separately from other foreign travel so a restart still depends on the Government removing specific advice against cruise travel. Cruise lines say it takes at least six weeks to get ships ready for sailing, so if the April 12 travel review includes a green light for cruise ships they could set sail by the end of May. Secondly, all cruise itineraries will be dependent on other countries easing their current restrictions.' I've heard lots about vaccine passports. Are these likely to be introduced? Talks with foreign officials over possible vaccine passports are being ramped up. Greece, Spain and Cyprus have all expressed interest. What is the best way to guarantee I get a refund if there is another lockdown? Package holidays offer the best protection. You'll be entitled to a refund within 14 days if punitive quarantine measures are put in place at home or abroad or your trip is cancelled. Check the company you are booking with has a good track record of processing refunds; providers such as TUI and Jet2 have been praised for this. When booking a staycation, scrutinise the terms and conditions. Will EU nations have the same system for allowing travel or set their own rules? Countries are most likely to adopt their own restrictions. However, the EU could introduce a one-size-fits-all policy for British tourists. I'm in my 30s and have booked a holiday in Greece in June. If I haven't had my jab by then, will I be able to go? If borders are open and travel is allowed, it's likely you will, but you may need proof of a negative test on arrival. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said last week he wanted it to be 'as easy as possible' for those who have not been vaccinated to travel to his country. Q I want to book a break in June or July. Which countries are my safest bet? Greece is looking good. It was one of the first to reopen to tourism last year and is keen to roll out the red carpet to British tourists. Israel is also a strong contender for a summer getaway, having led the charge when it comes to vaccinations. Q When will I be able to go on a staycation? I would like to book a UK break. Holiday lets and self-contained accommodation can reopen from April 12 to people from the same household. Visiting second homes will also be allowed. Hotels and B&Bs will have to wait until May 17. Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford says 'self-contained' holidays may be able to take place at Easter, but that would just apply to Welsh residents. Will booking a cottage with my elderly parents, who are in my bubble, be allowed? Yes, you can stay in self-contained accommodation with your household and/or whoever is in your bubble. What about campsites? Do they have any specific rules about reopening? Campsites with private facilities, such as en-suite bathrooms, can open from April 12. However, those with shared facilities will not reopen until at least May 17. Will airlines put on extra flights from May 17 to meet pent-up demand? Airlines are already increasing their capacity on the back of the Government's announcement this week and are likely to continue to do so as demand increases. EasyJet has announced it is adding new routes to its summer programme, including Enfidha in Tunisia and Sunny Beach in Bulgaria. Are all the current holiday deals likely to stick around for a while? Holiday providers have been slashing prices significantly to stimulate sales. However, prices are likely to increase as companies respond to growing demand and make up for big losses. I have relatives in Australia and am desperate to see them. When will I be able to travel Down Under? You could be waiting a while. Australia has pledged to keep its borders closed until its entire population has been vaccinated and the country only started its programme this week. On Monday, Australia's Tourism Minister Dan Tehan said he hoped that international tourism would resume 'by this time next year'. I've booked a trip to New York at the end of May, will this be possible? Unlikely. President Joe Biden recently reimposed a travel ban on the UK due to fears about the new coronavirus variants. Travel between the two countries could be possible this autumn. Children are not being vaccinated. Will they be able to travel abroad on holiday this year? The situation is unclear. Children are likely to be exempt from the vaccine requirement but not much has been said on the matter. While many countries will require those who have not been vaccinated to provide proof of a negative test, children under 12 will not have to. Advertisement Greek island holidays as early as MAY? Athens considers plan to break from EU rules and reopen borders to sun-seeking Britons before summer By SOPHIE TANNO FOR MAILONLINE Greek island holidays could be on the cards as soon as May as the country examines opening its borders early. Greece is looking into whether it can give an early green light to British tourists who have received the vaccine. The move would break from the rest of the European Union, which is pushing for a united and cautious approach to reopening non-essential travel from outside the bloc. Greek island holidays could be on the cards as soon as May as the country examines opening its borders early It comes as Greece has recorded a total of 182,783 Covid-19 cases and 6,343 deaths. Over the previous 24 hours, the country recorded 2,111 new cases and 22 new deaths It comes as Greece has recorded a total of 182,783 Covid-19 cases and 6,343 deaths. Over the previous 24 hours, the country recorded 2,111 new cases and 22 new deaths. Athens is seeking to boost the country's vital holiday industry, which has taken a hit due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The government is considering plans to allow in British visitors who can prove that they have been vaccinated Covid-19 in time for the summer months, according to a report in The Times. Athens is seeking to boost the country's vital holiday industry, which has taken a hit due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Above, Oia on the island of Santorini Greece is looking into whether it can give an early green light to British tourists who have received the vaccine. Elafonisi beach on the island of Crete is pictured above Athens is also putting in plans to ensure that airport staff and hotel employees will receive a vaccine. The reopening of the country would be in contrast with EU leaders who are expected to say that it is too soon to start lifting restrictions on non-essential travel. A video call in which EU leaders will gather to warn that infections are still too high to remove travel restrictions is expected to state that the 'epidemiological situation remains serious, and the new variants pose additional challenges.' ADVERTISEMENT Staff of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Council (NIPC) on Wednesday in Abuja began an indefinite strike. The staff shut their office complex in a protest against the Executive Secretary, Yewande Sadiku, accusing her of executive felonies. The protesting staff asked the government to intervene and address their grievances. The entrance to the commissions easily recognisable office was barricaded by unions members who held multi-coloured posters with Yewande Must Go written on them. The sparse group of protesters demanded payment of welfare allowances. The chairman Association of Senior Civil of Nigeria, NIPC unit, Yusuf Mustafa, told PREMIUM TIMES the action will untill they get results. We will not stop until our grievances are addressed, this strike is indefinite for now, he said. Mrs Sadiku did not respond to calls and text messages from this newspaper Wednesday seeking her response. The staff had carried out a similar protest in July 2020, also accusing Mrs Sadiku of wrongdoing, allegations she strongly denied at the time. Some of the reasons the staff raised as being responsible for the latest strike are alleged wrongful dismissal of members, denial of promotion, breach of the public procurement law and failure to pay staff relevant allowances. They did not provide evidence to back the claims. They called for the reversal of the dismissal of all staff sacked in the last four years, renovation and rehabilitation of zonal offices and the NIPC headquarters, and the removal of the executive secretary. Editors Note: This post has been updated with new details regarding the allegations against Mrs Sadiku. Decode Your Future with an Online Computer Science Degree from Drexel Drexel University's online computer science programs are designed to prepare you for work on the cutting edge of technology. The curriculum is designed for students with any level of experience or previous knowledge. Choose the program thats right for you. Learn More. Despite an environment conducive to phishing scams, malicious actors achieved only a marginal increase in success in 2020, according to a report from cybersecurity company Proofpoint. Catastrophic events, like a pandemic, coupled with hasty technological change such as many people forced to work from home immediately, have been a rich environment in the past for phishers, who use deception to infect machines with malware, steal credentials, and invade corporate networks. But in a survey performed in connection with Proofpoint's annual "State of the Phish" report, 57 percent of organizations in seven countries revealed they were targets of a successful phishing attack in 2020, which is only a two percent increase over 2019. However, phishers were a lot more successful in the United States, where 74 percent of organizations told researchers they'd experienced a successful phishing attack in 2020, a 14 percent increase over 2019. While the increase in successful attacks was slight, their impact wasn't. Compared to 2019, the report noted that the number of respondents who told researchers that phishing attacks resulting in data loss increased 13 percent and those leading to credential compromise jumped 11 percent. Regional Differences The impact of successful attacks varied by region, noted the report, which is based on data from two surveys -- one of 3,500 working adults in seven countries -- Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States -- as well as one of 600 IT security professionals in those countries and an analysis of some 75 million phishing emails. Japan, for example, experienced a large volume of phishing emails aimed at compromising credentials for Amazon accounts. Those attacks may have contributed to why so many of the country's organizations -- 64 percent, the highest of any region in the surveys -- had to deal with credential compromises. On the other hand, Japan's organizations were the least likely to deal with direct financial loss from phishing attacks, at 11 percent. That contrasts with the United States, where 35 percent of organizations suffered immediate financial loss, nearly twice the global average. Data loss and ransomware infections also had significant regional differences. In Spain, for instance, 69 percent of organizations experienced data loss. That compares to 47 percent of Australian organizations. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of Australian organizations (67 percent) were affected by phishing-based ransomware. That compares to 25 percent in France. Pandemic Fueled Phishing Historically, malicious actors have been quick to launch campaigns based on current events. That was the case with COVID-19. "Attackers were on it early, and they were prolific," said Proofpoint's Senior Security Awareness Strategist Gretel Egan. "There was a lot of uncertainty, fear and doubt early in the pandemic, and it continues now," she told TechNewsWorld. "Attackers were taking advantage of that," she continued. "We saw subject lines around 'Your co-worker has tested positive' or 'Your neighbor has tested positive' aimed at driving people to open that email and fall into a trap." Evgeny Gnedin, head of information security analytics at Positive Technologies, a global cybersecurity company, noted that, according to research by his company, in Q1 2020, 13 percent of all phishing attacks were related to COVID-19. Of those, nearly half (44 percent) targeted individuals. "The percentage of malware attacks and social engineering attacks against government agencies increased significantly as well, and this may be due to the pandemic," he told TechNewsWorld. "Many attackers sent emails to government agencies of various countries with malicious attachments related to the coronavirus crisis," he said. Gnedin added that the pandemic situation was used both for mass malware campaigns and APT attacks. "With so much attention on the virus," he continued, "it's very possible that more hacks are being aimed at companies in every sector, as IT teams globally are busier than usual maintaining operations for the large increase in remote workers." Growth in Malicious Domains Another sign that phishers were hot to exploit the pandemic was the increase in suspicious domain name registrations last year. "In 2020, we saw 12,490 new domains being registered containing the word 'vaccine', 'COVID', or both," observed Shashi Prakash, CTO and co-founder of Bolster, an AI-powered fraud prevention company in San Jose, Calif. "Of these, 6,104 sites showed signs of being weaponized for some sort of phishing or scam attack," he told TechNewsWorld. Companies had to quickly transition to a new remote work environment, in many cases that included rapidly spinning up new technology, explained Steven Bay, cyber fusion center and security operations practice lead at Kudelski Security, a provider of tailored cybersecurity solutions based in Cheseaux-sur-Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland. "This increased the risk to businesses and likely made them more vulnerable and open to attacks," he told TechNewsWorld. "Phishing is already the most successful way to breach an organization," he continued. "Layer on top of that the fact that people were more likely to click on a phishing email related to COVID-19, and it's easy to see that hackers viewed it as a prime opportunity to launch attacks and breach organizations." Double Dipping Extortionists The Proofpoint report also noted that malware infections from phishing attacks dropped by 17 percent from 2019 and that organizations saying they experienced direct financial losses due to phishing dropped 47 percent year-over-year. It reasoned those results could indicate that organizations have implemented stronger preventive measures against these types of attacks. Although the report found the number of organizations affected by ransomware attacks remained unchanged, Egan said that there was a change in how ransoms were paid. "More than 50 percent of organizations that were infected opted to pay to regain access to their data," she continued. "That was a slight increase over 2019, but we saw fewer people getting access to data after a single payment." "A lot more organizations were delivered follow-up demands for more money and a lot more organizations were willing to pay those follow-up demands," she observed. She added that 32 percent paid the extra ransom in 2020 compared to two percent in 2019." "In 2020, ransomware amounts skyrocketed," said Fleming Shi, CTO of Barracuda Networks, a security and storage solutions provider based in Campbell, Calif. "Some criminal groups aren't using fixed amounts anymore," he told TechNewsWorld. "They're fixing the ransom amount based on a percentage of a company's revenue." Lingering Problem Why do phishing emails continue to work despite education programs to expose them and technologies to block them? "Because we are all human," observed Saryu Nayyar, CEO of Gurucul, a threat intelligence company in El Segundo, Calif. "While most anti-spam and anti-phishing filters do a great job at catching the most common hooks, the ones that do make it through tend to be topical and clever, which makes them more likely to catch their intended victim," she told TechNewsWorld. In addition, phishers continue to evolve their craft. "Organizations sending phishing emails are more structured," explained Adrien Gendre, chief solutions architect at Vade Secure, a provider of an email filtering service based in Hem, Picardie, France. "These are global organizations providing tools, platforms and services that can be leveraged and licensed to local organizations," he told TechNewsWorld. "This has increased the quality of the phishing emails significantly." "They're much more sophisticated in the way they spread phishing emails," he continued. "Before, you might see 100,000 emails and they were all the same. Now we're seeing 100,000 emails and every one is different in some way. They are using tricks to make the content highly dynamic and make the emails unique when compared to each other." The quality of the Web pages linked to the phishing emails have also improved. "I have a presentation where I show two Microsoft log-in pages," Gendre said. "I ask my audience to vote by a show of hands which page is real and which is malicious." "Most of the people choose the malicious page," he continued. "The reason they choose the malicious one is because it has a better user experience than the real one." John P. Mello Jr. has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, IT issues, privacy, e-commerce, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer electronics. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including the Boston Business Journal, the Boston Phoenix, Megapixel.Net and Government Security News. Email John. Highlights Motorola is expected to launch the Moto G30 and Moto G10 in the Indian market soon. Moto G30 and G10 could launch in the budget segment like the previous phones. The smartphones are driven by Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets and come with interesting camera specs. After E7 Power, Motorola is expected to launch the Moto G30 and Moto G10 in the Indian market soon. The smartphones were launched in Europe last month and Motorola is expected to release those same models in India too. Moto G30 and G10 could launch in the budget segment like the previous phones. The smartphones are driven by Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets and come with interesting camera specs. Tipster Mukul Sharma took to Twitter to reveal that Motorola plans to launch Moto G30 and Moto G10 in India soon. He said that the launch could take place in March and "could very well happen in the first week if things go as planned." Motorola is yet to make an official announcement about the smartphones Moto G30 and Moto G10: Expected Price and availability Moto G30 was launched at a price of EUR 179.99 (roughly Rs. 15,900) whereas the Moto G10 starts at EUR 149.99 (roughly Rs. 13,300). The India prices are usually lower than the prices in Europe so the phones are expected to be priced under Rs 15000 In Europe, the G30 is available in colours including Pastel Sky and Phantom Black whereas the G10 is launched in colours including Aurora Grey and Iridescent Pearl. If the reports turn out to be true, Motorola will launch its next smartphones on Flipkart. Moto G30 and Moto G10: Specifications The phones were already launched in Europe and the same models are expected to launch in India as well. So here is what we know about the specifications. Moto G30 comes with a 6.5-inch HD+ display with 720x1,600 pixels with a high refresh rate of 90Hz. On the front, there is a waterdrop notch for the selfie camera. The smartphone is powered by the Snapdragon 662 SoC coupled with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. The storage can be expandable using a microSD card. In terms of optics, the Moto G30 sports a quad-camera setup on the rear which comprises of a 64-megapixel camera sensor, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide sensor, and two 2-megapixel macro shots. On the front, there is a 13-megapixel selfie sensor. The smartphone houses a 5,000mAh battery with support for 20W charging. Moto G10 on the other hand comes with a 6.5-inch HD+ display with a 60Hz refresh rate. The smartphone is powered by Snapdragon 460 SoC coupled with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. For camera, the G10 features a quad camera setup on the rear which comprises of a 48-megapixel sensor, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide, and two 2-megapixel sensors. On the front, there is an 8-megapixel sensor for selfies. The smartphone houses a 5,000mAh battery with support for 10W charging. "Through our SuburbanCares corporate initiatives, it's very gratifying to give back to our local communities, especially providing support to underserved children who need it most," said Nandini Sankara, Spokesperson, Suburban Propane. "Suburban Propane is proud to partner with Cradles to Crayons in Philadelphia. It's a privilege to assist with the distribution of essential hygiene items, along with our SuburbanCares bears to local children in need during a time when many families continue to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic." This initiative is part of Suburban Propane's SuburbanCares platform, which is dedicated to supporting community efforts across its footprint in the United States. Over the past year, Suburban Propane has undertaken initiatives to feed healthcare professionals in some of the most COVID-19 affected regions in the nation, including Houston, TX, Los Angeles, CA, Tampa, FL and Washington, DC; and throughout the states of Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey and New York. "The children in our local communities living in poverty have been disproportionately affected by Covid. More than ever, they need support and access to basic resources," said Michal Smith, Executive Director, Cradles to Crayons Philadelphia. "Thanks to our generous friends at Suburban Propane, we're able to satisfy the basic hygienic-needs of 1,000 young Philadelphians. We're very grateful to Suburban Propane for affording us the opportunity to make an impact in the communities we serve." About Suburban Propane: Suburban Propane Partners, L.P. (NYSE:SPH), a nationwide distributor of propane, renewable propane, fuel oil and related products and services, as well as a marketer of natural gas and electricity and investor in low carbon fuel alternatives, servicing over 1 million customers through its 700 locations across 41 states. The company proudly celebrated 90 years of innovation, growth and quality service in 2018. The brand is currently focused on three core elements including Suburban Commitment - showcasing the company's 90+ year legacy of flexibility, reliability and dependability, Suburban Cares - highlighting dedication to serving local communities across the nation and Go Green with Suburban Propane - promoting the affordable, clean burning and versatile nature of propane as a bridge to a green energy future. Suburban Propane is a New York Stock Exchange listed limited partnership headquartered in Whippany, NJ. For additional information on Suburban Propane, please visit http://www.suburbanpropane.com/. About Cradles to Crayons: Cradles to Crayons provides children from birth through age 12 who live in homeless or low-income situations with the essential items they need to thriveat home, at school, and at play. Cradles to Crayons supplies these items free of charge by engaging and connecting communities that have with communities that need, collecting new and like-new children's items through grassroots community drives and corporate donations. Working through its network of hundreds of nonprofit Social Service Partners, and supported by tens of thousands of volunteers, Cradles to Crayons-Philadelphia annually helps more than 70,000 children living in low-income and homeless situations. Cradles to Crayons has received a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator for ten consecutive years, among only 1% of the more than 8,000 United States organizations rated by the nation's largest independent charity evaluator. For additional information, visit http://www.cradlestocrayons.org/Philadelphia . SOURCE Suburban Propane Partners, L.P. Related Links http://suburbanpropane.com The Ukrainian National News Agency Ukrinform has entered the list of eight most quality Ukrainian online media outlets, the so-called White List. These are the findings of research by the NGO Institute of Mass Information (IMI), based on the results of a new two-stage semi-annual monitoring. As of February 2021, the new White List includes eight highest quality media outlets: Hromadske, Liga, Ukrayinska Pravda, Ukrinform, Radio Svoboda, Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, Bukvy, reads the report. The National Public Broadcasting Company (UA:PBC) is also among the highest quality media outlets in Ukraine. According to the results of the research, the level of compliance with professional standards on these resources totals about 97.8% on average. "No jeansa [paid-for material], hate speech, sexism, fake news, or harmful content have been found in the central newsfeed on these sites, the experts said. IMI also stressed that these sites at the same time mostly adhere to the transparency of media ownership at a high level, whereas the sites of Hromadske, UA:PBC, Liga, Ukrayinska Pravda, Radio Svoboda describe their editorial policies in details. IMI added that the research was conducted with the support of the American people, provided through the USAIDs Media Program in Ukraine, which is implemented by the international organization Internews. The contents of publications are the sole responsibility of the NGO Institute of Mass Information (IMI) and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID, the U.S. Government or Internews. iy (ANSA) - ROME, FEB 24 - AstraZeneca said Wednesday it would deliver five million does of its COVID vaccine to Italy by the end of March. It said it planned to get Italy more than 20 million shots of its jab by the end of the year. Italy's vaccine rollout has been hit by delays to AstraZeneca and Pfizer deliveries. Italy has so far given over 3.5 million people their first dose of a COVID vaccine. Mario Draghi's new government has vowed to speed up the programme. (ANSA). Long recognized as pioneers of visual modeling for IAM, Atricores research and development team has released the beta of a new tool at the intersection of Identity Access Management and DevOps. Vendor-agnostic IAM.tf facilitates the visual configuration of IDaaS-based identity management solutions, harnessing Terraform scripts to bring the code to life. IAM.tf is an in-browser cloud tool that introduces a unique IAM-as-code approach to configuring popular identity management solutions like Okta and Auth0. The vendor-agnostic tool breaks down barriers between popular IAM products, automatically generating Terraform scripts as the user visually describes IAM functionality like MFA and Social SSO. Out-of-the-box support for Okta and Auth0 is included, and AWS Cognito and Azure are in the works. Leveraging Terraform to automatically generate scripts for IDaaS solutions, IAM.tf can be used to supplement existing cloud solutions like Okta or Auth0, covering typical last-mile challenges such as on-boarding legacy applications, provisioning social sign-in with Google or Facebook, or implementing MFAall without writing a single line of code. By offering a subscription-based service, without any licensing fees, we hope to bring the convenience and ease-of-use of visual modeling to other cloud IAM solutions, not just our own product line, says Atricore CEO Gianluca Brigandi. As both a services and product company with a very active R&D arm, we feel that were in a pretty unique position to do so. Im incredibly proud of our developers, whove been able to harness widely available open source tools to create something that can benefit anyone who is struggling with what can often be a tedious and difficult process: thats the bridging of the gap between an enterprises legacy applications and todays popular IDaaS solutions. The current beta covers Okta and Auth0 and were hoping to expand that coverage to other products in 2021. The IAM.tf tool is freely available, with practically no friction as far as adoption is concerned it only requires a browser. Atricore CTO Sebastian Gonzalez explains: You can think of IAM.tf as something to layer on top of your existing IDaaS. It doesnt interfere with it in any way, and it provides your tech team with an intuitive method to configure things without the need to dig around in the code. By building on Terraform, weve been able to automate the provisioning work in a consistent and repeatable fashion, as well as describing the infrastructure details using their widely adopted configuration language. So its really vendor-agnostic; you can use it with any one, or several, IAM stacks. If your company already uses one or more of those, this is something you can just add to your toolkit. Atricore is an identity and access management products and services company, well known for JOSSO and the Atricore Console. Enjoy IAM.tf for free at the website: https://iam.tf. A spectacular oceanfront home in Santa Barbara, CA is now availableeven though buyers won't find it on realtor.com. Apparently inspired by recent big-ticket sales along the Central Coast, the owner has chosen to go the off-market route, according to Mansion Global. No price on the place has been made public, but it would be divulged to a qualified buyer. To get a ballpark estimate, the coastal estate was listed in 2017 for $32.75 million, and then relisted in 2018 for $21.5 million. The estate, designed by Wallace Neff and known as the Straus House, had originally been commissioned by Robert K. Straus, heir to the Macys fortune, who purchased land in whats known as the Hope Ranch enclave of Santa Barbara. Straus and his wife lived in a Bel-Air home designed by the Southern California architect, and tapped him to design their coastal retreat. For the interiors, the designer John Hall, who had completed several projects for their Bel-Air residence, was brought in. Neff collaborated with the celebrated landscape architect Thomas Church to design the grounds. Finished in 1970, the coastal abode made a splash when it was first unveiled 50 years ago. Featured in Architectural Digest, the eye-popping estate has since changed hands and undergone a massive renovation. The property is described as painstakingly restored, expanded, and modernized over a 10-year period, according to the website promoting the property. The spread sits on an oceanfront acre on the crest of a bluff, with panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean and over to the Channel Islands. The current owner, a local developer, purchased the place in 2007 for $7.5 million and proceeded on the lengthy renovation. Sales materials state that the owner worked with the local Historical Committee on all aspects of preserving the integrity of the design and inspiration of Neff's workwhile also incorporating deluxe accoutrements for today's luxury-minded buyer. The gated property is accessed by a motor court. The 14,000-square-foot spread includes six bedrooms and eight bathrooms and sits on 1.53 acres. The dramatic main living area features a vaulted and beamed ceiling, a fireplace, and a wall of glass facing the Pacific Ocean. Updates include a modernized kitchen, bathrooms, and a new lower level, which features a spa, media room, two elevators, and two wine cellars. A guesthouse is tucked under a hill, with ocean views. The gorgeous offering is now available exclusively off-market with the listing agents Weston Littlefield, Dalton Gomez, and Aaron Kirman of the Aaron Kirman Group at Compass. There is that one catch, though: Interested parties must contact a listing agent if they wish to find out the price. The post Wallace Neff-Designed Straus House in Santa Barbara Is AvailableIf You Ask appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com. President Klaus Iohannis promulgated on Tuesday the law amending Law no. 96/2006 on the Statute of deputies and senators, meaning the piece of legislation that eliminates special pensions for parliamentarians, according to AGERPRES. On February 17, Parliament adopted with amendments the bill initiated by the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and rejected the Save Romania Union - Liberty, Unity, Solidarity Party (USR PLUS) and the National Liberal Party (PNL) bills on the same topic. By this normative act, articles 49 and 50 of the Law on the Statute of Deputies and Senators are repealed. "From the date of entry into force of the current law, the payment of old age allowances granted based on the provisions of art. 49 of Law no. 96/2006 on the Statute of deputies and senators shall cease," stipulates the piece of legislation. LONDON and SINGAPORE, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- S&P Global Platts ("Platts"), the leading independent provider of information and benchmark prices for the commodities and energy markets, today announced that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Viridios Capital to launch a series of Artificial Intelligence ("AI") driven carbon indices to enhance transparency into the complex voluntary carbon credits and co-benefit markets. Jonty Rushforth, head of price group, S&P Global Platts said: "The complex voluntary carbon markets are evolving at a rapid rate. Combining Platts robust and trusted price assessment data insight alongside Viridios Capital's proven environmental AI technology will provide market participants with greater transparency into the market value of voluntary carbon credits and their associated co-benefits". Co-benefits are terms attached to carbon credits providing evidence of meeting the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) defined by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, including gender equality, clean water and biodiversity. The large number of factors such as project technology, geography and SDGs present significant challenges in determining the value of credits and a robust AI modelled approach will bring a new level of clarity to market participants. Under the terms of the agreement, Platts will co-create a series of AI-driven carbon indices to enhance transparency into voluntary carbon credits and co-benefits. The new indices will leverage environmental AI expertise provided by Viridios Capital, which has been trained on over 20,000 data points representing transactions from across the range of carbon projects around the world. The model will also include daily inputs from a range of Platts price assessment data to produce evaluations for sets of credits with specified co-benefits including project types, vintages, locations and standards. Eddie Listorti, CEO and co-founder of Viridios Capital said: "We are proud to partner with S&P Global Platts in bringing pricing transparency to the voluntary carbon markets through our AI technology. We are confident that the outcome will be to greatly assist companies to invest more in mitigating their environmental and social footprint while facilitating the flow of capital into urgent climate and sustainability initiatives". The new assessments will complement Platts growing suite of voluntary carbon price assessments including the Platts CEC, which reflect the daily value of CORSIA-eligible carbon credits, and was successfully launched in January 2021. About S&P Global Platts At S&P Global Platts, we provide the insights; you make better informed trading and business decisions with confidence. We're the leading independent provider of information and benchmark prices for the commodities and energy markets. Customers in over 150 countries look to our expertise in news, pricing and analytics to deliver greater transparency and efficiency to markets. S&P Global Platts coverage includes oil, gas, LNG, power, petrochemicals, metals, agriculture and shipping. S&P Global Platts is a division of S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI), which provides essential intelligence for individuals, companies and governments to make decisions with confidence. For more information, visit www.platts.com. About Viridios Capital Viridios Capital is fintech developer and asset manager in the carbon markets with a specific focus on ensuring capital delivered to sustainable developments is fair compensation. It was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2019 and holds Australian Financial Services Licence 521837 and has offices in New York and Singapore.Viridios is targeting April 2021 to have its pricing model available for subscription. For more information, visit viridioscapital.com SOURCE S&P Global Platts Related Links http://www.platts.com Two Irish nuns are accused of breaking lockdown restrictions in order to attend an exorcism at a park in Dublin. Mother Irene Gibson and Sister Anne Marie allegedly travelled from Cork to Dublin to attend an exorcism of the Dail in December, at a time when domestic travel was not permitted. They attended the exorcism before taking part in a traditional Latin Mass with around 70 participants outside the Irish Parliament in Dublin on December 8. Two members of the Carmelite Sisters of the Holy Face of Jesus. Two Irish nuns are accused of breaking lockdown restrictions in order to carry out an exorcism at a park in Dublin According to a report in the Irish Examiner, the nuns travelled around 135 miles to the exorcism expunging supposed evil spirits of the President of Ireland and the nation's top lawmakers, At the time, lockdown laws in Ireland meant that no more than 15 people were allowed to assemble outdoors. A video of the exorcism posted online shows the exorcism in Herbert Park. Father Giacomo Ballini, of the splinter group The Society of St Pius Resistance can be seen spraying holy water on an Irish Government Building. Mother Irene Gibson and Sister Anne Marie are accused of travelling from Cork to Dublin to attend an exorcism of the Dail in December He also prays for Satan to 'leave this place.' Father Ballini tells the crowd: 'No human power can take away the right to say Mass.' According to the Irish Examiner, the sisters, of the Carmelite Sisters of the Holy Face of Jesus, had previously been convicted of violating planning regulations while setting up a religious retreat. People have raised over 63,000 on their GoFundMe page to help them move to a new retreat. AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan has taken a stake in a $104million cattle farm with a famous history that helped shape the Aboriginal land rights movement. The 46-year-old footy boss snapped up a portion of Wave Hill Station, 750km south of Darwin in the Northern Territory's Victoria River District as part of Jumbuck Pastoral - a business syndicate run by his cousins Jock and Callum MacLachlan. ASIC documents reveal another key backer in the buyout is the millionaire Wilson family, who own a controlling stake in ASX-listed plumbing and bathroom supplies firm Reece Group. One of Australia's largest beef producers Western Grazing put the 1.25 million hectare property up for sale after three decades as part of a strategic review of their operations The 46-year-old footy boss (Gillon McLachlan, pictured with wife Laura Blythe in 2019) snapped up a portion of Wave Hill station, 750km south of Darwin in the Northern Territory's Victoria River District AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan has taken a stake in a $104million cattle farm with a famous history that helped shape the Aboriginal land rights movement. Pictured: Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory Under the deal, $56million was offered up for the land with the remaining $48million set aside for 40,000 Brahman cattle. Jumbuck director Callum MacLachlan told the ABC that being able to purchase the property along with prime cattle means the company can 'hit the ground running'. But in the immediate term, there will be some hurdles to navigate after below average rainfall over the past few years and arbitrary bans on Australian beef exported to China after a diplomatic spat erupted between the two countries in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. 'The underlying quality of the country and feed types, the diversity of the rangeland, consistent rainfall, the large run giving economy of scale efficiencies, and potential for development were all attractive,' Mr MacLachlan said. 'It's a generational asset a very long-term play.' Wave Hill Station played a key role in the history of Indigenous land rights after 200 Gurindji stockmen in 1966 walked off the job and went on strike. as part of Jumbuck Pastoral - a business syndicate run by his cousins Jock and Callum MacLachlan. Under the deal, $56million was offered up for the land with the remaining $48million set aside for 40,000 Brahman cattle. Pictured: Wave Hill Station The workers were not only protesting against their working and living conditions but also were demanding 3,250 square km of land be returned to its traditional owners. Protests lasted for nine years until the Whitlam government in 1975 brokered an agreement between the Gurindji people and the Vestey Group. The historic settlement concluded with a handover ceremony and ensured a section of land would remain in the control of traditional owners. The Wave Hill Station is the second foray into the Northern Territory for Jumbuck after purchasing the Killarney Station, also in the Victoria River District, for $35m in 2014. Jumbuck also runs about a dozen sheep and cattle properties across South Australia, Western Australia and New South Wales. Daily Mail Australia have contacted Jumbuck for comment on the purchase. Wave Hill Station played a key role in the history of Indigenous land rights after 200 Gurindji stockmen in 1966 walked off the job and went on strike. Pictured: Vincent Lingiari (pictured left) accepts the Gurindji land handback from Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (pictured right) A Mexican immigrant who was 'left for dead' after crossing into the US survived for six days in the Texas winter storm where she suffered horrific frostbite and hypothermia. The woman, 43, was abandoned by a smuggler in West Texas on February 13 as the extreme weather took hold across the state. She spent three days hiding among the rocks trying to shelter from the ice and snow. A Mexican immigrant who was 'left for dead' after crossing into the US survived for six days in the Texas winter storm where she suffered horrific frostbite and hypothermia The woman, 43, was abandoned by a smuggler in West Texas on February 13 as the extreme weather took hold across the state The woman later found an abandoned shed where she took cover for three more days amid the freezing temperatures. A concerned relative had contacted Border Patrol agents in Van Horn who scoured the area without any success. After six days hiding in the snow, the woman spotted tracks on a dirt road that she followed. She stumbled across a rancher who notified agents of her discovery and they immediately headed to a ranch where she received treatment. The woman was suffering from 'severe' frostbite and hypothermia after her six-day ordeal in the snow. The woman later found an abandoned shed where she took cover for three more days amid the freezing temperatures. Pictured: deep snow in Texas on February 15 Her injuries were so severe she was rushed to hospital where doctors said her situation was life-threatening. She since recovered and has been released and was processed by US Customs and Border Protection for adjudication. Big Bend Sector Chief Patrol Agent Sean McGoffin said: 'It's unfortunate so many people place their lives in the hands of unscrupulous smugglers, which often results in a tragic situation like this. 'For smugglers, it's a business and they will leave you behind if you cannot keep up with them.' U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Big Bend Sector Border Patrol have rescued more than 200 migrants in west Texas who were mostly abandoned by human traffickers US Customs and Border Protection agents assigned to west Texas have rescued more than 200 undocumented immigrants abandoned by human traffickers during Storm Uri. The numbers include one man who died from the freezing weather. CBP said that 10 people were taken to region hospitals for treatment to extreme weather exposure, frostbite or other serious medical conditions. The majority of the migrants were found by Big Bend Sector agents in the towns of Sierra Blanca and Van Horn. Most of the migrants were citizens of Ecuador, Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. Patna, Feb 24 : After the encounter in Sitamarhi on Wednesday afternoon, the opposition parties slammed the Bihar government for having 'no control' over the law and order situation in the state. RJD MLC Subodh Rai said: "The way liquor mafias attacked the police and snuffed out the life of a sub-inspector rank officer indicates that the home department, which comes under Nitish Kumar, has no control over law and order in the state. They (mafias) are rampaging in several districts of Bihar without any fear of the police." Encounters with Maoist elements is one thing, but it is alarming if liquor mafias become so powerful that they don't hesitate to take the lives of police personnel, Rai said. Liquor is smuggled into Bihar from other states with the silent support of the police, the RJD leader said, as he demanded a thorough probe into the matter. The encounter broke out in Kunwari village in Sitamarhi on Wednesday afternoon after a police team reached the village. After seeing the police team, the mafias opened fired on them. In the ensuing encounter, a sub-inspector was killed, while another received gunshot injuries. A liquor mafia named Ranjan Singh was killed in retaliatory firing by the police team. Mritunjay Kumar Singh, the president of the Bihar Police Association, alleged: "SPs of the districts, instead of giving directions to the police, apply pressure on them. The state government should give adequate compensation to the deceased person's family." State Energy Minister Bijendra Yadav courted controversy after he said: "Where is crime not taking place these days? Firing also took place in the Parliament of the US. England had made CrPC 250 years ago but the jails over there are empty. Are incidents not happening in other families?" Amit Kumar, ADG (law and order), said: "We have taken strong action against liquor mafias. They will be brought out of their den and will get appropriate punishment under the law. The state government has announced compensation of Rs 20 lakh to the deceased's family and government job for one family member." Rahul Gandhi stoking fear on vaccine, all will be vaccinate by December: Union Minister Rahul interacts with fishermen in Kerala; ventures into sea India pti-Deepika S Kollam, Feb 24: Seeking to reach out to the fishing community in poll-bound Kerala, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday interacted with the fishermen at Thangassery beach in the district. Gandhi, who had been touring the state for the last two days, also ventured into sea with the fisherfolks in their boat. After beginning his journey from Vadi beach here by 4.30 am, he spent nearly an hour with them before reaching the venue of interaction. He also cast the net and engaged in fishing along with them. Clad in blue t-shirt and khaki trousers, the Congress leader could be seen waving hands to the onlookers from the boat while reaching back to the shores. AICC general secretary K C Venugopal and T N Prathapan M P, also chairman of National Fishermen Congress, also accompanied him during his sea journey. During the interaction, Gandhi said he always wanted to experience the life of fishermen. "Early this morning, I went to sea with my brothers. From the moment the boat went and came back, they took the entire risk... their entire labour. They sought to the sea, buy the net and somebody else gets the profit," Gandhi said. "We tried to fish but got only one. Even with this investment, the net came back empty. This was my experience," he added. Gandhi further said he would strive to have a separate ministry for fisheries at the Centre. "So that the issues of fishing community can be defended and protected," he said adding that the UDF leaders in the state would soon hold discussions with the fisherfolk to prepare a separate manifesto for them during the impending assembly polls. Taking a dig at the LDF government apparently over the ongoing controversy related to the alleged deep sea fishing contract, the Congress leader said he would like to see what they were going to do with the trawlers. "I am for competition...but not for unfair competition. So, there should be a level playing filed for everyone," he added. Gandhi's interaction with the fishermen assumes significance as the Congress-led UDF has raised allegations against the Left government in the state over an alleged deep sea fishing contract with a US-based company. In the wake of the controversy, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had directed the officials concerned to cancel the MoU between EMCC, the US-based firm and Kerala State Inland Navigation Corporation (KSINC), a public sector undertaking and probe the circumstances under which it was signed. Note to former president Donald J. Trump: Time to channel a fellow New Yorker, a Roosevelt, no less. Thats the Oyster Bay Roosevelt, Teddy. Trustbusting needs to be a cornerstone of your America First agenda -- the agenda thats going to return you to the White House in 2024. In term Number One, President Trump was on track to bust up free speech loathing, oligarchy bent Big Tech outfits. This Sunday at CPAC, Trump plans to speak about a vision where the Big Tech monopoly is dismantled and free speech and free expression and free thought can reign, says Jason Miller, a key advisor to the ex-president. In the states, theres currently momentum toward antitrust action against Google and Facebook. Federal lawsuits started during Trumps term are still in play. This from the New York Times, February 16, 2021: The suits add to the mounting legal pressure on the tech companies. Federal and state officials have filed three lawsuits against Google, saying it illegally maintained monopolies in search and the online advertising market. Lawsuits filed against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and a group of states could seek to break the company up. Well see if the Biden administration continues to pursue lawsuits and actions against its Big Tech allies. If the last four years are any indication, Democrats will fix it so that their cronies wiggle off hooks. Its only uppity Republicans and patriots who are on the receiving end of justice. Trustbusting has broad appeal, but its not for short-term, crass political gain that Trump should champion antitrust sweeps: its to restore the free market, and to thwart enterprises that have made cynical calculations: Big government power can be leveraged to cement market dominance. Hence, a large swath of Corporate America is eager to help Democrats and the left trample our liberties. Always follow the money and power. Andrew Torba, Gab founder and Jekyll to Jack Dorseys Hyde, has made a bold proclamation: Patriots must build a parallel economy. Wrote Torba in a February 17 communication from his platform: We must exit this broken and failing system and start building a new one immediately. We are not revolutionaries. We are not violent. We are reformers. We are builders. When we up and leave the existing system in favor of our own the existing system will crumble without us lifting a finger. Patriots, similar to Atlas Shrugged, exiting the system may cause it to crumble, but fail? Not right away, necessarily. Though an untold number of Russians and others escaped Lenins and Stalins hell -- tens of millions of others were dispatched to eternal rewards -- the Soviet Union endured for 75 agonizing years. Putins oligarchic Russia is a lesser form of wretched. Castros shabby Caribbean failure is ongoing. Xis China is a chimera of prosperity. CCP potentates and apparatchiks, oligarchs, and coastal denizens enjoy Western-style affluence. But, despite CCP propaganda (lapped up by the MSM), hundreds of millions of Chinese exist precariously. Tyrants can survive crumbling -- until the slaves run out, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher. Yet Torba is right. Liberty loving Americans need to max their economic resources to create greater independence. They can no longer rely on enterprises that have been coopted by Democrats and the left. Livelihoods -- the very wellbeing of many millions of families -- are at risk. A parallel system of commerce isnt enough, though. Why? Well, what do we know about the nature of tyranny? Tyranny is cancerous. Its predatory. It thrives only by consuming. A separate America within America is probably a partial solution. Otherwise, it may only be a firebreak. Firebreaks are necessary expedients, not permanent answers. Sooner than later, Americas emerging tyrants will prowl, seeking to seize, devour, and, finally destroy whatever patriots build independently. A good defense is smart offense. Short of outright secession, the Republic needs to be retaken. Why would dark souls be permitted any purchase on America, anyway? Theres much that has to be done to reclaim the nation. Heavy lifting is the price of freedom. Breaking up concentrations of power is about as American as apple pie. Thats private and public concentrations. The Revolution was a war for independence from monarchy. The Constitution was designed as an essential bulwark in frustrating concentrations of power in government. Jacksonian Democracy was the successful challenge to, principally, the domination by New England and Northeast elites. Populism and antitrust, which came along in the late 1800s, were responses to the monopolies and cartels that had sprung up in industrializing America. MAGA is the latest in a series of modern grassroots uprisings. Its a rejection of the centralization of power in national government. Trump and MAGA are the inheritors of the Goldwater movement that begat Reagan, then Rush Limbaugh and Gingrichs Contract with America, and then the Tea Party. On the other hand, as mentioned, Democrats, the left, and moguls see big advantages in Big Government aligning with Big Business. The battlefields in this fight are more than about government overreach. The old saw bruited about by libertarians that free markets are the cure for monopolies and cartels is facing a stiff challenge. Markets arent remedies alone because, over the years, markets have become much less free. Indeed, national government must be curtailed and decentralized. Thats critical to restoring freer markets. President Trump was doing seminal work at deregulation, but even more aggressive approaches are required. Big Business moguls are sophisticated in ways that late 19th century titans werent. Theyve acquired a lot of money, cunning, and will to waylay competitors. Their tentacles reach deeply. Corporate giants have learned the value of collusion with politicians and bureaucrats. They spread their money and favors to leverage government. Higher taxes and more red tape arent necessarily impediments to big players. Carveouts can be achieved in legislation. In fact, taxes and regs can be used as weapons, putting the hurt on smaller competitors. Crippling competitors and crimping markets boost bottom lines. Big Tech is the most conspicuous threat to commerce and our liberties, but Big Finance poses a global threat that requires priority focus. This from Kelsey Bolar at The Federalist, February 19, 2021: The Trump administration rule appeared innocuous enough, instructing banks to conduct risk assessments of individual customers, rather than make broad-based decisions affecting whole categories or classes of customers when providing access to services, capital, and credit. Under Operation Choke Point, federal regulators instructed banks to do the opposite -- to openly discriminate against entire industries the Obama administration found objectionable. Weaponizing the power of banking regulators at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, the Obama administration realized it could block entire industries from the banking system that it didnt like. This made it difficult -- if not impossible -- for politically unfavored businesses such as gun sellers and short-term lenders to operate. Bidens handlers, per Bolars analysis, are reviving Operation Chokepoint. That should send chills up the spines of freedom-loving Americans. Epic crony capitalism is underway, and its terminus is oligarchy or fascism. The distinction between trustbusters of the right and left is that conservatives want to open up markets, promoting more competition, and minimize government meddling. The left wants to eventually coopt enterprises, making them public utilities or outright state enterprises. President Trump is an instinctive conservative, and can command the heights in this fight to end this rising threat to our freedoms and prosperity. J. Robert Smith can be found on Parler @JRobertSmith, and is new to Gab, again @JRobertSmith. He also blogs at Flyover. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Cheyenne Wyoming House Revenue Committee's Clark Stith Rock Springs Cheyenne Wyoming Cheyenne Patrick Collins Cheyenne Cheyenne Laramie County Commission Gunnar Malm Cheyenne Laramie County Library Laramie County School District 1 Laramie County Betsey Hale Laramie County Cheyenne Wyoming Business Alliance Wyoming Economic Development Association Cindy DeLancey Wyoming Capitol (TNS) With several local leaders fromopposed to the proposal, a legislative committee rejected a bill Tuesday that would have repea- led the state's sales tax exemptions available to data-processing centers.House Bill 88 would have eliminated the sales tax exemptions on various computer equipment purchased for data centers. The exemptions were first passed by the Legislature in 2010. In the short term, elimination of the exemptions would have broughtabout $16 million in annual revenue, split between the state's general fund and local governments.During themeeting Tuesday, the bill's sponsor, Rep., R-, described removing the exemption as "one piece of trying to fix what is a much larger structural problem with our whole tax system," arguing it was unfair that small businesses have to pay sales tax to replace their computer servers while wealthy, out-of-state companies typically use the exemption."I don't see that there's a reason, really, that we should discriminate against small businesses in favor of large businesses," Stith said.Stith also noted the Wyoming Home Services program, which provides daily help to senior citizens at risk of being moved to a nursing home, could be eliminated under the budget cut proposals that the Legislature will consider when it reconvenes next week. The program costs the state roughly $2.8 million each year.However, many who testified during the meeting, including several leaders from, where nearly all of the data centers inare located, argued the proposal would drive away new technological investments in communities statewide.Mayornoted at least 30 other states have some sort of tax exemption for data centers."Without this exemption, our community and state will no longer be as competitive to attract selectors that we depend on to grow this sector of our economy," Collins said. "In, we just zoned another five-acre business park as a site for another data center. I'm told by development people that we have $2 billion of new investment in the data center sector planned for construction inin the near future, and that's dependent upon this."Chairmanalso testified against the bill, stating the successful efforts in, which culminated with the arrival of a sizable Microsoft data center in 2012, would never extend to other areas of the state if the bill were to pass. He also ran through the other revenue that comes from the data center through property taxes and sales taxes paid on electricity."This last year, thereceived over $200,000 from one Microsoft data center. Our weed and pest district received $75,000, roughly. The Conservation District received $47,000. The community college here locally received $650,000. The county school fund received $567,000, and () received $2.5 million," Malm said. "If this repeal is to occur, those kinds of monies will not be realized in any other community ... outside.", CEO of the local economic development nonprofit Cheyenne LEADS, said her group has been in talks with a prospective data company that is considering relocation to five other states that offer similar tax benefits."That one company would bring over 1 million square feet of new construction, a capital investment well north of $1 billion, and over 200 primary jobs, paying much higher than theaverage annual wage," Hale said. "The opportunity costs of losing this project would be real, and would include the loss of real and personal property taxes and sales tax (on electricity) in the millions."Testimony during the meeting was not limited toofficials, as a few statewide organizations, including theand the, were also opposed to the proposal. WBA Presidenttold lawmakers it was important to follow through on the promise of the legislation passed in 2010."I deeply understand the need to diversify and look for new revenue sources," DeLancey said. "However, the larger precedent by reneging on a deal could have farther reaching consequences to business as a whole inthan the small economic gain that we might achieve by doing away with this exemption."Lawmakers on the committee ultimately rejected HB 88 by a 6-3 vote, meaning it won't get another hearing when the Legislature reconvenes at thenext week for its month-long general session. COLUMBIA The acting director of South Carolina's public safety agency took a step closer Feb. 24 to becoming its permanent leader, as senators applauded his progress over the last year in boosting trooper morale. A Senate panel voted unanimously to advance the nomination of Robert Woods IV to keep him at the helm of the state's long-troubled Department of Public Safety. "What Ive heard since youve been interim is that morale is going up," said Sen. Brian Adams, R-Goose Creek, a retired police officer. "I, too, have heard morale is going up, which is fantastic," said the panel's chairwoman, Sen. Sandy Senn, R-Charleston. Woods, a 54-year-old Citadel graduate, told senators he never aspired to the job. But when Gov. Henry McMaster asked him to temporarily take over in February 2020, he "seized that as an opportunity to do good things" for the agency he cherishes. His 30 years of experience in the agency, starting at the bottom patrolling Charleston-area roads, make him uniquely suited for the task of increasing the ranks and boosting morale, he said. The only other law enforcement agency Woods has worked for is the Charleston Police Department, where he patrolled the streets for two years before rejoining the Highway Patrol in 1993. "I know the operations, the culture and the people of the organization. There's really not much about the department I dont know in terms of how it operates," Woods said, noting he's been with the agency since it's inception. The job entails managing more than 1,200 employees statewide in several divisions, with the largest being the Highway Patrol, where complaints, including uneven discipline and unfair promotions, mounted most over the last decade. "Ive lived it. I understand it. I get where these guys are coming from. Its a situation in which I can identify with those who feel theyre in a low-power situation," he said. "What I want to do is provide them an open door for meaningful dialogue to change this organization not just for the employees but for the people of this state." Sign up for updates! Get the latest political news from The Post and Courier in your inbox. Email Sign Up! Woods said he's working to grow troopers' ranks from roughly 800 to at least 1,000. His efforts include seeking several million from legislators in the state budget to boost entry-level salaries so troopers can at least start at $40,000. "Just getting their attention, were behind the 8-ball," he said of advertising first-year jobs at $39,000. But that's a legislative decision, he said, and since money alone is not going to fix morale or keep troopers from leaving, "I need to control what I can control." He said assured senators he's committed to increasing diversity in the ranks. Just under 20 percent of troopers are minorities and very few are female. Efforts include recruiting at historically black colleges, he said. It's important to "ensure that we look like the community we serve and, in doing that, it builds confidence," he said, noting his master's degree from Columbia College is in conflict resolution. "I commend you for those efforts," said Sen. Marlon Kimpson, D-Charleston. "Im interested in working with you to track that number." Woods would officially replace Leroy Smith, who announced in fall 2019 he would not seek a third term at the helm, after years of legislators calling for his removal. McMaster's last pick for Smith's replacement, North Charleston Police Chief Reggie Burgess, removed his name from contention in late January 2020 after his first confirmation hearing unexpectedly veered to questions over unpaid taxes he'd since paid. McMaster's decision to keep Woods in the role requires the Senate's blessing. Woods is expected to easily win approval, following a vote by the full Senate Judiciary Committee next week. It has the backing of state law enforcement groups, the South Carolina Troopers Association, which Woods once led as president, as well as the state's top officer, State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. KYODO NEWS - Feb 24, 2021 - 23:41 | Japan, All Lawmakers from Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party have urged local members to shun a move that supports a legal revision allowing separate surnames for married couples, party sources said Wednesday. In what could be construed as applying pressure, a group of LDP lawmakers sent a written request to the members, the sources said. The group also includes Tamayo Marukawa, who recently took over as minister in charge of women's empowerment and gender equality. The 50 LDP members from both houses of parliament asked in a letter dated Jan. 30 that the members reject in their local assemblies a written opinion in favor of a policy change for different surnames. For proponents, written opinions adopted in the assemblies could help build momentum for discussions in parliament and among the public regarding the issue. The lawmakers, in their written request, argue that separate surnames could result in the collapse of the social system. When asked by an opposition lawmaker in a parliamentary session about the written request, Marukawa said, "It is my duty to push for further discussions in parliament." Japan's Civil Code requires a married couple to share a surname, and conventionally, the burden has largely fallen on women to change names after marriage. Conservatives who say they cherish traditional values are adamantly opposed to separate surnames, and argue the move may have an impact on family unity as well as children. Marukawa last week took over the post of Olympic minister as well as minister for gender equality after Seiko Hashimoto became head of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee. Hashimoto succeeded Yoshiro Mori, who quit the committee earlier this month after making sexist remarks. "Unfortunately it has become clear that Japan is only halfway in efforts (to achieving) gender equality," Marukawa said in her first press conference last week after becoming Olympic minister, and called for a change in the current situation. The government approved its basic gender equality promotion policy in December but did not include a commitment to allowing the use of different surnames for married couples. The draft policy had included wording positive about separate surnames but ultimately such language was dropped due to opposition from conservative lawmakers. Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) attends a campaign event as he runs for reelection at the Olde Blind Dog Irish Pub, in Milton, Ga., on Dec. 21, 2020. (Al Drago/Reuters) Former Sen. Perdue Says He Wont Run for Senate in 2022 Former Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) announced on Tuesday he wont enter the race for the U.S. Senate in the upcoming 2022 election in Georgia. After much prayer and reflection, Bonnie and I have decided that we will not enter the race for the United States Senate in Georgia in 2022, Perdue said in a statement on Twitter. I am confident that whoever wins the Republican primary next year will defeat the Democrat candidate in the general election for this seat, and I will do everything I can to make that happen, the 71-year-old politician said. Perdue added that the decision for him not to run again and try to reclaim a seat is a personal one and not a political one. Perdue, a former business executive who was elected in 2014, lost the states twin Senate run-off last month against Democratic opponent Jon Ossoff by approximately 55,000 votesa change of around 143,000 votes from the 2020 election, when Perdue edged Ossoff by over 88,000 ballots. The 2022 elections will be a key factor in determining which party will control the Senate after Republicans lost two seats to Democrats during last months dual runoffs in Georgia, ending with a 50-50 split U.S. Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaker. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), who won the race against then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) last month by over 1 percent, appeared optimistic regarding the 2022 election. Republican Senate candidate David Perdue (top L) and Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) (bottom L) and their Georgia runoff election challengers, Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock, are seen in a combination of file photographs. (Reuters) I am prepared to defeat whatever Republican they come up with, he told reporters in Washington, Savannah Morning News reported. Perdues announcement comes one week after he said in a Feb. 16 statement hes considering another run and already filed the campaign paperwork that could have opened that way for him. Perdue said it has been an honor for him to represent the people of Georgia. He also said he will continue to do everything he can to correct the inequities in our state laws and election rules so that, in the future, every legal voter will be treated equally and illegal votes will not be included. Loeffler, who served in the Senate for about a year after replacing former Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Republican, said the idea for running again in the Georgia elections next year is certainly on the table, though she hasnt decided yet. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) is seen at a rally in Cumming, Ga., on Dec. 20, 2020. (Jessica McGowan/Getty Images) Right now there is no answer on the Republican side to a comprehensive platform that provides the resources, the scale, the network, the message, the communications platform that we need for statewide success in 2022 and beyond, Loeffler said earlier this month during an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I dont know if any Republican can win if we dont shore up what were doing around voter registration, engagement and election integrity, she added. Secretaries of state for several key states have said they have found no evidence of voter fraud that would overturn the results of the 2020 election. From NTD News President of Kyrgyzstan Sadyr Japarov arrived in Moscow for his first foreign visit, 24.kg reports citing the Information Policy Department of the Presidential Executive Office. During the visit, Sadyr Japarov will hold talks with the Russian President Vladimir Putin. In addition, bilateral meetings of the head of state with the Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Federation Council Chairwoman Valentina Matviyenko and the State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin are planned. A meeting with the business community of the Russian Federation, compatriots and Kyrgyz students studying at the higher education institutions of Russia is also expected. Thats the plan. The reality is very different. Before the end, were treated to a full menu of sibling rivalries, parental misunderstandings, guilt trips and disinterred secrets. You dont assemble a cast like this one without giving every actor something tasty to chew on. Director Roger Michell is an expert when it comes to making ensembles work. He generated a cheery sense of camaraderie among the band of old friends surrounding Hugh Grant in Notting Hill and persuaded a quartet of British acting royalty to provide a feast of reminiscences in Tea with the Dames. Husband Paul (Sam Neill), a doctor, has acquired the necessary drug and the family is gathering for a final weekend with her. After everybody has gone, she will make her own exit painlessly and with dignity in the knowledge they all believe she has done the right thing. Lily (Susan Sarandon) has motor neurone disease and shes determined to say goodbye to life before the ravages wrought by the disease go any further. And he does just as well here. Lily still has enough spirit left to enjoy rattling her stitched-up daughter, Jennifer, played with a brunette wig and lot of nervy conviction by Kate Winslet. Her younger daughter, Anna (Mia Wasikowska) is another matter. Anna is fragile. Arriving late with her sometime girlfriend, Chris (Bex Taylor-Klaus), she immediately gets into an argument with her sister and were not far into the action before we learn shes secretly hatching a plan to ring 911 before her mother gets a chance to take the drug. An added complication is the presence of Lilys oldest friend, Liz (Lindsay Duncan), whos heartily resented by Jennifer for reasons that are revealed as things eventually bubble to a climax. The script has been adapted from a Danish film, Secret Heart, by screenwriter Christian Torpe, who screws up the tension little by little while dispensing a steady line in sardonic humour. The early scenes are infused with an exquisite unease. Full of overlapping dialogue and half-finished sentences, they whip up a mood so fraught that the sound of a dropped glass is enough to fracture the surface calm. The only one immune from embarrassment is Lily herself. The setting is a sunlit family house in Connecticut with big, open rooms and a windswept beach a short walk away. You dont have to be told that Lily and Paul have lived there for years, shaping it to reflect their tastes and personalities. Lily is the extrovert the one who has a way of dictating the mood of any gathering. And Sarandons casting infuses her with a feistiness and a sexiness she didnt have in the Danish version. Sarandon has never had any problem summoning up an air of authority and here its laced with a strong streak of mischief. Lily has always enjoyed disturbing the peace but she has less success in understanding her two daughters. She prefers to believe theyre reasonably happy yet its plain from the start their lives have been governed by what they read as her indifference to them. She likes to wind Jennifer up by encouraging teenage son Jonathan (Anson Boon) to break the rules her mother has set for him and its clear she regards Annas life as a mystery one that she has never really tried to solve for fear of coming across some uncomfortable truth. Anna, however, has decided the time has finally come for her to be enlightened. The views expressed by public comments are not those of this company or its affiliated companies. Please note by clicking on "Post" you acknowledge that you have read the TERMS OF USE and the comment you are posting is in compliance with such terms. Your comments may be used on air. Be polite. Inappropriate posts or posts containing offsite links, images, GIFs, inappropriate language, or memes may be removed by the moderator. Job listings and similar posts are likely automated SPAM messages from Facebook and are not placed by WFMZ-TV. ALEPPO, Syria Iranian forces and affiliated militias in Deir ez-Zor province in eastern Syria are trying to boost their influence and restore their prestige after suffering a resounding blow at the military, religious and cultural levels following the Israeli airstrikes that targeted Jan. 13 dozens of their sites in the province near the Syrian border with Iraq. Iranian forces are working to recruit Syrians from Deir ez-Zor and other provinces to join their ranks and form new militias, as part of their plan to cling to their influence and strategic interests in the region. It also conveys a message of confrontation to both Israel and the United States. The Afghan Fatemiyoun Brigade is one of the most prominent militias affiliated with the Iranian forces in Deir ez-Zor province, and it is widely spread in the provinces countryside as well as in other Syrian provinces. The brigade, and most of its Afghan Shiite fighters loyal to the Iranian regime, joined the war alongside Bashar al-Assads regime against the Free Syrian Army almost a year after the start of the Syrian revolution in 2011. The Fatemiyoun Brigade subsequently became one of the largest Iranian-backed militias in Syria as it increased its presence and organized several training camps. Ahmed al-Ramadan, director of the Euphrates Post, a Syrian opposition website that covers news of Deir ez-Zor province and eastern Syria, told Al-Monitor, The Fatemiyoun Brigade is one of the largest Iranian militias deployed in Deir ez-Zor province and is widely relied upon to extend Irans influence in the region, which is rich in underground wealth. He said, Two years ago, the Iranian forces began to show great interest in Deir ez-Zor province, so they supported the spread of their militias on a larger scale in the region. Among the militias that increased their presence was the Fatemiyoun Brigade, which began recruiting members through contracts in order to strengthen its popular base in Deir ez-Zor province and penetrate into the local community. In the wake of the [Jan. 13] Israeli airstrikes, the Fatemiyoun Brigade leadership drew closer to the people and influential figures to work on recruiting the youth in its ranks, taking advantage of the youths refusal to join the regimes army as well as of their need for money and work. The brigade accepts volunteers aged between 16 and 48 years old. Ramadan noted, Individuals wishing to join the Fatemiyoun Brigade ranks can go to the headquarters of the Nasr Center of the Iranian forces on Port Said Street in the center of Deir ez-Zor. He added, In the Fatemiyoun Brigade the salary of an Afghan member reaches $300 per month, while the salary of a Syrian member does not exceed $100 per month, and individuals joining the brigade are required to attend ideological courses and embrace the Shiite sect. According to the Persian newspaper Kayhan, which is close to Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ali Reza Tosli founded the Fatemiyoun Brigade along with 25 of his comrades after he sought refuge in Iran in the wake of the Afghan war in 1984. The name of the Fatemiyoun Brigade, according to the newspaper, first appeared in Syria in November 2012 in the battles fought against the Syrian armed opposition forces. Some prisoners who were detained during the battles confessed that they were staying as refugees on Iranian lands and later joined the fight in Syria after they were promised to be recruited and offered with various incentives. They were also motivated by ideological and sectarian reasons. The Iranian forces and their affiliated militias are pursuing their military activities, among other things, in Deir ez-Zor despite the continuous bombardment targeting their sites, military convoys and arms shipments by drones of unidentified sources. Ahed Slebi, a journalist from Deir ez-Zor and a member of Naher Media, a news website covering news from Deir ez-Zor and eastern Syria, told Al-Monitor, [Irans] Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] has recently established a group called the Hashemites. This group has been active during the short period that followed the Israeli airstrikes in the city of Abu Kamal in the eastern countryside of Deir ez-Zor. He noted, The tasks of the new militia members focus on protecting Shiite holy sites in Deir ez-Zor province such as Ain Ali Spring in the countryside of Mayadeen and the Dome of Ali in the countryside of Abu Kamal while carrying out inspection patrols. Forty individuals from Mayadeen have thus far joined the ranks of the Hashemites, in addition to 50 others from the city of Abu Kamal, most of whom hail from al-Mashahda Arab tribe. The Hashemites have taken two houses as their current headquarters, one in al-Alwa neighborhood in central Mayadeen and another in the main street of Abu Kamal; both houses belong to families displaced from the region. Slebi added, Members of the Hashemites presumably earn 150,000 Syrian pounds [$44 at the black market rate] per month and are promised a subsequent increase. The group is headed by someone called Abu al-Eis who is assisted by someone called Hammoud. The IRGC had previously suggested to the elders and sheikhs of the Deir ez-Zor tribes to form a military force from the regions tribesmen to support the IRGC and the Iranian forces in the province in return for direct military and material support. The aim appears to be attracting young men in the countryside of Deir ez-Zor in order to set up armed militias in return for attractive salaries, the strategic goal being to further cling to the region through various activities. The city of Abu Kamal in Deir ez-Zor is considered a strategic point for Iran, as it connects Iraq to Syria, and Iran to western Lebanon. The company has received funds totalling $659,476 and binding applications for the balance with the allotment of Tranche 1 to occur when the funds are received, which is expected to be no later than Friday March 26. Major shareholder Holdmark Property Group has agreed to participate in the offer ( ) has completed a A$2.994 million capital raising to sophisticated investors at A$0.04 per share, with one free attaching option at an exercise price of A$0.01 and an expiry date of April 21, 2022. The company has received funds totalling A$659,476 and binding applications for the balance. Proceeds will help fund further development of the companys portfolio of three projects - Needles Gold Project in the US, Governor Broome Minerals Sands Project in WA and Lower Smoke Creek Diamond Project, also in WA. Ongoing support of key shareholders Chairman Jacob Khouri said: We are delighted with the outcome of this capital raising led by Melbourne Capital, which demonstrates the ongoing support of key shareholders and sophisticated investors of Astro and its exploration and development strategy across the three principal projects. The board is particularly excited by the fact that funding is in place to commence the execution of the Needles Gold Project drilling programs, progressing to a pre-feasibility study for the Governor Broome Project, in addition to now having the capacity to undertake work at our diamond project in WA. We are confident that positive news flow lies ahead of us across our dynamic portfolio of projects. Two-tranche capital raise This capital raising is being conducted in two tranches: Tranche 1 498.9 million shares (issued out of Listing Rule 7.1 and 7.1A capacity). The free attaching option is subject to shareholder approval; and Tranche 2 249.6 million shares, issued subject to shareholder approval, expected to occur sometime in April 2021. Allotment of Tranche 1 is to occur when the funds are received, which is expected to be no later than Friday, March 26, 2021. Major shareholders Major shareholder Holdmark Property Group (via HPG Urban Developments Pty Ltd) has agreed to participate in the offer and has agreed to subscribe for 166 million shares under Tranche 2. If approved, Holdmark Property Group will retain its shareholding level at 19.9%, reinforcing its ongoing support for the company. Melbourne (MCL) led the capital-raising process. In addition, it has committed to provide ongoing corporate advisory services to the company for the next 12 months. Interim CEO appointed Astro has appointed Vince Fayad as interim chief executive officer following a significant increase to his leadership duties over the past 12 months, both corporately and at a project level. With more than 35 years experience, Fayad has strong ASX company experience, serving in roles including executive director, company secretary and chief financial officer of Greenvale Energy (now Mining) Limited ( ) and European Lithium Limited ( ) formerly known as East Coast Minerals. Khouri added: Vince has an impressive track record of company success, having played a major role in his previous position on the board of Greenvale Mining, where he was heavily involved in the development of the company. Over the last 12 months, Vince has assumed a greater leadership role in running Astro, overseeing the work programs being carried out across our portfolio of assets in Australia and the US and the companys general corporate activities. He is a great asset to the Astro team, and we are thrilled he has extended his role to that of Interim CEO. A public school system in New York has introduced a new curriculum to teach that 'all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism', and show kindergarten classes videos of black children shot and killed by police, instructing them about the dangers of police brutality. Buffalo's schools are expected to follow lesson plans devised by Fatima Morrell, the associate superintendent for Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Initiatives. Morrell's lesson plans, obtained by City Journal, teach pupils and their teachers how to be, in her words, more 'woke.' Fatima Morrell, the associate superintendent for Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Initiatives, has created a new curriculum and series of lesson plans for Buffalo public schools The youngest pupils read a series of texts under the heading 'Woke Kindergarten', which are described as being 'digital culturally responsive and sustaining easy reader books'. The texts help children with their 'learning for liberation' and tell the stories of children 'that we have lost to racist police and state-sanctioned violence.' Six young people killed by police, including Trayvon Martin, 17; Tamir Rice, 12; and seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, are imagined telling their stories on video. Aiyana tells the young viewers: 'I was sleeping.' Trayvon says: 'I was walking.' Clips were obtained by City Journal, which told the stories of black children killed by police Six children, including Trayvon Martin (pictured) were imagined telling their stories on video The four to six-year-olds in kindergarten will also be asked by their teachers to compare their skin color with an arrangement of crayons, City Journal reported. Older students will also be taught about the 'sickness' of American society. By fifth grade, students are taught that America has created a 'school-to-grave pipeline' for black children and that, as adults, 'one million black people are locked in cages.' In middle and high school, students were taught under headings such as 'The racial power of white elites'. Morrell held seminars for teachers where she explained the new teaching plans Zoom sessions were organized, which one veteran teacher described as 'scoldings' Students were taught about 'systemic racism,' with emphasis on American society being created for the 'impoverishment of people of color and enrichment of white people'. Pupils learnt that the United States 'created a social system that had racist economic inequality built into its foundation,' and that 'the [current] wealth gap is the result of black slavery, which created unjust wealth for white people,' who are 'unfairly rich.' Students are taught that 'all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism', according to the lesson plans, and that 'often unconsciously, white elites work to perpetuate racism through politics, law, education, and the media.' Some of the lesson plans were obtained by City Journal, which published them on Tuesday Older students are asked to atone for their 'white privilege' and to 'use their voices' for the cause of antiracism. They are taught to study the differences between white European and traditional African systems of justice, in which, according to the curriculum, whites have created a 'retributive,' 'merit-based' justice system, which relies on harsh punishment and creates inequalities. Traditional African systems, on the other hand, relied on a 'restorative,' 'needs-based' justice system focused on healing, giving to each according to his need, and prioritizing 'collective value' over individual rights. Morrell, according to the site, gave a presentation to teachers in which she explained the reasoning behind the lesson plans, saying: 'That's America's sickness - sickness that we have to deal with.' One teacher told City Journal that Morrell's training programs pushed 'radical politics'. Teachers were told that they had to 'be critically conscious (woke)' The teacher said the sessions become a series of 'scoldings, guilt-trips, and demands to demean oneself simply to make another feel 'empowered.' Teachers must submit to these 'manipulative mind games' and express support for Morrell's left-wing politics, or risk professional retaliation, the teacher claimed. Morrell has not responded to DailyMail.com's request for comment. Her curriculum and teaching plans have come into the spotlight before. In September, Tucker Carlson used his Fox News show to question her plan to teach fourth and fifth grades students 'the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics and a return to the 'collective village' that takes care of each other.' Carlson said: 'They are teaching to your kids, that your family should be destroyed. 'Why are we allowing this? You know what this is, it's an all-out war on the most important thing we have, which is the American family.' Booka Nile and Brett Helling only tied the knot on Tuesday's episode of Married At First Sight. And already, the pair have raised eyebrows, after doing an interview on Today Extra on Wednesday from two different cities. The pair appeared on the show via a live cross, with Booka in Perth and Brett in Melbourne. Trouble in Paradise already? On Wednesday, Married At First Sight's Booka Nile and Brett Helling appeared on Today Extra via a live cross from two different cities Hosts David Campbell and Belinda Russell immediately noticed that the two weren't in the same city together. 'You're both in different cities, oh oh,' David said, at the start of the chat. Belinda added: 'Come on, guys, what is going on? Is there trouble in paradise?' Newlyweds: Booka Nile and Brett Helling only tied the knot on Tuesday's episode of Married At First Sight Electrician Brett, 31, insisted that the pair just live in two separate cities and that moving interstate is a big thing. Musician Booka meanwhile said that the coronavirus pandemic is keeping them apart. 'Well it's not exactly, pack up the car and move down the road sort of territory, is it, it's halfway across the country, so,' Brett said. Booka added: 'Have you guys heard of a guy called Mark McGowan [the WA premier]... but we've got a pretty closed border to Victoria right now,' she said. Living interstate: Electrician Brett, 31, insisted that the pair just live in two separate cities and that moving interstate is a big thing. Musician Booka meanwhile said that the coronavirus pandemic is keeping them apart However, Interstate travelers from Victoria are allowed to enter Western Australia so long as they register and are approved for a 'G2G Pass' and have a place to quarantine in. Booka, 31, was also asked if Brett was the 'man of her dreams,' when she didn't outright answer the question with a yes or no. She played coy, saying: 'That jawline and mustache combination, I was pretty excited by it, by him.' Booka, 31, was also asked if Brett was the 'man of her dreams,' when she didn't outright answer the question with a yes or no. She played coy, saying: 'That jawline and mustache combination, I was pretty excited by it, by him' Booka and Brett tied the knot on Married At First Sight on Tuesday. However, her bridesmaids upstaged her for all the wrong reasons. The 31-year-old musician and mental health worker dressed her two bridesmaids in attention-grabbing pink dresses and hats. There was certainly no missing the two blonde bombshells in their polka dot pink gowns with puff sleeves. They accessorised with wide-brim pink hats and strappy yellow block-heel sandals. Ahead of the wedding, Booka's groom, Brett Helling, admitted he was feeling nervous, and hoped he'd been paired with someone as unique as he is. But the 31-year-old began to relax after looking out into the crowd and seeing Booka's family and friends with their colourful hairstyles and eclectic outfits. 'Looking out in the crowd and seeing all the colourful people makes me think that she's a really interesting person, and it's filling me with confidence,' he said. Daily Mail Australia has contacted Channel Nine for comment, in relation to this story. Italian embassy opens 3 new visa centers in Algeria From March 7, VFS Global to provide info on centers (ANSAmed) - ALGIERS, FEBRUARY 24 - Starting from March 7, VFS Global will be the new official partner of the Italian embassy in Algeria for visa handling. The Italian embassy made the announcement on its website. VFS Global will provide all information on visa centers for Italy, from opening hours to their location and ways to make an appointment. In addition, the new partnership with VFS Global calls for the opening of three new visa centers in Batna, Ouargla, and Saida. Visa centers for the Italian embassy are already found in Algiers, Constantine, Oran, Adrar, and Annaba. Due to the difficulties linked to COVID-19, only the centers in Algiers, Oran, and Constantine will be operative from March 7. The others will begin operating in line with an improvement in the situation.(ANSAmed). (ANSA). U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, part of a group of Senate Republicans who met with President Joe Biden and asked him to shrink his $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill, said Tuesday that families making $200,000 shouldnt get checks in this next round of payments. Collins said she supported keeping the payments at $1,400 for eligible individuals, $2,800 for couples and $1,400 for dependents, but wanted them to end more quickly than under the legislation moving through the House this week. The House legislation gradually phases out the payments for individuals earning from $75,000 to $100,000, and for couples earning from $150,000 to $200,000. The caps were added in response to complaints from lawmakers that the proposed formula would have allowed large families earning $300,000 or $400,000 to get some federal largesse. I suppose I should be happy that came down from $300,000, but that still strikes me as too high, Collins said, according to pool reports. But a $200,000 income doesnt make you rich in New Jersey, with its high cost of living, said Democratic U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez. The reality is, whats considered living large in some parts of the country is, at best, middle class in high-cost states like New Jersey, Menendez told NJ Advance Media. Many families in my state are struggling to keep a roof over their heads or put food on the table. The $1,400 stimulus checks would be a tremendous boost. The Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, Rep. Pamila Jayapal, D-Was., also has endorsed the thresholds for the stimulus checks. Biden used a White House meeting with Black essential workers a firefighter/emergency medical technician, pharmacist child care worker and grocery store manager to make a new pitch for those checks, saying it would give them some breathing room. A lot of you out there are struggling just to make ends meet even if you have a job, but were going to make sure you get that extra $1,400 check during the pandemic that both parties had said they support, Biden said. We just got to get it done now. CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Newsletter | Homepage Collins said the Republicans who first proposed a $618 billion stimulus plan would be willing to come up from their initial price tag, but President Joe Biden was not willing to come down from his. Their proposal also included $1,000 checks and lower thresholds, which the president also rejected. The administration has not indicated a willingness to come down from its now $1.9 trillion figure and thats a major obstacle, Collins said. And so what were looking at now is whether there are changes that we could make. But I would be surprised if there was support in the Republican caucus if the bill comes out at $1.9 trillion even if were able to make some beneficial changes. Democrats do not need any Republican votes to pass the bill since theyre considering the legislation under a process known as reconciliation, which prevents a filibuster and allows approval by majority vote. That how a GOP Congress was able to enact the 2017 tax law, which, like the stimulus plan, would increase the federal deficit by $1.9 trillion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Every Senate Republican voted yes then. It also means Senate Democrats cant afford any defections if they cant attract any Republican support, but Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday he expected the bill to pass his chamber and be signed into law by March 14, the date the current extended unemployment insurance benefits expire. We need to pass this bill, Schumer said at a press conference Tuesday. The American people, the American public, demands it. Everyone is going to have things that they want to see in the bill and well work hard to see if we can get those things in the bill but Job No. 1 is to pass the bill. Pass the bill we must and I have confidence we will do it. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell provided another argument for the legislation when he said Tuesday that he wasnt concerned about overspending during the pandemic. The economic recovery remains uneven and far from complete, and the path ahead is highly uncertain, Powell told the Senate Banking Committee. Even so, there could be changes to the legislation. At least two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, said they opposed Bidens proposal to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. New Jersey is on track to have a $15 an hour minimum wage by 2024. U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, expressed concern that state officials could use some of the proposed $350 billion in federal aid for tax cuts rather than its stated purpose of helping governments make up for lost revenues during the coronavirus-induced economic downturn. We could distribute billions to the states, and they turn around and lower taxes there are governors talking about that, and its not the point here, King told the Washington Post. There should be a prohibition against voluntarily diminishing revenues. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive research group, estimated a shortfall of $300 billion, not including the additional costs of fighting the coronavirus, such personal protective equipment, testing and providing emergency aid to businesses and individuals. But Moodys Analytics estimated that state and local revenues would be down only $61 billion through 2022. Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JDSalant. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. A group of swimmers based in County Derry say taking to the open water has had a positive effect on their mental health and wellbeing throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Ballyronan Bluetits are based in the Loughshore village, but attract swimmers from all around the shores of Lough Neagh and beyond. The group was formed in October 2020 by Mary O'Hagan, whose enthusiasm for open water swimming is leading many others into taking the plunge. I approached the Bluetits swimmers in Wales and asked them to set me up a group here locally, she told the County Derry Post. I had seen a few comments on Facebook from people who were keen to swim in this area. You're not supposed to be travelling off to the coast, so someone mentioned we could swim out of Ballyronan. I've lived four miles from Ballyronan all my life and it never occurred to me to swim in the Lough, I always would have gone to the coast to swim. Our sister group in Carrickfergus don't have the same experience of swimming in the fresh water, which gets to be a lot colder than the sea. We would get the water iced over, so it's particularly cold. About eight of them came down one day and we did an ice breaker swim at the slipway in Ballyronan Marina. Jo McCanny, Vinnie Niblock, Ricky Holmes and Mary O'Hagan with her son Devin getting ready for a swim in Moortown, Co Tyrone, last week. Mary suffers from a number of chronic illnesses, and open water swimming provides the perfect alternative to the more stuffy atmosphere of the swimming pool. I have several chronic illnesses, one of which is fibromyalgia, and the swimming pool for me is so noisy, so bright and so loud that I invariably will come out just feeling awful, she said. A big part of outdoor swimming is being out in nature. When we are swimming in Ballyronan, I've had sygnats flying over my head, moor hens swimming around me, it's a totally different experience. You see it more and more over lockdown. People are out climbing mountains, hiking and swimming. People have made their way back to nature and are finding what's helping them mentally. It's a very theraputic thing. When you get into cold water, you cannot be thinking about anything. You can't think about a bill you have to pay, or the three days behind you are with home schooling. You can only think about what you're doing at that time. You have to be in the moment because you're in such an extreme environment with the temperature. There is nothing else to think about and the fact you're there, in nature, in the cold water, completely clears your mind. It's like pushing the reset button for so many people. Vinnie making his way back to shore. Of course, alongside the great benefits open water swiming brings, there are obvious risks, but Mary says the Bluetits have a system in place to ease new swimmers into life with the group. You have to be very mindful of the risks, she said. I learned from the experience of the people I was swimming with. When someone comes new to our group, I'll take them one on one and guide them the whole way in. Everybody's body is different. What I can tolerate, others might not be able to. I have a good cold water tolerance now, but someone else who is very new might only be in a couple of minutes. The more experienced guide the less experienced. That's not to say I'm responsible for them, they have to make their own decisions. With the very idea of submerging yourself in icy water enough to make a lot of people grimace, the group members get a lot of comments when they are out and about. The Battery, Moortown, Co Tyrone, is one location the swimmers have used. Mary, though, likes to turn the tables on those asking the questions. We get that a lot. I'll be coming out of the water and people will be saying we're not wise, she said. But I say to them, 'you're not wise'. If they only knew the benefits they can get from that water. That person could be sitting at home maybe taking ten different medications from their GP. If they would take themselves out and experience what we're doing, it would make a difference. For me, I had read about the benefits of it and thought I would try it. From the first day I was hooked. You get a real sense of achievement and come out feeling like you can do anything, take on the world. That's what it does for you. Mary even goes as far as to say it is the open water swimmers who are closer to normality than those who baulk at the idea. It's all attitude. 90 percent of it is in your mind. Your body can cope with it, it's just your mind you have to convince, she said. We all live in these lovely super-heated houses now and we go to bed with electric blankets and we fear getting out into the cold. That's not the way humans were designed to be. We lived in caves, we dressed in furs and we were exposed to all these different things we aren't any more. Our bodies are not designed to cope with living in comfort 24-7. WATCH an extended interview with Mary at the site of a swim in Moortown, County Tyrone here. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) Some local governments in Metro Manila have started releasing the required advance payments to AstraZeneca so as not to forfeit the COVID-19 vaccine doses they pre-ordered from the British-Swedish pharmaceutical firm. The release of funds came after President Rodrigo Duterte permitted local governments to make down payments beyond 15% of the contract amount last week. Paranaque Mayor Edwin Olivarez on Wednesday disclosed they paid an initial P9,606,000 for 200,000 vaccine doses that cost around P50 million in total. Nag-down payment na po kami nung 20% (We already gave the required 20% down payment), Olivarez said at the Kapihan sa Manila Bay forum. San Juan City Mayor Francis Zamora also said they paid the down payment for 100,000 shots on Monday. Kung hindi natin ito gawin, mawawala ang allocation natin, Zamora told CNN Philippines in an interview on Tuesday. [Translation: If we do not do this, we will lose our allocation.] Valenzuela City Mayor Rex Gatchalian, meanwwhile, said they deposited their advance payment on Monday for 640,000 doses. We sent them our down payment based on the agreement, he said in an interview with CNN Philippines on Tuesday. Quezon City Mayor Joy Belmonte also told CNN Philippines they handed over their advance payment for 1.1 million doses two days ago. Last Friday, Manila Mayor Isko Moreno also announced they released an initial P38.4 million for 800,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. A number of LGUs signed tripartite agreements with AstraZeneca and the national government to procure their own anti-coronavirus shots. But some Metro Manila mayors revealed they encountered issues with their vaccine purchase since existing rules allow them to only make down payments of up to 15 percent of the contract price. AstraZeneca is asking for a 20% advance payment. CNN Philippines Correspondent Gerg Cahiles contributed to this report. People walk by a building owned by Donald Trump on Wall Street, one of numerous properties of the former president being investigated by a Manhattan court. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R Vance Jr fought for a year-and-a-half to get access to former president Donald Trumps tax records. Now, thanks to a US Supreme Court ruling, he will soon have them. But what will that mean for the Democrats investigation into Mr Trumps business affairs? Former prosecutors say the trove of records could give investigators new tools to determine whether Mr Trump lied to lenders or tax officials, before or after he took office. Prosecutors look for discrepancies in paperwork. For example, if Trump told the IRS hes broke and lenders that hes rich, thats just the type of discrepancy they could build a case around, said Duncan Levin, a former federal prosecutor who worked on a wide range of white-collar cases as Mr Vances chief of asset forfeiture. These documents are a very important piece of the jigsaw puzzle, Mr Levin said. Whether Mr Trumps records will contain evidence of a crime is uncertain. The former president has argued for years that he broke no laws and has been unfairly targeted by Democrats for political reasons. The tax records might be of limited use in the district attorneys investigation. Mr Trump went to extraordinary lengths to keep his federal income tax returns from becoming public, but those arent the only valuable documents included in this haul. His accounting firm, Mazars USA, is supposed to turn over not only the final versions of his tax returns, but also draft versions of those returns and any and all statements of financial condition, annual statements, periodic financial reports, and independent auditors reports held by the company. That could give state prosecutors an open book into Mr Trumps finances, said Adam D Citron, a former state prosecutor and partner at Davidoff Hutcher & Citron. Its really the kitchen sink. Examining those other documents could be key to determining whether Mr Trump or his companies gave tax authorities different information about his income than they presented to other officials, like banks and business partners. When the district attorneys investigation first began, one of the initial subpoenas sent to the Trump Organisation asked for information about payments Mr Trumps former lawyer, Michael Cohen, arranged to women who had claimed to have had extramarital sexual encounters with Mr Trump. Mr Cohen has said Mr Trumps company reimbursed him for one of those payments, to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels, disguising it in the form of legal fees. It isnt clear, though, whether Mr Trumps tax records will add much to that part of the probe. The New York Times, which obtained years of Mr Trumps tax data, wrote that it contained no new revelations about the payment to Ms Daniels and didnt include any itemised payments to Mr Cohen. The district attorneys office has been investigating some of the arrangements Mr Trump made to reduce his tax bill. Data in the returns could be essential in analysing whether any of those manoeuvres crossed legal lines. Prosecutors have questioned whether Mr Trump had chronically exaggerated the value of his assets to banks and insurance companies. Read More A CEO who slashed his own pay by $1 million and upped his employees' minimum salary to $70,000 has said billionaire philanthropy is 'one of capitalism's biggest PR scams'. Dan Price, founder and CEO of the credit-card processing company Gravity Payments, hit out at billionaires who enjoy praise for their charitable giving when they actually donate a smaller fraction of their fortunes than the average American. Price said the average billionaire donates just 1 percent to charity each year while research from Giving USA shows the average American parts with 2 percent of their fortune. The 36-year-old entrepreneur, who became a millionaire at the age of 31, also cast doubt on the motives behind philanthropic giving among the nation's richest claiming it 'helps them avoid having to face steeper bills' by paying more taxes. Price weighed in on the debate as Washington state lawmakers are currently mulling a billionaire wealth tax that, if passed, will implement a 1 percent tax on people who have more than $1 billion in wealth. Price gained instant recognition in 2015 when he announced he was raising the minimum wage at his Seattle headquarters to $70,000 and lowering his own wage from $1.1 million to $70,000 to match his staff. A CEO who slashed his own pay by $1 million and upped his employees' minimum salary to $70,000 has said billionaire philanthropy is 'one of capitalism's biggest PR scams'. Dan Price (right), founder and CEO of the credit-card processing company Gravity Payments, pictrued in 2019 with an employee cutting the ribbon on his Idaho site Price hit out at billionaires who enjoy praise for their charitable giving when they actually donate a smaller fraction of their fortunes than the average American Price slammed the so-called philanthropists who benefit from 'glowing articles, a hospital named after you and a massive tax write off' when they donate to charity despite donating a smaller proportion of their wealth, in a Twitter post Sunday. 'One of capitalism's biggest PR scams is the 'philanthropist.' The average billionaire donates 1% of their fortune to charity yearly - less than non-billionaires,' he wrote. 'But when you donate $200 you don't get glowing articles, a hospital named after you and a massive tax write off.' The businessman shared a link to an Observer article detailing The Chronicle of Philanthropy 2020 ranking of top charitable contributions. The ranking found that, while major corporations and their wealthy owners benefited from record profits during the pandemic, by proportion, they donated record low amounts to causes in 2020. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos was the top charitable donor in 2020, the ranking found, but his increase in donations did not correspond with his increase in wealth. Stocks in Amazon surged as people turned to online orders as retailers shuttered and stay-at-home orders were issued. As a result, Bezos' already bulging wallet ballooned further with his net worth now standing at an estimated $196 billion, according to Forbes. Price with employees at the opening of his Idaho office in 2019. Price said the average billionaire donates just 1 percent to charity each year while research from Giving USA shows the average American parts with 2 percent of their fortune In 2020, Bezos pledged $10 billion to the Bezos Earth Fund - his venture launched in February 2020 to invest in scientists, activists and other organizations with the aim of tackling climate change. However the fund handed out just $791 million in grants in 2020, according to the Chronicle. He also donated $100 million to food bank charity Feeding America. Based on these figures, MarketWatch reported Bezos donated just .5 percent of his net worth last year - a quarter of the 2 percent the average American donates each year. As well as the significantly lower proportion of philanthropy to total wealth, Price blasted billionaire philanthropists such as Bezos as he said they pay far less in charitable donations than they would pay if that money was included in their taxable income. 'In reality, the amount [billionaires] donate is a fraction of what they would pay if their tax rates were in line with the working class,' he told MarketWatch. While people donate to causes for 'various reasons', Price pointed out that billionaires benefit from philanthropy for tax reason. 'I think billionaires donate for various reasons, but it's clear that giving away the equivalent of what's in their couch cushions helps them avoid having to face steeper bills that would actually make a difference in solving systemic problems,' he said. Data shows Jeff Bezos (pictured) donated just .5 percent of his net worth last year - a quarter of the 2 percent the average American donates each year Price's comments come as he has publicly supported a bill currently being debated by lawmakers in Washington state which would ultimately tax wealthy business owners like him a higher amount. If passed, the HB 1406 bill would be the US's first ever net-worth tax of any state and would apply a 1 percent levy to people with a net worth over $1 billion. Bezos, who has often come under fire over his tax payments, alone would pay almost $2 billion a year in tax under the proposed law. The outgoing Amazon boss, together with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Mackenzie Scott, would account for around $4.8 billion a year in payments to the state if it passes. Price said the bill could help plug the state's budget shortfalls and would help correct the current system where low-income households pay almost 18 percent of their income in taxes compared to 3 percent or less for the highest-income households. He hit back at the argument that 'billionaires don't need to pay taxes because they already donate.' The Seattle office of Gravity Payments. Price also cast doubt on the motives behind philanthropic giving among the nation's richest claiming it 'helps them avoid having to face steeper bills' by paying more taxes 'In reality, the amount they donate is a fraction of what they would pay if their tax rates were in line with the working class,' he told MarketWatch. Price hit headlines in 2015 when he pledged a minimum salary of $70,000 for all staff in his Seattle headquarters by cutting up to 90 percent from his own $1.1 million pay day as he said he was 'sick of being part of the problem.' 'Previously, I was making a million dollars a year and people working for me were making $30,000 a year and that's wrong. I was feeding into the problem,' he said at the time. Four years later, he raised the minimum salary for his Idaho employees by $10,000 with immediate effect and then to $70,000 by 2024. The group of employees, who previously worked at ChargeItPro before Gravity Payments bought the company three years ago, were being paid a minimum salary of $40,000 a year. Last year when the pandemic struck businesses and millions lost jobs nationwide, Price said he avoided layoffs by asking employees to take a temporary pay cut. Staff were later paid back. The Bachelorette has a set filming location, according to Reality Steve. Warner Bros. and ABC have had to deal with unprecedented times during the coronavirus pandemic in finding accommodations for production. The show has had to film within a bubble of sorts to keep contestants safe from the virus. While doing so, the show also must maintain its aspirational, fantasy-like atmosphere. Prior to the pandemic, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette would start filming at Bachelor Mansion before traveling around the world. With new safety protocols in play in 2020 and 2021, the show must stay at one location for production. [Spoiler alert: This article contains predictions about next season of The Bachelorette.] Matt James and Chris Harrison on The Bachelor | Craig Sjodin via Getty Images Who is predicted to be the next lead for The Bachelorette Reality Steve had originally predicted that Katie Thurston will be the next lead of the show. But he said now ABC is reconsidering following the fallout from Chris Harrison and Rachel Lindsays interview on Extra that caused the host to step down. Viewers are rooting for Michelle Young, Bri Springs, and Abigail Heringer to carry the next season of the show. Not in the running? Predicted winner of The Bachelor, Rachael Kirkconnell, who has been embroiled in controversy for weeks. Harrison and Kirkconnell have both had to apologize for their recent words and pictures. With Harrison stepping down from the franchise temporarily, the host for next season remains unknown as well. But The Bachelorettes filming location is reportedly already set while the show must find a replacement for Harrison if his break from the franchise extends. Reality Steve said this is The Bachelorette filming location (SPOILER): Next season of the Bachelorette will begin filming in last half of March in New Mexico. No host or Bachelorette has been decided yet. Not 100% confirmed yet, but Im hearing the location is the Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort & Spa about 20 min outside of Albuquerque pic.twitter.com/dxUKCs1jo5 RealitySteve (@RealitySteve) February 24, 2021 RELATED: Reality Steve: Why The Bachelor Production Company Has Sued the Spoiler Multiple Times Reality Steve predicted on Twitter that The Bachelorette will film at the Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort and Spa near Albuquerque, New Mexico. He shared photos of the resort, which features a circular pool amidst the desert views. The hotel touts fun activities on its website that are perfectly suitable for dates on the show. The Bachelorette, if it films at this hotel, could take advantage of the horse stables, bike riding, Jeep tours, hot air ballooning, and fly fishing on the hotel grounds. Viewers would likely consider this a major upgrade from Clare Crawley and Tayshia Adams season of The Bachelorette. Their season took place at La Quinta Resort & Club during the blistering heat of California summer. Matt James season of The Bachelor filmed at the Nemacolin Resort in Farmington, Pennsylvania. The four-star resort appeared classic and luxurious on-screen while boasting beautiful views in the Pennsylvania fall. If The Bachelorette films at Reality Steves predicted resort, the sunny desert vibes will definitely give a different ambiance to viewers. What Reality Steve knows about the next season of The Bachelorette The blogger predicted on his website RealitySteve.com that The Bachelorette will begin filming in the third week of March and filming will solely take place in the United States. While there had been speculation before that Michelle couldnt be the next lead due to timing issues, production being pushed back could definitely make room for her to be the bachelorette. Before, Michelle would have still been in the race for Matts heart on the show when bachelorette production would have begun. But now, with it pushed back, the elementary school teacher could definitely be in the running. See the end of the womens journey with Matt on The Bachelor, Mondays at 8 p.m. on ABC. [February 24, 2021] The Auxtera Project Launches to Make Justice More Accessible to Vulnerable Populations The Auxtera Project, a charitable initiative seeking to make justice more accessible by donating digital investigation software and the voluntary services of digital forensic examiners to organizations supporting vulnerable populations, has officially launched. The initiative is now accepting applications from potential beneficiaries such as non-profit, charitable and public sector organizations, with demonstrable financial need, that work with children, racial and ethnic minorities and those who are financially disadvantaged. Founded by employees of Magnet Forensics, a developer of digital investigation software, The Auxtera Project was created with the aim of bringing together the digital forensics community to help ensure that a lack of digital forensic technology and trained personnel would not stand in the way of justice, the safety of children, or the protection of other vulnerable populations. "We believe that everyone, regardless of age, gender, race or financial well-being, should have equal access to justice," said Magnet Forensics founder and chief technology officer, ad Saliba. "Digital investigations haven't just played a crucial role in putting our worst criminals behind bars. They've helped rescue victims and exonerate innocent people of crimes they didn't commit. Without access to it, children, racial and ethnic minorities and the financially disadvantaged only become more vulnerable." Digital evidence has become an important element of the justice system as many investigations now include a digital element. Successful prosecutions and defenses often hinge on critical digital evidence such as images, emails and location data. But the tools used to handle this data and the technical personnel that operate them can be cost prohibitive for vulnerable populations, leaving them at a stark disadvantage. All beneficiaries of The Auxtera Project will receive Magnet Forensics' digital investigation platform, Magnet AXIOM. In addition to the software, beneficiaries in North America will be eligible to be matched with a volunteer from a roster of highly accomplished digital forensic examiners to help guide their investigations. These volunteers have decades of combined experience in performing digital forensic investigations at leading public and private sector organizations. "I'm volunteering for The Auxtera Project because I know that digital forensics examiners can make an incredible difference for at-risk groups that don't normally have access to them," said Lodrina Cherne, the principal security advocate at Cybereason. "Magnet Forensics is bringing the digital forensics community together for an important cause: to improve access to justice for all." Applicants looking for more information about The Auxtera Project can attend two video information sessions hosted by Magnet Forensics on March 3 at 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. EST and March 24 at 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. EST. ABOUT MAGNET FORENSICS Magnet Forensics is a developer of digital investigation software that acquires, analyzes, reports on, and manages evidence from computers, mobile devices, IoT devices and the cloud. The company's software is used by more than 4,000 public and private sector organizations in over 90 countries and has been helping investigators fight crime, protect assets and guard national security since 2011. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005223/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] We hear that President Biden wants to change the tough approach that the Trump administration set against Cuba. He wants dialogue, whatever that means, with a dictatorship. How can you talk to a regime that locks up its own people? From Miami to other cities, Cuban-Americans will remember today the 25th anniversary of a terrible massacre over the Florida Straits. On this day in 1996, four young men on a humanitarian mission were killed by the Cuban Air Force. Our friends at Capitol Hill Cubans recall what happened that awful day. This is from Senior U.S. District Judge Lawrence King in the civil lawsuit against the Castro regime and the Cuban Air Force (FAR): The government of Cuba, on February 24th 1996,in outrageous contempt for international law and basic human rights, murdered four human beings in international airspace over the Florida Straits. The victims were Brothers to the Rescue pilots, flying two civilian unarmed planes on a routine humanitarian mission, searching for rafters in the waters between Cuba and the Florida Keys. As the civilian planes flew over international waters, a Russian built MiG 29 of the Cuban Air Force, without warning, reason, or provocation blasted the defenseless planes out of the sky with sophisticated air-to-air missiles in two separate attacks. The pilots and their aircraft disintegrated in the mid-air explosions following the impact of the missiles. The destruction was so complete that the four bodies were never recovered. Mig 29 with Russian markings. Photo credit: Vitaly V. Kuzmin (cropped), CC BY-SA 4.0 license. What was "the crime"? They were flying over international waters, looking for rafters and advising the U.S. Coast Guard. It was a humanitarian act that posed no threat to the Cuban regime. The four victims were Armando Alejandre, Jr. (45 years old); Carlos Alberto Costa (29); Mario Manuel de la Pena (24); and Pablo Morales (29). Three of these young men were U.S. citizens, and the fourth was a legal resident. On behalf of their families, I call on the Biden administration to remember that nothing has changed in Cuba. To my knowledge, the regime has never apologized for the criminal act. PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk). Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. Donald Trump will leave office today, but what has he left behind in and Syria and what will challenges will his predecessor face? The Trump administration inherited the Syrian file whilst it was going through its worst early days. In early 2017, when Trump took power, the Assad regime, backed by Iran and Russia, had managed to displace more than 10 million Syrians and take control of large swathes of territory once held by different opposition factions. There were attempts to help the regime restore international legitimacy through bringing it back to the Arab League and opening a number of embassies representing it in several countries, especially by those who feared the rise of political Islam. The Trump administration eventually managed to outline a coherent policy on Syria only two years ago, the confrontation of Assads regime part of its confrontation with Iran and implementing a policy of extreme economic pressure. The administration also threw its weight behind the political process represented by the call for enforcing UN Resolution 2254, supporting the work of the constitutional committee and backing and giving legitimacy to those who claim to represent the Syrian political opposition. Here, the weakness of the Trump administrations Syria policy emerged, with moves contradicting the crux of its strategy, which rested on not recognizing the military triumph of Russia and the Assad regime in the war and preventing them from taking political advantage of the victory which Russia seeks to obtain through the constitutional committee. Arguing that the constitutional committee is the practical implementation of Resolution 2254 is a political and legal mistake since the constitutional committees formation decision came in the framework of an agreement by the Sochi process countries: Iran, Russia and Turkey. It was not part of the political negotiations according to Resolution 2254. The formation of the committee itself and defining the mechanisms of its work were a gain by Russia on the back of its bleak military triumph, parlaying this into a major political victory, the polar opposite of the declared US policy of not recognizing Russias military victory in Syria with which the Trump administration once complied. The political transition: The Assad regimes perspective The Trump administration has allowed the Assad regime and Russia to impose their own interpretation of political transition via the constitutional committee formed by the Sochi conference. This was clarified by the late foreign minister of the Assad regime, Walid Al-Muallem, who was quoted by Reuters on March 12, 2016, as stating: The Syrian governments understanding of the term political transition is that [Syria] is transitioning from the current constitution to another constitution and transitioning from the current government to another government with the participation of the other side. This makes it clear that the regimes vision and interpretation of the political transition process provided for in the Geneva Communique and Resolutions 2118 of 2013 and 2254 of 2015 is that it is merely transitioning from one constitution to another and from one regime-approved government to another, a vision expressed by Assad regime figures on more than one occasion since the Geneva Communique was issued. The regimes ally Russia has expressed the same vision, as seen in regular comments by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and in every Russian statement on Syria. The latest of these statements was made during Lavrovs last visit to Damascus when he voiced support for holding a presidential election regardless of the outcome of the work of the constitutional committee. This indicates that the Trump administration supported and recognized the victories of Russia and the Assad regime through recognition and support of the Russian-led constitutional committee. This constituted an unjustified and incomprehensible mechanism backing Moscows vision, influence and investments in the Syrian war. The core rules of procedure for Sochis constitutional committee A noteworthy aspect of this is that the Trump administration, which has supported the work of the constitutional committee, has never imposed even the faintest bit of pressure on Russia and the Assad regime to prevent them from imposing their conditions on the Core Rules of Procedure governing the work of the constitutional committee. These rules represented a clear intensification of US submission to the will of the Assad regime and its Russian ally at the expense of all international resolutions, to the extent that we can say straightforwardly that these rules have clearly pulverized and made a mockery of Resolution 2254 of 2015. The participatory approach According to the Core Rules of Procedure, we are not dealing with a negotiation-based political process in which two or three parties participate if we add civil society to the regime or the opposition. What emerged, however, was a workshop involving members from across the political spectrum with a wide range of differing affiliations. We find this participatory approach enshrined in a number of principles on which the Sochi constitutional committee was created, according to its internal regulations, with the most important of these being: The rule of individual members votes, as opposed to delegations or representatives votes: When there is a political or negotiation process between two sides, those two sides supposedly enjoy parity as two equal adversaries, each of which has its own will independent of the other. If we assume that there are two negotiation delegations, each of which is made up of 10 members, each delegate among them shall have one voice, one opinion and one position, not 10 voices. The principle of individual member votes proves that the core and essential point of what is happening in the committee is a participatory workshop involving members with different affiliations. Those members vote on an individual basis, not as a bloc or an opposition delegation, although this is a self-evidently vital and fundamental rule of negotiating delegations which nobody is being prompted to comply with or provide for. The Sochil constitutional committees Core Rules of Procedure, specifically Paragraph 13 of Article 3, stipulates the following: While large and small groups within the Constitutional Committee put forward proposals and take decisions by consensus where possible, voting otherwise requires support from a minimum of 75% of members in the respective body (i.e., 113 members present and voting in the large body, 34 members present and voting in the small body). This 75% voting threshold is to be a fixed feature. After reading this article which needs no further interpretation, it becomes clear to us that in the Sochi constitutional committee, were not witnessing a political process or a process of political negotiation, as members of the committee claim. Instead, this is simply a joint workshop whose outcomes are put to the vote on an individual basis. If we assume that the entire delegation representing the opposition and the entire delegation representing civil society voted in favor of a certain resolution, this does not mean the resolution is approved unless 13 members of the regimes delegation vote in favor. This ensures that any vote is, in fact, consistent with the Assad regimes and Russias worldview and vision which does not recognize the opposition as a party to the negotiations. For this reason, the regime embraced the individual-centered vote. If there had been a political negotiation or a technical process carried out as part of a political negotiation, the representative vote rule should have been embraced, with a vote for the regime versus a vote for the opposition and a vote for civil society. Those who agreed to pass this Core Rules of Procedure made a dangerous error and bear responsibility for obliterating the political negotiation process and enabling the Assad regime administration to have total control over the results. All this means that there is no room for making any amendments or rewording any constitutional provision without the regimes approval. One might argue, of course, that the same rule also applies to the regime, which also cannot pass any resolution without the approval of the opposition and 13 members of the civil society delegation. Theoretically and technically, this is correct. Politically, however, it is absolutely wrong. Those seeking to have a genuine democratic new constitution for the country are the Syrian people, not the regime. The regime, as we all know, does not want this to happen. The choice of the individuals-centered voting rule enabled the regime to control the course of the constitutional process, whether we admit it is consistent with Resolution 2254 or not, without bearing responsibility for its obstruction or any consequences since the committee as we have said does not represent the regime, opposition and civil society, instead representing individuals belonging to these three blocs 2. The joint chairmanship rule Some argues that the joint chairmanship of the Sochi constitutional committee is evidence of balance and equality between the regime and opposition. Unfortunately, this is another misleading argument since, in the Sochi committee, we dont have three delegations, but single members in equal numbers who represent three political blocs. This, again, is totally different from having three delegations sitting around the negotiation table. The rule of joint chairmanship unequivocally clarifies this issue. Paragraphs 14, 15 and 16 of Article 4 of the Core Rules of Procedure speak of the powers of the two co-chairs who should proceed in consensus (as stipulated in paragraph 15). Together, the co-chairs have the functions of: chairing and guiding meetings and sessions; proposing and ensuring observance of rules of procedure; identifying and inviting speakers; promoting gender mainstreaming, and receiving and putting forward ideas on the work as may be appropriate (paragraph 16). This paragraph indicates that the co-chairs guide a host of respective members, not negotiation delegations. Therefore, every single member has the right to speak, raise whatever issues he or she wants and introduce any memoranda or proposals he or she deems appropriate. This is totally outlandish in the context of a political process. As we mentioned earlier, negotiation delegations should speak according to one vision, and one position for each delegation. In negotiation situations, none of the individual negotiation delegations members has the right to raise whatever subject he or she deems appropriate or even speak on that issue without first obtaining permission from the chair of his delegation. All this means that those who propagate the claim that the course of Sochi constitutional committee is part of the political trajectory either havent had access to the rule of procedures regulating their work, or have read it but insist on embracing the deceptive ideas put forward to the Syrian people. The Assad regime is, effectly, being given the key to approving the constitution Paragraph 23 of the Core Rules of Procedures Article 7 stipulated the following: . The Constitutional Committee shall agree on the means of popular approval and transposition into the Syrian legal order of the constitutional reform adopted by the Constitutional Committee, and it may seek the good offices of the Special Envoy as may be needed. Maybe this paragraph which came at the conclusion of the Core Rules of Procedure is the most dangerous provision. It not only destroys the political trajectory based on the Geneva Communique and Resolution 2254 but it also practically destroys the constitutional process. Unfortunately, inserting the term constitutional reform into the Syrian legal system, will lead us to the following possibilities: The first possibility: The Sochi constitutional committee could result in constitutional amendments, according to the jurisdiction of the committee. According to Paragraph 8 of the Core Rules of Procedures Article 1, the Constitutional Committee may review the 2012 Constitution including in the context of other Syrian constitutional experiences and amend the current constitution or draft a new constitution. In this case, the process of approving amendments or inserting them into the Syrian legal system will be governed by Article 150 of Bashar al-Assads 2012 constitution, which literally stipulates that: The President of the Republic, and a third of the members of the Peoples Assembly, might propose amending the Constitution; Any proposal for amending the Constitution shall state the text proposed for amendment and the reasons for making the amendment; As soon as the Peoples Assembly receives the proposal for amendment, it sets up a special committee to examine it. The Assembly discusses the proposal for amendment. If it is approved by a three quarters majority, the amendment shall be considered final, provided that it is also approved by the President of the Republic. This is the only path for the constitutional amendment in Syria according to the 2012 constitution, i.e. the approval of two thirds of the members of the Peoples Assembly provided that the president of the republic also approves the amendments. The second possibility: The committees work leads to a new constitution. If this happens, the new constitution can be approved only by referendum. This takes us to Article 116 of Syrias 2012 constitution which stipulates: The President of the Republic might call for a referendum on important issues which affect the higher interests of the country. The result of the referendum shall be binding and come into force as of the date of its announcement; and it shall be published by the President of the Republic. In both cases, the constitutional committee has a one-way path leading only to Bashar Al-Assad. Based on these points, as soon as a decree is issued by the criminal, Bashar Al-Assad, calling for holding a referendum or approving amendments, this means legitimizing the entire era of Bashar Al-Assad and all his heinous actions over the past years. For all these reasons, it would be useful for the incoming US administration, if it wishes to resolve the Syrian crisis, to return to work on implementing UN Security Council Resolution 2254 according to the sequence set out in the resolution rather than leaving Syrians fate in the hands of Astanas three parties or Moscow or Tehran. Several steps could be taken to help the Syrian people in parallel, including: First: Holding election for the opposition in which the greatest numbers of Syrians overseas shall participate in electing new leaders with popular legitimacy according to the recognized institutions of the opposition, who will be capable of making decisions in favor of the Syrians free from considerations of other regional conflicts which have caused harm to the Syrian cause. Second: Washington can exert pressures by holding a comprehensive international conference which leads to a serious political solution. Previous experiences, such as the Cambodian experience or the political transition in Romania which were significantly successful, could be helpful in this respect. Third: Setting a final deadline for the constitutional committee to reach outcomes and obtain approval for them by the UN Security Council, or face disbandment. Fourth: The UN shall outline monitoring mechanisms according to the internationally-recognized standards for the coming presidential election. Fifth: Redefining the mission of the UN special representative for Syria. All these are only suggestions. Without action to change course in Syria towards democracy for the long-suffering Syrian people without giving Iran upper hand of the future of Syria and without giving any minority group upper hand in any area in Syria the current horrendous situation will not change. Bassam Barabandi is a former Syrian diplomat who resides in Washington. This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Syrian Observer. But the officers who placed a mesh hood on Mr. Prude, then pressed his head into the pavement until he lost consciousness, will not be charged over his death, officials said Tuesday. [Rochester officers will not be charged in the death of Daniel Prude.] These incidents have challenged public trust and confidence in our criminal justice system, and history has unfortunately repeated itself once again in the death of Daniel Prude, said Letitia James, New Yorks attorney general. Heres what you need to know: How Mr. Prude died Mr. Prude, 41, was visiting his brother in Rochester in March when he had an apparent psychotic episode and ran into the street, where officers found him naked, handcuffed him and threw him to the ground. Mr. Prude had told at least one passer-by that he had been infected with the coronavirus, and he started spitting after he was restrained. Officers placed a mesh protective hood over his head. The police then held Mr. Prudes head down on the pavement for two minutes. He had to be resuscitated at the scene, but he died in the hospital a week later. The medical examiner ruled that his death was a homicide. If you could have one superpower, what would it be? I was thinking it might be fun to be able to fly, although I probably wouldnt be able to use GPS up there, which could definitely be a problem. Who doesnt love a superhero? From movies and comic books to T-shirts and bobble heads, the idea of a superhero appeals to people of all ages. They are proof that it only takes one person to change everything, to fix the world. I think of Purim, which falls at the end of February (25-26), as a biblical version of a superhero story. There are the courageous heroes: Queen Vashti, who refused to obey her husbands drunken requests, and Mordechai and Esther, who stood up for the Jewish people despite an uncertain future. Then there is the central villain, Haman, whose evil plot could have wiped out the Jewish of Persia. Not only was he defeated, but we get to commemorate his demise by enjoying never-ending variations of hamantashen. ADVERTISEMENT My daughter had a Purim bat mitzvah a few years ago and my son had his bar mitzvah on Purim just last year. Its the one time in life that you enjoy people booing at you while you are trying to read a story. While we celebrated Micah, we were blissfully unaware that life as we knew it would change just one week later. Hugs were replaced by elbow bumps, masks replaced wearing lipstick, and hand sanitizer became a prized possession. We even gave my mom a keychain that proclaimed that we love her more than toilet paper. Each year, Purim reminds us that there are many types of disguises beyond my super-cute Vashti costume. This year, our masks are more than just figurative, and the threat of a deadly virus is real. But maybe our true superpower is that even in darkness, we are able find moments of light. Just as Haman was defeated and his evil intentions foiled, so too will we defeat this pandemic, discard our masks, and wear lipstick once again. Chag Purim Sameach, wishing everyone a happy, healthy Purim. I hope you are able to check out these PJ Library and PJ Our Way books about courage. Lilah Tov, Good Night Written by Mister G Illustrated by Noar Lee Naggan Ages: 2 to 3 Years Synopsis This family is leaving home on a long trip under cover of night. We dont know why theyre leaving or where theyre going, but we do know on their journey, they take comfort in the natural world around them Nachshon, Who Was Afraid to Swim Written by Deborah Bodin Cohen Illustrated by Jago Ages: 5 to 7 Years Synopsis As the Israelites rush to leave Egypt after being freed from slavery, young Nachshon is the first to brave the water that must be crossed, even though he is afraid to take the plunge. Seymour, the Formerly Fearful Written by Eve B. Feldman Ages: 9+ Synopsis Heights, bugs, deep water: you name it, Seymours terrified of it. This becomes a VERY big problem when his Israeli cousin comes for a visit. Can Seymour keep his number one fear a secret? To register to receive free books from PJ Library for kids birth through 8 1/2, go to www.pjlibrary.org and for kids 8 1/2 through 12 years, go to www.pjourway.org to sign up. Jennifer Baer works as the Director of Family and Teen Engagement at the Jewish Federation of St. Louis and has worked in the nonprofit sector for over 20 years. Born in Memphis, Tenn., she holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Texas in Austin and a masters degree in social work from Washington University. Most civilians were killed by suicide bombs and booby traps according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said on Thursday that it documented the killing of at least 102 civilians during the month of September, in illegal operations by parties to the conflict and the controlling forces in Syria. SNHR stated in its report that at least 102 civilians including 15 children, 10 women, and three medical personnel were killed this September by those involved in the conflict and the controlling forces in Syria, indicating that suicide bombings and booby traps were the main reason behind the deaths. The report indicated that 16 civilians including two children and one woman were killed by the Syrian regime forces, one at the hands of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and three including one child and one woman at the hands of the armed opposition/National Army. He added that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) killed five civilians, including a child, last September. The report also documents the killing of 77 civilians, including 11 children and eight women, at the hands of miscellaneous parties. The report pointed out that three medical personnel were killed last September, one of them due to torture in a detention center of the Syrian regime and two by other sides. In September, SNHR also documented the killing of 12 civilians due to torture, 10 of whom were killed at the hands of the Syrian regime, and two at the hands of SDF. The report indicated that civilians were killed due to mines last September as well, in various governorates and regions in Syria. It also documented a massacre due to a vehicle-borne explosive device in the Aleppo governorate. 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. EBSCO school databases are still exposing kids to porn, NCOSE says Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A national anti-pornography advocacy group has rejected a cease-and-desist letter it received from a leading K-12 research database provider used in many public schools after warning for years that the company is exposing students to sexually explicit content. The Washington-based National Center on Sexual Exploitation said Tuesday in response to the demand letter from EBSCO Information Services that despite years of pressure, the provider continues to allow live links to hardcore pornographic material and prostitution sites to be accessed by minors through its search databases. With services widely used in many U.S. public school systems and libraries, NCOSE claims that EBSCO allows eroticized stories and material that promotes commercial sex and sex toys in its databases. NCOSE, which regularly pressures companies to avoid promoting or profiting off of pornography, has long asked EBSCO to clean up its databases that are accessible to minors. The nonprofit warns that children using the databases for school purposes could be exposed to pornographic content. The letter from EBSCO, sent in October, demanded that NCOSE rescind information from a blog post about the content EBSCO had permitted. But NCOSE maintains its post is "appropriate and truthful." After alerting EBSCO to pornographic content on its K-12 databases several times since February 2017, EBSCO assured us it would address these concerns and in some instances, it did," Dawn Hawkins, NCOSE senior vice president and executive director, said in a statement shared with The Christian Post Tuesday. "We believed EBSCO was trying to improve its curation processes and training for school administrators." NCOSE formally contacted EBSCO in February 2017 to alert it of its placement on its "Dirty Dozen List," an annual list produced by the nonprofit to raise awareness of companies or entities that are said to be "facilitators of sexual exploitation in our society and culture." NCOSE asked EBSCO to either remove sexually explicit content or, at the very least, adequately warn users that the sexually explicit content may appear on its K-12 products. But last month, EBSCO's letter demanded the group take down a "Back to School" blog post that urged parents to be aware that problems continue on EBSCO databases and their children might be at even greater risk to exposure during virtual schooling. NCOSE sent a response letter on Oct. 30 rejecting that EBSCO's assertion that the organization's claims were not truthful. In the letter written by lawyer Douglas Baldridge, NCOSE attached even more evidence of explicit content found in the company's databases in the past two weeks. In a Wednesday phone interview, NCOSE Director of Corporate and Strategic Initiatives Lina Nealon elaborated that her group was profiling EBSCO because of the tremendous influence they have with students and schools. Nealon is a mom of three children in a public school system. She said she was able to access the material "quite easily" on their school-issued Chromebooks. "We're now waiting to hear back from EBSCO's legal counsel," she told CP. "The fact that we are able to so easily find this material, that parents are finding it, that other organizations are finding it, but EBSCO continues to claim that their databases are clean and safe. Now we're finding that the material is almost more egregious than in the past." Asked about why there seems to be such a back-and-forth process where EBSCO has addressed some issues that NCOSE highlighted but then ignored and denied others, Nealon offered that she could only speculate. But she reasoned that EBSCO's business model is based on publishing numbers and titles. "So they seem to have a vested interest in keeping numbers high," she said. "And what we can gather is that they don't want to remove these [explicit] things because it would potentially impact their bottom line." These databases have been an issue for years, she added. Nealon said it's especially the case given how many children are doing virtual schooling due to the coronavirus pandemic. "Any corporation that is involved so closely with students or with children I believe should feel the weight of responsibility to do everything it can to ensure their health and well-being," Nealon contends. "And for EBSCO to claim that they're educating and empowering when instead they are actually endangering them is highly negligent, in my opinion." Founded in 1962, NCOSE is the leading national non-partisan organization exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sexual abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking and the public health harms of pornography. Sexual assault victim Reem al-Hajj describes the journey recovering from her trauma, writes Zaman Al-Wasl. After I was raped in 2010, the most painful thing for me was peoples insistence that I undergo a hymen repair operation to hide the crime committed against me and that I should not talk about the injustice that I had experienced. Of course, I understood that my mother, my lawyer, and my friends were saying this so that I forget what has happened and that life goes on. I lived in Syrian society, a society of appearances that are rotten underneath. I know what it means to be raped in the Arab world, and I know the corruption of this country and the extent of hatred against women in it. I know the extent of injustice and tyranny against me and against my sisters, and how everything that we experience is used against us. There is no logic, justice, fairness, truth, or moral law that accepts this. But because I know this does not mean I accept it or accept taking part in the injustice directed towards myself. Just as I rejected the injustice against my mother from her family and environment, I also rejected the injustice that has befallen other women. I had decided then that if no one would stand by me, I would stand by myself. And indeed, because I stood with truth and against social corruption, I was able, in a few months, to overcome the pain of the incident. I was and am still fair to myself. I healed myself, and I learned to acknowledge the truth and stand proudly as a person full of life, strength, and hope despite everything that has happened. I faced this indignity and did not allow it to make me doubt the value of myself, the importance of my life, the necessity of my voice, and my thinking. I stand against the crime that was committed against me, and most importantly, I reject any blame for anothers crime against me. For this, with truth and awareness and without any hesitation, I answered my mother, when she asked me if I was going to undergo the operation: If it is marriage you are worried about, if it is with a corrupt and unjust person who would blame me for my misfortune, I do not want it at all. If I cannot share with my husband one of the most difficult experiences of my life, I do not want such a husband. I want a partner with whom I can share the laughter and the tears, the joy, and the sadness. Someone to stand by me So no, a thousand times no, I will not go through this operation to hide such a crime I am who I am and I will not change for anyone. Sexual assault is a painful traumatic experience, but it gave me a new and clear insight into the corruption around me. Freedom was, and still is for me, freedom from corruption, from disease, and from the Syrian and Arab social dogma. Freedom is also freedom of justice and thought, freedom of the path to truth, and the path to a better future despite all circumstances. Through my freedom, a few months after the incident in 2010, I reconciled with the idea that I will not be able to build a happy and healthy life in such an environment. Of course, at that time I thought that I would be spending my whole life in Syria because I was not financially able to go abroad. And yet, I lived with tolerance and love towards myself, and fairness towards everyone else, both men and women. I did not allow a sick criminal to distort my image. Since the age of 21, I have been an intellectually independent person who lived on the principle of freedom. The crime itself is just that, a crime, which demands punishment for the criminal, not the victim. The truth is clear. Do not believe anyone who tells you that you are just a victim or a survivor of rape. Do not allow anyone to convince you that you are just a reaction to a crime. You are not broken, you are a whole person, despite and in spite of your experiences. You are thoughts, feelings, strength, weakness, life, and much more. One event does not make up the story of your life. 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. Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland rises via video-link during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada, on Jan. 26, 2021. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press) Feds Agree to Allow Canadians With Mental Illness to Receive Assisted Death The federal government has agreed with the amendment of a bill in the Senate that would allow Canadians suffering solely from mental illnesses to receive medical assistance in dying. Last week, senators wrapped up debates on Bill C-7, proposing an 18-month time limit that will repeal a clause banning people whose sole medical condition is a mental illness to access medical assisted dying (MAiD). The Liberal government has proposed to extend the interlude to two years. Bill C-7 aims to expand access to assisted dying to people experiencing intolerable suffering and who are not close to their natural death, which would bend the law into compliance with a 2019 Quebec Superior Court ruling that argued the exclusion of those with mental illnesses to be unconstitutional. Justice Minister David Lametti said he believes the exclusion is constitutional and he does not believe we are entirely ready to safely provide assisted dying to people with mental illnesses. We think 24 months is still an ambitious timeline to implement such an important change in Canadas MAiD (medical assistance in dying) policy but it still provides a fixed timeline in the relatively near future, Justice Minister David Lametti told the Commons. Once approved by the Commons, the bill will return to the upper house, where senators will decide whether to accept the changes or dig in their heels. The government is hoping to have the bill passed by both parliamentary chambers by Feb. 26 to meet the court-imposed deadline. During the two-year interlude, the government has proposed to create an expert panel that will conduct an independent review and, within one year, recommend the protocols, guidance, and safeguards that should apply to requests for assisted dying from people with a mental illness. Until the exclusion is lifted, senators had wanted to clarify that it does not apply to people with neurocognitive disorders like Alzheimers disease. However, the government rejected that amendment. The government also rejected another Senate amendment to allow people who fear developing competence-eroding conditions such as dementia to make advance requests for an assisted death. The government has also agreed to a modified version of another Senate amendment to require the collection of race-based data on who is requesting and receiving medical assistance in dying. It is proposing to expand that to include data on people with disabilities and to specify that the information be used to determine if there is the presence of any inequalityincluding systemic inequalityor disadvantage based on race, Indigenous identity, disability or other characteristics. That is in response to the strenuous opposition to Bill C-7 from disability rights advocates who maintain the bill sends the message that life with a disability is a fate worse than death. They argued that black and indigenous people with disabilitieswho are already marginalized and facing systemic discrimination in the health systemcould be induced to end their lives prematurely due to poverty and a lack of support services. The Conservatives and the New Democrats are critical of the Liberal governments responses to Bill C-7. Conservative MP Michael Barrett moved an amendment to the government motion, that would delete the proposed sunset clause on the mental illness exclusion. He said the government has ignored the concerns of disability rights advocates and that his party will not go along with the governments rush to pass a deeply flawed bill. NDP MP Charlie Angus criticized the unelected and unaccountable Senate for expanding assisted dying to people who are depressed. Bloc Quebecois MP Luc Theriault said his party will support the minority Liberal governments proposal. He said the Bloc would have liked to expand access to MAiD even further, but the bill has already made some important progress. The government will ask the court on Thursday to give the thrice-extended deadline one more monthuntil March 26. With files from The Canadian Press One lesson must not be lost as we move forward from this weeks intensely hard freeze: Infrastructure matters. When our water isnt clean, or doesnt flow at all, it wreaks havoc on every aspect of our lives. Over the last week, we went without showers, could not easily flush toilets and stood in long lines to replace dwindling drinking water supplies. For some, the pursuit of usable water became a full-time job. As boil water notices are lifted, and we work to repair cracked pipes, for most of us, life will begin to return to normal (pandemic normal). But for many Houstonians, unreliable water and wastewater infrastructure is a way of life. Some of our neighbors across the city deal with toilet problems and dirty water on a regular basis not just during intense storms. Sewage backs up into peoples homes and settles in the yards where children play. It creates a major health risk that no one should have to live with. Houston is in a position to help these residents but for years, it has taken the position that it wont, simply because it doesnt have to. For over a decade, Houston has kept tabs on sewage backing up into our neighbors homes as part of its required reporting to regulators. These reports reflect the overall ailing state of the citys wastewater system and document thousands more spills and millions of gallons of untreated sewage that have entered bayous where people canoe and fish and parks where kids play and people exercise all across the city for the last decade. Only when threatened with a lawsuit under the Clean Water Act, the city claimed a fix, in the form of a legal settlement with regulators, was imminent. The city publicly promised the solution would include a project to replace defective sewer connections in a low-income area of the city most affected by sewage backups into their homes. When the mayor and City Council voted to approve that settlement in the summer of 2019, they agreed to pay $4.4 million in fines and invest $2 billion in long-overdue infrastructure updates. But not a cent of this historic expenditure went toward the promised pipe-repair project to repair or replace the lines connecting homes and businesses to the citys infrastructure. Instead, the settlement approved by the city left low-income residents to figure out their sewage problems on their own or potentially face enforcement action. Although the city never explained why, the Trump administrations whittling down of the use of a policy that made community-centered environmental projects a part of settlements possibly stood in their way. As of this month, however, the new White House administration emphasized its support for community-centered projects and its commitment to undoing historical environmental harms to low-income communities, clearing the way for the city to deliver on its promise. This means the city can help residents with sewer problems by working with the Department of Justice to redirect a portion of its $4.4 million penalty toward the pipe-repair project promised more than three years ago. Nothing in the legal settlement prevents the city and the new administration from working together to make this change. Reinstating this project now would also resolve one of the major objections raised by Bayou City Waterkeeper to the current settlement, clearing at least one obstacle to its approval by a local judge. The time for the city to act is now. Once the settlement is approved, it will govern the citys actions to fix its sewer system for the next 15 years. The city has a choice to make: Will it rest on a settlement negotiated with an administration that spent four years eliminating water protections and increasing threats to public health? Or, as residents across the city work to repair their pipes and increasingly look to the city for help, will the city prioritize clean, reliable water for all and deliver the program it promised nearly three years ago? The choice should be obvious. Schlemmer is the legal director for Bayou City Waterkeeper, which uses law and science to push back against polluters and irresponsible developers, fill gaps in regulatory enforcement, and build local community power. By MICHAEL HILL and CAROLYN THOMPSON, The Associated Press Police officers who put a hood over the head of a mentally distraught Black man, then pressed his body against the pavement until he stopped breathing will not face criminal charges after a grand jury declined to indict them, New Yorks attorney general announced Tuesday. Daniel Prude, 41, died last March, several days after his encounter with police in Rochester, New York. Police initially described his death as a drug overdose. It went mostly unnoticed. But nightly protests erupted after body camera video was released nearly six months later following pressure from Prudes family. FILE In this file image taken from police body camera video provided by Roth and Roth LLP, a Rochester police officer puts a hood over the head of Daniel Prude, on March 23, 2020, in Rochester, N.Y. A grand jury voted not to charge officers shown on body camera video holding Prude down naked and handcuffed on a city street last winter until he stopped breathing. New York Attorney General Letitia James announced the decision Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021. (Rochester Police via Roth and Roth LLP via AP, File)AP Attorney General Letitia James, whose office took over the investigation, said her office had presented the strongest case possible to the grand jury, but couldnt persuade it that the officers had committed a crime. I know that the Prude family, the Rochester community and communities across the country will rightfully be disappointed by this outcome, said James, who traveled to Rochester to announce the grand jurys decision at a church near where Prude was fatally injured. She said she was bound to respect the grand jurys decision, but she also condemned a system that she said had frustrated efforts to hold law enforcement officers accountable for the unjustified killing of African Americans. New York State Attorney General Letitia James (AP Photo/Adrian Kraus)AP What binds these cases is a tragic loss of life in circumstances in which the death could have been avoided, said James, who, like the mayor of Rochester and the citys current and former police chiefs, is Black. One recognizes the influences of race, from the slave codes to Jim Crow, to lynching, to the war on crime, to the overincarceration of people of color: Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. And now Daniel Prude, she said. Lawyers for the seven police officers suspended over Prudes death have said the officers were strictly following their training that night, employing a restraining technique known as segmenting. They claimed Prudes use of PCP, which caused irrational behavior, was the root cause of his death. Calls were made to the officers attorneys. Matthew Rich, who represents four officers, said were still taking it in and that the attorneys would speak to the press later. Hundreds of protesters gathered Tuesday evening on the street where Prude was detained. Dianne Stengel places candles at the site of Daniel Prude's encounter with police officers a year ago in Rochester, N.Y., Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Adrian Kraus)AP The March 23 video of Prudes fatal encounter with officers was initially withheld by police in part because of concerns it would inflame street demonstrations occurring nationwide over George Floyds death. Ultimately released Sept. 4, it showed officers placing a mesh bag over Prudes head to stop him from spitting after they detained him for running naked through the streets. Prude had been evaluated at a hospital for odd behavior a day earlier, but he wasnt admitted. His family called police because they were concerned about Prudes safety after he bolted from the house. One officer pushed Prudes face against the ground, while another officer pressed a knee to his back. The officers held him down for about two minutes until he fell unconscious. He was taken off life support a week later. The system failed Daniel Prude again, Prude family lawyer Elliot Shields said of the grand jurys decision. It failed him on March 22 when he was released from the hospital. It failed him on the night of March 23 when the police used deadly force against him. And it failed him again today. Shields said Prudes brother, Joe Prude, was heartbroken. Officers Troy Taladay, Paul Ricotta, Francisco Santiago, Andrew Specksgoor, Josiah Harris and Mark Vaughn, along with Sgt. Michael Magri, were suspended after Prudes death became public. The officers will remain on leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation, according to Rochester police chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan. The Rochester police union said in a statement it would not immediately comment. The grand jury decision isnt likely to end scrutiny of the Rochester Police Department, which has been heavily criticized over the past year over numerous incidents involving allegations of excessive force. Rochesters mayor, Lovely Warren, who fired police chief LaRon Singletary over his handling of the Prude case, called the grand jury decision hard for many of us to understand. There are no words that can comfort a family who has lost their loved one in this tragic way, she said. Our actions going forward will ensure that Daniel Prudes death was not in vain. Some activists said that they never expected the officers to face charges. Historically, we can see when Black and brown people are killed across this nation, most times there is no indictment. However, it isnt any less offensive, any less hurtful, any less painful, said Ashley Gantt of Rochester, as she headed to protest the decision. Im disgusted. Most of the respondents say the move is due to the politician's work in Russia's favor. Most Ukrainians support the sanctions imposed against MP from the Opposition Platform - For Life Party Viktor Medvedchuk and his wife Oksana Marchenko. That's according to a survey conducted by the Rating Sociological Group on February 22-23, as reported on the agency's website on February 24. As many as 75% of the respondents said they are aware of the decision of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) of Ukraine to impose sanctions on Medvedchuk and his wife. Of these, 40% are "very well informed" about this, 35% have heard at least something, while 25% of the pollees said they heard about it for the first time. Read alsoSBU says sanctions slapped on Sportmaster over operations in CrimeaA total of 58% of the respondents support the NSDC decision, while 28% do not support it. Among those who are well aware of this decision, 73% declared their support, while 23% oppose it. Sociologists say, 52% of Ukrainians believe the decision to impose sanctions against Medvedchuk was caused by his pro-Russian efforts. Another 30% believe this was part of a showdown between oligarchs, 16% argue this was an attempt to get the pipeline back to state ownership, 13% say it was done at the behest of the United States, and 10% consider the move pressure on the opposition. Mechanics of the poll The poll was conducted through computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) using a random selection of cell numbers. The sample is representative of the adult population (aged 18 and older). Some 2,500 respondents were polled in all regions of Ukraine except Crimea and other Russia-occupied parts of Ukraine, namely certain districts in Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The margin of error does not exceed 2.0%. Sanctions on Viktor Medvedchuk On February 19, 2021, the NSDC made a decision to impose sanctions against 19 legal entities and eight individuals. In particular, sanctions shall be applied to Viktor Medvedchuk and his wife Oksana Marchenko. Sanctions are imposed on all their property and assets. According to NSDC secretary Oleksiy Danilov, the SBU is investigating a case under the article "financing of terrorism," and the latest sanctions were applied to Medvedchuk, Marchenko, and other persons precisely in connection with the said probe. The NSDC also made a decision to nationalize part of the Samara - Western Direction fuel pipeline, now owned by Prykarpatzapadtrans. Reporting by UNIAN Vance has been seeking eight years of tax returns covering 2011 to 2019 from Trumps longtime accountants at Mazars USA. Last fall, The New York Times reported that Trump paid only $750 in federal income tax in 2016, the year he won the presidential election, and again in 2017, his first year in office. He managed to keep his payments so low by claiming massive business losses, maneuvers that also allowed him to pay no income tax at all in 10 of the previous 15 years. Trump has spent decades inflating his wealth and his business acumen, which has also fed his desire to keep a lid on his financial records. Pride, as much as the legal perils he faces, has informed his efforts to keep Vance, other prosecutors and Congress from getting his tax returns. (Trump sued me for libel in 2006 for a biography I wrote, TrumpNation, alleging that the book misrepresented his business record and understated his wealth. Trump lost the suit in 2011.) 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. Coronavirus cases: Delhi records around 900 new COVID-19 cases in last 24 hours Delhi to make negative Covid RT-PCR test report must for arrivals from 5 states India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Feb 24: Amid significant increase in coronavirus cases, Delhi likely to make it essential for those arriving from those states to carry a negative Covid test report from Friday. Reportedly, travelers from Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab will need a negative coronavirus test report to enter Delhi from 26th February till 15th March. However, an official confirmation is awaited. Maharashtra is showing a daily surge in COVID-19 cases, according to an official of the Union Health Ministry. Kerala is showing an incremental decline, but the daily cases in absolute numbers is still high over there. Punjab, with its daily increase in cases, is also a cause of worry. Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh are also showing an increase in daily cases, the central official had said on Tuesday. In the wake of second wave fear, several states have even imposed fresh restrictions on interstate travel. The vibrant Indian diaspora in Mauritius is a "shining example" of the Indian values such as peace, pluralism and shared progress and universal brotherhood, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said during his address to the community here. Jaishankar arrived here in India's strategically key maritime neighbour in the Indian Ocean region on Sunday night from the Maldives on the last leg of his two-nation tour. On Wednesday, Jaishankar visited the Ganga Talao, considered to be the most sacred Hindu place in Mauritius, and offered prayers at the temple. "Offered prayers at the holy Ganga Talao this morning. Grateful to Foreign Minister Alan Ganoo, Culture Minister Avinash Teeluck and Agriculture Minister Maneesh Gobin for joining me", he said in a tweet. The minister met the members of the Indian community during an event on Tuesday and thanked them for keeping the faith and fervour alive in Mauritius. Feels like homecoming. Thank the vibrant Indian community for keeping our faith & fervour alive in Mauritius. A shining example of all that India stands for peace, pluralism, shared progress & universal brotherhood - values more relevant than ever today, he tweeted. I have travelled to many countries in my long career as a diplomat and more recent incarnation as the External Affairs Minister, but I must tell you that visiting Mauritius is always different, it feels actually like a homecoming. Every time I am here in your beautiful country, I realise how closely we are bound. To be amongst people like you, who continue to cherish and celebrate their Indian roots and traditions so vibrantly, this is actually a feeling which is very difficult to put in words, Jaishankar said. Whether it is Maha Shivratri, or Kavadee Thaipoosam, or indeed Ganesh Chaturthi or Holi, the Indian community here keeps its faith and fervour alive, the minister said. Similarly, I can taste the flavours of India every time I visit, be it gateau piment or the Dal-puri. And I hear it in the Hindi news on Mauritian radio and TV and indeed in the melody of the geet-gawai; and I see it in the colourful saris, the clothes, the dance, the music, some of which we had the pleasure of just witnessing, Jaishankar said. Mauritius is probably the only country in the world where there are a thousand socio-cultural Indian organisations, he said. You serve as a vital umbilical cord that nourishes and keeps alive our shared cultural and historical legacy and passes them on to succeeding generations, Jaishankar said. India has been demonstrating that in action during these difficult times of COVID-19 by supplying vaccines to over 74 countries and by making a commitment to vaccinate all the UN Peacekeepers in the world, he said. As for Mauritius, which is one of our closest friends and partners, it is only natural that we would gift vaccines as soon as our own vaccination programme started at home. At the Mauritian government's request, we also facilitated the arrival of 100,000 more vaccines. I want to give you a clear message, India has always stood by Mauritius through thick and thin; before, now and ever after, Jaishankar said. He said India will, as always, support the enhancement of Mauritius's own capacities in vital areas of maritime surveillance and security to address the challenges of an uncertain world. This unique trust with a half century record should inspire even greater confidence in future endeavours. What touches me very deeply every time I visit Mauritius is the pride that the Indian diaspora and Mauritians like you take in India's growth and rise, he said. According to a latest report, more than 200 Indian-origin persons occupy top leadership positions in at least 15 countries of the world, he said. Though I must say Mauritius sets an example. Your invaluable contribution to our nation-building; your role as a living bridge' between India and your countries of domicile and the laudable reputations you have earned by the dint of your hard work, competence and assimilation; have all helped fly the Indian flag higher in different parts of the world. I thank you today on behalf of all Indians, for your outstanding contribution to Mother India. I invite you and all the socio-cultural organisations and businesses present here, and those to whom you would communicate this message, to reach out to us with any ideas, proposals, suggestions, feedback that you may have, to help us advance further on this shared path, the minister said. Like India, Mauritius is a shining example of how a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic and multi-religious country can not only become a vibrant and successful democracy, but also have a thriving, high-performing economy, he said. Indian-origin people constitute nearly 70 per cent of the population of Mauritius. Their ancestors were sent there as indentured labourers during British rule. India on Monday signed a landmark Comprehensive Economic Cooperation and Partnership Agreement (CECPA) with Mauritius, the first of its kind with an African nation, making the strategically-located country a launch-pad for business expansion into the huge African continent. Also read: 'The North remembers': BJP leaders condemn Rahul Gandhi's remarks at Kerala rally Ely Gold Retains a 2.5% Royalty Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Ely Gold Royalties Inc. (TSXV: ELY) (OTCQB: ELYGF) ("Ely Gold" or the "Company is pleased to announce that through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Nevada Select Royalty Inc (collectively "Ely Gold"), it has entered into an Option Agreement with Crestview Exploration for its Cimarron Property, located in Nye County Nevada. Crestview will have the option to purchase 100% of the Cimarron Property ("Cimarron" or the "Property") with Ely Gold retaining a 2.5% Net Smelter Royalty ("NSR"). The Cimarron Property is a high-grade epithermal gold target associated with the historic San Antonio mine. The prospect is located in Nye County, Nevada approximately 30 kilometers North of Tonopah, NV (see Figure #1). The property is situated in the northern portion of the San Antonio Mountain Range. Regionally, the property is at the intersection of two prominent gold trends: The Walker-Lane trend which runs approximately NW and hosts a number of mines including Bullfrog, Goldfield, and Rawhide; and an approximately NNE trend of gold mines including Manhattan, Gold Hill, and Round Mountain. The property is comprised of 13 unpatented lode claims which overlap and control the six historically-producing claims around the San Antonio mine. The San Antonio mine was active from the early 1900's to the 1940's, and the mine area received attention again in the 1980's from a number of exploration companies including Newmont and Echo Bay. Altogether, approximately 190 holes and 54,000' were drilled in the 1980's, with gold intercepts greater than 1 opt encountered in several drill holes. Mineralization at Cimarron is hosted in a series of Oligocene age volcanic rocks overlying Paleozoic strata, and younger Miocene age intrusions. The target is a shallow, low sulfidation oxide gold system with strong structural control. The mineralization is associated with silicification, brecciation, and iron oxides. The terms of the agreement are for 2.5% Net Smelter Royalty (NSR) and $200,000 (US$) in the following installments: Initial payment of $25,000 1 st Anniversary of $35,000 Anniversary of $35,000 2 nd Anniversary of $50,000 Anniversary of $50,000 3 rd Anniversary of $45,000 Anniversary of $45,000 4th Anniversary of $45,000 The 2.5% NSR applies to the property and any locatable land in a 1-mile Area of Interest. Stephen Kenwood, P. Geo, is a director of the Company and a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101. Mr. Kenwood has reviewed and approved the technical information in this press release. About Ely Gold Royalties Inc. Ely Gold Royalties Inc. is a Nevada focused gold royalty company. Its current portfolio includes royalties at Jerritt Canyon, Goldstrike and Marigold, three of Nevada's largest gold mines, as well as the Fenelon mine in Quebec, operated by Wallbridge Mining. The Company continues to actively seek opportunities to purchase producing or near-term producing royalties. Ely Gold also generates development royalties through property sales on projects that are located at or near producing mines. Management believes that due to the Company's ability to locate and purchase third-party royalties, its strategy of organically creating royalties and its gold focus, Ely Gold offers shareholders a favorable leverage to gold prices and low-cost access to long-term gold royalties in safe mining jurisdictions. On Behalf of the Board of Directors Signed "Trey Wasser" Trey Wasser, President & CEO For further information, please contact: Trey Wasser, President & CEO trey@elygoldinc.com 972-803-3087 Joanne Jobin, Investor Relations Officer jjobin@elygoldinc.com 647-964-0292 FORWARD-LOOKING CAUTIONS: This press release contains certain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation, including, but not limited to, statements regarding completion of the Transaction. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts; they are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimates," "projects," "aims," "potential," "goal," "objective," "prospective," and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will," "would," "may," "can," "could" or "should" occur, or are those statements, which, by their nature, refer to future events. The Company cautions that forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates and opinions of the Company's management on the date the statements are made and they involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Consequently, there can be no assurances that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Except to the extent required by applicable securities laws and the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements if management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change. Factors that could cause future results to differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements include the Company's inability to control whether the buy-down right will ever be exercised, and whether the right of first refusal will ever be triggered, uncertainty as to whether any mining will occur on the property covered by the Probe Royalty such that the Company will receive any payment therefrom, and the general risks and uncertainties relating to the mineral exploration, development and production business. The reader is urged to refer to the Company's reports, publicly available through the Canadian Securities Administrators' System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR) at www.sedar.com for a more complete discussion of such risk factors and their potential effect. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Figure #1 To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4181/75343_7357c8220465988e_001full.jpg To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75343 They've just landed what must be the most sought-after post in Kerry - so little wonder that last Monday brought tears of joy from couple Niamh Kelleher and Jack Cakebread. Niamh - 25, from Kilfinane, County Limerick - told The Kerryman that she and Jack (24) are still processing the news that they have been selected as caretakers of An Blascaod Mor's accommodation and cafe for summer 2021. It's a post that has attracted so many applicants in the past - some 45,000 last year alone - that Billy O'Connor and Alice Hayes of Great Blasket Islands tours and accommodation had to change the application process for 2021, capping the number of entries to hundreds rather than thousands. Despite that, the odds of securing the position remain slim for anyone who enters, and Niamh told The Kerryman of her joyous disbelief at the news. "I cried when I was told," she said. "I think that tells you just how excited we are. "We found out last Monday having applied at some time in mid-January. We both love the outdoors - we even met in France during a ski season in 2019 - and we're extremely active. That's part of what attracted us to this. "We've also worked in hospitality before, in changeovers and cafe work, so it's not a role we'd be nervous at starting out in." Niamh said she noticed the job while watching television, after which she rang Jack - who is originally from the UK but now lives in La Rochelle on France's west coast - to explain that she had found the perfect job for both of them. "I rang Jack straight away because this ticked every box," she said. "We had been to the Dingle peninsula a couple of years ago on a road trip, but unfortunately we were not able to cross the water and go on to the Blaskets. I'd also bought a copy of The Islandman [the English-language version of islander Tomas O Criomhthain's autobiography, An tOileanach], and we have a huge interest in the history of the island. "But for all our interest, I still didn't think that we'd get it. We knew about the amount of interest there was in the job, but we did get it, and we're still pinching ourselves." The island has been without permanent residents since it was evacuated in the 1950s, so with a chance to be a small part of its incredible history at stake, it's little wonder the position is so attractive. Alice Hayes said Niamh and Jack were selected for how eager they were, how they'd performed in interviews, and for their enthusiasm and interest in the island's history. It was a tough decision, she admitted, given the high quality of applicants, but Niamh and Jack had done enough. Alice told The Kerryman that she hopes the couple can begin their summer stint in May, depending on COVID-19-induced restrictions, but whenever the story starts, Niamh and Jack are hopeful they will be able to brighten up the summer for those visiting the island. "We hope that people can go on holidays during the summer, and staycations are likely to be the perfect option again," Niamh said. "It would be nice to have a good summer, and I hope that Jack and I can be a part of that." Further information on Billy and Alice's Blasket tours and accommodation is available at greatblasketisland.net. Midland County recorded 14 additional COVID-19 case on Tuesday, as President Joe Biden announced his plans to "mask up" the country. On Tuesday, Biden said his administration expects to send millions of masks to people around the country very shortly, according to the Associated Press. Biden did not provide details, including cost, timing and the type of mask to be shipped, and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The president confirmed the plan during a virtual roundtable discussion Tuesday with four Black essential workers: a St. Louis firefighter and EMT, a Chicago pharmacist, a child-care center employee in Columbus, Ohio, and a grocery store district manager in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Biden has asked everyone to wear face masks for the first 100 days of his term. He also required mask-wearing in federal buildings and on public transportation. Tuesday, Feb. 23 COVID-19 numbers: Midland County: 14 cases were added. Pandemic total is 4,345 cases, 581 probable, 61 deaths and three probable deaths. Bay County: 9 cases were added; pandemic total stands at 7,049 cases, 308 probable, 272 deaths and 12 probable deaths. Gladwin County: 2 cases wee added; pandemic total stands at 1,240 cases, 231 probable, 40 deaths and three probable deaths. Isabella County: 3 new cases were added; pandemic total stands at 3,544 cases, 449 probable, 72 deaths and one probable death. Saginaw County: 23 cases and seven deaths were added; pandemic total stands at 13,987 cases, 715 probable, 495 deaths and 11 probable deaths. The state on Tuesday added 1,316 new cases and 34 deaths, which includes 18 deaths identified during a vital records review. Overall, Michigan is at 582,719 cases and 15,396 deaths. Testing The state report shows as of Tuesday, Midland County has performed 56,621 COVID-19 tests. Gladwin County is listed as having administered 16,044 tests. Midland Countys seven-day rolling positivity rate on Feb. 18 was listed at 0.9%, and Gladwin County was listed at 2.3%. Our 12-county region is listed at 3.4% and Michigan is also at 3.4%. MidMichigan Health statistics As of Feb. 18, MidMichigan Medical Center in Midland is listed as having an 72% bed occupancy, with nine COVID-19 patients and one in the ICU. MidMichigan Medical Center in Gladwin is listed as having an 7% bed occupancy, with no COVID-19 patients. Regarding PPE supplies, the Midland hospital reported 15-30 days for N95 masks; 15-30 days for surgical masks; 30-plus days for surgical gowns; 15-30 days for exam gloves and 30-plus days for eye protection. The Gladwin hospital reported 30-plus days for all the reported. Guangzhou further expanded its nucleic acid testing as the city battles the spread of Covid-19, with Haizhu and Yuexiu districts starting mass testing on Sunday. In Haizhu district, residents queued for hours in the rain to get tested on Sunday. The city reported four new local and three new imported cases, and confirmed 14 cases originally reported as asymptomatic on Sunday May 31, 2021 05:47 PM NSW Government Retires Accellion File Transfer System Amid International Cyber Breach The NSW government has blocked access to an international file transfer company after servers at the states health and transport department were among those in major organisations hacked by international cybercriminals. The move comes as the personal information of at least 104,000 people, including NSW staff accounts, were compromised in a phishing attack that occurred in April 2020, according to a NSW Inquiry into Cybersecurity (pdf). Cyber Security NSW was first made aware of vulnerabilities to the Accellion File Transfer Appliance (FTA) in January and established Strike Force Martine with NSW police to investigate the impacts on the breach. In a statement published Tuesday, the NSW government said it had retired all instances of the Accellion FTA as part of the centralised response to protect customer and government data. It confirmed that government agenciesTransport for NSW and NSW Healthwere among those affected by the attack. An assessment of the volume and value of data and any consequences for customers or government is underway, the statement added. Forensic analysis by industry specialists has established there was no third-party access to major agency systems including the Driver Licence systems, the Opal travel systems, or electronic medical records systems used by public hospitals. According to the NSW Inquiry into Cybersecurity, close to 80 percent of the 104,000 individuals affected were notified of the data breach through registered mail. However, NSW Auditor-General slammed Service NSW for not effectively handling personal customer and business information to ensure its privacy. In response, CEO of Service NSW Damon Rees said the agency had begun reducing the risk of breaches by removing all email held in the accounts of customer service staff that was over 60 days old. Further controls have been implemented to reduce further risk. A lack of multi-factor authentication was also mentioned as a contributing factor to the breach. Accellion File Transfer Appliance (FTA), a 20-year-old legacy product (pdf), is an online file-sharing system developed by Californian cloud company Accellion that is used to store and share sensitive information. The system is expected to retire on April 30, the company announced (pdf). In recent weeks, data breaches have occurred to approximately 300 organisations that use the Accellion FTA system, reported Gizmodo. Organisations include: Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) (pdf), QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Queensland, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ), and Harvard Business School. According to Gizmodo, on Dec. 23, 2020, a bad actor hacked its way into Accellions client data via a zero-day vulnerability in its secure file transfer application. The vulnerability was patched by Accellion within 72 hours, the company said in a statement on Jan. 12, 2021. The NSW government said that scammers may try to capitalise on these events and that customers should not respond to unsolicited phone calls, emails or text messages related to any security matter. On Aug. 6, 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison pledged AU$1.67 billion to support a ten-year cybersecurity strategy to protect the nations critical infrastructure. Former Trump Aide Catalina Lauf to Primary GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger Catalina Lauf, a former top adviser to former President Donald Trump, announced she will challenge Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) for his 16th Congressional District seat. Laufs newly formed campaign accused Kinzinger of being an anti-Trump RINO who has turned his back on his constituents. RINO is an acronym that stands for Republicans in Name Only, which is used as a pejorative by some conservatives against the Republican establishment politicians and GOP officials who fail to adopt conservatives stances. In recent years, it has been used against Republican officials who defied or criticized Trump. As President, Donald Trump lifted millions out of poverty, invested historically in our schools, hospitals, and communities, restored Americas status as the strongest nation on earth, and defended the right to life, our Second Amendment, our borders, and our faith, Lauf added in a news release. Almost 75 million Americans supported that America First Agendabut it is clear now that Congressman Kinzinger is not one of them. A spokesperson for Kinzingers office stated that due to redistricting, its not clear how the race will look Congressman Kinzinger has a proven record of leadership and integrity, serving the interests of his constituents and his countrynot the sole interests of one man, the spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an apparent reference to Trump. Kinzinger was among 10 Republicans in the House to vote to impeach Trump, and in recent months, has been a frequent critic of Trump and pro-Trump Republican elected officials on social media and in press appearances. Lauf ran for Illinois 14th Congressional District seat in 2020 but lost the GOP primary to Jim Oberweis, who ultimately lost to Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.). Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) speaks to the media after attending the weekly House Republican conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Oct. 29, 2013. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images) I am proud to announce my candidacy for United States Congress, she said in the release, according to Breitbart News. Now more than ever, America needs true conservative leaders to oppose the radical agenda of Joe Biden and continue the legacy of President Trumpand as a former advisor to his Administration, I look forward to carrying that torch. Lauf then stated that she wants to end the reign of RINOs across this country, suggesting that the schism between anti-Trump Republicans and the pro-Trump faction wont be ending anytime soon. The small number of Republicans who either voted to impeach or convict Trump has faced significant backlash in their home states. Five of the seven GOP senators who voted to convict the former president have been censured since then. Trump, in a statement last week, said he would primary certain GOP lawmakers with candidates who support his agenda. Where necessary and appropriate, I will back primary rivals who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America First. We want brilliant, strong, thoughtful, and compassionate leadership, he said. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Computational detection of a hierarchical tree of neurite organization in the C. elegans neuropil. Credit: Mark Moyle et al, Nature 2021. Understanding how the brain works is a paramount goal of medical science. But with its billions of tightly packed, intermingled neurons, the human brain is dauntingly difficult to visualize and map, which can provide the route to therapies for long-intractable disorders. In a major advance published next week in Nature, scientists for the first time report the structure of a fundamental type of tissue organization in brains, called neuropil, as well as the developmental pathways that lead to neuropil assembly in the roundworm C. elegans. This multidisciplinary study was a collaboration between five laboratories, including scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, which hosted much of the collaboration. "Neuropil is a tissue-level organization seen in many different types of brains, from worms to humans," says senior author and MBL Fellow Daniel Colon-Ramos of Yale School of Medicine. "When things are that conserved in nature, they are important." "But trying to understand neuropil structure and function is very challenging. It's like looking at a spaghetti bowl," Colon-Ramos says. "Hundreds of neurons are on top of each other, touching each other, making thousands of choices as they intermingle through different sections of the animal's brain. How can you describe neuropil organization in a way that's comprehensible? That is one of the contributions of this paper." The authors focused on the neuropil in the C. elegans nerve ring, a tangled bundle of 181 neurons that serves as the worm's central processing unit. Through an innovative melding of network analysis and imaging strategies, they revealed that the nerve ring is organized into four layers, or strata. These strata, they showed, contain distinct domains for processing sensory information and motor behaviors. They were able to map the worm's sensory organs and muscle quadrants onto the relevant strata. The team also discovered unique neurons that integrate information across strata and build a type of "cage" around the layers. Finally, they showed how the layered structure of the neuropil emerges in the developing worm embryo, using high-resolution light-sheet microscopy developed by MBL Fellow Hari Shroff of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and MBL Investigator Abhishek Kumar. "This is a paradigm shift where we combined two fieldscomputational biology and developmental biologythat don't often go together," says first author Mark Moyle, associate research scientist in neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine. "We showed that by using computational approaches, we could understand the neuropil structure, and we could then use that knowledge to identify the developmental processes leading to the correct assembly of that structure." This approach can serve as a blueprint for understanding neuropil organization in other animal brains, the authors state. Volumetric reconstruction of the L4 C. elegans neuropil (from EM serial sections) with neurons from the four strata highlighted (S1-Red, S2-Purple, S3-Blue, S4-Green). Credit: Mark Moyle et al., Nature, 2021. From Buildings to Boroughs to New York City C. elegans has the best understood nervous system of all animals. More than 30 years ago, John White, Sydney Brenner, and colleagues published the worm's "connectome"a wiring diagram of its 302 neurons and the ~7,000 synaptic connections between them. Since that pioneering study, nearly every neuron in C. elegans has been characterized: its shape, functional category, the neural circuits it participates in, and its developmental cell lineage. What was missing, though, was a picture of how these cells and circuits integrate in space and over time. Colon-Ramos and team analyzed published data on all the membrane contacts between the 181 neurons in the nerve ring. They then applied novel network analyses to group cells into "neighborhoods" based on their contact profilessimilar in principle to algorithms that Facebook uses to suggest friends based on people's common contacts. This revealed the neuropil's layered structure and enabled the team to understand cell-cell interactions in the context of functional circuits, and functional circuits in the context of higher-order neuropil structure (See video 1). "All of a sudden, when you see the architecture, you realize that all this knowledge that was out there about the animal's behaviors has a home in the structure of the brain," Colon-Ramos says. "By analogy, rather than just having knowledge of the East Side of New York and the West Side, Brooklyn and Queens, suddenly you see how the city fits together and you understand the relationships between the neighborhoods." "So now we could see, 'OK, this is why these behaviors are reflex-like, because they are direct circuits that go into the muscles. And this is how they integrate with other parts of the motor program.' Having the structure allows you to generate new models regarding how information is being processed and parceled out to lead to behaviors," Colon-Ramos says. Time-lapse of the outgrowth dynamics of the C. elegans nerve ring followed by a 3D rotation of the last timepoint to highlight the neuropil, which is the bright ring structure in the anterior part of the embryo (top). Embryo twitches during later development. Neuropil intensity increases in overtime, probably due to an increase in the number of neurons entering the neuropil. Images are deconvolved diSPIM maximum intensity projections. Credit: Mark Moyle et al, Nature, 2021 Reconstructing the Birth and Development of the Nerve Ring The brain is a product of development, starting with one embryonic cell division and ending with a complete organ. "An order emerges through time. So our next question was, how can you instruct the formation of a layered structure? How are all these decisions simultaneously occurring in hundreds of cells, but resulting in organized layers? How are the decisions coordinated through time and space?" Colon-Ramos says. "Layered structures are a fundamental unit of brain organizationthe retina is a layer, and the cortex is a layer. If we could understand it for the worm, it would allow us to create models that might help us understand the development of layers in other vertebrate organs, like the eye," Colon-Ramos says. This part of the research began in 2014 when Colon-Ramos and Moyle began collaborating with microscope developers Shroff and Kumar at the MBL. "We started by building a microscope (the diSPIM) that let us look at the embryo with better spatial and temporal resolution than the tools of the time," Shroff says. They then identified every cell in the C. elegans embryo using lineaging approaches developed by co-author Zhirong Bao of Sloan Kettering Institute (these findings are catalogued at WormGUIDES.org). "This was a painful process, but very important to do," Shroff says. After years of sharing a lab at the MBL, numerous adjustments to the diSPIM system, integrations with other critically important technology, and plenty of frustration, the collaborators succeeded in resolving the developmental sequence of the C. elegans neuropil and revealing principles that guide its stratified organization (see video 2). "This would have been impossible without the long-term, gentle imaging of the diSPIM," Colon-Ramos says. "In developing the technology, many changes seemed incremental but in fact were very enabling, allowing us to do something we couldn't do before. Often the changes we needed fell between two disciplines with different vocabularies, and it required prolonged, focused, exhaustive conversations to identify them. That is what our collaboration at the MBL enabled." Explore further Can a miniscule worm hold the secret to genetically reversing brain damage? More information: Structural and developmental principles of neuropil assembly in C. elegans, Nature (2021). dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-03169-5 Journal information: Nature Structural and developmental principles of neuropil assembly in C. elegans,(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-03169-5 moderna Inc said it is beginning clinical trials of a booster shot to see if it provides better protection against the highly contagious coronavirus variant from South Africa. On Wednesday, the biotechnology company revealed it has shipped the vaccine to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) for additional study. Testing showed that Moderna's current two-dose regimen produced a weaker immune response against the variant, known as B.1.351, despite still generating said antibody in patients above the levels needed to be protective. 'Moderna is committed to making as many updates to our vaccine as necessary until the pandemic is under control,' Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a press release. 'We hope to demonstrate that booster doses, if necessary, can be done at lower dose levels, which will allow us to provide many more doses to the global community in late 2021 and 2022 if necessary.' It comes as the company announces it its global COVID-19 vaccine production goal for this year by 100 million doses from a total of 600 million to 700 million. Moderna says it has shipped boosters shots of its COVID-19 vaccine, designed to protect against the South African variant, to the NIH for clinical trials. Pictured: A Moderna COVID-19 vaccine box at a vaccination site in Arlington, Texas, February 12 In the U.S., there are 46 confirmed cases of the variant, known as B.1351 (purple dot), across 14 states Moderna's vaccine was initially developed in partnership with the NIH. It uses part of the pathogen's genetic code called messenger RNA, or mRNA, to get the body to recognize the coronavirus and attack it if a person becomes infected. The candidate, called mRNA-1273, works by tricking the body into producing some of the viral proteins, which the immune system then recognizes and builds a defensive response against. Trial data revealed the the vaccine was 94.5 percent effective at preventing coronavirus infection and 100 percent effective at preventing severe disease against the originally circulating strains of the virus. But, in a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found a six-fold decrease in antibody response against the variant from its vaccine. However, the company said the actual efficacy of its vaccine against the South African variant is yet to be determined. A study found Moderna's vaccine had a six-fold decrease in antibody response against the variant (far right) that other common versions of the virus Moderna has been experimenting with several potential ways to combat new variants of the virus. They include an additional booster shot that targets the variant now prevalent in South Africa and spreading globally, a combined booster shot that mixes its current COVID-19 vaccine with the experimental shot, and an extra booster shot on top of its current two-dose vaccine, the company said. The U.S. discovered its first case of the South African variant in January and it has been spreading ever since with 46 cases confirmed in 14 states, according to the Centers for Disease control and Prevention (CDC). Several studies suggest B.1.351 is more resistant to existing vaccines than other variants of the coronavirus. Moderna also raised its expected vaccine production for 2021 to 700 million doses globally from 600 million and is exploring further improvements to its manufacturing process that could raise production this year to as much as one billion doses. The company said it is also investing in additional manufacturing capacity that should bring its 2022 global production to around 1.4 billion doses. Several studies suggest have suggested the variant, known as B.1.351, is more resistant to existing vaccines than other variants of the coronavirus as the U.S. vaccinates about 1.3 million people per day Biden is currently on track to blow past his goal of 100 million shots in his first 100 days in office, but vaccinations must be ramped ur to meet his plans to vaccinate nearly all adults by the end of the summer A total of 300 million doses are guaranteed to the U.S. by the end of July. The company has so far delivered 45 million out of the first 100 million it is expected to deliver by the end of March, and says it is aiming to double its monthly vaccine deliveries from about 20 million per month to 40 million by April. Currently, the U.S. is vaccinating average of 1.3 million Americans per day against COVID-19, up from under in one million a month ago but less than the 1.7 million from one week ago President Joe Biden is currently on track to blow past his goal of 100 million shots in his first 100 days in office - though the pace must pick up even further to meet his plans to vaccinate nearly all adults by the end of the summer. The White House also said the government will ramp up genetic analysis of coronavirus samples from around the country to gain information on where more infectious and potentially deadlier mutations may be spreading. Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. Maharashtra registered 8,807 new coronavirus cases and 80 deaths in a span of 24 hours. The numbers are significantly higher compared to Tuesday when the state had recorded 6,218 new infections. The state Health Department said the total count of cases reported in the state has gone up to 21,21,119, including 59,358 active cases. The state saw 2,772 recoveries in the last 24 hours and the total number of recoveries has gone up to 20,08,623. The death toll stands at 51,937. Maharashtra continues to be one of the worst affected states in the country. The number of new cases in the state has seen a surge since 10 February, with daily figures crossing 6,000. The state government has instructed all district collectors and municipal commissioners to increase testing, a senior minister said after a cabinet meeting here. The Covid-19 situation in the state was reviewed during the meeting, said Minority Affairs Minister Nawab Malik. "An instruction was given to increase the number of tests," he said while speaking to reporters. On average, over 60,000 Covid-19 tests are being conducted in the state over the last two weeks. Officials were also asked to carry out contact tracing of coronavirus patients more vigorously, Malik further added. 32,41,14,800: BMC collected fine from over 16 lakh people Amid an upsurge in coronavirus infections in Maharashtra, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has collected 28 lakh fine from 14,000 people who were caught without face masks in public spaces. Since March last year, the Mumbai civic body has collected 32,41,14,800 in fine from 16,02,536 persons for flouting the mask rule. This comes in light of the rising number of coronavirus cases being reported in Maharashtra during the last few days. Govt deputes special teams for 10 states Meanwhile, the government has deputed high-level multi-disciplinary teams to visit ten states that have been witnessing a surge in the number of Covid-19 cases. The central teams will visit Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir to ascertain the reason behind the spike in cases. The teams will support the states in public health measures for targetted Covid response and management. The three-member teams are headed by joint secretary-level officers in the health ministry. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. A sugar daddy has revealed his advice for those wanting to embrace the lifestyle as he said the habit has helped him 'date women above his station.' Seth Sokoloff, 28, from the US, explained that while people assume sugar daddies are all super wealthy, the reality is that many women are willing to make arrangements just to cover their rent and that it's open to anyone who could afford to spend around $1,400 a month on their date. The former private equity investment analyst, who studied philosophy and economics at the University of Chicago and has been a sugar daddy for six years, said he hopes sugar dating will become a mainstream concept. 'There are younger guys in tech, finance, and such like myself who I'm getting signed up with the idea of having much-improved dating lives with our verified sugar babies,' he told Femail. 'I really do see sugar dating as a force for good and one of the ways is that nerdy guys like myself can learn how to talk to and date women.' Seth Sokoloff (pictured), from the United States, who has been employing women to be his sugar babies for the last six years, has founded a website to connect women with sugar daddies Seth recently founded SugarFetch.com in an effort to help connect men with women who appreciate their accomplishments. He explained: 'We offer a safe and supportive space for men to connect with verified sugar babies eager to get to know them, all while maintaining complete anonymity. He added: 'We have babies signing up from all ages 18+ and daddies signing up from all ages 21+ (as soon as they have the disposable income). So far, the sugar babies are mostly college-age women and we're looking to get more women in their late 20s through 40s signed up as sugar babies. 'College-age women are all over the idea of being sugar babies but older women don't realize yet that many sugar daddies are looking for babies a little closer to their own age. Seth (pictured) said sugar daddies are advised to offer their sugar babies a month's rent, because many women are 'happy' to be given just $1,4000 a month 'Most daddies are established in their career and looking to pamper younger women and savour the dates and texting as an escape from their stressful lives. People have a stereotyped notion of sugar daddies as older, but that's not always the case. 'Another way we're a force for good is that there are so many lonely and stressed out people and this can really help them. And of course sugar babies can have fun with luxury experiences, soak up mentorship, and get spoiled.' Seth describes the platform as 'empowering' and said the team are careful to interview the women who want to become sugar babies. 'For daddies' interviews, they need to confirm that they're looking for sugar relationships and willing to invest in meaningful pampering of their sugar babies. We ask daddies if they want to improve their babies lives and they need to have a positive answer to that. Seth (pictured) said other sugar dating websites don't take the time to remove fake profiles The website is free for women to join while men are expected to pay a fee with introductory membership being set at $99 (70). However, Seth added that none of the women are expected to have sex with men on the website, saying 'it's up to the members' what they do in their relationship. The sugar daddy explained that many men fear that they aren't able to afford a sugar baby, but said it's more affordable than some would think. Seth said he is personally taking a break from being a sugar daddy to 'concentrate on his work'. According to his website, his platform is designed to create 'long-term relationships' instead of flings and differs from conventional online dating because the sugar babies are eagerly waiting for men to talk to. He told Femail: 'Our ethos is rooted in the mutual empowerment of members, all of whom are personally vetted and verified by our team for authenticity. Our approach is based on helping our members feel confident in our ability to find their ideal sugar match. Seth's website has a series of blogs offering advice on how sugar dating arrangements should work and claims the arrangement is better than marriage. Pictured: A sugar baby from the site The website also features blog posts claiming sugar dating is better than marriage, offering advice on how to be a sugar baby or sugar daddy as well as setting boundaries within an arrangement. A recent post revealed as well as money sugar babies can expect gifts including clothes, computers, dinner, travel, status and apartments. One post reads: 'As time goes on, sugar dating is only going to become more and more accepted, so don't let the fear of what people might think hold you back from what could be the best choice you could make.' Another says: 'At the end of the day, those that want to be involved in sugar relationships want to please and to be pleased. The method of spoiling for that is different in each circumstance, and varies from person to person.' Of course, with all the crises facing our nation, conservatives are focusing on the most pressing issue of all: fascists being kicked off of Twitter. STEPHEN COLBERT Its like Comic-Con for neo-cons and neo-Nazis, too. JIMMY KIMMEL Its a whos who of Who needs that many guns in their rec room? STEPHEN COLBERT Still, better than last years CPAC theme: Giving the flag the clap. STEPHEN COLBERT According to CPAC, Its time to stand up for Americans whose views have gotten them canceled, which is why they kicked things off by canceling an appearance from one of their panelists for a history of making anti-Semitic claims. Good conservatives dont want to be associated with anyone like that. It could sully the good name of the mob with aluminum bats trying to murder Mike Pence. STEPHEN COLBERT On paper, the Democrats have a tenuous hold on power in Washington. Their president is a cipher with severely diminished mental capacities, the Senate is a 50-50 tie, and they hold the narrowest House majority in decades. Nevertheless, the Democrats see what could be a once in a lifetime opportunity, and are pressing forward with their most radical agenda since they seceded in 1861. Among other things, the Democrats are trying to repeal, in effect, the First Amendment, by barring conservative speechor, rather, speech that is not consistently left-wingfrom the public square. We have seen this in the moves against conservatives and other independent voices by Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Go Fund Me and other tech titans. While these companies are no doubt motivated in part by ideology in putting their thumbs on the scale of public discourse, the truth is more sinister than that. The major tech platforms are monopolies with obvious antitrust vulnerabilities, as we saw when the Trump administration brought an enforcement action against Facebook that seeks the divestiture of Instagram. The Democrats have not only urged tech platforms to silence conservatives, they are at least implicitly (God knows what is said in private) holding out the prospect of immunity from antitrust enforcement, which means many billions more in profits. This is the ultimate in 21st-century corruption. But it gets worse: the Democrats are also trying to drive independent voices off the more traditional broadcast and cable platforms. Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center sent out an email today that included this: The war against conservatives on social media has turned into a war against conservative broadcast media, as well. The House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology will hold a hearing tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. entitled Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media. But will the Democrats in this hearing talk about the lies from CNN or MSNBC? Probably not, since the memorandum for the hearing specifically cited articles that bashed Fox News, Newsmax, and conservative media. Two Democratic representatives have gone even further in their fight against the First Amendment. Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jerry McNerney (D-CA) wrote letters to the heads of multiple TV providers. The letters demanded answers to questions such as Have you ever taken any actions against a channel for using your platform to disseminate any disinformation? and Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN? Unsurprisingly, the letters made no mention of any liberal news organization. Please watch the hearing and comment on it. Yes, please do! I have been following politics closely for more than five decades, and the Democratic Partys war on freedom of speech is the most sinister thing I have witnessed in that time. What is truly chilling is how few Democrats are willing to stand up for freedom. I know of three: Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Taibai and Glenn Greenwald. Kudos to them, but it is shocking that not a single current Democrat office-holder is, as best we can tell, in favor of free speech. We are facing an existential threat to our traditional liberties. Up to two-thirds of gas industry job losses reported last year were in Western Australia due to cuts by Woodside and Chevron, a new analysis by The Australia Institute claims. The industry cut 10.5 per cent of its workforce nationally totalling at least 2615 workers during the 12 months to December 2020, the think tank said, citing the Australian Bureau of Statistics. It remains unknown exactly how many jobs were lost at Woodsides Karratha gas plant in the early days of the pandemic. Credit:Aaron Bunch Woodside and Chevron, which only have projects in WA, were the companies that reportedly carried out the largest cuts, said TAI principal adviser Mark Ogge: 1200 at Woodside, or one-third of its workforce, and 510 at Chevron, a quarter of its workforce. It is particularly concerning given the serious defects at Chevrons troubled Gorgon project that they are laying off over 500 workers. Surely if they were concerned about safety and fixing their defective [carbon capture and storage] operation they would be putting on more staff not less, Mr Ogge said. Cocaine with an estimated value of 1.6 million has been found inside a van which had recently arrived into Belfast Port. A 39-year-old man from Wolverhampton, has been arrested on suspicion of conspiring to supply controlled drugs after a National Crime Agency (NCA) investigation into drug supply. He is now being questioned by NCA investigators. A second man (46) was arrested on suspicion of the same offences in Wolverhampton as part of the investigation. The 20-kilo haul was discovered on Monday and was hidden inside an empty fuel tank being transported in a van which had just arrived from Birkenhead. Officers using special equipment had to be brought in to recover the drugs, in an operation which took several hours and also involved Belfast Harbour Police, Border Force and the PSNI. NCA branch commander Adam Warnock said: "This was a significant seizure of cocaine, one of the biggest to be made by law enforcement in Northern Ireland in recent years. "The loss of the profit that would have been made from it will be felt by the criminal groups involved in drug supply [who] are also involved in exploitation and violence in our communities, so taking away these drugs will prevent them from reinvesting in further criminal activity," he said. "Working with our partners across law enforcement we are determined to do all we can to disrupt and dismantle organised crime networks and protect the public." Detective Chief Superintendent John McVea, from the PSNI, said: "We are delighted with the success of our Law Enforcement colleagues. More importantly we are pleased with the positive impact this will have for individuals and communities within Northern Ireland in terms of disrupting the distribution and supply of Class A drugs and bringing those harmful offenders to justice. "Anything we can do to support a collective effort across a range of partners, as was seen in yesterdays operation, is always welcomed, as well as the fact that cocaine with an estimated street value of over 1.6 million has been taken out of the control of criminals," he said. 'Caged parrot' Rajnath Singh could resolve impasse if allowed to talk to farmers: Naresh Tikait India pti-Madhuri Adnal Barabanki (UP), Feb 24: Bharatiya Kisan Union president Naresh Tikait on Wednesday called Defence Minister Rajnath Singh a caged parrot and said the farmers issues could be resolved if he is given the freedom to talk with them. He accused the BJP-led central government of being stubborn over the three new laws, which farmer unions want repealed. The protesting farmers too are not ready to go back on their demands, he said. The government has made Defence Minister Rajnath Singh a caged parrot ('pinjre ka tota'). If he is given the freedom to talk to farmers, I can guarantee that there would be a decision and the BJPs prestige will also remain intact, he said. He said farmers respect the Defence Minister, but he is not given a chance by the government to deal with the farmers issue. Tikait addressed a farmers' "mahapanchyat" here and also spoke to reporters, claiming that the Centre was not paying heed to the farmers protesting against the laws. The government is stubborn and is not ready to hear out farmers. It should change its attitude," the BKU leader said. "If the PM is not ready to repeal the laws, we are also not going to backtrack. The farmers are ruined and not getting the right price for their produce. The rise in prices of power, petrol and diesel has affected them also," he said. "If this government continues for long, farmers will have to abandon agriculture," added. Farmers will gherao Parliament if govt doesn't repeal three agri laws: Rakesh Tikait The BKU leader said the way to Uttar Pradeshs Purvanchal is through Barabanki and if farmers here are made aware of the impact of the new laws, they will be able to tell farmers in that region about it. This government is defaming farmers, labelling them as terrorists and Khalistanis and we will not remain silent on this," he said. Tikait indicated that he had no quarrel with Union Minister Sanjeev Balyan, whose supporters and those of the Rashtriya Lok Dal clashed recently over the farmers protests. He indirectly referred to the riots in western Uttar Pradesh in 2013, over which Balyan too had faced charges "Earlier Hindus and Muslims lived in amity. But from 2013, BJP spread misconceptions among them and divided society. But now people have understood their tricks, the BKU leader said. Thousands of farmers have been camping at the border of Delhi since November-end, demanding the repeal of the new agri-marketing laws. They claim that the laws will weaken the minimum support price (MSP) system, an argument that the government rejects. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Are you a current print subscriber to Columbia Gorge News? If so, you qualify for free access to all content on columbiagorgenews.com. Simply verify with your subscriber id to receive free access. Your subscriber id may be found on your bill or mailing label. Protests, negotiations and differences in opinion are the hallmark of a democracy. But sometimes, these protests take the form of an undesirable zero-sum game because of brinkmanship. This refers to a slow-burn strategy by an opponent who pushes you to the brink of disaster by increasing your risk of losing everything. The term attained a public profile during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the US and Soviet Union were on the brink of a nuclear war. This strategy is pursued in various contexts, such as wage negotiations and trade wars. Both parties may relentlessly pursue this strategy until one of them finally succeeds in getting its way. But at what cost? It might be too late before both parties realize that the size of the pie has diminished considerably after accounting for various losses, be it in terms of production days, property, impact on people, etc. The bone of contention: Much has been written about Indias new farm laws, their merits and demerits. To summarize, yea-sayers argue that the state-run mandi system is fraught with cartelization and lack of price transparency. The new system will open the market for farm produce to private players, improve agri-infrastructure, minimize the role of intermediaries, offer farmers better prices, reduce wastage and unnecessary stockpiles held by Food Corp. of India, and help us fix environmental imbalances. Naysayers argue that the problem is not one of markets, but of access" to markets in the form of transportation and logistics and availability of liquidityhow quickly the produce can be converted into cash. Given the vulnerability of farmers to market volatility, they need wider and more reliable access to minimum support prices. Other important details include the asymmetric nature of contracts between corporations and small farmers, and a need to provide safeguards for contract farming. Negotiations: The government has had several rounds of discussions with farmers. With no solution in sight, protests are slowly taking the form of a zero-sum game, wherein the success of one is the failure of the other. It is uncertainty over when these negotiations will end that pushes either party to resort to brinkmanship with the attitude that this will hurt you more than me. For example, farmers may feel they have less to lose and that their cost of waiting, protesting day after day, is less than it is for the government. Negotiations often fail because of unclear information on (and poor understanding of) what the long- and short-term gains and losses for both parties are. In this context, talks between farmers and the government should be seen through the strategic lens of game theory, which analyses the interaction between stakeholders (or players) with distinct interests in terms of their action choices, the outcomes thereof, and their related pay-offs. Thinking Strategically: First and foremost, each stakeholder should list out the available alternatives to the negotiation terms, and select the best among them should the talks fail. In the parlance of game theory, one needs to apply the principle of BATNA, or the best alternative to a negotiated agreement" if negotiations do not work out. For example, what could be a better alternative to walking away from a deal (or negotiated agreement): Going to court, a hunger strike, heightened protests, or public demonstrations of anger? Each party must evaluate if the current deal is better than its BATNA or best alternative to it. If yes, the deal must be accepted. If not, both can look for a mutually acceptable zone, instead of prolonging the negotiations because of the time value of money. While making an offer, one must keep in mind all possible outcomes, the passage of time, and how it may impact the size of the eventual pie. Take the example of successive rounds of negotiation between two persons on how to judiciously divide a piece of ice-cream cake. Thinking ahead, one knows that in case of a delay, the cake will perish, and each party will get less than what it could have if they had both agreed to an equal split. Therefore, rationality dictates that both parties be fair and transparent at the outset. The key to strategic thinking is to look forward and reason backwards (i.e., backward induction). The introduction of farm bills, for example, called for a long-term outlook on how other stakeholders may react. A sign of good governance and leadership is its ability to think ahead and make credible commitments. For success, credibility must be built into the governments actions. This can be done through an assured framework for private participation in agriculture. For example, in Kenya, to assist small farmers, the government has recommended a sub-sector industry forum to collectively mobilize resources to address critical infrastructure bottlenecks in the dairy sector. In Uganda, its tobacco law has been amended to protect tobacco companies as well as farmers. Specialized non-government organizations help in resolving disputes and developing good work relations between farmer groups and agri-businesses. Equitable outcomes require multiple rounds of discussion in multiple forums to transform the standoff into a positive-sum game. This is where intellectuals and agricultural experts need to step in. They can help create conditions for a win-win result by conducting discussions and debates in public forums such as universities, industry associations and think-tanks. It can be achieved. This, indeed, is the strength of democracy. Madhuri Saripalle is area chair (economics), IFMR Graduate School of Business, Krea University Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Ananya Panday is gearing up for her upcoming film Liger, alongside South sensation Vijay Deverakonda. She has also become the youngest Pan-India celeb with this film in her kitty and her fans are inevitably excited for the same. However, Ananya has also been making headlines for her regular visits to her dance class. The actor has time and again, been spotted by the paparazzi while visiting the same. Now, the reason for the same has also been revealed and it is connected with Ananya's upcoming film Liger. It has been revealed that Ananya Panday has been repeatedly visiting her dance classes for prepping for a dance number in Liger. The actor has been undergoing a rigorous practice session for the same, which explains her occasional visits to her dance class. According to a news report in Indiaforums, a source close to the actor revealed to a publication, "Ananya was spotted as she was leaving from her dance class, she was doing rehearsals for her upcoming film 'Liger'. She has been rehearsing for hours together for a dance number from her upcoming Pan-India film. She has made dance classes a part of her routine now. All the rehearsals were for Liger and the shoot for the song will happen soon." Also Read: Liger: Ananya Panday To Start Shooting For Next Schedule Of Vijay Deverakonda's Film Soon; Read On With Liger, Ananya Panday will be making her regional debut and the film will be released in 5 different languages. Her fans along with the fans of Vijay Deverakonda are super excited to witness their fresh pairing on-screen. Earlier in January, a source close to Ananya had also revealed to a publication about her shooting schedule for the same. The Pati Patni Aur Woh actor has started shooting for the film from the second week of February. The source had revealed, "Ananya will be starting the next shoot schedule of Liger in the second week of February. The shoot will take place in Mumbai." Apart from this ambitious project, Ananya will also be seen in director Shakun Batra's untitled next alongside Deepika Padukone and Siddhant Chaturvedi. The actor was last seen in the film Khaali Peeli opposite Ishaan Khatter. Also Read: Liger First Look: Vijay Deverakonda Roars Like A Tiger In His Bollywood Debut Opposite Ananya Panday FILE PHOTO: A logo on the window of the Aviva head office in London By Pamela Barbaglia and Stephen Jewkes LONDON (Reuters) - Aviva has pushed back the deadline for final offers for its Polish operations to late March as the British insurer is still haggling with Spanish lender Santander over the renewal of a key distribution agreement in Poland, sources told Reuters. Three bidders, including Dutch insurer NN Group and Italy's Generali, are vying for the unit which is worth about 2 billion euros ($2.4 billion), three sources familiar with the matter said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Germany's Allianz is also in the race after missing out on Aviva's French business, which was snapped up by mutual insurer Aema Groupe for 3.2 billion euros on Tuesday, the sources said. A spokeswoman for Aviva confirmed the Polish business was under review, adding the British insurer was "exploring options across our manage-for-value portfolio," which also includes joint venture businesses. Santander, Allianz and Generali declined to comment, while NN Group was not immediately available. Aviva, which initially requested binding offers by Feb. 26, needs more time to renegotiate a bancassurance partnership in Poland with Santander, the sources said. The bid deadline - which has been moved to March 19 - risks being pushed back again as an agreement with Santander is not in sight, one of the sources said. "They are still haggling and no deal is possible until there's clarity on the new agreement with Santander," this source said. Generali has emerged as one of the most motivated bidders for the Aviva unit and its boss Philippe Donnet said on Wednesday that Poland was a "key market", adding the Italian insurer would consider any growth opportunity there. Generali, which has a board meeting on March 10 ahead of its annual results, is expected to discuss the Aviva deal in Poland at a second board meeting scheduled on March 22, two sources said. Aviva is the second largest life insurer in Poland after state-owned company PZU while NN ranks as the country's third-biggest, according to a report by the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF). Story continues The British insurer runs one of the biggest networks of life agents in Poland and two key bancassurance partnerships with Santander and ING. Its Polish business has been growing in recent years despite a general contraction of the country's life insurance market where insurers have moved away from single premium investment products and there has been an increased level of regulatory intervention. Aviva's portfolio review comes as boss Amanda Blanc is trying to shift the company's focus to its core operations in Britain, Canada and Ireland after a prolonged period of share price weakness. The London-listed firm, which is due to report 2020 earnings on March 4, announced on Wednesday a deal to sell its 40% stake in a joint venture in Turkey for 122 million pounds ($172 million). It is also in the final stages of selling the remainder of its Italian business and wants to wrap up that deal and the one in Poland by the end of the first quarter, the sources said. The Italian exit could be worth about 500 million euros, one of the sources said, and follows the sale of Aviva's stake in Italian life insurer Aviva Vita to joint venture partner UBI Banca for 400 million euros in November. Panmure Gordon analysts estimated the sale of Aviva's remaining European assets to be worth an overall 2.1 billion pounds, with Italy potentially valued at 600 million pounds and Poland at 1.5 billion pounds. (Reporting by Pamela Barbaglia and Stephen Jewkes. Additional reporting by Arno Schuetze, Carolyn Cohn, Gianluca Semeraro and Alex Huebner. Editing by Mark Potter, Kirsten Donovan) VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / ZincX Resources Corp. ("ZincX Resources" or the "Company") (TSXV:ZNX)(OTC PINK:ZNCXF)(FRA:M9R) is pleased to provide an update on the ongoing Kechika Trough targeting initiative. Detailed work has identified numerous Areas of Interest (AOIs) of which 19 have been classified as high-priority targets. These targets have been ranked and will be assessed in future exploration programs with focused field programs. Kechika Trough Targeting Initiative In mid-2020 the Company initiated a district wide, evaluation of its Kechika Regional properties, including the flagship Akie property. Collectively, the contiguous claim block extends over a strike length of approximately 140 kilometres covering the highly prospective Gunsteel formation. The Gunsteel formation is a siliceous, carbonaceous, fine-grained clastic assemblage of the Middle to Late Devonian Earn Group and is the primary host lithology for SEDEX Zn-Pb-Ag deposits and significant mineral prospects within the Kechika Trough. This work has utilized the extensive Kechika Trough Exploration Database to help identify underexplored regions of its properties by identification of new AOIs and near-term drill targets. The data base represents a comprehensive effort to compile and integrate over 40 years of exploration data derived from B.C. Assessment Reports, B.C. Property Files, internal reports and modern exploration that the Company has itself undertaken, including high-resolution, airborne geophysical surveys and targeted geochemical and mapping campaigns. Targets The Company has identified 19 high-priority targets from a pool of 95 AOIs across all its Kechika Trough tenure including key properties such as Akie, Pie, Mt. Alcock, and Bear/Spa. A set of district specific exploration criteria have been established from the study of past discoveries in the region (e.g., Cardiac Creek deposit, Cirque, Driftpile, etc.). Potential AOIs were assessed using these criteria and evaluated against the geological, geochemical, geophysical and geographical datasets present within the Kechika Trough Exploration Database to identify prospective AOIs. Work has been recommended representing early stage through to drill exploration targets. This evaluation also identified prospective areas on several properties that have had little to no exploration. The 19 ranked high-priority targets are located on almost every property within the district. Several target areas are classified as drill-ready while others require additional work in order to be upgraded. In some cases, these high-priority targets are associated with adjacent or proximal AOIs that pending exploration success could elevate their ranking. One of the highest priority targets is the Mt. Alcock prospect located approximately 40 kilometres northwest of the Akie property and 20 kilometres northwest of Teck Resources/Korea Zinc's Cirque property. The Mt. Alcock prospect, discovered in the late 1970s, is defined by a prominent massive barite cap ("kill zone) which hosts abundant coarse-grained galena and sphalerite on surface. Limited and extremely shallow drilling by previous operators intersected mineralisation with significant grade such as 9.30% combined Zn+Pb and 1.20 oz/t Ag over 8.8 metres in drill hole AK-89-3 including 14.20% combined Zn+Pb and 1.60 oz/t Ag over 3.6 metres (*) hosted in Gunsteel formation shale. Facies models recently derived by the Company from close examination of the Cardiac Creek deposit can be applied to the Mt. Alcock prospect and greatly assist in vectoring future targeted drilling at depth and down dip of prospective lithology. The tenor and style of mineralization at Cardiac Creek is a close analog and serve as an exploration model going forward. Mineralization in the district, including Cirque, and Driftpile, along with historical drilling, geochemical data and geophysical EM trends all support the exploration model. Other high-priority targets are present on the Saint and Thro properties located to the northwest of the Driftpile deposit. Targets on the Saint property are associated with a long continuous Pb soil anomaly with approximate dimensions of 3,500m x 500m with values consistently in excess of 100 ppm and localized areas where values can range up to 6,500 ppm. Historical operators recommended drilling for this target area but it was never pursued. On the Thro property historical work outlined an approximate 600m x 600m Pb soil anomaly with values consistently in excess of 100 ppm and range up to 12,500 ppm. Rock chip samples in the vicinity were also elevated in lead and rock chips taken from a hand dug trench in 1978 returned highly anomalous Pb values in excess of 400 ppm and ranging up to 5,600 ppm. These anomalies represent some of the largest in the district and both remain untested by drilling. Almost all the known deposits in the district are associated with a distinct Pb soil signature making the targets on the Saint and Thro properties attractive drill targets. Peeyush Varshney, CEO of the Company, stated: "While we continue to focus on maximizing value from our primary asset, the Cardiac Creek deposit located on the Akie property, we are also looking to unlock the blue-sky potential of our Kechika Regional Project. This targeting initiative is forward momentum to achieve that goal. Targets identified in this latest generative process are an important iterative step and we look forward to assessing them in the field in upcoming exploration programs." Work will continue to refine these high-priority targets and AOIs as well as identify new target areas as additional datasets are incorporated into the database. Kechika Trough Exploration Database The Kechika Trough Exploration Database represents a comprehensive effort to compile and integrate over 40 years of exploration data derived from B.C. Assessment Reports, B.C. Property Files, internal reports and documents, and more. Data was captured at property to regional scales and includes drilling, geological, geochemical, geophysical as well as satellite and geographical datasets. Currently, the database exceeds 155 GB in size and includes over 1,250 rock samples,1,775 silt samples, 24,000 soil samples, and 13,875 meters of drilling. Collectively this work represents in excess of $7.3 million dollars in historical exploration expenditures. The ability to access, display, layer, and analyze multiple datasets at both the property and regional scales, using modern GIS software such as ArcMap and QGIS, is a tremendous tool to increase the chances of exploration success that was unavailable to historical workers. Work will continue to synthesize and incorporate any new historical data into the database that can be utilised to aid in the definition of new exploration targets. The Akie Zn-Pb-Ag Project The 100% owned Akie property is situated within the Kechika Trough, the southernmost area of the regionally extensive Paleozoic Selwyn Basin and one of the most prolific sedimentary basins in the world for the occurrence of SEDEX zinc-lead-silver and stratiform barite deposits. Drilling on the Akie property by ZincX Resources since 2005 has identified a significant body of baritic-zinc-lead SEDEX mineralization known as the Cardiac Creek deposit. The deposit is hosted by siliceous, carbonaceous, fine-grained clastic rocks of the Middle to Late Devonian Gunsteel Formation. The Company updated the estimate of mineral resources at Cardiac Creek in 2018, as follows: 5% Zinc Cut-Off Grade Contained Metal: Category Tonnes (million) Zn (%) Pb (%) Ag (g/t) Zn (B lbs) Pb (B lbs) Ag (M oz) Indicated 22.7 8.32 1.61 14.1 4.162 0.804 10.3 Inferred 7.5 7.04 1.24 12.0 1.169 0.205 2.9 The Company announced robust positive results from the 2018 Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA). The PEA envisages a conventional underground mine and concentrator operation with an average production rate of 4,000 tonnes per day. The mine will have an 18-year life with potential to extend the life-of-mine (LOM) through resource expansion at depth. Key parameters for the PEA are as follows: Parameter Base Case1 Tonnes Mined 25.8 Mt Mined Head Grades 7.6% Zn; 1.5% Pb; 13.08 g/t Ag Tonnes Milled 19.7 Mt Milled Head Grades (after DMS2 upgrade) 10.0% Zn; 1.9% Pb; 17.17 g/t Ag Total Payable Metal (LOM) $3,960M3 Initial CAPEX $302.3M including $45.7M contingency LOM Total CAPEX $617.9M including $58.5M contingency All-in Total OPEX $102.4 per tonne milled Pre-Tax NPV7% $649M Pre-Tax IRR 35% Pre-Tax Payback 2.6 years After-Tax NPV7% $401M After-Tax IRR 27% After-Tax Payback 3.2 years 1. The base case used metal prices are calculated from the 3 year trailing average coupled with two year forward projection of the average price; and are: US$1.21/lb for zinc, US$1.00/lb for lead and US$16.95 for silver. A CDN$/US$ exchange rate of 0.77 was used. The NPV discount rate is 7%. 2. DMS = dense media separation. 3. All dollar amounts expressed in Canadian dollars. The PEA is considered preliminary in nature and includes mineral resources, including inferred mineral resources that are considered too speculative geologically to have the economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be categorized as mineral reserves. Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves have not yet demonstrated economic viability. Due to the uncertainty that may be attached to mineral resources, it cannot be assumed that all or any part of a mineral resource will be upgraded to mineral reserves. Therefore, there is no certainty that the results concluded in the PEA will be realized. Kechika Regional Project In addition to the Akie Project, the Company owns 100% of eight of eleven large, contiguous property blocks that comprise the Kechika Regional Project including the advanced Mt. Alcock prospect. The Kechika Regional Project also includes the Pie, Yuen and Cirque East properties which the Company maintains a significant 49% interest with partners Teck Resources Limited (TSX: TECK.B) and Korea Zinc Co. Ltd holding 51%. These properties collectively extend northwest from the Akie property for approximately 140 kilometres covering the highly prospective Gunsteel Formation shale; the main host rock for known SEDEX zinc-lead-silver deposits in the Kechika Trough of northeastern British Columbia. These projects are located approximately 260 kilometres north northwest of the town of Mackenzie, British Columbia, Canada. Ken MacDonald P.Geo., Vice President of Exploration for the Company, is the designated Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 and is responsible for the technical information contained in this release. Mike Makarenko P.Eng, JDS Energy and Mining, is the designated Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 and is responsible for the PEA technical information contained in this release. (*) Murrell M. and Roberts W., 1990. 1989 Exploration Program on the Mt. Alcock Property in the Kwadacha Recreational Area, Northern British Columbia, Ministry of Energy and Mines, Assessment Report 19829, 111p. The TSX Venture Exchange has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS ZINCX RESOURCES CORP. "PEEYUSH VARSHNEY" PEEYUSH VARSHNEY, LL.B CEO & CHAIRMAN SOURCE: ZincX Resources Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631581/ZincX-Resources-Provides-an-Update-on-the-Kechika-Regional-Targeting-Initiative When Joan Perkes, president of the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie Board of Trustees, became aware of an exhibit in Bedminster featuring works by a group of Trenton women artists, she turned to Trentons own Mel Leipzig who had curated the show and invited him to bring it to Ellarslie. Nationally known as an artist of the people, Leipzig added several more women whose art he knew well, bringing the total to 11 Women Trenton Style exhibiting their art in Ellarslie. Some are artists who have been recognized with prestigious awards and long professional careers, others are well on their way to similar professional journeys. They are the late Priscilla Algava, Elizabeth Aubrey, Nora Chavooshian, Cheryl Eng, Tracey Jones, Marge Miccio, Dallas Piotrowski, Tamara Torres, Khalilah Sabree, Aundretta Wright and Mary Yess. Some of the women have taught art and art history, all have been active in promoting the arts, founding and leading arts organizations, and creating their own outstanding art. Each artist has an incredibly strong voice and energy, Perkes says. The challenge was to present the show so they are heard individually and in unity. The show is hung beautifully, Leipzig commented after seeing it for the first time. One of the things I like most about it is it goes from complete abstraction to reality. The wide range of genres in this exhibit embraces everything from Tracey Joness thickly impasto Triangle series that can mesmerize you with thousands of brush-tip daubs of oil pigments covering the picture plane upon which triangular shapes have been embedded, to the stark realism of Mary Yesss oil, pen and pencil renderings of Trentons industrial buildings. Where Joness paintings leave it to your eyes to wander across their surfaces taking in color nuance and texture, Mary Yesss works invite you to think about all those smokeless smokestacks, those broken window panes and the ghost-like shapes that are seen in the glass remaining in some. Bordering between abstraction and reality, the paintings of Elizabeth Aubrey also have a sense of mystery. Buildings lean together, trees bend, leaves float across the surface. She describes her urban and rural landscapes as the conflict between man and nature. Marge Miccios paintings, however, are all about city life primarily Trenton. In a group of six night scenes, street lights illuminate storefronts and interior lights let us glimpse life going on inside. Her paintings evoke memories of neighborhoods and create a mood of nostalgia for those of us who grew up in Trenton. You can travel from the emotional landscape paintings of Tamara Torres in which shadow figures hide among webs of memory to the spiritually peaceful mixed media panels created by Khalilah Sabree. Torres says she first encountered art in books at the library where she escaped her life on the streets. Sabree, who taught in the art department of Lawrenceville High School before her retirement, is an educator whose life experience as an African-American Muslim woman flavors her works. Cheryl Eng, who also teaches, bases her paintings, photographs and mixed media works on her personal experiences and says her inspiration comes from the beauty and complexity of people, places and ideas that surround us. Her March Forward 100 Years portrays women of many ethnicities marching together wearing the pink pussy hats of yesteryear. And the late Priscilla Snow Algava is represented by samples of her delightful imagination and the flowing strokes of her drawings and watercolors as well as her iconic print Homage to Jacob Landau. Multi-talented Aundretta Wright, also an educator, is exhibiting not only her unique portraits in orange and green on black of poppies, daffodils and daylilies, she also has on display a deliciously caramel-toned large ceramic bowl whose rich dark chocolate interior appears to spill over its curved opening and drip down its sides. Her bowl commands its own important place between Dallas Piotrowskis monumental portraits of sunflowers. Her blooms stand regally against black, under her painted golden arches that lend elegance to their portrayal. And in another room her dramatic black panther, his yellow eyes focused menacingly, is poised to leap from the colorful borders that surround him. The drama continues with Nora Chavooshians works such as her Lace sculpture that appears to pour from a crack in the wall; her Speak, a massive jawbone with teeth and dark cascading fibers that hangs suspended from the ceiling, inspired by the human rights trials in Guatemala; River, a weaving of a 1915 map of the official deportation route of the Turkish Genocidal Death March on which her family members were sent; and Trama a collaborative tapestry incorporating squares by 28 weavers from 17 Mayan villages. Chavooshian, who is widely known for her successful career as a production designer in the film industry, is the daughter of the late Marge Chavooshian who also was a significant figure in the Trenton art community. These artists are terrific and their work deserves to be seen, Leipzig says. There isnt enough recognition of women artists. And all the women in this show have some connection to Greater Trenton. People dont realize how rich Trenton is in the arts and they need to know this. It has been an interesting challenge for me, Perkes says. I was not familiar with some of the artists and it has been an opportunity for me to reach deeper into the creative Trenton community. Moving forward we (at Trenton City Museum) hope to partner with other non-profit Trenton art and cultural organizations where we can be mutually supportive. Leipzig pauses pondering his response to what this exhibit says about Trenton, then concludes with quiet assurance, Art is life giving. IF YOU GO: ROSEVILLE, Calif., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- TopMark Funding, the premier funding destination for commercial vehicle dealers, announced three key additions to the team in the first months of 2021. The moves correspond with the company's continued implementation of its post-pandemic growth strategy including a return to travel for TopMark's dealer account representatives. The company is forecasting 60% year-over-year growth for 2021 as it emerges from the pandemic. TopMark has added two specialist roles to its roster as well as a dedicated sales recruiter. The first specialist is a dealer marketing position dedicated to introducing TopMark's solutions to dealers as a first touchpoint for any potential partnership. TopMark added this role in an effort to move full throttle into building long-term relationships with top-performing dealerships looking to both upgrade and maximize the finance options available to their customers. The second specialist is a dedicated customer service role which will serve as one of the first and most important points of contact for TopMark customers. The Sales Recruiter is a dedicated position focused on identifying and sourcing top sales talent from within the industry to support the companies growing sales needs and assist with the flow of transactions coming from TopMark's growing dealer base. These hires are part of TopMark's talent strategy to build high-performing teams in every facet of the organization. As the country begins to rebound and vaccinations are rolled out to essential workers including truck drivers, TopMark has revved its engine on growing the Dealer Referral Network and its sales team will be returning to the field in the coming months. "We have found it valuable to meet face-to-face with dealers at the onset of a new partnership to help ensure the dealer understands all of TopMark's financing options for their customers, and it allows us to demonstrate the speed and ease of using our DealerLinc system to submit transactions," said Larry Molenburg, Senior Vice President of Business Development, TopMark Funding, LLC. "In 2021, our attention continues to be on expanding the team to find and retain industry experts who have a passion for the commercial vehicle funding space and will contribute to the overall culture of the organization," said Evan Lang, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, TopMark Funding, LLC. "As our focus continues to grow around TopMark's dealer program offerings, we know that it is time to allow our top sales reps to safely return to building those key dealer relationships across the country." As part of the company's dealer program offerings growth, customers can expect additional features in DealerLinc to be rolled out in 2021. DealerLinc is TopMark's comprehensive platform for dealers to close transactions more quickly and with better communication throughout the process. To learn more about DealerLinc, visit TopMarkFunding.com . About TopMark Funding TopMark Funding, LLC, the premier funding partner for dealers, specializes in financing commercial vehicles and can effectively and efficiently handle dealer transactions. Founded in 2015, the company has a proven track record of helping transportation companies grow by offering strategic funding solutions for fleet owners and growing owner-operators in a variety of situations. With a laser focus on speed, accuracy, and unmatched customer service, TopMark Funding and its dedicated team assist dealers in financing over $5 million of commercial vehicles each month. MEDIA CONTACT: Jamie Haley [email protected] 818.635.6809 SOURCE TopMark Funding, LLC Credit: CC0 Public Domain In today's global economy, production of goods depends on inputs from many trade partners around the world. Companies and governments need a deeper understanding of the global value chain to reduce costs, maintain a profitable production system, and anticipate ripple effects of disruptions in the supply chain. Applied economists from the University of Illinois have developed a new model for in-depth analysis of global supply chain linkages across countries and industries, providing a rich tool that delivers valuable insights for businesses and policy makers around the world. "We live in a time when production processes are very much fragmented. In order to end up with one type of good, a car for example, many inputs are assembled abroad and imported from different places around the world. For instance, a car sold by leading U.S. companies may have anywhere from just 2% to 85% of U.S. and Canadian parts in it," says Sandy Dall'Erba, professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics and director of the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory (REAL) at U of I. Dall'Erba is co-author of the study. "Coordination of the entire supply chain system becomes more and more complicated and sensitive to disruptions at any stage throughout the process. If just one element in your supply chain is missing, it will have a ripple effect on the entire industry," Dall'Erba notes. "An example of this was the global semiconductor shortage that recently forced U.S. automakers to halt production." The researchers started with a widely used economic growth model called shift-share decomposition and expanded its components to include interregional and inter-sectoral linkages. This allows them to identify, for each industrial sector and each country, if the growth of the sector of interest is due to supply chain linkages at the domestic level versus the international level. The latter can be further split between linkages with trade agreement partners (such as NAFTA for the U.S.) and countries from the rest of the world, highlighting the benefits of trade agreements. "When we apply our technique to understand the drivers of growth in a particular sector, we not only can say whether it is growing faster or slower than another sector or region, we can also identify other sectors that are important for the growth of this particular sector," says Claudia Montania, the study's lead author. Montania was a visiting scholar in REAL when she conducted the study and is currently a researcher at the United Nations Development Accelerator Lab in Asuncion, Paraguay. Traditional shift-share decomposition includes information about changes in the industry mix and in region-specific features such as taxes, regulations, or characteristics of the labor force. But it does not include connections among different regions or different industry sectors. "The information provided by the traditional shift-share model is not enough," Dall'Erba notes. "For example, it would be a mistake to study only the food manufacturing sector in order to know what is happening in that sector, because it obviously depends on grain and livestock production which, in turn, depends on water and fertilizers among other inputs. "In addition, grains are not always used for food manufacturing but they may end up as fuel. The supply chain of any sector is intertwined with that of many other sectors," he adds. In the paper, Dall'Erba and Montania apply their model to country-sector linkages in the European Union, allowing them to compare three levels of connectionsdomestic, within the EU, and with the rest of the world, and to identify which ones matter most for each sector. The analysis included 35 industrial sectors in 15 countries from 1995 to 2006. Overall, the researchers found the most important linkages were among EU trade partners; the second-most important were domestic ties; and the least important linkages were with the rest of the world. They emphasize the results vary across sectors and countries. For example, the supply-chain linkages in place to manufacture a French car are different from those that exist for a German car. Their multi-dynamic model can provide detailed, specific information for each country-sector combination as needed for preemptive and tailored planning and policy making. "Knowing which type of linkages are the most important for your product or your sector can be very useful for local governments, for companies, and for producers, because you can make better plans to achieve the expected growth for your sector," Montania states. "You can also promote trade and diplomatic relationships in regions where you have strong sectoral linkages." Dall'Erba points out this information can help countries and industries protect against supply chain disruptions. Those can occur in many forms, ranging from natural disasters such as drought or earthquake to political upheaval, trade wars, and even the global pandemic. For instance, the extreme disruption airline companies have experienced as demand for air travel dropped in 2020 means both Boeing and Airbus have significantly reduced their production and so have the multiple companies manufacturing airplane components from fuselage to seat belts. "COVID-19 has pushed several governments to consider bringing back some industries in order to get better control over all the supply chain links. However, it is not necessarily a viable option as many companies have already de-located their unskilled labor-intensive production to low-wage countries while maintaining high-skilled workers at home," Dall'Erba concludes. Explore further US agricultural water use declining for most crops and livestock production More information: Claudia V. Montania et al, Multi-dynamic interregional input-output shift-share: model, theory and application, Economic Systems Research (2021). Claudia V. Montania et al, Multi-dynamic interregional input-output shift-share: model, theory and application,(2021). DOI: 10.1080/09535314.2020.1867078 A local cheesemaker will be featured in an upcoming episode of Modern Marvels on the History Channel. Caputo Brothers Creamery in Spring Grove, York County will share an inside look at its production facilities during the Feb. 28 episode. The show airs at 10 p.m. with host Adam Richman, best known for Man V Food on the Travel Channel. Richman travels the country to factory lines and locally owned shops to provide an insiders view on how some of Americas favorite foods are made. Caputo Brothers owners David and Rynn Caputo have built a following for their artisan cheeses made using milk from local farms. They are the only producer in the United States of naturally fermented cheese curds that can be stretched into fresh mozzarella. The idea for the company started in 2003. While on the second day of their honeymoon, David Caputo woke up and announced he wanted to quit his job in pharmaceutical sales and become a chef. Rynn followed suit and quit her job at Johnson & Johnson and the couple enrolled in a culinary program in Calabria, Italy. Adam Richman hangs out at Beaver Stadium before the 28-21 win over Michigan on Oct. 19, 2019. Richman is host of "Modern Marvels" on the History Channel. File photo by Joe Hermitt | jhermitt@pennlive.com While in Italy they became accustom to eating fresh mozzarella. Five years ago, the Caputos set out to make cheese in their home with the intention of producing 40 to 50 pounds a week to sell at farmers markets. They stuck to the skills they had learned in Italy. Today, Caputo Brothers sells more than 250,000 pounds annually. The difference between their cheese and others manufactured in the United States has to do with the way it is fermented. They do not use citric acid or vinegar. Caputo Brothers is the only cheesemaker in the United States producing a naturally fermented mozzarella. STOCKHOLM, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Swedish medtech start-up Capitainer today announced that the company's modified qDBS dried blood spot card, tailored for measuring Phosphatidylethanol (PEth), an alcohol biomarker with multiple clinical and forensic applications, has been evaluated in a scientific study. The study demonstrates that blood sampling by the qDBS card, fortified with an inhibitor of the enzyme forming PEth, enables accurate and legally secure analysis of PEth. "In blood specimens containing ethanol formation of PEth may continue after sampling leading to falsely elevated concentrations. In this study, we have validated a convenient test procedure enabling accurate measurement of PEth in blood by using a tailored, dried blood spot card specially prepared with an inhibitor of phospholipase D (PLD), the enzyme catalyzing the formation of PEth," says Professor Olof Beck, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, the lead author of the publication. Christopher Aulin, CEO of Capitainer comments: "The misuse of alcohol represents one of the leading causes of preventable death, illness and injury and is associated with a variety of adverse health and social consequences throughout the world. PEth is increasingly used as a biomarker for monitoring of alcohol drinking in clinical and forensic testing in many countries and PEth levels are also admissible as evidence in court cases. Thus, a false positive test result can have serious consequences. We are therefore pleased to be able to announce that the specially prepared qDBS card for accurate PEth analysis is commercially available as of now." Title and link to the scientific publication: Measurement of the alcohol biomarker phosphatidylethanol (PEth) in dried blood spots and venous bloodimportance of inhibition of post-sampling formation from ethanol, Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry (2021), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00216-021-03211-z. For more information visit www.capitainer.se. Media Contact: Richard Hayhurst +44 (0)7711 821527 [email protected] SOURCE Capitainer Related Links https://capitainer.se Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 18:22:14|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BAMAKO, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Two soldiers were killed and seven others injured in an ambush in central Mali on Tuesday, the Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) said Wednesday in a statement on its official website. The incident took place on Tuesday at around 2 pm when a mission of the 53rd Rapid Intervention Company of the army, leaving Sevare for Konna, fell into an ambush by armed terrorist groups about 32 km northeast of Sevare, the Malian army said. "The provisional toll is 2 dead and 7 injured among the FAMa", the statement said. Following the 2012 military coup, insurgents took control of the north of Mali. Despite the ongoing French military intervention in this West African country and the UN peacekeeping mission, the terrorist threat persists in central and northern Mali. Enditem 02/24/2021 Photo (c) huettenhoelscher - Getty Images In the wake of more than a dozen battery-related fires, Hyundai has announced that it will replace the battery systems in around 82,000 Kona EVs. The cost of replacing the batteries will come to around $900 million, but the automaker said its focus is on mitigating the fire risk. In total, 15 fires have occurred in connection to the batteries -- 11 in South Korea, two in Canada, one in Finland, and one in Austria. "Our priority is to dispel potential risks against customer safety despite the low possibility of fires and high financial burden," Hyundai said in a statement. Hyundais battery replacement initiative follows its recall of the Kona EV in South Korea and North America. After recalling the vehicles, Hyundai upgraded the Konas battery management system to cap charging at 90 percent to prevent overcharging. However, one vehicle that had received the update recently caught fire in South Korea. Cause not yet determined The batteries in question were manufactured by LG Chem, which said its continuing to work with Korea's Transport Ministry to determine what is causing the fires. According to Reuters, LG Chem said in a statement that Hyundai misapplied LGs suggestions for fast-charging logic in the battery management system and said that adding the battery cell should not be seen as the direct cause of the fire risks. Hyundai hasnt commented on the cause of the fires. Until a replacement battery system is installed, Hyundai urges Kona and Ioniq owners to limit battery charging to 90 percent of capacity. Highlights Thamb Ji had taken loan against auto. He was struggling to fund daughters' education. Xiaomi to contribute for next one year. The past year has been tough for everyone. More so for service providers. The pandemic has hit businesses hard, forcing them to take tough steps. Things have been more difficult for the self-employed. An auto-rickshaw driver found himself in a similar situation. As the COVID-19 spread and a lockdown was imposed, this auto-rickshaw driver was forced to sit at home. With no income, the driver decided to sell his vehicle to fund his daughters' education only for Xiaomi to intervene and help him out. Xiaomi's Global VP and India MD Manu Kumar Jain tweeted that the company will now be funding one year of education for both the daughters of the rickshaw driver. The tweet included a social media post narrating the story of the driver. It claimed that the driver had taken a loan to meet his financial needs during the tough phase. Both his daughters are studying in the same school Maharshi Vidya Mandir. As things changed and schools turned towards online education, the driver had to buy smartphones for both his daughters. He first took a loan against his auto and then pledged his wife's Mangal Sutra for the same. Thamb Ji had no other option but to sell his auto if he was unable to repay the loan. "We believe that everyone has the right to #education! We came to know about Thambi ji, an auto-rickshaw driver, who was selling the rickshaw for kids' education. Books. Happy: we're supporting both his daughters' education for one year," Jain tweeted, along with a picture of the driver with his wife. This isn't the first time when Xiaomi has come out to help people. Last month, it had announced a campaign with Sonu Sood to empower underprivileged children. As part of the collaboration, Mi India announced to empower thousands of students by donating Redmi smartphones. The initiative also allows people to donate their smartphones which are in good condition through a microsite launched by the brand. Last year, it had also announced a Scholarship program where Xiaomi plans to spend Rs 2 crore towards students' education in partnership with Teach for India as well as Buddy4study. On the business front, Xiaomi is gearing up to launch the Redmi Note 10 series in India. The new smartphones will be unveiled on March 4. President Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to forgive $10,000 of student loan debt, and some people are confused about whether the provision is part of the proposed $1.9 trillion third stimulus package thats making its way through Congress. Its not. But thats not stopping scammers from trying to trick borrowers into thinking it might be. Robocalls from hucksters who want to steal your personal information, citing a confusing mix of the stimulus package, the election and student loan forgiveness plans, are out in force. This is an important nationwide announcement regarding the litigation process happening with the U.S. presidential election. This means you only have a few months left to submit your paperwork to the Department of Education to be grandfathered into the federal student loan forgiveness program, the scammers say. This is the only notification you will receive about this. We currently have an available human representative to speak to you about this. It gives a phone number and references a March deadline that has something to do with the stimulus plan. Its all bunk. But there is some relief for student loan borrowers. Biden extended a suspension of payments on federal student loan debt called forbearance until Sept. 30. The provision, which went into effect in March 2020, would have expired on Jan. 31. It allows borrowers to take a pass on making student loan payments while interest on the loans is 0%. As for actual loan forgiveness, the new administration hasnt yet taken action to forgive any debt. While the Biden administration says the president still supports the $10,000 forgiveness plan, some Democratic lawmakers are pressuring him to increase the amount to $50,000. He said earlier this month that he doesnt support such a large forgiveness plan. I will not make that happen, Biden said during a town hall event on CNN, noting he doesnt think the government should forgive debt for people who went to Harvard and Yale and Penn. Some relief will be coming for borrowers, but we dont yet have a timeline and most importantly, it wont come to you in the form of a robocall. Please subscribe now and support the local journalism YOU rely on and trust. Karin Price Mueller may be reached at KPriceMueller@NJAdvanceMedia.com. Russias Interior Ministry proposes lifelong storage of dactyloscopic data TASS, Artem Geodakyan 10:54 24/02/2021 MOSCOW, February 24 (RAPSI) The Russian Ministry of Interior has proposed to store personal dactyloscopic data until the respective individual dies or reaches the age of 100, according to a bill presented for the public discussion. The document envisages to set the aforesaid storage terms for the dactyloscopic information received from the persons subject to state registration, a statement of the Interior Ministry press service reads. Citing the statistics of the last five years, which demonstrate a significant rise in the number of citizens reaching the age of 80, the Ministry points out that senior citizens are more vulnerable to diseases resulting in memory loss, what facilitates longer data storage terms. The Court motivation for the rejection of latest bail request by the democracy tycoon. His commitment not to use the internet and to limit contact overlooked. The legal foundations of the city have been subverted. Links between Lai and the Stand with Hong Kong pressure group rejected. Hong Kong (AsiaNews) - Jimmy Lai must remain in prison because there is a risk he could commit new crimes against national security. This is the High Court motivation published yesterday with regarding its February 18 rejection of the latest bail request presented by democracy advocate and media mogul. Now on April 16, Lai will appear before the judges on charges of "collusion" with foreign forces, a charge provided for by the national security law set up by Beijing. The 73-year-old owner of Apple Daily - a critical voice of the city's leadership and central government - was jailed in early December; on 9 February the Final Appeals Court invalidated his release on bail, granted on 23 December by the High Court. At the request of the Justice Department, an Intermediary Court suspended his bail on December 31, ordering his return to Stanley maximum security prison. Also indicted for corruption, he faces life imprisonment. In rejecting the bail application, judge Anthea Pang ignored two "additional conditions" offered by the defence: Lai's commitment not to use the web and to limit the number and duration of visits to his home. Considering the accused's financial capabilities and network of relationships, Pang explained that the risk of repeating the crime is very high. The judges position on the Lai case has drawn criticism from legal experts and the democratic front. The charge is of exploiting the national security law to subvert fundamental principles included in the Basic Law (the city's mini-constitution), such as the presumption of innocence. Confirming the ruling of the Final Court of Appeal, Judge Pang said the security measure imposes stricter thresholds for bail, with the burden of proof on the defence and not the prosecution: rules of the British "common law", the basis of the citys legal system. Lai also faces trial on charges of allegedly helping Andy Li, one of 12 anti-government activists who tried to flee to Taiwan in the summer again another crime under the recent security law. The billionaire is also among the nine democratic personalities who have been on trial for days for organizing and taking part in a major demonstration against the extradition law on August 18, 2019. Police believe Lai is the leader of an international pressure group called Stand with Hong Kong. Based in Great Britain, it allegedly launched a worldwide campaign to impose sanctions on the Hong Kong executive and the Chinese authorities. Its founder, Finn Lau, however, denied any connection with the democracy advocate and tycoon. Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. Nepal Prime Minister KP Oli received a major setback after the Supreme court reinstated the dissolved House Of Representatives, the lower house of the Nepalese Parliament. Nepals top court on Tuesday reinstated the dissolved House of Representatives in a major jolt to Nepalese Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli who was embattled and preparing for snap polls. A five-member constitutional bench headed by Justice Cholendra Shumsher JBR nullified the governments decision to dissolve the 275-member lower house of the parliament. the court further ordered the government to summon the house session within the next 13 days. Nepal dived into a political crisis in December 2020 after President Bidya Devi Bhandari dissolved the lower house on the recommendation of Prime Minister Oli, amidst a power tussle within the ruling communist party. this move by Prime Minister Oli triggered protests from a large section of the Communist Party headed by Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda, who also co-chairs the ruling party. In a letter to President Bhandari where the PM recommended to dissolve the house, he stated that he controlled over 64 % of the majority in the House and there was no possibility of forming a new government. he further underlined that the country needed a fresh mandate of the people to ensure stability. Also Read: Prime Minister Oli constantly defeated his manoeuvre to dissolve the House of Representatives, stating that some leaders of his party were seeking to form a parallel government. 13 writ petitions which also includes the one filed by Mr Whip Dev Prasad Gurung, chief of Nepal communist Party were submitted at the Apex Court seeking the restoration of the lower house of parliament. The five-judge constitutional bench which conducted a hearing over the matter from January 17 to February 19 comprised Jt. Bishwombhar Prasad Shreshtha, Jt. Anil Kumar Sinha, Jt. Sapana Malla and Jt.Tej Bahadur KC. Also Read: Georgia Toffolo put on a hilarious display as she posted a video of her working out with a massive bottle of 360 vodka on Instagram on Tuesday. The former Made In Chelsea star, 26, looked stunning in the clip she shared with her 1.8million Instagram followers as she joined the countdown to June 21st- the date scheduled for the U.K's lockdown to end. Sporting a matching burgundy gym set, Toff used the huge bottle of Belvedere vodka as a weight. That's one way to do it! Georgia Toffolo put on a hilarious display as she posted a video on her Instagram on Tuesday of her working out with a massive bottle of vodka Georgia, also known as Toff, drew attention to her pert cleavage in the low-cut gym top and added grey trainers to her ensemble. She held the bottle above her head as she performed squats and laughed for the camera. The TV star tied her blonde locks back in a sleek low ponytail as she carried out a series of exercises. During a set of sit ups, she pretended to pour the alcohol in her mouth. Hilarious: The former Made In Chelsea star, 26, sported a matching burgundy gym set as she pretended to pour the alcohol in her mouth while doing sit ups The star worked out to Montell Jordan's anthem This Is How We Do It played, and wrote: 'ARE WE READY PARTY PEOPLE'. Last week, Toff was forced to leap to her own defence, as she faced a barrage of criticism after being shown holidaying in Verbier on ITV's This Morning. She was shown hitting the slopes of the glitzy Swiss resort, prompting several viewers to question whether it was shot during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has sparked lockdowns and travel restrictions. Workout: She used the huge bottle of Belvedere vodka as a weight as she performed various exercises at home Keeping fit: Toff held the bottle above her head as she performed squats and laughed for the camera while her pet dog watched However, Toff who has been riding out the third lockdown at home in London took to Twitter within minutes of the luxury travel segment airing to assure that there was no rule-bending involved, as it was shot back in 2018. One viewer tweeted: '@ToffTalks on #thismorning: look at me hitting the slopes on Verbier, enjoying a delicious fondu and chatting with people without masks while you peasants are at home dealing with a pandemic.' Responding directly, the TV personality wrote: 'It was filmed in 2018,' ending her tweet with a laughing emoji. Criticised: Georgia was forced to leap to her own defence last week, as she faced a barrage of criticism after being shown holidaying in Verbier on ITV's This Morning Days before the three-year-old clip was aired, Georgia appeared to be in a reminiscent mood, when she shared a snap of herself enjoying a sun-soaked holiday. The media personality displayed her lithe physique in polka dot bikini bottoms and a contrasting blue top with the word 'Honey' emblazoned across the front. Georgia captioned the photo, which was shared on her Instagram account: 'Mentally Im here honey whats your favourite beach destination?' The reality star has been spending time at home after the UK was plunged into a third lockdown at the start of January, to prevent a rise in coronavirus cases. Old clip: However, Toff took to Twitter within minutes of the luxury travel segment airing to assure that there was no rule-bending involved, as it was shot back in 2018 The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company The views expressed by public comments are not those of this company or its affiliated companies. Please note by clicking on "Post" you acknowledge that you have read the TERMS OF USE and the comment you are posting is in compliance with such terms. Your comments may be used on air. Be polite. Inappropriate posts or posts containing offsite links, images, GIFs, inappropriate language, or memes may be removed by the moderator. Job listings and similar posts are likely automated SPAM messages from Facebook and are not placed by WFMZ-TV. Hundreds of New Yorkers marched on police stations and public buildings in Rochester on Tuesday, but no arrested were reported to have been made Daniel Prude's death last March and the release of the video six months later sparked nightly protests in Rochester, New York Hundreds of protesters marched on police stations and public buildings in Rochester on Tuesday after a grand jury announced that it cleared seven cops of criminal charges in the death of Daniel Prude. Prude, 41, was handcuffed while he was naked and had a spit hood placed over his head until he stopped breathing last March during a mental health crisis. He died a week after the ordeal and a medical examiner ruled his death a homicide caused by 'complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint'. On March 23, Prude was in the throes of a mental health crisis when his family requested help from police. Bodycam footage of the incident, where Prude can be heard saying, 'You're trying to kill me', was only made public six months later after city officials deliberately delayed its release. It sparked nightly protests in the New York town. Officers Troy Taladay, Paul Ricotta, Francisco Santiago, Andrew Specksgoor, Josiah Harris and Mark Vaughn, along with Sgt. Michael Magri, were suspended after Prude's death became public. The March 23 video made public on Sept. 4 was released in the wake of street demonstrations around the nation over George Floyds death. It shows Prude handcuffed and naked with a spit hood over his head Lawyers for the police claimed Prude's use of PCP, which caused irrational behavior, was 'the root cause' of his death The protesters had gathered around 7.30pm at the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Samuel McCree Way, where Daniel Prude met police, according to the Democrat & Chronicle. Stanley Martin, organizer of Free the People and a candidate for City Council, addressed the crowd. 'White supremacy protects white supremacists,' she said. '(The system) is not meant to protect us. The system did exactly what it was meant to do.' She continued: 'We keep marching; we keep fighting; we keep reimaging what the future looks like. The future does not include the RPD and I know that for a fact.' Protesters surround a police substation in Rochester on Tuesday after a grand jury voted not to charge officers for the death of Daniel Prude A protester was seen with a Justice 4 Daniel Prude shirt while wearing a ski mask that did not cover their mouth on Tuesday Protesters walk against traffic on Interstate 490, headed toward the Public Safety Building Dianne Stengel, left, places candles at the site of Daniel Prude's encounter with police officers a year ago Protesters were caught on video climbing over police barricades near a police station and coming face-to-face with cops as the department warned people on Twitter to avoid the area. Eventually, officers retreated into the station station receiving cheers from the crowd, according to the Democrat & Chronicle. By 9.45pm, the remaining crowd marched on interstate highway I-490 to the Public Safety Building, where protesters clashed with cops throughout 2020. The protest ended just before midnight with the crowd vowing to return, according to the outlet. There were no arrests reported and no apparent physical clashes with law enforcement. Over the Child St barricades pic.twitter.com/jjAMrOP4X4 Shawn Dowd (@sdowdphoto) February 24, 2021 Anthony Hall, right, speaks to a crowd gathered at the site of Daniel Prude's encounter with police officers in 2020 Hall, with the megaphone, speaks to a crowd gathered at the site of Daniel Prude's encounter with police officers in 2020 People march in protest after the New York grand jury voted not to indict police officers in Daniel Prude's death on Tuesday Protesters were seen carrying Black Lives Matter signed and called to defund the Rochester Police Department State Attorney General Letitia James, whose office took over the prosecution and impaneled a grand jury, said her office 'presented the strongest case possible' and she was 'extremely disappointed' by the decision not to charge the seven officers involved. 'The criminal justice system has frustrated efforts to hold law enforcement officers accountable for the unjustified killing of African Americans. And what binds these cases is a tragic loss of life in circumstances in which the death could have been avoided,' James said at the Aenon Missionary Baptist Church in Rochester. 'One recognizes the influences of race, from the slave codes to Jim Crow to lynching to the war on crime to the overincarceration of people of color: Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. And now Daniel Prude,' James later added. Barricades were placed in front of the Public Safety Building in downtown Rochester in anticipation for the decision. State Attorney General Letitia James said her office 'presented the strongest case possible' and she was 'extremely disappointed' by the decision Lawyers for the seven police officers suspended over Prude's death have said the officers were strictly following their training that night, employing a restraining technique known as 'segmenting.' They claimed Prude's use of PCP, which caused irrational behavior, was 'the root cause' of his death. The video of the March 23, 2020 incident was only made public on September 4 in the wake of demonstrations over the death of George Floyd. It shows Prude handcuffed and naked with a spit hood over his head as an officer pushes his face against the ground, while another officer presses a knee to his back. The officers held him down for about two minutes until he stopped breathing. He was taken off life support a week later. 'The system failed Daniel Prude again,' said Prude family lawyer Elliot Shields. 'It failed him on March 22 when he was released from the hospital. It failed him on the night of March 23 when the police use deadly force against him. And it failed him again today.' Shields said Prude's brother, Joe Prude, was 'heartbroken.' Barricades were placed in front of the Public Safety Building in anticipation for the decision Protesters carrying home made shields with the names of police officers who arrested Daniel Prude gather in Rochester, New York, on September 5, 2020 Calls were made to the officers' attorneys. Matthew Rich, who represents four officers, said 'we're still taking it in' and said the attorneys would speak to the press later. Prude's family filed a federal lawsuit in September alleging the police department sought to cover up the true nature of his death. The county medical examiner listed the manner of death as homicide caused by 'complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint' and cited PCP as a contributing factor. James recommended that officers and other responders be trained to recognize the symptoms of excited delirium syndrome, which can make people vulnerable to cardiac arrest. The medical examiner and the attorney generals expert both concluded that Prude was in a state of excited delirium. The attorney general also called for communities to minimize or eliminate police responses to mental health calls and to find alternatives to the type of 'spit sock' officers placed over Prudes head. She said the mesh hood clearly added to Prudes stress and agitation. Democratic Mayor Lovely Warren fired police chief La'Ron Singletary shortly after the video's release, while rejecting calls from demonstrators that she resign. More barricades placed around the front of the Public Safety Building in anticipation for the grand jury decision Prude's family filed a federal lawsuit in September alleging the police department sought to cover up the true nature of his death The city halted its investigation into Prude's death when James' office began its own investigation in April. Under New York law, deaths of unarmed people in police custody are typically turned over to the attorney generals office, rather than handled by local officials. James planned to meet with Prude's brother, criminal justice advocates and faith leaders in Rochester to devise a plan to fight for a more just system. 'The voices of individuals of good will must be heard and they are marching and crying out for a criminal justice system that is fair and just,' James said Tuesday. 'And so we must use boulders of righteousness, and hammers of intentional activism and mallets of moral clarity to bend the arc, the moral arc, towards justice and bring real equality in our time for all Gods people.' (Natural News) Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has issued a temporary moratorium on all electricity billing throughout the Lone Star State after some customers were charged thousands of dollars for just a few days of power. Following the deadly winter storm that left millions of Texans without power, Abbott convened an emergency meeting with state lawmakers to address the massive price gouging that has been taking place. Reports indicate that energy prices skyrocketed from around $50 per Megawatt to more than $9,000 in many areas of the state. Consequently, customers were shocked at the bills they received. Its mind-blowing, said Royce Pierce, a customer of energy company Griddy who received a bill for $8,162.73. I honestly didnt believe the price at first. Its not a great feeling knowing that there is a looming bill that we just cant afford. Pierce was one of the fortunate who did not lose power during the storm. At the same time, he was not so fortunate to receive a massive power bill for just a few days worth of energy. There is nothing we can do now, he says. This is already an insane thing and I dont care about the money when it comes to peoples health. If it were not for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19), Pierce says he would have had enough work, and thus money, to pay the lofty bill. Due to fears about Chinese germs, however, Pierce has not been working as much as normal, meaning he cannot afford to pay it. Man receives $17,000 power bill after Texas storm Another customer out of Dallas told the media that his bill was over $1,000, which is strange seeing as how he lives in a 700 square foot apartment I have been keeping at 60 degrees. When your electric company tells you to switch but there has been a hold on switching for over a week now, tweeted another couple about their plight. Using as little as possible 1300 sq ft house and this is my bill, they added, showing a screenshot of $3,800 charge for the month. One of the most disturbing bills we have seen was the one received by Ty Williams, who told WFAA that normally he pays around $660 per month for electricity. This month it rose to $17,000. How in the world can anyone pay that? he asks. I mean you go from a couple of hundred dollars a month theres absolutely no way it makes no sense. Abbott announced that the Public Utility Commission of Texas will be ordering all electricity companies to stop sending bills to customers until the state is able to find a way to protect customers from price gouging. Texans who have suffered through days of freezing cold without power should not be subjected to skyrocketing energy bills, Abbott told reporters on Sunday. The issue about utility bills and the skyrocketing prices that so many homeowners and renters are facing is the top priority for the Texas legislature right now. Because Texas has a deregulated energy market, customers are free to choose from scores of competing electricity providers. Many of them sell electricity at wholesale prices that rise in tandem with demand. Because well over 4.5 million Texas households were without power during the peak of the crisis, energy demand soared and so did peoples bills. The bill should go to the state of Texas, said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner in an interview Sunday. When theyre getting these exorbitant electricity bills and theyre having to pay for their homes, repair their homes, they should not have to bear that responsibility. More related news can be found at Collapse.news. Sources for this article include: CTVnews.ca NaturalNews.com ZeroHedge.com The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Police in the ACT are investigating an alleged assault at Parliament House. In a statement on Wednesday night, ACT Policing confirmed it had received a report about an alleged assault at Parliament House in March 2019. No additional comment will be made during the investigation, it said. No other formal reports associated with this matter have been made. Former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins had indicated she would be making a formal report on Wednesday afternoon, outlining allegations she was raped in March 2019 in the office of then-defence industry minister Linda Reynolds. Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. Sorry! This content is not available in your region Residents huddled under blankets in freezing homes following massive power outages. Vaccination plans were scrambled, delaying efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19. And, adding to the injury, Houston-area refineries and plants emitted hundreds of thousands of pounds of pollutants while state air monitors went offline. Facilities released roughly 700,000 pounds of excess emissions between Feb. 11 and Feb. 18, according to early company estimates reported to the state and analyzed by the Houston Chronicle. The data reinvigorated calls from environmental advocates for better preparation ahead of storms, which climate change is expected to make more likely. We really need to give thought to how facilities are able to address the impending climate change impacts, said Grace Tee Lewis, who works for the Environmental Defense Fund and also compiled the data. Because ultimately these excess emissions are impacting the community and our air. Industry officials prepared ahead of last weeks sub-freezing weather as they would before a hurricane, said Dennis Winkler, executive director of the East Harris County Manufacturers Association. Workers protected what they could. So-called ride-out crews staffed facilities for the whole disaster. On HoustonChronicle.com: Will climate change make winter storms more likely? They followed best practices that Winkler said theyve had to enact too many times. The region experienced major flooding in 2015 and 2016 and was affected by severe tropical storms or hurricanes in 2017, 2019 and 2020. As a matter of practice, our facilities are going to do everything that they can do to not have emissions or to reduce emissions, Winkler said. We are part of the community. Our employees are part of the community. Many of our workers live, and their families live, in those communities. Planning ahead was important, and facilities had plenty of notice, said Stewart Behie, interim director of the Mary Kay OConnor Process Safety Center, a research and education center at Texas A&M. One cant anticipate everything, Behie said. However one needs to plan as much as possible for the worst-case scenario and then make adjustments as one goes along. Planning is a critical, critical part. If you dont plan well, then youre not going to end up weathering the storm, so to speak. Why emissions occur Extreme situations still brought issues. Facilities in early reports following the cold weather snap blamed excess emissions on reasons such as malfunctioning equipment, loss of natural gas supply and frozen material. Generally, emissions can occur during a facility start-up, shutdown or malfunction, said Daniel Cohan, an atmospheric scientist at Rice University. Temperatures might not be normal. Operations might be affected. And pollution-control devices work best when things are running as usual. But there still may be critical safety reasons for why the emissions occur, he said. There is a reason to have more flexibility during these events, Cohan said, but you want these events to be rare and want them to be as carefully managed as possible. While Cohan said air in Texas is cleaner than ever in his lifetime, large emissions events continue to put people at risk. Pollution during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was on another level of magnitude. Some 8 million pounds of emissions were released, according to advocates. Storage tanks failed, power went down and the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby exploded. Tee Lewis noted that some facilities emitted significant amounts of contaminants in both the hurricane and recent freeze. That highlighted a need for better regulation ahead of the next natural disaster, she said. Vulnerable communities And there will be another disaster. Whether climate change will cause more ice storms such as Texas just experienced remains a topic of study. But its well-established that the burning of fossil fuels contributes to ongoing warming, making stronger hurricanes and more intense rainfall more likely. These facilities are highly vulnerable to extreme weather and, as the climate changes, these extreme weather events are going to happen more often, said Corey Williams, who works for Air Alliance Houston. Communities that surround these facilities are vulnerable. Harris County during the freeze saw the most excess emissions of any county, according to Catherine Fraser, who works on air quality issues for Environment Texas, an advocacy group. She noticed in recent years that excess emissions occurred when it got especially cold in Texas. So she anticipated the emissions during the freeze but felt they were preventable. She hopes to see stronger penalties put in place for repeat offenders. Facilities have two weeks to revise their initial emissions reports, which are submitted to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. State officials typically then decide if, according to the law, the emissions were avoidable and whether operators made efforts to reduce them. Some rules were suspended by Gov. Greg Abbott at the agencys request due to the bitter-cold temperatures. The state on Tuesday also deployed to Houston one of its newly equipped mobile monitoring vans. The van is meant to fill the gaps of a stationary monitoring system not intended to police facilities in disasters. The state takes its stationary monitors offline ahead of major hurricanes to prevent damage. A parallel problem arose in the freeze: 24 of the agencys air monitors in the Houston area went offline beginning Feb. 15 because they lost power. Power was restored by Feb. 18, spokesman Gary Rasp said. The state considered it important to have its monitors back online as facility operations resumed. A revamped Harris County Pollution Control department, too, was conducting additional air monitoring. As life returned to normal, excess emissions were still possible to find. Matt Dempsey contributed to this report. emily.foxhall@chron.com Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko, a leading member of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), believes Ghanaians can contribute to the LGBTQI debate without inciting others against homosexuals. In a Facebook post on Tuesday, the lawyer called on the public to approach the whole discussion with a human face in order to appreciate their situation. According to him, anti-gay campaigners must not end up generating an intense hate campaign against homosexuals. You can speak for the law and culture minus hate, Otchere-Darko admonished. Meanwhile, the Ghana Pentecostal and Charismatic Council (GPCC) is demanding for the immediate arrest and prosecution of persons behind the new Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgender and Queer Intersex (LGBTQI) community office in the country. It also wants all diplomats who allegedly took part in the opening of the LGBTQI office in Ghana to be summoned to explain their actions since Ghanas laws frown on such activities. A statement issued and signed by the president of GPCC Rev Prof Paul Frimpong-Manso said government must not yield to endorsing the activities of LGBTQI because it is a potential threat to peace. Close down without delay the alleged LGBTQI office in Ghana and immediately arrest and prosecute the individuals or groups behind the alleged opening of this new office in Ghana for breach of the law and potential threat to peace. Summon all foreign diplomats who allegedly participated in the opening of the LGBTQI offices in Ghana to explain their violation of the sovereignty of Ghana, the Council said in a statement. EU support On Wednesday the European Union in Ghana commended the country for respecting the rights of LGBT people. It further pledged support for civil society groups which will promote the rights of homosexuals in Ghana. The EU statement has provoked a backlash by the public. Many Ghanaians have called for the closure of the newly opened LGBT office in the capital, Accra. See Post below: Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The European Commission has warned that the regimes obstruction of the Constitutional Committee is obstructing a political solution, according to SY 24. The European Commission revealed the reasons hindering the political solution and the reconstruction of what has been destroyed by the decade-long war in Syria. In media statements, the Commission stated that there are two reasons that have contributed to obstructing the political solution, stressing that Syria is no longer a priority on the international agenda and that the Syrian regime continues to prevent any progress in the negotiations of the Constitutional Committee. With regards to reconstruction in Syria, the Commission stressed that it will not participate in the process without the Syrian regime being seriously involved in a political process in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 2254. This is the first time that the European Commission has spoken of the decline in the importance of the Syrian issue to the international community. On February 9, the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, announced following the conclusion of a closed session of the UN Security Council on Syria, that I do not have a plan of action for the future, and the fifth round of meetings of the Constitutional Committee was a disappointing and lost opportunity. Human rights defender, Abdel Nasser Hoshan, told SY-24 that the most important reasons for the failure of the fifth round of the Constitutional Committee meetings are the lack of seriousness shown by the international community, the rejection of the Syrian regime [of the Constitutional Committee], the impotence of the opposition, and foreign interference. In early February, the Head of the Syrian High Negotiations Committee, Anas al-Abdah, called on Pedersen to be clear in mentioning the side that is obstructing the work of the Constitutional Committee, stressing that what the delegation of the Syrian regime is doing in its dealings with the Committee is unacceptable. 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. Reuters Russia said on Monday it would send what it described as 'uncomfortable' signals to the United States ahead of a summit between the two countries' leaders next month and announced it was beefing up its western border militarily. The comments came a day after U.S. President Joe Biden said he would press Russian President Vladimir Putin to respect human rights when the two leaders meet in Geneva on June 16. "The Americans must assume that a number of signals from Moscow ... will be uncomfortable for them, including in the coming days," Sergei Ryabkov, Russia's deputy foreign minister, was quoted as saying by the RIA news agency. Bottom line: The haul will include products like headsets, keyboards, mice, USB microphones and console accessories. Interestingly enough, HP said Kingston will retain its DRAM, flash and SSD product lines for gamers and enthusiasts. Basically, HP wants the stuff that you plug into your computer, not what goes inside of it. HP Inc. on Wednesday announced it will be buying the HyperX gaming peripheral portfolio from Kingston Technology for $425 million. HP has been making inroads in the gaming segment as of late, most recently through the Omen sub-brand that debuted in 2016. Picking up an established brand like HyperX seems like a no-brainer, especially as other accessory makers such as Logitech and Corsair continue to cement their places in the industry with acquisitions of their own. Kingston got its start in the memory industry in the late 80s, but it wasnt until 2002 that it introduced high-performance memory modules under its HyperX line. Just earlier this week, the company announced the availability of its new Alloy Origins 60 mechanical gaming keyboard in the US and Canada. The board features a compact form factor with HyperX Red linear mechanical switches, double shot PBT keycaps and RGB backlit keys for $99.99. Both parties expect the transaction to close in the second quarter of 2021, pending customary regulatory review and approval. Images courtesy Antonio Batinic, Sergiy Palamarchuk NUR-SULTAN -- Dozens of people from across Kazakhstan have gathered in front of the presidential office in Nur-Sultan to demand the creation of a government commission to deal with what they called wrongful court decisions against them. The men and women, many of them visibly frustrated and angry, gathered at the site on February 24, preserving social distance to comply with coronavirus regulations. One of the protesters, Dauytbek Moldabaev from the southern town of Qapshaghai, told RFE/RL that the group had officially asked the chief of the presidential office, Erlan Qoshanov, to meet with them but they didn't receive an answer. Some of the protesters were allowed to enter the building one by one, where they were officially told that presidential administration's officials would not meet with them, as "there is no need for a government commission." One of the protesters, Alia Aitpaeva, said after she was allowed inside the building that she was told the protesters could file complaints separately with the presidential administration if they wished to do so. Some of the protesters said they will now turn to the European Parliament and Western governments for help. The day before, a group of civil rights activists from various regions gathered in Nur-Sultan, where they said they would ask the European Parliament to impose personal sanctions against the leadership of the ruling Nur-Otan party and other top officials for what they called the "refusal to deal with wrongful court decisions." On February 11, European lawmakers adopted a resolution on the human rights situation in Kazakhstan that expressed concern over the "deterioration in the general situation of human rights and a crackdown on civil society organizations in Kazakhstan." First Minister Arlene Foster has called on Executive health advisors to help her to understand why Northern Ireland is slower at reopening schools compared to other parts of the UK. Arlene Foster said she was determined to build consensus around a more rapid reopening. Read More Speaking to the BBC's Good Morning Ulster, Mrs Foster referred to correspondence she had received from a nine-year-old child and said she had to take that into consideration ahead of a meeting among the Executive on Thursday. When a nine-year-old child writes to me and says that he wants to go back to school because he is lonely, he misses his friends and he misses his teachers - I have to take that into consideration. The health advisors believe that we need to take a very cautious approach. I want to try and understand, given what has happened in all the other jurisdictions of the UK - and in the Republic of Ireland where there is a higher transmission rate - why we are moving at the speed we are moving. I will want to try and understand from our health advisors why Northern Ireland is so different. We can give hope and optimism to all our people. It was around this time last year we were entering into the dark tunnel that was Covid-19. Our people have been through so much, made so many sacrifices. Our vaccination programme is going so well we are very proud of that and I want to be able to give hope to people with our pathway to recovery. In England all pupils are to return to the classroom on March 8 and in the Republic junior children are to return on a phased basis. Around 320,000 students will return to school in the Republic on March 1, including junior and senior infants, first and second class and Leaving Cert students. This will be reviewed after two weeks and may then lead to the rest of primary school classes and fifth-year secondary students returning to school on March 15. Mrs Foster's comments come just a day after three cases of the so-called South African variant of the virus were detected in Northern Ireland. Gerry Waldron from the Public Health Agency maintained that the risk from these cases was low, but that it was important a close eye was kept on cases and variants. Detailed contract tracing has taken place for all of these cases and we are satisfied that the risk of onward transmission in respect of these cases is very low indeed, he said. That decision around emergence from lockdown is going to be taken in terms of taking advice of what is going on in terms of what variants are prevalent in Northern Ireland. That would be one of the conditions. Six new Covid-19 patients were confirmed in northern provinces of Hai Duong and Quang Ninh Tuesday evening, raising infection tally of the ongoing outbreak to 809. Five of them are in Hai Duong and the other in Quang Ninh. All are related to previously confirmed cases. Sharing the border, the two provinces are where first cases of the current community transmission wave were detected on January 28. With the new cases, Vietnam has recorded 809 locally transmitted cases in 13 cities and provinces, including HCMC with 36 cases and Hanoi with 35. Hai Duong alone has got 625 while Quang Ninh got 61. Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam, head of the national Steering Committee on Covid-19 Prevention and Control said at a meeting Tuesday: "By now, the outbreak has been basically controlled well." Vietnam, with a population of almost 100 million, shares a long border with different countries and on the other hand, has still allowed foreign experts to enter the country to serve its socio-economic development and therefore community infection is always a threat, Dam said. "We have to stay ready all the time. Fighting the pandemic requires us to be as quick, drastic and coherent as possible." Since the beginning of the pandemic, Vietnam has registered 2,401 cases and 684 are active. Indore, Feb 24 : The Madhya Pradesh government has recently launched the 'Safe City' initiative here which focuses on imparting self-defence skills to the girls and the women in battling against the anti-social elements. Under the new initiative, a self-defence camp was organised by the Vasumitra NGO at the Women and Child Development Centre in Indore's Jagjivan Ram Nagar. As many as 70 girls and women took part in the training where they were taught the self-defence techniques using pin and spray. Besides, the women facing domestic violence or any other type of harassment were asked to visit the 'One Stop Centre' for any assistance. The girls have also been apprised of the good and bad touch differences during the programme. [February 24, 2021] UnitedHealthcare Children's Foundation Awards 25,000th Grant UnitedHealthcare Children's Foundation (UHCCF) awarded its 25,000th grant, continuing its mission of helping families gain greater access to medical care that improves the quality of life of children across the United States. Since 2007, UHCCF has provided more than $54 million in medical grants to pay for children's medical expenses not covered, or not fully covered, by a commercial health insurance plan. UHCCF's funding is provided by contributions from individuals, corporations and UnitedHealth Group employees. As a company, UnitedHealth Group has contributed more than $1 billion to support healthy communities since 2000. A family in Arizona received UHCCF's 25,000th grant, which they used to pay for their young daughter's treatments, surgery, and hospital stays related to her heart condition. Ella, 9 years old, was born with only half a functioning heart. She has already undergone three open heart surgeries and the family expects additional surgeries in the future, as well as a possible heart transplant. Ella has no functioning spleen and a very weak immune system that requires daily medication and cardiologist appointments during the year. "We're very thankful to receive the medical grant as her care is extremely expensive. And while there is nothing we wouldn't do to care for her, it's hard to keep up with all the medical bills," her mom said. UHCCF is privileged to award the 25,000th grant in memory of Bob Hart. Hart, of Scottsdale, Ariz., was a UHCCF regional board member for more than 10 years and an inspiration as he generously helped fund more than 75 UHCCFmedical grants for children in the Western U.S. "Many of us know families with children who struggle each day - physically, emotionally and financially. That is why the UnitedHealthcare Children's Foundation is committed to helping improve the health of children and lessen some of the stress that affects entire families," said UHCCF President Matt Peterson. "Our hopes and prayers are with Ella as we are humbled to be in a position to help such an amazing child and family." UHCCF has set a goal to award its 50,000th medical grant in 2030, underscoring its reach and commitment to help children and their families across the United States. UHCCF grants help pay for a variety of medical services and equipment such as physical, occupational and speech therapies, counseling services, surgeries, prescriptions, wheelchairs, cranial helmets, orthotics, eyeglasses and hearing aids. Families can receive up to $5,000 annually per child ($10,000 lifetime maximum per child), and do not need to have insurance through UnitedHealthcare to be eligible. To be eligible for a grant, a child must be 16 years of age or younger. Families must meet economic guidelines, reside in the United States and have a commercial health insurance plan. Grants are available for medical expenses families have incurred 60 days prior to the date of application as well as for ongoing and future medical needs. Applications and more information about UHCCF can be found at www.uhccf.org. About UnitedHealthcare Children's Foundation UnitedHealthcare Children's Foundation (UHCCF) is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization that provides medical grants to help children gain access to health-related services not covered, or not fully covered, by their family's commercial health insurance plan. Families can receive up to $5,000 annually per child ($10,000 lifetime maximum per child), and do not need to have insurance through UnitedHealthcare to be eligible. Since 2007, UHCCF has awarded more than 25,000 grants valued at over $54 million to children and their families across the United States. UHCCF's funding is provided by contributions from individuals, corporations, UnitedHealth Group, and its employees. Visit uhccf.org for more information. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005104/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Federal Deputy Chief Medical Officer Professor Michael Kidd, who was told by Healthcare Australia the doctor had done all requisite training, is now investigating the incident. Mr Hunt was expecting a report from Healthcare Australia later on Wednesday. The doctor involved did the wrong thing and that is a case of human error, a case of unacceptable human error, the Health Minister said on Wednesday afternoon. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video I have asked the department to take action against the company and the doctor, from what is a clear breach on both fronts. Healthcare Australia did not respond to questions on whether they were aware the doctor had not completed the training when he was rostered to work. Professor Allen Cheng, Victorias Deputy Chief Health Officer and co-chair of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, said in light of Wednesdays revelations health providers needed to operate with hospital standards. There are systems to catch these sorts of errors happening. In hospitals, we have double-checking procedures and so on and I think that really needs to be looked at again in this case to make sure this doesnt happen again, he told ABCs 7.30 program on Wednesday. Professor Cheng said there the incident was a result of human and system error, and the government and contracted providers needed to learn from it. The two elderly aged care residents were unlikely to have adverse reactions to the overdose, Professor Cheng said. The Pfizer vaccine vials contain six doses and before the rollout of the vaccine, Health Department secretary Professor Brendan Murphy expressed concern the multi-dose vials presented a risk of vaccine wastage. Nobody in Australia that gives vaccines at the moment is experienced with multi-dose vials, Professor Murphy told a parliamentary committee in early February. Opposition health spokesman Mark Butler said Australians were entitled to expect that every vaccine provider had completed training. Opposition health spokesman Mark Butler said information about difficulties with multi-dose vials has been around for months. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen I dont know what desert island you will have been on not to know that these Pfizer vaccines were being delivered in multi-dose vials, he said. A casual observer of the debate around this over the last several weeks would have known that, weve known because we have no experience of multi-dose vials in Australia. In the first week of phase 1a of the vaccine rollout, 30,000 Pfizer doses were meant to be distributed to 190 towns for private healthcare providers to immunise residents of 240 homes. Healthcare Australia is providing vaccination services to aged care facilities in NSW and Queensland, while Aspen Medical is doing the same in Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT. Loading Healthcare Australia said the company would not finish vaccinating residents in NSW and Queensland facilities that were meant to have been done by Friday. We havent met that list, but we aim to make it up, a spokesman said. Last week, Mr Hunt and Professor Murphy were confident the 183,000 aged care residents in 2600 homes would be vaccinated within six weeks. It is OK to take four or five weeks to vaccinate all the aged care residents, Professor Murphy said at the time. On Wednesday morning, Mr Hunt said the rollout was going well so far. Im actually very happy with how this is going, he said. However, aged care providers said the rollout had already not gone to plan. Peninsula Villages chief executive Shane Neaves said staff in their Central Coast facility worked hard at the weekend to prepare the 300 residents for their first day of vaccinations. They were due to start at 8am on Tuesday but cancelled at the last minute. The residents are very disappointed, he said. Loading BaptistCares Bangor residents in Sydney were vaccinated on Wednesday, a spokesperson said, and its facility at Point Clare on the NSW Central Coast was scheduled for Thursday. However, the operator has received no information about its remaining centres, including one in Wagga Wagga, which was on the federal governments list of locations due to receive their vaccine this week. Other large aged care operators with facilities in locations on the list had not received information about when their vaccinations would occur, or been told if their doses were weeks or months away. The Healthcare Australia spokesman said the complexity of the rollout meant there needed to be flexibility and the company was still recruiting immunisation nurses. We are improving the efficiency of our program based on what we are learning about how long things take, he said. Mr Butler questioned how the government would vaccinate residents in more than 200 facilities before the end of the week. Almost 90 per cent of aged care homes that thought they would get the vaccine this week have not received it and were mid-week, he said. A spokesman for the federal Department of Health said data on the number of aged care residents who have been vaccinated is being collected and will be given to states and territories along with vaccination plans for coming weeks. with Rachael Dexter Several participants of the demonstration kicked the journalists and shouted abuse at them. They also damaged the crews video camera. The incident took place as hundreds of supporters of the opposition Homeland Salvation Movement marched through the city center to demand Prime Minister Nikol Pashinians resignation. The crowd stopped by the main entrances to the headquarters of Armenias police and National Security Service to condemn what opposition leaders described as a government crackdown on Pashinians vocal critics. Higher price not a factor in Grant Thornton's $350M TSA win If you just look at the disparity in pricing between the winner of a $350 million Transportation Security Administration contract and the losers, there is little doubt as to why they filed their protests. Both losing bids by Guidehouse and Deloitte Consulting were magnitudes lower than the winning bid by Grant Thornton. TSA will use the blanket purchase agreement to acquire a variety of program analysis and strategic support for airport security functions. The BPA naturally goes by the acronym PASS. The contract has a ceiling of $350 million over five years. Bidders had to submit their solution and pricing for a sample task order as well as submit their past performance qualifications. Grant Thorntons proposed price for the task order came in at $1.7 million. Deloitte's proposed price was slightly less half of that at $867,000. Guidehouse's proposed price of $536,000 was one-third lower than Grant Thornton's offer. But TSA picked Grant Thornton because the agency said that represented the best value to the government. As you can imagine, both Deloitte and Guidehouse challenged how that best value evaluation was conducted and how their technical solutions were graded. Given the difference in pricing and the relative closeness of their scores, you would think the Government Accountability Offices decision would be a slam dunk in the protesters favor. But that was not to be. GAO ruled TSA was justified in paying the higher price because they saw value in what Grant Thornton proposed. TSA also argued that Grant Thornton presented a lower risk. On top of that, Grant Thornton's price was still magnitudes lower than the estimated pricing TSA had established. Guidehouse and Deloitte both argued their technical proposals should have received higher marks. All three companies received scores of High Confidence for their technical approaches. But TSA rated Grant Thorntons proposal as technically superior. The government also worried that some of what the companies proposed to do could not be done under the pricing they proposed. That is where the risk worry entered the picture. Deloitte also was scored Some Confidence under the management approach category, while Grant Thornton and Guidehouse scored High Confidence. TSA didnt like how Deloitte said it would handle someone who was underperforming on the contract. Deloitte said the person would be replaced within 24 hours but failed to describe how they would determine if the person was under performing, according to the GAO decision. Guidehouse was dinged in its technical proposal, even though it was scored High Confidence. TSA felt Guidehouse's proposal had a risk factor in how it would gather data and engage directly with stakeholders at the airports. TSA said they didnt think Guidehouse could do that level of work under the pricing it proposed and that made their technical proposal riskier, according to the decision. Both decisions are lengthy. The Deloitte decision comes in at 16 pages and Guidehouse is 18. Both decisions have lots of footnotes. But interestingly, the shortest section in both decisions deals with the best-value tradeoff. There GAO basically says that TSAs source selection authority made a well-reasoned decision because the official could point to strengths and weaknesses in the bids and concluded that Grant Thorntons price was worth it. This is the bizarre moment a researcher named Mr Pidgeon is forced to interrupt a zoom call with the Northern Ireland Assembly after catching a pigeon inside his house. Colin Pidgeon was appearing remotely to give evidence to the Assembly's Finance Committee when his pet cat delivered the live pigeon to him. The research officer handled the avian interruption with calm assurance, swiftly capturing the seemingly unscathed bird and returning it out of the window to more familiar surrounds. The episode lit up an otherwise run-of-the-mill afternoon briefing to committee members from Mr Pidgeon and colleagues from the Assembly's Research and Information Service (RaISe). 'I have literally just caught a pigeon, I'm really sorry about this,' he informed Assembly members watching from the Senate Chamber of Parliament Buildings in Belfast. Wanting to get a better view of proceedings, deputy committee chairman Paul Frew wryly asked the Assembly broadcasters to expand his quadrant of the TV to full-screen mode. Committee chairman Steve Aiken tried to offer some advice. Colin Pidgeon is seen clutching a pigeon whilst appearing remotely to give evidence to the Assembly's Finance Committee Mr Pidgeon is seen taking the bird to the window as politicians and colleagues from the Assembly's Research and Information Service (RaISe) watch Following the interruption Mr Pidgeon returns to the call, seemingly unflustered by the pigeon 'Colin, go and put the pigeon outside, we'll skip that question, you just go and put the pigeon outside,' he suggested. Mr Pidgeon confirmed the bird appeared to be unharmed, saying: 'It flew off so the cat hasn't killed it.' Mr Frew was not so confident about the pigeon's prospects. 'We'll know what type of soup you're eating tonight, Colin,' he joked. Assembly members watching the scene unfold on Zoom from the Senate Chamber of Parliament Buildings in Belfast Committee chairman Steve Aiken advised that the researcher 'go and put the pigeon outside' Deputy committee chairman Paul Frew (pictured) wryly asked the Assembly broadcasters to expand Mr Pidgeon's quadrant of the TV to full-screen mode so they could get a good look Once Mr Pidgeon returned to his seat he was offered universal praise for how he dealt with the unexpected visitor. 'Congratulations Colin, well done,' said Mr Aiken. Mr Frew added: 'You kept your composure the whole way through that - amazing.' Mr Pidgeon offered an assurance to the committee that it was not a regular occurrence in his household. Mr Pidgeon later shared a picture of his cat with the caption: 'Proud cat owning moment' 'I've never been interrupted by wildlife before,' he insisted. He later shared a picture of his cat with the caption: 'Proud cat owning moment'. MailOnline has contacted Mr Pidgeon for comment. MORE than 100 people were detected for flouting Covid-19 regulations in Cork city last weekend. Chief Superintendent Barry McPolin revealed the figure to The Echo, saying that people who flout the public health guidelines are "irresponsible". Up to last Thursday, 898 fines had been issued in Cork city division for breaches of guidelines, while there were 262 in Cork North and 205 in Cork West. And he said that Cork city is consistently among the highest areas of the country in recent weeks for breaches of the regulations. In the first weekend of February, more than 200 fines were issued in the city division. Chief Supt McPolin said: "We had more than 100 detections concerning house parties and people who were travelling for non-essential journeys." He added: "It is very important that people abide by the regulations. We are in a pandemic after all. By holding a party or a household event, you are being in breach of the regulations. People have to realise that." Level 5 restrictions are set to remain in place until at least April 5, with a ban on non-essential travel, and a ban on household visits unless for care of the vulnerable and childcare, or as part of a support bubble. Travel restrictions do not apply in the case of domestic violence or to escape a risk of harm, whether to the person or to another person, according to gardai. 100 fines are in place for travelling beyond 5km, while the fine for attending an indoor gathering is 150. Organisation of a gathering can result in a 500 fine. A garda spokesman said: "People issued with a COVID-19 related fine have 28 days to pay the fine. Anyone who fails to pay their fine within 28 days will receive a Court date shortly after. It is a matter for the Court, but failure to pay the FPN can result in conviction for a first offence in the District Court in a fine of 1,000 and/or imprisonment. Courts are also open to reporting by local and national media." by Melani Manel Perera The PCol report points the finger at government leaders in office at the time, including the former prime minister and police chief. Despite warnings, they did not take the necessary steps to prevent the attacks. The report also calls for the ban of a radical Sinhalese Buddhist group (the BBS). Colombo (AsiaNews) The Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCol), called to shed light on the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks and criticised by Christians, has asked the Attorney General to start criminal proceedings against then-President Maithripala Sirisena and other senior government officials on duty at the time of the events. The PCol report yesterday reached the desk of current parliamentary speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena, to be given to all Members of the house so that they can study and assess it. For the authors of the report, the investigation demonstrates that former President Sirisena (pictured) was responsible for acts and omissions that favoured the attacks. Hence, the Attorney General (AG) should consider bringing charges against the former president under the suitable provisions of the Penal Code. Along with the former president, the PCol is calling for proceedings against Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando, former Chief of National Intelligence Sisira Mendis, former Inspector General of Police Pujith Jayasundara and his deputy Nandana Munasinghe, former Director of Intelligence Nilantha Jayawardena, and former Minister of Industry and Commerce Rishad Bathiudeen. According to the report, the former president went on a state visit to India from 16 to 21 April without appointing an acting Defence Minister, thus leaving a vacuum in a crucial security post, knowing full well of a threat against the country. This gave terrorists an advantage when they launched their attacks. Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando, a former permanent secretary to the president, along with Police Chief Pujith Jayasundara, failed to take the appropriate steps to prevent the massacres. Despite intelligence reports and warnings issued by the intelligence services, the two did not act in time leaving the jihadists free to act. Former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is also in the reports crosshair, blamed for failing to take the necessary steps to prevent the attacks. During his term in office, he did not act forcefully to stop the growing activism of extremist Islamist movements, which was one of the causes that facilitated the Easter massacres and other violent incidents that left a trail of blood across the country. In the meantime, based on a study of Buddhist movements and other religious organisations, the Commission has recommended a ban on Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), which has perpetrated attacks in the past. Finally, the Commission also recommended that the AG vet the speeches by the Venerable Galagoda Atte Gnanasara Thera in Maharagama and Aluthgama in 2013 and 2014 to assess possible criminal prosecution against him, in accordance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. By Mark Gokavi The rest of the lineup for the Clean Energy Speaker series presented by School of Engineering professor Kevin Hallinan has been announced. From 7 to 8 p.m. on March 4, Mohammad Pakravan of Green Empowerment will discuss From data to insight for development of low-resource communities. Zoom link Pakravan graduated from the University of Dayton in 2014 with a masters degree in renewable and clean energy. He also holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering design and applied economics from Oregon State University. Pakravans research, funded by the National Science Foundation and published in three journal papers, is a novel method to support technology and policy design in data scarce settings in an interdisciplinary approach that integrates behavioral, context-specific and technical attributes. Pakravan is the technical program manager at a non-profit, international development organization and focuses on providing decision makers with reliable insight for promoting renewable energy and clean water infrastructure in more than 10 countries in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Emily Burns, RE-volv, from 7-8 p.m. March 11; Nichole Hanus from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, from 7-8 p.m. March 15; and Zach Denning from artificial intelligence firm Hank, from 7-8 p.m. April 6 will round out the series. Burns, a UD senior majoring in mechanical engineering, will give a talk titled, Planting Solar Seeds: Financing Solar Projects for Nonprofits. RE-volv is an organization that helps non-profit organizations switch to solar power. Burns has been a solar ambassador for RE-volv for four years. Since its founding in 2011, RE-volv has funded solar projects at 42 nonprofits across 10 states, In Dayton, the UD RE-volv team has partnered with Mission of Mary Cooperative and East End Community services to go solar, and other projects in the country have included churches, animal shelters and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts. Hanus talk is called, Improving electricity grid resiliency and reliability, long-term resource planning. She works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a Dept. of Energy Office of Science Lab managed by the University of California. Hanus holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in engineering and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University, and B.S. in mechanical engineering from UD. She is a project scientist in the electricity markets and policy department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her research is aimed at improving electricity grid resiliency and reliability, long-term resource planning, and ESCO business models. Dennings talk is titled, Hank: Bringing AI to Buildings for Large-Scale Energy Reduction. Denning, a graduate of the California Maritime Academy, received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. He worked for three years at Schneider Electric (formerly Yamas Controls) as a programmer and field technician, learning how building automation played a key role in reducing energy consumption in buildings. Denning also worked at Controlco and Western Allied before becoming the founder and CEO at Hank, an end-to-end, AI virtual building engineer that uses artificial intelligence to maximize comfort and energy efficiency in commercial buildings. Earlier speakers were Andy Chang from GE Renewable Energy and John Seryak from Go Sustainable Energy. For more sustainability news and information, visit HSIs news blog, the Hanley Sustainability Institute website and the sustainability program website. To sign up for HSIs Sustainability Spotlight newsletter, register here. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company ANN ARBOR, MI The University of Michigans Shapiro Undergraduate Library was temporarily closed after venomous spiders were found in the building. Three Mediterranean recluse spiders were found in the librarys basement storage areas in late January, university spokeswoman Kim Broekhuizen said. The spiders were not in any public spaces, Broekhuizen said, and the library was closed on Feb. 21-22. Broekhuizen said a misunderstanding led the library to close for two days, and based on what the university knows now, it was a mistake to close the building. The university consulted with spider experts at Michigan State University and University of Michigan-Dearborn to determine the type of spider found, Broekhuizen said. Pest management has been working to treat the areas of the building where the spiders were seen, she said. Recluse spiders spend daylight hours in dark, secluded places indoors and outdoors, and are more abundant in warm, dry places, according to the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center. Recluse spiders are shy and prone to retreat when threatened, according to LSU. The Mediterranean recluse is native to central Europe and has been introduced to many areas of the U.S., presumably by human transport, according to LSU. It is commonly mistaken for the brown recluse spider, which it closely resembles. Bites are extremely rare and can cause cases of loxoscelism, which causes skin lesions. Symptoms can start anywhere from two to six hours after the bite and include fever, rash, nausea, vomiting and, in severe cases, death. Broekhuizen did not say whether there have been other instances of the spider being on campus in the past. More: Pennsylvania develops plan for 3.8 million acres of bat conservation Influencer receives backlash for posing with the heart of a giraffe she hunted for Valentines Day Sony is working on the next-generation VR system for PlayStation 5. The new VR will have improved focus of view, resolution, and single cord to simplify setup and, improve ease-of-use, claims Sony. This time, Sony is working on a new VR controller, which will use some features of the DualSense wireless controller, along with a focus on great ergonomics. Thats just one of the examples of future-proof technology were developing to match our vision for a whole new generation of VR games and experiences. Sony says the development for the new VR system is underway and wont be launching in 2021. But we wanted to provide this early update to our fans, as the development community has started to work on creating new worlds for you to explore in virtual reality. Also, the Japanese-tech giant is expected to start issuing development kits for its next-gen VR headset soon. However, the company didnt provide any information on the specifications or release dates as such. We also want to thank all of our PS VR players for your continued support with upcoming games like After The Fall, Sniper Elite VR, and Humanity, theres much more to come for PS VR whether youre playing on PS4 or PS5, added Sony. Los Angeles, Feb 24 : Model Chrissy Teigen requested the official Twitter account of the President Of United States Joe Biden to unfollow her Tiegen is known for her frequently raunchy tweets. She used to be one of 13 people followed by POTUS on Twitter, reports dailymail.co.uk. However, she wrote on Twitter: "I have tweeted a handful of times since my treasured @POTUS following. In order for me to flourish as me, I must ask you to please lord unfollow me. I love you!!! It's not you it's me!!!!" It seems she was concerned about him seeing her explicit language on the micro-blogging website. As soon as Biden unfollowed her, she posted a few curse words and added: "I am FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!" Adams Praises Election-Related Bills By The Associated Press, West Kentucky Star Staff FRANKFORT - Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams is praising legislation that would make early in-person voting a fixture in Kentuckys elections.The bills have been introduced in the House and Senate. Adams says the proposals would create four days of early in-person voting, including a Saturday, with no excuse required."This is the most significant election reform legislation in the past quarter-century. I'm grateful to Senator Adams and Representative Decker for their leadership. Kentuckians across party lines embraced many features of last year's elections, especially expanded in-person voting." Adams continued, "It's the General Assembly's prerogative to make our election laws, and now I hope they will exercise their authority to make permanent improvements to our election system."Last year, pandemic-related rules for Kentucky's general election included weeks of in-person early voting, including Saturdays, to prevent a crush of Election Day voting. Adams says the current bills also would allow counties to establish vote centers, where any voter in the county may vote regardless of precinct.According to Adams, the bills were drafted following extensive consultation with the Secretary of State, the State Board of Elections, and county clerks, with Republicans and Democrats at the table. Tourism Irelands two-day virtual sales mission in Austria and Switzerland is ongoing. The online event, with the participating tourism companies from Ireland including The Shed Distillery in Drumshanbo connecting with key Austrian and Swiss tour operators, via a series of video appointments. The aim is to promote Leitrim and Ireland to these influential tour operators, to position us well for when the time is right to welcome international visitors once again. Aubrey Irwin, Tourism Irelands Manager for Austria and Switzerland, said: Tourism Ireland is delighted that these key tour operators from Austria and Switzerland are taking the time to join us, and our partners from Ireland, for our virtual sales mission. The participation of these buyers is a strong indication that interest in visiting Ireland remains high. Our message for the Austrian and Swiss tour operators is that, when the time is right, we will have everything ready to welcome their clients back to our shores. Well be assuring them that tourism companies across Ireland have been implementing all the required new health and safety measures but will still be ready to deliver a fantastic holiday experience for their clients. Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald claimed the shared equity scheme will do nothing to make housing more affordable (PA) The Governments affordable housing scheme will inflate prices and put money back in the pockets of property developers, Sinn Fein has claimed. The plan by Housing Minister Darragh OBrien has previously been criticised by the Central Bank and the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). But the minister has defended the scheme, which would involve the Government taking a 30% stake of equity in property purchases. Speaking during Leaders Questions in the Dail on Wednesday, Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald said the strategy contains strong echoes of the failed Celtic Tiger policies of previous Fianna Fail governments. She said: The lives of an entire generation have been defined by a housing crisis. Its a crisis that was created, and worsened, by bad Fianna Fail and Fine Gael policy. And for so many people now, the aspiration of purchasing or owning their own home has been reduced to a distant pipe dream. Fianna FAil's housing scheme is written by property developers for property developers and will drive up house prices. Itas time to scrap this lame duck scheme and get behind @EOBroin's plan to deliver affordable homes for workers and families a @MaryLouMcDonald #DAil pic.twitter.com/tCYcwc8bdK Sinn FAin (@sinnfeinireland) February 24, 2021 She said people are angry and disappointed because Mr OBriens shared equity scheme does absolutely nothing to make housing more affordable. She added: In fact, it will achieve quite the opposite. His scheme will prop up already unaffordable prices, and will make a bad situation so much worse. His policy could be described as both the continuation of disastrous Fine Gael housing policy, but also one that has strong echoes of the failed Celtic Tiger policies of your own party Fianna Fail. It will have the effect of maintaining unaffordable prices, and saddling working people with more unsustainable debt. Ms McDonald noted her party is not alone in its criticism of the plan. She said: The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, the Economic and Social Research Institute, and indeed the Central Bank, have all warned you and told you that your scheme will drive prices up. Now, even the Fine Gael group of councillors on Dublin City Council have begun to see sense and have come out against this scheme. But it seems so far, that just as in the bad old days when you were last in government Taoiseach, your minister seems intent on ploughing on regardless. Responding, Taoiseach Micheal Martin said: Our only interest is in giving young people the chance to buy houses. At the moment, if you take last year for example, the number of houses built was not sufficient to deal with the housing crisis. So this kind of branding, and this kind of reference to developers and all that, is just political propaganda. Expand Close The Taoiseach dismissed Sinn Fein attacks on the affordable housing scheme as political propaganda (Julien Behal/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The Taoiseach dismissed Sinn Fein attacks on the affordable housing scheme as political propaganda (Julien Behal/PA) Because at the moment we do not have a degree of activity, either in the private sector that we should have, or indeed in the public sector. He accused Sinn Fein of consistently voting against home ownership. You voted against our affordability motions, you voted against the help-to-buy scheme, he said. Youre against the equity scheme before its even set up. Its nowhere near as dangerous as youre trying to indicate that it is. On Dublin City Council, Sinn Fein have voted against housing development motions 16 out of 21 times. Its time on those issues youve got off the fence and start allowing housing schemes to start, and not allowing ideology and politics to get in the way of getting houses built. Hyundai Motor Company brought Tucson production to the U.S. because we have proven our ability to build world-class automobiles, declared Ernie Kim, president and chief executive officer at Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama. Today, the Hyundai brand has positive momentum in the marketplace, thanks to the expanding lineup of sport utility vehicles. The new Tucson will continue that momentum in 2021.Scheduled to arrive at dealerships in the spring, the fourth-generation model is easy to recognize thanks to a jewel-like grille and full-width LED light bar that brides a pair of vertical taillamps. Even the side profile is a huge departure from the third generation due to geometric angles and hard edges.The cockpit is seriously impressive, too, if you remember that Hyundai makes relatively affordable vehicles. From the four-spoke steering wheel to the silver garnish lines that stream from the center fascia to the rear doors, the all-new Tucson is definitely posh. The digital gauge cluster, 10.25-inch media system, and minimalist gear selector are highlights in their own right.The 2022 model is 6.1 inches (155 mm) longer and 0.6 inches (15 mm) wider than the preceding generation, offering up to 38.7 cubic feet (1,096 liters) of cargo volume. One engine will be available in the first instance, namely the 2.5-liter Smartstream four-cylinder motor that comes standard with 187 horsepower.An idea torquier and more efficient compared to the 2.4-liter GDI from last year, the 2.5-liter GDI is coupled to an eight-speed automatic with shift-by-wire control, hence the minimalist gear selector. Not long now, a hybrid and a plug-in hybrid centered around a 1.6-liter turbo will be added to the lineup. Spain's north African enclave of Melilla has removed the country's last public statue of former dictator General Francisco Franco 45 years after his death. 'A day for History,' the regional government of Melilla tweeted along with pictures of workmen backed by a mechanical digger removing the statue on Tuesday evening from the gates of the city. The bronze statue, which shows Franco standing, was erected in 1978 to commemorate his role as commander of the Spanish Legion in the Rif War, a conflict Spain fought in the 1920s against Berber tribes in Morocco. Spain's north African enclave of Melilla has removed the country's last public statue of former dictator General Francisco Franco 45 years after his death 'A day for History,' the regional government of Melilla tweeted along with pictures of workmen backed by a mechanical digger removing the statue on Tuesday evening from the gates of the city The bronze statue, which shows Franco standing, was erected in 1978 to commemorate his role as commander of the Spanish Legion in the Rif War, a conflict Spain fought in the 1920s against Berber tribes in Morocco. Pictured: Workers load the statue into a truck General Francisco Franco effectively ruled Spain as a dictator from 1939 until his death in 1975 As a result of the statue's removal, no more commemorative tributes remain in public streets to the man who ruled Spain from 1939 after winning the Spanish Civil War until his death in 1975. The head of the regional government of Melilla said the statue was taken to a municipal warehouse, without clarifying whether it would later be put in a museum. A 2007 law passed by a previous Socialist government obliges towns to remove public symbols of the Franco era and to rename streets named after the dictator or generals who fought with him in the civil war. As a result, symbols of the dictatorship have slowly been removed, including other high-profile statues around Spain. The local assembly voted on Monday to remove the statue - which the government of Melilla said was 'the last statue of Franco in the public sphere in Spain' - to comply with this law, with only the far-right Vox party voting against. The conservative Popular Party (PP) abstained. As a result of the statue's removal, no more commemorative tributes remain in Spain's public streets The local assembly voted on Monday to remove the statue - which the government of Melilla said was 'the last statue of Franco in the public sphere in Spain' Vox argued the statue was a tribute to Franco for defending the city during the Rif War against Moroccan rebels and not a homage to him as a dictator. Franco ruled Spain with an iron fist during one of Europe's longest dictatorships. His regime was notorious for imprisoning, torturing and killing people who spoke out against his rule. Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has made reparations for the victims of the Franco era one of his priorities since coming to power in 2018. In October 2019 he had Franco's remains removed from a vast basilica in the Valley of the Fallen near Madrid where he was buried when he died in 1975, and transferred to a discreet family plot in El Pardo cemetery on the outskirts of the Spanish capital. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes AstraZeneca has rejected reports it will deliver less than half the number of Covid-19 vaccines it was contracted to supply to the European Union (EU) in the second quarter of this year. In a statement released this evening, the pharmaceutical firm said in its most up-to-date second-quarter forecast; it aims to deliver vaccines "in line with its contract with the European Commission". AstraZeneca said it will use its EU supply chain to meet half of the expected volume of delivery for the second quarter as well as its international supply network. "AstraZeneca confirms today that its most recent Q2 forecast for the delivery of its Covid-19 vaccine aims to deliver in line with its contract with the European Commission. As per this contract, approximately half of the expected volume is due to come from the EU supply chain, while the remainder would come from its international supply network. "At this stage, AstraZeneca is working to increase productivity in its EU supply chain and to continue to make use of its global capability in order to achieve delivery of 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter." Earlier, it had been reported that AstraZeneca was expected to deliver less than half the number of Covid-19 vaccines it was contracted to supply the European Union in the second quarter of this year. An EU official is reported to have told Reuters that the company told the EU it would deliver "less than 90 million doses" in the second quarter. The drugmaker had committed to delivering 180 million doses over the course of April, May and June. Taoiseach Micheal Martin said that this shortfall in the number of vaccines promised by AstraZeneca has been factored into their figures, which aim to have 82% of adults vaccinated by the end of June. He said that this did not "necessarily mean" that the September target to vaccinate 70% of adults would be missed. Mr Martin said that there a number of other vaccines that could become available before the end of the second quarter that have not been factored in such as CureVac. The Taoiseach added that Ireland would not be "too proud" to ask the UK for excess vaccines, but said that the UK still had "some way to go" before it had available stocks to give away. "I think we will have a sufficiency of vaccines. The big challenge for us in Q2 and Q3 will be the administration of the vaccines." Health Minister Stephen Donnelly assured there would be no change to the Government's forecast of one million vaccine doses a month from April onwards. "Shortfalls in AstraZeneca supply for Q2 were already factored in by our Vaccine Taskforce and our programme continues as planned," he said. It is reported an anonymous EU official told Reuters that AstraZeneca plans to deliver approximately 40 million doses. Following the production issues faced by AstraZeneca in January, the first-quarter commitments were also not met. The company looks set to deliver about 130 million doses to the EU by the end of June and this evening's statement recommits the company to delivering its quota of 300 million. This latest uncertainty around supply could impact the EU's target of vaccinating 70% of adults by the summer. The European Commission, which coordinates talks with vaccine manufacturers, has yet to comment on this evening's reports. New Delhi: RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat on Friday said that no power on earth can harm Indian until an iota of religion is surviving in the nation. As long as even an iota of religion (dharma) is surviving in India, no power on the earth can harm India. But unfortunately, if the religion vanishes from India completely, then no power would be able to save India, he said. Speaking at the valedictory function of a residential course for men and women volunteers of Hindu Swaysmsevak Sangh (HSS) at Nagpur Bhagwat said, The whole world is in the clutches of capitalism. Only India can rescue the world from this calamity. Quoting RSS founder Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar that the British or the Mughals could not be blamed for the countrys unfortunate situation. The only problem of the Hindu community is Hindus themselves and since Hindus are our own, we will not let them live in unfortunate situation, Bhagwat quoted Hedgewar as saying. Suggested Read: In a Dragon vs Tiger clash, who holds the edge? Indian military's strength check We need to build a Hindu community not because it is the problem, but because it is our own, and also for the conservation of the holy Hindu religion, culture and Hindu Rashtra, he added. Renowned economist and a member of Niti Aayog Bibek Debroy, who was present on the occasion, said that in the ancient times, the king had only limited responsibility for defence, internal security and ensuring the rule of the law, while everything else was done by the community. (With PTI inputs) For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Sports Australia, Qatar withdraw from Copa America BUENOS AIRES, FEB 24 (IANS) | Publish Date: 2/24/2021 1:24:58 PM IST Australia and Qatar have withdrawn from this years Copa America due to a clash with 2022 Asian World Cup qualifiers, an official of the South American Football Confederation (CONMEBOL) said. Both the teams had been invited to participate as the guests in the tournament, scheduled to be held in Colombia and Argentina from June 11 to July 10. Qatar and Australia will not be able to come because there will be qualifying rounds in their continents on those dates, CONMEBOL Secretary General Gonzalo Belloso on Tuesday told Argentine radio station La Red, Xinhua reported. Australia had been drawn in Group A alongside Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile and Paraguay while Qatar were placed in Group B with reigning champions Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru. Belloso said the competition would not be modified, apart from the reduced number of fixtures. Originally scheduled for 2020, the 47th edition of the Copa America was postponed by a year because of Covid-19. It will mark the first time the worlds oldest international football tournament will be hosted in the two countries. Despite the ongoing pandemic, Belloso said there was no chance the competition would be cancelled and expressed hope that fans could attend matches. The Copa America is 100 percent confirmed. The idea is that it will be played with stadiums at 30 per cent capacity, he added. QUITO, Ecuador More than 60 inmates were killed Tuesday in the worst prison riots in Ecuadors history, as rival gangs battled for control of the countrys growing drug trade. The violence broke out in a series of coordinated mutinies on Tuesday morning in three large prisons across the country, according to the police. It was not until the afternoon that the authorities regained control. Videos recorded by inmates and shared on social media showed beheaded corpses and mutilated arms and legs, shocking a nation unused to massacre. The ghastly imagery made clear just how far Ecuador has fallen into the violent spiral of organized drug crime. This sort of thing was unthinkable in our country, Ricardo Camacho, who once headed Ecuadors prison system, said in an interview. This is a tragedy, a true shock. Journalists and media unions in Australia, the US, Canada and the UK have issued the following joint call for governments to take "bolder steps" to protect jobs and save journalism. Journalism is a public good. Journalism is essential for democracy. In the midst of a global pandemic the need for quality, independent information is vital. And yet, across the world, journalists jobs are being axed, media are closing down and information is being censored, restricted or used simply as a commodity to be bought and sold by hedge funds, corporations and tech giants. Facebook by blocking news and public information sites in Australia - stands exposed as caring more about its profits than citizens rights to access information. Corporations are closing down local papers to protect their bottom line at the expense of rural, local, community news. News deserts are a symptom of the changing climate in which journalism operates. Above all they create a democratic deficit. It doesnt have to be like this. As unions representing tens of thousands of journalists and media professionals across all media we stand for an alternative. We condemn unreservedly the actions of Facebook in blocking news sites in a show of corporate power, in a threat to governments everywhere. We also condemn Googles earlier threats to switch off its services in Australia. These companies cannot use the free flow of information as a bargaining chip to defend their power and profits. Both companies have done all they can to avoid any regulation. While we welcome steps taken by the Australian government to make tech giants like Facebook and Google pay for the news content they profit from, we do not believe the solution is to be found in individual private commercial deals that lack transparency. The steps need to be bigger, bolder and ensure that any money raised does not just go to propping up the same monopoly media owners. Any monies must be used transparently to build and sustain a genuinely public-interest media that supports, among others, community, not-for-profit and local media. Such funds should not be used to fund more mergers and acquisitions or reward shareholders but to pay journalists a fair share of the profits made from their work, to retain professional journalists jobs, to save public-interest media, to build new and more diverse voices. All funds must go to support and invest in journalism. Facebook and Google are guilty of excessive profiteering. It is time not only to make them pay a fair share for the content they use but to level the playing field. If your local newspaper or local radio station has to pay tax why are Facebook and Google allowed to avoid and evade their social responsibilities? If governments were to tax their revenues or their profits, an independent fund could use those revenues to support a news recovery plan, saving jobs, sustaining media, supporting new voices. We could not only retain jobs but build and sustain new media and voices, assuring more diversity, more quality information and more jobs. The receipt of any funds must be strictly conditioned on investing in journalism. Journalism should not just be a business nor can it just rely on charity, philanthropy or the crumbs from the tech giants table. The pandemic has proved it must serve above all the public interest. We need to secure, support and sustain public-interest journalism on radio and television, in print and across digital platforms. Governments around the world need to take urgent steps to protect and sustain news and information. The use of tax and fiscal policy, public advertising campaigns, job retention subsidies and other measures are all vital to tackling the economic crisis facing media. As unions, affiliates of the International Federation of Journalists, representing journalists and media professionals we commit to advocate, lobby, campaign and act together around these principles, to rebuild journalism as a public good. - The NewsGuild-CWA (USA) - National Writers Union (USA) - National Union of Journalists (UK and Ireland) - CWA Canada The Media Union (Canada) - UNIFOR (Canada) - MEAA (Australia) International Federation of Journalists Download statement as pdf here Take nothing on its looks, take everything on evidence. There is no better rule. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations In March 2018, I wrote an article for RCM about why I thought the Trump Administrations steel tariffs would eventually backfire. My argument struck some readers as odd, but it was based on empiricism. Trade wars, tariffs, or any other policy designed to prop-up certain parts of the economy have always been rife with unintended consequences. The steel tariffs were promoted to fix the U.S. trade deficit problem with China while boosting the fortunes of beleaguered steel manufacturers. Sadly, they did neither. The U.S. trade deficit (if you believe in accounting abstractions to begin with) increased on President Trumps watch, rising to $679 billion in 2020, compared to $481 billion in 2016, the year Trump assumed office. Trumps tariffs did succeed in reducing the bilateral trade deficit with China. Final figures show the trade gap with China was $311 billion in 2020, down from $419 billion in 2018. There was an unintended side effect, however. As imports from China receded, domestic firms increased imports from other foreign suppliers. That resulted in the trade deficit rising with many countries in 2020, including Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia, Russia, Germany, and Switzerland. The Trump Administration argued that China would pay the price for the tariffs. But a recent paper titled, Whos Paying For The US Tariffs? A Longer-Term Perspective concludes the opposite. The paper finds, U.S. tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by U.S. firms and consumers. It also offers insights specific to the steel industry. Excerpt: The data show that U.S. tariffs have caused foreign exporters of steel to substantially lower their prices into the U.S. market. Thus, foreign countries are bearing close to half the cost of the steel tariffs. Since China is only the tenth largest steel supplier to the U.S. market, these costs have largely been borne by regions like the EU, South Korea and Japan. This is likely good news for U.S. firms that demand steel, but bad news for workers hoping that steel tariffs will bring back jobs. Indeed, the fact that foreign steel producers have lowered their prices in response to U.S. tariffs may help explain why U.S. steel production only rose by 2 percent per year between the third quarter of 2017 and the third quarter of 2019 despite 25 percent steel tariffs. AK Steel, profiled in the March 2018 article, is where many of my wifes family members devoted decades working at the plant in Middletown, Ohio. Unfortunately, AK didnt survive the coronavirus. At least, not as an independent company. From March 19, 2018 until March 12, 2020, AK Steels stock plummeted 69% before the company was finally acquired for $1.55 a share by Cleveland-Cliffs, Inc. Although Trumps tariffs may not have directly caused AKs demise, they didnt prevent it either. Werent they supposed to, though? Remember how aggressive the sales pitch was. These tariffs werent just to protect the steel companiesthey were supposed to propel them. And it was supposed to be easy. That's at least what President Trump said in numerous Tweets. For AK Steel and the rest of the S&P 500 Steel industry, though, nothing about recent years has proven easy. In fact, from March 2018 through March 2020, the Steel industry lost 41% compared to only a 1% pullback for the S&P 500. Why Cleveland-Cliffs Is Winning Despite awful equity performance and rising trade deficits with China, the American Steel industry is not dead, and America is not losing its economic battle with China. Far from it. Cleveland-Cliffs shares have been on firegaining 149% over the last year compared to an 18% increase in the S&P 500. American steel plants are currently running at about 75% of their capacity. Thats down from a peak of 83% in 2019, when they were receiving the full benefit of tariffs that former President Donald Trump instituted to shield the industry from import competition. Running plants at below capacity is a calculated decision based on normalized profitability assumptions. Lourenco Goncalves, the CEO of Cleveland-Cliffs, pledged to shareholders to focus on a quality over volume approach. Under my watch, Cliffs had never been and will never be tempted by the stupidity of volume for volumes sake, Goncalves said on a call with analysts last October. We will continue to manage our business in the most quality-focused and cost-efficient ways, always reaching for real value and return on invested capital. As a result of mills running below capacity, some steel customers are unable to source sufficient metal to produce things like automobiles and appliances. They may need to turn to overseas suppliers, putting a dent in U.S. volumes and undercutting the policy priority of onshoring more domestic production. Thats just blowing a giant hole in the idea of reshoring, where if you want to support U.S. manufacturing you need to have competitively priced inputs, said Josh Spoores, steel analyst at CRU Group, in a telephone interview. Goncalves and his competitors know the economics for steel imports are improving: the average tariff and transportation-adjusted import price is currently around $900 a ton, which is 25% less than the cost to buy from U.S. producers, per Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Andrew Cosgrove. The demand is not pre-Covid levels, but its just more than what we have in production today, said Dan DeMare, a regional sales manager for Heidtman Steel, a service-center customer of U.S. Steel. The steelmakers are going to make a load of money, but the stress it puts on the market is insane. One of the secrets to running a successful business in any industry is the ability to play offense when competitors are forced to play defense. Cleveland-Cliffs balance sheet and margin profile exceeded AKs for over a decade, which gave them the flexibility to make a timely acquisition last year. And now, the company is doing what smart companies domaneuvering around regulations and doing whats best for their company long-term. Despite Great Expectations, Evidence Shows Tariffs Dont Work Tariffs and trade wars are specifically designed to pick winners, which in the modern world means supporting the companies and pockets of industries that lobby the most. Designing policy to help certain companies succeed by definition means positioning other companies to lose. No two companies have the exact same interests, and helping one often means hurting another even in the same industry. Thats how AK Steel may have ultimately been victimized by tariffs. Nothing about trade relations is ever clean-cut or easy. If it werent for the tariffs, perhaps management would have made proactive changes before AK went into distress and had to be acquired at a fire sale price? Thomas Philippon explains the interplay of competing political interests in his book, The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up On Free Markets: Simply put, businesses lobby to protect their rents. This explains, for instance, the steel and aluminum tariffs imposed by the Trump administration in 2018. Lobbying spending by large American steel companies increased by about 20 percent between 2017 and 2018. They successfully pushed the Trump administration to impose tariffs, which led to higher prices and higher profits. In the case of aluminum, a midsize company with fewer than 2,000 workers, CenturyAluminum, was at the center of the lobbying effort. As Business Week reported on Septe-mber 27, 2018, what wasnt mentioned was that Centurys biggest shareholder is Glencore Plc, the Swiss trading company that is the biggest buyer and seller of commodities in the world While Century was lobbying the Trump administration, Glencore, along with a handful of other commodity trading companies, was stockpiling record amounts of foreign aluminum in the U.S.the idea being, if tariffs were announced, prices would rise, and all that cheap foreign metal would suddenly become more valuable. And thats what happened. Put simply, smart companies can game the system and usually outwit central planners. Thats why trade barriers ultimately fail. Tariffs have been tried, many times throughout history. Yet, to date, there is still no real evidence of any nation enjoying sustainable economic prosperity as a direct result of its tariff-related trade policy. Tariffs have never really worked, and they still dont. Michael Cannivet, CFA is President and Chief Investment Officer of Silverlight Asset Management, LLC. Major professional network LinkedIn, in its latest Workforce Confidence Index, has found that 80 per cent of professionals are confident about skilling opportunities, while 79 per cent are confident about the strength of their CVs. Based on the survey responses of 1,752 professionals, findings from January 1-29 reveal that professionals in India are confident about career progress despite growing uncertainties in the job market amid the coronavirus pandemic. The Workforce Confidence Index shows that four in five Gen Z (those born between 1990s and 2010s) and millennials (anyone born between 1981 and 1996) are confident about their potential to upskill. While 92 per cent of Gen X (those born between 1965 and 1979/80) and 98 per cent of Baby Boomers say the strength of their work experience and academic qualifications makes them more confident, 86 per cent of millennials say they are more inspired by opportunities to grow their skills and climb the ladder. Further, 80 per cent of Gen Z professionals say that the likelihood of progressing their careers makes them more confident today. Also read: 'Indian education system focusses too much on exams, not learning' While professionals are confident of career progress, there's a decrease in India's overall confidence, as the composite score dropped from +58 in December 2020 to +54 in January 2021, said the survey. The survey attributes the dip in optimism to growing concerns about the status of the pandemic, surmounting expenses, and job availability. As per LinkedIn's Labour Market update, India's hiring rate also dropped to 17 per cent year-over-year in December 2020, showing signs of distress in employees' confidence. While the job market looks bleak, the Labour Market Update spotlights the rise of entrepreneurship in India. The findings show a 10 per cent growth in members with the title 'founders' or 'co-founder' on their profiles from January to December 2020 on LinkedIn. Ashutosh Gupta, India Country Manager, LinkedIn, said skills are expected to become the new professional 'currency' this year as workers from different generations rely on learning new skills to future-proof their careers. "Employees from traditional sectors such as corporate services, healthcare, and software & IT industries are found to be most confident about the future of their employers, as companies continue to adopt newer technologies, and revamp their talent strategies. Reimagining employee skills and roles to welcome the post-pandemic ways of working will be crucial to building resilience for companies across sectors," says Gupta. Also read: India Inc to offer 7.7% average salary hike in 2021: Aon More than 70% of HR professionals consulted assert that their companies had to accelerate the transition from face-to-face sessions to digital training in 2020. A similar percentage of companies say they will increase, or at least maintain, their investment in e-learning in 2021. However, even though the digitization of corporate training rose significantly last year, it seems it's still lacking the expected innovation. 51% of employees surveyed by Gamelearn claim their companies' online courses are boring and hardly interactive. In-line with this, HR professionals themselves are aware they need to boost employee engagement and motivation in online settings. Unfortunately, reality doesn't reflect that ideal, and the predominant formats for digital training are mainly PDF text documents (61%) and videos (62%). These formats are perceived as unidirectional and noninteractive because employees are not able to obtain immediate feedback through these methods. Contradictions of Corporate training 2021 focuses on the differences between those responsible for training in companies and their employeesa disconnect that was already visible but is corroborated by this report. Nonetheless, it also reveals common ground. HR professionals prove they are aware of the benefits of including more attractive and disruptive elements in their corporate training. Similarly to many of the employees consulted, HR professionals think real-life simulations (52%) and gamification elements (36%) would help get employees more engaged with the content they are learning. The complete report developed by Gamelearn can be downloaded for free from today and includes expert opinions from HR managers regarding the status quo of corporate training. It also dedicates a chapter to employees' perspectives on the top employer brands of major companies in various sectors such as pharmaceutical, financial, and technological. About Gamelearn: Gamelearn is the leading platform in video games for corporate training. The Spanish company has revolutionized the corporate training sector with its game-based learning methodology and has been recognized with numerous awards. Gamelearn has collaborated on projects to train, educate, and develop employees from almost 5,000 organizations around the world. Web: www.game-learn.com SOURCE Gamelearn Related Links https://www.game-learn.com/ Tunisian president receives EU ambassadors Political instability not the same as govt instability, he says (ANSAmed) - ROMA, 24 FEB - Tunisian president Kais Saied on Wednesday met in his country's capital with ambassadors from the European Union under EU ambassador to Tunisia Marcus Cornaro. According to a statement issued by the president's office, Saied underscored that "political instability" in the country did not coincide with "government instability" and that Tunisia has "potential to strengthen its democracy and defend itself against narrow political calculations". "The fight against corruption, the restitution of territory that has been stolen, purchase of anti-COVID vaccines, a high-speed railway between Bizerte and the southern part of the country, and other projects like the medical fortress of Kairouan are as important as other projects in partnership with the EU," he said. The meeting also served as an opportunity for the president to reassert his firm "attachment to the Constitution, the State, and rule of law". Saied stressed the role that Tunisian women play in various fields and the importance of the role of civil society in a globalized world that has changed since the advent of social media. (ANSAmed). BENGALURU: Infosys Ltd has been on a "live enterprise" journey of reimagining processes and creating a shared digital infrastructure, chairman Nandan Nilekani said at the virtual launch of the book The Live Enterprise. Authored by Jeff Kavanaugh, global head of Infosys Knowledge Institute and Rafee Tarafdar, chief technology officer, strategic technology group, Infosys, the book talks about how leaders can prepare and respond to disruptive forces in a digital world. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers The live enterprise journey of Infosys, which began three years ago, is about working with the agility of a startup, being networked and connected, responsive to client and business needs, and walking the talk, Nilekani said. A live enterprise is one that transforms legacy systems into agile, digital ecosystems that evolve with changing market needs and can scale to any size. There is a big drive among our enterprise clients to modernize the systems from existing legacy infrastructureThe pandemic has demonstrated to the world that they cannot manage without being digitally agile," Nilekani said. In the wake of the pandemic, Nilekani said there is an increased rush among companies around the world to become digitally-savvy. For this, they need a roadmap and pathway to become digitally native organizations." Because of its early adoption of digital, Infosys was able to respond quickly and move to a digital platform when the pandemic struck in March last year, Nilekani said. As the infrastructure was already there, it was simply a matter of scaling that up from 10% of our employees working from home to 100%." As part of walking the talk and lending credibility, Infosys aims to help clients respond to the dynamic business needs based on their own experience of a live enterprise at Infosys. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. O'Dell Named MCCH Hospitalist Program Director By West Kentucky Star Staff MURRAY - Murray-Calloway County Hospital has announced the appointment of Nicholas ODell, M.D., as the hospital's new Medical Director of Murray Medical Associates Hospitalist Program.Dr. ODell joined Murray Medical Associates in 2014 and was named Chief Medical Officer in February 2020.As both the Chief Medical Officer and as the hospitalist director with Murray Medical Associates Hospitalist service, Dr. ODell will focus his time to serving in these capacities and will stop seeing patients in the clinic.Hospitalists are physicians who specialize in the care of hospitalized patients. A hospitalist program helps improve outcomes because someone oversees and coordinates your care, increases patient safety, reduces length of stay, and enhances hospital efficiency. Delectable Ghanaian actress and television personality, Nana Ama Mcbrown, celebrated her adorable daughter, Maxins second birthday over the weekend. McBrowns daughter, Maxin, turned two years on Sunday February 21, and the actress went to church with the entire family to thank God for adding another to her age. If I am standing here today with my family, its a big thank we are saying to God Almighty. Exactly a year ago we came here to thank God and this year, God has even done more. My child, my gift, my love and the blessing in my arms right was given to me by God. So my husband and I come before God today to say we than Him, Nana said among other thing when mounted the podium with her family. The United Showbiz Presenter donated several baskets of goodies to church members of Christ Apostolic Church, Osu branch who are 50 years and above as part of her daughter Maxins 2 years birthday celebration. The goodie baskets contained tuber of yam, bag of rice, hand sanitizers, tissue papers, drinks, water among other things. Watch exclusive coverage of the event below: Source: Eugene Osafo-Nkansah/Peacefmonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Chris Ross has joined Isagenix as chief marketing officer. His marketing knowledge and business acumen will be instrumental as we increase awareness of how our amazing products and supportive community can help people live better." - Sharron Walsh, Isagenix CEO To best inspire people around the world to connect with Isagenix International so they can more fully experience healthy, joyful, and abundant lives, the global wellbeing company has named Chris Ross as chief marketing officer. In this role, Ross will lead and develop the companys overall marketing strategy and serve as a member of the executive leadership team. Chris has extensive experience across multiple industries and has advised leading businesses on marketing strategy, so were thrilled hes joined our team, said Isagenix Chief Executive Officer Sharron Walsh. His marketing knowledge and business acumen will be instrumental as we increase awareness of how our amazing products and supportive community can help people live better. As chief marketing officer, Ross will be responsible for overseeing product development and launches, branding, creative work, digital and design efforts, and content. Hell work closely with the executive leadership team as well as the companys independent distributors. Ross 25-year career includes two previous stints as chief marketing officer and positions at companies including Sprint Corp., a telecommunications business; Aries Capital Partners, a private equity firm; and Gartner Inc., a research and advisory company. Most recently, he served as a vice president at Gartner, working with the worlds leading brands on strategy and innovation. Im honored to join Isagenix, as the company has an impressive reputation in the wellbeing and direct selling industries and is in the midst of an exciting brand evolution, Ross said. I look forward to leading our talented marketing team so we can reach even more people who are ready to feel, eat, move, and look better. To learn more about Isagenix, visit the Newsroom, like the company on Facebook, and follow it on Twitter and Instagram. About Isagenix International Established in 2002, Isagenix International believes that everyone deserves to experience a healthy, joyful, and abundant life. The global wellbeing company artfully crafts more than 175 effective products and offers a supportive community for its more than 550,000 customers worldwide. Isagenix shares its products through a network of independent distributors in 26 markets: the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, South Korea, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland. The private family-owned company has its world headquarters in Gilbert, Arizona. For more information, visit Isagenix.com. A 21-year-old man has been charged with stabbing another man with a nail punch, allegedly leaving the sharp tool lodged in his face. The incident occurred at a home on Jindabyne Circuit in Woodcroft, in western Sydney, when two men arrived to buy an item advertised on social media before midday on Tuesday. Police say a fight broke out after the 26-year-old male occupant spoke to the men at the door, ending with a brutal nail punch attack. A man was stabbed with a nail punch at a home on Jindabyne Circuit in Woodcroft New South Wales on Tuesday (pictured: Google Map image of Jindabyne Circuit) The injured 26-year-old man was taken to Westmead Hospital to remove the nail punch from his face (pictured: stock image of Westmead Hospital) The injured man was taken to Westmead Hospital and underwent surgery to remove the nail punch from his face. Officers from Blacktown Police Area Command attended and established a crime scene. Police arrested three men - aged 21, 24 and 25 - over the stabbing after stopping a Mitsubishi Lancer on Northcott Road, Lalor Park, at about 12.20pm. The men were taken to Mt Druitt Police Station and the 21-year-old was charged with wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. Police said the men were known to each other. The 21-year-old will appear at Mount Druitt Local Court on Wednesday. The other two men have not been charged and were released pending further inquiries. Ethiopia's foreign minister Demeke Mekonnen Hassen has told a United Nations human rights meeting that humanitarian access in the Tigray region is improving but remains "a work in progress." He said Ethiopia took its responsibilities to all refugees very seriously, and had reached out to two million people in need of aid. A deadly conflict in Tigray erupted in early November where Ethiopian and allied regional troops began fighting Tigrayan regional forces. Ethnic violence poses a major challenge to Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed as he tries to promote national unity in a country with more than 80 ethnic groups. (Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com) Photo credit: 'Untitled, (Club Couple)', Kerry James Marshall, 2014 - HBO From Harper's BAZAAR Photo credit: 'Untitled, (Club Couple)', Kerry James Marshall, 2014 - HBO The new HBO documentary Black Art: In the Absence of Light highlights the development of art over the past two centuries, using modern Black art scholar David C. Driskell's landmark 1976 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a point of departure. Executive produced by Henry Louis Gates with consulting by Thelma Golden, the film retroactively examines the history of Black art making that has long been dismissed by the white mainstream. The light in the title can be read as a euphemism for the white gaze, as well as the journey from private art making and disregard to success and visibility. The arc of works discussed ranges from David Drakes pottery from the early 19th century to Theaster Gates's conceptual approaches to pottery and his impact on place keeping in the highly gentrified Chicago, one of Americas Blackest cities. We are swiftly taken through the years of contemporary Black art, from the sexism experienced by Black women artists among institutions and their own Black male peers to the failures and successes of landmark exhibitions, like "Harlem on My Mind" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Two Centuries of Black American Art" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and "Black Male" at the Whitney Museum. Photo credit: 'School of Beauty, School of Culture', 2012 - HBO Master painter Kerry James Marshall offers this at the start of the documentary: I have a palette that is as complex and as broad and as range as any other color thats on the spectrum. Marshall emphasizes the beauty of Blackness when it is thrown against more Blackness; a practice of being self-referential and inter-relational. What do Black folks do in the absence of whiteness? Marshalls ethos as a portrait painter has contended with this question throughout his 30-plus-year career. Commentary by artists such as Betye Saar, Radcliffe Bailey, and Richard Mayhew remind us of the importance of legacy, inheritance, spirituality, and intuition that endure with and without a widespread audience. Story continues The documentary also marks the trajectory from having to insist on the cultural value of Black art to the market interest of it todaythe transition from moving out of the absence of light into sometimes overwhelming marketability. Contemporary collector of Black art, rap mogul, and self-proclaimed disruptor Swizz Beatz and collector Bernard Lumpkin speak of a more conscious approach to collecting. Feminist scholar Michele Wallace insists that the collecting work of Beatz and his wife, Alicia Keys,are about the culture. The film goes on to name other hip-hop moguls who have done the work of collecting (and rapping) about contemporary art, tying the increasing interest in Black art to this exposure via pop culture. As Beatz explained his collecting interests, I considered the recent rise of contemporary figurative painter Amoako Boafo. His work has been catapulted into the mainstream art market in a way that could be seen as predatory and exploitative . Collectors and consultants instigated the increase in value of his work to manipulate secondary markets, ultimately benefiting collectors disproportionately more than the artist himself. Similarly, Marshall made headlines in 2018, when a work of his that was sold by the artist for $25,000 in 1997 was sold 11 years later for $21.1 million, with no direct compensatory benefit for the artist. The presence of Beats and Lumpkin, and their declaration to support Black artists, presents a somewhat promising approach, but the glaring and burgeoning tensions that exist in the unregulated art market go unaddressed in the documentary. In addition to collectors, mainstream museums have made concerted efforts during the era of Black Lives Matter to collect more work by Black artists. This is ostensibly to redress and correct the ahistorical gaps of African-American art in their collections. But artist Fred Wilson, also featured in the film, has consistently interrogated these structures of invisibility. Instead, he is perpetually interested in how the counter-narratives of Americana can be brought to light through the work of Black art makers. And then, there are institutions that have supported Black artists since their inception, such as The Studio Museum in Harlem and historically Black colleges. Howard, Fisk, and Hampton Universities, as well as the Atlanta colleges and universities, are named in the documentary in a small segment. But these institutions deserve to be positioned as the crux of the storyline, since these spaces have enabled the legacy of Black art as we know it. These tensions are perhaps best highlighted in the official portraits of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, which take center stage in the documentary. The portraits of the First (Black) Man and Lady, made by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald respectively, are arguably two of the most famous paintings by Black artists. They are starkly distinguished in the documentary against a large collection of white male portraits of previous presidentsdrab and dreary with muted colors and very little light. The optics of the Obama couple, rendered in Wileys distinct hyperrealistic portraiture with a lush green background and Sheralds signature gray tone against easter-egg blue, suggest vitality, strength, even a holiness about them. Photo credit: Amy Sherald - HBO The Obamas portraits are a microcosm of the arc of Black art in the last 30 years. The belief of post-racialism and post-Blackness has defined and influenced much of the contemporary art we are seeing today, as Black artists began to emerge more profoundly into the mainstream during the 1990s. These artists insisted on being seen not just as Black artists, but as artists in general. Post-racialism is the promise of working to move beyond the perils of the Black condition in America, an achievement of Black acceleration and exceptionalism; when transcending race was aspirational and thought of to be wholly possible. This belief developed and climaxed as the United States elected its first Black president. In these portraits, the subjects captivate as they did on election night 2008. Looking at them, one could be convinced that the violence, disenfranchisement, and erasure against Black life in this country could be reformed and redressed. Yet, 13 years later, we recognize the ruse of the myth of race transcendence, no matter how many of us are made visible in the light. Seeing those portraits, I think about Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, a commentator in the documentary. Art is a way to exert power, she declares, which leads me to question, What does this power mean in the wake of a presidential election that barely escaped the grip of fascism and a new president who insists on unity as white supremacists terrorize? How can this power in art be used as leverage during an epoch of disaster capitalism, when works by Black artists are being sold in secondary markets for 10 times what they were sold for in the first? The most gratifying aspect of this documentary is the subtle eulogizing of scholar and artist David C. Driskell, who we lost in April of 2020. Throughout, he provides rich critiques of contemporary Black artists. Driskell speaks of Theaster Gates as both an artist and a preacher given his invigorating cadence that is renowned. Gates sermons toward the end of the documentary in an attempt to foreshadow what is to come in contemporary Black art. Were being trained and conditioned to only make when there is a light, he says. Are you willing to make in the absence of light? he probes, presumptively to a younger generation of artists. And yet, with all his zeal, his prompt still evokes trepidation and query: Which direction should Black artists take in the newfound light that can sometimes be too blinding to locate the woodshed? Black Art: In the Absence of Light is a comprehensive offering that traces the history of Black art. However, the film leaves something more to be desired about where the future of Black art is headed. There is no attention paid to new medium forms, work made by people with multiple genders and sexualities, and the fact of art being made out of what Elizabeth Alexander has termed the "Trayvon (Martin) Generation." In response to this concise documentary and Gates's demand, I ask, given the hypervisibility and marketability of Black art, paired with the insistence that Black lives, too, are valuable, how does this affect how art by Black artists is made? You Might Also Like Gladys Berejiklian has sparked another war of words with her Queensland counterpart Annastacia Palaszczuk, this time over hotel quarantine. NSW is demanding the Sunshine State repay the $30million owed for returned travellers holed up in hotel quarantine south of the border during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Queensland is refusing to pay up until Prime Minister Scott Morrison gives the green light for a proposed national quarantine hub near Toowoomba in the state's south-east. The NSW Premier, who has repeatedly clashed with Ms Palaszczuk over border closures, described Queensland's excuse for not footing the bill as 'lame'. Gladys Berejiklian (pictured on Wednesday) is demanding Queensland to foot its $30million bill for hotel quarantine 'Queensland's quarantine hub issue is with the federal government, while this is a direct debt they owe to the people of NSW and they need to do the decent thing and pay up,' Ms Berejiklian said. NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet went a step further by describing it as a political stunt. 'We acted in good faith in this process and it is disappointing that this agreement is now being treated in this way,' he said. NSW quarantined 7,112 arrivals during March and September who listed Queensland as their state of residence, according to an invoice tabled in Queensland parliament. An additional 4,991 arrivals who didn't record an Australian address were allocated proportionally across states and territories and was included in Queensland's bill, which is due March 19. More than 7000 returned travellers who underwent hotel quarantine in NSW last year listed Queensland as their state of residence Pictured is a quarantine hotel in Sydney But Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles is refusing to back down until the federal government caves in to its demands. 'Scott Morrison is like a school bully telling us we have to give our lunch money to NSW,' he said. 'We will not be paying that bill, not while the Commonwealth refuses to endorse our plan for a national quarantine centre.' Miles came under heavy fire from 2GB breakfast radio host Ben Fordham over his comments. 'This bloke is a child,' Fordham told listeners on Thursday. 'He's got a problem with the Commonwealth because they don't like his silly idea so he takes our money hostage. 'In the dope department, he's a world record holder. Give him the gold medal!' LOCAL BRIEFS: DAR essay winners, help for pet owners, Francee Sherman Award DAR honors four high school seniors The Joseph McDowell Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution recognized four high school seniors for their citizenship at a virtual chapter meeting on Feb. 12. Awards went to Guadalupe Aguilar-Gaona of Henderson County Early College, Gracie Milner of Hendersonville High School, Sarah Monoson of West Henderson High School and Jordan Reaves of North Henderson High School. The topic for this years essay was: How do the combined actions of so many good citizens keep our nation moving forward? The winners also participated in extracurricular activities, contributed to the community, demonstrated preparation for college and exemplified the qualities that make a good citizen: dependability, service, leadership and patriotism. Each winner received a $50 check, a pin and a certificate. The Good Citizens Award and Scholarship Essay contest was created in 1934 by a resolution of the DAR Continental Congress. To date, more than 6,000 students have participated in the program. Humane Society offers help for pet owner housing Blue Ridge Humane Society has been awarded a grant by the Community Foundation of Henderson County to provide assistance for pet owners seeking housing. Blue Ridge Humane Society is committed to keeping pets in loving homes through a range of programs and assistance for community pets. The new program adds a needed service to assist in the current pet-friendly housing challenges facing Henderson County residents. The new program will assist pet owners by assisting with temporary boarding cost while the owner is unable to keep an animal due to relocation or other emergency circumstances or by making a one-time pet deposit for a rental unit. Those needing assistance or interested in learning more may call (828) 393-5832. League accepting applications for Francee Sherman Award The Henderson County League of Women Voters is now accepting applications for the Francee Sherman Student Award. The annual $500 student award is named for Francee Sherman, the first president of the Henderson County league. It is given to a senior enrolled in a public school, domiciled in Henderson County and on track to graduate in the current school year. Applications and instructions may be found at www.lwvhcnc.org. Deadline to apply is March 31. Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Hydro66 Holdings Corp. (CSE: SIX) (the "Company") is pleased to announce that, further to its press releases dated January 7 and February 19, 2021, the Company and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Hydro66 Canada Ltd. ("Hydro66 Canada") have entered into a definitive share purchase and contribution agreement (the "Share Purchase and Contribution Agreement") with Northern Data AG ("Northern Data") providing for the sale of the shares of Hydro66 UK Limited ("Hydro66 UK"), which operated its data center in Sweden through Hydro66 UK's wholly-owned subsidiaries, Hydro66 Services AB, Hydro66 Svenska AB and Hydro66 Property Services AB. Pursuant to the terms of the Share Purchase and Contribution Agreement, Hydro66 Canada will receive 338,273 Northern Data shares and 4,000,000 cash, subject to adjustment based upon the consolidated balance sheet of Hydro66 UK as at 28 February, which is expected to be determined on or before June 30, in connection with preparation of the audited financial statements of the Company. 2,000,000 of the cash component of the purchase price will be held in escrow to be available to satisfy warranty and indemnity claims, if any, with 1,000,000 of the escrowed funds to be released 12 months following the closing of the transaction and the balance of the escrowed funds to be released 24 months following the date of closing. The shares of Northern Data to be received by the Company in connection with the transaction will be subject to resale restrictions for a period of 24 months following the completion of the transaction. Closing of the transaction is anticipated to be completed on or about March 1, 2021. The Company will retain its Megamining Limited subsidiary and the employees of the Hydro66 UK and its subsidiaries will be transferred to Northern Data. Prior to closing, the Company intends to complete a restructuring to eliminate various intragroup debts in a tax efficient manner and, post-closing, collapse the Canadian holding company structure. About Hydro66 Hydro66 owns and operates an award-winning colocation data centre in Sweden specializing in High Performance Computing ("HPC") hosting. The Company hosts third party IT infrastructure, utilizing 100% green power, at amongst the EU's lowest power prices and within an ISO27001 accredited facility. Hydro66 is uniquely positioned to capitalize on opportunities in blockchain infrastructure as well as the traditional Enterprise colocation data centre market. The Company provides truly green power at a leading price, purpose-built space and cooling, telecoms, IT support services and 24/7 physical security in their facility in Boden, Sweden. For more information please visit: www.hydro66.com FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT: Paul Morrison Chief Commercial Officer paul.morrison@hydro66.com (+44) 7789 915 147 Neither the CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Information Certain information set forth in this news release may contain forward-looking statements that involve substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements regarding future financial position, business strategy, use of proceeds, corporate vision, proposed acquisitions, partnerships, joint-ventures and strategic alliances and co-operations, budgets, cost and plans and objectives of or involving the Company. Such forward-looking information reflects management's current beliefs and is based on information currently available to management. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "predicts", "intends", "targets", "aims", "anticipates" or "believes" or variations (including negative variations) of such words and phrases or may be identified by statements to the effect that certain actions "may", "could", "should", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. A number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors may cause the actual results or performance to materially differ from any future results or performance expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond the control of the Company including, but not limited to, the impact of general economic conditions, industry conditions and dependence upon regulatory approvals. Certain material assumptions regarding such forward-looking statements may be discussed in this news release and the Company's annual and quarterly management's discussion and analysis filed at www.sedar.com. Readers are cautioned that the assumptions used in the preparation of such information, although considered reasonable at the time of preparation, may prove to be imprecise and, as such, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements. The Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by securities laws. 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/75344 CALABASAS, Calif., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- American Homes 4 Rent (NYSE: AMH) (the "Company"), a leading provider of high-quality single-family homes for rent, today announced that the Board of Trustees declared a dividend of $0.10 per share on the Company's common shares for the first quarter of 2021. This represents an increase of 100 percent versus the prior quarterly dividend rate of $0.05 per share. The distribution will be payable in cash on March 31, 2021 to shareholders of record on March 15, 2021. The Board of Trustees also declared a per share quarterly distribution on the Company's cumulative redeemable perpetual preferred shares of $0.40625 per share on the 6.5% Series D shares, $0.39688 per share on the 6.35% Series E shares, $0.36719 per share on the 5.875% Series F shares, $0.36719 per share on the 5.875% Series G shares and $0.39063 per share on the 6.25% Series H shares payable in cash on March 31, 2021 to shareholders of record on March 15, 2021. About American Homes 4 Rent American Homes 4 Rent (NYSE: AMH) is a leader in the single-family home rental industry and "American Homes 4 Rent" is fast becoming a nationally recognized brand for rental homes, known for high-quality, good value and tenant satisfaction. We are an internally managed Maryland real estate investment trust, or REIT, focused on acquiring, developing, renovating, leasing, and operating attractive, single-family homes as rental properties. As of September 30, 2020, we owned 53,229 single-family properties in selected submarkets in 22 states. Additional information about American Homes 4 Rent is available on our website at www.americanhomes4rent.com. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains "forward-looking statements" that relate to beliefs, expectations or intentions and similar statements concerning matters that are not of historical fact and are generally accompanied by words such as "believe," "expect," "will," "intend," "anticipate" or other words that convey the uncertainty of future events or outcomes. These forward-looking statements include the payment and anticipated timing of the payment of distributions of the Company's common and preferred shares. The Company has based these forward-looking statements on its current expectations and assumptions about future events. While the Company's management considers these expectations to be reasonable, they are inherently subject to risks, contingencies and uncertainties, most of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond the Company's control and could adversely affect our cash flows and ability to pay distributions. Additional information about these and other important factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from anticipated results expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements is available in the Company's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to conform to actual results or changes in expectations, except as required by applicable law. Contact: American Homes 4 Rent Investor Relations Phone: (855) 794-2447 Email: [email protected] SOURCE American Homes 4 Rent Related Links https://www.americanhomes4rent.com As the Jeep traveled north, approaching the Ford, the driver of the Jeep veered off the roadway to the right, striking the rear of (the Ford), according to state police. The force of the collision caused the Jeep and the Ford to cross all lanes of traffic and come to rest on the left shoulder, according to the statement. Ever burgeoning demand for food crops to feed an exponentially increasing population is compelling farmers to invest in sophisticated agricultural machinery, including combine harvesters, to maximize yield in forthcoming years ROCKVILLE, MD / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / Fact.MR's global combine harvesters market forecasts a positive growth path through 2021, sustained by increasing agricultural output across prominent regions. Threshing, winnowing and reaping of food crops are the primary applications expected to keep combine harvesters demand elevated in the long-term. According to the OECD FAO Outlook 2020-2029, about 85% of global crop output growth over the forthcoming decade is attributed to yield improvements. This is largely an end-product of more intensive input use, investments in production technology and enhanced cultivation practices. Further intensification of land use through multiple harvests annually will contribute an additional 10% growth. Hence, farmers are investing in advanced agricultural machinery, thus uplifting prospects for combine harvesters. Manufacturers are introducing a slew of advanced combine harvesters, equipped with highly sophisticated technological advancements. For instance, in 2014, New Holland introduced the CR10.90 combine harvester with a chaff-smoking 652 horsepower or 486 kWh fit to thresh the plants off the completion. It consists of a six-cylinder inline diesel engine called the Cursor 16, capable of pumping 14,500 liter grain storage tanks. "Rising demand for precision agriculture is compelling prominent combine harvester manufacturers to introduce state-of-the art and high capacity wielding machines, complete with advanced automation and AI-enabled software to aid in better harvesting practices, thereby uplifting expansion prospects for the market in the long run," remarks a Fact.MR analyst. Request a report sample with 170 pages to gain comprehensive insights at https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=516 Key Takeaways from Fact.MR's Combine Harvesters Market Study By power, the 300-450 HP combine harvesters to account for more than three out ten sales Hydraulic operated harvesters to experience high growth, attributed to its ability to handle demanding work functions By grain size, 250-350 bu to contribute 40% of the total revenue share in the near-term US and Canada to remain the epicenter of combine harvester growth, owing to increased mechanization of agriculture UK to witness heightened annual growth amid increasing preference for automated agricultural practices Implementation of modern agricultural practices to fuel combine harvester sales across India Combine Harvesters Market- Prominent Drivers Demand for shorter harvest times amid growing need for quicker agricultural output to escalate combine harvesters sales Deeper penetration of automation and technological advancements in agriculture to augment sales Manufacturers likely to target Asian markets for further expansion, attributed to largely agrarian nature of their economies Combine Harvesters Market- Key Restraints High capital expenditure incurred upon purchase to deter small-scale farmers from using combine harvesters Inadequate technical knowledge about operating such harvesters in under-developed economies to limit penetration Discover more about the combine harvesters market with 95 figures and 108 data tables, along with the table of contents. You will also find detailed market segmentation on https://www.factmr.com/report/516/combine-harvesters-market Competitive Landscape Caterpillar Inc., Deere & Company, Tractors and Farm Equipment Limited, Kubota Corporation, AGCO Corporation, Claas KGaA GmbH, New Holland, Mahindra and Mahindra, Escorts Limited, Bobcat, Case IH, KIOTI Tractor (Daedong Industrial Ltd.), Yanmar American Corporation, JCB and MASSEY FERGUSO are some prominent combine harvesters players profiled by Fact.MR's report. In order to sustain their operations, manufacturers are emphasizing on acquiring certifications from regulatory authorities alongside other organic and inorganic expansion strategies. For instance, in September 2020, New Holland Agriculture obtained the Origine France Garantine (French Origin Guaranteed) certification for its whole range of self-propelled grape and olive harvesters. For in-depth Competitive Analysis, Request for Customization! https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=RC&rep_id=516 Also, in March 2020, Kubota Corporation acquired a 10% equity stake in Escorts Ltd. to integrate and deepen their relationship towards achieving their mutual ambition of global leadership. This initiative will enable Kubota emerge as a leading player in the Indian market in agricultural equipment. Find More Valuable Insights on Combine Harvesters Market Fact.MR, in its new offering, provides an unbiased analysis of the global combine harvesters market. The study divulges compelling insights on the combine harvesters market on the basis of power type (below 150 HP, 150-300 HP, 300-450 HP, 450-550 HP, above 550 HP), mechanism type (hydraulic , hybrid), grain tank size (less than 250 bu, 250-350 bu, more than 350 bu), and across seven regions. Key Questions Covered in the Report How will the global combine harvesters market expand through 2021? What drivers are expected to underpin market growth? What challenges are likely to present themselves to the predicted growth trajectory in the long-run? How lucrative is the growth opportunity for combine harvesters across North America? Why is India anticipated to emerge as a highly promising market for combine harvesters? Which prominent manufacturers operate in the global combine harvester landscape? Request More Information about Report Methodology https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=RM&rep_id=516 Explore Fact.MR's Coverage on the Industrial Goods Domain Hydrogen Sensor Market: A recent study by Fact.MR on the hydrogen sensor market offers a 10-year forecast for 2021 to 2031. The study analyzes crucial trends that are currently determining the growth of the market. This report explicates on vital dynamics, such as the drivers, restraints, and opportunities for key market players along with key stakeholders as well as emerging players. Vacuum Loaders Market: A detailed assessment of value chain analysis, business executions, and supply chain analysis across regional markets has been covered in Fact.MR's extensive coverage on the subject. A decade long forecast sheds light on the prominent growth dynamics such as the drivers, opportunities and restraints likely to present themselves across prominent geographies and segments. Flow Meter Market: Fact.MR flow meter market research reports sheds light on the prominent growth drivers, opportunities and trends expected to shape future expansion trajectory for the upcoming decade. Details about key geographies, prominent segments and important manufacturers and stakeholders have also been embedded in the report. About Fact.MR Market research and consulting agency with a difference! That's why 80% of Fortune 1,000 companies trust us for making their most critical decisions. We have offices in US and Dublin, whereas our global headquarter is in Dubai. While our experienced consultants employ the latest technologies to extract hard-to-find insights, we believe our USP is the trust clients have on our expertise. Spanning a wide range - from automotive & industry 4.0 to healthcare & retail, our coverage is expansive, but we ensure even the most niche categories are analyzed. Reach out to us with your goals, and we'll be an able research partner. Contact: Sudip Saha US Sales Office: 11140 Rockville Pike Suite 400 Rockville, MD 20852 United States Tel: +1 (628) 251-1583 E: sales@factmr.com Corporate Headquarter: Unit No: AU-01-H Gold Tower (AU), Plot No: JLT-PH1-I3A, Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai, United Arab Emirates SOURCE: Fact.MR View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631631/Combine-Harvesters-Efficacy-in-Precision-Farming-Ramping-Up-Demand-FactMR [February 24, 2021] TPG and NewQuest Capital Partners Announce Expansion of Strategic Partnership TPG, a global alternative asset firm, announced today it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire a majority interest in NewQuest Capital Partners ("NewQuest"), a leading secondary private equity platform focused on the Asia-Pacific region. The investment will further align the two organizations and build upon the successful strategic partnership that began with TPG's minority investment in NewQuest in 2018. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter and is subject to regulatory approvals and other third-party consents. Since its founding in 2011, NewQuest has established itself as a leading provider of strategic secondary solutions to private equity asset owners across Asia. The firm currently manages approximately US$2.4 billion in assets across four funds. NewQuest closed its most recent fund, NewQuest Asia Fund IV, in November of 2019 on US$1 billion of commitments. The fund is the largest dedicated pool of capital raised for Asian secondaries to date. "I'm incredibly proud of what our team has achieved in the past few years to establish NewQuest as a leading secondary private equity firm in Asia," said Darren Massara, Managing Partner of NewQuest. "TPG has made us feel part of their community by ensuring we have access to the people, resources, and insights to help build and scale our business. I am excited to continue these efforts as part of TPG's platform, and I look forward to leveraging our market expertise to help TPG expand its secondary investing capabilities globally." Massara and his leadership team will maintain oversight of NewQuest's business and its investment process, including the strategy for its existing funds. The expanded partnership with NewQuest will complement TG's recently announced secondary investing business, which will focus on providing strategic investment solutions to GPs and owners of private market assets in the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. and European team is led by Michael Woolhouse, an industry veteran who joined TPG in 2020 to spearhead the effort. Together, the expanded partnership and new business will allow TPG to create a global secondary platform through which it plans to drive meaningful innovation in the market over time. "Secondaries have become an increasingly important part of our ecosystem over the past 10 years, and our partnership with Darren and the NewQuest team has provided us with unique exposure and insight into this fast-growing and evolving market," said Jon Winkelried, Co-CEO of TPG. "Today's announcement marks the next step in our evolution and will allow us to establish a differentiated, global platform. We look forward to leveraging the leadership and expertise of Darren and Michael, two industry veterans, to deliver innovative, flexible solutions to GPs and LPs across the private markets landscape." About NewQuest Capital Partners NewQuest is the leading dedicated secondary private equity platform focused on the Asia-Pacific region with offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Mumbai. NewQuest specializes in providing strategic liquidity solutions to private equity asset owners, including private equity funds, financial institutions, corporations, hedge funds and family offices. NewQuest was established in 2011 and currently manages four funds with capital commitments of over US$2.4 billion. For more information, please visit www.nqcap.com. About TPG TPG is a leading global alternative asset firm founded in 1992 with approximately US$85 billion of assets under management and offices in Austin, Beijing, Fort Worth, Hong Kong, London, Luxembourg, Melbourne, Moscow, Mumbai, New York, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore, and Washington, DC. TPG's investment platforms are across a wide range of asset classes, including private equity, growth equity, impact investing, real estate, secondaries, and public equity. TPG aims to build dynamic products and options for its investors while also instituting discipline and operational excellence across the investment strategy and performance of its portfolio. For more information, visit www.tpg.com and on Twitter (News - Alert) @TPG. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005589/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] The US Department of the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control has announced new sanctions against individuals and entities that provide support to the Assad regimes oil production network. Nov. 9, 2020. Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) took action against Syrian military officials, members of the Syrian Parliament, Government of Syria entities, and Syrian and Lebanese persons attempting to revive Syrias deteriorating petroleum industry. Specifically, OFAC added seven individuals and 10 entities to the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List, pursuant to Syria sanctions authorities. These sanctions focus on individuals and entities that provide support to the Bashar al-Assad (Assad) regimes oil production network. The Treasury Department is determined to continue to apply economic pressure on the Assad regime and its supporters for the repression conducted by the regime, said Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin. This action is the Treasury Departments fifth round of Syria-related actions since the provisions of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 (Caesar Act) came into full effect. Todays action complements the international effort to compel the Assad regime to cease the war it is waging against its own people and reinforces the U.S. governments continued effort to achieve a peaceful, political resolution of the Syrian conflict in line with UN Security Council Resolution 2254. With these actions, the U.S. government is endeavoring to disrupt and dissuade regime loyalists from continuing to support Assad and to hamper the flow of future oil-derived revenue to Assads war chest. Concurrent with the Treasury Departments designations, the State Department took action today against two Syrian persons pursuant to Section 2 of Executive Order (E.O.) 13894, Blocking Property and Suspending Entry of Certain Persons Contributing to the Situation in Syria. Syrian Petroleum Sector Targets Today, OFAC designated Arfada Petroleum Private Joint Stock Company (Arfada) and Sallizar Shipping SAL (Sallizar), two companies based in Syria and Lebanon, respectively, that have entered into substantial contracts with the Government of Syria to develop the Syrian oil sector. Arfada and Sallizar together hold an 85 percent ownership stake in two joint ventures with the Syrian Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources (Syrian Ministry of Petroleum) and the Public Establishment for Refining and Distribution (PERD) to establish two new oil refineries in Syria: Al-Resafa Refinery Company Private JSC and Coastal Refinery Company Private JSC. Al-Resafa Refinery Company Private JSC plans to establish, operate, and manage a heavy crude oil refinery in Syrias Raqqa province. Coastal Refinery Company Private JSC plans to establish, operate, and manage a condensate oil refinery in Tartus, Syria. As parties for the Government of Syria, the Syrian Ministry of Petroleum and PERD hold the remaining 15 percent in each of the newly established refinery companies. Arfada and Sallizar have further reached an agreement with the Syrian Ministry of Petroleum and PERD to develop and expand the Tartus oil terminal. The Syrian Ministry of Petroleum is a government entity that oversees the countrys oil and natural gas sectors. It sets the policy priorities and coordinates the efforts of the state-led companies that operate in the sector. In 2009, PERD was established by the Syrian Ministry of Petroleum to oversee and regulate the refining and distribution of oil products in Syria, and to act as the parent company of all state-owned refineries and oil distribution companies. PERD oversees the operations of the Banias Refinery Company and the Homs Refinery Company, which were identified by OFAC as part of the Government of Syria in 2014. Arfada and Sallizar were designated pursuant to E.O. 13582, Blocking Property of the Government of Syria and Prohibiting Certain Transactions With Respect to Syria, for materially assisting, sponsoring, or providing financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services in support of, the Government of Syria. Arfada and Sallizar were also designated today pursuant to the Caesar Act for knowingly providing significant financial, material, or technological support to, or knowingly engaging in significant transactions with the Government of Syria. Arfada is additionally being identified for being owned in the aggregate, directly or indirectly, 50 percent or more by OFAC designated Muhammad al-Qatirji and his brother Hussam Bin Ahmed Rushdi al-Qaterji (Hussam al-Qaterji), who was designated today by OFAC. OFAC identified the Syrian Ministry of Petroleum and PERD as part of the Government of Syria as set forth in E.O. 13582 and the Syrian Sanctions Regulations, 31 C.F.R. Part 542. The Al-Resafa Refinery Company Private JSC and Coastal Refinery Company Private JSC were identified for being owned in the aggregate, directly or indirectly, 50 percent or more by Arfada, Sallizar, and PERD. OFAC today also sanctioned Hussam al-Qaterji, a Syrian businessman and 33 percent shareholder of Arfada. Hussam al-Qaterji is known as the godfather of the regimes oil and wheat trade with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Beginning in 2014, Hussam al-Qaterji started brokering oil and wheat trade deals between the Assad regime and ISIS. Hussam al-Qaterji has been a Member of Parliament for the government-controlled area of Aleppo since 2016. In 2018, OFAC designated Hussam al-Qaterjis brother Muhammad al-Qatirji pursuant to E.O. 13852 for facilitating fuel trade between the Assad regime and ISIS, including providing oil products to ISIS-controlled territory. Hussam al-Qaterji was designated pursuant to E.O. 13573, Blocking Property of Senior Officials of the Government of Syria, for being a senior official of the Government of Syria. OFAC additionally designated Kamal Imad al-Din al-Madani (Kamal al-Madani) and Tariq Imad al-Din al-Madani (Tariq Al-Madani), two of the four founders of Sallizar. Kamal al-Madani represented Sallizar in its agreements with the Government of Syria and is the General Manager, Chairman of the Board, and an authorized signatory with a 25 percent stake in the company. Tariq Al-Madani is Sallizars Assistant General Manager, a Member of the Board, and authorized signatory with a 25 percent stake in the company. Tariq Al-Madani and Kamal Al-Madani were designated pursuant to E.O. 13582 for acting or purporting to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, Sallizar. Government of Syria Senior Officials and Entities Today, OFAC designated General Ghassan Jaoudat Ismail (Ismail), the head of the designated Syrian Air Force Intelligence (SAFI). Ismail has served as the head of SAFI since 2019, previously serving as the Deputy Director and in charge of SAFIs mission branch, which manages SAFIs elite troops in cooperation with the special operations branch, who play a key role in the repression conducted by the Syrian regime. OFAC also designated Brigadier General Nasr Al-Ali (Al-Ali), the head of the designated Political Security Directorate (PSD). Al-Ali has served as the head of PSD since July 2019. Prior to being named to this position, Al-Ali headed PSD branches in Aleppo and Daraa. Ismail was designated pursuant to E.O. 13572, Blocking Property of Certain Persons with Respect to Human Rights Abuses in Syria, for being a senior official of SAFI, an entity whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to E.O. 13572. Al-Ali was designated pursuant to E.O. 13572 for being a senior official of the PSD, an entity whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to E.O. 13572. Additionally, OFAC designated parliamentarians Nabil Toumeh Bin Mohammed (Toumeh) and Amer Taysir Khiti (Khiti). Toumeh is a member of the Arab Socialist Baath Party in the Syrian Peoples Assembly and has been a representative of Damascus Province for the Syrian Peoples Assembly since he was initially elected in 2016; Toumeh was reelected on July 19, 2020. Toumeh is one of seven members representing the Syrian Peoples Assembly in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean. Khiti, also a member of the Syrian Peoples Assembly, represents Rural Damascus Province and was elected on July 19, 2020. Toumeh founded holding company Toumeh International Group, which operates subsidiaries covering a range of products and services, including information technology, telecommunication, TV production, advertising, engineering and contracting, imports and exports, industrial equipment, tourism, printing and publishing, as well as decor and furniture. Khiti is the Chairman of Khiti Holding Group and is one of its founders. Formed in 2018, Khiti Holding Group is a real estate development, commercial and industrial conglomerate, active in the fields of industry, trading, agriculture, tourism, real estate, transportation and technical services. Toumeh and Khiti were designated pursuant to E.O. 13573 for being senior officials of the Government of Syria. Toumeh International Group was designated pursuant to E.O. 13573 for being owned or controlled by, directly or indirectly, Toumeh. Khiti Holding Group was designated pursuant to E.O. 13573 for being owned or controlled by, or has acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, Khiti. Lastly, OFAC designated the Military Construction Establishment (MCE) and the Productive Projects Administration (PPA). Established by legislative decree in 1972, MCE is a state-run construction company run by the Syrian Ministry of Defense. With branches throughout Syria, MCEs branch in Damascus has most recently been involved in the Marota City real estate investment project. On June 17, 2020, OFAC took action against investors in the project, which is being built on land that was expropriated from Syrians displaced by the regime. Founded in 1973 to supply the Syrian Arab Army with food and medicine, the PPA has since become involved in agricultural investment projects in property owned by the Syrian Ministry of Defense. Both the MCE and PPA were designated pursuant to E.O. 13573 for being an agency or instrumentality of the Government of Syria, or owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by the Government of Syria or by an official or officials of the Government of Syria. Sanctions Implications All property and interests in property of these persons that are in the United States or in the possession or control of U.S. persons must be blocked and reported to OFAC. OFACs regulations generally prohibit all dealings by U.S. persons or within (or transiting) the United States that involve any property or interests in property of blocked or designated persons. In addition, non-U.S. persons that engage in certain transactions with the persons designated today may be exposed to designation. View identifying information on the individuals and entities designated today. For more information regarding the scope of any sanctions programs requirements please contact OFACs Sanction Compliance and Evaluation Division at (800) 540-6322 or (202) 622-2490, or by email at OFAC_Feedback@treasury.gov. 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. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Irish Water, working in partnership with Offaly County Council, is progressing with essential water main replacement works in Clara to safeguard the water supply and reduce high levels of leakage in the area. The works involve the replacement of almost 300 metres of old, problematic water mains along Brendan Street in Clara with new, high-density polyethene (plastic) pipes. The works will also involve laying new water service connections from the public water main in the road to customers property boundaries and connecting it to the customers water supply. Where the existing service connections on the public side are lead, these will be replaced as part of this improvement work. The works, which are scheduled to begin on Monday 22 February, will be carried out by Ward and Burke Ltd. on behalf of Irish Water and are expected to be completed in March 2021. These essential works will be delivered in adherence with the current HSE and government guidance on Covid-19. To facilitate the safe delivery of these works, some traffic management will be in place, however, local and emergency access will be maintained. To minimise the impact on customers, areas of work will be limited to short sections. The works may involve some short-term supply disruptions, however, the project team will ensure that customers are given a minimum of 48 hours notice prior to any planned water shut-offs. Irish Water and Offaly County Council regret any inconvenience these improvement works may cause. Speaking about the project, Joe Carroll, Irish Water, said We understand that this type of work can be inconvenient and will ensure our work crews make every effort to minimise any disruption these works may cause. We would like to thank the local community for their patience and cooperation while we deliver this vital water network improvement project to safeguard the water supply in Clara. This project is one example of how Irish Water is working in partnership with Offaly County Council to reduce leaks every day. Fixing leaks can be complicated with over 63,000km of water pipe in Ireland. Our national Leakage Reduction Programme will see 500 million invested up to the end of 2021 to reduce the level of leakage across the country by fixing and replacing old and damaged water mains. This will ensure a safe, reliable water supply which is vital for our health, our environment and our growing population and economy. For more information, please visit www.water.ie/reducingleaks. Our customer care helpline is open 24/7 on 1850 278 278 and customers can also contact us on Twitter @IWCare with any queries. For updates please visit the Water Supply Updates section of the Irish Water website. Irish Water continues to work with our Local Authority partners, contractors and others to safeguard the health and well-being of both staff and the public and to ensure the continuity of critical drinking water and wastewater services. Irish Water would like to remind people to follow the HSE COVID-19 advice and ensure frequent handwashing. Turkey accused Greeces air force of harassing a Turkish research ship in the Aegean Sea this week ahead of renewed talks over the two countries ongoing maritime dispute. Turkeys Defense Ministry said Greek F-16s approached the TCG Cesme near the island of Lemnos on Tuesday. One of the fighters descended to 1,000 meters and dropped flares two nautical miles from the research vessel, Ankara alleged. Turkeys Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said Turkey responded within the rules to the alleged provocation, without offering specifics. Such harassment is not appropriate and does not suit good neighborly relations, Akar told reporters at the parliament. A spokesperson for Greeces Defense Ministry denied the accusation, saying no harassment occurred. Greek fighter jets conducted an exercise over the Aegean on Tuesday, which the Defense Ministry said took place far from the Turkish vessels route. The two countries are set to reengage in talks planned for Athens in early March ahead of the European Union summit. Tensions between Athens and Ankara have flared over the past year over their decades-long dispute over maritime delineations and access to hydrocarbon reserves in the eastern Aegean. Last year a Greek frigate vessel collided with a Turkish warship that was escorting the Oruc Reis seismic research vessel. Both sides downplayed the incident, which followed searing tensions over Turkeys repeated deployment of the Oruc Reis to waters claimed by Greece. The tensions have brought Greece closer in defense cooperation with other countries opposed to Turkeys increased drive for influence in the Middle East, North Africa and the Caucasus. Egypt, Greece, Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates have conducted joint naval drills in recent months. Athens signed a defense partnership with the United Arab Emirates and another with Israel late last year. Greeces government also inked a $3 upgrade to its air force from France and has expressed interest in purchasing the United States advanced F-35 fighter jet. * Username This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. Choose wisely! February 24, 2021 The costs associated with outsourcing manufacturing to China have been steadily climbing over the last decade. Wages for Chinese industrial workers have risen more than 2,000 percent in the past 40 years. As a consequence, the cost of using a China-based contract manufacturer has climbed steadily as well. Coupled with the rising costs of international logistics, many U.S. companies have pursued reshoring as a cost-effective production option. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the reshoring trend, with 69 percent of manufacturing and industrial respondents to an August 2020 Thomas Industrial survey stating that they were likely to bring manufacturing production and sourcing back to North America. Industries That Will Lead Reshoring While reshoring may not be feasible for all American companies, some industries stand to gain significant benefits by moving manufacturing operations back to the United States. Aerospace The aerospace sector has no room for cutting corners. Substandard components used in aircraft and spacecraft may result in severe injury or loss of life. Many major aerospace players have already been reshoring operations to the U.S. for the past several years to ensure better quality. The stringent American regulatory environment helps to mitigate the risk of quality issues in aerospace parts. Automotive/Transportation Many original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the automotive sector have imported metal-stamped components for years, blurring the lines surrounding what constitutes an American-made vehicle. In 2018-19, American automakers closed factories and laid off workers due to rapid decline in U.S. sedan sales. The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) has since incentivized the automotive OEMs to use suppliers located in North America. COVID-19 supply chain disruption has also highlighted the benefits of using suppliers closer to home. Chemicals The pandemic revealed limitations in the chemical supply chain as manufacturers of cleaning products and hygiene items quickly ran out of raw materials. The chemical sector has long had a heavy dependence on China, which has caused cost increases due to tariffs and COVID-19. While the chemical industry may never be able to fully move operations to the United States, chemical stakeholders will definitely focus on alternative sourcing opportunities in the near future in response to continued shortages and stockouts. Electronics From circuit boards to semiconductors, the U.S. electronics supply chain experienced significant delays as COVID-19 shuttered suppliers across Asia. For instance, even though the company has been slowly reshoring various assets since 2012, Apple had to postpone the release of the iPhone (News - Alert) 12 due to pandemic-related disruptions in Asia. More generally, the U.S. electronics supply chain has struggled with dependence on Asian electronics manufacturing for years, including quality concerns every year surrounding the Chinese New Year. These reasons, coupled with rising production costs, have many electronics manufacturers exploring reshoring as an option. Medical U.S.-based ventilator manufacturers rely on components imported from China. N95 respirators have a similar problem, with most of the materials and components to make them sourced outside of the United States. Critical shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, and other critical medical equipment caused U.S. businesses in these sectors to reexamine their dependence on foreign manufacturing. Large U.S. PPE manufacturers have significantly ramped up production on U.S. soil to meet the increased demand caused by the pandemic, though its likely many components and materials for these products still get sourced from overseas for the time being. Most of the PPE response thus far has been reactive in the face of current events, but medical and pharmaceutical manufacturers will undoubtedly look at reshoring at least some of their assets in response to political pressure and ongoing domestic demand. Military & Defense Even before the pandemic, the Pentagon expressed ongoing concern about the security risks involved with sourcing military and defense hardware from China. The Trump administrations Buy America initiative already shifted much of U.S. defense spending toward American-based manufacturers. Supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic have further accelerated this trend. Pharmaceutical Pharmaceutical manufacturers currently source about 80 percent of their raw materials from China and India. COVID-19 has highlighted the risks posed by this dependence on outside actors for the chemicals and ingredients used in pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical sector will undoubtedly begin to retool and diversify its supply chain to avoid more massive disruptions that risk patient lives. About Phoenix Investors Founded by Frank Crivello in 1994, Milwaukee-based Phoenix Investors and its affiliates (collectively Phoenix) are a leader in the acquisition, development, renovation, and repositioning of industrial facilities throughout the United States. Utilizing a disciplined investment approach and successful partnerships with institutional capital sources, corporations and public stakeholders, Phoenix has developed a proven track record of generating superior risk adjusted returns, while providing cost-efficient lease rates for its growing portfolio of national tenants. Its efforts inspire and drive the transformation and reinvigoration of the economic engines in the communities it serves. Phoenix continues to be defined by thoughtful relationships, sophisticated investment tools, cost efficient solutions, and a reputation for success. Edited by Erik Linask Press Release February 24, 2021 Pangilinan calls for pilot opening of 100 schools, instead of 1,065, for face-to-face classes CITING the need for immediate experience to help fine-tune the reopening of face-to-face classes, Senator Francis "Kiko" Pangilinan proposes that the Department of Education (DepEd) pilot an initial 100 schools instead of the suggested 1,605. "Kung mayroong UK variant at natatakot doon sa pagkalat, e di bawasan natin ang pilot areas, gawin nating isang daan muna. Ang importante, mayroon tayong pagkukunan ng karanasan ngayon pa lang at hindi iyong pagdating doon sa dulo saka natin gagawin dahil nakaangkla tayo sa isang libo," Pangilinan said. The DepEd earlier proposed the pilot testing of limited face-to-face classes in 1,605 schools, citing an internal DepEd survey that clamor is from the learners themselves. The proposal was rejected by President Rodrigo Duterte, who instead decided to go through with the reopening of classes once vaccination against Covid-19 starts. According to DepEd Undersecretary Nepomuceno Malaluan, 1,065 schools, or five schools per division, have been chosen for the pilot reopening. Possible start of the dry run is now on August 2021, or 17 months after schools were closed in March of 2020. Speaking at Wednesday's public hearing of the Senate Committee on Basic Education, Arts, and Culture tackling the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the country's basic education system, Pangilinan stressed the importance of having experience so that the country will know what to do once school reopens. "Baka naman pupuwedeng mayroon kayong alternative just to be able to get a system going and be able to fine-tune. Ang importante napa-pilot at nakikita iyong mga gaps so that when you expand it even to 1,065, you already have the experience of 500 or 300 to work around and to work on the necessary adjustments," Pangilinan said. "We need the experience now, we need the lessons drawn now because we don't have the luxury of time," he said. The Philippines remains the only Southeast Asian nation that has yet to reopen schools since the global pandemic outbreak. "Hindi na ho isang libo, 300 na lang, 200 na lang, o 100 na lang muna para lang mapag-aralan natin nang husto at ano ang magiging [epekto]. At kapag naging maganda at kapag nakita nating positibo, e di mayroon ka nang basis para magsabing mas magandang paramihin pa natin ito kasi mayroon nang proof of concept," Pangilinan said. In a presentation, the Philippine Pediatric Society (PPS) citing Department of Health data shows that Covid-19 cases on children 0-19 years old comprise only 9 percent of the total cases in the country. PPS recommends that the effects of prolonged school closure on health and development will be mitigated by reopening schools but cognizant of high standards in safety measures for everyone. As of February 23, the Philippines has reported 564,865 cases of Covid-19. The Senate earlier passed on third reading Senate Bill 2057 that will expedite the procurement and administration of Covid-19 vaccines. Hyderabad, Feb 24 : Telangana police on Wednesday arrested a driver and emergency medical technician of a 108 ambulance for theft of 2.300 kg gold ornaments from a car which met with accident killing two of the occupants. Police in Peddapalli district cracked the case of missing gold within 24 hours after the family members of two gold traders killed in the accident lodged a complaint. Two ambulances had reached the spot to shift the dead and injured to hospital. They handed over 3.300 kg gold jewelry to police saying they found this while shifting the victims. The police officers had even praised them for this. However, the family of K. Srinivas Rao (55) and K. Rambabu (45), the two brothers who were killed in the accident, complained to the police that jewelry weighing another 2.300 kg gold was missing. The police took up the investigation and after questioning the ambulance staff, cracked the case. Ramagunda Police Commissioner V. Satyanarayana told reporters on Wednesday that they arrested ambulance driver G. Lakshma Reddy, an emergency medical technician, who took advantage of the situation to keep 2.300 kg gold jewelry after handing over 2.300 kg gold jewelry to police. Staff of another ambulance which shifted injured car driver D. Santosh and another occupant in the car G. Santosh to Karimnagar hospital, found 1 kg gold jewelry in the pockets of Santosh and they handed over the same to police. The deceased, hailing from Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh dealing in gold jewellery were on their way to deliver orders to various jewelers in Telangana. The car overturned near Malyalapalli village on Ramagundam Rajiv Rahdari in the early hours of Tuesday. The police commissioner said except 2.300 kg relating to case of theft, the bills for the remaining gold jewellery were being verified in coordination with concerned departments. He said the policemen, emergency medical personnel and others first reaching the accident spots should act with honesty. "The greed of one or two persons can bring bad name to all those who work tirelessly to save many lives," he said. Carl Bradford's life got upended by the pandemic. The Vacaville, California, artist lost chances to exhibit at galleries. He's been unable to see his far-flung family or go to the gym. The 65-year-old steps out to volunteer with his church's food pantry but stays carefully masked and distanced. He's also just had his second COVID-19 vaccine dose. So is he ready to resume his old life, maybe hop on a plane to see his children and grandchildren? Nope. "Everybody's trying to stay smart," he said. The family made a pact: They won't get together until they get the official all-clear from health experts. And the official word is: Once you're vaccinated, sit tight a while longer. Things will be better soon, experts say. But vaccination is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. "It would be lovely to think that that was the case," said Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, a cardiologist, epidemiologist and chair of the department of preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. "But unfortunately, we're not at the state in the science to understand that we can turn people loose after they've gotten both of their vaccinations." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agrees. Until researchers know more, even vaccinated people are advised to wear masks in public, keep at least six feet from other people, avoid poorly ventilated spaces and keep their guard up. "Clearly, currently available vaccinations do protect one against severe COVID infection," said Lloyd-Jones, president-elect of the American Heart Association. "But we are just beginning to get data about whether someone who has been vaccinated can still transmit the virus." A vaccinated person can still test positive for the virus in their nose, he said, and it's unclear if that material is infectious. "Given that we don't know and given that we know what the consequences of keeping this pandemic going are, we have to err on the side of safety." So if you're vaccinated, you can feel good about being safe from severe infection. But "don't really change your behavior yet until we know more," Lloyd-Jones said. And that applies to people with underlying heart conditions. Their rules for post-vaccination safety are the same. Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, emphasized optimism in her advice. The vaccines available in the U.S., she said, are "really, really good" at protecting people from severe COVID-19. The problem is, "going out you don't know if everyone in the grocery store is vaccinated or unvaccinated. So the recommendation is going to be we all mask and distance around each other until we get to herd immunity." Gandhi, director of the UCSF Center for AIDS Research, said preliminary evidence from Israel about the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine's ability to limit virus transmission looked promising. She thinks vaccinated people should feel safe going to the gym if they stay masked and distanced. "This is going to be the rule until we're all vaccinated." She also said there was good reason to believe vaccinated people could feel safe around small groups of other vaccinated people. But Lloyd-Jones said the scientific evidence can't rule out the possibility that people could spread the virus in such situations. Intuition might suggest a small gathering of fully vaccinated people might be relatively safe, he said. "But I wouldn't want to bet the farm on it until we get to herd immunity." Gandhi emphasized concerns about mental health and the potential damage caused by loneliness. For vaccinated people wanting to visit unvaccinated family or friends, extra precautions such as COVID-19 testing, masking and maybe even quarantining would be necessary, she said. Although Lloyd-Jones agreed mental health concerns are important, "we're just not ready" for large gatherings or footloose travel yet. If someone absolutely has to travel, he said, "think about maybe skipping the food and keeping the mask on for the whole flight, if that's at all possible." Gandhi is hopeful things will be close to normal by fall. "By Christmas 2021, plan your trips, do whatever you want." Bradford can wait. He has been treated for prostate cancer, and his wife has diabetes both underlying conditions that can put someone at risk of severe COVID-19, as can heart disease, which runs in his family. His mother had heart issues, and his father one of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen of World War II died of a heart attack at age 73. Bradford is eager to travel again to see family on the East Coast and down in Florida. But "I'm not jumping on a plane to go see them, and they're not jumping on the plane to come see me." Staying a little bit scared is healthy, he thinks. Gandhi sees a bright future, though. "We will all get through this, and we will get to a normal life," she said. "It seems almost completely unbelievable, because life is so abnormal but we will." Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak Copyright 2020 HealthDay. All rights reserved. REUTERS Bill Burns, the career diplomat tapped by President Joe Biden to run the CIA, told a Senate panel Wednesday that his utmost priority as director will be to combat the technological and economic might of China. In a remarkably amicable exchange with the Senate intelligence committee, where controversies over intelligence failures and abuses have characterized nomination hearings for aspirant CIA directors since 9/11, Burns said the CIA would have to relentlessly sharpen its arsenal of digital weapons and its understanding of Beijings own. That and other aspects of Burns testimony received enthusiastic support from intelligence-committee senators of both parties, which seem to have reached a consensus that China seeks, as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the vice chair of the panel, put it, to replace the United States as the worlds most powerful and influential nation. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) mused that during the Cold War, the U.S. had an organizing principle that the current geopolitical competition with China provides. But Burns, a former deputy secretary of state and ambassador to Russia, also said U.S. rivalry with China was dissimilar to the competition with the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Burns defined U.S.-China competition as less of a security and ideological clash than one over economic and technological primacy. He spoke less of prospective covert measures against China than he did of providing the best possible intelligence on the nature of Chinese intelligence and capabilities. Whether the U.S. can avoid a cold war with a rising global power is a central question facing U.S. foreign policy at the dawn of the Biden administration. Bidens stated approach thus far has been to pursue great power competition without the trade war of the Trump administration and with the prospect of cooperation on climate change. Yet there is also an appetite in Washington for a far more aggressive confrontation. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) urged Burns not take the pressure off China in order to reach a deal on climate. Story continues Sasse, Bennet, and other lawmakers also focused on China as a way to imply the diminution in priority of the CIAs ongoing lethal counterterrorism operations, something Biden has placed under review. There was practically no discussion of CIA counterterrorism during the two-hour hearing. Two senators who have been relentlessly critical of CIA counterterrorism abuses, Democrats Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, usually the panels dissenters on agency nominees, both cheered Burns. Wyden noted Burns hearing was becoming a full-fledged bouquet tossing contest. Financial Batman in the Lead to Run Bidens CIA Unlike his predecessor, Gina Haspel, Burns has no ties to the CIAs post-9/11 human-rights abuses. I believe the CIAs former enhanced interrogation program included torture, Burns affirmed in a questionnaire for the committee. Notably, however, Burns did not turn a page on CIA counterterrorism, saying only that he would need to balance emergent challenges with the continuing threat posed by terrorist groups, 20 years after 9/11. He said those still at the agency who took part in the torture program would face no professional consequence. In the questionnaire, he stopped short of committing to providing the classified Senate torture review to Guantanamo defense attorneys representing people the CIA tortured. Wyden lambasted U.S. intelligence agencies purchase of commercially available data on Americans as an end-run around the Fourth Amendment. Burns pledged transparency over the purchasesbut did not pledge to end them. Burns also emphasized restoring respect for the courage [and] expertise of intelligence officials after the Trump administration persecuted whistleblowers, purged officials it considered disloyal, and sought generally to suborn the intelligence apparatus to its agenda. He was not Bidens first choice for the jobformer national security adviser Tom Donilon declined itbut said Biden told him to deliver intelligence to him straight. He also acknowledged that he will not be Bidens closest intelligence adviser; that will be Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, whom he called my longtime friend and colleague. As a foreign-policy traditionalist over his three decades in diplomatic life, one who held senior appointments under both parties, Burns was embraced as a signal of a restored status quo ante during a volatile period in American politics. His testimony followed encomia for him from two foreign-policy greybeards, George H.W. Bush Secretary of State James Baker and Obama CIA Director Leon Panetta. Baker called Burns nomination a bipartisan no-brainer. While Burns has been a consumer of intelligence rather than a producer during his government career, he wrote one of the most prescient pieces of analysis of the past generation. As the Bush administration was preparing to invade Iraq, Burns, as assistant secretary of state for the Mideast, wrote what has become known as the Perfect Storm memo. Burns accurately predicted in July 2002 that a horrible wave of bloodletting and private vengeance would result from a U.S. occupation. It was a warning to Secretary of State Colin Powell at a time when the White House disdained such concerns as disloyalty or defeatism and discouraged the CIA from producing similar analysis. Still, Burns did not resign when Bush invaded. He is not going to try to impose any particular formula with regard to reform. He knows how to work with a professional workforce, having had a whole career in the foreign service. Hell be open to suggestions and initiatives from below, said Paul Pillar, who was the CIAs senior Middle East analyst when Burns was assistant secretary of state. Ambassador Burns is, in my judgment, an excellent nominee for director of the CIA. He brings to the job utmost experience in what U.S. foreign policy most needs from the intelligence community: as a senior consumer at the State Department, he has an excellent feel for what the sorts of questions are that need to be addressed by the community. During the hearing, Burns alluded to his 2002 memo with modesty. It was imperfect. We got it about half-right and half-wrong, he said. But it was an honest effort to express our concerns without that, policy choices suffer. Read more at The Daily Beast. Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now! Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more. (@FahadShabbir) One of three men accused of planting a car bomb that killed Maltese anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017 dramatically pleaded guilty Tuesday and was swiftly sentenced to 15 years in jail Valletta, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2021 ) :One of three men accused of planting a car bomb that killed Maltese anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017 dramatically pleaded guilty Tuesday and was swiftly sentenced to 15 years in jail. Vincent Muscat received a relatively lenient sentence after the judge said he had been cooperating with police for years, in a case that rocked the Mediterranean island nation. The murder of Caruana Galizia, who exposed cronyism and sleaze within Malta's political and business elite, sparked international outrage and protests that forced prime minister Joseph Muscat to resign. Two alleged co-conspirators are still awaiting trial over the attack on October 16, 2017, while a businessman, Yorgen Fenech, has been charged with masterminding the murder. In a statement read out by their lawyer, Jason Azzopardi, the victim's family expressed their "hope that this development will begin the road for total justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia". The murder of the 53-year-old robbed her of "her right to enjoy her family and grandchildren," he said. "I say all this because if Daphne's family were to respond today with all the emotions, it would be obvious as to what their reply would be," the lawyer said. If you were to take the temperature of the nation, the emotions would range from despair to very slightly less pungent type of despair. As the Covid vaccine rollout happens at a pace close to watching molasses roll up a hill, and as many livelihoods and the economy are simply held in a sort of dreadful aspic, the frustration is very, very palpable. And Ireland has seemingly lost every shred of patience with the politicians tasked with managing the entire fandango. Several accusations are levelled by the public against Micheal Martin, Leo Varadkar and Stephen Donnelly in particular: theyre incompetent; they try to bamboozle everyday people with management speak; theyre far too interested in their careers and their parties to deal effectively with a pandemic; they dont care about regular people; they are not in this with us. Certainly, several optics lend themselves to each of these accusations. TDs getting a salary increase in the coming weeks is not a good look. And thats all fine. The governments inability to communicate clearly with us is incredibly galling. And its not the sort of leadership we want, need, or deserve. Whats not fine is making things personal. Robust debate is all very well and good, and offloading ones frustrations with TDs is a natural response to whats happening (or rather, not happening). Going to the house of Health Minister Donnelly, where his wife Susan, an academic with no skin in the politics game, is at home with their three young children, is as redundant and ridiculous a response as it is shameful. Read More This week, it was revealed that a security fence was set up at Donnellys Wicklow house after a number of incidents prompted security concerns. Among these incidents, reportedly, have been items being thrown at windows and items left on the doorstep. Works are being carried out for security reasons in conjunction with An Garda Siochana, a spokesman for Donnelly noted. Im no fan of Donnelly, but this is disturbing. A man, already subjected to personal abuse on Twitter with every passing second, now has the added worry of some hare-brained activists causing harm to his children? What must that be like for those young children and their mother a family no doubt tested by the vagaries of homeschooling, isolation like everyone else to experience that kind of insidious violence? Who in their right mind believes that intimidating the young family of a government minister is going to get us out of this pandemic-related mess any earlier? Far from resulting in the removal of people from government, it will leave them depleted, and resentful. This low-blow exercise in futility will not get us out of the spin and the leaks and the uncertainty. It really wont. And in this day and age, who would be a public figure in politics? The wife of former Health Minister Simon Harris was once followed to her family home while walking their infant daughter. A group of protestors gathered at his home when Harriss daughter was four weeks old. More recently, Lord Mayor of Dublin Hazel Chu has been subjected to unspeakable levels of harassment and racial abuse, noting that she fears for her daughters safety. The problem with this sort of activism is that its more likely to discourage regular people from running for office. If this is the way of things to come, the only people in public office will be the sort of insulated elites who dont need to care a jot what the electorate say, do or think. As with all other politicians, Donnellys political actions, handlings and decisions are certainly open to criticism. But vile, personal pot-shots on Twitter and throwing things at a familys window is utterly pointless and cruel. Instead, have your say at the ballot. Exciting times for Irish theatre While good news stories from the world of the arts are thin on the ground, there was cheer within Irelands theatre industry when it was announced that, after an open competition to fill the two leadership roles, the Abbey theatre had appointed Caitriona McLaughlin as its new artistic director, and Mark OBrien as its new executive director. Expand Close The Abbey Theatre / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The Abbey Theatre McLaughlin is a director of considerable renown, and will reportedly take the lead on the national theatres new strategy (and is the first female artistic director in the Abbey for decades). OBrien, meanwhile, has been the director of the Axis arts centre in Ballymun, and is no stranger to theatre and community engagement (he has also helmed the Axis chats, an online series of interviews with performers and artists, during lockdown). While outgoing directors Neil Murray and Graham McLaren certainly breathed new life into the Abbey, they came under criticism for staging too many international productions (300 members of the community signed an open letter expressing their deep concern and dissatisfaction at the direction the Abbey theatre had taken. Well, it would seem that our national theatre is certainly in safe hands. OBrien is known throughout the industry for promoting new talent and creativity, while McLaughlins passion for the stage will no doubt breathe a whole new energy into theatre. And, once Irish theatre is finally allowed to wake up from its year-long slumber, exciting times are truly ahead. Pat Kenny's Mayor NIMBY act If youve worked hard and long enough to afford a palatial Dalkey pad, its understandable that you would like to enjoy the fruits of your labour. Still, Pat Kennys palatial Dalkey home is fast becoming a thorn in the broadcasters side. Expand Close Pat Kenny at Bullock Harbour in Dalkey. Photo: Steve Humphreys / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Pat Kenny at Bullock Harbour in Dalkey. Photo: Steve Humphreys This week, in objecting to plans for a 104-bed nursing home next to his house, he called the decision akin to stuffing an ugly sisters foot into Cinderellas delicate slipper. Read More Pat has gone fully Mayor NIMBY before, blocking plans to erect an apartment block next to his home. Either those views from his home must be worth protecting, or he hasnt yet realised that nursing home residents would truly be the quietest neighbours one could wish for. India's total tally of COVID-19 cases rose to 1,10,30,176 with 13,742 new infections, while the recoveries have surged to 1,07,26,702, according to the Union Health Ministry data updated on Wednesday. The death toll increased to 1,56,567 with 104 new fatalities, the data updated at 8 am showed. The number of people who have recuperated from the disease surged to 1,07,26,702 which translates to a national COVID-19 recovery rate of 97.25 per cent and the case fatality rate stands at 1.42 per cent. There are 1,46,907 active cases of coronavirus infections in the country which comprises 1.33 per cent of the total caseload, the data stated. India's COVID-19 tally had crossed the 20-lakh mark on August 7, 30 lakh on August 23, 40 lakh on September 5 and 50 lakh on September 16.It went past 60 lakh on September 28, 70 lakh on October 11, crossed 80 lakh on October 29, 90 lakh on November 20 and surpassed the one-crore mark on December 19. According to the ICMR, 21,30,36,275 samples have been tested up to February 23 with 8,05,844 samples being tested on Tuesday. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Finix, the payments infrastructure company helping vertical SaaS companies transform their businesses through payments, surpassed $100M in total funding, allocating 10% of its most recent funding round for Black and Latinx investors. Matching its financial growth, the company hired three senior executives to Chief Technology Officer, Chief Operations Officer, and Senior VP of Revenue roles. "People too often focus on one aspect of diversity, but it's not just about diversifying your employees, leadership team, or cap tableit's about all of them combined," said Richie Serna, CEO and co-founder of Finix During its Series B , Finix facilitated a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to bring more than 80 traditionally marginalized investors onto its cap table. The company believes this is a tangible example of how early-stage, high-growth startups can increase representation in the venture capital ecosystem and work to close the racial wealth gap. A community has grown amongst the SPV investors, providing a recruiting and partnership advantage for everyone involved. "The Finix SPV provides tremendous value. It allows talented, knowledgeable investors and operators from diverse backgroundsespecially Black and Latinx peoplewho have traditionally been excluded from investing early in rocketship startups to be able to do so," said Tiffani Ashley Bell, Founder & Executive Director at The Human Utility and an SPV investor. "Finix's success and the success of the SPV will open up capital for many more entrepreneurs and investors from underrepresented communities." "Black and other Latinx entrepreneurs and investors were the first people to believe in me and to back Finix. I'm happy to pay it forward by creating this SPV, and I hope other founders will do the same," Serna said. "During this process, we were also hiring for senior executive positions, and I'm grateful to have found leaders representative of our company culture with diverse backgrounds and experiences that align with our trajectory." Finix has brought on seasoned executives with experience building, operating, and growing some of Silicon Valley's most notable companies to help it achieve its mission of turning every software company into a payments company. Finix's new leaders include: Fiona Taylor , COO, is an operations executive with an impeccable resume. She spent a decade as an Officer in the Royal Australian Air Force and another decade in the UK managing investment services and credit ratings throughout Europe . Fiona has spent the last fourteen years in the United States structuring and optimizing operations at technology companies. From Visa's and Solar City's IPO to Solar City's acquisition by Tesla to her most recent role as Marqeta's SVP of Operations, Fiona brings Finix a wealth of experience managing high-growth, global operations. , COO, is an operations executive with an impeccable resume. She spent a decade as an Officer in the Royal Australian Air Force and another decade in the UK managing investment services and credit ratings throughout . Fiona has spent the last fourteen years in structuring and optimizing operations at technology companies. From Visa's and Solar City's IPO to Solar City's acquisition by Tesla to her most recent role as Marqeta's SVP of Operations, Fiona brings Finix a wealth of experience managing high-growth, global operations. Ramana Satyavarapu , CTO, was a founding member of Microsoft Office 365 and the head of engineering for Google Play Search. He led Software infrastructure Engineering at Uber and was most recently the Head of Data Platforms & Products at Two Sigma, a renowned quantitative hedge fund. He led pioneering data initiatives leveraged by 1,000+ engineers, researchers, and Two Sigma fund portfolios to drive oversize returns. At Finix, Ramana's ability to deliver customer-focused products, harness complex data, and scale globally will be invaluable. , CTO, was a founding member of Microsoft Office 365 and the head of engineering for Google Play Search. He led Software infrastructure Engineering at Uber and was most recently the Head of Data Platforms & Products at Two Sigma, a renowned quantitative hedge fund. He led pioneering data initiatives leveraged by 1,000+ engineers, researchers, and Two Sigma fund portfolios to drive oversize returns. At Finix, Ramana's ability to deliver customer-focused products, harness complex data, and scale globally will be invaluable. Adam Boushie , SVP of Revenue, is an internationally experienced executive and entrepreneur who has invested more than 20 years building global technology companies. Before Finix, Adam was the Chief Revenue Officer for Gloo. Prior, Adam was an early employee at Google Cloud, where he spent eight years building and leading teams across the US, Europe , Middle East , and Africa . During his tenure, he helped grow Google Cloud to $8B in revenue. Adam has a proven track record of scaling businesses from a small startup to a global technology powerhouse. This first-hand leadership will be crucial as he helps accelerate Finix's growth. To learn more about Finix's special purpose vehicle, read our blog post . To learn about careers at Finix, visit https://learn.finixpayments.com/jobs . About Finix Finix is the smartest way for businesses to own, manage, and monetize payments. Built by payments experts from Klarna, PayPal, and Worldpay, Finix is trusted by companies like Lightspeed POS Inc., Passport, and Clubessential to build and scale their payments infrastructure. Headquartered in San Francisco, with an additional office in Cincinnati, Ohio, Finix is a privately held company with funding from American Express Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Homebrew, Inspired Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Visa, and others. To learn more, visit www.finixpayments.com . SOURCE Finix Related Links www.finixpayments.com Students are being banned from school for their mullet haircuts as the 80s trend makes a comeback. The hairstyle, made famous by the Beastie Boys, became popular during lockdown and has now prompted a move by principals to ban it. Principals have warned any student who arrives to school with a mullet, will be taken to the barber to get rid of it. The 80s hairstyle was made famous by the 1980s hip-hop group the Beastie Boys (pictured: John Farnham rocking a mullet) Waverley College (pictured) deputy principal Patrick Brennan said students are required to adhere to the school's expectations Waverley College in Sydney's eastern suburbs, has become the latest school to issue a ban on the hairstyle. 'In addition to the correct uniform, students' appearance including hairstyles must be in line with the College expectations from day one,' he said, The Daily Telegraph reported. 'The ''mullet'' haircut trending at present is not acceptable and students will be directed to the local barber or their preferred hair stylist to rectify any issues.' Schools across New South Wales including Wyong Christian Community School, Snowy Mountains Grammar School and Bathurst's Scots All Saints College have all banned the hair cut. Founder of the Mulletfest event, Laura Johnson, backed the trend and said people should not be judging by looks. 'You can't judge a book by its cover, so you shouldn't judge a man by their mullet,' she said. 'Just because you have a mullet doesn't mean you're not a down to earth and hardworking Australian.' Other hairdressers agreed saying the mullet is just another hairstyle. Participants are seen backstage during Mulletfest at Chelmsford Hotel in Kurri Kurri, NSW on February 23, 2019 Warwick Capper of the Sydney Swans rocks a mullet during a VFL match on August 1, 1990 in Melbourne The mullet has also been predicted to become the leading look for Australian men in 2021 following research from 18 salons and barbershops across Melbourne's Chapel Street Precinct. Thanks to the Covid lockdown and the closing down of hairdressers, many were forced to make do with the equipment at home. 'About 30 percent of my male clients came in with mullets cut by their wives [during lockdown] that I then had to fix. Now they look great,' said Nick Yannas of Volume Hair. Josh, a barber at The Bearded Man in Prahran, says long hair is in and big beards are out - a development that might prompt a change in branding. 'The first few weeks after lockdown we had many guys come in looking like cavemen with long hair and beards,' he said. 'We styled the hair and trimmed down their beards entirely for a cleaner, more comfortable look.' PRAGUE (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 24th February, 2021) High-ranking officials of the Czech Republic on Tuesday spoke in favor of using only those coronavirus vaccines that are approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the presidential office said. Earlier in the day, President Milos Zeman, Prime Minister Andrej Babis, Interior Minister Jan Hamacek, Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek, Defense Minister Lubomir Metnar and the lower house's Speaker Radek Vondracek held a meeting at the presidential residence at the Prague Castle, discussing the matter. "The main condition for the public trust [in the fight against COVID-19] is providing the public with objective and clear information about the vaccines that are used, first and foremost regarding their safety and effectiveness, based on scientifically reviewed, objective and sound data. The republic's top officials stress that the authorization process by the European Commission, based on EMA recommendations, meets all these demands and has led to the approval of three types of vaccine," the office said in a statement. Previously, Zeman said that he was not averse to follow Hungary's lead and acquire Russia's Sputnik V vaccine without waiting for the EU regulator to approve it. This month, Babis visited Hungary and Serbia to learn about their experience in purchasing and using the Russian vaccine. At the same time, many Czech politicians spoke in favor of purchasing the vaccine only after it is approved by the EMA. Sorry! This content is not available in your region Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Edison, NJ -- (SBWIRE) -- 02/24/2021 -- A new business intelligence report released by HTF MI with title "Global On-Demand Logistics Market Report 2021" is designed covering micro level of analysis by manufacturers and key business segments. The Global On-Demand Logistics Market survey analysis offers energetic visions to conclude and study market size, market hopes, and competitive surroundings. The research is derived through primary and secondary statistics sources and it comprises both qualitative and quantitative detailing. Some of the key players profiled in the study are Lalamove EasyVan (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Uber Freight LLC, Deliv Inc., MENA 360 DWC-LLC (Fetchr), Shadowfax Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Deliveree (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Bringg Delivery Technologies Ltd., Shippify Inc., Stuart Delivery Ltd. (STUART) & GoGo Tech Ltd. (GoGoVan). What's keeping Lalamove EasyVan (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Uber Freight LLC, Deliv Inc., MENA 360 DWC-LLC (Fetchr), Shadowfax Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Deliveree (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Bringg Delivery Technologies Ltd., Shippify Inc., Stuart Delivery Ltd. (STUART) & GoGo Tech Ltd. (GoGoVan) Ahead in the Market? Benchmark yourself with the strategic moves and findings recently released by HTF MI Get Sample Report + All Related Graphs & Charts @ : https://www.htfmarketreport.com/sample-report/3084587-global-on-demand-logistics-market-1 Market Overview of Global On-Demand Logistics If you are involved in the Global On-Demand Logistics industry or aim to be, then this study will provide you inclusive point of view. It's vital you keep your market knowledge up to date segmented by Applications [Peer to Peer Delivery, Others], Product Types [, Railways, Roadways, Airways, Waterways] and major players. If you have a different set of players/manufacturers according to geography or needs regional or country segmented reports we can provide customization according to your requirement. This study mainly helps understand which market segments or Region or Country they should focus in coming years to channelize their efforts and investments to maximize growth and profitability. The report presents the market competitive landscape and a consistent in depth analysis of the major vendor/key players in the market along with impact of economic slowdown due to COVID. Furthermore, the years considered for the study are as follows: Historical year 2015-2020 Base year 2020 Forecast period** 2021 to 2026 [** unless otherwise stated] **Moreover, it will also include the opportunities available in micro markets for stakeholders to invest, detailed analysis of competitive landscape and product services of key players. Enquire for customization in Report @: https://www.htfmarketreport.com/enquiry-before-buy/3084587-global-on-demand-logistics-market-1 The titled segments and sub-section of the market are illuminated below: The Study Explore the Product Types of On-Demand Logistics Market: , Railways, Roadways, Airways, Waterways Key Applications/end-users of Global On-Demand Logistics Market: Peer to Peer Delivery, Others Top Players in the Market are: Lalamove EasyVan (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Uber Freight LLC, Deliv Inc., MENA 360 DWC-LLC (Fetchr), Shadowfax Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Deliveree (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Bringg Delivery Technologies Ltd., Shippify Inc., Stuart Delivery Ltd. (STUART) & GoGo Tech Ltd. (GoGoVan) Region Included are: North America Country (United States, Canada), South America, Asia Country (China, Japan, India, Korea), Europe Country (Germany, UK, France, Italy), Other Country (Middle East, Africa, GCC) Important Features that are under offering & key highlights of the report: Detailed overview of On-Demand Logistics market Changing market dynamics of the industry In-depth market segmentation by Type, Application etc Historical, current and projected market size in terms of volume and value Recent industry trends and developments Competitive landscape of On-Demand Logistics market Strategies of key players and product offerings Potential and niche segments/regions exhibiting promising growth A neutral perspective towards On-Demand Logistics market performance Market players information to sustain and enhance their footprint Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at @ https://www.htfmarketreport.com/reports/3084587-global-on-demand-logistics-market-1 Major Highlights of TOC: Chapter One: Global On-Demand Logistics Market Industry Overview 1.1 On-Demand Logistics Industry 1.1.1 Overview 1.1.2 Products of Major Companies 1.2 On-Demand Logistics Market Segment 1.2.1 Industry Chain 1.2.2 Consumer Distribution 1.3 Price & Cost Overview Chapter Two: Global On-Demand Logistics Market Demand 2.1 Segment Overview 2.1.1 APPLICATION 1 2.1.2 APPLICATION 2 2.1.3 Other 2.2 Global On-Demand Logistics Market Size by Demand 2.3 Global On-Demand Logistics Market Forecast by Demand Chapter Three: Global On-Demand Logistics Market by Type 3.1 By Type 3.1.1 TYPE 1 3.1.2 TYPE 2 3.2 On-Demand Logistics Market Size by Type 3.3 On-Demand Logistics Market Forecast by Type Chapter Four: Major Region of On-Demand Logistics Market 4.1 Global On-Demand Logistics Sales 4.2 Global On-Demand Logistics Revenue & market share Chapter Five: Major Companies List Chapter Six: Conclusion Complete Purchase of Latest Version Global On-Demand Logistics Market Study with COVID-19 Impact Analysis @ https://www.htfmarketreport.com/buy-now?format=1&report=3084587 Key questions answered - What impact does COVID-19 have made on Global On-Demand Logistics Market Growth & Sizing? - Who are the Leading key players and what are their Key Business plans in the Global On-Demand Logistics market? - What are the key concerns of the five forces analysis of the Global On-Demand Logistics market? - What are different prospects and threats faced by the dealers in the Global On-Demand Logistics market? - What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors? Thanks for reading this article; you can also get individual chapter wise section or region wise report version like North America, Europe or Asia. Contact US : Craig Francis (PR & Marketing Manager) HTF Market Intelligence Consulting Private Limited Unit No. 429, Parsonage Road Edison, NJ New Jersey USA 08837 Phone: +1 (206) 317 1218 sales@htfmarketreport.com Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders has executed a Memorandum of Understanding with Mumbai Port Trust (MbPt) to further the economic growth of the region and the country under the Maritime India Summit 2021. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 23 February 2021. Shares of Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders gained 3.53% at settle at Rs 215.40 yesterday. The stock hit a 52-week high of Rs 242.4 on 11 February 2021. The stock hit a 52-week low of Rs 164 on 13 October 2020. Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders, a public sector undertaking under the Ministry of Defence (MoD), is engaged in the construction and repair of warships and submarines for use by the Indian Navy and other vessels for commercial clients. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The vaccine distribution process got off to a bumpy start, but recent events suggest supply issues could soon be a thing of the past. Pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Pfizer say they can make 240 million more doses of their respective two-shot vaccines by the end of March. Federal regulators gave the green light today to a single-shot vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson. More evidence shows that New York alone could save hundreds of thousands of doses by only giving a single shot to people who were previously infected with the coronavirus. Making more doses available will undoubtedly ensure that a higher percentage of the general public gets vaccinated, but it could worsen ongoing disparities in the distribution of vaccines unless a greater proportion of these new supplies reach communities of color. And public health experts say we will not achieve herd immunity and be able to return to normal life unless confidence and access to vaccines keeps up with growing supplies. You can have a rapid vaccination program and make sure that youre not leaving any marginalized community out, Dr. Syra Madad, senior director of the System-wide Special Pathogens Program at New York City Health + Hospitals, said in an interview. And I think theres a couple of things that youre starting to see we need to just do more of. New mass vaccination sites opening today in Brooklyn and Queens are examples of ongoing efforts by local, state and federal governments to increase access to vaccines. Pop-up sites have also brought vaccines directly to people in public housing projects and other places disproportionately ravaged by COVID-19. A vaccine equity task force helped convince the state to loosen eligibility rules to include essential workers that are disproportionately people of color like restaurant workers and delivery drivers. Black clergy are pushing confidence in the safety of new vaccines. Yet, city and state data has shown that white people are still getting inoculated at higher rates than their Black and brown counterparts. There are a multitude of factors that appear to be causing this. Non-English speakers are still having problems getting information in their native languages, even when a mass vaccination site is literally across the street from their homes. Setting up more sites in vulnerable communities can also be difficult given the logistics of operating in the pandemic, according to Jo-Ann Yoo, a member of the equity task force and executive director of the Asian American Federation. It requires a lot of space, she said in an interview. Theres this entire process. You have to register people. You have to follow up in the end to give them their (immunity) card. The new Johnson & Johnson vaccine does not need to be stored in extremely cold freezers like the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, which will make it easier to distribute. Its single shot also cuts in half the number of appointments that people have to make. Yet, vaccines are only useful once they get into peoples arms, and polls, government data and scientific research continue to show that Black and Latino people are relatively wary of getting vaccinated. A long history of racism plays a role, according to the Rev. Kevin McCall of Brooklyn, but ever-changing public health guidance on masks, Cuomos various feuds with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and the ongoing scandal surrounding nursing home deaths sometimes makes health experts and political leaders poor messengers, according to McCall. We have trust issues when it comes to dealing with the city government and state government, he said, adding that he is delaying getting a vaccine for now. Patience appears to be a key ingredient in successful vaccination efforts. Polling continues to show that the percentage of Americans willing to get inoculated is still short of the 75% or so level that public experts say is necessary to reach herd immunity. Madad said that addressing racial disparities is not an exact science, but things might be getting better for New York moving forward. We absolutely need really good, and robust science communication, she said. We just need more people that can speak the language (of local communities) people that communities are familiar with and that are trusted messengers to give good information. Christine McTiernan, who defied Level 5 restrictions yesterday and opened her premises at C&N Beauty Room, Balbriggan, Dublin, to the public. Photo: Colin Keegan/Collins Dublin Two people have been arrested and are due to appear in court this afternoon after a beauty salon in Dublin reopened to the public for the second day in a row. Christine McTiernan owner of C&N Beauty Room in Balbriggan opened the salon at 11am this morning. Gardai once again attended the premises and arrested Ms McTiernan. She is due to appear in court later this afternoon. Read More A protest which was held in Balbriggan this morning also led to a number of arrests. A garda spokesperson confirmed: Gardai arrested a woman, aged in her 40s, in Balbriggan this morning, 24/02/2021, for breaches of the Health Act 1947 as amended. She has since been charged and is due to appear before Swords District Court later this afternoon. "Gardai are also investigating a demonstration that was held in Balbriggan this morning. Seven persons were arrested in relation to this demonstration and associated breaches of the Health Act (four men and three women). Six of these arrests were dealt with by way of fixed penalty notice. The other person arrested, a man aged in his 50s, has been charged in relation to this incident. He is due to appear before Swords District court later this afternoon. All non-essential businesses are currently not allowed to open under Level 5 restrictions. In a statement posted on Instagram last week, Ms McTiernan said: "I never thought I'd be emailing this and going against the guidelines but with no help from the Government, and bills piling sky high the salon will be reopening next week. "This decides [sic] didn't come lightly as I've tried everything to get help of the Government. Salon has been open 20 days since October 16th and no help since then. "The decision isn't about greed or selfishness, it's about survival and keeping the salon a float. After six years of hard work keeping the salon going I don't want to see the doors shut for good. Apologies if this offends or upsets anyone with this decision but this is my livelihood. "They are destroying small businesses but allowing big chains to stay open." This year our dine and drink business locations throughout the Gorge have suffered with closures. You can help support your favorites by purchasing take out and gift cards. Many of these business will offer curb-side delivery and some will deliver to your home. Lets keep the Gorge going strong! IRVINE, Calif., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Shopoff Realty Investments ("Shopoff"), a national manager of opportunistic and value-add real estate investments, announced today that the company has successfully sold 45 acres of raw land in Riverside County to Pulte Homes for $6.5 million. "We originally acquired this land from the County of Riverside as a surplus land acquisition," explained Shopoff Realty Investments president and chief executive officer, William Shopoff. "Directly adjacent to our Spring Mountain Ranch master-planned community, we realized this land would be best suited for additional homes to benefit this growing area of Southern California." Shopoff received unanimous approval for the project from Riverside County in 2017, with approvals for 138 single-family homes, a neighborhood park and community trails that will connect to the trails in Spring Mountain Ranch. The Shopoff team then went to work securing necessary off-site water and sewer infrastructure installation, which was completed by the adjoining property owner in Spring 2020. "After navigating through the housing downturn as well as the entitlement process, we are pleased to have successfully concluded the business plan for this asset," Brian Rupp, Shopoff Realty Investment's EVP of Real Estate added. "These homes will be a wonderful asset to the community, and future homeowners will greatly benefit from the proximity to the trails and open space in close proximity to the project." About Shopoff Realty Investments Shopoff Realty Investments is an Irvine, California-based real estate firm with a 29-year history of value-add and opportunistic investing across the United States. The company primarily focuses on proactively generating appreciation through the repositioning of commercial income-producing properties and the entitlement of land assets. The 29-year history includes operating as Asset Recovery Fund, Eastbridge Partners and Shopoff Realty Investments (formerly known as The Shopoff Group). Performance has varied in this time frame, with certain offerings generating losses. For additional information, please visit www.shopoff.com or call (844) 4-SHOPOFF. Disclosures This is not an offering to buy or sell any securities. Such offer may only be made through the offerings memorandum to qualified purchasers. Any investment in Shopoff Realty Investments programs involves substantial risks and is suitable only for investors who have no need for liquidity and who can bear the loss of their entire investment. There is no assurance that any strategy will succeed to meet its investment objectives. The performance of this asset is not indicative of future results of other assets. Securities offered through Shopoff Securities, Inc. member FINRA/SIPC, 2 Park Plaza, Suite 770, Irvine, CA 92614, (844) 4-SHOPOFF. Contact: Julie Leber Spotlight Marketing Communications 949.427.1391 [email protected] SOURCE Shopoff Realty Investments Related Links http://www.shopoff.com Heathrow nosedived to a 2 billion annual loss after the 'toughest' year in the airport's 75-year history as the pandemic saw passenger numbers crash by 73%. The airport's annual financial results, which were released this morning, lay bare the devastating impact the Covid crisis has had on the aviation industry. The number of people passing through the west London airport tumbled from 80.9 million in 2019 to 22.1 million last year - a level not seen since the 1970s - and more than half of those travelled before the Covid-19 crisis struck. The group's mammoth loss last year compares with profits of 546 million in 2019. Swingeing cuts saw the group slash its management team by about a third and around a quarter of frontline staff take voluntary redundancy. Beleaguered airports and airlines were dealt another hammer blow by the government's roadmap which put a clampdown on international until at least May 17 - with experts warning this could be too late to save the ravaged industry. But in a shot in the arm to holidaymakers, Heathrow boss John Holland-Kaye today suggested it was 'likely' that people would be able to go abroad for their summer holidays. The group's mammoth loss last year compares with profits of 546 million in 2019 Chief executive John Holland-Kaye said: '2020 has been the toughest year by far in Heathrow's 75-year history.' English holiday destinations see huge surge in summer 'staycation' bookings Campsites and holiday lets across Britain saw a surge in bookings as Boris Johnson mapped out his roadmap out of lockdown last night, with some rentals selling out within minutes. Holidays abroad may still be on hold, but Britain's travel industry was given a shot in the arm by the news that staycations will be allowed from mid-April. The news provided a welcome boost for the sector, with companies seeing an increase in website traffic before the PM had even finished his address. Staycation giant Awaze, the owner of UK self-catering company Cottages.com, said it sold a record 10,000 breaks on Monday - recording one booking every second. Pitchup.com, meanwhile, has taken one booking every seven seconds in the past 24 hours. And Habitat Escapes, which offers luxury holiday in the Cotswolds and Dorset, told MailOnline that by this morning, sales were up 343 per cent compared with last week, and a staggering 9,559 per cent up on the same day last year. Cool Camping, which runs sites across the UK, saw an instant doubling in website traffic between 3-4pm followed by record numbers in the evening. A spokesman for the company told MailOnline: 'By the end of the day, bookings were up by an incredible 1,500% on the same day last year.' Cornwall was the most booked location, with some of the most popular spots already fully booked for some August weekends. The Prime Minister announced that self-catered breaks in holiday lets will be permitted from April 12. But hotels and B&Bs will have to wait until May 17 at the earliest before they can open their doors. Staycation giant Awaze recorded one booking every second and sold more than 10,000 UK breaks yesterday, as customers scrambled to secure their post-lockdown getaway. Following yesterday's announcement, year-on-year growth compared to the same day last year saw Cornwall up by 671%; Devon up 623%; and the two locations combined up by 643%. Habitat Escapes, which offers luxury holiday rentals at Lower Mill Estate in the Cotswolds and Silverlake in Dorset, has reported a surge in bookings and enquiries. As of this morning, sales were up 343% compared with last week, and 9559% up on the same day last year. Red Paxton, Director of Habitat Escapes, said: 'The Prime Minister has unlocked the summer we were all waiting for. 'We are delighted to see so many consumers booking again and looking forward to their habitat escape in England.' Despite the demand there is still availability to book a post lockdown escape at one of its two locations. Advertisement The Prime Minister's diktat on Monday warned foreign holidays will not be allowed for at least another 12 weeks with scant detail on how the final decision to open up air travel will be made. Heathrow's losses came despite the group's move to slash costs by nearly 400 million, reduce spending by 700 million and raise 2.5 billion to help see it through the crisis. The airport said it was now preparing for a 'safe restart of travel' this year. But bosses called on Chancellor Rishi Sunak to deliver measures to support the stricken sector in next week's Budget, making a plea for 100% business rates relief, an extension of the furlough scheme and to revive VAT-free shopping for tourists to the UK. Chief executive John Holland-Kaye said: '2020 has been the toughest year by far in Heathrow's 75-year history.' He warned the group might need to slash costs further if Chancellor Rishi Sunak ignores its plea for 100% business rates relief. He said the group was 'trying to avoid compulsory redundancies' among its 4,000 frontline workers, after 1,200 already took voluntary severance last year. It also axed 500 management jobs - a third of the team - in 2020. Mr Holland-Kaye said more action may have to be taken without extra Government support, fearing the aviation sector will not recover to pre-pandemic levels for another two years. 'We might need further cost reductions - we're doing everything we can to protect jobs,' he said. But he added: 'We can be hopeful for 2021, with Britain on the cusp of becoming the first country in the world to safely resume international travel and trade at scale. 'Getting aviation moving again will save thousands of jobs and reinvigorate the economy, and Heathrow will be working with the Global Travel Taskforce to develop a robust plan underpinned by science and backed by industry.' Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Holland-Kaye said it was likely the industry would take a 'risk based approach' like last summer, with pre-departure testing only needed for high risk countries. He added: 'I think we'll see some countries which are considered low risk places like Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, which have had very low Covid levels they would be considered low risk. 'Then of course there will be high risk countries, maybe quarantine still, certainly testing. 'But I think we can start to plan with more confidence for the future I think it's very likely people will be able to go on their summer holidays so that's really good news. 'The aviation sector can start to plan ahead for May 17 to make sure we've got the people and the planes in place so that we can not just get people on their summer holidays, but also start to get British businesses moving again.' But he cautiously added: 'We have to recognise that we are in an uncertain time, we all hope that this will be the last wave and we're planning our recovery but of course no one can predict anything with Covid.' The travel industry has been ravaged by the pandemic, with air passenger numbers plummeting by around 90 per cent by the end of last year. A raft of new measures in recent weeks, including pre-departure testing, quarantine hotels and the scrapping of 'travel corridors', has compounded the crisis and heightened fears for the future of the industry. Travel chiefs are concerned it may not be enough to give the sector the time it needs to prepare if holidays are to go ahead in the coming months and to create enough confidence for would-be holiday-makers to book. They want Mr Johnson to harness the success of the vaccine roll-out and indicate when travel restrictions can be expected to start being lifted. Mr Holland-Kaye said Heathrow had nearly 4 billion in the bank, 'enough to keep us going at least through until 2023.' He added: 'Aviation has always led the UK economy out of recessions and we'll be doing that again. SAGE scientist warns don't book a trip abroad before 2023 Professor Graham Medley, who sits on SAGE and is the UK's chief pandemic modeller, said yesterday he wouldn't book a holiday until 2023. He said: 'I'm not, I didn't last year and I won't next year probably either. 'I think it's a time of caution and we have to see. While we're doing very well with the vaccine in this country, other countries are not doing so well.' Asked to clarify he would not even book a foreign holiday for 2022, he added: 'Not at the moment. I wouldn't book anything. 'I think the whole situation's going to be uncertain for a long time. 'We've got more optimism and certainty now in this country than we have for most other places.' Advertisement 'And it's vital that we do because the same passenger planes that are taking you on your holiday are also carrying UK exports and the supply chain and, until we can re-establish those long haul flights all over the world, we are not going to be able get the British economy back, working at full speeds and protecting jobs here. 'So that's what we're focused on.' Critics have called the decision to wait until May 17 to open up flights a 'hammer blow' to the aviation industry, which directly and indirectly supports up to 4million jobs and around 100,000 businesses in the UK. Gloria Guevara, President & CEO of the World Travel & Tourism Council, based in London, told MailOnline: 'Delaying the return of international travel until mid-May will come as yet another hammer blow to the already struggling Travel & Tourism sector, which has been battling to survive for the best part of a year. 'The sector was banking its hopes on a quicker return to international travel, so there will be widespread dismay at this news. Its return is crucial if the UK economy is to recover from the ravages of the pandemic, given the sector generates 200billion to the UK's GDP'. There are also growing calls in the industry for vaccine passports - but there is no mention of them in relation to foreign travel in Mr Johnson's roadmap. But there will be a review of 'potential uses to enable access to settings' with 'Covid status certification' - with the conclusions published before June 21. The Government has said a final decision on when international travel can restart will be made before a review is completed by the Department for Transport after Easter, causing yet more uncertainty for those dreaming of going abroad. 'The Global Travel Taskforce will report on April 12 with recommendations aimed at facilitating a return to international travel as soon as possible while still managing the risk from imported cases and Variants of Concern. Following that, the Government will determine when international travel should resume, which will be no earlier than May 17', the report says. Read the small print before booking your summer holiday Boris Johnson's announcement of a roadmap out of lockdown triggered a huge surge in summer holiday bookings. Britons, keen to put the stresses of the past year behind them, immediately began booking foreign trips in the hours after the prime minister revealed international travel was back on the menu from May 17. However, experts have warned that holidaymakers should exercise caution when booking their trips. In November, holiday firms were accused of illegally withholding 1billion in refunds to families whose holidays were cancelled due to the pandemic over the past year. Around 9.4million people have lost a trip since coronavirus hit the UK and many of the firms involved delayed giving refunds or even tried to fob people off with vouchers or the option to re-book, say consumer experts Which? After the criticism, many companies have cleaned up their acts and now offer more reasonable refund terms. However, the risk still remains, especially with the threat of further lockdowns if new variants emerge. So, consumers should only book a holiday if the path to a refund is clear to them. Package holidays offer the best protection - if your trip is cancelled a refund is owed within 14 days. There is no obligation to accept a voucher and so Britons must exercise caution. Advertisement Experts have said that if restrictions run into the summer then it will cost the economy around 18billion with airlines saying they need weeks or even months advance warning to ensure they are ready to start flying again. Vaccine passports that would allow foreign holidays are 'feasible' but would require set standards across countries, scientists have said. More data are needed on the effectiveness of Covid vaccines and on the duration of immunity to establish how long a passport might be valid, they added. A report from the Royal Society called for a 'broader discussion' about the document, including the need for legal and ethical standards and data privacy. Yesterday Mr Johnson was warned that failing to reopen international travel by the summer would blow an 18billion hole in the economy. The prime minister has been facing growing pressure to include international travel in his roadmap for easing lockdown, due to be published today, Monday. On Thursday, the bosses of some of Britain's biggest airlines and package holiday firms urged Mr Johnson to have a 'can-do' attitude to reopening travel by summer or face tens of thousands more jobs being destroyed. And a study by a group of cross-party MPs lays bare the scale of the potential hammer blow if current restrictions continue over the summer months, saying it would be 'beyond devastating'. The figures project the hit to inbound tourism, integral to the recovery of shops, bars, restaurants, hotels and tourist destinations, would be at least 7.5billion. And for outbound travel, which generated around 37.1billion for the UK economy in 2019, the hit would be at least 10.5billion. The figures, compiled by Parliament's Future of Aviation group, relate to the potential hit for June, July and August this year. They are based on the amounts inbound and outbound travel were worth to the UK economy for these months in 2019 and the impact if current historically low passenger numbers continue over the summer. The road map to recovery: The PM's plan sees pubs shut until at least April 12 after Easter But Greek island holidays could be on the cards as soon as May as the country examines opening its borders early. Greece is looking into whether it can give an early green light to British tourists who have received the vaccine. The move would break from the rest of the European Union, which is pushing for a united and cautious approach to reopening non-essential travel from outside the bloc. It comes as Greece has recorded a total of 182,783 Covid-19 cases and 6,343 deaths. Over the previous 24 hours, the country recorded 2,111 new cases and 22 new deaths. Athens is seeking to boost the country's vital holiday industry, which has taken a hit due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The government is considering plans to allow in British visitors who can prove that they have been vaccinated Covid-19 in time for the summer months, according to a report in The Times. Athens is also putting in plans to ensure that airport staff and hotel employees will receive a vaccine. The reopening of the country would be in contrast with EU leaders who are expected to say that it is too soon to start lifting restrictions on non-essential travel. A video call in which EU leaders will gather to warn that infections are still too high to remove travel restrictions is expected to state that the 'epidemiological situation remains serious, and the new variants pose additional challenges.' Egypts Minister of Culture Ines Abdel-Dayem met with South Sudan's Minister of Culture, Museums and National Heritage Nadia Arop on 22 February to discuss enhancing cultural and artistic exchange between the two countries. ## The meeting was attended by the assistant administrative attache at the Embassy of South Sudan in Cairo, head of the General Organisation for Cultural Palaces Ahmed Awwad, head of the Cultural Development Fund Fathy Abdel-Wahab, head of the Foreign Cultural Relations Sector Souad Shawky, and head of the National Centre of Cinema Mohamed El-Basousi. Abdel-Dayem said that the meeting with the South Sudanese culture minister reflects the continuous communication between Egypt and other African nations. She also expressed willingness to provide the necessary support in all creative fields to South Sudan and welcomed an invitation by South Sudan for Egypt to be the guest of honour at the countrys first festival for arts and culture. The festival will feature folkloric performances and exhibitions of traditional products and handicrafts. Abdel-Dayem also suggested boosting the Egyptian presence in South Sudan by holding workshops for handicrafts and traditional arts as well as cinema and theatre performances. The minister also ordered the allocation of two grants for South Sudanese students in Egypt to study cinema at the Academy of Arts, as well as the inclusion of South Sudan in the activities of the Cultural Relations initiative to consolidate friendship between the two countries. For her part, South Sudan's Culture Minister Arop said that the visit by Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to South Sudan and his meeting with its President Silva Kiir paved the way for strengthening cooperation between the two countries in various fields. She also said that her country is following the cultural and artistic trends in Egypt. Arop also asked for Egypts support in founding the National Museum of South Sudan, in addition to sending an artistic delegation to photograph, and produce a documentary film on her country and organize a cultural week in both Cairo and Juba that will include a book fair, artistic performances and other activities. Short link: Press Release 24 February 2021 Hospitality industry veterans Chris Manley, formerly with Stonebridge Companies, and Jeff Blackman, founder and president of Bedford Lodging, have launched hotel management company Five Senses Hospitality Management. Focused on careers, guests and owners within the hotel management industry, Five Senses Hospitality manages the day-to-day operations of hotel properties for existing owners, enabling an accelerated cash flow recovery and investment in acquisition opportunities. "The hotel industry has been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, forcing a lot of very talented people to the sidelines," said Manley, president of Five Senses. "As a result, Jeff and I concluded that COVID-19 presents a once-in-a-career opportunity to assemble a team that can produce outsized cash flow to our equity partners while maintaining an exceptional level of guest service focusing on all five senses of the guest experience." Manley most recently served as chief operating officer of Denver-based Stonebridge Companies from 2015-2020, a privately owned, owner, operator and developer of more than 60 hotels and 11,000 guest rooms with more than 3,200 team members across 11 sta tes. He was appointed to the board of directors for the American Hotel Lodging Association (AHLA) in 2019 and served as co-chair of the Management Council. His nearly 30 years of hotel and real estate investment experience also includes 15 years as CFO of The Pauls Corporation, a real estate development and capital management firm focused on mixed-use projects in the western United States and Canada, and seven years as vice president of ProLogis, a real estate trust focused on supply chain logistics facilities. Since its inception last fall, Five Senses' portfolio has grown to five properties and more than 100 team members. "Our pipeline of prospective portfolio additions includes both opportunities to manage for and acquisitions on behalf of third party owners," said Blackman, a 25-year hospitality veteran and former Marriott executive. "In retrospect, many of our peer management companies did not adapt quickly enough to the challenges of the coronavirus, and owners suffered as a direct result. Five Senses approaches the business from the perspective of an investor which translates into an acute focus on the owners' objectives." Involved in the ground-up development of more than 150 hotel properties, Blackman's expertise encompasses every aspect of the lodging industry, including development, management, asset management, acquisition, due diligence and advisory services. Leveraging his long-standing industry relationships, Blackman in 2013 founded Bedford Lodging, a Dallas-based hotel development company with an extensive and successful track record of developing Marriott and Hilton products in California, Texas and Colorado. Bedford most recently opened an AC Hotel in the fall of 2020 in California's wine country. Employing forward-thinking modular design and construction, the hotel was constructed in Idaho and assembled on-site in Sonoma County, considerably reducing the build ti me while maintaining quality and finish details. Blackman began his career alongside Jack DeBoer, creator of the extended stay hotel concept and founder of Candlewood Suites, Residence Inn and Summerfield Suites, overseeing the development planning and market feasibility department for Candlewood Suites, shepherding its growth to more than 100 hotels nationwide. His past experience also includes serving as executive vice president of operations for Western International, one of the country's largest owners, operators and developers, where he oversaw the development of 25 hotels. Blackman also held the roles of vice president of development for the central region of Marriott International, growing the franchise business of its select service and extended stay brands by more than 100 development deals, and vice president of acquisitions for Ashford, acquiring $2 billion of hotel assets between 2003-2005. He currently serves as president of Marriott 's Fairfield Inn & Suites franchise advisory committee. Five Senses has an exclusive partnership with Blackman's Bedford Lodging to manage the day-to-day operations of its assets, and is concurrently looking to acquire a targeted niche of properties that will outperform their peers, with two properties currently in due diligence. "Historical returns in select service and extended stay have been able to produce a more stable and predictable cash flow to our investor base. COVID-19 presents an opportunity to assemble a portfolio of quality product at a substantial discount to replacement cost that will generate outsized risk-adjusted returns to our partners," Blackman notes. Manley adds: "We're not just focused on investment returns for our owners and partners. Growing and developing the careers of our team members is paramount to what Five Senses Hospitality is, a forward looking hospitality company focused on careers, guests and owners ." About Bedford Lodging Founded in 2013 by Jeff Blackman, Bedford Lodging is a Dallas-based hotel development company that has an extensive and successful track record of developing Marriott and Hilton products in California, Texas and Colorado. For more information, visit www.bedfordlodging.com. The court had asked to delay the repatriation. The UN had asked for a check for the presence of political refugees and asylum seekers. For more than a year, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has not been allowed to visit migrant detention centres. Kuala Lumpur (AsiaNews) - Despite a court order, the Malaysian government has repatriated 1,086 refugees to Myanmar. Yesterday the court had blocked the return due to the presence of possible political refugees and because of the situation in the country, which suffered a coup d'etat by the military. Human rights organizations had warned the Malaysian government that the group included members of ethnic minorities fighting with the Burmese army, who would face persecution if repatriated. The director general of Malaysian immigration Khairul Dzaimee Daud, said that "all the returnees returned voluntarily" and that there were no refugees seeking asylum among them. Daud also specified that there were no Rohingya but his claims cannot be verified because the countrys authorities have not allowed members of the UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) to visit detention centres for over a year. Yesterday, UNHCR representatives claimed there were members of the Chin and Kachin minorities, who are fighting with the regular army, among the refugees facing repatriation. They would be targeted for persecution if brought back home. Yesterday morning, however, there was talk of 1200 people to be repatriated. Yesterday evening, only 1,086 were repatriated. No one gave any explanations for the difference. The migrants had been detained in a military base. From here, with buses and vans, they were transferred to three ships made available by the Myanmar navy. The repatriation is seen by many observers as Malaysia's bow to military rule, even though Kuala Lumpur had declared days earlier that it was "seriously concerned" about the coup. Malaysia has welcomed millions of migrants from the poorest regions of Asia - mainly Myanmar, Bangladesh and Indonesia - to use them as low-cost labour, particularly in the construction sector. Due to the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis, the government expelled some 37,000 migrants last year. by Austin Bay February 24, 2021 Domestic political and cultural divisiveness has become the United States' greatest strategic weakness. This grim vulnerability, exploited by international rivals and authentic domestic enemies who despise the U.S. Constitution, puts the U.S. republic in peril. Let me provide a background example. Left-wing 1960-ish feminists politicized the personal. Demonizing men as innate aggressors was a cool political tool. The feminist propagandist portrayed herself as something more than a reborn 1912 suffragette demanding the vote. She was a systemic victim of the patriarchy, an oppressive, predatory sociocultural, political and American structural scheme concocted by males to marginalize human females. Somehow the scheme (always hazily defined) managed to oppress British queens and female New York millionaires. Note I did not write "human males." Edgy 1970s feminist cranks, doubting XY chromosome carriers possessed humanity, dehumanized men. Silly, neurotic soap opera slander? In some cases, yes. But substitute "capitalism" for the oppressive scheme and you've a divisive, tribal Cold War Marxist tract with the XX proletariat tribe battling the XY capitalist tribe. Crypto-Marxist diatribe doesn't begin to explain human relations. Alas, sensationalist mainstream media adored the slanderers, gave them pulpits. Media portrayed the cranks as righteously angry victims combating tyrannical cultural patriarchy. A base reading of that phrase: Dads are dictators. Swallow that hook and families become harmful institutions. Now make the Marxist-tribalist leap. Freedom as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution is a cultural fraud. That Constitution was written by dictator males with WHITE SKIN. That assertion, of course, ignores the fact that the checked and balanced U.S. Constitution was amended and women had the vote. Ironically, for 21st century identitarians, it also ignores how the Constitution's authors and signers may have ethnically, culturally and spiritually identified themselves. Indeed, the Constitution guys are lumped into a convenient DEMON TARGET. Several key words that factor in the 21st-century attacks fracturing America appear in the previous paragraphs. "Predatory," "marginalizing," "systemic," "oppressive," "structural," "ethno-cultural identity," "dehumanization" and "demonization" are key conceptual attacks on the U.S. Constitution and American culture for the politically divisive who would destroy both. Who benefits domestically from the tactics and strategy of strategically fracturing America? America's hard left, which is currently waging war on the 1st Amendment (protecting free speech) and the 2nd Amendment (protecting the right to bear arms). Absolutist ethnic identity powers the divisive propaganda. But the raw translation for leftist race identity is tribalism, another case of the proletariat versus the capitalist recast. No one sane ever said that black lives didn't matter or that racial prejudice doesn't exist in America -- just the opposite. But assert "all lives matter" (they do), much less "blue lives matter" (the lives of law enforcement officers), and Black Lives Matter activists, their political allies and media pals bash your words as gutter racism. Then Big Tech Media cancels your internet posts and stifles criticism of hard-left radical tactics, including criticism of their violence. In truth, the very name Black Lives Matter is a divisive tool for left-wing power grabbers. The name amounts to a race-baiting false accusation. It's a great propaganda tactic but, at its core, a manipulative Big Lie designed to weaken American faith in freedom while strengthening a radical activist's grip on the community he/she/it seeks to politically control. Jump from local to global. The Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote that the greatest general is he who wins without fighting -- he does not risk forces in combat. Hybrid war predates Sun Tzu. So does the concept "divide and conquer." America has international enemies who exploit its political divisions, with the goal of weakening the U.S. and ultimately destroying it. Sowing division is a classic Russian tactic. The Kremlin insistently fuels division among NATO members. False narratives, spun by both Russian operatives and local proxies, are a key technique. China uses disruptive information warfare attacks. A recent and utterly noxious example: COVID-19/the Wuhan virus was brought to China by a U.S. Army reservist. Sure, it's absurd, and Beijing knows the pandemic began in China, which is one reason it refuses to provide data from 2019 requested by World Health Organization investigators. However, an American public primed to believe the U.S. system is a structurally oppressive scheme might just capitulate to the Big Lie. Advantage: Sun Tzu. Ransomware Group Banks Millions; Cloudy Forecast Amid 40% Rise in Open-Source Malware in 2020; Social Distancing "Must Have" Tools Dominate Top Spoofed Brands CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) Security today released the 2021 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index highlighting how cyberattacks evolved in 2020 as threat actors sought to profit from the unprecedented socioeconomic, business and political challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, IBM Security X-Force observed attackers pivoting their attacks to businesses for which global COVID-19 response efforts heavily relied, such as hospitals, medical and pharmaceutical manufacturers, as well as energy companies powering the COVID-19 supply chain. According to the new report, cyberattacks on healthcare, manufacturing, and energy doubled from the year prior, with threat actors targeting organizations that could not afford downtime due to risks of disrupting medical efforts or critical supply chains. In fact, manufacturing and energy were the most attacked industries in 2020, second only to the finance and insurance sector. Contributing to this was attackers taking advantage of the nearly 50% increase in vulnerabilities in industrial control systems (ICS), which manufacturing and energy both strongly depend on. "In essence, the pandemic reshaped what is considered critical infrastructure today, and attackers took note. Many organizations were pushed to the front lines of response efforts for the first time - whether to support COVID-19 research, uphold vaccine and food supply chains, or produce personal protective equipment," said Nick Rossmann, Global Threat Intelligence Lead, IBM Security X-Force. "Attackers' victimology shifted as the COVID-19 timeline of events unfolded, indicating yet again, the adaptability, resourcefulness and persistence of cyber adversaries." The X-Force Threat Intelligence Index is based on insights and observations from monitoring over 150 billion security events per day in more than 130 countries. In addition, data is gathered and analyzed from multiple sources within IBM, including IBM Security X-Force Threat Intelligence and Incident Response, X-Force Red, IBM Managed Security Services, and data provided by Quad9 and Intezer, both of which contributed to the 2021 report. Some of the report's key highlights include: Cybercriminals Accelerate Use of Linux Malware - With a 40% increase in Linux-related malware families in the past year, according to Intezer, and a 500% increase in Go-written malware in the first six months of 2020, attackers are accelerating a migration to Linux malware, that can more easily run on various platforms, including cloud environments. Pandemic Drives Top Spoofed Brands - Amid a year of social distancing and remote work, brands offering collaboration tools such as Google, Dropbox and Microsoft, or online shopping brands such as Amazon and PayPal, made the top 10 spoofed brands in 2020. YouTube and Facebook, which consumers relied on more for news digestion last year, also topped the list. Surprisingly, making an inaugural debut as the seventh most commonly impersonated brand in 2020 was Adidas, likely driven by demand for the Yeezy and Superstar sneaker lines. Ransomware Groups Cash In On Profitable Business Model - Ransomware was the cause of nearly one in four attacks that X-Force responded to in 2020, with attacks aggressively evolving to include double extortion tactics. Using this model, X-Force assesses Sodinokibi - the most commonly observed ransomware group in 2020 - had a very profitable year. X-Force estimates that the group made a conservative estimate of over $123 million in the past year, with approximately two-thirds of its victims paying a ransom, according to the report. Investment in Open-Source Malware Threatens Cloud Environments Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses sought to accelerate their cloud adoption. "In fact, a recent Gartner survey found that almost 70% of organizations using cloud services today plan to increase their cloud spending in the wake of the disruption caused by COVID-19." 1 But with Linux currently powering 90% of cloud workloads and the X-Force report detailing a 500% increase in Linux-related malware families in the past decade, cloud environments can become a prime attack vector for threat actors. With the rise in open-source malware, IBM assesses that attackers may be looking for ways to improve their profit margins - possibly reducing costs, increasing effectiveness and creating opportunities to scale more profitable attacks. The report highlights various threat groups such as APT28, APT29 and Carbanak turning to open-source malware, indicating that this trend will be an accelerator for more cloud attacks in the coming year. The report also suggests that attackers are exploiting the expandable processing power that cloud environments provide, passing along heavy cloud usage charges on victim organizations, as Intezer observed more than 13% new, previously unobserved code in Linux cryptomining malware in 2020. With attackers' sights set on clouds, X-Force recommends that organizations should consider a zero-trust approach to their security strategy. Businesses should also make confidential computing a core component of their security infrastructure to help protect their most sensitive data - by encrypting data in use, organizations can help reduce the risk of exploitability from a malicious actor, even if they're able to access their sensitive environments. Cybercriminals Disguised as Celebrity Brand The 2021 report highlights that cybercriminals opted to disguise themselves most often as brands that consumers trust. Considered one of the most influential brands in the world, Adidas appeared attractive to cybercriminals attempting to exploit consumer demand to drive those looking for coveted sneakers to malicious websites designed to look like legitimate sites. Once a user visited these legitimate-looking domains, cybercriminals would either seek to carry out online payment scams, steal users' financial information, harvest user credentials, or infect victims' devices with malware. The report indicates that the majority of Adidas spoofing is associated with the Yeezy and Superstar sneaker lines. The Yeezy line alone reportedly pulled in $1.3 billion in 2019 and was one of the top selling sneakers for the sportswear manufacturing giant. It's likely that, with the hype for the next sneaker release in early 2020, attackers leveraged the demand of the money-making brand to make their own profit. Ransomware Dominates 2020 as Most Common Attack According to the report, in 2020 the world experienced more ransomware attacks compared to 2019, with nearly 60% of ransomware attacks that X-Force responded to using a double extortion strategy whereby attackers encrypted, stole and then threatened to leak data, if the ransom wasn't paid. In fact, in 2020, 36% of the data breaches that X-Force tracked came from ransomware attacks that also involved alleged data theft, suggesting that data breaches and ransomware attacks are beginning to collide. The most active ransomware group reported in 2020 was Sodinokibi (also known as REvil), accounting for 22% of all ransomware incidents that X-Force observed. X-Force estimates that Sodinokibi stole approximately 21.6 terabytes of data from its victims, that nearly two-thirds of Sodinokibi victims paid ransom, and approximately 43% had their data leaked - which X-Force estimates resulted in the group making over $123 million in the past year. Like Sodinokibi, the report found that the most successful ransomware groups in 2020 were focused on also stealing and leaking data, as well as creating ransomware-as-a-service cartels and outsourcing key aspects of their operations to cybercriminals that specialize in different aspects of an attack. In response to these more aggressive ransomware attacks, X-Force recommends that organizations limit access to sensitive data and protect highly privileged accounts with privileged access management (PAM) and identity and access management (IAM). Additional key findings in the report include: Vulnerabilities Surpass Phishing as Most Common Infection Vector - The 2021 report reveals that the most successful way victim environments were accessed last year was scanning and exploiting for vulnerabilities (35%), surpassing phishing (31%) for the first time in years. - The 2021 report reveals that the most successful way victim environments were accessed last year was scanning and exploiting for vulnerabilities (35%), surpassing phishing (31%) for the first time in years. Europe Felt the Brunt of 2020 Attacks - Accounting for 31% of attacks X-Force responded to in 2020, per the report, Europe experienced more attacks than any other region, with ransomware rising as the top culprit. In addition, Europe saw more insider threat attacks than any other region, seeing twice as many such attacks as North America and Asia combined. The report features data IBM collected in 2020 to deliver insightful information about the global threat landscape and inform security professionals about the threats most relevant to their organizations. To download a copy of the X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2021, please visit: https://www.ibm.biz/threatindex2021 About IBM Security IBM Security offers one of the most advanced and integrated portfolios of enterprise security products and services. The portfolio, supported by world-renowned IBM Security X-Force research, enables organizations to effectively manage risk and defend against emerging threats. IBM operates one of the world's broadest security research, development and delivery organizations, monitors 150 billion+ security events per day in more than 130 countries, and has been granted more than 10,000 security patents worldwide. For more information, please check www.ibm.com/security, follow @IBMSecurity on Twitter or visit the IBM Security Intelligence blog. Press Contact Georgia Prassinos IBM Security Media Relations gprassinos@ibm.com ____________________ 1 Gartner Press Release, Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Grow 18% in 2021, 17 November 2020 Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/95470/ibm_logo.jpg The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Indonesias foreign minister is scheduled to travel to Myanmar this week, a report said Tuesday, as Jakarta rejected claims it was endorsing a plan by the junta to hold new elections. Retno Marsudi was to make an hours-long trip to Naypyitaw on Thursday in what would be the first known visit by a foreign envoy since the Feb. 1 military coup, according to Reuters, which cited a Feb. 23 letter from the Ministry of Transport and an official who authenticated it. The news service also quoted Ministry of Foreign Affairs Teuku Faizasyah as saying that Retno was in Thailand on Tuesday. The spokesman did not did not immediately respond to a request from BenarNews for comment about the Reuters report. In Myanmar, an activist group rejected the purported visit by Jakartas top diplomat. A diplomatic delegation led by the Indonesian foreign minister visiting Myanmar in the current political crisis is tantamount to recognizing the military junta, Future Nation Alliance said in a statement on Tuesday. We strongly oppose and condemn Indonesia for sending a government envoy to Burma for official communications with the coup regime. After seizing power on Feb. 1, Myanmars military promised to hold democratic elections within a year. In the days leading up to the coup, the generals had made veiled threats that they might take such action over claims of fraud in the Nov. 8 general election, which Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy swept, as confirmed by Myanmar polling authorities. Earlier on Tuesday, demonstrators gathered outside the Indonesian Embassy in Yangon to reject reports that Indonesia was urging countries in the region to send monitors to ensure that the generals hold fair and inclusive elections. During a news conference in Jakarta, Faizasyah said that Retno was still looking for a regional consensus on Myanmar but that nothing had been decided. He said Indonesia was not pressing for member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to send election monitors to Myanmar. That is not Indonesias position, because our focus is on how to reach a peaceful settlement in Myanmar that is inclusive and involves all parties, Faizasyah said. I categorically say that such a plan of action doesnt exist, because the fact is that currently the foreign minister is still trying to forge a common position with other ASEAN foreign ministers, he said. Indonesia, the largest country in ASEAN and one of the blocs founding members, has been on a diplomatic push to get Southeast Asian members more involved in addressing the coup in Myanmar. Last week, Retno visited Brunei, this years ASEAN chair, and Singapore. While in Singapore, Retno and her counterpart there, Vivian Balakrishnan. They urged parties in Myanmar to work toward a peaceful resolution and national reconciliation in Myanmar, including a return to its path of democratic transition, the Singaporean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. Balakrishnan stressed that there should be no violence against unarmed civilians. In particular, live rounds should not be fired on unarmed civilians under any circumstances, the statement said. US, G7 nations react Meanwhile, other nations continued to pile pressure on Myanmar to release those detained during the coup, and to condemn subsequent crackdowns on anti-coup protesters. The foreign ministers of the U.S. and the other Group of Seven countries Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom along with the high representative of the European Union called for the unconditional release of those detained arbitrarily, including State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, in a statement issued on Tuesday. We condemn the intimidation and oppression of those opposing the coup. We raise our concern at the crackdown on freedom of expression, including through the internet blackout and draconian changes to the law that repress free speech, the statement said. We continue to call for full humanitarian access to support the most vulnerable, the statement said, while deploring the use of live ammunition against unarmed people as unacceptable. In Myanmar, at least three people have been shot dead by security forces in protests since the coup, as demonstrations continued demanding an end to military rule and the release of elected government officials, according to media reports. For its part, U.S. President Joe Bidens administration has been working to set up a foreign ministers meeting with ASEAN to address the situation in Myanmar, according to Nikkei Asia. The United States is committed to working with the international community, including our ASEAN partners, to press the military to reverse its actions and restore the democratically elected government, a State Department spokesperson told BenarNews, adding, we have no meetings to announce at this time. We stand with the people of Burma and call on the Burmese military to respect the results of the election on November 8, 2020, the spokesperson said. In remarks to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the military takeover and called for the release of all detainees. We see the undermining of democracy, the use of brutal force, arbitrary arrests, repression in all its manifestations. Restrictions of civic space. Attacks on civil society, the U.N. chief said. Today, I call on the Myanmar military to stop the repression immediately. Release the prisoners. End the violence. Respect human rights, and the will of the people expressed in recent elections, Guterres said. Sino-Indonesian talks Chinas government, meanwhile, said it supported an ASEAN foreign ministerial meeting on Myanmar and was ready to play a role in the process, officials said after weekend talks between Retno and her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi. No other country would care about the situation in Myanmar and expect for its resumption and maintenance of peace and stability more than China and ASEAN, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement posted on its website. The continuing turbulence in Myanmar is neither in the interests of Myanmar and its people, nor in the common interests of other regional countries. Both the military of Myanmar and political parties shoulder the important responsibility for the countrys stability and development, it said. Ika Inggas in Washington contributed to this report. This service applies to you if your subscription has not yet expired on our old site. You will have continued access until your subscription expires; then you will need to purchase an ongoing subscription through our new system. Please contact the Parsons Sun office at (620) 421-2000 if you have any questions A man identified as Thomas Webster (L) pins a police officer on the ground in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (DOJ) Retired NYPD Officer Charged for Impeding Police During Capitol Breach A retired New York City police officer was arrested and charged this week with impeding police during the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol. Thomas Webster, 54, a New York state resident, was charged with one count of assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding, intimidating, or interfering with any person assisting an officer or employee of the United States in the performance of their official duties while armed with a deadly or dangerous weapon, among other charges. A judge ordered Webster on Tuesday held, pending another appearance on March 3. According to an affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint against the former Marine, Webster was depicted in video footage from Jan. 6 assaulting a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officer who was attempting to secure the exterior plaza of the Capitol. Webster, wearing a snow jacket, jeans, and brown work boots while carrying a flagpole with a Marine flag attached to it, can be seen waving a finger at the officer and cursing at him. After berating the officer, Webster aggressively shoves the metal gate, behind which the officer was standing, into the officers body and then arms himself with the metal flagpole, according to the Department of Justice. A man identified as Thomas Webster (L) pins a police officer on the ground in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (DOJ) The footage then shows Webster raising the metal flagpole above his head and forcefully swinging downward, striking the metal barricade directly in front of the MPD officer. Webster then attempts to attack the officer by lunging toward him with the metal flagpole, striking at the officer with the flagpole numerous times. Webster proceeds to break through the metal barricade and begins charging toward the officer with clenched fists. Webster ultimately lunges at the officer and tackles him to the ground, it added. Video then appeared to show Webster pinning the officer to the ground and trying to remove the officers face shield and gas mask, cutting off the officers breath. It wasnt clear whether Webster had hired a lawyer. The case was not listed on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia docket as of Feb. 24. Over 150 people have been charged for committing crimes during the breach of the Capitol, according to the Department of Justice. Haiti - News : Zapping... DR : Former Mayor Chevry under house arrest for 3 months Arrested on February 14 in Dajabon, the former mayor of Port-au-Prince, Ralph Youri Chevry and the 3 other people who accompanied him were placed under house arrest on Monday by the Dominican justice for a period of 3 months. Information confirmed by the former minister of Haitians living abroad, Edwin Paraison. See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-33054-haiti-flash-the-former-mayor-of-port-au-prince-did-not-request-political-asylum-in-dr.html Haitian lawyer killed in Montreal area Originally from Port-au-Prince, Marly Edouard (32), died in the Montreal region during the night from Saturday to Sunday. The young businesswoman and lawyer moved there in 2016. The woman believed to be in the heart of a love triangle was found dead with a bullet to the head on Monday morning... Kidnapping : Colombian police alongside the PNH With the support of the US Department of State and the International Bureau of Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) in Haiti, Leon Charles, Director General ai of the Haitian National Police (PNH), welcomed counterparts of the Colombian National Police who will help strengthen the capacity of the PNH anti-kidnapping unit during their 3-month stay in Haiti. "Faced with the scale of the kidnapping phenomenon, my Government negotiated and obtained, with the support of the INL, support for the PNH, through a mission of the Colombian police. This cooperation aims to strengthen our capacities to fight against this scourge that we must eradicate," declared Prime Minister Joseph Jouthe. Canada : Writer Gabriel Osson Prix Alain-Thomas Congratulations to Gabriel Osson, author, poet and novelist, born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, who won the Alain-Thomas Prize at the Toronto Book Fair with "Le Jour se levera" published by Editions David", Embassy of 'Haiti in Canada. EDH : The 120 poles have arrived... The 120 concrete poles necessary for the construction of the interconnection network between the new Miragoane power station and the existing network arrived on February 23, 2021 at 1:00 a.m. This new power station will supply Miragoane, Petite Riviere de Nippes and Paillant Seee also : https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-32857-icihaiti-edh-about-200-concrete-poles-have-arrived-in-the-north-west.html OPC : Assise on the Preliminary Draft Constitution A launching ceremony of the multi-sectorial Assise on the Preliminary Draft Constitution, took place yesterday Tuesday, February 23, 2021 at the office of the Citizen's Protection Office (OPC) in Bourdon. HL/ HaitiLibre Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. The U.S. Capitol is seen behind the metal security fencing around the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Feb. 18, 2021. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo) Updates on CCP Virus: Critics Say $1.9 Trillion Relief Bill Loaded With Special-Interest Spending Buried on page 305 of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 is a provision that awards federal employees with children as much as $21,000 for each household to stay home. The Emergency Federal Employee Leave Fund provision includes $570 million for government workers who remain home to care for children because their schools havent resumed in-class instruction. No similar specific provision is included in the bill for the millions of private-sector workers whose children are unable to return to their public schools. FDA: Johnson & Johnson One-Dose Shot Prevents CCP Virus The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stated on Feb. 24 that Johnson & Johnsons single-dose vaccine prevents COVID-19 and that the FDA will make a final authorization decision soon. Johnson & Johnson has an ongoing study of 44,000 patients in South Africa, the United States, and several other countries, with seven deaths recorded among patients receiving a placeboand none among those who got the vaccine. There were no specific safety concerns identified in subgroup analyses by age, race, ethnicity, medical comorbidities, or prior SARS-CoV-2 infection, the FDA analysis stated. GOP Reps. Urge IG to Investigate NIH Relationship With Wuhan Lab A group of Republican representatives wrote on Tuesday to Health and Human Services (HHS) Deputy Inspector General Christi Grimm requesting an investigation into the National Institutes of Healths (NIH) connection with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. The letter was prompted by an editorial published by The Washington Post questioning the role of the WIV research lab in the pandemic. The lab is partially funded with U.S. tax dollars. The tax funds were made available to WIV through NIH subgrants from the nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance. Sister of DC Mayor Dies From COVID-19 Complication The sister of Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has died from complications related to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus. Bowsers office announced Wednesday that Mercia Bowser had died at the age 64 from COVID-19 related pneumonia. Mercia was loved immensely and will be missed greatly, as she joins the legion of angels who have gone home too soon due to the pandemic, said Bowser in a statement. Alaska Governor Tests Positive Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy has tested positive for the CCP virus and is experiencing mild symptoms, his office announced Wednesday. On Sunday, Dunleavy was identified as a close contact of someone who tested positive. He felt well and tested negative at the time but went into quarantine to reduce possible exposure to others. Dunleavy felt well until Tuesday night, the statement said. A second test Wednesday morning confirmed he had the virus. Italy Registers Highest Number of Infections in 6 Weeks Italy has registered 16,424 virus cases, the highest number in six weeks. Italys total number of confirmed cases has risen to 2.8 million. With 318 more deaths, the death toll stands at 96,666. It is Europes second-highest confirmed death toll after Britain. States Pass Their Own Virus Aid, Not Waiting on Washington States not willing to wait for pandemic financial relief from the federal government have taken matters into their own hands. Maryland and California recently approved help for small businesses, the poor, the jobless, and those needing child care. New Mexico and Pennsylvania are also funneling grants directly to cash-starved businesses. The spending shows that many states have proved unexpectedly resilient during the pandemic. And it has provided fuel for critics who say they dont need another massive infusion of cash from Congress. Merkel Says Variants Risk Third Wave, Must Proceed Carefully New variants of the CCP virus risk a third wave of infections in Germany and the country must proceed with great care so that a new nationwide shutdown does not become necessary, Chancellor Angela Merkel told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Because of (variants), we are entering a new phase of the pandemic, from which a third wave may emerge, Merkel said. So we must proceed wisely and carefully so that a third wave does not necessitate a new complete shutdown throughout Germany. Biden Administration to Distribute More Than 25 Million Masks The Biden administration will deliver more than 25 million masks to community health centers, food pantries, and soup kitchens this spring as part of its battle against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic, commonly referred to as the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, the White House said on Wednesday. The government will deliver the masks to more than 1,300 community health centers and 60,000 food pantries and soup kitchens between March and May, the White House said, adding that they are expecting the masks to reach between 12 million and 15 million Americans. Virus Survives on Fabrics for Maximum of 3 Days: UK Study A new study in the UK has found viruses similar to the strain of the CCP virus that causes the disease COVID-19 can survive on several common fabrics used in the health industry and transmit to other surfaces for up to 72 hours. The scientists study involved testing a model of a coronavirus with a very similar structure and survival pattern to that of the CCP virus, or SARS-CoV-2, by adding droplets on polyester, polycotton, and 100 percent cotton and then monitor the stability of the virus on the different fabric materials. Mexican President: Mexico Doing Better Than US Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Tuesday that his country is doing better than the United States in dealing with the CCP virus pandemic, even though Mexicos per capita death rate is probably higher and the country has vaccinated less than one percent of its population. Lopez Obrador said Tuesday that comparing countries is in bad taste, but went on to say the most powerful nation on earth, our neighbor, did worse than us. India Warns of Worsening Situation India warned on Wednesday that breaches of CCP virus protocols could worsen an infection surge in many states as the country announced an expansion of its vaccination program. Nearly a month after the health minister declared that the virus had been contained, states such as Maharashtra in the west and Kerala in the south have reported a surge in cases. Indias infections are the second highest in the world at 11.03 million, swelled in the past 24 hours by 13,742, health ministry data shows. Global Airline Body IATA Plans Travel Pass for End of March Global airline industry body IATA said it would launch a CCP virus travel pass at the end of March, bringing into use a digital system for test results and vaccine certificates to facilitate international travel. IATA said on Wednesday that it was essential that governments start issuing their citizens with digital vaccination certificates which can then feed into its travel pass. Ghana First Nation to Receive COVAX Vaccines Ghana received the worlds first delivery of CCP virus vaccines from the United Nations-backed COVAX initiative on Wednesdaythe start of a program that has thus far fallen short of its goal of giving shots quickly to the worlds most vulnerable people. The arrival of 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the West African country marks the beginning of the largest vaccine procurement and supply operation in history, according to the World Health Organization and UNICEF. It is part of measures aimed at bringing the pandemic to an end and is the first time an in-demand vaccine has been delivered to poor countries during an ongoing outbreak. North Dakota House Passes Bill Prohibiting Mandatory Masks North Dakotas House of Representatives voted to pass a bill on Feb. 22 that will forbid future mask mandates in the state with a 50-44 vote, advancing the bill to the Senate. Rep. Jeff Hoverson of Minot sponsored House Bill 1323 (pdf), which states, A state or local elected official, the state, or a political subdivision of the state may not mandate an individual in this state [to] use a face mask, face shield, or other face covering. In addition, schools and businesses cannot require the use of a face mask, shield, or covering a condition for entry, education, employment, or services. Germany Approves Home Tests to Ease Way out of Lockdown Germany approved three CCP virus tests for home use as part of Health Minister Jens Spahns strategy to help Europes biggest economy emerge from a lockdown that has been in place since mid-December. The infection rate in Germany fell steadily in the first weeks of the year but has stagnated in recent days, making it more less likely leaders will ease restrictions when they meet next week to consider lockdown rules that run to March 7. Jack Phillips, Zachary Stieber, Mark Tapscott, Lorenz Duchamps, Meiling Lee, Reuters, and The Associated Press contributed to this report. Cybersecurity Supply chain hack took a thousand engineers to pull off, tech exec tells Congress Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, told a panel of senators on Tuesday that his company estimates the cybersecurity breach of nine federal agencies and 100 private companies likely took "at least a thousand" skilled and capable people to pull off. "At Microsoft as we worked with customers that had been impacted by this, we stepped back and just analyzed all of the engineering steps that we had seen and we asked ourselves how many engineers do we believed had worked on this collective effort and the answer we came to was at least a thousand, Smith told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "I should say at least a thousand very skilled, capable engineers. So we havent seen this kind of sophistication matched with this kind of scale," he added. The scope and scale Smith described is keeping with the attribution being made by public sector and private sector officials that the hack, which leveraged flaws in IT management software from SolarWinds and products from other vendors to inject malware into computer networks, was perpetrated by Russia. "We went through all the forensics. It is not very consistent with cyber espionage from China, North Korea or Iran, and is most consistent with cyber espionage and behaviors we've seen out of Russia," Kevin Mandia, CEO of FireEye, said at the Feb. 23 hearing. George Kurtz, president and CEO of Crowdstrike, added that while his company could not corroborate an attribution to Russia, he has not seen evidence to contradict it. Mandia, Smith, Kurtz and Sudhakar Ramakrishna, CEO of SolarWinds, testified today to the panel on intelligence about the impacts of the hack of nine federal agencies and 100 private companies. The committee's chairman, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), said the panel invited an official from Amazon Web Services to testify but the company declined. The White House has continued to say the campaign is "likely Russian in origin," but is waiting to complete a formal investigation before using more specific language. FireEye, which is credited with discovering the initial breach, has been more cautious, saying that the hack was likely the work of a state or state-sponsored actor. Gregory Touhill, the federal government's first chief information security officer and a retired Air Force brigadier general, told FCW in January that formal attribution requires a level of proof that can stand up in court. "When it comes to attribution, what the intelligence and law enforcement community has to do is literally trace it all the way back to the root," he said. Public and private investigators have to gather evidence that "will hold up in court. That's the realm that [FireEye] and others are dealing with. Those who don't have to prove it in court can say whatever they want." In addition to the issue of attribution, multiple senators quizzed the technology executives about stepping up requirements for breach reporting and whether companies would need liability protections to take on that obligation. "The time has come to go in that direction," Smith said in response to a question from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). "We should notify a part of the U.S. government that would be responsible for aggregating threat intelligence and making sure it is put to good use." Mandia agreed with Smith's comments and added that the information shared would need to be confidential because of how quickly circumstances change in the aftermath of an attack. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the White House is planning to sanction Russia in response for the hack, among other things. The Post's reporting also added NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration as part of the list of agencies compromised. Ramakrishna said Monday during an event hosted by a Washington think tank that he feels his company has an "obligation" to speak publicly about the breach because "this is not a one company issue." He and other technology executives will speak to House lawmakers later this week about the effects the breach has had on the public and private sector. Both Ramakrishna and Mandia said this week that in addition to adding malicious code to the SolarWinds Orion IT management software, the hacking campaign also inserted innocuous code into Orion in October 2019 to test whether their method of injecting code worked without attracting attention. All Private Banks Allowed To Offer Government-related Tax and Revenue Payment Facilities To bookmark you need to sign in The Indian government on Wednesday lifted an embargo that prohibited private sector banks from carrying out government-related banking business. All private banks are now allowed to carry out government-related banking transactions like taxes and other revenue payment facilities, pension payments and small savings schemes. In a tweet, office of Nirmala Sitharaman, the finance minister says, "Embargo lifted on grant of government business to private banks. All banks can now participate. Private banks can now be equal partners in development of the Indian economy, furthering government's social sector initiatives, and enhancing customer convenience." Embargo lifted on grant of Govt business to private banks. All banks can now participate. Private banks can now be equal partners in development of the Indian economy, furthering Govt's social sector initiatives, and enhancing customer convenience. @FinMinIndia @DFS_India NSitharamanOffice (@nsitharamanoffc) February 24, 2021 A statement issued by the department of financial services (DFS) under the finance ministry says, "This step is expected to further enhance customer convenience, spur competition and higher efficiency in the standards of customer services. Private sector banks, which are at the forefront of imbibing and implementing latest technology and innovation in banking, will now be equal partners in development of the Indian economy and in furthering the social sector initiatives of the government." Govt agency biz for Pvt banks now open! Embargo removed. Tax payment & receiving pension made easy. Enhancing Cust. convenience #EoDB & Cust Service. Pvt Banks to be equal partners in Govt.s Economic & Social agenda. @RBI to authorize Pvt banks #AatmaNirbharBharat @PMOIndia https://t.co/wzOKGEb7rr pic.twitter.com/NK2nzSqjGN DFS (@DFS_India) February 24, 2021 With the lifting of the embargo, there is now no bar on Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for authorisation of private sector banks, in addition to public sector banks for government business, including government agency business. The government has conveyed its decision to RBI, the release from DFS says. Uday Kotak, chief executive of Kotak Mahindra Bank welcomed the move to allow all private sector banks handle government business. In a tweet, he says, It will enable the banking sector to serve customers better. It's been over a month now since US President Joe Biden entered the Oval Office but he has yet to make the much-awaited phone call to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The few exchanges and contacts that have taken place between Ankara and Washington in the meantime have been over contentious issues. Nevertheless, Erdogan is still seeking a new opening with Washington, even though this appears an unlikely prospect given the hard-line positions the sides are maintaining on issues that separate them. We believe our common interests with America far outweigh our differing opinions," Erdogan said in an address over the weekend inaugurating the newly launched Turkish-American TASC TV. He added that his government desired a relationship with the United States that takes the long-term perspective into account and is based on a win-win understanding. However, he did not miss the opportunity to also deliver barbs that showed why a rapprochement is unlikely any time soon. He accused the American side of backing the Peoples Protection Units (YPG) in Syria a group that Turkey has listed as a Kurdish terrorist organization. Ankara wants Washington to sever its ties with the group and list it as a terrorist organization, the way it has with its parent organization, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Erdogan also accused Washington of harboring Fethullah Gulen, the US-based Turkish cleric. Ankara accuses Gulen of masterminding the failed coup attempt against the Erdogan government in 2016. In the meantime, Bidens self-avowed commitment to supporting democracy and human rights globally also hampers the possibility of improved ties. A positive outreach toward the Erdogan government is considered unlikely at a time when conditions in Turkey in these areas continue to deteriorate. Exchanges that have taken place between Ankara and Washington since Biden took office have already set the tone in this regard. State Department Spokesman Ned Price issued a written statement Feb. 10 condemning the prolonged incarceration of Turkish rights activist Osman Kavala and characterizing the charges against him as specious. In its quick and sharp response, Ankara effectively told Washington to mind its own business and stop interfering in Turkeys legal affairs. The other seemingly insurmountable issue that is clouding ties concerns Turkeys purchase of Russian made S-400 air defense systems. Washington opposes this purchase on the grounds that it threatens NATO assets, most notably the new F-35 stealth fighter jet, and wants Ankara to ditch it. Turkey has already been kicked out as a partner from the F-35 program over this matter. Ankara recently hired a law firm in Washington to lobby for Turkeys return to the F-35 program. This move indicates that for all its bluster about having alternatives to the F-35 program, Ankara is smarting over this expulsion. On the day he issued his statement on Kavala, Price also reiterated Washingtons position regarding the S-400s, saying US policy has not changed. Russian S-400s are incompatible with NATO equipment. They threaten the security of NATO technology and theyre inconsistent with Turkeys commitments as a NATO ally, Price said. To underscore the gravity of this matter for Washington, he reiterated that Turkey had been slapped with sanctions under the Countering America's Adversaries through Sanctions Act because of this purchase. Price was responding to a question about remarks made by Turkeys Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, who suggested a desire to cooperate with the United States on determining how the S-400s would be used by Turkey. Erdogan, however, has made it clear that giving up on the Russian systems is out of the question. Meanwhile, Turkish defense industry officials have said talks are underway with Russia for a second batch of S-400s. Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby also said this week, There's been no change to the administration's policy with respect to the F-35 and the S-400. Kirby said Ankara had been provided with multiple opportunities to purchase the Patriot defense system from the United States but chose instead to buy the S-400 and provide Russia with revenue, access and influence. Turkey disputes that claim. Meanwhile, the YPG question flared up again following the execution of 13 kidnapped Turkish citizens mostly members of security forces by the PKK in Iraq recently. State Department spokesman Price deplored the killings and said the United States condemned them "in the strongest possible terms" subject to confirmation that it was the PKK that carried them out. The qualified condemnation left Ankara livid. You are with them and behind them, pure and simple, Erdogan said in his angry response, referring to US support for the PKK-linked YPG. Tensions were quickly lowered by Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and his US counterpart Anthony Blinken over the phone. Washington clarified its position later and accused the PKK in the killings without qualifications. Media reports that the United States is reinforcing the YPG in northern Syria and setting up joint bases with the group near the Turkish border are also fueling anger in Ankara. With Washington unwilling to budge over the YPG and Turkey unwilling to budge over the S-400s, the sides are locked in a dialogue of the deaf. Meanwhile, they continue to accuse each other of behaving contrary to the spirit of the alliance they are members of. Reflecting the official mood in Ankara, political analysts Sinem Cengiz wrote that it is still not clear what policy Biden will adopt to help its NATO ally in its anti-terror campaign. Bidens decision to bring back Brett McGurk, the architect of Americas cooperation with the YPG, indicates a policy that is likely to increase tensions, Cengiz said in an article for Arab News. McGurks appointment as National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa caused anger in Ankara. He is deeply disliked because of his support of the YPG and criticism of Turkeys Syria policy. Some Turkish analysts have established a false equivalence between the YPG and S-400 issues. They believe that a trade-off could be possible between these issues and result in improved ties. This is a nonstarter given the uncompromising stance the sides have on these issues, which, at any rate, are unrelated and have to be resolved separately in an atmosphere of trust that doesnt exist today. Foreign policy analyst Zeynep Gurcanli said, Washington will not bargain over the S-400s as long as the Biden administration remains in power, In an article for Dunya daily, Gurcanli said that even if Biden was prepared to compromise, he would face serious difficulties in convincing Congress, where a majority is unhappy with Ankara. Political scientist Ilter Turan of Istanbuls Bilgi University said Turkish-American ties are unlikely to improve given current conditions. The number of areas where respective interests are perceived to diverge irreconcilably appears not to be decreasing but possibly increasing, Turan told Al-Monitor. While there may be lulls in the stormy bilateral relationship, sustained improvement seems unlikely, he added. Turan also cautioned against the argument that Washington can ill afford to totally alienate Ankara given its strategic military assets in Turkey. While it is true that the Biden administration would like to have better rather than highly contested relations with Turkey, the US also seems to be developing surrogate options by promoting closer cooperation with Greece, Bulgaria and Romania and establishing a more permanent presence in northeastern Syria, Turan said. Pointing out that Turkey is dependent on the United States for defense procurement, Turan said this is a reality that would be extremely difficult and costly to change in the short run, exposing Turkey to significant security weaknesses. Turan also noted the economic constraints under which Turkey operates and which tie it to the United States. The recent overtures made by the Turkish government to the Biden administration to improve relations, although undermined by a credibility problem, indicate growing awareness of this reality, Turan said. An unidentified Marine Corps sniper in Vietnam Marine Corps The Marine Corps celebrated the history of the M40 sniper rifle with Redfield scope at Camp Lejeune. The M40 rifle was the same type of weapon used by Marine sniper Sgt. Charles "Chuck" Mawhinney. Mawhinney is the deadliest sniper in Marine Corps history, with 103 confirmed kills. Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories. The Marine Corps recently honored a rifle and scope long used by its snipers, including one of the service's deadliest marksmen. The Weapons Training Battalion (WBTN) at Marine Corps Installations East-Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune has chosen "Redfield" as the call word for the Stone Bay ranges in recognition of the impact the M40 rifle equipped with a Redfield 3x9x40 scope has had on Marine Corps history. Call words are a standard part of range control. Other examples include "Bearmat" at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twenty-nine Palms and "Longrifle" at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton. "Redfield" was chosen for the Stone Bay ranges because WBTN specializes in marksmanship, the Corps said in a post on the naming ceremony. It was also chosen because it celebrates the history of Marine Corps marksmanship. "We must remember where we came from," a retired Marine told the Corps. "Those marksmanship skills we've honed over the many years, we must continue to grow and make them better." Charles Mawhinney Marine Corps The modern Marine Corps sniper program was born in the jungles of Vietnam, when legends like Gunnery Sgt. Carlos Hathcock, Master Sgt. Eric England, and Sgt. Chuck Mawhinney proved just how effective a marksman trained in the art of stealth, camouflage and concealment could be in battle. For the Marines, Hathcock is by far the most famous of the legendary snipers. He had 93 confirmed kills with countless more unconfirmed, he set a record for the longest kill shot that held until the early 2000s, and he was a pioneer alongside others like Maj. Edward James Land in Marine Corps sniper training. Story continues It was long thought that Hathcock, armed with his Winchester Model 70 .30-06 caliber rifle equipped with an 8-power Unertl scope, was the deadliest sniper in Marine Corps history, but that title belongs to Mawhinney. The sergeant primarily waged war in Vietnam with one of the new M40 sniper rifles, a modified version of the Model 700 Remington 7.62mm bolt-action rifle that was first introduced in 1966. The early Marine Corps M40s were equipped with Redfield 3-to-9-power scopes. Charles Mawhinney Marine Corps Mawhinney is the son of a World War II Marine veteran. He joined the Corps in the summer of 1967 and trained as a scout sniper before he deployed overseas. He spent almost a year and a half in Vietnam, but when he returned home to Oregon in 1969, he kept the details of his service a secret. Mawhinney was not recognized as a Marine Corps legend until more than two decades later. In the early 1990s, former Marine sniper Joseph Ward credited Mawhinney with setting a Marine Corps record with 101 confirmed kills in his book "Dear Mom: A Sniper's Vietnam." Further investigation, however, revealed the number to be inaccurate. Mawhinney actually had 103 confirmed kills, along with 216 probable kills. Mawhinney's rules of engagement were simple. "If they had a weapon, they were going down," he previously told The Los Angeles Times. The sniper believed that with each kill, he was saving the lives of his brothers in arms. One of the things that haunted Mawhinney after he returned home from war was an enemy soldier that slipped away after a Marine armorer made adjustments to his rifle, affecting his shot. "I can't help thinking about how many people that he may have killed later, how many of my friends, how many Marines," he said in an interview. "It's one of the few things that bother me about Vietnam." Chuck Mawhinney posing with a M40 rifle replica, the same type of rifle he used in Vietnam Marine Corps Mawhinney is one of a handful of outstanding snipers that modern Marines aspire to be, not simply for his skills in battle, but also because of his humility and professionalism. An infantry weapons officer and WBTN gunner recently told the Corps that he hopes that when Marines hear the call word "Redfield," they will remember not just the M40 rifle, variants of which have been used for decades, but also legendary Marine marksmen like Mawhinney. Mawhinney's M40 sniper rifle has been on display at the National Museum of the Marine Corps since 2006. The Corps began partially replacing the M40A6, the latest variant of the M40 sniper rifle, with the Mk13 Mod 7 Long Range Sniper Rifle in 2019. The service is currently looking at the Barrett Multi-Role Adaptive Design (MRAD) rifle as a replacement for all bolt-action rifles. Read the original article on Business Insider [February 24, 2021] OPPO Flash Charges the Future at MWC Shanghai SHANGHAI, Feb. 24, 2021 /CNW/ -- Today, smart device company OPPO hosted a flash charging partner conference at Mobile World Congress, Shanghai (MWCS). Partners from sectors including consumer electronics and chip manufacturing, as well as experts in charging technology from CCTL (China Telecommunication Technology Labs), came together to discuss the future of flash charge technology on OPPO's stand (booth number N2-E40). Numerous examples of cutting-edge charging products feature on OPPO's stand. The 125W flash charger can charge a 4,000mAh phone battery to 100% in just 20 minutes. This is joined by 65W AirVOOC wireless flash charge products -- which charge the same battery in as little as 30 minutes -- and products from several partners who have licensed OPPO's proprietary technologies. The OPPO stand features innovative technologies across three more zones. The Smart Home of the Future shows how OPPO's IoT products can make our homes smarter and more connected than ever before. The unique 5G CPE, Omni, powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X55 5G Modem-RF System sits at the heart of this area, capable of turning 5G signals into stable, high speed Wi-Fi connections through two proprietary antenna systems. The O-Reserve 5G antenna system uses the Sub-6GHz 5G spectrum, automatically choosing four of its eight antennae at a time to get the best possible signal. At the same time, the O-Motion 360 technology can fully rotate its antennae, automatically ensuring the CPE is positioned for optimum 5Gmillimeter wave signal reception. OPPO, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and Ericsson recently completed successful tests of 5G millimeter wave technology with the Omni, achieving downlink speeds of 4.06Gbps. The Futuristic Technologies area lets MWCS guests explore the OPPO X 2021 concept phone, which features a screen that unrolls from 6.7 to 7.4 inches. Here they can also see how fast and easy charging is with OPPO's new Wireless Air Charging technology, which delivers up to 7.5W of charging power. This latest innovation uses magnetic resonance to remove some of the inconvenience of other wireless charging technologies, working as soon as devices are within 10cm of the charging mat. The Reno 5 Series is also on display in a smartphone area, including the Reno5 Pro+ 5G Artist Limited Edition. Designed in collaboration with graphic artist Joshua Vides , this beautiful device changes the colour of its rear panel from silver to blue with a simple tap, thanks to its electrochromic glass. For more information on OPPO's MWCS announcements, visit: https://events.oppo.com/en/oppo-mwc-2021/ For more information, please contact: The Harmony Agency for OPPO Anne Marie McCallion annemarie@theharmony.agency Nic Corns nic@theharmony.agency Notes to Editors For more information, please visit https://events.oppo.com/en/oppo-mwc-2021/ (the official website link). For on-site experiences, you are welcome to visit the OPPO booth at Shanghai New International Expo Center N2-E40, Mobile World Congress (Shanghai) from 23 to 25 February. About OPPO OPPO is a leading global smart device brand. Since the launch of its first mobile phone - "Smiley Face" - in 2008, OPPO has been in relentless pursuit of the perfect synergy of aesthetic satisfaction and innovative technology. Today, OPPO provides a wide range of smart devices spearheaded by the Find and Reno series. Beyond devices, OPPO provides its users with the ColorOS operating system and internet services like OPPO Cloud and OPPO+. OPPO operates in more than 40 countries and regions, with 6 Research Institutes and 5 R&D Centers worldwide, as well as an International Design Center in London. More than 40,000 of OPPO's employees are dedicated to creating a better life for customers around the world. * Qualcomm and Snapdragon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Qualcomm Incorporated. Qualcomm Snapdragon is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/oppo-flash-charges-the-future-at-mwc-shanghai-301234502.html SOURCE OPPO [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 00:34:28|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BRUSSELS. Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU) and Italian flags in Brussels flew at half-mast on Tuesday as a tribute to Luca Attanasio, the Italian ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), who was killed in an attack in the African country. Attanasio and two others in his entourage died in the attack during a humanitarian trip in a United Nations convoy in the east of DR Congo on Monday. Carly Nzanzu, governor of North Kivu, a province in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, said that the rebels stopped the convoy with bullets and ordered the passengers on board, including the ambassador, to get off the vehicle. "According to the testimonies we have gathered from the survivors, the rebels wanted money from the ambassador. They took all the passengers to the bush. And a few minutes later they killed the Congolese driver and then the bodyguard of the ambassador on site," said the governor. DR Congo authorities on Monday evening identified rebels of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) movement as being responsible for the ambush. Enditem The police in Ebonyi State on Tuesday detained a woman believed to be a commercial sex worker for allegedly trying to sell her baby for N40,000. The woman has been identified as Victoria Chukwube, 32. The four-month-old boy was still breastfeeding. The woman said she wanted to sell the child to raise money to start a business of selling drinks. The police spokesperson in Ebonyi, Loveth Odah, while parading the suspect, said she was arrested following a tip off. So her name is Chukwube Victoria, she told us she is a commercial sex hawker and that she has this baby which she carrying. She said if she leaves here she would continue to look out for prospective buyers. But we tried to talk to her and to make her see the value of being a mother, but she refused. She even told us that if we allow her to go home with the baby she will throw the baby away and that she cant tell who got her pregnant, Ms Odah, a deputy superintendent of police, said. Ms Chukwube, during interrogation, refused to disclose her state of origin or local government. She said she did not have the financial ability to take care of the child. I am from Nigeria, 32 years old, a commercial sex hawker and my baby is just four months old. I want to sell the baby at the rate of N40,000 to start up a business. I have a fridge and I reside at Ogbe Hausa in Abakaliki, she said. Meanwhile, police in the state have arrested a suspected armed robber, Obinna Obike. The suspect, according to the police, was part of a three-man armed gang which robbed a cargo bus along the Amasiri-Okigwe Highway. The police spokesperson, Ms Odah, who confirmed the incident, said the suspect was arrested in Uwulangwu, Ohaozara Local Government Area with Nigerian Army camouflage. The operatives arrested the suspect, following a robbery incident which took place along Amasiri-Okigwe Expressway by Oso-edda in Afikpo South Local Government Area of the state on the 13 February 2021. The three-man gang, dressed on Nigerian military camouflage, accosted a bus driver, tied him down and robbed him of the said bus loaded with goods worth millions of naira. The hoodlums diverted the goods to an unknown destination, Ms Odah said. Following a report by the driver of the bus, police operatives trailed the suspected robbers to their hideout where the suspect was arrested, while two others escaped. ADVERTISEMENT Ms Odah said the suspect has confessed to the crime and admitted that the camouflage belonged to their gang leader popularly known as Iron who is still at large. Eugene Peterson's sermons on Revelation released in new book, 'The Hallelujah Banquet' Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A collection of sermons preached by the late pastor and author of The Message, Eugene Peterson, about the book of Revelation has been published, with more works expected to be released in the near future. The book, titled The Hallelujah Banquet: How the End of What We Were Reveals Who We Can Be, was released in January by the Colorado Springs, Colorado-based publisher WaterBrook. Material for the book was chiefly drawn from a sermon series Peterson preached in 1984 at Christ Our King Presbyterian Church of Bel Air, Maryland, a congregation he helped found. Paul J. Pastor, editor of the book, said in comments emailed to The Christian Post on Thursday that Peterson had long been a respected influence on me, and the chance to help further share his creative legacy was an honor. I never had the chance to meet Eugene while he was alive, which I lament. But the process of spending so much time in his personal materials and manuscripts has given a unique sense of intimacy with his thought and work, Pastor said. Pastor, who also edited Petersons authorized biography, told CP that he found the experience of working on the book to be very special, adding that there was a tenderness to Eugenes work that makes it a nourishing joy to edit. Working with his materials was entering a space of slow, deep meditation on the Scriptures and the Christian life. These materials nearly all were written before Eugenes writing gained any sort of traction he was simply the local pastor of a small congregation without anything particularly attention-grabbing about it, he explained. And from that faithful simplicity came remarkably patient and hard-earned wisdom. His insights were rooted in a particular place, and in particular lives. Sitting with that simple wisdom cant help but impact a person, and I have been impacted. Pastor said he expected that at least two more books of Peterson's works would be released, as WaterBrook has access to a prolific archive of the late preachers writings. My hope is that these posthumous works will be seen as worthy of standing with the rest of his body of work as valuable and beautiful parts of his remarkable legacy, Pastor said. The last book of the Bible, Revelation focuses on the final judgment of mankind, describing future events with cryptic imagery whose meaning has been debated among countless clergy and laity. According to the first sermon in the book, Peterson argues that, despite how many read Revelation, the Bible book is not a disclosure of future events but the revelation of their inner meaning. It does not tell us what events are going to take place and the dates of their occurrence; it tells us what the meaning of those events is, stated Peterson, as noted in the book. The text gives us a summary of what lies behind the veil, behind the newspaper headlines, behind the expressionless mask of a new calendar. According to the editors note at the beginning of the book, the limited edits to Peterson's sermons have included the correction of minor errors and the removal of dated references to things like technology and popular culture. A prolific author known for his paraphrase of the Bible, titled, The Message, which is often mistakenly considered a translation, Peterson died in 2018 at 85. "It feels fitting that his death came on a Monday, the day of the week he always honored as a Sabbath during his years as a pastor," stated Peterson's family at the time, as quoted by NavPress, which published The Message. "After a lifetime of faithful service to the church running the race with gusto it is reassuring to know that Eugene has now entered into the fullness of the Kingdom of God and has been embraced by eternal Sabbath." In November 2019, WaterBrook released A Month of Sundays: Thirty-One Days of Wrestling with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, a devotional featuring sermons and writings from Peterson. Ingrid Beck, editor of A Month of Sundays, told CP in a 2019 interview that while Peterson was not heavily involved in the early stages of manuscript development, before he died, he accepted the overall concept and title. Once we settled on an overall direction, which was to create a collection of devotional readings anchored in the Gospels, we landed on the rough structure for this book by reading through Eugenes sermon archives and identifying excerpts that aligned with this concept, explained Beck at the time. Eugenes work is consistently inspiring and filled with compelling insights for todays Christians, and it is our sincere hope that A Month of Sundays will draw readers into a deeper understanding of what it means to live as a follower of Jesus. A third vaccine in the pipeline Some positive news: New analyses found that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine provided strong protection against severe disease and death from Covid-19 and may also reduce the spread of the coronavirus by vaccinated people. Over all, the report from the Food and Drug Administration found that the vaccine had an efficacy rate of about 66 percent against moderate to severe Covid cases across all of its global clinical trials. The results mean the F.D.A. could authorize the vaccine as early as Saturday, and Americans may have a third option for a vaccine as early as next week. Some people may get tripped up on the vaccines 66 percent efficacy rate compared with 95 percent for the Pfizer and Moderna shots and wonder whether they should pass on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and hold out for the other doses. But that figure doesnt tell the whole story. Here are some things to keep in mind. Its more effective in the U.S. The 66 percent efficacy rate was calculated across all of the companys clinical trials in the U.S., Latin America and South Africa. In the U.S., the vaccine fared better, with a 72 percent overall efficacy rate. That number dropped to 64 percent in South Africa, where a highly contagious variant is driving most cases. Even so, its the clear winner in South Africa so far, after Novavaxs vaccine showed an efficacy of 49 percent there, and the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine showed little protection at all. House Democrats to Challenge Seating of Iowa GOP Rep. Miller-Meeks Democrats on the House Administration Committee swept aside Republican objections to advance a challenge to Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meekss election to represent Iowas 2nd Congressional District. Miller-Meeks defeated Democrat Rita Hart by six votes after an official recount of the nearly 400,000 cast. Following the recount, Miller-Meekss election was certified by Iowa election officials. Miller-Meeks was sworn in on Jan. 3 with other members of the 117th Congress by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). She has since voted as a regular member of Congress on issues that include the second impeachment of former President Donald Trump, which she opposed. Hart disputes the recount, saying 22 votes werent counted that should have been and which would make her the election winner by nine votes. She formally asked the administration panel, which has jurisdiction over federal election procedures, to reverse the elections result. Over Republican objections prior to the vote, Democrats on the Administration panel approved two resolutions on Feb. 19 that establish the procedure by which Harts challenge will be heard. None of the Republicans on the committee opposed the resolutions in the voice vote that resulted in their passage. Under the process, the administration panel can convene hearings on the issue, call witnesses, accept documentary evidence and even conduct its own recount using rules of its choice to determine what ballots to accept or reject, rather than the rules adopted by Iowa officials. Ultimately, the decision could end up coming down to a vote by the full House, which Democrats control 221211, meaning Miller-Meeks could well be unseated by a partisan majority. The House hasnt reversed the seating of a state-certified election winner in that manner since 1985 when then-Speaker of the House Tip ONeill (D-Mass.) approved tossing out Republican Rep. Rick McIntyre, who had been officially seated, and instead accepted the incumbent Democrat, Rep. Frank McCloskey. The battle over whether to seat McIntyre or McCloskey in what has become known as Indianas Bloody Eighth and is widely thought to have launched the hyper-partisan atmosphere in Congress that continues to the present day. Spokesmen for Pelosi didnt immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment on how allowing the Hart challenge to proceed will contribute to lessening the hyper-partisanship in the current Congress. A spokesman for administration committee chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) also didnt immediately respond to a request for comment. Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), the ranking Republican on the panel, said during the hearing that Hart had an opportunity to challenge the recount result in state court, but instead opted to appeal to the Democratic majority in the House. Instead, she has decided to sidestep Iowa law and ask this House to decide this election for Iowa voters. Taking up this election contest would set a dangerous precedent that candidates dont have to exhaust their legal options through the state and can instead go straight to Congress if they dont like the outcome of an election, Davis told the committee during discussion of the two resolutions. I cant think of a worse first step this committee could take in this Congress than to waste taxpayer dollars by moving forward with overturning this election, Davis said. We know every legal vote was counted in Iowas second district because they were counted and recounted using a timely, transparent and bipartisan process and congresswoman Miller-Meeks never trailed in any of the recounts. Just to be clear, there are no provisional members of Congress. If you are sworn in and given the right to cast a vote on the House floor, you are a duly elected Member of Congress, just like congresswoman Miller-Meeks, he added. None of the other members of the panel offered comments during the hearing, but Rep. Brian Stihl (R-Wis.) told The Epoch Times on Feb. 24 that congresswoman Miller-Meeks has been certified as the winner of the election by the Secretary of State of Iowa. Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats must honor the decision of the voters in Iowas 2nd Congressional District. Contact Mark Tapscott at Mark.Tapscott@epochtimes.nyc Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 22:23:23|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close A woman receives a shot of the COVID-19 vaccine in Nicosia, Cyprus, Feb. 24, 2021. Cyprus' COVID-19 vaccination campaign is picking up speed as larger vaccine shipments were due to be delivered on Wednesday under the European Union's joint vaccine procurement scheme, a Health Ministry official said. (Photo by George Christophorou/Xinhua) NICOSIA, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Cyprus' COVID-19 vaccination campaign is picking up speed as larger vaccine shipments were due to be delivered on Wednesday under the European Union's joint vaccine procurement scheme, a Health Ministry official said. Elena Panayiotopoulou, a senior official of the ministry's Medical Services section, told CyBC state radio that close to 20,000 vaccination appointments have been made for the current week, equal to one third of the total number of vaccine doses administered since the program started at the beginning of February. She said that more than 58,000 people aged over 70, or about seven percent of the country's population, have already been vaccinated, and almost 20,000 of them have received a second jab as well. She said that Cyprus is only second to Malta among the EU countries in terms of its vaccination rate. She said that the health authorities expect to take delivery of up to 130,000 vaccine doses in March, the bulk of them -- almost 90,000 doses --coming from Pfizer and AstraZeneca, and the rest from Moderna. Panayiotopoulou said she expected that 25 percent of the population will be vaccinated by the end of March, while 500,000, more than half of Cyprus' population, would receive the coronavirus shot by the beginning of June. Petros Karayiannis, a member of the scientific team advising the government, said after a meeting with President Nicos Anastasiades and Cypriot party leaders that the relaxation of restrictions will come in two stages to enable the vaccination of as many people as possible. He said that as a first step, more school children will return to their classes as of March 1, while movement restrictions and the 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. night-time curfew will remain in force for two more weeks. Karayiannis said that catering establishments are now scheduled to be reopened on March 15. The decision rests with the Council of Ministers that will meet on Thursday. Vaccination has become pivotal in the strategy of many countries as they are struggling to contain the pandemic, using already-authorized coronavirus vaccines. A total of 255 candidate vaccines are still being developed worldwide -- 73 of them in clinical trials -- in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the United States, according to information released by the World Health Organization on Feb. 23. Enditem The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company The agreement on the abolition of visa requirements, signed by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the Government of Grenada, will enter into force on March 1, the press service of the Ukrainian State Agency for Tourism Development reports. "From March 1, 2021, the Agreement between the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the Government of Grenada, an island country in the Caribbean Sea, on the abolition of visa requirements will come into force," reads the repot. The Agency notes that according to the provisions of the agreement, citizens of both countries are exempted from the need to obtain a visa for entry, stay, departure and transit. The citizens of the two countries will be able to travel without visas for a period of 90 days within 180 days. "This applies to both one trip and a combination of several trips," the Agency noted. As reported by Ukrinform, in July 2020, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the Government of Grenada signed an agreement "On the abolition of visa requirements" to simplify the border crossing regime, as well as to strengthen friendly relations between the two countries. iy Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. Military should come up with realistic and effective solutions The extent of the security lapse when a North Korean man swam across the eastern maritime border earlier this month was much more serious than initially reported. Border guards were negligent, and the military failed to inspect drainage pipes under barbed wire fences set up along the shore. According to the results of an investigation by the Joint Chiefs of Staff into the Feb. 16 incident, the man was spotted on military surveillance cameras along the east coast 10 times after he swam ashore to the South in a diving suit. But soldiers failed to detect him even after alarms went off. The soldier in charge of monitoring the coastal surveillance equipment treated the warnings as system errors. The military said the drainage pipe he passed through was one of three in the area that had been omitted from a list of facilities for military oversight. The pipe is reported to be barely visible, but this cannot be an excuse, given that the military ordered all coastal guard units to check barriers inside the drainage channels after a North Korean defector returned to the North by using one on Ganghwa Island as a passage way last July. It also defies understanding that it took more than 30 minutes before the situation was reported to the relevant military unit. This is reminiscent of another security lapse last November when a North Korean civilian was detained 14 hours after crossing the inter-Korean border by jumping over barbed wire fences. The Ministry of National Defense vowed to punish those responsible for the breach, tighten discipline and revamp its surveillance system along the border. Yet beefing up security is easier said than done. What's important is that a series of problems that had previously occurred were yet again repeated. With renewed vigor and determination, the military should come up with realistic and effective measures that can prevent any recurrence of such security lapses. The Syrian Observer sat down for an interview with the former US ambassador in Damascus Robert Ford to discuss his opinion on the new US administrations role in Syria. Robert Ford, the former US ambassador in Damascus when the uprising started in 2011, talks to our editor-in-chief Wael Sawah. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Robert Ford, former US ambassador in Damascus, calls the new US Administration to engage more with both Russia and Turkey to have them take on the anti-Islamic State (ISIS) burden. In relatively controversial comments, he says that while Russia is a far from perfect partner, its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad makes it the right force to take over the counter-ISIS fight. He adds that the US has invested more than needed in supporting the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and that this has created widespread frustration over Kurdish political dominance among Arabs. In this interview, Robert Ford talks with our editor-in-chief Wael Sawah about his views on where the Syrian conflict is heading and what future US policy could be. The recommendation you made in your recent article, featured in Foreign Affairs, has instigated serious concerns among the anti-Assad Syrian elite. In particular, you recommend that it would be better to let Russia and Turkey secure their national interests by taking on the anti-ISIS burden. This is a blatant call for the Biden Administration to withdraw from Syria, not only militarily, but also politically. Will such a step not undermine the United States role as a leader of the free world? My strong recommendation that the US withdraw from Syria is about American national security interests, not Russian interests. Let us be frank: (1) Russia, along with Iran, have long been the Assad governments key partners; (2) Nothing the US has done in the past ten years has changed that; (3) geo-strategically eastern Syria is not, and never was, a vital area for American national security interests. As you well know, no one from the American embassy even visited eastern Syria for years prior to 2011, and yet we never considered that to be a danger for American interests. By contrast, some make the argument that US assistance to the opposition, and to the YPG [Peoples Protection Units] and SDF [Syrian Democratic Forces], and especially material assistance to them, has increased Assads dependency on Russia and Iran. I am not sure I would go that far after all, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and others also provided material assistance to the opposition too, not just the Americans. Realistically, however, the presence of some hundreds of US soldiers patrolling in Hassakeh and Deir-ez-Zor province will not diminish Russian and Iranian influence. Syria has symbolized Russias recent return as a major global player, but in your article, you call for working more, rather than less with Moscow in Syria. What do you think are Russias core interests in Syria? Couldnt the US seek to weaken Russia on the Syrian front as a means to have more leverage in its relations with Moscow? Well, if the US withdrew from Syria, Russia would be obliged to increase its military presence to manage the additional territories in eastern Syria where it would operate. That would cost the Russians more in terms of men, material, and money. By contrast, the existing presence of US forces has not done much to cost the Russians extra resources. And the Russians can continue paying the costs of its operations in Syria. We should be honest about that. And let me add one last very honest point. China is now Americas biggest foreign challenger, not Russia. The world is different from how it was 15 years ago or 10 years ago. America does not now, and never did, have huge interests in Syria. Our interests in Syria were not as great as they were in Saudi Arabia or even Egypt, for example. It would be better for the Americans to see Russia as relatively neutral in the competition between the US and China. I do not understand why we would aggravate relations with Russia about Syria, where we have few interests, and we have a new, and serious geostrategic competition with China where Russian neutrality would be better for us. The US has worldwide interests and Syria is not at the center of them. I would like Syrians to understand this so that they can make their own calculations about what they should do in their conflict. The worst accusation against me is that I gave Syrians the impression the Americans would fight Assad for them in 2011 or 2012. You were there and you will recall that I cautioned every Syrian I met that the US air force would not come; I reminded them about our bitter Iraq war experience. But I accept that many did not believe my words, especially after the visit to Hama even though I told the Hamwis that they had to maintain only peaceful protests and the Americans would not intervene militarily. And sooner or later, the US forces will leave eastern Syria because American resources are not unlimited. So let us be extremely honest with Syrians now. Yes, but is the best way to achieve a political solution to leave the country to Russia? In the end, we cannot fix Syria. I do not know if Russia can, but Russia has some advantages that the US does not. It has open diplomatic channels with all the actors in the conflict, while the Americans have no communications with Damascus and Tehran. But that does not mean that the Russians have the ability to fix Syria. Actually, I doubt they will. Still, even if they cannot fix Syria that will not be a reason for us to stay. In the end, we have to be realistic a low level of fighting could continue for many years, and the Syrians will have to learn to live with that until they are ready to make compromises. So you are talking here about the military withdrawal, not the political role? Yes. I object to sending soldiers with an indefinite mission or timeline. What victory is there in northeastern Syria for us? The Russians have a different set of calculations in Syria: they have a historic presence and relationship with the Syrians. You are tackling Syria from other countries perspectives: Iran, Russia, and China. Isnt Syria a problem in itself that needs to be tackled independently? Of course, every country matters. The question is where is the line? I think the line lies in our security interests. We do not have security interests in Syria. There is a moral issue, but we cannot address that without considering our interests. From a geostrategic perspective, the United States now is weaker than it was 10 or 15 years ago. We are compelled to reduce our commitment and need to be selective in where we send our troops, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria? We need to be selective. So what about the US role as the leader of the democratic world, does this not have consequences and responsibility? It cannot be the policy of intervening militarily to spread democracy. Take Myanmar for example. There is no way that the US will intervene there to defend democracy. Again, we need to be more selective. And I have said that many times since 2011. I never stopped to repeat that there would be no intervention in Syria. If we did we would be there forever. Your analysis barely mentions the Iran dimension of the US presence in Syria. Isnt the US presence in the Northeast and in the Tanf area an important part of the wider US regional strategy to counter Iran? You are right that I didnt mention Iran in my article. Iranian forces are not physically present where the Americans operate. Should anyone be surprised that because of the US presence in Tanf the Iranians have established a strong position in Albukamal? Most analysts think that Iranian influence has grown, not diminished, in the past four years despite the American presence in Tanf. And who is trying to limit the Iranian influence in eastern Syria? American soldiers patrolling around Qamishli and Hassakeh or the Israeli air force? Again, lets be honest. Some might argue that in your analysis you make cynical proposals focused on narrow US interests with little regard to the massive destruction and human rights violations perpetrated by the Assad regime. Isnt the Biden Administration supposed to offer something different from Trumps in terms of its outlook on the world and on defending human rights? In the end, the Obama Administration was a public witness to the Syrian governments atrocities. And American diplomats and colleagues, like you were, witnessed that the demonstrations in 2011 were almost all peaceful. But we didnt fix the problem of government atrocities. We havent even fixed the problem of the regime using chemical weapons. And Biden, like Trump, wont start a new big war in Syria against Assad. You live in the US and you know most Americans will not support that, especially because Russia and Iran will escalate to match American escalation. As I have said many times America cant fix Syria. If you dont believe me, please just look at the last ten years. Democrat presidents like Carter and Clinton raised the banner of human rights. Republican George W Bush fought heavily for democracy. Do I have the right to understand that you want Biden to recoil from these two areas? Do you want Biden to be a mixture of the worst part of Obama and Trump? I absolutely do not want military forces to promote democracy. See what happened in Iraq. I have always been against the war in Iraq before it happened, and after that when I was deputy ambassador there after the war. See Afghanistan. We have been there for 20 years. What have we accomplished? Intervention does not change bad governance. It is a fact. You co-authored an op-ed in Newsweek with Wael Zayat, another diplomat who worked in Syria and is of Syrian descent. In your article, you focused on Idleb. Is your advice to Biden to use micropolitics rather than macropolitics? My advice is not to mix humanitarian assistance with politics. Avoid politics as much as possible. We need to find new mechanisms to send our assistance to the people in need. New Delhi, Feb 24 : The Supreme Court has set aside a National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission (NCDRC) order, which imposed a liability on Tata Motors for sale of a defective two-year-old car by one of its dealers to a customer. A bench comprising Justices U.U. Lalit, Hemant Gupta and S. Ravindra Bhat said: "Special knowledge of the allegations made by the dealer, and involvement, in an overt or tacit manner, by the appellant (car manufacturer), had to be proved to lay the charge of deficiency of service at its door. In these circumstances, having regard to the nature of the dealer's relationship with the appellant, the latter's omissions and acts could not have resulted in the appellant's liability." The top court noted that unless the manufacturer's knowledge is proved, a decision fastening liability upon the manufacturer would be untenable, given that its relationship with the dealer, in the facts of this case, were on principal-to-principal basis. Antonio Paulo Vaz filed a case in 2011, when he bought a car after paying the agreed amount to the dealer. At the time of purchase, Vaz availed bank credit. A 2009 model car which had run 622 km was sold to him in place of a new car of the 2011 make. Vaz, therefore, requested for refund or replacement of the car with one of 2011. The price was, however, not refunded; neither was the car replaced. Vaz then refused to take delivery of the 2009 model car and moved the Goa District Consumer Redressal Forum, which noted defects in the car and held both dealer and car manufacturer jointly liable. Tata Motors appealed in the state commission, which rejected its plea stating that its relation with the dealer was on a principal-to-principal basis. The NCDRC held that the relationship of the dealer and the car manufacturer in the facts appearing from the record, did not absolve it of liability. "It (NCDRC) therefore, issued several directions - firstly upholding the orders of the fora below it and further declaring that the appellant had indulged in unfair trade practice, for which it was imposed with costs of 2,00,000 of which 1,00,000 was to be made over to Vaz..", noted the top court. Tata Motors challenged this decision in the top court. The bench said it is difficult to expect that the car manufacturer was aware of the physical condition of the car, two years after its delivery to the dealer. "For all the above reasons, the findings of the National Commission and the lower forums against the appellant are set aside," said the court. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company News and commentary on organized crime, street crime, white collar crime, cyber crime, sex crime, crime fiction, crime prevention, espionage and terrorism. Burma Singapore Says Its Banks Dont Hold Significant Funds From Myanmar Anti-coup protesters stage a sit-in protest near the Singapore Embassy in Yangon on Wednesday, demanding Singapore's banks freeze Myanmar's foreign reserves. / Aye Thandar YANGONThe Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said regular surveillance of the city states banking system had not turned up significant funds from Myanmar companies or individuals, after Myanmar people called for a freeze on their countrys foreign reserves, which recently fell under the control of the military regime. The statement came after Justice for Myanmar (JFM) reported that the military took control of approximately US$5.7 billion (8.03 trillion kyats) in foreign currency reserves and gained access to the global financial system after its takeover of the country. JFM said it had received credible intelligence that some of those funds are deposited with commercial banks in Singapore, including DBS, OCBC and UOB. Following the report, thousands of social media users on Facebook and Twitter demanded Singapore freeze the reserves, saying the generals should be prevented from gaining access to the countrys foreign assets and using the international banking system to maintain their unlawful actions. The MAS said it expected financial institutions in Singapore to remain vigilant to any transactions that could pose risks to the institution, including dealings with companies and individuals subject to financial sanctions by foreign jurisdictions. In the statement, the MAS also said it expected financial institutions in Singapore to comply with its directives implementing UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions, and to guard against fund flows that could be related to illicit activities. It closely supervises financial institutions to check that processes are in place for compliance and takes appropriate enforcement actions where there are serious violations, the agency added. JFM urged countries to freeze all of Myanmars assets, saying the reserves could be used to sustain military rule in Myanmar. It also urged countries to suspend all business with military-controlled banks in Myanmar. In early February, in response to the military coup, the US government froze $1 billion in Myanmar government funds in the US, to stop the military regime from accessing them. You may also like these stories: Myanmars Key Parties Reject Regimes Election Body Invites to Meet China Says It Will Work With ASEAN to De-Escalate Situation in Myanmar Myanmar Foreign Minister in Bangkok to Meet Indonesian Counterpart ALTON The U.S. Corps of Engineers is scheduled to discuss a proposed Mississippi River watershed plan with representatives of five states on Wednesday. The Corps estimates a watershed study for the Upper Mississippi River Basin would cost $3 million and take three years. We need a watershed study that works across the federal and state agencies to guide policies and actions in a coordinated way, said Christine Favilla, Three Rivers Project Coordinator of the Sierra Club. Where we are now, every time it floods its a war between neighbors, communities and states, she said. Instead of trenches and bombs, we are using levees and floodwalls to hurl the mighty Mississippi River at each other a river whose discharge can exceed one-million cubic feet per second during large flood events. For the past 11 years, the Piasa Palisades Group of the Sierra Club focused on Madison, Jersey, and Calhoun counties has used its Three Rivers Project to protect the region. Last year the Upper Mississippi River was listed as Americas No. 1 Most Endangered River because of poor watershed planning in the face of climate change that conservationists say is driving more intense rain storms, leading to more frequent and prolonged flooding in the Upper Midwest. The Sierra Club has been joined in calling for the watershed study by American Rivers, the Prairie Rivers Network, the Izaak Walton League and the Mississippi River Network. In a joint statement, the groups said the federal COVID-19 relief package signed into law in December included a provision to incentivize Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin to develop a watershed study and integrated water management plan for the Upper Mississippi River. The groups said those efforts disintegrated when the Midwest governors insisted the study focus on maintaining the Mississippi Rivers 9-foot-deep navigation channel and limiting activities in the floodplain. This attempt by the five Upper Mississippi River governors to divert federal funding, for what is essentially a massive public safety and green infrastructure planning effort, to support the river navigation industry defies all logic, said Olivia Dorothy, Upper Mississippi Basin Director for American Rivers based in East Moline. The Upper Mississippi governors are leaving millions on the table and putting peoples lives at risk, she said. As someone who lives on the banks of the Mississippi River, we need the states to start working together to plan and develop in the Upper Mississippi River Watershed to protect people and the Mississippi River ecosystem. Every drop of water that falls in the basin is on a rocket ship to the Gulf of Mexico, said Jill Crafton of the Izaak Walton League. We need to be working with farmers to slow water down through soil health measures across the landscape, and a watershed plan would help us get that done, she said. Ryan Grosso of the Prairie Rivers Network said a watershed study and untegrated watershed plan would help end flood fights while advancing green infrastructure solutions to restore and protect habitat. These solutions would help us manage water and land development in ways that work with nature, promote healthy natural ecosystems, and ultimately protect communities on the frontline, he said. Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar on Wednesday said that the government is ready to resume talks with the farmers protesting against the three farm laws if they respond to its offer. The government had offered to put the three contentious farm laws on hold for 1-1.5 years and in the meanwhile work out their differences through a joint committee. Till now, the government and protesting farmers have held 11 rounds of talks, the last being on January 22. During the 10th round of talks held on January 20, the Centre had offered to suspend the laws for 1-1.5 years and form a joint committee to find solutions. In return, they urged the protesting farmers to go back to their respective homes. In the 11th round of talks held on January 22, the farmer unions rejected the Centre's proposal. The path of negotiations stopped after the tractor rally by protesting farmers on January 26 turned out to be a violent show. During an event on Wednesday, Tomar said the government is committed to the interest of farmers and agriculture, and under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it is making efforts to double farmers' income and strengthen the Indian agriculture sector. The minister was replying to a query on Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader Rakesh Tikait threatening to march to the Parliament on 40 lakh tractors if laws are not repealed. Thousands of farmers, mainly from Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh, is protesting at Delhi borders for around three months, seeking repeal of three new laws and a legal guarantee of the MSP. Farmer groups have alleged that these laws will end the mandi and MSP procurement systems and leave the farmers at the mercy of big corporates, even as the government has rejected these apprehensions as misplaced. On January 11, the Supreme Court stayed the implementation of the three laws till further orders and appointed a four-member panel to resolve the impasse. Bhartiya Kisan Union President Bhupinder Singh Mann had recused himself from the committee appointed by the apex court. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. A judge on Wednesday recused himself from hearing a money laundering case involving businessman The matter was listed for hearing in the court of Justice Manoj Kumar Garg at the Jodhpur seat of the high court. The hearing was adjourned and its next date will be fixed after a new single bench is determined by the high court administration to hear the case which is related to some land deals in Rajasthan. The high court has already stayed the arrest of Vadra, who is Congress president Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law, and it will remain in force till next the hearing. (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.) Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Tuesday said the coronavirus crisis is yet to be over and the laid down protocol should be followed to prevent it. A UP government spokesperson said Adityanath, while reviewing the COVID-19 management and steps towards preventing its infection, said, "The corona crisis is yet to be over. Hence it should be ensured that every precaution is taken and the laid down protocol is adhered to." He directed all the district magistrates to hold meetings at the integrated command and control centres and COVID hospitals in the mornings and evenings. Directions were also issued for operation of the COVID help desk. Adityanath also said the vaccination drive should be accelerated and the public should be made aware of its benefits. This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Surge in Covid-19 cases in Zamboanga probably from new strains THE SURGE in Covid-19 cases in Zamboanga City may have been caused by new s... MOSCOW, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF, Russia's sovereign wealth fund) announces the approval of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine against coronavirus by the Egyptian Drug Authority. Egypt is the 35th country in the world to approve Sputnik V. It is also the most populated country in the Middle East with over 100 million people. Egyptian Drug Authority has approved the vaccine under the emergency use authorization procedure. Sputnik is one of the world's top three coronavirus vaccines in terms of the number of approvals issued by government regulators. Sputnik V had been approved earlier in Russia, Belarus, Argentina, Bolivia, Serbia, Algeria, Palestine, Venezuela, Paraguay, Turkmenistan, Hungary, UAE, Iran, Republic of Guinea, Tunisia, Armenia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Republika Srpska (entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina), Lebanon, Myanmar, Pakistan, Mongolia, Bahrain, Montenegro, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Gabon, San-Marino, Ghana, Syria, Kyrgyzstan and Guyana. Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, said: "Egypt is the most populated country of the Middle East and the decision of the Egyptian Drug Authority to include Sputnik V in the national vaccine portfolio demonstrates the appreciation of safety and efficacy of the vaccine. Sputnik V is now approved in 35 countries around the world and the number of registrations will keep increasing in coming weeks as the Russian vaccine is widely recognized as one of the best in the world." Sputnik V has a number of key advantages: Efficacy of Sputnik V is 91.6% as confirmed by the data published in the Lancet, one of the world's oldest and most respected medical journals; it is one of only three vaccines in the world with efficacy of over 90%; Sputnik V provides full protection against severe cases of COVID-19. The Sputnik V vaccine is based on a proven and well-studied platform of human adenoviral vectors, which cause the common cold and have been around for thousands of years. Sputnik V uses two different vectors for the two shots in a course of vaccination, providing immunity with a longer duration than vaccines using the same delivery mechanism for both shots. The safety, efficacy and lack of negative long-term effects of adenoviral vaccines have been proven by more than 250 clinical studies over two decades. The developers of the Sputnik V vaccine are working collaboratively with AstraZeneca on a joint clinical trial to improve the efficacy of AstraZeneca vaccine. There are no strong allergies caused by Sputnik V. The storage temperature of Sputnik V at +2+8 C means it can be stored in a conventional refrigerator without any need to invest in additional cold-chain infrastructure. Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) is Russia's sovereign wealth fund established in 2011 to make equity co-investments, primarily in Russia, alongside reputable international financial and strategic investors. RDIF acts as a catalyst for direct investment in the Russian economy. RDIF's management company is based in Moscow. Currently, RDIF has experience of the successful joint implementation of more than 80 projects with foreign partners totaling more than RUB2 tn and covering 95% of the regions of the Russian Federation. RDIF portfolio companies employ more than 800,000 people and generate revenues which equate to more than 6% of Russia's GDP. RDIF has established joint strategic partnerships with leading international co-investors from more than 18 countries that total more than $40 bn. Further information can be found at www.rdif.ru SOURCE Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Hungary on Wednesday became the first EU nation to start using China's Sinopharm vaccine against the coronavirus, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said. "Today we begin to inoculate with the Chinese vaccines," Orban said in a Facebook video message. Hungarywhose population is around 10 millionhas ordered five million doses of the Chinese jab. A planned 275,000 inoculations can be administered this week from the first batch of Sinopharm doses that arrived earlier this month, a health official said Tuesday. Also this month Hungary began using Russia's Sputnik V vaccine, another EU first. Budapest has often clashed with Brussels, especially on migration, and has repeatedly criticised what it says is the slow pace of vaccine approval and procurement by EU authorities. On Wednesday, Hungary reported 102 new deaths from COVID-19, bringing the country's overall death toll to 14,552, while the number of infections and coronavirus patients in hospitals has begun rising sharply in February. "A third wave of the virus is menacing Hungary," said Orban Wednesday, while urging citizens to get vaccinated. Hungarians are among the least willing to get the shots in the EU, but the rate has been rising in recent months. Orban, who has said that Sinopharm is his preferred choice of vaccine, also said he hopes he can receive his jab "perhaps sometime next week". In surveys the most popular vaccines were the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca vaccines, with the Russian and Chinese jabs least popular. Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak 2021 AFP The family of ENDOU enzymes is found in most organisms, yet its functions are only poorly understood. In humans, it has been connected with cancer. RNA viruses, such as SARS-CoV2, contain a gene corresponding to ENDOU, and this is important for virus replication and the suppression of the immune response. However, so far only few details of the role of these enzymes are known. The research group led by the molecular geneticist Dr. Wenjing Qi from the University of Freiburg now contributes some more details to its function in a study published by the renowned scientific journal Nature Communications. They suggest that the gene ENDU-2 could be responsible for triggering tumors in the body from a distance. In addition, the team discovered a novel, seemingly contradictive response: Under stress, ENDU-2 can contribute both to the protection of the organism and to its destruction. The researchers studied the nematode worm C. elegans, which is frequently used for such genetic investigations. More than 60 percent of the genes are similar in worms and humans, including one for ENDOU, which is called ENDU-2. The current theory of tumor development suggests that cells only become cancer cells when errors, called mutations, accumulate in their genes. These arise, for example, from radiation, certain chemicals, or during aging. Qi showed back in 2017 that such errors do not have to occur in the cancer cells themselves, but they can also arise elsewhere in the body. Cancer is therefore triggered remotely, so to speak. The researcher suspected that the damaged cells in this case send signals to accomplish this, which then reprogram the other tissues. They now discovered the signal for this: ENDU-2. ENDOU/ENDU-2 is not only selectively discharged from stressed cells and circulated throughout the body, but it can also bind to the messenger RNA (mRNA) of many genes at the site of origin and in the target cells", Qi explains. These mRNAs are the working copies of genes and are needed as blueprints for the production of all proteins and enzymes. What surprised the researcher was that ENDU-2 can perform two different functions under stress: at the site of origin, it cuts and destroys the mRNA, which reduces metabolism and prevents the already stressed organism from making faulty new proteins. At the destination, the RNA remains intact, and ENDU-2 helps these cells to survive. For this, however, it must be dosed precisely; otherwise it can cause tumor formation. One conclusion that can be drawn from this could be that the worm specifically protects the embryos, i.e. its offspring, in times of great stress. "In this way, it seems guaranteed that whenever the organism's self-healing powers are not sufficient for mother and child, it at least ensures the survival of the progeny", speculates Prof. Dr. Ralf Baumeister, who was also involved in the study and in whose department Qi leads a research group. The Freiburg scientists now know that the loss of ENDU-2 can also reprogram stem cells. These then lose their immortality within a few generations. Next, the team wants to explore which conditions cause ENDU-2 to distinguish between destruction and protection. ### The German Research Foundation is funding the Freiburg scientists' study. In addition, they are cooperating with BIOSS - Centre for Biological Signalling Studies and the Excellence Cluster CIBSS - Centre for Integrative Biological Signalling Studies at the University of Freiburg. Original Publication: Qi, W., von Gromoff, E.D., Xu, F., Zhao, Q, Yang, W., Pfeifer, W., Maier, W., Long, L., and Baumeister, R. (2021) The secreted endoribonuclease ENDU-2 from the soma protects germline immortality in C. elegans. Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21516-6 Contact: Dr. Wenjing Qi Institute of Biology III University of Freiburg Tel.: +49-1525-361-5186 E-Mail: wenjing.qi@biologie.uni-freiburg.de Prof. Dr. Ralf Baumeister Institute of Biology III, Center for Biochemistry and Molecular Cell Research University of Freiburg Tel.: +49-1522-292-8307 E-Mail: ralf.baumeister@biologie.uni-freiburg.de GOVERNMENT received a total of $7.37 billion from oil, gas and quarrying/mining companies in fiscal 2018, with the largest payment of $2 billion coming from majority State-owned National Gas Company (NGC). However, for the period 2019 to 2020, unaudited figures indicate a declining trend in revenue. The people of Myanmar may have got online later than most others, but their enthusiasm for the internet has the zeal of the converted. Communications on Facebook and Twitter, along with secure messaging apps, have united millions in opposition to the coup. Daily street protests against the military have gathered strength in recent days, despite fears of a bloody crackdown. Demonstrators have rallied at Chinas diplomatic missions in Myanmar, accusing Beijing of exporting the tools of authoritarianism to its smaller neighbour. Armoured vehicles continued to be seen on the streets of Myanmars capital on Tuesday, but protesters turned out despite the military presence. Credit:Getty Images Huawei and ZTE, two major Chinese companies, built much of Myanmars telecommunications network, especially when Western financial sanctions made it difficult for other foreign firms to operate in the country. Myanmars two foreign-owned telecom operators, Telenor and Ooredo, have complied with numerous demands from the military, including instructions to cut off the internet each night for the past week, and block specific websites, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. All the while, the military has placed officers from its Signal Corps in charge of the Posts and Telecommunications Department, according to two people with knowledge of the departments staffing. A 36-page draft cyber security law that was distributed to telecoms and internet service providers the week after the coup outlines draconian rules that would give the military sweeping powers to block websites and cut off access to users deemed troublesome. The law would also allow the government broad access to users data, which it stipulates the internet providers must store for three years. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video The cyber security law is just a law to arrest people who are online, said Ma Htaike Htaike Aung, the executive director of MIDO, a civil society group that tracks technology in Myanmar. If it goes through, the digital economy will be gone in our country. When the draft of the law was sent for comment to the foreign telecoms, the companies representatives were told by the authorities that rejecting the law was not an option, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations. Those people and others with knowledge of the ongoing attempts to crack down on the internet in Myanmar spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities of the new regime. Loading The draft law follows a years-long effort within the country to build out surveillance capabilities, often following cues from China. Last year, Telenor, a Norwegian-owned company, raised concerns about a government push to register the identities of individuals who buy mobile phone services, which would allow authorities to link names to phone numbers. The campaign in Myanmar has thus far been unsuccessful, though it bears similarities to Chinas real-name registration policies, which have become a keystone of Beijings surveillance state. The program reflected Myanmars ambitions but also just how far away it is from achieving anything close to what China has done. In recent years, Huawei surveillance cameras made to track cars and people have also gone up in the countrys biggest cities and in Naypyitaw, the underpopulated capital. A top cyber security official recently showed off photos of such road monitoring technology on his personal Facebook page. A Huawei spokesman declined to comment about the systems. For now, even as anti-Chinese protests mount over fears of an influx of high-tech equipment, the Tatmadaw has ordered telecom companies to use less sophisticated methods to hamper internet access. The method of choice is to decouple website addresses from the series of numbers a computer needs to look up specific sites, a practice akin to listing a wrong number under a persons name in a phone book. Loading Savvier internet users skirt the blocks with virtual private networks or VPNs. But over the past week, access to some popular free VPNs has been hindered. And paid services, which are harder to block, are unaffordable to most people, who also lack the international credit cards needed to buy them. Still, for one of Asias poorest countries, Myanmar has developed a surprisingly robust technical command. Over the past decade, thousands of military officers have studied in Russia, where they were schooled in the latest information technology, according to educational data from Myanmar and Russia. In 2018, the Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications, which was then under a hybrid civilian-military government, diverted $US4.5 million ($5.6 million) from an emergency fund to use for a social media monitoring team that aims to prevent foreign sources who interfere and incite unrest in Myanmar. Loading Thousands of cyber soldiers operate under military command, tech experts in Myanmar said. Each morning, after the nightly internet shutdowns, more websites and VPNs are blocked, showing the soldiers industriousness. We see a military that has been using analog methods for decades but is also trying to embrace new tech, said Hunter Marston, a South-east Asia researcher at the Australian National University. While its applied in a haphazard way for now, theyre setting up a system to sweep up anyone who posts anything even remotely threatening to the regime. Zaw Thurein Tun, of the Myanmar Computer Professionals Association, said that he was sitting at home, browsing the internet shortly after the coup, when a clutch of men arrived to arrest him. Other digital activists had already been detained across the country. He ran. Over the past day, February 23, twenty ceasefire violations were recorded in the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) area in Donbas. "The armed formations of the Russian Federation opened fire from 82mm mortars and grenade launchers of various systems and small arms on Ukrainian positions near the village of Zaitseve (62km north-east of Donetsk). As a result of the enemy shelling, one serviceman was killed and another soldier was wounded," the press center of the JFO Headquarters informs. The enemy fired 120mm mortars and tripod-mounted man-portable antitank guns outside Krasnohorivka (21km west of Donetsk). Ukrainian positions in the area of Pisky (11km north-west of Donetsk) came under heavy machine gun, small arms and sniping weapons fire. As a result of the shelling, a Ukrainian defender received a gunshot wound. Russian-occupation troops also used grenade launchers of various systems and heavy machine guns to open fire near Shumy (41km north of Donetsk); grenade launchers of various systems, heavy machine guns and small arms outside Prychepylivka (50km north-west of Luhansk) and Katerynivka (64km west of Luhansk). In the area of Avdiivka (17km north of Donetsk), Luhanske (59km north-east of Donetsk), Zolote-4 (59km west of Luhansk) and Myronivsky (75km north-east of Donetsk), the enemy fired several shots from tripod-mounted man-portable antitank guns; outside Hnutove (20km north-east of Mariupol) from grenade machine guns; near Pavlopil (25km north-west of Mariupol) and Novoselivka Druha (36km north-east of Mariupol) from hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers. Ukrainian troops opened fire in response to the enemy shelling. The OSCE representatives were informed about the ceasefire violations through the Ukrainian side of the Joint Control and Coordination Center (JCCC). Today, February 24, the situation in the JFO area remains controlled by Ukrainian soldiers. No ceasefire violations have been recorded. ol HOLYOKE The new owners of Providence Behavioral Health Hospital have told employee unions their contracts will not be honored after the sale, and have begun telling staff they will have to reapply for their jobs. Providence and Mercy Medical Center, the outgoing owners under the umbrella of Trinity Health Of New England, notified the state Department of Labor they will lay off 151 employees effective April 20. The two unions with workers among those 151 are Massachusetts Nurses Association, with 40 nurses, and United Auto Workers Local 2322, which has 60 members at Providence working as counselors, clinicians and certified nursing assistants. Nurses Association spokesman Joe Markman and Karen Rosenberg, a servicing representative and organizer for the UAW, described the situation with the contracts Tuesday. Trinity Health announced last week that it sold Providence Behavioral Health and its Holyoke building to Health Partners New England of Devens and GFI Partners, a Boston real estate company. The price, disclosed only in documents at the Hampden County Registry of Deeds, was $1 million. Rosenberg said Trinity Health gave all the UAW members notices stating they would all be terminated effective April 19, the last day before the new owners take possession. Trinity also informed UAW members they will have to apply for jobs with the new owner and said the union contract would be canceled as of April 19, Rosenberg said. We have heard nothing from (Health Partners New England), she wrote in an email. We have read the news reports in which HPNE has promised there will be no interruption in patient care, and also says it expects to receive millions of dollars in incentive payments from the state to re-open the in-patient psychiatric units that Trinity shut down last July (causing the layoff of about 60 other UAW-represented employees), despite those units being deemed essential to the community. The new owners have asked the state for approval to reopen inpatient psychiatric care with 84 care beds. They also plan to continue offering opioid addiction treatment and to rename the facility MiraVista Behavioral Health. The new owners said last week that they plan to have 200 staff at MiraVista. But Tuesday they had little in the way of details to share. The MiraVista leadership team will begin communicating with current Mercy employees this week to discuss these matters, a spokesman wrote in an email responding to questions. We will be addressing these topics with them before speaking about them publicly. Trinitys local press office referred questions to the new owners. Markman said the nurses are going to start a campaign among the public and political representatives to preserve union representation at Providence after it becomes MiraVista. Having transparent, fair guidelines around working conditions are hugely important for establishing a safe psychiatric setting, Markman said. Employees also need to feel able to speak out when there are problems. If they dont have union protection, employees are less likely to feel comfortable highlighting issues and trying to make situations better. He cited instances where unionized nurses pushed for protections against workplace violence. In addition, union nurses have overall better wages and benefits, a driver in recruiting and retaining qualified staff, which has been a major challenge in mental health, Markman said. Rosenberg said it is concerning that the new owners are for-profit operators. We are currently investigating whether Trinity violated its contract with the UAW, which required it to make every effort to ensure any future owner assumed the collective bargaining agreement between Trinity and the union, she wrote. To date we have not received information from Trinity about its efforts to comply with this requirement. We are of course very concerned about the impact of the sale on our members and investigating our options. Markman said the Nurses Association contract has a successor clause, meaning it should follow the sale of the operation. Trinity shut down the inpatient behavioral health units at Providence last year. That alone cost 40 to 50 nursing jobs. Related Content: [February 24, 2021] First Resonance Raises Fresh Round of Funding to Meet Growing Demand for Factory Operating System from New Generation of World-Changing Manufacturers LOS ANGELES, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- First Resonance, a Los Angeles-based start-up transforming manufacturing with a new Factory Operating System used by cutting-edge hardware companies, today announced a new round of funding led by Blue Bear Capital, which brings funds raised to date to more than $5 million. The new capital will be used to expand the First Resonance team to support continued development of its unique approach to manufacturing, informed by the team's background at SpaceX, NASA, Zoox, Toyota, and more. First Resonance's growing list of customers which includes Joby Aviation , Matternet , Cobalt Robotics , and Astra are not only inventing new types of products but also new ways to build them. The First Resonance Factory Operating System, ion, takes a fresh perspective on manufacturing. ion eliminates many of the needless and outdated structures for managing workflows, replacing them with flexible, connected, and data-driven workflows that this new generation of manufacturers taking on big challenges like climate change, congestion, and sustainability need to be successful. "At the global level, the revolution of next-gen manufacturing is critical to solving the climate and mobility challenges that we'll be facing n the years ahead. First Resonance's software ignites that revolution by enabling the manufacturing workflows required to electrify transport, reach orbit, and propel satellites. At the local level, Blue Bear couldn't be more thrilled to invest in and support another ground-breaking Los Angeles company, alongside some of the sharpest investors in the city," said Vaughn Blake, Partner, Blue Bear Capital. After experiencing bottlenecks building modern hardware products using standard manufacturing processes, the First Resonance team set out to build a manufacturing platform to help engineers move quickly, collaborate with their teams efficiently, and make decisions automatically. Today's factories have evolved from a mechanical, robotic, mundane workflow into an experiment factory where companies need to test new R&D alongside production workflows. Using First Resonance's ion manufacturing platform, engineers can track information at a granular level to find answers quickly in a complex and dynamic manufacturing environment. ion improves time-to-experiment, giving modern hardware companies the information leverage they need to quickly iterate and take on big challenges. ion is addressing the needs of the manufacturing execution system market which is anticipated to grow to $14.9B by 2025. This figure is being rapidly accelerated given the massive shift in supply chains brought on by a constantly shifting geopolitical landscape and accelerated by COVID-19. "First Resonance acquired over a dozen customers in 2020 as manufacturers looked for solutions to stay connected to their factories while working remotely and to get game-changing innovations to market faster and cost effectively," said Karan Talati, co-founder and CEO, First Resonance. "This new funding will allow us to expand our team with people who are passionate about building the foundation for how manufacturers will take on huge challenges like electric-powered air travel, autonomous vehicles, sustainable agriculture, clean energy and more." About First Resonance Headquartered in Los Angeles, California and run by a team of former engineers at SpaceX, JPL, Zoox, Toyota, First Resonance is breaking down the barriers between design, manufacturing, and product delivery with its ion manufacturing platform, so engineers building next generation hardware companies can move faster and continuously innovate on delivering better hardware to the world. The company is backed by Blue Bear Capital, Fika Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, Stage Venture Partners, and other leading investors. For more information on First Resonance please visit: https://www.firstresonance.io Press Contact Karan Talati press@firstresonance.io View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/first-resonance-raises-fresh-round-of-funding-to-meet-growing-demand-for-factory-operating-system-from-new-generation-of-world-changing-manufacturers-301234568.html SOURCE First Resonance [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] The biting cold that brought death and despair is subsiding, but the forecast for extreme weather remains bleak. The cold was a force of nature. It is also a reminder of the growing threat of extreme weather due to climate change, sparked by the use of fossil fuels that increase the levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. Whether this storm was a direct result of climate change remains to be seen. But we do know scientists have been warning of the ramifications of more extreme weather due to climate change, and our failure to manage the recent arctic blast raises profound questions of preparedness. Some observers expressed shock that Texas could be bludgeoned by ice and snow the same precipitation we have experienced for centuries. But this misses the point. Its not that climate change can be tied to a single weather event, but a warming world is one where extreme weather is more frequent and thus will require new technologies, infrastructure and, yes, regulation. When man and nature collaborate, when seasonal weather and climate change collide, the result is an unprecedented catastrophe. Experts said the impact of this storm dwarfed Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Some 185 generating units, including gas and coal-powered plants, tripped offline at the height of the storm. Millions lost power, and dozens died. It may be months before the final death toll is determined. This is a large-scale emergency, Julie McNamara, a senior energy analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told reporters. Were seeing the consequences of insufficiently considering climate impact on the grid. At the same time as grid operators underestimated potential for peak demand they also insufficiently estimated potential for outages. Texas should have learned from the severe weather of 2011, when widespread blackouts hit the state. Increasing reserve levels could have avoided the calamity, according to a study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. Recommendations also included winterizing the generators. ERCOT the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has come under severe criticism for its apparent refusal to heed the warnings of 2011. Texas is an electrical island. It does not ship power across state lines, which allows it to avoid federal oversight. A point lawmakers should reconsider. It would be better for Texas to sell electricity to other states, and be linked to other grids in case of emergency. Gov. Gregg Abbott criticized ERCOT for these failures, but the blame is widespread. ERCOT is regulated by the Texas Utility Commission, a three-member group appointed by the governor and overseen by the Legislature. Abbott has called for investigations and hearings into its handling of the emergency. Abbott also blamed renewable energy, including the damage inflicted on wind turbines. The criticism was deflection. Renewable energy, which accounts for only 10 percent of energy usage in the state, did not cause this catastrophe. The real factor is not anticipating what needed to be done to the infrastructure, state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, said. That had to do with a failure of multiple agencies to address how things work together in a deregulated market. Abbott said the disaster was unacceptable. He called on legislators to mandate power generators prepare for extreme winter storms. The state, he said, should supply the funding to make it happen. Winterizing the grid is only part of the answer. Texas officials must acknowledge climate change and we have not seen a willingness to do this. Many state Republicans have called for more fossil-fuel power sources but fossil fuels contribute to climate change, which leads to more extreme weather. We see a necessary place for natural gas in our energy portfolio, but to demonize renewable energy sources is to miss the broader point. Texas is blessed with abundant wind, sun and natural gas. It should be leading on mitigating climate change and adapting to extreme weather. Instead, we are perilously vulnerable to a warming world. New Delhi, Feb 24 : Bharatiya Kisan Union leader Rakesh Tikait on Wednesday warned the Centre that if the demands on the three controversial laws are not met, then 40 lakh tractors would join the farmers' agitation. While speaking to IANS, Tikait said: "Whenever the need arises, 40 lakh tractors would become a part of the movement." As per the data available, there are about 12 lakh tractors currently in India. Punjab has the highest number of seven lakh tractors followed by Haryana with around four lakh tractors. Uttar Pradesh has about two lakh tractors and Uttarakhand has around 30,000 tractors. Earlier this month also, Tikait had said that if the government accepted their demands then he would lead a rally of 40 lakh tractors to the Golden temple in Amritsar. Name tags sit at the entrance of the sorting room where election workers process absentee ballots, at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Ga., on Nov. 2, 2020. (Megan Varner/Getty Images) Georgia Senate Approves Election Reform Measures, Including Stricter Voter ID The Georgia state Senate on Feb. 23 approved a package of measures that would enable several changes to state election laws in response to the Nov. 3 presidential election. Among them, Senate Bill 67, which passed the Republican-controlled Senate in 3518 vote, requires voters to submit a drivers license number, state identification card number, or a photocopy of an approved form of identification in order to get an absentee ballot. Sen. Larry Walker, a Republican who introduced the measure, said the change would affect the absentee-ballot counting process. Absentee ballots are currently tallied via signature-verification. You sign your name on that little digital screen, and your signature oftentimes really doesnt look like your actual signature that you do on a daily basis, Walker said, according to the Washington Examiner. You could run into the situation where a family member mailed in the ballot request, which is totally legal, and so the signature would be a moot point. Another bill that was approved includes an overhaul to the states absentee-ballot-signature-matching-process. Former President Donald Trump and his surrogates, following concerns about the Nov. 3 election, panned the states signature-matching initiatives, saying that its impossible to carry out a proper audit without matching signatures on envelopes with ballots. Its not about disenfranchising voters. Its not about overly burdening the electorate. Its about efficiency, integrity, allowing the Georgia public to have confidence in the vote, Walker said Feb. 23, according to The Associated Press. Fair Fight Action, a leftist group founded by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, panned the approval of the bill and claimed that it promotes a discriminatory policy as well as racism. In Georgia, with more than 7,692,567 registered voters, that means that 230,777 electors may not have the requisite identification and will therefore incur a burden in complying with the law, it said. Georgia has not moved past the racist motivations for which it was included in preclearance under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Walker said the bill is designed to inspire confidence in Georgias election system, which was battered during and after the Nov. 3 election. A number of Republicans and surrogates of former President Donald Trump criticized the Georgia governors office and the secretary of states office for what they said was a lack of transparency and inconsistencies. The bills now go to the House for consideration. We are delivering on our promise to recycle our short-term coal cash flow into clean commodities whose use is largely in facilitating cleaner energy and technology," said Julian Treger (LON:APF, ) has struck a deal to acquire a 70% net interest in a stream on cobalt production from the Voisey's Bay mine in Canada. The company, in a statement, highlighted that it will provide a significant long-life revenue stream from an established, world class operation. At the same time, it provides exposure to a market thats fuelled by the fast rising demand for electric vehicles. The stream will entitle Anglo Pacific to 22.82% of all cobalt production from Voisey's Bay until a total of 7,600 tonnes of finished cobalt has been delivered, thereafter the stream will reduce to 11.41% of the projects cobalt production. Anglo Pacific is buying the interest from private equity sellers, for US$205mln (145mln) in cash. The terms of the stream will see the company pay equal to 18% of an industry reference price for each pound of cobalt, until it has recovered US$300mln (the original upfront outlay paid for the stream) and thereafter it will be raised to 22% of the reference price. Chief executive Julian Treger highlighted that the transaction is expected to be immediately earnings accretive. It will provide a significant long-life income source for Anglo Pacific and materially progresses our ambition to focus on 21st century commodities that support a more sustainable world, Treger said. We believe that this transaction largely solves Anglo Pacific's two major strategic challenges: it addresses the medium-term declining income at Kestrel and significantly repositions the company's portfolio away from coal. We are delivering on our promise to recycle our short-term coal cash flow into clean commodities whose use is largely in facilitating cleaner energy and technology. Funding the deal Anglo Pacific noted that it had taken advantage of a recent strong rebound in the iron ore price to sell a large portion of its holding in LIORC, to partially finance the acquisition. It also has support from a syndicate of leading Canadian banks. Meanwhile, theres also an equity component with the company today conducting a bookbuild for a share placing. The company noted that it will seek to sell new shares to existing and new institutional investors through the placing. A bookbuild process will be run by brokers at RBC, Peel Hunt and Berenberg. It is planned that the bookbuild will close by 4:30pm today. A separate retail share offer will be pursued via the platform, to raise up to 8mln (6.9mln). While the placing structure has been chosen due to its reduced timeframe to completion which enables Anglo Pacific to execute a strategically transformational acquisition as part of its growth strategy, the company highly values its retail investor base which has supported the company alongside institutional investors, Anglo Pacific said. Given the longstanding support of retail shareholders, the company believes that it is appropriate to provide retail investors the opportunity to participate in the equity fundraise. When Lisa Davis joined Blue Shield of California in February 2020, she was not immediately thinking about digital transformation; she was working to move the organizations 6,800 employeesthe majority of whom had never worked remotelyto a remote work environment. But once she and her team had accomplished that feat of strength, she was ready to focus on the future. One silver lining of the pandemic is that it brought to the forefront the importance of digital technology, data, and analytics in transforming our healthcare system, she says. At Blue Shield of California, we see an urgent need to create a digital health ecosystem in the U.S. The time is now. Davis and her colleagues call this transformation Health Reimagined, which has three prongs: holistic health, which addresses all the key drivers of health including social, environmental, clinical, genetic, and behavioral; personalized care, a data-driven, evidence-based, patient-centered strategy that rewards physicians for better quality outcomes; and the high-tech, high-touch support, which uses technology to remove inefficiencies in providing care that is safe and effective. Data is the key At the heart of Health Reimagined is data, says Davis. If we are to transform a broken healthcare system into end-to-end care, we need to understand all of the factors that impact a patients health. To deliver on the challenge of a holistic, personalized, and high-touch patient experience, Davis and her team have developed the concept of an experience cube. Imagine a scenario where the member, provider, and payer have data interoperability and transparency, so that they are all looking through the same pane of glass to drive better health outcomes and improve the experience for other providers and members, she says. As one example, Davis cites real-time claims settlement, where instead of a fragmented process of pre-authorizations and mailed-out benefit statements, the claim is settled by the time the patient leaves the doctors office. It should be as easy as checking out at the grocery store, she says. But we cannot deliver on this vision in an on-prem environment. We have to be in the cloud. Creating big change In addition to shifting to a cloud-first architecture, Davis and her team have moved to a new IT operating model. Way back in 2012, nearly all of IT at Blue Shield of California was outsourced. Since then, the team brought IT back inside, but we were still seen as a traditional IT service provider, with a traditional plan-deliver-run structure. We had little trust from the business, says Davis. We were not positioned for a future state of digital health, so we needed to pivot the organizational model. We needed to create big change, she adds. Davis drove big change by defining a portfolio product model, with seven portfolios aligned to key functions and lines of business: Medi-Cal, healthcare quality and affordability (HCQA), operations, commercial markets, consumer markets, marketing/digital/customer service, and corporate services. Each portfolio has an IT and business leader who are peers and who lead a team of business architects, solution architects, and delivery and security people. Data and analytics experts sit in the portfolios, as well. All of the IT portfolio leaders report to Daviss head of applications, and the business portfolio leaders report up to executives in the LOBs and business functions. As a company, we used to be very project-focused, says Davis. In shifting to this new model, weve reframed our applications as products that sit under a portfolio, all managed by a team of business and IT portfolio managers. Building trust with business partners Davis reports that her business partners love the new model because they now have support from IT teams that have better business acumen. Conversely, ITs business partners have a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities in automation. At the most fundamental level, we are creating trust between IT and the business. It's not just a seismic shift for IT; it is a seismic shift in how our business partners work with us, says Davis. Critical to the success of the portfolio model is the integration with the data and analytics team. Many enterprises struggle with where to put data and analytics, says Davis. At Blue Shield of California, weve moved it into IT because decisions about data have dependencies on architecture and platforms. The integration between data with technology has to be very tight. Davis and her team have also introduced agile development into the broader organization. We cannot create a digital healthcare system with waterfall methods, says Davis, who has been introducing agile in two ways: top-down, by shifting the executive leadership mindset, and bottom up, by integrating scrum masters into each portfolio. My team is now asking, Which products are the best candidates to move to an agile methodology? We know that its not a one-size-fits-all. Davis estimates that the organization is about 75% through the journey to the new portfolio operating model, but she is already seeing positive results. In our project-based model, solution requests were disconnected, with each business unit driving its own digital strategy, says Davis. The portfolio model removes the silos and allows us to prioritize better. It promotes a continual dialogue among IT and the rest of the business, and changes the conversation from fielding requests to prioritizing which products to bring to market. An opportunity for professional growth Davis also sees a leadership development benefit in the new model, since the portfolio leader roles provide a new growth opportunity for up-and-comers, both in IT and across the business. The portfolio leader has to have a collaborative mindset and fantastic communication skills, she says. They have to understand technology, business drivers, processes, and our customer and be ready to ready to roll up their sleeves and problem-solve. With every business relying more and more on digital technologies, that combined skillset will only become more in-demand. The portfolio model provides a vehicle for developing that critical skillset in-house. Davis offers advice for CIOs planning a shift to a portfolio IT operating model: Start with an organizational vision, which for Blue Shield of California is Health Reimagined, and then establish goals for your IT and data teams to align to that vision, she says. But you can't do that in a vacuum; this has to happen across the business, because all of the goals must be connected; they all need to ladder up to a shared vision. Remember, this is not an IT transformation; this is a transformation of the entire business. IRS Commissioner: No Plans to Extend Tax-Filing Season Like Last Year Americans shouldnt expect another extended tax-filing season, according to testimony given by the head of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Tuesday. We have no present plans to extend the filing season, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told lawmakers in Washington. Keep in mind, it creates a lot of confusion for taxpayers. It also backs up the Internal Revenue Service. As many of you know, for over a month, we actually shut down our systems to import stuff from the prior year so we can have a smooth filing season in the succeeding year, he added. Individuals can file for extensions on a case-by-case basis, as normal. If they do, theyll have until Oct. 15 to file. The IRS last year extended the regular deadline by three months to July 15 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee last week asked Rettig to extend this years deadline, saying the extension in 2020 helped both taxpayers and the tax agency. The extension deferred federal income tax payments without penalties or interest, providing important and necessary relief to taxpayers and practitioners. Further, it meant that taxpayers did not have to file forms or contact the IRS with respect to needed extensions, thereby lessening the demands on the IRS during a challenging filing season, they wrote. The Internal Revenue Service Headquarters Building in Washington on March 8, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) Tax season opened late this year, on Feb. 12. The start was delayed to give the IRS time to do additional programming and testing of systems following tax law changes implemented late last year. We are troubled that this reduced timeline will exacerbate difficulties for many taxpayers who may be unprepared for the amount due with their return and will have no savings to turn to and less time to consider their options, the Democrats added. Rettig told the House Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government on Tuesday that he was aware of the requests. The testimony came a day after the IRS said people affected by the winter storms in Texas would have their deadlines extended to July 15. The IRS automatically provides filing and penalty relief to any taxpayer with an IRS address of record located in the disaster area. Therefore, taxpayers do not need to contact the agency to get this relief, the agency said in a statement. However, if an affected taxpayer receives a late filing or late payment penalty notice from the IRS that has an original or extended filing, payment or deposit due date falling within the postponement period, the taxpayer should call the number on the notice to have the penalty abated. Queensland will refuse to cough up cash it owes New South Wales for hotel quarantine stays until Prime Minister Scott Morrison approves a proposed pop-up quarantine hub near Toowoomba. The quarantine mega-hub on the outskirts of Toowoomba, which would be built and paid for by local construction firm Wagners, needs federal government approval to go ahead. Deputy Premier Steven Miles likened Scott Morrison to a school bully telling us we have to give our lunch money to NSW. Credit:Jono Searle/Getty Images Applying pressure on Mr Morrison to move ahead on the pitch, Deputy Premier Steven Miles said the Queensland government would refuse to pay a $30 million quarantine bill issued by NSW until the federal government allowed repatriation flights to land at Toowoombas Wellcamp Airport. Mr Miles said his state was stepping up where the Commonwealth have failed by proposing the national quarantine facility in southern Queensland. Susan Dorman, M.D., an infectious disease physician at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), was recently awarded a 10-year, $9.9 million contract by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to run trials for the Tuberculosis Trials Consortium (TBTC). The TBTC is a collaboration of researchers whose goal is to improve the diagnosis, management and prevention of tuberculosis (TB) around the world. Dorman, who has dedicated her career to studying the disease, serves as a TB medical consultant for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control and leads research efforts to improve TB treatment and prevention. In the U.S., we think of TB as a disease of the past, and we do have good TB control in this country. However, in many other parts of the world, it is still a contemporary health problem that impacts people's lives in terms of morbidity and mortality." Susan Dorman, M.D., Infectious Disease Physician, Medical University of South Carolina According to the World Health Organization, TB is one of the top 10 leading causes of death in low-income countries. That's why Dorman has a long-term collaboration with a research team at the University of Cape Town Lung Institute in South Africa, where TB is very common. For one of the TBTC projects, she will partner with the Cape Town team to test TB treatment interventions in an area where people are severely affected by the disease. The leaders of the TBTC will set the research agenda for funded investigators and ensure it is relevant both globally and in the U.S. In this country, social disparities in health care are contributing factors to TB infection and transmission. People living in poverty and crowded living environments are at a higher risk for TB transmission. Lack of access to proper nutrition can increase disease susceptibility, and health care costs can negatively affect treatment outcomes. Future work from the TBTC will attempt to address strategies for better managing TB and latent TB in underserved populations in the U.S. Although TB is curable, Dorman said, it is a challenging course of treatment that can involve six months of antibiotics, with more than one antibiotic often being taken at the same time. The treatment can be difficult for patients to complete and can lead to side effects. One component of this funded work would be to shorten the treatment duration to improve the likelihood of patients completing it. Another hurdle to effective management of the disease is latent TB infection. The bacterium that causes TB can live inside people for years without causing any signs or symptoms. Later in life, they can 'wake up' and cause sickness, and so it is important that we have effective tools for preventing TB. The treatment for latent TB, much like that for active disease, involves an intense course of antibiotics that doesn't foster patient adherence, especially in people who feel healthy. The consortium will focus on improving the prevention of TB infection in individuals with latent TB. Ultimately, the efforts of Dorman and her team could vastly improve TB treatment and prevention and alter clinical guidelines for treating TB. Dorman is driven by her passion to prevent and treat TB. "I really am motivated to try to help to do a better job of preventing people from getting TB, and, if they do get it, doing a better job at treating them so they survive it." STARKVILLE, Miss. (WTVA) - The ice caused several issues with the roads across northeast Mississippi, but even as it evaporates, its impact still remains. As the ice melts off the roads, the ground revealed more potholes on the streets in Starkville. Its a little bad in the country. You know, kinda big holes, little holes, said Davalyn Bell. Bell lives in Starkville. He said these potholes have gotten large enough to cause serious damage to his vehicle. "Itll mess it up. Itll take the whole bumper from under that thing, he said. Potholes can start simply as a crack in the road. Once water seeps into the crack and freezes, it begins to expand under the surface. The road expands with the icy filling creating a large gap in the pavement. Once the ice melts, a pothole appears. Jeremiah Mullins-Wilson said these holes are dangerous to drivers. It could cause accidents and deaths, he said. Along with potentially being lifesaving, Bell believes fixing the roads could keep money in people's pockets. He said by fixing the roads, it will prevent more drivers from having to take their cars to the shop for road damage. Starkville mayor, Lynn Spruill said as long as the weather cooperates, she hopes to start work on fixing the potholes as early as Wednesday. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 00:32:42|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- China is ready to enhance anti-epidemic cooperation with Sri Lanka, continue to provide vaccine assistance to the country and take concrete actions to help Sri Lanka defeat the pandemic at an early date, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Wednesday. In a phone conversation with Sri Lanka's Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunawardena, Wang said that the two countries are strategic cooperative partners of sincere mutual assistance and lasting friendship. Over the past year, the two countries joined hands to fight against the pandemic and supported each other, and their bilateral relations maintained a strong development momentum, he said. Noting that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Wang said that China has won the victory of ending extreme poverty and achieved great results in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and will embark on a new journey toward fully building a modern socialist country. China's development means a growing force for peace and the growth of developing countries, which will provide more development opportunities for developing countries, including Sri Lanka, he added. Wang called on the two sides to make solid progress in cooperation within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, turning the Colombo Port City and the Hambantota Port into two major engines to boost Sri Lanka's economic development, pushing for Sri Lanka's industrialization, and enhancing the country's capacity for independent development. Gunawardena, for his part, said Sri Lanka regards China as its closest friend and sincerely thanks China for its long-term, selfless help for Sri Lanka's economic development, improvement of people's livelihood, and coping with internal and external challenges. In recent years, Gunawardena said, some Western countries, including the United States, have once again exploited the human rights issues, and baselessly accused developing countries including Sri Lanka in the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council. He expressed his hope that China will continue to uphold justice and stand with developing countries. Wang said that some Western countries are used to pressuring developing countries on the pretext of human rights, adding that China firmly opposes this, and is willing to unswervingly support each other with Sri Lanka to jointly safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of developing countries, the basic norms governing international relations, and the purposes and principles of the UN Charter including non-interference in other countries' internal affairs. Gunawardena warmly congratulated China on the 100th anniversary of the CPC's founding, saying that China has, under the leadership of the CPC, completely lifted itself out of poverty, made great development achievements, and significantly improved the livelihood of its people. Gunawardena said China has also led other countries on the way towards common development, and made vital contribution to human civilization. Sri Lanka appreciates China's fair stance on human rights issues and is willing to join hands with China to safeguard fairness and justice in regional and international affairs, he added. Enditem (CNN) Gerard Depardieu is under formal investigation in France for alleged rape and sexual assault, judicial sources have confirmed to CNN. The movie star has been under investigation since December last year, they said. The complainant is a young actress who accused the actor of several rapes and sexual assaults in the summer of 2018, the sources added. Depardieu's lawyer, Herve Temime, told CNN the actor disputes the allegations of wrongdoing and reminds of the presumption of innocence and that this case was initially dropped last June. The case was recently reopened by the judiciary. In 2018, the French actor was accused of rape and sexual assault by a 22-year-old woman, prompting a "preliminary investigation" according to the Paris public prosecutor's office. In the French judicial system, formal investigation ensues if officials find grounds for pursuing the matter further. Temime said in 2018 when Depardieu was first accused that his client was "shocked" by the accusation and "totally denies any assault, any rape and any criminal act." He added then, "I have strong elements to show that no offense took place," and that the offense was "the opposite" of Depardieu's personality. The complaint was filed on August 27 and went to the Paris prosecutor on August 29. "I regret that this investigation was not kept secret as usual," Temime added. Also in 2018, Temime confirmed that Depardieu knows the woman who accused him, but denied he was with her during the dates mentioned in the complaint. Depardieu is known for his roles in films like "Green Card," "The Man in the Iron Mask" and "Life of Pi." He was also nominated for an Oscar in 1991 for his leading role in "Cyrano de Bergerac." He was granted Russian citizenship by Vladimir Putin after saying he was going to give up his French passport in protest at government plans for a tax hike on the richest. Kolkata, Feb 24 : With high-voltage state Assembly polls round the corner, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi requesting the Centre to support in purchasing the required number of Covid-19 vaccines "on top priority basis". She said that the state government wants to provide coronavirus vaccines "free of cost to all people" in order to make the forthcoming elections safe for general voters. "We are required to reach out to every government and parastatal employee on an urgent basis to make the election safe. We feel it is equally important to reach out to them with a rapid vaccination programme immediately (in the) interest of health and well-being of all concerned," Banerjee said, pointing out that West Bengal is preparing for elections. CM said the worrying point is people in general would be forced to go to polling stations without vaccination. She requested PM Modi to "instruct appropriate authorities so the state can purchase vaccines, on top priority basis". She said that the state government wants to provide vaccination free of cost to all the people of Bengal. Bengal has a total population of about 10 crore. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 11:22:21|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close CANBERRA, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Australian government is facing criticism over its 25-Australian dollar (19.7-U.S. dollar) increase per week to the unemployment benefit. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Tuesday that the Jobseeker welfare payment would be increased from 570.8 Australian dollars (451.8 U.S. dollars) per fortnight to 620.8 Australian dollars (491.4 U.S. dollars) - the equivalent of an extra 3.57 Australian dollars (2.8 U.S. dollars) per day - from the end of March. "We are now confident that at the end of next month that our social safety net can once again be able to provide the support it needs to Australians as we come out of the COVID-19 recession," Morrison said in the parliament on Tuesday. However, the change will leave recipients worse-off by 50 Australian dollars (39.5 U.S. dollars) per week, as the coronavirus supplement, which is worth an extra 75 Australian dollars (59.3 U.S. dollars) per week, is set to end on March 31. Australia's national welfare advocate body, the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), had demanded a permanent increase of at least 25 Australian dollars per day - or 350 Australian dollars (277 U.S. dollars) per fortnight. "We cannot leave people to make impossible choices between food, rent, bills, basic toiletries and medications," ACOSS chief executive Cassandra Goldie said in a statement. "This is a heartless betrayal of millions of people with the least, including hundreds of thousands of children, single parents, people with disability, older people, students, people dealing with illness and injury, and others relying on income support. "It (the decision) comes as devastating news for so many and will have serious consequences for people's lives, including homelessness and crushing debt." Enditem JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Adecco Group, the world's leading talent advisory and solutions company, today announced plans to establish its new North American headquarters in Atlanta. While the Group's business services center will remain in Jacksonville, Florida, key leadership and commercial functions will be based in the new Atlanta headquarters. The move will support collaboration across the company's three Global Business Units Adecco, Talent Solutions and Modis, which were established as part of the Group's new strategic cycle [email protected] "We look forward to building a hub in Atlanta, where talent, diversity, technology and innovation are thriving," said Corinne Ripoche, Regional President of the Adecco Group, Americas. "As we embark on this next chapter, we have a clear focus on our purpose to make the future work for everyone, as well as the long-term growth and development of our business, our people and our customers." The company is currently in discussions with potential office locations throughout the Atlanta area and expects to announce a decision by the end of 2021, with a target of opening the new premises in spring 2022. About the Adecco Group The Adecco Group is the world's leading HR solutions company. We believe in making the future work for everyone, and every day enable more than 3.5 million careers. We skill, develop, and hire talent in 60 countries, enabling organisations to embrace the future of work. As a Fortune Global 500 company, we lead by example, creating shared value that fuels economies and builds better societies. Our culture of inclusivity, entrepreneurship and teamwork empowers our 35,000 employees. We are proud to have been consistently ranked one of the 'World's Best Workplaces' by Great Place to Work. The Adecco Group AG is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland (ISIN: CH0012138605) and listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange (ADEN). The Group is powered by three global business units: Adecco, Talent Solutions and Modis. In North America, the company's brand portfolio includes: Accounting Principals, Adecco, Adia, Ajilon, Entegee, General Assembly, LHH, Modis, Paladin, Parker + Lynch, Pontoon, Roevin, Special Counsel, TAD PGS and Vettery. SOURCE The Adecco Group, North America AstraZenecas contract with the EU was leaked last week, revealing that the drugmaker had signed up to deliver 180 million doses to the 27-nation bloc in the second quarter, while warning Brussels back in January that it would fall short of its first-quarter commitments due to a plethora of production issues. AstraZeneca Plc has informed the European Union to expect a shortfall in its deliveries of COVID-19 vaccines in the second quarter, reported Reuters. The BritishSwedish multinational pharmaceutical giant told the bloc during internal meetings that it would deliver less than 90 million doses in the second quarter, according to an EU official cited by the outlet. The drugmaker planned to deliver about 40 million doses in the first quarter also less than half the amount of jabs it developed with the University of Oxford and was under contract to supply, according to the source. Problems at a vaccine factory in Belgium run by partner Novasep were reportedly cited. A spokesman for AstraZeneca was quoted by the outlet as saying: We are hopeful that we will be able to bring our deliveries closer in line with the advance purchase agreement We are continuously revising our delivery schedule and informing the European Commission on a weekly basis of our plans to bring more vaccines to Europe. In a subsequent statement on Tuesday, the company said its most recent Q2 forecast for the delivery of its COVID-19 vaccine aims to deliver in line with its contract with the European Commission. At this stage AstraZeneca is working to increase productivity in its EU supply chain and to continue to make use of its global capability in order to achieve delivery of 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter, reads the statement by the pharmaceutical company. A spokesman for the European Commission that coordinates talks with vaccine manufacturers refused to comment on the confidential discussions. However, the official added, the outlet stated that the EU should have more than enough shots to reach vaccination targets if agreed deliveries from other suppliers are met. Closing the Gap Unrealistic According to a German health ministry document dated 22 February and cited by the outlet, AstraZeneca is expected to compensate for shortfalls in deliveries by the end of September, with Germany to receive 34 million doses in the third quarter. With its total jab deliveries to Germany projected to reach 56 million shots, this would be in line with the countrys share of 300 million doses AstraZeneca is under contract to supply to the bloc. There has not yet been any official comment on the report from the German health ministry. However, while hiking up output in the third quarter could be conducive to helping the European Union meet its vaccination targets, the blocs negotiators were reportedly sceptical. Closing the gap in supplies in the third quarter might be unrealistic, the EU official was cited as saying, emphasising that AstraZeneca is yet to clarify where the promised extra doses of vaccine would come from, and the drugmaker had changed its delivery figures many times before. While the company is currently not exporting jabs made in the UK, in accordance with a separate contract with the countrys government, AstraZeneca has pledged to supply the bloc with inoculations from its global supply chain, including plants in India and the United States, an EU official was cited by Reuters as saying last week. EU Vaccination Targets Under Threat Earlier in February, AstraZeneca vowed it would boost productivity to churn out over 200 million doses per month globally by April - double Februarys level. The promise came after a month earlier the company warned the EU bloc that it would fall short of its first-quarter commitments, citing a spate of production issues. Last year, the drugmaker was on course to deliver 30 million doses in the last quarter, but delayed approval of its vaccine by Brussels disrupted those plans. Overall, AstraZenecas total supply to the EU by late June might reach 130 million doses instead of the promised 300 million it had originally committed to deliver by that timeline. The current report also comes as AstraZenecas contract with the EU, leaked last week by Italian public broadcaster RAI, revealed the company had committed to delivering between 30 million and 40 million doses to the EU at the end of 2020, 80 million to 100 million doses by the end of the first quarter of 2021, and the total 300 million doses by the end of June. It also clarified that British plants were supposed to be part of the EU supply chain. The UK supply deal relies on production at AstraZeneca's two facilities in Oxford and Wrexham, Wales. The full publication of the European Union's contract with AstraZeneca also revealed that the European Commission and EU countries can't sue the drugmaker if there are "delays in delivery of the Vaccine under this Agreement". The EU contract says the sole exception is if AstraZeneca fails to meet "Good Manufacturing Practices", or if a claim "arises from AstraZeneca's wilful misconduct or failure to comply with EU regulatory requirement". Under the leaked EU contract, besides the two UK plants, AstraZeneca committed to producing vaccines at a facility in Belgium and one in the Netherlands. Spat Over Jabs Deliveries to the Continent had been the subject of a spat between the bloc and the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker, after the company revealed its deliveries would fall short by at least 75 million doses by the end of the first quarter. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had even threatened AstraZeneca with legal consequences. The EU has also faced delays in deliveries of the vaccines developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, as well as Moderna -the only vaccines approved for use by the EUs drug regulator. AstraZenecas vaccine was authorised in late January. The EU has been facing flak for a slow vaccine rollout across the bloc, lagging behind countries like Israel and Britain. As of 21 February, 2021, the United Kingdom had the highest COVID-19 vaccination rate in Europe, having administered 26.81 doses per 100 people in the country. On 19 January, when just over 5 million vaccines had been administered in the EU, the Commission revealed its bold targets to inoculate at least 80 percent of health workers and the elderly above the age of 80 by March, and 70 percent of the EUs adult population by the end of the summer. (SPUTNIK) Necessary protections for Indigenous heritage sites have been excluded from the Morrison governments proposed environmental reforms, prompting warnings from First Nations leaders it risks another devastating incident like Rio Tintos destruction of the Juukan Gorge. Former competition watchdog Graeme Samuels recent review of federal environment law said the government should bring in greater protections for Indigenous heritage immediately because of the legal culture of tokenism and symbolism. Before it was destroyed by Rio Tinto, the Juukan Gorge in WA held evidence of human habitation dating back 46,000 years. Credit:PKKP Aboriginal Corporation. The lack of legal protections for Indigenous heritage sites shot to public attention last year when mining giant Rio Tinto blew up two ancient Aboriginal rock shelters in Western Australias Juukan Gorge. The longer any substantial reforms take, there is every risk that a site is destroyed or impacted by land users who are not being held to any level of account by the government, said Anne Dennis, co-chair of the First Nations Heritage Protection Alliance representing 20 key Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island land councils nationwide. New Delhi: A woman principal of a government senior secondary school in Punjabs Patiala has been suspended after a 17-year-old boy of the same school levelled alleged sexual harassment charges against her. The Punjab education department has suspended the principal of government senior secondary school, Mardanpur, Adarsh Bhalla, 52. A suspension order was released by Krishan Kumar, secretary education. Krishan Kumar, secretary education, has ordered suspension of Adarsh Bhalla, 52, principal of the government senior secondary school, Mardanpur. The Punjab education board has directed the principal to report at the headquarters. Officials of education department said that actions were taken against the principal against Bhalla on basis of inquiry conducted by education department circle officer Nishi Jalota. Jalota said the statements of the victim, his parents, school staffs and other students have been taken. The matter came to light after class-12 boys name was struck out from the school. The victim on learning his name being struck off from the school records he detailed his ordeal to his parents. On learning the incident the boys parent and villagers gheraoed the school campus and raised protest. The boy alleged that the principal on regular occasions to take him at her residence and make sexual advances. He had also told the media that the accused used to make him sit beside her in the office during school-hours. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. The substantial landholding covers an area of 2,894 square kilometres including a network of sandstone paleochannels with groundwater that drains from uranium-bearing granite source rocks. The Frome Project is near the Honeymoon, Four Mile and Beverley uranium mines and is immediately adjacent to Goulds Dam deposit ( ) has acquired a package of highly prospective uranium exploration licences known as the Frome Project south of Lake Frome in South Australia. The project includes three highly prospective licences in the Frome Embayment area of South Australia, which is arguably the most prospective region in Australia for sandstone-hosted uranium deposits. Frome project tenement location and major uranium deposits. This area hosts the Beverley deposit and Four Mile in the northwest and the Honeymoon, Goulds Dam and Oban deposits in the southeast. Importantly, the area is nearby to existing, licensed uranium production sites such as Honeymoon, Four Mile and Beverley where uranium production is by in-situ recovery (ISR). Tenure and prospectivity Argonaut holds a 100% interest in two large exploration licences, both greater than 950 square kilometres, and a third licence via an option, sale and milestone agreement. This agreement provides for the acquisition by Argonaut of a 100% interest of a third similarly large exploration licence, currently in the application stage. These licences cover sandstone-bearing palaeochannels that contain groundwater that drains from uranium-bearing granite. Previous drilling of these palaeochannels confirms the presence of excellent sandstone aquifers at or near the base of the channels. These sandstone aquifers are four metres to 20 metres thick (typically 10-12 metres) and contain the necessary permeable coarse sands. Argonaut is applying the two fluids model for uranium roll front deposits, which involves oxidised, uranium-bearing groundwater (Fluid 1) flowing along the permeable sandstone units until it encounters reducing groundwaters that have leaked upwards through faults from deeper, hydrocarbon-bearing aquifers (Fluid 2). The interface of these fluids creates a redox front that can trap and concentrate uranium. Numerous discovery opportunities Argonaut has compiled and interpreted all existing data. The company believes the data is exciting in that it points towards numerous opportunities for the discovery of sandstone-hosted uranium. Work will proceed in several phases: Palaeochannel and fault interpretation via existing aeromagnetic and airborne EM data; Acquisition and interpretation of new, detailed airborne EM data; Drilling of high priority targets; and Drilling of regional, early-stage targets. The company is beginning the permitting process required for drilling. Erudina option and agreement terms A 100%-held subsidiary of Argonaut has entered an agreement with Groundwater Science Pty Ltd in relation to the Erudina exploration licence application, ELA2021/003. The principal terms are as follows: Senator Mitt Romney of Utah said on Tuesday that he believed Donald J. Trump would win the Republican nomination for president if he ran for his former office in 2024, another indication of Mr. Trumps perceived strength in the party. I dont know if hell run in 2024 or not, but if he does, Im pretty sure he will win the nomination, Mr. Romney said at the DealBook DC Policy Project. Mr. Romney noted that a lot can happen between now and 2024, but he added, I look at the polls, and the polls show that among the names being floated as potential contenders in 2024, if you put President Trump in there among Republicans, he wins in a landslide. Mr. Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, is the sole Republican senator who voted to convict Mr. Trump at both of his impeachment trials. India will vaccinate those who are above 60 years age against novel coronavirus , starting from next month. People above 45 years of age with comorbidities will also get jab during the next round of COVID-19 vaccine roll out, union minister Prakash Javadekar said on Wednesday. The central government will rope in 10,000 government and 20,000 private clinics for vaccination commencing from 1 March. The COVID-19 vaccine will be given free of cost at government centres, Javadekar said. Those who want to get vaccinated from private hospitals will have to pay. The amount they would need to pay will be decided by the health ministry within 3-4 days as they are in discussion with manufacturers & hospitals, Javadekar said. India started nationwide coronavirus vaccine drive on 16 January. During the first phase of vaccination, the healthcare workers and frontline workers received COVID-19 doses. The regulator gave nod to emergency use of two indigenous COVID-19 vaccines Covishield by Serum Institute of India and Covaxin by Bharat Biotech. Covishield is highly effective vaccine against novel coronavirus," Adar Poonawalla, chief executive officer, Serum Institute of India earlier mentioned. Researchers claim the vaccine protected against disease in 62% of those given two full doses and in 90% of those initially given a half dose. Covaxin, has showed long-term antibody and T-cell memory responses (three-months after vaccination) in phase I volunteers, and tolerable safety outcomes in the Phase II trials, according to reports. "Both the vaccines have been tested on thousands of people and side-effects are negligible. There is no risk of any significance," said Dr VK Paul, member of Niti Aayog. The COVID-19 vaccination will be voluntary, the health ministry earlier stated. However it is advisable "to receive the complete schedule of the vaccine for protecting one-self against this disease and also to limit the spread of this disease to the close contacts including family members, friends, relatives and co-workers," the ministry said. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Britains plans to change capital requirement rules for insurers following its departure from the European Union are about tailoring them to local conditions rather than any gratuitous deregulatory agenda, its financial services minister said. Britain inherited the Solvency II insurance capital rules from the EU, which it left on Dec. 31. But UK insurers and lawmakers have long called for changes to make the rules more specific for the sector in Britain. A consultation by the finance ministry on potential changes has just ended, with the insurance industry hoping it will lead to an easing in capital requirements. This isnt about a gratuitous deregulatory agenda, but proportionate and appropriate changes to reflect the situation happening in the UK, finance minister John Glen told the Association of British Insurers (ABI) annual meeting. The Bank of England has also warned insurers not to expect any big reduction in capital requirements after Brexit. Jon Dye, chair of the ABI, said insurers were not looking for huge capital reduction at the expense of policyholder protection. [Editors note: Jon Dye also is CEO of Allianz Insurance, Allianz UK subsidiary]. Theres plenty of scope for practical reform here that utilizes the UKs ability post-Brexit to have a regulatory system designed for the UK market, not the aggregated needs of 28 countries. The EU is concerned Britain might use its departure from the bloc to try to gain a competitive advantage. Changes to the Solvency II regime could free up 95 billion pounds ($134 billion), which insurers could use to invest in areas such as tackling climate change, according to research by consultants KPMG for the ABI. Charlotte Gerken, an executive director at the Bank of England, told a later conference session that we are not looking for increase or decrease but are interested in the evidence as to what is the amount of capital that is about right. Gerken said insurers had been resilient during the pandemic under the current regime. ($1 = 0.7099 pounds) (Reporting by Huw Jones; editing by David Goodman and Mark Potter) Equity shares of SMC Global Securities on Wednesday got listed at Rs 90.90 on NSE and Rs 91.60 on BSE. SMC was already listed on regional stock exchanges. As per Sebi guidelines, the company through direct process got listed on NSE and BSE without any public issue. The firm already has a public shareholding of around 38 per cent. "The shares got listed at Rs 90.90 on NSE and Rs 91.60 on BSE," SMC Global Securities said in a release. It gives us immense pleasure to on board SMC on the NSE main board platform. We are confident that the firm in the broking industry has a major role to play in having financial inclusion and ongoing digital revolution," said Vikram Limaye, MD and CEO, NSE. "We have well diversified public shareholding and this provides liquidity to our shareholders... This landmark marks a step forward in our aspiration to become a global organisation having a dominant position in the financial and investment services through customer centric approach," said Subhash C Aggarwal, SMC Global Securities. Established in 1994, SMC Global Securities is a financial services provider offering diversified financial services. It has presence across over 550 cities in India through a network of 95 branch offices including one overseas office at Dubai, further backed by over 2,500 sub-brokers/authorised persons and more than 13,700 independent distributors. I n the time its taken you to read the headline and these first few words, Marks & Spencer has sold 50 Percy Pig sweets. Now, make that 60. The British high street retailer sells approximately 10 Percy Pig sweets every second of the day, every day of the year. A staggering total of 400 million sweets (16 million bags) each year. The sweets are no longer just sold in bags either theyve been turned into everything from money boxes to dessert sauces, a swiss roll, ice cream and juice cartons. M&S has even suggested recipes for Percy Pig trifle, a Percy Pig pizza and Percy pudding nachos online. There is a Percy for every season: bright pink pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, a 30 floral bouquet with accompanying Percies for Valentines, Easter Eggs and advent calendars. There is even a Percy Pig bed linen set. And he is no longer the only character in the Percy range. In 2002, he was given a host of farmyard friends. Then, in 2013, he became a husband to Penny. Hes also a father and, as of 2018, an adult son. A globetrotting edition features animals Percy met on his travels around the world. As the sweet approaches its 30th birthday, its clear it is a resounding success. But it wasnt always that way. There was a time when the British public turned their snouts up at Percy. When Percy Pigs first went on sale in 50 M&S stores in 1992 with its berry and grape flavour, many customers were baffled by the product. Why were they shaped like a pig? Were they bacon flavoured? And why did Percy look so happy about being eaten? As you can imagine, you go into M&S and you see pigs being sold in bags and people have no idea what they are, Bill Davies, an M&S senior buyer at the time, tells The Independent. There were people saying, What are they, pork flavoured or what? He says initial sales were a real struggle. To overcome the initial weirdness factor that was prohibiting customers from putting the product into their basket, M&S decided to start giving out tasting samples. After that, sales slowly began to creep up until, eventually, they went ballistic, says Davies. But customer caution wasnt the only initial hitch on Percys journey to success. In fact, before Percy even made it to stores, the design was almost shelved as one of the first batches of sweets looked deformed, Julia Catton, Percys creator, tells The Independent from her kitchen (with a Percy Pig carrier bag and a jar of Percy Pigs in full view). We thought, We cant launch something that looks so deformed Julia Catton The sweets, which include a separate gelatinous layer in a darker shade of pink for Percys ears, are created face down in a starch mould, a process Davies recalls being hugely technically challenging. On the first attempt, Percy didnt look quite how theyd envisaged. They looked like they had pockmarks all over their faces, and they looked really, really disfigured, explains Catton. We thought, We cant launch something that looks so deformed. And it wasnt just the creators who had their misgivings about this new porky venture. Years later, Davis says he found out that the managing director of the German supplier who helped launch Percy never believed in the design, and had said a pig would never work. Fortunately, these early teething problems were soon just obstacles in the road, and the initial design was agreed upon. Davies says his children even helped him sift through the hundreds of thousands of samples at home, sorting them into suitable and undesirable Percies (and took on the task of eating them all when they were done). Finally, Percy was ready to be placed into the hands of M&Ss discerning customers. Fast forward 29 years, and Percys success is ever-growing. In 2020, most of us might have been focusing on getting through the pandemic but, for Percy, it was the biggest year yet, with 20 Percy product launches between September and Christmas alone. Sales of the sweets rose 40 per cent in 2020 and, to keep up with demand, M&S now produces over a million sweets each day. Percy has spawned a string of social media appreciation groups (his Facebook page has over 200,000 followers), one fan has the pig tattooed on his leg and unofficial merchandise themed around the character ranges from soaps to tote bags to earrings (and even a greetings card that reads Percy Pig in the streets, sex pig in the sheets...). M&S also regularly posts about the life and times of Percy on TikTok, in what some have called terrifying videos of massive plush versions of the character. Why, though, has Percy become the cult figure that he has? What takes a character from gummy sweet to British cultural emblem? In 2008, a bag of miniature Percies made British Vogues 2008 hot list, ranking at number 11 in the magazines 40 hottest people and trends to watch. Davies points to a combination of factors, including Percys moreishness, the fact that the sweets avoid being sickly and their unique texture, which he describes as being slightly soft but not too soft. He also references the fact that theyre not bad for you, as sweets go although a National Food Strategy report last year accused Percys packaging, which points out that the sweets contain real fruit juice, of false virtue. A single bag contains two thirds of your daily recommended sugar intake. In 2019, M&S declared that all Percy Pig varieties would always be vegetarian, helping the brand stand out in the crowded confectionery market. Catton says that the success of the sweets is that they appeal to both children and adults, which has helped elevate them above other brands. All the other fruity sweets at the time were either aimed at very small children, like jelly tots, or were things like wine gums, which had very serious and adult type packaging, she says. I think it bridged a gap. When Cattons children were younger, they would sometimes approach people buying Percies in M&S and tell them their mother had created the sweets. In fact, she herself admits to occasionally chatting to people in stores after spotting them picking up a bag of Percies. I see people picking them off the shelf, and I have occasionally started a conversation with them Julia Catton Whenever anybody talks to me about Percy and they find out Ive invented Percy Pig, they get so excited, and theyre so emotional about it, she says. I go in and I see people picking them off the shelf, and I have occasionally started a conversation with them. Its just nice to know why people love something that youve created. For many people in their 20s and 30s, Percy brings them back to their own childhoods. Hes the perfect way to raise a smile on a long journey or to perk up a friend who needs a lift, says the sweets brand manager Meaghan Hempenstall. Hes so much more than an illustration to many, hes more like an old friend. Percy Pig is no longer just a checkout treat with a snout, hes a PR machine and a cultural phenomenon. Give him another 29 years and hell have a burgeoning music career, an independent political party and a cosmetics range, you mark our words. She recently confirmed she'll be moving to the UK to live with her girlfriend Demi Sims after just a few weeks of dating. And Francesca Farago uploaded her last set of bikini snaps from Tulum's Casa Paamul resort to Instagram on Wednesday, hours before she reunites with her partner. The Too Hot To Handle star, 27, looked typically radiant as she posed by a swimming pool in a sheer bikini. Working it: Francesca Farago uploaded her last set of bikini snaps from Tulum's Casa Paamul resort to Instagram on Wednesday, hours before she sees her girlfriend Demi Sims Turning up the heat, the influencer showcased her toned figure in the two-piece, which featured a plunging, low-sleeve bralet and matching briefs. The media personality wore her tresses in loose waves, while her complexion was enhanced in minimal make-up. TV star Francesca explained how she initially wanted to fly to England with her new flame following their romantic 'work' trip, but had to complete 'three weeks' of paperwork in order to travel with her pet pooch Romeo. 'Cu soon baby': The Too Hot To Handle star, 27, will reunite with the TOWIE star, 24, later this week as she prepares to move to London Wow-factor! The influencer looked typically radiant as she posed by a swimming pool in a sheer bikini Killer curves: Later in the day, the bombshell struggled to contain her assets in a strapless two-piece as she soaked up the sun on the beach 'Off to London!' The TV star explained how she initially wanted to fly to England with her new flame, but had to complete 'three weeks' of paperwork in order to travel with her pet pooch 'Moving to London next, brb': The media personality announced her shock move on social media earlier this month, just after weeks of dating Last month, the blonde and her TOWIE girlfriend, 24, shocked social media as they got their names tattooed on each other's bottom and wrist, just days after going public with their relationship. The pair were among a host of reality stars who switched their 'work' trips from Dubai to Mexico amid a ban on UAE flights. Celebrities and influencers have been flocking to Mexico's bars and beaches as it establishes itself as the latest COVID getaway destination. Former love: The Canadian first received attention for her role in the Netflix original series Too Hot to Handle last April, when she briefly dated her co-star Harry Jowsey (pictured in 2020) The couple spent time together in the country with Demi's sister Chloe, 38, while her cousin Frankie, 33, flew back home to the UK earlier in the month. The Canadian first received attention for her role in the Netflix original series Too Hot to Handle last April, when she briefly dated her co-star Harry Jowsey. Demi has previously dated Leonie McSorley, with them last being seen out together in October, and having confirmed their romance in July. Surge in Covid-19 cases in Zamboanga probably from new strains THE SURGE in Covid-19 cases in Zamboanga City may have been caused by new s... As executive vice president and general manager of CNN International, Mike McCarthy is responsible for the global network's entire output, including schedule development, editorial production, personnel and programming at CNN's production centres in Atlanta, London, Hong Kong, New York and Abu Dhabi as well as international news gathering. He shares insights on the future of CNN, Trump, social media and fake news. Mike McCarthy, executive vice president and general manager of CNN International CNN recently took the top spot in cable news viewership - what are the factors behind the success (or failure by your rivals)? Did you have a strategy towards this goal? Trump, we were told by major news outlets, was a boon to ratings and subscriptions. Do you expect a downturn for the traditional media in the Biden administration? Or will the growing political and social polarization keep the flame going? The Twitter and Facebook ban on Trump and others is quite controversial. What is your take on it, and how do you see the regulatory battle unfolding in the coming months and years? How does it affect the traditional media? Do you expect a major crackdown on fake news by regulator and platforms? Do you think the public will turn against it (as is well documented, fake stories are more popular on social media than true stories)? Fox has made an about face regarding Trump; do you see it as genuine soul searching or opportunism? What is the right mix for the future, in your opinion, between text, video, social forms, maybe podcasts? Do you foresee a new, innovative form coming in the decade ahead? How does the US demography play in the future of CNN and liberal media? There are younger generations, more liberal and more diverse, coming of age and developing a social and political conscious will they influence the political landscape as well? What are the plans for CNN International? What are the biggest foreign potential markets? Where is CNN the most popular? In light of the current success, do you plan an expansion overseas? Does CNN have something to learn from social media phenomenon such as TikTok, adopt and adapt the influencer culture? Or do you prefer to stick to the more traditional news reporting style? 2020 was the most watched year in CNNs history, and some of the recent numbers are quite extraordinary. Since the day after the 2020 US Elections, CNN has been the number one network in all of cable, which is the networks longest streak in 21 years. The day of the Capitol insurrection was our most watched day ever, with our coverage reaching 113 million people globally across our platforms.This was certainly no accident, I think people turn to us time and again when there are major stories, and this past year has seen a confluence of those. From the pandemic, through to issues around social justice, the political drama in the United States, and then subjects like the environment, we have made sure our reporting is factual, distinctive, and comprehensive. Weve also worked hard to build and maintain audiences across multiple platforms. People turn to us because they trust us, and that trust has been built over four decades.Clearly the Trump presidency was an administration like no other, and people around the world were highly engaged in that story. But theres also evidence to suggest that a major reason why people turned to places like CNN, theand thein greater numbers was a simple desire for professional, fact-based, impartial journalism.This is not just about the White House, and that is underlined by some of the stories we know our audiences have flocked to watch and read. The Covid-19 pandemic and the amount of disinformation that has accompanied it have driven people to trusted news sources like CNN to get news and information they know they can rely on. Likewise, you have stories like the Black Lives Matter movement, the rise of anti-Semitism and white supremacists, international political stories like Brexit, or natural disasters and the impact of climate change. All of these have brought audiences to places like CNN.I think that the news industry can feel optimistic about the future because the attraction of good reporting and analysis is demonstrably clear. These are unprecedented times, regardless of who is in the White House. What is important is that we continue to provide news that audiences can trust.Social media platforms have existed in a grey area for a long time; because they havent been regulated in the same way as publishers, their role in spreading disinformation has been unchecked. The true impact of this has been brought into sharp relief around the pandemic, with the QAnon movement, and of course the wild disinformation following the presidential election, which threatened to spiral out of control and may yet have caused permanent damage to American politics.The recent bans on some accounts, including that of Donald Trump, have come after clear and persistent violations of Twitter and Facebooks policies. Some argue that these bans should have come about sooner. This is extremely serious stuff, with real-life consequences, as weve seen recently with the Capitol insurrection and the kind of dangerous lies that have spread around Covid-19. Its no exaggeration to say that this kind of disinformation has cost lives.Again, I think the role of traditional media is to rise above that and make sure people can turn to us to get the facts. Its often been said in the social media age that people first hear about something on social platforms and then turn on CNN to see if its true. It is vital that we and other professional news organisations continue to play that role in society.I think that the social platforms are trying hard to head off regulation by taking more strident measures to self-police, and many would argue that is long overdue. There are protections afforded by the First Amendment in the United States that come into play here, but there is no question that spread of false and deliberately misleading information on social media is front and centre of the political discourse now.Whether regulators can really do much about it remains to be seen, but I think the platforms themselves are aware that the environment has changed and that they cant simply sit back and let this kind of thing go on unchecked. It is impossible to argue that some activity on social platforms hasnt played a destructive role in politics and society in recent years. Perhaps more people are waking up to this now, which can only be a good thing.Its interesting that Foxs Arizona call on election night seems to have worked against it with a section of its viewers. It looks as though many of them were simply not interested in an impartial stance, and Fox only has itself to blame for that.I think over the past few years Fox has painted itself into a corner by failing to push back on some of the falsehoods that the Trump administration was peddling. It has strayed a long way from being a genuine news network and that has not only undermined its credibility as a news organization, but also helped foster some of the corrosive elements that have taken root in American society. I would hope that they see that too, but I cant really comment on their position. Time will tell.None of these media is mutually exclusive, in fact they are complementary. If I think about my own media consumption, so much of it depends on what Im doing with my day and what kind of story Im following.On the day of the Capitol protests I was watching TV, following our correspondents on social media, and tracking our live blog at the same time. Different media help fill out stories in different ways. Some stories are better suited to one medium than another, but our digital platforms are critical for proving the in-depth context, commentary, analysis and opinion that allows us to dive deeper into not just the news of the day but also other stories that have piqued the curiosity of our audiences.Live TV may be more linear, but in an evolving news environment it can still be enormously powerful and compelling, and audience numbers bear this out.Ultimately, we must follow the audience and be available on all platforms at all times, which is something CNN has done very successfully. Likewise, we must keep up with new innovations and stay with the audience as their habits evolve, which our early investment in digital technology has helped us to do.I just dont agree with the notion of CNN as liberal media. In spite of what some would have you believe, we dont have a political position; we are interested in facts and holding power to account. I think the dilemma of the Trump presidency, as Jeff Zucker has said many times, is that to be pro-truth could come across as being anti-Trump, and that was a difficulty for us and other news organisations.We were faced with a White House that was actively hostile towards us, and that inevitably made some people consider us partisan, but all we ever wanted to do was get to the facts.I do agree that the audience in the United States is changing as the population changes, but equally I think it would be a mistake to think that will automatically mean a political shift.Dont forget, more than 70 million people voted for Donald Trump at the last election, and there are similar political divisions between left and right in many countries around the world.I believe understanding that and continuing to tread a path that is focused on fact-based journalism is the only way we can push ahead. I think that is what audiences want from us and that will stand us in good stead going forward.International reporting is absolutely core to CNNs DNA, and it will continue to be so. In spite of the fact that the eyes of the world have been on Washington of late, the pandemic has also reminded us that the world is still incredibly interconnected, and CNN is perfectly placed to tell that global story.We have made substantial investments in our new London bureau, including a big, new state of the art studio, and once we are through the pandemic you will be seeing that more on our air; we are also investing in our Middle East hub in the UAE, we have strengthened our reporting line up in Asia Pacific too, and recently introduced brand new Africa-focused feature programming.We also have new branded partnerships such as CNN Brasil, which is approaching its first anniversary after an outstanding first year.All of this strengthens us internationally and benefits our audiences around the world. Right now, we have reporters working on stories on every continent, and that is the power of CNN.The media landscape is changing, and we need to make sure that we change with it; ultimately that means looking closely at new more measurable distribution models internationally. But we know that audiences are engaged with the CNN brand, they are coming to us in record numbers, and we have a product that people want. Its an exciting time to be working for CNN.CNN has an extremely strong presence on social media, through the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and many of our correspondents and anchors have a highly engaged following across a range of media, including TikTok. If you arent already following Max Foster I urge you to do so, because he is terrific there.But I think that, again, the style of these platforms and so-called traditional media arent mutually exclusive. You can get something different from each, and thats fine. I think reporting styles evolve too, but the fundamentals of journalism the who, where, when, what, why? are not up for debate. That is what CNN will always be about. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 04:50:22|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close CAIRO, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Egyptian Drug Authority (EDA) approved on Wednesday Russia's Sputnik V vaccine for emergency use. Meanwhile, Turkey started Wednesday the vaccination of teachers against COVID-19 as the country is poised to resume in-person education. In a statement, Mahmoud Yassin, head of EDA's Central Administration for Biological and Innovative Products, said that Russia's Sputnik V was approved after passing assessment tests at the authority's labs. It has previously approved China's Sinopharm vaccine and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. The EDA official said that the authority is currently working on testing the efficiency and safety of more vaccines. Last month, Egypt began a nationwide campaign of COVID-19 vaccination, starting with medical staff of government hospitals. Egyptian Health Minister Hala Zayed told a local TV channel on Tuesday that the vaccination will cost a citizen 200 Egyptian pounds (about 12.8 U.S. dollars) for a two-dose regimen of 21-day duration. Zayed added that needy families and individuals will be "exempt from any vaccination expenses." Starting Feb. 28, the minister said, a designated website will be opened for registration with priority to be given to the patients suffering chronic diseases and people above 40. A batch of Sinopharm vaccines provide by China for Egypt and the General Secretariat of Arab League arrived in Cairo early Tuesday. Turkey has started Wednesday the vaccination of teachers against COVID-19 as the country is poised to resume in-person education. Turkish Education Minister Ziya Selcuk received his first dose in a ceremony held in the Central Anatolia province of Corum. A list including 1.25 million teachers, who will be on duty for resumed classes, was submitted to the health ministry for vaccination, Selcuk said. Turkey gradually starts face-to-face schooling, as primary schools in villages opened on Feb. 15 and the rest of the primary classes, along with students in eighth and 12th grades, will resume on March 1. Turkey on Wednesday confirmed 9,561 new COVID-19 cases, including 660 symptomatic patients, taking the total number of positive cases in the country to 2,665,194. The death toll from the virus in Turkey rose by 72 to 28,285, while the total recoveries climbed to 2,540,293 after 5,297 more cases recovered in the last 24 hours, according to the Turkish health ministry. A total of 124,015 tests were conducted over the past day, raising the overall number of tests in Turkey to 32,684,747. Turkey started mass COVID-19 vaccination on Jan. 14 after the authorities approved the emergency use of the Chinese CoronaVac vaccine. More than 6,463,000 people have been vaccinated so far. Iranian health authorities said on Wednesday that 112 people infected with the mutant variant of coronavirus have been identified in the country. "So far, eight people in the country have died from the mutant virus," said Alireza Raisi, spokesman for the Iranian national headquarters fighting COVID-19. The symptoms of the new variant are the same as the common novel coronavirus, but its contagiousness and pathogenicity are higher, he said. Raisi warned against the possibility of the spread of the mutant variant in the country, urging people to follow the health protocols carefully. Iran's health ministry reported 8,270 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, raising the total nationwide infections to 1,598,875. The pandemic has so far claimed 59,736 lives in Iran, up by 73 in the past 24 hours. Of the newly infected, 746 were hospitalized, said Lari. Morocco's COVID-19 tally rose to 482,128 on Wednesday as 419 new cases were registered during the past 24 hours. According to a statement by the Ministry of Health, the death toll hit 8,592 as 18 COVID-19 patients died in the last 24 hours. The total number of recoveries from COVID-19 in Morocco increased to 466,815 after 710 new ones were added, while 437 people are in intensive care units, the statement said. Meanwhile, 2,911,635 people have been vaccinated so far against COVID-19 in the country. The North African country launched a nationwide vaccination campaign on Jan. 28 after the arrival of the first shipment of China's Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine. Lebanon recorded on Wednesday 3,513 new COVID-19 cases, raising the number of infections to 362,833, the Health Ministry reported. Meanwhile, death toll from the virus went up by 62 to 4,508. Jacques Mokhbat, member of the national committee for the administration of the COVID-19 vaccine, said on Wednesday that only 29,000 people in Lebanon have been vaccinated so far. "If the process remains that slow, we will not be able to reach herd immunity before 2027," he said. On Feb. 14, Lebanon started its vaccination campaign with employees in the health sector and the elderly above 75 years old. Kuwait reported on Wednesday 1,001 new COVID-19 cases, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 187,005. The Kuwaiti Health Ministry also announced five more deaths, taking the death toll to 1,062. The tally of recoveries in Kuwait rose by 960 to 175,048, while 10,895 coronavirus-related patients were receiving treatment. Abdullah Al-Bader, assistant undersecretary for medical affairs in the ministry, said on Wednesday that a new batch of coronavirus vaccines will arrive on Feb. 28. Kuwait is keen on battling the coronavirus spread by reinforcing its national vaccination campaign, Al-Bader said. The Iraqi Ministry of Health reported on Wednesday 4,306 new COVID-19 cases, the highest daily record in 2021, raising the total nationwide number to 680,288. It also reported 13 new deaths, raising the death toll from the infectious virus to 13,324, while the total recoveries in Iraq climbed by 2,110 to 625,447. Minister of Health Hassan al-Tamimi said at a press conference marking the first anniversary of detecting the first case of COVID-19 in Iraq that the ministry has "finished all preparations to receive the vaccines that will arrive soon." Enditem The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. AI and ML systems have advanced in both sophistication and capability at a staggering rate in recent years. They can now model protein structures based only on the molecules amino-acid sequence, create poetry and text on par with human writers even spot specific individuals in a crowd (assuming their complexion is sufficiently light). But for as impressive as these feats of computational prowess are, the field continues to struggle with a number of fundamental moral and ethical issues. A facial recognition system designed to identify terrorists can just as easily be leveraged to monitor peaceful protesters or suppress ethnic minorities, depending on how it is deployed. Whats more, the development of AI to date has been largely concentrated in the hands of just a few large companies such as IBM, Google, Amazon and Facebook, as theyre among the few with sufficient resources to pour into its development. But these companies arent doing this out of the goodness of their hearts or for bragging rights, theyre doing so to create and sell desirable products. But weve seen what happens when improving the companys bottom line comes at the cost of societal harm. Thats why when Alphabet coalesced its various AI endeavors under the Google.AI banner in 2017, the company also created an ethics team to monitor those projects, ensuring that they are being used for the betterment of society, not simply to increase profits. That team was co-led by Timnit Gebru, a leading researcher on the racial discrepancies in facial recognition systems as well as one of barely a handful of black women in the field of AI, and Margaret Mitchell, a computer scientist specializing in the study of algorithmic bias. Both women were staunch advocates for increasing diversity in what has historically been an overwhelmingly white and male field. Their team was among the most diverse in the entire company and regularly produced groundbreaking studies that challenged traditionally held views of AI research. They had also raised concerns that Google was censoring research critical of its most ambitious (and profitable) AI programs. In recent months, both Gebru and Mitchell have been summarily fired. Gebrus dismissal came in December after she co-authored a research paper criticizing large-scale AI systems. In it, Gebru and her team argued that AI systems, such as Googles trillion-parameter AI language model, that are designed to mimic language could harm minority groups. The papers introduction reads, we ask whether enough thought has been put into the potential risks associated with developing them and strategies to mitigate these risks. According to Gebru, the company fired her after she questioned a directive from Jeff Dean, head of Google AI, to withdraw the paper from the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT). Dean has since countered that the paper did not meet our bar for publication and that Gebru had threatened to resign unless Google met her list of specific conditions, which the company declined to do. Apparently my managers manager sent an email [to] my direct reports saying she accepted my resignation, Gebru tweeted in December. I hadnt resignedI had asked for simple conditions first and said I would respond when Im back from vacation. But I guess she decided for me :) thats the lawyer speak. I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great Ill take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date, she continued. Then she sent an email to my direct reports saying she has accepted my resignation. So that is Google for you folks. You saw it happen right here. Gebrus corporate email access was cut off before she had returned from her vacation but she published excerpts of her managers managers response on Twitter nonetheless: However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects because certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager. Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru) December 3, 2020 As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately, effective today. We will send your final paycheck to your address in Workday. When you return from your vacation, PeopleOps will reach out to you to coordinate the return of Google devices and assets. Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru) December 3, 2020 Gebrus termination, especially the way in which Dean handled the situation, set off a firestorm of criticism both inside and outside the company. More than 1,400 Google employees as well as 1,900 other supporters signed a letter of protest while numerous leaders in the AI field expressed their outrage online, arguing that she had been terminated for speaking truth to power. They also questioned whether the company was actually committed to promoting diversity within its ranks and wondered aloud why Google would even bother employing ethicists if they were not free to challenge the companys actions. With Gebrus firing, the civility politics that yoked the young effort to construct the necessary guardrails around AI have been torn apart, bringing questions about the racial homogeneity of the AI workforce and the inefficacy of corporate diversity programs to the center of the discourse, Alex Hannah and Meredith Whitaker wrote in a Wired op-ed. But this situation has also made clear thathowever sincere a company like Googles promises may seemcorporate-funded research can never be divorced from the realities of power, and the flows of revenue and capital. Mitchell subsequently penned an open letter in support of Gebru, stating: The firing of Dr. Timnit Gebru is not okay, and the way it was done is not okay. It appears to stem from the same lack of foresight that is at the core of modern technology, and so itself serves as an example of the problem. The firing seems to have been fueled by the same underpinnings of racism and sexism that our AI systems, when in the wrong hands, tend to soak up. How Dr. Gebru was fired is not okay, what was said about it is not okay, and the environment leading up to it was and is not okay. Every moment where Jeff Dean and Megan Kacholia do not take responsibility for their actions is another moment where the company as a whole stands by silently as if to intentionally send the horrifying message that Dr. Gebru deserves to be treated this way. Treated as if she were inferior to her peers. Caricatured as irrational (and worse). Her research writing publicly defined as below the bar. Her scholarship publicly declared to be insufficient. For the record: Dr. Gebru has been treated completely inappropriately, with intense disrespect, and she deserves an apology. After this public criticism of her employer, Google locked Mitchells email account and on January 19th opened an investigation into Mitchells actions, accusing her of downloading a large number of internal documents and sharing them with outsiders. "Our security systems automatically lock an employees corporate account when they detect that the account is at risk of compromise due to credential problems or when an automated rule involving the handling of sensitive data has been triggered, Google said in a January statement. In this instance, yesterday our systems detected that an account had exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts. We explained this to the employee earlier today." According to an unnamed Axios source, Mitchell had been using automated scripts to look through her messages to find examples showing discriminatory treatment of Gebru before her account was locked. Mitchells account remained locked for five weeks until her employment was terminated in February, further exacerbating tensions between the Ethics AI team and management. Meg Mitchell, lead of the Ethical AI team has been fired. She got an email to her personal email. After locking her out for 5 weeks. There are many words I can say right now. I'm glad to know that people don't fall for any of their bull. To the VPs at google, I pity you. Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru) February 19, 2021 After conducting a review of this managers conduct, we confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees, a Google representative told Engadget. Alongside Mitchells firing, the company announced that Marian Croak would be taking over the reigns of the Ethical AI team, despite her not actually having any direct experience with AI development. I heard and acknowledge what Dr. Gebrus exit signified to female technologists, to those in the Black community and other underrepresented groups who are pursuing careers in tech, and to many who care deeply about Googles responsible use of AI, Dean said in an internal memo published in February and obtained by Axios. It led some to question their place here, which I regret. "I understand we could have and should have handled this situation with more sensitivity," he continued. "And for that, I am sorry." The company has also pledged to make changes with regards to its diversity efforts moving forward. Those changes include tieing pay for VPs and higher senior management partly to reaching diversity and inclusion goals, streamlining its research publishing process, increasing its employee retention staff, and enacting new procedures regarding potentially problematic employee exits. Additionally, Google shuffled its AI teams so that the ethical AI researchers would no longer report to Megan Kacholia. However the company managed to step on one last rake by failing to notify the Ethical AI team of the changes until after Croak had been hired. But while the rollout officially started earlier this month, Google is only now publishing an announcement for the new major Android Auto update, thus providing us with more details on whats included in the latest release. As it turns out, theres also a little something we didnt know Google had actually introduced in Android Auto.First and foremost, Google has announced the new wallpaper support in Android Auto. Thanks to this addition, users can now select a different background for the Android Auto home screen, and while some people dont believe this is something useful given they spend the most time in apps like Google Maps and Spotify , others simply love it because it makes the UI feel fresh.To change the wallpaper in Android Auto, all it takes is to open the settings menu right in the app and then choose one of the preloaded backgrounds. Theres no support for third-party background at this point.Then, Google is introducing shortcuts, which users can create and pin right to the home screen.These provide convenient access to your contacts and even allow you to use Assistant to complete tasks like checking the weather or remotely adjusting the thermostat by simply tapping on the icon on your car display, just as you would on your phone, Google explains Android Auto now comes with improved widescreen support, too, allowing users to configure a split-screen UI that shows a real-time view of Google Maps and media controls. Privacy improvements have also been included in this update to configure when you want Android Auto to show up on the head unit.Finally, Android Auto now supports voice-activated games, and launching them is only possible with a voice command. Just say, Hey Google, play a game, and Android Auto should then launch games like Trivia and Jeopardy. She also upended the recruiting industrys business model by charging the agencies, not the job seekers, for her fees a commission model that became the industry norm. Because she represented the most sought-after talent, they paid. She loved to tell the tale of how she had once collected a fee for moving an executive from one job to another within the same agency. I wasnt about to give any freebies, she told New York magazine. Judith Wald was born on Aug. 21, 1924, in Manhattan to Albert and Rose (Fischel) Wald. Her father was a lawyer and briefly a New York State senator; her mother was a homemaker. Her younger brother, Niel, died in 2015. Ms. Wald graduated from Syracuse University in 1945 with a degree in psychology and then worked an assortment of jobs, including as an advertising copywriter. But selling people, not products, was what she loved most, and she worked her way through several personnel agencies before striking out on her own, renting a small office on the strength of a $2,000 bank loan. At first, her business bombed. I got turned down daily, she wrote in notes for an unpublished memoir that were provided by her family. My money and morale were about to run out. The tide turned when the Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising shop hired her to find a new creative director. The agency was overwhelmed with portfolios from applicants, an executive told her, and would rather pay her to vet candidates than do the work itself. Once it became known that the hottest shop in town paid for our service, all the other agencies got on the bandwagon, Ms. Wald wrote. As well-known names flocked to her firm, she opened offices in Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Paris and other cities, fueling her rise to industry power broker for more than 30 years. Colleagues remember her round-the-clock devotion to her job. She would do five breakfasts and four lunches and then go out for dinner, said Corynne Shaw, a longtime employee. Shed have me call 10 people on the phone and put them all on hold thats how she did it. She didnt care how long they held. And they didnt care, either, because they knew ultimately theyd get to talk to Judy Wald. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes The Mobile World Congress (MWC), one of the largest mobile communication events in the world, began in the year 2021 in China's Shanghai instead of the traditional place Barcelona in Spain, as the European city being under the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic. The MWC Shanghai event, originally planned in June, got its date swapped with the main event in Barcelona. During the launching presser on Tuesday, the holder of the event Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA) said China is "the only place" to launch the first MWC event in 2021 because the country has "a better record at fighting against the pandemic," and "an energetic mobile communication ecosystem." The event is planned to last three days and expected to attract 20,000 visitors. Industry leaders like China Mobile, Huawei, and Nokia participated in the event. Government officials, including Vice Industry and IT Minister Liu Liehong and Vice Mayor of Shanghai Wu Qing, attended the launching ceremony. In a first, MWC Shanghai is available both in-person and online. Visitors can watch the keynotes and exhibitions on the GSMA website. During the event, GSMA published this year's report about China's mobile economy development, pointing out that the country saw an additional 200 million new 5G connections in 2020. A total of 800 million 5G connections are expected by 2025. The first day of the event has concluded with smartphone fans flooding the demonstration area of Huawei, Samsung, ZTE, OPPO, and more, looking for the latest mobile technology like foldable/scrollable screen, under-screen face recognition, and 125-watt fast charging. The main event in Barcelona, on the other hand, is facing resistance from the media because of the decision to have an in-person event of 80,000 visitors. Tech media The Verge called the June gathering a "potential superspreader event" in a warning on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite GSMA's promise that strict control measures will be applied. (CGTN) Yesterday, the Georgian opposition organised a rally after the arrest of the leader of the largest opposition party, the United National Movement, Nika Melia. Georgian police arrested a top opposition leader on February 23, using tear gas in a dawn raid on his party headquarters, further deepening a political crisis sparked by last years parliamentary elections, the outcome of which the opposition disputes, Emerging Europe writes. The arrest came days after Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia resigned following a disagreement over whether to take Niki Melia, the chairman of the United National Movement (UNM), into custody. Mr Gakharia, who had been PM since September 2019, resigned last week over a disagreement with his own team over the treatment of Mr Melia. On February 22, Georgias parliament confirmed Irakli Garibashvili as the countrys new prime minister. Mr Garibishvili told MPs that he intended to precede with the arrest of Mr Melia, who faces charges of organising violent mass protests during demonstrations against the Georgian government in 2019. Melia faces up to nine years behind bars if convicted. The UNM, and other opposition parties, claim the charges are politically motivated. They have called for Georgians protest against the arrest at the prime ministers office later on February 23. A Tbilisi court last week ordered that Mr Melia be taken into custody for allegedly failing to post bail. The interior ministry at the time announced it was postponing the arrest following the resignation of Mr Gakharia. Mr Gakharia had said that Melias arrest was unacceptable if it threatened to fuel political divisions in the country. Western condemnation Western representatives in Tbilisi have been quick to condemn Mr Melias arrest. The United States Embassy to Georgia said in a statement that it is deeply concerned by the governments decision to detain the head of a major opposition political party at the partys headquarters this morning. The statement highlighted that, Today, Georgia has moved backward on its path toward becoming a stronger democracy in the Euro-Atlantic family of nations. The embassy said it regrets that the call of the United States and other international partners for restraint and dialogue was ignored. We are dismayed by the polarising rhetoric from Georgias leadership at a time of crisis. Force and aggression are not the solution to resolving Georgias political differences. Meanwhile, the UK ambassador to Georgia Mark Clayton wrote on Twitter that he was shocked by the scenes at UNM headquarters this morning. Violence and chaos in Tbilisi are the last thing Georgia needs right now. I urge all sides to act with restraint, now and in the coming days. Matthew Bryza, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former US mediator of the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict, says that the Georgian governments overreach is a chance for its unified opposition to make clear that it is responsible and ready to do the tough political work required to compel the government back toward democracy. Such an effort would need and merit full US and EU support. Political polarisation The ruling Georgian Dream party comfortably won a parliamentary election in 2020, taking 90 seats in Georgias 150-seat legislature. However, despite the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) saying that the election had been competitive and that fundamental freedoms had generally been respected, the opposition has disputed the results and has boycotted parliamentary sessions ever since. The OSCE did, however, report allegations of pressure on voters and that the blurring of the line between party and state reduced public confidence in parts of the process. Earlier this month, in its latest report on the implementation of the EU-Georgia Association Agreement, the EU called on Georgia to speed up judicial reform and do more to tackle political polarisation. The report said that the political situation which has followed 2020s elections, including the opposition boycott of parliament, demonstrates the need for further democratic consolidation. It is of vital importance that all Georgian political parties act within the institutional framework to find common ground and a way forward, said the EUs foreign policy chief Josep Borrell. Mr Garibashvili, who is 38, previously served as Georgias prime minister from 2013-15, and signed the countrys Association Agreement and Deep and Comprehensive Agreement with the EU. He has also had stints as the countrys defence and interior minister. Other changes to the cabinet include Irakli Karseladze taking over as minister of regional development, and Juansher Burchuladze replacing Garibashvili at defence. Georgian Dream, which took power from the UNM in 2012 and has ruled the country ever since, was founded by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune primarily in metals and banking in Russia in the 1990s. Mr Ivanishvili was himself briefly prime minister in 2013 only to resign and, he said at the time, quit politics. Opponents however said that he continued to run the country from behind the scenes. In 2018, he formally returned to the party and was elected its chairman, before ostensibly retiring from politics for good in January of this year. Armenia would welcome the expansion of a Russian military base on its territory and the redeployment of some Russian forces closer to its border with Azerbaijan after a conflict with its neighbour last year, its defence minister said. Ethnic Armenian troops in the Nagorno-Karabakh region ceded swathes of territory in and around the enclave to Azerbaijan in a six-week conflict in 2020 that claimed thousands of lives. Russian peacekeeping troops are deployed in the enclave and, under a formal defence pact with Armenia, Russia has a fully-fledged military base in the city of Gyumri near the Turkish border with an estimated 3,000 troops. Russia said in November it was deploying almost 2,000 servicemen as part of the peacekeeping mission. The question of expanding and bolstering the Russian military base on the territory of Armenia has always been on the agenda, Armenian Defence Minister Vagharshak Harutyunyan told Russias RIA news agency in an interview published on Monday. The Armenian side has always been interested in this. Harutyunyan did not say whether there were any concrete plans for a potential expansion. Armenian opposition politicians have called for the creation of a second Russian base in Armenias southern Syunik region, wedged between Azerbaijan and the Azeri exclave of Nakhchivan. Harutyunyan said he saw no need for Russia to formally open a second military base, but said the two countries were considering deploying a military unit from the existing base to eastern Armenia, near the border with Azerbaijan. Harutyunyan did not disclose the purpose of the potential redeployment nor its exact location. Russias Defence Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Armenias opposition, which has called on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to resign over the outcome of the conflict, planned to stage a fresh street protest on Monday. SOURCE: AP Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. PSNI Detectives have arrested five men after the seizure of approximately 900,000 in Class B drugs. Five men have been arrested after approximately 900,000 of Class B controlled drugs was seized by the PSNI and UK Border Force officers. Three arrests were made on Tuesday after a vehicle was stopped and searched in Glengormley, with two further men arrested after a nearby property was searched. The men aged 23, 35, 36, 37 and 69 were arrested on suspicion of a range of drug related offences including possession with intent to supply Class B controlled drugs, conspiracy to supply and importation of Class B controlled drugs. Four of the men were also being interviewed in relation to immigration offences. Detective Inspector Kelly from the Organised Crime Unit commented: A number of parcels were seized by Police and UK Border Force officers destined for addresses across Northern Ireland in the past 12 months. A house has also been searched in the Dungannon area in relation to this activity. These arrests are in keeping with our commitment to tackle the scourge of drugs, and are a result of combined and ongoing efforts with colleagues in UK Border Force and Immigration." He added: Drugs wreak havoc and devastation on individuals, families and communities. Those involved in the illegal supply of drugs dont care about the heartache they cause. Indeed, their only concern is to line their own pockets. I would appeal to anyone with information, no matter how insignificant it may seem, about the supply of illegal drugs to contact police immediately on the non-emergency number 101. A report can also be made using the online reporting form. Alternatively, information can be provided to Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 or online. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-23 23:36:27|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close CAIRO, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The foreign ministers of Egypt, Hungary on Tuesday discussed in Cairo means of promoting the bilateral ties and cooperation, as well as facing the common challenges of terrorism and illegal immigration. "Egypt has exerted great efforts to stop the illegal immigration from the Egyptian lands to Europe," Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said at a joint press conference with the visiting Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto. The two officials discussed means of promoting the bilateral ties and cooperation in several fields in light of the consensus between the two sides in regional and international issues, Shoukry added. For his part, Peter Szijjarto said Egypt closed its shores over the past six years for preventing illegal immigration to Europe, adding that Egypt deserves all support from the EU. "Hungary will benefit from Egyptian natural gas after building a pipeline from Greece to Budapest," he added, noting that his country seeks to expand economic cooperation with Egypt in fields of building water pumpers, developing ports, and peaceful nuclear activities. The two countries signed a memo of understanding in the fields of developmental and agricultural cooperation. The visit also saw the inauguration of a joint project in the railways' field, as Hungary will provide Egypt with 1,300 train carriages. Enditem Lifetimes Married at First Sight Season 12 in Atlanta has been one of the most eventful seasons so far. All five couples Clara Fergus and Ryan Oubre, Briana Morris and Vincent Morales, Paige Banks and Chris Williams, Haley Harris and Jacob Harder, and Erik Lake and Virginia Coombs had their ups and downs during their honeymoon in Las Vegas. But on the Feb. 17 episode of Married at First Sight, Defending Your Wife, the couples drama heated up even more when two pairs of newlyweds feuded with one another. Briana Morris | Kinetic Content Haley and Jacob consummated their marriage but were still at odds Haley and Jacob who seemed awkward together at their wedding and reception surprised many Married at First Sight fans by having sex during their Las Vegas honeymoon. Despite consummating their marriage, the couple seemed disconnected. Haley blamed the couples struggles on her dating history; shed been single for seven years, so the expectation of sudden intimacy with Jacob was overwhelming for her. Its just all kind of surreal, going from being by myself for seven years to being around someone 24 hours a day, Haley told Jacob. In turn, Jacob complained that his wife kept her cards close to the chest. He wanted his wife to let her guard down and be more receptive to him in general. This is not what I expected marriage to be, the Married at First Sight star admitted. Later, Haley admitted that something was missing for her in her marriage. Theres just something thats not clicking for me, she told Jacob. Jacob accused Haley of shutting him out and he seemed to make his point when she headed out for what she claimed was a girls night at the bar. Instead, when Jacob went down to have a drink himself, he saw his wife with all the other wives and husbands. When they caught a glimpse of him, he said, they all scattered as if they had something to hide. The truth of it is, she did not want me there and she did not tell me she did not want me there, Jacob revealed, adding that he knew that marriage was in trouble if she was going to intentionally lie to him. RELATED: Married at First Sight: Chris Has a Panic Attack and Disappears For Hours Before Admitting Hes Not Attracted to Paige Chris and Paige argued about money and his ex Chris and Paige continued to struggle in their relationship after the revelation that Chris ex was six weeks pregnant with his child. Not only did Chris warn Paige that he wasnt up for helping out with her dog, Bentley which she thought was rather ironic, given his own expectation that she become a bonus parent to his baby on the way but he also revealed that he didnt believe in joint accounts. For her part, Paige took this as a sign that Chris wasnt very committed. This is a marriage, and not just a fling or a hookup, she told Married at First Sight producers. Paige complained that Chris was overly invested in money rather than love or marriage. I wanted love, she said. I wanted to build and grow with someone, and money doesnt buy happiness. Sometimes I think hes one-minded, and it can come off a little selfish. Things got even rockier between Paige and Chris when he dropped yet another bombshell: He was still in love with his ex, and theyd even spoken about getting back together since she revealed that she was pregnant. Still, he insisted that he wanted to make things work with Paige and gave her mixed signals by telling her that he was now spiritually attracted to her. At first, Paige said she thought Chris comments about his ex were the equivalent of spitting in her face. She accused Chris of taking an innocent person and dragging them into his mess. Eventually, however, she agreed to try to work on her marriage to Chris because of her faith and the vows shed made. Clara and Ryan worried about their level of compatibility Meanwhile, Clara and Ryan seemed to be moving along in their relationship and getting to know each other. Still, there were some bumps in the road when it came to their discussions about their future. Clara told Ryan that shed dated plenty of men and said I love you to nearly all of them. Ryan, on the other hand, thought the word love was sacred and unique. He revealed that hed never actually been in love or declared his love to any woman. Clara took this revelation as a bad omen. She worried about how she could make things work with someone who kept his cards so close to the chest when she always wore her heart on her sleeve. The Married at First Sight star admitted that she was concerned about being too vulnerable with him and getting her heart broken. Ryan and Clara also clashed somewhat after she chimed in to Erik and Virginias fight with Chris and Paige. While Clara felt free to speak her mind, Ryan wanted his wife to think more before speaking. Clara wasnt thrilled about her husbands warning. She told Lifetime producers that she was keeping her mouth shut a little more than she was used to. Sometimes it feels like Ryans controlling me a little bit, Clara said, admitting that she was concerned about changing herself too much to suit him. RELATED: Married at First Sight: Which Season 12 Couples Stay Together On Decision Day? [SPOILERS] Erik and Virginia discussed their differences Like Clara and Ryan, Erik and Virginia also worried about their stark differences in terms of personality and lifestyle. Erik got tipsy along with his bride during their honeymoon, but he told her not to expect that too much from him in the future. Virginia revealed that she usually liked to party with her friends every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. But Erik reminded her that his career as a pilot wouldnt allow him to do that. Eriks jealousy also seemed to loom as a potential challenge for the couple. While Virginia promised him shed always come home to him, he issued a warning about her partying especially with male friends. You understand, youre married now, he said. You are not single now. You are with me. Both Virginia and Erik admitted they knew their differences would be an issue in the future. Im definitely worried theres gonna come a breaking point where we cant keep glossing over our differences, Virginia told Married at First Sight producers. RELATED: Married at First Sight: Chris Admits Hes Not Attracted to Paige Briana and Vincent talked about their pet peeves Briana and Vincent met their first obstacles in married life on the latest Married at First Sight episode. Briana pressed Vincent about whether she had annoyed him yet or not. She told him that she didnt like when he didnt listen or pay attention, and he seemed to get frustrated by her criticism. Vincent told his wife that he didnt like to be rushed or told what to do. He felt that Brianas bossiness could become a problem in the future, as he wouldnt stand for it in every situation. I need her to be a little more patient with me, he said. I take my time with things, and I dont like to be rushed. And I dont care who you are. Youre gonna get what youre gonna get. And Im not changing. Later, however, the couple talked over their issue and agreed to work it out. Briana admitted that she knew she had to change some things about her behavior if she wanted their marriage to succeed. The last thing she wanted, she said, was for Vincent to hold everything in, bottle everything up, and suddenly explode. Briana also asked Vincent to come to her with any problems he had. Were each others safe space, she told him. Virginia and Erik fought with Paige and Chris Outside of the drama between the newlyweds, two of the Married at First Sight couples Virginia and Erik and Paige and Chris also exchanged words and nearly came to blows at one point. Chris pushed back against Eriks insistence that he man up in the wake of his realization about his exs pregnancy. He complained that it was disrespectful and that his castmates concerns about his wife were fake. Later, Clara and Virginia confronted Chris about his treatment of Paige, resulting in an explosive exchange between Chris and Virginia. You are arrogant, Virginia snapped at Chris, who retorted, Youre a drunkard. Chris became even more incensed when Virginia and Clara told Paige theyd be there for her if she needed anything. Yall talking to my f*cking wife right now, he reminded them, pointing out that he needed privacy when it came to the touchy subject of his ex. At dinner that night, Chris apologized to Paige, as well as to Clara and Ryan. In turn, Clara apologized for crossing a boundary when it came to his privacy. But Erik and Virginia didnt let the feud go so quickly. When Erik arrived at dinner, he declared that Chris behavior toward his wife was unacceptable. I cant allow you to talk to her like that ever again, Erik announced, adding: If you need to say anything to her, you can go through me. Chris got up as if to fight Erik in response, but the two couples separated instead. While Paige acknowledged that Chris was wrong for speaking to the women the way he did, she placed some of the blame on Erik and Virginia for instigating more of a fight. Ultimately, there wasnt any closure between the Married at First Sight couples that night. And from the looks of the previews for upcoming episodes, the drama is going to get worse before it gets better. Kathmandu, February 15 The Ministry of Health and Population has informed that the countrys Covid-19 tally has reached 272,840 as of Monday afternoon. The ministry says 122 new cases were confirmed in the country in the past 24 hours. In this period, 3,541 swab samples were tested. So far, 2 million and 120,591 people have been tested in the country. As of today, 1,581 cases are active. Of the total cases so far, 269,204 people have achieved recovery whereas 2,055 died, according to the ministry. In the past 24 hours, 144 people have recovered whereas one death was reported. Over 50 people are quarantined across the country. The Taliban has told its members to avoid recruiting or harboring foreign fighters amid doubts about the militants' commitment to a deal reached with the United States last year that provided for severing links to terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda. All chiefs and mujahedin are directed to avoid arbitrary moves to bring in foreign nationals into their ranks or harbor them, the Taliban said in a statement on February 23. The group warned its fighters that anyone who makes such an attempt will be removed from their assignments, their group will be dissolved, and will be referred to the military affairs commission for further punishment. Under a U.S.-Taliban deal reached in February last year, all foreign forces are to leave Afghanistan by May 2021 in exchange for security guarantees from the militant group, including severing ties with the Al-Qaeda terrorist group and refusing to harbor any foreign terrorists. But the militants have been under criticism by Afghan and U.S. officials for continuing their ties with terrorist groups, in particular with Al-Qaeda. The Taliban has denied the accusations. We believe that the top leadership of Al-Qaeda is still under Taliban protection, Edmund Fitton-Brown, coordinator of the UN's Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Team, said earlier this month. According to the UN monitoring teams report last month, there are 200 to 500 Al-Qaeda fighters across about 11 Afghan provinces. The Taliban's move comes as peace talks between the group and Afghan government resumed on February 22 in Qatar after a hiatus of more than one month. With reporting by TOLOnews, AP, and BBC Federal Deputy Chief Medical Officer Professor Michael Kidd, who was told by Healthcare Australia the doctor had done all requisite training, is now investigating the incident. Mr Hunt was expecting a report from Healthcare Australia later on Wednesday. The doctor involved did the wrong thing and that is a case of human error, a case of unacceptable human error, the Health Minister said on Wednesday afternoon. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video I have asked the department to take action against the company and the doctor, from what is a clear breach on both fronts. Healthcare Australia did not respond to questions on whether they were aware the doctor had not completed the training when he was rostered to work. Professor Allen Cheng, Victorias Deputy Chief Health Officer and co-chair of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, said in light of Wednesdays revelations health providers needed to operate with hospital standards. There are systems to catch these sorts of errors happening. In hospitals, we have double-checking procedures and so on and I think that really needs to be looked at again in this case to make sure this doesnt happen again, he told ABCs 7.30 program on Wednesday. Professor Cheng said there the incident was a result of human and system error, and the government and contracted providers needed to learn from it. The two elderly aged care residents were unlikely to have adverse reactions to the overdose, Professor Cheng said. The Pfizer vaccine vials contain six doses and before the rollout of the vaccine, Health Department secretary Professor Brendan Murphy expressed concern the multi-dose vials presented a risk of vaccine wastage. Nobody in Australia that gives vaccines at the moment is experienced with multi-dose vials, Professor Murphy told a parliamentary committee in early February. Opposition health spokesman Mark Butler said Australians were entitled to expect that every vaccine provider had completed training. Opposition health spokesman Mark Butler said information about difficulties with multi-dose vials has been around for months. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen I dont know what desert island you will have been on not to know that these Pfizer vaccines were being delivered in multi-dose vials, he said. A casual observer of the debate around this over the last several weeks would have known that, weve known because we have no experience of multi-dose vials in Australia. In the first week of phase 1a of the vaccine rollout, 30,000 Pfizer doses were meant to be distributed to 190 towns for private healthcare providers to immunise residents of 240 homes. Healthcare Australia is providing vaccination services to aged care facilities in NSW and Queensland, while Aspen Medical is doing the same in Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT. Loading Healthcare Australia said the company would not finish vaccinating residents in NSW and Queensland facilities that were meant to have been done by Friday. We havent met that list, but we aim to make it up, a spokesman said. Last week, Mr Hunt and Professor Murphy were confident the 183,000 aged care residents in 2600 homes would be vaccinated within six weeks. It is OK to take four or five weeks to vaccinate all the aged care residents, Professor Murphy said at the time. On Wednesday morning, Mr Hunt said the rollout was going well so far. Im actually very happy with how this is going, he said. However, aged care providers said the rollout had already not gone to plan. Peninsula Villages chief executive Shane Neaves said staff in their Central Coast facility worked hard at the weekend to prepare the 300 residents for their first day of vaccinations. They were due to start at 8am on Tuesday but cancelled at the last minute. The residents are very disappointed, he said. Loading BaptistCares Bangor residents in Sydney were vaccinated on Wednesday, a spokesperson said, and its facility at Point Clare on the NSW Central Coast was scheduled for Thursday. However, the operator has received no information about its remaining centres, including one in Wagga Wagga, which was on the federal governments list of locations due to receive their vaccine this week. Other large aged care operators with facilities in locations on the list had not received information about when their vaccinations would occur, or been told if their doses were weeks or months away. The Healthcare Australia spokesman said the complexity of the rollout meant there needed to be flexibility and the company was still recruiting immunisation nurses. We are improving the efficiency of our program based on what we are learning about how long things take, he said. Mr Butler questioned how the government would vaccinate residents in more than 200 facilities before the end of the week. Almost 90 per cent of aged care homes that thought they would get the vaccine this week have not received it and were mid-week, he said. A spokesman for the federal Department of Health said data on the number of aged care residents who have been vaccinated is being collected and will be given to states and territories along with vaccination plans for coming weeks. with Rachael Dexter Photo: The Canadian Press FILE - In this Nov. 24, 2020, file photo President-elect Joe Biden listens as his Secretary of State nominee Tony Blinken speaks at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File) The Biden administration is moving slowly but surely toward reengaging with the Palestinians after a near total absence of official contact during former President Donald Trumps four years in office. As American officials plan steps to restore direct ties with the Palestinian leadership, Bidens national security team is taking steps to restore relations that had been severed while Trump pursued a Mideast policy focused largely around Israel, America's closest partner in the region. On Tuesday, for the second time in two days, Biden's administration categorically embraced a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, something that Trump had been purposefully vague about while slashing aid to the Palestinians and taking steps to support Israels claims to land that the Palestinians want for an independent state. The State Department said Tuesday that a U.S. delegation attended a meeting of a Norwegian-run committee that serves as a clearinghouse for assistance to the Palestinians. Although little-known outside foreign policy circles, the so-called Ad Hoc Liaison Committee has been influential in the peace process since Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords in 1993. During the discussion, the United States reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to advancing prosperity, security, and freedom for both Israelis and Palestinians and to preserve the prospects of a negotiated two-state solution in which Israel lives in peace and security alongside a viable Palestinian state, the State Department said in a statement. The United States underscored the commitment to supporting economic and humanitarian assistance and the need to see progress on outstanding projects that will improve the lives of the Palestinian people, while urging all parties to avoid unilateral steps that make a two-state solution more difficult to achieve, it said. U.S. participation in the meeting followed a Monday call between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israels foreign minister in which Blinken stressed that the new U.S. administration unambiguously supports a two-state solution. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is close to Trump, has eschewed the two-state solution. Biden spoke to Netanyahu last week for the first time as president after a delay that many found suspicious and suggestive of a major realignment in U.S. policy. Blinken, however, has spoken to Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi twice amid ongoing concern in Israel about Biden's intentions in the region, particularly his desire to reenter the Iran nuclear deal. In Monday's call, Blinken emphasized the Biden administrations belief that the two-state solution is the best way to ensure Israels future as a Jewish and democratic state, living in peace alongside a viable and democratic Palestinian state, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said. The Trump administration had presented its own version of a two-state peace plan, though it would have required significant Palestinian concessions on territory and sovereignty. The Palestinians, however, rejected it out of hand and accused the U.S. of no longer being an honest peace broker after Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, moved the U.S. embassy to the city from Tel Aviv, cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority, closed the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington and rescinded a long-standing legal opinion that Israeli settlement activity is illegitimate under international law, Central banks of China, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates as well as Hong Kong Monetary Authority have launched the Multiple Central Bank Digital Currency Bridge (m-CBDC Bridge) project to study the application of CBDC in the field of cross-border payment, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) said Wednesday. The Hong Kong branch of the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub has also extended its support to the research project, the PBOC added. The participants of the project will evaluate the feasibility of m-CBDC Bridge application in cross-border capital transfer, international trade settlement and foreign exchange transactions, among others. The research project will build an enabling environment for more central banks in Asia and other regions to jointly conduct research on enhancing cross-border payment capacity in order to solve problems such as low efficiency, low transparency and high costs, the PBOC said. Thunder Bay, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - White Metal Resources Corp. (TSXV: WHM) ("White Metal" or the "Company") is pleased to report that three diamond drill holes have now been completed on the Tower Stock Gold Property. To date, the Company has completed a total of 600 m of core drilling of the planned 4,000 m drilling program. The Tower Stock Project, which has not seen any exploration activity for more than eight years, is located about 40 km west-northwest of the port city of Thunder Bay, Ontario and consists of 81 Single Cell Mining Claims, 11 Single Cell Boundary Claims, four freehold land grants or patents, covering about 1 941 hectares. Michael Stares, President and CEO of White Metal, commented, "I am pleased with the progress to date and our team has been working hard preparing drill core samples for analysis. We still have numerous drill targets to test and look forward to reporting drill results as they come in. We are also eagerly awaiting results and interpretation of the DasVision IP Survey (see Company news release dated February 17, 2021), which we anticipate to be completed late March 2021. We're confident it will greatly benefit our exploration program in delineating known targets and generating new ones, as well as assisting in interpretation and modelling of the extensive gold mineralization system which characterizes the overall Tower Mountain Gold Project." The first two diamond drill holes were designed to test the H Zone area in which sampling from last fall's prospecting program outlined gold mineralization over a strike length of at least 100 m (see Company news release dated December 10, 2020). The H Zone drill holes intersected strong to moderate potassic alteration within a broad package of volcaniclastics over the entire length of the drill holes, with pyrite mineralization noted over widths up to 50 m. All samples from these two holes have recently been submitted to Activation Laboratories in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The third hole is an extension of TM-04-23, a hole drilled by Val Gold in 2004 in the UV Zone, and which was stopped at 300 m. White Metal has extended this drill hole a further 154 m to test for the possible down dip extension at 70 m below the U-V Zone, as intersected in historical hole TM-04-24, which returned 70.5 m (264.0-334.5 m) of 1.07 g/t Au. Core logging shows that mineralization, alteration and brecciation observed in the extension of TM-04-23 is very similar to the mineralized zone (264.0-334.5 m) noted in TM-04-24. The Company also announces that the TSX Venture Exchange has excepted the Anderson Property agreement submittal (see Company news release dated February 2, 2021). A Qualified Person ("QP") has not done sufficient enough work to verify the historical assay results and technical information reported herein. Technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Dr. Scott Jobin-Bevans (P.Geo.), Vice President Exploration and a Director of White Metal, who is a Qualified Person under the definitions established by the National Instrument 43-101. About White Metal Resources Corp (TSXV: WHM): White Metal Resources Corp is a junior exploration company exploring in Canada. For more information in regards to White Metal Resources Corp. you can visit the company's Web Page at www.whitemetalres.com. On behalf of the Board of Directors of White Metal Resources Corp. Michael Stares President & CEO, Director For further information contact: Michael Stares President & CEO, Director 684 Squier Street Thunder Bay, Ontario Canada, P7B 4A8 Phone: (807) 358-2420 THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE. The information contained herein contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements relate to information that is based on assumptions of management, forecasts of future results, and estimates of amounts not yet determinable. Any statements that express predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements." Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: risks related to failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis and on acceptable terms; risks related to the outcome of legal proceedings; political and regulatory risks associated with mining and exploration; risks related to the maintenance of stock exchange listings; risks related to environmental regulation and liability; the potential for delays in exploration or development activities or the completion of feasibility studies; the uncertainty of profitability; risks and uncertainties relating to the interpretation of drill results, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; risks related to the inherent uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses; results of prefeasibility and feasibility studies, and the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations; risks related to gold price and other commodity price fluctuations; and other risks and uncertainties related to the Company's prospects, properties and business detailed elsewhere in the Company's disclosure record. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. These forward looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. Actual events or results could differ materially from the Company's expectations or projections. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75351 Transcript REBECCA: Hi, and welcome to looped in. This is the Houston Chronicle podcast all about real estate. The dirt, the deals, the people, the places: It's all here. I'm Rebecca Schuetz, real estate reporter at the Houston Chronicle. Today, we're talking about the commission a buyer's agent earns. Buying and selling a home is the largest financial decision many people ever make. There are over 120,000 real estate agents in the state of Texas, according to the Texas realtors Association.So reducing commissions costs would have big impacts for both homeowners, who would likely save money, and for many people's livelihoods, because they'd likely make less per transaction. So buyers agent commissions are in the spotlight because of how they're set up. While the buyer's agent has a fiduciary responsibility to the homebuyer, their commission is actually largely set by the homeseller before it is entered into the MLS, which is the multiple listing service. That's how we can view homes on HAR.com.Even though this is the setup, buyer's agents are required to work in the homebuyer's best interest, which means they should not steer buyers to one house or another just because of what the commission is, which would be self interest. However, phone calls recorded by the brokerage Rex seem to show real estate agents doing just that. Rex credits the calls with a Department of Justice suit against the National Association of Realtors, so they've made some waves. We have Rex CEO, jack Ryan, here with us today. Hi, Jack. JACK: Hi, Rebecca. REBECCA: We also asked the National Association of Realtors if they would like to join, but instead they've sent along a statement, which I will read in a little bit. So to start, how does Rex work? Because it is sort of unique among brokerages in its model and its commission structure, right? JACK: Yeah, you know, it's only unique in residential real estate -- in no other industry does it work this way. Anyway, the way Rex works is you can hire us to sell a home. But you're not obligated to pay for a buy-side agent. If the buyer wants to pay for one, that's great. If they don't, that's great, too, but it's not mandated by us. That's why we're not not a member of the MLS, because that's barred, that's not allowed, if you're a member of the Houston Association of Realtors. That's how we're so different. REBECCA: I think what's so unique is that, yeah, usually the commission, paid for by the homeseller, is around 6 percent. And half of that goes to their own agent, half of that goes to the agent of whoever and ends up buying their home. And you're able to make that fee a lot smaller by saying, well we're paying, you know, the buyer's agent, and then the seller can negotiate with their agent -- which is also something you often see with for-sale-by-owner homes. I bought my home from -- it was a for-sale-by-owner -- and you know, I had to negotiate my commission directly with my agent. But that's hardly ever the way it works. And you're the only brokerage I've heard that does it as a brokerage. And as a result, what is your fee, generally? JACK: Two percent. So the way it generally works is that -- and how we're so different -- is it's 2 percent to list your home, and then oftentimes the buyer doesn't need an agent. So that's all there is: a 2 percent fee. Sometimes they do want to use an agent, and they pay for them themselves. But it's almost never a 3 percent fee. Once the buy-side agent has to get paid by the buyer for their work, the buyer says you want -- say, let's say it's a $400,000 home in Houston. So I found the home on my own online. Or I drove by it, the yard sign or however people are finding homes today. And I asked you to open up the door and let me in, and you want me to pay you $12,000 for that? Three percent of $400,000, that's a $12,000 service? You know, there's no reason it should cost $12,000 for that. So the buyer can negotiate with the buyer's agent, what they think the service is worth. Just like every other industry works: If you hire a painter, you negotiate with the painter for what that the service is worth, or a lawyer, or a bank or whatever you want to do. It's only in this industry where one side of the transaction has no choice but to pay the highest price and must hire somebody, and must pay the highest price to do so. It's just the most cockamamie world that I've ever seen. And we're changing that. REBECCA: I have a few quick questions. One is, is your fee 2 percent or 2.5? JACK: I'm glad you asked that question. The fees are 2 to 2.5 percent, depending upon if you're using us for other services, just like any other good company, the more services you use, the more of a discount you get because we're bundling those services to get you a better price and we discount our price if you use this for for more things. REBECCA: One person that I talked to when I was writing the story was one of your agents here in Houston, from when you were operating in Houston. She was talking about how, when she joined Rex, she didn't understand sort of all the implications of untied the listing agent and the buyer's agent, the way things are set up. So for example, one of the side effects is, because you have to say how much the buyer's agent will be paid in order to list on the MLS, you aren't going to be in the MLS. And as she was talking to people, and they're like, "Why aren't you in the MLS?" that comes with a lot of suspicion. REBECCA: I'm going to pause my conversation with Jack right here to play you a few things. Because instead of describing this suspicion, maybe it's easier to just let you listen. HOUSTON REAL ESTATE AGENT: I was just wondering if that's an actual real listing because it's not on HAR... REBECCA: That was a recording of a Houston real estate agent calling a Rex agent about a listing. Also, while we're paused, I think this is a good place to read the National Association of Realtors' statement I mentioned at the beginning: "Every REALTOR commits to a strict code of ethics based on professionalism, consumer protection, fairness and transparency. Any alleged violation of those ethics by one of our members should be reported immediately to the local REALTOR association for further investigation. As advocates for consumers, we're proud to be associated with the MLS system that puts consumers first and benefits home buyers, sellers and small business brokerages." End of statement. So what they're saying is if you think an ethical violation is going on, you should report it. The real estate agent I spoke to said that she had run into problems, including agents who said they weren't going to bring their buyers to see her homes. Here's another recorded call of a Rex agent encountering that issue here in Houston: HOUSTON REAL ESTATE AGENT 2: So I won't get any commission unless my buyer wants to do it? REX AGENT: Right, so your buyer will compensate you for the time that you put into the sale of the home. Because our owners are not obligated to pay that out. HOUSTON REAL ESTATE AGENT 2: Okay. Well then thank you, I will not be showing them this property. Thank you. Bye bye. REBECCA: And back to the recorded conversation with Jack. REBECCA: So she was telling me about some of her surprises. I was curious if you had any sort of comments on these challenges you face and why you reached out to the Department of Justice. JACK: Yeah, well, so the people who are saying were unprofessional and never the consumer. It was always the agents who are protecting their business, and they're saying it's so unprofessional. By the way, this happened to me in the stock brokerage business. When I was at Goldman Sachs, if you dared quote us a share at less than an eighth or a quarter, it was considered unprofessional. If you wanted to quote IBM stock at 72.08 rather than 72 and an eighth or 72 and a quarter, it was like how dare you be unprofessional? Well, the only unprofessionalism of it was that they didn't want their fees to be reduced. If you start quoting things in decimal points, as opposed to eighths, that 12 cents can get compressed really quickly. So it was considered, just like you're saying that she was told it was unprofessional that we're not members of the MLS. It's not the consumer saying that. It's the agent saying we're unprofessional. Just like they did it in the stock business until the DOJ said, "No more. No, there's no reason why you're quoting these prices for shares in only eighths or quarters, other than preserving that spread for yourself." Right. And you mentioned in your article, the DOJ action against all the Wall Street trading firms in the late 1990s. It's amazing to me that the National Association of Realtors is setting the terms of competition among the Realtors. It's a trade group! REBECCA: Setting the terms of cooperation, right? They're saying that all their members, when they're working together, should make sure that they will know how much they're getting paid. But not only the Department of Justice, there have been other lawsuits sort of alleging that this has an upward pressure on prices. JACK: Yeah, well, but it's not just a lawsuit, there's been a number of economists, who are from very famous universities who've written. Not only that, but just think about the job mobility. Let's say you want to move from Detroit, Michigan to Houston, Texas, because there's a great job for you there in the oil world, or Tesla's moving a plant near you. And you're a welder in Michigan and you want to move there to advance your family's success and net worth and reach your full potential as a welder or anything you want to do. Well, the value of your home in Detroit might be the value of your mortgage, just generally speaking, given what's happened to the Detroit housing market. So your house was worth $300,000 and your mortgage is worth $300,000. If I want to sell the house, I have to pay $18,000, which I may not have, to a Realtor, or I can't move. I can't free up my family to move to a higher and better life for myself because I can't pay the Realtor fee. And by the way, carpenters, plumbers, electricians: All their jobs are clustered around the purchase and sale of a home. Most of those jobs occur when you move into a home, or prepare your home to sell or you're moving into home and want to fix it up for you. Well, those jobs are being suppressed because these high fees suppress the number of transactions, they're being suppressed. It's not just the trillion dollars being moved for middle class Americans, it's all the friction they're causing that's not allowing people to reach their full potential as humans. REBECCA: Yeah, you cited some pretty big numbers. And I think that's why this is like such an important issue and why people are so passionate about it. That would be like a lot of savings by homeowners. It's also a very big industry. At the beginning, I wanted to mention how many people are real estate agents, because there are hundreds of thousands in this country. When I wrote the story, people are afraid. REBECCA: This is a call between a Houston real estate agent and Rex: HOUSTON REAL ESTATE AGENT 3: The real estate game is changing. And I'm not -- I mean, it's putting away my profession. So I'm not in favor of it. So I can't help you to sell something that's wiping out my profession. REBECCA: As you've mentioned, when they do negotiate directly with buyers, and this is something people say on the phone calls too, when they do negotiate directly with buyers, there tends to be a compression of their commission, right. They do tend to make less money. JACK: Right. REBECCA: So when people are saying that, you know, they're afraid for their livelihoods, I've also heard people say that they're afraid that customers might do something that's not in their own best interest. They might opt for a really cheap service and get screwed in ways that they don't understand. What is your response to these fears? JACK: Well, you know, I think change always makes people nervous. And, you know, of course, there's been so much change, whether that's what's going on in the world of -- anything. Whether it's, you know, there's still very good travel agents out there, they're still very good stockbrokers. But you better prove your worth to the consumer. So of course there are going to be some people who will love the transition to more of a free market, because the number of transactions will go up from 6 million probably to 12 to 15 million of homes per year. So there's going to be a lot more deals. But the cost structure is going to come way down because there's no need to be charging people 6 percent. REBECCA: And they go hand in hand, right, the reason the number of transactions is going up is because the cost of the transaction is going down. If you don't have to pay that much money to move from one house to another, you might do it more often. JACK: Of course, you know, and Rebecca, I know it sounds like a tautology if you've ever taken, you know, classes in economics, like almost all of your listeners have or things like that. But just to put it in real life: When it was 12 to 25 cents to trade shares in the late '80s, early '90s, on Wall Street, a big day for us was when 100 million shares traded a day. "Oh my gosh! One hundred million shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange today. Big day!" And when the fees went down to two cents, it was two billion shares traded per day. It wasn't linear, by the way, it is more like an algebraic curve or algorithmic curve in terms of as the fees go down. REBECCA: And, so there have already begun to be some changes, right? You said that part of the reason for the Department of Justice investigation was because of these phone calls you recorded. What have been some of the outcomes of that? JACK: It's not against the rules right now, the buy-side agent can tell the buyer: "Oh, don't worry, my services are free." Well, no, it's not free. It's right there in the closing document, it says you're getting 3 percent of this $400,000 home. You're getting $12,000. They oftentimes say, "Well, don't worry about it, the seller's paying it. They agreed to the 6 percent fee, so they're paying for it." No, they didn't agree to it. You told them that they had to pay a 3 percent fee to the buy-side agent to get a buyer to show up. Anyway, so the DOJ also said no more telling your buy-side customers, "This buy-side agent is free." One last funny thing that you'd mentioned. We were licensed and are licensed by the state of Texas and the 15, 20 states that we're in, to show homes. We passed the test in terms of the knowledge test, and we passed the background checks. So the point you were making before, Rebecca, we have a buyer and say, "Hey, I'd like to go see this home -- would you help me do it?" On the buy side, we would just rebate that 3 percent fee. If we're helping a customer on the buy-side look we'd say, "We're not, you shouldn't be paying 3 percent. You found the home on your own, you did most work, we'll help you on the stuff from here. But we'll just give you $7,000, $8,000, $4,000, $5,000 back -- usually half of that commission that was being offered to us, we just write it in a check right back to the buyers. So what they did was, with that lockbox, was say you can't get access to the home. That lockbox, that little keypad, you push when you try to get into the home. And the DOJ said no longer is that possible. If you're a registered agent with the state, like we are in Texas, no longer can these MLS firms bar us from showing the home as long as we're a registered agent in the state. So any non-MLS company -- which there's only one -- but any non-MLS company, as long as you're registered by the state as a licensed agent, must have access to that lockbox. REBECCA: Yeah, so there's been a settlement. It's still in the works. It's not been implemented yet. You know, these things are all sort of just coming down the pipeline. So they've agreed to these changes. After these changes are enacted, what do you think will change? JACK: Well, the fees are gonna start coming down. It will. Because, all of a sudden, we can start showing homes in places like Houston or places like, you know, other cities very quickly. We can get into the home as fast as anyone else can. And why would someone buy a home, that would be $5,000 or $6,000 less through Rex? So I think our competition is going to eventually have to start competing, which they haven't had to do, really, since its inception, on service and price. Also, when you're not allowed to tell your customer that your services are free -- hard to compete with free if the customer believes it, right? What's going to happen with all this transparency -- consumers are really smart. And once they understand the facts, they make very rational decisions. And so the transparency is going to resolve itself the way it always does in markets where there's freedom of information. Is that you get a market clearing price that's borne by competitive reasons, not because someone from on high is dictating that there should be a 6 percent fee for the service. So we know it's coming down from here -- how far it goes down, I don't know. But it's going to be great for the Houston consumer because home prices keep going up. Well, what if that 6 percent tax on a home got shrunk to 2 percent. Well ever home in Houston got 4 percent cheaper. That's a big help to the shortage of housing in certain parts of Houston. So I think it's going to be a huge advantage for the consumer. It will be a huge advantage for agents if they just give up the way they've been doing business for 70 years and get into the new way of doing business. And it's going to be a huge benefit for the country when every person in American can move to where they think they can reach their full flower as a human. So I think it's going to be so advantageous for so many people in our economy. REBECCA: Yeah, it's interesting that because you said homes will get 4 percent cheaper. And I think one of the complicated things about this transaction is -- it'd be hard to track exactly where these savings go, right? A lot of it might go to the current homeowner, some of it might trickle down to the homebuyer. I'm not sure how you would measure that, exactly. JACK: There's this thing called the incidence of a tax. So if you let's say I was gonna put a 10 percent sales tax on alcohol. Who pays that? Is that the, you know, retailer, or is the consumer? How they figure it out? Well, if there's a huge demand for that service, like it's almost a monopoly, then the consumer pays for all of it. But if it's like corn or some commodity, then it's almost always the producer. And so it kind of depends on the demand curve in a city as to when you put a tax on something who's paying what percent of the tax. REBECCA: So like if it's a buyer's or seller's market? JACK: Exactly. Exactly right, and it applies to any product. REBECCA: Now, it's a seller's market. So the seller would be saving that money. JACK: Right. Yes, exactly. Right. It would change from time to time. But if you talk to an economist at Rice and said, Hey, I'd like to, can you take me through who's paying for that tax -- it's called the tax incidence study -- they could tell you that in any one market. It's a well-described economic analysis about who pays the incidence of a tax. REBECCA: Okay. Oh, that's really interesting. Okay, so you think that the changes have already sort of started coming down the pipeline will lead to lower commissions. For the real estate agents listening what does this mean? In order to compete in a world where they need more volume in order to make up for the lower fees, does that mean they need third-party technology providers to automate more of their job? Does that mean that they have to join a company like Rex that can provide that infrastructure? I feel like that's a question on a lot of people's mind: What would that future look like? JACK: This is my best guess. And we're building to this guess. But you know, the problem with the residential real estate agent business today is you get no salary for the most part, for almost all of our competitors. And you'll only get 70 percent of the commissions of whatever commissions you generate. It's basically the last door-to-door sales force left in the US. But the flip side of that is you're paying 30 percent of whatever business you generate to the local franchisee for, you know, pick your firm, I'm just going to pick Coldwell Banker, but I'm not picking on Coldwell Banker, but you got paid 30 percent of your fees to them. So in a world where you can do a lot more transactions but you don't have to pay a 30 percent fee, you can make a lot more money. What platform do you use, then, to have your business, if you're an individual agent? And we're building out that platform for individual agents. So, we could help, with our platform -- who wants to spend an hour on the phone, calling up five people and playing a round robin trying to schedule that visit between the inspector and the mortgage person and the seller and the buyer, especially given how busy we are? We need to say, hey, just install this bot. And the bot, through text messages, reaches out to those four or five people and keeps suggesting new times, until everyone can agree. Well, that saves a lot of time, and their job just got better. Because you're not spending your time doing kind of robotic, mindless activities and being so frustrated, because you're calling four or five people trying to agree on a time. Imagine how frustrating that would be, and what a bad job that would be. Well, if you get rid of that and use your human empathy and your human intelligence to solve real problems -- like there's an easement in the backyard, and we've got to figure out who has the ability to cross your backyard, which we're working on, but it won't be solved for a while in terms of solving that through AI as opposed to human. Now you yourself as an agent or reaching your full value as a human to doing things that only humans can do, not doing stuff that is robotic. So we're taking a lot of the robotic activities away from the agents at Rex. And we can also deploy that to people who say, "Look, I don't want to be part of Rex, but I would love to have my own business as I do today. But I don't want to pay, you know, 30 percent of whatever my revenues are. I'll just pay Rex $300 a month and be on their platform." Their platform being the one that does all the robotic activities for you -- everything from doing the digital advertising for the house, if you want us to do it, to scheduling the tours. But it's not humans. You have the technology, we just deploy it to you and we'll provide the backend, but it's all for you. REBECCA: So there will probably be a smaller pool of real estate agents, some may leave for other industries, and the ones who stay will up their transaction volume partly through technology. My last question is just these phone calls that we've been discussing. Can you tell me a little bit about some of these phone calls that you shared with the DOJ? JACK: Yeah, I can, of course. The buyer agent is supposed to have a fiduciary duty to the buyer. Because you heard from those tapes, it's not everybody, but it's enough to make it a little not great for consumers. You heard in the tapes, that the buyer's agents are saying, "Unless you pay me the money, I'm not bringing my customer to see your home." Well, number one, that's a breach of fiduciary duty, you're supposed to be helping the buyer, not looking out for yourself. But second, that whole problem goes away if the person was paid by the buyer. They can only steer people away from homes, for economic reasons, if they're not being paid by their customer. REBECCA: Yeah. So that's one thing that hasn't been impacted yet. JACK: You know, one thing that the DOJ said is here's the four or five things we can agree with, agree with with the National Association of Realtors, but we're not finished. So I can't say for sure what's gonna happen next. But this isn't over. REBECCA: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to sort of walk us through some of the things you've gone through and some of the things you're expecting to unfold. I really appreciate it. Thank you, listeners, for tuning in. If you ever want to send an idea for a podcast or just say hi, you can reach out on Facebook or Twitter. I'm @raschuetz. That's R.A. Schuetz. And on our show notes, if you go to houstonchronicle.com/loopedin, we'll have links to the story and some of the recorded calls that we mentioned here. Special thanks to our guest, Jack Ryan, and to the National Association of Realtors for sending in a statement. Thanks to our editors, Jonathan Diamond and Rob Gavin. Thanks to Ferill Gibbs and his band All the Kimonos for the theme music and thanks to Scott Kingsley for producing. Until next time. Visibility for availability of vaccines for entire month of June provided in advance to States/UTs: Centre Want to vaccinate Bengal free of cost before polls: Mamata writes to PM Modi India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Feb 24: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has sought Prime Minister Narendra Modi's help in procuring COVID-19 vaccines so that entire state can be vaccinated before the upcoming state assembly elections. A rapid vaccination programme is needed immediately for the interests of health and well-being of all concerned, Banerjee said in a letter to Modi. "West Bengal being an election-going state, we are required to reach out practically to every government and para-statal employee on an urgent basis to make the election safe. However, the worrying point is that, in the ensuing elections, the people in general will be forced to go to the polling stations without any vaccination coverage," she wrote to Modi. "We feel that it is equally important to reach out to them with a rapid vaccination programme immediately for the interest of health and well-being of all concerned," her letter said. "We would request you to kindly take up the matter with appropriate authority, so that the state government is able to purchase the vaccines from designated point(s) on top priority basis, because the West Bengal government wants to provide vaccination free of cost to all the people," she wrote. Election to the 294-member West Bengal assembly is due in April-May. The Election Commission has already started inoculation of its personnel involved in holding polls in the state and the process will get over before the elections start. Till Tuesday at least eight lakh health workers and frontline workers were vaccinated in West Bengal, officials said. Incidentally BJP, which has emerged as the main opposition to the ruling TMC in the state, had in its manifesto for the assembly poll in neighbouring Bihar promised to provide free COVID-19 vaccine to every person if the National Democratic Alliance returns to power. Mobile telecommunications leaders in the Philippines, Smart Communications, Inc, has granted the wishes of K-drama fans by reuniting Hyun Bin and Son Ye Jin in a recent television advertisement. The SMART ad marks the first reunion between the two Hallyu stars after their hugely successful drama series, "Crash Landing On You." In the one-minute ad, sees the two stars speeding around a crowded city aided by 5G technology. Hyun Bin is first seen driving a black car with a motorcycle racing beside him, with the driver later revealed to be none other than Son Ye Jin. The ad featured snippets from Crash Landing on You in the background, highlighting the telecom service provider's seamless streaming capabilities. Set to the latest Ben & Ben track, "Inevitable," the pair gives a positive vibe of achieving the impossible, "much like how subscribers are able to achieve more when they are connected to Smart 5G," according to a press release from Smart Communications. "Finally! The wait is over for all of us K-fans who have been wishing for Hyun Bin and Son Ye Jin to be together again," exclaimed Jane J. Basas, Senior Vice-President and Head of Consumer Wireless Business at Smart. "We heard your clamor, and we read all your #InSmartWeTrust posts so we knew this was inevitable. We had to make this happen. You are all part of this sweet journey, and we owe this to you, our dear subscribers." A Rising Global Act Ben & Ben, the folk-pop/ pop-rock act based in the Philippines, has been ranked as the most-streamed local act by Spotify for the past year. Since forming in 2015 as The Benjamins, the musical group led by the twins Paolo Benjamin and Miguel Benjamin Guico have been constant hitmakers with "Ride Home," "Leaves," "Maybe the Night," "Pagtingin," and more. Aside from their homeland, the Philippines, Ben & Ben has also started trending in various parts of the world, including South Korea. In July 2020, the nine-member group held the first, second, third, sixth, and seventh spots of the Melon Realtime Search Chart, a tracking list from one of South Korea's largest music platforms. As for the SMART advertisement, Ben & Ben specifically wrote the song "Inevitable" for the ad featuring the Crash Landing on You stars Hyun Bin and Son Ye Jin. A Leader in 5G in the Philippines Standing at the forefront of 5G implementation in the Philippines, SMART continuously rolls out its latest ultrafast network. It has begun its campaign across strategic locations in the archipelago - Metro Manila, Cavite, Laguna, New Clark City in Pampanga, Rizal, Cebu, Davao, Iloilo, and in Boracay. Furthermore, the telecommunications service provider has teamed up with global smartphone manufacturers including Huawei and Samsung to offer 5G-ready devices that optiimize the technology under its Smart Signature 5G Plans. ATLANTA, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Invesco Ltd. (NYSE: IVZ), a leading global asset management firm, today announced the launch of the Invesco International Developed Dynamic Multifactor ETF (IMFL). The addition of IMFL broadens the firm's dynamic multifactor suite, which currently includes ETFs that access large-cap and small-cap US equities to include international equities. Invesco's dynamic multifactor ETFs adapt and evolve factor holdings as the market environment changes. "Invesco has a strong track record of offering dynamic multi-factor ETFs that adapt and evolve factor holdings as the market environment changes," said Anna Paglia, Global Head of ETFs and Indexed Strategies at Invesco. "Clients will now have access to international equities across geographies through an easily accessible single suite of ETFs." IMFL seeks to track the investment results of the FTSE Developed ex US Invesco Dynamic Multifactor Index1, a rules-based index that re-weights securities to align rewarded factors according to economic cycles and overall market conditions. Factor exposures are targeted according to the four stages of the business cycle; recovery, expansion, slowdown and contraction. IMFL's underlying index is powered by a proprietary methodology for identifying economic and market sentiment indicators, which leverages intellectual capital of Invesco Investment Solutions in partnership with Invesco's indexing business. IMFL and its index are reconstituted and rebalanced as frequently as monthly. The FTSE Developed ex US Index, the parent index of the FTSE Developed ex US Invesco Dynamic Multifactor Index, is comprised of large-capitalization (85%) and mid-capitalization (15%) stocks of companies located in 24 developed market countries around the world, excluding the United States. Other ETFs included in the dynamic multifactor suite are Invesco Russell 1000 Dynamic Multifactor ETF (OMFL) with a 5-star Morningstar Overall rating out of 1230 funds in the Large Blend Category and the Invesco Russell 2000 Dynamic Multifactor ETF (OMFS), with 5-star Morningstar Overall rating out of 630 funds in the Small Blend Category. Morningstar ratings are based on risk adjusted return as of Jan. 31, 20212. These funds also leverage the same intellectual capital of the Invesco Investment Solutions team. About Invesco Ltd. Invesco Ltd. (TickerNYSE: IVZ) is a global independent investment management firm dedicated to delivering an investment experience that helps people get more out of life. Our distinctive investment teams deliver a comprehensive range of active, passive and alternative investment capabilities. With offices in more than 20 countries, Invesco managed US$1.35 trillion in assets on behalf of clients worldwide as of December 31, 2020. For more information, visit www.invesco.com/corporate. About FTSE Russell: FTSE Russell is a global index leader that provides innovative benchmarking, analytics and data solutions for investors worldwide. FTSE Russell calculates thousands of indexes that measure and benchmark markets and asset classes in more than 70 countries, covering 98% of the investable market globally. FTSE Russell is wholly owned by London Stock Exchange Group. For more information, visit www.ftserussell.com. 1 Index returns do not represent Fund returns. An investor cannot invest directly in an index. 2 OMFL received 5 stars for the overall and three years, N/A stars for the five years and N/A stars for the 10 years. The fund was rated among 1230, 1230, N/A, N/A funds within the Morningstar Large Blend Category of the overall period, three, five and 10 years, respectively. OMFS received 5 stars for the overall and three years, N/A stars for the five years and N/A stars for the 10 years. The fund was rated among 630, 630, N/A, N/A funds within the Morningstar Large Blend Category of the overall period, three, five and 10 years, respectively. Morningstar ratings are as of Jan. 31, 2021, Morningstar ratings are based on a risk-adjusted return measure that accounts for variation in a fund's monthly performance, placing more emphasis on the downward variations and rewarding consistent performance. Open-end mutual funds and exchange-traded funds are considered a single population for comparison purposes. Ratings are calculated for funds with at least a three year history. The overall rating is derived from a weighted average of three-, five- and 10-year rating metrics, as applicable, excluding sales charges and including fees and expenses. Had fees not been waived and/or expenses reimbursed currently or in the past, the Morningstar rating would have been lower. The top 10% of funds in a category receive five stars, the next 22.5% four stars, the next 35% three stars, the next 22.5% two stars and the bottom 10% one star. Ratings for other share classes may differ due to different performance characteristics. 2019 Morningstar, Inc. All rights reserved. The information contained herein is proprietary to Morningstar and/or its content providers. It may not be copied or distributed and is not warranted to be accurate, complete or timely. Neither Morningstar nor its content providers are responsible for any damages or losses arising from any use of this information. Past performance cannot guarantee comparable future results. About Risk There are risks involved with investing in ETFs, including possible loss of money. Shares are not actively managed and are subject to risks similar to those of stocks, including those regarding short selling and margin maintenance requirements. Ordinary brokerage commissions apply. The Fund's return may not match the return of the Underlying Index. The Fund is subject to certain other risks. Please see the current prospectus for more information regarding the risk associated with an investment in the Fund. Investments focused in a particular industry or sector are subject to greater risk, and are more greatly impacted by market volatility, than more diversified investments. The risks of investing in securities of foreign issuers can include fluctuations in foreign currencies, political and economic instability, and foreign taxation issues. The performance of an investment concentrated in issuers of a certain region or country, such as the Japan and the European Union, is expected to be closely tied to conditions within that region and to be more volatile than more geographically diversified investments. Stocks of medium-sized companies tend to be more vulnerable to adverse developments, may be more volatile, and may be illiquid or restricted as to resale. Momentum style of investing is subject to the risk that the securities may be more volatile than the market as a whole or returns on securities that have previously exhibited price momentum are less than returns on other styles of investing. The Fund is non-diversified and may experience greater volatility than a more diversified investment. The Fund may engage in frequent trading of its portfolio securities in connection with the rebalancing or adjustment of the Underlying Index. A value style of investing is subject to the risk that the valuations never improve or that the returns will trail other styles of investing or the overall stock markets. FTSE International Limited. FTSE is a trademark of the London Stock Exchange Group plc and its group undertakings and is used by FTSE under license. FTSE has been licensed for use in the Underlying Index by the Adviser. The Fund is not in any way sponsored, endorsed, sold or promoted by FTSE, Frank Russell Company, or the London Stock Exchange Group companies ("LSEG") (together the "Licensor Parties") and none of the Licensor Parties make any claim, prediction, warranty or representation whatsoever, expressly or impliedly, either as to (i) the results to be obtained from the use of the Underlying Index, (ii) the figure at which the Underlying Index is said to stand at any particular time on any particular day or otherwise, or (iii) the suitability of the Underlying Index for the purpose to which it is being put in connection with the Fund. None of the Licensor Parties have provided or will provide any financial or investment advice or recommendation in relation to the Underlying Index to the Adviser or to its clients. The Underlying Index is calculated by FTSE or its agent. None of the Licensor Parties shall be (a) liable (whether in negligence or otherwise) to any person for any error in the Underlying Index or (b) under any obligation to advise any person of any error therein. Shares are not individually redeemable and owners of the Shares may acquire those Shares from the Fund and tender those Shares for redemption to the Fund in Creation Unit aggregations only, typically consisting of 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, 75,000, 80,000, 100,000, 150,000 or 200,000 Shares. Before investing, investors should carefully read the prospectus and/or summary prospectus and carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. For this and more complete information about the fund(s), investors should ask their advisors for a prospectus/summary prospectus or visit invesco.com/fundprospectus. Contact: Stephanie Diiorio, [email protected], 212.278.9037 SOURCE Invesco Ltd. Related Links https://www.invesco.com ARLINGTON, Va., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Tsymmetry, a leading information technology and business services provider to the Federal Government, announced the appointment of Courtney Bristow as Chief Operating Officer and Thomas Sullivan as Chief Growth Officer. As proven federal solutions experts with 50 years of combined experience, Tsymmetry continues to enhance their executive team with the addition of Bristow and Sullivan. Courtney Bristow, Tsymmetry Chief Operating Officer Thomas Sullivan, Tsymmetry Chief Growth Officer Prior to joining Tsymmetry, Bristow most recently served as Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at TeraThink, where she focused both internally on company operations and strategic projects, as well as externally leading client delivery engagements and agile capability development. Bristow has a proven track record of spear heading successful complex IT transformations and leading agile adoption for clients across the Federal, state, local and commercial sectors, with significant experience serving the DHS mission. In her role as Chief Operating Officer, Bristow will work with Tsymmetry's executive team to further instill a culture of continuous improvement and optimize operational performance. "This is an exciting time to join the Tsymmetry team, and I am looking forward to creating new opportunities for us to partner with our clients to deliver transformational work. As a people-focused leader, my goal is to make this the best place to work for our employees, empowering them to see their full potential.", said Bristow. Sullivan joins Tsymmetry following his service as Vice President of Capture and Proposals at LTS, helping the firm win new work and new clients. Throughout his career, Sullivan has helped secure key wins in the Federal, State and Local space, resulting in the award of strategic GWACs, IDIQs, large single award contracts, as well as $100+M task orders. Sullivan has successfully transitioned small business firms to the mid-tier government space by capturing, proposing and winning full-and-open contracts. Bringing his growth mindset to the Tsymmetry team, Sullivan will focus on developing and implementing strategic and tactical growth, account and pipeline expansion, and establish partnerships to build winning captures and proposals for client focused solutions. Sullivan expressed, "I was drawn to Tsymmetry by the outstanding CPARs, the deep client intimacy, and project teams that make all that happen. Tsymmetry is very employee focused, which is refreshing, since this is becoming a very difficult trait to find among government contractors." As Chief Growth Officer Sullivan will jointly work with Tsymmetry Chief Executive Officer, Jeff Affuso, and Chief Operating Officer Courtney Bristow, to drive a cultural change throughout the firm to establish a business development mindset and capability. "We are excited to have Courtney and Tom join Tsymmetry. Excited for our people, our clients, and our partners. Courtney and Tom complement Tsymmetry's strong performance-oriented culture, and their impressive leadership and capabilities will achieve our growth, delivery excellence, and operations results," said Jeff Affuso, Chief Executive Officer of Tsymmetry. About Tsymmetry Tsymmetry provides information technology (IT) and business services to the Federal Government, focused on the National Security and Public Safety domains. The company specializes in delivering application development, integrated data analytics, network engineering, infrastructure support and program management support services. Headquartered in Arlington, VA, with offices in Santa Fe (NM), and Melbourne (FL), Tsymmetry supports mission-critical programs in the U.S. as well as multiple OCONUS locations around the world. The company has a strong reputation of deploying innovative technology solutions and helping its clients achieve operational excellence through its mission of "accelerating good government". SOURCE Tsymmetry Yangon: The chorus of banging pots and pans begins in Chinatown at about 8pm. The district in Myanmars commercial city of Yangon is normally festooned with bright red lanterns to celebrate Chinese New Year. But when the Year of the Ox arrived in mid-February, the usual festive atmosphere was gone - replaced by a tension in the air. Demonstrators display a picture of Chinese president Xi Jinping, with a message requesting not to support military coup during a protest against the military coup in Mandalay, Myanmar. Credit:AP Here, and across the country, swelling ranks of young ethnic Chinese protesters are joining mass rallies against the junta that abruptly deposed Aung San Suu Kyis government. Many are united by rumours that China is helping the regime install a repressive new internet system that will severely restrict online freedoms behind a Great Firewall. Eager to show opposition to Beijing meddling, they gather outside the embassy, some displaying posters reading Myanmar-born Chinese oppose the military coup. The views expressed by public comments are not those of this company or its affiliated companies. Please note by clicking on "Post" you acknowledge that you have read the TERMS OF USE and the comment you are posting is in compliance with such terms. Your comments may be used on air. Be polite. Inappropriate posts or posts containing offsite links, images, GIFs, inappropriate language, or memes may be removed by the moderator. Job listings and similar posts are likely automated SPAM messages from Facebook and are not placed by WFMZ-TV. A resolution allowing voters to change the way Tennessees Attorney General is selected was approved on Tuesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senate Joint Resolution 1, sponsored by Senate Republican Caucus Chairman Ken Yager (R-Kingston), calls for a transparent nomination process by the Tennessee Supreme Court in selecting the State Attorney General, followed by a confirmation vote of the nominee by a majority of both houses of the Tennessee General Assembly. This is one of the most important appointed positions in the state, said Senator Yager. The State Attorney General has over 340 employees and a budget of over $50 million, not to mention the important decisions that are made which affect the lives of the people of Tennessee. The 1870 constitution required Supreme Court judges be elected by Tennessee voters. Senator Yager said the current system of appointing justices means the selection of the State Attorney General is twice removed from the public. Tennessee is the only state in which the State Supreme Court appoints the attorney general. The votes taken by the court on nominees are not currently disclosed to the public. The reason for this legislation is two-fold, Senator Yager said. It will provide for a more transparent process in the selection of nominees. The second is that confirmation by the General Assembly will make the process accountable to the people by giving elected officials a role in the process. This proposal adheres to the intention of the authors of our 1870 State Constitution, while keeping intact the current nomination role for the judiciary, he continued. The resolution would require the votes of the Tennessee Supreme Court justices to be held in open court with recorded votes. Once the nomination is made, the legislature would have 60 days to go through the confirmation process. In the event that the candidate is rejected, then the court would have 60 days to make another nomination. The resolution, which was approved by the 111th General Assembly in 2019, must receive a two-thirds majority of the 112th General Assembly under the Tennessee Constitution. Once on the ballot, constitutional amendments must receive a majority of votes cast in the gubernatorial election in 2022. Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Italy should brace for another month of restrictions due to the threat posed by new strains of the coronavirus, its Health Minister Roberto Speranza said Wednesday. The government is expected to adopt a new decree in the coming days, extending a three-tier system of regional restrictions currently set to expire on March 5. "We are in no epidemiological condition today to relax the measures against the pandemic," Speranza said, indicating that curbs would be extended until April 6. "Telling the country the truth is an obligation we must all strongly feel, even when this truth is uncomfortable," the minister said. He noted that 25 Italian towns or provinces had recently gone into lockdown due to outbreaks of British, South African or Brazilian strains of the coronavirus. The faster rate of transmission of the new variants "makes it even more essential for the country to raise its guard," Speranza said. "It is still possible to contain their spread, as long as very rigorous measures are adopted and quickly enforced," he added, referring to localised lockdowns. The situation is particularly critical in the southern Molise region, where the army was due to step in to provide extra intensive care hospital beds. Italy's new prime minister, former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, has made fighting the pandemic his number one priority. Italy, the first country in Europe to be struck by the coronavirus pandemic one year ago, has paid a heavy price during the last 12 months. More than 96,000 people with COVID-19 have died, while the economy plunged by nearly nine percent in 2020, the worst recession since World War II. Meanwhile, the country's vaccination campaign has struggled, mostly due to Europe-wide supply problems. Only some 1.3 million people have been fully vaccinated so far. Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak 2021 AFP John Lewis has said it is intent on resuming deliveries to Northern Ireland after tweaking its IT system to distinguish between goods meant for here and goods meant for Great Britain. It comes as unionist unrest over the Irish Sea border continues and the EU-UK joint committee on the Northern Ireland Protocol meets this afternoon to discuss whether grace periods waiving customs and regulatory checks on goods travelling from Great Britain can be extended. Despite an exemption from customs procedures until April on parcels worth under 135, John Lewis stopped sending packages to Northern Ireland at the end of last year. Other retailers, such as Dunelm, also suspended deliveries and Amazon stopped sending wine, beer and spirits to customers in Northern Ireland. It is understood, however, that John Lewis will announce a date for the resumption of deliveries within the next few weeks. A spokeswoman said yesterday: We are really sorry we have had to temporarily pause our deliveries to Northern Ireland and for any inconvenience this may have caused. As a UK-only retailer, the post-Brexit arrangements require us to make a range of changes to our systems so that they can automatically differentiate between deliveries to Northern Ireland and other locations in the UK. These changes are time-consuming as they need to take effect across our unusually wide assortment of products. We really value our customers in Northern Ireland and look forward to serving them again once our systems alterations are complete. Aodhan Connolly, the director of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium, and other industry representatives discussed the grace periods and operation of the protocol at a meeting of the Assembly Economy Committee this morning. He said trading regulations on parcels were only revealed 18 hours before the end of the Brexit transition period on December 31. A lot of (companies) have had to set up whole new systems, even some of the biggest guys, because they dont usually deliver outside of the UK customs union and single market, he added. To be fair to them, they have worked very, very hard to come back online. Speaking ahead of the meeting of the EU-UK joint committee, Maros Sefcovic, the vice-president of the European Commission, said: We will be going into that meeting with a constructive, solution-driven attitude. The EU has always been and remains fully committed to the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement and to the proper implementation of the protocol protecting the gains of the peace process, maintaining stability, avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland and preserving the integrity of the single market. At the same time, to make the Protocol work on the ground, we need to act jointly to minimise the impact of Brexit on the everyday lives of all communities in both Ireland and Northern Ireland. We are therefore open to pragmatic and flexible solutions to facilitate the implementation in line with the protocol and EU law. Since the start of this week, after one short-term grace period came to an end, export health certificates have been required for chilled processed meats moving to Northern Ireland from Great Britain. DUP leader Arlene Foster said any extension to grace periods would be a sticking plaster designed to paper over what unionists regard as the long-term problems of the protocol, including the erection of a trade barrier between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. However, Secretary of State Brandon Lewis warned yesterday that the protocol was here to stay. The protocol is a legal agreement thats in place... and weve got to make sure we make it works in a positive way for people in Northern Ireland, he told the BBC this morning. SAN DIEGO, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Truvian Sciences ("Truvian") today announced the close of more than $105 million in an oversubscribed Series C financing round led by TYH Ventures, Glen Tullman of 7wireVentures, and Wittington Ventures. The funds will advance development of Truvian's automated benchtop blood testing system, paving the way to submit the device for U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance, and enabling the company to scale its team in preparation for broad commercialization. Inclusive of the Series C, Truvian has raised more than $150 million in funding to date. "The global pandemic has further demonstrated that consumers want more control over their personal healthcare journeys. Today's announcement signifies tremendous confidence in Truvian's goal of decentralizing healthcare by bringing point-of-care diagnostic testing to a highly complex, distributed market," said Jeff Hawkins, President and Chief Executive Officer of Truvian. "I have full confidence that our executive team and board have the proven leadership and depth of experience in healthcare to deliver our benchtop platform and test menu through global regulatory approvals, making routine testing more convenient and accessible for all." Expanded Leadership Team Positions Company for Long-Term Growth and Innovation The company also announced an impressive roster of executive and board appointments. Former Divisional VP of Automation and Informatics at Abbott, Jay Srinivasan, has joined the company as Chief Product Officer. Several new investors will join the Board of Directors, including Glen Tullman, Managing Partner of 7wireVentures, Founder and former Executive Chairman and CEO of Livongo Health, and former CEO of both Allscripts and Enterprise Systems; Greg Wasson, President and Co-Founder of Wasson Enterprise and former President and CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance; and Megh Gupta, Partner at Wittington Ventures and former Global Head of Strategy and Corporate Development at Element AI. Renowned inventor Dean Kamen, known for his work in developing numerous medical devices including drug infusion pumps, portable dialysis machines, insulin pumps, and prosthetic arms, has been named to the position of Senior Technology Advisor. "Truvian has persevered through the challenges of the global pandemic this year and emerged stronger with a laser focus on commercializing their core point-of-care blood testing solutions with a clear plan to achieve success and thus democratize routine diagnostics," said Ashok Krishnamurthi, Managing Partner at GreatPoint Ventures. "GreatPoint Ventures looks forward to continuing our work with Truvian." "As we move to a more consumer-directed system of healthcare, providing easy, convenient access to a full suite of high-quality blood tests at a local pharmacy, an on-site clinic at work or a physician office will be a game changer," said Glen Tullman, Managing Partner at 7wireVentures, who co-led the round and formed a new entity for special investments outside of the core holdings of 7wireVentures, the successful early stage healthcare fund formed by Tullman and long-time business partner Lee Shapiro. He continued, "New rapid diagnostic tools are essential to provide health consumers with more information earlier in the process and equip clinicians with the information they need to provide high-quality care." Truvian Products in Development Truvian's approach to improving healthcare testing is based on developing a compact and fully automated benchtop system that combines chemistries, immunoassays, and hematology assays in one device. There is no other single on-site diagnostic platform that covers the breadth of analytes that Truvian can address, with accuracy that rivals central labs. By combining multiple testing modalities into one system, clinics can perform all standard blood tests ordered during a routine check-up on-site, helping their patients realize significant cost and time savings. Truvian's comprehensive wellness panel will cover the most commonly ordered diagnostic tests, including a lipid panel, metabolic panel, and complete blood cell count. About Truvian Sciences Truvian is a healthcare company at the intersection of diagnostics and consumer technology. Its automated benchtop system is being developed to produce lab-accurate results for a full-suite of health tests using a small sample of blood. Powered by patented technologies and intelligent integration, Truvian's system delivers a convenient and affordable alternative to off-site labs, providing immediate insights to inform healthcare decisions. Truvian was founded by individuals with deep domain experience in healthcare, diagnostics, and consumer technology. Today, the team has expanded to include top scientists, engineers, and healthcare business leaders each bringing specialized expertise to drive Truvian's mission of making routine health testing convenient, affordable, and actionable. For more information, visit www.truvianhealth.com . SOURCE Truvian Sciences Related Links www.truvianhealth.com Hussein Arnous was appointed Prime Minister in 2020, but has had a long career in the Assad regimes, aiding corruption and providing unwavering support. In Brief Many Syrians were surprised when Bashar al-Assad appointed Hussein Arnous as prime minister after the dismissal of Imad Khamis, in what resembled a scandal, on Aug. 30, 2020. The Syrians knew nothing about Arnous, despite him being part of the Syrian bureaucratic system for nearly thirty years. People close to him say that he lacks personality and is unable to take decisions. Background Hussein Arnous was born in al-Teh village, Maarat al-Numan, in the Idleb countryside, in 1953. He graduated from the Faculty of Civil Engineering at University of Aleppo in 1978. He has a long history of political work with the Assad regimes of both Hafez and Bashar, and has assumed leadership positions in Assad institutions since the 80s. Arnous held several positions in the government of the Syrian regime, starting with heading the Idleb branch of the Syrian Engineers Syndicate between (1989-1994), then taking over the management of the General Company for Roads and Bridges (1992-2002). In 2004, Arnous was appointed Director General of the General Organization for Road Transport, until 2009. Bashar al-Assad appointed him Governor of Deir ez-Zor in 2009, a position he kept until 2011, when he was appointed Governor of Quneitra, until 2013. He assumed the position of Minister of Public Works and Housing on Feb. 9, 2013, and was re-selected by the government of Wael al-Halqi in 2014, and again by the government of Imad Khamis, in 2016. Syrian Revolution Hussein Arnous was not known to have participated directly in the suppression of the Syrian revolution, but some believe he is flirting with the pro-Iran leaders of the Shiite community, to please Iran and of having close ties to Tehran. He was the first prime minister from the Idleb during the era of the two Assads, father and son. Arnous absolute and continuous support for Bashar al-Assad and the narrow circle around him played a role in enhancing Assads ability to kill more Syrians. That is why Arnous was affected by the US and European sanctions imposed on the regimes ministers in 2014, in addition to a travel ban imposed on him. Role in the Syrian Government If you examine the track record of Hussein Arnous, will not stumble upon any achievement, in any of the positions he held from 1989 until today. However, what is remarkable in Arnous biography, is the large number of positions, which he started assuming early on in his life eight positions in 30 years, half or more of which he spent in public institutions related to roads. He graduated from Director of the General Company for Roads and Bridges (1992-2002) to Assistant to the Minister of Transportation (2002-2004), and finally Director General of the Public Establishment of Roads Communications (2004-2009). Even when he took over the Ministry of Public Works and Housing (2013-2018), he did not break out of the roads, sidewalks, and bridges bubble. Arnous used to work in a high-stakes sector, but we must not overlook that the latter was controlled by big contractors such as Dhu al-Himma Shalish, Riad Issa Shalish, Tamim Badr, and other corrupt people under the rule of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, who, through Arnous, made handsome amounts of money, as well as the money they stole from the Syrian people and the treasury. Some Syrian analysts point to who the godfathers of Arnous were, and who kept him in positions of power without interruption from 1989 until today, a privilege that none of the current faces in the regime enjoyed, including those in military leadership positions. The analysts add that Arnous was a tool that the corrupt used for thirty years, through which they were able to steal the countrys resources, while he remained untouchable. Arnous played a major role in sowing corruption in the Establishment of Roads Communications, and when a journalist requested information from the Ministry of Transport, the head of the ministers press office warned him against pursuing the issue. Therefore, few people have insight into the corruption of the sector or the amount of money that was stolen, which economists estimate to be tens of billions of Syrian pounds preceding 2011, most of which was pocketed by Dhul-Himma Shalish and Riad Shalish, who were also stealing raw materials from the army, executing government projects in a mediocre way, and charging huge sums for their services. The same analysts believe that the secret behind Arnous continuous rise to the top is his ability to keep the secrets of the corrupt, and most importantly, the fact that he is not greedy, for he is satisfied with very little, which could be merely a position, according to those close to him. This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Syrian Observer. The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment has built a digital tree map in Vietnam to serve the identification of planting sites as well as management and taking care of trees throughout the country. Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Tran Hong Ha plants a tree during the launching ceremony of the New Year Tree Planting Festival in Hanoi on Sunday. The maps database, including information about tree species, planting process and characteristics of trees during the growing process, was expected to improve the efficiency of managing and taking care of trees nationwide, said Minister Tran Hong Ha at a launching ceremony of the New Year Tree Planting Festival and responding to the Governments programme of planting 1 billion trees during 2021-25, held in Hanoi on Sunday. More than 60 years ago, President Ho Chi Minh wrote an article which was published in Nhan dan (The People) newspaper, stressing the significance of tree planting to each person, each family and the entire nation. It has since become an annual Vietnamese custom each Lunar New Year. Ha said the database would be put on the App store as an application soon after it is finished. The application would help State-management agencies assess the current distribution of green trees, monitor the trees growing process and connect tree providers and growers, he said. Besides, the digital map would also assist the agencies to identify areas in need of ecosystem restoration, prevention of salinity intrusion and anti-desertification. Therefore, Ha called upon every individual and organisation in the country to participate in the festival and the programme. He said he expected all Vietnamese people to help in planting and protecting trees. It aimed to express the commitment and responsibility of protecting the environment and adapting to climate change from todays generation to the next generations. Under the directive No 45/CT-Ttg on implementing the New Year Tree Planting Festival and improving forest protection and development, the country will plant 1 billion trees during 2021-25, of which, nearly 700 million trees will be planted in urban and rural areas and more than 300 million trees will be planted in the forest. In 2021, the country will plant about 182 million trees. Speaking at the ceremony, Chu Ngoc Anh chairman of the Peoples Committee of Hanoi ordered districts and towns of the city to disseminate information to local residents about the importance of planting and protecting trees. Additionally, each household was encouraged to plant trees and flowers to make Hanoi a city with four seasons of blooming flowers, he said. It targeted that the city would plant over 300,000 trees this year and each resident would plant one tree by 2030, he said. VNS PM attends launch of tree-planting festival in Phu Yen PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc on February 20 attended the launch of a tree-planting festival in Phu Yen province, which is part of the activities to respond to a programme to plant 1 billion trees initiated by the Government leader. 02/24/2021 Photo (c) Andriy Onufriyenko - Getty Images Coronavirus (COVID-19) tally as compiled by Johns Hopkins University. (Previous numbers in parentheses.) Total U.S. confirmed cases: 28,265,193 (28,194,840) Total U.S. deaths: 502,856 (500,617) Total global cases: 112,282,725 (111,878,487) Total global deaths: 2,488,895 (2,478,131) FDA staff backs Johnson & Johnson vaccine More coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines could soon be on the way. In a report released today, the staff of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) assigned to review Johnson & Johnsons vaccine candidate recommends that it be granted emergency approval for use. The report was submitted to the FDAs Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which meets Friday to review the data and decide whether to grant the vaccine emergency use authorization (EUA). If approval is granted, Johnson & Johnson said it has millions of doses that can be immediately distributed, supplementing the vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna. It holds an advantage since it requires only a single shot. NYT: FDA will approve lower temperatures for vaccine storage The U.S. Food & Drug Administration is reportedly poised to approve a request from Pfizer and BioNTech to allow the companies to store their COVID-19 vaccine at higher standard freezer temperatures. The New York Times reports that the agency is preparing to grant the request to resolve logistical issues and make distribution easier. The current ultra-low temperatures required to store the vaccine prevent some clinics, which lack such storage facilities, from using the vaccine in large quantities. The companies last week petitioned the FDA to ease requirements for their COVID-19 vaccine. With the change, the vaccine can be stored in most pharmacy freezers. CVS adds states to its vaccine network CVS says it has added Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to the list of states where some of its retail pharmacies will offer COVID-19 vaccinations to eligible people. It began the program two weeks ago in 11 states. In some of the early states, the appointments filled up within hours of the launch. CVS says appointments for the latest allocation of approximately 570,000 doses will start to become available for booking today, with shots beginning February 25. "Feedback on every aspect of the vaccination process has been incredibly positive, from the digital experience to interacting with our team of health care professionals," said Karen S. Lynch, CEO of CVS Health. House vote on $1.9 trillion stimulus bill could come Friday House Democrats say they are planning to bring the Biden administrations $1.9 trillion stimulus bill to the House floor on Friday for a vote. Democrats, who control the chamber, say the measure will be approved. The American people strongly support this bill, and we are moving swiftly to see it enacted into law, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said in a tweet. Senate Democrats say they hope to be able to pass the measure before March 14, when extended unemployment benefits expire. Republicans have questioned the size of the spending bill, noting that it contains provisions not directly related to the pandemic. Is the worst behind us? Despite the fact that the U.S. COVID-19 death toll just exceeded 500,000, there is growing optimism that the worst may be behind us. New cases have plunged in recent weeks. This week, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines reported that bookings for the first quarter had risen sharply, mostly for passengers who were 65 and older who had been vaccinated. New York magazine offers nine reasons the worst may be over, noting new cases continue to drop, the vaccine appears to work really well, and seasonality may be working against the virus. Around the nation WASHINGTON -- Depleted uranium in tanks and ammunition used in the 1991 Gulf War "played no role" in the unexplained illnesses, known as Gulf War syndrome, that veterans faced in the years afterward, according to a new study. The findings by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Portsmouth in England counter decades of understanding by the military and Department of Veterans Affairs about potential causes for a host of ailments that collectively are now known as Gulf War illness. "That depleted uranium is not and never was in the bodies of those who were ill at sufficient quantities to cause disease will surprise many, including sufferers who have, over the last 30 years, suspected depleted uranium may have contributed to their illnesses," said Randall Parrish, a uranium isotope expert at the University of Portsmouth who developed the study's methodology to scan veterans' urine for traces of exposure. The study looked at depleted uranium levels in the urine of 154 veterans, of whom 106 had Gulf War illness symptoms and 48 did not. The findings may provide a definitive answer on whether there is a connection between depleted uranium exposure and Gulf War illness because of the level of precision used to detect any isotopes in veterans' urine and the time involved in the study, Dr. Robert Haley, the director of epidemiology at UT Southwestern, a Dallas-based research hospital, told McClatchy in a phone interview. The study took 20 years to shape, fund and review. Between 2008 and 2010, the researchers had each of the veterans come into the hospital for a week of controlled observation to rule out any other variables, Haley said. It will be published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports. According to a 2000 Department of Defense report cited by the study, U.S. and coalition tanks, aircraft and artillery fired about 300 tons of depleted uranium munitions in southern Iraq during the 1991 ground invasion. An estimated 500,000 U.S. service members deployed to the Middle East for Operation Desert Storm. About 25% of them have reported chronic symptoms including fatigue, headaches, joint pain, dizziness, respiratory disorders and memory problems, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. For years, Gulf War veteran and former Army officer Larry Chaney has suspected depleted uranium might have played a role in the tremors he suffers. Almost 30 years ago, on Feb. 27, 1991, Chaney was a 27-year-old lieutenant leading a platoon of M2A1 Bradley Fighting Vehicles when two of the vehicles were destroyed by friendly fire during one of the largest tank battles of the operation. There was a "brilliant flash," Chaney said in a phone interview with McClatchy. "A couple small pieces of depleted uranium hit me in the scalp and the shockwave knocked the wind out of me." Chaney became a participant in the study. He said he trusted the finding that depleted uranium was not a cause of what he said were milder symptoms of Gulf War illness. He said veterans he served with are more concerned that possible exposure to nerve agents in Iraq may have led to a number of cancers and thyroid issues. The study also calculated the amount of depleted uranium that would be expected to be found in the bloodstream over time based on the level of exposure, such as whether a service member had been hit by shrapnel that would have likely embedded depleted uranium in their skin, or whether they suspected exposure through inhalation of air particles on the battlefield. About half of the 48 participants who did not have Gulf War illness symptoms never deployed to the Middle East for Operation Desert Storm and did not experience depleted uranium exposure. But for both those with Gulf War illness and the control group without illnesses, the results were the same, the study did not find significant traces of depleted uranium, Haley said. "We found none, regardless of whether they had the Gulf War syndrome, one of the accepted case definitions, regardless of what kind of symptoms they had, and regardless of what kind of exposures they had," he said. The findings will be reviewed by the VA, Dr. Patricia Hastings, chief consultant for the agency's post deployment health services, said in a statement. "The research that depleted uranium is an unlikely cause of chronic multi-symptom illness will be reviewed by the scientists at VA's Depleted Uranium Center in Baltimore, Maryland," Hastings said. The VA provided some of the initial funding for the research, she said. Depleted uranium is also suspected in illnesses faced by veterans who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. Coleen Bowman's late husband, Army Sgt. Maj. Robert Bowman, was an Army Ranger who deployed to Iraq in 2004. His armored Stryker was hit by enemy fire at least 13 times during his 12 months overseas. Each time, depleted uranium in the Stryker's armor would absorb the attack. He died in 2013 of bile duct cancer at age 44. In his medical records, a doctor treating Bowman at the Army Medical Center in El Paso, Texas, documented in 2011 that the rare cancer was tied to environmental factors, including "burning depleted uranium from reinforced armored vehicles." "There are no other reasonable explanations for his condition," the doctor concluded. Coleen Bowman, who has spent several years connecting with other military spouses on the issue of toxic exposure, said she welcomed the study and its findings. She hopes that the researchers of the Gulf War illness will consider also studying exposure in the new generation of veterans. "For me, I don't know that I'll ever be able to know what substance it was that caused Rob's cancer," Bowman said to McClatchy in a phone interview. "But many veterans are showing up with high levels of depleted uranium in their urine post-9/11," she said. "Even veterans in Rob's unit." Chechnya's top court has ruled that the arrest of two young gay men was legal amid growing concern over their safety and lack of legal representation in the North Caucasus region know for abuses against LGBT people. The court ruling on February 24 comes after Salekh Magamadov, 18, and a 17-year-old companion were abducted by security agents earlier in the month from Nizhny Novgorod in western Russia and driven back to Chechnya. RFE/RL is not revealing the identity of the second teenager because he is a minor. The two are accused of providing food to an illegal armed group and could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted. They are currently being held in pretrial detention. According to the Russian LGBT Network, a rights group, the young men were forced to sign statements and testimonies under threats and pressure. Meanwhile, they have also been denied access to independent lawyers and doctors despite a demand from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). On February 8, the ECHR ordered Russia to explain the reasons for the detention of the two men, provide them access to independent lawyers, health care, and family visits. The LGBT Network has warned that two men face "mortal danger" in Chechnya. The nongovernmental organization helped both men leave Chechnya and settle in Nizhny Novgorod in July. The teenagers intended to leave Russia, but they were detained by Federal Security Service (FSB) agents earlier this month and taken to Chechnya. Rights groups have accused predominantly Muslim Chechnya of targeting sexual minorities, including the use of abductions, torture, and extrajudicial killing. With reporting by Current Time The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has collected Rs 30,96,21,200 in fine for not wearing a mask at public places in Mumbai from April 2020 to date during the COVID-19 pandemic, an official said on Wednesday. Recently, the financial capital has witnessed a spike in coronavirus cases. BCCL Most offenders from Juhu, Andheri From April 1, 2020 to February 15 this year, the BMC has caught 15,16,398 people without masks and collected Rs 30,69,09,800 as a fine from them, civic officials said. The highest number of 1,08,069 people were caught without face masks in Mumbai's K-West ward, which includes areas like Juhu, Andheri (West) and Versova, according to the BMC data. Out of these offenders, 13,008 were caught on Monday and a fine of Rs 26,01,600 was collected from them, a BMC official said. The BMC has been imposing a fine of Rs 200 for not wearing a face mask in public places. BCCL Measures adopted by BMC The development comes days after BMC commissioner IS Chahal announced stringent measures to curb the spread of coronavirus in Mumbai. He has also issued a directive of catching 25,000 offenders every day and also doubled the number of marshals to fine people for not wearing a mask. BCCL From Tuesday, the BMC started releasing consolidated data of fines collected by different agencies like Mumbai Police and central and western railways. The Central and Western railways, which run the suburban railway network, has collected Rs Rs 91,800 as fine so far. According to BMC data, the civic body is fining around 13,000 people and collecting over Rs 25 lakh on an average daily. Either pay or do community service BMC officials said they also asked some offenders who didn't have the money to pay the penalty to do community services like sweeping the street. Last week, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray announced a fresh state of restrictions in view of the rising Covid-19 cases. Thackeray also said that the state government would review the situation in the next eight days to decide whether a lockdown should be imposed. Reuters Also, Mumbai Mayor Kishori Pednekar today travelled on a local train from Byculla to CSMT and urged people to wear masks. "After Railway services resumed, COVID-19 cases spiked not just in Mumbai but in the entire state. Lockdown won't be implemented, but the situation is worrisome", she said. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. The owner of a billion pound company with more than 1,200 employees has revealed he doesn't have a human resources department and expects workers to resolve complaints themselves. Serial entrepreneur Greg Jackson ran a coffee shop, property management company and mirror-manufacturing company before founding Octopus Energy, a start-up selling green energy, in 2015. It has enjoyed huge growth and has been valued at more than 1.4billion ($2billion). Octopus Energy supplies 2million homes in the UK. Serial entrepreneur: Greg Jackson founded Octopus Energy, a start-up selling green energy, in 2015. He said he doesn't have an HR department because he trusts his employees Huge success: Octopus Energy has enjoyed huge growth and has been valued at more than 1.4billion ($2billion). Octopus Energy supplies more than 1.9million homes in the UK. Pictured, Mr Jackson with Boris Johnson at the Octopus Energy London office in October Mr Jackson explained he has resisted building HR and IT departments because there is a tendency for companies to 'infantilise' employees and 'drown creative people in process and bureaucracy'. 'Are companies with huge HR departments full of happier people, are they more productive? And the answer is usually "no",' he said in a BBC interview. 'Job adverts always say "we're looking for creative people, who can take responsibility, who've got passion for customers" and all that stuff. 'And yet when people start working for a company, the first thing the company does is drown them in processes and bureaucracy. 'If you're going to recruit smart people who are talented and motivated... The most important thing a company can do is free them up to deliver that stuff that is magic about humans.' Mr Jackson believes employees should be empowered to find solutions to problems themselves, including ones such as a complaint of bullying that might be typically handled by an HR department. Mr Jackson believes employees should be empowered to find solutions to problems themselves, including ones such as a complaint of bullying that might be typically handled by an HR department. Pictured, a photo from inside the Octopus Energy office He said he gives managers appropriate training and expects them to take personal responsibility instead of 'shelving responsibility to a third party. He continued: 'If you spend all of your time at work, whenever there's something difficult, handing it onto another function rather than doing it yourself, it is less fulfulling for you but it also means the company is getting less out of you. 'How can a company try and find better and better ways of dealing with things if it takes all of its intelligence from its people and diverts it from those big problems.' Mr Jackson said his belief that top-down management structures arise from the experience he gained building up companies from just a handful of employees. Permanent staff at Octopus Energy own 5 per cent of the business. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak visited the Octopus Energy office in October last year to promote green energy usage in Britain. During the visit, Mr Johnson said he wanted to make the UK the 'Saudi Arabia of green energy'. He was photographed alongside Mr Jackson. After a truly challenging and unique year, this survey once again offers a valuable snapshot into the perceptions and expectations of Long Island employers, said Kevin J. Keane, Managing Partner at PKF OConnor Davies. PKF OConnor Davies, LLP, one of the nations largest accounting, tax, and advisory firms, announced the results of its Long Island Economic Survey & Opinion Poll at a webinar hosted by the Firm on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. The survey of Long Island business owners found that a majority of businesses on Long Island maintained staff levels and increased employee compensation last year, despite wavering confidence in the economy brought on by COVID-19, political uncertainty, and other factors. Since 1995, the survey has been conducted by the certified public accounting firm AVZ, which joined PKF OConnor Davies earlier this year. After a truly challenging and unique year, this survey once again offers a valuable snapshot into the perceptions and expectations of Long Island employers, said Kevin J. Keane, Managing Partner at PKF OConnor Davies. At a high level, we found that organizations of all shapes and sizes understandably felt a bit more uncertain about the future of their business, but most still found ways to retain their people and even increase compensation. This survey will provide our team and the Long Island business community with meaningful insights as we continue to help our clients navigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey covered a broad range of topics centered on economic confidence, revenue, prices and profits, employment outlook, annual raises, growth industries, economic indicators, retirement, real estate, current events, and additional fun questions. Key survey findings include: Confidence in the Long Island economy dipped to 6.5 (down from 6.8) 61% of businesses experienced no change in headcount in 2020 89% of businesses gave their employees raises 73% of respondents believe real estate prices will continue to increase 58% of businesses received funds from the Payroll Protection Program Binge watching shows was the leisure activity people did most often while quarantining From mom and pop storefronts to international organizations, the Long Island business community is diverse, and understanding how business owners here are seeing and thinking about the future offers tremendously valuable insights, said Jeffrey Davoli, Partner at PKF OConnor Davies. This is the 27th survey our team at AVZ has conducted, and every year Im impressed and inspired by the findings we glean from the Long Island business community. Im thrilled to collaborate on those results with the PKF OConnor Davies team and use them to enhance the work we do for our clients on the Island and beyond. The Long Island Economic Survey & Opinion Poll surveyed businesses with operations throughout Long Island and in diverse industries. More than half of the companies surveyed have been in business more than 30 years, and half had more than 25 employees. PKF OConnor Davies has 14 offices in six states and continues to expand through organic growth and acquisitions on the East Coast. It has supported this growth with a strategic combination of promoting from within coupled with tactical external hires. About PKF OConnor Davies, LLP PKF OConnor Davies, LLP is a full-service certified public accounting and advisory firm with a long history of serving clients both domestically and internationally. With roots tracing to 1891, 14 offices in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Florida, and Rhode Island and more than 900 professionals led by over 100 partners, the Firm provides a complete range of accounting, auditing, tax, and management advisory services. PKF OConnor Davies is a top-ranked firm according to Accounting Todays 2020 Top 100 Firms list, and the Firm is also recognized as a Leader in Audit and Accounting, a Pacesetter in Growth, and one of the Top Firms in the Mid-Atlantic. In 2021 rankings, PKF O'Connor Davies was named one of Vault's Accounting 50, a ranking of the 50 best accounting employers to work for in North America, and ranked among the top 50 most prestigious accounting firms in America in a complementary Vault survey. The Firm is the 12th largest accounting firm in the New York Metropolitan area, according to Crains New York Business, and the 10th top accounting firm in New Jersey according to NJBizs 2019 rankings. PKF OConnor Davies is enrolled in the AICPA Peer Review Program and has central memberships in the Private Companies Practice Section (PCPS), the Employee Benefit Plan Audit Quality Center (EBPAQC), Government Audit Quality Center (GAQC), and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB). By consistently delivering proactive, thorough, and efficient service, PKF O'Connor Davies has built long-lasting, valuable relationships with its clients. Partners are closely involved in the day-to-day management of engagements, ensuring a high degree of client service and cost effectiveness. The Firms seasoned professional staff members employ a team approach to all engagements to provide clients with the utmost quality and timely services aimed at helping them succeed. Continuity of staffing and attention to detail in all client engagements make the Firm stand out among its competitors. PKF OConnor Davies is the lead North American representative of the international association of PKF member firms. PKF International is a network of legally independent member firms providing accounting, tax, and business advisory services in over 400 locations in 150 countries around the world. With its tradition, experience, and focus on the future, PKF OConnor Davies is ready to help clients meet todays ever-changing economic conditions and manage the growing complexities of the regulatory environment. For more information, visit http://www.PKFOD.com. The views expressed by public comments are not those of this company or its affiliated companies. Please note by clicking on "Post" you acknowledge that you have read the TERMS OF USE and the comment you are posting is in compliance with such terms. Your comments may be used on air. Be polite. Inappropriate posts or posts containing offsite links, images, GIFs, inappropriate language, or memes may be removed by the moderator. Job listings and similar posts are likely automated SPAM messages from Facebook and are not placed by WFMZ-TV. A federal judge denied Society Insurances motions to dismiss three bellwether lawsuits filed by hospitality businesses that were denied coverage for revenue lost because of COVID-19 public health orders. U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang in Chicago, who was assigned a consolidated case by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, rejected an argument that government orders that restricted the use of commercial property could not be considered a direct physical loss covered by the policies. None of the three insurance policies contained a virus exclusion, as most commercial property policies do. Here, the scope of the term direct physical loss is genuinely in dispute, Chang said in the opinion released Monday. A reasonable jury could find for either side based on the arguments and factual record presented so far in the litigation. The decision allows lawsuits filed by Big Onion Tavern Group, Valley Lodge Corp. and Rising Dough Inc. to proceed to discovery, but is not the final word in the cases. All three of the plaintiffs were forced to modify their business operations because of government orders. Big Onion and Valley Lodge operate in Illinois, while Rising Dough did business in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Tennessee. Chang said that Society Insurance preemptively and en masse denied COVID-19 business interruption claims by circulating a memorandum with is agents on March 16, 2020 that stated a quarantine of any size would not trigger business income or extra expense coverages. Society then denied the plaintiffs separate claims, saying that a suspension of business because of a government order is not direct physical loss. Valley Lodge and Big Onion filed suit in Illinois. Rising Dough filed in Wisconsin. The multidistrict litigation panel assigned the three cases to Chang, who is assigned to the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago. In its motion to dismiss, Society argued that the policy language clearly did not contemplate government closure orders as a cause of covered loss because it restricts coverage to a Period of Restoration that ends when the property is repaired, rebuilt or replaced. Chang said the argument did give him some pause. But too many textual clues point the other way, he said in the opinion. First and foremost, the Period of Restoration describes a time period during which loss of business income will be covered, rather than an explicit definition of coverage. Chang did grant Societys motion to dismiss the suits under grounds that coverage is owed by the civil authority and contamination provisions in the Valley Lodge and Big Onion policies and under the sue and labor clause of the Rising Dough policy. Those arguments cannot be brought before the jury. Policyholders have lost most of the COVID-19 business interruption lawsuits filed so far in initial rounds. As of late Tuesday, insurers have won 174 motions to dismiss or for summary judgment while policyholders have won 42 of those motions, according to a litigation tracker maintained by the University of Pennsylvanias Carey Law School. State and federal judges in Illinois have ruled against policyholders in 11 other cases so far, the litigation tracker shows. A total of 1,468 lawsuits have been filed so far. About the photo: The Valley Lodges Glenview, Ill. restaurant is shown. Photo courtesy of Valley Lodge. Dean of the School of Performing Arts at the University of Ghana, Professor Kofi Agyekum has appealed to human rights activists not to defend Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Transgender and queer Intersex (LGBTQI) in Ghana. Professor Kofi Agyekum, popularly known as Opanyin Agyekum, asked the human rights activists to stay clear off the issue of homosexuality but called on the government to, as a matter of urgency, take necessary actions against the activities of homosexuals. There are ongoing heated arguments about the LGBTQI community regarding whether or not their sexual orientation should be accepted in Ghana. The Christian and Islamic community together with many Ghanaians have spoken against the advocacy of homosexual rights and practice in the nation. Criticisms Spokesperson for National Chief Imam, Sheikh Aremeyaw Shaibu revealing the position of the Islamic body said; ''According to the various schools of Islamic thought, they have all accepted that the death penalty is the most deserving because the sin is so grave that such people don't deserve to live''. Member of Parliament for Assin South, John Ntim Fordjour has also called for legislation on homosexuality. "We should propose legislation to ban advocacy of LGBT matters. If we can't stay on radio to make advert and promote cocaine, theft, armed robbery and so forth which are against the law, we shouldn't allow people to promote issues like LGBT. We plead with all Ghanaians to support us. Just as we have galamsey fight and corruption fight or fight against corruption, this is a fight against fundamental values and customs and beliefs of the people of Ghana. We shouldn't politicize the issue. If we make it NDC/NPP issue, we will lose the fight. If we make it Christians vrs Muslims, we will lose the fight. We must all unite," he said. Sheikh Aremeyaw Shaibu and Hon. Ntim Fordjour made their submissions on Peace FM's morning show ''Kokrokoo'' on Monday, February 22, 2021. Opanyin Agyekum also shared his views saying ''the government must address this. We plead with the human rights activists not to involve themselves in this issue...All Ghanaians say it's an abomination, madness and nation-wrecking for a man to marry a man and a woman to marry a woman''. "Let the laws take its course. We should all condemn this act. Christians and Muslims dislike it. Our traditional leaders and ancestors have spoken against this practice a long time ago," he added. Opanyin Agyekum made these remarks on the same programme ''Kokrokoo'' on Tuesday, February 23. 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. Featured Video In Sept. 2019, a malfunction at a Springfield pump station triggered 90,000 gallons of untreated sewage released into the Connecticut River. Two months earlier, in South Hadley, a split in an 8-inch bypass led to a discharge of 284,193 gallons of raw sewage into the river. A bill signed last week by Gov. Charlie Baker required the public must be provided with more timely notice of spills into rivers and waterways. The bill requires operators to alert local boards of health within 2 hours of any sewer spill and also provide updates every eight hours until the spill is contained. The signing of this bill is a major victory for public health and transparency. Previous rules dictated operators to notify the Department of Environmental Protection within 24 hours. Andrea Donlon of the Connecticut River Conservancy advocating for the bill in March said, We look forward to the day when sewage spills are a distant, unpleasant memory in Massachusetts. We need public notification to keep our residents and their pets safe from sewage spills when they happen, and funding for our water and wastewater infrastructure to prevent spills from happening in the first place. In the summer months, there is a tremendous amount of recreation on the Connecticut River and tributaries. Getting the word out of a spill sooner, offers swimmers, boaters, and fishermen an opportunity to get out of the river to avoid contamination. Untreated sewage poses major health risks since it contains life-threatening pathogens that can lead to eye and ear infections, hepatitis, dysentery and other diseases. Julia Blatt of the Massachusetts Rivers Alliance says that each year 3 billion gallons of raw or partially treated sewage is discharged into the state waterways. The 410-mile-long river from the Quebec-New Hampshire border to Long Island Sound is a source of pride for every city and town through which it flows. Due to construction of sewage treatment plants and organizations that work with thousands of volunteers to help with clean-up efforts, the river has transformed into a popular form of recreation and sport. Measures to keep residents safe from the inevitable accident only adds value to this priceless natural resource. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Photo: Contributed Laura Arcangeli, or simply Chef Laura, has catered for the likes of David Duchovny on the set of X-Files, and Duran Duran on tour. There are many women in the industries of taste chef-ing, brewing, fermenting, and more to champion in advance of International Womens Day on Monday. This is barely a handful of those in B.C.s culinary and drinks businesses, but each of these women has been able to successfully pivot, several of them long before the word became trendy thanks to the pandemic. The Multi-tasker While her official title could be general manager of Robin Ridge Winery in the Similkameen, the reality is that Caroline Cottrill brings her accounting skills to bear on the layers of paperwork it takes to run a winery She also has built a trail to attract outdoor enthusiasts in for a tasting, designs labels, updates the website, and works at the Pharmasave in Keremeos. Therefore, there is no typical day in her world. But she has a passion for organics: the winery has been certified organic since 2018, and Caroline enjoys finding natural alternatives for customers at the pharmacy. That passion is fitting, as the Similkameen is the Organic Capital of Canada. The Innovator For a few years, you could get Winecrush products edible treats made from the derivatives left after the winemaking process at some wineries and other locations and pick up. Those treats have given way to a much bigger picture. Allie Broddy is part of the team that started the company, which was a recent winner of the Rising Star Award from the B.C. Cleantech Awards. Winecrush, with Broddy as the application and development manager, is working with leading wine scientists to transform these leftover materials into valuable nutrition. That not only keeps them out of landfills, but also reduces methane emissions and prevents soil contamination. The Adventurer Janet Annable is chief maker and financial officer of Millionaires Row Cider Co., a small cidery on Summerlands Bottleneck Drive. She might be grafting trees in the morning, and in the tasting room that afternoon. Why cider? Because its a personal favourite beverage, so why not add value to an orchard with a variety of apple trees? Janet, who arrived in Summerland in 2016, likes all the stages of the cider-making process, from crush to bottle, and loves having a small, family business. Try the Makin A Mint (mint, lemon, and hibiscus) if you can find a bottle. The Problem Solver Laura Arcangeli, or simply Chef Laura, has catered for the likes of David Duchovny on the set of X-Files, and Duran Duran on tour. With those gigs mostly gone thanks to the pandemic, what is a chef to do? Make cooking in lockdown easier and tastier for all of us. Enter cheflaura.ca,now home to a growing online shop. Her spice blends are a good product to start with; beautifully packaged and with tongue-in-cheek names from Dont Be a Jerk to Veg Out, instead of blending your own and making a mess, use hers in the cooking process. Look for these in the Okanagan soon. Hontiveros to NSC: Conduct security audit for China-owned Dito Telco now Senator Risa Hontiveros on Wednesday urged the National Security Council (NSC) to immediately conduct a security audit of China-owned Dito Telecommunity Corporation ahead of its commercial rollout on March 8. "Hindi pa nareresolba ang mga pangamba natin sa Dito telco. Habang patuloy ang pambubully ng Tsina sa West Philippine Sea sa gitna ng pandemya, nag-roll out naman tayo ng red carpet para sa isang kumpanyang direktong nagrereport sa gobyerno ng Tsina. This is worrying. NSC should execute a security audit for Dito. It's the least it can do," Hontiveros said. The senator added that NSC must also tap an independent security auditor, similar to how the National Telecommunications Commission conducted its technical audit of Dito. On Monday, Feb. 22, NTC announced that the third telco passed its first technical audit. "Kung nagkaroon ng technical audit, dapat may security audit din. Knowing that Dito is safe from China's incursions is as vital as knowing Dito's technical capabilities," Hontiveros said, reiterating that ChinaTel, which has a 40% stake in Dito, is 100% owned by the Chinese state. During the Senate hearing on Dito's franchise in December, the NSC admitted that it did not have a cyberdefense doctrine that can fight against cyberattacks. Hontiveros earlier questioned why Dito should be allowed franchise when the country's cyberdefenses are down. The senator had also flagged a China-based hacking group, code name "Naikon," that has been carrying out an espionage campaign against governments in the Asia Pacific, including the Philippines. "Nakakabahala na wala palang konkretong istratehiya ang NSC sa usapin ng cybersecurity. China can easily take advantage of this. Sinasakop na nila ang ating karagatan ng harap-harapan. Nothing is stopping it from doing the same to our data," the senator said. "Not unless China finally respects and honors that our territories in the WPS are ours and ours alone, every other business negotiation it has in our country will remain suspicious. Panindigan natin ang laban na ito. Kung hindi, ang Pilipino lang ang talo," Hontiveros concluded. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is worried that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Dogecoin in Asia's third-largest economy may have an impact on financial stability. RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said in an interview with a leading media that these big issues have been expressed to the administration. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is proposing to forbid all private cryptocurrencies in the country and to create a structure for an official digital currency. The banning proposal comes at a time when many cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Dogecoin, have seen a significant rise in their value. After digital currencies were used for fraud, the Central Bank barred banks and other regulated entities from funding crypto transactions in 2018. But last year, in response to an appeal by crypto-currency exchanges, the Supreme Court cut the curbs. Speaking about crypto-currencies, Das said there are advantages of blockchain technology, but, "there are some major concerns on the cryptocurrency that we have conveyed to the government." RBI Governor said that the RBI is working on procedural issues to introduce the country's digital currency soon, but that date has not yet been finalized. India is not the first nation to consider releasing its own cryptocurrency as a possibility. Nations such as Ecuador, China, Singapore, Tunisia, Venezuela and Senegal have released cryptocurrencies of their own. Supreme Court Asks RBI To Come Up With Detailed norms On Locker Management Piramal Group gets RBI approval to acquire debt-hit DHFL RBI allows residents to make remittances to IFSCs under LRS An explosive new book from Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow promises to uncover the secrets behind American media and politics and draw the curtain on the powerful people behind news media corruption. During an introductory monologue on Tuesday's "Breitbart News Daily" on SiriusXM, Marlow described his year-long investigative journey as "immersive work" that resulted in several discoveries on the powers working to destroy America's freedom and Christian roots. The Breitbart editor-in-chief went through several interviews, documents, and investigative research throughout the process of writing the book titled "Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media's Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption," which is set to be released on May 18, and will be available through various retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Books-A-Million, Indie Bound, and more. "I've been immersed in research on America's media conglomerates for a year and I've kept the material tightly under wraps," Marlow told Breitbart. "What I have found is shocking even to me, and I've tracked these players and issues my entire career." After a year of tireless investigation into the inner workings of the mainstream media, their construction of false narratives, and secret corruption My expose is now the #1 on Amazons Political Conservatism and Liberalism list. Check it out!https://t.co/3us6O1Macx Alex Marlow (@AlexMarlow) February 23, 2021 Marlow, who admitted that he was "routinely shocked" with the results of his investigation, admitted that he had finally uncovered the "new Soros," a "multibillionaire" and "puppet master" who actively funds establishment media outlets and has full control of Democrat establishment politics. According to Breitbart, the book, which is published under Simon & Schuster. provides "a firsthand account of how the establishment media became weaponized against Donald Trump and his supporters on behalf of the political left." "Media bias doesn't begin to describe what is in this book," Marlow said "Media giants have weaponized fake news to the benefit of the left, the globalists, and the multi-national corporations that control so much of our lives." The Breitbart editor-in-chief also hinted that he uncovered just how "American media is in bed with the Chinese government, to a point where you'll actually be mortified for this country." "From the cronyism to the China ties, to the unending web of lies and half-truths, this book lays out the reality of what our media has become, and it is enraging," he added. Marlow openly criticized news media companies for having "increasingly diversified revenue streams'' which force them into "unavoidable conflicts of interest in reporting." He points out that a lot of multinational conglomerates have business dealings with all sorts of companies and advertisers around the world, so it would be impossible to have a truly unbiased type of reporting. Marlow's descriptions of the media's ties to China seem to parallel what China Aid founder Bob Fu said earlier, stating western media "co-opted" with the Chinese Communist Party and receive massive funding to promote CCP propaganda. Aside from exposing the powers working to destroy Americans' God-given freedoms and the nation's Christian roots, the Breitbart editor-in-chief also tackles the United States Presidential Elections of 2020 and how it was manipulated by the left. Marlow believes that while the right had "an opportunity to elucidate some real problems in the American [electoral] system," they weren't able to do so because they were blindsided and "distracted by shiny objects." Ahead of the book's May release, the Breitbart editor-in-chief believes that the "cancel culture mob" led by the left will oppose his upcoming revelatory book. He encouraged his readers and anyone who wants to have an unbiased look at history to consider the results of his year-long investigation into the powers working to destroy America's freedom and Christian roots. Marlow warned, "They will try to figure out some way that we need to burn the book before we've read it. People are not going to want this thing to be out." About Alex Marlow Marlow, now 35, began his career with Breitbart when he was just a 21 year-old UC Berkeley student. He was personally hired by media mogul Andrew Breitbart himself and since then was under Breitbart's tutelage as an editorial assistant. In 2015, he was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30. Since 2016, the Breitbart editor-in-chief has challenged "fake news" and the people behind it. He believes that news media corruption runs deeper than merely political bias. In fact, his discoveries of the powers working to destroy America's Christian roots and the nation's God-given liberties is evidence of just how deep these influences go. New Delhi, Feb 24 : In the village of Great Wyrley near Birmingham, someone is mutilating horses. Someone is also sending threatening letters to the vicarage, where the vicar, Shahpur Edalji, is a Parsi convert to Christianity and the first Indian to have a parish in England. His son George -- quiet, socially awkward and the only boy at school with distinctly Indian features -- grows up into a successful barrister, till he is improbably linked to and then prosecuted for the crimes in a case that left many convinced that justice hadn't been served. When he is released early, his conviction still hangs over him. Having lost faith in the police and the legal system, George Edalji turns to the one man he believes can clear his name -- the one whose novels he spent his time reading in prison, the creator of the world's greatest detective. When he writes to Arthur Conan Doyle asking him to meet, Conan Doyle agrees. From the author of "Victoria and Abdul" comes "The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer" (Bloomsbury), an eye-opening look at race and an unexpected friendship in the early days of the 20th century, and the perils of being foreign in a country built on empire. Shrabani Basu is a journalist and author. Apart from "Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant", now a major motion picture, her books include "For King and Another Country: Indian Soldiers on the Western Front, 1914-18". In 2010, she set up the Noor Inayat Khan Memorial Trust and campaigned for a memorial for the WWII British spy of Indian descent, who was captured and executed by the Gestapo, which was unveiled by Princess Anne in London in November 2012. In September 2012, producers Zafar Hai and Tabrez Noorani obtained the film rights to Basu's biography, "Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan". Her story is portrayed in the 2020 film "A Call to Spy" written by Sarah Megan Thomas and directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher. Noor is played by Indian actress Radhika Apte. PHILIPSBURG:---Members of Parliament have received yet another postponement of a meeting to discuss the St. Maarten country package, the implementation agenda, and the Caribbean Body for Reform and Development (COHO). From the latest response by the Prime Minister to discuss the COHO and the so-called country package, it is evident that the Government has no intention to discuss this very important program with the Parliament or the population at large, expressed United Democrats Member of Parliament, Sarah A. Wescot-Williams. At least, it appears that the intention is not to have this discussion at a stage where the input of Parliament and the public could serve to strengthen and unify St. Maartens position. The reasons given by the Prime Minister for not appearing in Parliament at this time are neither here nor there. The meeting date of February 22nd was set to begin with based on the Prime Ministers schedule, still, the Prime Minister asked that the meeting be postponed indefinitely, giving the reasons that the draft COHO Kingdom Law has not been advised upon by the Council of State and thus a discussion on this is considered premature and secondly, that the Government is still busy aligning the country package components with the governing program and year plans for translation into a proper implementation plan. The MP further stated that with respect to the issue of the draft COHO Kingdom Law, the forerunner of the COHO, namely the Temporary Work Organization (BZK) is already up and running. The Netherlands is also steadily proceeding with agreements on the basis of the country package, such as the Border Control Agreement and the agreement regarding the reconstruction of the prison. Wescot-Williams thinks it is naive of the Government to believe that while they are engaging in this aligning of the country package as they call it and that because St. Maarten has until April 1, to together with the Netherlands, establish the implementation agenda, mean that the world has stood still, waiting for St. Maarten to align its plans. The Government has to admit that it is the country package that will dictate the pace and priorities for the coming years. While that might be a bitter pill for the governing coalition to swallow, thats the reality. Moreover, she says, it needs to be recognized that many of the country plans, especially those of Curacao and St. Maarten are in essence carbon copies. In many areas we are tied to Curacao, many of our laws are the same, our healthcare, education and tax systems have the same origins. Work that has already started for Curacao will not be duplicated from scratch to suit St. Maarten unless we can make a compelling case in our defense. Some of the areas where again we could be running behind the facts to have St. Maartens position taken along are e.g. dollarization for the monetary union of Curacao and St. Maarten (D-3), and a new tax system with a proposed form of a Value Added Tax (C-1). The implications of these reforms could be far-reaching. Would not any Government want to discuss its priorities and the way forward with its Parliament? questioned the MP. But then again, the Prime Minister has in the past observed that the Government is supported by a majority in Parliament. Thats no excuse though to brush aside a call from Parliament to defend Governments position at whatever stage in the process. The Government is presently dictating Parliaments agenda and it will only get worse, once the implementation agenda is established. It is clear from some of the timelines, that the Netherlands has no intention to let up on the speed with which they would like to see the country package implemented. The St. Maarten Governments current actions are therefore nothing more than stalling tactics, reiterated MP Wescot-Williams. What is being asked of the Government at this time, is to factor in Parliament in the preparatory work towards the implementation agenda from the onset. All of these matters are too important not to have good communication towards the general public and the relevant stakeholders from the beginning. This is an educational experience for everyone, and we have to work together to address diversity, equity and inclusion for a better workforce now and in the future. - Express CEO Bill Stoller With diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) becoming a top priority in recent months, the majority of U.S. hiring decision-makers indicate their company is responding through action and policy to prioritize and underscore these efforts. A new survey from The Harris Poll, commissioned by Express Employment Professionals, reveals more than 3 in 4 hiring decision-makers (78%) say their company has taken action on DEI, most commonly in these areas: Provided training for employees: 40% Offered safe ways for employees to report discrimination and harassment complaints: 31% Revised policies and procedures: 29% Changed recruitment and hiring practices: 28% Nearly half (46%) say their company currently has a DEI policy with 11% reporting they dont have one but plan to implement one by the end of 2021 and 14% plan to implement after 2021. Around 1 in 3 (31%) say one of the most important priorities for their company right now is expanding the diversity of their employees. Given these changes and policies regarding diversity, equity and inclusion, the majority (78%) feel just the right amount is being done at their company on this topic, but 10% feel too little is being done. Notably, action on this topic increases significantly with company size. The largest companies with more than 500 employees are at least twice as likely as the smallest companies with 29 employees to have taken each of these actions regarding diversity, equity and inclusion: Provided trainings for employees: 50% vs. 25% Offered safe ways for employees to report discrimination and harassment complaints: 41% vs. 16% Revised their policies and procedures: 39% vs. 14% Changed their recruitment and hiring practices: 39% vs. 12% The largest companies are also more than three times as likely as those with 29 employees to already have a diversity, equity, and inclusion policy (63% vs. 20%). I think businesses recognize the value of DEI and are moving toward it, said Shannon Wenninger, Express franchise owner in Fishers, Indiana. It is not something that will happen overnight, but when businesses become more intentional about it, change happens. In Jacksonville, Florida, Express franchise owner Mike Brady agrees that businesses still have work to do to address diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Unfortunately, discrimination still exists, whether it is overt or unintended, and it affects the work environment, he said. It is also extremely tough when you place an employee and there is no one at the job with a similar cultural background, which tells me businesses still have work to do. When DEI isnt addressed, Brady adds that it can lead to loss of production due to unhappy employees, constant turnover and the possibility of legal action. However, when steps are actively taken to remedy this, Wenninger lists several company benefits. It can help build a more robust business, she said. When customers and potential employees see a business that reflects who they are, it just feels better working with them. In addition, bringing different life perspectives and experiences to the table opens up more markets, solves problems creatively and creates a happier work environment. As for which companies are making the most changes, Brady says he sees DEI policies and procedures, as well as training, mainly at larger facilities. One example is the ban of political T-shirts and hats. Its encouraging to see businesses working to create safer and more inclusive environments for all, Express CEO Bill Stoller said. This is an educational experience for everyone, and we have to work together to address diversity, equity and inclusion for a better workforce now and in the future. Survey Methodology The survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Express Employment Professionals between Nov. 16 and Dec. 7, 2020, among 1,002 U.S. hiring decision-makers (defined as adults ages 18+ in the U.S. who are employed full-time or self-employed, work at companies with more than one employee, and have full/significant involvement in hiring decisions at their company). Data was weighted where necessary by company size to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population. *** If you would like to arrange for an interview with Bill Stoller to discuss this topic, please contact Sheena (Karami) Hollander, Director of Corporate Communications and PR, at (405) 717-5966. About Bill Stoller William H. "Bill" Stoller is chairman and chief executive officer of Express Employment Professionals. Headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the international staffing company has more than 830 franchises in the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Since inception, Express has put more than 9 million people to work worldwide. About Express Employment Professionals At Express Employment Professionals, were in the business of people. From job seekers to client companies, Express helps people thrive and businesses grow. Our international network of franchises offers localized staffing solutions to the communities they serve across the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, employing 526,000 people globally in 2020. For more information, visit http://www.ExpressPros.com. Horrific new footage claiming to show prisoners being assaulted in a Russian 'torture jail' has been released by a human rights group. Two inmates are shown being stripped and savagely beaten by uniformed officers wearing military fatigues, one of whom is nicknamed SS for his brutality after the infamous Nazi paramilitary unit. One of the victims is known to have died within a month of this 'torture', according to the Public Verdict Foundation. His body was returned to his family with no internal organs. Horrific new video footage of a Russian 'torture jail' has emerged, says a lawyers' human rights group. Pictured: Vazha Bochorishvili, a convict who died after the beating in the penal colony, is stripped and surrounded by uniformed officers. A female medical workers is also shown The footage shows both prisoners wearing only their underpants being brought in front of officers. In separate beatings, they are laid across tables and hit with truncheons at the notorious Yaroslavl IK-1 prison. The inmate who died after the attack was Georgian citizen Vazha Bochorishvili, who was summoned on the pretext of a body search procedure. Against jail regulations there is a female prison doctor present - wearing a mask - and she carries an anal dilator in her hands, says the report. She evidently did not report the abuse. Bochorishvili opposes the search procedure complaining of problems with his digestive system. After a dispute with officers demanding he 'squat', they throw him face down on a desk, and his underwear is pulled off. Another victim known as Andrei Ivanov - not his real name - was also shown in the footage being held over a table and beaten with truncheons Several officers held down the prisoners and others inflicted sharp blows with rubber truncheons on the legs and buttocks (pictured) Several officers hold him down and another inflicts sharp blows with rubber truncheons on the legs and buttocks. He screams in 'a terrible inhuman voice', said Novaya Gazeta newspaper which revealed the jail torture. 'Come on, come on, stronger', says one. 'Enough, enough,' begs Bochorishvili. After the punishment, the prisoner is hauled off the table which tips over, and collapses unconscious on the floor. He is ordered: 'Get up! Get on your feet, Bochorishvili!' He lies motionless on his side. The report said the torture continued after this, although the film ends at this point. The footage dates from April 2016 but has only been made public now. After the beating, he was left alone in a punishment cell, but his bleeding did not stop. He was then moved to Rybinsk hospital on May 9, and after he had died the same month, his body was returned to his relatives with 'no internal organs'. Sergey Efremov (pictured) former deputy of the operational department of correctional colony No. 1, was nicknamed 'SS' because of his brutality. He was previously sentenced to a four year term for abuse of office in punishing prisoners. This was later reduced to three and a half years The other victim is named Andrei Ivanov, but at his own request this is not his real identity. This victim is a Muslim inmate and he had become upset during a search when his Koran was thrown on the floor, says the report. Surrounded by a crowd of jailers and wearing only underpants he argues to defend his rights under the penal code. He is bundled onto the table and struck hard on the buttocks and legs with truncheons by several officers. He screams in agony but the attack continues. After release from prison, he required hospital treatment. The jail's former acting governor Dmitry Nikolaev (pictured) - in charge at the time these videos were made by prison officers - was acquitted in a previous torture case The footage has emerged after suspended sentences were given to officers at this jail in relation to previous allegations of torture, amid claims the authorities have sought to go soft on prison brutality. An appeal against the verdict concerning former jail staff Maxim Yablokov, Roman Onypa, and Vladislav Pisarevskyhas has been sent by the foundation to European Court of Human Rights. In the new footage, the faces of a number of the officers are clearly visible, and there are new demands for justice. Sergey Efremov - nicknamed SS for his habit of beating prisoners in the ears, causing deafness and disorientation - was believed to have been involved in torturing Bochorishvili, according to former inmates. He was previously sentenced to a four year term for abuse of office in punishing prisoners. This was later reduced to three and a half years. The jail's former acting governor Dmitry Nikolaev - in charge at the time these videos were made by prison officers - was acquitted in a previous torture case. Today the Investigative Committee opened a new criminal case based on the latest leaks of the videos at the Yaroslavl jail. Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes I know firsthand how critically important it is that we have a strategic and coherent plan for holding China accountable to its promises and effectively competing with its model of state-directed economics, her prepared testimony read. Both the Biden administration and members of Congress see finding consensus on trade issues as paramount, given the deep divisions that dogged Democrats in the past. During President Barack Obamas administration, the trade representative sparred with labor unions and many Democratic lawmakers over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact between countries along the Pacific Rim. Mr. Obama and his supporters saw the agreement as key to countering China. But progressive Democrats believed the pact would send more U.S. jobs offshore and fought the administration on its passage. Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the deal, and the remaining countries in the pact went on to sign it without the United States. Democrats spent a lot of time drilling down on what happened, said Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who supported the agreement. I really felt that it was important post-TPP to make sure that the trade conversation started and stopped with how the typical American worker and the typical American consumer would be affected, he said. What resulted, he said, was the approach in the revised North American trade deal higher labor standards, tighter environmental regulation and new mechanisms to ensure that the rules of trade agreements can be enforced which Democrats now describe as the bedrock of their new approach to trade. DUBLIN, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Wearable Patch Market By Technology (Connected Wearable and Regular Wearable), By Application (Non-Clinical and Clinical), By Region, Industry Analysis and Forecast, 2020 - 2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The Global Wearable Patch Market size is expected to reach $12.6 billion by 2026, rising at a market growth of 10.6% CAGR during the forecast period. Wearable patches are commonly known as electronic skin and smart patches. These are small, thin, and flexible in nature. Wearable patches are used for drug delivery, disease monitoring, and diagnosis. These patches are helpful in maintaining health and wellbeing in ageing patients suffering from prolonged conditions like diabetes and others. Currently, the market of wearable technologies is increasing, due to rise in research and development activities for designing new wearable patch carried out by significant players functioning in the market. Features like continuous monitoring of patient's body along with accurate data, minimal intervention with body movements and easier connectivity with the numerous smartphones are the pivotal factors that are boosting the growth of this market. In addition to it, the increase in a number of lifestyle diseases will also fuel the market growth. On the other hand, overlong process of governmental supports and interruption in new product launch are hamper the market growth. Growing acceptance of wearable patches in developing countries and rising adoption towards healthy lifestyle in order to create profitable prospects for wearable patches market. By Technology Based on Technology, the market is segmented into Connected Wearable and Regular Wearable. The Connected Wearable segment has the largest revenue share in 2019. This large share of this segment is accredited to the increasing occurrence of chronic diseases as well as the growing demand for the wearable patch in emerging countries. The speedily increasing aging population and growing occurrence of cardiovascular diseases are the primary factors that are expected to drive segment growth in the foreseeable period. By Application Based on Application, the market is segmented into Non-Clinical and Clinical. The clinical segment has the largest revenue share in 2019. Owing to the speedily increasing patient population and growing investments in the R&D for new wearable patch, the segment is anticipated to show growth in the coming years. Increasing investment in the clinical research industry by numerous players in the market to boost their efficacy and yield has driven the manufacturers to surge their emphasis on these activities. Growing focus on the wearable patch and increasing R&D spending are main factors that are responsible for the progress of this segment. By Region Based on Regions, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America, Middle East & Africa. North America is the leading region for the Wearable Patch Market, owing to the existence of large number of creators in the North America region is largely contributing for the growth of this region. Still, other emerging economies like Asia Pacific is expected to have a substantial growth owing to rising disposable income in the population and rising awareness about wearable skin patch in the Asia Pacific region. The major strategies followed by the market participants are Product Launches and Partnerships. Based on the Analysis presented in the Cardinal matrix; Koninklijke Philips N.V., Abbott Laboratories, Qualcomm, Inc., and L'Oreal Group are forerunners in the Wearable Patch Market. Companies such as VivaLNK, Inc., LifeSignals Group, Inc., and Smith & Nephew PLC are some of the key innovators in the market. Key Topics Covered: Chapter 1. Market Scope & Methodology 1.1 Market Definition 1.2 Objectives 1.3 Market Scope 1.4 Segmentation 1.5 Methodology for the research Chapter 2. Market Overview 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Key Factors Impacting the Market 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 Approvals 3.3 Top Winning Strategies 3.3.1 Key Leading Strategies: Percentage Distribution (2016-2020) 3.3.2 Key Strategic Move: (Product Launches and Product Expansions : 2016, Feb - 2020, Sep) Leading Players Chapter 4. Global Wearable Patch Market by Technology 4.1 Global Connected Wearable Market by Region 4.2 Global Regular Wearable Market by Region Chapter 5. Global Wearable Patch Market by Application 5.1 Global Non-Clinical Market by Region 5.2 Global Clinical Market by Region Chapter 6. Global Wearable Patch Market by Region Chapter 7. Company Profiles DexCom, Inc. Abbott Laboratories Koninklijke Philips N.V. Smith & Nephew PLC (Leaf Healthcare, Inc.) Qualcomm, Inc. L'Oreal Group VivaLNK, Inc. Cardiac Insight, Inc. AliveCor, Inc. LifeSignals Group, Inc. For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/n70co5 Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Related Links http://www.researchandmarkets.com .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... NEW ORLEANS The utility company serving New Orleans appears to have cut three times as much electricity as it needed to during emergency winter weather blackouts, slashing power to roughly 26,000 families and businesses on Mardi Gras night, company executives said Tuesday. Officials with Entergy New Orleans told the City Council that emergency shutdowns ordered by a regional grid manager last week called for the utility to reduce the citys power consumption by 26 megawatts. Instead, more than 80 megawatts of electricity was shut off, based on current estimates. The blackouts lasted more than an hour. They affected only a fraction of the more than 200,000 customers of Entergy New Orleans. ADVERTISEMENTSkip ................................................................ But the news that more power was cut than was necessary was an unwelcome revelation to members of the City Councils utility committee. Council members decried a lack of advance information on the rolling blackout, which left families unexpectedly shivering and businesses without power. Among those affected were restaurants, which were already operating at limited pandemic capacity on what would ordinarily have been a busy Mardi Gras night. We were already pretty slow, said Ashton Julia, a worker at an Asian restaurant on St. Charles Avenue where the usual parades had been canceled because of the coronavirus. The blackout just made a bad situation worse, he said. We had people run out on their check on one server, he said in a phone interview. I had one person call me because they had two babies, Council President Helena Moreno told Entergy executives at Tuesdays meeting of the impact. Now, maybe they shouldnt have even lost power to begin with. The subfreezing weather and rolling blackouts added misery to what was already a muted Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans. Pandemic worries had prompted city officials to close bars and implement strict crowd controls in the French Quarter to avoid the spread of COVID-19. Other areas fared worse. Power blackouts hit broad sections of Louisiana and Texas, leaving millions without heat while also knocking out some public water systems. Nearly 80 deaths have been attributed to the weather. I am just sitting here just seething and bewildered at the same time, panel member Jay Banks said. The City Council sought information on why power was cut with little or no warning to several neighborhoods and to part of the citys drinking water system. The blackouts came on the night of Feb. 16 as subfreezing temperatures hit much of the South. Entergy officials said the nonprofit organization that manages much of the Southern power grid the Midcontinent Independent System Operator ordered Entergy companies to cut 222 megawatts of power to customers in order to avoid a major regional blackout during the winter weather crisis. But why Entergy New Orleans cut more than 80 megawatts when required to cut only 26 was not yet clear, utility officials said. Entergy New Orleans CEO David Ellis said the company would try to provide answers in 30 days. Were trying to walk through all of this detail and understand exactly how that happened and prevent that from happening again, Ellis said. Moreno called for an independent investigation of the rolling blackouts in New Orleans. The council regulates Entergy New Orleans. Entergy Louisiana, which serves other parts of the state, is regulated by the Louisiana Public Service Commission, which is to discuss power issues on Wednesday. Entergy companies also serve parts of Arkansas, Mississippi and southeast Texas. New Orleans water system was affected when power was cut to a facility that pumps drinking water from the Mississippi River. Entergys John Hawkins said the facility should not have been included in the rolling blackouts and that the problem would be addressed. Water system officials said they were able to operate the pumps using generator power. Company officials vowed to review the system for rolling blackouts to avoid other such actions, and they said they would work to improve advance notice of rolling blackouts stressing that the blackouts often must be implemented quickly to avoid larger, longer lasting blackouts. Roboze, a 3D printing company serving the aerospace, energy and manufacturing industries, opened a U.S. headquarters in Houston to capitalize on the regions pool of engineering talent and central location. The company, based in Bari in southern Italy, set up shop in a new building at 7934 Breen Road in northwest Houston. We want to really focus now on the U.S. market and have Houston as our second home in the world, said Roboze founder and CEO Alessio Lorusso. Roboze plans to hire 30 employees to build out its engineering, marketing and sales teams in the next 90 days. It is also expanding in Italy. On HoustonChronicle.com: A&C Plastics showcases COVID-related uses for plastic panels at new HQ The companys technology is used to fabricate parts such as gaskets, valves and O-rings. The parts are made of a range of materials, including polymers designed to hold up to extreme conditions and high temperatures. The 3D technology is an alternative to parts that are traditionally machined out of a block of metal by cutting away the material that is not needed. Lorusso said the Roboze technology eliminates wasted material and produces parts in hours rather than weeks. It also provides manufacturers with the ability to print parts on-site for applications in the chemical, oil and gas and other industries. Over the next two years, Roboze aims to employ 100 people. Theyre on the cusp of something that economists and analysts have been talking about for a while, said Patrick Jankowski, the Greater Houston Partnerships senior vice president, research, in reference to printing products at the time they are needed rather than stockpiling them in a warehouse for later shipment. This is an astute move on this Italian companys part, Jankowski said. There is such demand in Houston for the sort of thing they say they can produce. Roboze selected Houston because of growth and product innovation in the space, energy and medical device sectors, Lorusso said. Scientific initiatives at Houston Spaceport and Rice University factored into the decision. The central location between the East and West coasts and future markets in South America also made Houston a good choice, he said. Roboze, which counts GE and the U.S. Army among its customers, sells its products to businesses in more than 25 countries. Expanding during the COVID-19 pandemic comes as companies rethink their supply chains and evaluate ways to get parts either on-site or from shorter distances to minimize disruptions in production. It was an acceleration of the business, Lorusso said. Companies understand how important it is to be owners of their production process. katherine.feser@chron.com twitter.com/kfeser Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... PHOENIX With COVID-19 cases dipping and teachers getting vaccinated, some Arizona school districts are looking to return to in-person learning as early as next month. The Osborn School District in Phoenix, which has been doing virtual learning full-time since the start of the school year, will welcome students back into classrooms March 30. A survey conducted by the district found that 90% of their staff have already been vaccinated. Ylenia Aguilar, president of the districts governing board, said they expect that number to be closer to 95% in March. She knows the district has been very lucky. Weve been able to work and partner up and had access to multiple vaccination opportunities, which we know is not the case for other school districts in other areas, specifically rural areas, Aguilar said. We are ready to open. ADVERTISEMENTSkip ................................................................ Aguilar spoke at a news briefing Wednesday alongside State Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman. The state Department of Educations top official promised to help school districts across the state safely transition back to in-person learning. But that would likely not look the same as before. The state wants to make sure mitigation measures such as plexiglass between desks and up-to-date ventilation systems are in place, Hoffman said. Also, students and teachers must continue to practice hand-washing, masking up and social distancing when possible. A return to campus would look more like a patchwork around the state. Some schools, such as those on the Navajo Nation, have already declared they will not be resuming in-person instruction because of the virus devastating impact, Hoffman said. I want to support schools at every stage, so that when they do resume in-person learning, they are doing so safely with mitigation strategies in place, enforced, and with the support of their families, students, and teachers, Hoffman said. Dr. Jason Vargas, president of the Arizona chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said there is more scientific evidence that children are not the main source of community transmission of the virus. For districts that are ready, he believes a return to school can be done safely. For children without significant health problems and with proper mitigation strategies, the risk is relatively low, Vargas said. Arizona officials on Wednesday reported 1,310 additional confirmed COVID-19 cases and 43 deaths as coronavirus-related hospitalizations and seven-day rolling averages for daily new cases and daily deaths continued to drop. The latest figures reported by the state Department of Health Services increased Arizonas pandemic totals to 811,968 cases and 15,693 deaths. According to data from The COVID-Tracking Project, the rolling average of daily new cases declined over the past two weeks, dropping from 3,169.3 on Feb. 9 to 1,559.7 on Tuesday while the rolling average of daily deaths dropped from 132 to 112. Hospitalizations also continue to drop, with the states coronavirus dashboard reporting 1,449 COVID-19 patients occupying inpatient beds as of Tuesday, down from the pandemic peak of 5,082 on Jan. 11. The number of infections is thought to be far higher than reported because many people have not been tested, and studies suggest people can be infected with the virus without feeling sick. Arizona continues to ramp up expansion of vaccine access. More than 1 million people have received at least one dose of vaccine. At least 330,000 have gotten both doses. But some doses have had to go by the wayside. Records show that over 220 vaccine doses in Arizona have been spoiled or wasted since the rollout began in December. In documents obtained from the Arizona Department of Health Services, a dozen health care providers from mostly smaller counties reported, as required, vials that were unusable or never administered. The spoiled doses were primarily the Moderna vaccine. Most reported single-digit losses. However, the La Paz Health Department sustained the biggest with 100 doses of Moderna vaccine ending up spoiled, according to a Jan. 11 vaccine return form. Northern Cochise Community Hospital reported 70 doses lost on Dec. 31 because they had not been properly stored. None of the wasted doses involved the state-run sites at State Farm Stadium in Glendale or Phoenix Municipal Stadium. The state Department of Health Services say this type of waste is unacceptable. Actor Byun Yo-han in a scene from "The Book of Fish" / Courtesy of Megabox Plus M By Kwak Yeon-soo Lee Joon-ik, a pioneering director who tells stories about Korean society and its traditions through a historical drama format known as "sageuk," is back with another black-and-white biopic, "The Book of Fish." In his upcoming film, actor Seol Kyung-gu plays scholar Jeong Yak-jeon, the brother of one of the leading scholars in the late Joseon era Dasan Jeong Yak-yong. His character meets a young fisherman named Chang-dae (Byun Yo-han) while living in exile on Heuksan Island in South Jeolla Province. In contrast to Jeong, who tries to avoid his scholarly endeavors, Chang-dae seeks knowledge. The fisherman believes that Confucianism the state ideology of the Joseon Kingdom can protect the people, so he concentrates on studying rather than catching fish. Lee has received accolades for making historical films such as "The King and the Clown" (2005), which revolves around two male traveling performers who are arrested for satirizing King Yeonsan, "The Throne" (2015), which is a tragic tale of King Yeongjo and his son Crown Prince Sado, and "Anarchist from Colony" (2017), which traces the turbulent life of anarchist Park Yeol during the 1910-45 Japanese occupation of Korea. His 2016 black-and-white biopic "Dongju: The Portrait of a Poet" is about poet Yun Dong-ju who was imprisoned for his participation in anti-Japanese movements in 1943 and died in a Japanese prison at the age of 27. Lee Joon-ik, front, and the cast stare at a screen after shooting a scene for "The Book of Fish." / Courtesy of Megabox Plus M Following the battle of Baghuz on 9 February 2019 by the US-led Coalition via its Kurdish partners the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Deir Al-Zor in eastern Syria close to the border with Iraq, the Kurds claimed that many prisoners and surrendering combatants were mostly foreign Islamic State (IS) group fighters. They claimed the end of the IS presence in the area, leading many to believe that the role of this terrorist group had ended in Syria, especially after its leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and other top commanders had either been killed or eliminated from the scene. However, over recent months it has become apparent that IS is still alive and undefeated in the region and that the group was not defeated by this or other battles led by the Kurds and the US-led Coalition. It has revived itself through new leadership strategies relying on urban warfare in which it is highly skilled. French Defence Minister Florence Parly has said that IS lives on and has reappeared in Syria and Iraq in some form, adding that since the fall of Baghuz in the Euphrates Valley, the last IS stronghold, we now see IS regaining power in Syria. During the past eight years and since the creation of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in April 2013, the group took control of large areas of Syria having a Sunni majority. Beginning in western Iraq and moving across to eastern and northeastern Syria and cities such as Raqqa, the group took control of large parts of the country, even going as far as areas with Alawite minorities that support the regime led by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. The group then defended this territory by fighting on several fronts, requiring it to have regular forces and commanders with strategic and tactical experience in traditional combat. It did not attack regime forces or towns with Alawite minorities, and Syrian opposition and leaked intelligence reports show that regime intelligence agencies were able to infiltrate IS ranks with large numbers of officers and trainers. The group relied on commanders who had originally served with Al-Qaeda and had lived in Iran. Its actions were a key element in convincing the West of Al-Assads claim that he was fighting terrorism and jihadist groups. After its defeats at Baghuz and elsewhere, the group today is making a comeback, targeting the Syrian regime, Iranian and Russian military bases in Syria, and relying on local jihadist commanders who want to fight the Syrian opposition, regime, Iran and Russia. In 2020, the terrorist group targeted the regime and its Russian and Iranian allies in the Syrian desert, making it an extensive battleground. It also attacked the Kurdish SDF east of the Euphrates River in Deir Al-Zor and areas under opposition control. It adopted a strategy of small attacks in desert and uninhabited areas, taking advantage of the differences between the other parties. This was unlike in Iraq, where Iraqi forces under coalition air cover were able to dismantle IS cells by relying on local informants who reported any activities. At the end of last year, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a local rights group, published a report on IS activity in Syria showing that the group was present across 4,000 square km of Syria, with most operations focused on areas around the cities of Aleppo, Hamah and Raqqah. IS had killed 780 regime soldiers and militias through ambushes and other clashes, including 108 men from Iran-backed militias who were not of Syrian origin, the SOHR said. Some 507 IS combatants had also been killed during these operations. The SOHR reported that IS had carried out more than 480 attacks in areas under SDF control, killing 208 people including 122 SDF members and civilians. Syrian opposition member Khaled Al-Matlaq said that the reappearance of IS in the Syrian desert clearly indicates that the group is alive and well and is operating according to a strategy of urban warfare, using units of no more than five members and sleeper cells in areas under opposition control. This method cannot be countered by traditional combat methods because it relies on close-range fighting and intelligence gathering among locals. Aerial, electronic and visual surveillance locate IS hideouts only with great difficulty due to decoys and the groups minimal use of modern communication technology, he said. The opposition believes that although IS targets regime forces, the regime is benefitting from the return of IS. According to opposition military sources, Syrian intelligence agencies have trained troops wearing IS uniforms to use the groups tactics and send them into areas not yet under government control. Iyad Barakat of the opposition forces said that the Kurdish SDF released a large number of IS fighters and their families from camps and detention centres in northeastern Syria, under the pretext that it could no longer protect these camps. But releasing associates of a terrorist group without prosecuting or rehabilitating them will only lead to new terrorist groups. On 5 October last year, the SDF announced the release of some 25,000 people from the Al-Hawl Refugee Camp as part of a blanket clemency deal, including IS members and their families. A statement claimed those who were released had not been involved in combat and had regretted joining IS. On 15 and 19 October, hundreds more were freed from 20 SDF jails, where more than 10,000 IS fighters were languishing, including 2,000 foreign combatants whose countries of origin refused their return. Media sources say that the Syrian Kurds have not been straightforward in addressing the issue of IS fighters. While complaining that various countries are refusing the return of their nationals, the Kurds refused to hand over a group of more than 25 IS members who were German nationals, to Germany. The Kurds want to make political gains out of this issue, such sources say, since they have failed to make any tangible gains in the political process in Syria, either by acquiring international legitimacy or being accepted by local tribes. Tens of thousands of people detained in SDF camps and jails have been radicalised due to terrible conditions, Barakat said. The Kurdish forces use these prisoners as leverage and would not hesitate to use them to serve Kurdish interests, even if this meant releasing them so they could join terrorist groups. Iraq and Syria are fertile ground for the rebirth and revival of terrorist groups, since both countries suffer from a power vacuum and lack of national and social unity. This has been exacerbated by the presence of many armed groups, foreign interference, near absent sovereignty and a lack of democratic rule. Under these conditions, the fight against terrorist groups in the two countries has been a near-futile process, with the threat now posed by them reaching beyond local borders and across the region as a whole. *A version of this article appears in print in the 25 February, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly Short link: The Spanish government extended its ban on British tourists entering Spain this morning until at least March 16. Only Spanish citizens and British residents can enter the country as part of restrictions introduced to limit Covid-19. The ban was first introduced in January. South Africa and Brazil are also on the list. French actor Gerard Depardieu has been charged with rape and sexual assault after authorities revived a 2018 investigation that was initially dropped, the Paris prosecutors office said. The office told the Associated Press that the French actor was not detained when he was handed the preliminary charges on December 16. The Paris prosecutors office addressed the charges after the case was leaked to French media. French media reports said the charges relate to allegations made by an actress in her 20s that date back to 2018. Expand Close Gerard Depardieu made his name in Hollywood with the film Green Card (Ian West/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Gerard Depardieu made his name in Hollywood with the film Green Card (Ian West/PA) Read More An initial inquiry against the star was dropped in 2019 because of lack of evidence, but was later revived. French newspaper Le Parisien and BFM TV said the actress and dancer alleged that Depardieu assaulted her in August 2018 at his home in Paris. The two met when Depardieu led a master class at her school, BFM TV reported. The actress, who has not been named, first filed a complaint with details of alleged rape and assault in August 2018 in the southern French city of Aix-en-Provence. The probe was take over by Paris investigators, but was soon dropped. Depardieus lawyer Herve Temime was not immediately available for comment, but he has previously said that the actor absolutely denies any rape, any sexual assault, any crime. Depardieu is among Frances most well-known and controversial stars. He has appeared in 200 films over six decades and is among a few French actors who have made a name for themselves in Hollywood. He won a Golden Globe for his performance in Green Card, a 1990 English-language romantic comedy co-starring Andie MacDowell. His first big hit in France was Les Valseuses, (Going Places), Bertrand Bliers classic farce about two wandering thugs. Before crossing the Atlantic, Depardieu played an array of roles ranging from Jean Valjean, the thief-turned-saint in Les Miserables, to Christopher Columbus. In 2014, he played the leading role in Welcome To New York, the film inspired by the life of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former director of the International Monetary Fund who was accused in 2011 of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. Bosch Group, a German technology and services major, is investing Rs 800 crore to upgrade its existing campus in Bengaluru to a fully artificial intelligence of things (AIoT)-enabled 'smart campus', a top company official said on Wednesday. The campus is likely to house the second-highest number of Bosch employees in the world, said Soumitra Bhattacharya, managing director of Bosch Ltd and regional president of Bosch Group in India. The 75-acre campus will be the base of the group's various companies in India, including the home appliances, power tools, powertrains and automotive aftermarket divisions and could host around 10,000 software engineers by the time it is completed. It is expected to be inaugurated in June 2022, when the group completes 100 years of presence in India. "In our smart campus in Adugodi, which has 75 acres which we are going to inaugurate in 2022, we are investing more than Rs 800 crore to make it one of the smartest campuses. "This is going to be one of the largest tech centres that we have in the world and likely to be the largest outside Europe," Bhattacharya said while addressing a virtual conference. Stating that the campus will allow the group to showcase "all our digital use cases", he said, "In the heart of the city of Bengaluru, housing one of the largest Bosch campuses in the world, this will be a testimony of our living as a AIoT company." Bhattacharya said the campus, which had initially housed Bosch's first plant in India, called the 'Bangalore plant', is being redeveloped into a "truly end-to-end smart campus" after shifting the manufacturing unit to a location on the way to Mysore. When asked about the likely employment in the upgraded campus, he said, "This is going to house very likely, the second-highest number of Bosch employees in the world. Already we house more than 3,000 software engineers, which will go up to a lot more, maybe towards 10,000 by the time we finish all the building." Bosch came to Karnataka in 1951 and "from 1953, we have been doing make in India", he said adding that "this campus is already existing for the last 68 years". "From people to mobility to non-mobility, we will have actual 'use cases' here, which we will show that they are proven technologies, we are inaugurating the revised smart campus in our 100 years of Bosch in India which is 2022," Bhattacharya said. Bosch has a total of 31,150 associates in India with 15 group companies and 16 manufacturing facilities across the country. Globally, the group has over four lakh employees; out of which, 73,000 are development engineers. Reiterating the group's commitment towards a self-reliant India, he said, "For the Atmanirbhar Bharat, Bosch India has been poised to play this game since we are doing Make in India for the last 68 years and in India for the last 98 years." He further said, "It is our responsibility as Bosch India to play an 'India agenda' first as we have announced to the whole government which ensures that India as a neutral and non-aligned country shows itself to be extremely self-reliant. I can assure you that Bosch India will play a very important role." Also Read: Schezwan vada pav to swadeshi burger: How Jumboking reinvented itself [February 24, 2021] Infinidat Expands Strategic Alliance with VMware Amid Growing Traction of Multi-Petabyte Scale Storage in Large Enterprises WALTHAM, Mass, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Infinidat, a leading provider of enterprise-class storage solutions, today announced that it has expanded its strategic alliance with VMware, a leading innovator in enterprise software. Infinidat has broadened its extensive VMware capabilities with new support for vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols). In addition, InfiniBox is now the first petabyte-scale storage platform available in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab. These new milestones in the deep collaboration between the two technology innovators make it even easier for customers to test, implement, and maintain large-scale software-defined datacenter (SDDC) environments. We are taking our partnership with VMware to a new level with vVols support and our Cloud Solutions Lab collaboration, said Phil Bullinger, CEO of Infinidat. Nearly all of our large enterprise customers are using VMware as their software-defined data center infrastructure platform of choice. We are now in an even better position to unlock next-generation cloud use cases for a wider range of large enterprises. Our expanded relationship reinforces Infinidat as an industry leading tier-one VMware storage provider. "The new InfiniBox vVols implementation raises the bar for enterprise-grade Tier 1 virtualization environments, building on Infinidat's rich history of VMware solutions that enable simplicity at multi-petabyte scale," said Lee Caswell, VP of Marketing, VMware Cloud Platforms Business Unit. Were thrilled to continue partnering with Infinidat to increase the value for customers across our portfolio, from traditional vSphere to VMware Cloud Foundation to emerging Tanzu Kubernetes environments." The VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is available for customer and partner use to validate emerging workloads and client scenarios. Leveraging the new InfiniBox technology, the Cloud Solutions Lab can now handle multi-petabyte data environments. InfiniBox has already been used as part of VMware Cloud Solutions Lab projects including the Data for Good big data reference architecture, as well as for machine learning on vSphere. Infinidat introduced us to advanced ways VMware can be integrated with the InfiniBox and showed us the power of using both products together, including instant single-VM restores, said Cole Thompson, President and CEO of Virtual Data Corp (VDC). "Infinidat's capabilities make VMware deploments so simple and reliable that they can be done in hours, compared to weeks with other products. Infinidats new enhancement with vVols support builds on the companys proven solutions at multi-petabyte scale. Keeping with its signature simplicity, Infinidat has differentiated its vVols support by making it easier to configure and operate than alternative implementations. vVols support on InfiniBox augments the companys comprehensive VMware solutions and provides a foundation for future capabilities. Customers can also leverage the new vVols functionality to use InfiniBox as Principal Storage within the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) hybrid cloud platform, or via native vSphere Cloud Native Storage (CNS) usage with VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. This helps streamline operations across multi-cloud infrastructure and broadens Infinidats best-in-class Kubernetes capabilities. The benefits include consistency and enhanced security of operations and infrastructure across public and private clouds, while increasing enterprise flexibility and agility. Infinidat has rolled out this expanded support for VMware customers as part of new enhancements to InfiniBox. In addition to vVols support, Infinidat also augmented the deep learning algorithm at the core of every InfiniBox - Neural Cache - to improve scalability by freeing up as much as a third of the DRAM of the machine. This software enhancement enables further storage consolidation and data growth possibilities to continue. Availability vVols support and other enhancements are available at no extra charge in the latest InfiniBox software release. About Infinidat Infinidat helps enterprises and service providers empower their data-driven competitive advantage at scale. Infinidats software-focused architecture delivers sub-millisecond latency, 100% availability, and scalability with a significantly lower total cost of ownership than competing storage technologies. The company was founded by storage industry pioneer, Moshe Yanai, in 2011 and has shipped over 7.1EB worldwide to date. The corporate headquarters are based in Herzliya, Israel, and U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.infinidat.com. VMware, vSphere and Tanzu are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions. Connect with Infinidat About Infinidat Read our blog Follow us on Twitter Join us on LinkedIn Visit us on Facebook See us on YouTube Be our partner Media Contact Infinidat Sapna Capoor Director of Global Communications scapoor@infinidat.com I Mobile: +44 (0) 7789684159 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Investigators in Manhattan looking into Donald Trump's tax affairs are becoming increasingly interested in the president's oldest son, according to a report. Donald Trump Jr has been running the Trump Organization alongside his brother Eric, 37, while their father was in the White House. Cyrus Vance Jr, the Manhattan district attorney, has been investigating the former president's tax affairs for several months. But on Tuesday it was claimed that Don Jr is now being dragged into the probe. Donald Trump Jr, 43, is now reportedly a focus of Cyrus Vance Jr's investigation into tax Vance has been looking into the Trump Organization's financial affairs and taxes for years Investigators were asking questions about the 43-year-old and about Allen Weisselberg, one of the former president's most trusted officers, The Daily Beast reported. Weisselberg, 73, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, has repeatedly appeared in investigations into the Trump family finances. In particular, he was heavily involved in the scheme to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels. Don Jr has played an increasingly large role in his father's political campaigns, while dealing with the family's foreign business interests. Forbes reported that Trump's two sons 'unloaded $118 million worth of the president's real estate since his January 2017 inauguration, striking deals everywhere from New York City and Los Angeles to Charleston, South Carolina and the Dominican Republic.' His activities have also caught the eye of the Washington DC attorney general, who is suing the Trump inaugural committee and the Trump Organization for allegedly misusing over $1 million in donations. Ivanka Trump spoke to Karl Racine, the attorney general of Washington DC, last year about the lawsuit, which she called 'a waste of taxpayer dollars.' On official in Racine's office confirmed in January that the prosecutor hoped to speak to Don Jr too. Allen Weisselberg, 73, is also being looked at by Vance's team, The Daily Beast reported Don Jr has not commented on The Daily Beast's report, and neither has Weisselberg. Vance has expressed satisfaction that his investigations are progressing. On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court approved Vance's request to see Trump's long-concealed tax returns and other financial records for a wide-ranging fraud probe. Vance responded: 'The work continues.' Donald Trump is pictured with his son, as Weisselberg looks on behind Trump released a statement complaining, 'The Supreme Court never should have let this 'fishing expedition' happen, but they did,' and baselessly accusing his foes of engaging in 'fascism' against him. The Manhattan prosecutors were reported last week to have also recruited new members to their team. On Thursday, The New York Times said that Vance had brought on Mark Pomerantz, a well-known former federal prosecutor, to aid in its investigation of Trump and his real-estate company. The Wall Street Journal reported that prosecutors are now investigating loans that Trump had taken out on multiple buildings, including Trump Tower in Manhattan. On Thursday Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was interviewed by the Manhattan team for the fifth time, with Vance personally sitting in on the interview. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to crimes including lying to Congress during the Russia investigation and campaign finance violations, and is now serving the final months of his sentence under house arrest. He predicted that Trump would be severely harmed by the investigation. 'The Supreme Court has now proclaimed that no one is above the law,' Cohen told The Daily Beast. 'Trump will, for the first time, have to take responsibility for his own dirty deeds.' A federal judge in a late-night ruling Tuesday extended his nationwide block on the Biden administrations order halting certain deportations for 100 days, a major victory for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sued over the policy. In a 105-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton granted a preliminary injunction that blocks the Department of Homeland Security policy, which was issued on Bidens first day in office. It was part of a broader strategy meant to give the agency time to recalibrate and focus on the highest enforcement priorities of securing the southwest border and national security, administration officials have said. As long as the decision stands, it leaves the Biden administration with no choice but to continue to deport individuals and families prosecuted under Trump administration rules that critics have called xenophobic and overly punitive. The Trump administration broadened the agencys deportation targets to include immigrants without serious criminal records, while the new administration is poised to narrow them. The 100-day pause did not apply to people considered national security threats or those who crossed the border illegally after Nov. 1. Tiptons ruling extends a previous temporary restraining order he granted first for 14 days, then extended for two more weeks. The judge has faulted Homeland Security for failing to explain why a pause in deportations was necessary as the department reconsidered its priorities. Tipton has also found that the policy would unlawfully cause financial harm to Texas by forcing the state to pay to continue to detain people who would otherwise be deported, and to provide public education to unaccompanied migrant children. The core failure of DHS lies not in the brevity of the January 20 memorandum or the corresponding administrative record, but instead in its omission of a rational explanation grounded in the facts reviewed and the factors considered, Tipton wrote. This failure is fatal, as this defect essentially makes DHSs determination to institute a 100-day pause on deportations an arbitrary and capricious choice. BACKGROUND: Texas AG Ken Paxton's lawsuit temporarily blocks President Biden's order on deportation Department of Justice attorneys are likely to appeal the decision, but face an uphill battle as the case heads toward conservative-leaning court after conservative-leaning court. Tipton was a Trump appointee, and an appeal would be heard by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative in the nation, then the U.S. Supreme Court. For Paxton, who has faced public scrutiny since the revelation that he took a business trip to Utah while Texas endured a major disaster last week, the judges ruling was welcome news. HUGE WIN. The first of many against Bidens unlawful agenda, Paxton tweeted Wednesday. Later, Paxton released a more detailed statement: A freeze on deportations at this scale would undermine federal law, irreparably harm our great state, and directly endanger our citizens. Law and order must be upheld, he said. I will continue to defend Texas against those who unlawfully ignore United States law in favor of their own policy preferences. On HoustonChronicle.com: AG Ken Paxton and wife Sen. Angela Paxton went to Utah during Texas freeze Attorneys for the Department of Justice said they disagreed with the decision and were considering next steps. An attorney with American Civil Liberties Union, which represents two Texas groups that intervened in the case, similarly said they were reviewing their options. This ruling is legally wrong and will seriously harm families and communities around the country, ACLU attorney Cody Wofsy said. Texas suit is an attempt to deprive the Biden administration of a meaningful opportunity to review and assess immigration enforcement after years of living under lawless Trump policies. Tipton said in his order that he understood the agencys desire to reset priorities as well as address operational challenges posed by COVID-19; however, he disagreed that a 100-day halt on certain deportations was the way to do that. Why is a 100-day pause needed to alleviate the problems COVID-19 poses? What basis in the record is there that anything will be different in 100 days on this front? he asked. Why does DHS need a 100-day pause on removals to fairly and efficiently process immigration and asylum applications at the southwest border? Why is pausing removals essential to redirecting immigration resources? Tiptons order prevents mass stayings of deportation orders; however, DHS still retains the ability to make case-by-case decisions. Geoffrey Hoffman, director of the University of Houston Law Centers Immigration Clinic, said Biden administration lawyers still have a good chance of having the decision overturned by higher courts, despite their conservative majorities. First, the Supreme Court and other federal courts have expressed doubts recently about the legitimacy of nationwide injunctions, Hoffman said. Second, there is the substantive problem with the decision impinging on the wide discretion given to presidents in the context of immigration enforcement, which traditionally has been within the almost-exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government. Raed Gonzalez, a Houston immigration attorney, said the suit will eventually be moot once the administration sets a more permanent policy beyond these 100 days, which will be up in May. In the meantime, however, he said it will mean more torn families and immigrants being forced to face danger in their home countries. The Biden administration did not intend to stop all deportations, but some that were not on their priorities, Gonzalez said. I trust this will be able to be achieved once the priorities from DHS are formally followed, but in the meantime this is just another partisan lawsuit clearly following Paxtons xenophobic policies of the prior administration. taylor.goldenstein@chron.com We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company New Delhi: Health Minister J P Nadda today has said that number of cesarean deliveries or C-section surgeries have witnessed an increase in the country. The minister addressed the same as a matter of concern. Nadda said during the Question hour that C-section surgeries have increased, particularly in the private institutions. He cited the reasons behind the same to factors like personal preference, time constraint and risk factor. "But our efforts are on to bring down the number of C- section. We are initiating the process of counselling," he said. C-section surgery is an operation by which a fetus is taken from the uterus by cutting through the walls of the abdomen and uterus. The minister said as per the information received from the Central Government Health Services-empanelled private hospitals, a total of 17,450 C-Section surgeries have been conducted out of 31,296 deliveries, which is about 55.75 per cent. He said the CGHS has already asked all CGHS empanelled hospitals to display the number of C-Section being conducted on voluntary basis prominently near reception of the hospital. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. In Japan, the suppression of Christianity increased from the end of the 16th century to the beginning of the 17th century, and many missionaries and Japanese believers were martyred during this period. New research has uncovered a letter indicating that Hosokawa Tadaoki, lord of the Kokura domain from 1600 to 1620, ordered the execution of Diego Hayato Kagayama, a chief vassal of the Hosokawa family, and the banishment of Genya Ogasawara, both Christians. The punishment and martyrdom of both men was previously known only from reports by Jesuit missionaries to Rome. The discovery of primary historical documents created within the Hosokawa family has clarified both the authenticity and the limitations of missionaries' writings of the time. In the mid-16th century, the number of Christian believers in Japan exploded with the arrival of the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier. Eventually, some of the feudal lords, daimyos, and their vassals came to believe in Christianity. There were many Christians in the Kyushu region in particular which served as a gateway to missionary work and "southern barbarian culture." The Hosokawa family, which eventually became the lords of the Kyushu region, had many Christian retainers. It is well known that Tama (Gracia/Garasha) Hosokawa, the wife of Tadaoki Hosokawa, the second head of the family, was a Christian. She maintained her faith and met her end in a major civil war, Battle of Sekigahara, in 1600. When the Edo shogunate issued a nationwide ban on Christianity in December 1614, Hosokawa family retainers abandoned their faith one after another. However, some vassals in the family chose not to apostatize, most notably Hayato Kagayama and Genya Ogasawara. Hayato Kagayama was a military commander who served three feudal lords who were all closely associated with Christianity. The first two were Christian, and after losing them to banishment deportation and death from illness, he proved himself to be a highly valuable retainer to the Hosokawa family. Although Tadaoki Hosokawa himself was not Christian, his wife Gracia was a devoted Catholic. Genya Ogasawara was Hayato's son-in-law and the son of a man famous for having been with Gracia during the last moments of her life. As the Hosokawa family residence was besieged by the enemy during the Battle of Sekigahara, Genya's father took Gracia's life and then committed seppuku, a form of ritual suicide in the samurai code of honor. Both of these acts were by order of Lord Hosokawa, who then became deeply grateful to Genya's father for protecting his wife's honor and not giving her to the enemy. Both Genya and Hayato refused to obey the order to change their religion, but it is thought that Tadaoki respected the two so much that he was unable to take decisive action to punish them. According to Jesuit missionary reports to Rome, on September 8th, 1619, Tadaoki finally ordered the beheading of Kagayama Hayato because he refused to apostatize. He also banished Genya Ogasawara and his family from Kokura, where the Hosokawa family castle was located, to the countryside to live with unknown farmers and outlaws. Researchers from Kumamoto University's Eisei Bunko Research Center* discovered a letter related to these orders while analyzing an archive of the Hosokawa family's first retainer, the "Matsui Family Documents." The sender, Rokuzaemon Yano, and three others were officials in charge of Genya Ogasawara's custody, and the recipient, Okinaga Matsui, was the first retainer of the Hosokawa family and the chief administrator in the Kokura domain. [Original text] (Note: Uses some old-style Japanese kanji.) [Translation reordered for presentation.] We have received Lord Tadaoki's decrees. 1. The Death Penalty (Martyrdom) for Hayato Kagayama: We understand that the order to execute Hayato Kagayama was given last night (September 8). 2. Spare the Genya Ogasawara Family: We immediately informed Genya Ogasawara that our Lord decided to save his life in gratitude for Genya's father's fealty. In response, Genya said, "I am so grateful to my Lord that I am at a loss for words." When we informed him of the Lord's intention to spare the lives of his family, including his children, he expressed his heartfelt gratitude and wrote a letter of reply to our Lord. In addition, Genya said to us, "Please, the three of you, express very carefully my gratitude to Lord Tadaoki." Please keep this in mind. 3. Management of Genya Ogasawara's family: We ordered local village officials to keep a close watch on Genya, and to seize him and inform us immediately if he tries to escape from the confinement area. If it is difficult to seize him, we understand it is not a problem to execute him. If any abnormalities occur we shall report them as soon as they occur. 5:00 PM on the 9th of September, From: Rokuzaemon Yano, Jinbei Yoshida and Ihei Tomishima, To: First Retainer Okinaga Matsui Professor Tsuguyo Inaba said following about this historical document: "Until now, we could only learn about the martyrdom of Hayato Kagayama and the punishment of Genya Ogasawara from the reports of Jesuit missionaries from Rome, and we could not eliminate information uncertainty. However, with the discovery of primary historical documents created by the organization that handed down the punishment, the Hosokawa family, more facts are now known. The punishment of the two men is now thought to have been carried out in the immediate aftermath of the "Great Martyrdom of Genna in Kyoto" (1619), one of the greatest incidents in the history of Japanese suppression of Christianity, by Tadaoki, who felt threatened by it. This was a shocking and decisive suppression of Christian retainers and vassals among leading feudal lords. After that point, daimyo and samurai within the family were forbidden from being Christian. This primary historical document demonstrates removal of Christians from the ruling class structure, and is a great historical discovery for Japanese Christianity." Items 1 and 3 of this letter are almost identical to the reports sent to Rome, but item 2 has never been seen before in any historical document. Genya Ogasawara's father protected the honor of his lord's wife, Gracia, by not letting her be taken hostage during the Battle of Sekigahara. After her death, he died a martyr close by. This document clearly shows that Lord Hosokawa highly valued Genya's father's loyalty. However, the Genya Ogasawara and his family were ostracized by Hosokawa because they would not renounce their faith. Eventually they would all be executed in Kumamoto in December 1635. The report from Jesuit missionaries at the time of Genya Ogasawara's punishment reads as follows: He was banished to the countryside where there were unknown farmers and outlaws in the territory. Law enforcement authorities see some good elements in a bill signed into law by Gov. J.B. Pritzker and intended to reform Illinois criminal justice system, but they say other elements will only handcuff them in trying to do their job. The legislation mandates the use of body cameras, limits use of force and changes policies governing removing officers from duty. It also eliminates the cash bail system. Cass County Sheriff Devron Ohrn said he is concerned about several portions of the law, including the elimination of the cash bail system. I dont know what happens in places like Chicago but, here, we dont have people that are kept in jail for months and months for minor offenses if they cant pay bail, Ohrn said. This is just putting criminals right back on the streets. With the opportunity for immediate release, there is less accountability and fewer consequences, Ohrn said. It isnt just the potential rise in crime that has Ohrn concerned. He said the changes show less concern for crime victims. The victims are seeing these criminals right back out on the streets, he said. I dont know when we stopped thinking about them. Morgan County Sheriff Mike Carmody said the legislation punishes law enforcement agencies. They are punishing an entire group of people that work for the public, Carmody said. For smaller departments, the funding for these new rules can hurt us. The elimination of the bail system also will lead to less funding for programs that benefit victims and even those who receive help following their release from jail. We dont just take this money, Carmody said. We use it to fund the court system, things like drug courts and other court programs. Mandates such as the required use of body cameras, come with no state funding support, leaving the burden on the counties and individual departments to cover the cost of buying those cameras, he said. Cass County States Attorney Craig Miller said the legislation wont impact his job much, but he knows the way police work is done will change. I do not envy our police officers right now, Miller said. Their job has been made more difficult. Other changes in how police respond to crimes also are of concern, Ohrn said. Some situations that were offenses for which one could be arrested now can receive no more than a ticket. One situation criminal trespass we could arrest someone, but now we can only write a ticket, Ohrn said. We can write a ticket, but we cant use force to make them leave. Such situations could lead to more severe problems, like a homeowner taking matters into their own hands because the police are limited in what they are able to do, he said. Ohrn said he is not opposed to changes in the system and acknowledged there are problems that need to be addressed, but said one large bill wasnt the way to do it. I dont think youll find a sheriff or police officer who isnt willing to sit down and find a better way of doing things, Ohrn said. This 700-plus-paged bill that was pushed through in the early hours of the morning where there was not time for them to read it isnt it. Government shouldnt be done like that. Others, however, say the legislation is a step in the right direction. The American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement in support of it. We are excited about the important changes to policing and our criminal justice system signed into law today by Governor Pritzker, the organization said. Reforming criminal justice and demanding meaningful police accountability are critical priorities for communities and people that are most harmed by the broken policing and criminal legal systems. Pamela Rodriguez, CEO of Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities, said the legislation will provide more protections and support for those suffering from substance abuse problems. The new law connects substance-use programs with first responder duties by expanding the definition of deflection to also make non-law enforcement first responders EMS and fire departments eligible to lead deflection programs and apply for state grant money, Rodriguez said. The law also explicitly acknowledges co-responder approaches that incorporate behavioral health professionals, social workers, or peers at the scene and in follow-up care. Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton said the legislation works toward making the criminal justice system more equitable to minority groups and the poor. As the governor said, we have heard from communities who have told us that they are over-policed and under-resourced, Stratton said. They told us about being in a constant state of trauma, yet living in communities with little to no access to mental health resources. They told us about the accessibility of drugs and guns, yet the flagrant inaccessibility of jobs and opportunity. And, yes, they told us of their desire to have what every Illinoisan desires and deserves to live in a safe and healthy community. We absolutely must protect public safety. To be clear, that is a priority of this administration. But the time has come for us to stop criminalizing being poor. Trillium Gold to Drill Test Updated Structural Model at Newman Todd in Red Lake Posted by Publisher Internet br /> New detailed model captures influence of east/west trending structures correlated with high-grade intercepts High-grade targets being defined to expand and upgrade mineralization Trillium Gold Mines Inc. (TSXV: TGM) (OTCQX: TGLDF) (FRA: 0702) (?Trillium? or the ?Company? https://www.commodity-tv.com/ondemand/companies/profil/trillium-gold-mines-inc/) is pleased to report that modelling of the structures and mineralization at its 100%-owned Newman Todd Project has yielded numerous drill targets to better define high-grade mineralization and structural controls. Work has begun on a fan of holes targeting high-grade structures and associated high-grade quartz veining emanating from the adjacent Rivard portion of the property. The influence of structures and high-grade quartz veining observed in outcrops on both the Newman Todd and Rivard properties are now recognized in the new modeling of the Newman Todd Zone (NT Zone). The NT Zone is a 2.2 km long and up to 200 metre-wide structural target situated in the Red Lake Gold Camp. From initial mapping on Rivard and close inspection of satellite images, a series of east/west trending structures have been modeled that appear to correlate well with the high-grade gold intercepts in the current and past drilling results (Figure 1).? Using these structural interpretations to influence the creation of grade shells, a series of discrete high-grade targets are identified that can now be tested for orientation and continuity. A fan of short holes to be drilled off-azimuth from the bulk of the historical drilling will confirm this interpretation and enable Trillium to begin targeting and defining the higher grade influences believed to be important from the outset of the current drilling program. Bill Paterson, Vice President of Exploration at Trillium Gold states: ?After countless hours of reviewing historical data, our thoughts are finally being recognized in the modeling of the NT Zone. These initial holes will confirm our interpretation of the high-grade intersections that were hinted in the historical drilling and will open up many more target zones up and down more than 2km of the NT Zone recognized on our property?. A selection of the current and historical results in the vicinity of the drill hole fan includes: 5m @ 18.25 g/t Au (from 170m) in NT-062, 2.3m @ 89.69 g/t Au (from 251.7m) in NT-083, 7m @ 32.57 g/t Au (from 193m) and 1m @ 174.11 g/t Au (from 229m) in NT-148, 1m @ 98.6 g/t Au (from 287m) in NT-152, and is up-plunge of the more recent 7.05m @ 15.41 g/t Au (from 226m) in NT20-169, incl. 4.3m @ 23.88 g/t Au and 1.12m @ 69.85 g/t.? Drilling from 2013 and earlier had mostly focused on testing the NT Zone by targeting from the footwall with drilling toward the southeast, now known to be sub-parallel to gold mineralized veining and structures, potentially missing high-grade intersections or undercutting much of the targeted mineralization. Newman Todd is a highly prospective target with 41% of the 165 historic drill holes having intervals of greater than 20 g/t gold over various lengths. In addition, nearly all drilling has been conducted to depths of less than 400 metres. The Red Lake Camp is famously known for high-grade gold mineralization at depth with Evolution Mining?s Red Lake Gold Mine currently reaching depths of several thousand feet. Trillium will continue to test various drill orientations in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of the mineralization and its structural controls and test the depth potential of the NT Zone. Figure 4 below shows the location of the Newman Todd Project as well as its relative location to the nearby past producing mines within the Red Lake Camp. The technical information presented in this news release has been reviewed and approved by William Paterson QP, PGeo, VP of Exploration of Trillium Gold Mines, as defined by NI 43-101. About Trillium Gold Mines Inc. Trillium Gold Mines Inc. is a growth focused British Columbia based company engaged in the business of acquisition, exploration and development of mineral properties located in the Red Lake Mining District of Northern Ontario. The Company recently extended its holdings in the Confederation Lake and Birch-Uchi greenstone belts, as well as in highly prospective properties in Larder Lake, Ontario and the Matagami and Chibougamou areas of Quebec. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release contains forward-looking information, which involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual events to differ materially from current expectation. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation, except to the extent required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Globe Newswire AS Pro Kapital Grupp has not yet published audited annual report for 2020 (related notice: https://view.news.eu.nasdaq.com/view?id=b9a14c4af26fbcf29852a28f2d4144b75&lang=en). However, the Company is using unaudited financial statements as basis of preparation in this report. All details related to this issue can be find in Note 2 of the report. MANAGEMENT REPORT Chairmans summary Start of 2021 has been a dynamic working period. We have continued working on our developments, where we see remarkable results, but also had to face a setback as after reporting date the decision of the Supreme Court terminated reorganisation proceedings of our subsidiary AS Tallinna Moekombinaat which led to the permanent insolvency of the subsidiary. Real estate development We have continued construction of Ratsuri Houses and Kalaranna projects and preparing project documentation for the following development phases in Tallinn. In March we completed Ratsuri Houses in Kristiine City where we had booked or presold all 39 apartments already prior to the completion. All apartments were sold and handed over within March and April. Soon we start handing over apartments in two first buildings of Kalaranna project, where completion of eight buildings with the total of 240 apartments will be achieved step by step in four phases. Today we have reservations or presales concluded for 85% of premises. After reporting date, we concluded an agreement for sales of all business premises of Kalaranna project for 16.16 million euros (with VAT) including the option to sell also premises of the last phase, which we are preparing to launch in the near future. This year we have started with construction of the new project Kindrali Houses in Kristiine City, where two building complexes with 129 apartments will be raised by next summer. In this project we had booked or presold more than half of the apartments before signing the construction agreement. Today over 90% of the apartments have been booked or presold. In Riga we are selling our luxury product River Breeze Residence and prepare for the further development of Kliversala Residential Quarter. We have received a building permit for City Oasis residential quarter with 326 apartments a tranquil and green living environment in the city centre. We will be ready to proceed with construction activities as soon as the market situation becomes more favourable. Unfortunately, the Latvian real-estate market has not been as active as its neighbouring countries Estonia and Lithuania. However, we have observed some changes in the recent months and recovery of the market. In 2019 we completed five buildings in Saltiniu Namai Attico project in Vilnius with 115 apartments. Today we have only 5 apartments unsold. We are preparing for the following phase with city villas and commercial building and plan to start the construction this year. Our revenues from the sales of the real estate depend on the completion of the residential developments as the revenues are recorded at the moment notary deeds of sale are concluded. In 2021 we have already completed Ratsuri Houses project with 39 apartments and soon we start handing over exclusive homes in prime location of Kalaranna project. T1 Mall of Tallinn On 3 April 2020 Harju County Court initiated reorganization proceedings of the operator of T1 Mall of Tallinn - AS Tallinna Moekombinaat (TMK). Reorganization proceedings were terminated a year later by the decision of 26 April 2021 of the Supreme Court not to take TMKs appeal into proceedings. Without the reorganisation proceedings AS Tallinna Moekombinaat is not capable to fulfil its obligations and has become permanently insolvent. On 7 May 2021 Harju County Court appointed Kristo Teder as an interim bankruptcy trustee of TMK. Interim bankruptcy trustee presented to the court a written report and opinion on 27 May 2021. Based on the report the court will take a decision about the following proceedings. The management of TMK continues to operate T1 Mall of Tallinn in cooperation with the interim trustee in bankruptcy until appointment of bankruptcy trustee and declaration of insolvency. Supreme Courts decision as an adjusting event after balance sheet date requires writing-off investment into subsidiary. AS Pro Kapital Eesti has written off an investment into subsidiary in amount of 13.4 million euros due to negative equity of TMK and as a result of adjusting event also receivables in the total amount of 26 million euros as at 31 December 2020. When bankruptcy is declared and the Company loses control over subsidiary, TMK will not be consolidated into the group any more. Although discontinuing consolidation will influence consolidated results by 26 million negatively, it will have a positive effect to the Group financial results due to derecognition of negative equity of the subsidiary. Bankruptcy of TMK will not affect liquidity of the Group nor short-term cash flows. Long-term cash flows are influenced by uncollectable receivables to the Group. Adjusting event described above and writing off the debts of subsidiary on parent company level has triggered a non-compliance with financial covenants of secured bonds (Notes 9 and 19). Hotel operations Last year had a significant impact on PK Parkhotel Kurhaus in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, the hotel was closed from March until the end of June and due to new restrictions hotel is not operating since November 2020. The impact of COVID-19 has been 0.7 million euros in less hotel revenues in the first quarter of 2021 comparing to last year. However, due to governmental support, the net result was better by 30 thousand euros. We expect to reopen the hotel in the middle of June. In the following months we continue construction works of ongoing development projects and plan to start with the following phases. In spite of losing T1 Mall of Tallinn, our real estate development is doing well, the Company is a going concern and we have an optimistic view for the future. Paolo Michelozzi CEO Key financials The total revenue of the Company in the first quarter of 2021 was 6.6 million euros, which is an increase of 12% compared to the reference period (2020 3M: 5.9 million euros). The real estate sales revenues are recorded at the moment of handing over the premises to the buyer. Therefore, the revenues from sales of real estate depend on the completion of the residential developments. The real estate sales revenue was higher in 2021 due to completion of Ratsuri Houses project, where apartments were handed over to new owners during March-April. In 2021, the Company has continued with presales of current development projects: first phases of Kalaranna District and Kindrali Houses in Tallinn. The gross profit in the first quarter of 2021 decreased by 8% amounting to 2.0 million euros compared to 2.1 million euros during the same period in 2020. The operating profit in the first quarter of 2021 was 1.9 million euros compared to 0.3 million euros during the same period in 2020. The increase in operating result is mainly influenced by the sale of investment property. The net result in the first quarter of 2021 was -2.1 million euros compared to -4.0 million euros during the same period in 2020. The net result of the reporting period was influenced by the sale of the investment property, but as well in fewer administrative (decreased 27% compared to 2020 3M) and financial costs (decreased 6% compared to 2020 3M). Cash generated from operating activities in the first quarter of 2021 was -2.1 million euros compared to -4.0 million euros during the same period in 2020. The net result of the reporting period was influenced by the sale of the investment property, but as well in fewer administrative (decreased 27% compared to 2020 3M) and financial costs (decreased 6% compared to 2020 3M). Net assets per share on 31 March 2021 totalled to 0.20 euros compared to 1.19 euros on 31 March 2020. Key performance indicators 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited*) Revenue, th EUR 6 563 5 873 19 234 Gross profit, th EUR 1 974 2 137 6 775 Gross profit, % 30% 36% 35% Operating result, th EUR 1 897 346 -43 108 Operating result, % 29% 6% -224% Net result, th EUR -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Net result, % -32% -68% -309% Earnings per share, EUR -0.03 -0.07 -0.98 31.03.2021 31.03.2020 (Restated*) 31.12.2020 (Unaudited*) Total Assets, th EUR 185 287 207 361 179 048 Total Liabilities, th EUR 177 829 142 022 169 477 Total Equity, th EUR 7 458 65 339 9 571 Debt / Equity ** 18.44 2.10 14.15 Return on Assets, % *** Return on Equity, % **** -1.2% -1.9% -30.7% Net asset value per share, EUR ***** -24.8% -5.9% -141.2% * See Note 2 in the Consolidated Interim Report for I Quarter and 3 Months Of 2021 for details regarding the unaudited status of the report and restatement as a result of an error 2019 year end results **debt / equity = total debt / total equity***return on assets = net profit/loss / total average assets****return on equity = net profit/loss / total average equity*****net asset value per share = net equity / number of shares CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS Consolidated interim statement of financial position in thousands of euros 31.03.2021 31.03.2020 (Restated) 31.12.2020 (Unaudited) ASSETS Current assets Cash and cash equivalents 13 331 9 459 9 393 Current receivables 1 542 1 281 1 797 Inventories 61 481 40 329 58 352 Total current assets 76 354 51 069 69 542 Non-current assets Non-current receivables 3 715 2 942 3 517 Property, plant and equipment 6 717 7 100 6 745 Right-of-use assets 318 480 357 Investment property 97 814 145 406 98 512 Intangible assets 369 364 375 Total non-current assets 108 933 156 292 109 506 TOTAL ASSETS 185 287 207 361 179 048 LIABILITIES AND EQUITY Current liabilities Current debt 104 373 83 153 107 581 Customer advances 10 284 5 935 7 866 Current payables 24 011 10 837 22 211 Tax liabilities 1 280 849 458 Short-term provisions 471 329 459 Total current liabilities 140 419 101 103 138 575 Non-current liabilities Long-term debt 33 425 38 398 27 255 Other non-current payables 2 638 1 064 2 295 Deferred income tax liabilities 1 151 1 320 1 170 Long-term provisions 196 137 182 Total non-current liabilities 37 410 40 919 30 902 TOTAL LIABILITIES 177 829 142 022 169 477 Equity attributable to owners of the Company Share capital in nominal value 11 338 11 338 11 338 Share premium 5 661 5 661 5 661 Statutory reserve 1 134 1 134 1 134 Revaluation reserve 2 984 3 262 2 984 Retained earnings -8 031 47 647 47 647 Profit/ Loss for the period -1 951 -3 788 -55 678 Total equity attributable to owners of the Company 11 135 65 254 13 086 Non-controlling interest -3 677 85 -3 515 TOTAL EQUITY 7 458 65 339 9 571 TOTAL LIABILITIES AND EQUITY 185 287 207 361 179 048 Consolidated interim statements of profit and loss and other comprehensive income in thousands of euros 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited) CONTINUING OPERATIONS Operating income Revenue 6 563 5 873 19 234 Cost of goods sold -4 589 -3 736 -12 459 Gross profit 1 974 2 137 6 775 Marketing expenses -126 -161 -621 Administrative expenses -1 143 -1 562 -6 154 Other income 1 351 3 478 Other expenses -159 -71 -43 586 Operating profit 1 897 346 -43 108 Financial income 1 1 4 Financial expense -3 994 -4 244 -15 998 Profit / loss before income tax -2 096 -3 897 -59 102 Income tax -17 -69 -354 Profit / loss for the period -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Attributable to: Equity holders of the parent -1 951 -3 788 -55 678 Non-controlling interest -162 -178 -3 778 Items that will not be reclassified subsequently to profit or loss Net change in properties revaluation reserve 0 0 -278 Total comprehensive income / loss for the year -2 113 -3 966 -59 734 Attributable to: Equity holders of the parent -1 951 -3 788 -55 956 Non-controlling interest -162 -178 -3 778 Earnings per share for the period (EUR) -0.03 -0.07 -0.98 Consolidated interim statements of cash flows in thousands of euros 2021 3M 2020 3M 2020 12M (Unaudited) Cash flows from operating activities Profit/loss for the period -2 113 -3 966 -59 456 Adjustments for: Depreciation, amortisation of non-current assets 100 105 416 Gain from disposal of investment property -1 092 0 0 Loss from write-off PPE and intangible assets 0 0 8 Change in fair value of property, plant, equipment 0 0 -16 Change in fair value of investment property 0 0 43 128 Finance income and costs 3 993 4 243 15 994 Changes in deferred tax assets and liabilities -19 -27 -178 Other non-monetary changes (net amounts) 2 -1 -3 111 Changes in working capital: Trade receivables and prepayments 53 -409 -1 514 Inventories -3 129 703 -13 011 Liabilities and prepayments 3 506 1 336 10 025 Provisions 13 10 59 Net cash generated in operating activities 1 314 1 994 -7 656 Cash flows from investing activities Payments for property, plant and equipment -28 -10 -94 Payments for intangible assets -2 -2 -43 Payments for investment property -210 -302 -844 Proceeds from disposal of investment property 2 000 0 0 Interests received 0 1 1 Net cash generated in investing activities 1 760 -313 -980 Cash flows from financing activities Net proceeds from secured bonds 0 28 500 28 500 Redemption of convertible bonds -69 0 -33 Redemption of non-convertible bonds 0 -28 000 -28 000 Proceeds from borrowings 5 838 100 14 410 Repayment of borrowings -2 857 -648 -1 376 Repayment of lease liabilities -46 -48 -135 Interests paid -2 002 -2 742 -5 953 Net cash generated by financing activities 864 -2 838 7 413 Net change in cash and cash equivalents 3 938 -1 157 -1 223 Cash and cash equivalents at the beginning 9 393 10 616 10 616 Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the period 13 331 9 459 9 393 The full report can be found in the file attached. Allan RemmelkoorMember of the Board+372 614 4920prokapital@prokapital.ee Attachment PKG Q1 2021 ENG remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. Changes to Western Australias Aboriginal heritage laws need to proceed as soon as possible after next months state election, politicians and activists say, after the disruption of another heritage site in the Pilbara raised concerns. WAtoday revealed on Tuesday that a registered Aboriginal heritage site had been damaged at BHPs Mining Area C project in the Pilbara in late January. BHP said the cause of the rock fall is not known. Credit:Louie Douvis The cause of the damage remains unclear, with BHP and the relevant traditional owner group, the Banjima people, jointly investigating. BHP said the site, which is a rock shelter, was not part of current mining operations and it noticed the rock fall there during regular monitoring activities, following which it notified the Banjima. The news comes almost a year after fellow Pilbara miner Rio Tinto drew international condemnation when it destroyed 46,000-year-old Aboriginal rock shelters while blasting at Juukan Gorge. This editorial ran in the Feb. 21 edition of the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. The views expressed here are solely those of the editorial board. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. (Natural News) A Houston-area couple is suing Entergy, the utility company in charge of Texas energy, for gross negligence following the death of their 11-year-old son during the recent blackouts. Cristian Pineda was found dead after trying to stay warm by huddling up in a single room. When his parents found him lying there unconscious, they tried to put him in a bed with his younger brother, though young Cristian was already dead from hypothermia. According to the nine-page lawsuit, Cristian died because grid wasnt a priority, and the energy provider made decisions based on profits. Both Entergy and ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas), the latter of which manages the flow of electrical power throughout most of the state, are responsible for Cristians death, the suit adds. Texans like the Pineda family should have been warned prior to the storm that they could be without power for many days, lawyers in the case say. Instead, they did nothing and people ended up dying. The failure to adequately inform Plaintiffs of the length of the black outs prevented them from properly preparing for the lack of power, or leaving the area, the suit alleges. Accurate information might have saved Cristian Pinedas young life. Entergy, ERCOT offer thoughts to suffering Texans On Feb. 15 when temperatures across Texas began to plunge, ERCOT made the decision to implement rolling blackouts. Because demand skyrocketed while energy generation decreased, a nightmare scenario ensued. Millions of Texans were left without power, and many of them never saw their power ever roll back on at all. The Pineda family was one such household where the power remained off, resulting in indoor temperatures plunging so low that young Cristian was unable to survive. According to a GoFundMe fundraiser page, the Pineda family was left without power for two days. On the morning young Cristian was found dead, temperatures had plunged to 12 degrees Fahrenheit. The suit seeks more than $100 million in damages from ERCOT and Entergy, both of which offered canned public statements about being deeply saddened by the loss of life in our community. ERCOT offered its thoughts to all Texans who have and are suffering due to this past week. However, because approximately 46 percent of privately-owned generation tripped offline this past Monday morning, we are confident that our grid operators made the right choice to avoid a statewide blackout, the group added in its defense. Ron Paul says Gov. Abbotts China virus restrictions made the blackout situation even worse ERCOT CEO Bill Magness claimed in the disasters aftermath that the Texas power grid was just minutes from a months-long blackout when it made the decision to implement rolling blackouts. As of Feb. 19, the grid was back up and running as normal. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and North American Electric Reliability Corporation, two federal agencies, along with multiple state agencies are currently in the process of investigating Texas grid failures. There are many reasons why Texas became like a Third World country, and we should be careful not to pin all the blame on just one factor, wrote retired Texas politician Ron Paul, as reiterated by a commenter at The Epoch Times. According to Paul, the disaster to a large degree was caused by political decisions to shift toward green energy generated from solar and wind and by Governor Abbotts authoritarian COVID restrictions. Abbott, who won a wind leadership award just this month, oversaw the near-collapse of wind energy generation last week, Paul added. Yet the politicization of energy generation in favor of green alternatives over natural gas and other fossil fuels has led to the unintended consequences of freezing Texans facing multiple millions of dollars in property damage and worse. More related news about corporate cronyism and its impact on the Texas energy grid can be found at Corruption.news. Sources for this article include: TheEpochTimes.com NaturalNews.com Jayalalithaas 73rd birth anniversary: AIADMK's Sasikala plan big to mark the day India oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P Chennai, Feb 24: The ruling AIADMK has lined up a series of events today(Wednesday) to mark the 73rd birth anniversary of former State Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa. However, all eyes are now on ousted AIADMK leader and Jayalalithaa aide VK Sasikala, who has completed her COVID-19 quarantine period. Her team is also preparing big for the event. According to reports, Sasikala's team members are preparing for a grand roadshow on Jayalalithaa's birthday. Notably, Sasikala returned to Tamil Nadu after four years on February 9 to a grand welcome by supporters. Her arrival left the ruling party in jitters ahead of the upcoming Assembly elections. Ahead of West Bengal elections 2021, TMC worker killed, 2 injured in bomb attack While Palaniswami is co-coordinator and Chief Minister, Panneerselvam is coordinator and Deputy Chief Minister. IT is reportedly said that the leaders have asked the AIADMK workers to light a lamp at 6 pm and take a vow in Jayalalithaa's name to protect people and guard the AIADMK till their last breath. While the test of Assembly polls is round the corner in about two months, "enemies and betrayers have joined hands to defeat the AIADMK", top AIADMK leaders O Panneerselvam and K Palaniswami said in a letter to cadres. Vowing to retain power for the second time in a row, they said such 'anti-people' forces must be taught a lesson again by vanquishing them through hardwork, unity and allegiance to the party. On the other hand, the main opposition DMK, which is out of power for almost ten years is leaving no stone unturned to win polls likely in April. The AIADMK, which snatched the reins of power in 2011 from archrival DMK, emerged victorious again in 2016 under Jayalalithaa's leadership. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 9:38 [IST] New Delhi, Feb 24 : Announcing the third phase of vaccination against Covid-19 pandemic from March 1, Union Minister Prakash Javadekar on Wednesday said people above 60 and those above 45 years of age with comorbidities will be vaccinated free of cost at government hospitals. Javadekar made the announcement after the Union Cabinet in a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, decided to launch the third phase of the world's largest vaccination drive, which began in India on January 16. "People above 60 years of age and those above 45 years of age with comorbidities will be vaccinated at 10,000 government and over 20,000 private vaccination centres from March 1," Javadekar said while addressing a press conference. "The vaccine will be given free of cost at government centres," the Minister said. The Minister further said that the private centres will charge for the vaccination and the rate will be decided in next three or four days. He said that the Union Health Ministry is engaged in talks with vaccine manufacturers and private hospitals to decide the charge for vaccination to all civilians. The decision came as India's cumulative vaccination coverage has crossed 1.14 crore recipients. The vaccination drive was started on January 16 for the healthcare and frontline workers, and the number was estimated to be around three crores. India's drugs regulator on January 3 approved Oxford Covid-19 vaccine Covishield, manufactured by the Pune-based Serum Institute, and the indigenously-developed Covaxin of Bharat Biotech for restricted emergency use in the country. Over 11 lakh people have been administered two doses of Covid vaccines so far amid reports of upward trend in cases in the past one week. The country reported 13,742 new cases in the last 24 hours on Wednesday with the overall tally mounting to 1,10,30,176 as per the Health Ministry's latest data. With 104 deaths due to the disease, the overall toll has touched 1,56,567. Prayut to now get AstraZeneca shot THAILAND: The first COVID-19 vaccine to be given to Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha is made by AstraZeneca, according to Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul. CoronavirusCOVID-19Chinese By Bangkok Post Wednesday 24 February 2021, 10:14AM Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha in a signing ceremony to acquire the COVID-19 vaccine from producer AstraZeneca, at Government House on Nov 27. Photo: Government House. Its important that Gen Prayut take the first COVID-19 vaccine shot because he is the countrys leader. There will naturally be a risk-assessment process by the Disease Control Department, which is an internationally accepted standard procedure. But its not discrimination, Mr Anutin said yesterday (Feb 23). The minister apparently wanted to clear the confusion on the previous day, when Gen Prayut said he would take the first shot to boost confidence in the vaccine among people. A doctor later warned the first lot of vaccine to arrive in Thailand today, the Chinese-made Sinovac, had been tested only on the age group of 18-59 and its efficacy and side effects are not known in other age groups. Since Gen Prayut is 67, the vaccine is apparently not for him. Mr Anutin said yesterday the doses to arrive in Thailand today were from two manufacturers - 117,000 from AstraZeneca and an unspecified number of Sinovac. Had there not been any drama, the vaccine would have arrived sooner, he said. He did not elaborate but activist Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit had earlier criticised the countrys vaccine plan for being too little, too late. The Move Forward Party linked to Mr Thanathorn also brought up the issue during the no-confidence debate last week. The shipment of AstraZeneca vaccine today came as a surprise since no imported doses of the vaccine had been on the plan. Gen Prayut will receive the vaccine with no age restrictions - AstraZeneca. The director of the National Vaccine Insitute had procured them. The date has not been set yet for the shot but the prime minister will be able to perform his duty normally after taking it, said Mr Anutin. He added the intervals were 14-28 days for Sinovac and six weeks for AstraZeneca. Both require a two-dose regimen. The vaccination will take place initially at medical facilities. People will have to wait 30 minutes after taking the shots to observe symptoms. According to the original plans, the first lot of vaccines to arrive is 200,000 doses of Sinovac today, followed by 800,000 doses in March and 1 million more in April. The rest of the vaccine for Thais in 2021 will be AstraZeneca made locally by Siam Bioscience, available from June to August (26 million) and September to December (35 million). By Chris Madson, Tom Christiansen, Bill Alldredge, Joe Bohne, Dave Moody, Bob Oakleaf, Armond Acri and Harry Harju. The authors, with the exception of Armond Acri and Bill Alldredge, are former employees of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. Guest Shots are solely the opinion of their authors. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. The central government has deputed high-level multi-disciplinary teams to states and Union Territory that have seen a surge in Covid-19 cases. The teams have been sent to Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, MP, Gujarat, Punjab, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Jammu and Kashmir. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers The three-member multidisciplinary teams are headed by joint secretary-level officers in the Union health ministry. They will work closely with the state administration and ascertain the reasons for a recent surge in infections. The teams will also coordinate with health authorities of the states for requisite Covid-19 control measures to break the chain of transmission. "The state governments have been advised for regular critical review of the emerging situation with concerned district officials to ensure that gains made so far in Covid management are not lost," the health ministry said in a statement. The Centre has also written to Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, which have been witnessing a rise in Covid-19 cases, along with decreasing proportion of RT-PCR tests and a rise in positivity in some districts. In a letter, the health secretary has asked Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab and J-K to focus on undertaking aggressive measures, including amplified RT-PCR testing, to curb the spread of the virus. "The states have been advised to increase testing in a focussed manner in the affected districts with the appropriate split of RT-PCR and Rapid Antigen Tests and to also ensure that all symptomatic negatives of antigen tests are compulsorily tested via RT-PCR tests. The positive persons must be promptly isolated/hospitalised, all their close contacts should be traced and also tested without delay," the ministry said. Covid-19 update India's total tally of Covid-19 cases surged to 1,10,30,176 with 13,742 new infections, while the recoveries have surged to 1,07,26,702, said the health ministry on Wednesday. The death toll increased to 1,56,567 with 104 new fatalities, the data updated at 8 am showed. The 104 new fatalities include 51 from Maharashtra, 14 from Kerala and 10 from Punjab. A total of 1,56,567 deaths have been reported so far in the country including 51,857 from Maharashtra followed by 12,472 from Tamil Nadu, 12,303 from Karnataka, 10,903 from Delhi, 10,253 from West Bengal, 8,718 from Uttar Pradesh and 7,168 from Andhra Pradesh. India's Covid-19 tally had crossed the 20-lakh mark on August 7, 30 lakh on 23 August, 40 lakh on September 5 and 50 lakh on 16 September. It went past 60 lakh on 28 September, 70 lakh on 11 October, crossed 80 lakh on 29 October, 90 lakh on 20 November and surpassed the one-crore mark on 19 December. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. US President Joe Biden has appointed Kiran Ahuja, a civil rights lawyer and an advocate for Asians, to head the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Kiran Ahuja, whose nomination was announced on Tuesday by the White House, is joining at least 20 other Indian Americans nominated by Biden to senior positions in his administration. As a member of Biden's transition team, she was in charge of ensuring a smooth move by the agency to the new administration. OPM oversees the federal government's civil service, coordinating the recruitment of government employees, and manages their health insurance and retirement benefits programmes. In former President Barack Obama's administration Ahuja had served in the (OPM) as chief of staff. She will have to be confirmed by the Senate in her new position. Ahuja is now the CEO of Philanthropy Northwest, a network of charitable organisations across six states. The White House said Ahuja grew up in Savannah, Georgia, "as a young Indian immigrant in the wake of the civil rights era." She shares an educational background with Vice President Kamala Harris having attended a historically Black institution like her. Harris went to Howard University for her bachelor's degree and Ahuja to Spelman College in Atlanta. With a law degree from the University of Georgia, Ahuja "began her career as a civil rights lawyer at the US Department of Justice, litigating school desegregation cases, and filing the department's first student racial harassment case," according to the White House. Initially in the Obama administration she had been the executive director of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, "leading efforts to increase access to federal services, resources and programs for underserved Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders," according to the White House. She also founded executive the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, an advocacy and membership organisation. As yet none of the Indian American nominees requiring Senate confirmation have come up for a vote before it. Neera Tanden, the nominee for the cabinet position of the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the only Indian American to have appeared for confirmation hearings before Senate committees. She has run into difficulties after a key Democratic Party senator, Joe Manchin, declared he will not vote for her. A committee vote is set for her on Wednesday as a prelude to action by the entire Senate. Biden is firmly standing by her even though it appears she may not be able to get enough votes for her confirmation as several Republicans have also declared opposition to Tanden because of her vicious tweets and statements attacking political leaders of all ideological stripes. Biden's Spokesperson Jen Psaki said on Tuesday, "We're going to keep our eyes focused on outreach to Democrats and Republicans and working toward getting Neera Tanden confirmed so we can get the budget process moving." (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter at @arulouis) Here we are waiting on a stimulus relief bill and Congress decided to go on break. Why dont you tell me again how much you love your Democrats? Minersville Why isnt the local YMCA building a handicap building? Many improvements have been made over the last few years but nothing has been done to accommodate handicapped individuals. Board members need to correct this situation as soon as possible. Pottsville Toomey showed he is a patriot by his vote to convict Trump of insurrection. It took courage to stand up to the GOP, which is loyal to Trump rather than to the Constitution. Auburn I am not sure it is fair that a business owner piles his snow over a drain so the borough has to use their time and resources to remove the snow. Not fair to the taxpayers who have to live with snow piles all around their homes. Minersville Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania voted with his conscience. Trump was guilty of insurrection. Now he is being censured. Thats why I personally think they should have secret ballots and Trump would have been impeached 90-10. Pottsville I am a Democrat and things like I read in the Republican Herald will assure I will remain one. It is abhorrent by the GOP to consider censuring U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey for being courageous, honorable and man enough to stand up for what were clearly impeachable offenses made by past president Donald Trump to find said president guilty of such behavior. Schuylkill Haven Too bad our Capitol is not located down on the border where those thousands of South American illegals are headed. Biden could then greet them personally. How can we stop or support such lunacy? God help us. Saint Clair I just sent Joe Biden my fuel bill so he could pay it. Cressona I wish Mahanoy City borough workers would get off their butts and try to get all these pathways open that are all full of snow, melting and all full of water. You could swim in the one at Main and Centre streets. All the rest are blocked. You cant walk. You cant make a path. Please get on the ball and open them up. Mahanoy City This is to all the Republicans out there who want to censure Sen. Toomey. They have it in reverse. They are the ones who should be censured. Toomey stood up for our country. The Republicans refused to do that. Pottsville It seems some people dont understand that presidents have always been doing executive orders. It is not just new to Biden. Clinton had 254 in eight years. Bush had 291 in eight years. Obama had 276 in eight years. Trump had 220 in four years. Tamaqua The censure of Toomey by the Pennsylvania state Republican leadership would be above stupid, it would be disgraceful. Trumps lies about the election caused the riots. Senate Republicans on the national level, McConnell, has so stated. It would be a more appropriate response to recommend him for the national Medal of Freedom for defending the Constitution and our votes. An honest man. Minersville It is about time that the Shenandoah Borough Council take off the baby training pants they are wearing and put on their big boy pants. Why? Three lawsuits. Two of them because of the former borough manager not forwarding funds to the Shenandoah Valley School District and Schuylkill County. Lets not forget the water authority, which is number three. The final determination: The borough will be worse than what it is now. Shenandoah I want to say a big thank you to PPL. The power in our area, Shenandoah, went off twice and they had it back on very quickly. I do feel bad about what his happening in other states. Their power is off. Shenandoah Hey, Jerry Notaro, how can you or any voters or politician in your party get to speak about freedom of speech? Republicans give a vivid example of what hypocrisy means every time they claim the importance of free speech and at the same time punish anyone in their party who speaks their own mind with being censured. Republicans have become the party of lies and disregard for this country and the Constitution and laws. Mahanoy City I must admit that I absolutely loved watching Nancy Pelosi slam her hand down on the desk, frustrated over the fact that Trump was acquitted a second time. Trumps lawyers literally showed what a bunch of hypocrite Democrats are and yet she is still acting the victim. Minersville Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 20:23:21|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close ADDIS ABABA, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The number of migrants from the Horn of Africa travelling to the Gulf countries through Yemen fell 73 percent amid the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study published by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The number, at 138,213 in 2019, dropped to 37,537 in 2020. The findings "are significant," especially because African migration through Yemen to the Gulf of Arabia has been high for the past four years, despite security risks in Yemen, which migrants from the region must cross to reach Saudi Arabia and beyond, the IOM said in the report, released on Wednesday. Despite reduced arrivals in 2020, due in part to COVID-19 related restrictions, risks increased with more detention, exploitation and forced transfers, the agency said. Forced returns from Saudi Arabia were also significantly reduced, from nearly 121,000 Ethiopian migrants in 2019 to 37,000 in 2020, the IOM said. The organization said it is working with and supporting the eight member countries of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) to develop and implement integrated regional approaches to responding to the needs of migrants and other vulnerable mobile groups, trying to harness the benefits of migration but reduce the negative impacts of COVID-19. IGAD groups Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda. The adverse impacts include millions of lost jobs and closed businesses and a decline in cash remittances sent from migrant workers abroad, which support millions across the region, the IOM said. The World Bank projects that COVID-19 remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries will decline by around 14 percent by 2021 compared to pre-COVID-19 levels. The fall in remittance is expected to have severe financial and social impacts on IGAD countries, including increased poverty and a reduction in access to basic services such as healthcare and education. According to the IOM, migrants, including internally displaced people and refugees in the region, are also unable to access medical treatment for COVID-19 and personal protective equipment, in addition to being subject to such risks as discrimination, stigma and xenophobia. COVID-19 border closures, which have left thousands of workers stranded, left many workers from the IGAD countries facing exploitation from people smugglers when trying to get home, the IOM report said. Enditem WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - New technology from Purdue University and Indiana University School of Medicine innovators may one day help patients who suffer devastating vocal injuries from surgery on the larynx. A collaborative team consisting of Purdue biomedical engineers and clinicians from IU has tissue-engineered component tissue replacements that support reconstruction of the larynx. The team's work is published in The Laryngoscope. The larynx is a very complex human organ consisting of outer cartilage for structural support, inner muscle that contracts to permit voicing, swallowing, and breathing, and inner vibratory lining. Currently, thousands of patients each year with laryngeal cancer or trauma require a procedure called total laryngectomy in which the entire larynx is removed, and patients are left without a human voice and breathing through a hole in their neck called a stoma. "There are very few options for laryngeal reconstruction and no options for restoration of laryngeal appearance, structure and function," said Stacey Halum, a fellowship-trained laryngologist specializing in head and neck surgery. "While surgeons occasionally use local or free tissue transfers to repair laryngeal defects, these local or regional tissues just 'plug holes' or close the defects without really restoring function because the transferred tissues are not dynamic - they do not move or contract. They also tend to lose bulk and scar over time." Halum, along with Sherry Harbin, a professor in Purdue's Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, led the innovation team. The innovators used a patented collagen polymer developed by Harbin's lab to fabricate the three regenerative replacement tissues for the laryngeal reconstruction procedure. "Our approach is unique in that we are using customized engineered tissue replacements, with the muscle component fabricated using the patient's own muscle progenitor cells," Harbin said. "We believe these engineering approaches will provide patients with better options for reconstruction so that total laryngectomies become something of the past." Harbin and Halum believe the technology has widespread applications for custom fabrication of engineered tissue replacements for tissue restoration in other parts of the body. Harbin founded GeniPhys, a Purdue startup focused on the commercialization of the collagen polymer technology. ### Halum is an associate professor in the IU School of Medicine Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery who has an adjunct appointment in Purdue's Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and sees patients at the IU Health Voice Center in Carmel, Indiana. The project is funded by the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. The innovators worked with the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization to patent the technology. The researchers are looking for partners to continue developing and commercializing their technology. For more information on licensing and other opportunities, contact Sherry Harbin at harbins@purdue.edu. About Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization The Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization operates one of the most comprehensive technology transfer programs among leading research universities in the U.S. Services provided by this office support the economic development initiatives of Purdue University and benefit the university's academic activities through commercializing, licensing and protecting Purdue intellectual property. The office is located in the Convergence Center for Innovation and Collaboration in Discovery Park District, adjacent to the Purdue campus. In fiscal year 2020, the office reported 148 deals finalized with 225 technologies signed, 408 disclosures received and 180 issued U.S. patents. The office is managed by the Purdue Research Foundation, which received the 2019 Innovation and Economic Prosperity Universities Award for Place from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. In 2020, IPWatchdog Institute ranked Purdue third nationally in startup creation and in the top 20 for patents. The Purdue Research Foundation is a private, nonprofit foundation created to advance the mission of Purdue University. Contact otcip@prf.org for more information. About Purdue University Purdue University is a top public research institution developing practical solutions to today's toughest challenges. Ranked the No. 5 Most Innovative University in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, Purdue delivers world-changing research and out-of-this-world discovery. Committed to hands-on and online, real-world learning, Purdue offers a transformative education to all. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue has frozen tuition and most fees at 2012-13 levels, enabling more students than ever to graduate debt-free. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap at purdue.edu. Writer: Chris Adam, cladam@prf.org Source: Sherry Harbin, harbins@purdue.edu This is like a replay of a movie weve watched before. And as everyone knows, the sequel is usually worse than the original. The most energy-abundant state in the nation suffered a catastrophic energy shortage. Again. Almost a decade ago to the day, Texas endured a statewide freeze in February 2011. That cold snap caused some large thermal plants to trip offline, which triggered a cascading series of power plant failures elsewhere, leading to rolling blackouts for millions of people across the state. Flash forward a decade and it happened again but worse. There were failures throughout the power sector. Some solar farms were coated in snow, and some wind turbines had ice on their blades, reducing renewable output to the grid. More critically, Texas lost over 30 gigawatts of thermal capacity natural gas, coal and nuclear power plants because of frozen equipment, outages and freezes in the natural gas supply system. Its as if we have not learned a single thing from 2011. Unfortunately, because of Texas independent grid, we also could not import power from neighboring states. And, critically, we reject climate science, which means we are not prepared for the reality of changing weather patterns. What needs to change is that we need to build climate science into our planning so that were not building the infrastructure of tomorrow for yesterdays weather. Scientists have been warning us for years that the increasing accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will manifest itself in several ways: ocean acidification, higher sea levels, and warmer air and ocean temperatures meaning more frequent and intense weather events. Our recent experiences with cold snaps are consistent with a weakening jet stream, which allows cold air from the North Pole to move thousands of miles farther south than was typical a few decades ago. Instead of just pretending we live in a hot state, we need to recognize these arctic fronts are an ongoing part of our future. That means we need to winterize the gas supply and power plants with insulation, heat tracing, temporary or permanent enclosures to keep out the wind and precipitation, on-site heaters for thawing equipment, cold climate packages for wind turbines and snow removal for solar panels. But theres more. LEFT IN THE DARK: The record-setting polar storm that cut San Antonio's power and froze water lines was forecast days in advance, but key city leaders were never told to expect a calamity. Texas grid should diversify to reduce interdependencies and over-reliance on gas. The natural gas system depends heavily on electricity, and the electricity system depends heavily on gas. In a vicious downward spiral, power constraints inhibit the ability to supply gas and vice versa. Reducing the power sectors needs for gas lets us continue to prioritize the gas supply for home heating. Adding more sources, such as geothermal, wind and solar, that do not rely on gas will reduce that vulnerability. Nuclear and coal could be alternatives to gas, but they are much more expensive and have their own reliability problems. In fact, in 2021 and the 2011 snowstorm, several coal plants failed due to the wintry conditions. Moving forward, we should interconnect to the Eastern and Western grids so we can sell them clean renewable power for a profit most of the time, while getting reliability benefits for those rare periods when the grid is struggling to keep up. We should also implement efficiency and conservation into building codes to reduce the energy we need to heat and cool our homes. That saves consumers money and eases the load on the states energy systems. And we should modernize our energy system with distributed energy resources, energy storage and microgrids to improve resilience rather than simply depending on a far-flung system of large, remote power plants and transmission lines that can fail when loaded with ice. Our biggest risk now is that were going to seek the wrong scapegoats and blame the wrong problem, and therefore, fail to make the right decisions or implement the proper solutions. That next severe winter storm will come, and power will most likely be lost again. The choices now will dictate how vulnerable we are in the future. Michael E. Webber is the Josey Centennial Professor of Energy Resources at The University of Texas in Austin and chief science and technology officer at ENGIE, a global energy company based in Paris. More than 160 Confederate symbols were removed from public spaces or renamed last year after the death of George Floyd, more than the previous four years combined, a watchdog group said on Tuesday. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has campaigned for the removal of Confederate statues and monuments, released the findings as part of a report on the status of the symbols. The nonprofit organization, based in Montgomery, Ala., started tracking symbols of the Confederacy after a white supremacist killed nine Black worshipers at a storied African-American church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. In the groups Whose Heritage? report, the Law Center said that last year had been transformative, but that more than 2,100 symbols of the Confederacy remained, including 704 monuments. BILBAO (dpa-AFX) - Spanish utility Iberdrola S.A.(IBDSF.PK) reported Wednesday that its fiscal 2020 net profit increased 4.2 percent from last year to 3.61 billion euros, driven by investment and operating performance. Underlying EBITDA was 10.71 billion euros in 2020, up 8 percent. The company noted that lower performance in Spain was compensated by international growth which now provides two thirds of EBITDA. EBITDA for Iberdrola Spain fell 5 percent and net profit 13 percent. However, investment grew 21 percent to 2.1 billion euros. Further, Iberdrola would propose a shareholder remuneration for 2020 of 0.42 euro gross per share, 5 percent more than in 2019. A supplementary remuneration of 0.252 euro gross per share for 2020 will be proposed to the Shareholders' Meeting. Looking ahead for fiscal 2021, the company expects to achieve net profit between 3.7 billion euros and 3.8 billion euros. The company also expects to distribute a dividend of 0.44 euro per share for the new year. In 2020, Iberdrola registered 43.8 million contracts, which it plans to increase to 48.5 million by the end of 2021. This will rise to 60 million in 2025 and around 70 million by 2030. Further, the company projects to reach 5 billion euros net profit by 2025 and approximately 7 billion euros by 2030. Shareholder remuneration is expected to evolve in line with results. The company expects a dividend of 0.56 euro gross/share for 2025 and around 0.75 euro gross per share in 2030. his dividend policy represents a 40 percent increase in shareholder remuneration for the period 2019-2025 and approximately 90 percent increase between 2019-2030. Iberdrola shares were trading at 10.36 euros, up 1.07 percent. 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. Iran said on Tuesday that South Korea had started to release the first US$1 billion of the US$7 billion Iranian oil funds blocked in Korean banks because of the U.S. sanctions on Tehran, but Seoul says that any transfer of the funds will be made only after consultations with the United States. After the United States pulled out from the so-called Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, it imposed sanctions on Tehran, specifically targeting its oil industry as a vital source of revenue. As a result, somewhere between US$7 billion and US$8 billion in oil revenues held at Korean banks were frozen by the banks, cutting off Irans access to the money. The strained relations between Iran and South Korea in recent years also led to the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) of Iran seizing last month a South Korea-flagged tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, the most crucial oil chokepoint in the world. After talks between Iran and South Korea in recent days, Seoul has now agreed to unfreeze U$1 billion of the funds as a first step to potentially resolving the dispute between the two countries, Bloomberg quoted Iranian government spokesman Ali Rabiei as saying at a news conference on Tuesday. On Monday, Iranian media reported that Abdolnaser Hemmati, Governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), met with the South Korean Ambassador to Tehran, Ryu Jeong-Hyun, to negotiate the details of allocating a part of Iranian funds blocked in South Korea for purchasing essential goods from third countries. Yet, South Koreas foreign ministry said on Tuesday that any release of the money will take place after consultations with the United States, as carried by the Yonhap news agency. The actual unfreezing of the assets will be carried out through consultations with related countries, including the United States, the ministry said. By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Google has fired both leads of its Ethical AI unit, leaving doubt about the direction of the team. The company has come under fire in recent months for alleged gender bias, racism, gaslighting and censorship. Last month, the company's workers formed the first major union in Silicon Valley in support of employee activism. The most recent controversy involves the firing of Margaret Mitchell, co-lead of Google's Ethical AI unit and an ethical AI expert. Mitchell specialized in a variety of topics, including machine learning bias, race, gender diversity and language models for image capture. She announced her firing in a tweet last Friday. The move follows the firing of Timnit Gebru in December. Gebru was the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, and had worked with Mitchell in that capacity for about two years. Google said in a statement that Mitchell had been fired after confirmation of "multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees." Gebru claims she was fired for criticizing the company for silencing marginalized voices. She also co-authored a research paper urging tech companies to ensure AI language systems do not promote gender bias. Google says Gebru resigned. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, has publicly apologized for the handling of Gebru's removal and has promised to work on restoring employee trust. Gebru's removal has been cited as one of the reasons workers created the groundbreaking Alphabet Workers Union last month. Alex Hanna, a Google employee who worked closely with Gebru and Mitchell, tweeted that the company has been running a "smear campaign" against the two researchers. Google has not commented on her remarks. Google said the company had conducted an internal investigation into Gebru's departure that will lead to a change in policies. Google said changes will include new procedures surrounding "potentially sensitive employee exits" as well as linking pay to diversity goals in some cases. Edited by Maurice Nagle [February 24, 2021] Datadobi Partners with Effect ICT Solutions, Delivers High-Performance Storage and Migration Strategy for MVRDV, Leading International Architect Datadobi, a global leader in unstructured data management software, and Effect ICT Solutions, a specialist SME solutions provider, have today announced the completion of a high-performance storage and data migration solution for MVRDV, a renowned international architecture and urbanism practice based in the Netherlands. With its legacy storage architecture nearing the end of its lifespan and almost at capacity-and large amounts of existing data to store, manage, and backup-MVRDV selected long-standing technology supplier Effect ICT Solutions, supported by Datadobi, to deliver a new, long-term solution for over 250 staff across its global office locations. Central to the success of the project was the selection of Datadobi's enterprise-class migration software, DobiMigrate, to relocate its existing data to the new storage architecture. This process had to be accomplished with minimal disruption to IT services and limited operational impact. Despite the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic during the early stages of the project, MVRDV's data was successfully migrated to its new storage architecture. MVRDV now has a high-availability storage and backup solution where its data is optimized for both performance and ease of management. "Without Datadobi, we wouldn't have been able to complete the rollout of new storage and backup infrastructure, implement a new approach to security management, and successfully complete the migration process in a single project. It was a critical factor in delivering a successul solution," commented Henk Nachtegaal, Director, Effect ICT Solutions. "The work we carried out during the project using DobiMigrate also has a long-term benefit in that if we need to make changes to the way data is stored and managed, we can do so much quicker than would have been possible with MVRDV's previous solution," Nachtegaal continued. "With a significant amount of data to migrate to the new architecture, MVRDV needed a solution that would fully support its transition to new, high-performance storage architecture," commented Carl D'Halluin, CTO, Datadobi. "Our close partnership with Effect ICT Solutions demonstrates the value DobiMigrate can deliver to these mission critical, long-term data strategies." About Effect ICT Solutions Effect ICT Solutions, founded in 1991, is an open and transparent company with enthusiastic and expert staff who'll go the extra mile to make sure you are satisfied. We are keen to develop a longer-term relationship with our clients, as only then can we talk about a truly effective partnership. The personal touch and close involvement are both concepts that are written into our DNA. Naturally you expect us to be market leaders in the application of innovative solutions, and that we are intimately familiar with the latest technologies. For more information, please visit effect-ict.nl. Follow and connect with Effect ICT Solutions on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. About Datadobi Datadobi, the global leader in unstructured data management software, enables enterprises to realize the value of their expanding universe of data. Datadobi helps customers to migrate and protect data while discovering insights and putting them to work for their business. Founded in 2010, Datadobi is a privately held company headquartered in Leuven, Belgium, with subsidiaries in New York, Melbourne, Dusseldorf, and London. For more information, please visit datadobi.com. Follow and connect with Datadobi on Twitter and LinkedIn. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005069/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] First output is now being produced by Russias number two gas producer (after state-owned Gazprom) Novatek - from its much-awaited fourth train at the Yamal LNG project, according to a number of Moscow-based oil and gas analysts spoken to exclusively by OilPrice.com last week. It is highly likely, they add, that the first full cargo from the 900,000 metric ton per annum (mtpa) LNG plant will be loaded on to a tanker within the next six months at most, and possibly even by the end of the second quarter of this year. The fourth train coming fully online will herald the full return of Yamal LNG into Russias Arctic gas initiative that President Vladimir Putin personally regards as a cornerstone projection of Russian energy power across the globe in the same way that the U.S. regards its shale energy sector. The delay to the fourth train came within the context of Novatek having previously brought the first three plants of its US$27 billion flagship Arctic LNG project in the Yamal Peninsula online on time or even ahead of schedule. Specifically, the first train opened in December 2017, the second in July 2018 and the third in December 2018, allowing Novatek to produce capacity of 16.5 million mtpa by the beginning of 2019 from the Yamal LNG facility. Just a few months after that, Novatek had also completed a fleet of 15 icebreaking carrier ships that could move its LNG product from Yamal to the global LNG markets. All of this had been achieved despite the full weight of U.S. sanctions having being imposed on Russia in 2014 as a result of its annexation of Crimea, and underscored Novateks international reputation as a world-class operator that never missed a deadline. This made the delay over the fourth train even before the COVID-19 pandemic came into play all the more mystifying. In reality, the delay was prolonged by the fallout from COVID-19 but the previous part of the postponement was likely in significant part to have been the result of the original gas processing pipelines not being able to optimally handle the exceptional cold temperatures involved at times, according to the Moscow-based analysts. Consequently, tests had to be carried out across the entire pipeline configuration and related equipment, which took time. The delay was apparently not connected to the basic design of the Arctic Cascade technology and equipment that lies at the heart of Novateks LNG program, elements of which are also utilised by other Russian companies now working in the Arctic LNG sector as well. Related Video: Goldman Calls $70 Oil in Q2, But Jet Fuel Is The Joker More immediately, the problems that caused the delay to the fourth train of Yamal LNG having now been remedied, there are unlikely to be any further significant knock-on effects to the launch date of the Obsk LNG plant in 2023. This will be Novateks third large-scale LNG export project, with its 5 million mtpa also based on the use of the Arctic Cascade technology. This is in line with Novateks plans to build out its LNG export capacity up to 70 million mtpa by 2030, including the 19.8 million mtpa Arctic LNG 2, which is due to start in 2023. In turn, this dovetails into Russias plans for LNG production of 80-140 million mtpa by 2035, which would be greater than that of LNG powerhouses Qatar and Australia. All of this can be done, according to Novateks chief financial officer, Mark Gyetvay, at competitor-busting LNG delivery rates into northeast Asian markets of a little over US$3 per million British thermal units. Arctic Cascade itself is based on a two-stage liquefaction process that capitalises on the colder ambient temperature in the Arctic climate to maximise energy efficiency during the liquefaction process and is the first patented liquefaction technology using equipment produced only by Russian manufacturers. The overall goal of Novatek, as the company itself has stated more than once, is to localise the fabrication and construction of LNG trains and modules to decrease the overall cost of liquefaction and develop a technological base within Russia. This means that these Arctic LNG operations are not subject to the whims of other countries and future sanctions. Consequently Novatek localised the fabrication and construction of LNG trains and modules to decrease the overall cost of liquefaction and develop a technological base within Russia, in addition to fully rolling out the Arctic Cascade process. This self-sufficient element was also mandated by Putin for the financing of Yamal LNG and other related Novatek projects, particularly after the U.S. imposed its 2014 Crimea-related sanctions. The Russian Direct Investment Fund, for example, established a joint investment fund with the state-run Japan Bank for International Cooperation with each contributing half of a total of about JPY100 billion (US$890 million) to it. The Russian government itself, having bankrolled Yamal LNG from the beginning with money from the state budget, supported it again when sanctions were introduced by selling bonds in Yamal LNG (the program began on 24 November 2015, with a RUB75 billion 15-year issue), and then provided it with another RUB150 billion (US$2.2 billion) of backstop funding from the National Wealth Fund. Related: Oil Prices Rally On U.S. Outages And A Weak Dollar This multi-layered state commitment to Arctic LNG attests to the multi-level importance that the Kremlin attaches to Arctic exploration more widely for three key reasons. First, there is the physical expansion of Russian entities into the Arctic region, clearly marking the countrys claim to all the resources that the entire area has to offer. Second, for a long time Putin has thought that Russias status as an energy superpower and especially a gas one - has not been reflected in its standing in the LNG sector. And third, LNG is a key part of Russias ongoing plans to secure as much of the still fast growing Asia segment of the gas market as possible to augment its pipelined gas plans. In this latter context, China remains Russias focus, building on its 2014 US$400 billion+ 30 year deal to export over 1 trillion cubic metres of gas through the Power of Siberia and related pipeline projects. Not only is Asias robust economic growth over the next 10 years set to continue in general, as is its uptake of gas, China in particular is expected to increase the gas share of its energy mix from 6 per cent to 15 per cent by 2030. The importance that Russia is placing on the Asian markets and the magnitude of gas and oil volumes that are expected to move in the Eastern direction is underlined by the fact that it is moving forward with the build-out of its trans-shipment LNG facility on the Russian Far East coast in Kamchatka and its Northern Sea Route to move Arctic oil to China as well. A fourth factor at play in Russias Arctic gas and oil drive is its capacity to subvert the U.S. dollar-based hegemony in the energy market, particularly as it features one of the worlds biggest oil and gas producers and one of its biggest buyers. On a number of occasions, Novateks chief executive officer, Leonid Mikhleson, has said that future sales to China denominated in renminbi is under consideration. This is in line with his recent comment on the prospect of further sanctions from the U.S. that such sanctions accelerate the process of Russia trying to switch away from U.S. dollar-centric oil and gas trading and the damage from potential sanctions that go with it. This has been discussed for a while with Russias largest trading partners such as India and China, and even Arab countries are starting to think about it... If they do create difficulties for our Russian banks the all we have to do is replace dollars, he said. The trade war between the U.S. and China will only accelerate the process, he added. Such a strategy was tested in 2014, when the state-run Gazprom Neft tried trading of cargoes of crude oil in Chinese yuan and roubles with China and Europe, to reduce Russias dependence on crude trading in dollars, in response to the initial Western sanctions against Russias energy sector. This idea of an alternate principal trading currency for oil and gas, away from the U.S. dollar, was also discussed a while back for the BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, and China] countries, and was work-shopped again recently by Iran, Iraq, Russia, and China, and Chinas launch of the yuan-denominated Shanghai International Exchange can be seen as a move in this direction, Mehrdad Emadi, head of risk analysis and energy derivatives markets consultancy, Betamatrix, in London, told OilPrice.com. The more the U.S. uses the U.S. dollar sanction against major suppliers in the oil market, like Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, and major buyers, like China, then the more momentum will build to replace the oil market with a new currency benchmark, he concluded. By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: KOKOMO, Ind. (WLFI) Seven people have been arrested, suspected to be involved in the murder of Kokomo resident Sharman Pearson. According to Kokomo police, 18-year-old Terrence Ben from Chicago Illinois was taken into custody on February 9, 2021, at his home. As a result of the continued investigation, six more individuals were identified as suspects involved in the murder. Kevonte Tyler (22-years-old) - Conspiracy to commit murder and Obstruction of justice Amari Deaarion Anderson (20-years-old) - Conspiracy to commit murder and Obstruction of justice. Marquis Darrionta Herron (19-years-old) - Conspiracy to commit murder Dion Creed Smith (18-years-old) - Conspiracy to commit murder Kyron Ardion McKnight (18-years-old - Conspiracy to commit murder Alexis James (19-years-old) - Obstruction of justice All six suspects were taken into custody without incident. On December 23, 2020, around 12:00 a.m., officers of the Kokomo Police Department responded to the area of E. Broadway in reference to a shooting that occurred at that residence. Officers arrived to find the victim, 42-year-old Sharman Pearson shot multiple times. He was transported to St. Vincent Hospital but died due to his injuries. DESPITE THE POSITIVE vibes coming from the inauguration of President Joe Biden last week, the siege of the U.S. Capitol smolders in our nation Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 21:40:02|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close LONDON, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The coronavirus vaccine supply fluctuations in Britain are likely to continue for "a few months", a senior British health official said Wednesday. Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England, said the recent fall in the number of Britons being vaccinated against COVID-19 each day is down to "supply fluctuations". It "will take a few months" before vaccine manufacturers are able to produce doses in a "steady routine", he told Sky News. "Global supply restraints" have also affected Britain's vaccine rollout, he said. "There are always going to be supply fluctuations," he said. "These are new vaccines, by and large the manufacturers have not made them or anything like them before." Nearly 18 million people in Britain have been given the first jab of the coronavirus vaccine, according to the latest official figures. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has pledged that every adult in Britain will be given a jab of the COVID-19 vaccine by the end of July. According to Johnson, people aged 50 and over and those with underlying health conditions will now be offered a jab by April 15. On Monday, Johnson announced his long-anticipated "roadmap" exiting the lockdown. Schools in England will reopen from March 8 as first part of the four-step plan, which Johnson said was designed to be "cautious but irreversible". Johnson has said he is "very optimistic" all restrictions on normal life in England will end on June 21. England is currently under the third national lockdown since outbreak of the pandemic in the country. Similar restriction measures are also in place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. To bring life back to normal, countries such as Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the United States have been racing against time to roll out coronavirus vaccines. Enditem Nairobi, Feb 24 : Ministers of environment and other leaders from more than 150 nations concluded a two-day online meeting of the Fifth United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-5) in which the Assembly warned that the world risks new pandemics "if we don't change how we safeguard nature". The UN Environment Assembly meets biennially to set priorities for global environmental policies and develop international environmental law; decisions and resolutions then taken by member states at the assembly also define the work of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). Due to the pandemic, the member states agreed on a two-step approach to UNEA-5: an online session that concluded on Tuesday and an in-person meeting planned for February 2022. Attended by thousands of online participants, including more than 1,500 delegates from 153 UN member states and over 60 ministers of the environment, the assembly - which was broadcast live - also agreed on key aspects of UNEP's work, kicked off the commemoration of UNEP's 50th anniversary and held leadership dialogues where member states addressed how to build a resilient and inclusive post-pandemic world. "It is increasingly evident that environmental crises are part of the journey ahead. Wildfires, hurricanes, high temperature records, unprecedented winter chills, plagues of locusts, floods and droughts, have become so common place that they do not always make the headlines," Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said in remarks to the Assembly. "These increasing adverse weather and climatic occurrences sound a warning bell that calls on us to attend to the three planetary crises that threaten our collective future: the climate crisis, the biodiversity and nature crisis, and the pollution and waste crisis." In a political statement entitled "Looking ahead to the resumed UN Environment Assembly in 2022 - Message from online UNEA-5, Nairobi 22-23 February 2021" endorsed at the close of the Assembly, the member states reaffirmed UNEP's mandate as the leading global environmental authority and called for greater and more inclusive multilateralism to tackle the environmental challenges. The statement said the assembly wished "to strengthen our support for the United Nations and for multilateral cooperation and remain convinced that collective action is essential to successfully address global challenges." It went on to warn that "more than ever that human health and wellbeing are dependent upon nature and the solutions it provides, and we are aware that we shall face recurring risks of future pandemics if we maintain our current unsustainable patterns in our interactions with nature." Sveinung Rotevatn, President of UNEA-5 and Norway's Minister for Climate and Environment, echoed the warning. "Everyone gathered at the environment Assembly today are deeply concerned about how the pandemic causes new and serious health, socio-economic and environmental challenges, and exacerbates existing ones, all over the world," he told a press conference on the closing day of UNEA-5. "We shall work together to identify actions which can help us address climate change, protect biodiversity, and reduce pollution, at the same time,a he added. The Assembly agreed to a new Medium-Term Strategy, Programme of Work and budget for UNEP. The new Strategy - which will take UNEP from 2022-2025 - sets out a vision for UNEP's role in delivering the promises of the 2030 Agenda. "The strategy is about transforming how UNEP operates and engages with member states, UN agencies, the private sector, civil society and youth groups, so we can go harder, faster, stronger," said Inger Andersen, UNEP as Executive Director. "This strategy is about providing science and know-how to governments. The strategy is also about collective, whole-of-society action - moving us outside ministries of environment to drive action." At an event commemorating UNEP's upcoming 50th anniversary in 2022, Andersen acknowledged the importance of the moment to reflect on the past and envision the future. "Indeed, the strides taken so far towards safeguarding the environment are testament to UNEP's work," President Kenyatta noted. "UNEP has had a lasting impact on how we care for the environment, nature and our livelihoods." In the run-up to the assembly, UNEP launched a major report, together with UN Secretary-General AntAnio Guterres a" Making Peace with Nature - which provides a comprehensive blueprint for solving the triple planetary emergencies of climate change, biodiversity and pollution. A number of events were also held in support of UNEA-5, including a Global Youth Assembly, a Science Policy Business Forum and the launch of a Global Alliance on Circular Economy and Resource Efficiency. "The last few days have been encouraging. We saw a new global effort on resource-efficient, circular economies. A push on financing emission reductions from forests. Governments, scientists and businesses coming together to look at big data as a tool for change. Youth raising their voices and telling us 'nothing about us, without us' and calling for targeted funds to enable their deeper engagement," Andersen added. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Dr. Bernard Okoe Boye, former Deputy Minister of Health, has dismissed claims of COVID-19 vaccines causing erectile dysfunction in men. The rumor stem from unsubstantiated reports of some people who received the vaccines abroad having side effects which have rendered the men impotent or reduced their ability to have sex with their partners. Erectile dysfunction isn't the only speculation about the vaccine but also people believe the vaccines are means to depopulate Africa. In Ghana, some people are already living in fear of the vaccines due to these rumors. Reacting on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo', Dr. Okoe Boye says there is no cause of alarm over the efficacy of the vaccines. According to him, the rumors are absolute falsehood. "People have received the vaccine and their wives are pregnant. So, it is not true that you can have erectile dysfunction," he emphasized. 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. Featured Video Spotlight PA is an independent, nonpartisan newsroom powered by The Philadelphia Inquirer in partnership with PennLive/The Patriot-News, TribLIVE/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and WITF Public Media. Sign up for our free newsletters. HARRISBURG The Pennsylvania Senate is advancing a measure that would give the states political parties final say over candidates for lieutenant governor, taking power away from voters. Its a necessary change to a process that has not always resulted in the best partnerships, Democratic and Republican lawmakers say. The proposed constitutional amendment, introduced by Sen. Dave Argall (R., Schuylkill), would allow a gubernatorial candidate to choose a running mate after the spring primary, subject to approval from their partys state committee. At the moment, voters choose candidates for lieutenant governor during closed, statewide primaries. The winner appears with the pick for governor on the general election ballot as a packaged deal. In the past, we have seen a leadership team separate into two warring factions that spent weeks not even talking to one another, Argall said in 2019, after his measure passed for the first time. If we want to succeed in Pennsylvania, then our top two executive officials need to see eye-to-eye on the issues and not get distracted by petty rivalries. The statement was a not-so-subtle reference to the tumultuous relationship between Gov. Tom Wolf and former Lt. Gov. Mike Stack. After complaints emerged that Stack and his wife were verbally abusive to their security detail and household staff, Wolf stripped the well-connected Philadelphia politician of his police protection. The painfully distant, arranged marriage, as The Inquirer described it, formally dissolved the following year when Stack lost during the primary to John Fetterman, who currently holds the position. All but one member of the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to advance the measure Tuesday, setting it up for a full vote in the chamber as soon as Wednesday. Because the change would require a constitutional amendment, it must pass both chambers of the legislature twice in consecutive sessions before it can go to the voters. Should the House approve the resolution this year, it could be before voters by November. Argall said this week the change would be a step forward in providing better teamwork between governors and lieutenant governors. While the latter position has been criticized as being somewhat ceremonial, the officeholder presides over the Senate and chairs the Board of Pardons. Essentially, it would follow the federal model, Argall said, referencing the way presidential hopefuls select their vice presidents. Argalls proposal won bipartisan support last session and is expected to have similar backing this time. Sen. Sharif Street (D., Philadelphia) who cosponsored the measure, said the change will allow governors and their deputies to have functional relationships. We could have five people running for governor and three people running for lieutenant governor or vice versa, Street told Spotlight PA on Tuesday. Then they get to the general election and they are forced to run together, even though they may have very different ideologies about how to run the commonwealth, which could cause some awkwardness. The measure also has the backing of the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based good-government group. As with the president and vice president nomination at the national level, voters deserve a chance to consider an integrated team of governor and lieutenant governor candidates, not an accidental pairing, said David Thornburgh, president of the organization. Support for the proposal isnt unanimous. In the state House, one GOP lawmaker joined more than 60 Democrats to vote no in 2019. Most lawmakers considered this question with a long lens and their position on it tends to reflect how they view the concept of the office rather than views of any specific people who have been lieutenant governor, Bill Patton, a spokesperson for House Democrats, said. Three state senators, including a Republican, similarly voted against it in January 2020. Sen. Katie Muth (D., Montgomery) was among the nays. She said Tuesday she believes governors and their lieutenants should both be chosen by voters, not by political parties. Leave it in the hands of the voters, she said. I want the people of Pennsylvania to decide because as a member of the Senate, they [lieutenant governors] play an integral role, including the ability to have a healthy debate, to have the democratic processes followed. She is also opposed to the change because she believes it could amplify political behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Im very much against appointments because of the pay-to-play system in Pennsylvania with state-level politics, she said. Argall defended his proposal Tuesday, noting its bipartisan support and the fact that voters will ultimately get to decide whether to make the change. Please be understanding that very few people very few people go to the polls in November and base their vote on who the lieutenant governor candidate is, he said. Theyre voting for the top of the ticket. 100% ESSENTIAL: Spotlight PA relies on funding from foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability journalism that gets results. Become a member today at spotlightpa.org/donate. Three events have been shaping Indias geopolitical environment since the Galwan Valley standoff between India and China since May-June last year. One is the trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic and the pace of vaccination. Two, the ascendance of US President Joe Biden and his swift moves to establish his domestic and international agenda. Finally, the farmers agitation against the three agricultural reform laws, passed hurriedly by Parliament without a proper examination by a select committee or a division and vote. Consequently, the normal boundaries between domestic politics and international relations have shattered, as the local and global factors impinge on each other. A classic case was how a toolkit developed for environmental activists to be more effective, tweeted by global youth icon Greta Thunberg, became the locus of the police arrests of Indian activists recommending it to protesting farmers. From there it is being sought to be linked to pro-Khalistan proponents abroad. Almost 100 British parliamentarians threw their weight behind the Indian farmers, whose protest has gradually widened as the lead passed from mainly Punjabi and Sikh farm union leaders to the redoubtable Tikait brothers of western Uttar Pradesh and the family of late Prime Minister Charan Singh. Besides rumblings in the US Congress, the state department urged respect for the protesters rights. American farm unions also lent their weight to the Indian protests. In the brouhaha, not enough attention has been paid to the repeated message from President Joe Biden, as he told the Munich Conference that we are at an inflection point. From that assumption, he argues how the US plans to regenerate economically and reassert strategically. The main challenges are climate change, the global pandemic, Chinese assertiveness combined with Russian obduracy, reform of multilateralism and defence of the democratic way of life. Between President Bidens Munich address on February 19 and his remarks at the G-7 meeting a day earlier, the most striking was his plea over the role of democracy and rule of law. Critics maintain that historically US actions in this regard have often been differed from Americas words. For decades, during the Cold War, the Americans not only happily worked with autocrats and dictators as allies but overthrew with alacrity democratic governments, for instance in Iran and Chile, if seen as unfriendly to US interests. Therefore, the Indian government has so far ignored subtle hints from the US that freedom of expression includes the freedom to protest peacefully and tweet or support those protests on social media platforms. The spat between the government and Twitter over which handles to block underscored the divergence between the Indian approach and that adopted in the West by and large. President Bidens words need closer attention to understand that this is a new America, traumatised by four years of Trumpian undermining of US institutions, including the former President denying his electoral defeat and repeatedly rejecting the orderly transfer of power. That wound is still open as despite the impeachment of Mr Trump having failed, the US Congress is in the process of setting-up a 9/11-type commission of inquiry into the Capital violence and Mr Trumps role in it. President Bidens Munich address began by recommitting America to its trans-Atlantic alliance, which his predecessor had contemptuously shredded. Then he developed at some length his defence of democracy. He argued that the alliance was rooted in the richness of our shared values, including the need to protect the rights of all and the rule of law. He warned that in both the US and Europe democratic progress is under assault. He added: We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future and direction of our world. Despite the pandemic and the so-called fourth industrial revolution, he continued, democracy was essential and must prevail. He concluded this part with the telling sentence that democracy does not happen by accident, nor is Western liberal democracy a relic of history. The same message emanated from the Australia-India-Japan-US Quad ministerial meeting, held a day before Mr Bidens Munich address. The statement notes the four nations share values as political democracies, market economies and pluralistic societies. They seek a rules-based international order and respect for the territorial integrity of other nations. The second is aimed at both the maritime claims of China in South and East China seas, as indeed resolving Chinese intrusions across the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh. But India too had to accept in exchange the criticism of the military coup in Myanmar by joining the demand for the rule of law and democratic transition. To assume that the US is just posturing against China and Indias strategic value as a counterweight to China, economically and militarily, would keep any serious criticism of heavy-handed and majoritarian governance of the Indian government in check might be a mistake. Mr Biden has seen power exercised both from the White House as vice-president for eight years and from the Senate, where he chaired the foreign relations committee. Hillary Clinton recounts in her book Hard Choices that she and Mr Biden opposed President Barack Obama cutting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak loose as the protests developed at Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring. That was Mr Biden as the traditional pragmatist. But the new Biden has emerged triumphant from Donald Trump almost bringing US democracy to its knees. Democracy for him is no longer some asinine prescription for the Third World, used selectively, but a living organism that needs defending if China and Russia have to be countered. Sources in the BJP say Prime Minister Narendra Modi is unwilling to roll back the farm laws. As chief minister, he apparently browbeat protesting Gujarat farmers over the installation of electricity meters. He is trying to extrapolate that success in dealings with the farmers of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. The BJPs Haryana government hangs by a thread. The UP Assembly election is just a year away. The Covid-19 pandemic is starting to re-spike as the vaccination pace is slow, with the calls for private sector involvement ignored. As Harold Wilson once said, a week is a long time in politics. Exactly a year ago, a cocky President Donald Trump said before he travelled to India that the US was on top of Covid-19. With him gone and half a million Americans dead, the conclusion is unavoidable that political arrogance can be costly. India may discover just that, caught between Prime Minister Modis obduracy, the BJPs reflexive majoritarianism and President Bidens evangelistic defence of liberal democracy. The vaccine has been touted as a game-changer. After immense anticipation, Johnson & Johnsons new single-shot coronavirus vaccine could receive emergency authorization from the federal government as early as Friday. Health officials believe it will play a critical role in bolstering a still lagging rollout. But how exactly will it help in New Jersey? How does it differ from the other two vaccines already approved? The New Brunswick-based pharmaceutical giant says it will be able to deliver enough doses to immunize more than 20 million Americans by the end of March. The company also remains confident it can deliver 100 million doses to the U.S. during the first half of 2021. The announcement is encouraging news, especially after the Biden administration recently said the company would have only a few million doses ready by the time it received approval. New Jersey has administered 1,713,580 vaccine doses as of Tuesday evening, including 1,170,200 first doses, according to state data. Thats out of 1.91 million doses the state has received, according to a running tally by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The approval of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine would not only boost supplies. It would also present a more convenient option for distribution as officials try to inoculate at least 70% of New Jerseys adults to reach herd immunity, experts say. J&J, if it is approved, if it is as safe and efficacious as the early indications or claims are, is a one-shot vaccine with regular refrigeration, Gov. Phil Murphy said last week. That does afford an enormous amount of flexibility for us collectively to get into hard-to-reach places, because you dont have to worry about this cold chain storage or scheduling the second appointment. That gives you a nimbleness that right now the system doesnt really have. Johnson & Johnsons candidate differs from the vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, the only two vaccines to have received approval thus far in the U.S. While those vaccines require two doses, Johnson & Johnsons version is a single-dose shot. This is critical, experts say, as a single dose is less of an obstacle than asking people to return for a second (booster) shot. Another difference is storage. Johnson & Johnsons candidate can be easily stored because it doesnt require specialized freezers like the Pfizer vaccine. But efficacy is another issue to consider. When Johnson & Johnson released data from its Phase 3 trial Ensemble there were some concern that its shot wasnt as effective as the two approved vaccines. Johnson & Johnsons data showed that its candidate was 66% effective overall in preventing moderate to severe COVID-19, according to a statement. But the pharma company has said its vaccine showed complete protection against COVID-related hospitalization and death, 28 days post-vaccination in clinical trials, the statement said. But that is less effective than the options from Moderna and Pfizer, which boast efficacy rates near 95%. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine developed by the companys Belgian division, Janssen Pharmaceutica was produced using a different method than Pfizer and Moderna, which rely on new mRNA technology. Johnson & Johnson, on the other hand, developed whats called a viral vector vaccine, technology that has been around since the 1970s, according to the CDC. Viral vector vaccines have been used against many infectious diseases, including the Zika virus, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and malaria. It was also used to create two Ebola vaccines, according to the CDC. Unlike mRNA vaccines, which use messenger RNA to create a protein that prompts an immune response in the body, our investigational COVID-19 vaccine uses an adenovirus a type of virus that causes the common cold that has been made unable to replicate, said Dr. Mathai Mammen, global head for Janssen Research & Development at Johnson & Johnson, in a statement. The adenovirus carries a gene from the coronavirus into human cells, which then produce the coronavirus spike protein, but not the coronavirus itself. This spike protein is what primes the immune system to fight off a subsequent infection by the virus. The company says this aspect of the vaccine has advantages. First, the adenovirus is well known in the human population, Mammen explained in the statement. And weve used it before, in our Ebola vaccine and in investigational vaccines for HIV and RSV, so we have a lot of long-term safety data for it. This method allows the vaccine to be kept in more stable temperatures. The vaccine technology weve used can remain stable for two years at -4 F, and at least three months at 35-46 F, which is about the temperature of your home refrigerator, Mammen said. It may be stable for even longer at refrigerator temperatures, and we are actively collecting stability data now to see how long we can go. We believe this stability will help make it easier to transport and distribute our COVID-19 vaccine candidate without the need for shipping at special temperatures. All of these aspects, experts have said, will allow for a more mobile and flexible shot one that is a single shot with easier storage, using methods that have been applied for decades. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Spencer Kent may be reached at skent@njadvancemedia.com. Facebook announced it would reverse its decision to block Australian news from the platform after a breakthrough in negotiations with Australias government over its proposed News Media Bargaining Code. The IFJ and its Australian affiliate the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA) welcome the outcome, but remain concerned at the failure of the code to support smaller media organisations and freelancers. After almost a week of a Facebook-imposed block against Australian audiences in both accessing and sharing Australian news content on the platform, Facebook said on February 23 that it would reopen access. It comes after ongoing negotiations between Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and Australias treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, that saw a number of amendments to the code, including an exemption for Facebook if they can prove they have signed enough deals with media outlets to pay for content, while also allowing Facebook more time to strike these deals. While early deals between major media companies and the Australian government is a positive step for Australian journalism, Australias media union, MEAA, warned the proposed News Bargaining Code alone has never been a silver bullet for small, regional, community and independent outlets. MEAA said that while the reversal of the news ban was a huge relief for small publishers reliant on Facebook to distribute their news, there were still major concerns regarding the code, which is seen largely as favouring big media. It said small and independent outlets, including websites run by freelancers, could miss out in the rush by the big companies to finalise deals to avoid arbitration under the Code. The union is calling for targeted assistance to any small, independent, regional, community or freelance media organisations that are unable to access funding either through negotiation or the News Media Bargaining Code. It also says assurances need to be made that funds generated through deals are reinvested into the production of news content. Facebooks decision to block content was due to its disapproval of the Australian governments proposed News Media Bargaining Code, which seeks payment from Google and Facebook to news outlets in exchange for the right to use their content. Google reportedly reached an agreement with the Australian government on February 17. Facebook responded a day later by initiating the ban on Australian media. The MEAA media federal president, Marcus Strom, said: Small publishers will remain at the mercy of Facebook and Google, which are both seeking to avoid mandatory regulation and will instead choose which media companies they come to agreements with. It shouldnt be up to Facebook and Google to cherry pick and groom publishers it deems acceptable for side deals. Any code should be mandatory, uniform, predictable, and fair; not at the whim of technology executives. The IFJ said: The IFJ supports MEAAs calls for a stronger discussion about equity in regulation that delivers outcomes for all news creators big and small, metropolitan, regional and community. The IFJ welcomes the governments strong position in defending the survival of news media as a pillar of democracy, but this should be applied to all not just a powerful few. The IFJ represents more than 600,000 journalists in 140 countries Find the IFJ on Twitter: @ifjasiapacific For decades, Outside magazine has stood independent, launching careers and winning awards since it was first founded in 1977. Now, the storied magazine has been sold to a new outdoors media company. Colorado-based Pocket Outdoor Media announced Monday that it was acquiring Outside magazine, as well as Outside TV and Peloton Magazine. The company also announced that it was acquiring GaiaGPS, an app that provides trail maps, and athleteReg, an online event management company. The acquisition of the iconic Outside properties is part of Pockets dizzying consolidation of outdoors media outlets. Led by CEO Robin Thurston, the company has acquired at least 22 titles in the past four years, reports GearJunkie, and listed almost 30 brands on its website prior to the acquisition of Outside. Other titles in the portfolio include Backpacker, Yoga Journal, Climbing and Trail Runner. These brands make our new company the worlds leading creator of active living content, experiences, travel, and services, Thurston said in a statement to SNEWS, an industry publication that is also under the Pocket umbrella. We now deliver content to almost every home in America across every platform, screen, and device. With the move, Pocket Outdoor Media will rebrand to Outside. According to the statement, current employees of the companies will be receiving job offers and not be required to relocate from Santa Fe, where Outside magazine was located. Thurston was previously the cofounder and CEO of the MapMyFitness app. He was also the CEO of a Helix, a fast-growing Silicon Valley startup acclaimed for building the worlds first personal genomics platform and a source for DNA learning. Pocket had also raised $150 million from Sequoia Heritage in a Series B round to fund acquisitions, Axios reported. With the acquisitions, the company will have 1 million paid subscribers, with average annual revenue per subscriber $70, Axios said. The Outside properties and other acquisitions will also be part of the company's $99 Annual Pass program, dubbed the "Amazon Prime of the active outdoor lifestyle" in a post. The membership includes premium content and magazine subscriptions, as well as access to the other titles and apps in the new Outside portfolio, creating an integrated media business model across platforms. The acquisitions were big news for the outdoors media industry. It meant that a large number of outdoor titles on the magazine rack are owned by one company. Its seismic, said Mike Rogge, the owner and editor of the Mountain Gazette, now one of the last remaining independent magazines in the outdoor media world. Being a resident of Northern California, were all used to companies buying companies. Im not one to say if its good or bad, as far as the sale goes. But Rogge did harbor concerns that the new Outside media company could become the McDonalds of outdoors media. Chris Segal/courtesy of Mike Rogge I worry with the consolidation that were going to lose the uniqueness and individuality of the titles, he said. More so than other publications outdoor publications speak to niche audiences in a language they understand, and thats important. Before the acquisition, Outside had come under fire for not paying its freelancers, with reportedly $150,000 in unpaid invoices. Soon after, the publication launched a contribution program to support Outside Online, saying that giving away content was no longer sustainable especially in the current economic environment. The only concern Carter said he has is if its not in the best interest of the other youth offenders to be housed with a youth offender charged with a dangerous, serious crime. But, the bill gives courts discretion, he said, so that could be addressed on a case-by-case basis. Narvar's intelligent rules engine plus Cycleon's global network of 30 DCs enables sophisticated, eco-friendly routing. Tweet this However, meeting these expectations can be costly, especially as the shift towards ecommerce accelerates. While the average return rate for in-store purchases is about 8%, for online purchases it's 20-30% depending on product category, equating to $428B last year . For brands trading globally, whether big or small, international returns add another complication. Retailers must find as much operational and cost efficiency as possible in returns to mitigate some of these costs and maintain the value of the returns experience to drive loyalty. Consumers are also increasingly focused on sustainability, choosing to do business with companies that share those values. The combination of Narvar's intelligent rules engine plus Cycleon's network of 30 distribution centers placed strategically around the globe creates a sophisticated routing automation capability, saving carbon footprint and reducing time to process returns and refunds. "Narvar and Cycleon are a great match, with complementary capabilities, many mutual customers, and a shared vision to help retailers solve reverse logistics," said Jelle Schoenmaker, EVP After Market Services & General Manager at Cycleon. "We're excited to integrate Narvar's market-leading front-end experience and data & intelligence with our operational expertise to deliver a comprehensive service." "Returns are an integral part of the retail journey, and will only increase as ecommerce accelerates. Retailers have been valiantly grappling with the challenges of balancing consumer expectations with operational efficiency," said Amit Sharma, founder & CEO of Narvar. "We're thrilled to partner with Cycleon to support those efforts with a flexible and sustainable one-stop returns solution." This integrated returns solution is available immediately. For more information, contact either Narvar or Cycleon . About Narvar Narvar is an intelligent customer experience platform that helps commerce companies simplify the everyday lives of consumers. Serving over 800+retailers globally including Sephora, Patagonia, Levi's, Bose, Warby Parker, Home Depot, LVMH, and L'Oreal, Narvar ensures every touchpoint along the consumer purchase journey engages consumers and enables emotional connectionsfrom pre-purchase to in-store experiences and beyond. With customizable customer messaging and tailored interfaces driven by unparalleled data intelligence, Narvar empowers commerce brands to turn every touchpoint into an opportunity. For more information, visit narvar.com . About Cycleon Cycleon (part of the Reverse Logistics Group) are experts in product returns management. Their global platform and logistics network optimizes returns each step of the way. Cycleon provides seamless return experiences for both retailers and consumers, and strives to reduce the environmental impact and cost of reverse logistics. Active in 80+ countries, and with 200+ partners, Cycleon provides returns solutions for leading brands in ecommerce, both fashion & apparel and electronics. For more information visit cycleon.com . SOURCE Narvar; Cycleon Related Links http://www.corp.narvar.com The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company WASHINGTON. D.C. - President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order launching a review of U.S. supply chains and directing federal agencies to identify ways to secure them against a wide range of risks and vulnerabilities. The order is an effort to keep the United States from being at the mercy of foreign countries for critical goods like personal protective equipment used by health care workers during the coronavirus pandemic, and semiconductor chips used in the auto industry, The American people should never face shortages of the goods and services they rely on, whether thats their car, or their prescription medicines or the food at the local grocery store, said Biden, recalling how shortages of masks, gowns and gloves during the pandemic jeopardized the safety of front-line health care workers. The move came after Biden discussed the matter with a bipartisan group of U.S. Congress members including U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican. In a press call with reporters before the meeting, Portman said a shortage of semiconductor chips is causing a slowdown in Ohio auto plants, which will see a significant reduction in automobiles because of the lack of semiconductors coming in from overseas. They just cant produce the vehicles because they dont have the semiconductors, said Portman. This is going to be a big problem. It will result in a lot of layoffs. Portman said appliance producing companies like Whirlpool are also affected by the semiconductor shortage, which was caused when semiconductor producing countries like Taiwan reduced their chip production because they thought demand for them would go down because of the coronavirus. Demand for the products is strong again, but Portman said the semiconductor shortage will hold back production. Portman, who served as U.S. Trade Representative during the administration of President George W. Bush, said he spoke to Taiwans ambassador on Wednesday in an effort to secure more semiconductors. In the mid and longer term, weve got to move production to this country, said Portman, who said he and Biden would discuss how to ensure the global supply chain is more reliable by bringing some of it back here to this country. In a separate interview with reporters, Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio attributed the semiconductor shortage to bad past trade policies that led to manufacturers of vital supplies going offshore because we have a tax and trade policy that encourages corporations to shut down in places like Ross County or Hamilton County or Mansfield, where I grew up, and move overseas. It means we need a different trade policy and a different tax policy and a focus on manufacturing, Brown continued. Biden described his meeting with the group that included Portman as very productive. It was like the old days, said Biden. People were actually on the same page. Biden said the United States shouldnt have to rely on foreign countries for critical supplies during a national emergency. He said he was following up on last months executive order to develop a multi-year implementation plan for domestic production of pandemic supplies by signing Wednesdays order to address vulnerabilities in our supply chains across additional critical sectors of our economy so the American people are prepared to withstand any crisis and rely on ourselves. He said resilient, diverse and secure supply chains will help revitalize U.S. domestic manufacturing capacity and create well-paid jobs, and allow the United States to export critical goods, as he held up a semiconductor chip of the type whose shortages have stalled auto production. Bidens order directs an immediate 100-day review across federal agencies to address vulnerabilities in semiconductors and advanced packaging, pharmaceuticals, critical minerals including rare earths, and large capacity electric batteries such as those used in electric vehicles. It also calls for a more in-depth review over the next year of supply chains used for defense industries, public health and biological preparedness, agriculture, communications, energy and transportation. This is the United States of America, said Biden. We are better prepared to meet the challenges of the 21st century than any country in the world. Read more: Congress members including Ohios Jim Jordan and Bob Gibbs grill postmaster general at hearing on mail delays Capitol Hill police blame intelligence failures for Jan. 6 riot breaches, Sen. Rob Portman cites training failures Jane Timkens Senate bid gains endorsement from Rep. Bob Gibbs Sen. Sherrod Brown wants pension fix included in coronavirus relief bill Senate to hold hearing on security failures behind U.S. Capitol riot Rep. Jim Jordan, in move dismissed by Democrats, questions whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should shoulder blame for Capitol Hill riot security failures Rob Portman votes to acquit Trump, Sherrod Brown votes to convict: Read their statements Ohios U.S. Senators speak out on Donald Trumps impeachment trial Ohios Rob Portman backs argument that its not constitutional to impeach a former president, votes with most GOP senators Senate banking chair Sherrod Brown would like to couple bank access for cannabis businesses with drug sentencing reforms The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence speak during a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony honoring former Sen. Bob Dole at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Jan. 17, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) Pence Praises Trump During Meeting With Republicans Former Vice President Mike Pence praised former President Donald Trump during a meeting with congressional Republicans this week, according to one of the lawmakers present. Vice President Pence made it very clear that hes proud of the Trump administrations accomplishments and he spoke favorable of President Trump and their relationship, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement. As a former Chairman of the Republican Study Committee himself, VP Pence gave a lot of great advice about my position. It was an honor to work with him to develop the RSCs forward-facing conservative agenda to unite the Republican Party, he added. I got the sense they speak often and maintain the same personal friendship and relationship now that they have for four years, he added to CNN. Banks said a group from his Republican Study Committee convened with Pence in the Washington region at the fellow Indianans transition office. They discussed the way forward for the GOP while also speaking about what the party accomplished in the past. Banks believes Pence will have a more public presence in the coming months, after speaking little since he and Trump left office last month. Hell be launching an organization defending the successful Trump-Pence record of the last four years, Banks said. The former vice president has spoken to Trump in recent weeks, a former aide said last week. The president thanked the vice president for his service, told him he did a great job, and theyve even had conservsations since then, including even this week, Marc Short, the former aide, said during an appearance on Fox News. Trump and Pence accomplished a lot together, and they should be proud about that, Short added. Pence is not planning to appear at the popular Conservative Political Action Conference this week, a departure from previous years. The director of the conference called it a mistake. One report alleged Trump wouldnt speak to the event if Pence didnt attend, but a spokesman for the former president said the report was patently false, noting it relied on anonymous sources. No such demand or request was ever made by President Trump, and in fact, President Trump and Vice President Pence had a great call last week! he wrote in a tweet. Questions about the relationship between the former running mates arose last month, when they diverged on how to handle counting electoral votes during a joint session of Congress. Trump, who continues to insist he won the 2020 election, wanted Pence to intervene during the session when votes from some states were brought up, because of laws declared unconstitutional by courts, or measures alleged to be unconstitutional, or allegations of voter or election fraud. Pence declined, saying he thought the Constitution constrained him from intervening as such in his role as president of the Senate. After more than a year of the shooting down of a Ukrainian commercial airliner in January 2020, a United Nations (UN) human rights expert has said that high-level officials of the Islamic Republic should be charged. The UN official described the killing of all 176 passengers aboard the Boeing 737-800 that was shot down shortly after takeoff from Tehran as a profound and serious indictment of the countrys civil and military authorities. A 45-page letter was delivered to the Iranian government by Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. The two independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council said on Tuesday that Iran committed several human rights violations in mistakenly downing Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) Flight PS752 on January 8, 2020. Callamard and Javaid Rehman, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran have raised concerns in the aftermath of the deadly shooting that Tehran admitted to being a mistake. As per UN News, Callamard wrote to the Iranian Government in December 2020 following a six-month inquiry. However, the UN special rapporteur is yet to receive a response. The inconsistencies in the official explanations seem designed to create a maximum of confusion and a minimum of clarity. They seem contrived to mislead and bewilder," Callamard wrote. As for the mistakes that have been admitted, they suggest at minimum a reckless disregard for standard procedures and for the principles of precaution, which should have been implemented to the fullest given the circumstances and the location of the missile unit in the proximity of a civilian airfield, she added. Read - UN: Iran Increasing Uranium Enrichment Purity, Quantities #Iran committed multiple human rights violations in shooting down #Ukraine International Airlines flight #PS752 and in the aftermath of the deadly attack UN experts. Read more: https://t.co/QqKYu4VTdz pic.twitter.com/EhqYyVZuk2 UN Special Procedures (@UN_SPExperts) February 23, 2021 Read - Iran Welcomes US Steps To Ease Pressure Iran cited human error Ukrainian jet was heading from Tehran to Kyiv when it was struck down by two missiles that were fired by the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) after the military personnel mistook the civilian aircraft for a US missile. The strike had taken place when Iran-US tensions were soaring following the killing of Iranian official General Qasem Soleimani by the United States. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani had previously called for 'national unity' after its military 'unintentionally' shot down a Ukrainian jetliner due to 'human error'. The Iranian Civil Aviation authority said in a report on July 11, 2020, that a failure occurred due to a human error in following the procedure for aligning the radar and leading to a 107-degree error in the security system. Read - Iran Imposes Curbs On UN Nuclear Inspections Read - Biden Attempt To Resurrect Iran Nuke Deal Off To Bumpy Start Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - SoLVBL Solutions Inc. (CSE: SOLV), an innovative cybersecurity company that provides proprietary data authentication SaaS that uniquely features advanced cryptography for data authentication at unprecedented speed and scalability, announced that the Company has a patent pending with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to document the cryptographic protocol, which is at the heart of Q by SoLVBLTM. The application encompasses the novel use of well known and time-tested cryptographic primitives, along with immutable media, to effectively remove the bandwidth and latency bottlenecks hampering many decentralized solutions. The protocol is data agnostic, in the sense that it can be applied to arbitrarily large, but finite, binary records, and produces transferable assurances which protect the record from future tampering - even in cases of collusion. The result, as stated by CEO Ray Pomroy, "Is, we believe, an efficient and scalable means to render arbitrary binary records effectively immutable in that they cannot be forged or altered without detection." Such functionality opens the door for verifiable data, whose proof of authenticity can be stored and, or, transmitted alongside the data itself. In other words, data, which vouches for its own authenticity and integrity. Being able to create self-authenticating data records will provide effective deterrence and a means of detection against numerous forms of digital forgery. Without such protective measures, systems and users have no ironclad way of determining whether some or all the digital information they consume has been doctored to misinform them. Undetected, the effects of forgery are boundless - and increasing every day - as more and more systems are being created to make automated critical decisions. As an example, Stuxnet relied on forging data to achieve its goals, as does the concept of 'fake news' relying on forging facts. The 2016 Bangladesh Central Bank heist involved the forgery of transactional data pre- and post-transmission on the SWIFT network. Increasingly, digital records are being used to guide courts and public opinion. Q by SoLVBLTM can authenticate such digital records, and is capable of handling the sheer quantity of digital information being generated in the modern age. The company also plans to file additional related patents, and commercializing numerous solutions to the increasing threat of digital forgery. "The filing of our provisional patent application validates our intention to create innovative authentication solutions that are designed to prevent, and address security challenges faced by many companies," said Raymond Pomroy, CEO of SoLVBL Solutions Inc. "As the world moves to remote work, we plan to develop more advanced continuous authentication solutions that can challenge the current industry standards while ensuring our clients' workflow remains uninterrupted, uncorrupted, in and out of the office." For further information, please contact CEO, Raymond Pomroy 15 Toronto Street, Suite 602 Toronto, Ontario, M5C2E3 E: Ray.Pomroy@SoLVBL.com T: 905.510.7982 About SoLVBL SoLVBL is an innovative cybersecurity company. The company's mission is to empower, better, faster decisions by developing a universal standard for establishing digital record authenticity. The lead product Q by SoLVBL, is a proprietary software of the company, designed to be easy to use and adopt, economically priced and provide digital record authentication at lightning fast speed. Q by SoLVBL allows organizations to establish trust in their data. The company is currently pursuing the following verticals: chain of custody for digital evidence; including, NG-911, data used in the financial sector, medical applications and critical IoT infrastructures. Forward-Looking Statements The CSE has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. NEITHER THE CSE NOR ITS MARKET REGULATOR (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE CSE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE. CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION: This news release contains "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release. Any statement that involves discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions, future events or performance (often but not always using phrases such as "expects", or "does not expect", "is expected", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", "plans", "budget", "scheduled", "forecasts", "estimates", "believes" or "intends" or variations of such words and phrases or stating that certain actions, events or results "may" or "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken to occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: the ability of the Company to successfully achieve its business objectives, including, the implementation and success of Q by SoLVBLTM, and expectations for other economic, business and/or competitive, factors. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release. Except as required by law, SoLVBL assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities described herein in the United States. The securities described herein have not been registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), or any state securities law and may not be offered or sold in the "United States", 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 an exemption from such registration requirements is available. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75337 The global banking industry has witnessed a significant downturn in the past two years due to the pandemic. The total brand value in the annual Brand Finance Banking 500 ranking increased by 10 per cent in 2018 (from $1.07 trillion to $1.18 trillion) and again by 15 per cent in 2019 ($1.36 trillion) but decreased by 2 per cent and 5 per cent in 2020 ($1.33 trillion) and 2021 ($1.27 trillion), respectively. However, the banking industry with the highest increase in brand value was Vietnam, which has risen by 146 per cent, according to Brand Finance Banking 500 list. Vietcombank's brand value climbed 99 per cent to $800 million, the second-highest growth rate globally. Since the Vietnamese government introduced its strategy to boost accountability and the strength of the banking sector, including more stringent capital requirements and greater transparency, customer perception has improved, Brand Finance noted. Growing confidence in the sector reputation measures have improved 8 per cent in our research has translated into higher revenues and a more positive outlook from equity analysts. Of the nine Vietnamese banks on the Brand Finance Banking 500 list, Agribank was the highest-ranked, placing 173th globally from 190th in 2019. Following are Vietcombank, VietinBank, VPBank, BIDV, Techcombank, MB, Sacombank, and ACB ranked 180th, 216th, 243th, 246th, 270th, 374th, 392nd, and 397th, respectively. Previously, Brand Finance stated that Vietnam is the fastest-growing nation brand in 2020 ranking, its brand value skyrocketed by 29 per cent to $319 billion. Emerging as a Southeast Asian haven for manufacturing, Vietnam defies the global trend, with its brand value up an impressive 29 per cent, Brand Finance noted. Furthermore, US banks account for almost a quarter of the total brand value in the ranking the nations 74 banks reaching a cumulative brand value of $274.8 billion. Five US brands feature in the top 10, including Bank of America (down 7 per cent to $33 billion), Citi (down 3 per cent to $32 billion), Wells Fargo (down 22 per cent to $32 billion), Chase (down 8 per cent to $29 billion), and JP Morgan (up 3 per cent to $24 billion). Bank of America remains the most valuable banking brand in the US, placing fifth overall, and JP Morgan is the only brand in the top 10 to record a positive value change. Currently holding the lowest reputation score among all banks in the US, Wells Fargo experienced the largest drop in brand value falling two places to seventh overall, and third in the US as a result of failing to rebuild favour among consumers in the wake of several past scandals, according to the report. Citi, the third-largest US bank by assets, has emerged as the strongest retail bank in the US with a BSI score of 80.7 out of 100 and AAA- rating (up from AA+ in 2020). Citi has also climbed one place in the ranking to the 6th position, following a rapid rebound in its profits in the third quarter of last year. Meanwhile, Chinese banks maintain dominance of the ranking, accounting for 33 per cent of total brand value and seven of the 10 top climbers. ICBC the largest Chinese bank remains the worlds most valuable banking brand. During the first week of February, production scaled back to one shift because of an ongoing shortage of semiconductor chips that has slowed the global auto manufacturing industry. The plant returned to full production the following week, Felker said. International travellers are particularly vulnerable to virulent strains of drug-resistant bacteria - often picking up several different types during a trip through spending time in the company of other tourists, a new study reveals. The global spread of intestinal multidrug resistant gram-negative (MDR-GN) bacteria poses a serious threat to human health worldwide, with MDR clones of E.coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae threatening more antibiotic resistant infections around the world. Researchers monitored a group of European travellers visiting Lao People's Democratic Republic for three weeks - analysing daily returns of information and stool samples to build a comprehensive picture of the tourists' gut health. Bacterial strains colonised multiple travellers staying at the same hotels and spending time in each other's company. In one exceptional instance, two participants staying in separate accommodation shared an identical strain after one took a shower in the other's bathroom. The international group of researchers, led by scientists at the Universities of Basel, Birmingham, Helsinki and Oslo, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute have published their findings in The Lancet Microbe. Alan McNally, Professor in Microbial Evolutionary Genomics at the University of Birmingham and a senior author of the study, commented: "International travel is strongly linked to the spread of MDR-GN bacteria, with transmission highest in India and Southeast Asia, Africa and South America. Travellers visiting these high-risk regions are at substantial risk of acquiring the bacteria. "Colonisation by MDR-GN bacteria is a highly dynamic process. We found constant 'competition' between circulating strains acquired by individual hosts and the travellers' 'native' bacteria. Travellers can pick up the bacteria even during short visits and further spread the strains after returning home." The impact of travel on the global spread of multidrug-resistant E. coli is well documented - up to 80% of travellers returning from high-risk regions are colonised by MDR-GN bacteria, with colonisation lasting up to a year. Previous traveller studies only analysed pre- and post-travel samples, rather than the actual travel period. Researchers found that, of the group of 20 European volunteers visiting Laos, 70% had been colonised at the end of the study. Daily sampling revealed that all participants had acquired extended-spectrum beta-lactamases (ESBL) at some time point during their overseas stay. ESBL enzymes create resistance within the body to most beta-lactam antibiotics, including penicillins, cephalosporins, and aztreonam. Infections with ESBL-producing organisms have proved difficult to treat. All but one participant acquired multiple strains of bacteria with 83 unique strains identified (53 E. coli, 10 Klebsiella, 20 other ESBL-GN species) and some of these strains being shared by as many as four subjects. Study co-senior author Jukka Corander, Associate Faculty at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK, and professor at Faculty of Medicine at the University of Oslo commented: "Our study reveals the true scale and complexity at which drug-resistant bacteria colonise the intestinal tract during travel, demonstrating that it has been seriously underestimated previously. "In addition, several of our participants lost some of their travel-acquired ESBL-GN strains while still abroad - indicating that previous studies solely employing pre- and post-travel sampling have under-reported the extent to which travellers are colonised by ESBL-GN." ### For more information, please contact Tony Moran, International Communications Manager, University of Birmingham on +44 (0) 121 414 8254 or +44 (0)782 783 2312. For out-of-hours enquiries, please call +44 (0) 7789 921 165. Notes to editors: The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the world's top 100 institutions, and its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers and teachers and more than 6,500 international students from nearly 150 countries. 'Intestinal multidrug-resistant bacteria contracted by visitors to a high-endemic setting: a prospective, daily, real-time sampling study' - Kantele A, Kuenzli E, Dunn SJ, Dance D, Newton P, Davong V, Mero S, Pakkanen S, Neumayr A, Hatz C, Snaith A, Kallonen T, Corander J, McNally A is published in The Lancet Microbe. The research paper can be accessed for journalists to use in their pieces via this post-embargo link: http://www. thelancet. com/ journals/ lanmic/ article/ PIIS2666-5247 (20)30224-X/fulltext The research team comprised of scientists from: University of Helsinki, Finland; University of Basel, Switzerland; University of Zurich, Switzerland; University of Birmingham, UK; Lao-Oxford-Mahosot Hospital-Wellcome Trust Research Unit, Vientiane, Lao People's Democratic Republic; University of Oxford, UK; London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK; Cantonal Hospital, St. Gallen, Switzerland; University of Oslo, Norway; Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK. New Delhi: BJP top leadership, including party president JP Nadda, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, UP CM Yogi Adityanath and EAM S Jaishankar, have launched an all-out attack on Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and called him an opportunist who is trying to create a north-south divide. The top BJP leaders slammed the Gandhi scion over his remarks "comparing" his present Wayanad parliamentary constituency in Kerala to his previous Amethi seat and said that he was a man of ''divisive mentality.'' BJP president JP Nadda accused Gandhi of "spewing venom against the North"."A few days back he was in the Northeast, spewing venom against the western part of India. Today in the South he is spewing venom against the North. Divide and rule politics won`t work, Rahul Gandhi Ji!" Nadda said in a tweet. A few days back he was in the Northeast, spewing venom against the western part of India. Today in the South he is spewing venom against the North. Divide and rule politics wont work, @RahulGandhi Ji! People have rejected this politics. See what happened in Gujarat today! https://t.co/KbxZSJ4sdt Jagat Prakash Nadda (@JPNadda) February 23, 2021 Gandhi, who addressed an event to mark the conclusion of Aishwarya Kerala Yatra in poll-bound Kerala, said he had been an MP for 15 years from the north and used to a different type of politics and coming to Kerala was very refreshing. "For the first 15 years, I was an MP in the north. I had got used to a different type of politics. For me, coming to Kerala was very refreshing as suddenly I found that people are interested in issues not just superficially but they like to go into detail about issues," Rahul had said. "I was talking to some students in the United States and I said to them I really enjoy going to Kerala. Its not just affection but the way you do your politics, the intelligence with which you do your politics. So, for me, its been a learning experience and a pleasure," he added. Gandhi had represented Amethi, a bastion of the Nehru-Gandhi family, for 15 years in Lok Sabha. He fought from two constituencies in 2019 and was defeated from Amethi but won from Wayanad in Kerala. On his turn, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan accused the Congress of trying to create a "north-south" divide in the country. "Wherever Rahul Gandhi has landed, Congress has been grounded. Rahulji had earlier made north India free of Congress and now he has headed southwards. For us and the people, the entire country is one. Congress wants to divide the country into north and south. People will not allow these attempts to succeed," Chouhan said in a tweet. - , - ! , ! , pic.twitter.com/6HBzvn10KI Shivraj Singh Chouhan (@ChouhanShivraj) February 23, 2021 Union Minister and senior BJP leader Smriti Z Irani also slammed Rahul Gandhi. "Not Rahul, its his divisive mentality that is speaking. It is the same Congress that divided the country into India and Pakistan on the basis of religion. Do they now want to divide it into North & South? he People will not let such efforts succeed," he said. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar also took a dig at Gandhi over his remarks and said "never run down a region, never divide us"."I hail from the South. I am an MP from a Western state. I was born, educated and worked in the North. I represented all of India before the World. India is one. Never run down a region; never divide us," he said in a tweet. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath accused Gandhi of "practising cheap politics" and resorting to regionalism. "Rahulji, Atalji had once said that India is not just a piece of land, but a living Rashtrapurush. Please don't try to divide it for your cheap politics by the sword of regionalism. India was one, is one, and will always be one," he said. Live TV New Delhi, Feb 24 : Demand for gold among Indian consumers is likely to recover in 2021 on the back of the lower import duty among other announcements made in the Union Budget for FY22, said a World Gold Council (WGC) report. Apart from reducing the import duty on gold, the government also proposed to authorise the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) as regulator for domestic gold spot exchanges. The Budget also proposed establishment of welfare schemes for rural areas designed to boost incomes, which according to WGC would indirectly help revive the gold market. "We believe India's gold market will not only benefit from these reforms but will also indirectly benefit from the various rural welfare schemes announced in the budget. With a revival in the economy and these positive budget announcements, Indian gold demand looks set to recover in 2021 from its 2020 lows," it said. It noted that a lower customs duty may also increase the headwind for gold smuggling. Unofficial imports fell by a whopping 80 per cent in 2020, to 20-25 tonne, due to logistical disruptions caused by COVID-19, and may be further impacted in 2021 with ongoing flight restrictions and lower customs duty. With import costs falling, official inflows in 2021 could be spurred, said the report. Lower customs duty and recovering demand may allow official imports to gain strength at the cost of unofficial imports, although the 14.07 per cent duty continues to make the grey market attractive, it said. Further, as per WGC, the gold industry in India has reacted positively to the recent budget announcements. "Rumours had previously been circulating that customs duty on gold might be increased rather than decreased. Consequently, the lower import duty is viewed as a boost to gold demand and a headwind for unofficial imports," it said. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text Insurance fraud seems like it might be an easy thing to do. Insurance companies are often so huge, one wonders how they might not even notic... Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 22:28:57|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close JERUSALEM, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Israel's exports of hi-tech industries services, excluding start-up companies, rose by 19 percent from 30 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 to 35.7 billion dollars in 2020, according to a report by the Central Bureau of Statistics released on Wednesday. In contrast to export of merchandise, export in services refers to the sale and delivery of intangible products such as transportation, tourism, telecommunications, construction, advertising, computing, accounting and R&D. The leading type of services exported from Israel in 2020 was computer programming, including consultancy and related activities, data processing, hosting-related activities and web portals. Israel's exports of services from start-up companies totalled 752 million dollars, a fall of 75.2 percent from 3.03 billion dollars in 2019, the report said. The data show the exports of Israel's scientific R&D services decreased by 6.2 percent in 2020 compared with 2019, thus totalling about 7.6 billion dollars in 2020 compared with about 8.1 billion dollars in 2019. The report also shows that Israeli travel services exports dropped 67.1 percent, from 7.6 billion dollars in 2019 to 2.5 billion dollars in 2020, while transportation services exports decreased by 6.7 percent, from 4.5 billion dollars to 4.2 billion dollars. In total, Israeli services exports amounted to 53.9 billion dollars in 2020, down 2.9 percent from 55.5 billion dollars in 2019. Enditem The Polk Awards also recognized The Post in justice reporting for George Floyds America, a six-part series by a team of seven bylined reporters that documented the life, community and experiences of Mr. Floyd, a Black man who was killed in May by the Minneapolis police, a death that touched off protests nationwide. The Post's other wins came in the categories of political reporting, for profiles by Stephanie McCrummen of a voter and two politicians in Georgia, and state reporting, for a series by Ian Shapira on racism at the state-funded Virginia Military Institute. The honors came days before the retirement of the papers top editor, Martin Baron, who has led the paper since 2013 and announced his retirement last month. Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire of The New York Times won the financial reporting award for shining a light on former President Donald J. Trumps hidden financial history. In work described as a reportorial coup by the Polk Awards, the Times journalists gained access to a trove of long-concealed tax data. Their analysis laid out years of tax avoidance, showing that Mr. Trump had paid $0 in income tax in 11 of 18 years they examined and $750 in each of 2016 and 2017. The public service prize went to Helen Branswell, an infectious-disease reporter for the six-year-old health and medical news site Stat. Ms. Branswells first article on what she initially described as a new virus, and perhaps even a new coronavirus was published Jan. 4, 2020. For the year, she wrote 161 articles on the subject, according to a statement announcing her award, reporting on the virus itself, its devastation and the vaccines that could put an end to it. Ed Yong of The Atlantic won in the science reporting category for his pandemic coverage. He predicted its destructive path through the United States in a detailed March report and analyzed its ravages in an August follow-up article. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-23 22:43:19|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close Aerial photo shows a China-Europe freight train bound for Duisburg of Germany departing from Tuanjiecun Station in southwest China's Chongqing, Jan. 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Tang Yi) China ranked second among Germany's biggest export markets last year, according to Destatis. Unlike all other major markets, German exports to China were almost unaffected and only decreased by 0.1 percent year-on-year to 95.9 billion euros. BERLIN, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Sentiment of Germany's manufacturing industry "improved noticeably" as the ifo index for export expectations rose from 7.5 points in the previous month to 10.7 points in February, the ifo Institute said on Tuesday. The ifo export index that reflects German companies' export expectations for the next three months climbed to the highest level since September 2018, according to the monthly ifo survey among 2,300 German manufacturers. "China's good economic situation and an increase in U.S. production are helping German exporters," said President of the ifo Institute Clemens Fuest in a statement. Photo taken on Nov. 6, 2020 shows the booth of German technology enterprise ZEISS at the Medical Equipment and Healthcare Products exhibition area during the third China International Import Expo (CIIE) in Shanghai, east China. (Xinhua/Chen Yehua) Although the United States remained Germany's biggest export market last year, exports declined by 12.5 percent year-on-year, reaching 103.8 billion euros (126.2 billion U.S. dollars) in 2020, according the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) on Monday. China ranked second among Germany's biggest export markets, according to Destatis. Unlike all other major markets, German exports to China were almost unaffected and only decreased by 0.1 percent year-on-year to 95.9 billion euros. According to the German Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Association (ZVEI), China even expanded its position as the German electrical industry's biggest export market last year. With an increase of 6.5 percent to 23.3 billion euros, the Chinese market "developed more dynamically" than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers assemble a car at a workshop of FAW-Volkswagen Automobile Co., Ltd. in Changchun, northeast China's Jilin Province, July 9, 2019. (Xinhua/Xu Chang) The chemical industry in Germany and manufacturers of machinery and equipment also expected "significant export growth," the ifo Institute said. Automotive manufacturers in Germany similarly "put a three-month lull behind them and are once again expecting more orders from abroad." However, Germany's furniture and clothing industries would "still face difficulties" in the international market and companies expected a "significant decline in sales," the ifo Institute said. The Association of the German Furniture Industry (VDM) said last week that sales of the industry declined by 3.7 percent year-on-year to 17.2 billion euros last year and the domestic market "proved to be significantly more stable for the industry than exports." Customers have meal at a German restaurant in Changchun, northeast China's Jilin Province, Sept. 12, 2020. (Xinhua/Xu Chang) Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. WASHINGTON (AP) Security officials testifying at Congress' first hearing on the deadly siege of the Capitol cast blame and pointed fingers on Tuesday but also acknowledged they were woefully unprepared for the violence. Senators drilled down on the stunning security failure and missed warning signs as rioters loyal to former President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, in a misguided attempt to stop lawmakers from certifying President Joe Biden's election. Five people died in the attack, including a Capitol Police officer. The security officials lost their jobs, and Trump was impeached by the House on a charge of inciting the insurrection, the deadliest attack on Congress in 200 years. Trump was ultimately acquitted by the Senate. Here are some takeaways from the testimony: FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE Intelligence warnings of an armed uprising by extremist groups heading to the Capitol didn't rise to the level of alarm or even get passed up the chain of command in time for the Jan. 6 attack. Crucially, a key warning flare from the FBI field office in Norfolk, Virginia, of a war on the Capitol was sent the night before to the Capitol Police's intelligence division. But then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund testified that he only learned about it the day before Tuesday's hearing. Instead, Sund said he was bracing for demonstrations on par with other armed protests by mobs of Trumps supporters in the nation's capital in November and December after the presidential election. No entity, including the FBI, provided any intelligence indicating that there would be a coordinated violent attack on the United States Capitol by thousands of well-equipped armed insurrectionists, he testified in written remarks about a conference call the day before the attack. The Democratic chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, said, There was a failure to take this threat more seriously. HE SAID, HE SAID As hundreds of rioters stormed the Capitol, breaking into the iconic building's windows and doors, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat with police, there are conflicting accounts from the security officials over what happened next. Sund, who had raised the idea of calling on the National Guard for backup days earlier, specifically recounted a 1:09 p.m. phone call he made to the then-sergeant-at-arms of the House, Paul Irving, his superior, requesting National Guard troops. Sund said he was told they would run it up the chain of command . Irving said he has no recollection of the conversation at that time and instead recalls a conversation nearly 20 minutes later. He said the 1:09 p.m. call does not show up on his cellphone log. As the riot escalated, Sund was pleading with Army officials for Guard troops in another phone call, testified Robert Contee III, the acting chief of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, whose officers had arrived for backup. Contee said he was stunned at the delayed response from the military. Defense Department officials have said they offered National Guard troops days earlier but were rebuffed. Pentagon officials are scheduled to testify to the Senate next week. COMMON FACTS: A PLANNED INSURRECTION At the start of the hearing, coming 10 days after Trump was acquitted by the Senate on the impeachment charge of inciting the insurrection, some common facts were agreed to. Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the chair of the Rules Committee, asked the security officials if there was any doubt the riot was a planned attack and carried out by white nationalist and extremist groups. None of the witnesses disputed the characterization of the facts of Jan. 6. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin read an alternative account, of mostly peaceful protesters festive that day, that he encouraged colleagues to consider. But in closing, Klobuchar restated the testimony: There was clear agreement this was a planned insurrection. ONE OFFICER'S PERSONAL STORY The hearing opened with Capitol Police Capt. Carneysha Mendoza, a 19-year veteran of the force, delivering a compelling personal account of being called at home that day as she was spending time with her 10-year-old before the start of her shift. She rushed to the Capitol only to find the worst of the worst scene of her career. A former Army veteran, she recounted the deadly mayhem, fending off rioters inside the buildings stately Rotunda, inhaling gas and suffering chemical burns to her face she said still have not healed. Her Fitbit recorded four hours of sustained activity, she said. The next night and following day she spent at the hospital consoling the family of Officer Brian Sicknick, who died after the attack. As an American, and as an Army veteran, its sad to see us attacked by our fellow citizens, Mendoza told the senators. TRUMP'S SHADOW The former president was hardly a presence at the first hearing. Instead, senators largely set aside their sharply partisan ways to drill down on the facts of what happened that day on how to prevent it from happening again. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., pointedly asked for the name of the commander in chief of the armed forces that day who was ultimately responsible for the military and security of the country. That drew out the former president's name. Among the senators on the panels are two of Trump's staunch allies who led the effort to overturn Biden's election victory Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. ___ Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Michael Balsamo and Lolita Baldor in Washington and Nomaan Merchant in Houston contributed to this report. Children and their teacher play a sleeping game at a kindergarten in Weinan City, northwest China's Shaanxi Province, March 21, 2017. (Xinhua/Cui Zhengbo) CHICAGO, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- A study of the University of Michigan suggests that groups of neurons activated during prior learning keep humming, tattooing memories into brain when one slips into sleep. Focusing on a specific set of neurons in the primary visual cortex, the researchers created a visual memory test. They showed a group of mice a neutral image, and expressed genes in the visual cortex neurons activated by the image. To verify that these neurons registered the neutral image, the researchers tested whether they could instigate the memory of the image stimulus by selectively activating the neurons without showing them the image. When they activated the neurons and paired that activation with a mild foot shock, they found that their subjects would subsequently be afraid of visual stimuli that looked similar to the image those cells encode. They found the reverse also to be true: after pairing the visual stimulus with a foot shock, their subjects would subsequently respond with fear to reactivating the neurons. "Basically, the precept of the visual stimulus and the precept of this completely artificial activation of the neurons generated the same response," said Sara Aton, senior author of the study and a professor in the UM Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. The researchers found that when they disrupted sleep after they showed the subjects an image and had given them a mild foot shock, there was no fear associated with the visual stimulus. Those with un-manipulated sleep learned to fear the specific visual stimulus that had been paired with the foot shock. "We found that these mice actually became afraid of every visual stimulus we showed them," Aton said. "From the time they go to the chamber where the visual stimuli are presented, they seem to know there's a reason to feel fear, but they don't know what specifically they're afraid of." This likely shows that, in order for them to make an accurate fear association with a visual stimulus, they have to have sleep-associated reactivation of the neurons encoding that stimulus in the sensory cortex. This allows a memory specific to that visual cue to be generated. The researchers think that at the same time, that sensory cortical area must communicate with other brain structures, to marry the sensory aspect of the memory to the emotional aspect. Aton said the findings could have implications for how anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder are understood. "To me this is kind of a clue that says, if you're linking fear to some very specific event during sleep, sleep disruption may affect this process. In the absence of sleep, the brain seems to manage processing the fact that you are afraid, but you may be unable to link that to what specifically you should be afraid of," Aton said. "That specification process may be one that goes awry with PTSD or generalized anxiety." The study, posted on UM's website on Monday, has been published in Nature Communications. President Uhuru Kenyatta has sent a message of condolence to the family, relatives and residents of Juja constituency following the death of their Member of Parliament Francis Munyua Waititu. The second term ruling party legislator succumbed to brain cancer Monday night at a Nairobi hospital after a long battle with the debilitating disease. In his message of comfort, President Kenyatta eulogised Hon Francis Waititu, famously known by his moniker, Wakapee, as a progressive, trusted and devoted leader. Weve sadly lost a very progressive, trusted and committed leader whose public actions always reflected the interests of his constituents. It is because of the trust and love that the people of Juja had for Hon Waititu that they entrusted him with a second term in a very competitive election despite his illness, the President said. The Head of State applauded the fallen legislator for his contribution and commitment to the fight against cancer in the country saying the MP continously raised public awareness on the disease. Throughout his fight with cancer, Hon Waititu led efforts to overcome the disease through awareness creation and support for initiatives aimed at lowering the cost of treatment in the country, the President said. President Kenyatta prayed to God to give the family and residents of Juja constituency fortitude and strength during this difficult time of mourning. GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Grand Rapids leaders have approved a $9.46 million contract to convert all city street lights to LED lights. City officials say the move will generate about $350,000 annually in energy savings, reduce the citys carbon footprint and bring some safety benefits. Under the contract approved by city commissioners on Tuesday, Feb. 23, Wyoming-based Strain Electric has two years to convert all remaining 16,000 street lights in the city to LED, with half of them required to be upgraded to LED within a year. About 2,000 of the citys roughly 18,000 street lights have already been converted to LED, thanks to initial LED piloting, replacement of failing concrete light poles and other operations and maintenance. Residents can expect to see the new lights coming to their neighborhoods starting summer 2021, according to the city. The lights will come in several different models. The citys current street lights are a mix of high-pressure sodium and mercury-vapor models. The color temperature of the LED lights chosen by the city measure at 4000K (Kelvin), which is sometimes called neutral white and said to closely resemble natural light. The city opted for that color over 3000K, which is a little warmer in tone, based in part on resident feedback, as well as slightly better energy efficiency and use in 314 other cities in the United States with 100,000 people or more. Our primary goal in arriving at this decision was the safety of our residents and neighborhoods, which is a critical objective in the citys strategic plan, James Hurt, managing director of the citys Public Services, said. We know that most accidents involving pedestrians and bicyclists happen at night, and many of those are the result of poor visibility. Additionally, better lighting will make residents feel safer in their own neighborhoods cities like Detroit have seen great results when they transitioned to this LED temperature for their street lighting. Pictured is another of the several LED street light models Grand Rapids is using to convert its existing 18,000 street lights to LED. (Courtesy photo from city of Grand Rapids) Unlike the current street lights, the LED light system will have automated controls that can detect issues with the lights and measure and collect data on energy usage. The lights also have dimming capabilities allowing them to adjust as necessary to weather conditions, address resident and neighborhood concerns and increase lighting levels as the LED fixture output degrades over time. While there has been some debate on the selection of this LED temperature, the opportunity costs, figuratively and literally, associated with not adopting this recommendation and a full transition to 4000K temperature LED lighting are far too great to ignore, Mike Grenier, manager of the citys Environmental Services Department, said. And at a time when smart cities like Grand Rapids are faced with budget shortfalls during the COVID pandemic that are resulting in economic challenges, it is incumbent on municipalities to continue finding ways to lower their costs. The LED conversation project is the last leg of a roughly $20 million overhaul to the citys electric infrastructure. The first phase, dating back to 2018, brought upgraded power cables and substations, the replacement of primary conductors and other investments. City staff said at the time that portions of the citys electric infrastructure was outdated and vulnerable to failures and electrical hazards. Related: $20M street-light project to focus on electric infrastructure then LEDs Part of the project also entails the replacement of 617 concrete street light poles with wood ones. Some of the poles were cracking and had structural integrity issues, officials previously said. The majority were replaced in the first phase of the project. Bonds issued by the city have financed the first leg of the project. City officials anticipate further bonds will be issued to pay for the LED upgrade phase. Read more: They call themselves militias, but actual militias report to the governor in Michigan Public bus system threatened with defunding likely to be cut loose from Muskegon County Michigan House package aims to curb skyrocketing prescription drug, health care costs In the backdrop of an ambitious push to its privatisation dreams, Centre is reportedly planning to hive off certain subsidiaries of Air India. The subsidiaries in question include the profitable ground handling as well as maintenance and repair arms of the national carrier, a report said. The government is finally making headway in its endeavour to sell its stake in Air India Central government is planning to separately sell Air India Airport Services, the ground handling operations of Air India. The Finance Ministry might float preliminary documents to invite interest bidders as Air India stake sale proceeds, the Mint quoted a ministry official as saying. Other subsidiaries including Air India Engineering Services will also be put on sale, but the timeline for this has not been decided yet, the report further said. Formerly known as Air India Air Transport Services Limited, AI Airport Services Limited (AI APS) was operationalised with effect from February 1, 2013, as a dedicated ground handling company after Cabinet's approval. AI APS provides unified ground handling services including ramp, passenger, baggage, cargo handling and cabin cleaning. The company operates at 81 airports across the country. Apart from handling the flights of Air India Limited and its subsidiaries, AI APS also provides its services to 37 foreign scheduled airlines, 3 domestic scheduled airlines, 4 regional airlines, 12 Seasonal charter airlines, 23 foreign airlines availing perishable cargo handling. Air India Engineering Services Limited (AIESL) was formed as a wholly owned subsidiary of Air India on March 11, 2004. The company claims to be the biggest aircraft maintenance and repair operation (MRO) in India. AIESL comprises of huge infrastructure to cater to line maintenance, base maintenance, engine overhaul, accessories overhaul and component overhaul activities as per capability at main bases and line stations. It provides base maintenance facilities at Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Thiruvananthapuram and Nagpur airports. AIESL also runs specialised overhaul shops at these locations, which are equipped with the necessary hangars, workshops, storage rooms and office buildings, in accordance with national and international regulations and requirements. AIESL also provides line maintenance facilities at various Indian as well as international stations, as well as exclusive maintenance services to third-party customers. Centre has been trying tooth and nail to divest its 100 per cent stake in the national carrier Air India, including the airline's 100 per cent stake in no-frill subsidiary Air India Express Ltd and 50 per cent stake in Air India SATS Airport Services. This government's second go in this regard after a failed attempt in 2018. So far, SpiceJet promoter Ajay Singh, Kolkata-based businessman Pawan Rui and Tata group are said to have shown interest in acquiring Air India. Other investors have also shown interest but not all of them are serious parties and not all of them will qualify for the later stage, when they will be asked to submit their bids, people in the know told the daily. Moreover, the government has also unofficially asked people to show interest for bidding as it wanted to avoid a repeat of 2018 when it failed to get a bid for 76 per cent stake. ALSO READ: Air India, BPCL disinvestment to be completed by July-August ALSO READ: Ajay Singh keen on Air India? SpiceJet promoter shows interest in carrier ALSO READ: Govt receives multiple EOIs for Pawan Hans disinvestment The pandemic seems to have exposed and perhaps worsened a recent trend in college admissions: Selective universities have seen extraordinary interest from applicants this year, after waiving test scores. But smaller and less recognizable schools are extending deadlines and expanding outreach to attract students. Students from less advantaged backgrounds are, predictably, being left behind. The Common Application saw 10 percent more applications submitted by about 1 percent more students. But about 3 percent fewer students who would be the first in their families to go to college submitted applications this year. There was also a 2 percent drop in students who qualified for waived admissions fees a proxy for family income. The inequities of access to education are in stark relief, said Jenny Rickard, the chief executive of the Common App. Selective and well-known schools like Haverford, the University of California, Los Angeles and Penn State saw double-digit surges. Harvard set a record a 42 percent increase and the entire Ivy League had to extend its notification deadline by a week to give counselors time to read applications. Egyptian Health Minister Hala Zayed said coronavirus vaccines will be available for citizens at a cost of no more than EGP 200 (around $13) for a two-dose regimen, with needy families and individuals to be exempt from the charge. In a phone interview with ON satellite channel on Tuesday night, Zayed noted that the price was pitched to ensure the sustainable availability of the vaccines, since it is still unknown whether the shots will be taken once in a lifetime or yearly. As of Sunday 28 February, Egyptians will be allowed to reserve doses of the coronavirus vaccines via registering their data on a designated website, with priority to be given to those who suffer chronic diseases and those who are above 40. Citizens who cant access the website can register their data in the nearest hospital. Zayed said a text message will be sent on phones to registered people, stating the date in which they will receive the inoculation. The minister also noted that elderly citizens and those with chronic diseases are expected to start receiving their first shot within the first week of March. Egypt has already vaccinated hundreds of medical workers at isolation and triage hospitals nationwide in the first step of its vaccination campaign, which began in mid-January. Egypt set a vaccination priority list starting with the medical teams at the isolation, fever, chest, and screening hospitals; followed by kidney failure and cancer patients; then the elderly. The health minister noted that the vaccination campaign is targeting to cover close to 65 percent of citizens under the age of 30 and around 40 million of those who are above that age by the end of 2021. The vaccination campaign currently includes the Chinese Sinopharm and British-Swedish Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines, with each person receiving two shots administered 21 days apart. Egypt has received 350,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine, and 50,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, both of which were granted emergency use authorisation by the Egyptian Drug Authority in January. Within the first week of March, Zayed said, Egypt is expecting a shipment of 8.6 million doses out of 40 million doses reserved of the AstraZeneca vaccine from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations, an international scheme aiming to ensure equal access to new and underused vaccines. Short link: Welcome to Morningstar.co.uk! You have been redirected here from Hemscott.com as we are merging our websites to provide you with a one-stop shop for all your investment research needs.To search for a security, type the name or ticker in the search box at the top of the page and select from the dropdown results.Registered Hemscott users can log in to Morningstar using the same login details. Similarly, if you are a Hemscott Premium user, you now have a Morningstar Premium account which you can access using the same login details. Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 06:09:11|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator, a 50-million-U.S.-dollar collaboration between the Wells Fargo Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, on Wednesday announced new winners of its Channel Partner Awards. For the current awards round, it called for proposals that would provide entrepreneurial opportunities for historically underrepresented individuals in the cleantech industry. Cleantech consistently ranks as one of the fastest-growing employment categories in the United States, but its workforce has historically lacked diversity. According to a 2019 report from the Solar Foundation, the nation's solar workforce at the time was 73 percent white, 17 percent Hispanic or Latino, 9 percent Asian and 8 percent Black. Minority entrepreneurship in cleantech is even lower, as only 10 percent of minority-owned businesses are in the Professional, Scientific and Technology sectors, according to Wells Fargo. A recent Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator whitepaper assessing the current cleantech landscape found that 78 percent of the surveyed cleantech startups maintain a predominantly white workforce, and 93 percent have a majority of male employees, further emphasizing the need for initiatives focused on diversifying the industry. Following a call for submissions, nearly 50 percent of the company's Innovation Incubator Channel Partners applied for the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-focused awards. Winners were selected on a competitive basis by evaluating their potential to support the trajectory of Black, African American, Latino, Asian American, American Indian, Alaska Native and women entrepreneurs in clean technology sectors. "Diverse entrepreneur and business-owner participation in the cleantech ecosystem is essential to achieving our vision of an inclusive and sustainable economic recovery," said Jenny Flores, head of Small Business Growth Philanthropy at Wells Fargo. The nationwide network of Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator Channel Partners includes 63 cleantech and agtech business incubators, accelerators, universities and industry experts. Since the inception of the awards program in 2016, 5 million dollars in competitive and non-competitive Channel Partner Awards have supported 48 Strategic Awards, 160 ecosystem awards and engaged all Channel Partners, the company said. Enditem Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Best Buy Co., Inc. is offering paid time off as vaccine benefit to all its employees amid the ongoing vaccinations against coronavirus. The company also announced bonuses to its hourly employees as a gratitude for the resilience shown by them as frontline workers during the crisis. The electronics retailer in a statement said it is offering paid time off for any employee who gets a COVID-19 vaccination, as well as additional sick time for any side effects after getting vaccinated. Part-time employees will receive four hours, and full-time employees will get eight hours. The time will be provided after vaccination has been verified. This is not time off to get the vaccination, it's to use how employees want afterward. As for additional sick time. Part-time employees will get four hours and full-time employees eight hours. This is in addition to the 'thank you' paid time off. Best Buy said while it is not requiring employees to get the COVID-19 vaccine, it strongly encourages them to vaccinate for their own and others' safety. Regarding the one-time bonus, the company said that all hourly employees, including full-time, part-time and occasional seasonal employee, will receive a gratitude bonus. Full-time hourly U.S. employees will receive $500 and part-time U.S. employees will get $200. The bonus will go to all hourly employees who were with the company as of February 15, regardless of whether they are staying with the firm or leaving. 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. Even from behind bars Vybz Kartel is doing his part to help the impoverished people of Jamaica who are facing the most challenging times. In his latest philanthropic act, the Dancehall artist, whose real name is Adidja Palmer, has donated JMD $200,000 to the father of a two-year-old cancer patient. The donation was made in Kartels name through DJ Lavas Chat & Laugh Instagram Live show yesterday. The parents of the child explained that the boy as two lumps on his forehead due to cancer, which was aggressive and spreading all over his body. The child began showing signs of sickness last May (2020) and he had been carrying him to doctors hoping for some answers, the dad explained. He added that the child was tested for sickle cell and the results came back negative but the pain he experienced didnt stop and they knew that something was not right. They continued to give him the prescribed medication to no avail. At one point the pain became so bad that the child had to be given morphine to cope, his dad continued to share. As the worried father cuddled his sick toddler, DJ Lava made the appeal to the people of Jamaica to donate to help the family take care of the medical bills. When he learned of Kartels contribution he was appreciative and said he is really the One World Don. Much thanks and appreciation, he added as he cracked a brief and small smile of relief. DJ Lava also used his Instagram page to show his appreciation for Kartels timely intervention. He said: Nuff respect to @vybzkartel for your support and your 200k ja donation towards the 2yrs old cancer patient also to the chat&laugh family. In July, Kartel donated to the family of the late Jodian Fearon the young woman who died in April, after being denied admission at several local hospitals while she was in labor, because she was suspected of having COVID-19. Kartel is currently awaiting the outcome of his appeal to the UK Privy Council on his murder case. He was convicted in 2014 for the 2011 murder of Clive Lizard Williams and was a given mandatory life sentence. He has been ordered to serve 35 years before being eligible for parole. Fans were quick to applaud the Worl Boss latest act of benevolence. Blessing addi may God bless ur food basket and never let it run dry, one fan said, another added, Artist and Politicians deh a road nah donate a penny! That y mi always ago seh GAZA!!!!! THANK YOU SIR, and another chimed in, Bless up kartel nuff respect to to u.. a lot of them free and a walk the road but u always there to give an helping hand big up salute. If you would like to help, you can contact DJ Lava for the cash app info through social media. KABUL The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Mohammad Haneef Atmar, will arrive in Moscow on Wednesday evening at the official invitation of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov heading a high-level delegation as part of a three-day visit to the Russian Federation. The purpose of the visit is to expand bilateral relations, strengthen regional and international consensus on the Afghan peace process, and to increase cooperation in the joint fight against terrorism and organized crime in the region. During his visit to Moscow, Mr. Atmar is scheduled to meet with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and a number of high-ranking Russian government officials. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Largest Family-Operated Dealership Group, Campers Inn RV, Acquires US Adventure RV in Naperville IL. Tweet this US Adventure RV has locations in Naperville, IL, (Chicago) and Davenport, IA, (Quad Cities) and has been repeatedly recognized as an RV Business Top 50 award winner, Airstream 5 Rivet Dealer and Winnebago Circle of Excellence winner. Campers Inn RV is the largest privately-owned family-operated RV dealership group in the country with 27 locations across the East Coast, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic regions. In 2010 and consecutively since 2014, they have been selected as one of RVBusiness Magazine's Top 50 Dealers in North America and were honored as the winner of the 2014 Innovation Award from RVBusiness. In 2019, Campers Inn RV received the RVBusiness Top 5 Blue Ribbon Award. Most recently, Jeff Hirsch, President/CEO of Campers Inn RV, was inducted into the 2021 RVMH Hall of Fame. "Having started and built our respective businesses, US Adventure RV and Campers Inn RV, are both built around similar philosophies of always maintaining the utmost in integrity standards," said John Dresselhaus, President, US Adventure RV. "Both organizations have been built around maintaining the best products from the best manufacturers and delivering unmatched customer satisfaction and support before, during, and after every sale. We believe this fact will lead to a seamless transition. Together we have an exciting and very bright future." John Dresselhaus continued, "Our advisor, Kevin Nill with Haig Partners, contacted several national and regional dealership groups. Through his efforts, Campers Inn RV was chosen based on the quality of its leadership team, operations network, participative culture, and past financial success. This merger provides the Naperville US Adventure RV team members an unmatched opportunity to participate in the upside of a future Midwest regional expansion with Campers Inn RV. Through this process, Kevin Nill has become a trusted friend and has always conducted our discussions with the utmost integrity. Thank you, Kevin, for your efforts in bringing our two organizations together." "We are pleased to have been able to work with the experts at Haig Partners on brokering a deal with US Adventure RV and expanding our dealership locations in the Midwest," said Jeff Hirsch, President/CEO, Campers Inn RV. "The process was professional and seamless, and they were a great asset in finding an organization that fit our company's culture and core values. The Haig team has been helpful in our goal of becoming the RVer's Trusted Resource for all RVers and their families across the U.S. through finding opportunities for us to expand our network of dealerships. We are excited to welcome John and Paul Dresselhaus, the Naperville US Adventure RV team and customers to the Campers Inn RV family and serving them across all of our locations." John and Paul Dresselhaus, owners of US Adventure RV, will continue to own and operate the Davenport, IA, location while assisting Campers Inn RV with the management of the Naperville location and growth of future locations in the region. Haig Partners LLC is a boutique investment banking firm and the leading buy-sell advisory firm to owners of higher value auto, RV and heavy truck dealerships. Since 1996, the principals at Haig Partners have completed more than 270+ dealership transactions totaling over $7.5 billion, more than any other team in the industry. They also publish the widely followed Haig Report that tracks trends in the auto industry and how they impact dealership valuations. The latest Haig Report is available here. Alan Haig is a frequent speaker at leading industry events. For more information, visit www.haigpartners.com. Contact: Aimee Allen, [email protected] SOURCE Haig Partners LLC Related Links https://haigpartners.com The former head of Russia's Mari El Republic, Leonid Markelov, has been sentenced to 13 years in prison on corruption charges. A court in the city of Nizhny Novgorod on February 24 found the 57-year-old Markelov guilty of bribe-taking, abuse of office, and illegal ammunition possession, and sentenced him the same day. The court also ordered Markelov to pay a fine of 235.3 million rubles ($3.2 million). Prosecutors in the high-profile case had asked the court to sentence Markelov to 17 years in prison. Markelov rejected all the charges and pleaded not guilty. "We will appeal the sentence that has been handed down," Interfax quoted Markelov's lawyer, Yelena Vyatkina, as saying. Markelov led the Mari El Republic in Russia's Volga Federal District from 2001-17. He was arrested in April 2017 days after he had resigned. Investigators accused him of accepting the equivalent of more than $3.1 million in bribes. While in pretrial detention in Moscow, Markelov complained of "torture" conditions. He said that he had been pressured in the Lefortovo detention center, where he says he was frequently transferred from one cell to another, subjected to frequent searches, and deprived of medical services. Markelovs lawyers also said their client was pressured to testify against himself. With reporting by Interfax [February 24, 2021] Justices Overturn Ruling That Would Have Closed Five San Diego County High Schools In a major win for Opportunity Youth in California, an appeals court overturned a 2019 ruling that would have closed five public schools for teens who have previously struggled in traditional schools. Opportunity Youth is defined as people ages 16-24 who are not in school or have a job. The ruling affects more than 1,100 students - 65 percent of whom had already aged out of public school and would be left with few options to graduate high school. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005295/en/ Learn4Life students study and take tests as part of one-on-one instruction meetings with supervising teachers. (Photo: Business Wire) In 2019, a San Diego Superior Court ruled that three Learn4Life high schools located within the boundaries of Grossmont Unified School District (GUSD) and two schools operating within the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) must close because of a discrepancy over geographical boundaries. Learn4Life schools have been operating in compliance with the California Charter Schools Act and providing a quality education for hundreds of students. The charters in question are authorized by neighboring districts in the county, and are sanctioned to locate and serve students where the need is greatest within the county. Learn4Life schools appealed the decision, and last week the ruling was overturned, ensuring the area's most needy students can continue their path to graduation, and 96 teachers and staff will keep their jobs. "We are so relieved that the court has sided with the students. This lawsuit by GUHSD and SDUSD did not put students first," said Lindsay Reese, San Diego area superintendent of Learn4Life schools. "We take students who were not successful in their traditional school, especially those who are credit deficient, former dropouts and those with learning disabilities." Reese points out that, "It is important to note tat these lawsuits were not questioning the quality of our education model even though hundreds of their students had dropped out or had aged out of traditional high school." According to Reese, Learn4Life schools can serve students up to 24 years old. "Every summer we have scores of 18-year-olds who didn't make it to a diploma, meaning they are too old to return to a traditional high school. We help them catch up, graduate and in many cases go on to community college or other post-secondary education," said Reese. "Without us, they have nowhere to go." The impact that dropouts have on communities is significant. Dropouts are ineligible for 90 percent of jobs1, commit 75 percent of crimes2, receive one-third of all food stamps3 and are six times more likely to go to jail4. Of the 1,100 students attending those five schools: 853 are minority, 254 are very low income, 550 are 18 years or older, 209 have disabilities, 84 are pregnant and/or parenting and 69 are homeless or housing insecure. Reese adds that 197 are English learners, including many Chaldean refugees. The local districts couldn't serve this population of Iraqis who fled to San Diego County to avoid religious persecution. These Learn4Life schools hired Chaldean-speaking staff and since 2018, have educated hundreds of English-learner Chaldean students. "We want to thank the justice panel for seeing this suit for what it was, which was never about the quality of education we provide to our students," Reese added. "As a charter, Learn4Life schools operate with extensive oversight and must earn its right to exist every five years - something traditional schools don't have to do." Read the appeals court ruling here. About Learn4Life Learn4Life is a network of nonprofit public schools that provides students personalized learning, career training and life skills. Each school is locally controlled, tuition free and gives students the flexibility and one-on-one attention they need to succeed. Serving more than 47,000 students - including full-time and intersession students - we help them prepare for a future beyond high school. For more information, please visit www.learn4life.org. 1 "High School Dropout Statistics." Statistic Brain RSS. http://www.statisticbrain.com/high-school-dropout-statistics/ (accessed July 21, 2014). 2 Smiley, Travis. "Fact Sheet: Is the Dropout Problem Real?." Travis Smiley Reports. Accessed February 26, 2014. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/tsr/education-under-arrest/fact-sheet-drop-out-rates-of-african-american-boys/. 3 Chen, Kelly. Behind the Numbers: Why Dropouts Have it Worse Than Ever Before. PBS Newshour, December 16, 2011. 4 Keeping Kids in School - Dropout Prevention & School Discipline. Fight Crime: Invest in Kids California. February 2015. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005295/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] The last year has left a long-lasting effect on us for many of the wrong reasons, however, one of the undeniable positives has been more time with those dearest to us, our families. It should be of no surprise that we are thus seeing a huge demand for family safari escapes! Time and space with your family Away from crowds Availability Unforgettable experiences Time for you and your partner Here and now Something in your diary Support local Help rebuild SA tourism African sense of hospitality Now more than ever, a classic South African safari will positively impact your entire familys mind, body and soul! The bush and wildlife will begin your rejuvenation process together.Here 10 reasons why a family safari is the best escape from the pandemic right now:The past year has been synonymous with restrictions of every kind! We have all been craving space, a simpler life and dreaming of sundowners overlooking the sweeping plains of the bushveld. A trip to the bush is the perfect escape to enjoy quality time with your kids no matter the weather.Luxury lodges are primarily an outdoor experience and equally are committed to following strict Covid-19 protocols. Soak in the serenity of nature, in the wide-open space and away from the crowds.South Africa for South Africans! Many foreigners are unable to visit and our beautiful country is now more open to locals. Many luxury lodges are offering unbeatable prices that are much more accessible to South Africans than ever before. These will only be available for approximately another six months! Use the opportunity before it disappears.If youve been on safari before, youll remember with fondness the enchanting sights and sounds of the African bushveld. The whole family soaking in new experiences and at times slightly out of your comfort zones undoubtedly bonds your family. These will be memories you treasure forever!The lodges across the country have some of Africas best and most obliging staff. The amazing staff are equally experienced in creating fun and exciting activities for your children! Most importantly, this allows you and your partner some well-deserved time off.You dont know what the future holds, and the bush reminds us of what is important time enjoyed with family and a chance to reset and align. Enjoying the here and now is watching the magic of the bush through childrens eyes as they experience its wonder for the first time.2020 was a journey of a long and winding road with surprises around every corner. Booking out time in your diary and having something to look forward to will steer the family and give everyone something to look forward to.If theres one thing weve learnt from Covid-19 its that supporting local business is essential to keeping our economy going.Local travel is how we keep the local safari industry alive, and lodges often contribute to important wildlife conservation efforts. By booking a local luxury safari, you will help in our collective effort to rebuild South African tourism.The African philosophy of I am because of who we all are is felt in every warming smile (today that is shown in the crinkle of the eyes above a mask); every helping hand and every generous offer to assist. Staff will take the time to plan for every possible need and ensure your stay is as comfortable and magical as possible.You will leave with a sense of rejuvenation, having been treated both as royalty and as a friend a balance only African hospitality can achieve. The Nobu Hotel and Restaurant will be located within the Elbtower, a project by SIGNA Real Estate, one of Europe's leading property companies. The Elbtower will be a mixed-use development destination encompassing premium office space and the Nobu Hotel and Restaurant set within the tallest high-rise in the city. Timo Herzberg, CEO SIGNA Real Estate Germany remarks, "The partnership with Nobu Hospitality in the launch of the Nobu Hotel and Restaurant Hamburg underscores the compelling Elbtower development as Northern Germany's tallest skyscraper. Hamburg as a destination fits seamlessly within the Nobu Hotel and Restaurant collection and will be embraced by our prestigious office tenants in the Elbtower as the most exclusive destination in Hamburg." Trevor Horwell, CEO Nobu Hospitality comments, "We are extremely honoured and excited to be working with SIGNA on this unique project. This is the first project in this growing partnership, and we are exploring other destinations with SIGNA. Hamburg is an economic powerhouse in Germany and is an exciting destination for travellers whether for business or pleasure and perfectly fits with our global clientele. The Elbtower itself is a very special project planned as Hamburg's world class dynamic lifestyle destination with our Nobu Hotel and Restaurant sitting as its core." Rising 245m and 64 stories over the River Elbe, the Elbtower is designed by celebrated architectural firm, David Chipperfield Architects, and will complete the city's silhouette with its striking and curved facade. Forming a designed counterpoint to the famed Elbphilharmonie concert hall and serving as an entrance marker to the prestigious HafenCity district. The Elbtower will house the Nobu Hotel and Restaurant, the tower itself will be comprised of flexibly designed office spaces with unparalleled views of the city and beyond. The ground floors, with their innovative layouts, will form the hub of the Elbtower community and play a significant role in positioning the Elbtower as the most attractive place to work, sleep, eat and drink, shop and socialise in Hamburg. The offering will comprise of a variety of retail shops, restaurants, and co-working spaces. The Elbtower will add to The SIGNA Group's portfolio of exclusive real estate properties in prime city locations around Europe. The Nobu Hotel Elbtower Hamburg will offer 191 spaciously designed guest rooms and suites, a 200-seat Nobu restaurant, a stylish terrace bar and lounge with views of the River Elbe, and a state-of-the-art fitness and wellness facility. In addition to the restaurant and private dining rooms, the hotel will offer sophisticated event space for corporate and social gatherings as well as an outdoor terrace. Another highlight will be a Nobu private members club for the local community where members will benefit from a private lounge with a food and beverage offering, access to the hotel's fitness and wellness facility as well as exclusive members only events. Nobu is one of the world's most celebrated luxury hospitality brands renowned for its award-winning "new style" Japanese cuisine and exceptional hotel offerings in the world's most desirable locales, with heartfelt service, energized public spaces and instinctive design. SOURCE Nobu Hospitality Related Links http://nobuhotels.com A death investigation has turned into a murder case, according to Laredo police. The man found dead on Tuesday morning near the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Lab has been identified as 25-year-old Justin Heath Allen of Vicksburg, Mississippi. An LPD officer on routine patrol arrived at about 9:15 a.m. by the dead end of the 4500 block of Clark Boulevard, east of Bob Bullock Loop and encountered an unresponsive man lying on the street. Laredo Fire Department crews responded to the scene and noticed that the man had obvious signs of death, according to first responders. Authorities identified him as Allen. Investigators from the crimes against persons unit have taken over the investigation. LPD has listed this case as the second homicide for this year. Webb County Medical Examiners Office personnel took custody of the body to perform an autopsy. The investigation continues. To provide information on the case, call police at 795-2800 or Laredo Crime Stoppers at 727-TIPS (8477). Information provided through Crime Stoppers could be eligible for a cash reward of up to $1,000. Police have released images of man who allegedly tried to set an indigenous mum and her daughter alight with a makeshift flamethrower as detectives ramp up their search for the attacker. The 40-year-old woman and her teenage daughter were approached by the man, who had a white swastika painted on his forehead, in the southeast Perth suburb of Gosnells on Saturday night as they walked home, according to police. He allegedly yelled racial obscenities at the woman before attempting to burn her with a makeshift flamethrower made using a can of deodorant and a lighter, inflicting minor arm injuries. Police have now released CCTV footage of the alleged offender walking across the Gosnells IGA car park around the time of the assault. Police have released images of a man (pictured) who allegedly tried to set a mother and daughter alight in Perth's southeast on Saturday night The man alleged to be behind the attack can be seen wearing a red shirt underneath a black jacket, black pants, black shoes and sunglasses, while cradling the alleged weapon components. WA Police want to speak with the man in the footage, who is described as fair-skinned, about 40 years old and 175cm tall. 'We are treating this cowardly and random attack on a woman and her child, doing nothing more than walking to the shops in the early evening, very seriously,' Detective Senior Sergeant Sean Bell said on Tuesday. 'This type of behaviour is not acceptable and is not tolerated within our community. 'We have allocated all of our available resources to locate this man. Someone in the community knows who this person is and we are asking that member of the community to contact us and assist in identifying this person.' The man reportedly fled the scene on foot and was last spotted on Dwyer Crescent, a few streets away from the IGA. It is understood he lives a short distance away from where the pair were attacked on Corfield Street, after they left the supermarket, The West Australian reports. West Australian police are hunting for a man who had a swastika painted on his head when he allegedly attacked a woman with a flamethrower CCTV footage shows the alleged offender walking through the IGA car park around the time of the assault An IGA worker who knows the mother said the victims were now living in fear the man would hurt them again. 'Shes all right, unbelievably, but she and her daughter were pretty shaken. I only spoke to them once since, and she said she wouldnt be walking to the shops anymore,' the worker said. A teenager girl who lives in the area said she knew the pair, but wished to remain anonymous out of fear she could be targeted by the same man next. 'She does FIFO, Im pretty sure shes left today to go back to work. Its really scary whats happened,' she said. 'Its 2021. We all bleed the same colour. The fact this is still happening to people like us is unacceptable. Its terrifying.' Police have also released information about what the mother and daughter were wearing in hope it will prompt witnesses to come forward. The mother was dressed in a light blue T-shirt with a white motif and black pants, while her daughter was in a black tracksuit with white writing on the front. Anyone with information is asked to contact Crime Stoppers. Protesters clashed with police near the presidential offices in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, following the conviction of Odesa activist Serhiy Sternenko on February 23. He was convicted on charges of abduction, robbery, and the illegal handling of weapons. Activists tried to enter the building but police blocked the entrance. Sternenko's supporters believe the charges were politically motivated because of his nationalist and anti-government positions. Jammu: The state government has removed the IAS officer from Udhampur after he posted an "awkward" pictures went viral on social media. Three pictures of the bureaucrat in an "awkward position" on bed went viral on WhatsApp and Facebook has raged anger among the public. Pending enquiry into his conduct, Niraj Kumar, Deputy Commissioner, Udhampur is hereby attached in the office of Divisional Commissioner, Jammu," an order issued by the General Administrative Department (GAD) said. After the picture went viral, the state government has sacked the IAS officer from his post. "We took immediate action after looking at the pictures. We do not know whether they are true or forged. A probe has been ordered to know the truth", a senior government official told PTI. Anand Sharma, Additional District Development Commissioner (ADDC), Udhampur will look after the work of Kumar till further orders, Amrik Singh, Under Secretary to the government, said in an order. Also read: Fill the system with energy of 'New India': PM Modi to IAS Officers of 2015 batch By Christian Akorlie ACCRA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization's global vaccine-sharing scheme COVAX delivered its first COVID-19 shots on Wednesday, as the race to inoculate the world's poorest people and tame the pandemic accelerates. Almost a year after the WHO described the novel coronavirus as a global pandemic, a flight carrying 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India landed in Ghana's capital Accra. Local representatives of the WHO and the United Nations children's agency UNICEF described the vaccines' arrival as a "momentous" step. "In the days ahead, frontline workers will begin to receive vaccines, and the next phase in the fight against this disease can begin the ramping up of the largest immunization campaign in history," said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore. The delivery comes eight months after the launch of the COVAX initiative, aimed at pooling funds from wealthier countries and non-profits to distribute vaccines equitably around the world. The shots, part of an initial tranche for low and middle-income countries, will be used by Ghana to start a vaccination drive from March 2 that will prioritise frontline health workers and others at high risk. "The first segment of the population that will receive the 600,000 doses will be health workers, adults 60 years and over, people with underlying health conditions," Ghana's government said on Wednesday. Some senior government officials, teachers, security personnel and essential workers in Accra and the country's second city Kumasi, will also be vaccinated. Coronavirus infections have soared in Ghana to over 81,200, and 584 people have died, with nearly as many dying in the first two months of this year as in the whole of 2020, health ministry data showed. "There are a lot of frontline workers who are self-isolating because they have been exposed and got infected," Emmanuel Addipa-Adapoe, a medical officer at the Greater Accra Regional Hospital, said. "Receiving the vaccine will be like arming them for the task ahead." Story continues EQUITABLE DISTRIBUTION The roll-out in Ghana is a milestone for COVAX, which is trying to narrow a politically sensitive gap between the millions being vaccinated in wealthier countries and the comparatively few who have received shots in less developed parts of the world. It plans to deliver nearly 2 billion doses this year, including 1.8 billion to poorer countries at no cost to their governments, and to cover up to 20% of countries' populations. But it will not be sufficient for nations to reach herd immunity and effectively contain the spread of the virus. The African Union (AU) has been trying to help its 55 member states buy more doses in a push to immunize 60% of the continent's 1.3 billion people over three years. Last week, its vaccine team said 270 million doses of AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson vaccines secured for delivery this year had been taken up. China has donated small batches of its Sinopharm vaccine to countries including Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea. And Russia has offered to supply 300 million doses of its Sputnik V vaccine to the AU scheme along with a financing package. But many countries are largely reliant on COVAX. On Tuesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged wealthy nations to share vaccine doses with COVAX, saying the goal of equitable distribution was "in jeopardy". "Today is a major first step towards realizing our shared vision of vaccine equity, but it's just the beginning," he said on Wednesday. He had earlier warned that so far 210 million doses of vaccine have been administered globally but half of those are in just two countries and more than 200 countries were yet to administer a single dose. COVAX is co-led by the WHO, the GAVI vaccines alliance, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and UNICEF. It was launched in June 2020 to try to prevent poorer countries being pushed to the back of the queue as wealthier nations bought billions of doses for their populations. COVAX said it had allocated the first tranche of 330 million doses of vaccines for 145 countries. Africa's reported COVID-19 death toll surpassed 100,000 last week, a fraction of those on other continents but rising fast amid a second wave of infections. South Africa paused its roll-out of AstraZeneca's vaccine after preliminary trial data showed less efficacy against the 501Y.V2 coronavirus variant dominant there, but other African countries say they will use the shot. Ghana is among six African countries that have confirmed cases of the variant. (Reporting by Christian Akorlie in Accra and Alessandra Prentice and Bate Felix in Dakar; Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Kate Kelland in London; Writing by Alessandra Prentice and Bate Felix; Editing by Alexandra Zavis, Richard Pullin, Catherine Evans and Giles Elgood) Advertisement Summer lessons will be offered to children leaving primary school and all secondary pupils as part of a 700million catch-up package designed to reverse the impact of coronavirus lockdowns on education. Under plans due to be announced today, secondaries will offer face-to-face teaching over the holidays, with ministers keen to see summer classes for incoming Year 7 pupils. The summer schools will be funded with 200million from the package, while a 302million Recovery Premium will also see every primary school handed 6,000 and secondaries 22,000 each to fund further support for pupils most in need. The Department for Education said this will come on top of another 200million in funding for the National Tutoring Programme and other tuition schemes and could be spent on extra clubs, activities or teaching for those who have fallen behind. However, radical measures previously discussed, like permanently trimming the summer holidays or lengthening the school day, do not figure in the plans. Despite this, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson did not rule out lengthening the school day to help pupils catch up from the coronavirus disruption. He told Sky News: 'We'll be looking at how we can boost and support children in a whole range of different manners. 'But it's not just about time in school, it's about supporting teachers in terms of the quality of teaching and how we can help them.' Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: 'Teachers and parents have done an heroic job with home schooling, but we know the classroom is the best place for our children to be. 'When schools reopen and face-to-face education resumes on March 8 our next priority will be ensuring no child is left behind as a result of the learning they have lost over the past year. 'This extensive programme of catch-up funding will equip teachers with the tools and resources they need to support their pupils and give children the opportunities they deserve to learn and fulfil their potential.' The announcement comes ahead of details expected to be released tomorrow on the replacement scheme for this year's cancelled GCSEs and A-levels. Reacting to the news, headteacher Carl Ward warned: 'its going to take a lot longer than one year, it could take the next decade to catch up but may I add that we do not know the depth of the problem yet. Once we've got children back in and schools back to normal, it will take some time, it'll come out of the system and then we'll know in more detail in the coming three to four months perhaps the scale of the problem.' It follows new official figures showing infections falling by 20 per cent on last Tuesday as Britain recorded just 8,489 Covid cases in the lowest daily rise since October 2, while deaths tumble with another 548 victims. The promising figures will be pounced upon by anti-lockdown Tory MPs who are calling for Mr Johnson to ease lockdown quicker. Even top scientists have hinted that economically-crippling measures could be relaxed sooner. This week, the Prime Minister unveiled No10's ultra-cautious blueprint back to normality, which could see all virus-controlling restrictions eased by June 21, if things go well. Schools will return on March 8, but there will be almost no further loosening of the draconian curbs before Easter. Nicola Sturgeon yesterday unveiled an even more cautious lockdown exit roadmap for Scotland, which will see the stay at home rule lifted and the return of some non-essential shops on April 5. The Scottish First Minister said the coronavirus situation in Scotland is 'still quite precarious'. But hopes of lockdown being drastically eased in the next few months could be dashed if Britain's vaccine roll-out fails to pick up pace. It has slowed down over the past month, with just 210,000 doses dished out on Monday in the UK - down a quarter on last Tuesday. It means around 335,000 Britons are getting inoculated for the first time each week, piling pressure on No10 to urgently ramp up the drive so that the path to freedom isn't threatened. In other coronavirus developments: A total of 5,691 deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending February 12 mentioned Covid-19 on the death certificate, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) - the lowest figure since the week ending January 1; Unemployment has risen to 5.1 per cent with younger people bearing the brunt as Rishi Sunak prepares to extend the furlough scheme in his Budget next week; Matt Hancock has defended rushing through PPE procurement after a wave of criticism about lack of transparency and cronyism; Scientists have suggested masks will still be used in 2026 after Sir Patrick Vallance said they could reappear next winter; Millions of secondary school pupils will have to wear masks in the classroom when they return to school on March 8; Scientists unveiled 'spectacular' data suggesting one dose of the Covid vaccine is cutting the hospitalisation risk among the over-80s by three-quarters; 178 virus deaths were announced yesterday - the fewest since mid-November. The seven-day average for cases was 11,186, compared with a peak of 68,053 on January 8; Downing Street confirmed ministers will examine the case for so-called 'vaccine passports', having rejected the idea two months ago. Summer lessons will be offered to children leaving primary school and all secondary pupils as part of a 700million catch-up package designed to reverse the impact of Covid on education. Pictured: Boris Johnson takes part in an online lesson during a visit to Sedgehill School in Lewisham, south east London, on February 23 Under plans to be announced today, secondaries will offer face-to-face teaching over the holidays, with ministers keen to see summer classes for incoming Year 7 pupils (file image) Why lockdowns DON'T always stop thousands dying of Covid: Britain has had some of the toughest rules but ranks in the top five WORST death tolls... while Cuba's draconian measures helped it escape lightly Britain has endured some of the toughest lockdown restrictions in the world but has still suffered the fourth highest death toll of the pandemic, data showed. Oxford University researchers ranked the UK's curbs on daily life the sixth harshest out of 180 countries, after taking into account school and office closures, bans on social gatherings, international travel restrictions and orders to not leave the home. Only the Republic of Ireland was found to have tougher restrictions in Europe. Although its curbs are broadly similar to England's, the country has also stopped construction work and click-and-collect shopping. Germany, the US and France all had less stringent curbs on daily life. But when countries were ranked by Covid deaths per million people, the UK had suffered the fourth highest death toll, according to separate figures from OurWorldInData, despite having stricter measures than Belgium, Slovenia and the Czech Republic the only countries where more people died of the virus. It had also suffered the highest fatality rate from the virus out of the top 10 countries with the harshest restrictions, although this may be because the lockdown became stricter only after cases had surged. The UK may have suffered more fatalities than other countries because of the rapid spread of the more infectious Kent variant, and after tens of thousands died in the darkest days of the first wave when potentially infected patients were discharged to care homes. Delays in taking action and differences in how the data was compiled between countries could may also explain the differences. The data does not show that lockdowns do not work because a lack of any restrictions, scientists estimate, would have killed tens of thousands more people. In Cuba, which had a lockdown ranked the toughest in the Oxford study, the death rate was 2.4 per 100,000 people, compared to 178 per 100,000 in the UK. Advertisement An extra 18million is being directed to support language development in the early years sector to try to stop the very youngest children being permanently disadvantaged. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said: 'Our package of measures will deliver vital support to the children and young people who need it most, making sure everyone has the same opportunity to fulfil their potential no matter their background. 'I know that longer-term support over the length of this Parliament will be vital to ensure children make up for lost learning. Our Education Recovery Commissioner Sir Kevan Collins will be engaging with teachers, school and college leaders and families over the coming weeks and months to develop our longer term plans.' The Times Educational Supplement reported that one aspect of the plan, which was to issue grades significantly earlier than normal - in early or mid-July - is now in doubt. Exams regulator Ofqual will also need to clarify the potentially important role of 'mini-exams'. Meanwhile, teaching unions yesterday appeared to back down in their opposition to Mr Johnson's 'big bang' plan for all schools to return from March 8. Last week the main unions signed an open letter demanding the PM 'go no further than a phased return', but their call was disregarded by the Government. The National Education Union yesterday said its priority was ensuring schools had 'robust safety measures' instead of trying to block the reopenings. Geoff Barton, of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that while a slower return would have been more logical, there was a 'whole range of different views' among headteachers. He added that, although mass testing presented a 'huge logistical issue' for larger schools, most teachers were 'looking for ways of solving those problems'. Scientists have warned that school reopenings could increase Covid's reproduction rate by up to 50 per cent. Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty on Monday insisted the risk posed by coronavirus to children at school is 'incredibly low' as he 'categorically denied' a claim he opposed a full return to classrooms on March 8. The Government's top medical advisor said there are 'huge advantages' to reopening schools across England in terms of the mental and physical health benefits for children as well as for their education. He said falling infection rates meant that 'there is some headroom' to resume face-to-face lessons next month and that 'everything is strongly in favour of children, whether primary or secondary, of going to school'. Professor Whitty's comments came after the Prime Minister revealed that secondary pupils will undergo a 'testing blitz' and be required to wear face masks in classrooms 'for several weeks' in his lockdown roadmap. Secondary pupils will be tested three times at school and once at home during the first fortnight before being asked to continue testing themselves twice a week at home, according to the Government's exit strategy. They will be allowed to return to class as soon as they have received a negative test result, while all teachers at primary and secondary level - as well as early years - will be entitled to twice-weekly testing at home. However, the Prime Minister's plans were immediately criticised by teaching unions who wanted a phased return to classes and accused Mr Johnson of 'failing to learn the lessons of his previous mistakes'. Reports at the weekend suggested Prof Whitty was opposing the 'big bang' return but he told a Downing Street press conference tonight that he had 'categorically denied' the claim. Setting out why he supports the return to classrooms next month, he said: 'First thing is, it is absolutely universally accepted that there are huge advantages for children to be at school from a health point of view, mental and physical, as well as from educational and from a life course point of view. 'Those are overwhelming, they are not in any dispute, everyone accepts that and if you keep children out of school, every single one of the children you keep out of school is disadvantaged.' He continued: 'The second point we made at that time which is still the case is the risk to children is incredibly low from going to school and indeed from catching Covid. 'Covid, one of the few good things about Covid is the risk to children, whilst not zero, nothing in Covid the risks are zero, the risks are so much smaller than they are for adults and others. 'Therefore we are confident that schools, given the huge benefits of schools, the very small residual risk is strongly in favour, from the child's point of view, everything is strongly in favour of children, whether primary or secondary, of going to school and the data on that I think are unambiguous.' However, radical measures previously discussed, like permanently trimming the summer holidays or lengthening the school day, do not figure in the plans The announcement comes ahead of details expected to be released tomorrow on the replacement scheme for this year's cancelled GCSEs and A-levels (file image) The summer schools will be funded with 200million from the package. A 302million Recovery Premium will also see every primary school handed 6,000 and secondaries 22,000 each to fund further support for pupils most in need (file image) An extra 18million is being directed to support language development in the early years sector to try to stop the very youngest children being permanently disadvantaged. Pictured: Prime Minister Boris Johnson visits Sedgehill School in south east London on February 23 Nicola Sturgeon reveals rival roadmap out of lockdown: Scotland will begin 'significant return to normality' with shops, gyms and hairdressers starting to open from April 26 - as First Minister hints pubs and restaurants could fully reopen BEFORE England Nicola Sturgeon unveiled a lockdown exit roadmap for Scotland which will see the stay at home rule lifted and the return of some non-essential shops on April 5 - a week earlier than in England. She said her 'deliberately cautious' plan will start with more pupils heading back to classrooms on March 15 and with the limit on outdoor mixing being increased on the same date to allow four people from a maximum of two households to meet. April 5 will then see all remaining pupils return to school as well as communal worship being allowed to restart. The definition of 'essential' retail will also be changed at this point to allow more shops to reopen - one week before the return of all retail in England which is earmarked to take place from April 12. However, Scotland will have to wait until April 26 for a 'phased but significant reopening of the economy' when the nation will return to a tier system of restrictions. Advertisement Prof Whitty said that falling case numbers and the R rate of infection meant the Government had some 'headroom' to reopen schools. 'The third question is, and this is the one that led to having to close schools this time around, as it did indeed on the first wave, is the impact this can have on R,' he said. 'And the view is that as things are falling down rapidly at the moment there is some headroom to go ahead and the first priority as the Prime Minister has repeatedly said is for schooling and I think everyone would agree with that.' The reopening of schools is the first step to freedom in Mr Johnson's lockdown exit roadmap. The PM said the strategy will 'guide us cautiously but irreversibly towards reclaiming our freedoms'. Outlining the wearing of masks in schools the Government's Spring 2021 Covid-19 response document states: 'The Government also recommends that the use of face coverings in Higher Education, Further Education and secondary schools is extended for a limited period to all indoor environments - including classrooms - unless 2m social distancing can be maintained. 'Face coverings are now also recommended in early years and primary schools for staff and adult visitors in situations where social distancing between adults is not possible, for example, when moving around in corridors and communal areas. 'All children will once again be expected to attend school, as they were in the autumn term.' The Prime Minister told the Commons: 'I can tell the house that two weeks from today pupils and students in all schools and further education settings can safely return to face to face teaching'. Mr Johnson also said the return of students will be supported by twice weekly testing of secondary school and college pupils. He told MPs: 'All the evidence shows that classrooms are the best places for our young people to be and that's why I've always said that schools would be the last to close and the first to reopen. 'And based on our assessment of the current data against the four tests, I can tell the House that two weeks from today, pupils and students in all schools and further education settings can safely return to face-to-face teaching, supported by twice weekly testing of secondary school and college pupils. 'Families and childcare bubbles will also be encouraged to get tested regularly.' However, the plans were immediately attacked by teaching unions who claimed the testing process may take at least two weeks, meaning some children could still be learning from home on March 22. Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the mass return, instead of a phased reopening, was 'hugely problematic'. It 'may prove counterproductive and lead to more disruption', he said, adding: 'Nevertheless, we will, of course, now work with the Government to try to make this plan work as safely and sustainably as possible.' Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said Mr Johnson had 'failed to learn the lessons of his previous mistakes'. 'A 'big bang' school reopening brings 10million people back into crowded buildings with no social distancing and inadequate ventilation,' she said. 'Headteachers should have been given the flexibility offered in the other nations to plan for a phased school return.' Yesterday the Prime Minister hit back at Tories and scientists suggesting lockdown could be eased faster - as Wales and Scotland warned his roadmap might be too quick. Ireland's Level 5 coronavirus lockdown is extended for ANOTHER six weeks as PM Micheal Martin begs 'completely fed up' nation not to drop its guard Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin last night extended the country's coronavirus lockdown for another six weeks until at least April 5 as he appealed to a 'completely fed up' nation not to drop its guard against Covid. In a live TV address to the nation from Government buildings, the Taoiseach confirmed Level 5 measures inflicting huge damage to the economy will remain in place until after Easter amid fears of the UK variant. Refusing to give specific timelines for the wider reopening of society, Mr Martin said: 'I know that people are physically and emotionally exhausted by this pandemic. It has placed enormous pressure on each of us. 'Businesses and workers are deeply worried about the future. We are all completely fed up with the impositions on our lives.' But he went on to call the more infectious B117 variant that has spread from England since Christmas 'equivalent to a new virus almost, and it is a major problem'. 'It is critically important that we do not let our guard down. When we open things, we want them to stay open,' the Taoiseach added. Mr Martin spoke after his Cabinet published a new lockdown plan following weeks of haggling after many businesses have spent nearly a year closed. The Irish Government, which has imposed one of the toughest lockdowns in the world, has spent more than 10billion keeping shuttered firms on life support and wages flowing to more than 600,000 workers made redundant. Outlining his revised Living With Covid plan, most existing lockdown measures imposed in late December will be extended until after Easter. People will be instructed not to leave their homes except only for essential reasons and should not travel more than 5 kilometres from their households. Schools and childcare will be reopened gradually, with junior and senior infants among the first to return to the classroom on March 1. Advertisement The PM said he was being 'sensible and prudent' with his four-stage plan after attacks on the approach from both sides. 'Some people will say we're going to be going too fast, some people will say we're going too slow,' he said on a visit to a school in South London. Mr Johnson refused to guarantee that all restrictions will definitely be lifted by June 21 as scheduled, but insisted he was 'hopeful' it can happen. The intervention came after Matt Hancock slapped down Professor Neil Ferguson for suggesting the government's blueprint for England could be speeded up if things go well. However, Commons Leader Jacob Rees-Mogg risked setting more hares running by suggesting that there could be 'flexibility' if the government keeps 'smashing' vaccine targets. Tories and business have been voicing disquiet about the ultra-cautious approach being taken by ministers, even though the vaccination drive has been surging ahead. Schools will return on March 8, but there will be almost no further loosening of the draconian curbs before Easter. There will be a five week gap between each of the four main stages of the plan, with scientists having won the argument in government that time is needed to assess the impact. The PM has been boosted by snap polls showing the public largely backs his stance, with 46 per cent telling YouGov it is about right - and around a fifth suggesting it is too fast. Nicola Sturgeon unveiled her own far more cautious exit strategy this afternoon, with non-essential retail not set to start opening until the last week in April. Welsh government experts have also warned that Mr Johnson's timeline is 'risky' and the outbreak could spiral out of control again. Professor Neil Ferguson - whose grim modelling triggered the initial lockdown last year - sounded a bright note on Times Radio last night. 'Hopefully what we'll see when each step happens is a very limited resurgence of infections. In which case, there's a chance we can accelerate the schedule,' he said. However, Mr Hancock dismissed the idea of speeding the schedule up in a round of interviews this morning. 'No. We need to see the effects of each step, and that takes five weeks,' he said. A row also erupted over vaccine supply as Pfizer slapped down the Health Secretary's claim that a lack of doses was to blame for their slowest ever jabbing day on Sunday. Matt Hancock claimed a delay in the supply schedule will result in fewer jabs being dished out. But he also said there would be some 'bumper weeks in March' to make up for the lag. Both Pfizer and AstraZeneca - manufacturers of the jabs currently deployed in the UK - say there is no issue with deliveries. Pfizer sources told MailOnline there were 'no supply challenges' and deliveries were arriving as planned. AstraZeneca admitted there were 'fluctuations' in supply at plants but that it was still 'on track' with orders. Official figures showed Britain only administered 150,000 vaccines on Sunday, in the worst daily performance since the NHS roll-out began to gather speed last month. The number of first doses dished out has dropped by 40 per cent week-on-week. With a rapid inoculation drive crucial to Britain's hopes of lockdown being eased in the next few months, critics say there is 'no excuse' for the rollout slowing down. Think-tank bosses believe it is unlikely supply is solely behind the downturn because there would be reports of centres across the country running out of stock - which hasn't been the case. Mr Johnson put a successful vaccine roll-out at the heart of his lockdown-easing plan. So long as the operation continues successfully, all restrictions could be dropped in England by June 21. Any hiccups could threaten that target. Britain is racing to give as many first doses to over-50s as possible before the end of March, when millions of second jabs must be rolled out - which will inevitably slow the operation. The PM has pledged to jab all 32million in the top nine groups by April 15 and every adult by the end of July. Contrary to assertions by the legal team of former President John Dramani Mahama in the ongoing election petition that neither their client nor President Akufo-Addo got the required votes to secure victory in the 7 December 2020 presidential polls, the National Democratic Congress own General Secretary, Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketia, arrived at 51.2 per cent for the second respondent and 47 per cent for his own presidential candidate during his testimony for the petitioner before the Supreme Court, Information Minister-designate, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah has said. In a post-trial address to the media on Monday, 22 February 2021, one of the spokespersons for Mr Mahamas legal team, Mr Sammy Gyamfi, who is also the National Communication Officer of the NDC, said: We are doing all these things because of the Constitution that all of us have agreed to be bound by, explaining: Article 63(3) of that Constitution says that no person should be made a president until and unless he attains more than 50 per cent of the total valid votes in any presidential election and it is clear from Jean Mensas own declaration and the figures contained therein that candidate Akufo-Addo did not get more than 50 per cent. Per the NDCs computations, Mr Gyamfi said President Nana Akufo-Addo should not be in office. Weve done the mathematics here over and over again and you can do the mathematics yourself. He did not cross and, so, the petitioner, John Dramani Mahama, is doing this on behalf of all of us, and he is doing this in defence of the Constitution, he noted. When the Presidents legal team took their turn to also address the media after Mr Mahamas team was done, Mr Oppong Nkrumah, who is the lead spokesperson for the Presidents legal team, said: Ghanaians have followed the journey that has gone on so far in the court where the petitioner was being looked to adduce evidence. I heard our colleagues [NDC legal team] saying that the mathematics is clear, but you have been here covering for all the days that we have been here and Im not sure that to you, you saw mathematics that yielded results other than 47 per cent for the petitioner, Mr John Dramani Mahama and 51.2 per cent for the second respondent Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. That was the mathematics that you saw Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketia arrive at." That was the arithmetic that he arrived at, the Ofoase Ayirebi MP stressed, noting: The answer that he arrived at when he made the various computations. You are hearing them telling you that the mathematics is clear, nobody crossed the 49-per cent [mark] but in the walls of the Supreme Court, before the Justices, Im not sure you have seen them prove that, he added. In his view, the court has given fair hearing to all the parties involved in the matter, of which, he noted, the petitioner has been a beneficiary. The court has decided that despite its earlier warnings that if its processes are not complied with, it can strike out the matter, it will still accommodate them so that they can file their written addresses. I think this is clear evidence that nobody is being denied a fair trial here. The court bent itself backwards and is accommodating the interest of all parties so we look forward to the 4th of March for judgment. Source: class fm 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 Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Source: Peter Krauth for Streetwise Reports (2/23/21) Silver Stock Investor editor Peter Krauth discusses silver's long history as a currency and recommends a way to avoid paying large premiums when buying silver. Many don't realize, but silver is considered to have been the first metal to serve as currency. Could silver one day regain its role as money? Perhaps. It's widely accepted that gold was used as money by Lydian merchants around 550 BC, roughly 2,500 years ago. But even before that was silver, more than 4,000 years ago in ancient Greece. At the time, silver ingots were used as payment in transactions of trade. Back when Athens oversaw an empire, its silver coin was the tetradrachm. But for now, silver's fastest growing demand segment, by far, is investment. In fact, it's exploding. Although the #Silversqueeze movement has faded somewhat from the headlines, its effect has been dramatic and persistent. Bullion dealers continue to struggle to meet physical demand, with most still charging 50% premiums or more. And that's likely to continue leading to much, much higher silver prices ahead. But there's one option you can follow to buy silver for as little as a 0.5% premium, or perhaps even at a discount to the spot price. It's not perfect, but it could make for an attractive silver investment option. Silver Demand Remains Elevated The tetradrachm is considered the first coin to attain "international standard" status, as it was used in trade across the Mediterranean. Today, of course, silver is no longer used as money in daily transactions. But for many, it still retains monetary characteristics and value. In my view, there's a reasonable possibility that silver may once again regain its role as money in the years to come. For now, the closest thing is silver's booming investment demand; it's been off the charts. There's no doubt that the advent of silver ETFs has facilitated (or exacerbated, you choose) this phenomenon. It's certainly clear from the above chart that silver ETF investments tend to be what's called "sticky money." That means when investors buy, they tend to hold, even through price drops and even through significant ones. I've highlighted this phenomenon with yellow arrows in the above chart. Even as silver prices sold off several times since 2016, silver ETF holdings remained rather stable. The most dramatic example of this was last March when silver plunged temporarily to $12, while ETF holdings barely budged. The Silver Institute confirms outsized, and growing, investment demand for silver. In a recent note, the Institute highlighted, " global holdings in ETPs grew by an impressive 331 Moz to end 2020 at 1.04 billion ounces, and since then, global ETP holdings have continued to escalate. Through February 3, ETP holdings rose 137.6 Moz to a new record level of 1.18 billion ounces." Consider that total annual supply in the silver market is about 1 billion ounces. So worldwide holdings in silver ETFs now surpass an entire year's supply. And in my view, that's likely to continue growing as interest remains elevated. Here's a little bit of anecdotal evidence. The following Google Trends chart for the search term "buying silver" supports this idea. Source: Google Trends Although the recent massive spike has subsided, it appears to be on the rise again. Per the Silver Institute, "Further upside is expected this year for physical investment, which is anticipated to rise to a six-year high of 257 Moz This projection reflects current demand in the all-important U.S. market, which has enjoyed a robust start to 2021, with overwhelming demand causing product shortages." So, with such outsized silver demand, investors who want the real thing have few options but to pay wild premiums and to wait out long deliveries, at least until things return to normal. But there's one option that could help you bridge this gap. A Workaround for Huge Silver Premiums Investors can purchase a silver ETF now in order to gain exposure to silver prices. It's an alternative while they wait for premiums to return to more normal levels. The Sprott Physical Silver Trust (TSX:PSLV; NYSE:PLSV)is a great option, but I do want to point out that this is not the same as owning physical silver coins or bars. PSLV is a claim on silver through the ownership of trust units, which are convenient exchange-traded shares. That said, Sprott is one of the most recognized names in precious metals and resource investment management. PSLV does offer advantages over some of its competitors. The silver it owns is fully allocated, meaning it cannot be loaned out or claimed by another entity. Unitholders have the option to redeem their units for physical silver bullion, however the minimum requirements are quite high. There are potential tax advantages for certain non-corporate U.S. investors, where capital gains may be taxed at a lower rate than for most other precious metals ETFs, coins and bars. Storage of the metals is at the Royal Canadian Mint, which is a Federal Crown Corporation of the Government of Canada. PSLV has almost $2.5 billion in assets and an annual management expense ratio near 0.67%. But here's the kicker: currently, PSLV trust units trade at a small premium around 0.75% of their net asset value (NSV). And depending on the market's sentiment, it sometimes trades at a discount to its NAV. So investors can own PSLV and pay very close to spot prices for silver. Once physical silver price premiums return to more normal levels, investors can then switch into physical. Meanwhile, silver futures prices at such low levels versus physical prices are unsustainable. This gap will undoubtedly close. I think that will happen with futures prices rising to approach physical silver prices, but at considerably higher levels than currently. And it could happen suddenly. That's why gaining exposure to silver now makes sense. The Silver Institute forecasts robust global silver demand to reach an eight-year high in 2021 at 1.025 billion ounces, thanks to gains in industrial, jewelry, fabrication and physical investment demand. In my view, it's physical investment demand that will be the biggest disruptor to the silver market for some time. In the Silver Stock Investor newsletter, I provide my outlook on which silver stocks offer the best prospects as this bull market progresses. I recently added a primary silver producer to the portfolio, which has gained nearly 30% in just three short weeks, and I believe has exceptional potential to double or better in the next 12 months. Investors need to have exposure to silver. Now. --Peter Krauth Peter Krauth is a former portfolio adviser and a 20-year veteran of the resource market, with special expertise in precious metals, mining and energy stocks. He is editor of two newsletters to help investors profit from metal market opportunities: Silver Stock Investor, www.silverstockinvestor.com and Gold Resource Investor, www.goldresourceinvestor.com. In those letters Peter writes about what he is buying and selling; he takes no pay from companies for coverage. Peter has contributed numerous articles to Kitco.com, BNN Bloomberg, the Financial Post, Seeking Alpha, Streetwise Reports, Investing.com, TalkMarkets and Barchart, and he holds a Master of Business Administration from McGill University. [NLINSERT] Disclosure: 1) Peter Krauth: I, or members of my immediate household or family, own shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: I am Long Sprott Physical Silver Trust PSLV. I personally am, or members of my immediate household or family are, paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None. My company has a financial relationship with the following companies mentioned in this article: None. I determined which companies would be included in this article based on my research and understanding of the sector. 2) The following companies mentioned in this article are billboard sponsors of Streetwise Reports: None. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. 3) Statements and opinions expressed are the opinions of the author and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. The author is wholly responsible for the validity of the statements. The author was not paid by Streetwise Reports for this article. Streetwise Reports was not paid by the author to publish or syndicate this article. Streetwise Reports requires contributing authors to disclose any shareholdings in, or economic relationships with, companies that they write about. Streetwise Reports relies upon the authors to accurately provide this information and Streetwise Reports has no means of verifying its accuracy. 4) This article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports. 5) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the decision to publish an article until three business days after the publication of the article. The foregoing prohibition does not apply to articles that in substance only restate previously published company releases. Ms. Stewart brings Volta more than three decades' experience leading multi-billion dollar operations, accelerating digital technology adoption and driving business transformation for major corporations in the IT, automotive and technology fields. As a former executive at DaimlerChrysler AG (now Daimler AG), she developed strategy and oversaw all interactive communications for the Chrysler Group brands and led innovative online initiatives to enhance consumer experience. In her current role as VP of Global Partnerships at Google, Ms. Stewart directs strategy, revenue and partner management for the largest U.S. publishers across search, mobile applications, commerce, news, broadcast, telecommunications and domains. "Bonita's leadership and expertise is a key addition to our Board," said Chris Wendel, Co-Founder and President of Volta. "Bonita made an indelible mark on Chrysler by identifying disruptive technologies and bringing them into the industry at the outset. By learning to leverage these technologies and eventually becoming a market leader on digital technology adoption, Bonita had a transformational impact on the consumer experience across the automotive industry. Her perspective on Volta's Board will be invaluable, particularly as we accelerate our expansion and reach." Unique to the EV market, Volta's business model centers around evolving spending habits caused by the move to electric vehicles by building a charging infrastructure that reinforces desired behaviors at each location. Volta's charging stations feature large eye-catching digital displays that function as a sophisticated media network, providing brands a way to reach shoppers moments before they enter a store. These sponsor-supported charging stations provide energy to customers who are able to plug in their vehicles where and when they shop. Volta's business partners who choose to have Volta charging stations installed report an increase in spend, dwell time and engagement on site. Currently located in 23 states and over 200 municipalities, Volta's approach has gained significant acceptance and penetration in the market. "The transition away from gas to providing clean energy is consumer-centric and has a broader, climate-focused mission. I'm excited to join Volta as it helps anchor this transformational change," said Ms. Stewart. "Volta's model of charging your car where you already are is how the re-imagined fueling infrastructure should be built. Combining that infrastructure with programmatic advertising changes the model of how consumers fuel, disrupts the industry and provides great convenience for consumers." About Volta For over a decade, Volta has been building a nationwide electric vehicle charging network to drive the world forward. Named after Alessandro Volta, the inventor of the electric battery, Volta's award-winning charging stations benefit brands, consumers, and real-estate locations by providing valuable advertising space to businesses and free charging to drivers. Strategically located in places where consumers already spend their time and money, Volta's chargers are among the most used electric vehicle charging stations in the United States. Headquartered in San Francisco, Volta is bringing to communities the means of building a sustainable fueling network for the 21st century. To learn more, visit www.voltacharging.com. SOURCE Volta Related Links http://www.voltacharging.com Anandhi Kayal married her beau Socrates last month (January 7) in Warangal. The wedding was a private event and only close friends and family were in attendance. But marriage hasnt had any impact on her career path, says the actress. We have known each other for four years and our friendship blossomed, so we decided to get married, explains Anandhi. Nothing has changed after marriage, says the 24-year-old actress, adding that marriage wont prevent her from signing films. In fact, I have started to listen to more scripts after my wedding and I have been able to strike a perfect balance between personal and professional life, she says. She will soon be seen in the Sudheer Babu-starrer Sridevi Soda Center. I believe its the performance that gets you offers, the actress says, stressing her view that marriage doesnt bring down womens capabilities. If a working woman outside the industry gets married, will she quit her job? We are the same. I am an actor, and I want to continue acting. says the Irandam Ulagaporin Kadaisi Gundu star. Away from arc lights, Anandhi is a very private person. I only use social media to promote my films, she says, adding that she was shooting until two days before her marriage. I could not even shop properly, she reveals. She re-commenced shooting about a week after the wedding. Thankfully my husband isnt complaining, she quips. Socrates is a marine engineer by profession. He worked as an Assistant Director too since he was passionate about films, and he will soon make his directorial debut, says the Kadavul Irukaan Kumaru star. Since the couple is in the film industry, do they discuss films, we ask. We do discuss movies, but when it comes to scripts, I believe in my instincts and take a call, she says. Although Anandhi Kayal is a Telugu girl (born in Warangal), shes very popular in the Tamil film industry. She says shes planning to sign more films in Telugu now. The public health evidence shows that policies that exclude noncitizens from critical government resources have been bad for the well-being of immigrants in the United States. Credit: rrodrickbeiler/Canva President Joseph Biden and the Democrat-controlled Congress have started boldly with immigration. On Feb. 18, Democrats introduced the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which would rollback many of Donald Trump's policies and bring comprehensive immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Researchers and community advocates are recognizing a renewed opportunity to use public health research and advocacy lenses to inform the dialogand ultimately the policiessurrounding immigration reform. In this Q&A, Steven Wallace, associate director at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and a professor of community health sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health, and his colleague Maria-Elena Young, a faculty associate at the center and assistant professor of public health at UC Merced, shared their recommendations to promote inclusive policies influenced by the public health mission to ensure the health and well-being of all people. Wallace's interest in immigration comes from listening to his grandfather's stories about coming to the U.S. through Ellis Island, and his father's memories of growing up in the immigrant neighborhood of Boyle Heights. An undergraduate summer internship in 1977 at a community health center where most of the patients were recent immigrants from Mexico sparked his interest in a more academic study of immigration, and since the mid-1980s he has published regularly on the subject. For Young, immigrant inclusion has been central to her personal and professional experiences. Her mother's family came to the U.S. from Nicaragua in 1950 and faced many challenges, but also economic and educational opportunity. As a youth in California, she observed the fear and division that resulted from the passage of Proposition 187. She became specifically focused on issues of immigration policy about 10 years ago when rules enacted under the Obama administration sharply increased deportations and she realized how immigration policy is a form of health policy. They recently co-authored an editorial in the American Journal of Public Health, which outlines priorities for the new administration in taking an equity-focused approach to reform, as well as making the call to action for researchers and advocates to work together with the goal of improving immigrant health and policies. What is the relationship between immigration and health, and why is it crucial in the current talks about immigration reform? Wallace: "Immigrant" is a political status given to those who move their primary residence from Vancouver to Seattle, or Tijuana to San Diego, but not to those who move from Boston to L.A. Depending on how people move their permanent residence they are subject to different sets of social and political pressures and resources that will impact their health. For example, according to an analysis of the California Health Interview Survey, an estimated 90% of undocumented immigrant adults ages 19-64 did not have comprehensive health insurance because they are in families with low-wage workers who are not provided insurance at work and they do not qualify for public programs. Even documented immigrants who live in families that include undocumented memberscalled mixed-status familiesoften report not obtaining benefits or seeking care they are eligible for because of their concerns about putting their undocumented family members at risk. And the chronic stress these families live under has negative health outcomes. Young: The relationship between immigration and health is critical to current policy proposals because immigrants' day-to-day experiences are shaped by immigration policies. Today, immigrants are less likely to have a place to receive health careand the insurance to pay for that careand more likely to work in low-wage, and often less safe jobs, than those born in the U.S. Across the U.S., they also report experiencing xenophobia and discrimination due to race, religion, citizenship and other factors. We know that having access to health care, economic opportunities, educational advancement and living free of racism and discrimination are key determinants of good health. Federal, state and even some local policies have an enormous impact on whether immigrants are able to access those resources and protections and the extent to which they may be targeted by enforcement. Unfortunately, over time policymakers in the U.S. have largely created a system that excludes many noncitizens from critical resources and actively authorized their policing and surveillance. The public health evidence shows that this policy approach has been bad for the well-being of immigrants and people of color across the nation. There's an opportunity to start to change that now. The Biden administration has proposed changes to immigration policies which involve creating a task force to reunify families, addressing migration patterns, and restoring faith in the legal immigration system. What do inclusive immigration policies look like to public health researchers and advocates, and how can the current administration take inclusion into account? Wallace: State and local policies on education, health care, employment, drivers' licenses and law enforcement impact immigrants' everyday lives, but federal policy sets the tone that can hinder, or help, these policies. For example, last year the Trump administration expanded the number of reasons an immigrant could be denied a green card, because they'd be considered a "public charge," someone primarily dependent on government assistance. The additional reasons included services to provide health care, food and housing. Both the new policy and public discussions about this have deterred many immigrants from using public programs they're legally qualified for. In that way, a draconian federal policy to exclude people overshadowed many inclusive state and local policies, such as those to provide prenatal care to undocumented women whose permanent home is in the U.S., food assistance to lawful permanent residents, and other programs designed to help immigrants who are an integral part of our communities and economy. Our research can inform federal policy makers on the benefits of not only reversing some of the punitive actions of the previous administration, but by establishing new national initiatives to help immigrants and refugees become fully incorporated into the society. Our work has shown that inclusive policies at the state level improve immigrant outcomes, independent of exclusionary policies that may also exist. An example of this is a study we conducted in 2018, which found that inclusive state immigrant policies may reduce immigrant poverty by fostering economic advancement. Young: As we describe in our current piece, key priorities that can advance equity are to decriminalize immigrants by dismantling and eliminating our enforcement infrastructure and creating a path to citizenship for all that is not contingent on increased enforcement against some groups. Within the public health field, we also should work to eliminate categories of "good," or deserving, versus "bad," or undeserving immigrants. Biden's initial proposals are an encouraging start. But new policies shouldn't simply be made in response to Trump's anti-immigrant agenda. For example, Biden has ended the construction of a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, but indicated there would be investment in a "virtual wall" which likely will increase surveillance of all people living at the border, whether citizens or not. Similarly, he is reviewing enforcement priorities, but even a shift in priorities does not address how enforcement arrests, detentions and deportations have led to stress, instability and discrimination in communities across the country. Public health researchers and advocates are ideally positioned to push the administration to make inclusion a central criterion for changes to the immigration system. How can researchers and advocates work together to ensure that the pathway to immigration reform is fair and equitable? Wallace: Where evidence is limited or dated, it invites ideological and harmful, or at best, only partially effective, responses to issues. Researchers need to work with affected communities to identify where solid, empirical data can help inform policies and efforts to improve policies. A few examples of where additional data might be useful include debunking the myths that health care programs are a "magnet" that attract immigrants and that some immigrants are more "deserving" of public services than others. Young: It's critical for researchers to work with advocacy groups, such as the California Immigrant Policy Center and the National Immigration Law Center, to support their current advocacy efforts. Public health researchers have established really critical evidence about the harms of restrictive immigration policies and the potential benefits of inclusive policies. That evidence should be translated into effective advocacy information, such as through better dissemination of the academic research to the advocates who are meeting directly with policymakers or through researchers' direct involvement in talking to policymakers. Explore further The public charge rule: What physicians can do to support immigrant health More information: Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young et al. A Window of Opportunity Is Opening to Improve Immigrant Health: A Research and Practice Agenda, American Journal of Public Health (2021). Journal information: American Journal of Public Health Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young et al. A Window of Opportunity Is Opening to Improve Immigrant Health: A Research and Practice Agenda,(2021). DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2020.306128 PUNE, India, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Global demand for Single-Use Bioreactor Market Size, in terms of revenue, was worth of USD 1.10 Billion in 2017 and is expected to reach USD 4.50 Billion in 2027, growing at a CAGR of 15.13% from 2021 to 2027. The global Single-Use Bioreactor is expected to grow at a significant rate due to the number of driving factors. Single-Use Bioreactor Market: Global Size, Trends, Competitive, Historical & Forecast Analysis, 2021-2027. Demand in Efficient Vaccines is a key driving factor for the growth of Single-Use Bioreactor Market. Single-Use Bioreactor top Manufacturers: Sartorius, Xcellerex, Eppendorf, Applikon, Danaher Corporation, Merck Millipore, Thermo Scientific HyClone, PBS Biotech and others. Get Sample Copy of this [email protected] https://brandessenceresearch.com/requestSample/PostId/1463 A bioreactor is generally used for growing organisms like animal cell, bacteria, yeast and others in controlled atmosphere and helps in the production of vaccines, antibodies, pharmaceuticals and others. The disposable bioreactor has a disposable bag instead of culture vessel which is known as Single-Use Bioreactor. This disposable bag has three layers of plastic foil made from Polyethylene terephthalate or LPDE, PVA or PVC and contact layer from PVA or PP. The single use bioreactors are better in performance and scalable compared to stainless steel bioreactors. The traditional bioreactors have a validation issues due to its complexity and cleaning process which is avoided by new single-use bioreactors. This system also holds other advantages like less turn around time, lowers risk of contamination, cost-effectiveness, and easy to install & movement. During this COVID-19 pandemic, some industries severely affected, and some industries have flourished. Healthcare industry and Bioprocessing manufacturing industries are affected positively in terms of revenue and funding. Due to the rise in demand of COVID-19 Vaccines and Medications, various governments and organizations are funding and prioritizing Biomanufacturing companies for key technologies like perfusion reactors, single-use equipments, and chromatography resins. Hence, drug and vaccine manufacturers are significantly opting for disposable components like single-use bioreactors to avoid contamination issues. Single-Use Bioreactor Market Segmentation Analysis: Global Single-Use Bioreactor Market report is segmented on the basis of construction, mode, sizes, applications and region & country level. On the basis of construction, it is classified as Stirred Bioreactor and Rocking Bioreactor. Based upon mode, global Single-Use Bioreactor market is classified into Batch, Continuous, and Fed-Batch. Based upon the size, global Single-Use Bioreactor market is classified into 500L, 1000L, 2000L and 6000L. The market is classified on Application as Academic, Pharmaceutical, Environment and Life sciences. By Construction: Stirred Bioreactor, Rocking Bioreactor By Mode: Batch, Continuous, Fed-Batch By Size: 500L, 1000L, 2000L, 6000L By Application: Academic, Pharmaceutical, Environment, Life sciences News: Cytiva's New Manufacturing in Shrewsbury, USA January 15, 2021; Cytiva opened new manufacturing facility for Xcellerex XDR bioreactors in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, US in December, 2020in collaboration with Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). This facility has been developed as a company's 5 year plan for expanding global manufacturing with total investment $500 million. Thermo Scientific HyPerforma Bioreactors got Application Specific Enhancements October 09, 2020; To shift the process specific solutions, Thermo Fisher Scientific introduced the application specific enhancements to HyPerforma Single-Use Bioreactors. It is in creation with the requirements of cell cultures, intensified fed-batch and perfusion. This enables the developers to focus on solutions for diverse bioproduction processes. Get Methodology @ https://brandessenceresearch.com/requestMethodology/PostId/1463 Demand for Effective Vaccines is a key driving factor for the growth of Single-Use Bioreactor Market The major factors driving the growth of global Single-Use Bioreactor market is rising in demand of effective vaccines and medications. They have also been widely accepted for the applications like development of pharmaceutical materials, personalized medicines, upstreaming process, and production of cell cultures. The market has seen significant growth after adaptation of automation and control for Biomanufacturing processes. As per Richard Mirro, Business Manager, Eppendorf there has been exceptional growth in research and development for vaccine along with significant demand in small size and single-use bioreactors has benefited Eppendorf Single-Use Bioreactors portfolio, as they have working volumes up to 50L. Still performance wise technology has not completely proven for single-use bioreactors and application based scalability issues needs to be taken care are some of the restraining factors for Single-Use Bioreactors Market. Product enhancements and developing new features with better performance is expected to create new opportunities in Single-use Bioreactors market. North America is dominating the Global Single-Use Bioreactor Market North America is expected to dominate the global Single-Use Bioreactor market over the forecast period attributed to significant Research and Development along with investment in advanced Bioprocessing technologies. Furthermore, meeting the demands of vaccine development, medications and scalability issues has always been the top priority for Biomanufacturing industry. In 2019, ABEC, a biopharmaceutical manufacturer in Pennsylvania, US launched the 6000L of Custom Single Run (CSR) Bioreactors to meet the scalability demands. Europe and Asia-Pacific also expected to substantial growth, as Sartorius, a German based company is leading in R&D processes for vaccine development and helping CanSino Biologics in China to develop vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 by using Sartorius' Biostat STR single-use Bioreactor system. 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Brandessence market research publishes market research reports & business insights produced by highly qualified and experienced industry analysts. Our research reports are available in a wide range of industry verticals including aviation, food & beverage, healthcare, ICT, Construction, Chemicals and lot more. Brand Essence Market Research report will be best fit for senior executives, business development managers, marketing managers, consultants, CEOs, CIOs, COOs, and Directors, governments, agencies, organizations and Ph.D. Students. We have a delivery center in Pune, India and our sales office is in London. Website: https://brandessenceresearch.com Article: https://businessstatsnews.com Media Contact: Mr. Aniket Patil [email protected] Email : [email protected] Corporate Sales: +44-2038074155 Asia Office: +917447409162 SOURCE Brandessence Market Research And Consulting Private Limited Acting Deputy PM: Armenia has not discussed and will not discuss issues within logic of "corridor" Armenia Central Electoral Commission determines numbers of political parties for elections Armenia 2nd President visits Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri (PHOTOS) Opposition Armenia bloc representative: We're running in elections to win Azerbaijan MFA comments on calls for release of Armenian POWs with infinite hypocrisy EC: Vaccinated citizens should be exempted from tests, quarantine when traveling within EU Armenia Ombudsman discusses rights of 6 captured Armenian servicemen with ICRC Delegation head EU ready to use all the tools at its disposal to change Turkey's behavior Yerevan court obliges to abolish violation of rights of Armenia Supreme Judicial Council ex-chairman Greek and Turkish leaders to meet in June on sidelines of NATO summit Armenia Central Electoral Commission to set up 2,008 polling stations for snap parliamentary elections Iranian companies to participate in reconstructing territories under Azerbaijan's control Opposition Armenia bloc's representative on acting PM's invitation to debate with 1st and 2nd Presidents Armenia acting FM dismissed upon presidential decree Body of brother of Armenian criminal authority "Don Pipo" found under bridge Armenia Prosecutor General holds consultation Digest on Armenian local news, EU is ready to help Armenia, Azerbaijan with border issues, 31.05.21 Relatives of missing Armenian servicemen open Heratsi Street in Yerevan Armenia acting PM to pay working visits to Paris and Brussels Armenia bloc representative on FM's resignation and National Security Service Armenia Investigative Committee: Fatal road accident, criminal case opened Armenia deputy FM submits resignation Chinese authorities allow families to have 3 children Dollar devalues in Armenia Stepanakert: Azerbaijan creates bridgeheads for pressure on Karabakh, expansion towards Armenia Sergey Lavrov says Russia is ready to disconnect SWIFT Armenia MFA spokesperson resigns Republican Party of Armenia Vice-President: Our ratings are growing, but we have greater pretensions Armenia acting PM's spokesperson responds to ex-FM Armenia parliament majority leader: Refusing to debate with acting PM is manifestation of low self-confidence Armenia State Revenue Committee, US Department of Justice sign Memorandum of Cooperation Vardevanyan: Attempts made to create false grounds for obstructing Armenia bloc election offices legal activities Lavrov says Russia is ready to resume dialogue with NATO Armenia opposition MP on FM's resignation India records lowest increase in COVID-19 cases in 50 days Bright Armenia faction in parliament: No response to acting PM's proposal to deploy observers along Azerbaijan border Ruling bloc MP: Acting premiers proposal does not limit Armenia in terms of cooperation with CSTO Acting PM is proud of Armenian servicemens heroism, says parliament majority leader Parliament majority leader: No border delimitation unless Azerbaijan army units leave Armenia territory Outgoing Armenia acting FM opens brackets: My decision of resignation was conditioned by that very reason Harutyunyan, Shoygu discuss tension on Armenia-Azerbaijan border Iranian MFA says US has not imported oil from country since Clinton era Court hearing on appeal against decision to drop March 2008 Yerevan tragedy case is rescheduled Missing soldiers relatives block Yerevan street Parliament majority leader: Armenia acting FM did not object, at Security Council meeting, to new document Armenia Police: 2,581,093 people on voters list Bright Armenia faction of parliament: No corridor through the country should be provided to Azerbaijan Analyst: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan gave self-confessed testimony Armenia national security finds about 1 kg of opium, detains Iran citizen driver and 2 others 182 hearing aids and 2 buses by benefactor Mikayel Vardanyan for students of Special Educational Complex 34 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Updated voters list is posted on Armenia central election commission website Armenia authorities provide considerable amount of subsidies ahead of snap parliamentary elections World oil prices on the rise MP explains his not being on Bright Armenia Party electoral list UK new flagship set to be named after the late Prince Philip US man who said he shot neighbor over loud music found guilty of attempted murder Lamborghini company to be sold for $11.5bn? China spacecraft docks with future space station Lawyer: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan grossly abuses administrative resources during Lori Province visit UN urges to investigate escalation of violence in Colombia Malaysia to open mega-centers for vaccination against coronavirus Police find 5 million in cash in London apartment French citizen to face trial in Iran on spaying charges Over 60 children in UK undergo surgery due to TikTok challenge Iranian Central Bank governor dismissed Armenian opposition: The one who liberated Artsakh will not go to debates with the one who sold it Iranian energy ministry: Iraq to allocate $ 125 million of frozen funds for vaccines No new COVID-19 cases reported in Artsakh Iran and Iraq to intensify cooperation and are ready for joint investment projects Armenia ex-PM says at least 2 more secret documents signed but not published yet Indonesia frees Iranian tanker 4 months later Mortar shelling in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US Second President of Armenia meets with residents of Ararat province Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria Armenian acting PM invites ex-presidents for debates European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia UK PM gets married in London Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: 4 people die EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia 2 people die in Armenia road accident Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released 61 quakes recorded in Congo per day Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs? Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war 4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) Vice President Leni Robredo is welcome to take Chinese firm Sinovacs COVID-19 vaccine first to help boost the publics confidence in inoculation, Malacanang said Wednesday. Kung papayagan tayo ng National Task Force at Department of Health ay kasama tayo sa mauuna magpapabakuna no para magbigay kumpyansa sa ating mga kababayan para mawala ang kanilang agam-agam, said Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque in a virtual briefing. Kung gusto ng Vice President, shes welcome to join also. [Translation: If the National Task Force (Against COVID-19) and Department of Health would permit it, we would be part of (government officials) that would get vaccinated first to boost our fellow citizens confidence and take away their doubts. The Vice President can also join if she wants to.] The spokesperson said Robredo is well within the age range recommended for inoculation of the said vaccine, as she is not yet a senior citizen. The Food and Drug Administration, upon issuing Sinovac emergency use authorization for its vaccine, advised against administering it to the elderly. RELATED: PH can expand age group recommendation for Sinovac vaccine once more data come in FDA Roque likewise cited the Vice Presidents prior statements regarding her willingness to get vaccinated in public. Robredo earlier said she is willing to roll up her sleeve first for a COVID-19 vaccine shot if it would help raise the publics confidence in vaccines. She also asked that officials should be willing to take the challenge but not because they want to get protected first, noting people frequently exposed to the virus need protection the most such as health workers. Medical frontliners are also among the groups the FDA did not recommend getting inoculated with the CoronaVac vaccine due to its lower efficacy rate in a test conducted among health workers in Brazil. The spokesperson likewise clarified during the briefing that while the vaccine isnt recommended for health workers, they arent forbidden from receiving it and may do so if they want to. RELATED: Senators say FDA advice vs. Sinovac use on some priority sectors raises more questions on emergency approval That is also the language of the EUA. Not recommended but if the healthcare workers want, they are welcome to it, said Roque. Sinovac general manager Helen Yang told CNN Philippines' The Source the Philippines first 600,000 vaccine doses are being prepared for delivery to the country, with arrival still possible within a week. The chupacabra has been called the Bigfoot of Latino culture, an urban legend said to drain the blood of goats and other farm animals from South America to south Texas. Its name is Spanish for goat sucker. And like Bigfoot, the chupacabra also has eluded capture and provided no credible evidence that it exists. Still, at least one citizen scientist sees the chupacabra as both a cultural phenomenon and a modern spin on the worlds most storied bloodsucker. Its basically a vampire or a small, evil, fairy-type creature, which are popular archetypes in Latino culture, said Ken Gerhard, a docent at the San Antonio Zoo and a widely recognized cryptozoologist. Cryptozoology is the study and search for so-called cryptids, hidden animals whose existence defies scientific evidence or substantiation, such as Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster, bizarre beasts that live on in alleged sightings and indecipherable photos and videos. Gerhard has traveled the world in search of such X-Files fare, skeptical as Dana Scully yet still wanting to believe like Fox Mulder. Ive never found one yet, Gerhard said. But I still look. When it comes to chupacabras, Gerhard said they just arent the most credible cryptids. He noted theres neither physical evidence a chupacabra exists nor any sort of biological reality or animal group that a chupacabra would fit in to. Its almost a little bit too weird, Gerhard said. On ExpressNews.com: Meet the T. rex of Texas that prowled the San Antonio area more than 100 million years ago Yet more than 25 years since its first alleged sighting, Gerhard said the chupacabra remains a quirky cucuy or boogeyman that fits well into pop culture and especially Latin culture. So much so that the San Antonio Zoo the zoo opened the first-ever chupacabra exhibit at a zoological facility in September. Located by the zoos bat habitat, a replica of the fabled creature greets patrons with a face full of fangs and a back full of quills. Were excited to educate the public and our visitors about the elusive and legendary chupacabra, San Antonio Zoo President and CEO Tim Morrow said in a statement at the time. This new one-of-a-kind habitat is sure to spark both the imagination of what wildlife exists that we havent yet discovered and the desire to conserve species, both known and unknown. Just days after that zoo debut, an anonymous rancher on San Antonios South Side reportedly killed a strange creature that was stalking his livestock. His first guess: Chupacabra!Rob Coke, director of veterinary care at the San Antonio Zoo, reportedly looked at photos of the carcass and deemed it a coyote with mange. Which is it? chupa-fact or chupa-fiction? Or maybe its both? Heres what we know about the chupacabra. At least, what they want us to know. A Puerto Rican export. The chupacabra, or Venator nocturnus according to the San Antonio Zoo exhibit, stalks most of South and Central America as well as northern Mexico and the southern United States. That is, according to reports of livestock deaths attributed to the creature. The first chupacabra sightings date back to March 1995 in Puerto Rico, where reports circulated of several sheep found dead with puncture wounds in their chest and purportedly drained of their blood. A comedian came up with the name. Puerto Rican comedian Silverio Perez coined the term chupacabra in 1995 while discussing the creatures attacks. The Spanish word literally translates to goat-sucker, as in chupa (to suck) and cabra (goat). The name comes from the creatures purported habit of sucking the blood of goats and other livestock. An urban legend with different legs. The chupacabra often is described as a hairless reptilian creature around 3 feet tall with gray-green skin and spines or quills down its back. But how it walks depends on where its spotted. South and Central America sightings describe the chupacabra as a goblinlike humanoid that walks upright on two legs, while sightings in Mexico and the US describe the chupacabra as a canine or doglike creature that walks on all fours. Gerhard was not involved in the chupacabra exhibit at the San Antonio Zoo, but said its canine-leaning depiction of the cryptid is a wonderful synthesis of the varying chupacabra descriptions. On ExpressNews.com: Yep, San Antonio gets its share of wild alligators. On guard, Fluffy! H.R. Giger may have inspired the first description. The first eyewitness account of the chupacabra likens its appearance to Sil, a sinewy alien-human hybrid with spines down her back in the 1995 sci-fi horror film, Species. Sil was designed by H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist famous for the title terror of the Alien films. In August 1995, Madelyne Tolentino in Puerto Rico alleged she saw a chupacabra in the municipality of Canovanas. Researcher and skeptic Benjamin Radford interviewed Tolentino for his 2011 book, Tracking the Chupacabra. He concluded her description was based on the creature from Species, which Tolentino had seen just the week before her report. Gerhard believes the internet popularized Tolentinos description and variations spun from there. Then again, its likely a mangy coyote. As Coke with the San Antonio Zoo noted, most chupacabra sightings in Mexico and the United States are debunked as coyotes with severe mange. Likewise, stray Mexican hairless dogs get mistaken for chupacabras. Gerhard has examined half a dozen animal carcasses referred to as chupacabras. He said DNA testing and bone and skull analysis revealed all of them were dogs or coyotes with some sort of mange or genetic deformity. They dont really suck blood, either. Dead livestock attributed to chupacabra attacks may bear puncture wounds, but those holes tend to correspond to bites made by canine teeth. There also are no reported autopsies that confirm the dead animals were drained of their blood. So why do so many accounts mention bloodless victims? Gerhard noted when an animal dies, its body goes into rigor mortis and its blood drains to the lowest part of the body where it coagulates. This gives the carcass a gaunt, drained appearance. On ExpressNews.com: Ringtails, a catlike creature with the head of a fox, on the rise in San Antonios Stone Oak A ufologist put San Antonio on the map for chupacabra investigation. Horror writer and San Antonio native Whitley Strieber is perhaps best known for Communion, his 1987 account of alleged experiences with aliens. But Gerhard noted Strieber also was instrumental in a chupacabra investigation. In 2004, a rancher killed and buried the so-called Elmendorf Beast, an alleged chupacabra blamed for livestock attacks in South Bexar County. Strieber had the animal exhumed for analysis at the San Antonio Zoo. Later DNA analysis at the University of California, Davis concluded it was a coyote with mange. Barely a blip on TV series. Guess Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster get all the plumb roles. About the only major TV series time dedicated to the chupacabra is a 1997 monster-of-the-week episode of The X-Files and a 2014 episode of Grimm. But oh what a TV movie. Eat your heart out, Sharknado. In the 2013 TV movie Chupacabra vs. The Alamo, Erik Estrada plays Carlos Seguin, a tough DEA agent who discovers a that bunch of doglike chupacabras have been making mincemeat of drug cartel members. Seguin and his band of desperate heroes make a last stand against the mythical blood-hounds at, of course, the Alamo. rguzman@express-news.net | Twitter: @reneguz When flying past Venus in July 2020, Parker Solar Probe's WISPR instrument, short for Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet that may be nightglow -- light emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules in the nightside. The prominent dark feature in the center of the image is Aphrodite Terra, the largest highland region on the Venusian surface. Bright streaks in WISPR, such as the ones seen here, are typically caused by a combination of charged particles -- called cosmic rays -- sunlight reflected by grains of space dust, and particles of material expelled from the spacecraft's structures after impact with those dust grains. The number of streaks varies along the orbit or when the spacecraft is traveling at different speeds, and scientists are still in discussion about the specific origins of the streaks here. The dark spot appearing on the lower portion of Venus is an artifact from the WISPR instrument. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher NASA's Parker Solar Probe captured stunning views of Venus during its close flyby of the planet in July 2020. Though Parker Solar Probe's focus is the Sun, Venus plays a critical role in the mission: The spacecraft whips by Venus a total of seven times over the course of its seven-year mission, using the planet's gravity to bend the spacecraft's orbit. These Venus gravity assists allow Parker Solar Probe to fly closer and closer to the Sun on its mission to study the dynamics of the solar wind close to its source. Butalong with the orbital dynamicsthese passes can also yield some unique and even unexpected views of the inner solar system. During the mission's third Venus gravity assist on July 11, 2020, the onboard Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, or WISPR, captured a striking image of the planet's nightside from 7,693 miles away. WISPR is designed to take images of the solar corona and inner heliosphere in visible light, as well as images of the solar wind and its structures as they approach and fly by the spacecraft. At Venus, the camera detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet that may be nightglowlight emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules in the nightside. The prominent dark feature in the center of the image is Aphrodite Terra, the largest highland region on the Venusian surface. The feature appears dark because of its lower temperature, about 85 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) cooler than its surroundings. That aspect of the image took the team by surprise, said Angelos Vourlidas, the WISPR project scientist from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, who coordinated a WISPR imaging campaign with Japan's Venus-orbiting Akatsuki mission. "WISPR is tailored and tested for visible light observations. We expected to see clouds, but the camera peered right through to the surface." NASA's Parker Solar Probe had an up-close view of Venus when it flew by the planet in July 2020. Some of the features seen by scientists are labeled in this annotated image. The dark spot appearing on the lower portion of Venus is an artifact from the WISPR instrument. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher "WISPR effectively captured the thermal emission of the Venusian surface," said Brian Wood, an astrophysicist and WISPR team member from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. "It's very similar to images acquired by the Akatsuki spacecraft at near-infrared wavelengths." This surprising observation sent the WISPR team back to the lab to measure the instrument's sensitivity to infrared light. If WISPR can indeed pick up near-infrared wavelengths of light, the unforeseen capability would provide new opportunities to study dust around the Sun and in the inner solar system. If it can't pick up extra infrared wavelengths, then these imagesshowing signatures of features on Venus' surfacemay have revealed a previously unknown "window" through the Venusian atmosphere. "Either way," Vourlidas said, "some exciting science opportunities await us." For more insight into the July 2020 images, the WISPR team planned a set of similar observations of the Venusian nightside during Parker Solar Probe's latest Venus flyby on Feb. 20, 2021. Mission team scientists expect to receive and process that data for analysis by the end of April. "We are really looking forward to these new images," said Javier Peralta, a planetary scientist from the Akatsuki team, who first suggested a Parker Solar Probe campaign with Akatsuki, which has been in orbiting Venus since 2015. "If WISPR can sense the thermal emission from the surface of Venus and nightglowmost likely from oxygenat the limb of the planet, it can make valuable contributions to studies of the Venusian surface." Explore further Unique solar system views from NASA sun-studying missions Queenslands borders will close to New Zealand travellers on Wednesday night as escalating COVID-19 cases in New Zealand meant it lost its status as a safe travel country. State Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young said all travellers from New Zealand arriving at Queensland airports from 6pm would need to complete quarantine. All travellers from New Zealand arriving in Queensland from 6pm on Wednesday must complete quarantine. Credit:Tertius Pickard Two new COVID-19 cases in New Zealand were confirmed on Wednesday morning, while five cases were reported on Tuesday. New Zealand Health has reported more than 50 cases at its border and 11 in the community. A care home which refused to ban visitors during lockdown has brought in hairdressers, entertainers and even taken residents out on rickshaws throughout the pandemic. Jonathan Cunningham, manager at Birkdale Park Care Home in Southport welcomed the Government announcement that care home residents would be allowed a regular appointed visitor from March 8 - but said the measures don't go far enough. The former army Major has openly dismissed Boris Johnson's guidance over care home visiting, branding the tales of relatives seeing their loved ones through a glass window or having to wear rubber gloves to hold their hand 'a complete abhorrence'. Instead, the self-confessed 'rebel' has allowed multiple visitors and kept residents from feeling isolated by bringing in comedians, putting on live music, and taking the residents out in rickshaws with their relatives - all without suffering an outbreak of Covid. Mr Cunningham said the home had been reported to local care bosses for breaching lockdown rules but it's not yet clear if any action will be taken. Frances Aspinall hugs her mother Molly Fenwick, 97 at Birkdale Care Home in Southport on Tuesday afternoon Jonathan Cunningham, manager at Birkdale Park Care Home in Southport, has openly dismissed Boris Johnson's guidance over care home visiting Care home residents allowed one visitor inside from next month From March 8, at the first stage of Boris Johnson's roadmap out of lockdown, each care home resident will be able to nominate a regular indoor visitor. These indoors visits are in addition to other visiting guidelines, which have been in effect for several months. The nominated visitor: Will be allowed to regularly visit the person indoors, including holding hands with their loved one; Has to test negative for coronavirus before each visit and wear PPE during the visit; Doesn't need to have had their coronavirus vaccine; Won't be able to change once chosen. It's at the discretion of the care home to allow more than one named visitor in exceptional circumstances. These visits will be suspended if there's an outbreak of coronavirus in the care home. Advertisement The manager said: 'This is the care home that refused to lockdown. We take our residents out in rickshaws with their loved ones next to them so they can get out and enjoy the fresh air. 'We've hired an activities coordinator who takes them out in mini buses and I've learned how to play the ukulele so I can do a live show every week. 'What we are doing here is the most heartwarming, uplifting, and inspiring thing you could wish to be involved with. 'I have done some incredible things in the forces but this is the most fulfilling job I have ever had. 'You can't put a price on it, seeing the joy in people's faces and the family members who thank us for giving them that time with their loved ones in the final months of their life. 'From the start I have fiercely disagreed with people meeting on the other side of a pane of glass, I thought it was simply cruel. 'I thought it was a disgrace to ask people to hold their mum's hand through a glove. 'I'm afraid we have people dying up and down the UK who haven't seen their families in the last year. 'That is a complete abhorrence, there is nothing you can say to me which will make that justifiable. 'Why the government felt they had to legislate to do what I think most homes should have been doing anyway is beyond me, I accept that you have to start somewhere but I feel it doesn't go far enough.' At the very start of the pandemic, Jonathan feared government guidance was not moving quickly enough and pulled Birkdale into full lockdown three weeks before the rest of the country followed. During the last 12 months, Birkdale has only seen two cases of Covid within the home, both of which occurred during the first peak of infections in April But after six weeks, he decided to bring the home out of lockdown and set about doing his own risk assessment to come up with ways that would allow the residents to live as normally as possible. During the last 12 months, Birkdale has only seen two cases of Covid within the home, both of which occurred during the first peak of infections in April. But while some doubters have even reported Jonathan to the Care Quality Commission, the care home manager insists the results of disobeying lockdown speak for themselves. He said: 'Some people will think 'maybe you have just been lucky'. 'But I'm extremely proud of our infection control and protocol. 'We did get reported to the CQC. 'Someone took umbrage with what we were doing and said we were breaking restrictions but I invited them in to see for themselves and assess whether there was any risk infection or danger and they came in and quickly agreed that we were not in breach of anything. 'Our residents sleep better, they eat better, they are just different people altogether. 'There's lots you can do with a bit of imagination.' Etched on their faces, the shocking toll of care residents' months in isolation: Heartbreaking images show the savage effects of lockdown loneliness as charities warn Boris Johnson's easing of curbs on family visits are too little, too late Harrowing photographs today lay bare the toll the pandemic has taken on care home residents many of whom have spent almost a year in isolation. These shocking before and after images illustrate how the elderly torn apart from their loved ones by visiting bans have suffered dramatic declines in their mental and physical health. Last night charities and MPs said the inhumane bans must never be allowed to happen again while campaigners said Britain will look back with horror on the way it has treated those in care homes during the crisis. Sylvia Griffiths (pictured above before and after) had always taken great pride in her appearance, wearing lipstick and doing her hair every day. Now the 80-year-old does not recognise herself in the mirror Today Boris Johnson will unveil plans to reopen homes to visits from one friend or family member per resident from March 8. They will be allowed regular visits and will be permitted to go indoors to hold hands but not hug or kiss as long as they have tested negative for Covid and are wearing PPE. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said this was the first step in easing visiting restrictions and the Government will allow greater visiting in a step-by-step way in the future. But experts say it is too little too late for thousands of residents, some of whom no longer recognise their spouse, sons or daughters. Mum used to look great, now she has just given up Sylvia Griffiths (pictured above before and after) had always taken great pride in her appearance, wearing lipstick and doing her hair every day. Now the 80-year-old does not recognise herself in the mirror. Mrs Griffiths was moved into a care home last June and has struggled enormously without seeing her two children every day to help keep her memories alive. Since November even window visits have been banned at the home in Essex. Her daughter Lynn Osborne was finally able to see her last Sunday, when Mrs Griffiths was admitted to hospital after a fall. But Mrs Osborne, 57, said: When mum went into the care home she looked great. She loves make-up and would always put on foundation, eyebrows and lipstick. When I saw her in the hospital her hair was dishevelled and she looked unkept. This is not how she would like to live. She doesnt recognise herself in the mirror any more because shes not got lipstick on. Mrs Osborne, who used to see her mother up to three times a day, said: She is sad and has just given up. All she used to talk about was her husband and her cat Boris. Now she has completely forgotten about them both. The only time they have been able to hug was when Mrs Griffiths was admitted to hospital last week. Mrs Osborne added: She said, It makes me so happy to see both my children. I started crying because it meant she still knew who we were. Advertisement For many of the UKs 410,000 residents 70 per cent of whom have dementia 11 months of loneliness has caused them to lose their ability to eat, drink and speak due to isolation. Families fear that unless the new guidance is backed with a law, care home providers will still find ways to shut their doors. The new rules force residents to choose just one family member or friend who can visit indoors, with some facing heartbreaking choices about which loved one to pick. Diane Mayhew, from Rights for Residents, said: Unless the Government passes legislation to make visiting guidance mandatory we expect many care homes will continue to lock relatives out. For thousands of families, this new guidance will come too late. Many residents have already died of loneliness and isolation without being able to say goodbye to their families. As a country, we will look back with horror on the inhumane and barbaric treatment of care home residents over the past year. Seeing dad is heartbreaking Smiling as he presented his beloved wife of 63 years with a bouquet of red roses last Valentines Day, dementia sufferer John Ross looked joyful. However, the great-grandfather of nine now appears grimly transformed by the toll of the pandemic and being separated from his loved ones. Mr Ross, 89, who lives in a care home in Liverpool, has seen his wife Marlene for just 20 minutes through a window since last March. John Ross, 89, is pictured above on Valentines last year with Marlene. Today, right, he looks a broken man His daughter Penny Ogden, 59, and her four siblings have seen him just a handful of times. When they are allowed to see Mr Ross, who has 21 grandchildren, Mrs Ogden said the visit is often heartbreaking and difficult because he is confused and tells them: Ive got nothing left to live for. I want to die. Mrs Ogden, a semi-retired book keeper, said: He just looks absolutely awful. Hes lost so much weight, hes not eating or drinking. He has changed so much. The photos prior to lockdown and now show his deterioration it is unbelievable. Mrs Ogden said that when he was reunited with his wife in September all he did was cry. Advertisement No hugs, and now we cant even phone him Martin Jannaways wife and daughter are both highly qualified carers with years of experience working in care homes. Yet they have been forbidden from giving the 65-year-old a hug for the past year. Mr Jannaway, who has dementia, has suffered hugely from the lack of contact with his family. This time last year he could eat, drink, exercise and speak. Now he has lost all speech, is doubly incontinent and cannot eat or drink unaided. Martin Jannaway, who has dementia, has suffered hugely from the lack of contact with his family. This time last year he could eat, drink, exercise and speak His daughter Joanne, 36, said: Ive been allowed a handful of outdoor visits, but havent had any physical contact with him since March. Ive worked as a private carer throughout the pandemic. But Im not allowed in to give my dad a hug even though they have agency carers in all day. She is horrified by the amount of weight he has lost and has pleaded with the care home managers to let her visit. But they have refused, even now she has been vaccinated. Miss Jannaway cannot have phone conversations with her dad because of his loss of speech, which she said was the final straw of losing him entirely. She added that the new guidance did not go far enough. She said: Were a very big family but he will only be allowed to see one of us. I fear its another way of the Government giving us false hope. Mr Jannaway, from Chichester, was diagnosed with dementia six years ago at the age of 59. His wife quit her job as a care home manager to look after him full time, before he was moved to a home last February. Advertisement Michael Blakstad, whose wife Trisha is in a care home with Alzheimers, said the new guidance is too little too late. Mr Blakstad, 80, said that if measures to allow visits had been brought in earlier it would have saved his wife from going completely down the hill. Shes now in advanced dementia, he said. The manager in the present home is sure that is due to the restrictions of Covid. Meaningful care home visits restarted briefly in December following a major Daily Mail campaign, which led to the rollout of rapid tests for visitors. But several care homes ignored the guidance and campaigners fear todays announcement on the road out of lockdown could be another false dawn. They are backing new legislation, drawn up by Parliaments human rights committee, which would give relatives the legal status as essential family carers and make outright bans illegal. Labours care spokesman Liz Kendall said: To have any confidence that things will really change, we need legislation to enshrine residents rights to visits and end the scandal of blanket visiting bans. James White, head of public affairs at the Alzheimers Society, said: We urge for restrictions to be eased further... to allow sons, daughters and grandchildren to see their loved ones too. Caroline Abrahams, of Age UK, said the new guidance means hundreds of thousands in care homes can realistically hope that their nightmarish separation will be coming to an end soon. But Helen Wildbore, of the Relatives & Residents Association, said: Asking residents to choose a single constant visitor for face-to-face visits will lead to heart-breaking decisions between family members and friends. The proposals fall far too short of what is needed to end the distress of isolation for the most vulnerable residents. For people with dementia and other conditions, touch is crucial. If youre looking to buy kratom online, then finding the right kratom vendorone you can trust to provide quality-assured and safe kratom productsis essential. Kratom, a tropical plant thats part of the coffee family, is indigenous to Southeast Asia and has gained a lot of popularity over the years for potential health benefits associated with its use. Still, finding a trusted source can be rather daunting, especially with the overwhelmingly large number of kratom vendors available online today. Well, no need to worry because weve done all the hard work for you and reviewed the best kratom vendors the market has to offer. This guide lists seven of the best kratom dealers to buy high-quality, directly sourced kratom strains and blends. The Best Kratom Vendors First Look: 1. The Golden Monk Best Kratom Vendor Overall Pros Easy checkout process Fast shipping Variety of strains available Fair prices Discounts available Cons Occasional customer service issues Kratom powder strong for some users The Golden Monk is possibly one of the best sellers on the market despite being relatively new to the business. The company has built a reputation for being a high-quality vendor and has gained recognition from the American Kratom Association[1]. The Golden Monk is also an audited member of the Current Good Manufacturing Practices[2], promising that this seller offers tested, high-quality products. Kratom lovers will also be impressed by the wide variety of kratom products, all of which are competitively priced. Moreover, to avoid contamination, this vendor follows a stringent shipping policy that ensures packing is handled in a controlled environment. There is even an option for free priority shipping for orders over $49.99. However, do keep in mind that some customers have reported strains from this vendor as being slightly on the stronger side. Therefore, novice users should take additional care while choosing products on this site. 2. Kratom Spot Highest-Quality Fair-Trade Kratom Pro Excellent customer support Fast shipping Good variety of strains Good reputation 30-day money-back guarantee Cons No international shipping Strict return policy This Irvine, Calif.-based vendor is another fast-growing, popular kratom seller loved by many. Currently considered one of the largest vendors on the market, Kratom Spot deals in over 30 high-quality kratom strains, all coming in at pretty affordable rates depending on which ones you go for. Thanks to this vendors extensive quality-control practices, customers are promised high-quality, natural kratom sourced directly from Southeast Asia. Its also worth mentioning that all Kratom Spot strains are free from additives, chemicals, and preservatives. Moreover, Kratom Spot is one of the few vendors that accommodate small and large orders. Local kratom sellers can make the most of this by applying for Kratom Spots Wholesale Kratom Program. Plus, they offer free shipping worldwide on any order worth at least $50. However, customers should be aware that this vendor does enforce a rather strict return policy, which can make finding the right strain more difficult for first-timers. Still, should you run into any issues, they offer a quick and active customer care line. 3. Kraken Kratom Best Variety of Kratom Strains Pros Top-notch quality kratom powder Dependable customer support GMP compliant Capsules and powders available Loyalty discount program available Cons Dated site design Occasional shipping problems Being one of the most experienced online kratom vendors in the business, Kraken Kratom stands out for many things, including quality assurance, competitive pricing and fast shipping. They offer some of the more popular strains on the market, including Red Vein, Super Indo, and Bali Kratom. All strains are GMP compliant and must pass stringent quality-control systems that promise safety[2]. You can also buy either the kratom capsules or powders at wholesale prices in bulk. The company has built a strong online reputation by awarding loyalty points to customers who rate their products, subscribe to their newsletter, or share feedback on social media. With 100 points equaling $1, customers can qualify over time for reasonably good discounts. One downside, however, is the sites rather vintage-looking design, which can be quite hard to dismiss. Of course, this doesnt make the site impossible to navigate but will make things potentially trickier for new users. Still, aside from occasional shipping delays, Kraken Kratom is a reliable seller. 4. Organic Kratom USA Best Premium Organic Kratom Pros High-quality kratom from Southeast Asia Impressive capsule-sealed packaging Detailed buying guides available Ideal for veteran buyers Satisfaction guarantee Cons A little pricey A LOT of varieties As the name suggests, Organic Kratom USA stocks all-natural kratom straight from the source in Southeast Asia. According to their website, they source leaves directly from licensed suppliers and offer a wide variety of strains and kratom powders. All strains are rigorously lab tested, and customers have the freedom to create their own unique blends. You can also buy either the kratom capsules or powders at wholesale prices in bulk. Plus, this site offers free shipping for purchases over $89, which is useful for local sellers looking for an online vendor to source from. Unfortunately, however, a notable shortcoming for many customers is the prices. Moreover, with the overwhelmingly large variety of strains available, deciding which kratom powder to buy can be quite difficult. Thats why we recommend Organic Kratom USA to more experienced kratom users who know what theyre looking for. 5. Kratom Crazy Most Competitive Prices Pros Good prices Professional site Wide selection of capsules and powders Great shipping experience 30-day money-back guarantee Cons Occasional payment issues Only unaltered strains available Kratom Crazy is another relatively new entrant into the online kratom vending business but has proved itself despite the competition. While most of the competition boasts enhanced products, Kratom Crazy has stuck by an arguably unique niche by focusing solely on unaltered strains. Still, the site has an extensive product selection that includes all the popular strains, such as Super Green, White Borneo, Red Bali, as well as some liquids and extracts. Products are also screened for contaminants such as microbial toxins and can be purchased in either capsulated or powdered form. After ordering, customers automatically join the Kratom Crazy Club, a customer loyalty program that sends out coupons and discount codes that can be used on future purchases. Moreover, customers who buy in bulk (more than 25 kilograms) will qualify for wholesale pricing. Just remember that Kratom Crazy stocks only unaltered strains. If youre interested in enhanced varieties, you will have to look elsewhere. Also, some customers reported a few issues with the payment system. But this seems to be an isolated problem and shouldnt concern anyone whos considering buying from this vendor. 6. Buy Kratom Bulk USA Best Bulk Kratom Distributor Pros Fast same-day shipping High-quality strains Excellent customer service Ideal for bulk orders Fair wholesale prices Cons Unclear free-shipping policy Occasional delays Buy Kratom Bulk USAs mission is to be the most trusted place to buy kratom online in bulk. The site deals in some of the rarest strains of kratom, ranging from Red Vein, White Vein, Yellow Vein, and even Maeng Da, among others. Moreover, the company prides itself on developing a stronger scientific understanding of kratom globally, with a specific focus on these rare specimens. Buy Kratom Bulk USA offers top-quality, authentic kratom products at very competitive prices. Theyve built a reputation online as a reputable kratom vendor because of their loyal customer base and have an impressive 4.6-star rating on Trustpilot. The only discernible downside appears to be minor delivery issues, with some customers receiving incomplete orders. Though, with so many reviews praising the customer service team, it shouldnt be too difficult to fix any order-related problems. 7. Kats Botanicals Best Quality Kratom Blends Pros High-quality, lab-tested strains Reliable customer support Amazing deals and discounts Specialty blends available 30-day money-back guarantee Cons Limited variety Limited shipping Based in New Jersey, Kats Botanical is aimed at customers who are on the lookout for holistic natural supplements. This, however, does not mean that the company neglects basic kratom products, as Kats Botanicals stocks all the popular strains, including Bali Kratom, Red Vein, White Vein, and more. Moreover, their products are hand-harvested, following 100 percent organic farming practices, and very competitively priced. The company also offers other health supplements, including turmeric, Shilajit, and CBD products, plus a variety of kratom-infused products such as juices, teas, and smoothies. Their kratom soap line is another well-known product growing in popularity among their customers. The only noticeable drawback relates to the companys shipping policy, as the site delivers only to a specified number of states. Though, if youre fortunate enough to be based in one of these states, make sure you take advantage of the deals and discounts on offer. What You Need to Know About the Kratom Industry Whether youre a newbie or an avid user, there are a few key factors that you should pay attention to. Is Kratom Legal? In the United States, kratom is mostly legal; that is, many states allow it, while a few have outlawed it. This is mostly because the drug is yet to receive Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval as research on its benefits and effects is still underway. The same applies to the rest of the world. Kratoms legality generally falls into a gray area in most places, and thus youll need to confirm whether kratom is legal where you live before placing an order. Is Kratom Safe? When appropriately used, kratom can have some beneficial impacts on your health. The key here is appropriate use because theres no guarantee that any strain is 100 percent risk-free. Because the FDA does not regulate this substance, kratoms potential safety hazards are worth paying attention to. For instance, kratom has some addiction risks because it targets the same brain receptors as opioids. In short, this means the dosage has to be monitored to ensure kratom is used safely. Plus, it is advised not to use kratom if you have underlying medical conditions, mental health problems, or are already taking medication. Kratom is also not recommended for pregnant or lactating women. Does Kratom Have Any Side Effects? Kratom may affect different people in different ways, but many studies have reported side effects that cut across the board, especially for long-term users[3]. In most cases, side effects from overuse include insomnia, constipation, loss of appetite, weight loss, and even the discoloration of cheeks. Even though its not addictive in the same way that opioids are, just like any other drug, it can induce dependence. The withdrawal symptoms that can arise from such a scenario include aggression, insomnia, hostility, irritability, muscle pain, and mood swings. What Health Benefits Can You Expect from Using Kratom? Effects may vary from one person to the next, but many users report the following benefits: Pain Relief: Kratom binds to pain receptors in the nervous system and thus people use it as a painkiller for neuropathic and nociceptive pains. Anxiety Reduction: Kratom has sedative effects similar to those of opioids and thus some people take it to relieve anxiety and depression. Improved Concentration: Since kratom induces the release of acetylcholine, serotonin, and dopamine, many use kratom to increase concentration[4]. Enhanced Blood Circulation: Kratom may impact metabolic processes and blood circulation, which in turn may result in higher energy levels. Drug Addiction Treatment: Kratom has been used in drug addiction treatment to emulate opioids without the same high risk of dependence. Moreover, it has been used to remedy withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety, nausea, and vomiting. Improved Mental Health: By stimulating the opioid receptors in the brain, kratom may support its users in achieving some level of mental and emotional stability. Diabetes Management: Some studies have shown that kratom can be very helpful in the regulation of blood sugar levels and the control of appetite, which makes it quite beneficial to people with diabetes[5]. How Do You Pick the Best Kratom Vendors? While trying out as many sites as you can (and spending a fortune) is always an option, we would not recommend it. Instead, you should start by looking for reputable guides that list the best places to buy kratom online, such as the ones found here. Next, you should look at how the vendor tests for quality and assures that its products are free from contaminants. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself these questions and more when looking at any online vendor. Where is the kratom sourced from? What quality assurance protocols do they have in place during lab testing? Do they offer both capsules and powders? Whats the vendors return policy like? Do they offer a money-back guarantee? Then, you should look for legitimate user reviews and consider contacting vendors directly to inquire about their products. This will help you steer clear of scams and low-quality online vendors. Finally, keep your eye out for deals, discounts, and sample packs available. Best Kratom Vendors: The Takeaway There are a lot of things to consider when it comes to choosing the right kratom vendor for you. But hopefully, our top picks and advice will help you figure out where to start. Golden Monk is perhaps the best place to look if you are new to using kratom. Not only are the prices fair, but the company also has a fantastic reputation for delivering consistent, high-quality products. Here, were always working hard to update you on the top-rated online vendors and what they have to offer. Still, for most, its a matter of preference and whether the vendor in question offers the right products, strains, and buying experience that suit you. All in all, stay safe as you shop for kratom online, and buy only from trusted vendors with real customer feedback. Have you bought kratom from any of our top picks? Tell us about your experience below! Sources: A 14-year-old boy who became stuck waist-deep in freezing marshland after running away from home has been rescued by police in a daring mission. Three New Jersey state troopers, Carl Scowcroft, Matthew Hess and Thomas Rheault, were dispatched to save the boy trapped in Salem County. Bodycam footage captured by the officers shows their attempts to free the teenager in Alloway County at 11.30pm on Sunday night. A 14-year-old boy who became stuck waist-deep in freezing marshland after running away from home has been rescued by police in a daring mission The boy had run away from home and become stuck waist-deep a marsh near Sawmill Road. When the troopers arrived, the boy was trapped and unresponsive and was breathing slowly. Sergeant Scowcroft powered through the mud while his two colleagues kept their flashlights focused on the boy. The footage shows Scowfroft saying, 'it's getting cold quick' as he reaches out an arm to the boy. The trooper pulls on both his arms as they struggle to free him from the dense mud. After some effort, Scowcroft managed to pull the boy out and carry him towards safety. Three New Jersey state troopers, Carl Scowcroft, Matthew Hess and Thomas Rheault, were dispatched to save the boy trapped in Salem County The boy had run away from home and become stuck waist-deep a marsh near Sawmill Road The boy was suffering from hypothermia after the rescue, officials said. At the time of the rescue, the temperature was recorded at around 20 degrees at nearby Millville Municipal Airport. Later, fire fighters arrived at the scene and helped secure the area and continue the rescue mission. The boy was taken to Salem Memorial Hospital and he is expected to make a full recovery. The footage shows Scowfroft saying, 'it's getting cold quick' as he reaches out an arm to the boy The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved production linked incentive (PLI) scheme for pharmaceutical sector for financial year 2020-21 to 2028-29 to increase investment and production in diversified product categories, and the scheme is expected to bring in investment of Rs 15,000 crore in the sector. "India exports pharmaceutical products to over 200 countries, but high-end patented drugs are imported. The scheme aims to make Indian pharmaceutical industry globally competitive," Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said while briefing the media on the decisions taken by the Cabinet. The scheme is expected to promote production of high-value products in the country and increase the value addition in exports. Total incremental sales of Rs 2,94,000 crore and total incremental exports of Rs 1,96,000 crore are estimated during six years from 2022-23 to 2027-28, the government said in a release. "The scheme is expected to generate employment for both skilled and un-skilled personnel, estimated at 20,000 direct and 80,000 indirect jobs as a result of growth in the sector," it said. It will promote innovation for development of complex and high-tech products, including products of emerging therapies and in-vitro diagnostic devices, as also self-reliance in important drugs. The scheme is expected to bring in investment of Rs 15,000 crore in pharmaceutical sector. "The scheme will be part of the umbrella scheme for the development of pharmaceutical industry. The objective of the scheme is to enhance India's manufacturing capabilities by increasing investment and production in the sector and contributing to product diversification to high value goods in the pharmaceutical sector," the government said. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told a Congolese official on Wednesday that Cairo supports a Sudanese proposal to form an international quartet committee to mediate the stalled negotiations on the disputed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). The proposed committee would include the US, the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN), and the African Union (AU), and would be under the auspices of Felix Tshisekedi, the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the current head of the AU. In a meeting in the Egyptian capital, Shoukry discussed with Alphonse Ntumba, the coordinator of the panel concerned with the DRC's presidency of the African Union (AU), the latest developments on the GERD. Minister Shoukry expressed hope that the proposed methodology would push the negotiations forward and assist the three countries in reaching the desired agreement as soon as possible, foreign ministry spokesman Ahmed Hafez said in a statement following the meeting. The minister also expressed Egypt's appreciation for the Congolese endeavours in following up on the latest development in the GERD issue. According to Hafez, Shoukry told the Congolese official that Egypt hopes the DRC can play a "key role" to help reach a legally binding agreement on the rules of filling and operating the Ethiopian dam. Since last year, the AU has been mediating the talks between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia over the dispute caused by GERD. The last round of AU negotiations, mediated by South Africa, the former president of the AU, stalled in January due to Khartoum's withdrawal from the latest meetings in objection to the methodology upon which the talks had been held. Sudan called for granting a bigger role to the experts involved in the talks instead of holding direct discussions between the three nations. Ethiopia, as well as Egypt, rejects Sudan's demand. The US and the EU have been participating in the AU-sponsored talks as observers. Before the AU stepped in to mediate the long-standing dispute, the US Treasury Department hosted more than one round of tripartite talks from November 2019 until February 2020, but Ethiopia withdrew from the last session of talks and refused to sign any binding deal. Egypt fears the project will significantly cut its crucial water supplies from the River Nile, while Sudan has concerns over how the reservoir will be managed. Ethiopia says the massive project, which it hopes will make it Africas largest power exporter, is key to its development efforts. Egypt has stressed on multiple occasions that it supports Ethiopia's development goals, but has insisted that a legally binding agreement between the three sides is the only acceptable way to end the dispute and safeguard its water rights. However, Ethiopia completed the first filling of the dam last summer and announced plans to complete the second filling in July without waiting for a deal to be signed. Short link: NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Latham & Watkins LLP1 is pleased to announce that 19 counsel have been elected to the partnership, effective March 1. The group consists of experienced and trusted advisers who collaborate with clients on a range of corporate, litigation, finance, and regulatory matters. The counsel promotions announced today follow the recent election of 33 associates to the partnership, announced in October 2020 and effective January 1, 2021. "We congratulate our newest partners, all of whom are exceptional lawyers who embody our culture of teamwork, innovation, and unwavering commitment to client service. Through hard work and dedication, they have built practices that contribute significantly to the growth of our firm across key markets and in important industry sectors," said Rich Trobman, Chair and Managing Partner of Latham & Watkins. The counsel who have been promoted include: Chicago Nineveh Alkhas is a member of the Benefits, Compensation & Employment Practice in the Tax Department. She focuses on labor and employment law, advising clients in corporate transactions and counseling on day-to-day employment matters. She capitalizes on her employment litigation and counseling experience to assess risks and strategize with respect to labor and employment matters implicated in a deal. She received her JD from the University of Missouri School of Law in 2005. Laura N. Ferrell is a member of the Investment Funds Practice in the Corporate Department. She advises a broad cross-section of the asset management industry on complex legal, regulatory, and compliance matters, including SEC examinations and investigations. In addition to advising leading global financial services institutions, she represents public and private investment vehicles such as private equity funds, private credit funds, and business development companies. She received her JD from the University of Michigan Law School in 2009. Cindy Caillavet Sinclair is a member of the Banking Practice in the Finance Department. She represents financial institutions, private equity firms, and corporate borrowers in a wide range of leveraged finance transactions, including acquisition financings, working capital revolvers, large cap and middle market cash flow and asset-based lending facilities, reserve-based lending facilities, and debtor-in-possession and exit facilities. She received her JD from Northwestern University School of Law in 2005. Hamburg Ulrich Klockenbrink is a member of the Restructuring & Special Situations Practice in the Finance Department. He regularly guides clients through complex restructuring, distressed M&A, and enforcement situations, both in and out of court. His clients include investors, shareholders, lenders, lender groups, steering committees, insolvency administrators, and distressed companies in restructuring, insolvency, and financing matters. He earned his LLM from the University of Virginia in 2010 and his Dr. iur. as well as an Executive MBA in Mergers & Acquisitions from Westfalische Wilhelms-University in 2007. He completed the Second German State Exam at the Higher Regional Court of Dusseldorf in 2009 and the First German State Exam at Westfalische Wilhelms-University in 2005. Hong Kong Simon Hawkins is a member of the Financial Regulatory Practice in the Corporate Department and is Co-Chair of the firm's global Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Task Force. His practice focuses on non-contentious financial regulatory matters. He has extensive experience advising banks, broker-dealers, asset managers, insurers, and fintech companies on conduct and compliance matters relating to financial regulation in Hong Kong and the broader Asia-Pacific region. He also frequently advises on the regulatory aspects of capital markets, structured finance, and M&A transactions involving financial institutions and fintech companies. He received his LPC from BPP Law School, London in 2007. Richard Watkins is a member of the Mergers & Acquisitions Practice in the Corporate Department. He advises clients on private equity, M&A, and other corporate finance transactions, particularly cross-border M&A (ranging from buyouts to minority investments), growth capital, and consortia and joint ventures. He has a broad range of experience on both buy-side and sell-side transactions in a variety of industries, particularly asset management, TMT, real estate, and retail across regions. He received his LPC from College of Law, London in 2007 and a Graduate Diploma in Law from College of Law, London in 2006. London Thomas W. Cochran is a member of the Structured Finance Practice in the Finance Department. He advises on a wide range of securitization and structured finance transactions in the context of portfolio acquisitions, corporate restructurings, broader M&A transactions, and general treasury management. He has experience with traditional public securitizations and private warehouse financings, involving both well-established and esoteric asset classes. He received his LPC from BPP Law School, London in 2007 and a Graduate Diploma in Law from Oxford Brookes University in 2006. JP Sweny is a member of the Project Development & Finance Practice in the Finance Department. He represents sponsors, financial institutions, and private equity investors on a wide range of project finance and structured finance transactions, particularly in the energy and infrastructure sectors. He earned his LPC from College of Law, London in 2002 and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Law from College of Law, London in 2001. Seonaid Todisco is a member of the Banking Practice in the Finance Department. She advises clients in all aspects of core and hybrid infrastructure, acting for a wide range of infrastructure funds, bank lenders, institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, and pension funds. She received her LPC from College of Law, Moorgate in 2007 and her LLB from the University of Nottingham in 2004. David Wallace is a member of the Restructuring & Special Situations Practice in the Finance Department. He advises on direct lending, private debt, and preferred equity transactions, opportunistic credit, and equity investments, as well as complex multi-jurisdictional debt and equity restructurings. His clients include issuers and investors alike, including asset managers, credit and hedge funds, and other alternative capital providers, as well as corporates, private equity sponsors, and management teams. He received his LPC from College of Law, London in 2008 and a Bachelor of Laws from University College London in 2007. Los Angeles Arash Aminian Baghai is a member of the Capital Markets Practice in the Corporate Department. He advises issuers, underwriters, and investors in securities offerings, particularly equity-linked securities transactions involving complex securities laws as well as tax and regulatory elements. He received his JD from Hastings College of the Law in 2001 and is a Chartered Financial Analyst. Brian P. Duff is a member of the Mergers & Acquisitions Practice in the Corporate Department who represents strategic and private equity clients in public and private M&A transactions, particularly emerging companies and clients in the healthcare and life sciences sector. He also regularly advises public and private clients on corporate governance, securities law matters, and joint ventures. He received his JD from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law in 2005. Beth P. Gordie is a member of the Project Siting & Approvals Practice in the Environment, Land & Resources Department. Her practice focuses on land use, energy, and infrastructure matters. She advises developers, utilities, and other clients on all aspects of project development, from initial permitting and entitlement strategy to governmental approvals. She received her JD from Seattle University School of Law in 2003. Madrid Ivan Rabanillo is a member of the Transactional Tax Practice in the Tax Department. He advises Spanish multinational groups and international investors on the tax aspects of cross-border M&A, financing, capital markets, and restructuring transactions, dealing with cutting-edge tax structuring issues. He earned his LLM from New York University School of Law in 2007, a Masters in Taxation from the University of Barcelona in 2003, and a law degree from Universidade Salvador in 2001. He is admitted to practice in Spain, Brazil, and the state of New York. New York Jason C. Ewart is a member of the Capital Markets Practice in the Corporate Department. He advises underwriters and issuers on high-value debt transactions, with a focus on advising clients in high-yield debt offerings and acquisition financings. His work also encompasses bridge loan facilities, convertible debt offerings, restructurings, exchange offers, and consent solicitation processes. He received his JD from the University of Chicago Law School in 2007. Paris Mathilde Saltiel is a member of the Antitrust & Competition Practice in the Litigation & Trial Department. She represents international companies before the European Commission and the French competition authority in merger control proceedings and antitrust investigations, and coordinates multi-jurisdictional merger filings for global transactions. She advises clients in industries including telecommunications, financial services, and energy. She graduated from Sciences Po Paris in Business Law in 2008 and earned an Advanced Master in European Law from the University of Paris V in 2009. Suzana Sava-Montanari is a member of the Capital Markets Practice in the Corporate Department. She advises financial institutions, buy-side market participants, and corporations in connection with derivatives and structured finance transactions and regulatory matters. She received her LPC from BPP Law School in 2003 and her LLB from the London School of Economics in 2001. Washington, D.C. Rachel Weiner Cohen is a member of the Intellectual Property Litigation Practice in the Litigation & Trial Department. Her practice focuses on complex intellectual property infringement disputes. She represents clients across a range of industries and technologies, including medical devices, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, power, automotive, multimedia, digital applications, and social networking. She has represented clients in trial and appellate matters and has experience with international arbitrations and general commercial litigation matters. She received her JD from the American University Washington College of Law in 2008. Andrew Sorkin is a member of the Restructuring & Special Situations Practice in the Finance Department whose practice focuses on Chapter 11 and out-of-court restructurings. He represents debtors, creditors, shareholders, debtor-in-possession lenders, asset purchasers, investors, and professionals in restructuring matters spanning a variety of industries and sectors, including energy, telecommunications, manufacturing, power, automotive, and retail. He received his JD from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2007. About Latham & Watkins (lw.com) Latham & Watkins delivers innovative solutions to complex legal and business challenges around the world. From a global platform, our lawyers advise clients on market-shaping transactions, high-stakes litigation and trials, and sophisticated regulatory matters. Latham is one of the world's largest providers of pro bono services, steadfastly supports initiatives designed to advance diversity within the firm and the legal profession, and is committed to exploring and promoting environmental sustainability. Notes to Editors 1 Latham & Watkins operates worldwide as a limited liability partnership organized under the laws of the State of Delaware (USA) with affiliated limited liability partnerships conducting the practice in France, Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore, and the United Kingdom and as an affiliated partnership conducting the practice in Japan. Latham & Watkins operates in South Korea as a Foreign Legal Consultant Office. Latham & Watkins works in cooperation with the Law Office of Salman M. Al-Sudairi in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Contacts Rich Trobman, Chair and Managing Partner, +1.212.906.1650 SOURCE Latham & Watkins Related Links http://www.lw.com Firm Acquires two Historic Industrial Buildings in Amsterdam and now Manages a Portfolio of Assets throughout Europe on behalf of E.ON Pension Trust, one of its Institutional Investment Partners Global real estate and investment company Jamestown today announced it has significantly expanded its global presence and now has more than $1 billion in European assets under management with the acquisition of another two buildings in Amsterdam, and a mandate to manage a portfolio of properties across Europe on behalf of one of its institutional investment partners and co-investors, E.ON Pension Trust. This latest news about its European portfolio comes on the heels of Jamestown's recent purchase of three office buildings in Cologne, Germany, and just over a year after purchasing the iconic Groot Handelsgebouw in Rotterdam, one of the largest mixed-use buildings in the Netherlands, which currently houses more than 450 businesses. "After entering the European market just over a year ago, Jamestown has grown its platform with $1 billion in assets under management and a knowledgeable real estate team headquartered in Cologne, Germany and offices in Amsterdam, London, and Madrid," said Jamestown president Michael Phillips. "We continue to see many opportunities for future growth. Our vertically integrated team structure is at the root of our value-add asset management strategy enabling us to create innovative spaces while simultaneously preserving cities' industrial pasts. As our European footprint expands, we will continue to focus on sustainable, adaptive reuse projects that bring new life to local communities." Jamestown's newly acquired Dutch assets are in Amsterdam's up-and-coming Schinkel neighborhood and include the historic A-Factorij, previously owned by E.ON Pension Trust and home to one of Jamestown's European offices, and Helicopterstraat, a property previously owned by Gerose and comprised of four buildings on the adjoining Helicopterstraat, Vliegtuigstraat, and Valschermkade. The properties were acquired in partnership with E.ON Pension Trust and the RAG-Stiftung. E.ON Pension Trust made the decision to include A-Factorij in the co-investment given their belief in the long-term potential of the neighborhood, and that future opportunities in the neighborhood with the newly acquired properties are better acted on as co-investors. In addition, Jamestown will provide asset management services for a portfolio of properties owned by E.ON Pension Trust in Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the UK. The properties Jamestown will manage include a mix of shopping centers, office buildings, and mixed-use developments. "We have known Jamestown for a long time and they have been a great partner to us in the US," said Udo Schaffer, Vice President, Head of Real Estate, E.ON SE. "Jamestown is one of our preferred global partners given their active approach to asset management and focus on creative and out-of-the-box thinking. After several co-investments with Jamestown in Europe, we now look forward to working with them on the E.ON Pension Trust Separate Account Portfolio." A-Factorij (Pilotenstraat 35-45), a 128,177 square foot 11,908 square meter former bicycle factory was originally built in 1955 and converted into a creative office space in 2002. Jamestown has been involved in management of the property since 2018. Adjacent to A-Factorij is Helicopterstraat, a 67,102 square foot 6,234 square meter commercial property comprising four interconnected offices and industrial space, with a showroom and gym on the ground floor. The Schinkel district is transforming from industrial and loft offices to a true mixed-use community with a residential focus. The Amsterdam municipality plans to turn the 247-acre neighborhood into a vibrant, innovative, and sustainable district with international allure. Gerose was represented by Appelhoven Real Estate Advisors in this off-market transaction. Van Ooijen Accountants Tax Advisors (Paul van der Aar and Adriaan Daniels) were the legal tax advisors of the seller, together with HMK Notarissen. Greenberg Traurig represented Jamestown. "This area of Amsterdam has generated a lot of interest from institutional and private investors from around the world," said Stijn Uijthoven of Appelhoven Real Estate Advisors. "The properties Jamestown has acquired from Gerose Vastgoed were designed to be flexible and sustainable, and responsive to the changing neighborhood. It was a pleasure to work with Jamestown on this transaction and I look forward to seeing the evolution of the properties and the larger community in the coming years." Jamestown has a long-standing commitment to securing a better future for its tenants, residents, visitors, and investors by creating spaces that are sustainable, healthy, and inclusive. In 2020, after achieving its goal to reduce energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 20 percent four years ahead of schedule, Jamestown committed to reducing its GHG emissions once again by committing to achieve net zero operational carbon by 2050. Jamestown also joined the ranks of other forward-thinking global organizations and 193 countries, and has adopted the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals into its corporate sustainability strategy. For high-resolution images of A-Factorij and Helicopterstraat, please click here. About Jamestown Jamestown is a design-focused real estate investment and management company with a 37-year track record and a clear mission: to transform spaces into innovation hubs and community centers. Jamestown employs more than 400 people worldwide with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, and Cologne, Germany, and offices in Amsterdam, Bogota, Boston, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, New York, and San Francisco. The company is well-known in the industry for its market discipline. Since its founding in 1983, Jamestown has executed transactions in excess of $35 billion, and as of December 31, 2020, the company has assets under management of $12.1 billion. Current and previous iconic projects include Chelsea Market in New York City, Industry City in Brooklyn, Ponce City Market in Atlanta, Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, and the Innovation and Design Building in Boston. In addition to its portfolio in key markets throughout the U.S., Jamestown continues to expand its investment footprint to South America and Europe. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005702/en/ Contacts: Abigail Levene Stampa +31-20-404-2630 jamestown@stampacommunications.com A simulated red dye tracer released from the Beaufort Gyre in the Artic Ocean (center top) shows freshwater transport through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, along Baffin Island to the western Labrador Sea, off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, where it reduces surface salinity. At the lower left is Newfoundland (triangular land mass) surrounded by orange for fresher water, with Canada's Gulf of St. Lawrence above colored yellow. Credit: Francesca Samsel and Greg Abram Freshwater is accumulating in the Arctic Ocean. The Beaufort Sea, which is the largest Arctic Ocean freshwater reservoir, has increased its freshwater content by 40% over the past two decades. How and where this water will flow into the Atlantic Ocean is important for local and global ocean conditions. A study from the University of Washington, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that this freshwater travels through the Canadian Archipelago to reach the Labrador Sea, rather than through the wider marine passageways that connect to seas in Northern Europe. The open-access study was published Feb. 23 in Nature Communications. "The Canadian Archipelago is a major conduit between the Arctic and the North Atlantic," said lead author Jiaxu Zhang, a UW postdoctoral researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies. "In the future, if the winds get weaker and the freshwater gets released, there is a potential for this high amount of water to have a big influence in the Labrador Sea region." The finding has implications for the Labrador Sea marine environment, since Arctic water tends to be fresher but also rich in nutrients. This pathway also affects larger oceanic currents, namely a conveyor-belt circulation in the Atlantic Ocean in which colder, heavier water sinks in the North Atlantic and comes back along the surface as the Gulf Stream. Fresher, lighter water entering the Labrador Sea could slow that overturning circulation. The Beaufort Gyre is a clockwise wind pattern in the western Arctic Ocean that causes freshwater to accumulate at the oceans surface. When those winds relax, the freshwater drains not through Fram Strait, but through the narrow channels of the Canadian Archipelago to reach the Labrador Sea, off the coast of Canadas Newfoundland and Labrador. Credit: University of Washington "We know that the Arctic Ocean has one of the biggest climate change signals," said co-author Wei Cheng at the UW-based Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Atmosphere Studies. "Right now this freshwater is still trapped in the Arctic. But once it gets out, it can have a very large impact." Fresher water reaches the Arctic Ocean through rain, snow, rivers, inflows from the relatively fresher Pacific Ocean, as well as the recent melting of Arctic Ocean sea ice. Fresher, lighter water floats at the top, and clockwise winds in the Beaufort Sea push that lighter water together to create a dome. When those winds relax, the dome will flatten and the freshwater gets released into the North Atlantic. "People have already spent a lot of time studying why the Beaufort Sea freshwater has gotten so high in the past few decades," said Zhang, who began the work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "But they rarely care where the freshwater goes, and we think that's a much more important problem." This map shows the study region of the Beaufort Gyre and nearby waters, with colors showing the average surface salinity for 1983-2008. Labels show the Labrador Seas exit region, Nares Strait, Lancaster Sound, Davis Strait and Fram Strait. Credit: Zhang et al./Nature Communications Using a technique Zhang developed to track ocean salinity, the researchers simulated the ocean circulation and followed the Beaufort Sea freshwater's spread in a past event that occurred from 1983 to 1995. Their experiment showed that most of the freshwater reached the Labrador Sea through the Canadian Archipelago, a complex set of narrow passages between Canada and Greenland. This region is poorly studied and was thought to be less important for freshwater flow than the much wider Fram Strait, which connects to the Northern European seas. In the model, the 1983-1995 freshwater release traveled mostly along the North American route and significantly reduced the salinities in the Labrador Seaa freshening of 0.2 parts per thousand on its shallower western edge, off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, and of 0.4 parts per thousand inside the Labrador Current. The volume of freshwater now in the Beaufort Sea is about twice the size of the case studied, at more than 23,300 cubic kilometers, or more than 5,500 cubic miles. This volume of freshwater released into the North Atlantic could have significant effects. The exact impact is unknown. The study focused on past events, and current research is looking at where today's freshwater buildup might end up and what changes it could trigger. "A freshwater release of this size into the subpolar North Atlantic could impact a critical circulation pattern, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which has a significant influence on Northern Hemisphere climate," said co-author Wilbert Weijer at Los Alamos National Lab. Explore further The Arctic Ocean was covered by a shelf ice and filled with freshwater More information: Jiaxu Zhang et al. Labrador Sea freshening linked to Beaufort Gyre freshwater release, Nature Communications (2021). Journal information: Nature Communications Jiaxu Zhang et al. Labrador Sea freshening linked to Beaufort Gyre freshwater release,(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21470-3 Manila, Feb 25 : Two police officers were killed and four others injured during a shootout between the police and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) agents outside a mall in the capital Manila on Wednesday night, police said. Police Major General Vicente Danao, chief of the National Capital Region Police Office, said the injured include a police officer and three PDEA agents, the Xinhua news reported. PDEA spokesperson Derrick Carreon told a television interview that the drug agents were conducting a buy-bust operation at the mall in the Quezon City suburb when the shootout broke out. The mall management confirmed that the shootout took place past 6 p.m. local time. "We have secured all access to the mall, so all shoppers are safe inside," the mall said in a statement. The police said that a joint board of inquiry composed of personnel from the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the PDEA will be established following the shootout. "In the interest of determining the truth behind the incident, a joint PNP-PDEA Board of Inquiry will be formed to determine what transpired and who should be held liable," the PNP said in a statement. When Turkey launched its Afrin offensive in early 2018 to dislodge Kurdish minorities from Northern Syria, the country ordered Facebook to block the page of a prominent militia group in the area known as the Peoples Protection Units or YPG. Forced to make a decision, the company prioritized staying online over objecting to censorship, new internal emails obtained by ProPublica show. Since then, the social media giant has blocked users in Turkey from accessing the YPGs Facebook page. Facebook complied with the order even though, like the US government, it does not consider the group a terrorist organization. ... We are in favor of geo-blocking YPG content if the prospects of a full-service blockage are great, the team that accessed the situation wrote to Joel Kaplan, the companys vice-president of global public policy. Geo-blocking the YPG is not without risk activists outside of Turkey will likely notice our actions, and our decision may draw unwanted attention to our overall geo-blocking policy. The subsequent discussion was short. When Kaplan told Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and CEO Mark Zuckerberg he agreed with the recommendation, Sandberg sent a single-sentence response. I am fine with this, she said. When asked about the emails, Facebook confirmed it blocked the page after it received a legal order from the Turkish government. We strive to preserve voice for the greatest number of people. There are, however, times when we restrict content based on local law even if it does not violate our community standards, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told ProPublica. In this case, we made the decision based on our policies concerning government requests to restrict content and our international human rights commitments. Publicly, Facebook has also said free speech is one of its core tenets. We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, and we work hard to protect and defend these values around the world, it said in a recent blog post on Turkey. President Joe Biden was swept into office amid arguably the largest protest movement in U.S. history, so its worth taking a closer look at his chief public safety funding proposal, one that is central to his own legacy on police reform. Biden has promised to reinvigorate funding for the Department of Justices Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, office with a $300 million investment in putting new community policing officers on the street. But funneling Department of Justice dollars toward community policing initiatives and the COPS office is the wrong approach if the federal government truly wants to improve public safety and health for communities in this moment. It will neither drive structural changes to American policing nor tackle the root causes of gun violence in cities that have seen a sharp uptick in shootings since the pandemics inception. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Subscribe to the Slatest newsletter A daily email update of the stories you need to read right now. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. Please enable javascript to use form. Email address: Send me updates about Slate special offers. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Sign Up Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. Instead, the Biden administration should take a hard look at the history of the COPS office and federal spending on so-called community-oriented policing efforts. Community policing initiativeswhich seek to emphasize trust and partnership in solving crime between communities and officers who intimately know the neighborhoods they patrolwere a hallmark of the Obama administrations post-Ferguson-era reform package, but did not prevent another legitimacy crisis for American policing. But the story of COPS is darker than a benign police reform proven ineffective. It has expanded the federal governments capacity to bankroll some of the more harmful misadventures in modern American policing. The COPS office was established by the 1994 crime law to provide federal grants to support training and hiring for local community policing efforts. President Bill Clinton argued that lowering crime was the major challenge facing the Department of Justice and the country, and he identified community policing as a new frontier for crime fighting: Police had often been viewed as occupiers, but now they would be woven seamlessly into the fabric of neighborhood life. Initially, COPS served as a vehicle for Clintons campaign promise to put 100,000 new community police officers on Americas streets (a goal that was not quite met), and averaged more than $1 billion in annual spending. Biden was one of its chief architects in Congress. Advertisement Advertisement While funding stalled to nearly zero in the mid-2000s, the Great Recession revitalized COPS, when Congress allocated $1 billion through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for the office to help local police departments facing budget cuts retain officers. Its maintained higher appropriation levels since, including over $500 million awarded last year, although the program has not been formally reauthorized by Congress. The office has now funded more than $16 billion for the community policing initiatives of state and local law enforcement agencies. The rate of federal funding for law enforcement has increased far more than state and local spending, but what has America received for the billions invested in COPS? In a 2001 Baltimore Sun op-ed titled Bush: Dont Cut COPS, then-Sen. Biden called COPS the most successful crime fighting strategy this nation has ever seen. He has also claimed that you cant find another program as meaningful as the COPS program that has worked so well. Advertisement But there is no universal evidence that COPS has had a considerable impact on violent crime rates, or that it was a leading driver of the great crime decline of the 90s. A 2017 congressional analysis of research on the effect of COPS hiring grants on crime in the late 90s concluded that they yielded at best a modest (and potentially no) reduction in crime and may have been less effective in large cities. Another study argued the grants had little to no effect on crime in the 90s. Other congressional research suggested that any potential benefits from crime reduction did not outweigh the programs cost. One recent, well-designed paper that studied COPS grants through the 2009 stimulus bill (when crime was much lower than in the 90s, but the economy was in turmoil) found statistically significant reductions in crime. However, the author notes that crime reduction benefits came from maintaining existing staffing levels by avoiding layoffs rather than from adding many new cops on the beat, as was the case with COPS in the 90s; and that its not clear the benefits of the program outweighed the social costs. Advertisement Advertisement While COPS grants cost-effectiveness and impact on crime are inconclusive, there is clearer evidence that the office has not served public health and safety in other respects. The COPS office has fueled the rise of police presence in public schools that surged in the 90s through its Cops in Schools program. Between 1999 and 2005, COPS allocated over $750 million to cities to hire thousands of school police known as school resource officers, or SROs. Less than 20 percent of schools had police in their halls by the mid-90s, but now most of them do, and this has led to the increased surveillance and criminalization of studentsparticularly students of colorand the expansion of the school-to-prison pipeline. While research has not shown that SROs improve school safety, it has demonstrated that school policing leads to a cascade of collateral consequences for the behavioral health and educational development of children. Advertisement Because the provision of the crime bill that created COPS never defined community policingan inherently nebulous conceptthe office itself has been able to determine what counts and has put very few restrictions on the nature of police practices and functions it funds. In practice, COPS grants have been used to advance some of the most harmful and aggressive features of modern policing, including the increased militarization of law enforcement and the use of quality-of-life enforcement practices like stop and frisk. Indeed, one of the progenitors of the Broken Windows theory has argued that this style of policing is a core element of community policing. Advertisement In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Washington Post columnist Radley Balko documents how COPS grants were used to hire officers for SWAT raids and specialized tactical units, as departments saw no conflict between strategies that promoted community collaboration in problem-solving and those that emphasized an aggressive, trooplike mentality to fight supposed threats. In The First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa notes that 60 percent of community policing officers who were surveyed said they spent some, little, or no time on community problem-solving, but 25 percent spent most or all of their time on the broken windows style of policing that cities like New York (historically a large COPs grant recipient) began popularizing around the same time as the rise of COPS. Advertisement But even when COPS funding has been used for initiatives that are more consistent with the original intention behind community policing, the results have been middling. Policymakers from both sides of the aisle believed that embedding officers in neighborhoods would create more respectful and transparent interactions between police and the public and curb police brutality. COPS dollars went to help support the Obama administrations National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, its flagship police reform campaign. An Urban Institute evaluation found that it was not successful in consistently improving police-community relations, much less reducing racial disparities in arrests or use-of-force incidents. Advertisement Advertisement Its also not clear what unique purpose COPS serves, as one of a number of public safety grant-making agencies housed in the Department of Justice. One congressional study concluded that there was structural overlap between the Office of Justice Programs and COPS, and critics have pointed out that other federal programs, like Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants, have been used to subsidize the same local law enforcement activities. Advertisement At a five-year retrospective on COPS in 1999, Bill Clinton heaped praise on Biden and implored Congress not to let funding for the program expire: And it is true that we would never have been able to do this without the leadership of Sen. Biden. You see Joe Biden up here, full of enthusiasmwouldnt it break your heart if it turned out to be wrong? This victory lap would prove to be premature, even by Bidens own later standards. Bidens Plan for Strengthening Americas Commitment to Justice claims that COPS has never been funded to fulfill the original vision for community policing. But the legacy of COPS is a part of Bidens own legacy, and its unclear where he thinks community policing went wrong, or whether he just thinks we arent spending enough money on it. Advertisement Advertisement DOJ grant-making has fueled the growth of militarized and racist tendencies in law enforcement under the amiable name of community policing for too long already. Rethinking this failed memento of the Clinton-Biden years could mean reorienting federal public safety spending toward programs that both improve community well-being and shrink the footprint of the criminal legal system. There are more effective and less punitive investments the federal government could make to reduce violence, pursue racial justice, and make communities safer and healthier. President Biden doesnt have to say defund the police to stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and other advocates who want to divest from policing and invest in communities; his budget can do the talking for him. Federal spending should nurture the seeds of new community-based public safety systems that are germinating through innovative social programs in municipalities around the countrynot more COPS. New Delhi, Feb 24 : The Uttar Pradesh and the Punjab governments have locked horns over whether a state government can file a petition under the Constitution's Article 32 to claim fundamental rights. The UP government had moved the Supreme Court under this constitutional provision seeking direction to the Punjab government and Rupnagar (Punjab) jail authority to immediately hand over gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari's custody to Banda (UP) district jail. Ansari is lodged in the Rupnagar jail since January 2019. Citing the top court verdict in Union of India vs V. Sriharan, the UP government contended that the court entertained the petition filed by the Centre as there existed dispute between it and a state bearing directly on fundamental rights. "It is submitted that there exists no explicit or implicit bar for filing a Petition under Article 32 by the state as long as there exists a requirement of order/direction to be passed by the Hon'ble Court to ensure the protection of fundamental rights enshrined under Part III of the Constitution", said the UP government in written submissions filed through advocate Garima Prasad. Article 32 deals with 'Right to Constitutional Remedies', and gives the right to move the apex court for the enforcement of the rights conferred in the Constitution. In Ansari's custody, the UP government said that in the present case, the dispute is between two states affecting the fundamental right to speedy trial which is implicit in Article 14, 19(1) (a) and 21 of the Constitution. "It is submitted that there is no restriction specified as to who per se can file a petition for the enforcement of fundamental rights of the citizens under Article 32, thus, anyone including the state, can also approach this Hon'ble Court seeking reliefs pertaining to the enforcement and protection of the Fundamental Rights," it added. The Punjab government has contested these claims, saying that only a citizen can move the top court under Article 32 to claim fundamental rights and a state cannot invoke this provision. "State by itself has not been given any right to move this court under Article 32 under any circumstances.. therefore, the state of UP is not competent to file the present writ petition as it is neither citizen to whom the right is conferred and neither it has any fundamental rights which are exclusively conferred upon citizens," it said, seeking dismissal of UP's plea. Earlier in the day, the Uttar Pradesh government told the Supreme Court that the Punjab government is "shamelessly" protecting Ansari as he is not being handed back to UP where he faces trial for several heinous offences before a special MP/MLA court. The UP government added that more than 30 FIRs and more than 14 criminal trials including heinous crimes of murder and under Gangster Act are pending against Ansari in various MP/MLA courts, where his personal appearance is sought. Those who have had experiences with Lyme disease must be ecstatic. Because according to a report by WBUR (Bostons NPR news station), a springtime shot to prevent Lyme disease could become available in 2023. The shot has been developed by MassBiologics, the nonprofit unit of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worchester. Take note however, its not a vaccine, it is what the researchers call pre-exposure prophylaxis, known as PrEP: It delivers anti-Lyme antibodies directly to the patient rather than triggering the patients own immune system to make the antibodies as vaccines do. Dr. Mark Klempner of MassBiologics and his colleagues pinpointed antibodies as being the key to immunity against Lyme disease after a vaccine failed. Klempner said: A Lyme vaccine that used to be publicly available had been withdrawn and since we understood the mechanism of protection there, we were able to go right after the molecule that we thought would be protective. Federal approval was granted at the end of last year to begin human testing, and that phase one, clinical trial began last week with 66 subjects, said Klempner. The initial testing is not being done in Massachusetts, however. It is being done in a location where very few Lyme disease infections occur Lincoln, Nebraska. This will help them be more sure that any antibodies against the Lyme bacteria detected in the subjects blood came from the shot, not from a previous infection. Klempner says this testing will likely last through 2021, to make sure the antibodies can last through an entire tick season. After that, testing for how effective the shot is will hopefully begin in 2022. This will put the shot on target for wide public availability in 2023. For decades, Lyme disease has been on the rise, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, and it is one of the hardest diseases to diagnose. The Center for Disease and Prevention estimates it infects nearly a half million Americans each year. Read more: Mumbai-based data centre firm Web Werks said storage and information management company Iron Mountain will invest $150 million primary equity over the next two years in Web Werks. Post-investment, Iron Mountain will be the majority stakeholder in the venture. Once completed, this transaction will allow Web Werks to accelerate its expansion across different Indian cities and build capacity. The transaction is expected to close within the next 90 days, subject to customary closing conditions. "We have 15 data centres worldwide, 11 in North America, three in Europe, and one in Singapore. We are always on the lookout to expand our footprint geographically. Asia is one of the key markets that we are looking at, because Asia is forecast to grow tremendously over the next five years. Since Iron Mountain has only one data center in Asia...India is one of our first priority to expand into because that is what a lot of our customers are actually looking at," said Michael Goh, General Manager Asia Pacifc at Iron Mountain Data Centers. The investment enables Web Werks to expand its operations in its three existing markets immediately and expand into Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. Web Werks houses six worldwide Points of Presence (POPs), provides 4 megawatts (MW) of existing capacity, supports over 6,000 servers and supports 850 clients. "What we bring on the table is hyper connected data centers, which is very well interconnected. And you know, Iron Mountain comes with hyperscale experience, which we do not have...," said Nikhil Rathi, CEO, Web Werks. He added that given Iron Mountain's expertise and Web Werks' understanding of the Indian market, more facilities could be up and running in the next 15 to 18 months. This investment reflects Iron Mountains commitment to invest in high growth, good return global markets to continue to meet our customers requirements. The India data centre market is projected to grow exponentially in the coming years and Iron Mountain is excited to be an early mover into a market where the demand is high and the supply is low. stated Mark Kidd, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Iron Mountain Data Centers. Web Werks has a highly respected and seasoned leadership team; we are delighted to not only support their continued growth and success but also to provide our existing Iron Mountain data center customers access to this growing and thriving market. Pharmaceuticals, stock broking, insurance, gaming and over the top streaming services are areas that saw high demand for data centres as people started working from home during the pandemic, said Rathi, and this is only set to go higher as more and more organisations become digital. Deutsche Bank was the exclusive financial advisor to Web Werks for the deal, Khaitan & Co and Ernst & Young acted as the exclusive advisors to Web Werks. Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas and PwC India acted as advisors to Iron Mountain on this transaction, Jones Lang LaSalle acted as an introducing partner to both parties. Japan's automaker Suzuki chairman Osamu Suzuki, pictured here in 2017, is stepping down Suzuki's chairman Osamu Suzuki will retire after more than four decades at the helm of the Japanese carmaker, the company said Wednesday. The 91-year-old, who married into the firm's founding family, will leave the post after a shareholder meeting in June and become an adviser, it said. After he became company president in 1978, Suzuki expanded the automaker's business in India, where it has had enormous success, and steadily increased its share in Japan's small car market. He became chairman in 2000 and his eldest son, Toshihiro Suzuki, assumed the role of president in 2015. The carmaker, which had once tied up with General Motors and Volkswagen, forged a capital alliance with Toyota in 2019. No one will replace him for now, while Toshihiro Suzuki will remain president. 2021 AFP Ukrainian airports set to resume pre-pandemic passenger traffic by 2024 Ukraine's potential for the growth of this indicator is estimated by experts as huge. Reporting by UNIAN If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Denton, TX (76205) Today Scattered thunderstorms. High near 75F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Locally heavier rainfall possible.. Tonight Showers and thundershowers this evening will give way to steady rain overnight. Low 64F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected. Locally heavier rainfall possible. [February 24, 2021] Iron Mountain Enters Into an Agreement to Expand Data Center Footprint to India With Joint Venture With Web Werks, Entering Mumbai, Pune and Delhi NCR Iron Mountain (News - Alert) Incorporated (NYSE:IRM), the storage and information management services company, today announced that it has entered into an agreement to form a joint venture with Web Werks, one of India's top colocation data center providers. Iron Mountain expects to invest $150 million over the next two years, and anticipates being the majority investor in the venture after the investment period. The first phase of the transaction is expected to close within the next 90 days subject to customary closing conditions. Web Werks operates three Tier 3 (News - Alert) , carrier-neutral data centers, in Mumbai, Pune and Delhi NCR. This investment enables Web Werks to immediately expand its operations in its three existing markets and subsequently expand into Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai. Iron Mountain Data Centers is making this investment to support its existing hyperscale, network, content and enterprise customers looking to expand and scale in the rapidly growing pan-India region. With a combined footprint of 225,000 square feet, Web Werks houses 6 worldwide Points of Presence (POPs), provides 4 megawatts (MW) of capacity, supports 6,000+ servers and supports 850+ clients. Web Werks also provides access to a robust, neutral interconnection ecosystem of carrier, content and cloud providers including over 160 Internet Service Providers (ISP) and 6 Internet Exchanges. As market leaders in hyper-connected data centers, Web Werks supports a broad base of well-known brands including: Enterprises, Banking, Financial Services, Insurance (BFSI), and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) who require the ability to efficiently and effectively scale their businesses. "This investment reflects Iron Mountain's commitment to invest in high growth, good return global markets to continue to meet our customers' requirements. The India data center market is projected to grow rapidly in the coming years and we are excited to be an early mover into a market where the demand is high and the supply is low," stated Mark Kidd, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Iron Mountain Data Centers. "Web Werks has a highly respected and seasoned leadership team and we are delighted to not only support their continued growth and success, but also to provide our existing Iron Mountain data center customers access to this growing and thriving market." India is the second-largest telecommunications market in the world. According to a recent report by JLL, India's Colocation data center market size is expected to grow from 375MW in H1 2020 to 1,078MW by 2025, registering a CAGR of 21%. According to the December 2020, Global Data Centre Colocation & Interconnection report by Structure Research (SR), the Asia Pacific region will account for half of the global colocation market by 2025 driven by large emerging markets like India. The SR report also recognizes Mumbai and Pune as key opportunity markets in India with combined projected MW of built-out critical IT load capacity growth to reach over 470MW by 2025. "India provides an important next step in expanding our Asia Pacific footprint," stated Michael Goh, General Manager Asia Pacific atIron Mountain Data Centers. "We have seen very strong regional demand from our global customers following the grand opening of our Singapore data center, SIN-1, in 2019." "Joining forces with the Iron Mountain Data Center team will further solidify Web Werk's leadership position in the pan-India region and among the broader set of global customers," stated Nikhil Rathi, CEO, Web Werks. "Web Werks and Iron Mountain Data Centers are fully committed and aligned to grow and scale in order to meet the digital transformation and interconnection needs of our customers. The Joint Venture is expected to be among the select few data center operators with assets across all major cities and also have both Hyperscale and dense interconnection expertise. We look forward to the collaboration and continued success." Deutsche Bank acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Web Werks on the fund raise. Khaitan & Co and EY acted as the exclusive advisors to Web Werks respectively. Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas and PWC India acted as advisors to Iron Mountain on this transaction. JLL acted as an introducing partner to both parties. For more information please visit www.ironmountain.com/datacenters. About Iron Mountain Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), founded in 1951, is the global leader for storage and information management services. Trusted by more than 225,000 organizations around the world, and with a real estate network of nearly 93 million square feet across approximately 1,450 facilities in 56 countries, Iron Mountain stores and protects billions of valued assets, including critical business information, highly sensitive data, and cultural and historical artifacts. Providing solutions that include secure records storage, information management, digital transformation, secure destruction, as well as data centers, cloud services and art storage and logistics, Iron Mountain helps customers lower cost and risk, comply with regulations, recover from disaster, and enable a more digital way of working. Visit www.ironmountain.com for more information. About Web Werks With a combined footprint capability of 225,000 square feet, Web Werks operates 3 strategically located Data centers in Mumbai, Pune and Delhi NCR along with 3 worldwide Points of Presence (POPs). Web Werks currently operates 4 megawatts (MW) of capacity supporting 6,000+ servers running 850 clients. Web Werks through its Data centers also provides access to a robust, neutral interconnection ecosystem of carrier, content and cloud providers including over 160 Internet Service Providers (ISP) and 5 Internet Exchanges. As market leaders in hyper connected infrastructure, Web Werks supports a broad base of well-known brands from Enterprise, BFSI, SMEs and OTTs who require the ability to efficiently and effectively scale their online businesses. For more information please visit www.webwerks.com. Forward Looking Statement Safe Harbor Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and other securities laws and is subject to the safe-harbor created by such Act. Forward-looking statements include, but are not, limited to the anticipated closing of the transaction, the timing and size of additional investments, Iron Mountain's expected ownership stake and the expected value of the joint venture and future expansion growth in the region. These forward-looking statements are subject to various known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors. When Iron Mountain uses words such as "believes," "expects," "anticipates," "estimates" or similar expressions, it is making forward-looking statements. Although Iron Mountain believes that its forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, Iron Mountain's expected results may not be achieved, and actual results may differ materially from its expectations. In addition, important factors that could cause actual results to differ from Iron Mountain's expectations include, among others Iron Mountain's ability to close the proposed transaction in accordance with its terms, the risk that the conditions to completing the transaction will not be satisfied on a timely basis or at all and risks that we may not through the joint venture be able to achieve the expectations for the business and value based on challenges with the operations, risks in the market or gain the ownership or control we expect. Other risks described more fully in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including under the caption "Risk Factors" in our periodic reports or incorporated therein. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements except as statements of Iron Mountain's present intentions and of its present expectations, which may or may not occur. Except as required by law, Iron Mountain undertakes no obligation to release publicly the result of any revision to these forward-looking statements that may be made to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005109/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Four men have been arrested following a significant gathering of men in the Pitt Park area of east Belfast on 2 February. Detectives from the PSNI and Paramilitary Crime Task Force arrested the men on Wednesday morning. A number of searches are ongoing in east Belfast and Newtownards. The men, aged 33, 35, 46 and 54 years old, were arrested on suspicion of terrorism, and other related offences. Detective Chief Superintendent John McVea said: Our investigation into the gathering at Pitt Park and activities linked to east Belfast UVF is continuing, and todays arrests were conducted under the Terrorism Act. Those arrested will now be questioned in Musgrave Street Serious Crime Suite. I would continue to appeal to anyone in the community who has information or footage regarding the incident or criminality in the area, to contact the police. Alexander lashed out at journalists outside Brisbane Magistrates Court on Wed Flatmate picked up the kitten and threw it across the room, escalating dispute An enraged cat-loving teenager allegedly tried to poison her housemates as payback for mistreating her kittens, a Brisbane court has been told. Te Raukura Anahera Alexander, 19, was so angry when her flatmates mishandled the kittens that she allegedly spiked yoghurt and milk in the fridge with poison extracted from Mortein Peaceful Nights sachets. The bitter dispute had simmered for days before finally erupting when the kittens wandered into a flatmate's room at the shared inner-city Brisbane home and scratched him on the hand. Te Raukura Anahera Alexander (pictured) was so angry when her flatmates mishandled the kittens that she allegedly spiked yoghurt and milk in the fridge with poison It escalated when another female flatmate picked up the kitten and threw it across the room. Alexander also allegedly verbally threatened one of the housemates, telling police she hoped they killed themselves. The next day, police were called when Alexander allegedly slashed all four tyres of a car parked at the share house. Alexander (pictured) also allegedly verbally threatened one of the housemates, telling police she hoped they killed themselves When police arrived, Alexander confessed to poisoning the yoghurt and milk with a teaspoon of liquid Mortein. Fortunately, no one consumed either of the tainted dairy products. Police later seized a Mortein container from a bed in Alexander's room for scientific testing. Alexander was charged with two counts of attempting to injure by noxious substances, assault, wilful damage when she appeared briefly in Brisbane Magistrates Court on Wednesday. The teenager was granted bail to live with her father and ordered not to return to the shared home or approach her former flatmates. She was remanded to reappear on March 29. Outside of court she refused to speak to waiting media, covering her face with her hand before lashing out at journalists and photographers. Photo: BC Gov Flickr A wide range of health-care professionals will be dotting the landscape inside B.C.s COVID-19 immunization clinics as the province draws closer to its mass vaccination rollout. Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry revealed Tuesday (February 23) shes issued an order allowing dentists, midwives, pharmacy technicians, paramedics, retired nurses and a number of other professions to assist at clinics administering vaccines. At peak immunization capacity, the province will be relying on 715 full-time immunizers across 172 vaccination sites as it seeks to administer about 100,000 doses per day. Those immunizers are expected to see 140 patients a day to administer doses. We are very excited to be able to have the workforce that we are going to need over the next six months ensure that we can get vaccine to as many people as want it, as efficiently as possible, Henry said during an afternoon media briefing. The province will be unveiling additional details Monday for its broader vaccination plans, specifically for those who are 80 years and older. The current vaccination campaign is focused on B.C.s most vulnerable groups as well as frontline workers. To date, 224,354 vaccine doses have been administered in B.C., of which 58,896 are second doses. Thats up from the 218,726 doses administered 24 hours earlier, of which 55,057 were second doses. Henry said that 10 out of 100,000 doses administered have resulted in allergic reactions. Meanwhile, the country is set to receive its largest shipment of vaccines to date this week, totalling 643,020 doses from both Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE) and Moderna Inc. (NYSE:MRNA). Pfizer is due to deliver 64,350 doses to B.C. this week, followed by 60,840 doses the following four weeks. That will drop slightly the final week of March when the pharmaceutical giant is scheduled to deliver 59,670 doses. Moderna is due to deliver 16,400 doses to B.C. this week, but the exact allocation after the new few weeks afterward remains murky as Ottawa awaits specifics from the manufacturer. The latest deliveries bring Canadas total tally to 2.5 million doses since mid-December, while Pfizer and Moderna are still due to deliver a combined additional 3.5 million doses by the end of March. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Rob Lowe was snapped working on the set of 9-1-1: Lone Star on Tuesday in Los Angeles. Lowe was in costume in a navy blue top with a fire department graphic with firefighter pants, dangling a face mask over his chin as he sipped from a cup of water. He was later seen wearing a full fireman's outfit including a helmet and oxygen mask amid another high-intensity scene. On the job: Rob Lowe, 56, was snapped working on the set of 9-1-1: Lone Star on Tuesday in LA The 56-year-old actor portrays Owen Strand on the procedural action-drama about first responders in Austin, Texas, a New York native dealing with cancer and health problems brought about by his work responding to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. The Parks and Recreation actor, speaking with Variety earlier this month, said he was creatively invigorated by the role on the show from Ryan Murphy. 'The Ryan Murphy World special sauce is what makes doing a semi-procedural interesting for me as an actor,' he told the outlet earlier this month. 'We have all of the elements of the genre, but in this iteration there are elements of the unexpected. 'It can be authentic and honest and then become almost absurdist. We do wild tone swings. It keeps it fresh for me.' The veteran actor looked focused as he reviewed details of his scene with crew Lowe was later seen wearing a full fireman's outfit including a helmet and oxygen mask amid another high-intensity scene Lowe, who is father to two sons - Matthew, 28, and John Owen, 26, with wife Sheryl Berkoff, 59 - told the outlet 'its a good thing to spotlight real-life heroes' with the series, which is a spin-off of the Los Angeles-based series 9-1-1. 'They may not wear masks and capes, but their stories are every bit as compelling,' he said. 'Probably more so.' Lowe said that in his career, he's been fortunate to 'not to be pigeonholed' into a specific genre in his projects: 'Im lucky enough to be on both lists - the comedy list and the drama list, which is good.' 9-1-1: Lone Star airs Mondays on Fox at 9/8c. Mohamed Bazoum, victorieux au Niger Le candidat du parti au pouvoir a la presidentielle au Niger, Mohamed Bazoum, l'a emporte avec 55,75% des voix face au candidat de l'opposition Mahamane Ousmane (44,25%), a annonce ce mardi la Commission electorale nationale independante. Des resultats qui restent provisoires , a precise le president de la Ceni, Issaka Souna. La Commission electorale nationale independante a proclame, ce mardi en fin d'apres-midi, les resultats globaux provisoires du second tour de cette presidentielle, lors dune courte ceremonie au Palais des congres de Niamey. Selon ces chiffres, le candidat du parti PNDS au pouvoir, Mohamed Bazoum, arrive en tete avec 55,75% des voix. Son opposant Mahamane Ousmane, candidat du RDR Tchanji, recueille quant a lui 44,25% des suffrages exprimes. Et toujours selon ces resultats annonces par la Ceni, le taux de participation setablit a 62,91%. Le president de la Commission electorale, Issaka Souna, a precise que ces resultats etaient provisoires et soumis a lanalyse de la Cour constitutionnelle. Des resultats contestes par l'opposition Cette proclamation se fait sur fond de contestation. Ce mardi apres-midi, le president de la coordination de la campagne de Mahamane Ousmane a fait une declaration a Niamey, devant des journalistes et militants reunis au siege de campagne de la coalition Cap 20/21 et allies. Deux heures avant la proclamation des resultats globaux provisoires par la Commission electorale nationale independante, dans un palais des congres de Niamey ou la securite est renforcee, il appelle a la suspension immediate de cette publication : Nous exigeons la suspension immediate de la publication de ces resultats qui ne prennent aucunement en compte la volonte exprimee par le peuple , a declare Falke Bacharou. Il evoque de graves manquements dans le processus electoral et invite tous les Nigeriens a se mobiliser comme un seul homme pour faire echec a ce hold-up electoral . Apres cette declaration, quelques groupes de militants sortent dans la rue a Niamey, brulant des pneus, arrachant des affiches et hurlant tchanji , le changement en haoussa. Ils sont disperses par les forces de securite. La direction de campagne du parti MNSD, qui a apporte son soutien au candidat Mohamed Bazoum, est saccagee. Dans la soiree, ce dernier a affirme avoir adresse un message a Mahamane Ousmane pour lui demander de faire en sorte que pouvoir et opposition regardent dans la meme direction et que nous nous donnions la main, pour faire face aux defis auxquels notre pays est confronte . Il a choisi d'afficher sang froid et ponderation, felicitant son adversaire, dont il salue le score excellent . Im certain the name of Charles Burleigh Purvis wasnt submitted to the district, but officials may consider him if there is another round of name changes. He was the first Black physician to treat a sitting U.S. president after James Garfield became the second commander-in-chief to be killed by an assassins bullet in 1881. Purvis went on to be one of the founders of the medical school at Howard University. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company HOUSTON, Feb. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In commemoration of Black History Month, the University of Houston Law Center will host a virtual discussion led by University of New Mexico School of Law Professor Emeritus Sherri L. Burr at 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 25. Burr's presentation is titled, "Genealogical Research into America's Antebellum Past: The Challenges of Finding the Enslaved, the Free, and Enslavers." Dean Leonard M. Baynes will serve as a commentator. "We must analyze pre-Civil War ancestral history because too much of relations between races has been lost, misunderstood, or misinterpreted," Burr said. "This unexamined history continues to impact relations between races today." "For many African-Americans, the search for historical ancestors is complicated by slavery," Baynes noted. "Professor Burr's research provides hope that some will be able to fully trace their family roots. Moreover, Professor Burr's genealogical discovery is very important because it evidences that there was a significant amount of race mixing during Antebellum times in both the South and the North." Six years of tracking relatives and ancestors resulted in Burr's book, "Complicated Lives: Free Blacks in Virginia, 1619-1865," published by the Carolina Academic Press in 2019. It received numerous awards and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in History. After hearing Burr present part of her research in 2018, the Aaron Burr Association unanimously voted to acknowledge that Aaron Burr fathered two children of color with Mary Emmons and that all of their descendants were legitimate members of the Fairfield Branch of the Burr Family. In 2019, the Aaron Burr Association placed a memorial headstone, acknowledging his parentage, on the gravesite of John Pierre Burr at Eden Cemetery in Pennsylvania. Burr worked for with the Aaron Burr Association for eight months to secure grant funding, design the headstone, arrange shipping, and installation. The event is sponsored by the University of Houston Law Center's Black Law Alumni group. Attendees will receive one hour of Texas continuing legal education credit. Click here for registration information: https://www.law.uh.edu/alumni/calendar/2021-0225.asp UHLC media contacts: Carrie Anna Criado, UH Law Center Assistant Dean of Communications and Marketing, 713-743-2184, [email protected]; Elena Hawthorne, Assistant Director of Communications and Marketing, 713-743-1125, [email protected]; and John Brannen, Media Relations Rep, 713-743-3055, [email protected]. About the University of Houston Law Center The University of Houston Law Center (UHLC) is a dynamic, top tier law school located in the nation's 4th largest city. UHLC's Health Law, Intellectual Property Law, and Part-time programs rank in the U.S. News Top 10. It awards Doctor of Jurisprudence (J.D.) and Master of Laws (LL.M.) degrees, through its academic branch, the College of Law. The Law Center is more than just a law school. It is a powerful hub of intellectual activity with more than 11 centers and institutes which fuel its educational mission and national reputation. UHLC is fully accredited by the American Bar Association and is a member of the Association of American Law Schools. About the University of Houston The University of Houston is a Carnegie-designated Tier One public research university recognized with a Phi Beta Kappa chapter for excellence in undergraduate education. UH serves the globally competitive Houston and Gulf Coast Region by providing world-class faculty, experiential learning and strategic industry partnerships. Located in the nation's fourth-largest city and one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse regions in the country, UH is a federally designated Hispanic- and Asian-American-Serving institution with enrollment of more than 47,000 students. SOURCE University of Houston Law Center Related Links http://www.law.uh.edu Police discovered 4,000 highly potent diazepam tablets after a woman was admitted to Altnagelvin Hospital for a drug overdose, Derry Magistrates Court has heard. A male defendant, who was granted anonymity, has been charged with possession of Class C drugs diazepam and pregabalin, as well as intent to supply and being concerned in the supply of the same drugs. He is further charged with possession of Class B drug cannabis. All of the alleged offences took place between December 21, 2020 and February 22, 2021. A PSNI officer said there was no specific threat against the defendant but the generalised threat against people charged with drug offences in Derry is extremely high. The court heard that on Sunday February 21, at 4.20pm, police were approached by a Ward Sister at Altnagelvin Hospital about a female who had been brought in because of a suspected overdose. A support worker with a local charity attended the defendants address where a female was unresponsive lying on a bed, a police officer said. The court was told that the defendant left whenever the support worker arrived and an ambulance was called. The worker then lifted a white box which she believed to contain the womans medication, a police officer said. At Altnagelvin a police officer opened the box and found 4,000 diazepam tablets, electric weighing scales and a quantity of pregabalin. A police officer added that phones were seized and an additional 500 tablets were found in the womans handbag. When the accused was arrested he had 24 tablets in his pockets. A police officer said they are fake diazepam believed to be up to 10 times stronger. Explaining why he didnt initially open the door to police the defendant said, I was afraid I was going to get a hiding because I lost them things yesterday. He told officers he couldnt believe that the support worker would take something out of his flat that wasnt his. Three mobile phones were also seized at the property along with herbal cannabis. A diary was found believed to belong to the female which detailed the number of drugs she took each day. The woman is still in hospital on a heart monitor, a police officer said, but she was arrested in relation to alleged offences. FAKE DIAZEPAM During police interview the defendant said they bought 5,000 fake diazepam tablets on the dark web as he knew how to use Bitcoin. He denies supplying drugs and said they ate 1,000 tablets in three weeks. The court was told that the accused also admitted using other phones to order drugs. If he was going to sell them, the defendant said, he would do so in batches of 1,000. A police officer said that in the past the defendant got 1,000 tablets for 125 and he believed 5,000 tablets for 200 was a good deal. The defendant has 11 previous convictions for drug use and supply and has completed an enhanced combination order that was imposed in 2019 for supplying Class C drugs. Objecting to bail, the officer believed the accused will reoffend and said a fourth phone that was seized has to be triaged. He also raised concerns about bailing him to an address in Derry. Defence solicitor Paddy MacDermott said his client is a regular consumer of drugs and the phones found dont belong to him. Nothing on the phones linked him ton drugs supply, he added. A fourth phone is in police possession, he noted, which could allay any concerns about interference with the course of justice. Requesting bail subject to strict conditions, Mr MacDermott said his client has been honest and upfront. The defence solicitor said his client could have put the blame on his partner but didnt. The address put forward is the only one available to him, the court heard. Deputy District Judge OHare said the defendant got hold of a luxurious quantity of drugs to the bail address and suggested it might not be the best option. In response, Mr MacDermott said the cat is out of the bag with him, that ship has sailed. Judge OHare referred to the scales that were found saying there is more than a prima facie case. Im not satisfied the risk can be dealt with by any conditions, he added. The defendant was remanded into custody to appear in court again on March 18. Covid-19 and other similar strains of virus can survive on clothing and transmit to other surfaces for up to 72 hours, a study has found. Research carried out by De Montfort University (DMU) in Leicester looked at how coronavirus behaves on three fabrics commonly used in the healthcare industry. Scientists said polyester poses the highest risk for transmission, with infectious virus still present after three days that could transfer to other surfaces. The study, led by microbiologist Dr Katie Laird, virologist Dr Maitreyi Shivkumar and postdoctoral researcher Dr Lucy Owen, involved adding droplets of a model coronavirus called HCoV-OC43 which has a very similar structure and survival pattern to that of Sars-CoV-2 which causes Covid-19 to polyester, polycotton and 100% cotton. Scientists said on 100% cotton the virus lasted for 24 hours, while on polycotton it only survived for six hours. The university said Dr Laird advised the Government that all healthcare uniforms should be laundered in hospitals to commercial standards or by an industrial laundry. Dr Laird, head of the Infectious Disease Research Group at DMU, said: When the pandemic first started there was very little understanding of how long coronavirus could survive on textiles. Our findings show that three of the most commonly used textiles in healthcare pose a risk for transmission of the virus. If nurses and healthcare workers take their uniforms home, they could be leaving traces of the virus on other surfaces. She continued: Once we had determined the survival rate of coronavirus on each of the textiles, we turned our attention to identifying the most reliable wash method for removing the virus. Read More While we can see from the research that washing these materials at a high temperature, even in a domestic washing machine, does remove the virus, it does not eliminate the risk of the contaminated clothing leaving traces of coronavirus on other surfaces in the home or car before they are washed. We now know that the virus can survive for up to 72 hours on some textiles and that it can transfer to other surfaces too. This research has reinforced my recommendation that all healthcare uniforms should be washed on site at hospitals or at an industrial laundry. These wash methods are regulated and nurses and healthcare workers do not have to worry about potentially taking the virus home. Read More Alex was appointed the Managing Director of Hyva China in 2004 and has since led the business with distinction, overseeing its meteoric growth from inception to market leadership. He was appointed Head of Hyva Asia in 2011 and also assumed global responsibility for Hyva's waste management line of business in 2015. He said: "I am honoured to be given the opportunity to lead the company that has been my life for 21 years. Hyva's success has been achieved through the strong entrepreneurial spirit of our people and our focus on our customers and their success. I wish to retain these qualities even as we strengthen our capabilities in innovation and new product development to support our customers effectively in the face of rapidly developing new technologies and digitization in our industry." The current CEO, Marco Mazzu, will be moving into the role of Chairman. Before Hyva he covered senior leadership positions for the previous 20 years in the automotive, commercial vehicles and agricultural equipment industries across four different continents: "I am honoured to have led the Hyva Team for the last six years and helped reposition the company and our global organization and business processes. I am proud of the great results and accomplishments achieved by the company in this time. I have worked with Alex for six years, and I know he will lead Hyva to new great achievements." Hyva's Board of Directors said in a statement: "We would like to extend our thanks to Marco for a job well done. He joined Hyva as it faced a tumultuous time in many of its key markets and has since overseen a tremendous improvement in the Company's operating and financial performance, which was sustained during 2020 despite the disruptions caused by COVID-19. We would also like to welcome and congratulate Alex on his appointment as CEO. Alex has a proven leadership track record of driving excellence. As a Hyva insider, he brings a deep knowledge of our products, markets, and customers to the job. We wish him all the best." The company has a worldwide footprint in all major markets, with a longstanding presence in the fast-growing Asia Pacific region. Hyva provides solutions to more than 20,000 customers and is world leader in front-end tipping cylinders with over 40% global market share. The company operates in more than 110 countries with over 3,500 employees around the world. The Group encompasses more than 30 subsidiaries across Europe, Asia, the Americas and MEA, with a vast sales and service coverage and a well-equipped manufacturing base of 12 production facilities in Brazil, China, Germany, India, and Italy. Throughout the challenging time of the Coronavirus pandemic, Hyva managed in protecting the health of its employees and kept up with servicing its clients worldwide across the four lines of business: Tipping Solutions, Cranes, Container Handling Solutions and Waste Handling Solutions. Visit www.hyva.com. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1441194/Hyva_1.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1441195/Hyva_2.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1441196/Hyva_Logo.jpg For further information: Marcello Laugelli [email protected] +393358438856 SOURCE Hyva Related Links https://www.hyva.com Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ANNAPOLIS, Md. Not waiting for more federal help, states have been approving their own coronavirus aid packages, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to help residents and business owners devastated by the the pandemics economic fallout. Maryland and California recently moved forward with help for the poor, the jobless, small businesses and those needing child care. New Mexico and Pennsylvania are funneling grants directly to cash-starved businesses. North Carolinas governor wants additional state aid for such things as bonus pay for teachers and boosting rural internet speeds. The spending also provides fuel for critics who say states dont need another massive infusion of cash from Congress. The Biden administrations $1.9 trillion relief plan would send hundreds of billions of dollars to state and local governments. ADVERTISEMENTSkip ................................................................ Governors and lawmakers say their state spending is targeted at Americans who remain desperate for help nearly a year after the pandemic began shuttering businesses. In Maryland, where direct stimulus checks were being distributed as part of more than $1 billion in relief, Catrina Garrett said the boost from the state was crucial. Garrett, a 35-year-old single mother with a part-time job, said it will help her pay rent and catch up on bills. A lot of people will need this, and it will help families that have not been able to provide for their children, said Garrett, who lives in Baltimore with her three kids. Other states are considering significant spending to provide more relief to residents. Governors and lawmakers have said they are concerned the economy and job prospects will deteriorate even further before Congress acts on the Biden plan. A slow start to the nationwide vaccination program also has tempered expectations that inoculations will be widespread soon enough to rescue businesses that have struggled with shutdown orders. Under a bill awaiting the governors signature, New Mexico would provide $200 million in direct grants to businesses, which could use them to pay rent and mortgages. Its part of a proposed state pandemic relief package that also would provide a $600 tax rebate to low-wage workers, a four-month tax holiday for restaurants as they recover from indoor-dining restrictions and a waiver on liquor store license fees. Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said aggressive action is needed to ward off business closures and evictions as Congress deliberates. The cascading effect, its actually a problem that most states are grappling with waiting for the relief money out of the feds, she said. We need to be able to hold up, to shore up businesses moving forward, and we want them to have security to hold their current employees and potentially hire more. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom this week signed a $7.6 billion relief package that includes $600 in one-time payments for about 5.7 million residents, including immigrants who were left out of previous relief initiatives. Another $2 billon is going to struggling businesses. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, signed legislation last week with bipartisan support in the Democratic-controlled legislature for one-time stimulus payments of $300 for individuals and $500 for families, reaching about 400,000 people. It also provides up to $9,000 in sales tax relief for small businesses. Absent of a federal response, the states are having to step up, said Robin McKinney, co-founder and CEO of the CASH Campaign of Maryland, a nonprofit organization that helps low-income residents file taxes. The spending also shows that many states have proved unexpectedly resilient during the pandemic, with better-than-projected tax revenue and healthy budgets. Critics say the stronger-than-expected state finances undermine the Biden administrations $1.9 trillion plan. Congress has already allocated more than $4.5 trillion to address this crisis, including roughly $400 billion for state and local governments, U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, said this month. Some governors are facing pushback from their own legislatures. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, unveiled a $695 million emergency budget proposal that would use state money to address needs related to the coronavirus. While Republicans in charge of the legislature havent dismissed his ideas, they are unlikely to pass such a sweeping package. They noted that they approved another COVID-19 relief package in February that distributed more than $2.2 billion in federal money for vaccine preparations, to schools and to prevent evictions. They also are still figuring out how to spend another $1.8 billion in federal money that Congress approved in December. We are addressing the needs, said Republican state Sen. Brent Jackson. Cooper said North Carolinas coffers currently have nearly $6 billion to spare, an amount roughly equal to 25% of the states annual budget. He wants to spend it on bonuses for educators and school staff, hazard pay for state law enforcement officers, rural broadband and small businesses. People need help immediately, and we have both the means and the power to get it to them, he said. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, earlier this month signed legislation using $145 million in reserves from a workers compensation fund for grants of up to $50,000 to owners of hard-hit bars, restaurants and hotels. The money is expected to be available next month. Industry representatives said the money is helpful but wont reach many who work in Pennsylvanias 30,000 such businesses. And for some of those who do receive it, the extra state aid represents just a fraction of the financial hit they have taken during the pandemic. Susan Williams, who with her sister owns a bar in Pittsburgh and another just outside the city, plans to apply for the grants. Her businesses remain under restrictions that include serving at 25% capacity, no seating at the bar and 11 p.m. last calls. The bars are closed part of the week to keep from losing money, and theres nothing left over to pay tax bills that arrived this week. They know damn well we havent been open, Williams said. They basically choked our income, but theyre still sending our tax bills. Its insane. ___ Associated Press writers Adam Beam in Sacramento, California; Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Chennai, Feb 25 : Former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, J. Jayalalithaa's close aide and expelled AIADMK leader, V.K. Sasikala on Wednesday renewed her call to the 'cadres of Amma (ex-Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa)' to come together to win the Assembly elections. Almost a fortnight after reaching Chennai she broke her silence for the first time that too on the birth anniversary of Jayalalithaa on Wednesday. "The true cadre of Amma should come together and win the elections to form the government. Amma has mandated that even after 100 years, our government should be there. I am confident that you would accomplish that," she said after paying floral tributes to the portrait of Jayalalithaa at her residence here. She added that she would stand by you (workers). "Very soon, I will meet the people and the cadre. I know you (cadre) cannot be bought. Because you are the cadre with conviction just like Amma (Jayalalithaa). It is a happy day for me since I celebrated the birth anniversary of Amma. It is an invaluable occasion," Sasikala said while addressing the workers gathered at her residence. Asserting that Jayalalithaa had left crores of workers behind her, Sasikala said, "I see Amma in everyone's face. You know what she said in the state Assembly. It is our duty to prove her words. So, all cadres of Amma should come together to win the elections. To achieve that, you all should stand by me. Each one of you should work like bees and offer the victory in elections to her. You should take a vow towards this and work hard." Meanwhile, AISMK founder, actor R. Sarathkumar and his wife Radhika called on Sasikala. Later, Sarathkumar said he knew Sasikala for more than 10 years and that as a gesture of gratitude, he met her. Radhika referred to Sasikala as "Udan Pirava Sahodari of Jayalalithaa" (Sister of Jayalalithaa from another mother). Later, Naam Thamizhar Katchi leader Seeman, film director Bharathi Raja and farmers union leader PR Pandian also called on Sasikala. Bharathi Raja said Sasikala had come to fill the political vacuum in Tamil Nadu and described her as "veera thamizhachi" (courageous Tamil woman). Though these meetings are described as courtesy calls to enquire about the health of Sasikala who was cured of Covid-19, there is speculation about a separate political front headed by her. Already, the DMDK treasurer Premalatha has expressed her support for Sasikala. The scenario is likely to become clear once the seat-sharing talks in the AIADMK-led alliance come to an end In 2017, Sasikala and Dhinakaran were ousted from the AIADMK after the factions led by chief minister K. Palaniswami, earlier chosen by her for the top post before proceeding to serve her jail term, and Panneerselvam merged burying the hatchet. Authorities in Tibetan areas of China have further tightened restrictions on public gatherings at Buddhist monasteries during the Lunar New Year period, limiting attendance at previously widely attended religious ceremonies in one case to the resident monks, Tibetan sources say. The first three days of the New Year, beginning this year on Feb. 12 and called Losar in Tibetan, are usually packed with festivals and religious ceremonies, with most Tibetan Buddhists across the region visiting monasteries and temples for traditional observances. Responsibility for traditional prayer festivals at Gansu provinces Labrang Tashi Kyil and Qinghais Rebgong Rongwo monastery has now been taken from the monasteries themselves and put in the hands of local religious affairs committees, one local source told RFAs Tibetan Service. According to strict guidelines, the monasteries will not be allowed to independently arrange the routines of the Choetrul Monlam prayer festival, RFAs source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Also called Monlam Chenmo, the annual prayer festival traditionally draws thousands of participants, but attendance at Labrang and Rebgong will be limited this year to monastery residents and a few selected locals as a precautionary measure to prevent the spread of coronavirus, the source said, quoting official notices. Monasteries in the Qinghai region have also been barred from hanging decorated tapestries related to the annual prayers and from performing the traditional Cham religious dances, a source living in Rebgong said. In Gansu, Labrang monastery will remain closed to visitors from Feb. 12 to Feb. 28, while at Kumbum monastery in Qinghai, members of the public have been barred from taking part in a special flower ritual usually performed on the 15th day of Losarthis year on Feb. 26with concerns over the spread of COVID-19 cited by authorities as the reason for the ban. Local Tibetans are also barred from taking part in Choetrul Monlam in Dargye monastery in [Sichuans] Kardze [Ganzi] prefecture, and in other monasteries nearby, another source said. According to notices sent out by local Chinese officials, the guidelines and restrictions must be obeyed in order to contain the spread of coronavirus. Buddhist monasteries in Tibet and Tibetan-populated regions of western China have frequently become the focus of efforts to promote not just religious but Tibetan cultural values, and residents in some areas have voiced doubts over official reasons for the restrictions on attendance at traditional events. Reported by Lhuboom and Chakmo Tso for RFAs Tibetan Service. Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Written in English by Richard Finney. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Ozan Electronic Money Turkey, which offers financial services to individual users and SMEs, has entered into a strategic cooperation with one of Turkey's most well-known banks, Albaraka Turk. Thanks to this collaboration, Ozan SuperApp users will be able to access various financial services ranging from fractional shares to foreign exchange services, to bill payment, virtual IBAN and more. Istanbul, Turkey--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Insha Ventures, a subsidiary of Albaraka Turk, is by many considered Turkey's first fintech venture builder. Now it is joining forces with Ozan Electronic Money Turkey, which offers next generation financial services to individuals and businesses. The strategic open banking cooperation integrates Albaraka API Platform infrastructure into Ozan SuperApp, allowing Ozan SuperApp users to perform a variety of services such as 24/7 money transfer, purchase of commodities such as gold, foreign exchange transactions and bill payment, just to name a few. Dr. Ozan Ozerk, Founder of Ozan Electronic Money Turkey To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7788/75341_ozan_orig.jpg The Pioneer of Banking as a Service in Turkey Meliksah Utku, the General Manager of Albaraka Turk, commented on the cooperation between Ozan Electronic Money Turkey and Insha Ventures: "Albaraka Turk continues to be the pioneer of open banking and Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) in Turkey thanks to the Albaraka API platform that started with 'Let's build together the digital products of the future!' motto. I believe that the cooperation between Insha Ventures and Ozan Electronic Money Turkey will contribute a lot to the ecosystem of financial technologies and I find that very exciting." Omer Suner, the CEO of Ozan Electronic Money Turkey, said: "With Ozan SuperApp, we aim to offer our users in-house developed financial services that are run on the rails of our industry-leading business partners. Following our Visa membership that we announced last week, our strategic partnership with Insha Ventures aligns with our vision of growth through long-term partnerships." A Bridge to The Development of the Fintech Ecosystem Yakup Sezer, the General Manager of Insha Ventures, emphasized that Insha Ventures served as an important bridge to the development of the fintech ecosystem in Turkey, and added: "Insha Ventures supports super applications by offering them APIs-based services such as payment accounts, investment products, bill payments, and money transfer. Our comprehensive cooperation with Ozan SuperApp is a very important step to make contributions to the financial services industry in Turkey. Thanks to this cooperation, our Albaraka Open Banking Platform will provide Ozan SuperApp a great range of integrated financial services, representing the latest technology within open banking the world." Dr. Ozan Ozerk, founder of Ozan SuperApp, highlights the impressive level of Turkish financial technologies of today, by commenting on the incredible journey of Turkey's banking technology sector: "Since early 2000 Turkish banking industry has been joining forces with telecoms, ISPs, technology companies and other key players leapfrogging into the future. Private and government initiatives have pushed competition to the highest level, bringing Turkish financial technologies to become a global leader. Ozan SuperApp aims to benefit from this ecosystem as its launches globally." About Ozan Electronic Money Turkey Founded by Dr. Ozan Ozerk, Ozan Electronic Money Turkey is a new generation financial technology initiative, established to bring individual users together with SMEs on financial services. Ozan Electronic Money Turkey, which obtained electronic money license from the Banking Regulation And Supervision Agency (BRSA) in accordance with law no. 6493, has been serving under the supervision and surveillance of the Central Bank of Turkey (CBRT) since January 2020. Ozan SuperApp services include physical and virtual debit card services, multi currency e-money accounts, domestic and international money transfer, QR code payment, local and international bill payment and purchasing game code safely and instantly. In addition to these consumer facing B2C services, Ozan SuperApp also provides SMEs B2B financial services such as payment accounts, FX services, Virtual POS and Mobile POS products. Press contact: Omer Suner CEO, Ozan Electronic Money Turkey Email: omer.suner@ozan.com Internet: ozan.com/tr Related Images dr-ozan-ozerk-founder-of-ozan.jpg Dr. Ozan Ozerk, Founder of Ozan Electronic Money Turkey Dr. Ozan Ozerk, Founder of Ozan Electronic Money Turkey ozan-electronic-money-turkey.jpg Ozan Electronic Money Turkey Ozan Electronic Money Turkey Related Links https://ozan.com/tr To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75341 A leaked secret message reveals that Assad called for Russian military intervention during the 2013 battles of eastern Ghouta, Sowt Al-Asime reports. The Russian newspaper Zavtra wrote in an article it published on Saturday about a secret message that the head of the Syrian regime, Bashar al-Assad, sent to Russia amid the 2013 battles of eastern Ghouta. The newspaper said that the message, which was received by Russia at 4:56 p.m. on Nov. 24, 2013, stated, we have provided chemical weapons to the international community, and we are confident that Russia will present the necessary alternatives to confront the terrorist aggression on our homeland. However, presently, matters point to a possible sudden collapse within a few days, after we lost the five largest towns in Ghouta yesterday, with the militants reaching a distance of three kilometers from Damascus International Airport and cutting off the Damascus-Homs International Road after they occupied the city of Deir Atiyah. Our human resources and weapons are depleted. Therefore, there is a very urgent need for direct military intervention by Russia, otherwise, Syria and the civilians will fall into the hands of Islamic terrorists, according to a translation by Russia Today. Zavtra added that Moscow made the decision to intervene in Syria after it received Assads message, and it was necessary to open a channel of military communication with the US forces on the ground in Syria, noting that the formation of the Astana group resulted from that communication. The disclosure of the aforementioned message came within an article published by the Russian newspaper under the title Is Damascus Moving Towards Normalization with Israel? This happened one day after Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, held a meeting with the UN Special Envoy on Syria, Geir Pedersen, during which the two sides touched upon the results of the 15th International Meeting on Syria within the framework of the Astana process, which was held in the Russian city of Sochi last week. They also discussed the work of the mini-constitutional committee, which held its fifth session in Geneva late last month. The newspaper pointed out that Assad does not believe in the credibility of the international community or its role in providing adequate guarantees during the transformation processes, pointing out that the president fears facing a fate similar to that of the former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, who died in prison after he was deceived by the West, as the article put it. 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. New Delhi: Researchers have found a previously unknown family of darkly colored asteroids, which may be the oldest objects in the known universe. A newfound ancient family of asteroids is nearly as old as the solar system, a new study finds. Asteroids are rocky, airless worlds that orbit our sun but are too small to be called planets. Tens of thousands of these minor planets are gathered in the main asteroid belt, a vast doughnut-shaped ring between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Asteroids that pass close to Earth are called near-earth objects. The main belt contains a vast number of irregularly shaped asteroids, also known as planetesimals, orbiting the Sun between mars and Jupiter. By identifying all the families in the main belt, we can figure out which asteroids have been formed by collisions and which might be some of the original members of the asteroid belt," said SwRI astronomer Kevin Walsh. "We identified all known families and their members and discovered a gigantic void in the main belt, populated by only a handful of asteroids," said Walsh, a co-author of the research published in the journal Science. Also read: Gigantic storm about the size of Earth observed on Neptune "These relics must be part of the original asteroid belt. That is the real prize, to know what the main belt looked like just after it formed," he said. Identifying the very oldest asteroid families, those billions of years old, is challenging, because, over time, a family spreads out, researchers said. As asteroids rotate in orbit around the Sun, their surfaces heat up during the day and cool down at night. This creates radiation that can act as a sort of mini-thruster, causing asteroids to drift widely over time. After billions of years, family members would be almost impossible to identify, until now. The team used a novel technique, searching asteroid data from the inner region of the belt for old, dispersed families. They looked for the "edges" of families, those fragments that have drifted the furthest."Each family member drifts away from the center of the family in a way that depends on its size, with small guys drifting faster and further than the larger guys," said team leader Marco Delbo, an astronomer from the Observatory of Cote d'Azur in Nice, France. Also read: NASA looking for 'Planetary Protection Officer' to save Earth from aliens; salary, how to apply - all you need to know For all the Latest Science News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. The body of a state security officer has been found shot in eastern Ghouta, reports Sowt Al-Asima. On Monday, the residents of the Hawsh Nasri village in eastern Ghouta found the body of an officer from the State Security branch. The officer was killed by unknown persons and thrown into one of the dilapidated houses on the outskirts of the village. The Sowt Al-Asima correspondent said that the people informed the security authorities after finding the dead officers body. The regime intelligence closed all entrances to the area where the body was located, near the Hassan Ibn Thabit Mosque. The correspondent confirmed that the body belonged to an officer from the State Security Branch, with the rank of Lieutenant, called Mohsen Shamma, who hails from the city of Masyaf, west of Hama. According to the correspondent, the regime intelligence apparatus transported the officers body to a hospital in the capital, Damascus, only to realize that he was killed by two bullets to the head, fired by a military pistol. The regime intelligence carried out a search campaign that affected many homes in the area surrounding the Hassan Ibn Thabit Mosque, where the officers body was found, without any arrests recorded. The Sowt Al-Asima team documented, in 2020, the targeting of 32 military bases and checkpoints belonging to the Syrian regime, in addition to the targeting of leaders within the ranks of local militias as well as the most prominent regime agents in the capital and its environs. According to the documented toll, the operations targeted seven military checkpoints and 14 security vehicles using improvised explosive devices, in addition to 11 leaders and members of local militias, in addition to informants in various regions. 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. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Wednesday that Kashmir is the only dispute with India and it can only be resolved through dialogue. Addressing the Sri Lanka-Pakistan Trade and Investment Conference which he co-chaired with his counterpart Mahinda Rajapaksa in Colombo, Khan said that he offered India an opportunity to hold peace talks on being elected as prime minister in 2018 but nothing came to pass. "Our only dispute is Kashmir and it can only be resolved through dialogue," he said. Earlier this month, India said it desires normal neighbourly relations with Pakistan in an environment free of terror, hostility and violence. "Immediately when I came into power, I approached our neighbour India and explained to Prime Minister Narendra Modi that the way forward for the subcontinent is to resolve our differences through dialogue," Khan said. "I didn't succeed but I am optimistic that eventually sense will prevail. The only way the subcontinent can tackle poverty is by improving trade relations," he added. India has said that the onus is on Pakistan to create an environment free of terror and hostility. "Our position is well-known. India desires normal neighbourly relations with Pakistan in an environment free of terror, hostility and violence," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said. "The onus is on Pakistan for creating such an environment." Ties between India and Pakistan nosedived after a terror attack on the Pathankot Air Force base in 2016 by terror groups based in the neighbouring country. Subsequent attacks, including one on Indian Army camp in Uri, further deteriorated the relationship. The relationship dipped further after India's war planes pounded a Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist training camp deep inside Pakistan on February 26, 2019 in response to the Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF jawans were killed. The relations deteriorated after India in August 2019 announced withdrawing special powers of Jammu and Kashmir and bifurcation of the state into two union territories. Khan, who is the first head of state to visit Sri Lanka since the COVID-19 pandemic, said political stability in the region - by maintaining good relations with neighbouring countries - ensured a business-friendly environment that resulted in the people's overall development. The Sri Lankan Muslim leaders were allowed to meet Khan after the opportunity was denied to them initially. Rauff Hakeem, the leader of the main Muslim party - Sri Lanka Muslim Congress - said that they had a pleasant and fruitful discussion with Khan. He said the Pakistani prime minister had expressed confidence in the ability of the Muslim leaders to achieve communal harmony in the island nation. Khan was under pressure from local Muslim leaders to raise the issue of forced cremations of Muslim COVID-19 victims. Sri Lanka had adopted a policy of allowing only cremations citing health issues despite opposition from the Muslim community and international rights groups who were insisting on respecting the Islamic religious rite of burials. Khan congratulated Sri Lanka earlier this month when Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa said in Parliament that burials would be allowed for Muslim victims of COVID-19. However, the decision is yet to be implemented. Aside from slating a date for the second dose, McFeeley said officials have not yet determined when the site might be offering vaccines again, adding: But these numbers are terrific so I think there will be reason to continue with this (point of delivery) for essential municipal workers. The first I heard from my congressman was at 5:14 p.m. last Tuesday, some 39 hours after Austinites began reporting theyd lost power in the midst of a deadly winter freeze. The high that day was 26 degrees, the low 7, and when the email came, my husband and I had just slid a half-mile down icy, barren streets to get warm at a friends apartment, our own heat and electricity having gone out that morning. Advertisement The congressman was not emailing to see how we were holding up. Instead, he seemed primarily concerned with assigning blame for the outages, which would leave, at their height, 4 million Texans without power and result in overwhelmed hospitals and an as-yet-unknown number of deaths. Radical ideologies have politicized energy policy at the state and federal levels in recent years, he declared, echoing the sentiments of other Republicans, who had already begun falsely blaming renewable energy sources as the primary reason for the outages. The congressman was in touch with various agencies to see how additional federal deregulation might solve the problem. To those still without heat and electricity, he suggested consulting an outage map for which hed forgotten to include the URL; the here we were to click on linked to nothing. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The congressman in question is Chip Roy, representative of Texas 21st District, and to those of us who pay his way, this behavior is par for the course. Roy rarely lifts a finger for Austinites and knows he doesnt need to in order to winwe didnt elect him in the first place. Despite the old saw that the state capital is a blue dot in a red seaa silly metaphor given that all four of Texas biggest cities vote Democraticthe political power of our citizenry has been severely curtailed by partisan gerrymandering. The congressman released a statement not explaining how he planned to help the struggling citizens of his district but eulogizing Rush Limbaugh. For the uninitiated, gerrymandering is the process of manipulating how districts are drawn to give one political party an unfair leg up. In Texas, the Republican-held Legislature is responsible for drawing the maps every 10 years, and our current boundaries were created with the sole purpose of maximizing the power of the people with the pens. Advertisement When it comes to Austin, the preferred gerrymandering method of the GOP is called cracking, in which the party in control spreads the opposing partys supporters across multiple districts, diluting their voting power. Thus, despite the fact that Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by 45 points in Travis County (which includes Austin), only one of our six different members of Congress is a Democrat. Advertisement What this means in practice is that Austin tax dollars subsidize politicians like Chip Roy, who despite Austinites wishes has worked assiduously to undermine public health officials battling the pandemic, who opposes the Violence Against Women Act and has passionately defended drug company profits, and whose response to Bidens order mandating mask-wearing on federal property was to tell Biden, via Twitter, to kiss my ass. Advertisement Our district includes a wide swath of the Texas Hill Country, home to Roys base, as well as slivers of Austin and San Antonio, and Roy has made clear he does not see his job as representing those of us who did not vote for him. In his first term, pre-pandemic, he rarely offered Austinites the chance to interact with him in public settings on our home turf (an exception was a Q&A hosted by his allies at a conservative think tank), while frequently holding town halls and other events in his rural strongholds. On social media, hes referred to the duly elected Austin City Council as Marxist and has claimed because of safety concerns he doesnt like to take his family into our downtown. Advertisement So when the Texas freeze came, I was not expecting much from my representative. Even by his standards, however, the lack of response was shocking. The day after Roys initial email, subfreezing conditions continuing and much of Austins power, including ours, still out with no end in sight, the congressman released a statement not explaining how he planned to help the struggling citizens of his district but eulogizing Rush Limbaugh. You may now return your talent to God, loaned to you to share with us all these years, he wrote. Advertisement Roy wasnt the only Austin Republican whose priorities did not seem to include looking out for Austinites last week. Like Roy, Rep. Roger Williams of the 25th District signed on to letters to President Joe Biden, asking him to approve the Texas governors disaster declaration, and to the president of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, commonly known as ERCOT, which operates the states electric grid. But Austin constituents on Williams email list told me they didnt receive any communication from him during the crisis. One acquaintance in Williams district noted that on the same day, Feb. 17, that she was Googling hypothermia to see if we were at risk of freezing to death, her congressman was offering his own condolences to Limbaugh (Ill always cherish the time I got to spend with him) and, bizarrely, attacking New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Rule #1 for the Socialist Democrat Party, use any crisis available to lasso control). (An email I sent to Williams communications director seeking comment went unanswered as of Wednesday.) Advertisement Austinites in the 10th District, home to Rep. Mike McCaul, told me they, too, didnt hear from their congressman during the freeze. His communications director, Rachel Walker, responded in an email that McCaul had kept his social media feeds updated frequently, and had assisted local officials across his district in getting them the resources they needed. Advertisement When I called Roys office to see if he mightve done more to reach out to us Austinites, a staffer told me that the congressman had lost power during the cold snap, and directed me to a video, posted Monday, in which Roy notes that over the weekend he spent a couple hours distributing water in Harper, 100 miles west. By contrast, Austins lone Democratic representative, Lloyd Doggett, who was also operating without power for much of last week, nonetheless used his social media feeds as a clearinghouse for essential information like where to find water, food, and warming shelters. Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez has raised $5 million in relief money for Texans, while former Rep. Beto ORourke, who currently does not hold elective office, ran a virtual phone bank through which volunteers made almost 800,000 phone calls to Texas seniors, connecting them with food, water and transportation. As for Roy, after his first email to constituents last Tuesday, we didnt hear from him again until Friday, well after our power had returned. This time, hed remembered to include the link to the outage map. Advertisement Four days after our power came back on, I received a message from a friend, Holly, whod spent much of the last week ferrying other friends without heat to safety. Shed found one pal in a 36-degree apartment. The friend is now recovering, and told Holly she intends to vote every last mfer out of office when the time comes. Unfortunately, it may not be possible, no matter how well deserved. The next round of redistricting will happen during this legislative session, and theres no reason to believe the Republicans in charge will draw a map any less gerrymandered than the one we have now. The U.S. Supreme Court has also essentially given them the greenlight after upholding the previous gerrymander in 2018. The court ruled that state lawmakers had not intentionally discriminated against Black and Latino voters even though the maps clearly diluted their voting power. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Here in Austin, theres plenty of rage to go around: at a Republican governor and Legislature that failed to properly winterize our power sources, even though theyve known of the need to do so for a decade; at a certain Texas senator who tried to turn this disaster into a vacation and an entire GOP apparatus hellbent on changing the subject. And though it may not get as much attention, theres palpable anger, too, at the members of Congress who have gerrymandered their way into Austin and given it little back in a time of crisis. Its a fury that would be enough to light and heat an entire city, if only we could convert it into power. Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. Boris Johnson has signalled the UK will not boycott the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics despite China facing 'genocide' claims. The Prime Minister said the Government is 'not normally in favour of sporting boycotts', adding this has been a 'long-standing' position. Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey had called for Britain and Team GB to boycott the 2022 spectacle over the 'genocide' of the Uighur minority population in China's Xinjiang province. Boris Johnson has signalled the UK will not boycott the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics despite China facing 'genocide' claims Speaking at Prime Minister's Questions, Sir Ed said: 'Today, millions of Uighur people in China live in fear under a cruel regime. 'The BBC, international media and human rights NGOs are all reporting on forced labour camps, women being raped and sterilised and families being separated. This is a genocide happening in front of our eyes. 'So does the PM agree with me that unless China ends this genocide, Britain and Team GB should boycott the Winter Olympics in Beijing next year?' Mr Johnson replied in the Commons: '(He) is absolutely right to highlight the appalling campaign against the Uighurs in Xinjiang and that's why the Foreign Secretary has set out the policies that he has, the package of measures to ensure that no British companies are complicit in or profiting from violations. The Prime Minister said the Government is 'not normally in favour of sporting boycotts', adding this has been a 'long-standing' position. Above, an exhibition center for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics in Yaqing district 'We're leading international action in the UN to hold China to account and will continue to work with the US, friends and partners around the world to do just that. 'He raises a point about a sporting boycott, we're not normally in favour of sporting boycotts in this country and that's been the long-standing position of this Government.' Earlier this month, Team GB chef de mission Georgie Harland said there is 'no question' of Britain boycotting next year's Winter Olympics. His remarks followed a coalition of 180 human rights groups urging a boycott over the Chinese government's reported complicity in human rights abuses. A North Korean man crossed undetected over the inter-Korean border earlier this month and wandered along a beach in Gangwon Province until he was caught three hours later. The incident alone demonstrates what a dire state the South Korean military is in. On Tuesday, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the man was captured no fewer than 10 times on various security cameras as he walked along the coast, but nobody was watching until the eighth time he appeared on the screens. Twice he even set off an alarm, but the sentries thought the wind had triggered the sensors and the senior officer was on the phone. This was just one unit. What must the rest be like? While the North Korean man was able to walk some 5 to 6 km for three hours without being detected, it then took 34 minutes for the initial report of detection to reach the division commander. Suppose it had been North Korean soldiers trying to infiltrate -- what would have happened then? The North Korean simply crawled through a drainpipe under a border fence after swimming along the coast in a diving suit and flippers, but the unit guarding that section of the border said it never even realized there was a drainpipe there. Their excuse is that landmines strewn in the area "made it difficult for troops to assess the terrain." If soldiers shrink from assessing any terrain they consider dangerous, the country might as well employ some forestry wardens there. In fact, the soldiers had been put on notice before. When a North Korean defector returned to the North last July through a drainage ditch on the west coast, the JCS ordered frontline troops to look at all drainpipes along the border, but the unit involved in the latest fiasco reported there were no problems. The JCS said it is "profoundly aware of the situation" and pledged to get to the root of the problem. But that is what it says after every debacle -- it said it when the North Korean defector returned to the North last year; when a North Korean fishing boat reached deep into South Korean waters before it was detected two years ago; and when a naval base on Jeju Island became the stomping grounds of protesters; when the Capital Defense Command was breached by a drunk; and when a naval base in Jinhae was infiltrated by an elderly man with Alzheimer's. Three months ago, another North Korean civilian climbed over a border fence in Gangwon Province and no alarms were triggered at all. Last year, detection equipment sensed a person seven times as he crossed over the border to North Korea, but the military found out about the breach only after the North announced it. And yet this same military thinks it can gain wartime operational control of all troops here, including the U.S. Forces Korea. Never mind that it does not have a single nuclear weapon, it cannot even man its own security cameras. Why on earth would the U.S. agree to place its troops under the control of such fools. The country's defense is plagued by farcical incompetence. Experts have pointed out that the government's envisioned light aircraft carrier will be useless since South Korea has plenty of bases on land where fighter planes can take off and land, but the logic is that South Korea needs a light aircraft carrier because Japan is building one. Of course it will cost trillions of won in taxes, but the only visible role it will play is for show at naval events. All the while not one high-ranking military officer seems to be voicing opposition. While the president is busy trying to court North Korea, the military is sinking into a morass in indiscipline and incompetence. President Mon Jae-in claims he wants to protect the country through dialogue rather than firepower, but what if the enemy is not listening? Now he has sunk so low he wants to ask North Korea for "permission" to conduct joint drills with the U.S. military. It is not surprising to hear a former USFK commander warn of the "great risk" of South Korean people "falling under the North Korean regime." Wednesday, February 24, 2021 at 1:30PM by Nathaniel R Without theaters open the popular annual tradition of the nominees bundled together at movie theaters will probably have to wait, so we thought we'd discuss them before the Academy votes on nominations this year as they were blessedly easy to track down -- at least in the Doc Short category, all of which are available to stream. Herewith, a look at the ten films competing for those five slots, half of which are directed or co-directed by women. They're grouped by emotional or thematic similarities. UPDATE: IF THEY WERE NOMINATED THAT'S MARKED BELOW... FILMMAKING IN WAR ZONES DO NOT SPLIT- NOMINEE Anders Hammer (War zone figurative) This film about the 2019 Democratic protests in Hong Kong (opposing China's intervention in their semi-independent state -- the history of Hong Kong is complicated) is resonant and timely. Protestors are attacked and trapped by police (most memorably at a college campus for days on end) and suffer tear gas, rubber bullets, and water hoses. The protestors are described as rioters but the police are the ones escalating the violence. (Hmmm, where have we seen all this before?) What's most thrilling and artful about this short is how close the camera gets to the action, marching, running, and hiding right in the clouds of tear gas. The dizzying escalation is thankfully presented in linear fashion with an informative timeline; the short film's thrills and the protests themselves are cut off abruptly by the arrival of COVID-19 and then only the fear remains. One female activist's speech about the rough future of the very young activists -- or lack of it now that they'll be anathema to employers who hope to stay in good standing with China is particularly sobering. Director Hammer is a Norwegian journalist and previously extensively covered the war in Afghanistan for several media outlets. This is his second short but he also directs for television. [Available to stream on Field Of Vision]. HUNGER WAR- NOMINEE Skye Fitzgerald (War zone literal) This is the longest contender at 40 minutes and the most emotionally grueling. It's a cry of despair coming from two "feeding centers" in Yemen, one in the North and one in the South. The images of war torn Yemen are tough to look at, as are the skeletal children, too tired to smile or play, even when the staff attempts to lighten their mood. Though the final aerial rotating camera felt like an unceccesary flourish overall the filmmaking is stark and observational rather than manipulative. Fitzgerald's camera is watching the most intimate and expansive of tragedies (dying children and war, respectively) but remains fairly non-intrusive as it wanders the hallways and bombed out buildings. Our two POV characters are a head nurse and a doctor at the centers, just getting through each day; their haunted eyes and occassional speeches amply revealing how traumatized they themselves are. Fitzgerald, based in Portland Oregon, is the only filmmaker here who has been nominated in this category previously. This is the third short in his "Humanitarian Trilogy" following 50 Feet From Syria (2015) which made the finals and Lifeboat (2018) which was nominated. We think he'll win this time if nominated. [RSVP to Upcoming Screenings] GRAPPLING WITH THE PAST COLETTE - NOMINEE Anthony Giacchino Armchair Oscar-watchers have long looked at WW II and Holocaust related dramas somewhat suspiciously (in terms of quality) due to the Academy's inability to resist them, whether they're strong films or not. This one, though, is a relatively strong entry. And it's not technically a Holocaust film though it deals with Nazi concentration camps. We travel with a 90 year old woman, relatably short-fused at times, as she travels to the camp where her brother was killed in Germany, taken as a prisoner due to his work with the French Resistance. The concept is simple and the filmmakers wisely step back and just let Colette control the tone, as she vacillates between tetchy, sad, angry, wistful, and contemplative about the past. Giacchino previously won an Emmy in the short-form Nonfiction category for Great Moments from the Campaign Trail (2008). [Available to stream on The Guardian] Hysterical Girl Kate Novack I suspect this film is the least likely to get a nomination, not for qualitative reasons, but merely from tone and form. In some ways it feels less like a traditional documentary than a confrontational narrative short, as it reimagines a Sigmund Freud case with modern feminist eyes, calling out the misogyny of diagnoses. Whether or not that will appeal to you is largely based on your feelings about looking back at the past -- particularly the infancy of a science like pscyhoanalysis -- through a modern POV. This is Novack's first doc short as director but she previously directed the doc feature The Gospel According to Andre. [Available to stream on New York Times Op-Docs] A LOVE SONG FOR LATASHA - NOMINEE Sophia Nahli Alison A debut! This 18 minute grieving short, looks back at the shooting death of a 15 year old black girl. It's arguably the most self-conciously impressionistic of the shorts (perhaps due to lack of Latasha footage from her life) but it has an emotional pull as we hear from those who loved Latasha best about what the future might have held for her and the circumstances of South Central LA in 1992. [Available to stream on Netflix] FEEL GOOD ENTRIES A CONCERTO IS A CONVERSATION - NOMINEE Kris Bowers and Ben Proudfoot It's as the title says. This very well paced brief profile film (13 minutes) is a conversation between the 31 year old composer Bowers (Green Book, Bridgerton, United States vs Billie Holiday) and his grandfather who has been diagnosed with cancer, as they prepare for the premiere of Bowers latest composition. They discuss the grandfather's experiences in the Jim Crow south, systemic racism, and Bowers own childhood on the piano and how much his parents pushed him towards musicality. The image of the grandfather steaming his grandson's shirt may bring tears -- you've been warned. It's a bit strange to realize that Bowers, who sounds so humble on camera, co-directed a very flattering short about himself but the result is charming and moving. The other director, Canadian filmmaker Ben Proudfoot, is only 30 years old but this is his 25th short already (!) so, like Bowers, his talent must have been nurtured right from the start. Let's hear it for supportive environments for talented young artists! [Available to stream on New York Times Op-Docs] Speed Cubers Sue Kim One of the obvious standouts in the finalist list -- we will be furious if it's passed over. The film charts the journey of a Rubik's Cube prodigy Max Park, who is autistic. His parents, who have struggled with connecting with him, encourage his fascination with the competitive sport due to his obvious engagement as well as his fandom for the then-current two time world champion, Australian Feliks Zemdegs. Zemdegs, to his credit, is even a better sport than he is a champion, taking a rival (Park) under his wing, and continually happy for him even when Park starts breaking all his records. Much of the film revolves around their competition to win World Champion in Melbourne in 2019. This is quite a debut calling card for new director Sue Kim as it's terrifically paced, touching, informative, and tense and unlike many movies (shorts or features) it feels like its exactly the right length (39 minutes in this case). [Available to stream on Netflix] What Would Sophia Loren Do? Ross Kauffman It's the most surprising inclusion on the finalist list since the Academy's doc branch has not shown any particular tendency to obsess over movies about movies (the way the general Academy does in Best Picture and the craft categories). So perhaps its finalist status has more to do with the director (an Oscar winner) and the subject (also an Oscar winner) and maybe the power of Netflix this season when everyone's been trapped at home for a year watching their televisions? This light short is about an Italian-American grandmother who really loves Sophia Loren and recounts many memories of her movies and how Loren and her films helped her through hard times. The ending is like a yummy dessert that you finally get to eat. Ross Kauffman is the only previous Oscar winner in the finals. He won for the Documentary Feature statue for Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids (2004). [Available to stream on Netflix] FILMMAKING AS OBSERVATIONAL ESSAY Abortion Helpline, This is Lisa Barbara Attie, Mike Attie, Janet Goldwater A fly on the wall look at a Philadelphia abortion helpline where women answer calls from desperate women. Everyone goes by "Lisa" for anonymity's sake. In just a few short calls the film amply conveys how stacked the deck is against poor women when they're seeking help. The film wisely doesn't editorialize much -- the message comes through regardless -- though it's a bit of a funny mystery why it would take three directors for something this miniature. In fact, we wish it had been a bit longer for more context as to their funding and why the various "Lisas" work there. [Available to stream via Topic on Vimeo.] Call Center Blues Geeta Gandbhir We saved one of the best for last! This surprisingly expansive 25 minute short presents the unlikely business of Call Centers in Tijuana as refuge for displaced undocumented Americans who have been deported to Mexico for various reasons. Some of them had never lived in Mexico before and many struggle for years from depression. We get several different stories about the displaced whose lack of accents (raised bilingual in the States) makes them sought after employees for telephone work. The savvy slyly political film manages to comment on a host of problems including populism, racism, the war on Drugs, Trumpism, and more with patient humanism and well-judged images of the border wall. Gandbhir has previously won two Emmys as part of the editing teams on When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and By the People: The Election of Barack Obama and worked on the PBS series Asian Americans this year (reviewed). Call Center Blues is her fourth documentary short as a director. [Available to stream via Topic on Vimeo] Nomination Predictions (in presumed order of probability) Hunger Ward (lock?) Colette (great shot) A Concerto is a Conversation (It's funny we always assumed Bowers would get his first Oscar nomination in the next few years.. but we didn't expect it would be in this category!!!) Do Not Split (vulnerable?) Speed Cubers (vulnerable -- too happy?) Potential spoilers: Love Song for Latasha... but really any of them. The shorts categories are hard to predict! Personal Preference (ranked) Speed Cubers Call Center Blues Hunger Ward Do Not Split ??? Subject to change (slightly) on another day of course! What did you think of these if you've seen them? We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form A suspect has been arrested in a fatal shooting last June in a Meriden hotel, police said. Trevor Outlaw, 33, was arrested Friday in the June 21, 2020 death of Giovanni Rodriguez at the Comfort Inn on East Main Street, the New Haven Register reports. Outlaw, also known as Wolf, Wolfie and F1, faces charges of murder, criminal possession of a firearm and carrying a pistol without a permit. Rodriguez was found in the entranceway to the hotel with a gunshot wound to his chest, police said. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Authorities named Outlaw as a person wanted for questioning in the shooting in September. Outlaw is being held on $2 million bond. He is due back in court on March 9. Information on an attorney for Outlaw wasnt immediately available. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Connecticut Small changes to people's writing style can reveal which social group they "belong to" at a given moment, new research shows. Groups are central to human identity, and most people are part of multiple groups based on shared interests or characteristics - ranging from local clubs to national identity. When one of these group memberships becomes relevant in a particular situation, behaviour tends to follow the norms of this group so that people behave "appropriately". The new study - by the University of Exeter, Imperial College London, University College London and Lancaster University - demonstrates that group normative behaviour is reflected in a person's writing style. It also shows that assessing writing style can reveal - with an accuracy of about 70% - which of two groups affected a person while they were writing a particular piece of text. To demonstrate their method, researchers studied how people who are parents and feminists change their writing style when they move from one identity to another on anonymous online forums such as Reddit, Mumsnet and Netmums. "People are not just one thing - we change who we are, our identity, from situation to situation," said Dr Miriam Koschate-Reis, of the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, both at the University of Exeter. "In the current situation, many people will need to switch between being a parent and being an employee as they are trying to manage home schooling, childcare and work commitments. "Switches between identities influence behaviour in multiple ways, and in our study we tracked which identity was active by focussing on language. "We found that people not only change their writing style to impress their audience - they change it based on the group identity that is influencing them at the time. "So, when we asked people in an experiment to think about themselves as a parent, their language patterns reflected this." The study avoided "content" words (a parent might mention "childcare" for example) and focussed on stylistic patterns including use of pronouns, "intellectual" words and words expressing emotions. Commenting on the possible uses of the new method, Dr Koschate-Reis said: "We are currently focussing on mental health. "It is the first method that lets us study how people access different group identities outside the laboratory on a large scale, in a quantified way. "For example, it gives us the opportunity to understand how people acquire new identities, such as becoming a first-time parent, and whether difficulties 'getting into' this identity may be linked to postnatal depression and anxiety. "Our method could help to inform policies and interventions in this area, and in many others." Group identities have been found to affect thoughts, emotions and behaviour in many settings - from work contexts to education to political activism. Research is ongoing to understand how much control we have over switches between different identities - most of which are thought to be triggered by the social context. Dr Koschate-Reis said it might be possible to manipulate the cues that trigger an identity switch by going to a location associated with the identity. For example, students might find it easier to write in an "academic style" when they are in the library rather than the local coffee shop. ### The study was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The paper, published in the journal Behavior Research Methods, is entitled: "ASIA: Automated Social Identity Assessment using linguistic style." VA Bedford Healthcare will expand scheduling appointments for COVID-19 vaccines to all enrolled veterans regardless of age on Thursday. Vaccination appointments will also extend to designated caregivers of veterans who are enrolled in the VAs Comprehensive Assistance for Family Caregivers Support Program. Veterans can schedule an appointment by calling the COVID vaccination clinic at 781-687-4000. The clinic will be scheduling appointments from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Monday through Friday. Vaccines will be administered seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Those who receive the vaccine will also be required to be monitored for 15 minutes. The clinic will automatically schedule veterans for their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine in three weeks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention require both doses of the Pfizer vaccine be received at the same location. Veterans who receive the first dose at the VA Bedford agree to receive the second in the same location. Veterans not enrolled in VA Healthcare can can apply for enrollment by filling out an application and submitting it online. First responders who are veterans enrolled at VA Healthcare are not required to make appointments and may walk in to the vaccination clinic, daily from 7:00 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. The clinic requires proper ID as determined by Massachusetts for walk-up first responders. Veterans can use the VA Bedford shuttle service to arrive at the vaccination clinic. Seats should be reserved before making the vaccination appointment, the VA Bedford said. As of Tuesday, VA Bedford has administered more than 18,000 doses of the vaccine to veterans. Related Content: A senator has accused unemployed people of 'playing Xbox on the couch' instead of wanting to work for a living. Matt Canavan praised the government's new rules for JobSeekers to make sure they accept a job if they are offered one. 'There are people out there who are bludging on the dole. I don't mind saying frankly. There are lots of people,' the Nationals politician told ABC News. 'We have seen them in the last year that people taking JobKeeper and JobSeeker and not taking work. Now, we can't just keep doing that. We can't keep paying people to sit on the couch and play the Xbox.' Matt Canavan (pictured) has slammed 'dole bludgers' for playing Xbox instead of working for a living Scott Morrison on Tuesday announced unemployed Australians will receive an extra $50 a fortnight when the coronavirus boost expires next month. However, they will have to attend face-to-face appointments with officials, make 20 job searches a month and take a short training course or do work experience after six months on welfare. Welfare groups and the Greens wanted a much greater increase to the dole - but the Prime Minister has ruled out a higher amount. A source told the Sydney Morning Herald the $50 increase was a 'take it or leave it' offer. Labor has said they will not stand in the way of the increase. Senator Canavan said he supported the increase, which will cost $9billion over four years, but resisted any higher payment to avoid the government getting into more debt. As part of the welfare reforms, the government will also set up a hotline for employers to dob in someone who rejects a job they are qualified for. 'Every person we get back into a job means a lower cost to the taxpayer. That's why the mutual obligation is so important,' Mr Morrison said. Pictured: People are seen in Centrelink queues in Gold Coast back in April 2020 What are the changes to the dole? The changes include: permanently increasing the rate of working-age payments by $50 a fortnight from 1 April 2021, benefiting 1.95 million Australians; permanently increasing the income-free earnings to $150 per fortnight for JobSeeker Payment and Youth Allowance (other) from 1 April 2021; temporarily extending the waiver of the Ordinary Waiting Period for certain payments for a further three months to 30 June 2021; temporarily extending the expanded eligibility criteria for JobSeeker Payment and Youth Allowance (other) for those required to self-isolate or care for others as a result of COVID-19 to 30 June 2021. There will also be changes to the Mutual Obligation Scheme: job seekers will be required to search for a minimum of 15 jobs a month from early April, increasing to 20 jobs per month from 1 July; an employer reporting line will be established to refer Jobseekers who are not genuine about their job search or decline the offer of a job; some job seekers will be required to participate in work for the dole after six months; job seekers can choose to participate in an approved intensive short course instead of participating in work for the dole; job seekers return to compulsory face-to-face services with Jobactive providers; increased auditing of job applications to ensure job seekers are making genuine applications. Source: PMO Advertisement The new rate, which will kick in when the $150 JobSeeker supplement runs out at the end of March, will provide an extra $3.57 a day. The increase lifts JobSeeker to 41.2 per cent of the national minimum wage and will cost $9billion over four years. Mr Morrison said: 'We are moving from short-term emergency measures to long-term arrangements that people can rely on should they find themselves out of work. 'Our social safety net is a social contract. It is a contract between the government and Australians, but it is also a contract between Australians, and what you've heard today is about getting the balance of that right.' Cassandra Goldie from the Australian Council of Social Service said the permanent increase should have at least matched the temporary top-up payment. 'Anything below where the rate is now is a betrayal,' she said. Without government intervention the unemployment benefit would have returned to its pre-pandemic rate of $565 a fortnight, or $40 a day. Greens leader Adam Bandt described the increase as 'a bloody insult'. 'This decision will keep people going hungry. It will keep unemployed people facing homelessness,' he said. 'We must raise the rate above the poverty line.' Those on welfare will have to fulfill more rigorous obligations to taxpayers under Scott Morrison's rules Social Services Minister Anne Ruston said the $50 increase was decided upon because it provides more support without disincentivising work. 'We needed to make sure that we created a system and improved a system so that the incentives to take up work were there, and the disincentives were removed,' she said. Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese said Labor will not stand in the way of the increase. 'It's important there be a permanent increase and that be done as a matter of urgency, just to provide certainty for people as well,' he told reporters. 'I don't quite understand why this government has held back on this announcement.' The unemployment benefit rate has not been increased in real terms since the 1990s. There are about 1.2 million people on JobSeeker payments. Senator Ruston believes hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients are single, have no children and no medical barrier to full-time work. Senator Ruston said various sectors were crying out for more staff. 'Whether it may be a short-term job in agriculture or casual work in the caring industry because modelling tells us that people who report earnings, even just a small amount, are at least twice as likely to exit the social security system,' she said. With AAP An Istanbul court on Wednesday sentenced three Turks to four years and two months in prison for helping smuggle former Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn in a musical instrument case from Lebanon to Japan. The court jailed two pilots and an employee of a small private airline who moved the former auto industry giant via Istanbul, while he was out on bail facing financial misconduct charges in December 2019. This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. PHILADELPHIA A doctor was stabbed in the face and head by a person she was treating at a Philadelphia hospital, authorities said. Police reported the stabbing at Pennsylvania Hospital in Center City shortly before 3 p.m. Tuesday. Officials say the doctor was in stable condition with multiple wounds to the face and head. A suspect was arrested and a weapon was recovered, police said. There was no immediate word on the circumstances of the stabbing. The hospital said in a statement that swift action by hospital staff ensured that the physician received immediate care and there was no danger at any time to other patients or staff. All hospital operations continue as usual and officials are cooperating with law enforcement in their investigation, the statement said. ALSO READ: Texas trucker back in Union County to face homicide charge in I-80 interchange killing Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Mike has reported on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem's wildlife, wildlands and the agencies that manage them since 2012. A native Minnesotan, he arrived in the West to study environmental journalism at the University of Colorado. Vijayawada: AP Cabinet headed by Chief Minister Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy on Tuesday gave its nod to a new welfare scheme EBC Nestham that will benefit poor women belonging to forward castes. Announcing this, information minister Perni Venkataramaih alias Nani said the new Economically Backward Caste (EBC) scheme EBC Nestam will be implemented from the coming financial year. Under it, the government will provide financial assistance of Rs. 45,000 to each woman beneficiary aged between 4560 years at the rate of Rs. 15,000 per annum for three years. He said the government has allotted Rs. 670 crore per annum for the scheme, totalling to Rs. 2,010 crore for three years. The cabinet also approved the welfare schemes calendar for 202122. The minister announced that the cabinet has decided to allocate five per cent of land in private layouts for the poor. Serious action will be initiated against parties violating this rule. He said earlier 300 sq. ft. TIDCO houses had been given for Rs. 2.65 lakh each, whereas the YSRC government is giving it for only Re. 1. He stated that the previous government charged Rs. 3.65 lakh for 365 sq. ft. house. This government is allotting the same house for Rs 3.40 lakh. The 465 sq. ft. houses had been allotted for Rs. 4.65 lakh each, while they are now being given for Rs. 4.15 lakh. The state will take a burden of Rs. 5,579 crore on account of the various decisions taken on Tuesday. The state cabinet has given its nod to roll out Kadapa Steel Plant works at a cost of Rs. 10,082 crore. It will be implemented in Phase1 and 2 through a joint venture partnership with a capacity of three million tonnes in each phase. The cabinet approved the decision to complete investigation within 100 days with regard to those caught red-handed in the ACB cases. The earlier limit was two years. The government has decided to amend the law providing for action against ACB officials if they do not complete the inquiry before the stipulated deadline. The minister said that the cabinet approved allotment of new fire stations and personnel in Kadapa and Chittoor districts. It gave its nod to upgrade PHCs to 50-bed hospitals in Penumuru and Karvetinagaram of Chittoor district. Medical and non-medical staff will be recruited to that extent. The cabinet approved recruitment of additional teaching and non-teaching staff for the newly established degree college in Kovvur. Multipurpose facility centres will be established in villages at a cost of Rs. 2,718 crore. 165 acres of land in East Godavari district has been allotted to Maritime Board for taking up its operations. Nani said 2,700 vehicles have been allocated for door-to-door collection of garbage in municipalities. The Chief Minister has directed authorities to beautify every municipality within three to six months, adopting best practices like in Surat municipality of Gujarat. National Centre will resume talks if farmers agree on suspension of laws: Tomar NEW DELHI, FEB 24 (AGENCIES) | Publish Date: 2/24/2021 12:53:16 PM IST Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar on Wednesday said the Centre was ready to resume talks with farmer unions on the three new agriculture laws but only if they respond to the governments offer to put the legislation on hold for 18 months, PTI reported. Tomar said that the differences between the Centre and farmer bodies can be resolved through a joint committee. The minister was briefing the media at an event to mark the completion of two years of the Centres flagship PM-KISAN scheme, under which eligible farmers are provided cash support of Rs 6,000 annually. Responding to a query on farmer leader Rakesh Tikaits announcement of a march of 40 lakh tractors to the Parliament, Tomar said that the Centre was sensitive towards the farmers demands, PTI reported. The government of India has always held discussions with farmers with a lot of sensitivity, he said. Even today, whenever their response comes, the government is always ready to hold talks. The talks between farmers and the Centre have been in the state of stalemate since the eleventh round of meeting on January 22. In that meeting, the Centre had asked the farmer bodies to consider its proposal on the temporary suspension of the implementation of the farm laws. Prior to that, on January 20, the farmers rejected the Centres proposal to suspend implementation of the three agricultural laws for 1.5 years, and stuck to their demand of repealing the laws. New Delhi, Feb 24 : Retired army personnel numbering about 1000 have come out in full support of the farmers' movement at Ghazipur on the Delhi-UP border. Speaking to IANS Anurag Lathwal, who was a Naik in the Indian Army and is now National Secretary, Veterans Association of India said, "All demands of farmers are genuine. The central government intends to hand over the agriculture sector to the industrialists in the same manner as it has handed petrol, diesel and airports to industrialists." IANS also spoke to Jai Prakash Mishra who was a Subedar Major in the Army and is now the National President of the Veterans' Association. He said they have been supporting the farmers from the start and would continue to do so. Gurucharan Singh who was a Subedar and is now the District President of Lakhimpur Kheri, Veterans Association told IANS, "There is a huge difference between what the Modi government says and what it does. Therefore, the Modi government cannot be trusted." He added that these three black farm laws were like a death warrant for the farmers and this government should not be allowed to rule the country. Mani Dev Chaturvedi who was in the Border Security Force and currently National Joint Secretary, Veterans Association, told IANS that whichever government went against the wishes of the people was always defeated. History was witness to the fact that evil was always defeated as were Ravana, Kansa and Duryodhan, he added. A park named after founding father Benjamin Franklin in Washington has been renamed to honor Rosa Franklin, the state's first African American woman to serve in the state Senate. Metro Parks' Board of Commissioners in Tacoma unanimously voted to change the park's name in Franklin's honor on Monday, according to a column in The News Tribune. She served as a member of the Washington State Senate from 1993 to 2010. The 93-year-old Rosa Franklin, a former nurse and longtime parks supporter, said she was 'so appreciative' of the unexpected honor at Monday night's meeting, the outlet reported. Rosa Franklin, 97, was the state's first African American woman to serve in the state Senate Franklin, right, served as a member of the Washington State Senate from 1993 to 2010 Rosa Franklin Park, pictured, will now be the second park in Tacoma named after an African American 'Are you sure?' Franklin recalled asking when she heard the news that the park would be renamed in her honor. Franklin, who used to live in the district where the park is located, said her two children attended the nearby Franklin Elementary School. The park, which covers more than 20 acres, was planned in the 1930s and first opened in 1941. It was named in honor of Benjamin Franklin because of its proximity to the school, according to the Metro Parks website. It will now be the second park in Tacoma named after an African American after Marine Park along the city's waterfront was renamed Judge Jack Tanner Park in 2019. Judge Tanner marched for housing equality in the 1960s, advised President John F. Kennedy on the drafting of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and was the first African-American to serve as a federal District Court judge in the Pacific Northwest. Franklin Park, which has a sprayground pictured, has been renamed to honor Tacoma Sen. Rosa Franklin A picnic shelter is pictured at Franklin Park, renamed to honor Tacoma Sen. Rosa Franklin An aerial view shows the more than 20-acre Franklin Park in Tacoma, Washington which has been renamed According to Metro Parks board commissioner Aaron Pointer, who is black, told The News Tribune that the renaming of the parks shows the important role black Tacoma residents have played in the city's history. 'I really believe that it means a lot to people and to kids to see people who look like them represented in the names of parks and schools and other facilities,' Pointer told the outlet. 'It gives people inspiration. To some, it might not mean a lot. But to others, it can mean a sense of belonging, and that the city recognizes that our people are a part of the city, and not just something that is disregarded.' Debbie Terwilleger, Metro Parks' director of business, administration and planning said park staff spent about a month preparing the recommendation to rename the park in honor of Franklin. Terwilleger told the outlet that changing the park's name won't be expensive but will require a new sign, expected to cost about $5,000, to be made with features highlighting Franklin's achievements and legacy. Erik Hanberg, chair of the park's board, said the move isn't meant to disrespect the legacy of Benjamin Franklin but to honor a local woman of color who dedicated much of her life to the city's residents. The park was previously named in honor of Benjamin Franklin, pictured 'In this case, there was an opportunity to take a name from someone who had not been from Tacoma and had died long before the city was founded and replace it with an icon who is also a woman of color,' Hanberg told The News Tribune. 'I don't think [Ben Franklin] loses anything by having Tacoma change the name ... to someone who is actually connected to our city and has done great things for our city.' Benjamin Franklin, who signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the United States Constitution, has a complicated history with slavery. According to the National Archives, Franklin owned slaves as a young man and would post ads profiting off the selling of slaves in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. Initially, Franklin believed slaves were inferior to white Europeans and couldn't be educated but started questioning his position after visiting a school for young African children, according to PBS. Later in life, Franklin became a vocal abolitionist publishing essays against the practice and submitting several Anti-Slavery Petitions to Congress. In 1787, he began to serve as President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. MBABANE- It seems your client did not tell you the whole story. This comment was made by Judge Titus Mlangeni in the matter between the wife of the late Senator Jimmy Jameson Hlophe and his (senator) alleged live-in-lover Bonisile Gwebu. The judge yesterday noted that among the items that the wife, Elizabeth Hlophe, wanted from Gwebu and the late senators son, Andile Hlophe, was a Toyota Fortuner, but she (Elizabeth) did not mention the vehicles registration number. Your client did not tell you about her life with the deceased. If she did not know the number plate of the car, it says something. She did not tell you the whole story. In future, she must take the court into her confidence, said Judge Mlangeni. In response, Elizabeths attorney, Noncedo Ndlangamandla, informed the court that her client told her everything about her relationship with the deceased, hence she mentioned in her papers that the late senator resided with Gwebu at Sigcineni. Possession Ndlangamandla said it was for that reason that most of the documents belonging to the deceased were in Gwebus possession. The issue of the motor vehicle, My Lord, has already been settled between the parties. There are some concessions which have been made in the matter, submitted Ndlangamandla. Through their attorneys identified as Masondo, Gwebu and Andile informed the court that they were opposing the application. Masondo informed the court that they would be filling comprehensive papers outlining why they were opposed to the granting of the orders being sought by Elizabeth. The applicant (Elizabeth) has taken Gwebu and Andile to the High Court, accusing them of refusing to hand over some of the assets belonging to her husband. Elizabeth wants the court to interdict the respondent from disposing of the assets of the late Jimmy, in particular the Toyota Fortuner. She is also praying for an order directing the duo to forthwith surrender all the assets of the late Jimmy to her, pending the appointment of the executor of his estate. Surviving In her application, Elizabeth submitted that she was the surviving spouse of the late Jimmy, having been married to him in terms of civil rites and in community of property on May 16, 1969. Prior to his passing, my husband was in a relationship with the second respondent (Bonsile) and at times, he resided with her at our other home at Sigcineni in the Manzini Region, alleged the applicant (Elizabeth). These are allegations whose veracity is still to be tested in court. She alleged that after her husband passed away, Gwebu had been in possession of assets including his (Jimmy) motor vehicles, a tractor and bank accounts as well as personal documents belonging to the deceased. According to Elizabeth, Gwebu was refusing to hand over same to her as Jimmys wife. Elizabeth alleged that on February 18, 2021, she received information from one of her sons that Andile had advertised her husbands motor vehicle, being a Toyota Fortuner, on social media, in particular Facebook. The applicant submitted that she went to check on Facebook and found that the first respondent (Andile) had indeed advertised the motor vehicle and he was selling same for the sum of E540 000. Upon further enquiry and to my surprise and dismay, I further learnt that Bonsile (Gwebu) has been withdrawing monies from the accounts of the deceased from the time he was admitted to hospital around January 5, 2021, despite the estate of the deceased having been reported with the master of the High Court, submitted the applicant. Advised She averred that she had been advised and verily believed that her husbands bank cards were in Gwebus possession and she was allegedly the one who was making the unlawful withdrawals from his bank accounts. The matter returns to court for arguments on March 5, 2021. 40 long-finned pilot whales deserted on a remote beach were successfully refloated by hundreds of people in New Zealand who worked together. They carried the animals back to the open water. The whales didn't glide out into the deeper ocean, still, some conservationists are nervous that the animals may bring themselves back to the beach the second time. New Zealand government published disturbing news. 40 Whales Stranded The Associated Press from the New Zealand government disclosed that on the 22nd of February, Monday morning, the 40 whales originally stranded on South Island, on Farewell Spit with other nine whales that lost their lives during the desertion. The officials worked with the marine rescue team Project Jonah and the locals to look after the surviving whales, splashing buckets of water over their skin and making sure their fins weren't hurt under their beached bodies. The increased wave came in the evening delivering sufficient water for service persons to refloat the whales, spokesperson of Project Jonah Louisa Hawkes explained that to refloat moderately small whales similar to Globicephala melas (long-finned pilots) which are parts of the dolphin family, people regularly waterproof tarps to gradually move the animals into open water and enable them to regain themselves before swimming away. ALSO READ: Blue Whales of Antarctica Seen Again in South Georgia After Near Extinction The Associated Press The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealed that generally speaking, the whales can grow to around 5.7 - 76 meters (19 feet to 25 feet) in length and weigh about 1,315 - 2,267 kilograms (2,900 pounds to 5,000 pounds) each. They are not deemed exposed, researchers do not possess sufficient data to specifically determine the long-finned pilot whales conservation status. The Associated Press discloses that the volunteers didn't point out if they utilized tarps in this rescue, but the whales on Farewell Spit were scattered out on the beach. The Heroics of the Whale's Rescue Team The team initially gathered the animals into a pod, approximately 200 people then created a boundary at the shoreline and steered the pod into the ocean, when the whales got quite deep, boats started patrolling the shore to stop the whales from coming back. Though in the end, the whales didn't paddle away into the ocean, the fear is they may float back again, Everyone is quite optimistic but also very practical. According to New Zealand's Department of Conservation long-finned pilot whales in New Zealand account for the most mass strandings, where two or more whales strand at once. Often, hundreds of whales can beach themselves at once. For instance, four years ago, two mass strandings had 350 long-finned pilot whales dead on Farewell Spit, while the whale's rescue crew arranged to refloat around 300 others. Still, researchers are not certain why mass standing happens. But whales' echolocation might not work well near the shoreline, so they might become disorganize and not able to learn their way back into the deep ocean. It's also likely that once a whale strands, others in the pod ensue behind to assist, and end up beaching themselves. RELATED ARTICLE: WATCH: Secret Feeding Habits of Whales in Antartica Revealed For more news, updates about whales and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature World News! (@FahadShabbir) The White House said President Joe Biden will visit Texas on Friday, an appearance that comes just as the state is recovering from a deadly winter storm that left millions without power and water WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 23rd February, 2021) The White House said President Joe Biden will visit Texas on Friday, an appearance that comes just as the state is recovering from a deadly winter storm that left millions without power and water. "On Friday, February 26, the President and the First Lady will travel to Houston, Texas," the White House said in a press release Tuesday. Apple CEO Tim Cook is celebrating Steve Jobs who would have been 66 years old on Wednesday. Cook shared a tweet wishing the late co-founder a happy birthday, along with celebrating Jobs' technology that 'brought us together in limitless ways' during a year that many were under lockdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic. 'That's a testament to Steve's life and the legacy he left, which continue to inspire me every day,' Cook wrote in the tweet that included a black-and-white image of Jobs smiling. Jobs, who co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976, died October 5, 2011 at the age of 56 after a battle with cancer. Scroll down for video Apple CEO Tim Cook is celebrating Steve Jobs who would have been 66 years old on Wednesday Jobs, along with Wozniak and Wayne, created Apple on April 1, 1976. They originally sold computer kits, which led to the first product known as Apple I. From there the team built other computers, each more advanced than the prior versions, and in 1984 they introduced the Macintosh. In 1998, Cook joined Apple after Jobs invited him to take on the role of senior vice president of worldwide operations at a time when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. To convince Cook to get on board, Jobs told him about a new product that was sure to shake up the computer world the iconic iMac G3. Jobs (pictured), along with Wozniak and Wayne, created Apple on April 1, 1976. They originally sold computer kits, which led to the first product known as Apple I. Pictured is Jobs with the Apple II In 1998, Cook (left) joined Apple after Jobs (right) invited him to join as senior vice president of worldwide operations at a time when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Pictured is the pair in 2007 'I had always thought that following the herd was not a good thing, that it was a terrible thing to do,' Cook said in a 2010 interview. 'But I looked at the problems Apple had, and I thought, you know, I can make a contribution here. So all of a sudden, I thought, I'm doing it. It didn't make sense. And yet, my gut said, go for it. And I listened to my gut.' The computer featured a bulbous, colorful design that launched shortly after Cook started at Apple and helped the firm become the tech powerhouse it is today. Jobs succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 2011, but Cook has said numerous times that he thinks of the late founder every single day. To convince Cook to get on board, Jobs told him about a new product that was sure to shake up the computer world the iconic iMac G3 (pictured) Cook has said numerous times that he thinks of the late founder every single day and shares a tweet each year on the anniversary of the birth of Jobs And the CEO shares a tweet each year on the anniversary of the birth of Jobs. In 2019, Cook tweeted a simple Steve quote:'The most precious resource we all have is time.' A year later, Cook included a quote from poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou. 'A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.' Maya Angelou. You're always with us Steve, your memory connects and inspires us every day,' reads the tweet. Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Saturday announced the appointment of Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar as the brand ambassador of the Swachh Bharat Mission in the state and also made his upcoming film "Toilet:Ek Prem Katha" tax free. The movie stresses on the importance of building toilets and ending open defecation in the country. "The message which has been given through the film is an inspiration for all... The film will give a new sensitivity to the society and help remove the ills", Adityanath said during a programme attended by the film's lead stars Akshay and Bhumi Pednekar. Besides picking up the broom, the Chief Minister and the cast of the film also administered the oath of cleanliness to the children and others present at the event. Read more: Sonu Sood to play a warrior in 'Manikarnika- The Queen of Jhansi' "Everyone needs to do 'shramdan' for 100 hours in a year and two hours a week", the CM said, adding that the dream of a healthy society can be realised only by adopting cleanliness and it is everyone's social responsibility to promote it. "The state government is working with complete sincerity on the Swachh Bharat Mission and by October 2, 2018, the state will be made open defecation free", he added. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. One America News, the upstart right-wing cable channel that was granted special status by the Trump White House, is clashing again with its mainstream colleagues on the presidential beat. Last year, the channel became the first news outlet in history to have its correspondents banned from the briefing room by the organization that represents White House reporters. The board of the White House Correspondents Association voted to boot OAN after its reporters repeatedly attended the briefings in violation of social distancing protocols that have severely limited the number of people who can be in the cramped room at once. Now the San Diego-based network is locked in a turf battle with other TV networks over a spot just outside the briefing room - a patch off of the North Lawn known as Pebble Beach. The networks have for many years used the area as the staging ground for their makeshift TV studios, positioning their correspondents in front of cameras and lights with the White House as a backdrop. OAN won approval from then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows last year to set up its own studio on the site. It was one of several favours granted to OAN by President Donald Trump and his staff, following its favourable coverage of him. But OANs setup, which includes a large tent and full array of cameras and transmission equipment, has drawn complaints from its network neighbours, who say it encroaches on their operations and crowds out smaller networks that seek to use the space. The standoff over TV standups has yet to be resolved. A committee consisting of five leading networks - ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox - is mulling its options, according to people knowledgeable about the dispute. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak for the group. The brewing confrontation is the second one involving OAN and the White House press corps. Although OAN has carved out a niche among Trump supporters for its conspiratorial reporting about the Biden familys alleged activities in Ukraine and for its support of Trumps bogus claims about the 2020 election, the disputes have little to do with politics or point of view and more to do with procedure, according to members of the correspondents association. The association, which has for years assigned the seats in the briefing room and the workspaces behind it, voted to strip OANs correspondents of their seat and workspace last year after the networks lead White House correspondent, Chanel Rion, repeatedly violated covid-related restrictions. Rion stood in the rear of the briefing room and asked questions of Trumps press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, in defiance of the correspondents self-governed restrictions on access. The briefing room has 49 seats, and normally accommodates dozens more who stand in the aisles, but the correspondents association began limiting seating to just 14 reporters in March to keep people safely spaced. News organizations thereafter observed a rotation, which gave each a seat in the room about once every 10 days. OAN showed up anyway, saying it was invited by Trump. Its reporters were joined in the back of the room last summer by correspondents from two other Trump-friendly outlets, the Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit, both of which said they received clearance from the presidents staff. Trump called on all three outlets to ask questions during his televised news conferences. The White House Correspondents Association board voted to ban OAN from the room last year and bar it from using the small workspace it shared with another news organization. Beyond a brief mention in the board meeting minutes, it did not publicize its decision at the time, said one member, to avoid turning OAN into a martyr. The ban had nothing to do with OANs news reporting, said Zeke Miller, an Associated Press reporter who serves as the organizations president. The association took action [against OAN] to ensure the health and safety of the people in the briefing room, he said. However, OAN has irritated other news organizations over the years, starting in 2018 when it filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Trump and the White House supporting its decision to ban CNN reporter Jim Acosta from the grounds. Trump ordered the removal of Acostas White House press pass after a contentious news conference; a court later sided with CNN, ordering the White House to restore Acostas access. For her part, Rion last summer started a rival organization to the WHCA, the National White House Correspondents Association. She said the group aimed to share control of the White House briefing room and all other delegated press functions with the WHCA. Neither Rion nor OAN executive Charles Herring responded to repeated requests for comment. Miller said the ban on OANs access isnt permanent; the network can reapply for a seat and will be given due consideration, he said, although it will likely be a number of months before pandemic-related restrictions are lifted. Article courtesy of the Washington Post We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form It is not often that an academician says exams "jaye bhaad mai" but it is with this philosophy that Professor Pankaj Chandra, Vice-Chancellor at Ahmedabad University is building the institution that instills the culture of learning and not of examinations. Chandra shares with BusinessToday.In how the university has been experimenting with different formats to understand the drivers of learning: completely unsupervised exams, volunteer work, and even its mandatory course Foundation programme that every student has to undertake. Q: Please share some of the gaps that you think are ailing the education system in the country. The gaps today in our education system are it is siloed. Teachers are trained in knowledge of the past, they don't have skills of the future. Another big gap is education institutions do not engage with the society around them. We are living in an ivory tower. Teachers teach theory, talk about protests, caste and gender, and expect students have learned. This methodology of bringing society in through books is important but it is not sufficient. There is too much focus on exams and not learning. This often desists the teacher to innovate their pedagogy. Exam becomes the end goal for the faculty, the learning and the curriculum. Q: While these gaps exist, what are the ways in which we can address them? First, it is important to understand that education has multiple purposes. Livelihood is just one. It's a joke that in India, where it is said that the first degree was for the parents, the second was for livelihood, the third degree was for your soul. So why don't we collapse all of this so the first degree is for your soul and livelihood too. For instance, at Ahmedabad University, we admit students to the university, and not to a programme. At 17, not everyone knows what they want to do. So, they get admission, attend the courses and decide where their passion lies. We have had kids who came to study commerce but took some courses in sciences and ended up doing BSc in Physics. We should build an institution for learning, not for examinations. If you've learned nothing, even with 4.0 out of 4.0, you will never be able to do anything in life. But if you've learned, then at some point of time in your life, it will actually show up. To incorporate this, we have continuous evaluation process and the weightage for each exam is relatively low. So every day there can be a quiz. Every week, there is a small assignment. Some courses might not have an exam also. The idea is not to put pressure on the students. Q: At Ahmedabad university, how are you ensuring students learn to love to learn. Please share some initiatives. I believe the purpose of the university is to enhance somebody's capabilities more than what they think they can do. So after a lot of experimentation, we say there are 4 ways in which one can learn. One is ways of thinking. That entails reading, writing, assignments, examination so on and so forth. This is important but it is not sufficient. There are three other ways too. There is a need for universities to connect all the subjects students learn. Today, the problems, like that of the pandemic, climate change, urbanisation are all global problems. There is a need for interdisciplinary nature of teaching, to connect the knowledge that's coming from one field with knowledge from another. Doing a course in computer science but taking up two modules in literature doesn't work. There has to be someone who is connecting the dots for the students between these two domains. We have to make the structure of the university very porous. A faculty may be appointed to the School of Arts and Sciences, but they would be teaching in the School of Management. Many of our philosophy professors teach courses on ethics in the School of Management. Sometimes they partner with the business professor and teach together. The third way is to learn by doing. Usually, in classrooms, there are first a few lessons in theory and fieldwork is at the end of it. But those theory lessons are a waste because there is still not a clear understanding of what it means. To give you an example, we used to do a course called Sound and Acoustics and Physics, which was earlier in the theory exam mode but we realised the class was not learning. Now that course is called The Science of Building Musical Instrument. A music professor and a professor of computer science teach it together and the kids build three instruments: string instrument, one wind instrument, and third is a keyboard. They'll get raw materials, put it up together. Then, there will be a lecture on sound and the physics behind it. So, they go back to their guitar, remake it, fine tune it further, apply the theory and in doing that they would have learnt Physics. The last way of learning is ways of becoming. We realised that purpose of education is not only to offer livelihood but also to change you as a person. We wanted the students to not see themselves as graduates or technicians, they should see themselves as citizens where they have an independent mind, can think critically and solve problems. There are some people more empathetic than others and we think because they are exposed to this world a little bit more, they have experienced what it means to be in a slum or knows a person with disability. Also Read: Cabinet to approve PLI scheme for electronics, medical devices Also Read: India Inc to offer 7.7% average salary hike in 2021: Aon Also Read: Need to get into cutting edge tech to bolster exports: Amitabh Kant Constitutional Convention Is Not the Solution to Big Government Commentary Millions of Americans are understandably frustrated at the inexorable growth of governmental power, especially at the federal level. This frustration has caused many to look for solutions, many of which will either do nothing or have the potential to make the problem worsemuch worse. The proposal for a constitutional convention to supposedly rein in the out-of-control federal behemoth is the greatest example of the latter. In fact, calling a national convention to change our Constitution in our present toxic atmosphere could very well provide the final blow to our constitutional republic. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia once told the Federalist Society, in reference to the push for such a convention, this is a bad century in which to write a Constitution. While this might seem to be alarmist, the threat is real. Harpers magazine sponsored a forum at New York University in 2019 that illustrates the danger. The left-wing scholars at the forum argued that its our Constitution thats the chief obstacle to the full implementation of the progressive agenda. One participant, Lawrence Lessig, argued that the best way to achieve progressive goals is a constitutional convention, provided for in Article V of the Constitution. The Constitution has been amended 27 times (the first 10 times were all at once, producing our treasured Bill of Rights), but all of these amendments were proposed by the first method of proposalby a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress. The second method of proposal, via a constitutional convention, has never been used. But Lessig sees this so-far-unused second method as the best vehicle to remove the present constitutional obstacles to achieving the goal of the forumditching the present Constitution of the United States. He believes its time to rewrite our Constitution. Lessig has supported an organization dedicated to the calling of a national constitutional convention, known as Wolf-PAC. On page 293 of his 2011 book Republic, Lost, he wrote a constitutional convention is the only final plausible strategy for forcing fundamental reform onto our Congress. Although there are many conservatives who are likewise desirous of a convention in order to pass this or that conservative reform, they should understand that once the convention is seated, conservatives might very well not have control of its agenda. Any such convention will be chosen by the same electorate that has picked our present Congress. The argument by the organization Convention of States that it would be the state legislatures that chose the delegates has no support in the text of Article V of the Constitutionnone. Many goals of the left would also be on the agenda at any such convention. For example, many have suggested the abolition of the Electoral College as one of the objectives that could be achieved at a national convention. Other progressives would no doubt target the repeal of the Second Amendment. Some conservatives have been sold on the idea that adding new language to the Constitution to restrain the federal government is the solution to our present problems, but considering that congresses, presidents, federal judges, and federal bureaucrats routinely disregard our present constitutional restrictions on their powers, why should we believe they would respect any addition to the Constitution attempting to rein them in? The First Amendment, adopted in 1791, specifically said that Congress could pass no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press. Yet, just seven years later Congress did exactly that with the Sedition Act. President John Adams signed the bill into law, and federal judges handed down fines and jail time to violators of the law. James Madison, the man dubbed the Father of the Constitution, specifically rejected the idea of the calling of a constitutional convention to restrain a federal government that disregarded the restrictions placed upon it in the Constitution, when he wrote Federalist 49 of the Federalist Papers. In fact, Madison said that occasional appeal to the people [a convention] would be neither a proper nor an effectual provision for placing restraints on the federal government. One of the frequently stated goals of the Convention of States crowd is the enactment of an amendment to require a federal balanced budget. While a balanced federal budget is a good idea in the abstract, this illustrates the fundamental problem of those conservatives who are calling for a national convention. First of all, Congress is presently exceeding its constitutional authority to spend money on a range of projects. If Congress simply obeyed our Constitution as its presently written, the federal budget would be balanced with ease. Secondly, unless Congress quits spending money on unconstitutional purposes, a balanced budget amendment would almost certainly lead to drastic tax increases. Proponents of a constitutional convention assert that any such convention could be limited to certain topics. But this assertion cant be supported by the text of Article V, which says nothing about limiting the convention to certain topics. It only says that the convention (not the state legislatures) can propose amendments. What Article V does say is that once two-thirds of the state legislatures make application for a constitutional convention, Congress (not the state legislatures) calls the convention. In 2014, a report from the Congressional Research Service asserted that Article V gave Congress the exclusive authority to determine the number and selection process for its delegates. In short, those national convention advocates who expect each state to be equally represented at any such convention are exceptionally naive. Does anyone really expect Californias mostly Democrat delegation to permit Republican, but low-population, states to send as many delegates to a convention as them? This means, of course, if delegates are elected by popular vote within their state (it would be up to Congress to decide the selection process), then we could expect any such conventions delegates to have the same ideological balance as our present Congressafter all, they would be chosen by the same electorate. Once seated, the delegates themselves would determine what amendments to consider, not the Congress and not the state legislatures. While there would no doubt be some constitutionalists present at the convention, we could also expect to see delegates dedicated to the elimination of the Second Amendment and the Electoral College. In our present cancel culture, its probable there would be a push to restrict freedom of speech. Some would even desire to alter our very form of government, attacking the concepts of federalism and limited government. Constitutional convention advocates argue, of course, that even if the convention passed horrific proposals, these still have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states. Again, the process of ratification would not be up to the state legislatures. Article V stipulates that its Congress that determines the ratification method, either state legislatures or state conventions. We would have much to fear in either case. We can expect large sums of money would be used in an effort to get the progressive amendments ratified. Unexpected events could create an emotional environment for passage of, say, the repeal of the Second Amendment. Ask yourself: Would you want a proposal to repeal the Second Amendment to be up for consideration in the immediate aftermath of another mass shooting? So much more could be said in opposition to this unwise idea of a constitutional convention. The best we could hope for out of such a convention is that they would meet, pass an amendment or two that we could live with, and go homegiving the federal government yet another part of the Constitution to disobey. But, like a game of Russian roulette, the hammer could fall on the wrong chamber and kill our constitutional republic. Steve Byas is a professor of history and government, who has taught Constitutional Law, and is the author of Historys Greatest Libels. He has written several articles for both popular publications and academic journals. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. The forever war on Afghanistan will continue. The U.S. and its NATO proxy force have spent nearly 20 years and a trillion dollars to "do something" in Afghanistan. What that something was to be was never clear. There were attempts to impose some kind of enlightened model of governance on the Afghan people. But anyone with knowledge of that country knew that this would never work. Bribes were handed out left and right and Afghan warlords, many of whom hold government positions, enriched themselves by scamming the occupation forces. They naturally do not want that to end. There are also Afghans who do not want to live under the heel of corrupt warlords and ignorant occupation troops. They are called Taliban and get support from Pakistan and Arab countries which the U.S. calls 'allies'. The occupation forces tried to fight them but after nearly 20 years of wars the Taliban again rule over half of the country. Even while the warlords still have military support from the occupation forces their troops are losing in nearly every engagement. Militarily the war against the Taliban has long been lost. Even with the 100,000 'western' troops the Obama administration had sent there was no way to win it. President Donald Trump made efforts to end the useless war on Afghanistan. He negotiated with the Taliban to remove all 'western' forces by May 1. The agreement also commits the Taliban to not attacking those forces and to negotiate with the warlord government in Kabul on power sharing. They agreed to that after the U.S. promised that Taliban prisoners of war, held by the Afghan government, would be released. The Afghan government had and has of course no interest in losing power. At least not as long as still gets sponsored by 'western' money. It also did not want to let prisoners go as those would just turn around and again fight against it. A year ago the Trump administration threatened to withhold money should the Afghan government not follow the negotiated terms: Facing collapse of Afghan peace talks before they even start, the Trump administration has threatened to withhold up to $2 billion in aid unless President Ashraf Ghani and his main rival put aside their political differences and open negotiations with the Taliban. ... The threat was the sharpest sign yet that the Trump administration is distancing itself from its Afghan ally and moving closer to the Taliban. The longtime U.S. adversary has in effect become a wary partner as President Trump seeks to withdraw thousands of American troops before the November election and end Americas longest war. ... The Kabul government is heavily dependent on international assistance. U.S. aid was expected to total $4.3 billion this year, all but $500 million of which was earmarked for training and equipping the Afghan army. The threat worked as expected. But when it became clear that a new management would take over the White House the Afghan government again tried to stall the process. Today the talks resumed but they are unlikely to achieve any results: Peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government have resumed in the Qatari capital Doha after weeks of delays, escalating violence and a change in US diplomatic leadership as the Biden administration began. Taliban spokesman Mohammad Naeem tweeted on Monday night the resumption of the talks, which were the outcome of an agreement between the Afghan armed group and the US in February 2020. But the administration of President Joe Biden is reviewing the agreement, which was aimed at ending the longest war the US has fought. ... When talks ended abruptly in January, days after they began, both sides submitted their wish lists for agendas which they now have to sift through to agree on negotiation items and the order in which they will be tackled. The priority for the Afghan government, Washington and NATO is a serious reduction in violence that can lead to a ceasefire, the Taliban have until now resisted any immediate ceasefire. Washington is reviewing the Doha peace agreement the previous Trump administration signed with the Taliban as consensus mounts in Washington that a delay of the withdrawal deadline is needed. The Taliban have resisted suggestions of even a brief extension. Without financial pressure there is no chance that the Afghan government and the Taliban will ever reach a power sharing deal. Even if there would be an agreement there is little chance that it will be upheld by all sides. The conflict would likely reignite and the Taliban would win. The obvious consequence should be to just follow Trumps plan and to leave as soon as possible. But Trump was bad and thus the Biden administration is discussing three options: If the US leaves in the next three months, its likely the Taliban will overrun the US-backed Afghan government and once again make life worse for millions of Afghans, especially women and children. Staying in Afghanistan just a little bit longer would likely delay that takeover, but would also expend any diplomatic capital the US has left with the Taliban and keep US troops in harms way. Finally, violating the terms of the agreement and remaining indefinitely will almost certainly lead the Taliban to restart its campaign, put on hold ahead of the May 1 deadline, to kill American service members in the country. Biden could follow Trumps agreement with the Taliban and order the troops home. He could sell that as a victory and a fulfillment of a campaign promise. But with the blob again in power that option had little chance to survive: The opinion editors at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal may not agree on much, but they are both determined to oppose bringing forces out of Afghanistan as our war there approaches its 20th anniversary, raising the specter of withdrawing irresponsibly. Meanwhile conservative establishmentarians like Washington Post columnist Max Boot, and his cohort on the center-left side of the dial, David Ignatius, as well as Madeleine Albright, make common cause for keeping troops in Afghanistan as Bidens best option. Todays stay advocates, which include Republicans like Lindsey Graham making the media rounds, may all be coming from different plot points on the Washington political grid, but keeping the United States committed to a desultory, unwinnable conflict unites them. Their messages are circulated and amplified by social media and establishment friendlies, and among big cable news outlets. Thus, a consensus is born. The blob is usually fond of claims that "all options are on the table". Here it was keen to take one away: Multiple US officials told me in recent days that the administrations Afghanistan policy review is nearing its end, with one telling me they expect Biden to make a decision very soon. I dont know which way the president will go, said this official, who like others spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to talk freely about a sensitive national security deliberation. Another person familiar with the Afghanistan discussions told me its clear a full withdrawal by May 1 is off the table. This again demonstrates that the U.S. is no longer agreement capable. By staying longer than May 1 the Biden administration will breach an international agreement the previous administration had made. It is unlikely that the Taliban will agree to a prolonged stay of any troops from such an unreliable entity. They will rescind the ceasefire and the war will again enter a bloody phase: [F]ew think Biden will withdraw all US troops by May 1, which means he will be keeping US service members in the country with or without the Talibans approval. If he does it without their approval, that could lead the insurgents to attack and kill American personnel as they overtake major Afghan cities, perhaps even Kabul. At that point, withdrawing from Afghanistan would be harder, experts say, because the administration wont want to look like its running away from the fight. A return to a larger war, then, would likely ensue, leading to more death and woes for the millions of Afghans whove already suffered tremendously. Unfortunately the decision by the Biden administration was utterly predictable. The military-industrial complex will not allow a retreat from a profitable battlefield and Biden is way too weak to resist its pressure. Patanjali will step in if no other Indian company bids for IPL title: Ramdev On Ramdevs allopathy remark Patanjali says he was only reading a forward Dr Harsh Vardhan should say he is not endorsing Patanjali's Coronil, says Indian Medical Association India oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P New Delhi, Feb 24: In a recent development, Dr JA Jayalal, national president of Indian Medical Association (IMA) said that Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan should come out with a statement that he is not endorsing the sale of Coronil as a curative medicine for COVID-19. The statement was in response to the Delhi Medical Association defending Dr Vardhan's attendance at the launch of Coronil, which Yoga guru Ramdev's Patanjali group claims can be used to treat coronavirus. Tamil Nadu CM unveils portraits of three freedom fighters Underlining that IMA is a professional body, Dr Jayalal said that as its national president he had expressed the scientific view of 3.5 lakhs doctors "on this public gimmick mela." Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan should come out with a statement that he is not endorsing the sale of Coronil as a curative medicine for Covid-19, said Dr JA Jayalal, national president of Indian Medical Association (IMA). The statement was in response to the Delhi Medical Association defending Dr Vardhan's attendance at the launch of Coronil, which Yoga guru Ramdev's Patanjali group claims can be used to treat coronavirus. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 14:01 [IST] UPDATE Feb. 26 5:03 p.m. Katlin Gallaread, who has been missing for more than a week, has been found safe in Pittsburg, according to a Pittsburg Police Department tweet. An alert city landscape worker recognized Gallaread, 14, and her companion, Tyler Sexton, 16, according to police. Katlin's father, Jason Gallaread, confirmed to KTVU that Pittsburg police had located his daughter. Feb. 26 7:45 a.m. Jason Gallaread, Katlin Gallaread's father, told news outlets Thursday that she left a note prior to her sudden departure. In the note, per the San Francisco Chronicle, she expressed feelings of isolation due to the pandemic shutting down schools. (SFGATE and the Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but operate independently of one another.) She's a freshman at Wallenberg High, and she said that her grades have been slipping. Her running away was motivated by a need to solve her problems, the Chronicle said. Feb. 25 9:15 p.m. Katlin Gallaread, who has been missing since Feb. 16, may be in the company of another runaway juvenile, San Francisco police said Thursday. Gallaread, 14, is possibly traveling with Tyler Sexton, 16, of Monroe, Mich., police said. Sexton is described as a white male, 5-foot-6, weighing 155 pounds. The last known location of the two teens was Sacramento. Anyone with information regarding this investigation is asked to call the SFPD 24-hour tip line at 415-575-4444 or Text a Tip to TIP411 and begin the text message with SFPD. Feb. 24 11:15 a.m. Bank records may prove to be evidence in solving the disappearance of a 14-year-old San Francisco girl. Katlin Gallaread was last seen on Tuesday, Feb. 16. That was when she last had dinner with her father, Jason Gallaread. He told KTVU that Katlin went to her room after their meal together. At some point between that evening and early last Wednesday, Katlin left their home in the Western Addition. A Ring surveillance video found her outside their home at around 9:45 p.m. that time. The high school freshman has not contacted her family since and her father said in a KTVU interview fears that she was she was talked into running from home by a stranger. At the time, police said in a statement that she frequented the Safeway on Webster Street, the Target on Geary Blvd. and Japantown. San Francisco Police Department While the search for Katlin around San Francisco has continued to no end, Jason said that her bank records withdrawn from her savings may provide information as to her current whereabouts. A withdrawal was made in Chinatown, which he said was not a neighborhood she frequented, hours after she went missing. The next withdrawal reported took place days later, in West Sacramento, where the entirety of her savings account was withdrawn. Calls made to her phone are sent straight to voicemail. "I'm very concerned for my daughter," Jason Gallaread told KTVU. "The streets are very tough. There's a lot of sick individuals out here." Police continue to search for any leads related to her disappearance and are working with other jurisdictions, but it remains unclear if the bank information or her cell phone use are being used as evidence. They are continuing to take any information on the SFPD tipline. A spokesman for San Francisco police declined to comment further, citing ongoing investigations to SFGATE. Cochin Port will sign nine MoUs worth Rs 2,825 crore at the second Maritime India Summit 2021 to be held held on March 2-4, the government said on Wednesday. is one of the 12 major ports in the country. " (CoPT), one of the major port trusts in India, will sign 9 MoUs of Rs 2,825 crore (as of today) at 2nd Maritime India Summit 2021 scheduled to happen on 2nd to 4th March 2021," Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways (MoPSW) said in a statement. These MoUs will be majorly signed between Fertilisers and Chemicals Travancore Limited (FACT); Kottayam Port & ICD Services; IOCL; IGTPL; etc. The MoUs will be signed in the areas like dredging for maintenance of channels and basins, coastal connectivity, cargo handling, tourism related projects, aviation fuel terminal, deepening and widening of port channels, etc. "The Ministry of Ports, Shipping, and Waterways is also in process of finalising more than 217 MoUs to be signed in conjunction with the summit. These MoUs will be signed with different coastal states and stakeholders of the sector," the statement said. These MoUs are focused on attracting investment, skilling, and generating employment in the sector. The signing of these MoUs will help in streamlining the process of ship maneuvering resulting in more business to the ports and economic stability to the sector and its stakeholders. The statement said within two weeks of the announcement, more than 30 CEOs, including national and international, have confirmed their participation. Also, total 83 speakers have confirmed their participation including international and domestic speakers. International participants are from countries like USA, Russia, Denmark, Brazil, Japan, Sweden, Singapore, Netherlands, etc, it 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.) KN95 masks for sale in a mask vending machine during the CCP virus pandemic in New York City on May 29, 2020. (Cindy Ord/Getty Images) North Dakota House Passes Bill Prohibiting Mandatory Masks North Dakotas House of Representatives voted to pass a bill on Feb. 22 that will forbid future mask mandates in the state with a 50-44 vote, advancing the bill to the Senate. Rep. Jeff Hoverson of Minot sponsored House Bill 1323 (pdf), which states, A state or local elected official, the state, or a political subdivision of the state may not mandate an individual in this state [to] use a face mask, face shield, or other face covering. In addition, schools and businesses cannot require the use of a face mask, shield, or covering a condition for entry, education, employment, or services. Sometimes we need to do things simply because its the right thing to do, Hoverson said before the lower chamber voted on Monday. Of all the bills Ive introduced, none have come close to this one in terms of supportive emails and calls. This obsession with masks that are on shaky ground have kept us from using available life-saving treatments we do have an obligation to correct this and turn from this dangerous path. Our elderly deserve better, he added. Rep. Jeff Hoverson gives a statement in support of House Bill 1323 that prohibits making masks mandatory, in Bismarck, North Dakota, on Feb. 22, 2021. (Screenshot via North Dakota Legislature) The Republican claimed that there are no solid clinical studies that support widespread mask-wearing protects people from becoming infected with the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes the disease COVID-19. One of the largest studies from Denmark involving 6,000 participants found no significant difference in CCP virus infections between those who wore a mask and those who didnt. Forty-two participants (1.8 percent) in the mask group caught COVID-19 while 53 (2.1 percent) in the control group contracted the disease. California and New York have higher mask compliance and a more severe lockdown than Florida, but both states have a higher death toll of 49,345 and 46,812 respectively, compared to Floridas 29,906 fatalities, according to statista.com. Hoverson said that North Dakota should be a free state like South Dakota where people are able to make healthy decisions for themselves, their families, and their neighbors instead of being forced by the government. As of Jan. 23, North Dakota had 99,416 cases and 1,439 deaths, and South Dakota had a slightly higher number at 111,546 cases and 1,863 deaths. However, South Dakota did not shut down its businesses or require statewide mask-wearing. GOP Rep. Jason Dockter said he couldnt support the bill because it was more about local control instead of giving people or organizations a choice to enforce mask-wearing where needed. I dont like wearing masks but there comes a point where public health is very important, Dockter said. And if people want to decide to have a mandate for a certain organization or certain political subdivisions, they should have that choice but they should also have the choice not to mandate. Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, allowed the statewide mask requirement to end on Jan. 18 after he enforced it back in November 2020 due to increases in COVID-19 cases, fatalities, and hospitalizations. However, certain school districts still require masks to be worn at school while others allow the students to go to school without a mask. While North Dakota has ended its mandatory mask policy, New York has doubled down on it. People are now required to double-mask or wear a properly fitted N95 mask approved by the Food and Drug Administration if they want to enter certain federal buildings, according to a new policy (pdf). Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci has also said in a CNN interview that masks may still have to be worn in 2022. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company 4 senators move to allow De Lima to attend sessions, conduct hearings AS she marks her fourth year in detention today, four of Senator Leila de Lima's colleagues have crossed party lines and moved to allow her to participate in plenary sessions and conduct committee hearings through teleconferencing or other forms of electronic communications. Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto and Minority Senators -- Minority Leader Franklin Drilon, Francis "Kiko" Pangilinan, and Risa Hontiveros -- jointly filed Senate Resolution 658 as De Lima marked her 1,462nd day at Camp Crame Detention Facility. The four stressed that there is available technology to allow De Lima to perform her functions as a duly-elected lawmaker. On July 31, 2019, Senators Drilon and Panfilo Lacson filed Senate Resolution 51, entitled "Resolution Allowing Senator Leila M. De Lima to participate in plenary through teleconferencing, video conferencing, or other forms of remote or electronic communications." It is still pending at committee level. The Senate on May 4, 2020 adopted Resolution 43 allowing the conduct of plenary sessions and committee hearings through teleconference, video conference, or other reliable forms of remote electronic means due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Through this, the Senate and its committees have been conducting plenary sessions and committee hearings through remote and electronic means. After the Supreme Court allowed litigants to appear before the courts via teleconferencing, Camp Crame established three existing facilities within its grounds to allow De Lima to attend her court hearings via remote access from her detention center. They added that in the case of then-Senator Antonio Trillanes, jurisprudence allows detained legislators to perform their as long as they are done within the confines of their detention centers as ruled by the Supreme Court. As a duly elected member of the Senate of the 18th Congress, De Lima must be accorded "the privilege of participating in its plenary sessions and committee hearings via remote access," they said. Conflict-torn is falling off a cliff and will face the worst the world has seen for decades unless donors, and especially its Gulf neighbours, contribute generously to this year's UN humanitarian appeal for $3.85 billion, the UN humanitarian chief has warned. Mark Lowcock on Wednesday said Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which contributed generously to UN appeals in 2018 and 2019, cut back drastically last year. This forced aid agencies to reduce the number of Yemenis receiving food and other humanitarian aid from 13-14 million every month in 2019 to just 9 million in 2020, he said. The 4 million people who didn't receive food last year are among those essentially in the long, slow, brutal, painful, agonising process of starving to death, Lowcock told a virtual briefing for a group of reporters. He spoke ahead of Monday's pledging conference co-hosted by Sweden and Switzerland where Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will appeal for $3.85 billion. Without that funding, a lot more people will die, there could be catastrophic prospects unleashed in the country, Lowcock warned. Because of the state in the country now, where there (are) already pockets of famine, what we're going to see is the worst the world has seen for decades. So, there is a lot at stake and there's an urgency. The devastating conflict in the Arab world's poorest country erupted in 2014, when Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized Yemen's capital, Sanaa, and much of the country's north. That prompted a US-backed Arab military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to intervene months later in a bid to restore the government of Yemeni President Abed Rabu Mansour Hadi to power. The conflict has killed some 130,000 people and spawned the world's worst humanitarian disaster. Lowcock said US President Joe Biden's new policy aimed at ending the six-year war and halting support for the coalition, and the way it has been welcomed especially by Saudi Arabia, does create a major opportunity for peace and progress in That creates probably the biggest opportunity that we've seen since 2016 to find a resolution, he said. Lowcock said it's now up to Yemen's warring parties to take the opportunity and build a government that represents everybody and addresses the needs of the people including rebuilding the economy and restoring livelihoods for millions of people. If that happens, he said, that government will receive support. Lowcock stressed that in order to keep the situation in the country stable for the peace process to have a chance, the humanitarian situation must improve to where it was in 2019 when 13-14 million people per month were receiving food -- and that requires $3.85 billion funding. Last year's $3.4 billion appeal received only about $1.8 billion, he said, with the UN receiving only $300 million of the $500 million that Saudi Arabia pledged, just a modest contribution from the UAE, and Kuwait only coming in with a late $20 million pledge, he said. Lowcock said he has been talking to Gulf countries every day for the last week or 10 days with the message that what they did in 2018 and 2019 saved a lot of lives and prevented a tragedy of genuine historic proportions. It's now back on a knife edge. And what you do will make a huge difference, and please pledge generously and please pay promptly, he said he told Gulf officials. Lowcock said Monday will be his fourth pledging conference for Yemen, and he's expecting a higher turnout, a higher-level presence including foreign ministers, and strong representation from the Gulf countries which he called an encouraging sign. I think there is an understanding now that the humanitarian situation is about to fall off a cliff, that a huge is not in anyone's interest, he said. Lowcock said he believes countries also realise that the Biden administration's new policy offers an opportunity to try to restore peace to Yemen, and humanitarian aid is a critical element. (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.) Nick Clegg was today blasted for a 'bizarre', 'patronising' and 'disingenuous' rant about Facebook's war with Australia over paying for news content. The former deputy PM, now vice president of global affairs at the tech giant on a reputed seven-figure salary, moaned its position had been 'misunderstood' in an extraordinary blog posted on an official site. Claiming to be telling the 'real' story of the standoff, Sir Nick said Facebook temporarily blocked the sharing of news stories in Australia because a new law would have left it signing a 'blank cheque' to publishers. He griped that the platform did not ask people to share news, comparing the situation to 'forcing carmakers to fund radio stations because people might listen to them in the car, and letting the stations set the price'. CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally agreed to end the week-long blockade of news after Australian ministers significantly watered down the laws. Commons Culture Committee chair Julian Knight was among those slating Sir Nick - who took the job and moved to California after being humiliatingly ejected from Parliament at the 2017 election - over his justification. 'Nick Clegg's bizarre statements remind me of the old saying if you are in a hole stop digging,' the Tory MP told MailOnline. 'The idea that Facebook is some sort of innocent drawn into a row because of its pesky users posting news stories stretches credulity to breaking point. 'To use an analogy of Clegg-like proportions, it's like blaming students for the 2010 Lib Dem manifesto promising to abolish tuition fees.' Nick Clegg was today blasted for a 'bizarre', 'patronising' and 'disingenuous' rant about Facebook's war with Australia over paying for news content The former deputy PM, now vice president of global affairs at the tech giant on a reputed seven-figure salary, complained its position had been 'misunderstood' in an extraordinary blog Claiming to be telling the 'real' story of the standoff, Sir Nick said Facebook temporarily blocked the sharing of news stories in Australia because a new law would have left it signing a 'blank cheque' to publishers Former culture committee chair Damian Collins told MailOnline the article was 'pretty disingenuous' and patronising 'even by his own high standards'. 'He implied that Facebook is doing the news industry a favour. If you look what has happened in Australia, not only do Facebook and Google control 80 per cent of the advertising market, since 2006 ad revenues for newspapers have fallen by over 50 per cent,' Mr Collins said. 'That has led to papers closing, journalists being laid off, it has created a real problem which is what the competition authorities are trying to address. 'Nick Clegg seems to neither understand nor care about anything like that. 'He completely ignores the fact that Facebook makes money by people engaging with content on its platform. 'It sells advertising against that. And that includes sharing news articles.' The Tory MP went on: 'Facebook has got a business model where it makes money out of other people's content and other people's data, and it doesn't think it should have to pay for it. 'The time has come when it does.' Facebook claims it will have the power to pick and choose who it pays for news after Australia's new media laws come into force, handing the company a powerful weapon in its fight over paid content. Campbell Brown, Facebook's vice president of news partnerships, said Australian ministers assured him today the site will be free 'to support the publishers we choose to' after new bargaining laws are voted into force later this week. The rule could allow Facebook to ban companies demanding higher prices for their news while using cheaper rivals - a significant loophole in legislation that was designed to 'level the playing field' between tech firms and publishers. It could also allow Facebook to block news outlets who are critical of the site, though the final deal has yet to be published. The concessions will have global ramifications. The UK, EU and US are all considering whether to pass similar rules, but will now find it much harder to go beyond the precedent set in Australia. Writing online in a blog post titled The Real Story Of What Happened With News On Facebook In Australia, Sir Nick said that while it was 'understandable' that some news publishers 'see Facebook as a potential source of money to make up for their losses', it would not have been fair to be able to demand a 'blank cheque'. 'That's what the Australian law, as it was proposed, would have done,' Sir Nick said. 'Facebook would have been forced to pay potentially unlimited amounts of money to multinational media conglomerates under an arbitration system that deliberately misdescribes the relationship between publishers and Facebook without even so much as a guarantee that it is used to pay for journalism, let alone support smaller publishers.' He insisted: 'We neither take nor ask for the content for which we were being asked to pay a potentially exorbitant price. Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden is set to meet with Facebook executives over the tech giant's decision after Downing Street said it was 'concerned' about the situation. Sir Nick said Facebook was 'more than willing to partner with news publishers' and pointed to its Facebook News service, which pays news publishers for their content and recently launched in the UK. The former Lib Dem leader said Facebook was open to discussing greater regulation of the tech sector. 'There are legitimate concerns to be addressed about the size and power of tech companies, just as there are serious issues about the disruption the internet has caused to the news industry,' he said. Facebook has agreed to restore news pages in Australia after CEO Mark Zuckerberg (left) forced MPs to water down new laws that will make the site pay for content Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (right) hailed the news as a victory and said Facebook will negotiate with Australian publishers over their content What legal changes has Australia agreed to - and what do they actually mean? The government says: 'A decision to designate a platform under the Code must take into account whether a digital platform has made a significant contribution to the sustainability of the Australian news industry through reaching commercial agreements with news media businesses' What it means: Tech companies will not be affected by the new rules if they strike deals with media publishers and pay enough money The government says: 'A digital platform will be notified of the Governments intention to designate prior to any final decision noting that a final decision on whether or not to designate a digital platform would be made no sooner than one month from the date of notification' What it means: If the law is going to be applied, then tech companies will be given a month's notice in order to strike more deals The government says: 'Non-differentiation provisions will not be triggered because commercial agreements resulted in different remuneration amounts or commercial outcomes that arose in the course of usual business practices' What it means: The government will not force tech companies to offer the same fees to all news publishers, will not force them to share information on their algorithms, and will not force them to sign data-sharing deals The government says: 'Final offer arbitration is a last resort where commercial deals cannot be reached by requiring mediation, in good faith, to occur prior to arbitration for no longer than two months' What it means: Even after the rules are applied, tech firms will have two months to negotiate before being forced into arbitration - which will be used only 'as a last resort' The government says: 'These amendments add further impetus for parties to engage in commercial negotiations outside the Code' What it means: Publishers should do deals with Facebook now, because arbitration is unlikely to be used in practice Advertisement Australian Treasurer Josh Fryberg has painted the move as a victory, saying Facebook will now negotiate deals to pay for content - albeit with a stronger negotiating hand than it had last week. Key changes agreed by Australia are that the law will not apply if Facebook can show a 'significant contribution' to Australian journalism by striking its own deals with news publishers. If the law is going to be applied, then Facebook will be given one month's notice - allowing the company more time to strike deals and wiggle out of regulation. Even after the law is applied, Facebook will have a further two months to negotiate deals on its terms and will only be forced into arbitration - which would set a fixed price for news content - 'as a last resort'. In effect, it means arbitration is unlikely to ever be used and encourages deals to be struck ahead of time - with Mr Frydenberg telling media companies to 'get out there and talk to Facebook' as he announced the changes on Tuesday. The new rules also state that Facebook is free to offer different fees to different news organisations as a result of its negotiations, and will not have to reveal the inner workings of their closely-guarded algorithms or disclose data. Campbell Brown, Facebook's vice president of global news partnerships, also claimed the site will retain control over which news organisations get to appear. 'Going forward, the government has clarified we will retain the ability to decide if news appears on Facebook so that we won't automatically be subject to forced negotiation,' he said. 'We have come to an agreement that will allow us to support the publishers we choose to, including small and local publishers.' While the final details of the deal have yet to be seen, giving Facebook the option of blocking certain news sites would hand it significant bargaining power while weakening the hand of publishers in negotiations. How uber-Liberal Nick Clegg is living the Californian dream in 'America's most expensive zip code' with his millions from Facebook, the world's 'most illiberal firm' Nestled in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, the sleepy hamlet of Atherton has been crowned 'America's most expensive zip code' for each of the past four years. The average house costs 5 million and the 7,000 uber-wealthy residents include tech titans Eric Schmidt, former head of Google, and Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. Atherton screams 'new' money and lots of it. But that doesn't stop the villagers priding themselves on impeccably liberal credentials. In November's US Presidential election, nearly 80 per cent of them cast their vote in favour of Democrat Joe Biden and against Republican President Donald Trump. What better place, then, to find Sir Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister and Lib Dem leader who is now Facebook's Vice-President for Global Affairs and Communications? Life seems good for the 54-year-old, who once led the Coalition Government with David Cameron. He shares a 7 million mansion with wife Miriam and gets by on a salary reported to be 2.7 million a year. The average house in Atherton, Silicone Valley, costs 5 million and the 7,000 uber-wealthy residents include tech titans Eric Schmidt, former head of Google, and Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. Pictured, Nick Clegg's 7 million mansion Clegg has taken to life here with ease. Before lockdown, he was often seen cycling the three miles from his home to Facebook's Menlo Park HQ wearing workout clothes and flip-flops. This is the man who once declared: 'If you scratch below the surface and ask what really makes me tick, it's the liberalism of trying to promote freedom and opportunity.' So it seems an irony that Clegg's new life in the sunshine is funded by an organisation increasingly described as a threat to democracy. Last week, Facebook caused consternation around the Western world. Faced with demands from an elected government that it pay for the news content it copies from others and promotes, the tech giant reacted by censoring Australian Facebook pages and simply removing the news feeds. Clegg is now at the heart of negotiations with the Australian government. Canada is threatening to introduce similar legislation. The clouds have been gathering for some time. Google and Facebook already face demands that they be broken up, with anti-trust suits against them in US courts. And in their treatment of Trump effectively silenced by Facebook and Twitter while he was still President the tech giants have been described as both illiberal and unaccountable. Facebook, with its 2.8 billion unique users a month, wields more power than most countries and knows it. Mr Clegg is pictured with his wife Miriam Gonzalez Durantez. Miriam, 52, says life in Silicon Valley is 'a bit like living in the Vatican', adding: 'It's slightly insular, massively wealthy. It's not so diversified and is mostly run by men' Roger McNamee, an early investor in the company, said: 'Facebook has more monthly users than there are notional adherents to Christianity; roughly twice as many as there are people in China. 'When your numbers are that big your ego can give you the illusion that you are a nation state.' Not that the Cleggs will meet much criticism in Atherton. Miriam, 52, says life in Silicon Valley is 'a bit like living in the Vatican', adding: 'It's slightly insular, massively wealthy. It's not so diversified and is mostly run by men.' One local said: 'This is a place you find people driving Teslas rather than Lamborghinis. You can't swing a cat without hitting a billionaire but that's part of the charm. Gardeners, maids and other service people come in at sunrise and leave at sunset. It's a safe haven for the super-rich and those aspiring to be.' Lady Clegg works as a lawyer while running a charity called Inspiring Girls and cultivating a vegetable patch in the grounds of the couple's two-storey faux Queen Anne house built in 2009. With an acre of land, huge outdoor swimming pool with hot-tub, a sun deck and an outdoor fireplace, the family have been well prepared for the privations of lockdown. The house has five bedrooms, six bathrooms and a dining room that seats 16. NO EXPENSE SPARED: The faux Queen Anne house was built in 2009 But they should enjoy it while they can. One Hollywood power-broker who met Clegg shortly before the pandemic struck said he faced an 'impossible' task of trying to promote the idea Facebook can be a self-regulating force for good rather than a behemoth which puts profits before people. 'He's the ultimate liberal, living in the beating heart of liberal Silicon Valley, yet he works for the most un-liberal company in the world,' he said, while adding that he found Clegg 'a very likeable guy'. 'He was basically brought into Facebook to help the company's image and that of Mark Zuckerberg personally. He went around the room promising to make the company more transparent, saying it would be more accountable, that it wouldn't just ignore criticism but would embrace it. Let's be honest his job is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig. But comparing Facebook to a pig is being unfair to pigs. Facebook has continued to put profits and growth before users' safety and privacy.' Clegg's supporters point to improvements he has made since joining the company, including helping to create an Oversight Board an 'independent' committee which will have the ultimate say on content. The Hollywood source added: 'He's not hated but he's not managed to score a huge victory. The jury's still out. He's facing a thankless task. The reality is probably he will move on, head held high. But this has been a job that has given his family a life-altering income.' For the first time since Facebook was founded in 2004, the world is waking up to the threat it poses along with Google, Amazon and the rest. But that's unlikely to ruffle the Cleggs in their Californian mansion as, day by day, the money keeps rolling in. Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 24, 2021) - Embark Delta Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Embark Health Inc. ("Embark" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has entered into a supply agreement with the Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS), the wholesaler and sole online retailer for recreational cannabis in Ontario. Embark is thrilled to be launching their solventless concentrate brands in the province including The Hank Co. ("Hank") and Hazel. The initial product rollouts will include The Hank Co. high THC Bubble Hash and Hazel Hash Sticks. Ontario is Canada's largest market for adult-use cannabis products. The agreement authorizes Embark to supply The Hank Co. and Hazel products to the OCS for sale and wholesale distribution. The products are anticipated to be available for purchase early this spring. "We are delighted that our best in class Bubble Hash will be available across Ontario under The Hank Co. Brand," stated Embark's CEO, Dr. Luc. C. Duchesne. "This is a significant moment for Embark as we are also launching our signature Hazel Hash Sticks in Ontario. Both brands offer affordable, sustainable and exceptional cannabis products to consumers," continued Dr. Duchesne. Embark's approach is to work with master cultivators and suppliers of unwavering quality standards. The Embark team's experience and expertise is a blend of tradition, artistry and technology; producing pure, craft, solventless concentrates such as bubble hash and hash sticks. The Company is in continued discussions with the remaining provinces, territories and private retail outlets. Embark's advanced 2.0 product portfolio will continue to expand into the adult-use market through-out 2021. About Embark Health Inc. Embark Health Inc. is an emerging leader in cannabis extraction, with a focus on the formulation and production of advanced 2.0 products for the Contract Manufacturing and Adult-use markets. Embark continues to be at the forefront of production of solventless concentrate products including Bubble Hash, Traditional Pressed Hash, Rosin and Dry Sift. With the acquisition of EmbarkNano (formerly, Axiomm Technologies Ltd.) Embark is also launching a suite of next generation Cannabis 2.0 products. The acquired portfolio of products and formulations support the mass production and distribution of advanced 2.0 products including cannabis-infused beverages, topicals, edibles and water-soluble powders. For more information, please visit www.embarknano.com. Embark's mandate is to pursue best in class production processes resulting in premium quality commercial and consumer extraction products. Embark is dedicated to unleashing the full potential of the cannabis plant through scientific approaches to extraction and the production of quality products to enhance everyday life. For more information, please visit www.embarkhealthinc.com . For Further Information Contact Investor Relations: IR@embarkhealthinc.com FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws including statements regarding the future growth and profitability prospects for Embark, the demand for Embark's products, timing for the launch and sale of its products, the success of Embark's products in the market and the ability of Embark to successfully execute its business plan. Although Embark believes in light of the estimates by management, current conditions and expected future developments and other factors, that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them. Accordingly, Embark can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Actual results and developments may differ materially from those contemplated by these statements depending on, among other things, changes in economic conditions or financial markets; regulatory delays; increases in costs; litigation; legislative, environmental and other judicial, regulatory, political and competitive developments; and technological or operational difficulties. This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect our forward-looking information. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this release. The Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements unless and until required by securities laws applicable to the Company. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO US NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/75364 Chris Wade reached into the darkness to silence his blaring alarm clock. It was 4:30 on a frigid winter morning in Warren, Ohio, and outside a fresh layer of snow blanketed the yard. Thank God, Wade thought to himself. He would be able to get out his plow and make some quick cash. Money never used to be a problem for Wade, 47, who owned a house with a pool back when he worked at Delphi Automotive, a parts manufacturer that for years was one of the biggest employers in this wooded stretch of northeastern Ohio. But 10 years after taking a buyout as part of Delphis ongoing shift of production out of the United States and into Mexico and China, the house and the pool were gone. Berta Alicia Lopez, 54, is the new face of Delphi. On a recent chilly morning, she woke before sunrise on the outskirts of Juarez, Mexico, and caught an unheated bus that dropped her an hour away at the Delphi plant. Lopez earns $1 an hour assembling cables and electronics that will eventually be installed into vehicles the same work that Wade once did for $30 an hour. A farmers daughter who grew up in an impoverished stretch of rural Mexico, Lopez is proud to own a used Toyota sedan and a concrete block house. She frequently thanks God for the work, even if it is in a town troubled by drug violence, even if she doesnt see many possibilities for earning more or advancing. The two workers live 1,800 miles and a border apart and have never met. But their stories embody the massive economic shift that has accompanied the rise of free trade. In the United States, that shift has contributed to the loss of jobs that once helped workers buy homes, pay for health insurance and send children to college. In Mexico, it brought jobs though they didnt create the kind of broad, middle-class prosperity they once had in America. President Trump has pledged to bring factory work back. But it may be too late to turn back the clock on the powerful forces shaping the lives of Wade and Lopez and two cities, one American and one Mexican, that remain inextricably linked by the geography of global economics. An empty Delphi plant known as Plant 8 in Warren, Ohio. After a day of work plowing snow, Chris Wade talks on the phone about the rest of the week's work. A binder full of Wade's business papers and receipts. Wade worked at Delphi Automotive Systems for 13.5 years. Photographs by Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times Top: An empty Delphi Automotive plant known as Plant 8 in Warren, Ohio. Bottom left: After a day of work plowing snow, Chris Wade talks on the phone about the rest of the week's work. Wade worked at Delphi Automotive Systems for 13 and a half years. Bottom right: A binder full of Wade's business papers and receipts. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times) To hear Trump tell it, free trade deals and globalization have produced clear winners and clear losers. Delphi had been reducing its U.S. workforce for years before it moved most of its operations overseas in 2006. Every time I see a Delphi and I see companies leaving, that wall gets a little bit higher, and keeps going up, Trump promised at a campaign rally in Ohio a few days before the election. We are going to fight Delphi and other companies and say, Don't leave us, because there are going to be consequences. He has pledged to tax imports from Mexico and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which eliminated most tariffs on the continent and, in Trumps view, enriched Mexico at the expense of middle America. But the real legacy of NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, is more complicated. Nobody disputes that the loss of manufacturing has left a bruising mark in parts of the U.S., especially in places like the Rust Belt, where lower paying service industry jobs are increasingly replacing middle class factory positions. But many economists say changes in technology, along with competition with China, are more to blame than NAFTA. The period of steepest decline in manufacturing jobs, which fell from 17 million to 11 million between 2000 and 2010, is substantially attributable to the free import of goods manufactured more cheaply in China and increasing reliance on machines to do the jobs humans once did, according to Gordon Hanson, an economist and trade expert at UC San Diego. South of the border, free trade has indeed helped modernize Mexico by creating millions of jobs since the passage of NAFTA, boosting investment flow and helping to diversify the countrys manufacturing sector. Mexican workers now help build everything from Whirlpool washing machines to Bombardier jets. But wages have remained low, so that Mexico remains attractive to manufacturers who might otherwise be tempted to locate in China or elsewhere in Asia. Since NAFTA went into effect, there has been no change in the number of Mexicans living below the poverty line more than half. Now, as Trump pushes companies to cancel plans for new factories in Mexico and vows to renegotiate trade deals, it appears more dramatic change is on the horizon. His administration has proposed a 20% tax on imports from Mexico and other countries with which the U.S. has a trade deficit. Economists say the plan poses a serious threat to Mexico, which sends roughly 80% of its exports to the U.S., and whose peso has plummeted amid fears of what the Trump administration may do. Its a new era, Mexicos president, Enrique Pena Nieto, said in a recent speech, warning that if trade deals are opened up, everything including Mexicos cooperation with the U.S. on matters of immigration and security will be up for negotiation. Lopez is only vaguely aware of Trump shes too busy for politics. Wade said he just wants things to go back to the way they were. But even he sometimes wonders: Is it too late? After shoveling a client's driveway, Chris Wade shovels the walkway. Wade worked at Delphi Automotive Systems for 13 1/2 years before taking a buyout in 2006 as part of the company's ongoing shift of production out of the U.S. Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times The snow kept falling, so Wade called up some buddies he works with and fired up his plow. He sipped coffee from a thermos as he wove along a country lane through a landscape that looked like a Thomas Kinkade painting, with cornfields and churches and quaint clapboard houses all cloaked in white. His first job was to clear the driveway of an industrial park that once belonged to Delphi. Thats when times was good, Wade said in his raspy drawl. Thats when I liked this place. Delphi began as Packard Electric, which started out in Warren in 1890 making light bulbs, but later branched out to auto parts. It became a division of General Motors in 1932, eventually expanding to include factories across the U.S. The companys factories in Warren paid middle class wages and helped build a prosperous city, with bustling streets lined with handsome brick buildings. Both of Wades parents worked for Packard, earning enough to take the family on summer vacations and build a swimming pool in the backyard. Growing up, Wade heard stories at the dinner table each night about what had happened that day on the factory floor. By then, Packard had started reducing its U.S. workforce by moving some of its operations to Mexico to take advantage of lower labor costs in cities such as Juarez, which was inviting foreign companies to build factories there while paying minimal taxes. The threat that more jobs could be shifted overseas forced union representatives in Ohio to make concessions in salaries and benefits. Still, Wades brother and sister-in-law went to work at the Warren factory after high school and Wade figured hed land there too. By the time he did in 1993, after a stint in the Navy that ended with a knee injury the union workforce in Warren had dropped to less than 9,000, compared with 13,000 a decade earlier. Still, Wade was happy with his life. He worked nights on the assembly line and cashed his paychecks every Thursday at the bar across the street. On days off, he went duck shooting with his chocolate Labrador, Hunter. By the early 2000s, after Packard had been renamed Delphi Automotive Systems and spun off as a company independent of GM, Wade had the house and pool. His wife drove a brand new Trailblazer, and he drove a new Chevrolet pickup. He had no idea what was coming. Berta Lopez, top left, talks with a fellow worker on the bus to Delphi factory. Workers leave the Delphi factory after a shift is over in Juarez, Mexico. A poor neighborhood in Juarez where many factory workers live. Berta Lopez earns $1 per hour working at the Delphi factory in the city. Photographs by Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times Top left: Berta Lopez, left, talks with a fellow worker on the bus that takes them to and from their jobs at a Delphi factory. Top right: Workers leave the Delphi factory after a shift is over in Juarez, Mexico. Bottom left: A poor neighborhood in Juarez where many factory workers live. Bottom right: Lopez at home. She earns $1 per hour working at the Delphi factory in the city, and says she frequently thanks God for the work, even if it is in a dangerous city. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times) Lopez grew up in Bermejillo, a dusty town in the state of Durango, where her stepfather spent his days in the sun, irrigating cotton and melon fields. Her mom had pulled her out of school when she was in fifth grade. Why study if youre just going to work and have babies? her mother told her. Sure enough, by the time she was 17 she had a son, the first of her five children. For centuries, people in Bermejillo made their living in the fields, and Lopez had little reason to think she would be any different. But NAFTA made things hard on small Mexican farmers, who found themselves competing with imports from giant U.S. agribusinesses, many of which received healthy subsidies from the U.S. government. In places like Bermejillo, a generation of young people were suddenly out of work, and many headed north to the U.S. Others went to frontier towns such as Juarez. As NAFTA took effect, Juarez was transformed overnight from a desert oasis best known for its nightclubs and casinos into a sprawling grid of concrete industrial buildings intersected by dirt roads. The population grew faster than officials could build highways, schools and other infrastructure. Migration to cities like Juarez also marked a cultural shift. Parents worked all day, and without extended family to look after them, children often found themselves alone. Drug cartels, whose power was growing, found easy recruits. As the city erupted into gang warfare, murders spiked, along with suicides and violence against women. Lopez had been working in a cafe for $5 a week when a truck driver passing through town told her about new factory jobs up north. She arrived in Juarez in 1996 with her husband and five children. Her eldest son, then 16, who had not been able to find work in Durango, immediately found a job at a maquiladora, as they call the U.S. factories that had begun to proliferate along the Mexican side of the border. So did Lopez, at Delphi, where on her first day she was so nervous she offered to clean the bathrooms instead of working on the floor. God helped me, she recalled. However good or bad, at least we had work. She took to factory life gossiping with the other workers on breaks, earning the equivalent of a GED in classes offered after her shifts, making peace with living in a big city far from home. Then in 2001, her second eldest son committed suicide. She was so despondent after his death that for the first time she stayed home from work. One of her managers at Delphi traveled to her neighborhood and gently persuaded her to return to the factory floor. Lopez thought about returning to Durango, but she knew there would be no good jobs there. She resigned herself to the fact that the Delphi factory was probably the best place shed ever work, and that Juarez was now her home. If I didn't have the job, I wouldn't eat, she said. The sun sets over Juarez, Mexico, where many maquiladoras are located. Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times Delphi had its own listing on the New York Stock Exchange, but its fortunes still rode on General Motors, its biggest customer. When the car company slumped in 2004, the transnational auto parts maker went into a tailspin. The next year amid an accounting fraud scandal in which the SEC fined several top executives Delphi filed for bankruptcy. Its board hired a new chief executive, Robert Miller, who complained that the companys U.S. workers were overpaid, with labor costs triple that of other unionized auto suppliers. In March 2006, Delphi announced it was closing or selling 21 of its 29 American plants, a move that eliminated more than 20,000 jobs, or about two-thirds of its total workforce. Operations were shipped to factories in China or Mexico, where Delphi now has about 70,000 employees working at factories in 20 cities. Most of the plants in Warren remained open, but with a much smaller workforce. While Miller got a sendoff package that by one account was worth $35 million, workers were urged to take a buyout and warned that if they stayed, their wages would drop from an average of $29 an hour to $16.50. On the day he walked away from Delphi with a buyout package worth $140,000, Wade was, as he put it, fired up. The CEOs and the guys at the top make millions while everybody else can barely survive, he said. Its not right. In Trumbull County, the former manufacturing and steel stronghold where Warren is located, the Delphi cuts felt like kicking a guy who was already down. Wades post-Delphi years were not easy. Shortly after leaving the factory, he went through a divorce and narrowly avoided prison after being pulled over while drunk and with unlicensed guns in his car. He had received his truck driver's license, but the DUI eliminated that career plan. He earned a certification to sell insurance, but that didnt pan out either. He works in roofing now during the summer and plows snow in the winter. After a decade, hes making about what he was when he worked at Delphi. But he doesnt have the security of a pension, paid vacation or health insurance. If he had kept his job at Delphi, he would be just seven years from retirement. Wade doesnt want to hear about the Mexican workers who replaced him. He boils when he hears what low wages they get paid, and is equally angry about immigrants who work illegally in the U.S. He liked that Trump called out Mexico on the issue. It was the kind of talk that helped persuade Wade, a lifelong Democrat and union member, to give Trump his vote. He was joined by many others in Trumbull County, which voted Republican for president for the first time since 1972. Brian Lutz, shop steward with the union that once represented Wade, said he understands the anti-establishment anger. I hear all the time people who say why would I continue to vote for a Democrat when all the people I worked with are gone and the Democrats havent done what we sent them to do? he said. His union recently negotiated a contract that starts workers at $13 an hour. Thats about 10 times as much as Lopez takes home from the Delphi plant in Juarez today, two decades into her career there. Lopez's home is in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Juarez. Lopez cleans her home on her day off. For the last couple of years, every spare peso has gone to pay the college tuition for her youngest son. Photographs by Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times Left: Lopez's home sits in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Juarez. Right: Lopez cleans her home on her day off. For the last couple of years, every spare peso has gone to pay the college tuition for her youngest son. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times) At the end of the shift in Juarez one recent afternoon, hundreds of workers streamed out of the Delphi factory toward the long line of white buses that take them home. Lopez climbed onto No. 6621, which headed east along the U.S. border, past dozens of other factories and a slew of big box stores. It dropped Lopez in New Lands, a grid-like housing development that rises from the sand on the outskirts of the city. Overweight and suffering from diabetes, she shuffled past the Toyota in her driveway. Trumps warnings to companies to keep their business in America are already having an effect on the Mexican economy. Last month, after being criticized by Trump on Twitter, Ford announced it is canceling plans to build a new $1.6-billion factory in Mexico, opting instead to hire workers in Michigan. Trump claimed credit, though the company said market demand was a bigger factor. The Mexico factory was designed to build small cars, but as gas prices have fallen, demand has shifted toward bigger models made in Michigan. But some companies that produce goods in Mexico say theres no going back to the U.S. That includes Delphi. The company just announced a plan for more layoffs in Warren, where only 1,500 employees remain. Speaking at Barclay's Global Automotive Conference in New York in December, Delphis chief financial officer Joe Massaro explained what he thought would happen to Delphi under several Trump trade scenarios. If Trump were to close the border with Mexico outright, in less than a week, all the people who voted for him in Michigan and Ohio would be out of work, Massaro argued, underscoring the fact that many factories in the U.S., including car makers in Detroit, depend on parts made in Mexico. If the United States were to withdraw from NAFTA and start taxing imports from Mexico again, Delphi would continue doing business in Mexico, he said. The company would pass on the extra cost to its suppliers or to consumers, or would find a way to reduce its production costs which could mean layoffs or salary cuts in Mexico. What it all means for Lopez and her family, she is not sure. Of her four children, three work in factories. For the last couple of years, every spare peso has gone to pay the college tuition for her youngest son, Sergio, who is studying computer engineering. He dreams of starting a software company that can compete with U.S. firms. He has watched his moms life, and wants to earn more than factory wages. It's a lot of work for little money, he said. Lead art: After shoveling his client's driveway, Chris Wade shovels their walkway. Wade worked at Delphi Automotive Systems for 13.5 years before taking a buyout in 2006 as part of the company's ongoing shift of production out of the U.S. He works in roofing now during the summer and plows snow in the winter. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times) This story was reported in part with a grant from the International Womens Media Foundation. kate.linthicum@latimes.com Twitter: @katelinthicum logged 4,106 new cases of COVID-19 and 17 deaths on Wednesday, taking the caseload to 10,45,358 and toll to 4,136. State Health Minister K K Shailaja said the state tested 70,568 samples in the last 24 hours and the test positivity rate was 5.82 per cent. She said 5,885 people recuperated from the disease, taking the total recoveries in the state to 9,87,720. There are now 52,869 people under treatment in the state, the minister said in a release. According to the release, 2,28,416 people are under observation out of which 8,006 are in isolation wards of various hospitals. The state has tested 1,12,08,411 samples so far. She said out of the total number of people testing positive for the virus today, 107 had reached the state from outside while 3,174 contracted the disease through their contact. Three people, who returned from the UK, tested positive in the last 24 hours, taking the total number of virus-affected UK returnees to 91. "The sources of infection of 262 are yet to be traced while 23 health workers are also among the infected," the minister said. Among the districts, Pathanamthittareported the highest number of cases--469, followed by Kozhikode with 465 and Enakulam 446. No new hotspot was added today and five regions were removed from the list, taking its total number to 369. Wrexham businesses help raise 100,000 for Hope House Childrens Hospices This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Feb 24th, 2021 Companies across Wrexham are making a real difference in their community by helping to raise more than 100,000 for a childrens hospice. Introduced by Hope House Childrens Hospice at the end of 2020, firms can become a Business Champion by generously pledging a donation, which will go towards supporting seriously ill children and their families across Wrexham and Flintshire. The pandemic has had a huge effect on the finances of the charity, with traditional fundraising events having to be cancelled and shops being closed. The financial pressures of the last year has meant the charity faces a 1.25 million shortfall in income to date, while there are additional requirements for things like PPE and increased staffing levels, and so the Business Champion initiative was born. The first cohort of Business Champions from across North Wales, Shropshire, Cheshire and Powys have pledged to directly helping to fund some of the PPE costs for the hospices, with a 100,000 being raised so far. Cat Dowdeswell, fundraiser for the Business Champion incentive, said: The hospices need 12 specialist masks and 12 gowns in any one 24-hour period for every child being cared for. This equates to a cost of 78 for each child, per day. We invited businesses to become a Champion by initially donating 780 which could cover the cost of 10 days PPE for one childs stay. The response has been overwhelming, with a good number of business donating more than the 780, we are extremely grateful to all those businesses that have got on board supported us in this way, it really is making a difference. Amongst those to become Business Champions is the North Wales Business Club. Mel Herman, vice chairman of the club, said: There are an estimated 640 children in North Wales with life limiting conditions and the North Wales Business Club wanted to help those in most need. Ty Gobaith, the only childrens hospice in North Wales, and the pandemic has resulted in a loss to date of more than 1.25 million which means they have become much more reliant upon donations to help continue their wonderful work. The North Wales Business Club are delighted to have been able to support them during these difficult times and honoured to be made Business Champions. Graham Anwyl, chairman of Ewloe-based Anwyl Homes, said: Were very proud to be one of Hope House Childrens Hospices founding Champions. Their wonderful hospices and other services provide exceptional care for children and their families in their time of greatest need. The Covid pandemic has led to many charities facing a funding crisis and right now they need our support more than ever. It means so much to us as a family business to support Hope House Childrens Hospices, which is close to the hearts of many of our colleagues and our local communities. Mark Watkin Jones, chief executive officer at Watkin Property Ventures Limited, said: Watkin Property Ventures are delighted to become a Business Champion. The charity provides an incredible service to children, young adults and their wider families in the most difficult of circumstances and we are so pleased that the company and our staff are able to assist this worthwhile cause and support our local community. Warren Hadlow, Senior Partner at Hadlow Edwards Wealth Management n Wrexham, said: For Hadlow Edwards, supporting the local community and staying close to our roots is an important part in our staff and wider businesss personality. Hope House Childrens Hospices is a fantastic charity that supports our local community for those in need, therefore we take great pride in ensuring we can help them to do so. Every year Business Champions will make a pledge towards a specific need for the charity, and know that every pound they donate will go towards making sure the hospices can continue to support those that need them the most. If you or your business is interested in becoming a Business Champion and making a real difference in your community, then please visit hopehouse.org.uk/businesschampion CARRBORO, N.C., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Fleet Feet today announced significant growth and success in 2020, with its 182 locally owned and operated locations serving nearly 1.2 million customers amid the pandemic. Other annual achievements included the opening of five new locations, the incorporation of dynamic pressure mapping technology to its in-store outfitting process, the addition of three charitable partners under the brand's national charitable arm, Do the Run Thing, the expansion of its distribution center, the triple-digit growth of its e-commerce site, and the bolstering of its Store Support Team to foster continued growth. "As I look back on 2020, I'm in awe of what Fleet Feet was able to accomplish," said Joey Pointer, CEO and president of Fleet Feet. "Early on in the pandemic, the state of retail was fragile and fragmented with different local ordinances. Thankfully, we had the infrastructure and more importantly, nimble and determined franchise owners and employees at every level within our stores and Store Support Team, in place to help us quickly adapt our operations and continue to serve our customers. It was a total team effort that embodies our core value of "Run Together" in times both good and challenging." Additional highlights and details of the brand's 2020 growth and success follows in the below sections. Retail Operations A major focus of Fleet Feet's customer service innovation included launching appointment scheduling and queue management software, an especially timely development that allowed stores to adhere to local ordinances and social distancing guidelines while continuing to serve customers throughout the pandemic. Additionally, the company created and launched virtual fittings within 48 hours of an almost complete shutdown of systemwide in-store retail operations. Fleet Feet also elevated its in-store outfitting experience, fit id, by introducing dynamic pressure mapping to its existing 3D foot scanning technology. The integration, currently available in 100 stores, launched in September and allows Fleet Feet to offer individualized footwear solutions from biometric data captured in-store. From a retail operations personnel standpoint, the company promoted Matt Werder to Senior Director of Retail Operations overseeing company-owned and franchise stores, Alex Tallman to Senior Manager of Retail Experience leading education, the Leadership Development Program training, and overseeing the brand's Retail Experience Managers, and Amy Rihel to Retail Trainer to support retail experience initiatives. Digital Growth Fleet Feet's digital business grew 200% in 2020, buoyed by shifting consumer shopping trends as well as key infrastructure updates. The digital team launched a new order management system and checkout experience on FleetFeet.com, allowing for more seamless deliveries of online purchases fulfilled from local Fleet Feet stores. "The e-commerce flywheel created explosive online demand and growth last year," Pointer said. "In addition to the enhancements we made to our order management system, we drove revenue through increased marketing efforts fueled by email and key digital advertising, and leveraged original content and an aggressive SEO strategy to drive brand awareness, in-store visits, and customer engagement." To support the continued growth and opportunity with the online customer experience, Fleet Feet promoted Ruth Wright to Senior Manager of Email Marketing, Evan Matsumoto to SEO Strategist, Zach Schneider to Fulfillment Operations Manager, and hired Sarah Moxham as Digital Copywriter. Supply Chain Infrastructure Fleet Feet significantly invested in enhancing its supply chain infrastructure over the past year, including moving from a 7,500-square-foot distribution center to a new 24,000-square-foot facility, and expanding from 15 to 23 full-time employees. Additionally, the company implemented a centralized buying and distribution system for footwear. Fleet Feet promoted Jon Davis to Senior Director of Operations overseeing the continued expansion of the distribution center and e-commerce partnerships, Catherine Moloznik to Senior Director of Merchandising overseeing merchandising strategy and supporting retail operations and distribution, and Justin Garr to Senior Manager of Amazon and IT infrastructure overseeing fulfillment process functionality. Business Development Fleet Feet opened five stores in 2020, bringing the total store count to 182 across 37 states and the District of Columbia. This year, Fleet Feet has already opened one new store in Gaithersburg, Md., with additional franchise locations slated to open in Madison, Ala., New Albany, Ohio and Carnes Crossroads, S.C., by June 30. Additional store openings are currently underway. "We're planning for continued growth through the expansion of our retail footprint with new and existing franchisees as well as exploring opportunities in new markets," Pointer said. To support store and market expansion, Fleet Feet promoted John Moloznik to Director of Business Development overseeing store growth and laying the framework for the next 100 stores under the Fleet Feet brand, and Carson Sasser to Controller continuing to develop and implement financial processes and procedures to support the strength and stability of the company. Do the Run Thing As a part of its community-based social responsibility efforts, Fleet Feet strengthened its national charitable arm, Do the Run Thing, as well as saw its stores continue to support local charities across the country. In the early days of the pandemic, Fleet Feet donated 20,000 pairs of socks to hospital workers in partnership with Feetures. The company also launched three new partnerships with Black Girls RUN!, Civil Rights Race Series and Latinos Run, donating a collective $25,000 to their organizations. Additionally, Fleet Feet raised $44,000 for Girls on the Run through a virtual run on Global Running Day, as well as made a $9,000 donation to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. "The national efforts reflect what continues to happen in our stores day in and day out, and that is grassroots support and partnerships with local charities and organizations that strengthen communities across the country," said Pointer. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Fleet Feet prioritized a transparent and focused approach in tackling the underrepresentation of the Black community within its system, from customers to employees to franchise owners. Outlined on its DEI page on FleetFeet.com, Fleet Feet has prioritized two key pillarspeople and partnershipand listed its 2021 commitments and accountability in making progress in both areas. Additionally, Fleet Feet formed an internal Diversity Task Force to help drive success and accountability of all DEI initiatives; became a founding member of the Running Industry Diversity Coalition, a newly formed coalition of running brands, running retailers, and runners representing Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) who are working together to increase diversity within the running industry; and joined the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion, the largest CEO-driven business commitment to advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Leadership & Looking Ahead Over the past six months, Fleet Feet's leadership team saw the promotion of Ellen Donahue to Vice President of Marketing, and more recently, the hiring of two new executives. Erika Braun, Senior Director of Human Resources, brings more than 20 years of human resources experience to Fleet Feet. She oversees the development of Fleet Feet's recruitment strategy and will manage payroll, benefits and compensation, among other responsibilities. Tiffany Lee, Director of Marketing, helps develop and execute Fleet Feet's overall brand strategy and national consumer efforts, and oversees a team of retail, social and digital marketers with a goal to drive customer acquisition, retention and loyalty. With Fleet Feet's upcoming 45th anniversary this year, Pointer says the leadership additions and 2020 accomplishments carry on the original mission set forth and inspired by the brand's co-founders, Sally Edwards and Elizabeth Jansen. "At its core, Fleet Feet was and is still about providing a welcoming place for the local community to find the inspiration, gear, and support they needed to achieve their goals," said Pointer. "Sally and Elizabeth were both strong-willed leaders who worked relentlessly to deliver what customers needed, even with headwinds against them. I'm more confident now than ever that with our current owners, store employees, and Store Support Team members, we will continue that spirit in 2021 and keep the customer's needs at the core of all we do." For more information, visit www.fleetfeet.com, and follow Fleet Feet on Facebook , Instagram and YouTube . About Fleet Feet Founded in 1976, Fleet Feet is the largest franchisor of locally owned and operated running stores with 182 locations in 37 states and a national headquarters in Carrboro, N.C. Committed to offering personalized outfitting, robust running programs and rewards, community support and outreach, and 24 / 7 brand access at fleetfeet.com, each Fleet Feet location serves runners based on the belief that RUNNING CHANGES EVERYTHING. Stay inspired, motivated, and connected @fleetfeet. MEDIA CONTACT: Nikki Rode Fish Consulting [email protected] SOURCE Fleet Feet MEDFORD, Ore. The former UPS driver accused of shooting at drivers along I-5 in southern Oregon entered guilty pleas on 15 counts, the Jackson County District Attorney's Office said on Tuesday. State troopers arrested 49-year-old Kenneth Ayers in August following a string of shootings along the Interstate corridor between Douglas, Josephine, and Jackson counties one of which injured a woman near Central Point. A grand jury indicted Ayers on a total of 34 counts in December. On Tuesday, Ayers agreed to plead guilty on three counts of Attempted Murder in the Second Degree, five counts of Unlawful Use of a Weapon, two counts of Criminal Mischief in the First Degree, three counts of Recklessly Endangering Another Person, and two counts of Criminal Mischief in the Second Degree. RELATED: OSP investigating shots fired at vehicles on I-5 between Josephine and Douglas counties (July) Oregon State Police investigated eight separate shootings between Central Point and Roseburg, stretching between May and August of 2020. During the investigation, a number of victims told police that they had been driving near a semi-truck when the shootings happened some identifying a UPS double or triple trailer. On August 19, a woman was shot in the shoulder while driving on I-5 northwest of Central Point. Witnesses said that a UPS truck had been getting on the freeway at the same time. State troopers later stopped a UPS truck in Douglas County, identifying the driver as Ayers. He was employed as a UPS truck driver at the time of the shootings. Before May of 2020, Ayers drove a route for UPS that took him north of Roseburg, investigators said. He was put onto a route south of Roseburg around the same time that the first known shooting occurred. Though the shootings took place in three separate counties, Ayers agreed to have all of the charges tried in Jackson County. His plea on Tuesday included charges stemming from Jackson, Josephine, and Douglas counties. A sentencing hearing has been scheduled for March 2 at 11 a.m. WASHINGTON - Around 7 p.m. on Jan. 5, less than 24 hours before an angry mob overran the U.S. Capitol, an FBI bulletin warning that extremists were calling for violent attacks on Congress landed in an email inbox used by the District of Columbia police Department. That same evening, a member of the Capitol Police received the same memo. But the alert was not flagged for top officials at either agency, according to congressional testimony Tuesday - deepening questions about the breakdowns that contributed to massive security failures on Jan. 6. Both acting District police chief Robert Contee III and former Capitol Police chief Steven Sund said the intelligence community at large failed to detect key information about the intentions of the attackers and adequately communicate what was known in the run-up to the Capitol riot. "I would certainly think that something as violent as an insurrection at the Capitol would warrant a phone call or something," Contee told lawmakers. Sund cast the Capitol Police as a "consumer" of intelligence from 18 federal agencies. "If they were finding efforts that this was a coordinated attack, that had been coordinated among numerous states for some time in advance of this, that's the information that would have been extremely helpful to us," Sund said, adding, "That type of information could have given us sufficient, advance warning to prep, plan for an attack such as what we saw." But Tuesday's joint hearing by two Senate committees also spotlighted the stark warnings that were issued before Congress met in a joint session to formalize Joe Biden's victory. One came in the form of the Capitol Police's own intelligence report three days before the attack, as The Washington Post first reported. In a 12-page memo, the agency's intelligence unit warned that "Congress itself" could be targeted by angry Trump supporters who saw the electoral college vote certification as "the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election." Two days later, the FBI alert issued by its field office in Norfolk, Va., described how "an online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating 'Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled.' " BLM is a common reference to the Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice. Pantifa is a derogatory term for antifa, a far-left anti-fascist movement whose adherents sometimes engage in violent clashes with right-wing extremists. "Get violent," the online thread continued, according to the bulletin. "Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal." Separately, dozens of people on a terrorist watch list were in the District on the day of the riot, including many suspected white supremacists, as The Post previously reported. "There were clearly intelligence issues with information that was out there that didn't get to the right people, actions that weren't taken," Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., chairwoman of the Rules and Administration Committee, told reporters during a break in the hearing. The FBI said in a statement Tuesday that the Norfolk, Va., report was shared with the Washington Field Office's joint terrorism task force within 40 minutes and discussed inside a command post there. It was also posted on the Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal, which is available to law enforcement officers nationwide, the bureau said. The FBI said the information was raw and could not immediately be traced to a specific person. "The information obtained by our Norfolk office was on a message board thread and could not be attributed to a specific individual," the bureau said. "The language was aspirational in nature with no specific and credible details." The deluge of incendiary threats online, law enforcement officials have said, has made it difficult to distinguish aspirational boasts from actual public safety concerns. But Sen. Gary Peters, R-Mich., chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the mayhem that engulfed the Capitol on Jan. 6 made clear that law enforcement cannot become inured to threatening chatter on social media. "The federal government must start taking these online threats seriously to ensure they don't cross into the real-world violence," he said. The internal Capitol Police memo concluded that Jan. 6 was shaping up to be a perfect storm of dangerous elements - the large size of the expected crowds, the likelihood of demonstrators bringing deadly weapons and the proximity of the protests to Capitol grounds. Promoting all of this chaos and violence: "President Trump himself," the memo noted. "Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election," according to the memo, portions of which were obtained by The Post. "This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent. Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter-protesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th." Two people familiar with the memo, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe security preparations, said the report was conveyed to all Capitol Police command staff by the intelligence unit's director, Jack Donohue. The report said organizers were urging Trump supporters to come with guns and specialized combat gear, including gas masks and military-style bulletproof vests called "plate carriers." But Tuesday, former Capitol security officials said the intelligence did not point with enough specificity to the potential for an attack on the complex. "The intelligence was not that there would be a coordinated assault on the Capitol, nor was that contemplated in any of the inter-agency discussions that I attended in the days before the attack," former House sergeant-at-arms Paul Irving said in a written statement to the committees, adding that the Capitol Police assessed the potential for civil disobedience and arrests as "remote" or "improbable." The FBI report pointed to organized plans that were underway, including individuals sharing a map of the Capitol complex's tunnels and designating places in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and South Carolina where extremists could gather before heading to Washington. "As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence in response to 'unlawful lockdowns' to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington, D.C.," the document read. The Jan. 5 warning was shared with the field office in the District, and within an hour, officials in a command post there were briefed, FBI Assistant Director in Charge Steven D'Antuono has said. He also has said the document was shared through a joint terrorism task force that includes representatives from the Capitol Police, District police and other law enforcement agencies. During Tuesday's hearing, Contee said the FBI bulletin went to an email account that "is not something that is a moderated list, 24 hours a day that would generate an immediate response." "I assure you that my phone is on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and I'm available for any phone call from any agency that has information with respect to something of this magnitude happening in our city," he added. Contee also stressed that the FBI warning was "raw information" that was not "wholly vetted." District police were preparing for a "large violent demonstration" similar to previous pro-Trump rallies, Contee said, adding that "the intelligence did not make it where it needed to be." For his part, Sund said that in the previous 24 hours, he had learned for the first time that the Capitol Police had also received the FBI bulletin. It went to an official assigned to the joint terrorism task force, who "reviewed it and then forwarded over to an official at the intelligence division over at U.S. Capitol Police headquarters," he said. Sund said he never saw the report himself, nor did the top security officials in the Capitol, the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms. FBI Director Christopher Wray and then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen also were not briefed on the Norfolk document because it was considered raw intelligence, and investigators had not identified those behind the online posts. Internally, some officials have wondered whether the threats were not taken more seriously because the rallygoers were White conservatives loyal to Trump. Others have said widespread criticism of law enforcement's heavy-handed approach to racial justice protests over the summer caused them to tamp down their response to the warnings about potential unrest on Jan. 6. On the eve of the rally, District Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, sent a letter to Rosen, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and acting defense secretary Christopher Miller, asserting that unless federal law enforcement was coordinating with District police, she "discourages" them from patrolling District streets the next day. - - - The Washington Post's Aaron C. Davis, Peter Hermann and Karoun Demirjian contributed to this report. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) Contrary to the Philippine governments earlier pronouncement, Chinese company Sinovac Biotech on Wednesday said it would be needing an indemnification agreement with the country on the planned purchase of its COVID-19 vaccines. Speaking to CNN Philippines, Sinovac General Manager Helen Yang said an indemnification clause is common in vaccine deals even with other countries. I think the general indemnification is similar to all the countries because the vaccine is still in research, and we believe that every country will [be] evaluating the data up to now, Yang told The Source when asked if they will be requiring a similar deal from the Philippines. So I think there needs to be some indemnification for using the vaccine Actually for the term sheet, well have a similar language there as well, she added. Malacanang earlier this week noted that the Philippine government was not required to ink an indemnification deal with Sinovac but did not elaborate on the matter. Several pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca, have demanded that governments shoulder the cost of treatment in case of possible adverse effects caused by vaccination to spare the firms from legal cases. No supply agreement signed, but Sinovac says it can be flexible Yang said the supply agreement between the two camps has not yet been signed, as she noted that revisions on the deals provisions will take some time. However, she assured that Sinovac will try its best to secure and deliver the 25 million doses for the Philippines within the year. She added the company can also be flexible with the requirements of the deal. Were trying to be flexible because this is a pandemic I know that right now, people are having an urgency of accessing the products, so thats why were trying to be flexible if the term sheet works, we can start the delivery, Yang said, but did not divulge further. Apart from the procurement deal, Chinas government has also donated 600,000 Sinovac vaccine doses to the Philippines, which Yang said are being prepared for delivery. She expressed hope the shipment will arrive in the country within the week. It was not immediately clear if the donation will also need to be covered by an indemnification agreement. Nearly two-thirds of white evangelicals don't believe Biden's election was 'legitimate,' poll finds Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants do not believe that President Joe Biden was legitimately elected, according to data from the public policy research organization American Enterprise Institute. Recently, AEIs Survey Center on American Life released findings from its January 2021 American Perspectives Survey. The research is based on interviews with 2,016 adults from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The survey focused on the post-election political views of Americans and was announced earlier this month. When asked if they think President Bidens victory in the 2020 presidential election was legitimate or not legitimate, 63% of white evangelical Protestant respondents responded that his victory was "not legitimate." For white evangelicals who identified as Republican, the percentage of those who did not view Bidens win as legitimate grew to 75%, according to a spokesman for the center. The spokesman also told The Christian Post that the total number of white evangelicals surveyed for the report was 343. There were not enough white evangelical respondents who identified as Democrats to draw any conclusions about that subset. The centers director, Daniel A. Cox, a former research director of the Public Religion Research Institute, wrote an analysis of the survey's findings, published Feb. 11. The January 2021 American Perspectives Survey finds evidence that Americans are divided over not only how they feel about the 2020 election but also how they perceive the legitimacy of Bidens win, Cox explained. Political conspiracy theories, including QAnon, have not disappeared after Trumps defeat, and a significant number of Americans condone the use of violence in the face of political failures. The survey found that 66% of Republicans surveyed don't believe Biden's election was legitimate, while 24% of Independents and 2% of Democrats said the same. The survey data drew attention from NPR, which ran with the headline: New Survey Shows 3 In 5 White Evangelicals Say Joe Biden Wasn't Legitimately Elected. There has been much emphasis placed on white evangelicals' views in recent years because conservative evangelicals were a major voting bloc for President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. The AEI data comes after Trump pushed claims that targeted voter fraud impacted the outcome of the 2020 race, a claim many of his supporters believe. According to Cox, the survey found that 65% of all respondents believed that Bidens election win was legitimate, while 31% of respondents did not believe it was legitimate. Amid ongoing false claims that the 2020 election was rife with voting irregularities, a large share of the public believes there was widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, wrote Cox. This included 29% of respondents saying that the statement there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election is either mostly or completely accurate. The survey found a partisan divide, with 65% of Republican respondents saying they believe widespread voter fraud occurred, while 22% of independents and 2% of Democrats agreed. There has been much debate recently about how influential Christian nationalism, a term used to describe advocates for fusing a conservative cultural version Christianity with American civic life, is in conservative Christian circles. According to notable academic researcher Andrew Whitehead, while Christian nationalists can be found in all sectors of society, evangelical Protestants are the most likely to support its goals. In a webinar held last month, Whitehead expanded on research he conducted with Samuel L. Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma. We see that almost 80% of evangelical Protestants are at least accommodators or ambassadors of Christian nationalism, so very prevalent, said Whitehead at the time. But even in mainline Protestantism, we see that over 30% are accommodators and just under 20% are ambassadors. So half of mainline Protestants in the U.S. are, again, friendly towards Christian nationalism. But John Stonestreet and Timothy D. Padgett of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview argued that Christian nationalism is being used as a scare label to dismiss any policy or person more conservative than whoever is using the term. were all but guaranteed for the near future that anything vaguely traditional or moral, and any appeal to anything higher than the latest cultural fad, will be smeared with this label, they wrote in a column for BreakPoint. Its silly. Even more, its dangerous. Even so, Christians must not abandon the public square just because people say mean things about us. Linda Robson has left her Birds of A Feather co-star Pauline Quirke out of a gushing Instagram post paying tribute to her 'favourite girls.' Following reports that the pair have fallen out following a huge row, the actress, 62, shared a gallery of snaps featuring female friends and loved ones to mark 'Galentine's Day' on February 14, with Pauline noticeably absent. It comes after it was alleged on Tuesday that Pauline and Linda's 50-year friendship ended after the star was involved in a tense face-off with their mutual co-star Lesley Joseph outside TV studio toilets. What's going on? Linda Robson (left) has left her Birds of A Feather co-star Pauline Quirke (centre) out of a gushing Instagram post (pictured with Lesley Joseph in 2015) Linda's post included several snaps with her Loose Women co-stars, including an image with Nadia Sawalha from her emotional return to the show last year. Another snap showed her alongside longtime co-star Lesley, 75, who was reportedly involved in the row with Pauline, 61, that has ended their friendship. Linda's post also included snaps with her daughters Lauren and Bobbie, as well as her beloved granddaughters Betsy and Lila. Questions: The actress failed to mention her close friend and co-star in a post paying tribute to her 'favourite' girls, after sources claim a rift has developed in their 50-year friendship Cute: Among the images Linda shared were a snap of her daughters Lauren and Bobbie (left), as well as one with her beloved granddaughters Betsy and Lila Close bond: One snap showed Linda sweetly embracing Nadia Sawalha, taken from her return to Loose Women following a break in January 2020 United: Another snap showed the entire panel dressed in red gowns as they attended the National Television Awards last year The post was captioned: 'A few (but not all) of my favourite gals #Galentine.' Several of Linda's followers noted that Pauline was absent from the tribute, with one writing: 'Can we see one of you and Pauline?' Another added: '@lindarobson58 wheres Pauline Quirke?' with a third writing: 'The fact Pauline is missing is very disappointing. Friends should be able to conquer anything. 'The recent lockdown shows that friendship should mean something. 50 + years. That must count for something. My best friend is everything to me, and we make sure we never sleep on an argument. Fix it. Now. You will regret.' Poignant: Linda also paid tribute to her sisters Tina and Debbie with one of the snaps Observant: Several of Linda's followers noted that Pauline was absent from the tribute and questioned why What!?It comes after an astonishing report on Tuesday claimed that Pauline's friendship with her co-stars has ended after a row with Lesley outside TV studio toilets It comes after an astonishing report on Tuesday claimed that Pauline's friendship with her co-stars has ended after a row with Lesley outside TV studio toilets, which has reportedly left Linda believing the pair 'will never speak again.' According to the report, the women were 'basically pulled apart' by Teddington Studios' crew members who were left 'stunned' over the alleged incident. A source told The Sun: 'The nadir came during one astonishing row at Teddington Studios, culminating in Pauline and Lesley squaring off, noses centimetres apart, outside the women's loos. 'They were basically pulled apart by stunned crew members. The insider explained how the friendship crumbled from that point, and claimed: 'Linda doesn't believe they'll ever speak again.' MailOnline contacted Pauline Quirke and Lesley Joseph's representatives for comment at the time. Face-off? According to the report, the women were 'basically pulled apart' by Teddington Studios' crew members who were left 'stunned' over the alleged incident (Pictured in 2012 on stage in Birds of a Feather play at The New Victoria Theatre in Woking) Pauline and Linda played sisters in the hit comedy, and as real-life childhood best friends appeared to be a perfect fit for the roles. But the frequent on-screen bickering between their characters Sharon Theodopolopodous and Tracey Stubbs appears to have exploded into the actors' real lives, prompting fears for the future of the long-running programme. This weekend, The Mail on Sunday revealed that a seemingly irreparable rift has developed between Pauline and Linda, whose friendship of 50 years once helped cement their reputation as among the UK's most popular double acts. The end? The insider explained how the friendship crumbled from that point, and claimed: 'Linda doesn't believe they'll ever speak again' (Pictured in 2014) Insiders said there have been 'real and tense issues' which resulted in Pauline refusing to take part in the 30th anniversary show, which aired in 2019. At the same time, Linda grew closer to co-star Lesley, who plays man-eating neighbour Dorien Green, and the pair decided not to ask Pauline to take part in 2020's Christmas special. The fall-out seemingly marks an end to Pauline's much-loved character of Sharon, whose recent absences have been explained by the character heading off on a cruise. One friend said: 'Both Linda and Lesley were saddened that Pauline didn't want to return to make a 30th anniversary episode. Linda and Pauline used to be very close, less so Pauline and Lesley. 'I think Pauline resented the attention that Lesley got and it was very tense and difficult to navigate at times. 'Pauline wasn't approached about the Christmas special. The atmosphere on the set had previously become difficult, there were real and tense issues.' The trio shot to fame in 1989 when Birds Of A Feather began on BBC1. Following the lives of two sisters who move in together after their husbands are jailed for armed robbery, it ran for nine years. Linda Robson and Pauline are pictured in 1993 It was later revived in 2014 on ITV by its original writers and creators Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran. The Christmas special pulled in an impressive 7.9 million viewers, and it is understood that Linda and Lesley are keen to continue with the Essex-set show. But sources say ITV are not convinced they want to make another series. Claims of Pauline's allegedly 'demanding' and 'difficult' behaviour on set were blamed as factors for the original fall out, and in a bid to secure the future of the show, a new character called Jordan dubbed a 'mini-me' of Sharon was introduced. The friend added: 'It appears that Sharon has been replaced by another character so that the show can go on. It is all very sad. Pauline and Linda have been friends for more than half a century and, of course, Lesley has known the women for at least 30 of those years.' To complicate matters, Pauline's son Charlie also stars on the show as Travis Stubbs, Tracey's youngest son. He appeared in the Christmas special and at the time ITV tried to explain her absence. A spokesperson said: 'Unfortunately, Pauline Quirke will not be taking part as she's stepping back from acting to focus on her 200 nationwide performing arts academies.' In the show, only a photograph of Sharon was seen and the storyline was written to say that she was on a cruise, during which she had met a Costa Rican hunk and married him. Irreparable: Over the weekend, The Mail on Sunday revealed that a seemingly irreparable rift has developed between Pauline and Linda Last year, Linda described her long friendship with Pauline, saying: 'We were friends from ten years of age. We went to the same primary school and we started taking acting classes together. 'We were known as the real kids, or the cockney kids off the street. We've both been really good friends, and we're still working 52 years later.' Linda and Lesley revealed in an interview with bingo company Mecca that they had met up during the pandemic when restrictions allowed, but there was no mention of Pauline. The two women declined to comment at the time. Pauline Quirke's spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. Tributes have been paid to a well-known County Derry mother-of-sixteen who passed away over the weekend. Alice McElwee had 38 grandchildren, 22 great grandchildren and 16 children of her own, including triplets who died in infancy, and Thomas, who died in the 1981 hunger strike. The Bellaghy woman's daughter Pauline paid an emotional tribute to her mother at her funeral yesterday. She told mourners how Alice was a private woman, but one who fully embraced her life. Mammy often took trips across to Scotland with Aunt Maggie, and the pair of them would head off on the boat to Dumfries to visit family over there, she said. Mammy also was the founder of the Boy Scouts in Bellaghy and also a member of the Irish Womens' Federation, and the odd weekend she would head off to An Grianan with them. She would spend a weekend there taking art classes, maybe pottery, dancing, whatever was going, she was up for it. Even though she was a quiet and private woman, she loved to talk about the friends she made there from different counties in Ireland. Pauline told those congregated in the church how Alice would have enthralled her grandchildren and great grandchildren with tales of the boat back to Ireland when she was a young girl. My mother was born in Philadelphia in 1925. Between the ages of 7 or 8, the family moved to Ireland, she said. She often told stories to the grandchildren and great grandchildren about the trip home on the boat. One of the stories she told was about the races the children had on the boat and how she had come first and won a wee doll. When her family moved back to Ireland they stopped in Ballynease before moving to Portglenone and on to Mulholland's Town. Alice moved from Mulholland's Town when she met her husband, Jim McElwee, who built the family a house in Tamlaghtduff, outside Bellaghy. She was hugely devoted to her faith, which sustained her during a period of illness following the birth of her second child. Mummy had a great devotion to Our Lady and attended the Legion of Mary for 40 years, said Pauline. During this time she would have gone with her great friend Mrs Nugent. They would have walked together and maybe picked up a few flowers for Our Lady's altar on the way there. Alice featured in the TG4 documentary 'Mathair' last year. Her devotion extended to heading off to Lourdes on the buses with the Christian Leaders' Movement alongside her yearly visits to Knock, of course. She would have taken each one of us as children. Some have better memories of it than others, but she would have taken us all at different stages to help us appreciate her love for Our Lady. She also was a pioneer her entire life and has quite a number of pins to show for that. Mum's faith was very important to her; the Rosary was said every night at home. Her strength of faith helped her through some of the most difficult times of her life, and in fact every aspect of it. To Alice, age was inconsequential, and in recent years she would travel on the bus to the gym at Erin's Own GAC, Lavey, and the driver would often have to chase her beloved dog, Cody, back into the house before the bus could leave. Her love of life went hand-in-hand with her love of music, and Pauline told mourners how she delighted in the talents of her grandchildren and great grandchildren. She had a great love for Irish music and Ceilidh music in particular, she said. In fact, just a few nights before she died, they were singing to her and playing music. In later years she loved to listen to her grandchildren and great grandchildren playing music and singing to her. Over the years, Mammy just loved to get family together. Every Christmas we would have booked somewhere for Christmas dinner. She loved a night out and a dance. One of her favourite songs is 'The Walk of Life' and of course it had to be put on no matter where you were at. What a life she has walked. In the run-up to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Oregon led all states in per-capita internet searches for armed groups and conspiracy theories. This data comes from Moonshot CVE, an anti-extremism tech company that, from September to December 2020, tracked internet disinformation and threats of violence that were linked to the U.S. presidential election. The results dont surprise University of Oregon political-science professor Joseph Lowndes, who studies populism, racial politics and far-right groups. Oregon has seen a convergence of strong QAnon support, an active paramilitary milieu and, in Portland, Patriot Prayer, he says. He points out that the state has been a longtime home to right-wing militia activity, spurred years ago by the reduction in federal timber payments as well as increasingly limited government services in some rural areas. Militias moved in to take up some of that work, to act as first responders, he says. The three most common Oregon searches in Moonshots data -- and five of the top 10 -- are tied to QAnon conspiracy theories. Coming in fourth is Anarchist Cookbook, a reference to a 50-year-old manual for bomb-making and related DIY activities. A graphic in a February report from Moonshot CVE indicates internet searches "related to election violence." (Image: Moonshot CVE) The London-based companys February report, From Sh--posting to Sedition, also found that Oregon has spread a conspiracy theory that falsely claims there are FEMA concentration camps. The report references a 2020 YouTube video, shot outside a fenced-off empty lot at Northwest Broadway and Glisan streets in Portland, that insists theres a sinister plan dealing with the homeless in the city. The homeless will be fenced in. Barbed wire, the videos narrator says, before adding: Everything that Alex Jones talked about for decades now, this stuff is becoming a reality. (Jones, the founder of InfoWars, is a well-known conspiracy theorist who has been banned from Twitter and Facebook because of his false claims about school shootings and other events.) Lowndes, co-author of the 2019 book Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity, sees the decades-long development of conspiratorial thinking in Oregon as especially relevant. The state could be viewed as a case study of where the national Republican Party is headed now, he says. A temporary security fence topped with concertina razor wire surrounds the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. The fence was erected around the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress and their associated office buildings following the deadly January 6 insurrection. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)Getty Images Michael McCarter, who heads up Move Oregons Border, a longshot effort to flip most of Oregons rural eastern and southern counties into Idaho, said in an email to supporters this week that the Moonshot report was proof that his objective is necessary. He argued that the liberal state government in Oregon protects Antifa arsonists, not normal Oregonians. Divisions in Oregon are getting dangerous, so we see the relocation of the border as a way to keep the peace, he wrote. The Moonshot report found that, with population weighting, Oregon led all states in internet searches for armed groups. Oregon was followed by Wyoming, Tennessee, Arizona and Idaho. Moonshot, in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League, defines armed groups as non-state actors and organizations that bear arms to challenge the governments authority. Oregon also topped the list of searches for conspiracy theories, followed by Arizona, Washington, Illinois and California. And the state made the top 5 in searches that showed an interest in political violence. Curry was the Oregon county with the most per-capita searches related to election violence. Lowndes calls the Moonshot report, which hes read, sound enough as a research method; it provides good hard evidence. He adds that one does have to be cautious about what you extrapolate from the data, pointing out that researchers dont know why people searched for terms related to militia groups and election violence. Moonshot CVE, which is funded by the United Nations, various governments and big-tech companies such as Google, develops databases of tens of thousands of keywords which indicate risk -- for example, join Oath Keepers -- and runs ads against those keywords, says company manager Clark Hogan-Taylor. The Moonshot ads are designed to be violence prevention counter-content. The private company was initially founded as an effort to derail Islamic State online recruiting. Now it has expanded to address white supremacy and anti-government activities. Moonshot just opened an office in Washington, D.C. Its a very scary moment in America right now, Moonshot co-founder Vidhya Ramalingam recently told The Hill newspaper. I mean, the implications are so wide-reaching. Theres just the potential for so much more violence right now. Those implications reach deep into Oregon, the report concluded. Violence in Portland last summer motivated militia groups to employ disinformation and propaganda to mischaracterize protest-related activities by their Black Lives Matter (BLM)/Antifa opponents, the study states. It added: Significant events [in Oregon], such as the West Coast wildfires and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, have given rise to even further disinformation in the state. For instance, disinformation regarding Antifas role in the wildfires and alleged Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) concentration camps in the state grew throughout Oregons wildfire season. The report argues that the contentious 2020 election and its violent aftermath wasnt the beginning of the end, it was the end of the beginning. -- Douglas Perry dperry@oregonian.com @douglasmperry Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 21:14:19|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- If you ask Andy Carr, a 22-year-old smart South African girl, what she would like to do in the future, her answer may amaze you. "I would be really excited to open my own practice and help people with their general well-being using traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture," she said. Carr is among about 100 students who are learning acupuncture programs offered to bachelor's and post graduate students in the University of Johannesburg. "I have been raised on natural medicine, so I have been exposed to Chinese medicine and acupuncture from a very young age," she said. After almost two-year studying acupuncture in university, Carr tried to treat family and friends who need assistance and are not too afraid of needles. "Initially, obviously there has been skepticism when you tell someone that you can treat these conditions using something as simple as just the needle. But, doing it yourself is amazing because you can actually see the effect that it will have on your patients," said Carr. She said many South African people have misunderstandings towards acupuncture, regarding it as a painful treatment. "I always have to convince people like, guys, it is not supposed to hurt when you do acupuncture," she said, adding that "when I treat family member or friend, they will ask 'is the needle in yet?' And I am like, 'yes, it is in'. " "I actually spent the whole of my Christmas holiday last year assisting family and friends who had problems," she recalled. "My dad injured his back over the holiday, so I treated him. When he woke up the next day, he said it felt like nothing at all was wrong. Normally he would be in pain for about two to three weeks after the injury. " In the Department of Complementary Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences where Carr was studying, there stands the Acupuncture Teaching Clinic (ATC) and Acupuncture Museum (AM). The ATC consisted of 10 consultation rooms and 20 beds, which served as the clinical teaching base and research facility where the training of students' clinical and research skills takes place. It will open to the public and start to receive patients from July 1, 2021. The AM aims to provide a visual history of Acupuncture as a part of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The history from ancient times to nowadays has been presented and exhibited, including the classics, stories of famous doctors as well as historical items. This museum will also serve as a valuable resource for students like Carr. Due to the COVID-19, Carr and her classmates moved to online learning last year. "When ancient medicine meets modern technologies, the results might be confusing in the past," said Hu Zijing, a supervisor at the University of Johannesburg. "After almost one year of online teaching, we see very good results, and we are confident with the online teaching and so the students are leading us to engage in online teaching to ensure the quality of the outcomes," he added. "The distant study doesn't reduce the quality of the teaching because we are making use of the videos, the recordings and the live sessions of lectures," Hu said, adding that "the live sessions of online teaching are very similar to the contact classes." Hu said acupuncture was regulated in 2001 in South Africa. Successful graduates will be able to register with other health profession councils of South Africa to practise acupuncture in the country. He believed South Africa's rural healthcare could benefit a lot from acupuncture medicine. "The rural health in Africa and also in South Africa, can be improved by Chinese medicine and acupuncture especially because of the cost of these medicines. The benefit of these medicines is effective and cost-effective, so it is very suitable for rural health," he said. "As we can see from our practice, more and more patients especially the local patients, are coming in for these services." Carr held the same sentiment. She believed that acupuncture does work, and it has worked for hundreds of years. Opening an acupuncture clinic "is a way of uplifting the community here in South Africa specifically in my own home Melkbosstrand, Cape Town," said Carr. Enditem Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin said Tuesday that he supports the effort by Amazon workers at the companys Bessemer facility to unionize, a day after he tweeted that he represents all workers -- those who wish to organize and those who do not. Some construed the earlier tweet as the mayor not taking a stance on whether the Amazon Bessemer employees should unionize, with several Twitter users calling Woodfin a coward. As Mayor, I represent all workers those who wish to organize and those who do not. My voice is not nearly as important as their voice. And this decision should be driven by what they believe is best for themselves and the families they provide for. Randall Woodfin (@randallwoodfin) February 22, 2021 I made a statement on Twitter yesterday about representing all workers as mayor of Birmingham. After speaking with folks in the labor movement today, I want to take an opportunity to clarify and share my support for RWDSU and the Amazon workers in Bessemer in their journey to unionize BHM1, the mayor said in a statement Tuesday, referring to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union that the Bessemer employees are trying to join. Here is full coverage of the Alabama Amazon unionization effort I want to state for the record that I am unequivocally pro-worker, which means pro-union, Woodfin added. Without unions, we would not have the 40-hour work week, vacation days, sick leave or employee benefits that millions rely on. Unions built the middle class of this country, and have played a historic role in shaping Birmingham and Jefferson County as a whole, granting opportunities to thousands of working families. Birmingham has a long history of workers of all races banding together to demand better working conditions, and the unionization effort in Bessemer is a critical chapter in the history of organized labor in this community. The effort to join a union in Bessemer has attracted nationwide attention, and if its successful it would mark the first time Amazon employees have unionized. On Monday, actor Danny Glover rallied in support of the workers. A mail-in vote began earlier this month among more than 5,000 employees at the center to see if they want representation by the RWDSU. The votes will be counted in late March. If approved, the workers would be represented by the RWDSU. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. I cannot abandon these kids, Khathazile said. Such families struggle to make ends meet. Most people are farming in a way that depends on rain, said Tshepiso Mthimkhulu, an official at Swazilands Red Cross, based in Piggs Peak. There are many orphans and widows who have difficulty surviving. There is certainly a market for their alternative source of income. According to the United Nations, South Africa has reported rising marijuana use, and Swaziland appears to be an eager supplier. The country, a tiny nation of about 1.4 million people, was reported to have more acreage under marijuana cultivation in 2010 than India, a nation more than 180 times its geographic size. Sibongile Nkosi, 70, said she started growing marijuana even before her daughter died and left her with two orphans to feed. She had heard from other women in her village, which sits on a hilltop on the outskirts of Piggs Peak, that the plant could earn a decent return. I put the seeds in the ground, watered them, and it grew, she said of her first crop. I was able to feed my children. Marijuana cultivation may provide a safety net, but the grandmothers of Piggs Peak are hardly drug kingpins. They must find a secret field to plant, often one deep in the forest, which they reach by walking for hours. Clearing a patch is tough work, even for women long accustomed to hard labor. They have to buy seeds, if they are new at planting, as well as manure. Not enough manure and the crop fetches a lower price. It must be carefully pruned to produce the right kind of flowers. And they have to watch out for weeds. Image Credit... The New York Times Weeds are very bad for weed, Ms. Nkosi said. Then there are the police. They often search for marijuana fields in March and April, just before the harvest, and burn them to the ground, leaving the women with nothing to show for their hard work. The daughter of one of Britain's first gay fathers has admitted she refuses to shop at Primark or Michael Kors - and throws away clothes after just one wear. Saffron Drewitt-Barlow, 21, who was born in Manchester but now lives in Tampa, Florida, claimed that Primark is one of multiple 'sh** shops' she refuses to spend her money in - despite going there just once. 'Those sh*t shops, like Forever 21 and Primark, I'd never shop in,' she said, writing in her column for Fabulous. 'Primark clothes are just so gross, they don't know how to make them. I wouldn't mind if they had nice pieces but they don't.' 'I've been once with my cousins and it just wasn't for me, it's all horrible.' Saffron's father Barrie split from husband Tony, 55, last year and got engaged to Saffron's ex-boyfriend Scott Hutchison, 25, in August. Bisexual Scott and Barrie welcomed a daughter, Valentina, in September. Saffron Drewitt-Barlow (pictured) - the daughter of one of Britain's first gay fathers - 21, who lives in Tampa, Florida, has admitted she refuses to shop at Primark or Michael Kors - and throws away clothes after just one wear The 21-year-old (pictured) claimed that Primark is one of multiple 'sh** shops' she refuses to spend her money in - despite going there just once Saffron (pictured) claims just the shoes, bags and clothes in her wardrobe are worth well over a million pounds Saffron told how she's known Scott since she was 13, when he came to work for the family as a personal assistant, and he's one of her best friends (pictured with Barrie) Saffron - who claims just the shoes, bags and clothes in her wardrobe alone are worth well over a million pounds - went on to say that at a push, she'd purchase a pair of hoop earrings for a night out if she didn't want to wear her 'nice' stuff. And Primark wasn't the only shop Saffron took issue with, as she also slammed Michael Kors - adding she doesn't 'like the look of his things or the pattern.' Speaking of the designer bags which can cost anywhere up to 1,655, Saffron added: 'Also it's the people who wear his stuff. They think getting a Michael Kors bag means they're the richest people in the world and have all this money. Actually anyone could buy a Michael Kors bag, it's not exclusive at all. It's cheap, I hate it.' Saffron (pictured) claimed that Michael Kors is a brand for those wanting to look rich Barrie and Tony hit headlines in 1999 when they became the first same sex couple to be formally registered as parents to twins Saffron and Aspen, born via surrogate Saffron's father Barrie split from husband Tony, 55, last year (pictured, together) Ans Saffron's dislike for the brand is so strong, that she claimed her dad bought her a Michael Kors hat and glove set for Christmas, which she has refused to open. Saffron also told how Tampa, Florida doesn't have 'amazing shops,' so she frequently jets off to Miami or Los Angeles to hit the shops. However, not everything she purchases has to have a hefty price tag, with the 21-year-old admitting she purchases from the likes of Pretty Little Thing and Boohoo because they look good with a pair of Louis Vuitton shoes. She added: 'I treat clothes like they're disposable really, wear them one or two times then either chuck them or bung them in the wardrobe. 'I don't like wearing things again because what's the point? Everyone's already seen you in it.' Jasmine Louise McClain, 27, has been charged with assault on a government employee after claiming she had COVID-19 and blowing twice on a sheriff's deputy A North Carolina woman has been charged with assault after allegedly saying she had COVID-19 and blowing in the face of a sheriff's deputy twice. Jasmine Louise McClain, 27, was being booked into jail in Lincoln County in relation to a stabbing charge on Sunday night when the incident happened. Lincoln County Sheriff's Office has not confirmed whether or not she had COVID-19, according to the Charlotte Observer. 'While being processed into the jail, McClain is accused of blowing into the face of the processing officer twice after admitting she had tested positive for Covid-19 eight days earlier,' the sheriff's office said in a news release. 'She was charged with assault on a government official.' At 4.20am on Sunday morning, police had responded to a call about a man who had been stabbed in the chest at Brevard Place Road. McClain had allegedly 'already left the scene but returned a short time later while deputies were still there'. McClain was being booked into the Harven A. Crouse Detention Center at the time McClain is now being kept at the detention center, pictured above, on charges of assault on a government employee and assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury She was identified as a suspect in the stabbing and arrested without incident on charges of assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury. She was taken to Harven A. Crouse Detention Center with no bond, according to WBTV. McClain's actions as she was being booked landed her with the additional charge of assault on a government employee. She was also given an additional $5,000 secured bond. It was unclear if McClain has hired an attorney. The stabbing victim was identified as Marcus McDowell. He was taken to Caromont Regional Medical Center to be treated for his injuries but there was no update available on his condition. Four board members of Texas' power grid operators plan to leave their post after last week's widespread blackouts, which left millions of people without electricity amid the cold weather situations. Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) board chairwoman and vice chairman with two other board members issued a letter announcing their intention to resign from their position at a meeting on Wednesday, NBC News reported. "To allow state leaders a free hand with the future direction and to eliminate distractions, we are resigning from the board effective after our urgent board teleconference meeting adjourns on Wednesday," they wrote in their letter filed with the Texas Public Utility Commission. The letter was signed by Chairwoman Sally Talberg and Vice Chairman Peter Cramton. Finance and Audit Committee Chairman Terry Bulger and Human Resources and Governance Committee Chairman Raymond Hepper also signed in the letter. Meanwhile, ERCOT, the agency that runs Texas' electricity grid, did not respond to NBC News' request for comments. According to a Forbes report, federal agencies that manage the U.S. electricity sector have announced investigations of the failure of many of the state's power plants. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electricity Reliability Corporation said in a joint statement that they would look into the bulk-power system's operations amid the winter weather conditions experienced in Midwest and South-central states. Related story: Texas Should Bear the Responsibility of Paying Residents' High Energy Bills, Houston Mayor Says Texas Energy Bills Texas operates its power grid independently, unlike other states. This allows Texas to avoid some federal regulation. However, it also constrains its ability to import power and gas during emergencies. The recent winter storm left customers in Texas with sky-high electricity bills, and it is unclear who will pay for the exorbitant bills. Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin, said that "everybody" would have to pay for it some way, meaning taxpayers, shareholders, or customers. "But it'll take a few months for details to shake out," Webber said in another NBC News report. Last weekend, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that the state's Utility Commission had put a moratorium on customer disconnections for nonpayment to address the huge bills. Abbott said he has met with legislators about how the state could help reduce the energy bills burden on consumers. President Joe Biden has already approved a major disaster declaration for Texas. It will provide federal assistance for temporary housing and home repairs in Texas. Rep. Michael McCaul said over the weekend that the plan is to use federal assistance to build damage and cover the cost of electricity bills. San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said there would be "hell to pay" if residents are expected to carry the bill for the ballooning electricity costs. Nirenberg added that it would be unconscionable for bills to be put on the backs of the state's residents, who have been suffering and freezing in their homes for the last week. Read also: "No One Owes You or Your Family Anything"- Texas Mayor Resigns After Calling Residents 'Lazy' Amid Winter Storm Bangladeshi Ambassador to Korea Abida Islam, second from left, hoists her country's flag at half-mast in front of the embassy in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, on Language Martyrs' Day and International Mother Language Day, Feb. 21. Courtesy of Embassy of Bangladesh in Korea By Yi Whan-woo The Bangladeshi martyrs who sacrificed their lives while fighting to protect their Bangla language were honored in Korea on International Mother Language Day and their country's Language Martyrs' Day, both which fall on Feb. 21. The movement for linguistic and cultural rights began in 1952 when then-East Bengal under the Dominion of Pakistan rose against the West Pakistani-dominated government that pushed to designate Urdu as the official language, which was predominantly spoken in West Pakistan. The 1952 movement led to the independence of Bangladesh, meaning "land of Bangla-speaking people," in 1971. Led by the country's founding father Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the movement was later recognized by UNESCO, which, as part of its efforts to safeguard linguistic diversity, proclaimed Feb. 21 as International Mother Language Day. The Embassy of Bangladesh in Korea organized multiple remembrance programs this year. Among them were laying a floral wreath at the Shaheed Minar (Martyrs' Monument) in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province; hoisting of the national flag at half-mast at the diplomatic mission; a moment of silence; reading of messages from Bangladeshi leaders President Md. Abdul Hamid, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and State Minister for Foreign Affairs Md. Shahriar Alam plus UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay; and a screening of a documentary on Feb. 21. Bangladeshi Ambassador to Korea Abida Islam led the events that strictly observed social distancing rules. "The ambassador paid rich tribute to the language martyrs who laid down their lives on Feb. 21, 1952, in Dhaka to protect the dignity of our mother language Bangla and established it as the state language of the country," the embassy said in a press release. "She also recalled with deep reverence the greatest Bengali of all times, the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman under whose charismatic leadership we attained our independence in 1971 through a systematic struggle of self-autonomy from 1952 to 1971." The ambassador also highlighted the different initiatives of the government in the promotion of multilingualism in line with the 2021 theme of International Mother Language Day "Fostering multilingualism for inclusion in education and society." Bangladeshi Ambassador to Korea Abida Islam speaks during a webinar organized by the embassy in collaboration with the Korean National Commission for UNESCO, Feb. 19, to mark Language Martyrs' Day and International Mother Language Day that fell Feb. 21. Courtesy of Embassy of Bangladesh in Korea The Bauchi State chapter of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) on Tuesday called on President Muhammadu Buhari ... The Bauchi State chapter of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) on Tuesday called on President Muhammadu Buhari to, as a matter of urgency, call leaders, including governors, fanning the ember of violence to order. Addressing a press conference at the Press Centre of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Bauchi State Council, the state chairman of MACBAN, Alhaji Sadiq Ibrahim Ahmed, said recent statements made by the some political leaders was a clear indication that the unity of Nigeria was at stake and can only be protected by President Buhari. Speaking against the backdrop of recent utterances by some state governors, even to the extent of threatening to expel Fulani herders from their territories, Ahmed said all these point to the fact that some people had the agenda of instigating violence aimed at cleansing the Fulani people from the land. The position of our state council on these issues is to call on the President to quickly address those leaders who are violating the constitution by disenfranchising on the fundamental rights of some particular members of the society. The statements made by the these leaders are a clear indication that the unity of Nigeria is at stake and can only be protected by Mr President, the MACBAN state chairman said. He particularly urged the President to sanction governors of Benue, Ekiti, Oyo, Taraba States According to him, the recent statement made by Bauchi State governor, Senator Bala Mohammed, to the effect that herders were forced to defend themselves by carrying arms as a result of the failure of the country and its citizens to protect them was being used to attack the governor. The MACBAN chairman assured that the association will continue to educate to remain law abiding citizens of Nigeria and reject any attempt by any tribe to criminalise them. We will continue to educate and enlighten our members to continue to be law abiding but should lawfully reject any attempt by a group of tribes in Nigeria trying to control and instigate violence in a united Nigeria. While expressing support for Governor Mohammed on his statement on Fulani herders protecting themselves against attacks, Ahmed threatened that farmers among MACBAN members would stop transportation of food items to the Southern part of the country should threat against Fulani continued. We support the executive governor of Bauchi State that once the lives and properties of citizens are in danger, we have no option than protecting ourselves. We warn that when these issues continue to linger, we will advise our members who produce animals and foodstuff to stop the transportation of such food items to the South. It was supposed to be a much-needed break from the year of COVID-19 restrictions for Anna Shpilberg and her four friends. She threw together the trip to Cancun, Mexico with less than a month of planning and they found themselves basking in the warm sunshine over Valentines Day weekend. The five friends even donned red bikinis on the beach at Shpilbergs suggestion on Valentines Day. At home in New Jersey, however, Shpilbergs boyfriend John Menendez brooded over her getaway with friends and that anger turned to deadly rage when she didnt answer his repeated calls during the trip, according to investigators and family. Menendez, a Hudson County corrections officer, is accused of killing Shpilberg and her friend Luiza Shinkarevskaya, both 40, after they landed at Newark Liberty International Airport on Feb. 16. Shinkarevskayas cousin, Mishel Chan-Min, told NJ Advance Media on Tuesday that Menendez, who is 17 years younger than Shpilberg, was furious and he was upset. According to Chan-Min, Menendez told Shinkarevskayas boyfriend that he cant believe they went on vacation and that Anna was going to hear it from him when she got off the plane. Shinkarevskayas boyfriend, who is identified only as Witness B in court papers, tried to calm Menendez down, even offering to pick up the women from the airport himself. Im fine. Ill go pick them up, Menendez allegedly said, according to the boyfriends account to police. Menendez met them at Newark airport shortly after their flight arrived 8:30 p.m. and drove both women to an off-airport parking lot where Shinkarevskaya had left her car, investigators and family of the women said. Menendez shot Shinkarevskaya in the head and left her on a sidewalk bleeding before driving about a mile to a spot a block from Newark Penn Station, where Shpilberg was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head, according to family and investigators. Menendez, who had blood on him, walked up to a city police officer sitting in his patrol car near the scene and confessed, according to an affidavit of probable cause filed by police in support of murder charges. I killed both of them. Just arrest me, bro, Menendez allegedly told the officer. When the officer read Menendez his rights and handcuffed him, he continued to talk, authorities said. This is crazy. I cant believe I did this, Menendez told the officer, according to court records. He remained in the Essex County Jail on Tuesday, pending a detention hearing on March 2. Court records do not list an attorney for Menendez. Chan-Min said Tuesday that Menendez was constantly calling Shpilberg when they were not together. Others who knew the couple voiced similar concerns about Menendezs behavior, noting he sometimes required her to send photos proving where she was. He was always with her, he was always calling, Chan-Min said. I dont think Luiza and her even got to go out without him. He was always there. Any step that she took, he was there. So I was just surprised that she went without him. John Menendez, 24, of West New York.Essex County Jail Shinkarevskaya, who had addresses in Morris County and in Brooklyn, New York, was found fatally shot about 9:53 p.m. in the 100 block of Haynes Avenue near the airport, according to the Essex County Prosecutors Office. Shpilberg, of Randolph, was found dead at 9:55 p.m. in the passenger seat of her vehicle in the area of Edison Place and Bruen Street near Newark Penn Station, according to the prosecutors office. In an interview with police after the killings, Menendez said Anna had been ignoring his calls. He said he lost it and killed them, detectives wrote in a probable cause affidavit filed in the case. Best friends Anna Shpilberg, left, and Luiza Shinkarevskaya were killed Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2020 in Newark. Chan-Min said her cousin texted her photos of the resort where they stayed in Cancun and that she appeared to be having a good time with Shpilberg and the others. Shpilberg and Shinkarevskaya emigrated to the United States from the Ukraine as children about three decades ago and were close friends, according to family and friends. Shinkarevskaya was an ultrasound technician who worked out of an office in Manhattan. Shpilberg was a dental hygienist who worked on Staten Island, friends said. Luiza Shinkarevskaya, 40, was killed Feb. 16 after returning from a trip to Cancun, Mexico.Photo courtesy of Mishel Chan-Min Chan-Min said she met first Menendez during an outing with her cousin and Shpilberg at the beach more than a year ago and that he seemed off. I thought he was weird. Their age difference alone was just weird, Chan-Min said. But he also felt distant. His energy was off, like he was there but not really there at all. I just felt like he was uncomfortable, she said, adding that the women all spoke Russian and he did not, which may have contributed to his feeling left out. Chan-Min said she last saw Menendez during Shinkarevskayas birthday party on Oct. 27, 2020 and that he seemed to enjoy himself. He was pouring shots and the women were drinking, she said. He seemed okay, like he was finally having a good time. Services were held for Shinkarevskaya on Sunday at the Plaza Jewish Community Chapel on Amsterdam Avenue in New York City. After a private graveside service, she was interred at Mt. Moriah Cemetery Jewish Cemetery in Fairview, Bergen County, according to Chan-Min. A GoFundMe to help cover those funeral costs has raised more than $6,000. Chan-Min said Shinkarevskaya was an only child and that her parents were at the services, along with aunts, uncles, cousins and dozens of friends and co-workers. The service was hard. Everyone is still basically in shock, said Chan-Min, who last saw her cousin three days before she left for Cancun. As of Tuesday, funeral arrangements had not been completed for Shpilberg, according to her former fiance, Fabian Goni. Several of Shpilbergs relatives have arrived from the Ukraine and are still in the process of deciding where to hold the funeral and burial, Goni said. Friends and family were also there to comfort Shpilbergs 15-year-old son, who attends school in Randolph. A GoFundMe set up for the teenager had raised more than $42,000 as of Tuesday. Words cannot accurately describe Daniels grief right now, the GoFundMe states. His future is uncertain but his main wish is to continue his life in Randolph, the only home he knows, surrounded by his friends, classmates, and neighbors. The last photo Shinkarevskaya sent to her family and friends from her trip to Cancun.Photo courtesy of Mishel Chan-Min New Jersey provides multiple resources for domestic abuse victims including a 24-hour hotline 1 (800) 572-SAFE (7233). Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription. Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Incidents of fly-tipping on public land have increased by two percent across England in 2019/2020, according to new figures released by Defra. While councils have dealt with just under 1 million fly-tipping incidents during this period, these figures account for waste illegally dumped on public land reported to these authorities. However, the vast majority of fly-tipping incidents on privately-owned land, which are thought to be 'significantly more', are not included. The Country & Land and Business Association (CLA) said it believed these figures did not fully reflect the severity of the situation. According to the organisation, one rural firm, which is regularly subjected to fly-tipping, is having to pay 50,000 each year for rubbish, such as tyres, fridges, tents, barbecues and building waste, to be cleared. The CLA has called for local authorities to start sharing the brunt of the costs, and taking more responsibility for waste dumped on peoples land. Mark Bridgeman, president of the rural group, said while the government's new figures were alarming, it was just the tip of the iceberg. Cases of fly-tipping on privately owned land are significantly more than on public land so these figures do not reflect the true scale of this type of organised crime, which blights our rural communities. "Part of the problem is that its currently too simple to gain a waste carrying licence that enables firms to transport and dispose of waste and this needs urgent reform with correct checks put in place. "A revamped system would act as a deterrent, Mr Bridgeman said. The most common size category for fly-tipping incidents in 2019/20 was equivalent to a small van load (34% of total incidents), followed by the equivalent of a car boot or less (28%). The most common place for fly-tipping to occur was on highways (pavements and roads), which accounted for over two fifths (43%) of total incidents. And although the maximum fine for anyone caught fly-tipping is 50,000 or 12 months imprisonment, if convicted in a Magistrates' Court, this is seldom enforced. The CLA said that unless tougher action was taken to combat this kind of rural crime, it would continue to increase. Danbury schools Superintendent Sal Pascarella co-wrote a letter on behalf of a number of Connecticut school districts calling on Gov. Ned Lamont to supply their districts with more state aid after he put a hold on scheduled increases to the districts grant money. The letter states the superintendents opposition to Lamonts pause in state funding escalations in his proposed biennial budget, which would take more than $109 million away from Connecticuts 53 Alliance District and urban schools, they claim. The letter is co-authored by superintendents from Danbury, Meriden, Vernon and East Hartford and signed by numerous district leaders including those from Bridgeport, New Haven, Norwalk, Stamford, Middletown and Torrington, among others. As such, we urge you to reconsider this strategy and reinstate the original phase-in schedule for all Alliance Districts, the letter read. Alliance Districts are identified by the state as eligible for additional funds and are historically under-performing. This shift will allow us to fund our general budget obligations, help cushion distressed municipalities from large tax increases, and avoid utilizing one-time federal funding intended for COVID-related purposes to fund ongoing operations, it continued. The state conceived a grant formula to give Alliance District schools and others in some urban districts representing fiscally challenged communities state funding to address a persistent state achievement gap, according to the letter. These schools are typically awarded an increase in grant money annually to help provide vital services to students. However, Lamonts pause will discontinue the planned increases leaving these schools at a loss. Danbury was scheduled to see an increase of more than $2.5 million for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years. Lamonts spokesman Max Reiss said more $440 million in federal funding is available to school districts across Connecticut including the states Alliance and urban districts. Connecticut districts are also preparing to receive their slice of a federal COVID-19 relief grant, which they can use to supplement missing grant money for the next two years by infusing millions of federal relief dollars into their budgets for COVID-related expenses. These funds can and should be used for school leaders to provide the resources necessary to address the needs of the districts and focus on learning loss and recovery as well as continued safe reopening, Reiss said. The governors budget mitigates the need for broad-based tax increases, relying on federal aid and partial use of the states Budget Reserve Fund while the states economy and revenues continue to recover. While this aid helps relieve some pressure in the interim, superintendents said it will be burdensome to their long-term fiscal plans. By pausing the ECS increase formula [grant money increases] and supplanting this phase in approach with funds not intended for general budget activities, Connecticut adopts a financial strategy that will create large-scale disruptions for fiscal year 2024, the letter read. Using the federal aid from Congress will add to their current budgets, but leave a hole when that aid is no longer available in two years, forcing them to seek local and state help in filling their budgetary gaps. When districts mitigate the large financial shortfalls associated with using the one-time funding from Congress, local governments will have to navigate the following three ripple effects. Districts will either lean on already economically challenged municipalities to subsidize their funding, seek massive increases in state aid, or be pushed to reduce supportive programs for students in the aftermath of the states grant cuts, the letter said. While we recognize that there are no easy answers, we are eager to engage with you and your team on helping design a sustainable, long-term financial plan that can preserve our states commitment to equity, stimulate academic recovery and best utilize the federal dollars, the letter stated. Reiss said as the budget process continues, the administration will continue to engage with local stakeholders, those who work with students, and the General Assembly on a sustainable path forward. Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law bills that beef up fines for violating a controversial law on "foreign agents" as well as other legislation relating to protests, such as the financing of rallies and disobedience of law enforcement, in the wake of unsanctioned protests in support of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny. According to the laws, signed by Putin on February 24, releasing information about so-called "foreign agents" and their materials without also indicating their status could lead to fines of up to 2,500 rubles ($34) for individuals and up to 500,000 rubles ($6,720) for entities. The law applies regardless of whether the "foreign agent" in question is a mass media outlet or an individual. The other laws signed by Putin on February 24 set fines for individuals found guilty of illegally financing a rally at up to 15,000 rubles ($200), while officials and organizations for such actions will be ordered to pay up to 30,000 rubles ($400) and 100,000 rubles ($1,345), respectively. Putin also signed a law that significantly increases fines for disobedience of police and security forces. Police detained more than 11,000 people at nationwide protests over the past month in support of Navalny, according to OVD-Info, a protest monitoring group. Russias "foreign agent" legislation was adopted in 2012 and has been modified repeatedly. It requires nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign assistance and that the government deems to be engaged in political activity to be registered, to identify themselves as foreign agents, and to submit to audits. Later modifications of the law targeted foreign-funded media, including RFE/RLs Russian Service, six other RFE/RL Russian-language news services, as well as Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. At the end of 2020, the legislation was modified to allow the Russian government to include individuals, including foreign journalists, on its foreign agents list and to impose restrictions on them. RFE/RL will not be deterred from our independent reporting for our Russian audience." The Russian state media monitor Roskomnadzor last year adopted rules requiring listed media to mark all written materials with a lengthy notice in large text, all radio materials with an audio statement, and all video materials with a 15-second text declaration. The agency has prepared hundreds of complaints against RFE/RLs news websites. When they go through the court system, the total fines levied could reach nearly $1 million. RFE/RL has called the fines a state-sponsored campaign of coercion and intimidation, while the U.S. State Department has described them as intolerable. Human Rights Watch has described the foreign agent legislation as restrictive and intended to demonize independent groups. "RFE/RL will not be deterred from our independent reporting for our Russian audience," RFE/RL President Jamie Fly said in a statement on February 24. The Kremlin is targeting RFE/RL because of the audience response to our work and interest in our coverage of recent political events in Russia. The Russian people will be the ultimate victims of laws like this that use intimidation tactics to try to silence voices and reduce media diversity, Fly added. Since early in Putins presidency, the Kremlin has steadily tightened the screws on independent media. The country is ranked 149th out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index produced by Reporters Without Borders. Navalny, 44, was flown to Germany last August after collapsing in Siberia following what he said was an attempt by Putin to kill him with a military-grade nerve agent. That assertion has been backed by many Western countries, but the Kremlin has steadfastly denied any involvement in the incident. Upon his return to Moscow in January, Navalny was detained immediately and subsequently sentenced to jail on February 2 for parole violations while being treated abroad for the poison attack. The court changed his 3 1/2 -year suspended sentence to a prison term. He is set to spend just over 2 1/2 years behind bars because of time already served in detention. Russia has ignored a demand by the European Court of Human Rights to release Navalny, and European Union foreign ministers agreed earlier this week to impose sanctions on four senior Russian officials close to Putin in a mainly symbolic response to Navalny's jailing. The EU is expected to formally approve the agreement in early March. Some traders at Tema Community One market as well as residents of Kpone-Katamanso Municipality on Wednesday expressed mixed reactions on the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccination exercise. Mr Kwaku Aggeman-Manu, the Minster of Health-designate, at 0700 hours today, February, 24th, 2021 on behalf of the Government of Ghana received the nations first batch of the COVID-19 vaccine. In a random interview with residents in Tema and Kpone-Katamanso by the Ghana News Agency Tema team, some school of thought admitted that the coronavirus had retarded the progress of the country and it was good to receive the vaccine, which would help to improve the health condition of the citizens. According to the school of thought, they are ready to take the vaccine because according to them government have invested more funds to secure the medication to protect citizen, so we must be prepared to partake in the COVID-19 vaccination exercise. Most of the traders who said they were ready to partake in the vaccination stressed that even though it might not be compulsory to take the vaccine, it may be a requirement for traveling outside the country very soon. The same applies to the yellow fever vaccine, many people refused to go for the vaccination at the Tema Harbour, but now whenever you want to travel outside the country, you are required to present a yellow fever card as part of your particulars that shows that you have been vaccinated, some of the traders stated. The other school of thought who kicked against participation in the COVID-19 vaccination based their argument on the wrong foundation that COVID-19 was for the affluent people especially those who had air condition at the work places, the homes, cars hence the government will be making money out of it. They also pressed the panic button and questioned whether there would be any side effects after taking the vaccination stressing that if the vaccine could not entirely protect them from contracting COVID-19 then they would prefer adhering to the protocols. Scores of others also proffered that Ghana was endowed with natural herbs, which when invested in could have fought against the disease, boost peoples immune systems and served as COVID-19 cure. I am not taking the medicine until I see the authorities and their family members taking it, after that I will investigate whether the vaccine given to them would be the same as what would be offered the public, Francis Nuertey Tetteh of Kpone stated. I will wait for a month and if nothing happens to those who have taken it, then I will, because I dont know how it will react with my immune system, Madam Sheila Korkor Nartey also of Kpone stated. I will take it because the rate at which people are dying is scary, although there has been a lot of misconceptions about the vaccine, Ghana is not the first country to use it, Mr Andy Sackitey another resident stated. GNA observed during the survey that, those who kicked against partaking in the COVID-19 vaccination exercise were afraid of the after effect, did not trust the health authorities, and lack understanding of the whole issues. Scores therefore appealed to the National Commission for Civic Education, Information Services Department and the media to assist in educating the public to reduce the fear syndrome as well as the misconception about COVID-19 pandemic it is a disease for the affluent. 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 More creative and sophisticated applications helped to satisfy everyday life demands in hassle-free ways. In the last decade, this sentiment has played an important role in stepping up creativity in the consumer electronics industry. DUBAI, UAE / ACCESSWIRE / February 24, 2021 / Future Market Insights: FMI states in its recent study on the Consumer-electronics market that the market will record a CAGR of 5.6% through 2031. Demand is anticipated to increase due to the availability of devices stimulating automation of daily chores. "Consumers today are more conscious of receiving more in less. With each new development of device generation, consumers expect more features either in the same size or even in lesser than that. Due to the prevalence of minimalism concept, the adoption of miniature designs with rich features is rising steadily." says the FMI analyst. Request a report sample to gain comprehensive market insights at https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-433 Consumer electronics Market - Important Highlights The top-selling category is the consumer electronic goods that include optical camcorders/DVR/camera, smartphones & tablets, smart TV, and others. The prominent distribution outlets in the consumer electronics industry are anticipated to be multi-brand stores, followed by specialty stores. In numerous countries, the notion of a smart home is gaining popularity. North America led by the US is estimated to dominate the market towards 2031 end. Consumer electronics Market - Drivers Smart homes with smart devices and technology that ensure greater efficiency, comfort, protection, and ease of everyday life are increasingly desired by people today which will generate growth prospects. To promote developments in existing electronic technology, some of the leading players in the consumer electronics industry invest extensively in research and development activities which is boosting the growth of the market. The Internet of Things (IoT) enables improved security while enhancing the efficiency and efficiency of goods. Concerning the IoT (Internet of Things), all these aspects are planned to further promote growth in the consumer electronics market. We Offer tailor-made Solutions to fit Your Requirements, Request Customization@ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/customization-available/rep-gb-433 Consumer electronics Market - Restraints The electronics industry operates in a stringent regulatory environment which is hindering the growth of the market. Furthermore, electronic devices designed to be marketed in a certain area or country are expected to conform with the relevant national laws and regulations in force which is a key constraint for the market. COVID-19 Impact on Consumer electronics Market It is claimed that many persons will not be able to function during the COVID-19 pandemic epidemic without contact and advanced digital electronics. Connectivity, encoding, and memory/storage are all heavily dependent on current consumer technologies. With the general economic effect on many customers, total sales of consumer technology will decline, but consumers are more dependent than ever on their digital devices to communicate with others and continue to operate at home. As time goes by, the emphasis on web-based meetings, online education, and cloud-based resources, in general, will grow. Competitive Landscape The consumer electronics market players are leaning towards the expansion of the production facilities besides opting for strategic collaborations to attain a competitive edge. For instance, To expand their sales footprint, Samsung Electronics has developed numerous Samsung research Global AI centers in various regions such as America, Russia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and others. A few of the key companies functioning in the global market include Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., LG Electronics Co. Ltd., Apple, Inc., Hitachi Ltd., Koninklijke Philips N.V., Sony Corporation, Hewlett Packard Inc. Contact Sales for Further Assistance in Purchasing this Report@ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/checkout/433 About the Study The study offers readers a comprehensive assessment of the consumer electronics market. Global, regional, and national-level analysis of the latest trends influencing the market is covered in this FMI report. The study provides insights based on product type (Consumer Electronic Devices, Wearable Devices, Smart Home Devices), Sales Channel (Hypermarkets/Supermarkets, Specialty Stores, Multi-brand Stores, Online Retailer, Wholesalers & Distributors) and across key regions (North America, Latin America, Europe, China, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa). Explore FMI's Coverage of the Technology Industry Semiconductor wafers market: Get insights on the outbound semiconductor wafers market through FMI's report covering detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis for projection period 2020-2030. Submarine cables market: FMI's exhaustive study on the submarine cables market covers the latest trends, innovations, key players, and popular strategies for the period 2020-2030. Ultrasonic sensors market: Obtain detailed analysis on the ultrasonic sensors market through FMI's report covering competitive analysis, key regions, and segmental analysis for 2020-2030. About Future Market Insights Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in Dubai, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India. FMI's latest market research reports and industry analysis help businesses navigate challenges and make critical decisions with confidence and clarity amidst breakneck competition. Our customized and syndicated market research reports deliver actionable insights that drive sustainable growth. A team of expert-led analysts at FMI continuously tracks emerging trends and events in a broad range of industries to ensure that our clients prepare for the evolving needs of their consumers. Contact Mr. Abhishek Budholiya Unit No: AU-01-H Gold Tower (AU), Plot No: JLT-PH1-I3A, Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai, United Arab Emirates MARKET ACCESS DMCC Initiative For Sales Enquiries: sales@futuremarketinsights.com For Media Enquiries: press@futuremarketinsights.com Report: https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/consumer-electronics-market Press Release Source: https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/press-release/consumer-electronics-market SOURCE: Future Market Insights View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631618/How-Technological-Advancements-are-Spurring-Growth-of-Consumer-Electronics-Market-Future-Market-Insights-Report-Analyzes The cost of excessive care due to health disparities is estimated to be upwards of $93 billion. This is a difficult time to address inequity but the earlier a hospital can adopt cultural competency, inclusive leadership strategies, the faster improved outcomes will emerge. The statistics around higher rates of death and poorer health outcomes for minorities and people of color are undeniable. As a result of a lack of culturally competent care, healthcare leaders and administrators often miss an important point: health inequities cost hospitals real money(1). Based on recent research, the cost of excessive care due to health disparities is estimated to be upwards of $93 billion and another estimated $175 million in economic losses due to shortened life spans.(2) Poor treatment plans, medical errors as a result of biasconscious or unconsciousincrease lawsuits and might put a facilitys accreditation in jeopardy. Health equity is a patient safety issue.(3) Today, hospitals are overwhelmed and dont have the bandwidth to face this problem head on, and that puts the hospital at risk, says Dr. Maria Hernandez, President and CEO of Impact4Health. In this difficult environment, it will take time to course correct but its vital to the wellbeing of Black and Latino patients in particular. The problems are manifold and cross-cultural, involving unconscious bias, social barriers and not surprisingly, language. Very simply, diversity and inclusion inequities present risks beyond patient care including crippling financial penalties, skyrocketing lawsuits, and unwanted investigations from regulatory agencies. (4) Quality communication between patients and physicians is critical to achieving positive outcomes. Language is a great example of how inequity serves as a catalyst for problems. (5) For example, doctors are legally required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to have interpreters. (6) But realistically, interpreters arent always available. Beyond the fundamental conflict of differing languages, doctors also encounter patients who dont necessarily need an interpreter but might not understand what is happening. Its important to know that language preferences can put minorities at greater risk for more medical errors, explains Dr. Hernandez. When a physician is treating a Limited English Proficient patient, who doesnt have the capacity to clearly communicate or understand, the doctor must be very careful regarding that patients adherence to the course of care, use of medications and follow-up treatment. On the part of the physician, explains Hernandez, potential interventions might include: Requesting an interpreter through the hospitals appropriate channel. Waiting for the interpreter if the patients condition is stable. Asking the patient to repeat the instructions they have been given to ensure comprehension. Asking a family member or caregiver to serve as the patients advocate to confirm they can support the patients adherence to treatment Telemedicine presents a potential solution, but Dr. Hernandez warns that issues like computer literacy skills, regionalism and indigenous lexicon may lead to misinterpretation, despite the best intentions. To help hospitals and healthcare providers understand and address health inequities and their consequences, Impact4Health uses a comprehensive assessment to improve health equity that links to improved health outcomes. Put simply, data reveals disparity. The Inclusion Scorecard for Population Health is a free online assessment featuring best practices to advance health equity. The assessment is a first step in determining what opportunities exist to support diverse and vulnerable populations. Embedded in the Scorecard are key data to gather to determine where inequities may exist. The next step is training in Inclusion Leadership, where Impact4Health trains professionals to recognize and address cultural challenges and more closely engage with the community at large. When the hospital begins to connect the dots on quality of care and health equity, they are not resistant, but theyre often overwhelmed. This is a difficult time to address inequity but the earlier a hospital can adopt cultural competency, inclusive leadership strategies, the faster improved outcomes will emerge, explains Dr. Hernandez. Risk is inherent in every industry and that includes healthcare but not addressing the inequities related to diversity and inclusion borders on negligence. Diversity and inclusion are not just a matter of social equity but generate authentic safety issues with very real consequences for patients, physicians, C-suite executives and other healthcare professionals. Medical centers must be reminded of the importance of diversity and inclusion, and the ethical principles that guide the medical fieldjustice for all people, showing respect for others and the simplest rule of all: first, do no harm. (7) About Impact4Health Impact4Health is a multidisciplinary team of community psychologists, public health researchers, physicians and health educators who promote health equity, working in partnership with hospitals, public health departments, and healthcare insurance providers. Strategies employed include training in cross-cultural health, inclusive leadership, and implementing the Inclusion Scorecard for Population Health. For more information, please visit us as http://www.Impact4Health.com. 1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Health Equity Considerations and Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html Accessed 14 FEB 2021 2. Kellog Foundation; The Business Case for Racial Equity: A Strategy for Growth. altarum.org/sites/default/files/uploaded-publication-files/WKKellogg_Business-Case-Racial-Equity_National-Report_2018.pdf Accessed 14 FEB 2021 3. Safety and Health Magazine; Diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace: A safety issue safetyandhealthmagazine.com/articles/20307-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-the-workplace-a-safety-issue?page=2 Accessed 14 FEB 2021 4. National Institutes of Health; Addressing Health and Health-Care Disparities: The Role of a Diverse Workforce and the Social Determinants of Health; ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3863703/ Accessed 14 FEB 2021 5. National Institutes of Health; Providing Interpreters for Patients with Hearing Disabilities: ADA Requirements ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3472899/ Accessed 14 FEB 2021 6. Florida Health; Are Doctors Required to Provide Interpreters for Medical Visits and Other Medical-Related Situations? floridahealth.gov/programs-and-services/childrens-health/cms-plan/for-health-care-providers/_documents/ada-questions.pdf Accessed 14 FEB 2021 7. National Institutes of Health; First do no harm; then try to prevent it ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2658469/ Accessed 14 FEB 2021 Imperial Valley News Center California DMV Really? Imperial, California - It was a case of COVID confusion that caused the Department of Motor Vehicles in California to send a driver a new license using a picture of her wearing a face-mask, reports the Association of Mature American Citizens. Lesley Pilgrim told CBS news that she was wearing her mask when the DMV photographer snapped her picture, apparently by mistake. He took another shot of her mask-less but, somehow, the wrong ID photo was used. The DMV said it was an oversight. Ms. Pilgrim said, we all make mistakes. Protesters take a knee and raise their fists during a "Black Lives Matter" demonstration in front of the Brooklyn Library and Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, N.Y., on June 5, 2020. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images) West Virginia Bill Seeks to Recreate Trumps Critical Race Theory Ban at State Level Republican lawmakers in West Virginia have introduced a bill modeled after a revoked Trump-era order to purge elements of critical race theory from the states workforce and schools. Currently known as House Bill 2595, the proposed legislation seeks to ban race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating in the workforce, defined as assigning fault, blame, or bias to a race or sex, or to members of a race or sex because of their race or sex, as well as any claim that, consciously or unconsciously, and by virtue of his or her race or sex, members of any race are inherently racist or are inherently inclined to oppress others, or that members of a sex are inherently sexist or inclined to oppress others. It also prohibits state contractors from pushing those views upon their employees. The bill would also ban schools from using any curriculum that promotes divisive acts, and block state funding from going into agencies promoting those concepts, including the idea that the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist, that an individual, by virtue of race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously, and that any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on the basis of race or sex. House Bill 2595 is largely a replica of former President Donald Trumps September 2020 executive order, which declared that un-American and divisive concepts should no longer be promoted in any diversity and inclusion trainings for the U.S. Armed Forces, government contractors, federal agencies, or recipients of federal grants. The latest version of the bill contains the exact same language and wording as the Trump order, with the United States replaced by the State of West Virginia. President Joe Biden, in one of his first executive actions in White House, rescinded Trumps ban of critical race theory in federal workplaces. In place of the Trump order, Biden issued an executive order of his own, stating that it is now the policy of the federal government to pursue a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, and that federal agencies should revise any steps taken in accord with the previous order within 60 days. The West Virginia bill came amid a heated debate over critical race theory and its role in Americas social, cultural, and economic institutions. An outgrowth of the European Marxist school of critical theory, critical race theory interprets the American system through a lens of power struggle between the race of the oppressor and that of the oppressed. As a result, according to the theory, the very foundations of the American social and political lifesuch as rationalism, constitutional law, and legal reasoningare considered to be tools of racial oppression. Washington, Feb 24 : In a wide-spread cyber-attack on US federal agencies and enterprises, hackers also broke into the networks of NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), The Washington Post has reported, saying the Biden administration is reportedly preparing sanctions against Russia as the cybercriminals are "likely Russian in origin". Nine federal agencies and about 100 private sector companies were compromised as a result of the SolarWinds hack, the White House said last week. NASA and the FAA were named ahead of a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing tasked with investigating the widespread cyberattack. A spokesperson for NASA did not dispute the report but declined to comment citing an "ongoing investigation." A spokesperson for the FAA did not respond to a request for comment. The other federal agencies that were attacked include the Departments of Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security, Justice and State, the Treasury and the National Institutes of Health. The cyber-attacks were discovered last year after FireEye reported its own network was breached. Although the hack was "likely of Russian origin," the hackers launched their attack from inside the US, Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology, said in a briefing. To carry out the attack, hackers installed a malware in the Orion software sold by the IT management company SolarWinds. "As you know, roughly 18,000 entities downloaded the malicious update. So the scale of potential access far exceeded the number of known compromises," Neuberger said, adding that many of the private sector compromises are technology companies, including networks of companies whose products could be used to launch additional intrusions. "The hackers launched the hack from inside the United States, which further made it difficult for the US government to observe their activity," she added. The top cybersecurity official informed that the intelligence community is looking at who is responsible. Earlier media reports suggested that the hackers compromised at least 250 federal agencies and top enterprises in the US. According to Microsoft, the hackers compromised 'SolarWinds' software allowing them to "impersonate any of the organisation's existing users and accounts, including highly privileged accounts." Microsoft said it had discovered its systems were infiltrated "beyond just the presence of malicious 'SolarWinds' code." It may take several months for the US government to complete the investigation into the SolarWinds hack. A San Antonio woman pleaded guilty to her role in defrauding an area bank of millions of dollars. Phyllis Jo Martinez, 79, on Tuesday entered a guilty plea to a single count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud in a case involving the former president of a Bank of San Antonio subsidiary. She also had been indicted on one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, but that was dropped as part of her plea agreement. Martinez is scheduled to be sentenced May 25. She faces the possibility of up to 30 years in prison, up to three years of supervised release and a maximum $1 million fine. She also will be required to make full restitution. The Bank of San Antonio revealed in August that it had uncovered a $13.2 million Ponzi-style fraud scheme involving Ronald Wayne Schroeder, the former president of its Texas Express Funding LLC factoring subsidiary. On ExpressNews.com: 5 indicted in alleged scheme defrauded San Antonio bank Schroeder is accused of using proceeds from the alleged scheme to buy automobiles, recreational vehicles, an airplane, a boat and a beach house. He faces three counts of bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Martinez and Schroeder were among five people indicted by a federal grand jury in November. The others are Martinezs son, Ryan Martinez, Jill Martin Alvarado and her husband Rigo Alvarado. Martinez is the first of the five defendants to plead guilty. Court records show Jill Alvarado also has entered into a plea deal, though no hearing has been set in the matter. She was indicted on the same offenses as Phyllis Martinez. We appreciate her quick acceptance of responsibility, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Blackwell said of Martinez after the hearing. The proceeding was conducted by U.S. District Judge Jason Pulliam via Zoom. Bobby Barrera, Martinezs lawyer, couldnt immediately be reached for comment. SA Inc.: Get the best of business news sent directly to your inbox Martinez is the former owner of a cleaning company called Nerd Factory LLC. According to the redacted indictment, she assisted Schroeder in providing false and misleading invoices to financial institutions to factor. Factoring involves advancing cash to companies in return for acquiring the debts owed to them at a discount. Companies get money quickly instead of waiting for customers to pay their bills. The factoring firm in this case, Texas Express Funding makes money on the difference between what it acquired the debts for and what the customers owe on the invoices. Schroeder would submit misleading information to financial institutions, resulting in payments to Nerd Factory, the Alvarados company and a fake company that the U.S. attorneys office has said Schroeder created to steal money for himself. Some of the money that went to Nerd Factory was returned to Schroeder for his own benefit, the indictment stated. The alleged conspiracy began in 2017 and continued through November, the indictment stated. Schroeders lawyers previously said he was cooperating and would continue to work with the government to rectify the situation. pdanner@express-news.net From Tobacco to Textiles and Now Clean Energy Why a Tech School So Far from the Shore? The Future of Offshore Wind Energy Arrives A Technician-in-Training Safety Is Part of the Course Attracting Students to Martinsville High overhead, Offshore Wind Specialist Rema McManus takes a tentative step off the white steel tower platform and swings herself over the side, suspended in the air by a single nylon rope. The weight of her body strains against her bright orange and black safety harness, a six-pound web of belts, straps, buckles and clamps. Heavy-duty lanyards, attached with four oversized metal hooks, dangle from her vest, one at each side. Lowering slowly at first before picking up speed, she celebrates in mid-descent with outstretched gloved hands and a smile, barely visible under her COVID-19 mask. Safely on the ground, she untethers herself, only to climb back up the ladder and repeat the process.Rema is one of four students, the first cohort to enroll in a new program designed to train wind turbine technicians at the New College Institute (NCI) in Martinsville, Va. While she spends the week learning to work at heights, the other three are in a classroom nearby, going over the basic technical skills needed for working on turbines. A fifth student had been expected to train with Rema, but illness forced a last-minute cancellation. Full five-day participation is mandatory.Martinsville was established in 1791 in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, just north of Virginias southern border. For many years, the area economy was based almost entirely on tobacco growing and processing. By 1900, Martinsville and the surrounding area was home to 15 manufacturers of plug (chewing) tobacco , two cigar factories, two tobacco warehouses and a company that made the boxes to ship all the product. For a time, Martinsville was known as the plug tobacco capital of the world. The boom ended at the dawn of the 20th century when big tobacco companies began to buy up the factories and consolidate production elsewhere. By 1920, tobacco manufacturing in Martinsville was no more.As the tobacco firms closed, furniture manufacturing and textile mills migrated to Martinsville from the north, lured by cheap southern labor. By the 1990s, Martinsvilles mills were producing among other things three quarters of the t-shirt and sweatshirt cloth sold globally. Twice in a century, the southern city declared itself worthy of a world title: sweatshirt capital of the world. Even though 1996 saw a record year of production, the mills began to close, lured again by lower-cost labor, this time overseas. So, too, have the furniture companies shut down, victims of foreign competition.Today, downtown Martinsville is a shadow of its former self. Beautiful old buildings that once housed department stores, restaurants and banks now house an overabundance of hair salons and thrift shops. Many storefronts are vacant, some with their display windows covered in plywood or tattered cloth. IMAGINE what YOU can do with this space reads the sign on an old furniture store. Contact the city of Martinsville for more information. But the city has not given up on itself.Pedestrians might be few and far between, but the sidewalks, crosswalks and curbs are clean and in good repair. Signage, streetlights and traffic signals shine like new. Bike racks, benches and trash containers are everywhere, looking like they were installed yesterday. A number of brick buildings have been freshly painted and outfitted with striped, period-correct awnings. A former ladies shop and Masonic Temple has been converted to high-end loft apartments and office space. Two blocks down the hill, just beyond the farmer's market, the New College Institute anchors the west side of downtown. After the rise and fall of tobacco, furniture and textiles, this is where the city is hoping to jumpstart the local economy.With the loss of manufacturing jobs in southern Virginia, state- and local-level support began to grow for access to higher learning in this educationally underserved region. The nearest public four-year universities are a two-hour drive from Martinsville. In 2004, the New College Institute opened within existing buildings in downtown Martinsville, enrolling over 100 students. NCI works in partnership with other schools, allowing students to obtain degrees from a number of Virginias universities without having to travel. Workforce development and technical training have been part of the mix from the start.Since July 2014, NCI operates from a purpose-built, three-story, 52,000-square-foot facility with multiple classrooms, communal learning areas and offices. Indoor and outdoor event space is available to rent for conferences, weddings and banquets, cementing the schools relationship to the town. The Center for Advanced Manufacturing, a state-of-the-art technical training facility, anchors one end of the new building. The expansive, high-ceilinged bay is stuffed with computerized lathe and milling machines as well as tools of every description. Racks of steel, aluminum and brass bars are stacked 6 feet high, left over from a cancelled association with the Rolls-Royce jet engine factory that closed because of COVID-19 . It is in this room where Rema McManus is practicing on the recently installed 25-foot-tall wind training tower, standing against a cinderblock wall in one corner.Supplying over 7 percent of the nations electricity, wind is now the biggest source of renewable energy, passing hydroelectric in 2019. According to the American Clean Power Association, wind energy directly accounts for 120,000 jobs. Another 26,000 workers manufacture wind turbine parts in more than 500 American factories. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics lists wind technician as one of the fastest-growing careers in the coming decade. Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa and Kansas account for more than half of the wind electricity generated in all of the United States. The Lone Star State alone generated a quarter of the countrys wind electricity in the past three years while providing 22 percent of the states electrical needs and edging out coal in the process. Wind is now the largest source of electricity in Iowa and Kansas.By far, the greater number of wind farms are on land, with very few in the southeastern states. But thats about to change.Virginia-based Dominion Energy recently completed testing on a two-turbine pilot project within a 112,800-acre site 27 miles off the Virginia coast. The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project will be the largest offshore wind farm in the nation, capable of producing 8.8 million megawatts of energy when construction is completed five years from now. CVOW is the first such undertaking to be owned by an electric utility and the first installed in federal waters. The project is expected to create as many as 900 jobs and produce $143 million in economic impact annually during the construction phase. When the wind farm is operational, expectations are that there will be 1,000 new jobs created and over $200 million in annual economic impact. Filling those jobs will require a workforce specifically trained in wind technology.Last October, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced the formation of the Mid-Atlantic Wind Training Alliance, offering courses certified by the Global Wind Organisation that are essential to the construction and operation of turbines. The alliance is a collaboration between Centura College, which has seven education centers in eastern Virginia, and the Mid-Atlantic Maritime Academy, the largest Coast Guard training center on the East Coast. The New College Institute in Martinsville serves as the host institution.Rema McManus may be an offshore wind specialist and the very first student to take the heights course at the Institute, but she sits behind a desk at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. I work on funding, grants and proposals, she says. Offshore wind is picking up, so its going to be vital that we keep it funded. With more than a passing interest in machinery, the 34-year-old seems well-suited to this class. She has a second job, working as an auto mechanic on weekends where she changes oil, fixes brakes and works on transmissions. I have a good idea of how things work, she says. Ive been working on my car since the first one I ever got, a 97 Toyota Corolla. I want to know whats going on with (a car). I want to diagnose it. I want to fix it.Dan Madsen has come from his home base in Orlando to teach this first class in working at heights. A veteran of the Danish Navy, he travels the world, training wind turbine technicians, something hes been doing for 25 years. Ive worked in Japan, Ive worked in China, you name it, he says with just a hint of an accent. Peru, Scotland, Norway. There were no safety programs when I first started.In a few days, he will be heading to Iowa. We like to start with the safety, says Dan. Once we know that you can work safe at height and take care of yourself and the other people around you, then we can focus on your technical background, your actual job. Eventually, the New College Institute will have its own instructors on staff.In the course of the weeks training, Rema is often outnumbered three to one in the classroom and on the platform. Because this is a new program, Dans supervisor, also from Orlando, is in Martinsville for the week, making sure things go as planned. An auditor is here from Denver, observing from the back of the room, making sure Dans instruction conforms to standards prescribed by the Global Wind Organisation (GWO), a consortium of owners and suppliers set up to establish standardized training and safety protocols.While Rema is immersed in the correct procedures of manual handling while working at height, three other students are in a nearby classroom, learning how to service a turbine . Two of the men, already wind and electrical instructors at Centura College in Norfolk, are here to learn more about turbine fundamentals and the process for GWO certification. They will be taking what they learn back to Norfolk where they will apply their newfound knowledge to Centuras wind training program. The third student is Trevor Martin, a Martinsville native who is already NCIs advanced manufacturing technician. He hopes to become the schools wind tech trainer as well. The process could take months. Ill have to go into a turbine at some point, he says. To get familiar with it. And then Ill have to work with another instructor, and sit in on their classes, and then theyll sit in on mine.Today, Trevor and his fellow students are clustered into one corner of a bright and airy classroom, each seated before a portable hydraulic trainer. Someone has drawn electrical diagrams and made numeric notations in black marker on three of the four walls. Referring to printed instructions and schematics, they are trying to accomplish basic tasks put forth by instructor Luke Posch, who, like his colleagues down the hall, is also here for the week from Orlando. All of these components that were dealing with are what you would find in a turbine, says Luke. Were manually controlling them and understanding what the schematics look like and how they actually function. If you can understand it, you can be employed for a long time.Rema is sore after scrambling up and down the training tower for two days, laden with the tools of the trade. Day two included rescuing a 150-pound dummy from the platform. Wind turbines are 300-400 feet up in the air, instructor Madsen tells her. You call 911 and theyre going to stand at the bottom looking up at you and waiting for you to bring the casualty to them. You are the first responder. The rest of the week will be spent mostly in the classroom, learning how to safely handle materials in and around a turbine followed by two days of first aid. But first, its time to head outside and get some experience extinguishing a fire.A couple of Martinsville firefighters are waiting near the loading dock just off NCIs machine room. They didnt come far, as their station is just across the street. An array of fire extinguishers is set up on the driveway, not far from a worn metal tub full of water. A narrow pipeline runs along the ground to the tub from a propane tank. One of the firefighters stands ready to ignite the gas with a lit flare attached to one end of a long pole. A small crowd has gathered on the loading dock as the flare hovers over the tub, which instantly erupts into flame.Its time for Rema to practice what she learned in class just an hour earlier. Pull the pin, aim at the fire near the base, squeeze the handle and then sweep, says Dan. Aim closest to you, then sweep slowly until the fire is completely out. Crouching low in her helmet, goggles and gloves, Rema aims at the fire and puts it out with a blast from the extinguisher. The process is repeated several times until everyone is confident shes doing it right. The observers on the loading dock stick around until theyre sure the show is over.Instructor Dan Madsen is bullish on the future of wind energy and the number of associated jobs that come with it. I think were very much focused nowadays on bachelor and associates and masters and those things, he says. And we need to. But society sometimes forgets that we also need people that can work with their hands and maintain things.Brian Pace, head of advanced manufacturing at NCI, has lived in Martinsville all his life. He is anxious to bring jobs and opportunity to a part of the state that is greatly in need of both. Well see how quickly this grows, he says. Ideally, Id like to see us do two trainings a month. Now its how do we get people in here? How do we locate the part of the population that this would appeal to?""There are colleges and universities, and then we have this, Dan says, spreading his arms wide to virtually encompass New College Institute. It gives a lot of people a second chance. [February 24, 2021] Andreas Dombret Named Independent Chairman of DACH Region for Houlihan Lokey to Spearhead Firm's Growth in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland Houlihan Lokey (NYSE:HLI), the global investment bank, announced today that Dr. Andreas Dombret has been appointed Independent Chairman of the firm's activities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (DACH). Dr. Dombret was appointed as a Senior Advisor to the firm last year and will now devote more time to Houlihan Lokey in his expanded role. As Independent Chairman, he will provide senior leadership and strategic counsel to the heads of our Corporate Finance and Financial Restructuring businesses in DACH and spearhead our further expansion in the region. "As we continue to expand our businesses across Europe, we are delighted to have Andreas guiding our growth in the DACH region. His experience and expertise in both policy and investment banking provide him a unique perspective that will give our clients unparalleled insights," commented Scott Adelson, Co-President of Houlihan Lokey. "Having made an immediate impact after joining the firm last year as a Senior Advisor, it became clear to us that Andreas was the ideal person for this new role, to play a critical part in driving our businesses forward in DACH," added Matteo Manfredi, Head of Corporate Finance in Continental Europe for Houlihan Lokey. "Andreas is an eminent figure in the German financial community, and having him on board in a leadership capacity will have a meaningful impact on our business in the region," said Joseph Swanson, Co-Head of Houlihan Lokey's EMEA Restructuring Group. Andreas Dombret commented, "Houlihan Lokey is already the leading U.S. mid-cap corporate finance advisory firm, and has shown its clear intention to match that position in Europe with the continued expansion of the business here. Within DACH, I can see many growth opportunities for both Corporate Finance and Financial Restructuring, and I look forward to helping the firm achieve its strategic goals in the region." The appointment comes as the firm's two businesses in Germany prepare to move into a new office in Frankfurt in April. In DACH, Houlihan Lokey's Corporate Finance team is headed by Managing Directors Tobias Rieg, Martin Bastian, Christian Keller, and Nicolas Zintl. The German Financial Restructuring team is led by Managing Directors Niklas Lerche and Malte Wulfetange. Between 2010 and 2018, Andreas Dombret served as a member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, the German central bank; from 2014 to 2018 he was a member of the Supervisory Board of the European Central Bank (ECB); and from 2012 to 2018, he was a Board Director at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Prior to joining the Bundesbank in 2010, he was Vice Chairman of European Investment Banking at Bank of America. From 2002 to 2005, he served as a Partner at Rothschild & Co. in Frankfurt and London. He joined Rothschild after 10 years with J.P. Morgan, where he was a Managing Director covering the financial institutions sector in Germany and Austria. He began his career at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt in 1987. Since leaving the Bundesbank in 2018, Andreas Dombret has taken on a number of international advisory positions, which are unaffected by this appointment. About Houlihan Lokey Houlihan Lokey (NYSE:HLI) is a global investment bank with expertise in mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, financial restructuring, and valuation. The firm serves corporations, institutions, and governments worldwide with offices in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region. Independent advice and intellectual rigor are hallmarks of the firm's commitment to client success across its advisory services. Houlihan Lokey is the No. 1 M&A advisor for the past six consecutive years in the U.S., the No. 1 global restructuring advisor for the past seven consecutive years, and the No. 1 global M&A fairness opinion advisor over the past 20 years, all based on number of transactions and according to data provided by Refinitiv (formerly Thomson Reuters (News - Alert) ). View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005392/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Gov. Cuomo's fall from grace leaves many asking why he and other governors insisted for months that elderly COVID patients get warehoused in vulnerable nursing homes. When experts were predicting 2.2 million deaths, it could have been a calculated decision to sacrifice the elderly to save everyone else. However, when the experts were swiftly proved wrong, and that the policy should have been reversed, the refusal to admit an error, the economic benefits, and the ability to attack Trump may all have been lures too strong for these governors to resist. Andrew Cuomo is in trouble for his March 25 order forcing COVID-positive patients to be admitted into nursing homes. This order was shocking because the elderly's vulnerability to COVID was well known, and it may have led to many nursing home deaths. Fox News reported that New York removed the order from view in May, but it is still available here. Other governors signed similar orders, but Gov. Cuomo remains the center of attention. People contend that Cuomo was stupid or wanted to kill old folks. I don't think he is that heartless, nor do I believe he's stupid. Instead, I think Cuomo was convinced that the best thing for New York would be to move COVID-positive elderly patients to nursing homes to save other lives. After all, when he issued the order, hospital capacity, including ICU beds and ventilators, were the big issues. Cuomo may have been convinced that the total number of deaths could be lowered by freeing hospital capacity. More nursing home patients might die, but the greater public would not be denied treatment because the hospitals were full. It is a cold-hearted calculus but unavoidable. Older patients would tie up beds for more time, and there was a greater possibility that they would die anyway. People who might be saved with timely treatment would get the scarce ICU bed. In early March, bed scarcity was in nearly every news story about COVID. It was a national crisis. There also were not enough ventilators or ICU rooms. The supply of almost everything was insufficient, and it was all laid at President Trump's feet. Cuomo's infamous order came just ten days after the inception of the infamous "15 Days to Flatten the Curve" announcement. The curve-flattening was specifically to keep hospital admissions low and spread out infections so hospitals would not be stretched over capacity. The "15 Days" event was also three days after candidate Biden had a major campaign event in which he emphasized the critical need for hospital beds: [W]e need to surge our capacity to both prevent and treat the coronavirus and prepare our hospitals to deal with this influx of those needing care as I've been saying for weeks. This means not just getting out testing kits and processing them quickly, but making sure communities have the hospital beds available.... The president should order FEMA to prepare of the capacity with local authorities to establish temporary hospitals with hundreds of beds in short notice.... And a week from now, a month from now, we can need an instant 500 bed hospital to isolate and treat patients in any city in this country. We can do that, but we are not ready yet and the clock is ticking. The president was not moving quickly enough for Cuomo and Biden. The Javits Center hospital did not open until April 2, and the hospital ship Comfort began taking patients on April 7. It turned out, though, that the experts had miscalculated. Neither facility was needed. The hospitals were not overrun. There was no massive influx of patients even though diagnosed cases were increasing. Most importantly, if the hospitals were not overrun, sending COVID patients to nursing homes was unnecessary. It was a miscalculation based on the models. It was also an early sign that the models might be wrong, with tragic consequences. The various governors' orders relied on models predicting millions of people would be infected and 2.2 million would die in the U.S. alone. Had the models been correct, the governors' decisions may have been horrible to contemplate but still correct or at least the best of several bad options. The real mistake was blindly trusting the models and then doubling down by failing to change tactics as the models' failures were becoming known. When the Comfort and the Javits Center were not fully utilized, Cuomo could have changed the nursing home policy. The same was true for the other governors. However, politically, the Democrat governors benefited from the bad predictions. Changing policies would admit that Trump's actions were effective. Additionally, because the elderly are expensive (taking economically from the system after they cease adding), there was an economic benefit to their deaths. The crisis has left us with a legacy of death, poverty, isolation, troubled children, increased depression, and suicide. We have seen that society's worship of "science," especially when coupled with power plays and rabid partisan politics, carries a high price. Image: Andrew Cuomo. Rumble screen grab. A man said he broke in to Sea World and concealed himself in a wild animal enclosure because he wanted to see the seals. Luke Gowman was slapped with an $800 fine in Southport Magistrates Court on Wednesday for jumping the fence at the Gold Coast theme park on February 10. Security guards spotted Gowman lurking around the aquatic park after climbing over the fence at about 9.40pm. Pictured: Luke Gowman, who admitted to breaking in to Sea World on the Gold Coast to see the seals When staff could not find him, sniffer dogs tracked him down in the seal enclosure. Pictured: a seal at Sea World When staff could not find him, sniffer dogs tracked him down in the seal enclosure. Sergeant Nicole Conditsis told the court that Gowman told police he 'wanted to see the animals'. Magistrate Gary Finger acknowledged that no damage was done to the park, but added that fences are installed for a reason. Gowman represented himself in court and pleaded guilty to one count of trespass. Magistrate Gary Finger acknowledged that no damage was done to the park, but added that fences are installed for a reason. Pictured: A seal at the enclosure at Sea World He said he was not drunk or under the influence. Outside court, Gold Coast Bulletin reporters asked Gowman why he visited the park after hours. 'To see the seals,' he replied. When reporters asked if it was worth it, he replied: 'Not really.' Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday listed four priority areas for the international community to address the risks that climate crisis poses to peace and security, including putting a greater focus on prevention through strong, ambitious climate action. "First, we need a greater focus on prevention through strong, ambitious climate action," the UN chief told the Security Council high-level videoconference open debate on climate and security, the Xinhua news agency reported. "We must get the world on track to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and avoid climate catastrophe," said Guterres, adding that "we must create a truly global coalition to commit to net-zero emissions by the middle of the century." On the second priority, the top UN official said that "we need immediate actions to protect countries, communities and people from increasingly frequent and severe climate impacts." "We need a breakthrough on adaptation and resilience, which means dramatically raising the level of investments," he added. "Third, we need to embrace a concept of security that puts people at its center," Guterres said. "The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the devastation that so-called non-traditional security threats can cause, on a global scale," he added. Talking about the last priority area, Guterres said that "we need to deepen partnerships across and beyond the system." "We must leverage and build on the strengths of different stakeholders, including this Council, the Peacebuilding Commission, international financial institutions, regional organisations, civil society, the private sector, academia and others," said the secretary-general. "The Climate Security Mechanism, which brings together the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, the Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme, is a blueprint for such collaboration within the United Nations System," the UN chief added. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson presided over the meeting, representing the first time a British prime minister has chaired a Security Council meeting since John Major in January 1992. A youth climate activist briefed the virtual gathering. Several heads of state and of government attended. China's special representative on affairs Xie Zhenhua delivered a speech. --IANS int/rs (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.) Incorrect dosages of coronavirus vaccine given to two residents of a Brisbane aged-care facility have prompted health authorities to reassure the public that the rollout is proceeding safely as planned. An 88-year-old man and a 94-year-old woman were given an excessive amount of the vaccine at the Holy Spirit Nursing Home at Carseldine in Brisbanes north and the doctor involved has been temporarily stood down. The residents were reportedly given up to four times the standard dose of the vaccine. Credit:File Image/ Bloomberg Nine News is reporting the pair was given four times the recommended dose and the elderly man was admitted to hospital as a precaution. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk called for national cabinet to meet as soon as possible in the wake of the incident. Narcotics Task Force Awarded Federal Grant By West Kentucky Star Staff WESTERN KENTUCKY - On Tuesday, Governor Andy Beshear announced $1.4 million in grants to assist 13 law enforcement agencies across Kentucky, including one in western Kentucky.The Pennyrile Narcotics Task Force was awarded $260,468 to assist with developing leads and gathering information to combat the sale, distribution, and transportation of illegal drugs and narcotics within the Pennyrile Area Development District. The task force also devotes time and money to provide educational programs to churches, schools, civic organizations, and others.Additionally, the group participates with county coalitions and the Kentucky Agency for Substance Abuse Policy to promote anti-drug campaigns and community awareness."Without the JAG grant monies given to the task force, the Kentucky communities that we are responsible for would have to combat crime and drugs with fewer resources and would have to ask state and local governments for more financial help," said Pennyrile Narcotics Task Force Director David Thompson. "With the current situation with COVID, we all know that would not be an option. So we are grateful for the JAG funds that keep us in the business of identifying and prosecuting drug traffickers in our communities. Without it, we would be out of business."The task force is comprised of 11 counties across western Kentucky, including Caldwell, Christian, Crittenden, Lyon, Livingston, Trigg, Henderson, Muhlenberg, Todd, McLean, and Webster.Federal JAG funding is distributed to agencies based on a formula that takes population size and crime statistics into account. The funds can be used to hire additional personnel, purchase equipment, supplies, contractual support, training, technical assistance, and information systems for criminal justice."Kentucky's law enforcement officers, and others across the nation, face extraordinary challenges daily with both strength and resilience, but often times with limited resources. My administration believes it is crucial to provide funding to our state and local government agencies for them to purchase the tools and resources that will not only allow them to protect our communities but ensure their own safety as they stand on the front lines every day," said Gov. Beshear.You can see a full list of grant recipients at the link below.On the Net: Among the more than 2,000 youngsters treated for the coronavirus at Children's National Hospital in the District of Columbia, one newborn was unusual. The baby was very sick, for one. Most infected kids barely show symptoms and even the hospitalized ones tend to have mild cases. But the real surprise came when doctors measured the infant's viral load. It was 51,418 times the median of other pediatric patients. And when they sequenced the virus in the baby recently, they found a variant they hadn't seen before. Roberta DeBiasi, chief of infectious disease for the hospital, knew she couldn't conclude anything from one case. But it set off alarm bells. And as the researchers delved further into the mystery, they found evidence that a variant with a mutation called N679S may be circulating in the Mid-Atlantic region. No one knows whether the infant, who was seen in September and has since recovered, represents achance case, a sign of things to come, or worrisome changes already in motion as new, more transmissible variantsraceacross the Earth. "It could be a complete coincidence," DeBiasi said. "But the association is pretty strong. If you see a patient who has exponentially more virus and it's a completely different variant, it is probably related." Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, said the viral load in the infant's nose "in itself, is shocking and noteworthy." However, he was cautious in speculating that it "could be because of N679S, or simply because it is a [newborn] with an immature immune system, permitting the virus to replicate out of control." As the world heads into a new stage of the pandemic where the virus is changing in significant ways, the United States has been so behind in tracking new variants that it's difficult to understand the current threat, much less predict the next one. The White House announced last week that it will invest an additional $200 million into genomic sequencing to help track new variants - making it possible to analyze 25,000 per week. And some experts argue that some of the best bang for our limited genetic testing buck could come from focusing more on children, who could act as harbingers of more infectious strains because they are generally more resistant to the virus. Until then, findings like the one from Children's National remain single puzzle pieces that may be important in determining the direction of the pandemic - or merely transient scientific curiosities. The question of the new variants' effect on children is especially important the nation's top health authority has declared that it is largely safe to reopen schools even as school systems in countries besieged by the United Kingdom variant have closed. Kids in general do not get sick from the coronavirus the way adults do. The rate of severe illness is low, and about 270 children have died from covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, or an associated illness in a sea of 500,000 U.S. deaths. It is still not known why.It could be something about the biology of youth, some scientists have said, or perhaps a higher likelihood of being exposed to a similar pathogen more recently. There's no evidence that the variant with N679S, or others from the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil, are more dangerous to children. But health officials in the United Kingdom have said they are monitoring an unusual surge in infections, especially among children ages 6 to 9, that is disproportionate to their share of the population. In Italy, officials have been puzzled by a spike in cases in the northern town of Corzano among those in elementary school and even younger. And according to a Feb. 9 report in the medical journal the BMJ, Israel also has experienced "a sharp rise in covid-19 infections among young people, with more than 50,000 children and teens testing positive in January - more than Israel saw in any month during the first and second waves." In the United States, doctors at several major medical centers reported a holiday surge in hospitalizations of children that paralleled what happened in adults, and a January and February spike in cases of MIS-C - a rare but potentially fatal post-viral syndrome associated with covid-19 that occurs four to six weeks after a coronavirus infection. Those increases are in line with what would be expected given the waves of community spread of the virus nationwide. But at Children's National, DeBiasi said the hospital has been surprised to find that more MIS-C patients have needed intensive care-level support than last year. About 40 to 60 percent were in the ICU last year, she said, and now it's closer to 90 percent. Some other institutions, however, reported no change in the severity of cases. Doctors at Boston Children's and UCLA Health said the MIS-C cases have been more numerous because of the surge in community infections, but the course of the illness appears similar to before. A doctor at Intermountain Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake City also reported no change in the severity of cases, but said physicians have noticed that more children with MIS-C have active infections than in the past, when nearly all tested negative for the virus - prompting the group to send samples off for sequencing in recent days. "It's hard to say what is out of the ordinary, because with covid, we're always finding something new," said Ngan Truong, a pediatric cardiologist. "But we've wondered, 'Is this because of new strains? Is virus shedding longer than previous strains?' " Why hospitals in different parts of the country are seeing a divergence in these cases is unclear. DeBiasi said it could be pure happenstance. Perhaps another virus - maybe a cold or flu - circulating in the D.C. area last year resulted in a milder disease that was mistaken for MIS-C, or perhaps there was another regional difference unrelated to the coronavirus. However, the team cautioned in a paper posted on Feb. 10 that the critical location of the newly documented variant in the infant - in the spike protein area that researchers think gives it an advantage in attaching to receptors in bodies - as well as evidence that it is infecting other patients in the region, "underscores the need for increased viral sequencing to monitor variant prevalence and emergence, which may have a direct impact on recommended public health measures and vaccination strategies." - - - As of Feb. 11, more than 3 million children in the United States had tested positive for the virus since the beginning of the pandemic. The biggest surges have occurred since mid-November, when cases increased at a rate of 100,000 to 200,000 each week. But the nation's scant genomic sequencing has focused almost exclusively on adults. Harvard researcher Adrienne Randolph, who is leading an international research effort on children and the coronavirus, said that in the early days of the pandemic, fewer children were infected, so they were not prioritized for sequencing. But now that cases are surging in the youngest Americans, and the virus is evolving, the need to expand sequencing is urgent, she said. "A couple of hospitals saying their cases are more severe in kids doesn't mean nationally this a problem," Randolph said. "But we have to investigate. With new variants, it could be some of these kids were infected with them." Variants being closely tracked from South Africa, Brazil and the United Kingdom have a change in their spike protein that affects how it binds to cells, which scientists fear is making the variants more transmissible orpossibly able to reinfect. Another in California appears to be potentially be more resistant to treatment with monoclonal antibodies. "There are likely other variants of concern we're not aware of right now," said Neville Sanjana, a geneticist at the New York Genome Center and New York University who studies coronavirus mutations. "That's the real worry." Sanjana, whose team was among the first to document the effect of the D614G mutation that is all over the world today, said that as more adults get vaccinated, it becomes even more important to watch how mutations affect children,who will be among the last to be vaccinated, with clinical studies still ongoing. A study in Open Forum Infectious Diseases in June, for example, found that 95 percent of children seen at hospitals in Southern California were infected with virus with the D614G mutation as early as April. At that time, only 60 percent of the state's infected population had strains containing that mutation. "If you're not capturing what's happening in young individuals, that is shortsighted and we wouldn't be able to fully understand how the virus may be different in people of different ages," said Jennifer Dien Bard, director of the virology lab at Children's Hospital Los Angeles and one of the study's co-authors. Another big finding in the paper, which looked at 35 children, is the sheer diversity in the variants infecting them - 97 unique changes from the original virus first identified in Wuhan, China, were sequenced - but no particular variant appeared to correlate with disease severity. That provided important evidence to researchers that it probably was something about the children, their environment or the way they were infected that determined who got very sick and who had a milder case. DeBiasi's Children's National study involved 76 patients, 27 of whom had their full genomes analyzed. The researchers found evidence similar to the Southern California study that most variants did not seem to affect the severity of disease. Most notably, they found five children with identical viral genomic profiles - but the course of their illnesses looked very different. And on the flip side, the hospital saw two children with similar-seeming MIS-C cases, but each had very different viral genotypes. The newborn with the high viral load was an anomaly. The initial measures of the amount of virus were so unbelievably high that the researchers ran them again on a different type of machine and found similar results. Genomic sequencing revealed that the virus infecting the child had the D614G spike variant mutation, as well as something they hadn't seen before: the N679S mutation. The finding was so unusual that they reran this analysis on another platform with the same results. DeBiasi and the other authors noted that the particular change appears to be related to how the virus enters the body. William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, speculated that "the spike mutation might have something to do with why that [viral load] was so high, but I think it is premature to draw strong conclusions." Hanage urged caution when interpreting the significance of children with high viral loads: "It is probable that in order for infection in kids to be noticed at all, the viral loads have to be very high." At Children's National, no other patients had the same variant, but when researchers queried an emerging international database used by scientists worldwide to compare genomic sequences, they were surprised to find six other samples in the Maryland and Virginia area, and two more in Delaware. Alan Beggs, a genomics expert at Boston Children's Hospital, said the fact that N679S appears in the database - which represents a tiny portion of the virus circulating in the world - suggests that "this variant is present in some significant percentage of the population in this area." He also said there was evidence that the eight cases had a common genetic background, indicating that all "were originated from one patient initially somewhere in the region." There were four additional cases in Australia and Japan and one in Brazil. Medical information about them was not available in the database. Like other researchers, Beggs emphasized that the paper "does not have evidence this new variant has anything to do with making little babies sicker." However, he added, when so many millions of people have active infections, anything can happen in terms of mutations. "The take-home message is that as a country or society, we are doing poorly in identifying worrisome changes in the evolving virus," he said, "and this is just more evidence that needs to change." Joel Achenbach contributed to this report. Read more: Special report: A mass-casualty event every day: 72 hours in the coronavirus winter Coronavirus mutations add urgency to vaccination effort as experts warn of long battle ahead Oxford-AstraZeneca begins a vaccine trial for children. It's the youngest group yet to be tested. - - - The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach contributed to this report. Then-Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland testifies during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington on Feb. 22, 2021. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images) McConnell Says He Supports Merrick Garlands Nomination for Attorney General Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday indicated he would back Judge Merrick Garlands nomination for attorney general. McConnell told Politico on Tuesday afternoon that he plans to support Garlands nomination. He did not elaborate on his decision to back the nominee, the media outlet reported. McConnells office did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times request to comment about his support for Garlands nomination. This comes after the judge was grilled by lawmakers from the Senate Judiciary Committee during the first day of his two-day confirmation hearing this week. Outside witnesses were invited to testify about Garland for the second day of the hearing. The vote for Garlands nomination is scheduled to take place on March 1. McConnell is the latest senior Republican member to express support for Garlands nomination. Republicans in 2016 blocked Garlands nomination to the Supreme Court to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia 11 months before the election. McConnell famously declined to hold hearings for Garland, setting a precedent. The Republican leader drew outrage in 2019 when he appeared to soften his stance, saying that he would fill the vacancy if one came up. Democrats quickly accused him of being hypocritical, but, a spokesperson for McConnell said at the time the Kentucky senator was consistent with his 2016 comments because he had said that vacancies that occur when the White House and Senate are held by different parties should not be acted upon. He again garnered scrutiny when Republicans pushed ahead with Amy Coney Barretts nomination to the Supreme Court in 2020 despite intense opposition by Democrats. Other Senate Republicans have also signaled support for Garland, including Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas). In his testimony presented on Monday, Garland pledged to serve the rule of law and ensure equal justice under the law, according to his prepared remarks. He also vowed to oversee the prosecution of protesters who breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Senators on the Judiciary Committee questioned Garland over a range of topics including illegal border crossings, gun control, special counsel John Durham, and domestic terrorism. In his exchange with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Garland gave an evasive answer about whether illegal border crossings should continue be treated as a crime. Garland replied that he had not thought about that question. I think the president has made clear that we are a country with borders and with a concern about national security, Garland continued, adding that he is not aware of any proposal to decriminalize but still make it unlawful to enter. I just dont know the answer to that question, I havent thought about it, Garland said. He also told Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah.) that the Justice Department would align its policies on gun restrictions with the White Houses push to control the ownership of firearms. The president is a strong supporter of gun control and has been an advocate all his professional life on this question, Garland told Lee. The role of the Justice Department is to advance the policy program of the administration as long as it is consistent with the law, Garland continued. Where there is room under the law for the presidents policies to be pursued, I think the president is entitled to pursue them. He also attempted to distinguish between the left-extremist attacks on federal property in Portland, Oregon, and the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol. He indicated that he may not think those violent riots, which caused significant property damage, injuries, and deaths over the summer, are included in the definition of domestic terrorism. Let me ask you about assaults on federal property in places other than Washington, DCPortland, for instance, Seattle. Do you regard assaults on federal courthouses or other federal property as acts of domestic extremism, domestic terrorism? Hawley asked Garland. Garland responded, Well, Senator, my own definition, which is about the same as the statutory definition, is the use of violence or threats of violence in attempt to disrupt the democratic processes. So an attack on a courthouse, while in operation, trying to prevent judges from actually deciding cases, that plainly is domestic extremism, domestic terrorism. An attack simply on a government property at night, or any other kind of circumstances, is a clear crime and a serious one, and should be punished. I dont know enough about the facts of the example youre talking about. But thats where I draw the line. One isboth are criminal, but one is a core attack on our democratic institutions, he said. Former Attorney General William Barr has repeatedly condemned the violent attacks against the federal courthouse in Portland. Shielded by the crowds, which make it difficult for law enforcement to detect or reach them, violent opportunists in Portland have attacked the courthouse and federal officers with explosives, lasers, projectiles, and other dangerous devices. In some cases, purported journalists or legal observers have provided cover for the violent offenders; in others, individuals wearing supposed press badges have themselves attacked law enforcement or trespassed on federal property. More than 200 federal officers have been injured in Portland alone, he said last year. In May 2020, Barr characterized the violence instigated and carried out by Antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting as domestic terrorism. Environmental activists in Bosnia are warning that tons of rubbish floating down the Balkan countrys rivers are endangering the local ecosystem and peoples health. The River Drina, located on the border between Bosnia and Serbia, has been covered for weeks with rubbish that has piled up faster than the authorities can clear it out. Weeks of wet winter weather that swelled the Drina and its tributaries pulled plastic bottles, rusty barrels, used tyres, old furniture and other rubbish into the water. Near the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad, islands of rubbish can be seen floating on the emerald-coloured water as they advance towards the dam of the local hydroelectric power plant. Expand Close A machine collects rubbish floating in the Drina in Bosnia (Kemal Softic/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A machine collects rubbish floating in the Drina in Bosnia (Kemal Softic/AP) Activists say the situation is similar for miles up and downstream from Visegrad. This is a problem of huge proportions, warned Dejan Furtula of a local environmental group. I am appealing to all institutions and everyone who can help to join the (clearing) process. Local authorities have been working to remove the waste, but more rubbish is constantly arriving from upstream, carried also by the Drinas tributaries in Serbia and Montenegro. The waste eventually piles up by the Visegrad dam. The 215 mile-long Drina later flows into the Sava River. Mr Furtula said that micro plastics and toxins from the rubbish end up in the food chain, threatening both wildlife and humans. The entire ecosystem is in danger, he said. We all eat fish here. Expand Close Environmental activists in Bosnia said the waste is endangering the local ecosystem and peoples health (Kemal Softic/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Environmental activists in Bosnia said the waste is endangering the local ecosystem and peoples health (Kemal Softic/AP) Waste management is a problem in many Balkans nations, where the economies are struggling and environmental issues often come last, after efforts to step up employment and industry production. Serbia recently faced a similar waste-clogging emergency. The Drina clearing effort in Bosnia received a boost this week from a start-up based in Germany that brought in a rubbish-picking vessel dubbed Collectix. Everwave co-founder Clemens Feigl said shocking images of the rubbish-covered river motivated the company to help. We will try in the next days to get as much waste as possible out of the water, he said. We will be in action for the next 14 days and will give it our everything. In addition to river pollution, many countries in the Western Balkans have other environmental woes. One of the most pressing is the extremely high air pollution affecting a number of cities in the region. Loading Looking down at your laptop or monitor? A few books stacked underneath can easily solve the problem. Get off the couch Who hasnt been tempted to work from the soft office (aka your bed) or the couch? However Smith says this should be strictly limited to 30 minutes or less, and is really only good for pumping out a few quick emails. If you sit there and stay there you are in a very, very dangerous position. ... And your mobile phone Likewise, avoid overdoing it on your phone. Sometimes theyve got notifications which trigger you and then you get sucked into the vortex, says Smith. From a musculoskeletal point of view, if you disconnect your notifications, youre less likely to use your mobile device for all those email sessions. Back to the desk Ergonomist Ted Dohrmann, the managing director at Dohrmann Consulting, says your home office chair should be close to the underneath of your desk. So if you can, adjust the height of your chair. Dohrmann says if seated correctly you shouldnt have to raise your arms like a chicken in order to work, which may result in sore shoulders or a sore neck. For dangling legs, he suggests a footrest or just grabbing a pile of books, or reams of paper - to rest your feet on and take the load off your lower back. And that dodgy chair... Travel blogger and IT worker Anna Sherchand recently woke up one morning and couldnt move her neck. It obviously doesnt happen in one day, it was probably months and months of working with a bad posture and it just affected me really badly, she says. Loading Forced off the road because of COVID-19, Sherchand moved to Melbourne in October, when the choice of office chairs was extremely limited. I ordered a proper working chair but you had to assemble it yourself, and when I tried to do that, it just didnt fit (with the desk), so I had to return it, she says. Shes been using a dining room chair since, with a new office chair now a priority. Dohrmann recommends looking out for two main features in any office chair you should be able to adjust not only its height, but also the backrest to provide lumbar support. Hybrid working Now that some people have returned to the office part-time, does it matter if your two set-ups arent the same? Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video My strong recommendation, and this is what we do with our own team, is we expect them to have two of everything, other than their laptop, says Smith. So if youre going to work from home, even if youre only going to do it two days a week, you need a good chair, you need the same set-up at home as you do at the office, and youre just literally plugging your laptop in. Get up, stand up Loading Whatever you do, keep moving and stretching. Muscles need movement, so you can have the best work station set-up in the world, in your office, or in your house or on a submarine if you want, but humans need movement to be comfortable, and over time actually to avoid injury, says Dohrmann. And those long video calls? Dohrmann suggests keeping this catchy little saying in mind: At the end of the Zoom, leave the room. This photo provided by the Alexandria Adult Detention Center shows Emma Coronel Aispuro. The Justice Department says Emma Coronel Aispuro was arrested at Dulles International Airport on Monday, Feb. 22, 2021 and is expected to appear in federal court in Washington on Tuesday. She is the wife of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin El Chapo Guzman and is accused of helping her husband run his multibillion-dollar cartel and plot his audacious escape from a Mexican prison in 2015. (Alexandria Adult Detention Center via AP) PHOTO:Alexandria Adult Detention Center via AP Wife of El Chapo Arrested on US Drug Charges By The Associated Press WASHINGTON - The wife of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin El Chapo Guzman was arrested in the United States and accused of helping her husband run his multibillion-dollar cartel and plot his audacious escape from a Mexican prison in 2015. Emma Coronel Aispuro, a 31-year-old former beauty queen, was arrested at Dulles International Airport in Virginia on Monday and is expected to appear in federal court in Washington on Tuesday afternoon. She is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico. Her arrest is the latest twist in the bloody, multinational saga involving Guzman, the longtime head of the Sinaloa drug cartel. Guzman, whose two dramatic prison escapes in Mexico fed into a legend that he and his family were all but untouchable, was extradited to the United States in 2017 and is serving life in prison. And now his wife, with whom he has two young daughters, has been charged with helping him run his criminal empire. In a single-count criminal complaint, Coronel was charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana in the U.S. The Justice Department also accused her of helping her husband escape from a Mexican prison in 2015 and participating in the planning of a second prison escape before Guzman was extradited to the U.S. Coronel was moved to the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia late Monday night and is expected to appear by video conference for her initial court appearance on Tuesday. Her attorney Jeffrey Lichtman declined to comment Monday night. As Mexicos most powerful drug lord, Guzman ran a cartel responsible for smuggling mountains of cocaine and other drugs into the United States during his 25-year reign, prosecutors said in recent court papers. They also said his army of sicarios, or hit men, was under orders to kidnap, torture and kill anyone who got in his way. His prison breaks became the stuff of legend and raised serious questions about whether Mexico's justice system was capable of holding him accountable. In one case, he escaped through an entry under the shower in his cell to a milelong (1.6-kilometer-long) lighted tunnel with a motorcycle on rails. The planning for the escape was extensive, prosecutors say, with his wife playing a key role. Court papers charge that Coronel worked with Guzmans sons and a witness, who is now cooperating with the U.S. government, to organize the construction of the underground tunnel that Guzman used to escape from the Altiplano prison to prevent his extradition to the U.S. The plot included purchasing a piece of land near the prison, firearms and an armored truck and smuggling him a GPS watch so they could pinpoint his exact whereabouts so as to construct the tunnel with an entry point accessible to him, the court papers say. Guzman was sentenced to life behind bars in 2019. Coronel, who was a beauty queen in her teens, regularly attended Guzmans trial, even when testimony implicated her in his prison breaks. The two, separated in age by more than 30 years, have been together since at least 2007, and their twin daughters were born in 2011. Her father, Ines Coronel Barreras, was arrested in 2013 with one of his sons and several other men in a warehouse with hundreds of pounds of marijuana across the border from Douglas, Arizona. Months earlier, the U.S. Treasury had announced financial sanctions against her father for his alleged drug trafficking. After Guzman was rearrested following his escape, Coronel lobbied the Mexican government to improve her husbands prison conditions. And after he was convicted in 2019, she moved to launch a clothing line in his name. Mike Vigil, the Drug Enforcement Administrations former chief of international operations, said Coronel has been involved in the drug trade since she was a little girl. She knows the inner workings of the Sinaloa cartel. He said she could be willing to cooperate. She has a huge motivation, and that is her twins, Vigil said. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close Sectigo Website Security and Threat Report Reveals Vulnerabilities, Impact of Breaches, and Spending Trends for SMBs ROSELAND, N.J., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Preventing website attacks isn't always top of mind for small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), despite the critical role security plays in their success. A new study by Sectigo, the "State of Website Security and Threat Report," reveals that 20% of SMBs have experienced a breach in the past year alone, even though nearly three-fourths believe their companies are mitigating risks effectively. The new report details this perception gap, along with methods and frequency of SMB website attacks, the impact of breaches, security technologies in use, and expected website security spending for 2021. In its inaugural State of Website Security and Threat Report, Sectigo surveyed more than 1,100 website security decision makers at SMBs and found that a significant number of businesses do not feel they are vulnerable to online threats, with 48% of respondents indicating that their business is "too small to be the target" of an attack. Perception Battles with Reality Half (50%) of SMBs surveyed have experienced a website breach at some point, with 20% reporting a breach in the last 12 months. Yet nearly half perceive their business as too small to be the target of a cyberattack, and 73% believe they are effectively mitigating risks. More than 40% report a range of attacks targeting their website on a monthly or more frequent basis, with malware injection, data breaches, and brute force login attempts leading the list of attack vectors. The majority of SMBs surveyed don't believe they are vulnerable to online threats unless they have recently experienced an attack. Fifty-eight percent of SMBs who have recently experienced a breach feel their business is "vulnerable" or "very vulnerable," compared to 30% of those who have not recently had a breach considering their business to be "vulnerable" or "very vulnerable." Lost Revenues, Customers, Time, and IP Of the SMB survey respondents who experienced a breach in the past year, only 3% reported "no impact" to their business due to the breach. Twenty-eight percent reported "severe" or "very severe" consequences stemming from a cyberattack-with 60% experiencing a website outage and more than a third incurring revenue loss. Malware scanning and remediation, firewalls, and website backup tools are the most common website security technologies SMBs use to protect their websites. While 94% of SMBs surveyed already use at least one type of security product or service to protect their websites, 37% of those who experienced an attack in the past year concede that they had some form of website security in place at the time-further underscoring the need for better, or additional, website security. Making Security a Priority in 2021 Attack frequency and severity have many SMBs increasing spending. Eighty-one percent of respondents believe cyberattacks will become more sophisticated, and 75% believe attacks will occur more frequently in 2021. More than 72% of respondents say they collect or store sensitive data through their website, and half say that a website outage would have a serious impact on their business. "As SMBs increasingly digitize their operations, their websites become mission-critical for communicating with customers and conducting business," explained Michael Fowler, President of Partners and Channels, Sectigo. "No business is too small a target. Attacks continue to evolve, and hackers are increasingly resourceful, making it critical for SMBs to invest in multi-layered solutions that stay ahead of ever-changing threats." The study found that 60% of SMBs currently spend $500/month or less on website security, with nearly half of all respondents planning to increase website security spending in 2021. The businesses that have not experienced a recent breach plan to make modest increases, while those breached in 2020 expect to boost their spending by nearly 30% in 2021 (from 31% to 40% of their overall website budget). "Companies are advancing their security posture are taking a wise step toward protecting their brand, data, and revenues by warding off website outages, ransomware, and more. While security spending increases are promising for SMBs, businesses must be thinking beyond their SSL certificates. Today's automated, all-in-one web security suites are helping SMBs tackle website monitoring, remediation, performance, and recovery with little effort, ensuring business continuity," noted Jonathan Skinner, Chief Marketing Officer at Sectigo. Survey Methodology The Sectigo State of Website Security and Threat Report is based on a global web-based survey of 1,167 website security-decision makers at companies with fewer than 500 employees. Respondents represent organizations spanning a range of industries, with a primary emphasis on technology, retail, and financial services. The survey was conducted in November 2020. For more information, including overall study findings and key takeaways, download the full report. About Sectigo Sectigo is a global cybersecurity provider of digital identity solutions, including TLS / SSL certificates, DevOps, IoT, and enterprise-grade PKI management, as well as multi-layered web security. As a leading Certificate Authority (CA) with more than 700,000 customers and over 20 years of online trust experience, Sectigo partners with organizations of all sizes to deliver automated public and private PKI solutions to secure web servers and user access, connected devices, and applications. Recognized for its award-winning innovations and best-in-class global customer support, Sectigo has the proven performance needed to secure the digital landscape of today and tomorrow. For more information, visit www.sectigo.com and follow @SectigoHQ. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/778218/Sectigo_Logo.jpg Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. MESSINA, FEB 24 - A ship's rope broke and hit a sailor on board a ferry at Messina Wednesday, killing him instantly. Gaetano Puleo, 61, was a bosun on the Eolo, which plies the Messina Strait. He was employed by the Caronte & Tourist ferry company. The accident took place during docking operations at the Norimberga Dock in the Sicilian city. The broken rope hit the sailor full in the face, eye witnesses said. (ANSA). US President Joe Biden shakes hands with former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack during a campaign event in Newton, Iowa, last year. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo The US Senate has confirmed Tom Vilsack to head the Department of Agriculture, returning the former Iowa governor to the job he held under ex-President Barack Obama. The 100-member Senate approved Vilsack 92-7. He needed a simple majority in the Democratic-controlled chamber to be confirmed. As secretary of the sprawling department, Vilsack will oversee about 100,000 employees responsible for food stamps, crop insurance, land conservation and other missions at a time U.S. farmers are benefiting from high soybean and corn prices but hunger is on the rise throughout America. Vilsack has said the White House wants to tap a pool of funds from the agencys Commodity Credit Corporation to support on-the-farm efforts to fight climate change, a policy priority for new President Joe Biden. The Depression-era program of up to $30 billion in annual funding was tapped by the Trump administration to distribute billions of dollars in aid to cover farmers lost sales due to trade wars, primarily with China. Vilsack must also confront the coronavirus pandemic, which has reduced restaurant demand for farm products and led to long lines at food banks. We have a lot of work to do as we overcome obstacles created by the COVID-19 pandemic, American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said in a statement after the vote. Some slaughterhouses shut temporarily in spring 2020 due to outbreaks of the coronavirus among workers, pushing up meat prices and leading to shortages of certain products. We found that when one or two processing facilities shut down during COVID, it created havoc in the market, Vilsack said during a Senate committee hearing on Feb. 2. We cant have that. Groups like the National Black Farmers Association raised concerns about Vilsacks nomination, saying alleged discriminatory practices continued at USDA under his previous leadership. Vilsack, who was Iowa governor from 1999 to 2007, said at the Feb. 2 hearing that there can be no tolerance for discrimination. NEW YORK A former New York City police officer has surrendered to the FBI and is facing multiple charges after being accused of attacking police officer with a metal flagpole during the U.S. Capitol assault on Jan. 6. Thomas Webster, 54, has been charged with assaulting police officers with a deadly weapon, obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder, knowingly entering a restricted area, disorderly conduct in a restricted area, engaging in physical violence in a restricted area and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, CNN reports. According to the New York Times, Webster served on the unit that provided security for the citys mayor before retiring in 2011. Webster, a Marine, appeared in court Monday, nbcnewyork.com reports. Prosecutors say Webster is seen in video attacking a Capitol police officer with a flagpole during the assault by supporters of Donald Trump who were trying to disrupt Congress confirmation of the results of the presidential election. NBC News reports that prosecutors say Webster called the officer names and went after him like a junkyard dog. A charging document says images show Webster appearing to pin the officer to the ground and trying to remove his gas mask and face shield. Webster is accused of hitting the officer several times with the flagpole, which had a Marine Corps flag attached. A lawyer for Webster says his client was acting in self-defense after the unidentified officer punched him, the Times reports. He went there as an American citizen to protest, an event that was urged on by our former president to protest an issue that Tom felt very strongly about, said the lawyer, James Monroe, according to the Times. Thats protecting the Constitution. Prosecutors say there is no evidence on video that Webster was punched by the officer, CNN reports. A judge has ordered that Webster be detained as he awaits trial. More: Central Pa. cop charged in U.S. Capitol riot ordered to trial but freed from jail as he awaits prosecution 6 U.S. Capitol police officers suspended, dozens under investigation over riot Whos to blame for riot at the U.S. Capitol? Officers point fingers about security issues Fading West Development CEO Charlie Chupp is excited to create a new modular home manufacturing facility. We are excited to expand our vision throughout Colorado and the western United States by creating beautiful, high quality, affordable homes. A new 110,000 square foot home construction factory is being built in the heart of the Arkansas River Valley by Fading West Development, with the vision of providing attainable housing for the workforce market throughout the western United States. The climate-controlled housing production facility is expected to create over 700 homes, townhomes and apartments each year. This new manufacturing plant aims to help address the nationwide housing shortage, while creating more than 100 great jobs in the community. We are excited to expand our vision throughout Colorado and the western United States by creating beautiful, high quality, affordable homes, says Fading West Developments CEO Charlie Chupp. We intend to develop attainable communities throughout the west, and partner with other developers and general contractors looking for smart, cost-effective housing options. The Fading West Building Systems factory will produce modular homes and apartments using Toyotas Production System, commonly called LEAN, to eliminate waste throughout the entire construction value stream. Building in a controlled production environment allows for better quality and lower costs by leveraging semi-automated equipment, skilled production builders and value engineered products. Modular units are built in sections with fully finished interiors and exteriors that are complete and ready to be installed on permanent foundations. Our homes are designed and built just like traditional built homes, but much more cost effectively. Chupp said. The benefits of factory built modular housing is the ability to reduce build times by upwards of 40 percent and lower construction costs by 10-20 percent. All homes are built to international, state and local building codes. Our mission and our passion is to drive down the astronomical cost of home ownership. We want to give more people the opportunity to own their own homes and put down roots in their communities. We work with municipalities, landowners and investors who want to be a part of helping address the affordable housing crisis. We have an incredible opportunity to do something special here in Colorado, Chupp said. Fading West Development has proven that their system works as can be seen by the incredible success of its development, The Farm at Buena Vista, a 21-acre, 218 home pocket-park community in Buena Vista, Colorado. The Fading West Building Systems factory is expected to start production late 2021 and is located in Buena Vista, northwest of the Central Colorado Regional Airport. Fading West Development is looking to work with landowners and developers around the Mountain West who are interested in helping solve their communities housing needs. To schedule an appointment and learn more, email info@fadingwestllc.com or call (719) 398-3080. ### About Fading West Development Fading West Development works to do good in the world by creating high quality, architecturally interesting communities for the workforce homebuyer across the Mountain West. To learn more, visit http://www.fadingwestdevelopment.com or https://www.linkedin.com/company/fading-west-devlopment. This time one week ago, our high temperature in Huntsville was 19 degrees with wind chill values near 0. What a difference a week makes! High pressure has taken over North Alabama, giving us a spectacular Spring-like day across the region. Many spots were able to reach 70 degrees and will likely warm up into the low 70s once again Wednesday. Tomorrow will be a near carbon copy of today, with maybe a few more clouds passing through. A cold front will move through North Alabama Wednesday night. While there is not a whole lot of moisture with this front, a few showers will be possible tomorrow night. Much of Thursday is dry, but temperatures will be back to near 60. The more active pattern takes over Thursday night and Friday as the frontal boundary stalls out nearby and becomes a stationary front. Along this front, several waves of rain are expected to move through the region. Where the exact location of the front ends up will determine how much rain we see. For now, it looks as though areas just to our north across middle Tennessee will see the most significant amounts of rain. Here in North Alabama, widespread swaths of 2 to 4 inches of rain are still possible through Monday. Because the rain is spread out over several days, the threat for flooding is low. However, some rises in creeks and rivers can't be ruled out. Stay with us for updates as we continue to fine tune the wet weekend forecast. Until then, soak up the sunshine while we have it! The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company A civilian has died over the past 24 hours as a result of shelling of the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine by Russia-led forces near Khutir Vilny in Luhansk region, the press center of the Joint Forces Operation reports. "On February 23, the armed forces of the Russian Federation once again cynically violated ceasefire and, in addition to shelling our positions with prohibited weapons, opened fire on Khutir Vilny in Luhansk region. A civilian born in 1947 came under fire from the Russian occupation forces. A mine exploded in his yard, as a result of which a man was seriously injured. Doctors tried to save the man's life for several hours in a row, but, unfortunately, he died of injuries," the JFO press center said on Wednesday morning. The headquarters said that "such audacious and criminal actions of the Russian armed forces once again testify to their interest in further escalation of the conflict in eastern Ukraine and once again confirm the systematic disregard for the agreements reached." Also the headquarters reported that the materials collected in full will be sent to Severodonetsk SBU for the decision on entering the data into the Unified Register of Pretrial Investigations on signs of the crime provided by part 2 Article 258 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (terrorist act). Syracuse, NY -- An Onondaga County judge on Tuesday ruled out any chance that 18-year-old Jabari Boykins could be bailed out of jail after a prosecutor revealed a string of pending felony charges against him. Boykins has been jailed since Feb. 12 after being on the lam for days following a disturbing Facebook Live video in which hes accused of attacking a crying woman as she begged him to let her go. RELATED: Syracuse man who attacked woman in live Facebook video arrested, police say Since his 18th birthday last April, Boykins has been arrested four separate times, including three times on charges he disobeyed a judges orders, the prosecutor said in court. Hed been held until Tuesday on bail of $250,000 cash, $500,000 bond or $1 million partially secured bond (a $100,000 payment to the court). But prosecutor Ariana Pastorello said that wasnt enough: she asked Judge Matthew Doran to revoke Boykins bail entirely. Pastorello noted that Boykins felony criminal contempt charge from the Facebook Live incident was only the most recent of his troubles. Hes accused of repeatedly ignoring a judges order to stay away from the woman in the video. (Boykins also faces misdemeanors for the actual beating.) In fact, Boykins had already been charged with ignoring orders to stay away from the victim twice in the past, Pastorello said. The first charge came on Nov. 27, 2020 after Boykins was found in the presence of the victim despite being ordered to stay away, the prosecutor said. Boykins was released on a misdemeanor. On Jan. 12, he was charged again with violating the judges order to stay away from the victim. This time, it was a felony. But Boykins bailed out of jail before the Facebook Live video, which was recorded on Feb. 9. He was located and arrested three days later. In addition to his three criminal contempt charges, Boykins also faces an indictment from April 2020 accusing him of tampering with physical evidence. Details of that case were not immediately available. All of that happened after Boykins turned 18 years old. Records show that he was involved in a domestic violence case in March 2020, which was referred to domestic violence court. No further information about that case is public. Boykins lawyer, Lourdes Rosario, noted to the court that her client was 18 years old and had diagnosed challenges that required special schooling. Many of those services had been hampered by the pandemic due to virtual school, she said. But Boykins had been nothing but cooperative with her, Rosario added. She argued that his interventions needed to be rehabilitative, not punitive. The defense lawyer also added that the incidents had apparently taken place at Boykins residence and there had been consensual contact between Boykins and the victim, despite the judges orders to Boykins to stay away. While Pastorello, the prosecutor, had asked for bail to be revoked, Rosario asked the judge to lower Boykins bail. Doran ruled that he would revoke Boykins bail, but noted that the domestic violence law required him to hold a hearing to make such a ruling permanent. That hearing is scheduled for later this week. In a separate case, Boykins was in the news in 2017 after an encounter with a police officer at his school. Officer Vallon Smith broke Boykins arm when he threw him to the ground while arresting him for trespassing and resisting arrest at Nottingham High School, according to Boykins mother. At the time, Boykins was 14 years old. The city paid Boykins $200,000 in that case to settle a police brutality lawsuit. Staff writer Douglass Dowty can be reached at ddowty@syracuse.com or 315-470-6070. Wednesday: Drive (2011) Sony Movies, 9pm - Driver (Ryan Gosling) performs death-defying stunts in big-budget films but when he's not on a set, he works as a mechanic for his good friend Shannon (Bryan Cranston) - and also performs illegal jobs, which invariably involve high-speed getaways from crime scenes. When one heist goes wrong, Driver is marked for death at the hands of hoodlums Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and Nino (Ron Perlman). There are romantic complications when Driver falls for pretty neighbour Irene (Carey Mulligan), whose husband Standard Gabriel (Oscar Isaac) has just been released from prison. Director Nicolas Winding Refn hits the accelerator in the opening scenes and barely touches the brakes as the plot skids with sickening inevitability towards its bloody resolution. Thursday Educating Rita (1983) BBC4, 9pm Bored Liverpool hairdresser Rita (Julie Walters) enrols in an Open University English course. Her tutor is Frank (Michael Caine), a hard-drinking poet who is initially sceptical, but comes to see his new pupil's frank opinions and natural intelligence as a breath of fresh air. She's slightly in awe of him, but as she finds her feet and starts mixing with other pupils, the dynamics of their relationship change. Although Willie Russell's play, which was written as a two-hander, has been opened out for the screen, the film ultimately depends on the relationship between Frank and Rita. Fortunately, Walters and Caine, who were both deservedly nominated for Oscars, are perfect in their roles, making the growing friendship completely believable. The result is a smart, funny and very touching comedy drama, filmed entirely in Dublin, in particular Trinity College. Friday Empire of the Sun (1987) BBC2, 11.20pm This lavish adaptation of JG Ballard's autobiographical novel is one of Steven Spielberg's most underrated films. Long before anybody thought he'd make a suitable Batman, a 13-year-old Christian Bale took the role of Jim, a young English boy in war-torn Shanghai. His life is turned upside down when the Japanese take over and he becomes separated from his parents. He's eventually captured and forced to survive the terrors of internment alone. The previously spoilt young lad learns a few harsh life lessons, but displays a remarkable determination to survive which rubs off on those around him. The top-drawer cast includes John Malkovich, Nigel Havers, Miranda Richardson, Leslie Phillips and Burt Kwouk, while John Williams, as usual, excels with his stirring soundtrack. Saturday Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut (1979) BBC2, 11.00pm Director Francis Ford Coppola added 30 extra minutes to his Vietnam war epic, and now there's a chance to see it in all its glory. Martin Sheen plays Captain Willard, an assassin assigned to find and kill the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who is believed to have descended into insanity. Winner of two Oscars, including Best Cinematography, and two Baftas, it has gone on to influence countless movies, from Tropic Thunder and Avatar, to the more recent Ad Astra. Dennis Hopper, Harrison Ford and Laurence Fishburne also star, while Robert Duvall has a memorable turn as the surf-obsessed Colonel Kilgore. Sunday Sorry Angel (2018) BBC4, 10.00pm Love moves in mysterious ways in writer-director Christophe Honore's 1990s-set gay romance. HIV-positive writer Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps) has resigned himself to the idea that he will never forge a meaningful connection with another man. He puts up emotional defences as protection until he wanders into a cinema and catches a glimpse of the much younger Arthur (Vincent Lacoste) in the dark. Unlike Jacques, Arthur is at the beginning of his journey of self-discovery as a gay man and he is keen to explore every facet of his identity away from the close-knit small town where he grew up. The two strangers enjoy each other's company and agree to meet again. The men's feelings intensify but Jacques has commitments to his dying ex-lover Marco (Thomas Gonzalez). The two major parties have doubled their combined weekly West Australian election ad spend on Facebook as early voting options started on Monday. Premier Mark McGowan and Opposition Leader Zak Kirkup said their parties would not stop buying advertising on the social media giant, despite both criticising it last week for shutting down news content in Australia. The federal government pulled its own ads from the site after the move. Premier Mark McGowan and Opposition Leader Zak Kirkup have ruled out scrapping political Facebook advertising in the middle of the election. Credit:Peter de Kruijff WA Labor was the biggest advertiser from February 13 to 19, nearly tripling its weekly spend from $11,928 to $32,825. The party directed most of its social media spend through Mr McGowans own Facebook page, pouring in $7169. Press Release February 24, 2021 Villar lauds 3 Pinoy space engineers in the 2nd nanosatellite launched to the ISS Senator Cynthia A. Villar wants the Senate to recognize the three Filiipino space engineers for developing Maya-2 CubeSat, the country's 2nd nanosatellite successfully launched to the International Space Station (ISS) last Feb. 21. In filing Senate Resolution 657, also introduced by Sen. Nancy Binay, Villar said the three engineersIzrael Zenar C. Bautista, Mark Angelo C. Puno and Marloun P. Sejera, have brought pride to the country for the satellite launched aboard the cargo spacecraft Cygnus "NG 15." Villar said the remarkable achievements of the three Filipino engineers are not just in line with the policies and goals of the Philippine Space Act. It was also viewed as a "welcome good news" bringing genuine inspiration to the Filipinos amid the backdrop of the prolonged Covid-19 pandemic in the country. "Their work on the development of Maya-2 CubeSat launched into space constitutes a valuable contribution to the country's science and technology, particularly in the area of space science," noted Villar. And for this, Villar said the three, who are currently pursuing their respective doctorate degrees in Space Engineering at the Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan, should be given commendation. She related that the Philippine Senate has in numerous occasions paid tribute to exemplary Filipinos for their outstanding contribution to the country. Furthermore, the senator said the 1987 Constitution recognizes that science and technology are essential for national development and progress. Due to this, the State shall give priority to research and development, invention, innovation and their utilization, and to the science and technology education, training and services. Villar said the Maya-2 CubeSat, while being the second Philippine nanosatellite launched, is actually considered as the country's 4th satellite orbiting into space. The Philippines launched Diwata 1 microsatellite on March 23, 2016; Diwata 2 microsatellite on Oct. 29, 2018 and Maya-1 nanosatellite on June 29,2018. The Maya-2 uses commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components to verify proper function in space and the information gathered form the basis for the usage of these COTS components for future space missions. It also carries a store-and-forward payload that can be used to gather data from ground sensors for more practical applications like for weather and infectious disease analysis. The Maya-2 CubeSat was launched to the ISS along with GuaranSat- CubeSat of Paraguay and Tsuru CubSat of Japan under the BIRDS-4 Project or the Fourth Leg of the Joint Global Multi-Nation Birds Satellite Project, initiated by the Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan. The spacecraft Cygnus "NG-15", carrying the Maya-2 CubeSat, is Northrop Gumman's 15rh contracted cargo resupply mission for NSA to the ISS and tasked to deliver 8,000 pounds of science and research, crew supplies, and vehicle hardware to the orbital laboratory and its crew. It was propelled through the launcher Grumman Antaresr rocket, lifted off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, Pad 0A at the Wallops Flight Facility of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Virginia, USA. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. "The Retreat & Recovery at Ramapo Valley arrives at a critical time for our state," said Robert C. Garrett, CEO of Hackensack Meridian Health . "We know that more people are struggling with mental health issues and addiction. In fact, it's a pandemic within the COVID-19 pandemic and we are here to help.'' The first phase of The Retreat & Recovery at Ramapo Valley, which is now open, focuses on outpatient services on the 40-acre campus. A 48-bed inpatient facility and detox services are scheduled to open in 2022 to provide a full array of behavioral health care services, to be followed by an expansion to 90 beds in Phase 2 of the project a few years later. "Our care model focuses on the integration of traditional therapy, evidence-based practice and integrative medicine to provide a modern, comprehensive approach to individualized care," said Donald J. Parker, president of Hackensack Meridian Carrier Clinic and behavioral health services for the network. "The Retreat & Recovery at Ramapo Valley is proud to offer co-occurring services in addition to medicated assisted treatment under the guidance of our medical director and licensed professionals." Hackensack Meridian Health is committed to transforming behavioral health care by expanding access to treatment, providing more coordinated care and innovating treatment. Through the network's merger with Carrier Clinic in 2019, New Jersey's first behavioral health urgent care center was opened in Neptune to give patients an option besides emergency care for behavioral health treatment. Hackensack Meridian Health is working to dramatically improve behavioral health care because: One in five adults experiences a mental health issue in the U.S. An estimated 50 percent of patients today who are seen in primary care offices, urgent care settings and emergency departments have a behavioral health need. Among those conditions, depression is the leading cause of disability in the United States among those 18 to 44 years old. among those 18 to 44 years old. 60 percent of people with mental health issues did not receive care in the prior year. A Gallup poll published in December found that Americans' self-reported mental health is at the lowest point it has been in 20 years. In addition to the human toll, the impact of substance abuse and mental health diagnoses dramatically drives up health care costs. Depression ranks among the costliest illnesses in the U.S. and globally. The U.S. loses nearly $200 billion annually in lost productivity due to mental illness. "We are committed to providing high-quality and accessible behavioral health care and we do not believe people should have to leave New Jersey to receive these vital services,'' Mr. Garrett said. Individuals can enroll in outpatient programming at The Retreat & Recovery at Ramapo Valley by calling 833-734-0171. The Retreat & Recovery at Ramapo Valley also welcomes referrals from other providers, hospitals, sober living facilities, and any other entities that would like to refer to its network of care. "At the Retreat & Recovery at Ramapo Valley, we understand the complexity and the pervasive nature of addiction," Parker added. "That's why we're here to support the individual seeking recovery from active substance use as well as their families. Our family programming is offered once per month, in addition to individual family sessions scheduled on an as-needed basis when clinically appropriate." ABOUT HACKENSACK MERIDIAN HEALTH Hackensack Meridian Health is a leading not-for-profit health care organization that is the largest, most comprehensive, and truly integrated health care network in New Jersey, offering a complete range of medical services, innovative research, and life-enhancing care. Hackensack Meridian Health comprises 17 hospitals from Bergen to Ocean counties, which includes three academic medical centers Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack, Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune, JFK Medical Center in Edison; two children's hospitals - Joseph M. Sanzari Children's Hospital in Hackensack, K. Hovnanian Children's Hospital in Neptune; nine community hospitals Bayshore Medical Center in Holmdel, Mountainside Medical Center in Montclair, Ocean Medical Center in Brick, Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, Pascack Valley Medical Center in Westwood, Raritan Bay Medical Center in Old Bridge, Raritan Bay Medical Center in Perth Amboy, Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank, and Southern Ocean Medical Center in Manahawkin; a behavioral health hospital Carrier Clinic in Belle Mead; and two rehabilitation hospitals - JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison and Shore Rehabilitation Institute in Brick. Additionally, the network has more than 500 patient care locations throughout the state which include ambulatory care centers, surgery centers, home health services, long-term care and assisted living communities, ambulance services, lifesaving air medical transportation, fitness and wellness centers, rehabilitation centers, urgent care centers and physician practice locations. Hackensack Meridian Health has more than 36,000 team members, and over 7,000 physicians and is a distinguished leader in health care philanthropy, committed to the health and well-being of the communities it serves. The network's notable distinctions include having four hospitals among the top in New Jersey by U.S. News and World Report. Other honors include consistently achieving Magnet recognition for nursing excellence from the American Nurses Credentialing Center and being named to Becker's Healthcare's "150 Top Places to Work in Healthcare/2019" list. The Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine opened in 2018, the first private medical school in New Jersey in more than 50 years, welcomed its third class of students in 2020 to its On3 campus in Nutley and Clifton. Additionally, the network partnered with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to find more cures for cancer faster while ensuring that patients have access to the highest quality, most individualized cancer care when and where they need it. Hackensack Meridian Health is a member of AllSpire Health Partners, an interstate consortium of leading health systems, to focus on the sharing of best practices in clinical care and achieving efficiencies. For additional information, please visit www.HackensackMeridianHealth.org. SOURCE Hackensack Meridian Health Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 THE New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Malachy Browne is set to inspire young journalism students at the University of Limerick via a webinar this Wednesday. The Broadford native who is a Senior Producer in Visual Investigations at the New York Times a unit that he co-founded in 2017 - will link in with journalism students and campus staff from his base in the Big Apple. Mr Browne won the highest accolade in journalism the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for the sometimes risky work, that he and his team carried out in proving for the first time that Russia had bombed Syrian hospitals and civilians. And his team has recently published a series of reports on the riot at the US Capitol. Mr Browne said: Our work combines traditional reporting with digital sleuthing and the forensic analysis of videos and images to find truth, hold power to account and to deconstruct significant news events. In his UL webinar entitled: Visual Investigations: Innovation in Truth Telling, Mr Browne is to give an insight into the workings of their team which comprises open source reporters, story producers, video editors and animators, along with copy editors and audience development editors. Mr Browne has also led investigations into the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and other black citizens; the Las Vegas mass shooting, chemical attacks in Syria and extra-judicial military killings in Nigeria. His team was first to name the Saudi officials who murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And it was also the first team to reveal how Iran's military shot down a passenger plane in Tehran. UL Senior Lecturer in Journalism Mary Dundon who will moderate the webinar said: We are delighted to have such a distinguished journalist address our students. Mr Brownes work has been cited in murder trials, congressional hearings and UN Security Council meetings. It has also triggered government inquiries and policing reforms, and has led to the suspension of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. Mr Brownes work has also been recognised with two News and Documentary Emmy Awards; A George Polk award; three Overseas Press Club of America Awards and Investigative Reporters and Editors Award. Before joining the New York Times, Mr Browne worked for two social media start- ups, Storyful and Reported.ly, and with Village Magazine in Dublin. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. An 18-year-old has died after a shooting outside of a Pittsburgh bar by a man authorities say had been kicked out of the establishment earlier that night. Ahmar Tuli was rushed to the hospital after he was shot in the head Sunday night and later died from his injuries, WPXI is reporting. According to reports, Tuli was the son of the owner of Prettis Pitt bar on Penn Avenue in Pittsburghs Strip District, where he worked. Police have issued an arrest warrant for the suspect, 45-year-old Mark McClendon, who also goes by Howard Hawkins, reports indicate. According to reports, security at the bar asked McClendon to leave after he got into an argument. He came back and shot Tuli, who was outside of the bar, reports state. I broke down in tears on the radio, and I cant stop the tears from coming because to know Mir, even in passing, he definitely was a really sweet kid, Portia Foxx, a DJ at WAMO who would broadcast weekly from Prettis Pitt, told WPXI. Reports indicate Tuli was a recent graduate of North Hills High School Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. For full access, please log in, register your subscription or subscribe. Try for 99 a month for two months, cancel or pause anytime. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Cocaine worth an estimated 1.6 million has been seized by authorities at Belfast Port. Two men have been arrested as a result of the find. 20 kilos of the drug was discovered hidden inside an empty fuel tank which was being transported in a van arriving in Belfast after travelling on a ferry from Birkenhead on Monday. A 39-year-old man from Wolverhampton was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to supply controlled drugs. He is currently being questioned by NCA investigators. In Wolverhampton, a 46-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of the same offence. The cocaine haul was uncovered as part of an operation by the National Crime Agency (NCA), incorporating Belfast Harbour Police, the PSNI, and the Border Force. The NCA said officers had to bring in specialist equipment to recover the drugs in an operation which lasted for several hours. Read More NCA branch commander Adam Warnock said: This was a significant seizure of cocaine, one of the biggest to be made by law enforcement in Northern Ireland in recent years. The loss of the profit that would have been made from it will be felt by the criminal groups involved in drug supply in the province. Those groups are also involved in exploitation and violence in our communities, so taking away these drugs will prevent them from reinvesting in further criminal activity. Working with our partners across law enforcement we are determined to do all we can to disrupt and dismantle organised crime networks and protect the public. Detective Chief Superintendent John McVea, from the PSNI, said: We are delighted with the success of our Law Enforcement colleagues. More importantly we are pleased with the positive impact this will have for individuals and communities within Northern Ireland in terms of disrupting the distribution and supply of Class A drugs and bringing those harmful offenders to justice. Anything we can do to support a collective effort across a range of partners, as was seen in yesterdays operation, is always welcomed, as well as the fact that cocaine with an estimated street value of over 1.6 million has been taken out of the control of criminals. In a video posted online last weekend, workers were treated to the nauseating spectacle of Coles CEO Steven Cain and Chief Operations Officer Matt Swindells congratulating one another on the companys recently announced half-year profits of more than $500 million, and hailing their progress in a far-reaching restructure. The conversation was conducted in the corporate jargon that is favoured by the top levels of company management. In the course of little over four minutes, the word team was used on almost too many occasions to count. In the peculiar language of business speak, employees are referred to as team members. Cain and Swindells (Screenshot, Coles communications video) Both executives insisted that after customers, their team members were Coles most important stakeholder. Cain explained that management wanted team members to submit their ideas on how we can make this business better. Swindells added that they could participate in team member circles, as a way of channelling those ideas back to the centre. Cain was pleased to report that morale was high among these team members. Of course, the nice thing is that team engagement is very good, he said. This will all be news to the 350 workers at the companys Smeaton Grange warehouse in southwestern Sydney. Their engagement with the company has involved being locked out without pay for more than three months, as Coles seeks to permanently close the warehouse, destroy their jobs, and force them to accept the lowest redundancy and wage provisions that it can get away with. Cains assessment may also be a surprise to the 1,700 or more workers, who are next in line for the scrapheap, as Coles seeks to shutter four other warehouses across the country. Workers will likely also have noted the sharp contrast between Swindells' upbeat and cheery tone, and his demeanour in other recent screen appearances. After the Smeaton Grange workers rejected a sell-out agreement in an official ballot on February 2, Swindells appeared in a video informing them that the retribution for defying company demands would be an indefinite extension of the lockout. Swindells furiously condemned workers who had called for a no vote, describing them as deeply unhelpful and enormously irresponsible. He denounced extremist anti-union socialists, i.e., the WSWS and the Socialist Equality Party, for campaigning against the sell-out and for seeking to develop a wider agenda of taking on big business and the banks. In a follow-up video, Swindells again hectored workers opposed to the deal, and told employees that they would not receive a wage until they ratified the sell-out. That Swindells and Cain were able to tout very good team engagement, given this recent record, is the product of two factors. Firstly, the top levels of management are part of a corporate and financial elite that is completely indifferent to the social hardships and crises that its insatiable drive for profit creates for workers. The Coles managers inhabit a different world to their team members. According to Coles 2020 annual report, Swindells received remuneration totalling more than $2.3 million last financial year, Cain pocketed almost $7 million. Secondly, Coles management is able to gloat, engage in unseemly self-congratulations and declare that the restructuring will proceed, because of the role being played by the United Workers Union (UWU). At Smeaton Grange, the UWU has isolated the workers, refused to organise actions at any other Coles facilities and rejected calls that it provide strike pay. The union is trying to force workers to accept a sell-out deal that would give the company everything that it wants. This has been publicly acknowledged by Swindells, who hailed the UWU and defended it from the exposures of the WSWS, the same time he was denouncing workers in his February 10 video. The video of Cain and Swindells showed concretely what the UWU has done for Coles. By suppressing any struggle against the restructure, the union has ensured that the company has had one of its best performances in recent years. Coles net profit, for the half-year that ended in December, was $560 million, up 12.1 percent. Shareholder dividends increased by 10 percent. Cain and Swindells pointed to two interrelated factors in Coles increased profitability: the COVID-19 pandemic, and the implementation of the companys sweeping restructure, announced in 2018. The coronavirus crisis drove an increase of sales by 8.1 percent. Like every other aspect of Coles activities over the past year, this was completely dependent on the UWU. The union supported the designation of Coles employees as essential workers, which has allowed the companys operations to proceed unhindered throughout the pandemic. According to workers at one of Coles Melbourne warehouses, for instance, there was a substantial COVID-19 outbreak at the facility infecting up to 30 workers last August. Those struck by the illness and their close contacts were placed into isolation, but the warehouse continued running without pause. A worker told the WSWS: Those left behind had to do 12-hour shifts for six days a week, and that management, without opposition from the union, brought in large numbers of casuals from a labour hire firm. Coles also used panic buying as the pretext for the establishment of pop-up warehouses to cope with increased demand. According to workers, they are primarily staffed by low-paid casuals and the union has ignored calls from workers for a struggle against their operations, which are clearly aimed at driving down wages and conditions throughout the sector. When the Smeaton Grange workers were locked out, the work done there was immediately transferred to the pop-up sheds. In other words, Coles, with the assistance of the union, has exploited the pandemic to intensify its restructure. Dubbed the Second Century strategy, this involves slashing costs by a billion dollars between 2018 and 2023. The centrepiece is the closure of Smeaton Grange, the Eastern Creek National Distribution Centre in western Sydney, the Coles warehouse in the regional New South Wales town of Goulburn, and the Heathwood and Forest Lake facilities in Brisbane. They are all set to be replaced by two automated warehouses, one in Brisbane and the other in Sydney, that will employ far fewer workers. The closures are to be enforced by the end of 2023, with the new facilities operational in 2024. Coles is seeking to dramatically reduce its costs as part of an ongoing war for market dominance with its chief rival Woolworths. In 2018, Coles was demerged from its parent company Wesfarmers, on the explicit basis that its operations would need to be overhauled to drive up returns for its biggest shareholders, which now include BlackRock and Vanguard Group, two of the largest US investment firms. The Coles overhaul has the character of a race with Woolworths to be first to reap the benefits of warehousing developments in automation. Woolworths is carrying out an almost identical restructure, over the same time scale, aimed at shuttering four facilities. At the same time, both companies are seeking to shore up their effective duopoly against third players, such as Aldi. Cain warned that Coles would experience headwinds as a result of a decline in high COVID-19 related buying. It was essential, he stressed, for Second Century to proceed at pace. In comments to the Australian Financial Review, the CEO predicted that $250 million of the savings would be made in 2021. This is a warning to warehouse workers across the country. Coles is clearly planning a rapid closure of Smeaton Grange that would be followed swiftly by the shuttering of the other warehouses and mass job destruction. The stakes demonstrate the crucial importance of the struggle at Smeaton Grange. This fight must develop into a broader movement of workers throughout Coles, Woolworths and the warehousing sector as a whole. That requires a complete break with the UWU, the establishment of independent rank-and-file committees controlled by workers themselves, and plans for coordinated industrial and political action across different warehouses. This is a political fight against Coles, the government, Labor, the unions, and the Fair Work laws they use to prevent any collective action. It requires a socialist program, aimed at placing Coles and Woolworths under public ownership and democratic workers control, so they are operated to meet the needs of workers and of society, not the profit demands of a tiny corporate elite. There is no evidence of protection, and increases in homicide for States where stand your ground was enacted. Credit: Shutterstock Stand Your Ground laws, designed to protect individuals who actively defend themselves from crime, have not improved public safety across the United States, according to a new study in the American Journal of Public Health. In some states, notably Florida, such laws have led to increases in violent crime and homicidesand evidence suggests the application of legal protections under these laws may intensify racial inequities in criminal justice. The Oxford-led research team, which includes the University of Pennsylvania and University of Toronto, conducted the most comprehensive review of the impacts of laws, which have been adopted since 2005, expanding civilian rights to use deadly force in self-defense without first attempting to retreat. Senior study author Dr. David Humphreys, from Oxford's Department of Social Policy and Intervention, says, "Lawmakers continue to enact these laws across the U.S., often with the justification that they have a beneficial impact on crime and public safety. Our study finds no evidence to support these claims. "The accumulated evidence is remarkably consistent and suggests that these laws are both harmful and inequitable. These findings should act as an alarm bell for states thinking of enacting these laws." The team examined evidence that 25 studies in the U.S. have described the impacts of such laws and other expansions to self-defense laws on violence, crime, and firearm use. And an additional seven studies looked at the outcomes of self-defense cases under Florida's 'stand your ground' law. This evidence showed that expanding the right to use deadly force has not reduced crime. In some states, including Florida, violence has increased. Studies based in Florida also suggest that there is racial bias in the legal rulings on self-defense claims. Cases where white citizens were injured were less likely to considered justifiable than cases where black or brown citizens were killed or injured. Cases involving white victims were even less likely to be ruled justifiable when defendants were from racial minorities. Lead author Dr. Alexa Yakubovich, of Unity Health Toronto and the University of Toronto, says, "It is critical that policy and lawmakers consider the scientific evidence on the potential impacts to the health and safety of all and especially to social justice. "We need more research on how these laws may have impacted people differently in terms of violence and criminal justice outcomes by race and gender. However, the available evidence suggests that the race of victims in self-defense cases has impacted how these legal protections are applied." University of Pennsylvania's Professor Douglas Wiebe, a study co-author, comments, "This comprehensive review of the research on stand your ground laws, locates multiple studies finding no evidence of protection, and increases in homicide for states where 'stand your ground' was enacted. These findings are timely and need to be understood by the legislatures that, as we speak, are considering a 'stand your ground' law for their state." The paper, "Effects of Laws Expanding Civilian Rights to Use Deadly Force in Self-Defense on Violence and Crime: A Systematic Review," is published in the journal, American Journal of Public Health. Explore further State gun laws may help curb violence across state lines More information: Alexa R. Yakubovich et al. Effects of Laws Expanding Civilian Rights to Use Deadly Force in Self-Defense on Violence and Crime: A Systematic Review, American Journal of Public Health (2021). Journal information: American Journal of Public Health Alexa R. Yakubovich et al. Effects of Laws Expanding Civilian Rights to Use Deadly Force in Self-Defense on Violence and Crime: A Systematic Review,(2021). DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2020.306101 Police officers shown on body camera video holding Daniel Prude down naked and handcuffed on a city street last winter until he stopped breathing will not face criminal charges, according to a grand jury decision announced Tuesday. The 41-year-old Black mans death last March sparked nightly protests in Rochester, New York, after the video was released nearly six months later, with demonstrators demanding a reckoning for police and city officials. State Attorney General Letitia James, whose office took over the prosecution and impaneled a grand jury, said the criminal justice system is badly in need of reform. While I know that the Prude family, the Rochester community, and communities across the country will rightfully be devastated and disappointed, we have to respect this decision, James said in a prepared release. Serious reform is needed, not only at the Rochester Police Department, but to our criminal justice system as a whole. Lawyers for the seven police officers suspended over Prudes death have said the officers were strictly following their training that night, employing a restraining technique known as segmenting. They claimed Prudes use of PCP, which caused irrational behavior, was the root cause of his death. The video made public on Sept. 4 shows Prude handcuffed and naked with a spit hood over his head as an officer pushes his face against the ground, while another officer presses a knee to his back. The officers held him down for about two minutes until he stopped breathing. He was taken off life support a week later. The county medical examiner listed the manner of death as homicide caused by complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint and cited PCP as a contributing factor. Prudes family filed a federal lawsuit alleging the police department sought to cover up the true nature of his death. Officers Troy Taladay, Paul Ricotta, Francisco Santiago, Andrew Specksgoor, Josiah Harris and Mark Vaughn, along with Sgt. Michael Magri, were suspended after Prudes death became public. Democratic Mayor Lovely Warren fired police chief LaRon Singletary shortly after the videos release, while rejecting calls from demonstrators that she resign. Singletary has said in legal papers that Warren told him to lie to support her assertion that she hadnt learned of Prudes death until months later, and fired him for his refusal to do so. A city spokesperson said his version of events confirms Warren never saw the video until August. Warren announced a run for a third term in January and pleaded not guilty in October to an unrelated indictment alleging she broke campaign finance rules and committed fraud. The citys public integrity office found no ethical lapses by the mayor in a narrow review of Prudes death. The city halted its investigation into Prudes death when James office began its own investigation in April. Under New York law, deaths of unarmed people in police custody are typically turned over to the attorney generals office, rather than handled by local officials. ADVERTISEMENT The Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, Tuesday in Abuja gave kudos to what he characterised as Nigerias rising profile in the fight against corruption and which he said was now earning the country international recognition and commendation. These commendations have not only translated into appreciation by the international community, but it has also led to establishing their (international community) faith in what we are doing as a nation, said Mr Malami, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, while meeting with officials of the Centre for Fiscal Transparency and Integrity Watch in his office. Nigeria has succeeded in establishing a culture, institutions as well as laws and legislations associated with the fight against corruption and has also succeeded in putting in place a conducive working environment intended and targeted at institutionalizing the fight against corruption, the countrys chief law officer remarked. While most countries are battling unsuccessfully to retrieve looted assets from their political elites, a delighted Mr Malami said it was the goodwill that the country had garnered, which helped Nigerias success in her certain recoveries, making her, according to Mr Malami, an exception at establishing standards. I think we are imbibing the culture of transparency and accountability in what we do, Mr Malami said, pointing to the institutionalisation of asset recovery and disposal as indications of Nigerias ethical progress. However, Mr Malamis pronouncement came against the background of a stunning 2020 Transparency International [TI] Corruption Perception Index (CPI) report which scored Nigeria 25/100, one point less than its 26 points earning in the previous year. The CPI report also had Nigeria at a 149 placement out of 180 sampled countries, a record that is three steps lower than its rank of 146 in 2019. In the 2018 index, Nigeria rose by four places on the index from 148 to 144. Transparency International assesses countries on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean. The latest ranking is an indicator that corruption is perceived to have worsened in the country within the last year. Umar Yakubu, chief executive at the Centre for Fiscal Transparency and Integrity Watch, in an earlier remark, had asked Mr Malami to provide an enabling environment for the passage and amendment of several anti-corruption bills. These bills include the Proceeds of Crime Recovery and Management Agency Bill; the Whistle Blowers Protection Bill; the Witness Protection Bill and the Audit Bill; as well as the amendments of the EFCC, NFIU and ICPC Establishment Acts. Accepting Mr Yakubus challenge, the attorney general said work was already apace in the direction of reform of some anti-corruption instruments but asked for patience, adding that this was where more work still needed to be done in spite of the progress the nation was already making in many areas around the fight against corruption. I am happy to state that these policy decisions are paying off because, according to him, from whatever direction you look at it either from the point of prevention or enforcement, I think we are not doing very bad as far as the fight against corruption is concerned but that does not mean that there are no rooms for improvement. He added that on a daily basis, we are striving and working hard to see what additional policies, legislations, institutions if the need arises for the purposes of deepening our transparency, accountability and integrity ensuring at the end of the day we address the level of corruption Mr Malami, enthusiastic, accepted that there are a lot of legislations which have the capacity to turn things around and provide additional support in fighting corruption pending at the national assembly. To achieve success with these pending legislations, Mr Malami believes, his office can work together with the group in facilitating their passage and acceptance, while registering his and the Ministry of Justices commitment to work with the Centre for Fiscal Transparency and Integrity Watch. He suggested that the group should work with the responsible committee within the ministry to create a road map to ensure a collaborative path in the quest for this vision. Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Its nearly two months since turbulence erupted around China Huarong Asset Management Co.At the end of March, its 4% perpetual dollar bond was trading at 102 cents on the dollar as investors figured the January execution of former chairman Lai Xiaomin for bribery put a line under past wayward behavior. But the failure of the company to release 2020 results by a March 31 deadline, and a subsequent report by mainland media Caixin that the firm will restructure, sparked weeks of turmoil. The same bond is now at 57 cents.The heart of the matter is whether the central government will rescue a state-owned company thats integral to the smooth running of the financial system. While there are signs Beijing wants to ensure China Huarong can repay its debts on time, uncertainty prevails.Heres a look at the key events for China Huarong:May 28The company has wired funds to repay $978 million of notes maturing within the following week, according to Bloomberg News, the biggest bond payment since the 2020 results delay.May 27Liang Qiang, who currently heads another bad-debt manager, is on track to become president of China Huarong, reports Bloomberg News.May 24China Huarong dollar bonds climb after the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece that the asset manager is nowhere near defaulting on its more than $20 billion of offshore notes.May 21Some of China Huarongs thinly traded onshore bonds slump after having held up better than the companys dollar-denominated notes, signaling broadening concern about the firms financial health.May 18China Huarong has transferred funds to repay a $300 million note maturing May 20, Bloomberg News reports, the first dollar bond to come due since the delayed 2020 results. Prices for the firms dollar bonds slump earlier in the day after the New York Times reports China is planning an overhaul that would inflict significant losses on both domestic and foreign China Huarong bondholders.May 17The company has reached funding agreements with state-owned banks to ensure it can repay debt through at least the end of August, by which time China Huarong aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements, according to a Bloomberg News report. That as at least two of its onshore bonds see big price declines in recent days, worrying some investors.May 13The firm says its prepared to make future bond payments and has seen no change in the level of government support, seeking to ease investor concerns after a local media report that regulators balked at China Hurarongs restructuring plan.May 6The company says it transferred funds to pay five offshore bond coupons due the following day, its latest move to meet debt obligations amid persistent doubts about its financial health.April 30China Huarong breaks its silence, with an executive telling media it is prepared to make its bond payments and state backing remains intact. The official also says the weeks rating downgrades have no factual basis and are too pessimistic.April 29Moodys Investor Service downgrades China Huarong by one notch to Baa1, adding the firm remains on watch for further downgrade. The cut reflects the companys weakened funding ability due to market volatility and increased uncertainty over its future, according to the statement.April 27China Huarong units repay bonds maturing that day. The S$600 million ($450 million) bond was repaid with funds provided by Chinas biggest state-owned bank, according to a Bloomberg News report.April 26Fitch Ratings downgrades China Huarong by three notches to BBB while dropping the companys perpetual bonds into junk territory. The lack of transparency over government support for the firm may hamper its ability to refinance debt in offshore markets, Fitch said.April 25China Huarong says it wont meet an April 30 deadline to file its 2020 report with Hong Kongs stock exchange because auditors needed more time to finalize a transaction the company first flagged on April 1. Securities and asset-management units said in the days before that they wouldnt release 2020 results by months end.April 22The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission asks lenders to extend China Huarongs upcoming loans by at least six months, according to REDD, citing two bankers from large Chinese commercial lenders.April 21China is considering a plan that would see its central bank assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) of China Huarong assets to help clean up the firms balance sheet, according to a Bloomberg News report. Peer China Cinda Asset Management Co. was said to be planning the sale of perpetual bonds in the second quarter.April 20China Huarongs key offshore financing unit says it returned to profitability in the first quarter and laid a solid foundation for transformation. Reorg Research reports that regulators are considering options including a debt restructuring of the unit, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd.April 19Huarong Securities Co. says it wired funds to repay a 2.5 billion yuan local note.April 16The CBIRC says China Huarongs operations are normal and that the firm has ample liquidity. These are the first official comments about the companys troubles. Reuters reports Chinese banks have been asked not to withhold loans to Huarong.April 13Fitch and Moodys both put the company on watch for downgrade. The finance ministry, which owns a majority of Huarong, is considering the transfer of its stake to a unit of the countrys sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg News reports. Chinese officials signal they want failing local government financing vehicles to restructure or go bust if debts cant be repaid.April 9China Huarong says it has been making debt payments on time and its operations are normal. Bloomberg News reports the company intends to keep Huarong International as part of a potential overhaul that would avoid the need of a debt restructuring or government recapitalization. S&P Global Ratings puts China Huarongs credit ratings on watch for possible downgrade.April 8China Huarong is preparing to offload non-core and loss-making units as part of a broad plan to revive profitability that would avoid the need for a debt restructuring or government recapitalization, Bloomberg News reports.April 6Selling gains steam in China Huarongs dollar bonds, following a holiday in China. Huarong Securities says there has been no major change to its operations, in response to a price plunge for its 3 billion yuan local bond.April 1China Huarong announces a delay in releasing 2020 results, saying its auditor is unable to finalize a transaction. Stock trading is suspended and spreads jump on the firms dollar bonds while China Huarong tells investors its business is running as usual. Caixin reports the company submitted restructuring and other major reform plans to government officials and shareholders.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P. Image via Getty Former No Limit standout McKinley Mac Phipps has been incarcerated for the last 21 years over a killing many people believe he didnt commit. And it looks like the rapper might finally be coming home, after the Louisiana Board of Parole and Pardons voted to grant him clemency on February 22, the Huffington Post reports. The move to push for Phipps release came after reporting from New Orleans investigative news outlet The Lens and a wave of scandals plaguing a former district attorney cast doubt on his conviction. McKinleys wife told the Huffington Post that she was excited by the news and awaiting Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards sign-off. Todays been a good day. Its kind of the beginning of the road to freedom, but theres still some more bases to go. Angelique Phipps said. Its a start. One step closer. Angelique added that she thinks the clemency case will give hope to other people fighting to overturn wrongful convictions. Not only is this amazing for us, but I believe that it also provides hope for those in comparable situations. Our goal is in sight, and we will get to the finish line, she said. Phipps was charged with manslaugter in the 2000 shooting death of Barron C Victor, Jr. at a nightclub called Club Mercedes in Slidell, Louisiana. In spite of the fact that Phipps bodyguard admitted to police that he had shot Victor by mistake when another person at the club charged him, the rapper was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison. The Lens uncovered an affidavit from one of the defenses key witnesses, who claimed they were threatened and harassed into testifying that they had seen Phipps kill Victor. Other witnesses who claimed to be next to the rapper when the shots were fired by someone else were not called to testify. The case received even more scrutiny after the then-DA of St. Tammany Parish Walter Reed was sentenced to 5 years in prison on charges of corruption in 2017. Reed served as the district attorney for three decades, overseeing a local criminal justice regime so punitive that the area earned the nickname of St. Slammany for its willingness to put people behind bars. Even the victims former fiance has come around to Macs innocence, telling HuffPost that an innocent man is locked up back in 2016. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Smuggled photos used against Syrian regime in landmark torture trial Berlin-based Syrian lawyer Ibrahim al-Kasem shows a photo from the so-called Caesar files, which constituted key evidence in a landmark German trial dealing with crimes against humanity in Syria Thousands of images of dead Syrians smuggled out of the country by a photographer known as "Caesar" showed the world the horrors detainees allegedly suffered at the hands of President Bashar al-Assad's regime. The so-called Caesar files constituted key evidence in a landmark German trial dealing with crimes against humanity in Syria, which handed down its first verdict on Wednesday. In the first court case worldwide over state-sponsored torture by Assad's regime, Eyad al-Gharib, 44, was sentenced by a German court to four and a half years in prison for complicity in crimes against humanity. The Caesar photos showing Syrians who had been flogged, strangled, electrocuted or starved to death in detention centres have also given their name to a series of US economic sanctions. A defector who had worked as a photographer for the Syrian military police, Caesar risked his life to take the 53,275 images of 6,786 corpses, including only one woman, between May 2011 and August 2013. - Escape from Syria - Horrified by the thousands of images he had taken, Caesar contacted the Syrian opposition who, after asking him to collect as many photos as possible, organised for him to be smuggled out from Syria. Each of the corpses photographed bears a number, often inscribed on the skin. Some of them have no eyes, while most are naked or in their underwear. The world was stunned by the brutal snapshots in 2014 when they were used as part of a report by three former international prosecutors. The images then gave their name to the Caesar Act in the US, which provides for economic sanctions against Syria. In June 2020, a new set of sanctions came into force under the law, targeting many members of the Syrian president's family and entourage, including his wife Asma al-Assad. The photos were also shown last year in a court in Koblenz, Germany in the crimes against humanity trial against Gharib. - 'I won't forget' - They were scrutinised during the trial by forensic scientist Markus Rotschild, and were deemed to constitute overwhelming material evidence. Story continues "Allow me to make a personal remark. I won't forget these photos," said judge Anne Kerber as the verdict was handed down against Gharib, a former member of the Syrian intelligence services. The images also provided a basis for international arrest warrants issued by France and Germany in 2018 against senior members of the regime, including Jamil Hassan, the former head of the air force intelligence service. Since his escape from Syria, Caesar and his friend "Sami", who helped him get the photos out, have been living in total anonymity. "We are trying to protect him, he has to change his residence regularly, it's very hard for him and his family," Syrian lawyer Ibrahim al-Kasem, based in Berlin, told AFP. Kasem manages the photos and liaises with families who believe they have spotted a missing relative in them. Caesar spoke publicly for the first time, his face concealed beneath a hood, at a US Congress hearing in 2014. He was heard again in 2020 before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Senate. Sami, for his part, spoke to German police as part of the investigation that led to the Koblenz trial. I am curious to know why there is a need to inform publicans of a revised later opening regime, especially when pubs and nightclubs have been closed for the best part of a year, and there is still no indication when they will be open. Publicans and nightclub owners and the general public (especially the young) will be glad of any opening hours at this moment in time. As for extending Sunday opening times, surely most people would be going to work or college the next day and therefore are unlikely to stay out late. Susan Burke Cahir, Co Tipperary Politicians pay would have to be threatened to get urgency It beggars belief that we can learn from the Taoiseach that more vaccination centres could possibly be rolled out in Limerick and elsewhere. Not since the Popes visit to Ireland in 1979 have we had so much advance notice of an upcoming event as the arrival of vaccines. Yet even now we are scrambling around trying to set up centres for vaccination. The sheer incompetence is mind-blowing and a true reflection on why we cannot open shops and businesses much sooner than we will. Thousands of jobs will be lost due to the inertia at Government level. This shameless level of ineptitude, given such notice, borders on criminal negligence. If only their pay packets were as adversely affected as the rest of us we might see some level of urgency. Eamon Kearney Dublin 13 Weve no real plan but lots of posturing for the cameras You must stay at home unless its essential but dont go any further than 5km, otherwise you could be fined or maybe something even worse. If you are travelling into the country, no problem, we will make sure you are well looked after as long as you spend a few bob. Avoid associating with the population who have been in lockdown for the past 12 months, they are very much restricted and beaten into submission, and we dont want that to change. This is Ireland v Covid at the moment, no real plan of action, just posturing at the podium for the cameras. Its time now to stop all the shenanigans and shut down travel completely until the virus is eliminated. Otherwise those of us who have been living by the rules will suffer untold damage to our mental well-being. J OConnell Co Galway Lack of political will to get vaccine moving is baffling I refer to the Governments Covid vaccination programme and I will keep this simple as I am mindful of the possibility of confusing some politicians. The two big words in their vocabulary for the last forever months are deaths and (overdue) dates. I believe Health Minister Stephen Donnelly is living in a world of fog. As of today, England has 18 million people vaccinated, and Northern Ireland is also flying in this regard. We are languishing at the back of the bunch. I am at loss to understand the lack of political will. I am equally bereft when it comes to appreciating how come we are all being so patient. I am 71 years of age. I suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and atrial fibrillation. I live on my own and have more or less been confined to barracks for almost a year. In short, I am cracking up. If what I hear on the TV and radio is to be believed, I should be vaccinated by the end of May. I used to be able to laugh, but theres nothing funny about courting disaster. We had an asylum down here in Ballinasloe for a very long time but unfortunately it is closed now. What a pity, I feel Im almost ready for admission! So, lads get the lead out and try and up your miserable efforts. Michael J Twohig Ballinasloe, Co Galway Dawdling Donnelly needs to push through quarantine bill Why cant Health Minister Stephen Donnelly bring his bill for mandatory quarantine to the Dail at 9am, have it passed through the Dail by lunch, through the Seanad by afternoon, and signed before tea by our President Michael D, and enforced by 9pm. The public demands action. Lets have it. Stop dawdling, politicians. John Johnston-Kehoe Dunmore Road, Waterford New meaning to doing shots with chaser a fortnight later Instead of opening the pubs, should people be injected with alcohol and given a booster two weeks later? John Williams Clonmel, Co Tipperary While Russia denies its role as an aggressor in the Donbas conflict and pretends to be a mediator in the peace process, there are no prospects for constructive negotiations and the return of peace to eastern Ukraine, according to Sergiy Kyslytsya, Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the United Nations. He made such a statement during the UN General Assembly debate on agenda item "Situation in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine" on Tuesday, February 23, according to an Ukrinform correspondent. "It is crucial to constantly remind Moscow of its obligations as a party to the conflict. Until Russia denies its role in the conflict, the prospects of peaceful resolution will remain elusive," Kyslytsya said. In this regard, he said that statements by Russian officials about Moscow's alleged "mediation" role in the Donbas peace process were outrageous. "Russia has not been and cannot, in principle, be a mediator in the conflict it has started and continues to take part in since the first day of aggression," he said. Kyslytsya also noted that Russia should not be allowed to use its veto power at UN Security Council meetings, because Russia is not even mentioned in Article 23 of the UN Charter on the composition of the Council. The diplomat recalled that according to the latest UN data, as a result of Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine, more than 13,000 people have died, including more than 3,000 civilians, tens of thousands have been injured, and about 1.5 million have become internally displaced persons. "Security remains the crucial element of the de-escalation. Until a 400-km section of the state border in the conflict zone remains open for a free flow of Russian weaponry and personnel, the situation will remain tense and fragile," Kyslytsya said. In this context, he reiterated the need to introduce a UN peacekeeping mission in Ukraine. "Sovereign control of Ukraine over its state border should be renewed and UN Peacekeepers, as one of the options, could play an important role in its monitoring," he said. Kyslytsya also said that joint efforts could help not only restore Ukraine's territorial integrity, but also strengthen the authority of international law, and return peace and stability to the European continent. op Second diamond rig to be deployed at Avoca during the first week of March. Additional rig accelerates current work program at Avoca, further targets near-surface strike and depth projections of known mineralization. VANCOUVER, BC, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Leviathan Gold Ltd. ("Leviathan", the "Company") (TSXV: LVX) is pleased to announce that further to its press release of February 18, 2021 in respect to the initiation of drilling at the Avoca and Timor projects (the "Projects") in the Victorian goldfields, Australia, that drilling with a second diamond rig is to commence at Avoca during the first week of March. This additional rig is to be deployed in acceleration of the current work program at Avoca, targeting near-surface strike and depth projections of known mineralization. Of the recently announced drilling program at Avoca, two holes - for a total depth of 271m - have been completed at the Excelsior Reef, and a third is currently targeting a depth of 200m. This drilling forms part of the greater 30,000m program that Leviathan is implementing in regard to the Avoca and Timor projects. Leviathan Gold Chief Executive Officer, Luke Norman, remarked: "We are excited to double our drilling capacity at Avoca, thereby accelerating the pace of our drill-led exploration programs, and demonstrating the pace at which we intend to operate. We are moreover pleased to have been able to achieve mobilization of an additional drill-rig within two weeks of trading, a mark of the ease of operation in Victoria, and a critical achievement in light of the number of targets we have before us to explore. The deployment of a second drilling rig is an important step forward in the fulfillment of Leviathan's current thirty-thousand meter drilling program". About the Avoca and Timor Projects Background and History The Victorian goldfields are one of the world's major gold provinces, with recorded historic production in excess of 2,500 tonnes - or over 80 million ounces of gold since their discovery in 18511. The Avoca and Timor projects comprise 223 square kilometers of exploration tenements within these goldfields, approximately 180 kilometers north west of the state capital of Melbourne. The Projects are well-served by modern infrastructure, are easily accessible via paved roads, and fall less than 100 kilometers from the regional cities of Bendigo and Ballarat, both long-established centers of mining services and expertise. The Projects are located within an area of the Victorian goldfields, the golden triangle, that is home to large scale gold deposits with long and very prominent histories of production such as those at Ballarat, Bendigo and Castlemaine. More recently, major discoveries have also been made at the Fosterville Gold Mine near Bendigo (operated by Kirkland Lake Gold), which boasts reserves of 1.70 million ounces at an average grade of 23.1 g/t Au, including 1.16 million ounces at an average grade of 61.2 g/t Au2. Within the area being explored by Leviathan Gold hundreds of small historical gold mines are known to have existed within a 50 km radius of Avoca and Timor. The Avoca and Timor projects were the subject of historical mining between the 1850's and the early 1900's, during which era operations targeted so-called alluvial "deep lead" gold occurrences buried auriferous river-bed deposits - as well as primary vein-hosted mineralization developed via shaft and underground stoping methods Such operations reportedly producing 1.3 million ounces of gold in the Avoca and Timor project areas alone. The mining, water removal and ore processing methods of the day were rudimentary, such that only isolated extraction of shallow, near-surface, visible, high-grade mineralization was possible, resulting in only very selective and discontinuous mining. Over fifty such gold occurrences are known within the Projects, and despite this prodigious endowment, no systematic exploration of the Projects has occurred. With only limited exploration work having been recorded since WW1, numerous targets to test, and mineralization potentially open to depth at most of these, a rare opportunity exists for Leviathan to pursue a consolidated approach in the exploration of near-surface mineralization using modern drilling, geochemical and geophysical techniques. Historical records are not historical resource estimates, but instead are official Government records of gold production from individual mines. Historical production records do not carry a comparable confidence level to a current Mineral Resource estimate reported in accordance with CIM standards for resource estimation and should not be treated as such. Leviathan does not treat historical production records as indicators of a current mineral resource or mineral reserve. The information relating to historical gold mines has not been independently verified by the Qualified Person and such information is not necessarily indicative of mineralisation on the properties that it the subject of this Press Release. Geology The Victorian goldfields are located within the Lachlan Fold Belt, a tectonic belt composed of volcanic, sedimentary rocks, and granitic intrusions extending in one form or another along the eastern seaboard of the Australian continent. The Stawell and Ballarat-Bendigo Zones (of Cambrian and Ordovician age, respectively) of the Lachlan Fold Belt in the area of Avoca and Timor typically consist of slates and indurated sandstones that have experienced regional upper greenschist facies metamorphism3. Under such conditions the slates are seen to behave in a more ductile manner than the sandstones, which typically causes quartz veins to occur as lodes within the slates and slate-like rocks, and as quartz stockworks or ladder veins within fracture networks in the sandstones. Numerous faults, and fault splays located in the Avoca and Timor area stretching for tens of kilometers, are associated with gold mineralization, where they appear to have served as important conduits to the passage of mineralizing fluids. Silicate alteration occurs proximal to the quartz veins, in a general assemblage of biotite-muscovite-chlorite-calcite. Sulphide veins are commonly of pyrite-pyrrhotite-arsenopyritic character; contemporaneous base metal sulphide mineralization including chalcopyrite, galena and sphalerite - may occur in association with quartz veins. When taken together, this interplay of lithology, structure, ductility contrasts, alteration, and ore mineralogy serve as a key exploration targeting tools at Avoca and Timor. The understanding of these elements as fundamental building blocks in the definition of gold mineralization at the Projects is central to Leviathan's exploration strategy. In a key illustration of the importance of structure, the fault-associated Leviathan structural corridor at Timor from which the Company takes its name hosts numerous historic workings developed on a series of parallel quartz veins, these being where the majority of historic workings in this particular part of the Timor area are located. Significant potential is thought to exist associated with the various other veins and faults within this corridor to its north and in potential repetitions to its east. __________________________________ 1 Earth Resources Victoria (2020). https://earthresources.vic.gov.au/geology-exploration/minerals/metals/gold/gold-mining-in-victoria 2 Kirkland Lake Gold (2020). https://www.kl.gold/our-business/resources-and-reserves/default.aspx Future Work Programs There are over thirty historical gold workings within the Avoca project area4, all of which require additional mapping, surface sampling and drill testing to assess their potential and on which the Company intends to report on an ongoing basis. The highest priority targets include: Pyrenees Reefs: 16,199 tons mined for 16,602 ounces of gold to a depth of 130 meters at an average recovered grade of 32 g/t Au, worked from 1860 to 1912; mineralized shoots per historic underground mine plans. Excelsior Reef: 13,200 tons mined for 9,260 ounces of gold to a depth of 100 meters at an average recovered grade of 22 g/t Au, worked from 1909 to 1915; mineralized shoots per historic underground mine plans. Vale's Reefs: 1,444 tons mined for 1,388 ounces of gold to a depth of 52 meters at an average recovered grade of 29.4 g/t Au, worked from 1865 to 1883. Monte Christo Reefs: 2,795 tons mined for 937 ounces of gold to a depth of 30 meters at an average recovered grade of 10.3 g/t Au, worked from 1872 to 1877. The Timor project lies immediately east of the Avoca project and hosts numerous hardrock and alluvial gold deposits as evidenced by the extent of historic workings, of which approximately twenty hardrock workings can be considered to have been significant producers. The highest priority targets include: Leviathan Group of Mines: 189,085 tons mined for 56,474 ounces of gold at an average recovered grade of 9.14 g/t Au. The Leviathan structural corridor hosts several parallel quartz veins with most of the production coming from one mine active in the early 1900s. Significant potential is believed to lie within the various other veins and faults within the corridor to the north. Shaw's Reef: 16,881 tons mined for 12,623 ounces of gold to a depth 130 meters at an average recovered grade of 22.9 g/t Au, worked from 1883 to 1891. Along strike of this fault zone, arsenopyrite and stibnite mineralization is recorded in association with the gold mineralization indicating possible epizonal Fosterville-style gold mineralization. The Leviathan Group of Mines and Shaw's Reef both lie on separate large regional north-south structures traceable for tens of kilometers with hardrock workings over much of their length. Neither of these structures have witnessed significant drilling within the tenement. These two mineralized structures will be a near-term focus for exploration within the Projects. Modern core orientation techniques, with the objective of further understanding the structural controls on mineralization, will be systematically applied during this program. ___________________________________ 3 Peters, P. (2016). ECR Minerals Plc., "Competent Person's Report. Project Number AU9666" Retrieved from Snowden Mining Industry Consultants Pty Ltd. https://snowdengroup.com/ 4 State of Victoria Mining Surveyors and Registrar's Quarterly Reports from 1860 to 1891 and Annual Reports issued thereafter. All the production from these reefs occurred within the Avoca licence. Qualified Person The technical content of this news release has been reviewed, verified and approved by Keith Whitehouse, AusIMM (CP), Exploration Manager of Leviathan Gold (Australia) Pty. Ltd., a qualified person as defined by NI 43-101. On behalf of the Company, Luke Norman, Chief Executive Officer and Director 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. No securities regulatory authority has either approval or disapproved of 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 in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available. Forward-Looking Statements Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release, including with respect to geological prospects of Leviathan'smineral projects, planned exploration activities, success of exploration activities, the relevance of historical information, the timing of exploration activities, general business and economic conditions; that applicable approvals are obtained; that qualified workers, financing, permits, approvals, and equipment are obtained in a timely manner; that market conditions continue; that contractual counterparties perform their obligations as required; and that Leviathan is able to locate sufficient financing for favourable ongoing operations. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. Leviathan cautions that all forward looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by many material factors, many of which are beyond Leviathan's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to whether exploration activities will result in commercially viable quantities of mineralized materials; the possibility of changes to project parameters as plans continue to be refined; the ability to execute planned exploration and future drilling programs;COVID-19; the ability to obtain qualified workers, financing, permits, approvals, and equipment in a timely manner or at all and on reasonable terms; changes in the commodity and securities markets; non-performance by contractual counterparties; and general business and economic conditions. 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. Although Leviathan has attempted to identify important risks and factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors and risks that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Consequently, undue reliance should not be placed on such forward-looking statements. In addition, all forward-looking statements in this press release are given as of the date hereof. Leviathan disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, save and except as may be required by applicable securities laws. The forward-looking statements contained herein are expressly qualified by this disclaimer. SOURCE Leviathan Gold Ltd Related Links https://leviathangold.com STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A lawsuit was filed earlier this week against Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio on behalf of more than 20 boutique fitness studios -- several of which are located on Staten Island -- due to gym classes still being banned across New York City. With movie theaters, billiards halls and catering halls having an opening date on the horizon, boutique fitness studio owners say they have been left out of the reopening plans. According to court papers filed in New York State Supreme Court, the mom-and-pop gym owners say they simply want to be able to open their studios and conduct socially distant classes adhering to all coronavirus (COVID-19) guidelines. Larissa Schiano-Gonzalez often goes to her business, Be Yoga & Dance in Rosebank, to dance and/or meditate -- alone. All these studios have been shuttered for nearly a year. While Cuomo said gyms across the state could reopen Aug. 24, he said that local elected officials -- in New York Citys case thats de Blasio -- may choose to delay resuming fitness classes. While many big box gyms were able to open Sept. 2, 2020, the mayor wont allow fitness classes to resume indoors. This has left boutique fitness studios, like the Max Challenge, yoga centers, CrossFit and Pilates studios, which rely on classes as the main draw to their business, unable to reopen. In light of the huge Supreme Court win yesterday in Buffalo we feel it further backs our argument that all gyms should be opened, said Charlie Cassara, president and founder of the New York Fitness Coalition (NYFC), referring to a case won by a Buffalo gym owner against the state. Joseph Cannizzo's Staten Island Judo Jujitsu Dojo in Annadale has been closed for nearly a year. (Courtesy of Joseph Cannizzo) The mayor and his team have repeatedly not been able to show any evidence or truth behind these forced and arbitrary shutdowns, added Cassara, who also is president of the United States Fitness Coalition (USFC), which, along with NYFC has been representing fitness owners throughout the pandemic. And the lawsuit filed this week is one of several on behalf of the fitness industry since the pandemic began. One filed last year in Richmond County was unsuccessful. No judge has yet to overturn de Blasios ruling against fitness classes. Last week de Blasio said: We want everything decided by the data and the science. As the doctors have said, theres a particular sensitivity around those sites. ...I want to see life continue to improve for the people of the city. I want to see more and more things open -- reopen. I want to see businesses survive and their employees have jobs, but job one is the health and safety of all New Yorkers, and those sites do come with a special sensitivity. The offices of the governor and mayor didnt immediately respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit. STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE And Island-based fitness studio owners say they are struggling to survive. Karen Torrone, alone at 5 Boro Power Yoga, where she still can't host indoor classes. She was forced to close her Tottenville studio, and only her New Dorp location remains in business, she said. (Courtesy of Karen Torrone) Roseann Camarda, who owns three popular fitness studios -- in Grasmere, Woodrow and Great Kills -- under the Max Challenge franchise on Staten Island with her husband, Anthony Camarda, said she is barely holding on. Im behind on my rent. We still have to pay all types of insurance. Im keeping the utilities on, she said, noting she has lost a large share of her membership by only being able to offer virtual classes. I just heard Gov. Andrew Cuomo is opening amusement parks, why are we the only ones closed? I just read Mayor de Blasio wants women-owned businesses to flourish. Im a woman-owned business, but hes destroying me. Said Joseph Cannizzo, owner of Staten Island Judo Jujitsu Dojo in Annadale: We are approaching the one-year anniversary of the mandated closure of my martial arts school. My dojo is facing bankruptcy as a result of outstanding property tax, mortgage payments and cooperative fees, which have not been paid for almost one year. Politicians have failed at passing swift and efficient legislation focused on subsidizing small businesses like mine. ... We have been absolutely destroyed. Larissa Schiano-Gonzalez, owner of Be Yoga & Dance in Rosebank, said that while she has many loyal members of the studio who take the classes, her revenue has dropped by 75%. She said shes able to pay her rent, but not much else. Im literally just paying the rent and my teachers. Im able to stay afloat, but I have had to work extra hard and do outside things to support the studio, she said. Like Schiano-Gonzalez, Karen Torrone, owner of 5 Boro Power Yoga, has been offering online classes since her studio has been closed. She was forced to close her Tottenville studio, and only her New Dorp location remains in business, she said. I have lost over half our members and more than 60% of revenue. Since we understand the needs for health, wellness and connection, we have been offering four free online yoga classes a week, including one class for anyone affected by addiction. These free online classes have been a lifeline for those who are suffering from anxiety and stress and need an outlet, but dont have the means right now, said Torrone. *** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK *** FOLLOW TRACEY PORPORA ON FACEBOOK and TWITTER Albany On June 16, 1961, more than 1,000 people packed Wilborn Temple's pews, crammed the balcony and vestibules, stood in aisles, sat on the floor in front and waited expectantly for the speech of a rising 32-year-old African-American preacher from Atlanta. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had not yet become a household name as a civil rights leader. He was a few years away from leading historic marches in Washington, D.C., and Selma, Ala., and delivering iconic speeches. Still, the throng squeezed into the church until it reached capacity, and dozens more were turned away at the front entrance of the brownstone house of worship on Lancaster and South Swan streets. One of those who arrived early for King's Friday night speech was 26-year-old Solomon Dees, one of nine children raised on his family's 80-acre cotton farm in Camden, Ala., 40 miles south of Selma. After high school, Dees migrated to Albany because two brothers lived in the area. He joined Wilborn Temple in 1956 and was eager to hear a preacher who had a pulpit in Montgomery, Ala., not far from where he grew up. "I remember it was so jampacked there was no place to put anyone else," said Dees, who became pastor of Wilborn Temple in 2007 after serving as deacon, assistant pastor and chairman of the board of trustees. "It was something to witness, I'll tell you," he said. "Rev. King was a great orator, even though he was young and not yet very well known outside the South at that point. "He had a drive and a presence that was different from other preachers I'd heard," said Dees, 80, of Menands, a retired hospital cardiovascular technologist with two sons and six grandchildren. He worries that the message of King is being forgotten by younger generations. "I talk to young people about the civil rights movement and it's all kind of foreign to them," he said. Dees recounted an incident in 1962 when his wife, Nora, was shot as she walked near her home on Clinton Avenue by a man who lived across the street. The bullet narrowly missed her vital organs and she was not seriously injured. "I wanted to shoot a black person," the shooter said at his trial, in which he was found guilty and sentenced to prison. His wife recovered after a week in the hospital. She died a year ago. "There was a lot of racial tension in Albany in those years and that was the mood here when Rev. King visited," Dees said. Recently discovered images of King with Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, an early supporter of the civil rights leader, and Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd in the Times Union photo archives and newspaper accounts opened a window onto King's largely forgotten visit to the Capital Region at the invitation of his friend, the governor. King also spoke in Schenectady in October 1961. There is no plaque in Wilborn Temple commemorating King's address there, but Dees is considering having one installed. The Wilborn Temple speech almost had to be canceled when King missed his train. Rockefeller dispatched his private plane to New York City to fly the pastor to Albany. Rockefeller hosted a private dinner for King in Rockefeller's suite at the Ten Eyck Hotel in Albany. It was a volatile time for the nascent civil rights movement. On May 21, 1961, King spoke at a mass rally at a church in Montgomery after the first groups of Freedom Riders were assaulted in Alabama as they tried to integrate bus terminals. On June 14, 1961, the Rev. Leslie Smith, 35, pastor of the Sojourner Truth AME Church in Albany, left Albany on a bus filled with Freedom Riders. At a Greyhound bus station in Ocala, Fla., Smith was attacked, arrested and detained for four hours in jail following the fracas. He was later released and returned to Albany with his assistant pastor, the Rev. Edward C. Morton, 32, the same day that King arrived. "The riders should continue until it is clearly established that Negroes can ride interstate buses without being harassed and discriminated against," King said. According to accounts from the Times Union and Knickerbocker News, King said it was imperative for the Freedom Riders to act "in a peaceful and nonviolent way" despite being provoked with racial taunts and violent assaults. He said the nonviolent tactics he espoused confused white supremacists in Mississippi and Alabama who tried to provoke black protesters into fighting. "They don't know what to do. We are not violent. We have love in our hearts for those who hurt us," King said. He called segregation "immoral" and said "if America is to remain a first-class nation, she can no longer afford to have second-class citizens." Rockefeller also spoke at the three-hour church rally that was a fundraiser for King's Southern Leadership Conference. More than $1,600 was donated, ranging from quarters to $100 bills. Rockefeller noted that he was raised a Baptist, as was King, and he called the civil rights leader "an American Mahatma Gandhi." King's address carried some of the echoes of the lyricism he would repurpose in his famous "I Have A Dream" speech on Aug. 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington. In Albany he said, "America is essentially a dream, a dream of a land where men of all races, creeds and nationalities can live together as brothers." His speech was met with murmurs of assent, calls of "you said it, brother" and interrupted by thunderous applause on several occasions. "We must let people know we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer," King said. "We will meet your capacity to inflict punishment by our capacity to endure punishment." Peter Pryor, a young black lawyer who had begun taking on police brutality cases and representing blacks in housing discrimination lawsuits, attended King's talk and remembers the crowd was racially mixed. "I viewed the speech as a wake-up call to Albany. It was a reminder by King that what was happening in the South existed in a more latent form in communities like Albany in the North," said Pryor, 88. He was born and raised in Savannah, Ga., and settled in Albany in 1947 after his Army service. King's speech resonated with him because he witnessed racial discrimination in Albany. "It wasn't like Selma or Jim Crow, but there was de-facto discrimination in housing and employment in Albany. Police brutality against blacks was rampant." Pryor is writing a memoir, tentatively titled "Uncommon Law: The Darker Side of Albany," that recounts local discrimination and racism. Pryor represented Smith and helped the pastor with the legal work to establish the Sojourner Truth AME Church. Pryor later became president of the local chapter of the NAACP. Following his Wilborn Temple talk, King and the governor left Albany at midnight on Rockefeller's private plane. At Rockefeller's urging, King returned on Oct. 9, 1961, to address a capacity crowd of 1,200 in the gymnasium of Linton High School at the opening session of the Schenectady Freedom Forum. King reiterated a recurring theme and called for nonviolent protests against racial discrimination and a collaborative approach. "Integration can be achieved by strong and vigorous leadership from the federal government, genuine liberalism in the North, leadership of Southern moderates and the work of the Negro himself," King said. The audience cheered loudly several times during his speech. On April 4, 1968, King was shot and killed while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. He was 39. pgrondahl@timesunion.com 518-454-5623 @PaulGrondahl Frys Electronics, the go-to chain for tech tinkerers looking for an obscure part, is closing for good. The company, perhaps even more well known for outlandish themes at some of its stores, from Aztec to Alices Adventures in Wonderland, said Wednesday in an online posting that the COVID-19 pandemic had made it impossible to continue. Fans immediately took to Twitter to post images and memories (good and bad). The chain was concentrated on the West Coast -- its only Oregon store was in Wilsonville -- but had 31 stores in nine states. It was founded 36 years ago. The pandemic has done heavy damage to retailers, but Frys was already getting hammered by online competition and a battle between heavy-hitters Best Buy and Amazon.com. Frys Electronics Inc. said its operations have ceased and the wind-down of locations will begin immediately. Customers with electronics being repaired in-store store are being asked to pick them up. The chains online presence appears largely to have been shut down. -- The Associated Press That means fewer than 30% of eligible CPS students have indicated they want to return to classrooms. Officials had said last month that 67,000 pre-K through eighth grade and cluster students were due to return for in-person classes, in most cases part time. District officials have deflected the decreases by noting that families have the option to select in-person learning and can always choose to stay remote if they change their minds. A North Korean defector wore a diving suit and fins during a daring six-hour swim around one of the world's most fortified borders, a Seoul official said, and was caught only after apparently falling asleep. Bungling South Korean forces did not spot the man's audacious exploit despite him appearing several times on CCTV after he landed and triggering alarms, drawing heavy criticism from media and opposition MPs. Even after his presence was noticed, the man who used diving gear to make his way by sea around the Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula was not caught for another three hours. The man, reportedly in his 20s, landed north of the town of Goseong on the east coast. "He presumably had swum for about six hours, wearing a padded jacket inside a diving suit and fins. His clothing appeared to have kept him warm and allowed him to stay afloat," an unnamed Joint Chiefs of Staff official was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency on Tuesday. Read | Trump 'offered Kim Jong Un a ride home on Air Force One' Tidal currents worked in his favour, the official said, and he abandoned most of his equipment before making his way through a drainage channel under the barbed-wire fences that run along the coast. Over more than three hours surveillance cameras caught him eight times, audible alarms sounding twice, but border guards did not notice. Eventually a manhunt was launched, and troops found him three hours later, apparently asleep, his facemask hanging in a tree. Officials say the defector, presumed to have been a civilian in the North, has expressed a desire to defect. The military acknowledged troops had "failed to abide by due procedures" and vowed to strengthen border security. And in a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday, Defence Minister Suh Wook acknowledged that surveillance systems in the area were "malfunctioning and outdated". Also Read | North Korea attempted to steal Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine technology, says South Korean spies Only a handful of Northern defectors ever directly cross the DMZ or swim past the maritime border -- although the last such publicly known incident was in November, when questions about security were also raised. The vast majority of defectors instead first travel to neighbouring China, sometimes staying there for years before making their way on to the South via third countries. More than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to the South over the decades but numbers plummeted to just 229 last year, after Pyongyang imposed a strict border closure to protect itself from the coronavirus that first emerged in neighbour and key ally China. The incident was evidence the South Korean military was "close to a near collapse", the conservative Chosun Ilbo newspaper said Wednesday. "Is this unit the only unit not doing its job properly? We think not," it added in an editorial. Hole LRGF-20-025 intersected significant mineralization for a total of 96.2m out of 124.3m drilled from surface, including 70.5m of 115 g/t AgEq, 18.3m of 133 g/t AgEq, and 7.4m of 113 g/t AgEq. The hole also included multiple higher grade intersections included within the wider intervals, including 10.1m of 478 g/t AgEq, 2.1m of 353 g/t AgEq, and 2.0m of 728 g/t AgEq . "The El Favor target is demonstrating that not only does it have some high grades in the kilos, but also potentially bulk mineable zones approaching 100m in combined intercepts that are near surface," said Brad Langille, President and CEO. "The convergence of three semi-parallel veins on the Favor deposit in the Hundido area giving us widths and grades that could accelerate the growth of resource ounces. Our belief that Los Ricos North is a large mineralized system is strengthened with these results." Table 1: Drill Hole Intersections Hole ID Area From To Length1 Au Ag AuEq2 AgEq2 (m) (m) (m) (g/t) (g/t) (g/t) (g/t) LRGF-20-023 Favor 0.0 13.7 13.7 0.26 97.5 1.56 117.3 including 10.5 13.7 3.2 0.51 148.1 2.49 186.5 LRGF-20-024 Favor 0.0 12.0 12.0 0.20 41.8 0.75 56.5 including 7.4 10.5 3.1 0.31 84.0 1.43 107.0 LRGF-20-025 Favor Salomon 0.0 73.1 70.5 0.26 95.1 1.53 114.7 including3 47.0 69.8 20.1 0.59 251.5 3.94 295.5 including3 49.8 62.5 10.1 0.99 403.9 6.37 478.0 LRGF-20-025 Favor Salomon 81.8 89.2 7.4 0.56 71.5 1.51 113.3 including 84.1 86.2 2.1 1.86 213.6 4.70 352.7 LRGF-20-025 Favor Guitarrillas 107.0 125.3 18.3 0.35 106.8 1.77 133.1 including 122.3 124.3 2.0 2.17 565.6 9.71 728.3 LRGF-20-026 Favor Guitarrillas 99.3 102.9 3.6 0.12 53.5 0.83 62.2 including 234.7 235.4 0.7 1.05 421.7 6.67 500.3 LRGF-20-028 Favor 23.1 42.0 17.7 0.12 52.8 0.82 61.7 including 38.0 40.3 2.3 0.14 147.7 2.11 158.2 LRGF-20-029 Favor 0.0 31.9 31.9 0.26 91.8 1.48 111.2 including 1.0 6.7 5.7 0.55 193.2 3.13 234.8 Favor - Salomon 75.0 95.2 20.2 0.27 63.4 1.11 83.6 LRGF-20-030 Favor 5.4 32.5 27.1 0.24 78.4 1.29 96.7 including 23.5 25.3 1.8 0.73 223.9 3.72 278.9 including 30.5 32.5 2.0 1.09 260.5 4.56 342.3 and 56.0 59.3 3.3 0.56 132.2 2.32 173.9 LRGF-20-031 Favor 14.4 25.3 10.9 0.51 71.4 1.47 109.9 including 16.7 19.1 2.4 2.18 213.8 5.03 377.2 LRGF-21-033 Favor - Salomon 1.8 35.7 33.9 0.59 116.2 2.14 160.4 including 10.1 13.0 3.0 1.25 433.1 7.02 526.6 LRGF-21-033 Favor Guitarrillas 62.0 67.9 5.8 1.94 274.7 5.60 420.2 including 65.7 67.9 2.1 4.14 543.8 11.39 854.0 LRGF-21-033 Favor Los Chivos 114.0 122.8 8.8 2.00 485.6 8.48 635.7 including 115.0 117.3 2.3 7.36 1693.0 29.94 2,245.2 1. Not true width. 2. AqEq converted using a silver to gold ratio of 75:1. 3. Excludes 2.6m of historically mined void. 4. Holes 21,22,27 excluded as did not intercept significant mineralization. Hole 32 is excluded as the assays are pending. Discussion of Drill Hole Results Three of the four major veins (Salomon, Guitarrillas and Los Chivos) appear to converge into a 100m wide zone at the western end of the El Favor deposit in the vicinity of the Hundido Pit at an elevation of 1300m. The wallrock in between the veins is strongly silicified, altered and mineralized. This mineralization can be observed in outcrop at the Hundido Pit, underground in the Salomon Cross Cut and in the road cuts along the north side of the El Favor hill and in the drill holes. More holes are required in this area to determine the strike length and potential depth of these wide combined zones. The Eastern end of the El Orito deposit (as presently defined) is located about 800 metres along strike to the west of the Hundido Pit (see Figure 1). Wide zones of precious and base metal mineralization were cut by drill holes at El Orito (see Press Release dated January 27, 2021) at elevations between 600 to 800m. Geological mapping, prospecting and sampling programs in the area between El Orito and the Hundido Pit have been accelerated and given priority. Following are Figure 1, which shows a plan view of the area of Los Ricos North from La Trini to El Favor, Figure 2 which shows a plan view of the drilling to date at El Favor, Figure 3 which is a cross section of hole LRGF-20-025, and Figure 4 which is a cross section of hole LRGF-21-033. Table 2: Drill Hole Locations Hole ID Easting Northing Elevation Azimuth Dip Length LRGF-20-021 585397 2336724 1234 180 -60 279.0 LRGF-20-022 585096 2336514 1263 180 -65 243.5 LRGF-20-023 585404 2336564 1281 180 -45 195.0 LRGF-20-024 585458 2336629 1241 180 -45 235.0 LRGF-20-025 585208 2336487 1355 180 -45 222.0 LRGF-20-026 585329 2336595 1279 180 -45 295.7 LRGF-20-027 585475 2336679 1221 180 -65 189.0 LRGF-20-028 585428 2336647 1250 180 -45 175.0 LRGF-20-029 585407 2336599 1268 180 -45 162.0 LRGF-20-030 585825 2336750 1190 180 -45 108.0 LRGF-20-031 585723 2336367 1200 180 -45 121.9 LRGF-21-032 585240 2336495 1350 180 -45 202.5 LRGF-21-033 585277 2336494 1351 180 -45 222.5 VRIFY Slide Deck and 3D Presentation VRIFY is a platform being used by companies to communicate with investors using 360 virtual tours of remote mining assets, 3D models and interactive presentations. VRIFY can be accessed by website and with the VRIFY iOS and Android apps. Access the GoGold Company Profile on VRIFY at: https://vrify.com The VRIFY Slide Deck and 3D Presentation for GoGold can be viewed at: https://vrify.com/explore/decks/9404 and on the Company's website at: www.gogoldresources.com. Los Ricos District Exploration Projects The Company's two exploration projects at its Los Ricos property are in Jalisco state, Mexico. The Los Ricos South Project began in March 2019 and includes the 'Main' area, which is focused on drilling around a number of historical mines including El Abra, El Troce, San Juan, and Rascadero, as well as the Cerro Colorado, Las Lamas and East Vein targets. An initial resource on the Los Ricos South project was announced on July 29, 2020 and indicated a Measured & Indicated Mineral Resource of 63.7 million ounces AgEq grading 199 g/t AgEq contained in 10.0 million tonnes, and an Inferred Resource of 19.9 million ounces AgEq grading 190 g/t AgEq contained in 3.3 million tonnes. An initial PEA on the project was announced on January 20, 2021 indicating an NPV 5% of US$295M. The Los Ricos North Project was launched in March 2020 and includes drilling at the El Favor, La Trini, and El Orito targets. During 2020, GoGold's exploration team identified over 100 targets on the Los Ricos North properties, demonstrating the significant exploration potential. The Company plans to drill 10 of these targets as part of its 2021 drilling program which is planned to exceed 100,000 metres of drilling and will be one of the largest in Mexico. Procedure, Quality Assurance / Quality Control and Data Verification The diamond drill core (HQ size) is geologically logged, photographed and marked for sampling. When the sample lengths are determined, the full core is sawn with a diamond blade core saw with one half of the core being bagged and tagged for assay. The remaining half portion is returned to the core trays for storage and/or for metallurgical test work. The sealed and tagged sample bags are transported to the ActLabs facility in Zacatecas, Mexico. ActLabs crushes the samples and prepares 200-300 gram pulp samples with ninety percent passing Tyler 150 mesh (106m). The pulps are assayed for gold using a 50-gram charge by fire assay (Code 1A2-50) and over limits greater than 10 grams per tonne are re-assayed using a gravimetric finish (Code 1A3-50). Silver and multi-element analysis is completed using total digestion (Code 1F2 Total Digestion ICP). Over limits greater than 100 grams per tonne silver are re-assayed using a gravimetric finish (Code 8-Ag FA-GRAV Ag). Quality assurance and quality control ("QA/QC") procedures monitor the chain-of-custody of the samples and includes the systematic insertion and monitoring of appropriate reference materials (certified standards, blanks and duplicates) into the sample strings. The results of the assaying of the QA/QC material included in each batch are tracked to ensure the integrity of the assay data. All results stated in this announcement have passed GoGold's QA/QC protocols. Mr. David Duncan, P. Geo. is the qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 and is responsible for the technical information of this release. About GoGold Resources GoGold Resources (TSX: GGD) is a Canadian-based silver and gold producer focused on operating, developing, exploring and acquiring high quality projects in Mexico. The Company operates the Parral Tailings mine in the state of Chihuahua and has the Los Ricos South and Los Ricos North exploration projects in the state of Jalisco. Headquartered in Halifax, NS, GoGold is building a portfolio of low cost, high margin projects. For more information visit gogoldresources.com. CAUTIONARY STATEMENT: The securities described herein have not been, and will not be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), or any state securities laws, and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to, or for the benefit of, U.S. persons (as defined in Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act) except in compliance with the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or pursuant to exemptions therefrom. This release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy of any of GoGold's securities in the United States. This news release may contain "forward-looking information" as defined in applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements other than statements of historical fact, included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding the Los Ricos South and North projects, and future plans and objectives of GoGold, including the intention to undertake further exploration at Los Ricos North, and the prospect of further discoveries there, constitute forward looking information that involve various risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking information is based on a number of factors and assumptions which have been used to develop such information but which may prove to be incorrect, including, but not limited to, assumptions in connection with the continuance of GoGold and its subsidiaries as a going concern, general economic and market conditions, mineral prices, the accuracy of mineral resource estimates, and the performance of the Parral project. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking information. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from GoGold's expectations include exploration and development risks associated with GoGold's projects, the failure to establish estimated mineral resources or mineral reserves, volatility of commodity prices, variations of recovery rates, and global economic conditions. For additional information with respect to risk factors applicable to GoGold, reference should be made to GoGold's continuous disclosure materials filed from time to time with securities regulators, including, but not limited to, GoGold's Annual Information Form. The forward-looking information contained in this release is made as of the date of this release. SOURCE GoGold Resources Inc. Related Links http://www.gogoldresources.com/ The boss of Australias busiest airport says there will be no justification for state border closures once the countrys most vulnerable people have received a COVID-19 vaccination, and wants some international travel to resume when half the population has been immunised. Sydney Airport chief executive Geoff Culbert said he had received a promising response from the federal and NSW governments on his plan to open up travel in step with each phase of Australias vaccine rollout. We will be perceived as the best place in the world to study, the best place in the world to work, the best place in the world to holiday, he said on Wednesday after revealing a $145 million full-year loss at the ASX-listed airport. Qantas near-empty terminal at Sydney Airport on February 14. Credit:Edwina Pickles Theres a huge economic opportunity in this for the nation if we open up at the right speed. ALBERTSON, N.Y., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Vandis is pleased to expand their Microsoft Azure Marketplace Offerings with the addition of Managed Network Access Control (NAC) powered by Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager. As a recognized Managed Service Provider (MSP) in the Microsoft Azure Lighthouse program, Vandis leveraged its NAC and Azure expertise in this unique offering to reduce branch authentication latency and enhance the end user authentication experience. As part of this offering, the Vandis team will configure ClearPass within the Azure environment to securely authenticate wired and wireless devices for an organization's employees and guests. For organizations with an existing NAC configuration, Vandis' Networking and Security specialists will review, optimize, and migrate policies into their Azure environment. "As a member of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association, Aruba is committed to expanding our offerings with Microsoft Azure," said Jim Harold, Vice President of North American Channels at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. "We have seen substantial interest in our recent release of ClearPass in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, and greatly value partners like Vandis for their experience implementing our solutions on-premise and in the cloud to meet the evolving needs of joint customers." As an ongoing Managed Service, Vandis provides custom alert notifications, ad hoc break/fix services, and support by Vandis Certified Engineers and Microsoft Support Services. "Our clients have been looking for ways to migrate their ClearPass environment into the cloud. With our new Managed NAC offering, Vandis can deploy and manage a ClearPass environment for our clients that improves the end user experience by bringing ClearPass to their branch edge." said Vandis' CTO Ryan Young. You can view the full offering in the Azure Marketplace here. If your organization is looking to strengthen enterprise-wide policies and improve user experience, this may be the right solution for you. To learn more, reach out to [email protected] or call 516-281-2200. About Vandis Vandis offers security, cloud, networking, mobility and infrastructure services to promote the establishment of secure and stable systems for clients both on-prem and in the cloud. With over 35 years of industry experience, Vandis offers comprehensive strategies that combine our client's security and networking needs. Able to handle projects on regional, national, and global scales, Vandis works closely with both market-leading and niche manufacturers to deliver custom solutions. Media Contact: Max Slygh [email protected] SOURCE Vandis Related Links http://www.vandis.com One of Americas leading pig slaughterhouses is running faster than ever as meatpackers hustle to keep pork in grocery stores during the COVID-19 pandemic. Plant worker Hector Ixquier says its time to slow down. Ixquier said he sought medical treatment in January for tendons he strained in his right arm while draining blood from pigs in a Seaboard Foods pork plant in Guymon, Oklahoma. The 30-year-old immigrant from Guatemala said he requested a transfer to the position piercing jugular veins about five months ago, after an increase in slaughtering speeds made it too tiring to do his previous job: wrestling chains around pigs hind legs before they are killed. His new job is also physically taxing, and a doctor recommended rest and avoiding certain tasks at work, Ixquier said in an interview. Im thankful for the opportunity, he said of the new gig, but its still too fast. Seaboard, the second-biggest U.S. pig producer after Smithfield Foods, sped up its Guymon operations last year after the U.S. government removed limits on pork plant line speeds in late 2019. It was the first plant to operate under the new rule, which was intended to allow processors to produce meat more quickly. But some workers, like Ixquier, say they have suffered physically as a result. Seaboard now requires employees to slaughter between about 1,230 and 1,300 hogs per hour, two plant workers who are also union stewards told Reuters. That compares to under 1,100 an hour in 2019, said one of the workers, Jose Quinonez. Workers and their advocates say the rule change is part of a series of measures finalized by former President Donald Trumps administration that jeopardize employee safety, including exempting dozens of poultry plants from slower line speeds and re-opening plants battling COVID-19. The changes, and prevalence of COVID-19 at slaughterhouses, have made it harder to keep workers in their jobs at a time when U.S. companies are trying to build up meat supplies. Seaboard, which didnt respond to questions about Ixquier, said employee health is a top priority. The company, a subsidiary of Kansas-based Seaboard Corp, works to improve processes and equipment and hires additional employees to help ensure each workers load is manageable and safe, said Seaboard spokesman David Eaheart. Eaheart added that the rule relaxing pork line speed limits improves Seaboards ability to adjust operations based on demand. Seaboard aims to average 1,200 pigs per hour under normal conditions, but has adjusted speeds as the pandemic has reduced staffing, he said. The company needs to examine how the plant will work under non-COVID-19 conditions to truly understand how the change affects it business, Eaheart said. Under the new rule, pork plants can slaughter as fast as they want, as long as they prevent fecal contamination and minimize bacteria. Previously, the government-imposed limit was 1,106 pigs per hour. President Joe Bidens administration, which pledges to prioritize worker safety, withdrew a Trump era proposal to allow all poultry plants to operate faster. But reversing the pork rule would be trickier, lawyers said, because it is already in effect. The 2019 elimination of pork line speeds by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was part of the New Swine Inspection System, which also lets pork plants use some company inspectors instead of USDA ones. The USDA said that it isnt considering a rollback of its elimination of pork line speeds. But it said the agency is closely examining how the new pork inspection system was developed. The White House did not respond to questions about line speeds. Slaughterhouse closures due to outbreaks last spring, record-large U.S. pork exports in 2020 and consumers stockpiling food during the pandemic have run down inventories in commercial freezers across the United States. Total U.S. pork inventories in cold storage were at a ten-and-a-half year low at the end of December. Injury Increase Guymon, a city of about 11,000 people, is dominated by the Seaboard pork plant. Last March, it became the first slaughterhouse to operate under the new rule, according to USDA documents. Prior to the rule change, six other major U.S. pork plants had surpassed the previous slaughter speed limits with special USDA permission, the agency documents show. The USDA told Reuters that the slaughterhouses had demonstrated they were capable of producing safe pork while operating at faster speeds. Seaboards plans to increase line speeds predated the coronavirus pandemic. Its decision to go ahead coincided with the mass spread of COVID-19 in the United States. Hundreds of the slaughterhouses 2,700 employees were infected. Seaboard spokesman Eaheart said the company wanted to operate faster to reduce the number of six-day work weeks for employees and give them more rest. However, lower staffing levels due to the pandemic forced the company at times to slow line speeds and to require employees to work on Saturdays, he said. The local United Food and Commercial Workers International union representing Guymon workers said it has seen a correlation between speeding up the lines and more workers going to the plants nurses station. It declined to provide figures. Company data show an uptick in injuries. The Seaboard plant in 2020 reported five lacerations on the slaughtering floor that required paid medical treatment outside of the plant such as stitches, a three-year high, according to the company. That compares to one laceration claim in 2019, zero in 2018, and five in 2017. The plant also saw an increase in less-serious cuts that did not require outside medical attention, the company said. The number of these incidents, which can include minor cuts treated with adhesive bandages, jumped to 19 last year from 10 in each of the prior two years. Seaboard says its overall injury rate is well below the Bureau of Labor Statistics industry standard for animal slaughtering and processing. Nationwide, inspections of serious incidents at meat plants rose last year. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) conducted 27 inspections at non-poultry meat plants in 2020 due to either a fatality or a catastrophe, up from one in 2017, three in 2018 and five in 2019, OSHA data shows. The UFCW in 2019 filed a lawsuit against the USDA in Minnesota federal court seeking to reverse the pork speed rule change, alleging it is unsafe for workers. The USDA said in court filings that the union did not show a direct link between workers alleged injuries and the rule change. The lawsuit is ongoing. Production Has to Go On More pork plants are planning to opt into the system, which eliminates speed limits. Meat giant Tyson Foods Inc. notified the USDA it intends over the next several months to resume implementation of the system at plants in Madison, Nebraska, and Perry, Iowa. Tyson had paused plans to opt in last year because of the pandemic, spokeswoman Liz Croston said. Tyson is focused on modernizing inspections, not line speeds, she said, and does not anticipate immediate significant change to its slaughter capacities. At Seaboards Guymon plant, UFCW steward Quinonez told Reuters he transferred to a job slicing skin off hog heads last year. The faster line speeds had left him unable to keep up with his former gig: scraping hair and skin off tongues. A 13-year employee at the plant, he said the speed increase worsened pain in his hands and shoulders that hed experienced in his former job. He now reports back problems as well. If Seaboard needs to pause production because of a mechanical problem or other glitch, the plant later runs even faster to make up for the halt, he said. At the end of the day, the production has to go on no matter what, Quinonez said. (Additional reporting by Christopher Walljasper in Chicago. Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Cassell Bryan-Low) Topics Oklahoma Meat Processing Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) Ayala Land Inc. will be merging with listed subsidiary Cebu Holdings Inc. and its subsidiaries, the property developer announced. In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange published Wednesday, Ayala Land said its board of directors approved a day ago its merger with the Cebu-based property developer and subsidiaries Asian I-Office Properties, Inc. (AiO), Arca South Commercial Ventures Corp. (ASCVC) and Central Block Developers Inc. (CBDI). The merger is an internal restructuring as well as a consolidation of Ayala Lands Cebu portfolio under one listed entity, the document read, adding that it is "expected to result in operational synergies, efficient funds management and simplified reporting to government agencies. Ayala Land said the merger will be effective immediately upon the Securities and Exchange Commissions approval. Cebu Holdings is a 71.13% owned subsidiary of Ayala Land engaged in real estate development in the city. It is the developer behind the Cebu Business Park and Cebu I.T. Park. It has as wholly-owned subsidiary AiO, which is most known for developing and running e-bloc Towers 1 to 4 in the Cebu IT Park Estate. ASCVC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ayala Land which owns a mixed-use block with a commercial mall comprised of 4 levels of retail development, office towers and basement levels in Arca South Estate. CBDI is owned 55% by Cebu Holdings and 45% by Ayala Land. It owns and runs another mixed-use block in Cebu IT Park Estate. The block consists of a 5-storey mall development, 2 office towers, and 1 hotel tower atop the mall. The planned merger will also be submitted for approval of the concerned companies stockholders in separate annual meetings this April, the disclosure said. Sorry! This content is not available in your region Saudi Binladin Group (SBG), a subsidiary of the Binladin International Holding Group (BIHG) and also the largest construction company in the kingdom, has appointed contracting industry veteran Grigoris Christofides as its new chief transformation officer. Christofides has spent more than 35 years in the contracting industry, and joins SBG at a crucial time in its history; amidst a group-wide transformation programme designed to see BIHG absorb, rebuild, and reinvent SBG under the mandate of its board of directors. BIHG is a diversified conglomerate, established in 2019, in collaboration with the Istidama Holding Company, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Finance, which holds a 36.22% stake in the Group. Christofides officially took up his position at the beginning of this month. In his new role, he will work closely with SBG's management and BIHGs board, along with appointed advisors, to oversee the execution of the transformation of SBG, to ensure value maximisation for all concerned stakeholders, said the statement from BIHG. Working with the CEO of SBG Contracting, he will lead the business repositioning efforts to achieve a sustainable balance sheet across the organisations global, financial and operational divisions, it stated. Welcoming the appointment, CEO Khalid Al Gwaiz said: "The appointment of Christofides comes as part of several critical measures taken by BIHG to drive the successful transformation of the business and reposition SBG as the kingdoms national construction champion." Christofides was formerly the CEO of J&P, as well as Arabtec Construction (a fully owned subsidiary of Dubai-based Arabtec Holding) that constructed the Burj Khalifa , in UAE. Having begun his career with US engineering and management firm Bechtel in 1986, Christofides joined the UKs Ove Arup & Partners, as a structural design engineer before moving to the UAE with Al Habtoor, said the statement. He later joined the UK's WS Atkins & Partners as a construction manager for the Burj Al Arab hotel. Joining Arabtec Construction in 1996, as a project manager, Christofides served as an Executive Director for the next decade, ahead of being appointed CEO in 2011 and departing in 2014. As CTO, Christofides joins a team mandated to regain SBGs position as the kingdom's national, and the wider GCC's regional, construction champion, while underscoring its vital role in the country's economy in support of the Saudi Vision 2030. "Christofides is a seasoned industry veteran and brings the necessary in-depth sector, and turnaround experience, to the organisation," stated Al Gwaiz. "We look forward to seeing the fruits of his dynamic and focused leadership, at a time when SBG is undergoing a challenging and complex transformation and restructure, which is a first in its 90-year history," he added.-TradeArabia News Service A Chinese divorce court has ordered a man to compensate his wife with 50,000 yuan ($7,700; 5,460) for five years of unpaid labour/housework she did during their marriage. The landmark course case has generated a huge debate online over the value of domestic work, with some feminists saying the compensation amount was too little. The court ruling comes after China's introduction of a new civil code. Under the new law, a spouse is entitled to seek compensation in a divorce if he or she bears more responsibility in child raising, caring for elderly relatives, and assisting partners in their work. Previously, divorcing spouses could only request such compensation if a prenuptial agreement had been signed - an uncommon practice in China. According to court records, the man identified by his surname Chen had filed for divorce last year from his wife, surnamed Wang, after getting married in 2015. She didn't want to divorce at first, but later requested financial compensation, arguing that Chen had not shouldered any housework or childcare responsibilities for their son. Beijing's Fangshan District Court ruled in her favour, ordering him to pay her monthly alimony of 2,000 yuan, as well as the one-off payment of 50,000 yuan for the housework she has done. The presiding judge told reporters this week that the division of a couple's joint property after marriage usually entails splitting tangible property. "But housework constitutes intangible property value," said the judge. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Chinese women spend nearly four hours a day on unpaid work - roughly 2.5 times that of men. 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 Sinn Feins Paul Maskey has condemned those behind bomb alerts at party offices (Liam McBurney/PA) Senior nationalist politicians have said they won't be deterred after security alerts sparked by reports of explosive devices at their offices. West Belfast MP Paul Maskey was defiant after a bomb alert outside Sinn Fein's constituency offices in west Belfast. SDLP deputy leader Nichola Mallon MLA also said her party will not be intimidated after reports her North Belfast office had also been targeted. It was one of three security alerts in the city yesterday. Secretary of State Brandon Lewis said his thoughts were with both politicians. "These pathetic attempts at intimidation are totally unacceptable. Nothing can justify such actions against public representatives who willingly serve in the best interests of their communities," he said. Unionist politicians also condemned the alerts, with UUP MLA Doug Beattie saying it would do nothing to help concerns around the Northern Ireland Protocol. Sinn Fein was contacted by police yesterday after a report that an explosive device may have been thrown at a party office on the Falls Road. "This report is very concerning and I condemn those responsible," Mr Maskey said. "They have nothing to offer society and they bring nothing but disruption to the local area. "This is an attack on the entire community and an attempt to undermine democracy but it will not succeed. Sinn Fein will not be deterred by these types of incidents and will continue to serve the entire community." PSNI Inspector Peter Brannigan said: "Information was received to suggest devices may have been thrown at an office on Falls Road, Belfast and police are seeking to establish the veracity of this information. The local community is asked to be vigilant and report anything out of the ordinary to police." Police searched the area around Ms Mallon's office after a report of an explosive device being thrown at it yesterday afternoon. "I want to make it clear that neither I nor my party will be intimidated or deterred by those responsible. We are committed to representing people in North Belfast and in every community across Northern Ireland," the Minister for Infrastructure said. Chief Inspector Darren Fox said later that officers checked the area and nothing was found. UUP leader Steve Aiken condemned the incident as "absolutely despicable intimidation". "All other political parties should also call out this pathetic attempt to undermine our democracy," he said. His party colleague Doug Beattie MLA said such incidents would not help with rising tensions around the NI Protocol. "This won't help anybody. We need to make sure we are trying to deal with the issues, which is the protocol, in a legal manner and this is just unhelpful," he said. DUP MLA Christopher Stalford said there was "absolutely no place for criminal behaviour like that and anyone who has any information about the identity of those responsible should come forward and share that with the police". Earlier, a suspicious object which sparked a security alert in the city centre was declared as "nothing untoward". Council offices on Adelaide Street and Linenhall Street were sealed off at around lunchtime and all employees asked to leave the buildings. Cyber Crowdstrike: Pandemic drove 2020 uptick in cyberattacks A significant boost in cyber activities in 2020 from both criminal and nation state actors was primarily driven by attempts to extort the healthcare industry as well as acquire information related to the coronavirus and possible vaccines, according to a new Crowdstrike report. "There's a couple major themes we saw throughout the last year: the most dominant feature I think is obviously COVID. The impact that COVID had in the cyber domain was absolutely mind boggling," Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at Crowdstrike, told FCW. The company's "2021 Global Threat Report" outlines activities throughout 2020 by hacking campaigns and other threat actors spanning across 10 different countries as well as groups categorized as being motivated by "eCrime" or hacktivism. "In the early days of the pandemic, objectives for targeted intrusion actors may have included acquiring information on infection rates or country-level responses to the treatment of COVID-19," according to the report. "The search for a vaccine became of paramount importance, and the scientific information that could lead to a vaccine for COVID-19 was a high-priority collection requirement for many targeted intrusion adversaries." Meyers noted that early in 2020, there was a noticeable uptick in activity from Vietnam targeting health agencies in China looking for information about the coronavirus. Those activities preceded lockdowns and other precautions to guard against COVID-19 weeks before other countries had begun enforcing similar measures. The relatively lower infection and mortality rates in Vietnam, which shares a border with China, reflect those early precautions, Meyers said. The company also found a noticeable spike in ransomware cases being used against healthcare facilities. "CrowdStrike Intelligence confirmed that 18 ransomware families infected 104 healthcare organizations in 2020," the report states. Ransomware attacks against the medical industry have become particularly controversial in recent months as the coronavirus proliferated. Some hacking campaigns have pledged not to target hospitals or to provide decryption keys if a medical facility is accidentally swept up in an attack. This article first appeared on FCW, a Defense Systems partner site. Health workers treating a Covid-19 patient in Cosaga hospital in Ourense. Brais Lorenzo / EFE Spain has finally left a situation of extreme risk due to the coronavirus. According to the latest report from the Health Ministry, released Tuesday evening, the epidemiological curve in the country continues to fall, and the 14-day cumulative number of coronavirus cases per 100,000 inhabitants is now at 235. This is below the limit of 250 that the ministry had set as a situation of maximum alert and that indicated that the pandemic was not under control. Despite this positive news, infections are still being registered by the countrys regions, and the ministry reported 7,461 on Tuesday and added 443 fatalities to the overall death toll. In fact, there is still a danger that the curve could get out of control once more, and the health authorities estimate that to emerge from the risk zone, the cumulative incidence must be pushed below 50 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. February is close to becoming the month with the highest number of fatalities since the first wave Eleven of the countrys regions are now out of the extreme risk zone: the Balearic and Canary Islands, Cantabria, Castilla-La Mancha, Catalonia, Valencia, Extremadura, Galicia, Murcia, Navarre and La Rioja. Extremadura is currently showing the best data, and has overtaken the Canary Islands in terms of transmission and is currently showing a cumulative incidence of 96. On the other end of the scale is the Madrid region, with 362, and the North African exclave city of Melilla, with 434. While the data is improving in Spain, the country is not out of danger. According to the traffic light system approved in October by the central government and the regions to measure the risk of coronavirus transmission, the curve has now shown the latest sign of relief by dropping below 250 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. But this level, of between 150 and 200 cases per 100,000, is still high risk. And the pressure on the countrys intensive care units (ICUs) continues to be very high with 3,365 critical Covid-19 patients currently receiving treatment. They are occupying 31.5% of the ICU beds across the country. According to the Health Ministrys traffic light system, more than 20% of ICU beds occupied by such patients also represents a situation of extreme risk. Whats more, the number of deaths continues to be high and February is close to becoming the month with the highest number of fatalities since the first wave. In April, nearly 15,500 deaths were reported while in November, the peak of the second wave, the figure was 9,191. For February so far, the official Covid death toll is close to 9,000. In the last seven days, 871 were reported. The most favorable indicators are to be found in the positivity of diagnostic tests, which are at 7.6% according to the latest report thats to say, the percentage of coronavirus tests coming back positive is now just under 8%. The scientific community recommends that this parameter be under 5% for the transmission of the virus to be considered under control. While there are regions where the figure is above 10% such as Ceuta, Melilla, Aragon and Valencia positivity in Spain continues to fall and is now at a medium-risk level, according to the Health Ministry. Despite the good trend in this third wave we are insisting on the need for precautionary measures Maria Jesus Montero, government spokesperson The positive trend of the epidemiological curve also reflects the effectiveness of the social restrictions that have been implemented to a greater or lesser extent by the countrys regions, which are in charge of controlling the pandemic as well as their separate healthcare systems. The central government is calling on the regional governments not to let their guard down and relax these restrictions, but some regions have already begun to announce their own deescalation measures. From Friday, for example, Galicia will allow meetings of up to four people who do not live together and the hostelry sector will start to reopen gradually. The Valencia region, meanwhile, is also considering suspending perimetral lockdowns from March onward. Catalonia, however, has opted to suspend its deescalation after noting a slowdown in the fall of infections. Despite the good trend in this third wave we are insisting on the need for precautionary measures, said government spokesperson Maria Jesus Montero on Tuesday, after the weekly Cabinet meeting. Until we have vaccinated 70% of the population we cannot start to relax these measures. The Spanish government is aiming to hit this target for the inoculations by the summer, an objective that was also cited by the prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, during his appearance in the Senate yesterday. English version by Simon Hunter. Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. The Ondo State governor, Rotimi Akeredolu, has vowed to continue fighting the insecurity facing the state as he begins his second term of four years in office. Mr Akeredolu, who was sworn in on Wednesday along with his deputy, Lucky Aiyedatiwa, in Akure, said the current security challenges demanded that states be allowed to defend their space. Mr Akeredolu was at the centre of a controversy after he gave an ultimatum to Fulani herdsmen operating in the states forest reserves to leave due to increased kidnapping and other criminalities perpetrated there. Although he had to contend with the Presidency and some northern elements, the governor stood his ground on his demand to document all those operating in the forest and evacuate those who failed to register. We have had our share of security challenges since our assumption of office, the governor said in his inauguration address. I have been able to confront this problem head-on. This problem is one of the main issues militating against the development of this country. Apart from COVID-19, the other debilitating issue is insecurity. We are of the firm belief that the police central command be brought so near the federating units for effective monitoring. We have been relentless in advocating for the establishment, therefore, of state police and we will continue to call for it. There can be no other way, if we are indeed serious about securing lives and property. Every state must be allowed to secure its space. He said the security challenge informed the establishment of the Ondo State Security Network, along with other south-west states, codenamed Amotekun in the efforts to deal with the problem of insecurity. According to Mr Akeredolu, Amotekun has done very well in its short time of existence and has been able to work within the law, adding that its achievements have justified its establishment. He then assured visitors and citizens of the security of lives and property in the state. We are not paying lip service to this at all. It is a priority, he said. The ceremony had in attendance the national leader of the All Progressives Congress, Bola Tinubu; former governor of Osun State, Bisi Akande; Governors of Ekiti, Edo, Lagos, and Osun States; former Senate President, Ken Nnamani; former Ogun governor, Ibikunle Amosun; Iyiola Omisore, who recently defected to the APC among others. After being administered the oath of office, Mr Akeredolu and his deputy went to observe a police parade staged at the arena of the International Conference and Cultural Centre, also known as the Dome. Mr Akeredolu also highlighted some of his achievements in the first tenure, such as the construction of roads, provision of health care, renovation of primary schools and improvement of tertiary institutions. He said with his new mandate he would continue to improve on the work already, with improved economic situations. ADVERTISEMENT Mr Akeredolu noted that his first term in office recorded tremendous success due to sound fiscal discipline which enabled him and his team to deal with the challenges they met. The governor thanked his cabinet and other political leaders, including those who contested against him during the primaries for standing by him during the last governorship election held on October 10, 2020. Mr Akeredolu won the election by polling 292,830, as against Eyitayo Jegede of the Peoples Democratic Party, who garnered 195,791 votes to come second. Mr Jegede is however, contesting the outcome of the election in the Ondo governorship election tribunal claiming that Mr Akeredolu was not validly elected and that the election was marred by violence. Post-pandemic seafood could be more sustainable. Heres how tech is driving the change. by Virginia Gewin February 24,2021 | Source: Popular Science Workdays can begin hours before dawn in Guaymas, Mexico, where a small cohort of locals launch modest fiberglass-and-wood boats from the rocky shore into waters that will gleam azure at sunrise. From their pangas, crafts about 20 feet long with little more than three bench seats and an outboard motor, the 38 members of the Sociedad Cooperativa de Produccion Pesquera 29 de Agosto SCL cast baited hooks on longlines and pull in yellowtail, grouper, or snapper by hand. On most outings, each boat can catch as much as 220 pounds before it returns to dock in the afternoon. Some 75 years ago, co-op president Andres Grajeda Coronados great-grandfather, Celso Grajeda, handled his catch the same way. He used the same as we do: a line and a hook, says Coronado. A statue of Celso, one of Guaymas first fishermen, overlooks the town. Today, the city is the most productive seafood-producing community of the dozens that dot the Gulf of California, the strip of water separating the Baja peninsula from mainland Mexico, where thousands of laborers deliver fish from the ocean to cities. In Celsos day, he was one of only a few men selling catches directly to consumers on the docks, but today, a generation of artisanal workers often find themselves tangled at the bottom of a vast global supply chain. Ninety percent of the worlds 35 million fishermen operate on a small scalewith millions in remote, rural areasyet they produce more than half of the global catch and a similar share of what hits their countries export markets. Many live hand to mouth, dependent on a string of middlemen to keep 91 million tons of perishable wild-caught fish cold, processed, and distributed to restaurants, hotels, and supermarkets. On many remote docks, a single buyer sets the price, or a few collude to keep fishermen from demanding higher rates. And all the shuffling between parties from there onward provides ample opportunity for misconduct. Catches that are illegal, unreported, or unregulated (known in the trade as IUU) account for one of every five fish reeled in, injecting $23.5 billion worth of effectively stolen seafood into the market, according to Global Fishing Watch, an international nonprofit that uses satellites, infrared, and radar imagery to detect IUU. Such losses jeopardize food security for over 3 billion people and the livelihoods of small-scale fishermen. To maintain incomes, they do whatever they can to catch more. In Guaymas, a majority use gill nets, which trap swimmers by the gills in webbingto devastating consequence. A 2016 assessment of 121 Gulf of California fisheries stocks by researchers at several entities, including the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, estimates that 69 percent have collapsed and another 11 percent are overexploited. Such indiscriminate methods also lead to losses of other species, notably the critically endangered vaquita, the worlds smallest porpoise. There may be no more than 10 of them left. Thats in normal times. When COVID-19 shut down most of the world in March 2020, it unleashed an economic tsunami on the $150 billion global seafood market. The shuttering of restaurants, where nearly 70 percent of catches ended up before the pandemic, dried up demand for high-end chef favorites such as lobster, abalone, and squidas well as everyday fare like Guaymas yellowtail and grouper. The global movement of fresh fishthe most traded food commodity in the worldhas been sputtering ever since. The coronavirus is an unparalleled disruption, says Paul Doremus, deputy assistant administrator for operations at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, the US agency tasked with monitoring marine resources. It is so comprehensive in scale and scope and so long in duration that it is going to have profound effects on seafood supply chains globally, in ways we dont entirely understand yet. The interruption has undoubtedly complicated efforts to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal to end overfishing, illegal catches, and destructive practices by the end of 2020. Amid the chaos, though, many see an opportunity to reshape seafood sales in ways that bolster adoption of more sustainable methods and create a more equitable future for fishermen like those in Coronados co-op. That starts with helping the little guys benefit from supplying the best of their goods to a growing market of home cooks and eco-conscious retailers. The secret weapon is transparency: the ability for the end consumer, and industry monitors, to verify the how, where, and by whom of each snapper, salmon, or shrimp. Over the past few years, nonprofits, government agencies, and industry collectives have begun steady development of projects to rebuild depleted fish stocks, often by enlisting locals in managing catches. In addition, efforts are underway to test and adopt traceability technologies such as RFID chips, QR tags, and blockchain coding to carry information about a specific fish from hook to cook. 2021 Popular Science. A Bonnier Corporation Company. All rights reserved. Theme(s): Others. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION IN THE UNITED STATES OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION IN WHICH IT WOULD BE UNLAWFUL TO DO SO. Pratteln, Switzerland, February 24, 2021 - Santhera Pharmaceuticals (SIX: SANN) announces that it is convening an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) where the Board will propose to shareholders the authorization and issuance of the shares required to implement the upsized financing from a fund managed by Highbridge Capital Management, LLC, and the intended restructuring of its CHF 60 million Senior Unsecured Convertible Bonds. This press release complements the earlier announcement "Santhera Announces Corporate Update and Proposal to Strengthen Capital Structure", which can be viewed here . As announced in the recent corporate update, Santhera's Board of Directors is calling an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM), to be held on March 18, 2021, mainly to propose to the shareholders the authorization and issuance of the shares required to implement the below transactions: Financing arrangement with Highbridge Santhera's existing investor Highbridge Tactical Credit Master Fund, L.P. (a fund managed by Highbridge Capital Management, LLC, "Highbridge") has committed to increasing its existing financing arrangement with Santhera to provide up to CHF 18 million in senior secured notes exchangeable by Highbridge (CHF 6 million of which was previously committed), which will be available in tranches and subject to certain drawdown conditions. The maturity of such exchangeable notes has been extended to July 2022 and in consideration for this commitment and amendment, Highbridge will receive a fee in the form of five-year warrants (options) for Santhera shares priced at a small premium to a reference share price determined ahead of the closing of the bond restructuring. Bond restructuring As part of its restructuring activities, Santhera has called a bondholders' meeting (to be held on March 8, 2021) and proposes to the holders of the Bonds to (i) convert 32.5% of the principal amount of each Bond (CHF 19.5 million in aggregate) into shares of Santhera at the current conversion price of CHF 64.80 per Share and (ii) modify the terms of the remaining 67.5% of the principal amount of each Bond (CHF 40.5 million in aggregate). The terms of the amendments are set out in the invitation to the bondholders' meeting. The proposed bondholder resolution requires a majority of two-thirds of all Bonds outstanding and Highbridge as the largest bond investor with approx. 32% of the outstanding principal amount has already agreed to support the resolution. The intended strengthening of Santhera's capital structure is dependent, among others, on the approval of both its bondholders (March 8, 2021) and shareholders (March 18, 2021). If the EGM does not approve the required capital increases, the restructuring of the bonds couldn't be completed and the Company would have insufficient available capital to fully utilize the recently agreed additional Highbridge finance facility. As a result, the Company would be significantly limited in its ability to raise sufficient funding in the short term to continue operations. The Board proposes to increase the ordinary share capital by CHF 312,000 for the delivery of shares for the restructuring of part of the convertible bond, to increase the authorized capital to the statutory limit of 50% of the issued share capital and to also increase the total of the two conditional capitals to the same 50% limit (the proposed increase of the conditional capital for employee participations amounts to CHF 1,850,000). The Board of Directors is also requesting shareholder support for a motion related to a both time and performance based equity instrument for Executive Management in the form of performance share units (PSU). The agenda for the EGM, with details on each of the proposed agenda items and further information, can be viewed here . Due to COVID-19 restrictions, shareholders will be able to exercise their rights at the EGM solely via the independent proxy. All proposed capital increases require the approval by two thirds of the votes represented at the EGM. Related Documents Invitation to the Extraordinary General Meeting. Press release "Santhera Announces Corporate Update and Proposal to Strengthen Capital Structure": Link . Invitation to the Bondholders' Meeting Corporate calendar March 8, 2021 Bondholder Meeting March 18, 2021 Extraordinary General Meeting April 27, 2021 Publication of annual results and Annual Report 2020 June 22, 2021 Annual General Meeting About Santhera Santhera Pharmaceuticals. Raxone is a trademark of Santhera Pharmaceuticals. For further information please contact: public-relations@santhera.com or Eva Kalias, Head External Communications Phone: +41 79 875 27 80 eva.kalias@santhera.com Disclaimer / Forward-looking statements This publication is not intended to constitute an offer or solicitation to purchase or invest in securities of Santhera Pharmaceuticals Holding AG in any jurisdiction. The securities referred to in this publication, including in connection with the contemplated transaction described in this publication, may not be publicly offered, directly or indirectly, in Switzerland within the meaning of the Swiss Financial Services Act ("FinSA"). Neither this communication nor any other information material relating to the securities referred to in this publication constitutes advertisement within the meaning of the FinSA or a prospectus pursuant to the FinSA, and no such prospectus has been or will be prepared for or in connection with the transaction described in this publication. This publication does not constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to purchase, any securities in the United States. The securities of Santhera Pharmaceuticals Holding AG to which these materials relate have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"), and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements of the Securities Act. There will not be a public offering of securities in the United States. This publication may contain certain forward-looking statements concerning Santhera Pharmaceuticals Holding AG and its business. Such statements involve certain risks, uncertainties and other factors which could cause the actual results, financial condition, performance or achievements of Santhera Pharmaceuticals Holding AG to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such statements. Readers should therefore not place undue reliance on these statements, particularly not in connection with any contract or investment decision. Santhera Pharmaceuticals Holding AG disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. # # # Attachment Apparel firm Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd ( ABFRL ), which retails brands such as Louis Philippe, Van Heusen, Allen Solly, on Wednesday announced a partnership with designer Tarun Tahiliani for luxury couture and ethnic menswear. Under the partnership, ABFRL and Tahiliani will jointly set up a new entity which will retail contemporary ethnic wear and accessories for men under a new brand. ABFRL will hold 80% in the venture and Tahiliani 20%. ABFRL said the partnership will strengthen its position in the ethnic wear segment. The new entity will open the first set of retail stores by September. The company plans to operate 250 stores over the next five years for the mens ethnic wear brand, targeting sales of 500 crore. As part of the partnership, ABFRL will also acquire 33.5% stake in Tahilianis luxury couture business Goodview Properties Pvt. Ltd for about 67 crore, with an option to increase it to 51% later. ABFRL has been increasing its exposure to premium Indian designer labels over the last two years with several investments. In January, ABFRL signed a definitive agreement to acquire a 51% stake in luxury designer label Sabyasachi, a brand owned by designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee, for an estimated 398 crore. These investments give the retailer of mens formal wear and fast-fashion brands access to the occasion wear market, with a sharp focus on ethnic clothing. In June 2019, ABFRL had acquired ethnic apparel and lifestyle retailer Jaypore for 110 crore. The deal was intended to help it tap the fast-growing ethnic apparel market. In July 2019, the firm announced a partnership with Shantanu & Nikhil. Over the next few years, ethnic wear is going to be an important category. Tarun Tahiliani has been at the forefront of the emergence of the Indian design industry and we are proud to partner with him to launch a brand that gives the emerging Indian consumer a new range of celebration wear at more accessible prices," Ashish Dikshit, managing director, ABFRL said in a statement Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Aankhen 2: Amitabh Bachchan, Sidharth Malhotra And Akshaye Khanna Starrer To Go On Floors In May? It was some weeks back that the news of Aankhen 2 and a fresh cast of the film had started doing the rounds. While there has been no official confirmation of the same yet, it is being reported that Sidharth Malhotra and Akshaye Khanna will join Amitabh Bachchan in this film. Now, we are getting to hear that the film is all set to go on floors in May. Amitabh Bachchan will continue to play Vijay Singh Rajput, and Sunil Grover will also be a part of the cast. A source told Mid Day, The heist in Aankhen 2 is being planned on a grander scale. The temperamental Vijay Singh Rajput returns after serving his prison sentence and leads a new team of visually-impaired people, played by Sidharth, Akshaye and Sunil, as they rob a gaming establishment. Considering the story is set abroad, the unit has done recce in the UK and Bulgaria. If all goes well, the three actors will kick off the first schedule from May 20 with Bachchan joining them later. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Akshaye Khanna (@akshaye_khanna) Delhi Belly director Abhinay Deo would be helming this one and he confirmed the news of the casting of the film but said there's no surety of the date it would go on floors. He told the daily, Mr Bachchan, Akshaye Khanna and Sidharth Malhotra are part of Aankhen 2. We are in the process of finalising the fourth actor. At this point, I cannot comment on anything else as theres no surety about the shooting schedule. We are looking forward to this film. The Joint Forces' units have returned fire. The Command of Ukraine's Armed Forces has reported one killed in action (KIA) and two wounded in action (WIA) amid 20 violations of the ceasefire agreement by Russia-controlled armed groups in the Donbas warzone on Tuesday, February 23. "In the past day, February 23, as many as 20 ceasefire violations were recorded in the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) zone," the press center of the Ukrainian JFO Command said on Facebook in an update as of 07:00 Kyiv time on February 24, 2021. In particular, Russia's armed formations fired proscribed 82mm mortars and grenade launchers of various systems near the village of Zaitseve. "A serviceman was killed as a result of the shelling, while another one sustained shrapnel wounds," reads the report. The Joint Forces' Command has expressed its sincere condolences to the families and friends of the fallen soldier. Read alsoAnother Russian sniper unit arrives in Donbas intelligenceAlso, the enemy used 120mm mortars and anti-tank grenade launchers near the town of Krasnohorivka, as well as heavy machine guns, automatic and sniper rifles near the village of Pisky. "One Ukrainian defender was wounded as a result of the shelling," the JFO HQ said. The Russian occupation troops also fired grenade launchers of various systems and heavy machine guns near the village of Shumy, as well as rifles near the villages of Prychepylivka and Katerynivka. What is more, the enemy used anti-tank grenade launchers near the town of Avdiyivka, and the villages of Luhanske, Zolote-4 and Myronivsky, automatic grenade launchers near the village of Hnutove, and hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers near the villages of Pavlopil and Novoselivka Druha. The Joint Forces' units have returned fire. The violations were reported to OSCE representatives through the Joint Center for Control and Coordination (JCCC) of the ceasefire in Donbas. Since midnight, enemy forces have not attacked Ukrainian troops. Ukrainian military say the situation is under full control. Donbas ceasefire: Background Participants in 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 00:01 on Monday, July 27, 2020. On the very first day of the newly-agreed truce, Russia's hybrid military forces mounted three attacks on Ukrainian positions in Donbas, eastern Ukraine. Ukraine has reported more such violations over the latest period. Reporting by UNIAN Heathrow saw passenger numbers collapse to 22 million while cargo volume was down 28%. Photo: Getty Images Once Europes biggest airport, Heathrow suffered an annual loss of 2bn ($2.8bn) in 2020, as passenger numbers were hit and the pandemic took a major toll on the travel industry. Heathrow Airport Holdings, which runs the airport, said this highlighted the devastating impact of COVID-19 on aviation as passenger numbers collapsed to 22.1 million, levels not seen since the 1970s. Overall revenue fell 62% to 1.2bn and adjusted EBITDA fell to 270m. Government policies over recent months have effectively closed borders. We have had no government support, other than furlough, and have not been given relief from business rates, unlike other airports, retail and hospitality businesses, Heathrow said in a statement. It added that the UK budget, to be announced in March, will be a key opportunity for chancellor Rishi Sunak to support the travel sector by providing 100% business rates relief and extending the furlough scheme. We can be hopeful for 2021, with Britain on the cusp of becoming the first country in the world to safely resume international travel and trade at scale, said Heathrow CEO John Holland-Kaye. He added that prime minister Boris Johnson will have the unique opportunity to secure global agreement on a common international standard for travel when he hosts the G7 in June. The company also said it saw a 28% decline in cargo volumes, which "shows the cost to the economy of shutting down aviation." It explained that passenger planes from Heathrow are the UKs global trading network, carrying British exports and inbound supply chain and that the UK's economic recovery will be held back until long haul passenger flights are restarted, especially to key markets such as the US. READ MORE: Heathrow no longer Europe's biggest airport as it slams lack of passenger testing In October Heathrow had significantly revised down its 2021 forecasts as the pandemic and restrictions continue to hit air travel, predicting 37.1 million passengers this year. It had forecast 62.8 million in June. Story continues Heathrow has been plunged into the toughest crisis in its history and is fighting for survival as demand for international travel has plummeted," said Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. She said "there had been high hopes fortunes would change rapidly following vaccine breakthroughs but the mutation of the virus causing fresh spikes of infection across the world has seriously delayed its recovery." She noted that Heathrow has a 3.9bn support cushion of liquidity to see if through, "but there could be yet more turbulence ahead if restrictions severely curtail the summer season." Joe Morris, partner at law firm, Gowling WLG, said that the knock on effect of the pandemic on airport traffic and footfall "has undoubtedly been damaging. However, the accumulative result of passenger numbers swelling as planned lockdown lifting measures take effect should help boost investment in Heathrow as its retail network, as well as flight numbers, look towards recovery." There is some optimism around travel later in the year. UK prime minister Boris Johnson set out his roadmap out of lockdown in parliament on Monday. The rules are not clear on when exactly both domestic and international travel will be allowed, but it does appear current strict restrictions will be eased. Included in Johnson's four-step plan was to allow international travel potentially by 17 May, although not any earlier, and subject to review. Johnson said current restrictions on international leisure travel will only be eased after a review in April, led by transport secretary Grant Shapps. The market appears to be positive about the outcome of this review. Earlier this month, Shapps had said foreign holidays will remain banned until everybody has had a coronavirus vaccine. His comments sparked an angry response from the travel industry. Meanwhile domestic holidays will also be prohibited until 12 April at the earliest, which is when the second stage of the roadmap will kick in. Airlines and travel firms have seen a bump in demand since prime minister Boris Johnson's proposed roadmap out of lockdown was laid out. In the hours after the announcement, budget airline EasyJet (EZJ.L) said bookings by UK customers for the summer season were more than four times higher compared with the same period during the previous week. According to the data, the most popular destinations for this summer are beach resorts including Malaga, Alicante and Palma in Spain, Faro in Portugal and the Greek island of Crete. August is the most booked month, followed by July and September. WATCH: Should I book a holiday in 2021? Spain's prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, announced in Congress this Wednesday (24 February) that the central government will approve in the "next few weeks" an additional aid package of 11 billion euros for "new actions" for companies, small and medium-sized enterprises and the self-employed. This is a "significant amount of resources for sectors that were competitive before the pandemic, such as tourism, hotels or small businesses", according to Pedro Sanchez during his speech to the lower house. The objective, said the prime minister, is "to facilitate the return of the economic activity, reinforce the solvency of balance sheets and to make investments and hire workers to face the economic recovery". However, Sanchez has not specified whether it will be direct aid, which other countries, such as Germany, have deployed and something that the business sectors, employers and different economic organisations are demanding. During his speech about coronavirus and the current state of alarm, the leader of the PSOE said, "We not only want to save companies and jobs but to strengthen them and create new companies and jobs." "Economic recovery is a firm hope," he said. The prime minister highlighted that, since the beginning of the pandemic, the government has committed 20 per cent of gross domestic product in resources in "an exercise of protection never seen before". He also added that transfers to the autonomous regions since the beginning of the pandemic exceed 24 billion euros, designed to strengthen healthcare but also, he said, to inject direct aid as the regional authorities are closest to and aware of the impact of the restrictions applied. A subsidiary of Germanys Munich Re will no longer insure the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Europe amid the fear of sanctions by the U.S. government. The U.S. has been threatening sanctions against European companies that support construction of the $11 billion gas pipeline, and Zurich Insurance Group dropped out last month. "Munich Re Syndicate has issued the notice of termination to Nord Stream 2," a spokesman said in an emailed statement on Tuesday, referring to the companys subsidiary. Munich Re declined to provide further details, Reuters reported. Nord Stream 2 declined to comment on Munich Res decision but said it was up to European governments and the European Commission to protect European companies from sanctions that "they have described as contrary to international law and an interference in energy policy sovereignty." [February 24, 2021] Markforged, Leader in Additive Manufacturing, to Become Publicly Listed Through Merger With one Markforged (the "Company"), creator of an integrated metal and carbon fiber additive manufacturing platform, The Digital Forge, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to merge with one (NYSE: AONE), a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by A-star and founded and led by technology industry veteran Kevin Hartz. Upon completion of the transaction, the combined company will retain the Markforged name and will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "MKFG." This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005529/en/ Markforged's AI-powered and intuitive additive manufacturing platform, The Digital Forge, is reinventing manufacturing by continuously improving and transforming the way engineers, designers and manufacturing professionals operate all over the world. (Photo: Business Wire) Founded in 2013, Markforged's AI-powered and intuitive additive manufacturing platform delivers tangible value to customers by solving demanding applications across key verticals, including industrial automation, aerospace, military and defense, space exploration, healthcare and medical and automotive. The platform seamlessly combines precise and reliable 3D printers with industrial-grade materials and cloud-based machine learning software, providing modern manufacturers with the resources to create more resilient and agile supply chains while saving time and money. A differentiated solution. Markforged invented a new industrial-grade process that replaces traditionally manufactured plastic, steel and aluminum end-use parts with both easy-to-print metal and the Company's proprietary continuous Carbon Fiber Reinforced (CFR) composites. This solution is powered by an integrated modern software platform that continuously updates and learns via AI, driving faster innovation and deployment. The Company has a full suite of Industrial and Professional grade printers being sold to customers today, as well as more than 170 issued and pending patents. As adoption of these technologies continues to spread across the $13 trillion global manufacturing industry, the Company is well-positioned to become a critical partner to leading manufacturers of the future. Strong track record. Markforged's products are already in 10,000 facilities across 70 countries. The Company has printed more than 10 million parts across the entire product development lifecycle, from R&D to aftermarket repair. Markforged has a proven operating model and a strong track record of growth since inception and generated revenue of approximately $70 million in 2020. Large and growing market opportunity. The additive manufacturing industry represents a large and growing market opportunity. The industry has grown from $2 billion in 2012 to an expected $18 billion in 2021, and it is projected to reach $118 billion in 2029. As additive technology matures in its ability to create cost-effective end-use parts, industry growth is driven largely by the acceleration of existing supply chain consolidation and reshoring trends. "Our mission and vision are to reinvent manufacturing by bringing the power and agility of connected software to the world of industrial manufacturing. Today is a pivotal milestone as we progress towards making that vision a reality," said Shai Terem, President and CEO of Markforged. "We've been at the forefront of the additive manufacturing industry, and this transaction will enable us to build on our incredible momentum and provide capital and flexibility to grow our brand, accelerate product innovation, and drive expanded adoption among customers across key verticals. We're focused on making manufacturing even better by capitalizing on the huge opportunity ahead, and we are making this important leap through our new long-term partnership with Kevin Hartz and the entire team at one, a group of seasoned founders and operators with unparalleled experience. Their expertise and guidance will be invaluable as we continue to reinvent manufacturing today, so our customers can build anything they imagine tomorrow." Kevin Hartz, Founder and CEO of one, commented, "Markforged has already reinvented the additive manufacturing industry and is well-positioned for robust growth benefiting from the velocity of digitization. When launching one, our priority was to partner with a company with exceptional founders, visionaries and operators taking a differentiated approach in large and growing markets - Markforged ticked all of those boxes and more. We're thrilled to be working closely with the entire Markforged team, comprised of highly engaged founders, visionary leaders and world-class engineers, uniquely positioned to lead a revolution in modern manufacturing." Greg Mark, Founder and Chairman of Markforged, said, "When I co-founded Markforged, our mission was to reinvent manufacturing by driving innovation and creating products and technologies that have the potential to transform an entire industry. I've been thrilled that Markforged has thrived in its successful pursuit of these ambitions with a growing network of customers across major sectors and around the world. As we take Markforged to the next level, we have found the ideal partner in one. Kevin and his team recognize not only Markforged's ability to transform the way businesses innovate, but also the brilliant, passionate employees that make this company so unique." Transaction Overview The combined company will have an estimated post-transaction equity value of approximately $2.1 billion at closing. The transaction will provide $425 million in gross proceeds to the Company, assuming no redemptions by one shareholders, including a $210 million PIPE at $10.00 per share from investors including Baron Capital Group, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Miller Value Partners, Wasatch Global Investors and Wellington Management, as well as commitments from M12 - Microsoft's (News - Alert) Venture Fund and Porsche Automobil Holding SE, existing Markforged shareholders. Net transaction proceeds will support Markforged's continued growth across key verticals and strengthen its competitive advantage with new products, proprietary mateials and expanded customer use cases. Current Markforged shareholders are expected to hold approximately 78% of the issued and outstanding shares of common stock immediately following the closing. The transaction, which has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both Markforged and one, is expected to close in the summer of 2021, subject to the approval of both one and Markforged stockholders and regulatory approvals, as well as and other customary closing conditions. Following the completion of the transaction, Shai Terem will continue to lead Markforged as President and CEO. Kevin Hartz will join the Company's board. Additional information about the proposed transaction, including a copy of the merger agreement and investor presentation, will be provided in a Current Report on Form 8-K to be filed by one with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available at www.sec.gov. Advisors Citigroup Global Markets Inc. is serving as lead financial advisor and capital markets advisor to Markforged. William Blair is also acting as financial advisor and capital markets advisor to Markforged, and Goodwin Procter LLP is serving as legal counsel. Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC is serving as exclusive financial advisor to one and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP is serving as legal counsel. Citigroup Global Markets Inc. and Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC are serving as co-placement agents on the PIPE. Investor Webcast Information In connection with this announcement, management of Markforged and one will host an investor webcast to discuss the transaction on Wednesday, February 24, 2021 at 8:00 a.m. EST. The webcast can be accessed here. For those who wish to participate by telephone, please dial 1-877-407-9039 (U.S.) or 1-201-689-8470 (International) and reference the Conference ID 13716849. The conference call will be accompanied by a detailed investor presentation. A copy of the investor presentation can be found by accessing https://investors.markforged.com. About Markforged Markforged transforms manufacturing with 3D metal and continuous carbon fiber printers capable of producing parts tough enough for the factory floor. Engineers, designers, and manufacturing professionals all over the world rely on Markforged metal and composite printers for tooling, fixtures, functional prototyping, and high-value end-use production. Founded in 2013 and based in Watertown, MA, Markforged has more than 250 employees globally, with $137 million in both strategic and venture capital. Markforged was recently recognized by Forbes in the Next Billion-Dollar Startups list, and listed as the #2 fastest-growing hardware company in the US in the 2019 Deloitte (News - Alert) Fast 500. To learn more about Markforged, please visit https://markforged.com. About one one is a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by A* formed for the purpose of effecting a business combination with one or more businesses in the innovation economy. one completed its initial public offering in August 2020 raising $215 million in cash proceeds. A* was founded and is led by technology industry veteran Kevin Hartz. To learn more about one, please visit https://www.a-star.co/. Important Information and Where to Find It A full description of the terms of the transaction will be provided in a registration statement on Form S-4 to be filed with the SEC (News - Alert) by one that will include a prospectus with respect to the combined company's securities to be issued in connection with the business combination and a proxy statement with respect to the shareholder meeting of one to vote on the business combination. one urges its investors, shareholders and other interested persons to read, when available, the preliminary proxy statement/ prospectus as well as other documents filed with the SEC because these documents will contain important information about one, Markforged and the transaction. After the registration statement is declared effective, the definitive proxy statement/prospectus to be included in the registration statement will be mailed to shareholders of one as of a record date to be established for voting on the proposed business combination. Once available, shareholders will also be able to obtain a copy of the S-4, including the proxy statement/prospectus, and other documents filed with the SEC without charge, by directing a request to: one, 16 Funston Avenue, Suite A, The Presidio of San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94129, Attention: Secretary. The preliminary and definitive proxy statement/prospectus to be included in the registration statement, once available, can also be obtained, without charge, at the SEC's website (www.sec.gov). Participants in the Solicitation one and Markforged and their respective directors and executive officers may be considered participants in the solicitation of proxies with respect to the potential transaction described in this press release under the rules of the SEC. Information about the directors and executive officers of one is set forth in one's final prospectus filed with the SEC pursuant to Rule 424(b) of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"), on August 19, 2020 and is available free of charge at the SEC's web site at www.sec.gov or by directing a request to: one, 16 Funston Avenue, Suite A, The Presidio of San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94129, Attention: Secretary. Information regarding the persons who may, under the rules of the SEC, be deemed participants in the solicitation of the one shareholders in connection with the potential transaction will be set forth in the registration statement containing the preliminary proxy statement/prospectus when it is filed with the SEC. These documents can be obtained free of charge from the sources indicated above. Non-Solicitation This press release is not a proxy statement or solicitation of a proxy, consent or authorization with respect to any securities or in respect of the potential transaction and shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy the securities of one, the combined company or Markforged, nor shall there be any sale of any such securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of such state or jurisdiction. No offer of securities shall be made except by means of a prospectus meeting the requirements of the Securities Act. Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements that are based on beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the following words: "may," "will," "could," "would," "should," "expect," "intend," "plan," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "predict," "project," "potential," "continue," "ongoing" or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words. These statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from the information expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Although we believe that we have a reasonable basis for each forward-looking statement contained in this press release, we caution you that these statements are based on a combination of facts and factors currently known by us and our projections of the future, about which we cannot be certain. Forward-looking statements in this press release include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the proposed business combination, including the timing and structure of the transaction, the expected new investors in the combined company, assumptions relating to redemptions, the expected proceeds of the transaction and the anticipated uses of those proceeds, the equity value, cash position and initial market capitalization of the combined company, the benefits of the transaction, the expected ownership of current Markforged shareholders following the closing of the transaction, as well as statements about the expected growth of the additive manufacturing industry, the combined company's competitive position in the industry, the anticipated growth of the combined company, the increased adoption of its products, and the expected benefits of product innovation. We cannot assure you that the forward-looking statements in this press release will prove to be accurate. These forward looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including, among others, general economic, political and business conditions; the inability of the parties to consummate the business combination or the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstances that could give rise to the termination of the business combination agreement; the outcome of any legal proceedings that may be instituted against the parties following the announcement of the business combination; the risk that the approval of the shareholders of one for the potential transaction is not obtained; failure to realize the anticipated benefits of the business combination, including as a result of a delay in consummating the potential transaction; the risk that the business combination disrupts current plans and operations as a result of the announcement and consummation of the business combination; the ability of the combined company to grow and manage growth profitably and retain its key employees; the amount of redemption requests made by one's shareholders; the inability to obtain or maintain the listing of the combined company's securities following the business combination; costs related to the business combination; and those factors discussed under the header "Risk Factors" in the registration statement on Form S-4 to be filed by one with the SEC and those included under the header "Risk Factors" in the final prospectus of one related to its initial public offering. Furthermore, if the forward-looking statements prove to be inaccurate, the inaccuracy may be material. In light of the significant uncertainties in these forward-looking statements, you should not regard these statements as a representation or warranty by us or any other person that we will achieve our objectives and plans in any specified time frame, or at all. The forward-looking statements in this press release represent our views as of the date of this press release. We anticipate that subsequent events and developments will cause our views to change. However, while we may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we have no current intention of doing so except to the extent required by applicable law. You should, therefore, not rely on these forward-looking statements as representing our views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005529/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Colorado Politics is published both in print and online. Our website features subscriber-only news stories daily, designed for public policy arena professionals. Member subscribers also receive the weekly print edition of our award-winning newspaper, containing outstanding features and news stories, in their mailboxes every Saturday. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. U.S. Naval Scholar Criticizes Philosophy Behind the Indo-Pacific Strategy Feb. 23 , 2021 (EIRNS)U.S. Naval Warfare College research professor Lyle Goldstein had never been afraid to sail against the current with regard to his vision for a sane U.S. defense policy, and it is hoped that his view is also shared by a number of U.S. defense intellectuals, who have some awareness of how the world is changing. In his latest article, The Indo-Pacific Strategy Is a Recipe for Disaster, Goldstein scores the malarkey dreamed up by U.S. policy planners based on the notion that the U.S. has now entered a period of intense rivalry with China and with Russia. Goldstein goes back to a 1992 strategy document that asserted that the goal of U.S. policy was to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge and to maintain the continuity of the unipolar moment. He also points out that the Pentagon declassified, long before it was normal, the U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific, which built on the same basic notion. The authors of the Trump Administrations framework were evidently so pleased with the work that they thought it necessary to declassify it before leaving office and share it with the public, even though the general custom is to wait 30 years before declassification, writes Goldstein. But surely they also intended that the document might constrain and direct the Biden Administrations approach to U.S. strategy heads. He continues: The strategy represents a fusion of neoconservative and neoliberal thinking and may satisfy large segments of the foreign policy elite, orchestrating the design for a new cold warthis time focusing on China. And what are the problems that this strategy represents? While harping a lot on the alliance of democracies, the strategy is meant to include countries like Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore, all of which fall into that category only with great effort. Even with South Korea and Japan, traditional U.S. allies, he argues, it will be difficult for them to follow in the wake of a U.S. man-of-war heading for China. More serious, he states, is the situation with changing the policy toward Taiwan. The island has befuddled American strategists for decades and their clever solution has been strategic ambiguity, balancing a general acceptance of Chinas claim with a subtle hint of deterrence in the hope that the complex issue could be settled peacefully. The newly declassified strategy overtly codifies the deterrence aspect without even the slightest nod to Chinese claimssomething acknowledged by American Presidents going back to Franklin Roosevelt. Discarding strategic ambiguity, as the Trump Administration seemingly did in its last year in office, has put Washington and Beijing on a direct course for war. Some Americans seem to welcome that possibility, but they are not well informed about the military balance and likely scenarios. The truth is that the United States could very well lose such a war, a fact admitted in early 2021 by a senior Air Force official, and there is no telling whether nuclear weapons would be used or not. And then there is India. Goldstein observes that Indias military potential is not what it is cracked up to be and that any attempt to promote trouble on the India-China border could lead to a disaster for India similar to that in 1962. And promoting an Indian presence in the South China Sea has already led to a major Chinese naval build-up. Goldstein also calls out the folly for India in pushing a major military buildup with so much of its domestic needs crying for attention. Goldstein concludes: In the end, the Indo-Pacific framework proved long on rhetoric and ideology, but failed to grapple seriously with the underlying changes in the regional balance of power that must occasion a new U.S. strategy based on realism and restraint. The Biden administration should not overlook the former strategys foundational weaknesses. The new team would be wise to junk the old strategy and start fresh. Good advice from a defense scholar with great experience. Goldstein set up the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. But his article was published in a lesser known blog, Lawfare, which is, however, published in cooperation with Brookings Institution. Hopefully, it will be transmitted further. For although Lyle Goldstein may be a lone voice, in a cacophony of disparateand mostly outlandishvoices, it does remain the voice of reason, and therefore deserves to be heard. New observational series The Pet Rescuers follows the daily adventures of a team on a mission to give abandoned pets a second chance. Filmed during Victorias second lockdown by Silverfox Network this is a 10 part series. Each year in Australia, a quarter of a million dogs and cats are put down, due to overcrowded pounds and shelters, says Marisa Debattista, who leads the team at Second Chance Animal Rescue (SCAR) in Melbourne. Its a tragic cycle that were determined to end. Rescuing cats on death row, bottle-feeding kittens, performing life-saving surgery and rehabilitating neglected dogs, before finding them new homes are all in a days work, at the outer suburban shelter, where no fur baby in need is ever forsaken. As long as theres a chance they can be nursed through to a healthy, happy life, we wont give up on them, assures Marisa. Not even a global pandemic could slow down these champions of the underdog (and cat). They became Covid-safe warriors overnight, says producer Euan Jones. Taking surrenders in the car park, doing outdoor vet consults, delivering free pet food to owners in need. We had to scale down so much that many scenes featured just one person and an animal and had to be shot on a gopro, explains producer Gillian Bartlett. The result is fabulously intimate. Each character (both two- and four-legged) shines through and every interaction beautifully illustrates the warmth and depth of the bond between them. While The Pet Rescuers title may seem to refer to the humans in the story, SCAR member Megan insists it could be read another way. I think animals are much more resilient than we are, she explains. As long as theyre loved, as long as theres food, animals bounce back so quickly. They teach us so much about survival, sometimes it feels as though they are actually rescuing us. Saturday 6 March at 4pm on Nine. Related SAN RAFAEL, Calif., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Phoenix American Financial Services and its subsidiary PAFS Ireland, Ltd ("Phoenix American") announced solid business and operational progress in 2020, building on the company's nearly 25-year industry-leading role as provider of managing agent services for asset-backed securitizations (ABS) in the commercial aviation industry. In February 2020, Phoenix American was appointed as Managing Agent for the AASET 2020-1 ABS and the LUNAR 2020-1 ABS. With the pandemic shutdowns, the company concentrated on maintaining peak service levels for existing clients and enhancing other revenue streams: accounting for sale-leaseback transactions, servicing warehouse facility deals, administering finance transactions and being appointed as Managing Agent to legacy ABS deals, while managing a 10% increase in headcount for the eventual recovery of the ABS industry. "Providing additional supports and value adds to our clients, as they have worked through the impact of the pandemic is something the team at Phoenix American placed significant focus on," said John McInerney, Managing Director of PAFS Ireland. "With the continual recruitment and development internally, Phoenix American is perfectly placed to help assist new and existing clients as the aviation industry exits the effects of this pandemic." In January, 2021, Phoenix American was appointed as Managing Agent for the CLAS 2021-1 ABS, the first ABS transaction to come to market since the pandemic began, clear recognition of Phoenix American's strength at the center of the ABS marketplace. With this addition, the company now serves entities with over 1400 aircraft and engines having a combined appraised value exceeding $36 billion. A new fund accounting service offering for aircraft finance clients was introduced in 2020. Phoenix American now offers a full-service, 'one-stop-shop' solution for a variety of aviation finance structures. In 2020, PAFS Ireland, Ltd. completed an ISAE 3402 Type II audit, certifying that the company has internal controls that meet or exceed the standards of the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB). The ISAE 3402 Type II is equivalent to a SOC 1 Type II audit in the United States In July, 2020, John McInerney, Managing Director of PAFS Ireland, was named 'Future Leader of Year' by Airline Economics Magazine topping its 'Top 40 Under 40' list, which honors outstanding aviation industry professionals under 40 years of age. Mr. McInerney's proficient management of the growth of PAFS Ireland and exemplary leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic shutdown earned him this honor. Phoenix American attributes its continued success to an uncompromising insistence on excellence in every aspect of its service offering. The company utilizes Oracle Financials for its general ledger accounting and adheres to robust processes, procedures and controls. The company's long-tenured work force represents deep levels of operational experience. "Top tier technology, a rigorous control environment and experienced personnel with a laser focus on customer service are what issuers look for in a managing agent and that's what we deliver at Phoenix American," said Joseph Horgan, Senior Vice President at Phoenix American. Phoenix American Financial Services, Inc. Phoenix American Financial Services, including subsidiary PAFS Ireland Ltd, provides managing agent and fund accounting services for asset backed securitizations in the commercial aviation leasing industry. The company also provides fund administration, investor services, and sales and marketing reporting to companies in the alternative investment industry. The company is an affiliate of Phoenix American Incorporated along with Phoenix American SalesFocus Solutions. Phoenix American was founded in 1972, has five offices worldwide and is headquartered in San Rafael, CA. Media Contact David Fisher 310-621-7822 [email protected] SOURCE Phoenix American A 10-year-old Mumbai girl got a fresh lease of life after doctors at a private hospital extracted a 3-cm long pointed metal pin she had accidentally swallowed nearly two years ago, officials said here on Wednesday. The foreign body was detected when the girl started getting a dry cough while sleeping in certain positions, raising fears of Covid-19 among her family. They took her to the Zen Multispeciality Hospital here which conducted an x-ray on the girl's chest to make a shocking discovery. "To our utter surprise, the chest x-ray revealed a metallic foreign body in the lower airway (the breathing tube) on the left side. A CT-scan was performed to determine the precise location of the foreign object," said ENT Surgeon Dr. Kshitij Shah. Dr. Shah and his team of Dr. Shalaka Dighe, Dr. Sagar Warankar, Dr. Pramod Kale and others attempted to initially extricate the foreign body by flexible bronchoscopy, but later decided on performing a rigid bronchoscopy to remove the pin. The hour-long surgery involved gaining access to the patient's airway using a hollow metallic tube under general anesthesia, he explained. "The foreign body was successfully removed without any complications or leaving any external scars on her body. She recovered quickly and was discharged after two days," Dr. Shah said. The relieved father Sanjiv Shah said that his daughter had accidentally swallowed the pin nearly two years ago and an x-ray of the abdomen which failed to reveal the foreign object. "Everybody forgot about that incident. My daughter's life was smooth until she started complaining of dry cough after one-and-half years, while sleeping in certain positions," said Sanjiv Shah. Worried about Covid after seeing the dry cough bouts, the family took her to the hospital which helped detect the pin lodged in her chest for almost two years. "The child was hale and hearty in a couple of hours after surgery and discharged 48 hours later," said Dr. Shah. The family is grateful to the hospital for promptly treating their little girl and also urged all parents to keep their small kids away from such sharp, tiny or metallic objects like pins, coins, etc., as a safety precaution. Kanye West reportedly tried to sell some of the jewellery he had bought for his estranged wife Kim Kardashian, just days before she filed for divorce. The rapper, 43, is said to have visited two jewellers to get quotes for the items he was considering selling. A source told The Sun: 'In the last two weeks, Kanye was attempting to sell jewellery he had purchased for Kim to at least two top jewellers. Split: Kanye West reportedly tried to sell some of the jewellery he had bought for his estranged wife Kim Kardashian, just days before she filed for divorce (pictured in 2019) 'Kanye recently said, "I don't want to be connected to the Kardashian brand anymore" but he was so torn because he still very much loves Kim. 'Although he never ended up selling the jewellery he was talking about how he didn't want to be reminded of the past.' The insider added Kanye 'really wanted to stay together but she was done'. During their marriage, the Stronger hitmaker splashed out millions building Kim's jewellery collection. Divorce: A source said: 'In the last two weeks, Kanye was attempting to sell jewellery he had purchased for Kim to at least two top jewellers' (pictured September 2019) These included a $1million Lorraine Schwartz diamond necklace as her push present for North, her 15-carat engagement ring worth $3million, two Cartier bracelets and a vintage Cartier gold plaque necklace with a text from Kanye etched into it. It is not known what items out of Kim's vast collection Kanye reportedly wanted to sell. MailOnline has contacted Kim and Kanye's representatives for comment. Kim filed for divorce from Kanye on Friday, after almost seven years of marriage. Bling bling: During their marriage, the Stronger hitmaker splashed out millions building Kim's jewellery collection. Here she is pictured showing off a vintage Cartier necklace last year The reality star is asking for joint legal and physical custody of their four young children: North, seven, Saint, five, Chicago, three, Psalm, 21 months. It was claimed that neither will contest their prenup and they are far along in their agreement over how to split the property. Kim is worth almost $1B thanks to her makeup, fragrance and intimates lines. The rapper is worth a reported $1.3B thanks to his music, concerts, and apparel and shoe lines. The insider added to the publication that the plan is for their children to remain in the Los Angeles area, despite Kanye appearing to call Wyoming home these days. The Selfish author has had very little contact with the rapper since October when they argued during her 40th birthday party held at The Brando resort in Polynesia which kickstarted several reports the two were over. The tension reportedly started in July when he decided to run for President of the United States and ranted he wanted North aborted but Kim refused. He also called Kim's mother Kris Jenner 'Kris Jong Un.' A source told People Magazine on Friday that the rapper is now 'resigned to reality' over the divorce filing, add that 'it is a somber day for him.' A big family: The reality TV star and makeup guru is asking for joint legal and physical custody of their four children North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm 'It's as amicable as possible, but amicable doesn't mean joyful or ideal,' a source told the publication. 'It just means that they're being adults about the whole thing.' People also reported that Kim is 'ready to move on' from the divorce drama. 'Kim is with her family today,' said an insider. 'She is doing okay. She is sad, but ready to move on. The source said that Kim and Kanye's marriage 'has been broken for a long time.' 'Kim feels like she has done everything she can to save it. Filing for divorce is something she has been thinking about for a long time. She has also been dreading it. She really, really has done everything to avoid filing. 'Last year, she hoped they could somehow work things out,' they added. 'In the past few weeks though, it has been clear that they are done. Although, there is still love, they are just too different and have different visions for the future.' An insider told the site that Kanye 'is fine with the joint custody arrangement.' He and Kim have already discussed co-parenting, it was added. The children have been seen mostly with Kim in Hidden Hills, California, in the past few months. Kim and Kanye started dating in 2012, became engaged in 2013 and wed in May 2014 in Italy after they had already welcomed their eldest daughter North. This will be Kim's third divorce as she was wed to Damon Thomas from 2000 until 2004 and she was married to Kris Humphries from 2011 until 2013. The logo of Boyu Capital is seen at the company's office in Hong Kong December 11, 2013. (Tyrone Siu/File Photo/Reuters) Boyu Capital Moves Operations Out of Hong Kong Amid Suspected Political Infighting: Report Boyu Capital, a fund company owned by Chinas former leader Jiang Zemins family, is moving its business from Hong Kong to Singapore and Shanghai, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Feb. 22. Jiang built a faction within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) centered in Shanghai that controlled Hong Kong and had influence in other regions. Jiangs faction, also called the Shanghai clique, is the main rival of current Chinese leader Xi Jinping within the party. Xis actions, such as changing the leadership of Chinas central government Hong Kong Liaison Office in January 2020 and suspending the IPO of Alibabas Ant Groupwhich Boyu Capital holds shares inin November 2020, are designed to take over power from Jiangs faction or block its development, according to a China affairs commentator. It makes sense that Alvin Jiang Zhicheng (Jiangs grandson) is transferring Boyu Capitals operations from Hong Kong to Singapore and Shanghai. Singapore is a free state where can make sure his wealth wont be taken away by Xis administrations. Shanghai is the base of Jiangs faction where the faction has the capability to protect its properties, U.S.-based China affairs commentator Tang Jingyuan told The Epoch Times in a phone interview on Feb. 23. Former leader of China Jiang Zemin (L) and current leader Xi Jinping. (Wang Zhao & Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images) Business Transfer Out of Hong Kong Boyu Capital is headquartered in Hong Kong and has offices in Beijing and Shanghai. Recently, the company added a Singapore office on its website, which is located at a shared commercial building in the citys main business district and faces Marina Bay. This is the first office that Boyu Capital has outside of China. According to Google records, a webpage was established on Feb. 3 showing the company was incorporated in Singapore. Boyu Capital Singapore was registered on Nov. 22, 2019, at another address under the name of Tong Xiaomeng, who serves as the companys CEO, according to the Singapore business website. Tong, 48, has an English name, Sean, holds a mainland China passport, and is a Hong Kong permanent resident. He joined Boyu Capital in May 2011 as co-founder in Hong Kong, according to his public resume. WSJ reported on Monday that Boyu Capital planned to transfer part of its Hong Kong operations to Singapore to reduce exposure to potential Chinese scrutiny. A view of Singapore city center. (Roslan Rahman/AFP Getty Images) The report quoted two people who knew of the Boyu Capital move and expressed concern over Jiangs ebbing clout. The report said Tong and another co-founder of Boyu Capital, Louis Cheung (Zhang Zixin), moved from Hong Kong to Singapore in 2019 to operate the new office and the business. This month, Boyu Capital Hong Kong-based chief financial officer Vincent Fok moved to Singapore, joining Tong and Cheung to work in the Singapore office. The three key executives moved to Singapore because the company transferred its business from Hong Kong to there, the report explained. It also mentioned that Boyu Capital is moving other parts of its operations to Shanghai where the companys bossthe Jiang familyresides. The Epoch Times called Boyu Capitals headquarters on Feb. 24, and was told: Unfortunately, we have no comment about that [the business transfer from Hong Kong to other offices]. A man uses his umbrella on Kowloons Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront that faces Victoria Harbor and the Hong Kong Island skyline (back) in Hong Kong on Aug. 19, 2020. (Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images) Big Ambitions Tang said that more and more businesses are moving out of Hong Kong since the Beijing regime passed the national security law on June 30 last year. [Businessmen are] worried that the regime will behave as it does in the mainland, and take away peoples properties without following any law. Tang then reviewed how Hong Kong police have arrested a large number of pro-democracy politicians and activists in recent months. Hong Kong is more and more like a mainland city, rather than having the democratic autonomy that the CCP regime had promised, he added. Boyu Capital earned a lot of money by using the political influence of Jiang Zemin. Xi Jinping definitely wants to confiscate this wealth, Tang said. Xi has promoted several officials who are loyal to him in Hong Kong. Once he feels its the time, he will take action [on Boyu Capital.] Tang believes that Jiangs faction still controls power in Shanghai and has influence in some other regions in China. Xi emphasized repeatedly that therere party members who have big ambitions [who must be removed] and all party members must unify thinking. Chinese propaganda promoted Xis words in traditional media, social media, books, even students textbooks. All these phenomena show that Xi is facing big challenges from the party. As Xis main rival, Jiangs faction still thinks that it has a chance to remove Xi. Boyu Capital must feel that its Shanghai office can be protected by Jiangs faction under [the] current condition, Tang concluded. A streak of lightning is seen above the skyline of Shanghai, China on Aug. 19, 2016. (Aly Song/Reuters) Boyu Capital Jiang Zemin was the Chinese leader from 1989 to 2002. Jiangs older son, Jiang Mianheng, was the first president of ShanghaiTech Universityfounded in 2013and a board member of Shanghai-based Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, state-run China Netcom Corporation, SAIC Motor, and Shanghai Airport Authority. Jiang Mianheng used to hold key positions in several Chinese state-owned businesses and organizations, such as the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences from 1999 to 2011. Alvin Jiang, 35, is the only child of Jiang Mianheng and the oldest grandchild of Jiang Zemin. He received a bachelors degree in economics from Harvard University in 2009 and then worked in Goldman Sachs principal investment area in Hong Kong for nine months. In 2010, then 24-year-old Alvin Jiang assembled an all-star team and co-founded Boyu Capital in Hong Kong. His partners included former Lenovo CFO Mary Ma Xuezheng and former executive director of Ping An insurance group Louis Cheung. The combined business experience of Ma and Cheung was over 50 years, double that of Alvin Jiangs age. Ma died from pancreatic cancer in August 2019 and Cheung still works for Boyu Capital. A close-up view of an Alipay logo in the Shanghai office building of Ant Group in Shanghai, China in a file photo. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images) During Boyu Capitals development, the fund management company always invested in a business before an IPO and then sold out the shares after the IPO. Through this investing-selling process, Boyu Capitals returned several times its investment in profit. For example, Boyu Capital invested in Alibaba in 2012. Two years later, Alibaba was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2017, Boyu Capital invested in WuXi Biologics. Weeks later, the company was listed on the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing. In the same year, Boyu Capital invested in SF Express, days before it listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Alibabas Ant Group, the owner of Chinas largest digital payment platform Alipay, planned an IPO in Hong Kong and Shanghai in 2020, but was stopped by Xi Jinping in November. Chinas state-run media Caixin reported on Aug. 27, 2020, that Boyu Capital held part of the shares of Ant Group by its affiliated entities. Tang said he believed that Xi stopped the two Ant Group IPOs because Boyu Capital and the Jiang faction were behind them. A newly-built community for poverty alleviation relocation in Zhaojue County, southwest China's Sichuan Province, May 13, 2020. /Xinhua For millennia, countless generations of Chinese people have dreamed of living without poverty. In the text of the great Confucius Shijing ("Book of Poems"), he presented old folk songs. Many of the songs are imbued with the hope for happiness, for a life without hunger and want. It was Confucius, the "teacher of ten thousand generations," who gave birth to the idea of "xiaokang," which he interpreted as "small well-being." Deng Xiaoping proposed to reformulate "xiaokang" into the term "moderately prosperous." In the last century, China remained the world's largest concentration of poor people in the hundreds of millions for decades. Even in 1978, the majority of the country's population lived in poverty. By 2012, there were still 99 million left. The final stage of the war on poverty began in 2013 when President Xi Jinping proposed the "Chinese Dream" and set out a specific goal of ending absolute poverty by 2021. The "black swan" of the coronavirus pandemic should have prevented these plans' implementation. The ensuing illness of tens of thousands of people stopped the economic life of huge cities, even entire provinces of the country. Then came the global economic recession. But even such colossal challenges have failed to stop the Chinese people's strong desire to achieve their goal of poverty eradication. It is now essential to analyze and understand how this success was achieved. What was the real "secret" of this historic victory? Here I would like to refer to an incident that happened to me on November 10, 2018, when I attended the first China International Import Expo (CIIE). On one of its main stands, a vast digital clock displayed a countdown until the complete eradication of poverty in the country. This picture was a living illustration of the Chinese people working hard to achieve the objective. During my trips to Gansu and Inner Mongolia, organized by the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs (CPIFA) in July 2019, I was again convinced of the people's aspiration to achieve the millennial goal. On our way from Lanzhou to Hezuo in Gansu Province, we drove 230 kilometers on a first-class highway through a picturesque Tibetan landscape. We went through dozens of beautifully designed long tunnels. I was puzzled. Tens of billions of dollars were invested in improving the lives of fewer than a million people. At a meeting with the provincial authorities, I told them that these vast investments could not be justified from a business perspective. They agreed but emphasized that business pragmatism was not the main reason for the investments; the real goal was to reduce poverty, create jobs, achieve social justice and harmonious development in this remote area. During the same trip, I attended the Kubuqi International Desert Forum in Ordos in Inner Mongolia. It is challenging to live and maintain a decent life and successful business in this arid area. The poverty level there has always been above the national average. The Kubuqi Desert project has succeeded not only in containing the growth of one of the largest deserts in China but also turned a third of the desert into green landscapes, which is about 6,000 square kilometers! I was even more surprised to learn that this colossal project was initiated and implemented not by the state with public funds but by a commercial company at its own cost. Since 1988, the privately-owned Elion company has invested billions in a greening project in the Kubuqi Desert, which has helped lift more than 100,000 local farmers and herders out of poverty. These are just two examples. They demonstrated that all available resources were thrown into the country's fight against poverty. It became evident that the real "secret" of victory was the entire nation's aspiration to achieve the Chinese people's long-held dream. The fact that absolute poverty in the country has been eliminated does not mean that the mission is accomplished. China will still need to continue its work on combating poverty. There are many fundamental issues to be resolved. A lot of obsolete industries require restructuring. Many workers are part-time and precariously employed. Some enterprises are highly dependent on government support. According to various estimates, nearly two million people who have recently been lifted out of poverty are still at risk of returning to poverty; almost three million are only slightly above the poverty line. China's impressive achievements in the fight against poverty are of immense importance to countries worldwide. Naturally, my region of Central Asia would like to learn from its neighbor as well. The Central Asian states' leaders have repeatedly expressed their wish to apply China's experience to fight poverty. For example, in September 2020, speaking at the 75th session of the UN General Assembly, President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev proposed to define the theme of combating poverty as one of the main topics on the agenda of the assembly. At the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) two months later, he again raised this topic. To coordinate interaction in this area, he put forward an initiative to develop a particular program of cooperation between the SCO member states. In his opinion, the implementation of these measures should draw on China's successful experience. As China's closest neighbors, the Central Asian countries want to fight poverty as actively as possible. Djoomart Otorbaev is the former Prime Minister of the Kyrgyz Republic, a distinguished professor of the Belt and Road School of Beijing Normal University, and a member of Nizami Ganjavi International Center. Hunter Biden had a controversial affair with his brother Beau's grieving widow Hallie, while exchanging raunchy texts, 'partying', and even renting a house with her sister, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal. Hallie Biden's older sister, Elizabeth Secundy, who was recently separated from her husband of 15 years, referred to Hunter as her 'prince' and told him she loved him, in a series of text messages dating back to 2016. The pair's relationship was revealed in files and emails recovered from Hunter's laptop - the contents of which became public last year after it was abandoned at a Delaware computer shop. While Hunter has promised to reveal details of his personal life and struggles with alcohol and drugs in his upcoming memoir, Beautiful Things, it is unclear whether Hunter has included details of his relationship with Secundy. The embattled father-of-five, now 51, split with his first wife Kathleen in 2015. When his brother Beau died of brain cancer that year, he became close to his grieving sister-in-law. He and Hallie became a couple in 2016, according to an interview Hunter gave to the New Yorker two years ago. The unconventional relationship was first acknowledged publicly in March 2017, with Joe Biden issuing a statement giving his blessing to Hunter and Hallie, 46. But emails and texts from Hunter's abandoned laptop, logged on spreadsheets and reviewed by DailyMail.com, reveal his romantic relationship with his sister-in-law was even more complicated and scandalous. Love triangle: Hunter Biden raised some eyebrows in 2017 after it was revealed he began dating his brother Beau's widow Hallie (left) shortly after his death in 2015. DailyMail.com can reveal the 51-year-old father had also exchanged sexual text messages with Hallie's sister Elizabeth Secundy (right) during that time Hunter and first wife Kathleen Biden (pictured together in 2016) married in 1997 and have three daughters together. They reportedly began living separately in 2015 and their divorce was finalized in 2017 An email obtained by DailyMail.com from Hunter's abandoned laptop suggests he had cheated on Hallie early in their relationship. On July 18, 2016, she wrote to Hunter accusing him of being unfaithful and buying another 'expensive gifts' while she had tried to get him help A text message exchange recovered from the laptop hard drive revealed a sexual conversation between Hunter and Secundy from September 2016 - at the time he would have been dating Hallie. Hunter offered to teach Secundy 'how to masturbate' and referenced buying her 'panties'. Secundy, now 49, also referred to Hunter as her 'prince' and told him she loved him in the texts. Files on the laptop suggest the relationship continued well into 2018, with one document showing they had rented a home together starting in July that year. Hunter's love life has already been a source of several scandals in the years since his split from his first wife Kathleen, the mother of his three daughters. After raising some eyebrows for dating his sister-in-law, the former lobbyist was then revealed to have fathered a child with a DC stripper whose paternity he initially denied, and later married his current wife, Melissa, just six days after meeting her in 2019. They too now have a one-year-old child, named after Hunter's late brother. Hunter found himself in hot water once again in 2020 when his laptop, that he reportedly had left at a Delaware computer store for repairs, fell into the hands of several media organizations and the FBI. Photos recovered from the device showed him posing with a crack pipe in his mouth and partying with prostitutes. Hallie is pictured front standing next to Hunter Biden (left in blue suit and sunglasses) and Joe Biden (right in black) at Beau Biden's funeral on June 6, 2015 Elizabeth, 49, shared an old photo with her brother-in-law Beau on social media shortly after he died in May 2015 Text messages suggest Elizabeth (left) was having a relationship with Hunter while separated from her husband and father of her three children Joel Secundy (right). The pair split in 2015 after 15 years of marriage but their divorce was not finalized until three years later Documents from the laptop also exposed Hunter's controversial business dealings with Chinese oil giant CEFC, leading to a federal tax fraud investigation and a probe by the Senate Intelligence Committee into undue political influence by the Chinese. The newly unearthed text messages between Hunter and Secundy could throw him into yet another controversy, and cast doubt on the timeline of his relationships he has previously given in interviews. Hunter's older brother - Joe Biden's eldest son - Beau died from brain cancer in May 2015 at the age of 46, shaking the family to its core. Hunter had struggled with drug and alcohol abuse for years, with Beau - a former Delaware attorney general - often helping him back to sobriety and encouraging him to go to rehab. Two months after Beau's death, Hunter fell off the wagon again and moved out of his home after breaking his sobriety pact with his wife Kathleen, according to an interview he gave to the New Yorker in 2019. Text messages sent from Hunter and Hallie's cell phones in 2016 and 2017, obtained by DailyMail.com, were logged in spreadsheets found on the laptop. Each line shows the telephone number Hunter or Hallie were texting, the time and date of the message, and what the message said. Above, Hunter's messages to Elizabeth are marked 'send' while hers are 'received' One conversation with Elizabeth on September 8, 2016 - when Hunter was dating Hallie - shows he suggested they 'shower together by [Facetime] every morning or night' and offered to 'teach' her 'how to masturbate' The messages show Hunter would frequently message Elizabeth late at night. In an exchange above, he playfully tells her off for choosing someone else 'over a FT shower with me'. 'I'm the only prince you know,' he adds, to which she replied: 'indeed' On September 9, 2016, Hunter texted Elizabeth telling her he had been up late watching 'bad porno movies like I'm 13', and referred to buying her 'panties' The timing of the messages suggest Hunter became involved with Elizabeth when he began dating Hallie, his later brother Beau's widow. In a conversation from July 27, 2016, he tells her 'where are you you little sh*t. I miss you' It is unclear if Hallie was aware of their relationship at this time, however, in a message sent to Elizabeth on August 4, 2016, Hunter advises her to spend time with her 'sister' and 'search your conscience' The text conversations suggest Elizabeth had been strapped for cash as she repeatedly asked Hunter for help. In August 2016, she asked him to send her 'more money' In another text message - from September 2016 - Elizabeth tells Hunter his 'transfer went through' but suggests she is still in the red In a group conversation between Hallie, Hunter and Elizabeth, from April 26, 2017, Elizabeth asks her sister and lover to 'please hire me now', adding: 'I hate asking for money everyday. It's the worst feeling' One text message conversation from November 2017 showed an argument between Hunter and Hallie during which he threatened to go off the deep end. Above Hunter writes: 'By the way I'm going to have 5 strippers naked and admiring my d**k back to my hotel tonight and I'm going to smoke crack and drink enough to kill and [sic] elephant and put your kids robbed over the phone and wake them up and assure them that your (sic) not as bad a person as you seem. Let's call [redacted] together and we can patch [redacted] in so they can see their new daddy.' The couple's divorce papers say they formally separated in October 2015, but it wasn't until December the following year that Kathleen officially filed to end their marriage. Files recovered from Hunter's laptop show the president's son drafted several long, emotional messages to his friends and family he was arguing with, and saved them as notes on his computer. In one undated note, Hunter refers to his ex-wife accusing him of 'f***ing' Hallie the day after her husband died. 'It really really was devastating to me that you adopted Kathleen's narrative: 'Dad and Aunt Hallie (K's words exactly to me tonight on phone with girls in room) were F***ING the day after Uncle Beau died,' he wrote. It is unclear who the note was addressed to and whether Hunter ended up sending it. Another email also revealed Hallie had accused Hunter of being unfaithful to her early on in their relationship, while she had been trying to get him help for substance abuse. The email appears to contradict Hunter's previous statement about when he began his relationship with Hallie. In a 2019 interview with The New Yorker Hunter claimed their romantic relationship began in the fall of 2016. But the email suggests Hallie and Hunter were already romantically involved in July of that year. 'Hunter, you cheated on me,' Hallie wrote in an email dated July 18, 2016. 'You continued to cheat on me while I worked with [redacted] etc to get you help. Not only did you cheat on me, Viagra and Cialis, you actually bought her expensive gifts. 'I am stronger than you think. I'm not standing by while you treat me like dirt.' Hunter's relationship with Hallie (pictured) was confirmed in 2017 in an interview with the New Yorker in which he revealed the two became romantically involved a year earlier Joe Biden's eldest son Beau died from brain cancer in May 2015, shaking the whole family to its core. The Delaware Attorney General Beau is seen celebrating his re-election with his wife Hallie in 2010, right. The couple wed in 2002 Brothers: Hunter (center) is pictured sitting with his late brother Beau (right) and their sister Ashley (far left) in 2012 It is unclear when Hunter and Elizabeth (pictured with friends) began their relationship, however, a source says Hunter had started spending time with the two sisters regularly at Beau's old home after he died In an interview with the New Yorker addressing the relationship, Hunter said that he went on a vacation in the Hamptons with Hallie and her two children in August 2016 and started to become close to her. But he said it wasn't until a few weeks later in the fall that they became a couple. He told the magazine he was on the way to rehab in Arizona but ended up going on a binge in Los Angeles after taking crack he bought from a man in a homeless encampment. He said he eventually checked into a rehab center in Arizona and Hallie flew to meet him at a resort spa after he checked out, where the two decided to begin their romantic relationship. However, texts on his laptop show that he was already having extremely flirtatious conversations with Hallie's sister by then. On September 8 that year, Hunter wrote to Secundy: 'We should shower together by FT [FaceTime] every morning or night when we're up at 3- stress relief - I'll teach you how to masturbate.' In one undated note found on his laptop, Hunter refers to his ex-wife accusing him of 'f***ing' Hallie the day after her husband died. It is unclear who the note was addressed to and whether Hunter ended up sending it In an email sent on August 2, 2018 - long before his split with Hallie was made public - Hunter wrote to her saying: 'I need you as a friend Hallie- you can love romantically whomever you want' The confusing tangle continued well into 2018, as Hunter and Elizabeth signed a rental agreement together on a $2,200-per-month, three-bed colonial townhouse in Greenville, Delaware, according to documents on the abandoned laptop 'Wow re-reading that I can see how Joel [Secundy's 51-year-old husband] might have some doubts,' he added. 'I'm up actually I've not gone down - when o [sic] get home tonight I'm calling you from the shower. Ly [Love you].' Secundy separated from Joel, her husband and father of her three children, in 2015 after 15 years of marriage. Their divorce was finalized three years later. The next day Hunter texted Secundy telling her he had been up late watching 'bad porno movies like I'm 13', and referred to buying her 'panties.' 'I have lulu panties. They are my only non Grammies besides the ones from you,' Secundy texted him. The conversations showed Secundy had told Hunter she loved him, and repeatedly asked him for money. Messages show Elizabeth would often tell Hunter she loved him. In this September 17, 2016 exchange, Hunter expresses he wishes he was 'back in Beijing' In another conversation, Elizabeth reassures Hunter he's her 'only prince', adding 'I'm totally coming back for you'. She also reminds him that she and Hallie are always '100% with' him (September 17, 2016) On September 4, 2016, Hunter texted Elizabeth asking if they could hang out on her porch. Sources told DailyMail.com Hunter, Elizabeth, and Hallie were 'partying' at Beau's old house regularly and 'would sit out on the patio like crackheads' Hunter's love life has already been at the center of several scandals after he split with wife Kathleen. The former lobbyist had kept nude photos of himself on his laptop On September 17 she wrote: 'I'm at Hal's alone for next 24hrs call me,' and 'LYSM [Love You So Much]'. Later that day she wrote 'your [sic] my only prince. I'm totally coming back for you.' Hunter replied: 'Well get in a mood- not quite sure what mine is yet - but it's always nice to have you fun and loving me I'm going to need it I think- except from your sister.' A friend with knowledge of Hunter's relationships told DailyMail.com that Beau's former home soon became a very different environment with Hunter, Hallie and Secundy 'partying' there regularly. 'They were living at Beau's old house and it just became a party house. They were obviously up 24/7 just partying,' the source said. 'They would sit out on the patio like crackheads almost. Hunter's split with his wife only became public in December that year, when Kathleen filed for divorce citing Hunter's alleged drug-taking and use of prostitutes. His flirtation with Secundy did not appear to have stopped his relationship with Hallie progressing. By March 2017, when several newspapers reported Hunter was in a relationship with his brother's widow, Joe Biden confirmed the news. A scruffy-looking Hunter is seen holding takeout from Burger King in a photo from his laptop. The father-of-five struggled with drug and alcohol abuse for years, with Beau often helping him back to sobriety and encouraging him to go to rehab Hunter last year opened up about his passion for art in an interview with the New York Times, saying the creative endeavor was 'literally keeping me sane' following his struggles with crack addiction. A photo obtained by DailyMail.com shows he painted a rather explicit self portrait of himself lying in bed Past: Hunter Biden became so addicted to illicit sexual thrills that he once spent $11,400 on a single night of debauchery at a New York strip club and shelled out more than $21,000 to one adult 'live cam' adult website Infamous: The picture of Hunter Biden in bed with what appears to be a crack pipe emerged from his laptop around the same time as he signed his book deal 'We are all lucky that Hunter and Hallie found each other as they were putting their lives together again after such sadness,' he told the New York Post at the time. 'They have mine and Jill's full and complete support and we are happy for them.' The texts on Hunter's laptop also show Secundy asked Hunter and her sister for money repeatedly, saying she was left near-penniless after her breakup with her husband. On August 18, 2016, Secundy wrote to Hunter saying: 'hey.... can you send me more money? sorry to ask. i promise it won't be much longer. Joel took that job. xxoo' TIMELINE OF HUNTER'S TANGLED LOVE LIFE May 30, 2015: Beau Biden passes away from brain cancer July 2015: Hunter Biden says he moved out of his home after breaking his sobriety pact with his wife Kathleen October 2015: Hunter and Kathleen formally separate August 2016: Hunter vacations in the Hamptons with sister-in-law Hallie and her children September 8, 2016: Hunter sexts Hallie's married sister Elizabeth Secundy Fall 2016: Hallie flies to meet Hunter when he got out of rehab in Arizona December 9, 2016: Hunter's wife Kathleen files for divorce March 1, 2017: Hunter and Hallie are publicly revealed as a couple, Joe Biden gives a statement with his blessing December 2017: Hunter conceives a child with stripper Lunden Roberts July 3, 2018: Hunter and Elizabeth sign a lease together on a house in Greenville, Delaware August 2, 2018: Hunter emails Hallie 'you can love romantically whomever you want' April 30, 2019: Hunter and Hallie's split is publicly revealed May 10, 2019: Hunter meets South African model Melissa Cohen May 16, 2019: Hunter marries Melissa May 28, 2019: Lunden sues Hunter over unpaid child support March 2020: Melissa gives birth to the couple's first child, a son named after Hunter's late brother, Beau Advertisement A week later she wrote, 'f*** I don't even have any money for parking. This is a nightmare that I can't wake up from.' Months later, on April 10, 2017, she sent Hunter another message saying: 'are you able to give me $500?' She also messaged Hunter and Hallie in a three-way conversation on April 26, 2017, saying: 'hunt/hallie can you please hire me now .....so i can get my life together and then i will find my own job and unburden both of you.' Hunter replied to the two of them: 'Hallie it's called leverage.' Secundy replied: 'so is that a yes? i hate asking for money everyday. it's the worst feeling.' Despite the seemingly long-term relationship, it turned out the president's son was unable to remain faithful to either Hallie or her sister. In December 2017, he conceived a child with Lunden Roberts, a reported former stripper at a Washington DC club he frequented. But a year later the confusing tangle continued, as Hunter and Secundy signed a rental agreement together on a $2,200-per-month, three-bed colonial townhouse in Greenville, Delaware, on July 3, 2018, according to documents on the abandoned laptop. The rental agreement, listing the two as tenants and Patterson-Schwartz & Associates as the landlord's agent, was from August 2018 to July 2019. The wood-floored home has three bedrooms and three bathrooms and sits on a quiet country road in the small town outside Wilmington. Emails from the time suggest that when Hunter and Secundy rented the property, his and Hallie's relationship had disintegrated. On August 2, 2018 Hunter wrote to Hallie telling her 'I need you as a friend Hallie- you can love romantically whomever you want.' 'But I have no friends that I need like I need you. I thought we agreed that we would never part ways and certainly that we would never forbid access to my family, that we would ignore and not speak to one another - that we would never make decisions unilaterally that cause harm,' the email said. Hallie and Hunter's eventual and final split did not become public until April 2019. Neither of them commented on the story at the time. 'I don't think she'll ever be the same again after Beau passed, but she was definitely better after splitting with Hunter,' the friend told DailyMail.com. 'She definitely parented more, engaged with trying to get the kids straight in school. A month after Hunter's split with Hallie was publicized, he was introduced to South African model Melissa Cohen (pictured at the inauguration) who he married six days later The father-of-five was seen with his wife and their infant son Beau, named after his late brother, joining Joe Biden on stage after he was declared winner of the 2020 presidential election Hunter Biden's stripper baby-mama Lunden Roberts (pictured with her new fiance) had chased him through the courts to take a DNA test confirming her daughter Navy was his 'I never saw anything untoward between Hunter and Hallie while Beau was alive,' the friend added. 'She was a much more serious person then, Beau and Hallie were real people then. 'Hunter was always about to burst. He would have blown up whether Beau was alive or not. Hunter was always doing some bad, dumb, stupid stuff. Hunter promises to reveal details of his relationships and struggles with alcohol and drugs in his upcoming memoir, Beautiful Things, set to be released on April 6 'But Beau wouldn't have tolerated all this other crap, and they all listened to him.' A month after Hunter's split with Hallie was publicized, he was introduced to South African model Melissa Cohen. He married her six days later. Though the Bidens may have been hopeful that their black sheep was finally settling down and ending the intrigue around his love life, there was more scandal ahead: on May 28, 2019 Roberts sued Hunter over unpaid child support. The president's son at first denied he had fathered a baby with the former stripper, until a paternity test revealed the truth. He also told the Arkansas judge presiding over the case that he did not have enough money to pay child support despite renting a $12,000 per month home in Hollywood and driving a Porsche Panamera at the time. After the judge ordered him to produce financial records, he settled the case with Roberts out of court. DailyMail.com has reached out to Hunter Biden, Hallie Biden and Elizabeth Secundy for comment. A Los Angeles comedian and former waitress is revealing what it was like to serve food to the stars, from 'flawless' Lady Gaga to 'rude' Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann. Annie Bond was a waitress 'at a busy Los Angeles restaurant for five years,' and while she wouldn't share the name of the LA hotspot where she worked, she did reveal the stars who came in during her time there. In a TikTok video that's racked up hundreds of thousands of views in less than a day, Annie dishes on her experiences waiting on Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes, Anna Faris, and more, revealing which stars were great and which could have been nicer. Spill! Annie Bond was a waitress 'at a busy Los Angeles restaurant for five years.' On TikTok, she shared details about her experience waiting on several stars at the unnamed restaurant Love her: Earning the most enthusiastic rave review was Lady Gaga, whom Annie referred to as the 'queen of my heart, queen of the world' 'Honestly, she remembered everybody's name, she always looked flawless. She's extremely nice, she's a goddess,' she said 'Anna Faris is the kindest, most wonderful person alive. I wish she was my best friend. She was so nice, just so unbelievably nice,' she gushed Earning the most enthusiastic rave review was Lady Gaga, whom Annie referred to as the 'queen of my heart, queen of the world.' She gave her a rating of five million out of ten. 'Honestly, she remembered everybody's name, she always looked flawless. She's extremely nice, she's a goddess,' she said. Next best was Anna Faris, who scored a rating of 20/10. 'Anna Faris is the kindest, most wonderful person alive. I wish she was my best friend. She was so nice, just so unbelievably nice,' she gushed. Good times! Annie seems to have had quite a few good experiences with stars, and also had a nice evening when Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes came to eat with their children 'Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes casually strolled up one night when it wasn't that busy, and they had their kids and they were so casual, and so gorgeous, and so polite,' she said Nope! Knocked Up director Judd Apatow and his actress wife Leslie Mann were not her favorite customers, rating just 1/10 Oh dear: Speaking about her encounter with the couple, Annie said she 'wanted to like [them] so much, but they were so rude' Annie seems to have had quite a few good experiences with stars, and also had a nice evening when Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes came to eat with their children. 'Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes casually strolled up one night when it wasn't that busy, and they had their kids and they were so casual, and so gorgeous, and so polite,' she said. Annie rated them 11/10, adding: 'I would like to be in their marriage.' However, Knocked Up director Judd Apatow and his actress wife Leslie Mann were not her favorite customers, rating just 1/10. 'I wanted to like [them] so much but they were so rude,' she revealed. Still, she tried to give them the benefit of the doubt in her video, adding: 'Maybe they were just having a bad day?' Sharing secrets: Laura Mesrobian, a New York City waitress, spilled the beans on stars she has served last year Rare sighting: She said her friend waited on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sometime after the 2016 election Famous: Most of her other celebrity encounters were of the Hollywood variety, including Jake Gyllenhaal, who got 7/10 'Yes, he's f***in' gorgeous. Yes, his eyes will pierce your soul. But kinda whiny? And really likes his pinot noir and French fries. Always with friends. Somehow never paid?' she recalled In November, a New York City waitress went viral on the app for sharing her own celebrity encounters. Laura Mesrobian, a 25-year-old actor and a server in the Big Apple, reflected on the times she waited on Jake Gyllenhall, Greta Gerwig, Amanda Seyfried, and Glenn Close and the surprising drink that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was downing after the 2016 election. Though Laura didn't indicate where she encountered these celebrities, until the pandemic hit she worked at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater, a downtown bar frequented by theatergoers. One of her biggest star sightings was Hillary Clinton, whom her friend served some time after the 2016 election. 'It was post-election Hillary. She had been through it. So I was thinking maybe she'd want, like, red wine, something relaxing,' Laura said. 'Hillary Clinton was drinking tequila sodas.' She rated Clinton '9/10 for drink choice' but '2/10 for war hawk policies.' Most of her other celebrity encounters were of the Hollywood variety, including Jake Gyllenhaal. Star power: Julianne Moore, whom she calls her 'redhead icon,' did slightly better with a rating of 8/10 'Beautiful, classy, and sweet. One of the few celebrities, let alone people, to look you in the eye and say thank you. Great skin, really tiny that's most celebrities. It was a joy for all,' she said VIP: Glenn Close also got 7/10, with Laura describing her as 'regal' and 'composed,' though she admitted that 'some people thought of it as cold, but I don't think so' 'Yes, he's f***in' gorgeous. Yes, his eyes will pierce your soul. But kinda whiny?' she said. 'And really likes his pinot noir and French fries. 'Always with friends. Somehow never paid? But he was pretty fun,' she added, giving him 7/10. Julianne Moore, whom she calls her 'redhead icon,' did slightly better with a rating of 8/10. 'Beautiful, classy, and sweet. One of the few celebrities, let alone people, to look you in the eye and say thank you. Great skin, really tiny that's most celebrities. It was a joy for all,' she said. Glenn Close also got 7/10, with Laura describing her as 'regal' and 'composed,' though she admitted that 'some people thought of it as cold, but I don't think so.' Good taste: Frances McDormand scored 9/10, mostly because of her urgency in ordering drinks Pretty: Amanda Seyfried, meanwhile, 'looks like a beautiful little fairy in person' '[She] came in on a super busy night with her husband but was really sweet and understanding. Got a cheese board and overall pretty great,' she said, rating her 8/10 'She'd probably dealt with a lot of people by this time, so give her a break,' she said. 'But the kicker is, with Glenn Close always came Pip. And Pip was running the show. Pip had full reign to run around the restaurant as much as he wanted. Not the most fun, but the dog was pretty funny and it was overall OK.' Frances McDormand scored 9/10, mostly because of her urgency in ordering drinks. 'All she said to me was, "Are you our waitress, because we need alcohol right now,"' Laura recalled. Amanda Seyfried, meanwhile, 'looks like a beautiful little fairy in person.' '[She] came in on a super busy night with her husband but was really sweet and understanding. Got a cheese board and overall pretty great,' she said, rating her 8/10. Sweet: Dakota Fanning, she went on, 'seems like a really normal person' and got 7/10 as well Girls' night: '[She] met a girlfriend there, split a bottle of white wine. Solid tipper. Can't complain,' Laura said Laura's highest compliments went to Greta Gerwig, whom she called a 'true queen' but Greta's partner, director Noah Baumbach, is another story While Greta talked about how her breasts changed since having a baby, Noah 'didn't seem like he was having any fun' Dakota Fanning, she went on, 'seems like a really normal person' and got 7/10 as well. '[She] met a girlfriend there, split a bottle of white wine. Solid tipper. Can't complain,' Laura said. Laura's highest compliments went to Greta Gerwig, whom she called a 'true queen.' 'This girl was so fun,' she said. 'She had just finished her pregnancy at the time and given birth to her kid, and she talked to me for about two minutes at the bar about how much her t**s had changed. 'Totally would want to party with her, all night. Just super good presence in the room,' she added, giving her 11/10. But Greta's partner, director Noah Baumbach, is another story Laura rated him just 2/10. 'Def didn't match the vibes of Ms. Gerwig,' she said. 'Didn't seem like he was having any fun? Could see why Noah Baumbach would make Marriage Story.' Loved her! New York-based TikTok user IAmTahira, a former Barneys employee, said Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall 'was amazing' and rated her 10/10 Shopping: The star (pictured in SATC) was shopping for a Prada dress for an event In February, New York-based TikTok user IAmTahira spilled the beans on the celebrities she helped over the years, detailing the best and worst behavior she experienced from A-listers during her time working at Barneys in Manhataan. First, she recalled a time she helped Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall. Though tabloid speculation has painted the actress has difficult and a diva, Tahira's experience couldn't have been further from that and she rated the star 10/10. 'Love her, she was amazing. She had a charity event, she was looking for a dress from Prada. She brought a picture in from Instagram,' she recalled. 'We actually didn't have the dress but I told her that I can call my friend at Bergdorf's to see if they have it, and they had it! 'She's like, "text me!" and I texted her, "Go to Bergdorf's, they're holding the dress for you," and she went and got the dress. She was so nice. 'I still have her number in my phone,' she added with a laugh. Sweet: Next up was Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke, who was 'so sweet' and also got a rating of 10/10 Next up was Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke, who was 'so sweet' and also got a rating of 10/10. Emilia had an appointment with a different stylist, but Tahira came over to say hello because she was a big fan. 'We talked about her Dolce & Gabbana campaign that just came out. I was also six months pregnant at the time, so we talked about motherhood. She was so sweet. Sweetest, sweetest, sweetest, sweetest thing.' But Tahira didn't rave about every star. While Kim and Emilia were both pleasant, the same couldn't be said for Pitch Perfect star Anna Kendrick. Tahira rated her -100/10, calling her a 'terrible person'. The stylist said she had actually met Anna while working at a different store in 2016, where Anna was doing a book signing. Uh-oh... Of Anna Kendrick, Tahira said that she would 'never support anything this chick does' after she behaved While on tour for her book 'Scrappy Little Nobody,' the actress made a stop at Club Monaco on 5th Avenue in New York on November 15, 2016. 'My job was to pull a few look options for her to wear for the signing,' Tahira explained. 'I'm walking her through the racks [and] she won't speak to me that's strike one. I'm asking her, "Do you want to wear pants? Or do you want to wear a dress?" She won't say anything. 'She turns to her PR lady and her PR lady was like, "Can I speak to you outside?"' she recalled. 'We go outside and she's like, "If you guys want her to wear a look, $10,000." Kerala: Fishers at sea over Kerala governments deal move by Unnikrishnan S February 24,2021 | Source: The New Indian Express The fisher communities in the state feel betrayed by the state government for allowing a huge investment by a private company to operate ships and manage facilities at the expense of the livelihood of over a million people. The controversy over the MoU signed for deep-sea fishing between Kerala Shipping and Inland Navigation Corporation (KSINC) and US-based EMCC International has come as a rude shock to them because the government has not given permit to any vessels in the past five years as part of its stated policy to protect the livelihood of the local fisher community. Besides, the states fishing policy offered support to the local community for deep-sea fishing. Even the states budget presented on January 15 earmarked Rs 25 crore for helping the fishermen buy 100 deepsea vessels at a subsidised rate. We get a feeling that the state government also supports corporate investment in fishing sector. It goes in line with the national policy, said Kerala Swatantra Matsyathozhilali Federation (KSMTF) state president Jackson Pollayil. The fishermen have reasons to be aggrieved, because if the government goes ahead with the Rs 5,000-crore project, 400 new vessels will be added to the already crowded sea front. In the absence of a national law, the sea beyond 12 nautical miles is a free-for-all location where catamarans compete with trawlers to get a share of the dwindling catch. While the regional trawl boat operators are worried about the competition in the deep sea, the traditional fishermen are suspicious about deal. The deal has a mention of five mother vessels meant for fish processing. We doubt that it would help in shallow water fishing, said Jackson. The concerns raised by the fishermen could be far fetched as the project is in a nascent stage. However, they are apprehensive because of the governments initial reaction. The minister was evasive when we approached her even before it became a controversy, said the leader. According to him, it is difficult to comprehend that the minister was unaware of the development. Experts in the sector said the deal was controversial on many aspects. The Meenakumari Committees report (2015) on deep-sea fishing said the stock is depleting. So adding more vessels would not make any business sense. The new company would find it difficult to get skilled workers as those engaged in the work have vessels under their ownership. It needs to be probed how KSINC got involved in the project without ascertaining the ground realities and the stated government policy, said A J Vijayan, an activist and an expert in the sector. The issue is likely to be a headache for the ruling LDF ahead of the elections if it fails to take the community into confidence. Protests ahead Feb 22: A replica of fishing vessel on Alappuzha beach to be burnt by KSMTF, march to the office of KSINC in Kochi by Fisheries Coordination Committee. Feb 24: A copy of agreement with EMCC to be burnt in Kochi. Feb 27: Coastal hartal by joint protest committee involving boat owners, traditional fishermen and fish workers. March: Protest march to the Secretariat. newindianexpress.com 2021 Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The consortium chosen to resurrect Jet Airways (India) Ltd has proposed to invest 600 crore in the first two years in the grounded airline to repay creditors and acquire an 89.79% stake in the carrier. This would include raising 125 crore from selling non-core assets of Jet, lawyers representing lenders and their chosen resolution professional told the Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) on Tuesday. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers The consortium comprising London-based asset management firm Kalrock Capital and entrepreneur Murari Lal Jalan is currently awaiting the bankruptcy courts approval to restart Jet that stopped flying in April 2019 amid an acute cash crunch and large debt. View Full Image Paras Jain/Mint The group has proposed to invest 475 crore in the first two years and 125 crore from the sale of existing non-core assets like realty and luxury cars of the airline by the end of the first year. It has also proposed to pay 131 crore, 193 crore, and 259 crore at the end of the third, fourth and fifth year, respectively, to financial creditors from the airlines cash flows. Overall, the consortium hopes to repay 1,183 crore to creditors over five years, which would include collections from asset sale proceeds and cash flows. A committee of creditors (CoC) of Jet Airways had in October 2020 approved the revival plan submitted by the Kalrock-Jalan group. The consortium plans to make an initial investment of 280 crore within 180 days of the court approving the resolution plan, a lawyer representing the resolution professional for Jet told NCLT. This will be used to pay off financial creditors ( 107 crore), corporate insolvency resolution process or CIRP ( 43 crore), workmen and employees ( 113 crore), other creditors ( 9 crore), and contingency fund ( 8 crore). The group has also proposed to pay 195 crore to financial creditors by the end of 730 days or the second year from the completion of the process. The successful completion of the investment plan would result in the consortium taking an 89.79% stake in Jet Airways. The other shareholders would be assenting financial creditors (9.5%), workmen and employees (0.5%) and public shareholders (0.21%). Stakes held by former promoter Naresh Goyal and family, Etihad Airways, and financial institutions will be extinguished, the resolution professionals lawyer informed the NCLT. According to the proposal, which was shared with NCLT on Tuesday, the consortium plans to replace 11 existing older planes owned by Jet with six narrow-body Boeing 737 planes, which will be used to initially operate on domestic routes and further extended to short-haul international destinations. The consortium plans to induct one plane every month, with the aim of having 120 aircraft in six years. The consortium proposes to initially begin operations with 50 staff, mostly hired from the airlines existing employee pool, and estimates that it will require about 114 employees per aircraft. Jet currently has 3,681 staff and workmen on its payroll, who would be demerged from the parent airline into subsidiary Aircraft Ground Services Ltd that would be owned by a trust formed by workmen and employees. The consortium will transfer 0.5% equity of Jet to the trust that will provide services to the airline for a fee. Experts caution that a successful return of Jet Airways would hinge on the product offered by the new owners. Jet will probably return to the sky towards the end of the pandemic...but the success of the airline will depend on its product offering, ," said Mark Martin, chief executive of aviation consulting firm Martin LLC. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. New Delhi: The Centre on Wednesday (February 24, 2021) announced that people above 60 years of age will get the COVID-19 vaccine shots from March 1. The Centre also informed that people above 45 years of age with comorbidities will also be vaccinated from the same date. "From March 1, people above 60 years of age and those above 45 years of age with comorbidities will be vaccinated at 10,000 government and over 20,000 private vaccination centres," said the Union Minister Prakash Javadekar. He added that the coronavirus vaccine will be given free of cost at the government centres. "Those who want to get vaccinated from private hospitals will have to pay. The amount they would need to pay will be decided by the health ministry within 3-4 days as they are in discussion with manufacturers and hospitals," stated Prakash Javadekar. This is to be noted that as of Wednesday till 7 am, 1,21,65,598 people have been vaccinated across India through 2,54,356 sessions, as per the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. These include 64,98,300 health care workers (1st dose), 13,98,400 health care workers (2nd dose) and 42,68,898 front line workers (1st dose). The world's largest COVID-19 vaccination drive for the first dose was started on January 16, whereas, the 2nd dose of coronavirus vaccination began on February 13 for those beneficiaries who completed 28 days after receipt of the 1st dose. The vaccination of the front line workers started on February 2. Earlier in the day, the Centre deputed high-level multi-disciplinary teams to Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir for supporting them in public health measures for targeted COVID-19 response and management, and effectively tackling the pandemic. The three-member multidisciplinary teams are headed by Joint Secretary level officers in the Health Ministry. These teams will work closely with the states and UT administration and ascertain the reasons for the recent surge in the number of COVID-19 cases. They will also coordinate with health authorities of the states and UTs for requisite COVID-19 control measures to break the chain of transmission. The states have also been advised for regular critical review of the emerging situation with concerned District officials to ensure that gains made so far in COVID management are not lost. The Centre has also written to Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab and Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir which have been witnessing a surge in the daily coronavirus confirmed cases, along with decreasing proportion of RT-PCR tests and a rise in positivity in some districts. In the letter written by the Union Health Secretary, he has exhorted Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab and the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir to focus on undertaking aggressive measures to break the chain of transmission and to ensure that RT-PCR testing is amplified to flush out hitherto undetected cases from the population. Meanwhile, Indias cumulative COVID-19 recoveries increased to 1,07,26,702 and the recovery rate now stands at 97.25%. India recorded 13,742 new coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours, which took the country's active caseload to 1,46,907. Live TV Walgreens and CVS stories will offer more cororonavirus vaccines to eligible individuals in participating locations throughout the Bay Area after receiving tens of thousands of more doses from the federal government. Both companies received an additional 49,000 vaccines each for their California stores through the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program. Vaccinations at some Walgreens began Wednesday. Eligible groups can book an appointment for a vaccine at participating CVS pharmacies starting Wednesday, with vaccinations beginning Thursday. Health care workers, long-term residents, people over the age of 65, teachers, child care workers, emergency workers, food and agricultural workers are eligible to get vaccinated in California as of Wednesday. However, some teachers, grocery store employees and first responders may not get their first-dose shots for another two or three weeks in San Francisco because many public health departments and providers are prioritizing second-dose shots. Heres how you can book an appointment with Walgreens and CVS: Walgreens Eligible individuals are required to create an online Walgreens account to schedule an appointment. To schedule an appointment, visit Walgreens.com/ScheduleVaccine or call 1-800-Walgreens or 1-800-925-4733 to find a list of participating stores in the Bay Area. Walgreens will not accept walk-ins. If appointments are not available, individuals must create an account to sign up for alerts on appointment availability. Vaccine supplies are still very limited, but they will be ramping up. Please be patient while attempting to schedule appointments, as appointments will be limited as well, Walgreens said in a statement. CVS CVS will add an additional 40 locations across California, including several in the Bay Area, that will start to administer vaccines Thursday, according to spokeswoman Monica Prinzing. Individuals can book an appointment starting Wednesday on CVS.com, through the CVS Pharmacy app or by calling 1-800-746-7287. The list of specific pharmacies will be available on CVS.com as more vaccines and appointments become available. Active stores also change based on vaccine supply, Prinzing said. Customers should continue to check availability on CVS.com. Jessica Flores is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jessica.flores@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jesssmflores NEW DELHI: The Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Wednesday, approved the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme for the domestic pharmaceutical sector for financial years 2020-21 to 2028-29. About Rs15,000 crore worth of incentives will be provided under the scheme. Also Read | Bitter home truths for migrant workers The scheme, the government said, will benefit domestic manufacturers, help generate 20,000 direct and 80,000 indirect jobs, and will likely make available a wider range of affordable medicines to consumers. It is also likely to boost production and export of high-value products. Total incremental sales worth Rs2.94 trillion and incremental exports of Rs1.96 trillion are expected during the six years from 2022-23 to 2027-28, the government said in a statement. The objective of the scheme is to enhance India's manufacturing capabilities by increasing investment and production in the sector and contributing to product diversification to high value goods...," said Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, at the Cabinet briefing. It is expected to promote development of complex and high-tech products, emerging therapies and in-vitro Diagnostic Devices. The scheme is expected to bring in investment of Rs15,000 crore in the domestic pharmaceutical sector, the government said. The manufacturers of pharmaceutical goods registered in India will be grouped based on their Global Manufacturing Revenue (GMR) to ensure wider applicability of the scheme across the industry and at the same time meet objectives of the scheme. The Indian pharmaceutical industry is the third largest in the world, by volume and is worth $40 billion. The country contributes 3.5% of total drugs and medicines exported globally. India exports pharmaceuticals to more than 200 countries and territories including highly regulated markets such as the US, the UK, the European Union, Canada, among others. As of now, low-value generic drugs make up for the chunk of exports from India, while a large proportion of domestic demand for patented drugs is met through imports. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. Borough residents may soon find a jury-duty notice in their mailbox. A spokesman for the state Office of Court Administration (OCA) said Wednesday that officials plan to send out the notices on Staten Island and throughout the city sometime next week, in anticipation of starting jury trials later next month. The expected resumption of jury trials on March 22 comes amid a drop in coronavirus (COVID-19) infections in the state. We have been discussing the restart with affected parties and feel confident about the resumption, said Lucian Chalfen, an OCA spokesman. Should the trajectory of the infection rate change from its continued downward trend, we will adjust accordingly, as we did in the fall. Criminal and civil jury trials were suspended in mid-November after a spike in coronavirus cases around New York. Jury trials were initially shut down last March at the beginning of the pandemic. They restarted seven months later in October but were quickly rolled back within weeks when coronavirus cases jumped. New grand-jury empanelments were also suspended in November, but only for seven weeks. A new grand jury was seated on Staten Island on Jan. 4. The grand jurys role is to decide whether to bring criminal charges or an indictment against individuals accused of felonies. Jury trials will also resume around the state on March 22. Chalfen said the trials will proceed slowly, at first. Incarcerated defendants will receive priority for criminal trials, he said. Since mid-March, courts have largely operated remotely due to the coronavirus. In-person functions had ramped up slowly starting in the summer, before being scaled back in November. At present, there are limited in-person appearances, and in-person staffing has been sharply reduced in all state courts. The violence in Bengaluru on August 12 last year in which Dalit Congress MLA R Akhanda Srinivasa Murthy's house and two police stations were torched was a larger conspiracy by the Social Democratic Party of India to create communal disharmony in the country,the NIA said in its charge sheet filed recently in a special court here. The National Investigation Agency took up the investigation after a person moved the Karnataka High Court demanding a probe by the agency. The agency has named 247 people as accused in the case, according to NIA sources. While the immediate cause of violence in which more than 4,000 people from minority community went on rampage was allegedly a social media post by Pulakeshinagar MLA R Akhanda Srinivasa Murthy's nephew Naveen, the NIA charge sheet said the SDPI cadres provoked him with derogatory message to insult Hindu Gods in a social media post and tagged him along. "The SDPI in Bengaluru was unhappy with the decisions of the Central government on certain matters which are repeal of Article 370, issue of CAA/NRC, Supreme Court verdict on Babri Masjid case, Triple Talaq etc." "They were waiting for an opportunity to create communal disharmony and thereby create unrest in the country," the charge sheet read. After prime accused Fairoz Pasha joined the SDPI, Mohamed Shariff, Muzammil Pasha and other SDPI Bengaluru district leaders hatched a criminal conspiracy, it said. "In furtherance to the conspiracy, they decided to post some derogatory message to insult and provoke Hindu Gods and the Hindu community through Fairoz Pasha's Facebook account," the NIA said. It added that the conspirators intentionally selected August 11, 2020 because it was Krishna Janmashtami, an auspicious day for Hindus. The agency said SDPI cadres were well prepared to respond to any situation and to execute their plans for a violent attack. Accordingly, on August 11 afternoon, Fairoz Pasha posted a video and audio clip, it said. The comments in English made blasphemous and utterly derogatory comments on Hindu Gods and Goddesses,the charge sheet said. Fairoz then tagged Naveen in the post.The post provoked Naveen to respond in a similar aggressive manner against the Prophet, the NIA stated. After noticing Naveen's reply, Fairoz approached the Muslim community members and organisation leaders for lodging complaint against him and pressurise the police and government to act against Naveen, it said. The post was widely circulated in WhatsApp and other social media accounts to hold him accountable for the violence. In the night, Fairoz Pasha mobilised SDPI cadres and others to attack houses of Naveen and Murthy and also the KG Halli and DJ Halli police stations and police personnel, the charge sheet read. Four people were killed in the violence including three in police firing and one due to abdominal injuries while many vehicles and shops were torched and damaged inside and outside the police stations. The city police, which too is probing the case simultaneously, has accused the former Congress Mayor R Sampath Raj, who is a corporator of DJ Halli ward, of being part of the conspiracy to politically finish off his own party's MLA Akhanda Srinivasa Murthy. Sampath remained absconding for many weeks before he was finally caught. He is now out on bail. New Delhi, Feb 24 : India Inc has joined the global chatter on the four-day workweek. A recent announcement about the much-talked-about new labour code suggests that organisations may be allowed to offer the option to employees. However, the ministry keeps the 48-hour cap on the workweek "sacrosanct". Much before the pandemic, remote work and flexible work policies became a part of our lives, companies around the world had begun litmus testing a three-day weekend for employees. Zahara Kanchwalla, co-founder & COO, Rite Knowledge Lab, lists down a few things to consider if you're giving the four-day workweek a thought for your workforce: More hours in exchange for extra off One of the primary arguments in favour of the four-day workweek is that the extra time off leads to better productivity at work. However, look closely and you find that it's only when a four-day workweek is accompanied by reduced weekly work hours that the concept bears fruit. Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand-based company, the first to grab headlines for testing the four-day workweek in 2018, asked its employees to work 30 hours a week and paid them for 37.5 hours. Similarly, Spain experimented with the four-day workweek in response to the pandemic, asking workers to clock in 32 hours a week. Finland's Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, has floated the ambitious idea of 6-hour 4-day work weeks. In effect, the employee continues to work between 8 to 10 hours on working days and enjoys an extra day off from work. However, in India, the weekly work hours remain 48. Adding the option for an extra day off by stretching out the other four days of work is counter-productive at best and threatens employee well-being at worst. One must consider that it's adding almost 50 per cent to the average 8-hour workday. It's a drastic shift for employees to switch into. Longer hours means less focus The brain is known to concentrate for 2-hour stretches with 15 to 30-minute intervals in between. Employee focus is usually at its peak at the beginning of the shift with concentration levels gradually dipping as the hours pass. By the 8th or 9th hour of the workday, workers are fatigued and unlikely to be at their productive-best for the additional hours they now have to clock in. It also raises the likelihood of mistakes, errors and accidents. Just like one can't make up for sleep lost in the week by sleeping for 48 full hours, the additional day off may hardly matter when one works a 12-hour shift for four consecutive days. Add to that an average of three hours of commute to and from work, makes it a total of 15 hours a day that the employee is out of their home for work. Creativity can't be clocked In a digital agency where a majority of the roles are of a creative nature, twelve-hour workdays are impractical. Sure, pulling a caffeine-fuelled all-nighter a day before an important pitch may get those creative juices flowing but that's just the pressure of the deadline in action on a creative brain. Writing, designing, creative visualising and ideating aren't functions that can be dictated to work for 12-hour stretches. Besides, one can only focus on the same project for so long before mental fatigue and the infamous creative block sets in. To be able to look at the same problem afresh, taking breaks at regular intervals throughout the day is a crucial part of the thinking and ideating process. It cannot be crammed into four days and switched off for the other three. Always connected Beyond the creative functions of a digital agency, the nature of the business itself is interdependent on many external factors and stakeholders. As a digital agency, by default one has to be connected to what's happening in real-time and be of service to clients. Twelve hour-long shifts can be demanding on those in customer-facing roles too, with the possibility for poor judgements and reactions graver in the final hours of the shift. In addition, like the rest of the services industry, in these hyper-connected times, one is also expected to be available to clients at all times. A company may put a rotational system in place but that means a further restructuring of the workforce. Work from home inspired many organisations to finally embrace flexible work policies. If your company already allows its workforce to tailor their work schedules around their personal lives, a four-day workweek may not add further value. A long break is priceless Having said that, a long break away from work is indeed priceless. Employees have long grumbled about the two-day weekend passing by in a blink. On the flip side, a four-day workweek could prove as motivation for the long weekend. Knowing that the workweek is now shorter may encourage employees to complete tasks faster. The promise of three full days to oneself may inspire employees to focus fully while at work. Besides, a three-day weekend allows one to plan longer holidays out of the city. It may also open up opportunities for employees to engage in long-forgotten hobbies, sign for an upskilling program or take up gigs on the side! Long weekend or mid-week break While some companies may make Thursday the new Friday by giving employees a three-day weekend. Some may place the extra day right in the middle of the workweek, on a Wednesday, for employees to return afresh to face the latter half of the week. Companies that want to stay available to their clients and customers through the week will put their employees on a rotation system. As long as the length of the workday remains the same, the four-day workweek seems to bear sweet fruits. So, you may think announcing a three-day weekend may position you as an attractive employer but giving an extra day off by adding lost hours to rest of the workdays may just end up being like repackaging the same thing in a new gift wrapper. Make sure you take into account all aspects of the decision. Ultimately, if your workers are tired, it's your product and business that will suffer. (Puja Gupta can be contacted at puja.g@ians.in) People all across Houston and Texas took massive hits during the historic winter storm, and farmers were no exception. The state suffered from major power outages, which in turn led to a loss of heat, food, water and lack of access to resources. Unfortunately, crops and livestock were not spared. Constant Ngouala lost 80 percent of his crop at his Plant It Forward site in Southwest Houston, per the Houston Chronicle's Emma Balter. In Needville, Jennifer Plihal and Peg Turrentine of Three Sisters Farm lost nearly 100 percent of their crop and a number of plants that had to be moved from a greenhouse after the power died. With the extended forecast of below 20 degrees, we knew there was nothing we could do to save it, said Plihal, as reported by Balter. We didnt even cover anything. REBUILDING TEXAS: Communities of color have a long road to recovery after Texas winter storm Plant It Forward president Liz Vallette said the damage they suffered is worse than when Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, as reported by Balter. But it did help them prepare. Thomas Garcia-Prats, operates Finca Tres Robles in Second Ward, an urban farm he says has "very little support or network," according to Balter. He's suffered from the loss of his entire crop before. "USDA doesnt have crop insurance for farms of our size," he said. "According to the TDA and our appraisal district, Im not even considered an agricultural operation." Stacey Roussels goats had six babies at All We Need in Needville during the winter storm. All of the goats remained in good health, but a 14-year-old sow named Mamma Pig died from the cold. The Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) is in charge of the State of Texas Agriculture Relief Fund (STAR) in times of disaster. They've currently raised $120,000 for farmers' relief, but the fund is not designed for crop or animal loss, according to Balter. The voted 92-7 on Tuesday to confirm Tom Vilsack as secretary, his second run at the Cabinet post. The former Iowa governor spent eight years leading the same department for former President Barack Obama's entire administration. In his testimony, Vilsack, 70, heavily endorsed boosting climate-friendly agricultural industries such as the creation of biofuels, saying is one of our first and best ways to get some wins" on climate change. He proposed building a rural economy based on biomanufacturing and turning agricultural waste into a variety of products. He pledged to work closely with the Environmental Protection Agency to spur the industry on biofuels. With systemic racial inequity now a nationwide talking point, Vilsack also envisioned creating an equity taskforce inside the department. Its job, he said, would be to identify what he called intentional or unintentional barriers" that prevent or discourage farmers of colour from properly accessing federal assistance programs. Vilsack also heavily backed the SNAP or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme commonly known as food stamps as a key instrument in helping the country's most vulnerable families survive and recover from the pandemic era. His Trump-era predecessor, Sonny Perdue, had sought to purge hundreds of thousands of people from the SNAP-recipient lists. He faced minimal opposition throughout the confirmation process. (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.) BINGHAMTON, NY -- Ancestry estimation -- a method used by forensic anthropologists to determine ancestral origin by analyzing bone structures -- is rooted in "race science" and perpetuates white supremacy, according to a new paper by a forensic anthropologist at Binghamton University, State University of New York. By themselves, bones seem somewhat uniform to the untrained eye. They lack the traits we so often use to categorize fellow humans: hair texture, the shape of nose and eye, skin pigmentation. Forensic anthropologists know that race isn't based in biological fact, but in a history and culture that assigns meaning to physical traits that occur among different human populations. Why, then, are they still relying on a tool from the field's negative roots in "race science"? Binghamton University Associate Professor of Anthropology Elizabeth DiGangi addresses this issue in a recent article in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Co-authored with Jonathan Bethard of the University of South Florida, "Uncloaking a Lost Cause: Decolonizing ancestry estimation in the United States" explores a practice that dates back to the very origins of forensic anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The field was initially created by anatomists who had human skeletons in their museums or medical schools; they began studying the bones to see what could be learned from their features. Ancestry estimation, which analyzes bone structures -- especially those in the face or skull -- to determine ancestral origin was among the early developments. However, the practice was originally anything but neutral: scientists used these features to classify races they had already arbitrarily defined, with the goal of proving the superiority of European men. It should be noted, DiGangi said, that these scientists were all European men themselves. When forensic anthropology became formalized later in the 20th century, it kept the practice of ancestry estimation. "Since the time of professionalization of the field in the late 1970s, we've just taken as fact that ancestry estimation could and should be done," she said. Social vs. biological race The categories we're all familiar with from census forms to employment applications -- African-American/Black, European-American/white, Asian-American and so forth -- are examples of social race. These categories are not only a human creation, but they have changed through the years based on government priorities and social sentiment. In the early 20th century, for example, Irish and Italian immigrants weren't considered white, although they are today. "Biological race is the myth that there is something inherently biological about the differences between these constructed groups, that the human species is divided into races. This myth has been debunked for decades," DiGangi said. "The problem is that science was responsible for teaching the world that biological race was real, yet has not fully succeeded at rescinding it, explaining why we were wrong and atoning for the gross miscommunication." These concepts can influence how we interpret otherwise neutral phenomena, such as bones. Like any other part of the body, bones have subtle variations from individual to individual, such as the precise location of a hole where a nerve passes through or a roughened area for a muscle attachment. Ancestry estimation particularly relies on skull features and the bones that make up the face, known as morphoscopic traits. It has long been assumed that morphoscopic traits indicate a person's ancestry, and there has been some research into specific feature variations among different human groups. However, research has never determined the extent to which these features are inherited, making their connection to particular groups largely anecdotal, DiGangi explained. There are other problems, too: If you were to study whether these traits could be inherited, how do you determine the demarcation line between different groups? In other words, ancestry estimation isn't grounded in good science. Those defending its use, however, say that it's a needed tool. In the United States' complex system of death investigation, forensic anthropologists work alongside law enforcement when it comes to identifying human remains. The morphoscopic traits, dental traits and skull measurements that underpin ancestry estimation would be meaningless to investigators unless they can be mapped onto social racial categories. But it's hard to say whether ancestry estimation really helps identify people, the authors point out. Estimates tend to rely on cases where a body is successfully identified -- and don't take the failures into account. And then there is also the troublesome legacy of white supremacy that underpins policing in the United States. In the paper, the authors hypothesized that racial bias on the part of the investigators could lead to delayed or nonexistent identification for people of color, and issued an urgent call for research. "People in the forensic sciences have a tendency to think that because we work for justice for victims, we are above the fray and racism is not applicable to us or the institutions we work for," DiGangi said. "As far as I'm concerned, it's well past time for a reality check." Changing a culture of exclusion Today, the discipline once created by white anatomists is called biological anthropology, partially to distinguish it from its earlier racist roots. We shouldn't forget that history, but instead "own it and actively atone for it, which includes ensuring that the discipline is more equitable and inclusive," DiGangi explained. Biological anthropology has made some progress in this area, but forensic anthropology, a subset of that larger field, hasn't done the same. Today, 87% of forensic anthropologists are white and DiGangi is a rarity. In fact, she's the only board-certified person who has identified as Black in the history of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, which was established in 1977. While diversity is sorely needed, it has to be more than just a buzz phrase. Concrete actions need to be taken not only on the board level, but in anthropology departments, student organizations, and undergraduate and graduate mentoring relationships, all of which lead future forensic anthropologists to the discipline. These actions include increasing transparency and atoning for the past and present harms done to a variety of populations: people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community and those who aren't able-bodied or neurotypical. One of those harms is a history of exclusion. "Leadership may think that they are not exclusionary, but any organization whose membership consists overwhelmingly of white people is exclusionary, and the organization and its members have a responsibility to figure out the factors that have led to that and fix it," she said. Organizations need specific policies and procedures to create a welcoming environment. Think of a typical summertime barbecue: no one is going to invite themselves in, especially if the other attendees don't look like them and the food and music are otherwise unfamiliar, DiGangi said. But if the barbecue attendees are welcoming, engage with that new individual, make adjustments to meet their needs and truly listen, the situation changes. This isn't an issue unique to forensic anthropology. "All of the sciences, and certainly the other forensic disciplines, need to face the issue of how racism and other forms of discrimination have been a key force in everything from our membership recruitment and retention to our methods and how we interpret the results," she said. ### Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO, speaks at The Economic Club of Washington's Milestone Celebration in Washington, on Sept. 13, 2018. (Cliff Owen/AP Photo) Amazon Minimum Wage Push Aimed at Crushing Competition, Expert Says Amazons campaign to have Congress approve a national minimum wage of $15 an hour isnt as much altruistic as it is anti-competitive, according to labor policy researcher Rachel Greszler. Amazon portrayed its efforts as humanitarian toward workers in need of a raise as well as small businesses that will benefit from increased spending, but the minimum wage increase would leave many of those workers without any job at all and crush Amazons small-business competitors at a time when theyre already struggling, said Greszler, a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. It just gives them a competitive advantage and it forces out the little guys, she told The Epoch Times. While Amazon raised its starting wage to $15 an hour to much fanfare in 2018 and nudged other companies to follow suit, critics accused it of sleight of hand as the company reportedly slashed employee bonuses and stock rewards at the same time. Recently, with Democrats in charge of Congress and the White House, Amazon renewed its push for a boost in the minimum wage, taking out ads that call for swift action. Were calling on Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and urging other major corporations to increase wages to this level, an Amazon spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement. Were pleased that multiple companies have taken this important stepwhich will help workers and their families, communities, and our overall economyand hope more will follow suit. Amazon officials didnt respond to specific questions by The Epoch Times regarding the criticism the company has faced on this issue. There are multiple problems with Amazons assertions in Greszlers view. Endowed with a gargantuan capital base, Amazon has been able to make investments in automation that small competitors have little chance to match. The company has automated out of existence a lot of its low-productivity jobs, Greszler said. Amazon workers perform their jobs inside an Amazon fulfillment center on Cyber Monday in Robbinsville, N.J., on Dec. 2, 2019. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters) The edge that small businesses have is agility. Theyre able to put together a scrappy team of workers who may endure low wages in the hopes that there will be a reward if the company makes it big. Many of them cant yet afford to pay all their workers at least $15 per hour but that doesnt mean that they should just be driven out of business or prevented from starting and growing, Greszler said. I think that if Amazon had to pay the equivalent of $15 minimum wage when it first set up shop 25 years ago, it might not even exist today. Its especially untimely to increase the minimum wage now, she said, when government restrictions amid the COVID-19 pandemic put many small businesses on the edge of bankruptcy. About three out of five workers earning minimum wage or less are in the restaurant industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). For many of those, their actual earnings largely depend on how generous their patrons are with tips. Federal law allows tipped workers to get a base hourly rate of $2.13, as long as their wage with tips adds up at least to the minimum wage. COVID-19 restrictions have forced many restaurants out of business, particularly focusing on shutting down indoor diningexactly the service where workers traditionally earn their tips. One of Amazons arguments is that the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009. But the rate seems to have little to do with how much Americans actually earn. Only 21 states have maintained the federal minimum wage. Rates in other states range from $8.65 in Florida to $13.69 in Washington state. Washington, the U.S. capital, has a $15 per hour rate. A waitress takes customers orders in the outdoor seating area of a restaurant in Los Angeles, on Jan. 28, 2021. (Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images) Between 2010 and 2019, the national average minimum wage rate weighted by state population increased by about 25 percent and the share of population subject to minimum wage rate no higher than the federal one dropped from a bit over 65 percent to less than 40 percent, based on data published by the U.S. Department of Labor. Meanwhile, the share of hourly wage workers making the federal minimum wage or less dropped more than threefold, to less than 2 percent from 6 percent, according to BLS. Far from just the 1.6 million who earned the federal minimum wage or less in 2019, an increase to $15 an hour would boost wages of estimated 17 million workers who make less than that and likely an additional 10 million who currently make slightly more than $15 an hour, according to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf). Amazon has pointed to several studies suggesting a positive impact of such a shift, but the government cant just wish higher wages into existence, Greszler warned. To be worth $15 an hour, a full-time employee has to produce value in excess of $36,000 a year for the employer. For those who cant do that quite yet, we tell them that theres just no place for them in the labor market, she said. A majority of studies on the effects of minimum wage increases indicate that the move kills jobs, according to a recent review of research on the subject (pdf) published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. A minority of studies show positive or no effects on employment. Proponents of a higher minimum wage theorize the money to fund it will come from excessive profits of the employers. That may apply to companies such as Amazon, but hardly to small businesses, Greszler said. The average small business owner makes $70,000 a year. They cant pay 10 employees twice the wages on that, she said. Businesses with fewer than 250 employees accounted for about 45 percent of U.S. employment, according to BLS. Another problem is, weve never dealt with a 107 percent increase in the federal minimum wage, Greszler said. This just has such broad implications across so many areas of the economy that I dont think we even know how widespread the upheaval would be. For instance, shes estimated that child care costs would go up 21 percent for a family with two children, spiking the bill by $3,700 per year. The uncertainty has been underscored by the CBOs estimate that the hike would cause the loss of anywhere from zero to 3.7 million jobs. The estimate had only 66 percent confidence. The federal government is especially ill-suited to impose a uniform minimum wage since states differ widely by cost of living. What necessities one can buy for $160 in Washington, D.C., go for about $100 in Florida and $87 in Oklahoma, according to data from the Council for Community and Economic Research. Imposing a national minimum wage rate would seem to dent the competitive advantage of states where a lower cost of living could attract businesses with potentially lower labor costs. For Amazon, this is really about driving out competition and preventing opportunities, Greszler said. Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly characterized the rounding of the increase of the national average minimum wage rate weighted by state population between 2010 and 2019. The rate increased by about 25 percent. The Epoch Times regrets the error. Update: The article was updated with information regarding the drop of the share of population subject to minimum wage rate no higher than the federal one between 2010 and 2019. EC to finalise schedule for upcoming polls in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry today India oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P New Delhi, Feb 24: In what comes as a recent development, the Election Commission of India (ECI) is all set to finalise the schedule for upcoming polls in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry today. On Friday, Deputy Election Commissioner Sudip Jain, who is also the in-charge, will be travelling to Kolkata to take note of the preparedness and updates. During his visit, Jain will hold a series of meetings with district magistrates and police superintendents. Jayalalithaas 73rd birth anniversary: AIADMK's Sasikala plan big to mark the day In a statement, the ECI had informed that 12 companies of the Central Police Forces (CPF) will be sent to West Bengal, as is routinely sent in advance to poll stations for area domination to all the States or Union Territories where Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections are to take place and not specifically to West Bengal. It further said that the Central Police Forces (CPF) are routinely sent in advance to poll stations for area domination to all the States or Union Territories where Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections are to take place and not specifically to West Bengal. The numbers of polling booths are likely to increase due to the current pandemic situation. The terms of the legislative assemblies of West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala, and Puducherry will come to an end either in May or in June this year. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 10:08 [IST] Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. A fisherman was left reeling after reportedly catching a baby shark with an eerily human-like face. Abdullah Nuren, 48, claims he and his brother accidentally caught a pregnant female shark in their trawler net while fishing in Indonesias East Nusa Tenggara province over the weekend. And if that wasnt enough of a surprise, they reportedly later discovered three pups inside the adult shark after slicing it open. Mr Nuren claims two of the baby sharks looked similar to their mother, but the third had facial features bearing a striking resemblance to those of a human. Images allegedly taken of the fish show it has two large round eyes close together, similar to the popular Baby Shark cartoon. (Viral Press) (Viral Press) The fisherman said he decided to take the shark home, where he plans to preserve it as a good luck charm. Dr David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist and postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University, said it was more likely the sharks features were caused by a congenital defect than it being a new species. This is not a thing I study, but some experts I follow are reporting it may be a case of partial Cyclopia (do not Google this while eating) with one fused orbit but still two eyes, he wrote on Twitter. He added: Assuming its real, its some kind of birth defect and not a new species. Theres another good reason to tie benefits to the number of children rather than the level of income. The federal program commonly known as welfare, which provided money to lower-income mothers until it was effectively shut down in the 1990s, was criticized for discouraging work by tying benefits to income. Earn more, get less. The Biden plan avoids this trap. The main problem with the Biden plan is that it would last for only one year. The one-year benefit is a political gambit. The Biden plan has not attracted any Republican support in the narrowly divided Senate, so Democrats can pass it only through the process known as reconciliation, which allows some fiscal measures to pass by a simple majority, subject to strict cost limits. Democrats hope that a taste of the new benefit will rouse public support for a permanent program. It would be better to borrow a few pages from an alternative plan introduced by Senator Mitt Romney, the Utah Republican. Mr. Romney is proposing a permanent benefit along with a package of tax increases and spending cuts to pay for it. Analysts estimate that the cuts in existing spending programs would exceed the value of the new benefits for some families, but it would be straightforward to substitute other sources of revenue. The key point is that Democrats can pass a permanent change now by doing the hard but necessary work of figuring out how to pay for it. Mr. Romneys plan has another advantage that Democrats ought to incorporate, too. The federal government currently allows parents to reduce their federal income tax payments by up to $2,000 per child. In some cases, lower-income households that owe less than $2,000 in taxes can instead receive a portion of the benefit in the form of a direct payment. The Biden administration has proposed to increase the benefit to a minimum of $3,000 per child, and to make it fully refundable, meaning that lower-income families would receive in cash any portion of the benefit that they did not use to reduce their income tax obligation. Crucially, under the version of the plan passed by the House Ways and Means Committee this month, the government would distribute the money in monthly chunks. MUMBAI: In view of rising coronavirus cases, the Mumbai Police has now allowed its personnel to work from home. According to an order issued by the Additional Director General, Maharashtra Police, 100 per cent attendance will be mandatory for Class A and B officers. Besides this, the attendance of employees in the C and D categories working at the police headquarters have been reduced to 50 per cent. Out of those, 25 per cent of C and D category employees will be called between the 9 am to 4 pm shift, while the remaining 25 per cent will be called in 11 am to 5 pm shift. The Station House Officers at the police stations have been authorised to take a call on the workforce required for daily duties. The remaining employees will work from home and be available on the phone so that they can be called if needed. It may be recalled that Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray had on Tuesday said that more people should work from home as the number of coronavirus cases is rising significantly across the state. Maharashtra on Tuesday reported 6,218 new COVID-19 cases and 51 deaths. The state Health Department said the total count of cases reported in the state has gone up to 21,12,312, including 53,409 active cases. The state saw 5,869 recoveries in the last 24 hours and the total number of recoveries has gone up to 20,05,851. The death toll stands at 51,857. Maharashtra continues to be one of the worst affected states in the country. The number of new cases in the state has seen a surge over the last few weeks. State authorities have also imposed a night curfew in Aurangabad from 11 pm to 6 am till March 8 exempting essential services. Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Sunday collected a total fine of Rs 28 lakh from 14,000 people in the city who were caught without face masks in public spaces. Live TV .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... BERLIN A former member of Syrian President Bashar Assads secret police was convicted Wednesday by a German court of facilitating the torture of prisoners in a landmark ruling that human rights activists hope will set a precedent for other cases in the decade-long conflict. Eyad Al-Gharib was convicted of accessory to crimes against humanity and sentenced by the Koblenz state court to 4 1/2 years in prison. It was the first time that a court outside Syria ruled in a case alleging Syrian government officials committed crimes against humanity. German prosecutors invoked the principle of universal jurisdiction for serious crimes to bring the case that involved victims and defendants who were in Germany. ADVERTISEMENTSkip ................................................................ German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said the trial was a step against impunity in the conflict. His country has given refuge to hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing violence and hardship in their homeland, and backed international efforts to collect prosecutable evidence of crimes in Syria. But Russia and China have used their vetoes to block attempts by the U.N. Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court. Thats why the cases outside Syria are big bright spots, but also a clear signal to the victims that they shall get justice, Maas told The Associated Press. Al-Gharib could have faced more than a decade behind bars, but judges took into account mitigating factors, including his testimony to German authorities investigating the allegations. The 44-year-old was accused of being part of a unit that arrested people following anti-government protests in the Syrian city of Douma and took them to a detention center known as Al Khatib, or Branch 251, where they were tortured. Al-Gharib went on trial last year with Anwar Raslan, a more senior Syrian ex-official who is accused of overseeing the abuse of detainees at the same jail near Damascus. Raslan is accused of supervising the systematic and brutal torture of more than 4,000 prisoners between April 2011 and September 2012, resulting in the deaths of at least 58 people. During his pretrial police interrogation, al-Gharib testified against Raslan, implicating him in more than 10 deaths of prisoners. A verdict in Raslans case is expected later this year. The court also considered photographs of thousands of alleged victims of torture by the Syrian government. The images were smuggled out of Syria by a former police officer, who goes by the alias of Caesar. Todays verdict is the first time a court has confirmed that the acts of the Syrian government and its collaborators are crimes against humanity, said Patrick Kroker, a lawyer with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which represented multiple survivors at the trial. Testimony by torture survivors and intelligence officers, as well as the Caesar photos, prove the scale and systemic nature of enforced disappearances, torture and sexual violence in Syria, he said. The relevance of this evidence extends far beyond the proceedings in Koblenz. Delivering the oral verdict, the presiding judge made it clear that al-Gharibs crimes were part of the Syrian governments systematic abuses against its own population. Syrian officials did not testify during the 60-day trial. The court concluded that al-Gharibs unit, which was under Raslans command, was involved in chasing down and detaining at least 30 people following a demonstration in Douma, and then bringing them to the detention center where they were tortured. Al-Gharib, who had the rank of sergeant major until he defected, left Syria in 2013 and came to Germany in 2018. Both men were arrested a year later. Some rights groups have raised questions about the trial, noting that government defectors like Al-Gharib may not realize that statements they make during asylum applications may be used against them. Mohammad Al-Abdallah, director of the Washington-based Syria Justice and Accountability Center and a former prisoner in Syria, said Al-Gharib was a low-ranking officer with little value in the case against him. He suggested that putting defectors like Raslan and Al-Gharib in prison would please the Assad government, because this will deter anyone else from defecting or joining the opposition or supplying information to human rights groups. But Wassim Mukdad, a Syrian survivor and co-plaintiff in Raslans trial, said while al-Gharib was just one small cog in the vast Syrian torture apparatus the verdict against him was important. I hope it can shed light on all of the Assad regimes crimes, he said. Only then will the trial really be a first step on this long road to justice for myself and other survivors. Al-Gharibs lawyer, Hannes Linke, said the courts verdict was in large parts convincing and that the sentence imposed on his client would send a clear signal to war crimes perpetrators worldwide. Linke said he would nevertheless appeal the verdict and ask Germanys top court to review the lower tribunals decision to dismiss al-Gharibs defense that he acted to avert harm from himself. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which supports 29 survivors in the case against Raslan, of whom 14 are represented as co-plaintiffs in that case, is working to bring further cases against Syrian officials to trial in Germany, Austria, Sweden and Norway. ___ Sarah El Deeb in Beirut, and David Rising in Berlin, contributed to this report. The Episcopal Church of the Resurrection in Austin is distributing meals to vulnerable communities impacted by the storms and power outages. Our partners in Texas are skilled at figuring out how to quickly use the churches gifts to meet community needs, and I continue to be inspired by their creativity and tenacity under extraordinarily difficult circumstances," said Katie Mears, Episcopal Relief & Development. Episcopal Relief & Development is supporting the Episcopal dioceses of Dallas, Texas and West Texas as they provide emergency relief to individuals and families impacted by the unprecedented ice storm, low temperatures and power outages last week. Episcopal Relief & Developments US Disaster Program partners with local churches and other organizations to provide emergency relief and long-term support as vulnerable communities respond to and rebuild from disasters such as hurricanes, winter storms and wildfires. Most disasters have three phases: Rescue, Relief and Recovery. We are early on in the life-cycle of this disaster, said Katie Mears, Senior Director, US Disaster Program, Episcopal Relief & Development. Our partners in Texas leveraged their experience in responding to hurricanes and COVID-19 to immediately provide aid in their communities. They are skilled at figuring out how to quickly use the churches gifts to meet community needs, and I continue to be inspired by their creativity and tenacity under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. The Episcopal Diocese of Dallas, with Episcopal Relief & Developments support, is targeting relief efforts to reach refugee and underserved communities with food, bottled water and gift cards for utility bills. Many in these communities are day laborers who, in addition to experiencing damage to their homes, lost income due to the lack of work and power outages. To address immediate needs during the power outages, the diocese opened a warming center and shelter at St. Matthews Cathedral in Dallas. Now that temperatures have warmed, the Cathedrals food pantry remains open. All relief efforts are being carried out while following strict protocols to reduce the potential spread of COVID-19. Similarly, The Episcopal Diocese of Texas, with Episcopal Relief & Developments support, initially opened emergency shelters and warming centers and distributed food, gasoline and generators to address immediate needs in under-resourced communities in the greater Houston, Waco and Austin areas. In the Austin area, volunteers and staff are continuing to distribute meals for individuals and families in need. Congregations in the greater Houston area have begun assisting with plumbing repairs, while continuing to provide food, clothing and other personal goods to help replace what was damaged. The Episcopal Diocese of West Texas mobilized its hurricane response team to begin to identify opportunities to provide support to people living in the 19 counties in southern Texas that have been declared disaster areas. In partnership with Episcopal Relief & Development, the diocese will work through its network of churches and food banks to deliver food, water, direct financial assistance, household and other supplies. As this disaster evolves, our partners will continue to identify innovative ways to meet needs that are not being met by other organizations, continued Mears. Please pray for all those impacted by the winter storms and power outages. Donations to the US Disaster Response Fund will enable Episcopal Relief & Development to continue to respond to the winter storms and other disasters. Learn more about Episcopal Relief & Developments US Disaster Program. About Episcopal Relief & Development: For 80 years, Episcopal Relief & Development has been working together with supporters and partners for lasting change around the world. Each year the organization facilitates healthier, more fulfilling lives for more than 3 million people struggling with hunger, poverty, disaster and disease. Inspired by Jesus words in Matthew 25, Episcopal Relief & Development leverages the expertise and resources of Anglican and other partners to deliver measurable and sustainable change in three signature program areas: Women, Children and Climate. Photo courtesy of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. ["Open Mike" is the often off-topic editorial page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays, give or take.] I read yet another book about climbing Everest recently. I'm so terrified of heights that I can't even watch videos of mountain climbersthe activity strikes me as quite insane. I am persecuted by recurring "fear of heights" dreams or nightmares. Yet for some reason, apparently I like to read about it. From the coziness of my warm armchair. When Brian Stewart quoted Cavafy's "Ithaka" in the Featured Comments to the "Struggle!" post, it struck me how relevant the quote is to mountain climbing. Here's the quote "mod. auct." as Alan Watts would have footnoted it, meaning "modified by me": When you set out for Mount Everest ask that your way be long, full of adventure, full of instruction. Have the mountain always in your mind. Your arrival there is what you are destined for. But don't in the least hurry the journey. Better it last long, so that when you reach the summit you are old and rich with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Everest to give you wealth. The mountain gave you a splendid journey. Without her you would not have set out. She hasn't anything else to give you. Fits, doesn't it? Life is a climb to the summit, when you think about it. The summit itself actually has nothing to give you, beyond its function in marking the accomplishment of getting to it. Brian and I haven't been able to identify the translation he prefers and is familiar with, but here's the whole poem in the standard Keeley translation from Poetry Foundation. And here it is as recited by the late Scottish acting legend Sean Connery. Cavafy C.P. (Constantin Peter) Cavafy was an Egyptiot Greek* poet who lived from 1863 to 1933. He wrote only 155 poems and didn't care to publish them in his lifetime, preferring to share them in more informal publications and by casual means. He is remarkably plainspoken, his meanings usually left out in the sun. For some reason he is beloved of translators so he's been translated many times into many languages. Most of his poems were written after he was 40. His most famous poem is "Waiting for the Barbarians." Mike *A Greek Egyptian, like Cleopatra. Book o' This Week: Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The definitive 4th edition of this perennial bestseller, in print since 1979! The above link is a portal from TOP to Amazon. The book is also available at Amazon Canada. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Here's a handy portal to B&H Photo: Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from: Andrew: "Whatever you do, do not watch Free Solo." Mike replies: Don't worry. It would make my guts churn, believe me. Tom Duffy: "I used to do a lot of climbing when I was younger (OK, way younger) to the point of getting frostbite from a winter climb on Long's Peak in Colorado in '77. Experientially, I found that if I kept looking at the summit of a mountain, I would find myself becoming disheartened at my seeming lack of progress as I climbed. I came to realize that since I knew the goal, all I had to do was keep putting one foot in front of the other, and that steady-state, non-introspective activity achieved the summit. "The insight stuck with me. Much of success in life becomes comes from endurance and not much more. As important as thinking is, I'd make the case that after defining a goal, it's often more productive to simply endure." Emil: "Matsuo Basho summed the concept up quite nicely in the 17th century when he wrote what may be translated as 'Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.'" [This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource Games Press.] London, February 24th 2021, 12:00 (GMT): Payload Studios today announces that Tencent, a leading internet and technology company, has invested a minority stake in Payload. This investment will support the growth of the team and development of future titles with Payloads signature community-driven model. The London based developer was founded in 2013 by games industry veterans Russell Clarke and Vincent Scheurer, with a focus on creative sandbox games. Their award-winning debut title, TerraTech - an open-world sandbox builder game - was self-funded, self-published and embodies the studios community-centric approach, reflected in consistently rising player feedback ratings which currently stand at 91% lifetime positive on Steam. Tencent has been actively supporting British studios and the industry ecosystem, previous investment and partnerships include Frontier Developments, Sumo Digital, Miniclip and more. Russell Clarke, Co-founder and CEO, Payload Studios said: This investment is a huge milestone for Payload Studios. It represents a major validation for the team, and everything we have achieved in the past seven years with TerraTech. With the strength and reach of Tencent backing us, we can scale our capability and ambition to levels we had only dreamed of until now - taking the TerraTech IP to new places and opening up entirely new possibilities. Look out for a major announcement later this year about whats coming next from Payload! Vincent Scheurer, Co-founder and Operations Director, Payload Studios added: Tencent operates one of the most successful online games platforms, so it is fantastic news that they wish to back our business. We are now part of an extended family of amazing games companies who have been backed by Tencent. This investment will have a transformative effect on Payload Studios and provides us with the capital we require to grow, while preserving our autonomy. We can now accelerate our recruitment plans substantially and bring even more world class talent to our team. This investment is a validation of seven years of hard work from our team, who built a community driven development and publishing business from scratch with practically no initial capital. Ends For Further Information: Payload Studios terratechgame.com twitter.com/terratechgame facebook.com/terratechgame youtube.com/payloadstudios twitch.tv/terratechgame reddit.com/r/terratechgame For UK media enquiries: Eva Field Noisy Communications [email protected] Helen Jones - Noisy Communications [email protected] About Payload Studios Payload Studios is a British independent game studio founded by Russell Clarke and Vincent Scheurer to develop the ultimate exploration sandbox game - TerraTech. Studio history: Payload Studios co-founder Russell Clarke left London's Ideaworks mobile studio 2012 to go on his very own indie adventure, pulling in his experience from working on beloved franchises like Metal Gear, Call of Duty, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider and Fable. TerraTech started development in late 2013 and progressed rapidly, launching on Steams Early Access platform in February 2015. Building upon a wealth of community feedback, it was fully released on Steam in August 2018, with console versions following soon afterwards on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. The team expanded at pace and is now based in London Farringdon as founders of the Tentacle Zone, a co-working space for game industry professionals. The teams hard work and dedication was recognised when Payload Studios won TIGAs Best Small Studio Award of 2020. About Tencent Tencent uses technology to enrich the lives of Internet users. Our communication and social platforms, Weixin and QQ, connect users with each other and with digital content and services, both online and offline, making their lives more convenient. Our targeted advertising platform helps advertisers reach out to hundreds of millions of consumers in China. Our FinTech and business services support our partners business growth and assist their digital upgrade. Tencent invests heavily in talent and technological innovation, actively promoting the development of the Internet industry. Tencent was founded in Shenzhen, China, in 1998. Shares of Tencent (00700.HK) are listed on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. About Tentacle Zone The Tentacle Zone is the moniker Payload Studios gave to the independent developer collective they created in 2015 when they wanted to bring their early access game, TerraTech, to gamers via events. Initially conceived as a way for several small studios to split the costs of attending events, it quickly evolved and has since supported 200 games through the stand. The Tentacle Zone now includes a shared workspace in London for other game developers, talks and events. 2020 saw Tentacle Zone activities change to reflect working practices and game development during the global pandemic, with events being delivered online and recently launched a virtual incubator for underrepresented founders. About TerraTech TerraTech is an open-world, sandbox adventure game, where you design and build your own creations through a mix of crafting, combat and discovery. Design vehicles from a huge library of blocks - scavenge, craft and buy new blocks to survive and become the ultimate planetary prospector. Construction - Using building blocks, such as guns, wheels and wings from several Mining Corporations, you can build varied Techs to suit every purpose. Be it powerful armoured combat vehicles, unstoppable resource gathering machines, sprawling resource processing bases or a hybrid of all three - creativity is your key to exo-planetary success. Exploration - The world in TerraTech is procedurally generated and infinite, so there are always new lands to discover and more resources to find. Treacherous mountain ranges, luscious grasslands and huge deserts are among the biomes you will encounter. Combat - The intergalactic mining industry is a profitable one, but you are not the only miner in search of new worlds to exploit. Defending yourself from rival miners will take time, resources and skill, with success leading to new equipment and new territory. All equipable blocks can be damaged or destroyed, so ensuring you are sufficiently armed and ready for battle is a key element of both survival and prosperity in TerraTech. Get out there and show them whos boss! Crafting - By gathering and processing natural resources, players are able to construct bases for storage, refining and ultimately for crafting new blocks. Like the look of that Venture Hail Fire Rifle that just tore your vehicle apart? Go prospecting for the needed resources, and craft a couple for yourself! Corporations - All exo-planetary prospectors buy parts from the established Corporations, each with their own specific brand of technology - Get the job done with all-rounders GSO Strip-mine to the max with the heavy-duty GeoCorp Go full throttle with high-speed recon specialists Venture Operate with military efficiency using the combat-focused Hawkeye Pursue technological superiority with the cutting-edge Better Future Redefine the boundaries with experimental scientists Reticule Research Complete missions and discover blocks for each Corporation to improve your standing with them and gain access to the more sought-after components in their arsenal. TerraTech won TIGAs Best New IP Award in 2014 and Best Action/Adventure Game Award in 2015. About Game On Payload Studios recognises our responsibility to improve the diversity of the studio and ensure our workplace is truly inclusive. Our initiative, Game On, includes a range of internal steps and a programme of regular events. Since April 2019 we have organised and hosted a series of public events focused on inclusion (these include panels, talks and workshops). These are open to Payload Studio employees, Tentacle Zone residents as well as the wider games industry. The events have welcomed incredible speakers as well as attendees from almost 200 different studios/companies. Our events focus on specific topics related to diversity and inclusion while also amplifying the voices of diverse leaders, studios and some of the leading games industry diversity organisations. We aim to improve attendees understanding of issues related to inclusion, diversity, equality and belonging and also provide individuals and companies with actionable steps to improve inclusivity and diversity. We've had the Star Wars seal of approval, and now we've got the two thumbs up from the one and only Pierce Brosnan after the former 'James Bond' talked about his love of Kerry in a recent video promoting Ireland. In the video, a project between Tourism Ireland and Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA), the 67-year-old actor is shown speaking about his love of Kerry as aerial footage of the Kingdom is shown on screen. "What's not to love about Ireland? This tiny island that has sown the greatest gifts of poetry and storytelling. "I love the Kerry coastline; I love the Ring of Kerry. My father, Tom Brosnan, was a Kerryman, so I try to go back there as often as I can," the former 007 actor said. "What do I miss about Ireland? It's the people - the sheer stamina and life force of Irish people, from this great, beautiful landscape. I'm a Navan man, County Meath. I left Ireland when I was a boy, I was 11, so over these many decades now, going back, there's always something great to discover," he continued. Speaking about the project to promote Kerry and Ireland to the rest of the world, Kerry native Aine Moriarty, who is the IFTA CEO was delighted to be a part of the campaign. "IFTA is delighted to partner with Tourism Ireland to showcase the beauty of the Irish landscape alongside the voices and sentiments of our leading Irish Academy members such as Pierce Brosnan. Ireland has given so much to international film; our wonderful actors, filmmakers and spectacular filming locations. The Academy is proud to help showcase our beautiful country to the world". The beautiful footage of Kerry seen in the film is the result of Aine reaching out to local Kerry talent including Tadhg Hayes Video Production, Killorglin; Michael Pixie O'Gorman, Listowel; Beeview Studio/Kerry ETB in Tralee and Screen Kerry. The lobby of the Seoul 50 Plus Foundation's Mapo campus in Seoul, Feb. 13, 2019 / Korea Times file By Bahk Eun-ji The Seoul 50 Plus Foundation is providing middle-aged and elderly people with a chance to work as pet sitters, as a part of its project to offer job opportunities for senior citizens. The foundation, under the Seoul Metropolitan Government, is aiming to offer education or job opportunities for people who are "planning a new life after the age of 50." This project is jointly carried out with Pet People, which operates a platform called Pet Planet that links pet care workers with pet owners. "The project is aimed at discovering a new business model where middle-aged people can find gainful employment through their experience raising pets," the foundation said in a press release. Applicants must be aged between 40 and 67 living in Seoul with the experience of raising a pet. Preference is given to those who have raised pets for more than five years, have experience as a pet sitter or possess a pet-related license. Those selected through document screening and interviews will start work after completing 16 hours of training. They will be registered as pet sitters on Pet Planet and take care of the pets matched through the app at their home. Pet sitters will receive 30,000 won to 40,000 won for 12 hours of care and 40,000 won to 50,000 won for 24 hours. "Many single-person households leave their pets alone at home during the day due to work, going out and traveling. Middle-aged and elderly citizens who have experience raising pets will be of great help to these people," said Kim Young-dae, CEO of the foundation. The Seoul 50 Plus Foundation will accept applications until March 2 on through 50plus.or.kr. Members of the Seoul 50 Plus Foundation of Mapo campus, Seoul, participate in a drama class, Feb. 13, 2019. Korea Times file We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. Britain won't get 'steady' supplies of coronavirus vaccines for a 'few months', one of the nation's top health chiefs admitted today amid a clear slump in the UK's roll-out which must go smoothly for the nation to be released from lockdown. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, England's deputy chief medical officer, described the process of manufacturing Covid jabs as being 'a bit like beer-making' because not every batch yields the same amount. He told Sky News that supply fluctuations were natural, adding: 'It's going to take a few months before the manufacturers really get into this very confident, very steady manufacturing routine.' His comments came after Education Secretary Gavin Williamson insisted there was 'no problems in terms of the flow of vaccines', saying that 'there will always be some days' when uptake dips. Just 24 hours earlier Matt Hancock claimed that there were 'ups and downs' in the delivery schedule. The Health Secretary warned the speed of the roll-out was down to supply but claimed March would see some 'bumper weeks'. Officials say smaller deliveries were planned for in mid-February because Pfizer had to improve its key Belgian factory at the start of the year. AstraZeneca's production was also slower to get off the ground than planned. Both firms have since claimed their vaccine deliveries are on track, leaving ministers confident they can hit their ambitious target of offering first doses to all over-50s by April 15 and every adult by the end of July. More than 18million Brits have already received a first dose and Boris Johnson has put a successful roll-out at the heart of his path back to freedom. As long as the drive goes well, all restrictions could be dropped in England by June 21 but any hiccups along the way could threaten that target. But fears that No10's plans for freedom could be derailed grew this week after two poor performances in Britain's roll-out. Just 150,000 doses were given out on Sunday, the worst in a month, and 210,000 the following day. However, today's figures show there were 353,000 doses administered on Tuesday, in a sign the scheme might be picking back up. But Tuesday's output is still down 6 per cent on last week and there are on average 345,000 doses being administered each day, which is the lowest since mid January. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, England's deputy chief medical officer, described the process of manufacturing Covid jabs as being 'a bit like beer-making' because not every batch yields the same amount Gavin Williamson has claimed there are no coronavirus vaccine supply issues after Britain's roll out suffered its worst slump in a month Figures show just 150,000 Covid vaccines jabs were dished out in the UK on Sunday, the worst daily output since the scheme began to pick up pace last month The AstraZeneca vaccine is a natural product it is a genetically engineered virus made to look like the coronavirus so must be grown naturally. The cells needed to make the jab will only reproduce as fast as they naturally can, and astronomical quantities of them are needed, which means the process will always take a minimum amount of time. AstraZeneca says it takes three months, on average, to make each batch of the vaccine. Numerous ones are made at the same time but this means that there is an upper limit to how much or how fast one plant can make jabs. And the yields of these natural batches are also not entirely controllable the company said it had not produced as much as it had hoped at the start of the production. Professor Van-Tam reaffirmed the repeated claim that the dip in daily vaccine roll-out has come about as a result of a fall in supply. He said: 'That's really very simple to explain. There are always going to be supply fluctuations. 'These are new vaccines and by and large the manufacturers have never made them or anything like them before. You do get batch size variations and that's natural. New hope for summer trips abroad in vaccine passport app Holidaymakers could be offered a phone app 'within weeks' that would enable them to prove they have tested negative for Covid or been vaccinated. The International Air Transport Association, which is in talks with the UK Government, yesterday revealed plans to go live with its digital Travel Pass next month. The development is a boost to the millions of Britons hoping for a foreign holiday this summer after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a roadmap for reopening foreign travel on Monday. Mr Johnson has asked a new taskforce to look into how holidays can safely be resumed, with 'vaccine passports' seen as one potential long-term measure. Popular holiday destinations such as Greece, Cyprus, Spain and the Canary Islands have already expressed interest in the idea. IATA's app will be capable of verifying if a passenger has had the Covid-19 tests or vaccines required to enter a country. It would also prove they were administered by an approved authority and store the information on individual phones rather than in a centralised database to better protect privacy. Vinoop Goel, IATA's regional director of airports and external relations, said: 'The key issue is one of confidence. Passengers need to be confident that the testing they've taken is accurate and will allow them to enter the country. 'And then governments need to have the confidence that the tests passengers claim to have is one which is accurate and meets their own conditions.' He added: 'The plan is to go live in March, so basically we expect to have a fully functional working system over the next few weeks.' IATA stressed the app would not be live for use next month as a 'vaccine passport', partly because Britain does not currently issue proof of vaccination in digital format. But it is understood this is one of the issues being worked through by the new Department for Transport-led travel taskforce raising the prospect of British holidaymakers using such an app this summer. The UK's vaccine credentials, which are currently given in paper format, would need to be 'digitalised', IATA said. One way this could be done is if health authorities began issuing QR codes which could be scanned and uploaded into apps as proof that both doses of the vaccine had been given, along with information about where it was given, which jab was received and who it was administered by. The industry sees digital passes as an essential part of reopening air travel, as many countries still have strict restrictions or quarantines, which could be lifted for those who can prove they have been inoculated. Singapore Airlines was the first airline to start trials of the IATA Travel Pass in December. Etihad, Emirates, Qatar Airways and Air New Zealand are among the others conducting trials. Other airlines are also trialling different apps which could end up being used for 'vaccine passports'. British Airways is trialling one called VeriFLY and expanded the trial last week to cover all inbound flights to the UK, in addition to all outbound flights to the US. It is currently only used to verify a negative Covid test result. Advertisement 'The process of making a vaccine is one where, basically, you set the equipment up and leave it all to do its thing - a bit like beer-making really. 'What you get at the end is not something that you can say is identical every time in terms of the yield, the amount of doses you can then make from that batch.' However, Professor Van-Tam said that the UK is in 'a great place in the world' despite global restraints and that he expects the rollout to pick up pace again. Professor Van-Tam also admitted to concerns about the uptake of the vaccine within black and minority ethnic groups, as well as in deprived parts of the UK, which could be slowing the roll out. 'I am concerned about it, I know there is hesitancy in some of the black and minority ethnic communities and I know it's been an issue for decades that it is always more difficult to get high uptake of vaccines and other preventative healthcare services in areas of unfortunately low prosperity, high deprivation of the UK. 'This is not a new problem but it is one that greatly concerns me because we need very high uptake.' Professor Van-Tam said high uptake will 'give us the best chance of moving from where we are now which, let's face it, is quite a bit better than where we were a month ago to where we really want to be by the time the road map is complete in the early summer'. He acknowledged there are 'supply fluctuations' for the vaccines and it could take 'a few months' for manufacturers to get into a steady routine for production. Earlier, on ITV's Good Morning Britain, Professor Van-Tam called for health and care workers to take the vaccines they have been offered. NHS England has said around 88 per cent of patient-facing NHS Trust health care workers in England are likely to have had their first dose of a vaccine by now. But there are no published vaccine uptake figures for people working in social care. Professor Van-Tam said healthcare workers have a 'professional responsibility to take steps themselves to prevent them from being in a position where they could harm patients through infectious diseases they might have'. He added: 'The other way of framing this is saying, if you're a consumer of healthcare, if you're a patient or a relative, would you prefer a healthcare worker to attend you or your relative if they have been vaccinated against Covid, or would you not really mind either way?' He sought to reassure anyone wishing to become pregnant about the safety of vaccines, saying there is a lot of 'nonsense out there' about their supposed effects on fertility. 'There's just no evidence at all that there are any issues in relation to planning a family, or fertility,' he said. 'So if you're in a risk condition and you're called, then my advice would be to get on and take the vaccine.' It is not 'biologically logical' for the vaccine to have an impact on fertility, he said. Nicola Sturgeon yesterday claimed stockpiling was partly to blame for the slowing down of the vaccination drive. Scotland's First Minister claimed there had been a 'temporary dip' in supply during her daily press briefing. But she also said the 'need to reserve stock so that second doses can be offered to people who received their first dose in December' was having an effect. No10's top scientific advisers say it is crucial Britons get their top-up jab no later than 12 weeks after their first dose. The UK drew criticism in January when it pushed back giving second doses of both vaccines from three weeks to three months. The advice was made by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. Its goal was to get wider coverage more quickly. Government figures show another 1.8million second doses have to be dished out between now and April 11 to meet its 12-week second dose schedule. Around 2.4million Britons had received their first jab by January 11, when national daily figures were first released. Only 640,000 vulnerable Britons have so far had both inoculations, meaning some 1.8million still need to get their booster dose before April 11. Some will need to receive booster doses even sooner, if they were inoculated early on in the scheme, which began on December 8. With 46 days to go until April 11, it means around 40,000 doses per day have to be reserved for top-ups if the rate is stable. Britain is currently dishing out 350,000 vaccines per day on average, meaning the second doses will soon take-up one-tenth of the current operation. Some local NHS chiefs are already working off their own agenda, with 15 per cent of over-70s in Portsmouth having already received their top-ups by February 14. In contrast, rates are almost 300 times lower in Morecambe Bay, where just 0.05 per cent of elderly residents at the top of the queue have had both jabs. It came after AstraZeneca reportedly told the European Union yesterday it would not be able to deliver on the EU's vaccine orders amid supply issues. The firm had committed to supplying the bloc with 180million doses in the second quarter of 2020. But an EU official, involved directly in talks with the firm, said the company had warned it could now only 'deliver less than 90million doses', according to Reuters. Britain has ordered 100million doses of the Oxford vaccine and it is one of two Covid jabs being rolled out on the NHS. Asked about the EU official's comment, a spokesman for AstraZeneca told Reuters yesterday: 'We are hopeful that we will be able to bring our deliveries closer in line with the advance purchase agreement.' Later in the day a spokesman in a new statement said the company's 'most recent Q2 forecast for the delivery of its COVID-19 vaccine aims to deliver in line with its contract with the European Commission.' He added: 'At this stage AstraZeneca is working to increase productivity in its EU supply chain and to continue to make use of its global capability in order to achieve delivery of 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter.' Earlier this week, AstraZeneca said that although there had been 'fluctuations' in supply at plants, they were still 'on track' with orders with no issues with delivery of the UK-manufactured vaccine. A spokesman for the European Commission, which coordinates talks with vaccine manufacturers, said it could not comment on the discussions as they were confidential. He said the EU should have more than enough shots to hit its vaccination targets if the expected and agreed deliveries from other suppliers are met, regardless of the situation with AstraZeneca. The EU official confirmed that AstraZeneca planned to deliver about 40 million doses in the first quarter, again less than half the 90million shots it was supposed to supply. AstraZeneca warned the EU in January that it would fall short of its first-quarter commitments due to production issues. It was also due to deliver 30 million doses in the last quarter of 2020 but did not supply any shots last year as its vaccine had yet to be approved by the EU. All told, AstraZeneca's total supply to the EU could be about 130 million doses by the end of June, well below the 300 million it committed to deliver to the bloc by then. The arrival of fewer AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines in the European Union in the second quarter has been factored into Irish forecasts that were updated on Tuesday, Prime Minister Micheal Martin said after Reuters reported the shortfall. The EU has also faced delays in deliveries of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech as well as Moderna's shot. So far they are the only vaccines approved for use by the EU's drug regulator. Vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi yesterday urged Britons to 'keep the faith', saying No10 'will deliver' on its ambitious inoculation goals. Doctors risk disciplinary action if they refuse the vaccine Doctors and healthcare staff have been told they risk being fired if they refuse to get vaccinated. NHS England's medical director Steve Powis told staff they have a 'professional responsibility' to take the vaccine. Executives have moved towards making the jab obligatory for frontline NHS staff after England's chief medical officer Chris Whitty on Monday said it was health staff's professional duty to be vaccinated. But ministers are reluctant to introduce compulsory vaccination because they fear it would make reluctant staff less likely to accept one. And health chiefs are divided on mandatory vaccination, with NHS bosses preferring professional leaders rather than managers to take the lead. Employers have not been blocked from requiring staff to take the vaccine, with Boris Johnson praising 'very high quality' care homes that have made it a condition of employment. Medical unions have left the door open to making vaccination a condition of employment and have insisted staff should get the jab. Chair of the British Medical Association council Dr Chaand Nagpaul told The Times: 'We agree that doctors should have the Covid-19 vaccine unless they have a valid medical reason for not being vaccinated. 'We will continue to encourage uptake of vaccinations but any proposal for a contractual or regulatory requirement for healthcare workers to have a Covid-19 vaccine would require careful scrutiny to consider the legal and ethical implications.' The General Medical Council said 'it is clear' all doctors should be immunised against any transmissible disease, including Covid, unless there are good reasons why not. Academy of Medical Royal Colleges chair Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard said vaccination of staff is 'plain common sense'. Advertisement The Government has pledged to offer first doses to all over-50s by April 15, with all remaining adults set to be reached by the end of July. Mr Zahawi echoed claims ministers have made repeatedly since the New Year that the only factor hampering the drive is supply, saying doses were 'finite'. But he hinted that the roll-out could be about to be pick up pace again, after saying previously the UK would get tens of millions of doses in March. Matt Hancock also promised 'bumper' weeks next month. Supplies of Moderna's Covid jab which was approved in January are set to come on stream within weeks, giving the NHS operation another boost. It comes after Professor Paul Hunter, from the University of East Anglia, said Britain will 'struggle' to get enough people immunised to stick to ambitious plans to end lockdown by June unless rates 'pick up very soon'. He said: 'This could lead to more potentially vulnerable individuals being unprotected for a lot longer than we had expected as we try to relax restrictions further. 'This would have the real potential to derail the UK's road plan for coming out of lockdown.' Ministers have been urged to introduce door-to-door vaccinations to reach people who are unwilling or unable to go to GP surgeries. Chief executive of the Runnymede Trust thinktank Dr Halima Begum told The Guardian members of the NHS army should outreach to people who have not come forward for the jab. She said: 'We would urge the government to take the jab door to door where necessary. 'Although there are a lot of vaccination centres in inner cities, a lot of elderly and immobile people are simply unable to get there.' She said black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities are particularly in danger of being left unvaccinated. Vaccines are being offered to people in their own homes if they are registered as housebound or immobile with their GP. But there are currently no plans to rollout door-to-door vaccination in hard-to-reach areas. It comes amid debate over whether vaccines should be made mandatory for medical staff. NHS England's medical director Steve Powis told staff they have a 'professional responsibility' to take the vaccine. Executives have moved towards making the jab obligatory for frontline NHS staff after England's chief medical officer Chris Whitty on Monday said it was health staff's professional duty to be vaccinated. But ministers are reluctant to introduce compulsory vaccination because they fear it would make reluctant staff less likely to accept one. And health chiefs are divided on mandatory vaccination, with NHS bosses preferring professional leaders rather than managers to take the lead. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam said healthcare workers have a 'professional responsibility' to take the vaccine Employers have not been blocked from requiring staff to take the vaccine, with Boris Johnson praising 'very high quality' care homes that have made it a condition of employment. Medical unions have left the door open to making vaccination a condition of employment and have insisted staff should get the jab. Ministers urged to introduce door-to-door vaccinations Ministers have been urged to introduce door-to-door vaccinations to reach people who are unwilling or unable to go to GP surgeries. Chief executive of the Runnymede Trust thinktank Dr Halima Begum told The Guardian members of the NHS army should outreach to people who have not come forward for the jab. She said: 'We would urge the government to take the jab door to door where necessary. 'Although there are a lot of vaccination centres in inner cities, a lot of elderly and immobile people are simply unable to get there.' She said black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities are particularly in danger of being left unvaccinated. Vaccines are being offered to people in their own homes if they are registered as housebound or immobile with their GP. But there are currently no plans to rollout door-to-door vaccination in hard-to-reach areas. Advertisement Chair of the British Medical Association council Dr Chaand Nagpaul told The Times: 'We agree that doctors should have the Covid-19 vaccine unless they have a valid medical reason for not being vaccinated. 'We will continue to encourage uptake of vaccinations but any proposal for a contractual or regulatory requirement for healthcare workers to have a Covid-19 vaccine would require careful scrutiny to consider the legal and ethical implications.' The General Medical Council said 'it is clear' all doctors should be immunised against any transmissible disease, including Covid, unless there are good reasons why not. Academy of Medical Royal Colleges chair Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard said vaccination of staff is 'plain common sense'. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam said there was a professional standard that staff should adhere to that involves not putting people in their care at risk. NHS England has said around 88 per cent of patient-facing NHS Trust health care workers in England are likely to have had their first dose of a vaccine by now. But there are no published vaccine uptake figures for people working in social care. Asked how he feels about people working in the NHS or care homes who are refusing to have a jab, Prof Van-Tam told Good Morning Britain: 'I agree with Professor Whitty in that I think healthcare workers have always had a professional responsibility to take steps themselves to prevent them from being in a position where they could harm patients through infectious diseases they might have. 'That's been a very clear position on hepatitis B vaccine and performing invasive procedures, particularly surgery, for decades and decades. 'And so I think that's the professional standard that everybody ought to adhere to. 'Now, the other way of framing this is saying, if you're a consumer of healthcare, if you're a patient or a relative, would you prefer a healthcare worker to attend you or your relative if they have been vaccinated against Covid, or would you not really mind either way?' Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 02:47:15|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BUCHAREST, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Romania began vaccinating the teaching staff in the basic education system against COVID-19 on Wednesday, aiming to administer the first dose for 60,000 people within a half-month intensive vaccination program. "The teaching staff, as we know, is part of the staff that serves essential activities ... by the nature of the activity they carry out, they come into contact with many people," said Valeriu Gheorghita, president of the National Committee for Coordination of Vaccination Activities against COVID-19 (CNCAV). According to him, the authorities are trying to speed up the vaccination process among teachers through concentrated vaccination that ends on March 10. Of course, teachers will remain eligible for immunization throughout the national vaccination campaign and will be able to do so when they want to be vaccinated, he said, adding that it would be good for teachers to get vaccinated as soon as possible, to catch "the epidemiologically appropriate window." There were constant reports of students and teachers infected with the virus after in-person classes resumed on Feb. 8 in most kindergartens and schools. Latest data from the Ministry of Education showed that as of Feb. 19, a total of 730 classes had their activity suspended due to COVID-19 cases, while a number of 809 students and 638 employees from the education system were confirmed infected with the novel coronavirus during this period. The vaccination program for the teaching staff started on Wednesday in more than half of the country, including the capital city of Bucharest and other 22 counties, while on Thursday, another 14 counties will follow suit; two more on Friday and the last three on March 1. The pandemic situation in Romania has eased since the beginning of 2021. On Wednesday, the country registered 3,337 new cases and 73 deaths in a 24-hour period. Now the country counts a total of 788,048 confirmed cases and 20,086 deaths. The authorities hope to further alleviate the pandemic by stepping up its vaccination campaign that started on Dec. 27, 2020. So far, 855,097 people have been vaccinated. Currently, Romania is using three vaccines for vaccination -- Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca. Globally, 255 candidate vaccines are still being developed worldwide -- 73 of them in clinical trials -- in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the United States, according to information released by the World Health Organization on Tuesday. Enditem Establishing a New Global Leader in Data Protection and Management Merger will create broadest set of best-in-class business continuity solutions from a single vendor End-users will achieve a fast-track to cloud modernization and next-generation data infrastructures MSPs, VARs, and distributors will gain immediate business advantages Combination will expand global footprint, scale, and regional diversification Innovation and technology further advanced through combined IP portfolio and accelerated investment into R&D EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. and DRAPER, Utah, Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Arcserve, the world's most experienced data and ransomware protection provider, and StorageCraft, whose mission is to protect all data and ensure its constant availability, today announced that they have signed a definitive agreement to merge. Once completed, the merger of the two highly complementary companies will form the most comprehensive global provider of data management and protection solutions for organizations spanning from SMBs to the Fortune 50. The merger will solve the growing market need for a single source to manage and protect workloads throughout the data center, cloud, SaaS applications, and at the edge. With expanded geographic reach, the industry's broadest product portfolio, flexible business models, and magnified innovation footprint, the merged companies will bring extensive market and revenue opportunities for MSPs, VARs, and distributors. Addressing challenges facing end-users in every size organization Combining capabilities will create a comprehensive product suite that addresses the vast majority of use cases and business continuity challenges. With total global data storage projected to exceed 200 zettabytes by 2025and cybercriminals expected to attack a new business every 11 seconds in 2021, organizations will be able to choose one vendor for a single, agile ecosystem to manage data workloads in all environments and to protect and recover data in the event of cyberthreats, human error, and natural disasters. Organizations of all sizes will be able to rely on a single partner to protect current and evolving data infrastructures with a solutions-based portfolio that spans DRaaS, BaaS, SaaS protection, hybrid and converged data management, direct to cloud data protection, and workload migration to the cloud - or any other infrastructure. Significant value for MSPs, VARs, and distributors As two 100% channel-focused organizations come together, the merger will create meaningful new revenue opportunities for partners worldwide. The significantly expanded portfolio will simplify the selling process with solutions, services, and support from one vendor while also providing diversification to help partners expand addressable market share, scale revenue, and create margin opportunities. Flexible perpetual license and subscription business models will further optimize market and revenue opportunities and enable friction-free commerce. Accelerated investment for future infrastructures and next-generation data workloads Arcserve and StorageCraft will continue to fully support and invest in their existing solutions. In addition, both companies will increase investments in R&D and combined IP, which will strengthen both companies' product portfolios. Channel partners and end-users alike will see rapid innovation for continuous data availability across every platform and location. This will enable a seamless evolution from current to next-generation infrastructures and data workloads, including hyper-converged, multi-cloud, containers, edge infrastructures, and next-generation cloud data centers. Following the merger, StorageCraft will be branded 'StorageCraft, an Arcserve Company,' and the merged company will be united under the leadership of CEO Tom Signorello, the current CEO of Arcserve, and president Douglas Brockett, the current president of StorageCraft. Availability The combined Arcserve and StorageCraft solution portfolio will be available through channel partners and distribution. Supporting Quotes Tom Signorello, CEO, Arcserve "Companies in every sector are looking to modernize their infrastructures amid unabated cyber threats and global changes that have altered the way they must protect and manage data. This merger will place us at the forefront of filling a massive market gap by supporting all workloads in every environment with one ecosystem. No longer will organizations require ad-hoc solutions that only add to the complexity they are trying to solve. We will be better placed than any other vendor to be ready as new workloads arise and infrastructures evolve - providing certainty today and in the future." Matt Medeiros, Chairman and CEO, StorageCraft "The combination of StorageCraft's leadership in the SMB and MSP market combined with Arcserve's strength in the enterprise and VAR ecosystem, is game changing for the data protection and recovery market." Douglas Brockett, President, StorageCraft "Following the completion of the merger, the scope and scale of our combined businesses will allow us to bring a dramatically broader portfolio of solutions to market. At the same time, it expands the resources with which we can serve our customers and ensures we grow hand in hand with our channel partners." Phil Goodwin, Research Director, IDC "The combination of Arcserve and StorageCraft is very intriguing because it combines complementary hardware and software platforms. Arcserve's data protection and data security portfolio, when combined with StorageCraft's object-based data protection appliance platform, opens up solution possibilities beyond data protection and recovery. A holistic approach to data protection, security and secondary uses is the sort of solution that many IT organizations are considering." Jerome Wendt, President & Founder, DCIG LLC "StorageCraft and Arcserve coming together as a single company will very likely disturb the status quo of the data backup and protection industry. Independently, they represent well-run organizations with market-leading products that play in complementary markets. As a unified entity, it means that, for the first time, organizations have access to solutions that span from the enterprise to the smallest office - all from a single source. It gives organizations new freedom and potentially better choices in how they implement data management in their environments - plus a powerful and less complicated roadmap for future data workloads. This merger is likely a win for everyone, except maybe their competitors." Patric Gleisenberg, Regional Lead DACH - Software & Cloud, ALSO "When two 100% channel-centric data protection leaders merge, it can only be good news for the channel. The unified portfolio is highly attractive to us. There is only minimal product overlap, so we as well as our partners can easily extend our portfolio by adding services and expand our market and revenue opportunity pretty frictionless." Nicolai Landzettel, CEO, Data-Sec "The combination of Arcserve and StorageCraft is highly compelling. The capacity to bundle solutions and meet any customer need with flexible purchase models - such as perpetual and subscription - without licensing complexity makes it easier to grow profitably. The accelerated innovation capability is important because our ability to easily migrate data to next-generation infrastructures and workloads is critical to long-term customer success." For more information, including background and factsheets, please visit Arcserveor StorageCraft. About Arcserve Arcserve provides exceptional solutions to protect the priceless digital assets of organizations in need of full scale, comprehensive data protection. Established in 1983, Arcserve is the world's most experienced provider of business continuity solutions that safeguard multi-generational IT infrastructures with applications and systems in any location, on-premises and in the cloud. Organizations in over 150 countries around the world rely on Arcserve's highly efficient, integrated technologies and expertise to eliminate the risk of data loss and extended downtime while reducing the cost and complexity of backing up and restoring data by up to 50 percent. Arcserve is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota with locations around the world. Explore more at www.arcserve.comand follow @Arcserve on Twitter. About StorageCraft For nearly two decades, StorageCraft has been innovating advanced data management, protection, and recovery solutions. Together with our channel partners, we ensure medium and small organizations can always keep their business-critical information safe, accessible, and optimized. Our customers benefit from category-leading intelligent data protection, and management solutions converged primary and secondary scale-out storage platform and world-class cloud backup and DRaaS services. Regardless of whether an organization relies on on-premises, cloud-based, or a hybrid IT environment, StorageCraft solves the challenges of exploding data growth while ensuring business continuity through best-in-class protection and recovery solutions. For more information, visit storagecraft.com. Contact Information: Jock Breitwieser StorageCraft +1 408.800.5625 jock.breitwieser@storagecraft.com Jackie Blundell Red Lorry Yellow Lorry +1 857.217.2886 arcserve@rlyl.com Griddy, a California-based startup, came to Texas about three years ago hoping to shake up the power market by offering wholesale electricity prices to consumers. But it appears that the market has shaken Griddy. Griddy is facing harsh criticism from political leaders, lawsuits from angry consumers and an investigation by the Public Utility Commission after its customers were hit with electricity bills in the thousands of dollars as wholesale prices spiked during last weeks severe power shortages. It wasnt the first time that Griddys model, which charges customers $10 a month for access to wholesale pricing, left customers with huge bills, dwindling bank accounts and rising credit card charges. Electricity charges for its customers soared into hundreds of dollars in during a heat wave in August 2019, when wholesale prices rose because of tight power supplies. Whether Griddy and its model can survive the backlash this time remains to be seen. The attention it has received, both in Texas and nationally, has battered its reputation and undermined Griddys basic premise: that consumers should have the same access to wholesale markets as companies and traders. Buying wholesale could save individuals a great deal of money, said Joshua Rhodes, a research associate at the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas at Austin, but they need a long-term outlook as well as the stomach and cash to weather price spikes, he said. On HoustonChronicle.com: Power crisis spills into retail market But most people dont have the time or resources to monitor markets closely, he said. Most of the entities in wholesale power markets have trading desks, analysts, and people whose full-time job it is to assess where prices are going, Rhodes said. It's just hard for me to believe that the average consumer in Texas has the information that they need and the ability to act on that information that they would need to operate in the wholesale market, Rhodes said. Griddy entered the Texas power market in 2018, positioning itself as a disruptor that would give people more control over electricity costs and using edgy advertising that taunted competitors that offered traditional retail plans. Not for everyone Customers have an app that allow them to monitor wholesale markets and shift power consumption depending on prices at any given time. If prices jumped on summer afternoons, they might turn down the air conditioning. Or they might run dishwashers and other appliances at night when power prices are particularly low. For most months, wholesale prices are bargain at about 3 cents per kilowatt, compared to the nine or 10 cents you might pay for one-year retail contract, said Doug Lewin, an energy and climate consultant in Austin. But he also adds, Its not for everyone. The recent winter storm showed that dramatically. Prices soared to and held at the state maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour, meaning Griddy customers werent paying 3 cents or even 9 cents per kilowatt hour. They were paying $9. That ran up the bill of Lisa Khoury, of Mont Belvieu, to more than $9,000 for three weeks, she said in a lawsuit filed against Griddy Tuesday. At this point we dont know how many people might be affected, but there are likely thousands of customers whove received these outrageous bills, said her lawyer, Derek Potts of the Potts Law Firm in Houston. Griddy has about 30,000 customers in Texas, but that is a tiny share of a competitive power market with some 7.5 million electric meters. Griddy, in a statement, said it doesnt set wholesale power prices, just passes them along. As soon as the company realized how high the prices would rise over the holiday weekend, it began emailing and texting costumers that they might be better off switching plans. The company also blasted the state Public Utility Commission for a move on Feb. 15 that drove prices to $9,000 per megawatt hour from as low as $1,200 to reflect the severe power shortages that forced widespread blackouts. On HoustonChronicle.com: The murky and confusing Texas electricity market If there had been no price manipulation from the (PUC) consumers electricity bills would not have increased as dramatically as they did, Griddy spokesperson Lauren Valdes said in an email. Octopus Energy U.S., which has a similar model that uses wholesale pricing, is offering one-time bill forgiveness for Texas customers. The plan provides forgiveness of any energy bill amount that is more than the average price for Texas of 12.2 cents per kilowatt hour for the week of Saturday, February 13th through Friday, February 19th. Call for regulation Tim Morstad, associate state director of AARP Texas, which advocates for older Americans, said hes skeptical that many of Griddy customers understood the risks of the wholesale market as they shopped for power and were enticed by low advertised rates. He called for more regulation to protect consumers. I want people to know that its our state regulators at the Public Utility Commission, who have allowed creative marketing to ensnare customers through plans like these, Morstad said. The PUC launched an investigation on Tuesday into retail electric providers offering plans indexed to the wholesale electricity rate in Texas. On HoustonChronicle.com: What went wrong with the Texas power grid? While the structure of those plans is allowed by state law and PUC rule, the avalanche of customer complaints our Customer Protection Division has received about such plans and the business practices of the limited number of companies that offer them has triggered the investigation, said Andrew Barlow, a spokesperson for the PUC. The investigation and its parameters will be taken up in discussion in the commission meeting next Wednesday. becca.carballo@chron.com IF you have absolutely no urgent or emergency need to be outdoors today, then remain at home. Should you take a chance and decide to tempt fate, then it may most likely result in you being stopped and questioned by police officers and members of the Defence Force, or even find yourself charged and taken before a court. Fishing off the coast of Idenau Atia Azohnwi The Commission, leading the fight against illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing worldwide, has called on Cameroon to respect the international law of the sea in a bid to stamp out illegal fishing. In a press release published in Brussels on February 17, 2021, the commission issued a warning (so-called yellow card) to Cameroon that it should step up its actions against illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. The Commission decision is based on identified shortcomings in Cameroon's ability to comply with agreed standards under international law of the sea as flag, port and market state, the press release read in part. In particular, the Commission said Cameroon should develop a robust registration policy for fishing vessels entitled to operate under its flag and should ensure efficient and adequate control overfishing activities carried out by vessels flying its flag. Weak flag state control is one of the major causes of illegal fishing in an international context. Commissioner for Environment, Oceans, and Fisheries Virginijus Sinkevicius said: Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is one of the most serious threats to the sustainable exploitation of the sea representing a major hazard to the marine environment, the sustainability of fish stocks and marine biodiversity. It is unfortunate that Cameroon has not been able to ensure proper control of fishing activities happening under its flag. The Commission stands ready to work and cooperate with Cameroon to implement the necessary reforms. The Brussels-based Commission encouraged Cameroon to take the necessary actions in order to abide by its international obligations in the fight against illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. The yellow card is a warning and offers Cameroon the possibility to react and take measures to rectify the situation within a reasonable time. However, in cases of prolonged and continued non-compliance, countries can ultimately face a procedure of identification (a so-called red card), which entails sanctions, including on trade of fisheries products with this country, the Commission said. It furthered that illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is jeopardising the very foundation of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) and the EU's international efforts to promote better ocean governance. Under the European Green Deal and pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal for conservation and sustainable use of the oceans, sea and marine resources, the Commission says it has committed to a zero-tolerance approach to IUU fishing. The fight against illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is also an important aspect of the EU Biodiversity Strategy's objective to protect the marine environment. It should be noted that the EU is the world's biggest importer of fisheries products. Fighting illegal fishing is part of the EU's commitment to ensure sustainable use of the sea and its resources, under the Common Fisheries Policy and under its ambition to install better international governance of our oceans. The global value of IUU fishing is estimated at 10-20 billion euros per year. Between 11 and 26 million tonnes of fish are caught illegally every year, corresponding to at least 15% of world catches. Last weeks Commission decision is based on the EU's IUU Regulation', which entered into force in 2010. This key instrument in the fight against IUU fishing is the catch certification scheme that ensures that only legally caught fisheries products can access the EU market. The Regulation also provides for specific dialogue mechanisms with the countries that are not complying with their obligations as flag, coastal, port and market State under international law. While failure to cooperate in the framework of the dialogue can lead to an import ban for fisheries products (a so-called red card), the IUU dialogues are based on cooperation and support and are an important step in tackling IUU fishing, with trade prohibition only a last resort measure. Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Wednesday, February 24, presented the state's first paperless Budget in the state assembly. This is the Congress-led state government's third Budget. Beginning his Budget speech by mentioning the effect of coronavirus pandemic on India's economy, Gehlot said, "The state Budget 2021-22 will be paperless this time. Efforts have been made to take every section of society together. Corona has affected the economy so efforts will be made to gather financial resources." The Chief Minister, who also holds the finance portfolio, finalised the Budget at his residence on Tuesday, February 23. Announcing the Budget, Gehlot said the state government did not propose any new tax in its Budget for the financial year 2021-22 but announced relief measures of up to Rs 910 crore through various exemptions. Also Read: COVID-19 vaccination: Over 1.22 lakh beneficiaries administered first dose in single day in Rajasthan The Budget has projected a revenue deficit of Rs 23,750.04 crore and a fiscal deficit of Rs 47,652.77 crore for the coming financial year 2021-22. The fiscal deficit is 3.98 per cent of the Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP). "I feel that every section of the society has suffered due to the corona pandemic so no new tax has been proposed but relief of about Rs 910 crore is being provided during this corona period," the Chief Minister said in his Budget speech. The Budget estimates a revenue deficit of Rs 23,750.04 crore in FY 2021-22. Giving a brief overview of the Budget estimates for the financial year 2021-22, Gehlot said that during this period revenue receipts are estimated to be Rs 1,84,330.13 crore, revenue expenditure Rs 2,08,080.17 crore, and revenue deficit is Rs 23,750.04 crore. While presenting the revised estimates for the financial year 2020-21, he said that revenue receipts during this period were Rs 1,47,980.19 crore, revenue expenditure was Rs 1,89,701.80 crore while revenue deficit was Rs 41,721.61 crore. Meanwhile, the BJP termed the state Budget as disappointing, claiming that it did not live up to the expectations of the people of Rajasthan, whereas ruling Congress leaders said every section had been appropriately focussed on in the Budget. BJP state president Satish Poonia said the Budget is nothing more than a cut and paste job as new schemes have been announced just like past Budgets, which hardly get realised on the ground. "There is a huge contrast in announcements and their realisation. The Budget is just like a cut, copy and paste job. It's a cosmetic Budget, which has a good face but intentions are not good," Poonia added. Also Read: Petrol crosses Rs 100 in Rajasthan's Ganganagar, MP's Nagarabandh He said the Budget did not mention anything about regularisation of contractual workers or protesting unemployed youth. Overall, the Budget has failed to live up to the expectations of people, he added. Leader of Opposition Gulab Chand Kataria said old announcements made in previous Budgets for his own constituency have not even started and new ones have been announced. "It has become their hobby to make announcements. They are only misleading people as they do not have a proper Budget. This Budget is nothing more than a bundle of lies," Kataria said at a press conference. On the other hand, Congress leaders have termed it a holistic Budget, which has taken care of all sections of the society. Medical and Health Minister Raghu Sharma praised the Budget, saying that it is an unprecedented one for overall development. He said the Budget dedicated to health will fulfill the dream of a healthy Rajasthan. Sharma said several innovations in medicine and health have been announced in the Budget. We will present a unique example in the country by bringing a bill in the Assembly to provide the Right to Health to All. He described the Universal Health Care scheme as unprecedented from the point of view of health rejuvenation at a cost of Rs 3,500 crore from the upcoming financial year. Under this scheme, each family of the state will get the benefit of medical insurance scheme of Rs 5 lakh. Congress state president Govind Singh Dotasra said that a commendable Budget has been presented by CM Gehlot, which is all-inclusive and development-oriented. To take forward the state on the path of progress, announcements have been made in the Budget keeping the public interest paramount, he said in a statement. (With inputs from PTI.) Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) A senator wants the National Security Council to perform a security audit on Dito Telecommunity ahead of its slated commercial rollout this March. In a statement, Sen. Risa Hontiveros said worries surrounding the countrys third telco player haven't been resolved yet. Dito, a consortium of Davao-based businessman Dennis Uy's Udenna Corp. and Chelsea Logistics, is also backed by state-owned China Telecom. Habang patuloy ang pambu-bully ng Tsina sa West Philippine Sea sa gitna ng pandemya, nag-roll out naman tayo ng red carpet para sa isang kumpanyang direktang nagre-report sa gobyerno ng Tsina, said the lawmaker. [Translation: While China continues its bullying in the West Philippine Sea amid the pandemic, we just rolled out the red carpet for a company directly reporting to the Chinese government.] Dito announced Tuesday it's ready to take subscribers in by March 8, but only in the Visayas and Mindanao for now. It expects to make operations fully available nationwide by June. https://cnnphilippines.com/business/2021/2/23/Dito-Telecommunity-March-8-2021-rollout.html Hontiveros said a security audit must be conducted on the third telco player apart from a technical one, and that the NSC must tap an independent auditor like what the National Telecommunications Commission did. Dito passed its first technical audit earlier this week. The independent audit found that Ditos average connectivity is at 85.9 megabits per second (mbps) for 4G and 507.5 mbps for 5G, well above its commitment of at least 27 mbps on its first year of operation. http://www.cnnphilippines.com/business/2021/2/22/dito-telecommunity-passes-technical-audit.html Knowing that Dito is safe from Chinas incursions is as vital as knowing Ditos technical capabilities, she said. Dito also drew controversy before regarding its plan to establish cell sites inside local military camps, adding more security and privacy concerns. The company said the plan has not yet pushed through as they still await final approval from authorities. Both Dito and the Armed Forces of the Philippines previously downplayed the spying concerns. Last December, Hontiveros also questioned the granting of the franchise to the telecommunications network despite the NSC's lack of a cyberdefense doctrine against cyberattacks. The NSC made the admission during the Senate hearing on Ditos franchise that month. Given what she referred to as the lack of a concrete strategy on the part of the NSC regarding cybersecurity, the senator likewise flagged the operations of an alleged China-based hacking group called Naikon, which she said is executing an espionage campaign against Asia-Pacific governments like the Philippines. China can easily take advantage of this. Sinasakop na nila ang ating karagatan ng harap-harapan (They are already blatantly occupying our seas). Nothing is stopping it from doing the same to our data, lamented Hontiveros. Not unless China finally respects and honors that our territories in the WPS are ours and ours alone, every other business negotiation it has in our country will remain suspicious, she added. INDIANAPOLIS (AP) The Indiana Black Legislative Caucus called Tuesday for lawmakers who sparked confrontations with Black legislators last week to face reprimands and for all lawmakers to undergo mandatory anti-bias training. The request came after tempers flared among Indiana House members on Thursday. Black lawmakers were shouted down and booed by some Republicans during a debate and some verbal altercations took place in hallways. Democratic Rep. Robin Shackleford of Indianapolis, the Black caucus chairwoman, called the conduct of some Republican members aggressive and intimidating and said it was time to say enough is enough. Shackleford said she and other Black caucus members met with Republican House Speaker Todd Huston and asked for reprimands, training on implicit racial bias and for greater safety assurances for lawmakers against hostile behavior. The steps are needed because of offensive social media posts and comments from some Republican House members, Shackleford said. We cant tell who all is racist over there. We hear some of the comments, she said. Huston didnt address the Black caucus requests on Tuesday, saying in a statement he was committed to maintaining decorum, civility and professionalism. Huston, who is in his first full year as speaker, told House members on Monday that they should be considerate of different perspectives and must be more respectful of lawmakers speaking in accordance with House rules. Its not my nature to be heavy-handed in enforcement, but make no mistake going forward that will be the case, Huston said. Last weeks confrontations started when Black lawmakers spoke against a bill allowing a rural, mostly white township in St. Joseph County to leave the South Bend Community Schools, which is about 60% Black or Hispanic, and called the proposal discriminatory and racist. Several Republican members booed, said loudly no and stop, and some started leaving the House meeting room. An argument erupted in a hallway between Republican Sean Eberhart of Shelbyville, who is white, and Democratic Rep. Vanessa Summers of Indianapolis, who is Black. Other legislators separated them. Democratic Rep. Vernon Smith of Gary, who is Black, said he was called a bully by Republican Rep. Alan Morrison of Brazil, who is white, when they were in a restroom. Smith said Morrison kept berating him in the hallway until Morrison was pulled aside by another legislator. I understand that what I say often is not comfortable for some of my colleagues, Smith, whos been a House member for 31 years, said Tuesday. What I was offended by is that one of my colleagues wanted to shut me up. I think that I have a right to speak my opinions. Morrison declined through his legislative press secretary to comment to The Associated Press. Morrison told The Indianapolis Star he wouldnt talk about what happened. What happens between two grown men, I wont say anything, Morrison said. He can say whatever he wants, but Ive got no comment on it. The Black caucus is made up of 14 House members or senators among the 150 state lawmakers. All are Democrats from Indianapolis or northwestern Indianas Lake County. The Republican-dominated House narrowly approved the school district bill on a 52-43 vote as 14 Republicans joined Democrats in voting against the proposal, sending it to the Senate for consideration. The Spanish Cabinet on Wednesday extended travel restrictions on arrivals from the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa until March 16. The measure is aimed at preventing the arrival of the more-contagious variants of the coronavirus that have been detected in those countries. Current rules stipulate that only Spanish citizens or people with other nationalities who have official residency in Spain or Andorra can fly or sail into the country from the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa. Passengers traveling from those countries to a non-Schengen destination with a stopover less than 24 hours in Spain must not leave the international transit area of the airport. The agreement, however, establishes some exceptions to the rules and allows the Health Ministry to lift the restrictions and allow one-off flight arrivals for justified reasons. According to a report from the Health Ministry, the B.1.1.7 strain now accounts for nearly 70% of new coronavirus cases in Asturias and close to 50% in Catalonia Restrictions on passenger travel from the UK by air and sea have been in place since December 22, following alarm over the B.1.1.7 strain of the coronavirus that was first detected in the English county of Kent. Spain introduced further restrictions on travel from Brazil and South Africa on February 2 after more-infectious variants of the virus were also identified in those countries. The rules were set to expire on March 2. The decision from the Spanish Cabinet comes as the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic continues to ease in Spain. On Tuesday, the 14-day cumulative number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants fell below 250 the threshold considered to indicate a situation of extreme risk. But health authorities warned that there is still a danger that Spain will see a new uptick in cases as regions start to relax restrictions on social gatherings and the hostelry industry, and the Easter break approaches. Compounding the risk is the arrival of the new variants of the coronavirus, which are not only more contagious, but can also cause more serious illness and, in the case of the strain from South Africa, reduce the effectiveness of current Covid-19 vaccines. According to a recent report from the Health Ministry, the B.1.1.7 strain now accounts for nearly 70% of new cases in Asturias and close to 50% in Catalonia. The document stated that a total of 916 infections of the new variants have been detected in Spain, most of which correspond to the strains detected in the UK, South Africa and Brazil. The effort to tackle the variants has been hindered in Spain by the countrys low genetic sequencing capacity. While the European Commission wants all member states to genetically sequence 5% of all coronavirus cases, experts believe Spain lacks the resources to meet that goal in a sustained manner, regardless of whether there are spikes in infections. English version by Melissa Kitson. While truth and lies can look the same, they are like identical twins, that can be very different indeed, as the painting A detail from The Twins, Kate and Grace Hoare (1876), by John Everett Millais, suggests. The Fitzwilliam Museum. (PD-US) Truth and Her Twin, Part 2: Mendacium Writ Large We looked in Part 1 at the mythological origins of Truth (Veritas) and Lies (Mendacium). We established that they were like twins: sometimes very difficult to distinguish between one and the other. And we made the point, too, that Mendacium, because she was footless, was immobile and also unbalanced. If we think through what this imagery meanskeeping in mind that the myths tell us deep psychological or even spiritual truthswe realize that being footless, being immobile, means that we are not free. The essence of being free is that we are free to move, wherever and whenever we want. If at any point in our lives we cannot move, we cannot truly be said to be free. While truth and lies can look the same, they are like identical twins, who can be very different indeed, as the painting The Twins, Kate and Grace Hoare (1876), by John Everett Millais, suggests. Kate (L) holds a riding crop and her demure sister, a hat. The Fitzwilliam Museum. (PD-US) At a religious level, for example, Christ said that in knowing the truth, the truth would set us free, and this idea was matched by his healing of the physically infirmsome of whom could not even move. By healing, not just curing their bodies, he set them free. Truth has this remarkable quality: It frees us. In healing the lame, Jesus made manifest the dictum that the truth sets one free. Christ Healing the Lame at the Pool of Bethesda, 1640s, by Pieter van Lint. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum. (Public Domain) But not just at a spiritual levelthis is also true at a political one. If we cannot move, for example, as during a lockdown, a curfew, an embargo, and so on, then we are not free politically. Not to be misunderstood: There may be good reasons for curtailing freedom in a lockdownsuch as public health, but nevertheless, the restriction denies ones freedom. This issue, then, is really important. In a way, what I am saying is that the acceptance of MendaciumLies or Erroris the precursor to loss of freedom. It is neither necessarily nor immediately apparent that we lose our freedom, but if enough people collectively subscribe to Mendacium, then as sure as night follows day, our freedoms are eroded and we become enslaved by false and lying ideologies. Mendacium Rules Today we are assaulted on all sides by just such a lying ideology, Mendacium threatening to undermine all our freedoms. In terms of identifying it, English writer Theodore Dalrymple perhaps caught its very essence when he wrote: He [Stefan Zweig] would have viewed with horror the cacophony of monomaniassexual, racial, social, egalitarianthat marks the intellectual life of our societies, each monomaniac demanding legislative restriction on the freedom of others in the name of a supposed greater, collective good. Notice the strength of feeling in that statement: not people, but monomaniacs demanding what? Our freedom for some supposed greater, collective good. And lest we think that the danger can only come from self-evident monomaniacs (and self-confessed communists)as visible as some of them are, aggressively protesting on our streetsyet the danger of Mendacium can be much subtler. It can be a lie generated by an internal contradiction that is difficult to spot. Camille Paglia comments, in her book Sexual Personae, on modern liberalism and its connection to feminism: Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects government to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands that it behaves as nurturant mother Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate. Scholar Camille Paglia in 2015. (Fronteiras do Pensamento/CC-SA BY 2.0) Isnt this the essence of Mendacium? Its so close to Veritas. Surely, we can all agree that it is right that women should be treated equally with men, but along the way, this truth has morphedvia modern liberalisminto a lie. Its a lie that denies human limitation, which is the actual difference between men and women, or their nature. Modern feminism has also denied fate. We may wish to use another word for thisdestiny, providence, the Tao. But whatever word we use, wed realize if we understood it, that outcomes in life never have been, never will be, equal. The striving for equality of outcomes is utopian, futile, and ultimately anti-freedom. For what does it mean to be free? It means we take self-responsibility, and as a consequence, we each achieve different results for ourselves. On an individual level this is obviously true, but we have seen in history plenty of collective efforts to reverse this situation. As Jordan B. Peterson put it, If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917, there is absolutely and finally no excuse now. The encroachment of Mendacium onto the domain of Veritas often seems to start with small things. In the UK, for example, politician and military historian Robert Oulds, in his book Moralitis, comments on student unions which ensure freedom from speech through no-platforming and safe spaces. Notice the rather witty, freedom from speech, not of speech. It almost seems funny until one reflects that we are talking about the young university generation whom we once thought went to collegelike we once didto broaden and expand their minds. While utopias promise paradise founded on earthly equality, they deliver dystopian hells. Escaping the Dome, 2014, photomontage of images by Eric Perrone and yumikrum. (Yumikrum/CC SA-BY 2.0) Werent universities places that had famous debating chambers? No more it seems. Most students today cannot abide an idea that contradicts their uninformed prejudices. Worse, this intolerance is like an insidious cancer, which spreads so that soon the whole body is riddled with it. Quoting Dalrymple again, we end up with a society of emasculated liars who are very easy to control. Our Way Back to Truth How do we resist this insidious undermining of all that we hold dear? Clearly, there is no easy answer, for if there were, we wouldnt have the problem. But I make two suggestions that seem relevant. One is honest journalism of the type that The Epoch Times espouses. There has to be resistance to the fake news and social media control that currently now appertains. In a way, this is immediate and frontline stuff. But the deeper, longer-term stuff is related to the kind of culture we live in and the values it espouses, or claims to espouse, for frequently actions belie espoused values. In particular, I feel that our arts are of primary importance in this battle for the hearts and souls of the people, especially the younger generation. Why is this? Because it is the artsliterature, drama, music, and visual artthat most affect our emotions. In the absence of any pervasive spiritual or religious tradition, our sense of the creative can only derive from these sources. Statue of Veritas (Truth), by Walter Seymour Allward. Outside the Supreme Court of Canada, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. (D. Gordon E. Robertson/CC BY SA 3.0) The trouble is, so much of art today is either entirely nihilistic or not art at all! John Habgood (former Archbishop of York) some while ago observed: The fact that not much art these days seems to be inspired by explicitly religious themes may, however, be a reflection of the trivialization and disorientation of art itself. Art inspired by the divine, as it was in the past, can affect us in profound ways. John Habgood, the former Archbishop of York, believed that the fact that much of art today is divorced from religion might reflect the trivialization and disorientation of art itself. Praying Hands, circa 1508, by Albrecht Durer. Albertina art museum in Vienna, Austria. (PD-US) The problem is that people no longer believe in anything, including something as basic as form itself. In poetry, we now have free verse, meaning, usually, poetry with no structure at all. And without form, very little beautyor truth. What is true of todays poetry is also true of the other art forms. We all know this about the arts but, as with the emperors new clothes, like to pretend otherwise. Thus, we need to press for art that rediscovers the myths of old, but for a contemporary generation. The great critic Northrop Frye said: A myth is designed not to describe a specific situation but to contain it in a way that does not restrict its significance to that one situation. Its truth is inside its structure, not outside. This is the real twin, Veritas, which compels assent because her truth is inside, is internal, and is the only one that can really stand. Part 1 of Truth and Her Twin explains the myth of Veritas and Mendacium. James Sale has had over 50 books published, most recently, Mapping Motivation for Top Performing Teams (Routledge, 2021). He won first prize in The Society of Classical Poets 2017 annual competition, performing in New York in 2019. His most recent poetry collection is HellWard. For more information about the author, and about his Dante project, visit TheWiderCircle.webs.com Waitrose has unveiled plans for a new beef production facility at its farm on the Leckford Estate, replacing the current dairy unit. The new beef facility will replace the Hampshire estate's existing dairy operation, which represents just 3% of the retailer's total milk production. Cattle produced at the estate will spend a large proportion of the year outside and are free to roam. Additional crop land will also be created to help produce more flour and oil, which will be sold to customers. The announcement is part of the Waitrose's ten year agriculture strategy. Andrew Hoad, head of the Leckford Estate, said regenerative agriculture was vital in fighting climate change. Retaining cattle on the farm means providing a rich source of organic matter, which will improve soil quality and contribute to multiple benefits including greater biodiversity," he said. "Not only will this be good for the environment, it will be good for our customers too as we can ensure we continue to grow high quality crops and produce whilst using nature balanced solutions to encourage wildlife and benefit nature. Waitrose has farmed on the Leckford Estate for over 90 years and is the only remaining supermarket in the UK to have its own farm. James Bailey, executive director at Waitrose, said the estate was a test bed for industry best practice and farming innovation. "Over the coming years, we will take those learnings to tweak our approach and share them with all our suppliers to ensure best practice across our whole supply chain. If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this Got news tips, gossip, suggestions, complaints?E-mail us: progressivecharlestown@gmail.com We strive to avoid errors in our articles. Our correction policy can be found here Todays environmental activists are so hostile to capitalism that they end up killing animals they want to protect. Like the African rhinoceros. Poachers kill them to get their horns, which can sell for as much as $300,000. Poachers mostly sell in China and Vietnam, to people who carve them into ornaments or sell them as aphrodisiacs. By the way: The aphrodisiacs dont work. When I started Stossel TV, my first video covered one mans attempt to reduce rhino poaching by flooding the market with fake horns. Matthew Markus argued that his 3D printed rhino horn would reduce demand for real horns. One way to devalue something is to create a lot of it, he explained. When things are abundant, people dont fight, kill or steal. True. Bootleggers and Al Capones thugs disappeared when America ended Prohibition. South Africa, home to the largest number of rhinos, once tried something similar. For 20 years, they allowed people to own rhinos and sell their horns. Rhino farmers put the rhinos to sleep with tranquilizer darts, sawed off their horns (the horns grow back) and sold the horn. Farmers had an incentive to protect rhinos. South Africas rhino population quadrupled. But in 2009, under pressure from environmental groups, South Africa banned sales of horn again. The sad result: Poaching increased sharply. Poachers also killed park rangers who tried to protect rhinos. So, I confronted Masha Kalinina of the Humane Society, one of many groups that called Markus plan to sell 3D printed horn greenwashing an illegal activity. Kalinina said legalization might increase demand for real rhino horn, as did happen once with elephant tusks. It started up a new carving industry in China that had been dormant for decades, she said. I pushed back: It needs to be long enough to bring the prices down, and then people say, Eh, theres no money in poaching. The problem is that people still see animals as commodities! Kalinina responded, natural resources for their use. Well, yes. I do. So what? I eat eggs. Chickens are plentiful because people like me pay for what chickens produce. Kalinina sneered, Are we really going to just farm every single animal on this planet so we can endlessly continue supplying this bloodlust and thirst of people to consume wildlife products? Bloodlust? Give me a break. Even if you oppose people using animal products, banning sales doesnt stop the use. It just creates black markets and crime. Far better is letting rhino farmers trim horns and sell them. Farming gives people incentive to protect rhinos from poachers. That saves both rhinos and human lives. When I told Kalinina, your bans have failed... they are cruel to both rhinos and people, she replied that education is the way to stop poaching. The Humane Society runs ads in Vietnam telling people that rhino horns have no medical value. They claim this campaign convinced many people. But what good did it do? I asked. People are still poaching the rhinos. It takes time, she replied. Time for the trickle-down effect. Its nice that the Humane Society tries to convince people not to buy horn, but its outrageous that their hatred of capitalism blinds them to better ideas. Its like the drug war, I point out. You can ban things, but if theres money to be made, poachers will kill animals. This is an endless argument, she replied. We cant live in a lawless society. But markets are not lawless. Legal rhino farming or selling fake horn, would save endangered animals. But the environmental groups just cant see that. Now researchers from the University of Oxford have produced a new form of fake rhino horn that they say would reduce demand for poached horn. Environmental groups oppose that, too. Fortunately, South Africa wised up. After my video was first broadcast, officials decided to ignore the complaints from the environmental groups. They re-legalized sales of farmed rhino horn. After that, the killing of rhinos fell dramatically. JOHN STOSSEL is author of Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media. For other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. The wife and five children of an Iraqi politician have been terrorised for more than a year in their southwest Sydney home as part of an international attempt to extort $10million from the prominent dual citizen. Detective Chief Superintendent Darren Bennett of NSW Police State Crime Command said four people have been arrested in dawn raids on Wednesday after a joint investigation between Australian and Canadian authorities. Two men - aged 24 and 22 - were arrested at Blacktown and Seven Hills and are expected to be charged over multiple violent incidents at the family home at Chester Hill between December 2019 and January this year. NSW Police State Crime Command said four people have been arrested in dawn raids on Wednesday after a joint investigation between Australian and Canadian authorities Two men - aged 24 and 22 - were arrested at Blacktown and Seven Hills and are expected to be charged over multiple violent incidents Two simultaneous search warrants were executed in Edmonton, Canada, by the Edmonton Police Cybercrime Unit, who seized a replica firearm and electronic devices. A 33-year-old man and a 32-year-old woman were arrested and are now in the custody of local authorities. Strike Force Mulach was established by the Robbery and Serious Crime Squad to investigate and worked with police in Edmonton. Det Supt Bennett said the Canadian man was the mastermind behind the plot that involved attacks on the family's home in Chester Hill and online threats, demanding payment of up to $10million. The target is reportedly Iraqi politician Ahmed Al Asadi - a dual citizen who lives in Baghdad. Two men, aged 24 and 22, are expected to be charged allegedly terrorising the wife and five children of an Iraqi politician for over a year (pictured: home where the two men were arrested) NSW Police arrested two men on Wednesday after a joint investigation between Australian and Canadian authorities His wife and children - aged between 10 and 25 - were initially the victims of a home invasion by four masked people, where the 16-year-old son was assaulted and robbed of cash. On another occasion a shot was fired at the home and another time a brick was used to smash the front window. Earlier this month a threatening note was left outside the home and a fire was lit on the front porch. 'There's been constant demands for money over a period of time,' Det Supt Bennett said. The men from Sydney are expected to appear in court later on Wednesday charged over the home invasion and other attacks NSW Police believe money was handed over to people in Sydney to commit the crimes (pictured: one of the arrested men inn police custody) 'We think some money has been handed over to people in Sydney to commit acts of violence in and around the family home,' he told reporters. 'Our allegation will be that the mastermind behind this is the male in Canada and he has been directing criminal activity in Sydney.' The $10million was not paid, he said. The men from Sydney are expected to appear in court later on Wednesday charged over the home invasion and other attacks. Two simultaneous search warrants were executed in Edmonton, Canada, by the Edmonton Police Cybercrime Unit, who seized a replica firearm and electronic devices. State lawmakers in Hawaii are considering legislation that would make some hikers pay for their own rescue when they get lost or endangered because of their own recklessness. Senate Bill 700 would allow local governments to recoup the cost of search and rescue operations, which can run upward of $10,000. A second bill, SB 363, also working its way through the state Senate, would go further and impose fines for illegally hiking on closed trails and private property. The legislation, which mimics similar rules in multiple other states including California, would penalize hikers who disregard warning signs, trespass or take other risks in their quest for off-the-beaten-path adventure. Denton, TX (76205) Today Scattered thunderstorms. High near 75F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Locally heavier rainfall possible.. Tonight Showers and thundershowers this evening will give way to steady rain overnight. Low 64F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected. Locally heavier rainfall possible. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Tim Weiner is a former New York Times reporter and author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007). The history of the CIA, according to Weiner, is a history of the failures of the CIA. The CIA chose not to ignore the book. It posted a response by the agencys historian that the agency has unfortunately removed from its site. The CIA historians response to Weiners book was linked in J.R. Bullingtons review for American Diplomacy here, but the link now draws up a blank page. I read the CIA response at the time Weiners book was published and thought it was pretty good. Writing from my memory of it, I think it informs Bullingtons review. My favorite writer on intelligence issues, however, is Edward Jay Epstein, with whom I have gotten friendly over the past 15 years. Indeed, Ed is my model of a journalist, period. Ed praised Weiners book in attention-getting terms in his Wall Street Journal review (accessible online here). Ed particularly appreciated elements of Weiners book that supported Eds continuing defense of former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton. One astounding paragraph of Weiners book relates the penetration of the CIA by Cuban intelligence: In June 1987, Major Florentino Aspillaga Lombard, the chief of Cuban intelligence in Czechoslovakia, drove across the border to Vienna, walked into the American embassy, and defected to Jim Olson, the CIA chief of station. He revealed that every Cuban agent recruited by the agency over the past twenty years was a doublepretending to be loyal to the United States while working in secret for Havana. It was a genuine shock, and hard to believe. But CIA analysts glumly concluded after a long and painful review that the major was telling the truth. That same summer, a trickle of fresh intelligence about the deaths of the CIAs agents began coming in from a new set of Soviet and Soviet-bloc military and intelligence officers. It grew to a stream, and then a flowing river, and seven years passed before the terrible realization that it was disinformation delivered to mystify and mislead the CIA. Olson sat for a fascinating interview in Foreign Policys I Spy podcast series. I have embedded the podcast with Olson below. I asked Ed Epstein to check it out. Ed commented: Olson dates the Cuban penetration of CIA operations to 1962. In 1962-1964, the CIA was running assassination plots against Castro in parallel to Oswalds trips to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. The key agent was AMLASH (Roland Cubela), who was meeting with his CIA case officer on Nov. 22, 1963 to get equipment to kill Castro. You can find it in my chapter in Annals of Unsolved Crimes as well as my paperback on Amazon, Political Assassinations. Eds most recent discussion of the Kennedy assassination makes up the epilogue to The Annals of Unsolved Crime (2014), but three of Eds books bear on the Kennedy assassination: Inquest (1966, on the Warren Commission), Counterplot (1968, on the odious Jim Garrison), and Legend (1978, on Lee Harvey Oswald). Anyone interested in the subject will want to take in the podcast with Olson below. A Sinn Fein councillor said he no longer considers one of his TUV colleagues a "d***head" during a heated argument in Mid and East Antrim Borough Council. However, James McKeown did say that unionist counterpart Timothy Gaston was "fairly worth the comic value he brings to this chamber". Tensions in the chamber were high on Monday night as councillors debated holding an investigation into information given to them before they unanimously voted to remove council staff working at Larne Port earlier this month. While the row raged on TUV councillor Timothy Gaston noted that Sinn Fein's James McKeown had once called him a "d***head". Mr Gaston said the motion before councillors "wouldn't even make good kindling never mind an independent investigation" and noted the leaking of confidential information to the media. "I certainly wouldn't regard myself as a tout as Carnlough Jimmy can well adhere to and be aware of," the TUV councillor said. "Back in January 2016 the Carnlough representative in this chamber called me a d***head, he didn't have the guts to admit it on that night when I called him out. Expand Close Angry: Councillor James McKeown / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Angry: Councillor James McKeown "My question would be is he going to come on tonight and own up or is he going to hide behind the hedges like he did in his provisional days." The 2016 row broke out over links from the council's website to external organisations such as the Reserve Forces and Cadets' Association. Mr McKeown, who is based in the Carnlough area, later admitted making the remark off microphone, but said he was provoked due to Mr Gaston's repeated comments linking Sinn Fein councillors to the IRA. Speaking on Monday evening, Mr Gaston also noted that the council reported him to the Northern Ireland Local Government Commissioner for Standards after he disclosed sensitive commercial information during an open council meeting in February 2019. The TUV councillor was forced to apologise for the remarks last year. He called for similar action to be taken against those found to be leaking information about the situation around Larne Port. Mr McKeown attempted to intervene to respond to the comments from Mr Gaston with "a clarification", but Mayor Peter Johnston made it clear it was not his turn to speak. However, the Sinn Fein councillor spoke over the DUP councillor, saying "I no longer consider him (Gaston) a d***head but he is fairly worth the comic value he brings to this chamber". The motion calling for an independent investigation was defeated by 26 votes to 11, with one abstention. On February 1 council staff were withdrawn from inspection duties over "concerns for their safety and welfare" following "an upsurge in sinister and menacing behaviour". Police later said they had found no evidence of "credible threats" against port staff and they returned to their posts. It has been alleged the threat was exaggerated due to unionist's unhappiness with the Northern Ireland Protocol, which has led to checks on goods travelling from Great Britain to the region. Mr Gaston told the Belfast Telegraph that while his primary motivation in voting to remove staff was their safety, he also took the opportunity to do the right thing for "the bigger picture of unionism". The Oregon Employment Department experienced a tenfold increase in identity theft issues in 2020 as new jobless claims poured in during the pandemic, mirroring a spike in claims that took place across the country. Cyberthieves capitalized on the huge volume of unemployment claims filed during the early months of the pandemic to submit fraudulent benefits applications. Washington lost upwards of $200 million during the pandemic; Californias losses top $11 billion. But unlike several other states, Oregon wont say how much money was lost to fraud. The employment department rejected a public records request submitted in December, citing a broad statutory exemption from the records most state agencies must disclose. The department also refused an accompanying request seeking records explaining how it reached the decision not to disclose information on fraud. The employment department maintains that thieves are watching news coverage and social networking groups for clues as to how individual states are fighting fraudulent activity. Acting director David Gerstenfeld said that putting a dollar figure to the states losses, even for a full year, could trigger a wave of attempted theft that could drain the states unemployment insurance trust fund and slow payments to legitimately unemployed Oregonians. Weve seen a couple other states get hit with incredibly large, sudden waves of claims. We certainly want to avoid that, Gerstenfeld said. Pressed by The Oregonian/OregonLive, the department acknowledged the sharp spike in attempted identity theft from around 900 cases in 2019 to more than 9,000 last year. Gerstenfeld said the rate of overpayments money paid to claimants who dont deserve it increased from 10% in 2019 to at least 14% in 2020. We think that probably understates the scale of the issue, Gerstenfeld said. Many of those overpayments were genuine mistakes, by claimants or the employment department, but some share of them were fraud. Still, Gerstenfeld said Oregon believes its fraud losses are considerably smaller, on a per capita basis, than the huge losses in California and Washington. He said those states were unlucky in that they were hit early in the pandemic and that Oregon has learned from problems elsewhere. Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin have all disclosed estimated fraud losses during the pandemic. Oregon and a few other states, among them Tennessee and West Virginia, have said they will not. Michele Evermore, researcher and policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, said the states have legitimate concerns about disclosing information thieves could use. If these fraudsters are looking around state to state, and they see a state with a particularly high number, theyre going to say: Oh, this is going to be an easier one to hack, Evermore said. She said thieves tactics are constantly evolving and theyre looking for any advantage. Still, Evermore said, The public needs to know whats going on, too. Its just hard to figure out how to balance all that. The employment department is in the process of adding staff as part of an expanded fraud-detection effort, though Gerstenfeld said that wasnt triggered by any recent increase in claims. Oregon has paid nearly $8 billion in jobless benefits in the 11 months since the pandemic began last March, more each month than it typically pays in an entire year. An unprecedented 750,000 people have received some class of unemployment benefit during that time. Oregon has severely lagged other states in promptly paying jobless claims and implementing new jobless benefits programs during the pandemic. It was the very last state to pay waiting week benefits last year for the first week workers are out of a job; an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive found the department was among the slowest at paying regular benefits, too. The states repeated failings last year result, in large measure, from the obsolete technology Oregon relies on to pay jobless benefits. The system dates to the 1990s and, amid dysfunctional culture in the employment department, repeatedly delayed upgrades despite receiving $86 million in federal funds to pay for a modernization in 2009 (the state still has most of that money.) One element of Oregons old-fashioned systems may be working against fraudsters. Oregon often pays initial benefits by a check through the mail, rather than electronically. That means thieves must either collect checks from the mailbox of an identity theft victim, or wait for subsequent weeks payments to come online. By that time, the identity theft victim or the employment department may have caught on to the scam. Gerstenfeld declined to say how much of a factor that may be in limiting Oregons fraud losses. Without figures on the states actual fraud losses, its impossible to know for sure whether Oregon has indeed performed better at preventing fraud than it has at paying benefits. Lawmakers are divided over the departments refusal to say how much it has lost. California and Washington have been forthcoming with some of their issues. I dont know why we cant, said Sen. Betsy Johnson, D-Scappoose, co-chair of the Legislatures joint Committee on Ways and Means. Being transparent about the deficiencies is not going to incentivize fraud. The fraud already exists. Rep. David Gomberg, a Democrat representing parts of the Oregon coast, repeatedly raised the issue of unemployment fraud at legislative hearings this month. But he said he is sympathetic to the employment departments position, and intends to seek a confidential briefing to obtain more information. I am frustrated but understand their explanation, Gomberg said. Again, I would like to know more but not if it results in costs to the fund or more fraud. Fraud victim? Some people who havent filed jobless claims have received benefits checks or tax forms from the employment department indicating they were paid unemployment benefits during 2020. Those may be the result of identity theft. Additionally, the Oregon Employment Department warns that fraudsters are impersonating the department or the U.S. Department of Labor over the phone or on social media. The employment department says it will never ask for PIN verification numbers over the phone, and warns people about emails coming from or directing people to fraudulent websites. The employment department says its communication comes from a .gov internet address, typically Oregon.gov. The employment department has a new form for people and employers to report suspected identity theft in jobless claims. Alternately, the department is taking calls on suspected fraud at 877-668-3204. -- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway | SMC Global Securities on Wednesday made a direct debut on the BSE, NSE to provide liquidity to its existing shareholders. The stock was listed at Rs 90.90 on NSE and Rs 91.60 on BSE. The company that was already listed on Calcutta Stock Exchange (CSE) went public in 90s and was listed on multiple stock exchanges. "We went public in 1995-96 and got listed stock exchanges in Delhi, Calcutta, Ahmadabad, Ludhiana and Guwahati. Except Calcutta Stock Exchange, rest of other exchanges got closed. Trading has been minimal at CSE too. Therefore, to unlock shareholders wealth and provide liquidity to our 1500-odd shareholders, we decided to go for mainboard listing," Subhash C Aggarwal, SMC Global Securities told BusinessToday.In. The promoters hold 62 per cent in the company, while 38 per cent include public, corporate, and high net-worth investors. Should you buy? The broking space is crowded. Already big players such as Motilal Oswal, Edelweiss Financial Services, ICICI Securities, Angel Broking and 5paisa Capital are listed, while discount brokerages such as Zerodha and Upstox of the worlds are giving tough competition to traditional brokerages. To this, Aggarwal says they have already ventured into discount brokerage through its subsidiary company under the brand 'STOXKART'. "We have a unique model in which you pay brokerage only when you make profit. No profit, then no brokerage fee." Besides, the company earns its revenues from various sources with broking income contributing 49 per cent to it. "Apart from 49 per cent revenues coming from brokerage fee, we have multiple revenue streams from investment banking, wealth management, PMS, third party distribution, real estate broking, insurance broking, NBFC to fixed income securities and HFT & algo trading. Besides traditional equity, we also handle commodity and currency broking," says Aggarwal. Speaking at the listing ceremony, Vikram Limaye, MD & CEO, National Stock Exchange said: "It gives us immense pleasure to on board SMC Global on the NSE main board platform. We are confident that the company in the broking industry has a major role to play in having financial inclusion and ongoing digital revolution." SMC Global reported Consolidated Total Revenue of Rs 6,38.5 crore for the 9M FY21, an increase of 9 per cent in total revenue. Profit after Tax for the 9M FY21 was Rs 67.7 crore, an increase of 268 per cent compared with corresponding 9M FY20. The company has witnessed a CAGR growth of 15 per cent and 21 per cent in revenue and PAT, respectively, in last five years. The company recently declared interim dividend of 60 per cent for 9M FY21. "We have been consistently paying dividend to our shareholders since FY 2013-14," the company says in its press release. Also Read: Cabinet to approve PLI scheme for electronics, medical devices Also Read: India Inc to offer 7.7% average salary hike in 2021: Aon Also Read: Need to get into cutting edge tech to bolster exports: Amitabh Kant By TABU BUTAGIRA Bobi Wine yesterday announced that he would be withdrawing a petition he had filed to overturn Yoweri Musevenis January 14, 2021 re-election. Under section 61 of the Presidential Elections Act, a presidential election petition can only be withdrawn with leave of court, meaning whereas Bobis press conference proclamation yesterday was politically pivotal, it was not legally conclusive. His lawyers will still have to put together the required paperwork and file a notice before the Supreme Court. Until that happens, the National Unity Platform (NUP) petition would remain validly standing for the decision of court. Read more: https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/news/national/why-bobi-is-exiting-poll-petition-and-what-next3300972 Wales could return to a stay local message in the coming weeks as lockdown measures are reviewed This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Feb 24th, 2021 Wales may move to a stay local message in the coming weeks as lockdown restrictions are reviewed, the health minister said today. Under the level four lockdown people are only allowed to leave their home for essential travel, work if they cannot work from home or to exercise. Such measures have been in place since December 20. However over the last few days all four nations have outlined how certain measures could start being eased, although an exact roadmap beyond April has yet to be announced by the Welsh Government. On Monday Prime Minister Boris Johnson set out a four stage roadmap to cautiously ease lockdown in England, which could see most restrictions lifted by the summer. In the roadmap, a number of key dates were given starting with a return for all schools in England on 8 March and culminating with what would essentially be the end of Covid restrictions on 21 June. The plan also included self accomodation holidays and the potential for travel abroad in the coming months. Asked about whether the ban on travelling from Wales into England and vice versa had been looked at following the UK Governments roadmap earlier this week, Health Minister Vaughan Gething said it could be moving towards a stay local message in the coming weeks. This would be similar to the message in place for part of last summer and during the initial localised lockdowns in place towards the end of the year. However nothing has been finalised, with the outcome of the next review not due for another three weeks. He added that any changes would need to consider the respective rules in England. Mr Gething said: At this point in time, we may be moving to a stay local period, that depends on what were able to do successfully over the next two and a half weeks. If were in a position to further reduce, or further maintain the suppression of coronavirus, then we may be able to move from stay home to stay local, that would be really positive. Well have to think about what stay local means. England were contemplating a move to stay local later than that. So actually, in terms of cross border movement, it would be the law in England that will prevent people from moving either into England, or from England into Wales. Thats part of the reason why the four governments need to talk to each other, as we have tried to, and weve been very open to doing. I recognise there are some border areas in both northeast Wales but also right across the border in mid Wales and south east Wales, where the reality of community links and services mean that people cross the border as a normal part of a essential day to day service. So when we go into thinking about if stay at home is going to come to an end, and that is an if, what stay local might mean. The same challenge will also be for the UK Government acting for England only if theyre going to move to stay local. And of course, there was some dispute about whether stay local was a good or a bad thing previously, but theyve indicated thats what theyre likely to do but at a later point in April. So there are very practical decision making points for us here in Wales when we get to our next review and England gets to its next significant unlocking event, which they have planned for April 12. Photo: (Photo : Photo by Alexandr Podvalny from Pexels) Experts have long been interested in how parents influence child development. However, it is challenging to find actual cause-and-effect correlations between parents' particular behaviors and children's later behavior. The parenting style essentially affects academic accomplishments, self-confidence, violence, psychological strength, and willingness to deal with real-life problems. Western parenting appears to have several variations than Eastern due to cultural myths, societal requirements, services available, and several other factors that impact parenting. The Western-style seems lenient and permissive, while the Eastern style is more oppressive, rigid, and demanding. READ: Want Stop Yelling at Your Children? Here Are 6 Proven Ways to Minimize Verbal Abuse What are a few Western parenting cultural myths? While Western parenting encourages children to grow up as autonomous and imaginative individuals, these are myths, and you shouldn't be surprised. According to some experts, the idea that babies shouldn't wake up at night is a cultural myth. The belief that older babies "should" be able to sleep through the night derives from studies in the 1950s that discovered that 70 percent of babies living in London started "sleeping through the night" by the time they were three months old. But the researchers described "sleeping through" as not waking their parents between the hours of midnight and 5 a.m. by crying or fussing, far from the unbroken eight-hour cycle that many new parents long for, and not whether or not during that period the babies themselves were still asleep. In any event, by that age, 30 percent of babies had not started to sleep for extended periods and half of the babies who were "sleeping through" return to waking up later at night. ALSO READ: Texas Snowstorm and Power Outages, Families Continue to Suffer Instead, many parents in Western cultures resort to sleep training tactics, the most severe form of which includes leaving a baby to "cry it out" on their own in an attempt to enable their babies to sleep for more extended periods so that parents can get some much-needed rest as well. There are also state-funded residential sleep schools in Australia where parents can "sleep-train" their children. This isn't the only aspect of new parenthood that Westerners do differently. Another relatively recently developed misconception is the sharing of beds or rooms with babies, and not spread across the world. Sharing a room, and often a bed, with your baby is the norm in some cultures. For at least the first six months, parents in the US and UK are encouraged to sleep with their babies in the same room, although many see this as a quick stopover on their way to a dedicated nursery. Babies remain with their parents longer than most other cultures worldwide since it is one way of reducing the stress of waking up at night for babies. In several Asian countries, sharing not just a room but a bed with one or more of their parents found a high prevalence: over 70% in India and Indonesia, for instance. Research in countries across Africa is patchy, but it shows that the activity is almost universal. Encouraging early freedom aligns with individualism with a typical Western cultural focus. For this reason, some may find that bed-sharing is like giving in to your child and allowing them to remain dependent on their parents. READ MORE: Here Are 6 Fun Activities for Your Kids Before the Winter Season Ends " " Bass Reeves was a Black deputy marshal in the 1800s, a frontier hero and the possible inspiration for "The Lone Ranger." Wikipedia/HowStuffWorks He stood 6 feet, 2 inches (1.88 meters), weighed 180 pounds (82 kilograms) and could reportedly whoop two men at a time with his bare hands. He was as quick on the draw as he was deadly accurate with his Winchester rifle, capable of taking down a running target at a quarter-mile (402 meters). He wore a thick handlebar mustache and spit-shined boots unless he was in one of his clever disguises. In the storied American West of the late 19th-century, where duty-bound lawmen pursued murderous outlaws for high-priced bounties, none deserved their fame as much as Bass Reeves. Born into slavery in 1838, Bass escaped to Indian Territory during the Civil War and emerged as a skilled marksman and tracker who could speak multiple Native American languages. Reeves was hired as a deputy U.S. marshal, one of several Black and Native American lawmen to patrol the hardscrabble territory on behalf of the Federal government. It was a notoriously hazardous profession at least 114 deputy U.S. marshals were killed on duty in Indian Territory before it became the state of Oklahoma in 1907. But Bass Reeves was no ordinary officer of the law. Over his three-decade career, Reeves arrested more than 3,000 individuals, survived countless skirmishes with armed outlaws, and killed at least 14 men while defending his life and others'. He was, in a word, a hero. "Bass Reeves was the greatest frontier hero in American history," says Art T. Burton, former history professor and author of "Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves." "He walked into the valley of death every day for 32 years. He helped people regardless of their race, their religion or their background his entire life." Advertisement From Fugitive Slave to Lawman Not much is known about Bass's early life other than that he was born in Arkansas into an enslaved family owned by Arkansas state legislator William Reeves and then his son George Reeves. The family was moved to Texas where George Reeves organized and led a cavalry regiment for the Confederacy. Bass served alongside Colonel Reeves in the Civil War as his body servant and the two men formed a close bond. But that bond was broken when they got to arguing over a card game and Bass punched the colonel out cold. "For a slave to hit his master in Texas was punishable by death," says Burton, "So Bass didn't wait around to see what the consequences might be." He spent the next few years living among the Creek, Cherokee and Seminole tribes, learning their languages, studying their hunting and tracking techniques, and according to some accounts, fighting for the Union in guerilla regiments. After the war, Reeves returned to Arkansas a free man, married his wife Jennie, and started working as a scout for federal lawmen patrolling the neighboring Indian Territory. In 1875, a new judge took over the Fort Smith federal courthouse in Arkansas and called for the hiring of 200 more deputy U.S. marshals to chase down lawbreakers who escaped into the territories. Bass Reeves was one of them. While Bass wasn't the first Black deputy U.S. marshal, he was easily the most famous. Advertisement The Life of a Deputy U.S. Marshal As a Black man with a badge in the Reconstruction-era South, Bass had arresting authority over whites, American Indians and fellow freedmen. He even arrested some white men for lynchings. If a member of an Indian tribe committed a crime against another Native American, those were handled by tribal police and tribal courts, but Reeves and his fellow deputy U.S. marshals handled all other crimes committed in Indian Territory. "Things like murder, attempted murder, rape, and theft of horses and cattle," says Burton. "The illegal trade of whiskey was a very big problem for the deputy U.S. marshals." Like other formerly enslaved people, Reeves was never taught to read or write, but he developed the uncanny ability to memorize a pile of arrest warrants and associate each crime with the "shape" of an individual name. The system worked. While other deputies would return to Fort Smith with three or four captured fugitives, he routinely delivered a dozen or more wanted men. An 1882 notice in The Fort Smith Elevator reported that "Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves came in on Monday with sixteen prisoners," including men wanted for attempted murder and arson. Advertisement The Best Bass Stories The tales of Bass Reeves' bravery and cunning are legendary and legion, and Burton chronicled some of his favorites in "Black Gun, Silver Star." There was the time when Reeves was in pursuit of a band of outlaw brothers laying low at their mother's house in Chickasaw territory. Reeves had a whole posse with him, but he knew they'd be spotted miles away. So, Reeves disguised himself as a tramp with holes in his shoes, a big floppy hat and a cane. He walked 28 miles (45 kilometers) across the parched plains and arrived on the mother's porch begging for some food and water. When her sons came home, the mother introduced Reeves like an old friend and the group started scheming up a crime they could all pull together. The outlaw brothers awoke the next day handcuffed to their beds and Reeves marched them all the way back to his camp on foot. "Momma was hot," laughs Burton. "I think she followed Bass for about 10 miles [16 kilometers] cursing at him." Then there was the time that Bass was ambushed by the three Brunter brothers, each wanted for multiple counts of horse theft, robbery and unsolved murders. The brothers told Reeves to drop his weapons, but he played it cool and calmly asked the men for the day's date. When asked why, Reeves said so he could mark it down on their arrest warrants when he brought them to court. The Brunter brothers almost fell over laughing, thinking the outgunned lawman was out of his mind. But Reeves seized the opportunity to whip out his Colt revolver, shoot two of the men dead and grab the muzzle of the third brother's revolver before beating him over the head with it. One of Burton's favorite Bass Reeves stories was the time that Reeves was called in by his fellow deputy U.S. marshals to help smoke out a stubborn fugitive. After an hourslong shootout, the outlaw made a run for it. "The rest of the posse started shooting at him as he's running across the field but they were missing," says Burton. "Then Deputy U.S. Marshal Bud Ledbetter hollered, 'Get him, Bass!' And Bass said coolly and calmly, 'I will break his neck.' Bass took his Winchester rifle at a quarter of a mile and broke this man's neck." Advertisement The Inspiration for the Lone Ranger? In his book, Burton makes the bold yet believable claim that Bass Reeves was the real-life inspiration for the Lone Ranger, a masked hero first created for radio in the 1930s before becoming a movie and TV star. "Bass is the closest thing to the Lone Ranger to exist in reality," says Burton. "The Lone Ranger handed out silver bullets. Bass handed out silver dollars. Bass worked with an Indian sidekick and rode a white horse. Bass worked in disguise throughout his career. The Lone Ranger's last name is Reid, which is very close to Reeves." Also like the Lone Ranger, Reeves was known for his strong moral compass and dedication to justice. When Reeves' own son was wanted for the murder of his wife, he solemnly requested the warrant and brought his boy in for trial. Reeves also arrested the preacher who baptized him. In need of money, the congregation had convinced the preacher to run bootleg whiskey, but Reeves wouldn't have it. Burton believes that Detroit might provide the connection between Bass and the Lone Ranger. The original radio program was created at a Detroit radio station in 1933 and most of the outlaws that Bass arrested in the 1880s and 1890s were sent to the Detroit House of Corrections to serve out their sentences. Did the writers of the white Lone Ranger take inspiration from local legends of a morally upright Black lawman who patrolled the Wild West? Burton thinks so, although he admits there is no conclusive proof. Advertisement The End of a Legendary Life By the time Bass Reeves retired from his long career as a Federal lawman, he was famous throughout Indian Territory. There were folk songs written about his heroics and he could nab a fugitive by the power of his reputation alone. The story goes that Belle Starr, an outlaw known as "the female Jesse James," turned herself in at Fort Smith when she heard that Bass had her warrant. Despite being hunted by aggrieved outlaws for most of his life, Reeves died of natural causes at age of 72. One obituary published in The Daily Ardmoreite wrote: "No history of frontier days in Indian Territory would be complete with no mention of Bass Reeves and no tale of the old days of 'Hell on the Border' could be told without the old deputy marshal as a prominent character." HowStuffWorks may earn a small commission from affiliate links in this article. Now That's Cool More than a century after his death, Bass Reeves is finally getting his due. The Black lawman was featured in the first episode of HBO's "Watchmen" and is the subject of a TV series being developed by Morgan Freeman based on Burton's books. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. One of the decisions facing the Biden administration is whether to perpetuate unprecedented levels of tariffs imposed by President Trump. These import taxes, the bulk of which apply to goods from China, have cost the average American household $704 and have dulled the positive effects of tax reductions and regulatory reforms pursued by the Trump administration. Rolling back these costly tariffs would provide a much-needed boost to the economy as we attempt to rebound from the global pandemic. President Biden has pledged not to take any immediate action on tariffs, presumably in part for fear that removing them would subject him to accusations of being soft on China. When President Reagan first took office, he faced a similar dilemma. Reagan had promised to end the Soviet grain embargo, which had been imposed by President Carter after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Although Reagan had promised to end the embargo, hawks in his administration and in Congress encouraged him to reconsider. Secretary of State Alexander Haig argued lifting the embargo would give the Soviets the concession they want most. Reagan, like Biden, decided against taking immediate action, saying, In the first few weeks of my Presidency, I decided that an immediate lifting of the sales limitation could be misinterpreted by the Soviet Union. I therefore felt that my decision should be made only when it was clear that the Soviets and other nations would not mistakenly think it indicated a weakening of our position. On April 24, he terminated the embargo. There are many parallels between the Soviet grain embargo and Trumps China tariffs. Reagan believed the embargo was ineffective and that it unfairly burdened American farmers: As I say, it was asking one group of Americans to bear the burden and, I have always thought, was more of a kind of gesture than it was something real. Similarly, U.S. farmers bore the brunt of Trumps China tariffs. Although the administration infamously stated that China would not retaliate against U.S. tariffs, China instead imposed tariffs on a broad range of U.S. exports, led by agricultural goods. In two short years, agricultural exports to China were cut in half, including a 78% drop in soybean exports. The fallout from the trade war left farmers increasingly dependent on government support. In 2015, before Trump took office, federal payments accounted for just over 10% of net farm income. The Department of Agriculture estimates government payments will account for a whopping 39% of net farm income for 2020. Though the United States and China signed a phase one trade deal that contained ambitious commitments for China to buy more U.S. exports, the results have been dismal. Even before the COVID pandemic hit, trade experts doubted China would be able to meet its ambitious purchasing goals, and they wound up falling 42% short of meeting their purchase commitments in 2020. Hawks like Alexander Haig urged Reagan to maintain the ineffective grain embargo to maintain leverage against the Soviet Union. Today, China hawks like Robert Lighthizer, Trumps U.S. Trade Representative, are urging Biden to maintain tariffs to provide leverage against China. As one former Trump trade negotiator put it, Whether you love the tariffs or hate the tariffs, they have created leverage for the United States. Unfortunately, Trumps tariffs have been both costly and ineffective. In addition to failing to liberate its economy, China has run roughshod over Hong Kongers and Uyghurs, ramping up its territorial aggression and its deplorable treatment of religious minorities as it takes a more confrontational approach on the regional and global stage. Reagan campaigned on a promise to end the grain embargo. Bidens position on tariffs was less definitive, but while campaigning in Iowa he said: Any beginning econ student at Iowa or Iowa State could tell you the American people are paying his (Trumps) tariffs. After securing the nomination, when asked whether he would keep the tariffs, he replied: No. Hey, look, who said Trumps ideas a good one? And during the vice presidential debate, Kamala Harris told Vice President Mike Pence: You lost that trade war. In this case, the new president and vice president should trust their instincts. Ten years after Reagan overruled his administrations hawks and ended the grain embargo, the Soviet Union collapsed. As with the grain embargo, the impact of tariffs on China is largely symbolic but the costs imposed on Americans are real. Biden should follow Reagans example and terminate the tariffs. Bryan Riley is director of the National Taxpayers Unions Free Trade Initiative. He wrote this for InsideSources.com. (Soliday), who called me immediately, said, I got this bill So-and-so gave it to me. Mayor, what do you think about it? And I said, Representative, if you guys pass that bill, Hammond goes bankrupt. Thats how vindictive the customer communities were in his lawsuit, McDermott said. But I know who did it and what they were trying to do theyre trying to do, so we reached a deal and obviously, that bill didnt go anywhere. VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 23, 2021 / Golden Lake Exploration Inc. (CSE:GLM) ("GLM" or the "Company") announces that it has arranged a non-brokered private placement of up to 12 million units ("Units") at a price of $0.45 per Unit for aggregate gross proceeds of $5,400,000.00 (the "Offering"). Each Unit will be comprised of one common share ("Share") and one half of one transferable Share purchase warrant of the Company ("Warrant"). Each whole Warrant will entitle the Subscriber to purchase one Warrant Share for a 24-month period after the Closing Date at an exercise price of $0.60 per share. Net proceeds of the Financing will be used to advance the Corporation's Jewel Ridge gold property near Eureka, Nevada and for general working capital purposes. Shares issued pursuant to the Financing will be subject to a four-month hold period according to applicable securities laws of Canada. Finders' fees may be payable on the private placement, subject to the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange. About Golden Lake Exploration Inc. Golden Lake Exploration Inc. is a junior public mining exploration company engaged in the business of mineral exploration and the acquisition of mineral property assets. Its objective is to acquire, explore and develop economic precious and base metal properties of merit and to aggressively advance its exploration program on the Jewel Ridge property. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD " M ike England" Mike England, CEO&DIRECTOR FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: Telephone: 1-604-683-3995 TollFree:1-888-945-4770 The Canadian Securities Exchange does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. SOURCE: Golden Lake Exploration Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/631548/Golden-Lake-Exploration-Announces-Financing The one-shot coronavirus vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson provides strong protection against severe disease and death from COVID-19, and may reduce the spread of the virus by vaccinated people, according to new analyses posted online by the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday. The vaccine had a 72% overall efficacy rate in the United States and 64% in South Africa, where a highly contagious variant emerged in the fall and is now driving most cases. The efficacy in South Africa was 7 points higher than earlier data released by the company. The vaccine also showed 86% efficacy against severe forms of COVID-19 in the United States and 82% against severe disease in South Africa. That means that a vaccinated person has a far lower risk of being hospitalized or dying from COVID-19. The analyses confirmed that Americans are likely to benefit soon from a third effective coronavirus vaccine developed in under a year, as demand for inoculations greatly outstrips supply. The FDA could authorize the vaccine as early as Saturday, depending on a vote of its vaccine advisory panel Friday after it discusses the newly released documents. With a J&J vaccine, well be able to accelerate the vaccine rollout for our country and for the world, said Dan Barouch, a virus expert at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston who led much of the early research on the vaccine last year. Johnson & Johnsons vaccine can be stored at normal refrigeration temperatures for at least three months, making its distribution considerably easier than the authorized vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, which require two doses and must be stored at frigid temperatures. But access to the new vaccine could be severely limited at first. Dr. Richard Nettles, vice president of U.S. medical affairs at Janssen Pharmaceuticals, the drug development arm of Johnson & Johnson, told lawmakers Tuesday that nearly 4 million doses would be ready for shipment after the FDA authorizes the vaccine, far below the 12 million it had originally pledged to give the federal government by the end of February. White House officials had an even lower estimate Tuesday, telling governors on a weekly call that around 2 million doses would be available next week, according to an administration official. Nettles said Tuesday that a total of 20 million doses would be ready by the end of March. The company has a contract to deliver 100 million doses by the end of June. Johnson and Johnsons vaccine has a lower efficacy rate than the vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, which are both around 95%. But in South Africa, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is so far the clear winner. Novavaxs shot had an efficacy of 49% in South Africa. And a small trial in South Africa of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine found that it did not offer much protection at all. The negative results led the South African government to abandon its plan of giving 1 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccines to health care workers. Last week, the government started giving Johnson & Johnsons vaccines instead and has so far administered more than 32,000. The newly released documents, which include the FDAs first technical analysis of the companys 45,000-person clinical trial, presented evidence that the vaccine was safe, with noticeably milder side effects than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and without any reports of severe allergic reactions like anaphylaxis. The vaccines protection was consistent across Black, Hispanic and white volunteers, and also across different ages. The trial indicated a lower efficacy, of 42.3%, for people over 60 who had risk factors like heart disease or diabetes. But this figure came with a large amount of statistical uncertainty, the FDA noted. Although several vaccines can protect people from getting sick with COVID-19, it is unclear whether the shots can also prevent people from getting infected and passing the virus to others, leading to a debate about how quickly society can return to normal after inoculations begin. Modernas trial found some hints that vaccinated people were less likely to develop an infection without symptoms. And AstraZeneca found that its vaccine reduced asymptomatic infections by about half. Johnson & Johnson looked for asymptomatic infections by checking for coronavirus antibodies 71 days after volunteers got a vaccine or a placebo. The new analyses estimate that the vaccine has an efficacy rate of 74% against asymptomatic infections. But that calculation was based on a relatively small number of volunteers, and the FDA noted There is uncertainty about the interpretation of these data, and definitive conclusions cannot be drawn at this time. I think its going to add to the growing evidence that the vaccines really do prevent infection as well as prevent disease, Barouch said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. The New York Times ANGLE INLET, Minn. On the Northwest Angle, a small patch of Minnesota connected to the rest of the United States only by water, it feels like the coronavirus shutdown never ended. But the empty cabins, boatless marinas and out-of-work fishing guides are not the result of some lockdown imposed by Minnesotas governor. Nor do they indicate an acute fear of the virus. (Many residents are already vaccinated, and pretty much nobody wears a mask.) Instead, in the second walleye season of the pandemic, U.S. businesses on the Angle remain largely cut off from their American customers because of a geographical quirk, a foreign government and a gravel road through Manitoba. It starts to feel very oppressive, said Lisa Goulet, who along with her husband, Jason, owns Angle Outpost Resort, where there were no customers early last week. I dont know if I want to live like this. I dont know if its really worth it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Getting to the Angle, which has about 100 full-time residents and an economy consisting of little other than tourism, has always required some extra effort. There is only one road in, and driving there from the Minnesota mainland requires a 41-mile detour through rural Canada. Those wanting to avoid the border crossing have to charter a seaplane or take a boat across the olive-colored waves on the Lake of the Woods, which can be dangerous in a small fishing vessel and cost at least $150 round trip in a professionally piloted one. An ice road that offered a two-month respite from the border headaches has long since melted. Over the decades, the small, family-owned resorts on the Angle cultivated loyal followings of American visitors who tolerated the chore of clearing customs in Canada and then again in the United States so they could enjoy world-class fishing, pine-scented forests and a level of solitude offered by few other places in the Lower 48. But that solitude, more evident than ever, is no longer such an asset. Canadas continued COVID prohibition on American leisure travelers even those whose final destination is in the United States has crippled Angle businesses, upended family traditions and eroded decades of cross-border goodwill in ways that seem likely to reverberate long after the pandemic. As pleas from Minnesotas congressional delegation for a tourism exemption on the Angle go unheeded, resort owners and fishing guides are seeking part-time jobs, canceling another summer of bookings and, in some cases, rethinking their relationship with a foreign country they can see from their docks. I didnt think Canada would ever take this position, said Paul Colson, whose family has since 1945 owned Jakes Northwest Angle, where boat slips are empty this spring and cabins unrented. You know, its not defendable. Doesnt make sense. Doesnt follow any science. The Northwest Angle, which owes its existence to treaties negotiated when maps of the region were imprecise, has been the subject of diplomatic tangles before. Canada and Britain tried without success to purchase the area back from the United States in the 1800s. And just a generation ago, a trade dispute known as the Walleye Wars broke out over whether guests of U.S. resorts could keep fish caught in Canadian waters, inspiring some talk of secession. But in a place where both U.S. and Canadian flags can be spotted along the roadside and where many people have friends and relatives on both sides of the line, this latest dispute feels different. More personal. More painful. The border, long permeable, has suddenly hardened. The few visitors who still arrive are no longer allowed to fish in Canadian waters, an area many fishermen prefer. And ideas for a compromise an international travel corridor, perhaps, or a pilot car to escort tourists to the Angle without coming in contact with Canadians have not yet gained traction. Officials at the U.S. State Department declined to speak specifically about the Angle and would not say whether they had pressed Canada for concessions there. Every passing day costs the business owners more money. In a region where summer weather is fleeting and where snow flurries can appear even in late May, there is little time left to save this tourism season. This is absolutely urgent. I dont think that all of them can survive a second summer of no business, said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, a Republican who represents the Angle in Congress and who sent a letter this month to Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, asking for the restrictions to be loosened. Although Canada relaxed its rules recently to allow full-time Angle residents to travel to mainland Minnesota to shop for groceries and other essentials without producing a negative COVID-19 test, tourists and part-time Angle residents, including those who own cabins but only stay in them during the summer, are still not allowed in. A senior Canadian diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and fast-moving issue, said officials in that country were sympathetic to the plight of Angle businesses and expressed optimism that restrictions might be loosened for vaccinated travelers later in the summer. Kirsten Hillman, Canadas ambassador to the United States, said in a statement that she had discussed the Northwest Angle with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., but Hillman gave no timeline on when that border might more fully reopen. With the Angle, given the small numbers there youre dealing with, I think theres some unwillingness to look at making exceptions, Klobuchar said of the Canadians. And I really think they have to look at this uniquely. Now is the time when the Angle usually comes alive. In a typical year, locals say, boat traffic jams would be forming in the marina at Youngs Bay, and visitors would be snapping photos next to the brightly painted sign noting the Angles status as the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states. But there is no wait for a table these days at Jerrys Bar and Restaurant, the only eatery on the Angle, and no one is lining up to use the phone booths where visitors who cross the border must report their whereabouts to customs agents. Some resorts have not had a customer since ice fishing season. Throughout the Angle, where black bears and deer graze along dusty roads, residents speak of disrupted lives: funerals on the mainland missed, jobs lost, travel plans canceled. There is a growing feeling of helplessness, too, a sense that neither country cares enough about their predicament to do much about it. Weve been forgotten; weve been abandoned, said Doug Freitag, a retiree who has been looking after the cabins of neighbors who are not able to visit and whose wife lost her income as a housekeeper at local resorts. The U.S. isnt doing enough to give us our rights as citizens for free passage. The Canadians are treating us like were a very unique group of people that they dont quite know how to deal with. When the United States and Canada decided last year to close down the border to traffic deemed nonessential, many Angle residents said they were sympathetic, even supportive. But as the closure stretched from weeks to months, patience grew thin. Theyre just prolonging the problem, thinking that theyre going to stop COVID, said Andy Lundbohm, a fishing guide on the Angle for more than 20 years who took on more taxidermy work to make up for lost income. Klobuchar, Fischbach and some other American politicians have also pressed for a broader reopening of the border. But many Canadians remain deeply skeptical about allowing more international travel, and officials there have faced domestic pressure to keep restrictions in place. Some of the tension lies in the two countries very different approaches to the pandemic. In the United States, businesses have reopened; domestic tourism has resumed; vaccines are plentiful; and, with case numbers plummeting, fully vaccinated Americans have been advised that they do not need masks in most settings. In other parts of Minnesota, including other portions of the Lake of the Woods, which has more square miles of water across the two countries than Rhode Island has land, fishing resorts are booming. But in Canada, which has far fewer total cases per capita than the United States, the recent virus outlook has been less encouraging, and business restrictions have remained in place across much of the country. Manitoba has been identifying new cases at a faster pace than any other state or province, and the vaccination campaign in Canada has moved much more slowly. Although roughly half of both Americans and Canadians have received an initial dose of a vaccine, only about 5% of people in Canada are fully vaccinated, compared to about 40% of people in the United States. James Cudmore, a spokesperson for Canadas minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said in a statement that the uptick in vaccinations made an eventual loosening of regulations possible but that the decision on when and how to reopen the border will be made in Canada, with the best interest of Canadians as our top priority. At the Angle Outpost Resort, where geese huddled near the choppy water on a recent afternoon as Goulet mowed, it was already shaping up to be another rough summer. Bookings were down, cancellations were still rolling in, and uncertainty over when and if the border might reopen made it difficult to reschedule customers. Goulet was planning another trip to North Dakota, where he has been working in construction to make up some of his lost income from the resort. And at a time when many Americans had returned to a relatively normal routine, the family had grown exhausted with trying to convince Canadian border guards that each trip down to the mainland met that countrys definition of essential. Were in a corral, Goulet said. Or a prison cell. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. The passenger jet was over northeastern New Mexico when the pilot reached out to the control tower to report what he described as a long cylindrical object.A radio transmission published by Steve Douglass, a well-known radio interceptor, reveals the unidentified object was reported to the air traffic control in Albuquerque when the aircraft was flying at 406 mph (653.39 km/h).Do you have any targets up here? We just had something go right over the top of us. I hate to say this but it looked like a long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing moving really fast right over the top of us, the pilot is heard to say.With no military aircraft known to be around, many believe the Airbus A320 had a quick encounter with a UFO. The FBI is already looking into the whole thing. A statement released by American Airlines confirmed for Fox News that the recording is authentic but pointed to the Feds for more information.Following a debrief with our Flight Crew and additional information received, we can confirm this radio transmission was from American Airlines Flight 2292 on Feb. 21, an American Airlines spokesperson was quoted as saying. For any additional questions on this, we encourage you to reach out to the FBI.The FBI, however, hasnt released any information on the alleged encounter with the unidentified flying object.On the other hand, its important to emphasize the pilot has never used the term UFO but referred to the unidentified object as a cruise missile. As the cited source indicates, New Mexico hosts the White Sands Missile Range, but pilots would obviously be informed of any activity at the center before approaching the area. Delegates vote on party constitution items at the Conservative Party of Canada national policy convention in Halifax on Friday, Aug. 24, 2018. (The Canadian Press/Andrew Vaughan) Ahead of Party Convention, Social Conservatives Mobilize to Advance SoCon Policies Social conservatives are more organized than theyve been in decades as they mobilize to get their core issues integrated into the Conservative Partys platform at its upcoming convention, according to a leading advocacy group for SoCon issues. Social conservatives are revitalized across the country. I think theyre engaged more than they have been in 30 years, said Jack Fonseca, director of political operations for Campaign Life Coalition (CLC), a pro-life advocacy group representing around 270,000 members. Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) members across the country are now electing delegates from every riding to vote on policy and elect a National Council, where federal decisions are made for the party. Delegates will represent members interests at the national policy convention, to be held virtually from March 18 to 20. In efforts to advance policies important to them, CLC and other socially conservative groups have been organizing to have their preferred delegates selected in each riding association, by sending out lists of candidates for party members to vote for based on who will best represent socially conservative issues. Among other organizations involved in the effort are the parental rights group Parents as First Educators (PAFE) and the National Firearms Association, which says social conservatives are one of the largest factions in the Conservative Partys base. Weve done a fantastic job of recruiting tons of delegates, our pro-life supporters, to become delegates in their local Electoral District Association, Fonseca said in an interview. Were waiting to see the results of that. Hopefully, we have a clear majority of social conservatives as delegates at the convention. Fonseca says the CLC has been promoting over a dozen policieswhat he characterizes as pro-life, pro-family, pro-free speech policiesin hopes they will make it to this years convention. The organizations top priority is erasing the partys stated policy that a Conservative government will not support legislation to regulate abortion. Originally slated for August 2021 as an in-person meeting, the convention was moved up following a decision to switch to a virtual format due to the pandemic. CPC president Scott Lamb said the timing is good because it allows the party to gather feedback from its members and build that into its platform before a snap election is called. In a minority Parliament, the next election could come at any time, and holding the convention later risks having an election before we can gather views from our membership, Lamb said in a press release in November. Six months after the Conservatives leadership election last August, at which social conservative candidates Derek Sloan and Leslyn Lewis received strong support, SoCons appear to remain a significant segment of Conservative Party membersFonseca estimates 40 to 70 percent. Lewis, a lawyer from Toronto, was a relative unknown before last years leadership race. She was unapologetic about her social conservative values, including her pro-life stance, and ended up neck-and-neck with longtime Tories Erin OToole and Peter MacKay. In the second round of voting, Lewis garnered 30 percent of votes, behind MacKays 34.78 percent and OTooles 35.22 percent. (L-R) Conservative Party of Canada 2020 leadership candidates Erin OToole, Peter MacKay, Derek Sloan, and Leslyn Lewis wait for the start of the French Leadership Debate in Toronto on June 17, 2020. (Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press) Sloan, despite being ousted from Conservative caucus last month, has reportedly been a major driving force in mobilizing SoCon groups ahead of the convention. SoCons are becoming more engaged in politics due to what they see as a society in decline as a result of the erosion of traditional Christian beliefs, including in the sanctity of life, in family, in freedom, and in faith, says Fonseca. In addition to abortion laws, CLC notes several key issues of concern, such as the expansion of euthanasia laws, the sex-ed curriculum in schools, and the erosion of parental and constitutional rights under Bill C-6, the Liberals conversion therapy legislation. In their efforts to mobilize ahead of the CPC convention, SoCons are also reacting to efforts to sideline those issues within the political establishmentincluding in their own partyas well as among elites and institutions such as legacy media, Fonseca says. He notes that shying away from electing candidates who support those issues, out of fear of losing the election, is a bogeyman excuse that doesnt hold water. In a recent email, PAFE called on members to use the convention as an opportunity to keep the party representative of all members. The CPC party does not belong to any one person or set of people, it belongs to all of us. All of us deserve to have our voices represented in the party, wrote PAFE president Teresa Pierre. And thats what well be defending, our democratic right to fair representation, by sticking with the Convention process. RICHMOND, Va., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Businesses looking to advance their digital capabilities and accelerate operations can find in-depth support with UDig's new Intelligent Automation (IA) services. The technology consulting company's goal is to help organizations modernize how employees work while meeting rapidly changing demands. "For the past year, we've seen the pandemic expedite how companies move into a digital environment," explains UDig Founder and CEO Andy Frank. "While some have evolved well, not everyone can quickly scale on their own. And those that are slow to pivot risk being left behind if they can't support their employees and stay efficient and relevant. Our goal is to provide the technical trade-offs that allow companies to keep their businesses humming while transforming how they work." To achieve this goal, UDig aligns its services with change management and employee satisfaction, in addition to operational improvements. Rather than focus on a single automation element, UDig tailors every aspect to address the data, software, operations, and processes that drive how people work. From creating an Idea Hub that crowdsources employees' modernization ideas to building software solutions in-house, UDig's capabilities support every development stage and need. "Automation is as much a human element as it is a digital transformation," says Chris Lara, UDig's new senior director of intelligent automation. "People often view automation as something that threatens a workforce. We believe the opposite is true: When you center automation around the people you support, you improve employee satisfaction as well as operational efficiency. Our goal is to unlock each person's potential and value, and let automation save them time by doing the repetitive, mundane tasks." To support clients as they begin their journey, UDig offers two Intelligent Automation solutions. The IA Discovery Workshop engages a client's business and technical teams to discover which work elements are ripe for automation. The IA QuickStart enables a team to pilot a process from concept to creation. At the center of each service is a focus on helping people and companies thrive. About UDig UDig is a technology consulting firm based in Richmond, Virginia, that supports businesses throughout the mid-Atlantic and southeast markets. We believe in the power of innovation and know that solutions are only as powerful as the people who craft, curate, and use them. We're proud to be named one of the Best Places to Work in Virginia in 2021. Visit us at udig.com. SOURCE UDig LLC Related Links www.udig.com NCIS: Hawaii may be coming to CBS debuting as the fourth original crime series under the NCIS umbrella. According to Deadline, a potential spinoff series is in the works with Christopher Silber and Jan Nash (NCIS: New Orleans) serving as executive producers and creators. They are reportedly joined by SEAL Team Writer/Producer Matt Bosack. Reports indicate that the spinoff will feature its own origin story and unique set of characters (as opposed to developing from an existing NCIS series). There is already an extensive production base built on the islands. It is used for CBSs other high-ranking shows, including the recently ended Hawaii Five-O and the new Magnum P.I. NCIS cast on the set | Emily Wickersham as NCIS, Bishop, Wilmer Valderrama as Torres, Mark Harmon as Gibbs, Cliff Chamberlain as Peter Buck | Sonja Flemming/CBS via Getty Images CBS is known for delighting its fans with series crossovers, and filming the new in Hawaii will likely be enough to guarantee some unique and exciting crossover episodes. Will NCIS: Hawaii feature Hawaii Five-O characters? CBS is home to several original crime-oriented shows, including Blue Bloods, NCIS, NCIS: New Orleans, Magnum P.I., and more. NCIS: Hawaii is bound to, at one point, crossover with existing NCIS shows. Not to mention, presenting such crossovers early on is often a useful tool to boost viewership for a spinoff series. Its also likely that the network will give NCIS: Hawaii a prime time slot between existing high-viewership shows. Our hearts are filled with joy and happiness. Congrats @WValderrama! pic.twitter.com/JFAqKZJgc0 NCIS (@NCIS_CBS) February 21, 2021 RELATED: NCIS: Why Mark Harmon Is Reportedly Ready to Leave After Season 18 Even though NCIS: Hawaii may be filming far from the other sets, its easy enough to make such episodes work if only a few characters appear in the other tent-pole shows. Yet, what about Hawaii Five-O and Magnum, P.I.? Though Hawaii Five-O is no longer on the air, the show ran for 10 seasons (from 2010 to 2020); CBS would be foolish to ignore its decade-long success when aiming to build hype around a new series. If those involved can snag a few of the main actors from Hawaii Five-O to guest star on NCIS: Hawaii, they probably will. The loyal Hawaii Five-O fan base is still strong, as the show only ended several months back. Will Magnum P.I and NCIS: Hawaii crossover episodes become common? Magnum, P.I. also films on location in Hawaii, using the existing Hawaii Five-O set. Its likely that cast members from Magnum P.I. will find a way to join NCIS: Hawaii members to fight crime together, as the shows filming schedules are bound to make such narrative attempts rather seamless. And, if such episodes do well, crossovers between the two shows will likely be frequent. Because, in the end, showbiz a business, and businesses aim to make money. One guess who is on the other line. #MagnumPI pic.twitter.com/edlT1ZNoG8 Magnum P.I. (@MagnumPICBS) February 23, 2021 RELATED: Cote de Pablo Gave Mark Harmon the Credit He Wont Take for NCIS Success Now, heres the big catch! Though Tom Selleck currently stars in Blue Bloods, he was also the main character in the original Magnum P.I. Heres what needs to happen: They must get Tom Sellecks Blue Bloods character to guest star on NCIS: Hawaii during a crossover episode with Hawaii Five-O, and make all the cheesy jokes and references imaginable. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. ALBANY A former staffer for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo who in December accused the governor of sexually harassing her published a personal essay Wednesday saying the governor asked her to play strip poker on a private plane, flirted with her inappropriately and kissed her without consent at his New York City office. The post was published on Medium by Lindsay Boylan, a former staffer at Empire State Development and adviser to Cuomo. She ran unsuccessfully for Congress last election cycle and is now running for Manhattan borough president. "Let's play strip poker," she said Cuomo asked her in October 2017 aboard a private plane after a political event in western New York. The disclosure by Boylan, who has declined to be interviewed by reporters about her allegations, sparked harsh reactions from many lawmakers, including fellow Democrats who have not normally spoken out against Cuomo. State Senate Majority Leader Andrew Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat, called Boylan's allegations "deeply disturbing." "Clearly, there is no place for this type of behavior in the workplace or anywhere else," Stewart-Cousins said in a statement. The disturbing account by Boylan of her alleged interactions with Cuomo are surfacing at a time when the governor's administration is the focus of an investigation of its controversial nursing home policies by the FBI and U.S. attorney's office. Cuomo and his senior aides also have recently been accused of bullying and threatening political adversaries or those who oppose their policy decisions. "Gov. Andrew Cuomo has created a culture within his administration where sexual harassment and bullying is so pervasive that it is not only condoned but expected," Boylan wrote. "His inappropriate behavior toward women was an affirmation that he liked you, that you must be doing something right. He used intimidation to silence his critics. And if you dared to speak up, you would face consequences." In December, after Boylan initially came forward, Cuomo denied her allegations, saying he has "fought for and I believe a woman has a right to come forward and express her opinion, and express issues and concerns that she has." "But its just not true," he added. PREVIOUSLY "There was no flight where Lindsey was alone with the governor, a single press aide, and a (state) trooper," said Caitlin Girouard, a spokeswoman for Cuomo. A statement issued by Cuomo's office on Wednesday afternoon said four former administration members all of whom were aboard flights with the governor and Boylan in October 2017 said they never overheard the conversation that she has described. "We were on each of these October flights and this conversation did not happen," their statement reads. The four former members of the administration who issued that statement are: John Maggiore, who was a senior advisor to Cuomo; Howard Zemsky, formerly head of Empire State Development; Dani Lever, a former communications director, and Abbey Fashouer Collins, a former deputy press secretary for Cuomo who is now communications director for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Not long after Boylan said she first met the governor in January 2016, "(m)y boss soon informed me that the governor had a 'crush' on me. It was an uncomfortable but all-too-familiar feeling: the struggle to be taken seriously by a powerful man who tied my worth to my body and my appearance," she wrote in the blog post for Medium. Boylan also wrote that the governor compared her physical appearance to Lisa Shields, a woman who had a relationship with the governor. Boylan asserted another aide to Cuomo wrote in an email to her that Cuomo had made the remark and said: "You could be sisters. Except you're the better looking sister." Boylan embedded a screenshot of the email from December 2016. The email was a marked difference from December, when she posted tweets about her allegations against Cuomo but had not offered any corroborating evidence. In her blog post Wednesday, she also described how Cuomo allegedly touched her lower back, arms and legs, and had singled her out for attention in a way that made her uncomfortable. A member of his senior staff also asked Boylan whether she would be attending an event, implying that the governor had asked about it, another email produced by Boylan indicates. Then, in 2018, Boylan said that Cuomo asked her to brief him on economic development projects in his New York City office, and at the conclusion of the meeting he "stepped in front of me and kissed me on the lips. I was in shock, but I kept walking," past the desk of another staffer. These allegations come at a time when Cuomo is already under intense political fire for the alleged cover up of nursing home data and for recent published reports of accounts of the governor yelling at and threatening other lawmakers. Republicans have pushed for an impeachment inquiry of Cuomo, while Democrats are slowly advancing proposals to roll back the governor's emergency powers. Subscribe to Capitol Confidential, a Times Union podcast The Capitol Confidential podcast is a weekly show from the Times Union that focuses on the policy, personalities and politics of New York's state government. Listen to the latest episode below, and be sure to subscribe in your podcast apps. Assemblywoman Patricia Fahy, D-Albany, also weighed in on the allegations made by Boylan. These are serious allegations that require an independent and timely investigation," Fahy said. "No form of sexual harassment can be tolerated in the workplace and cannot be tolerated at any level of government." U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Long Island Republican being encouraged by some GOP party members to run for governor in 2022, issued a statement accusing Cuomo of "using intimidation to cover up his rich history of bullying, threats, intimidation and harassment. "Within his administration, Cuomo institutionalized widespread abuse, which silenced his many victims and allowed him to continue preying on those around him not just under the cover of darkness, but openly as well, in a way that underscores the arrogance that has become a hallmark of his reign, Zeldin said in a statement. "If theres one thing weve learned throughout his three terms in office, its that Andrew Cuomo will not accept responsibility for just about anything willingly." U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Schuylerville Republican who has frequently clashed with Cuomo, issued a statement after Boylan's post published calling for Cuomo's resignation, highlighting that she had called for an investigation into Boylan's accusations in December. The congresswoman also lashed out at the media and other New York politicians she contends "brushed this serious and credible allegation under the rug." "Gov. Cuomo has earned his title as Worst Governor in America, and now every New Yorker knows that he is a criminal sexual predator," Stefanik wrote in an emailed statement. "I have served in Congress during the height of the #MeToo movement leading to resignations and retirements of my colleagues. Sexual harassment and sexual abuse in the workplace is not a political issue, it is about right and wrong. Gov. Cuomo must immediately resign. And any elected official who does not immediately call for his resignation is complicit in allowing a sexual predator to continue leading the great state of New York." PREVIOUSLY Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Paul Buckowski/Times Union How dare anyone question Gov. Andrew Cuomos motives over the handling of COVID-19. At a time of great anxiety over the virus, it was Cuomo who kept us afloat reassuring us every day that together we would conquer this pandemic. When Cuomo took the helm in fighting this terrible virus, President Donald Trumps jealousy of Cuomos approach, not to mention that we are a blue state, made him determined to cut financial support to New York state. We had to endure four years of Trump breaking all norms, operating like a mob boss and getting away with it. We had a free and fair election in 2020, and the idea that Trump was allowed to spread the Big Lie without consequence is appalling. Prime Minister on Wednesday made a strong case for of undertakings that he said burdened the taxpayer, and stressed that the government has no business to be in business. He said his regime has set a target to monetise 100 in oil, gas, airports, ports, power, among other areas, which will draw Rs 2.5 trillion of investment. This process will continue in the future as well, he said at a webinar on and investments in the Budget for 2021-22. The PM underscored the need for adopting the best global practices for determining price discovery of these and mapping stakeholders. The implementation of these policies are equally important. Stable policies and the right processes are required to ensure transparency and competition, he added. The PM said the government is committed to privatise enterprises (PSEs) in every area other than strategic as was underlined in the Budget. He said this policy Medium-Term Strategic Approach is more than simply setting annual targets for disinvestment in PSEs. This approach will help in drawing up a road map for investments. The PM said the change in management in PSEs often takes these units to new heights. Our mantra is monetise and modernise, he said. He exuded confidence that many foreign investors are eager to open their first office in India. He suggested they can take the help of GIFT City in Ahmedabad. We are working expeditiously to provide such plug-and-play facilities in the country, he said. He said the taxpayers money is used for keeping even loss-making PSEs running, whereas it should have been utilised for social welfare schemes for the poor and for meeting the aspirations of the youth. PSEs need not be run simply because they were there for so many years and were the pet projects of someone, he emphasised. They should be run if they are useful for some specific and strategic sectors, he clarified. The government needs to support enterprises and businesses in the country, but need not run these enterprises in this era. the government does business, it leads to many losses. There is lack of commercial decision-making in the government. Employees dont take decisions out of fear of legal tangles and let the system work as it is, he said. The government has the best workforce, but it is trained in running the public administration and social welfare activities. When the government does business, the bright workforce has to be shifted from its core activity. We do justice neither to the employees nor the enterprises. That is why I say the government has no business to be in business, he said. The money that will accrue through asset monetisation and will be used for social welfare activities building houses for the poor, laying roads in villages, opening schools, and bringing potable water to the poor. Privatisation will also throw open employment opportunities to the youth, he said. Modi reiterated that the government has a Rs 111-trillion national infrastructure pipeline for the next five years, of which around Rs 25 trillion may come from the private sector. He said the Budget has addressed the tax issues in infrastructure raised by investors. The Budget has laid a road map for taking India to a high growth trajectory. While supermarkets are legally allowed to operate between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. on the public holidays, Supermarket Association of Trinidad and Tobago President Rajiv Diptee says, for obvious reasons, groceries will not be opening. South Africa: SA urges countries to work together to fight COVID-19 President Cyril Ramaphosa says in order to fight COVID-19, there is a need for all the countries to pool their resources together to overcome the pandemic. To overcome the pandemic, we must work together to end hunger, promote education and the resumption of learning and to protect our planet, President Ramaphosa said. The President made these remarks during the virtual Global Citizens Recover Better Together post COVID-19 campaign launch on Tuesday. South Africa he said, was honoured to lend support to Global Citizen and the campaign. For the past 10 years, Global Citizen has been a leading voice for the involvement of governments, world leaders, philanthropists, activists, artists and the citizens of the world in ending extreme poverty. The initiative is organised by Global Citizen, in partnership with the European Commission and the World Health Organisation (WHO). The campaign seeks to create momentum for global COVID-19 pandemic recovery and a return to the implementation of global goals. President Ramaphosa commended Global Citizen for acting swiftly when the Coronavirus pandemic struck last year by hosting the One World: Together At Home benefit concert in support of the healthcare workers on the frontline. The substantial pledges made for Coronavirus relief at this event enabled NGOs around the world to help those most vulnerable in many countries, he said. The President further added that the Recover Better Together campaign recognises that overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic is essential to making progress in tackling poverty. To achieve this, we must deepen cooperation to ensure equitable access to vaccines. No person, no country and no region must be left behind. To fight the pandemic, we need to pool resources, capabilities, knowledge and intellectual property. That is why we continue to call on world leaders to support the COVAX facility to ensure rapid and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines for all countries. Another important step is to enable the transfer of medical technology for the duration of the pandemic. This will allow us to increase the production of COVID-19 vaccines and other medical products, lower prices and improve distribution to reach all corners of the world. Alongside these efforts to overcome the pandemic, we must work together to end hunger, promote education and the resumption of learning, and protect the planet. The President expressed confidence that the world will recover from the pandemic sating it will recover better, and it will recover together. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2021-02-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. NTT Co-authored Papers at FC21 Reveal Risks and Boost Efficiencies NTT Research, Inc., a division of NTT (TYO:9432), and NTT Secure Platform Laboratories, today announced that three papers co-authored by scientists in their groups will be presented at Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2021 (FC21), a virtual conference taking place March 1-5, 2021. Organized by the International Financial Cryptography Association (IFCA), in cooperation with the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), the FC is a forum for research, advanced development, education, exploration and debate regarding information assurance, with a specific focus on commercial contexts. This year's FC21 is the 25th FC conference. It will feature 12 sessions, 4 workshops and more than 50 papers, including the following: "Selfish Mining Attacks Exacerbated by Elastic Hash Supply," Yoko Shibuya, Go Yamamoto, Fuhito Kojima ( NTT (News - Alert) Research, Inc.), Elaine Shi (Carnegie Mellon University), Shin'ichiro Matsuo (NTT Research, Inc./Georgetown University), Aron Laszka (University of Houston). "Mining" session: Wednesday, March 3, 10:00 am EST (15:00 UTC). This short paper addresses Selfish Mining attacks against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which increase the attacker's share of mining rewards and decrease the profitability of mining for honest nodes. Previous theoretical analyses have assumed that honest miners will not change their strategy in response to Selfish Mining. This paper demonstrates, using real-world data from three different cryptocurrencies, that there is a statistically significant correlation between profitability of mining and the total hash rate, confirming that miners do indeed respond to changing profitability. Furthermore, this paper shows that depending on the attacker's initial share, Selfish Mining could lead to a stable equilibrium or to a collapse of a chain. "In contrast to what is widely believed, the Selfish Mining attack is disruptively dangerous and the attacker's profit is small," said Go Yamamoto, Senior Scientist, NTT Research. "Instant Block Confirmation in the Sleepy Model," Vipul Goyal (Carnegie Mellon University/NTT Research, Inc.), Hanjun Li, Justin Raizes (Carnegie Mellon University). "Blockcain Protocols" session: Tuesday, March 2, 10:10 EST (15:10 UTC). Large quantities of stake in blockchain are owned by parties who do not participate in the growth of the blockchain, thereby reducing its security. Recent solutions (i.e., The Sleepy Model of Consensus) enable secure progression even when the majority of parties are offline, but their requirements delay the confirmation of transactions. Existing Byzantine Agreement-based blockchain protocols, such as Algorand, confirm transactions as soon as they appear in the ledger, but are unable to progress when users are not online when mandated. This paper offers an adaptation of Byzantine Agreement-based blockchains to the Sleepy Model, where honest parties are not required to actively participate at all times. "This allows us to bring the advantages of Byzantine Agreement to this relatively new model, which captures the unpredictability of users or investors more accurately," said NTT Research Senior Scientist and Carnegie Mellon Associate Professor, Vipul Goyal. "Efficient Noise Generation to Achieve Differential Privacy with Applications to Secure Multiparty Computation," Reo Eriguchi (The University of Tokyo/AIST), Atsunori Ichikawa (NTT Secure Platform Laboratories), Noboru Kunihiro (University of Tsukuba), Koji Nuida (The University of Tokyo/AIST). "Secure Multi-Party Computation" session: Monday, March 1, 11:15 EST (16:15 UTC). This paper provides a general framework and model for secure multi-party computation (MPC) whose outputs satisfy differential privacy, a mechanism for anonymizing data by injecting noise into a data set. The paper proposes two kinds of protocols based on secret sharing. The first is a constant-round protocol that enables parties to jointly generate shares of noise drawn from the discrete Laplace distribution. The second allows parties to non-interactively obtain shares of noise following the binomial distribution by pre-distributing keys for pseudorandom functions in the setup phase. "These new MPC techniques are much more efficient in noise processing than previous protocols," said Atsunori Ichikawa, NTT Secure Platform Laboratories. "Congratulations to the IFCA on its 25th FC conference," said Tatsuaki Okamoto, Director of the NTT Research Cryptography & Information Security (CIS) Lab. "We are pleased that papers co-authored by NTT scientists have joined this year's robust program of research and debate and believe they shed light on critical challenges and ongoing opportunities for improvement in the areas of blockchain and multi-party computation." In related news, NTT Research along with UCLA and the University of Washington announced in September 2020 that a paper co-authored by cryptographers affiliated with their respective institutions solved an enduring problem involving indistinguishability obfuscation. In August 2020, NTT Research announced that two of the three Best Paper award winners at Crypto 2020 were co-authored by NTT cryptographers; and in April 2020, NTT Research announced that a paper co-authored by Brent Waters, a Distinguished Scientist in its CIS Lab, won an IACR Test-of-Time Award. NTT Research has also entered multi-year joint research agreements to advance cryptography and blockchain research with Stanford University, UCLA and Georgetown University. About NTT Research NTT Research opened its offices in July 2019 as a new Silicon Valley startup to conduct basic research and advance technologies that promote positive change for humankind. Currently, three labs are housed at NTT Research facilities in Sunnyvale: the Physics and Informatics (News - Alert) (PHI) Lab, the Cryptography and Information Security (CIS) Lab, and the Medical and Health Informatics (MEI) Lab. The organization aims to upgrade reality in three areas: 1) quantum information, neuro-science and photonics; 2) cryptographic and information security; and 3) medical and health informatics. NTT Research is part of NTT, a global technology and business solutions provider with an annual R&D budget of $3.6 billion. NTT and the NTT logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE CORPORATION and/or its affiliates. All other referenced product names are trademarks of their respective owners. 2020 NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE CORPORATION View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005463/en/ Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-24 18:23:37|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close HONG KONG, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- There is no evidence to support Washington's narrative of China's engagement in "debt-trap diplomacy," said an article published Sunday by South China Morning Post. "There is no evidence China aims to deliberately push poor countries into debt as a way of seizing their assets or gaining a greater say in their internal affairs, researchers and analysts said -- countering Washington's narrative that China was engaging in 'debt-trap diplomacy,'" the article said. Deborah Brautigam, a professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University and founding director of the China Africa Research Initiative (Cari), considers the "debt-trap" narrative a myth, it said. After scrutinizing thousands of Chinese loan documents, mostly for projects in Africa, Cari reported that it has not found any evidence that China seizes the assets of other countries if they fail to pay loans, the article said. The revelation comes at a time when dozens of African countries are either in or at a high risk of debt distress. Most of the countries -- including Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia, which are among the top borrowers from China -- have sought debt relief. Beijing has since provided some debt relief to more than 20 countries and, for some countries, has cancelled interest-free loans that were maturing in 2020, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce. For instance, noting some reports that China seized the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota when the South Asian country fell behind in servicing its debts, the article said that instead of the port being seized by China, Sri Lanka privatised 70 percent of the Chinese-financed port to a Chinese firm, citing Cari researchers. "The U.S. narrative on debt-trap diplomacy was flawed because of its lack of nuance," David Shinn, a professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, was quoted by the article as saying. "The real issue is China's holding of 20 percent of Africa's debt, not debt-trap diplomacy," Shinn said. Enditem SUV Not as luxurious as the Platinum nor as sporty as the ST, this fellow takes its name from a ranch founded by Captain Richard King in 1853 in Texas. Explorer families can now enjoy a piece of the King Ranchs renowned craftsmanship and the multigeneration legacy that still thrives 168 years after its founding, declared Explorer marketing manager Lee Newcombe.The King Ranch logo insert on the Mesa Del Rio leather armrest opens the list of goodies. Augmented with perforated surfaces, the mahogany-colored upholstery is also present on the front and second-row seats. Premium touches further include leather on the door cards, leather on the dashboard, Sapele wood garnish, and Norias stitching on the four-spoke steering wheel.King Ranch trim buyers can spruce up the Explorer with the Premium Technology Package, which adds multi-contour seats with active motion massaging. Other highlights include the 10.1-inch touchscreen infotainment system with swipe and pinch-to-zoom capabilities and a B&O sound system by Bang & Olufsen with 14 speakers that will please the audiophile in you.As far as the exterior is concerned, the Blue Oval decks out the Explorer King Rang with Stone Gray for the front grille, 20-inch aluminum wheels with Running W center caps, a liftgate scuff plate, quad tips with a chrome finish, and King Ranch badging. Whats under the hood, I hear you ask?As you would expect from a mid-sizethat costs more than $50k, the Ford Motor Company offers the 3.0-liter EcoBoost twin-turbo V6 with 365 horsepower on tap. The 380 pound-feet (515 Nm) torque rating is enough for a towing capacity of 5,600 pounds (2,540 kilograms) with the Class III Trailer Tow Package, which is understandably standard on the King Ranch.Like every other variant in the lineup, the King Ranch is manufactured at the Chicago, Illinois plant. The 5,810 employees working there are also responsible for the Lincoln Aviator and Ford Police Interceptor Utility. Nearly a dozen regional collaboratives to help streamline COVID-19 vaccination efforts were announced by the Baker administration on Wednesday. The collaboratives, which include locations in Berkshire County, Northampton, Worcester and more, will have the capacity to vaccinate a minimum of 750 individuals per day, 5 days a week, the state said. Each location will also have to meet an administration rate threshold of 85% and report doses within 24 hours, be open to all residents of the Commonwealth and provide public links for vaccine appointments. These collaboratives will leverage local health officials, regional hospitals and others to deliver high-throughput, efficient vaccination sites for all eligible residents across the commonwealth beginning March 1, the state said. The move comes after the administration announced local boards of health would no longer be getting doses of the vaccine to help administer. Last week, more than 40 legislators signed a letter to Gov. Charlie Baker expressing their concerns about halting COVID-19 vaccines to local boards of health, a decision that will seriously jeopardize the ability of our seniors to receive their COVID-19 vaccinations, the letter states. Our seniors should not be expected to arrange this type of lengthy transportation, away from the safety of their community, in the middle of a deadly pandemic, the letter states. The announcement came as a surprise to many. MassLive had reached out to multiple local boards of health earlier in the week, many of which said they had been receiving the vaccine and had no plans on changing. Instead, they were left confused and worried for their residents. We know who these people are. They know us, were able to get them in comfortably and take care of them and we even had plans in place to bring vaccinations to shut-ins, Chris Schultz, chair for the Arlington Board of Health, said, adding that the larger vaccination sites and the pharmacies are important but it really shouldnt be at the expense of local boards who are able to do this more effectively and know their patients. Baker echoed these efforts the local boards of health can help with on Wednesday, adding that the regional collaboratives have been tremendously successful and should serve as a model for other parts of the state. I think the thing that locals really need to help us with, weve said, is with the hard-to-reach populations: senior housing, shut-ins, folks who literally not only cant go to a local place but may not be able to go to any place at all, Baker said. Then the provider community is going to have a big role to play as well. For some locations this will be a significant increase in amount of vaccines it was administering. In Northampton, the local board of health has the ability to give 1,200 vaccines per week, according to Northampton state. Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa. But last month were limited to 100 doses per week. After help from local leaders like Sabadosa, Northampton Public Health director Merridith OLeary said they were able to switch from Moderna to Pfizer, which allowed the city to get 975 doses per week That is now increasing to 750 vaccines per day a day, five days a week doubling its current operation. Weve been doing about 360 a day. Tomorrows our largest clinic at 420, OLeary said, adding that they were seeing 20 people every 20 minutes. Now thatll have to be 30 people every 15 minutes. Shes confident this can all be done but involves careful planning, including hiring more staff, increasing the number of volunteers and clearing out additional room so they can use more space. We cannot compromise the integrity of our clinic and our injection control plans. Its not worth it, she said. Weve seen that happen at some of the mass vaccination sites. We saw that happen at CVS [last week]. We will not have that happen. At least one of the locations, however, is already vaccinating more than 750 per day. Lawrence General Hospital said they have been vaccinating over 1,000 people a day, including some of the most vulnerable in our community, said Deborah J. Wilson, president and CEO of Lawrence General Hospital. The communities we serve have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and Lawrence General Hospital remains committed and eager to continue working closely with city leaders and state health officials as we ramp up vaccination efforts here in the Merrimack Valley. said Wilson. See below for the full list of locations. Chinese state media has launched a scathing attack on Australia and its fellow Five Eyes members, accusing the nations of creating a "racist community". Beijing mouthpiece the Global Times, who Canberra sought clear-the-air talks with in December through outspoken editor-in-chief Hu Xijin, took aim at the alliance in the wake of Canada's decision to declare China's treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang as genocide. The editorial lambasted Australia for proactively pressuring China on a series of issues, presumably the key conflicts outlined in a 14-point dossier handed to Nine Newspapers by a Chinese diplomat late last year including stances on human rights in China. "They have formed a US-centred, racist, and mafia-styled community, wilfully and arrogantly provoking China and trying to consolidate their hegemony as all gangsters do," it said. The Global Times, led by Hu Xijin, has been highly critical of Australia in recent years. Source: Weibo The Global Times said the unified attack on China from the UK, Australia, the US and Canada had allowed for diplomatic hooliganism. The editorial said New Zealand was the exception. China themselves have been accused of a heavy-handed approach in terms of its diplomacy in the past 12 months, with its new approach dubbed 'wolf warrior diplomacy' after the hit action movies of the same name where Rambo-like protagonists defend the interests of China across the globe. Zhao Lijian, the foreign ministry spokesperson responsible for sharing the provocative artist's image of an Australian soldier slitting the throat of an Afghan child in December, is one of many players in China's newly-adopted aggressive approach. Beijing has argued it has not shifted its style of diplomacy, instead insisting it was simply defending itself from a rise in unprovoked attacks from Western nations on a series of matters it deems internal affairs. Story continues The Global Times said Australia and the other countries had begun targeting China and Russia with an ever-growing discriminative stance. "The evil idea of racism has been fermenting consciously or unconsciously in their clashes with the two countries," it said. Western allies accused of 'hijacking' global diplomacy The editorial went as far to say the Five Eyes alliance was responsible for the "most serious white supremacy threat" globally. It said it was vital global diplomacy was not "hijacked" by such an approach. "We cannot allow their selfishness to masquerade as the common morality of the world, and they cannot set the agenda of mankind," the editorial said. "What they want is sham multilateralism, and what they actually pursue is hooliganism in their own interest circle. Australia and China have endured a rapidly-declining relationship in recent years. Source: Getty/ AAP "By resisting them, China is not only defending its own interests, we are also defending the diversity of the modern world, which is based on the free choices of people and paths taken by different countries." On Tuesday evening, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Canada's move regarding Xinjiang had "deliberately smeared China". "Some people in Canada should abandon their anti-China bias, step outside from the dark room into the sunlight, look at China in an objective and fair way, rather than indulge in the obsolete mentality of ideological confrontation," he said. Australia has felt the wrath of China during 2020 for refusing to kowtow to Beijing, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison repeatedly warning it would not compromise its sovereignty. China is widely perceived to have retaliated with a raft of trade sanctions which has seen several of Australia's exports such as beef and wine badly affected. 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. UTICA, N.Y. A Utica man who admitted to putting his 9-month-old baby in a bag and throwing him in the Mohawk River in 2013 has been denied parole. Jevon Wameling was sentenced to seven-and-a-half to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to manslaughter in the death of his infant son, Levon. Initially, Wameling falsely reported Levon missing, allowing authorities to waste time searching for the baby for two months. Wameling later pleaded guilty to manslaughter, claiming Levon fell off a couch, hit his head and died. He said he only disposed of the body in the river. Levon's mother, Amy Warney, now living in Whitesboro spoke to News Channel 2 after receiving the news of Wameling's parole denial. Warney says she is very happy Wameling's parole was denied. She says she fell to her knees when she got the word Tuesday morning, "The past couple of weeks have been nothing but worrying. I'm like, Oh my God is he going to come home, because if he did get granted parole he would've been home next month and I am definitely not ready for that at all. That was my worst fear. That has always been my worst fear. I'm not ready to face that man." Warney says she wrote a letter to the parole board and told the board she deserves to know the truth of what happened, how her life has changed completely, and how she will never be able to forgive him. She says she will always be urging the parole board to deny Wameling's parole, "I know ahead of time what I have to do, so I prepare myself, so I have a year to figure out what I'm going to say next. I wrote the parole hearing a letter and that's what I'm gonna do for next year, prepare myself." Wamelings next parole hearing is in November of 2022. With the hope of contributing to the fight against cancer, researchers in Sweden have published a new molecular mapping of proteins that regulate the cell division process - identifying 300 such proteins. The release of the data, which was published today in the scientific journal, Nature, is significant because it helps bring medical research closer to the point of being able to target specific proteins to treat cancer. Identifying and understanding what characterizes these proteins is important, says co-author Emma Lundberg, a professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology whose research group at Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Stockholm contributed to the mapping of these proteins. The long-term hope is that doing so will lead to progress in development of tailor-made cancer drugs and treatments, adapted to the specific anatomical condition of the individual patient in relation to the underlying disease, Lundberg says. In addition to the 300 newly-identified proteins, the researchers report that 20 percent of the human proteome (all protein molecules that the genome encodes for) indicates cell-to-cell variation, that is, fluctuation in gene expression within otherwise identical cells. This information presents medical research with new insights into the cell cycle, in which a balance is moderated between those proteins which promote cell proliferation and those which inhibit it. Lundberg says the work is now incorporated into the open-access research database, the Human Protein Atlas. "Our hope is that this provides a valuable resource for a better understanding of, among other things: cell-to-cell variation, the human cell cycle, and the newly-identified proteins in the cell cycle and their role in the formation of tumors," she says. In order to identify the cell cycle-specific proteins, the researchers used so-called immunofluorescent microscopy. The researchers then combined the collected data with RNA sequencing of individual cells to describe the temporal presence of RNA and proteins throughout the cell cycle. ### The research work was carried out by 19 researchers from KTH, including Diana Mahdessian and Anthony Cesnik, via SciLifeLab. The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, Uppsala University and Stanford School of Medicine also contributed. Research support was provided by the Swedish Research Council and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. Germany's biggest-selling newspaper has praised Britain's vaccine success and Boris Johnson's plans to lift the lockdown, with a front-page headline saying: 'Dear Brits, we envy you!'. The article in Bild said the UK's 'successful' vaccine programme had allowed the PM to promise a brighter future while Germany is 'stuck in lockdown' and Angela Merkel's government is languishing behind in handing out vaccine doses. The German gloom marks a stark turnaround from earlier months of the pandemic when Merkel was widely praised for her handling of the crisis, Johnson heavily criticised and Germany kept its death toll significantly below Britain's. Now, Merkel is warning of a looming 'third wave' as Covid-19 infections start to increase again with only four per cent of the public vaccinated - while Britons are already counting down the days to freedom on June 21. Bild's front page today includes the headline: 'Dear Brits, we envy you!', superimposed on a Union Jack and accompanied by the caption: 'The English have announced their return to normality on June 21... and here there's no hope' Optimism: Boris Johnson at a Downing Street press conference on Monday after setting out plans to end the lockdown entirely by June 21 Gloom: German chancellor Angela Merkel has warned of a looming 'third wave', with the pace of vaccinations too slow to protect a large share of the population Bild's front-page headline has the words 'we envy you', partly in English, superimposed over the Union Jack - with a caption saying that 'the English have announced their return to normality on June 21... and here there's no hope'. The article describes Britons as 'just plain happy', adding that they had 'reacted with overwhelming euphoria' to the PM's announcement on Monday. 'It means: Normal life is coming back! FREEDOM!,' the article published in Wednesday's paper says. 'That's made possible by the successful vaccination campaign,' it says, noting that more than 17.7million people have received a jab in the UK compared to 3.4million in larger Germany. The article goes on: 'While the Brits are already planning their summer holidays, Germany is stuck in lockdown. 'That's because chancellor Angela Merkel, who as recently as Monday was holding out the prospect of loosening lockdown, sounded the alarm again yesterday.' Merkel told party colleagues on Tuesday that 'we are now in the third wave', warning that any easing of lockdown after March 7 could only take place gradually. The chancellor, a trained scientist, has long been cautious about a hasty exit from lockdown - and Germany's jab programme is not moving fast enough to protect a large share of the population at this stage. Britain is far outpacing Germany and other EU countries in handing out vaccines to guard against a resurgence of Covid-19 A two-month 'hard lockdown' has brought Germany's infection rate down, but progress has now stalled with cases on the rise again in the last week The death rate has fallen from its January peak but is still higher than during the first wave, when Germany was celebrated for keeping deaths low A second Bild article describes Johnson's plans as a 'Corona-Brexit', and asks: 'When will we catch up to the Brits?'. 'The deficit is growing: at the moment the Brits are vaccinating nearly three times as many people per day,' it says. 'Herd immunity on the island [meaning Britain] certainly appears in sight. And that's why the Brits want to open up.' Health minister who clashed with Merkel over jab shambles 'fights for his career' as she 'takes revenge' German health minister Jens Spahn is said to be 'fighting for his career' after overseeing a shambolic vaccine roll-out, clashing with Angela Merkel and failing to deliver on a promised rapid-testing scheme. Spahn, who only months ago was being feted by those marvelling at Germany's early success against the pandemic, has seen his approval rating slide five points in a month amid the vaccination chaos and a grinding two-month lockdown. Merkel's decision to postpone a major rapid testing roll-out which Spahn had promised to bring in on March 1 has prompted talk of 'revenge' in German media - after the chancellor accused him of trying to shift blame for the vaccine fiasco to Brussels. With Bild now describing Spahn as a 'ministerial flop', the 40-year-old - who was seen as an outside contender in the race to succeed Merkel as chancellor later this year - is said to be 'frustrated' and 'bewildered' by the setbacks to his career. Like the rest of the EU, Germany is lagging far behind the UK in its vaccine roll-out - with Merkel's government under fire for delegating the task to Brussels. While Britain has given out 27.0 doses per 100 people, Germany has managed only 6.2, only fractionally above the EU average. Spahn's promises of five million doses by the end of January and a jab for all care home residents by the middle of February were also not met. A leaked letter last month revealed how Spahn and some of his fellow health ministers had handed the vaccine task to the European Commission last June. But according to Bild, that led Merkel to suspect that Spahn had organised the leak in order to deflect blame for the slow progress being made in Germany. Merkel is since thought to have brought responsibility for the vaccine programme into the chancellor's office, limiting Spahn's authority. Advertisement While Merkel has come under fire for letting Brussels take the lead in the vaccine race, the EU's supply problems have been made worse by many Germans' reluctance to take the AstraZeneca vaccine after European leaders voiced doubts about the jab. Germany was among the countries which refused to let over-65s take the jab because of limited trial data, in contrast to Britain where real-world data this week showed the jab cutting hospitalisations in Scotland by 94 per cent. Emmanuel Macron added fuel to the fire in France by casting doubt on the jab's effectiveness and claiming that Britain had taken a risk by approving it so quickly. Merkel's office is now pleading with Germans to take the AstraZeneca shot after only 187,000 of the jabs were administered out of the first 1.5million delivered. 'The vaccine from AstraZeneca is both safe and highly effective,' Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said on Monday. 'The vaccine can save lives.' EU chief Ursula von on der Leyen has now joined in that effort, saying that she herself would take the vaccine despite her earlier feud with the company. 'I would take the AstraZeneca vaccine without a second thought, just like Moderna's and BioNTech/Pfizer's products,' von der Leyen told the Augsburger Allgemeine. The EU's AstraZeneca problems are set to continue into the spring, with as many as 90million doses expected to be missing from shipments in the second quarter of 2021. An EU official involved in talks with the firm says the company has warned that it may deliver only half of its promised 180million doses from April to June. It comes after Brussels reacted with fury last month when AstraZeneca said it would cut deliveries to the bloc because of delays at a Belgian factory. After AstraZeneca warned of shortfalls but continued to supply Britain in full, the EU published its contract with the firm and claimed to have cast-iron commitments. Brussels also imposed export controls on jab shipments leaving the bloc, but was forced into retreat after initially saying they would apply to Northern Ireland. But AstraZeneca's CEO blamed the delays on the fact that the EU had not signed a contract until three months after Britain had tied up a deal last year. AstraZeneca is not exporting vaccines made in the UK, in line with its separate contract with the British government. But AstraZeneca has told the EU it could provide more doses from its global supply chain, including from India and the United States, an EU official said last week. The roadmap out of lockdown: Boris Johnson's plans would allow for all restrictions to be lifted by June and significant freedoms to return before then Also under fire is Merkel's health minister Jens Spahn, who has been criticised over the vaccine fiasco and suffered further humiliation this week when his plan to roll out rapid testing from March 1 was torpedoed by Merkel's office. The rapid-testing plan will now merely be discussed at talks between Merkel and state premiers on March 3, the chancellor's spokesman said. As recently as last week, Spahn had promised that the publicly-funded tests would be available from March 1 in pharmacies and local testing centres. 'These testing options can contribute to a safe everyday life, especially in schools and daycare centres,' Spahn had said. The government's popularity has also been hit by the prolonged lockdown which has turned Germany's success of last spring into a much bleaker picture this winter. German soldiers prepare AstraZeneca vaccines at a former Berlin airport earlier this month, amid widespread reluctance to take the jab despite its proven effectiveness After seeing fewer than 10,000 deaths during the first wave, Germany's death toll is now above 68,000 and a weeks-long decline in cases has now come to a halt. The last seven days have seen 52,419 new cases, up from 50,403 the week before, and the closely-watched R rate has been as high as 1.25. The stagnation means that the infection rate per 100,000 people, currently 59.3, is hovering agonisingly above the level of 50 identified as a benchmark for re-opening. Germany's success in the first wave means its total death rate is still well below Britain's, with 68,740 deaths compared to the UK's 121,305. EU is set to receive 90 MILLION fewer AstraZeneca jabs than expected in latest blow to their vaccine drive as Ursula von der Leyen admits she would take the jab despite Europes scaremongering Europe's vaccine chaos is set to continue into the spring with as many as 90million doses missing from AstraZeneca shipments in the second quarter of 2021. An EU official involved in talks with the firm says AstraZeneca has warned that it may deliver only half of its promised 180million doses from April to June. It comes after Brussels reacted with fury last month when AstraZeneca said it would cut deliveries to the bloc because of delays at a Belgian factory. The new shortage could hamper the EU's ability to meet its target of vaccinating 70 per cent of adults by summer - with Britain promising to offer one dose to 100 per cent by July 31. EU leaders have also made matters worse by raising doubts about the AstraZeneca jab despite its proven effectiveness - with Germany now pleading with its citizens to take the jab after the scaremongering led to low uptake. European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, 62, has also sought to quell doubts by saying that she herself would take the AstraZeneca jab. European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, pictured, says she would take the AstraZeneca vaccine despite feuding with the firm over supplies to the bloc 'I would take the AstraZeneca vaccine without a second thought, just like Moderna's and BioNTech/Pfizer's products,' von der Leyen told the Augsburger Allgemeine. But she also continued to voice doubts about the UK's strategy of delaying second doses - a move approved by Britain's chief medical officers - as she claimed that the EU was 'catching up' in the vaccine race. The EU supply shortage is seen as one of the main reasons for a widely-criticised vaccine roll-out which is lagging far behind that in Britain. While the UK has handed out 27.0 doses per 100 people, the EU is lagging behind on 6.2 and has not significantly sped up its progress in recent weeks. Von der Leyen defended her policies by pointing out that the EU had handed out 27milion doses in total compared to 17million in Britain - but the bloc of 27 countries has a population more than six times larger. She also noted that Italy had given double-doses to more people than Britain, but it has handed out far fewer doses overall. Catching up to Britain will be made even harder if AstraZeneca shortfalls continue into the early summer, as an EU official told Reuters last night. AstraZeneca is producing vaccines at two plants in the UK, one in Belgium and one in the Netherlands, but is not exporting its British-made jabs under its contract with UK ministers - although it has offered the EU doses made in India and the US. This woman received the AstraZeneca vaccine in a hospital in Madrid on Tuesday - but elsewhere there has been low uptake after European scaremongering about the product The official said AstraZeneca planned to deliver about 40million doses in the first quarter, less than half the 90million shots it was supposed to supply. It was also due to deliver 30 million doses in the last quarter of 2020 but did not supply any shots last year as its vaccine had yet to be approved by the EU. All told, AstraZeneca's total supply to the EU could be about 130 million doses by the end of June, well below the 300 million it committed to deliver to the bloc by then. AstraZeneca did not deny the EU official's claims, but said it was striving to increase productivity in order to meet its 180million target. 'We are hopeful that we will be able to bring our deliveries closer in line with the advance purchase agreement,' an AstraZeneca spokesman said. Later in the day, the firm added that its 'most recent Q2 forecast... aims to deliver in line with its contract with the European Commission'. 'At this stage AstraZeneca is working to increase productivity in its EU supply chain and to continue to make use of its global capability in order to achieve delivery of 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter,' it said. A European Commission spokesman declined to comment on confidential talks but said the EU should have enough shots even if the AstraZeneca targets are not met. An EU regulator approved the AstraZeneca jab in late January but the ruling was overshadowed by a furious political row over the delayed shipments. After AstraZeneca warned of shortfalls but continued to supply Britain in full, the EU published its contract with the firm and claimed to have cast-iron commitments. Brussels also imposed export controls on jab shipments leaving the bloc, but was forced into retreat after initially saying they would apply to Northern Ireland. But AstraZeneca's CEO blamed the delays on the fact that the EU had not signed a contract until three months after Britain had tied up a deal last year. AstraZeneca is not exporting vaccines made in the UK, in line with its separate contract with the British government. But AstraZeneca has told the EU it could provide more doses from its global supply chain, including from India and the United States, an EU official said last week. The EU published its 42-page contract with AstraZeneca, pictured, at the height of a bitter row over shipments last month AstraZeneca is now forecast to make up its shortfalls by the end of September, according to a German health ministry document. German officials expect to receive 34million doses in the third quarter, taking the country to its full entitlement of 56million out of the EU's 300million doses. Despite its approval by EU regulators, the AstraZeneca vaccine has met with resistance in some countries - further slowing the European roll-out. Some countries including France and Germany have refused to approve it for over-65s because of limited trial data, despite the firm's assurances that it is effective. French president Emmanuel Macron added fuel to the fire by questioning the jab's effectiveness and claiming Britain had taken a risk by authorising it so soon. The effect of such scaremongering is that only 187,000 AstraZeneca shots have been administered in Germany out of 1.5million due to have been delivered by last week. German leaders have now launched a public relations push to reassure the public that the shot developed at Oxford University is effective. 'The vaccine from AstraZeneca is both safe and highly effective,' Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said on Monday. 'The vaccine can save lives.' Von der Leyen has now joined in that effort, saying that she herself would take the vaccine despite her earlier feud with the company. What IS behind Britain's vaccine drive slowing down? All the answers to your questions on the AstraZeneca/Pfizer supply issues which ministers say is to blame Britain's vaccine rollout has slowed down over the past month, with ministers and manufacturers pointing the finger at each other for the hold-up. With a successful immunisation drive crucial to Britain's hopes of restrictions getting eased drastically over the next few months, critics say it is vital the programme picks up speed to avoid Boris Johnson's ambitious plans getting derailed. Just 192,000 people were vaccinated on Monday and 142,000 on Sunday, in two of the lowest daily tolls since the mammoth NHS operation began to gather steam at the start of the year. Ministers have repeatedly blamed the supply of vaccines as being the 'rate-limiting factor' of the programme, and the UK's reliance on just two companies' jabs makes the situation precarious. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson today said there was 'no problem' with the supply chain and Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer, agreed that 'fluctuations' were anticipated. Officials say smaller deliveries were expected because Pfizer had to improve its key factory in Belgium at the start of the year, and AstraZeneca's production was slower to get off the ground than planned. However, both drug giants have insisted that there are no unforeseen issues with the supply chain, as Nicola Sturgeon said Scotland's rollout couldn't speed up until 'the supplies start to flow in greater volumes again'. And the concerns spread wider than Britain when an EU official revealed that AstraZeneca is now set to deliver only half of the planned doses to the continent in the second quarter of this year as the firm recovers from a row with the bloc earlier in the year about its supply commitments. Despite fears that deliveries are slowing down, Matt Hancock has promised 'bumper' weeks in March to compensate for the lag. Supply figures published by the Scottish Government in mid-January appeared to back his claims, which the number of doses being delivered next month set to be significantly higher. Here, MailOnline digs into why Britain's vaccination drive has slowed down: The UK has one of the most advanced vaccination programmes in the world, reaching 18million people already, but Sunday and Monday saw its progress slow down Delivery schedules published by the Scottish Government in January and later removed from its website showed a scheduled dip in stocks in February followed by a surge in availability in March What slowed down Pfizer's vaccine? One of the biggest hold-ups in vaccine delivery appears to have been Pfizer doing maintenance work at its manufacturing facility in Belgium. As part of preparing to produce hundreds of millions of doses for countries around the world, the company admitted in January that it would be delaying deliveries. A frustrated EU Commission said the delay was caused by 'modifications at the plant' and Pfizer planned to have finished them by mid-February. Pfizer confirmed the disruption would affect all countries in Europe and told the Financial Times: 'Although this will temporarily impact shipments in late January to early February, it will provide a significant increase in doses available for patients in late February and March.' The Scottish Government plans showed that the deliveries from Pfizer would fall by a third from around 128,000 doses in the final week of January to 80-83,000 per week throughout February before spiking back to 130,000 or more in March. Scotland gets around eight per cent of the UK's vaccine supply, suggesting the deliveries for the UK as a whole may have changed from 1.6million per week to 1m. Pfizer told MailOnline yesterday there were 'no UK supply challenges' and deliveries were arriving as planned. Pfizer had to make 'modifications' at its manufacturing facility in Belgium which led to delays to deliveries of the vaccine to countries all over Europe What slowed down AstraZeneca's vaccine? The UK's other major vaccine supplier, AstraZeneca, is making up for the majority of jabs being given out and is expected to be supplying 2million doses per week. This rapid pace of delivery came later than expected, however, which delayed the NHS's plans to roll it out to care homes and GP surgeries across the country. Mid-January had been the original target for two million per week, The Times reported at the start of the year, but this was pushed back by a month. In a briefing on January 13 AstraZeneca president Tom Keith-Roach said the commitment would be met 'on or before the middle of February'. AstraZeneca slashes EU delivery expectation by half AstraZeneca told the European Union yesterday it would not be able to deliver on the EU's vaccine orders amid supply issues. The firm had committed to supplying the bloc with 180million doses in the second quarter of 2020. But an EU official involved directly in talks with the firm, said the company had warned it could now only 'deliver less than 90million doses', according to Reuters. Britain has ordered 100million doses of the Oxford vaccine and it is one of two Covid jabs being rolled out on the NHS. Asked about the EU official's comment, a spokesman for AstraZeneca told Reuters yesterday: 'We are hopeful that we will be able to bring our deliveries closer in line with the advance purchase agreement.' Later in the day a spokesman in a new statement said the company's 'most recent Q2 forecast for the delivery of its COVID-19 vaccine aims to deliver in line with its contract with the European Commission.' He added: 'At this stage AstraZeneca is working to increase productivity in its EU supply chain and to continue to make use of its global capability in order to achieve delivery of 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter.' Earlier this week, AstraZeneca said that although there had been 'fluctuations' in supply at plants, they were still 'on track' with orders with no issues with delivery of the UK-manufactured vaccine. A spokesman for the European Commission, which coordinates talks with vaccine manufacturers, said it could not comment on the discussions as they were confidential. He said the EU should have more than enough shots to hit its vaccination targets if the expected and agreed deliveries from other suppliers are met, regardless of the situation with AstraZeneca. Advertisement The Scottish delivery figures show that AstraZeneca's supplies were also scheduled to be low in February. They would fall from a high of 261,000 doses in a week in late January to none at all in one week in the middle of the month, before escalating to more than 300,000 per week from the beginning of March. A spokesman for AstraZeneca said on Monday that although there had been 'fluctuations' in supply at plants, the firm was still 'on track' with orders. Why are the UK and Europe being affected differently? Pfizer's manufacturing issues appear to affect the European Union and Britain equally, but AstraZeneca's are different because it manufactures the vaccines in different places. The AstraZeneca vaccine is a natural product it is a genetically engineered virus made to look like the coronavirus so must be grown naturally. The cells needed to make the jab will only reproduce as fast as they naturally can, and astronomical quantities of them are needed, which means the process will always take a minimum amount of time. AstraZeneca says it takes three months, on average, to make each batch of the vaccine. Numerous ones are made at the same time but this means that there is an upper limit to how much or how fast one plant can make jabs. And the yields of these natural batches are also not entirely controllable the company said it had not produced as much as it had hoped at the start of the production. Low yields at major European supply plants in Belgium have devastated supply plans on the continent, but Britain makes its own supply in England where the success rate has been higher. Is there an easy solution? The UK's 'lumpy' supply cannot be improved easily because there is no quick fix for such a huge manufacturing operation. Other countries have vaccine orders of equal or higher priority Pfizer is being used widely in Europe, for example, and Moderna is still unavailable to the UK because it was later to place orders than the US and EU. And of the vaccines Britain is already receiving, manufacturing cannot be sped up infinitely. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, England's deputy chief medical officer, explained on Sky News today: 'There are always going to be supply fluctuations. 'These are new vaccines, by and large the manufacturers have not made them or anything like them before. 'The process of making a vaccine is one where, basically, you set the equipment up and leave it all to do its thing a bit like beer-making really. 'What you get at the end is not something that you can say is identical every time in terms of the yield, the amount of doses you can then make from that batch.' He added that it will take 'a few months' before the manufacturers can get into a steady routine, he said, and there were also 'global supply constraints'. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam (left), England's deputy chief medical officer, said 'There are always going to be supply fluctuations', and NHS chief Sir Simon Stevens (right) said the pace of vaccination could double in the second phase of the rollout Will the UK's vaccine rollout speed up? Ministers insist that the vaccination programme will speed up significantly in March when supplies become bigger and more regular. The Government is aiming to vaccinate everyone over the age of 50 by May, and Boris Johnson said he plans to offer a first dose to all adults in the UK by July 31. Moderna's vaccine, of which the UK is expecting seven million doses and has already approved for us, will start to be delivered from the end of March. Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, suggested the rollout could even go twice as fast in its second phase in order to keep reaching people at the same rate as now while also giving out the second doses to elderly people. 'Compelling' real-world data from Scotland shows one dose of either jab cuts risk of being hospitalised by up to 95% Covid vaccines being used in Britain are working 'spectacularly well' and cutting hospital admissions caused by the virus by as much as 95 per cent, according to the first real-world evidence of the roll-out. Researchers yesterday called the results 'very encouraging' and claimed they provided 'compelling evidence' that they can prevent severe illness. Scientists counted Covid hospital admissions in Scotland among people who had had their first dose of a jab and compared them to those who had not yet received a dose of either the Pfizer or Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. In a ray of hope for Britain's lockdown-easing plans, results showed the jabs slashed the risk of being admitted to hospital with Covid by up to 85 and 94 per cent, respectively, four weeks after a single dose. The study carried out by academics from the universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde, as well as Public Health Scotland was the first of its kind. But it currently doesn't have enough data to analyse how well the jabs prevent death or stop transmission of the virus. Lead researcher Professor Aziz Sheikh said: 'These results are very encouraging and have given us great reasons to be optimistic for the future. We now have national evidence that vaccination provides protection against Covid hospitalisations. 'Roll-out of the first vaccine dose now needs to be accelerated globally to help overcome this terrible disease.' Advertisement He said at a Downing Street briefing last week: 'In this next phase, the second sprint, actually were going to be vaccinating a larger number of people than in the first sprint. 'And overall, although supply will vary week to week and weve got to adjust accordingly, we may be giving up to twice as many vaccinations overall given weve got to be doing second doses as well than we have done in the first sprint.' Health Secretary Matt Hancock also yesterday said vaccination figures would stay low for the rest of this week in an interview with LBC's Nick Ferrari. He said it will be a 'quieter week' for the vaccine rollout because of a drop in stockpiles, warning that the success of the drive was 'all about supply'. Mr Hancock added: 'We have got a quieter week this week and then we're going to have some really bumper weeks in March.' Pointing the blame at vaccine manufacturers, he also claimed there has been 'ups and downs' in the delivery schedule. Why is it important for the rollout to progress quickly? Britain's vaccination programme must go quickly because the country's entire route out of lockdown hinges on it. Boris Johnson's plans to lift lockdown rules are based on vaccinating the majority of people who are likely to die if they catch coronavirus. The more people who can be successfully vaccinated with at least one dose, the faster the rules can be loosened because the lower the death count of the third wave could be expected to be. A third wave of the virus is now inevitable, with cases expected to skyrocket when lockdown ends, but the impact of this will be more tolerable if the majority of adults in the country are immune to the virus. Professor Paul Hunter, from the University of East Anglia, said yesterday that Britain will struggle to stick to its plans if vaccination rates don't pick up 'very soon'. Professor Hunter pointed out that the rapid decline in positive coronavirus tests seen earlier in the lockdown appears to be levelling off now, and the number of people being vaccinated each day are dropping lower at the same time. He warned: 'Taken together, these two observations are concerning... 'If more of our vulnerable people were protected from severe disease through immunisation, then we could allow some increase in numbers without posing a substantial extra risk of severe disease and hospitalisation. 'However, a lot of people admitted to hospital with Covid are still not in the groups where vaccination has been completed. 'If vaccination rates do not pick up very soon, then we will struggle to give enough people their first dose before we have to allocate more and more of our available doses to peoples second injections. 'This could lead to more potentially vulnerable individuals being unprotected for a lot longer than we had expected as we try to relax restrictions further. This would have the real potential to derail the UKs road plan for coming out of lockdown.' WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- Understanding how the brain works is a paramount goal of medical science. But with its billions of tightly packed, intermingled neurons, the human brain is dauntingly difficult to visualize and map, which can provide the route to therapies for long-intractable disorders. In a major advance published next week in Nature, scientists for the first time report the structure of a fundamental type of tissue organization in brains, called neuropil, as well as the developmental pathways that lead to neuropil assembly in the roundworm C. elegans. This multidisciplinary study was a collaboration between five laboratories, including scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, which hosted much of the collaboration. "Neuropil is a tissue-level organization seen in many different types of brains, from worms to humans," says senior author and MBL Fellow Daniel Colon-Ramos of Yale School of Medicine. "When things are that conserved in nature, they are important." "But trying to understand neuropil structure and function is very challenging. It's like looking at a spaghetti bowl," Colon-Ramos says. "Hundreds of neurons are on top of each other, touching each other, making thousands of choices as they intermingle through different sections of the animal's brain. How can you describe neuropil organization in a way that's comprehensible? That is one of the contributions of this paper." The authors focused on the neuropil in the C. elegans nerve ring, a tangled bundle of 181 neurons that serves as the worm's central processing unit. Through an innovative melding of network analysis and imaging strategies, they revealed that the nerve ring is organized into four layers, or strata. These strata, they showed, contain distinct domains for processing sensory information and motor behaviors. They were able to map the worm's sensory organs and muscle quadrants onto the relevant strata. The team also discovered unique neurons that integrate information across strata and build a type of "cage" around the layers. Finally, they showed how the layered structure of the neuropil emerges in the developing worm embryo, using high-resolution light-sheet microscopy developed by MBL Fellow Hari Shroff of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and MBL Investigator Abhishek Kumar. "This is a paradigm shift where we combined two fields - computational biology and developmental biology - that don't often go together," says first author Mark Moyle, associate research scientist in neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine. "We showed that by using computational approaches, we could understand the neuropil structure, and we could then use that knowledge to identify the developmental processes leading to the correct assembly of that structure." This approach can serve as a blueprint for understanding neuropil organization in other animal brains, the authors state. From Buildings to Boroughs to New York City C. elegans has the best understood nervous system of all animals. More than 30 years ago, John White, Sydney Brenner, and colleagues published the worm's "connectome" - a wiring diagram of its 302 neurons and the ~7,000 synaptic connections between them. Since that pioneering study, nearly every neuron in C. elegans has been characterized: its shape, functional category, the neural circuits it participates in, and its developmental cell lineage. What was missing, though, was a picture of how these cells and circuits integrate in space and over time. Colon-Ramos and team analyzed published data on all the membrane contacts between the 181 neurons in the nerve ring. They then applied novel network analyses to group cells into "neighborhoods" based on their contact profiles -- similar in principle to algorithms that Facebook uses to suggest friends based on people's common contacts. This revealed the neuropil's layered structure and enabled the team to understand cell-cell interactions in the context of functional circuits, and functional circuits in the context of higher-order neuropil structure (See video 1). "All of a sudden, when you see the architecture, you realize that all this knowledge that was out there about the animal's behaviors has a home in the structure of the brain," Colon-Ramos says. "By analogy, rather than just having knowledge of the East Side of New York and the West Side, Brooklyn and Queens, suddenly you see how the city fits together and you understand the relationships between the neighborhoods." "So now we could see, 'OK, this is why these behaviors are reflex-like, because they are direct circuits that go into the muscles. And this is how they integrate with other parts of the motor program.' Having the structure allows you to generate new models regarding how information is being processed and parceled out to lead to behaviors," Colon-Ramos says. Reconstructing the Birth and Development of the Nerve Ring The brain is a product of development, starting with one embryonic cell division and ending with a complete organ. "An order emerges through time. So our next question was, how can you instruct the formation of a layered structure? How are all these decisions simultaneously occurring in hundreds of cells, but resulting in organized layers? How are the decisions coordinated through time and space?" Colon-Ramos says. "Layered structures are a fundamental unit of brain organization - the retina is a layer, and the cortex is a layer. If we could understand it for the worm, it would allow us to create models that might help us understand the development of layers in other vertebrate organs, like the eye," Colon-Ramos says. This part of the research began in 2014 when Colon-Ramos and Moyle began collaborating with microscope developers Shroff and Kumar at the MBL. "We started by building a microscope (the diSPIM) that let us look at the embryo with better spatial and temporal resolution than the tools of the time," Shroff says. They then identified every cell in the C. elegans embryo using lineaging approaches developed by co-author Zhirong Bao of Sloan Kettering Institute (these findings are catalogued at WormGUIDES.org). "This was a painful process, but very important to do," Shroff says. After years of sharing a lab at the MBL, numerous adjustments to the diSPIM system, integrations with other critically important technology, and plenty of frustration, the collaborators succeeded in resolving the developmental sequence of the C. elegans neuropil and revealing principles that guide its stratified organization (see video 2). "This would have been impossible without the long-term, gentle imaging of the diSPIM," Colon-Ramos says. "In developing the technology, many changes seemed incremental but in fact were very enabling, allowing us to do something we couldn't do before. Often the changes we needed fell between two disciplines with different vocabularies, and it required prolonged, focused, exhaustive conversations to identify them. That is what our collaboration at the MBL enabled." ### In addition to Colon-Ramos, Shroff, and Bao, co-corresponding authors on the paper include Smita Krishnaswamy of Yale School of Medicine and William A. Mohler of University of Connecticut Health Center. The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is dedicated to scientific discovery - exploring fundamental biology, understanding marine biodiversity and the environment, and informing the human condition through research and education. Founded in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1888, the MBL is a private, nonprofit institution and an affiliate of the University of Chicago. BLACKPINK has proven, time and again, that they are the biggest girl group in the world today. Aside from their stunning visuals and sold-out concerts, Jennie, Lisa, Jisoo and Rose have been dominating surveys and music charts in the past few months. BLACKPINK's 'DDU-DU DDU-DU' MV Reaches a New Feat On Tuesday, Feb. 23, it was announced that the official music video of "DDU-DU DDU-DU" by BLACKPINK exceeded the 1.5 billion views mark on YouTube already. Reports have it that only Jennie, Lisa, Jisoo and Rose have made this kind of milestone among other K-Pop groups. Most, if not all, fans are very much aware that the "DDU-DU DDU-DU" music video of BLACKPINK was released on June 15, 2018, on YouTube. In other words, the clip took two years and eight months before it reached its newest feat. In November, the official music video of "DDU-DU DDU-DU" by BLACKPINK surpassed the 1 billion views mark, which was also a first among other K-pop acts. Though it was launched more than two years ago, the song continues to gain popularity due to its addictive beats and choreography. "DDU-DU DDU-DU" is the carrier single of the "SQUARE UP" album, which is the first EP of BLACKPINK. Through the years, the said track has achieved several victories in major global music charts. As a matter of fact, "DDU-DU DDU-DU" effortlessly made it to the No. 40 spot of the Billboard 200 chart and at No. 55 spot of the Billboard Hot 100 chart just days after it was released. The BLACKPINK track even surpassed 300 million streams on Spotify, which proves that they are truly a global phenomenon. BLACKPINK Lisa Gets 47 Million Followers on Instagram Meanwhile, BLACKPINK member Lisa has proven, again, that she is the Queen of Instagram when she surpassed the 47 million followers mark recently. The co-member of Jennie, Jisoo and Rose, who has a total of 648 posts, is said to be the very first K-Pop idol to ever reach this milestone on the said social media platform. Aside from BLACKPINK Lisa, Jennie also got 40.2 million followers already on Instagram while Jisoo and Rose both got 36.4 million followers each. Because of these whopping numbers, it comes as no surprise that the foursome is considered as the Top 4 most followed K-Pop artists on Instagram. The social media power of BLACKPINK has not gone unnoticed as they were tapped by various luxury fashion brand to endorse their products. In fact, Jisoo endorses Dior while Lisa endorses Celine. Rose, on the other hand, is the brand ambassador of Saint Laurent while Jennie is the face of Chanel. Other South Korean artists with the most followers on the said platform include EXO members Chanyeol with 22.7 million followers, Sehun with 21.2 million followers and Baekhyun with 20.1 million followers. GOT7 member Jackson Wang also made it to the list with 22.1 million followers. G-Dragon and IU completed the Top 10 list with 19.1 million followers and 18.8 million followers as of this writing. For more K-Pop news and updates, always keep your tabs open here on KpopStarz. KpopStarz owns this article. Written by Nica Vaughn Chikkaballapur : , Feb 24 (IANS) 'Playing with fire' is an old adage and it seems to appropriately describe the accidental blast that took place in a quarry in Hirenagaveli near Gudibande in Karnataka's Chikkaballapur district on Tuesday. A senior police officer told IANS on condition of anonymity that the police started raiding various mines and stone crusher units across the district after the Hunasodu incident in Shivamogga last month woke up the district administration. "We had conducted a series of raids on explosive suppliers in the district. After raiding several explosive experts/suppliers, the police zeroed in on Gangoji Rao, a big time explosive supplier who hails from Tamil Nadu. "Rao is known for stockpiling beyond all legal and illegal mining operators' total requirement. Supplying 'stronger explosives' was his forte, that is why he had become close to almost all the mine operators," the officer explained. He added that once the police came to know about his profile, Rao was raided multiple times in the last one month, leading to the seizure of huge quantities of explosives. "Fed up with the raids and multiple cases, he had sought help from the owners of Bhramaravasini Sanders and especially the manager of the quarry, Umakanth, and supervisor Ramu. Both agreed to dispose of his explosives, but Rao did warn them not to play with the explosives in any manner. Instead they should dip all the explosives in water for two to three days and then bury them in some secluded place, Rao had told them," he said. The officer added that Umakanth, who has been working in the mines sector for five years, chose to do otherwise. Instead of disposing of the explosives in water, he convinced his five other colleagues to throw them in a fire. "Here too they committed a blunder. Instead of throwing the explosive sticks one by one, they threw three or four sticks together and due to impact and heat, they spread to other sticks which they were carrying in a plastic gunny bag. As a result of this, they could not even get the time to save themselves or run for cover," the source said. In Tuesday's blast, Gangadhar Babu, Abhilash Nayak, Muralikrishna, Mahesh Singh Bora (a Nepali citizen), Umakanth and Ramu were killed on the spot. The Centre has lifted the restrictions on the grant of government businesses to private banks, Minister announced on Wednesday. All now will be allowed to conduct government-related banking transactions, such as tax and pension payments. Sitharaman in a tweet said that private can now be equal partners in the development of the Indian economy, furthering government social sector initiatives, and enhancing customer convenience. Embargo lifted on grant of government business to private All banks can now participate, she tweeted. By lifting the embargo, this move will spur competition and promote greater efficiency in the standards of customer services, the Department of Financial Services said in a statement. In a statement, the ministry said the government has conveyed its decision to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). With the lifting of the embargo, there is now no bar on the RBI for authorisation of private banks for government business, including government agency business, the statement added. Government-related banking transactions include taxes and other revenue payments, pension payments, and small savings schemes. In 2012, the ministry had not allowed private banks, barring some, to undertake government business for three years. In 2015, the government had continued with the embargo, and allowed the private sector with existing government agency business to continue without any fresh authorisation to private banks. ALSO READ: 'Current yields will lead to mark-to-market losses for banks' For undertaking government agency business, the RBI pays a commission to banks. The central bank carries out the general banking business of the central and state governments through agency banks appointed under Section 45 of the RBI Act, 1934. The government transactions eligible to commission are revenue receipts, payments on behalf of the central and state governments, pension payments, and any other item specified by the RBI. The current directive relates to the central governments business. Private banks will get a level playing field, and get more room for government business, said Prashant Kumar, managing director and chief executive officer, YES Bank. This will also benefit customers in specific instances like businesses and firms maintaining accounts with public sector banks (PSBs) for paying tax, added Kumar. Now, this can be done through private banks as well, he added. The social sector programmes of the government can be conducted through private banks as well, said Kumar. When private banks get government business, they will be obliged to perform, he added. Private banks are competent to handle mandates for public benefit with a robust digital backbone. Hopefully, state governments will take a cue from this shift in approach and become open to engage closely with private banks, he added. The development underscores the importance of private banks and their technological prowess, said Prakash Agrawal, head-financial institutions at India Ratings and Research. This will improve the flow of current account savings account, along with pension accounts, improving both their funding and fee income, said Agrawal. However, PSBs will get impacted by the move, as this is a very large business for them, said a former public sector banker. There is a strong chance that a good chunk of this business will move to private banks over a period of time. But private banks will not look at transaction-related business, given not much money is involved in that, said the banker. Business that pertains to the deployment of funds through various government ministries will be more lucrative, he added. R K Thakkar, former chairman of UCO Bank, said the size and scale of the business is growing every year and there is space for all. This will be good for competition and enhance customer convenience, he said. To give an estimate on the size of the government funds routed through agency banks, Thakkar said taxes worth Rs 2-2.5 trillion are routed through agency banks every month. Calling it a good decision, former banking secretary D K Mittal said the RBI will now have to work out the modalities for allowing more banks to undertake government business. This will negatively impact banks that are currently allowed to do business due to intense competition, he added. Head bowed, shoulder slumped, voice faltering - this is the moment South Dakota's attorney general was told a man's face had come through his windshield during a hit and run, despite his claim that he thought the 'victim' was a deer. The date was September 30 and Jason Ravnsborg was taking part in his second interview with investigators following the fatal hit-and-run of 55-year-old Joseph Boever near the town of Highmore 18 days earlier. Footage of the interview, released for the first time on Tuesday, reveals how detectives told Ravnsborg that Joseph's glasses had been found inside his car after the accident - and 'the only way for them to get there is through the windshield'. 'His face was in your windshield, Jason. Think about that,' one of the agents says. But Ravnsborg, the man responsible for administering justice in South Dakota, sticks to his story: 'I did not know it was a man until the next day,' he says, 'I just believed it was a deer.' Ravnsborg is now facing impeachment proceedings brought by lawmakers from across the aisle after the 44-year-old defied calls to stand down. Meanwhile prosecutors have brought three misdemeanor counts against him, with a maximum penalty of 30 days in jail or a $500 fine, leaving Boever's relatives calling for harsher charges. South Dakota lawmakers have begun impeachment proceedings against the state's attorney general. Jason Ravnsborg (pictured) is facing misdemeanor charges for striking and killing a man with his car and is already under pressure to resign [File photo] Nemec, Boever's cousin, told the Washington Post: 'He's grossly undercharged. I was hoping he'd be charged with involuntary manslaughter, but that didn't happen. 'He knew there was a dead man in that ditch. He knew what he hit and he lied.' Agents from the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation sat down with Ravnsborg for two interviews after the September 12 accident - once on September 12 and again on September 30. In the first interview, they can be heard asking him about glasses that were found inside the vehicle, and whether he ever wore glasses himself. 'We found a pair of broken glasses in your vehicle, but they werent sunglasses, they almost look like [reading glasses] of some sort,' one agent says. 'There was like a black-framed glass, part of them was laying on the front passenger floorboard, and part of them were laying in the back seat, broke in half. Do you know [about them]?' 'No,' Ravnsborg replies. During the next interview, the issue of glasses came up again. 'Theyre Joe's glasses,' the agent says, 'so that means his face came through your windshield.' Ravnsborg can be heard sighing deeply. 'I was thinking that his face did not come through because I thought there would have been blood...' he says. 'The glasses are right there, Jason. They're Joe's. The only was for them to get there is through the windshield,' the agent adds. 'Did you see anything?' 'I did not see anything,' Ravnsborg insists. 'I mean... it was just... Again, I was looking to get to the side. I did not. See. Anything.' Lawmakers argue in the impeachment resolution that Ravnsborg should be removed from office for 'his crimes or misdemeanors in office causing the death' of Boever. The resolution also stated that Ravnsborg's conduct following the crash was 'unbecoming' and his 'statements and actions failed to meet the standard' of his office. 'When we started looking through and thinking about the duties that the attorney general owes to the people of South Dakota, and I think he owes a special duty to protect the people and upload the laws. 'And I think that the actions in these incidents fell short of that duty,' said Rep. Will Mortensen, who represents the area where the crash occurred and who sponsored the impeachment resolution. Shortly before the impeachment resolution was filed, Governor Kristi Noem called for Ravnsborg to step down. Noem's spokesman Ian Fury said she also supports the impeachment resolution. 'Now that the investigation has closed and charges have been filed, I believe the Attorney General should resign, Noem said in a statement. Joseph, Boever, 55, was struck and killed by Ravnsborg's car in September 2020 while he walked on the shoulder of an unlit highway The Ford Taurus that Ravnsborg was driving the night he killed Boever had a huge hole in the windshield of the passengers side is pictured But Ravnsborg will not be stepping down, according to spokesman Mike Deaver. 'As an attorney and a Lt. Colonel in the Army Reserves, AG Ravnsborg has fought for the rule of law and personal liberties and would hope that he is afforded the same right and courtesy,' Deaver said in a statement. While Ravnsborg has not been convicted of any crimes, Mortensen said he felt it was the 'right time' to begin impeachment after looking through the publicly available evidence and prosecutors announced their charging decision. It would take a simple majority in the House to advance the impeachment charges to the Senate. There, it would require two-thirds of senators to convict and remove him from office. State law requires senators to wait 20 days from when the attorney general receives a copy of the impeachment charges before beginning the trial. Noem would get to appoint a replacement if Ravnsborg leaves or is removed from office. The attorney general, who was elected to his first term in 2018, was driving home to Pierre from a Republican fundraiser late on September 12 when he struck and killed Boever, who was walking on the shoulder of the highway. Officials said there was nothing to show Ravnsborg was intoxicated at the time. Ravnsborg called 911 that night and told a dispatcher that he hit 'something' and that 'it was in the middle of the road.' When the dispatcher asked if it could have been a deer, Ravnsborg initially said, 'I have no idea' before adding, 'It could be.' Boever's relatives believe he was walking toward his truck that had crashed earlier that evening. Ravnsborg initially told authorities that he thought he had struck a deer or another large animal and said he searched the unlit area with a cell phone flashlight. He said he didn't realize he had killed a man until the next day when he returned to the accident scene. Rep. Will Mortensen (pictured), who represents the area where the crash occurred and who sponsored the impeachment resolution, said he thought Ravnsborg had fallen short of his duty to protect the citizens and uphold the law Ravnsborg initially said he thought he had hit a deer or a large animal and was unable to explain why his car had swerved. Pictured: The scene of the incident After an investigation that stretched over five months, prosecutors said they still had questions about the crash but were unable to file more serious criminal charges against Ravnsborg. They charged him with careless driving, driving out of his lane and operating a motor vehicle while on his phone. Prosecutors found he was not using his phone at the time of the crash, but had been while driving about one minute before. The attorney general could face up to 30 days in jail and a fine of up to $500 on each charge if convicted. Ravnsborg has said he is confident he did not commit a crime, and that he was not drinking before the crash. He provided a blood sample and handed over his electronic devices to investigators. A toxicology report from a sample taken roughly 15 hours after the crash showed no alcohol in Ravnsborg's system. Boever's family has questioned Ravnsborg's account, and expressed frustration at the five-month wait to hear whether he would face charges. Michael Moore, the Beadle County State's Attorney, who is assisting in the case, said on Monday that when Ravnsborg was interviewed by law enforcement following the crash, he was not clear about what had caused him to swerve on to the shoulder of the highway and gave 'varying examples of possibly what could have happened.' Pictured: The impeachment resolution filed against Ravnsborg on Tuesday Noem released videos of Ravnsborg's two interviews with law enforcement late on Tuesday. In the videos, investigators confront the attorney general with the gruesome details of the crash, at one point telling him, 'His face was in your windshield, Jason, think about that.' Ravnsborg appeared unsure of many details of the crash, but investigators told him that Boever's glasses had been found in the attorney general's Ford Taurus and bone scrapings were found on the highway shoulder. As investigators described how his car swerved onto the shoulder and struck Boever, causing major damage to the car hood and windshield, Ravnsborg appeared distressed. 'I never saw him,' he told the investigators. 'I never saw him'. Social media may have started as a young person's game, but some of the hottest influencers on Instagram aren't Gen Z or millennials at all they're grandmothers. Popular 'granfluencers' are taking over the platform, earning followers in the hundreds of thousands and in some cases, millions with enough popularity to rack up brand partnerships and sponsored posts. These granfluencers aren't your stereotypical grannies, though: They're not knitting or shuffling around in house slippers, but rather dressing up in fabulous designer outfits, traveling the world,and just generally showing younger audiences how to live their best lives. Star power! One of the most popular granfluencers is Helen Ruth Elam, who goes by Baddie Winkle on Instagram where her tagline is 'been stealing ur man since 1928' Fab! The 92-year-old Knoxville, Tennessee resident didn't earn fame until her 80s, but her follower count on the app is now up to 3.5 million Her fabulous style and fun personality have earned her plenty of fans, which have equaled lucrative partnerships Making money! She also did a series of cute ads for INC.redible Cosmetics Baddie Winkle, 92: 3.5 million followers One of the most popular granfluencers is Helen Ruth Elam, who goes by Baddie Winkle on Instagram where her tagline is 'been stealing ur man since 1928.' The 92-year-old Knoxville, Tennessee resident didn't earn fame until her 80s, but her follower count on the app is now up to 3.5 million. Baddie clearly doesn't subscribe to any maxims about dressing one's age, and is known for her bright, colorful, trendy outfits. Her fabulous style and fun personality have earned her plenty of fans, which have equaled lucrative partnerships. Past sponsorships have included Amazon Echo Show 8, Svedka vodka, LG, Canada Dry, Aussie Hair, My/Mo Mochi Ice Cream, Jack in the Box, Fashion Nova, Lisa Frank, INC.redible Cosmetics, and more. And according to research by TopRatedCasinos.co.uk via Daily Front Row, she can earn up to $9,815 per sponsored post. Accidental Icon Lyn Slater's 749,000 Instagram followers fawn over her style and her smarts Extra cash: Now, her sponsored posts, like this one for Canada Dry, can reportedly bring in $2,984 each 'I think that as women get older, there is a difference in the kind of attention that you may receive. So I started paying more attention to the kinds of clothes I was wearing,' she said Lyn said: 'Its time for a new outlook on what it means to be an older woman' Accidental Icon, 67: 749,000 followers Accidental Icon Lyn Slater's 749,000 Instagram followers fawn over her style and her smarts. A masters in criminal justice and PhD in social welfare, the 67-year-old shows her fans that age is just a number. 'Im not 20. I dont want to be 20, but Im really freaking cool. Thats what I think about when Im posting a photo,' she told the New York Times. Though she works as a professor, she earned style cred eight years ago when photographers assumed she was a fashionista heading to New York Fashion Week. Its time for a new outlook on what it means to be an older woman Lyn Slater Now, her sponsored posts can reportedly bring in $2,984 each. She's also been a model for fans to look up to for aging gracefully. 'I went through a process about how I was experiencing myself internally and things that were happening to my body,' she told AARP's Disrupt Aging. 'I didnt like it at first. At some point I had to accept the fact that aging is inevitable. There is nothing you can do to control it, so try to be the best you can be. 'I think that as women get older, there is a difference in the kind of attention that you may receive. So I started paying more attention to the kinds of clothes I was wearing. 'I am in my 60s, and I am the most visible I have ever been in my entire life,' she added. 'Its time for a new outlook on what it means to be an older woman.' Prolific: UK-born Sarah-Jane Adams, 65, has two popular accounts on Instagram; her more popular one has 194,000 followers Busy! Sarah-Jane's incredible style has meant big business, including her own jewelry line and a book, as well as a contract with IMG models Sponsored Instagram posts can rake in big bucks for this Australia-based granfluencer, who lists herself as a Priceline Ambassador in her bio Sarah-Jane Adams, 65: 194,000 followers UK-born Sarah-Jane Adams, 65, has two popular accounts on Instagram: The first, @saramaijewels, has earned 194,000 followers to date, while the second, @mywrinklesaremystripes, has 32,000 followers. Sarah-Jane's incredible style has meant big business, including her own jewelry line and a book, as well as a contract with IMG models. 'I dont feel as if Im trying to play the old card,' she said. 'I was a punk, and before that I was a hippie. Now Ive merged the two cultures. Im part of the Germaine Greer generation. But in the world of social media, Im simply lumped with all the over-60s.' Age has hardly gotten in the way of her social media fame, though. Sponsored Instagram posts can rake in big bucks for this Australia-based granfluencer, who lists herself as a ambassador for the Aussie brand Priceline in her bio. Another perk of being Instagram famous is the freebies, and Sarah certainly racks up plenty of gifts and gamely shows off her favorites on the account. In the past, she's promoted a flower company, accessories brands, and even Mercedes-Benz. Insta-famous! On the younger side of of granfluencers, Montreal-based Grece Granem, 56, has 529,000 Instagram followers 'Stay visible! Once women pass a certain age, they dont get looked at anymore,' she told Vogue. 'I dont take that into account' Past sponsorships have included the jewelry brand We Are Missoma, e-commerce site Farfetch, and accessories brand Aspinal of London Grece Ghanem, 56: 529,000 followers On the younger side of of granfluencers, Montreal-based Grece Granem, 56, has 529,000 Instagram followers and doesn't believe into fading into the background as she gets older. 'Stay visible! Once women pass a certain age, they dont get looked at anymore,' she told Vogue. 'I dont take that into account. I still wear things in a fun way. I dont have to disappear.' Grece has won fans for her incredible style and story: She moved with her adult daughter to Canada from her home country of Lebanon, where she'd been a microbiologist with a huge collection of designer clothes. Starting over in Canada, she became a personal trainer and had to build up her wardrobe again from scratch. These days, she sometimes gets a bit of help doing that from sponsorships, which in the past have included the jewelry brand We Are Missoma, e-commerce site Farfetch, and accessories brand Aspinal of London. Seeing the world! Charlotte Simpson, a 65-year-old retired guidance counselor, documents her travels on Instagram for her 14,000 followers Over the past several years, the Indiana resident has been to the Caribbean, Japan, Iceland, Germany, Albania, Ecuador, Canada, Morocco, France, and Guatemala Aura Frames' most successful influencer partnership last year was not with a 20-something, but with Charlotte, whose ad had six times as much engagement as any other Success story: She's also done partnerships with hotels, including follower giveaways Charlotte Simpson, 65: 14,000 followers Not all the influencers are fashionistas with closets packed with designer clothes. Charlotte Simpson, a 65-year-old retired guidance counselor, documents her travels on Instagram for her 14,000 followers. Over the past several years, the Indiana resident has been to the various islands in the Caribbean, as well as Japan, Iceland, Germany, Albania, Ecuador, Canada, Morocco, France, and Guatemala. And some brands have noticed that women like her can help drive sales more than their younger counterparts. According to PR Daily, Aura Frames' most successful influencer partnership last year was not with a 20-something, but with Charlotte, whose ad had six times as much engagement as any other. Char posted two ads with the digital picture frame that did big business for the company. Fitness fanatic: Joan McDonald, 74, has 1.1. million followers on her Train With Joan Instagram account, where she shares her workouts, meals, and active lifestyle She only started working out a few years ago, and now she's a gym rat and a social media pro Makin' money! She has promoted clothing brands, workout gear, and supplements on her page She said: 'People think, Oh Grandma, what does she know? But youd be amazed at what Grandma can do' Joan MacDonald, 74: 1.1 million followers Joan McDonald, 74, has 1.1. million followers on her Train With Joan Instagram account, where she shares her workouts, meals, and active lifestyle. Joan's another example of how it's never too late to start something new: According to Glamour, she didn't even start exercising at a gym until a few years ago. '[When I was younger] married women didnt belong to gyms, they just didnt, until later on,' she said. Now she's a gym rat and a social media pro, and has promoted clothing brands, workout gear, and supplements on her page. 'Older women have a lot to offer,' she said. 'There are a lot of older women out here older than I am that are really strong, amazing people. Older women have a voice and we need to be listened to. 'People think, Oh Grandma, what does she know? But youd be amazed at what Grandma can do.' SEATTLE, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Amperity , the #1 enterprise customer data platform for consumer companies, today announced that it has been awarded U.S. Patent 10,922,337 for "Clustering of data records with hierarchical cluster IDs." This award is the fifth patent granted for Amperity's core identity resolution and customer 360 technology, and further cements its platform as the only Enterprise CDP with protected innovations that help drive customer-centricity. Customer data is a mess. Brands want to personalize each interaction with their customers, but often end up falling short of this ideal because the data doesn't cooperate. Many high quality personalized experiences require using more of this messy data, not less. But necessarily this requires the ability to tune the richness of the data to the data quality required for a particular use case -- an order confirmation is very different from a list of product recommendations. The differences in confidence required across the spectrum of personalization is what motivated this innovation. The patent for "Clustering of data records with hierarchical cluster IDs" covers the algorithm that organizes different customer records based on the degree of certainty in the match, allowing brands to know when personalized messages make the most sense for that specific communication, or whether a generic message may be more appropriate. "When interacting with customers we realized that the level of confidence that the person being contacted is exactly the person you think they are varies depending on the type of interaction," said Yan Yan, Data Scientist at Amperity. "For instance, an engagement like 'How was your store visit' requires high confidence, whereas a product recommendation email requires less confidence. This invention makes it easy for us to control how the records are matched based on the confidence required, which vastly improves marketing ROI and reach." This capability is essential for companies that are looking to improve their customer experiences and marketing effectiveness by relying on first-party data to achieve an accurate view of their customers. Amperity 3.0 is the first comprehensive enterprise CDP for consumer companies with the scale, flexibility, and power to quickly help teams across the organization use first-party data for exactly this reason. Amperity's platform works by ingesting raw customer data across all touchpoints, using machine learning to resolve identities even when records lack unique identifiers across systems. The result is unified customer databases that centralize data from online and offline transactions, loyalty programs, email interactions, finance systems, and more, enabling its customers to efficiently deploy customer data for targeting, suppression, analytics, customer service, regulatory compliance, and more. Amperity's protected intellectual property is unique among CDPs. In addition to the most recently-awarded patent, Amperity has received four others covering different aspects of its proprietary approach: About Amperity Amperity's mission is to help companies use data to serve their customers. The company has revolutionized the way brands identify, understand, and connect with their customers by leveraging AI to deliver a truly comprehensive and actionable Customer 360. This unified view improves marketing performance, fuels accurate customer insights, and enables world-class customer experiences. With Amperity, technical teams are freed from endless integration and data management, and business teams have direct access to the comprehensive data they need to build long-term customer loyalty and drive growth. Amperity serves many of the world's most loved brands, including Alaska Airlines, Lucky Brand, Kendra Scott, Planet Fitness, Michaels, Kenneth Cole, Johnny Was, Seattle Sounders FC, Crocs, Endeavour Drinks, and many more. To learn more, visit Amperity.com . SOURCE Amperity Related Links https://www.amperity.com JERSEY CITY, N.J., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ElectrifAi, one of the worlds leading companies in practical artificial intelligence (Ai) and pre-built machine learning models, today announced it will be working with OXIO, a New York based telecommunications company, to personalize phone plan rates. ElectrifAi has deep domain expertise in the Telecom industry using its machine learning technology. Generating increased revenue uplift through customer segmentation, personalization and encouraging customers to spend more with a particular Telecom carrier are just a few of the many benefits. ElectrifAi has applied that domain expertise to improve OXIOs ability to accurately predict an individual customers phone usage. OXIO has a unique business model that provides a carrier-as-a-service to brands and enterprises. OXIO has built the modern overlay network entirely as a 100% cloud-based solution, blending the wireless connectivity of many providers. By doing this, OXIO enables a custom-purposed, asset-light network delivered to each brand in a matter of days. OXIOs data-driven approach using ElectrifAis machine learning models allow OXIO to design rate-plans that can save customers money by not paying for services that they dont need. Human analysts can estimate phone usage but not to the degree of accuracy that machine learning technology can. Artificial intelligence identifies patterns in thousands of data points that are fed into a machine learning model to generate recommendations. ElectrifAis pre-built machine learning model, Initial Rate Plan Assignment, uses an existing framework that will allow OXIO to market faster than if it were built from scratch, which allows customers to begin saving money sooner. The models accuracy will also ensure that the recommended rate plans will prevent customers from spending excessive fees in overage charges. ElectrifAi machine learning capabilities bring great time-to-value to OXIO. OXIO will deploy these machine learning models in their own secure Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment on Amazon SageMaker, an AWS service that helps data scientists and developers to prepare, build, train, and deploy high-quality machine learning models quickly. OXIO will feed its data directly into the machine learning model on Amazon SageMaker without sharing the end user data with ElectrifAi, reducing privacy and security risks, thereby better protecting end users. The model then provides output recommendations that are conveniently fed back to OXIOs existing data flows without any programming and only with minimal configuration. As OXIO continues to expand its market throughout the United States, ElectrifAi will help expand OXIOs ability to provide targeted accuracy for customers phone-plan options. In addition, ElectrifAis machine learning model will bolster OXIOs personalization efforts, which will allow the company to target exactly who to market to. "With ElectrifAI's solutions, OXIO will be able to serve its customers with the best-in-class Data Science and AI capabilities, unmatched in the telecommunications industry today. ElectrifAis AI capabilities will help OXIO reshape the telecommunications industry as we know it by opening the door to completely new business models, and we are looking forward to broadening this cooperation into other fields, said Gilles Louwerens, OXIOs Head of Customer & Business Intelligence. The ML models in AWS Marketplace are available worldwide. Please click here to access our pre-trained models and our associated services to help accelerate ML adoption within your organization. About ElectrifAi ElectrifAi is a global leader in business-ready machine learning models. ElectrifAis mission is to help organizations change the way they work through machine learning: driving revenue uplift, cost reduction as well as profit and performance improvement. Founded in 2004, ElectrifAi boasts seasoned industry leadership, a global team of domain experts, and a proven record of transforming structured and unstructured data at scale. A large library of Ai-based products reaches across business functions, data systems, and teams to drive superior results in record time. ElectrifAi has approximately 200 data scientists, software engineers and employees with a proven record of dealing with over 2,000 customer implementations, mostly for Fortune 500 companies. At the heart of ElectrifAis mission is a commitment to making Ai and machine learning more understandable, practical and profitable for businesses and industries across the globe. ElectrifAi is headquartered in Jersey City, with offices located in Shanghai and New Delhi. About OXIO OXIO is the first carrier-as-a-service platform for brands and enterprises that unbundles mobile telecom infrastructure, capturing the powerful data and true value that it emits. OXIOs 100 percent cloud-based solution blends the wireless infrastructure of many providers, enabling something that wasn't possible before a custom-purposed, asset-light network delivered to each brand in a matter of days. OXIO's B2B SaaS solution unlocks the full and uncompromising control of the wireless experience for brands, including actionable intelligence that drives clear value and results. Mobile data, long locked up in telecom silos, allows brands to get closer to their customers than ever. For more information, visit oxio.com. SOURCE ElectrifAi Related Links https://electrifai.net/ Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. French apple exports to the Mena region have increased by 16.43% between August 2019 and July 2020, (compared with 2018-2019), representing approximately 11% of total French apple exports. In total, 46,386 tonnes of French apples were exported to Mena, up from 39,839 tonnes the previous year, the top three markets being Saudi Arabia (12,975 tonnes), UAE (12,920 tonnes) and Egypt (6,210 tonnes), which together import over 66% of French apple exports to the region. Other major markets include Israel, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman. Interfel, the French fresh fruit and vegetable interprofessional organisation responsible for promoting the consumption of apples in the Middle East and the European Commission, is participating at Gulfood where they are showcasing a range fruit and vegetables. This underscores the large variety of apples, which are very healthy and flavourful due to the exceptional richness of the soil and the climate. Also, 65% of French apples (over 1,300 growers) are produced in eco-friendly orchards, which has also contributed considerably towards the popularity of French apples, said Daniel Soares, Marketing Export Manager, Interfel. The taste of our produce resonates well with Middle East consumers. As such, we will be highlighting the different flavours and the multiple ways in which they can be used in everyday cuisine, added Soares. The National Association of Apples and Pears (ANPP) divides French apples into five different categories, gourmet, fragrant, balanced, rustic and tonic. The most popular type of apple grown in France is Golden, which benefits from official marks of quality and origin. Due to their tolerance to drought and hardy adaptation to all types of rootstock, Golden are renowned for their easy cultivation and represent 35% of all apples grown in France today. In the Middle East, the Gala apples sweetness makes it the most popular in the region. All global markets are highly competitive, but France consistently produces apples that are crisp and full of rustic taste, having been grown in a temperate climate, with abundant sunlight and respect for the local environment. This gives them a distinct competitive edge, concluded Soares. Interfel highlights a wide range of high quality, healthy and safe varieties of fruit and vegetables. On the stand, apple producers include Apple Bird, Harmonie, Cardell Export, and Pominter. French chef, Charles Soussin is also on hand to showcase the apples superior taste through a range of recipes for visitors to the stand to enjoy. -- Tradearabia News Service SMOKY LAKE, Alberta, Feb. 23, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Provincial Council of the Metis Nation of Alberta (MNA) met today at Metis Crossing to discuss ongoing concerns regarding the work of the MNA Constitution Commission. A resolution to immediately stop any and all work associated with the MNA Constitution Commission, and to disband or pause the Commission so as to allow the Provincial Council to determine a more meaningful process for advancing a Constitution once the pandemic is under control, was put forward by members of the Provincial Council. Subsequently, the MNA President refused to allow the Provincial Council members to put forward or vote on the resolution. The MNA Provincial Council consists of 14 officials who are elected to govern the affairs of the MNA at a provincial level. In recent weeks, numerous Metis citizens and communities have expressed concern to the Provincial Council regarding the work of the Constitution Committee, including with respect to the makeup of the Commission and that bodys plans for engagement. We are hearing from our citizens that trying to ram through a Constitution that will be with us for decades to come, in the midst of a public health crisis, should be viewed as not culturally appropriate and largely undemocratic, stated Duane Zaraska, President, MNA Region 2. At a time when our members and communities are faced with ongoing challenges related to coping with the pandemic, including dealing with the loss of loved ones during a very difficult time, they have less time to engage in politics of this nature and have a greatly reduced capacity to protect their individual and collective rights. MEDIA INQUIRIES: Stephanie Gillis-Paulgaard Take Roots Consulting 780-885-0458 stephanie@takeroots.ca Lady Hoey warned the protocol was "devastating" for the biodiversity of local woodlands The Northern Ireland Protocol is having a "devastating" impact on the biodiversity of woodlands here, the House of Lords has been told. Belfast-born Brexit-backing Baroness Hoey said the Woodland Trust had cancelled an order for 22,000 trees from Britain. She said the trust had specifically said it was due to the "ban on British soil coming from GB to Northern Ireland". Lady Hoey warned the protocol was "devastating" for the biodiversity of local woodlands. Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minister Lord Goldsmith said the situation made "no sense whatsoever". He said he would speak to ministerial colleagues to see what could be done to "restore common sense". The exchanges came after it was recently reported that orders for almost 100,000 trees had been cancelled because of a Brexit ban on the plants being moved from Britain. The problem is said to stem from the protocol, which sees the region observing EU customs and regulatory rules on plants and animals. BURBANK, Ill., Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- NAS Investment Solutions (NASIS), a national sponsor of high-quality real estate investment properties, has acquired a Class-A, 14,833 square-foot, essential business property in Burbank, IL. Located approximately 15 miles southwest of downtown Chicago, the property is 100% leased to Walgreens, a nationwide retail pharma operator and an investment grade tenant. Walgreens' parent company, Walgreens Boots Alliance has corporately guaranteed a 17+ year, absolute NNN lease. NAS Investment Solutions (NASIS), a national sponsor of high-quality real estate investment properties, has acquired a Class-A, 14,833 square-foot, essential business property in Burbank, IL. NAS Investment Solutions was established to leverage National Asset Services' vast experience in investment property management by identifying, acquiring, and enhancing commercial real estate investments across all sectors of the real estate industry. Walgreens is one of the oldest and largest pharmacy store chains in the nation. Built in 2013, this location features a pharmacy drive thru window. The property is situated in a densely populated area at a signalized intersection with an estimated daily traffic count of 50,000 autos. The property has 62 parking spaces on a total lot size of 54,866 sq ft. The acquisition creates an opportunity for 1031 Exchange investors who are in immediate need of a quality replacement property. It is also suitable for self-directed IRAs and represents a narrow window of opportunity for accredited investors to participate in an investment that is projected to deliver an annual 5.75% cash-on-cash return beginning on day one. "This investment property is a great opportunity to purchase fractional interest in a prime, recession-resistant asset with dependable, predictable cash flow that is non-correlated to Wall Street performance," commented Karen E. Kennedy, President and Founder of NAS Investment Solutions and National Asset Services. "There is a strong demand for high quality real estate investments with investment grade tenants in strong suburban markets such as Burbank. Investors are turning to quality commercial real estate as an investment alternative that is insulated from Wall Street uncertainty." Assuming responsibilities for asset management and property management for the newly acquired property is National Asset Services (NAS), one of the Nation's leading commercial real estate companies. Accredited investors seeking more information on this sponsor-owned property should contact Karen E. Kennedy at [email protected] or at 310.988.4240. About National Asset Services (NAS) Since 2008, NAS has served 2,520 investment clients and has established an impressive track record for investment property management. The track record includes generating over $585 million in cash distributions to property investors and managing a commercial real estate portfolio of 168 diverse commercial properties, comprised of 24.34 million square feet, in 30 states. The overall value of NAS' managed portfolio in the company's 11-year history, totals $3.3 billion. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, NAS manages a wide range of diverse commercial real estate: Office, medical office, multifamily, retail, student housing, assisted living and industrial flex properties. The company manages solely owned and multi-owner properties. NAS offers a wide range of asset management capabilities. They include: Property management; project management; lease administration; acquisition and disposition services; real estate strategy analysis; long-range business objectives; monitoring changing market conditions; investor relations; real estate and investor accounting; loan modification and workout solutions; exit and hold strategies; leasing & marketing; tenant retention plans; research studies; site selections; feasibility studies; insurance risk management; capital improvement planning and tracking; property tax appeal services and cost segregation services. About NAS Investment Solutions (NASIS) NAS Investment Solutions was established to leverage National Asset Services' vast experience in investment property management by identifying, acquiring, and enhancing commercial real estate investments across all sectors of the real estate industry. The company is differentiated from other property investment sponsors by: Investing in the property alongside investor clients Managing the sponsored investment through National Asset Services, making the company accountable throughout the entire hold period Maintaining high acquisition standards and executing an exhaustive, transparent due diligence process Thoroughly vetting potential property investments, utilizing professionals that have extensive experience in acquiring and managing real estate A proven track record of closing properties on time Ensuring investment properties are 1031 exchange eligible and qualify for self-directed IRAs For more information about National Asset Services and NAS Investment Solutions, visit nasassets.com or nasinvestmentsolutions.com. Contact: JW Robison 310-795-8985 [email protected] SOURCE National Asset Services WASHTENAW COUNTY, MI -- Changing the distribution process of the COVID-19 vaccine to ensure its more equitable is the main focus of a virtual town hall meeting Thursday. COVID-19 and the African American Community: Equitable Vaccine Distribution is being hosted by Michigan Medicine from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Feb. 25, and is being livestreamed on the Program for Multicultural Health at Michigan Medicines Facebook page. The event features discussions on the COVID-19 vaccine distribution process, how to increase vaccinations among African Americans, and what changes need to be made to ensure equitable vaccine distribution. Its being moderated by State Rep. Felicia Brabec, D-Pittsfield Township. The panelists include: T. Anthony Denton, Senior, vice president and chief operating officer UM Health System - Michigan Medicine Alonzo Lewis, president, St. Joseph Mercy Ann Arbor and Livingston Tendai Thomas, associate division head, internal medicine, IHA Christopher Altman, clinical manager for immunization, Rite Aid Corp. Charles Wilson, community health promotion supervisor, Washtenaw County Health Department Those interested can register here and watch the livestream on this Facebook page. Those wishing to submit questions before the event, can do so here. Read more: New Michigan vaccine data shows disparities along racial lines Liquor license suspensions upheld for 8 violators of Michigans dine-in ban Johnson & Johnson vaccine effective against COVID-19, analysis says, clearing way for FDA authorization Ankara hosted a trilateral meeting of the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Turkmenistan on February 23. After the meeting, a joint press conference was held with the participation of Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and Deputy Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers of Turkmenistan, Minister of Foreign Affairs Rashid Meredov. First, the ministers signed the protocol of the meeting. Then the ministers exchanged views on the results of the trilateral meeting. 3 1 of 3 Mark Mulligan, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Show More Show Less 3 of 3 One in eight Harris County residents 16 and older have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccines, according to state and local data. A Chronicle analysis found that the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines have gone to 12.4 percent of the countys population in that age range, or 447,861 people. The revival of the moniker is fueled by the company holding control over it, Liquid Asset Partners (LAP). The comeback was announced by LAPs Bill Melvin, who hinted at the revival and a flood of no fewer than ten models over the next three years. Those are said to range from dirt to touring bikes, and from dual-sport to cruisers. There's possibly even an electric two-wheeler in the cards.The official announcement left out any indication of Buells founder, Erik Buell, being involved in this. That led to speculation in some circles that the former Harley-Davidson employee might have a role to play. He doesnt, of course, and made that perfectly clear in an email sent over to Road Racing World Buell Motorcycles was born in 1983 in Michigan, and by the 1990s, it was already beginning to become part of Harley-Davidson. As usual, the Milwaukee monster messed up a lot over the following decade, and in 2009 it killed Buell as a brand. Erik calls this outcome the result of unwise choices made by Harleys executives.Having lost Buell, the man moved on to create Erik Buell Racing, but for various reasons, that business failed too, and it eventually crossed over to LAP.Presently, Erik Buell is involved in a company called FUELL , in the business of making electric urban mobility solution for cities. He says he has nothing to do with LAPs announcement and is no longer involved with neither EBR nor Buell Motorcycles. For Subscribers Why South Dakota county officials are shirking state-given water rights Grant County could be the thirteenth county to repeal their drainage ordinance in the past decade. It was easy to root for Phil Mickelson at the PGA Championship last weekend. The little boy who learned to play golf left-handed by standing opposite his right-handed dad and mirroring dads swing has long been a crowd favorite. He is not only immensely gifted; he is imaginative and willing Hindustan Copper Ltd is quoting at Rs 126.45, up 8.87% on the day as on 11:43 IST on the NSE. The stock is up 261.29% in last one year as compared to a 25.62% gain in NIFTY and a 53.44% gain in the Nifty Metal index. Hindustan Copper Ltd rose for a third straight session today. The stock is quoting at Rs 126.45, up 8.87% on the day as on 11:43 IST on the NSE. The benchmark NIFTY is up around 0.77% on the day, quoting at 14820.45. The Sensex is at 50035.45, up 0.57%. Hindustan Copper Ltd has added around 130.75% in last one month. Meanwhile, Nifty Metal index of which Hindustan Copper Ltd is a constituent, has added around 17.12% in last one month and is currently quoting at 3749.55, up 1.09% on the day. The volume in the stock stood at 195.36 lakh shares today, compared to the daily average of 70.2 lakh shares in last one month. The PE of the stock is 0 based on TTM earnings ending December 20. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) New Delhi: In a big push for Atmanirbhar Bharat, the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) approved buying of defence equipment worth Rs 13,700 crore for the three armed forces that also includes 118 Arjun Main Battle Tank (MK-1A) for the Indian Army. The Defence Ministry has cleared a Rs 6,000 crore proposal to procure these Arjun Mk-1A Main Battle Tanks. The DAC under the chairmanship of Defence Minister Rajnath Singh approved capital acquisition proposals of various weapons, platforms, equipment and systems required by the Indian Army, Indian Navy and Indian Air Force. Three Acceptance of Necessities (AoNs) for an overall cost of Rs 13,700 crore were accorded. All these acquisition proposals will be indigenously designed, developed and manufactured and these will include inter-alia platforms and systems designed and developed by Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). "To meet the Atmanirbhar Bharat goals of the Government on the time-bound defence procurement process and faster decision making and to systematically work towards reducing the time taken for capital acquisition, the DAC also approved that all capital acquisition contracts (delegated and non-delegated) other than D&D cases shall be concluded in two years," the Ministry of Defence said in a statement. Earlier on February 14, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had handed over the Arjun Main Battle Tank (MK-1A) to the Indian Army in Chennai. About the Arjun Mk-1A Main Battle Tank: The Arjun MBT Mk-1A is an indigenous tank developed for India's self-reliance in Armoured Fighting Vehicle capability. With modern battle tank technologies, it is distinct from the contemporary main battle tanks and is a dependable warfighting machine. What Arjun Mk-1A Main Battle Tank offers: The Arjun MBT Mk IA is a state-of-the-art weapon platform with superior repower, high mobility, excellent protection and crew comfort with 14 major upgrades on Arjun MBT Mk including laser warning and counter system, automatic target tracker and 57 minor refinements. Defence Acquisition Council approved 118 MBT Arjun Mark-1A indigenous tanks for #IndianArmy. The tank has 14 major upgrades including #LaserWarning and Counter System, Automatic Target Tracker and 57 minor refinements.#IndianArmy#StrongAndCapable#AtmaNirbharBharat pic.twitter.com/CJ8cgsCztE ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY (@adgpi) February 24, 2021 The Arjun Main Battle Tank Mk-1A, a multi-disciplinary Armoured Fighting Vehicle, is infused with 71 new features and would ensure effortless mobility in all terrains. Besides this, it would also ensure precise target engagement during day and night. (With inputs from agencies) The views expressed by public comments are not those of this company or its affiliated companies. Please note by clicking on "Post" you acknowledge that you have read the TERMS OF USE and the comment you are posting is in compliance with such terms. Your comments may be used on air. Be polite. Inappropriate posts or posts containing offsite links, images, GIFs, inappropriate language, or memes may be removed by the moderator. Job listings and similar posts are likely automated SPAM messages from Facebook and are not placed by WFMZ-TV. FLINT, MI -- Flint residents who havent viewed documents related to the Flint water crisis settlement are about to have them hand-delivered to their mailboxes. An administrator with the U.S. District Court is mailing about 70 pages of information to households with water service, including forms for adults to register or opt-out of the $641-million settlement of lawsuits filed by Flint residents against the state of Michigan, city of Flint, McLaren Regional Medical Center and Rowe Professional Services. The same forms are available online at the courts Flint water settlement site. You have a right to know about a proposed class action settlement and about all of your options before the Court decides whether to give final approval to the settlement, the mailing says in part. This notice explains the lawsuit, the settlement, your legal rights, what settlement fund money will be available, who is eligible, and how to get money from the settlement fund. The notice applies to anyone who was 18 or older at any time they owned, rented or lived in residential property in the city from April 25, 2014 until Nov. 16, 2020 and who claims an injury, damage, or loss of any kind as a result of having been exposed to Flint water, the documents say. It also covers the owners of any business that received Flint water or was legally responsible for payment of that water during the same time. Those who are currently represented by a law firm in the water crisis cases should consult their attorney, who may have completed the registration on their behalf, the information says. The packages do not address the specific rights of minors, who are in line to receive the bulk of the settlement on an individual basis. Minors have the right to have a claim form filed on their behalf and may submit a registration form for money from the settlement program by the same March 29 deadline set for adults. Minors have an additional opportunity to later submit a registration form and receive a payment up until they turn 19 years old. The information from the federal court says those who want to make a claim on behalf of a minor who was exposed to Flint water should speak to your lawyer or consider hiring one to represent the minor child. Children 6 years old and younger during the Flint water crisis are the biggest potential beneficiaries of the proposed settlement and nearly 80 percent of the settlement, which state officials said is likely the largest in Michigan history, is to be paid to children who were younger than 18 when they were first exposed to Flint River water, which contained elevated levels of lead and bacteria in 2014 and 2015. Settlement paperwork says that the federal court will hold a public hearing July 12 to determine whether the settlement class can be certified and whether the settlement is fair, adequate, and reasonable and should be finally approved. The court will also consider the application for an award of attorneys fees and expense reimbursement, but the location and format of that hearing has yet to be determined. Related: Youngest Flint water crisis victims to get 80 percent of historic $600 million settlement Federal judge says she will meet for days if necessary to hear from residents about Flint water settlement Judge gives preliminary OK to $641 million Flint water crisis settlement Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-25 02:48:17|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close MINSK, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Belarusian Health Minister Dmitry Pinevich said on Wednesday that the third wave of coronavirus promises to be less intense. The minister said the intensity of the third wave of coronavirus would depend on the introduction of new strains, as well as the degree of vaccination coverage of the contingents. The official said Belarus is in the second wave of COVID-19. The incidence rates are decreasing in all regions, he added. Pinevich said the number of vaccinated people in Belarus is almost 25,000. Moreover, 100,000 doses of the Chinese vaccine arrived in Belarus, and another 100,000 doses will arrive in March, he added. Enditem Since he was first elected four years ago, Cunningham said he promised an administration with one team and one vision for Waukegan. He said if he is reelected in the April 6 general election, that is what he will do. remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 24) Two policemen were killed during a shootout between members of the Quezon City Police District and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency near a mall in Quezon City on Wednesday. The shootout followed a drug bust near the Ever Gotesco Mall along Commonwealth Avenue. National Capital Region Police Office chief Brigadier General Vic Danao said two QCPD officers were killed and one was badly wounded. He added that three PDEA agents were also hospitalized. Danao also said no civilians were harmed during the incident. The NCRPO chief described the shootout as a "misencounter," adding this is not the first time such an "unfortunate" incident has happened. The Philippine National Police and PDEA will create a joint body to investigate the shootout. "PNP Chief, Police General Debold Sinas, appointed the CIDG as the lead investigating body while the RD, NCRPO has been designated to speak on any updates from the PNP in order to keep the public updated with accurate and relevant information," the PNP said in a statement. "The PNP and PDEA both agree and assure the public that the incident, while serious, will in no way affect the continuing operational relationship and coordination they have long firmed up in the fight against illegal drugs," it added. Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra has ordered the National Bureau of Investigation to conduct a parallel investigation into the alleged "misencounter" between the police and PDEA agents. This will be separate from the joint PNP-PDEA investigation body announced by Sinas. The mall management said it immediately secured all access points to the building to ensure the safety of shoppers. "The management is closely coordinating with the PNP (Philippine National Police)," Ever Gotesco said in a Facebook post. Meanwhile, Quezon City Mayor Joy Belmonte asked residents to avoid posting online any unverified information regarding the incident. Grey's Anatomy actress Kate Walsh's new boyfriend has been revealed as Australian farmer Andrew Nixon. The 53-year-old actress reportedly met her beau on a cruise early last year. According to The West Australian, the couple have been living together in Perth since the COVID-19 pandemic began after Andrew convinced Kate to relocate. Revealed: Grey's Anatomy star Kate Walsh's 'mystery man' has been revealed to be Australian farmer Andrew Nixon - after they were spotted frolicking around a beach in Perth Andrew is part of Nixon Farming, a family farming enterprise in the Moora region. Daily Mail Australia published photos of the pair getting cosy with enjoying a beach date last month. The California-born actress showed off her incredible figure in a slinky black bikini as they frolicked around on the sand. Going strong: According to The West Australian, the couple have living together in Perth since the COVID-19 pandemic began after Andrew (pictured) convinced Kate to relocate Last year, Kate spoke to The Daily Telegraph about her new love affair with Australia after getting 'stuck' here amid the pandemic lockdown. 'I didn't really want to go back to New York in the middle of a pandemic when it was pretty gnarly to say the least,' she said. 'I couldn't go home initially, and now that I can, I don't really fancy going back. When I have my own mother saying don't come home, my 86-year-old mum we are in a very challenging time!' 'I don't want to go back to New York': Last year, Kate spoke to The Daily Telegraph about her new love affair with Australia after getting 'stuck' here amid the pandemic lockdown Claiming to have found a new 'passion project', Kate also revealed her plans to help bolster Australia's local film industry. The star recently told 2GB's Jim Wilson she felt 'very grateful' to be in Australia during the COVID-19 crisis. 'Honestly, I feel very lucky,' she said. 'It's kind of a crazy situation: it's like being in an alternate reality compared to the rest of the world.' Stocks to watch today: Here is a list of top stocks that are likely to be in focus in Wednesday's trading session based on latest developments. Share Market Live: Sensex rises 100 points, Nifty at 14,750; ONGC, Bajaj Finance, HCL Tech top gainers Coal India: Board members of the company will meet on March 5, 2021, to consider the second interim dividend. Pfizer: Company's COVID-19 vaccine has received full approval from Brazil's health regulatory agency. Tata Power : The company will issue NCDs worth Rs 900 crore on private placement basis. SPARC : US FDA sought new phase 3 study on cancer drug Taclantis. SBI Cards : The company will issue NCDs worth Rs 550 crore. Mazagon Dock : The company signed MoU with Mumbai Port Trust in Maritime India Sumit 2021. Alkem Labs : The company received US FDA nod for generic of antibiotic drugs Omnicef and Suprax. Aurobindo Pharma: To avail the benefit of captive consumption of solar power, the company has entered into binding agreements to invest Rs 5.38 crore each in NVNR (Ramannapet I) Power Plant and NVNR (Ramannapet II) Power Plant, Hyderabad. The company will hold 26 per cent of the equity share capital of each of the solar power generating companies after subscription. Sanofi India: A final dividend of Rs 125 per share and a special dividend of Rs 240 per share has been approved by the company. NTPC: The company said that it has signed a share purchase agreement to buy GAIL's 25.51 per cent shareholding in Ratnagiri Gas and Power Pvt Ltd (RGPPL) to exit from Konkan LNG. Tata Consumer Products: As per a press release issued by the National Stock Exchange (NSE), Tata Consumer Products will replace GAIL India in Nifty50 Index with effect from March 31, 2021. United Spirits : The company initiated a strategic review of selected popular brands and the review is expected to be completed by the end of the 2021 calendar year. UPL : The company has issued an update on the fire incident at Unit 5, Jhagadia. The company issued a closure notice for the entire plant saying that operating the plant is a safety risk. The closure will take place gradually as an immediate shutdown of a chemical unit may lead to another accident. How to obtain a legal heir certificate? When a person dies intestate (without leaving a will), the transfer of certain assets to the heirs of the deceased requires a legal heir certificate, and in a few States a probate, in order to establish their claim. Mumbai-based lawyer Siddhartha Shah says A number of other documents such as legal heir certificate may be procured, as an alternative to a succession certificate, for the purpose of establishing an inheritance or aiding in the transfer of assets from the deceased. It is comparatively easier to obtain it. Mr Shah explained In some cases, a legal heir certificate may be used in the place of a succession certificate merely because family is able to obtain a legal heir certificate conveniently and quickly. Usually, families first apply for a legal heir certificate and in the event a legal heir certificate is not accepted by the relevant authority for some reason, then a succession certificate is applied for. A legal heir certificate is thus a crucial post-demise document to establish the relationship between the deceased and legal heirs and who the legal heirs are, in order to claim certain assets. One legal heir can apply for the certificate but he/she has to include the names of all possible legal heirs in the prescribed application form. A legal heir certificate establishes the relationship of the heirs to the deceased for claims relating to pension, provident fund, gratuity or other service benefits of central and state government departments, specifically when the deceased has not selected a nominee. Banks and private companies also accept such certificates for allowing transfer of deposits, balances, investments, shares, etc. Mr Shah cautions that the applicant legal heir must truthfully mention all other legal heirs apart from him/her on the application form. Remember that you are signing the document. Mr Shah said Do not leave out any legal heirs because it will tantamount to misrepresentation, manipulation and is a criminal offence and one could land up in jail. It will amount to perjury and you can be held liable for lying if the other legal heirs challenge the certificate later on or you are caught. Despite it being such a crucial document, misrepresentation and misuse often happens leading to long-drawn litigation. Mr Shah stressed that the legal heir certificate is revocable if someone later on objects that it should not be granted to you. It does not certify that you are the only legal heir of that deceased person or that you are entitled to all assets that have been left behind by the deceased person. For that you would need a succession certificate. Succession certificate is granted by a court of law after following the due process of issuing a public notice and inviting objections from the public at large as well as the other legal heirs of the deceased person. It is this succession certificate which grants the right to successors to claim all the movable assets of the deceased person. Mr Shah added Legal heir certificate is not conclusive when it comes to determining the legitimate class of heirs of a deceased person under the laws of succession or the title of heirs to any disputed property that belonged to the deceased. In case of any disputes between the heirs of the deceased, the revenue officer cannot issue a legal heir certificate and is required to direct the heirs to approach a civil court for determination of the rightful heirs. Mr Shah further clarified A legal heir certificate is issued to identify the living heirs of a deceased person whereas succession certificate is issued to establish the authenticity of the heirs and give them the authority to inherit debts, securities and other assets that the deceased may have left behind. The legal heir certificate names all the heirs of a deceased person, under the applicable law, after a proper enquiry. All eligible successors must possess this certificate to stake a claim over the deceased persons property. One needs the legal heir certificate for the following: Transfer of properties and assets of the demised person to his successors (such as transferring the car or telephone/ electricity connection) For insurance claims Sanction and processing family pension of the deceased employee. To receive dues such as provident fund, gratuity etc from the government or to salary arrears of the deceased (state or central government employee). To gain employment based on compassionate appointments File tax returns on behalf of the deceased: Legal heir certificate is also a must when one needs to file income tax returns on behalf of the deceased assessee (as a representative). As per Section 159 of the Income Tax Act, 1961, if an individual dies, then the legal representatives shall be liable to pay any sum which the deceased would have been liable to pay had the individual not died and were alive. A legal representative or legal heir is deemed to be an assessee (representing the deceased) and tax is payable on income/ earnings from 1st April to the date of death of the asset owner. However, the legal representative/ heir is not responsible to pay the income tax dues from his/her own pocket. Importantly, the legal heirs are liable only up to the extent of the assets that they inherit from the deceased asset owner. Who can apply for a legal heir certificate: As per Indian law, the following persons are considered legal heirs and can claim a legal heir certificate: Spouse of the deceased Children of the deceased (Son/ Daughter) Parents of the deceased Sibling(s) of the deceased Procedure to obtain legal heir certificate Once a death certificate is obtained from the municipal corporation, the legal heir can apply for the legal heir certificate to claim their right over the assets of the deceased person. The legal heir certificate can be obtained by approaching the area/taluk Tehsildhar, or from the corporation/municipality office of the respective area, or from the district civil court. In Mumbai, you can contact concerned window, Mumbai City Collectorate, Old Custom House, Ground floor, Fort Mumbai-400001. The main documents needed are - 1. Xerox copy of the first and last page of the ration card 2. Affidavit duly affirmed on stamp paper of Rs.20/- 3. Death certificate 4. Service record from the office of the deceased employee The process of obtaining a legal heir certificate are stated below: The legitimate heir of the deceased person must visit the appropriate authority listed above and seek an application form for the legal heir certificate application. This requisite application must include the names of all the legal heirs, their relationship with the deceased and addresses of the family members. This has to be filled up signed and submitted. All the required documents including the death certificate of the departed person should be attached to the application. An affidavit on stamp paper or self declaration needs to be submitted along with the application. Revenue Inspector/administrative officer conducts an inspection and completes the enquiry. Authorities after receiving the application will check the attached documents and details. If all are in place, they will make entries in their registry and provide you a record number for reference. Tehsildar will assign the application for further processing to the Village Administrative Officer (VAO) and Mandal revenue officer (MRO) OR the authorities concerned. There will be a ground level verification and scrutiny of the documents submitted by the above authorities. Enquiry will take place for the verification by the local revenue officers as well as village administrative officials. Generally, a statement by the administrative/gov employee who is known to the dead person and his/her family will be registered in the application form. After the verification, the officials will submit their report in the prescribed form. Once the verification is over, these revenue officer and village administrative officials will submit their report in due form to the Tehsildar to decide and issue the certificate to the applicant with the names of all legal heirs of the deceased. After the enquiry is completed successfully, the authorized officer issues the legal heir certificate. Applicant will get the certificate after due verification. After the due enquiry, based on the report presented by the revenue officer and village administrative officials the certificate will be issued by the competent authority in which names of all the legal heirs will be mentioned. The process of obtaining a legal heir certificate generally takes 30 days. If there is an unnecessary delay in receiving this certificate or the concerned authorities fail to respond, you should then approach the Revenue Division Officer(RDO)/sub-collector or Tehsildar. Documents required to apply for legal heir certificate Here is the list of documents required: Death certificate of the deceased Identity proof and address proof of the applicant (legal heir) written / prescribed application form Proof of residence of deceased person (voter ID / driving licence/ bank pass book etc) If spouse applies for certificate If the spouse survives, Aadhaar, marriage registration certificate or passport or Voter ID should be submitted Birth certificate or Transfer certificate of all Children Self declaration of the spouse indicating all other legal heirs (including mother-in-law if wife is the applicant) If child applies if parent are deceased Death certificate of the parents Birth certificate / Aadhaar / passport / transfer certificate of the applicant and adhaar card of all possible heirs In case a minor child applies when parents are deceased Death certificate of the parents Birth certificate / Aadhaar / passport / transfer certificate of the applicant and Aadhaar card of all possible heirs Guardianship order issued by the Honourable civil court to prove relationship to the heirs If parents or sibling apply (in case unmarried children pass away) Death certificate of the deceased Birth certificate / Aadhaar / passport / transfer certificate of the deceased Self declaration of the parents / siblings The applicant can opt for any of these: voter ID, Aadhar card, driving license, passport or any other government-issued identity card as the identity proof. Address proof of legal heir can be any valid identity proof or telephone/mobile bill, gas bill, bank passbook with the name and address of the legal heir. Date of birth proof of legal heir can be a birth certificate, school transfer/leaving certificate, PAN card, passport etc. Difference between legal heir certificate and succession certificate Many people get confused between legal heir certificate and succession certificate. Mr Shah pointed out that it is important to note that both legal heir certificate and succession certificate are not same. Both certificates are very different and serve different purposes. A succession certificate is issued by the civil court and there are separate procedures to obtain the same. Legal heir certificate is issued to build a relationship for claims related to pension, insurance, administrative/service advantages, retirement benefits of the state and central government offices, government works etc. and to get a government job on compassionate grounds. A succession certificate enables the legal heirs to transfer the property, shares, debentures, etc. of the deceased in their own name. Major differences between these two certificates are as follows: Legal heir certificate usage is limited to certain matters such as claiming employee benefits of the deceased, insurance claims, property registration etc. A legal heir certificate is not accepted as conclusive proof under the law of succession in India. With respect to the settlement of any property which is disputed or under court litigation, a succession certificate is vital. Click here to view Moneylife session on how to prepare a legal will or appoint a nominee for your assets. Note: This article intends to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances. I've been a reporter and editor at Missouri community newspapers for 35 years and joined the Columbia Missourian in 2003. My emphasis at the Missourian is on local government and elections. You can reach me at swaffords@missouri.edu or at 573-884-5366. Follow this search Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today Monkey being examined in Manaus area. Scientists will monitor areas in which these diseases are endemic to investigate the factors that trigger outbreaks Credit: CREATE-NEO Yellow fever was the first human disease to have a licensed vaccine and has long been considered important to understanding how epidemics break out and should be combated. It was introduced to the Americas in the 17th century, and high death rates have resulted from successive outbreaks since then. Epidemics of yellow fever were associated with the slave trade, the U.S. gold rush and settlement of the Old West, the Haitian Revolution, and construction of the Panama Canal, to cite only a few examples. Centuries after the disease was first reported in the Americas, an international team of researchers will embark on a groundbreaking study to develop models that predict epidemics of yellow fever and other diseases caused by mosquito-borne arboviruses such as dengue, zika, and chikungunya. "Knowledge of these diseases, their cycles, and the possibilities of new outbreaks is very well-established, but we still lack a systematic understanding of how to predict when outbreaks will occur. Our goal is to create predictive models to help monitor and combat outbreaks, protect the public, and develop a deeper understanding of the combination of factors that leads to epidemics," said Mauricio Lacerda Nogueira, a professor at the Sao Jose do Rio Preto Medical School (FAMERP) in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and a member of the CREATE-NEO project funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The new international study is part of a thematic project supported by FAPESP to monitor the mosquito population in the urban area of Sao Jose do Rio Preto and the monkey and mosquito populations in the transition zone between rural and urban Manaus, the Amazonas state capital. An article written by the researchers to mark the project's inception is published in Emerging Topics in Life Science, reviewing the factors that influence the potential re-emergence of yellow fever in the Neotropics. "Deforestation, seasonal variations in rainfall and non-human primate populations are all factors that influence outbreaks, but we need to know the tipping point for each one, and to find that out, we'll develop predictive models based on research and monitoring conducted in arbovirus hotspots in Sao Paulo, Amazonas and the Pantanal in Brazil, and in Panama," Nogueira said. The history of yellow fever shows that outbreaks occur at intervals of between seven and 10 years. "Brazil has many arboviruses, with outbreaks and even epidemics in progress all the time," said Livia Sacchetto, also a researcher at FAMERP and a member of CREATE-NEO. From forest to city and vice-versa According to Sacchetto, the project also aims to find out more about spillovers and, if possible, anticipate these outbreaks in which arboviruses jump from humans to animals or vice versa. Dengue, zika, and chikungunya are transmitted to humans and non-human primates by infected Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. In the case of yellow fever, A. aegypti is the urban vector, but mosquitoes of a different genus (Haemagogus) are responsible for transmission in the countryside (sylvatic cycle). Despite the existence of a highly effective vaccine since 1937, and no reported cases caused by urban transmission since 1942, sylvatic outbreaks of yellow fever frequently spill over into cities. "Many people and monkeys die of yellow fever in Brazil and other parts of the Americas, as well as in Africa," Sacchetto said. "Despite the vaccine and progress in controlling transmission of the disease, we continue to see cases emerging from the sylvatic cycle. The virus is endemic in part of Brazil, with persistent circulation between mosquitoes and non-human primates, which are its primary hosts." This enzootic cycle is far from easy to control. "Once established, the enzootic cycle ensures that the virus stays in forests or other rural areas, but it can spread to a city via accidental infection of a human," she said. Circulation of the virus in cities raises concerns about a return of the urban cycle involving transmission by A. aegypti. "Hence the importance of epidemiological surveillance studies and maintenance of large-scale vaccine coverage to control outbreaks." Predictive models for arboviruses also take into account climate change and urbanization destroying native vegetation. "We have active cases of yellow fever in both non-human primates and humans in the Southern states of Parana and Santa Catarina. This hasn't happened for several decades," Nogueira said. In Africa, from which yellow fever came to the Americas, most cases of the disease occur in the sub-Saharan region. Urban yellow fever is a major public health concern, with frequent outbreaks that are hard to predict. In the Americas, as the authors of the review article note, yellow fever has historically been reported from northern Panama to northeastern Argentina. In recent years, most cases have occurred in the Amazon Basin during the rainy season, when population densities of Haemagogus mosquitoes are at their highest, but the number of reported cases following sylvatic spillover has increased in Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay, as well as Brazil. Explore further Researchers use genomics to reconstitute yellow fever outbreak in Sao Paulo More information: Jenny Low et al, Re-emergence of yellow fever in the neotropicsquo vadis?, Emerging Topics in Life Sciences (2020). Jenny Low et al, Re-emergence of yellow fever in the neotropicsquo vadis?,(2020). DOI: 10.1042/ETLS20200187 A former aide to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, Reno Omokri, says popular Islamic scholar, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, is facilitating banditry an... A former aide to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, Reno Omokri, says popular Islamic scholar, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, is facilitating banditry and not promoting peace as believed many. He also said Sheikh Gumi was sowing the seed of discord in the country and inciting Muslims against Christians by telling bandits that Muslim soldiers were the ones neutralising them. He, therefore, urged the Department of State Services to summon the cleric and question him for incitement. Omokri, a critic of the regime of the President, Muhammadu Buhari , spoke on Wednesday while featuring on a PUNCH Online interview programme, The Roundtable. Sheikh Gumi should be answering questions with the DSS, he said, adding, Sheikh Gumi should be summoned by the DSS to back up his claim that Christian soldiers are the ones killing Muslims. Of late, Sheikh Gumi has been seen in photos holding talks with notorious bandits in the forests of Zamfara, Niger and other states. He had also advocated blanket amnesty for the bandits like was done for the militants in the Niger Delta region. Sheikh Gumi had said bandits had only killed a few people accidentally, adding that they killed for revenge. Sheikh Gumis latest comment attracted outrage on social media with many users describing him as the spokesperson for bandits in the country. Speaking on Wednesday, Omokri said it was unthinkable that Sheikh Gumi was still allowed to move freely by the Buhari regime which had summoned a former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Dr Obadiah Mailafia, over his comments on notorious terror group, Boko Haram. Details later